NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ReEnergy Biomass Operations LLC ("ReEnergy") and Ember Infrastructure ("Ember") today announced plans to enter into a joint venture to create an industry-leading bioenergy platform. The company will be named ReGenerate Energy (the "Company") and will be led by experienced team members from ReEnergy and Ember. The Company will acquire an ownership interest in ReEnergy's two biomass power plants in Maine, ReEnergy Stratton and ReEnergy Livermore Falls, and will look to expand the platform across North America.

The Company will leverage ReEnergy's operational capabilities and both teams' experience in acquiring and growing renewable energy platforms as it pursues a robust pipeline of acquisition targets. ReEnergy will continue operating the Maine facilities as well as the other assets added to the Company, and the Maine facilities will continue to use the ReEnergy name.

Larry D. Richardson, Chief Executive Officer of ReEnergy Holdings and one of its co-founders, said: "This is an exciting time in the history of ReEnergy. With the combination of Ember's capital and experience in the energy industry, and ReEnergy's expertise in the bioenergy sector, we look forward to a period of new growth and innovation."

Elena Savostianova, Managing Partner of Ember said: "We are thrilled to partner with ReEnergy, given the team's track record of best-in-class operations as we build out the platform and capitalize on compelling opportunities we see in the bioenergy sector as demand grows for resource efficient, carbon-neutral base-load power generation."

The transaction is expected to close this summer; terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Whiteman Osterman & Hanna LLP served as legal counsel to ReEnergy. Mayer Brown LLP served as legal counsel to Ember.

About ReEnergy

ReEnergy Biomass Operations LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of ReEnergy Holdings LLC, which was formed in 2008 by a senior management team comprised of experienced industry professionals along with an energy-sector focused private equity fund. In 2019, the management team completed a buyout of this fund's ownership interest. ReEnergy Holdings LLC also owns ReEnergy Black River, a 60-MW biomass power facility located on the Fort Drum U.S. Army installation near Watertown NY, and ReSource Waste Services LLC, which operates five facilities in New England that recycle construction and demolition waste materials. ReEnergy's bioenergy facilities transform forest-derived, sustainably harvested woody biomass and other wood waste residues to produce renewable clean energy. This benefits the environment by enhancing forest health and reducing the use of fossil fuels.

The 48-MW ReEnergy Stratton and 39-MW ReEnergy Livermore Falls facilities support approximately 50 direct jobs, more than 300 indirect jobs, spend more than $30 million annually and purchase more than 700,000 tons of fuel each year from Maine loggers/truckers and mills.

About Ember

Founded in 2018, Ember is a New York-based private equity firm delivering capital solutions to businesses and assets seeking to reduce carbon intensity and enhance resource efficiency. Ember focuses on equity investments across renewable energy, water, waste, industrials and agricultural infrastructure. For more information, please visit www.ember-infra.com.

Media Contacts

ReEnergy

Sarah Boggess

(518) 810-0200

[email protected]

Ember Infrastructure

Maria Rengifo

(646) 374-4476

[email protected]

SOURCE Ember Infrastructure Management, LP

Related Links

http://www.ember-infra.com


In late April, Microsoft said that it has finalized the next major version of Windows 10, formally named the Windows 10 May 2021 Update, for release in the near future. On Wednesday, May 18, Microsoft delivered on that promise as it began rolling the next big Windows update out to all PCs.

The Windows 10 May 2021 Update will also be known as version 21H1. It will probably appear as 21H1 when users launch the winver command after Microsoft begins pushing the update to client PCs.

Previously, in a blog post announcing the Windows 10 May 2021 Update, senior program manager Brandon LeBlanc said Microsoft is sending the final build, Build 19043.928, to the Release Preview channel of its Windows Insider program. The Release Preview channel is the most conservative of Microsofts Insider channels, the place where users can try a final, well-polished build of the next Windows 10 feature release a bit early. Microsoft invited testers to try out the final build by joining the Windows Insider program and downloading Windows 10 21H1. Now, Microsoft has completed that testing and is deploying Windows 10 21H1 to all PCs.

Even as of May 18, Windows 21H1 will be handed out as a seeker build. It won't be automatically pushed to your system yet. Youll have to go into the Windows 10 Settings menu, then to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and choose to download and install 21H1.

Before you go to all that trouble, you should know that the Windows 10 May 2021 Update actually isnt going to have many new features. Brandon LeBlanc, the senior program manager at Microsoft who authored May 2021 Update announcement blog post, confirmed via Twitter that the 21H1 feature list remains unchanged from Microsofts February announcement of the Windows 10 21H1 feature list.

That feature list contains a single item: If you own a laptop with its own Windows Hello webcam, plus a separate external Windows Hello webcam, Microsoft will now allow you to select the external Hello webcam as the default camera.

Windows 10 21H1, however, is also a release thats designed to fix bugs, including issues with the little-known Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) browser, plus copy performance when file sizes top 400MB. Microsoft has published a list of Windows 10 21H1 bug fixes.

Microsoft was expected to sideline Windows 10 in favor of Windows 10X, but that apparently hasnt happened as quickly as Microsoft expected. Positioned as Microsofts answer to Googles Chrome OS, Windows 10X has leaked but hasnt yet been formally released. Microsoft also said Tuesday that it won't be releasing Windows 10X, but will be incorporating features of it inside Windows 10.

Updated on May 18 to note that Windows 10 21H1 is now being formally released to users.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Newly appointed Ambassador of Japan to Armenia Masanori Fukushima presented his credentials to President Armen Sarkissian on April 29, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

The Armenian President congratulated the Ambassador on appointment, wishing success to his responsible mission. Sarkissian said he warmly remembers his visit to Japan for participation to the enthronement ceremony of the Emperor, and has asked the Ambassador to convey his greetings to Emperor Naruhito.

President Sarkissian said Armenia attaches importance to the deepening of relations with Japan, adding that both countries can do much more for expanding the bilateral ties in a number of areas. He emphasized that there is a great mutually-beneficial cooperation potential in particular in the fields of energy, including nuclear energy and nuclear security, high technologies, education and culture.

The Japanese Ambassador in his turn noted that its an honor for him to start a diplomatic mission in Armenia. He expressed confidence that despite the challenges caused by the war and the pandemic Armenia will move on a development path, and Japan is ready to support friendly Armenia. He assured that he will make all efforts for deepening the Armenian-Japanese relations.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Giorgio Pietrostefani attends an hearing of the trial for the killing of police officer Luigi Calabresi, on Oct. 17, 1995. (Luca Bruno/AP Photo)

Former Members of Italian Red Brigades Arrested in France

PARISSeven Italians convicted of left-wing domestic terrorist crimes, including several former members of the Red Brigades were arrested in France on Wednesday, the French presidency said in a statement.

French police made the arrests on warrants seeking the suspects in Italy for acts of terrorism, the statement said. The arrested individuals had fled Italy and sought refuge abroad before they could be imprisoned to serve their sentences. Police in France were searching for three others who were not at home.

Crimes for which some of those arrested were convicted in Italy include the 1980 killing of a Carabinieri paramilitary general and the 1980 kidnapping of a judge.

Five of those arrested in what Italian police said was code-named Operation Red Shadows were former members of the Red Brigades, a group active during the 1970s and 1980s that carried out killings, kidnappings, and so-called kneecappings, in which targets were shot in the legs by attackers who fled. The group later fell dormant.

Also among those detained in France was Giorgio Petrostefani, 77, a militant from the far-left group Lotta Continua (Struggle Continues). Petrostefani was convicted of the 1972 slaying of Milan Police Chief Luigi Calabresi and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

The police chiefs slaying was one of the more notorious crimes during the so-called Years of Lead, when acts of terrorism committed by the extreme right and the extreme left bloodied Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.

Calabresi had been leading the interrogation of Giuseppe Pinelli, a suspected anarchist, about the 1969 bombing of a Milan bank that killed 17 people. Pinelli fell to his death from the 4th floor of police headquarters. The police chief was shot three times from behind while he walked to his car. The bank bombing has never been solved, and Pinellis death inspired a play and a movie.

The other person arrested had belonged to Armed Cells Against Territorial Power, which Italian police described as a subversive group. Narciso Manenti was convicted of the 1979 killing of a Carabinieri police officer. Italian police said he married a French citizen in 1985.

The communication to French prosecutors of the Italian requests followed important bilateral work to prepare for the arrests and the subsequent decision by investigators to focus on the more serious crimes, according to the French presidency. Italy had initially identified 200 individuals.

France, also hit by terrorism, understands the need for justice for the victims, the statement said.

France and Italys justice ministers met on April 9. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia formally requested the extraditions on that occasion.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on France Inter radio that it is now up to a French court to decide whether the people arrested will be extradited to Italy.

The French presidency said the definitive extradition decision could take two to three years depending on the appeal proceedings. A Paris court is expected to decide in the coming days whether those arrested will remain in jail or be freed and placed under judicial supervision.

The expirations of the various European arrest warrants that allowed their capture were set to expire between December this year and 2023, according to Italian police.

France established in 1985 a policy known as the Mitterrand doctrine, named for Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. It said that Italian far-left activists who had fled to France would not be extradited to Italy unless there was evidence that they committed crimes of blood.

The policy had been an irritant to right-wing politicians in Italy for decades.

Italian Premier Mario Draghi expressed satisfaction that France has now agreed to start judicial proceedings for cases that have left an open wound, a statement from the premiers office said.

The memory of those barbaric acts is vivid in the conscience of Italians, Draghi said.

By Sylvie Corbet and Frances DEmilio
Hong Kong's civil liberties are being eroded (file photo) - ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images

Hong Kong has passed a new immigration law that allows city authorities to bar people from entering or leaving the global business hub, raising concerns that Chinese mainland-style exit bans could be used against activists.

Diplomats, rights groups and lawyers have warned that the way the law is worded will give sweeping powers to the citys immigration chief, who will not need to seek a court order to block people from boarding flights to and from Hong Kong.

City authorities have rejected those concerns, saying the legislation aims to screen illegal immigrants given a backlog of asylum requests and will not infringe on free movement. Officials have also said the ban will only apply to flights heading to Hong Kong.

But government assurances are largely falling flat in Hong Kong where many say the special territorys unique way of life has disappeared as the ruling Chinese Communist Party tightens its grip.

Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong last year which criminalises vaguely defined crimes of subversion, secession, terrorism and foreign collusion, punishable by up to life imprisonment.

Authorities continue to defend the law as necessary to restore stability in the city, where mass pro-democracy protests lasted for months in 2019.

But in the ten months since the national security law came into effect, prominent activists, lawyers, journalists and businesspeople have been arrested and detained.

Many have fled Hong Kong over concerns of being persecuted, seeking asylum overseas in countries including the UK, US, Australia, and Canada.

Some of Hong Kongs opposition lawmakers were disqualified last year with the rest resigning en masse as there was no longer a critical minority in the city legislature to sufficiently filibuster bills.

Now, proposals like the just-passed immigration law to sail through the Hong Kong legislature without challenge.

Exit bans are often used in mainland China against dissidents who challenge the government, or to pressure people abroad to stop their activism by barring their family within China from travel.

These have also impacted foreign nationals, including journalists and businessmen. Irish citizen Richard OHalloran has been unable to leave China for more than two years after becoming involved in a legal dispute involving the Chinese owner of the Dubin-based company he works for.
Photo: (Photo : Pexels)

Having kids is one of most expensive things you will do in your life. We don't realise until we have a baby that there is so much to think about. From formula, trips to the pharmacy, baby food, clothing, baby gear, trips and everything else in between.

We've put a list together of the top ways to save money when you become a new mum. It's one of the most exciting, tiring and expensive things to do. We're here to help you through with these great life hacks on how to save money as a new mum:

Make a list if the practical new mum gifts you could get

Some of the best new mum gifts are the practical ones. It could be requesting a large pack of diapers or something more like baby gear like a stroller from family. Just see this like when you're married and you ask for gifts - it's something people do. Another popular is a free baby box. This can be a great gift as it's so varied and come with some really practical items. A baby box is an essential that can be kept in the car in any emergency.

Get free hospital baby freebies

When you're a new mum in the hospital they will be loads of free baby stuff on for you to take home. A lot of practical items. Added to this lots of manufacturers leave samples for you to try - this can be formula, diapers and baby cloths. It's best to ask for these items as most nurses will be busy but these types of items can save you money and as the old saying goes; every penny counts.

Ditch the shoes till your baby is older

There is no need to buy shoes for your baby. It actually slows down their process in learning to walk. It's better for them to barefoot. They won't need baby shoes till their a little older and walking. If they go outside then booties or thick socks do the trick.

Formula Freebies

Formula prices can add up to hundreds or over $1000 dollars a year so it's worthwhile getting in touch with manufacturers to see if they are willing to send out free samples. It's important to do this as your baby could be fussy and prefer some over others. Alternatively you could breastfeed which free's up this cost and it's also healthier.

Return gifts you don't want

This is why it can be a good life hack to write a list of practical gifts you could want as a new mum. Sometimes you can get items you don't need, isn't good for the baby or isn't practical. In this case return the items to the shop for something else or if you have the receipt then get your money back.

Make sure you can try the baby gear

Baby accessories and gear can be some of the most expensive items. Let's take for example the Stroller. Some can be awkward so it's important to try it out before purchasing it. It means you don't have an item that cost a lot not going to use.

Borrow things you only need temporarily

Sometimes you only need certain items for a short time so it saves you wasting money on something you won't get much use out of. Friends will have item their kids will have outgrown such as a baby bath and a walker with toys attached. Two good examples.

Minimise early birthdays and holidays

Your new born baby won't know what time of day it is, let alone whether its Christmas or another holiday. Keep these events low key in the early years and you could save all this cash for further down the line, for bigger and better birthdays.

These are just some of the great ways to save money when having a new baby. Whether that's a baby box, returning gifts you won't want, baby freebies from hospital and manufacturers and many more. These life hacks can save you money in the long run no matter how little they seem now. It also means you can spend that money on more worthwhile experiences together as mum and son/daughter.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Oil rose above $65 a barrel in New York for the first time in more than six weeks as signs of strengthening demand in key markets offset concerns about a COVID resurgence in some countries, especially India.

New York City aims to fully reopen July 1, while U.K. road fuel sales are nearing last years summer levels. Austrian refiner OMV AG is expecting to boost runs later in the year and Repsol reported a slight recovery in demand. Consumption may also get a boost when China breaks for an extended holiday on Saturday, with mobility expected to climb to a record.
The Syrian People's Council received applications from 51 candidates from the Supreme Constitutional Court for the presidential elections on May 26.

A total of 51 hopefuls have put their name into the hat to challenge Bashar Assad for Syria's presidency in the upcoming vote, state-run news agency SANA reported.

According to the Syrian constitution, the parliament accepts applications from candidates within 10 days after the announcement of the start of the election campaign (19 April). For 2021's elections, in the last 24 hours alone, 12 candidates have submitted applications. However, only those able to secure support from 35 lawmakers will be able to run.

Given that the Syrian People's Council consists of 250 parliamentarians, no more than seven people can participate in the presidential race. At the same time, the candidate from the Arab Socialist Baath Party, whose secretary general is Assad, has the best chance, since it has 167 seats in parliament.

In Syria's 2014 elections, 24 applications were registered, of which three candidates took part in the elections, including the President Assad himself.
Transmission electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, emerging from human cells. Credit: NIAID

The outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed the widespread effects a pandemic can have on all spheres of life from health, to social life, to the economy. The main thrust of efforts to control the spread has been to decrease the reproduction rate to flatten the curve of the total number of infected individuals per day in order to reduce overload on the health system. The most widely implemented response to the exponential growth of the infection has been widespread quarantine and lockdown. While isolation is an effective tool to decelerate the spread, repeatedly imposing complete quarantine for a relatively long period of time until the virus is suppressed has negative effects on people's lives and on the economy. Moreover, if proper population monitoring is not enforced further waves of the disease may ensue. Therefore, early detection of positive test results is of paramount importance to suppress the spread of COVID-19 as soon as possible.

A second component in fighting the pandemic is to devise better testing policy. Today, health systems around the world prioritize the administration of tests to people who have had direct contact with an infected person or who are symptomatic. Some countries are implementing extensive resources to test people widely and randomly to detect areas where the pandemic is likely to spread. Nevertheless, these strategies do not use resources effectively.

A recent study, published in the journal Scientific Reports by Prof. Amir Leshem, from the Kofkin Faculty of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University, and Dr. Kobi Cohen, of Ben-Gurion University, offers a more effective method for the prioritization of tests using a feedback methodology. The key to the proposed method is to test individuals with a high probability of being infected and identify them before symptoms appear. The probability of individuals being infected acts as an input to selecting additional individuals for testing. Those with the highest probability of infection are selected. Their test results then act as feedback to update the probability of other individuals being infected, and so on.

By reducing the lapse in time between contact with an infected person and taking a COVID-19 test, it has been demonstrated that the proposed method, when combined with contact tracing, may reduce the rate of isolation and mortality by up to 50% compared to existing methods. The key is to test individuals with a high probability of being infected before symptoms appear. These probabilities are updated based on contact tracing and test results. Proper use of the controlled testing methodology significantly improves the outcome for any testing capacity. However, the most significant results are when daily testing capacity is between 0.3% of the population and 3% of the population.

The authors also demonstrated that for small, new outbreaks, controlled testing can prevent the large spread of new waves. Tracing and quarantining only those at riskfor instance those in close contact with an infected individual, depending on the duration of contact and distancecan contain epidemics without using aggressive lockdowns using surveillance," says Prof. Leshem. "There are two elements to halting epidemics: quarantine and testing," explains Prof. Leshem. "One approach is to test only those who have symptoms, as was done during Israel's first lockdown, but this proved ineffective. Another approach is to randomly perform as many tests as possible. According to calculations, random tests will only be effective if 5% of the population is tested. In our article we propose acceleration by initiating the test rather than waiting for people to do them. Technological means, such as contact tracing, can facilitate this." If within a day people suspected of being infected were called in for testing based on data regarding their proximity to someone known to have contracted the virus, infection rates and morbidity would be reduced, unnecessary tests would not be performed and less unnecessary isolation would be imposed.

Prof. Leshem and Dr. Cohen propose the use of technology that is not based on GPS and does not involve tracking geographical locations, but rather depends on proximity between devices that transmit waves at short distances, such as Bluetooth. With this less-intrusive method, the individual's identity is random and stored in the device, and is "exposed" only if he has been in the vicinity of a person who has tested positive within his Bluetooth range. People will be called in for a test based on the number of infected people who have been around them and the length of time they were in the same vicinity. The risk will be calculated using a dedicated algorithm.

Furthermore, the adoption of control testing methods may prevent new outbreaks (as a result of variants or other viruses) in the early stages and in widespread outbreaks. For example, in a scenario of a single outbreak in a population of 100,000 people, which takes into account that only 70% of the population will comply with the isolation provisions and that the tests are only 80% reliable. Existing methods have been found to require more than a million cumulative days of isolation until the spread is completely eradicated, while mortality reaches about 2,000 people. In contrast, the method proposed by Leshem and Cohen found that only half a million days of isolation were required until the spread was completely eradicated, while mortality reached only about 1,000 people. While existing policies taken by governments around the world have failed to control the outbreak and led to full lockdowns, in terms of the economic cost, the proposed method can save around 8 percent of GDP, for each month of full lockdown that can be saved.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: Kobi Cohen et al, Suppressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using controlled testing and isolation, Scientific Reports (2021). Journal information: Scientific Reports Kobi Cohen et al, Suppressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using controlled testing and isolation,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-85458-1
A U.S. senator has called for more transparency from the Biden administration regarding reports of "directed energy" attacks directed at U.S. troops and individuals in and around Washington, D.C.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats Thursday, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire asked Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines about the mysterious attacks, which were first reported in 2016 by U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba. Diplomats and intelligence officials later reported similar events in China and Russia.

CNN reported Thursday that federal agencies are investigating at least two alleged attacks in the D.C. area, including one last year on a National Security Council official on the Ellipse, near the White House, and another in 2019 on a White House official in the Virginia suburbs.

Read Next: Australia Will Invest Millions to Upgrade Military Sites Where US Marines Train

The CNN report follows an article in Politico last week about a closed Pentagon briefing to the House Armed Services Committee regarding the threat such attacks pose to U.S. troops.

Politico had previously reported, based on sources, that the Pentagon was investigating suspected incidents involving U.S. service members.

According to the reports, Defense Department briefers told lawmakers they are increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of service members in the Middle East and some countries in South America.

During the briefing, DoD briefers allegedly pointed to Russia as likely being behind the attacks, although China was also raised as a suspect, according to Politico.

Shaheen said she is concerned that the "clampdown" on information about the attacks has led to leaks and that there is no way to know whether the media reports are correct.

"What more can be done to declassify this information, share it with members of Congress, that lets us better respond?" she asked. "After all, we have to fund operations, and there are a lot of personnel -- not a lot -- there are personnel who have been harmed and we need to make sure they get the care and benefits they need."

Haines cited reasons for the information being classified and said the intelligence community would brief members of Congress and ensure they have access to information needed to make funding and policy decisions.

"I would argue that with stories like this," Shaheen countered, holding up a copy of the CNN article, "and with stories that have appeared over the last two years, really, and those people who have been affected and gone public, the horse is out of the barn on this."

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report late last year saying that neurological symptoms experienced by nearly 50 State Department and Central Intelligence Agency employees -- including dizziness, tinnitus, intense cranial pressure and cognitive issues -- likely were caused by "directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy."

The study did not say where the attacks originated. The report noted, however, that previous research on similar injuries had been conducted in the former Soviet Union.

Shaheen was instrumental in crafting legislation that provides long-term emergency care benefits to those injured in China or Cuba; it also allows compensation to those who can no longer work as a result of their injuries.

During the hearing, Haines assured Shaheen that "leaders are focused on this issue" across the intelligence community.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patricia.kime.

Related: Pentagon Tracking 14 Cases of Heart Inflammation in Troops After COVID-19 Shots


An Italian man that has lived on the island for over 30 years will be relocated after being pressured by authorities. Way back in 1989, Mauro Morandi, 81, relocated to Budelli off northern Sardinia.

Mr Morandi said last year that the people who own the island, which is well-known for its pink beach, wanted him to leave. On Sunday, he wrote on Facebook saying: "I will leave with the hope that in time to come Budelli will be protected as I have protected it for 32 years."

In a conversation with BBC Outlook in 2018, the previous physical education teacher said he had "been a bit of a rebel every time." Mr Morandi said he was quite fed up with so many things about our society: consumerism and the political situation in Italy. And he decided to relocate to a desert island in Polynesia, far away from all civilization. He said he wanted to begin a new life that is close to nature.

Also Read: No Women Allowed: This 'Sacred' Men-Only Island in Japan Is Up For UNESCO World Heritage Status

Eviction Threats Morandi Encountered

After starting their journey by sea, he and some friends arrived on the Italian archipelago of La Maddalena, where they plan on working and making money to fund the rest of their journeys. But after landing on Budelli and encountering the guardian of the island, who was close to retiring, Mr Morandi decided not to leave - and has stayed there ever since, taking care of the island and communicating with tourists.

However, over the years he has encountered a number of eviction threats. Fabrizio Fonnesu, the president of La Maddalena's National Park, in 2020, told CNN that Mr Morandi had carried out illegal changes to his hut, which is a previous radio station dating back to World War Two.

A petition calling on the Italian government to let him stay generated over 70,000 signatures. But on Sunday, Mr Morandi discloses his decision to move, letting The Guardian newspaper know that he would relocate to a small flat close to the island of La Maddalena: "My life won't be too different, I'll still see the sea."

Budelli

Budelli is an island located in The Maddalena Archipelago National Park, in the north of Sardinia close to the Bocche di Bonifacio. It is part - with Santo Stefano, Caprera, La Maddalena, Spargi, Santa Maria, Razzoli, and also other smaller ones like the Cardellino, the islets of Rome, and of Cala Lunga, 62, in the middle of islands and islets, for a sum of 180 km of coasts - of the Arcipelago di La Maddalena National Park.

its beautiful Pink Beach (Spiaggia Rosa), in Cala di Roto, south-east of the island is very famous. It owes its name to the feature coral pink colour of the sand of the shoreline. The uniqueness of its colouring is because of a pink micro-organism, Miniacina miniacea, whose shells are removed by the wind action and water.

Related Article: Countries on Pacific Island Lead the Report on Global Warming, According to Experts

For more news updates about islands and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature world News!
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:11:12|Editor: huaxia

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Three persons sustained injuries as a bomb blast targeted a vehicle of the employees of the national power company in Jalalabad city, the capital of eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province on Thursday, a local official said.

The blast took place in the morning rush hour in Police District 4 of Jalalabad city, injuring three persons, the official said on condition of anonymity.

However, Gulzada Sangar, the spokesman for the provincial health department, said six injured persons had been taken to the hospital from the blast site.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blast yet.

The blast in Jalalabad city took place hours after security forces arrested three members of the Islamic State, including Mawlawi Rohullah, who was in charge of the terrorist group's propaganda in the eastern region of the war-battered country. Enditem
GAITHERSBURG, Md. and SUZHOU BIOBAY, China, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sirnaomics Biopharmaceuticals (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Sirnaomics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of RNAi therapeutics against cancer, fibrotic diseases and viral infections, announced today that the company has entered into a partnership agreement with Walvax Biotechnology (Walvax) for the co-development of its anti-influenza siRNA therapeutic product candidate STP702. Sirnaomics will out-license to Walvax the exclusive development and commercialization rights for territories including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. Based on the agreement, the company will receive an initial payment of ~US$6.4 million for this asset, with additional milestone payments and royalty sharing based on product sales.

While the medical and scientific communities are continuing the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, there needs to be continued attention towards other viruses, such as Influenza, which cause severe epidemics worldwide. Along with its resistant strains, new pathogenic viruses continue to be discovered, creating an ongoing need for new anti-influenza treatments. RNA interference (RNAi) is a cellular gene-silencing phenomenon, in which sequence-specific degradation of target mRNA is achieved by means of complementary short interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules. This advanced therapeutic approach, using siRNA technology as a targeted inhibitor, affords a tractable strategy to combat influenza pathogenesis. SiRNAs are easy to design, and can be directed against multiple strains of the influenza virus by targeting their conserved gene regions. The newly established partnership between Sirnaomics and Walvax will specifically focus on development of the siRNA-based anti-influenza therapeutic candidate STP702.

"Establishing this partnership with Walvax exemplifies our continued execution for development strategy," said Patrick Lu, PhD, President and CEO of Sirnaomics, and Chairman of Sirnaomics Suzhou. "The out-licensing of our antiviral siRNA candidate, especially to an internationally well-recognized biopharma company like Walvax Bio that specializes in development of vaccine and therapeutics against various viral infections, marks a major milestone in Sirnaomics' growth. I look forward to seeing the Sirnaomics and Walvax teams working together to develop a novel siRNA therapeutic to combat potential influenza epidemics of the future."

"We believe our siRNA technology has extremely broad therapeutic potential and we are excited to combine Walvax's deep vaccine expertise with our siRNA platform technology to unlock additional value outside of our core oncology and fibrosis therapeutic focus," said Allan Shaw, Chief Financial Officer at Sirnaomics. "This alliance provides the latest validation of Sirnaomics technology platform and furthers our strategy to evaluate its potential in a wide range of new disease areas."

About STP702

Sirnaomics team has been working diligently on finding a better alternative for prophylaxis and therapeutic treatment of Influenza A. In silico design and in vitro screening (H1N1 in a P2- and H7N9 in a P3-environment) led to the identification of potent siRNA sequences targeting the most conserved regions of Influenza viral genes, and these siRNAs exhibited a broad anti-influenza activity. Through rational pairing of these potent siRNA oligos, a specific combination of two siRNA sequences can further improve efficacy by demonstrating synergistic antiviral activity while also broadening the potential coverage of Influenza strains. The most critical technical advancements are the nanoparticle-enhanced siRNA delivery (STP702) in the viral-challenged mouse models, resulting in more potent anti-influenza activity than the marketed chemo drugs: Ribavirin and Tamiflu.

These results are the first demonstration of a synergistic therapeutic effect from combining siRNAs in a single delivery system. They also demonstrate the utility of nanoparticle mediated delivery of siRNAs through IP administration and suggest that these siRNAs may act as a broad anti-Influenza therapeutic - offering a rapid response to newly emerging viral outbreaks where existing therapeutics and vaccines are ineffective. Finally, mutations in select gene segments within the virus can confer resistance to existing therapeutics, while the use of STP702 containing siRNAs against two distinct gene segments within the influenza viruses should greatly reduce the ability of the virus to escape therapeutic pressure and reduce this additional threat.

About Walvax:

Founded in 2001, Walvax Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Walvax) is specialized in research and development, manufacturing and distribution of vaccines. Headquartered in Kunming, China, Walvax had an IPO in 2010 (300142.SZ) with a current market value of USD$14.8 billion (April 26, 2021). The company has successfully developed 7 vaccines with NMPA (China FDA) approval, including 13-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccine (PCV-13) approved a year ago. Other products include haemophilus influenza type b conjugate, group A and C meningococcal polysaccharide, group A and C meningococcal conjugate, group ACYW 135 meningococcal polysaccharide (MenACYW 135 polysaccharide), 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide and DTaP vaccines. In addition, Walvax's bi-valent human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV-2) is at BLA filing stage, nona-valent HPV vaccine (HPV-9) and three other innovative vaccines are also at clinical stage. Walvax products cover markets in more than 2000 counties of 30 provinces of China. The company also works closely with business partners to export its vaccine products to more than 15 countries and areas around the globe. In addition, the company's venture fund has invested in several innovative biopharma companies. Learn more at www.walvax.com.

About Sirnaomics, Inc.

Sirnaomics, Inc., a leading privately held biopharmaceutical company for discovery and development of RNAi therapeutics, is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, with subsidiaries in Suzhou and Guangzhou, China. The Company's mission is to develop novel therapeutics to alleviate human suffering and advance patient care in areas of high unmet medical need. The guiding principles of the Company are: Innovation, Global Vision with a Patient Centered focus. Members of the senior management team have a combined experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, spanning clinical development, regulatory, financial and business management in both the USA and China. The Company is supported by funding from institutional investors and corporate partnerships. Sirnaomics has developed a strong portfolio of intellectual property with an enriched product pipeline. The therapeutic areas of focus include oncology, anti-fibrotic, anti-viral and metabolic therapeutics. Learn more at www.sirnaomics.com.

Contact:

Sirnaomics:

David Evans, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer

Email: [email protected]

Investors:

Stephanie Carrington

Tel: +1 646 277 1282

Email : [email protected]

Media:

Mark Corbae

Tel: +1 203 682 8288

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Sirnaomics, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.sirnaomics.com


A Boeing 737 MAX 8 sits outside the hangar during a media tour of the Boeing 737 MAX at the Boeing plant in Renton, Washington (Photo : REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo)

Boeing Co on Wednesday confirmed a halt on 737 MAX deliveries after electrical problems re-grounded part of the fleet, and voiced concerns over a surging pandemic in India and U.S.-China political tensions.



Reuters reported on April 16 that Boeing stopped delivering its cash cow single-aisle 737 MAX after the electrical grounding problem - months after the plane returned to service following a lengthy safety ban.



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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a new airworthiness directive Wednesday requiring a fix before the jets resume flight. The FAA said last week the issue impacts 109 airline planes worldwide but Boeing did not immediately say how many additional undelivered planes must be fixed.



Boeing's shares fell 2.4% after the U.S. planemaker reported its sixth straight quarterly loss and a charge on its high-profile Air Force One presidential jet program.



The barrage of technical and financial challenges clouded optimism over a resurgent U.S. domestic travel market fueled by vaccinations and pent up demand.



"We view 2021 as a critical inflection point for our industry," Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told analysts on a conference call.



Boeing has paused 737 MAX deliveries to address the electrical issues, and expects to "catch up on deliveries over the balance of the year," Calhoun added.



But Calhoun said he could not predict when the 737 MAX's electrical grounding issue would be resolved, and doubled down on fears of a long-off recovery of international travel, citing the pandemic's impact and tensions between Washington and Beijing.



He also said he expects China to lift its grounding order on the 737 MAX in the second half of 2021.



Boeing has delivered more than 85 737 MAX jetliners since it was cleared by most regulators to re-enter service late last year following two fatal crashes, lifting revenue and cash flow, it said.



Boeing said it still expects to deliver half the 400 MAX jets in inventory by end-2021, with a return to positive cash flow in 2022.



But the new electrical grounding problem found on some models of the jet earlier this month has cast a shadow on Boeing's freshly re-affirmed plans to increase 737 MAX production to 31 planes per month by early 2022. Airlines have pulled dozens of 737 MAX jets from service, awaiting repairs.



Calhoun, asked about concerns over Boeing's falling market share in the narrow-body market against European rival Airbus SE, said: "I want to split that market."



Highlighting Boeing's risk in one of the most important battlegrounds for the next generation of jetliners, U.S. major Delta Air Lines placed a firm order for 25 A321neo aircraft last week.



Calhoun's remarks come after Boeing extended its required retirement age of 65 to 70 to allow Calhoun, 64, to stay in the top job.



Calhoun plans to stay in the role until he is 70, insiders say. His decision surprised many in the industry who saw him as a shorter-term crisis manager and triggered the upcoming exit of Boeing's well-regarded CFO and heir-apparent for the job, Greg Smith, 54.



Boeing also reaffirmed a sharply-reduced production rate of five 787 jetliners per month after consolidating production at its South Carolina factory.



It is facing reduced demand due to the pandemic's impact on longer-haul travel, and a growing price tag for 787 retrofits due to production defects embedded in dozens of the advanced carbon-composite jetliners.



It still expects to deliver the first 777X mini-jumbo in late 2023 despite certification and design challenges, with a combined output of the new 777X and its 777 legacy model of two a month.



The U.S. planemaker reported a core operating loss of $353 million in the first quarter, its sixth-straight quarterly loss, compared with a loss of $1.70 billion a year earlier.



Boeing recorded a $318-million pre-tax charge related to Air Force One presidential aircraft due to a spat with a supplier.



In July 2018, Boeing received a $3.9-billion contract to build two 747-8 aircraft for use as Air Force One, due to be delivered by December 2024.



In the quarter, Boeing completed a hot-fire engine test on NASA's forthcoming SLS rocket and started production on the U.S. Air Force's new trainer jet.


(Alliance News) - Global Petroleum Ltd on Thursday said it has raised GBP1.0 million through the placing of 222.2 million shares at 0.45 pence each.

Shares in the oil & gas, upstream exploration company were trading 26% lower at 0.46p each on Thursday morning in London.

The Australia-based company has also issued 111.1 million warrants at an exercise price of 0.9p per share for a period of two years, with one warrant for every two ordinary shares. If exercised in full, this would raise a further GBP1 million, giving total proceeds of GBP2 million at an average weighted price of 0.6p per share.

Monecor Ltd, trading as ETX Capital, acted as the sole broker of the placing.

The proceeds will be used to fund commitments for its PEL0094 oil licence in Namibia, which it believes is "highly prospective".

Following admission, Global Petroleum will have 611.5 million shares in issue.

"We are very pleased to have raised additional capital which enables us to progress our exploration activities on PEL0094, and to welcome new shareholders to the company. We look forward to providing further updates in due course," said Chief Executive Officer Peter Hill.

By Will Paige; willpaige@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
W&M Commencement award winners to join Pres. Rowe for Community Conversation

With the 2020-21 academic year concluding next month, William & Mary President Katherine Rowe will be holding a special Community Conversation with student Commencement award recipients at 3 p.m. on Friday. The participants will discuss the challenges and opportunities over the last year, what theyre looking forward to for Commencement Weekend and life after graduation.

Not all award winners will participate in the Community Conversation, but they will all be honored during Commencement Weekend from May 20-23. Here is a full list of this years winners, with biographical information drawn from award citations:

Lord Botetourt Medal



James Frederic Carr Memorial Cup



Thatcher Prize for Excellence



Graves Award



Sullivan Awards  students



Sullivan Award  non-student

Duke Award

The James Frederic Carr Memorial Cup

The James Frederic Carr Memorial Cup was established in honor of a William & Mary student who served with distinction in the First World War and lost his life before he could return to graduate. The award recognizes the student who best exemplifies character, scholarship and leadership.

The recipient of the 2021 Carr Memorial Cup is Abram Clear 21. Clear will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and anthropology and recently accepted an offer to pursue a fully-funded linguistics M.A. at University of Toronto.

A 2021 Rhodes Scholarship finalist, Clear distinguished himself as a true academic and campus leader. His senior honors thesis focused on the dialect of his family, based in the Appalachian Mountains, specifically on vowel production and perception.

Described as a reflective and enthusiastic student by his professors, Clear transformed his scholarship into leadership and community service on campus. He has served as co-president of the William & Marys Rainbow Coalition, which is the universitys LGBTQ education and advocacy programming board, where he helped to found an ally training program for staff and students.

One professor described Clear as one of a very few people I have ever known who works every day to make the world a better place.

The Lord Botetourt Medal

The Lord Botetourt Medal is presented each year to the undergraduate student who has most distinguished him or herself in scholarship during their time at William & Mary. In 2021, this honor is awarded to John Kainer 21.

An international relations major, Kainer graduates from William & Mary having fulfilled the requirements of his degree in only three years. In his time here, Kainer has completed an honors thesis on the Hegelian theory of international relations, been selected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was recently admitted to a Master's program at Oxford University, one of the top international relations programs in the world.

One faculty member described the breadth of Kainers intellectual curiosity and academic achievement as remarkable. He entered William & Mary with a strong interest in international relations, but also distinguished himself as a devoted student of economics, demonstrated by his teaching assistantship in macroeconomic theory. He also studied Chinese language in Beijing and is an accomplished violinist, who has performed as a soloist, as well as with chamber music groups and orchestras.

Multiple faculty members described Kainer as a true scholar, who is unafraid to take intellectual risks and has sheer joy for learning.

The Algernon Sydney Sullivan Awards

The Sullivan Award, given in the form of a medallion, is in recognition of influence for good, taking into consideration such characteristics of heart, mind, conduct and demonstrating a spirit of love and helpfulness to others. It is awarded each year to two individuals from the graduating student body and to a third person who has a close relationship to the university.

Sonia Kinkhabwala

Sonia Kinkhabwala 21 has exemplified what is meant by the term active citizen during her time at William & Mary. A sociology major, with a minor in management and organizational leadership, Kinkhabwala consistently has turned her academic acumen toward impactful projects that have served a broad swath of the greater university community. In 2019, she was recognized for some of her efforts with the Presidents Award for Service to the Community.

Due to her passion for service, Kinkhabwala has become a constant presence in the Office of Community Engagement. For four years, she has been involved with the Aim 4 civil leadership program. In addition, she consistently volunteers during service days and has as served with the Branch Out alternative break program.

Her longtime passion for the welfare of senior citizens led her to co-found Intergenerational Insights and initiate a COVID-19-inspired program in which more than 150 students signed to be pen pals with senior citizens, at a time when seniors were particularly vulnerable to the pandemic and the isolation that resulted from it.

Sonia honors and uplifts the experiences of those around her, said one of those nominating her for the Sullivan award. The nominator noted that Kinkhabwala is someone with a special skill for seeing into places of disconnection and finding authentic and compassionate ways to soothe hurting hearts and restore broken bonds.

Nicholas Agyevi-Armah

Nicholas Agyevi-Armah J.D. 21 emerged as a quiet leader with a tenacious appetite for advancing the interests of others during his time as a law student at the university. He earned numerous accolades from fellow students, administrators and professors for his work as president of the Student Bar Association at the William & Mary Law School.

Described as someone who challenged the community to live up to its values of diversity, inclusion and belonging, Agyevi-Armah is a passionate advocate. One administrator noted that Agyevi-Armahs generosity of spirit, good faith and confidence in others good faith, causes those around him to join together for the common good.

A rare combination of kindness and strength made Nick an irreplaceable match for the moment, one of his professors said. You are taken aback by the ways in which he embraces people, added another. He does not try to be anything special. He just shows up the way he is.

Corinne Picataggi

In addition to her duties as William & Marys Chief Technology Officer, Corinne Picataggi found herself at the center of the universitys efforts to safeguard the community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether creating the universitys COVID-19 dashboard and case management systems, offering guidance concerning testing and contact-tracing and ensuring that members of the university community had access to vaccines, Picataggis contributions were, as one colleague noted, the glue to our entire COVID-response efforts.

Although Picataggi works behind the scenes, her contributions to the campus-wide COVID Response Team and Public Health Advisory Team have been essential to the universitys successful ability to safeguard the community and advance our academic mission during a period fraught with challenges and uncertainties, remarked one of the individuals who nominated her for the Sullivan award.

A co-worked noted that whenever Picataggi was asked to take on a new project, she would always say We can do this, no matter how great the challenge. Another colleague described her as the linchpin in the universitys successful response to an unprecedented public health crisis.

While working under stress, Picataggi became known for her ability to manage tasks calmly and to extend that sense of calmness to others. She also was cited as a person who exudes a level of confidence that becomes contagious.

Shes the most positive person, and she has helped us all stay positive when weve dealt with challenging situations, remarked a colleague. Another added that when they think about heart, mind and helpfulness to othersthat is Corrine in a nutshell.

Thatcher Prize for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Study

The Thatcher Prize is presented annually to recognize an outstanding student in graduate or professional study. The winner is selected on the basis of scholarship, leadership, character and service.

This years recipient is Joseph Joey Matt Ph.D. '21.

During his time as a graduate student, Matt has distinguished himself as a scholar and a pioneering researcher in the field of shellfish and polyploid breeding, and his work has significant implications for the future of shellfish aquaculture and coastal economies. He is also an active and supportive member of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science community, always willing to help others in need.

Beginning with his time as an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates student, Matt has impressed with William & Mary faculty with his focus and professionalism. His REU project that summer resulted in him publishing a paper as a principal author, the first of many papers he would write for scholarly journals.

After working as a Tetraploid Technologist with the Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center, Matt began his pursuit of a masters degree. As a Ph.D. student, Matts research has taken him around the world. He has also sought learning opportunities outside of his chosen field, earning a business management certificate through the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at W&M. As one professor wrote, this kind of search and learn behavior has set Matt apart as a graduate student.

Thomas Ashley Graves, Jr. Award for Sustained Excellence in Teaching

The Thomas Ashley Graves, Jr. Award is named for the 23rd president of William & Mary and recognizes sustained excellence in teaching. Recipients are selected annually by the president from nominations submitted by each of the academic deans.

This years recipients are Robert J. Latour and Judith B. Harris.

Robert J. Latour

Latour is a professor of fisheries science at W&Ms Virginia Institute of Marine Science. According to his award citation, he is an interdisciplinary scholar who strives to gain insights about process-oriented marine science questions and applies the results to advance knowledge and improve natural resource management practices.

He has secured more than $27 million in external funding and authored 72 peer-reviewed journal articles. In addition to his research and scholarship, he serves as a mentor to graduate students and participates in academic program governance and strategic planning at all levels.

According to nominators, his courses have a reputation for intensity  and popularity. He currently advises four students and has advised or co-advised a total of nine masters and 11 doctoral students, while serving on dozens of graduate committees at VIMS and other institutions.

Works published by his lab have led to changes in harvest quotas for fisheries operating in the Atlantic Ocean, demonstrating the connections that he and his students forge between the advancement of basic knowledge and the incorporation of that knowledge into the science/policy forum where decisions are made. His advisees consistently receive competitive external funding and awards for their research, publish in high quality journals and upon graduation, attain jobs in higher education, federal agencies and other sectors.

Judith B. Harris

Harris is the Professor and Pavey Family Chair in Educational Technology at W&Ms School of Education. According to her award citation, Harris has a passion for teaching, both doing and studying it. She describes teaching as identity more than achievement; as lifelong active inquiry more than something that can be listed and enumerated.

Throughout her career, she has studied educational technologies and how they can be integrated in curriculum-based, student-focused ways. She designs learning experiences for her students that engage them in conversation, inquiry, exploration and active learning.

Harris is known for the extensive, formative feedback she provides to students and for helping doctoral students master academic writing for publication. As one student nominator said, Feedback for Dr. Harris is a two-way street. She collaborates with students on their learning journeys and empowers them to take leadership in navigating that journey.

In addition to her expertise and dedication, Harris brings care and compassion to the classroom with a welcoming and instructional style, her citation says. This validation is priceless and is symbolic of the human respect and dignity she offers everyone who enters her classroom, a student nominator wrote.

Duke Award

An endowment from Charles and Ann Duke supports an annual award to an outstanding staff member in memory of Mr. Dukes parents, Charles and Virginia Duke. This years two recipients are Wendy Urbano, manager of academic & degree progress in the Office of the Registrar, and Darlene White, custodial senior worker with Facilities Management.

Wendy Urbano

Its not a stretch to say that any undergraduate student or faculty advisor of those students at William & Mary knows about Urbanos careful, considerate and compassionate work to get them across the finish line to graduating, as a nominator wrote about her work.

As manager of academic & degree progress in the Office of the Registrar, Urbano communicates with these students, with great care and empathy, to make sure they have the information they need to graduate. Her attention to detail ensures the integrity of the W&M degree, with not a credit missed.

Known for her boundless patience and careful attention to detail, Urbano works behind the scenes at William & Mary to keep each student on track, according to nominators. This often involves answering questions for faculty while helping them navigate degree requirements. Building on her earlier years working in the Dean of Students Office, Urbano has served the university for more than 30 years.

The combination of dedication to service and demonstration of excellence is a foundation to Wendys success and to her exceptional service to W&M and its students and alumni, wrote a nominator.

Darlene White

Some of William & Marys most historically iconic and public-facing spaces are a point of pride for White. Her primary job as a custodial senior worker with Facilities Management is to keep them clean and well-maintained.

Through more than 30 years of working at William & Mary, White has been assigned to care for various buildings on campus. Most recently she has been asked to work in the Wren Building and the Brafferton on the Historic Campus as her main assignments, as well as helping with the Presidents House and other buildings.

White brings her meticulous attention to detail to meet the special needs of the buildings many unique features to ready it for its many events and tours. She shows great initiative in both preparation and response to the needs of the building and the events that take place there, according to nominators.

White trains new housekeepers, instructing them on the finer points of Wren Building care. She is keenly observant, rigorous in her duties and responsible to the building and how the whole university uses it, according to a nominator.

Described as a team player who helps her co-workers, she is always on the go and always cleaning, according to a nominator. She is known for her positive attitude and taking pride in her work, as well as for her dependability and care for others and the university.
Vaccines against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of COVID-19, were developed at an unprecedented pace. To date, more than 1 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, many of which messenger RNA (mRNA) based.

Clinical trials for both the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 and Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccines demonstrated the ability to prevent infection and severe disease, leading to emergency use authorization U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have recommended that these mRNA vaccines be made available for lactating women. However, the initial trials excluded breastfeeding women, leading to questions about their safety.

One study of 31 breastfeeding women who received an mRNA vaccine found that >60% reported side effects. Researchers led by Kerri Bertrand and colleagues, from the University of California, San Diego, sought to evaluate a larger sample of vaccinated breastfeeding women and their breastfed children. The research paper is posted to the medRxiv* server.

They found that >85% of participants reported local or systemic symptoms for both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines following either dose.

The study cohort involved 180 breastfeeding women who had received either one of the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 and Moderna mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccines). These women were enrolled, December 14, 2020, and February 1, 2021, into the Mommys Milk Human Milk Research Biorepository at the University of California, San Diego.

While 71.1% of women received the Pfizer vaccine, the other 28.9% received the Moderna brand; most of them were exclusively breastfeeding their babies (the age at enrollment averaged 7.47 months).

The researchers observed that a similar number of women reported symptoms by either of the vaccine brands. Notably, the frequency of specific symptoms did not differ by brand.

However, following dose two, women who received the Moderna brand reported significantly more systemic side effects: chills, muscle/body aches, fever, vomiting. They also observed reports of localized symptoms including pain, redness, swelling, or itching at the injection site than women following dose two of the Pfizer brand.

Although a small proportion of women experienced a reduction in milk supply (8.0% vs. 23.4% for Pfizer and Moderna, respectively, after the second dose), the milk production returned to normal within 72 hours.

These data are reassuring regarding the safety of vaccination in breastfeeding women and their breastfed children with either of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, wrote the authors.

The team also reported that five women observed a change in the color of milk (blue-green).

This study also noted some behavioral changes in the children; the most common were irritability, poor sleep, significantly more drowsiness reported for children whose mothers received the Pfizer vaccine - all of these outcomes are non-serious. The researchers claimed that this is the first study published on outcomes in breastfed children.

Because non-replicating vaccines pose no risk for lactating people or their infants, COVID-19 vaccines are also thought to not be a risk to the breastfeeding infant. National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), Division of Viral Diseases (Last Updated March 18, 2021).

While there is a starkly higher percentage of women complaining of symptoms post-vaccination (compared to the previous study by Gary et. al), the researchers reasoned that it could be due to the differences in assessment methods, timing, and the number of symptoms specifically queried.

In short, this study informs about the immediate safety of COVID-19 vaccines in lactating people, the effects of vaccination on the breastfed infant, and the effects on milk production or excretion. Additional studies are underway to evaluate milk composition and antibody status in samples obtained from women participating in the current study, the researchers inform.
Director Guy Ritchie arrives to the GQ Men Of The Year Awards 2019 in London, Britain (Photo : REUTERS/Henry Nicholls/File Photo)

All it took was a two-minute phone call to pitch the idea for his new film "Wrath of Man" and British director Guy Ritchie was back working with action star Jason Statham after some 15 years.



The dark thriller sees Statham play "H", a mysterious loner who takes up a job at a security firm whose armoured vehicles transporting valuables have recently been the target of deadly armed robberies.



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With the attacks continuing, it soon transpires "H" is not after a steady paycheck but rather a skilled marksman seeking revenge for a personal tragedy.



Statham was working as a model when Ritchie first cast him in his 1998 movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", helping him launch his film career. The two went on to collaborate on the 2000 movie "Snatch" and reunited again in 2005 for their last joint project "Revolver".



Fast forward 16 years, and very little has changed between the two friends, Statham said.



"The only difference is we're a little older and a little chubbier ... He called me up about this idea that he had. It was a very short pitch and I liked the premise. And I was quick to say 'yes'," Statham told Reuters.



"I thought this would be the perfect story for Jason and I to be reunited on. It's not funny, this film. It's serious and the theme is serious and it's very violent, very aggressive. But I thought it'd be the perfect role for Jason to occupy," Ritchie added.



For the movie, based on the 2004 French thriller "Le Convoyeur", Ritchie enlisted an ensemble cast including Josh Hartnett, Scott Eastwood, Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Holt McCallany. He also hired U.S. rapper Post Malone for a surprise cameo.



Hartnett, a former Hollywood heartthrob who appeared in early 2000s hits "Pearl Harbor", "Black Hawk Down" and "Lucky Number Slevin", said he had quietly been keeping busy with other projects in recent years.



"I've always been sort of making really interesting films. It's just suddenly Hollywood is taking notice again and I'm getting offers for bigger films," he said. "It goes in waves. Hollywood's a weird place and I love it and hate it."



"Wrath of Man" opens in U.S. cinemas on May 7.


Africatown seeks public art

For its planned Africatown Plaza, with 126 affordable units near 23rd and Union, Africatown Community Land Trust will have a large public plaza where public artwork is planned  along with other areas of the seven-story building (designed by GGLO). To that end, the nonprofit recently issued a call for art, in all disciplines and media, to focus on restoring and celebrating the city's Black and Pan-African communities. About 20 art stations will be curated by local organization Wa Na Wari with architect Dream Collaborative. Africatown CEO K. Wyking Garrett said in a statement, We need the genius of our local and global artists to help tell the stories of our journey; a lot of what has happened has been traumatic, so we need to build spaces of healing and restoration. For more info, see africatownplaza.com. The deadline for entries is May 14. Africatown Plaza itself has passed through design review, and is now in fundraising mode. No start date or general contractor have been announced.




Officials also reported 143 additional cases of the variant first seen in Brazil for a total of 679, 63 additional cases of the variant first seen in California for a total of 350 and eight additional cases of the variant first seen in South Africa for a total of 39.
The government on Wednesday claimed that it is not receiving the quantity allocated to it by the Centre following the upsurge in COVID-19 cases even as an official order has been issued to allot a detailed proportion of the supply of the life-saving gas to hospitals.

"We received 402 metric tonnes of yesterday and the day before that 408 metric tonnes. We have been allocated the share of 480 metric tonnes on April 21st and 490 metric tonnes on April 25th, but it is hardly reaching us in that quantity. Presently, the allocation is happening keeping in mind the number of ICU beds and non-ICU beds," the AAP dispensation claimed in a statement.

The government has been allocated 490 MT of oxygen and has worked out a "detailed allocation of oxygen" to the hospitals on the basis of bed capacity and requirement of oxygen for ICU and non-ICU beds, an official order said.

The order said the allocation has been worked out based on the "standards for calculation for requirement of oxygen for ICU/non ICU beds and the hospital bed capacity".

"It is clarified that the allocation has been done based on 490 MT of oxygen allocation made to government of However, the actual supply of oxygen to the hospitals shall be subject to the actual delivery of oxygen in Delhi, which is seen to be lower than the allocated quantity," the order issued on April 25 said.

The calculations for requirement of oxygen for ICU/non ICU beds has been done according to these standards -- 10 litre/minute of oxygen supply to a non-ICU bed and 24 litre/minute to an ICU bed.

The order also stated that "the demand and supply of oxygen is dynamic/evolving and subject to change as per the allotment to and requirement and availability of the number of Covid facilities, ICU beds, non-ICU beds and the actual delivery of oxygen".

"The supplier allocation in the 490 MT order for Delhi has necessitated changes in the existing suppliers to hospitals due to the capacity allocated to specific manufactures/suppliers. Therefore to maintain smooth distribution to pre-existing arrangements with hospitals, the suppliers may also pick up oxygen from any other manufacturer allotted to Delhi within the overall quota of such manufacturer," it said.

Hospitals that use oxygen cylinders may receive supply against the allocation provided in this order either through their refiller plant or any other direct or indirect arrangement with allotted manufactures and suppliers, it added.

The exponential rise in cases have left people scrambling for medical oxygen and ICU beds in hospitals in Delhi.

Every few hours last week, hospitals across the national capital and its suburbs sent out desperate messages of help on social media and other platforms, flagging their dwindling stocks of oxygen. A few of them also had to knock on the doors of Delhi High Court to seek respite on the issue.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday announced his government will import 18 cryogenic tankers from Thailand and 21 ready-to-use oxygen plants from France.

Within a month, the Delhi government will set up 44 oxygen plants at various hospitals, including 21 that will be imported from France. The Centre will install eight oxygen plants by April 30, Kejriwal had said.

Delhi logged a record 381 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, while the positivity rate stood at 32.72 per cent. This was the sixth day on the trot that Delhi has recorded over 300 deaths due to

It had reported 380 deaths on Monday, 350 on Sunday, 357 deaths on Saturday, 348 on Friday and 306 on Thursday, according to government data.

The national capital had recorded 20,201 cases on Monday, 22,933 on Sunday, 24,103 on Saturday, 24,331 on Friday, 26,169 on Thursday, and 24,638 on Wednesday.

The positivity rate was 35.02 per cent on Monday, 30.21 on Sunday, 32.27 per cent on Saturday, 32.43 on Friday, the highest so far with 36.24 on Thursday, 31.28 on Wednesday and 32.82 on Tuesday.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In recent times, the most sought-after career opportunity is digital marketing. Digital marketing skills are in serious demand and the digital skills gap is set to widen, the job market is booming and brands are putting more of a focus on digital marketing than ever before. The digital marketing industry has a very open culture. With skills and tools knowledge advancement, empiricism holds a big portion and that pushes you up for being the next level of the marketer. Given the pandemic and its devastating effects on professional and personal lives, it has been our sole support system. The internet has given rise to career paths that were non-existent just a few decades ago. Heres when Digital Marketing comes to play, as it is a vast world in itself.

Statistics show that the digital marketing industry is booming worldwide, offering 8 lakhs jobs in the very first quarter of 2017. Naukri.com. Digital marketing profession is one of the highest-paid job profiles. Google says, the national average salary of the senior digital marketing manager is $95,415 and that in India is 447, 346 rupees. Additionally, the average pay tends to defy the principle of gravitation ever on the rise by at least 30% YOY.

The demand for digital marketing in India is growing exponentially. The hiring trends of various companies indicate the growing need for hiring professionals with expertise in Digital Marketing. More and more companies are choosing to work with freelancers. And this has great potential to turn into something big, as it is slowly becoming more relevant with freelancing becoming a feasible option for many who are advancing their careers based on work that allows them the freedom to function the way they want to.

Needless to say, using these websites will help you set a solid start for your freelance career.

KIWI- Incepted in 2020 by technopreneur Imran Ladiwala and serial entrepreneur Mishu Ahluwalia, KIWI is a real-time freelancing platform that connects freelancers and clients within 180 seconds and creates a high-skilled on-demand talent network in the world. The startup assists people in getting their issues resolved in real-time, and freelancers get their money within 60 minutes. The gig economy is growing at a massive pace and COVID-19 has propelled that growth. With KIWI, clients hire a freelancer who is an expert in solving their exact issue, instantaneously. Lastly, freelancers would spend more time servicing skills than preparing sales pitches or proposals.

Aquent- Aquent has won many awards as a freelancing firm. The freelance website is well-established and known to deliver high-quality workers for creative, digital, and marketing purposes. While Aquent states that they mainly accept someone who has 2+ years of working experience, fresh graduates are still welcome to explore their available jobs. And if you doubt how much your skill is worth, there is a salary guide to help you set your price.

99Designs -This freelance website aims to focus on designer jobs  everything from logos to book covers. It also allows clients to start a contest that everyone in 99Designs can participate in. At zero cost, youll get a platform to showcase your work and improve your creative knowledge with up-to-date articles.

Upwork  Upwork may be one of the best freelance websites for finding work no matter what type of freelancer you are. Those in web development, graphic design, customer support, and even freelance writing will find that Upwork has much to offer. The seemingly unending feed of job postings is continually updated. From small businesses to huge corporations, many different types of companies are looking to hire bloggers, freelance designers, and freelance writers through Upwork.

Behance - When seeking creative inspiration, you've no doubt landed on Behance. It features so much great work to soak in, including illustrations, animations, web design, and more. With Behance, your work is put in front of an audience of like-minded creatives. And if your work earns the coveted spot of featured project, you'll get even more positive exposure. Who knows who might see it and might want to hire you. Behance also functions as a social media network to connect with other designers. Expanding your list of contacts may bring you new design opportunities.

Fiverr- Fiverr was founded in 2010 on the concept of buying and selling of freelance services globally, starting at just $5.Having a presence on multiple freelancing sites gives you the most exposure. Some people may dismiss Fiverr, but it can be one of the best freelance websites if youre willing to do the hard work it takes to be successful. many designers are offering their services on Fiverr, often cheaper and of questionable quality, but dont let this discourage you. If you can create your own niche and specialization as a freelancer on Fiverr, it can be a reliable way to find new projects and earn additional revenue.
MADRID (Reuters) -Spain has demanded that Israel improve the conditions of Spanish citizen Juana Ruiz who has been detained there since April 13 without charge, Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya said on Tuesday.

An Israeli military spokesman said Ruiz was arrested on suspicion of "contact with a foreign agent and offences related to money laundering" that helps fund the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant group.

An Israeli military court had ordered her continued detention "for investigative purposes", the spokesman said.

Gonzalez Laya told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting that the Spanish consul general on Monday personally attended Ruiz's fourth court hearing in Israel, but Ruiz still did not know what she stood accused of.

"We are in an intensive dialogue with Israeli authorities," the minister said.

Spain had demanded the improvement of conditions such as food, hygiene and personal care, and also "asked for full guarantees for Ruiz in this investigation phase," she said.

Israeli and Spanish media reports described Ruiz as a long-time resident of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where she is married to a Palestinian and active in a pro-Palestinian NGO.

"We hope the investigation concludes soon so this citizen can find out of what she is accused of, if she is accused of anything," Gonzalez Laya said.

The Israeli military spokesman said the court noted the money-laundering suspicions against her in its decision to keep her in custody.

(Reporting by Nathan Allen and Inti Landauro, additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Editing by Andrei Khalip and Andrea Ricci)
Fourteen Manitoba schools have fully switched to remote learning because of COVID-19 exposures, the province confirmed Wednesday.

Now, a Winnipeg high school teacher who tested positive for COVID-19 days before he was scheduled to be vaccinated is urging the province to move all schools to remote learning for the remainder of the school year.

Marc Giguere has been teaching for more than 30 years, more than 20 of them at College Jeanne-Sauve. This past year, he said, has been the most difficult of his career. But when he was in class last Friday, instructing about 14 masked students who sit two metres apart, he didnt yet know hed been exposed to the virus.

"I was putting an end to a unit and looking forward to starting the next unit with my students on this upcoming Monday," the 58-year-old English teacher said.

The students were pretty quiet, but that hasnt been unusual during this pandemic, he said.

"Students tend to be, theyre a lot more aloof, a lot more quiet, and I get that, because theyre fed up. Everyones fed up," Giguere said. "No ones seeing the light at the end of this tunnel."

It turned out to be his last day at school before getting tested for the virus and entering a mandatory two-week isolation period.

Giguere got his positive result Monday, six days before he was supposed to receive his first vaccine dose. That appointment has been postponed. He is confident he was exposed to the virus while he was at work, after conversations with contact tracers.

"Im pretty healthy, so this I consider to be a minor setback, but its frustrating," he said.

He said he feels he unwittingly put his family and friends at risk "simply because of a situation that was definitely beyond my control."

Giguere said he believes the high school has been doing the best it can to reduce the risk of transmission. Class sizes have been split into smaller groups so that only half as many students are in the same room at once. Teachers, rather than whole groups of students, move from classroom to classroom. Everyone is spaced apart, and desks are wiped down between cohorts. Students are sent out of school for lunch, and they  along with school staff  are required to wear masks at all times.

Still, the precautions havent been enough, Giguere said. He acknowledged remote learning is not always effective, and works better for some students than for others, but he said he believes its the option Manitoba should adopt now, with six to eight weeks left in the school year.

"Theres tons and tons of factors to consider in this. Nothing is easy, but at the end of the day, it is my personal belief that obviously, even though it may not be the best solution, it is still the correct solution at this point. Yes, there are only six weeks left, but at the same time, if more and more people are going to get sick over the next few weeks, and you can pretty much bet that that will be the case... better to act now," Giguere said.

Not everyone agrees a complete switch to remote learning is the best thing to do in Manitobas third wave. Provincial health officials have said the virus is not being significantly transmitted within schools, but children and teens are increasingly contracting the virus at household gatherings and non-school activities.

Prioritizing teachers for vaccines would be a big help, several school officials told the Free Press.

About 70 per cent of teachers in Seven Oaks School Division are eligible to be vaccinated after criteria were expanded to include more Winnipeg neighbourhoods this week, said superintendent Brian OLeary.

"Thats tremendously helpful," he said. As more teachers get vaccinated, he said he hopes schools can remain open for the rest of the year, especially since most of the viruss spread happens out of schools.

"If kids arent in school, it doesnt mean theyre safer than when they are," OLeary said. "I think schools have done well, and hopefully we can continue to navigate through the next month, and hopefully things get better."

The division hasnt moved any of its schools to remote learning, but has routinely done so for individual classrooms.

No schools in Winnipeg School Division, the citys largest, had moved entirely to remote learning as of Wednesday. Two schools in Pembina Trails division are online only. Ecole St. Avila and Ecole South Pointe School in Winnipeg will temporarily switch to remote learning in the coming days and are expected to return to in-class instruction May 17, the division said.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay
New Delhi:

Former Bihar chief minister and RJD president Lalu Prasad on Sunday dubbed liquor prohibition in the state as a big failure, saying that alcohol is being delivered at home.

While talking to reporters on Friday nights incident, in which four persons died after consuming spurious liquor in Rohtas district, he said, Prohibition has been a big failure and a complete flop in the state as home delivery of liquor is happening in Bihar now.

The RJD president blamed cops of their involvement, saying they are making quick money as truckloads of liquor were frequently coming to the state, and spurious liquor was being sold to areas where the supply was short.

A complete ban on sale and consumption of alcohol was imposed in Bihar in April last year.

Meanwhile, the police and excise officials have launched a massive hunt against those involved in production and sale of illicit liquor in the state.

Shahabad Range Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police Mohammad Rahman said four teams, each headed by a sub-divisional police officer (SDPO), had been formed to conduct raids against the illicit liquor traders and producers at various locations of Rohtas and Bhojpur districts.

The teams led by the SDPOs of Ara, Piro, Vikramganj and Dehri would conduct raids from Sahar in Bhojpur district to Yadunathpur in Rohtas district, he added. (With PTI Inputs)

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YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian government approved amendments to the tax code related to imports of cars, a move aimed at developing the required tax environment for the introduction of the trade-in system in the Armenian car market.

Caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan noted that the current tax system isnt favorable for this process and therefore they decided to change it.

He said that the trade-in system is widely used throughout the world. We concluded that our current tax system isnt favorable for this process. With these changes we are trying to contribute to getting our countrys motor vehicle fleet updated and so that replacing old cars with new ones gets easier, Pashinyan said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Przepraszamy!

Ogoszenie na stanowisku:

Fullstack or Frontend Developer (JS, Java)



wygaso z dniem 2021-05-13



Ta propozycja bya zozona przez Nordea Bank Abp SA Oddzia w Polsce

Mozliwe przyczyny wygasniecia ogoszenia to:

propozycja zamieszczona przez pracodawce zostaa usunieta z serwisu praca.egospodarka.pl

rekruter zakonczy proces rekrutacji uzyskujac odpowiednia ilosc pracownikow

firma zmodyfikowaa tresc zlecenia i jest ono dostepne pod innym adresem WWW

dostawca tresci usuna ogoszenie z bazy danych

nieprawidowy adres url ogoszenia

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Inne oferty, ktore mogy byc w kregu Twoich zainteresowan:
Two men face charges after police found them with an estimated $1 million worth of marijuana during a traffic stop on Route 80 in Bergen County, authorities said Wednesday.

A driver, Shawn Porter, 34, of Etobicoke, Canada, and his passenger, Jeremy Windoloski, 23, of Hogansburg, New York, were each charged with possession with the intent to distribute marijuana over 25 pounds, according to Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella.

Members of the county narcotics task force on Tuesday pulled over the men as they traveled in an SUV on Route 80 in Lodi, authorities said.

When the windows to the vehicle were rolled down, detectives observed the entire rear portion of the vehicle to be filled with thirteen oversized duffle bags, Musella said in a statement.

A Bergen County Sheriffs dog signaled for the presence of drugs, the prosecutor said. Police found 360 pounds of marijuana during a search of the vehicle, authorities said. It was not clear what led detectives to stop the vehicle.

Windoloski was also charged with aggravated assault on a police officer and resisting arrest for causing injury to a detectives arm while being taken into custody, according to the prosecutors statement.

Gov. Phil Murphy earlier this year signed laws that decriminalized having up to six ounces of marijuana and permit a legal recreational cannabis industry for people 21 and older.

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Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com.
GREENWICH  With more than 1.3 million Connecticut residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the race to make appointments for getting a shot is slowing.

Starting this weekend, Greenwich Hospital will allow walk-ins at its vaccination clinic at Brunswick Schools King Street campus. Anyone arriving between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday will not need an appointment, Greenwich Hospital President Diane Kelly said.

Also, the hospital has dropped its Connecticut residency requirement for getting vaccines at the site.

Some of our neighbors here in Westchester (County in New York) should be able to be vaccinated if they still need to do that, Kelly said.

Walk-in appointments began Tuesday at the clinic run by Family Centers at the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center. Heather Dawson, vaccine coordinator for the nonprofit, said walk-in clients are welcome from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays. Connecticut residents seeking a vaccine should bring an ID card and an insurance card, if they have them.

We wanted to be able to open it up to people who still need appointments or maybe have had a difficult time accessing them through the online system, Dawson said. Now we can just do it for them.

To encourage residents to get the vaccine, Family Centers is also doing more outreach in the community, including at its clinic in Wilbur Peck Court, she said.

We want to get the people that may be hesitant or who were having trouble with access, she said. Were hopeful (that allowing walk-ins) will help. At the least it will give people another avenue.

This week, Family Centers also resumed offering the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Use of the J&J vaccine had been halted after six women reported they had serious blood clots after receiving the one-dose vaccine. But last week, the federal government said the vaccine could be used again.

Dawson said residents have not been hesitant to receive the J&J vaccine despite reports of blood clots.

There were people who were really interested in just Johnson & Johnson and I dont think its really changed, Dawson said. I think they had their heart set on it and were waiting for it to be reinstituted. People coming in seem pretty comfortable with it.

All state residents age 16 and up are eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
Gram panchayats in several villages across the country have banned the sale of cold drinks and ice creams, keeping in view the spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths amid the pandemic.

In some part of the country, these apex rural bodies have also barred the entry of outsiders until the situation gets normal. Currently, India is gripped with the second wave of Covid-19, which is way scarier and deadlier than the first one.

As a result, villagers are striving to protect themselves from the wrath of Covid-19 by placing sops for outsiders. However, theres no scientific relation between the spread of Covid-19 and soft drinks/ ice creams.

It is usually the elders of the village that have reportedly reflected issues with the sale of cold items. FMCG makers are facing difficulties in cracking this hoax. In some villages, even the sale of srikhand has been banned by the authorities.

Meanwhile, in many villages, shops are reportedly only open from 7 Am to 9 PM, leading to a fall in sales of FMCG goods. Gram Panchayats have imposed a Rs 500 fine if anyone is seen flouting the rules.

The fear among villagers is quite normal, considering the fact that the first Covid-19 wave impacted mostly cities. But this time, the coronavirus is severely infecting people living in the villages.

With no proper healthcare infrastructure at many places, it is advisable to place restrictions on movement to break the chain, because prevention is better than cure.

However, for FMCG makers, this might emerge as a serious problem at some point. The firms were betting on the speedy recovery of the rural economy after the first wave of Covid-19. Local suppliers are already facing the heat, as they are unable to sell their stocks with the restrictions set in place.
A former Downing Street spin doctor has joined the BBC's board despite previously criticising the 'woke-dominated groupthink' of its staff.

Sir Robbie Gibb, 57, served as Theresa May's communications director for two years between 2017 and 2019.

Following his political career, Sir Robbie slammed the broadcaster and its 'woke-dominated' and 'left-leaning' staff.

The former journalist, who worked for the national broadcaster for 25 years, was appointed to the paid role by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

He will start serving his three-year term as the board member for England on May 7.

Sir Robbie Gibb, (right) was Theresa May's spin doctor between 2017 to 2019. Before that, he had a 25-year career as a journalist with the BBC

Since leaving frontline politics, Sir Robbie argued BBC bosses were 'fearful of causing offence to woke activists' in a Telegraph comment piece last August.

He wrote: 'The BBC has been culturally captured by the woke-dominated groupthink of some of its own staff.

'There is a default Left-leaning attitude from a metropolitan workforce mostly drawn from a similar social and economic background.

'Once the gold standard of impartial, fair and accurate news, BBC journalists are increasingly letting their political preferences show.

'Over the past decade, the BBC has drifted away from its purpose and the people it serves.'

But speaking after his appointment today, Sir Robbie adopted a more optimistic tone for the future.

Last year, Sir Robbie slammed BBC chiefs and 'woke-dominated' and 'left-leaning' staff at the Corporation

'Throughout my time at the BBC and since leaving I have always believed that impartiality should be the BBC's number one priority because it is so critical to audience trust.

'The Corporation has a big job to reform and make sure it once again becomes the gold standard for broadcasting impartiality - I am privileged to have the chance to play a part in helping the BBC achieve that.'

The brother of schools minister Nick Gibb, he has also accused Radio 4's Today programme of painting a 'picture of Britain that is monstrously out of touch'.

In January 2020, he added: 'There is growing mistrust over BBC impartiality  not just among politicians but with whole swathes of the public.'

Sir Robbie was knighted in Mrs May's resignations honours list in 2019.

Before entering frontline politics, Sir Robbie was deputy editor of BBC Newsnight and editor of The Daily Politics and This Week.

While in Whitehall he was criticised as a 'hard Brexiter' trying to destroy Mrs May's search for compromise during wranglings over the EU exit.
Three men from Georgia, who are previously indicted in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, have been charged with hate crime and attempted kidnapping charges by a federal grand jury, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

The three white suspects allegedly armed themselves, chased, and shot Ahmaud Arbery after they spotted the 25-year-old Black man running in their Georgia neighborhood, Associated Press reported.

It can be recalled that Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot on Feb. 23, 2020. The incident happened while the African-American was out for a jog in Brunswick City. Arbery was accused of being one of the burglars in a series of local break-ins.

In June last year, the three Georgia men were indicted on malice and felony murder charges by a grand jury in Georgia. Each suspect was also charged with aggravated assault and false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit a felony.

RELATED ARTICLE: Lawmaker Says Ahmaud Arbery Was Murdered for Being Black

Georgia Men and Federal Hate Crimes

The three suspects were identified as Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and William "Roddie" Bryan, 51.

In the new charges filed against them, the three Georgia men face one count of interference with rights and one count of attempted kidnapping.

The Justice Department further noted that Travis and Gregory were also charged with one count each of using, carrying, and brandishing "and in Travis's case, discharging-a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence," NBC News reported.

Federal prosecutors said the three Georgia men "used force and threats of force to intimidate and interfere with Ahmaud Arbery's right to use a public street because of his race."

While Ahmaud Arbery was jogging, prosecutors said the McMichaels "armed themselves with firearms, got into a truck, and chased Arbery through the public streets of the neighborhood while yelling at him, using their truck to cut off his route, and threatening him with firearms."

After seeing the McMichaels pursuing Arbery in a pick-up truck, Bryan joined the chase and used his truck to cut off Arbery's route, prosecutors added.

The Justice Department noted that "all three defendants attempted to unlawfully seize and confine Arbery by chasing after him in their trucks in an attempt to restrain him, restrict his free movement, corral and detain him against his will, and prevent his escape."

In a Twitter post, Lee Merritt, a lawyer representing the family of Arbery, said the family is grateful for the federal hate crimes charges against those responsible for Arbery's murder.

"These charges will serve as a fail-safe to the state prosecution. Hate claimed Ahmaud's life. Our justice system must combat intolerance," Merritt added.

The family of Ahmaud Arbery is grateful for the fed hate crime charges against the men responsible for his murder.



These charges will serve as a fail-safe to the state prosecution.



Hate claimed Ahmauds life. Our justice system must combat intolerance. https://t.co/NZuIB5v2od  S. Lee Merritt, Esq. (@MeritLaw) April 28, 2021

Meanwhile, lawyers of the McMichaels argued that Travis only pursued Arbery as he has been suspected as a burglar after security footage recorded him entering a house that is under construction. They also emphasized that Travis McMichael shot Arbery as "he was fearing for his life."

However, Richard Dial from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) testified that Bryan told investigators that he heard Travis McMichael say "f - -ing n ---er" while Arbery was on the ground. McMichaels' lawyers have denied the accusation.

Ahmaud Arbery Shot and Killed

The Associated Press reported that three short-ranged shotgun blasts killed Ahmaud Arbery.

Gregory, a retired police officer, helped leak the video recorded by Bryan because he wanted "the public to know the truth, his lawyer earlier said.

The Associated Press noted that the case is the most significant civil rights prosecution undertaken to date by the Justice Department under the Biden administration.

READ MORE: Ahmaud Arbery's Mother Accuses Prosecutors, Police of 'Vast Cover-up' in New Civil Lawsuit

WATCH: Justice Department Indicts 3 Men on Federal Hate Crime Charges in Death of Ahmaud Arbery - From FOX 4 Now
Srinagar, April 29 : Police in Kashmir was directed on Thursday to ensure hassle free movement of health workers and essential services during the lockdown.

Vijay Kumar, IGP (Kashmir zone) said in tweet, "During the #LockdownPeriod, all the #Police Units have been directed to facilitate hassle free Movement of Doctors, Health Workers and Essential Services. For any assistance #Dial-112." Jammu and Kashmir government has imposed 84-hour long lockdown in 11 districts starting on Thursday at 7 p.m till 7 a.m. on Monday.

J&K has recorded a steep surge in both the daily reported new Covid cases and deaths during the last one week.
The decision this week of the Supreme Court to hear its first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade is momentous in many ways. Scholars and jurists have been clamoring for years for the court to clarify its landmark, but opaque 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller. The core holding in Heller has not been much disputed in the intervening years. According to Heller, the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to have a functional handgun in the home for reasons of self-protection. What has not been clear in the 13 years since the decision was rendered is how far outside of the home Hellers individual rights view of the Amendment extends. In the case now before it, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett, the court will have to offer a concrete answer to this question. What is the scope of the Second Amendment right to bear arms outside of the home? The case will also force two of the courts newest justices to choose between Hellers precedent of extending gun rights and the purported originalist methodology put forth in the ruling.

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Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett have each staked out strong originalist views. Both jurists insist that their approach is not reflective of ideology, but instead a rigorous methodology. Moreover, both justices have argued that when their preferred methodology yields conclusions that are not politically congenial to them, they are willing to accept outcomes that may support liberal policy preferences they personally oppose. In the case of the Second Amendment, both justices are about to be tested. More than a decade of rigorous research by scholars working in a variety of sub-fields have demonstrated that key elements of the Heller decision were premised on flawed historical claims. Hellers many errors have been thoroughly debunked and discredited, time and again. Any effort to expand Hellers scope in Corlett will require the courts current originalists to ignore this impressive body of scholarship and abandon their pledge to apply their own methodology in a neutral fashion.

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Heller argued that its conception of the right to keep and bear arms rested on a pre-existing English right to have arms and carry them in public. Unfortunately, new work by English historians Tim Harris, Priya Satia, and Lois Schwoererthree of the most distinguished scholars of British history teaching on this side of the Atlanticundercut this claim. To support its view Heller relied almost exclusively on the work of a single libertarian scholar, Joyce Lee Malcolm, the NRAs Patrick Henry Professor, who now teaches at the Antonin Scalia School of Law. Contrary to Malcolms ahistorical libertarian view of British history, Harris, Satia, and Schwoerer build on a strong scholarly consensus about the meaning of the English Declaration of Rights. Indeed, at a conference in England cohosted by the Duke Center for Firearms Law and Pembroke College Oxford, leading English historians in attendance were astounded to learn that the Supreme Court had accepted Malcolms vision of the past and its views of gun toting Englishmen as gospel truth. Malcolms account is beyond idiosyncratic, it rests on claims that few serious English historians would credit as plausible. There simply was no free-standing right of English subjects to travel armed in public under English law. Outside of a narrow list of well recognized legal exceptions to this general prohibition, mostly situations where individuals were expected to assist in preserving the Kings Peace by participating in community-based forms of law enforcement, such as the posse commitatus, traveling armed was a crime under common law. The Statute of Northampton, enacted during the reign of the English monarch Edward III, expressly prohibited traveling armed in fairs, markets or elsewhere. Traveling armed was by its very nature a challenge to the Kings authority and an affray, a common law crime against the peace of the realm. More importantly, several states enacted their own versions of this ancient law limiting armed travel in public around the time the United States formed as a nation.

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Another major problem with Heller that will now confront Gorsuch and Barrett was that it relied heavily on a small body of legal cases from the slave owning South and ignored the rest of Americas legal history. In part, Hellers historical blind spot reflected the paucity of scholarship about the history of gun regulation, an omission that has been rectified in the decade since the case was decided. The expansive libertarian vision of gun rights that Heller found in parts of the antebellum slave South did not encompass other parts of the new nation. Outside of the Slave south a tradition more favorable to gun regulation emerged and took hold. This new American legal theory limited armed travel to individuals who had a good cause to arm. Traditional English common law relied entirely on community-based law enforcement to address such threats, but the new American model recognized that there would be some situations in which individuals had to have a right to armed self-defense.

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In contrast to modern gun rights ideology, the new American approach was not libertarian, but an adaptation of the of the Founding generations idea of well-regulated liberty. This new American approach to self-defense law and the right to bear arms first took hold in Massachusetts. The states distinguished jurist, Peter Oxenbridge Thacher, one of the new republics most esteemed authorities on criminal law, made this observation about his own states limits on public carry. In our own Commonwealth, he wrote authoritatively, no person may go armed with a dirk, dagger, sword, pistol, or other offensive and dangerous weapon, without reasonable cause to apprehend an assault or violence to his person, family, or property. Gun rights advocates have dismissed Thachers unambiguous account of the law in his own state, because his statement was issued in grand jury charge, an event that they erroneously claim was merely ceremonial and hence has no legal significance. In fact, grand jury charges, particularly in New England, were solemn public occasions that offered leading judges an opportunity to explain the meaning of the law to citizens. Grand jury charges were sometimes published, and this one was reprinted in the popular press of the day, a fact that only underscores its importance. In short, Thachers exposition of the law was exactly the type of source that originalists ought to value most: an explanation of the law by an esteemed legal authority crafted to be comprehensible to an audience of ordinary citizens at a key moment in American legal history. Yet, modern gun rights advocates, including their allies on the bench, have preferred the views of slave owning judges in the South over the clear statement of one of pre-civil war Americas leading experts on criminal law. It is surely one of the oddest features of Justice Scalias version of originalism that he thought these Southern slave owning judges who wrote decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment provided a better guide to its meaning than the members of First Congress who penned its words. Indeed, in his somewhat testy majority opinion in Heller, Scalia dismissed Justice John Paul Stevens dissent for its heavy reliance on sources drawn from the First Congress.

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In another of Hellers odd intellectual moves, Scalia read the Second Amendment backwards, and in the process effectively erased the texts preamble. To justify this unusual reading strategy, an interpretive approach that Stevens reminded his colleagues on the bench had never been done in the courts history, Scalia cited legal treatises written decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment. Once again, to obtain his preferred result Scalia rummaged among sources written a half a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment to find evidence of the texts original meaning. Such a move only makes sense if one believes that nothing significant happened in American legal history between the adoption of the Second Amendment and the Civil War, a view most historians would find bizarre and erroneous. Curiously, Justice Scalia did not turn to a legal source more readily available that was written at the same time as the Second Amendment. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist, had ruled on this issue in 1790s. Jay wrote: A preamble cannot annul enacting clauses; but when it evinces the intention of the legislature and the design of the act, it enables us, in cases of two constructions, to adopt the one most consonant to their intention and design. In essence, when two possible readings of a constitutional text are possible, the preamble ought to serve as the tie breaker. Scalia disregarded this Founding era rule and applied a different rule that gained prominence decades later so that he could advance his gun rights vision.

Justices Gorsuch and Barrett have staked their reputations on their commitment to apply originalist methods in a neutral manner and let the evidence dictate the outcome. Will they follow through on that promise in Corlett? Research and scholarship published in the decade after Heller will force them to put their earlier promises to the test. It now seems clear that if they apply originalism in a neutral fashion they will have to choose between Hellers methodology and Hellers conclusions.
Representatve image

Islamabad [Pakistan], April 29 (ANI): Pakistan's senior media editors have raised alarm over a new directive by the electronic media regulator that has advised satellite television channels not to report on government meetings under progress.

The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) on Wednesday said news channels should exercise caution while reporting on decisions taken at cabinet meetings and rely mainly on briefings given by a cabinet member, in order to avoid the airing of "fake or speculative news".

Senior professionals from broadcast media have objected to restrictions placed by Pemra on TV channels under cover of the 'advice' on how to report on cabinet meetings.

Pemra was turning into a 'censorship tool' instead of acting as a regulator, said Azhar Abbas, the president of the Association of Electronic Media Editors and News Directors (Aemend).

"Such actions to curb media freedom are making Pemra controversial," Abbas said.

"Aemend is of the firm view that if there is news concerning the proceedings and decisions of the federal cabinet, and official circles decline to say anything on record, it is the media's responsibility to report on matters of public interest."

Journalists and the media are a priority target of Pakistan's military and inter-intelligence services to subjugate freedom of speech, EU Chronicle had reported in October 2020, adding that such actions of intolerance towards independent journalism have increased dramatically since July 2018 when Imran Khan became prime minister.

Not only that, internet freedom in Pakistan has also declined dramatically as in 2020 Imran Khan-led government has increased blocking political, social and cultural websites, as well as increased "weaponisation of the cybercrime law as a tool".

The report titled 'Annual Pakistan media legal review 2020' was launched by the Institute for Research, Advocacy and Development (IRADA) to commemorate the upcoming World Press Freedom Day on May 3, Dawn reported.

"The accumulative effect of these outcomes was that the already unfriendly legal framework governing freedom of expression, right to information and digital rights in Pakistan worsened considerably during 2020," according to the report titled "Growing fear and hate in Pakistani online civic spaces." (ANI)
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Royal Challengers Bangalore duo Adam Zampa and Kane Richardson arrived home in Australia on Thursday, cutting short their Indian Premier League (IPL) stints amid growing concerns over India's COVID-19 crisis.

The pair, plus compatriot Andrew Tye of Rajasthan Royals, have left the Twenty20 tournament as India continues to grapple with coronavirus infections which crossed 18 million on Thursday.

There were concerns the Bangalore duo could be stranded after the Australian government suspended flights from India until May 15 to prevent virulent COVID-19 variants from entering the country.

"Thanks to everyone for the messages of concern. Kane and I have both reached Melbourne safe and sound," Zampa, 29, said in a statement issued by the Bangalore franchise.

He thanked the Bangalore management for being "fully supportive" of their decision to leave the tournament, which is being played in a bio-bubble atmosphere and without spectators.

Zampa said leaving IPL was his "personal choice" and hoped the eight-team competition would continue as planned.

"I believe the tournament is in great hands and will definitely see the finish line," said the spinner.

Earlier, fellow Australian, Kolkata Knight Riders speedster Pat Cummins, said suspending the IPL was not the answer despite criticism of the league being played in the midst of India's national crisis.

About 40 Australians remain involved in the IPL as players, coaches, officials and commentators, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison said they would not be allowed to jump the queue for repatriation flights when they resume.

The Australian Cricketers' Association said on Wednesday it was having "conversations" with governing body Cricket Australia and the Australian government on how to repatriate cricketers from India at the end of the IPL.

The regular IPL season ends on May 23, with playoffs to follow before the final on May 30.

A senior Indian cricket board official told Reuters on Wednesday the IPL would continue as it was providing solace and entertainment to people during hard times.

(Reporting by Ian Ransom and Amlan Chakraborty; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Ken Ferris)
Tajikistan has started talks with Russia on registering and buying its Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus, the central Asian nation's healthcare ministry said on Thursday.

The first round of talks was on Wednesday, the ministry added, but gave no details on potential volumes, Reuters reported.

The mass inoculation campaign in the former Soviet republic now uses the AstraZeneca vaccine.
PLANO, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Grassroots political organization American Veterans Honor Fund launched a campaign in Plano, Texas ahead of their City Council Special Election which will take place on May 1st. Residents will be voting to select Council Members for Places 2, 4, 6 (Mayor) & 8, fill the unexpired term for Place 7, and consider bond propositions.

American Veterans Honor Fund prioritizes, supports, and encourages Veterans running for elected positions at local and state levels. The organization provides training, technology, and an experienced network of contacts, experts, and professionals dedicated to preparing our Veterans to serve in an elected capacity at the state and local levels of government. Their mission is to give Veterans the opportunity and tools to fight against the corruption and mismanagement of our government from within.

The organization will be encouraging residents to Get Out the Vote through a large, targeted campaign- including a digital advertising campaign, text messages & phone calls. They plan to get in touch with at least 13,000 voters before the election.

"There's an important election on May 1st and we need you to get to the polls! Keep veteran candidates in mind when you vote," the organization encourages all Plano community members. "When you cast your ballot, remember that our nation's veterans are the best choice to lead your City Council. Veterans have the integrity, drive, and leadership experience necessary to lead Plano. Remember, Vote Vets!" a spokesperson for American Veterans Honor Fund commented.

For information on the Special Election and the candidates running for office, visit https://www.plano.gov/1402/Elections . For more information about American Veterans Honor Fund, visit www.americanveteranshonorfund.com

The American Veterans Honor Fund is a national political organization organized under Section 527 of the IRS Tax Code. Contributions are not tax deductible. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

SOURCE American Veterans Honor Fund
MATSAPHA - Imagine working hard and having sleepless nights only to be blocked from writing your examination paper?

This befell some students enrolled at the University of Eswatini (UNESWA), Kwaluseni Campus, who had come to write their examination papers yesterday morning as they were locked out of the institution by workers who were on strike. The students were supposed to write their examination papers at 9am, but when they arrived at the university at around 8am, they found that the main gate was locked by the workers of the institution who were on strike. The examination is for the first semester of the 2020/21 academic year.

Demanded

During their strike action, which they termed a combo strike, the workers demanded three per cent cost-of-living adjustment (CoLA) for the 2020/21 financial year and the removal of the Chairman of the University Council, Prince David. Regarding the three per cent CoLA, the workers, who are organised under the banner of the National Workers Union in Swaziland Higher Institutions (NAWUSHI), said they had exhausted all available avenues, but their demand was not adhered to. They said they even petitioned Parliament on same, but did not yield the desired results. NAWUSHI President Samuel Shongwe said the UNESWA employees did not benefit from the CoLA that was stipulated in the Public Enterprises Unit (PEU) Circular of March 2020, which granted three per cent as Major to be used for 2020/21 salary adjustment. He said they believed that the institution had the financial muscle to implement the salary adjustment.

He said this was because apart from receiving a government subvention, UNESWA currently had many self-sponsored students and it also received donations from individuals and various institutions locally, regionally and abroad. He said they believed that the chairman of the university council was allegedly stopping the institution from implementing the circular. He said this was because the chairman allegedly called them to a meeting and told them that the university did not have money and in that regard they would not get the three per cent CoLA.

Deadlock

According to the unionist, they took the issue of the CoLA to the Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration Commission (CMAC) and reached a deadlock. Thereafter, he said a certificate of unresolved dispute was issued and they used it to ballot for a legal strike action.
Prof Van-Tam said he was 'highly confident scientifically' that there were no risks if two people who had received both jabs met up at least two weeks after their second dose - Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP

Meetings between fully vaccinated people are "incredibly safe", the country's deputy chief medical officer has said amid growing calls for those who have had the jab to be allowed to hug loved ones.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam said he was "highly confident scientifically" that there were no risks if two people who had received both jabs met up at least two weeks after their second dose  but he urged the public not to do so yet.

It came as official data showed that seven in 10 adults now have antibodies against Covid, with a leap in protection over the last month as the vaccine programme rollout continued.

Health officials were repeatedly questioned on Wednesday about Britain's approach to the rollout, with other countries such as the United States having granted more freedoms to those who have had their jabs.

Dr Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at Public Health England, told MPs one of the reasons for Britain's approach was a "cultural perspective" rather than a scientific one "in that we tend to do everything together".

She suggested the Government was re-examining this approach, opening up the possibility of different rules for those who have been vaccinated, given growing evidence about the effectiveness of even one jab.

Asked about the comments, Prof Van-Tam told a Downing Street press conference: "If two people who both had two doses of vaccine and have both served at least 14 days after their second dose, then I would be highly confident scientifically that  if those were reputable vaccines  then indeed it would be incredibly safe for those two people to meet."

On when that could happen in the UK, he said: "Soon, I really hope soon  but not quite now."

He pointed out that people below the age of 42, apart from healthcare workers and those with underlying conditions, had yet to receive one dose.

"I know this feels tantalisingly, extremely close and it is going to be frustrating at times, particularly for those who have had their two doses  but we just need to make sure we don't have to go backwards again on any of this," he added, urging people to "hold the line for just a teeny bit longer".

Story continues

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said ministers had taken the decision that "we all move as one" as the roadmap progresses, contrasting the policy with the decision to allow different freedoms to different geographical areas in the autumn.

During a meeting of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, Dr Ramsay said the policy of leaving up to 12 weeks between vaccine doses  a move she said had saved lives  meant the country was only now reaching the point at which significant numbers had been fully vaccinated.

"I think the United States says it has to be at least two or three weeks after your second dose before you can release those restrictions, and we're only really just reaching that now," she told MPs. "I think they are able to be less cautious, perhaps, than us because of the fact that more people have had two doses, which one would expect to give even better protection against transmission.

"Our data is now coming through showing that even one dose is very good [against transmission], so I think we can begin to look at those factors. I think the other thing is we have a slightly different cultural perspective in this country in that we tend to do everything together. We started vaccinating second doses really towards the end of April, so it is very early.

"But I think the roadmap and the policy decision which has been taken by Government, not by PHE, is about doing everything as a whole. We are trying to say that this is about the population as a whole rather than the individuals, those privileged individuals who have had two doses, being somehow able to do things that other people cannot."

She said it "may be that, within the future roadmap, we are able to pick out individuals," stressing that policy decisions were for the Government.

On Wednesday, Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M) said he was increasingly hopeful that people would be able to hug their loved ones after June 21.

Speaking after the release of a PHE study which found that just one vaccine dose cuts onward transmission by up to half, he said it was unclear what rules or guidance would be in place after that date, when social distancing rules are due to be lifted.

He told Times Radio: "I think the key thing is that if you're both vaccinated, of course, it does reduce the risk of anyone becoming severely ill. My hope is that as we move towards that June date, we will be in a position that we can not just see our loved ones but also hug our loved ones, because it's been a very long time since we've been able to do that."

On Wednesday, the Government announced that the NHS app will become Britons' vaccine passport for international travel.

Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, confirmed that the app  currently used to book medical appointments and order repeat prescriptions  will be used by holidaymakers to prove their virus status to destination countries.

Ministers announced that they had secured 60 million more doses of the Pfizer/BionNTech vaccine, which will be used for booster jabs to protect against new Covid variants this autumn. Trials are examining "mix and match" combinations of different vaccines to establish the best approach.

Prof Van-Tam said latest figures suggested the country was now "at, or close to, the bottom" of levels of Covid, with "very low levels" testing positive  in line with those last September at around 2,000 cases a day. He added that the numbers in hospital may drop further, but at 1,634  down from a peak of around 38,000  were close to the lowest they were likely to reach.

Mr Hancock also suggested the Government may soon relax rules that require care home residents to isolate for two weeks after a trip out.

He said he hoped to have "good news soon", adding: "We are working on it right now, and in fact I had a meeting on this yesterday, to make sure we can get the rules right so that people can safely leave a care home and come back without bringing coronavirus back into the home."
The business tends to be compartmentalized. An affiliate will identify, map out and infect targets, choose victims and deploy ransomware that is typically rented from a ransomware-as-a-service provider. The provider gets a cut of the payout, the affiliate normally taking more than three-quarters. Other subcontractors may also get a slice. That can include the authors of the malware used to break into victim networks and the people running the so-called bulletproof domains behind which the ransomware gangs hide their command-and-control servers. Those servers manage the remote sowing of malware and data extraction ahead of activation, a stealthy process that can take weeks.
(Source: Getty Images)

By Andreo Calonzo

About half of the more than 60 online casinos in the Philippines have permanently shut due to coronavirus restrictions, affecting as many as 30,000 foreign workers, the nations gaming agency chief said.

The Philippine Amusement & Gaming Corp. expects its gaming revenue to drop to as low as P16 billion ($330 million) this year from about P30 billion in 2020 as strict movement curbs in the capital region remain, Chairman Andrea Domingo said in a virtual briefing.

Revenue from online casinos, which cater mostly to Chinese clients, will likely be less than half the usual earnings of P8 billion to P9 billion, Domingo said. Some online casinos known as Philippine offshore gaming operators or POGOs partially reopened in December.

Manpower is really a problem. Chinese nationals cant go to the Philippines, so no one can take bets, Domingo said. Workers who left for Chinese New Year in 2020 were not able to return because of the lockdown, and there arent enough locals to do the job, she said.

Some operators will likely transfer to Vietnam, Myanmar and Malaysia, while bigger online casinos may return to the Philippines once travel restrictions ease and theres clarity on proposals to tax the industry, Domingo said.

The property sector will also take a hit from the shutdowns, as online casino workers leave empty offices and residential units, she said.

To recoup losses, the gaming agency proposed to the virus task force that land-based casinos be allowed to operate at half capacity under the second-strictest quarantine level, which is in force in the capital.

Were trying to keep afloat, Domingo said. We have to open up a little bit so we dont lose the market altogether.

 2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Sharon Steinmann, Staff / Chronicle

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday unanimously rejected a death row prisoners assertion that he is too mentally ill to execute, going against a recommendation from the trial court for a second time, records show.

Eric Cathey, a former mechanic from Houstons Third Ward, was sentenced to die for the 1995 kidnapping-murder of Christina Castillo, who was abducted by a group of men intent on robbing her boyfriend of his drugs and money. Prosecutors alleged he was the ringleader, but he has repeatedly professed his innocence.
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The Kardashian-Jenner clan are known worldwide for their heavily-filtered and heavily-edited social media snaps.

Khloe Kardashian's signature curves became one of the most hotly-debated internet topics when her team attempted to 'kill' an 'unflattering' unfiltered and un-airbrushed bikini photo at the start of April.

And in the wake of the drama, her reality star sisters appear to have ditched their famed filters and polished make-up to embrace more of their natural beauty - with Kim, Kylie and Kourtney opting for stripped back looks for their latest Instagram snaps.

MailOnline takes a look at how the sisters' Instagram photos have gone from filters and full-face make-up to bare-faced and beautiful...

Kim Kardashian

Change: Reality icon Kim, 40, has long been hailed with changing the face of beauty and fashion with her eye-popping curves and love of contouring - but in recent weeks, the Vogue coverstar has opted for fresh-faced and family snaps (pictured R in March)

Reality icon Kim, 40, has long been hailed with changing the face of beauty and fashion with her eye-popping curves and love of contouring - but in recent weeks, the Vogue coverstar has opted for fresh-faced and family snaps.

Brunette beauty Kim happily posed up with BFF La La Anthony at mother Kris Jenner's Palm Springs mansion this week - as the pair sizzled in bikinis.

However Kim ditched her flawless make-up and showcased her radiant visage as she worked the camera in the natural snap.

Fresh-faced: Brunette beauty Kim happily posed up with BFF La La Anthony at mother Kris Jenner's Palm Springs mansion this week - as the pair sizzled in bikinis

With the kids: Kim looked incredible as she posed with her beloved children in holiday snaps posted to her Instagram account - on April 11 (left), April 10 (centre) and April 9 (right)

Days earlier on April 20, make-up mogul Kim wowed in a very revealing beige halter dress that left little of her curves to the imagination - while going make-up free.

On April 22, Kim again revealed her natural beauty in snaps taken while she was studying law in a bikini.

The star sported a casual headscarf in the seemingly candid snaps.

Hard at work: Just six days ago, the star posted three snaps while studying for her bar exam in her quest to become a lawyer; she is scheduled to take her exam next year

Just days after Khloe's unedited picture emerged on April 5, Kim again embraced the filter-free look as she posted snaps with her children from her tropical vacation.

The star - who is currently going through a divorce with husband Kanye West - looked relaxed and carefree as she cradled her beloved children by the beach.

Fans have lauded the star's recent photos, branding her 'cute' and 'beautiful'.

Kylie Jenner

Radiant: Fellow make-up mogul Kylie, 23, has always attracted attention for her smouldering good looks - which she has always credited to make-up trickery, clever photography and fillers (pictured left on Wednesday and right last month)

Fellow make-up mogul Kylie, 23, has always attracted attention for her smouldering good looks - which she has always credited to make-up trickery, clever photography and fillers.

The beauty has followed in Kim's footsteps by posting more natural snaps alongside her flawlessly made-up images - and looks stunning in the process.

Kylie has been speaking to her 228million Instagram followers in candid video filmed without make-up on.

Confident: Kylie showed off her stunning looks and flawless complexion this week

This week, the star bundled up in white sweats and showed off a makeup-free glow as she told followers about her afternoon plans.

Kylie wore her raven locks long and loose, letting them cascade down well past her waist.

In the past she has vehemently denied ever having plastic surgery, telling Paper Magazine in 2019: 'People think I fully went under the knife and completely reconstructed my face, which is completely false. Im terrified. I would never.'

Kourtney Kardashian

Gorgeous: Kourtney has been sharing stunning candid bikini snaps (left on April 24 and right in March)

The eldest Kardashian-Jenner sister, 42, has been glowing of late on social media, thanks to her titillating new romance with rocker boyfriend Travis Barker and her more fresh-faced snaps.

Kourtney has been showcasing her natural curves in skimpy thong bikinis, all documented in various loved-up snaps with the musician.

The stunning star, who is no stranger to a highly-polished social media snap, has posted snaps showing her indulging in outdoor activities with Travis, relaxing in her underwear and even sucking on her new love's thumb in a saucy video.

'Just like heaven' The eldest Kardashian-Jenner sister, 42, has been glowing of late on social media, thanks to her titillating new romance with rocker boyfriend Travis Barker and her more fresh-faced snaps

Reminiscing: Travis took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a slew of snapshots and clips taken during his recent vacation with Kourtney - who stunned in nude swimwear

Intimate moments: Kourtney has also been captured in romantic moments from this month - sucking Travis' thumb and holding his hand

In one loved-up clip, Barker placed a hand on Kardashian's bikini-clad backside as they cruised around on a motorboat.

Giving his following a better view of his girlfriend's sensational physique, Travis included a photo of Kourtney sitting at the bow of the boat, while gazing out onto the water.

Her lengthy raven hair flowed out from under a skull print scarf and she showcased her enviably toned physique in a gold thong-style two piece.

Another clip showed the couple walking carefully across a suspension bridge, with Kourtney taking the lead.

That Khloe Kardashian un-edited photo controversy...

Natural look: This comes as a leaked photo of Khloe, 36, in a bikini began circulating online earlier this month and it was reported that she and her family were working overtime to wipe any trace of it from the internet

The controversy all started after the original bikini photo of Khloe emerged on social media at the start of April.

The image in question showed Khloe standing by a pool wearing a skimpy leopard print string bikini and appearing unfiltered an un-airbrushed.

Soon after it leaked on various forums online, members of the Kardashian PR team reported the posts as copyright infringement, due to the photo being posted without permission.

In the candid image, which is still up on one subreddit, the mother-of-one appears to be mid-conversation and has her hair pulled up in a ponytail as she holds her phone and flashes a subtle smile at the photographer.

Toned: Khloe addressed the drama on Instagram days later, as she shared live videos of herself to prove that her body 'isn't photoshopped'

Showing it off: Khloe posed topless in the bathroom mirror as she showed off her unedited body and declared the clip wasn't Photoshopped

The image seems to have been snapped at Kris Jenner's desert compound in La Quinta, California, where the Kardashian and Jenner clan just spent the Easter weekend.

While most would be proud to look so good in a bikini, it's not hard to see that Khloe looks very different to her highly glamorized Instagram images.

In the alleged unedited snap, her waistline appears less defined, her curves less dramatic and her skin not as impossibly smooth as it looks in her carefully staged glossy fashion shoots.

Tracy Romulus, Kim Kardashian's BFF and chief marketing officer for KKW brands, said in a statement to Page Six: 'The color edited photo was taken of Khloe during a private family gathering and posted to social media without permission by mistake by an assistant.'

Khloe has come under fire in recent years for her changing face and body, with many accusing the KUWTK star of brazenly photoshopping her Instagram posts to an extent fans sometimes struggle to recognize her.

Speaking out: Khloe described her body image struggles in a lengthy statement posted to her account where she spoke of the pressure to look a certain way

Candid: She wrote: 'Everyday I am told by my family and friends who love me that I am beautiful but I know that it needs to be believed from within'

Following a slew of questions from fans, cosmetic and injectables specialist Claire McGuinness weighed in on the discussion, offering her opinion on what changes Khloe may have made.

She speculated that the mother-of-one had changed her appearance so dramatically thanks to a combination of 'surgery, injectables, weight loss... and filters, makeup and lighting'.

The reality titans have always denied having plastic surgeries, despite looking markedly different from their show debut more than a decade ago.

Proud: Khloe showed all the results of her time at the gym in the video which she shared on Wednesday

Khloe addressed the drama on Instagram days later, as she shared live videos of herself to prove that her body 'isn't photoshopped.'

Subsequently she issued a lengthy statement where she spoke about the pressure of being in the spotlight and her body being 'micro-analyzed' as a public figure.

The star also revealed that being compared to her siblings, Kim and Kourtney, in addition to 'constant ridicule and judgment' has been 'too much to bear.'

Comparisons: Khloe chalks her morphing looks up to picture perfect contouring done by shading and highlighting through makeup (Left 2019, right 2008)
The Nagol is Back! VTOs guide to this years Nagol, plus where to stay and play in south, central and north Pentecost.
Over the past day, April 28, 15 ceasefire violations by the armed formations of the Russian Federation were recorded in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) area in eastern Ukraine.

In particular, Russian-occupation forces opened fire from 120mm mortars prohibited by the Minsk Agreements, heavy machine guns and tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns on Ukrainian defenders in suburbs of Krasnohorivka (21km west of Donetsk); 120mm mortars, small arms, hand-held grenade launchers and tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns  near Katerynivka (64km west of Luhansk); 82mm mortars, different grenade launchers and small arms  outside Vodiane (94km south of Donetsk); tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns and grenade machine guns  in the area of Hnutove (20km north-east of Mariupol); heavy machine guns and tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns  near Svitlodarsk (57km north-east of Donetsk); tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns  outside Avdiivka (17km north of Donetsk); hand-held antitank grenade launchers  in the area of Zolote-4 (59km west of Luhansk); small arms were used to shell Zaitseve (62km north-east of Donetsk), the press center of the JFO Headquarters informs.

In the area of responsibility of the operational and tactical group North, a Ukrainian member of the Joint Forces was wounded in the enemy shelling.

Ukrainian troops returned fire in response to the enemys attacks.

In the area of Vodiane, the invaders used hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers to deliver POM-2 mines.

The Ukrainian side of the Joint Control and Coordination Center (JCCC) informed the OSCE representatives about the actions of the armed formations of the Russian Federation.

As of 7 a.m. on April 29, three ceasefire violations by Russian-occupation forces were recorded.

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Lehigh Countys district attorney revealed several people were accosted by the armed gunman who fatally shot a man at a Wawa, then later shot himself.

A news release Wednesday from District Attorney James Martin says Za Uk Lian, 45, of South Whitehall Township pointed the gun at a crowd of people, then confronted two people to try to take their vehicles after he allegedly shot and killed 31-year-old Ramon Ramirez.

The release says Lian arrived at the Wawa on Route 100 in Upper Macungie at 4:48 a.m. on Wednesday, April 21. Lian allegedly drove up next to a parked Jeep and shot the driver. There was no interaction between them before the shooting, the release says. The victims condition has been upgraded to critical, it says.

Lian then shot and killed Ramirez as he was pumping gas into a truck tractor, the release says. There was no interaction between them before the shooting, it says. Ramirez, 31, of Allentown, left behind a wife and three children.

Surveillance video allegedly shows that after the shootings, Lian pointed the gun at a group of people who were standing outside of a parked vehicle; the identities of those people are unknown at this time.

He then allegedly confronted the driver of a parked F150 pickup truck and demanded the keys. The driver, who has been interviewed by police, told Lian the keys were inside, but as officers arrived nearly simultaneously, Lian ran away, the release says.

A third individual, who has been interviewed by police, was also accosted by Lian at gunpoint and a demand was made for his vehicle, the release says.

However, more police were arriving and Lian ran toward a shed near a fence, crawled under the fence and proceeded about a quarter mile to a daycare center and wooded area, where he shot himself, the release says.

The motive for Lians actions remains unclear. Police dont know where he was prior to the incident. Lians cellphone was left behind at his home and neither it nor another electronic device recovered has revealed any evidence about these crimes or a motive, the release says.

Prior to the Wawa shooting, Lian was driving on Route 22 alongside a car driven by a woman. She said she heard a loud noise, then Lian pulled ahead of her. She coincidentally went to the Wawa and noticed a bullet hole in her car at that point and called police. She left the store just prior to Lians arrival, the news release says.

The release says Lian arrived in the U.S. in 2013 and settled in the state of Washington before arriving in the Lehigh Valley about two years ago. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2019.

The gun used by Lian had been purchased legally, and Lian had applied for and received a concealed carry permit in Lehigh County.

Lian was employed at a Home Depot warehouse near the Wawa. He last worked there on April 9. He was reportedly positive for COVID-19 as of April 12. There is no known connection between his employment history and the shooting, the release says.

Martin credits the prompt response of various law enforcement agencies to this incident with likely saving lives.

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com.

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LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- dmg events announced the launch of the Citizens Energy Congress, a unique energy industry event committed to resetting the energy agenda, post COVID-19, to drive the transition to a low carbon energy system that balances affordable energy access and climate change commitments.

The Citizens Energy Congress will be a virtual event taking place from June 15-16. It will connect the fragmented, divergent, and polarising perspectives around energy and accelerate the industry's response to growing pressure for a bold new approach to how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed.

The Citizens Energy Congress will bring together a broad spectrum of energy industry professionals, policy makers, investors, and civil society to challenge the concepts and constraints of the existing energy models and to foster consensus-driven foundations for a low carbon energy system.

The Congress will seek to build on the growing momentum around the need to tackle global warming, reinvigorated by the virtual summit hosted by US President Joe Biden this month. At the two-day summit, attended by 40 world leaders, the world's leading economies either reaffirmed pledges, or committed to new targets, to reduce carbon emissions to address climate change. The Citizens Energy Congress will look beyond these pledges and examine how these ambitions can be met.

The Citizens Energy Congress will address the challenging questions at the heart of the energy transition, recognising the multifaceted nature of the energy system. Attracting global ministers, CEOs and influencers from across the energy ecosystem, the speaker line-up will provide diverse opinions and ensure vigorous debate to help shape future strategic direction.

A selection of confirmed speakers include Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development and President of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, according to The New York Times "probably the most important economist in the world"; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Former Danish Prime Minister and Former CEO of Save the Children, named by Forbes magazine in 2017 as one of the world's greatest leaders; Peggy Liu, Chairperson, Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), one of the leading catalysts of a green China; Lorenzo Simonelli, Chairman & CEO, Baker Hughes and Mark Campanale, Founder and Executive Chair, Carbon Tracker.

Supporting organisations include OGCI, the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative, a CEO-led directive that aims to accelerate the industry response to climate change, and Boston Consulting Group, one of the world's leading management consulting firms and the official Strategic Insights Partner for the Citizens Energy Congress.

Bob Dudley, Chair of OGCI and former Group CEO of bp said: "Solving the climate challenge will require new ideas, new technologies, new investments, and new government policies, all executed at scale and at speed. Commitment and collaboration across industry, finance, research, government and society are critical."

Alan Thomson, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG as well as global leader of BCG's Energy practice said: "Private and public-sector organisations must collaborate more consistently, in order to develop and scale technologically and economically impactful solutions to be able to tackle global climate change challenges efficiently."

Christopher Hudson, President of Global Energy, dmg events, said: "The Citizens Energy Congress will provide a uniquely balanced and inclusive debate between a broad audience of stakeholders across the energy value chain. Recognising we are all interconnected, our goal is to enhance understanding, not enforce agreement. Our intent is to deliver a world-class forum for a broad-based examination of the competing perspectives on how to achieve a sustainable energy future through strategy, collaboration and innovation."

https://www.citizensenergycongress.com/press-release/

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1498997/Citizens_Energy_Congress_Logo.jpg

SOURCE dmg events
Patricia Denny and her husband, Jeff, had hoped to one day get an RV and travel the country. Instead, Jeff has been forced into retirement at age 54 by a lung disease caused by the asbestos that's polluted the small town of Libby, Montana, for decades.

Jeff Denny's lungs are damaged from the asbestos he breathed while participating in an Environmental Protection Agency-run cleanup of the asbestos contamination caused by the vermiculite mine that closed 30 years ago in this community in the Cabinet Mountains. Patricia Denny is afraid she will get asbestos-related disease as well, given how many residents of the town have become sick. Barbed fibers, a byproduct of vermiculite, attach to the lungs when breathed in.

At least 400 people exposed to Libby asbestos have died of asbestosis, mesothelioma or other lung diseases, and thousands more have been diagnosed with lung damage and diseases caused by asbestos, according to the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, the Libby clinic that diagnosed Jeff Denny.

"It is not the matter of if, it is when," Patricia Denny said in an online message. "Once this barbed killer gets in ya it stays  and kills the area it penetrates."

The company that operated the mine, W.R. Grace, filed for bankruptcy in 2001, as thousands of lawsuits poured in after the extent of the contamination became known. Since then, the Montana Supreme Court has held several other companies responsible as well, including the BNSF Railway, one of the nation's largest rail companies. BNSF, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, is liable for spreading asbestos amid the dust that blew off its cars while transporting vermiculite across the nation for use in insulation and other purposes, according to court rulings.

Now, the railroad is going after the local health clinic that opened to deal with the health crisis in 2000 and still screens dozens of people each month as new cases emerge. BNSF is suing the Center for Asbestos Related Disease in federal court.

The rail company alleges that the clinic is defrauding Medicare and grant agencies by overdiagnosing asbestos-related diseases and running unnecessary tests. BNSF also takes issue with CARD's reliance on X-rays or CT scans to make its diagnoses, even if independent experts disagree with the clinic's interpretations of the scans.

"CARD knowingly billed the federal government millions of taxpayer dollars for medically unnecessary radiographic studies and interpretations that they routinely disregarded," BNSF spokesperson Lena Kent said in a statement.

In the suit, which was filed in 2019 but not made public until Feb. 18, BNSF asked the U.S. government to prosecute CARD for fraud. The government declined, leaving BNSF to sue the clinic itself under a federal whistleblower statute.

Kent said that the decision "was not taken lightly" and that BNSF "recognizes the extraordinary impact that Asbestos-Related Disease has had on the [Libby] community."

CARD's team is one of the few who study the health effects of Libby amphibole asbestos  the name of the needle-like mineral found only in Libby and a few other mines around the world. The clinic is also the leading provider of asbestos diagnostics and care in the 2,700-person town, where mesothelioma and asbestosis are rampant.

CARD and its lawyers see the lawsuit as a ploy to damage the clinic's credibility and limit the railroad's financial liability by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the clinic's diagnoses. The attorney representing CARD, Tim Bechtold, said the lawsuit is taking the clinic's time and resources away from patients. "All they want to do is hassle CARD," he said. "It's completely cynical."

The EPA declared Libby a Superfund site in 2002 and spent more than $600 million on the cleanup, according to the agency. W.R. Grace agreed to pay current and future asbestos victims medical costs and $250 million for the cleanup, and the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2014.

People in Libby are still being diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases today. Decades can pass between exposure and the development of symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anyone in Libby can qualify for Medicare if they develop lung disease, under a special part of the Affordable Care Act.

The crux of BNSF's accusations is that many of CARD's diagnoses of distinct lung diseases in Libby residents are fraudulent, largely due to their rarity and the difficulty that others have diagnosing them.

Researchers from CARD and Mount Sinai hospital in New York City have found that CT scans from the lungs of people exposed to amphibole showed a distinct type of scar tissue called lamellar pleural thickening (LPT). CARD's research suggests that this scar tissue thickens over time and makes it increasingly difficult for the patient to breathe.

But few, if any, cases of asbestos-associated LPT have been diagnosed outside of CARD. The clinic said that is because no one else knows to look for it. "The disease is different than typical [asbestos-related] disease so it does in fact take a trained eye to identify it," CARD said in a statement. "If the [CT] reader did not know what he/she was looking for, then it would not be identified."

Others see this as evidence that CARD is overdiagnosing patients with a condition that may not exist. "I was appalled by what goes on in Libby," said Dr. Anthony Dal Nogare, a pulmonologist at Kalispell Regional Healthcare who has testified for BNSF in prior lawsuits. "It's like the emperor's new clothes if it's something only they can see and no one else can."

Dal Nogare, who visits Libby frequently to see patients, said he never sees LPT on CT scans and rarely sees asbestos-related lung diseases in people who did not work in the mine. He pointed out that the smoking rates in Libby are high, which could account for the shortness of breath and other symptoms CARD's patients experience.

CARD said it sends each of its CT scans to independent radiologists who can confirm the diagnosis of LPT. The clinic's records indicate it finds abnormalities in 60% of scans, while the outside radiologists find them in only 35%. CARD's administrative director, Tracy McNew, said the discrepancy occurs because the independent radiologists don't receive any clinical information about patients or their symptoms, meaning they can't learn how to see LPT and associate it with the disease.

"It's just not an exact science," said Bruce Alexander, an environmental epidemiologist at Colorado State University. Although something serious like mesothelioma would be obvious in a CT scan or X-ray, he said, trained radiologists can differ on how to interpret subtle signs like pleural thickening, which may be confused with fat on the lungs.

Dr. Paul Scanlon, a pulmonologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said most radiologists would read what CARD calls LPT as pleural plaques, which are difficult to mistake on a CT scan. Pleural plaques are an indication that someone has been exposed to asbestos but are not very harmful by themselves.

CARD declined to make its medical experts available to respond, citing the pending case.

"Theres legitimate scientific debate about what the implications of these exposures are, but it's pretty clear people in these communities were adversely affected," Alexander said. In 2012, he studied the lungs of Minneapolis residents who lived near a plant that processed Libby vermiculite. He found about 11% of the residents there had a type of pleural thickening or plaques but said the long-term health implications are unclear.

Other evidence suggests that the lungs of Libby's residents are especially damaged, both those of people who worked in the mine and those who did not. In 2017, the CDC published a study showing that residents were more than 100 times as likely to die of the lung disease asbestosis than the general population.

"Simply by living in Libby, they were exposed to asbestos at a high-enough concentration," said paper author Samantha Naik, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a private consultant. She said Libby represents a rare case in which an environmental chemical can be scientifically proven to cause a disease.

For her part, Patricia Denny is frustrated that BNSF and other companies have yet to be held fully accountable.

"They all made a huge profit, still are, while the people are dying," she said.
President Biden said on Thursday that he was not told in advance about the F.B.I.s execution of search warrants at Rudolph W. Giulianis office and home, citing his pledge not to meddle in law enforcement matters.

I give you my word, I was not, told of the search, Mr. Biden said in a taped interview with NBC at the White House early Thursday, before heading to Georgia.

I made a pledge, Mr. Biden said in the interview, which will air Friday morning on the The Today Show. I would not interfere in any way  order or try to stop any investigation the Justice Department had in their way. I learned about that last night when the rest of the world learned about it.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden vowed to restore the independence of the Justice Department after years of Trump administration policies that led to allegations of political interference and retaliation.
Paxton, IL (60957)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening. Increasing clouds with periods of showers late. Low 69F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening. Increasing clouds with periods of showers late. Low 69F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
HAARLEM, Netherlands, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Eurofins Cyber Security, the Cyber Security division of Eurofins Digital Testing, is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement with NTECHCON (www.NTECHCON.com) as the company's first Cyber Security Business Development Channel Partner. NTECHCON, a leading technology consultancy based in Madrid, operates extensively in Europe and overseas.

The Eurofins Cyber Security Channel Partner Plan, launched this year, is open to established ICT related companies with a customer base in cyber security and/or digital testing. We are delighted that NTECHCON, based in Madrid, with a skilled team of consultants and technical experts, has become our first partner. They will help bring Eurofins Cyber Security's product portfolio to the important markets of Spain and Portugal.

As a Eurofins Cyber Security channel partner, NTECHCON will be authorised to deploy Eurofins Cyber Security's highly regarded Penetration Testing services, Cyber Security Health Checks, TestWizard test automation platform and many other products and services.

Felix Prieto, CEO of NTECHCON Consultancy commented "This Sales Consultancy Agreement will allow our expert consultants to bring Eurofins comprehensive and unique service offerings to customers across the Iberian peninsula, helping them meet the latest cyber risks and challenges head on. We strongly believe that the sum of Eurofins pioneering technology solutions and NTECHCON's expertise and capabilities will create a significant value proposition and deliver success in the Iberia market."

NTECHCON have appointed Issac Alegre as Executive Sales Manager for the partnership in Iberia. Issac has more than 25 years' experience in technical and cyber security sales.

Eurofins looks forward to working with NTECHCON and helping bring the benefits of robust cyber security tools and services to even more organisations across Europe and worldwide.

SOURCE Eurofins Cyber Security
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The city is planning to lift all of its coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions this summer.

On MSNBCs Morning Joe on Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will reopen in full capacity beginning July 1.

Our plan is to fully reopen on July 1. We are ready for stores to open, for businesses to open, offices, theaters, full strength, de Blasio said. The mayor did not say if the mask mandate will remain in place.

New York City has not been open at full strength since everything shuttered when COVID-19 first hit in March 2020. Gov. Andrew Cuomo in July of 2020 began reopening certain sectors of the state and city, however, things did not ramp up until the vaccination effort began in January.

Beginning July 1, restaurants, hair salons, arenas and gyms will open at full capacity, followed by Broadway by September. City public schools will also open at full strength in September, the mayor repeated Thursday and has been saying for weeks.

People have gotten vaccinated in extraordinary numbers, 6.3 million vaccinations in New York City to date, the mayor said about the decision to open up. We know the vaccination effort is going to grow and grow. We gotta keep working hard at that.

Help us out by going out and getting vaccinated if you havent already, and its free and its all over the city and now were doing walkups at sites all over the city, Hizzoner said. Weve got some work to do but Im quite confident well be ready for full strength by July 1.

On Wednesday, Cuomo announced the restaurant curfew would be lifted on May 17, as well as catered affairs where people have been vaccinated or provided a negative COVID-19 test. Patrons will be permitted to sit at the bar again and dancing will be permitted at catered events beginning on May 3.

People wishing to throw in-residence parties with more than 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors will be allowed so long as the events are staffed by a professional, licensed caterer.

Cuomo also said the decision to lift the restriction is the result of lowered positivity rates that are the direct result of disciplined behavior and vaccination efforts.

FOLLOW KRISTIN F. DALTON ON TWITTER.
Chinese-owned global agricultural giant Syngenta Group reported a strong pick-up in revenue growth in the first quarter, as a media report said the company formed last year through a merger of assets in Europe, Israel and China may be accelerating its IPO plans with an aim to list this year.

The Swiss-based group said its sales rose 20% in the first quarter of 2021 to $7.1 billion, according to an announcement on Thursday. That marked an acceleration from the full-year 2020 when the companys revenue grew by a more modest 5% to $23.1 billion.

As a private company, Syngenta is not required to release financial reports. Its main assets are the previously publicly traded Syngenta AG, as well as Israeli-based Adama and the agricultural businesses of China National Chemical Corp. (ChemChina). The new Syngenta Group is Chinese-owned but based in Switzerland.

The groups earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), often considered a measure of operating profit, rose 19% to $1.5 billion in the first quarter, also accelerating from a 3% rise for all of 2020.

Following a robust full year 2020 performance, Syngenta Group continued its strong growth trajectory in the first quarter. All businesses delivered broad-based, double-digit growth, the group said in a statement. EBITDA increased significantly and EBITDA margin was maintained with a focus on operational efficiency.

The company said that sales for its biologicals unit were particular strong, up 40% in the first quarter from a year earlier on a comparable basis. Including results from its acquisition of Italian company Valagro last fall, the biological units revenue more than doubled year-on-year. Also performing well was its modern agriculture platform, which provides farmers access to market-leading technologies, with sales tripling to $280 million for the quarter.

Among its major business units, its Syngenta Group China was by far the strongest as that country emerged earlier than the rest of the world from the global pandemic. Syngenta Group Chinas sales rose 41% to $2.2 billion, accounting for 31% of the groups total. The weakest performance came from Adama, whose first-quarter sales were still up 14% year-on-year.

We delivered strong sales and profit growth across all business units, said Syngenta Group CFO Chen Lichtenstein. Our success in China is fueled by our strong offering and farmer-centric ecosystem. We aim to continue driving growth, focusing on operating margins and further accelerating our innovation pipeline.

Syngenta Group announced the results a day after a report in German publication Handelsblatt, citing unnamed finance and industry sources, reported the company was considering accelerating its plans for an IPO to possibly make the listing this year, compared with a previous timetable for 2022.

Chinas state-owned ChemChina first purchased a majority of Adama about a decade ago, and acquired the remainder in 2016. ChemChina then completed its purchase of Syngenta AG a year later in a landmark deal worth $43 billion, much of that paid for with debt.

ChemChina more than doubled its assets through the Syngenta AG purchase, but the deal also propelled its debts beyond 434 billion yuan ($67 billion), up 88% from six months prior to the acquisition, raising questions about the state-owned giants ability to integrate the Swiss company. Those debts continued to grow, hitting 647.58 billion yuan at the end of September 2019, when the companys asset-liability ratio swelled to 77.38%.

Contact reporter Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com)

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Follow the Chinese markets in real time with Caixin Globals new stock database.
NatWest was acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2000, which has had its headquarters in Edinburgh for almost 300 years.

RBS' HQ has been in Edinburgh for 294 years

NatWest Group PLC (LON:NWG) said today that the bank would shift its HQ to London in the event Scotland votes for independence from the UK.

Speaking to reporters after first-quarter results chief executive Alison Rose said that if Scotland did split away Our balance sheet would be too big for an independent Scottish economy. And so we would move our registered headquarters, in the event of independence, to London"

NatWest was formerly known as Royal Bank of Scotland until a change of name in early 2020.

Rose insisted that the bank was agnostic on the issue of independence and said it was an issue for Scotlands people to decide.

NatWest was acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2000, which has had its headquarters in Edinburgh for almost 300 years.

The enlarged bank was rescued by the UK government in 2008 when the financial crash had led it to the brink of bankruptcy and the UK taxpayer still owns 54%.

Rose also warned it was facing a potentially big bill from criminal charges relating to a breach of money laundering regulations between 2011 and 2019.

UK financial regulator the FCA alleges that NatWest failed to monitor deposits of 365mln paid into one customers accounts, of which around 264mln was in cash.

If convicted, NatWest faces an unlimited fine and further substantial costs.

"We're very disappointed with the situation. We take AML (anti-money-laundering) very seriously and we invest very significantly in our services," Rose said.

NatWest shares fell after the first quarter results today even though profits almost doubled to 946mln.

Analysts blamed the lack of comment about dividends going forward was to blame especially as the bank revealed a very strong capital position.

Shares eased 3.7% to 196.2p.
The Very Rev. Nyansako-ni-Nku, former PCC Moderator Facebook

The Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC) has announced the death of erstwhile Moderator, the Very Rev. Dr. Nyansako-ni-Nku.

The man who served as Moderator of the PCC from 1999 to 2009 died on Tuesday, April 27, 2021, in Douala, said Rev. Miki Hans Abia, PCC Synod Clerk.

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC), the Rt. Rev. Fonki Samuel Forba announces with deep regret the death of the Very Rev. Dr. Nyansako-ni-Nku, former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon and [erstwhile] President of the All African Conference of Churches [elected on November 27, 2003] who slept in the Lord on Tuesday, April 27, 2021, + Fonki said on Wednesday morning.

Rt. Rev. Fonki adds that funeral arrangements will be communicated in the days ahead. He calls on all Presbyterians to pray for the rest of the soul of our church father and remain in prayers for the whole church.

The Moderator of the PCC extends his deep sympathy to our mother Ma Nku Grace, the immediate family and the PCC family at large.

Rev. Nyansako-ni-Nku served as Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon from 1989 to 1999. He was first elected Moderator of the PCC in 1999. At the end of his five-year mandate, he was re-elected for a second five -year term as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon, PCC in an election that took place at the 41st Synod of Growth meeting, held at Presbyterian Church Center, Kumba from November 7 - 9, 2004.

Rev. Dr. Nyansako-ni-Nku described himself as an "intensely family man." He was married to Grace Mbong, a secondary school teacher of history. They had four children: two girls and two boys.

He was born on September 29, 1945, in Kotto-Barombi, a village in Meme Division of Cameroon's South-West Region. In April 1972, he was ordained into the Ministry of Word and Sacrament.

"You fought a good fight, you kept the faith and indeed you have finished your work. Only remembered by what you have done. Fare thee well servant of God and may your soul rest in peace," said Rev. Geraldine Njwie Mforsah Fobang, associate pastor of PC Buea Town and Station Manager of CBS Radio Buea.

The name Rev Nyansako-ni-Nku occupied my mind from Sunday school, YP, and CYF until the day you ordained me. I was planning to pay him a visit, just to hear that he has gone home to be with the Lord. I thank God for laying your hands on me during my ordination. You personally handed me my bachelor's degree in the seminary for my distinction. You have groomed sons and daughters to follow you in your footsteps. The Ramah family will keep you and your family in prayers, said Rev. Solomon Warah, a former pastor of the PCC.
Production Designed to Serve Recently Announced CROSSMARK Driven Rollout

VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Rritual Superfoods Inc. ("Rritual" or the "Company") (CSE: RSF) (FSE: 0RW) is pleased to provide an update on its third full scale production run which commenced in mid-March 2021. Building from the Company's newly established relationship with CROSSMARK, the Company confirms that its third full scale manufacturing run, nearing completion, has been scaled to service distribution to 2,400 retail stores with 10,000 points of distribution.

As a result of the Company's strategic sales campaign, mass retail response and demand for the Rritual Superfoods lineup continues to strengthen meaningfully on a daily basis. The Company's strategic focus on building a national presence in the USA, powered by its CROSSMARK relationship, necessitates an agile and sophisticated manufacturing capability from the acquisition of raw materials all the way to fulfillment at the store level.

"As the demand forecast continues to accelerate, the Company has developed the relationships and capacity to exceed the production and fulfillment requirements of our most aggressive modelling," said Mr. David Kerbel, Rritual President and CEO. "Our team, including our foundational relationships such as CROSSMARK, have exceeded expectations putting the Company in position to embrace its growth trajectory as our national rollout begins to build momentum."

About Rritual

Rritual is a functional superfood company that creates plant-based elixirs, which support immunity, focus and relaxation. The company is poised to dominate a segment where demand and sales are growing exponentially. Under the executive leadership with over 100 years of CPG pedigree, Rritual is launching in North America in Q2 2021 as the company positions itself as a leader in the functional health and wellness industry. Rritual's superfood elixirs can be found online at www.rritual.com.

Follow Rritual on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , and Instagram .

Functional Foods Market

According to Grandview Research*, it is estimated that the global functional food market is projected to reach $275 billion by 2025, growing at 7.9% each year with consumers putting more emphasis on health and wellness.



*https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-functional-foods-market

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 Information

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation (collectively, "forward-looking statements") that relate to Rritual's current expectations and views of future events. Any statements that express, or involve discussions as to, expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, through the use of words or phrases such as "will likely result", "are expected to", "expects", "will continue", "is anticipated", "anticipates", "believes", "estimated", "intends", "plans", "forecast", "projection", "strategy", "objective" and "outlook") are not historical facts and may be forward-looking statements and may involve estimates, assumptions and uncertainties which could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. No assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon. These statements speak only as of the date of this news release. In particular and without limitation, this news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company's plans to leverage third party manufacturing and logistics, the Company's broader retail distribution plans and the Company's other plans, focus and objectives.

Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Rritual's control, which could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the impact and progression of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors set forth under "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the final long form prospectus of the Company dated February 26, 2021 and available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Rritual undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Rritual to predict all of them or assess the impact of each such factor or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. Any forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.

SOURCE Rritual Superfoods Inc.
China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Wednesday stressed the stringent implementation of epidemic control measures at tourist sites nationwide ahead of the Labor Day holiday starting on May 1.

At a teleconference, the ministry called on tourist sites to limit the number of visitors in key areas such as ticket counters, entrances, core attractions and dining spaces.

Tour routes should be optimized to prevent overcrowding at popular spots, said the ministry.

Supervision was advised to ensure tourists' compliance with COVID-19 containment measures covering transportation, accommodation, catering, shopping and other sectors.

Also on Wednesday, the Ministry of Education issued a notice requiring schools to keep anti-epidemic measures in place during the holiday, strengthen health guidance for outgoing students and staff, and keep track of their health conditions.

China expects to see around 250 million domestic travelers during the upcoming holiday, a majority of whom will be tourists.






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HOUSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Boomerang Credit Fund, Channel Investments and the Anvil Energy Partners team today announced a business combination to deploy up to $300,000,000 via a static pool lending facility for upstream oil and gas producers. The new company will be branded as Anvil Channel Energy Solutions.

The new private lender will originate new issue facilities for borrowers seeking between $10,000,000 and $100,000,000 for refinancings, acquisitions and development of energy assets.

The firm will combine origination, credit expertise and in-house technical engineering leveraged to the Anvil team and track-record.

"We are excited about the prospects our combined teams offer in terms of addressing the largely unmet small and mid-cap market for direct lending," said Cary Meadow, Executive Chairman of Anvil Channel. "We believe in the continued long term need for uni-tranche capital deployment to environmentally sound upstream energy companies."

Echoing Mr. Meadow, James Avery, CEO of Anvil Channel said, "We look forward to the structural integration of our firms and coming to market with our first transactions in 2021. We believe that while renewable energy and alternative power solutions are an integral part of the global energy mix going forward, upstream oil and gas are still critical elements of the U.S. energy complex for the foreseeable future."

President and CIO, David O'Driscoll said, "The continued retrenchment of capital from the sector has resulted in a prolonged cycle; we are excited to provide crucial liquidity to the market to facilitate the strategic initiatives of our clients." This sentiment was followed by his colleague and Head of Origination, Rob Lindermanis, who noted "we look to provide capital to companies positioned for growth and expansion in this challenging environment."

The Company, headquartered in Houston, TX with offices in Los Angeles, CA and Stamford, CT is actively seeking opportunities in the domestic United States and Canada.

More information about the team and strategy is available at: http://www.anvilcp.com

About Anvil Energy Partners

The Anvil Energy Partners team entered the credit market in 2019 with an upstream strategy supported by several institutional investors.

About Boomerang Credit Fund

Boomerang Credit Fund is a wholly owned subsidiary of Channel Investments, a private alternative investor with deep energy expertise based in Los Angeles, California.

SOURCE Anvil Channel Energy Solutions
Weekend helps travellers discover nearby locations for unforgettable weekend getaways





DUSSELDORF, GERMANY 29 April 2021  trivago, a leading global accommodation search platform, today announced the US and UK launch of trivago Weekend , a brand-new way for users to discover weekend getaways close to home. Weekend, which provides curated content to help travellers find great deals on accommodation and experiences on and near their doorstep, is now available to travellers in the US and UK.

Weekend highlights close-to-home adventures and experiences in direct response to the travel restrictions caused by the pandemic. The product taps into the need for experiential, memory-making trips coveted by modern travellers. The launch in the US and UK has been timed to make the most of lockdown restrictions easing across the country and the reported uptake in domestic breaks this summer.

With the pandemic placing restrictions on travel, many of us have become aware of some of the incredible destinations and activities available on our doorstep, says Axel Hefer, CEO. To help users understand the potential of their surrounding area, trivago Weekend provides travellers with ideas for those exciting nearby getaways. In addition to helping users find amazing deals on accommodations, we want trivago to become a source of inspiration for weekend getaways, both planned and spontaneous.

trivago users in the US and UK will be able to click onto Weekend via the homepage and set a search radius of 100-200 miles from their location, with the results showing both deals on accommodations and recommendations of attractions and things to do in the destination area. The platform can be searched by location, dates for travel and number of rooms/guests, so that travellers can tailor the perfect getaway to their needs. The search results give accommodation options, with suggestions of nearby attractions and points of interest for inspiration and planning.

The product is expected to be rolled out to select markets throughout the year.

The launch follows trivagos acquisition of weekend.com in January. The company has since integrated weekend.coms content, focused on inspirational weekend getaway packages, into its own platform.

Recent research from trivago reveals that activities and hobbies are increasingly important in choosing breaks and getaways: discovering new things was the number one travel inspiration for British consumers, and of those who have picked up a new hobby during the pandemic (56%), more than half (54%) say that its at least somewhat likely that they will pick a trip connected to a new hobby once the pandemic ends.

To learn more, visit trivago.com.

# # #

About trivago

trivago is a leading global hotel search platform focused on reshaping the way travelers search for and compare hotels and alternative accommodations. Incorporated in 2005 in Dusseldorf, Germany, the platform allows travelers to make informed decisions by personalizing their hotel search and providing them access to a deep supply of hotel information and prices. trivago enables its advertisers to grow their businesses by providing access to a broad audience of travelers via its websites and apps. As of December 31, 2020, trivago has established 54 localized platforms connected to over 5.0 million hotels and alternative accommodations, in over 190 countries.

Contact:

Press Contact:

Stephanie Lowenthal

stephanie.lowenthal@trivago.com

Forward looking statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Words, and variations of words such as "believe," "expect," "plan," "continue," "will," "should," and similar expressions are intended to identify our forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, and important factors that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. For additional information factors that could affect our forward-looking statements, see our risk factors, as they may be amended from time to time, set forth in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim and do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement in this press release, except as required by applicable law or regulation.

As used herein, references to "we", "us", the "company", or "trivago", or similar terms shall mean trivago N.V. and, as the context requires, its subsidiaries.

Attachment
Ukraine will insist that the OSCE SMM start meaningful reporting on the results of Russia's aggression in the Azov-Black Sea region, First Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Emine Dzhaparova said.

"Since the OSCE SMM in its activities adheres to the principle of 'we report what we see,' the theme of the occupation of Crimea and its consequences is not adequately reflected in the mission's reports. The SMM also does not have the proper technical equipment to carry out monitoring activities at sea and the corresponding fixation of specific restrictions freedom of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea region," Dzhaparova told Interfax-Ukraine.

According to her, at the same time, amid the mentioned restrictions, the mission's mandate and its monitoring capabilities should be aimed at fixing the social and economic consequences of such illegal restrictive measures on the part of Russia by communicating with representatives of the affected Ukrainian enterprises, seaport administrations, ship crews and the like.

Dzhaparova said this also applies to monitoring the situation in the occupied Crimea as a whole, which can be carried out remotely through contacts with people who cross the administrative border line with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, because among them are victims and witnesses of illegal persecution by Russian security forces, public activists, representatives of independent media, and others.

"These important areas of monitoring are on the agenda of our contacts both with the leadership of the SMM here in Ukraine, and with the leadership of the OSCE Secretariat in Vienna and the current chairmanship in the organization, and we will continue to insist that the OSCE SMM take into account our position and start meaningful reporting on the results of the Russian aggression in the Azov-Black Sea region. In addition, a good example for study and imitation in this context can serve as the reports of the UN Secretary General on the human rights situation in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, containing separate sections on the methodology for collecting data in the context of blocked access to the peninsula from Russia," she said.

Dzhaparova also said that for the seventh year in a row Russia has been blocking access to the OSCE SMM both to Crimea and to a significant part of the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, especially in the areas adjacent to the part of the state border with Russia, temporarily not controlled by the government of Ukraine.
Ethnic minority Karen troops are seen after setting fire to a building inside a Myanmar army outpost near the Thai border, which is seen from the Thai side on the Thanlwin, also known as Salween, riverbank in Mae Hong Son province, Thailand, April 28,

Myanmars junta, which suffered casualties and attacks in two far-flung regions controlled by ethnic armies this week, has been frustrated in its effort to revive moribund peace talks with powerful militias who wont play ball with the unpopular military dictatorship, analysts and ethnic leaders said.

In Chin state, a rugged, poor region near the border with India and Bangladesh, the junta lost some 15 troops in an ambush Monday by a militia formed three weeks earlier to oppose military rule, while other Chin fighters wielding home-made rifles staged guerrilla-style attacks on army convoys.

As local residents said they killed four more soldiers Tuesday with improvised bombs near Chin states Mindat town, more than 650 kms away in Karen state, fighting between ethnic Karen rebels and Myanmar troops came close to the frontier with Thailand, forcing some 450 Thai residents of border communities to flee inland, Thai officials said.

Both regions of the multi-ethnic country the size of France had enjoyed years of relative calm until the Feb. 1 overthrow of leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her elected government, which has been followed by 12 weeks of street protests and bloody military crackdown that has killed some 750 civilians.

This Chin state conflict erupted over the arrest on April 24 of seven local youths protesting in central Mindat in support of the National Unity Government (NUG), the parallel government formed by ousted civilian leaders. Chin fighters attacked government troops after they had refused to release the seven, killing 15.

On Wednesday the Chin Peoples Defense Forces said thy had struck a deal that won freedom for the seven detained protesters in exchange for lifting a blockade of roads leading to government military bases.

And it was done. They released the detainees, said a member of the Chin group, who had mustered 150 fighters Tuesday for a showdown with heavily armed government troops.

In Karen state, meanwhile, an exchange small arms fire between troops from Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and government soldiers on Wednesday morning was followed bomb attacks and aerial gunfire from two Myanmar planes and an attack by two helicopters, said Gov. Sithichai Chindaluang of Thailands Mae Hong Son province.

Thai officials had no reports about casualties from the cross-border violence on Wednesday.

General Mutu Say Poe (L), chairman of the Karen National Union (KNU), speaks with Myanmar's commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing (R) during a photo session at the Union Peace Conference in Naypyidaw, July 11, 2018. Credit: Reuters

Reviving 2015 peace process

While fighting rebels on western and eastern fronts, and suppressing civilian protests against military rule, the junta is trying to revive peace talks with ethnic armies, a halting process that began in 2015 and brought 10 rebel groups into a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement but hit a roadblock even before the coup.

Peace negotiators from State Administrative Council (SAC), the juntas formal name, met in the capital Naypyidaw with leaders of the Karen Army and the Peace Council of the KNLA on April 26, according to a military statement.

The peace process will continue in line with the NCA guidelines, Lt. Gen. Ya Pyay, chairman of the juntas peace negotiating team, told the meeting.

However, many of the ten ethnic groups that signed the pact have stated they do not want to continue peace talks. Some have given safe haven to protesters and they have been courted by the NUC or by its related parallel parliament, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH).

"Once the NCA pacts were rescinded by the military coup, the ten NCA signatories themselves were reluctant to move forward, said Than Soe Naing, a political analyst.

"It will be difficult for peace talks to be held without a solution between the CRPH and SAC, said Kyaw Saw Han, a national security analyst.

There may be requests to have talks privately through an intermediary, but peace talks will be difficult to be seen as legitimate if talks between the CRPH and SAC do not take place, he told RFA.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing said the junta appeared to be looking to other ethnic militias, those who have remained outside the NCA process, for partners in talks.

United Wa State Army (UWSA) soldiers participate in a military parade, to commemorate 30 years of a ceasefire signed with the Myanmar military in the Wa State, in Panghsang, April 17, 2019. Credit: Reuters

Some militias back protesters

In early April, the junta's peace negotiation team met with some officials of the United Wa State Army, a China-backed force in Shan state that is the most powerful of the countrys dozens of ethnic armed groups. Neither side disclosed information about the meeting.

The UWSA signed a peace agreement with the previous junta in 1989 and has not fought against anyone since.

The junta dare not start a war with the UWSA, said Than Soe Naing. After 32 years of peace, the UWSA has formed a powerful, formidable army with Chinese help.

The UWSA have said they have no need to join the NCA, but they lead an umbrella group of the ethnic armies mostly in northern Myanmar that have not joined the ceasefire agreement: Ta'ang National Liberation Army, the Arakan Army, Shan State Progressive Party, Kachin Independence Army, the Taang National Liberation Army, and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army.

Calling themselves the Three Brotherhood Alliance, the Arakan Army, Taang National Liberation Army, and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army issued a statement in late March condemning the crackdown on protesters and warning they would support the resistance movement if the violence did not stop.

Shan State Progressive Party spokesman Lt. Col. Sai Suu, whose group chose not to meet the military regime representatives this month, said now was no time to talk peace with the junta.

This is a point in time when everything has stopped in all directions. It's a time to settle things. The current problems must be solved peacefully. he told RFA.

Security analyst Kyaw Saw Han said the coup had hampered domestic peace efforts and progress was unlikely without talks between the junta and the elected government it ousted.

Talks with northern groups will require Chinese intervention, and I think it will be difficult for China to intervene when the problems of (central Myanmar) have not been resolved, he told RFA.

I think we can hope for legitimate peace talks only when the current problems are resolved."

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service, and by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Paul Eckert.
The late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee visits the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with his family. Courtesy of Samsung Group



By Baek Byung-yeul



Samsung Group's ownership structure looks to be less affected by the over 12 trillion won in inheritance tax on the late Chairman Lee Kun-hee's fortune as his heirs are seeking to take out bank loans to pay the due taxes.



Samsung said the heirs of the late chairman will pay over 12 trillion won ($10.8 billion) in inheritance taxes. The tax amount, which is one of the largest ever imposed worldwide, will be paid in six installments over the next five years, the heirs added.



Attention has been drawn to how the heirs can prepare for such a large amount of tax, but industry officials said Thursday that some of the over 12 trillion won inheritance tax will be financed by credit loans  an unsecured loan  from local banks.



Two local banks are set to provide the loans worth hundreds of billions of won to the heirs. One of the two banks held a credit review meeting in which it decided to approve the loan.



"The heirs have applied for bank loans to pay the inheritance taxes. This can be interpreted as that they are trying not to stir up issues related with the group's governance," an industry official said on condition of anonymity, Thursday.



Industry officials viewed that most of the late chairman's shares in Samsung Electronics will be given to his son, Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong. The current Samsung leader has wielded control over Samsung Electronics as he holds a 17.48 percent stake in Samsung C&T, which itself holds a 19.34 percent stake in Samsung Life Insurance, which owns an 8.51 percent stake in the electronics giant.






Chips by Tsinghua Unigroup are seen at the 2020 World Semiconductor Conference in Nanjing in China's eastern Jiangsu province on August 26, 2020. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

China Tackles Chip Shortage Problem Via Marxist Approach

Tsinghua University sets up new school in response to chip shortage crisis

Chinas industrial sector is suffering from a severe shortage of semiconductor chips, following U.S. sanctions and other supply problems, which is seriously slowing down the countrys manufacturing capacity. Recently, Tsinghua University announced the establishment of a new school that would help solve the countrys chip shortage problem, as Chinese leaders promote a Marxist approach to speed up chip production. But experts say China has a long way to go.

On April 22, Tsinghua University in Beijing announced the establishment of the School of Integrated Circuits that would help China build up its own chip market and cut its reliance on foreign suppliers. During the inauguration ceremony, Tsinghuas president, Qiu Yong, said, The skyscraper of a strong country cannot be built on the foundation of others. The key core technology must be in ones own hands.

Qiu also said that the schools goal is to have its best scientists develop key core technologies; accelerate the cultivation of much-needed high-level innovative talent; provide strategic support for the development of technological self-sufficiency and self-improvement.

The announcement by Tsinghua came three days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the university on April 19.

Chip Shortage Hits Chinas Auto, Manufacturing Industries

Due to U.S. sanctions and the impact of the pandemic, China is suffering a severe shortage of semiconductor chips. Following Volkswagen and NIO, Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors is also experiencing a choke point. Its two main production bases in Chongqing and Baoding city are rumored to stop production in May and June, affecting popular models such as the Haval H6, Great Wall Cannon, and Tank 300. Great Wall Motors, however, denied the rumors in a public statement on April 24.

In December last year, FAW-Volkswagen and Shanghai Volkswagen were forced to suspend production at some of their plants due to chip shortages.

NIOs plant in Hefei city, Anhui Province, was forced to stop production for five days from March 29 to April 2 this year. The lack of chips remains a serious problem, NIO co-founder and president Qin Lihong said during the recent Shanghai auto show.

Hozonautos president, Zhang Yong, also admitted that they had to give up some orders, involving 6,000 vehicles in the first quarter.

An electric concept car from Chinese vehicle manufacturer BYD displayed at the Beijing auto show on April 26, 2018. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers predicted this month that the chip shortage will have a greater negative impact on Chinas auto production in the second quarter than it had in the first.

The shortage of chips has had a huge impact on the Chinese manufacturing industry, with some companies seeking to buy chips at highly inflated costs. Quoting the former head of Samsung Electric, the Chinese semiconductor industry has been panic stockpiling, with some companies buying chips at prices up to 20 times the regular rate, from any source they are able to around the globe, First Financial reported on April 21.

Furthermore, impacted by the pandemic, the global chip supply has been increasingly tight since the second half of 2020, with automotive, cell phones, small home appliances, and other chip-related industries seriously affected.

Chinas chip supply shortage is further exacerbated by recent events such as the Texas blizzard, a fire at Japans chipmaker Renesas Electronics, and drought in Taiwan.

Xi Advocates Marxist Approach to Handle Chip Problem

Faced with the situation of a dwindling chip supply, Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed the need of taking control of this sector and that universities need to follow the CCPs leadership.

When visiting Tsinghua University on April 19, Xi said the first-class universities need to adhere to the leadership of the CCP by following its educational policies and upholding its marxist and communist ideologies. He also called on Tsinghua students to sense the urgency of the country, to have the courage to undo the choke point of key core technologies, and to draw strength and inspiration from the lessons of Party history, according to a report by Xinhua.

On March 15, a month prior to his visit to Tsinghua University, Xi had penned an article titled, Strive to Become the Worlds Leading Scientific Center and a High Ground of Innovation, which was published in the Communist Partys theoretical journal Quishi (or Seeking Truth). It called for a major effort in key areas and choke point areas, gathering elite forces, and striving to realize the strategic change from following to running ahead and leading.

It Will Take Decades for China to Solve Chip Dilemma

A commentator who goes by the name Hong He Cong on Chinese social media Zhihu, criticized the Chinese regimes handling of the chip shortage crisis, calling the CCPs approach a Great Leap Forward style chip-making campaign. He pointed out that making chips involves more than 50 disciplines in science and technology and thousands of processes, and as of now, no country is able to make chips on their own.

The article quotes John Lee, a senior researcher at the Mercator Center for China Studies (MERICS), a German think tank, as saying that the chip production process is built on decades of knowledge accumulation in the West, and that it is unlikely that Chinese companies will be able to produce chips independently of the existing industry chain in the near future. Lee highlighted the need to use U.S. patented technology in the upstream of the semiconductor equipment supply chain.

A worker controls the production line for silicon chips using for making photoelectric board products, in Baoding, China, on June 24, 2009. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

In addition, dictatorships such as the CCP are subject to multilateral export controls imposed by the international community. This control dates back to 1949, when the U.S. established the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) with 16 other countries, including the UK, Japan, and France. The United States further established a China committee in 1952, an executive agency dedicated to enforcing the embargo against the CCP.

After the dissolution of the CoCom in 1994, its list of embargoed items was succeeded by the Wassenaar Agreement, which was signed by 42 countries worldwide in 1996. The agreement once again added China to the list of controlled countries. Last December, the agreement expanded the scope of control to include military-grade semiconductor manufacturing technologies and photolithography.

All the major equipment suppliers in the global semiconductor industry have joined the agreement, so China basically does not have access to the most advanced equipment and technology. For example, SMICs official website shows that the 32nm lithography machine it purchased in 2015 was produced by ASML in 2010; while for the semiconductor industry, five years is enough time for TSMC to make multiple upgrades.

China expert and U.S.-based current affairs commentator Li Yanming, who has been following Chinas chip supply situation, also believes that the CCPs attempt to overtake the world in the chip field and solve the chip shortage problem will take several decades.

Judging by the global trend of blocking the CCP, it is hard to say how long the CCP regime will last, Li said.
MORRISVILLE, N.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Biopharmaceutical solutions provider TrialCard Incorporated today announced it has surpassed its anticipated fundraising goal for Ronald McDonald House of Durham and Wake (RMH), an ambitious task made even more difficult by the COVID-19 global pandemic.

In February 2020, TrialCard President & CEO Mark Bouck was honored by the RMH with its Heart of Gold Award and immediately announced TrialCard's commitment to raise $100,000 for the organization. Under Bouck's leadership, TrialCard has become one of RMH's most significant community partners, contributing thousands of volunteer hours and providing nearly 5,000 meals for guest families since 2015. The company and individual employees also contribute sustaining, annual financial support.

TrialCard and RMH are uniquely aligned partners. As a leader and advocate for patient access to care, TrialCard understands that, for pediatric patients, an essential part of the healing equation is keeping families close. Bouck explains, "TrialCard's involvement with Ronald McDonald House, and all it does to support pediatric patients and their families, feels like a natural extension of what our company is all about. It's the perfect charitable partnership for us."

Nancy Jones, Senior Director of External Relations at RMH, agreed. "I have worked in non-profits for the past 30 years," Jones said. "I see strong parallels between TrialCard's and RMH's cultures."

RMH Executive Director Oie Osterkamp added, "To a person, everyone I have met at TrialCard is remarkable. The entire company possesses a wonderful can-do attitude and a sense of giving that is woven into its culture. In terms of total involvement, volunteering and giving, TrialCard is the company we use as an example of the highest measure of engagement."

To reach its goal, TrialCard relied heavily on its employees, clients, and providers. In addition to the support shown to RMH, TrialCard also supported 47 other national, state, and local charities in 2020.

About TrialCard

TrialCard Incorporated provides patient affordability, medication access and adherence, patient support, payer policy intelligence, and clinical trial support services on behalf of biopharmaceutical manufacturers. Founded in 2000, TrialCard has connected over 35 million patients with more than $18 billion in branded drug savings to date. The company is headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina. For more information about TrialCard, please visit www.trialcard.com.

About Ronald McDonald House of Durham & Wake

Built with love, the Ronald McDonald House of Durham & Wake (RMH) offers a comforting home away from home and a community of support for seriously ill children and their families. RMH programs in Durham and Raleigh provide families with the comforts of home, including private bedrooms, inviting community spaces, home-cooked meals and a stocked kitchen, a playroom, computer room and laundry facilities, as well as a network of support through interactions with other families, staff and volunteers. For more information, visit www.RMHDurhamWake.org, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Contact:

Landy Townsend

[email protected]



SOURCE TrialCard Incorporated

Related Links

http://www.trialcard.com


Tiffany Franco is uncertain about her future with Ronald Smith on 90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After?

In PEOPLE's exclusive sneak peek, Tiffany, 29, seeks legal advice from an attorney as she continues raising the couple's daughter, Carley, alone in Maryland. She wants her husband to put in more effort  both emotionally and financially  as Ronald, 31, resides in his native South Africa.

"Ronald, right now, is not emotionally supportive. He's not financially supportive," Tiffany, who also has a son named Daniel from a previous relationship, says in a confessional. "Not once does Ronald offer, 'Hey, let me buy diapers for Carley. Hey, let me send her some clothes or let me send you money for clothes.' Nothing  and that's so frustrating because it's not only my responsibility. I didn't make this baby alone."

RELATED: 90 Day Fiance: The Other Way's Tiffany Franco and Ronald Smith Welcome Daughter Carley Rose

While speaking to the attorney, Tiffany provides background information on her and Ronald's current situation. She also explains why she is seeking his assistance.

"We applied for the spousal visa and literally within a month to three more months we should be getting a response on whether he's approved or denied and he can come," she tells the lawyer.

TLC

After confirming the logistics of their dynamic, the attorney asks Tiffany whether the couple plans to live together permanently as a family. The longest they have lived together was a mere three months.

"I don't know. In the beginning, I was so sure about everything and now, I'm not sure about anything," she says. "I actually, at this moment, have no idea."

Never miss a story  sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Tiffany then notes in a confessional that she's "always been committed to making things work" with Ronald, but she has begun to feel as if she's "the only one trying" to preserve their marriage.

Story continues

"Right now, more than ever, everything is really tense," she admits to the attorney. "We've had moments where I wonder if this marriage is right for me."

Tiffany and Ronald originally appeared on the first season of 90 Day Fiance: The Other Way. The pair met and fell in love during Tiffany's trip to South Africa. Ronald proposed shortly after and they later tied the knot in his home country.

RELATED: 90 Day Fiance's Anny and Robert Expecting Second Baby Together: 'Our Family Is Growing!'

Six months after welcoming their daughter, Tiffany announced the duo's split via her Instagram Stories. "I wanted to be the first to let you know rather than hiding it and putting on a facade for social media," she wrote last January. "Thank you, guys, for following our story, we really love each other but some things are just irreparable. We both deserve much better than we can offer at the moment."

Ronald also wrote in his own social media statement: "Thank you for following our story but unfortunately it just didn't work for me. I'll be filing for divorce since in [South Africa] since she isn't even registered in [the] USA as married."

Tiffany later confirmed that March that the couple had reconciled their relationship. As episodes from season 6 of 90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After? continue to air, fans will see the pair butt heads over the future of their marriage.

90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After? airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on TLC and is available for streaming on discovery+
Microsoft will decrease the share of money it charges independent developers that publish PC games on its online store, starting in August, the company said on Thursday.

Developers will keep 88 percent of the revenue from their games, up from 70 percent. That could make Microsofts store more attractive to independent studios than competitors like Valves gaming store, called Steam, which typically starts by taking a 30 percent cut. Epic Games store takes 12 percent.

We want to make sure that were competitive in the market, said Sarah Bond, a Microsoft vice president who leads the gaming ecosystem organization. Our objective is to have a leading revenue share and really a leading platform.

The share of revenue that developers get to keep has come under greater scrutiny across the tech industry. Google and Apple have faced antitrust questions for the 30 percent fees they charge developers whose programs appear in their app stores.
[April 29, 2021] Ares Management Corporation Closes Oversubscribed Fifth European Direct Lending Fund at 11 Billion

Ares Management Corporation ("Ares") (NYSE: ARES), a leading global alternative investment manager, announced today the final closing of its fifth commingled European direct lending fund, Ares Capital Europe V ("ACE V" or "the Fund") at 11.0 billion, representing the largest European direct lending fund raised to date. With strong investor support, ACE V surpassed its 9.0 billion target eight months after its launch and closed oversubscribed at its 11.0 billion hard cap. The final Fund size represents an increase of approximately 70% versus the predecessor fund, Ares Capital Europe IV, which closed in July 2018 at its 6.5 billion hard cap and which was also oversubscribed. Including anticipated leverage, the total available capital for ACE V will be approximately 15.0 billion. ACE V also represents the largest institutional fund raised by Ares Management to date. The Fund attracted strong backing from a diverse group of nearly 180 investors, including 65 limited partners new to Ares Management. ACE V's global investor base includes pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, asset managers and family offices. With more than 80% of commitments coming from existing Ares investors, ACE V received strong support from the firm's broad investor base. "We believe the successful fundraise for ACE V is a result of our market position and our cycle-tested track record," said Blair Jacobson, Partner and Co-Head of European Credit at Ares. "We appreciate the strong continued support and confidence our investors have in our team, strategy and the strength of our leadership position in Europe. ACE V will also seek to have a positive social impact as part of our broader firm-wide focus on ESG. We look forward to working to buildvalue for our limited partners for many years to come."



The Ares European Direct Lending team has already started investing ACE V using its demonstrated strategy of providing flexible capital to predominantly mid-market companies. ACE V benefits from the team's market leading pan-European sourcing platform with 11 investments committed to the Fund to date totaling 1.7 billion. "The deployment backdrop remains constructive as middle market companies increasingly seek our flexible capital solutions in an improving economy. As a result, our team's investment activity has been robust, and we have achieved this whilst increasing our selectively rates," said Michael Dennis, Partner and Co-Head of European Credit at Ares. "We believe the scale of our capital remains a key differentiator due to our ability to provide flexible, one-stop financing solutions, making Ares an attractive direct lender to companies seeking a long-term partner to sustain their growth."

Ares launched its direct lending business in Europe in 2007 gaining a first mover advantage in a nascent market for direct lending. Today, Ares has one of Europe's largest dedicated direct lending teams with nearly 70 investment professionals across six originating offices in London, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Madrid. Ares had more than $42 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2020 in its European direct lending strategy, which we believe makes Ares the largest and most experienced capital provider in the European market. Since its inception, Ares' European Direct Lending business has completed 235 investments totaling over 27 billion of invested capital supporting 115 private equity sponsors. "We sincerely appreciate the continued support from our investors, who once again entrusted us with their capital and have helped us achieve this record fundraise for Ares," added Kipp deVeer, Partner and Head of the Ares Credit Group. "We believe the market opportunity for direct lending in Europe continues to grow and are proud that the Ares team will continue to lead the way." About Ares Management Corporation Ares Management Corporation (NYSE: ARES) is a leading global alternative investment manager operating integrated groups across Credit, Private Equity, Real Estate and Strategic Initiatives. Ares Management's investment groups collaborate to deliver innovative investment solutions and consistent, attractive investment returns for fund investors throughout market cycles. As of December 31, 2020, Ares Management's global platform had approximately $197 billion of assets under management with more than 1,450 employees operating across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. For more information, please visit www.aresmgmt.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428006205/en/

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OTTAWA, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ -

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to create stress and anxiety for many Canadians, particularly those who do not have ready access to their regular support networks. Through the Wellness Together Canada online portal, people of all ages across the country can access immediate, free and confidential mental health and substance use supports, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

National Immunization Awareness Week (NIAW) is an opportunity to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated, including getting the COVID-19 vaccination as soon as its our turn. Removing barriers to vaccination and providing evidence-based information are crucial for supporting Canadians in getting vaccinated. The Public Health Agency of Canada is funding several projects under the Immunization Partnership Fund for the development and expansion of tools and training for healthcare providers, as well as supporting community-driven solutions to promote COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and uptake. Funding for two initiatives, announced this week, is helping to address barriers that can delay or discourage people from getting vaccinated. Science Up First is developing a national network of science and health communicators, media, and citizens to debunk mis- and disinformation and flood social media with accurate and credible information about COVID-19 vaccines. The University of Toronto is improving the COVID-19 vaccine experience by adapting their successful student CARD system for use in adults to decrease pain and fear, which can be barriers to vaccination. The CARD system uses game-based coping strategies to comfort, relax, and distract patients. Through projects like these, we are working to build confidence and make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible for everyone in Canada.

As COVID-19 activity continues in Canada, we are tracking a range of epidemiological indicators to monitor where the disease is most active, where it is spreading and how it is impacting the health of Canadians and public health, laboratory and healthcare capacity. At the same time, the Public Health Agency of Canada is providing Canadians with regular updates on COVID-19 vaccines administered , vaccination coverage and ongoing monitoring of vaccine safety across the country. The following is the latest summary on national numbers and trends, and the actions we all need to be taking to reduce infection rates, while vaccination programs expand for the protection of all Canadians.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 1,202,737 cases of COVID-19, including 83,354 active cases and 24,117 deaths reported in Canada; these cumulative numbers tell us about the overall burden of COVID-19 illness to date. They also tell us, together with results of serological studies, that a very large majority of Canadians remain susceptible to COVID-19 . As vaccine delivery ramps up at an accelerated pace, there is cause for optimism that widespread and lasting immunity can be achieved through COVID-19 vaccination. We now have multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines with unique advantages that are authorised for use in Canada . Vaccine coverage is increasing across Canada, with benefits being seen in prioritized high-risk populations. Ramp up of vaccine supply and acceleration of vaccination programs will return further benefits to protect more Canadians, over the coming weeks and months.

Although COVID-19 activity remains elevated, with a high proportion of cases involving more contagious variants of concern, we are cautiously optimistic that our efforts and strengthened restrictions are beginning to have an impact, as presented in the latest epidemiology and modelling update . However, strong public health measures must be sustained where COVID-19 is circulating and individual precautions are important everywhere. The latest national-level data show a 7-day average of 7,897 new cases daily (Apr 22-28), an 8.3% decrease compared to the previous seven days.

Elevated infection rates continue to impact COVID-19 severity indicators, particularly in areas with sustained high levels of disease activity. The rise in severe and critical illnesses continues to place a prolonged and heavy strain on the health system and healthcare workforce. Provincial and territorial data indicate that an average of 4,392 people with COVID-19 were being treated in Canadian hospitals each day during the most recent 7-day period (Apr 22-28) representing a 7.6% increase over last week. This includes, on average 1,406 people who were being treated in intensive care units (ICU), which is 13.6% higher than the previous week. The mortality trend is also still on the rise, with the 7-day average of 50 deaths reported daily 8.7% higher than the week prior.

While COVID-19 continues to impact people of all ages in Canada, infection rates are highest among those under 60 years of age. Serious illness can occur at any age and evidence indicates that variants of concern can be associated with more severe illness and increased risk of death . In addition, circulation of COVID-19 in younger, more mobile and socially-connected adults is an ongoing risk for spread into high-risk populations and settings. As of April 28, a total of 102,700 variant of concern cases have been reported across Canada , including 98,706 involving B.1.1.7 variants, 3,384 P.1 variants and 610 B.1.351 variants. These represent the tip of the iceberg, as there are many more COVID-19 cases that have screened positive for mutations indicative of variants of concern. The B.1.1.7 variant has now been reported in all provinces and territories, and has replaced the original virus as the dominant strain in several areas.

Canadians are urged to remain vigilant, continue following local public health advice, and consistently maintain individual practices that keep us and our families safer: stay home/self-isolate if you have any symptoms , think about the risks and reduce non-essential activities and outings to a minimum, avoid all non-essential travel , and maintain individual protective practices of physical distancing , hand, cough and surface hygiene and wearing a well-fitted and properly worn face mask as appropriate (including in shared spaces, indoors or outdoors, with people from outside of your immediate household).

Canadians can also go the extra mile by sharing credible information on COVID-19 risks and prevention practices and measures to reduce COVID-19 in communities and by downloading the COVID Alert app to break the cycle of infection and help limit the spread of COVID-19. Read my backgrounder to access more COVID-19 Information and Resources on ways to reduce the risks and protect yourself and others, including information on COVID-19 vaccination .

SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada

For further information: Media Relations, Public Health Agency of Canada, 613-957-2983, [email protected]
Biden is turbocharging the economy with stimulus. Will he smother it with regulation?

Michael Canty worries that President Joe Bidens administration is poised to crank out a thicket of new regulations  in areas such as oil and gas drilling, workplace safety and labor -- that will slow the growth of his manufacturing company in Mentor, Ohio.

So Canty says he has shelved plans to spend up to $2 million on new equipment and add about 15 employees to his staff of 85. For now, he's waiting to see how Bidens regulatory agenda plays out.

Missouri farmer Kalena Bruce is holding off on expanding her cow herd because of concerns that administration officials will broaden the types of water bodies that must be protected from the effects of farming to include ditches that fill with water during heavy rains.

And Cincinnati-based marketing agency owner Mark Homer frets Bidens revamping of a Trump-era rule that makes it easier to bring on independent contractors could force him to lay off most of his freelancers, hampering his ability to take on new clients.

In his first few weeks in office, Biden signed a whirlwind of executive actions  many halting or reviewing steps President Donald Trumps administration took to roll back climate change regulation and loosen workplace safety and labor protections. A push to eventually reinstate broadband regulation also may be in the offing.

Biden economy is 7 charts: How economy has performed during his first 100 days

Vaccines are shot in arm for growth: The economy grew 6.4% in Q1

Does regulation really hurt growth?

The efforts are putting a fresh spotlight on a decades-old question: Does regulation hurt economic and job growth?

Trump boasted that his sweeping deregulation  which largely reversed Obama-era rules  was a big driver of the economys pre-pandemic growth. Traditionally, Republicans have argued that cumbersome federal rules force firms to hire attorneys, spend many hours filling out paperwork or purchase costly equipment, such as pollutant filters, leaving less time and money to run and grow their businesses.

Story continues

Biden appears set on undoing much of that legacy, with the goal, he says, of promoting public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations. Indeed, the debate about whether regulation restrains the economy doesn't consider the social benefits of new rules, which theoretically should outweigh the financial costs.

Many Republicans arent swayed.

Unfortunately, recent actions undertaken by your office threaten the security of a pared-back, streamlined regulatory landscape that directly contributed to the explosive pre-COVID growth experienced by small businesses, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., and ranking member of the House Small Business Committee, wrote in a letter on April 12 to Biden and other administration officials.

The share of small businesses calling regulations their single most important problem fell from about 20% late in Obamas term to 11% in August while Trump was in office. That share then ticked up from 14% late last year to 15% in the early months of Bidens presidency, surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business show.

Democrats and many economists say companies make decisions about whether to expand and hire based on customer demand, not regulations. Several recent studies conclude that Trumps deregulation helped some industries and hurt others, but had little or no effect on the overall economy.

If Trumps deregulatory moves were not a major factor in expanding the economy, then reinstating those regulations (under Biden) will not impede economic growth, says Cary Coglianese, director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and co-author of one of the studies.

Trump supporters counter that its difficult to measure the economic effects of easing or toughening regulation, and that Trumps tax cuts and deregulation unleashed the animal spirits of U.S. businesses, providing them the confidence to invest and hire. Bidens proposed tax increases and regulatory agenda could have a chilling effect, they say.

With higher regulatory costs, Youre more likely to hold onto the money you have, says Dan Bosch, director of regulatory policy for the center-right American Action Forum.

Oil pipeline, out; Paris accord, in

In his initial days in office, Biden canceled the permit to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, committed the U.S. to rejoin the Paris climate accord, and halted new oil and natural gas leases on federal land and waters  all of which reversed Trump actions to unshackle fossil fuel companies. And he ordered reviews of Trump moves to lower vehicle fuel efficiency standards, lift requirements to fix methane leaks from oil and gas wells, and streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects.

President Joe Biden signs an Executive Order reversing the Trump-era ban on transgender individuals serving in military, in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Jan. 25, 2021.

The Biden administration is also more aggressively enforcing workplace safety standards and reviewing a Trump rule that broadened the types of workers that employers can classify as independent contractors.

Its too early to judge the outcomes of Bidens reviews, says Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, adding, The business community wants to work with the administration. But, he says, If we dont get this right, it could well dampen investment and hiring.

In the meantime, even the threat of new rules could lead companies to sit on their hands, he says.

There is ... an economic cost to regulatory uncertainty, Bradley says.

Trump and Biden couldnt be more opposite in their approaches to regulation. Trump was the first president to methodically attack federal agency rules, establishing a requirement to eliminate two for every one added. Biden quickly scrapped the mandate and proposed that cost-benefit studies of new regulations consider benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify.

Any harmful effects from even the risk of new regulations will be difficult to tease out in this years booming recovery from the COVID-19-induced downturn, says economist Andrew Hunter of Capital Economics. Biden has helped turbocharge that growth, spearheading the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package passed by Congress in March.

The economy is expected to slow next year as the effects of the relief package fade, possibly elevating the significance of any new rules that may curtail growth. Even Bidens $2.3 trillion "Build back better" infrastructure proposal could be significantly delayed if officials reinstate Obama-era environmental reviews that, according to the nonprofit Common Good, pushed back major highway projects an average of six years, and inflated their costs. The Trump administration limited such reviews to two years and eased requirements to consider a project's greenhouse gas emissions.

We want to build back better sooner and not later, says Nick Goldstein, who heads regulatory affairs for the American Road and Transportation Builders Association.

The left-leaning Center for American Progress says Trump officials gutted the regulations and undermined efforts to fight climate change.

Some firms adopt wait-and-see mode

Some businesses say theyre already pulling back amid the prospect of tougher oversight.

Canty, the CEO of Alloy Precision Technologies, says he spent $8 million on factory expansions and new equipment in the Trump era, but fears the pause in oil and gas leases on federal land, along with other constraints, will hammer his companys revenue. Alloy Precision makes metal parts for natural gas-fueled power plants and for pressure control in oil and natural gas wells.

Michael Canty

If my customers cant drill for oil and gas, I cant sell to them, he says.

Canty also worries about tougher workplace safety inspections, noting he was fined $15,000 during the Obama administration because a plastic guard on a metal-cutting machine was 1/8th inch off its previous position. And he fears that Biden will make it easier for workers to unionize.

Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas producer, fears Biden is going to pile more regulations on and stop the positive things in the industry'Drill, baby, drill' is over.

But producers like Continental are nimble. If drilling activity is restricted on federal land, where Continental has about 10% of its wells, the company will simply shift those leases to private property, Hamm says.

Yet while fossil-fuel companies likely will be hobbled by more restrictions, the industrys production and jobs will be replaced by clean energy, resulting in a wash for the economy over time, Coglianese says. A report by the nonprofit Environmental Entrepreneurs says clean energy already employs nearly three times as many workers as does fossil fuel extraction and generation.

Youre going to end up with winners and losers, the economist Hunter says of any new regulations.

And in the long run, renewable energy helps avoid the untold economic costs wrought by global warming through hurricanes, floods and wildfires, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys Analytics.

Other industries are also nervous about a potential rise in regulatory costs.

Kalena and Willa Bruce on the family's farm.

Bruce, who raises 50 cows in Stockton, Missouri, notes the U.S. water rules, which prohibit discharges of pollutants into navigable waters, were streamlined under Trump to exclude temporary water bodies such as ditches that fill with rainwater. Shes concerned the Biden administrations reassessment could revive the old rule, requiring her to obtain permits she cant afford if she expands her herd. So shes putting off the $31,000 purchase of 20 cows.

Were in a holding pattern, she says.

Amanda Levin, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the water rules typically exclude most pollution discharges from routine farming, like runoff from fields.

Mark Homer

Biden is also expected to crack down on companies that misclassify workers as contractors, denying them minimum wage, overtime and other benefits. Homer, CEO of GNGF, an 11-employee marketing agency for law firms, worries that a restrictive new rule could force him to convert a couple of his five to 10 contractors to employees and lay off the rest. They typically handle surges in work, such as when he signs up new clients.

It would limit my growth, he says.

'We're all doing the same thing'

Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, says misclassifying workers as contractors also hurts the economy by denying workers higher wages and benefits.

We dont just want more crappy jobs, she says.

Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, aren't concerned about the prospect of more oversight. Frank Knapp, who owns a pet boarding and grooming facility in Irmo, South Carolina, says he wouldnt mind complying with new rules, such as a $15 federal minimum wage, as long as his competitors are subject to them.

Were all doing the same thing, says Knapp, who heads the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. If his costs rise, he says hell simply raise prices to maintain profits rather than lay off workers.

Did Trump deregulation spur growth?

While companies and industries are often affected by looser or stricter rules, studies say Trumps deregulation didn't move the needle on the broader economy.

Several found that Trump overstated how much red tape he actually cut. Capital Economics and Goldman Sachs concluded he actually didnt substantially reduce regulations, but the flow of new rules slowed or largely stopped after creeping up for decades.

It was the absence of new regulations that was a sigh of relief for small businesses, says Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center. Since small business owners handle regulatory compliance themselves, they had more time to run their firms, she says.

After accounting for regulations both added and cut during Trumps term, there was a net savings of about $160 billion in regulatory costs in future years, according to an American Action Forum analysis of Trump administration figures. Another report by Trumps Council of Economic Advisers says 20 major deregulatory actions will save consumers and businesses about $220 billion a year after they take full effect.

Yet that's only 1% of the $21 trillion U.S. economy. The Penn study also underscores the challenges of isolating the benefits of deregulation. Although lower fuel efficiency standards will bring down car prices, for example, motorists will end up spending more overall because of higher fuel costs.

All told, Capital Economics found little change in a range of economic gauges during Trumps term. After getting a tax cut-related boost in early 2018, business investment was sluggish the rest of that year and throughout 2019 before the pandemic. Growth in productivity -- or output per worker  ticked higher in 2018 and 2019, but Hunter credits low unemployment that forced companies to squeeze more out of existing employees or buy labor-saving technology.

An exception is Trumps deregulation of the oil industry, which appeared to lift crude production during his term, the study says. Still, drilling activity continued to track the ups and downs of oil prices.

If deregulation truly was revitalizing the oil sector, we would expect to see drilling activity rising at a materially stronger pace, the study says.

Overall, the economy grew an average of 2.5% a year during the first three years of the Trump administration, compared to a nearly identical 2.43% during Obamas last three years, while 1.5 million more jobs were added under Obama.

'Cumulative effect'

Bosch, of the American Action Forum, says that without Trumps tax and regulation cutting, economic and job growth would have been weaker as the record-long recovery that began in 2009 began petering out.

And a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University argues the effects of regulations are nuanced and their buildup over time leads to duplicative, obsolete, conflicting, and even contradictory rules, and distorts company decision-making. Also, a drop in investment because of regulatory costs leaves a smaller economy that has ripple effects for decades, says James Broughel, a senior research fellow at Mercatus.

From 1977 to 2012, the study found, regulation decreased economic growth by nearly a percentage point a year.

Its the cumulative effect, Broughel says.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will Biden squash economic and job growth with new regulations?
U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) speaks during a runoff election night party at Grand Hyatt Hotel in Buckhead in Atlanta, Ga. on Jan. 6, 2021. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Georgia AG Denies Loefflers Request to Probe Raffensperger Over 2020 Election

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr on Wednesday denied an investigation that former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-G.A.) had requested into the conduct of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during the 2020 presidential election.

Hours earlier, Loeffler had sent a letter to Carr asking him to probe whether Raffensperger used his position to push his personal political interests during last years election cycle.

She wanted the probe to uncover whether Raffensperger put his political self-interest ahead of the people of Georgia in conducting elections by never fixing problems from the June 6 primary, and not resolving double-voting issues. These problems, she said, has reduced trust and transparency.

Loeffler alleged that the secretary of state politicized and minimized voters legitimate concerns about changes to Georgias elections which were related to the pandemic and legal settlements, failed to complete investigations and provide timely information, and engaged in political matters during an election.

This request is not about the outcome of an election, but about the loss of confidence in our elections and the importance of holding elected officials accountable for upholding the law and carrying out their constitutional duties, Loeffler wrote.

She asked Carr to probe whether these actions constituted a conflict of interest in violation of the states Constitution and/or statutes.

If voters dont trust the electoral process and their elected officials, we risk sustained damage to voter participation in our state, she wrote. Voting rights are not a partisan issue, and the loss of electoral confidence disenfranchises voters of any political affiliation.

Loeffler said that Secretary Raffensperger made unprecedented changes to the states elections last year amid the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

These changes included the mass mailing of unsolicited absentee ballot requests, entering into a consent decree without the legislatures awareness, accepting millions in outside money from an organisation linked to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and failing to resolve hundreds of open investigations from the primary and general elections.

Carr however declined the request for a probe, saying he represents Raffensperger.

Under the Georgia Constitution, the Department of Law is the lawyer for the executive branch of governmentwhich includes the Secretary of States Office. As such, we cannot investigate our own client on these particular matters, Carrs office said in a statement.

In a strong rebuke, the secretary of state called the allegations laughable.

Kelly Loefflers failure to convince anyone she actually was a Trump supporter is the reason Georgia doesnt have a Republican Senator or the United States a Republican Senate, Raffensperger said in a statement.

Loeffler lost her seat in a January runoff election against Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).

She is now ramping up the rhetoric around the key role of her new get-out-the-vote drivecalled Greater Georgiato counter Fair Fight, the voter participation initiative founded by former Democratic congressional representative Stacey Abrams.

Raffensperger and AG Carr didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
Mumbai, April 29 : Actor Kunal Kemmu chose to make a statement in black and white on social media, with a close-up shot he posted on Thursday.

An Instagram picture Kunal shared captures him looking into the lens intensely. The image, where the actor wears a vest, is a throwback.

"Just another Black and White. #BlackAndWhite #Selfie #Throwback," he wrote as the caption.

Last year, Kunal was seen in the musical thriller "Malang" and the OTT-release heist comedy "Lootcase", besides the web series "Abhay 2".
Former lawmakers of the now-disbanded Unified Progressive Party, including former floor leader Oh Byung-yun, left, announce their position in front of the Supreme Court in Seoul, Thursday, after the court rejected their request to restore their National Assembly seats. Yonhap



By Jun Ji-hye



The Supreme Court refused a request from five former lawmakers, who belonged to the now-disbanded leftist Unified Progressive Party (UPP), to restore their status as lawmakers, Thursday, upholding an appellate court's ruling issued five years ago.



The top court said it was a "logical consequence" to strip the five lawmakers of their seats, as it was required to exclude members of the party from National Assembly activities after the Constitutional Court decided on the disbandment of the party.



"The consequence accords with the idea of democracy," the court said in its verdict.



In December 2014, the Constitutional Court made an unprecedented decision to disband the left-wing UPP and strip the party's five lawmakers of their seats. The decision was made while conservative President Park Geun-hye was in power, and Hwang Kyo-ahn, the former chairman of the conservative main opposition United Future Party, now the People Power Party, was serving as the justice minister.



Among the five lawmakers was Lee Seok-ki who had been convicted of instigating a rebellion to overthrow the state.



At the time, the Constitutional Court said the UPP was organizing activities with the hidden goal of creating a communist country like North Korea, noting that it had to strip the party's five lawmakers of their seats to "secure the effectiveness of the disbanding of the party," although it was not expressly stipulated in relevant laws whether lawmakers of a party ordered to be disbanded should be stripped of their seats.



Following the decision, the UPP lawmakers, including then floor leader Oh Byung-yun and Kim Jae-yeon, filed a lawsuit against the state in January 2015, claiming that the Constitutional Court stripped them of their seats without a legal basis and demanding their status be restored.



A local court dismissed their lawsuit, saying the decision to strip them of the Assembly seats was made by the Constitutional Court that has the ultimate authority to interpret and apply the Constitution.



They appealed but an appellate court ruled against the lawmakers, saying their seats had to be removed as a result of the order to disband the party. At the time, the court separately dismissed a similar request from Lee Seok-ki, saying he had been convicted and thus already lost his Assembly seat in accordance with the National Assembly Act.



When upholding the appellate court's ruling, the Supreme Court said, however, that it would be more appropriate to expressly stipulate in laws whether lawmakers of a party ordered to be disbanded should be stripped of their seats.



Following the ruling, the party's former floor leader Oh said, "We can no longer let the judiciary suppress the people. We will continue to protest the decision."


2021 Genesis GV80 Chicagoland Review by Larry Nutson +VIDEO

Premium Utility

By Larry Nutson

Executive Editor and Bureau Chief

Chicago Bureau

The Auto Channel

The 2021 GV80 is the first utility vehicle (UV) from Genesis, the luxury vehicle brand from Hyundai Motor Group.

GV80 made a noteworthy and attention getting appearance at the 2020 Chicago Auto Show, the only major auto show to take place in the CV-19 pandemic year 2020. I had a good up-close and personal look at the GV80 and was quite impressed by its luxury look and premium exterior and interior design.

The GV80 midsize utility shares its architecture with the G80 sedan riding on an exclusive rear-drive platform. The all-new GV80s ability to maximize passenger comfort and design flexibility while balancing performance and safety capability all stems from its carefully engineered chassis.

The GV80s large crest grille is flanked by two-line graphic lighting that extends beyond the headlamps, to front fender side lights and into the rear quarter and the taillamps. This Genesis lighting signature is certainly unique and an element I found attractive. Bright trim in the door lower panels carries to the rear across the facia.

GV80 has seating for five, however there is one three-row seven-seat offering. The all-new GV80 is offered in Standard, Advanced, and Prestige trims in 2.5T or 3.5T configurations. Theres also the choice of rear-wheel or all-wheel drive with the 2.5T. All 3.5T configurations are AWD.

The 2.5T is so named for its 300hp 2.5-liter turbocharged inline-4 that develops 311 lb.-ft. of torque. Correspondingly, the 3.5T has a 375hp 3.5-liter turbocharged V6 that develops 391 lb.-ft. torque. Both use an 8-speed automatic transmission. Comfort, Smart, Eco, Sport and Custom modes are selectable, with shift paddles allowing for manual gear control.

All GV80s are rated to tow up to 6,000 lbs. Cargo area behind the second-row seat is 34.9 cu.ft. and can increase to 84 cu.ft. with the seat folded. EPA test-lab fuel economy ratings are 21 city mpg and 25 highway mpg for all 2.5T configurations and 18 city mpg and 23 highway for the 3.5T.

As is todays consumer must-have, the GV80 is equipped with a complete array of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) safety features.

The 5-seat interior is plenty roomy. The low dashboard height and large glass area makes for clear sightlines and outward visibility. Slim air vents, a large central infotainment touch screen, low mounted HVAC controls and an uncluttered steering wheel provide an inviting and functional driving environment.

Transmission gears are selected with a center console rotary controller. Just ahead of it sits the infotainment multimedia controller that is turned and pushed to make selections. Redundant controls are steering wheel mounted. The infotainment screen is a big reach so these controls are the ones to use.

The all-new GV80 has a starting base price of $48,900 for the 2.5T RWD. The 2.5T AWD is priced at $54,650, the 3.5T AWD is $59,150 and the seven-seat 3.5T Advance+ is $65.050, plus a $1,025 destination fee for all.

For my Chicagoland drive experience I spent time in a 2.5T AWD Prestige with a base price of $63,400.

I thought the GV80 a deserved consideration compared some well-established competitors from American, German and Asian brands. The powertrain delivers decent all around performance. The cabin is quiet. The Prestige trim has active noise control system that cancels out road and wind noise. Ride quality is very smooth. Theres lots of tech features and luxury appointments.

Heated and ventilated seats also have a massage feature. Road Preview uses a front camera to detect road irregularities in your path and adjusts the electronically-controlled suspension for greater comfort. A 21-speaker Lexicon premium audio system with 1,050 watts of power makes for concert hall listening.

More details on the 2021 Genesis GV80 can be found at www.genesis.com. Genesis provides a 5-year/60,000 mile warranty that includes 3 years/36,000 miles of complimentary scheduled maintenance as well as 3 years/36,000 miles complimentary Service Valet. The GV80 is in dealer showrooms now.

Genesis was ranked the #1 brand in the industry for the second consecutive year in JD Powers 2019 Initial Quality Study (IGS), was named #1 ranked brand in the JD Power 2020 Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS) as well as #2 brand in the annual Consumer Reports 2020 Report Card rankings.

More models are coming from Genesis. Recently the GV70 utility vehicle (UV) made its debut. Its the fifth model and second UV in the Genesis lineup and will reach the market in 2021.

 2021 Larry Nutson, the Chicago Car Guy

February 23, 2021; If you were not familiar with the Genesis car brand you should be now. Tiger Woods suffered leg injuries in a car crash in Southern California. Tiger was driving a new 2021 Genesis GV80 SUV at excessive speed and lost control, according to reports. His injuries were not life-threatening. Law enforcement officials said the crash integrity of the Genesis GV80  and Woods' use of a seat belt  may have saved his life. Passive safety features required for new vehicles today provide outstanding occupant protection. The Genesis GV80 features a front seat center air bag that in combination with front and side air bag cushion the occupants. ,
GREENSBORO, N.C., April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Triad Business Bank (OTC Pink  TBBC) was founded a year ago on a vision that it would be Pivotal to the Economic Success of the Triads Business Community. In the last twelve months, TBBC has delivered on its vision.



Within days of opening, the CARES Act was passed, and TBBC engaged in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to provide over $100 million of loans to businesses in need, potentially saving more than 12,000 jobs. In the months that followed, TBBC shifted its focus to building core commercial relationships. On March 16, 2021 Triad Business Bank celebrated our one-year anniversary, and we have much to celebrate. As of March 31, 2021, TBBC had $178 million in gross loans outstanding (including PPP loans) after originating $326 million of core and PPP loans to businesses in the last twelve months. Total deposits have grown to $188 million and over 100 local businesses are using the Banks treasury management systems for their cash management needs. The PPP program helped the Bank to develop hundreds of business relationships. Together with these businesses, shareholders, board members and management, TBBC is building a powerful foundation in the Triad. We believe our customers and shareholders will prosper for many years to come, commented Ramsey K. Hamadi, Chief Executive Officer.

We are pleased to provide our shareholders with the Banks March 31, 2021 quarterly results, including linked quarter comparisons and comparisons to the first-twelve months projections provided in the Fall 2019 Investor Presentation:

Linked Quarter Income Statement Highlights:

Pre-provision operating loss (prior to provision for loan loss and tax expense) declined to $117,000 from $446,000

$1.8 million of PPP fees ($1.4 million net of loan costs) remain unrealized

Non-PPP revenue increased 56%

Net interest margin expanded 10 basis points to 2.51% from 2.41%

Total revenue increased 18% to $1.9 million



Linked Quarter Balance Sheet Highlights:

Total assets reached $265 million, a 20% increase

Noninterest bearing demand deposit accounts grew 104% to $56 million

Net core loans increased 30% to $95 million while net PPP loans increased to $83 million

Total deposits increased $39 million to $188 million

Core deposits increased $34 million to $179 million

Treasury Services exceeded 100 customers

Allowance for loan loss increased to $1.2 million, equal to 1.25% of core loans

No classified, non-performing or past due assets reported

New loan pipeline remained robust at $150 million

Small Business Administration repaid $22.5 million of PPP loans in both the March 2021 quarter and the December 2020 quarter

Originated $27.6 million of PPP loans in the March 2021 quarter



Select March 31, 2021 financial data compared to management projections provided in the Fall 2019 Investor Presentation (the Plan):

Total assets reached $265 million, compared to the Plan projection of $186 million

Bank employees total 38 compared to 23 projected in the Plan

Loans outstanding totaled $178 million compared to our Plan of $114 million

Deposits were $188 million compared to our Plan of $142 million

Noninterest bearing deposits totaled $56 million compared to $22 million projected in the Plan

Treasury customers exceeded 100 businesses with $39 million of noninterest bearing balances compared to our Plan projection of 40 businesses with $20 million in deposits

Tangible book value per share of $8.66 compared to our Plan of $8.66; however, adjusting for impairment of the deferred tax asset, the non-GAAP tangible book value per share at March 31, 2021 was $8.90

Pre-provision loss for the March quarter was $117,000 compared to $308,000 projected in the Plan

A PDF accompanying this announcement is available at http://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/372ca78d-fdd0-4eee-aca6-755a2622d887

March Quarter Results



The Bank had a net loss of $397,000 or $0.08 per share, for the March 2021 quarter compared to a net loss of $728,000 or $0.14 per share, in the December quarter. However, when considering results before the provision for loan losses, the linked-quarter operating loss declined 74% to $117,000 in March from $446,000 in December, following net operating losses for the quarters ended September 30, 2020 and June 30, 2020 of $758,000 and $1.0 million, respectively.

The Banks primary source of income is the spread it earns between its interest earning assets, which are primarily loans and investments, and the cost it pays for its funding sources, which are primarily deposits. Net interest income increased $184,000 to $1.5 million in the March quarter compared to the December quarter. The Banks net interest margin continued to rise to 2.51% in the March quarter from 2.41% in the December 2020 quarter, 1.76% in the September 2020 quarter and 1.45% in the June 2020 quarter. Hamadi commented, As the Bank continues to build the core loan portfolio, the net interest margin should continue to rise. In the March quarter, the average balance of core loans increased to $84.2 million from $60.6 million in the December quarter. The weighted average yield on these loans declined to 3.50% in the March quarter from 3.79% in the December quarter. The Bank applies a disciplined pricing model that it believes will yield consistent results over time. In the March quarter, the yield curve steepened which is expected to help the Banks margins in future periods.

PPP Update

In the March quarter, the Bank originated 96 new PPP loans totaling $27.6 million. The SBA made $22.5 million of principal forgiveness payments on the Banks PPP loan portfolio, which resulted in a $5.1 million net increase in PPP loans to a total of $84.9 million on March 31, 2021. During the March quarter, the Bank realized $746,000 of interest and fee income on the PPP portfolio, a decrease of $135,000 from the prior quarter. On March 31, 2021, the Bank had $1.8 million remaining in unrealized PPP fees ($1.4 million net of unrealized costs). Since inception, the Bank has originated 447 PPP loans for over $134 million. PPP revenue as a percentage of total revenue declined from 54% in the December quarter to 39% in the March quarter. The growth in core earnings of the Bank reduced the reliance on PPP revenue. Core interest income and noninterest income (total revenue less PPP revenue) increased 56% in the March quarter compared to the December quarter.

Treasury Services Update

In March, the Bank added its 100th treasury customer. These customers are businesses that use the Banks treasury systems to manage their primary operating accounts. On March 31, 2021, these businesses had $39 million of noninterest bearing deposits, $16 million of other deposits and almost half of core loans outstanding. Treasury fees are an important source of fee income and is expected to grow over time commensurate with activity. Robin Hager, President and Chief Operating Officer commented, When we formed the Bank, we chose to invest in what we believe is the best suite of Treasury Management systems on the market. The ease and quality of our systems are bringing us more business relationships than anticipated.

Loans and Deposits

The Banks net loans increased $26.6 million to $177.0 million during the first quarter of 2021, which included a $22.1 million increase in core loans, $4.8 million net increase in PPP loans offset by a $280,000 increase in the Allowance for Loan Losses (ALLL). On March 31, 2021, core loans totaled $95.1 million and surpassed PPP loans which totaled $83.0 million. The ALLL totaled $1.2 million, or 1.25% of core loans on March 31, 2021.

For the March quarter, the Bank originated $65.5 million of new loans which included unfunded commitments. New PPP loans in the amount of $28 million and $23 million of core loans were originated during the first quarter of 2021. Unfunded loans (lines of credit and construction lines) increased from $46.0 million to $52.5 million. For the last twelve months, the Bank originated $326.1 million of loans with $178.2 million in gross loans outstanding on March 31, 2021. Unfunded loans totaled $52.5 million. Loans sold through participations totaled $30.8 million. PPP payoffs and forgiveness payments totaled $51.2 million and other changes totaled $13.4 million.

On March 31, 2021, the Bank had 112 core loans in its portfolio totaling $95.1 million in outstanding balances and $147.6 million of gross core loans including unfunded commitments. The average size of new core loans originated was $1.3 million. On March 31, 2021, 56% of the Banks outstanding core loan portfolio was Commercial and Industrial (C&I) in nature:

Loan Diversification Loan Category 3/31/2021 Composition Other Construction & Land Development $ 12,518,620 NonOwner Occupied CRE $ 29,651,385 Total CRE $ 42,170,006 44% Owner Occupied RE $ 23,649,014 C&I $ 29,322,816 Total C&I $ 52,971,829 56% Other Revolving Loans $ 1,287 0% Total $ 95,143,122

Total deposits increased $39.1 million during the quarter and totaled $187.8 million on March 31, 2021, while core deposits increased $34.1 million to $179.0 million. Growth in core deposits was due primarily to growth in noninterest bearing demand balances which increased $28.6 million to $56.0 million. Treasury Services business customers demand balances totaled $39 million of the $56 million of total noninterest bearing balances. Money market, NOW and time deposit balances increased $11 million to $132 million. For the March quarter, the Bank acquired 81 new deposit relationships, bringing the total number of deposit accounts to 581 on March 31, 2021. The average balance of each deposit relationship was $323,000.



Noninterest Expense

Noninterest expense increased $32,000 to $1.8 million in the March quarter compared to the prior quarter. The increase in expense was due primarily to increased compensation expense.

Due to increased activity, the Bank has a total of 38 employees compared to our Plan projection of 23 employees. The added personnel are in sales, underwriting, treasury management, loan and deposit operations, and customer service management. Hamadi commented, We could not have planned for the extraordinary events of this last year. Although the PPP revenue in particular is nonrecurring, the unique opportunity of the PPP afforded the Bank the ability to stay ahead of our original operating plan while building a broader and deeper organization capable of growing well beyond the forecast.

Credit Risk

The Bank had no nonperforming assets and reported no criticized or substandard assets on March 31, 2021. The Banks emerging loan portfolio has been underwritten with an eye on the impact COVID-19 is having on cashflows of prospective businesses. Many of these businesses are prospering in the current environment and have either stable or expanding revenues. By building a loan portfolio as the quarantines began, the Bank has been able to assess credit risk with a high level of clarity.

Deferred Tax Asset, Non-GAAP Measure

The Banks tangible book value per share on March 31, 2021 was $8.66. Organization and startup costs during the organization period and net operating losses during the first twelve-months of operations created a deferred tax asset of $1.2 million. This asset is currently fully impaired and will be carried at $0 until sufficient, verifiable evidence exists to demonstrate that the deferred tax asset will more likely than not be realized. At that time, the valuation allowance will be reversed. On March 31, 2021, the valuation allowance lowered tangible book value per share by $0.24 from $8.90 (a non-GAAP measurement). On a non-GAAP basis, tangible book value per share fell from $9.02 on December 31, 2020 to $8.90 at March 31, 2021 when adding back the impairment of the deferred tax asset.

Outlook

As we celebrate our one-year anniversary, we are pleased to see that the opportunity for TBBC in the Triad is greater than our original forecast. TBBCs assets are 42% greater than Plan; loans are 56% higher and core demand deposit accounts are over 100% greater than Plan. The extraordinary growth over the first year has allowed the Bank to invest more than we expected while not compromising efforts to achieve profitability. We are pleased to have built a larger than projected sales and service team with more bankers, treasury officers and support staff. On March 31, 2021, the Bank had 38 employees versus our Plan of 23. On April 28, 2021 we announced the hiring of a commercial real estate team, led by Robert Gray, President of Commercial Real Estate, and Chad Davis, Senior Commercial Real Estate Lender. We believe the addition of this real estate-based lending team will complement the Banks strong C&I focus and is expected to help balance loans with the robust deposit growth. To date, the Banks core deposits have increased faster that core loans. At quarter end, the Bank had $1.8 million of deferred PPP revenue ($1.4 million net of deferred costs) that has yet to be recognized. This deferred revenue, should continue to bolster the Banks total revenue through late in 2021 at which time we anticipate core operations will be profitable. We are pleased with the Banks results on our first anniversary, and as we look forward, we believe TBBC will continue to exceed expectations. Hamadi commented.

About Triad Business Bank

With three co-equal offices located in Winston-Salem, High Point and Greensboro, Triad Business Bank focuses on meeting the needs of small to midsize businesses and their owners by providing loans, treasury management and private banking, all with a high level of personal attention and best-in-class technology. For more information, visit www.triadbusinessbank.com

Forward Looking Language

This release contains certain forward-looking statements with respect to the financial condition, results of operations and business of Triad Business Bank. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are based on the beliefs and assumptions of management of Triad Business Bank and on the information available to management at the time that these disclosures were prepared. These statements can be identified by the use of words like expect, anticipate, estimate and believe, variations of these words and other similar expressions. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Triad Business Bank undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Triad Business Bank Balance Sheet (Unaudited) March 31, 2021 December 31, 2020 September 30, 2020 June 30, 2020 Assets Noninterest-bearing cash $ 4,899,326 $ 1,398,613 $ 736,435 $ 246,655 Interest-bearing due from banks 17,259,583 39,763,399 70,015,162 24,851,368 Securities 59,398,336 26,065,622 18,032,330 17,978,181 Federal funds sold - - - - PPP Loans 83,016,045 78,173,460 100,057,189 99,731,136 Core Loans 95,143,122 73,083,871 49,840,339 13,847,114 Allowance for loan loss (1,190,350 ) (910,079 ) (628,371 ) (173,808 ) Loans net 176,968,817 150,347,252 149,269,157 113,404,442 Other assets 6,055,184 3,528,292 3,220,127 2,817,054 Total assets $ 264,581,247 $ 221,103,178 $ 241,273,211 $ 159,297,700 Liabilities Demand deposits $ 55,978,388 $ 27,409,213 $ 18,681,865 $ 32,596,234 Interest-bearing NOW 21,956,030 19,067,897 4,737,561 2,670,394 Interest-bearing savings & MMA 101,058,331 98,446,048 70,005,273 33,845,514 Time deposits 8,818,530 3,806,611 501,000 500,000 Total Deposits 187,811,279 148,729,769 93,925,699 69,612,142 Other borrowings 20,685,620 24,946,988 99,713,260 41,228,228 Fed Funds Purchased 9,346,000 - - - Other liabilities 2,523,648 2,569,615 2,238,944 1,963,004 Total Liabilities 220,366,548 176,246,372 195,877,903 112,803,374 Shareholders' Equity Common Stock 49,822,062 49,730,750 49,639,875 49,549,875 Accumulated Deficit (5,801,946 ) (5,404,682 ) (4,676,843 ) (3,464,641 ) AOCI 194,583 530,738 432,276 409,092 Total Shareholders' Equity 44,214,699 44,856,806 45,395,308 46,494,326 Total Liabilities & Shareholders' Equity $ 264,581,247 $ 221,103,178 $ 241,273,211 $ 159,297,700 Shares outstanding 5,102,984 5,102,984 5,102,984 5,102,984 Tangible book value per share $ 8.66 $ 8.79 $ 8.90 $ 9.11









Triad Business Bank Income Statement (unaudited) For three months ended For three months ended For three months ended For three months ended March 31, 2021 December 31, 2020 September 30, 2020 June 30, 2020 Interest Income Interest & Fees on PPP Loans $ 745,907 $ 881,063 $ 514,893 $ 378,879 Interest & Fees on Core Loans 727,116 577,864 341,619 33,624 Interest & Dividend Income on Securities 254,383 155,893 132,261 96,280 Interest Income on balances Due from Banks 8,354 9,428 6,623 12,160 Other Interest Income 4,548 440 364 - Total Interest Income 1,740,308 1,624,688 995,760 520,943 Interest Expense Interest on NOW Deposits 53,207 20,350 11,221 4,749 Interest on Savings & MMA Deposits 183,260 272,626 147,500 61,929 Interest on Time Deposits 12,369 5,373 1,011 219 Interest on Borrowings 18,525 41,947 54,271 11,320 Other Interest Expense 4,139 - - - Total Interest Expense 271,500 340,296 214,003 78,217 Net Interest Income 1,468,808 1,284,392 781,757 442,726 Provision for Loan Losses 280,271 281,708 454,563 173,808 Net Interest Income After Provision for LL 1,188,537 1,002,684 327,194 268,918 Total Noninterest Income 87,062 19,290 40,230 1,211 Total Gain(Loss) on Securities 108,488 - - - Noninterest Expense Salaries & Benefits 1,152,497 1,087,939 924,103 927,050 Premises & Equipment 114,060 139,222 114,659 83,024 Total Other Noninterest Expense 514,794 522,652 540,864 453,611 Total Noninterest Expense 1,781,351 1,749,813 1,579,626 1,463,685 Loss before Income Tax (397,264 ) (727,839 ) (1,212,202 ) (1,193,556 ) Income Tax - - - - Net Loss $ (397,264 ) $ (727,839 ) $ (1,212,202 ) $ (1,193,556 ) Net Loss per Share Basic & Diluted $ (0.08 ) $ (0.14 ) $ (0.24 ) $ (0.24 ) Weighted Average Shares Outstanding Basic & Diluted 5,102,984 5,102,984 5,102,984 5,066,972 Pre-Provision, Pre-Tax Loss $ (116,993 ) $ (446,131 ) $ (757,639 ) $ (1,019,748 )









Non-GAAP Measures Tangible Book Value Actual

3/31/2021 Non-GAAP

3/31/2021 Total Shareholders' Equity $ 44,214,699 $ 45,424,999 Shares Outstanding 5,102,984 5,102,984 Tangible Book Value Per Share $ 8.66 $ 8.90 Deferred Tax Asset $ 1,210,300 $ 1,210,300 Valuation Allowance $ (1,210,300 ) $ - Recorded Deferred Tax Asset - 1,210,300 Effect of Non-GAAP Measure on Tangible Book Value $ 0.24 During the start-up phase of the Bank, a valuation allowance was created which fully impairs the Deferred Tax Asset. When sufficient, verifiable evidence exists demonstrating that the Deferred Tax Asset will more likely than not be realized, the valuation allowance will be eliminated. The Non-GAAP measure is shown to disclose the effect on tangible book value per share at 3/31/2021 had there been no valuation allowance at that date. Pre-Provision Income Qtr Ended

3/31/2021 Qtr Ended

12/31/2020 Qtr Ended

9/30/2020 Loss Before Income Tax $ (397,264 ) $ (727,839 ) $ (1,212,202 ) Provision For Loan Losses $ 280,271 $ 281,708 $ 454,563 Pre-Provision Income Before Income Tax (Non-GAAP) $ (116,993 ) $ (446,131 ) $ (757,639 )








VICTORIA, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Americans have been hearing about forthcoming changes to the pharmaceutical industry that will work to lower the prices for prescription drugs for years now. There's been little in the way of progress there. There are a host of reasons why prescription drugs are often very expensive in America, but the primary one is that the USA is the only country that has a system allowing drug manufacturers to set prices as freely as they please. These ongoing high prices have U.S. residents increasingly looking to online pharmacies in Canada, like Canada Drugs Direct, to have their prescriptions filled for less.

Canada Drugs Direct Save upto 80%

It's natural for people looking into this alternative to ask if Internet pharmacies are safe, and are they as safe as brick-and-mortar ones found in their community. The short answer is that yes, they are safe, and the reason why most online pharmacies are safe is because ones in the USA and every online pharmacy in Canada are going to be required to adhere to operating guidelines. Ones that are put in place by the US FDA and Health Canada.

Both countries have measures in place to ensure compliance, and this includes inspections to ensure they have the same good operating practices as storefront pharmacies. However, what can the average individual do to be assured they're going to receive safe, pure, and quality products when ordering drugs online from Canada or getting them from a U.S. online pharmacy?

For starters, you should be able to determine that the pharmacy meets these three criteria:

a valid prescription from a licensed doctor is required before prescriptions are filled a physical address and telephone number is clearly listed on the pharmacy's site speaking or consulting with a licensed pharmacist is available through the online pharmacy

Plus, there are two good online resources you can use to check if a pharmacy is safe or reputable. If you're considering an online pharmacy in the USA, use the US FDA's own database of licensed online pharmacies by State. If you've decided to order your medication online from Canada, verify the pharmacy with PharmacyChecker or use the CIPA (Canadian International Pharmacy) list of accredited pharmacies in Canada.

About the Company

Canada Drugs Direct is a Canadian online pharmacy that is among those recommended for Americans who shop at a pharmacy in Canada to save money on medications. It is able to source medications in a way that allows for the best prices on Rx drugs from Canada. All orders require a prescription and are dispensed by a licensed pharmacist, in the same as any pharmacy in America. Pay less for medication ordered online from Canada.

Contact Canada Drugs Direct:

https://www.canadadrugsdirect.com/

Toll Free: 1-800-891-0844

[email protected]

Related Images

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Canada Drugs Direct

Canada Drugs Direct Save upto 80%

SOURCE Canada Drugs Direct
DUBLIN, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TriNet, a leading provider of comprehensive human resources for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), today announced the company has won a Gold, multiple Silver, and a Bronze Stevie Award in the 19th Annual American Business Awards. Among a record-setting field of 3,800 applicants, TriNet's inaugural PeopleForce conference received two awards, including the only Gold Stevie award in its category and a Bronze award.

TriNet's humanity-centric marketing campaign was awarded Silver for Marketing Campaign of the Year - Corporate Reputation/Professional Services, and Brand Experience of the Year - Business-to-Business. Additionally, TriNet's efforts to help SMBs navigate COVID-19 earned a Silver Stevie award for Most Valuable Corporate Response.

"Businesses everywhere have stepped up, pivoted, and evolved to adapt to the ongoing pandemic," said Michael Mendenhall, senior vice president, chief marketing officer and chief communications officer at TriNet. "It's an honor for TriNet to be recognized among such an impressive group of companies that have also had to find innovative ways to service customers and stakeholders this year. We look forward to continuing our work in championing SMBs to persist and succeed, no matter what challenges lie ahead."

More than 250 professionals world-wide participated in the judging process to select this year's Stevie Awards winners. One judge called TriNet's COVID-19 corporate response a "great example of an effective pivot amid COVID-19, backed by an impressive speaker line-up." Another judge said it was a "very impressive event that offered a vast variety of information to small and medium business."

The award-winning TriNet PeopleForce conference is a three-day virtual event that debuted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and covered an array of crucial and timely topics impacting SMBs, including diversity, equity and inclusion, workplace culture, and the future of work. Headlined by a conversation with former U.S. President George W. Bush and his daughter, New York Times bestselling author and co-host of "Today with Hoda & Jenna," Jenna Hager Bush, the roster was comprised of prominent business leaders, public servants, educators, authors, influencers and health industry experts.

"The American economy continues to show its resilience and as we're poised on the beginning of what should be a phenomenal period of growth, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of a wide range of organizations and people over the past 18 months," said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher. "This year's Stevie-winning nominations in The American Business Awards are testament to the ingenuity, the commitment, the passion, the adaptability, and the creativity of the American people. We look forward to celebrating this year's winners during our virtual ceremony on June 30."

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2021 Stevie winners are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

About TriNet

TriNet (NYSE: TNET) provides small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with full-service HR solutions tailored by industry. To free SMBs from HR complexities, TriNet offers access to human capital expertise, benefits, risk mitigation and compliance, payroll and real-time technology. From Main Street to Wall Street, TriNet empowers SMBs to focus on what matters most-growing their business. TriNet, incredible starts here. For more information, visit TriNet.com or follow us on Twitter.

TriNet and the TriNet logo are registered trademarks of TriNet. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE TriNet

Related Links

https://www.trinet.com


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NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Crisis Text Line, a not-for-profit organization that provides free, 24/7 text-based mental health support, released its second annual national data report, Everybody Hurts 2020: The State of Mental Health in America , identifying the top issues for texters in 2020. In a year unlike any other, Crisis Text Line's Crisis Counselors supported 843,982 texters in crisis through 1.4 million conversations, resulting in 48 million messages.

Our national American psyche suffered repeated blows in 2020. In a year of tumult, COVID-19 infection and death rates soared against the backdrop of an economic recession, massive protests in response to the murder of George Floyd and a polarizing Presidential election. Between lockdowns, rising death tolls, street protests in cities from coast to coast, political conflict and rampant misinformation, it is no wonder so many Americans reached out to Crisis Text Line for help at unprecedented levels all year, resulting in a 19% increase in total conversations from 2019.

Amid these challenges, data scientists at Crisis Text Line found unexpected information on the state of mental health in America, with an overall 20% decline in conversations about suicide with texters. In March 2021, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that death by suicide declined by 5.6%. Crisis Text Line's findings in this year's report align with this data.

In 2020, young people actively reached out to Crisis Text Line, with 74% of texters falling under the age of 24. Texters aged 13 and under accounted for 13.74% of conversations, texters ages 14 to 17 accounted for 34.10% of conversations and texters aged 18 to 24 made up 26.48% of conversations.

Crisis Text Line's Chief Transformation Officer, Shairi Turner, MD, MPH, says, "While it seems counterinutuive in nature to experience a decrease in depression and suicide during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, experience has shown us that this is typical of human behavior during emergencies that pose external threats to our safety." She continues, "This year was also marked by devastating racial violence. We know that prolonged exposure to systemic racism, whether through violent incidents or micro aggressions, contributes to chronic anxiety and other risk factors that worsen mental health in the long term. At Crisis Text Line, we aim to increase access to mental health support for all, and especially for our youth in need and Black, LatinX and other BIPOC communities that are disproportionately affected by healthcare disparities."

Key findings of the report include:

Mentions of depression and suicide dropped significantly in 2020.

Texters' feelings of depression and sadness dropped by 10% from 2019 to 2020, and conversations in which texters expressed thoughts of suicide dropped by 20%. This trend was also noticeable in the relative drop in conversations flagged as "at imminent risk of suicide," where a texter indicated they were thinking about ending their life, and they also had a plan, the means and wanted to make an attempt within 48 hours. Suicide was a topic in 23% of all conversations with texters. In Wyoming, South Dakota and Utah, mentions of suicide were significantly higher than the national average. While the overall percentage of conversations related to depression decreased, it was still a topic in 36% of all conversations with texters. In West Virginia, South Carolina and Arkansas, mentions of depression were significantly higher than the national average.

Mentions of anxiety increased in 2020.

Beginning in March 2020, as COVID-19 began to spread throughout the country, anxiety and stress surged. Nationally, anxiety was a topic in almost 36% of all conversations with texters. In Puerto Rico, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, mentions of anxiety were significantly higher than the national average.

Young.

In 2020, 74% of our texters were 24 or younger. Texters aged 13 and under accounted for 13.7% of conversations, texters ages 14 to 17 accounted for 34.1% of conversations and texters aged 18 to 24 made up 26.4% conversations. It is our hope that with this understanding of the generational challenge facing American youth, Crisis Text Line can play an integral role in expanding America's mental-health safety net to support our youth as they build our collective future.

Diverse.

In 2020, texters who reached out to Crisis Text Line were more diverse than in previous years. Texters who identify as Black accounted for 14.2% of conversations, texters who identify as Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin accounted for 20.5% of conversations, texters identifying as Asian made up 6.8% of conversations, texters identifying as American Indian / Alaska Native came in at 3.9%, and, those identifying as Middle Eastern, North African or Arab made up 1.6% of conversations. Racism is a public health threat that can worsen mental health, and we continue to work to increase access to mental health support for BIPOC and diverse communities.

Increase in volunteers.

As the pandemic raged on, thousands of people found themselves quarantining at home, and wanting to do something positive and productive. In March and April, more than 15,000 applied to become a Crisis Counselor.

Everybody Hurts 2020: The State of Mental Health in America

This report highlights what we learned through 1.4 million conversations nationally and in all 50 states, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. The full report is available here . Click here to view Crisis Text Line data from your state.

Background: A Year Like No Other

Just after noon on Monday March 16, 2020, the light signaling the number of people waiting for a Crisis Text Line Crisis Counselor briefly flashed from green to yellow, and then turned red. A red queue indicated that there was more incoming volume from texters in crisis than current volunteers on the platform. By 2pm, conversation volume was up by 29% from an average day of approximately 3,000 conversations, and by 7pm, it had doubled.

Crisis Text Line was experiencing an epic spike. By midnight, Crisis Text Line had 5,900 conversations with people in crisis, rising to 6,606 conversations by the next day. One week before, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The mental health crisis was well underway and Crisis Text Line was readyand already remoteto support people who were working on the frontlines as health care and essential workers, students who found their lives interrupted by quarantines, parents who were trying to hold it all together, and thousands of others who needed a trained counselor to listen to their pain. We had 1.4 million conversations with texters during 2020, with higher than average volume almost every day after March 16.

As the pandemic raged on, thousands of people found themselves quarantining at home, wanting to do something positive and productive. In March and April, more than 15,000 people applied to become a Crisis Counselor.

In 2020, COVID-19 infection and death rates soared against the backdrop of an economic recession, massive protests in response to the murder of George Floyd and other victims of police and gun violence, and a polarizing Presidential election. Prolonged exposure to systemic racism, whether through violent incidents or micro aggressions, contributes to chronic stress and other risk factors that worsen mental health. In April 2021, the Center for Disease Control released a statement identifying racism as a threat to public health. The report states, "A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our societyaffecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefitssuch as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditionsoften referred to as social determinants of health are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes ."

Throughout the year, Crisis Text Line's data science team watched closely for trends in real time, questioning what the data would tell us about the historic year and the effects of the pandemic and racial trauma on the population. We wanted to understand how mental health issues like anxiety, depression and suicide shifted in 1.4 million crisis conversations in 2020, and learn from the words associated with the complex matrix of concurrent crises in the 48 million messages that were exchanged between texters and volunteers.

Crisis Text Line

Crisis Text Line provides free, 24-7, high-quality text-based mental health support and crisis intervention by empowering a community of trained volunteers to support people in their moments of need.

Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a trained Crisis Counselor, free 24/7.

Visit us on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook .

Media Contact: Julia Pacetti / Cordelia Sklansky, Verdant Communications, [email protected] / [email protected]

SOURCE Crisis Text Line
Handout

In the latest legal spat between Ghislaine Maxwell and the feds, lawyers for the alleged accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein suggest she got a black eye from shielding her face from the harsh lighting inside her jail cell at Brooklyns Metropolitan Detention Center.

The British socialite and accused sex-trafficker has been denied bail four times since her arrest for grooming minors last July. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Maxwells request to be released on bond. At oral arguments the day before, her lawyer David Oscar Markus complained about her conditions in the federal lockup, claiming MDC guards were keeping Maxwell awake at night by conducting suicide checks and flashing lights in her cell every 15 minutes.

In its order, the appeals court said, To the extent Appellant seeks relief specific to her sleeping conditions, such request should be addressed to the District Court.

Ghislaine Counters Toilet Flushing Smears With Bizarre, Gushing Website

Bobbi Sternheim, another attorney for Maxwell, wasted no time writing to a Manhattan federal court judge over the 59-year-olds supposed sleep deprivation. She also included a photo of Maxwell with a bruise under her left eye as an exhibit.

While Ms. Maxwell is unaware of the cause of the bruise, as reported to medical and psych staff, she has grown increasingly reluctant to report information to the guards for fear of retaliation, discipline, and punitive chores, Sternheim wrote Judge Alison J. Nathan on Thursday. However, there is concern that the bruise may be related to the need for Ms. Maxwell to shield her eyes from the lights projected into her cell throughout the night.

According to Sternheim, Maxwell resorts to using a sock or towel to cover her eyes in an awkward attempt to shield them from disrupting illumination every 15 minutes.

Ms. Maxwell continues to be disrupted throughout the night by guards shining a flash/strobe light into her cell, claiming that her breathing must be checked, Sternheim added. The myth that Ms. Maxwells conditions of confinement are related to her being a suicide risk was laid to rest during the oral argument: There is nothing to support that contrived claim.

Story continues

On Wednesday night, Sternheim wrote, MDC staff confronted Maxwell about the bruise covering her left eye and warned theyd place her in the lockups Special Housing Unit, or solitary confinement, if she didnt tell them how she got it.

The lawyer asked the court to direct MDC to stop its 15-minute checks of Maxwell or justify the need for the disruptive flashlight surveillance.

Maxwells family has criticized prison staff for their handling of the bruise.

I am shocked my sisters guards didnt immediately refer her for proper medical care, Maxwell's brother, Ian, said in a statement Thursday night. Instead they bullied and harassed her, effectively blaming the victim. The simple solution is to review the round-the-clock security camera footage to see what may have occurred. Apart from whatever happened in this House of Horrors, I can report that Ghislaines family and friends continue to support her. We are confident, once this is over, it will be the prosecutor who has a proverbial black eye.

Nathan has ordered prosecutors and MDC legal counsel to answer whether Maxwell is being subjected to flashlight surveillance as described; what the basis is for doing so; and whether the jail can provide Maxwell with an appropriate eye covering.

Maxwells legal team has repeatedly claimed shes suffering from detrimental conditions in the federal detention center. In response, the government fired off its own missive to the court claiming Maxwell was cared for as well as any other prisoner, and that jail staff had to remind her to clean her cell and flush her toilet.

When Maxwell appeared before a judge last week, the socialite did not appear to be frail or in poor health as her lawyers have claimed.

Maxwell faces trial this summer for allegedly grooming, abusing and trafficking four underage girls for Epstein from a period covering 1994 to 1997 and 2001 to 2004. Her lawyers asked Nathan to postpone the trial until next year.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Some parents in Childress, Texas, are publicly voicing outrage at two local churches after their children were exposed to explicit sexual education materials without their consent. Church officials argue that they were simply responding to questions asked by the children.

One parent, Kayla Evans, revealed on Facebook that she was upset when she learned about the discussions and terminology her 13-year-old daughter was exposed to after being dropped off at Childress First United Methodist Church last Wednesday.

Im seriously at a loss for words and just completely confused what our daughter was taught at church tonight. Im outraged, Evans wrote.

Its been a while since Ive been at church but is this really whats being taught to youth now? I had to ask my 8 year old just to be sure he hasnt had some kind of talk without my permission. I didnt get this kind of sex talk. Hell I just learned some of it in my adult life, what is this world coming to? Ive been protecting them as much as possible from freaking YouTube I had no idea Id get this from church!!!!!!!!

Source:The Christian Post
PHILIPSBURG (DCOMM):---The Collective Prevention Services (CPS), a department in the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development and Labour (Ministry VSA), would like to inform clients of CPS Youth Health Care and the Baby Wellness Clinic, that the latter has been experiencing some challenges with the telephone network.



Clients of CPS Youth Health Care and Baby Wellness Clinic can reach both entities (temporarily) by calling 520-4163 between the hours of 8:30 AM to 5.00 PM (Mon-Fri) or persons can call 914 and request to be transferred to the Baby Wellness Clinic.



Both agencies apologize for any inconvenience caused and ask for your patience as the telephone system is upgraded.
Zomato, the Indian startup that acquired Uber's local food delivery business last year, is headed for a mega IPO.

The company on Wednesday filed for an initial public offering in Mumbai that could raise up to 82.5 billion rupees ($1.1 billion). That would be India's biggest IPO so far this year, according to Dealogic.

In a filing to India's stock market regulator, the food delivery upstart said it would issue new shares worth as much as 75 billion rupees ($1 billion). One of its shareholders, Indian tech firm Info Edge, will sell up to 7.5 billion rupees (about $100.6 million) worth of equity.

Zomato is also considering privately raising up to 15 billion rupees ($201.1 million) before it hits the market, which could reduce the amount it plans to raise publicly, it added.

Zomato was founded in New Delhi in 2008. The company has built a name for itself as one of India's most successful startups, with a team of more than 5,000 employees that reaches more than 10,000 cities in two dozen countries, from Sri Lanka to Slovakia to South Africa.

The firm made international headlines last January for acquiring Uber Eats in India in exchange for handing the US tech company an almost 10% stake in its business. Users, restaurants and delivery workers on Uber's platform at the time were shifted over to Zomato's app.

The listing is a major moment for India's tech industry.

Only a handful of Indian tech firms have held listings over the the last two decades. And no tech startup worth more than $1 billion has gone public. Walmart-owned Flipkart is the only Indian tech unicorn to have been acquired at a valuation of more than $1 billion.

Zomato was last valued at $5.4 billion, according to CB Insights. The startup declined to comment on Wednesday.

The IPO will also serve as another test for the closely watched global food delivery industry. Deliveroo's IPO crashed in London last month despite great fanfare, becoming the city's worst debut on record.

 Diksha Madhok contributed reporting.
The Directors of Scales Corporation Limited have declared a fully imputed final cash dividend for the 2020 Financial Year of 9.5 cents per share.

Taking into account the 9.5 cents per share interim dividend, paid in January 2021, total cash dividends for the 2020 Financial Year total 19.0 cents per share, which represents 96% of Underlying Net Profit (excluding non-controlling interests).

The dividend is payable on 9 July 2021, with a record date of 1 July 2021.

Annual Shareholders Meeting

The Annual Meeting is scheduled for 3.30pm, Wednesday 9 June 2021. The meeting will be held in Christchurch, with shareholders also able to attend virtually. The Notice of Meeting will be distributed shortly.

The meeting will provide an excellent opportunity to update shareholders on trading to date for each business unit, including confirmation of the gross apple harvest and estimated packout percentage for Mr Apple, as provided historically.

Please see the links below for details:

Final Dividend - 2020 Financial Year

Distribution Notice

Source: Scales Corporation Limited

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CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- From the Mediterranean hotspot that put the "US" in HUMM-US, comes the holiday to top all holidays as Roti honors National Hummus Day all month long. Move aside guac, starting May 1, hummus takes over as everyone's favorite dip, allowing the cherished chickpea to finally get the credit it deserves.

"When something is so good, why only celebrate it for one day?" says VP of Brand and Marketing Nico Nieto. "Hummus has all of the components of a perfect food. First, it's absolutely delicious. It can be eaten as a side or a full meal, makes an amazing spread for sandwiches and is incidentally full of good-for-you ingredients. We want to share our love of hummus and intend on doing so the entire month of May."

In honor of National Hummus Day on May 13, Roti is introducing new, bold and mouth-watering flavors of hummus for a limited time only, including Roasted Red Pepper and Beet. Roti will also be celebrating hummus with exciting promotions that will keep everyone dipping all month long.

NATIONAL HUMMUS DAY | MAY 13

It's the most wonderful day of the year in MAY! Paying homage to one of the oldest, most delicious ingredients, May 13 will celebrate the dip of all dips by offering FREE hummus of any flavor to all customers online and in-store.

SPREAD LOVE AND HUMMUS

Roti spreads Love AND Hummus by giving back to the community. Throughout the month of May, customers who purchase a hummus bowl or side of hummus can post a picture on their own Facebook and/or Instagram, tag @Roti with the hashtag #spreadloveandhummus. For every post using the hashtag, Roti will make a charitable donation to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that uses the power of food to nourish communities and strengthen economies in times of crisis and beyond.

POP-UP HUMMUS HAPPY HOUR

It may always be 5 o'clock somewhere, but it's not always Hummus Happy Hour -- so when it is, you will want to be in the know! Throughout the month of May, Roti will host pop-up Hummus Happy Hours, giving away free hummus and chips. The only way to get the inside scoop on when a flash Hummus Happy Hour occurs is to follow Roti on social media. Once the Hummus Happy Hour is announced, run to Roti for a side of free hummus and chips or pita with purchase!

THIRD PARTY PERKS

DoorDash DashPassers rejoice! Place an order using the app (over $15.00) and receive FREE Hummus and Pita.

To learn more about Roti, please visit www.roti.com , and to join in the fun, follow Roti's Facebook and Instagram channels.

ABOUT ROTI

Roti, headquartered in Chicago, IL, operates 40 locations nationally, including Chicago, Washington D.C., New York City, Dallas, Houston and Minneapolis. Inspired by the bold flavors and wholesome ingredients of Mediterranean cuisine, Roti's food philosophy is straightforward: "Crave Better." The fast-casual menu features bowls, salads and pitas, and numerous sides and toppings that allow customers to curate their perfect meal matched to their food mood. For more information about Roti, visit www.Roti.com or follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

SOURCE Roti

Related Links

http://www.roti.com


Federal officials are investigating two incidents in the United States that appeared similar to the mysterious apparent attacks that left overseas personnel suffering from "debilitating" symptoms, CNN reports.

In one incident, a National Security Council official was reportedly sickened near the south side of the White House in November 2020, while in another, a White House official "reported a similar attack" while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb in 2019. They "reported similar symptoms to CIA and State Department personnel impacted overseas, and officials quickly began to investigate the incident as a possible 'Havana syndrome' attack," CNN writes.

Officials have previously been investigating mysterious incidents starting in 2016 in which U.S. personnel in Cuba experienced unexplained symptoms including nausea, ear popping, vertigo, and headaches, which a government study suggested may have been caused by directed microwave energy. Investigators, CNN reports, haven't determined whether these two incidents in the U.S. are connected to ones that occurred overseas or what might have caused them, but the report notes that the "fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming."

This news comes after The New York Times reported in March that a CIA task force was seeking to expand its inquiry into the "Havana syndrome" incidents.

"CIA is working alongside other government agencies to double down on our efforts to find answers regarding the unexplained global health incidents that have impacted personnel," CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett said.

Last week, Politico reported the Pentagon warned lawmakers "about the growing and urgent threat of directed-energy attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East and elsewhere," telling them that the suspected energy attacks were "growing across the world." CNN reports, though, that investigators "still haven't completely ruled out the possibility that the symptoms are caused by some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a weapon."

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Supplier News

29 April 2021

Gillis, a consulting, training and sales performance partner organization for hoteliers, announced today that its CEO and founder, Tammy Gillis, was selected as a finalist in the Women in Sales Awards "Professional Services Sales" category. The Women in Sales Awards is a prestigious award that celebrates the achievements of women in sales in North America. Finalists will present to a panel of judges on May 12, 2021 and winners will be announced on June 17, 2021.

Under the leadership of Tammy Gillis, Gillis disrupted the traditional hotel sales model in 2013 and launched a full service, turnkey, virtual sales team with employees based across North America.

Elevating the sales profession  Gillis identified a gap in how salespeople were being onboarded into the industry and felt they were not being set up for success. This resulted in an ongoing high turnover rate in sales. To date, Gillis has trained thousands of sales professionals, hotel owners, general managers, and front-line associates. The company works with major brands across the country.

 Gillis identified a gap in how salespeople were being onboarded into the industry and felt they were not being set up for success. This resulted in an ongoing high turnover rate in sales. To date, Gillis has trained thousands of sales professionals, hotel owners, general managers, and front-line associates. The company works with major brands across the country. Visionary, innovator and professional speaker  As a sales performance expert and professional speaker, Gillis is well known in the hospitality community. Her most requested presentations include Selling Without a Sales Team and Selling to the Modern Buyer. As a visionary, innovator and trainer, she provides a practical and genuine approach. Her presentations and workshops have been well received by the attendees of: Best Western Hotels and Resorts, Choice Hotels International, GBTA, Hotel Association of Canada (HAC), AAHOA and Coast Hotels.

 As a sales performance expert and professional speaker, Gillis is well known in the hospitality community. Her most requested presentations include Selling Without a Sales Team and Selling to the Modern Buyer. As a visionary, innovator and trainer, she provides a practical and genuine approach. Her presentations and workshops have been well received by the attendees of: Best Western Hotels and Resorts, Choice Hotels International, GBTA, Hotel Association of Canada (HAC), AAHOA and Coast Hotels. Disrupted the traditional sales model  Gillis launched its Dynamic Sales Solution (DSS) to provide all hotels with access to sales support regardless of their size or location. This approach allows hotels to sell like a full-service property without having to spend like a full-service property.

Tammy Gillis, CEO, Gillis, said: "I am honored to have been selected as a finalist for this prestigious award, however, our company wouldn't be where it is today without the incredible group of women and men I work with. Our success is because of their dedication and the passion they show our clients and team members every day."

View the complete list of Women in Sales Awards North American finalists here: https://www.wisawardsna.com/2021-finalists.html#.YH9OyKlKjX0
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 23:43:25|Editor: huaxia

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KAMPALA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Uganda on Thursday repatriated 42 Burundian girls it rescued after busting a human-trafficking racket in the capital city of Kampala, a police spokesperson said here.

Charles Twiine, police spokesperson for criminal investigations directorate, told Xinhua by telephone that the girls were handed to Burundi's Ambassador to Uganda Epiphanie Kabushemeye Ntamwana.

The rescued Burundian girls were later transported by road to Bujumbura for reunion with their families.

"Police in conjunction with the directorate of immigrations have today (Thursday) repatriated 42 Burundian girls that had been rescued from the hands of the traffickers," said Twiine. "We have handed them over to the Burundian authorities so that they can be reintegrated in the society and better their lives."

He said one suspect has been arraigned before court, charged and remanded to prison over human trafficking.

"We want to condemn this mysterious act of trafficking. We have built a good robust team across the borders to ensure victims of trafficking are detected and rescued," said Twiine.

The police in conjunction with other security agencies early this month rescued the Burundian girls and arrested suspects involved in the human-trafficking racket. Enditem
The Chumakov Federal Scientific Center for Research and Development of Immune and Biological Products of the Russian Academy of Sciences has submitted a vaccine dossier to the World Health Organization (WHO) for prequalification of its CoviVac vaccine, the Centers director, Aidar Ishmukhametov, said in a televised interview with Rossiya-24 channel on Wednesday.

"We have submitted documents to the WHO for so-called prequalification. It is a long enough road to be able to vaccinate, as I believe, the third world later on when we cope with this ourselves," he said.

Ishmukhametov said that the dossier was submitted to the WHO last week. "The documents were submitted last week. Prequalification is a long process, it is too early to talk about timing," TASS cited him as saying/

The Chumakov Centers inactivated whole-virion CoviVac vaccine was registered with the Russian Health Ministry on February 19. Whole-virion vaccines are based either on artificially weakened viruses incapable of causing a disease or killed (inactivated) viruses. It was Russias third vaccine certified for mass use.
Lucknow, April 29 : The various teachers' unions in Uttar Pradesh have claimed that 577 teachers and support staff died while on panchayat poll duty in the state.

The unions have given a list of the 577 deceased persons to the Uttar Pradesh State Election Commission (UPSEC). The list sent by Dinesh Chandra Sharma, president of UP Shikshak Mahasangh (UPSM), has names and addresses of the 577 teachers and shiksha mitras.

The unions have now asked teachers to stay away on counting day, May 2.

On Tuesday, the Allahabad High Court had sent a notice to the SEC seeking explanation on Covid preparedness and the alleged deaths.

"The court's issuance of the notice has not benefited teachers because the next date of hearing in this case is May 3, which is a day after counting day. What was needed was postponement of counting at least, if not the fourth phase of elections on April 29," said a teacher leader.

Special work officer, SEC, S.K. Singh had issued a letter to all the district magistrates and district police chiefs, asking them to check the veracity of the reported deaths.

Sharma said they are yet to receive information on the health of teachers on election duties from several districts like Fatehpur, Balrampur, Shamli, Aligarh and Hamirpur.

"I am afraid about the numbers. Their families are also affected. The situation is extremely critical," he said.

He further said, "We had requested the SEC, after there was a surge in cases on April 12, to postpone the polls but our request was ignored. We may be forced to boycott counting duty," added Sharma.

District presidents of another union, Rashtriya Shikshak Mahasangh, have also given a memorandum to the SEC's office in all the districts of the state.

Senior vice-president of UP Primary Teacher association, Rajendra Singh, said, "Polls have already done the damage. Now counting may wreak more havoc. We are living in fear." Officials have gone ahead and organized a training session for the staff on counting duty on Wednesday.
[April 29, 2021] MIT-ADT University pledge to spearhead IP & Entrepreneurship movement on World Intellectual Property Day

PUNE, India, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Institution's Innovation Council-MIT ADT University, Pune in association with Research & Consultancy Cell & AIC-MITADT Incubator Forum organized an online National workshop on Intellectual Property Rights & IP Management for Start-ups from April 27 to 28, 2021 to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day. Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Executive President & Vice-Chancellor congratulated team IIC-MIT ADT University for creating the larger public awareness regarding the pivotal role being played by the IPR in the growth of a Nation in view of the increasing significance of the IPR in the globalized knowledge economy. The national workshop was attended by more than 170+ Students, research scholars, faculty members, Start-up enthusiasts across India through online mode in the new normal. Dr. Mangesh Karad emphasized the urgency for creating a mass 'IPR literacy' movement across India. Intellectual property has a great potential to build strategic alliances for the socio-economic and technological growth in the modern world as well as the foundation for the sustenance in the competitive economic state. MIT Art, Design and Technology University has already published policies on Intellectual Property Rights and Research & Consultancy at the august hands of Dr. Abhay Jere, Chief Innovation Officer, Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India; Dr. Kishore Sreenivasan, Head - CSIR URDIP, Govt. of India; Prof. Dr. Vishwanath Karad, Founder, MIT Group of Institutions, and Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Vice-Chancellor, MIT ADT University, Pune on Dussehra last year to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. Dr. Karad said, "Our appetite is to create a World Class University for entrepreneurial development of students and to promote talent at the national and international levels. The initiative would surely provide young entrepreneurs the chance to build a new India and our focus is on creating a vast talent pool of job creators with immense employment opportunities for Indian youth." Prof. Dr. Kishore Ravande, Dean, Research & Consultancy Cell and Principal MIT School of Engineering said, innovation and IPR are of utmost imprtance in higher educational institutions and exhorted all educationists to be involved in IP activities such as patent, copyrights, designs, and trademark, irrespective of their discipline: arts, design, science, engineering, management, or architecture.



Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani, Associate Dean & President-IIC MITADTU also called upon students, research scholars to involve in orienting their tasks towards innovation for the progress of the university and the nation. The training was conducted by experts in IPR training - Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani and Prof. Suraj Bhoyar, aimed at creating awareness across key stakeholders to understand various Intellectual property rights, processes, fees involved, how to apply, to cover all the know-how regarding IPR.

The workshop was organized and coordinated by Prof. Suraj Bhoyar - Project Director MIT Centre for Future Skills Excellence & Convener Institution's Innovation Council MITADTU. Soon, Online Masterclass on IPR will be organized to cover detailed topics like Copyright Practice & Procedure, Prior Art Search, Patent Drafting, Prior Art Search, Role of IP & Enforcement. MIT Art, Design & Technology University, Pune is the place where Innovation and Creativity coexist and offers exclusive courses in the domain of Fine Arts and Applied Arts, Music, Vedic Sciences, Design, Architecture, Bioengineering Sciences, Food Technology, Marine Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechatronics & Automation Engineering complemented by Management studies. The sessions were concluded with the IP Generation games & exercises to answer How to ignite innovations in young researcher's minds and start-up opportunities & challenges for the student community in India. The national workshop concluded with a pledge to spread IP awareness among the fraternity to generate more intellectual properties and make India move upward in the Global Innovation Index. Let's urge for Creative India; Innovative India. About MIT-ADT University

MAEER's Trust which is known to set the strong precedence for the privatization of Engineering education in Maharashtra had taken a first mover's advantage by establishing the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT-Pune), in 1983, which continues to remain the flagship institute of the group.

MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has been established under the MIT Art, Design and Technology University Act, 2015 (Maharashtra Act No. XXXIX of 2015). The University commenced its operations successfully from 27th June 2016. The University is a self-financed institution and empowered to award the degrees under section 22 of the University Grants Commission act, 1956. The University has a unique blend of Art, Design, and Technology as the core of its academics.

Recently, MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has accomplished the following accolades:

Ranked 26th for ARIIA 2020 by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India . Received 5 Star rating for exemplary performance by the Ministry of Education's Innovation Council, Govt. of India . Conferred with Best University Campus Award by ASSOCHAM, New Delhi Granted with Atal Incubation Centre under ATAL Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, Govt. of India MIT Art, Design and Technology University has been taking a holistic approach towards imparting education wherein the students are being motivated to build a complete winning personality which is "physically fit, intellectually sharp, mentally alert and spiritually elevated". The students are being encouraged to participate in yoga, meditation, physical training, spiritual elevation, communication skills, and other personality development programmes. Currently, we have 7500+ students studying in various schools of higher education under the University viz. Engineering and Technology, Food Technology, Bioengineering, Arts, Design, Marine Engineering, Journalism and Broadcasting, Film and Television, Music (Hindustani Classical Vocal and Instrumental), Teacher Education, and Vedic Sciences Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1479539/MIT_ADTU_Logo.jpg

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499587/National_Workshop_on_IPR.jpg Media Contact:

Suraj Bhoyar

suraj.bhoyar@mituniversity.edu.in

+91-9028483286

Project Director

MIT Art, Design & Technology University Pune

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Large sporting fixtures and music events with crowds in attendance will be piloted as part of the phased reopening of the country.

The Government is also examining a return to international travel through the use of the EU green pass system, which could be rolled out here as early as July.

Minister for Tourism and Sport, Catherine Martin, described the plan to follow cities such as Barcelona in organising large-scale entertainment events as a "big development".

However, she could not give a timeline for when these pilot outdoor and indoor events will take place, as they require complex planning around everything from ticketing to crowd management and how people travel to and from the venue.

Positive signal on live events and sport

"European countries have taken interesting approaches. Details will be firmed up in the weeks ahead but I am delighted this gives our live events and sport a signal.

We are a nation that loves arts, sport, and entertainment  and I will do my best to help them."

The phased reopening of smaller indoor music venues is also being examined.

"Everything has to be done in steps to make sure that when we open we can keep them open, if the doors open on these venues, I don't want to see them close again. I want our performers earning a living again."

International travel

Turning to aviation, Ms Martin said international travel, which is "critical" to our tourism sector is also being looked at.

It comes after the Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) called for the introduction of EU Digital Green Certificates as soon as possible. The ITAA believe that these certificates could help to repair some of the damage caused to the Irish travel sector as a result of the pandemic.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin said the Government is now finalising a policy in relation to the use of the green cert.

"Certainly by July you are looking at a critical mass being vaccinated, not just in Ireland, but across Europe, the United States and other countries, and that has to then bring into consideration the travel issue and aviation," he said.

'Clarity needed' on maternity unit restrictions

He said any decision on international travel would also "inform" the position taken on mandatory hotel quarantining.

Reacting to the latest announcement on the easing of restrictions, Social Democrats TD Holly Cairns expressed disappointment over the continued lack of clarity around maternity hospital restrictions.

"I believe that partners should be allowed to attend for all scans, particularly in cases where there are complications in the pregnancy or any concerns," she said:

Expectant mothers also need clarification on whether partners or accompanying persons will be allowed to be with them for all of labour or just for active labour.

Mr Martin suggested that advice will be issued on "national uniform position" so that partners will be facilitated "at the birth".

Walk-in testing

Labour leader Alan Kelly said "every tool" must be used to keep the virus under control, particularly antigen testing.

"If there is an outbreak there must be swift action to aggressively suppress the virus in the community. Walk-in testing centres for example have played a vital role."

Mr Kelly said the Government should roll out the model used in the UK where every household has been given seven free rapid antigen tests.
Moderna Inc will begin shipping larger vials of its COVID-19 vaccine to state health departments over the next few weeks.

The vials will go from storing 10 doses to as many as 15, Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CNN on Wednesday.

'Those larger vials will be in the hands of states by the third week of May,' she said.

However, it is unclear which states will be receiving the larger vials first and how many will be shipped.

Moderna Inc is manufacturing a larger vial of its COVID-19 vaccine that can hold 15 doses instead of the standard 10 doses. Pictured: The standard vial containing 10 vaccine doses

Moderna is switching to larger vials to 'increase the number of doses that it gets out there by increasing the size of the vial,' Freeman told CNN.

'That was the best way they determined that they could increase doses.'

The Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company said on April 1 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had authorized two new vials.

The first allowed 11 doses to be extracted from the original 10 and the second was a large vial that could hold up to 15 doses each.

Additionally, the FDA is now allowing the vaccine vials to be stored at room temperature fo 24 hours after being removed from the freezer, up from the original 12-hour maximum.

'We are committed to constantly learning and improving to facilitate easier administration of our COVID-19 vaccine for medical staff and accelerate immunization programs,' Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement at the time.

Freemna told CNN that the firm is concerned that the larger vials will be harder to use to vaccinate hard-to-reach populations such as homebound seniors.

This could lead to heath officials not using all 15 doses and being forced to throw some away.

'That doesn't really help state and local health departments who see the larger dose vials as not being as conducive or flexible for some of the work they have to do with populations that are remaining to be served,' she said.

Moderna told CNN that it is not clear how many vials will be immediately available or to where they will ship.

Moderna's vaccine was developed in partnership with the National Institutes of Health.

It uses part of the pathogen's genetic code called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get the body to recognize the coronavirus and attack it if a person becomes infected.

The candidate works by tricking the body into producing some of the viral proteins, which the immune system then recognizes and builds a defensive response against.

Updated clinical trial data published earlier this month found that vaccine is 90 percent effective at protecting against COVID-19 six months after the second dose.

This is a downgrade from estimates in its earlier clinical trials, which suggested it could prevent 94.5 percent of infections, but is proof of long-lasting protection.
The Minister of Health of the Junta de Andalucia, Jesus Aguirre, has said that he will be requesting changes to Spain's vaccination campaign at the next meeting of the regions and the national Ministry of Health's Interterritorial Health Committee.

The most important request, which would affect the vaccination schedule, is to increase the spacing of the second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to eight weeks, "in order to increase the number of people with the first dose", Aguirre explained to the full Andalusian Parliament.

The other request he will be making to the national committee is that the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine be authorised for those over 18 years of age "who want to be given it voluntarily", explained the Health Minister.

He said there are "thousands of unused vaccines" after the group of essential workers between 55 and 59 years old stopped being vaccinated with this formula.

Jesus Aguirre has also confirmed that Andalucia will once again request the government to allow freedom of movement to those fully immunised by means of a vaccination certificate.
It has been 10 years since U.S. special operations forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The covert military operation, ordered by then-President Barack Obama, was executed on May 2, 2011 -- four months shy of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, one of many acts of terrorism orchestrated by bin Laden. In the wake of the surprising announcement of bin Laden's death, Gallup polling captured how it affected public attitudes.

The U.S. public was largely supportive of the military action, across party lines. More than nine in 10 approved of it, and 79% thought it was important to the U.S. that bin Laden was killed. Sixty percent of Americans thought it was better that he was killed than captured alive, but 33% would have preferred the alternative. Majorities of U.S. adults gave the U.S. military (89%) and the Central Intelligence Agency (62%) "a great deal" of credit for the mission, while then-President Obama (35%) and former President George W. Bush (22%) received less.

Although he did not receive the most credit for bin Laden's demise, Obama's job approval rating rose six percentage points, to 52%, in the immediate aftermath of the killing, with the initial increases in support coming among independents and Republicans.

Barack Obama's Job Approval Rating Before and After Bin Laden's Death Apr 29-May 1, 2011 May 2-4 , 2011 Change % % pct. pts. U.S. adults 46 52 +6 Republicans 9 21 +12 Independents 40 49 +9 Democrats 81 81 0 GALLUP

The rally in support of Obama persisted for five weeks. This bump in approval is similar to other rally effects Gallup has seen after domestic and international crises. The largest such uptick, 35 points, came after 9/11.

Bin Laden's death had a similar effect on Americans' approval of Congress and overall satisfaction with the way things were going, as well as economic confidence.

Shortly after he was killed, Americans were about twice as likely to say bin Laden's death would make the U.S. safer from terrorism (54%) rather than less safe (28%). Still, retaliation may have been on their minds, as 62% believed acts of terrorism in the U.S. were imminent, higher than at any time since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. More recently, the 2011 level was surpassed in 2015, when 67% said acts of terrorism were likely to occur -- but that fear subsequently fell to 60% in 2017, the last time the question was asked.

Line graph. Americans' view of how likely it is that there will be acts of terrorism in the U.S. over the next several weeks. After Osama bin Laden's death, 62% Americans' belief that it was likely there would be a terrorist attack in the next few weeks. This is among the highest readings for the measure but much higher after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Yet, a majority said they were "a lot" (39%) or "a little" (34%) more confident that the U.S. could succeed in the war against Islamic terrorism as a result of the killing. Given this, a slim 52% majority thought the U.S. still had important work to do in Afghanistan and favored keeping troops there, while 45% said the U.S. had accomplished its mission.

A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan shortly after the killing of bin Laden found 64% of Pakistanis disapproved of it. About one in four Pakistanis hadn't heard about the U.S. action yet, but among those who had, 81% disapproved. Just 10% of Pakistanis who knew about the U.S. action believed that bin Laden should have been killed; 52% thought he should have been captured but not killed, and 29% said neither should have happened.

Eighty-five percent of those who were aware of the U.S. raid in their country disapproved of the fact that it was conducted without the knowledge of the Pakistani government. Three in five said that it would make Pakistan less safe from terrorism.

Bottom Line

Al Qaeda leader bin Laden was the mastermind behind many acts of international terrorism -- including 9/11, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000. Obama made finding bin Laden his top priority in the war against al Qaeda, and although some would have preferred that he was captured alive, the American public largely favored the killing. Now, nearly 20 years after 9/11 and almost 10 years after bin Laden's death, the U.S. is preparing to withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan.
The Communications and Digitalization Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has advised people who practice LGBT to keep it private as Ghanaians cannot be compelled to accept a practice which is culturally and socially abhorrent.



In an interview with Nana Aba Anamoah on Starr Fm, she noted that Ghanaians are not expressive and do not fondle their partners in public. Adults can do whatever they like in the privacy of their homes but should not force their sexual preferences down anyones throat.



She admitted that she is still friends with her first boyfriend and also stated that the practice of supi was commonplace in many boarding schools during her time.



She said at that youthful stage of a girls life, there is the proclivity to explore ones sexuality which is just a passing phase. It was also seen as a harmless adventure.



Youre exploring your sexuality, so you do all kinds of silly things growing up. Thank God there was no social media when we were growing up to leave a permanent record of some of the crazy things we did, she said



She however charged the youth to grow out of the crazy things and be useful to society.

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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The High Court has appointed provisional liquidators to a well-known tour operator that provided group tours to places of pilgrimage.

The company, Joe Walsh Pilgrimtours, had for many years brought mainly elderly groups or Irish Catholics to places on package tours to Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Rome and Medjugorje in Bosnia.

However, the High Court heard that its business was devasted due to the Covid19 pandemic. As a result, the company, which employs 30 people, has had to halt all its planned tours.

The tours were initially postponed.

As the pandemic progressed, it was not possible to rearrange those tours, and the company came to a conclusion that it can no longer stay in business, and passed a resolution that it be wound up.

In 2020 the company recorded losses of 7.5m.

The bulk of the company's 3,000 creditors mainly consist of persons who had booked and paid monies for tours, are owed some 5m.

The court heard that it is envisaged those customers, many of whom are elderly will get their money back by making applications to the Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR).

Other creditors include Revenue, the firm's landlord and other companies within the Joe Walsh travel group, and various trade creditors.

The court heard that the joint provisional liquidators will help ensure an orderly winding up and will take steps to deal with the company's creditors.

The court also heard that some of the firm's staff will be kept on to make contact with and answer queries from affected customers.

Mr Justice Senan Allen on Wednesday appointed experienced insolvency Eamonn Richardson and Andrew O'Leary of KPMG as joint provisional liquidators to Joe Walsh Pilgrimtours Ltd, after being told the firm is insolvent and unable to pay its debts.

Brian Conroy Bl, instructed by solicitor Brian O'Neill, for the company told the court the company was founded by the late well-known travel agent Joe Walsh in 1982 and had been very successful for many years.

In recent the years the firm had been run by Mr Walsh's family, David, Margaret and Barry Walsh.

Counsel said the company had hoped to obtain additional investment to allow it survive. but that had not proven possible to achieve.

The decision to wind up the company was also prompted by the fact it would not be able to renew the annual licence it requires to operate from CAR.

To get such a licence it would need to have a bond, from a third-party insurance provider, in place.

The bond would assist the firm in the event the company was unable to discharge monies owed to customers if it was unable to honour its obligations to them.

Despite its best efforts the company could not get such a bond, the court heard.

Given the current conditions caused by the pandemic, it was not thought that a buyer for the business could be found, counsel added.

At the conclusion of submissions from counsel Mr Justice Allen said he was satisfied to appointed the provisional liquidators, and granted them certain powers, including powers to take control of the company and its affairs.

The matter was adjourned to a date in June.
A man was arrested and charged with allegedly smuggling 35 live finches in hair curlers from Guyana for "singing contests" in New York City, according to a complaint from the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Kevin Andre McKenzie, a 36-year-old Guyanese resident, flew to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday, according to the complaint, where Customs and Border Protection officers pulled him aside for an examination and found the birds, authorities said. He was charged with unlawfully importing the finches.

Photographs show the tiny finches were stuffed inside hair rollers sealed with perforated netting. Authorities said they were attached to the inside of McKenzie's jacket as well as the top of his shoes.

The traveler was released on a $25,000 bond, the US Attorney's Office said.

James Darrow, McKenzie's attorney, declined to comment.

The investigation found that these types of birds are often entered into "singing contests" in the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods of New York, according to Kathryn McCabe, a special agent for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

"In such contests, often conducted in public areas like parks, two finches sing and a judge selects the bird determined to have the best voice," McCabe stated in the complaint. "Many who attend the singing contests wager on the birds. A finch who wins these competitions becomes valuable and can sell for more than $10,000. Although certain species of finch are available in the United States, species from Guyana are believed to sing better and are therefore more valuable."

McKenzie told officers that he had been offered $3,000 to smuggle the birds, the complaint says. He allegedly was paid $500 before his flight and was to receive the remaining $2,500 after he got through Customs. It is not immediately clear whether anyone else has been arrested.

Besides a valid import permit, birds are required to quarantine for 30 days to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, according to government regulations listed in the complaint.
US government agencies have launched an investigation after reports of mysterious energy attacks near the White House and in Virginia.

The Pentagon is probing two incidents, including one that reportedly took place near the Ellipse, a 52-acre park south of the White House fence in Washington, DC in November.

A National Security Council official is believed to have developed a mystery illness after the attack, according to CNN.

An earlier attack took place in 2019 and was reported by a White House official who was walking her dog in a Virginia suburb near Washington.

These invisible strikes involve directing energy towards a particular target, and could involve methods such as lasers.

Energy attacks, which can also involve directing microwave energy towards people, are believed to have previously caused US officials in Cuba, China and Russia to become sick. Studies have suggested that microwave radiation is to blame.

One of the attacks reportedly took place near the Ellipse, a 52-acre park south of the White House fence in Washington, DC in November (pictured)

The attacks have reportedly been linked to the 'Havana Syndrome', a mystery illness that affected US diplomats in Cuba in 2016.

At the time, staff at the US embassy in Havana complained about symptoms such as dizziness, hearing loss and 'cognitive fog'.

The US subsequently accused Cuba of carrying out 'sonic attacks' amid a tense diplomatic stand-off between the two countries.

However, officials have not yet found conclusive evidence to suggest that this latest attacks on US soil is linked to those that occurred abroad.

It comes after the Pentagon briefed top lawmakers last month on suspected energy attacks on US troops that were believed to have been carried out by Russia.

Lawmakers were briefed on injuries sustained by U.S. troops in Syria but it was not clear how many US forces were involved.

An earlier attack took place in 2019 and was reported by a White House official who was walking her dog in a Virginia suburb near Washington. The White House is pictured

Joe Biden is seen boarding the Marine One near the Ellipse on April 16. The United States President has frequently been seen boarding Marine One at this location

The Pentagon began investigating the attacks last year, amid concern the alleged attacks had parallels to the attacks in Havana.

A task force has been set up to track reports of unusual symptoms impacting Defense Department personnel overseas.

Several government departments are investigating these mysterious attacks including the CIA, the State Department and the Defense Department.

CIA Director William Burns also recently pledged to examine evidence of these alleged attacks on US personnel overseas.
By Ankur Banerjee

(Reuters) -The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, a long-awaited win for anti-smoking and civil rights groups but one that could erase a huge share of sales for the Big Tobacco.

The proposed ban can take years to implement and might throw the health regulator into protracted legal battles with the deep-pocketed industry, which has repeatedly fought attempts to block anti-tobacco regulations.

Anti-smoking groups have for decades argued that mentholated cigarettes contribute to disproportionate health burdens on Black communities and often draw young people into smoking.

Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids President Matthew Myers said the latest move could be the "strongest action" that the United States "has ever taken to drive down the number of kids who start smoking".

The FDA statement sent shares of Altria Group Inc, British America Tobacco Plc, and Imperial Brands Plc were down about 1%.

U.S. menthol cigarettes accounted for about 25% of BAT's profit, 20% for Altria and 15% for Imperial, according to brokerage Jefferies.

Altria and Reynolds America, a unit of BAT, said they would evaluate the proposal, while Imperial's U.S. business, ITG Brands, said it was disappointing, but not unexpected.

"We share the common goal of moving adult smokers from cigarettes to potentially less harmful alternatives, but prohibition does not work," Marlboro-maker Altria spokesman said. "Criminalizing menthol will lead to serious unintended consequences."

Menthol cigarettes are banned in many U.S. states including California and Massachusetts and smoking rates in the country have been declining for many years, but they still account for more than a third of the industry's overall market share.

The FDA was forced to act by an April 29 court deadline to respond to a citizen's petition from 2013 seeking a ban on menthol cigarettes. (https://bit.ly/3u5oomP)

Story continues

Last week, a WSJ report said the Biden administration was considering capping nicotine levels in cigarettes.

"Lowering nicotine content in cigarettes...that's something that's still under consideration," acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said on a media call on Thursday.

"It's on the table, but we have not finished deliberations on that matter."

(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee and Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Uday Sampath Kumar and Aishwarya Venugopal; Editing by Bernard Orr and Arun Koyyur)
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An ardent supporter of Donald Trump who called for the slaughter of members of Congress two days after the Capitol riot faces up to 10 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of threatening lawmakers.

On 8 January, two days after the assault on the Capitol, Brendan Hunt posted a video titled KILL YOUR SENATORS: Slaughter them all to a website popular with the far-right.

He also posted several threats on social media in December targeting Democratic lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The 37-year-old was arrested on 19 January. He will be sentenced in June.

We need to go back to the US Capitol, when all of the senators and a lot of the representatives are back there, and this time we have to show up with our guns, he said in a video posted to BitChute. And we need to slaughter these mother*******.

On the right-wing platform Parler, he also called for Trump supporters to bring your guns to the Capitol on 20 January, the date of Joe Bidens inauguration, according to court documents.

Attorneys for Mr Hunt, who was prosecuted in US District Court in Brooklyn, argued that the comments made from his home in Queens were constitutionally protected speech that did not constitute legitimate threats, despite their content.

In testimony to the court on Tuesday, Hunt  the son of a retired judge  said he was joining in with inflammatory online rhetoric at the time and was under the influence of drugs and alcohol while posting.

The idea that I would somehow borrow somebodys gun, waltz into Bidens inauguration ceremony like some Looney Tunes character and somehow line up all senators and execute a firing squad on them, I think is a pretty ridiculous idea, he said. Im sort of just a YouTube guy who makes controversial content and clickbait videos.

The jury returned a verdict after three hours of deliberation on Wednesday.

In their verdict, jurors indicated that they found only the video  not the Facebook and Parler posts  to be a true threat for his conviction.

Though Hunt did not participate in the deadly riots at the Capitol on 6 January, he is among the first to be convicted of crimes in connection with the attacks, and the first to face a prison sentence for online threats made in its wake.

The Justice Department has charged at least 400 people in connection with the assault on Congress, fuelled by the former presidents persistent lie that the election was stolen from him and supporters.

Federal prosecutors expect at least 100 more people will face charges, they revealed in court documents last week.

The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol attack will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence, prosecutors wrote in district court filings on Thursday.

Prosecutors are targeting individuals as well as members of far-right groups as part of several conspiracy investigations, they said.

As the Capitol attack investigation is still on-going, the number of defendants charged and the volume of potentially discoverable materials will only continue to grow, they argued in filings. In short, even in cases involving a single defendant, the volume of discoverable materials is likely to be significant.
Matrix42 Matrix42 has every ingredient they need for success: a huge market opportunity, a superb product set, a talented and motivated management team, and a highly supportive investor in Corten

Matrix42, a leading provider of Digital Workspace Management software has a new investor. Corten Capital is set to purchase all shares of former majority shareholder EMERAM Capital Partners. This transaction will enable Matrix42 to pursue its continuing plans for expansion and invest in new markets. The financial terms of the transaction, which is subject to customary regulatory approvals, are not disclosed.

Corten Capital, founded in 2019 and based in the United Kingdom, is a specialist B2B technology investment firm, that partners with entrepreneurial management teams to acquire and build market leading, technology driven B2B services, information and software companies across Europe and North America. Corten Capital employs a focused investment strategy with only a small number of platform investments, allowing them to provide management teams with active, entrepreneurial support and guidance. Corten Capital is deeply committed to leveraging outstanding technology and innovations in pursuit of long-term, value-added growth, and the firms experienced team of experts and valued network of partners are instrumental to that work.

Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, Matrix42, a global provider of innovative solutions for digital workspace management and was recently ranked the top vendor for Enterprise Service Management and Secure Unified Endpoint Management. The Matrix42 platform, used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, automates mission-critical IT and business support processes, license and cloud expense management, and related enterprise workflows, while delivering operational efficiencies and enhanced employee experiences. Matrix42 provides a secure, scalable, user-friendly, and easy to implement solution to a wide range of organizations across Europe and North America.

As part of the transaction, Matrix42 also announced that Al Monserrat, former SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services at Citrix, CEO of RES and President of Nuance Imaging, is expected to join the Company as Supervisory Board Chairman. He will support CEO Oliver Bendig and the management team during Matrix42s next growth phase.

I am immensely proud of what the Matrix42 team have achieved, said Oliver Bendig, Matrix42 CEO. The COVID19 pandemic has been a tectonic shift for the Digital Workspace. Matrix42 is at the center of this revolution. With our solutions, we will continue to support customers to simplify and secure their digital work and to help them through their digital transformation. With the support of Al and the Corten team, we will continue driving innovation in workspace management, while growing our product, team, and global presence. Matrix42 has strengthened its market positioning over the years through continuous product development, add on acquisitions and internationalization. My thanks to EMERAM for helping our company reach these important milestones.

Matrix42 is a perfect fit for Cortens operationally focused investment approach, said Joseph Schull, Managing Partner of Corten Capital. We see enormous potential for the Company and look forward to working with Oliver, Al and the Matrix42 team over the coming years.

There are exciting times ahead, said Al Monserrat, Supervisory Board Chairman designate. Matrix42 have every ingredient they need for success: a huge market opportunity, a superb product set, a talented and motivated management team, and a highly supportive investor in Corten. As the global workforce continues to adjust to new and dynamic workstyles, Matrix42 is perfectly positioned with its innovative workspace solutions.

Kai Koppen, Senior Partner at EMERAM, added: We are impressed by how well Matrix42 has developed over the past years. Today, Matrix42 is a true leader in its verticals Enterprise Service Management and Secure Unified Endpoint Management while having expanded beyond its core DACH market. CEO Oliver Bendig has done an excellent job strengthening Matrix42s market position, offering businesses the opportunity to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to digitalization. Matrix42 is a great example of EMERAMs strategy to transform market leaders in attractive niches.

Corten Capitals long-term investment strategy also offers tangible advantages for the over 5,000 customers who rely on Matrix42. They stand to benefit from stability, financial support and investment, and knowledge transfer, and can place their trust in a solid product and service portfolio that is continuously developing and expanding its reach worldwide.

About Matrix42

Matrix42 helps organizations digitize and secure the workspace environment of their employees. The software for digital workspace experience manages devices, applications, processes and services simple, secure and compliant. The innovative software supports the integration of physical, virtual, mobile and cloud-based workspace environments seamlessly into existing infrastructures.

Matrix42 AG is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and distributes and implements software solutions with regional and global partners. Read more: http://www.matrix42.com
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Re: Rapid pace of advancement | In 20 years, the auto industry has evolved from a dinosaur to futuri Quote: IshaanIan Originally Posted by I honestly believe we have not really advanced that much in the last two decades. The Ambassador is a car from the 50s. If you were to compare a car launched in the early 2000s to one launched today, apart from the growth in sheer size and rear seat space, I only see integration of available tech from other industries, into the automotive sector like Android auto and apple car play and automatic wipers and such. I do not believe there has been much of a mechanical advancement in the past two decades TBH.



I am not a particular fan of Elon Musk, but the guy has singlehandedly come up with more balssy and innovative ideas than All the others put together. Of course, that is partly Musk, but is is also because he is competing with this lazy bunch of idiot who would not recognise a new innovative idea if it bit them in their fat behinds! Musk pushed these lazy automotive executive into action. Good for Musk, but it really shows up the vast majority of the automotive sector for what they really are.



Without Musk many of them would be very happy reaping huge bonuses for just delivering very average cars that just happen to meet the next new set of regulations. And they would be flying in their private jets to lobby with politicians, to give them a break on legislation, give them a tax break, give them another subsidy.



We also seem to have forgotten that it was this lot, or at least quite a few of them, who knowingly installed software in their cars to circumnavigate in a highly illegal way emission rules. Millions of car owners basically were sold cars that never delivered what the sticker said.



So I am quite underwhelmed by the automotive industry. Luckily, there are still a few exceptions. E.g.Musk with Tesla, PAL-V



Jeroen I agree. I dont think there has been that much advancement at all. And a lot of it has been purely reactive, not driven by vision and enthusiasm. Not wanting to oversimplify and or generalise, but by and large automotive executives are just a lazy highly overpaid fat cats.I am not a particular fan of Elon Musk, but the guy has singlehandedly come up with more balssy and innovative ideas than All the others put together. Of course, that is partly Musk, but is is also because he is competing with this lazy bunch of idiot who would not recognise a new innovative idea if it bit them in their fat behinds! Musk pushed these lazy automotive executive into action. Good for Musk, but it really shows up the vast majority of the automotive sector for what they really are.Without Musk many of them would be very happy reaping huge bonuses for just delivering very average cars that just happen to meet the next new set of regulations. And they would be flying in their private jets to lobby with politicians, to give them a break on legislation, give them a tax break, give them another subsidy.We also seem to have forgotten that it was this lot, or at least quite a few of them, who knowingly installed software in their cars to circumnavigate in a highly illegal way emission rules. Millions of car owners basically were sold cars that never delivered what the sticker said.So I am quite underwhelmed by the automotive industry. Luckily, there are still a few exceptions. E.g.Musk with Tesla, PAL-VJeroen Last edited by Jeroen : 27th April 2021 at 19:44 .
The Indian government launched the Prime Minister Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme to provide financial aid to millions of marginalised small farmers across the country. Under the scheme, the government credits Rs 6000 per year directly into the bank account of beneficiaries in three instalments, subject to certain exclusions.

The first instalment is credited between April 20 July, the second one between August to November and the third one between December and March.

The purpose of the scheme is to provide landholding farmers with some capital so that they can ensure proper crop health and yields. So far, the government has released seven instalments under the scheme, and is pretty soon expected to roll out the eighth instalment to aid farmers amid a crisis.

However, if you not receiving compensation under the scheme and believe that you fulfil the criteria, then you may need to find first check if your name is on the list. You can do so by visiting pmkisan.gov.in.

Now go to Farmers Corner and click on the beneficiary list option. Enter details such as state, district, sub-district, and block to get all the names of farmers receiving the benefits under the scheme in your area.

You now need to check the beneficiary status. For this, go to pmkisan.gov.in, and click on Beneficiary Status in the Farmers Corner section. Enter details such as Aadhaar card, account number, and phone number to check your status. You can also edit your details from this section.

Heres how to file a complaint to add your name to the beneficiary list

If your name is missing from the beneficiary list and youre not receiving Rs 2000 every four months yet then you can file a complaint by dialling 011-24300606 (PM Kisan Samman Helpline).

Enrol yourself on the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme

For enrolling yourself, you need to approach the local Agriculture Assistant officer. You can get the details of your local Agriculture Assistant officer by visiting the Farmers Corner on the official portal.

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[April 29, 2021] Air Lease Corporation Increases Senior Unsecured Revolving Credit Facility to $6.4 Billion

Air Lease Corporation (NYSE: AL) amended and extended its senior unsecured revolving credit facility with JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent whereby the Company extended the maturity date of the facility from May 5, 2023 to May 5, 2025 and increased the total revolving commitments to approximately $6.4 billion from $6.2 billion, across 50 financial institutions. The senior unsecured revolving credit facility remains priced at LIBOR plus 105 basis points with a 20 basis point facility fee, each subject to adjustments based on changes in the Company's credit ratings. "We are pleased to announce the extension of our senior unsecured revolving credit facility by two years to 2025 and upsize of the facility to $6.4 billion, a more than 35% increase since the beginning of 2019," said Gregory B. Willis, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Air Lease Corporation. "The success of this facility is reflective of ALC's investment grade credit metrics and the strength of our platform, and we appreciate the ongoing support of our lender group. This facility remains a foundational aspect of ALC's funding strategy, providingus with a highly cost efficient and flexible financing tool to drive value for our shareholders."



Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are based on current expectations and projections about our future results, prospects and opportunities and are not guarantees of future performance. Such statements will not be updated unless required by law. Actual results and performance may differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including those discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

About Air Lease Corporation (NYSE: AL) ALC is a leading aircraft leasing company based in Los Angeles, California that has airline customers throughout the world. ALC and its team of dedicated and experienced professionals are principally engaged in purchasing commercial aircraft and leasing them to its airline customers worldwide through customized aircraft leasing and financing solutions. ALC routinely posts information that may be important to investors in the "Investors" section of ALC's website at www.airleasecorp.com. Investors and potential investors are encouraged to consult the ALC website regularly for important information about ALC. The information contained on, or that may be accessed through, ALC's website is not incorporated by reference into, and is not a part of, this press release. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429006177/en/

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HALIFAX, NS, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Chorus Aviation Inc. ('Chorus') (TSX: CHR) is proud to announce that its subsidiary, Voyageur Aviation Corp. ('Voyageur'), has been awarded a 3-year contract to upgrade and modify Transport Canada's National Aerial Surveillance Program (NASP) fleet of three Dash 8-100 and one Dash 7 aircraft with new surveillance equipment.

Since 1991, the iconic red planes of NASP have played an integral role in keeping our country safe by helping prevent pollution in Canadian waters, protecting the marine environment and endangered marine life, and ensuring a safe and efficient transportation industry along Canada's massive and varied coastlines.

The contract involves the entire NASP fleet and includes the installation of surveillance equipment provisions for an electro-optical and infrared ('EO/IR') sensor, infrared and ultraviolet ('IR/UV') scanner for pollution monitoring, observation windows, mission crew seats, and other modifications to existing system installations. Additionally, one Dash 8-100 aircraft will receive Voyageur's Long-Range Fuel System installation to enable missions requiring significant range and endurance.

"This contract demonstrates Voyageur's unique engineering capabilities to support customers requiring innovative special mission solutions." said Scott Tapson, President, Voyageur. "We are excited to expand our relationship with Transport Canada and look forward to working together on this project."

All work for this contract will be completed at Voyageur's 200,000 square foot maintenance and engineering facility located at its company headquarters in North Bay, Ontario.

About Voyageur Aviation Corp.

Voyageur Aviation Corp. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chorus Aviation Inc. Voyageur is an integrated provider of specialized aviation services, including contract flying operations both internationally and domestically, and offers advanced engineering and maintenance capabilities. Headquartered in North Bay, Ontario, Voyageur delivers innovative solutions to customers with unique aviation requirements and operates under the core principles of comprehensive safety management, quality assurance, and client-dedicated solutions. www.voyav.com

About Chorus Aviation Inc.

Chorus is a global provider of integrated regional aviation solutions. Chorus' vision is to deliver regional aviation to the world. Headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chorus is comprised of Chorus Aviation Capital  a leading, global lessor of regional aircraft, and Jazz Aviation and Voyageur Aviation  companies that have long histories of safe operations with excellent customer service. Chorus provides a full suite of regional aviation support services that encompasses every stage of an aircraft's lifecycle, including aircraft acquisitions and leasing; aircraft refurbishment, engineering, modification, repurposing and preparation; contract flying; and aircraft and component maintenance, disassembly, and parts provisioning.

Chorus Class A Variable Voting Shares and Class B Voting Shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol 'CHR'. www.chorusaviation.com

SOURCE Chorus Aviation Inc.

For further information: Chorus Media Contacts: [email protected]; Chorus Analyst Contact: [email protected]

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www.chorusaviation.ca


Indian Point will permanently stop producing nuclear power Friday, unplugging a key source of electricity for nearby New York City that opponents call a threat to millions living in the surrounding, densely packed metropolitan region.

The retirement of the Indian Point Energy Center could increase New York's short-term reliance on natural gas plants, despite the state's goal of reducing carbon emissions.

But Governor Andrew Cuomo and others who fought for its closure say any benefits for the Hudson River are eclipsed by the prospect of a major accident or a terror strike 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the city.

The Unit 2 reactor was taken offline exactly a year ago under a 2017 agreement among the Cuomo administration, the environmental group Riverkeeper and the plant's operator, Entergy Corp. Unit 3 is shutting down Friday under the same agreement, paving the way a decommissioning that is projected to cost $2.3 billion over at least 12 years.

The two reactors, which went online two years apart in the mid-1970s, had generated about a quarter of the electricity used in New York City and the lower Hudson Valley.

They also generated controversy.

Environmentalists faulted the plant for killing fish by taking in massive amounts of river water for cooling.

Critics said the plant was antiquated and pointed to a safety history that included faulty reactor bolts and radioactive tritium detected in groundwater onsite.

Fears that Indian Point could be a terror target intensified after one of the planes hijacked for the Sept. 11 attacks flew by the plant on its way down the river to the World Trade Center.

Cuomo said the densely populated suburbs by the plant could not be evacuated quickly enough.

Nuclear power has been a presence in the village since the first, long-since-retired reactor built on the site of a former amusement park went online in 1962.

Nuclear plants have been closing in recent years amid low natural gas prices, slow growth in electricity demand and competition from renewables.

Entergy has said low wholesale energy prices and operating costs factored into its 2017 decision to close Indian Point.

Indian Point's exit is not expected create reliability problems for New York's electrical grid.

But it comes as the Democratic Cuomo administration works to increase the share of electricity generated by clean renewables like wind and solar. The state aims to get 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Indian Point proponents say its retirement will require New York to rely more heavily on fossil-fuel burning natural gas plants. They note that natural gas generation in New York already increased last year after Unit 2 closed.

Backers of the closure say any potential bump up in New York natural gas generation needs to be considered in context of a decrease in fossil fuel generation since 2016, as well as progress in renewables and energy efficiency.

New York has more than 20 large-scale renewable energy infrastructure projects that will be under construction this year with more planned.

Tom Congdon, chairman of Cuomo's Indian Point task force, said the state has been preparing for the closure for years and the state remains on target for its clean air goals.

He said any fluctuation in natural gas generation would be temporary because of all renewable energy projects scheduled to come online in the next few years.

Pending state regulatory approval, Entergy will transfer Indian Point to New Jersey-based Holtec International for decommissioning. Spent fuel is being moved to gigantic onsite "dry casks" until it can go elsewhere.

Holtec said it will provide job opportunities more than 300 Indian Point employees, and local communities will have access to payments and assistance to ease their post-nuclear transition.

Village of Buchanan Mayor Theresa Knickerbocker, a lifetime resident, said she hopes some of the 240-acre site along the river will be used for residential and commercial development.

But as Indian Point shuts down Friday, she will take part in a ceremony near the site honoring the plant workers.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg on Wednesday spoke about Austrias mediation role after he held a meeting with Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tichanowskaja. Condemning the Belarusian leaders security forces brutal crackdown on the civilians on post-election protests, and more than 30,000 arbitrary arrests, Schallenberg said that the EU will discuss new sanctions at the next Foreign Ministers Council in May, according to Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung. "We're not looking the other way, we're staying committed," Schallenberg said, adding that the pressure on the Belarusian regime must be maintained and the civil society must be supported. This includes the contacts between NGOs, experts from the Venice Commission, and trips by young Belarusian artists to Austria, Austrias Foreign Minister said.

Furthermore, The Austrian Greens said in a statement issued later that Belarus must place a high level of trust in Austria's mediating role. We should take this important task [of sanctions] seriously," Green human rights spokeswoman Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic said. Belarusian opposition leader and the ex-presidential candidate Svetlana Tichanowskaja thanked the Austrian minister for standing in solidarity with Belarus and their determination to seek democratic change.

At a news conference, Schallenberg also said that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should rightly mediate in the sanctions process as a retaliatory measure to the brutal and disproportionate use of coercive force by government law enforcement authorities against the ordinary protesting citizens. The Austrian minister, however, did not name whose names the EU would put on the sanctions list.

It was a pleasure to meet @MFA_Austria head Alexander Schallenberg in Vienna. I am thankful for the help in facilitating negotiations, which will lead us to the new election this year, and all work in support of free & independent Belarus, including the @UN_HRC resolution & IAPB. pic.twitter.com/fU00uqECoB  Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) April 28, 2021

'Ceasing cooperation' with Belarusian regime

The Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tichanowskaja was received by Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen in the Hofburg for the meeting. It is important to know how the people of Belarus are doing and under what terrible conditions critics of the regime are in custody, Tichanowskaja said, expressing thanks to Austria for support. She added that the Austrian companies must immediately cease cooperation with the Belarusian regime.

Tichanowskaja also met with Austria's Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz who stated that he was "impressed by the commitment of Svetlana Tichanovskaya and Belarusian civil society". "We fully support the efforts of the Belarusian opposition and civil society, especially Svetlana Tichanovskaya, for free and fair elections in Belarus. We will also coordinate closely with our partners in the EU.," Kurz said.

Speaking with the ORF radio, Schallenberg gave further details about the EU sanctions, saying that it would have to be targeted against those responsible for the violence against protesters, arbitrary detentions, and internet blockades. Earlier, Swedens foreign minister Ann Linde told the local broadcasters that the EU diplomats would draft a high political level list about who the sanctions will target which will gradually expand in the future.
TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GP JOULE North America, a subsidiary of GP JOULE GmbH and a leader in utility-scale solar Engineering, Procurement and Construction, with proprietary racking solutions, has broken ground on a 106-megawatt solar PV portfolio for Concord Pacific, Canada's largest community builder. Experience building projects in challenging climates with durable technology that provides a lower cost of energy were key drivers in GP JOULE being awarded the three PV projects, each 35 megawatts in size.

GP Joule 25-MW Merchant Solar Plant in Alberta, Canada

"GP JOULE is proud to work with Concord Pacific to bring enduring reliability and strong returns to their projects," said David Pichard, CEO of GP JOULE North America. "Our high-quality standards in design, system optimization, material selection and skillful installation coupled with our tough PHLEGON racking solution allows us to deliver great value to owners of merchant plants."

Technology at all three project sites, which are located within one hour of Lethbridge, Alberta, must sustain the province's highest wind speeds at 140 kilometers per hour. GP JOULE's proven PHLEGON Fixed racking system was determined best suited for the area's exceptional conditions.

"GP Joule was the logical choice as they had recent experience in building merchant plants and furthering utility scale projects during the pandemic," said Terry Hui, President and CEO of Concord Pacific. "We are also pleased to be working with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation as we expand our portfolio in Alberta."

GP JOULE is known for building a network with local workers transitioning to renewable energy. It is estimated upwards of 150 skilled and professional trade workers will be hired with about 60% likely hailing from the fossil fuel industry.

"Our track record across Canada and the US shows we're committed to local partners, including indigenous communities," said Pichard. "Local hiring agencies and contractors help us boost job creation wherever we can. We always strive to secure all our partners and staff within a 90-kilometer radius of a project site."

To serve our ongoing partnerships in Western Canada, Alberta's talented energy workforce was tapped by GP JOULE with over 35% increase in area staffing since the beginning of 2021. We further expanded our business footprint with a larger office in Calgary to accommodate new business and team members.

Concord Pacific has an established renewable energy portfolio including solar power plants operating in Ontario, wind turbines in Saskatchewan and the Skookum run of river power plant in British Columbia. They also have more than 500 megawatts of renewable energy projects in their pipeline. As Concord Pacific embarks upon its first time developing a solar PV site, GP JOULE is proud to support the corporation's milestone, leading to significantly lower carbon footprint across its residential and commercial neighborhood property developments.

About GP JOULE North America

GP JOULE is a global renewable energy company headquartered in Reuenkoge Germany, with GP JOULE Canada Corp. and GP JOULE USA Inc., servicing the North American market. In this region the company provides EPC turnkey services and a full range of solar PV racking solutions which combined focus on delivering a long-term, lowest cost of solar power. GP JOULE's in-house capabilities include civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical engineering and construction execution in the commercial and utility-scale market. The company has installed more than 76 MW of solar PV across North America, with over 100 MW under construction and another 100 MW in its pipeline. Globally, GP JOULE has installed over 800 MW of solar and wind energy projects. Visit gp-joule.com.

Concord Pacific and Concord Green Energy

Concord Pacific created Concord Green Energy to explore and support future communities with a variety of zero carbon energy producing projects. Concord Green Energy has projects of scale in wind, solar and hydro at various stages of planning, development, and operation across Canada. Concord's current green energy projects can power more than twice the needs of all its communities. Visit concordpacific.com

Media Contacts:

GP JOULE North America

Michelle Montague

[email protected]

650.804.2504

Concord Pacific/ Concord Green Energy

Peter Udzenija

[email protected]

SOURCE GP JOULE Canada Corp.
BEIJING (AP)  China on Thursday launched the main module of its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long term, the latest success for a program that has realized a number of its growing ambitions in recent years.

The Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony," module blasted into space atop a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan, marking another major advance for the countrys space exploration.

The launch begins the first of 11 missions necessary to complete, supply and crew the station by the end of next year.

Chinas space program has also recently brought back the first new lunar samples in more than 40 years and expects to land a probe and rover on the surface of Mars later next month.

Minutes after the launch, the fairing opened to expose the Tianhe atop the core stage of the rocket, with the characters for China Manned Space emblazoned on its exterior. Soon after, it separated from the rocket, which will orbit for about a week before falling to Earth, and minutes after that, opened its solar arrays to provide a steady energy source.

The space program is a source of huge national pride, and Premier Li Keqiang and other top civilian and military leaders watched the launch live from the control center in Beijing. A message of congratulations from state leader and head of the ruling Communist Party Xi Jinping was also read to staff at the Wenchang Launch Center.

The launch furthers the three-step strategy of building up China's manned space program and marks an important leading project for constructing a powerful country in science and technology and aerospace," Xi's message said.

The core module is the section of the station where astronauts will live for up to six months at a time. Another 10 launches will send up two more modules where crews will conduct experiments, four cargo supply shipments and four missions with crews.

At least 12 astronauts are training to fly to and live in the station, including veterans of previous flights, newcomers and women, with the first crewed mission, Shenzhou-12, expected to be launched by June.

Story continues

When completed by late 2022, the T-shaped Chinese Space Station is expected to weigh about 66 tons, considerably smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh about 450 tons when completed.

Tianhe will have a docking port and will also be able to connect with a powerful Chinese space satellite. Theoretically, it could be expanded to as many as six modules. The station is designed to operate for at least 10 years.

Tianhe is about the size of the American Skylab space station of the 1970s and the former Soviet/Russian Mir, which operated for more than 14 years after launching in 1986.

The core module will provide living space for as many as six astronauts during crew changeovers, while its other two modules, Wentian, or Quest for the Heavens, and Mengtian, or Dreaming of the Heavens, will provide room for conducting scientific experiments including in medicine and the properties of the outer space environment.

China began working on a space station project in 1992, just as its space ambitions were taking shape. The need to go it alone became more urgent after was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese programs secretive nature and close military ties.

After years of successful rocket and commercial satellite launches, China put its first astronaut into space in October 2003, becoming only the third country to independently do so after the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Along with more crewed missions, China launched a pair of experimental, single-module space stations  Tiangong-1, which means Heavenly Palace-1, and its successor, Tiangong-2. The first burned up after contact was lost and its orbit decayed, while the second was successfully taken out of orbit in 2018.

The Tiangong-2 crew stayed aboard for 33 days.

While NASA must get permission from a reluctant Congress to engage in contact with the Chinese space program, other countries have been far less reluctant. European nations and the United Nations are expected to cooperate on experiments to be done on the completed Chinese station.

The launch comes as China is also forging ahead with crewless missions, particularly in lunar exploration, and it has landed a rover on the little-explored far side of the moon. In December, its Change 5 probe returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the U.S. missions of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, a Chinese probe carrying a rover is due to set down on Mars sometime around the middle of next month, making China only the second country to successfully accomplish that after the U.S.

The Tianwen-1 space probe has been orbiting the red planet since February while collecting data. Its Zhurong rover will be looking for evidence of life.

Another Chinese program aims to collect soil from an asteroid, a key focus of Japans space program.

China plans another mission in 2024 to bring back lunar samples and has said it wants to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. No timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

China has proceeded in a more measured, cautious manner than the U.S. and Soviet Union during the height of the space race.

One recent setback came when a Long March 5 rocket failed in 2017 during development of the Long March 5B variant used to put Tianhe into orbit, but that caused only a brief delay.
Australians have shared the 'petty' things they simply can't stand - including pineapples on pizza, baked beans, the sound of chewing gum and even their mother-in-laws.

One mum prompted an amusing discussion on social media after she asked: 'What is something a lot of people like, but you can't stand? I'll go first, pineapple on pizza. Enough said.'

Her post was quickly met with more than 4,400 responses from frustrated Aussies, with hundreds sharing their own infuriating pet peeves.

The most commonly mentioned irritants included food-related things such as pineapples on pizza, coriander, avocados, beans, oysters, celery and mushrooms.

Australians have shared the 'petty' things they simply can't stand - including pineapples on pizza (stock image)

What are some petty annoyances Australians have? * People who don't wave in traffic to say thank you * Pineapple on pizza * Chewing, especially crunchy foods and chewing gum * People who chew with their mouths open * Shortened words like 'veggies' instead of vegetables * Strong-smelling foods like bacon, corn chips and cheese * People using their windscreen wipers to clean their windscreen and the water going onto the car behind * People who cut into small spaces in front of you in traffic * Family members not closing cereal boxes or containers properly so the food goes off * Family members not putting dirty clothes in the laundry basket and leaving them on the top instead * People who answer the phone and tell you to 'hold on' Advertisement

'Baked beans, any of the legume beans like red kidney, lentils etc. The texture makes me gag, which is a bugger as I would quite like to have nachos when I am out but the mince always has nasty beans in it, too many to work around,' one explained.

Another said: 'Pineapples do not belong on pizza,' while one man added: 'Pineapples in general! It's strange however, I used to like them but now for some unexplained reason I can't stand them - yuck.'

And another confessed: 'Coriander. I hate coriander. I absolutely hate coriander.'

'Mushrooms are gag worthy. And Truffle, it's an earthy flavour they say. Nah it tastes like dirt,' another added.

One woman said she couldn't stand the taste of pork, especially the crackling.

'I can eat a bit of roast pork if it has lots of apple sauce or gravy to disguise the pork flavour. To me it just tastes like an old pig yuck,' she said.

Others shared their everyday annoyances, which ranged from the word 'veggies' and their mother-in-law to anyone cracking their knuckles or chewing gum.

'I like to eat vegetables but I hate the word "veggies",' one woman wrote.

Many said they couldn't stand the taste of 'nasty' baked beans (stock image)

Meanwhile, others confessed they couldn't stand their mother-in-law (stock image)

Many listed the 'smells' they couldn't handle, including bacon, basil, salmon, coconut, honey and cooked eggs.

'The smell of bacon. It makes me want to vomit,' one wrote, while another added: 'Coconuts, the smell, taste and texture - yuck.'

'Honey. The smell alone makes me want to vomit,' one said, while one woman revealed she hated the smell of basil, saying: 'It's so bad! I cried once when I had to eat a salad with fresh basil in it.'

Dozens of Aussies complained about cheese as well.

'Blue cheese and Parmesan. The latter smells like vomit to me,' one woman wrote, while another added: 'Anything with melting cheese in it or over it, makes me feel ill, too rich.'

Others mentioned driving gripes including windscreen wiper use while driving and people who refuse to give a 'thank you' wave.

'The gap I leave between me and the car in front isnt your space to turn into and brake,' one wrote.

'When driving in car, car in front of you washing the windscreen. Water splash on my windscreen. So annoying! Should do it before driving.'
ALBANY  Albany police have launched an internal investigation into why officers obscured their badge numbers during the forceful clearing of an encampment outside of a police station last week.

Police Chief Eric Hawkins said that while it is a violation of department policy for an officer to knowingly obscure identifying information, it was not a nefarious action but rather a way to protect against threats to their families by activists.

This was widely known among the officers, Hawkins said. And they felt like they could minimize the risk to their families by concealing their badge numbers.

The department is also investigating whether officers covered the badges under the mistaken belief that police brass authorized them to do so.

Hawkins addressed the Common Council on Wednesday and defended his decision to clear the encampment outside of South Station last week, a measure which drew swift condemnation from activists and civil rights leaders who contend the action set back decades of progress.

The chief acknowledged that some in the community believe officers covered their badges in order to evade consequences for any misconduct on their part during the clearing operation. But he said such a strategy would be futile because surveillance cameras would have captured any officer engaged in inappropriate conduct.

We are 100 percent certain well identify the officers involved and the officers all know that, Hawkins said.

Mayor Kathy Sheehan called the obscuring of badge numbers appalling.

Thats not OK and that erodes trust, Sheehan said on Wednesday.

The Albany Police Officers Union did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Wednesday evening.

Hawkins comments pivoted between vigorously defending the city's decision and the need for broadened community dialogue. While he acknowledged he didnt meet with activists beforehand to discuss their demands, Hawkins forcefully countered comments by Councilwoman Judy Doesschate that he did not try to de-escalate the situation.

There was no intention whatsoever to comply with any lawful orders to leave that encampment, Hawkins said.

Councilman Derek Johnson, who represents Ward 2 where South Station is located, said he had a tough time reconciling Hawkins attempts to strike a balance between clearing the camp and touting a desire to engage more deeply with overly policed neighborhoods.

Someone in that station knew they were coming out with their badges covered up, Johnson said. Theyre willing to break policies to protect themselves. A lot of time I hear about officers safety, but Im not hearing about community safety.

Officer Steve Smith said Thursday the department has received credible threats of harm to police and their families but claimed the department could not release the evidence "due to security concerns."

Hawkins presented video from body-worn cameras and surveillance cameras that depicted activists barricading the camp and tending to bonfires before it was cleared by officers in riot gear, resulting in eight immediate arrests and several others after nightfall.

It was very clear at that time that they were not peaceful protesters, Hawkins said.

Responding to often-withering inquiries by lawmakers, Hawkins said activists were unwilling to peacefully disperse and that their actions were not peaceful  the reason why officers were clad in riot gear to break up the six-day occupation.

Doing so was necessary to clear the road, protect activists and prevent injury, Hawkins said. He also cited complaints from the Capital City Rescue Mission.

Lexis Figuereo, an organizer who was arrested last week, said police cherry-picked the footage.

The video was purposely set to make us look like monsters, Figuereo said, claiming that protesters were smiling and laughing even during tense standoffs.

Other community leaders questioned the extent to which the department will hold officers accountable for hiding their identities.

"How can we have faith in that?" said Paul Collins-Hackett, secretary of the Community Police Review Board and community leadership team steering committee member for the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program.

And given the fact that officers broke their own protocols, he wondered if the department would adhere to its own policies if the Common Council decides to ban tear gas, referring to the ongoing debate over its usage.

"Given their demonstrated inability to adhere to their own protocols, they simply cannot be trusted with a weapon such as tear gas," Collins-Hackett said.

The city has been facing mounting criticism, including from civil rights leaders who say their actions set back by decades progress on improving police-community relations.

Lawmakers said theyve spent the past week watching footage from the scene, and peppered Hawkins with questions, including how the department is planning for another summer of what's expected to be vigorous activism from racial justice advocates.

I really dread the hot summer nights when more people are going to be out in the streets, said Councilman Tom Hoey. What can we do to get people talking?

Hawkins acknowledged that images of officers using batons to strike possessions and dragging protesters out of the camp were troubling for some. But the use of force seldom looks nice  especially when it involves people who knowingly violate the law, he said.

Had there been compliance with lawful orders to leave, there would not have been physical contact with officers.

Yet he acknowledged the situation was fraught with difficult, complex questions for which there were no easy answers.

A blistering letter from union leadership criticizing the citys tolerance of the camp had no factor in his decision to clear it out, Hawkins said.

City Councilman Owusu Anane told Hawkins decisions shouldnt be made unilaterally and lawmakers should be consulted.

He suggested a more measured approach to clearing future encampments to avoid a repeat, including putting up fliers giving firm deadlines for eviction.

The citys Department of General Services could then be assisted with clean-up. And if necessary, officers could assist  but clad in regular uniforms.

We are the legislative body for the city of Albany, Anane said. Try to involve us when it comes to some of these really hot issues that are going to impact so many residents of the city of Albany.

Several lawmakers also expressed discomfort with the unauthorized application of Blue Lives Matter insignias on riot shields.

Councilwoman Ginnie Farrell said she supports the original meaning, which was designed to memorialize fallen police officers.

But that imagery has morphed over time to mean something else, she said, and now has different connotations to activists, who view it as representing a belief system that is diametrically opposed to the movement for racial justice.

City police should find another way to find another way to honor officers, she said.

Its just not appropriate anymore, Farrell said. Its quite frankly seen as a racist image.

Upon questioning from City Council President Corey Ellis, Hawkins acknowledged the insignia was unauthorized and inappropriate and said the situation is being dealt with.

Theres ongoing communication and expectations as it pertains to what is appropriate and what is permissible to be on official department property, Hawkins said. That is not permissible and its been very clearly communicated to our people.

Activists, including several who were arrested, kept a running commentary in the comments section of the meeting, which was broadcast on Facebook Live.

I went to the hospital and he said he removed us peacefully, wrote Kasey Charles, adding a vulgarity for emphasis.

Questions for mayor

Moments before Hawkins addressed lawmakers, Sheehan was questioned aggressively by the moderator of a panel discussion on police reform organized by the Harvard Kennedy Schools Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

Moderator Sandra Susan Smith said the altercation generated national attention and wondered how a mayor who is seeking a third term on a platform of social justice and correcting longstanding systematic inequalities reconciles those viewpoints with the forceful clearing of nonviolent protesters.

Youre saying one thing, Smith said. The actions look very different.

Sheehan largely stuck to previous comments that activists posed a public safety risk and would not have dispersed peacefully. And many came from outside of the city, she said.

These are challenging, difficult decisions, Sheehan said. I understand there are people upset at how it was happening.
CHICO, Calif. - With the help of community donations and grants, the City of Chico has been able to conduct maintenance in parks to reduce fire fuel and make parks accessible and safe for everyone.

Every year, the City of Chico will receive donations from the community and about 25,000 volunteer hours to help with the maintenance of Chicos greenways and parks, according to Linda Herman, Park and Natural Resources Manager for the City of Chico.

Fire Prevention

The city applies for grants every time it identifies a park project. It also works with the California Conservations Corps (CCC) to trim bushes and pick up dead wood, Herman said.

We just recently went down our South Park Drive and Petersen Memorial Way with CCC crews, Herman said. They elevated and trimmed all the bushes so we can get the flail mower down, so you might see some of the piles from them.

The CCC got a wildfire grant last year that helped the city with fuel reduction for the 6,400 acres the city manages.

The city brought in goats to graze the parks, which allowed the CCC to come through and pick up dead tree limbs and brush that was not previously seen.

Herman said crews do not do this every year but would like to do it more often.

RELATED: Chico City Council approves of wildfire protection plan

On April 6, Chico City Council unanimously approved a Vegetative Fuels Management Plan to provide funds to the city to prevent areas from being overgrown and becoming a potential fire hazard.

Herman said the city received a CAL FIRE wildfire prevention grant to develop a fuels management plan for the land the city handles.

It helps us look at wildfire prevention but also the health of the ecosystem and the health of the biodiversity of the plants, Herman said. We want to encourage native plants to grow.

Herman said the fuels management plan aims to reduce catastrophic wildfire risk, improve resilience to fire and climate change.

The CCC crews began working on a 15-acre fuel reduction project on 10-Mile House Road in Upper Bidwell Park on Tuesday, April 20.

We are doing a shaded fuel break to reduce the fuels around the trail, said Logan Forbes, Conservationist One Pre Supervisor for the CCC.

RELATED: Vegetation work to begin on 10 Mile House Road in Upper Bidwell Park

Forbes said the crews will be working up to 50 feet off the trail to remove vegetation. This will widen the trail in the case that firefighters need to bring equipment down the trail to fight a fire.

The corps, along with Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, started at the bottom of 10-Mile House Road and will work its way up to the gate at the entrance near Highway 32.

Upper Bidwell Park

The city council also voted to move forward with a parking fee in Upper Bidwell Park once all construction and road maintenance is completed.

The city received a grant to conduct road maintenance in Upper Bidwell, which will include replacing culverts, fixing drainage, and to sheet water off the road in order to maintain good road conditions for the public and emergency vehicles.

We are still going through environmental review for that project but we are hoping to get some, if not all, done this summer and fall, Herman said.

RELATED: Chico City Council moves forward with Upper Bidwell parking fees

The city plans to charge people $2 per day for parking or $25 for a one year parking pass.

After the road is fixed, the city will put in kiosks and signage to show people when the lots are full or not full. People will be able to use their phones to pay for parking as it will be based on license plates.

Herman said the city does not want to start implementing parking fees until the road is fixed and the experience is positive for everyone. She added that the road will continue to be dirt and will not be paved.

City Parks

In 2018, the $4 billion Proposition 68 passed to invest in improving and creating parks and recreation areas. Proposition 68 funds are used to award grants based on the needs and benefits of the project.

We are going to be replacing the surfacing around the neakal dragon project in Caper Acres and then putting large shade sails over it, Herman said.

The renovation and sails are funded by Proposition 68, along with about $70,000 in donations the city received from the community.

In addition to the improvement plans, the city has also had an increased amount of labor due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as crews work to keep public facilities safe and clean.

We actually had help from our alliance for workforce development crews, Herman said. We were able to receive some crews that are free for us but they get paid through a job fulfillment program.

These crews sanitize the facilities every day and spray bleach solution on the playground at Caper Acres and on all the picnic tables.

Herman said the city demolished the horseshoe pits to allow a restoration process to commence. She said the city will rebuild them and she would like for the pits to be regulation size in order to host competitions.

Crews have also completed general maintenance in the park such as building new split rail fences around One Mile, painting the park benches, poles and trash cans.

Visit the City of Chico Volunteer Page to learn how to volunteer and to view the citys volunteer calendar.
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday spoke with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on phone.

In their conversation, the President and the Prime Minister discussed several matters of mutual interest, top among them the Global Education Summit which Kenya and the UK will co-host in July.

Through the Summit, Kenya and the UK aim to raise 5 billion USD, the amount needed to get 175 million children into school around the world.

Besides the Summit, President Kenyatta and PM Johnson talked about Kenya-UK collaboration in the fight against Covid-19, climate change and, regional security and peace.

On Covid-19, the President and the Prime Minister explored new avenues of collaboration including research on identifying new mutations of the virus and accelerated access to vaccines.

President Kenyatta and PM Johnson expressed concerns on the unfolding political situation in Somalia, and resolved to work more closely through the UN Security Council, the Commonwealth and other multilateral platforms to ensure regional peace and stability.

On climate change, the President and the Prime Minister exchanged notes ahead of COP26 in Glasgow and explored opportunities for partnerships in areas such as renewable energy where Kenya is an African success story.
Jaipur, April 29 : Two days before the start of the third phase of vaccination drive for all those in the 18-44 years age group, the Rajasthan High Court on Thursday issued a show cause notice to the Centre, the state government and two vaccine manufacturers -- the Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech -- questioning them on why different rates are being fixed for one vaccine.

A bench of Justice Sabina issued the notice on the PIL filed by journalist Mukesh Sharma. The next hearing is scheduled on May 12.

Advocate Abhay Bhandari, appearing for the petitioner, said that three rates have been fixed for one vaccine across the nation. While the Central government will get the Covishield and Covaxin vaccine at Rs 150 each, the state government shall receive Covishield for Rs 300 and Covaxin for Rs 600, while private hospitals shall get Covishield and Covaxin for Rs 600 and Rs 1,200, respectively.

This is a clear violation of Article 14 and 21 of the Constitution by the Central government and private companies, he argued.

The petition said that the Union Budget had a clear provision of Rs 35,000 crore for corona vaccinations. Also PM Cares had an estimated fund collection of Rs 900 to 1,000 crore. In such a scenario, the government should run a free vaccination drive across the nation as the government had made preparations for vaccinations quite early, he added.
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The Minister of Public Health, Social Development and Labor (VSA), Omar Ottley would like to inform the Public that Monday May 3rd, 2021 will be a normal working day.





Based on article 23, paragraph 3 in the Arbeidsregeling (labour regulation national ordinance), the Minister of VSA has the authority to assign new dates for Carnival Day and Sint Maarten Day only.





As it pertains to Labour Day, it is stipulated that Labour Day shall be celebrated annually on May 1st. Should this day fall on a Sunday, it would then be celebrated the next day which will be the Monday.
Monte Carlo methods, used to evaluate risk and simulate prices for a variety of financial instruments, involve complex calculations and consume significant time and computational resources. Typically, these calculations are executed once overnight, which means that in volatile markets, traders are forced to use outdated results. Providing traders, who are always looking for an additional edge in the markets, with a quantum computing approach to perform these risk assessments with far greater speed means that simulations could be executed throughout the day and could transform the way financial markets worldwide operate.

"Our team at Goldman Sachs is focused on developing the best technology for the firm and our clients," said William Zeng, Head of Quantum Research, Goldman Sachs. "Quantum computing could have a significant impact on financial services, and our new work with QC Ware brings that future closer. To do this, we introduced new extensions to a core technique in quantum algorithms. This exemplifies the fundamental contributions that our group looks to make in the field of quantum technology."

The research community has known for some time of quantum algorithms that can perform Monte Carlo simulations 1000x faster than classical methods. However, these algorithms require error-corrected quantum hardware projected to be available in 10 to 20 years. Current quantum devices have very high error rates and can only perform a few calculation steps accurately before returning incorrect results.

For the past year, Goldman Sachs and QC Ware researchers have been working to answer this question: "How can we cut the current timeline in half yet still get a significant speed-up?" By successfully sacrificing some of the speed up from 1000x to 100x, the team was able to produce Shallow Monte Carlo algorithms that can run on near-term quantum computers expected to be available in 5 to 10 years. Technical details of the new algorithms are outlined in a recently released research paper .

Reducing the Quantum Hardware Timeline for Monte Carlo Simulations

The graph below illustrates how Shallow Monte Carlo algorithms compare with previous Monte Carlo algorithms across two dimensions:

the speed-up provided by the quantum algorithms when compared to classical approaches, and

the expected timeline for quantum hardware capable of executing the algorithms

The graph also shows the comparative position of two often cited quantum algorithms and their use cases, prime factoring and the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms. While the Shallow Monte Carlo algorithms show more moderate speed-ups than Quantum Fourier Transformation Free Monte Carlo (QFT-free Monte Carlo) and Standard Monte Carlo algorithms, they have far less onerous hardware requirements, and therefore are anticipated to reduce the timeline to usability in half.

"At QC Ware, we focus on designing useful quantum algorithms that significantly reduce quantum hardware requirements yet achieve provable performance speed-ups over classical algorithms," said Iordanis Kerenidis, Head of Algorithms - International, QC Ware. "The Goldman Sachs and QC Ware research teams took a novel approach to designing quantum Monte Carlo algorithms by trading off performance speed-up for reduced error rates. Through rigorous analysis and empirical simulations, we demonstrated that our Shallow Monte Carlo algorithms could result in the ability to perform Monte Carlo simulations on quantum hardware that may be available in 5 to 10 years."

About Goldman Sachs

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and individuals. Founded in 1869, the firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world.

About QC Ware

QC Ware is a leading quantum-as-a-service company focused on the development of applications for near-term quantum computing hardware. With a team composed of some of the industry's foremost experts in quantum computing, QC Ware is growing rapidly and generating substantial revenue from global enterprise and government sector customers including Aisin Group, Airbus, BMW Group, Equinor, Goldman Sachs, and Total. QC Ware Forge, the company's flagship quantum computing cloud service, is built for data scientists with no quantum computing background. It provides unique, performant, turnkey implementations of quantum computing algorithms. QC Ware is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and supports its European customers through its subsidiary in Paris. QC Ware also organizes Q2B , the largest annual gathering of the international quantum computing community.

Media contact

[email protected]

SOURCE QC Ware Corp.
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- "Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again" - Joe Biden addresses the nation in Congress. Full summary of the speech

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- Biden confirms Child Tax Credit extension to 2026

- Government money powers the US economy in the first quarter

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- Missing stimulus check money? Here's what to do

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 18:46:04|Editor: huaxia

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COLOMBO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Army Commander and Head of the National Operations Center for Prevention of COVID-19, General Shavendra Silva said Thursday that a nationwide lockdown would not be imposed in the Asian country but warned the cases of a new COVID-19 virus variant were on the rise.

Silva said that authorities would not go for a lockdown but urged people to follow all health guidelines including wearing a face mask.

"We expect the people to be disciplined. And have their masks firmly on. While we will not go for a countrywide lockdown there will be area isolations, depending on the number of patients reported," Silva said.

Health authorities on Wednesday announced that a new variant of the COVID-19 virus which was rapidly spreading across Sri Lanka was identified to be the B.1.1.7 variant reported in Britain and presently in creating havoc in India.

Director of the Department of Immunology and Molecular Medicine at the Sri Jayawardenapura University, Dr. Chandima Jeewandara told journalists that scientific research on this new variant had shown that the variant was about 55 percent more deadly than other variants, with an increased transmission rate of up to 50 percent.

Health officials have said hospitals in Sri Lanka were filled to capacity due to a increasing number of patients, and that more young people were infected and admitted to hospitals needing critical care.

Several areas that have reported a higher number of patients infected with the new variant have already been isolated, police said.

On Thursday, Sri Lanka reported its highest single-day surge of COVID-19 cases of over 1,400, raising its total tally to 104,953 with 661 deaths. Enditem
NOTED BUILDER AND ENTREPRENEUR CHARLES QUARLES LENDS NAME TO WATTS AREA BUSINESS INCUBATOR

Preparing for Post-Pandemic Progress (SOUTH LOS ANGELES-CA) Charles Quarles, President of The Bedford Group of Companies, a leading Los Angeles real estate development firm, has lent his family name to the Quarles Business Opportunity Center (QBOC), a business incubator focused on assisting minority entrepreneurs in the communities of: Watts, Willowbrook, Compton, Carson, and South Los Angeles.

An Entrepreneur Educational Center, Inc. (EECI) project, QBOC will be home to EECIs free Miracles Entrepreneur Programs (MEP) designed for beginning or struggling businessmen and women in need of a business plan that will, according to EECI officials prepare them for postpandemic progress. During the Grand Opening program Quarles, and his daughter Starlett Quarles, Bedford Groups Marketing Director, well-known podcast host, and Gen X advocate, were presented with a plaque recognizing the familys rich history of community service. In accepting the recognition Quarles shared his belief in the project and his relationship with EECIs Executive Director, Barbara J. Stanton whose decades-long background in championing economic development projects and programs in Watts and surrounding communities is well known.

Im incredibly grateful for the honor bestowed in memory of my sisters Priscilla and Carol by naming the business incubator after the Quarles family. Barbara, who has a tremendous passion for the youth, that Ive observed over the years, is continuing in that way, Quarles said. I wish her the best and believe because of her passion the Quarles Business Opportunity Center will become a great success, he concluded. The Grand Opening was also an opportunity for students to enroll for MEPs 2021 class. Upon completion of the sponsored supported 3-month course, graduates receive complimentary Doing-Business-As (DBA) registration for their startups, or EECI will incorporate their Nonprofit Agencies with the State of California. Other benefits include workspace, mentor expertise, access to investors, and in some cases, working capital in the form of a loan. Erected in 1971 the 3,000 sq. ft. QBOC building, located on the southeast corner of 102nd and Broadway in South Los Angeles, was once the field office of Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

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It is distinguished as being the first of many built by Quarles who has established a reputation for his rock-solid business acumen and a comprehensive expertise in developing successful urban infill communities that bring services, jobs, and affordable housing to the underserved. Stanton noted the builders impact cannot be overstated, His body of work and compassion for the underserved make Mr. Quarles a perfect role model for black and brown students who will utilize QBOCs services. Mr. Quarles amazing entrepreneurial spirit is what EECI, and Miracles programs are looking to unlock in others who feel they have the potential to plant and then grow the seed of a business that will benefit them, their family, and most of all their community.

QBOC is administered by EECI, and supported by the U.S. Small Business Administration, Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County 2nd District. Sponsors include The Thomas and Dorothy Leavy Foundation, Cathay Bank, Union Bank, City National Bank, Northern Trust, Pacific Western Bank, Citizens Business Bank, First Republic Bank, Comerica Bank, Pacific Premier Bank, American Business Bank, First Choice Bank, Bank of Hope, First Credit Bank and FHL Bank, San Francisco, Black Business Association, JGM, Popeyes, and 94.7 THE WAVE. Visit www.entrepreneureducationalcenter.org or call (323) 757- 7506 for more information.
Washington:

Actress Annabella Sciorra has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape, detailing her harrowing encounter with the now-disgraced movie mogul.



She joins dozens of women who have already leveled allegations of sexual abuse against the 65-year-old Weinstein.



Sciorra -- who received an Emmy nomination for her role in the acclaimed television series "The Sopranos"  said in the early 1990s Weinstein forced his way into her apartment and violently raped her.



She told The New Yorker Magazine that before the alleged attack Weinstein came in "like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt."



"It was very clear where he thought this was going to go."



She urged Weinstein to leave but "he shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me," Sciorra said.



Despite her resistance Weinstein forced sexual intercourse with her and "attempted to perform oral sex on me," she told the magazine.



"I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me."



"I was so ashamed," Sciorra, now 57, said, adding that she fell into deep depression and stopped working for several years.



She kept the graphic story under wraps for fear of professional backlash. Though she did eventually begin acting again Weinstein continued to harass her for years, Sciorra said.



The actress is now one of more than 50 women to accuse Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment -- a group that includes stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Mira Sorvino.

Also read: Ashley Judds first TV interview after sexual abuse claims against Harvey Weinstein



Also read: Sharon Stone recalls brain stroke, says it felt like being hit by lightening bolt

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Hollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
The night vision camera operated remotely by U.S. agents captures the silent drama of a coyote  a smuggler of people  straddling the border wall on a recent spring day, raising a child from the Mexican side.

The coyote lowers the small child to the U.S. side slowly with one hand. He stretches his arm to reduce the childs fall. The child lands and remains face down, probably stunned, then stands unsteadily like any toddler. The man carefully drops another child, presumably older, who lands feet first and falls to a sitting position. The coyote drops a small package containing their passports and a cellphone near the children and flees into the Mexican night with another man. The younger child bends over slightly to help the older child.

What must they have said? What fear and confusion must these two children have felt from the moment they left their familys embrace to landing in the New Mexico desert?

Rescued by Border Patrol agents, the toddlers  sisters ages 3 and 5  were uninjured and taken to safety by U.S. Border Patrol. The girls parents had left their daughters in a remote, mountainous town in Ecuador with maternal grandparents. Their parents, now in the U.S., paid the coyote to bring the girls. They are now reunited with their parents. In 58 wordless seconds, we saw just two of the thousands of unaccompanied children arriving at our southern border.

Government officials, television talking heads and countless other critics have decried the brazen, coldhearted act of those smugglers and questioned the parents judgment.

Not me. The coyotes had done their job: bringing two sisters to the safety of our great nation, just as their parents had purchased.

I may never know the girls parents. But I dont blame them. What conditions would drive parents to such desperation, giving their children to strangers to carry them 2,980 miles to New Mexico? What must their anguish be not knowing their fate?

Editorial: A humane approach to border crisis

More than once during the past 100 years we have seen parents make Solomon-like decisions, just as the girls parents did to save them. Jewish parents in Nazi Europe put their children on trains or handed them to underground operatives out of harms way. Cuban parents in 1960 placed more than 14,000 of their children aboard Peter Pan flights to Miami. Vietnamese parents herded their children onto U.S. helicopters, planes and boats as Saigon fell in 1975. All these parents knew they might never see their children again.

What we saw that night on television was not new. Unaccompanied children have been crossing our border for decades, just not in the numbers we see today. Our government has had ample time to prepare with humane approaches and using the best practices of the child welfare system, which is predicated on the standard of serving the best interest of the child.

We must do a better job of explaining the factors that drive parents and children to take enormous risks. Vice President Kamala Harris is tasked to engage Central American countries to address the root causes of migration. Its a start. But its not a time for politics and empty diplomacy. Humanitarian action is needed.

The U.S. can quickly mobilize a humane system of care that begins at the border and safely brings children to the arms of loved ones here. Reception centers dont have to be tent cities; they can be sophisticated places that conduct pediatric, dental, educational and psychological evaluations and treatments, and provide clean clothes, nutritious food, warm shelter and small communal arrangements.

Sibling groups must never be separated, even when those older than 19 are considered adults. Like any logistical system, it involves a pipeline. Processing centers are just the entry point for unaccompanied children. Each step of the way to their destination cities requires the same level of tender loving care.

We dont want to see toddlers dropped on our soil by coyotes or imagine parents desperately putting their children at such risk. But if coyotes can bring two toddlers uninjured a vast distance, we surely can take care of the children once they are here. We have the know-how. All we need is the will.

Luis H. Zayas is dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alabamas graduating Class of 2020 joined a national trend of lower average ACT scores, with students now scoring lower on the tests than they did five years ago.

Data released by the nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama Thursday matches a national slump across students of all genders, economic backgrounds and demographics. Data also does not reflect changes to learning and testing wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic; graduating seniors would have taken the tests before schools went online.

The average 2020 score was 18.6, the lowest number in the past five years. Since 2015, scores have hovered between 18.8 and 19.2.

The typical composite score for students entering Alabama colleges ranges from a composite score of 18 at Alabama State and Alabama A&M to 28 at Auburn and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, according to PARCA.

That average score for Alabama students places the state below the national average of 20.6. And while the state has a high number of high school graduates, it also ranks below the national average in their assessed math, English, reading and science college readiness.

Only 16.3% of Alabama students scored at or above ACTs college readiness benchmark in all four subjects in 2020.

PARCA notes lingering disparities in scores between non-economically disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged students, between Asian, white, Black and Hispanic students, and between male and female students. But all groups saw scores decline in 2020.

Black students scores hit a low mark with an average statewide score of 16; white students similarly scored the lowest since 2015 with an average statewide score of 20.1.

While SAT and ACT tests remain frequent tools for assessing college readiness and ranking students against each other, many universities waived a requirement to submit test scores during the 2020-21 application season, and some have declared intentions to limit use of the tests moving forward.

Most of Alabamas four-year colleges focused on a students high school grades and courses during the past years application process.

Some schools, like Auburn, also waived admissions for internal programs like the Honors College that typically required a certain score on the ACT, instead saying valedictorians and salutatorians from most accredited high schools would automatically be admitted.

The University of Alabama has said it will remain test-optional for students applying through at least the 2021-22 admission cycle for spring, summer and fall 2022 semesters.

Last month, an ACT representative wrote a blog post saying test-optional policies probably arent going away; more than half of American universities are expected to limit use of the tests moving forward.
By Yun Byung-se





All eyes are now on Myanmar following the country's Feb. 1 military coup and the arbitrary detention of members of the government, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and others. The three-finger salute raised by Myanmar's U.N. envoy Kyaw Moe Tun at the U.N. General Assembly on Feb. 26 eloquently epitomized the scope and level of the ongoing pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, known locally as the "Spring Revolution."



The salute has become a symbol of opposition to the military; and the live coverage of the suppression of peaceful demonstrators through social media has succeeded in raising awareness in the international community.



A tipping point came when the military junta started to use violence, including lethal weapons, against civilians, resulting in large-scale bloodshed. The international community has responded swiftly this time. Global institutions and notable people, including the U.N. secretary-general, U.N. Security Council, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the World Bank, as well as regional bodies such as the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and other like-minded groups, responded in their own way, ranging from condemnatory statements and resolutions to targeted sanctions, arms embargoes and the suspension of aid and loans.



Many governments, including the United States, the EU, the United Kingdom and Canada imposed individual sanctions targeting military leaders and their business networks. In an unusual move, the Korean government, the National Assembly, and both ruling and opposition parties also joined this chorus of condemnation and sanctions.



Even the chairman of Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was on board with a joint statement of 12 JCS chiefs, including those from the U.S., Japan and Australia, condemning the junta's use of lethal force against civilians. This echoes the sentiment shared by the majority of the international community.



Nevertheless, there is still a big divide over how to deal with the Myanmar crisis. One side favors much tougher punitive measures, advocated by many democracies across the world and former global leaders. The other is in favor of non-interference in domestic affairs or constructive engagement with the junta, advocated by China, Russia and some ASEAN countries.



The former camp was well represented by the U.N. Human Rights Council when it adopted by consensus on March 24 the toughest-ever resolution on Myanmar in recent times. It contained strong condemnations on the junta's use of force and very sensitive accountability aspects regarding violations of international human rights norms and standards.



What deserves our special attention is its reference to the "R2P" (Responsibility to Protect) concept, recalling the authority of the Security Council to refer the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC). ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda used to describe the ICC as "the legal arm of R2P." In a follow-up, the chairman of the Global Leadership Foundation comprised of 45 former leaders, former South Africa President F.W. de Klerk, sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres imploring him to convene a U.N. Security Council session on this issue.



The letter also called on the Security Council to invoke its "R2P" principle, agreed in 2005 to safeguard populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in their own countries, and act as a coalition to bring the killing in Myanmar to an end. In the same vein, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also defined the bloody suppression as a "crime against humanity" at the virtual U.N. Security Council meeting held on April 19.



All these developments will serve as a shot in the arm for those people across Myanmar who carried placards with "We need R2P" to call on the international community to not just condemn what is happening in their country, but to act on it.



The second approach can be well explained by the dissociation of China and Russia from the above Human Rights Council resolution. However, they did not go so far as to oppose the U.N. Security Council chair's statement on March 10, unanimously condemning the military's violence against protesters and calling for the immediate release of all those detained arbitrarily.



The Myanmar crisis goes beyond the dimensions of human rights and democracy. It is a litmus test of the "ASEAN way" of constructive engagement as well as its charter that upholds human rights, democracy and rule of law as one key purpose of the group. The five-point consensus adopted at the ASEAN Leaders' Meeting on April 24 is a step in the right direction, but still there is a long way to go.



China's close relations with both the junta and Aung San Suu Kyi make its calculus complex. Meanwhile, it is an embarrassment and challenge to the Biden administration who under President Barack Obama decided to normalize ties with Myanmar, hailing Myanmar's shaky road to semi-democracy as one of its major foreign policy accomplishments. The ever-intensifying Sino-American conflict complicates international efforts to stand united. India also has a stake in Myanmar.



Under these circumstances, the road to a return to democracy in Myanmar, even partial and incomplete, seems to be bumpy and arduous. Many Myanmar watchers recognize that the transition to democracy, beginning 2015 when the National League for Democracy took power, was incomplete under de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But, from the perspective of citizens, Myanmar in 2021 was a more open, free, and business-savvy society than it was back in 2011 or 2015.



Myanmar's experiment with partial democracy allowed the genie to escape from the bottle, and the country's citizens have no intention of putting it back. As Koreans traveled this road some decades ago, we know and feel what this means in our minds and hearts. The international community should do what it can to demand a return to the lawfully elected civilian government.





Yun Byung-se is former foreign minister of South Korea. He is now a board member of the Korea Peace Foundation and is a member of several ex-global leaders' forums and task forces, including the Astana Forum and its Consultative Council as well as the Task Force on U.S. Allies and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.


Mark McCall

FTI Consulting's PR unit registered a 3.7 percent hike in Q1 revenues to $60.5M and a 21.7 percent rise in operating income to $9.1M as the strategic communications operation rebounded sharply from its 8.8 percent revenue slide in Q4 2020.

We are off to a solid start in 2021, Mark McCall, head of the stratcom unit, told ODwyers.

The stratcom operation remains focused on its long-term opportunities by investing in the global network and specialty practices, such as ESG, digital/insights, PA, government affairs and crisis, according to McCall.

FTI bolstered its senior PR management ranks during Q1 with the addition of Consumer Brands Assn. executive VP Bryan Zumwalt to head the government affairs group in Washington.

Julian Lambertin, Weber Shandwick executive VP, global strategy and insights, signed on as managing director, head of data & analytics, EMEA. Hes based in Germany.

Kate Brader, a management consultant at Regester Larkin by Deloitte, joined to head FTIs Crisis+ offering in London.

Total stratcom headcount grew one percent to 778 from year-end 2020.

Overall, FTIs Q1 revenues jumped 13.5 percent to $686.3M. Net income advanced 13.7 percent to $64.5M.
ANNAPOLIS, Md., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

Filed by Severn Bancorp, Inc.

Pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act of 1933

And deemed filed pursuant to Rule 14a-12

Under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934

Subject Company: Severn Bancorp, Inc.

Commission File No. 000-49731

Dear Severn Bancorp Stockholder,

Severn Bancorp, Inc., the parent company of Severn Bank, has traditionally held its annual stockholders meeting in the spring. This year, the annual meeting has been postponed  and may not be held at all.

Severn Bancorp, Inc. entered into a merger agreement with Shore Bancshares, Inc., the parent company of Shore United Bank. This will bring Severn Bank and Shore United Bank together.

We will have an expanded community banking franchise, growing assets from $1 billion to $3 billion.

In addition to Severn's 7 branches in Anne Arundel County, we will have an additional 22 branches throughout the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Baltimore County, and Howard County. The combined financial strength and size of the merged banks will enhance the experience of our collective customers, and the combined organization will be a formidable community bank dedicated to the neighborhoods we serve.

We anticipate closing the transaction in the third quarter of 2021. Prior to closing, we will have a special meeting of the stockholders, to consider and vote on the transaction. If for whatever reason it appears that the transaction will not occur in 2021, we will hold an annual stockholders meeting toward the end of the year.

You can access additional information about the merger, free of charge, at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov, or by accessing Severn Bank's website at www.severnbank.com under the "Severn Bank Investors Relation" link, and then under the heading "SEC Filings" and "Documents."

Very truly yours,

Alan J. Hyatt

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This letter contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding the financial condition, results of operations, business plans and the future performance of Severn Bancorp, Inc. ("Severn") and Shore Bancshares, Inc. ("Shore"). Words such as "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "expects," "forecasts," "intends," "plans," "projects," "could," "may," "should," "will" or other similar words and expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on Shore's and Severn's current expectations and assumptions regarding Shore's and Severn's businesses, the economy, and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to future results and occurrences, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks, and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. Any number of risks, uncertainties or other factors such as the COVID 19 pandemic could affect Severn's or Shore's future financial results and performance and could cause actual results or performance to differ materially from anticipated results or performance. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others: the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the right of one or both of the parties to terminate the definitive agreement and plan of merger between Severn and Shore; the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Severn or Shore; delays in completing the transaction; the failure to obtain necessary regulatory approvals (and the risk that such approvals may result in the imposition of conditions that could adversely affect the combined company or the expected benefits of the transaction) or shareholder approvals, or to satisfy any of the other conditions to the transaction on a timely basis or at all; the possibility that the anticipated benefits of the transaction are not realized when expected or at all, including as a result of the impact of, or problems arising from, the integration of the two companies or as a result of the strength of the economy and competitive factors in the areas where Severn and Shore do business; the possibility that the transaction may be more expensive to complete than anticipated, including as a result of unexpected factors or events; diversion of management's attention from ongoing business operations and opportunities; potential adverse reactions or changes to business or employee relationships, including those resulting from the announcement or completion of the transaction; the ability to complete the transaction and integration of Severn and Shore successfully; and the dilution caused by Shore's issuance of additional shares of its capital stock in connection with the transaction. Except to the extent required by applicable law or regulation, each of Severn and Shore disclaims any obligation to update such factors or to publicly announce the results of any revisions to any of the forward-looking statements included herein to reflect future events or developments. Further information regarding Severn, Shore and factors which could affect the forward-looking statements contained herein can be found in Severn's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 and its other filings with the SEC, and in Shore's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 and its other filings with the SEC. SEC filings are available free of charge on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.

Additional Information About the Merger and Where to Find It

This letter does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval with respect to the proposed transaction.

In connection with the proposed merger transaction, a registration statement on Form S-4 will be filed with the SEC that will include a joint proxy statement of Severn and Shore and a prospectus of Shore, which will be distributed to the shareholders of Severn and Shore in connection with their votes on the merger of Severn with and into Shore and the issuance of Shore common stock in the transaction. INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO READ THE REGISTRATION STATEMENT AND JOINT PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE (AND ANY OTHER DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE TRANSACTION OR INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE INTO THE JOINT PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS) BECAUSE SUCH DOCUMENTS WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING THE PROPOSED MERGER AND RELATED MATTERS. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain these documents, and any other documents Severn and Shore have filed with the SEC, free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov , or by accessing Shore's website at www.shorebancshares.com under the "Investor Relations" link and then under the heading "Documents," or by accessing Severn's website at www.severnbank.com under the "Severn Bank Investors Relation" link and then under the heading "SEC Filings" and "Documents." In addition, documents filed with the SEC by Shore or Severn will be available free of charge by (1) writing Shore at 18 East Dover Street, Easton, MD 21601, Attention: Edward C. Allen, or (2) writing Severn at 200 Westgate Circle, Suite 200, Annapolis, MD 21404, Attention: Vance Adkins.

Participants in the Solicitation

The directors, executive officers and certain other members of management and employees of Severn may also be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies in connection with the proposed transaction from the shareholders of Severn. Information about the directors and executive officers of Severn is included in the proxy statement for its 2020 annual meeting of Severn shareholders, which was filed with the SEC on April 10, 2020.

The directors, executive officers and certain other members of management and employees of Shore may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the shareholders of Shore in connection with the proposed transaction. Information about Shore's directors and executive officers is included in the proxy statement for its 2021 annual meeting of Shore's shareholders, which was filed with the SEC on March 26, 2021.

Additional information regarding the interests of those participants and other persons who may be deemed participants in the transaction may be obtained by reading the joint proxy statement/prospectus regarding the proposed merger when it becomes available. Free copies of this document may be obtained as described above.

SOURCE Severn Bancorp, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.severnbank.com


The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. [Xinhua/Ju Zhenhua]

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua)  Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday expressed his congratulations on the successful launch of the core module of China's space station.

On behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the CMC, extended warm congratulations and sincere greetings in a message to all who have participated in the mission.

Xi said in the message that the successful launch of the core module Tianhe marks that China's space station construction has entered the full implementation stage, which lays a solid foundation for follow-up tasks.

He noted that building a space station and national space laboratory is an important goal of the three-step strategy of China's manned space program, and an important leading project to boost the country's strength in science and technology, as well as in space.

In the message, Xi said he hopes all members of the mission, through self-reliance and innovation, will be completely successful in their space station construction mission and make new and greater contributions to building a modern socialist country in an all-around way.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. [Xinhua/Jin Liwang]

Premier Li Keqiang and member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee Wang Huning, both also members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, watched the launch at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

The congratulatory message was read aloud by Zhang Youxia, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and vice CMC chairman, at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Hainan Province.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site at 11:23 a.m. (Beijing Time).

China's space station is a crewed space station independently built and operated by China. It consists of three modules: the core module Tianhe, and the Wentian and Mengtian lab modules. Tianhe is the management and control center of the space station, and it is the first space station module launched into orbit.

According to the mission schedule, China will complete the construction of the space station in orbit in 2022. The station will have the ability to carry out long-term scientific and technological experiments and explore space resources in low-Earth orbit.

(Source: Xinhua)
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President Muhammadu Buhari could face impeachment proceedings if the security summit to be held by the House of Representatives fails to improve the security situation in the country, an opposition lawmaker has said.

Dachung Bagos (PDP, Plateau), who represents Jos South/Jos East federal constituency of Plateau State, said the security summit to be organised by the House is the last opportunity for the President.

He said this while appearing on a Channels TV Sunrise Daily programme on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the House inaugurated a special ad-hoc committee, chaired by the Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila. The committee will organise a security summit between May 24 and 28.

Mr Bagos said if the summit fails to yield the needed changes, the lawmakers will call for the resignation of the president or impeach him.

After this last resort with this summit, if nothing is done by the executive, after some months, we will call for the resignation of the president. We have the power to impeach the president.

. So this is like the last resort, we are taking it seriously. We know the discussion we had to make. We know how members were being talked to.

He added that We can assure Nigerians that this summit, the National Assembly will hit the gavel and tell the president if he cannot protect lives of Nigerians, he should let someone else do it

On Tuesday, the House had an executive session during which 12 resolutions were reached including organising the summit.

It is unclear if Mr Bagos statement has the broad support of the lawmakers. The ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), controls both chambers of the National Assembly.

The president has called the bluff of the House in previous attempts to hold him accountable for general insecurity in the country, including an invitation by the House in the aftermath of the Zabarmari killings in 2020. He had said he would attend the summon by the lawmakers but later refused to.

As the security situation in the country worsens, PREMIUM TIMES reported that in the second week of April, over 239 people were killed and 44 kidnapped. Furthermore, states like Niger and Yobe have seen an increase in terrorists taking over territories.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low 69F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low 69F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Patna, April 29 : The experts committee set up by the Patna High Court submitted its report before the judges wherein it has found many loopholes in the action plan of the state government to fight the corona infection.

The three-member committee found that over 1000 beds are not occupied in PMCH, IGIMS, Medanta hospital due to unavailability of oxygen.

"As these hospitals are unable to get a continuous supply of oxygen, they are refusing patients for admission," the committee told the court.

As per the report, Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH) has a capacity of 1,750 beds but patients on only 106 beds are getting oxygen. Medanta hospital has a capacity of 500 beds, but the hospital has no oxygen supply.

The judges, Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh and Justice Mohit Kumar Shah, after the report, had passed harsh comments against the health department.

"We had strong doubts about the claim of the state government, hence we had constituted the committee and our suspicion was true," the bench said.

The high court has also directed the state government to ensure round-the-clock supply of oxygen and submit fresh reports.

The committee has also pointed out that 46,000 posts of doctors are vacant in the state. Upon this, the court asked what was the government doing over the years. It also asked the state government to clarify how it will arrange doctors in emergency situations.

The high court directed the government to submit a detailed report on the deaths taking place every day due to coronavirus.
A mans scalp was reportedly left lying in the road after a late-night machete attack in Manchester.

Officers were called at around 7.15pm on Wednesday evening to a report of an assault on Birch Lane, Dukinfield.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) today said they believe the man had been assaulted by three other men, one armed with a machete.

The victim, who has not been named, suffered serious head neck and shoulder injuries and was taken to hospital by ambulance, where he underwent surgery.

His injuries are not believed to be life threatening. No arrests have been made.

Witness from the scene told the Daily Mail the injuries were caused by a machete and pictures from the scene appeared to show what looked like a scalp on the pavement.

Detective Inspector David Donlan, of GMPs Tameside district, said: This was a horrific attack that left a man with serious injuries.

His injuries are not life-threatening but could have been a lot worse.

We are appealing for anyone saw anything or may have information to contact us on 0161 856 9262.

The local area was cordoned off by police while they undertook an investigation.
New Delhi: The assembly elections to four states and one union territory is nearing their conclusion. Voting for the last phase ended in West Bengal today.

Zee News on Thursday (April 29) presented the Maha Exit Poll to predict who will win the elections to five assemblies - West Bengal (294 seats), Assam (126 seats), Tamil Nadu (234 seats), Kerala (140 seats) and Puducherry (30 seats).

BJP looks set to retain power in Assam and win Puducherry as well.

The battle of Bengal looks quite close, but as per the Maha Exit Poll, BJP certainly has an edge here as well.

In Tamil Nadu, DMK-Congress alliance is slated to get a comfortable victory with a massive margin.

In Kerala, the ruling LDF alliance is expected to retain power as the pollsters predict a tough one for UDF.

Here are the final numbers according to Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

West Bengal Exit Polls results (Total seats  294):

The battle of Bengal seems to be much closer than other states. While, ABP News - C Voter predicts a win for Mamata Banerjee's TMC, Republic-CNX and India TV-Peoples Pulse show BJP having the edge.

Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

BJP - 144, TMC  132, Congress+  15, Others  1

Republic-CNX:

BJP - 138-148, TMC  128-138, Congress+  11-21, Others  1-3

ABP News  C Voter:

BJP+ - 109-121, TMC  152-164, Congress+  15-25, Others  0

INDIA TV - Peoples Pulse:

BJP+ - 173-192, TMC  64-88, Congress+  7-12, Others  0

TV9 - Pollstrat:

BJP+ - 125-135, TMC  142-152, Congress+  16-26, Others  0

India Today - Axis My India:

BJP+ - 134-160, TMC  130-156, Congress+  0-2, Others  0-1

Assam Exit Poll results (Total seats  126):

BJP looks set to retain power in Assam. All major pollsters predict a win for the party.

Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

BJP+ - 73, Congress+ - 51, Others  2

News 24  Chanakya:

BJP+ - 61-79, Congress+ - 47-65, Others  0-3

India Today  Axis My India:

BJP+ - 75-85, Congress+ - 40-50, Others - 1-4

ABP News  C Voter:

BJP+: 58-71, Congress+: 53-66, Others: 0-5

Republic TV-CNX:

BJP+ - 74-84, Congress+ - 40-50, Others-1-3

Tamil Nadu Exit Poll results (Total seats  234):

DMK-Congress alliance looks in a comfortable position to cross the halfway mark of 118 seats in the assembly.

Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

AIADMK+  57, DMK+  173, Others  4

Republic-CNX:

AIADMK+  58-68, DMK+  160-170, Others  4-6

News 24  Chanakya:

AIADMK+  46-68, DMK+  164-186, Others  0-6

India Today  Axis My India:

AIADMK+  38-54, DMK+  175-195, Others  0-5

ABP - C Voter:

AIADMK+  58-70, DMK+  160-172, Others  0-7

Kerala Exit Poll results (Total seats -140):

LDF is expected to retain power in Kerala, as per most pollsters.

Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

LDF  91, UDF  47, Others  2

Republic-CNX:

LDF  72-80, UDF  58-64, BJP  1-5, Others  0

India Today  Axis My India:

LDF - 104-120, UDF - 20-36, BJP - 0-2

ABP News - C Voter:

LDF - 71-77, UDF - 62-68, BJP - 0-2, Others - 0

News 24 - Chanakya:

LDF - 93-111, UDF - 26-44, BJP- 0-6, Others - 0-3

Puducherry Exit Poll results (Total seats  30):

BJP is looking good to form the next government in the union territory.

Zee News Maha Exit Poll:

BJP+  19, Congress+  10, Others  1

Republic-CNX:

BJP+  16-20, Congress+  11-13, Others  0

ABP News - C Voter:

BJP+: 19-23, Congress+ - 6-10, Others: 1-2

Live TV
NORTHERN SPY by Flynn Berry (W&N 16.99, 304 pp)

NORTHERN SPY

by Flynn Berry (W&N 16.99, 304 pp)

Two sisters working in Belfast  one a producer for the BBC who has an infant son, the other a paramedic  lie at the heart of this elegantly wrought story about the perils of not being what you seem.

Tessa is at work at the BBC when footage of an IRA robbery at a petrol station comes in. She is astonished to see her sister Marian pulling on a black mask and taking part.

She cannot believe it. Both girls were brought up to oppose Republicanism and, besides, shes supposedly on holiday by the sea, miles away from Belfast.

The police, however, are convinced that Marian is an active member of the IRA, even now, years after the Good Friday agreement.

Tessa confronts her, only to discover that there are secrets within secrets in Marians life, and so she, too, is dragged into the sinister and dangerous world of terrorism, with nerve-shredding suspense.

VANISHED by James Delargy (Simon & Schuster 14.99, 496 pp)

VANISHED

by James Delargy (Simon & Schuster 14.99, 496 pp)

This second novel from the promising Delargy demonstrates just how good a storyteller he is. The Kane family, Lorcan and Naiyana, as well as their six-year-old son Dylan, suddenly abandon their comfortable life in Perth, Western Australia, and relocate to an abandoned gold mining town, Kallayee, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.

But their new life in the wilderness does not turn out the way they might have hoped.

The old town has been deserted for years, but the gold might not have disappeared and three men are secretly looking for it.

So begins an enthralling confrontation between the covert miners and the Kane family living above them  only for the family to disappear into thin air, leading to the arrival of a female detective from their previous home in Perth to investigate.

Full of twists and abrupt surprises, the pace never flags as the ugly truth begins to emerge.

THE HIT LIST by Holly Seddon (Trapeze 8.99, 352 pp)

THE HIT LIST

by Holly Seddon (Trapeze 8.99, 352 pp)

Exactly a year ago, teacher Marianne Heywoods husband, Greg, was knocked off his bike and killed on his way to work and shes still struggling to cope with the loss.

There is a new man in her life, but she cant forget her husband and so on the anniversary night she cross-examines his laptop for memories of him. But what she finds terrifies her.

Apparently, Greg had hired a hitman from the dark web to assassinate her and he is out there right now.

So begins a captivating game of cat-and-mouse, with Marianne desperately trying to work out why her beloved husband would do such a monstrous thing, and how she can save herself. Or was he trying to protect her in some way from his own misdeeds?

Meanwhile Sam, the hitman, stalks ever closer as Marianne discovers unpalatable truths about the respectable world she and Greg appeared to inhabit: compelling and supremely well-told.
The futuristic machines lid automatically lowers and locks in place.

The contraption, which looks like a cross between a food processor and a frying pan, begins to spin and whirr  think a washing machine gearing up for its spin cycle. But its not cleaning clothes. Its getting ready to cook.

Soon the top opens and a side compartment filled with a thick brown sauce is catapulted into the pan. Thirty seconds after, a container of fried chicken to be launched into the fray. Steam begins to rise from the lid vents.

Less than a minute later, the lid rises one last time as the machine plays a robotic tune reminiscent of a Nokia cell phone ringtone from 2004. The song is met by the sound of sizzling and the sweet, tangy scent of General Tsos Chicken fills the air.

Dinner is served. By a robot.

The machine isnt just a piece of equipment at Komodo, a new Chinese restaurant in Brick. Its essentially a staff member; one of six such contraptions that prepare nearly ever single dish on the menu.

A machine cooks General Tso's Chicken at Komodo in Brick, a new restaurant using robots to cook food. (Jeremy Schneider | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Fried rices, sauces and soups are still made by hand, but almost every other dish is cooked by machine. All the staff has to do is load ingredients into the proper section, hit the right buttons on the machines touch screen, and the automated cooking begins.

You press the button, it beeps, the top comes up and youre ready, co-owner and Red Bank native George Beyar said.

Komodo, which opened on April 3, believes it is the first eatery in the United States using the technology.

Beyar and a group of partners were looking to get into the restaurant industry when they saw a demonstration of Megcook Automatic Cooking Pots and were immediately sold. Restaurant partner Johnny Guan said they found out many restaurants in China employ the technology, but didnt know of any in the United States using it. The ability to cook food consistently, quickly and with a smaller restaurant staff made the machines an easy choice for the restaurant.

Its consistent, Beyar said. When you go to other restaurants, it matters whos cooking it. We do the same ingredients, as far as the sauces, and do the same process, and those machines are exact.

A machine cooks General Tso's Chicken at Komodo in Brick, a new Chinese restaurant using robots to prepare food. (Jeremy Schneider | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

As restaurants across New Jersey struggle to hire and the industry aims to rebound after massive COVID-19 losses, Beyar sees the robots enabling him to run a small staff but also hire almost anyone to work in the kitchen.

You really cut down on the manpower because I could run four machines (at once), Beyar said. We could have younger people come in and learn how to use them in and work just like any other restaurant, like McDonalds or Chick-fil-A.

Beyar and Guan say the restaurant has already been embraced by the Brick community, with a steady base of regular customers already building. They hope to continue expanding with locations in Edison and New Brunswick within the next year.

We want to be the next Panda Express, Guan said.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jeremy Schneider may be reached at jschneider@njadvancemedia.com. Tell us your coronavirus story or send a tip here.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Joe Biden is declaring in his first address to a joint session of Congress that America is rising anew."

He's pointing to the nations emergence from the pandemic as a vital moment to rebuild the U.S. economy and fundamentally transform roles the government plays in American life.

Biden is urging a $1.8 trillion investment in children, families and education that would fundamentally transform roles the government plays in American life. He's marking his first 100 days in office as the nation emerges from a confluence of crises, making his case Wednesday night before a pared-down gathering of mask-wearing legislators because of coronavirus restrictions.
Pilgrim's Ashton-under-Lyne pork processing plant has been forced to put 100 workers on a three-day week as China's ban on exports continues to impact the sector.

The pork processor said the delay in reinstating the licence to export to the world's largest pork market had 'significantly impacted the profitability of the site in Ashton'.

The company, formally known as Tulip, added that this meant the current situation was 'financially unsustainable and could put at risk the site and its 600 employees'.

The Greater Manchester based site had been previously licensed to export products to China, but this was voluntarily suspended by the company in October due to a number of positive Covid tests at the site.

Pilgrim's received a clean bill of health from Public Health England (PHE) and local health authorities in early December.

But while the Ashton site was due to have its licence reinstated, this had been withheld 'while political tensions between the UK and China have escalated', it said.

To ensure it remains commercially viable, the processor said it had no option but to reduce the number of operational hours per week within the abattoir section of the site.

The abattoir is now only operating from Monday to Wednesday  with impacted employees placed on furlough for the remaining two days per week.

A spokesperson for Pilgrims said: While we do not take this action lightly, these measures are absolutely necessary in order to prevent redundancies and protect jobs.

"The delay in reinstating our export licence with China has had a significant impact on site profitability and without action the commercial viability of the site is under threat.

We are working closely with the government and relevant authorities to have the export licence with China reinstated without further delay, and once this is achieved, we will look to return to previous shift patterns.

Defra said although there were a 'small number of businesses' that could not currently export pork products to China, this issue was 'not unique to the UK'.

"We recognise the challenges the sector is facing and are closely monitoring the situation," the department's spokesperson said.

Defra will continue to support the affected establishments, working closely with UK industry and the British embassy in Beijing, with the aim of securing the resumption of exports.

Earlier this month, the sector called for a 3.2 million Covid support package to recognise the impact of overweight pigs on producers' businesses.

The request, by the National Pig Association (NPA) and processors, follows similar schemes in Scotland and NI that reflect Covid-related losses suffered by producers.
A fisherman repairs his boat in the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, at Masinloc, Zambales, the Philippines, April 22, 2015.

The Vietnamese government on Thursday denounced Chinas annual, unilateral fishing ban in the South China Sea, which begins May 1.

Vietnam opposes and resolutely rejects China's unilateral decision, Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Deputy Spokesman Doan Khac Viet said at a press conference in Hanoi.

He said it violated Vietnams sovereignty over the Paracel Islands, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea agreed by the Southeast Asian bloc in 2003. Viet added it violates the Vietnam-China agreement on the basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related issues.

The comment came despite Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc telling visiting Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on Monday to not let the hostile forces destroy Sino-Vietnam relations. He emphasized the need for political and military cooperation.

The fishing ban, which runs through Sept. 16, is typically opposed by neighboring countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, who reject Chinas assertion of its jurisdiction over contested waters.

China says the ban is aimed at environmental conservation and has has unilaterally enforced it since 1995, mostly targeting its own ships but has gone after foreign fishing boats violating the ban since at least 2002, Chinese government documents show.

A 2017 study by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a program of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, confirms that foreign fishing boats have on multiple occasions been targeted during the ban by Chinese enforcers in recent years.

That said, last year the 3-month ban passed with relatively few recorded incidents involving non-Chinese boats and fisherman.

According to a report Tuesday from Chinese state-run press agency Xinhua, the ban covers the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the waters north of 12 degrees north latitude in the South China Sea.

Xinhua described the unilateral ban as part of Chinas efforts to protect marine fishery resources.

Map showing the 12th parallel north in the South China Sea. [Image: Google Earth; Analysis: BenarNews]

Map showing the 12th parallel north in the South China Sea. [Image: Google Earth; Analysis: BenarNews]

Chinas expansive maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea often put it at odds with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, who all maintain competing claims. And while overfishing is rife in these waters by vessels of many nations, China is widely viewed as a key source of illegal and unregulated fishing.

Last years ban was met with protests from fishing associations in both Vietnam and the Philippines.

Xinhua reported that this year the China Coast Guard will play a central role in enforcing the ban, noting that the CCG will work closely with other agencies to strengthen joint operations, communications, and intelligence-sharing.

The authorities will use patrols, surveillance technology, and other means to enforce the ban, Xinhua said.

This will be Chinas first fishing ban since passing its new Coast Guard Law, which granted the CCG more freedom to use force in the defense of Chinas maritime claims and attracted criticism from other regional governments.

In a written testimony submitted Thursday to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, German Marshall Fund Asia Program Director Bonnie Glaser explained that China has advanced its vast territorial claims in the contested waters through a variety of gray zone tactics, including the use of non-military assets such as coast guard vessels and maritime militia.

Chinese fishing and coast guard vessels have also operated without permission in the EEZs of Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Indonesia, Glaser said.

The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea defines an EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, as an area generally extending 200 nautical miles from shore, within which coastal countries retain special rights to exploration and use of marine resources, even though it is international territory.

Glaser added that in 2020, the CCG not only maintained a persistent presence at Second Thomas Shoal, Luconia Shoals and Scarborough Shoal, but even increased the frequency of patrols during the pandemic. She was referring to disputed features in the South China Sea where China has been involved in past standoffs with the Philippines and Malaysia.

Chau Vu of Radio Free Asias Vietnamese service contributed to this report.
New Delhi, April 29 : A new study using data from India and five other countries finds that using domestic travel bans to control Covid-19 infections may be inadvisable.

Depending on their duration, these restrictions can lead to more rather than fewer infections overall, especially when there is a large urban-rural migrant population, it indicated.

As India battles a severe second wave of Covid-19, state governments are once again faced with the question: Should they use travel bans to control disease transmission? In the first wave of Covid-19, most states chose this option. The hardships faced by migrant workers prevented from returning home to their villages were seen as a necessary sacrifice to reduce the spread of disease into rural India.

In the second wave, the Delhi government has urged migrants not to leave. Other cities may follow suit.

A new research paper by academics at the University of Chicago suggests that imposing travel bans can counter-intuitively increase the total spread of the disease, creating a lose-lose situation.

This outcome occurs when a country has a large migrant population that is prevented from leaving an urban hotspot and returning to rural areas. The researchers show that if the net effect of a travel ban is to delay the movement of these people, rather than prevent it entirely, the policy can lead to more cases overall.

The paper uses detailed data on rural-urban migration, travel ban policies, and Covid-19 cases to show that this lose-lose outcome occurred in India during the first wave, due to travel bans imposed on migrants wishing to leave Mumbai.

Elaborating on the findings, Anant Sudarshan, South Asia Director of The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and one of the study authors, said: "The national lockdown in the first wave trapped millions of migrants inside big cities like Mumbai that were fast-growing coronavirus hotspots.

"Eventually people were able to leave, but variations in government policy meant that the length of time they were detained depended on where they wanted to go. In the case of rural districts where people could return quicker -- using the Shramik Special Trains for example -- cases rose modestly at the destination.

"But for those areas where bans were in effect longer, there was a much more intensive increase in coronavirus, likely because the returning population was now more likely to be infected, having been trapped in the hotspot longer." Apart from Mumbai, the paper further analyses data from five other countries where migration is prevalent -- China, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Kenya.

Together these countries comprise roughly 40 per cent of the global population and all of them had initial outbreaks in a few hotspot locations.

The researchers used epidemiological data, migration data, and information on travel bans from all these countries to show that although exceptionally long bans may work to reduce total cases, moderate durations are associated with significant increases in disease spread.

Fiona Burlig, Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, one of the co-authors of the study, adds: "The evidence indicates that if the duration of a travel ban is not long enough, we may end up imposing hardship on people while perversely seeing more spread of infection.

"Getting the duration wrong is easy because it is not possible to predict in advance what the optimal length should be, and in a democracy, such restrictions cannot be easily sustained. There may be merit in letting people go home early, and indeed encouraging them to do so, rather than forcing them to stay."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Edison Housing Authority joins the New Jersey Purchasing Group by BidNet Direct Registered vendors can access bids, related documents, addendum and award information.

Edison Housing Authority announced it has joined BidNet Directs New Jersey Purchasing Group and will be publishing and distributing upcoming bid opportunities on the system. BidNets New Jersey Purchasing Group connects participating agencies from across New Jersey to a large vendor pool and streamlines the bid and vendor management process. BidNets New Jersey Purchasing Group provides notifications to registered vendors of new relevant solicitations, as well as any addenda and award information from participating agencies across New Jersey, and can be accessed at http://www.bidnetdirect.com/new-jersey.

Edison Housing Authority joined the purchasing group in April, and will be utilizing the system to streamline their purchasing process including bid management, bid distribution and vendor relations. The New Jersey Purchasing Group is a single, online location for managing sourcing information and activities and provides local New Jersey government agencies the tools needed to minimize costs and save time throughout the purchasing process.

The New Jersey Purchasing Group expands an agencys vendor pool and enhances vendor competition without increasing distribution costs. In addition to the existing vendors on the New Jersey Purchasing Group, all vendors looking to do business with Edison Housing Authority can register online: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/new-jersey. The Housing Authority invites all interested bidders to register today.

Registered vendors can access all open bids, related documents and files, additional addenda and award information. In addition, the New Jersey Purchasing Group offers a value-added service to notify vendors of new bids targeted to their industry, all addenda and advance notification of expiring term contracts. Registered vendors have access to not only Edison Housing Authority bid opportunities, but all participating agency bids.

Our vendors can now save time and paper. They not only have direct access to our open bids, but those from other agencies throughout the state and can submit bids electronically. We invite all vendors to register on the New Jersey Purchasing Group to start receiving business opportunities, stated Deborah Hurley, Executive Director of Edison Housing Authority.

Vendors may register on the New Jersey Purchasing Group at: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/new-jersey. BidNets vendor support team is available to answer any questions regarding the registration process or the bid system at 800-835-4603 option 2.

Other local New Jersey government agencies looking to switch from a manual bid process, please contact the New Jersey Purchasing Group for a demonstration of the no-cost sourcing solution.

About Edison Housing Authority:

Edison Housing Authority provides qualified lower income families with the best opportunities for safe and decent housing and communities and to provide the resources to become financially independent.

Edison Housing Authority seeks to establish a community where residents can thrive in secure, affordable housing and can strive to reach economic self-sufficiency through support and training, thus improving their lives.

By partnering with neighborhood organizations, local and state governments, private sector developers and property owners, and supportive service providers, the EHA contributes to the prosperity of Edison. Creating and sustaining urban communities offer all citizens growing opportunities for creating better lives on common ground and with dignity.

EHA offers residents offers a variety of programs, workshops, and seminars with the goal of financial self-sufficiency and/or homeownership.

EHA hosts a full calendar of activities that bring residents together. EHA believes that socializing with neighbors is the best way to cement a community.

About BidNet Direct:

BidNet Direct, powered by mdf commerce, is a sourcing solution of regional purchasing groups available at no cost to local government agencies throughout the country. BidNet Direct runs regional purchasing groups, including the New Jersey Purchasing Group, across all 50 states that are used by over 1,600 local governments. To learn more and have your government agency gain better transparency and efficiency in purchasing, please visit https://www.bidnetdirect.com/buyers
Zhou Zhengyi is shown (left) in an undated photo next to a screenshot from his April 23 party in Shanghai.

Six high-profile state TV anchors in Shanghai have been suspended by their employers after they attended a recent birthday party for businessman Zhou Zhengyi following his early release from a 16-year jail term for "bribery" and "embezzlement."

Zhou threw a lavish 60th-birthday bash at a five-star hotel on the Bund in Shanghai on April 23, which was attended by several presenters and hosts from state-run Dragon Television.

Video clips from the star-studded event went viral on social media platforms in China, showing Zhou roaming around the venue, taking photos with guests, in obviously high spirits.

All six presenters have now been suspended, RFA has learned.

A person familiar with the situation who gave only a surname Fang, said an investigation team had arrived from Beijing just a few days ago to investigate the hosts' attendance at the party.

"It's not even the municipal government investigating any more," Fang said. "An investigation team from the central government has arrived."

He said other high-profile figures had been found to have attended alongside the TV anchors.

"Several senior executives of the Shanghai Media Group went to the party as well," he said. "They didn't admit it at first, but they were exposed by other people."

The six TV anchors had initially claimed to have been there in a personal capacity, but Fang said they had each charged 100,000 yuan as a fee for their presence at the event.

The central investigators for the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will also be looking into how Zheng got out of prison two years before completing his sentence, he said.

The Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court would be among the targets of the investigation, for approving his early release, sources said.

'Glitzy celebration'

In a screenshot of a reply to a request for information from the Shanghai branch of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s propaganda department, Dragon TV said six of its presenters and show hosts had attended the glitzy celebration at the Wanda Ruihua hotel on the Bund in Shanghai on Sunday.

They were named as Cheng Lei, Chen Rong, Zhu Zhen, Ni Lin, Fang Haiyan, and Dai Liufei. A seventh presenter, Gao Yuan, was named, but wasn't a Dragon TV employee, it said, claiming that no fees had been charged.

Another screenshot reported that Gao Yuan had discovered they were on an official media blacklist since the party, while another showed an invitee turning down the glitzy invitation for fear of political repercussions.

Zhou, who served 13 years of his prison term, recently took a job as "adviser" to a cosmetics and skincare company in Shanghai.

Known in Hong Kong as Chau Ching-ngai, where he is wanted by the city's Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), Zhou was once Shanghais richest man and the 11th richest in mainland China, with an estimated fortune of U.S.$320 million from property development and stock market speculation.

Zhou's case was linked to the downfall of former Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu, who is currently serving an 18-year jail term for misuse of Shanghai's social security fund.

Hong Kong's ICAC wants to question him in connection with fraud allegations linked to publicly listed companies there.



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
In a city whose news kiosks have become glorified chewing gum emporiums, where the Grand Central newsstand shelves are overtaken by chips and phone chargers, one of my few remaining happy places is Casa Magazines. Its a hole of a shop on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 12th Street, and every wall and every inch of floor heaves with obscure, international fashion and design publications, for a dwindling class of print lovers. (I still remember, when I founded a magazine in 2015, the relief I felt when I saw my first issue piled on the floor of Casa; then it was real.) Once upon a time, before New York was swallowed into the smartphone screen, the city had dozens of shops like this. Now, if you care about fashion photography and print design, you probably belong in a museum.

Fellow print media nostalgics ought to seek out Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine at the Jewish Museum. It offers a longing gaze on the last centurys fashion and editorial photography  with snaps by Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, for publications like Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Life, Look, Fortune and the rest.

With just 150 works, among them several facsimiles, the show is too small and spare for comfort. In many places, it feels more like a drive-by of midcentury American graphics and photography than a systematic study. (Among the absent: the photographers George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst, and the designer Alvin Lustig.)
( ) (FRA:R8L) is set to transform into a graphite producer in the current quarter with the pending acquisition of a 70% stake in the Zavalievsky group of companies based in Ukraine complementing the companys recent membership of the European Battery Alliance (EBA).

The ZG Group acquisition will give Volt the opportunity to become a key participant in the European EV battery value chain leveraging the benefits of membership of the EBA.

Completion of the acquisition will immediately transform Volt into one of the few ASX-listed graphite producers, positioning the company well ahead of most of its peer graphite companies to become a graphite producer without the usual greenfield financing and development risk.

The company intends to become a fully integrated graphite mine and SPG producer based in Europe with plans to progress the development of LIB anode material (SPG) to be in production by 2022.

Volt also intends to continue to progress the exploration and development of its wholly-owned Bunyu Graphite Project in Tanzania and its gold projects in Guinea, West Africa.

"Significant step forward"

It has signed binding share purchase agreements (SPAs) in April 2021 to acquire a 70% interest in the Zavalievsky group of companies for a total of US$7.6 million.

Volt managing director Trevor Matthews said: The signing of the binding share purchase agreements is a significant step forward for Volt in its ambition to be a graphite producer.

The acquisition of a controlling interest in the ZG Group positions Volt years ahead of its peer graphite companies and without the usual development risks associated with a greenfield project.

Following Volts recently announced membership of the European Battery Alliance providing Volt with access to business development opportunities and a business investment platform, the ZG Group acquisition has the potential to make Volt a key participant in the supply of graphite and battery anode materials into the growing European market with excellent access to other markets in the USA and Middle East.

Completion of the transaction remains subject to the satisfactory completion of Volts due diligence by May 14, 2021, or such later date as the parties may agree.

Advantages of Zavalievsky purchase

The Zavalievsky Graphite business has the following significant advantage:

 The Zavalievsky Graphite business is in eastern Europe is close to key markets, with significant developments in lithium-ion battery (LIB) facilities planned to service the European-based car makers and renewable energy sector;

 Plans to produce battery anode material using existing graphite production to become a fully integrated supplier to LIB cell makers based in Europe;

 Makes graphite products across the range with the potential to significantly increase its large flake production;

 Produces a high value green purified 99.5% total graphitic content (TGC) product;

 Long life multi-decade producing mine with further exploration upside;

 Existing customer base and graphite product supply chains, which Volt expects to be able to leverage off in developing its existing Bunyu graphite project in Tanzania;

 Excellent transport infrastructure covering road, rail, river and sea freight combined with reliable grid power, ample potable groundwater supply and good communications;

 An experienced workforce to assist with training, commissioning and ramp-up for Volts Bunyu development;

 Potential to generate material cashflow, which could make Volt internally funded for corporate costs and working capital into the future;

 Co-products of quarry stone for the domestic market and garnet for the European market that could generate material cash flow for relatively low capital and operating cost leveraging the synergies from the graphite business infrastructure and experienced mining and processing staff; and

 A 79% interest in 636 hectares of freehold land, with the mine, processing plant and other buildings and facilities located on that land.

Battery anode materials

The ZG Group has plans to install a processing plant and equipment to commence the production of spheronised purified graphite (SPG) for the European LIB anode market within the next 12 months.

It has already attracted interest from LIB cell manufacturers and major carmakers.

Bunyu Graphite Project

The Bunyu Graphite Project is the largest JORC resource in Tanzania with 461 million tonnes at 4.9% TGC, a proven reserve of 127 million tonnes at 4.4% TGC and 22.6 million tonnes of contained graphite.

There is huge upside potential with exploration of less than 6% of the project area.

All key approvals are in place and advanced funding discussions for Stage 1, expanding to 170,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) with excellent economics for Stage 2.

The project is being undertaken in a two-stage development strategy with Stage 1 significantly de-risking the Stage 2 expansion through a lower risk small scale development with mine and plant operations, trained workforce, supply chain and product sales experience.

Stage 1 is a 400,000 tpa plant to supply 23,600 tpa at 6.26% TGC feed grade and Stage 2 planned production of 170,000 tpa.

The financial analysis for the Stage 2 expansion is based on the pre-feasibility study, which has a 1.4-year payback, post-tax NPV of US$890 million with an average annual EBITDA of US$195 million.

Targeted funding of US$40 million includes the development cost of US$31.8 million and resettlement compensation of US$3.5 million.

Stage 1 is based on an initial 7-year project life, with plans to expand to a multi-decade project via the Stage 2 development.

A Definitive Feasibility Study for the Stage 2 expansion will be undertaken once finance has been approved for Stage 1.

There is at least 22 years project life, with potential multi-decade project based on current JORC mineral resource.

The development funding is estimated at US$173 million, with a 1.4-year payback, post-tax NPV of US$890 million, average annual EBITDA US$195 million.

The plan is for Stage 2 to be commissioned in 2023 to align with the forecast significant increase in graphite demand from 2022.

Volt is in advanced discussions with African development banks.

Guinea gold projects

The company owns six permits covering 348.7 square kilometres in the highly prospective Birimian Greenstone Belt in the Siguiri Basin.

These six permits fall under the Kouroussa, Mandiana and Konsolon projects.

The Kouroussa and Kouroussa West permits border the ( ) gold project, which last year announced a gold intersection of 46 metres at 6.58 g/t.

Further, 90 grab samples from Monebo and Nzima returned grades of up to 14.5 g/t at Nzima and 8.89 g/t at Monebo.

A legacy soil geochemistry review of Konsolon data found multiple gold in soil anomalies between 1-2.5 kilometres in length across this permit.

The review found high-grade gold results including 20.25 g/t, 12.87 g/t, 5.12 g/t and 4.97 g/t.

Auger drilling programs on four permits are in progress, with initial drill sample assay results due to be announced soon.
A Workman for God is the creation of published author Alberta Betty Roveto. A talented poet, these poems are an expression of one woman's ardent faith.

Roveto shares, When we believe and trust God, when we are not ashamed of our faith and when we have opportunity to speak truth and glorify God and His Son the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. We are workman for God.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Alberta Betty Rovetos new book is a collection of Christian poetry written to Gods glory, honor, and praise. But beyond exalting God, the book also provides comfort, encouragement, and even instruction meant to strengthen ones faith.

View a synopsis of A Workman for God on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase A Workman for God at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about A Workman for God, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States, Japan and South Korea are arranging a meeting of their foreign ministers during the G7 meeting in the United Kingdom next week, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Thursday, citing multiple government sources.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong are expected to affirm their cooperation on dealing with North Korea's nuclear and missile development, according to the newspaper article.

North Korea test launched two suspected ballistic missiles into the sea near Japan in March, underscoring steady progress in its weapons programme.

This month, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he and U.S. President Joe Biden agreed to insist that Pyongyang abide by United Nations resolutions on its nuclear arsenal and missiles.

The United States is taking the lead in arranging the trilateral talks on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers' meeting, to be held May 3-5, the Yomiuri reported its source as saying.

Mogi and Blinken are also expected to hold a meeting, but it is unclear whether bilateral talks between the Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers will take place, the newspaper said.

(Reporting by Eimi Yamamitsu; Editing by Karishma Singh and Gerry Doyle)
Saying Pennsylvanias law on the offense is unconstitutionally vague, the state Supreme Court on Thursday voided the prison sentence of a motorist convicted of refusing to submit to chemical testing after being accused of driving while under a DUI-related license suspension.

The problem, Justice David N. Wecht found in the high courts majority opinion, is that the 20-year-old statute under which Khalil Eid was prosecuted doesnt state a maximum term of imprisonment for that offense.

That omission by the Legislature violates state and federal requirements that minimum and maximum sentences be listed for violations of any particular law, Wecht concluded. The statute under which Eid was prosecuted specifies only a minimum sentence of 90 days without stating a maximum penalty.

Eid was sentenced to 90 days to 6 months in prison by a Philadelphia County judge on his conviction. He was arrested because police said he collided with two parked cars in February 2015. Investigators said Eid was intoxicated when the wreck occurred.

Wecht found the gap in the state law under which Eid was prosecuted regarding lack a maximum sentence renders ithe statute unconstitutionally vague and inoperable for the time being.

We leave it to the General Assembly to remedy this impediment, if it so chooses, either by amending the statute to provide for a maximum term of imprisonment or by expressly permitting flat sentencing within a range not to exceed that maximum sentence, the justice wrote.

The high courts ruling doesnt leave Eid completely off the hook.

Wecht found that Eid still has to pay the $1,000 fine specified for his offense.
[April 29, 2021] Amplio Launches Esperanza, a First of its Kind Digital Spanish-Language Dyslexia Curriculum

AUSTIN, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AmplioSpeech ("Amplio"), a developer of a digital platform that connects students, educators and therapists with advanced technologies to help students with special needs, announced today the launch of a digital Spanish-language dyslexia curriculum, Esperanza, developed by Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagan. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is offering Amplio's digital intervention platform with the Esperanza curriculum to all 1,029 school districts at no cost. Earlier this year, Amplio and TEA launched an English-language dyslexia digital intervention platform utilizing the Multisensory Teaching Approach (MTA), developed by Margaret Taylor Smith, which is also available to all Texas school districts at no cost. Esperanza is the first Spanish-language dyslexia curriculum of its kind. "Using advanced technologies, Amplio's platform facilitates individualized, outcomes-focused interventions and intensive digital guided practice, correlating to student progress," said Dr. Yair Shapira, founder and CEO of Amplio. "We're excited to offer the first-ever digital Spanish-language dyslexia curriculum with Esperanza, which will help bilingual students gain native language literacy." "Amplio was designed for use in the classroom, during a lesson, as well as when remote instruction is needed," Dr. Shapira added. "At a time when educators and parents are concerned with the tremendous toll of learning loss and the 'COVID slide,' we must think out-of-the-box to help our students and educators quickly recover this lost time." By addressing specific sounds, words and general reading concepts, interventionists can use Esperanza to provide differentiated and individualized therapy for Spanish-speaking or bilingual students with dyslexia. Utlizing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the platform functions as an extension of the interventionist by assessing student responses and providing visual and audio cues to support the lesson. Amplio recently piloted Esperanza in Ysleta and Crowley ISDs, directly impacting over 40 students with dyslexia.



Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagan, Director of the Valley Speech Language and Learning Center and Amplio partner, commented, "It has always been my hope that all children have access to high-quality reading interventions. The demand for digital and online resources for students has dramatically increased. The Amplio platform allows the Esperanza Spanish literacy program to reach more students with the added benefit of highly-trained professionals who now have access to real-time data that informs and enhances literacy instruction. Through the Amplio platform we can further accelerate our mission of providing every bilingual child the opportunity to read and learn." In May 2020, TEA approached Amplio to help address learning challenges faced by students in speech and language therapy programs due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the switch to remote at-home learning. Speech-Language Pathologists have access to Amplio's platform and interact remotely with students to provide speech therapy required by each student's individualized education program (IEP). More than 10,000 students have received services through Amplio's platform, and the partnership has effectively allowed Speech-Language Pathologists and Interventionists to support large caseloads virtually, while also providing valuable documenting, monitoring and oversight services.

Amplio will be leading a live webinar about Esperanza on Thursday, April 29, 1:30-2:30 pm CT, via TEA . About Amplio

Amplio's digital platform connects students, educators, therapists and administrators with advanced technologies to help students with special needs maximize their potential and improve outcomes. Whether on-site or online, the platform equips students with individualized, high-fidelity interventions and enables educators to devote more time to direct instruction. Administrators gain a 360-degree view into student progress and programs, resources, compliance and funding. Our solutions are developed in conjunction with parents and a world-class advisory council, academics, and school administrators with expertise in special populations. Tens of thousands of students have received services and interventions using the Amplio platform since the solution was launched in 2019. About the Texas Education Agency

The Texas Education Agency is the state agency that oversees primary and secondary public education. It is headed by Commissioner of Education Mike Morath. TEA improves outcomes for Texas's 5.5 million public school students by providing leadership, guidance, and support across the state's 1,200 school systems. Contact: Morgan Moritz, mmoritz@piercom.com, 512-745-2575 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amplio-launches-esperanza-a-first-of-its-kind-digital-spanish-language-dyslexia-curriculum-301280592.html SOURCE AmplioSpeech

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EQS Group-News: PolyPeptide Group / Schlagwort(e): Borsengang

PolyPeptide Group legt IPO-Angebotspreis bei CHF 64.00 pro Aktie fest und beginnt Handel an der Schweizer Borse



29.04.2021 / 07:00





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FOR RELEASE IN SWITZERLAND - THIS IS A RESTRICTED COMMUNICATION AND YOU MUST NOT FORWARD IT OR ITS CONTENTS TO ANY PERSON TO WHOM FORWARDING THIS COMMUNICATION IS PROHIBITED BY THE LEGENDS CONTAINED HEREIN.



PolyPeptide Group legt IPO-Angebotspreis bei CHF 64.00 pro Aktie fest und beginnt Handel an der Schweizer Borse

Zug, 29. April 2021 - PolyPeptide Group AG (PolyPeptide oder die Gruppe), ein weltweit fuhrender Entwickler und Hersteller von Peptiden, hat das Bookbuilding-Verfahren ihres Borsengangs (IPO) erfolgreich abgeschlossen und den Angebotspreis bei CHF 64.00 pro Aktie festgelegt. Die Kotierung der Aktien und der Beginn des Handels an der Schweizer Borse (SIX) unter dem Tickersymbol PPGN erfolgen heute.

- Der IPO-Angebotspreis von PolyPeptide wurde bei CHF 64.00 pro Aktie festgelegt, was eine Marktkapitalisierung von CHF 2'120 Millionen impliziert.

- Das Angebot war mit einer starken Nachfrage von Schweizer und internationalen Investoren mehrfach uberzeichnet.

- Der Streubesitz (Free Float) betragt rund 35% vor einer allfalligen Ausubung der Mehrzuteilungsoption und 40% im Falle einer vollstandigen Ausubung der Mehrzuteilungsoption.

- Die Aktien von PolyPeptide (SIX: PPGN) werden heute kotiert und ab heute an der SIX gehandelt.

Peter Wilden, Prasident des Verwaltungsrates von PolyPeptide: Mit einer fokussierten Strategie seit den Anfangen im Jahr 1952 hat sich PolyPeptide zu einem fuhrenden Anbieter entwickelt. Heute stellt das Unternehmen rund die Halfte aller derzeit zugelassenen Peptidwirkstoffe her. Die Kotierung an der SIX ist ein wichtiger Meilenstein in der Geschichte unseres Unternehmens, soll aber auch als starkes Zeichen unserer Ambition gesehen werden, Innovation zum Nutzen von Patienten auf der ganzen Welt voranzutreiben. Mein Dank gilt dem PolyPeptide-Team und allen, die dazu beigetragen haben, dies zu erreichen.

Im Rahmen des Borsengangs haben die Syndikatsbanken erfolgreich 3'125'000 neue Aktien sowie 8'396'740 bestehende Aktien, die vom Alleinaktionar der Gruppe, Draupnir Holding B.V., angeboten wurden, jeweils zu einem Angebotspreis von CHF 64.00 pro Aktie platziert. Zudem hat der verkaufende Aktionar eine Mehrzuteilungsoption von bis zu 1'728'261 bestehenden Aktien gewahrt, die zum Angebotspreis innerhalb von 30 Kalendertagen nach dem ersten Handelstag ganz oder teilweise ausgeubt werden kann, was ein Platzierungsvolumen von insgesamt bis zu CHF 848 Millionen impliziert.

Basierend auf dem Angebotspreis belauft sich die implizite Marktkapitalisierung von PolyPeptide auf CHF 2'120 Millionen. Der Streubesitz betragt vor einer allfalligen Ausubung der Mehrzuteilungsoption rund 35%. Unter der Annahme einer vollstandigen Ausubung der Mehrzuteilungsoption wird der Streubesitz 40% betragen, und Draupnir Holding B.V. wird einen Anteil von 60% am Unternehmen behalten.

Wie beabsichtigt, erzielte PolyPeptide durch den Verkauf der neuen Aktien im Rahmen des Angebots einen Bruttoerlos von CHF 200 Millionen; dieser soll dazu verwendet werden, die laufenden Investitionsausgaben zu beschleunigen, die Expansion der Gruppe in verwandte Geschaftsbereiche voranzutreiben und langerfristig allenfalls weitere organische und nicht-organische Wachstumsmoglichkeiten zu verfolgen.

Raymond De Vre, Chief Executive Officer von PolyPeptide: Der erfolgreiche Borsengang ist eine Anerkennung der ausserordentlichen Erfolgsbilanz von PolyPeptide und dessen Team, das sich stets dafur einsetzt, auch die hochsten Kundenerwartungen zu erfullen. Fur die Zukunft wollen wir nun auch den Erwartungen unserer Investoren gerecht werden und ihr Vertrauen verdienen, und wir freuen uns auf die weiteren Kontakte mit den Marktteilnehmern.

Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley und BofA Securities fungieren als Joint Global Coordinators und Joint Bookrunners fur den Borsengang. Berenberg, Danske Bank und Zurcher Kantonalbank fungieren als Joint Bookrunners. Rothschild & Co. ist unabhangiger Finanzberater von PolyPeptide Group und Draupnir Holding B.V.

Wichtige IPO-Informationen und indikativer IPO-Zeitplan

Eckdaten Borsenkotierung Schweizer Borse SIX (International Reporting Standard) Ticker PPGN Valorennummer 111 076 085 ISIN CH1110760852 Nennwert CHF 0.01 pro Namenaktie Angebotspreis CHF 64.00 pro Aktie Basisangebot 3'125'000 neue Aktien

8'396'740 bestehende Aktien Mehrzuteilungsoption (Greenshoe) Bis zu 1'728'261 bestehende Aktien (15% des Basisangebots) Anzahl ausstehende Aktien 33'125'001 Aktien Indikativer IPO-Zeitplan Kotierung und erster Handelstag 29. April 2021 Einbuchung/Lieferung der angebotenen Aktien gegen Bezahlung des Angebotspreises 3. Mai 2021 Letzter Tag zur Ausubung der Mehrzuteilungsoption 28. Mai 2021

Kontakt

PolyPeptide Group

Michael Staheli, Head of Investor Relations & Corporate Communications

michael.staeheli@polypeptide.com

+41 41 723 20 34



Lemongrass Communications

karin.rhomberg@lemongrass.agency, andreas.hildenbrand@lemongrass.agency

+41 44 202 52 00



Uber PolyPeptide Group

PolyPeptide ist ein Auftragsentwickler und -Hersteller (CDMO) im Bereich proprietarer und generischer Peptide in GMP-Qualitat, die von Pharma- und Biotech-Unternehmen in zugelassenen pharmazeutischen Produkten, Medikamenten in der klinischen Entwicklung sowie in Generika eingesetzt werden. Das Unternehmen, dessen Anfange ins Jahr 1952 zuruckreichen, stellt heute rund die Halfte aller derzeit zugelassenen Peptidwirkstoffe her und verfugt uber eine globale Prasenz mit sechs GMP-zertifizierten Produktionsanlagen in Europa, den USA und Indien. Als multinationales Unternehmen mit uber 900 Mitarbeitenden vereint PolyPeptide umfassendes Wissen und Erfahrung. PolyPeptide ist organisch und durch selektive Akquisitionen bestehender Expertise gewachsen und ist heute ein fuhrendes Unternehmen in der ausgelagerten Peptidherstellung. Die Aktien von PolyPeptide (SIX: PPGN) sind an der Schweizer Borse kotiert. Weitere Informationen finden Sie unter polypeptide.com.



PolyPeptide Group AG, Dammstrasse 19, 6300 Zug, Schweiz



Disclaimer

This document is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to purchase or subscribe for shares. This document is not a prospectus within the meaning of the Swiss Financial Services Act and not a prospectus under any other applicable laws. Copies of this document may not be sent to jurisdictions, or distributed in or sent from jurisdictions, in which this is barred or prohibited by law. The information contained herein shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, in any jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation would be unlawful prior to registration, exemption from registration or qualification under the securities laws of any jurisdiction.

A decision to invest in securities of PolyPeptide Group should be based exclusively on the offering prospectus published by PolyPeptide Group AG (the "Company") for such purpose. Copies of the offering prospectus and any other supplements to the offering prospectus are/will be available free of charge in Switzerland for 12 months following the first day of trading on SIX Swiss Exchange at Credit Suisse AG, Zurich, Switzerland (email: equity.prospectus@credit-suisse.com). In addition, copies of the offering prospectus and any other supplements to the offering prospectus are/will be available free of charge in Switzerland from PolyPeptide Group AG, Investor Relations, Dammstrasse 19, 6300 Zug, Switzerland (phone: +41 41 723 20 34; email: michael.staeheli@polypeptide.com).

This document is not for publication or distribution in the United States of America (including its territories and possessions, any State of the United States and the District of Columbia), Canada, Japan or Australia or any other jurisdiction into which the same would be unlawful. This document does not constitute an offer or invitation to subscribe for or purchase any securities in such countries or in any other jurisdiction into which the same would be unlawful. In particular, the document and the information contained herein should not be distributed or otherwise transmitted into the United States of America or to publications with a general circulation in the United States of America. The securities referred to herein (the "Securities") have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), or the laws of any state, and may not be offered or sold in the United States of America absent registration under or an exemption from registration under the Securities Act. There will be no public offering of the Securities in the United States of America.

This document does not constitute an "offer of securities to the public" within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "UK Prospectus Regulation") of the Securities in the United Kingdom (the "UK"). Any offers of the Securities in the UK will be made pursuant to an exemption under the UK Prospectus Regulation from the requirement to produce a prospectus for offers of the Securities. In the UK, this document is only addressed to qualified investors within the meaning of the UK Prospectus Regulation. In addition, this document is only being distributed to and is only directed at (i) persons who are outside the United Kingdom or (ii) to investment professionals falling within article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "FSMA Order") or (iii) persons falling within Articles 49(2)(a) to (d), "high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc." of the FSMA Order, and (iv) persons to whom an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity within the meaning of Section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 may otherwise be lawfully communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons together being referred to as "relevant persons"). The Securities are only available to, and any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire such Securities will be engaged in only with, relevant persons. Any person who is not a relevant person should not act or rely on this document or any of its contents.

This document does not constitute an "offer of securities to the public" within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Union, as amended (the "Prospectus Regulation") in any member state of the European Economic Area (the "EEA"). Any offers of the Securities to persons in the EEA will be made pursuant to an exemption under the Prospectus Regulation from the requirement to produce a prospectus for offers of the Securities. In any member state of the EEA, this document is only addressed to qualified investors in that relevant member state within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation.

Identification of Target Market

Solely for the purposes of the product governance requirements contained within: (a) EU Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments, as amended ("MiFID II"); (b) articles 9 and 10 of Commission Delegated Directive (EU) 2017/593 supplementing MiFID II; and (c) local implementing measures (together, the "MiFID II Product Governance Requirements"), and disclaiming all and any liability, whether arising in tort, contract or otherwise, which any "manufacturer" (for the purposes of the MiFID II Product Governance Requirements) may otherwise have with respect thereto, the Securities have been subject to a product approval process by each underwriter (as defined below) established in the EEA, which has determined that the Securities are: (i) compatible with an end target market of retail investors and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II; and (ii) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels as are permitted by MiFID II (the "MiFID II Target Market Assessment").

Solely for the purposes of the product governance requirements of Chapter 3 of the FCA Handbook Product Intervention and Product Governance Sourcebook (the "UK Product Governance Requirements"), and /or any equivalent requirements elsewhere, and disclaiming all and any liability, whether arising in tort, contract or otherwise, which any "manufacturer" (for the purposes of the UK Product Governance Requirements and/or any equivalent requirements elsewhere) may otherwise have with respect thereto, the Securities have been subject to a product approval process by each underwriter (as defined below) established in the UK, which has determined that the Securities are: (i) compatible with an end target market of retail investors and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in Chapter 3 of the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook; and (ii) eligible for distribution through all permitted distribution channels (the "UK Target Market Assessment").

Notwithstanding the MiFID II Target Market Assessment and the UK Target Market Assessment, distributors should note that: the price of the Securities may decline and investors could lose all or part of their investment; the Securities offer no guaranteed income and no capital protection; and an investment in the Securities is compatible only with investors who do not need a guaranteed income or capital protection, who (either alone or in conjunction with an appropriate financial or other adviser) are capable of evaluating the merits and risks of such an investment and who have sufficient resources to be able to bear any losses that may result therefrom.

The MiFID II Target Market Assessment and the UK Target Market Assessment are without prejudice to any contractual, legal or regulatory selling restrictions in relation to the offering of the Securities.

Furthermore, it is noted that, notwithstanding the MiFID II Target Market Assessment, the underwriters (as defined below) established in the EEA will only procure investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties under MiFID II and that, notwithstanding the UK Target Market Assessment, the underwriters established in the UK will only procure investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties under Chapter 3 of the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook. For the avoidance of doubt, the MiFID II Target Market Assessment and the UK Target Market Assessment do not constitute: (a) in the case of the MiFID II Target Market Assessment, an assessment of suitability or appropriateness for the purposes of MiFID II and in the case of the UK Target Market Assessment, an assessment of suitability or appropriateness for the purposes of Chapters 9A or 10A respectively of the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook; or (b) a recommendation to any investor or group of investors to invest in, or purchase, or take any other action whatsoever with respect to the offered Securities. Each distributor is responsible for undertaking its own relevant target market assessment in respect of the offered Securities and determining appropriate distribution channels.

This publication may contain specific forward-looking statements, e.g. statements including terms like "believe", "assume", "expect", "forecast", "project", "may", "could", "might", "will" or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may result in a substantial divergence between the actual results, financial situation, development or performance of PolyPeptide Group and those explicitly or implicitly presumed in these statements. Against the background of these uncertainties, readers should not rely on forward-looking statements. PolyPeptide Group assumes no responsibility to up-date forward-looking statements or to adapt them to future events or developments.

Except as required by applicable law, PolyPeptide Group has no intention or obligation to update, keep updated or revise this publication or any parts thereof following the date hereof.

None of the underwriters (as defined below) or any of their respective subsidiary undertakings, affiliates or any of their respective directors, officers, employees, advisers, agents, alliance partners or any other entity or person accepts any responsibility or liability whatsoever for, or makes any representation, warranty or undertaking, express or implied, as to the truth, accuracy, completeness or fairness of the information or opinions in this announcement (or whether any information has been omitted from the announcement) or any other information relating to the group, its subsidiaries or associated companies, whether written, oral or in a visual or electronic form, and howsoever transmitted or made available or for any loss howsoever arising from any use of this announcement or its contents or otherwise arising in connection therewith. Accordingly, each of the underwriters and the other foregoing persons disclaim, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, all and any liability, whether arising in tort or contract or that they might otherwise be found to have in respect of this announcement and/or any such statement.

Each of Credit Suisse AG, Morgan Stanley Europe SE, Merrill Lynch International, Danske Bank A/S, Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG and Zurcher Kantonalbank (the "underwriters") is acting exclusively for PolyPeptide Group and no one else in connection with any transaction referred to in this document. Each of the underwriters will not regard any other person as a client and will not be responsible to anyone other than PolyPeptide Group for providing the protections afforded to their respective clients nor for the giving of advice in relation to any transaction, matter or arrangement referred to herein.

This publication includes industry and market information based on the PolyPeptide Group's analysis of multiple internal and third party sources, including information extracted from market research, governmental and other publicly available information, independent industry publications and information and reports prepared by consulting firms (which has been produced based on publications comprising industry data, forecasts, market and customer surveys, analyst reports, other consultant strategy reports and other information made available to it by third party data providers, industry associations, competitors, published accounts, interviews with key market participants/primary interviews and virtual field visits it conducted with industry experts and participants, secondary market research and internal financial and operational information supplied by, or on behalf of, the Group). Readers should be aware that market data and statistics are inherently predictive and speculative and are not necessarily reflective of actual or future market conditions. Such statistics are based on market research, which itself is based on sampling and subjective judgments by both the researchers and the respondents. In addition, the value of comparisons of statistics of different markets is limited by many factors, including that (i) the underlying information is gathered by different methods with varying levels of access and information available in different markets and (ii) different assumptions are applied in compiling the data. Market studies are frequently based on information and assumptions that may not be exact or appropriate and their methodology is by nature forward-looking and speculative.
L.A.-area organizations provide guidance to help maintain the peace in the community

A consortium of local and regional violence prevention leaders recently united to offer proven violence prevention strategies to residents of impacted neighborhoods throughout greater Los Angeles.

The organizations, connected by their advocacy for criminal justice reform, held a press conference on April 21, to announce their intention to form the Southern California/L.A. Peacekeepers Collaborative (SCLAPC).

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Dr. Aquil Basheer, executive director of the Brotherhood Unified for Independent Leadership Through Discipline program (BUILD), founded SCLAPC to share knowledge and lessons learned from decades of working on inner-city streets to mitigate disagreements among individuals and groups.

Explaining how current events were an influencing factor in establishing SCLAPC, Basheer said, As the nation remains on edge regarding gun violence, police-involved shootings and unprovoked racists attacks on Asian Americans, collaboration and preparedness on the street level [are] the key to violence prevention.

The goal of the SCLAPC is to connect successful efforts from across the country to complement local community policing efforts, revealed Basheer, who is also an instructor at USCs Safe Communities Institute and author of the acclaimed book, Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence.

As part of the services offered by SCLAPC, he is expected to share insight from his role as a leader of the Community Based Public Safety Association (CBPSA), a first-of-its-kind association of community-based public safety and violence prevention programs. Basheer is also a highly regarded expert on violence intermediation, public safety and hardcore gang intervention.

SCLAPC organizations and individuals taking part in the press conference were Khalid Shah, founder and CEO of the Stop the Violence Increase the Peace Foundation and chair of the Regional Violence Prevention Coalition; Kellie Dillon, founder of Back to Basic Violence Prevention and Intervention agency; Big William Welch, outreach 360 Inc. School-based Intervention Program; William Blinky Rodriquez, executive director of Communities in Schools Greater Los Angeles/San Fernando Valley; and Mustafa Khan of Safe Communities Initiatives.

Representatives were also on hand from the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, Homies Unidos, Outreach 360, Revolve Impact, United Hood Nation, The Reverence Project, South Bureau Ministerial Alliance, Confidential Matters Inc., Project Kindship, Young Visionaries, Visionary Youth, Stentorians, along with numerous others group members.

Basheer stressed that the SCLAPC objective is not to replace existing prevention and intervention models, but to urge City leaders to expand on these best practices in the highest risk districts where crime is impacting residents the most.

He continued: SCLAPC members have long provided some of the most credible expertise and been part of the process of change. The new alliance is expected to set the standard in which similar peacekeeping organizations will be able to provide a measurement for success. The collective has brought together decades of expertise, which has proven effective nationwide.



Aquil Basheer outlines the goals of the Southern California/L.A. Peacekeepers Collaborative during a press conference on April 21. (Karim Saafir photo)
DENVER (AP)  As Western states prepare for this years wildfire season, the worlds largest firefighting plane has been grounded and could be converted to help fight against another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic.

After investing tens of millions into upgrading the Global SuperTanker and its technology, the revenue coming mostly from contracts with the U.S. government and California did not produce enough profit for the company to continue the funding the tanker, said Roger Miller, managing director at Alterna Capital Partners LLC, the investment company that owns the plane.

Alternas decision to ground the SuperTanker was made on April 19, according to the firm, which had funded the planes operations and upgrades since 2016. Since the announcement, the Connecticut-based firm has received several offers to buy the SuperTanker and turn it into a freight carrier aircraft, Miller said.

The COVID crisis has led to a huge boom in the aircraft freighter market flying around PPE, flying around vaccines, just all the stuff that you cant afford to put on a ship and wait 45 days to get, Miller said.

The investment firm is open to potential investors who want to continue using the SuperTanker for wildfire response, but if freight companies present a more attractive offer, the firm will sell it to them, Miller said.

In order for the SuperTanker to be ready for the 2021 wildfire season, the plane would have to undergo a federal certification process by June, said Dan Reese, president of Global SuperTanker Services.

As the company weighs its options, two Washington state legislators sent a letter Tuesday to U.S. Congress members in Western states, urging them to find a solution to continue the SuperTankers operations, which they described as the biggest and one of the best weapons in battling the catastrophic fires.

Our time is limited, through this week, they wrote. A willing buyer, a group of investors or government loan guarantees is needed to step up and help protect our livelihoods, economy, and environment against this devastating enemy.

During the 2020 season, there were 58,950 wildfires that burned over 15,816 square miles (40,963.29 square kilometers), according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho.

The Global SuperTanker is one of several Very Large Airtankers used to fight wildfires from above by dropping fire retardant and water. Water is dropped on the fires, and fire retardant is commonly dropped next to or around the fires as an extra line of defense. Once the retardant dries, it denies oxygen to the vegetation to prevent the spread of fire.

But some fire experts, like Andy Stahl, executive director at Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, are skeptical about the use of tankers and retardants for wildfire response because of the dangers that aerial firefighting poses, the specific environmental factors needed to operate the tanker and the overall expense of retardants.

Stahl said that fire retardant is used not at all or only incredibly rarely in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Fire retardant, he said, is a Western state phenomena because there are more federal lands and the U.S. Forest Service has the money to spend on retardants, which Stahl says is more expensive than dropping Perrier out of airplanes.

In 2020, the federal government and state agencies dropped over 56 million gallons (211,983,060 liters) of retardant, which costs on average $3.10 per gallon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

The retardant contracts are very profitable for a small group of very influential firefighting companies and for the bureaucracy that uses them. The retardant is a wonderful way of showing the concerned public that were really trying hard to protect their homes, Stahl said.

But Michael DeGrosky, chief of the Protection Bureau at Montanas Department Of Natural Resources and Conservation, said there is a time and place for effective retardant use.

Like all tools, you need to use the right tool in the right situation, DeGrosky said. My personal experience is that retardant is most effective on initial attack. It can be used very effectively when youre trying to guide a fire and draw it away from homes and property.

Other Very Large Airtankers can carry up to 8,000 gallons (30,283 liters) of fire retardant, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

The Global SuperTanker can dump up to 19,200 gallons (72,678 liters) of water or flame retardant in six seconds and fly as low as 200 feet (61 meters) above the ground to do its work. It can be refilled in just 13 minutes.

Domestically, the SuperTanker has been used mostly in California and in Oregon in 2018. Washington and Montana fire officials said the SuperTanker has not been used in their states, so the elimination of it will not affect their fire response this season.

Theres always the possibility that by having it unavailable in California or Oregon where its typically operated, you know, that may put other pressures on the system. Aircraft we rely on might be committed there, but we dont see any direct impact, DeGrosky said of Montanas wildfire response.

Officials from Montana and Washington said they would ensure access to additional planes and helicopters through their state fire departments and regional and national contracts for other aircrafts for the upcoming season.

The SuperTanker has also been deployed in Israel in 2016 and in Chile in 2017. The company declined to say how much the SuperTanker costs per day.

About the photo: The Global Supertanker drops retardant while battling the Glass Fire in Napa County, Calif., on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech drugs regulator said on Thursday it lacked the documentation needed to fully assess Russia's COVID-19 vaccine for possible use, drawing a rebuke from Moscow amid a separate, heated dispute over spying allegations.

The Czech Republic and Russia are embroiled in their worst row in decades after Prague said the same Russian agents accused of a 2018 attempt to poison a former Russian spy in Britain were also likely behind 2014 blasts at a Czech ammunitions depot.

The allegations, denied by Russia, have led to mass expulsions of staff from each of the country's embassies.

New Czech Health Minister Petr Arenberger said on April 7 he would not oppose using Russia's Sputnik V vaccine as part of a clinical trial.

But the head of the State Institute for Drug Control (SUKL), Irena Storova, told Czech Radio on Thursday that her office had not received enough documentation to make an assessment of its efficacy and safety.

"What we have seen is a fraction of the documentation that should be provided for the registration of a vaccine or medicine," she said. It is up to the Health Ministry to decide on the use of the vaccine.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov linked the apparent setback for its vaccine in the Czech Republic to the row over the arms depot explosions. "Such decisions, which are taken in the interest of a mood of provocation, are at the very least not in the interests of Czechs," he said.

Even before the dispute over the arms depot explosions, the central European country had not yet opted to use the Sputnik vaccine as it lacks approval from European Union authorities.

Other countries have also said they lack sufficient documentation to use the vaccine, marketed abroad by the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Brazil's health regulator this week ejected importing Sputnik, citing a lack of information.

In Czech neighbour Slovakia, where a rift over a Sputnik order forced the prime minister to resign, the regulator has yet to endorse the vaccine, also citing a lack of data.

Only Hungary has administered the Russian shot within the EU.

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jason Hovet in Prague and Dmitry Antonov in Moscow; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
The company said that results from a single vein on the property returned significant gold intervals in two separate trenches about 160 metres apart

Golden Arrow Resources Corporation ( ) (FRA:G6A) ( ) revealed the first results from its trenching program at the Esperanza property on the Flecha de Oro gold project in Argentina.

The company said that results from a single vein on the property returned significant gold intervals in two separate trenches about 160 metres apart: 5 metres averaging 3 grams per ton (g/t) gold, including 2 metres averaging 6.2 g/t gold, and 1 metre averaging 5.5 g/t gold.

Vancouver-based Golden Arrow started the trenching program at Flecha de Oro in December 2020, initially focusing on the Puzzle area before prioritizing Esperanza.

READ: Golden Arrow Resources inks deal to option Caballos Copper-Gold Project in Argentina

Since trenching began at Esperanza in March, Golden Arrow has completed 20 trenches totaling 1,693 metres across surface quartz veins and sheeted veinlets that range from a few centimeters to two metres in width. An additional 15 trenches are underway, the company said in a statement.

"We have seen from our previous surface sampling that there is widespread gold in the system at Esperanza, so we are encouraged to find some broader intervals in the near-surface that will help us vector into the heart of the system, vice president exploration and development Brian McEwen said.

Flecha de Oro includes the La Esperanza, Puzzle and Maquinchao properties that collectively make up nearly 14,000 hectares in central Rio Negro province.

Golden Arrow has identified similarities in size and geologic style to the Cerro Vanguardia district to the south in Santa Cruz province that has produced 4.5 million ounces of gold, it told shareholders.

The Phase I program is expected to continue through most of May.

Exploration update

Separately, Golden Arrow said it had tapped Quantec Geoscience Chile Ltda to complete a new transient electromagnetic surface geophysical survey at its Rosales copper project in Chile.

Also, the firm has delayed a planned follow-up drill program at its Tierra Dorada gold project in Paraguay until it receives permits allowing for deeper holes.

Contact angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas
Three men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have had new charges added after a grand jury claimed that they planned to use weapons of mass destruction to blow up a bridge, the justice department said.

Adam Fox, 40, of Wyoming, Michigan; Barry Croft Junior, 45, of Bear, Delaware; and Daniel Joseph Harris, 23, of Lake Orion, Michigan, have been charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, in addition to a kidnapping conspiracy charge in October, Reuters reported today.

The justice department accuses them of planning to delay or harm Governor Whitmers security detail and nearby police officers by destroying a bridge near her holiday home, a Justice Department statement said.

The new indictment releasded on Wednesday supercedes the previous one and also alleged that Mr Croft and Mr Harris possessed a destructive device that was not registered as required by U.S. federal law.

It also claimed that Mr Harris possessed an unregistered semiautomatic assault rifle.

Police handout of alleged attempted kidnappers left to right, top row: Adam Fox, Kaleb Franks, Ty Garbin. Bottom row: Brandon Caserta, Daniel Harris, Barry Croft. (Kent County Jail and Delaware Department of Justice)

Governor Whitmer was allegedly targeted by around 14 individuals as a result of Covid-19 restrictions she put in place affecting businesses and social activities in the state.

The alleged plot to kidnap the politician from her home and leave her stranded in a boat on Lake Michigan was foiled by undercover informants and federal agents who had embedded themselves in the group.

The men reportedly met and schemed in the basement of a vacuum shop in the Grand Rapids area and held training exercises at various locations across the state.

Ty Garbin, 25, of Hartland Township, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer.

The remaining defendents Mrs Fox, Croft, Franks, Harris and Caserta face potential life sentences if convicted of the kidnapping conspiracy.
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "MRAM Market - Forecasts from 2021 to 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global Magnetic RAM Market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28.71% over the forecast period to reach a market size of US$4,996.637 million in 2026 from US$853.870 million in 2019.



The market is expected to surge in the coming years, because of the increasing usage of MRAM in applications such as automotive, defense, aerospace, consumer electronics, and others. Major companies, scientific, and research & development institutions, have been developing MRAM technologies, in the past few years. For Instance, In April 2020, a team at the Indian Institute of Technology, in Mandi, India, announced the development of Magnetic Random-Access Memory, intending to address data storage concerns. The team stated that the spin-transfer torque MRAM, which were based on nano spintronic devices, would be used to put an end to data loss from computers, because of interruptions, and would enhance the next-generation computers, or other gadgets. There are other developments in the market, in recent years. Startups and novel players have been working hard to secure funding from major players in the market.

For instance, In September 2020, Antaios, a key pioneer in SOT-MRAM technology, announced that it had secured US$11 million in funding from a major French venture capital firm, Sofimac Innovation, and Innovacom. The company stated that the novel funds would be used to deploy SOT-MRAM in every chip, becoming a major candidate for the next generation memory storage market. MRAM is considered a niche memory storage memory in the market, because of the availability of alternatives such as DRAM. But, in recent years, with the increasing investments in R&D in MRAM technology, the market growth has accelerated.

In May 2020, The Korea Institute of Science and Technology announced that its research team had developed a magnetoresistive random-access memory, that has high speeds of spin direction changes and consumes extremely low power. The research team stated that MRAM's had more advantages than DRAM, as they processed data at a faster rate, and also flashes memories, and were highly energy efficient. . Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones, globally, stated recently the company had been planning to expand the applications of MRAM technology, to various sectors. The company had been aiming to use MRAM chips in more areas, beyond Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, such as the automotive market, low-level cache, graphic memory, and wearables. The company begins the mass production of MRAM solutions in mid-2019. The chip was built using a 28nm FD-SOI process.



Increasing Defense Expenditure



The market is expected to surge in the coming years, because of the acceleration in defense spending and expenditure, globally. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure saw a surge in the year 2019 and 2020, reaching approx. US$1.9 trillion in the year 2019. The budget saw a surge of 3.6% in 2019, then the previous year. The top five military spenders in the year 2019, were the United States, China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The defense budget is utilized for the development and procurement of novel weapons, with updated and advanced technology. The use of Magnetic Random-Access Memory in defense equipment has seen a growth in the last few years.

The total military spending by the United States in 2019, was at US$732 billion and it accounted for approx. 38% of global military expenditure. China and India had a military expenditure of US$261 billion and US$71.1 billion, in the same years. Major companies have been providing Magnetic Random Access Memory solutions for different applications. For Instance, Teledyne e2V, one of the major players in the market, provides MRAM type EV2A16A for different applications, such as defense, avionics, and others. The type has been an extended reliability version of the MR2A16A from another key player in the market, known as Everspin. It is an ideal memory solution for applications that usually stores and retrieves data, more quickly. In defense, the solution and the product are used for Electronic Warfare, Field Communication, ECM, and Radar. Another benefit of the product is that it provides reliable performance and operation, across the different military temperature range



The rise in Aviation Sector



The market is expected to be driven by the Magnetic Random Access Memory in the aviation industry, in recent years, MRAM technology has been gradually increasing its presence in Aviation and Aerospace industry, because it provides higher density non-volatile memory on a specific device. Moreover, the black box in an airplane is used to store data and memory, and with a faster and more durable MRAM device, the market is expected to register substantial growth during the forecast period. With the rise in air passenger traffic, worldwide, the demand for aircraft production is likely to surge. According to the World Bank, the air passenger rose from approx. 310 million in the year 1970, to approx. 4.397 billion in the year 2019. The OECD members have a major share in air passenger traffic, with over 2.44 billion passengers in the year 2019.

Major companies such as Boeing and Airbus, have increased the production and delivery of aircraft in recent years. Boeing delivered 35 commercial jets, in December 2019, and Airbus delivered 138 commercial jets, in December 2019. Major companies have been providing novel and advanced MRAM solutions, for the aerospace and aviation industry, in the past few years. Avalanche Technology had been developing a large and substantial portfolio of around 1Mb to 256 Mb of radiation hardened, highly reliable Persistent SRAM products, which had been based on its proprietary pMT. STT-MRAM technology, by the company, had been designed to operate successfully in harsh and difficult weather conditions and environment. Radiation surges the aging and life cycle of semiconductor materials and parts, leading to major degradation of premature failure or electrical performance. Avalanche had announced its partnership with NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre to examine and evaluate the company's novel and first-generation P=SRAM products



Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction

1.1. Market Definition

1.2. Market Segmentation



2. Research Methodology

2.1. Research Data

2.2. Assumptions



3. Executive Summary

3.1. Research Highlights



4. Market Dynamics

4.1. Market Drivers

4.2. Market Restraints

4.3. Porters Five Forces Analysis

4.3.1. Bargaining Power of Suppliers

4.3.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers

4.3.3. The threat of New Entrants

4.3.4. Threat of Substitutes

4.3.5. Competitive Rivalry in the Industry

4.4. Industry Value Chain Analysis



5. Global Magnetic RAM Market Analysis, By Product Type

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Spin-Transfer Torque MRAM

5.3. Toggle MRAM



6. Global Magnetic RAM Market Analysis, By Application

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Robotics

6.3. Consumer Electronics

6.4. Automotive

6.5. Aerospace & Defense

6.6. Enterprise Storage

6.7. Others



7. Global Magnetic RAM Market Analysis, by Geography

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Americas

7.2.1. United States

7.2.2. Others

7.3. Europe Middle East and Africa

7.3.1. UK

7.3.2. Germany

7.3.3. France

7.3.4. Others

7.4. Asia Pacific

7.4.1. Japan

7.4.2. China

7.4.3. South Korea

7.4.4. Others



8. Competitive Environment and Analysis

8.1. Major Players and Strategy Analysis

8.2. Emerging Players and Market Lucrativeness

8.3. Mergers, Acquisitions, Agreements, and Collaborations

8.4. Vendor Competitiveness Matrix



9. Company Profiles

9.1. Intel Corporation

9.2. Honeywell International Inc.

9.3. NVE Corporation

9.4. Everspin Technologies Inc

9.5. Avalanche Technology

9.6. Crocus Nano Electronics LLC

9.7. Toshiba Corporation

9.8. Spin Transfer Technologies

9.9. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

9.10. Qualcomm Incorporated

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

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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Something to look forward to: It's not that often that Microsoft changes the default font of its office applications. The last time was in 2007, when Calibri replaced Times New Roman. Fourteen years have passed since then, and Microsoft wants to do it again, but this time with the help of Microsoft 365 users. Out of the five custom fonts that Microsoft has commissioned, users must choose one, but even if your favorite doesn't win, Microsoft will keep all of them available in Microsoft 365 apps.

The five new fonts available for the taking are called Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview. Microsoft's Design Team will evaluate the fonts for the next few months alongside cloud app users and expects them to expose their opinion through social media after testing them out.

Tenorite designers say that their font looks like a "warmer, more friendly" sans-serif. It consists of elements such as big dots, accents, and punctuation that should make it easier to read on smaller screens, and wider characters for a more open look.

Bierstadt adopts a more precise and modern style "inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss typography." Its simple and clear characters give it a more "blocky" appearance, similar to what we find in 'Helvetica'.

The most unique of the bunch is Skeena. Based on "multiple typographic periods," the designers created a humanist font with varying thickness across all characters. Despite being suited for text walls, it also fits nicely in shorter text sections such as tables, presentations, and brochures.

Seaford is an old-school-styled serif font that should look familiar to most. Featuring asymmetric forms and distinctive characters, Seaford inspires a comfortable feeling when reading content written with it.

We need to talk. What should our next default font be? pic.twitter.com/fV9thfdAr4  Microsoft (@Microsoft) April 28, 2021

Grandview is similar to the font used in German roads and railways, meaning it can be easily read at significant distances, even in bad weather. Due to its origins, this font was designed for short passages in small spaces, but the small adjustments made by the designer also allow it to be used in body text.

You can check the new fonts if you use a Microsoft app with access to cloud fonts, like Outlook for Microsoft 365. To check the new cloud fonts, open the app while connected to the Internet, go to File > Account > Manage Settings and under Account Privacy, enable 'Optional connected experiences'.
COVID-19 is surging out of control in India. Crematoriums have been running at capacity while bodies pile up. As a resident of Delhi told the Time s of India, I have lived here all my life and pass through this area twice a day. I have never seen so many bodies burning together.

Official figures indicate that the country saw another record one-day high with almost 380,000 cases of COVID-19 and 3,647 deaths yesterday. There were an unprecedented 5 million cases in less than three weeks. The country just surpassed 200,000 COVID-19related deaths.

Travelers register themselves with health workers before getting tested for COVID-19 outside a train station in Bengaluru, India, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, Wednesday became the fourth to cross 200,000 deaths, behind the United States, Brazil and Mexico. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Experts insist that the crisis in India is far more massive than official reports indicated. The actual caseload may be 10 to 30 times higher than official statistics. Based on the unprecedented number of funerals taking place, some have placed the death toll at 10 times the figures cited by state epidemiologists and political representatives.

Indias reporting system for all-cause mortality is woefully inadequate. One in seven deaths is never registered. Of those that are, barely one in four is certified by a physician. The pandemic has further exacerbated this situation, as a death attributed to COVID-19 requires a recent positive test result. Despite the massive surge in cases, testing outside major urban centers remains very limited.

According to the Economist, Even with more than 1.5 million Indians now getting tested each day, the rate of testing relative to population is still less than a tenth of that in Britain. And because of the surge in cases, labs, even in Delhi, Indias capital, are overwhelmed. They now take days to deliver results; many die without knowing they are positive, or after getting a false negative. The positivity rate in Delhi is above 30 percent, implying that one in three tests results in a confirmed infection.

Social media apps are being flooded with panicked requests by people and pleas for oxygen, medicines, and basic medical supplies to care for their families at home because hospitals can no longer admit patients. According to Becker  s Health IT, Aanchal Agrawal, a 29-year-old content creator, is working with 200 volunteers combing through her 42,000 Twitter followers to source oxygen, beds, antivirals for residents infected with the coronavirus.

They wrote, Along with Twitter and Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, and Google Docs have been used by ordinary citizens in India to crowdsource financial help and medical equipment. Experts have criticized the countrys government for allowing massive gatherings and not ordering enough of the vaccines needed to meet its inoculation targets. India, with its status as the worlds pharmacy, the largest producer of generic drugs, has been unable to meet the health demands of the population.

Friends and families, overwrought to find life-saving oxygen and medicines, turn to the black markets and profit gougers for these supplies. Pharmacists tell their customers that the only place left to purchase the antiviral agent, Remdesivir, is on the black market for 100,000 Rupees ($1,340 US dollars), or over 30 times its regular price. The average monthly salary of a worker in India ranges from around 12,000 (mechanic) to 23,000 (Business development manager) Rupees.

With many public hospitals having exhausted their supplies of medicinal oxygen, desperate families begin the frantic search for another facility that can render medical treatment. Empty beds at private hospitals are now available through bidding wars. A 46-liter oxygen cylinder is up to 10 times the regular price. Many who can scrounge the money have to pay in advance and hope to get it the next day.

Heart-wrenching have been the scenes of loved ones carting their parents, siblings, or children from one medical center to another only to be shunned. A recent grim account on Twitter from Dr. Eric Ding recounted, A desperate mother pleaded at the front steps of a hospital for someone to save her 16-month-old with COVID-19. The toddler died at the doorstep of the hospital soon after.

Meanwhile, according to Business Insider, Indias uber-rich are escaping in droves, fleeing in private jets as the pandemic crashes through the country. The wealthy Indian families pay tens of thousands of dollars to catch last-minute flights before travel restrictions are imposed, flying to popular destinations such as the United Arab Emirates. A spokesman for charter company Air Charter Services India told the Economic Times that interest in private jets has been absolutely crazy.

As reports of horrific asphyxiation from exhausted oxygen supplies become familiar news headlines, oxygen express trains are being rerouted throughout India, attempting to supply medical grade oxygen to areas depleted of the life-saving gas. One report cited in New Scientist said that demand for medicinal oxygen in the intensive care units has jumped 600 percent in recent days.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White Houses chief medical adviser, told the Guardian on Tuesday that the tragic development in India was a product of failure of wealthier nations to provide equitable access to health care worldwide. The only way that youre going to adequately respond to a global pandemic, he said, is by having a global response, and a global response means equity throughout the world.  Were all in this together, Its an interconnected world. And there are responsibilities that countries have to each other, particularly if youre a wealthy country and youre dealing with countries that dont have the resources or capabilities that you have.

Meanwhile, neighboring countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka face their challenges as the virus is now rapidly disseminating throughout their communities. The pandemics global toll continues to rise, with more than 150 million cases worldwide. Today, over 865,000 infections were confirmed, and close to 15,000 people died.
Treasures of Oregon Coast Hide in Plain Sight Near Yachats, Port Orford, Cannon Beach

Published 04/25/21 at 6:55 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Cannon Beach, Oregon)  The nooks and crannies of Oregons coastlines are multivarious and all over the place. Bizarre features and spots full of surprises lurk in corners just out of sight, but sometimes not quite out of the way. (Above: Bob Creek near Yachats).

Many of the best wonders are literally hiding in plain view, just under your nose. In the case of one Cannon Beach area, that is very true and not a metaphor. Another couple of coastal stunners happen just as youre whizzing down the highway  one just south of Yachats and the other near Port Orford.



Photo courtesy Dan Nevill / Flickr

Port Orfords Sisters Rock State Park. Strangely not actually listed on the state parks website but called Sister Rock State Park, the place is a somewhat tiny attraction yet crammed full of unique finds. All of it, however, is tucked away just off bustling Highway 101. Its easy to zoom past this spot thats full of character.

The telltale two giant blobs emerge pretty quickly into sight. A small parking lot gives way to huge views, and a semi-paved path or two up to the blobby rock and then down to either side of Sisters Rock State Park. To the south, you have the rubbly, more pebble-covered beach thats rougher until it gives way to softer sands. On the northern edges its softer, gray sands  but those darker tints contain a secret. On this part of the southern Oregon coast darker strands often mean gold.

Trippy highlights of Sisters Rocks beaches include a sea cave and the dramatic, intricate Frankport Beach next door, where rusting old components of a kind of makeshift shipping port lie, about 100 years old.

Crescent Beach at Cannon Beach. Its like a cove or almost a bay, but technically just falls short. This off-the-beaten-path treasure sits in the middle of one of the Oregon coast's more popular hot spots: Cannon Beach, which is usually smothered with people.

Yet there are still some sections less traveled, far less populated, like the very northern end, near the southern face of the cliffs of Ecola State Park. It takes some walking, but that's why you'll find fewer folks and plenty to explore. Behind this headland hides Crescent Beach.

These basalt structures are perhaps half a mile from the nearest beach access, which lies at the end of a private neighborhood at the end of 5th St. But tides do not usually let you cross here. Only at extreme low tides is this possible  and then only for a time. You'd best hurry.

You can, however, reach Crescent Beach by a mile or so trail from the forested road en route to Ecola State Park. Parking here is sketchy at best: it's a private neighborhood and it's easy to intrude. You often have to walk a ways to the trailhead.

Crescent Beach, however, is a wonder and a half. There, you'll find a large half-moon of a beach, cut off from any access but that lengthy hike. Pristine sands surround you, with almost never a human being there. As if designed by Mother Nature to be a centerpiece, a sizable, monolithic sandstone sits practically in the middle.

You can look down on this clandestine beach from the overlooks at Ecola State Park.





Bob Creek Wayside  between Yachats and Florence. South of Yachats, and just barely south of Strawberry Hill and Neptune State Park, you'll find this almost mystical spot. Tidepool creatures far, far outnumber the humans meandering about, looking for agates or exploring Bob Creek's myriad of crannies, nooks and notches.

At lower tides, a wildly-shaped mushroom-like blob emerges from the tidepools, which quickly draw your attention. Starfish and hordes of brightly colored critters reside here, seemingly as far as the eye can see. Given the right tidal conditions, there's a kind of a ramp going down to the sea, really just a break between basalt slabs that house all the tide pools.

The sands become much larger and coarser, unlike most any place along the Oregon coast. In fact most of this ramp is more covered in stones than sand. It's shockingly thick stuff: abrasive and rough, but somehow still pleasant.

At the southern end of Bob Creek, there's also a small sea cave  one that rises and falls dramatically in height, depending on the sand levels. There's much less of it in summer when sands pile up, but winter  when it's as safe to enter  it's a tall, eerie natural feature that immediately makes you think of pirate treasure.

Close by, you'll find a huge boulder that creates a sort of arch by leaning up against the cliffs. It's like a mini-sea cave here, but awfully close to the tides. So be careful.

At the north end, you'll find plenty of mussels - but you'll have to cross the creek to do so. During the winter that's difficult if not impossible, and often certainly unwise. During the summer months, it's much easier. MORE PHOTOS BELOW



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Since the 1990s I've been driving each summer from my home in Buffalo to visit friends in Auburn and to research my book on the life of Theodore Case, the forgotten "Father of Talkies." Case sold his sound-on-film patents to Fox Films in 1926, and by 1931 every movie house in America was using his system.

Everybody in Auburn once knew about Ted Case. But in recent years I've met people  even senior citizens  who say they have never heard of him. That's why Auburn High School should be renamed Theodore Case High School.

Most movie books credit Case's rival, Lee DeForest, inventor of the radio audion tube, with perfecting sound-on-film for commercial use. Those few historians who mention Case claim that he stole the system from DeForest. This included the Encyclopedia Britannica! (When Case's son, Bill, complained to the editors, they merely agreed to omit Case's name from future editions.)

It all began when a woman friend of DeForest wrote a flattering biography in 1930, claiming that Case had been his employee and had stolen the system. DeForest's own autobiography in 1950 enlarged on those lies.
The WNBA star joins James Harden, Naomi Osaka, Mookie Betts, Baker Mayfield, Trae Young, Christian McCaffrey, and Carlos Vela in the new BODYARMOR ad. BODYARMOR

Sabrina Ionescu stars in BODYARMOR's latest commercial alongside a star-studded cast of athletes.

The WNBA star joins James Harden, Naomi Osaka, Mookie Betts, and more in pushing for "one more."

Ionescu told Insider about shooting the ad, her BODYARMOR routine, hanging with Osaka, and more.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Sabrina Ionescu is going for "one more."

The New York Liberty star and former Oregon Duck standout is one of many top-notch athletes starring in BODYARMOR's latest ad campaign, which celebrates the power of pushing oneself and striving for more.

Sabrina Ionescu. AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack

But even with the likes of James Harden, Naomi Osaka, Mookie Betts, Baker Mayfield, Trae Young, Christian McCaffrey, and Carlos Vela appearing in the 75-second spot, it was Ionescu who closed out the commercial by draining three after three for the camera.

Insider spoke to the NCAA's triple-double queen about shooting the brand-new ad, meeting and bonding with Osaka on set, her BODYARMOR favorite flavors, and how she incorporates the drinks into her routine. Check out the interview and BODYARMOR's "One More" commercial below:

This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

Sabrina Ionescu was a superstar for the Oregon Ducks. Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports

What was it like watching yourself in the "One More" ad alongside seven other superstar athletes?

While doing it, I had no idea what it was going to look like and how great of a production it was going to be. But after seeing the rough cut and seeing how many awesome and inspirational athletes are a part of it, being blessed to be in conversation as well, and then being towards the end, it was definitely honoring and humbling.

I'm super excited to be able to be a part of this and just be a part of this amazing brand. Being able to partner with them and do this together is a really awesome experience."

How was spending time with Naomi Osaka on set while you were both shooting?

We definitely had talks on social media before that, but that was the first time I met her. Just being able to do that campaign in the same area as she was, and being able to watch her, connect with her, talk to her was really, really cool. And I'm excited to be able to do many more [commercials] with her in the future.

Story continues

How do you incorporate BODYARMOR into your routine?

As soon as I start my day, I'm drinking the water. I think I drink like a handful of the waters a day aside from when I'm playing or practicing. But during practice I'm having at least two SportWaters and at least two orange mangoes. They're my favorite.

Sabrina Ionescu sips BODYARMOR. BODYARMOR

While I'm playing it definitely keeps me hydrated throughout the day, it's packed with potassium and electrolytes and there's also no artificial ingredients. Playing and needing to stay hydrated through workouts and through games, it's definitely in my routine of taking care of my body. On and off the court, whether I'm playing or waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night, it's all part of the routine that I've established this off season.

What are your favorite flavors?

I love the orange mango and then the peach mango light.

Check out the BODYARMOR "One More" ad below:

Read the original article on Insider
Irrfan Khan's son Babil often takes to his Instagram feed to post pictures and several anecdotes from his father's life.

On the occasion of the late actor's first death anniversary, Babil yet again took to social media to share an emotional note.

 Instagram/Babil Khan

 Instagram/Babil Khan

Babil shared Irrfan's picture, in which the actor can be seen building his own table. The actor is seen smiling in his relaxed yellow T-shirt and casual trousers.-



Irrfan Khan breathed his last on 29th April 2020, as he was battling a two-year-long fight with a neuroendocrine tumour.



Babil, with the picture, added a caption and wrote "Chemo burns you from the inside, so to find joy in the simple things, like building your own table to write your own journals. There is a purity, I have not yet discovered. There is a legacy that has already been concluded by my Baba himself. A full stop. Nobody can ever replace him. Nobody will ever be able to."

He further added, "To the greatest best friend, companion, brother, father, I ever had and ever will have. I love you so much, for the rest of this chaos we are choosing to call life. I miss you, more than all that shah-Jahan/mumtaz stuff; I would have built a space monument that could have taken us to the furthest parts of a blackhole singularity you were always intrigued by, but I would have been there with you Baba, and we could have gone together, hand in hand. (Exploring the last mysteries)."

These pictures are from the time when Irrfan was going through Chemotherapy in the UK.

Along with this, Babil also posted a handwritten note by the late actor, just a few minutes before his picture. The note said, "Reality of being NOW. The most amazing period of life in London 25 Jan 2018. The period of realisation of inner mechanism and the experience of magic which lays on the other side of the conditioned mind. The world of sensations and clear unbound mind."

Babil captioned it saying "Need I say much? My Baba, last stages of evolution."

 Feather Light Films

Irrfan's last movie Song of the Scorpions will be released in cinemas, as a tribute to the actor.



As for Babil, he is going to make his debut in Bollywood with Qala, directed by Anvita Dutt opposite Tripti Dimri.
FARMINGDALE, N.Y., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BEDGEAR, the brand of Performance that provides innovative bedding by focusing on an active lifestyle and well-being, is pleased to announce the elevation of Ross Stuart to President Asia-Pacific. Bringing over 25 years of industry experience, Stuart previously served as the Vice President of International Sales for Asia-Pacific. In his new role, Stuart will lead all aspects of the region's business, including branding, marketing, logistics, and operations. This strategic move is part of BEDGEAR's expansion across key markets, such as Australia, China, Thailand, Korea and Singapore.

BEDGEAR Elevates Ross Stuart to President Asia-Pacific

Upon joining forces with the company in 2017, Ross established an Asia-Pacific BEDGEAR corporate office in Sydney, Australia. Since establishing a first presence in the region, Stuart has secured partnerships across key countries. After launching numerous stand-alone BEDGEAR stores and 'experience centers,' hundreds of retail distributors are now offering BEDGEAR bedding products to Asia-Pacific consumers. Each BEDGEAR store embraces the brand's approach to personalization and an interactive in-store shopping experience.

"I am proud of the journey Ross and I have experienced in establishing the BEDGEAR brand in the Asia-Pacific region that has resulted in rapid success," said BEDGEAR founder and CEO Eugene Alletto. "We are now ready to support Ross in running this region independent of our United States operations, allowing him to quickly concentrate resources that are country specific to this vibrant market. With remarkable recent achievements in Thailand and Korea, we will strengthen our business in Australia, a market whose people are close to my heart as the area is on a course to mirror our path to success within the US."

BEDGEAR is also creating a strong digital presence in Asia-Pacific. Stuart oversaw the launch of BEDGEAR's upgraded bedgear.com/au website that fully encompasses the brand. With the easy-to-navigate PillowID quiz, online shoppers can quickly find their fit for a personalized Performance pillow based on their body shape, temperature preference and sleep position. The website offers an assortment of the brand's breathable mattresses, pillows, sheets, mattress protectors and other bedding essentials.

"Each country in the Asia-Pacific region is unique, and all aspects of the BEDGEAR brand from education to an online presence must be fine-tuned to match the culture of a specific region," said Stuart. "Having an entrepreneur mindset, I firmly believe in 'what got us here will not necessarily take us to the next level.' In other words, pivoting from trailblazing mode to development mode requires a strategic re-set. BEDGEAR will continue to innovate by providing unmatched breathable bedding products."

Globally, BEDGEAR has served more than 14 million consumers and is represented in 4,000 retail stores. There are about 400 BEDGEAR Performance Sleep Shops within retail doors and more than 100 stand-alone BEDGEAR stores.

ABOUT BEDGEAR

Launched in 2009, BEDGEAR is the brand of Performance that provides innovative bedding by focusing on an active lifestyle and well-being. BEDGEAR's sleep solutions are engineered with fabrics that are temperature neutral and instant cooling and maximizes airflow to allow the body to naturally regulate its temperature. With a core belief of One Size Does Not Fit All, BEDGEAR has redefined the way people view sleep by developing interactive in-store experiences and breathable bedding products that are personally fit to a consumer based on specific factors, including body type, sleep position and temperature. BEDGEAR is dedicated to integrating environmental responsibility into product development to ensure less returned goods are being sent to landfills. BEDGEAR is essential to the rest and recovery routines of professional athletes and active people who need to maximize their sleep. A proud manufacturer in the USA, BEDGEAR offers mattresses, pillows, sheets, blankets, pet beds as well as travel, kids and baby products that often feature removable and washable covers to maintain a clean and healthy sleep environment. BEDGEAR is represented in more than 4,000 retail stores across the globe and has earned more than 220 U.S. and worldwide patents, trademark registrations and pending applications. Sleep Fuels Everything! Learn more at bedgear.com.

Media Contact: Jamie Shrewsbury jshrewsbury@bedgear.com

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bedgear-elevates-ross-stuart-to-president-asia-pacific-301280617.html

SOURCE BEDGEAR
More than 70,000 owners of freight and delivery trucks in California can be classified as employees of the companies that hire them, with rights to overtime and sick pay and work expenses, rather than as independent contractors, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

A federal judge had ruled that a California law allowing the owners to be considered employees interfered with uniform nationwide regulation of interstate transportation. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego barred the law, AB5, from applying to truckers in 2020 and cited a 1994 federal law overriding any state laws that are related to a price, route or service of any motor carrier ... with respect to the transportation of property.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overruled Benitez in a 2-1 decision Wednesday and said California could apply its law to the truckers. One provision of AB5 classifies workers as employees rather than contractors unless their jobs are outside the usual course of the hiring entitys business.

The court cited its 2014 ruling that allowed California to require meal and rest breaks for truck drivers. Although the breaks might increase a companys costs, the court said in 2014, they did not bind the carrier to a particular price, route or service and thus did not conflict with the 1994 federal law. That ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, which denied review.

Likewise, AB5 may increase expenses of a company that hires truck drivers, but does not compel a result in a motor carriers relationship with consumers, such as freezing into place a particular price, route or service that a carrier would otherwise not provide, Judge Sandra Ikuta said in Wednesdays majority opinion.

Her opinion was joined by U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock of Massachusetts, temporarily assigned to the appeals court. In dissent, Judge Mark Bennett said the California law interferes with uniform federal regulation because it affects motor carriers relationships with their workers and significantly impacts their services.

The issue could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve differences between the Ninth Circuit and the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which ruled in 2016 that a similar law in Massachusetts conflicted with federal law.

AB5 also briefly classified drivers for ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft as employees. But the companies spent $200 million to win passage of Proposition 22, a November initiative that reclassified the drivers as contractors.

The California Trucking Association said it disagreed with Wednesdays ruling and will take whatever legal steps are necessary to continue this fight on behalf of independent owner-operators and motor carriers operating in California.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which joined other labor organizations in support of the state law, called the ruling a massive victory for Californias truck drivers, who for far too long have faced exploitation and misclassification at the hands of trucking companies that place corporate profit ahead of drivers safety and well-being.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Solon and Chagrin Falls took a slight dip to rank as the 5th and 8th best high schools in Ohio, in this years U.S. News & World Report 2021 rankings.

Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati took first place, Ottawa Hills near Toledo took second place, Wyoming north of Cincinnati took third and Bexley, outside of Columbus, took fourth.

In the U.S. News report, an online magazine known for its rankings and analysis of educational institutions, the highest-ranking schools included students who demonstrated above average in math and reading state assessments, earning qualifying scores in an array of college-level exams, and graduating in high proportions.

Even with the coronavirus pandemic upending education over the last year, many of the schools on the list are familiar.

Rocky River High School Principal Rob Winton said the school was honored to receive the recognition of No. 11, jumping eight spots this year.

This is a testament to our students, teachers, staff, parents/guardians, and the entire Rocky River community for their hard work and commitment to excellence that helped RRHS earn this national award, Winton said. The continued efforts of all involved ensure that our students are ready for an ever-changing global society after finishing their time at RRHS.

Bay Village High School also jumped a bit, landing at No. 17, up five spots this year.

Superintendent Jodie Hausmann was thrilled to hear the news.

Most importantly, we are proud that we have been in-building five days a week for 80 percent of the school year, said Hausmann. Our students have continued to thrive in a nontraditional year because of in-person learning and a dedicated faculty and staff.

Here are the six key factors used when ranking the schools

College readiness (30%): percentage of seniors that took at least one Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam and the rate which passed.

College curriculum breadth (10%): percentage of seniors who took a wide variety of AP and IB courses across multiple disciplines and those who passed.

College reading and math proficiency (20%): how well students did on state reading and math assessments.

Reading and math performance (20%): how well students did on state reading and math assessments compared to what the publication predicted based on modeling.

Underserved student performance (10%): how well students receiving subsidized school lunch and black and Hispanic populations perform on state assessments relative to statewide performance among students not in those subgroups.

Graduation rate (10%): rates are for the 2018 graduation cohort.

See last years rankings.

Here are the rankings of the top 25 high schools in Ohio.

1. Walnut Hills High School

Cincinnati, OH

District: Cincinnati Public Schools

Enrollment: 121,994

2. Ottawa Hills High School

Toledo, OH

District: Ottawa Hills Local

Enrollment: 12,309

3. Wyoming High School

Wyoming, OH

District: Wyoming City

Enrollment: 12,656

4. Bexley High School

Bexley, OH

District: Bexley City

Enrollment: 12,756

5. Solon High School

Solon, OH

District: Solon City

Enrollment: 121,600

6. Madeira High School

Cincinnati, OH

District: Madeira City

Enrollment: 12,403

7. Indian Hill High School

Cincinnati, OH

District: Indian Hill Exempted Village

Enrollment: 12,639

8. Chagrin Falls High School

Chagrin Falls, OH

District: Chagrin Falls Exempted Village

Enrollment: 12,757

9. Oakwood High School

Dayton, OH

District: Oakwood City

Enrollment: 12,697

10. Hudson High School

Hudson, OH

District: Hudson City

Enrollment: 121,542

11. Rocky River High School

Rocky River, OH

District: Rocky River City

Enrollment: 12,872

12. Turpin High School

Cincinnati, OH

District: Forest Hills Local

Enrollment: 121,116

13. Aurora High School

Aurora, OH

District: Aurora City

Enrollment:12,980

14. Olentangy High School

Lewis Center, OH

District: Olentangy Local

Enrollment: 121,449

15. Dublin Jerome High School

Dublin, OH

District: Dublin City

Enrollment: 121,794

16. William Mason High School

Mason, OH

District: Mason City

Enrollment: 123,511

17. Bay High School

Bay Village, OH

District: Bay Village City

Enrollment: 12,813

18. Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School

Broadview Heights, OH

District: Brecksville-Broadview Heights City

Enrollment:121,357

19. Grandview Heights High School

Columbus, OH

District: Grandview Heights Schools

Enrollment:12,317

20. Orange High School

Pepper Pike, OH

District: Orange City

Enrollment: 12,704

21. Olentangy Liberty High School

Powell, OH

District: Olentangy Local

Enrollment: 122,157

22. Mariemont High School

Cincinnati, OH

District: Mariemont City

Enrollment: 12,496

23. Columbus Alternative High School

Columbus, OH

District: Columbus City School District

Enrollment: 12,815

24. Granville High School

Granville, OH

District: Granville Exempted Village

Enrollment: 12,819

25. John Hay Early College High School

Cleveland, OH

District: Cleveland Municipal

Enrollment: 315

The complete list of schools can be found on the U.S. News & World Report website.
As part of a laboratory experiment, Rebecca Holmes examined water bottles that had been acquired from abroad expecting to find bisphenol A (BPA), a human-made component commonly found in polycarbonate plastics used to make consumer products.

What she found, however, was that those water bottles were just fine, yet some control bottles purchased in the United States and supposedly BPA-free actually contained traces of the chemical now thought to negatively impact heart health.

Holmes, a researcher formerly in the laboratory of Hong-Sheng Wang, PhD, professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Pharmacology and Systems Physiology, was working on her master's degree in molecular, cellular and biochemical pharmacology in the College of Medicine at the time.

"We believed that it likely was BPA contaminant on the surface of the bottle," says Holmes, who is now clinical research coordinator at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center. "I thought there is something here. I was thinking people are buying those bottles off the shelves, and they are taking them home and probably not washing them. They are using them so they are consuming BPA."

Holmes, Wang and Jianyong Ma, PhD, a research scientist at UC, decided to test an array of drinking bottles made of Tritan to see if transient BPA was present. Tritan is a BPA-free plastic. They acquired 10 different Tritan bottles and detected BPA release from two kinds of Tritan bottles. The team then tested whether rinsing, handwashing or dishwashing removed the BPA from the Tritan bottles. The results of their study is available in the scholarly journal Chemosphere. It showed that multiple cycles through the dishwasher was the most effective at removing BPA.

"The release of BPA from these bottles could pose a health threat to the consumer," says Ma.

Wang says researchers decided to consider cleaning options for Tritan bottles after Holmes did an informal survey of 114 UC students about ways they commonly cleaned brand-name water bottles after purchase. Some used the bottle right away without washing, others rinsed them with water, while others either washed the bottle with water and soap or placed them in the dishwasher for cleaning.

"Water bottles are ubiquitous on college campuses," says Wang. "While most of the bottles we tested were indeed BPA-free our study showed that there is a possibility that some may have BPA contamination. If you are concerned about the possibility that the BPA-free bottles are contaminated, washing the bottles after purchase is a good idea. Dishwashing is an effective way of removing the contamination in the specific kind of bottle we tested."

Wang says it is also a good idea to follow a manufacturer's wash instructions on water bottles or other containers.

Researchers washed the Tritan bottles that showed release of BPA up to six times, and at that point there was no longer any detectable release of BPA. A past study by a different group of researchers shows rinsing was effective in removing BPA release from the Tritan bottles they tested, so effectiveness of washing methods likely depends on the specific bottle. The bioactivity of the leached BPA from the bottles in the UC study was confirmed by examining the cardiovascular systems of transparent blackworms and the heart tissue of mice exposed to water in these containers over a seven-day period.

"BPA is an endocrine disruptor, and it acts like estrogen and it can affect the cardiovascular system along with other systems," says Holmes. "It can contribute to irregular heart rhythms."

Wang explains that as part of the team's project Holmes visited a plastics manufacturing factory to get a better understanding of how BPA might have gotten onto BPA-free containers.

"I wanted to go to a plant to see how plastic products are made," says Holmes. "I was able to tour the facility and none of the products in this facility were for consumer purposes. It was to see how the process works. What I found is that similar products with different types of plastic were being made closely together."

###

Syam Andra, PhD, associate professor of environmental medicine and public health at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, was also a co-author on the research study.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health R01ES027855, University of Cincinnati Center for Environmental Genetics through the NIEHS award P30ES006096, and NIH/NIEHS funding from NIH/NIEHS U2C ES026561 and P30ES023515.
WINDSOR  Local police said they are investigating after several nooses were found hanging at an Amazon facility under construction on Kennedy Road this week.

A construction company supervisor told police around 3:19 p.m. Tuesday that a hangmans noose was found hanging from a steel beam on the second floor of the building, police said.

The sites safety team documented the incident and removed the noose. An email was sent around to employees informing them of the incident, Windsor police Capt. Andrew Power said in a news release.

Police were called back to the site Wednesday afternoon for a report of a rope that was thrown around a beam, Power said. Police said the second incident was not a noose.

Police responded to the site again on Thursday around 9 a.m. where five additional ropes that could be interpreted as nooses were found on different floors and throughout the facility.

The ropes will undergo testing to help police determine who might have put them there, according to police.

Police said there were no other messages or markings that indicated who the target is or the intent of the message.

The contractor has been proactive in addressing the incidents and is cooperating with police, Power said. The company held a safety meeting on Wednesday and is conducting anti-discrimination training.

The company is also offering a $5,000 reward for information on the person responsible.

Scot X. Esdaile, president of the Connecticut state conference of the NAACP, said the organization plans to hold a press conference in front of the facility Friday afternoon, and suggested the six nooses are part of a backlash against recent events, including the conviction of Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd.

Esdaile said the NAACP plans to reach out to state police, the governors office and federal authorities to investigate the incidents.

Theyre really terrorist acts, they should not be taken lightly, Esdaile said.

Anyone that has information is asked to call the Windsor Police Department at 860-688-5273
Australia's medicines regulator has suggested it is unlikely two deaths in NSW were linked to coronavirus vaccinations.

Therapeutic Goods Administration head John Skerritt said investigations were underway after two men, 55 and 71, reportedly died from blood clots.

It is believed both received the AstraZeneca jab, which is recommended for use only in people over 50 because of extremely rare but serious blood clots.

Adjunct Professor Skerritt said the men had various blood clots but declined to provide more detail on privacy grounds.

He strongly cautioned the media and public against reaching any conclusion about the deaths and potential links to vaccination.

Darren 'Misso' Missen, 55, (pictured) died in hospital on April 21 from blood clots in his lungs eight days after receiving the vaccine

'The current evidence does not suggest a likely association,' he told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.

Darren 'Misso' Missen, 55, from Tamworth, died in hospital on April 21 from blood clots in his lungs eight days after receiving the vaccine.

Tributes have begun pouring in over social media for Mr Missen, who has been described by friends as a 'top bloke'.

Friend Darren Craig said his 'good mate' was a 'fit and healthy' man but quickly deteriorated after being vaccinated.

'I lost a good mate during the week  he was a fit healthy fella loved a schooner & a punt as we do,' Mr Craig wrote on Facebook on Friday.

'Darren had the corona Jab [sic] end of last week was a little bit off colour at work early this week and died from a blood clot in the heart Wednesday afternoon.'

A Sydney man, 71, also died days after getting the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. It is understood he had several underlying health conditions.

The TGA boss stressed the regulator was not seeing a flood of serious adverse reactions with just 11,000 reports from 2.1 million doses ranging from sore arms to heart attacks.

All serious incidents are carefully scrutinised with the rate of blood clots linked to AstraZeneca still around five in every one million shots.

Friends said Mr Messin was a 'fit and healthy' man prior to his death. Pictured: Tamworth Base Hospital

'The benefits dramatically exceed the risks, so knowing there is a small background risk of clots is something not to hide,' Professor Skerritt said.

'But all medicines, all treatments, all procedures, driving a car, flying in a plane, have some risk and in the case of these vaccines the benefits outweigh the risks.'

Prime Minister Scott Morrison also urged caution about linking blood clot deaths to vaccines without proof from medical experts.

'We've got to be careful about how we talk about these cases,' he told Darwin radio Mix 104.9 on Thursday.

'Let's allow the medical facts to be established.'

The prime minister's cautious tone comes as the government and health experts try to fight rising vaccine hesitancy.

Chief Nursing Officer Alison McMillan said stringent processes were in place to investigate adverse reactions.

'It's really important not to jump to conclusions here,' she told the ABC.

The TGA has confirmed six cases of rare blood clots that are likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccination.

A link between the vaccine and either death are yet to be established, but Therapeutic Goods Administration head John Skerritt said 'current evidence evidence does not suggest a likely association' (pictured, a Sydney nurse getting the jab)

Earlier this month, the federal government announced the Pfizer vaccine was the recommended shot for people under 50 after AstraZeneca was linked to rare blood-clotting condition thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS).

There have been 1.1million doses of AstraZeneca administered in Australia as of April 22, and six reported cases of TTS.

Genene Norris, 48, from the New South Wales Central Coast died on April 14 after receiving the AstraZeneca jab on April 8.

Ms Norris, a diabetic, developed blood clots the next day and was later placed on dialysis in an intensive care unit until her death.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration's vaccine safety investigation found Ms Norris' case of thrombosis was likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The first two cases - a Western Australian woman and a Melbourne man, both in their 40s - are still in hospital but are recovering well.

Last week, three more Australians were diagnosed with the rare blood clotting disorder.

A 35-year-old woman in New South Wales, a 49-year-old Queensland man and an 80-year-old Victorian man were hospitalised with the condition between nine and 26 days after receiving the jab.

'The VSIG (Vaccine Safety Investigation Group) concluded that all three of the cases were likely linked to vaccination,' the TGA said on Friday.

'All three patients are clinically stable, have responded well to treatment and are recovering.'

On April 21, a Queensland Police officer, 40, who worked patrolling the state's quarantine hotels was hospitalised with blood clots after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

Health authorities are yet to determine whether it was linked to the jab and the case is currently being investigated by the Queensland Health and the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Who Am I And Who Says I Am Who I Am: a testimony of the authors life after going through an identity crisis and how his bond with the Creator helped him find his true self. Who Am I And Who Says I Am Who I Am is the creation of published author Pastor Albert J. Harris Jr., a diligent and gifted writer whose desire is to inspire people to believe in themselves and most especially in the Higher Being.

Pastor Harris Jr. shares, Once again, God continues to remind me that my life is a lifetime of untold stories that I must share with the world. It is God who inspires the stories for me to tell to the world. As God was preparing my mind to write this story, I personally had experience many of the things that I talk about in this book. There is one thing that I have accepted as I wrote this book, and that is, For in God we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Im just saying that God is the source of our very existence. This is why, I practice believing that I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me (Phil. 4:13). I want you to know that what God does for one person, he can do the same for you. That is the purpose of this book: to give hope to those who are hopeless and helpless. I believe that we need to get to know ourselves because we dont know ourselves as well as we think we do. But I know someone who knows all of us better than we know ourselves (Jer. 1:5). Let me encourage and inspire someone that the one who knows you better that you know yourselves is Jesus. He also has your best interest at heart. I recommend that we consider submitting, and surrendering to him because he is the life that weve all been searching for (John 1:114).

So it is, my brothers and my sisters, when you come to know who Jesus is, you will also come to know who you are. When God made you, he made the best you there is. So it is up to you not to lose hope nor your self-esteem, but you ought to continue your pursuit of being the best that you can be with Gods help. Jesus gives this hope to all those who will believe and trust him. In John 10:10b, Jesus says, I come that you have life, and have life more abundantly. My brothers and my sisters, it is my prayer that you be the best that you can be with the resources that God provides, for all of us. Every day that you wake up, it is another for improvement in your life. Please dont let lifes opportunities pass you by, but start taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way because life is too short to pass it up.

Stop underestimating your worth. God said that everything that he made was good and very good that includes you and me, amen (Gen. 1:31).

With much love, I send these pages of my life out into the world with the hope that someones life will be the better. Also, I want to remind someone that their life also is a book, whether its open are closed, it can be shared with the world. Its a wonderful thing to know that we reap what we sow. In other words, what goes around comes around. Amen. When we invest in others, we also invest in ourselves (Gal. 6:78).

May God always bless and keep you.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Pastor Albert J. Harris Jr.s new book is a heartfelt read that shows that an established relationship with God is the best way to know ones true self.

View a synopsis of Who Am I And Who Says I Am Who I Am on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Who Am I And Who Says I Am Who I Am at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Who Am I And Who Says I Am Who I Am, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
First Quarter 2021 Highlights

Net sales totaled $997 million, an increase of 33.8% on a reported basis and 25.6% at constant currency*

Net loss totaled $105 million; Adjusted net income* was $96 million

Adjusted EBITDA* increased to $176 million; Adjusted EBITDA margin* improved 320 basis points to 17.7%

Net cash provided by operating activities totaled $32 million

Adjusted free cash flow* totaled $162 million; Adjusted free cash flow conversion rate* was 169%

Garrett Motion Inc., a leading differentiated technology provider for the automotive industry, today announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021.

$ millions (unless otherwise noted) Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Net sales 997 745 Cost of goods sold 801 607 Gross profit 196 138 Gross profit 19.7% 18.5% Selling, general and administrative expenses 55 57 (Loss) income before taxes (81) 53 Net (loss) income (105) 52 Adjusted net income* 96 71 Adjusted EBITDA* 176 108 Adjusted EBITDA margin* 17.7% 14.5% Net cash provided by operating activities 32 57 Adjusted free cash flow* 162 58

* See reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measure in pages 4-11.

"We are encouraged by our strong start to 2021, delivering results that exceeded our expectations across all key financial metrics," said Olivier Rabiller, Garrett President and CEO. "During the first quarter, we maintained our positive sales momentum, generating approximately $1 billion in net sales for the second consecutive quarter and outperformed global auto production by 15 percentage points. Our Adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter improved 320 basis points, which we believe reflects our ability to leverage Garrett's global operating platform and adapt our variable cost structure. Management's intense focus on conversion also led to robust adjusted free cash flow, which more than doubled in Q1 to $162 million."

Mr. Rabiller added, "Our business fundamentals remain sound with increasing demand for Garrett's differentiated technologies complemented by our proven track record in operational excellence. We continue to expand our in-house advanced engineering capabilities and invest in world-class turbo, electrification and software solutions for both passenger and commercial vehicles on a worldwide basis.

"Through our financial restructuring, we expect to emerge shortly with a new capital structure with less debt and strong sponsorship to support our strategic vision. I am proud of our team's performance throughout this process while navigating the ongoing global pandemic. Although challenges remain, we believe our new foundation will help solidify Garrett's technology leadership and strengthen its operations over the long-term as we continue to address the needs of an industry undergoing rapid transformation."

Results of Operations

Net sales for the first quarter of 2021 were $997 million compared to $745 million in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 33.8%. Net sales at constant currency increased 25.6% and total volumes expanded 30% to 3.8 million units. During the first quarter, light vehicles OEM products increased $197 million, commercial vehicles OEM products increased $44 million, aftermarket products increased $9 million, and other products increased $2 million.

The increase in light vehicles OEM products was primarily driven by higher gasoline volumes in China and higher diesel volumes in Europe. The production of Garrett's facilities in China increased significantly, with an increase in net sales of 116% compared to the prior year period. During the first quarter of 2020, the company's manufacturing facility in Wuhan, China, was closed for six weeks in Q1 2020 and Garrett experienced diminished production in its Shanghai, China facility during the same time period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first quarter, the increase in net sales for commercial vehicles was mainly driven by higher volumes in Europe and China. The increase in aftermarket product sales was primarily driven by higher volumes in Europe, partially offset by volume decreases in North America.

Cost of goods sold for the first quarter of 2021 was $801 million versus $607 million in the first quarter of 2020 primarily due to higher volumes. Research and development expenses in the quarter were $33 million versus $30 million in the first quarter of 2020.

Gross profit percentage for the first quarter of 2021 increased to 19.7% from 18.5% in the first quarter of 2020 primarily due to higher volume leverage.

Selling, general and administrative ("SG&A") expenses for the first quarter of 2021 decreased to $55 million from $57 million in the prior year period. As a percentage of net sales, SG&A for the quarter was 5.5% versus 7.7% in the first quarter of 2020.

Net loss for the first quarter of 2021 was $105 million compared to net income of $52 million in the first quarter of 2020. For the first quarter of 2021, the company recorded Reorganization items net totaling $174 million, representing professional service fees related to the Chapter 11 cases (see below under "Voluntary Filing Under Chapter 11") of which $79 million is related to the termination and expense reimbursement of the stalking horse bid. There were no Reorganization items net in the first quarter of 2020.

Net cash provided by operating activities for the first quarter of 2021 totaled $32 million versus $57 million in the first quarter of 2020.

Expenditures for property, plant and equipment for the first quarter of 2021 totaled $18 million, or 1.8% of net sales, compared to $39 million, or 5.2% of net sales, in the first quarter of 2020.

Additional Non-GAAP Financial Measures

Adjusted net income, which excludes Reorganization items net, unhedged debt exposure, restructuring costs and stock-based compensation, for the first quarter of 2021 was $96 million. This compares to adjusted net income of $71 million, which excludes Honeywell indemnity obligation expenses and litigation fees, restructuring costs and stock-based compensation, in the first quarter of 2020.

Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2021 increased 63.0% to $176 million from $108 million for the same period in 2020. The Adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 17.7% in the quarter from 14.5% in the first quarter of 2020 primarily due to higher volumes.

Adjusted free cash flow, which excludes reorganization items, repositioning charges (primarily severance costs related to internal restructuring projects) and stock-based compensation, was $162 million for the first quarter of 2021 for an adjusted free cash flow conversion rate of 169%. This compares to Adjusted free cash flow of $58 million, which excludes Indemnity-related payments to Honeywell, repositioning costs and stock-based compensation, in the first quarter of 2020, for an adjusted free cash flow conversion rate of 82%.

Voluntary Filing Under Chapter 11

On September 20, 2020, Garrett and certain of its subsidiaries (collectively, the "Debtors") each filed a voluntary petition for relief under chapter 11 of title 11 of the United States Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The Debtors' chapter 11 cases are being jointly administered under the caption "In re: Garrett Motion Inc., 20-12212." For additional information regarding the chapter 11 cases, visit http://www.kccllc.net/garrettmotion.

As previously announced, on April 26, 2021, the Bankruptcy Court entered an order among other things, confirming the Garrett's plan of reorganization. Garrett expects that effective date under the plan will occur as soon as all conditions precedent to the plan have been satisfied, and is currently targeting an effective date on or around April 30, 2021. Although Garrett is targeting occurrence of the effective date as soon as reasonably practicable, Garrett can make no assurances as to when, or ultimately if, the plan will become effective. It is also possible that technical amendments could be made to the plan prior to the effective date.

Conference Call

Garrett will host a conference call on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 8:30 am Eastern Time 2:30 pm Central European Time to discuss the company's financial results for the first quarter. The conference call will be broadcast over the Internet and include a slide presentation. To access the webcast and supporting materials, please visit the investor relations section of Garrett's website at http://investors.garrettmotion.com/. The webcast will also be archived on Garrett's IR website.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements, other than statements of fact, that address activities, events or developments that we or our management intend, expect, project, believe or anticipate will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements including without limitation our statements regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Garrett's business, financial results and financial conditions, industry trends, Garrett's strategy, and Garrett's capital structure following emergence from the Chapter 11 process. Although we believe forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which may cause the actual results or performance of Garrett to be materially different from any future results or performance expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those described in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended March 31, 2021, as well as our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements." You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this document. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results, developments and business decisions may differ from those envisaged by our forward-looking statements.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

This presentation includes constant currency sales growth, Adjusted Net Income, EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA Margin, Adjusted Free Cash Flow, Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion Rate and Net cash provided by operating activities less Expenditures for property, plant and equipment not compliant with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States ("GAAP"). The Non-GAAP financial measures provided herein are adjusted for certain items as presented in the Appendix containing Non-GAAP Reconciliations and may not be directly comparable to similar measures used by other companies in our industry, as other companies may define such measures differently. Management believes that, when considered together with reported amounts, these measures are useful to investors and management in understanding our ongoing operations and in analysis of ongoing operating trends. Garrett believes that Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin are important indicators of operating performance because they exclude the effects of income taxes and certain other items, as well as the effects of financing and investing activities by eliminating the effects of interest and depreciation expenses and therefore more closely measures our operational performance. These metrics should be considered in addition to, and not as replacements for, the most comparable GAAP measure. For additional information with respect to our Non-GAAP financial measures, see our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 and our quarterly report for the period ended March 31, 2021.

About Garrett Motion Inc.

Garrett Motion is a differentiated technology leader, serving customers worldwide for more than 65 years with passenger vehicle, commercial vehicle, aftermarket replacement and performance enhancement solutions. Garrett's cutting-edge technology enables vehicles to become safer, more connected, efficient and environmentally friendly. Our portfolio of turbocharging, electric boosting and automotive software solutions empowers the transportation industry to redefine and further advance motion. For more information, please visit www.garrettmotion.com.

GARRETT MOTION INC. (DEBTOR-IN-POSSESSION) CONSOLIDATED INTERIM STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions, except per share

amounts) Net sales 997 745 Cost of goods sold 801 607 Gross profit 196 138 Selling, general and administrative expenses 55 57 Other expense, net 1 16 Interest expense (excludes contractual interest for the three months ended March 31, 2021 of $9 million) 21 16 Non-operating expense (income) 26 (4 Reorganization items, net 174 (Loss) income before taxes (81 53 Tax expense 24 1 Net (loss) income (105 52 Earnings (loss) per common share Basic (1.38 0.69 Diluted (1.38 0.68 Weighted average common shares outstanding Basic 75,904,898 75,040,932 Diluted 75,904,898 76,261,545

GARRETT MOTION INC. (DEBTOR-IN-POSSESSION) CONSOLIDATED INTERIM STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE (LOSS) INCOME For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Net (loss) income (105 52 Foreign exchange translation adjustment 110 39 Changes in fair value of effective cash flow hedges, net of tax 1 Total other comprehensive income, net of tax 111 39 Comprehensive income 6 91

GARRETT MOTION INC. (DEBTOR-IN-POSSESSION) CONSOLIDATED INTERIM BALANCE SHEETS March 31,

2021 December 31,

2020 (Dollars in millions) ASSETS Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents 382 592 Restricted cash 195 101 Accounts, notes and other receivables-net 807 841 Inventories-net 258 235 Other current assets 93 110 Total current assets 1,735 1,879 Investments and long-term receivables 30 30 Property, plant and equipment-net 484 505 Goodwill 193 193 Deferred income taxes 262 275 Other assets 131 135 Total assets 2,835 3,017 LIABILITIES Current liabilities: Accounts payable 1,099 1,019 Borrowings under revolving credit facility 370 370 Current maturities of long-term debt 6 Debtor-in-possession Term Loan 100 200 Accrued liabilities 277 248 Total current liabilities 1,852 1,837 Long-term debt 1,049 1,082 Deferred income taxes 2 2 Other liabilities 125 114 Total liabilities not subject to compromise 3,028 3,035 Liabilities subject to compromise 2,107 2,290 Total liabilities 5,135 5,325 COMMITMENTS AND CONTINGENCIES EQUITY (DEFICIT) Common stock, par value $0.001; 400,000,000 shares authorized, 76,531,559 and 76,229,578 issued and 76,068,026 and 75,813,634 outstanding as of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively Additional paid-in capital 30 28 Retained deficit (2,312 (2,207 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (18 (129 Total deficit (2,300 (2,308 Total liabilities and deficit 2,835 3,017

GARRETT MOTION INC. (DEBTOR-IN-POSSESSION) CONSOLIDATED INTERIM STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS For the Three Months Ended

March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Cash flows from operating activities: Net (loss) income (105 52 Adjustments to reconcile net (loss) income to net cash provided by operating activities: Reorganization items, net 19 Deferred income taxes 4 (15 Depreciation 23 19 Amortization of deferred issuance costs 2 2 Foreign exchange loss 33 12 Stock compensation expense 2 2 Other (6 8 Changes in assets and liabilities: Accounts, notes and other receivables (2 58 Inventories (34 (14 Other assets 14 (10 Accounts payable 74 (29 Accrued liabilities 17 1 Obligations payable to Honeywell (21 Other liabilities (9 (8 Net cash provided by operating activities 32 57 Cash flows from investing activities: Expenditures for property, plant and equipment (18 (39 Other 1 Net cash used for investing activities (17 (39 Cash flows from financing activities: Payments of debtor-in-possession financing (100 Proceeds from revolving credit facility 621 Payments of revolving credit facility (555 Payments of long-term debt (1 Debtor-in-possession financing fees (1 Other (3 Net cash (used for) provided by financing activities (101 62 Effect of foreign exchange rate changes on cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash (30 (13 Net (decrease)/increase in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash (116 67 Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at beginning of period 693 187 Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at end of period 577 254 Supplemental Cash Flow Disclosure: Reorganization items paid 145

Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA(1) For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Net (loss) income GAAP (105 52 Net interest expense 20 15 Tax expense 24 1 Depreciation 23 19 EBITDA (Non-GAAP) (38 87 Other expense, net (which consists of indemnification, asbestos and environmental expenses) (2) 16 Non-operating income (3) (3 (2 Reorganization items, net (4) 174 Stock compensation expense (5) 2 2 Repositioning charges (6) 8 5 Foreign exchange gain (loss) on debt, net of related hedging (gain) loss 33 Adjusted EBITDA (Non-GAAP) 176 108 Adjusted EBITDA Margin (Non-GAAP) (7) 17.7 14.5

(1) We evaluate performance on the basis of EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA. We define "EBITDA" as our net income/loss calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP, plus the sum of net interest expense/income, tax expense/benefit and depreciation. We define "Adjusted EBITDA" as EBITDA, plus the sum of non-operating income/expense, other expenses, net (which consists of indemnification, asbestos and environmental expenses), stock compensation expense, reorganization items, net, repositioning charges and foreign exchange gain/loss on debt, net of related hedging gain/loss. We believe that EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are important indicators of operating performance and provide useful information for investors because: EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA exclude the effects of income taxes, as well as the effects of financing and investing activities by eliminating the effects of interest and depreciation expenses and therefore more closely measure our operational performance; and

certain adjustment items, while periodically affecting our results, may vary significantly from period to period and have disproportionate effect in a given period, which affects comparability of our results. In addition, our management may use Adjusted EBITDA in setting performance incentive targets in order to align performance measurement with operational performance. (2) The accounting for the majority of our asbestos-related liability payments and accounts payable reflect the terms of the Honeywell Indemnity Agreement with Honeywell entered into on September 12, 2018, under which Garrett ASASCO is currently required to make payments to Honeywell in amounts equal to 90% of Honeywell's asbestos-related liability payments and accounts payable, primarily related to Honeywell's former Bendix business in the United States, as well as certain environmental-related liability payments and accounts payable and non-United States asbestos-related liability payments and accounts payable, in each case related to legacy elements of the Bendix business, including the legal costs of defending and resolving such liabilities, less 90% of Honeywell's net insurance receipts and, as may be applicable, certain other recoveries associated with such liabilities. The Plan as confirmed by the Bankruptcy Court includes a global settlement with Honeywell providing for, among other things, the full and final satisfaction, settlement, release, and discharge of all liabilities under or related to the Honeywell Indemnity Agreement, that certain Indemnification Guarantee Agreement, dated as of September 27, 2018 (as amended, restated, amended and restated, supplemented, or otherwise modified from time to time), by and among Honeywell ASASCO 2 Inc. as payee, Garrett ASASCO as payor, and certain subsidiary guarantors as defined therein (the "Guarantee Agreement," and together with the Honeywell Indemnity Agreement, the "Indemnity Agreements") and the Tax Matters Agreement. See Note 18, Commitments and Contingencies of Notes to the Consolidated Interim Financial Statements. (3) Non-operating income adjustment includes the non-service component of pension expense and other expense, net and excludes interest income, equity income of affiliates, and the impact of foreign exchange. (4) The Company has applied ASC 852 in preparing its Consolidated Interim Financial Statements. ASC 852 requires the financial statements for periods subsequent to the Petition Date to distinguish transactions and events that are directly associated with the Company's reorganization from the ongoing operations of the business. Accordingly, certain expenses and gains incurred during the Chapter 11 Cases are recorded within Reorganization items, net in the Consolidated Interim Statements of Operations. See Note 2, Reorganization and Chapter 11 Proceedings of Notes to the Consolidated Interim Financial Statements. (5) Stock compensation expense adjustment includes only non-cash expenses. (6) Repositioning charges adjustment primarily includes severance costs related to restructuring projects to improve future productivity. (7) Adjusted EBITDA Margin represents Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of net sales.

Reconciliation of Constant Currency Sales Change(1) For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 Garrett Reported sales change 34 (11 Less: Foreign currency translation 8 (2 Constant currency sales change 26 (9 Gasoline Reported sales change 46 11 Less: Foreign currency translation 10 (3 Constant currency sales change 36 14 Diesel Reported sales change 31 (21 Less: Foreign currency translation 10 (3 Constant currency sales change 21 (18 Commercial vehicles Reported sales change 31 (18 Less: Foreign currency translation 5 (1 Constant currency sales change 26 (17 Aftermarket Reported sales change 11 (18 Less: Foreign currency translation 5 (2 Constant currency sales change 6 (16 Other Sales Reported sales change 13 (25 Less: Foreign currency translation 6 (2 Constant currency sales change 7 (23 1 We previously referred to "constant currency sales growth" as "organic sales growth." We define constant currency sales growth as the year-over-year change in reported sales relative to the comparable period, excluding the impact on sales from foreign currency translation. This is the same definition we previously used for "organic sales growth". We believe this measure is useful to investors and management in understanding our ongoing operations and in analysis of ongoing operating trends.

Reconciliation of Net Income GAAP to EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA, and to Adjusted Free Cash Flow and Net cash provided by operations less Expenditures for property, plant and equipment For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Net (loss) income GAAP (105 52 Net interest expense 20 15 Tax expense 24 1 Depreciation 23 19 EBITDA (Non-GAAP) (38 87 Other expense, net (which consists of indemnification, asbestos and environmental expenses) 16 Non-operating income (3 (2 Reorganization items, net 174 Stock compensation expense 2 2 Repositioning charges 8 5 Foreign exchange gain (loss) on debt, net of related hedging (gain) loss 33 Adjusted EBITDA (Non-GAAP) 176 108 Change in working capital 38 15 Cash taxes (15 (3 Capital expenditures (18 (39 Other (16 Cash interest (19 (7 Adjusted free cash flow (Non-GAAP) 162 58 Honeywell Indemnity Agreement (39 Stalking horse termination reimbursement (79 Chapter 11 professional service costs (66 Stock compensation cash (1 Repositioning cash (2 (1 Net cash provided by operating activities less expenditures for property, plant and equipment (Non-GAAP) 14 18

Reconciliation of Cash Flow from Operations less Expenditures for PP&E to Adjusted Free Cash Flow For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Net cash provided by operating activities GAAP 32 57 Expenditures for property, plant and equipment (18 (39 Net cash provided by operating activities less expenditures for property, plant and equipment (Non-GAAP) 14 18 Honeywell Indemnity Agreement expenses 39 Stalking horse termination reimbursement 79 Chapter 11 professional service costs 66 Stock compensation cash 1 Repositioning cash 2 1 Adjusted free cash flow (Non-GAAP) 162 58

Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion Rate For the Three Months

Ended March 31, 2021 2020 (Dollars in millions) Net (loss) income GAAP (105 52 Foreign exchange gain (loss) on debt, net of related hedging (gain) loss 33 Other expense, net (which consists of indemnification, asbestos and environmental expenses) 16 Non-operating income (3 (2 Reorganization items, net 174 Stock compensation expense 2 2 Repositioning charges 8 5 Adjusted tax expense (1) (13 (2 Adjusted net income (Non-GAAP) 96 71 Adjusted free cash flow (Non-GAAP) 162 58 Adjusted free cash flow conversion (Non-GAAP) 169 82 1 Adjusting items are tax effected at the same annual effective tax rate that was used at the time the adjusting item was originally recorded. If the adjusting item was not originally taxed at the annual effective tax rate, then the amount of the tax originally recorded is used.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005558/en/

Contacts:

MEDIA

Michael Cimini

+1 973 216-3986

michael.cimini@garrettmotion.com

INVESTOR RELATIONS

Paul Blalock

+1 862 812-5013

paul.blalock@garrettmotion.com
April 29, 2021





2020 was such a challenging year that many concerns fell by the wayside. One such set of issues were preparations for Brexit, which would surely have received more attention in a less dramatic year. Now, though, the transition period is almost over and Brexit day itself draws near. It's time to give more thought to what the commercial sector needs to do to prepare for and react to the change.







Brexit has wide-reaching implications for an enormous number of businesses. There is bound to be an impact of Brexit on UK companies. They need to consider how the change will impact the movement of goods and services to and from the European Union. EU businesses need to consider similar issues affecting their own trade with partners and customers in the UK. Manufacturers and retailers should be particularly concerned with Brexit, as it will undoubtedly affect the flow of both supplies and components as well as finished goods and services that are delivered across borders. Whether your business is a giant or a small start-up, you must carefully consider how Brexit is going to change your operation. These matters impact small businesses and in turn even things like the Henderson smaller companies trust share price

The effects of Brexit can reach even further into otherwise-unaffected industries because it has the potential to affect any commercial contract that involves the UK and the EU. The United Kingdom's transition period for Brexit comes to an end on December 31st, 2020, regardless of what deals and agreements may be struck before the deadline. That means the time to consider Brexit's impact on your business's contractual relationships is now.

Brexit: The Core Concerns

Although the specifics of Brexit's impact will vary from industry to industry and company to company, we will all see clear alterations in the way we do business. Our team has taken a wide perspective to gather some fundamental and practical advice that can help your business prepare for post-Brexit operations no matter what industry you work in.

How Contracts Refer To The EU

Any commercial contract that mentions the EU (in establishing zones of exclusivity or defining selling rights, for instance) may unintentionally change the way that contract treats the UK after the nation leaves the EU. An area of exclusivity that is contractually defined by referring to the EU may, contrary to the parties' intentions, exclude the UK after the changeover. This is why companies need to carefully examine the way their contracts address geographic scope before Brexit. Any territorial definitions which rely on referring to the EU or EEA may need to be updated. Intellectual property licenses, non-compete clauses, and agreements for franchising, distribution, and agency may all be affected. Contracts should be updated by either including a dated reference to EU membership at the time the agreement was signed or by making express, separate reference to the UK. In many cases, a formal variation will be required to amend the contract properly.

Supply Chain Concerns

The withdrawal of the UK from the Union means that customs procedures once again have to be considered when goods are moved between the EU and the UK. Many existing contracts do not address compliance responsibilities and liability for customs requirements. Your company may need to develop new plans for addressing its export and import responsibilities. Will you need to handle these responsibilities on your own, or will they be shared with contractual partners? Most importantly, you should apply now for an Economic Operator Registration and Identification number. This will be essential for moving goods between Europe and the UK after Brexit.

Tariffs

Once the transition period is over, tariffs may apply to goods and services supplied across the border. Businesses should make a careful study of how such tariffs will be calculated, investigate ways of reducing tariff costs, and which parties in contractual relationships will be responsible for tariff expenses. Depending on the severity of tariffs, it may be useful or even necessary to seek alternate sources of goods and services within your business's country of origin.

Businesses that supply other businesses or individual consumers need to be ready to factor tariff costs into their quotes. If your business intends to pass tariff costs wholly or partially on to your customers, make sure that your quotes make it clear that you are doing so.

Tariffs should be another factor considered when reviewing existing contracts. Establish, if possible, which parties are responsible for changes in tariff costs and consider if the existing arrangement should be altered. Depending on how extensive tariffs are, how contracts address them could have serious ramifications for one or more parties.

Currency Exchange Rates

It is likely, if not certain, that Brexit will continue to affect exchange rates as it has done ever since it became a possibility. Exchange rate volatility increased sharply immediately following the June 2016 referendum, with the Pound losing ground against both the Euro and the US dollar. You need to be aware of how changes in the exchange rate may impact your business going forward and even property rpices if buying from abroad according to this online estate agents. How are your existing contracts affected? Is your business exposed to undue risk? Do you need to revise existing contracts and/or update new ones? As with most Brexit concerns, remember to examine exchange rate fluctuation in the context of which party or parties are responsible for absorbing costs.

Delays

Brexit will introduce extensive customs checks on goods entering and leaving the UK. This means that the movement of goods will inevitably slow down. You need to examine your business's supply chain and consider how customs delays will impact your operations. Where does the liability lie? If your suppliers can no longer meet your needs in a timely fashion, what alternatives are open to you. You should consider these areas in particular:

* How time-sensitive is the delivery of a given supply or product?

* Will customs delays result in liquidated damages and/or service credits?

* What liabilities is your business exposed to?

* Will customs delays make termination rights applicable?

Data Security

Data protection has been an increasingly visible concern as the end of the transition approaches. Contractual arrangements covering data protection need to be reviewed. UK businesses that receive personal data from EEA states, in particular, need to consider revisions to their procedures to ensure that they remain compliant with all applicable regulations. Follow this link for additional information on data protection arrangements.
An NYPD officer was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Wednesday after fatally shooting himself with his own firearm, DailyMail.com has learned.

Rory Dahill, 34, was discovered at his Stuyvesant Town home at around 7:30pm, lying face down on his bed with a gunshot wound to his head and with his weapon beside him, according to a source.

The cop, who joined the force in 2013, was due to report to work at his stationhouse in Times Square at 6pm.

When he failed to show up that evening, his family was called and a wellness check was conducted at his home, sources said.

Rory Dahill, 34, is the second NYPD officer to die by suicide this month. The cop, who joined the force in 2013, was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head on Wednesday evening

The NYPD has seen a troubling rise in force suicides in the past two years. Just weeks earlier on April 5, Deputy Inspector Denis Mullaney (left) shot himself in his police vehicle in Queens. In February 2020, Detective Paul Federico (right) 53, a 29-year veteran, died by suicide at his mother's home in Queens

His death is the second suicide in the NYPD this month.

It also comes one day after NYPD Highway officer Anastasios Tsakos was killed by a drunk driver while on duty on the Long Island Expressway.

Dahill had paid tribute to his fallen colleague on Facebook just 24 hours before he took his own life, according to social media.

And just weeks earlier on April 5, a NYPD precinct commander died by suicide after shooting himself to death inside his police vehicle across from a park in Queens.

Deputy Inspector Denis Mullaney, 44, who commanded the Queens 107th precinct, had called another precinct official to say he was thinking about killing himself, a source told DailyMail.com.

Dahill's suicide also comes one day after fellow NYPD cop Anastasios Tsakos (pictured) was killed by a drunk driver while on duty on the Long Island Expressway

The official immediately called the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit to try and locate Mullaney by the position of his phone.

But by the time they managed to locate him, he had pulled the trigger, the source said.

Dahill had paid tribute to his late colleague on social media (pictured) about 24 hours before taking his own life

Mullaney is believed to the first active-duty police officer to kill themselves this year after a rise in police suicides over 2019 and 2020.

In March 2020, an NYPD transit cop committed suicide inside a Midtown police station by using another officer's gun to shoot herself after her own service weapon was taken away from her by the department.

A month earlier, Detective Paul Federico, 53, killed himself at his mother's home in Queens after being stripped of his gun.

Federico was a 29-year veteran of the force and was assigned to the police commissioner's office.

He hanged himself in the Middle Village home on 79th Street, sources said.

In 2019, 10 NYPD officers took their own lives, double the annual rate of previous years, prompting the department to launch a new suicide prevention program.

There were at least 228 officer suicides nationally in 2019 alone, according to Massachusetts-based nonprofit Blue H.E.L.P.
A group of environmentally-focused farmers have called on the next Scottish and Welsh governments to introduce climate-friendly farming practices.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) has launched its manifesto ahead of the 6 May elections, urging new devolved governments to back sustainable practices.

Farmers in Scotland and Wales want new pledges that back strong environment and agriculture policies which recognise nature-friendly practices as a central part of food production.

The organisation works with hundreds of farmers across the two nations, who report on the benefits of nature-friendly farming.

These include increased yields and biodiversity, to carbon sequestration and improved soil health.

Key asks of the next government include helping farmers provide nature-based solutions to tackle the climate crisis and new support for rural communities and economies.

Michael Clarke, NFFN Scotland Chair, said new support for farmers was needed following a 'period of unprecedented difficulty'.

"The future government will be presented with a unique opportunity to deliver a clear roadmap and ambitious policies that put nature and community resilience at the heart of food production.

"With the right tools and support in place, farmers can lead on reversing biodiversity loss and the transition to a net-zero economy, he said.

The NFFN has also called for more support directed to helping farmers produce healthy and sustainable food while improving public health.

Hillary Kehoe, NFFN Cymru Chair, added that the future survival of all farming businesses 'depends on a thriving environment'.

"With the right policies and support in place, farmers are uniquely positioned to accelerate positive change at scale," she said.

"The next Welsh government can and must strive for a more nature-friendly, profitable farming industry.

"Our manifesto sets out the tasks ahead that would ensure the long-term profitability of the farming sector while supporting the government to reach climate targets."
BALTIMORE, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In an effort to monitor the spread of COVID-19 variants in the State of Maryland, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA , announced that UMaryland Genomics at UMSOM will perform genome sequencing of variants in at least 10 percent of COVID-19 test samples, reaching an important benchmark set by the federal government to help control the spread of these variants.

The State has entered into separate agreements with UMSOM and Johns Hopkins Medicine in an effort to double the state's surveillance of coronavirus variants to more than 10 percent of COVID-19 cases, Governor Larry Hogan announced at a recent press conference. This would enable Maryland to achieve the surveillance goal set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the spread of variants.

The sequencing is being conducted at UMaryland Genomics, a high-throughput sequencing and analysis center at the UMSOM's Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS). The laboratory team, which has more than two decades of high-throughput sequencing expertise, initiated viral genome sequencing last week to identify variants in positive samples containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19.

"We are monitoring for any variants including those that were originally discovered in South Africa, the United Kingdom and Brazil, which tend to be more contagious," said Jacques Ravel, PhD , Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at UMSOM and Associate Director of IGS. "Viral genome sequencing can detect new variants that are circulating, and we do not yet know about."

Information from variant monitoring can be used in multiple ways. First and foremost, it can provide valuable surveillance data to state health officials on the spread of variants through local cities and communities. This information can be used along with contact tracing to determine whether certain variants are more contagious. It can also be used to determine whether vaccinations are protecting against these variants.

"If a previously vaccinated individual tests positive for SARS-CoV-2, genome sequencing can tell us whether they contracted a variant strain," said Luke Tallon of IGS, and Scientific Director of UMaryland Genomics, which is conducting the sequencing and analysis. "This information will help us to determine whether vaccines protect against variants."

Over the past year, UMaryland Genomics at UMSOM, in collaboration with the University of Maryland Pathology Associates (UMPA) and with support from the State, has successfully performed more than 750,000 COVID-19 tests throughout the state, including the majority of testing for universities, nursing home facilities, urgent care locations, and correctional facilities. The new sequencing effort will involve using positive test samples identified by the testing lab.

"Since we refocused much of our high-throughput laboratory infrastructure to COVID-19 testing almost a year ago, we have achieved many impressive milestones that have enabled us to become an important partner with the State of Maryland in helping to provide rapid and accurate testing to Maryland residents," said Claire Fraser, PhD , the Dean's Endowed Professor and Director of IGS. "Our new mission to perform genome sequencing of variants is a natural progression of this effort, and we are proud to partner with the State once again on this important public health mission."

Over the past two decades, UMaryland Genomics/IGS at UMSOM have contributed to large-scale genome sequencing and analysis of prior viral outbreaks, including influenza, rhinovirus (common cold), Zika, Ebola, and others.

UMSOM Dean E. Albert Reece added: "We are delighted to partner with the State of Maryland on this important effort, and the UMSOM community can be proud of the tremendous collaboration that has taken place between UMaryland Genomics/IGS and UMPA, and between UMSOM, UMB and MDH to make these testing and surveillance efforts successful. We owe all of these teams a debt of gratitude for the essential role they are playing in helping the State effectively manage the COVID-19 response."

About the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Now in its third century, the University of Maryland School of Medicine was chartered in 1807 as the first public medical school in the United States. It continues today as one of the fastest growing, top-tier biomedical research enterprises in the world -- with 45 academic departments, centers, institutes, and programs; and a faculty of more than 3,000 physicians, scientists, and allied health professionals, including members of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and a distinguished two-time winner of the Albert E. Lasker Award in Medical Research. With an operating budget of more than $1.2 billion, the School of Medicine works closely in partnership with the University of Maryland Medical Center and Medical System to provide research-intensive, academic and clinically based care for nearly 2 million patients each year. The School of Medicine has more than $563 million in extramural funding, with most of its academic departments highly ranked among all medical schools in the nation in research funding. As one of the seven professional schools that make up the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus, the School of Medicine has a total population of nearly 9,000 faculty and staff, including 2,500 student trainees, residents, and fellows. The combined School of Medicine and Medical System ("University of Maryland Medicine") has an annual budget of nearly $6 billion and an economic impact more than $15 billion on the state and local community. The School of Medicine, which ranks as the 8th highest among public medical schools in research productivity, is an innovator in translational medicine, with 600 active patents and 24 start-up companies. The School of Medicine works locally, nationally, and globally, with research and treatment facilities in 36 countries around the world. Visit medschool.umaryland.edu

SOURCE University of Maryland School of Medicine

Related Links

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Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

ON THE RIVER NIGER BRIDGE, Nigeria  After two hours spent in gridlocked traffic trying to cross a bridge spanning the mighty Niger River, despair kicks in. Weve not moved an inch. I fidget in the back seat. Will we ever make it to the other side?

After being stuck three hours  time mostly spent pondering why in Nigeria, the giant of Africa, this narrow bridge is the only major connection between two economically vital southern regions  acceptance arrives: This is where were spending the night.

People emerge from their cars and trucks to stretch, accepting it too. Half a dozen men drift to the curbside, to sit and joke. Women lean on the trunks of their cars and chat.
A trio of $11,200 contests for developing horses opened a five-day racing week at Harrahs Philadelphia on Wednesday (April 28).

In the first of the contests for pacing males, the gelded son of Mr Wiggles Nextmovebestmove remained undefeated in four starts, chopping down the well-regarded leader Rockin Rocko while lowering his lifetime best to 1:51.2. Montrell Teague drove the Clyde Francis trainee, improving by the race, for George Teague Jr. Inc. and David Collins.

In the other headliner section for sidewheelers, most bettors thought one of the McCarthy brothers would winbut they thought it would be Todd McCarthy behind 1-10 shot Shakespeare. However, it proved to be brother Andrew getting the victory with the Sweet Lou three-year-old colt Tapped Teen in a career best of 1:52.3, coming out of the pocket to wear down the big chalk for owner-trainer Aaron Lambert.

In the feature cut for trotters, the Googoo Gaagaa sophomore filly Goo Doo Doll made her 2021 debut a winning one, reducing her mark to 1:57. David Miller had to send the filly on the difficult tuck-then-grind mission, but the stakes-placed filly here last year was impressively up to the challenge for trainer Ed Gannon Jr. and owner Frank Canzone.

On Thursday (April 29), a $12,800 trot for developing horses heads the lineup, with Shikansen coming off a 1:54.2 win at The Meadowlands for Kelvin Red Harrison, tied at the top of the Philly trainer standings. Hell take on Ginger Tree Knox, stepping up off two straight victories for the hot Team Cook/Beegle. First-race post will be at 12:30 p.m. (EDT). Program pages for the card will be available at the PHHA website.

FINISHING LINES  At the PHHAs sister track, The Downs at Mohegan Sun Pocono, on Wednesday morning, Bronx Seelster, a son of Big Jim who was the Battle Of Waterloo winner at two, had a sharp 1:52 qualifier for the Down Under team of trainer Shane Tritton and driver Lauren Tritton, who won over 900 races in her sulky time back home.

(PHHA / Pocono)
The jury took only a few seconds to confer, not even bothering to leave the packed Court of Common Pleas in London where they had been sitting all day. Then the foreman said to the judge: 'My lord, we are agreed in a verdict  it is for the Defendant.' This was the cue for loud bursts of applause and shouts of 'Good old Melbourne'.

No less a person than the Prime Minister, the handsome Lord Melbourne, had been dramatically cleared of having 'criminal intercourse' with a married woman, the alluring Caroline Norton.

Her aggrieved husband, George, had made the accusation in June 1836. London society buzzed with excitement, predictions, lamentations, exultations or a combination of all these emotions.

Witnesses, mainly servants, had thrilled with salacious mixtures of observation and conjecture about the couple's illicit meetings  glimpses of their mistress's tumbled hair after Melbourne's visits, of disordered clothing and even an uncovered thigh as she lay on a hearth rug. A footman witnessed his hand on Mrs Norton's shoulder, a maid saw kisses bestowed on her by Melbourne.

The recounting of such intimacies had all caused much jollity but, as the judge had pointed out in his summing-up, the vital legal point was this: though 'great familiarity' had been shown on the part of Melbourne and Mrs Norton, adultery had not.

He had told the jury that unless adultery was proved, they must find for Melbourne. As they did.

Caroline Norton, oil on canvas, Sir George Hayter, 1835. Her plight turned Caroline Norton into a passionate campaigner for women's rights

For Caroline, this was a moment of pure joy. She was separated from her bully of a husband, who, to her great distress, had taken away their three young sons. Now, with the court verdict against her husband, her life could revert to normal, her children back in their mother's care and she able to live the life she wanted.

That was her hope, but she was to be disappointed. The court case caused no harm to the reputation of the popular Melbourne.

It was Caroline who continued to suffer, losing not only her reputation but her children. Because in the patriarchal society of early 19th-century Britain, married women had no rights. Wives could carry on a separate business  as Caroline, a hugely successful writer of novels, poems and magazine articles, did  but copyright belonged to the husband.

'Everything that's yours is mine,' a husband tells his wife in one of her novels. 'The clothes you have on, the chain round your neck, the rings you have on, are mine. The law doesn't admit a married woman has a right to a farthing's worth of property.'

And the same went for any offspring  all rights over children were vested in their father.

Her plight turned Caroline Norton into a passionate campaigner for women's rights, making a real contribution to a cause that subsequent generations take for granted: infant custody rights for mothers.

Here was the very first piece of feminist legislation in British history, the work of a remarkable individual whose whole life bore witness to the undeniable fact that a married woman did exist and could not be ignored by the law.

SHE was born Caroline Sheridan, a granddaughter of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he of The Rivals and School For Scandal. She and her two sisters  born within three years of each other  were such dazzling beauties that they were known in society as the Graces.

Prime Minister, the handsome Lord Melbourne (pictured), had been dramatically cleared of having 'criminal intercourse' with a married woman, Caroline Norton

To Charles Dickens, they were 'sights for the Gods', while another admirer summed them up as 'bewitching, wickedly mischievous and innocently wicked'.

Caroline's thick, lustrous dark hair gave her an Eastern-looking beauty which captivated the aristocratic George Norton, a barrister and Tory MP.

They married in the summer of 1827, when she was just 19 and he 25, and took up residence in a house in Storey's Gate close to Parliament. There, with all her natural charm, she was soon presiding over a salon for politicians.

Caroline was a fresh and lively presence in political circles; a flirt, certainly, seeing this as part of her role as a hostess.

She dazzled guests with her huge, dark eyes, using them 'so wickedly' in deliberate acts of enchantment that the graceful modesty with which she lowered them became famous  or was it notorious?

A portrait of Caroline by William Etty, painted after her Infant Custody Act victory in 1839

She also had a seductive power of speech  'a most peculiar, deep, soft contralto voice which was, like her beautiful dark face, set to music'. But the conversation that came forth was sharp, stinging, sardonic and often outrageous.

She prided herself on her full and voluptuous figure  'fleshy' in the language of her time. Exactly how 'fleshy' is impossible to say, since in her early married life she was mostly pregnant, giving birth to three sons in five years.

But it was far from a happy marriage. Shortly after their wedding, Norton became enraged with his young wife and attacked her physically. Thereafter, he took to kicking, pushing and shoving her when she displeased him.

He threatened to throw her downstairs when she was pregnant, and a miscarriage was caused by a vicious blow at least once.

Such attacks were not necessarily against the law. A married woman was her husband's property  as Caroline put it, 'she does not exist'. The considerable amount of money she earned from her writing was also her husband's legal property. Norton resented her literary career, but was happy to live off the proceeds.

Meanwhile, an increasingly regular caller at the Norton home was Lord Melbourne  a widower in his early 50s, nearly 30 years older than Caroline, he was still an attractive man.

He had a preference for strong women and was also bent on avoiding boredom.

A gentle rallying, teasing friendship began. Caroline found gratification in the sheer importance of her admirer's position as Prime Minister, and it quickly became known that her presence put the great man in a good humour, resulting in an increase in her social prestige.

The warmth of her relationship with Melbourne was soon a matter of general comment. One acquaintance who dined with them commented that 'they appeared better friends than I should have liked if I had been Mr Norton'.

As for Norton, the subordinate role in which he found himself riled him. He was haunted by the impression that Caroline did not think he was good enough for her and her friends. They began spending more and more time apart.

From her correspondence, it seems clear that if Caroline was not in love with Melbourne at this point, he was at the least the focus of her sentimental feelings.

Which did not necessarily mean they were lovers. Caroline had many admirers; she flirted with many people, that was her nature. Nevertheless, her letters to him grew ever more tender and the frequency of his visits, however innocuous, could not fail to be remarked upon by the servants.

Just before Easter 1836, things with her husband came to a head when Caroline made arrangements to stay with her brother in the country. Norton was specifically not invited and they quarrelled.

He refused to let her take the children, and eventually sent them to live with his sister in Scotland, as far from Caroline as possible.

She wrote an appalled letter to Melbourne: 'He has taken all my children from me! Here is a man, who was mad to marry me at 18, who turns me out of his house nine years afterwards and inflicts vengeance as bitterly as he can'.

Wild threats began to be exchanged on both sides. It was the question of the children which drove Caroline to madness  or was it the reasonable response of a devoted mother?

On the other hand, it was the question of adultery which seemed to be driving her estranged husband to equal madness.

Earlier in the year, Norton had asked his wife to use her influence with Melbourne to secure him a paid position as a magistrate. Now he proposed to sue that same man for adultery and ask for the vast sum of 10,000  just under 900,000 in modern values  in damages.

Caroline was not a co-defendant in the action and since she had no legal existence outside marriage, she was not represented in court, though her words and deeds would be widely cited. She wrote bitterly to her writer friend Mary Shelley: 'Well, a woman is made a helpless wretch by these laws of men  or she would be allowed a defence, a counsel, in such an hour.'

Unfortunately, there was no comfort to be got from Melbourne himself, who  to protect himself politically  stood back from supporting her.

In a letter she accused him of 'shrinking from me and my burdensome distress'.

His main reaction seems to have been a wish to be involved as little as possible. To a friend, he made a somewhat ungallant complaint: 'The fact is He [Norton] is a stupid Brute and She [Caroline] had not temper nor dissimulation enough to manage him.' The tone of her letters to Melbourne became sombre. In one, she expressed 'my strong impression that you have ceased to feel the affection for me which you did'.

Another ended: 'I am to be a childless mother & a disgraced wife for my supposed power to charm strangers, yet the man I have been 'charming' since I was 22 [the age she met Melbourne]'.

Then she breaks off. 'Well! I beg pardon. All I say is, worse women have been better stood by.'

As for the charge of adultery, though in her letters she admitted that 'no one ever loved another better than I have loved you', that leaves unclear whether romantic passion was ever physically consummated, and if so, to what degree.

Certainly, in their personal correspondence, neither Caroline nor Melbourne ever admitted to having had the raging affair of which they were accused.

In theory, it is possible they did and simply lied about it. But there are cumulative indications which point in a different direction, not least that for so much of the time she knew Melbourne she was pregnant. This was proof of continuing conjugal relations with Norton, who never questioned the boys' paternity at the time.

Another factor points away from full consummation. Melbourne had an acknowledged taste for flagellation, and there is no suggestion he ever indulged in this taste with Caroline  who, as the wife of an abusive husband, was unlikely to have welcomed it.

In an age without reliable birth control, dalliance of a lighter sort was popular. It seems most likely Melbourne and Caroline indulged in intimate caresses, stopping short of the ultimate act. So she was convinced she had not committed adultery. And so the Court of Common Pleas had pronounced. She and Melbourne were not guilty of 'criminal intercourse'.

But while he was cheered in the House of Commons, popular opinion took a different view of Caroline, with The Times characterising her as vain and her conduct imprudent, indiscreet and undignified, 'the very last we would hold out to an English wife'.

Caroline and Norton were expected to continue as before: an unhappily married couple with three sons, amid bouts of physical violence. But she refused to accept her fate.

Innocent or not, the law was on the side of the husband, not the wife. Knowing her sons might grow up without ever seeing her, she campaigned to change the law.

First, she produced a pamphlet of Observations On The Natural Claim Of The Mother To The Custody Of Her Infant Children As Affected By The Common Law Right Of The Father.

Then, with her help, one of her MP friends, lawyer Thomas Talfourd, introduced in the House of Commons the first feminist legislation ever to be brought before it  the Infant Custody Bill.

In cases where the parents were living apart, it sought to empower judges to make orders relating to the custody of children under the age of seven.

Opponents pitched into Talfourd's suggested measures by attacking the principle of a mother's absolute right to access.

It was declared 'immoral and anti-Christian' for encouraging women to feel the freedom to separate rather than seek reconciliation with their husbands.

It was also argued that allowing women this maternal right would encourage adultery  though, true to the times, it was the adultery of the mother that was contemplated with eloquent horror rather than the adultery of the father. Talfourd's bill was passed in the House of Commons by 91 votes to 18, but then went to the Lords.

There, it was opposed by a former Lord Chancellor on the grounds of being 'repugnant to nature'. By 11 votes to nine, an exceptionally small House of Lords threw it out, demolishing the hopes of women.

Meanwhile, Caroline wrote to her husband that after 14 months' separation: 'I am hungry for the children.' He allowed her to see them for daily visits in London, but then sent them back to Scotland, and there was nothing she could do.

But slowly the atmosphere was changing. In April 1839, Talfourd returned to Parliament with his bill and went further than before by asking for a mother to have not mere access to her infant child, but actual custody. This time the Lords allowed it to proceed, and in August that year, the young Queen Victoria gave it the Royal Assent.

A woman was now able to petition the court for custody of her own children up to the age of seven, and for access to other, older children. The Court of Chancery could transfer legal custody to the mother if she was judged to be best suited to the care of the child.

For the first time in English history, a mother had some legal rights over her own children. The father's were no longer absolute. Not that this made much difference to Caroline.

George Norton persistently used his trump card  access to the boys  to impose his own terms.

Eventually, though, he would extend no further opposition to her seeing them, and in 1842 she spent her first Christmas with them for seven years (though sadly without Willie, the youngest, who had tragically died from blood poisoning after falling from a pony).

Over the years, there was much criticism directed at Caroline because of her seemingly scandalous behaviour.

She also came under attack that her campaigning was totally selfish, based entirely on self-interest, not the interests of women in general.

She didn't care. To her, it was more important that the law should be altered than that she should be approved. 'Many a woman may live to thank Heaven that I had the courage and energy to attempt the task,' she wrote.

Some women, including her own sisters, disapproved, believing she sought the oxygen of publicity. But she was determined to make public her anger.

She used all her political contacts, and, above all, her agile pen, to tread boldly forward in protest. The wrong done to her was done towards all women.

It was appropriate, then, that when Victorian artist Daniel Maclise painted her portrait he chose to picture Caroline as Justice  a dominating female holding a pair of scales, with those huge dark eyes, the ones she had used to such good effect, cast ever upwards.
MUSA is the world's first clinically available CE-certified surgical robot assistant for microsurgeons. The device has been developed by a team of engineers and surgeons, creating a groundbreaking solution and compatible with current operating techniques, instruments and other operation room-equipment. MUSA seamlessly scales down motion and filters out tremor to keep a steady hand at any time throughout every microsurgical procedure. This can greatly improve clinical outcomes for various micro-surgical indications such as lymphatic-venous anastomosis, distal nerve repair, vascularized tissue transplantation and many other complex microsurgical procedures.

The initial planned clinical roll-out of MUSA was seriously delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, giving the company the opportunity to also further develop a number of improvements to the current MUSA system, which will be available on the market in the course of 2022.

New CEO

In mid 2020, Microsure appointed Sjaak Deckers PhD as its new CEO, to lead the company into its next phase of market entry. Deckers is an experienced MedTech executive with broad product development experience, as CEO of two earlier MedTech startup companies, GTX Medical and Sapiens (Steering Brain Stimulation), and as venture partner at European Healthtech Builder NLC. He also held senior management positions at Medtronic, Philips Healthcare and Philips Research, where his latest role was Senior Director Business Development Healthcare.

Deckers is very pleased with the new funding to further advance the MUSA:

"Despite the Covid-19 restrictions, our engineers have made tremendous improvements to the current MUSA system, and our clinical team gained further adoption experience of microsurgery in the Netherlands with the MUSA system. Microsure has attracted strong interest from multiple key sites, and users from across Europe to further advance its unique robot assisted microsurgical technology platform. This investment will help us expediting our further clinical validation and adoption across multiple sites. It will scale up our business presence, addressing the unique clinical needs for microsurgeons."

Wouter van Westenbrugge, senior investment manager at Invest-NL adds:

"Invest-NL is a Dutch impact investor committed to businesses and projects focusing on making The Netherlands more sustainable and innovative. To that respect, Microsure's activities and goals fit right in our TOPSS program and thus we're thrilled to be able to support Microsure on their exciting journey to further improve micro-surgery systems. High-tech innovation in key technologies is critical for the Netherlands in the future and will improve people's lives."

Tom Schwarz, chairman of the supervisory board representing Innovation Industries comments:

"This investment round enables the Microsure team to continue with their clinical evaluations, and in parallel to further advance their next generation systems. We are looking forward to the fruits of their work in clinical practice over the coming years."

For Further information please contact

Microsure

Sjaak Deckers PhD, Chief Executive Officer

T: +31 (0)6 2249 0104

E: [email protected]

For media:

LifeSpring Life Sciences Communications, Amsterdam

Leon Melens

T: +31 (0)6 538 16 427

[email protected]

About Microsure

Microsure is a medical device company located in Eindhoven (Netherlands) founded in 2016 by Eindhoven University of Technology and Maastricht University Medical Center. Its focus is to improve patients' lives through developing robot assisted systems for microsurgery.

Its current leading product is MUSA, the world's first CE-marked and approved surgical robot for open microsurgery. MUSA is designed in close cooperation with microsurgeons and engineers, specifically for microsurgical applications. MUSA provides superhuman precision for microsurgeons, enabling new interventions that are currently impossible to perform by hand.

Microsure is proud to build on a network of clinical and technical advisors, including top surgeons from university medical centers worldwide, with the Maastricht University Medical Center+ as a leading clinical partner.

For more information, please visit: www.microsure.nl

About Invest-NL

Invest-NL is an impact investor committed to businesses and projects that will make the Netherlands more sustainable and innovative. Its focus lies on carbon-neutral and circular economy and on innovative, fast-growing companies, or scale-ups. Invest-NL supports innovative entrepreneurs through financing and advice according to one simple principle: impact is our goal, return is our means. As the Dutch partner for European investment institutions, Invest-NL is dedicated to cooperation and always works together with other investors. Invest-NL is headquartered in Amsterdam and employs a staff of 60 people.

For more information, please visit www.invest-nl.nl.

About the Brabant Development Agency (BOM)

The Brabant Development Agency (BOM) stands for a future-proof Brabant economy. We do this by developing, investing and internationalizing. Together with entrepreneurs from Brabant we work on sustainable food systems, vital care systems, climate-proof energy solutions and the development of promising key technologies.

In order to keep healthcare systems effective and affordable, BOM focuses on personalized treatment methods, digital care and applications of key technologies such as photonics, nanotechnology and robotics.

For more information, please visit www.bom.nl

About Innovation Industries (IIF)

Innovation Industries is an independent venture capital fund that combines company-building and venture investment under one roof. We use a market-driven approach to create long-term value in high technology start-up and scale-up companies. Our partnerships with all Dutch technical universities and applied research institutes (TNO) provide us with unparalleled access to knowledge and technologies.

For more information, please visit www.innovationindustries.com

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499147/Microsure_Logo.jpg

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499148/Microsure_MUSA.jpg

SOURCE Microsure
SYDNEY, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Regulators worldwide have largely adjusted to the new circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and maintained their focus on protecting consumers and markets, according to a new survey published by global software company Nuix (www.nuix.com). The report also highlights the importance of investigation readiness for regulators, highly regulated corporations and the legal and advisory firms they turn to for help.

Nuix's 2021 Global Regulator Report: Best Practices for Financial and Competition Regulators Around the World is the result of a survey by Ari Kaplan Advisors (www.arikaplanadvisors.com) of 31 securities, financial services and competition regulators in 18 countries.

"Over the period I was doing the research, the regulators I spoke to were making significant adjustments to their own work practices and in the way they dealt with their target corporations as a result of the pandemic," said Ari Kaplan, principal of Ari Kaplan Advisors and the report's lead researcher and author.

"On the one hand, the regulators understood that their targets were operating in changed circumstances. But they also recognized that in tougher economic times, there is a greater temptation to do the wrong thing, such as the emergence of COVID-related fraud, and that called for greater vigilance."

The survey examines financial and competition regulators' investigative methods, preferred technology protocols, primary enforcement strategies, data sharing preferences and much more. As well as providing a wealth of data for regulators seeking to benchmark against their global peers, the report offers valuable intelligence for highly regulated corporations and their legal and advisory firms.

"One very interesting finding was that most regulators don't provide any warning that an investigation is about to drop," said Stuart Clarke, Nuix's Regional Director for Northern Europe. "Throughout my career, I've seen that urgent, last-minute responses to regulatory investigations incur the greatest financial burden.

"This research clearly shows the return on investment for developing a regulator-ready strategy. Being regulator ready is not just about remaining compliant. You can dramatically reduce your risk by having a firm grasp of your regulatory environment and leveraging best-in-class technology to discover and investigate your data."

Between March 20 and August 11, 2020, legal industry analyst Ari Kaplan interviewed 31 regulators responsible for securities, financial services and competition in 18 countries. To read the full report and related materials, visit www.nuix.com/Regulators-2021.

About Nuix

Nuix (www.nuix.com) creates innovative software that empowers organizations to simply and quickly find the truth from any data in a digital world. We are a passionate and talented team, delighting our customers with software that transforms data into actionable intelligence and helps them overcome the challenges of litigation, investigation, governance, risk and compliance.

Nuix Ltd

Level 27, 1 Market St

Sydney NSW 2000

Australia

Nuix (and any other Nuix trademarks used) are trademarks of Nuix Ltd. and/or its subsidiaries, as applicable. All other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Any use of Nuix trademarks requires prior written approval from the Nuix Legal Department. The Nuix Legal Department can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. THIS MATERIAL IS COMPRISED OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OWNED BY NUIX LTD. AND ITS SUBSIDIARIES ("NUIX"), INCLUDING COPYRIGHTABLE SUBJECT MATTER THAT HAS BEEN NOTICED AS SUCH AND/OR REGISTERED WITH THE UNITED STATES COPYRIGHT OFFICE. ANY REPRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, TRANSMISSION, ADAPTATION, PUBLIC DISPLAY OR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (OTHER THAN FOR PREAPPROVED INTERNAL PURPOSES) REQUIRES PRIOR WRITTEN APPROVAL FROM NUIX.

SOURCE Nuix

Related Links

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GrubMarket today announced it led the Series A funding in IOT Pay, a provider of omnichannel payment solution, enabling merchants to accept omnichannel payment (in-store and online) on a global scale. Used by over 4,000 merchants in North America, IOT Pay offers payment solutions for in a variety of industries and across borders at more attractive cost than other payment solutions.

GrubMarket plans to offer IOT Pay's solution as part of its ecommerce and WholesaleWare software products. GrubMarket's proprietary WholesaleWare software suite is a Software-as-a-Service platform providing food industry suppliers and vendors with seamless financial management, easy-to-use online ordering and sales, precise inventory management, and engaging CRM tools. Genevieve Wang, GrubMarket's Chief Software Officer, will join IOT Pay's board as part of the transaction.

GrubMarket plans to help both customers and the company's bottom line by speeding up the payment process. "This investment will allow us to offer our communities new tools and added flexibility to reduce transaction friction and do more business with our customers, producers and logistics partners. We look forward to bringing more value to our stakeholders, our suppliers and our customers." said Mike Xu, CEO of GrubMarket.

"We are thrilled to join the GrubMarket network and expand our reach to their ecosystem. GrubMarket's technology brings industry-leading tools for the American food supply chain. This partnership allows us to collaborate and offer a more comprehensive suite of products and services to GrubMarket's constituencies." said Leo Chen, CEO of IOT Pay.

About GrubMarket

Founded in 2014, GrubMarket is a San Francisco-based food technology startup operating in the space of food ecommerce both B2B & B2C as well as providing related software-as-a-service solutions to solve inefficiencies in the American food supply chain. Currently, GrubMarket operates in California, Washington, Texas, Michigan, New York and Massachusetts, with plans to expand to other parts of the country.

For Media Inquiries:

GrubMarket Media Team

[email protected]

(510) 556-4786

GrubMarket

1925 Jerrold Ave.

San Francisco, CA. 94124

SOURCE GrubMarket

Related Links

http://www.grubmarket.com


As the rest of the country grapples with a deadly pandemic and COVID-19 numbers continue to ravage the already in shambles healthcare system, this village in Madhya Pradesh has managed to keep the virus at bay.

Chikhalar village in Madhya Pradesh is in the news for all the right reasons. One being, for not recording a single COVID-19 case until now despite the deadly second wave of the pandemic. Second being, the women bagging all the credit for it. Yes, you read that right.

India.com

How do they do it?

The women of the village have taken it upon themselves to restrict the entry of outsiders completely. Armed with sticks, the women not only prevent outsiders from entering into the village but have also imposed a complete lockdown in their locality to keep the residents safe from the novel coronavirus. This village is otherwise famous for the sale of raw liquor.

But whats put this village on the map are the women dressed in sarees and armed with sticks who ensure no one enters the village. The women sealed the boundaries of the village by placing a bamboo barricade next to a poster that prohibits the entry of outsiders. And thats not all, the women also monitor everyone entering the state highway, passing close to the village.

India.com

What is keeping them going?

Instead of having villagers go outdoors to do important work, two youths have been assigned to get the work done for the rest instead.



According to the women of Chikhalar, they have no qualms to wield the sticks against people who are aimlessly wandering in the village. They say they took this tough decision to safeguard its people from the deadly virus.

India.com

Where does the MP state stand?

This village has indeed set a vibrant example on how people have gathered together to do their bit to protect themselves from the infection. Chikhalar has set a wonderful example for not just villages but even cities in India to follow.



With active cases of 92,773 on Wednesday and a 21.7% positivity rate, Madhya Pradesh hospitals are nearly out of oxygen-equipped beds, with patients left to fend for themselves. On Tuesday, nearly 94% of its 9,360 ICU and HDU (high dependency unit) beds and 86% of its 23,164 oxygen-equipped beds were occupied, with around a quarter of its cases requiring oxygen beds.


Filtronic plc (AIM: FTC), the designer and manufacturer of RF, microwave, and mmWave products for the telecoms, critical communications and defence applications markets, today announced that it has been honoured with a Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

Filtronic is one of 205 organisations nationally to be recognised this year with a prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise, of which 122 are for International Trade. Filtronic's successful award entry focused on the outstanding short-term growth in export sales of its microwave and mmWave solutions over a three-year period.

Filtronic was founded in 1977, and specialises in RF, microwave and mmWave subsystems. Its E-band transceivers are used in 5G backhaul, and also find applications in test measurement, and in High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO satellites). New markets continue to be nurtured, for example E-band transceivers have recently been supplied for a successful trial of a 10Gbps track-to-train backhaul solution in Asia.

"Filtronic's award celebrates the global nature of our business. It specifically acknowledges the export success of our E-band mmWave transceiver products, of which we have shipped over 50,000 units to date with 99.9% destined for customers outside the UK," said Walter Magiera, Chief Commercial Officer of Filtronic. "We are very proud to have been honoured with this award, and consider it an exceptional achievement for a company with a 40-year heritage to be growing exports at such a rate."

"We continue to invest in both capability and research development, to help us increase our share in the rapidly growing telecom market," said Richard Gibbs, CEO of Filtronic. "Over the past 18 months we have invested over 1 million in new equipment, and have expanded our workforce, in our hybrid microelectronics assembly facility in Sedgefield, County Durham. This has enabled us to significantly increase capacity, keep production going throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and maintain a strong order book during the 2021 fiscal year."

Now in its 55th year, the Queen's Awards for Enterprise are the most prestigious business awards in the UK, and are designed to acknowledge and encourage outstanding achievements in the fields of innovation, international trade, sustainable development and promoting opportunity through social mobility.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005574/en/

Contacts:

Editorial contact:

Fin Farrelly, Filtronic plc

marketing@filtronic.com

PR contact:

Helen Duncan, MWE Media Ltd

helen.duncan@mwemedia.com
WILLIAM Grant & sons have applied to Offaly county council for permission to develop a visitor centre with shop at their D.E.W distillery at Clonminch, in Tullamore.

The application seeks a change of use of their existing ''Three Storey Three Sisters Administration Building,'' at the distillery.

However, Offaly County Council has deemed the application to be incomplete and it has been returned to the applicants. It's expected to be amended shortly and resubmitted to the council.

Last year the company announced plans to relocate the visitor centre from Bury Quay in Tullamore to the Clonminch distillery.

This came as a shock locally as the facility had been attracting up to 40,000 visitors each year.

William Grant & Sons blamed the move on the Covid pandemic and its negative effect on visitor numbers.

On its website the company has posted:''From Summer 2021, the Tullamore Distillery in Tullamore, Co. Offaly, Ireland, is planned to become the new home of our Tullamore D.E.W. Visitor Experience and will host all future brand and whiskey tours.''

Last year the Irish Times reported William Grant & Sons had pre tax losses of 3.73 million for 2019.
A total of 812 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Massachusetts schools during a two-week period that includes April break, education officials said Thursday.

From April 15 to April 28, public schools reported 718 students and 94 staff members were positive for the coronavirus, according to data from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Those figures include students and staffers who tested positive within seven days of being in a school building.

Those positives included 711 students and 85 staffers at local school districts, 3 students and 5 staffers at education collaboratives, and 4 students and 4 staffers at approved special education schools.

The percent of individuals in schools reported with COVID is 0.11% among students and 0.08% among staffers, data indicates.

The last COVID case report from DESE detailed cases among 1,095 students and 184 staff members detected from April 8 to 14, the highest total number since the state began releasing the data. The week prior, the state reported a total of 978 new cases.

The numbers in this weeks report may be lower than before because cases are only reported by the state if the child or staffer was in a school within the seven days before testing positive. School vacation meant students were not in school buildings.

From April 12 to 25, the state-funded pooled COVID testing program had a positivity rate of 0.91%, according to the department. There are 184 districts participating in the last two weeks, with an average of 7.2 swabs per pool and 10,857 pools processed. Of those pools, there have been 99 positive results.

Through the entire pooled testing program, from Feb. 1 to April 25, 188 districts have participated in the program, with 61,839 pools processed, 524 positive results, and a positivity rate of 0.85%, data indicates.

With hundreds of thousands of students returning to school buildings, medical experts have forecasted that the number of positive cases reported to schools may increase due to the increased volume of students. The Department will continue to follow safety guidelines and mitigation strategies, including pooled testing to help identify and isolate positive cases, reads a note from DESE with the case data.

Among school districts, New Bedford reported the most student cases with 43, according to the data. West Springfield had 26, Framingham had 24 and Taunton had 20.

Staff cases were highest in districts in Worcester, with 13, followed by Fall River with 4, according to DESE.

Among education collaboratives, there was one student case each at the Collaborative for Regional Educational Service and Training (CREST), Valley Collaborative and Northshore Education Consortium. There were two staff cases at LABBB Collaborative and one student case each at Collaborative for Regional Educational Service and Training (CREST), Cape Cod Collaborative and South Shore Educational Collaborative (SSEC).

At approved special education schools, there was one student case each at New England Academy School, Landmark School, Perkins School for Blind and Center for Applied Behavioral Instruction School. Three staff cases were reported at May Center School for Autism and Developmental Disabilities (Randolph) and one staff case was reported at Nashoba Learning Group.

There are roughly 650,000 students and 125,000 staffers in public school buildings. On Wednesday, DESE started requiring districts to provide five days a week of in-person learning for students in grades 6-8 unless the district obtained a waiver. Earlier this month, the same requirement started for K-5 students.

This week, the state also announced that districts on May 17 would need to provide full-time education for high schoolers.

Officials have said in-person spread of the virus in school buildings has been minimal.

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BIGGS, Calif.  The Community Action Agency of Butte County, Inc. (CAA) North State Food Bank will host a free food distribution event on Friday, April 30, in Biggs.

The event will be held at the Community Hall 280 B Street, Biggs, CA. The distribution begins at 10 a.m. and ends at Noon, or until supplies run out.

The food boxes include healthy, shelf-stable and perishable food depending on seasonal availability. Boxes weighing between 12  17 pounds will be placed by volunteers into vehicles attending. Participants are asked to remain in their vehicles.

Weve organized a drive-through event using pre-boxed food to help protect those in need of food and our volunteers to the maximum extent, Tom Dearmore, CAA Community Services Manager for the North State Food Bank said.

The CAA said the food is made possible by funding from the State and County to assist families impacted by COVID-19.
Van Buren, N.Y.  A wrong-way driver crashed into an ambulance Wednesday night on Route 690 in Van Buren, according to firefighters and police dispatches.

A car headed north on southbound Route 690 hit a Menter Ambulance just before 11 p.m. near Downer Street, according to Onondaga County 911 and police scanner dispatches. Multiple departments  including the New York State Police, the North West Fire District and Northern Onondaga Volunteer Ambulance  were called to the scene.

Injuries were initially reported.

Firefighters took the passengers side door off the wrong-way car to free a passenger, the fire department said in a Facebook post. An hour later, firefighters had cleared the scene.

Troopers and firefighters could not immediately be reached for comment.

More information will be shared when its available.

Staff writer Samantha House covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? Reach her at shouse@syracuse.com.
Guwahati, April 29 : A top leader of the outlawed ULFA-I was killed and one of his aides arrested during an encounter with the security forces on Thursday in Bongaigaon district of western Assam, Director General of Police Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta said.

The Assam police chief said that the encounter between the security forces and the United Liberation Front of Asom-Independent took place at Besimari under Manikpur police station in Bongaigaon District early morning on Thursday. In a tweet Mahanta said: "ULFA-I commander western command, recently appointed to replace Drishti Rajkhowa, self-styled Col Dwipen Saud appears dead with bullet injury. He's being taken to the hospital now." "His (Dwipen Saud) gunman Padum Rai is apprehended alive with a weapon. Another weapon and a grenade recovered in the PO (place of occurrence). Further search is on," the police chief said in another tweet. The DGP said: "We had intelligence (report) that the ULFA-I western command was planning some high profile kidnapping in collaboration with other anti-India forces which now appears to be foiled. Today's successful operation is due to high quality police intelligence input that worked out precisely for on ground action." Drishti Rajkhowa, 50, was the deputy commander-in-chief of ULFA-I and he surrendered to the security forces in South West Garo Hills in Meghalaya, bordering Bangladesh in November last year. Thursday's development took place nine days after the ULFA-I headed by Paresh Barua abducted three Oil and Natural Gas Corporation engineers from the Lakwa oil rig site in eastern Assam's Sivasagar district along the Assam-Nagaland border. The three kidnapped ONGC employees are Mohini Mohan Gogoi, 35, and Ritul Saikia,33, both junior technicians, production, and Alakesh Saikia, 28, a junior engineering assistant, production.

The Army, along with Assam Rifles troopers, rescued Gogoi and Alakesh Saikia following an encounter on April 23 night. ULFA-I, in a statement on April 24 said that all three abducted employees were handed over to villagers of Totokchingnyu in Nagaland amidst concerns for their safety. It claimed that Ritul Saikia may have been killed in the crossfire or the army is hiding him.

Special Director General, Law and Order, G. P. Singh on Wednesday said that there was specific information from the Assam Rifles, the Army and the Nagaland Police that Ritul Saikia is still in the captivity of ULFA-I.

The anti-talk outlawed ULFA-I had recently released radio operator Ram Kumar, a resident of Bihar, and drilling superintendent Pranab Kumar Gogoi of Sivasagar district, more than 100 days after the two employees of Delhi-based private oil and gas exploration company Quippo Oil and Gas Infrastructure Ltd were abducted from Arunachal Pradesh on December 21 last year.
Australian security software house Click Studios has told customers not to post emails sent by the company about its data breach, which allowed malicious hackers to push a malicious update to its flagship enterprise password manager Passwordstate to steal customer passwords.

Last week, the company told customers to "commence resetting all passwords" stored in its flagship password manager after the hackers pushed the malicious update to customers over a 28-hour window between April 20-22. The malicious update was designed to contact the attackers servers to retrieve malware designed to steal and send the password managers contents back to the attackers.

In an email to customers, Click Studios did not say how the attackers compromised the password manager's update feature, but included a link to a security fix.

But news of the breach only became public after Danish cybersecurity firm CSIS Group published a blog post with details of the attack hours after Click Studios emailed its customers.

Click Studios claims Passwordstate is used by more than 29,000 customers, including in the Fortune 500, government, banking, defense and aerospace, and most major industries.

In an update on its website, Click Studios said in a Wednesday advisory that customers are "requested not to post Click Studios correspondence on Social Media." The email adds: "It is expected that the bad actor is actively monitoring Social Media, looking for information they can use to their advantage, for related attacks."

"It is expected the bad actor is actively monitoring social media for information on the compromise and exploit. It is important customers do not post information on Social Media that can be used by the bad actor. This has happened with phishing emails being sent that replicate Click Studios email content," the company said.

Besides a handful of advisories published by the company since the breach was discovered, the company has refused to comment or respond to questions.

Story continues

It's also not clear if the company has disclosed the breach to U.S. and EU authorities where the company has customers, but where data breach notification rules obligate companies to disclose incidents. Companies can be fined up to 4% of their annual global revenue for falling foul of Europe's GDPR rules.

Click Studios chief executive Mark Sandford has not responded to repeated requests (from TechCrunch) for comment. Instead, TechCrunch received the same canned autoresponse from the company's support email saying that the company's staff are "focused only on assisting customers technically."

TechCrunch emailed Sandford again on Thursday for comment on the latest advisory, but did not hear back.
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A dramatic raid of Rudy Giuliani's New York City apartment may have been spurred by a voicemail where the former Mayor of New York City hinted at having a burner phone, it was claimed.

Federal investigators may have been alerted over a November 2019 message Giuliani left his ex associate Lev Parnas in November 2019.

Giuliani is said to have been recorded saying: 'Joe, its Rudy Giuliani, the message starts.

Im calling, uh, to see if we can talk either about or with Lev. I have my lawyer with me, but you can call me back at [REDACTED]. Thats [REDACTED].

Giuliani then adds: Thats the soon to be gotten rid of number.

Joseph Bondy, the attorney for former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, filed a motion in court in December that included a transcript of the voicemail message that the ex-mayor left him.

A link of the transcript was found on Wednesday by Newsweek.

Investigators raid of Rudy Giulianis New York City apartment and office on Wednesday may have been spurred by a transcript of a voicemail which surfaced in court recently about the former mayors soon to be gotten rid of phone

Joseph Bondy (left), the attorney for former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas (right), filed a motion in court in December that included a transcript of a voicemail message that the ex-mayor left him in November 2019

Joe, its Rudy Giuliani, the message starts. Im calling, uh, to see if we can talk either about or with Lev. I have my lawyer with me, but you can call me back at [REDACTED]. Thats [REDACTED]. Giuliani then adds: Thats the soon to be gotten rid of number.

Bondy told Newsweek that the transcript was accurate.

I can confirm the veracity of the statements that I made in that reply motion, he said. Further details on what Giuliani may have been referring to have not been disclosed.

A burner phone is a cheap, pay-as-you go mobile phone intended for short term use, and which is untraceable back to its owner. It also remains unclear if Giuliani was implying he used one.

Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the FBI raid on 'patriot' Giuliani's Manhattan apartment, saying it is 'very unfair'.

The former president spoke out to defend his personal attorney after federal agents raided the 76-year-old former New York City mayor's home and office Wednesday, taking with them his electronic devices including computers and cellphones.

Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo: 'Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He just loves this country, and they raid his apartment.

'It's like so unfair and...it's like a double standard like I don't think anybody's ever seen before. It's very, very unfair. Rudy is a patriot who loves this country.'

Joe Biden later said he found out about the raid 'when the rest of the world learned about it', adding: 'I had no idea this was underway.'

The raid signals a major escalation of the Justice Department's investigation into any possible violation of federal lobbying laws and the business dealings of Giuliani.

Giuliani, once celebrated for his leadership after 9/11, has been under federal scrutiny for several years over his ties to Ukraine. The dual searches sent the strongest signal yet that he could eventually face federal charges.

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello said the warrants involved an allegation that Giuliani failed to register as a foreign agent and that investigative documents mentioned John Solomon, a frequent Fox News commentator with close ties to Giuliani.

Solomon pushed baseless or unsubstantiated allegations involving Ukraine and Biden during the 2020 election. His former employer, The Hill, published a review last year of some of his columns and determined they were lacking in context and missing key disclosures.

Trump said Thursday: 'I don't know what they're looking for or what they're doing.

'They say it had to do with filings of various papers and lobbying files. Well, did Hunter [Biden] file? Did [President] Biden file? Because they did a lot of work with other countries. To the best of everyone's knowledge, they didn't file.

'It's a very, very unfair situation.'

He added: 'It is so terrible when you see the things going on in our country with the corruption and the problems and then they go after Rudy Giuliani. It's very said, actually.'

He ended the interview by telling Bartiromo: 'You're going after the Rudy Giuliani's of the world when you have rapists and murderers coming in through the border.'

Andrew Giuliani blasted accused President Joe Biden's Justice Department for playing politics after agents raided his father's apartment and office

'Here we go folks!!!' Michael Cohen tweets following news of the raid After news of the raid broke, Michael Cohen, Trump's former attorney who was also subject of a federal raid and would eventually plead guilty to eight federal counts, including violating campaign finance law, tweeted: 'Here we go folks.' It was revealed earlier this month that Cohen met for the ninth time with Manhattan prosecutors, in their continued criminal investigation into Donald Trump and his namesake business. The meeting added to the more than 300 hours Trump's former fix-it man has already spent coordinating with various inquiries. Cohen was convicted in 2018 of campaign finance violations while working as Trump's personal attorney  he was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to nine charges. Less than a year after his sentencing, Cohen was released from Otisville Correctional Facility in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic on compassionate grounds. He has been confined to his Trump Park Avenue apartment in Lenox Hill ever since July 2020. Advertisement

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and also a accused agents of ignoring Hunter's hard drives during their search

Agents searched Giuliani's Madison Avenue apartment and Park Avenue office, people familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press.

The warrants, which required approval from the top levels of the Justice Department, signify that prosecutors believe they have probable cause that Giuliani committed a federal crime - though they do not guarantee that charges will materialize.

A third search warrant was served on a phone belonging to Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor and close ally of Giuliani and Trump.

Her law firm issued a statement saying she was informed that she is not a target of the investigation.

The full scope of the investigation is unclear, but it at least partly involves Giuliani's dealings in Ukraine, law enforcement officials have told the AP.

Giuliani's son Andrew has already accused the Department of Justice of raiding his father's New York apartment and office for political reasons - and claims agents didn't want to take allegedly incriminating evidence involving Hunter Biden.

Giuliani's lawyer Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and also a accused agents of ignoring Hunter's hard drives during their search.

Phone records published by House Democrats in 2019 in the wake of Trump's first impeachment trial showed frequent contacts involving Giuliani, Solomon and Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate who is under indictment on charges of using foreign money to make illegal campaign contributions.

Federal prosecutors have been looking at Giuliani for more than a year.

In November 2019, they sought records of payments to Giuliani as part of an active criminal investigation, according to a grand jury subpoena seen by Reuters.

Prosecutors were investigating money laundering, wire fraud, campaign finance violations, making false statements, obstruction of justice, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, according to the subpoena.

The federal investigation centers on whether Giuliani acted as an unregistered federal agent and lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs.

Those were the same group of people who were helping Giuliani search for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Ukrainian gas company, during the 2020 election in an effort to help Trump politically.

Prosecutors are looking into Giuliani's dealings with Ukraine's then-top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was crucial to Giuliani's efforts to produce damaging information on the Bidens.

No such information ever came to light, neither Biden has been charged with a crime and Hunter Biden stepped down from Ukrainian company Burisma's board during the 2020 election. Hunter Biden is under tax investigation.

Documents obtained by The New York Times suggest there were discussions for Lutsenko to pay $200,000 to retain Giuliani Partners.

FBI agents also raided Washington-area home of Victoria Toensing, a lawyer close to Rudy Giuliani; she is seen with Giuliani and her husband Joe diGenova at a November 2020 press conference at the Republican National Committee; Toensing and diGenova were on the legal team trying to overturn the results

Officers from the New York Police Department (NYPD) are seen exiting the apartment building of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Victoria Toensing, the lawyer whose attorney husband said the election security chief should be 'shot at dawn' Victoria Toensing and her husband Joseph diGenova are legal panelists on Newsmax, a right-wing media outlet. They used to be regulars on Fox News until DiGenova made wild claims that much of the State Department was under the control of a well-known Jewish financier George Soros. Trump wanted them on his legal team for his impeachment trial - he was said to be impressed with diGenova's defense of him on Fox News - but the two were unable to join due to conflicts of interest. They represent Ukrainian businessman Dmitri Firtash, who was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with bribery and racketeering. They also reportedly worked with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two associates of Giuliani's who were arrested on charges of campaign finance violations. A former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, diGenova pushed the theory that lawmakers tried to frame Trump when they investigated whether his campaign colluded with Russia four years ago. Toensing represented Scooter Libby, the assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney, when Trump pardoned him. Advertisement

Investigators have examined conversations Giuliani had about taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in apparently unrelated consulting business from Lutsenko, but that deal never happened.

Trump praised Lutsenko as a 'very good prosecutor' during that phone call with Zelensky.

Toensing represented Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch under indictment in the United States whose help Giuliani sought. She is married to attorney Joseph diGenova and the couple were on the legal team - led by Giuliani - that challenged the 2020 election results on Trump's behalf.

The raids indicate the investigation of the former New York City mayor has entered an aggressive new phase.

It is unusual for prosecutors to execute a search warrant on a lawyer, particularly one who has privileged conversations with his client, the former president of the United States.

After news of the raid broke, Michael Cohen, Trump's former attorney who was also subject of a federal raid and would eventually plead guilty to eight federal counts, including violating campaign finance law, tweeted: 'Here we go folks.'

The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election.

The two Soviet-born men were charged with federal campaign finance violations.

The two, who pleaded not guilty, were arrested at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe. That investigation is on-going and faced some delays due to the COVID pandemic.

Trump has said he doesn't know the two men or the work they did.

Investigators are also looking into Giuliani's role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump's first impeachment trial. Current and former U.S. officials testified at that inquiry that Giuliani carried out a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine.

As Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation of the Bidens, he pushed to have Yovanovitch removed, seeing her as an obstacle to his efforts to produce a probe that would benefit Trump politically.

At Giuliani's urging, Trump had her recalled.

Contacted Wednesday, Fox contributor Solomon said it was news to him that the Justice Department was interested in any communications he had with Giuliani, though he said it was not entirely surprising given the issues raised in the impeachment trial.

'He was someone that tried to pass information to me. I didn't use most of it,' Solomon said of Giuliani. 'If they want to look at that, there's not going to be anything surprising in it.'

Everything was sitting 'in plain view,' Solomon said. He said he believed his reporting had 'stood the test of time' and maintained that he was 'unaware of a single factual error' in any of his stories.

Solomon previously worked for The Associated Press, departing the news organization in 2006.

Giuliani's neighbor Michele Hebert, the ex-wife of Pantone creator Larry Hevert, said she saw the FBI 'taking a lot of stuff' out of his Upper East Side apartment during their raid on Wednesday

Lev Parnas, center, and Igor Fruman with Rudy Giuliani at far right, Trump second right, and VP Mike Pence left

Investigators are also looking into Giuliani's role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump's first impeachment trial. Prosecutors are also looking into Giuliani's dealings with Ukraine's then-top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was helping Giuliani in his dirt-digging mission
The European Parliament has rubber stamped rules that will require platforms to take down terrorist content within an hour of European Union member states issuing a removal notice. If a platform doesnt take down the content quickly enough, it'll have to provide an explanation.

The law will come into force 20 days after its published in the EUs Official Journal, and it will start to be applied 12 months after that. Itll be up to member states to determine penalties up to a maximum of four percent of a companys global annual turnover if they repeatedly break the rules. Consideration will also be given to "the nature of the breach and the size of company responsible," the parliament said.

The regulations "target content such as texts, images, sound recordings or videos, including live transmissions, that incite, solicit or contribute to terrorist offences, provide instructions for such offences or solicit people to participate in a terrorist group." There are protections for educational, research, artistic and journalistic work.

The rules don't include a general obligation for platforms to monitor or filter content. Still, they'll have to take measures to prevent the spread of terrorist material soon after national authorities flag it. Companies will also be asked to explain the actions they took to limit the propagation of such content in annual transparency reports.
Former New Caney Independent School District Superintendent Kenn Franklin will be serving two years in prison for taking thousands of dollars in unearned work travel expenses.

For fraudulently claiming $5,600 in travel reimbursement, Franklin on Wednesday pleaded guilty to aggregate theft by a public servant, a third-degree felony, in the 221st District Court. Visiting Judge Paul Damico handed out Franklins sentence, according to the Montgomery County District Attorneys Office.

Franklin, 62, served as superintendent of the east Montgomery County school district for 12 years before resigning Nov. 16. His resignation followed an arrest on charges of tampering with a governmental record and public servant theft.

An investigation by the Texas Rangers and New Caney ISD police found Franklin submitted false travel expense vouchers approximately 25 times between 2019 and 2020. The vouchers were mostly for trips to Waco, Austin and San Antonio for meetings he never attended, according to the DAs Office.

Court records documented instances of Franklins malfeasance, including an investigating Texas Ranger reportedly seeing the superintendent barbecuing at his New Caney home on a day he filed $259 in travel expenses for a meeting in San Antonio.

In a statement, Montgomery County District Attorney Brett Ligon chastised Franklin for personally gaining from his leadership position.

Franklin was given a salary of $350,000 a year, but that was not enough for him. He had significant privileges, respect and authority, and those benefits were not enough for him, Ligons statement read. Rather than be grateful for what he had already been given, Franklin decided to act out of dishonesty, greed, and selfishness.

The case against Franklin was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Darla Faulkner, who in a statement reprimanded the former official for his actions during the pandemic.

Not only did he steal money from the school district, but he also kept his staff and students from having a present and engaged leader during one of the most challenging times in education the county has ever faced, Faulkner said in a statement. Franklin squandered that opportunity and stole from the students and the community he was entrusted to serve.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

twitter.com/jrgzztx
Thiruvananthapuram, April 29: Kerala Health Minister K K Shailaja on Thursday said that according to the new guidelines, preference will be given to those taking the second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, when scheduling a session at vaccination centres.

Speaking to media, Shailaja said, "There is no need to rush to COVID vaccination centres for this. The second dose of Covishield vaccine should be taken within 6-8 weeks and the Covaxin within 4-6 weeks. The list of those eligible to receive the second dose of vaccine at each vaccination centre will be available on the CoWIN portal. Accordingly, the managers of the vaccination centres will inform them with the help of ASHA workers and local bodies."

The new guideline stated that the slot for the first dose will be allowed for online booking only after giving preference to those taking the second jab. "To avoid crowding for spot registration at the vaccination centres those taking the second dose will be given a fixed date and time in advance. Only at that time given to those who booked their second slot should reach the centre for vaccination. Steps will be taken to ensure COVID protocols are followed at the vaccination centres," said the health minister. COVID-19 Vaccination For 18-44 Age Group in India: When Can You Book A Slot to Get Your First Dose of Vaccine After Registration? Here's What CoWin Portal Says.

"The vaccine currently available at private centres, must be used for vaccination of people before April 30. The rest of the vaccine purchased now will have to be given at the rate of Rs 250 for those above 45 years of age from May 1," she added.

Shailaja also informed that a revised central vaccination policy will be implemented from May 1 and vaccination centres at private hospitals will have to procure the vaccine directly from the vaccine manufacturers.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Dallas, TX, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sealy & Company, a fully-integrated commercial real estate investment and operating company and recognized leader in the industrial real estate market, announces the closure of two off-market transactions in one week, proving its industrial investment prowess. A 129,000-square foot distribution warehouse in the St. Louis, Missouri market and a 59,425-square foot FedEx distribution center in El Paso, Texas are the two most recent additions to Sealy & Companys actively growing portfolio. Both off-market transactions were made for undisclosed amounts.

Qualified as the nations fourth-most active private real estate investing firm of 2020 by Real Capital Analytics, Sealy & Company makes strides in 2021 to exceed its previous records. Not only does the company currently hold standing among top private firms by transaction volume, but it also received high marks on the global list for top public and private companies as well. With a full pipeline of quality opportunities and already nearly $150 million in deals closed for the year, Sealy is on track to close on well over the forecasted number of assets established for 2021.

The companys proven track record in its 60 years of industrial-specific investment focus is evidenced in its historically significant close rate and industry-leading returns. For years, the firm has successfully closed on 100 percent of its transactions that are brought to contract, a defining testament to Sealy & Companys educated buying process, investing integrity, and commitment to its market relationships.

Our creative strategies and demonstrated deal sense have broadened our investment criteria and provided access to off-market transactions like these. We are pleased with our success this year and look forward to many more closed transactions, says Scott Sealy, Jr., Chief Investment Officer for Sealy & Company.

Sealy & Companys refined sourcing and acquisition strategy and unique network of key local market experts that identify mispriced product opportunities in evolving markets allow the firm to close more quickly than its competitors. Its deep understanding of market cycles and enterprise financing capabilities continue to propel the company forward.

Located in St. Louis, the largest metro area in the state of Missouri, 8807 Seeger Industrial Drive is a 129,000-square foot infill property that benefits from high accessibility to the US population via a well-integrated interstate highway network, the cargo transit system of the Mississippi River, and the St. Louis Airport. The multi-tenant property acquired by Sealy & Company is leased to two tenants, one of which is a Fortune 1000 and S&P 500 company whose operations serve more than 50 countries. Sealy & Company purchased the property from JGB Properties, LLC with the help of brokers John Hassler of Newmark.

The companys portfolio addition in El Paso is fully-leased to an international credit tenant that benefits from the propertys proximity to the adjacent El Paso International Airport and the US-Mexican border. As a critical commercial hub for American and Central American trade, El Pasos distribution network is key to longtime tenant, FedEx Express. Sealy & Company purchased this property from HNWI and was assisted by Ryan Barr of Barr & Bennett to close the deal.

For more news and information regarding Sealy & Company, please visit the companys website at www.Sealynet.com.

About Sealy & Company

Sealy & Company, a fully-integrated commercial real estate investment and operating company, is a recognized leader in acquiring, developing, and redeveloping regional distribution warehouses, industrial/flex, and other commercial properties. Sealy provides a full-service platform for high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors through our development, management, and brokerage divisions. Sealy & Company has an exceptional team of over 100 employees, located in five offices, with corporate offices in Dallas, TX and Shreveport, LA.

Attachments
Come on, thats way too early! Rudys not himself until hes had his first cup of hot breakfast wine.  STEPHEN COLBERT

They took the former mayors electronic devices; they were seized. I think its safe to assume none of those electronic devices were toothbrushes.  JIMMY KIMMEL

I know Rudy Giuliani is a high-powered lawyer, mayor of New York City, adviser to the president of the United States, but I still picture his office above a repair shop right next to a palm readers.  JAMES CORDEN

But Rudys lawyer  very upset. He called the raid legal thuggery. He said, Why would you do this to anyone, let alone someone who was the associate attorney general, U.S. attorney, mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer to the 45th president of the United States? Who would dare to show up unannounced and take his beloved Jitterbug phone? Its just not American.  JIMMY KIMMEL

Investigators are reportedly conducting a criminal investigation into Giulianis dealings in Ukraine to try to dig up dirt on the Bidens on behalf of Donald Trump. And if you think he was sweating Grecian Formula before, you should see him now.  JIMMY KIMMEL

When the agents walked in, Rudy got so nervous, he started sweating hair dye and tucking all the evidence down his pants.  JIMMY FALLON
A North Texas man charged with assaulting police officers during January's Capitol riot is a Republican Party precinct chair and has been an election poll worker, CNN reported Wednesday.

Details: Mark Middleton, 52, was appointed as the GOP chair of Precinct 14 in Cooke County during a meeting last December, Cooke County Republican Party chair Chris McNamara told Axios in an email.

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"Precinct Chairs are an elected position in the Party or can be appointed to fill a vacancy and there is no mechanism in Texas election law to remove a sitting precinct chairman in this situation," McNamara said.

The big picture: Per a criminal complaint from the Department of Justice and the FBI, the precinct chair was arrested last week, along with Jalise Middleton after the couple from Forestburg were identified from body camera footage allegedly assaulting two Metropolitan Police Department officers guarding the Capitol.

They've also been charged with remaining on restricted grounds, though they do not appear to have entered the Capitol complex.

The Middletons have pleaded not guilty to all seven federal charges they each face.

Of note: Middleton is one of "multiple rioters with local Republican Party ties," CNN notes.

Others include former West Virginia House of Delegates lawmaker Derrick Evans and former California Republican Assembly State Board secretary Jorge Riley.

What they're saying: McNamara told Axios he'd only known Middleton for a short time, "but the behavior he has been accused of seems very out of the character to me."

"This is not the Mark I know and I was very surprised," he added.

"The Cooke County Republican Party does not condone or support the actions that the Middletons are accused of. I am deeply saddened and disappointed by the events that took place on January 6th."

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In this Oct. 6, 2020, file photo, the operator of the controversial "Digital Prison" website arrives at Incheon International Airport after being repatriated from Vietnam. The operator on Wednesday was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for violating privacy law by disclosing personal data of suspected sex offenders and other criminals. Yonhap

An operator of the controversial doxing website "Digital Prison" has been sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for violating privacy law by disclosing personal data of suspected sex offenders and other criminals.



The Daegu District Court delivered the prison sentence Wednesday to the website's initial operator and ordered him to pay a forfeiture of 8.18 million won (US$7,340).



The accused was indicted on charges of sharing personal information of alleged and convicted sex offenders, murderers and other criminals online and on an Instagram account from March to August last year.



According to the police investigation, the 34-year-old initially opened an Instagram account in March to share private information of Cho Ju-bin, the mastermind of an infamous Telegram sexual exploitation ring, who was later sentenced to 45 years in prison on charges of abusing dozens of women and girls for profit.



He expanded the account to a full-blown website as he gained massive traffic online and interest.






Escazu Agreement: the reactions of Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil with respect to its adoption

April 29,2021 | Source: Lexology

Some Latin American countries have seemed reluctant to incorporate in their domestic laws the measures proposed by of the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Escaz Agreement). We provide an overview of the current position of Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil in respect of this international treaty, signed on March 4 2018 in Costa Rica, and due to enter into force on April 22 2021. In accordance with the indications of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLA), this Agreement addresses aspects of environmental management and protection from a regional perspective, regulating rights of access to information, public participation and justice in matters such as sustainable use of natural resources, conservation of biological diversity, combating land degradation and climate change, and increasing resilience in the event of disasters.



In accordance with the indications of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLA), this Agreement addresses aspects of environmental management and protection from a regional perspective, regulating rights of access to information, public participation and justice in matters such as sustainable use of natural resources, conservation of biological diversity, combating land degradation and climate change, and increasing resilience in the event of disasters.



1 Principles



The principles incorporated in the agreement include: non-discrimination, accountability, prevention, intergenerational equity, maximum disclosure, and pro persona. The precautionary principle is also one of the salient features and refers to the possibility, in the event of reasonable doubt regarding the scope, seriousness or irreversible nature of damage to environmental systems, that the public authority can suspend, postpone, condition or prevent the activity from being carried out. In terms of principles, prevention was also highlighted referring to the possibility, in the event of reasonable doubt regarding the scope, seriousness or irreversible nature of damage to environmental systems, that the public authority can suspend, postpone, condition or prevent a specific activity relating to a project, from being carried out, which according to some detractors of the agreement, can generate legal insecurity in implementing projects.



2 Access to environmental information



Countries should guarantee to all persons access to environmental information, in accordance with the principle of maximum disclosure, respecting in all cases, the exceptions enshrined in national regulations and in the agreement itself. Requests for information may be submitted without mentioning any special interest, or explaining the reasons for the request. Furthermore, the Agreement proposes certain regulations relating to timeframes and response mechanisms for the countries when such requests for environmental information are made.



3 Generation and dissemination of environmental information



The Agreement seeks to ensure that the Member States have in place mechanisms for issuing environmental information, thus guaranteeing direct communication with the public in environmental matters in each country.



4 Public participation in environmental decision-making processes



The States are required to adopt measures that will ensure public participation in decisionmaking processes relating to projects, activities and other procedures for environmental authorizations which have, or could potentially have, a significant impact on the environment.



5 Access to justice in environmental matters



The States will be required to guarantee access to justice for all persons, paying particular attention to the needs of the most vulnerable persons or groups, by establishing support mechanisms, which will include free technical and legal assistance.



6 Human rights defenders in environmental matters



The States undertake to take the appropriate measures to recognize, protect and promote the rights of human rights advocates in environmental matters, in order to ensure a safe environment in which people, groups and organizations can exercise their rights.



Chile



Chile has been an active participant in the Escaz Agreement since 2014, the year that it assumed the presidency of the commission responsible for negotiating the Agreement, together with Costa Rica. However, once the term had opened for countries to confirm their participation in the Agreement (2018), the Chilean Government announced its decision to "carry out an indepth analysis of the Agreement" prior to its endorsement and ratification. In September 2020, the Government announced that it would be "inappropriate to sign the Escaz Agreement" for the following reasons:



1. The Agreement introduces a series of undefined principles that would condition Chilean environmental law.



Several principles referred to in the Agreement have not been defined, and these will be detailed in future State Conferences, which makes for some legal uncertainty. In addition, it is necessary to examine whether those principles could be in contravention of the law or contradict certain environmental institutions or other environmental principles recognized in current national legislation.



2. The Agreement could imply uncertain changes in the law leading to legal insecurity.



Notable among such changes were:



1. The difference between article 19 no. 8 of the Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile and article 1 of the Agreement. .

2. With respect to a self-executing norm of the Agreement, this could lead the courts of justice to rule that the Agreement prevails over domestic law.

3. It is not clear what the public's participation would entail.

4. Uncertainty with respect to the inclusion of citizen participation in environmental decisionmaking processes could lead to massive judicialization of all kinds of administrative decisions.

5. The Agreement would make it easy to produce evidence of environmental damage, which would modify "the national system of evidence in matters of environmental damage".



3. The Agreement introduces obligations for the State, which are ambiguous, extensive and indefinite, and compliance would be difficult.



1. The recognition and protection of "Human Rights Defenders in Environmental Matters".

2. The concept of "favorable environment" for the work of persons, associations or groups involved in activities of protection of the environment.

3. The concept of "environmental qualities of goods and services" as information that should reassure consumers and users is not defined.

4. The type of environmental information or any other aspects that "private entities" are required to generate and disseminate is not specified.



4. The Agreement exposes Chile to international controversies due to the direct application of its provisions and their ambiguity.



Colombia



The Escaz Agreement was signed by the President of Colombia on December 11 2019, and presented to Congress of the Republic in July 2020, in order for its ratification to take effect, as urged by the Executive. However, a dissenting opinion was raised in Congress against ratification of the Agreement, taking into account that several sectors have been critical of some of its possible effects if the Agreement is approved by Colombia. In any case, the Draft Bill for approval of the Agreement is currently going through Congress of the Republic.



Some aspects, which have been controversial in the debates on approval of the Agreement, include the following:



1. Bearing in mind that the Political Constitution of Colombia accords prevalence over domestic laws, of international treaties and conventions ratified by Congress that recognize human rights, some lower ranking legislation implementing aspects regulated in the Escaz Agreement could encounter problems when they are interpreted and applied. This is a particularly significant point, given that the Colombian legal system has an extensive set of regulations in matters of access to environmental information, public participation in environmental matters and access to justice. As a result, these provisions would have to be reassessed in the light of the regulations contained in the Escaz Agreement.



2. Under the terms of the Agreement, States are committed to protecting defenders of human rights in relation to environmental matters. Given the current situation in Latin America and Colombia, in particular regarding the present status of human rights defenders in connection with environmental matters, the international and local community has considered that this undertaking will be a step forward in ensuring the guarantees that will lead in practice to effective defense of the environment. However, as far as this aspect is concerned there has been some criticism of potentially creating a group of subjects destined for special protection, comprising mainly human rights advocates. Critics consider that providing special protection of this kind could have adverse effects for more vulnerable communities, as they would be unable take advantage of the same instruments and guarantees for the exercise of their rights.



3. Finally, the principle of precaution is one of the most widely criticized points in that it refers to the possibility that, should there be any reasonable doubt as to the scope, seriousness or irreversible nature of damage to environmental systems, the authorities could suspend, postpone, condition or prevent the activity from being carried out.



Peru



Peru signed the Escaz Agreement in September 2018. However, in order to be implemented, it had to be ratified by the Congress of the Republic, pursuant to the terms of article 56 of the Political Constitution of Peru. In this regard, on October 20 2020, following a lengthy debate on the issue, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress of the Republic approved a report which (i) recommended not to approve Draft Legislative Resolution No. 4645/2019-PE of the Executive Authority, through which the Escaz Agreement would be ratified (received in Congress in August 2019), and in turn, (ii) held that the aforementioned bill should be shelved; as a result the matter was not debated in the Congress plenary session.



The debate in the Foreign Affairs Committee



The main reasons for the two opinions expressed by the Committee are as follows:



1. Majority opinion (against ratification)



One of the main reasons that motivated the failure to ratify was that the provisions on environmental matters were already regulated within the current national regulatory framework, mainly through the following: (i) Political Constitution, (ii) Law of Transparency and Access to Public Information and its Regulations, (iii) Law of Citizen Participation and Control, (iv) General Environment Law, or (v) Law of the National System of Environmental Management, among others.



Another reason was the presumed loss of sovereignty of the Peruvian State in respect of the management its own natural resources, and dispute resolution in environmental matters, as it would be compulsory to submit cases to the International Court of Justice. Finally, it was also held that the Escaz Agreement would be a threat to the rights acquired through concessions, contracts, agreements or authorizations granted, as well as to private property, insofar as it allows access to environmental information without grounds, which could seriously deter investments, in addition to imposing obligations which private entities should not be required to support.



2. Minority opinion (in favor of ratification)



In contrast, the minority opinion, expressed in an alternative report, emphasized the fact that, although there are regulations on environmental issues, these would not be adequately enforced, and therefore an impartial supranational body would be needed to resolve environmental controversies arising in Peru. Furthermore, the report held that the Agreement would allow improved access to all Peruvians of updated, comprehensive and ordered information on the environment, for the purposes of future decision making; as well as increasing the effectiveness of exercising the fundamental rights of citizens relating to this matter.



It was also argued that the sovereignty of the Peruvian state would not be compromised, in that several provisions of the Agreement indicate that the application of rights of access to information and citizen participation would be exercised within the framework of national legislation, and this would be accorded a broad margin so that, based on the possibilities of each state, the terms of the Agreement could be implemented. Finally, and from this perspective, the Escaz Agreement would strengthen the environmental institutional structure, and would improve the country's competitiveness at an international level, reducing conflict and improving legal security. As a result, investment would not fall away but conversely, ratification would bring responsible investment with the focus on sustainability.



3. Public opinion



Prior to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress of the Republic approving the report recommending not to ratify the Escaz Agreement, the president of that committee made known what the majority view would be in this matter. Having discovered the way the voting would probably go, the Peruvian Environmental Law Society (SPDA) organized a joint pronouncement in which they requested that the members of Congress and the Commission reassess their position, with a view to ratifying the Escaz Agreement. National and international institutions added their voice to this call, along with citizens from different parts of Peru.



Peru is currently preparing for its presidential and congressional elections, which are planned for 11 April 2021, according to the program approved by the electoral bodies. Therefore, several bodies from the private sector such as the SPDA are lobbying for ratification of the Escaz Agreement to be part of the electoral debate, seeking to return ratification to the agenda of the Executive and Legislative Authorities as soon as possible.



Mexico



The Agreement was drawn up following a twoyear preparatory period and nine meetings of the Negotiation Committee in which the State of Mexico was an active participant, and during which the country made statements interpreting the concepts of "damage" and "significant damage" in order to ensure that these two terms were in congruence with the national legal framework, specifically with the law on transparency and access to public information, as well as ecological balance and protection of the environment. Similarly, an interpretative statement was made in respect of the term "being informed promptly" in article 5, paragraph 2, section b) of the Agreement, which will be interpreted in accordance with the terms and timeframes of current national laws on matters of transparency and access to public information.



The Federal Executive Authority submitted the Agreement to the Mexican Senate, where it was unanimously approved on November 5 2020, and published in the Official Gazette of the Federation on December 9, following which Mexico became the eleventh country to ratify the Agreement. It will enter into force 90 days after depositing the eleventh instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or adhesion to the United Nations. Despite the fact that the Agreement has not yet entered into force in an international context, it has already been applied by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in a ruling relating to the appeal for constitutional remedy 307/2016, which mentions the requirement of states to have measures in place that facilitate production of evidence of environmental damage, in light of the environmental damage that occurred in Laguna del Carpintero, Tampico, Tamaulipas.



This Agreement is the first of its kind that is legally binding and that considers the work of human rights defenders in connection with environmental matters as a matter that will strengthen democracy, rights of access and sustainable development, as well as being a pioneering instrument for the protection and safeguarding of rights. It establishes that the parties to the Agreement will take steps to adopt the most favorable interpretation to ensure full enjoyment of, and respect for, rights of access and it will foster and encourage the use of new information and communications technologies.



The Commissions to which the Agreement was submitted for their opinion, indicated in their report to the Senate that, in the case of Mexico, the applicable regulations in matters of transparency and access to information are advanced compared to other national frameworks in the region. They also indicated that the Agreement is not contradictory, nor does it in any way exceed the terms of the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico, the General Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information, or the Federal law of Transparency and Access to Public Information, among other regulatory frameworks applicable to this matter. However, they did establish the need to substantially improve the country's information systems in order to ensure that citizens are better informed of projects and decisions that could affect their rights.



It is hoped that with its entry into force, it will be necessary to adapt the various instruments of environmental policy, which include assessment of environmental impact, use of land in forested areas, and urban development programs, among others. By virtue of the foregoing, with the approval of the Agreement it will enter the Mexican block of constitutionality and conventionality. It will therefore be applicable in the light of the principle of conforming interpretation, and greater protection should be afforded to persons in the country in light of the human rights set forth in the Agreement.



Brazil: Content provided by the Brazilian firm NBF|A



Brazil signed the Escaz Agreement during the presidency of the previous incumbent Michel Temer. At the present time, the Agreement is being analyzed by the executive authority that is, the current president Jair Bolsonaro, who continues to examine it and has not yet sent it to Congress for ratification.



According to the information obtained, following its signature, the text was sent to three ministers for examination and analysis, namely, the Ministers of Environment, Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and the Minister of General Transparency and Control of the Union. However, to date, no further information has been obtained regarding the status of its presentation to Congress for ratification.

Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Fisheries Resources, Communities and Organisations, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Landing Centres, Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods.
Tim Scott responds to Biden: 'America is not a racist country'

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In his response to President Joe Bidens address to a joint session of the 117th United States Congress, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., pushed back on the presidents contention that systemic racism plagues the country, asserting that America is not a racist country.

Scott, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2013, is the only African American Republican serving in the chamber. He began his response to Bidens address by accusing Biden of failing to live up to his promises to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, [and] to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. Our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes," Scott said. "We need policies and progress that brings us closer together, but three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart. Stressing the need for common ground, Scott proclaimed, Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions of race. While acknowledging that he had experienced the pain of discrimination and that our healing is not finished on the issue of race, he praised the U.S. for making tremendous progress and criticized the people making money and gaining power by pretending we havent made any progress at all by doubling down on the divisions weve worked so hard to heal.

America is not a racist country, he asserted, rebuking the allegation shared by Biden in his address to Congress that systemic racism remains a major problem in American society. Its backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination, he said, referring to the embrace of critical race theory in many corners of American culture, specifically in education and the workforce. Its wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.

The senator discussed his personal background, lamenting that the novel coronavirus pandemic has attacked every rung of the ladder that helped me up. He specifically expressed concern about the fact that so many small businesses have gone under and for months, too many churches were shut down.

Im saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day, he added. Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future. Our public schools should have reopened months ago. Other countries did. Private and religious schools did. Science has shown for months that schools are safe, but too often, powerful grown-ups set science aside and kids like me were left behind.

Scott also criticized Bidens infrastructure plan, noting that less than 6 percent of the presidents plan goes to roads and bridges. He characterized the proposal as a liberal wish-list of big government waste plus the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation.

Experts say when all is said and done, it would lower wages of the average American worker and shrink our economy, he warned. Scott held up the American Families Plan, which the president unveiled in his address, as an example of even more taxing and even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college.

The beauty of the American dream is that families get to define it for themselves. We should be expanding opportunities and options for all families, not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.

Infrastructure spending that shrinks our economy is not common sense, he declared. Weakening our southern borders and creating a crisis is not compassionate.

Building on his notion that Biden and the Democrats have moved too far to the left, he alleged that the president has been abandoning principles hes held for decades to appease the progressive wing of his party.

Referring to his reversal on his support for the longstanding Hyde Amendment that prevents taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, he decried Bidens belief that your tax dollars should fund abortions as well as his decision to form a commission laying the groundwork to pack the Supreme Court.

Scott also addressed the recently passed election bill in Georgia, which he argued was deliberately mischaracterized: Republicans support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat and so do the voters.

Noting widespread support for voter IDs and early voting, he expressed concern that this conversation has collapsed. Scott explained that the law expands early voting, preserves no-excuse mail-in voting and despite what the president claimed, did not reduce Election Day hours. If you actually read this law, its mainstream. It will be easier to vote early in Georgia than in Democrat-run New York, but the left doesnt want you to know that. They want people virtue-signaling by yelling about a law they havent even read.

The president absurdly claims that this is worse than Jim Crow, he continued. This misplaced outrage is supposed to justify Democrats new sweeping bill that would take over elections for all 50 states, it would send public funds to political campaigns you disagree with and make the bipartisan Federal Elections Commission partisan. This is not about civil rights or our racial past, its about rigging elections in the future.

Additionally, Scott rejected the idea pushed by Democrats recently that the filibuster, which has been used to stall both progressive and conservative legislative packages over the years, is a racist relic just because the shoe is now on the other foot. He maintained that race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants. Its far too important.

As his remarks concluded, Scott reiterated, A president who promised to bring us together should not be pushing agendas that tear us apart. The American family deserves better and we know what better looks like. Scott praised the legislative accomplishments of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, specifically highlighting Operation Warp Speed and the implementation of criminal justice reform.

Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams, he predicted. It will come from you, the American people.

In spite of his concerns about the Biden administrations agenda, Scott shared his belief that our finest hour has yet to come. ... Original sin is never the end of the story, not in our souls and not for our nation. The real story is always redemption.

Scott ended his remarks by quoting from the Christian worship song The Blessing, which was inspired by several passages in the Bible: May the Lord bless you and keep you  make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May His presence go before you and behind you and beside you, in your weeping and your rejoicing. He is for you. May His favor be upon our nation for a thousand generations and your family and your children and their children.

Scott is widely seen as a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. A straw poll taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of grassroots conservative activists, found Scott polling at 1% in a hypothetical Republican primary field that included former President Donald Trump. In a hypothetical scenario where Trump was not seeking the Republican nomination, Scott also polled at 1%.
It has taken four years, two British prime ministers, two European Commission presidents and various changes of EU governments but, at last, the final ratification of the Brexit withdrawal agreement is under way. The so-called consent vote by the European Parliament means the treaty can be formally ratified by the European Union.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has welcomed the parliaments approval of the post-Brexit trade deal, but warned that its faithful implementation was crucial. Several MEPs expressed concerns over whether the British government would stick to the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA). Alongside the vote to approve the deal, the parliament passed a resolution condemning the UKs recent unilateral actions, in breach of the Withdrawal Agreement, to extend grace periods.

Nevertheless, MEPs voted overwhelmingly to endorse the deal. It is little wonder that they did considering that, on the face of it, EU negotiators have achieved far more than their UK counterparts. Under the agreement, EU exports continue to have unfettered access to UK markets, while UK exporters now have limited access to EU markets and the Northern Ireland protocol introduces some barriers to intra-UK trade.

It is for these realities, as well as British negotiating tactics, that we should not consider this an end to acrimony between the UK and the EU. It marks a beginning more than an end. What matters now is that the EU continues to monitor and ensure that Britain holds up its side of the bargain. Boris Johnson and his government have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted. Indeed, the vote to approve the deal had to be postponed last month when it became clear that the Johnson administration was in the process of breaking international law for a second time over Northern Ireland.

On March 3, the UK was accused by the European Commission of breaking international law after the British government announced plans to unilaterally extend a grace period on a range of checks on trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The commission made it clear that, under the Brexit deal, the decision should have been agreed with the EU. The unilateral move by the British infuriated the Irish government, prompting legal action by the EU.

The EU are negotiating with a partner they simply cant trust, Simon Coveney, the foreign affairs minister, told RTEs Morning Ireland programme, but yesterday he welcomed the vote.

So what has changed to allow for ratification? Christophe Hansen, a Luxembourg MEP and rapporteur for the Committee on International Trade, said the deal would help hold the Johnson government to its commitments.

Ratification of the agreement is not a vote of blind confidence in the UK governments intention to implement our agreements in good faith, Mr Hansen said in a statement. Rather, it is an EU insurance policy against further unilateral deviations from what was jointly agreed.

Let us hope that does not turn out to be a wildly optimistic view of the future, considering tactics used in the past.
Kantar Launches South Africa's 'Largest' Panel

Kantar has launched what it says is South Africa's biggest ever consumer panel, measuring the FMCG purchasing behaviour of more than 6,500 local households at launch.



Covering all nine provinces, the panellists come from all socio-economic groups, and will use their smartphones to provide continuous information about grocery purchases through barcode collection and 'in-the-moment' trip records. Analysis will be available by product, channel and retailer, and reporting and segmentation by SKU. Data will be offered through Kantar's Worldpanel division, and available 24/7.



In addition to two panels in the Middle East, Kantar is now present in thirteen African countries, including recent panel investments in South Africa, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia, and consumer panels in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria. The company has also made a commitment to expand its footprint to meet clients' demands in Algeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. The first dataset for the South Africa consumer panel will be available in July.



Ivan Moroke (pictured), CEO South Africa of Kantar's Insights Division, comments: 'We are thrilled that Worldpanel is launching in South Africa. This is another arrow in our quiver that adds actionable insights to help our clients in the FMCG space gain a more holistic view of shopper behaviour and along with our consumer insights, builds a complete understanding of people to help brands pursue growth and increase market share'.



Web site: www.kantar.com .




Over 1.32 crore people registered on the government's portal CoWIN and Aarogya Setu mobile app to apply for Covid-19 vaccination on Wednesday. The government has allowed vaccination for all above the age of 18 from May 1, registrations for which started at 4 pm on April 28.

"So we close Day 1 with 1.32 crore registrations on http://Cowin.gov.in. Kudos to Team CoWIN for building a truly scalable and robust platform. Handling more than 50000 API calls per second is mammoth!!," Aarogya Setu tweeted.

So we close Day 1 with 1.32 Cr Registrations on https://t.co/xWRsgcZ3lD. Kudos to Team CoWin for building a truly scalable and robust platform. Handling more than 50000 API calls per second is mammoth!! #LargestVaccinationDrivepic.twitter.com/DafOrdMfBP a Aarogya Setu (@SetuAarogya) April 28, 2021

Both the CoWIN portal and Aarogya Setu app had also faced minor technical glitches on Wednesday minutes after the government opened the registrations for all. However, services were back again soon and people were able to register for vaccination phase 3.

Over 35 lakh people had registered for vaccination in the first hour of opening of the registrations. "More than 35 lakhs people registered in the first hour after the launch of 18 plus registration on http://cowin.gov.in. Appointments for 18-44 will be available when state govts and private vaccination centers schedule sessions," the Aarogya Setu tweet further said.

National Health Authority chief RS Sharma said the system was robust and even after seeing traffic of 55,000 hits per second, it is functioning "as expected". "We have seen a traffic of 55,000 hits per second. System functioning as expected," he tweeted.

While most people were able to register for vaccination, many were unable to load the CoWIN website or faced difficulty in receiving OTPs during registration. Many were also not able to type the OTP on the portals. "Cowin Portal is working. There was a minor glitch at 4 PM that was fixed. 18 plus can register," Aarogya Setu tweeted later.

RS Sharma also said the number of registrations had risen manifold as the government allowed vaccination for everyone above the age of 18 from May 1. "We think our system will be able to take the load when registrations open today," he said.

Registration for the new phase started at 4 pm on Wednesday. However, as the country struggles with a shortage of vaccine doses, some states might not start the latest phase on May 1.

The Centre has allowed states to procure vaccines directly from the manufacturers. COVID-19 vaccine makers can supply 50 per cent of their stock to states and private hospitals. To that end, Serum Institute has priced Covishield at Rs 300 per dose for states and Rs 600 per dose for private hospitals. Bharat Biotech, on the other hand, has priced Covaxin at Rs 600 per dose for the government and Rs 1,200 per dose for private hospitals.

One must keep in mind that vaccination in this phase will require registration and there will be no walk-in vaccinations. Recipients can register through CoWin app or Aarogya Setu app. Here's how:

COWIN APP

Open www.cowin.gov.in on web browser or download the app

Click on Register/Sign in

Enter mobile number for the OTP. Once done, click on Get OTP

Once OTP is generated, enter it and click Verify

Enter details like name, age, gender, photo ID proof on Register for Vaccination page

Click on Register. Then click on Schedule button next to name of the person

Enter pin code, or select from the list of districts. Once done, vaccination centres will show up

Select vaccination centre, date, time. Once done, click Confirm

As many as four people can be registered from same mobile number

AAROGYA SETU APP

Click on CoWIN tab on the home screen

Press on Vaccination Registration

Enter phone number for OTP

Once it is verified, Aarogya Setu will lead to Registration of Vaccination page

Enter details like aforementioned

Enter pin code or select districts to get a list of vaccination centres. Once done, pick desired centre

Enter date to check availability. Pick time slot

Once done, confirm appointment

Also read: COVID-19 vaccine registration for 18 to 45 years: How to register via CoWin portal, Aarogya Setu app

Also read: CoWIN registration mandatory for 18-45 age group to get COVID-19 vaccine
TUPELO, Miss., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BancorpSouth Bank (NYSE: BXS) received the 2021 America Saves Designation of Savings Excellence for its seventh consecutive year of promoting better savings plans for customers.

The annual award recognizes financial institutions that go above and beyond to encourage people to save money. BancorpSouth and 11 other financial institutions are being recognized for their efforts to encourage individuals to open accounts and begin building wealth.

"This past year has been financially difficult for many people across the country," said BancorpSouth Chairman and CEO Dan Rollins. "We're so proud, now more than ever, to be a part of providing education and resources to our communities about the importance of saving."

BancorpSouth implemented a comprehensive, multi-channel plan to reach customers at different stages of their financial journeys.

America Saves Week, which is coordinated by America Saves and the American Savings Education Council, is an annual opportunity for organizations, like banks or credit unions, to support good savings behavior by encouraging people to evaluate their savings status and set goals. For more information about the award, visit www.americasaves.org .

About BancorpSouth Bank

BancorpSouth Bank (NYSE: BXS) is headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, with approximately $26 billion in assets. BancorpSouth operates approximately 300 full service branch locations as well as additional mortgage, insurance, and loan production offices in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, including an insurance location in Illinois. BancorpSouth is committed to a culture of respect, diversity, and inclusion in both its workplace and communities. To learn more, visit our Community Commitment page at www.bancorpsouth.com. Like us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter and Instagram: @MyBXS; or connect with us through LinkedIn.

SOURCE BancorpSouth Bank

Related Links

http://www.bancorpsouth.com


Seven Italians convicted of left-wing domestic terrorist crimes in the 1970s and 1980s, including several former members of the Red Brigades, have been arrested at their homes in France.

The development on Wednesday has been hailed as historic by Italy.

The crimes for which they were convicted include the 1980 killing of a Carabinieri paramilitary general and the kidnapping of a judge in the same year.

This file handout photograph released by her family on January 1, 2007, shows former member of Italy's disbanded Red Brigades group Marina Petrella. France on April 28 has detained seven former members of left-wing Italian extremist group the Red Brigades who have long been sought by Rome in what was billed as a diplomatic olive branch by President Emmanuel Macron

Adriano Ascoli, pictured above, who was arrested with Luigi Fuccini and Giuliano Pinori for suspected subversive activity linked to the Red Brigades terrorist group, in a pre-dawn raid in Pisa, northern Italy, Monday, June 6, 2005 (File image)

Giuliano Pinori, arrested with Luigi Fuccini and Adriano Ascoli for suspected subversive activity linked to the Red Brigades terrorist group, in a pre-dawn raid in Pisa, northern Italy, Monday, June 6, 2005 (File image)

The arrests followed negotiation and agreement between Italy and France after decades during which Paris refused to act on many of the arrest warrants issued by Italy for convicted left-wing terrorists.

The French presidency said new negotiations started when Emmanuel Macron was elected French president in 2017, but the decisive change came when Mario Draghi became Italian premier earlier this year.

The seven arrested individuals had fled Italy and sought refuge abroad before they could be imprisoned to serve their sentences. Police in France, aided by Italian police, are still searching for three others who eluded arrest at their homes.

Five of those arrested in what Italian police said was code-named Operation Red Shadows were former members of the Red Brigades, a group active during the 1970s and 1980s that carried out killings, kidnappings and so-called 'kneecappings,' in which targets were shot in the legs by attackers who fled. The group later fell dormant.

Also detained was Giorgio Petrostefani, 77, a militant from the far-left group Lotta Continua (Struggle Continues). Petrostefani was convicted of the 1972 slaying of Milan Police Chief Luigi Calabresi and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Picture dated 20 April 1978 of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, after he was kidnapped by far-left Red Brigades movement

French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti, attends a news conference following the weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Wednesday, April 28. Seven Italians convicted of left-wing domestic terrorist crimes, including several former members of the Red Brigades. were arrested in France on Wednesday, the French presidency said in a statement

The police chief's slaying was one of the more notorious crimes during the so-called 'Years of Lead,' when acts of terrorism committed by the extreme right and the extreme left bloodied Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.

Calabresi had been leading the interrogation of Giuseppe Pinelli, a suspected anarchist, about the 1969 bombing of a Milan bank that killed 17 people. Pinelli fell to his death from the 4th floor of police headquarters. The police chief was shot three times from behind while he walked to his car. The bank bombing has never been solved. Pinelli's death inspired a play and a movie.

France established in 1985 a policy known as the 'Mitterrand doctrine,' named for Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. It said that Italian far-left activists who had fled to France would not be extradited to Italy unless there was evidence that they committed 'crimes of blood.'

The various European arrest warrants that allowed Wednesday's arrests were set to expire between December this year and 2023, according to Italian police. A French court must decide on extradition to Italy for each person individually. The French presidency said definitive decisions could take two to three years depending on appeals.

Crowds gathering near the site where five-time Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped, near his home in Rome (File image)

'France's decision to remove every obstacle to the just route to justice is of historic importance,' Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia said. She added that 'my thought today, above all, goes to the victims of the Years of Lead and to their families, kept for so many years waiting for a response.'

Italian Premier Draghi, who took office two months ago, expressed satisfaction, saying the cases 'have left an open wound. 'The memory of those barbaric acts is vivid in the conscience of Italians,' he said in a statement released by his office.

Mario Calabresi, a prominent Italian journalist and editor and son of the slain Milan police chief, tweeted that what happened on Wednesday established 'a fundamental principle: there mustn't exist free-zones for those who kills.' But, Calabresi, added 'I can't feel satisfaction in seeing an old and sick person in prison after so much time.'

French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told a news conference: 'I am proud to take part in that decision which will enable Italy, I hope, after 40 years to turn a page of history that has been covered in blood and tears.'

Barbara Balzerani is seen during a hearing in a high security court in Milan, Italy, in this 1993 file photo. Balzerani, who was convicted of a leading role in the 1978 Red Brigades abduction and slaying of former Premier Aldo Moro, was released early from prison

Amid the negotiations, French investigators had decided to focus on the 'more serious crimes,' according to Macron's office. Italy had initially identified 200 individuals.

One of the five Red Brigades members arrested is Marina Petrella, 66, who was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of crimes including the murder of a Carabinieri paramilitary police general in Rome on New Year's Eve 1980 and the abduction of a judge in the Italian capital a few weeks earlier.

Petrella had been arrested in France in 2007, but the government of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy said in 2008 she would not be extradited to Italy due to her state of health. France's Italian-born first lady at the time, Carla-Bruni-Sarkozy, visited Petrella in the hospital, leading some to believe she played a role in the French decision.

Also arrested was Narciso Manenti, 63, from the Armed Cells Against Territorial Power, which Italian police described as a subversive group. Manenti was convicted of the 1979 killing of a Carabinieri police officer and sentenced to life in prison. Italian police said he married a French citizen in 1985.

The others arrested were Roberta Cappelli, 65, and Sergio Tornaghi, 63, former Brigades members who were sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in murders and kidnappings the 1970s and 1980s, according to Italian police.

Giovanni Alimonti, 65, is another `'brigatista,' as members of the terror group are known in Italy. He was sentenced to 11 1/2 years for being a member of an armed group with terrorist aims, as well as the attempted murder in 1982 of a Rome anti-terrorism police official.

Enzo Calvitti, 66, is also a Red Brigades member. The European warrant for his arrest runs out in December. He was given a sentence of nearly 18 years and eight months for various terrorism crimes, including arms charges.
About the award

Level: Masters

Course: MSc Artificial Intelligence and MSc Computer Science

Country: Home

Value: 11,250 plus living expenses

No. of awards: up to 5

Deadline: 28 May 2021

More information

As part of a joint initiative with the Office of AI, QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, is offering to sponsor up to five students to study a Masters in Artificial Intelligence. The purpose of this initiative is to increase the muscle and number of AI talent in the United Kingdom whilst facilitating equal opportunity for all students to access a higher level of education.

Selected students will be offered a financial sponsorship funded by QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, which will cover tuition fees & living expenses (tuition fees amount covered will be equivalent to domestic tuition fees). The successful students will also be given the opportunity to complete an internship with QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, once the Masters is successfully completed.

You are eligible to this sponsorship if:

You are part of an under-represented group in technology, particularly in AI.

You dont have the financial means to study a Masters independently.

You have an undergraduate degree in a STEM field, preferably in Computer Science, Mathematics & Statistics.

You have a strong academic record.

You are able to demonstrate a passion for AI and big data, and a desire to work within the industry.

You are committing to pursue a career in the United Kingdom.

You have been accepted to study a MSc in AI or related field (e.g. Computer Science, Machine Learning...). Please don't refrain from applying if you're still waiting for an admission answer!

Application process:

Your application should include:

A one page CV (please ensure your CV includes the name of the MSc degree and university you have applied for/been accepted in)

A 500 words (max) essay on what makes you an eligible candidate for this sponsorship, why you are passionate about AI and why we should chose you.

Please submit your application directly to QuantumBlack via their website.
LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Commonwealth of Dominica expanded its bilateral relations after signing a joint communique with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan last week. The meeting, which took place in New York, saw Ambassador Loreen Ruth Bannis-Roberts, the Permanent Representative of Dominica, and her counterpart Ambassador Adela Raz representing their respective governments as they agreed upon enhancing the two nation's relationship.

One of the areas that the communique sought to strengthen was the cooperation between the countries regarding the 2030 Agenda and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With both nations witnessing the impact of the climate crisis, the signing included trading practices and expertise on building resilience. Additionally, the meeting demonstrated the countries' commitment to developing friendly relations as stated in the UN charter.

Aside from contributing to the growth and development of both nations, the signing also proves Dominica's commitment to establishing a global community. The island is one of the top countries in the Caribbean to hold high-level talks focused on bilateral relations, which are intrinsically linked with its vast visa-free offering. Holders of Dominica's passport gain access to roughly 75 percent of the world, comprising major business hubs and popular travel destinations.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit highlighted this achievement during a recent webinar: "Dominica now boasts having visa-free or visa-on-arrival to 143 countries. By the end of 2021, we will certainly increase this by another 25 or so percent."

This is one of the reasons that makes Dominica's citizenship so coveted amongst foreign investors. The small island operates one of the world's oldest Citizenship by Investment Programmes which invites high net-worth individuals and their families to become lifelong citizens of Dominica once investing in its economy. This can be via the government fund or through the purchase of a selected real estate.

Once citizenship is granted, investors gain access to increased travel freedom, higher quality education and healthcare, along with the ability to pass citizenship down for generations to come. In today's climate, a second citizenship is recognised as an insurance policy in the event of unpredictability. With governments overburdened by the economic fallout of the pandemic and political unrest marring many parts of the world, there is no better time than to invest in a Plan B.

+44(0)7867942505, [email protected], www.csglobalpartners.com

SOURCE CS Global Partners
Provided

Alexa Dixon of Jacksonville is among those inducted into Phi Eta Sigma honor society for academic excellence at McKendree University in Lebanon.

Phi Eta Sigma is the nations oldest multi-disciplinary honor society for first-year college students.
The last time she saw Anwar Raslan, the witness had just spent some of the worst days of her life in the prison of secret service branch 251 in Damascus. After more than a week in a 1.5 square meter solitary cell with no windows, the then 19-year-old feared she would lose her mind. When she asked to see the colonel, she had just one request: to be transferred back to the communal cell with the other female prisoners. In his office on the first floor of the branch, otherwise known as Al-Khatib, she cried and pleaded with Colonel Raslan to grant her that one wish. I knew that he would lose nothing if he allowed it, she testified in court nine years later, breaking out in tears. But even though Raslan spoke to her like a friendly uncle and said he would help her, she was returned to the dreaded isolation cell alone. He was cold as ice, she said of the defendant, who was sitting to her right in the courtroom, taking notes.

As the Al-Khatib trial in the German city of Koblenz continues into its second year, two witnesses have talked about their personal encounters with defendant Anwar Raslan. The former head of investigations at branch 251 is accused of 4,000 cases of torture, 52 killings and several cases of sexual violence that allegedly happened at the secret service prison while he was in charge. After his co-defendant, a lower-ranking officer, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison at the end of February for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, the trial against Raslan has continued separately, with a verdict expected this autumn.

A highly intelligent officer with a photographic memory

During the first year of the trial that started in April 2020, the structural framework of what has been happening in Syria since the beginning of the popular uprising ten years ago has been established. After examining the Caesar photos of prisoners tortured to death and internal government documents, after hearing insiders, experts and survivors on general prison conditions, on the structure of the secret services, and on the violence used against peaceful protesters, the court has concluded that the Syrian regime has committed crimes against humanity against the civilian population. Now it is time for the judges to narrow down the exact role that Raslan may have played in these crimes.

Recommended reading Koblenz, the first Syrian state crimes trial in Europe

The young woman in the solitary cell was not the first witness who identified Raslan in this trial. There were several witnesses last year who had encountered him, among them a young conscript who said that the colonel had always been friendly to lower-ranking officers; a German journalist who met Raslan in Jordan and described him as highly intelligent with a photographic memory; and an ex-detainee who said that Raslan had offered her coffee during the interrogation and treated her in a friendly way. In comparison to them, the latest witnesses testimony cast a much poorer light on the defendant. In her testimony lasting for two days in mid-April, the young woman explained that she met Raslan for the first time more than a year before her own incarceration.

In March 2011, her sister had organized and attended one of the very first protests of the Syrian uprising, where she was arrested and taken to branch 251. A few days later, the witnesss parents managed to organize a meeting with Raslan and their daughter to ask for her release. The witness went with them to see her sister. Her headscarf was full of blood. Her face was swollen and blue from being beaten, she remembers, when Raslan brought her sister into the office. My father was very upset and asked Raslan if we could take her with us. But he responded that they would keep her for a few days to educate her.

I was thinking of ways to end my own life

Despite this experience, the witness  who is one of around 20 joint plaintiffs in the case  decided to ask Raslan for help when she was arrested herself during a protest in Damascus and detained in branch 251, just like her sister a year before. In the courtroom in Koblenz, she described how she was tortured in Al-Khatib branch with electric shocks, how she was hung from her wrists from the ceiling and burned with hot water. According to the indictment, all these acts were committed under Raslans responsibility. I was thinking of ways to end my own life, she said of her time in the solitary cell during which she said she was sexually abused by one of the prison guards. She was the first witness who was accompanied by a psychosocial trial assistant who sat next to her in court with a hand on her shoulder to support her during the hardest parts of her testimony.

Raslan reacted to the accusations in a statement read by his lawyers the next day. He gave a different account of the events, claiming he had in fact protected the witnesss sister and other detained women. Two officers were insulting and beating them, he said. I stepped between them and told the officers, who were not under my command, to stop. Even though he said he did not remember the witness asking him for help during her own detention a year later, he argued: She would hardly have turned to me if her sister had told her anything negative about me after her release.

Not the kind of person who would punch someone in the face

Another witness who claimed to have seen Raslan on several occasions testified in early April. The Syrian journalist said that the defendant had been among the security forces present at small protests in Damascus in early 2011. At one of these protests, the witness claimed that he was punched in the face by Raslan when he tried to prevent his friends from being arrested. This prompted him to take a photo of Raslan when he saw him again at the funeral procession for a famous Syrian film director. I was filming the funeral procession when I recognized the man who had punched me. So, I took his photo, the witness explained to the judges in Koblenz, adding that he had hoped the picture might help him hold that man accountable one day.

The photo is not part of the Raslan prosecution file. It was allegedly taken from the witness together with his laptop when he was arrested from his home and detained in Al-Khatib branch a few weeks after taking it. He claims that at the branch he was beaten again by Raslan, who interrogated him about the photo. I was very scared that they would take revenge on me, said the witness, who was later released after almost two weeks of interrogation and torture. I had photographed a member of the security services, which was of course a problem in Syria at the time.

The defence reacted to his statement by arguing that Raslan had an office job and was not present during protests, so the witness could not have seen him there. They added that their client was not the kind of person who would punch someone in the face.

More testimonies are expected about alleged acts by Raslan, including evidence about violence that he allegedly committed personally. But in the majority of the 4,000 torture cases he is accused of, he did not personally raise his hand and beat someone, victims lawyer Patrick Kroker explains regarding crimes for which Raslan could also be held accountable as a superior. Then the court will examine Raslans personality. When it comes to sentencing, it will be important whether he was especially cruel or whether he did his job unwillingly, says Kroker.
[April 29, 2021] Trust & Will Enables Seamless Access to Digital Estate Plans with New Shared Access Feature

SAN DIEGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trust & Will, a modern approach to online estate planning, announced today its new Shared Document Access feature to help families better plan for their financial futures. Shared Document Access is a new feature that enables family members, financial advisors, and other professionals to gain instant access to a digital estate plan. As more financial assets and personal accounts become digitized, including cryptocurrencies and social media profiles, a process for enabling secure access to these accounts is more important than ever. As more financial assets become digitized, a process for enabling secure access to accounts is more important than ever. Shared Document Access for Members

The Shared Document Access feature responds to the common request from members to share estate planning documents quickly and securely with others. Members can now proactively share their documents electronically with important friends and family, such as the executor of their estate, guardians of their minor children and pets, as well as beneficiaries, and even financial advisors. By sharing plans with loved ones in advance, families can better plan for their financial future. This also allows executors and other people named in a plan to better nderstand and discuss the implications of their role, including what to do in case of a medical emergency.



Shared Document Access for Advisors

The Shared Document Access feature is also available to the Trust & Will for Advisors Network, which currently includes more than 2,500 financial advisors across the U.S. The advisor dashboard provides interactive tools for financial advisors to offer complete estate planning services to their clients with the ability to track and manage their clients' plans. By integrating the Shared Document Access tool into the advisor dashboard, financial advisors now have more insight and visibility into their client's estate with real-time updates on documents and status changes, ensuring they always have access to the latest and most relevant version of their clients' plans. "We launched the Shared Document Access feature to simplify the once-complex process of estate planning even further," says Cody Barbo, Founder and CEO of Trust & Will. "Many Americans still struggle to create an estate plan, and our mission is to enable everyone to leave a legacy by removing as many barriers as possible. Hopefully, the days of looking through filing cabinets and lockboxes for a set of papers with instructions are long gone. By incorporating your family or financial advisor directly into your estate plan through a seamless digital process, we are expanding the support network for anyone going through the process of creating a plan."

To learn more about Shared Document Access and how to securely share estate planning documents with loved ones or personal representatives, visit https://trustandwill.com/learn/shared-access-estate-planning. Attorney Support

In addition to new digital sharing features, Trust & Will is also actively expanding their estate planning attorneys' network to support their members. The Attorney Support Network is now available in six states: California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. This feature is helpful for those with more complex estates and includes line-by-line document review to help members gauge their total net worth, uncover potential tax issues and address any other legal questions that arise during an estate plan. To learn more, visit https://trustandwill.com/estate-planning-attorney. ABOUT TRUST & WILL

Since 2017, Trust & Will has helped more than 200,000 members successfully plan their legacy. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, Trust & Will is on a mission to provide families a better way to plan for the future. We make estate planning simple, affordable, and accessible for everyone by providing a secure way to set up your plan online in minutes. We've modernized estate planning with a design-first approach, layered on top of incredible customer support to help people throughout the process. In response to COVID-19, Trust & Will launched the Frontline Heroes Initiative, which has provided more than 11,000 free estate plans to healthcare professionals and teachers. To learn more, visit https://trustandwill.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trust--will-enables-seamless-access-to-digital-estate-plans-with-new-shared-access-feature-301280450.html SOURCE Trust & Will

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Edwin Poots is viewed as one of the people most likely to succeed Mrs Foster

Arlene Foster said yesterday that she is quitting as DUP leader and First Minister

One of the frontrunners in the race to replace Arlene Foster as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party is a creationist who believes the world is 6,000 years old.

Edwin Poots, Stormont's current Agriculture Minister, said in 2007 that he believes the earth dates back to 4000 BC.

He also hit out at scientists who he claimed wanted to 'indoctrinate everyone' with the theory of evolution.

Mr Poots this afternoon formally announced his intention to stand for the leadership of the DUP.

The Lagan Valley Assembly member outlined his reasons for running in a video posted on Twitter.

'I am a proud Northern Ireland man, I love its people and its place, and it faces many challenging times, it's with that in mind, I'm putting my name forward for the leadership for the Democratic Unionist Party,' he said.

'I look forward to the engagement and the debate with colleagues and the wider public in this contest.

'Northern Ireland is a place that has had many great things over this last hundred years, I wish to see us rebuild, revitalise, reinvigorate and revive for the next hundred.'

It is unclear whether Mr Poots will yet have competition in his bid to take charge of Northern Ireland's largest unionist party. The DUP has never had a contested leadership race.

Edwin Poots, Stormont's current Agriculture Minister, has been tipped as a potential successor to Arlene Foster as DUP leader. He announced his candidacy for the top job this afternoon

Mrs Foster announced yesterday that she is stepping down as DUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland

What is creationism? Creationism is the religious belief that all life exists as the result of divine creation. It includes a belief that all the forms of life in existence today were created by God. Some creationists believe this happened in a single event while others do not. Creationism follows the account set out in the Bible for how the world came into being. Scientists reject creationism as unscientific and there have been major rows in the past over whether it should be taught in schools. The UK Government said in 2014 that creationism could not be taught as a valid scientific theory in any free school or academy. Advertisement

Mr Poots was asked about his religious beliefs during a BBC radio interview back in 2007.

Asked how old he believes the earth is, he reportedly replied: 'My view on the earth is that it's a young earth. My view is 4000 BC.'

Mr Poots was a culture minister at the time of the interview and he was asked by another interviewee: 'You're the culture minister and you don't believe in evolution?'

He replied: 'Yes, absolutely. And you're telling me that all of this evolution took place over billions of years, and yet it's only in the last few thousand years that Man could actually learn to write?'

Mr Poots hit out at the scientist Richard Dawkins during the same interview, telling the programme: 'He [Mr Dawkins] wants to indoctrinate everyone with evolution.'

Mr Poots was also asked about his faith when he was appointed environment minister in 2009.

He told the Belfast Telegraph: 'I am a Bible-believing Christian and I do not see that will impact in any way, shape or form on my role as Environment Minister.'

Mr Poots has held a number of senior executive portfolios at Stormont and he has been tipped by many as the leading contender to replace Mrs Foster.

Mrs Foster yesterday announced that she was resigning as DUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland after an internal party revolt over her handling of Brexit.

She said in a statement that she intends to step down as DUP leader on May 28 and will then quit as First Minister at the end of June.

She said it has been the 'privilege of my life to serve the people of Northern Ireland as their First Minister' as she brought the curtain down on her five and a half year tenure as DUP leader.

The 50-year-old Fermanagh and South Tyrone representative also indicated her resignation will mark the end of her political career, as she said she was preparing to 'depart the political stage'.

There is some speculation that when Mrs Foster does depart, the twin roles she currently occupies could be split, with one politician taking on the role of party leader and another being appointed First Minister.

That would potentially allow an MP to lead the party from Westminster while an MLA takes on the First Ministers job.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 04:28:17|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen on Wednesday called for more international diplomacy to unlock progress in Syria.

"If this highly internationalized conflict is to move toward resolution, we need a more constructive and comprehensive international diplomacy on Syria to try to unlock progress step-for-step," he told the Security Council in a briefing.

He said he has made this appeal to the Syrian parties and to key interlocutors in Russia, the United States, Turkey, Iran, the Arab world, Europe and others. "I appreciate that key international interlocutors are expressing interest in this idea. At the same time, it is clear that mistrust and a desire for others to move first are prominent elements in the minds of many."

"I understand this. But there are ways to overcome these concerns," he added.

A new means of international discussion or a new international format could bring all of those stakeholders who can put something on the table to the table. Exploratory consultations could help test possibilities and bridge the gaps of mistrust that hinder such an effort. Key players could identify, with realism and precision, the mutual and reciprocal steps they can take and what they would seek, in order to promote progress on Resolution 2254, which provides a roadmap for Syria. Well-defined packages without ambiguity, and parallel implementation and verification as relevant, could help, he said.

"There are no guarantees that common ground would be found. But I am convinced that it could be. There is enough at stake and enough common interest for us to try. We must begin to lay the groundwork for such an effort, conscious that it will require time and effort to come to fruition," he said. "With a relative, albeit fragile, calm on the ground, and many capitals understanding the need for a way forward, we need to explore what is possible. We should not lose further time in exploring this seriously." Enditem
Welcome to the highly specific golden age of animated movies about complicated father-daughter relationships. In the Oscar-nominated (and unjustly Oscar-losing) Wolfwalkers, a fearful English soldier counsels his wild-hearted daughter to collaborate in the occupation of Ireland, lest her disobedience draw the vengeful eye of Oliver Cromwell. And in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which arrives on Netflix on Friday, a technophobic dad frets about his daughters decision to major in filmmaking instead of choosing a more practical career path. In other ways, the two movies are diametrically opposed. Wolfwalkers is hand-drawn, while the digitally animated Mitchells takes its cues from the frenetic style of online memes and frequently annotates its action with bursting hearts and crude squiggles. Wolfwalkers also counsels humanity about keeping in balance with nature, while The Mitchells vs. The Machines, despite its adversarial title and a plot that centers on humanity nearly being extinguished by a rogue cellphone, is surprisingly tech-positiveonly fair for a movie that was created on computers and is debuting via a streaming service.

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Katie Mitchell (voiced by Broad Citys Abbi Jacobson) is a classic art-school outcast, just itching to leave home to meet the college classmates shes already befriended over the internet. Her dad, Rick (Danny McBride), is a hulking mountain man with a stiff brush of a moustache, one who loves his daughter but finds her and her world increasingly difficult to understand. At the last family dinner before her flight, she proudly unveils a new video shes made, depicting herself as the family pug boarding a many-legged school bus as rainbows explode all around, but all Rick can see, or at least all hes able to express, is that theres a laptop on the table, where hes forbidden them to be, and his daughter is preparing to devote her life to a dream he can only see ending in failure.

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Thank God for the robot apocalypse. Desperate for a chance to mend fences, if still not especially sensitive to his daughters desires, Rick cancels Katies plane ticket and arranges an impromptu family road tripone thats interrupted by an army of humanoid automatons. Eric Andres tech mogul has built them to replace the obedient personal assistants people already carry in their pockets, but theyve been commandeered by his jilted former cellphone. PAL, voiced with delightful dudgeon by Olivia Colman, has some of the baffled outrage of a discarded parent, and Andres tech bro is barely more than a child himselfhe clarifies one when I was a young man anecdote by adding   three years ago. The tasks that he brags that his new fleet of robo-helpers can accomplish are all domestic chores: cook me breakfast, unpack these boxes, sweep up that mess. For him, a bleeding-edge gadget that can do almost anything finds its highest function as a mom you dont have to thank.

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It takes its cues from the frenetic style of online memes and frequently annotates its action with bursting hearts and crude squiggles.

The Mitchells dont escape the fate of being rounded up and prepped for shipping into deep space because theyre extraordinary, or even because their dysfunction somehow makes them special: Its just dumb luck that they escape while the perfect-seeming family nextdoor gets captured. (In a particularly immaculate bit of casting, the Instagram-famous clan is voiced by Chrissy Teigen, John Legend, and Charlyne Yi.) The mom, Linda (Maya Rudolph), is a first-grade teacher. Little brother Aaron (director and co-writer Michael Rianda) loves dinosaurs. Theyre not even extreme in their addiction to devices, even if their eyes do water when Rick forces them to lay down their phones and tablets and talk to each other. If anything distinguishes them, its the solidity of the familys foundation, which shows itself not in perfectly posed selfies but in the way even the worst argument seems to subside after a whilethe way Katie is furious at her father for turning her quick flight into a days-long odyssey and then shrugs and opts to make the most of it. Their problems feel realits subtly implied that one of the reasons Rick has trouble relating to Katie is because shes gayand so their reconciliations feel real, too.

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The ballast of Rick and Katies relationship allows the The Mitchells vs. the Machines to take some audacious swerves that might otherwise topple the whole enterprise, including a Dawn of the Dead-style mall battle in which the family is pursued by demonic smart appliancesand eventually a five-story Furby that breathes atomic fire like the rebooted Godzilla. Rianda and Jeff Rowes script is nimble and clever, with wry nods to sources that will delight aspiring Katies (theres a particularly sublime reference to Kill Bill) but sail blissfully over the heads of unwitting Aarons. And after Into the Spider-Verse and a handful of Lego Movies, its further proof that producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are an animation brand as reliable as Disney or Pixar, and a good deal more likely to provide something thats not only sturdy but genuinely surprising.
I can remember the radicals of the 60s and 70s with their hate rhetoric against the police throughout the country. So many people distanced themselves from the police. Cops in their patrol cars drove through neighborhoods with their windows rolled up tight. There was no social interaction between the cops on patrol and the people of the community they worked in. It was an us-vs-you attitude.

Now the educators are trying it all over again. They dont want their children to have any social interaction with the police what-so-ever. This way the educators can change the childrens opinion of the police and walk the children down their own steep road. The police provide security for the school children and I applaud that.

The educators should not be so narrow minded as to let one cop in a state 1,100 miles away do something to change the mindset of a population so far away. Let the cops protect the children, and the educators should leave their politics outside the school doors.

(Robert McKenna is an Annadale resident.)
McCracken Man Faces 25 Animal Cruelty Charges

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Detectives and McCracken County Animal Control went to Howery's Broyles Avenue home to speak with him and arrest him on the Adair County warrant. Detectives reportedly found approximately 100 animals on the property, including dogs, cats, goats, chickens, pigs and horses.



According to police, over 40 dogs were found inside multiple buildings in cages. Police said none of the kennels inside the home had food or water, and there was no electricity or ventilation inside the buildings. Animal feces and urine was left and covered by straw, creating an unsafe and dangerous condition.

An outside organization responded Wednesday night and Thursday morning to transport the animals to a qualified facility, under the direction of Animal Control.

Howery was arrested and charged with 25 counts of 2nd degree cruelty to animals and lodged in the McCracken County Regional Jail. The investigation is ongoing and detectives say more charges are possible.

MCCRACKEN COUNTY - A McCracken County man was jailed Wednesday on more than 20 counts of animal cruelty.The McCracken County Sheriff's Office received a tip of possible animal cruelty from a law enforcement agency outside of Kentucky alleging that David Howery was possibly boarding a large number of animals in McCracken County and neglecting them. Detectives learned that Howery had an outstanding bench warrant from a previous cruelty to animals conviction in Adair County, KY.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-28 17:21:06|Editor: huaxia

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Have you ever tried to learn Chinese? Is it difficult? We spoke with international students at Shanghai International Studies University about their tips to mastering the language. 

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British Empire Launches New Anti-Corruption Sanctions Scheme, Joined at Hip with U.S.

April 28 , 2021 (EIRNS)British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced two days ago that the United Kingdom, under the newly-enacted Global Anti-Corruption Sanctions Regulations of 2021, will henceforth impose economic sanctions not just against alleged violators of human rights, but also against individuals and organizations deemed to be involved in serious corruption. To show how serious the British Empire takes corruption, he announced 22 such sanctions immediately, 14 against Russian tax fraudsters named in the famous Sergei Magnitsky case; the other 8 against individuals from South Africa, South Sudan, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Raab stressed that Britain is already collaborating with the United States on this new category of sanctions; two members of Bidens cabinet issued statements to the same effect.

What a show: The spokesmen for the most corrupt cesspools on the planet, Wall Street and the City of London, stating with straight faces that they have joined forces to fight serious corruption around the world! Rest assured that China, Russia and smaller nations alike are clear that this new coordinationwhich they hope to extend to other alliesaims in actuality to prepare for excluding from the international financial system those that do not play ball with the would-be global Anglo-American dictatorship.

Global Britain is standing up for democracy, good governance and the rule of law. We are saying to those involved in serious corruption: we will not tolerate you or your dirty money in our country, Raab declared. The first sanctions announced are being taken partly in tandem with the U.S., which is today also announcing further corruption sanctions. Acting together sends the clearest possible signal that corruption comes with a heavy price.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken commended the United Kingdom for adopting this expanded economic warfare capability, which reinforces the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the fight against corruption and illicit finance.... Corrupt actors, and their facilitators, will not have access to our financial systems, he blustered.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin welcomes the U.K. move, which gives the United Kingdom an authority similar to the United States Global Magnitsky program and Canadas Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, her statement asserted.

U.S. sanctions are more likely to compel changes in behavior and disrupt threatening activities when pursued in concert with our alliescarrying a more forceful economic impact by disrupting access to the international financial systemand sending a stronger message to malign actors by virtue of our solidarity. Sanctions are, however, but one tool,

she noted. Treasury will also be providing guidance to financial institutions, technical assistance, and engagement with foreign and private sector partners on enforcement, so that no one dares get out of line.
FILE PHOTO: A Tencent logo is seen at its booth at the 2020 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China September 4, 2020. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese financial watchdogs on Thursday summoned 13 internet platforms engaged in finance business, including heavyweights Tencent and ByteDance, to order them to strengthen compliance with regulations, the central bank said.

The move by the four regulators is part of widening efforts by Beijing to rein in the country's massive internet "platform economy," which includes an ongoing antitrust clampdown backed by President Xi Jinping.

The country's platform economy has grown rapidly and covers whole range of e-commmerce activities ranging from banking to shopping and food delivery.

"Internet platforms have played an important role in improving the efficiency of financial services and broadening the access of financial services to more people," the People's Bank of China said in a statement.

"At the same time, some financial services were running without licences, and there are serious rule violations in areas such as regulatory arbitrage, unfair competition and damaging consumers' interests," it said.

The companies will have to set up financial holding companies if they meet requirements to do so, as Alibaba's fintech affiliate Ant Group was recently forced to do, a move that tightens capital requirements.

They should also draft "business rectification" plans to comply with regulations, cut "improper" links between their payment tools and other financial products, break "monopolies" in holding data, and prevent risks in internet mutual aid businesses.

They should be more compliant with their issuance of asset-backed securities, and overseas listings, the central bank said in a statement following the meeting between regulators and the companies.

Tencent and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other companies targeted by regulators on Thursday include Du Xiaoman Financial , which is backed by Baidu Inc , as well as Meituan, Ping An-backed Lufax, 360 DigiTech, Trip.com, Xiaomi Corp and JD.com's JD Digits.

None of these companies immediately responded to requests for comment.

Alibaba and Ant, the original targets of China's squeeze on what was until recently a loosely regulated internet economy, were not among those named by regulators on Thursday.

Beijing's crackdown on fintech was triggered by an October speech by Alibaba founder Jack Ma criticising the country's regulatory system, which led to the scuppering of Ant's record $37 billion initial public offering that continues to reverberate.

"Tighter supervision is not only aimed at the Ant Group, and the problems of the Ant Group are definitely not an exception," the state-run China News Service wrote in a Thursday commentary.

"Many platform companies have irregularities to varying degrees behind their rapid expansion over the years."

Earlier this month, China's antitrust watchdog called in nearly three dozen internet companies to warn them to stop using any banned practices, such as forcing vendors to use their platform exclusively.

(Reporting by Tony Munroe and Cheng Leng; additional reporting by Yingzhi Yang and Pei Li; editing by John Stonestreet and Jane Merriman)
Parents slam Texas churches for exposing children to explicit sex education

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Some parents in Childress, Texas, are publicly voicing outrage at two local churches after their children were exposed to explicit sexual education materials without their consent. Church officials argue that they were simply responding to questions asked by the children.

One parent, Kayla Evans, revealed on Facebook that she was upset when she learned about the discussions and terminology her 13-year-old daughter was exposed to after being dropped off at Childress First United Methodist Church last Wednesday.

Im seriously at a loss for words and just completely confused what our daughter was taught at church tonight. Im outraged, Evans wrote.

Its been a while since Ive been at church but is this really whats being taught to youth now? I had to ask my 8 year old just to be sure he hasnt had some kind of talk without my permission. I didnt get this kind of sex talk. Hell I just learned some of it in my adult life, what is this world coming to? Ive been protecting them as much as possible from freaking YouTube I had no idea Id get this from church!!!!!!!!

The controversy first highlighted in a report by KCBD 11, surrounded a handout that was given to students as part of a sex and relationship lesson in the youth program (for kids ages of 12 to 18) of Church of Christ in Childress.

The lesson spanned a conversation on pornography, including a list of sexual terms like cunnilingus and fellatio.

I went back in forth on sharing but what **** said about [how] they want to reframe the definition of sex has me mind blown and concerned its being taught in other churches so I think other parents need to be aware!! Evans wrote.

A representative of Childress First United Methodist Church who said he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Christian Post Tuesday that they partnered with Church of Christ in Childress for the sex education lesson and the church was well-intended.

We joined with another church, and it is a curriculum that theyve developed over the last 15 years, the representative said. The actual specific handout that was given out was compiled from questions that youth had over the last several weeks. It was answering questions that the kids brought up.

When asked why parents werent consulted before the church provided answers to the questions asked by the children, the representative said, I cant answer that. I dont know.

The parents were not aware of the handout, but the very few calls we have received have been asking questions of clarification. The majority of people have not called this church and my understanding is they have not called the other church. They have taken to social media to air grievance without finding out what actually happened, he said.

Mike Henderson, a representative for the United Church of Christ in Childress, did not immediately respond to calls from CP Tuesday. But he confirmed to KCBD 11 that the sex education lesson is part of a curriculum theyve been offering to their youth program for 15 years without issue because participants are usually aware of what will be covered.

I dont want to throw anybody under the bus, and I dont want to be critical or defensive at all. At the last minute, like maybe even 5:00 Wednesday afternoon, the youth minister from the other church involved called Drew Denman, our youth minister, asking if they can attend, Henderson said.

And he said, With parental consent, but when someone shows up, you cant tell them not to come in because they knew what it was about.

He further noted that this was the first time they allowed another church to join the series weeks after they started, which may have contributed to the reaction some parents had.

This was a seven week series, and they set the stage for all this. The person who was disappointed in this wasnt at the first three sessions to prepare them for what was going to happen, he said.

According to KCBD, the Church of Christ in Childress will implement changes to be more strict in getting parental authorization.




The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, changed its guidelines Tuesday on wearing masks outdoors to prevent coronavirus infection.

The CDC said fully vaccinated Americans do not need to continue covering their faces with masks unless they are in a large group of people. It added that even some unvaccinated people can go outside without masks in some situations.

The CDC has been telling Americans since the start of the health crisis to wear masks if they were within two meters of other people.

The decision marked the U.S. governments latest step toward normal conditions. But it came as much of the country already had moved on from mask rules.

In the small town of Oxford in Nebraska, the local schools stopped requiring masks last month. It was an easy decision: there were few cases of coronavirus. Local officials were not concerned about guidelines from the CDC.

The CDC federal mask guidelines just did not seem to fit local conditions. In the town of about 800 people, very few wear a mask. Saying the town did not pay attention to federal guidelines, the head of Southern Valley, Bryce Jorgensen, added you just cant compare Chicago to Oxford, Nebraska. Things are just different.

On the same day as the CDC decision, Louisianas Democratic governor removed part of the states mask requirement. Around the country, local government leaders have been doing away with mask rules. Alabamas governor did not renew the states mask requirement law earlier this month.

In Montgomery, Alabama, 73-year-old Judy Adams said she has not worn a mask outside since the early days of the pandemic a year ago. She usually wears them only to enter stores that require them. Its not helping, she said of mask rules. This is about control and fear.

The federal government has struggled to create public health rules that all states can follow. The CDC has released guidelines on masks, social distancing, travel and other activities. But, it is state governors who decide if they will be enforced.

On Tuesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said: Over the past year, we have spent a lot of time telling Americans what you cant do. Today, I am going to tell you some of the things you can do, if you are fully vaccinated.

The CDC says that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people do not have to wear masks outdoors when they walk, bike or run alone or with members of their household. An unvaccinated person can also go without a mask when outdoors with those who are vaccinated. But unvaccinated people should wear masks when with other unvaccinated people, the CDC said.

In addition, the CDC said everyone, fully vaccinated or not, should keep wearing masks at outdoor events made up of large groups, such as sporting events.

The CDC also says that continuing to wear a mask in public places is still the safest thing to do, even for those who have been vaccinated.

The change comes as more than 50 percent of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of vaccine, and more than 33 percent have been fully vaccinated.

Walensky said the decision was the result of increasing vaccinations as well as decreases in new cases. New research shows that less than 10 percent of cases are spread outdoors.

In Plano, Texas, Rob Webster, a 49-year-old church employee, said the new guidelines sound reasonable. But he still has concerns.

I dont know if I were around a group of people who werent wearing masks, are they really vaccinated?...It makes me maybe a little more fearful and less trusting of the people around me, he said.

Im Susan Shand.

The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

___________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

mask  n. a covering for the face or part of the face: especially related to preventing the spread of disease

dose  n. the amount of a medicine, drug or vitamin that is taken at one time

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LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Shares of Standard Chartered Plc (SCBFF.PK, STAC.L, STAN.L) were gaining around 3 percent after the British bank reported Thursday that its first-quarter profit before taxation climbed 59 percent to $1.41 billion from last year's $886 million. Earnings per share were 32.6 cents, up 17.7 percent from 15 cents last year. Underlying profit before taxation was $1.45 billion, compared to $1.22 billion a year ago. Underlying earnings per share were 33.5 cents, compared to 25.4 cents last year. Operating income declined 9 percent to $3.94 billion from prior year's $4.34 billion. Operating income was down 3 percent at constant currency and excluding a $305 million reduction in DVA. Net interest income fell 10 percent from last year to $1.66 billion. Looking ahead, Standard Chartered said it still expects the recovery to be volatile and uneven, even as the scale of the US fiscal stimulus and speed of vaccine roll-out have significantly lifted global economic prospects. The company sees some of its larger markets to continue to drive the global economy out of recession over the coming quarters. The bank said the positive backdrop reinforces its confidence in previous guidance for fiscal 2021. The company said, 'With the net interest margin having broadly stabilised, we expect income to start growing again in 2H'21 compared to 2H'20. Income is expected to be similar in FY'21 to that achieved in FY'20 at constant currency and to return to our medium-term guidance of 5-7 percent growth from FY'22.' In London, Standard Chartered shares were trading at 508.29 pence, up 2.94 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.
Syracuse, N.Y.  Syracuse firefighters pulled a woman from a burning home on the citys South Side near Interstate 81 this afternoon.

Firefighters rushed to 521 Garfield Avenue at 4:41 p.m. to find heavy smoke and fire in the attic of the 2  story, wood-frame home, according to a Syracuse Fire Department news release this afternoon.

They entered the home and encountered tremendous heat and zero visibility while searching for the trapped woman, officials said. After a few minutes, they found the woman, they said.

The woman was unconscious and immediately treated by firefighters and paramedics from AMR, officials said. She was transported to Upstate University Hospital. Her condition is not currently known.

Three firefighters were hurt while battling the blaze, officials said. All three were transported to hospitals with minor injuries.

It took crews nearly 30 minutes to extinguish the fire, officials said.

National Grid and the Syracuse Police Department also responded to the scene. The American Red Cross will be assisting displaced residents with shelter and other needs.

Members of the Fire Investigation Bureau are currently working to determine the origin and cause.

We are on the scene and will update this report as soon as more information is available.
Across Pennsylvania, about 6 million people have now had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

About 48% of eligible Pennsylvanians have had at least their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, the Pennsylvania Department of Health said Thursday. After early stumbles in the vaccine rollout, Pennsylvania now ranks 10th in the nation in first doses, according to The New York Times daily vaccine tracker.

More than 3.3 million people in Pennsylvania are now fully vaccinated, according to the state health department. An additional 1.9 million have received the first dose of a two-shot vaccine. Altogether, about 5.25 million Pennsylvania residents have had at least one dose, the health department says.

However, the state data doesnt include Philadelphia, which is handling its own vaccine rollout.

In Philadelphia, more than 500,000 people are fully vaccinated, while more than 748,000 people have had at least one shot, according to the city health department.

Combining the city and state data, Pennsylvanias full vaccination picture looks like this: more than 3.8 million have been fully vaccinated, and roughly 6 million people have been given at least one shot.

State officials and health care providers have expressed growing concerns about vaccine hesitancy and a reduction in demand in recent days. Most providers have said vaccine appointments are now easy to schedule, with appointments available within a day or two. State officials and health care providers say they are also ramping up efforts to get vaccines into under-served communities.

The state has also reported another dip in hospitalizations due to the coronavirus.

Statewide, 2,318 people are being treated in hospitals for COVID-19, which is down from about 2,800 early last week, according to data from the health department. The number of hospitalizations had been climbing steadily since mid-March, when about 1,400 people were hospitalized.

The health department reported 3,322 new cases Thursday, raising the statewide total to 1,146,398. The state also reported 50 new coronavirus deaths Thursday. Since the pandemic began, 26,179 deaths have been tied to COVID-19, according to the health department.

Most of those who are infected deal with relatively mild symptoms and many dont get sick at all. But doctors say COVID-19 poses potential risks to everyone, particularly seniors and those with certain health conditions.

Recently, doctors in central Pennsylvania have said they are seeing more young people with serious cases of COVID-19. Doctors stress the importance of younger people getting vaccinated as variants of the virus have emerged.

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New Delhi, April 29 : Indian Army chief General M.M. Naravane said on Thursday that the force is opening hospitals for the local people wherever possible seeing the surge in the number of Covid-19 cases across the country.

After visiting the forward locations in Siachen and eastern Ladakh on Wednesday, Naravane met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday to brief him on the various initiatives taken by the Army to help in Covid management.

The Army chief informed the Prime Minister that medical staff of the force are being made available to various state governments. He also told Modi that the Army is setting up temporary hospitals in various parts of the country.

Naravane also apprised the Prime Minister that the Army is opening its hospitals for civilians wherever possible and the citizens can approach their nearest Army hospitals.

He informed the Prime Minister that the Army is helping with its manpower for imported oxygen tankers and vehicles where specialised skills are required to manage them.

On April 27 in Ranchi, in response to the requisition for medical assistance sought by the state government, the Military Hospital in Namkum opened a 50-bed Covid care facility for the local people.

The modalities of setting up the facility were discussed by a team of Army officers led by the GOC, Cockerel Division, with Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren.

On April 29, the Indian Army established a dedicated Covid facility at the Old Command Hospital complex in Pune where substantial capacity has been created for treating the local people referred by the district medical officer.

The facility has a dedicated team of Army doctors and paramedical staff to take care of Covid patients.

This is in addition to the assistance provided by the Army for opening a 900-bed hospital in Ahmedabad, and a 100-bed isolation facility in Barmer, Rajasthan.

The force is making similar efforts at multiple locations in Madhya Pradesh, under which a 150-bed facility in Bhopal and two 40-bed facilities in Gwalior and Saugor have been established.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
A girl has been tied up and gang-raped after being lured with the promise of a coronavirus vaccine in India.

The two men, identified only as Rocky and Montu, met the victim at a health centre in the Covid-ravaged city of Patna, Bihar state.

After convincing her that they could provide a vaccination, they took the girl to an abandoned house where they raped her.

The victim told police she was tied up by her hands and feet, and gagged with a handkerchief during the ordeal.

The men met the victim at a health centre in the Covid-ravaged city of Patna, Bihar state [stock image]

An investigated officer told the Indo-Asian News Service: 'The victim managed to free herself and reached home. She narrated her ordeal before her family members who approached local police.

'As the accused were known to her, we raided their respective houses on Wednesday morning and arrested them.'

The officer added that enquiries were ongoing to determine how old the girl is, as police suspect she is under 18.

Patna is among Indian cities which are dealing with a massive second wave of coronavirus.

The men met the victim at a health centre in the Covid-ravaged city of Patna, Bihar state

The city of 2 million is recording an average of more than 2,200 cases every day, compared to a peak of nearly 800 cases recorded in August.

The country is the world's epicentre of Covid infections and setting records each day for the most daily cases ever recorded, with another 379,257 on Thursday.

Another 3,645 fatalities were added to India's death toll of more than 200,000, however the figures are believed to be under-reported amid scenes of mass cremations in Delhi and Mumbai.
General view of Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal in Saudi Arabia (Photo : REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah)

Major Chinese investors are in talks to buy a stake in Saudi Aramco, several sources told Reuters on Wednesday, as Saudi Arabia's state oil firm prepares to sell another slice of its business to international investors.



Saudi Arabia was in discussions to sell 1% of Aramco to a leading global energy company and could sell further shares including to international investors within the next year or two, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in televised remarks on Tuesday.



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A stake of 1% would equate to around $19 billion based on Aramco's current market capitalisation.



Sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation (CIC) was among those that could invest, two sources told Reuters.



Aramco was talking to CIC, as well as Chinese national oil companies, said one of the sources close to CIC. None of the Chinese companies could be reached immediately for comment.



Aramco had been in touch with Chinese investors for a few years and CIC is the most likely investor, said the second source with a state-backed private equity fund.



"The kingdom does have close relations with China," said a third source, who is close to Aramco. "The major shareholder will decide what to do with their shares."



Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, retained its position as China's biggest crude oil supplier for a seventh consecutive month in March.



Another source said before the COVID-19 pandemic, Aramco had toured around China looking for investors, talking to all the major state investors with overseas money, but few were interested. CIC and China's Silk Road Fund were also among the firms they approached.



Aramco, the world's biggest oil company, listed on the Saudi bourse in late 2019, raising $25.6 billion in the IPO and later sold more shares under a "greenshoe option" to raise the total to $29.4 billion.



"There are talks now for the acquisition of a 1% stake by a leading global energy company in an important deal that would boost Aramco's sales in ... a major country," Prince Mohammed said, without elaborating.



"There are talks with other companies for different stakes, and part of Aramco's shares could be transferred to the (Saudi) Public Investment Fund and a part listed ... on the Saudi bourse," he said in an interview aired by Saudi TV marking the fifth anniversary of Vision 2030.



The 2019 Aramco IPO was seen as a pillar of the economic diversification programme aimed at attracting foreign investment.



Prince Mohammed said in the interview that Riyadh was strengthening its relationships with China, India and Russia, though the United States remained a strategic partner despite some differences with the Biden administration, which has taken a tougher stance on Saudi Arabia.



"China has said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner, India has said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner and Russia has also said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner," the prince said.



Friction between China and the United States has flared in recent months on a range of issues, including Taiwan and Beijing's use of forced labour in its northwestern Xinjiang province, home to the Muslim Uighur minority.


(@FahadShabbir)

Beijing's Badaling section of the Great Wall, a popular tourist destination, will cap its daily number of visitors at 75 percent of the maximum capacity during the May Day holiday, the site's administration said Thursday

BEIJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :-- Beijing's Badaling section of the Great Wall, a popular tourist destination, will cap its daily number of visitors at 75 percent of the maximum capacity during the May Day holiday, the site's administration said Thursday.

The scenic spot expects a significant rise in tourist numbers during this year's holiday from May 1 to May 5.

Visitors need to reserve tickets to the site in advance.

To accommodate the May Day crowds, the Badaling Great Wall will extend its opening hours during the holiday and launch night tours from April 30 to May 4.

The scenic site administration also reminds tourists to follow COVID-19 prevention and control protocols such as conducting temperature checks before entry and keeping a safe distance from other visitors.
Park Inn by Radisson, Dubai Motor City has appointed Amish Ali as its Front of House Manager.

Ali joins the hotel after spending three years at Radisson Blu Hotel, Dubai Media City where he started as a Meetings & Events Sales Executive until leaving as Assistant Meetings & Events Sales Manager. He has been with Radisson Hotel Group since 2010.

In his new role, Ali will oversee front office and the pool while working with the relevant departments to drive new projects, incremental revenue & overall guest satisfaction and creating memorable moments for the guests at Dubais only motor themed hotel. - TradeArabia News Service
Samsung has posted its detailed financial report for Q1 2021, and the numbers look great. The Korean company reported record-breaking revenue of KRW65.39 trillion (about $59 billion), mostly thanks to solid sales of smartphones and consumer electronics, making up for businesses like semiconductors and displays.

Q1 2021 Q4 2020 QoQ Change Q1 2020 YoY Change Sales (in KRW / USD) 65.39 tr / 59B 61.55 tr / 55.57B 6% 55.33 tr / 49.95B 18% Profit (in KRW / USD) 9.38 tr / 8.46B 9.05 tr / 8.17B 3.6% 6.45 tr / 5.82B 45%

The numbers might be a bit skewed due to the comparison with Q1 2020 when the coronavirus swept the world and surprised both markets and consumers. Now Samsung is confident conditions will improve, and component business will be better in the second half of the year.

Speaking about the Mobile Communications Business, the report revealed sales of flagships and mass-market devices, as well as tablets, PCs, and wearables, maintained solid performance, backed by the 5G expansion across the globe.

However, revenue and profit will decrease in the next quarter, the one ending in June. Samsung stated it is capable of providing displays and memory chips, but due to the bottleneck in manufacturing SoC, sales will be down, affecting all the distributors involved.

Source
The choice between two non-invasive diagnostic tests is a common dilemma in patients who present with chest pain. Yale cardiologist Rohan Khera, MD, MS, and colleagues have developed ASSIST, a new digital decision-aiding tool.

By applying machine learning techniques to data from two large clinical trials, this new tool identifies which imaging test to pursue in patients who may have coronary artery disease or CAD, a condition caused by plaque buildup in the arterial wall.

The new tool, described in a study published April 21 in the European Heart Journal, focuses on the long-term outcome for a given patient.

"There are strengths and limitations for each of these diagnostic tests," said Khera, an assistant professor of cardiology at Yale School of Medicine. Patients may have calcium in their blood vessels or a more advanced stage of the disease than can be missed. "If you are able to establish the diagnosis correctly, you would be more likely to pursue optimal medical and procedural therapy, which may then influence the outcomes of patients."

Recent clinical trials have attempted to determine if one test is optimal. The PROMISE and SCOT-HEART clinical trials have suggested that anatomical imaging has similar outcomes to stress testing, but may improve long-term outcomes in certain patients.

"When patients present with chest pain you have two major testing strategies. Large clinical trials have been done without a conclusive answer, so we wanted to see if the trial data could be used to better understand whether a given patient would benefit from one testing strategy or the other," said Khera. Both strategies are currently used in clinical practice.

To create ASSIST, Khera and his team obtained data from 9,572 patients who were enrolled in the PROMISE trial through the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and created a novel strategy that embedded local data experiments within the larger clinical trial.

A unique aspect of our approach is that we leverage both arms of a clinical trial, overcoming the limitation of real-world data, where decisions made by clinicians can introduce bias into algorithms." Rohan Khera, MD, MS, Yale Cardiologist

The tool also proved effective in a distinct population of patients in the SCOT-HEART trial. Among 2,135 patients who underwent functional-first or anatomical-first testing, the authors observed a two-fold lower risk of adverse cardiac events when there was agreement between the test performed and the one recommended by ASSIST. Khera said he hopes this tool will provide further insight to clinicians while they make the choice between anatomical or functional testing in chest pain evaluation.

Functional testing, commonly known as a stress test, examines patients for CAD by detecting reduced blood flow to the heart. The second option, anatomical testing, or coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA), identifies blockages in the blood vessels. Using machine learning algorithms ASSIST provides a recommendation for each patient.

"While we used advanced methods to derive ASSIST, its application is practical for the clinical setting. It relies on routinely captured patient characteristics and can be used by clinicians with a simple online calculator or can be incorporated in the electronic health record," said Evangelos Oikonomou, MD, DPhil, a resident physician in Internal Medicine at Yale and the study's first author.

ASSIST is part of a broader enterprise concept called Evidence2Health. Khera will present this new concept at the Yale Innovation Summit on May 19. Hosted by Yale Office of Cooperate Research, the Yale Innovation Summit is the largest gathering in Connecticut of venture capital and institutional investors from around the country.
Workers install rooftop solar panels on the Mid County Community Organization building in Adair County. The panels were installed as part of the Cherokee Nations Housing, Jobs and Sustainable Communities Act.
Premier Brian Pallister says images of needles going into arms shown repeatedly on TV may be contributing to vaccine hesitancy in Manitoba.

Premier Brian Pallister says images of needles going into arms shown repeatedly on TV may be contributing to vaccine hesitancy in Manitoba.

Asked Thursday why he thinks reported inoculation rates are low in parts of southeastern Manitoba, the premier said the provincial government is promoting the need for people to get vaccinated.

"Thats why weve communicated though advertising, through written materials" how important that is, Pallister said during a news conference.

However, he added, one thing that might combat vaccine hesitancy would be for media to stop broadcasting shots of people getting shots.

John Woods / Canadian Press files Video and still images of the moment the needle, wielded by chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin, plunged into the Premier Brian Pallister's left arm at the beginning of April were among the day's top local news.

"Ill be blunt. Basically, every night now when I have the opportunity to watch a TV broadcast, I see a needle going into somebodys arm. If youd like to stop scaring people, stop showing the needle going into everybodys arm and the blood coming out. It doesnt really help," Pallister said.

"Maybe if we could just talk about the importance of vaccines rather than showing the needle going into somebodys arm, we might do a little better on convincing some people to get the vaccine."

On April 8, the premier got his first shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine during a media event at the downtown Winnipeg convention centre. Video and still images of the moment the needle, wielded by chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin, plunged into the premier's left arm were among the day's top local news.

NDP leader Wab Kinew recieves a COVID-19 vaccination from Dr. Marcia Anderson, public health lead, Manitoba First Nation Pandemic Response Coordination Team, at Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre on April 29. (Supplied)

On Thursday, NDP Leader Wab Kinew disagreed with Pallister's stance, saying people need to see graphic images of the the vaccine being administered.

"I think it's important that we show the actual needle going into the arm to combat conspiracy theories that are out there," Kinew said in a scrum with reporters.

"One of the ones that I've seen circulating is that when you see politicians or celebrities or influencers getting the shot and you don't actually see the needle going in, then it's a conspiracy  they're not actually getting it," said Kinew.

"At this point, (we should do) anything we can do to counter misinformation."

John Woods / The Canadian Press Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba chief public health officer, receives the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine from Dr. Joss Reimer, medical lead on the Manitoba Vaccine Implementation Task Force on March 19.

Kinew received a COVID-19 vaccine dose Thursday, and invited media to attend.

"I have a lot of trust in media types who've been programming television news for many years over their entire careers," said Kinew, a former broadcast journalist. "I think they'll get it right."

The NDP leader said he felt "elated" after receiving his first COVID-19 vaccine dose.

"For me, it made it seem as though the end of the pandemic is a little bit closer," he said. "This is how it ends  this is how we end it  by getting the vaccine."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders

Legislature reporter After 20 years of reporting on the growing diversity of people calling Manitoba home, Carol moved to the legislature bureau in early 2020. Read full biography
The Defense Ministry on Wednesday delivered building materials and a new power generator to the U.S. base where a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery is stationed in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province.

The single access road to the former golf course has effectively been blocked by protesters since the THAAD battery was stationed there in April 2017, and soldiers still live in primitive conditions in the former club house and shipping containers, while basic supplies have to be airlifted in.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called their circumstance "unacceptable" when he met with Defense Minister Suh Wook in March.
Negotiations are still ongoing over granting full diplomatic status to the European Unions ambassador to the UK, Downing Street said.

Joao Vale de Almeida took up his post as Brussels first ambassador to London last spring after Britains exit from the bloc was ratified, but he was denied formal recognition while cross-Channel trade negotiations were under way.

Reports have suggested that Mr Vale de Almeida, however, was on the verge of having his status upgraded following the European Parliaments decision to ratify the post-Brexit trade terms this week.

The deal, thrashed out by Boris Johnsons Government and the EU over months of difficult negotiations, was approved by MEPs by 660 votes to five, with 32 abstentions.

There are a few remaining formalities that need to be completed before the deal struck by the Prime Minister and the EU on Christmas Eve last year is finally ratified.

Facing questions on the ambassadors status on Thursday, the Prime Ministers official spokesman said: Ive seen the reports on that.

Negotiations on this issue are ongoing, so Im not going to pre-empt that.

We are engaging with the EU on the long-term arrangements for the delegation.

It is important to say that, regardless of the agreement reached, the EU, its delegation staff, will continue to receive the privileges and immunities necessary to enable them to carry out their work in the UK effectively.

The European Parliament ratified the post-Brexit trade deal this week (Yui Mok/PA)

Mr Vale de Almeida was asked about the decision not to afford him the same status as national ambassadors during an event with the Institute for Government on Wednesday.

The Portuguese diplomat said that discussions were still taking place and that he was confident that we will find a solution that is in line with international practice.

He added: It is about recognition. It is about respect. It is about the formalities of diplomatic life and that is an important aspect.

I am very hopeful that we can soon come to an understanding on how to organise this diplomatic side of our relationship.

Once that is the case, we will be in a better position to contribute to a constructive relationship.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has appointed an Alabama lawyer to participate in an investigation into former President Donald Trumps conduct following the 2020 election.

Jack Sharman, a partner with Birminghams Lightfoot, Franklin & White, was appointed by Kemps executive order Wednesday. He will serve as special counsel to the Georgia Secretary of States office in an investigation by the Fulton County District Attorney.

The investigation is currently focused on a call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In a Jan. 2 telephone conversation, Trump 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 during the conversation, which was recorded. Because we won the state.

Joining Sharman on the team for this matter are Lightfoot partner Brandon Essig, and associates Jay Sewell and Amaobi Enyinnia.

Sharman has served as special counsel in several government investigations.

Sharman and fellow Lightfoot attorney Liz Huntley assisted the Huntsville Police Citizens Advisory Council in its report on the law enforcement response to protests in Huntsville last summer, which was issued April 22.

Sharman also served as special counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the Alabama House of Representatives during the impeachment investigation of former Gov. Robert Bentley, and was special counsel to the House Financial Services Committee for the Whitewater investigation involving President Bill Clinton.
A higher ratio of green spaces at the county level is associated with a lower racial disparity in coronavirus infection rates, according to a new study. It is the first study to report the significant relationship between the supply of green spaces and reduced disparity in infectious disease rates.

The research team included William Sullivan, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was led by Bin Jiang, a landscape architecture professor at The University of Hong Kong who received his Ph.D. at Illinois, and Yi Lu, an architecture professor at City University of Hong Kong. They reported their findings in the journal Environment International.

Previous studies by Sullivan, Jiang and Lu have shown that green spaces have positive effects on health. Access to green spaces is associated with improved cognitive performance, reduced mental fatigue and stress, reduced impulsiveness and aggressiveness, increased sense of safety, reduced crime rate, increased physical activity and increased social cohesion.

Prior studies also provide strong evidence that green spaces may mitigate racial disparities in health outcomes. However, none have looked at the effect on disparities in infectious diseases. Most studies examining the racial disparity in coronavirus infections have focused on its association with socio-economic status or pre-existing chronic disease factors.

For this study, the researchers identified 135 of the most urbanized counties in the U.S., with a total population of 132,350,027, representing 40.3% of the U.S. population. They collected infection data from county health departments from late January to July 10, 2020, and used it to calculate the infection rates for Black and white residents of the counties, while controlling for differences in income, pre-existing chronic diseases and urban density.

The data showed that the average infection rate for Black residents was more than twice that of white residents - 497 per 100,000 people for white individuals versus 988 per 100,000 people for Black individuals.

The researchers compared the infection rates of each population within each county, rather than across all the counties studied. The county-level comparison Is critical because it can minimize the bias caused by differences of socioeconomic, transportation, climate and policy conditions among counties, they said.

Sullivan, Jiang and Lu said several factors could account for the findings. They proposed that a greater proportion of green spaces in a county makes it more likely that Black and white individuals have more equal access to the green spaces and the accompanying health benefits.

In many, many counties, Black folks have less access to green space than white folks do. In counties with more green space, that disparity may be less, and it may help account for some of the positive benefits we're seeing," William Sullivan, Landscape Architecture Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The coronavirus is spread through aerosol particles, and the spread is heightened in indoor settings without adequate ventilation. Having access to green spaces attracts people outdoors, where air movement and the ease of social distancing can reduce the spread of the virus.

More access to green spaces is likely to promote physical activity, which may enhance the immune system. Green spaces enhance mental health and reduce stress, which also promotes immune system health. They strengthen social ties, which is an important predictor of health and well-being, the researchers said. Green spaces also may decrease infection risk by improving air quality and decreasing exposure to air pollutants in dense urban areas.

"We did not measure these things, but we know from previous research that all these things are tied to green spaces and have implications for health and well-being," Sullivan said.

Jiang described green space as preventive medicine, encouraging outdoor physical activity and social ties with neighbors that will boost the immune system and promote social trust and cooperation to reduce risk of infections.

While the study looked at infection rates in the U.S., "we also think the racial disparity issue is not just an American issue. It's an international issue," Jiang said.

The research shows the importance for local and regional governments to invest in the development of green spaces, Sullivan said.

"One of the things the pandemic has helped us understand is that the built environment has real implications for the spread of disease and for our health. The design of landscape in cities, in neighborhoods, in communities also has really important ways it can contribute to or detract from health and well-being," he said. "There is a lot of competition for investment of public dollars. Lots of times, investments in parks and green spaces are prioritized lower. People think it makes a place look pretty and it's a place to go for walks. What we're finding is these kinds of investments have implications for health and well-being."
Syracuse, N.Y.  Last year, syracuse.com reported that the Syracuse Police Department had paid officers to stay at home during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, officers were paid overtime to fill shifts.

Monday, Auditor Nader Maroun released an audit criticizing Mayor Ben Walsh and police Chief Kenton Buckner for the policy, as well as for a lack of proper communication among officials.

Marouns report determined the mayor did not play a role in the decision to pay officers to stay at home, and said it was unclear whether the mayor was informed of the decision. The Common Council also was not informed.

The policy cost the city $293,423, Maroun found.

The audit made seven recommendations that mostly outlined the need for better methods of communicating and monitoring the impacts of new policies. He also recommended the city implement a new payroll and timekeeping system, something thats been in the works for about two years.

Buckner said Monday he agreed with some of the audit, but maintained that the early days of Covid were extremely challenging and unprecedented, and he was making decisions aimed at keeping officers safe.

Walsh acknowledged that the policy had shortcomings.

With all weve learned about Covid-19 in the past year, it is now clear this practice should have been handled differently, he said in a statement Tuesday.

There are four candidates running in primaries for the Democratic and Republican nominations to challenge Walsh for mayor in the fall. We reached out to all four to ask which recommendations from the audit they would implement and how they would respond to the audit if they were mayor.

Candidates were asked to limit their responses to 250 words. Below are their replies, edited for style.

Khalid Bey (D):

Auditor Marouns report reveals the frustrating truth that this administrations lack of transparency and accountability have tangible consequences burdening all our communities. The fact the auditor had to recommend a report to the Council suggests lack of understanding or purposeful violation of procedure from the administration. There are no circumstances where the chief can make decisions about changes in spending policy without approval from the mayor and Council.

The recommendations given by Auditor Maroun are practical steps that can be taken immediately to establish transparency and accountability. The mayor should enforce the implementation of adequate policy to ensure this type of error does not happen again. The mayor and Council should be made aware of any budgetary and policy changes so they can provide support or dissent on behalf of the people. To argue the chief is not required to inform the Council of any spending policy changes suggests a purposeful neglect of duty. The recommendations further demonstrate the need for more efficiency when spending taxpayer dollars, making an additional audit something to consider. Consulting with the Onondaga County Health Department should have been a requirement to ensure police officers were following Covid protocols.

Enforcing city laws, rules and policies is the responsibility of the mayors office. As mayor, if a decision was made that resulted in a $293,000 injury to the taxpayer absent my approval, a legal investigation would ensue with serious disciplinary actions. A top-down approach to management is the only effective way to operate our city.

Michael Greene (D):

Syracuses chief of police made a unilateral policy decision that cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars during a financial crisis. If I were mayor today, I would be having a frank conversation that this breach of trust is unacceptable. The mayor is supposed to be the ultimate decision maker yet it clearly seems that is not the case.

All seven recommendations from the audit are common sense policies that should be implemented. Its misleading to call ourselves a smart city when the police department tracks its overtime on pieces of paper. I would give the police department 48 hours to issue a timeline and strategy for implementation of these policies, then I would hold the department to their timeline.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. It shares a root cause with the botched rollout of the Right to Know Law and the delayed deployment of body cameras: a lack of civilian oversight. The police department sets its own policies, and city hall finds out about them in the newspaper. When Im mayor, I will hire a civilian Commissioner of Public Safety who will oversee the police department and implement needed reforms. Until there is a sustained focus on policy change from the leadership of the department and city hall, nothing will change. My Commissioner of Public Safety will have the responsibility to push through this kind of common-sense reform.

This is the civilian oversight that Syracuse needs in order to change the culture of the police department.

Thomas Babilon (R):

It is disturbing that during one of the citys most violent years that this administration paid police officers to sit at home. It is equally disturbing that during a fiscal crisis this administration paid officers overtime to fill shifts that were empty because it paid other officers to sit at home. Most disturbing of all is that Mayor Ben Walsh had absolutely no idea about this major police department policy or how it was being implemented. I fully agree with Auditor Marouns common sense recommendations, and it is time to bring common sense back to city hall.

Janet Burman (R):

Every week brings new revelations as to how Syracuse is governed by reaction, instead of leadership, especially when it comes to public safety. This week we saw the city auditors report on the police departments procedures during the early months of the Covid crisis. I agree with all of the recommendations made in this report, but I am appalled that these were needed. Furthermore, I find that one of the most important recommendations has been left out.

In the aftermath of 9/11, government leaders realized the importance of developing crisis response plans. I oversaw the development of plans in my agency for responses to a wide range of scenarios, including an accident at 9 Mile nuclear plant, weather-caused disaster, work-place shooting, and a flu pandemic. The Syracuse Police Departments operations manual section on emergency mobilization, excerpted beginning on page 55 of the auditors report, does not include procedures for response to a pandemic.

Had such a plan existed, six recommendations in the auditors report would not have been necessary. All of the policies and procedures would have been documented in the plan. The seventh recommendation should not have been necessary. The scheduling and payroll systems should have already been replaced.

While Ben Walsh is mayor, we will continue to see shortcomings in the management of the police department, and citizens of Syracuse will not feel safe.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Its going to be a year of big spending for Santa Fe, after city councilors approved the fiscal year 2022 budget late Wednesday night.

The councils unanimous approval came after hours of debate, both Wednesday night and during a series of budget hearings this month, during which city officials explained plans to increase spending in several areas.

That includes an allotted $347.3 million total for expenditures across all funds, an increase of 11% compared with the previous fiscal year, with increased investments across several departments.

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Councilor Roman Abeyta, who heads the Finance Committee, said the pandemic presented challenges for creating a budget, such as conducting meetings online, but that he was happy with the final product.

Ive never had to do it under these circumstances, Abeyta said, later applauding city staff for putting it together. Its realistic, its optimistic.

City officials said the budget seeks to undo much of the austerity implemented last year in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which tanked revenues as Santa Fes hospitality industry suddenly came to a halt.

Part of that is unfreezing 58 city positions, pay raises for some employees and department heads, and the city covering health care premiums for employees.

While the budget reflects a sense of optimism in the citys finances, some councilors expressed plenty of concerns.

Union officials with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3999, which represents about half of the citys workforce, complained their workers would not receive an across-the-board raise like other employees.

Union employees, rather, will receive a pool of money and negotiate with the city on where and how those funds are spent. The city maintains the sum is equivalent to a 4% raise.

Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler addressed multiple concerns during Wednesday nights meeting and criticized the city for making it seem as though union employees were receiving an across-the-board raise.

If we meant something else, we should have said something else, Vigil Coppler said.

City Manager Jarel LaPan Hill said the citys messaging was consistent, but that she can understand why there was confusion.

Councilor Michael Garcia said the budget relies too heavily on cash reserves  around $10 million across all funds  and that it fails to account for a potential virus spike that could damage the local economy.

I do believe that were being fiscally irresponsible in the sense of dipping into our reserves the way we are, Garcia said. If it wasnt for entities like the federal government or state government, we would still be climbing out of the hole.

He also criticized the budget for not anticipating a settlement with AFSCME over violations made while furloughing employees at the onset of the pandemic.

Some of the most discussed aspects of the budget, such as the city covering increases in health premiums, are being paid for out of cash reserves, Senior Budget Officer Andy Hopkins said. He added, though, that an emergency like the pandemic warrants governments to utilize reserves when necessary.

The budget does not include the $15 million the city expects to receive from the American Rescue Plan; officials have said adjustments will be made once the city receives the funds.
A family walks by a COVID-19 safety sign at Disneyland California Adventure themepark in Anaheim, Calif., on Feb. 1, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Anaheim Commissioner Removed After Refusing to Partner With Chinese City

Anaheim city council stripped a commissioner of his title for comments he made after refusing to partner with a Chinese city.

Council unanimously voted to remove Larry Larsens commissioner status from the sister cities commission during an April 27 city council meeting.

Theyre going to destroy me and my reputation, kick me off sister citieswhich you voted to put me onbecause I said, China virus, Larsen told the council.

The issue began when the sister city commission, which works to develop Anaheims cultural and economic relationships with international cities, considered partnering with Pudong, China, on Feb. 22.

Pudong is a district within Shanghai where the Shanghai Disney Resort is located. Anaheim and Pudong have a friendly city relationship, but are not full-fledged sister cities.

Larsen said he was shocked by the commissions consideration of a Chinese city, given how the CCP had lied for weeks about having the virus before informing the World Health Organization.

I am stunned that anybody in Anaheim would consider such a thing, Larsen said.

During the Feb. 22 meeting, commissioner Dara Maleki said: I dont know who our bigger enemy isforeign or the domestic. Weve got a pandemic; weve got a serious virus.

Larsen said: Its called the China virus. The city of Anaheim is in the tank, and were going to invite them into our house?

Chair Taline Cole interjected: Larry, Im going to stop you there. This isnt the place to have political conversations.

Larsen fired back: Im blown away that this city has taken that invite from China. And now were going to smack happy with these people? Im absolutely stunned.

Maleki said the commission chooses sister cities based upon similar industries, such as the Disney Resort.

However, Pudong has not made contact with Anaheim for about six years because of Mayor [Tom] Tait and his relationship with the Dalai Lama, Larsen said.

The minute Mayor Tait was out of office, here comes Pudong knocking on the door.

The city was notified of its dormant status with Pudong after a letter was sent to the commission encouraging a sister city relationship.

Community Services Superintendent Kimberly Kelemen said when it came to Pudong, the city of Anaheim was under the impression that everything had been completed. Pudong later circled back to say it had another consideration process, she said.

During the sister city commissions March meeting, the Pudong item was agendized for discussion.

Larsen recommended that Anaheim send a letter to Pudong, informing a termination of the two cities relations because of the CCP virus pandemics impact on the Anaheim community.

Our kids have been out of school for a year; the people are unemployed, the city for all intents and purposes is teetering on bankruptcyand we want to court these people? Larsen said. It makes no sense to me at all. I cant believe that anybody would even want to do that.

Cole said: I dont think that people of Pudong, China, that live there every day, the citizens of that city, did anything to the city of Anaheim. Whether you feel you agree with their government or not, I think thats a different issue.

Larsen said that every industry within China is tied to the CCP.

Taline, let me add something, he said. First of all, you have to be awful naive not to understand that not one thing is said or done in the country of China that isnt government.

Commissioner Brian Stanley agreed with Larsen, saying the CCP, being communist, doesnt fit with Anaheim or the U.S.

Larsen said the CCP owes the city of Anaheim a payment for the damages it brought to schools, children, and the economy.

Well, if Pudong, out of a gesture of friendliness or kindness or whatever word you want to use, wants to write a check for $150 million to Anaheim to reimburse us for the damage thats been done, I would probably look kindly on that, Larsen said.

The commission decided to take no action and leave the two cities in a friendly city relationship, rather than sister cities.

Larsens Removal

Councilman Jordan Brandman brought up removing Larson from his role during an April 13 council meeting, due to his comments during the sister cities commission meetings.

Brandman refused to refer to the commissioner by his name because that person is not worth the dignity of having their name announced.

During the April 27 city council meeting, Brandman agendized the removal of Larson.

I believe that what was said at the February and March meeting by the commissioner in question does not represent what Anaheim stands for, Brandman said during the meeting.

He was given the opportunity to resign. He chose not to do so. It is incumbent upon us as an example, to do what we think, within the commission.

Larsen addressed the council during the April 27 meeting; Brandman didnt attend the public comments and arrived late to the city council meeting.

Jordan Brandman has accused me of the most vile thing a person can be accused of, and thats being a racist, Larsen said.

He raked me through the mud in trying to destroy my stellar reputation that Ive worked my entire life in this city to develop. And then he doesnt have the nerve to show up.

Councilman Trevor ONeil was upset with Larsens remarks during the council meeting.

Tonight, rather than taking his comment time to tout his accomplishments, I wish that Mr. Larson would have addressed some of the things that he actually said during the sister city commission meetings, ONeil said.

I would have liked to have heard an apology for his insensitive remarks.

The council voted unanimously to remove Larsen from his position as commissioner.

Anaheim is a diverse and global city and we are proud of that, Mayor Harry Sidhu told The Epoch Times via email.

The former commissioners comments were his own and do not speak for or reflect the city of Anaheim.

Councilman Avelino Valencia said he didnt expect Larsen to rescind his comments but was nevertheless unhappy with his remarks during public comment.

At last nights council meeting, Mr. Larsen had an opportunity to make things right, but instead opted to further reiterate his statements during public comment, Valencia told The Epoch Times via email.

While I believe that we all deserve an opportunity to learn and grow from our mistakes, it should not be at the expense of our community.
Syrian refugee health volunteer Sameeh is pictured outside a vaccination centre in Jordan's Za'atari refugee camp.  UNHCR/Shawkat Alharfosh

Sameeh has lived in Jordans bustling Zaatari refugee camp since 2013, when he fled his home in Daraa  just an hours drive north across the border  to escape Syrias 10-year conflict.

The camp that today hosts 80,000 Syrian refugees is where he met and married his wife, and two years ago welcomed their first child. It was his connection to the camp and sense of community that first led Sameeh, 32, to become a health volunteer for Save the Children, one of UNHCRs, the UN Refugee Agencys, health partners in Zaatari.

When he first started volunteering, he would visit families in his neighbourhood, telling them how to access health services and explaining the benefits of vaccinating their children against common diseases. But following the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, the significance of the role  and his commitment to it  increased.

Before COVID-19, my role as a community health volunteer in Zaatari Camp was just like any other normal job, Sameeh explained. But now my job means something. You feel there is an urgency. Getting the COVID-19 vaccine could be a matter of life or death.

"You feel there is an urgency."

Jordan, which is currently home to more than 750,000 registered refugees including 665,000 from neighbouring Syria, was one of the first countries in the world to include refugees in its national COVID-19 vaccination programme and start innoculating them against the virus.

Priority for the jab is determined by the Ministry of Health, based on risk factors including age, chronic diseases and professions such as health workers. Since the start of the campaign in mid-January, almost 5,000 Syrian refugees living in the two main camps at Zaatari and Azraq have received the vaccine, with a further 13,000 residents registered on the governments online platform and waiting for an appointment.

These figures are broadly in line with wider national trends, and the gradual increase in vaccination rates is a positive step towards fighting the virus. At the same time, further awareness campaigns are targeting refugees in urban areas to encourage uptake, with a focus on fighting misinformation on social media about potential side effects.

Sameeh, 32, helps a fellow refugee in the camp register to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.  UNHCR/Shawkat Alharfosh

Amina, 85, sits on the bed with her son Abdo at the home they share in Touline, Lebanon.  UNHCR/Houssam Hariri

Amina holding her son Abdo's hand before going to her vaccination appointment.  UNHCR/Houssam Hariri

Sameeh says that much of his work has involved challenging false information circulating on social networks.

People here are in general scared about the vaccine. There are a lot of rumors and worries about side effects. My job is to provide them with the correct information, he said. I would say that once I speak to people, the majority end up registering for the vaccine. Having a conversation is important.

The efforts of Sameeh and his fellow volunteers reflect the goal of this years World Immunization Week, running from 24-30 April, which aims to promote trust in vaccines and maintain or increase their acceptance under the motto Vaccines bring us closer.

As more and more people get vaccinated, Sameeh takes pride in the fact that his work is having a positive effect. He also senses that some of the fear that gripped the camp during the earlier phase of the pandemic is starting to lift.

We just want normal life back. As more people have received the vaccine things have got better. Especially now a lot of the elderly in the camp have been vaccinated, he said. We are very lucky that we can receive the vaccine here in Zaatari Camp. Refugees are treated like any other people.

In Lebanon, similar initiatives were undertaken to encourage the 7,000 refugees in the country aged 75 years and above to sign up for the vaccine. They were among the first to be eligible for vaccination under the national roll-out plan drawn up by the country's Ministry of Public Health, which covers all communities in Lebanon including refugees..

Teams of refugee volunteers have visited the homes of older refugees to talk to them about the benefits of inoculation and to help them register on the governments website. UNHCRs call center in the country has supplemented the outreach efforts, ensuring that all refugees aged 75 and over have been contacted about the vaccine.

Among them was Iraqi refugee Boulos, 75, who received a visit from one of UNHCRs refugee volunteers who encouraged him to get the vaccine and helped him fill out the online form.

I was hesitating, but then we had deaths [from the virus] near us, three of them, Boulos said. So I got encouraged and I thought getting vaccinated is better. Based on all that, I decided to get the shot.

As well as protecting refugees from the virus itself, the vaccine has also offered a route out of isolation for many older refugees. Syrian refugee Amina, 85, had been living alone with her son Abdo since the start of the pandemic, unable to see her other nine children and many grandchildren.

Abdo was contacted on behalf of his mother, who is hearing impaired, by an outreach volunteer, who encouraged him to convince her to get the vaccine. After getting her shots, she is once again surrounded by her extended family.

For Amina, the vaccine is not just about protecting her health, said Dalal Harb, UNHCR Communication Officer for Lebanon. The vaccine is an opportunity for her to reunite safely again with her family who care for her.

Reporting by Lilly Carlisle in Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan, and Dalal Harb in Touline, Lebanon




An independent panel created to review the validity of an ongoing investigation into the Seoul prosecution chief on charges of abuse of power will convene on May 10, judiciary sources said Thursday.







Lee Sung-yoon, chief of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office, is being probed over allegations he exercised undue influence in 2019 to stop an inquiry into the alleged illegal exit ban imposed on a former senior official.







The Supreme Prosecutors Office last week accepted Lee's request for outside experts' review of the legality of the probe. He argued the case should be transferred to a new investigative agency in charge of public corruption.







Yang Chang-soo, who chairs the review committee, set the meeting for May 10, according to the sources.







The panel's 15 members have been selected from a pool of some 250 figures from academia, media, civic groups and other various sectors, they said.







The independent review system was introduced in 2018 to ensure the neutrality and fairness of cases that are of great public interest.







In March 2019, former Vice Justice Minister Kim Hak-ui was stopped at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, from leaving the country as prosecutors sought to reinvestigate allegations that he received sexual favors from a local constructor more than a decade ago.







A whistleblower has claimed the travel ban enforced by the justice ministry did not follow due procedures and that Lee, then head of the Supreme Prosecutors Office's anti-corruption team, abused his power to block an investigation into officials involved in the exit ban.







Lee has strongly denied the allegations and expressed concerns about "biased" media reports and "possibly targeted" investigation against him. (Yonhap)


Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert sought to distract attention from US president Joe Biden during his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday by producing a thermal space blanket in the middle of his speech.

Mr Biden was speaking 100 days after entering the White House, describing the opening months of his tenure as a moment of crisis and opportunity, declaring that America is rising anew and detailing his plans for reviving the economy following the coronavirus pandemic and for tackling the global climate emergency.

But the first-term Colorado representative demonstrated her lack of interest in the occasion and disagreement with the presidents remarks throughout, tweeting more than 30 disparaging comments over the course of the address and declining to stand or applaud.

What I want to hear in Bidens speech is how to solve the border crisis, she wrote in one post. What I will hear are plans to spend trillions of dollars and raise taxes. What I dont want to hear are disingenuous calls for unity from this authoritarian leader and his radical administration.

She later noisily produced the foil blanket and draped it across her lap, distracting political correspondents like Matt Fuller of The Daily Beast, who reported on it.

Ms Boeberts communications director Ben Stout later told Business Insider that she intended the gesture as a means of drawing attention to the influx of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border.

President Biden did not address or bring attention to the crisis at our southern border. So Rep Boebert did, he said.

Mr Biden actually did address the issue, calling on lawmakers to get at the root of the problem of why people are fleeing to our southern border from Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Lets end our exhausting war over immigration, he said, calling on the Senate to consider legislation passed by the House of Representatives in March granting legal status to Dreamers who arrived in the US illegally as children and to agricultural labourers and those with Temporary Protected Status.

If Congress wont pass my plan - lets at least pass what we agree on. Congress needs to pass legislation this year to finally secure protection for the Dreamers - the young people who have only known America as their home, Mr Biden said.

Boebert sits texting under her foil space blanket (Getty)

Congresswoman Boebert subsequently issued a statement calling the president a left-wing extremist and declaring: My reaction to the speech can be summed up in four words: I miss President Trump.

Fortunately for her, Mr Trump duly gave a phone interview to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in which he accused the president of receiving undue credit for the US coronavirus vaccine rollout and of destroying our country with his policy on immigration, warning without evidence that murderers are flooding in.

Mr Trumps own administration was notorious for its draconian zero tolerance policies at the border, which included caging children and forcibly separating families as a deterrent.

Lauren Boebert was not the only Republican to act up during Wednesdays speech, with Texas senator Ted Cruz appearing to doze off behind his face mask.
Eye contact plays a fundamental role in human communication and relationships. When we look into each other's eyes, we show that we are paying attention to each other. However, we do not only look at each other but also at our four-legged companions. According to new research by Hungarian ethologists, at least four independent traits affect dogs' ability to establish eye contact with humans. Short-headed, cooperative, young, and playful dogs are the most likely to look into the human eye.

Dogs adapted uniquely well to live with humans, and communication plays a vital role in this. They are sensitive to the direction of the human's gaze, which helps them decide whether the message is directed to them. Forming eye contact with the owner raises oxytocin levels in both parties, which plays a role in developing social bonding. However, individual dogs are not equally prone to make eye contact; the anatomy of the eye, the original function of the breed, i.e., the task they were bred for, age and personality might also affect the tendency to form eye contact.

"One hundred and thirty family dogs were examined at the Department of Ethology, Eotvos Lorand University. We measured the length and width of their heads because this is related to their vision." - said Zsofia Bognar, Ph.D. student, first author of the study, published in Scientific Reports. "The boxer, bulldog, pug, and snub-nosed dogs, in general, have a more pronounced area centralis in the retina, so they can better respond to stimuli in the central field, which may make it easier for them to form eye contact with humans."

In contrast, long-nosed dogs, such as greyhounds, see a wide panoramic image because the nerve cells that process the visual information distribute more evenly in their retina. Therefore, if they have to focus on the center of their visual field, they may be distracted by visual stimuli from the periphery more easily.

In the behavior test, the experimenter first initiated play with the dog. In another test, she measured how quickly and how many times the dog formed eye contact with her within five minutes. "The experimenter did not speak and remained motionless until the dog looked at her. Every time the dog looked at her, she rewarded this with a treat. Meanwhile, the owner sat on a chair, silent. We measured how much time elapsed after eating the treat until the next eye contact." - presented the test Dr. Dora Szabo, ethologist. See the video summary of the research here.

It turned out that the shorter the dog's nose, the faster it made eye contact with the experimenter. "It is likely, that they see the human face more sharply because of their special retina, but it is also possible that their owners gaze at them more often as their facial features resemble a small child, a powerful cue for humans. Because of this, dogs with shorter noses may be more experienced in making eye contact." - explained Zsofia Bognar.

The researchers also examined whether the original role of the breeds still influenced eye contact forming. Shepherd dogs, for example, are visually cooperative who follow the direction of the owner's hand (stick) during their work with the stock. In contrast, visually non-cooperative sled dogs running in front of the musher can only rely on vocal cues, while dachshunds also cannot see their owner in the underground life-and-death struggle. Long- and short-headed dogs evenly distributed across the different breed groups.

As expected, dogs bred for visually guided work made eye contact faster than those driven by voice or selected for independent work. Surprisingly, the mixed breeds performed similarly well, even though 70% were adopted from a shelter. Perhaps their willingness to make eye contact even helped them to get adopted in the first place.

The research was part of the European Research Council funded Senior Family Dog Project, aimed at aging research. The oldest dog participant was 15 years old.

"We assumed that aging dogs would find it more difficult to control their attention and would be slower to switch from eating to looking at the face of the experimenter. That's what happened. Since we pre-screened our participants for potential visual and auditory impairments, the slower establishment of eye contact seems to be a natural consequence of aging." - says Dr. Eniko Kubinyi, the leader of the project.

This research emphasizes the fact that many factors affect the way dogs and humans communicate. It also sheds new light on our knowledge of short-nosed dogs. Many researchers, including Konrad Lorenz, suggested that these dogs were selected for their baby-like facial appearance. However, it is also plausible that people preferred individuals that were more attentive to them and looked at them for a longer duration, facilitating communication.

###
(Getty Images)

Republican representative Lauren Boebert, notable for her fiercely anti-gun control stance, was not happy as Joe Biden spoke about a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

The Colorado congresswoman, one of just 200 lawmakers able to attend the presidents Joint Address to Congress, was seen shaking her head.

NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt was one of a number of people to point out that Ms Boebert also did not clap or stand up when Mr Biden urged Americans to get vaccinated.

Most of Ms Boeberts Republican colleagues stood and applauded.

Ms Hunt tweeted that the lawmaker appeared to be texting, noting shortly afterward that she was still typing on her phone.

With President Biden still speaking, Ms Boebert replied on Twitter to correct her: *Tweeting.

On her official Twitter account, Ms Boebert did indeed live-tweet her reaction to the speech: What I want to hear in Bidens speech is how to solve the border crisis, she wrote. What I will hear are plans to spend trillions of dollars and raise taxes.

She added: What I dont want to hear are disingenuous calls for unity from this authoritarian leader and his radical administration.

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At one point she tweeted: Is it me or is Biden talking about a lot of problems that were created in his nearly 50 years in office.

On gun control, she wrote: Will Joe Biden start his gun control crusade by investigating Hunter?

Meanwhile, on her personal Twitter account, Ms Boebert posted: You just heard Joe Biden ramble on for an hour about how government is the solution to everything. It is not.

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She followed that by asking for donations to her campaign.

Ms Boebert later wrote: We, the people, have had enough of big government.

Read More

Harris and Pelosi make history at Bidens joint address to Congress as president says its about time

Tim Scott insists US is not racist in response to Biden speech  after revealing racist abuse he has faced

Biden speech - live: President outlines plans for America in address as Trump and allies to appear on Fox
Blinken meets Israeli spy chief as Iran talks continue View Photo

WASHINGTON (AP)  Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden administration national security aides met Thursday with the chief of Israels Mossad spy agency for talks that focused primarily on Iran, according to officials familiar with the meeting.

The two-hour meeting was the second this week in Washington involving senior officials from the two countries and underscored Israels unease with ongoing indirect nuclear negotiations between Iran and the United States in Vienna and Iran more broadly, the officials said. Although other issues were discussed, Israel used Thursdays meeting to express strong concerns about Iran, one of the officials said. The officials were not authorized to discuss the private diplomatic talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Blinken attended Thursdays meeting along with his newly confirmed deputy, Wendy Sherman, President Joe Bidens national security adviser Jake Sullivan and two other senior officials, Brett McGurk from the National Security Council and Derek Chollet from the State Department. Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Gilad Erdan represented Israel.

The State Department declined to comment on the meeting or even to confirm that it had happened, but said the Biden administration is committed to coordination and transparency with Israel in its nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

On Tuesday, Sullivan, McGurk, Chollet and U.S. special envoy for Iran Rob Malley met with Erdan and Israeli national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat to discuss Iran and other regional matters. Malley departed Washington for Vienna shortly after those talks.

A White House readout of that meeting said the U.S. had updated Israel on the talks in Vienna and emphasized strong U.S. interest in consulting closely with Israel on the nuclear issue going forward.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday that the Vienna consultations had made some progress, but the sides are not on the cusp of any breakthrough.

The Biden administration has said it is willing to lift certain sanctions on Iran if Iran returns to compliance with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018. Under the accord, Iran got billions of dollars in sanctions relief in return for curbing its nuclear program. Much of that relief evaporated when Trump pulled out of the deal and re-imposed tough new sanctions on Iran.

A potential U.S. return to the deal along with the sanctions relief it would entail has unsettled both Israel and its Arab neighbors, which fear increasing Iranian assertiveness in the region. Price said an inter-agency team of senior officials would travel to Gulf Arab countries in the coming days to address those concerns. He declined to offer details.

By MATTHEW LEE

AP Diplomatic Writer
Supreme Court weighs if California can force nonprofits to disclose private donor information NAACP, conservative groups call for regulation to be stuck down

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Oral arguments were held before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday on whether Americans will remain free to give to nonprofit organizations privately and without the fear that nonprofits will be forced to disclose private donor information.

The decision will determine if charities in California will be forced to disclose the names of donors to state regulators, a regulation opposed by both liberal and conservative groups.

Since March 2012, Californias attorney general has harassed Thomas More Law Center, ordering the center to release confidential donor information, such as the names and addresses of major donors.

California is one of four states that require nonprofits to submit a copy of their Schedule B tax form, which provides names and addresses of those who donated more than $5,000 to their causes. Supporters of such measures contend that striking them down could lead to a proliferation of dark money in American politics.

According to the Thomas More Law Center, a Michigan-based conservative legal nonprofit that defends religious freedom, family values and sanctity of life, forcing organizations to reveal their donors threatens an individuals freedom of association.

Around 5% of Thomas Mores donors are California residents, and the center has operated cohesively with Californias attorney general for years until the attorney general began to demand the center turn over confidential donor information.

California demanded the names and addresses of the centers major donors, even though a trial showed the California Attorney Generals Office had no compelling need for confidential donor information and is known for leaking information.

John Bursch, senior counsel and vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, represented Thomas More Law Center before the Supreme Court on Monday.

Every American should be free to peacefully support causes they believe in without fear of harassment or intimidation, Bursch said in a statement. Public advocacy is for everyone, not just those able to weather abuse. Forced donor disclosure is a threat to everyone and discourages both charitable giving and participation in the marketplace of ideas.

The state, however, has argued that regulation to disclose donor information is necessary to enforce charitable fraud laws.

But Bursch stated in a piece published by The Hill that Californias Attorney Generals Office has a history of leaking confidential documents and has published private data online in the past, leaving confidential data easily exposed and vulnerable to internet hackers.

Given Californias careless handling of private information, its demand for donor data threatens to decrease charitable giving, particularly to charities that work on sensitive issues, Bursch wrote.

Thats why organizations  have filed briefs that agree with my employer [Alliance Defending Freedom]s merits brief on behalf of the Law Center, urging the court to strike down Californias dangerous regulation.

Twenty-two states and several organizations have submitted over 40 friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court to support ADFs argument that Americans should remain free to support nonprofit organizations and causes without fear, harassment or threats.

As sister states with virtually indistinguishable law-enforcement and anti-fraud interests, our collective experience is uniform and unequivocal: we dont need this sort of compelled collection of donor information for legitimate law enforcement purposes, and its stockpiling is unlikely to lead to any outcome other than mischief and chilling of speech, the brief filed by 22 states stated.

Those who submitted briefs in favor of ADFs position include groups across the ideological spectrum who all share the concern that the forced disclosure of private donors could threaten free speech.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute and ChinaAid all filed friend-of-the-court briefs to support the ADF-represented case for Thomas Moore Law Center.

An ADF statement said Supreme Court justices were sympathetic to the law centers and Americans for Prosperity Foundations positions presented in oral arguments.

The justices carefully listened to the arguments, and we hope the court will decide in favor of the First Amendments promise of the freedom to associate with like-minded groups, which includes the right to citizen privacy, Bursch said.

Justice Clarence Thomas cited how the government used confidential census data to locate Japanese citizens during World War II for internment. He expressed concern that in todays culture, the disclosure of confidential information could be used to loosely label people as racist or white supremacist based on their once-private giving information.

Bursch also expressed concern that the forced disclosure of nonprofit donors could lead to cancel culture.

Potential givers to charities have good reason to fear being doxed  that is, having their public information spread for malicious purposes, Bursch said. Too many are quick to ostracize, lambast, and threaten people who they disagree with politically or morally. This tendency  often described as cancel culture  shouldnt be codified or aided by the force of law.

Justice Neil Gorsuch showed concern that ruling for California could lead to the government mandating the disclosure of even more personal information from citizens, such as Christmas card lists or dating history.

Justice Stephen Breyer raised a question about how a ruling against California might impact campaign finance rules.

If you win in this case, it will have been because the interest of the donors in maintaining privacy of their giving to a charity outweighs the interest of the state in having a law on the books that even if it never is actually enforced frightens people into behaving properly, Breyer argued.

But if we hold that, can we distinguish campaign finance laws where the interest is even stronger in people being able to give anonymously?

While the Trump administration filed a brief opposing the California policy last year, the federal governments position on the case has changed under the Biden administration, which is calling for the court to send the case back to a lower court.

Because the court of appeals analysis was incomplete, a remand is appropriate to allow the court to reassess the burden that Californias disclosure requirement places on the associational rights petitioners assert, a brief led by Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar states. The court could then determine whether the disclosure requirement satisfies exacting scrutiny as applied to petitioners, in light of the principles set forth above.
[April 29, 2021] FASTSIGNS International, Inc. Celebrates Small Business Month with Social Media Takeover

CARROLLTON, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In honor of Small Business Month, FASTSIGNS International, Inc. , franchisor of FASTSIGNS, the leading sign, graphics, and visual communications franchise, is hosting a social media takeover across their brand channels throughout the month of May. With a focus of businesses empowering and supporting each other to come back stronger than ever, posts will highlight the expansive capabilities that FASTSIGNS has by featuring comprehensive projects from several industries including education, healthcare, restaurants and retail, and property management. Last year revealed that the 30.7 million business owners in America can truly make a difference when they support and rally around other local businesses. By working together, small businesses kept communities safe, fed, entertained, engaged and moving forward. One aspect of the Small Business Month mission highlights companies who desire to witness the growth and success of other small businesses. Franchising provides a way for entrepreneurs to invest in themselves and open their own small business, using a proven model and access to unique expertise in the space. As businesses slowly come back, locally owned and operated FASTSIGNS centers have proudly supported and empowered fellow businesses in their communities every day across the country. Catherine Monson, CEO at Propelled Brands and FASTSIGNS International, Inc., and Chair of the International Franchise Association dedicates her time, energy and resources to herald small businesses as she has led not only her own network but other franchise organizations through the uncharted waters of 2020 and 2021. "At FASTSIGNS, we support Small Business Month, because the franchise world is made up of small business owners across the globe who are in business for themselves, but not by themselves," said Catherine Monson. "We recognize the value of each and every one of the business owners we represent--and the IFA represents--and the important role they play in the economic landscape of our country." To learn more about the Small Business Month at FASTSIGNS, visit www.fastsigns.com . About FASTSIGNS FASTSIGNS International, nc. is the leading sign and visual communications franchisor in North America, and is the worldwide franchisor of more than 750 independently owned and operated FASTSIGNS centers in 9 countries including the United States and Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Grand Cayman, the United Arab Emirates, Malta, the Dominican Republic and Australia (where centers operate as SIGNWAVE). FASTSIGNS locations provide comprehensive signage and graphic solutions to help companies of all sizes and across all industries attract more attention, communicate their message, promote their products, help visitors find their way and extend their branding across all of their customer touchpoints.



FASTSIGNS is consistently ranked as a top franchise opportunity. Recognized as an invaluable resource for potential franchisees, the Franchise 500 ranks FASTSIGNS as #44 overall  the only sign, graphics, and visual communications franchise to be recognized in the top 100  for its outstanding performance in areas including unit growth, financial strength and stability, and brand power. In 2021, FASTSIGNS was named one of Franchise Direct's Top 100 Global Franchises and Franchise Gator recognized FASTSIGNS as one of the Top 100 Franchises . In 2020, Entrepreneur magazine named FASTSIGNS a Top Growth Franchise and one of the Top Franchises for Veterans . Additionally, FASTSIGNS was ranked on Franchise Times' annual Top 200+ list and Franchise Business Review named FASTSIGNS one of its Top Franchises for Second Careers and Top Franchises for Veterans . In 2019, the brand was named to America's Best Franchises to Buy list by Forbes magazine. Franchise Business Review has also recognized FASTSIGNS as one of the "Best of the Best" for franchisee satisfaction for the last 10 years, as well as one of its Top 50 Franchises for Women and Top Service Franchises lists in 2019. FASTSIGNS has also received the Canadian Franchise Association Franchisees' Choice for 8 consecutive years. In 2021, Propelled Brands was formed, the corporate umbrella that includes FASTSIGNS, SIGNWAVE in Australia where FASTSIGNS centers operate under the SIGNWAVE brand, and NerdsToGo, an emerging IT services franchise brand acquired in September 2020. With a focus on business-to-business franchises and the people behind those businesses, Propelled Brands will help each franchise confidently navigate forward based on their unique position, momentum and purpose.

Learn more about sign and graphic solutions or find a location at fastsigns.com . Follow the brand on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/fastsigns , Twitter @FASTSIGNS or Facebook at facebook.com/FASTSIGNS . For information about the FASTSIGNS franchise opportunity, contact Mark Jameson (mark.jameson@fastsigns.com or call 214.346.5679). Contact:

Leah Edwards

FASTSIGNS Corporate Communications

214.346.5792

leah.edwards@fastsigns.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fastsigns-international-inc-celebrates-small-business-month-with-social-media-takeover-301280666.html SOURCE FASTSIGNS International, Inc.

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As stargazers across the world settled in to observe the rare Pink Supermoon on April 26 and 27, Qatar National Tourism Council (QNTC) marked the epic event with the announcement of its new and bespoke range of astro-tourism experiences.

Inspired by the starry skies of the Qatari desert, the astronomer themed vacations have been curated for visitors to enjoy when the borders re-open.

The unique 'Arabian Nights' packages, available to book through Gulf Adventures and redeemable until April 2022, offer unmissable activities such as a moon-lit camel safari and stargazing with an astronomer. Also included are BBQ dinner banquets by the campfire and a stay at the Regency Sealine Camp, where modern luxury meets authentic Arabian style, overlooking Khor al Adaid, also known as the Inland Sea which is a recognised UNESCO - where the sea meets the desert.

Several of the new itineraries also offer a tour of the Souq Waqif and a dinner at the spectacular Torch 360 restaurant, which offers panoramic views of the Doha skyline.

The exclusive new tours are a once in a lifetime experience, available to be enjoyed when Qatar re-open its borders until April 2022.

To invite travellers to enjoy the Arabian Nights packages, QNTC in partnership with local astro-photographer, Vinay Swaroop Balla, captured incredible photos of the moon rising above the country's most iconic locations, Torch Tower and Al Aamriya Desert.

Chief Operating Officer of Qatar National Tourism Council, Berthold Trenkel, said: "Qatar's desert is a perfect spot for astronomy enthusiasts to observe the dark and starry skies; the packages we've put together will provide unforgettable experiences that travel-lovers can look forward to when we welcome them back to the country. As a diverse and cosmopolitan country, this new offer is a dazzling addition to a multitude of activities tourists can enjoy in Qatar."

All packages will be in line with the Qatar Clean programme and measures will be in place to adhere to government guidelines. - TradeArabia News Service
Hunt did not deny creating a series of menacing-sounding posts, but told the jury that he never thought they would be taken seriously

Prosecutors said Hunt, who acted in his own defense faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing on June 22

A retired judge's son was convicted on federal charges of threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A jury on Wednesday found Brendan Hunt guilty after a weeklong trial in federal court in Brooklyn, rejecting his claims that it was harmless rhetoric.

It found that videos made by Hunt posed a real threat supporting the conviction, but decided that a Facebook post calling for a 'public execution' did not rise to that level.

Testifying in his own defense a day earlier, the 37-year-old did not deny creating a series of menacing-sounding posts, but he told the jury that they were often put together after he had been smoking pot and drinking beer and he never thought they would be taken seriously.

'I wrote a lot of things I didn't mean,' Hunt said, calling himself 'immature' and 'very irresponsible.'

'I just feel terrible about how I expressed myself,' he added.

A New York court worker was convicted on federal charges of threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress. A jury on Wednesday found Brendan Hunt (pictured) guilty at the close of a weeklong trial in federal court in Brooklyn, rejecting his claims that it was harmless rhetoric

A U.S. Capitol Police officer had testified at the trial, as prosecutors sought to link Hunt and his brand of extremism to the January 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol.

Hunt did not attend the riot but admitted posting videos and other materials expressing support for the violent mob.

A staunch Trump supporter, avid comic book collector and analyst for the New York court system, Hunt had pleaded not guilty to charges that alleged, in part, that he had called for the 'public execution' of Democratic U.S. Reps. Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Schumer.

A staunch Trump supporter, avid comic book collector and analyst for the New York court system, Hunt had pleaded not guilty to charges that alleged, in part, that he had called for the 'public execution' of Democratic U.S. Reps. Nancy Pelosi (pictured) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer

Prosecutors say it was part of a month long online campaign to urge violence against members of Congress that culminated with a January 8 video titled 'Kill your senators. Slaughter them all.'

Defense attorneys had called the charges overblown.

They argued that Hunt's posts and texts used as evidence, some containing racial slurs, were protected free speech and that there was no proof that he was dangerous.

'With today's verdict, the defendant is now a convicted felon, not for his repugnant, racist rants, but because he threatened to attack and kill members of Congress to prevent them from carrying out their constitutional duties, and that is a federal crime,' Acting U.S. Attorney Mark Lesko said in a statement.

Prosecutors said Hunt faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing on June 22.

A message was left with one of his lawyers on Wednesday by the Associated Press.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. The European Union calls on Azerbaijan to provide the outstanding information about the Armenian prisoners of war to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which was requested by the Court earlier.

The EU issued a statement which says:

The European Union welcomes the consolidation of the ceasefire on the ground, following the ceasefire agreement reached by the parties on 9 November 2020, and some positive results achieved on issues such as the repatriation of human remains and the provision of humanitarian assistance to populations severely affected by the conflict.

The European Union reiterates, however, that renewed efforts are necessary to build confidence between both countries and make progress towards sustainable peace. This includes refraining from hostile and offensive rhetoric, finalizing, as soon as possible, the return of all remaining prisoners of war and detained persons, regardless of the circumstances of their arrest, and cooperating also on other important issues such as demining.

In this context, following the recent notification by the European Court of Human Rights to the Committee of Ministers regarding the interim measures indicated under Rule 39 of the Rules of the Court in relation to the recent armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, we stress that the Courts case law has clearly established that States Parties to the European Convention on Human Rights are under an obligation to comply with interim measures and we call on Azerbaijan to provide the outstanding information requested by the Court.
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Coinciding with President Biden's 100th day in office today, Family Research Council is releasing a new resource, "Tracking the Biden Administration," that reports President Biden has made at least $479.9 billion available that can subsidize abortion and abortion businesses  more than 19 times the level set under President Obama.

Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package made $467.8 billion available for abortion and abortion businesses. By comparison, within President Obama's first 100 days, he had signed a stimulus bill that included $24.7 billion in subsidies for employer-sponsored plans that cover abortion. These funds made available by the Biden administration expressly exclude existing prohibitions on abortion funding, including the Hyde amendment and Helms amendment. In his first 100 days, President Biden has also funded abortion and abortion businesses by delivering an additional $12.1 billion through executive actions.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins issued the following statement:

"On his 100th day in office, it's more than clear that President Biden has not only returned to the pro-abortion policies of the Obama administration, and is eliminating many of the Trump administration's pro-life policies, but he has expanded abortion funding far beyond the level of any previous administration.

"In his 100-day sprint to the Left, President Biden has forced taxpayers back into a partnership with the abortion industry, both at home and abroad. He has made clear that he places no value on the inherent dignity of human life. His actions deny the truth that every human life, born and unborn, possesses inherent dignity and deserves to be treated with respect.

"As Senator Tim Scott noted in his remarks last night after the Biden address, this is a president who has failed to find the common ground he promised. Instead, President Biden has prioritized spending taxpayer dollars on abortion, making Obama look moderate by comparison," concluded Perkins.

Connor Semelsberger, Director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity at Family Research Council, added:

"The level of federal taxpayer funds made available to the abortion industry in President Biden's first 100 days is unprecedented. As a senator from Delaware, Joe Biden consistently supported key provisions like the Hyde and Helms amendments, which prohibit funding for abortion at home and abroad. But as president, Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that expressly excluded these longstanding provisions in key areas, despite members of both parties coming together to maintain abortion funding restrictions in the five COVID-19 relief packages signed by President Trump."

For more information, please visit: www.frcaction.org/biden.

SOURCE Family Research Council

Related Links

http://www.frc.org


Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, say goodbye to law and order Joe.

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Some infected patients and their family members are making every effort to influence the doctors in both govt and private hospitals for a bed, remdesivir injections and medical oxygen. (Photo: AFP)

VIJAYAWADA: As many Covid-19 patients from the state are becoming increasingly choosy with regard to hospital bed, remdesivir injection and medical oxygen irrespective of their need, it is mounting pressure on health infrastructure and even causing shortage at times.

A woman employee from a public sector undertaking was desperate to get a bed in a hospital when her fathers health condition was serious after getting infected with the virus. After she managed to get a bed in a private hospital in Amalapuram, she wanted that remdesivir injections be administered. Even before the doctors could assess the requirement of the patient, the family members are deciding what kind of treatment has to be given and are making frantic efforts assuming that they could help save the life of their loved ones.

In another case, a man hailing from a middle-income group from Chirala, tested positive. His family members were desperate to get a bed in a hospital. They managed to get one at a private hospital in Guntur district. The hospital authorities reportedly asked them to check whether the treatment they were going to offer would be covered under the Aarogyasri scheme or health insurance scheme. It is believed that they were trying to cash in on the ignorance of the patients family.

Some infected patients and their family members are making every effort to influence the doctors in both government and private hospitals for a bed, remdesivir injections and medical oxygen.

Some private hospitals empaneled for Aarogyasri scheme, stopped giving remdesivir injections as their cost has been revised to Rs 800 and Rs 600 per vial depending upon the manufacturer from May 1 It was earlier priced Rs 2,800.

Vizianagaram district medical and health officer Dr S.V. Ramana Kumari said, It is true that we are receiving a lot of calls from people asking for a bed in a specific hospital, remdesivir injections and medical oxygen. We are trying to educate them to come out of their misconception that both the injection and the medical oxygen are no longer a sanjeevini to save their lives.

Anantapur additional DMHO Dr Rama Subba Rao said, Some people are on an overdrive with regard to the treatment to be given even if it is for the doctors to decide the best possible course. We are trying to advise them not to panic as have all requisite facilities.

District health authorities state that if such demands are obliged, and when supply is less, this will cause trouble to patients who are in desperate need of them.

Guntur DMHO Dr J. Yasmin said, Though we are getting calls from people seeking such favours, we are trying to convince them to take treatment as per their need and not based on their demand.
U.S. President Joe Biden makes remarks at the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington on April 20, 2021. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

Biden Admin Proposes Ban on Menthol Cigarettes

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on April 29 that it would move to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored tobacco products.

The FDA faced an April 29 deadline to answer a 2013 citizen petition to ban or curb menthol products. The petition turned into a court filing in 2020.

The FDA is working toward issuing proposed product standards within the next year to ban menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and ban all characterizing flavors (including menthol) in cigars; the authority to adopt product standards is one of the most powerful tobacco regulatory tools Congress gave the agency, the FDA stated in the April 29 news release.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 7 of 10 black youths between the ages of 12 and 17 reported smoking menthol cigarettes, while black adults have the highest percentage of menthol usage compared to other demographics. Tobacco companies, meanwhile, have been accused of marketing menthols specifically to black communities and young people.

This decision is based on clear science and evidence establishing the addictiveness and harm of these products and builds on important, previous actions that banned other flavored cigarettes in 2009, the FDA stated in explaining its proposal to ban menthols.

FDA officials said that these flavor standards would reduce cigarette and cigar initiation and use, reduce health disparities, and promote health equity by addressing a significant and disparate source of harm.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other critics have said that banning menthols could lead to an underground market for such products, leading to more criminal activity.

Such a ban will trigger criminal penalities, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction, stated a recent ACLU letter to the Biden administration. A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with law enforcement.

The group noted that George Floyd, whose officer-involved death sparked nationwide protests, was using a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase cigarettes, while Eric Garner, killed by a police chokehold, was illegally selling loosie cigarettes.

Rev. Al Sharpton, meanwhile, has long been a critic of proposed bans on menthols, saying such a move would create a black market.

Any menthol ban would likely take years to implement and would face legal challenges from tobacco firms.

An Altria spokesman told The Associated Press in a statement ahead of the announcement that criminalizing menthol would have serious unintended consequences. Altria is one of the worlds largest producers of tobacco.

The Epoch Times has contacted Reynolds American, another tobacco producer, for comment.

FDA officials said they are planning to hold a call on the proposed ban later Thursday.
Potsdam, Germany, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :An employee at a clinic for disabled people outside Berlin was arrested Thursday on suspicion of killing four people at the centre and wounding a fifth, police said, with the motive still unclear.

The slain victims, two women and two men, were stabbed with a knife late Wednesday at the facility in the city of Potsdam, the daily Bild reported.

Those killed are believed to be patients at the care clinic, local newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten reported.

Police said earlier the dead were subjected to "intense, extreme violence", but did not give any details around the circumstances of the killings.

A 51-year-old female staff member has been arrested on "strong suspicion" of carrying out the assault, police said, while acknowledging that any motive was still undetermined.

Prosecutors were due to give a news conference later in the day.

State police were called to the clinic at around 9 pm Wednesday, according to reports, with the victims later discovered in their rooms.

Specialised teams were dispatched overnight to collect evidence from the crime scene.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is addressing a public meeting in Karnataka's Dharamsthala. The PM also said that this century is about skill development.

Updates:

# I thought Congress would have learnt its mistakes from past: PM Modi

# Congress leaders backing those seeking Azadi in Kashmir was an insult to our soldiers: PM Modi

# Congress must answer on his leader's statement: PM Modi

# Statement of a Congress leader on Kashmir clearly shows how the party feels on surgical strikes & bravery of our Army: PM Modi

# Why are Congress leaders lending their voice to those who want Azadi in Kashmir? This is an insult to our brave soldiers: PM Modi

# We should learn how to use the BHIM App and cashless transactions, said PM.

# We have never learned to live for ourselves. Whether we are there or not we won't let the country be destroyed, said PM

# Every rupee, every resource from the Government of India is devoted for the welfare of Indians. We are ensuring the fruits of development reach the intended beneficiaries without any scope of corruption: PM



Every rupee, every resource from the Government of India is devoted for the welfare of Indians. We are ensuring the fruits of development reach the intended beneficiaries without any scope of corruption: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) October 29, 2017

# We need to give importance towards living in harmony with nature & not think about short term gains. We need to reduce the usage of Urea: PM

# If we move towards micro-irrigation and adopt 'Per drop, more crop', then we can bring a lot of change: PM Modi

# I urge the farmers of Karnataka to embrace methods like drip irrigation that help conserve water: PM

# I have seen how hard @BSYBJP works for the welfare of farmers. Even when I was serving as Chief Minister, he would be talking to me about issues relating to farmers: PM

# PM addresses the issue of global warming, says that we should be responsible in utilising natural resources and think about our future generation

Conservation of water is a major challenge for us in this day and age. We also need to give importance towards living in harmony with nature and not think about short term gains: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) October 29, 2017

# The era of digital currency has begun and Indian should not be late in adopting it, says PM Modi

# Conservation of water is a major challenge for us in this day and age. We also need to give importance towards living in harmony with nature and not think about short-term gains: PM

# PM congratulated Dr. Hegedde and women of Self Help Group for paving way for Digital India.

# 12 lakh people in Self-help groups have decided to conduct cashless digital transaction

# I got the opportunity to hand over RuPay cards to womeself-helplp groups. Happy to see enthusiasm towards digital transactions: PM

# Our saints and seers created as well as nurtured institutions which have helped society for centuries: PM

Our saints and seers created as well as nurtured institutions which have helped society for centuries: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) October 29, 2017

# This century is about skill development. A nation like India is youthful and hence, we must harness our demographic dividend

I got the opportunity to hand over RuPay cards to women self help groups. Happy to see enthusiasm towards digital transactions: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) October 29, 2017

# "I don't believe that a man named Narendra Modi is in a position to honour a great man like Dr. D Veerendra Heggade who is an inspiration for all," says Modi.

# PM Modi felicitated Dr. D Veerendra Heggade at a public meeting in Dharmsthala's Ujire.

# Happy that I got opportunity to offer prayers to Lord Manjunatha: PM Narendra Modi at a public meeting in Ujire #Karnataka

# Karnataka: Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a public meeting in Dharmasthala's Ujire

Happy that I got opportunity to offer prayers to Lord Manjunatha: PM Narendra Modi at a public meeting in Ujire #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/zLe5leQKt0  ANI (@ANI) October 29, 2017

# Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives at Shri Manjunatha Swamy Temple in Dharmasthala Karnataka

# PM Modi arrives in Karnataka's Mangaluru, to offer prayers at Shri Manjunatha Swami Temple at Dharmasthala & address a public meeting

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A coronavirus survivor thought to be Britain's longest-suffering patient has been left vomiting every day.

Jason Kelk, 49, from Leeds, was rushed to hospital with a chest infection last April, which turned out to be Covid.

The primary school IT teacher, who has not left the hospital since, was transferred to intensive care and hooked up to a ventilator just 48 hours later.

But the damage wrought by the virus to his stomach has reportedly left him with gastroparesis, causing him to suffer regular vomiting bouts. He is also still unable to walk unaided.

Jason Kelk, 49, has been in Leeds General Infirmary for more than a year. He suffers daily vomiting fits because he suffers gastroparesis, which stops the stomach emptying normally

His wife Sue described it as miraculous when he took his first steps in ten months in February

WHAT ARE THE LONG-TERM SYMPTOMS OF COVID? Most coronavirus patients will recover within a fortnight, suffering a fever, cough and losing their sense of smell or taste for several days. However, evidence is beginning to show that the tell-tale symptoms of the virus can persist for weeks on end in 'long haulers'  the term for patients plagued by lasting complications. Data from the COVID Symptom Study app, by King's College London and health company Zoe, suggests one in ten people may still have symptoms after three weeks, and some may suffer for months. Long term symptoms include: Chronic tiredness

Breathlessness

Raised heart rate

Delusions

Strokes

Insomnia

Loss of taste/smell

Kidney disease

Mobility issues

Headaches

Muscle pains

Fevers For those with more severe disease, Italian researchers who tracked 143 people who had been hospitalised with the disease found almost 90 per cent still had symptoms including fatigue two months after first falling unwell. The most common complaints were fatigue, a shortness of breath and joint pain - all of which were reported during their battle with the illness. Advertisement

It is not clear whether he is definitely the longest suffering coronavirus patient in the country, but Leeds Live has given him this title.

A handful of infected patients have been forced to remain in hospital for months, including Kate Garraway's husband Derek who was only recently discharged.

'Long Covid'  which includes breathlessness, brain fog, and muscle pains  strikes around one in ten people who suffer the disease, according to estimates. More severe cases are much rarer.

Mr Kelk's wife Sue, 63, said he has made 'huge strides' over the past two months, with doctors taking him off his ventilator earlier in April.

On a fundraiser website set up to buy a television for his room, Ms Kelk said: 'He has been off the ventilator for four weeks... but we have an unknown amount of time (until he can come home).

'Jason still has a tracheostomy (opening in the neck for a ventilator tube) and continues to vomit every day.'

She added to Leeds Live: 'His kidneys and lungs had almost been completely destroyed and he has developed suspected gastroparesis (when the stomach cannot empty normally).'

NHS England's website says the condition is sparked by food not emptying properly from the stomach, leading to the vomiting.

They add there is 'no obvious cause' for the condition, but it can be linked to complications with surgery and type 2 diabetes, which Mr Kelk suffers from.

But the Yorkshire Evening Post, who interviewed him last month, reported it was linked to the stomach damage from the virus itself.

Studies suggest Covid can also disrupt the digestive system, with some scientists calling on health authorities to recognise diarrhoea as a possible symptom of Covid.

The US-based CDC already considers this as a symptom of Covid, but the NHS still lists only a high temperature, new continuous cough and loss of taste and smell as possible warning signs.

Speaking about her husband, Ms Kelk told Leeds Live: 'For a very long time, I was always told that it would be a question of if, not when, Jason would return home.

'Now it's really looking like him coming home with me is a real possibility  we're saying when and not if.'

Sue Kelk says it is 'nothing short of miraculous,' that her husband is still alive after a nine-month battle with Covid-19

During his battle with Covid-19, Mr Kelk, pictured with wife Sue and her daughter Claire, has become dependent on a ventilator as well as a round-the-clock kidney filter

Mother-of-five Sue Kelk said: 'I didn't realise how strong a character Jason was. I just wish I had hugged him more. Because now I can't and that's really hard'. The couple were able to speak most recently on Boxing Day

The pair have only been able to see each other a few times while he's been on the ward because of Covid restrictions.

Mr Kelk suffered from type 2 diabetes and mild asthma before he caught the virus, which put him at higher risk from the disease.

Ms Kelk said she felt about '10 foot tall' when he managed to walk with assistance for the first time in February.

'I'm so proud of him, it really is miraculous to see,' she said.

'He's managed to walk on the spot before and had taken a few steps but this was the first time he's walked like this. It was quite a long way - about six to 10 metres I think they said.

'It was a fantastic moment, I was absolutely buzzed.'
Next year. The momentum is there!

Maybe in 3-4 years. There's always some problem.

Not until it's already legal in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi

Somehow, the legislature will criminalize weed for eternity

Vote

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OTTAWA, Ontario (AP)  The Ottawa Senators moved out of last place in the North Division on Wednesday night, with Brady Tkachuk recording a Gordie Howe hat trick in a convincing 6-3 win over the Vancouver Canucks.

Tkachuk was happier with the two points than posting the goal-assist-fight trifecta.

Im not going to lie to you, it was pretty cool, he said of the hat trick. Ive definitely had opportunities beforehand. I just havent got it done.

I wouldnt really call that one a fight, he said, referencing a short bout with Zack MacEwen. Im more happy with the outcome and how we played. We played a full 60 (minutes), just a great game top to bottom. Now were just kind of showing our true colors right now. Were a fun team to watch. Its fun to be a part of right now. Like Ive been saying all year, weve learned a lot and thats why success is following.

The win moved Ottawa (19-27-4, 42 points) past Vancouver (19-21-3, 41 points) although the Canucks have seven games in hand due to their lengthy COVID-19 hiatus.

The Senators have won six of their last eight (6-2-0)  after losing six of their previous seven (1-5-1). They improved to 11-10-4 at home this season.

The Senators lost 13 of their first 15 games (2-12-1). They have gone 17-15-3 since.

Josh Norris, Victor Mete, Chris Tierney, Thomas Chabot and Colin White also scored for Ottawa. Marcus Hogberg finished with 16 saves.

Tyler Myers, Jake Virtanen and Brandon Sutter scored for Vancouver, which needed a strong game from Thatcher Demko to keep the score from ballooning. The Canucks have lost three of four.

it wasnt a very good one from our group, Myers said of the Vancouver performance. I thought any time we were generating momentum, we just kind of shot ourselves in the foot. A few too many turnovers, not making the right decisions at the lines and it ended up costing us.

Ottawa outshot Vancouver 33-22.

We had a lot of good efforts by a lot of guys, said Ottawa coach D.J. Smith. It looked like we had pretty good legs and they didnt have very good legs tonight compared to the other games weve played them.

Story continues

Obviously this many games for them in a row with travel probably played into it.

Down by three and needing points to stay in the playoff race, the Canucks pulled Demko with 7:20 remaining. He returned less than a minute late as the Sens just missed the empty net.

White added an empty-net goal at 14:33 of the period when Demko went to the bench again, making it 6-2. It was his 10th of the season.

It was the fourth straight meeting between the teams in seven days. Ottawa won the first and third, by 3-0 and 2-1 scores, with Vancouver taking the second, 4-2.

The Sens came into the game having won five of their last seven (5-2-0)  after losing six of their previous seven (1-5-1). They improved to 11-10-4 at home this season.

Vancouver gave Demko his second start since the team returned to action after the COVID outbreak. Braden Holtby had started four of the five previous games.

Mete, acquired April 12 on waivers from Montreal, opened the scoring on Ottawas first shot of the game. Taking a pass from Alex Formenton, he split the defense and beat Demko with a low shot at 2:04 for his first point as a Senator.

While the edge in shots was only 11-10 in favor of the Senators after the first period, Hogberg had a far more comfortable 20 minutes than Demko.

The second period was all action with five goals  three for Ottawa and two for Vancouver  in the first seven minutes 23 seconds.

Tierney and Norris scored 32 seconds apart early in the second for Vancouver.

Connor Brown won a battle deep in the Vancouver zone, feeding the puck back to Chabot for a shot from the blue line. Tierney won the battle in front of the net to tuck in the rebounds 38 seconds into the period for a 2-0 lead.

Norris scored seconds later, prompting an irate Vancouver coach Travis Green to call a timeout.

Myers pulled one back, firing a shot through traffic at 5:43 of the second for his fifth of the season. But Chabot answered 53 seconds later, to make it 4-1 with a shot from a tight angle after an Ottawa attack started by a Quinn Hughes turnover.

The goals kept coming with Virtanen, notching his 100th career point, scoring after Hogberg misplayed the puck behind his net. Motte retrieved the puck and sent it back in front for an easy goal that cut the lead to 4-2.

A line change allowed Tkachuk to go in alone and beat Demko glove-side for a 5-2 lead with his 16th of the season.

Demko made several great saves to deny Ottawa as the Senators pressed short-handed. Sutter added a consolation goal for Vancouver at 17:43.

UP NEXT

Canucks: At Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday in the opener of a two-game set.

Senators: At Montreal on Saturday.

___

More AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/NHL and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
New Delhi:

Senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Sunday hit back at Prime Minister Modi, saying that the latter did not read his statement entirely on Jammu and Kashmir. The Congress leader said Modi was imagining a ghost and attacking it.

Chidambaram said, "It is obvious the PM has not read the whole answer to the question put to me on Jammu and Kashmir. Those who criticise, must read the whole answer and tell me which word in the answer was wrong. The PM is imagining a ghost and attacking it."

Asked during an interaction in Rajkot whether he still felt that Jammu and Kashmir should be accorded greater autonomy to defuse the unrest in the valley, he said, "Yes... The demand in Kashmir Valley is to respect in letter and spirit of Article 370. And that means that they want greater autonomy. My interactions in Jammu and Kashmir led me to the conclusion that when they ask for 'azadi', most people - I am not saying all - (an) overwhelming majority want autonomy."

Also Read: PM Modi in Bengaluru: Congress leaders supporting those seeking 'Azadi' in Kashmir is an insult to our soldiers

Earlier in the day, PM Modi while addressing a rally in Bengaluru lashed out at the Congress leader over his greater autonomy  remark, saying that the Congress leaders are lending their voice to those who want "Azadi in Kashmir".

He said, "Congress leaders supporting those seeking Azadi in Kashmir is an insult to Indian soldiers". Click here to read more.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
2021 Edison Silver Award Presented to Life365 and Partners We worked quickly in 2020 to work with our partners, AMR and Avixena, to put together a range of home monitoring services for COVID

Life365, a leading virtual care platform provider, is proud to announce today that their solutions have received a 2021 Edison Award (Silver) in the category of COVID-19 Innovations: Mobilizing for Emergency Responses. The recognition highlights the integration of solutions and services for virtual care on a common platform. The Life365 team collaborated with their partners at American Medical Response (AMR), a leader in emergency medical services, and avixena Population Health Solutions, a SaaS provider of evidence-based population health management tools, to offer a set of solutions that could help ease pressure on hospital emergency rooms and reduce exposure to COVID-19 with at-home patient monitoring.

Were excited to be selected as an Edison Award recipient, said Kent Dicks, CEO of Life365. We worked quickly in 2020 to work with our partners, AMR and avixena Population Health Solutions, to put together a range of home monitoring services for COVID, offering support from AMR nurse call centers to help people stay away from the Emergency Room, and limit the exposure to COVID-19 for frontline workers and patients. Avixena created a COVID-19 screening app using protocols to help assess individuals that may be showing symptoms of COVID-19 and pointing them to the appropriate resources to help slow the spread of the virus. This was supported by Life365 Covid Kits with thermometers and pulse oximeters to help monitor patients diagnosed with the virus and expedite recovery at home  as well as undiagnosed individuals at risk, proactively monitoring their vitals.

The Edison Awards highlight top-tier new product innovation, service development and human-centered design. Finalists for the Edison awards were chosen as the best of the best by 3,000 of the worlds top senior business executives, academics and innovation professionals.

We were very impressed by the level of collaboration and discovery in this years entries, said Edison Universe Executive Director Frank Bonafilia. Somehow, while facing the unprecedented challenges of this global pandemic, companies around the world figured out how to work safely and smartly and still innovate at an award-winning level.

About Life365

The Life365 Virtual Care platform integrates health systems with healthcare solution / service providers and logistics companies to deliver a one-stop, integrated platform for engaging a growing patient population at home  and beyond. The platform enables health professionals to remotely manage patients with a variety of disease states and offers consumer apps for self-managing their health and wellness. Life365 is headed by an industry recognized team with deep experience in remote healthcare technology. The founding teams previous Connected Health Company was acquired by Alere (now Abbott). Life365 is also a major patent holder of the next generation of intelligent, AI driven wearables, sensors and patches that will enable the next generation of virtual care.

For more information regarding Life365, please visit http://www.life365.health.

The Edison Awards

Over the last 34 years, being recognized with an Edison Award has become one of the highest accolades a product can receive in the name of innovation success. The awards are named after Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) whose inventions, new product development methods, and innovative achievements changed the world. The Edison Awards are operated by Edison Universe, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of recognizing, honoring and fostering innovations and innovators, and are hosted in Fort Myers, Florida.

For more information regarding the Edison Awards, please visit http://www.edisonawards.com
Hyderabad, April 29 : Telangana on Thursday received 3 lakh doses of Covishield amid the continuous shortage of Covid vaccine for targetted groups.

The vaccine doses reached Rajiv Gandhi International Airport from Serum Institute of India (SII) in Pune.

The consignment was then shifted to state vaccine centre in the city. Officials were making arrangements to transport the doses to various districts.

The doses arrived at a time when vaccination programme in the state has been hit by the vaccine shortage. Many people were returning disappointed from vaccination centres. At some centres heated arguments were seen between people and the officials.

The fresh stock will last for only couple of days as the state health authorities plan to vaccinate 1 to 1.5 lakh people every day.

Officials said that the state has no vaccines stocks for launching vaccination of people aged between 18 and 45 years from May 1.

Uncertainty prevailed over the launch of the thirds phase of vaccination due to lack of sufficient supplies. The authorities are currently focusing on vaccination people above the age of 45, especially those due for second dose.

Director of Public Health, G. Srinivas Rao had on Wednesday reiterated that the state has the capacity to vaccinate 10 lakh people every day but it is waiting for sufficient number of doses.

On April 28, the health authorities in the state administered 1,38,152 doses. They included 28,828 people who received second dose. The cumulative number of doses given rose to 45,36,641.

Before the stock that arrived on Thursday, Telangana had received 46,53,890 doses. According to the Director of Health, vaccine wastage stands at 1.01 per cent.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Reddy is likely to announce the state's vaccine policy in a day or two.

The Chief Minister on April 24 decided to vaccinate the state's four crore residents against Covid-19 for free, irrespective of their age.

The state government said it will spend Rs 2,500 crore for the vaccination programme.

The state government on Tuesday urged Bharat Biotech to supply maximum doses of its Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to the state.

Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar met Bharat Biotech Chairman and Managing Director Krishna Ella in this regard.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

When Tom Becker was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in March 2020, the 60-year-old EMS helicopter pilot from Washington, Missouri, worried he would never fly again.

But his cardiologist, Dr. Christopher Allen, had served in the Air Force and knew aviation physiology. So Becker felt reassured when Allen told him he didn't expect any problems, because Becker was still fairly young.

Allen told Beckerwho lives about 50 minutes away from his office at Mercy Hospital South, near St. Louisthat Becker could call his cellphone with any concerns and meet with him virtually. Becker estimates they had more than 10 video appointments over six months.

"The video visits worked just the same as being in the office," said Becker.

That's a common assessment from patients and providers at Mercy, the St. Louis-based Roman Catholic health care organization that became a pioneer in telehealth in 2015 when it opened Mercy Virtual Care Center in the suburb of Chesterfield. Officials described the $54 million stand-alone facility as the world's first "hospital without beds." And after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mercy became a model for ramping up telehealth throughout a health system.

The virtual care center, whose staff includes doctors, nurses and technology professionals, is not siloed from traditional care; it's a hub from which some care is provided and new approaches to telehealth are introduced.

"It's an integrated part of what we do every day," said Mercy Virtual's president, Dr. J. Gavin Helton.

Having the virtual center gave Mercy a head start when the pandemic forced doctors and hospitals across the nation to turn to telehealth. With insurers and the federal government footing the bill, virtual visits suddenly went from being allowed only in the narrowest of circumstances to often being the only option.

Though Mercy leaders and doctors have had years to try out and evaluate virtual care, some health experts are now concerned that the overnight adoption of telehealth nationally hasn't allowed enough time for research to determine when it's effective.

If the floodgates to telemedicine remain wide open, they warn, wasteful spending, fraud and bad health outcomes could ensue. Some worry doctors could start charging gratuitously for visits they used to handle as free phone calls.

"Just in the same way we would test a new drug, we should also test: How effective is adding telemedicine in improving health?" said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard University.

When Mercy Virtual Care Center opened, its leaders said the model could provide better patient care at a lower cost.

But at the time, Medicare and most insurers covered telehealth services only if patients lived in designated rural areas and traveled to a local facility to remotely see a specialist.

That changed in March 2020. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued temporary waivers allowing providers to virtually visit with patients in their homes, outside of designated rural areas and even across state lines.

In early 2020, an average of 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries used telemedicine services each week, according to CMS. After the pandemic took hold, that number jumped to 1.1 million. A recent survey showed most were satisfied with virtual care.

Virtual visits also increased dramatically at Mercy. In 2019, fewer than 20 providers did a couple of hundred visits, spokesperson Joe Poelker said. During the pandemic, the organization has conducted an estimated 660,000 virtual visits, and 85% of its providers have used telehealth.

For presumed COVID-19 patients, Helton said, "We were able to quickly pivot to a digital-first approach."

Mercy sent them daily text messages. If they responded that they were worried or had worsening symptoms, the system alerted providers at Mercy Virtual, who then did video visits, preventing possible exposure to COVID-19 in the emergency department. The organization has since applied the same approach to other health issues, such as congestive heart failure, with Mercy Virtual providers directing patients to in-person treatment when needed.

Allen, the cardiologist, said he had never used telehealth before the pandemic and wondered how he could take care of patients remotely.

But he suddenly had to embrace virtual care in March 2020 when he learned he had lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. His compromised immune system left him at greater risk from COVID-19.

He was pleased to discover that telemedicine allowed him to see almost 30 patients a day, up from fewer than 20 previously. He could monitor patients' chronic diseases more closely, preventing hospitalizations.

But more medical visits is not always a good thing, said Mehrotra, who testified at a U.S. House hearing on telemedicine last month.

"The concern is that in some circumstances telemedicine is too convenient and may encourage excessive use of care," Mehrotra said in written testimony. "After an in-person visit, a physician could easily add a quick follow-up telemedicine visit that increases costs without any substantial improvement in health."

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recommends "applying additional scrutiny to outlier clinicians who bill many more telehealth services" per person than others.

Allen said Mercy pays him a fixed salary, so, unlike private practice doctors, he has no financial incentive to schedule extra appointments.

Becker said telehealth has allowed him to get care more conveniently. His visits with Allen were covered entirely by the Tricare insurance Becker receives as an Army veteran.

"There is no evidence to support that doctors are going to start calling patients willy-nilly to get telehealth visits on the books. First off, they don't have time for it. Secondly, if it's not clinically appropriate, they can't," said Sarah-Lloyd Stevenson, a policy adviser for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration who now lobbies on behalf of the American Telemedicine Association, an industry group.

Mehrotra argues that until research shows where telemedicine is effectivewhich will take timeit should be covered for high-risk populations in areas with limited access to providers, such as rural towns. Otherwise, he said, it should be used only where there is "evidence of value or there is compelling need," rather than visits with "little clinical benefit," such as seeing a patient who likely has a common cold.

Despite calls for caution, lawmakers from both parties want to make permanent the temporary regulatory changes concerning telehealth.

Mehrotra said Medicare should not continue to reimburse providers at the same rate for virtual and in-person care, arguing virtual care should eventually cost less. He also said he expects a significant learning curve for clinicians.

"Everyone got forced to do this very, very quickly," he said. "You have been practicing cardiology for 30 years and now all of a sudden you have telemedicine? You're going to have to figure that out."

Helton, on the other hand, supports payment parity because he thinks it will allow for more preventive care and lower total costs. In the long run, he said, "telemedicine is not only here to stay but will continue to grow."

Becker, who underwent a cardiac ablation last year and is back to work rescuing people, said he'd love to continue avoiding the long drive to St. Louis to see Allen for checkups.

Allen, now in remission from cancer, said he plans to keep visiting with patients virtually.

"There is so much value in offering the telehealth option that I think patients are going to demand it," Allen said. "If they can duck into a break room [at work] for 15 minutes or go out to their car and see us, it's  a very effective option."

Explore further Many endocrine patients, providers want to continue telehealth after pandemic

2021 Kaiser Health News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Increasing contracts and purchase orders demonstrate a growing interest in and demand for the company's Decipher solutions in Tailings and Rehab.

A new contract has also been signed with Evolution Mining for tailings management

( ) is pleased with the progress made since the acquisition of Decipher for Mining was announced in January 2021 from CSBP Ltd and Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers Ltd (WesCEF) for 3.7 million shares as well as performance shares.

The sale has seen ( ) (OTCMKTS:WFAFF) (FRA:WF3), through its subsidiaries CSBP and WesCEF, become K2flys largest shareholder with a 10.13% stake in the company, with the ability to raise this to 14.22%.

Decipher brings additional depth to K2flys growing solution suite in tailings and rehabilitation and extends K2fly's technical assurance and governance footprint inside existing global customers.

Decipher solutions pipeline

The pipeline for Decipher from K2fly solutions is growing rapidly because of pressure from investors and other stakeholders in the mining industry.

K2flys pipeline for Decipher includes:

Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GITS or the Standard) formal endorsement by the co-convenors of the Global Tailings Review: International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI);

In December 2020, the Church of England Pensions Board and the Council on Ethics of the Swedish National Pension Funds wrote to over 350 mining companies on behalf of investors with $21 trillion in assets under management (AUM), asking them to confirm their support for the Standard and to set out a timeline for their intended compliance with it; and

When ICMM launched GITS alongside the UNEP and PRI, all ICMM member companies (28) committed that all tailings facilities with extreme or very high potential consequences will be in conformance with the Standard by August 2023, and all other facilities by August 2025. On May 6, 2021, ICMM will be launching its Conformance Protocols for GITS.

Live at SAEC

In February 2021 Decipher went live at South African Energy Coal (SAEC) for its tailings monitoring solution and resulted in a total contract value (TCV) of more than A$70,000.

SAEC includes four coal mining operations as well as three processing plants, producing energy coal for the domestic and export market.

On April 30, 2018, SAEC became a standalone business to be managed separately from the rest of the South32 Group - this project continues to deliver to expectations.

Contract with Evolution Mining

K2fly signed a new contract with ( ) for its inaugural implementation of a tailings solution at Lake Cowal in New South Wales.

The contract term will be three years with a TCV over A$250,000.

Evolution is a gold company engaged in operating, identifying and developing gold-related mining projects in Australia and Canada. It operates five wholly-owned mines - Cowal in NSW, Mt Carlton, Mt Rawdon and Cracow in Queensland and Mungari in Western Australia.

In addition, Evolution holds an economic interest in the Ernest Henry copper-gold mine in Queensland.

The Cowal gold operation is an open-pit facility located 350 kilometres west of Sydney.

K2fly has also received a Purchase Order from BHP- Hunter Valley Energy Coal for an initial proof of concept for the Decipher Rehab solution.
Strong rebound from pandemic losses is forecast for the UK ad market, however full recovery will stretch into 2022, states the latest Advertising Association/ WARC Expenditure Report, the only source to collect advertising revenue data across the entire media landscape. The report forecasts that UK ad spend will grow by 15.2% this year to reach a total of 27.0 billion. This will recover the entirety of 2020s 1.8 billion decline and is expected to precede a 7.2% rise in 2022, by when the market will be worth a record 29.0 billion.

Ancillary forecasts suggest the UK is on course to achieve the strongest ad trade recovery of any major global market this year, and this puts the UK economy in a position to bounce back strongly post-pandemic, as every pound invested in advertising generates six in GDP.

Ad spend growth forecast for all media in 2021

Particularly strong results are expected for the media most adversely affected by the pandemic, namely cinema at +266.8%, digital out of home at +52.3%, and traditional out of home at +14.5%. Online classified investment is set to rise by a fifth (20.4%), supported by increased recruitment activity arising from brighter economic prospects this year.

Other media are not expected to recoup 2020s losses until next year, however. This is true of TV (up 8.8% in 2021), direct mail (up 6.4%) and publishing disciplines encompassing national news (up 7.3%), regional news (up 3.9%) and magazine brands (up 6.8%).

Online display  inclusive of social media and online video  is set to see growth accelerate this year (+13.4%), as is the case for paid search (+18.4%). Taken together, these two sectors are expected to account for two-thirds (66.4%) of all UK advertising spend this year, up ten percentage points from a share of 56.2% in 2019.

The full picture in 2020

The latest dataset includes final figures for Q4/FY 2020, which show spend on advertising declined by 7.2% to a total of 23.5 billion last year. The decline in 2020 was softer than that following the Great Recession at the total market level, but most media owners recorded significant reductions in spend. In a positive end to last year, spend rose 2.6% during the final three months, resulting in the highest quarterly total on record (7.0 billion).

The key findings for 2020 show a strong shift by advertisers into online video, social media and search markets, in a move part-reflective of the rapid acceleration of e-commerce, as lockdowns forced consumers to purchase goods and services from home. Spend on paid search went up 7.1%, online display rose by 10.4%, and TV VOD was up 15.7%. There was a small increase (0.5%) for online news brands, though other media saw sharp declines.

The UKs advertising industry was well-positioned for the challenges of the lockdown, as it already had one of the most developed digital ad markets in the world. The UKs average weekly value of e-commerce spend rose 47.1% in 2020, to 2.1 billion, which equated to 27.9% of all retail sales latest year  ahead of key international markets. For the first time, the UK was the country with the largest e-commerce share as a percentage of total retail spend. Chinas equivalent figure was 24.9%, the EU was 20.0%, and the US was 14.0%.

Among individual product categories, Government ad spend grew 37.2% during 2020 as public health messaging was deployed in the effort to combat COVID-19. As normality returns, this spend is expected to fall back in 2021, with growth instead expected across the other main consumer categories, notably services (up 22.0%), industrial (up 19.8%) and financial (up 20.2%).

Media 2019

m 2020

m 2020

year-on-year % change 2021 forecast year-on-year % change 2022 forecast year-on-year % change Search 7,814.9 8,369.0 7.1% 18.4% 10.8% Online display* 6,404.5 7,070.8 10.4% 13.4% 7.9% TV 4,930.0 4,350.0 -11.8% 8.8% 2.1% of which VOD 451.7 522.7 15.7% 14.3% 13.9% Online classified* 1,399.0 975.6 -30.3% 20.4% 2.2% Direct mail 1,383.0 909.0 -34.3% 6.4% -7.3% Out of home 1,300.8 699.1 -46.3% 36.9% 19.2% of which digital 694.0 414.9 -40.2% 52.3% 24.6% National newsbrands 996.2 755.0 -24.2% 7.3% 0.5% of which online 317.1 318.8 0.5% 10.9% 7.7% Regional newsbrands 719.5 470.1 -34.7% 3.9% -1.0% of which online 238.8 183.3 -23.3% 7.3% 5.5% Magazine brands 654.5 461.9 -29.4% 6.8% 0.1% of which online 264.1 199.4 -24.5% 15.8% 4.6% Radio 702.7 613.9 -12.6% 12.9% 2.4% of which online 49.3 46.8 -5.0% 14.0% 5.6% Cinema 299.1 54.7 -81.7% 266.8% 61.1% TOTAL UK ADSPEND 25,283.1 23,458.1 -7.2% 15.2% 7.2% Note: Broadcaster VOD, digital revenues for newsbrands, magazine brands, and radio station websites are also included within online display and classified totals, so care should be taken to avoid double counting. Online radio is display advertising on broadcasters' websites. Source: AA/WARC Expenditure Report, April 2021

Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive, Advertising Association, commented, Advertising investment has mirrored the rapid changes seen across the economy over the last year, primarily the acceleration provided by lockdowns towards e-commerce across all sectors able to sell online. The pandemic accelerated trends that were already changing the market, evident for several years. The UKs sophisticated online advertising marketplace helped to keep the economy moving and, no doubt, supported businesses, large and small, to stay connected with consumers who were no longer on the high street. SMEs that had little or no online presence quickly adapted to serve their customers via online platforms and more sophisticated online businesses increased their investment behind these.

Across the economy that advertising serves, we saw remarkable innovation and agility, which helped to lessen the economic impact as firms adapted to keep serving their customers, despite the disruption. The predicted growth this year of 15.2% is good news, with every 1 of advertising spend generating 6 of GDP, this will be a welcome boost for jobs and growth in the wider economy, he added.

James McDonald, Head of Data Content, WARC, remarked, The data from 2020 were unlike any we have seen in our 40 years of market monitoring. Save for a flock of online pure-players, the majority of media owners surveyed by WARC experienced their worst trading climate in living memory. This was true at both the financial and the human level  many will not witness a full recovery until 2022 at the earliest.

He further said, Agile formats with short lead times were seen to flourish last year, particularly within social media and e-commerce environments, the latter benefitting greatly from stay-at-home orders and well-established logistical networks. Media owners in these spaces are expected to build on good 2020 results this year, though the situation will be more challenging across the remainder of the landscape as ad investment continues to favour performance marketing.
Good Supply excels in high THC products across the largest categories in cannabis  flower, vapes , and oils  and is building off this momentum by expanding into concentrates with hash, wax and kief products. Good Supply's concentrates offer a range of formats, which provide multiple consumption experiences and potency levels. Each Good Supply concentrate follows an individual extraction process to unlock the potential of the cannabis plant, resulting in different terpene profiles and levels of THC.

"We are strategically expanding our portfolio by developing our flower into new formats. Concentrates is an exciting category that is still maturing in Canada and presents a great opportunity to offer variety to consumers," said Irwin D. Simon, Chief Executive Officer of Aphria. "We are proud of the quality that goes into Good Supply's hash, wax and kief, which Canadians can enjoy at a price point they expect."

Good Supply concentrates are a natural extension of the brand, delivering on quality in three unique, complex new formats that are high potency and high value.

Good Ol' Hash

As the first brand from Aphria's portfolio to launch a hash product, Good Supply's Good Ol' Hash is a high potency (35% THC1) solventless concentrate, developed from a blend of Good Supply strains and available in select Canadian markets in a 2-gram format. Hash is currently the single largest format in the concentrate's category, with four out of the top five concentrates in Ontario being hash products2.

Good Supply Wax

Good Supply Wax is available in select markets under the Grower's Choice (ON)/Dealer's Pick name. Hydrocarbon extraction is used as a solvent to extract cannabinoids and terpenes from whole flower, resulting in a smooth wax texture. Grower's Choice (ON)/Dealer's Pick is currently produced using a single-strain input, White Rhino, and has a potency of 78% THC with aromas of citrus, berry and pine.

Good Supply Kief

Offered in two of its best-selling strains, Jean Guy and Sour Kush, Good Supply Kief is now available nationally (except Quebec) in 1-gram units. Consisting of terpene and cannabinoid-rich trichomes, Good Supply Kief can be used in conjunction with flower to increase potency.

For more information, visit: www.goodsupplycannabis.com

About Aphria Inc.

Aphria Inc. is a leading global cannabis-lifestyle consumer packaged goods company with operations in Canada, United States, Europe and Latin America, that is changing people's lives for the better  one person at a time  by inspiring and empowering the worldwide community to live their very best life by providing them with products that meet the needs of their mind, body and soul and invoke a sense of wellbeing. Aphria's mission is to be the trusted partner for its patients and consumers by providing them with a cultivated experience and health and wellbeing through high-quality, differentiated brands and innovative products. Headquartered in Leamington, Ontario, Aphria cultivates, processes, markets and sells medical and adult-use cannabis, cannabis-derived extracts and derivative cannabis products in Canada under the provisions of the Cannabis Act and globally pursuant to applicable international regulations. Aphria also manufactures, markets and sells alcoholic beverages in the United States.

For more information, visit: aphriainc.com

____________ 1 *Percentage may vary based on availability and lot 2 OCS Sales Data (April 2021)

SOURCE Aphria Inc.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 05:21:41|Editor: huaxia

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Illegal immigrants arrive at a naval base in Tripoli, Libya, on April 29, 2021. The Libyan Coast Guard on Thursday rescued 99 illegal immigrants off the western coast of the town Mellitah, some 70 km west of the capital Tripoli, as their boat was about to sink. (Photo by Hamza Turkia/Xinhua)

TRIPOLI, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Libyan Coast Guard on Thursday rescued 99 illegal immigrants off the western coast of the town Mellitah, some 70 km west of the capital Tripoli, as their boat was about to sink.

On Wednesday, another 108 illegal immigrants were rescued off the country's western coast.

Libya is a preferred point of departure for thousands of illegal immigrants who attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe.

Over 6,000 illegal immigrants have been rescued off the Libyan coast so far this year, including women and children, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The rescued were sent to overcrowded reception centers across Libya, despite repeated international calls for their closure. Enditem
Press Release

29 April 2021

Hyatt Hotels Corporation (NYSE: H) announced Together by Hyatt, a new suite of events offerings designed to meet planners where they are on their journey to return to events. Building on Hyatt's deep-rooted expertise in delivering high-quality meetings and events, Together by Hyatt advances care for meeting planners by simplifying and streamlining event planning and execution, with attendee safety and wellbeing as top priorities.

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"Throughout COVID-19, we have been intensely focused on listening to our customers and while we've heard that there are many challenges, more importantly, we've heard that planners are excited about the opportunities to come back together during recovery and beyond," said Jack Horne, global head of sales and revenue, Hyatt. "We're here to help planners explore the possibilities and reach their attendees in creative and impactful ways. As a new suite of meetings and events offerings, Together by Hyatt is designed to support planners at every step of the way as we reimagine what events can look like and collaborate to bring their vision to life."

Rooted in Hyatt's purpose to care for people so they can be their best, Together by Hyatt prioritizes four pillars that are essential to all events:

Care + Safety

Hyatt's Global Care & Cleanliness Commitment, which focuses on enhanced rigorous cleanliness and safety protocols and includes GBAC STAR Facility Accreditation and GBAC-Trained Technicians from the Global Biorisk Advisory Council (GBAC), serves as the foundation for Together by Hyatt. With safety and wellbeing as top priorities, Hyatt has taken additional steps in an effort to provide more peace of mind:

Reimagined Meeting Spaces: From socially distant room setups to signage for attendees to care stations with personal protective equipment, Hyatt has reimagined all touchpoints of the event experience.

GBAC STAR Facility Accreditation: With the requirement for all Hyatt hotels globally to secure GBAC STAR Facility Accreditation and have at least one dedicated Hygiene & Wellbeing Leader who is a GBAC-Trained Technician, planners can feel confident that Hyatt is following some of the industry's most rigorous cleanliness standards and protocols.

COVID-19 Testing and Verification: Hyatt has worked with COVID-19 testing and verification providers to enable planners to easily explore COVID-19 testing for attendees as part of their event protocol.

Care + Technology

As the driver for hybrid event capabilities, seamless and streamlined technology platforms are critically important to the overall experience. Hyatt is working with Swapcard* in an effort to offer meeting planners an exclusive opportunity to use its end-to-end virtual and hybrid events platform with hybrid meetings at hotels. Hyatt and Swapcard are working together to offer the Together by Hyatt Technology Platform Powered by Swapcard, which will provide planners with access to a bespoke platform that unifies on-site and virtual experiences and uses Swapcard's artificial intelligence to enhance remote attendees' experience. This collaboration will also allow planners to tap into Swapcard's expertise and best practices for hybrid events.

In addition to the Together by Hyatt Technology Platform Powered by Swapcard and in-house audiovisual capabilities, planners can take advantage of Hyatt's proprietary meeting tools. From virtual hotel tours that enable planners to tour a hotel from the comfort of their home or office to making requests directly to the hotel team in real time through the Event Concierge app to Group Bill, which organizes all event charges into one bill, Hyatt's robust set of event tools provides planners with more choice and flexibility at their fingertips.

*Available at participating Hyatt hotels.

Care + A Community of Experts

In a recent survey of Hyatt customers, almost half of planners expressed difficulty creating a synchronized and compelling hybrid experience. To address complexities of hybrid events and further care for planners as they navigate the new normal, Together by Hyatt offers planners the opportunity to tap into new resources and dedicated expertise surrounding hybrid events:

Hybrid Event Experts: Hyatt has introduced a new team of Hybrid Event Experts to help planners seamlessly integrate and execute virtual components of events. With this specialized skill set and deep-rooted expertise spanning events and technology, new Hybrid Event Experts will be available to help planners explore hybrid capabilities and ensure their events are shared experiences between in-person and virtual attendees.

Support Squad: Alongside the on-the-ground Hyatt team to oversee on-site event execution, a dedicated Support Squad will assist with all virtual components. From addressing real time technology questions from attendees to assisting speakers with set up, the specially trained Support Squad will provide additional peace of mind for planners throughout event execution.

Certifications for Planners: To support its most loyal customers, Hyatt is providing the opportunity for planners to be sponsored to secure training from the Global Biorisk Advisory Council, allowing them to approach event planning with the same training as Hyatt's Hygiene & Wellbeing Leaders. Additionally, Hyatt is teaming up with the Virtual Events Institute, an organization of hybrid event experts who serve the community of event professionals globally, to offer loyal planners a training course with certification to deepen their knowledge of hybrid events.

Resource Guides: As planners begin to ideate on what their next event could look and feel like, new resource guides will be available to share the possibilities at Hyatt hotels and provide inspiration.

Care + Wellbeing

COVID-19 has fundamentally shifted the importance of wellbeing, making it top of mind for many. With wellbeing at the core of its purpose of care, Hyatt is addressing this increased focus on wellbeing in new ways through Together by Hyatt:

Miraval Experiences: A new series of guided experiences featuring wellbeing experts at Hyatt's Miraval resorts will be available for planners to integrate into event agendas for meetings at all Hyatt hotels, connecting on-site and virtual attendees alike. With content that is purposely designed to serve as a break in the agenda, attendees will be able to enjoy a variety of wellbeing moments  from intention-setting activities to guided stretching exercises  throughout their event.

Headspace: Curated content from Headspace, a global leader in mindfulness and meditation, will be offered through Together by Hyatt, providing planners with a unique opportunity to care for attendees' mental wellbeing. From meditations, breathing exercises and focus music, planners will be able to make their meetings more mindful with Headspace.

Food & Beverage Offerings: With a strong reputation for food & beverage excellence, Hyatt is evolving its culinary offerings in creative ways to bring exceptional food & beverage experiences to attendees  whether on-site or remote. With services like Personal Preference that allow attendees to choose their meal once seated to providing recipe cards and shopping lists for remote attendees, food & beverage will continue to be a top contributor to attendee experience.

"While events will look and feel different, we believe there is pent-up demand to create, connect and collaborate, whether that's in-person or a hybrid format, and once again experience the joy of what it means to be together," said Steve Enselein, senior vice president of events, Hyatt. "Guided by our purpose of care, every aspect of Together by Hyatt is intended to provide a seamless experience for planners so they can focus on delivering exceptional events for attendees. We've taken strategic steps to bring safety, technology, support and wellbeing to the forefront of our offerings, and we are here to co-create the path forward, which we believe lays the foundation for a new era of events that will be more inclusive than ever before."

To learn more about Together by Hyatt and current offers, please visit hyatt.com/events.

The term "Hyatt" is used in this release for convenience to refer to Hyatt Hotels Corporation and/or one or more of its affiliates.
MILWAUKEE, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ademi LLP is investigating VEREIT (NYSE: VER) for possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law in its transaction with Realty Income.

Click here to learn how to join the action: https://www.ademilaw.com/case/vereit-inc or call Guri Ademi toll-free at 866-264-3995. There is no cost or obligation to you.

Ademi LLP alleges VEREIT's financial outlook is excellent and yet VEREIT shareholders will receive only 0.705 shares of Realty Income stock for every share of VEREIT stock they own. The merger agreement unreasonably limits competing bids for VEREIT by prohibiting solicitation of further bids, and imposing a termination penalty if VEREIT accepts a superior bid. VEREIT insiders will receive millions of dollars as part of change of control arrangements. We are investigating the conduct of VEREIT's board of directors, and whether they are (i) fulfilling their fiduciary duties to all shareholders, and (ii) obtaining a fair and reasonable price for VEREIT.

If you own VEREIT common stock and wish to obtain additional information, please contact Guri Ademi either at [email protected] or toll-free: 866-264-3995, or https://www.ademilaw.com/case/vereit-inc.

We specialize in shareholder litigation involving buyouts, mergers, and individual shareholder rights throughout the country. For more information, please feel free to call us. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contacts

Ademi LLP

Guri Ademi

Toll Free: (866) 264-3995

Fax: (414) 482-8001

SOURCE Ademi LLP
Reporters and photographers are waiting outside of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on Oct. 27, 2020. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)

NY Man Convicted of Making Death Threats Against US Lawmakers

A New York man who threatened to kill Democratic members of Congress on social media earlier this year was found guilty by a jury at a federal court in Brooklyn on April 28, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Brendan Hunt, a 37-year-old part-time actor and filmmaker from Queens who sometimes used the alias X-Ray Ultra, was found guilty of one count of threatening to assault or murder multiple U.S. officials in a video posted online, officials said in a statement.

Hunt, who will be sentenced on June 22, faces up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say members of Congress who Hunt threatened in the video included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

With todays verdict, the defendant is now a convicted felon, not for his repugnant, racist rants, but because he threatened to attack and kill members of Congress to prevent them from carrying out their constitutional duties, and that is a federal crime, stated Mark Lesko, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District.

This Office will not tolerate threats of violence against public officials who are entrusted with upholding the Constitution.

Hunt was accused of posting the video on Bitchute two days after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot. The video was entitled: KILL YOUR SENATORS, with the summary line, Slaughter them all, according to a criminal complaint (pdf).

Theyre going to come after us, theyre going to kill us, so we have to kill them first, Hunt allegedly says in the video.

We need to go back to the U.S. Capitol when all of the Senators and a lot of the Representatives are back there, and this time we have to show up with our guns. And we need to slaughter these [expletive], he said, according to the complaint.

Our government at this point is basically a handful of traitors  so what you need to do is take up arms, get to D.C., probably the inauguration  so-called inauguration of this [expletive] communist Joe Biden  Thats probably the best time to do this, get your guns, show up to D.C., and literally just spray these [expletive], he said, according to the complaint.

Hunt also called on then-President Donald Trump to hold a public execution of Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi, and Schumer, saying that if he doesnt, the citizenry will.

Start up the firing squads, mow down these commies, and lets take america back! he said, according to the complaint.

Jan Rostal, the defense attorney for Hunt, told jurors her client was a registered Democrat who voted for former President Barack Obama, but later was disappointed by his Middle East policies. Rostal said Hunt became politically active online to support Trumps efforts to challenge Novembers election results.

During his trial, Hunt told the court he didnt really mean what he said in the videos and regretted the language he used, adding that he is a pretty immature 37-year-old.

I had a lot of time to think in prison. Ive been in prison for three months. A lot of that in solitary confinement, he said, CNN reported. And I had to come to grips with the fact that a lot of my language was very inappropriate, it was irresponsible, careless, and immature in a lot of ways.

Tom Ozimek and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

From NTD News
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Land productivity could be greatly increased by combining sheep grazing and solar energy production on the same land, according to new research by Oregon State University scientists.

This is believed to be the first study to investigate livestock production under agrivoltaic systems, where solar energy production is combined with agricultural production, such as planting agricultural crops or grazing animals.

The researchers compared lamb growth and pasture production in pastures with solar panels and traditional open pastures. They found less overall but higher quality forage in the solar pastures and that lambs raised in each pasture type gained similar amounts of weight. The solar panels, of course, provide value in terms of energy production, which increases the overall productivity of the land.

Solar panels also benefit the welfare of the lambs by providing shade, which allows the animals to preserve energy. Also lamb grazing alleviates the need to manage plant growth under the solar panels through herbicides or regular mowing, which require extra labor and costs.

"The results from the study support the benefits of agrivoltaics as a sustainable agricultural system," said Alyssa Andrew, a master's student at Oregon State who is the lead author of the paper published in Frontier in Sustainable Food Systems.

Solar photovoltaic installation in the U.S. has increased by an average of 48% per year over the past decade, and current capacity is expected to double again over the next five years, the researchers say.

Past research has found that grasslands and croplands in temperate regions are the best places to install solar panels for maximum energy production. However, energy production in photovoltaic systems requires large areas of land, potentially causing a competition between agricultural uses.

Agrivoltaics looks to diffuse that competition by measuring the economic value of energy production and agricultural use of the same land. Past research has focused on crops and solar panels and found that some crops, particularly types that like shade, can be more productive in combination with solar panels.

Another recent Oregon State study found that shade provided by solar panels increased the abundance of flowers under the panels and delayed the timing of their bloom, both findings that could aid the agricultural community.

The just-published study with lambs and solar panels was carried out in 2019 and 2020 at Oregon State's campus in Corvallis. Findings included:

The lambs gained almost the same amount of weight in the two pasture types in both years.

The daily water consumption of the lambs in the two pasture types in spring 2019 were similar during early spring, but lambs in open pastures consumed more water than those grazed under solar panels in the late spring period. There was no difference observed in water intake of the lambs in spring 2020.

Over the two years, solar pastures produced 38% less forage than open pastures.

Overall, the return from grazing was $1,046 per hectare (one hectare equals 2.47 acres) per year in open pastures and $1,029 per hectare per year in pastures with solar panels.

"The overall return is about the same, and that doesn't take into account the energy the solar panels are producing," said Serkan Ates, an assistant professor in the Oregon State's Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences and a co-author of the paper. "And if we designed the system to maximize production we would likely get even better numbers."

Andrew is now working on a follow up to this study where she is quantifying the forage and lamb production from three different pasture types under solar panels.

###

In addition to Andrew and Ates, several colleagues from the Oregon State College of Agricultural Sciences co-authored the paper: Mary Smallman of the Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences and Chad Higgins and Maggie Graham of the Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering.

The Agricultural Research Foundation at Oregon State funded the research.
Car production in the UK rose in March for the first time after 18 consecutive months of decline, according to the latest vehicle manufacturing figures published today.

Outputs were up by almost 50 per cent compared to the same month a year ago, when factories were forced to close down operations as a result of the pandemic.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders described the growth as a 'major step in the right direction' but warned that manufacturers face a fresh challenge in the shape of the worldwide shortage of semi-conductors.

Car manufacturing ramps up: Production increased by 46.6% in March as most factories return to near full-scale operations. It's the first year-on-year rise in outputs recorded following 18 month of decline

There has been a significant shift in the cars coming out of Britain's automotive plants.

More than one in five (21.5 per cent) cars built last month were either battery electric or hybrid models, up from 13.7 per cent a year before, as the UK steps up its efforts to be a leader in low-emission vehicles.

UK car production officially rose by 46.6 per cent in March 2021 - the first increase in motor manufacturing since August 2019.

A total of 115,498 units emerged from Britain's car factory assembly lines last month as sites returned to near full-scale operation on the year anniversary of restrictions in light of the pandemic.

This was a substantial increase on the 78,767 vehicle output a year earlier - though it was also the first month when the coronavirus crisis hit the UK and caused all auto plants to be shuttered to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Looking back 24 months, March 2021's output was just 8.5 per cent down on the manufacturing numbers achieved in the third month of 2019.

However, compared to the five-year March average, production was down 22.8 per cent, equivalent to a loss of 34,047 units. It was also also almost a third (32.1 per cent) lower than the record output in March 2017.

The new figures also confirmed a 4 per cent decline in car manufacturing in the first quarter of 2021 with 306,558 units produced, 12,694 less than a year before.

Almost 115,000 new cars left UK factories last month. While 2020's figure (78,767) was hugely impacted by the first coronavirus lockdown, looking back 24 months shows that last month's output was just 8.5% down in comparison

The Covid-19 pandemic has spearheaded the huge downward shift in UK vehicle production. March '21 is the first month of growth since August 2019

Production for the domestic market rose 19.4 per cent, but it was the 54.1 per cent uplift in orders for export that fuelled the increase, with 95,229 units in total built for overseas markets.

Exports to the EU, US and Asia were all up in March, by 33.5 per cent, 36.4 per cent and 54.1 per cent respectively, as a number of global economies gradually climb their way out of the pandemic.

The EU remained by far the number one market for UK made cars, with more than half (51.9 per cent) of all exported cars heading across the channel.

With car showrooms allowed to reopen as of 12 April, we are likely to see an increase in home demand for new models built in the UK. In March, more than four in five British-built new cars were exported

Commenting on the figures, Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said: 'The first rise for UK car production since summer 2019 is a major step in the right direction but belies the underlying situation.

'With factories shut for much of March 2020, output was always going to be up but it remains below average, with some 11billion worth of production lost over the past year.'

Computer chip shortage threatens sector recovery

Hawes also pointed to the latest threat to vehicle manufacturers' recovery from the pandemic - the global shortage of computer chips.

'Whilst the Covid situation is improving in the UK and in some major export markets, manufacturers are still struggling to manage residual issues, most notably the global semiconductor shortage,' he said.

Jaguar Land Rover has this week suspended production at its Castle Bromwich and Halewood factories due to disruption to the chip supply chain.

The worldwide shortage of semi-conductors has been caused by US-China trade tensions and increased demand, with the chips used in electronics like computers and other devices experiencing high orders with more people working from home.

US-China trade tensions and supply disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are causing a worldwide shortage of computer chips

In a statement issued last week, JLR said: 'Like other automotive manufacturers, we are currently experiencing some Covid-19 supply chain disruption, including the global availability of semi-conductors, which is having an impact on our production schedules and our ability to meet global demand for some of our vehicles.

'As a result, we have adjusted production schedules for certain vehicles which means that our Castle Bromwich and Halewood manufacturing plants will be operating a limited period of non-production from Monday 26th April.

'We are working closely with affected suppliers to resolve the issues and minimise the impact on customer orders wherever possible.'

Massimilano Messina, automotive lead at KPMG, says manufacturers had hoped that the semiconductor shortages would be resolved by now, but the issue is forcing more into plant shutdowns.

'Some are not expecting normal service to resume until the end of the year, suggesting that a drag on production is likely in the near-term,' he told This is Money.

'While reports that carmakers are contemplating stripping old washing machines for chips should be taken with a pinch of salt, it points to the level of concern in the sector.

'Add the shortages of chemical products to the mix along with price rises for rubber, oil and steel, and the return to pre-pandemic production volumes could be pushed back to as late as 2023.'

Jaguar Land Rover has this week suspended production at its Castle Bromwich and Halewood factories due to the disruption to the chip supply chain

The SMMT also warned that Brexit-related trade issues also threaten the sector's recovery, especially with UK production heavily reliant on its export stream

The SMMT also warned that Brexit-related trade issues threaten the sector's ability to bounce back from one of its darkest periods in recent history, especially with UK production heavily reliant on its export stream.

Its latest member survey found that nine-in-ten (91 per cent) of automotive businesses are spending more time and resource managing UK/EU trade than in 2020 and more than a third (36 per cent) already devoting more resource to rest of the world trade.

'Companies are already having to absorb additional costs arising from our new trading arrangements with the EU, but must also invest in new technologies, new processes and upskilling the workforce,' Hawes said.

'A competitive business environment that helps reduce operating costs and policies that support manufacturing will be essential if the transition to zero is to be Made in the UK.'
On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, the smartphone update that Facebook fears.

The operating system upgrade includes improvements like a Face ID thats better attuned to face masks, as well as more convenient interoperability between Siri and various music apps. Whats generating the most discussion, though, is a tool called App Tracking Transparency, which allows users to prevent apps from sharing identifiable personal data with third parties. The tool, billed as a major step forward for user privacy, could roil the digital ads industry, whose major players often track users as they move between apps on their phones. The update shouldve shown up on your iPhone by now; if you werent prompted to download it, go to Software Update under your general settings. Its a milestone for the consumer web and a possible blow to social medias business model, which depends on selling highly personalized advertising. Theres one hitch: Even when you turn it on, you might not notice a single thing has changed.

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Whenever you download an app using iOS 14.5, a notification will appear asking whether you want to allow it to track your activity across other companies apps and websites. You can either select Ask App Not to Track or Allow. You can also opt in or out of tracking for an app at any time by navigating to the Privacy menu in the devices settings and clicking on Tracking. From there youll see a list of apps alongside switches you can toggle to turn the tool on or off. Asking an app not to track you means that it isnt allowed to transmit any of the identifiable location, contact, health, browsing history, or other info that it collected on you with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else who might be interested in learning more about you. This should prevent, say, Facebook from serving you ads on grills based on the fact that you were searching for them on Chrome. Apps wont be able to combine data they gather on you with information collected elsewhere by third parties.

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It might seem like a fairly unremarkable feature, but App Tracking Transparency has the potential to reorient users relationships with their personal data, primarily by making the tracking opt-in. Prior to iOS 14.5, users did have the ability to limit the data that apps shared, but the default was to allow tracking, and you had to proactively check the settings to turn it off. Having the apps themselves ask this question upfront is an important aspect of the shift. Its not just giving users the choice, said Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the internet-rights advocacy group. Its forcing these app developers to ask permission and possibly just stop tracking preemptively so they dont have this scary permission associated with their app. Theres a whole industry built around targeting ads using personal data, and if enough people start regularly opting out of tracking, Apples new tool could frustrate many of the businesses in this space. Facebook, in particular, is expecting the tool to have a small but noticeable effect on its revenue and has been taking out full-page ads characterizing Apples move as hurting small businesses. During the companys quarterly earnings call in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg accused Apple of trying to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.

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However, if you turn tracking off for everything, will there be any actual differences in how you use your apps or what ads you see? According to Gebhart, it might not be so clear-cut. For instance, if youre searching for grills on Chrome and then see ads for them on Facebook, that doesnt necessarily mean that the tool isnt doing its job. The ad-targeting ecosystem is so complex and multilayered that there are a number of ways that Facebook could determine that you want a grill just from your activity through first-party tracking on its own app. The platform could gather that youre a middle-aged man who just bought a house in the suburbs at the beginning of the summer and determine that its likely that youre in the market for a grill without ever looking at your Chrome browsing history. In other words, there probably wont be any noticeable signs indicating that the tool is or isnt working. Youll know in theory that apps shouldnt be swapping your data amongst themselves, but it likely wont look all that different in practice.

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This opacity is partly meant to make the user experience simpler. Being constantly exposed to the under-the-hood mechanics of the apps on your phone could be overwhelming. At the same time, though, keeping all this tracking hidden serves to obscure just how much of your personal info your apps are collecting and sharing. Apples new tool adds some more transparencyand thus frictionback into the equation, but theres still a lot you wont really be able to see. Theres so much going on under the surface that advertisers and data brokers dont want you to see, and all of the sudden Apple is forcing some of that above the surface, but its hard to say what to look for to know whether App Tracking Transparency is working, Gebhart said, adding that users will continue to be at a disadvantage in trying to maintain their privacy online because of this dramatic information asymmetry. Still, one change that could result from Apples move is more chicanery from the data-hoovering business, which will need to find more creative ways to build profiles of internet users that can help advertisers target consumers. Thats why Gebhart says shell track which apps, if any, Apple decides to kick off its store for violating the tracking rules and any changes in strategy that companies in the digital ads industry are making.

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With Apple acting as an unofficial regulator of user privacy, how will companies that want your data cope? It helps to understand how Apples update works. The main mechanism for controlling cross-app tracking is to limit access to whats known as an Identifier for Advertising (or IDFA). The identifier essentially allows apps to combine data they directly collect on certain smartphone users with information collected by third parties elsewhere, like on the web. If you switch App Tracking Transparency off, the app wont get access to the devices IDFA. There are, however, loopholes that apps could potentially use try to identify someone without an IDFA. One method, known as fingerprinting, involves using other characteristics of your device like the model and screen resolution to follow you across the web. Under Apples policies, though, using this and other unsanctioned tracking methods could lead an app to get kicked off of the App Store. In fact, the company sent warnings in March to developers in China who were trying to create a new way of tracking users with an alternate ID system backed by the countrys advertising association.

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Many of these problems are policy problems, said Serge Egelman, a research director at the University of California, Berkeleys International Computer Science Institute, who added that Apple cant simply relying on technology to mechanistically restrict IDFA access. In order for this new feature to work, it has to make it clear to developers that trying to track people in other ways will result in enforcement actions. The issue is that the technology would need to anticipate every possible way that information that could be used to identify the user could be transmitted. Constantly sweeping through apps would likely be necessary to enforce the policy.

Again, a typical user wont be able to determine whether one of their apps is breaking the rules. Its really only Apple or highly skilled researchers who could effectively monitor any shady data collection. Egelman noted that even if a typical consumer were able to see the traffic going in and out of an app, it would look like inscrutable strings of numbers and letters. Even someone with some nonspecialized programming knowledge would have a tough time catching everything because some of the information is purposefully hidden. One of the problems is that there have been a lot of advances in securitygood advances aimed at protecting usersthat make it a lot harder to intercept the traffic, which at the same time we need to do to see whats in it, said Egelman. Most of the time youd need a special device that monitors app traffic be able to get around those protections. In the end, laypeople will have to depend on apps to follow the rules, on Apple and independent researchers to be on the lookout for rule-breaking, and on Facebook and data-brokers not to get too clever about finding new ways to track us.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
One has to be careful around tar: while tarring the other, one may besmear one's own self.

This, to judge by the New York Times article on the 213-page Human Rights Watch report accusing Israel of apartheid, is exactly what HRW tried to do  smear Israel with racism while avoiding the equally toxic accusations of anti-Semitism.

As follows from the Times article, this proved a tough, and largely unsuccessful act.

To an average person, the word "apartheid" is associated with the universally condemned and long abandoned South African treatment of blacks. It is a potent word (which is why HRW badly wanted to use it on Israel), but is also highly problematic, catching HRW in the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the word has huge explosive power because, as the Times elegantly put it, "apartheid, with its connotations of forced segregation, police shootings and racist ideology, has a special sting"  yet it is simply inapplicable to Israeli policy toward Palestinians, which is driven by security considerations resulting from Palestinian animus, intransigence, and terrorism.

So to HRW, the word "apartheid" is irresistible  but its use is unjustified. What to do?

This is where the ages-long technique of speaking out of both corners of the mouth came to the rescue. To the more informed and intelligent, and therefore more squeamish, it was told that "HRW in its report takes pains to separate its list of grievances from the horrors of South Africa" and that "Human Rights Watch does not draw a direct comparison with the notorious South African regime that segregated and subjugated people according to their skin color."

The uninformed, however, are naturally left free to "draw a direct comparison with the notorious South African regime," the comparison that "has a special sting." At least insofar as the uninformed are concerned, HRW report's task of tarring Israel apparently succeeded.

Except that it didn't. HRW's doublespeak had not gone unnoticed, and Israelis reacted strongly: "The mendacious apartheid slur is indicative of an organization that has been plagued for years by systemic anti-Israel bias," said Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Regev added: "To allege that Israeli policies are motivated by racism is both baseless and outrageous, and belittles the very real security threats posed by Palestinian terrorists to Israeli civilians  whose fundamental human rights to live in freedom and security are callously ignored by HRW." Israel's ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan, said the report bordered on anti-Semitism. "When the authors of the report cynically and falsely use the term apartheid, they nullify the legal and social status of millions of Israeli citizens, including Arab citizens, who are an integral part of the state of Israel," he said.

So, the question becomes, is Israel guilty of apartheid, or is Human Rights Watch, of anti-Semitism? Since it is certainly not the former, I wonder whether the HRW, in its excitement of getting at Israel, reached too far into its barrel of tar and accidentally besmeared its own self  with anti-Semitism.

Image: HRW.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Press Release

29 April 2021

CANCUN, MEXICO - The world's leading Tourism Ministers joined together to urge the public and private sectors to work together in partnership to save Travel & Tourism at the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

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The plea came at the Global Leaders Dialogue session at WTTC's annual Global Summit 2021, which is being held in Cancun Mexico this week.

Key ministers and business leaders participated in the event, which enabled those taking part in the forum to discuss how the Travel & Tourism sector could safely revive international travel and help generate the global economic recovery.

Facilitated by prominent US travel journalist Peter Greenberg, the ministers looked back over the last year and shared how devastating the pandemic had been for the sector and how vital it was that action be taken now to arrest the collapse of businesses and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

However, the ministers attending the event with senior Travel & Tourism business leaders agreed that the need for close public and private collaboration would be key to the sector reviving the global economy.

This was the second major meeting this year between the two sectors, since the private sector was invited to attend an historic meeting of G20 tourism ministers for the first time.

Gloria Guevara, WTTC President & CEO, said: "The seriousness of the impact of COVID-19 cannot be overestimated. WTTC research shows this crisis has been 18 times worse than the 2008 financial crash."

"But WTTC has worked tirelessly with its Members to find solutions to revive the sector and save millions of jobs globally which have been lost and the terrible social impact of their disappearance."

"The debate today enabled leading Ministers to share their thoughts about how the sector can tackle the pressing issues of how to save jobs, save businesses and save the global economy by safely reviving international travel."

"It was hugely encouraging to see there was common agreement by all those attending that collaboration and cooperation between the public and private sector, would lead the way for revival of international travel."

"This will be critical to powering the world's recovery, so we are indebted to those ministers who joined us today to be part of this amazing event and help kickstart our Global Summit and energise the sector to unite and make a difference."

Among those participating in WTTC's Global Leaders Dialogue were Harry Theocharis, Minister of Tourism, Greece who championed the public sector's lead to provide a roadmap out of the COVID-19 Crisis.

Kevin McAleenan, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, said it was vital the international community laid down parameters and followed through at the governmental level, advocating a pragmatic risk-management approach to resuscitate international travel.

Portuguese Secretary of State for Tourism, Rita Marques, said the sector must avoid taking short-term decisions and instead advocated the development of a long-term strategy by government and private companies.

Colombian Vice Minister of Tourism, Julian Guerrero Orozco, warned against the prolonged use of 'health passports', which create a danger of first and second class travellers and become a real barrier to travel.

Also participating were Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism, Fernando Valdes Verelst, Nicole Marrder, Minister of Tourism of Honduras and Edmund Bartlett, Minister of Tourism for Jamaica.

Mexico was represented by Carlos Joaquin Gonzalez, Governor of Quintana Roo and Federal Secretary of Tourism, Miguel Torruco Marques.

The private sector was represented by some of the world's top Travel & Tourism companies, including Andrea Grisdale, Chief Executive Officer and Sole Founder of IC Bellagio and Dan Richards, Chief Executive Officer of Global Rescue.

Fawaz Farooqui, Managing Director of Cruise Saudi also participated, along with Kike Sarasola, President & Founder of Room Mate, Luis Felipe de Oliveira, Director General of Airports Council International (ACI) and Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio di Balsorano de Clunieres, Chairman of Abercrombie & Kent.

Under the theme "Uniting the World for Recovery", the Global Summit made history by becoming the first global Travel & Tourism event where leaders gathered in person since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the sector and brought most major events around the world to a grinding halt in March 2020.

Visit our online photo gallery for more pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/worldtravelandtourismcouncil/.

Or catch up on any sessions missed via our virtual platform or YouTube.
Bottom line: A deal of this caliber is unusual for a major contract chipmaker, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The ongoing global chip shortage, caused in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, has forced a rethink across many industries and this is just one example of one companys way to keep the wheels moving.

United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), one of the worlds largest contract chipmakers, has announced plans to expand capacity at its 300mm Fab 12A facility in Tainan, Taiwan.

UMC said it has worked out an agreement with several of its leading customers thatll guarantee long-term chip supply in exchange for upfront deposits and pre-set pricing. Phase six, as the program is being called, will be equipped with mature 28nm tools that can later be swapped for 14nm gear to accommodate future roadmaps.

Fab 12A is currently churning out around 90,000 300mm wafers per month (wpm). An additional 10,000 wpm is being installed this year and phase six will add another 27,500 wpm to the mix.

UMC said it is also expecting to hire an additional 1,000 employees to help support the effort. The total cost of the P6 expansion is earmarked at NT$100 billion, or around $3.6 billion.

TSMC, the worlds largest chipmaker, said earlier this month that it would be investing over $100 billion across the next three years to boost manufacturing capacity and expand R&D efforts.

Image credit Macro photo, Glitterstudio
By Andrew Osborn and Lisandra Paraguassu

MOSCOW/BRASILIA (Reuters) - The Russian developer of the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine said on Thursday it would sue the Brazilian health regulator Anvisa for defamation, prompting a stern rebuttal from the agency.

Anvisa's board on Monday denied requests by Brazilian states to approve Sputnik V for import. The agency's manager for medicines and biological products, Gustavo Mendes, said there was evidence an adenovirus used in the vaccine could reproduce, which he called a "serious" defect.

Adenoviruses - a category of viruses that can cause a range of illnesses in humans like the common cold - are sometimes repurposed as viral vectors for vaccines. Such viral vectors are often used to transport genetic material for a protein - in this case, from the novel coronavirus - to elicit an immune response from vaccinated individuals.

However, global health guidelines warn against "replication-competent adenoviruses" (RCA) that could multiply inside a patient's body, possibly creating a negative reaction.

Denis Logunov, who developed Sputnik V at Russia's Gamaleya Institute, denied on Tuesday that the two adenoviruses used to produce the vaccine could replicate.

Sputnik V's official Twitter account on Thursday quoted Mendes, who cited Gamaleya Institute's test results at a public hearing on Monday as the basis to deny an import license.

"Following the admission of Brazilian regulator Anvisa that it did not test Sputnik V vaccine, Sputnik V is undertaking a legal defamation proceeding in Brazil against Anvisa for knowingly spreading false and inaccurate information," the Sputnik V tweet said.

"Anvisa made incorrect and misleading statements without having tested the actual Sputnik V vaccine."

In a press conference on Thursday, Anvisa officials rejected the "grave accusation" and insisted the Gamaleya Institute's own paperwork flagged potentially risky levels of RCA in the finished vaccine.

"The data presented by the Gamaleya Institute show the presence and acceptance of the replicating virus in the finished product," said Anvisa's Mendes in a Thursday briefing. "That specification is 300 times higher than the highest regulatory threshold we could find."

(Editing by Brad Haynes, Aurora Ellis and Kevin Liffey)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:41:24|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Extreme weather conditions killed a total of 1,048,000 heads of livestock across Mongolia in the first quarter of this year, the country's statistics office said Thursday.

Lack of grass for livestock due to a bad summer in 2020, extreme wintry weather known as dzud, and heavy snow and dust storms are the main causes of the animal deaths, said Nyamsuren Ulziikhand, a statistician at the National Statistics Office.

Almost half of the livestock deaths occurred in the southwestern Mongolian province of Bayankhongor, which is one of the provinces most affected by desertification, said Ulziikhand.

Over 88 percent of the dead animals were goats and sheep.

Animal husbandry is the backbone of the landlocked country's economy as nearly 40 percent of its nomads depend on animal husbandry for their livelihoods.

Mongolia had 67.1 million heads of livestock at the end of 2020, according to the statistical agency. Enditem
She's the stylist-to-the-stars who won the nation's heart with her quirky sense of humour on Locky Gilbert's season of The Bachelor last year.

And Juliette Herrera turned plenty of heads on Thursday as she arrived for the Perfect Plate Contest Launch at City Tattersalls Club in Sydney's CBD.

The brunette bombshell, 34, stunned in a low-cut animal-print dress which showcased her figure to perfection.

Show-stopper: The Bachelor's Juliette Herrera turned plenty of heads on Thursday as she arrived for the Perfect Plate Contest Launch at City Tattersalls Club in Sydney's CBD

Juliette completed her glamorous look with black heeled sandals and statement drop earrings, and styled her raven locks straight.

She appeared to be having a great time at the culinary event, mingling with other guests, sipping champagne and preening for the camera.

It comes after the reality star told Draw Your Box she was 'relieved' to learn a culturally diverse suitor had been chosen for the next Bachelor.

Glamorous: The brunette bombshell, 34, stunned in a low-cut animal-print dress which showcased her figure to perfection

The details: Juliette completed her glamorous look with black heeled sandals and statement drop earrings, and styled her raven locks straight

Socialising: She appeared to be having a great time at the culinary event, mingling with other guests, sipping champagne and preening for the camera. Pictured with Emma Roche

Diversity: It comes after the reality star told Draw Your Box she was 'relieved' to learn a culturally diverse suitor had been chosen for the next Bachelor

Juliette, who describes herself on Instagram as an 'Aussie Latina', said casting Jimmy Nicholson showed Channel 10 and Warner Bros. Australia were 'finally listening to audiences who have been... demanding for more diverse representation' for years.

She also noted that 'whether we like it or not our skin can be political', and that means Jimmy, 31, will be representing minority Australians regardless of whether his cultural background forms a part of his journey to finding love.

Pilot Jimmy who is of New Zealand and Fijian descent, is the first non-white Bachelor since Blake Garvey, whose father is African American, fronted the series in 2014.

Diverse: Pilot Jimmy Nicholson who is of New Zealand and Fijian descent, is the first non-white Bachelor since Blake Garvey, whose father is African American, fronted the series in 2014

Representation: Juliette, who describes herself on Instagram as an 'Aussie Latina', said casting Jimmy showed Channel 10 and Warner Bros. Australia were 'finally listening to audiences who have been... demanding for more diverse representation' for years

Sri Lankan-born Niranga Amarasinghe, from the 2019 season of The Bachelorette, said Jimmy to 'be prepared' for racism when he makes his debut later this year.

But the aircraft engineer said he was confident someone in Jimmy's position 'can easily stand up to anyone with confidence'.

It comes after Channel 10 content boss Beverley McGarvey said in March it wasn't easy finding diverse contestants for The Bachelor.

Views: She also noted that 'whether we like it or not our skin can be political', and that means Jimmy, 31, will be representing minority Australians regardless of whether his cultural background forms a part of his journey to finding love

'It's a particular type of show, and there are certain cultural groups that don't want to be part of that,' she told TV Tonight.

Ms McGarvey added: 'That is absolutely fine and it is disrespectful of us to try and encourage particular groups to be part of something they don't want to be part of.'

Niranga had made similar comments in July last year, telling News.com.au 'there are less POC [people of colour] auditioning for reality TV' for cultural and family reasons.

Experience: Sri Lankan-born Niranga Amarasinghe, from the 2019 season of The Bachelorette, told Draw Your Box 'there will always be racism but we have to be prepared for it'. However, he added he was confident someone like Jimmy 'can easily stand up to anyone with confidence'

'For the ones who do [apply] and are successful, there is another hurdle an individual has to conquer to actually make it to the filming stage,' he explained.

'They have to convince their families they are happy for them to go on reality TV. POC individuals can have very strict cultural backgrounds which don't always allow this kind of public display.'

Channel 10 officially announced Jimmy as Australia's new Bachelor last month.

Cultural barriers: It comes after Channel 10 content boss Beverley McGarvey said in March it wasn't easy finding diverse contestants for The Bachelor. 'It's a particular type of show, and there are certain cultural groups that don't want to be part of that,' she told TV Tonight

He told Sydney Confidential he'd signed up for the role because his career as a commercial airline pilot had made it difficult for him to find a long-term partner.

'I was never in the same spot for too long,' he explained.

The Bachelor's ninth season will air on Channel 10 later this year
IRVINE, Calif., April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a release issued under the same headline earlier today by Lantronix (NASDAQ: LTRX), please note that the timespan in the third bullet has been changed to an 18-month period. In addition, a sentence was added stating that Silicon Valley Bank and SVB Capital provided a commitment for acquisition financing. The corrected release follows:

Transaction brings increased scale and operating efficiencies to Lantronix; combined annual revenue expected to exceed $100 million



Adds complementary switching, PoE and media conversion technologies to Lantronix IoT connectivity portfolio

Anticipates $7 million in annualized expense synergies to be implemented over 18-month period following close of transaction

Expects day-one accretion to earnings (excluding acquisition-related costs), with significant contribution to earnings in the first full year

Announces conference call to discuss the acquisition



Lantronix Inc. (Lantronix) (NASDAQ: LTRX), a global provider of Software as a Service (SaaS), connectivity services, engineering services, intelligent hardware and turnkey solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Remote Environment Management (REM), today announced that it has entered into a definitive Securities Purchase Agreement to acquire Transition Networks and Net2Edge, which comprises the Electronics and Software reportable business segment of Communications Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: JCS) (CSI).

Under the terms of the agreement, Lantronix will pay CSI a base price of $25.0 million, subject to customary working capital adjustments following closing, plus an earn out of up to $7.0 million, based on revenue milestones for the two 180-day periods following closing of the securities purchase agreement. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and CSI shareholder approval and is expected to close in June or July of 2021.

The transaction will bring immediate scale to Lantronix, with the revenues from the combined company expected to total more than $100 million on an annual basis. The acquisition will bring complementary IoT connectivity products and capabilities, including switching, Power over Ethernet (PoE) and media conversion and adapter products. Lantronix sees significant operating and product development synergies in the combined company and expects the acquisition will be immediately accretive upon closing and significantly accretive in the first full year of operations. Lantronix will have further commentary on synergies, accretion and non-GAAP EPS expectations upon closing.

Story continues

The acquisition of Transition Networks and Net2Edge demonstrates our continuing commitment to deliver incremental growth and shareholder value through acquisition, stated Paul Pickle, president and CEO of Lantronix. In this transaction, we added significant revenue scale and operating model efficiencies while adding a highly complementary Industrial IoT connectivity product offering targeting Smart City infrastructure with significant long-term revenue synergy opportunities. We expect this acquisition will be accretive immediately upon closing, and we will drive synergies throughout our model to deliver increased cash flow for future acquisitions and for the benefit of our shareholders.

Lantronix will host an investor conference call and audio webcast at 5:00 a.m. Pacific Time (8:00 a.m. Eastern Time) on Thursday, April 29, 2021. To access the live conference call, investors should register before the call at the following link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7605844611974218768

Silicon Valley Bank, the bank of the worlds most innovative companies and their investors, along with SVB Capital, provided a commitment for acquisition financing.

OMelveny & Myers LLP served as legal advisor to Lantronix.

About Lantronix

Lantronix Inc. is a global provider of Software as a Service (SaaS), connectivity services, engineering services, intelligent hardware and turnkey solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Remote Environment Management (REM). Lantronix enables its customers to provide reliable and secure IoT Intelligent Edge and OOBM solutions while accelerating time to market. Lantronixs products and services dramatically simplify the creation, development, deployment and management of IoT projects while providing quality, reliability and security across hardware, software and solutions.

With three decades of proven experience in creating robust IoT technologies and OOBM solutions, Lantronix is an innovator in enabling its customers to build new business models, leverage greater efficiencies and realize the possibilities of the Internet of Things. Lantronixs solutions are deployed inside millions of machines at data centers, offices and remote sites serving a wide range of industries, including energy, agriculture, medical, security, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, retail, financial, environmental and government.

Lantronix is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. For more information, visit www.lantronix.com.

Learn more at the Lantronix blog, www.lantronix.com/blog, featuring industry discussion and updates. To follow Lantronix on Twitter, please visit www.twitter.com/Lantronix. View our video library on YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/LantronixInc or connect with us on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/lantronix.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Statements that are not strictly historical statements constitute forward-looking statements and may often, but not always, be identified by the use of such words such as expects, believes, intends, anticipates, plans, estimates, potential, possible, or probable or statements that certain actions, events or results may, will, should, or could be taken, occur or be achieved. The forward-looking statements in this press release include, among others, statements about the expected benefits of the proposed acquisitions pursuant to the SPA (the Transaction), including expected synergies in the combined company, to Lantronix and its stockholders, the anticipated completion of the proposed Transaction or the timing thereof, the accretive nature of the proposed Transaction and expected future operating results of the combined company. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and analyses made by Lantronix and its management in light of experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors appropriate under the circumstances. However, whether actual results and developments will conform to expectations is subject to a number of material risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to: the ability to obtain CSI shareholder approval of the proposed Transaction; the ability of Lantronix to obtain the necessary financing on terms acceptable to it; the receipt of required regulatory approvals of the proposed Transaction; the ability to complete the proposed Transaction on anticipated terms and timetable; Lantronixs ability to integrate the acquired businesses successfully after the Transaction and achieve anticipated benefits from it; the possibility that various closing conditions for the Transaction may not be satisfied or waived; risks relating to any unforeseen liabilities of the acquired businesses; the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against any of the parties in connection with the proposed Transaction; any loss of management or key personnel; the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the emergence of new strains of the virus and the impact of vaccination efforts, on the combined companies business, employees, supply and distribution chains and the global economy; and any additional factors included in Lantronixs Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) on September 11, 2020, including in the section entitled Risk Factors in Item 1A of Part I of such report; its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2020, filed with the SEC on February 12, 2021, including in the section entitled Risk Factors in Item 1A of Part II of such report; and in the Companys other public filings with the SEC. In addition, actual results may differ as a result of additional risks and uncertainties of which Lantronix management is currently unaware or does not currently view as material to the Companys business. For these reasons, investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements Lantronix makes speak only as of the date on which they are made. Lantronix undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements except as required by law or the rules of the Nasdaq Stock Market, LLC.

 2021 Lantronix, Inc. All rights reserved. Lantronix is a registered trademark, and EMG and ConsoleFlow are trademarks of Lantronix Inc. Other trademarks and trade names are those of their respective owners.

Lantronix Media Contact:

Gail Kathryn Miller

Corporate Marketing &

Communications Manager

media@lantronix.com

949-453-7158

Lantronix Analyst and Investor Contact:

Jeremy Whitaker

Chief Financial Officer

investors@lantronix.com

949-450-7241

Lantronix Sales:

sales@lantronix.com

Americas +1 (800) 422-7055 (US and Canada) or +1 949-453-3990

Europe, Middle East and Africa +31 (0)76 52 36 744

Asia Pacific + 852 3428-2338

China + 86 21-6237-8868

Japan +81 (0) 50-1354-6201

India +91 994-551-2488








Ministers turned a blind eye to the negative impact of forcing children to wear face masks in schools, leaked documents show.

It has been mandatory since March for secondary school pupils in England to wear coverings when social distancing is not possible, including in classes and corridors.

That is despite teenagers being at a very low risk of Covid and millions of tests being deployed in schools every week.

Public Health England documents seen by The Telegraph said officials 'expressly did not consider any potential disbenefits of the policy' prior to its introduction.

Campaign groups say they have received multiple reports of children suffering both mental and physical harm as a result of wearing a mask for up to eight hours a day.

UsForThem said it 'beggars belief' that ministers brought in the measure without 'the usual rigour of an public health intervention'.

The group warned children's health and education were being put in jeopardy by the policy, with a number of cases of children becoming irritable, losing concentration and suffering from facial rashes, headaches and nausea.

There is growing pressure for No10 to drop the controversial intervention, originally meant to be temporary, due to the vanishingly low Covid rates in schools. Pupils are already required to take a lateral flow test twice a week.

There is still little evidence that schools are a hotbed for the virus, with the latest PHE data showing there were just 13 clusters of respiratory infections in the week up to April 22. For comparison there were 25 in offices and workplaces, where masks are not always mandatory.

Ministers did not consider the negative impact of forcing children to wear masks in schools, leaked documents show. Year 11 students, wearing face coverings, take part in a GCSE science class at Park Lane Academy in Halifax on March 8

Latest PHE data showing there were just 13 clusters of respiratory infections in the week up to April 22. For comparison there were 25 in offices and workplaces, where masks are not always mandatory. The data includes all respiratory viruses and is not strictly limited to Covid, although due to social distancing measures there is very little other viral illnesses circulating

Boris Johnson announced in February that when schools went back in March, secondary pupils would need to wear masks at all times indoors when social distancing was not possible - including in classrooms and corridors.

He claimed it was only a temporary measure that would be reviewed by Easter, but that has been pushed back to May 17 at the earliest.

Primary school pupils read tougher books during lockdown due to boredom Primary school pupils read more challenging books during lockdown  because they were bored. When the reading habits of more than 1.1million pupils across the UK and Ireland were analysed for the annual What Kids Are Reading report, it found reading levels increased during school closures. During the first lockdown, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban by JK Rowling was primary pupils' favourite book. Report author Professor Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee, said: 'During the lockdown overall, pupils were tending to read longer books of greater difficulty and with greater comprehension. 'Having more time gave children the chance to immerse themselves in literature. 'It is great to see that primary age children are reading more difficult books and this should be reflected at secondary school age where book difficulty this year plateaued. 'Secondary schools need to encourage their pupils to attack more difficult books.' But the study also found the number of books read overall fell by 17 per cent compared with the same period a year before. Advertisement

Christine Brett, co-founder of the parent campaign group UsForThem, told The Telegraph: 'It beggars belief that the Government has recommended secondary school children wear face coverings for up to eight hours a day without the usual rigour of an public health intervention imposed on a healthy population.

'There is increasing evidence of masks being harmful to childrens health, welfare and impacting on their ability to learn, develop and communicate.'

The newspaper reports that Government lawyers, responding to a pre-action letter from UsForThem, admitted PHE did not carry out a scientific risk analysis of the masks in schools policy.

Instead, they said officials conducted a series of surveys among teachers, workers' unions and local councils.

They suggested the intervention was popular and scrapping it could lead to a drop in attendance rates.

But last week the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson revealed the face coverings rule in classrooms could be partially lifted by May 17, as part of stage three of the roadmap out of lockdown, when pubs and restaurants are due to reopen for indoor service and foreign travel is to resume.

Even if masks are scrapped in classrooms, pupils would still expected to wear them in corridors and on school buses.

Any changes to the policy will be confirmed with one week's notice following a review of the latest data on infection and vaccination rates, the Department for Education said.

But Mr Williamson is facing pressure from teaching unions which have urged him not to 'rush into' scrapping the policy.

They claim that masks are not causing disruption to learning and insist they do help in curbing the spread of the virus.

But the jury is still out on masks' effectiveness. A Danish study last winter, one of the only real-world trials into their use, found no difference in infections rates between people who wore masks and people who didn't.

Leaders from the National Education Union (NEU), NASUWT, NASUWT teaching union, NAHT school leaders' union, GMB and Unison came out in support of the school mask policy earlier this month.

In a letter to Mr Williamson, they said: 'None of us wants to see pupils or staff wearing face coverings for longer than is necessary.

'However, it is our shared view that the government should not rush into changing this policy at short notice without careful consideration of the scientific evidence surrounding the wearing of face coverings in schools.'

The unions argued that there is 'a strong scientific consensus' that masks 'can and should' be part of anti-coronavirus measures.

'The research suggests that they cut down the chances of both transmitting and catching the coronavirus,' the leaders said.

'We have also seen the emergence of more recent studies that suggest that they can help to reduce transmission of the virus within schools.'
More tributes have been paid to the late John 'Jack' Duggan, a Laois teacher whose tragic death has stunned the Portlaoise community this week.

Mr Duggan from Clonboyne Portlaoise died on Tuesday April 27. He was Deputy Principal and an Irish teacher in St Mary's CBS in Portlaoise, and a stalward member of Portlaoise GAA club.

Retired teacher Michael Reynolds is secretary of the Leinster Council.

"He was the salt of the earth, a great worker and a good teacher. He contributed to the GAA both in the Patrician College in Newbridge where he started his teaching career, and in Portlaoise GAA club and St Mary's CBS.

"He gave an unknown amount of time to training young lads and going to matches. He gave a lifetime of support, enjoying every sport to the full," Mr Reynolds said.

A near neighbour to John Duggan, he also noted his dedication as a farmer breeding pedigree cattle.

"On behalf of the Leinster Council, I extend sympathy to his wife and all the Duggan family," he said.

Portlaoise GAA club has also shared their shock and sadness.

"It is with shock and deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of a great clubman, John Jack Duggan. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to all of his family at this sad time. Our thoughts and prayers are also with his friends, colleagues and students. May they all find comfort in the tough days ahead. Ar dheis De go raibh a hanam dilis."

John Duggan is mourned by his wife Anna and his parents Dan and Margaret, brothers Liam and Cyril, sisters Ann and Noeleen, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews and all of his extended family, neighbours and a large circle of friends. Funeral will be private in line with restrictions. Details to follow.
Gujarat: Repatriation of fishermans body from Pakistan to be delayed: Centre

by Gopal Kateshiya

April 29,2021 | Source: The Indian Express

A day after intimating Gujarat government that Pakistan will repatriate on April 30 the mortal remains of Ramesh, a fisherman who had died in a Pakistan jail more than a month ago, the Central government on Wednesday informed the state government that the repatriation of the fishermans body will be delayed. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had written to the Gujarat government on Tuesday that Pakistan will hand over mortal remains of Ramesh at Wagah/Attari border crossing on Friday. Indian High Commission in Islamabad has confirmed that the repatriation of mortal remains of late Ramesh is scheduled on 30 April 2021 through Wagah/Attari border.., a communication from MEA to Gujarat government on Tuesday stated. DP Desai, in-charge fisheries commissioner of Gujarat confirmed that his office had received the intimation from the MEA. We have received a communication from the MEA intimating us that the fishermans body would be handed over at Wagah on April 30. We will send our team there to receive the body. We are making arrangements to send his body from Wagah to his native place. We are exploring possibilities, including bring his body to Gujarat by air, Desai confirmed to The Indian Express on Wednesday afternoon.



However, the officer later said that the repatriation of the fishermans mortal remains would be delayed. We just received a mail from MEA that it is going to be delayed, Desai said. The latest communique from the MEA does not cite any reason for the delay. All it says that Rameshs mortal remains would not be repatriated on April 30 and that a fresh date will be communicated later on, said an officer of fisheries department of Gujarat. Ramesh, who hails from a coastal village in Gujarat, was apprehended by Pakistan in May 2019 while fishing in the Arabian Sea off Gujarat coast. He had completed his prison sentence in July 2019 but was never granted consular access by Pakistan. Hence his nationality could not be ascertained till his death inside a Karachi jail on March 26.

 2021 The Indian Express [P] Ltd.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:50:30|Editor: huaxia

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VIENTIANE, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The first batch of Lao cattle have been exported to China, the Chinese embassy in Laos said on Thursday.

The first batch of live cattle from Laos were shipped on Wednesday, from the quarantine of the foot-and-mouth disease immunization area in Luang Namtha province, some 360 km north of Vientiane capital, to the quarantine of Mengman port in Xishuangbanna of southwestern China's Yunnan Province, and were later slaughtered for exportation to China.

Breakthrough has been made in the trade of live cattle between China and Laos. The officially-launched export of Lao cattle to China is a bilateral agricultural cooperation project.

The first exportation of Lao cattle to China reflects the in-depth development of the China-Laos economic and trade cooperation, the Chinese embassy said in a statement issued on Thursday, adding that the export also helps promote the cooperation in the prevention and control of cross-border animal diseases in the Greater Mekong Subregion and the joint maintenance of bio-security in border areas.

The live cattle trade will steadily advance the building of the China-Laos Economic Corridor and help realize China's dual circulation strategy with the mutual promotion between the internal circulation and the external circulation, the Chinese embassy said. Enditem
Andhra Pradesh: Annual sea fishing ban triggers rise in price of freshwater fish in parts of the State

by Nalla Babu

April 29,2021 | Source: The Times of India

With the deep-sea fishing ban currently in effect, prices of freshwater fish have risen by nearly 30 per cent in parts of Andhra Pradesh. Traders attribute this price rise due to the decline in availability owing to rising temperatures. Popular varieties of freshwater fish such as Koramenu (red snapper) and Matta Gidasa are selling for Rs 700 and Rs 400 a kilo respectively. Only a couple of weeks back, Koramenu was selling for Rs 500 a kilo while Matta Gidasa went for Rs 250 a kilo. Other freshwater fish such as Catla, Rohu, Mrugala and Rup Chand are selling between Rs 150 and Rs 300 per kilo.



Ch Satyanarayana Murthy, president of Dolphin Boat Operators Welfare Association, said that the annual deep-sea fishing ban has triggered the price rise of freshwater fish. Fishing activities at Visakhapatnam harbour have come to a standstill, he said. In restaurants too, seafood delicacies have seen prices shoot through the roof due to a shortage of stock. Restaurants are not serving seafood dishes during the ban. We hope for the situation to improve in the last week of June, said Akella Venkata Ramana Murthy, president of Andhra Pradesh Hotels Association (APHA). Meanwhile, chicken prices have come down significantly from Rs 220 per kg to Rs 160 per kg. Chicken-sellers say that consumption of chicken has decreased dramatically during the summer resulting in a decrease in chicken prices. The broiler chicken business is good only on Sundays, but very low on other days, say traders.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 20:12:37|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese lawmakers on Thursday passed an amendment to the Education Law, aimed at ensuring fairness in education by mandating tougher punishment for those who steal the identity of others to enroll in a school or college.

Impostors will have their admission qualifications revoked and slapped with a ban from relevant national examinations for two to five years, according to the amendment, which was approved at the 28th session of the 13th National People's Congress Standing Committee.

The amended law stipulates that academic diplomas of impostors will be revoked and those holding public office will be dismissed. Criminal activities will receive criminal punishments.

The law stipulates that people who allow others to illegally use their identities for enrollments in schools or colleges shall be barred from appearing in relevant national examinations for up to three years, with all illegal gains confiscated.

The law also demands stringent punishment for public office bearers involved in identity theft in school or college enrollments.

Officials who organize activities of identity theft, fraudulently using someone else's identity, illegally substituting for others in admissions, or instigate others to conduct such malpractices, will be sanctioned in accordance with the law.

Violators will be prosecuted for criminal liability if the circumstances constitute a crime, the law notes.

If the lawful rights and interests related to admissions are infringed upon due to illegal substitute, the victim can request restoration of admission qualifications.

The amendment will take effect on April 30, 2021. Enditem
An international traveller is seen being escorted by hotel quarantine staff into a complex care Quarantine Hotel in Melbourne, Australia Dec. 7, 2020. (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)

Victorian Government Purpose Built Quarantine Facility Dependent On Federal Funding

Victorias proposed COVID-19 quarantine facility is dependent on federal funding and wont be ready until the end of the year.

The state government has confirmed the preferred site for the facility will be next to the Mickleham post-entry pet quarantine centre, a commonwealth site about 40km north of Melbourne.

The 500-bed facility would cost about $200 million to build, with an expansion to 3000 beds taking the cost to $700 million.

The state government added it would cost about $15 million to get the project ready for construction.

A final call on whether construction goes ahead will not be made until September, with Acting Premier James Merlino saying it could be ready by the end of the year.

He said it was now up to the Commonwealth as to whether the facility would be built.

Merlino said the facility would be federally owned but operated by Victoria.

Its about providing Victoria and our nation with options  to make our community safer, he said on Thursday.

Now we have a business case and preferred location, a detailed proposal has been sent through to the Commonwealth.

The request to the Commonwealth is that they pay for the construction of this facility and ultimately take ownership of this facility.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was asked on Thursday if the Victorian government had asked him for a blank cheque to fund the facility.

I spoke to the state treasurer just a few days ago and he didnt raise that specific issue with me, he told ABC radio. But no doubt there will be discussions between states and the federal governments on this quarantine issue for a long time to come because the virus is still with us for some time to come.

The new facility would be cabin style accommodation, to be built as an alternative to hotel quarantine in the state.

Merlino said if the Mickleham proposal was rejected, the alternative was Avalon Airport near Geelong.

A purpose-built quarantine centre was proposed after Februarys Holiday Inn outbreak, which sparked a five-day lockdown across Victoria.

The facility will be based on the Northern Territorys Howard Springs facility, with guests kept in separate cabins and more fresh air than quarantine hotels.

Premier Daniel Andrews said at the time the purpose-built facility would not represent zero risks but lower risk.

Victorias streak of no community transmission extended to 62 days on Thursday, with one new case from overseas.
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In a move to curb further attacks on security agents in the state, Governor Nyesom Wike has imposed night curfew in all the 23 local government areas of Rivers.

Human and vehicular movement is prohibited in any part of the state from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. from April 29 until further notice, Mr Wike said in a state-wide broadcast on Thursday.

Rivers appears to be the first state to impose a state-wide curfew since the beginning of the attack on security agents, including Nigerian soldiers, in several states in the countrys South-east and South-south regions.

In one of the deadliest attacks so far in the state, eight security officials, including two police officers, were said to have been killed on Sunday along the Omagwa/Isiokpo/Elele Owerri Road in Rivers.

Four soldiers, attached to an oil company, Starling Global Ltd, were also shot dead by unknown gunmen on Sunday in a local hotel in a community in Rivers State.

The killings prompted the administration to ban people from entering or leaving the state at night, as a proactive measure to check further attacks.

The State Security Council has, today, after exhaustive deliberation, decided and advised that a statewide curfew on human and vehicular movements be imposed as part of additional measures to prevent the faceless criminals from unleashing their deadly actions, Mr Wike said in his Thursday broadcast.

READ ALSO: Wike declares curfew in some parts of Rivers

We wish to repeat that in taking these and other drastic measures at this time, our singular intention is to secure our State and guarantee the protection of lives and property.

While therefore calling for continued understanding, we again advise everyone to be vigilant and promptly report every suspicious movement in your neighbourhood to the security agencies for immediate actions, the governor added.

Governors in the South-east and South-south have been struggling to contend the killings and the general insecurity in the regions.
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(@FahadShabbir)

Nearly all of the world's glaciers are losing mass at an ever increasing pace, contributing to more than a fifth of global sea level rise this century, according to unprecedented research released Wednesday

Paris, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Apr, 2021 ) :Nearly all of the world's glaciers are losing mass at an ever increasing pace, contributing to more than a fifth of global sea level rise this century, according to unprecedented research released Wednesday.

Glaciers -- vast bodies of frozen water that sit above ground -- have been melting fast since the middle of the 20th century, but until now the full extent of ice loss had only been partially understood.

An international team of researchers has for the first time observed all of Earth's some 220,000 glaciers, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, to properly evaluate the amount and rate of melt over the past two decades.

Analysing images taken by NASA's Terra satellite, they found that between 2000-2019, the world's glaciers lost an average of 267 billion tonnes of ice each year.

That's enough water to submerge Switzerland under six metres (20 feet) of water -- every single year.

But the team also found that the rate of glacier melt had accelerated sharply during the same period.

Between 2000 and 2004, glaciers lost 227 billion tonnes of ice per year. But between 2015-2019, they lost an average of 298 billion tonnes each year.

This glacial melt has contributed to 21 percent of sea level rises in the study period, the researchers said -- equivalent to 0.74 millimetres a year.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the fastest-melting glaciers were situated in Alaska and the Alps.

The authors also expressed concern about the retreating mountain glaciers in the Pamir Mountains, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas, which provide water for more than 1.

5 billion people.

"During the dry season, glacial meltwater is an important source that feeds major waterways such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers," said Romain Hugonnet, lead study author and researcher at ETH Zurich university and the University of Toulouse.

"Right now, this increased melting acts as a buffer for people living in the region, but if Himalayan glacier shrinkage keeps accelerating, populous countries like India and Bangladesh could face water or food shortages in a few decades." - Greater certainty - The authors also found areas where melt rates actually slowed between 2000-2019, on Greenland's east coast and in Iceland and Scandinavia, for instance.

They attribute this to weather in the North Atlantic that caused higher precipitation and lower temperatures in the region, thereby slowing ice loss.

The findings will be included in the forthcoming assessment report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hugonnet told AFP that the research had reduced uncertainties in glacier melt surveillance by a factor of 10.

"We know with a lot more certainty what the contribution to sea level rise is, about we must also look beyond a global scale," he said.

"Glaciers, like the ice caps, contribute to sea level rise but they are also far closer to populations, so they affect the water cycle and natural disasters much more."
Dhaka, April 29 : Harun Izhar, former education and cultural secretary of the abolished committee of the militant outfit Hefazat-e-Islam, was detained by the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) early on Thursday from Lalkhan Bazar Madrasa in Chittagong.

Harun's personal assistant has confirmed his detention. The leader also posted a 'good bye' message on his Facebook page on at 12.45 a.m. on Thursday.

Harun also posted converted Muslim's reciting Quran on his FB page to spread communal message against non-muslims.

In November 2009, Harun was arrested for allegedly planning an attack on the US embassy in Dhaka along with two other suspects. The other two, who were arrested in the US, had provided the information about Harun. They also said that they were planning attacks on various locations in different countries including a newspaper's office in Denmark.

Harun is the son of Mufti Izharul, who was trained by the bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Mufti Izhar was then the chief of the militant alliance Islami Oikya Jote and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The two others who were arrested then were linked to Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba.

In December 15, 2010, the RAB had arrested Mufti Izharul over charges of involvement in militancy. Lt Col Sazzad RAB Chittagong the then Commanding Officer (CO) had said, "We have evidence and documents proving his involvement with Huji's militancy." But he was later released on bail. He was accused in several cases, including one under the Explosive Substance Act.

Izharul went into hiding after three people including two students were killed and several others injured in the explosion at the four-storey dormitory of Al Jamiatul Ulum Al Islamia Madrasa in Lalkhan Bazar of Chittagong on October 7, 2013. That time Mufti Harun was arrested from Raozan of Chittagong two days later but his father managed to evade arrest.

A Chittagong Court on 2012 issued an arrest warrant against Hefajat-e Islam's then Nayeb-e-Ameer Mufti Izharul Islam in a case filed for not submitting his wealth statement before the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC). Mufti Izharul has evaded arrest for over one and a half years.

Police later recovered huge explosive-making materials, four unexploded grenades from the surrounding areas of the madrasa and 18 bottles of acid after raiding the residence of Izhar on the night of the deadly bomb explosion.

Police than found traces of huge explosives, including more than 30 handmade grenades, had been stored in the room where the explosion took place.

Later, police filed three cases - one under Explosives Substance Act, another under Acid Act and the other for murder of the three people in which nine people were accused including Mufti Izhar, his son Mufti Harun, three other madrasa teachers and two students.

Harun and his father tried to pass it off as a laptop blast, but police recovered grenades, acid and huge amount of explosives during a raid on the madrasa after the blast. Izharul was also the chief of Nezam-e-Islam Party, another radical group.

Ten cases were filed against Hefazat leaders and activists in Patia, Hathazari, Chittagong in connection with the March 28 violence and massacre which was conducted by Harun Izhar directly. About 6,000 people were accused in this. About 40 leaders and activists have been arrested so far.
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is due to discuss anti-pandemic efforts with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the phone on Thursday, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a video on his Facebook page.

Hungary is the only European Union country to use Chinese vaccines under an emergency protocol before they have been officially approved by the bloc, with over a million doses of the Sinopharm shot helping the country record one of the world's highest inoculation rates.

(Reporting by Marton Dunai @mdunai; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Hospital patients will be handed vaping 'starter packs' in a bid to help them stop smoking tobacco under a new Government-funded trial.

The initiative at five NHS hospitals will see smokers who attend A&E units offered e-cigarettes when they are discharged.

Research has shown that nicotine e-cigarettes can be a useful tool to help people quit tobacco.

However, the devices are controversial as people can become addicting to vaping and research has suggested they can lead to heart and lung damage.

Experts at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are today launching a trial which, if successful, could see the NHS routinely provide e-cigarettes as part of its stop smoking programmes.

The research team aim to recruit around 1,000 smokers who have attended emergency departments for any medical reason.

Smokers who agree to take part in the trial will be randomly assigned to receive either a pack of e-cigarettes and referral to local stop smoking services, or just written information about locally available stop smoking services.

Both groups of patients will be asked if they are still smoking one, three and six months after they attended hospital.

Hospital patients will be handed vaping 'starter packs' in a bid to help them stop smoking tobacco under a new Government-funded trial

Vaping 'could be banned in the UK' Vaping could be banned in the UK following recommendations set out by the World Health Organisation. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has set out plans to prohibit e-cigarettes due to fears users could replace ingredients with other harmful substances, The Sun on Sunday reported in February. Clive Bates, a tobacco harm expert and the former director of anti-smoking group ASH, told the publication the advice was 'irresponsible and bizarre', and would ultimately 'protect the cigarette trade'. The potential ban was detailed in a report published by WHO's tobacco regulatory committee, and will be discussed later this year at a conference in Glasgow. Advertisement

Professor Caitlin Notley, from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: 'Many people who smoke want to quit, but find it difficult to succeed in the long term.

'Electronic cigarettes mimic the experience of cigarette smoking because they are hand-held and generate a smoke-like vapour when used. They can be an attractive option for helping people switch from smoking, even if they have tried and failed in the past.

'We know that they are much less harmful than smoking tobacco, and that they have been shown to help smokers quit.

She added: 'We'll be looking at the number of people who successfully quit smoking across both groups, to see which intervention works best.

'We'll also work out how much it would cost to roll the scheme out nationally.' Trial co-lead Dr Ian Pope said: 'Emergency Departments in England see over 24 million people each year of whom around a quarter are current smokers.

'Attending the Emergency Department offers a valuable opportunity for people to be supported to quit smoking, which will improve their chances of recovery from whatever has brought them to hospital, and also prevent future illness.' The new trial is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), which is funded by the Department of Health.

It will run at five hospitals in England and Scotland - the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the Royal London Hospital and Homerton University Hospital in London, Leicester Royal Infirmary and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

The initiative has been launched as a new major study by the University of Oxford suggested e-cigarettes containing nicotine are an effective way of helping people quit tobacco.

The Cochrane review found that e-cigarettes could increase the number of people who stop smoking compared to other forms of nicotine replacement therapy - such as chewing gum and patches - and compared to electronic cigarettes that do not contain nicotine.

Public Health England have repeatedly endorsed e-cigarettes since they became available around a decade ago. Health officials believe tens of thousands of people stop smoking every year after switching to vaping.

Latest PHE estimates show that around 2.7 million adults in England vape, compared to nearly seven million who smoke tobacco.

Although e-cigarettes are better for people than tobacco, there are still concerns they pose a risk to health.

Last year a major Government-backed review of their safety found that e-cigarettes can worsen heart disease and lung disorders while the risks posed by inhaling ingredients used to flavour them are still 'unknown'.

The research said e-cigarettes should only be used as an aid to quit smoking. Scientists have also warned that smokers who switch to e-cigarettes often remain addicted to nicotine and fail to quit altogether.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 07:33:07|Editor: huaxia

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BUENOS AIRES, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Argentina's Ministry of Health reported on Wednesday 23,718 new COVID-19 infections and 348 more deaths in the last day, for a total of 2,928,890 cases and 62,947 deaths, amid a new wave of infections.

As a result, the country's Minister of Security Sabina Frederic and Secretary of Justice and Security of the City of Buenos Aires Marcelo D'Alessandro agreed on "greater control of terminal station entrances and different transfer centers" in the capital.

During a meeting on Wednesday, they analyzed "the possibility of restricting access to the city at certain times" to deal with the increase in COVID-19 cases, official sources told state news agency Telam.

Meanwhile, Argentina's vaccination campaign against COVID-19 has administered 7,667,385 doses, while the country remains under social, preventive and mandatory distancing measures until Friday. Enditem
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TEMPE, Ariz.  Benchmark Electronics Inc. (BHE) on Wednesday reported first-quarter earnings of $7.9 million.

The Tempe, Arizona-based company said it had net income of 22 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to 21 cents per share.

The electronic manufacturing services company posted revenue of $505.7 million in the period.

For the current quarter ending in July, Benchmark expects its per-share earnings to range from 23 cents to 29 cents.

The company said it expects revenue in the range of $515 million to $555 million for the fiscal second quarter.

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Benchmark shares have increased 12% since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Wednesday, shares hit $30.18, a climb of 36% in the last 12 months.

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This story was generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on BHE at https://www.zacks.com/ap/BHE
NORTH STATE, Calif. - Congressman Doug LaMalfa released a statement following President Bidens first Address to Congress.

LaMalfa said he had hoped Biden spoke about the crisis at the border and the attacks on energy-related and other solid jobs with some remorse or lessons learned.

LaMalfa said Bidens actions are showing he believes in a bigger government, more taxes and spending.

LaMalfas full statement:

Tonight, I had hoped that President Biden would reflect on the first 100 days and seen the self-created border disaster and the attacks on energy-related and other solid jobs with some remorse or lessons learned. Alas, Bidens first three initiatives in that 100 days total a staggering $6.3 trillion in new spending, an astronomical burden on our nations debt. With rising interest rates, a massive increase in debt would swallow all other federal spending and be nearly impossible to pay the interest. Worse, it would smother any chance of economic recovery. Instead of reopening and unleashing the American economy, Bidens priorities would fund bailouts of wasteful blue states, taxpayer handouts to illegal immigrants, and social spending programs disguised as infrastructure. His tax and spend policies are undercutting a much needed recovery from the year-long government forced shutdown. His plans will freeze investment activity, hitting those in middle and lower income ranges hardest, particularly those who own or desire to buy their own homes. Despite his continued campaign rhetoric promising unity, Bidens actions show he believes in more government, centralizing more power in DC, more taxing, and more spending, all at the expense of individual freedom and opportunity. Americans wanting to return to a sense of normalcy after a pandemic are going to be extremely disappointed.
Cruising could resume from U.S. ports by mid-July aboard ships with at least 98% of crew members and 95% of passengers fully vaccinated, the nations top health protection agency announced.

A key official of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention delivered a set of revised guidelines Wednesday that could clear the way for cruising more than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down.

The guidelines follow a high-profile campaign by top industry officials, and a lawsuit by Floridas attorney general, demanding that the CDC allow the industry  crucial to Floridas tourism economy  to resume operations from Floridas six cruise ports this summer.

Still unknown is how Gov. Ron DeSantis will respond to the CDCs statement that cruise lines can speed up their resumptions if nearly all crew and passengers are vaccinated.

Earlier this month, DeSantis said cruise lines would not be exempted from his executive order barring businesses from requiring vaccine passports. The governors office has not yet responded to a request for comment about the CDC letter.

The revised guidelines follow discussions with cruise industry representatives aimed at identifying the fastest path back to sailing without compromising safety, according to a CDC statement.

They include:

SImulated voyages required by previous CDC guidance wont be necessary if a ship attests that 98% of crew members and 95% of passengers are fully vaccinated.

If a cruise line applies to conduct simulated voyages, the CDC will review and respond to the application within five days instead of 60 days.

Vaccinated crew members and passengers will be allowed to take simplified viral tests.

Cruise ship operators will be allowed to enter into multiport agreements instead of separate agreements with each port. These agreements are meant to ensure that medical and housing facilities near ports are available in case of a large-scale infection onboard ships. Multiport agreements may be suitable if one port has limited medical or housing capacity and a nearby port is able to supplement these capacities.

Infected passengers could be allowed to use their own vehicles to drive to their homes and quarantine, reducing the contracted housing capacity cruise lines must demonstrate.

In her letter to the industry, Aimee Treffiletti, captain of the CDCs Global Migration Task Forces maritime unit, affirmed that it wont be possible for cruise lines to guarantee that no one can get infected.

We acknowledge that cruising will never be a zero-risk activity and that the [CDCs goal] is to resume passenger operations in a way that mitigates the risk of COVID-19 transmission onboard cruise ships and across port communities, Treffiletti wrote.

We remain committed to the resumption of passenger operations in the United States following the requirements in [CDC guidelines] by mid-summer, which aligns with the goals announced by many major cruise lines.

In a separate statement, the CDC said it looks forward to continued engagement with the industry and urges cruise lines to submit port agreements as soon as possible to maintain the timeline of passenger voyages by mid-July.

Cruise Lines International Association, a trade organization representing all of the major lines, said it was still reviewing the clarifications.

Meanwhile, CLIA called the CDCs statement encouraging. We are optimistic that these clarifications show positive progression  and importantly, a demonstrated commitment to constructive dialogue, which is key to restarting cruising as we have seen with other governments and health authorities around the world, said Laziza Lambert, CLIAs manager of strategic communications.

--

Ron Hurtibise of the South Florida Sun Sentinel wrote this story.

2021 South Florida Sun Sentinel. Visit at sun-sentinel.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
New Delhi:

The Army has finalised one of its biggest procurement plans for infantry modernisation under which a large number of light machine guns, battle carbines and assault rifles are being purchased at a cost of nearly Rs 40,000 crore to replace its ageing and obsolete weapons.

The broad process to acquire around 7 lakh rifles, 44,000 light machine guns (LMGs) and nearly 44,600 carbines has been finalised and the defence ministry is on the same page with the Army in moving ahead with the procurement, official sources told PTI.

The worlds second largest standing Army has been pressing for fast-tracking the procurement of various weapons systems considering the evolving security threats including along Indias borders with Pakistan and China.

Apart from kick-starting the procurement process, the government has also sent a message to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to expedite its work on various small arms, particularly on an LMG.

The sources said a fresh RFI (request for information) to procure the LMGs will be issued in the next few days, months after the defence ministry scrapped the tender for the 7.62 calibre guns as there was only one vendor left after a series of field trials. The plan is to initially procure around 10,000 LMGs.

The Army has also finalised the specifications for a new 7.62 mm assault rifle and the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), the defence ministrys highest decision making body on procurement, is expected to give the go-ahead for the much-needed procurement soon.

The General Service Quality Requirements (GSQR) for the new assault rifle has been finalised. The procurement plan will soon be placed before the DAC for approval, said a senior official, who is part of the acquisition process.

In June, the Army had rejected an assault rifle built by the state-run Rifle Factory, Ishapore, after the guns miserably failed the firing tests.

The procurement of assault rifles has witnessed significant delays due to a variety of reasons including the Armys failure to finalise the specifications for it. The Army needs around 7 lakh 7.62x51 mm assault guns to replace its INSAS rifles.

The Army had issued RFI for the rifles in September last year and around 20 firms responded to it. An RFI is a process whose purpose is to collect information about capabilities of various vendors.

In June, the Army had kick-started the initial process to procure around 44,600 carbines, nearly eight months after a tender for it was retracted, also due to single-vendor situation. Around half a dozen firms including a few global arms manufacturers have responded to the RFI.

Army sources said various specifications for the LMGs and battle carbines were tweaked to ensure that the problem of single vendor does not recur.

The combined cost of the LMGs, assault rifles and carbines will be in excess of Rs 40,000 crore, said an official.

On DRDO missing a number of deadlines in finalising the LMG, an official said the defence secretary has called a meeting this week of all stakeholders to discuss the project.

The infantry modernisation plan is a major initiative of the Army and it will significantly bolster the overall capability of the foot soldiers, said a senior army official.

The issue was extensively discussed at the recently-concluded Army Commanders conference which felt modernisation of the Army must be in tune with the evolving security threat facing the country.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman conveyed to the Army during the conference that modernisation of the force was a priority for the government and all its deficiencies will be addressed to strengthen its combat capability.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Our research indicates that states like Vermont might not be ideal for a new business. Entrepreneurs should access this recent study to gain more insight on whether or not it makes sense to launch a business in Vermont, says David Franklin, CEO Expertise.com.

Expertise.com, a top resource for online reviews and the best local experts, has published findings from a recent study on the best and worst states for Americans to start a small business in 2021. Researchers applied a comprehensive methodology using 24 business-focused metrics. The report offers total scores for each state and rankings based on new business environment, available resources, and business costs.

Vermont earned the lowest overall score across the three categories assessed. The state has the highest business costs and one of the least favorable environments for new business. Vermont also has few available resources for entrepreneurs.

Our research indicates that states like Vermont might not be ideal for a new business. Entrepreneurs should access this recent study to gain more insight on whether or not it makes sense to launch a business in Vermont, says David Franklin, CEO Expertise.com.

Expertise.com evaluated all 50 states and calculated an overall score using a 10-point scale for each metric. The report features three subcategories with corresponding metrics, such as job growth, available loans, median hourly wage, and corporate taxes. To view the complete list of best and worst states for starting a small business in 2021, visit: https://www.expertise.com/research/best-and-worst-states-for-starting-a-small-business-in-2021

ABOUT EXPERTISE.COM

Expertise.com identifies leading service professionals in over 200 industries across the top cities in the United States. The company provides authentic online reviews of service providers via a selection process that includes in-depth research, detailed comparisons, customer feedback, and mystery shopping. Expertise.com is based in Los Angeles, California, and backed by a team of marketing, research, and content development experts. To learn more, visit https://www.expertise.com/

###


Photo: The Canadian Press Attorneys for the family of Andrew Brown, Wayne Kendall, at podium, makes comments after a judges decision on the release body cam video of the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, N.C., Wednesday, April 28, 2021. A judge denied the request to immediately release body cam video of the incident.

A judge refused Wednesday to release body camera video showing North Carolina deputies shooting and killing a Black man, ruling that making the video public at this stage could jeopardize the investigation into Andrew Brown Jr.'s death.

However, the judge did order authorities to allow Brown's family to privately view five videos from body cameras and one from a dashboard camera within 10 days, with some portions blurred or redacted. Family members had previously been allowed to view only a 20-second clip from a single body camera.

Judge Jeffery Foster said he believed the videos contained information that could harm the ongoing investigation or threaten the safety of people seen in the footage. He said the video must remain out of public view for at least 30 days, but he would consider releasing it after that point if investigations are complete.

The release at this time would create a serious threat to the fair, impartial and orderly administration of justice, Foster said.

While one attorney for Browns family, Wayne Kendall, initially said it was a partial victory for the family to view more video, the legal team later issued a statement condemning the decision not to make the video public.

In this modern civil rights crisis where we see Black people killed by the police everywhere we look, video evidence is the key to discerning the truth and getting well-deserved justice for victims of senseless murders, said the statement signed by the legal team, including Ben Crump and Harry Daniels.

The decision came shortly after a North Carolina prosecutor said that Brown had hit law enforcement officers with his car before they opened fire last week.

District Attorney Andrew Womble, who viewed the body camera videos, told the judge that he disagreed with a characterization by an attorney for Brown's family that Brown did not try to drive away until deputies opened fire. Womble said the video shows that Browns car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.

As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers, he said, adding that the car stops again. The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.

Womble said that officers shouted commands and tried to open a car door before any shots were fired.

None of the deputies were injured, according to previous statements by the Pasquotank County sheriff, Tommy Wooten II.

Womble argued that video of the shooting should be kept from the public while state investigators pursue their probe. He said the video should not be released until a trial in the shooting or, alternatively, if a completed investigation results in no charges.

One of the Brown family lawyers, Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who viewed the 20-second video, said Monday that shots were heard from the instant the clip started with Browns car in his driveway and his hands on the steering wheel. She said he did not try to back away until after deputies ran up to his car and began shooting, and he did not pose a threat to deputies, explaining: He finally decides to try to get away and he backs out, not toward officers at all.

In response to Wombles remarks in court, she defended her description of the footage.

At no time have I given any misrepresentations. I still stand by what I saw in that clip, she said, adding that she watched the clip over and over, taking notes.

The judge denied formal requests by a media coalition including The Associated Press and by the sheriff to release the video. Under a 2016 state law, authorities can show body camera video privately to family members of a victim but must receive a judge's approval to make it public.

Accountability is important, Mike Tadych, a lawyer for the media coalition, said in court. But in order to hold public officials accountable, we have to see whats going on."

Tadych said later in an email that he and his colleagues will decide the best route for an appeal once they receive the judge's written order.

The FBI on Tuesday announced a civil rights investigation into Brown's death, and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who has also called for a swift release of the video, urged that a special prosecutor be appointed to take the state's case over from Womble. However, under state law, the district attorney would have to agree to let another prosecutor step in. Womble indicated in a statement Tuesday that he will not do so.

The State Bureau of Investigation began a probe of the shooting shortly after it happened. It has said that it would turn its findings over to Womble, as is standard under state laws and procedures.

Brown was shot April 21 by deputies serving drug-related search and arrest warrants at his house in the North Carolina town of Elizabeth City, about 160 miles northeast of Raleigh. On Tuesday, Browns family released an independent autopsy showing he was shot five times, including in the back of the head. The states autopsy has not been released yet.
VICTORIA - The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in British Columbia has ticked up to 515, breaking a previous record set last week.

An ambulance drives past the emergency entrance of Vancouver General Hospital in Vancouver, B.C., Friday, April 9, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

VICTORIA - The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in British Columbia has ticked up to 515, breaking a previous record set last week.

Among those hospitalized, 171 people are in intensive care.

Five more people have died after contracting the illness, pushing the death toll in the province to 1,576.

The number of active infections was down to just over 8,000 as health officials reported 841 new cases on Wednesday.

A joint statement from provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix says B.C. has now administered more than 1.7 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, of which close to 90,000 are second shots.

Vaccine bookings will open to people age 58 and older at midnight, while people age 30 and up who live in COVID-19 hot spots are now eligible to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in B.C.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 28, 2021.
Dr. Kurt Wharton, an Oakland County obstetrician, currently has four pregnant patients in intensive care units battling COVID-19.

None were vaccinated. Now the four are fighting for their lives, said Wharton, who works at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak.

Dr. David Colombo, a Grand Rapids obstetricians, tells a similar story.

He heads Spectrum Healths maternal fetal medicine office, which specializes in more complicated pregnancies. That means west Michigan women who get COVID during their pregnancy tend to end up in that office, he said. And weve seen people get very sick. Weve had some problems with it.

That even includes death, he said.

Luckily, the number of deaths has been very small, Colombo said. But weve had some patients in this region who have died from COVID while they are pregnant.

Wharton and Colombo are among obstetricians strongly recommending their pregnant patients get vaccinated, saying there is a growing body of research about the risks of COVID-19 during pregnancy and the relative safety of the coronavirus vaccines.

Last week, researchers at the University of Washington published a study looking at the health outcomes for 2,100 women who contracted COVID-19 during pregnancy.

The study found that the women were 20 times more likely to die than pregnant women who were not infected, and the women with COVID were also more likely to experience preterm birth, preeclampsia and admission to the ICU and/or intubation. Each woman affected by COVID-19 was compared with two uninfected pregnant women who gave birth during the same span in the same hospital.

To be sure, most of the COVID-19 patients with negative outcomes had comorbidities such as high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes or heart disease, noted Dr. Jim Jeakle, a obstetrician who also is chief medical officer for Munson Healthcare Charlevoix Hospital.

Nevertheless, the take-home point is that we are learning more about the negative impact that COVID has on pregnancy, he said.

Jeakle also points to another study released last week, this one by the federal Centers of Disease Control that looked at safety of the COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women.

The study involved 35,000 pregnant women were among the first wave of Americans to be vaccinated. The women downloaded an app to record their symptoms and any health issues after receiving the vaccine. The study found that injection-site pain was reported more frequently among pregnant persons than among nonpregnant women, whereas headache, muscle aches, chills, and fever were reported less frequently.

More importantly, among the vaccinated women who have given birth so far, there were no neonatal deaths and the number of premature births and other birth-related complications were statistically in line with unvaccinated women, the report said.

Jeakle said its important to note the study is ongoing and the initial report only includes women vaccinated in the third trimester because they are the only participants to have given birth when the first round of data was collected.

Still, they didnt see any red flags at all, which is a good thing, Jeakle said.

I think thats pretty safe to say now that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks for pregnant women, especially those with comorbidities that put them at higher risk of COVID complications, Jeakle said.

The studies also are good news for people at lower risk, which is the majority of people, who are hunting for information about being vaccinated during pregnancy, Jeakle said.

Its been a hard thing for people to decide what to do, he said. I think this data will give people a better sense of which way to go.

Dr. LaKeeya Tucker, a Lansing obstetrician and the incoming medical chief of staff at Sparrow Hospital, called the studies super exciting news.

Patients have been super scared about whether or not to get the vaccines, so its promising to have these studies out there, she said.

Tucker and other doctors also pointed to other recent studies that show the benefits of vaccination for pregnant and breastfeeding women, including one published in March in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that found women vaccinated for COVID-19 can pass the antibodies to their bodies through the placenta during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.

Its important to note that most pregnant women who contract COVID-19 during pregnancy do very well, said Dr. Stacey Sensor, a Gaylord obstetrician. But pregnancy is not a good time to be dealing with other health issues, particularly at the end of the pregnancy when those other issues can make it harder to go through labor and recovery.

Im always really concerned if they get it at the in the last four weeks of the pregnancy because those patients tend to do worse, Sensor said.

A particular concern is that one complication of COVID can be blood clots, and pregnant women already are at higher risk of that, she said.

As physicians we want to have healthy moms and healthy babies, thats what we live for, Sensor said, which is why she urges her pregnant patients to be vaccinated against COVID.

Its an opportunity for our patients to have a decreased risk of an adverse event, and I think its really, really important to take advantage of that opportunity, she said.

Wharton noted that that the official stance of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology is that any woman who is pregnant, breastfeeding or thinking of becoming pregnant should be vaccinated.

What are the risks of not being vaccinated? Wharton said. We know that a woman who is pregnant and develops COVID shes more likely to be admitted to a hospital; shes more likely to need increasing amounts of oxygen than her non-pregnant friend. Shes also more likely to end up in the ICU. We also know that compared to women who dont get sick, that she has a much higher risk of giving birth to her baby prematurely.

Colombo agreed, saying hes urging both pregnant patients and those trying to get pregnant to get vaccinated ASAP.

Theres no advantage to waiting, he said. Women trying to get pregnant should get the vaccine. People who are newly pregnant should get the vaccine. Theres no advantage to waiting until the second trimester or until you deliver. Get it as soon as you can.

More on MLive:

Cancer doesnt wait for COVID: Health experts urge Michigan residents not to delay routine care

Health freedom activists target school boards in fight against Michigan COVID restrictions

At this point, COVID-19 is a preventable disease -- even as thousands continue to get infected every day

Michigan to resume use of Johnson & Johnson vaccine following federal review
Angel R. Oquendo (University of Connecticut - School of Law) has posted Justice for All: Certifying Global Class Actions (16 Washington U. Global Studies L. Rev. 71-124 (2017) (Fully Revised 2021)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

A federal court should approach the presence of foreigners in a global class-action for monetary relief with an open mind. It should keep them in so long as it can conclude, upon a reflective comparative law analysis, that the judiciary in their nation of origin would uphold the ultimate ruling. For example, Latin American absent class-members should normally stay on board inasmuch as virtually every jurisdiction in their region would allow a U.S. adjudicator to arrive at this conclusion. Accordingly, they would fail, on grounds of res judicata, if they ever tried to re-litigate the matter back home upon a defeat on the merits in the United States. In particular, a tribunal from any one of seven representative regional countries (Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Ecuador) would most probably find such a U.S. judgment consistent with local due process, as well as with the remaining requirements for recognition. In other words, it would hold that absentees stemming from its jurisdictional territory could not legitimately complain about the preclusive effect since they would have free ridden on the efforts of their representatives with a chance at compensation, would have benefited from numerous fairness controls, and could have similarly faced preclusion in their homeland based on a suit prosecuted by someone else without their authorization. Judges in the United States should engage in a similar in-depth deliberation to decide whether to welcome citizens from anywhere else in the world to the litigation.
Ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick stole the headlines, but his friend and favorite municipal construction contractor Bobby Ferguson was found just as guilty of stealing taxpayer money. Eight years later, both are regaining their freedom.

About three months after former President Donald Trump commuted Kilpatricks 28-year sentence, a federal judge on Thursday, April 29 granted Ferguson, now 52, compassionate early release from his 21-year sentence.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds, who originally sentenced Ferguson and Kilpatrick in 2013, also granted Fergusons early release.

Related: Trump commutes Kilpatricks sentence

First, defendant has hypertension, high cholesterol, and reduced lung capacity due to bullet wounds Defendant suffered when he was a victim of an attempted carjacking and robbery, Edmunds wrote. The CDC has identified hypertension as a condition that can possibly make an individual more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19.

Second, defendant now faces the prospect of a period of incarceration much longer than a more culpable co-defendant.

Edmunds noted that Ferguson was not an elected official and was convicted of substantially fewer charges than Kilpatrick.

Kwame Kilpatrick peers out from a corner of the Theodore Levin U.S. Courthouse in Detroit following his 6-month corruption trial in which the ex-Detroit mayor was found guilty on 24 of 30 counts, including racketeering and extortion on Monday, March, 11, 2013. (Tanya Moutzalias | MLive.com)Tanya Moutzalias | MLive.com

Kilpatrick was convicted in 2013 by a jury of 24 crimes, including racketeering, extortion and bribery. The jury found Ferguson guilty of 11 counts.

Not only has defendant served a slightly longer term of imprisonment than a more culpable co-defendant, but his motion comes during an unprecedented global pandemic and defendant has an increased vulnerability to the virus, Edmunds said. In sum, the court finds there are extraordinary and compelling reasons warranting a sentence reduction in this case.

Ferguson and Kilpatrick rigged municipal contracts worth nearly $70 million for Fergusons construction company in a kickback and bribery scheme.

Ferguson is still slated to repay the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, where many of the contracts were issued, $6.2 million in restitution.

At his sentencing in 2013, Ferguson said: The American dream is supposed to be about spirit, liberty. It just dont seem that way anymore.

Edmunds, even then, felt Ferguson was the less culpable of the duo.

Mr. Ferguson was not the mayor, Edmunds said at sentencing. He was not elected. There was no public trust... He has no elected accountability to the people of southeast Michigan in the same way that Mr. Kilpatrick did.

Had he completed his entire sentence, Ferguson earliest possible release date was set for Jan. 29, 2031. He would have been 62.

More on MLive:

Trump commutes Kilpatricks sentence

Kilpatricks decent into corruption

Kilpatrick sentenced to 28 years

Kilpatrick denied early release

Court: Kwame Kilpatrick didnt cause Detroit bankruptcy, but atmosphere of corruption didnt help

Kwame Kilpatricks son pleads with President Trump to commute ex-Mayors sentence

Ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick denied release from prison again

Report: Kwame Kilpatrick asks President Trump to commute his sentence
Photo: Department of Justice

I want to share part of a conversation I once had with a now-retired provincial cabinet minister.



The former minister said one of the challenges in government, when attempting to resolve a problem, is the need to ensure the proposed solution does not create newer, unanticipated problems.



I am reminded of this as the Liberal government has tabled, and recently amended, Bill C-10: An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.



Few would dispute that in an age of increased digital steaming, and various online media platforms, that the Broadcasting Act and the oversight regulation with the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) badly needs updating.



The challenge, as the now retired former cabinet minister would remind us, is to make these much-needed updates without inadvertently creating new problems.



Recently, the Liberal government removed a critical exemption to Bill C-10, that, in my view and the view of many other experts and stakeholders, will create serious setbacks to our Charter protected right of free expression.



When Bill C-10 was first proposed it exempted unique user generated content from the bill.



For example, if Canadians created and posted their own video on YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok or any other online social media platforms, their content would be exempted by the changes proposed in Bill C-10.



However, during clause-by-clause examination of Bill C-10 in the Industry, Science and Technology committee, the Liberals removed this exemption.



Removing this exemption means that the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats at the CRTC could have the power to regulate, remove and censor what Canadians post to their own social media.



This can also limit what Canadians are able to see online in Canada.



Instead of Canadians having the choice, the choices could be limited based on yet-to-be announced-criteria set and enforced by the CRTC.



The Liberals defend this amendment stating that the intent is to limit the broadcast of unlicensed content online to protect copyright holders, who have lobbied for these changes.



That ultimately is the problem with the Liberal approach in Bill C-10.



Rather than resolving the unlicensed content issue through copyright law, the government proposes to cut it off at the broadcasting level, allowing Canadian's content to be sacrificed in the process.



In a statement on the bills Charter compliance, justice officials argued that the original exemption, removed by the Liberals, alleviated potential concerns of breaching section 2 (b) of the Charter on free expression.



With the exemption's removal, many are speculating on what impacts this bill will have.



This approach by the Liberals, according to one of Canadas foremost law professors, who also holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, is a shocking and likely unconstitutional speech regulation.



Prof. Michael Geist further notes:



We would never think of subjecting the content of the letters, emails or blog posts to CRTC regulation, yet Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government believe it is appropriate to regulate a new generations form of speech  TikTok videos, Instagram posts, Facebook feeds, and YouTube videos  as if they are the equivalent of broadcast programs.



For the record, I share the concerns of Prof. Geist.



My question this week:

Do you support or oppose this amendment to Bill C-10?

I can be reached at [email protected] or call toll free 1-800-665-8711.
The secondary listing is aimed at enhancing the visibility and accessibility of the uranium development company to North American investors.

Lotus owns 85% of the Kayelekera Project in Malawi that hosts a uranium resource of 37.5 million pounds.

Ltd ( ) (OTCMKTS:LTSRF) has completed its secondary listing on the OTCQB market in the United States with the ticker LTSRF and trading began last night.

The secondary listing on the OTC Markets is aimed at enhancing the visibility and accessibility of the uranium development company to North American investors.

It will allow potential North American investors to both trade and settle during US trading hours in US dollars.

Established trading platform

Operated by OTC Markets Group in New York, the OTC is an established trading platform providing live-market trading in companies that hold primary listings in other markets.

Trading of Lotus shares on the OTC imposes no additional compliance or regulatory standards over and above the Companys existing compliance requirements as an Australian incorporated entity listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

OTC trading is non-dilutive to existing Lotus shareholders, as no new shares are being issued to enable trading on the OTC.

Kayelekera project

Lotus owns an 85% interest in the Kayelekera Uranium Project in Malawi that hosts a resource of 37.5 million pounds of U3O8 and historically produced around 11 million pounds of uranium between 2009 and 2014.

The company has completed a positive Restart Study which demonstrated that Kayelekera can support a viable long-term operation and has the potential to be one of the first uranium projects to recommence production in the future.

North American marketing

Lotus Resources has already increased its marketing effort towards North America, with attendance at multiple upcoming virtual conferences, as well as the hosting of numerous webinars and one-on-one presentations.

Upcoming events include:

North American Investor Webinar  May 3, 2021, https://www.redcloudfs.com/rcwebinar-lot/

OTC Markets  Metals and Mining Conference  May 6, 2021, https://www.virtualinvestorconferences.com/events/event-details/metals-miningvirtual-investor-conference/

Uranium Conference: Fuelling the Path towards electrification  May 13, https://www.redcloudfs.com/uraniumconference2021/

The company has a market capitalisation of approximately A$114 million and shares on the ASX today have been as much as 9% higher to A$0.13.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta v9.0 software update is coming sooner than expected and it promises to remove reliance on radar readings and focus on computer vision.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the FSD v9.0 may be available in two weeks and teased that it will "blow your mind."

Tesla FSD v9.0: What to Expect With the Latest Update

On Apr. 10, Inside EVs said that Tesla electric vehicles (EV) usually come with twelve ultrasonic sensors, eight cameras, and a forward-facing radar sensor, but the latter will not be used when the FSD v9.0 becomes available.

Musk also confirmed that the radar sensor would be dropped from Tesla's production, and would stop using the technology in the future.

In addition, the FSD v9.0 would improve driving during bad weather, and "weird corner cases," as well as unprotected left turns.

Tesla's FSD support page also mentions an upcoming autosteer feature on city streets, but neither Musk nor the support page mentions when exactly it will be released.

However, the tech CEO tweeted that utilizing pure vision with FSD v9.0 was proved to be safer and that the Gating factor is "achieving."

For those who are unaware, the Gating factor refers to a key element that limits or delays a specific task.

Lastly, the "Download Button," which was first promised to arrive with the FSD v8.3 update, would instead be included on the FSD v9.0.

Also Read: Elon Musk Tesla to Update FSD Render with New Probability Vector Space and Look for Better Integration With System

Tesla FSD Under Regulatory Grey Zone

After several fatal crashes involving Tesla EVs, government agencies have kept a close eye on the FSD feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had been recording and investigating fatal incidents involving a Tesla EV, including the one that claimed two lives during the Apr. 19 Texas crash.

However, the NHTSA remains lagging on the matter as the government agency failed to issue specific regulations or performance standards for vehicles with semi-autonomous systems, including Tesla's FSD feature.

Additionally, the fact that deploying semi-autonomous functions blurs the line on who is controlling the EV makes regulation much more complicated.

"NHTSA refuses to take action for vehicles termed as having partial, or lower level, automation, and continues to wait for higher levels of automation before requiring that AV systems meet minimum national standards," said Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). "Because NHTSA has put in place no requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the AV control systems limitations."

The agency defended that it is in the midst of reviewing regulations around semi-automated vehicles, and encourages NTSB to lend them a hand in formulating advanced policies on semi-autonomous driving systems.

"NHTSA is drafting rules on autonomous vehicles, but it has been slow to regulate semi-autonomous vehicles," University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith said.

Related Article: Elon Musk: Tesla FSD Q2 Release 'For Sure,' Says Buying Is Better Than Subscription Service!

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Leigh Mercer

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Edison, NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/29/2021 -- Latest released the research study on Global Smart Gas Meter Market, offers a detailed overview of the factors influencing the global business scope. Smart Gas Meter Market research report shows the latest market insights, current situation analysis with upcoming trends and breakdown of the products and services. The report provides key statistics on the market status, size, share, growth factors of the Smart Gas Meter. The study covers emerging player's data, including: competitive landscape, sales, revenue and global market share of top manufacturers are Itron, Inc. (United States) , Honeywell International, Inc. (United States) , Apator Group (Poland) , Landis+Gyr (Switzerland), Diehl Metering (United Kingdom) , Sensus (United States) , EDMI Limited (Singapore) , Chongqing Shancheng Gas Equipment Co., Ltd. (China) ,.



Free Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts @: https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/sample-report/35576-global-smart-gas-meter-market



Definition:

Smart gas meter generally involves in the installation of an intelligent meter at the residential and commercial platforms. It automatically measures the basic parameters such as volume, pressure, and temperature of the gas flowing in the pipeline. Additionally, increasing consumer focus on purchasing energy-efficient equipment that has enhanced the product demand from the gas and pipeline industry. Factors such as increasing demand for smart gas meter coupled with rising consumer spending on latest technology based power efficiency equipment such as embedded control systems and RF Connectivity will provide a positive scope for the product penetration during the forecasted timeframe. There has been a significant rise in number of residential meters with a figure stood up to 22 Million in Italy region alone in 2018. So, the future for baby strollers looks promising. The major companies are adding more innovative techniques in Asia-Pacific countries as these countries are focused on the fastest-growing verticals for the electric sector.

Itron, Inc. launched a new smart gas meter platform which is beneficial for delivering smart meter functionality to the European Market. It is used to measure and manage gas through accurate and detailed usage data, as well as reduce business cost by using capabilities, such as advanced alarms, remote asset monitoring, and remote valve operation.



Analyst at AMA have conducted special survey and have connected with opinion leaders and Industry experts from various region to minutely understand impact on growth as well as local reforms to fight the situation. A special chapter in the study presents Impact Analysis of COVID-19 on Global Dichroic Glass Market along with tables and graphs related to various country and segments showcasing impact on growth trends.



Market Trend:

Increasing Demand from Asia Pacific Regions

Value Oriented Customers



Market Drivers:

Growing Demand for Energy Efficient Equipments

Increasing Urbanization and Rise in Smart City Infrastructure



Opportunities:

Rising Investments from Manufacturers for Digitalize Gas Distribution Channels

Accurate Billing and Improved Customer Service



The Global Smart Gas Meter Market segments and Market Data Break Down are illuminated below:

by Type (Automatic Meter Reading, Advanced Metering Infrastructure), Application (Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Others), Card (CPU Card Type, RF Card Type, Others)



Enquire for customization in Report @: https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/enquiry-before-buy/35576-global-smart-gas-meter-market



In February 2019, Genesis gas solutions partnership with Tata Communications LoRaWAN Internet of Things (IoT) network for providing the pre-paid smart gas metering system to Indraprastha Gas Limited (IGL). It's used to monitor their gas level more accurately in real-time and offers ultra-low power long-range technology solutions.



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



Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Global Smart Gas Meter Market:

Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Smart Gas Meter market

Chapter 2: Exclusive Summary  the basic information of the Smart Gas Meter Market.

Chapter 3: Displaying the Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges of the Smart Gas Meter

Chapter 4: Presenting the Smart Gas Meter Market Factor Analysis Porters Five Forces, Supply/Value Chain, PESTEL analysis, Market Entropy, Patent/Trademark Analysis.

Chapter 5: Displaying market size by Type, End User and Region 2015-2020

Chapter 6: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the Smart Gas Meter 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 (2021-2026).

Chapter 8 & 9: Displaying the Appendix, Methodology and Data Source

Finally, Smart Gas Meter Market is a valuable source of guidance for individuals and companies in decision framework.



Get More Information:

https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/reports/35576-global-smart-gas-meter-market



Key questions answered

- Who are the Leading key players and what are their Key Business plans in the Global Smart Gas Meter market?

- What are the key concerns of the five forces analysis of the Global Smart Gas Meter market?

- What are different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Global Smart Gas Meter market?

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?



Definitively, this report will give you an unmistakable perspective on every single reality of the market without a need to allude to some other research report or an information source. Our report will give all of you the realities about the past, present, and eventual fate of the concerned Market.

Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.
PORTLAND - Meeting the state affordable housing goals has been a challenge, according to Mary D. Dickerson, the towns economic development planner.

Since the early 1990s numerous housing developments have been completed without an affordable component, setting the town back in its percentage of affordable housing, she said.

In 2006, the Planning and Zoning Commission took steps to address the issue.

The commission voted to allow accessory dwelling units by right, meaning an ADU could be located within an existing home with the issuance of a zoning permit rather than an approval from the PZC, Dickerson said.

Portland was an early adopter of this type of measure.

The PZCs action was an attempt to provide needed housing opportunities while retaining the integrity of single-family neighborhoods and the interests of surrounding properties and homeowners, Dickerson said.

The commission also adopted an allowance for two-family & four-family homes, which has increased Portlands housing diversity by adding additional rental units to the market, Dickerson said.

Taken together, the two actions enabled the town to raise its percentage of affordable housing to 8.56 percent, she said.

Now, the Social Justice Coalition is sponsoring a virtual meeting Thursday on affordable housing in Connecticut in general and on Portland accessory dwelling units in particular.

The program, Fair Housing Matters, a Whole Community Conversation, is being co-sponsored by the town and the Portland Public Library.

It is being held virtually beginning at 7 p.m. and is presented as part of Fair Housing Month, officials said.

The library is requesting that residents who wish to take part in the meeting register to do so. Registrations can be made by calling the library at 860-342-6770.

In addition to offering information about how Portland has worked to make affordable housing more generally available, the program will include personal stories from residents of public housing in Portland, as well as what steps can be taken to make Portland more inclusive, as well as a presentation by DesegregateCT.

The group identifies itself as a coalition of neighbors and nonprofits who believes in creating abundant, diverse housing in service of equity, inclusive prosperity, and a cleaner environment.

Portland, with about 9,200 residents, has about 3,700 dwelling units, according to the U.S. Census. It had a median income of $99,292 in 2019, with a poverty rate of 6.8 percent, according to the census. The town, from 2015-2019 had an 82.5 percent owner-occupancy rate of its housing units, according to the census.

There will also be a question-and-answer session as part of the meeting.

Residents are asked to send their questions to the coalition at portlandsocialjusticecoalition@gmail.com

Connecticut has laws aimed at having 10 percent of housing in each community be affordable.
As COVID-19 infection rates in Fort Bend County remain steady and vaccination rates on the rise, the city of Missouri City has made the move to reopen its public meetings to those wishing to attend in person, albeit with safety protocols in place.

According to Fort Bend County statistics, there have been 175,057 vaccinations administered by the county through April 29. There have been 56,985 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March 2020 with 598 associated deaths. In the month of April, there have been just one confirmed death from COVID-19 in Fort Bend County.

In Missouri City there have been 4,634 confirmed cases of the virus since the county began tracking cases.

With cases on the wane and vaccinations up, Missouri Citys City Council meetings will now be held open to the public at the Community Center in City Hall Complex, 1522 Texas Parkway.

The location was moved from Council Chambers to the Community Center due to the current plan to renovate the room and also to accommodate more individuals and to effectively follow COVID-19 protocols including social distancing, city officials reported in a news release. All attendees are required to wear masks and have their temperature checked prior to entering the facility.

Anyone wishing to address the City Council concerning agenda items or issues not on the agenda must attend the in-person meeting at the Community Center.

Upon arrival attendees should follow COVID-19 regulations and complete the orange comment card and present the comment card to the City Secretary prior to the beginning of the meeting, according to the release.

For questions, contact the City Secretarys office by email at CSO@missouricitytx.gov or call 281-403-8686.

The meeting will still be livestreamed for residents who wish to listen or watch the meeting virtually on the city website at https://tinyurl.com/9sn9bpa9. To view details of City Council meetings  including agendas, videos and other materials  go to https://tinyurl.com/b6k63keu.

Other city meetings  including the Parks Board and the Planning & Zoning Commission  are preparing to begin in-person meetings in June.

For more information go to www.missouricitytx.gov.

rkent@hcnonline.com
A teenager is facing attempted murder charges after allegedly deliberately driving into two pedestrians in the states far west.

Emergency services were called to Lane Street, Broken Hill about 8.45pm on March 30 to reports two men, aged 19 and 49, had been hit by a car while walking along the footpath.

Both pedestrians were taken to Broken Hill Hospital in a serious but stable condition. NSW Police on Friday said the older man was transferred to Royal Adelaide Hospital where he remains with serious head injuries.

The driver of the car, an 18-year-old man, was arrested at the police station a short time after the crash but released pending further inquiries.

Police at 9.15am on Thursday again arrested the teenager at a home on Wyman Street, Broken Hill.
Apr. 28Jaclyn Tourtelotte has carefully watched the student-athletes at Foxcroft Academy practice and play their way through the COVID-19 pandemic since preseason practices began last summer.

As the school's athletic administrator, she has worked with coaches in various sports seasons to create competitive opportunities  all with a keen eye on the players' health in her role as athletic trainer at the Dover-Foxcroft school.

News Tuesday that Gov. Janet Mills has relaxed Maine's outdoor face mask requirements in the wake of new federal guidance  and the hope that changes to the state's community sports guidelines that might unmask high school student-athletes for outdoor activities  had Tourtelotte hopeful that she'd soon be able to see her athletes from yet another perspective.

"It would be great to see a kid make a great play and be able to see him smile," she said.

That opportunity should be in full evidence for spring sports after the Maine Principals' Association on Wednesday afternoon issued revised guidelines for sports.

Face coverings no longer are required for outdoor practices and competitions, though masks are recommended when 6 feet of physical distancing is difficult to maintain.

Masks still are required when individuals are in settings such as locker rooms, rest rooms or buses.

In addition, spectators are not required to wear a mask at outside events if they are able to maintain 6 feet of social distancing.

All of the new guidelines align with Maine's newly revised community sports guidelines.

The announcement came after the MPA on Wednesday morning sent a proposal to state officials, according to MPA interscholastic executive director Mike Burnham.

Earlier this week, new federal guidance and the state's initial response to them fostered hope for a return to normalcy for interscholastic sports and other outdoor athletic activities such as road racing.

"I was really impressed with how quickly Maine changed the written guidelines for all of us after the CDC's announcement. It seemed almost simultaneous," said Gary Allen of Great Cranberry Island, a longtime road race director whose events include the Mount Desert Island Marathon and the Millinocket Marathon.

Story continues

"It seems like more and more as people are getting vaccinated more and more things are being relaxed and it does make me feel more optimistic."

Allen served as an official last weekend at the first track and field meet hosted by Mount Desert Island High School of Bar Harbor in more than 600 days.

"The kids obviously did what they were supposed to do and wore masks in order to compete, but there was a side of me that was a little sad not being able to see their faces," he said.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if some of these kids, especially the seniors, in one of their next meets, or if the state meet can be held, could be able to compete without their masks.'"

The community sports revisions mirror Mills' statement Tuesday, which indicated that face coverings would remain required for outdoor settings where the 6-foot social distancing standard is challenging, as well as for indoor public settings.

"I think it just comes down to people respecting other people's space," Tourtelotte.

Allen had planned to host the Bridge the Gap road race from Prospect across the Penobscot Narrows Bridge to Bucksport this weekend, but for now has postponed that event.

The next scheduled race he's directing is the Downeast Sunrise Trail Relay, a 102-mile team event July 23-24 from Ellsworth to Eastport that he expects to attract 400 runners.

"It's already sort of a socially distanced event because all of the teams are spread out over a 102-mile course, but teams travel together in the support vehicles so we would need to have protocols in place for that," Allen said.

He hopes staging the Downeast Sunrise Trail Relay could lead to the return of the MDI Marathon in October and the Millinocket Marathon in December after a year's absence.

"I think it's going to be one of those situations where the rules regarding road racing will continue to evolve and the rules for high school sports will continue to evolve, but I don't think we're months and months away from things getting better," he said. "I think week by week as a higher percentage of Americans and Mainers keep getting vaccinated it's going to further relax things."
MDHHS, MDARD, MDNR offer best practices to minimize risk of rabies after four bats test positive in Clinton, Ingham, Kent, and Midland counties

MDHHS, MDARD, MDNR offer best practices to minimize risk of rabies after four bats test positive in Clinton, Ingham, Kent, and Midland counties

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 29, 2021

Contact: MDDHS, Chelsea Wuth, 517-241-2112

MDNR, Ed Golder, 517-284-5815

MDARD, Jessy Sielski, 517-284-5725

LANSING, Mich. - The Michigan departments of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) and Natural Resources (MDNR) are urging Michiganders to adopt practices to protect their families and animals from rabies. Four bats have tested positive for rabies in Clinton, Ingham, Kent, and Midland counties in 2021.

Spring is typically when rabies cases start appearing. Generally, bats and skunks are a primary source of the disease. Michigan local health departments experience an increase in calls from citizens about bat encounters between May and September when bats are most active. In 2020, there were 56 cases of rabies in Michigan animals including 52 rabid bats and four rabid skunks.

"With warm weather coming, it is possible for Michiganders to unintentionally come into contact with a potentially infected animal," said Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, MDHHS chief medical executive and chief deputy for health. "If you come into physical contact with a wild animal or are bitten or scratched, it is important that you seek medical care quickly to keep a treatable situation from becoming potentially life-threatening."

Rabies is a viral disease of mammals and is transmitted through the bite or scratch of an infected animal. Exposures can take place in a variety of settings, including when bats are found in the bedroom of a sleeping person or a child comes into contact with an infected animal. It is important to seek medical care to determine the need for post-exposure treatment.

Rabies is fatal to humans if proper treatment is not received before symptoms begin. Preventive treatment is given to people who are exposed to a potentially rabid animal. Treatment is not necessary for people if the animal can be tested and tests negative for rabies.

To protect your family and your animals from rabies, there are some very important tips to follow.

People:

People should leave wild and stray animals alone, including baby animals. Animals could be carrying rabies and not appear sick. Do not try to nurse sick wildlife or stray animals to health. Report ill wildlife to the Department of Natural Resources. Contact your local animal control agency with concerns about stray animals.

If you are bitten or scratched by an animal, promptly seek medical care and notify your local health department about the bite.

If a person may have been asleep in the same room as a bat, or a young child or person with an impairment may have been alone with a bat, safely confine or collect the bat if possible and contact your local health department to determine if it should be tested for rabies. If the bat escapes or is released, contact your local health department to discuss the situation and determine if treatment of people potentially exposed to the bat is necessary.

Animals:

Talk to your veterinarian about vaccinating pets and livestock. Even indoor pets that never go outside can encounter a bat that gets inside the home. Rabies is fatal in animals, and there is no treatment. Therefore, vaccination is important to protect your pets and livestock from rabies.

If your animal is bitten, scratched or may have been unsupervised with a wild or stray animal, contact your veterinarian as soon as possible. Even if your animal is currently vaccinated against rabies, additional actions may need to be taken to prevent the spread of the virus. If possible, safely confine or capture the wild or stray animal without touching the animal. Then, contact your local animal control agency or a veterinarian, as the animal may need to be tested for rabies.

Keep your pet on a leash and under your control as this can reduce the chances of having contact with wild and stray animals.

More information about rabies and a map of rabies positive animals in Michigan can be found at Michigan.gov/rabies.

###
The North Portland property where police and protesters engaged in a tense standoff late last year was the site of a large party Tuesday that spilled into the surrounding neighborhood and prompted nearly two dozen 911 calls.

The party at the so-called red house was advertised on Instagram, featured live music and drew between 100 and 150 people, according to neighbors who say they worry the site will continue to be the source of nuisance complaints as warmer weather approaches. The property is located at 4406 N. Mississippi Ave.

One neighbor, Dylan Kruse, said he called 911 to report trespassing on his property and later spoke with a police officer about the assault of a woman associated with the party. Kruse said he heard the woman screaming. Kruse said the officer told him that police would not insert officers into the situation.

Kruse said his fence was tagged with an anti-police message overnight.

Scenes from the red house on North Mississippi Street in Portland, April 28, 2021. Beth Nakamura/StaffThe Oregonian

The red house and adjacent empty lot remain largely unchanged since becoming a flashpoint for protesters late last year after authorities arrived to evict people from the home, though a makeshift stage for performers appears to have been added. Signs around the mostly boarded up house say, Land back, Protest the red house and Indigenous solidarity for black liberation.

A Moroccan flag still flies in front of the house, a nod to the Moorish sovereign beliefs of William Kinney, who goes by William X. Nietzche. The home previously belonged to Kinneys parents, who lost the property through foreclosure. Kinney embraces the sovereign citizen movement, a fringe belief system whose adherents profess they are above the law.

Meanwhile, talks about both properties appear to have stalled. Libra Forde, chief operating officer at Self Enhancement Inc., a prominent nonprofit that has long served the areas Black youths and families, said her organization remains interested in acquiring the empty lot, but the review process continues.

By the end of the year, it seemed a deal that would turn the house over to the Kinneys had been brokered, but little has happened since. A spokesman for Mayor Ted Wheeler said he needed to check on the status of talks about the properties and did not get back to The Oregonian/OregonLive by days end.

Portland police Sgt. Kevin Allen said the city received numerous noise complaint calls in that neighborhood last night.

He said it does not appear that officers responded in person but they did return calls to people who wanted to speak with an officer.

He said limited police resources mean police will always prioritize life safety emergencies.

They also would factor in that any response there would require more officers to respond as there has been hostility toward the police from some community members at that location, he said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

He said police did receive a complaint about an assault but the officers notes indicate the complainant decided to call back another time.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie
Ithaca, N.Y.  A Tompkins County man was arrested Wednesday after being accused of possessing child pornography on his desktop computer at his former place of employment, according to federal prosecutors.

Randolph Bullock, 64, of Dryden, could face up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines if found guilty, prosecutors said.

Bullock was held Wednesday following an initial appearance ticket, prosecutors said. A detention hearing is scheduled for May 3, prosecutors said.

The charge on Bullocks complaint is an accusation and he is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty, prosecutors said.

The investigation by a Federal Bureau of Investigation Mid-State Child Exploitation Task Force  comprised of FBI Special Agents and Investigators of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI), with assistance from the Tompkins County Sheriffs Department and the Dryden Police Department  is ongoing, prosecutors said.

Authorities ask anyone with information about this case to call the FBI at 607-274-5050.

Staff writer James McClendon covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? Reach him at 914-204-2815 or jmcclendon@syracuse.com.
U.S. travelers soon will be able to vacation again on cruise ships, but with two catches: They will need to show theyve fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and they must travel out of the country before boarding.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention barred cruise ships from picking up passengers in U.S. ports more than a year ago because of the pandemic. The CDC hasnt reversed that decision, despite the large number of Americans who have been vaccinated.

That hasnt stopped the cruise ship industry, which has racked up billions of dollars of losses. Operators are moving their vessels to the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Bermuda, Greece and other Mediterranean ports for the summer season.

The ships arent subject to CDC rules as long as they dont depart or stop at a U.S. port.

Cruise operators have adopted a strict no vaccination, no trip policy. Some say they will continue the vaccination rules even when they are allowed to resume regular U.S. operations.

On ExpressNews.com:More than 1 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in San Antonio

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings shares the CDCs view that vaccinations are the primary vehicle for Americans to get back to their everyday lives, Frank Del Rio, president and CEO of the company, said in statement. We believe that through a combination of 100 percent mandatory vaccinations for guests and crew and science-based public health measures we can create a safe, bubble-like environment for guests and crew.

Norwegian has asked the CDC to allow it to resume service from the United States in July. Silversea Cruises also has told the CDC it wants to return to American ports with a vaccine requirement.

Following home rules

Associated Press file photo

Americans who go to foreign ports to board still would have to meet the local countrys health guidelines, which means being vaccinated in some cases.

The 27 countries of the European Union are expected to allow American tourists again this summer, but only if they are fully vaccinated. To get on board a cruise ship in Greece would require proof of vaccination.

Caribbean destinations, Bermuda and the Bahamas dont require travelers to be vaccinated  but theyll have to be to board their cruise ships.

Safe travel is our priority and placing vaccinations and other key public health travel protocols at the core of our cruise industry restart will not only restore traveler confidence, but also offer comfort to visitors and Barbadians alike, Lisa Cummins, the Barbados minister of tourism and international transport, said in a statement.

Carnival Corp.s Seabourn Odyssey will depart from Barbados starting in July, eliminating Miami, one of its ports.

Seabourn launched operations from Barbados in November but stopped after a passenger on the first cruise tested positive for COVID-19.

Luxury line Crystal Cruises will require a negative COVID-19 test in addition to proof of vaccination when it starts weekly cruises from Nassau, Bahamas, on July 4 and from Bimini in the Bahamas on July 3.

Interim CEO and President Jack Anderson said in a statement that a recent survey showed that 80 percent of people who have been on cruises would go on another if a vaccine were required.

But in an interview, Vanessa Rodriguez, Crystal Cruises public relations manager, wouldnt say whether the company would still require passengers to be vaccinated when its cruise ships can start docking again in the U.S. She said the plan going forward is fluid.

Royal Caribbean Cruises and Celebrity Cruises also are requiring vaccinations and redeploying ships outside the United States.

Royal Caribbean will redeploy its Galveston-based cruise ship, Adventure of the Seas, to Nassau for weekly cruises beginning June 12. Its Vision of the Seas vessel is moving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Bermuda for weekly trips starting July 10.

It is unclear when U.S. cruise lines will be able to once again depart from domestic ports. The CDC hasnt finalized regulations for a resumption.

On ExpressNews.com:Mask on: Restaurants and shops in San Antonio that are keeping mask requirements

Not all cruise lines say they will require passengers to be vaccinated when they resume U.S. departures  unless the CDC orders it.

Royal Caribbean CEO Michael Bayley said in a recent interview with Miami radio station WLRN that the company didnt intend to require vaccinations when its ships restart U.S. departures. About 80 percent of Royal Caribbean potential passengers are vaccinated or plan to be vaccinated, he said.

But allowing cruise lines to depart from the U.S. without vaccination mandates would be a mistake, said Tara Kirk Sell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

There are a lot of opportunities on cruises for super-spreading outbreaks, and not just for COVID, she said.

Kirk Sell said cruise ships often have seen disease outbreaks, such as norovirus, which causes vomiting, diarrhea and gastrointestinal infections.

Against vaccine passports

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order in April prohibiting businesses, including cruise ships, from requiring proof of vaccination.

DeSantis is anxious to get the cruise industry restarted. He announced April 8 that Florida is suing the Biden administration in federal court to reopen the cruise industry immediately.

We must allow our cruise liners and their employees to get back to work and safely set sail again, he said at a Port of Miami press conference. To be clear, no federal law authorizes the CDC to indefinitely impose a nationwide shutdown of an entire industry.

Florida is home to the three largest cruise ports in the world: Miami, Port Canaveral and Port Everglades, which is in Fort Lauderdale.

Its an issue because the governors order runs contrary to the vaccinations the cruise lines are currently requiring of passengers, said Stewart Chiron, a cruise industry analyst who runs the website The Cruise Guy.

Texas has one cruise port, Galveston, which is the fourth-busiest in North America as measured by departing passengers, just behind the Florida ports.

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed an order banning government-sponsored vaccine passports, but it does not apply to private industry, including cruise ships.

The CDC did not respond to requests for comment.

The cruise industry got a black eye in the early days of the pandemic. Daily news reports focused on the plight of two ships, many of their passengers infected with the coronavirus.

The Diamond Princess saw the largest COVID-19 outbreak outside China in mid-February 2020. Following a cruise, 13 passengers died and 20 percent of the people onboard got sick with the coronavirus during its anchorage off Yokohama, Japan.

Passengers on a second ship, the Grand Princess, were quarantined off the coast of California for three weeks. Eight passengers died from the COVID-19 outbreak and more than 100 passengers were infected.

The CDC still gives cruise ship travel its highest warning  Level 4. It recommends not boarding a cruise ship because the risk of catching COVID-19 is too high.

Loyal passengers, however, remain anxious to cruise again, said Peter Herff, owner of Herff Travel in San Antonio.

Herff said many cruisers are vaccinated and ready to board once the ships return to the U.S. He said he has seen several dozen bookings for the overseas cruises.

Herff said he is not anti-vaccine but that its unfair to require cruise passengers to be vaccinated. After all, he said, passengers wont be subject to the same requirement before they board planes.

I will guarantee you that if Im talking to one of my clients and if they have a fear of traveling due to the virus, they dont fear it on a cruise line  they fear it on the airplane, he said.

randy.diamond@express-news.net
ROME, APR 29 - Health Minister Roberto Speranza on Thursday signed an order extending a ban on arrivals in Italy from India and Bangladesh to Sri Lanka because of the high levels of COVID-19 contagion in these countries. Only people with Italian citizenship will be allowed to return to Italy from these nations. (ANSA).
OTTAWA, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada is providing support where COVID has struck hardest  to women, to young people, to low-wage workers, and to small and medium-sized businesses, especially in the tourism and hospitalityindustry. Budget 2021 is a plan to finish the fight against COVID-19 and ensure a robust economic recovery that is inclusive of all Canadians.

Today, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, the Honourable Bernadette Jordan, and Member of Parliament, Kody Blois, met with the Executive Director of Wine Growers Nova Scotia, Haley Brown, as well as Proprietor and Founder of L'Acadie Vineyards, Bruce Ewert, to discusstargeted investmentsaimed to support wineries from Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience.

The growth of the Canadian wine sector over the last 15 years has been a success story of Canada's agri-food sector. With over twenty vineyards and nearly 1000 acres of grapes planted in Nova Scotia, the sector has become an economic driver in the province's economy. It continues to provide growth opportunities for grape growers and tourism businesses.

Budget 2021 proposes to provide $101 million over two years, starting in 2022-23, from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, to implement a program for the wine sector that will support wineries in adapting to ongoing and emerging challenges, in line with Canada's trade obligations.

For too long, trade barriers within our country have held back Canadian businesses from reaching the full force of the Canadian market. Removing barriers to trade between provinces and territories will help build a more prosperous economycreating jobs, fueling business expansion, expanding consumer choice of Canadian goods and services, and helping regional economies grow.

Budget 2021 proposes to allocate $21 million over three years, starting in 2021-22, to:

Work with provincial and territorial partners to enhance the capacity of the Internal Trade Secretariat that supports the Canadian Free Trade Agreement in order to accelerate the reduction of trade barriers within Canada .

Advance work with willing partners towards creating a repository of open and accessible pan-Canadian internal trade data to identify barriers, including licensing and professional certification requirements, that we can work together to reduce them. Pursue internal trade objectives through new or renewed discretionary federal transfers to provinces and territories.

Budget 2021 is a plan to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through the crisis and towards a robust recovery. It proposes to extend business and income support measures through to the fall and to make investments to create jobs and help businesses across the economy come roaring back. It will support almost 500,000 new training and work opportunities including 215,000 opportunities for youth; support businesses in our most affected sectors such as tourism and arts and culture; and accelerate investment and digital transformation at small and medium-sized businesses. Budget 2021 is a plan that puts Canada on track to meet its commitment to create 1 million jobs by the end of the year.

Canada entered the pandemic in a strong fiscal position. This allowed the government to take quick and decisive action, supporting people and businesses, and put it in the position to make historic investments in the recovery.

Quote

"Small businesses, like the independent wineries here in Nova Scotia, are the heart of local communities and essential to our national economy. Budget 2021 makes smart investments to make sure that they not only survive the pandemic, but can create new opportunities on the other side of it. We're making sure that our home-grown small businesses have the resources they need to grow their operations, access new markets and create more jobs for Canadians."

Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, the Honourable Bernadette Jordan

"Budget 2021 makes important investments for small businesses that are the backbone of the economy in rural Canada. The investment to support Canada's wine sector is important to so many small businesses across the country that are creating important opportunities and world class products, including right here in KingsHants."

Member of Parliament, Kody Blois

Quick Facts

Budget 2021 includes $101.4 billion over three years in proposed investments as part of the Government of Canada's growth plan that will create good jobs and support a resilient and inclusive recovery. Key measures include:

Extending emergency supports to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through to recovery, including:



Extending the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy and Lockdown Support until September 25, 2021 .





Extending important income support for Canadians such as a 12-week extension of the Canada Recovery Benefit and 4-week extension of the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit.



Enhancing Employment Insurance sickness benefits from 15 to 26 weeks.



Supporting small and medium-sized businesses through several transformative programs, such as:



A new Canada Digital Adoption Program that will assist over 160,000 businesses with the cost of new technology. And it will provide them with the advice they need to get the most of new technology with the help of 28,000 young Canadians who will be trained to work with them.





Allowing Canadian small businesses to fully expense up to $1.5 million in capital investments in a broad range of assets, including digital technology and intellectual property. This represents an additional $2.2 billion investment in the growth of Canada's entrepreneurs over the next five years.



Revitalizing Canada's tourism sector through $1 billion to help tourism businesses recover and support festivals and cultural events that provide jobs and growth in many of our cities and communities.

Related Links

Associated Links

SOURCE Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Maritimes Region

For further information: Media may contact: Jane Deeks , Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, [email protected]
Trucks transport shipping containers at a dockyard in Qingdao in eastern China on Sept. 25, 2020. (Chinatopix Via AP)

Chinese National Admits Exporting US Marine Tech to China

A Chinese national and businessman has admitted to illegally exporting more than $100,000 in U.S. marine technology to a Chinese military research institute.

Shuren Qin, a 44-year-old marine biologist and founder of LinkOcean Technologies, a company that sells oceanographic instruments, pleaded guilty in Boston federal court to one count of conspiracy to unlawfully export U.S. anti-submarine warfare devices to Chinas Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU).

The military research institute, located in the northwestern Chinese city of Xian, works closely with the Peoples Liberation Army on the advancement of its military capabilities, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Qin, who resides in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was arrested in June 2018. On April 28, he pleaded guilty to one count of visa fraud; two counts of making false statements to law enforcement agents regarding his customers and the types of parts he caused to be exported from the United States to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC); four counts of money laundering; and two counts of smuggling hydrophones from the U.S. to the PRC, in addition to the unlawful exporting count.

From 2015 to 2016, Qin exported to China at least 60 hydrophonesdevices that can be used to monitor sound underwaterprosecutors said.

Because of national security risks, the U.S. Commerce Department requires a company to obtain an export license in order to ship U.S. goods to NWPU. Prosecutors said that Qin exported the devices to China without obtaining such a license and purposely concealed from a U.S. supplier of hydrophones that NWPU was the recipient of the exported goods.

Prosecutors previously also accused Qin of exporting unmanned surface vehicles and robotic boats, alleging he had supplied $8 million in goods to Chinese government-controlled entities from 2015 to 2018.

He admitted to charges only concerning 60 hydrophones, worth $100,000. Under a plea deal, prosecutors agreed to recommend a prison sentence at the low end of the 87 to 108 months he faces under federal sentencing guidelines.

The plea was conditional, and Qin may still appeal a judges decision to not suppress evidence against him.

Qins attorney, William Kettlewell, had argued that his client wasnt aware of how NWPU would use the exported goods. The university was also indicted, but never appeared in court.

Last week, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe named the Chinese communist regime as the greatest adversary of the United States, saying that its capable of challenging, and even supplanting the U.S. as the worlds superpower economically, militarily, and technologically.

On April 13, the Office of the DNI released its annual threat assessment, describing the Chinese regimes push for global power as the leading threat to U.S. national security.

Annie Wu and Reuters contributed to this report.
Chinese Magazine Publishes Reports That Boiled Eggs Can Hatch, Netizens Question Legitimacy

A Chinese magazine has published two reports in the last year that conclude boiled eggs can be turned into raw eggs before hatching chicks, through a regeneration process. The anecdotal evidence has recently led to questions on Chinese social media about the academic industry and the magazines publishing quality.

One report titled Turning Cooked Eggs into Raw Eggs (Egg Regeneration): A Lab Report on Hatching Chicks, was published by Pictorial Geography magazine, a state-run publication managed by the Jilin Provincial News Radio and TV Bureau, in June 2020.

After 20 minutes the eggs were successfully regenerated. A light transmission test was conducted by an observer, and the egg was translucent, with the egg white and yolk clearly visible, said the authors Guo Ping and Bai Weiyun, stating that over 40 boiled eggs had been brought back to life after specially-trained students focused their mental energy on reviving them, according to state-run media Xinhua.

Guo is the principal at an occupational training school in Zhengzhou city, Henan Province. According to the schools official website, which is no longer accessible, a number of training activities have taken place such as whole-brain development and fostering childrens creativity.

The second paper, published in March 2021, said boiled fertilized eggs can be restored to raw eggs through intention and energy transmission, performed by students trained in this technique, without harming bioactivity. One of the seven regenerated eggs was allegedly proven to hatch out a healthy chick, as witnessed by seven students, six parents, and two professors.

Every process is very strict and serious, states the report.

Chinese netizens mocked Guo for lacking common sense and called her a liar for misleading public opinion and harming children. Some called it an insult to intelligence.

One netizen on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform thats similar to Twitter, questioned whether the academic industry was corrupt. Doesnt the journal review papers and send them out for money? the netizen wrote.

On April 26, Pictorial Geography magazine issued a statement about a paper that seemingly lacks common sense and should not have passed normal reviewing protocols.

Guo told the state media that although she witnessed the experiment, the report was written by a friend on her behalf.

In recent years, corruption has been on the rise in the academic industry due to the eagerness of researchers to achieve quick success and profit, along with the lack of external supervision of academic journals.

State media reported that on the morning of April 27, someone was still drumming up business for Pictorial Geography, stating, 2,500 characters per page, 975 yuan ($150 USD) covers everything, guaranteed publication this month. The all-inclusive service includes writing and publishing.

The second author of the paper, Bai, said he was only invited to watch the experiment at the time and somehow was also listed as an author, Chinese news portal Sohu reported.

On the same day, the magazine was suspended from publication while Chinese authorities launched an investigation to verify the reports.

Guo has apologized to the public through Xinhua for the published paper, admitting the experiment was not rigorous enough to be published publicly.

Whether its true or not, she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:51:55|Editor: huaxia

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, April 29 (Xinhua) -- At least 44 militants have been confirmed dead and seven others injured over the past 24 hours as government forces have mounted pressure on the Taliban outfit in parts of the southern Kandahar province, said an army statement released here Thursday.

Security forces backed by military planes, according to the statement, began striking Taliban hideouts in the restive Miwand, Khakriz and Zhari districts since Wednesday.

Taliban local commanders Qari Bismillah and Qari Hakim are among those killed during the crackdown, the statement added.

The highway linking Kandahar to neighboring Herat province has remained closed due to the fighting in Miwand district, local media reported Thursday.

All passengers and drivers stranded on the highway have been calling on the warring sides to cease fighting and allow passengers to reach their destinations.

Army's Gen. Haibatullah Alizai toured the war fronts in Kandahar on Wednesday and vowed to clean the area from the insurgents.

Separately, 48 more insurgents have been killed and dozens of others were injured in Laghman, Balkh, Ghazni and Paktia provinces over the past 24 hours.

Zabihullah Mujahid, who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit, rejected the claim, saying the armed group is capable enough to defend its positions. Enditem
A boat found drifting off the coast of Spain's Canary Islands with 24 dead migrants on board arrived Wednesday on one of the archipelago's islands, officials said.

A Spanish maritime rescue vessel arrived with the wooden boat in tow at the port of Los Cristianos on the island of Tenerife where several hearses and emergency services workers were waiting.

"Firefighters are removing the bodies from the boat and they will then be taken to a funeral home," Domingo Martin of Spanish Red Cross in Tenerife told reporters at the scene.

Spain's maritime rescue service initially said the boat held 17 bodies.

But after it arrived in port, the office of the central government in the archipelago said the remains of 24 people had been found on the vessel, including those of two minors.

A Spanish air force plane on a routine patrol first spotted the boat on Monday morning some 500 kilometres (300 miles) southeast of the island of El Hierro.

A Spanish military helicopter then airlifted three people found alive on the boat -- two men and a woman -- to a hospital on the island of Tenerife.

One of the men was in serious condition with "severe dehydration", emergency services tweeted.

"They were so weak that I needed help from my colleague to keep them upright," Juan Carlos Serrano, a member of the air force helicopter team who rescued the migrants, told reporters earlier on Wednesday.

The migrants on the boat were all sub-Saharan Africans.

A Spanish maritime rescue boat was also dispatched on Monday to tow the migrant boat to Tenerife.

Migrant arrivals on the Atlantic archipelago have surged since late 2019 after increased patrols along Europe's southern coast dramatically reduced crossings to the continent via the Mediterranean.

Last year 23,023 migrants reached the Canaries, a figure eight times higher than in 2019, according to the interior ministry.

"The rough seas at this time of year and the long distances travelled... make this route particularly dangerous," the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration said in a joint statement.

"Boats may be adrift for days, running out of water and food," it added, saying the UN agencies were "saddened by the latest tragedy off the Canary Islands".

At its shortest, the sea crossing to the Atlantic islands from the Moroccan coast is around 100 kilometres (60 miles), but it is a notoriously dangerous route because of strong currents. Vessels are also typically overcrowded and in poor condition.

Last year, 1,851 people died on the route, according to the Caminando Fronteras organisation which monitors migrant flows.
Software Platform Offers All-in-One Solution for Organizations to Setup, Scale, Manage and Maintain Physical Equipment for WFH Workforces

ABERDEEN, Scotland & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Firstbase, a provider of remote infrastructure for global teams, today announced $13 million in funding, with a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from B Capital Group, and Alpaca VC. This follows a $2 million seed investment led by Alpaca in August 2020 with participation from Acceleprise, Remote First Capital and Backend Capital. The new capital will fuel the companys rapid growth plans through hiring, product development and increased customer deployment. Firstbase also announced it has added Andreessen Horowitzs David Ulevitch to its Board of Directors.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005273/en/

Firstbase Co-Founders Trey Bastian (CTO) and Chris Herd (CEO) (Photo: Business Wire)

Firstbases mission is to improve individuals quality of life by enabling remote work. Its software platform helps companies set up, manage, maintain and retrieve all physical equipment remote workers need to work from home comfortably and effectively. From laptops and monitors, to mics and headsets, and ergonomic chairs and adjustable desks, Firstbase handles deployment of assets, IT installation and upgrades, ongoing repairs, culture and perks, and asset collection when a worker leaves.

Most organizations underestimate the complexity and cost of going remote. Typically, HR, IT and facilities teams are involved in getting a single employee set up with hardware, access and security, said Chris Herd, Co-founder and CEO of Firstbase. With so many people involved, mistakes are often made, costs are incurred and time is wasted. Our solution removes the hassle and friction from the remote setup and promises a better experience for everyone - emotionally, logistically and financially. The same is true on the other end, when an employee leaves, we take the headache out of collecting, tracking and redeploying the equipment.

Firstbase, headquartered in the U.K. and New York, was founded in 2019 by Chris Herd and Trey Bastian. The entrepreneurs were initially forming a fintech startup, but quickly pivoted their focus when they identified the common equipment infrastructure challenge among their business customers. Herd, a former operations manager, was responsible for outfitting oil rigs in remote locations. He saw firsthand that it was expensive, time-consuming, and nearly impossible to get assets back when they were deployed remotely. As a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Airforce, Bastian managed the deployment, support and training of mission critical cybersecurity systems and technical infrastructure in the most challenging environments globally. Applying what they learned in these environments to the obstacles of physical provisioning for remote office workers, exacerbated by a global pandemic, led to the creation of Firstbase.

The Physicality of Remote Work

The adoption of remote work is estimated to have been accelerated by 15 years by the pandemic. This seismic shift caused companies of all sizes to scramble to get employees up and running comfortably and securely from remote locations. However, the cross-functional logistics of ordering, shipping, setting up, managing, repairing and eventually collecting the physical assets needed to perform a function couldnt be executed overnight. Approximately 5 hours of time and nearly $3,500 is required to set up a single hire. By comparison, Firstbases platform centralizes the entire process in 30 seconds with an affordable monthly subscription. The subscription allows a company to establish its own unique catalogue of available inventory and the worker to select the equipment and tools to fit his or her individual needs. Then, every aspect of order fulfillment and delivery is outsourced to Firstbase, essentially providing an infrastructure-as-a-service. Ongoing, Firstbase serves as a single source of truth, enabling organizations to seamlessly manage their assets.

The Benefits of Flexible Location

According to a recent Prodoscore survey, there are nearly 255 million desk jobs globally and an estimated 90% of these workers have expressed an affinity for working from home. Hybrid and flexible WFH policies will be the new norm, providing an HR benefit for employees and improving businesses operating costs. Estimates predict that if U.S. workers split their time 50/50 between the office and home, organizations could save nearly $1 trillion on IT management costs and offset real estate costs by 50-90%, depending on the frequency workers are expected to attend in person.

"With a permanent shift in attitudes toward remote and hybrid work, employees and companies are more reliant on their equipment and workspace to stay connected and productive than ever before," said David Ulevitch, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "Firstbase is the critical infrastructure that will power the distributed workforce. Employees get the setup they need to stay effective working from home and employers have a centralized view and management system for all equipment. Firstbase is really leading the charge into the future of work."

Firstbases software is currently in use with customers with remote workers across the U.S. and Europe, including: TaxJar, Hey Summit, Recording Academy, Robin Healthcare, Clubhouse, SureSwift Capital, Edify, Filtered, DMT, Elemendar, Italic, Zego and Verse. The new capital will be used to triple Firstbases workforce over the next year, making key hires across product development, marketing, and sales. The company also intends to increase integration with HR and collaboration software partners and update its customer experience to quickly convert its 10,000+ waitlisted organizations.

ABOUT FIRSTBASE

Firstbase is a remote work SaaS platform providing organizations with a centralized source to track and manage physical equipment assets. Founded in 2019, just six months before the COVID-19 pandemic forced workers globally to go remote, thousands of organizations have turned to Firstbase to expedite the setup of secure, reliable and comfortable remote work environments that promote productivity. To date Firstbase has helped more than 1,500+ individuals work remotely and is adding 350+ each month. Firstbase is headquartered in Scotland and New York. For more information: https://www.firstbasehq.com/

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005273/en/

Whitney Topping

Walker Communications

whitney@walkercomms.com

Source: Firstbase
For a start, a public authority under the Right to Information (RTI) Act can reject information under any of the 10 sub-sections of Section 8; under Section 9, which protects private copyright; under Section 11, which exempts third-party information relating to commercial and trade secrets and; under Section 24, which relates to public authorities dealing with security and intelligence (though they are required to disclose information regarding corruption and human rights violation).

The CIC annual report of 2019-20, that has recently been uploaded on its website, is by itself a mundane narration with tables and graphs and it would be difficult for a layman to make sense of it. Its thanks to the painstaking efforts of RTI activist and research scholar Venkatesh Nayak that some shocking facts are revealed.

For example, he points out that Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act was the most favoured and frequently invoked of the permissible exemptions across public authorities in India in 2019-20.

Section 8(1)(j), by the way, permits denial of access to personal information if disclosure has no relationship to any public activity or public interest or is likely to cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual concerned.

Observes Mr Nayak, One in every three RTIs was rejected based on the Section (1) (j) exemption during this period. However, as compared with the frequency of use in 2018-19 (34.28%) there is a slight decrease (34.05%) in the use of this exemption in 2019-20. The use of this exemption was highest (37.06%) in 2011-12.

Time and again, experts have pointed out how there is rarely a reply from a central public information officer (CPIO) or public information officer (PIO), which would state that the personal information indeed has a larger public interest. So timid they are!

Rejections under Section 8 (1) (j)

So, which is the public authority which has rejected the maximum RTI applications under Section 8 (1) (j)?

Amongst all the central public authorities at the Centre, public authorities under the ministry of finance invoked Section 8(1)(j) the most number of times, that is a whopping 7,528 times which amounts to 41.99% of the total number of rejections of RTI applications in 2019-20.

The next dubious distinction goes to public authorities under the ministry of defence which invoked this provision in more than a third of rejections, that is in 755 RTI applications comprising 37.44% in rejections. The department of atomic energy rejected 168 RTI applications which comprise 50% odd of the requisitions received.

Mr Nayak observes this implies that one out of every two RTIs was rejected under Section 8 (1) (j) the department of atomic energy.

Besides, he says, the ministries and key public authorities which rejected more than 200 RTIs by invoking Section 8(1)(j) of the Act are: the ministry of electronics and information technology (93.54%), ministry of human resource development (65.68%), ministry of coal (49.41%), ministry of power (42.16%), ministry of communications (40.13%), ministry of defence (37.43%), Supreme Court of India (37.27%), ministry of petroleum and natural gas (36.82%), Delhi police (36.05%) and ministry of railways (23.8%).

Rejections under Section 24

The second most frequently invoked of permissible exemptions across public authorities is Section 24.

As of now, the Central government has notified 26 intelligence and security agencies such as the IB, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), National Investigation Agency (NIA), Enforcement Directorate (ED), Assam Rifles, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) under Section 24(1) of the RTI Act.

These organisations are partially excluded from providing information but they are required to disclose information pertaining to allegations of corruption and of human rights violation within 45 days with the approval of the CIC.

However, observes Mr Nayak in his analysis, One in every five RTIs (22.34%) was rejected under this provision in 2019-20- a significant increase from 20.29% reported in 2018-19.

"Taken together, Sections 8(1)(j) and 24 accounted for more than half (56.39%) of the RTIs rejected under permissible exemptions in 2019-20 (excluding rejections under "Others" category). This is the highest percentage of use of both exemptions since 2005. In 2018-19 this proportion was 54.57%. Strangely, the ministry of labour and employment rejected 150 RTIs (40% of the total number rejected RTI applications) under Section 24 of the Act although none of its public authority comes under Section 24 of the RTI Act. However, there is no discussion on this subject in the Annual Report.

Rejections under Other Sub-sections of Section 8

Similarly, other sub-sections of Section 8 have also been generously used to reject RTI requisitions under commercial confidence and intellectual property rights where disclosure is likely to harm the competitive position of a third party; under denial of disclosure of information in fiduciary relationship; those under sovereignty, defence, economic, strategic or foreign relations and; breach of privilege of Parliament and state legislatures.

Most shockingly", says Mr Nayak, Rejection of RTI applications happens under `Others category, although this cannot be the ground of rejection. The CIC includes this data in its annual report without questioning its validity.
Miss Earth Vietnam to be held for first time

The Miss Earth Vietnam 2021 pageant will be organised at the end of this year following the Miss Earth format, according to organisers.











The judge panel of Miss Earth Vietnam 2021



The press conference to announce the pageant, which will be held for the first time in Vietnam later this year, was held on April 28 with the attendance of many beauty queens which had represented Vietnam at the previous Miss Earth competitions.



Miss Earth Vietnam 2021 will follow the Miss Earth international format in which four winners will be announced in the final night including Miss Earth, Miss Earth Air, Miss Earth Water, and Miss Earth Fire.



Online registration for the competition will start from May. The semi-final round will be held in November and the final night is scheduled on December 4 at the Cu Lan Village in Lac Duong District in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong.



Head of the Miss Earth Vietnam 2021 organising board, Phuc Nguyen, said that the choice of the Cu Lan Village which lies 40 kilometres from Dalat City for the final night will be a challenge for them but this would conform with the competition's guiding principle of environment protection.





The village with forest coverage of 85 percent has convinced us," he said.





A corner of the Cu Lan Village



The judge panel includes many famous beauty queens and experts including Miss Vietnam 1992 Ha Kieu Anh as deputy head.
For more than four decades, D.R. Horton has built homes for homeowners, but this past winter, it tried something new. In a pine-nestled neighborhood just north of The Woodlands, it built 124 houses not for homeowners, but for renters. It leased them up and put them on the market as a package deal for a different kind of buyer: an investor.

The winning bid, $31.8 million, was 79 percent more than the $17.8 million the community had cost to build, market and sell. For comparison, the average home the builder sold to a homeowner in that quarter went for only 34 percent more than costs. On an earnings call, analysts marveled over the trade.

The build-to-rent business model has burgeoned as investors  faced with low or uncertain returns in more traditional investments  pour money into new developments. Single-family rentals allow investors to collect monthly rent payments as well as capture home price appreciation, which has soared to the double digits during the pandemic. (The median Houston-area home sold in March went for 16 percent more than the median price of a year before, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.) Now, one in four Houston-area homes sold is purchased by an investor, according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting, which tracks residential investing.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Why Houston's suburbs are exploding with build-to-rent homes

More than 7,500 build-to-rent homes have been developed in the Houston area, according to the RCLCO, a real estate advisory firm  good news for renters who, for one reason or another, are sitting out the pandemics homebuying frenzy but still want the perks of living in a home with a backyard, neighborhood amenities and a good school district.

But some argue it also means prospective homeowners face a tighter market.

It goes to the affordability issue, said Jim Gaines, economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M. If property is diverted from potential ownership into the rental market, then thats lower inventory, he said. Thats making prices go up.

And yet the momentum is undeniable. Homes are going up so quickly in Wan Bridges Clearwater at Balmoral  part of a Humble master-planned community surrounding a crystal lagoon  that walking down the street feels like traveling through a time lapse. On one block, the wooden frames of buildings were still visible; across the street, roofed and insulated houses awaited brick siding; and down the road, recently completed homes stood ready for move in for rents starting at $1,995 a month. One had already welcomed its first occupants. Within the span of a recent Thursday morning, two more prospective tenants filled out paperwork to move in.

Roots in the Great Recession

After poorly underwritten mortgages triggered the Great Recession in 2007, millions of Americans lost their homes  and investors with suitcases full of cash showed up at foreclosure auctions to snap up properties at bargain prices.

They were buying the homes to rent  the beginning of the metamorphosis of single-family home rentals from a mom-and-pop endeavor to an asset class that attracts attention from funds so large, theyre known as institutions. Now, investors can buy and sell large portfolios of single-family rental homes without their ever appearing on a listing website, rental homes can be publicly traded in real estate investment trusts, or REITs, and rent rolls can be bundled into securities. Your pension fund could very well be collecting rent from suburban homes.

But as home prices recovered from the Great Recession, investors began to face the same price pressures squeezing prospective first-time homeowners. Houston developer Ting Qiao, who began buying scattered homes to rehab and lease in 2013, quickly found it harder and harder to find homes at prices low enough to make a good return.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Developer launches rental home community on Galveston Island

Then, in 2015, he had an idea: His company, Wan Bridge, compared the cost of buying an old home and renovating it to the cost of building new.

Our conclusion was the cost is the same, he said. So why dont we just get the whole community built from one development?

At first, he came up against the stigma associated with older neighborhoods where many of the homes were for rent, as well as confusion from lenders and investors. When he built his first community for rent, outside Dallas, he raised funds from individuals overseas who were looking for an easy way to invest in American real estate. As the model was proven, Qiao said, banks became willing to finance build-to-rent communities, and family offices and institutional players wanted to invest in the homes.

There is no alternative

Wan Bridge is now one of at least half a dozen firms building single-family homes to rent in the Houston area. It has seen so much success, it is currently seeking to increase its staff by 25, or more than 50 percent.

Among the reasons for the sudden rush to build-to-rent is the global economic landscape. Giant funds are under pressure to find high returns on their money, but government response to the pandemic-induced recession and economic uncertainty have pushed bond yields to historic lows. At the same time, it is harder to find undervalued companies when stocks are at record highs, and commercial real estate investments once seen as dependable streams of revenue  office towers, hotels, retail centers, apartments  have been pummeled by social distancing.

Yields are crazy, crazy low right now, explained Rick Palacios Jr., principal at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. So you have investors across the world who have to find investments that meet their yield requirements, groups that used to be able to do that in safe things like treasuries. They cant do that any more.

But occupancy, rent collection and even rent increases for single-family homes stayed healthy throughout the pandemic, offering a dependable return that investors are leaping at.

Its attracting unprecedented capital, Palacios said.

Impact on homeowners?

The flood of investor money chasing build-to-rent is pulling some supply out of the for-sale system and helping push home prices up, he said. Because now you have another pool of capital competing for land, youre bidding up land prices, which the derivative of that is home prices.

Others pushed back against the idea that build-to-rent impacts prospective homebuyers.

These are homes that wouldnt have been built for sale, said Lawrence Dean, Houstons regional director for the housing research company Zonda. And they wouldnt have been built at all except for this institutional capital.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houstons housing market stays hot as offers flow and prices rise

Tim Dosch, one of the principals of Houston land brokerage Dosch Marshall Real Estate, has seen build-to-rent players making big bids.

Build-to-rent are paying about triple what the build-for-sale guys would pay for land, he said. But with 40 such deals currently underway, he has yet to see both types of developers bidding on the same lots.

But one at least one Houston-area homebuilder has said that it will increase the portion of its land used for single-family rentals instead of for-sale units. The Woodlands-based homebuilder Lennar announced that institutional investors aim to acquire $4 billion worth of its single-family homes and townhomes for rent.

This exciting new venture has an opportunity to scale at a pace we do not believe possible for competitors in the single-family rental space, given direct access to Lennars pipeline of over 300,000 owned and controlled homesites, Rick Beckwitt, Lennars co-chief executive, said in a statement.

Boon for renters

Either way, the trend is unfolding apace. Renters are flocking to newly built rentals in dozens of neighborhoods across town.

On a recent weekend in Kingwood, Erica Lockwood was moving into Regent Square Brownstones, another Wan Bridge development.

A longtime homeowner, it was her first foray into renting, and she was nervous about putting monthly payments toward a house she didnt own. But it was walking distance to her office, which she had moved across the country to work out of, and zoned to a good high school for her 16-year-old son. Whats more, it was brand-new and beautiful, and she knew that yard care and maintenance would be taken care of.

I have to tell you, Im a single, professional woman, she said. I work a lot. I have a demanding job. And the enticement of not being responsible for my lawn maintenance  I dont even have to worry about changing the lightbulbs!  that is great. The tradeoffs (of not owning) are worth it to me.

rebecca.schuetz@chron.com;

twitter.com/raschuetz
"The priority continues to be improvement of the testing programme for everyone with symptoms no matter how minor or non-specific and all their contacts"

"The priority continues to be improvement of the testing programme for everyone with symptoms no matter how minor or non-specific and all their contacts"

Encouraging self-testing at home twice a week for all adults in England, and soon Scotland, is a misguided policy, unlikely to reduce transmission, warn public health experts in The BMJ today.

In an editorial, Angela Raffle and Mike Gill, Public Health Consultants with experience in both communicable disease control and screening programmes, say that the UK is not yet succeeding in testing, and supporting to isolate, everyone with symptoms and their contacts.

Coronavirus tests per case detected are already higher in the UK than anywhere in the world, they write, and the value of adding universal low-risk testing is unknown, yet is being introduced without plans to measure the costs and consequences.

They acknowledge that response in a pandemic requires speed, but say without training and proficiency testing for those taking and reading samples, plus a robust process for ensuring appropriate actions follow a test result, "SARS-CoV-2 self-testing by asymptomatic members of the public is unlikely to reduce transmission."

A key justification cited by government for mass testing of asymptomatic people at low risk is the assertion that "up to one third" of cases are symptomless, they write. Yet evidence is growing that transmission arises overwhelmingly from people with symptomatic infections and their contacts.

The UK is an outlier globally in placing such emphasis on asymptomatic testing, they add, pointing out that the World Health Organization has never advised testing low risk people, and both the EU and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend screening tests only for those where risk is highest.

They argue that the challenge for the UK now is to use the past year's learning, the new laboratory capacity, and the availability of rapid tests to best effect. "Current efforts are undermined by secrecy, quality failures, underused capacity, and a misplaced focus on low yield uses," they write.

"Both the laboratories and the rapid tests could be targeted to deliver a substantially more effective and cost effective testing service founded on the public service principles of sound evaluation, strong ethics, high quality, and full transparency."

###

Externally peer reviewed? No

Evidence type: Editorial; Opinion

Subjects: People
As India's healthcare system is finding it harder to cope with the rising Covid-19 cases due to the second wave of the pandemic, the American government has advised its nationals to return to the US.

The Department of State issued the highest level travel advisory asking US citizens "not to travel to India or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so".

In its advisory, the government in Washington said, "Access to all types of medical care is becoming severely limited in India due to the surge in Covid-19 cases. US citizens who wish to depart India should take advantage of available commercial transportation options now. Direct flights between India and the United States are offered daily, with additional flight options available to U.S. citizens via transfers in Paris and Frankfurt.

There are 14 direct daily flights between India and the U.S. and other services that connect through Europe, the department said.

The US urged its citizens to enroll with the embassy in order to receive critical information related to health and safety in India.

New cases and deaths from COVID-19 have risen sharply throughout India to record levels, the advisory said adding that COVID-19 testing infrastructure is reportedly constrained in many locations. Hospitals are reporting shortages of supplies, oxygen, and beds for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 related patients.

The advisory said that the US citizens are reporting being denied admittance to hospitals in some cities due to a lack of space. Some statesa-have enacted curfewsa-and other restrictions -- that limit movementa -- and the operation of non-essential businesses.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a level 4 travel health notice too.

India has reported 18 million cases of infections since the pandemic began, out of which 14.8 million recovered. So far, over 200,000 people have died due to Covid-19. In the last one month, due to a virulent mutation, the pandemic has taken a heavy toll. On Wednesday, over 360,000 people tested positive for the infection and over 3,000 people died across the country due to the pandemic.

Australia has already banned all flights from India. The UK has banned the entry of any visitor who was in India in the last 10 days.

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.
The group said the LikidoHOME residential water heater improves energy efficiencies by 300% with its high temperature supercritical CO micro heat pump

The product will also dramatically reduce carbon emissions and save consumers up to 80% on energy costs

( ) has said it is kick-starting the development of LikidoHOME, a super energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly home water heater designed by its portfolio company Likido Limited.

The San Diego, California-based group said that the LikidoHOME residential water heater improves energy efficiencies by 300% with its high temperature supercritical CO micro heat pump. Additional benefits include dramatically reducing carbon emissions and saving consumers up to 80% on energy, said the group.

With its patent-pending drop-in design, LikidoHOME has the potential to replace the worlds gas-fired and electric water heaters, Dalrada noted. The initial market focus is on the UK, European Union, and the US.

READ: Dalrada Financial says subsidiary Prakat Solutions partnering with Dragonchain to increase business workflow efficiencies

In the UK, gas boiler water heaters are to be banned by 2025 in newly built homes. By 2035, fossil fuel burning boiler water heaters will be phased out and replaced with heat pump technology and district heating.

In a statement, Dalrada CEO Brian Bonar said: LikidoHOME is a perfect example of how industries and consumers can improve quality of life, aid the environment, and work together to support climate change policy.

Dalrada said it is working on solutions for carbon emissions reduction. By reducing reliance on the combustion of fossil or biomass fuels, the group said Dalradas Likido created an affordable heat pump replacement and energy transfer method for homes and businesses to align with industries in the global goal of achieving Net Zero by 2050.

According to the company, heating is the largest single source of carbon emissions in the UK. Currently, only one million of the UKs 27 million homes have low-carbon heat. In the US, of the roughly 93 million homes, residential energy use accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.

LikidoHOME is small and compact for installation in the same position as conventional wall-hung water heater boilers, noted the company, while adding that unlike other traditional heat pumps, it can be plumbed directly into the existing pipework without modification.

Meanwhile, the group said LikidoONEs proprietary low-carbon, industrial, all-in-one heating and cooling pump design implements "supercritical CO2 as a natural non-toxic, non-flammable and CFC/HFC-free working fluid and is used in multiple applications.

Dalrada explained that the standard approach to providing heating and cooling in hotels has been with hot water heaters/boilers coupled with environmentally damaging HFC-based conventional chillers and cooling towers or HFC-based heat pumps.

However, the beauty of the LikidoONE system is that it operates in a combined heating and cooling mode producing 160 kilowatt (kW) of high-grade heat, while it extracts 120kW of cooling at traditional temperatures for an electrical input of just 37kW, for a 1:8 coefficient of performance (COP).

Based on a 250-bed hotel in California, a single LikidoONE module will save an average of $110,000 a year in energy costs operating at the current exceptionally low oil prices, pointed out the group.

Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow her on Twitter: @UttaraProactive
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Magomed Magomedov and his two sons, both named Magomed, work in 10-day shifts to monitor the weather at a meteorological station high in the mountains of Russia's southern Daghestan Republic. The site is cold, poorly supplied, and prone to avalanches, but the family takes pride in the unique information they're able to collect.
Mumbai: The existing lockdown-like restrictions in Maharashtra, imposed to stem the COVID-19 spread, are most likely to be extended by 15 days beyond April 30.

State's Health Minister Rajesh Tope has given indications that the Maharashtra government has decided to extend the full lockdown, likely to be another 15 days, till May 15.

A decision in this regard was taken during the state cabinet meeting on Wednesday but the time duration is yet to be decided. The state government is expected to issue an order to this effect in the next two days.

It may be noted that the strict curbs on the movement of people and a host of other activities are in force in the state since April 14 and were to end on April 30. Essential services have been exempted from the curbs.

Addressing media persons after a Cabinet meeting, Tope said though the COVID-19 situation seems to have stabilised to some extent in the state, all the ministers pitched for extending the ongoing curbs.

Today, the number (of daily cases) is 60,000-plus. There definitely is some stability. We had earlier predicted that (daily) cases may go beyond 70,000. But that has not happened. Now I hope and pray to God that this may be the peak and there will be a decline in the graph daily hereon," he said.

The minister said if people observe COVID-appropriate behaviour by wearing masks and adhering to social distancing norms, the present situation can be brought under control.

But one thing is sure, all the Cabinet members said in unison that the lockdown, which will be effective till April 30, be extended. Now, it definitely will be extended by 15 days, Tope said.

Prohibitory orders, banning the assembly of five or more people at once place, are in force, while non-essential activities are not being allowed. At present, vegetable shops, grocery stores and milk shops are allowed to remain open only between 7 am and 11 am, while home delivery of items is permitted till 8 pm.

Last week, the state government further tightened the curbs by imposing restrictions on travel, attendance in offices and wedding functions.

Amid all this, Maharashtra on Wednesday reported 63,309 new coronavirus cases and 985 deaths, the state health department said. It took the tally of infections in the state to 44,73,394 and the death toll to 67,214. Mumbai recorded 4,926 new cases and 78 deaths, raising its caseload to 6,40,409 and the death toll to 12,954.

A total of 61,181 patients were discharged from hospitals during the day, taking the number of recoveries to 37,30,729. Of 985 fatalities, 392 occurred in the last 48 hours, 251 in the last week while the rest had taken place earlier but were added to the tally now, an official explained.

Maharashtra has now 6,73,481 active cases. With 2,73,125 new tests, the number of samples examined for coronavirus so far in Maharashtra has gone up to 2,65,27,862.

Currently, 42,03,547 people are in-home quarantine, while 31,159 people are in institutional quarantine. Maharashtra's COVID-19 recovery rate stands at 83.4 per cent, while the fatality rate is 1.5 per cent. The case positivity rate was 16.86 per cent.

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As lockdown restrictions lift and the weather starts to turn warmer, thousands of Britons are planning their spring or summer escape.

Although there are signs that travelling abroad may be allowed in the near future, albeit with a vaccine passport, many are avoiding the risk and sticking to a staycation for the second year in a row.

Demand has surged yet again, with booking numbers over 200 per cent higher this year than last in some cases.

In fact, Britons are expected to spend an average of 353 each in the next six months on UK holidays, according to data from American Express.

Brighton is a popular destination for travellers this summer - alongside London and Newquay

Some of the most popular locations for travellers this year include London, Edinburgh, Brighton and Newquay.

To find out how much demand has grown by and when we are all planning to head away, This is Money spoke to some of the UK's most popular staycation providers.

Skyscanner said searches for domestic flights from the UK increased 10 per cent week-on-week in the week beginning 18 April.

It said the most searched-for locations for trips between June and August this year were mainly UK cities, including London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Belfast.

Jon Thorne, UK traveller expert at Skyscanner, said: 'British travellers are enjoying the relaxation of rules on tourism in the UK and are booking fights and hotels within the UK for the immediate future.

'We see from our data that there is a short-term desire for domestic and predicted travel-corridor countries, who will welcome visitors first.

'We also see a lot of pent-up demand for international trips, and as the world starts to reopen, we expect the percentage of international travel taken to return as fast as the recovery allows.'

Travel: The Cotswolds has been a popular destination for holidaymakers this year and last

Meanwhile, Hoseasons said bookings for the year ahead were up 215 per cent on where they were this time last year, and 24 per cent up on the same point in 2019 - which was itself a record year.

Bookings in July and August were up 163 per cent compared to last year, and 61 per cent on the same point in 2019.

Later in the year, October trips have soared 111 per cent compared to 2020 and 78 per cent from 2019.

Many were also preparing for further in the future, with bookings for 2022 up 153 per cent.

It is a similar story at Cottages.com with bookings for the year ahead up 210 per cent compared to the same time last year and 40 per cent up on the same point in 2019, also a record year.

Summer bookings are up 171 per cent from 2020 and 86 per cent on the same point in 2019.

Bookings for October are also up 144 per cent on where they were this time last year and 122 per cent on the same point in 2019.

Meanwhile, bookings for 2022 are up 157 per cent on where they were at the same point last year for this year and 118 per cent on 2019 for 2020.

Simon Altham, group chief commercial officer at Awaze, the parent group of Cottages.com and Hoseasons, said: 'Everything we are seeing suggests it's going to be a year like no other for the domestic holiday industry.

'The outlook for foreign travel is still uncertain, and so perhaps it's not surprising that summer is selling so well.

'But the huge uplift in bookings for October and 2022 just goes to show the enduring appeal of a quick, safe and convenient UK break, as people look to get back together and have something to look forward to both now and in the weeks and months to come.'

Many have already booked to take a trip to London this summer, according to Skyscanner

Center Parcs has seen a significant increase in bookings and interest in breaks recently. It said bookings for 2021, in particular from May onwards, were proving very strong.

A spokesperson for Center Parcs said: 'Whilst we expect demand for a break in the UK to remain high, it is clear that people want reassurance about the flexibility to cancel or change dates.'

It said its Book with Confidence guarantee allowed guests to change dates with no fee, or receive a full refund should they no longer be able to, or feel comfortable to, go ahead with their break when the time arrived.

Forest Holidays said its year-on-year occupancy for July to October was also up 60 per cent from the same time last year.

School summer holidays have been the most popular dates, with Deerpark in Cornwall and its White Willow cabins at Delamere in Cheshire selling out first.

Prices have increased slightly due to high demand for cabins, but it said it offers guests up to a 100 discount to move their break if affected by Covid closures.

The firm noted most of its cabins left in May were larger cabins with 4 or 5 bedrooms. This suggests people are travelling in smaller groups, likely due to Covid restrictions.

In the longer term, however, holidaymakers are happy to make larger bookings. Fore the winter season, Forest says its two and three-bedroom family cabins are selling faster than the one-bedroom couples cabins.

Meanwhile, Booking.com's research has revealed an increase in travel searches since the Government's roadmap announcement on the lockdown restrictions easing.

It said eight out of the top ten most searched for destinations for summer were now based in the UK, which is twice as many as 2020.

Some 22 per cent of people cite a relaxing beach or spa trip as the first type of trip they will take when it's safe to do so, whilst just 5 per cent say a city break is a priority.

The top domestic destinations for this year include Torquay, Bournemouth, Edinburgh, Brighton and Hove and St Ives.

Edinburgh is another popular location for holidaymakers looking to get away this year

Haven Holidays said that as a result of the lifting of lockdown restrictions, it had experienced unprecedented demand, following a long period of very low demand.

Following the announcement of the roadmap out of lockdown, it celebrated its most successful sales day ever, recording a revenue increase of over 60 per cent on its previous best sales day.

A spokesperson said: 'Due to the level of demand, certain weeks of the year have seen a greater level of interest and, as always, we move our prices in line with demand.

'At present the highest level of demand is for the May half-term break and school summer holidays, where we have sold over 70 per cent of the breaks available. On average, our prices are currently around 20 per cent higher than in 2019.'

Holidaycottages.co.uk said bookings for July and August were up more than 150 per cent compared to the same point in 2020, and almost 120 per cent up compared to 2019.

Matt Brayley, marketing director at holidaycottages.co.uk, said coastal areas in regions such as Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Wales and Norfolk were seeing the highest demand, with searches currently up more than 150 per cent compared to 2019.

TravelSuperMarket.com said consumer confidence to start searching and booking a UK holiday had risen enormously since the start of the year.

Comparing the week of 19 to 25 April to the first week of the year, visits to TravelSupermarket's website to search for UK holidays had grown by 506 per cent.

Traffic specifically looking and comparing prices for UK cottage breaks had grown by 349 per cent.

Many booked breaks with their household for April departures, to take advantage of the first opportunity to get away from home for many months.

Top destinations booked included Devon, Cumbria, Dorset, Norfolk and Cornwall.

Other places which were proving popular included Snowdonia, Anglesey, North Yorkshire. Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

TravelSuperMarket added that people were also booking now for 2022.

Emma Coulthurst of TravelSupermarket said: 'The conundrum is finding a good price and somewhere you want to go to: my advice is to be open-minded about where you go, if you want to find somewhere at a reasonable cost.

'It pays to shop around, compare prices and be open-minded and consider a few different and not so well-known destinations. It is also worth asking friends and family for their ideas of destinations which they've enjoyed which might be less visited, and therefore have more availability and lower prices.'

She added that if customers are prepared to travel to a UK city for a holiday this summer, there are currently some good-value prices available.

What do holidaymakers need to be aware of?

For travellers booking to travel this summer, there are still several points they should take note of in the event that restrictions change.

1) Can you change dates?: When you book, ensure that you are able to switch dates or get your money back if Covid restrictions imposed by the Government prevent you from travelling.

2) Terms and conditions: Read the terms and conditions before booking and know what you are signing up to. Find out what the firm's policy is regarding coronavirus cancellations, and what measures have been put in place to keep you safe.

3) Get insurance: Importantly, holidaymakers should still purchase travel insurance even if they're staying in the same country.

You will still need it in case your holiday is cancelled, your baggage gets stolen or your accommodation provider goes bust.

4) Credit card: Consider booking with a credit card for Section 75 protection. This means you can make a claim to get a refund if something goes wrong with your trip.
Republican Opposition Leads Charge for Gavin Newsom Recall

As California Leads the Nation in COVID Recovery Efforts, Governor Gavin Newsom and Leading Democrats Vow to Fight

A petition to recall California State Governor Gavin Newsom has collected enough signatures to become an effective ballot. Confirmed by State election officials on Monday, April 26; a ballot seen in this light would be the second of its kind in California history.

According to a segment noted on Associated Press, retired county sheriff sergeant Orrin Heatlie spearheaded the recall efforts last year, they captured him saying, The people of California have done what the politicians thought would be impossible, the statement continued, Our work is just beginning. Now the real campaign is about to commence.

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The collection of signatures started as early as June 2020 and by fall the numbers grew as the frustration rose in the hardships of living through a global pandemic.

According to the California secretary of states office, there were over 1.5 million valid signatures as of Monday; there is a possibility for people to withdraw their consent within 30 days. Signatures from Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego make up roughly half of the total.

The recall for Newsom has been considered one of the highest-profile political races in the country this year. Newsoms response was made clear to the backlash in a fundraising appeal, it read I am not going to take this fight lying down, according to Associated Press.

The Los Angeles County Democratic Party responded with conviction, stating, Los Angeles Democrats say: Bring. It. On.

LACDP Chair Mark Gonzalez said in a statement. Republicans are forcing a recall on a governor whose approval ratings are over 50%, and who has proven he can get things done, because they know they cant win in 2022.Gonzalez went on to state that the special election is a waste of the tax payers dime, surpassing the projecting state budget.

The recall unearths different angles to consider; the world has never seen or felt a health crisis to this extent; with an uprooted reality, everyone including politicians are unnerved with learning how to navigate the new world. With that said, those opposing Newsom, are holding him accountable for his ability to manage a state of emergency lasting over a year. If Newsom overcomes this recall, his term for reelection will become available in 2022.

Candidates that would be available to replace Newsom include former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner and Kevin Faulconer who was the former mayor of San Diego. In response to the signatures collected, Faulconer was quoted, saying, Californians from all walks of life are seizing this historic opportunity to demand change, He continued, As the only candidate whos won tough elections and enacted real reform, I am ready to lead this movement.

Reports captured Falconer stating, As the only candidate whos won tough elections and enacted real reform, I am ready to lead this movement, according to City News Service.

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Caitlyn Jenner stated Friday, For the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people.She continued, As Californians, we face a now-or-never opportunity to fundamentally fix our state before its too late.

There are assumptions that majority of this effort is stemming from pro-Trump republicans, reports state, City News service reported Newsoms team issued a fundraising email on Friday; stating that Jenner is working closely with Donald Trumps former presidential campaign manager.

Recounting Newsoms election in 2018, he had over overwhelming numbers of votes and support, however, the pandemic created a different expectation for politicians, the standard of social responsibility has elevated in the eyes of the people.

Newsoms response to the pandemic thus far has been the fuel to the recall fire, both of his political and personal actions has been under heavy scrutiny. Heatlie led the charge for his recall as early as 2020, but due for different reasons. The former mayor did not agree with Newsoms stand on immigration and other liberal legislations.

However, it has been reported that Newsom was not surprised by the recall, expecting it from the early stages of the pandemic. He did point out the special election would be a waste of time and money, seeing how the 2022 gubernatorial primary will be held in June.

City News Service Reports reflect 1,626,042 signatures were validated, this exceeds the standard threshold of 1,495,709 participants that would need to sign, based on 12 percent of the 12,464,235 votes cast in 2018 gubernatorial election

Within the next 30 days, the process will allow a window to withdraw consent from the petition, the deadline for those types of adjustments is June 8. Also, within that time period, there will be follow-up reviews which will include the calculation of cost for an election in October.

The Senior advisor of RecallGavin2020, Randy Economy, has called this event a grassroots historical movement, and supporting groups continue to emphasize Gavins actions during an unforeseen global pandemic, stating that his quarantine was too constricting.

According to the RecallGavin2020 administration, Gavin has failed at his job, using preexisting conditions prior to the pandemic to support their claim.

Getting a different perspective of Newsom, political advisor Dan Newman released a statement, lending a different angle to see the California State Governor, he said, Newsoms competent, compassionate, experienced leadership during an unprecedented series of crises.

This act of retraction for this position has been taken place once before; with the recall of former California State Governor Gray Davis in 2003. Tt resulted in votes placing Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger into the State Governor position.

Almost two decades later, in the middle of the most vulnerable time the world has ever seen, Governor Newsom has been flagged for a recall of his position. Although the opinions of why he is being considered unsuited varies, but the volume of people who have given consent to this matter is undeniable.

By June 2021, there will be a new set of standards installed in the preexisting candidacy of policy makers, or placed on the heads of the new leaders. The people are expecting more from those serving in civic duty.
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In a huge boost for the nation, vaccines for over-30s are set to start within a fortnight while 40-year-olds will be invited for their jabs from today as the numbers falling ill with Covid drop to the lowest level since the pandemic began.

From today, anyone aged 40 and over in England can book a vaccination. This is set to be extended on May 10, when people aged 35 to 39 are likely to be called up for their first jabs.

In total, 48 million jabs have been given across the UK, including 14 million second doses.

In more good news, Boris Johnson will be told that social distancing can be scrapped at big outdoor events from June 21, paving the way for the return of big crowds.

Scientists monitoring the impact of letting fans back into the FA Cup semi-final, Carabao Cup final and the snooker World Championships have noted no spike in cases among attendees.

This means they will advise the PM next week that crowds can return safely without social distancing in June - as long as measures such as staggering entries and good ventilation are put in place.

It is more good news as the fight against the virus continues, with the latest data revealing that there are only 757 symptomatic cases a day in England and the chance of getting infected is as low as one in 150,000 for those who have had both jabs.

Meanwhile a Public Health England report revealed infections in the over-80s have fallen to the lowest level on record. And in a further , hospitalisations and cases continue to plummet in all regions of the country.

In other developments:

British holidaymakers will be able to visit France from June 9 if they are vaccinated or have a negative Covid test;

A study found that much of Europe could safely be put on the travel 'green list' this summer thanks to the successful vaccination programme;

Nearly three quarters of a million appointments were made on Monday and Tuesday this week as the NHS began inviting over-45s to be vaccinated;

Ministers faced renewed calls to scrap rules which 'falsely imprison' care home residents.

There are only 757 symptomatic cases a day in England and the chance of getting infected is as low as one in 150,000 for those who have had both jabs

MPs called for the lifting of restrictions to be sped up, while pressure grew for a rethink of rules governing funerals and care homes. But Downing Street is resisting calls to go faster, saying everything is on track for a resumption of near-normal life from June 21.

NHS England said that text messages will be sent out from Friday to 40 and 41-year-olds allowing them to arrange their vaccination appointments.

Chief executive of NHS England Sir Simon Stevens said: 'With nine tenths of people aged 45 and over having been jabbed, nearly three quarters of a million new appointments were made in just two days as our booking service opened to people aged 42 to 44.

'With second doses also proceeding apace, we're now ready to invite all those aged 40 and over to join the most successful vaccination drive in health service history.'

NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens yesterday called the vaccination drive the 'most successful in health service history'.

The latest data shows that it has been extraordinarily effective in slashing infections and hospitalisations.

Researchers at King's College London said the chance of becoming infected if you have not been vaccinated is just one in 45,000. Among those who have received one dose, they put the risk at one in 100,000, while it is just one in 150,000 for those who have had both doses.

The study, based on data gathered from more than a million users of the ZOE Covid Symptom Study app, suggested that infections are now even lower than they were in the summer when lockdown had been lifted. The scientists said that just 1,046 people are getting symptomatic Covid-19 across the whole of the UK each day, including just 757 in England.

The number testing positive each day is averaging 2,258, according to latest Department of Health figures.

But that includes those who do not have symptoms. Professor Tim Spector, who leads the study, said: 'It's a great position to be in. It's very reassuring that low rates continue despite reopening gyms and outdoor areas in pubs and restaurants, and bodes well for further relaxation of restrictions in line with the Government roadmap out of lockdown.'

Meanwhile, Public Health England's weekly report into coronavirus revealed that fewer over-80s than ever are catching the virus. There were only 6.3 cases per 100,000 people aged over 80 in the week ending on Sunday, the lowest since the report began in June.

The vaccine rollout has slashed hospital admissions. There are 1,553 patients in hospital with Covid-19, the lowest figure for seven months and down from a peak of 39,000 in January.

Despite the positive data yesterday, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said Britons needed to be 'careful' and that it was too soon to hug or mix indoors.

Don't hold your hopes up for summer festivals yet, vaccine minister warns Summer festivals could still be banned this year despite a successful vaccine rollout and tumbling coronavirus cases, the vaccines minister warns. Nadhim Zahawi said today Britons should avoid signing up for the mass events, even though the UK remains on course to lift all restrictions this summer. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'If you are now booking, then you do carry some risk, clearly because we have to follow the data.' There was a suggestion that all restrictions on large events and performances could be relaxed by June 21 , when social distancing is due to be legally scrapped. But the Government has refused to commit to specifics about which rules will and won't stay beyond that date, claiming it will be led by 'data, not dates'. Many popular festivals including the world famous Glastonbury and Winchester-based Boomtown have already shelved plans to take place this year. But others such as the Reading and Leeds festival say they are still intending to go ahead in August. Organisers say festivals are being cancelled because of problems getting Covid insurance, and have called for a Government-backed scheme. Mass gatherings have been restricted throughout the pandemic because scientists fear packing people close together could spark an outbreak of the virus. Studies suggest Covid spreads quickly at mass events, and one infected individual could pass it on to more than 100 others. But organisers are looking to reduce the threat by asking attendees to take a Covid test before they enter, to slash the risk of the virus arriving at the event. Scientists found no sign of infection after they ran a test concert in Spain last month, where revellers were asked to wear masks but didn't have to socially distance. Around 5,000 music fans came to the event after getting a negative test result, and two weeks later only six people had tested positive. Researchers concluded four of these people had caught the virus elsewhere, and said they could not establish whether the other two were infected at the event. Advertisement

But former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said that the string of good news showed 'we need to get on with it' and accelerate the roadmap. A No10 source insisted there was still a need for 'caution'.

Every English region also saw falls in cases in the past week  despite millions more tests being deployed  with the lowest rates recorded in the South West (14.2), South East (17.2) and the East of England (20.5).

Meanwhile, the Department of Health's daily update revealed there were 2,445 cases in the past 24 hours and 22 deaths, with infections down 10 per cent from a week ago and deaths up slightly on the 18 last Thursday.

Latest figures show another 462,000 second and 134,000 first vaccine doses were dished out on Tuesday. It means more than 34million Britons have had at least one dose and 14m have been fully vaccinated.

Experts said the UK was moving out of the Covid pandemic and into a situation that was much more manageable after separate figures showed the number of people falling ill across Britain is also at a record low.

But despite a plethora of evidence showing the virus is firmly in retreat, England faces at least seven more weeks of restrictions. June 21 has been earmarked as the earliest possible date that most curbs can be lifted.

The country's largest symptom tracking study estimated just 757 people are getting sick with Covid every day in England. Across the whole of the UK, it is believed to be 1,046. Infections have never been lower, even compared to last summer when lockdown rules had been lifted and the virus was in retreat, according to the study which launched in May last year.

Professor Tim Spector, the King's College London epidemiologist who runs the study, praised the 'consistent low levels' of Covid and said: 'Its a great position to be in.' He claimed the findings 'signal that were moving from a Covid pandemic to Covid becoming endemic in the UK'.

Professor Karol Sikora, a medical expert at the University of Buckingham, told MailOnline the pandemic would be declared over now if the Government hadn't been 'frightened by messages from the Government'.

Meanwhile, Test and Trace figures show infections fell by nine per cent in the week up to April 21, despite 600,000 more swabs being carried out. Out of 5.1million tests, just 16,776 were positive  the lowest weekly total since last September.

The positive data add to the continuing huge success of the vaccine rollout, which scientists have found is cutting transmission of the virus and keeping people out of hospital. Almost 70 per cent of England has Covid antibodies, separate figures revealed yesterday.

According to the King's study, the current risk of getting infected with Covid in Britain is one in 45,000  and just one in 100,000 in vaccinated people.

It came as Matt Hancock received his first coronavirus jab yesterday morning after the vaccine programme opened to people aged 42 this week. The 42-year-old Health Secretary was given the jab by England's deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam at the Science Museum in London.

Over 40? Time for a jab: As Hancock is given his shot by Van-Tam, 2.5million more Britons get their vaccine call this week

By Kate Pickles for The Daily Mail

Anyone aged 40 and over in England can book their Covid jab from today as the rollout continues at pace.

Text messages are being sent to 40 and 41-year-olds to arrange vaccination appointments for first doses.

Nearly three-quarters-of-a-million appointments were made on Monday and Tuesday this week as the NHS began inviting over-45s to be vaccinated.

Yesterday, Matt Hancock said it was a 'privilege' to receive his first dose of the Oxford jab at the hands of Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam.

The 42-year-old Health Secretary described the process in the vaccination hub at London's Science Museum as painless.

Text messages are being sent to 40 and 41-year-olds to arrange vaccination appointments for first doses

Alongside a picture on Twitter of himself receiving the injection from a masked Professor Van-Tam, he wrote: 'Brilliant! Got the jab. In & out in 8 minutes. Didn't hurt at all. Massive thanks to JVT & the @sciencemuseum team. When you get the call, get the jab!'

NHS England said 2.5million more people have been invited for their jab this week alone.

It comes as the latest NHS England figures revealed more than 28.5million in England had received their first jab by April 28, nearly two thirds of the adult population.

The data, published yesterday, also showed that nearly 12 million people had received their second doses, making them fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

Government figures show 48,138,009 vaccinations have now been given across the UK, including 14,043,961 second doses.

NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said: 'With nine tenths of people aged 45 and over having been jabbed, nearly three quarters of a million new appointments were made in just two days as our booking service opened to people aged 42 to 44. With second doses also proceeding apace, we're now ready to invite all those aged 40 and over to join the most successful vaccination drive in health service history.'

Professor Stephen Powis, medical director for the NHS in England, urged those who receive a text to book their jab.

He said: 'The rapid rollout of the NHS vaccination programme, the swiftest in Europe, is down to months of careful planning and sheer hard work by nurses, doctors and countless other staff supported by our volunteers.

'If you receive a text inviting you for your jab, please follow the instructions provided and book  it is simple, effective and provides vital protection against the virus.'

NHS England said that when invited, people will be able to book in at a vaccination centre or pharmacy site through the national booking service.

Text invitations appear as an alert from 'NHSvaccine' and include a link to the NHS website to reserve an appointment.

Those who cannot go online can call the service on 119 instead to book their jab.

Meanwhile, regulators have said that the rare blood clotting disorder linked to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine particularly affects younger adults.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency released a more detailed breakdown of figures as government scientists continued to debate whether everyone under 40 should be offered an alternative vaccine. The latest number of cases in the UK was 209, including 41 deaths, up to April 21  up from 168 cases and 32 deaths a week earlier. The estimated number of first doses administered in the UK by then was 22million, giving an overall case incidence of around one per every 108,000 doses.

'The data suggest there is a higher incidence reported in the younger adult age groups', said the regulator. 'This evolving evidence should be taken into account when considering the use of the vaccine.'
President Joe Biden made a direct appeal to a primetime audience to sell his once in a generation agenda, one that could reshape American life through a vast expansion of federal safety nets and a renewed workforce, primed for a nation at the brink of the climate crisis and emerging from the economic fallout from a global pandemic.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on the eve of his 100th day in office, the president addressed crisis and opportunity, about rebuilding a nation, revitalizing our democracy, and winning the future following the deaths of thousands of Americans from the coronavirus and a previous administration that sowed chaos, capped by a deadly assault in the building where Mr Biden delivered his remarks.

America is on the move again, the president said in his hour-long speech. We all know life can knock us down, but in America, we never ever stay down.  America is rising anew, choosing hope over fear, truth over lies and light over darkness.

He outlined his sweeping, multi-trillion dollar domestic agenda  one that would touch on nearly every aspect of American life, from broadband internet access across rural communities to the pipes in the nations schools, federal funding for childcare and paid sick leave, and extending universal education to preschool-aged children and college students.

It was a sales pitch to Congress, urging lawmakers from both parties to converge around his vision, but its one that relies on his personal brand of politicking that can speak to the urgency of the moment.

He also renewed his calls for lawmakers to pass gun control legislation, raising the federal hourly minimum wage to $15, immigration reform to put millions of people on the path to citizenship, criminal justice reform, civil rights protections for LGBTQ people, labour rights, and voting rights protections  all critical to his administrations agenda.

The president underscored his platform as one echoed in history and American promise, one of opening the doors of opportunity and guaranteeing fairness and justice. 

Its time we remembered that We the People are the government, he told lawmakers.

Not some force in a distant capital  not some powerful force we have no control over, he said. Its us.

The speech is a familiar tradition  one in which he has participated as both a longtime member of Congress and as vice president, seated behind Barack Obama during his State of the Union addresses.

Its good to be back, he said as he approached the dais.

But it was a tradition warped with the growingly familiar markings of a year-long public health crisis  an emptied room and attendees wearing face masks. There were no guests in the First Ladys private box, and the House chamber contained only 200 physically distanced lawmakers and officials.

The State of the Union-styled speech also saw for the first time two women flanking the president at the dais  Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Its an inflection point in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than 573,000 Americans, but Mr Biden entered his speech with renewed optimism and reason for hope. Roughly 44 per cent of Americans have received at least one dose of three available Covid-19 vaccines, and roughly 30 per cent of the country is fully vaccinated from the disease.

His agenda also has widespread support among Americans. Recent polling from Monmouth University found that 68 per cent of Americans support his American Jobs Plan infrastructure plan, and 64 per cent support his American Families Plan initiatives, as well as raising taxes on the nations wealthiest households and corporations to pay for them.

That agenda is built on decades of organising around workers rights, wage increases and universal childcare and education platforms that progressive lawmakers have pushed his campaign and the White House to embrace.

Passage of the widely popular American Rescue Plan coronavirus relief package is making all the difference in the world for many Americans, he said.

He pointed to personal stories of hope  a woman in Florida who cried in her car after getting a vaccine, a single mother in Texas who wrote to tell him that direct payments saved her family from eviction, a woman who could afford to take her granddaughter to the eye doctor  against a defining image of miles-long lines for food banks.

I dont know about you but I dont think Id ever see that in America, he said.

The president argued that getting Americans back to work through a blue-collar blueprint to build America in his American Jobs Plan follows a legacy of transformational investments in public services and infrastructure in the US, from transcontinental railroads and interstate highways to public schools and universities.

Time and again, they propel us into the future, he said.

The president made several appeals to lawmakers as they mull several pieces of White House-backed legislation, from immigration reform to voting rights.

He pleaded with Congress to end the epidemic of gun violence in America and the exhausting war over immigration as his administration sees a growing number of unaccompanied children arriving at the US-Mexico border and the White House grapples with thousands of asylum seekers.

We also have to get at the root problem of why people are fleeing, particularly to our southern border, from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, Mr Biden said. The violence, the corruption, the gangs, the political instability, hunger, hurricanes, earthquakes, natural disasters.

The president urged lawmakers to find consensus on police reform with the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which he wants on his desk by 25 May  the anniversary of Mr Floyds death.

His speech  with some off-script remarks and several personal reflections wrapped into a pitch for a $6 trillion plan to boost the nations economy  also spoke directly to young transgender people.

To all the transgender Americans watching at home, he said. Especially the young people who are so brave, I want you to know that your president has your back.

He underscored his appeal to lawmakers and the American publics imaginations with a reminder of the violence that rocked the Capitol in which he stood, an attack desecrating our democracy.

It was an existential crisis he said, and a test of whether our democracy could survive.

It did, he said. But the struggle is far from over.
Joe Biden delivered his first joint address to Congress Wednesday night, unveiling plans for a $2.3 trillion 'blue collar jobs' bill.

And while many balked at the cost of the President's proposal, others were distracted by the surprising sartorial choices of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The New York senator, 70, turned heads in an electric blue suit which he paired with patterned socks and shiny leather loafers.

The eye-catching ensemble caught the attention of Twitter users, one of whom claimed that the suit was the same color as Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

Sen. Chuck Schumer turned heads in an electric blue suit during Joe Biden's joint address to Congress on Wednesday night

The eye-catching ensemble caught the attention of Twitter users, one of whom claimed that the suit was the same color as Cookie Monster from Sesame Street

Some praised Schumer's sense of style, saying he stood out amid other male politicians who played it safe in bland black.

'I want that suit,' one cooed. 'That's the shade of blue suit I'm missing and I need to level up.'

'When do we have the national conversation about Chuck Schumer's suit?' another asked, adding a GIF that read 'Dear God, it's beautiful!'

As blue is the color associated with Democrats, other viewers claimed the suit was deliberately chosen by Schumer to signify his liberal credentials.

One even speculated that the brighter the blue the more radical the policies that Schumer was endorsing.

'I believe the correct name for the color of Chuck Schumer's suit is 'radical liberal blue', they wrote.

Meanwhile, other style spectators wondered whether Republican Liz Cheney was also sending a subtle message with her choice to also wear a blue suit.

The GOP Rep. has been an outspoken critic of her own party over their failure to critique the Capitol Riots on January 6.

'It would be wrong to conclude anything from Liz Cheney's bright blue suit, right?' one Twitter user asked, implying that she may be showing her support for the Democrats.

Showing support for the Democrats? Other style spectators wondered whether Republican Liz Cheney was sending a subtle message with her choice to also wear a blue suit
By Ritah Kemigisa

The Republic of Korea has donated 4,500 metric tons of rice to over 392,000 South Sudanese refugees in Uganda.

The donation to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) was received by the Country Director El-Khidir Daloum.

He says the contribution will cover another one to two months of humanitarian assistance at a time they have a US$86 million funding shortfall.

Ambassador Ha Byung-Kyoo says Ugandas progressive refugee model is appreciated internationally.

The donation will be distributed in the settlements of Adjumani, Imvepi, Kiryandongo, Palorinya and Rhino Camp to meet the refugees basic cereal needs in August and part of September.
URBANA, Ill. - With threats of water scarcity complicating the need to feed a growing global population, it is more important than ever to get crop irrigation right. Overwatering can deplete local water supplies and lead to polluted runoff, while underwatering can lead to sub-optimal crop performance. Yet few farmers use science-based tools to help them decide when and how much to water their crops.

A new University of Illinois led study identifies obstacles and solutions to improve performance and adoption of irrigation decision support tools at the field scale.

"We wanted to offer our perspective on how to achieve field-scale precision irrigation with the most recent and advanced technologies on data collection, plant water stress, modeling, and decision-making," says Jingwen Zhang, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois and lead author on the article in Environmental Research Letters.

Zhang says many farmers rely on traditional rules of thumb, including visual observation, crop calendars, and what the neighbors are doing, to decide when and how much to water. Better data and more advanced technologies exist to help make those decisions, but they aren't being leveraged currently to their full potential.

For example, some fields are equipped with soil moisture sensors or cameras that detect changes in crop appearance, but there aren't enough of them to provide accurate information across fields. Satellites can monitor vegetation from space, but the spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images is often too large to help make decisions at the field scale.

Kaiyu Guan, assistant professor in NRES, Blue Waters professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and project leader on the study, pioneered a way to fuse high-resolution and high-frequency satellite data into one integrated high spatial-temporal resolution product to help track soil and plant conditions.

"Based on remote sensing fusion technology and advanced modeling, we can help farmers get a fully scalable solution remotely," he says. "That's powerful. It can potentially be a revolutionary technology for farmers, not only in the U.S., but also smallholder farmers in developing countries."

With modern satellite technology and Guan's fusion model, data acquisition won't be a limiting factor in future precision irrigation products. But it's still important to define plant water stress appropriately.

Historically, irrigation decisions were based solely on measures of soil moisture. Guan's group recently called for the agricultural industry to redefine drought, not based on soil moisture alone, but on its interaction with atmospheric dryness.

"If we consider the soil-plant-atmosphere-continuum as a system, which reflects both soil water supply and atmospheric water demand, we can use those plant-centric metrics to define plant water stress to trigger irrigation," Zhang says. "Again, if we use our data fusion methods and process-based modelling, we can achieve precision irrigation with very high accuracy and also high resolution."

The researchers also looked at challenges regarding farmer adoption of existing decision support tools. Because current products are based on less-than-ideal data sources, Guan says producers are reluctant to switch from traditional rule-of-thumb methods to tools that may not be much more reliable. Non-intuitive user interfaces, data privacy, and inflexible timing compound the problem.

Trenton Franz, associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and a coauthor, says farmers will be more likely to adopt precision irrigation decision tools if they are accurate down to the field scale, flexible, and easy to use. His and Guan's teams are working on technologies to fill this need and are actively testing the technology in irrigated fields in Nebraska. This includes participating with Daran Rudnick, assistant professor at UNL and co-author of the study, in the UNL Testing Ag Performance (TAPS) program, which focuses on technology adoption and education for producers across the region.

"We're pretty close. We have real-time evapotranspiration data, and we're adding the soil moisture component and the irrigation component. Probably in less than a year this will be launched as a prototype and can be tested among the farmer community," Guan says.

###

For more detail, see the article, "Challenges and opportunities in precision irrigation decision-support systems for center pivots," published in Environmental Research Letters [DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe436]. Additional Illinois co-authors include Bin Peng, Chongya Jiang, Wang Zhou, Yi Yang, Yaping Cai, and Madhu Khanna, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and interim director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

This project is primarily funded by the USDA NIFA Cyber-Physical System Program and an NSF CAREER Award through its Environmental Sustainability Program.

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics are in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois. The Agroecosystem Sustainability Center is a joint research center of ACES and iSEE.
A man drove himself to the hospital after he was shot in the leg Thursday morning, police said.

The shooting happened at 351 Woodland St. about 2:50 a.m., Lt. Aaron Boisvert said.

He was able to drive himself to Saint Francis Hospital, he said. The hospital is less than a half-mile down the street at 114 Woodland.

The man was listed in stable condition, Boisvert said.

Police continue to investigate the shooting. They didnt have any suspects as of 2 p.m. Thursday, he said.

Christine Dempsey may be reached at cdempsey@courant.com.
Purdy detailed a recent example of the challenges with WellNow not relaying information to the health department. A local student had COVID-19 symptoms and went to WellNow in Auburn. A rapid test was administered at the urgent care center and the student tested positive for the virus. Another test, a polymerase chain reaction test, was performed and sent to a lab in Boston.

While waiting for the results of the second test, the student's mother contacted the health department for guidance. But, Purdy said, the department wasn't aware of their positive test result.

"We did not have him in the system as one of our positives, nor could I find any test results for him," she continued.

According to Purdy, WellNow provided isolation instructions but didn't inform the health department, which is responsible for isolation and quarantine orders, of the positive test.

"We get a person calling us after the fact telling us they need orders to take back to work," she said, "and we never had them in quarantine or isolation."
When Zara Kay began fearing for her safety in Tanzania, she asked her adopted country, Australia, for help.

The ex-Muslim activist first went to the east African country to attend to a family emergency, but soon started receiving threats of murder and rape over her public comments on social media about the government and Islam. One text message said, If u dont wanna be killed Dont post shit. Another read: What makes you think you deserve to stay alive?

Australian acitivist Zara Kay, now at her friends home in Manly, was detained for 36 hours in Tanzania. Credit:Louise Kennerley

The founder of Faithless Hijabi, an organisation dedicated to supporting women as they move away from Islam, contacted the Australian high commission in Nairobi, which handles consular cases in Tanzania.

This email was to notify my embassy that as an activist Ive been receiving and have received many threats of either rape, killing me or pinning me down, she wrote on October 29 last year. With the elections that just happened and the riots that are predicted to happen, I feel the need to keep my embassy informed on this.
Alleging police had no legitimate basis to break up a large crowd marching against police brutality last June, three protesters have filed a lawsuit against New Orleans Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson over his departments use of tear gas and rubber projectiles on the Crescent City Connection bridge approach.

They say the NOPD gave no warning before officers unleashed a barrage of tear gas on the elevated highway that led to a scramble for safety -- an assertion thats backed by an internal report.

In the aftermath, Ferguson made matters worse by declining to reprimand the officers involved, the lawsuit alleges. Ferguson has said that because the NOPD failed to have clear guidelines in place for protests, none of his officers violated regulations.

The chief has defended the use of tear gas, saying officers were provoked by a small group of agitators at the front of the protest line. The internal report from the NOPDs Public Integrity Bureau likewise concluded that the use of force was reasonable.

Remingtyn Williams, Lauren Chustz and Bilal Ali-Bey are the lead plaintiffs in what is proposed as a class-action lawsuit. It was filed Wednesday in federal court in New Orleans by their attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.

The suit claims the NOPD violated the plaintiffs free-speech rights and subjected them to excessive force. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Greg Guidry, a Donald Trump appointee.

The lawsuit claims the NOPD gave disparate treatment to protesters who rallied against the removal of Confederate monuments in 2017, treating them with kid gloves compared to the armory of tear gas and projectile weapons they deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters on the night of June 3.

+3 Internal report details chaotic June 3 standoff, teargassing on Crescent City Connection bridge The New Orleans Police Department deployed teargas on a crowd of protesters so quickly on June 3 that several officers didnt have time to don masks.

The ACLU of Louisiana, which has launched a litigation effort designed to put racist policing on trial, claims that the treatment reflects a larger pattern from the NOPD, pointing to the incidents after Hurricane Katrina that led to the forces 2012 reform agreement with the federal government.

The events of the June 3 protest reveal that NOPDs history of unconstitutionally discriminating against African Americans through the use of force continues in violation of the very Consent Decree put in place to curb unconstitutional conduct, the lawsuit states.

The Nelson Mullins law firm is also representing the protesters.

The city declined to comment Wednesday.

The lawsuit is the first major legal fallout from weeks of demonstration in New Orleans last spring and summer following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. Those protests were mostly peaceful. On the night of June 2, officers even joined a crowd in taking a knee on the Claiborne Expressway in downtown New Orleans.

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The next nights protest began in similar fashion, with speeches in Duncan Plaza near City Hall. But after winding through Uptown neighborhoods, demonstrators slipped past police and onto the Pontchartrain Expressway in the direction of the west bank.

They were met by a cordon of cops. Police said the standoff devolved when a group of protesters, at the front of a crowd of hundreds, rushed the line of officers. Demonstrators said they did not understand why the police refused to let them cross the bridge after their attempts at negotiation.

Cops launched tear gas into the crowd and ultimately used less lethal projectile weapons on some demonstrators.

Williams, a poet and aspiring filmmaker, claims he was both protesting and documenting the night of June 3. He says he was pushed forward by the crowd, struck by batons or shields, dazed by tear gas and then hit with a projectile. He claims the incident took a "severe emotional toll" on him, according to the lawsuit.

Chustz, a chef and actress, says she was near the front of the protest line. She says she was among those chanting, praying and trying to persuade police to join the demonstration. She heard no warning before the tear gas was launched, causing "total chaos" and irritating her eyes.

Since the demonstration, Chustz has suffered irregularities in her menstrual cycle, she says. The lawsuit states that those problems have been linked to the use of tear gas and proposes the creation of a special class of female plaintiffs whose cycles were disrupted, or who might be intimidated from attending future protests by the threat of gas.

Meanwhile, Ali-Bey says his legs were hit by projectiles, which left him with bruises for months and lingering nightmares. He was one of the first to speak out about the use of rubber balls on protesters, which police initially denied.

In addition to Ferguson, the lawsuit lists as defendants 40 NOPD supervisors or officers involved in the incident.

+4 A new sheriff in town? Susan Hutson, longtime NOPD monitor, to run against Marlin Gusman After more than a decade as the New Orleans Police Departments independent monitor, Susan Hutson wants to make the switch from watchdog to to

Separately, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Lamar Davis and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto are listed as defendants, along with John Doe troopers and deputies who were stationed nearby, on the theory that those agencies should have intervened to stop the NOPD from firing tear gas.

The JPSO didnt immediately comment, and a spokesman for the State Police declined comment.

Upon receiving the lawsuit, our department will review with our legal staff. We will not be able to provide statements on pending litigation, said Capt. Nick Manale.
MSU Announces Spring 2021 Outstanding Seniors

By West Kentucky Star & MSU Staff

MURRAY - Murray State University has named Katie Waide and Alex Thome as the Outstanding Senior recipients for spring 2021. Students recognized with this honor are known for their academic excellence and professionalism.Katie Waide is the daughter of Kent and Stacy Waide of Madisonville, Kentucky. She is a double major in economics and organizational communication as well as a Presidential Fellow and member of Murray States Honors College. As part of her fellowship experience, Waides final thesis is on the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding on broadband availability and adoption across states.Waide completed an internship last fall with the Murray-Calloway County Economic Corporation, gaining experience in working with business owners, demographic research for grant applications and the recruitment process of manufacturers. Waide has also held past internships with the Madisonville-Hopkins County Economic Development Corporation and the Hopkins County Tourism and Convention Commission.She will graduate this semester and will be moving to Lakeland, Florida to work for MidFlorida Credit Union as an Associate Manager.I am just so incredibly grateful to be chosen as this springs Outstanding Senior Woman. An honor like this is not just an individualone, though. I absolutely would not be the person I am today without the mentors, professors and friends I have met throughout my time at Murray State University. Leaving behind these people and the memories surrounding Murray State will be bittersweet. However, I know there is an exciting future ahead, all thanks to my education and experience here in Murray, Waide said.Alex Thome is the son of Edward and Angela Thome of Murray, Kentucky. He is a double major in chemistry and music performance with a minor in mathematics.While at Murray State, Thome has conducted research in organic polymer chemistry and has served as a teaching assistant in the chemistry department. He also provides music lessons for piano and cello students while helping organize regular and special opportunities for students to gain performing experience.Following graduation, Thome will attend Indiana University in their Master of Music, Piano Performance program. He hopes to then obtain a doctoral degree in music and teach at the university level.I have had an incredible experience at Murray State University. The professors here include some of the most wonderful people I know, who helped me when I needed help, and matched intensity when I wanted to go above and beyond. Additionally, I met some of the most amazing friends of whom I could have dreamed. With an education and relationships that will last a lifetime, I am so grateful for all that Murray State provided me. I am greatly honored to be chosen as the Outstanding Senior Man of spring 2021 and will miss Murray State immensely, Thome said.The spring 2021 commencement ceremonies will take place May 7-8 at the CFSB Center. Please visit murraystate.edu/commencement for additional information.Since 1922, Murray State University has provided a collaborative, opportunity-rich living and learning community that fosters personal growth and professional success through a high-quality college experience. Students receive support from inspiring faculty and staff and will join a distinctive campus community  the Racer Family. With nearly 10,000 students, Murray State prepares the next generation of leaders to join more than 75,000 successful alumni who make a difference in their community, across the country and around the world. We are Racers. The Universitys main campus is located in Murray, Kentucky, and includes five regional campuses in Ft. Campbell, Henderson, Hopkinsville, Madisonville and Paducah. To learn more about Murray State University, please visit murraystate.edu .
The lives of 23 Kilkenny men and women, who died while serving with the ANZAC forces, were remembered in a moving tribute at dawn on Sunday.

Tributes were paid to the fallen, who were among the 123 Kilkenny men and women who served in the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces, at a special Anzac Day dawn service which was held at the Kilkenny Great War Memorial at the Peace Park on Sunday.



The service began at 6.30am with the Irish Flag flying at half-mast. Representing the Australian Embassy was Mr Tim Millikan, Deputy Head of Mission, who lit two candles - one each to represent the Australian and New Zealand forces.

Music was provided by Larry Scallan, who played the hymn Abide With Me. A short Australian prayer was read by Berni Egan.

Wreaths

Addressing the event, Mr Millikan laid wreaths and read aloud the names of the 23 Kilkenny men and women who died in the ANZAC forces.

John Joe Cullen read the poem For The Fallen by Laurence Binyon and the Ode of Remembrance. Charlie Parsons played the Last Post and Reveille before the Irish Flag was raised to full mast. A minutes silence was observed.



The Australian and New Zealand national anthems were played and the ceremony ended with the playing of the Irish national anthem.

It is proposed to make the ceremony an annual event in Kilkenny. Members of the public, especially those who are originally from Australia and New Zealand, will be very welcome in future years.

This years event was held in compliance with the restrictions, with social distancing observed.
Being connected is an essential part of our everyday lives, enabling us to connect personally and professionally, but with protecting privacy vitally important in the digital era, how do you do this?

According to the Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2020 (PDF link), the majority of Australians know they should be taking privacy seriously, with 85% having a clear understanding of why they should protect personal information but almost half (49%) dont know how to go about it.

Privacy Awareness Week is May 3-9, and to raise awareness of the importance of protecting personal information and help Australians keep their data private, the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) has the following five tips:

The tips are as follows:



1. Be conscious of what you share on social media

Having access to social media via our mobile devices 24/7 makes it easy to share our every move. Its important to be wary of uploading personal details to your social media account, such as geotagging your location or sharing images of your house, as it can be difficult to keep across who follows you and can interact with your content online.

A good rule of thumb is to make your profile private and if you wouldnt share the information with someone in a physical interaction, think again before sharing it on social media.

2. Erase personal information off previous devices

Before selling, giving away, or trading in a phone that you no longer use, make sure that your data is completely erased by using your phones Erase all Content and Settings or Factory Reset features.

Using this feature will remove all your personal data from your device including messages, contacts, photographs, browsing history, Wi-Fi codes, passwords, and any apps you've installed. You can back up your old devices and transfer your favourite photos and memories to your new devices, making them more accessible to browse through.

3. Review your app permissions

When you install a new app, it's common for it to ask for certain permissions. App permissions are the privileges an app has, like having access to your phone's camera, location, or your contact list.

But not every app needs to access permissions for everything, an example of this would be a music app requesting permission to view your location. Take notice of the apps that request access to data that isn't relevant to its function and think about whether its actually necessary.

4. Secure your mobile device

Most apps and websites that you use gather data from you, especially once you log in. When you create a new account using your Facebook login, such as for a music streaming service or online dating, these apps and websites can request access to information on your profile.

To protect your private information ongoing, its important to regularly log into your Facebook account to review which apps and websites youve allowed access to.

5. Separate your work and personal devices

While it may seem inconvenient to switch back and forth between multiple devices, one of the key challenges people face is protecting sensitive corporate data. The more work programs and software that you install on your personal devices, like your mobile phone, the higher chance you have of facing vulnerabilities.

Where possible, its best to keep your main work device and main personal device separate, or at the very least ensure that your IT team puts strong security measures in place on your personal device if you are using it for work to reduce the chance of any cybersecurity complications.
Biden spoke for over an hour to roughly 200 masked, vaccinated congresspeople in a mostly empty House chamber. Showing the manic energy of a grasshopper on amphetamines, he did much better than I expected. Barring a few verbal slips, Biden managed to stay on point the whole time. Really, the only problem with the speech was that it was a lie from beginning to end.

The biggest lie was Biden's relentless calls for togetherness. "And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation." "My fellow Americans, we have to come together." "We need to work together to find a consensus." "We came together." "There is nothing  nothing  beyond our capacity  nothing we can't do  if we do it together."

That's a lovely sentiment  and Biden uttered it with a straight face on the same day that his Department of Justice sent the FBI with an open-ended search warrant to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's lawyer. This is a terrifying descent into practices common in dictatorships:

The next biggest lie was how Biden framed the events of January 6, when a few hundred unarmed people, egged on by leftist provocateurs, pushed their way into Congress, just as leftists have done since George W. Bush became president. They did so not to overturn the government, but to ask for an honest certification vote.

Once the lies stopped, it was clear that only one Trump-supporter died from violence when a still unnamed police officer murdered her in cold blood.

That's not what Biden said. He called January 6  a protest of the type that leftists routinely make  "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War." And again, "as we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol  desecrating our democracy  remain vivid in our minds." January 6 is and will remain the Democrats' justification for every crackdown.

Despite a year of Antifa and BLM riots across America  none of which he mentioned  Biden said that "the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism." Maybe that explains why the people who were arrested following January 6 are in solitary confinement four months later without ever being tried. D.C.'s federal prison is the new Gitmo North for terrorists.

Biden congratulated himself for the vaccine, without once mentioning that he had a vaccine in place thanks to Trump's Operation Warp Speed to develop it and organizational abilities to distribute it.

He promised that all his spending can be paid for with taxes on rich people and corporations. But super-rich people and corporations don't pay taxes. The rich people live in Loophole Land, while corporations pass taxes on in the form of lower wages, fewer hires, and higher prices. If that weren't the case, I would love to see Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other socialist billionaires fund Biden's proposed spending spree.

He implied that last year's economic collapse was Trump's fault, ignoring that Trump had the economy on steroids, benefiting the poorest Americans most. It was the hysteria the Democrats fostered to destroy Trump's presidency that torched the economy. He even had the chutzpah to imply that Trump's policies enriched the 650 billionaires who became super-billionaires because of Democrat lockdowns.

Biden blamed Trump for the chaos on the border, claiming that when he was Veep, he addressed root causes by sending taxpayer money to Latin America, but "the last administration shut it down." It was that, not Biden's open border policy, that created the chaos. Harris, though, will make it all better. (Harris has yet to visit the border.)

So much of what Biden said was stupid. He promised to build 500,000 electric charging stations for Americans driving electric cars. Even with high-speed charging, it takes 40 minutes to "fill the tank" of an electric car. At that rate, 500,000 stations won't be enough  and there's no way any electrical grid can support that demand.

He wants a $15 minimum wage, which every economist agrees will severely reduce jobs.

He wants the Paycheck Fairness Act, which purports to address the canard that women unfairly earn less than men. Women earn less than men because they take lower-paying jobs or flex jobs that allow them to spend more time with their children. Democrats are all about denying biological reality, one aspect of which is the mother-child bond.

He wants to further empower the NIH, the same organization that, under Fauci, sent American money to the lab in Wuhan in which COVID almost certainly originated.

He wants even more money poured into public education, something that may be a tough fight after families across America saw their children's teachers continue to collect paychecks while refusing to teach.

He wants Congress to force employers to provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. The comparison is always to "other developed countries." But other developed countries didn't fund those programs  America did by absorbing their defense costs during the Cold War.

He boasted about lowering prescription drug prices, ignoring that one of his first acts was to raise the insulin prices Trump had reduced.

He said that H.R. 1, which would unconstitutionally remove elections from state control, will make them fairer and lied that Americans support it. There is nothing fair about increasing the opportunity to cheat, something that steals every honest American's vote. Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID, not ending voter ID.

He demanded gun control, making the risible claim that there are magazines that hold 100 bullets that can be fired in a few seconds. We call those machine guns, and they are illegal for civilian use.

It was an hour-long speech, so this only scratches the surface. Suffice it to say that he spoke in terms of unicorns leaving behind him a big mound of unicorn poop.

Image: Bidens state of the union speech. YouTube screen grab.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
FLINT, MI  A job fair centered on filling open positions for entry-level, skilled trades and managerial positions at local manufacturers is scheduled to take place next month.

Job seekers can explore all the open positions at the virtual Manufacturing Career Fair from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Monday, May 10.

The economic rebound thats underway has a number of local manufacturers in search of talent to fill various job openings, according to a press release from the Flint & Genesee Economic Alliance.

The participating employers include Avancez Assembly LLC; Domico Med-Device; Fernco, Inc.; General Motors-Flint Assembly; HIROTEC America, Inc.; Miller Industries; Peckham, Inc.; Richfield Industries; Rolls Mechanical; and more, per the release.

Resource partners will also be available to offer career and support services.

The employers we have partnered with have great opportunities for individuals to build a career right here in our community, Tyler Rossmaessler, executive director of the Flint & Genesee Economic Alliance, said. So, we are excited to partner with local companies to help connect residents to the manufacturing careers.

The career fair will use Brazen software to enable employers and job seekers to connect and interact virtually in real-time. The online format will allow participants to engage directly with company representatives from their home computers, smartphones or tablets.

After signing in on the day of the career fair, job seekers will be able to explore the available information and opportunities with each employer.

Those interested will first need to create an account and complete the registration form. To get started, visit here.

Many companies are hiring but in the COVID-era it can be difficult to host an in-person career fair. Fortunately, technology has provided an ideal solution that delivers the same kind of one-stop service for both employers and future employees, Rossmaessler said. We are excited we are able to offer this easy-to-use online platform to connect job seekers with the opportunities available in our community.

The event is hosted by the Flint & Genesee Economic Alliance and its workforce development partners  GST Michigan Works!, Mott Community College Workforce & Economic Development and Flint & Genesee Education & Talent. (The Flint & Genesee Economic Alliance and Flint & Genesee Education & Talent are divisions of the Flint & Genesee Group, formerly known as the Flint & Genesee Chamber of Commerce.)

For any questions about the Manufacturing Career Fair, contact Karena Hamlet, talent connection specialist, at khamlet@flintandgenesee.org.

Related news:

Congressman Dan Kildee highlights new resources for struggling Genesee County businesses

$1,000 bonuses offered for new workers at Sauce Italian American Kitchen, rooftop bar in Flint
We have been disappointed: Liberal congregations leaving United Methodist Church over homosexuality debate

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Multiple theologically progressive congregations in the United Methodist Church are in the process of leaving the mainline Protestant denomination due to its stance on LGBT issues.

For decades, the UMC has debated whether to change its biblically-based position on homosexuality, labeling it as sinful, its ban on the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, and defining marriage as only being between one man and one woman.

Although many expect a large number of conservative congregations to eventually leave the UMC because of the debate and form their own denomination, in recent months, some liberal congregations have already decided to exit.

HopeGateWay, a congregation in Portland, Maine, voted to leave the denomination on March 28, with the New England Annual Conference to vote on their disaffiliation in June.

Sara Ewing-Merrill, lead pastor at HopeGateWay, told The Christian Post that the March vote was 68 in favor and one against, with no plans at present to join another denomination.

We are exploring partnerships. We believe in connectionalism and ecumenical and interfaith work. We are in covenant with our fellow disaffiliating churches here in Maine, explained Ewing-Merrill.

Because of legislation passed at the special session of General Conference in 2019, HopeGateWay reported being able to keep its property and assets upon leaving the UMC.

For many, many years as we approached the next General Conferences, we have told our congregation that things would get better and the UMC would become more open and affirming. Every time we have been disappointed, Ewing-Merrill added.

Now that an option was created for us to make our own decision and not be dependent on others, we felt compelled to create a church where all are truly welcomed and affirmed.

Chebeague Island United Methodist Church, located on Chebeague Island, Maine, voted in February to leave the denomination following a discernment process that began in 2019.

As with HopeGateWay, Chebeague Island UMCs vote to disaffiliate still needs to be confirmed when the New England Annual Conference meets in June.

Chebeague Island Pastor Melissa Yosua-Davis told CP that her congregation will be released from their trust clause with the UMC when they fulfill certain payments to various entities.

Through agreement with the Board of Trustees of the New England Annual Conference, we will be paying our pro-rata share of the unfunded pension liability, as well as an additional year of mission shares, to honor the commitment of the conference to care for clergy in retirement and to leave in a way that respects the ongoing work of the Conference and its budgetary financial commitments, Yosua-Davis explained.

Yosua-Davis also told CP that while it's expected that many conservative churches will soon leave the UMC, it is no guarantee that the denomination that will remain will become entirely inclusive and affirming of LGBT individuals and their families.

That scenario could be years down the road. Even if the UMC changes its policies, which I hope happens, it will still be a long road for full and true inclusion, she added.

By leaving now, it enables the church to be more responsive to God's hopes and dreams for us and our community.

Bering Church of Houston, Texas, voted to leave the UMC on April 18, deciding to join the more theologically liberal mainline denomination, the United Church of Christ.

The Rev. Diane McGehee of Bering forwarded to CP the responses she gave to questions posed by the UMC Texas Annual Conference regarding her congregations plan to leave.

Berings sole reason for departing the UMC is the soul-level harm being done to persons who are LGBTQ+ and their families because of the official stance of the United Methodist Church that living out ones sexual orientation and gender identity as LGBTQ+ is incompatible with Christian teaching, said McGehee in the responses.

The weight of all of those years and the refusal of the denomination to act to end the discrimination deeply informs this decision.

According to Bering, the church will receive a general warranty deed to their property from the UMC after they pay for two years of apportionments and a future pension obligation.

Berings future is bright, continued McGehee. It is a vibrant, missionally active community, committed to bringing the Good News of the Gospel to all people, but especially those who have been pushed to the margins.

News of the departing progressive congregations comes as many conservatives within the UMC are planning to form their own denomination, known as the Global Methodist Church.

Keith Boyette, spokesman for the Global Methodist Church, told CP in an earlier interview that UMC leadership has shown an unwillingness to uphold its teachings on LGBT issues.

In the United States, particularly, some bishops, clergy, and churches are operating in open defiance to the teachings of the United Methodist Church, said Boyette. The Church has become ungovernable as a consequence, such unchecked defiance has destroyed the integrity of the Church.

In light of this, theologically conservative leaders have decided to launch a new denomination that will be true to its doctrine and teachings and end this endless conflict within the United Methodist Church.
Not more than two persons shall be allowed to accompany the winning candidate or his/her authorised representative to receive the certificate of election from the returning officer. (Representational Photo: AP)

HYDERABAD: The Telangana State Election Commission (TSEC) has banned victory processions/rallies by candidates and parties after the counting of votes for the municipal polls on May 3 in view of the surge in Covid-19 cases

in the state.

The poll panel has made all the arrangements for polling on April 30 with Covid-19 restrictions. Voting on Friday is for elections to Warangal and Khammam municipal corporations besides for municipalities in Atchampet, Siddipet, Nakrekal, Jadcherla and Kothur. Besides, voting will be held for Lingojiguda division in the GHMC and for a ward each in Gajwel, Nalgonda, Bodhan and Parkal municipalities.

"No victory procession after the counting of votes on May 3 shall be permissible. Not more than two persons shall be allowed to accompany the winning candidate or his/her authorised representative to receive the certificate of election from the returning officer," said an order issued by C. Partha Sarathi, commissioner, TSEC.

A total of 11,34,032 persons are eligible to exercise their franchise in these polls. As many as 1,539 polling booths will be staffed by 9,809 personnel.

The SEC has deployed additional police forces in 676 sensitive polling booths. The polling will be held through ballot papers. A total of 2,500 ballot boxes were supplied to the polling booths.
In addition, Lions Head is the name of a mountain next to Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, where Persson grew up. "It's a mountain I enjoyed climbing very much when I was a child. So for me, it had a poignancy."

The Lions Head brand, he said, "was meant to be a process of discovery, really embracing technology and new technique as they come along. We would see this as an area where we would innovate and try new things. But it actually became a story of resilience, which wasn't by design or intention."

This began with the 2014 South Napa earthquake. "We had significant damage," Persson said. "We lost a lot of wine but it also damaged one of our cellars really badly. So we took that as an opportunity to try and put a silver lining on a really bad day, and we rehabilitated that cellar into our Lion's Head cellar."

They installed state-of-the-art winemaking technology, "a lot of small lot fermenters, double insulated all around, computer-controlled. We bought our winemakers all the toys, so to speak," Persson said. "That was largely to allow us to house some of the newer fruit that was coming off our vineyards that we had completely started to rehabilitate from 2011 onwards. In essence, Lion's Head came out of that  making it work and embracing the fact that nature had designated which cellar had to be overhauled."
"As Gaels, we all know what makes Iona College such a special place. Now, it's time to share that story with the world."

The new logo consists of a Celtic knot cross with intermingling lines of maroon, gold and white. It is both a reflection of Iona's Catholic history as well as its core strengths  unity on campus, purpose in the classroom and service in the community. The line work is also a visual nod to Iona's new brand promise, which asks:

Where are you going?

The known path, or your own path?

Iona College is where your story starts.

Where you'll be given the means to dream

and find meaning in your dreams.

To follow your heart and your head.

To serve while you learn and learn while you serve.

To fight the good fight.

To own your path.

So, where are you going?

Iona College.

Learn Outside the Lines.

"Now more than ever, we know the value of the promise to Learn Outside the Lines," Reilley said. "From the very beginning, the process of rebranding was about so much more than just creating a new look and feel for the College. Staying true to ourselves, we sought to uncover the authentic aspects that make us distinctive. Iona's mission, vision and values; our heritage and history; the legacy of the Christian Brothers; the students we serve; and the experiences of our alumni, students, faculty and staff  all were taken into consideration and are reflected in the final product."

Learn more about the new Iona College brand by watching this launch video.

The redesigned website  iona.edu  is laser-focused on providing the best possible user experience. Over 2,000 pages were refreshed and transferred to the new platform with engaging, interactive, informative and accessible content, including:

more robust and compelling academic pages and program descriptions;

simplified Admissions and Financial Aid information;

engaging photos and videos that reflect Iona's vibrant and diverse campus culture;

vibrant and diverse campus culture; interactive search and navigation functions that make programs more discoverable for the wider community; and

an intranet with curated pages for current students, faculty, staff and alumni.

"As our vibrant alumni body  now over 50,000 strong  can attest, Iona has a legacy of providing a transformative education, equipping students with the knowledge and spirit to chart a successful path through life once they leave our campus," said Iona's executive-in-residence, James Mustich, who is assisting Iona's leadership team in developing vibrant strategies for innovation across the campus. "In today's world, empowering students to be resilient and resourceful  to Learn Outside the Lines  is more important than ever, and our new brand delivers that message with fresh energy."

Iona worked closely with two agency partners, mStoner for the website and Lawrence & Schiller for the rebranding.

"From the moment that we set foot on campus, we realized Iona was a special place and an extraordinary community, and we wanted to create a site that brought Iona's story to digital life," said Voltaire Santos Miran, CEO and head of client experience at mStoner, Inc. "The collaboration with Iona and with Lawrence & Schiller was a true partnership that resulted in a new brand platform, a vibrant identity system, and a dynamic new web presence. Not only is the site beautiful, accessible, and mobile-native, it's also built on a rock-solid Drupal implementation that will allow Iona to sustain and enhance the site over time. Working with Iona has been a great privilege."

Jamie Hegge, director of client services at Lawrence & Schiller, said: "It was an honor to work with Iona College on developing their new brand identity. We're proud to have created a brand reflective of both Iona's people and its mission  one that celebrates their past, exemplifies their future, and epitomizes their constant commitment to living and learning with purpose."

A NEW CHAPTER

Building on a tradition from Saint Columba on the Isle of Iona, to Blessed Edmund Rice in Ireland, to the Congregation of Christian Brothers in New Rochelle, Iona has established a legacy of opportunity, inclusion and the liberating power of education. It is a legacy that continues to inspire, fueled by a spirit of innovation that challenges students to create their own paths as they begin their journeys at Iona.

"As Gaels, we fight the good fight  certa bonum certamen  as we confront the future and lead by example," Reilley said. "We hope all Gaels feel the pride that comes from such a legacy, as we turn the page to a fresh chapter in Iona's bright future."

ABOUT IONA

Founded in 1940, Iona College is a master's-granting private, Catholic, coeducational institution of learning in the tradition of the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers. Iona's 45-acre campus is just 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. With a total enrollment of nearly 4,000 students and an alumni base of over 50,000 around the world, Iona is a diverse community of learners and scholars dedicated to academic excellence and the values of justice, peace and service. Iona is highly accredited, offering undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, science, and business administration, as well as Master of Arts, Master of Science and Master of Business Administration degrees and numerous advanced certificate programs. Iona's LaPenta School of Business is accredited by AACSB International, a prestigious recognition awarded to just five percent of business schools worldwide. The Princeton Review recognized Iona's on-campus MBA program as a "Best Business School for 2021." Iona College also recently launched a new, fully online MBA program for even greater flexibility.

SOURCE Iona College

Related Links

http://www.iona.edu


Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - West High Yield (W.H.Y.) Resources Ltd. (TSXV: WHY) ("West High Yield" or the "Company") announces that it has arranged for a loan to be provided by Big Mountain Development Corp. Ltd. (the "Lender"), a related party of the Company, in the principal amount of CAD$750,000 (the "Loan"). The Loan will have a term of 12 months and will bear interest at the rate of 10% per annum. The Loan will be secured by the previously executed first charge general security agreement on all of the present and after-acquired property of the Company granted in favour of the Lender.

The Company further announces the closing (the "Closing") of its previously announced private placement (the "Private Placement") for 1,325,000 units (the "Units") at a price of CAD$0.20 per Unit for gross proceeds of CAD$265,000.00. Each Unit is comprised of one common share (the "Common Shares") and one Common Share purchase warrant (the "Warrants"). The Warrants expire 12 months from the date of issue and two (2) Warrants together with CAD$0.30 will entitle the holder to acquire one (1) additional Common Share of the Company. No finder's fee was paid to any person in relation to the Private Placement. The Units issued pursuant to the Private Placement are subject to resale restrictions, including a hold period of four months and one day pursuant to applicable Canadian securities laws.

The proceeds of the Loan and the Private Placement will be used primarily to fund the completion of the Company's application to the British Columbia Department of Mines for the mining permit for the Record Ridge magnesium/nickel mine located in Rossland, British Columbia and for general working capital.

About West High Yield

West High Yield is a publicly traded junior mining exploration company focused on the acquisition, exploration and development of mineral resource properties in Canada with a primary objective to locate and develop economic gold, nickel and magnesium properties.

Contact Information:

West High Yield (W.H.Y.) Resources Ltd.

Frank Marasco, President and Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: (403) 660-3488 Facsimile: (403) 206-7159

Email: frank@whyresources.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. The forward-looking statements and information are based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the Company. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking statements and information are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements and information because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct.

Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: general economic conditions in Canada and globally; industry conditions, including governmental regulation; failure to obtain industry partner and other third party consents and approvals, if and when required; the availability of capital on acceptable terms; the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; and other factors. Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on this forward-looking information, which is given as of the date hereof, and to not use such forward-looking information for anything other than its intended purpose. The Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in the United States. The securities of the Company will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of U.S. persons except in certain transactions exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act.

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 OF THIS RELEASE.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82336
The next contract to manage the Savannah River Site nuclear reservation south of Aiken could last a decade and be worth $21.5 billion at full term.

The Department of Energy on Wednesday published a draft request for proposals for the massive management-and-operations contract, which includes a breadth of environmental cleanup, national defense and maintenance work.

Those interested have until May 28 to comment.

Draft requests for proposals are an early step in the Energy Departments contracting process; they are published to solicit feedback and, ostensibly, shape the final requests. Draft requests also offer early glimpses at what future contractors will be tasked with  the big-money projects they handle, the facilities under their control, key personnel requirements and the anticipated exchanges with communities.

In this case, the next Savannah River Site management team will have a full plate. The operations contract presented Wednesday is a familiar medley of nuclear materials management, nuclear weapons work and general upkeep.

The future management team will be in charge of, among other things, H-Canyon, a one-of-a-kind hardened separations plant; K-Area, where a cache of plutonium is kept and handled; and L-Area, a spent nuclear fuel storehouse.

For the National Nuclear Security Administration, the team will spearhead the tritium program, packaging a radioactive hydrogen isotope used in nukes, and manage the proposed plutonium pit factory, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. The NNSA on Wednesday announced its go-ahead for a pit production project in New Mexico; a decision for South Carolina is expected soon.

The prospective management contract does not incorporate the liquid-waste programs, including the up-and-running Salt Waste Processing Facility and the tank farms, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste are kept, and the paramilitary security job. The former is handled by Savannah River Remediation and will be tied into the much-anticipated Integrated Mission Completion Contract. The Savannah River National Laboratory is getting its own management team  Battelle Savannah River Alliance, whose transition is already underway  and will be separate, as well.

The current Savannah River Site management-and-operations firm is Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. The Fluor-led team has been on the job for more than a decade.

SRNSs contract expires Sept. 30. A single one-year extension remains, affording the Energy Department time to work through its sometimes arduous and often arcane acquisition process.

A final request for proposals is expected this summer.
Degree Deodorant has launched Degree Inclusive, a deodorant for people with visual impairment and upper limb motor disabilities.

Previously: [video] Tactile Packaging for Beauty: Inclusive Design

The brand partnered with a team of design experts from Wunderman Thompson, occupational therapists, engineers, consultants and people living with disabilities across the globe to create a prototype.

Degree Inclusive features:

A hooked design for one-handed usage

Magnetic closures that make it easier to take the cap off and put it back on for users with limited grip and/or vision impairment

Enhanced grip placement for easier application for users with limited grip or no arms

A braille label with instructions for users with vision impairment

A larger roll-on applicator to reach more surface area per swipe

In partnership with The Chicago Lighthouse, Open Style Lab and Muscular Dystrophy Association, Degree has invited 200 people with disabilities in the United States to trial the prototype design and share their feedback with Degree.

Kathryn Swallow, global Degree brand vice president, said: "As a brand that's committed to inspiring confidence in everyone to move more, Degree believes no one should be held back from experiencing the transformative benefits of movement. More than 60 million people in the US live with a disability, yet products and experiences are still not designed with this community in mind. With Degree Inclusive we hope to inspire bold action across the industry to ensure that people with disabilities have an equal playing field."

Aline Santos Farhat, EVP of global marketing and chief diversity and inclusion officer at Unilever, said: "Breaking stereotypes unleashes creativity and drives growth. Degree Inclusive challenges what a deodorant product should be. It's a breakthrough accessible design that genuinely serves the needs of people with visual impairment and upper limb motor disabilities."
Gemma Collins put on a brave face while announcing she was 'heartbroken' by the death of her friend, Rhys Alan Smith.

Rhys, the ex-boyfriend of TOWIE star Harry Derbidge, was found dead in Tenerife last week, and police are not treating the death as suspicious.

Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Gemma, 40, spoke about her grief as she posed for pictures with a waitress from her favourite restaurant.

Staying strong: Gemma Collins put on a brave face in an Instagram post on Thursday while announcing she was 'heartbroken' by the death of her friend, Rhys Alan Smith

Alongside the beaming snap, Gemma penned: 'Just felt like dressing up to get a cuppa from my fave @pelliccicafe  they make you feel so special  and it means so much always 

'Ive been so down recently and absolutely heartbroken after my dear friend more a little brother passed away its really cheered me up  sorry Ive been quiet on the gram but you just realise its all kinda BS when real things happen 

'I love you all @pelliccicafe  and thank you for making a fuss of my mum  Im just taking it easy at the moment  @pelliccicafe deserve an award for making people happy [sic]'.

Candid: Taking to Instagram, Gemma, 40, spoke about her grief as she posed for pictures with a waitress from her favourite restaurant

Heartbreaking: Rhys, the ex-boyfriend of TOWIE star Harry Derbidge, was found dead in Tenerife last week, and police are not treating the death as suspicious (pictured together in a throwback photo shared by Rhys earlier this year)

Gemma's outing comes after it was revealed to MailOnline that Rhys' death is not being treated as suspicious by police.

Last week, it was revealed that Rhys had been found dead in Tenerife where he had been living, with the cast of the The Only Way Is Essex paying tribute.

Gemma paid tribute to Rhys commenting on his final Instagram post: 'My heart will never be the same. I won't ever be the same, love you Reece'.

Police sources on the island confirmed on Tuesday that officers had been called to an address in Granadilla de Abona in the south of the island in the early hours of last Thursday morning.

Exes: Rhys dated TOWIE star Harry Derbidge in 2013 with the former couple regularly appearing at events together before Harry dated Bobby Norris

An insider told MailOnline: 'The alarm was raised around 3.50am and a man was confirmed as being dead at the address officers went to.

'An investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death is still ongoing and a report has been sent to a local court coordinating the probe.

'But there were no obvious signs of any violence and at this stage the death is not being treated as suspicious or the result of a crime.'

Rhys' last Instagram post was on April 3 where he shared a photo of himself in Tenerife captioned: 'Quality time with myself.'

Prior to that, he had spent time in Dubai where he had shared several pictures of himself enjoying various activities such as kayaking with friends.

He then returned to his former base in Spain where he is believed to have been training as a masseuse.

Exes: In 2014, Harry split from Bobby after he told the reality star he had slept with an ex at the beginning of their romance (Harry and Bobby pictured in 2014)

Rhys dated TOWIE star Harry in 2013 with the former couple regularly appearing at events together before Harry dated Bobby.

In 2014, Harry split from Bobby after he told the reality star he had slept with an ex at the beginning of their romance.

He said at the time: 'Before I tell you this I absolutely love you so much. Please don't cry, please. When we was in Tenerife I did sleep with my ex. I'm f**king so sorry because I f**king never meant to hurt you, I really didn't.'

Only recently on TOWIE, Harry and Bobby have been caught in several bitter rows as they addressed their past split, although Rhys was never directly named on the show.

Bobby, who went on to 'take a break' from the ITVBe series, branded Harry a 'compulsive liar' and accused him of trying to 'rewrite the history' of their break-up, which took place seven years ago.

The reality star's pal Amy Childs - who is also Harry's cousin - tried to build bridges between the pair by inviting them both to dinner, however the meeting ended in a bitter row and Bobby stormed off.

Harry had been unhappy with Amy carrying on a friendship with his ex, despite the fact their relationship ended seven years ago and Harry is now engaged.
Jimmy Sheirgill Booked In Ludhiana For Violating Covid Safety Protocols While Shooting A Web-Series

Bollywood actor Jimmy Sheirgill has been booked in Ludhiana for violating COVID-19 protocols and safety guidelines while shooting for a web series in the city. The permission to shoot was till 8 pm, but the actor and the team of the series continued well beyond the time and into curfew hours.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jimmy Sheirgill (@jimmysheirgill)

Other than Jimmy Sheirgill, director Eeshwar Nivas and 35 others had also been booked. Ludhiana Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Varyam Singh told ANI, "A case has been registered against the actor Jimmy Sheirgill. He only had the permission to shoot the film till 8:00 pm but a case of violating COVID-19 guidelines has been registered against him. In fact, the shooting went on even after 8 pm, two hours after curfew was enforced. When the police were notified about the same, they reached the spot and found more people at the location of the shoot. A case was later filed against Jimmy and other people."

Punjab: Actor Jimmy Shergill, director Eeshwar Nivas & 35 others have been booked for violating COVID-induced curfew while shooting for a web series in Ludhiana last night.  ANI (@ANI) April 28, 2021

A police team reached the spot after receiving a tip-off and found over a hundred people at the site. A case under section 188 and other relevant sections of the Epidemic Diseases Act has been registered. There has been no word from Sheirgill or his team yet.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

There was a hope that as more plants start to grow in Arctic and boreal latitudes as our warming climate makes those regions more hospitable for plants, those photosynthesizing plants would work to help sequester the atmospheric carbon dioxide that helped them flourish in the first place. But new research led by scientists at UC Irvine and Boston University, out in Nature Climate Change, suggests that all the new green biomass is not as large a carbon sink as scientists had hoped.

"What does greening really mean? Can we really trust it to save us from climate change?" said Jon Wang, an Earth system scientist at UCI who the led the work alongside BU Earth & Environment professor Mark Friedl. "A big question is: What'll happen to the carbon that's currently stored in these forests as above-ground biomass in the face of a changing climate?"

The answer, it turns out, is that a lot of the carbon isn't staying stored in the plants, because as fires and timber harvests at those latitudes become more and more common as climate change makes those parts of the world hotter and drier and more arable at rates sometimes twice that seen at lower latitudes, much of the new green biomass isn't storing carbonit's combusting during wildfires.

"What we found overall is across this whole domain over the past 31 years the carbon stocks have increased modestly," Wang said. "What we estimate is that 430 million metric tons of biomass has accumulated over the last 31 yearsbut across this domain it would've been nearly double if it weren't for these fires and harvests that are keeping it down."

The assumption before, Wang explained, was that greening was happening and it was going to help draw climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations downbut no-one knew the exact extent of that help.

To test the assumption, Wang and his team combined observational data from two different satellite missions from the US Geological Survey and NASA, Landsat and ICESat, so they could model the amount of carbon stored in biomass across a 2.8-million-square-kilometer region spanning Canada and Alaska.

ICESat data provides measurements of the height of forest canopies, while Landsat data extends back 31 years to 1984 and provides data on the reflection of different wavelengths of light from the surface of the planetwhich also provides information about plant biomass abundance. Juxtaposing that with a two-to-three times increase in the severity of wildfires in the region, and the pictures started to take shape.

Wang found that plant biomass still increased, but not as much as previous computer models that aim to simulate climate change suggested they would, as those models have struggled to account for fires as a variable. The results, Wang hopes, will help scientists who construct those modelsmodels that tell the world what we can expect climate change to look likebuild ever-more-accurate pictures of what's in store as the century unfolds.

Co-author James Randerson from UC Irvine believes these new data are important because they provide an independent means to test climate models, and because of the way they represent feedbacks between the carbon cycle and the climate system. "The rates of carbon accumulation in this region are lower that what previous studies have indicated, and will push the science community to look elsewhere for the main drivers of the terrestrial carbon sink," Randerson said.

Wang added: "The change is good news for climatebut it's also much lower than we might've expected, because these fires have raged, and gotten more severe."

Explore further Soils or plants will absorb more CO2 as carbon levels risebut not both

More information: Disturbance suppresses the aboveground carbon sink in North American boreal forests, Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01027-4 Journal information: Nature Climate Change Disturbance suppresses the aboveground carbon sink in North American boreal forests,
MILAN  Leading Generali investor Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone will snub its AGM on Thursday in the first public sign that the businessman is unhappy with the balance of power among shareholders, three sources close to the matter said.

Tensions among investors in Italys largest insurer have been brewing behind closed doors, but are expected to intensify as Generali kicks off a months-long process to appoint a new board in spring next year, the sources told Reuters.

Caltagirone, whose business empire spans construction to publishing, recently raised his Generali stake while also building a holding in its top investor Mediobanca.

With a 12.9% stake, Mediobanca is the leading shareholder in Generali, followed by Caltagirone with 5.6%.

By not taking part in Thursdays annual general meeting, Caltagirone wanted to signal that he is unhappy with the existing shareholder situation at Generali and would like to have a bigger say on strategic decisions, the sources said.

Both Caltagirone and Leonardo Del Vecchio, who is Generalis third-largest investor with a 4.8% stake and the single biggest shareholder in Mediobanca, have criticized some of Generalis strategic moves in the past year, sources have previously said.

However, a source close to Del Vecchio said the eyewear magnate would take part in the AGM, which will be held remotely due to COVID-19, and had already filed his vote.

Generali shareholders will be asked to sign off on the financial statements for 2020 and a proposal to pay a two-tranche dividend of 1.47 euros per share.

Caltagirones decision not to attend the AGM was first reported by la Repubblica newspaper.

(Reporting by Stefano Bernabei, Claudia Cristoferi and Gianluca Semeraro; Writing by Valentina Za; Editing by Alexander Smith)

Topics Generali Life Assurance (Thailand) Plc.
As President Joe Biden greeted the vice president and speaker Wednesday night, history was made.

Thank you, Madame Speaker and Madame Vice President, Biden said, greeting Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No other President has ever said those words from this podium  and its about time.

Wednesdays address before Congress marked the first time two women stood beside an American president for the speech. Harris is also the first woman of color to hold either position.

The women greeted each other by bumping elbows before the address began. Although it wasnt the typical greeting it was used due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During President George W. Bushs presidency, Pelosi made history by becoming the first female House speaker.

While Wednesday was historic, gender equality advocates look forward to the day a women gives the address.

For all of us who care about womens public leadership, we still look forward to the day when the person standing at the podium, in front, is a woman, Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told the AP. But for now this is a particularly gratifying moment.

Related Content:
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 11:39:33|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand, one of the Five Eyes Alliance countries, has distanced itself from Australia, another partner of the group, to blacken China on its human-rights record, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

"It's not necessary, all the time on every issue, to invoke Five Eyes as your first port of call in terms of creating a coalition of support around particular issues in the human-rights space," New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said at a news conference with her Australian counterpart Marise Payne in Wellington, according to the report released on April 22.

While Payne said that "We also have to acknowledge that China's outlook -- the nature of China's external engagement both in our region and globally -- has changed in recent years."

"New Zealand is adopting an extremely Beijing-friendly stance on these questions and breaking away from a much stronger position adopted by" the other Five Eyes partners, Clive Hamilton, a professor at the Charles Sturt University, told Bloomberg.

Australia had barred Chinese enterprises from participating in its 5G network construction on trumped-up charges, frequently denied investment of Chinese companies in the country under the pretext of "national security," and arbitrarily raided Chinese journalists based in the country.

Australia had also blatantly torn up cooperation agreements with China and wantonly damaged normal exchanges and cooperation. Enditem
With human and financial resources deployed to fight the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, there is no doubt that healthcare services are facing major disruption.

The results of a World Health Organization (WHO) report on malaria released this month (21 April) shows that about a third of countries around the world reported disruptions in malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment during the first quarter of 2021.

Despite this, seven countries  Algeria, Belize, Cape Verde, China, El Salvador, Iran, Malaysia, and Paraguay  succeeded in meeting the WHO's goal of malaria elimination by the end of last year.

How these countries were able to achieve the elimination milestone and what African leaders can learn from their experiences were some of the key questions addressed at a virtual forum on malaria elimination, co-hosted by the RBM Partnership to End Malaria and the WHO last week (21 April).

Key to their success, the forum heard, was a combination of political commitment, strong primary healthcare systems, and a robust data system.

Success is driven, first and foremost, by political commitment within a malaria-endemic country to end the disease and this commitment is translated into domestic funding that is often sustained over many decades, even after a country is malaria-free." Pedro Alonso, Director, Global Malaria Programme, WHO

Common to all the countries that reached zero malaria cases were strong primary healthcare systems that ensured access to malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment services, without financial hardship, for everyone living within their borders, regardless of nationality or legal status.

It is clear that until all health services, including those targeting malaria, are provided free for all, regardless of nationality or legal status, it will be extremely difficult to stamp out malaria across Africa.

African leaders must borrow a leaf from Algeria and Cape Verde, where diagnosis and treatment were provided free of charge, not only for their citizens, in an effort to stem the tide of imported cases from mainland Africa.

These countries have shown that halting malaria is achievable. As Alonso put it: "For Algeria to eliminate malaria in the face of massive complexities, then achieving zero malaria worldwide is possible. If the extra 25 countries selected by WHO to achieve malaria elimination stage by 2025 can join in the celebration, it will be a massive source of inspiration for the rest of the high burden countries like Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo."

But we should not forget that retaining elimination could be more difficult and the certified malaria-free countries should not let their guards down. They should safeguard progress by focusing on sustaining vector control and strengthening malaria surveillance, especially at ports, airports and in their capital cities.
The local state government is not ready to declare that the postponed and rescheduled 2021 Australian GP will definitely be able to go ahead.

When explaining the cancellation of the Canadian GP for the second year in succession, Formula 1 declared in a statement that it was "impossible" for the sport to enter Montreal "without a mandatory 14-day quarantine".

An identical quarantine period was also the reason Melbourne was postponed earlier this year and rescheduled for late November.

Australian Grand Prix Corporation (AGPC) chief Andrew Westacott, however, is not giving up.

"They (Formula 1) have a very, very rigorous schedule that won't accommodate separate quarantine periods in every one of the jurisdictions where they race," he told Australia's Nine Network broadcaster.

"What we've got to do, in consultation with the health authorities, Formula 1 and the government is an arrangement where they will come into a separated bubble, with no interaction with the general public, to be able to operate between the hotel and the circuit only."

However, a spokesman for the state government of Victoria, in which Melbourne is the capital, insists that a decision about the race is yet to be taken.

"The government's public events team is working closely with the AGPC and health officials to develop a covid-safe event plan that could support the delivery of the race in a covid-safe way," the spokesman said.

"The health and safety of Victorians will take precedence in all decisions made."

(GMM)
Banking giant RBS would move its headquarters from Scotland to London in the event of a vote to take the country out of the UK, the boss of its parent company has said.

Alison Rose, chief executive of the NatWest Group, said while the issue of independence is one for Scots to decide, the banks balance sheet would be too big for an independent Scottish economy.

The Royal Bank of Scotland was founded in Edinburgh almost three centuries ago in 1727.

Tory finance spokesman Murdo Fraser said confirmation that independence would see it move its base away from the Scottish capital starkly confirms the very real consequences for Scottish jobs and business if Nicola Sturgeon ever gets her way.

The RBS headquarters at Gogarburn in Edinburgh (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Mr Fraser insisted: For the historic Royal Bank of Scotland to be forced to leave Scotland in the event of the break-up of Britain would be devastating.

His comments came after Ms Rose told the Herald newspaper: As you know, we are neutral on the issue of Scottish independence  it is something for the Scottish people to decide.

We have been very clear, and it is recognised by senior nationalists, that in the event that there was independence in Scotland, our balance sheet would be too big for an independent Scottish economy, and we would move our registered headquarters to London.

Her remarks came just days before Scots go to the polls in the Holyrood election, with the SNP pushing to win a majority of seats in the hope of securing a second referendum on independence.

Pamela Nash, chief executive of the pro-UK Scotland in Union campaign group, said: As part of the UK, Scotland has a thriving financial services industry providing high quality jobs and income.

Losing the RBS HQ to London would be a hammer blow for the countrys reputation as a place to invest and work.

As a new and smaller economy, a separate Scotland would be at greater risk of shocks, and we would be gambling with peoples livelihoods by scrapping the pound and building a border with England.

The last thing our economy needs as we enter the Covid recovery period is more uncertainty, which is why the SNP should drop its obsession with a divisive and reckless referendum.

Scottish Government trade minister Ivan McKee insisted: The SNP is focused on getting Scotland through and out of the pandemic and into recovery  as the plans we have set out today for the first 100 days of an SNP government show.

If we are re-elected we will immediately deliver support for our NHS, protection for jobs and help for our children and young people.

Mr McKee added: As the chief executive of the NatWest Group makes clear, Scotlands future is for the people of Scotland to decide and the bank, which is not talking about moving its operations but simply its registered address, has no view on that.

Scotland is already one of the most attractive places in the world to do business, and the evidence clearly shows that Scotland has the talent and ambition to build a prosperous economy, drive economic recovery and raise competitiveness.
DUBLIN, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Investigation Report on China's Ambroxol Market, 2021-2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

In 2021-2025, the Chinese ambroxol market will gradually recover. It is estimated that the sales of ambroxol in China will reach CNY924 million in 2025, and the CAGR will reach 10% in 2021-2025.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the ability of Chinese hospitals to receive patients has declined. The decrease in the number of people seeking medical care makes China's sales and sales of ambroxol show a downward trend in 2020. The sales of amboxol in China dropped by 34% in 2020, compared to 2019.

According to the analyst, the incidence and case fatality rate of respiratory diseases in China are high in recent years. Following cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and cancers, respiratory diseases rank third among the chronic diseases that cause deaths in China.

Therefore, developing drugs for the treatment of respiratory diseases has become an important part of drug research. In the case of respiratory infections (respiratory diseases such as chronic bronchitis), a large amount of sputum is produced, which requires the application of expectorants. Respiratory mucus regulators are the main expectorants.



After years of development, third-generation expectorant ambroxol has become the most common drug in the clinical treatment of respiratory diseases. The chemical constituent of ambroxol is ambroxol hydrochloride, an active metabolite of Bromhexine. In 1981, ambroxol (trade name: Mucosolvan) developed by German company Boehringer Ingelheim was launched. Compared with the first and second generations of expectorants, ambroxol excels in dissolving mucus. In 1994, Boehringer Ingelheim's ambroxol entered China. Afterwards, the generic drugs by Chinese companies also came onto the market.



Ambroxol has been growing rapidly since it entered China. From 2005 to 2014, its annual sales value increased from less than CNY 200 million to CNY 1.26 billion, representing a CAGR of 20.9%. From 2015 to2020, the sales revenue of ambroxol declined in China. By sales value, Boehringer Ingelheim takes up a market share of about 47.75% in the year of2020.

The rest market share is captured by Chinese companies, among which the top market players are Changzhou Siyao Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., Shenyang Xinma Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., TIPR Pharmaceutical Responsible Co., Ltd. and. Cisen Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Ambroxol is sold in China in the dosage forms of injections, solutions, syrups, granules, tablets and capsules mainly. Injections dominate the market.



Topics Covered:

The impact of COVID-19 on China's ambroxol market

ambroxol market Situation of respiratory diseases in China

Sales value and volume of China's ambroxol 2016-2020

ambroxol 2016-2020 Competitive landscape of China's ambroxol market

ambroxol market Prices of ambroxol in China

Prices of ambroxol in China by regions and manufacturers

by regions and manufacturers Analysis of factors affecting the development of China's ambroxol market

ambroxol market Prospect of China's ambroxol market from 2021 to 2025

Key Topics Covered:



1 Relevant Concepts of Ambroxol

1.1 Indications for Ambroxol

1.2 Development of Ambroxol in China

1.3 Governmental Approval of Ambroxol in China

1.4 The impact of COVID-19 on China's ambroxol market



2 Sales of Ambroxol in China, 2016-2020

2.1 Sales Value of Ambroxol

2.1.1 Overall Sales Value

2.1.2 Sales Value by Region

2.2 Sales Volume of Ambroxol

2.2.1 Overall Sales Volume

2.2.2 Sales Volume by Region

2.3 Sales of Ambroxol by Dosage Form in China, 2016-2020

2.3.1 Tablets

2.3.2 Capsules

2.3.3 Injections

2.3.4 Solutions

2.3.5 Syrups

2.3.6 Granules



3 Analysis on Major Ambroxol Manufacturers in China, 2016-2020

3.1 Analysis on Market Share of Major Ambroxol Manufacturers

3.1.1 Market Share by Sales Value

3.1.2 Investigation on Market Share by sale volume

3.2 Boehringer Ingelheim

3.2.1 Enterprise Profile

3.2.2 Sales of Boehringer Ingelheim's Ambroxol in China

3.3 Changzhou Siyao Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.

3.3.1 Enterprise Profile

3.3.2 Sales of Changzhou Siyao Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.'s Ambroxol in China

3.4 Shenyang Xinma Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.

3.4.1 Enterprise Profile

3.4.2 Sales of Shenyang Xinma Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.'s Ambroxol in China

3.5 TIPR Pharmaceutical Responsible Co., Ltd.

3.5.1 Enterprise Profile

3.5.2 Sales of TIPR Pharmaceutical Responsible Co., Ltd.'s Ambroxol in China

3.6 Cisen Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.

3.6.1 Enterprise Profile

3.6.2 Sales of Cisen Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.'s Ambroxol in China



4 Prices of Ambroxol in China, 2020-2021

4.1 Average Price

4.1.1 Average Price in China

4.1.2 Sales Price of Ambroxol by Region

4.2 Boehringer Ingelheim (Mucosolvan)

4.3 Changzhou Siyao Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. (Lansu)

4.4 Shenyang Xinma Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Kaishun)

4.5 TIPR Pharmaceutical Responsible Co., Ltd. (Yinuoshu)

4.6 Cisen Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.(Senan)



5 Prospect of China's Ambroxol Market, 2021-2025

5.1 The impact of COVID-19

5.2 Forecast on Market Size

5.3 Forecast on Market Trend

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/oq9hgz

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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A large COVID-19 vaccine clinic in a former Northampton County box store is opening up for walk-ins, at least the second large-scale site to do so in the Lehigh Valley.

Anyone 18 and older can now get their first Moderna shot without an appointment at the Lehigh Valley Health Network clinic in the old Sears location at the Northampton Crossings shopping center, 3768 Easton Nazareth Highway in Lower Nazareth Township.

The clinic is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. The site is still taking appointments for those who want one. LVHNs other vaccine clinics  another old storefront at 2633 MacArthur Road in Whitehall Township, and its hospitals in East Stroudsburg, Hazleton and Pottsville  still require appointments.

This week, the Allentown Health Bureau opened its vaccine clinic to walk-ins 18 and older. That clinic is held at the Allentown Fairgrounds Agri-Plex, 1725 W. Chew St. As of Thursday morning, the health bureau had hundreds of slots available on select dates through May.

Only those getting their initial shot can walk in; an appointment for the second dose is scheduled when you get your first, and must be given by the same provider. Check with providers for availability.

Residents can get vaccine appointments in Pa. through hospitals and health networks, local health bureaus and a number of pharmacies.

(Cant see the Pa. vaccine provider map? Click here.)

The operators of the Lehigh Valleys mass-vaccination sites are getting creative as supply matches demand and the rush for shots starts to subside after more than a year in the coronavirus pandemic. St. Lukes University Health Network has said appointments are slower to be claimed, but most are still booked. The Bethlehem Health Bureau recently told lehighvalleylive.com that it will continue its large clinic at Wind Creek Event Center a few more weeks, then take a more targeted approach.

As of Wednesday, 48% of all Pennsylvanians and roughly half of the Lehigh Valley have received at least one shot, per figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia health departments.

(Cant see the map? Click here.)

The Wolf administration is aiming for 80% vaccination rate in the state. Gov. Tom Wolf himself has said that 65% to 70% fully vaccinated, combined with recommended guidance on masks and social distancing, could speed the process toward fully reopening restaurants and other businesses.

The CDC estimates that about 15% of Lehigh Valley residents are hesitant to get the vaccine. But a recent Muhlenberg College poll suggested that 31% of Pennsylvanians do not plan to get a shot at all.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com.
According to the National Centre for Seismology (NCS), the powerful quake which first shook Sonitpur in northern Assam at 7.51 a.m. on Wednesday, were also felt in North Bengal, other northeastern states including Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, neighbouring Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Guwahati, April 29 (IANS) People of central and northern Assam spent a sleepless night on Wednesday as 20 aftershocks continued till Thursday afternoon after the powerful earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale jolted the state, causing damages to many buildings and injuring 10 persons.

The NCS data said that after the main quake at a depth of 17 km from the surface, 20 aftershocks of magnitude 2.3 to 4.7 on the Richter scale were recorded on Wednesday and Thursday (until 4.17 p.m. on Thursday) in the vicinity of Sonitpur, Nagaon, Morigaon districts.

The disaster management officials in Guwahati said that there are reports of damage to buildings, roads and some other infrastructure in different parts of Sonitpur, Tezpur, Nagaon, Morigaon and adjoining areas.

At least 10 persons were injured in Darrang, Kamrup Metro, Nagaon and Sonitpur districts.

The official said that several apartments, buildings and hotels developed cracks. Electricity and gas supply were disrupted in some places.

An official statement of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority said that detailed damage assessment is going on in coordination with various agencies including Fire and Essential Services, state and national disaster response forces and the experts from Assam Engineering College led by Professor Jayanta Pathak.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and DoNER (Development of North Eastern Region) Minister Jitendra Singh spoke to Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and assured all possible help.

Immediately after the tremors were felt, Sonowal rushed to Dhekiajuli, 140 km north of Guwahati, to assess the situation and announced financial assistance for those injured in the tremor.

Successive earthquakes in the mountainous northeastern states, especially in Assam, Mizoram and Manipur, have made the authorities worried.

The northeastern states, especially Mizoram, frequently witness mild to moderate earthquakes that force the public and private builders to construct quake resistant houses.

Seismologists consider the mountainous northeastern region as the sixth most earthquake-prone belt in the world. In 1950, an earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale had altered the course of the mighty Brahmaputra river, which passes by the Guwahati city.

--IANS

sc/sdr/
Dublin, April 29 : An emergency donation of 700 oxygen concentrators departed Ireland for India on Wednesday in response to the worsening Covid-19 outbreak there, according to a government statement.

A further donation of more life-saving equipment including at least one oxygen generator and 365 ventilators has been agreed and transport arrangements are being made, said the statement posted on the Irish government's website, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The donation of the oxygen concentrators is being made from stocks originally purchased by the Health Service Executive (HSE) as part of pandemic preparations, said the statement.

The HSE is a state agency responsible for public health service in Ireland.

"Once again, the HSE and the Irish people are showing solidarity with India at this time," said the statement, quoting Darragh O'Brien, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

The emergency aid offered by Ireland is part of the coordinated effort by the European Union member states currently underway to provide a collaborative response following India's request for assistance, according to the statement.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenian authorities are considering relaxing entry requirements for travelers who have been inoculated against COVID-19.

Now, only people whove had a negative test result over the past 72 hours are allowed to enter the country. Travelers are also enabled to get tested at the airport.

Health authorities are now considering opening the country to travelers whove been vaccinated and exempt them from the requirement of passing a test.

Naturally we are proposing concrete requirements. The travelers must have received two doses of the vaccine and at least two weeks must have passed from the time theyve been inoculated, Gayane Sahakyan, the Deputy Director General of the National Center of Disease Control and Prevention says. Travelers must carry signed and sealed documents proving that they have received the vaccine.

The proposal is now circulating and government agencies are expected to give their opinions. The economy ministry has already approved it and the move is expected to boost tourism and the economy.

Sahakyan cited Greece and Israel, who are requiring travelers the option of either getting tested or having been vaccinated to enter their countries.

Gayane Sahakyan says the European Union and Russia are now also discussing similar proposals.

Reporting by Anna Gziryan

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
The National Committee for Emergency Situations (CNSU) adopted at its Wednesday's meeting a decision under which the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education are empowered to issue a joint ministerial order for the safely resumption of the school year, report agerpres.

Returning to in-person classes should be done in compliance with several provisions:

* allowing the daily in-person participation in classes of students with special educational needs, regardless of grade, in all schools operating where the measure of area quarantine is not established, provided the strict observance of COVID-19 containment guidelines;* allowing the daily participation in person presence in classes of all the students in grades VIII, XII, XIII and those in the final years of vocational and post-secondary education in all educational units operating where the measure of area quarantine is not established, provided the strict observance of COVID-19 containment guidelines;* allowing the organisation of remedial classes, with physical presence, in all educational units operating where the measure of area quarantine is not established, provided the strict observance of COVID-19 containment guidelines.
The safety strikes, conducted shortly after employees learned someone at the warehouse had been diagnosed with COVID-19, called for a two-week shutdown to stop the spread of the virus and disinfect the facility. A petition called for the company to stock necessary cleaning supplies, pay employees who needed to self-quarantine or take time off to care for a family member, and for better transparency around coronavirus-related issues at the facility.


BURBANK (dpa-AFX) - Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, said Walt Disney is using the AWS public cloud infrastructure for the global rollout of its streaming service Disney+. AWS is supporting the explosive growth of Disney+, which quickly surpassed 100 million subscribers globally only 16 months after U.S. launch in November 2019.



Walt Disney has been able to rapidly expand Disney+ to 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America by leveraging AWS's fault-tolerant, flexible and highly performant secured cloud video infrastructure.



Disney+ is expanding its use of AWS's industry-leading services to include more than 50 technologies, such as machine learning, database, storage, content delivery, serverless and analytics.



'AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+,' said Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president & CTO, direct-to-consumer of Walt Disney.



The company had in 2019 expected that Disney+ would have 60 million to 90 million subscribers around the world by the end of fiscal 2024. However, the 100 million mark has been breached at least nineteen months ahead of that.



Disney+ recorded 28.6 million paid subscribers globally in less than three months of its launch in the U.S. and 50 million global paid subscribers in just five months of its launch. The infrastructure was able to handle more than 10 million new Disney+ sign-ups within 24 hours of its launch.



Disney+ was launched in the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands on November 12, 2019. The service was also launched in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India and Latin America as well as eight Western European counties including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland.



Disney+ provides high quality content from brands such as Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Star and National Geographic. Disney+ is currently available in 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Latin America.



In February, Disney+ added more content with the addition of the Star brand, which launched on the platform across Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Europe. Disney+ with Star will continue its global rollout in new markets later this year with Latin America, Eastern Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.



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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 04:47:58|Editor: huaxia

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COPENHAGEN, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Denmark will tighten travel restrictions for those from India from Thursday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday.

The ministry updated its travel guide on India and raised the risk assessment from "orange" to "red," the highest level, and advised against all travels to India, including business trip.

The decision was made to "limit the risk of importing the virus variant B.1.617 to Denmark," said the ministry in a press release.

Foreigners from India will only be allowed entry into Denmark for a recognizable purpose, according to the new travel restrictions.

Danish citizens and people who already reside in Denmark can continue to enter Denmark from India.

Denmark now joins several European countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain that have already applied travel restrictions on India. Enditem
A shallow labor pool is forcing one central Pennsylvania restaurant owner to take drastic measures.

Starting May 2, Yak N Yeti owner Tenzin Norbu said hes temporarily closing his Himalayan restaurant at 213 N. Third St. in New Cumberland so he can follow through with plans to open a third restaurant in Lancaster. He also operates a Yak N Yeti in Carlisle, which will remain open.

Right now, Im having a hard time finding staff for Lancaster, Norbu said. What I do now is ask all my staff in New Cumberland if they are willing to go to Lancaster and they agreed.

Since 2019, Norbu said plans were in set motion to open Norbu at 38 N. Christian St. in Lancaster city. Then the pandemic hit and delayed the opening.

Now, he said he cant afford not to open Norbu, which will serve a similar Bhutanese and Nepalese menu as his other establishments. Norbu said the shrinking labor pool due to the enhanced unemployment benefits related to the coronavirus pandemic is making it hard to find help.

READ MORE:

Across central Pennsylvania, many restaurant and bar owners report they are struggling to find workers just as the economy is bouncing back. They say in addition to the enhanced unemployment benefits, some workers have left the industry for other jobs.

Norbu said he plans to reopen Yak N Yeti in New Cumberland in a few months when the labor shortage eases up. The restaurant is accepting reservations for its final day on May 2 with limited takeout.

When it opened in 2016, Yak N Yeti quickly became a favorite spot among Harrisburg-area diners for its cuisine representing Nepal and Bhutan. The Carlisle location followed in 2018. Yak N Yeti follows recipes from Norbus Nepalese mother and Bhutanese father.

Before he opened Yak N Yeti, Norbu worked as an executive in the diamond industry in New York. There, he met his wife, Sanya Yeh who is from Lancaster, and the couple relocated to central Pennsylvania when they decided to have children.

The Lancaster restaurant came about he said because so many people were driving from Lancaster to New Cumberland. He said he signed a contract for Norbu in 2019.

Lancaster is so happening, so I had to find a spot, he said.

Norbu said he anticipates the restaurant will open in mid-May and operate noon-8 p.m. daily.
Apr. 29A former airline employee at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport pleaded guilty in federal court this week to fraud charges involving more than $30,000 in charges made with stolen credit card numbers  including a $112 order from a local Domino's, officials said.

Hayder Lefta, 24, of Manchester, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to six counts of access device fraud, Acting U.S. Attorney John J. Farley said in a statement.

While working as a United Airlines customer service representative at the airport in 2018 and 2019, Lefta copied the credit card numbers of airline customers, according to court documents and statements in court.

Lefta then used the credit card numbers to purchase airline flights and meals for himself and for friends, to pay for hotels for his leisure travel and for other personal expenses.

According to court documents, a customer who traveled through the airport on or about Sept. 17, 2018 later noticed unauthorized charges on his credit card that included $112.31 at Domino's Pizza in Manchester, tickets on Turkish Airlines in the amounts of $2,657 and $1,488, and other attempted fraudulent charges.

Investigators determined Lefta was working as a United customer service representative and processed the customer's credit card at the airport. They also determined that the Domino's pizza order was placed from Lefta's telephone number and delivered to the airport to someone matching Lefta's description.

The investigation also linked the Turkish Airlines tickets to Lefta. Investigators interviewed the people in whose names the tickets were purchased. They said Lefta purchased the tickets for them and they paid him $1,800 in cash.

On Jan. 8, 2019, Lefta was arrested while working at the airport, court documents show. Three cellular telephones, an iPad and a computer belonging to him were seized during the arrest.

On the devices investigators found numerous credit card numbers on screen shots from airline computer terminals. They also recovered screen shots of passengers' names and personal information.

Story continues

Investigators contacted credit card account holders one by one and identified at least 12 victims who traveled through Manchester Boston Regional Airport and whose credit cards Lefta processed.

Lefta, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 17, is required by his plea agreement to pay restitution to his victims, officials said.

"Crimes that involve the theft of credit card numbers or other personal information have serious consequences for their victims," said Farley in a statement.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Air Marshal Service and Londonderry police.
With the acquisition of Golden Farm, ADM aims to expand its range of Wisium premix offerings in the Vietnamese market

The Wisium line of premix products and solutions is a recognised market leader, known for bringing together global expertise, resources, and innovation with local insights to create value-added, tailor-made solutions for each customer, said Gerald Wilflingseder, president, ADM Animal Nutrition Asia-Pacific. Were excited to expand our vast capabilities in Vietnam, and look forward to working with customers across the country to meet and exceed their premix needs.

ADM's Wisium offers millers, integrators and home mixers a strong and dedicated partnership with a unique focus on enhancing quality, productivity, and profitability performance.

With the addition of Golden Farm, Wisium will now serve customers in Vietnam with a state-of-the-art premix facility in Long Khanh, Dong Nai, with international quality standards and the capability to offer a wide array of innovative products and services to customers across Vietnam.

Following the launch of Wisiums line of products and services in Vietnam two years ago, this strategic step widens our range of value-added premix products and services across the country, said Francois Fernandez, vice president, Wisium Premix and Services. Weve been expanding Wisiums capabilities around the globe, and were excited to continue to invest across Southeast Asia to expand and strengthen our position as a leader in the premix and services businesses.

Wisium is the international premix business brand of ADM, a long-time global leader in animal nutrition. Wisium, which joined ADM as part of the strategic acquisition of Neovia in 2019, offers millers, integrators and home mixers a strong and dedicated partnership with a unique focus on enhancing quality, productivity and profitability performance. For any species, Wisium experts deliver tailor-made solutions combining high-end products and added-value services.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike will close the southbound Route 903 interchange exit and entrance ramps for part of the upcoming weekend.

While the ramps are closed, crews will maintain electronic toll equipment. The interchange is in Carbon County.

The southbound exit ramp will close from 10 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday.

The southbound entrance ramp will close from 10 p.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Sunday.

Work schedules may change based on the weather.
Government troops and rebels clashed on Thursday in a region of western Chad where president Idriss Deby Itno was killed last week, a spokesman said.

"Fighting is continuing in Kanem -- we are going to have continue to fight, otherwise they will destabilise us," General Azem Bermandoa Agouna, spokesman of the military junta which took power after Deby's death, told AFP.

The so-called Military Transition Council (CMT) is headed by Deby's son, 37-year-old Mahamat Idriss Deby.

Fighting is going on in the desert region of Kanem, about 300 kilometres (180 miles) north of the capital N'Djamena, near the border with Niger.

Rebels are gathered in a group called the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), drawn mainly from the Goran ethnic group.

Security sources, without giving further details, said the Chadian army bombarded FACT positions.

Deby, 68, died on April 19 from mortal wounds that he suffered fighting the Libya-based rebels, according to the authorities.

The insurgents had launched an offensive in the northern Tibesti region on April 11 as presidential elections were unfolding.

Deby died on the day that the electoral commission confirmed that he had won a landslide victory, the authorities say.

FACT is led by Mahamat Mahadi Ali, a veteran insurgent who previously lived in France.

Deby, a career soldier, seized power in 1990 and exercised it ruthlessly for 30 years.

He was fiercely criticised for authoritarianism and inequality, but for many Western countries, including the former colonial power France, he was a trusty ally, especially in the fight against jihadism in the Sahel.

FACT vowed to pursue its offensive after a pause for Deby's funeral on April 23.

Experts believe FACT has between 1,500 and 2,000 fighters.

The Chadian army claimed on April 19 to have killed 300 rebels and captured 246 others, who were being taken to the capital N'Djamena to stand trial.

Military casualties have not been made public.

Story continues

The armed forces have recently sent reinforcements to Kanem, security forces said.

On Sunday, the CMT announced there would be no "mediation or negotiation" with FACT and called on Niger to help it capture the group's chief.

The CMT took over on April 20, immediately after Deby's death was announced, as parliament and government were dissolved.

It has promised an 18-month transition period before "free and transparent" elections.

At least six people died on Tuesday in banned protests against the junta, according to the authorities, while a local NGO reported nine fatalities.

On Monday, the military junta appointed Albert Pahimi Padacke as transitional prime minister. He called for a nationwide effort to speed the return to civilian rule.

yas-ah/dyg/ri/tgb
Opinion Article

29 April 2021

As a part of the ongoing partnership between the Accor Hospitality Hotel Group and Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, a challenge was given to the BOSC6 students on the "Hospitality Technology Strategy" elective course.

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"How can technology help to monetise Accor's hotel spaces, services, data and customers beyond traditional room and F&B distribution?"

The primary mission of this assignment was to come up with innovative and plausible ideas for the creation of new tech-driven possibilties within a hotel infrastructure. The challenge was presented by Mr Floor Bleeker, Group Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Accor, who shared with the students some valuable real-life insights into the technological side of the hospitality industry as well the current situation in which the industry finds itself. This challenge was a part of the "Hospitality Technology Strategy" elective, an intensive course taught by Ian Millar, Manager of Institute of Business Creativity & Senior Lecturer, who has been with EHL for almost 20 years.

In this course, students learned about technologies for hospitality businesses, how they can improve operations and become a financial win. The main goal of introducing this challenge was for the students to perform an in-depth study of today's market of digital solutions in the hospitality industry and find a perspective application for one of them at Accor.

BOSC6 students on the "Hospitality Technology Strategy" elective course.  Photo: EHL

Notable guest speakers

In order to further immerse students into the realities of today's tech industry, Ian Millar invited several guest speakers to share their knowledge and experience with the students during his elective.

Phil Le Brun, Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services and a former CIO of McDonald's, addressed digital transformation and the need for companies to timely acknowledge the changes in their environment and be agile in order to survive. The main takeaway that Phil Le Brun wanted the students to have was that while being a critical and an exciting enabler, technology on its own is "just" an enabler. It is a combination of culture, people, and technology that makes fundamental changes in organisations possible.

Lyle Worthington, Principal, Technology Executive, Consultant, CIO Advisor and a Startup Mentor, he was formerly a President at HFTP and a CIO of Student Hotel. In his presentation, Lyle Worthington covered the important technical concepts of digital transformation in more detail in order to provoke "thinking digital" in the students. He also reviewed the obstacles that businesses are facing on their way to digitalisation.

Florian Montag, Co-Founder of Hotelhero and an EHL Alumni, shared his experience of pursuing the entrepreneurial path in the world of hospitality technologies. He explained how to manage the digital transformation for a hotel in order to optimise the digital guest journey.

Timo Kettern, Corporate Director at IT Bierwirth & Kluth and a Vice-Chair HITEC Europe Advisory Council, discussed with the students the specificities of technology strategy depending on the size and the category of a brand, and reviewed a hospitality technology strategy from the point of view of a hotel management company.

Nick Price, CEO at NetSys Technology Limited, a former CIO/CTO of Mandarin Oriental and a Technology Hall of Fame Winner, shared his knowledge of how to identify competitors, products, and customers as big-picture elements foundational to any hospitality digital reinvention strategy.

Ideation

At the end of the elective, in their solutions, students put emphasis on enhancing the process of connecting with hotel guests digitally. They prepared several tech solutions that can amplify this connection and extract even more benefits out of it than ever before. Ideas included the increased use of chatbots to fit with the digital traveler, increasing the use of F&B data to create unique experiences as well as "workspitality" considering the current Covid-19 situation and home office working.

It was thanks to the expertise and valuable insights from Accor represented by Floor Bleeker, Ian Millar and his "Hospitality Technology Strategy" elective and the guest speakers that the students managed to deliver thoughtful and insightful solutions as the result of this challenge.

Insights from the course

Students: "

I really enjoyed working on the Accor project because the subject is very current. It allowed me to understand the presented concepts during class. Additionally, I believe that the presentation of the group projects enhanced the learning experience due to the fact that the groups explained their approach to the challenge. Finally, it made me realise how important technology is for the hospitality industry, and that the collaboration between tech companies and hotel establishments must further be developed." - Gianluca Claus, BOSC6 Student.

"This project was a perfect example of a working experience under real-time pressure. You are thrown together in a team you haven't worked with before; you are given a challenging problem and are expected to deliver a high-quality solution to the "client" under short time constraints. For me, this project was an excellent opportunity to learn how to solve and tackle a real-life work issue." - Anna Sophia Stimpfl, BOSC6 Student.

Accor: "It was great to work with the EHL students on opportunities to leverage our technology to create new digital services. The interest and dedication from the students are promising for us as we need innovative ideas and new technology to drive the industry forward." - Floor Bleeker, Group Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Accor.

Ian Millar: "In brief, this elective was one of the many examples of EHL education working closely with top industry players to create real life synergies. Our students learn from the best professionals in the world, who in turn take away fresh perspectives from young talents bursting with ideas, eager to enter into the hospitality management arena."
Syracuse, N.Y.  Onondaga County sheriffs deputies could have body cameras by the end of May, County Executive Ryan McMahon said today.

The cameras could be deployed soon after that, McMahon said at a briefing this afternoon.

Sheriff Eugene Conway is expected to turn in a proposal for body cameras by the end the day, county officials said.

The initial estimates put the cost at $450,000-500,000, McMahon said.

Once Conways plan is turned in, McMahons office will put a final price tag on the program, said Justin Sayles, McMahons spokesman. Legislators will vote Tuesday on the proposal to give the sheriffs office money, he said.

From there, its up to the sheriff to get the body cameras.

Conway had told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard recently that he had no plans to outfit deputies with body cameras. He said cameras were important but expensive  an expense he would not choose over priorities like hiring deputies to fill vacancies, buying more cars and replacing ballistic vests.

That changed on Friday.

Just 9 1/2 hours after Syracuse.com published an article outlining Conways resistance, the county went from having no plans for body cameras  considered an important part of policing and police reform by many  to a pledge by McMahon to pay for the cameras within a month.

After a Syracuse.com story reported Onondaga County Sheriff Office had no body cameras and no plans for them, Sheriff Gene Conway called a news conference to say he would welcome the cameras if the county provides the money. Here, Conway holds up the syracuse.com article to make his point on Friday, April 23, 2021.Katrina Tulloch

Heres what happened:

At 6 a.m., Syracuse.com published the article about the sheriffs inaction on cameras, a stance hed held for at least four years.

In response, Conway called a 10 a.m. news conference to complain about the article and express that hed start planning a body camera program right away if his office was given money to fully pay for a program.

At 3:30 p.m., County Executive McMahon held his own news conference  announcing hed approve giving the sheriffs office the money needed to get body cameras, possibly as soon as in May.

Lets strike while the iron is hot, McMahon said on Friday.

Conway has declined to comment on the county executives pledge to fund a program. As of Tuesday, the sheriff and McMahon had not spoken about body cameras, said Sgt. Jon Seeber, spokesman for the sheriffs office.

Officials with the sheriffs office and the county executives office have been communicating about creating a program, Sayles said. Both offices are researching options, he said.

The Onondaga County Legislature is expected to vote Tuesday on funding a body camera program.

If funding is approved, it will be up to Conway to make the program happen. No one can order the sheriff, an elected official, to have his deputies use body cameras.

The article by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard published Friday reported that:

At least 10 of Onondaga Countys 15 law enforcement agencies have body cameras. That includes the Syracuse Police Department.

The sheriffs offices in three of Upstate New Yorks four most populous counties have body cameras.

The New York State Police started equipping troopers in the Capital Region with body cameras this month. The state plans to roll out the cameras to the rest of the force this summer and fall.

Nearly half of the nations more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies had body cameras as of 2016, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics , the most recent estimate available.

Before last Friday, Conway had not asked for funding for cameras since before McMahon took office in 2018.

Conway estimated the cost of body cameras would be as much as $2 million a year. Based on Syracuse police departments experience, the article estimated equipping the sheriffs department 225 deputies could cost about $429,000 a year.

Body cameras benefit the public and police, experts say.

Complaints about officer misconduct steadily decline when police wear cameras, a study released in November by the Urban Institute found. Knowing a camera is present, experts said, tends to improve the behavior of everyone involved.

Body cameras give investigators and the public a chance to review police shootings and weigh whether an officers decision to use force was justified

Editors note: Syracuse.coms Tim Knauss contributed to this article. This article was updated with information from an afternoon briefing by Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon.

Related articles

In a dizzying day, county exec forces sheriffs hand on body cams: Well pay for them

After Syracuse.com article, Sheriff Conway says he welcomes body cameras if county provides money

Sheriff Conway refuses body cameras while more U.S. police forces embrace them

Staff writer Samantha House covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? Reach her at shouse@syracuse.com.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said on Monday they have not detected any indication so far that Pfizer-BioNTechs COVID-19 vaccine causes inflammation of the heart, but are monitoring with special interest reports of cases.

Over the weekend, Israels pandemic response coordinator said it was a question mark whether Pfizers vaccine had caused tens of cases of myocarditis, a dangerous condition of heart inflammation, that had been identified there primarily among young men after they had taken their second dose, according to Reuters.

Pfizer, in a statement to McClatchy, said that it was aware of the Israeli observations and that the company has not observed a higher rate of myocarditis than what would be expected in the general population. A causal link to the vaccine has not been established.

An FDA official told McClatchy that the agency has not seen any new safety signals for myocarditis following administration of any of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines.

Over 220 million doses of vaccine doses produced by Pfizer and Moderna  which use the same biological technology, known as messenger RNA  have been administered nationwide.

A CDC official said that at this point, there is no safety signal for myocarditis or pericarditis for COVID-19 vaccines in U.S. monitoring systems. Pericarditis is a condition where the thin membrane that surrounds the heart is inflamed.

The CDC official said that the reports of cases are being closely watched by a safety monitoring board as an adverse event of special interest for U.S. vaccine safety surveillance of COVID-19 vaccines.

In the United States, the Pentagon said it was examining 14 cases of a linkage among troops. And a Washington-based reporter wrote on Twitter of his experience with myocarditis shortly after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

All of these cases have been reported to Pfizer and the FDA.

To date, FDA and CDC have not seen any new safety signals for myocarditis following administration of any of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA official told McClatchy. Post-authorization safety monitoring during the COVID-19 pandemic vaccination program will aim to continuously monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines to rapidly detect safety problems if they exist.

Should any new safety signals be identified by FDA and CDC through this safety surveillance, that information will be communicated to the public, the official added.
LOS ANGELES, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Preserving family legacies and stories of loved ones has become increasingly important over the past year, during a time that has provided many with the opportunity to reflect on what matters the most to them. Following a year filled with so much uncertainty, StoryTerrace commissioned a new survey that reveals how Americans feel about holding onto cherished memories from family and friends.

StoryTerrace is the leading global memoir-writing service that pairs people with a professional ghostwriter to turn life stories into a treasured keepsake. According to StoryTerrace's CEO and Founder Rutger Bruining, "Over the past year, StoryTerrace has seen a significant increase in people looking to write memoirs as many were separated from loved ones due to the pandemic. We expect this trend to continue to grow as more people realize the importance of preserving their family history for generations to come."

Key findings from the survey include:

The desire to capture stories from loved ones:

Nearly three in four (74%) Americans regretted not learning more about their relatives that are no longer here.

Americans regretted not learning more about their relatives that are no longer here.

73% have lost a family member whose story they wished had been written down.

have lost a family member whose story they wished had been written down.

67% are afraid of forgetting stories they have been told by family members or close friends.

are afraid of forgetting stories they have been told by family members or close friends.

63% said the circumstances of 2020 have increased their interest to learn more about their family member's history.



said the circumstances of 2020 have increased their interest to learn more about their family member's history. The greatest stories hit close to home:

72% know someone whose personal story would make an interesting book. 62% have dreamt about writing their own memoir someday.

know someone whose personal story would make an interesting book. have dreamt about writing their own memoir someday.

The top family members that respondents would like to know more about were their grandfathers (56%) , grandmothers (53%) and fathers (45%) .

, grandmothers and fathers .

The top three elements needed for a great memoir or personal story were overcoming personal challenges or adversity (59%), a life of adventure (57%) and humor (39%) .



a life of adventure and humor . Immigration Stories Are of Top Interest:

91% of children of first-generation immigrants know someone whose personal story would make an interesting book

of children of first-generation immigrants know someone whose personal story would make an interesting book

Over 50% of children of first-generation immigrants "strongly agreed" that they regret not learning more about their relatives that are no longer here.

of children of first-generation immigrants "strongly agreed" that they regret not learning more about their relatives that are no longer here.

Nearly half (49%) said a loved one's story they'd like to learn more about was an immigration story.

said a loved one's story they'd like to learn more about was an immigration story.

Children of first-generation immigrants (56%) also chose their grandfathers as the people they would most like to know more about.

also chose their grandfathers as the people they would most like to know more about.

64% of military members said the loved ones' story they're interested in learning more about is an immigrant story.



of military members said the loved ones' story they're interested in learning more about is an immigrant story. Millennial Views on Memoirs:

33% of millennial respondents "strongly agreed" that they are afraid of forgetting stories they have been told by family members or close friends.

of millennial respondents "strongly agreed" that they are afraid of forgetting stories they have been told by family members or close friends.

62% of millennials feel disconnected from their family's past

of millennials feel disconnected from their family's past

Nearly three in ten (29%) of respondents ages 25-40 "strongly agree" that they feel disconnected from their family's past.

of respondents ages 25-40 "strongly agree" that they feel disconnected from their family's past.

Over half of millennials (53%) wished they could turn a grandparent's life into a book.



wished they could turn a grandparent's life into a book. Military Members:

89% percent of military respondents know someone whose life would make an interesting book.

percent of military respondents know someone whose life would make an interesting book.

People in the military said their mothers (63%) were the people they looked forward to hearing stories from as a child.

were the people they looked forward to hearing stories from as a child.

The people military members were most likely to wish they could turn their lives into a book were themselves (53%)



Two in five (43%) of military members "strongly agreed" they are afraid of forgetting stories they have been told by family members or close friends.

The survey was funded by StoryTerrace and conducted by OnePoll, members of ESOMAR and employ members of the MRS. Conducted in February 2021, the survey was taken from a demographically representative sample of 1,005 Americans ages 18 and up.

SOURCE StoryTerrace

Related Links

http://storyterrace.com


"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

 George Orwell, 1984

Over the last five years, in the U.S. and across the West, free expression in cyberspace has come under unprecedented assault.

Uniformity of thought (groupthink) is already prevalent in every other corporate-controlled U.S. medium  print, radio, television.

The siege of U.S. cyberspace began in earnest in late 2016 with the defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election  perhaps the greatest electoral upset in American history. Every mainstream media outlet got it dead wrong. On election day, the "paper of record" New York Times gave Clinton an 85% edge. The Washington Post ran a headline that said "a comprehensive average of election forecasts points to a decisive Clinton victory." The Huffington Post estimated a 98% chance of a Clinton win.

Trump, it turns out, won, handing the corporate press a stunning defeat in the information war.

Immediately in the aftermath of the election, Clinton and Co. rolled out the "fake news" narrative. At a Dec 9, 2016 ceremony for departing Sen. Harry Reid, Clinton set the wheels in motion for an unprecedented crackdown on cyber-speech:

It's now clear that so-called 'fake news' can have real world consequencesLives are at risk. Lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days, to do their jobs, contribute to their communities... It's imperative that leaders from the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.

The unspoken intent was clear: to give rhetorical cover to the state to reckon with the digital infosphere outside its control that had cost the DNC the election. Soon after Clinton's Dec. 2016 declaration of war against "fake news," the corporate press, in tandem with Silicon Valley, rolled out the censorship agenda:

If the fact-checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed.

A censorship bonanza ensued. Countless "fringe" media figures outside the good graces of the ruling class  on the grassroots left and right  have been purged from the web in the intervening five years.

Ultimately, the Mueller Report failed to identify any evidence at all for the "Russia-gate" conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was somehow a Kremlin agent on the Russian payroll.

The false narrative lives on, though. This incisive two-minute compilation of corporate media talking points on the "Russia-gate" conspiracy theory illustrates the lockstep rhetoric of the corporate press to push the narrative

What are the consequences of media power concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, and where do things go from here?

* * *

If all of this fearmongering sounds oddly familiar and totalitarian, that's because the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been a pioneer in the conquest of cyberspace for decades  under the guise of combatting "misinformation" harmful to national security:

From the CCP's perspective, "Western anti-China forces" are "actively trying to infiltrate China's ideological sphere," threatening China with the spearhead of Westernizing, splitting, and Color Revolutions, for which the blame is often placed upon the influence of the Internet and social media.

Chinese state censorship  along with the other tools of social control it deploys on its own population  is the model that Western governments hope to emulate:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau met with criticism for the second time in as many days Friday, after telling a Toronto fundraising crowd that he admired China's 'basic dictatorship.'

The Chinese government operates what has been called the "Great Firewall"  restricting access to information deemed unacceptable by nameless state censorship agents and sending it down the Memory Hole.

The CCP exercises pernicious, ruthless dominance in its own cyberspace behind the Great Firewall. No bit of subversive minutia is too small to ban; it successfully scrubbed images of Winne the Pooh into oblivion after internet activists likened the character to CCP boss Xi Jinping in 2017.

* * *

We Western heirs to the Renaissance and Enlightenment cannot allow the internet to become the plaything of the state in the mold of the Great Firewall, for information to be censored on a whim and distorted and rebranded.

If a population in a free society grows distrustful of its government, as has occurred in the U.S., the onus should be on the state to rebuild trust  not on the population to be herded into Orwellian goodthink via censorship.

Instead of demonizing a large (and growing) portion of the citizenry that no longer has faith in the government to serve its needs, the entity that needs fixing in this scenario is the government, not the people. Free speech is that corrective mechanism.

* * *

The Jan. 6, 2021 "insurrection" in D.C.  which was largely organized on the web via hard-to-track apps like Telegram  gave further ammunition to the corporate state to justify repression of dissident voices:

In the days following the insurrection, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other major platforms have imposed stricter measures and deployed new rationales for taking action. Besides suspending or permanently banning President Trump, they've also removed content undermining the integrity of the election results.

Corporate-state censorship is increasingly justified on the grounds of amorphous concepts with no legal definition like "dangerous speech" or "hate speech." Without strict legal limits on what can be considered "dangerous" or "hateful," this 21st-century digital book-burning is left to the whims of nameless; faceless bureaucrats; or, even worse, to tech giants' computer algorithms.

Freedom of expression is the birthright of the Western citizen  the bounty of hundreds of years of struggle against authoritarian, censorious states.

The torch of Enlightenment liberty is all but extinguished in the United States in 2021, except in the dark corners of the web. We must relight it.

Ben Bartee, is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via email (benbartee@protonmail.com), his website Armageddon Prose, or LinkedIn.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
gettyimagesbank



By Lee Hyo-jin



A policy introduced by the Ministry of Justice to give undocumented migrant children legal status and allow them to have temporary residency rights, may not be helpful for those in need, according to local migrants' rights groups.



Currently, children without legal immigrant status are allowed to stay in the country until they finish high school, after which they face deportation.



In order to protect the basic rights of these children, the ministry announced the policy, April 19, under which unregistered migrant minors can apply for temporary legal status  a D-4 visa usually given to people studying here, or a G-1 visa that allows a one-year stay for various reasons.



Eligible applicants are limited to those born and resident in Korea for more than 15 years, who graduated from elementary school before Feb. 28, 2021. The policy will be effective until February 2025, and those wishing to apply should visit an immigration office with their parents.



The ministry noted that the limits on eligibility and duration of the policy were aimed at preventing it from being abused for illegal immigration.



The policy came after civic groups urged the ministry to devise measures that would give undocumented children, who are deprived of access to basic social services, some form of legal status in Korea.



The ministry estimates that there are up to 20,000 undocumented migrants in Korea under the age of 18 and 100 to 500 of them will be eligible to apply for the temporary resident status.



However, migrant rights groups said that there will be few if any applicants due to the strict requirements as well as additional clauses penalizing their parents.



In order to sign up for the temporary stay, parents who have stayed here illegally for over seven years must pay a fine of up to 30 million won ($27,000) depending on the duration of their stay. If they are able to pay the fine within three months, the amount will be reduced to 9 million won.



Song In-sun, head of the Gyeonggi Global Center, said the heavy fine on parents will bar eligible children from applying. "The 30 million won fine, even if it gets reduced to 9 million won, is an excessive burden for unregistered migrants who mostly hold low-paying jobs," Song told The Korea Times.



"It is unfair that the government has added such an unrealistic penalty. Every child, regardless of their parents' legal status, should be guaranteed access to basic social services and protection," he added.



Song also pointed out that as the policy cover only children born in Korea, it leaves many unregistered minors born outside the country in a blind spot. "Their undocumented status is the result of a situation they did not choose. The government should not discriminate between children depending on their place of birth."



Lee Han-sook, head of the Migration and Human Rights Institute, also said that she was disappointed by the long-awaited policy.



"It is difficult to understand why the ministry specifically limited the application to children who have stayed here over 15 years. Duration of stay should not be used to differentiate between them," she said.



Lee added that she did not see a particular reason behind the ministry's concern that the policy may be abused by illegal immigrants. "The government seems to be taking an overly cautious stance due to public sentiment opposing immigrants. But child protection should be prioritized," she said.



Both Song and Lee said the policy should have been devised in a way to protect as many undocumented children as possible, based on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the Korean government ratified in 1991.



According to the convention, "every child has the inherent right to life," and "the state shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child."


City, School Races To Be Decided Saturday Election day for several cities and school districts in Hill County will be Saturday, May 1. Whitney Independent School District (ISD), the City of Whitney, the City of Hubbard, Covington ISD, the City of Mount Calm and Mount Calm ISD are holding elections.



Voting in both the City of Whitney and Whitney ISD elections will be held at the Whitney ISD Administration Building Board Room, located at 305 South San Jacinto in Whitney.



The City of Hubbard's election will be held in the chamber room of City Hall, located at 118 North Magnolia Avenue.



Covington ISD voters will cast ballots at the City of Covington, 402 Gathings in Covington.



Voters will cast ballots in the City of Mount Calm and Mount Calm ISD election on the Mount Calm High School campus.



Polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. on election day.



Voters who possess one of the seven approved forms of photo identification (ID) must present that ID at the polls. Voters who do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of the seven forms of approved photo ID may execute a Reasonable Impediment Declaration form, available to them at each polling location, and provide a supporting form of identification.



In addition, certain voters may qualify for an exemption to presenting an acceptable form of photo identification or following the Reasonable Impediment Declaration procedure.



The seven forms of approved photo ID are:



 Texas Driver License issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)



 Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS



 Texas Personal Identification Card issued by DPS



 Texas Handgun License issued by DPS



 United States Military Identification Card containing the persons photograph



 United States Citizenship Certificate containing the persons photograph



 United States Passport (book or card)



With the exception of the U.S. Citizenship Certificate, which does not expire, the acceptable photo ID must be current or, for voters aged 18-69, have expired no more than four years before being presented for voter qualification at the polling place. A voter 70 years of age or older may use a form of acceptable photo ID listed above that has expired for any length of time if the identification is otherwise valid.



If a voter does not possess one of the forms of acceptable photo identification listed above, and the voter cannot reasonably obtain such identification, the voter may fill out a Reasonable Impediment Declaration form, which will be available at each polling location, and present a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of identification:



a government document that shows the voter's name and an address, including the voter's voter registration certificate



a current utility bill



a bank statement



a government check



 a paycheck



a certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate



a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes the voter's identity (which may include a foreign birth document)



The address on an acceptable form of photo identification or a supporting form of identification, if applicable, does not have to match the voter's address on the list of registered voters.


President Biden labeled terrorism by white supremacists the most lethal terrorist threat to the U.S., during his address to a Joint Session of Congress on Wednesday.

Biden initially described an evolving terrorist threat from Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, before pivoting to white supremacy.

Make no mistake  the terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001 and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States, wherever they come from. Al Qaeda and ISIS are in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and other places in Africa and the Middle East and beyond, Biden said in prepared remarks released by the White House.

And, we wont ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined  the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism, Biden added in the remarks.

While delivering the speech to Congress, Biden slightly departed from the prepared script, saying that white supremacy is terrorism.

Bidens remarks echo comments by FBI director Christopher Wray in March congressional testimony.

The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and its not going away any time soon, Wray said at the time. We viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June 2019 we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level as ISIS and homegrown violent extremists.

However, Wray said that while the biggest part of the FBIs domestic terrorism cases involve white supremacists, not all domestic terrorists could be classified as such.

One of the things we struggle with in particular is that more and more, the ideologies, if you will, that are motivating these violent extremists are less and less coherent, less and less linear, less and less easy to pin down, Wray said. In some cases it seems like people coming up with their own customized belief system  a little bit of this, a little bit of that  and they put it together, maybe combined with some personal grievance thats happened to them in their lives, and that drives them.

More from National Review








The past few episodes of Debris have been plowing ahead at a mostly good pace and with a lot of intriguing pieces on the table.



Episode 1.08 Spaceman is mostly a straight forward episode with the first half full of action, as a sudden twist at the beginning of the episode slingshots the narrative forward. We left off in the previous episode with the CIA believing they have found Dr. George Jones whereabouts via Anson Ash's memories and are about to send Bryan, Finola, and other Orbital tactical members to this alleged INFLUX experimentation compound. It was no surprise that M16 would want to get their hands on Jones and had ordered Finola and another agent to enact an extraction plan, but what was truly shocking was that the CIA didn't want Jones at all, they wanted him eliminated!







Of course it is left to Bryan and another member of the CIA to carry out this plan, but realizing that Finola is right, that they can't really trust either of their handlers or agencies, Bryan tells Finola straight away and Bryan ultimately chooses to help Finola save Jones!



It takes time to find the way into underground facility where clearly many people were being experimented on, but things end up working out in such a way, that neither one of their partners are in a position to reveal to their handlers that Bryan and Finola found Jones and are going to try and run with him without letting the CIA know.



In the meantime M16 Agent Brill has been left to intercept Jones and Finola, apart of the abstraction, which they never show up. And if anyone doubted that Brill has something "wired" going on, their doubts should of subsided, as Brill seems to be using a clone as a way to "heal" himself from something we don't yet understand. The scene (oh-so-familiar to Fringe fans) was truly horrific as he used his clones skin to place on his own, and his clone seemed to be suffering in the process!!! We don't really know what's going on here and if "Brills" could of been switched already, but I will discuss more in the Fringe Factor section!





The rest of the episode from the point they find Jones doesn't do as much character development for Finola, as it probably should, but there is one plot twist and a plot set-up for the next few episodes!



As it turns out Jones has a piece of debris in his eye and allegedly this is how he was reanimated back to life!! He also seems to not remember much about certain things that came before, claiming that the debris implant may have effected the use of certain parts of his brain, but what Jones does remember is that INFLUX is looking for a very specific piece of debris, --a game changer, and Jones can build a scanner to find it!





Unlike 1.08, 1.09's White Tulip Do You Know Icarus, takes viewers to much more intriguing place.



The episode starts out with Bryan and Finola taking George to Gary Garcia, another early member of Oribital who was removed from the team after an incident involving the debris left him injured. According to Jones, Garcia has all of the resources he needs to make his scanner, but before the audience can really learn to much more, (which generally remains true for the rest of the episode), Bryan and Finola are called to a new debris event, not far away.



Bryan and Finola go to Oceanside believing that Maddox believes that nothing is wrong, that Jones is dead...

But what this case turns out to be about is about a young man named Shelby who found a piece of debris in a lake next to his parents' house, and it has the ability to send someone back in time...no, actually, send someone back to other iterations of the timeline a few hours before. But somehow on one of these trips, when Shelby came back, he found his twin sister is missing and instead he has a little brother!



As it turns out some version of Finola and Bryan have visited Shelby many times over, only for Shelby to dive into the lake and try again! Viewers end up witnessing several more of these, some with rather alternate variations, with Bryan coming to Shelby's home being the solid constant. In several versions Bryan finds himself hilariously with different partners. In some iterations Jones is dead, and that matters because Shelby keeps trying to talk to Jones about how he can reset this timeline so he can end up with a reality with his twin sister back, but many times Jones warns that the more Shelby does this, the more the fabric of the universe will deteriorate!



Towards the end of the episode however, Jones begins to conclude that not only does the color Shelby sees matter in determining what reality he ends up in, or that his sister can briefly be seen in the mirror as proof of the fabric of the universe's breakdown, but moreover the debris may be playing on Shelby's desires, that perhaps some part of him didn't want his sister to be there!





Shelby once again goes diving for the debris, but this time Bryan follows him and finds himself in another reality with yet again another partner, but for Bryan, who like Shelby remembers what came before, he can't shake what has happened to him.



When he and his new partner Lee Grace confront Shelby again, Bryan has a complete meltdown, taking everything out on Shelby. Grace thinks he's completely out of control and calls it in. Bryan proves that some of things he is saying is true and is able to get in contact with an alternate version of Finola.



Despite everything, Finola behaves pretty much the same, but doesn't fully connect with Bryan until he takes about the Soldier and Penguin story her dad had mentioned in the previous iteration.



Episode 1.08is mostly a straight forward episode with the first half full of action, as a sudden twist at the beginning of the episode slingshots the narrative forward. We left off in the previous episode with the CIA believing they have found Dr. George Jones whereabouts via Anson Ash's memories and are about to send Bryan, Finola, and other Orbital tactical members to this alleged INFLUX experimentation compound. It was no surprise that M16 would want to get their hands on Jones and had ordered Finola and another agent to enact an extraction plan, but what was truly shocking was that the CIA didn't want Jones at all, they wanted him eliminated!Of course it is left to Bryan and another member of the CIA to carry out this plan, but realizing that Finola is right, that they can't really trust either of their handlers or agencies, Bryan tells Finola straight away and Bryan ultimately chooses to help Finola save Jones!It takes time to find the way into underground facility where clearly many people were being experimented on, but things end up working out in such a way, that neither one of their partners are in a position to reveal to their handlers that Bryan and Finola found Jones and are going to try and run with him without letting the CIA know.In the meantime M16 Agent Brill has been left to intercept Jones and Finola, apart of the abstraction, which they never show up. And if anyone doubted that Brill has something "wired" going on, their doubts should of subsided, as Brill seems to be using a clone as a way to "heal" himself from something we don't yet understand. The scene (oh-so-familiar to Fringe fans) was truly horrific as he used his clones skin to place on his own, and his clone seemed to be suffering in the process!!! We don't really know what's going on here and if "Brills" could of been switched already, but I will discuss more in the Fringe Factor section!The rest of the episode from the point they find Jones doesn't do as much character development for Finola, as it probably should, but there is one plot twist and a plot set-up for the next few episodes!As it turns out Jones has a piece of debris in his eye and allegedly this is how he was reanimated back to life!! He also seems to not remember much about certain things that came before, claiming that the debris implant may have effected the use of certain parts of his brain, but what Jones does remember is that INFLUX is looking for a very specific piece of debris, --a game changer, and Jones can build a scanner to find it!Unlike 1.08, 1.09's, takes viewers to much more intriguing place.The episode starts out with Bryan and Finola taking George to Gary Garcia, another early member of Oribital who was removed from the team after an incident involving the debris left him injured. According to Jones, Garcia has all of the resources he needs to make his scanner, but before the audience can really learn to much more, (), Bryan and Finola are called to a new debris event, not far away.Bryan and Finola go to Oceanside believing that Maddox believes that nothing is wrong, that Jones is dead...But what this case turns out to be about is about a young man named Shelby who found a piece of debris in a lake next to his parents' house, and it has the ability to send someone back in time...no, actually, send someone back to other iterations of the timeline a few hours before. But somehow on one of these trips, when Shelby came back, he found his twin sister is missing and instead he has a little brother!As it turns out some version of Finola and Bryan have visited Shelby many times over, only for Shelby to dive into the lake and try again! Viewers end up witnessing several more of these, some with rather alternate variations, with Bryan coming to Shelby's home being the solid constant. In several versions Bryan finds himself hilariously with different partners. In some iterations Jones is dead, and that matters because Shelby keeps trying to talk to Jones about how he can reset this timeline so he can end up with a reality with his twin sister back, but many times Jones warns that the more Shelby does this, the more the fabric of the universe will deteriorate!Towards the end of the episode however, Jones begins to conclude that not only does the color Shelby sees matter in determining what reality he ends up in, or that his sister can briefly be seen in the mirror as proof of the fabric of the universe's breakdown, but moreover the debris may be playing on Shelby's desires, that perhaps some part of him didn't want his sister to be there!Shelby once again goes diving for the debris, but this time Bryan follows him and finds himself in another reality with yet again another partner, but for Bryan, who like Shelby remembers what came before, he can't shake what has happened to him.When he and his new partner Lee Grace confront Shelby again, Bryan has a complete meltdown, taking everything out on Shelby. Grace thinks he's completely out of control and calls it in. Bryan proves that some of things he is saying is true and is able to get in contact with an alternate version of Finola.Despite everything, Finola behaves pretty much the same, but doesn't fully connect with Bryan until he takes about the Soldier and Penguin story her dad had mentioned in the previous iteration.

his Finola to other---explaining, he has to get back to her!









The Fringe Factor:



While there wasn't so much one particular episode that came to mind during 1.08, there surely was a lot of familiar plots taken from Fringe. Obviously, as mentioned several times before in previous reviews, Jones seems to be either a [blue] Walter Bishop or William Bell type, despite his and Finola's surname plays to ZFT villain David Robert Jones.



But really both of these episodes heavily play on the Fringe dynamics between Walter, Bell, Jones, and Thomas Jerome Newton when we throw Agent Brill into the mix.



But whom is whom is still pretty unclear, although Dr. George Jones definitely seems to playing to the broken Walter type (minus the levity), especially when we look to an early plot where Walter's grey matter was removed by Bell, so that ZFT could not figure out how to find Walter's dismantled portal that allows one to cross universes.



And while Gary Garcia doesn't seem to be as myopic as William Bell, he's still acting as a resource man to George's brilliance in which there is missing story about their work before Oribital was co-opted by the CIA just like Fringe's Kelvin Genetics (cortexifan trials) and/or Massive Dynamic.





Speaking of Brill and Newton, Roche's scene in 1.08 is was pretty disturbing, but rather familiar. In Fringe Thomas Jerome Newton was the leader of the shapeshifters and seem to exist by slightly different technology that was used by other shapeshifters. One point of using shapeshifter in Fringe was about looking at identity and how it could stolen from someone else, which becomes a HUGE ongoing Fringe team whether we're taking shapeshifters, espionage infiltration tactics by dopplegangers in an alternate universe, memories taken or received, or even if somehow one conscious to override another's.



Still it's not clear what's happening with Brill --If like a few other characters he's experienced damage from using the debris?? But just like his Fringe character, Brill seems ruthless in his methods to heal himself and that is something we have seen in other characters too like Agent Maddox or even perhaps INFLUX, should we believe they facility Jones was at was really theirs and/or Jones or Garcia couldn't still behind INFLUX' inception.



I'm still holding out that Brill could be misunderstood alien. After all Jones made point that he believes that debris was gift the aliens gave to humanity, a sentiment shared by Anson Ash, but again, just like Brill, the CIA/Maddox, INFLUX's methods seem question extremely questionable.



As for 1.09 Do You Know Icarus, Fringe episode White Tulip is the clear front runner for the most obvious episode reference.







White Tulip was an episode about a man who was able to turn himself into a time machine, where he was trying to collection enough energy to go further and further back into the time line in order to save someone he loved from dying in a car crash...by the end of the episode, Walter convinces him that he needed to accept his fate and to ask for forgiveness. Walter had also divulged what he had done after he lost his son, Peter. He was able to to see into an alternate universe where the alternate Peter was also sick, so he created a portal to cross universes, despite knowing it may begin to rip the fabric between them in order to bring a cure he had found to late to cure the other Peter.



But what ensued was Walter breaking the vile and kidnapping the other Peter and raising him in his own universe as his son. Really a great deal of Fringe relies on these actions and is fundamental to Walter's redemption story and the heart of Fringe. At the end of the episode Walter receives a White Tulip drawn on paper from Alister (the man time traveling) that comes off as mysterious symbol from the unknown, (because it's a new iteration of the blue timeline) that Walter knows means he will be forgiven thanks to Peck. The episode then ends on a mass cliffhanger with Bryan stuck in this alternate reality where he ends up beginning to profess his feelings forto other---explaining, he has to get back to her!While there wasn't so much one particular episode that came to mind during 1.08, there surely was a lot of familiar plots taken from. Obviously, as mentioned several times before in previous reviews, Jones seems to be either a [blue] Walter Bishop or William Bell type, despite his and Finola's surname plays to ZFT villainBut really both of these episodes heavily play on thedynamics between Walter, Bell, Jones, and Thomas Jerome Newton when we throw Agent Brill into the mix.But whom is whom is still pretty unclear, although Dr. George Jones definitely seems to playing to the broken Walter type (minus the levity), especially when we look to an early plot where, so that ZFT could not figure out how to find Walter's dismantled portal that allows one to cross universes.And while Gary Garcia doesn't seem to be as myopic as William Bell, he's still acting as a resource man to George's brilliance in which there is missing story about their work before Oribital was co-opted by the CIA just likeKelvin Genetics (cortexifan trials) and/or Massive Dynamic.Speaking of Brill and Newton, Roche's scene in 1.08 is was pretty disturbing, but rather familiar. InThomas Jerome Newton was the leader of the shapeshifters and seem to exist by slightly different technology that was used by other shapeshifters. One point of using shapeshifter in Fringe was about looking at identity and how it could stolen from someone else, which becomes a HUGE ongoing Fringe team whether we're taking shapeshifters, espionage infiltration tactics by dopplegangers in an alternate universe, memories taken or received, or even if somehow one conscious to override another's.Still it's not clear what's happening with Brill --If like a few other characters he's experienced damage from using the debris?? But just like hischaracter, Brill seems ruthless in his methods to heal himself and that is something we have seen in other characters too like Agent Maddox or even perhaps INFLUX, should we believe they facility Jones was at was really theirs and/or Jones or Garcia couldn't still behind INFLUX' inception.I'm still holding out that Brill could be misunderstood alien. After all Jones made point that he believes that debris was gift the aliens gave to humanity, a sentiment shared by Anson Ash, but again, just like Brill, the CIA/Maddox, INFLUX's methods seem question extremely questionable.As for 1.09episodeis the clear front runner for the most obvious episode reference.was an episode about a man who was able to turn himself into a time machine, where he was trying to collection enough energy to go further and further back into the time line in order to save someone he loved from dying in a car crash...by the end of the episode, Walter convinces him that he needed to. Walter had also divulged what he had done after he lost his son, Peter. He was able to to see into an alternate universe where the alternate Peter was also sick, so he created a portal to cross universes, despite knowing it may begin to rip the fabric between them in order to bring a cure he had found to late to cure the other Peter.But what ensued was Walter breaking the vile and kidnapping the other Peter and raising him in his own universe as his son. Really a great deal ofrelies on these actions and is fundamental to Walter's redemption story and the heart of. At the end of the episode Walter receives a White Tulip drawn on paper from Alister (the man time traveling) that comes off as mysterious symbol from the unknown, (because it's a new iteration of the blue timeline) that Walter knows means he will be forgiven thanks to Peck.







The white tulip theme runs through Fringe in such episodes as Subject 13 when child Peter and Olivia had unknowing ran away together and sat out in a field of White Tulips... The white tulip theme runs throughin such episodes aswhen child Peter and Olivia had unknowing ran away together and sat out in a field of White Tulips...







In Do You Know Icarus, we literally see white tulips in the opening scene, but we have a time loop episode, where someone is trying to change their desires back to save someone they have know lost, but not just with one character, but now two. In fact Bryan's whole situation is pretty similar to when Olivia finally tells Peter her feelings before being swapped out for the alternate Olivia at the end of season or even Peter's season 4 arc where he begins to bleed through and reprint onto an already existing blue universe. The way Walter describes retro casualty as "the event before the cause" or the way Walter sees Peter in the mirror is very similar, if not identical concept.



It's not entirely clear yet, since this episode ended on a cliff hanger, if we are only dealing with iterations of the same universe, or if we are actually crossing universe, but Jones mentioning of the color spectrum, which seems to point to an "amber-esque" spectrum could be telling of something, if not now later, as Fringe's season 4 blue universe was known as "amber timeline/universe".



There is also the little parallel that we learn that Maddox' son was injured in car accident that his wife feels responsible for, very similar to Alistor Peck.



In addition I felt like the Soldier and Penguin story is like it's own white tulip in terms of something meaningful that could maybe run through Debris with deeper meaning? We'll see--but the notion about Bryan being 'the selfless soldier' could point out that Bryan can "reset" or get back to a timeline he knows, if he chooses it, much like Peter in the Wave Sync Device. I kind of love the idea that Bryan may be able to reset the timeline not just for himself, but for Shelby and that he could finally start changing once he does...



But just quickly to point out some other things that aren't exactly Fringey, the episode title in particular is curious.



In Greek mythology Icarus was the son of a famous craftsman who was given wings, but was warned by his father not to fly too high. He didn't listen and lost his wings and fell into the ocean and drowned.



I feel like this is a good metaphor for the alien technology, especially if Jones is right about their intentions and any one could be Icarus, but on the other hand we have Jones and Garcia to consider as Oribital's fathers--and we don't necessarily know what the aliens wanted or if this something they intended. In, we literally see white tulips in the opening scene, but we have a time loop episode, where someone is trying to change their desires back to save someone they have know lost, but not just with one character, but now two. In fact Bryan's whole situation is pretty similar to when Olivia finally tells Peter her feelings before being swapped out for the alternate Olivia at the end of season or even Peter's season 4 arc where he begins toonto an already existing blue universe. The way Walter describesor the way Walteris very similar, if not identical concept.It's not entirely clear yet, since this episode ended on a cliff hanger, if we are only dealing with iterations of the same universe, or if we are actually crossing universe, but Jones mentioning of the, which seems to point to anspectrum could be telling of something, if not now later, asseason 4 blue universe was known as "amber timeline/universe".There is also the little parallel that we learn that Maddox' son was injured inthat his wife feels responsible for, very similar to Alistor Peck.In addition I felt like thestory is like it's own white tulip in terms of something meaningful that could maybe run throughwith deeper meaning? We'll see--but the notion about Bryan being 'could point out thathe knows, if he chooses it, much likeI kind of love the idea that Bryan may be able to reset the timeline not just for himself, but for Shelby and that he could finally start changing once he does...But just quickly to point out some other things that aren't exactly Fringey, the episode title in particular is curious.He didn't listen and lost his wings and fell into the ocean and drowned.I feel like this is a good metaphor for the alien technology, especially if Jones is right about their intentions andcould be Icarus, but on the other hand we have Jones and Garcia to consider as Oribital's fathers--and we don't necessarily know what the aliens wanted or if this something they intended.




Have I said recently how much I love my work?

This week, we got to release our 2019 Vaccarese, the first bottling of our first vintage of this obscure Rhone red grape. I dove into its history in the blog Grapes of the Rhone Valley: Vaccarese last year, so I'm not going to rehash its full history here. If you'd like to refresh yourself on it, take a moment now. OK, welcome back.

But in getting from growing the grapes to making and bottling the wine to now, finally, getting to share it with our fans I've spent a fair amount of time looking for literature on Vaccarese. It barely exists. In her seminal and comprehensive Wine Grapes, Jancis Robinson dedicates barely three-quarters of a page to it (under its synonym Brun Argente) and in the subheading calls it a "very minor southern Rhone variety". At just 12 hectares (about 30 acres) in France as of 2012, it's scarce. Most of that, Jancis reports, is in Chusclan, a minor appellation in the Gard, where it is known as Camarese. (Yes, this grape is old enough that despite its scarcity now and as far as we can tell forever, it goes by three different names. Welcome to the challenges of being a grape ampelographer.) In Chusclan, it is generally blended with Grenache to make roses. But its percentage is capped at 20%. So, you're not going to find a 100% Vaccarese from Chusclan.

How about Chateauneuf-du-Pape? Very unlikely. According to Harry Karis in his 2009 Chateauneuf-du-Pape Wine Book, there were 4.1 hectares (about 10 acres) in the entire appellation, representing just over one tenth of one percent of the 3,231 hectares planted. [Editor's note April 29th: It appears there may be one! See the comment below from Robert Parker Wine Advocate contributor Joe Czerwinski, reporting on a special cuvee from Chateau des Fines Roches called "Forget Me Not". The wine's page on the producer's website lists a blend of 90% Vaccarese and 10% Grenache. That's the closest we've yet found!]

For confirmation, I checked the Wine Searcher Pro, the industry-leading wine search engine, to see if any Vaccarese bottlings were listed. A global search returned just three results, one Cotes du Rhone for sale in Switzerland and two Chateauneuf-du-Papes, one for sale in Austria and another in Massachusetts. But in all three cases Vaccarese was the fourth or fifth variety in the blend. How rare does this make Vaccarese? Compare the limited results to a grape like Picpoul, which returns 2,720 listings. Grenache Blanc, rarely found on its own, returns 1,670 listings. Even Counoise returns 185 results.

How about historically? It seems unlikely. Although the grape comes in for praise in Pierre Galet's 1990 ampelography Cepages et Vignobles de France, it's for its blending value. He quotes a winemaker who finds it "particularly interesting for moderating the alcoholic power of Grenache in the roses of Chusclan and the red wines of Chateauneuf-du-Pape" (my translation). And while there was more acreage in 1990, according to Galet there were still just 40 hectares (100 acres). Going back to the Viala and Vermorel's 1901-1910 Ampelographie doesn't help. They don't have an entry for Vaccarese, instead listing it and a few alternate spellings in the index as "nonspecific names given to grape varieties in the Vaucluse". Brun Argente is dismissed equally briefly in the index: "a grape variety from the Vaucluse, poorly described ampelographically" (both translations mine again). Camarese doesn't even get an appearance in the index. So, it's pretty clear that at least for the last century Vaccarese has never been widely planted, or been a lead grape where it was.

So, where does that leave us? Forging our own way. And based on our experiences this week, where we've released the 2019 Vaccarese to our club members and been tasting the 2020 Vaccarese around the blending table, the grape has potential. My (brief) notes on the 2020 out of barrel were "Lovely dark color. Nose herby and savory. Mouth medium-weight, blackberry and chalk, rose hips and leather. Structured." It was good enough that we're going to use a portion of it in our 2020 Esprit de Tablas, in just its second year in production. That's rare for us. For more on that story, stay tuned for next week's blog, on this week's blending. But we'll still have enough to bottle perhaps 100 cases on its own, which I think is important for such a new grape. After all, we want help from other people wrapping their heads around this grape which is so new and so rare.

If any of you have ever had a 100% Vaccarese from anywhere, or even a Vaccarese-led wine, will you please let me know? We'd love to try it as a comparison. If not, and ours if your first, please let us know what you think!

Have I said recently how much I love my work?
1. Yes. Its important to keep my child as safe as possible. We plan to take advantage.

2. Yes. With the school district dropping its mask mandate, its a necessary step.

3. No. Local COVID cases are dropping. There is no good reason to vaccinate my child.

4. No. There hasnt been enough data on vaccinated children. I think Ill hold off.

5. Unsure. I havent decided yet whether to take part in the vaccine clinics.

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This editorial appears in the April 30, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

EDITORIAL

U.S. Sanctions Are a

Knee to the Neck of Millions

[Print version of this editorial]

Mr. Mallouk initially submitted this text as a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun. He is a long-time LaRouche Movement organizer.

The Sun Opinion Editor Tricia Bishop contends that the Derek Chauvin verdict, though a victory, is no cause for celebration. In her April 20th commentary, she says, only a recognition of our shared humanity can change U.S. justice. Shes absolutely rightbut for completely different reasons than the ones she cites.

A cynically evil adage says that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. Comparing the (rightful) popular outrage at the George Floyd atrocity with the studied indifference exhibited by so many to the innumerable lives destroyed by U.S. regime-change wars, and the even more deadly regimen of sanctions imposed by the successive Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations, one has to wonder how deeply corrupted our thinking has become.

Recently, Cardinal Mario Zenari, the Apostolic Nuncio to Syria, charged that the U.S. sanctions have driven fully 90% of that tortured nations population to poverty and near starvation, putting Syria just behind Yemen (another victim of economic warfare emanating from Washington) in that catastrophic situation. A bevy of UN officials has testified to similar effect with respect to Venezuela, Iran and other targets on the U.S.-UK hit list. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all but pled guilty to genocide in explaining that the purpose of sanctions is to impose so much privation on the civilians that they rise up against their putatively murderous rulers. Yes, you read that right: our government is perpetrating starvation, disease, and misery to save lives!

Schiller Institute founder Helga LaRouche, former Virginia State Senator (and decorated Vietnam veteran Marine Aviator) Col. Richard Black (ret.), and many others, have demanded that the barbaric form of warfare known as sanctions be suspended forthwith. Where on earth are the protestors decrying this huge crime?

Justice for George Floyd? Absolutely! But when is the U.S. government, with its ponderous weight, going to remove its knee from the necks of the millions victimized by its bombs, and even worse, its sanctions?
SACRAMENTO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Woodside Homes Northern California Division is proud to announce its contribution of a 2,280 square-foot home with an estimated value of $500,000 for the 2021 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, a contest whose mission is to end the fight against childhood cancer. On April 8, 2021, Tracy, CA, resident and monthly donor to St. Jude's, Delois Black, was named the lucky winner of the Rancho Cordova dream home.

This four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a loft, modern open kitchen/dining area, and two-car garage raised $755,500 for St. Jude. The St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway is the largest single-event fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital nationwide.

"Having built tens of thousands of homes for families, Woodside Homes is honored to participate in the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway. We are inspired by the non-profit's important mission to offer no-cost treatment for children with cancer, the support they provide their families, and essential research," says Brian Cutting, President of Woodside Homes Northern California Division. "We wish Delois Black many years of happy memories in her new home."

Not only did Woodside Homes become the first builder to partner with St. Jude in multiple markets, the homebuilder also received the 2020 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway New Horizon Award beating out more than 45 builders across the nation.

About Woodside Homes

In 2021, Woodside Homes begins its 44th year building homes in partnership with their buyers, who want their home to become a better fit for their lives. The company has closed more than 53,000 new homes since its inception, and according to Hanley Wood data, it is the 28th largest homebuilder in the United States. Woodside Homes is dedicated to delivering an exceptional experience to every customer and acting as a trustworthy, knowledgeable guide throughout home buying, building, and initial months of ownership.

In 2017, Woodside Homes was acquired by SEKISUI HOUSE, one of the world's largest homebuilders. The two companies joined forces with their shared philosophies in creating sustainable communities that grow and adapt to the needs of today's homebuyers.

SEKISUI HOUSE has constructed more than two million homes since 1960. Based in Osaka, Japan, it has approximately 90 subsidiaries and affiliates, 23,000-plus employees, and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Nagoya Stock Exchange. Since 1997, SEKISUI HOUSE has positioned its commitment to the environment as a core management target and provided numerous environmentally and sustainably conscious products as a front-runner among industrialized housing manufacturers.

The ownership by SEKISUI HOUSE allows Woodside Homes to evolve and adapt cutting-edge methods in customer-focused building, sustainability and efficiency practices. For more information, visit http://www.woodsidehomes.com/ .

2021 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway in Rancho Cordova, CA

St. Jude was locally and exclusively partnered with Woodside Homes and ABC 10 to build and give away the 2021 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway house in Rancho Cordova, CA. Sacramento and surrounding area residents were able to enter into the drawing for a chance to win the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, located in the Eucalyptus at Cypress community, and/or one of several other major prizes.

Residents reserved tickets for $100 starting on Jan. 15, 2021. The goal was to sell 8,500 tickets to raise $850,000 for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Overall, the fundraiser alone has built over 590 houses and raised more than $500 million for St. Jude.

Current sponsors of the campaign included Woodside Homes, ABC 10, New Country 105.1 KNCI, McCreery's Home Furnishings, John L. Sullivan Charitable Foundation, Patelco Credit Union, and national sponsors Trane, Bosch, Shaw Floors and Brizo. To learn more about the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway in Sacramento, or to be involved as a sponsor please visit dreamhome.org .

Media Contact:

Hilary Reiter

Redhead Marketing & PR

hilary@redheadmarketingpr.com | 435.901.2071

www.woodsidehomes.com

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SOURCE: Woodside Homes

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643077/Winner-Selected-for-the-2021-Woodside-Homes-St-Jude-Dream-HomeR-Giveaway-in-Northern-California
Matt Hancock has described it as a privilege to get his first coronavirus vaccination at Londons Science Museum, and thanked Englands deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, for administering the jab.

The Health Secretary tweeted a picture of the moment he was given his first dose, describing the process as quick and painless.

Mr Hancock said he was very excited when he was called for the jab and encouraged everyone invited for a Covid-19 vaccination to take up the offer.

The Department of Health confirmed Mr Hancock received the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

Alongside a picture of himself getting the injection from a masked Prof Van-Tam, he wrote: Brilliant! Got the jab. In & out in 8 minutes. Didnt hurt at all. Massive thanks to JVT & the @sciencemuseum team. When you get the call, get the jab!

In a further statement, he said it had been a privilege to get my first jab within the historic walls of the Science Museum in London, where the team are documenting the national pandemic response and preserving items like the first Covid-19 vaccine vial to be used anywhere in the world.

He paid tribute to learning from science, saying it had been central this last year more than ever and that it therefore felt fitting to be at the museum.

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He added: Over 47 million doses have now been administered across the country, thanks not only to hundreds of hospitals, GP clinics and pharmacies, but to incredible sites like this that have volunteered their unused spaces.

The rollout continues at pace and we are on track to reach our target of offering all adults a first dose of the vaccine by the end of July.

I was very excited when my call came, and Id urge everyone to take up the offer when it comes, and become part of history in the UKs biggest ever vaccination programme.
Boeing Co. posted its sixth straight quarterly loss as the COVID-19 crisis and languishing deliveries for the South Carolina-based 787 program continued to weigh on the planemaker's finances.

The company on April 28 reported a narrower loss of $561 million for the first three months of the year, compared to a $628 million loss for the same period of 2020.

Revenue dropped 10 percent to $15.2 billion, a decline tied in part to the 787 program, according to Boeing's latest financial results. Right up until the end of the first quarter, Dreamliner deliveries remained on pause because of lingering production issues and inspections, leaving dozens of the jets in inventory.

So far, nine 787s have been handed over to customers since deliveries resumed late last month, CEO Dave Calhoun said Wednesday. He added that "a couple more" of the widebodies could get picked up before the end of the week.

Boeing has about 100 Dreamliners in its inventory, finance chief Greg Smith said.

The company still says it expects to hand over most of the 787s in inventory by the end of the year, though Calhoun said the main constraint will be the switch to a higher monthly delivery pace  not a reluctance among customers to take them.

"It's just gonna be because of logistical timing with respect to when crews can get in and take delivery and move them out," he said.

Smith didn't give a specific timeframe for how long it's taking to rework 787s that are found to have the issue that set off these inspections  wrinkles in areas where sections of the fuselage are joined  but he said it's a matter of days per plane and that the process is moving more quickly now that workers are "coming down the learning curve."

While the 787 delivery delays were a blow to first quarter results, Calhoun said in a note to employees that halting deliveries to do checks and rework aircraft was "the right thing to do."

"Our pause went on longer than I think anybody wanted it to, maybe even including us," Calhoun said of the hiatus, which lasted nearly five months.

That long pause, which required "an awful lot of energy, a lot of cost and a lot effort" was purposeful, he said, and allowed them to "eliminate rework loops."

"We've taken really hard actions over the course of this year to stop things when we see an issue and get them fixed once and for all," Calhoun said, adding that the 787 is a "glaring example of that."

As of late February, Boeing's North Charleston campus has been the only site where the 787 is assembled. It had been splitting the work with the widebody factory in Everett, Wash., until the previously announced plan to consolidate production of the jet in South Carolina was made official last quarter.

That transition "went smoothly," Calhoun said.

Dreamliners haven't disappeared entirely from the Seattle-area site, where the original production has been shut down. Because of the inspections, workers in the Puget Sound region are continuing to handle rework and deliveries of Everett-made 787s.

The North Charleston site is juggling inspections, rework and assembly simultaneously, though new jets are being built at a slower pace.

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Production of the 787 slowed to a rate of five per month in the first quarter, Calhoun noted, meaning the North Charleston site is building fewer aircraft than it did when it was sharing the work with Everett. The lower rate is a response to the pandemic-induced drop in demand for new airplanes.

Just four Dreamliner orders have been logged so far this year  the first since March 2020.

Orders for the narrow-bodied 737 Max accelerated in the last several months, though, with Boeing securing substantial sales agreements with Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines. Those orders gave Boeing its first months with net positive order outcomes since 2019.

But the Max has suffered a new setback: Electrical problems that Boeing disclosed earlier this month grounded dozens of Max jets, not long after federal regulators approved the planes for commercial flights again late last year.

Because of those groundings, Calhoun said on Wednesday's call that deliveries of the 737 have been temporarily put on pause, which will "make April deliveries very light." They expect to catch up on Max deliveries "over the balance of the year," he said.

Calhoun said Boeing is "finalizing the plans and documentation" with the Federal Aviation Administration on how operators can safely return those jets to service.

Once those plans are approved, Boeing expects it will take "a few days per plane" to complete the necessary work. About 100 in-service aircraft are affected, Calhoun said.

Smith, the Boeing finance chief who announced last week he'll be retiring after 30 years with the company, said he believes that, from a cash perspective, the company has endured its most challenging quarter of 2021.

Unloading 787 inventory and getting Max deliveries back on track are still the biggest drivers for improving "all financial metrics" for the planemaker in 2021, Smith said.

Calhoun said Boeing sees this year as a "critical inflection point," especially as more COVID-19 shots are administered.

"Vaccine distribution remains the critical hurdle to a broad reopening," he said.

The air travel industry's active fleet is still around three-quarters of its pre-pandemic size, he said, and, since domestic markets are rebounding first, single-aisle jets, like the 737 Max, are performing better than twin-aisle planes, like the 787, which are used for the likely last-to-recover long-haul routes.

In February, international air travel traffic was 11 percent of what it was in 2019, slightly below prior expectations, Calhoun said.

Returning to pre-pandemic levels of demand will still take "multiple years," he said.

Calhoun is expected to stay at the manufacturer's helm for at least several years of its COVID-19 recovery, following a board decision last week to raise the mandatory retirement age to 70 from 65. Without that change, Calhoun would have been forced to step down as CEO next April.
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Cases of domestic violence against Indigenous women and children and instances of sexual assault increased over the past year as nonprofit groups and social workers scrambled to meet the added challenges that stemmed from the coronavirus pandemic, advocates said Tuesday.

Their testimony came in the opening session of a two-day summit focused on ending violence against Indigenous women and children. Native American leaders from pueblos throughout New Mexico and from the Navajo Nation gathered virtually for the event.

The victim advocates who shared their stories pointed to lockdowns and stay-at-home orders that were instituted in the early months of the pandemic. Many domestic violence victims were stuck at home with their abusers, believing there was nowhere else to turn while advocates themselves faced challenges getting to work and finding new ways to connect with victims and share information about resources.

They called it a shadow pandemic, saying it has had ripple effects for victims, law enforcement and advocacy groups.

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Angel Charley, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, said tribally based advocates and other organizers from Shiprock to Nambe and Santo Domingo used the past year to reinforce existing mutual aid networks and learned many lessons in doing so that will help plant the seeds for change as communities begin to emerge from the pandemic.

When we return to our gatherings and ceremonies, deer dinners, feasts and dances, though we will be missing some who we lost and loved dearly, the lessons of this past year will not be in vain, said the mother and Laguna Pueblo member. It is my sincere hope that when we all leave our time here together, we are inspired to make things better  better for our women, better for our children and for all the people we love who might experience violence in their lives.

Charley said its going to be different  it has to be.

The coalition, which organized the summit, and its partners have been working for decades to address a problem that only in recent years began to make headlines as more Indigenous people went missing or turned up dead. Native American women have been victimized at astonishing rates, with federal figures showing that they  along with non-Hispanic Black women  have experienced the highest rates of homicide.

An Associated Press investigation in 2018 found that nobody knows precisely how many cases of missing and murdered Native Americans happen nationwide because many cases go unreported, others arent well documented, and no government database specifically tracks them.

Sherriann Moore is the deputy director of the Tribal Affairs Division within the U.S. Justice Departments Office on Violence Against Women. She told those attending the summit that some programs have been reorganized to address tribal concerns about bureaucratic hurdles for accessing assistance and grant funding.

Moore also discussed the Biden administrations proposed spending for addressing violence against women, saying the recommendation of $1 billion would nearly double the current budget and would include money for new programs ranging from restorative justice and protections for transgender victims to support for women at tribal colleges and universities.

She urged tribal leaders to lobby Congress for more funding and to push for reauthorization of federal laws including the Violence Against Women Act and the Tribal Law and Order Act.

Gail Starr, clinical coordinator of the Albuquerque Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners Collaborative, said the pandemic helped to illuminate how few safety nets there are, particularly for survivors of sexual assault and other violence. She and others talked about the need to find safe housing for them and even cellphones so they have a way to reach out for help.

Pojoaque Pueblo Gov. Jenelle Roybal said her community north of Santa Fe is starting a pilot project in which tribal police will partner with the U.S. Marshals Service on cases involving missing and slain Indigenous victims. The pueblo also is focused on educating young tribal members about healthy relationships.

Roybal said education will be key to stopping the cycle, pointing out that half of the homeless women and children in the U.S. are fleeing from domestic violence.

When you think about all the women and children who arent receiving the help they need, its very upsetting, she said. Just moving forward and assisting each other is definitely what we need to do.
(CNN)  Blue Origin is pushing back on NASA's decision to hand a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX to build the vehicle that will land the next astronauts on the moon. The move adds to a years-long battle between rocket companies owned by the world's two richest men: Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, and Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX.

The dispute centers on NASA's Human Landing System, or HLS, program, which originally aimed to have at least two private-sector companies compete to build the spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface for the space agency's Artemis moon landing missions. But earlier this month, NASA made the surprise announcement that it would move forward with SpaceX as the sole contractor for the project, citing costs as a primary reason for the decision.

The news was first reported by the New York Times.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told The Times in an interview this week that NASA's decision was flawed because it misjudged advantages of Blue Origin's proposal and downplayed technical challenges in SpaceX's.

Musk responded on Twitter:

"Can't get it up (to orbit)," he wrote. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment, but Musk followed up his tweet with another referring to Blue Origin's proposed lunar lander design, which was called "Blue Moon," as "Blue Balls."

Along with Blue Origin, a third company that was competing for the HLS contracts, Alabama-based Dynetics, also protested NASA's decision.

Both Blue Origin and Dynetics argued in their complaints, filed with the Government Accountability Office this week, that NASA hadn't properly evaluated their bids, pressing the space agency to reconsider. The government has 100 days  or until August 4, 2021  to rule on whether the protests have merit.

Pushback against such contracting decisions is common, especially in the aerospace industry, where NASA and the US military are the primary customers for rocket builders and winning or losing awards can have a massive impact on a company's bottom line.

But Blue Origin and SpaceX's Musk have been particularly vocal about their rivalry.

"In NASA's own words, it has made a 'high risk' selection," Blue Origin said in a statement. "Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America's return to the Moon. Because of that, we've filed a protest with the GAO."

Blue Origin had proposed working as a "National Team" for the HLS program alongside frequent government contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to design a lunar lander specifically to service the space station, called Gateway, that NASA plans to put in orbit around the moon. Dynetics came in with a similar proposal.

SpaceX, however, proposed using its Starship, a gargantuan spaceship and rocket system that is currently in the early stages of development in South Texas. SpaceX's primary goal for Starship is to take humans to Mars, but the company proposed using a modified version to service NASA's Artemis moon program.

Though the vehicle will theoretically be capable of taking astronauts from Earth directly to the lunar surface, NASA plans to use the vehicle in tandem with its own rocket and spacecraft: The SLS, or Space Launch System, and Orion.

NASA officials said during a press call earlier this month that, under its current plan, SLS will carry astronauts to the moon's orbit, and then the crew will transfer to the Gateway space station, and from there, SpaceX's Starship will carry the astronauts to the moon's surface.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Battle of the billionaires: Jeff Bezos' rocket company protests SpaceX's latest NASA contract."
As spring is rounding the corner into May, forecasters are glancing at the summer outlook, which looks mostly in line with last years patterns, according to the National Weather Service at State College.

So far, spring has been decent, said meteorologist John Banghoff. Its been a roller coaster of an April with some much warmer and cooler days than usual. Well hope for warm days, but not too warm in May, so we can get outside to enjoy some social activities after a long winter.

Kids and adults beat the nearly 100-degree temperates by staying cool at the Jackson Lick Pool in Harrisburg, July 19, 2019. Vicki Vellios Briner | Special to PennLiveVicki Vellios Briner | Special to PennLive

Initial summer weather predictions show that rainfall will be near normal levels and temperatures will be slightly above average, he said. The official first day of summer is June 20.

We can hope that this summer is a Goldilocks-type summer, but well see, Banghoff said. One thats not too hot, not too cold, and not too much precipitation.

Seasonal weather starts to rev up in May bringing with it the occasional pop-up thunderstorms, as well as cold fronts, he said.

We know what our average summer temperatures are based on a 30-year data set, Banghoff explained. Were expecting a little bit warmer days than what they are usually. There are going to be either a handful of days that are significantly warmer or a lot of days that are. Its not clear yet.

In Harrisburg, high temperatures in May generally range from 47 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. At the peak of summer, which is considered July 1, the range is normally 66 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

Were looking at peaking in the 80s in mid-July, Banghoff said. That time of year, high temperatures tend to be between low 80s to mid-90s. The further north and west you go, the cooler temperatures youre going to get.

Thunderstorms start showing up on the radar generally as soon as early May and realistically taper off in August, he said.

Some of the hazards in the summertime in Pennsylvania, they include severe weather that can produce damaging winds, hail, and tornadoes, Banghoff said. We can get heavy rainfall, which can cause flooding, and then extreme heat as well. Thats not really a forecast, but those are some of the hazards that we are focused on, as well as lightning that poses hazards independent of thunderstorms.

Recalling recent summers, Banghoff said hes not certain what exactly to expect in 2021 yet.

In recent memory, 2020 was a really pleasant summer with not a lot of precipitation with fairly few hot days, he said. The problem was we had pretty significant drought coditions. But then when you remember the summer of 2018, it seemed like it never stopped raining. It felt like we had constant flooding.

AccuWeather is saying much of the same, noting that the first part of summer will feature frequent thunderstorms across the Northeast, Ohio Valley, and Midwest, limiting the potential for long-duration heat waves with temperatures averaging right around normal. The welcomed precipitation will help parts of central Pennsylvania that have experienced drought conditions.

Paul Pastelok, a meteorologist who leads AccuWeathers team of long-range forecasters, said he thinks the Northeast, including Pennsylvania, will experience the same number of 90-degree days as last summer, which was notably higher in 2020 compared to normal years.

Central Pennsylvania could see a number of 90-degree days this summer. Photo: AccuWeather

According to AccuWeather, New York City recorded 20 days in 2020 on which the mercury hit 90 F, and Philadelphia managed to crack the 90-degree mark on 36 occasions in 2020. Washington, D.C., may even come close to reaching 90 F on 50 days in 2021.

Pastelok predicts temps will be 1 to 3 degrees above normal summer temperatures in 2021.

Read more from PennLive

After storms Thursday, high winds on Friday could cause power outages, make travel difficult

Thunderstorms could lash central Pa. multiple days this week, forecasters say
Middlefield Canadian Income PCC Net Asset Value

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Middlefield Canadian Income - GBP PC

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Legal Entity Identifier: 2138007ENW3JEJXC8658

Net Asset Value

As at the close of business on 28 April 2021 the estimated unaudited Net Asset Value per share was 119.22 pence (including accrued income, which excludes an amount of 1.275 pence per share in respect of the quarterly dividend to be paid on 30 April 2021).

Investments in the Companys portfolio have been valued on a closing price basis.

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Following a backlash from residents and politicians, the New York Police Department will no longer deploy its Spot robot dog. A lease for the device has been canceled and it will be returned to Boston Dynamics, the NYPD told the New York Times.

The police force planned to keep testing Spot (which it nicknamed Digidog) until the lease ran out in August. The NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, John Miller, said the department changed its mind after Spot became a target for people who "had improperly used it to fuel arguments about race and surveillance."

Critics raised privacy concerns about the robot , which has been deployed to several crime scenes and hostage situations since October. Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, told the NYT he was glad the Digidog was put down," adding that the machine is "creepy, alienating and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers."
Following the legalization of recreational adult-use cannabis in New York, Australis said it is in discussions with a number of potential partners to enter a market expected to capture $1.2 billion in sales by 2023

( ) (OTC:AUSAF) has released a corporate update, revealing that its revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, is expected to have doubled year-over-year, as well as highlighting a batch of other recent news developments.

A big reason for that, according to Australiss CFO on Jon Paul, is the company's 51% stake in commercial crops facility management firm 2750176 Ontario Inc (ALPS), even though the deal was closed less than a month before the fiscal year ended.

"Despite ALPS only contributing approximately 3 weeks to our year-end, AUSA's revenues are anticipated to more than double for the entire fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, Paul said in the update. With an array of current projects in progress and an expanding pipeline of new projects anticipated to be signed, the impact of ALPS on the first quarter of our fiscal 2022 will be even greater.

Meanwhile," the CFO added, "we expect the sale of a land asset held through our other acquisition, Green Therapeutics, to close shortly, which will add approximately C$2.5 million in cash to our working capital position. With the anticipated growth at ALPS and GT, as well as other liquid assets held, AUSA is in robust shape financially for its current level of operations."

New York

Following the legalization of recreational adult-use cannabis in New York, Australis also revealed that it is in discussions with a number of potential partners to enter a market expected to capture $1.2 billion in sales by 2023 and $4.2 billion by 2027.

We intend to play a leading role in the eastern US market, which will take a variety of forms, Australis CEO Terry Booth said. We initiated discussions and negotiations with potential partners over 8 months ago in anticipation of this significant advancement in the American adult usage cannabis market. We will now accelerate these negotiations to determine the opportunities that these potential partners bring to strengthen our applications and negotiations.

Booth noted the importance of diversity within the cannabis space and the necessity of supporting communities of color to achieve equity in the sector.

He said: We also applaud the social equity components of the new legislation in New York. Diversity and Inclusion will not just be a check mark on our applications, it will be a pillar of our corporate culture. We also believe the cannabis industry owes a debt to advocates, activists, innovators and early adopters. This legislation will enable many of these and otherwise disadvantaged groups to participate in the New York and eastern US markets, which we strongly believe is in the best interest of both the industry and society at large.

We intend to enter new jurisdictions in a capital light fashion and will assess each opportunity on its accretive merits. This is an exciting time to be involved in these markets and we look forward to providing consumers in the eastern US with access to our award-winning brands. The US cannabis industry will never be as small as it is today," Booth added.

SAFE Banking Act

CFO Jon Paul also weighed in on the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act of 2021, passed by the US House of Representatives in bipartisan fashion, 321-101, on April 28. The bill would allow access to banking services for licensed cannabis businesses operating in states that have legalized the sale of marijuana. In the Senate, the bill is co-sponsored by Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat. Australis is based in Las Vegas.

Many cannabis operations have been hamstrung in their development by lack of access to capital and by the inability to process credit card payments or other card-based transactions, the company said. Additionally, passing the act would likely lift compliance restrictions with many investment houses that have been eager to enter into the space.

Passing of the SAFE act will be a game-changer for the industry, Paul said. Not only will it facilitate normal banking for cannabis companies, but it is also expected to provide much greater access to capital, likely at lower cost than is presently the case. Rapidly growing companies, such as AUSA, are well-positioned to benefit from this change and we look forward to capitalizing on new opportunities created if this act is adopted by the House and the Senate."

Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Board

Australis said it has established a diversity and inclusion advisory board, headed by Melissa Rolston, CEO of the cannabis industry pioneer JADA, to advise senior management on implementing measures to ensure that diversity and inclusion are at the core foundation of the company as it continues to grow.

"I'm excited to join as the Chair of AUSA's diversity and inclusion advisory board, Rolston said. I will strive to advance the group's established and future efforts. The company's decision to formalize its efforts towards diversity and inclusion speaks volumes of its dedication to social equity. Together, we will be able to build a more forward-thinking corporate structure, serve as role models to our peers, and aim to set the standard in our industry and beyond."

The boards goal is to ensure the company is aligned in supporting the communities that have been greatly impacted by the war on drugs, Australis said. The idea is to create a gold standard of social equity in the US and beyond.

ALPS Adds APIS Contract

Meanwhile, the company noted that ALPS has signed a contract with Sigg, a nursery in Finland supplying 8 million plants per year to tomato and cucumber growers, for the provision of its APIS maintenance offering. Sigg will utilize the new services module, which offers predictive scheduling and preventative maintenance to help optimize cultivation operations.

"Interest in our APIS CMMS offering is growing, both within the cannabis and traditional horticultural industries because of the very significant return on investment our platform delivers, ALPS president Thomas Larssen said. Having applied our over three decades of growing experience, we have been able to identify the bottlenecks and risk points in a grower's operation. Through APIS, we prevent these from occurring, delivering significant economic benefits to our customers, while generating a recurring and high-margin revenue stream for the company."

Green Therapeutics

Australis also pointed out that Green Therapeutics (GT) - which the company is in the process of acquiring - has signed a management agreement with a Nevada-based cultivator and producer of premium cannabis products. GT will operate the partner's cultivation facility, with products sold under the GT brands, and GT will receive a royalty on all products sold, it added.

"This agreement is a good reflection of our exceptional operational capabilities, our standing in the market and the strength of our brands, AUSA COO Drake Fu said. The agreement provides GT with the ability to grow high margin revenues, without having to deploy Capex for cultivation infrastructure."

The company noted that GT is also in the final stages of completing the acquisition of a 23-acre plot of land in Nevada. The intention is for ALPS to help develop facilities for third-party operators, while securing access to a steady supply of competitively priced biomass to fuel GT brands in Nevada.

As part of the unwinding of the original transaction between GT and AUSA, the company said it is in the process of completing the divestment of a non-operational plot of land. The transaction is expected to close shortly and add roughly C$2.5 million to AUSA's balance sheet.

Cocoon Kiosks come to Canada

Australis also revealed that it installed has its first self-service Cocoon kiosk outside of the US, bringing it to a British Columbia (BC) branch of Kiaro, an independent dispensary chain with seven locations in BC and Saskatchewan.

"Utilizing technology to redefine how we transact with our customers is very much part of our corporate philosophy, Kiaro CEO Daniel Petrov said. We are therefore very pleased to be the first company in Canada to deploy the Cocoon kiosk and be able to assess its potential of having a major positive impact on the customer experience."

Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel
New Delhi :

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi is set to address the nation through his monthly radio broadcast titled 'Mann ki baat'. This form of the PM's address has received huge reception from the citizens of the country from all walks of life.

This broadcast will be conducted live through All India Radio (AIR) and through the You Tube Channel of Prime Minister's Office (PMO). All private TV channels will also broadcast the PM's radio address.

This is the 37th edition of 'Mann Ki Baat'. Before every session of the monthly radio broadcast, the PM through various social media platforms asks the citizens to suggest any topic which needs to be emphasised.

Umpteen responses are received from the citizenry which can be read at the PM's website www. narendramodi.in.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
An off-duty Los Angeles police officer was shot multiple times with his own service weapon after a burglar broke into his private vehicle.

The suspect, who stole the cop's firearm and a bulletproof vest from the vehicle, was shot by the unnamed officer, who was carrying another weapon.

The incident happened in the underground parking lot of the officer's apartment building in Sherman Oaks at about 2:25 p.m. on Wednesday.

LAPD Chief Michael Moore told reporters that the 'senselessness' of the incident had left him 'extremely troubled.'

An off-duty Los Angeles police officer was shot multiple times with his own service weapon after a burglar broke into his private vehicle

The suspect, who stole the cop's firearm and a bulletproof vest from the vehicle, was shot by the unnamed officer, who was carrying another weapon

'From what started out as a burglary, a theft into a vehicle, and the senselessness of this escalated into this level of violence just has left me extremely troubled,' Moore said.

The officer was heading to his vehicle with an unidentified woman when they saw the male suspect sitting in the car, the New York Post reported.

The burglar was wearing the officer's bullet-proof vest when the officer confronted him.

Police said the suspect then opened fire, kicking off a shoot out in the parking lot that then moved to the street.

Authorities said the officer retrieved his service gun and vest after shooting the suspect three times. The suspect sustained injuries to his shoulder, arm and leg.

'The officer goes back to his vehicle inside the subterranean garage, rejoins the other individual he was there with and places those guns next to the vehicle and collapses,' Moore said.

The officer had multiple bullet wounds in his torso and one in his thigh.

Both men were hospitalized and are in a stable condition, the New York Post reported.

An investigation is underway and charges against the suspect are reportedly pending.

Moore said that officer had not been targeted and that the burglar appears to have been random.

'Praying for one of my friends that was just shot," LAPD Officer William Jones Jr. wrote on Twitter'.
Study by Sansum Diabetes Research Institute and Rice University points to new directions for improved diabetes care

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults.

The findings by researchers from Sansum Diabetes Research Institute (SDRI) and Rice University are available online this week in EClinicalMedicine, an open-access clinical journal published by The Lancet.

"The fresh look at the glucose data sheds new light on disease progression, which could have a direct impact on better management," said Rice study co-author Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor and department chair in electrical and computer engineering and founder of Rice's Scalable Health Labs. "An important aspect of our analysis is that the results are clinically interpretable and point to new directions for improved Type 2 diabetes care."

The study builds on SDRI's groundbreaking research to address Type 2 diabetes in underserved Hispanic/Latino communities. SDRI's Farming for Life initiative assesses the physical and mental health benefits of providing medical prescriptions for locally sourced fresh vegetables to people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes, with a focus on the Hispanic/Latino community. SDRI recently added a digital health technology called continuous glucose monitoring to this research.

Continuous glucose monitors track blood sugar levels around-the-clock and allow trends in blood glucose to be displayed and analyzed over time. The devices typically consist of two parts, a small electrode sensor affixed to the skin with an adhesive patch and a receiver that gathers data from the sensor.

"We found that the use of this technology is both feasible and acceptable for this population, predominantly Mexican American adults," said study co-author David Kerr, SDRI's director of research and innovation. "The results also provided new insights into measurable differences in the glucose profiles for individuals at risk of as well as with noninsulin-treated Type 2 diabetes. These findings could facilitate novel therapeutic approaches to reduce the risk of progression of Type 2 diabetes for this underserved population."

Sabharwal, who is also a co-investigator of the Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations (PATHS-UP) engineering research center, said, "The collaboration with SDRI aligns with our mission to use technology as an important building block to reduce health care disparities."

"We are excited about the application of digital health technologies for underserved populations as a way to eliminate health disparities and improve health equity," Kerr said. "This opens up potential for a larger number of collaborations to support SDRI's evolving focus on precision nutrition and also the expanded use of digital health technologies for both the prevention and management of all forms of diabetes."

###

Sabharwal is the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering.

Study co-authors include Souptik Barua of Rice and Namino Glantz, Casey Conneely, Arianna Larez and Wendy Bevier of SDRI.

The research was supported by the Department of Agriculture (2018-33800-28404), the National Science Foundation (1648451), the Hearst Foundation, the Mosher Foundation, Sun Life Financial, the St. Francis Foundation and the Blooming Prairie Foundation.

Links and resources:

The DOI of the EClinicalMedicine paper is: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100853

A copy of the paper is available at: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. eclinm. 2021. 100853

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https:/ / sansum. org/ images/ Lancet-graphic-print. jpg

CAPTION: Sansum Diabetes Research Institute's Farming for Life initiative addresses Type 2 diabetes in underserved Hispanic/Latino communities by assessing the physical and mental health benefits of providing medical prescriptions for locally sourced fresh vegetables to people with or at risk of the disease. In a study of participants who wore continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), devices that measure blood sugar levels around-the-clock, researchers showed CGM data can provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults. (Image courtesy of Sansum Diabetes Research Institute)

https:/ / news. rice. edu/ files/ 2018/ 01/ 180129-SCATTER-Ashu-lg-157myq6. jpg

CAPTION: Ashutosh Sabharwal is a professor and department chair in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University and the founder of Rice's Scalable Health Labs. (Photo courtesy of Rice University)

https:/ / sansum. org/ images/ David-Kerr-print. jpg

CAPTION: David Kerr is the director of research and innovation at Sansum Diabetes Research Institute. (Image courtesy of Sansum Diabetes Research Institute)

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
[April 29, 2021] Rick Juraschek Named Mid-Atlantic Regional Sales Director at Purchasing Power

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Rick Juraschek has been appointed Mid-Atlantic Regional Sales Director at Purchasing Power, LLC, an Atlanta-based voluntary benefit fintech company that offers the leading employee purchase program through the convenience of payroll deductions. Juraschek will be based in Charlotte and report directly to Purchasing Power Chief Revenue Officer Mike Wilbert. In his new role, Juraschek is responsible for strategic sales efforts directed toward benefit brokers and the targeted employer clients they represent. He is charged with building new broker segments to generate lasting business relationships representing the Purchasing Power program and its financial flexibiliy advantages for employees. Juraschek's sales activity will be targeted to Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.



"Rick's considerable experience and success in the employee benefits and healthcare industries provide valuable insight and understanding of how we can best serve our broker partners and their clients," said Wilbert. "He furthermore is well established in the mid-Atlantic region, where we are firmly positioned for brand growth and expansion. We're confident that Rick will bring new vision and creative strategies to our sales efforts." With more than 20 years of experience representing employee benefits selling including life, disability, absence management and voluntary products, Juraschek joins Purchasing Power after serving most recently as a national accounts sales director for the south east at Lincoln Financial Group, where he earned National Account Sales Rep of the Year in 2019. Prior to this, he was a group sales consultant for Liberty Mutual, where he was Group Sales Rep of the Year for 2014. He also held senior group sales roles at AIG and Canada Life.

Juraschek earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Among personal commitments, he is a longtime volunteer at Community Matters: Insurance Partners of Charlotte where he helps to raise funds on behalf of the Charlotte Rescue Mission. Purchasing Power brings employees of large corporations, associations, and government agencies a unique online retail purchasing platform with access to over 45,000 products and services that is delivered interest-free via payroll deduction with no liability or cost to the employer. Purchasing Power's stated mission is to "power people to a better life." About Purchasing Power, LLC

Purchasing Power, LLC, is an Atlanta-based voluntary benefit company celebrating 20 years as the leading employee purchase program for consumer products and services through payroll deduction. Helping employees achieve financial flexibility, Purchasing Power is available to millions of people through large companies including Fortune 500s, associations and government agencies. Purchasing Power is a Flexpoint Ford, LLC company. For more information, visit www.corp.purchasingpower.com Purchasing Power is a registered trademark of Purchasing Power, LLC.

2021 Purchasing Power, LLC. All rights reserved. Media Contact:

Joe Swaney, 404.609.5630

jswaney@purchasingpower.com



Juliann Kaiser, 770.643.0615

jkaiser@kaisermarketinggroup.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rick-juraschek-named-mid-atlantic-regional-sales-director-at-purchasing-power-301280342.html SOURCE Purchasing Power, LLC

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Japanese language courses help students develop strong speaking skills with the help of regular conversation meetings, sessions in the Language Learning Center, and tutoring. Early in the first year of study students begin learning traditional script. There are ample opportunities to practice with native speakers of Japanese. Most students regularly take part in Japanese Club activities.

There are special courses on Japanese culture, film, and literature.

BGSU students learning Japanese come from a variety of majorsin the School of Art, History, in the Schmidthorst College of Business, Popular Culture, and other fields.

The Japanese Program frequently sponsors art exhibits, performances, and other special events. There is an authentic tea ceremony room, adjacent to the gallery in the School of Art, and the Nakamoto Japanese Studies Room, where the Japanese Club meets.

The minor combines core Japanese language course work with additional elective work related to Japanese culture and literature. The total number of credits to complete the minor is 21.

Japanese Minor:

21 hours of coursework in Japanese, with at least 6 hours at the 3000 and/or 4000 level, including one course on literature or film. Required: JAPN 1010 (4 cr.) and JAPN 1020 (4 cr.) and JAPN 2010 (4 cr.) and JAPN 2020 (4 cr.); Electives: JAPN 3010 (3 cr.), JAPN 3020 (3 cr.), JAPN 3120 (3 cr.), JAPN 3000 (up to 3 cr.), JAPN 4150 (3 cr.), JAPN 4800 (up to 3 cr.), JAPN 4910 (up to 3 cr.)



The Asian Studies Program makes awards to students on a competitive basis (see below).

Semester and summer study and work abroad opportunities are open to all students of Japanese.

Program Features

Qualified students may spend a year in Japan through the student exchange program. It is a great opportunity to learn the language and the culture intensively.

Students have the opportunities to participate in an internship program in Japan for six months at a Japanese company. This allows the students to experience Japanese business practices first-hand.

The department actively supports the Japanese Club, one of the multicultural student organizations on campus.

Students may take the opportunity to use an authentic Japanese tea ceremony room and Nakamoto Room for Japanese Studies at BGSU.

Scholarships

The following scholarships are available to the students who are pursuing the studies in Japanese:

The Christina Merrick Scholarship is given to a student who has demonstrated excellence in the study of Japanese language.

The Dr. Hiroko Nakamoto Scholarship for Japanese studies is given to a student who has demonstrated excellence in the study of Japan.

The Mrs. Seiko McCann Scholarship is given to a student who has demonstrated leadership to promote American-Japanese friendship and understanding.

The Dr. Kiyo Kitahara Scholarship for Asian Studies is given to an Asian Studies major who has demonstrated excellence in the study of Asia.
Syracuse, N.Y. -- CenterState CEO announced the winners of this years Business of the Year awards during its annual meeting, which was held virtually on Thursday.

The awards recognize outstanding achievements of regional businesses and organizations in five categories. This years winners are:

Category: More than 50 employees

Winner: Quadrant Biosciences Inc.

With its academic research partners, it developed diagnostics and surveillance tools to aid in the detection of Covid-19 in individuals and communities across the U.S. In 2020, it gained national recognition for co-developing a saliva test for Covid-19.

Category: Less than 50 employees

Winner: ComSource Inc.

When Covid-19 hit, the IT solutions and service provider quickly adapt to the changing business landscape and its customer needs by developing and connecting clients to a variety of work-from-home solutions. It also connected customers with health and safety-related technology to aid their reopening efforts.

Additionally, ComSource opened a new headquarters in Franklin Square, created several new positions while retaining existing employees, and contributed to 23 philanthropic efforts, including the Jim & Juli Boeheim Foundation.

Category: Nonprofit

Winner: Central New York Community Foundation

In 2020, the Community Foundation administered the CNY COVID Community Support Fund, a joint effort with United Ways and other local partners that raised more than $2.2 million for immediate emergency response grants to nonprofits across four Central New York counties.

It also launched the Black Equity & Excellence Fund to support Black-led and Black-governed nonprofits and projects in Syracuse. , which distributed more than $550,000 in support to local, Black-led nonprofits and projects this past year.

Category: Community Involvement

Winner: Thompson & Johnson Equipment, Co.

In 2020, provided support to nonprofits with forklifts and heavy equipment, in addition to staff volunteer time and monetary donations. Notably, it supported nearly 10,000 meals to the FoodBank of CNY, FoodBank of the Southern Tier, and the Regional FoodBank.

Category: Minority-owned business (presented in partnership with the Upstate Minority Economic Alliance)

Winner: Dreissig Company

Dreissig offers products and services focused on apparel, uniforms, textiles, linens, industrial supplies, paper products and janitorial supplies. In 2020, after the company lost 60% of its revenue because of the pandemic, it pivoted to distributing personal protection equipment to hospitals, state agencies and local customers. The change greatly reducing its revenue loss for the year.

CenterState also announced the winners of its Health Care Heroes awards in recognition of CenterState members that represent hospital and critical testing partners for their front-line response during the pandemic:

Crouse Health

Nascentia Health, Inc.

Oswego Health

St. Josephs Health

Syracuse Community Health Center

Upstate University Hospital

Upstate University Hospital at Community General

WellNow Urgent Care

Also at the meeting, CenterState President Robert Simpson spoke about the challenges faced by the community as the result of the pandemic and how there are promising signs of recovery.

We are beginning to see signs that we are approaching a turning point in our economic recovery, he said. Unemployment has dropped from record highs at the height of the pandemic, the pipeline of projects is beginning to fill quickly, and perhaps more importantly, a sense of hope and optimism about our regions recovery is returning.

The meetings keynote speaker was Aisha Glover, vice president of Newark, New Jersey, based Urban Innovation at Audible, a creator of premium audio storytelling.
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The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to organise a national conference on security so as to galvanize ideas and options to tackle insecurity in our country.

The opposition party said this in a communique issued after its National Executive Council (NEC) meeting held on Thursday.

NEC also urged President Buhari to, without delay, convoke a national conference on Security so as to galvanize ideas and options to tackle insecurity in our country, the party said.

The PDP also asked the president to declare a state of emergency in the security sector.

The party questioned Mr Buharis commitment to curb the insecurity across the country.

The Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, a member of the PDP, had on Tuesday, while addressing people protesting the recent attack by suspected herders, called on Mr Buhari to call a national security conference.

Mr Ortom said not less than 70 persons were murdered in two weeks in Makurdi, one of the local government areas in the state.

The National Assembly has also deliberated on the security situation with the House of Representatives saying it would organise a security summit.
Videoconference meeting of Ambassador of Belarus N.Ovsyanko with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador

On April 28, 2021, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Republic of Colombia and the Republic of Ecuador concurrently Nikolai Ovsyanko held a videoconference with Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador Cesar Montano.

During the conversation, the parties discussed topical issues of the Belarusian-Ecuadorian agenda and interaction of the two countries within international organizations.

Special attention was paid to the issues of enhancing bilateral cooperation in the trade and economic sphere.

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[April 29, 2021] ZEDEDA Accelerates Growth with New Executive Hires, Opening of European Headquarters in Berlin

ZEDEDA, the leader in orchestration for the distributed edge, today announced the hiring of three industry veterans to executive roles, along with the opening of its European headquarters in Berlin, Germany. The moves come weeks after ZEDEDA closed a $12.5 million strategic investment round with an eye on expanding its global leadership in secure distributed edge computing. The company was recently named IoT Security Platform of the Year as part of the 9th Annual Compass Intelligence (News - Alert) Awards, while CRN included ZEDEDA in its list of the 10 Coolest IoT Software Companies of 2021. "Since the launch of ZEDEDA's distributed edge orchestration solution in January, demand has far surpassed our expectations," said ZEDEDA founder and CEO Said Ouissal. "The executives joining our team bring deep expertise in operating world-class organizations and will help ZEDEDA grow and scale. And, our new Berlin office opens access to top developer talent in Europe and a new support hub for our international customers." Executive Team Adds Industry Veterans Darren Kimura, Padraig Stapleton, Michael Pearl Darren Kimura, who previously served as President and CEO at LiveAction (a Network Performance Management software company) and pioneered MicroCSP (Micro-scaled Concentrating Solar Power technologies) as CEO of Sopogy, joins the company as Chief Operating Officer. With experience taking three previous companies from seed stage to exit, and as a venture capitalist, Kimura will drive ZEDEDA's go-to-market growth and strategy.



"The growth that ZEDEDA has achieved is a testament to its vision, product excellence and execution," Kimura said. "I'm excited to join this amazing team, driving strategy and execution, with the goal to extend our leadership in the edge computing industry as we expand operations globally." Padraig Stapleton brings senior management experience in both public and pre-IPO companies to his new role as ZEDEDA's VP of Engineering. Stapleton spent two years growing AT&T's (News - Alert) Big Data Development group and most recently served as chief of engineering at Mobileum. At ZEDEDA, Stapleton will coordinate the work of engineers worldwide, focusing on driving innovation and improving product quality.

"Edge computing creates a complexity within organizations, from new challenges around security, availability, networking, and more, to an immense diversity of hardware, applications, data sources and destinations, and more. " Stapleton said. "ZEDEDA's vision of an open framework that enables organizations to easily scale their edge deployments is industry-defining, and I'm excited to join ZEDEDA to build and scale its worldwide engineering operations." Veteran sales executive Michael Pearl joins ZEDEDA to grow sales and drive customer engagements. Prior to ZEDEDA, Pearl spent two years leading Cisco's Industrial IoT Americas sales team after previously serving in various IoT and networking sales and business development leadership roles at Cisco, Jasper and Axeda (News - Alert) . Pearl brings extensive startup experience, with expertise leading OEM sales engagements and scaling sales organizations to drive rapid revenue growth. "As more organizations focus on automation, analytics and AI while utilizing multi-cloud capabilities, ZEDEDA is in a unique position to help companies secure and scale the distributed computing edge while providing future proof, long-term orchestration options to our customers," Pearl said. "I'm excited to join ZEDEDA at this pivotal stage and help define and execute on the company's vision for expanding its sales operations." Berlin Office Actively Recruiting Open- Source (News - Alert) Developers ZEDEDA's European headquarters in Berlin, Germany, will serve as an R&D hub and support European-based customers and will be under the leadership of veteran open-source developer Dr. Dmitri Chiriaev. Initial efforts will build an extension of ZEDEDA's engineering team, focused primarily on the open-source development of EVE-OS within Project EVE in the Linux Foundation's (News - Alert) LF Edge organization. ZEDEDA contributed the initial code for Project EVE in 2019, with the goal of establishing an open, vendor-agnostic and standardized architecture and operating system that streamlines orchestration of cloud-native and legacy apps for distributed compute nodes. In this regard, EVE-OS can be thought of as "the Android of distributed edge computing." ZEDEDA leverages EVE-OS as the edge foundation for its cloud-based orchestration solution to deliver visibility, control, and security to the distributed edge at scale. Interested applicants should visit the ZEDEDA career page. About ZEDEDA

ZEDEDA, the leader in orchestration for the distributed edge, delivers visibility, control and security for edge computing deployments. ZEDEDA enables customers the freedom of deploying and managing any app on any hardware? ?at scale? ?and connecting to any cloud or on-premises systems. Distributed edge solutions require a diverse mix of technologies and domain expertise, and ZEDEDA provides customers with an open, vendor-agnostic orchestration framework that breaks down silos and provides the needed agility and futureproofing as they evolve their connected operations. Customers can now seamlessly orchestrate intelligent applications at the distributed edge to gain access to critical insights, make real-time decisions and maximize operational efficiency. ZEDEDA is a venture-backed Silicon Valley company headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in Bangalore and Pune, India and Berlin, Germany. For more information, contact info@zededa.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005094/en/

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Manlius, N.Y.  Leah McIrwin charted out her future with one goal in mind: Helping others.

Central New York, the place where she grew up, was where she decided to start a career geared toward making a difference.

McIrwin, a 2015 Fayette-Manlius High School graduate, returned to the Syracuse area in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic after earning a masters degree in social work.

She joined Helio Health in January 2021, where she worked as a case manager for people trying to deal with mental illness and/or substance abuse.

It was a tough job, said Jeremy Klemanski, president and CEO of Helio Health. But McIrwin had a heart to serve, he said, and quickly became known as someone her clients could count on.

But just four months into her career, McIrwins life  one she was trying to dedicate to helping others  was over.

McIrwin, 23, and Oscar Sullivan, 25, were found dead inside their Manlius apartment on Monday morning. Officers had stopped by the 4601 Hadley Lane residence to check on McIrwin after her mother reported she failed to show up to work.

Investigators are still working to determine how the pair died, said Capt. Kevin J. Schafer, of the Manlius Police Department.

McIrwin, after graduating from high school, earned her bachelors degree in social work from Syracuse University. She then continued her education at the University at Buffalo, where she graduated in 2020 with a masters degree in social work.

McIrwin interned at UBMD Neurology when she was studying at the University at Buffalo, a college spokeswoman said. During her internship, she visited the community services her patients used to get a full feeling for what options were open to the people she served, said Mary Karpinski, who served as McIrwins field educator.

She worked from her first day to her last day of practice learning about what services were available and how they could benefit the patients she worked with, Karpinski said of McIrwin. She showed compassion to each patient and their families.

After finishing her masters degree, McIrwin returned to the Syracuse area. She started working as a case manager at Helios Star Park Apartments, a supportive housing program in Syracuse for people with histories of substance abuse and mental illness.

Klemanski, of Helio, said McIrwin worked to find ways her clients lives could be improved or enriched  doing everything from connecting her clients with medical appointments and job opportunities to helping them find hobbies and places to volunteer.

Days after McIrwins death, the people she helped have come forward to tell Helio managers how much they valued her, Klemanski said.

One resident, in particular, said: She was the person I always went to when I needed something, he said. She clearly made a big impression on people.

McIrwins fellow F-M alumni mourned her death on a Facebook page for the high schools class of 2015.

Her former classmates remembered McIrwin as a sweet person and calming presence  a person known for her kind, caring nature. One classmate wrote: Rest In Peace dear Leah, you were a lovely soul. Our memories as children growing up/time spent in your neighborhood and backyard will always be fond to me. I am praying for your family.

McIrwin also worked for more than six years at TJ Maxx in the Towne Center in Fayetteville, according to her Linkedin listing.

McIrwins parents, Mary McGuire and Robert Irwin, live in Fayetteville. A family member who lives in Fayetteville declined comment at this time.

Staff writer Samantha House covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? Reach her at shouse@syracuse.com.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (Bank) today announced its operating results for the first quarter of 2021. Net income for the first quarter of 2021 was $94 million, compared with a net loss of $8 million for the first quarter of 2020.

The $102 million increase in net income relative to the prior-year period primarily reflected an increase in net interest income of $109 million and an improvement in provision for/(reversal of) credit losses of $45 million. This was partially offset by a decrease in other income of $39 million, primarily attributable to an increase in net fair value losses associated with financial instruments carried at fair value that was partially offset by an increase in net fair value gains associated with non-hedge qualifying derivatives.

The $109 million increase in net interest income primarily reflected an increase of $64 million in net fair value gains on designated fair value hedges, an improvement in retrospective adjustment of the effective yields on mortgage loans and related delivery commitments of $38 million, and an increase in prepayment fees received on advances of $7 million. Additionally, the Bank recorded a reversal of credit losses of $6 million for the first quarter of 2021, primarily associated with certain private-label residential mortgage-backed securities (PLRMBS) classified as available-for-sale (AFS) and largely resulting from improved credit performance and an improved economic outlook. This reversal compares with a provision for credit losses of $39 million recorded for the first quarter of 2020 associated with certain PLRMBS classified as AFS, which primarily resulted from a significant decline in fair values in the first quarter of 2020.

At March 31, 2021, total assets were $57.9 billion, a decrease of $10.7 billion from $68.6 billion at December 31, 2020. Total investments decreased $7.7 billion, to $27.5 billion at March 31, 2021, from $35.2 billion at December 31, 2020. The decrease in investments primarily reflected a decrease in securities purchased under agreements to resell, U.S. Treasury securities, and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), that was partially offset by an increase in Federal funds sold, as the Bank continued to manage its liquidity. In addition, advances decreased $2.9 billion, to $28.1 billion at March 31, 2021, from $31.0 billion at December 31, 2020, as many members maintained significant deposit balances and excess liquidity resulting from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accumulated other comprehensive income/(loss) (AOCI) increased by $137 million during the first quarter of 2021, to $367 million at March 31, 2021, from $230 million at December 31, 2020. The increase in AOCI during the first quarter of 2021 primarily reflected higher fair values of MBS classified as AFS.

As of March 31, 2021, the Bank complied with all of its regulatory capital requirements. The Banks total regulatory capital ratio was 10.3%, exceeding the 4.0% requirement. The Bank had $6.0 billion in permanent capital, exceeding its risk-based capital requirement of $1.2 billion. Total retained earnings as of March 31, 2021, were $3.7 billion.

Today, the Banks board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend on the capital stock outstanding during the first quarter of 2021 at an annualized rate of 6.00%. The quarterly dividend rate is consistent with the Bank's dividend philosophy of endeavoring to pay a quarterly dividend at a rate between 5% and 7% annualized. The quarterly dividend will total $34 million. The Bank expects to pay the dividend on May 11, 2021.

Financial Highlights(Unaudited)(Dollars in millions)

Selected Balance Sheet Items at Period End Mar. 31, 2021 Dec. 31, 2020 Total Assets $ 57,908 $ 68,634 Advances 28,140 30,796 Mortgage Loans Held for Portfolio, Net 1,581 1,935 Investments, Net1 27,526 35,228 Consolidated Obligations: Bonds 33,011 44,408 Discount Notes 17,109 16,213 Capital Stock  Class B  Putable 2,238 2,284 Unrestricted Retained Earnings 2,983 2,919 Restricted Retained Earnings 761 761 Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income/(Loss) 367 230 Total Capital 6,349 6,194 Selected Other Data at Period End Mar. 31, 2021 Dec. 31, 2020 Regulatory Capital Ratio2 10.33 % 8.69 %

Three Months Ended Selected Operating Results for the Period Mar. 31, 2021 Mar. 31, 2020 Net Interest Income $ 158 $ 49 Provision for/(Reversal of) Credit Losses (6 ) 39 Other Income/(Loss) (21 ) 18 Other Expense 39 36 Affordable Housing Program Assessment 10  Net Income/(Loss) $ 94 $ (8 ) Three Months Ended Selected Other Data for the Period Mar. 31, 2021 Mar. 31, 2020 Net Interest Margin3 1.04 % 0.18 % Operating Expenses as a Percent of Average Assets 0.23 0.12 Return on Average Assets 0.61 (0.03 ) Return on Average Equity 6.04 (0.46 ) Annualized Dividend Rate4 5.00 7.00 Average Equity to Average Assets Ratio 10.01 6.09

1. Investments consist of Federal funds sold, interest-bearing deposits, trading securities, available-for-sale securities, held-to-maturity securities, and securities purchased under agreements to resell.2. This ratio is calculated as regulatory capital divided by total assets. Regulatory capital includes retained earnings, Class B capital stock, and mandatorily redeemable capital stock (which is classified as a liability) but excludes accumulated other comprehensive income/(loss). Total regulatory capital as of March 31, 2021, was $6.0 billion.3. Net interest margin is net interest income (annualized) divided by average interest-earning assets.4. Cash dividend declared, recorded, and paid during the period, on the capital stock outstanding during the previous quarter.

Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco is a member-driven cooperative helping local lenders in Arizona, California, and Nevada build strong communities, create opportunity, and change lives for the better. The tools and resources we provide to our member financial institutionscommercial banks, credit unions, industrial loan companies, savings institutions, insurance companies, and community development financial institutionsfoster homeownership, expand access to quality housing, seed or sustain small businesses, and revitalize whole neighborhoods. Together with our members and other partners, we are making the communities we serve more vibrant and resilient.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements related to the Banks dividend philosophy and dividend rates. These statements are based on our current expectations and speak only as of the date hereof. These statements may use forward-looking terms, such as endeavoring, will, and expects, or their negatives or other variations on these terms. The Bank cautions that by their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk or uncertainty and that actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements or could affect the extent to which a particular objective, projection, estimate, or prediction is realized, including future dividends. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the application of accounting standards relating to, among other things, the amortization of discounts and premiums on financial assets, financial liabilities, and certain fair value gains and losses; hedge accounting of derivatives and underlying financial instruments; the fair values of financial instruments, including investment securities and derivatives; future operating results; allowance for credit losses; and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

Contact:Mary Long, (415) 616-2556longm@fhlbsf.com

Source: Federal Home Loan Bank Of San Francisco
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Northbrook, IL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/28/2021 -- According to the new market research report "Machine Condition Monitoring Market with COVID-19 Impact Analysis, by Monitoring Technique (Vibration Monitoring, Oil Analysis, Corrosion Monitoring), Monitoring Process, Deployment Type, Offering, Industry, and Region - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Machine Condition Monitoring Market size is projected to grow from USD 2.6 billion in 2021 to USD 3.6 billion by 2026; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.1% from 2021 to 2026. The growth of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market is majorly driven by significance of remote operations owing to spread of COVID-19, advent of secure cloud computing platforms used for machine condition monitoring, adoption of wireless communication technology in machine condition monitoring, inclination toward predictive maintenance of industrial machinery, and deployment of automated condition monitoring technologies in smart factories.



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Online Condition monitoring accounted for the larger size of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market in 2020.



Online condition monitoring accounted for the largest market in 2020. Online condition monitoring is an advanced monitoring process and it provides real-time plant data to operators, resulting in its higher adoption than portable condition monitoring process. Online vibration monitoring systems have applications in industries where a 24-hour production is required. In production-intensive industries, such as oil and gas, power generation, and mining and metals, failure of some devices leads to complete system overhauls, high repair costs, and an unsafe work environment. Thus, such industries require continuous monitoring of assets and machinery.



Oil and gas segment is expected to hold the largest size of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market in 2020.



Oil and gas segment is expected to hold the largest share in the Machine Condition Monitoring Market during the forecast period. The industry has been emphasizing increasing its profitability owing to the rising pressure of high operating costs of oil and gas plants. Fluctuations in oil prices in the global market are another factor contributing to the increasing pressure on the oil and gas industry to reduce its operating costs. Thus, this industry is expected to adopt condition monitoring systems and solutions to maintain the efficient working of its critical assets and reduce downtime. Moreover, the increasing demand for online condition monitoring solutions is expected to further drive the growth of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market for oil and gas industry. Though the oil and gas industry accounted for the largest share of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market in 2020, there was a sharp decline in oil prices owing to the COVID-19 in the same year. This may adversely affect the deployment of new machine condition monitoring systems and solutions in the oil and gas industry in 2021.



Browse in-depth TOC on "Machine Condition Monitoring Market"



218  Tables

79  Figures

293  Pages



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North America is projected to be the largest market for machine condition monitoring from 2021 to 2026.



North America accounted for the largest share of the Machine Condition Monitoring Market in 2020. Factors such as increased focus on optimum asset utilization; tight government regulations for workplace and personnel safety; and stringent quality control in the oil and gas, chemicals, and food and beverages industries drive the demand for machine condition monitoring systems and solutions in North America. The post-COVID-19 scenario is expected to be characterized by supply chain disruptions and suspension of commercial and industrial activities. Consequently, the demand for semiconductor devices in these segments is anticipated to reduce remarkably. The US, which is home to the majority of manufacturers of machine condition monitoring systems, has witnessed the impact of the COVID-19 on the production of sensors and other components owing to disruptions in the manufacturing activities caused by lockdowns and shutdowns of production facilities.



Emerson Electric Co. (US), General Electric Co. (US), Honeywell International Inc. (US), National Instruments Corp. (US), SKF AB (Sweden), ALS Ltd. (Australia), Wilcoxon Sensing Technologies Inc. (US), Parker Hannifin Corp. (US), Rockwell Automation Inc. (US), Schaeffler AG (Germany), Bruel & Kjaer (Denmark), Symphony Industrial AI Inc. (US), are some of the major players in Machine Condition Monitoring Market.



Related Reports:



Machine Safety Market with COVID-19 Impact, by Component (Presence Sensing Safety Sensors, Safety PLCs, Safety Modules/Controllers/Relays), Implementation, Application (Assembly, Packaging, Robotics), Industry, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025



Vibration Monitoring Market by Component (Hardware and Software), System Type (Embedded Systems, Vibration Analyzers, and Vibration Meters), Monitoring Process (Online and Portable), Industry, and Region  Global Forecast to 2025



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WOOD COUNTY, Wis., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DATAMARK, the public safety GIS team of Michael Baker International, has been selected by Wood County, Wisconsin, to provide DATAMARK Address Comparison and Evaluation (ACE) services. The ACE will compare a master address database to other sources containing address records and identify potentially missing address data. The resulting report will provide the highest level of public safety GIS data completeness and accuracy needed to support Wood County's NG9-1-1 system.

DATAMARK (PRNewsfoto/DATAMARK)

"Having a complete and accurate address database is of the utmost importance in emergency situations and when gaps in data exist, it can delay or inhibit our first responders from providing critical services," said Drew Fioranelli, Business Development Manager at DATAMARK, Michael Baker International. "Our team of experts will work with Wood County to compile an all-inclusive address database to meet the data requirements for NG9-1-1 and ensure accurate emergency response location data."

As a part of the one-year contract, the DATAMARK team will work from a master address dataset and perform a comparative analysis to other data sources, which may include parcel or utility databases, waste management records, etc. The team will verify addresses with highly accurate commercial location data.

About DATAMARK

As trusted advisors in public safety, DATAMARK brings comprehensive, real-world expertise in police, fire, EMS and 9-1-1 leadership roles to Next Generation 9-1-1 transitions. The DATAMARK team leads the industry by shaping rules and legislation, and by building a suite of products and services that ensure accurate emergency response location data in life-critical situations. DATAMARK empowers its team and stakeholder partners to foster trusted relationships and cultivate data integrity for informed decision making. DATAMARK, the public safety GIS team of Michael Baker International, has decades of proven experience in mission-critical government addressing projects. The team works with clients to solve their complex needs, from data quality checks and addressing to workflow analysis and more. Learn more about the company at www.datamarkgis.com and follow DATAMARK on Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook .

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About Michael Baker International

Michael Baker International is a leading provider of engineering and consulting services. The firm's Practices encompass all facets of infrastructure, including design, civil engineering, planning, architecture, environmental, construction and program management. For more than 80 years, the company has been a trusted partner, providing comprehensive services and solutions to commercial clients and all branches of the military, as well as federal, state and municipal governments. Embracing emerging technologies and the latest innovations  like intelligent transportation and design-build project delivery  Michael Baker is an industry leader that delivers expertise and quality. The firm's more than 3,000 employees across nearly 100 locations are committed to Making a Difference for clients and communities through a culture of innovation, collaboration and technological advancement. To learn more, visit https://mbakerintl.com/ .

Contact: Julia Covelli

julia.covelli@mbakerintl.com

(866) 293-4609

Cision

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SOURCE DATAMARK
Texas' oil exploration and production sector added 4,300 jobs in March, the largest single monthly gain since the summer of 2011.

The sector has added 12,000 jobs since September, bringing the total drilling and oil extraction employment in Texas to 169,700 jobs, according to data from the Texas Workforce Commission analyzed by the Texas Oil and Gas Association.

As our state continues to recover economically from the effects of the COVID-19 global pandemic, continued gains in the upstream sector of the Texas oil and natural gas industry are another sign that life is getting back to normal for many Texans, said Todd Staples, president of the trade group, in a statement.

The oil and gas industry is recovering from the worst downturn in decades with crude prices and demand rising as more Americans receive coronavirus vaccines and states lift pandemic-related restrictions. Texas lost about 60,000 exploration and production jobs during the global pandemic, which slashed demand for crude products such as gasoline and jet fuel. Nationally, the oil and gas industry lost an estimated 107,000 jobs during the pandemic, according to global consulting firm Deloitte.

RECOVERY: Oil and gas bankruptcies fall in first quarter as crude prices rebound

The sector has posted three consecutive months of job gains as crude prices have climbed above $60 a barrel, a price at which many producers can turn a profit. Texas has seen upstream sector job growth in five of the past six months.

Employment in oil-field services, which performs many of the drilling activities for E&P companies and is upstream's largest employer, took the biggest hit during the past year. OFS companies, including Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, cut more than 102,000 jobs, including 39,000 in Texas, during the pandemic. Since late last year, the services sector has gained back more than 23,000 jobs, or about 3.8 percent, according to the Energy Workforce & Technology Council.

Analysts fear, however, that robotics and automation could slash more oil and gas jobs by 2030 as energy companies turn to more-efficient methods. At least 20 percent, or more than 140,000 jobs in drilling, operational support and maintenance are at risk of becoming automated over the next decade, according to Norwegian energy research firm Rystad.

Robotic drilling systems can potentially reduce the number of roughnecks required on a drilling rig by 20 to 30 percent, decreasing the annual cost of U.S. wages in the industry by more than $7 billion by 2030, according to Rystad.
San Francisco superintendent Vincent Matthews urged the school board to bring in consultants last June, but the firm he recommended were rejected on ideological grounds

The San Francisco school board that parents blasted for frittering away time during lockdown by renaming 'racist' schools finally has agreed to hire a consultant to figure out how to re-open its schools - a year after rejecting the idea.

School Superintendent Vince Matthews has once again asked the board to hire consultants to plan the nuts and bolts of re-opening the 55,000-student school district after being shut for a year. The board rejected the idea last June, even though it had donations to fund the $90,000 cost.

Now, the board has done an about-face, and is finally looking for an outside consultant to help it re-open its schools, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The board has come under harsh pressure from parents to re-open.

Back in June, the board blocked the hire of consultants Planning Partnership Group by a vote of 4-2 because the consultants had previously worked with private charter schools, which operate separate from public schools, though they use some public funding.

One board member, Alison Collins, at the time said the consultants were 'like a crime syndicate or something', for consulting with charter schools, the Chronicle wrote.

Collins is the woman who was lambasted last month when tweets came to light that were considered anti-Asian and that also used the term 'house n*****.' She resisted calls to resign and has initiated an $87 million lawsuit against the district and some of her colleagues.

Now, Matthews is again seeking to hire consultants that would look at three scenarios for the fall, according to the Chronicle: one that gets kids back into school assuming widespread vaccination of adolescents and adults; one that looks at current health guidelines remining in place; and one that looks at less-restrictive guidelines.

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Plexiglass dividers are set up on tables in a first grade classroom at San Francisco's Bryant Elementary School on April 09, 2021. Students have just started to head back to class

Bryant Elementary School kindergarten teacher Chris Johnson sets up his classroom on April 09, 2021. San Francisco schools have been among the slowest to reopen in the country

The board's vice president, Faauuga Moliga, told the Chronicle the board likely would support a consultant this time around. It's unclear if there are still donations committed to paying for the consultants.

Health officials authorized San Francisco schools to begin reopening last September - and state legislators passed a law requiring public schools to offer in-person learning where possible.

However, the California city's school board resisted attempts to force them to return children to the classroom, and only allowed students to begin trickling back into classrooms in April.

San Francisco has had one of the slowest reopenings of its public schools anywhere in the country, with fewer than half of students back in the classroom.

A pandemic of racism: From renaming schools to historic Tweets The San Francisco School Board voted to strip Vice President Alison Collins of her leadership title after anti-Asian tweets she penned in 2016 were recently unearthed The renaming debacle is just one of several controversies the San Francisco school board has faced during the pandemic. The board ousted one of its members Alison Collins from her role as vice president over anti-Asian American tweets she wrote in 2016. In the series of tweets she posted on December 4 2016, she referred to Asian Americans as 'house n***ers' and said they used 'white supremacist thinking' to get ahead. 'Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump?' Collins asked in her Twitter thread. 'Don't Asian Americans know they are on his list as well? Do they think they won't be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You're still considered 'the help''. Collins resisted calls to step down but five board members voted to pass the No Confidence Resolution in her. She is now suing the district and former board colleagues for $87 million, seeking damages. Advertisement

The school board has instead been convulsed in a months-long battle over renaming schools that it deemed had been named after racist figures.

Under the plan to rename schools voted in in January, schools named after George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were to be renamed after board members found what they believed to be incriminating evidence of racism on sites such as Wikipedia.

After widespread criticism and legal threats, the San Francisco board eventually reversed its decision in early April.

Last June, as frustrated parents juggled kids' Zoom lessons and working from home, San Francisco Unified Superintendent Vincent Matthews warned that rejecting the proposal to hire consultants would be a 'body blow' to reopening efforts.

But he couldn't convince the board - which had funding in place - to follow through on the proposal, and by August, the school district still didn't have a comprehensive plan in place, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

In March, Matthews announced he would retire at the end of the school year, before reversing that decision and agreeing to stay on to oversee getting children back into classrooms.

In early April, San Francisco's school board reversed its much-criticized decision to rename 44 schools that were named after 'controversial' historic figures, including American presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The city's Board of Education voted unanimously to formally suspend its plan to strip the names off a third of San Francisco's public schools - a move that was criticized as cancel culture run amok.

The board had previously said the school names honored figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices.

Among the schools set to be renamed were buildings named after writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere as well as longtime Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who also was mayor of San Francisco starting in the late 1970s.

The school board, which convened over Zoom, didn't admit it had made a mistake. Instead, the board said it was reversing its renaming decision to avoid 'frivolous litigation' after being sued for violating the states open meeting law with its initial decision.

It initially voted to rename the schools back in January - a move that sparked an immediate backlash with critics slamming the decision as cancel culture gone too far and others pointing out significant flaws in the board's research, some of which was conducted on Wikipedia and all of which didn't consult historians.

Parents, students and elected officials also blasted the timing of the move when many felt the board should have been focusing on getting children back into the classroom as schools were had been shuttered since last March.

Columnist and city scribe Carl Nolte previously hit out that 'while we're at it, what about renaming San Francisco', noting that the city was named by missionaries for a Roman Catholic saint.

'Clearly that fits the guidelines for a new name,' he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle after January's vote.

Former US Presidents Abraham Lincoln, left, and George Washington, right, are among 44 historical figures whose names were to be stripped from San Francisco schools

Abraham Lincoln High School is seen in San Francisco. A San Francisco school board has reversed its decision to rename 44 schools that were named after historic figures including American presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson

California Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein was supposed to have her name stripped from a city school as well because when she was mayor in 1984, a decision was made to replace a vandalized Confederate flag

Historian Harold Holzer called the school board's first stab at renaming an 'over correction.'

Holzer disagreed with deleting Abraham Lincoln's name from a high school, which the San Francisco committee said was due to the treatment of Native Americans during his administration.

'I know people want to be inspired and want not to be worshipping false idols,' said Holzer, a Lincoln Scholar and director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House of Public Policy Institute.

'But, honestly, to me there is still no better example of the American story at it's highest level of idealism than Abraham Lincoln.'

In the midst of the Civil War in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the Confederacy, among other achievements that included rising out of poverty to become president, fighting for equal opportunity and saving the country from splitting up.

'If Lincoln doesn't win, we're in big trouble,' said Holzer.

'The achievements so far outweigh the mistakes. I think he deserves adulation.'

California Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein was supposed to have her name stripped from a city school as well because when she was mayor in 1984, a decision was made to replace a vandalized Confederate flag

In February, board president Gabriela Lopez admitted that 'mistakes' had been made in the selection and said the process would be paused until all children were back in school.

Lopez said when the board returns to the issue, it will engage historians for a 'more deliberative process.'

'We need to slow down and provide more opportunities for community input,' she said.

Since the renaming vote, the board has faced multiple lawsuits on a number of issues.

In March, a suit was filed by San Francisco attorney Paul Scott, whose children attend public schools, alleging the school board's renaming decision violated

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman issued a ruling calling on the board to do what the lawsuit requests - rescind the vote and dissolve the renaming advisory committee - or show by April 16 why it shouldn't be compelled to do so.

A separate suit was filed by City Hall and the mayor to pressure the school district and board to reopen classrooms more quickly.

California's open meeting law and did not involve the community.

However, the renaming saga may not be fully over, with the board still planning to revisit the matter after all students have returned full time to in-person learning.
Serco staff cooked up fake invoices worth 500,000 a month at the height of an ill-fated attempt to defraud the taxpayer, it has been revealed.

The company had a contract with the Ministry of Justice to monitor electronically-tagged offenders, awarded in 2005.

This had a clause requiring it to pay back excess profits to the Government.

Fake invoices: Serco had a contract with the Ministry of Justice to monitor electronically-tagged offenders, awarded in 2005

But between August 2011 and January 2013 it tried to hide these takings by creating false charges worth nearly 15million.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said that for one period of six months 500,000 per month was being falsely charged.

However the company was later investigated and agreed to pay a 23million out-of-court settlement.

Details were revealed for the first time yesterday after reporting restrictions lifted.

That followed the embarrassing collapse of the SFOs prosecution of two former Serco executives.
This April, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has successfully finished its third flight to Mars. The team behind this technology considered this as a huge improvement that they have achieved.

The demo project needs first to meet all three objectives to rule it out as successful.

While we are surprised by the spacecraft's most recent flight, the Ingenuity team seems to be wanting more discoveries on the red planet. At the time, they wanted to conduct a fourth test flight to further conduct a thorough study on the planet's craters and rocks.

Ingenuity Helicopter Fourth Flight Launch Date

On Wednesday, Apr. 28, NASA said that the next flight will happen this week. The fourth flight is set for Thursday, Apr. 29 at 10:12 AM EST.

It's only a matter of days after the third flight has occurred, and again, we will be seeing another experiment on the surface of Earth's neighboring planet.

Six years ago, the team accomplished their first objective after carrying out a flight demo of the helicopter. The spacecraft managed to glide while inside a JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Chamber.

Read Also: NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Successful Third Flight Hints at 'Rotorcraft'

Meanwhile, the second objective was accomplished this April, when the Ingenuity has triumphantly landed on the red planet. It even obtained its third and last objective of flying at nearly 4.5 MPH in 164 feet while on a 16-feet altitude.

Regardless of the accomplishments of the Ingenuity helicopter, the team has yet to conduct more experiments with the given numbers.

"When Ingenuity's landing legs touched down after that third flight, we knew we had accumulated more than enough data to help engineers design future generations of Mars helicopters. Now we plan to extend our range, speed, and duration to gain further performance insight," Ingenuity chief engineer J. "Bob" Balaram said.

What Will the Fourth Flight of the Ingenuity Helicopter Cover?

According to the latest report by Engadget's Mariella Moon, the fourth flight of the Ingenuity helicopter will involve a lot of changes. Compared to the third flight, the machine will fly for an approximate height of 276 feet from its starting point while maintaining a 16-feet altitude.

Moreover, the best part of the upcoming test flight will be an increased airspeed to 8 MPH from the previous 4.5 MPH. Furthermore, the airborne time will be lengthened to 117 seconds from 80 seconds.

For the data gathering, NASA JPL assumes that by 1:21 PM EST on Apr. 29, the first data set will be collected already from the test flight. This will guarantee that we would no longer have to wait for long periods to determine the success of the fourth flight.

If there is a fourth test, we could also expect another one-the fifth and the final flight. At the moment, there is no official date for that experiment.

Most likely, we could hear more about the last flight after the Ingenuity team has already accumulated enough data for the investigation.

After completing the five flights, NASA could transfer to its main mission on the Mars Perseverance rover. For this part, the team will be seeking potential forms of ancient life on the planet.

Related Article: NASA Releases First Color Photo of Mars Taken by Ingenuity, Shows Red Colors of the Planet

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
HYDE PARK, N.Y., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and FoodService Director (FSD) have unveiled the Plant-Forward Healthcare Operations to Watch, a list of hospitals and senior-living communities whose foodservice teams demonstrate industry-leading innovation in plant-forward cuisine, local sourcing, sustainability, and more. The plant-forward movement has taken the foodservice world by storm, and with COVID-19 casting a harsh spotlight on the link between poor food choices and many of the underlying health conditions that elevated risk of disease and death during the pandemic, the concept of food as a vital pathway to good health may have a more receptive audience than ever before.

The CIA and FSD collaborated on developing the list with input from Health Care Without Harm, an organization that promotes sustainability within healthcare. The CIA and FSD will further feature honorees from the list as part of the CIA's Menus of Change Leadership Summit: Virtual Edition, June 22-24, and at FSD's MenuDirections conference, taking place Oct. 17-19, at the University of Notre Dame.

"The term 'hospital food' once conjured up images of soggy vegetables and gray meat, but not anymore," said Greg Drescher, the CIA's vice president of strategic initiatives and industry leadership. "The organizations on this list shatter that stereotype with creative menus and mouthwatering dishes that show patients and visitors how vibrant and flavorful healthy, plant-forward eating can be."

The CIA has long worked to promote healthy, sustainable, and delicious menu strategies, through its Menus of Change initiative, a collaboration with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthDepartment of Nutrition, and, most recently, through a host of educational resources at the CIA's Plant-Forward Kitchen website. In mid-2021, the CIA will launch its new plant-forward training and certification program for foodservice operators.

"As consumers up their demand for plant-based offerings, dining teams across the country are finding exciting ways to deliver," said FSD Editor-in-Chief Kelsey Nash. "The innovation exemplified by these operations is a testament to the versatility and promise of produce and other plants at the center of the plate."

For additional information, or to view the full list, visit https://www.foodservicedirector.com/plant-forward-healthcare-operations-to-watch.

About The Culinary Institute of America

Founded in 1946, The Culinary Institute of America is the world's premier culinary college. Dedicated to developing leaders in foodservice and hospitality, the independent, not-for-profit CIA offers master's, bachelor's, and associate degrees with majors in culinary arts, baking & pastry arts, food business management, hospitality management, culinary science, and applied food studies. The college also offers executive education, certificate programs, and courses for professionals and enthusiasts. Its conferences, leadership initiatives, and consulting services have made the CIA the think tank of the food industry and its worldwide network of more than 50,000 alumni includes innovators in every area of the food world. The CIA has locations in New York, California, Texas, and Singapore. For more information, visit www.ciachef.edu .

About FoodService Director

For more than 30 years, FoodService Director has served as the noncommercial foodservice operator's trusted source of information to boost profitability and spur innovation in a changing economic environment. With a forward-looking approach, FSD's editors deliver solutions and strategies to readers across all segments of noncommercial foodservice, including colleges and universities, business and industry, K-12 schools and healthcare.

SOURCE The Culinary Institute of America and FoodService Director Magazine

Related Links

http://www.ciachef.edu


Researchers have long known that problem drinking increases a man's likelihood of being violent towards his wife or girlfriend, but a new study published today by the scientific journal Addiction suggests that this relationship between drinking and violence is also affected by the man's attitude toward women's equality; that is, toxic masculinity also plays a role. In a study of men in low and middle income countries, heavy drinking males were more likely to commit violence against their wives and girlfriends (intimate partner violence, or IPV) if they held sexist rather than egalitarian attitudes about women.

Male violence against women is a global problem. But the interaction of heavy drinking, sexism, and male violence is particularly important to understand in low and middle income countries (LMIC), where male harmful heavy drinking, inequitable attitudes toward women, and IPV rates are all higher than in high-income countries.

This study used data from 9,148 male married or ever-partnered (with women) respondents aged 18-49 years from seven Asian-Pacific LMIC: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste. Respondents who reported having 6+ drinks in one session at least monthly were defined as regular heavy episodic drinkers. Gender attitudes were scored using the Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) scale, which measures attitudes toward gender norms related to sexual and reproductive health, sexual relations, violence, domestic work and homophobia.

Overall, 13% of the men interviewed reported committing physical or sexual IPV in the previous 12 months. As expected, both binge drinking and lower gender-equitable attitudes independently increased IPV. The pooled odds ratio of men reporting IPV was 3.42 times greater for regular heavy episodic drinkers than for abstainers, and every point decrease in gender equitability attitude on the GEM scale was associated with 7% increased odds of IPV.

When their effects were combined, regular heavy episodic drinking and lower gender-equitable attitudes were together associated with IPV over and above the relationship of the two factors separately.

Lead author Dr. Anne-Marie Laslett explains: "This interaction suggests that traditional gender norms, which we already know increase the risk of IPV victimisation, may be particularly dangerous when combined with binge drinking. To address the problem of intimate partner violence everywhere, but especially in low and middle income countries, we will need to tackle both entrenched inequitable attitudes toward women and risky alcohol consumption."

###

For editors:

Peer reviewed: Yes

Type of study: Secondary analysis of a longitudinal study

Subject of study: People

Funding: Intergovernmental organization

This paper is free to download for one month from the Wiley Online Library: https:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ abs/ 10. 1111/ add. 15485 or by contacting Jean O'Reilly, Editorial Manager, Addiction, jean@addictionjournal.org.

To speak with lead author Dr Anne-Marie Laslett: contact her at La Trobe University, Australia by email (a.laslett@latrobe.edu.au) or telephone (+61 408 338 093).

Funding: Partners for Prevention: a UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women and UNV regional joint programme for the prevention of violence against women and girls in Asia and the Pacific and the Australian Research Council.

Full citation for article: Laslett A-M, Graham K, Wilson IM, Kuntsche S, Fulu E, Jewkes R, and Taft A (2021) Does drinking modify the relationship between men's gender-inequitable attitudes and their perpetration of intimate partner violence? A meta-analysis of surveys of men from seven countries in the Asia Pacific region. Addiction 116: doi: 10.1111/add.15485

Addiction is a monthly international scientific journal publishing peer-reviewed research reports on alcohol, substances, tobacco, and gambling as well as editorials and other debate pieces. Owned by the Society for the Study of Addiction, it has been in continuous publication since 1884.
Uber has announced plans to employ a further 20,000 drivers by the end of next year as lockdown measures begin to ease across the country and demand for rides soars.

The private hire firm will recruit the new drivers after reporting a more than 50 per cent increase in trips across the UK since restaurants opened for outdoor dining on April 12.

But the new jobs drive, which will boost the group's driver network to 90,000 in the UK, has been slammed by the App Drivers & Couriers Union who said it would 'inevitably lead to increased driver poverty and rising urban congestion'.

Announcing the plans, Jamie Heywood, Uber's regional general manager for Northern and Eastern Europe, said: 'As cities open up and people start moving again, we are encouraging 20,000 new drivers to sign up.

Uber has announced plans to hire another 12,000 drivers across the country as demand for rides soars. (Stock image)

'We are proud to offer every driver the rights and protections they deserve, a guaranteed wage, holiday pay and a pension, but we're not the only player in town.

'Drivers work with multiple operators and deserve the same standard of work on every trip.'

Supporting the move, Mick Rix, national officer of the GMB trade union, said the new drive was a 'positive indicator'.

He said: 'Uber is trying to signal the horrendous collapse of the private hire minicab sector brought about by the pandemic is coming to an end.

'Signing up another 20,000 drivers on top of the 70,000 already using the app is a positive indicator.

'Now Uber has committed to treating its workers fairly, granting them the rights to which they are legally entitled, this can only be good for the beleaguered private hire sector.'

But the App Drivers & Couriers Union, which represents some Uber drivers, said the post pandemic recruitment push would inevitably lead to 'rising urban congestion'.

Union president Yaseen Aslam said: 'Uber's post pandemic recruitment push will inevitably lead to increased driver poverty and rising urban congestion.

'They can easily afford to recruit an extra 20,000 people simply because it continues to rely on an illegal and exploitative employment model which allows them to strengthen their monopolistic position while driving more workers into poverty.

The App Drivers & Couriers Union slammed the decision and said the recruitment push would lead to 'rising urban congestion' (Stock image)

'We urgently need capacity controls and enforcement of employment law, but the government has abdicated its fundamental responsibilities. Our union will continue to resist Uber's brutal exploitation of people and communities.'

The latest plans come just a month after it was revealed that more than 70,000 Uber drivers will now to be treated as workers under UK employment law, after the ride-hailing giant lost a landmark Supreme Court case.

The move, which followed lengthy legal action, will now mean drivers will be guaranteed minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions.

However former driver James Farrar, who spearheaded the battle that began six years ago to grant Uber drivers worker status, said the app giant still had not gone far enough.

Mr Farrar said drivers still did not get sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal and said the next step was to go back to court to get Uber to meet its obligations.

Where does Uber operate in the UK? Uber first launched in San Francisco in 2009 before it was brought over to the UK in 2012. The firm, which allows users to book journeys on their app, has since grown across the country and now provides rides for thousands. These are the locations in the UK in which the group currently operates: London Birmingham Nottingham Leicester Stoke East Anglia Leeds Manchester Liverpool Newcastle Sheffield Northern Ireland Scotland Brighton and Sussex Portsmouth Bristol Wales Advertisement

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I'm afraid that Uber is still short changing drivers for about 40-50 per cent of their working time.

'The next step is for us to go back to court. It's not meeting the legal minimum, so it's enough for us. We're not nearly there yet.'

Uber had previously argued that its drivers were self-employed.

But the Supreme Court ruling defined Uber drivers as workers, prompting lawyers to say it meant they would be entitled to workers' rights such as holiday pay and compensation for lost pay.

Uber, which was launched in the UK in 2012, said its drivers will now earn at least the National Living Wage.

On average, its drivers earn 17 per hour in London and 14 in the rest of the UK.

Under the new court ruling, all drivers will receive holiday time based on 12.07 per cent of their earnings, which will be paid out on a fortnightly basis.

And then they will also be automatically enrolled in a pension scheme.

Last month Uber's takeover of British tech firm Autocab was also cleared by the competition watchdog.

In January, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation to examine whether the deal with the Manchester-based Autocab, which provides private hire taxi operators across the world, could impact rivals.

It came after ride-hailing giant Uber said that it had reached an agreement to acquire the company, saying the move would help it connect passengers with local drivers in areas it did not serve.

As part of the deal, Uber pledged to keep Autocab independent, with its own staff and management.

The probe concluded that there was only limited indirect competition between the two companies, with no evidence suggesting that Autocab was likely to become a significant and more direct competitor to Uber in the future.

Joel Bamford, senior director of mergers at the CMA, said: 'Millions of people across the UK rely on taxis every day and technology has transformed the way this industry works.

'It is therefore important that mergers like these are properly scrutinised to ensure that customers aren't negatively affected.

'After a thorough investigation, the CMA has found no competition concerns as a result of this deal.

'This is because the companies are not close competitors, the two businesses will continue to face competition from rivals and Autocab's customer taxi companies can switch to credible alternative providers if they wish.'
A 19-year-old has been charged in a fatal weekend shooting outside a Bessemer convenience store.

NarDarrius Anton Christian is charged with murder in the Sunday-night slaying of Christopher Kasean Jackson, known by many in the community as OG Chris.

Jackson was shot outside the Stop N Go on Bessemers Dartmouth Avenue. His death came less than 16 hours after he had posted on Facebook asking someone to take him to church.

Christopher Kasean Jackson, 21, was shot to death Sunday, April 25, 2021 in Bessemer. He is shown here in April 2020 when someone shot at his vehicle.

Bessemer police received a call of shots fired at 9:54 p.m. and were on the scene at 9:55 p.m. As officers approached the store, they saw two vehicles fleeing the scene. Police pursued one of those vehicles and, once they got it stopped, found Jackson inside. He was being driven by another male who was trying to get him to the hospital.

Paramedics were brought to the location where police stopped the vehicle  the 700 block of Ninth Avenue  but efforts to save Jackson were unsuccessful. He was pronounced dead on the scene at 10:14 p.m.

Charging documents against Christian state he shot Jackson in the chest with a .9 mm pistol. Christian surrendered at the Jefferson County Jail at 11:17 a.m. Tuesday and released at 3:49 p.m. the same day after posting $150,000 bond.

Authorities said they have not yet identified a motive.
Thursday, April 29, 2021

From the Guardian:

Switzerland will hold a referendum on whether to push ahead with same-sex marriage after opponents forced the government to hold a binding vote on a 2020 law allowing gay couples to marry.

The Swiss parliament passed a bill recognising same-sex marriage last December, several years after most other western European states.

On Tuesday, the countrys federal chancellery announced that critics of the law had gathered 61,027 valid signatures in favour of putting the matter to a national vote.

Under Switzerlands system of direct democracy, members of the public can veto parliamentary decisions via a referendum if they manage to collect 50,000 valid signatures within 100 days of the official publication of the act.

Read more here.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/family_law/2021/04/swiss-referendum-on-same-sex-marriage.html
Japan will consider making vaccines and medical treatments that have yet to be domestically approved available in an emergency after regulatory roadblocks delayed its COVID-19 vaccination campaign as cases spiked.

Amid criticism over Japan's slow pace of inoculation, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga hopes to update existing legislation. If approved, new vaccines and treatments that are already in use overseas would temporarily be made available to the public before a clinical trial can be completed in Japan.

"Most countries do not require a domestic clinical trial, but Japan does," Suga told reporters on Friday. "I strongly feel that we need to update our legal framework for emergency situations."

The revision could be submitted to parliament as early as next year.

Japan currently requires new vaccines to go through a clinical trial in the country before approval. The entire process usually takes about a year.

Though the Japanese government expedited screening for the Pfizer shot, the process still took about two months after the application was submitted in December.

Japan's health care workers began receiving shots in mid-February, months after their counterparts in the U.S. Older adults only became eligible this month.

Japan's emergency approval scheme will likely be modeled after the U.S. emergency use authorization program, which granted approval in less one month after Pfizer and Moderna filed their applications.

The Pfizer shot is the only COVID-19 shot approved in Japan. The AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines still have not been approved, despite being available in many other countries.
Three doctors have been permanently barred from practicing medicine in New Jersey, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement on Wednesday.

Two had pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact with patients during office visits, and the third was a psychiatrist who allegedly engaged in professional and sexual misconduct with a patient, the state said.

The medical license of Dr. Carl J. Renner, 66, was permanently revoked by the State Board of Medical Examiners, the state said.

As part of his plea to criminal sexual contact, Dr. Renner admitted that he intentionally touched six female patients inappropriately and without legitimate medical purpose or their consent, during medical procedures and examinations at his Hasbrouck Heights practice, the state said.

Reached by telephone Wednesday night, Renner said he had no comment.

In a separate action, the board also found Dr. Michael Tyshkov, 67, engaged in criminal sexual contact with patients and revoked his license. In December, Tyshkov pleaded guilty to sexual contact and endangering the welfare of a minor after admitting to touching three female patients inappropriately, one of whom was a minor, during medical visits at his Summit practice, the state said. Attempts to reach Tyshkov were unsuccessful because phone numbers connected to him were out of service.

The third revocation was the license of psychiatrist Dr. Pritpaul Singh, 71, for his alleged involvement in sexual activity with a female patient, violation of the standards for prescribing controlled dangerous substances (CDS), failure to utilize the Prescription Monitoring Program, and failure to monitor patient compliance with treatment, the state said. Singh was never criminally charged and phone numbers linked to him were out of service.

The revocations follow reforms announced by the attorney general earlier this month to crack down on sexual abuse and misconduct by licensed professionals in the state.

Sexual abuse and misconduct is inappropriate in any setting, but especially troubling when the perpetrators are the professionals we entrust with our health and well being, Grewal said in a statement. The egregious conduct in these cases warranted severe consequences, and these sanctions should serve as examples of how we will continue to protect the public by holding professionals involved in sexual misconduct accountable.

The reforms tasked the Division of Consumer Affairs to work with the states 51 professional boards and committees to adopt new policies and improve existing processes to help prevent sexual misconduct from occurring, promote accountability among licensees, and ensure that victims who report incidents receive the support they deserve.

The reforms affect approximately 700,000 New Jersey licensees, including physicians, social workers and home health aides, the state said.

Patients can file complaints online Consumer Affairs or can call (973) 504-6200 to request a complaint form.

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

Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Independent Member of Parliament Christophe Emmanuel has disclosed that the final choice for Head of the Section Repression at the Fire Department came down to a Dutchman and a qualified St. Maartener who has acted as the interim head of the same section on previous occasions. He said the Prime Minister of St. Maarten missed an opportunity to appoint a local professional and instead chose a Dutchman on the flawed premise of government being an equal opportunity employer.

The MP disclosed that after a two-week solicitation period, a total of four persons applied for the position, two from the Netherlands and two from St. Maarten. Two of the four moved on to the second round of interviews, one from St. Maarten and the other from the Netherlands.

The St. Maarten candidate was not chosen simply because he has to finish up a program course. Mind you, this same person as early as March 2021, was placed in charge of the same Repression Department in the absence of the Fire Chief and another Dutchman who held the position but has since returned to Holland. He ran the Repression Department for approximately 6 months. So he was good enough to substitute for the Fire Chief, but not good enough to be given the position because of a course that he can easily finish now. That is why we have kept one of our own out of a top position, Emmanuel said.

To add insult to injury, the MP continued, the same local fire officer was requested to execute the Head of Materials and Logistics position in an acting capacity at the Fire Department, a position with very similar qualification requirements as the position of Head of Repression.

Our local candidate also completed courses in Curacao. From the successful candidates on Curacao, one has already been promoted to Head of Repression there and another as Head of a different department, with the same qualifications as the officer from St. Maarten. What is the matter with us on St. Maarten that we cannot promote our own people, the MP said, adding that the PM can easily step in and stop this unfair treatment. Or she can continue to show her true colors and stand against St. Maarten people and the families that depend on them, he said.

He reiterated that he has no problem with people coming to St. Maarten to find work. He also has no problem with dismissing local people in top positions if they are not performing and failing terribly. But with the latter, the replacement should be with another qualified St. Maartener if available, and the former should see a local person getting the first opportunity if available.

If we absolutely do not have another local applicant or candidate, then we can look elsewhere to appoint a non-local for a temporary period until a local can be trained for the position. But in this country, we have to start putting our own first. What has been done to the candidate at the Fire Department is an injustice after the same candidate has been running the department for you. These things must stop. We have to learn to embrace the culture of St. Maarten first. And if they fail, you dismiss them on fairgrounds and look for another St. Maartener. Nobody could ever fault us for looking out for our own first, the MP concluded.
Any UN project in Ukraine exceeds Ukraines annual contribution for membership in the Organization.

"I am surprised when someone says that the UN is so expensive, and it is unknown why we should pay [contributions]. Any one of the dozens of projects implemented by the UN in Ukraine exceeds our annual contribution," Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the UN Sergiy Kyslytsya said in an interview with Ukrinform.

As noted, Ukraine annually pays $1.6 million to the regular UN budget, less than Croatia, Slovenia or Lithuania. According to Kyslytsya, Poland pays $23 million.

This year alone, the UN is to allocate $168 million for humanitarian purposes in Ukraine, to help the occupied and adjacent territories, Kyslytsya said. In addition, the plan of cooperation between Ukraine and UN agencies provides for projects with a total budget of $667 million for five years. The projects concern the development of public administration, democratic governance, employment, green energy, etc., he said, noting that this potential is actively used by Ukrainian agencies.

An important area of UN activity in Ukraine last year was to assist the Government in combating COVID-19, Ukraines Permanent Representative noted. The UN conducts centralized procurement of vaccines under the COVAX Facility, including for Ukraine.

According to Kyslytsya, the largest contributor to the UN is the United States, securing more than 22% of the regular UN budget (total budget of $3 billion) and more than 27% of the peacekeeping operations budget (total budget varies between $6 to $8 billion). This year, the United States allocates $1.5 billion for peacekeeping operations.

Kyslytsya also underlined significant changes in the approaches to the UN of the current U.S. administration, compared to the previous one. In particular, they concern the payment of contributions to the UN, which the United States owed under the previous administration.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:10:09|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The world in the past 24hrs. A selection of the best daily press photos from Xinhua.



Aerial photo taken on April 26, 2021 shows the city view in Tangshan City, north China's Hebei Province. Tangshan City in north China's Hebei Province, leaning against the Yanshan Mountains, facing the Bohai Sea, and abutting Beijing and Tianjin, is the cradle of China's modern industry, a recovery miracle after the horrific earthquake in 1976 and also the hometown of Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Communist Party of China (CPC). (Xinhua/Yang Shiyao)

Aerial photo taken on April 26, 2021 shows the former residence of Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in Daheituo Village, Laoting County of Tangshan City, north China's Hebei Province. Tangshan City in north China's Hebei Province, leaning against the Yanshan Mountains, facing the Bohai Sea, and abutting Beijing and Tianjin, is the cradle of China's modern industry, a recovery miracle after the horrific earthquake in 1976 and also the hometown of Li Dazhao. (Xinhua/Jin Haoyuan)

Performers rehearse symphony ballet "The Glorious Century" in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021.

The latest production of the National Ballet of China, the symphony ballet "The Glorious Century," will have its grand premiere at Beijing Tianqiao Theater from May 23 to 30. (Xinhua/Jin Liangkuai)

A Mercedes Benz new energy concept vehicle is displayed at the 19th International Automobile Industry Exhibition (Auto Shanghai 2021) in Shanghai, east China, April 28, 2021. The 19th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition (Auto Shanghai 2021) concluded on Wednesday.

The 10-day auto show, which kicked off on April 19, attracted roughly 810,000 visitors and more than 1,000 companies in the auto industry. A total of 1,310 vehicle models were displayed at the show, according to the organizer.

Auto Shanghai 2021 is the first major auto show globally to run normally amid the coronavirus pandemic this year. (Xinhua/Chen Fei)

An intelligent inspection robot inspects the power lines of the pipe gallery at Sangong substation in Urumqi, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, April 27, 2021.

In order to ensure electrical safety, the 220-kilovolt Sangong substation of the State Grid Urumqi Electric Power Supply Company has introduced intelligent inspection robots since November 2020. The robots can inspect the power lines of the pipe gallery 24 hours a day, providing a strong guarantee for production safety while improving efficiency. (Xinhua/Hou Zhaokang)

He Qiao communicates with a hearing-impaired resident with sign language at a community police station in Cijian Village of Shapingba District, southwest China's Chongqing, April 27, 2021.

He Qiao, 36, is a police officer in the community of Cijian Village, where 161 speech or hearing-impaired residents live. In order to better communicate with them, He Qiao signed up for a sign language training class at Chongqing Normal University at her own expense. As time goes by, He Qiao can proficiently use sign language. Thanks to her efforts, the Qiaojie Silent Police Station was established in 2019 in the community to better serve the needs of these special residents. He Qiao has carried out more than 50 micro-classes in the silent police station, to explain the laws and regulations to these residents with sign language to enhance their law awareness. She also took the initiative to organize college students to join the silent police station, and at present, more than 130 college students have carried out social practice in the station. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao)

Trainer Fu Mingyan trains a guide dog in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province, April 22, 2021. The Dalian branch of the China Guide Dog Training Center, which was founded in May 2006, is a non-profit training institution of guide dogs in China. It has provided 239 free guide dogs to visually impaired people around the country.

Guide dogs in the center are strictly selected from Labrador and Golden retrievers. Usually 45 days after birth, those puppies are sent to live with volunteer families, getting familiar with human life and learning simple orders. When the puppies grow up to about one year old, they are sent back to the center for professional training for one to one and a half year. Customized courses which are specially set according to the life scenes of visually impaired people, include going up and down stairs, avoiding obstacles and crossing streets. They also take a series of "exams," and the assessment of their characters is an important item. Those dogs that have a tendency to attack people will be dismissed.

After completing all trainings, guide dogs will attend a 40-day joint training with visually impaired users. Every day, the users go out with guide dogs under the guidance of staff. Only when the two sides cooperate well and successfully pass the joint training period can the guide dog obtain a "graduation certificate" and be delivered to users. (Xinhua/Pan Yulong)

People wearing face masks wait for vaccination in Goregaon, a western suburb in Mumbai, India, April 26, 2021. (Str/Xinhua)

Tourists visit the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in Italy, on April 27, 2021. Italy took a first decisive step toward a post-pandemic phase on Monday, the first day of reopening amid decreasing coronavirus cases. (Xinhua)

Photo taken on April 27, 2021 shows a super moon above Sydney, Australia. (Xinhua/Bai Xuefei)
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan has bought 150 oxygen concentrators and aims to send them to India this weekend to help it deal with a massive increase in COVID-19 infections, and is also looking at providing further aid, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said on Thursday.

Countries around the world have been rushing to help India alleviate the crisis. India's death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surged past 200,000 on Wednesday, worsened by shortages of hospital beds and medical oxygen.

Wu told reporters that they had been working on an aid package for India and have already purchased 150 oxygen concentrators which should be able to be sent this weekend.

"We are in the process of buying more oxygen concentrators and buying raw materials from overseas so our companies at home can produce even more," he said.

An oxygen concentrator reduces nitrogen from an air supply to produce an oxygen-enriched air supply to a patient.

Taiwan is also looking at providing other aid as requested by India, Wu added.

While India, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, the two have gotten closer in recent years thanks to their shared antipathy of Beijing.

Taiwan sees India as an important like-minded democracy and friend, and there are close cultural and economic links too.

Last year Taiwan accused China of trying to impose censorship in India after its embassy in New Delhi advised journalists to observe the "one-China" principle after newspapers carried advertisements for Taiwan's national day.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Michael Perry)
Vietnams coffee exports in the first four months of the year likely down 17.6% from a year earlier to 563,000 tonnes, while rice exports likely down 10.8%, government data released on Thursday showed.

Coffee

Coffee exports from Vietnam are expected to drop an estimated 17.6% in the first four months of this year from a year earlier to 563,000 tonnes, equal to 9.38 million 60-kg bags, the General Statistics Office (GSO) said on Thursday.

Coffee export revenue for Vietnam, the worlds biggest producer of the robusta bean, will likely fall 11.6% from a year earlier to $1.02 billion in the four-month period.

The countrys coffee shipments in April are estimated at 110,000 tonnes, valued at $209 million.

Rice

Rice exports in January-April are forecast to drop 10.8% from a year earlier to 1.89 million tonnes.

Revenue from rice exports in the period is expected to increase 1.2% from a year earlier to $1.01 billion.

April rice exports from Vietnam, likely totalled 700,000 tonnes, worth $362 million.

Engery

Vietnams January-April crude oil exports were seen falling 38.5% from the same period last year to an estimated 1.05 million tonnes.

Crude oil export revenue in the period is expected to dive 16.7% from a year earlier to $487 million.

Oil product imports in the four months were estimated at 2.4 million tonnes, down 46.4% from the same period last year, while the value of product imports decreased 38.7% to $143.3 million.

The GSO trade data is subject to revision next month.
Following the very successful 15 year tenure of former AMTA CEO Chris Althaus, the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) has announced that it has appointed Louise Hyland as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Late last year, former AMTA CEO Chris Althaus announced he was stepping down from the position, with iTWire conducting a video interview with him a month later, which you can view here.

Now comes the appointment of Louise Hyland as the new CEO.

AMTA explains Hyland is an experienced international senior executive and advisor with a focus on commercial strategy, transformation, and governance.

She comes to AMTA from Hirst Advisory, where she consulted to businesses and government agencies in the telecommunications, telehealth and infrastructure sectors. Previously, Louise was the General Manager, Commercial Implementation at NBN Co for over 6 years and the Commercial Director of PCCWs business in Europe.

AMTA Chair, Dan Lloyd, said Louises extensive telecommunications background, experience implementing complex technology and infrastructure projects, and commercial acumen will be invaluable in her role as Chief Executive of AMTA.

At a time when mobile telecommunications and infrastructure has never been more important for Australia, I am confident that Louises appointment will continue and accelerate AMTAs critical role in ensuring the sustainability of the industry increasing mobile connectivity.

I would also like to thank Chris Althaus for his exceptional contribution to the mobile telecommunications industry over the last 16 years, the strong team he has built at AMTA, and his exceptional support for the recruitment and transition process. We wish Chris all the best for the future.

AMTAs new CEO, Louise Hyland, said I am delighted to be appointed as AMTAs next Chief Executive Officer. It is an exciting time in the mobile telecommunications industry with the ongoing roll out of 5G reflecting our advanced mobile sector.

I look forward to working with the AMTA team and members, key stakeholders and all levels of Government to continue to deliver positive change in support of Australias mobile-enabled future.

Hyland will step into the role from May 3.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) has warmly welcomed Louise Hyland as the new Chief Executive Officer of The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA).

ACCAN CEO, Teresa Corbin also extended her thanks to outgoing AMTA CEO, Chris Althaus.

We want to wish Chris all the best for the future. Chris has seen the organisation through a period of ongoing change and growth in Australias mobile telecommunications industry and has been a champion for many worthy consumer-focused initiatives including Mobile Muster and ACCANs own Accessible Telecoms.

We congratulate Ms Hyland on her recent appointment and look forward working with her, said Corbin.
They were one of the most iconic Australian girl bands from the early 2000s.

And it seems Bardot is making a comeback of sorts after returning to the music charts - two decades after their last hit single.

The pop group - whose members included Sophie Monk, Belinda Chapple, Sally Polihronas, Chantelle Barry, Katie Underwood and Tiffani Wood - just released an album of remixes and a new track called Something Worth Fighting For.

They're back! Early noughties Australian girl band Bardot (pictured in August 2000) is making a comeback of sorts after returning to the music charts - two decades after their last hit single

Both releases - the album of remixes and the new single - have made it to the top 10 on iTunes, reports The Daily Telegraph.

The newest LP includes 20 tracks and is available on both iTunes and Spotify.

Bardot's debut single, Poison, went straight to the top of the charts in the year 2000, making them the hottest girl group in Australia.

But just two years later, the band members found themselves pushed aside so that breakout star Sophie could pursue a solo career.

New release: The pop group, whose members included Sophie Monk, Belinda Chapple, Sally Polihronas, Chantelle Barry, Katie Underwood and Tiffani Wood - just released an album of remixes (pictured) and a new track called Something Worth Fighting For

In August 2020, Belinda, now 45, revealed on the Back From Reality podcast that finding out her career was over was a brutal experience.

'It happened overnight... we were so blindsided,' she said of the decision to dissolve Bardot so that Sophie, 41, could go solo.

'We were ready for years ahead, with so many bookings to look forward to and our album was doing really well,' she added.

'We were blindsided': Ex-member Belinda Chapple recently revealed the brutal way the band found out they were 'finished' so that breakout star Sophie Monk could launch a solo career

Belinda apparently discovered her managers had other plans when she accidentally stumbled across a stack of CDs for Sophie's first solo album.

'I wasn't meant to see it,' she said.

Belinda confronted the management team to find out what was going on.

'They couldn't look me in the eye. I said, "You're going to tell me now what all this stuff is? What are you guys doing? Is she doing a side project?"'

Star: While Belinda and the other band members, Sally Polihronas, Katie Underwood and Tiffani Wood, have mostly stayed out of the spotlight following the group's split in 2002, Sophie's (pictured) career has gone from strength to strength

She was sent home and the band was called in for a meeting the next day.

'He just sat us down and said, "It's over Bardot's over. That's it,"' she said.

While Belinda and the other band members, Sally, Katie and Tiffani, have mostly stayed out of the spotlight following the group's split in 2002, Sophie's career has gone from strength to strength.

'I wasn't meant to see it': Belinda apparently discovered her managers had plans for Sophie's (pictured) solo career when she accidentally stumbled across a stack of CDs for her first album

She has appeared in Hollywood movies, including Date Night and Click, hosted two seasons of Love Island Australia and was the Bachelorette in 2017.

Bardot's former manager David Caplice claimed in April last year the band split following an 'explosive' backstage bust-up before their Mardi Gras performance in 2002.

'I remember the girls became very adversarial to each other towards the end, when envy and infighting was out of control,' he told News.com.au.

Allegations: Bardot's former manager David Caplice claimed in April last year the band split after an 'explosive' backstage bust-up before their Mardi Gras performance in 2002 (pictured)

'It wasn't that particular performance that heralded the end for me  it was the blow-up backstage at the Mardi Gras prior to their 2am headline performance that really shocked everybody.

'That explosive encounter was the death blow for the band... Bardot could have been the biggest girl band in the world.'

The band members later denied any altercation had taken place at the 2002 Mardi Gras, saying David's claim was simply 'not true'.
Community News Editor / Librarian

Jeannie Maschino is community news editor and librarian for The Berkshire Eagle. She has worked for the newspaper in various capacities since 1982 and joined the newsroom in 1989. She can be reached at jmaschino@berkshireeagle.com.
Health authorities have found three new cases of coronavirus on board the gas tanker Inge Kosan which is off the Queensland coast.

The new cases on Thursday take the total number of COVID-19 cases among people on the British-flagged gas tanker to 11.

The Inge Kosan is currently anchored off Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast with state authorities containing and treating the active cases aboard the ship.

The Inge Kosan is seen anchored off the coast of the Sunshine Coast on Tuesday. Health workers will assess COVID-positive crew on board a British-flagged tanker after the ship was given permission to anchor

Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young (pictured) has also issued new health directives regarding interstate outbreaks, which will take effect on Thursday night

The Queensland government forewarned on Wednesday that more cases could emerge on ship.

Consideration is being given as to whether infected patients can be quarantined on the vessel to reduce risk to the rest of the crew.

The Maritime Union of Australia is continuing to call for an independent investigation into the death of an Inge Kosan crew member whose body washed up on a beach in Vanuatu two weeks ago.

There were similar calls in Vanuatu for a thorough investigation into why the body of the middle-aged Filipino crewman was in the sea and how he died.

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young has issued new health directives regarding interstate outbreaks, which will take effect on Thursday night.

Under the new rules anyone who has been to an interstate virus exposure venue during the exposure period must quarantine and get tested.

People who are identified as close contacts of known cases will also have to go into quarantine and get tested.

Australian Defence Force or international air crews will be allowed to leave the state before completing quarantine if they have no symptoms, travel directly to the airport by private transport and depart on a crew-only flight in which everyone wears face masks.

People line up to be tested at the Gold Coast University Hospital testing centre (pictured) on March 31

Visitors, staff or volunteers will be banned from entering hospitals, residential aged care or disability provide facilities if they've visited interstate exposure venues or are identified as close contacts in the previous 14 days.

The new health directives will be in place indefinitely and automatically come into effect whenever an interstate outbreak occurs.

Dr Young said in a statement the directives would all be in effect by 10.30pm on Thursday.

Queensland Health on Thursday also reported a fourth positive case who was already in hotel quarantine after arriving from Papua New Guinea.

The state conducted 6362 virus tests and administered 2379 vaccine doses in the 24 hours to 9am on Thursday.

Queensland has now given 141,866 doses since the rollout began on February 22.
Bengaluru-based digital startup which recently launched an app-based blood oxygen saturation monitoring tool, will also now look to expand it to other vital signs such as blood pressure and heart beat monitoring. Right after a few months into the pandemic the company saw how there was an increased need as well as shortage of pulse oximeters. "We worked with hospital partners by creating a dummy tool to read reflected light from the fingers and measuring with the pulse oximeter," said Ajit Narayanan, CTO, Mfine, explaining how the tool evolved.

MFine's proprietary algorithm measures the oxygen saturation using a smartphone camera. A photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal is obtained from the user's fingertip using the smartphone camera. The PPG is an optically obtained plethysmogram that can be used to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue. The LED illuminates the skin and the smartphone camera measures the changes in light absorption. The signal is then broken down into red, blue and green parts and using the difference in levels of light absorbed across these different wavelengths, SPO2 is calculated by a machine learning algorithm. Driven by platform data, the AI technology has 80 per cent medical grade accuracy, the company claims.

Currently with a user base of around 2 million, a monthly active user base of 80,000 and 12,000 daily consultations, the company offers tele-consultation, e-diagnostics and medicine delivery. In addition, they also offer care plans to manage several ailments. The company does not look to monetise the self-assessment tools. "We will extend that also to do BP and heart rate variability from the light signal, we will keep the health tools free," added Ajit hoping that the self-assessment lowers the entry barrier and through early warning signs lower risks.

Also read: Over 1 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccine still available with states: Centre

Also read: 'India is my home, it's bleeding': Priyanka Chopra starts fundraiser for COVID-19 relief
By Kane Wu, Tom Arnold and Alex Lawler

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Major Chinese investors are in talks to buy a stake in Saudi Aramco, several sources told Reuters on Wednesday, as Saudi Arabia's state oil firm prepares to sell another slice of its business to investors.

Saudi Arabia was in discussions to sell 1% of Aramco to a leading global energy company and could sell further shares including to investors within the next year or two, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in televised remarks on Tuesday.

A stake of 1% would equate to around $19 billion based on Aramco's current market capitalisation.

Sovereign wealth fund Investment Corporation (CIC) was among those that could invest, two sources told Reuters.

Aramco was talking to CIC, as well as Chinese national oil companies, said one of the sources close to CIC. CIC did not comment for the story. None of the other Chinese could be reached immediately for comment.

Aramco had been in touch with Chinese investors for a few years and CIC is the most likely investor, said the second source with a state-backed private equity fund.

"The kingdom does have close relations with China," said a third source, who is close to Aramco. "The major shareholder will decide what to do with their shares."

Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, retained its position as China's biggest crude oil supplier for a seventh consecutive month in March.

Another source said before the COVID-19 pandemic, Aramco had toured around looking for investors, talking to all the major state investors with overseas money, but few were interested. CIC and China's Silk Road Fund were also among the firms they approached.

Aramco, the world's biggest oil company, listed on the Saudi bourse in late 2019, raising $25.6 billion in the IPO and later sold more shares under a "greenshoe option" to raise the total to $29.4 billion.

"There are talks now for the acquisition of a 1% stake by a leading global energy company in an important deal that would boost Aramco's sales in ... a major country," Prince Mohammed said, without elaborating.

"There are talks with other for different stakes, and part of Aramco's shares could be transferred to the (Saudi) Public Investment Fund and a part listed ... on the Saudi bourse," he said in an interview aired by Saudi TV marking the fifth anniversary of Vision 2030.

The 2019 Aramco IPO was seen as a pillar of the economic diversification programme aimed at attracting foreign investment.

Prince Mohammed said in the interview that Riyadh was strengthening its relationships with China, India and Russia, though the United States remained a strategic partner despite some differences with the Biden administration, which has taken a tougher stance on Saudi Arabia.

" has said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner, India has said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner and Russia has also said Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner," the prince said.

Friction between China and the United States has flared in recent months on a range of issues, including Taiwan and Beijing's use of forced labour in its northwestern Xinjiang province, home to the Muslim Uighur minority.

(Reporting by Kane Wu in Hong Kong, Tom Arnold and Alex Lawler in London; Additional reporting by Ron Bousso, Davide Barbuscia, Saeed Azhar and Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

(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.)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Qventus, the first real-time operations system for healthcare, has partnered with Saint Luke's Health System to streamline discharge planning at two high-volume facilities and enable real-time situational awareness that helps balance patient loads across the health system's 16 hospitals and campuses in the Kansas City region. The Qventus system for automating hospital operations -- leveraging AI, machine learning, and behavioral science -- will enable Saint Luke's to better manage throughput and proactively address operational bottlenecks in order to create vital capacity and reduce inefficiencies when discharging patients. The partnership advances Saint Luke's mission by enhancing the capacity to provide high-quality care, giving back valuable patient time to frontline teams, and restoring margins amidst the challenging economic environment created by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"With short-term financial pressures from Covid-19 and long-term pressures from falling reimbursements, we must work smarter to remove friction and inefficiencies to reduce costs and continue to deliver the high-quality care that our community needs," said Debe Gash, SVP Chief Digital Officer at Saint Luke's. "Our partnership with Qventus adds cutting-edge technology that hardwires performance improvement best practices to prioritize work intelligently and empower our care teams to more efficiently manage the discharge process. Not only will this deployment reduce costs from excess days, but it will also reduce unnecessary delays for patients who are clinically ready for a safe discharge  which will improve the quality of care and enhance the patient experience."

Industry research reveals that, on average, patients are ready to go home a full day before they're released. This excess day amounts to 22% in wasted hospital capacity, resulting in unnecessary costs and using up critical bed capacity that is in more demand than ever during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Saint Luke's will deploy Qventus solutions that work within hospital inpatient settings and among facilities within the system, including:

The Qventus Inpatient Solution , which streamlines and standardizes the discharge planning process. It processes millions of data points in real-time and uses artificial intelligence to predict the expected date of discharge, disposition and barriers to discharge days in advance of the actual discharge date. It also uses machine learning to prioritize orders for ancillary services and simplifies coordination so that care teams can collaborate in real-time. Finally, it also applies statistical engines so that leadership can monitor processes and intervene in real-time, as needed.

, which streamlines and standardizes the discharge planning process. It processes millions of data points in real-time and uses artificial intelligence to predict the expected date of discharge, disposition and barriers to discharge days in advance of the actual discharge date. It also uses machine learning to prioritize orders for ancillary services and simplifies coordination so that care teams can collaborate in real-time. Finally, it also applies statistical engines so that leadership can monitor processes and intervene in real-time, as needed. The Qventus Command Center Solution, which will give Saint Luke's real-time situational awareness across the system and facilities. Using AI and machine learning, the solution automatically surfaces patient flow and resource utilization issues. It then engages frontline teams and helps them proactively resolve bottlenecks by identifying available capacity, balancing patient loads, and managing centralized resources. Importantly, it also hardwires escalation pathways to resolve issues and standardizes processes to optimize valuable resources.

During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Saint Luke's turned to Qventus to gain better insight into their operations so they could be more targeted in their response strategy. By using Qventus' Covid-19 model and scenario planner, based on 450 local AI-powered epidemiological models, Saint Luke's was able to model what-if scenarios about the spread of the virus specific to each local hospital and predict the pandemic's impact on critical resources, such as ICU and med surg beds, ventilators, staff, and PPE.

"For too long, excess days have wasted valuable hospital capacity, which we need more than ever during the pandemic and in the midst of declining Medicare reimbursements," says Mudit Garg, Qventus CEO. "As a health system known for providing the highest levels of excellence in patient care, Saint Luke's recognizes this consequential opportunity to optimize capacity and reduce excess days that ultimately will enhance their ability to provide care for the community. Saint Luke's is a national leader in innovation, and we're proud to partner with them to bring real-time operations to their world-class team."

About Qventus

Qventus is the first real-time operations system for healthcare. Integrating with EHRs, the Qventus platform uses AI and behavioral science to power best-practice solutions for inpatient, ED, perioperative, and command center settings. With hundreds of deployments in health systems and hospitals across the country, including CommonSpirit Health, M Health Fairview, Mercy, and NewYork-Presbyterian, Qventus delivers proven outcomes, including 90% lower excess days per patient and up to 0.8 day reductions in length of stay. For more, visit www.qventus.com .

About Saint Luke's Health System

Saint Luke's is a faith-based, not-for-profit, aligned health system committed to providing the highest levels of excellence in compassionate health care and health-related services. Saint Luke's has more than 16 hospitals and campuses and more than 200 primary care and specialty offices treating patients in 65 specialty services across 67 counties in Missouri and Kansas. Saint Luke's has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the elite hospitals in the nation. For more than 135 years, Saint Luke's has been dedicated to enhancing the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the diverse communities we serve. Follow us: Facebook , Twitter , YouTube , Instagram , LinkedIn .

SOURCE Qventus

Related Links

http://www.qventus.com


WARREN, MI  A Southeast Michigan police detective is facing a five-year felony charge for allegedly selling evidence for cash, WXYZ Detroit reports.

Kevin Dailey, a detective and 14-year veteran of the Warren Police Department, worked in the departments auto theft unit and is accused of selling auto parts for cash after taking them from the department, the TV station reports.

He is charged with two counts of embezzlement in the line of duty, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, the report said. Dailey is out of jail on a $5,000 personal bond. He is on unpaid leave from the department.

READ MORE:

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Man dead after school bus runs over moped

Woman charged with 4-year felony for alleged false claims of sexual assault, kidnapping

Man builds poop wall after property line dispute with neighbor

4 charged with sex crimes against victims under 13

Michigan bar can be sued after attack on Black customer
The Minister of National Defence, General Nicolae Ciuca, and the Joint Chief of Staff's head, lieutenant-general Daniel Petrescu, met on Thursday, at the headquarters of the Ministry of National Defence (MApN), with the head of the Italian Republic Chief of Defence Staff, General Enzo Vecciarelli, the three addressing the current security topics from the agenda of the North-Atlantic Alliance, military cooperation and amplifying opportunities for collaboration relations.

"The cooperation between the two armies enrolls in an upward trend, both in bilateral format, through participation in joint training activities, as well as an ally, through its affiliation of an Italian unit at the South-Eastern Multinational Brigade, participating in enhanced air police and NATO operations, Romania and Italy having relevant contributions in the framework of assumed commitments," reads a press release sent by MApN to AGERPRES.

The discussions included the security situation in the region, repatriation from Afghanistan and participation in the EU missions.

"Joint preparations, throughout the bilateral and multinational exercises, remain one of our priorities, cooperation between our soldiers being the foundation for inter-operability growth at the level of force categories. Today's meeting is new proof of the tight relations between Romania and Italy's armies, adapted to the new reality and the context of the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions," minister Ciuca declared during the meeting.

The head of the Joint Chief of Staff, lieutenant-general Daniel Petrescu, appreciated the constant efforts of the Italian Armed Forces for applying insurance measures at the Eastern flank of NATO through its contribution in augmenting the air police service ensured by the Romanian Air Force.

"I told the Italian counterpart that we are also following to consolidate our land and maritime components within the Strengthened Forward Presence and encouraged the participation of members of the Italian Chief of Staff to the allied control-command structures, dislocated throughout our country's territory," lieutenant-general Daniel Petrescu said, quoted in the press release.

Wednesday and Thursday's visits from the Italian Republic's head of the Chief of Staff took place at the invitation of lieutenant-general Daniel Petrescu and envisages meetings with the command teams of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the force categories and Headquarters of the South-Eastern Multinational Corps and South-Eastern Multinational Division.
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Chief Collision Technology, part of Vehicle Service Group (VSG) and Dover (NYSE: DOV), has introduced Constellation, the collision industry's first mobile 3D hail damage scanning system. The new product provides a complete workflow system, tracking hail-damaged vehicles from the initial damage incident, through the claims process and finally to vehicle repair.

"With Constellation, we saw an opportunity to develop a solution to improve the way the industry handles hail damage that is faster and more accurate," says Bob Finkle, brand manager at VSG, "Today, when an adjuster comes out to a CAT site, he or she tallies hail dents manually, leaving a large margin for human error. Constellation's innovative technology eliminates the need for manual review, delivering an exact count of hail dents with an accuracy rate of 90 percent or greater."

The mobile system can be deployed and set up quickly at any location within 24 to 48 hours and can accommodate everything from small passenger vehicles and SUVs to pickup trucks. The automated and touchless system uses 3D technology to quickly scan the vehicle, identify, count and calculate the size of each hail dent and create a record that can be used to estimate the cost to repair the vehicle.

To learn more about Chief Collison Technology's full line of products and services, visit https://chieftechnology.com/constellation/.

About Chief Collision Technology:

Chief is a collision repair technology company that gives modern body shops the tools, technology and training they need to perform accurate repairs. Chief offers innovative technology solutions that help shops identify, diagnose and repair the damage and document that the vehicle was returned to the original manufacturer's specifications. Chief offers everything shops need for today's modern structural repair. For more information, visit chieftechnology.com .

About Vehicle Service Group:

As an operating company of the Dover Corporation, Vehicle Service Group (VSG) offers the world's premier brands in vehicle lifting, wheel service, collision repair and aftermarket OEM equipment. With over 90 years of experience, we design, test, manufacture, sell and support our products with one thing in mind, our customer.

About Dover:

Dover is a diversified global manufacturer and solutions provider with annual revenue of approximately $7 billion. We deliver innovative equipment and components, consumable supplies, aftermarket parts, software and digital solutions, and support services through five operating segments: Engineered Products, Fueling Solutions, Imaging & Identification, Pumps & Process Solutions and Refrigeration & Food Equipment. Dover combines global scale, operational agility, world-class engineering capability and customer intimacy to lead the markets we serve. Recognized for our entrepreneurial approach for over 60 years, our team of approximately 24,000 employees takes an ownership mindset, collaborating with customers to redefine what's possible. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com .

Vehicle Service Group Contact:

David Fischmer

(812) 265-9543

[email protected]

Dover Media Contact:

Adrian Sakowicz, VP, Communications

(630) 743-5039

[email protected]

Dover Investor Contact:

Andrey Galiuk, VP, Corporate Development and Investor Relations

(630) 743-5131

[email protected]

SOURCE Dover

Related Links

http://www.dovercorporation.com


The Turkish police have found and neutralized an explosive device at a bus station in Istanbul, planted by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said.

"Today, the police of Istanbul have foiled a big terrorist attack. As a result of our police's vigilance, a 5-kilogram explosive device planted in a car was found at the bus station. Two people, who planted the explosive device, have been detained and are in custody," Soylu told the NTV broadcaster on late Wednesday.

Soylu said the security forces first launched an operation when they saw the suspicious movements of terrorists, Anadolu Agency reported.
Travis Scott is back with another overpriced and overwhelming collaboration.

THE KING OF COLLABS: Travis Scott signs creative deal with Playstation

I've begun to believe that a lot of the success the Missouri City native has experienced with his big-brand partnerships over the last is more smoke than substance. I think people are infatuated with anything "Travis Scott," regardless of whether what he's selling is any good see Cacti Agave Spiked Seltzer.

The latest in the rapper's too-pricey collaborations is a shoe deal with Air Jordan. The rapper worked with the mega-brand to create the Travis Scott x Air Jordan 6 Retro SP "British Khaki."

Courtesy Nike

According to Joshua Espinoza at Complex, "the Houston rapper replenished his online store with a range of new merch inspired by the world of motorsports."

I'm a big fan of neutrals, but this colorway is absolutely disgusting. Clearly, it's not for me to like, but this hypebeast-esq release is just hideous.

Undoubtedly, the release stays true to the Cactus Jack aesthetic, with his signature browns and beiges. To supplement the shoe release, the "Astroworld" rapper included new merchandise  graphic tees, and hoodies, as well as rugby sweaters and backpacks. Like the shoes, the merchandise offering comes in dark brown colors with splashes of red.

Courtesy Cactus Jack

PRICEY MERCHANDISE: Here's how you can win a rare Travis Scott action figure in Houston

The merchandise is available on Scotts online store but now shows that almost everything, with the exception of a few shirts and bags, is sold out. Fans were able to receive raffles for the Air Jordan release, but that is currently sold out as well. The collaborative shoe is set to drop on Scott's 29th birthday this Friday.

Despite the shoe having an ugly color pattern, it's sure to feature another hallmark of any merch Travis Scott puts his name on: Insane resell value. Because of all the hype that comes with a Travis Scott releaseand the losses many users take on merchandise apps like SNKRS and GOATthese ugly shoes retailing at $250 could easily end up selling for thousands on the secondary market.

I'll be back with an update of however much money people are willing to spend on the high-demand shoe.
Dan Olson, CEO of UpCity, had this to say about the 502ads team: 502ads provides an excellent service for their area. Not only do they have experience, but a true understanding of how to partner with local clients to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing.

502ads is thrilled to officially announce that we have been recognized as one of the top content marketing agencies in Louisville and nationally by UpCity.

For most of small-town America, a new business opening used to be the talk of the town. These days all that buzz and word-of-mouth has shifted online, but small businesses have been left to fend for themselves as bigger companies dominate search and social media. 502ads prides itself on doing everything possible to change that by helping local businesses use content to their advantage.

The commitment to helping local, small businesses excel is only one reason the Louisville-based company has been recognized by UpCity as not only one of the best content marketing agencies in our area but also nationally in the United States.

UpCity is a resource that helps connect businesses to service providers they can trust. With more than 70,000 listed providersfrom marketing agencies to accounting firms to HR consultants to IT specialists, and many more1.5 million businesses (and counting) have visited UpCity to research and identify the best partner for their needs.

UpCitys proprietary algorithm utilizes a variety of digital signals to measure the credibility, trustworthiness, and recommendability of B2B service providers across the U.S. and Canada. These digital data points like reviews (both on UpCity and other third-party review sites), presence in relevant search results, domain authority, website speed and experience help UpCity connect businesses with outstanding service providers like 502ads.

Dan Olson, CEO of UpCity, had this to say about the 502ads team: 502ads provides an excellent service for their area. Not only do they have experience, but a true understanding of how to partner with local clients to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing.

We are proud to be partnering with UpCity and thankful for the recognition, said 502ads founder Joshua Coffman. This wouldnt be possible without our fantastic clients, who inspire us every day.

ABOUT UPCITY

UpCity is a resource that helps connect businesses to service providers they can trust. With more than 50,000 listed providersfrom marketing agencies to accounting firms to HR consultants, and many more1.5 million businesses (and counting) have visited UpCity to identify the best partner for their needs.

ABOUT 502ads

Founded in April 2020 by longtime Louisville journalist Joshua Coffman, 502ads provides marketing strategies and campaign management for small businesses in Louisville and the surrounding area in Kentucky to succeed in finding customers online, particularly in the realms of SEO, social media and Google Ads management.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Contact Joshua Coffman at (502) 619-4195 or via email at josh@502ads.com.
Dr. Le Duy Binh, managing director of management consultants Economica Vietnam

The PCI is fairly popular in Vietnam as a means of assessing innovation and competitiveness among localities. Why is an additional DDCI set required, and how are the two systems related?

The DDCI was first developed in Vietnam by Economica Vietnam and Lao Cai Peoples Committee in 2013. After eight years, more than 20 provinces have applied this indicator framework for assessing economic management and governance at the local level, in addition to the application of the PCI framework.

The system is developed to measure the quality of local economic governance at districts and provinces  the administrative levels which directly interact with economic entities like household businesses, enterprises, cooperatives, and investors.

When we surveyed the PCI data, we found that although there are many good policies enacted by the central and provincial levels, the implementation at grassroots level, in particular at the department or district level, is not uniformly effective.

Inconsistent policy implementation, depending on the circumstances, has kept the PCI low in many localities, despite efforts to improve the business environment.

At this point, the DDCI will help departments, agencies, and peoples committees of districts and cities identify the advantages and shortcomings and limitations in improving the business and investment environment of the province.

For example, there are issues of market entry, informal fees, transparency, and effective implementation of policies from the central and provincial levels at the district level. The same goes for the provincial government departments and agencies about licensing, the cost and time in complying with administrative procedures and the quality of public services, the issue of information transparency and business support services.

In other words, the DDCI is a further extension of the PCI, expanding and deepening the reform level of the business environment, improving the quality of economic governance in Vietnam.

Since its introduction, it has contributed to improving the PCI rankings of many localities and strengthening the high ranking positions of provinces in the PCI rankings in recent years. The application of the DCCI in districts and departments since 2015 is also one of the reasons for Quang Ninh to maintain its first position in the national PCI ranking for four consecutive years.

What does the DDCI inherit from the PCI?

The PCI outlines the main criteria for quality governance for provincial governments. When developing the DDCI, we also took the functions and duties of the provincial government as a foundation, in particular the functions and duties of the departments at the district level.

In terms of general criteria, the DDCI continues to use and inherit 60-70 per cent of the PCI criteria. Criteria such as transparency, effectiveness in policy implementation, low informal fees, and the dynamism of the local government must be required at any level, from central to local levels (departments or agencies) and even the district level. There will also be new criteria suitable for the specific characteristics of the district government or the department level.

For example, land accessibility cannot be applied for assessment and comparison at all departments because there are departments and agencies that are not related to land. Similarly, indicators on legal mechanisms are only applied to a few departments.

Also, district governments have additional criteria to be used, depending on the target audience of the district government, and the departments and agencies.

Usually, district and suburban authorities deal with matters related to individual business households, while provincial authorities tackle larger units. This division in responsibilities warrants different evaluation criteria for these authorities.

Currently, the PCI evaluates provincial economic governance based on 10 criteria, while the DDCI assesses the governance capacity of district authorities through 10 component indicators. These are costs of market entry; accessibility to land and business premises; quality of public service in licensing and efficiency in inspection; proactivity and dynamism of district leadership; efficiency of public and private dialogues and accountability; information transparency and fair treatment; effectiveness in administrative reforms, public services, and of district one-stop-shops; effectiveness of business support services; informal costs; and public order and security supporting a safe business environment.

In addition, five indicators are used in the DDCI to measure the economic governance of provincial government departments and agencies. They are the effectiveness in implementation of legal and planning documents; quality of public services; information transparency and fair treatment; proactivity and accountability of department leadership; and informal fees.

According to statistics, when the PCI increases by one rank, the investment attraction in industries and the local economy increases by about 1.5 per cent. How has the increase in DDCI rank helped to increase the local PCI tally?

We do not have specific figures on the corresponding increase in district-level investment attraction as the DDCI increases but localities that have implemented the DDCI over the past few years have had a positive increase in their PCI. For example in Quang Ninh, Bac Ninh, and Dong Thap, the DDCI has contributed to improving their rankings and consolidating their high positions in the PCI rankings over the years. In particular, the DDCI has become one of the priority contents in the administration of the provinces in order to implement solutions to improve the business environment and enhance competitiveness.

Thereafter, the system continued to prove to be an effective tool to improve economic governance and administration capacity in the provinces such as Vinh Phuc, Bac Ninh, Tuyen Quang, Quang Ninh, Cao Bang, and many more.

Which localities have become examples of successful DDCI application?

According to the 2020 PCI 2020 Report announced by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Lao Cai and Son La are two provinces with impressive changes in the PCI with rankings at 16 and 54 across the country, up nine and three places, respectively, compared to the results in 2019. If we look at the PCI growth of these two provinces over the years, we can see that the PCIs in Lao Cai and Son La both started to increase rapidly since the implementation of the DDCI assessment framework.

In addition, Lao Cai and Son La have their own characteristics, such as focusing on the areas that are the provinces strength in localities such as agricultural development.

The new approaches of these two provinces to economic development and business environment improvement as well as development of industries combining with issues of gender equality, attention to ethnic minorities, environmental issues, culture, and history have brought Son La and Lao Cai to be the first two provinces to successfully implement and contribute to replicating this model to many other provinces across the country.
By Angus Whitley, Bloomberg News (TNS)

The U.S. government told its citizens to leave India as soon as possible because of the countrys escalating COVID-19 crisis.

In a Level 4 travel advisory  the highest issued by the Department of State  U.S. citizens were told not to travel to India or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so. There are 14 direct daily flights between India and the U.S. and other services that connect through Europe, the department said.

Indian authorities and hospitals are struggling to cope with record COVID-19 infections and deaths. Official data on Wednesday showed new infections rose by 360,960 in the prior 24 hours, while 3,293 additional lives were lost  both a record for the country. India has the worlds fastest-growing caseload.

People wearing face shields and masks as a precaution against the coronavirus as they wait to receive COVID-19 vaccine in Mumbai, India, Thursday, April 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)AP

Australia earlier this week banned all flights from India to relieve pressure on the nations system of mainly quarantining returned residents from overseas in inner-city hotels, after a jump in infections. The U.K. has barred any visitor whos been in India in the previous 10 days from entering. British and Irish nationals arriving in England from India must quarantine in a hotel.

More: U.S. joins European countries in sending vaccine material, medical equipment to India as virus worsens
Receiving final environmental approval over the full Lake Way project will enable our team to commence construction of the remaining on-lake infrastructure and deliver the full scope of the Lake Way project," says CEO.

Construction work on the final components of on-lake infrastructure will begin this quarter.

( ) ( ) ( ) (FRA:W1D) has received its Part IV Environmental Approval for the Lake Way Project in Western Australia covering full-scale operations of 245,000 tonnes per annum of sulphate of potash (SOP).

The permit enables SO4 to finalise construction of pond trains 4-6 as well as associated trench and bore construction that will support full-scale operations at Lake Way.

Construction on the final components of the on-lake infrastructure will begin this quarter.

The Part IV Environmental submission has been approved by the WA Government, having been recommended by the EPA with no appeals in January 2021.

Construction of remaining infrastructure

Chief executive officer Tony Swiericzuk said: Receiving final environmental approval over the full Lake Way project will enable our team to commence construction of the remaining on-lake infrastructure and deliver the full scope of the Lake Way project.

We look forward to commencing work shortly on this final phase.

The company's market cap is approximately A$313 million and shares today have been up to 6% higher at A$0.45.

Commissioning kicks off at Lake Way

On Monday, March 22, Salt Lake Potash started front-end process plant commissioning at Lake Way, marking a major milestone for the company as it is the first time that potassium-rich harvest salts, precipitated from lake aquifer brine, have been fed into an SOP plant in Australia.

The first harvest salts have been fed into the feed hopper, conveyed to the surge bin, run through the lump breaker and then into the attritioning feed tank at the front-end of the process plant.

Over the coming weeks the utilities, conversion circuit, flotation circuits, crystallisers and dryer will all be commissioned ahead of full load commissioning and SOP production in the current quarter.

First SOP sales within sight

SO4 chief executive officer Tony Swiericzuk said at the time that the company was on track for first production and SOP sales in the June quarter.

He said: Commencing commissioning of Australias first sulphate of potash processing plant is a major milestone for SO4 and testament to the hard work of our owners team and GR Engineering Services.

It is exciting to see the vision that was first conceived in late 2018 come to fruition less than two and a half years later.

First SOP sales and revenue are now well within sight.
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) The Council of the European Union approved on Thursday the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement, which will enter into force on May 1.

"The Council has today adopted a decision on the conclusion of the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement and the security of information agreement.

This is the last step for the EU in the ratification of the agreements. The UK will now be notified of the finalisation of the internal EU procedures. Following this, the agreements and accompanying texts will be published in the Official Journal of the EU before the end of the month. On 1 May 2021, both agreements will enter into force," the Council of the European Union said in a press release.
Some chemical pollutants endure long after they have passed through our water treatment systems and made their way back into the environment.(Aditya Chinchure/Unsplash)

Investigation Finds Toxic Chemicals in Water Across the US

Persistent chemicals have entered our water supplies and current regulations and water systems are inadequate to remove them

Drinking water safety isnt often top of mind unless it has made the news, such as the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan. However, the level of contamination in U.S. tap water is very concerning, whether your water supply is from the municipal water system or a well. Just because it looks clear and seems to taste normal doesnt mean its safe or pure.

Consumer Reports, in cooperation with The Guardian, conducted a recent survey analysis of water supplies across the United States and found what other studies have also foundtap water is brimming with toxic chemicals. Additional test results from the 2017 Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of 50,000 water utilities in 50 states also found 267 different contaminants out of 500 they tested for.

One of the problems with the water supply is an aging infrastructure that may be nearing the end of its useful life, according to the 2021 report card by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Water pollution from fire-fighting chemicals, agricultural chemicals, drugs, and nerve toxins produced by freshwater cyanobacteria add an additional toxic load to the water supply.

Because your body is mostly water, you require a constant supply of pure water to fuel your filtration system and ensure your body is free of toxins. Your blood, kidneys, and liver all require a good source of clean water to detoxify from the toxic exposure they meet every day.

But, as the recent collaborative water survey from Consumer Reports and The Guardian has demonstrated, the water supply is in desperate need of detoxification.

Toxic Chemicals Found in Drinking Water Across the US

The team from Consumer Reports and The Guardian asked readers for help investigating the nations drinking water supply and more than 6,000 people held up their hands to be counted.

Statisticians from Consumer Reports whittled the group down to 120 households that represented a cross-section of each of the EPAs 10 jurisdictional regions. Within each region, the team chose a mix of locations in which they tested the water for multiple different contaminants.

The analysis showed that 118 of the 120 water samples collected had high levels of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), arsenic, and detectable levels of lead. The group acknowledged that the study had some limitations since water quality was tested in one day, which may not demonstrate the overall quality supplied throughout the system.

According to the report from Consumer Reports, the challenges arent technological. In other words, they believe filtration systems exist that can clean the water of contaminants and yet they are not being used uniformly by community water systems.

Although the deputy director of public works in New Britain, Connecticut, told Consumer Reports that a single sample may not be representative of the overall toxic exposure, EPA spokesperson Andrea Drinkard said that 93 percent of the population supplied by community water systems gets water that meets all health-based standards all of the time, the Guardian reported.

Drinking water contamination is a crisis. According to an analysis published in The Guardian in February, more than 140,000 water systems in the United States are affected. The same analysis demonstrated that clean drinking water isnt distributed equally since systems that service rural counties and poor areas have a higher likelihood of violations.

EPA Balances Cost Against Health When Setting Arsenic Levels

One of the factors new homeowners dont often consider is the purity of their tap water supply. Consumer Reports learned one of the participants in the study, Sandy and Scott Phillips from Texas, had built a custom home in a new development just north of Austin. After moving in, they invested thousands in a reverse osmosis and water softening system to take care of the unusual odor in the water.

What the couple learned from a survey was their water supply was high in multiple chemicals, including arsenic. Arsenic is a heavy metal thats naturally present in groundwater and highly toxic. The greatest public health threat from arsenic comes from drinking water, food preparation, and irrigation of food crops.

Long-term exposure increases the risk of several forms of cancer, including skin, lung, and bladder cancers, summarizes a 2014 article published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health. Other research has suggested there is an association with neurological effects, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and reproductive disorders.

The health impact of low-level exposure to arsenic doesnt occur immediately but happens over a long period of time. Exposure to arsenic can also reduce childrens IQ and increase the risk of skin discoloration and lesions. Arsenic can get into the drinking water supply from industrial processes and runoff from agricultural and mining concerns.

The general manager for the Texas couples water supplier told Consumer Reports that it has complied with all federal and state minimum contaminant level standards for arsenic and lead for many years. He also said the results from the Consumer Report survey conflicted with their records.

The acceptable level set by the EPA for arsenic in drinking water in 1942 had been 50 parts per billion (ppb). The level was reduced to 10 ppb in 2001, which was an amount the EPA felt would help water system operators balance the cost of filtering the water against health challenges.

Yet, this level is still more than triple the 3-ppb level at which experts, including scientists at Consumer Reports and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), have long insisted it should be limited to.

Nearly every water sample tested had measurable amounts of arsenic. A 2017 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) study noted that the EPA had set a maximum contaminant level for arsenic at zero since no level is safe. However, it set the enforceable level at 10 ppb, which continues to present a substantial cancer risk.

The same report showed there were 573 water systems across the United States that were delivering water with excessive arsenic to more than 1.8 million people. One 2014 study published in Environmental Health found exposure to arsenic at 5 ppb or greater in the drinking water lowered IQ scores in children approximately 5 to 6 points in most cognitive areas, including working memory, verbal comprehension, and perceptual reasoning.

EPA: Wait Until 10 Percent of Homes Have High Lead Levels

Survey results from the Phillips home in Texas also revealed their unfiltered water had 5.8 ppb of lead. In this instance, cost again has taken precedence over the potential health effects on consumers. Consumer Reports notes that while the EPA recognizes there is no safe exposure to lead, they dont require utility services to lower lead levels until 10 percent of the homes sampled in the area exceed 15 ppb.

In the same NRDC report that surveyed violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the researchers found there were 5,367 water systems that were allowing high levels of lead and copper into the water system that affected more than 18 million consumers.

It wasnt until 1986 that using lead pipes to connect the water main in the street to buildings was banned. However, many of the previous water systems are still in use, affecting up to an estimated 6 million homes and businesses across the United States, noted Consumer Reports.

Many of the health effects from lead exposure are well-known, including kidney and brain damage, anemia, weakness, neurological damage to a developing baby, lower IQ in children, and infertility in men and women, notes the CDC.

Yet, despite the overwhelming costs to the community and individuals from exposure to lead, the EPA hasnt made significant changes to the maximum acceptable exposure levels for lead and many other toxins found in the drinking water supply.

The NRDC notes, Weaknesses in the current Lead and Copper Rule, and numerous deficiencies in other EPA drinking water rules, require strengthening changes for the sake of public health.

PFASs Are Forever Chemicals Found in Drinking Water

It may sometimes look like alphabet soup when scientists begin writing about perfluorinated chemicals, historically abbreviated PFC. To reduce confusion, the EPA made the move to use PFAS to refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances that describe the chemicals, which are sometimes referred to as The Teflon Chemicals or forever chemicals.

PFASs make products water, oil, grease, and stain resistant and are also found in firefighting foam. PFOS and PFOA are two PFAS chemicals that were voluntarily phased out by manufacturers. However, while they are no longer manufactured in the United States the EPA reveals phased out doesnt mean not being used.

The recent water survey confirmed the ubiquitous nature of PFAS in the water supply, finding 117 of the 120 water samples taken contained the chemical. Instead of enforceable legal limits, the EPA has established voluntary limits for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion (ppt), which many experts believe is far too high.

Harvard health expert Philippe Grandjean believes research evidence suggests a lower limit of 1 ppt. The threshold is also supported by the Environmental Working Group and Consumer Reports chief scientific officer.

PFOA, commonly called C8, had been dumped from a plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, beginning in the 1950s. The C8 Science Panel assessed the links between exposure and several health conditions, finding probable links to high cholesterol levels, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, several types of cancer, and pregnancy-induced high blood pressure.

The report from the NRDC didnt include PFAS chemicals as they arent regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Instead, the EPA issued a health advisory establishing unenforceable levels that inform officials and water utilities of a level that may be safe.

An analysis published by the EWG showed there were 2,337 sites in 49 states with known PFAS contamination. Unfortunately, while evidence continues to mount demonstrating forever chemicals are hazardous, the EPA is unwilling to protect consumer health. According to the EWG, the EPA recently released a so-called PFAS action plan, but it is woefully inadequate. The EPA plan will not address ongoing sources of PFAS pollution, will not clean up legacy pollution and will not even require reporting of toxic PFAS releases.

Filtered Water Is a Health Priority

If you choose bottled water instead of tap water, you may only be slightly better off, depending on where you live. The purity of bottled water has been in question since at least 2009 when the EWG released a scorecard showing most water brands failed to disclose contaminants contained in their water.

Another EWG survey in 2011 revealed that 18 percent of bottled water didnt show where the water came from and 32 percent didnt disclose how the water was treated or the purity. In 2020, Consumer Reports tested 47 bottled water brands for heavy metals and 30 PFAS chemicals.

They found PFAS was detectable in most of the noncarbonated water brands and in all but one of the carbonated waters. For an objective analysis of your water quality, consider consulting the Tap Water Database created by the EWG. Unless you can verify the purity of your water, seriously consider installing a high-quality water filtration system.

Ideally, the water can be filtered at the point of entry and the point of use. This means adding a filter where the water enters the home and then again at the sink and shower. There are a variety of options that have benefits and drawbacks. You can read more about water filtration systems in Properly Filter Your Water on Mercola.com.

Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com. An osteopathic physician, best-selling author, and recipient of multiple awards in the field of natural health, his primary vision is to change the modern health paradigm by providing people with a valuable resource to help them take control of their health. This article was originally published on Mercola.com.
The three males  police did not say if they were adults or children  took off running. One person was arrested but police did not catch the two others and they had not been apprehended as of Thursday morning, according to police.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The STEM, national, charter, and state school rankings published each spring by U.S. News & World Report have long been a useful and heralded external barometer to measure success at top American schools. For the nationally-acclaimed BASIS Charter Schools network, the 2021 rankings once again prompted affirmation of excellent student outcomes and college readiness, resulting in rankings success.

Nationwide, BASIS has six top 20 STEM schools, seven top 10 charter schools, and eight of the top 55 schools overall. Tweet this Students in a science lab at BASIS Chandler, the highest-ranked campus of the eight BASIS Charter School campuses atop the 2021 U.S. News & World Report rankings. BASIS.ed (PRNewsfoto/BASIS.ed)

The network of BASIS Charter Schools has six campuses in the nation's top 20 STEM schools, eight campuses in the nation's top 55 schools of any type, and seven of the top ten charter schools in the United States. US News says it assessed nearly 24,000 schools for its 2021 rankings, and numerically ranked approximately 17,000 schools.

NATIONAL STEM RANKINGS

BASIS Charter Schools comprise three of the top ten and six of the top twenty STEM campuses nationally  unmatched by any other district or network in the United States. STEM rankings assess student success by school in science, technology, engineering, and math courses.

"The STEM rankings are again U.S. News & World Report's best pure measure of college readiness," said BASIS Educational Ventures CEO Dr. Peter Bezanson. "STEM ranks are as close to assessment based on college prep as US News now gets, and our lofty STEM rankings  which, remarkably, improved from 2020 -- are the strongest possible mark of our continued excellence at readying students for college success."

US NEWS' METHODOLOGY and BASIS' COLLEGE READINESS

2021 is the third straight year that the BASIS Charter Schools network had an unprecedented number of campuses ranked this highly on the national STEM rankings, the national rankings overall, and the national charter rankings, despite the shifted U.S News & World Report methodology.

Through 2018, US News ranked fewer than 3,000 schools per year; it has since considered more than 24,000 schools each year, including 2021.

ranked fewer than 3,000 schools per year; it has since considered more than 24,000 schools each year, including 2021. US News has stated that its rankings before 2019 were "based solely on college readiness"  a measure precisely aligned with the BASIS Charter School Curriculum's college prep focus.

has stated that its rankings before 2019 were "based solely on college readiness"  a measure precisely aligned with the BASIS Charter School Curriculum's college prep focus. With its huge change in 2019, US News wrote that it implemented a "comprehensive ranking methodology which reflects how well high schools serve all students, not just those planning to go to college."

"Despite the change, we're still showing up incredibly well in these rankings, and college readiness is still the most vital aspect of what we do. It's the unwavering goal of our K-12 program," Dr. Bezanson said. "The shine is on our students and teachers yet again, because their schools' rankings in this still-new methodology are fantastic."

Indeed, if US News used its old methodology  which ranked schools on the ability to prepare students for performance in college  our analysis indicates that BASIS Charter Schools would have five of the top six schools in the entire nation -- and nine of the top 20 schools in the U.S.

In fact, in the final years before the methodology change, BASIS swept the national rankings, including having the #1 through #5 national schools in 2018, the final year of US News' college prep-based rankings, and the #1, #2, and #3 ranked national schools in 2017.

NATIONAL CHARTER SCHOOL RANKINGS

BASIS Chandler is the best charter school in America for the second straight year.

Four of the top five charters nationally, seven of the top ten, and nine of the top 25, are BASIS Charter Schools, including BASIS Mesa, in its highest ever ranking  the #11 charter in the U.S.

BASIS San Antonio  Shavano is the 25 th ranked charter school in the U.S., its second straight year among America's top 25. It is also the second highest ranked charter school in the state of Texas .

 Shavano is the 25 ranked charter school in the U.S., its second straight year among America's top 25. It is also the second highest ranked charter school in the state of . BASIS has the eight best charter schools in Arizona .

"The charter school rankings are once again truly astounding," said David Hubalik, BASIS.ed's Senior VP of Charter Schools. "The national charter rankings are meaningful to our teachers and staff, especially given the circumstances of the past year. They're meaningful to our students and their families too, of course, as they're the ones who choose a charter school education, and by choosing us, they chose the best charter school network in the U.S., at least according to U.S. News & World Report!"

ARIZONA STATE RANKINGS

BASIS Chandler is the #1 school (charter or otherwise) in Arizona for the second consecutive year.

for the second consecutive year. BASIS Charter Schools comprise four of the state's top five campuses, and eight of Arizona's top ten schools of any type.

"We're a network of schools across the country, but we started with a single campus in Arizona in 1998, so it's significant to have eight of the top ten campuses in our home state," Hubalik said.

Three BASIS Charter Schools  BASIS Flagstaff, BASIS Goodyear, and BASIS Prescott  were not eligible for full ranking consideration due to data errors at the state or national level.

About BASIS Charter Schools

The network of BASIS Charter Schools is among the nation's best for students, whether assessed by national rankings, OECD/PISA scores, AP Exam scores, college admissions, merit aid earned, or any other measure. Our passionate and knowledgeable subject expert teachers serve eager K-12 students using the college-prep oriented BASIS Charter School Curriculum, known for its STEM focus and liberal arts and sciences foundation. Our acclaimed programfounded in 1998 and cultivating excellence every school year sinceeducates students at the highest international levels, preparing them to be intelligent participants in the 21st century global workforce. In the 202122 academic year, there will be 31 BASIS Charter Schools serving more than 20,000 students in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

For more information, please visit BASISschools.org or BASISed.com, or apply at enrollBASIS.com.

SOURCE BASIS Charter Schools

Related Links

http://www.BASISed.com


Electronics Co Ltd snatched back the crown from as the world's biggest smartphone producer, accounting for a fifth of overall global sales in the first quarter, market research firm Canalys said.

China's Corp clocked its best quarterly performance ever, with shipments surging 62% to 49 million phones and market share to 14%, taking it to the third position after and

Overall, global sales surged 27% to 347 million units in the first quarter as the Chinese economy opened up after the pandemic and a swift vaccine rollout in the United States raised hopes of an economic recovery.

South Korea's shipped 76.5 million smartphones in the quarter to grab a 22% share of the market, Canalys said. The company on Thursday reported a 66% surge in quarterly profit in its mobile business, thanks to robust sales of its flagship Galaxy S21 smartphone series.

Canalys said shipped 52.4 million iPhones in the January-March period, falling to the second spot with a 15% marketshare, after it wowed Chinese shoppers in the December quarter with its new 5G-enabled iPhone 12.

People upgrading to the new iPhone still drove sales, though, and the company said on Wednesday that overall sales to China nearly doubled.

Last year, people shopped for smartphones and gadgets as they stayed indoors because of the coronavirus pandemic, fuelling a global shortage in semiconductor chips that has roiled industries including autos and white goods.

"Supply of critical components, such as chipsets, has quickly become a major concern, and will hinder smartphone shipments in the coming quarters," Stanton said.

Apple said on Wednesday that the chip shortage could cost the company $3 billion to $4 billion in revenue in the April-June quarter, affecting primarily iPads and Macbooks.

March-quarter smartphone shipments for China's Oppo and Vivo brands also surged, Canalys said.

China's Huawei, the former No. 1 that remains shackled by U.S. sanctions, took the seventh place with 18.6 million units after selling its Honor brand last year.

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
Press Release

April 29, 2021 Bong Go commends inclusion of PRC frontliners, examiners in the A4 group of the government's vaccine priority list Senator Christopher "Bong" Go lauded the government's decision to include frontliners of the Professional Regulation Commission, such as proctors and watchers, for upcoming professional board exams, and board examiners in the A4 priority group for COVID-19 vaccination. "Nagpapasalamat po tayo at kinokomendahan natin ang desisyon ng national government na isama ang ating PRC frontliners at board examiners sa A4 priority group ng ating COVID-19 vaccination program," began Go. "Maituturing dapat na essential workers ang mga miyembro ng PRC na nagsasagawa ng mga professional board exams. Kung protektado sila dahil sa bakuna, mas makakapagtrabaho sila ng maayos para hindi maantala ang mga kailangan ng ating mga kababayan para sa kanilang mga propesyon," he added. In his previous appeal, Go emphasized the significant role of the PRC in processing and evaluating professionals, particularly nursing graduates, which, in turn, could address the need of the country for more medical frontliners amid the pandemic. "Kung mapoproteksyunan ng bakuna ang PRC examiners, proctors at iba pang personnel, maisasagawa natin agad ang board exams sa ligtas na paraan at mas madadagdagan natin ang mga healthcare professionals sa lalong madaling panahon," Go said in his appeal. In a letter addressed to the Senate Committee on Health chaired by Go, the PRC requested assistance to have its frontliners, members of Professional Regulatory Boards and other personnel of the agency to be included in the vaccination program of local government units as they are constantly exposed to COVID-19 due to the nature of their work. The PRC cited that, in March alone, a total of 52 COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the agency's central and regional offices, including a member of the Board of Medical Technology who succumbed to the disease. Go heeded PRC's request, citing the role of the agency in augmenting the number of healthcare professionals in the country amid the ongoing pandemic. "Kung mababakunahan ang mga kawani ng PRC na magsasagawa ng mga board exam na ito, tiyak na makakapaghold tayo ng mga kinakailangan nating board exams na makakatulong sa ating health care system," he noted. But aside from PRC frontliners, Go also asked authorities to consider the inclusion of soon-to-be health professionals or pre-board nursing graduates in the vaccination priority list, particularly those who are scheduled to take their licensure exams this year -- without prejudice to already identified priority sectors and depending on the scheduled availability of additional vaccine doses. He cited the need to take immediate steps to address the shortage of healthcare professionals in the country amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. "Hirap na hirap na po ang ating mga doktor, nars, at iba pang health workers. Kailangan na talagang madagdagan sila. Marami po diyan na nagsitapos na ng pag-aaral at kinakailangan na lang pumasa ng board exam para maging ganap na health professional," said Go. "Gawin na natin ang kailangan para matulungan sila at matulungan rin ang kapwa nilang health workers sa paglaban sa COVID-19," he added. Previously, Go has also supported the appeal of seafarers and other Overseas Filipino Workers to be inoculated with vaccines that are acceptable in their country of destination, as well as the provision of necessary documentation to prove that they have been vaccinated. The Senator has also recommended the inclusion of certain essential sectors in the vaccine priority list. Among these sectors that have already been included in the A4 category through Go's recommendation are frontline news media workers and airport personnel. Meanwhile, Go filed in July 2019 Senate Bill No. 395, also known as the "Advanced Nursing Education Act of 2019". The measure seeks to protect and improve the nursing profession by instituting measures that will result in relevant nursing education, humane working conditions, better career prospects and a dignified existence for our nurses. Go's proposed measure will require the establishment of standard basic and graduate programs for nursing education, to be established in Commission on Higher Education-accredited institutions of higher learning.
Press Release

April 29, 2021 De Lima urges DILG to task barangay officials to ensure enforcement of COVID-19 health protocols of community pantries Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has urged the Duterte administration to "assume a friendly approach" to community pantries after Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano issued a warning that pantries face the possibility of being shut down if health protocols are violated in the process. De Lima, a social justice and human rights champion, said that instead of suggesting the halt of the operations of community pantries, the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) should instead encourage and help in ensuring the enforcement of health protocols. "If this administration no longer has the capability or interest to give additional aid to our countrymen, the least they can do is help make the community pantries safe for everyone. Ang pagbabanta sa mga community pantries ay direktang pag-atake sa kumakalam na sikmura ng mamamayan," she said. "Hindi ba dapat saluhin ng local at barangay officials yung pagtitiyak na nasusunod ang health protocol kahit sa mga community pantries? Sa halip na ipasara yung mga pantries, hindi ba mas mabuting utusan ng DILG ang mga barangay officials at mga pulis na tumulong?" she added. Based on media reports, Ano reminded organizers of community pantries to adhere to COVID-19 health and safety protocols because failure to do so is supposedly ground for closure. Ano further said that he will issue an advisory and memo to the local government units (LGUs) on the best way to handle community pantries initiated by the private sector and individuals. The lady Senator from Bicol likewise maintained that the government should work with community pantries instead of being an obstacle to their mission. "Kulang ang ayuda ng gobyerno kaya pumipila ang mga tao. Tumulong na lang tayo sa pagtitiyak ng kanilang kaligtasan habang kumukuha sila ng ayuda sa mga community pantries. Kapag pinasara natin ang mga community pantries, sino pa ang tutulong sa mga nangangailangan ngayong panahon ng pandemya?," she said. "Thankfully, we have true Filipinos like Patreng Non who devised a way through which the support and donations of our kababayans reach those who are in need," she added. Non is the woman behind the original community pantry dubbed as "Maginhawa Community Pantry" which was first set up on April 14. Amid concerns of overcrowding, the pantry is now implementing a new decentralized pantry system with the delivery of goods to barangays in the Diliman area in Quezon City.
PHOENIX, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Phoenix Business Journal's annual awards of honoring the 25 Outstanding Women in Business for 2021 included Catholic Education Arizona's Nancy Padberg, MBA, President and CEO. The 260 nominations consisted of all sectors and sizes of organizations.

"It's an honor to be recognized with this talented group of Arizona business leaders for servant leadership, creating a healthy culture and driving revenue. I thank my associates for their effective and focused teamwork and our Board of Directors for their commitment to our mission," stated honoree Nancy Padberg.

Catholic Education Arizona (CEA) partners with Arizona businesses and individual taxpayers to make private education affordable and accessible while serving approximately 100 parishes and 37 Catholic schools and Boys Hope Girls Hope of Arizona. CEA, a School Tuition Organization serving the Diocese of Phoenix, offers Arizona residents and businesses an opportunity to help change lives and build communities. Arizona tax credit legislation allows individuals and corporations to direct their tax dollars to families with demonstrated need:

Corporations filing as an S- or C-Corp, LLCs filing as an S-Corp and insurance companies collecting premiums can direct up to 100% of their state tax liability to Low Income and Disabled Displaced tuition scholarships through CEA. Companies receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.

CEA partners with companies such as APS, Grand Canyon University , Camelot Homes, Cigna Health Insurance, Earnhardt Auto Centers, BBVA and many local businesses.

, Camelot Homes, Cigna Health Insurance, Earnhardt Auto Centers, BBVA and many local businesses. Individual tax credits allow taxpayers in Arizona to contribute their state tax liability to education and receive a dollar-for-dollar credit.

Melissa Fees, Ph.D., Executive Chair, Board of Directors added, "Nancy's business expertise and her collaborative leadership style pair perfectly to lead our organization. She has assembled the best team and together with the Board of Directors is advancing the mission."

Catholic Education Arizona is one of the largest providers of scholarships to underserved families attending private schools and recently was recognized #22 Best Places to Work in Arizona by The Phoenix Business Journal. Last year CEA's tax credit contributions assisted 45% of Diocese of Phoenix Catholic school students. Since 1998, over $268 million has been raised to benefit students in the Catholic schools in the Diocese of Phoenix and 138,000 scholarships have been awarded. Learn more about how CEA is changing lives one scholarship at a time. www.ceaz.org 602-218-6542

Contact: Colleen McCoy-Cejka

Catholic Education Arizona

[email protected] or (602) 218-6542

SOURCE Catholic Education Arizona

Related Links

www.ceaz.org


Facebooks push into e-commerce features is starting to pay off. Facebook Marketplace, the Craigslist-like service where users buy and sell with each other, now has one billion users, Mark Zuckerberg shared in an update during the companys latest earnings call . He also revealed that there are more than a million Shops, with more than 250 million users interacting with those storefronts each month. Facebook launched the feature, which lets businesses create product catalogs on their pages, last year.

Zuckerberg noted that e-commerce has become a lot more important during the coronavirus pandemic. It also allows Facebook to find new ways to make money off its services. For example, the CEO said the company would allow business owners to buy Facebook ads that open directly in WhatsApp from the WhatsApp Business app. And Instagram plans to allow influencers to run their own shops on the app.

We're investing in building the future of commerce, Zuckerberg said. We have a long way to go to build out a full-featured commerce platform across our services. This modern commerce system is going to bring together a number of areas where we either already have strong offerings like in ads, community tools and messaging with areas like shops and business messaging and payments.

Facebook warned last quarter that 2021 would bring uncertainty as the company navigates the effects of Apples iOS 14.5 update , which requires users to agree to ad-tracking. CFO Dave Whener said the company now expects the update to begin having an impact next quarter.

So far, though, the company is doing just fine. It reported just over $26 billion in revenue, an increase of 48 percent from last year. It also grew its user base to 1.88 billion daily active users, though growth in the U.S  its most lucrative ad market  remained flat. Of note, Facebooks other revenue grew 146 percent. The category accounts for Facebooks hardware sales, including its Oculus and Portal devices. Quest 2 is doing better than expected, even after the holiday season, Zuckerberg said.
A concerned father testifying at a hearing in the Arkansas statehouse against an anti-trans bill has spoken out about being arrested after speaking for more than their allotted time.

Chris Attig, who uses the pronouns they/them, was passionately defending the rights of teenagers and minors in the state to have access to gender-affirming medical care, as their now 22-year-old son had.

It was just shocked sitting there in jail thinking that this is what happens when you speak to people about how their proposed laws are affecting your children, Mr Attig told LGBT+ publication them on Tuesday. They dont want to hear it. They put you in jail.

Adding to the outrageous sight of Mr Attig being handcuffed and removed from the hearing last month was that those speaking in favour of the bill were allowed to speak for up 40 minutes.

Only those against the bill were held to a two-minute time limit, LGBTQNation reports, while the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council, classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, spoke for much longer.

No matter what happens here today, you are loved, Mr Attig said in their testimony in the 9 March hearing, addressing trans youth in the state.

Republican state representative Jack Ladyman interjected that Mr Attigs time was up near the two-minute mark, but they persisted, intending to finish their speech.

After repeating that their time was up, lawmakers cut the mic, but they continued to talk, at which point security was instructed to remove them.

Mr Attig was taken to jail, held for several hours and now faces a charge of disorderly conduct.

House Bill 1570, the Arkansas Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, banned medical professionals from providing gender-affirming healthcare of any kind to transgender minors. The ban includes hormone therapy, reversible puberty blockers, and surgery  though that is not performed on minors.

While the bill was passed by the legislature, it was vetoed by Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson.

Mr Hutchinson said he believes the government should not be involved in medical decisions and restraint is better than overbroad actions that interfere with important relationships in our society.

The state legislature nevertheless overrode the veto.

Mr Attig worries that bills such as this send a message that it is permissible to attack transgender people.

Medical practitioners in Arkansas say they have been asked by parents which state they should now move to for treatment for their children.

They are also concerned that others may turn to the black market for hormone treatments that cannot be adequately monitored by professionals.

In recent comments to the Associated Press, the Arkansas Childrens Hospital reported that four trans youth attempted to end their lives after HB 1570 was signed into law.
WHITE CITY, Ore.  Today Gov. Kate Brown visited Southern Oregon and toured Amys Kitchen.

The facility has been the location of multiple coronavirus outbreaks throughout the pandemic; however, Dr. Jim Shames with Jackson County Public Health has called the facility a good example of what businesses should do to protect employees, citing multiple COVID-19 precautions in place.

Gov. Brown got an up-close look at operations inside, where temperature checks are required at the door, random rapid testing is done on employees to ensure the virus isnt spreading undetected, dividers are placed throughout the production line to ensure protection, masks are required and all employees along the production line are at least 6 ft. apart. Just recently, Amys Kitchen began offering free Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses to any employees that want it. The vaccine is distributed on-site at the companys medical facility that offers free medical services to employees and their families.

Gov. Brown said she could see more business and medical professional partnerships as vaccine rollout continues, saying that the state is potentially looking to get involved, were willing to partner, probably with bigger employers for the most part, but were willing help employers coordinate with vaccination efforts, said Brown.

When asked about the future of vaccinations, Gov. Brown says the way COVID-19 vaccines are administered will shift.

We see mass vaccination clinics tapering off around mid-May because we want the vaccines to come through a regular vaccination distribution channel, said Brown.

The Kaiser Family Foundation seems to agree that family physicians will be the best way to ensure more people continue to be vaccinated, especially as vaccine hesitancy remains to be a common barrier to vaccinations throughout the country.

According to an article published on KFFs website, throughout the coronavirus pandemic, majorities of U.S. adults have said their doctors and nurses were their most trusted sources of information about the coronavirus and eight in ten have said their doctors are the ones they will turn to when decided whether or not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
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It would be 'incredibly safe' for two fully Covid vaccinated people to meet up, England's deputy chief medical officer said - but the UK will not follow the US in enabling vaccinated people to get together without social distancing.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam told a Downing Street press briefing that scientifically it would be safe for vaccinated people to meet.

He suggested the reason why they are currently prevented from doing so is because younger people have not had a vaccine.

Professor Van-Tam urged people to wait a 'teeny bit longer' for more normal social interactions to resume.

Fully immunised Americans are allowed to stop wearing masks outdoors  except in large venues, and are permitted to meet up without restriction with other vaccinated people indoors.

But in the UK the 13.2million people who have had their full course of vaccines must still follow the same social distancing and lockdown rules as everyone else so younger people can catch up.

Professor Van-Tam said: 'If two people who both had two doses of vaccine and have both served at least 14 days after their second dose, then I would be highly confident scientifically that if they were reputable vaccines then indeed it would be incredibly safe for those two people to meet.'

On when that could happen in the UK, he said: 'Soon, I really hope soon, but not quite now.'

He warned that nobody under 42, apart from the clinically extremely vulnerable 'in whom the vaccine may be slightly less effective' and healthcare workers, have had the vaccine.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam told a Downing Street press briefing that scientifically it would be safe for vaccinated people to meet

'I know this feels tantalisingly, extremely close, and it is going to be frustrating at times for people, particularly those who've had their two doses,' he said.

'But we just need to make sure we don't have to go backwards again on any of this and just hold the line a teeny bit longer.'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the briefing a decision had been made to move as a population towards greater freedoms - as set down in the Government's road map.

Current rules in Britain allow groups of six to meet up outdoors, outdoor service at bars and restaurants, and overnight stays with your own household.

Indoor meet-ups are still banned and people cannot have gatherings of more than six people, unless they are at a specifically permitted event like a wedding.

This is despite scientific research piling up to prove that vaccines work very well in the real world and even appear to drastically cut transmission of the virus.

In the US, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said fully vaccinated people can start doing some of the things they did before the pandemic.

It says that two weeks after a second dose, people can gather indoors with other fully vaccinated people without wearing a mask or social distancing.

Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England, told MPs today: 'This is about the population as a whole rather than those privileged individuals who have had two doses'

They can also gather indoors with unvaccinated people from one other household without social distancing unless that household has somebody vulnerable to Covid.

Asked why England will not follow the US, Mr Hancock said: 'The decision we've taken... is to move together, that's what the road map does.

'As you know, in the autumn we moved different parts of the country according to the rates that we saw in those areas.

'That had some advantages but it also had a disadvantage that we then saw in the areas where we had fewer restrictions we saw cases pop up.

'So we took the decision when we wrote the road map that we all move as one, and I think that is very widely supported.'

It comes after Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England, earlier told MPs that part of the reason the country was not following the US in allowing greater freedoms was cultural, as people in the UK 'tend to do everything together'.

Dr Ramsay told the Commons Science and Technology Committee the UK's policy of leaving up to 12 weeks between vaccine doses - a move she said has saved lives - means the UK is behind the US when it comes to fully vaccinated individuals.

'I think they (US) are able to be less cautious, perhaps, than us because of the fact that more people have had two doses, which one would expect to get even better protection against transmission,' she said.

'Our data is now coming through showing that even one dose is very good (against transmission), so I think we can begin to look at those factors and we are looking at those factors.

More than 13.2million people have already had a second dose of their Covid vaccine, suggesting over a quarter of adults will have maximum immunity in the next couple of weeks

'I think the other thing is we have a slightly different cultural perspective in this country in that we tend to do everything together.

'We are trying to say that this is about the population as a whole rather than the individuals, those privileged individuals who have had two doses, being somehow able to do things that other people cannot.'

Greg Clark, chairman of the committee, asked Dr Ramsay if that means decisions are being taken for sociological reasons, rather than being based on the science.

WHAT CAN FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE DO IN THE US VS UK? In the US fully vaccinated people can: Meet indoors with other vaccinated people without social distancing or masks;

Meet unvaccinated people from one other household indoors without masks or social distancing;

Choose not to wear a mask outdoors except in large venues or crowds;

Take domestic flights without needing a Covid test;

Don't have to self-isolate if exposed to someone with Covid. In the UK fully vaccinated people have the same freedoms as unvaccinated people, meaning they: Can not meet people from other households indoors;

Can meet only in groups of six outdoors;

Must still self-isolate if exposed to the virus;

Must continue social distancing if meeting anyone they don't live with. Advertisement

She said the road map and policy decisions are being taken by the Government, not by PHE, and the road map reflects 'doing everything as a whole'.

Dr Ramsay added: 'It may be that, within the future road map, we are able to pick out individuals.

'I think that is the direction of travel, that we will all be able to release certain things as time goes on, but you know the next level will be to allow people to meet indoors, and it won't necessarily depend only on having been vaccinated.'

Dr Ramsay also told MPs it was 'very important' that as many people as possible are vaccinated before all restrictions are eased.

'It is really very important that we have as many people vaccinated before we release all those restrictions, so at the moment we are trying to balance it very carefully,' she said.

'As more people get vaccinated, we are releasing gradually, we're observing what happens, and then that's allowing us to carry on, but it does depend on what the future holds, how people behave, how the vaccine works.'

Dr Ramsay said that while the proportion of people with two jabs is increasing, there are still some elderly who have not been vaccinated and children cannot yet have a vaccination.

'I think it will be very hard to say confidently that by X we can stop doing Y and I think it really is a question of keeping observing and keeping monitoring, so that we can get that balance right,' she said.

'There is a risk that we get a resurgence as we release restrictions - hopefully that will mainly lead to mild disease and younger people, but there will still be the risk that those people can potentially pass this on to older individuals who are, for whatever reason, either unable to respond to vaccine, unvaccinated or maybe if the vaccine begins to lose protection over time.'

Dr Ramsay said that there will be a need to monitor regional spikes in future coronavirus cases.

'There is always the risk that if that pocket of transmission - whether it's due to social factors, housing, behaviour, vaccination or lack of vaccination - they could potentially all coalesce and you could have potentially pockets where there was quite worrying rates of transmission, so I think the real importance is that we continue to monitor this on a very careful basis and we continue to look at the local level.'

Fully vaccinated people in the UK don't get any extra freedoms, whereas they are given more licence to meet people indoors in the US (Pictured: A woman is vaccinated in Reading, Berkshire)

As lockdown rules are loosened across the UK, people are anxious to get more freedom as quickly as they can.

And with vaccines touted as the only way back to normality, people already fully immunised may feel they deserve to have their lives less tightly controlled after spending more than a year under restrictions.

Greg Clark MP, the chair of Parliament's science and technology committee, today suggested they were being kept in lockdown for 'sociological reasons' rather than scientific ones.

Studies have showed vaccines work and officials in the US have decided evidence is strong enough to grant vaccinated people more freedoms.

Speaking at the Downing Street press conference on Wednesday Professor Van-Tam also announced that he believed the UK is 'at or close to the bottom' of its Covid outbreak as data showed daily cases fell again by 10 per cent in the past week, to 2,166, while 29 more deaths were announced.

The deputy chief medical officer said he was 'hopeful' about Britain getting back to normal in the coming months and said vaccines should mean tough national lockdowns won't happen again.

He compared the situation now to last September's, before the devastating second wave ignited by the Kent variant, and said: 'The vaccine has undoubtedly helped... it really is the way out of getting into trouble of the same size and magnitude ever again.'

The Department of Health's usual update today showed there were 2,166 positive test results received in the past 24 hours, down 9.6 per cent from a week ago. Another 29 deaths were recorded, up by a third on the 22 last Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a major Office for National Statistics (ONS) testing survey revealed 68.3 per cent of people in England had coronavirus antibodies in the week ending April 11, up from 53.1 per cent a fortnight prior. It suggests the majority of the population now has some immunity against the disease.

The finding highlights the success of the huge vaccination drive, which today saw another 116,328 people given a first dose and 379,265 their second. In total almost 34million Brits have been given at least one injection and 13.5m have been fully immunised.

And separate analysis today revealed a single dose of vaccine slashes the risk of spreading coronavirus to a member of your household by up to half. This means not only do they reduce the chance of catching Covid in the first place, the jabs greatly reduce the chances of passing it on.

The deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, said at today's Downing Street briefing that he was 'hopeful' about Britain getting back to normal in the coming months and said vaccines should mean tough national lockdowns won't happen again

UK BUYS 60m MORE PFIZER VACCINE DOSES Britain has bought another 60million doses of Pfizer's Covid vaccine as part of plans to launch a booster jab rollout this autumn, Matt Hancock revealed tonight. Ministers hope the extra supplies  which will take No10's total order to 100million  will start to be delivered from September through to early 2022 so everyone in the country can be offered a third vaccine. Some of the supplies may also be used for second doses for under-30s vaccinated in June and July, who would expect their boosters in September and October. Young adults are not likely to get the AstraZeneca vaccine because of concerns about blood clots. The autumn vaccine rollout will offer everyone who has been vaccinated a third jab, either of the same type or potentially a different vaccine if studies prove this works, to boost their immunity for the long-term, officials said. The extra jabs will be the same as the Pfizer ones given out at the moment, not specific ones targeted at the South Africa or Brazil variants, although the company is working on these. Mr Hancock said at a Downing Street briefing today that 'evidence is stacking up that the vaccine protects you, it protects your loved ones, and it's the way out of this pandemic'. Advertisement

Professor Van-Tam said in the briefing: 'We are really in very low levels that are comparable to where we were in September last year. We are running as a typical seven-day average at just over 2,000 people testing positive per day.

'My sense is that probably we are at or close to the bottom at the moment in terms of this level of disease in the UK.

'Most of the steady decline we have seen, the disappearance of our third wave, has been down to the efforts of the British people in following lockdown.

'The vaccine has undoubtedly helped in the later stages and there is good evidence that the death rate in the elderly has dropped faster than it has in the younger age groups and it has dropped faster than it did in the second wave, and that is undoubtedly a vaccine effect.

'What is important about these vaccines and the vaccine rollout is it really is the way out of getting into trouble of the same size and magnitude ever again, and that's why it's important that this job must get finished.'

He, Health Secretary Matt Hancock and the NHS's Dr Nikki Karanani took to the Downing Street podiums to announce that Britain had bought 60million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine for an autumn third-jab rollout.

They showed charts painting a picture of impressive vaccine uptake across the UK, urging younger people to come forward when they are allowed to, as Mr Hancock, 42, will get his vaccine tomorrow.

Professor Van-Tam added: The modelling consensus is clear, we will have what's called a third wave.

'I am fairly hopeful that, if the vaccine programme continues at pace and continues to be as successful as it has been, the third wave might just be a third upsurge and much less significant because of the delinking of cases to hospitalisations and deaths.

'But I think it is inconceivable to think we will go from a period of relative calm, which is where we are now, with no further bumps in the road in terms of upswings in activity between now and this time next year.'

Today's ONS report, based on random blood tests of around 20,000 adults across the UK, estimated 62.5 per cent of the adult population in Northern Ireland have the proteins. The figure was slightly lower in Wales at 61 per cent and Scotland (57.8 per cent).

As well as through jabs, antibodies are made in response to previous infection. The fact that almost half (46.5 per cent) of people aged 16 to 24 in England tested positive for antibodies suggests younger people are enjoying protection from prior infection.

About seven in 10 adults in England have coronavirus antibodies, according to a major Office for National Statistics (ONS) testing survey. It also estimated 62.5 per cent of the adult population in Northern Ireland have the proteins. The figure was slightly lower in Wales at 61 per cent and Scotland (57.8 per cent)

How antibody levels have increased over time thanks to vaccines: The jab programme was rolled out to older people first (highlighted in February, left) and has gradually opened up to younger groups

The results highlight the success of Britain's vaccine programme, which has seen almost 34million Britons - more than half the entire population - receive at least one dose. Some 13.2m of them have been given both injections

And official data shows nearly 40 million Britons live in practically 'Covid-free' areas, where two or fewer cases were recorded during the latest week. England is split into 6,800 areas - which each have average population of approximately 8,200 - to record data on Covid. Public Health England (PHE) redacts data for areas that see two, one or no cases in one week so as to protect the identities of those infected (a graph showing areas based on the number of Covid cases). A total of 4,819 areas have had their information pulled by PHE

It comes as a major Government analysis today revealed a single dose of vaccine slashes the risk of spreading coronavirus by up to half. Adults who received the Pfizer vaccine (red) but still caught the virus were 49 per cent less likely to spread it to other household members than those who weren't inoculated. Those given the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab (blue) were 38 per cent less likely to transmit it to others in their household. The graph shows that in the first few days after vaccination (right), people are more likely to pass the disease on compared to weeks later, when immunity has time to build up (left). The figures are based on an odds ratio, meaning anything above one is an increased risk - and anything below is the opposite

NHS England began offering people a jab to people aged 42 and over this week and the programme is expected to open to people in their 30s next week. Only younger people with underlying health conditions or who live in areas where GPs have extra stock have been offered an appointment.

In England, the highest percentage of adults testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies in the week to April 11 was estimated to be the 70 to 74 age group (87.6 per cent), followed by 80 and over (87.1 per cent) and 60 to 64 (85.7 per cent). The lowest percentage was for 16 to 24-year-olds (46.5 per cent).

TAKING RAPID COVID TESTS DOESN'T MAKE YOU 'INVINCIBLE', HEALTH CHIEF WARNS People who are vaccinated and using rapid turnaround Covid-19 tests are 'not invincible', Professor Anthony Harnden of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), has said. 'If you've got a positive lateral flow test that's quite helpful in the sense that you know that you need to have a PCR and you may well have the infection and you may be infectious to other people,' he told the Science and Technology committee of MPs today. 'The problem is with a negative lateral flow test doesn't mean to say necessarily you've not got the infection. 'I think everybody's got to be cautious and just because you've been vaccinated, and just because you have a negative lateral flow test, does not mean you're invincible because these tests are not perfect. 'Of course, as the prevalence infection goes down in the population the predictive value of all these tests becomes problematic as well, so I would say they're helpful, as part of the arsenal of tests and investigations and vaccine and everything else, but they shouldn't be just taken in isolation.' Source: Press Association Advertisement

In Wales, the highest proportion of adults likely to have tested positive for antibodies was the 70 to 74 age group (83 per cent) followed by 65 to 69 (82.9 per cent) and 60 to 64 (82.8 per cent).

In Scotland the highest percentage was estimated to be among 65 to 69-year-olds (85.1 per cent), followed by 70 to 74-year-olds (81.4 per cent) and 60 to 64-year-olds (80.1 per cent).

In Northern Ireland, the ONS uses different age groups due to small sample sizes and estimates 82 per cent of people aged 70 and over were likely to have tested positive for antibodies in the week to April 11. All figures are for people in private households and do not include settings such as hospitals and care homes.

Other scientific advisers have warned that the country must stick to its rigid lockdown-easing schedule, which won't see pubs and restaurants open for indoor service until May 17, when foreign travel will also resume. They said speeding up lockdown-easing plans would still be a 'big mistake'.

Professor Peter Openshaw, chair of the SAGE subgroup NERVTAG, told the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme: 'I really think that we're doing the right thing by being cautious and by proceeding according to the evidence and not easing too fast.

'I think we do know that easing too fast would be a big mistake and we don't want to lose all the ground that's been gained by massive public effort to get to where we are now. It's so vital that we do keep up the precautions and move with cautious speed.'

Dr Tildesley suggested the decision on whether social distancing would be needed after the June road map date could be a political one.

However, he said vaccines were doing the job of preventing most people falling seriously ill, and he was hopeful hugs would be back on the agenda by the date the Government has set for lifting legal limits on social contact.

Speaking on Times Radio, Dr Tildesley was asked at what stage people will be able to be close to another person, such as a family member, if both have been vaccinated.

He said: 'I think this is really difficult because of course, in a sense, this becomes more of a sort of a political decision rather than an epidemiological decision because we have been told that on June 21 all of these legal limits on contact will be removed, but it's still unclear exactly what that means.

'Whether that means that on that date some social distancing will be in place or whether all of those will be removed and you'll be able to go and hug your loved ones...

'I think the key thing is that if you're both vaccinated, of course, it does reduce the risk of anyone becoming severely ill and my hope is that as we move towards that June date, we will be in a position that we can not just see our loved ones, but also we can hug our loved ones because it's been a very long time since we've been able to do that.'

Brits rush to download NHS App after Grant Shapps confirmed it WILL be used as Covid passport for travel The NHS app will double as a covid passport with vaccinations already uploaded, it was revealed today, as Portugal said it would welcome tourists with jabs from mid-May and Spain from June. Thousands have rushed to download the app this morning and were shocked to discover the details of their jab - including how many they've had - is already on there. He tweeted a picture of his record in the 'medicines and treatments' section of the NHS app to his 895,000 followers, which led to a flurry of replies from others who had discovered the same thing. But the Department of Health has denied claims it has secretly rolled out covid passports, insisting that all vaccines are automatically added to the app containing the user's medical records. The spokesman could not confirm if this is how people will present proof of being vaccinated airports, or how a negative test will be uploaded to the app if it is not done via the NHS. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps today revealed the NHS app is being worked on to become a health certificate for international travel - but explained it will be housed on the app used to book appointments and repeat prescriptions, not the Covid-19 one currently used to check into pubs, cafes and other venues. His announcement led to a rush of people trying to download the app, but people using smartphones such as the Apple iPhone 6, launched in 2014, claim they were unable to use it. Domestic coronavirus statistics 'look good' enough to enable the resumption of foreign holidays from May 17, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps also revealed. Mr Shapps also said the NHS app is being worked on to become a health certificate for international travel - but it is the app used to book appointments, not the Covid-19 one currently used to check into pubs, cafes and other venues. Advertisement

He said there was a need for ongoing monitoring of the situation, including of what happens when people are allowed to mix indoors again.

From May 17, up to two households, or six individuals from other households (the rule of six), will be able to meet inside.

Dr Tildesley said: 'We obviously do need to monitor the data as we get to the main relaxation, when you are allowed to go inside people's households, it's really important that we monitor that data and ensure that we don't get a resurgence at that point.'

It came after research by Public Health England (PHE) found just one dose of vaccine cuts the risk of spreading the disease to others by half.

The analysis, which involved almost 1.5million adults, is the first of its kind to confirm the effectiveness of the vaccines in curbing the virus's ability to spread.

The new study on transmission of the virus found that adults who received the Pfizer vaccine  but still caught the virus  were 49 per cent less likely to spread it to other household members than those who weren't inoculated.

The results for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were not quite as good but nonetheless, those who received it were 38 per cent less likely to transmit it to others in their household.

But the fact that both vaccines dramatically reduce the virus's ability to spread  as well as preventing serious illness  offer renewed hope that they hold the key to a return to normal life.

They have already been shown to reduce coronavirus hospitalisations and deaths by 80 per cent after one dose, rising even higher after full immunity.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: 'This is terrific news, we already know vaccines save lives and this study is the most comprehensive real-world data showing they also cut transmission of this deadly virus.'

Previous analysis had already confirmed the jabs were excellent at preventing severe disease and death but one of the unanswered questions was how much they stopped transmission.

Scientists have repeatedly warned a jab that is poor at halting the disease's spread meant there was always a risk of the virus circulating in high numbers and eventually spilling into the small number of vulnerable people who aren't jabbed or for whom the jabs don't work.

On PHE's latest analysis, Mr Hancock added: 'It further reinforces that vaccines are the best way out of this pandemic as they protect you and they may prevent you from unknowingly infecting someone in your household.

'I urge everybody to get their vaccines as soon as they are eligible and make sure you get your second dose for the strongest possible protection. This is a huge national effort and we will beat the virus together.'

The jabs' ability to prevent virus transmission kicked in after just 14 days and they worked regardless of a person's age or the number of people within their household, with whom they had close contact.

One jab HALVES spread of virus in your home A single dose of vaccine slashes the risk of spreading coronavirus by up to half, a major study reveals today. Not only does the jab reduce a person's chance of catching Covid in the first place, it greatly reduces their chances of passing it on, should they get infected. The research by Public Health England (PHE) which involved almost 1.5million adults is the first of its kind to confirm the effectiveness of the vaccines in curbing the virus's ability to spread. The new study on transmission of the virus found that adults who received the Pfizer vaccine  but still caught the virus  were 49 per cent less likely to spread it to other household members than those who weren't inoculated. The results for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were not quite as good but nonetheless, those who received it were 38 per cent less likely to transmit it to others in their household. But the fact that both vaccines dramatically reduce the virus's ability to spread  as well as preventing serious illness  offer renewed hope that they hold the key to a return to normal life. They have already been shown to reduce coronavirus hospitalisations and deaths by 80 per cent after one dose, rising even higher after full immunity. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: 'This is terrific news, we already know vaccines save lives and this study is the most comprehensive real-world data showing they also cut transmission of this deadly virus.' The results will come as a huge boost for the country's lockdown easing plans, given that almost 34million Britons - more than half the entire population - have had one dose. Some 13.2m of them have been given both injections. It comes as Boris Johnson said yesterday that the 'road ahead looks positive' as separate figures revealed Covid deaths have plummeted 97 per cent since the second peak. Previous analysis had already confirmed the jabs were excellent at preventing severe disease and death but one of the unanswered questions was how much they stopped transmission. Scientists have repeatedly warned a jab that is poor at halting the disease's spread meant there was always a risk of the virus circulating in high numbers and eventually spilling into the small number of vulnerable people who aren't jabbed or for whom the jabs don't work. On PHE's latest analysis, Mr Hancock added: 'It further reinforces that vaccines are the best way out of this pandemic as they protect you and they may prevent you from unknowingly infecting someone in your household. 'I urge everybody to get their vaccines as soon as they are eligible and make sure you get your second dose for the strongest possible protection. This is a huge national effort and we will beat the virus together.' Advertisement

Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at PHE, said: 'Vaccines are vital in helping us return to a normal way of life.

'Not only do vaccines reduce the severity of illness and prevent hundreds of deaths every day, we now see they also have an additional impact on reducing the chance of passing Covid-19 on to others. I encourage anyone who is offered a vaccine to take it as soon as possible.

'While these findings are very encouraging, even if you have been vaccinated, it is really important that you continue to act like you have the virus, practise good hand hygiene and follow social distancing guidance.'

Meanwhile, official data has revealed nearly 40 million Britons live in practically 'Covid-free' areas. The UK's hugely successful vaccine rollout and continued lockdown measures have meant that seven in ten people now live in places where two or fewer cases were recorded during the latest week.

In another positive sign, yesterday's daily deaths figure halved in a week - with 17 recorded on Tuesday, compared to 33 one week prior. England is split into 6,800 areas - which each have average population of approximately 8,200 - to record data on Covid.

Public Health England (PHE) redacts data for areas that see two, one or no cases in one week so as to protect the identities of those infected. A total of 4,819 areas have had their information pulled by PHE, analysis by The Times revealed.

This means that 38 million people are in areas where two or fewer cases have been recorded in the most-recent week of available data.

It was also revealed today that the NHS app will double as a Covid passport with vaccinations already uploaded.

Thousands have rushed to download the app this morning and were shocked to discover the details of their jab - including how many they've had - is already on there.

He tweeted a picture of his record in the 'medicines and treatments' section of the NHS app to his 895,000 followers, which led to a flurry of replies from others who had discovered the same thing.

But the Department of Health has denied claims it has secretly rolled out covid passports, insisting that all vaccines are automatically added to the app containing the user's medical records.

The spokesman could not confirm if this is how people will present proof of being vaccinated airports, or how a negative test will be uploaded to the app if it is not done via the NHS.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps today revealed the NHS app is being worked on to become a health certificate for international travel - but explained it will be housed on the app used to book appointments and repeat prescriptions, not the Covid-19 one currently used to check into pubs, cafes and other venues.

His announcement led to a rush of people trying to download the app, but people using smartphones such as the Apple iPhone 6, launched in 2014, claim they were unable to use it.

Domestic coronavirus statistics 'look good' enough to enable the resumption of foreign holidays from May 17, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps also revealed.

Mr Shapps also said the NHS app is being worked on to become a health certificate for international travel - but it is the app used to book appointments, not the Covid-19 one currently used to check into pubs, cafes and other venues.

He told Sky News: 'In terms of vaccine certification, I can confirm we are working on an NHS application, actually it will be the NHS app that is used for people when they book appointments with the NHS and so on, to be able to show you've had a vaccine or you've had testing.

'I'm working internationally with partners across the world to make sure that system can be internationally recognised, as that's the way forward.

'Actually, I'm chairing a meeting of the G7 secretaries of state for transport, my equivalents from America and Canada and all the G7 countries, next week on exactly this subject'.

Overseas leisure travel could resume for people in England on May 17 under Boris Johnson's road map for easing restrictions.

Mr Shapps told Sky News: 'I have to say that so far the data does continue to look good from a UK perspective, notwithstanding those concerns about where people might be travelling to and making sure we're protected from the disease being reimported.'

He added he will set out which countries fall into the 'green', 'amber' and 'red' categories under the new risk-based traffic light system 'towards the beginning of May'.

That will determine what testing and quarantine requirements travellers will face when they return from various destinations.

Revealing Spain was throwing open its beaches, tourism minister Fernando Valdes Verelst said: 'June will be the start of the recovery of tourism in Spain. By then, we will have a digital vaccination certificate in place and we will be able to reopen our borders.'

He said Spain was pushing for the UK's digital vaccine passport to be 'mutually recognised' and that he welcomed Boris Johnson's plans to restart international travel.

Mr Verelst said he expected Spain to be on the UK's travel green list when international travel resumes thanks to the country's successful vaccine rollout which has seen 22 per cent of the population receive a first dose.

This would mean Britons returning to the UK from Spain would not have to quarantine.

But Mr Shapps said the public will have to 'wait and see' about whether the UK will permit travel to Spain.

He told Times Radio: 'Spain specifically, I'm afraid I just don't have the answer to that because the Joint Biosecurity Centre will need to come up with their assessment and we can't do that until a bit nearer the time.

'So we will need to wait and see.'

Speaking at the World Travel and Tourism Council in Mexico, he added: 'Because of the progress in our vaccine rollout with 22 per cent of our population having had their first dose already, we expect by June to be at the green light.

'We are having close conversations with UK authorities and we are exchanging information on Spain's digital system and the trial happening at our airports in May.'

Spain is the UK's most popular overseas destination with 18.1million people visiting the country from the UK in 2019.

The port city of Malaga in Spain's Costa del Sol was easyJet's top beach destination for British tourists in 2019.

The UK has earmarked May 17 as being the earliest date when international travel would be allowed for non-essential reasons following a winter lockdown, with a 'traffic light system' based on individual countries' COVID risk levels.
Lucknow: The final phase of polling for the panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh ended on Thursday (April 29) with a 75 percent turnout. The last phase witnessed a group clash in Mathura and the deaths of two workers who fell ill while on poll duty. The counting of votes will take place on May 2.

In Thursday's fourth phase, over 5.27 lakh candidates contested for about 2.10 lakh seats in 17 districts, officials told PTI, adding that 75.38 per cent of the registered voters turned up, a polling percentage higher than the previous phases.

In Mathura district's Barsana, eight people were injured when supporters of rival groups exchanged fire, reported the police, adding that six people from both factions were arrested.

Additional Superintendent of Police (Rural) Shrish Chandra told PTI that polling was affected for some time at the Nehra village centre before they brought the situation under control. The injured were, however, rushed to hospital, where their condition was stated to be stable.

In Shahjahanpur district, two government employees died after taking ill while on poll duty. Among them, sanitation worker Sobaran Lal complained of uneasiness and died later in hospital, District Magistrate Indra Vikram Singh reportedly said, adding that the family will be given Rs 15 lakh as government assistance.

Another worker posted a video clip on social media as her health deteriorated and she was admitted to a hospital. In Kalan block too, a teacher was taken to hospital after recording a similar video. The cause of the two deaths is not immediately clear but employee associations have been alleging that several people on poll duty have succumbed to coronavirus.

In separate statements on Thursday, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav demanded compensation of Rs 50 lakh for the families of each employee who has died. Gandhi referred to an allegation that there have been about 500 such deaths.

Polling took place in Ambedkar Nagar, Aligarh, Kushinagar, Kaushambi, Ghazipur, Farrukhabad, Bulandshahr, Basti, Bahraich, Banda, Mau, Mathura, Shahjahanpur, Sambhal, Sitapur, Sonbhadra and Hapur districts on Thursday.

Lakhs of candidates were in the fray for over 7.32 lakh seats in gram panchayat wards, 58,176 in gram panchayats. 75,852 in kshetra panchayats and 3,050 in zila panchayats in the state-wide elections, held over four phases amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

There were 10,679 candidates in the fray for 738 posts of Zila panchayat members in these districts. Also, 55,408 candidates contested for 18,356 posts of kshetra panchayat members, 1,14,400 for gram panchayats and 3,47,436 for gram panchayat wards in this phase, according to the poll body.

Notably, the first phase of panchayat polls took place on April 15 and the second round on April 19 recorded a turnout of 71 per cent, while in the third phase on April 26, 73.5 per cent reportedly exercised their franchise.

577 teachers on panchayat poll duty died: Teachers` unions

The various teachers` unions in Uttar Pradesh have claimed that 577 teachers and support staff died while on panchayat poll duty in the state, said an IANS report. The unions have now asked teachers to stay away on counting day, May 2.

They have also given a list of the 577 deceased persons to the Uttar Pradesh State Election Commission (UPSEC). The UP Shikshak Mahasangh (UPSM) has sent names and addresses of the 577 teachers and Shiksha Mitras.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Allahabad High Court had sent a notice to the SEC seeking an explanation on Covid preparedness and the alleged deaths. Special work officer, SEC, SK Singh had issued a letter to all the district magistrates and district police chiefs, asking them to check the veracity of the reported deaths.

(With Agency Inputs)

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Columbus city leaders are requesting a Justice Department investigation following a series of police killings of black people, because of 'fierce opposition' to reform within the agency.

The request by Mayor Andrew Ginther and City Attorney Zach Klein - both Democrats - capped several painful months for the city, culminating most recently with the April 20 fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant as she swung a knife at a woman. Bryant was black and the rookie officer who shot her was white.

Criticism has included not just fatal police shootings but also the department's reaction to last summer's protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

The city has taken steps to address the criticisms including police body cameras and creation of a civilian review board but leaders say they have met push-back from police the entire way.

'The City has been met with fierce opposition from leadership within the Columbus Division of Police,' Wednesday's letter said, which also suggested the Justice Department could use court-ordered measures to force the local police union to comply with changes.

Columbus officers 'are always willing to work with any entity to improve policing in the communities they protect and serve,' Jeff Simpson, executive vice president of the local union, said in a statement. 'Politicians constantly vilifying officers breeds contempt for authority, emboldens the criminal element and has led to a mass exodus of law enforcement officers from the profession.'

The request by Mayor Andrew Ginther (right) and City Attorney Zach Klein (left), both Democrats - capped several painful months for the city

A report commissioned by city council and released earlier this week criticized both the police department and city leaders, saying Columbus was unprepared for the size and energy of the protests.

'This is not about one particular officer, policy, or incident; rather, this is about reforming the entire institution of policing in Columbus,' Ginther and Klein said in Wednesday's letter. 'Simply put: We need to change the culture of the Columbus Division of Police.'

It's not unusual for mayors or local law enforcement leaders to ask the Justice Department to review an agencys record. Those requests sometimes are made when city officials anticipate a federal probe is looming regardless of their wishes.

When the Justice Department does launch such a review, city officials can do little to stop it, so they generally welcome the investigations, at least in public. The mayors of Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, quickly endorsed the reviews the Justice Department recently announced of those cities police departments following the killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

It's likely that the recent police killings in Columbus combined with the mayor's push for changes would make the city's request appealing to the Justice Department, said Ayesha Hardaway, a Case Western Reserve University criminal law professor.

Myron Hammonds, left, and Paula Bryant, center, father and mother of Ma'Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old girl shot and killed by a Columbus police officer on April 20, stand next to family attorney Michelle Martin during a news conference Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Martin has called for full investigations into the teen's fatal shooting by a Columbus police officer

Ma'Khia Bryant's death has sparked an investigation by Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation

'I imagine that Columbus will be considered a good opportunity to make lasting change,' said Hardaway, who has worked with Cleveland's police department in the wake of Justice Department involvement after the 2014 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

A message was left with the Justice Department seeking comment.

The request by Columbus leaders came the same day that the attorney representing the family of Bryant requested a federal investigation into her death and the state's foster care system.

Columbus remains an outlier among other American cities under Justice Department scrutiny, with multiple initiatives launched over the last few years to address complaints about the police department, pushed by Ginther and the citys all-Democratic city council.

In 2016, shortly after Ginther took office, the city spent millions of dollars to buy police body cameras for the first time and is now in the process of spending millions more to upgrade them. The city recently created its first-ever civilian review board in a 2020 voter-approved measure pushed by Ginther and the city council.

Even with its initiatives, Columbus - the country's 14th largest city - has recorded a number of contested police shootings.

The most recent cases include Bryant, the April 12 killing of 27-year-old Miles Jackson in a hospital ER room, and 47-year-old Andre Hill. The white police officer who fatally shot Hill Dec. 22 has pleaded not guilty to a number of charges made against him by the state's attorney general's office.

The case of Casey Goodson Jr., a 23-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by Franklin County Sheriff's deputy in early December in Columbus, has widened criticism of policing in the city to include the county sheriff's office.

In January, interim Columbus Chief Thomas Quinlan was forced out after Ginther said hed lost confidence in the chiefs ability to make needed changes to the department.

Before the recent police shootings, the city was sued over the 2016 shooting of Henry Green, a Black man, by two undercover white police officers working in an anti-crime summer initiative.

Protesters in Columbus took to the streets on Wednesday to demand justice for Ma'Khia

People listen as friends of Ma'Khia Bryant speak about her at a community vigil, on Wednesday, at Douglas Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio

Paula Bryant, mother of Ma'Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old girl shot and killed by a Columbus police officer on April 20, holds a photo of her daughter while talking about her during a news conference Wednesday, April 28

Later in the same year, a white officer fatally shot 13-year-old Tyre King, who was Black, during a robbery investigation. In 2017, a video showed a Columbus officer restraining a Black man lying on the ground and preparing to handcuff him when an officer - Zachary Rosen - who was also involved in the Green shooting arrived and appeared to kick the man in the head.

The city fired Rosen, but an arbitrator ordered him reinstated, angering many in the community while underscoring the challenge that police union contracts can pose for cities trying to hold officers accountable.

Records show that black residents, about 28% of the Columbus population, accounted for about half of all use-of-force incidents from 2015 through 2019.

The agency - like many big-city departments - is juggling calls for internal change even as it battles street violence. Columbus saw a record 174 homicides in 2020 and has recorded 62 so far this year, a figure not reached until early July of last year.

Federal involvement in the Columbus police department over allegations of officer misconduct isnt new.

In 1999, the Justice Department sued the city, accusing officers of routinely violating peoples civil rights through illegal searches, false arrests and excessive force. A year later, the government added a racial profiling complaint, alleging that from 1994 to 1999, Black people in Columbus were almost three times as likely as whites to be the subject of traffic stops in which one or more tickets were issued.

A federal judge in 2002 dismissed the lawsuit after the city, which had fought it, made changes on the use of police force and handling of complaints against officers.

In Wednesday's letter, Ginther pledged to give the Justice Department the city's full cooperation if the agency agrees to take on the review.

'We want to be partners with the DOJ to bring about meaningful, sustainable and significant reforms,' he wrote. 'Not only is the elected leadership in the City of Columbus aligned with this request, but the residents of Columbus unquestionably share the same goal.'
Taylor Goodon is one of 10 people who recently received the 2021 3M National Student Fellowship Award, making her the first Brandon University student to achieve this status.

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Taylor Goodon is one of 10 people who recently received the 2021 3M National Student Fellowship Award, making her the first Brandon University student to achieve this status.

As a result, the third-year science student received a two-year membership in the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and will get the chance to participate in the organizations online Unconference in June.

Taylor Goodon

In a news release from BU, Goodon said she is especially grateful for this opportunity since it will give her the chance to show other Indigenous youth that they have a place in Canadian academia.

"I also wish to acknowledge my Metis community for inspiring me to advocate on behalf of all Indigenous women and youth," said Goodon, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Metis community. "And Id like to thank my parents for always believing in me and pushing me to become my best self."

The 3M National Student Fellowship Award is designed to honour diploma and undergraduate students who demonstrate outstanding leadership in their lives and at their post-secondary institution.

According to BU Dean of Science Bernadette Ardelli, Goodon definitely fits this bill, having worked as a tutor in the Indigenous Student Transition Program as well as the Department of Chemistry.

She has also volunteered with the Brandon Chapter of the Bear Clan, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Brandon and the Manitoba Metis Federation.

"Taylor really leads by example as a student and also in her volunteer work," Ardelli said.

"She is a very well-rounded person, and Im impressed by her desire to encourage other women and Indigenous students to pursue education and careers in the STEMs field. Im thrilled to see her be rewarded with this fellowship."

In terms of academic accomplishments, Goodon recently worked in Michael Charettes ribosome assembly lab at BU, presenting her research at conferences provincially, nationally and internationally.

As a result, Goodon was named one of BUs top female students in 2020 and was included on CBC Manitobas Future 40 list in that same year.

"Our students stack up well against the best anywhere in Canada, and they shine when they step into the national spotlight," BU president David Docherty said on Monday. "Taylor is an excellent example of this as a very accomplished student and leader, with a bright future ahead of her."

Goodon is currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Science degree program at BU, with a major in chemistry and a minor in biology. Her ultimate goal is to pursue a career in medicine, like her brother Hunter.

 The Brandon Sun
Copenhagen, April 30 : More Europeans have been vaccinated against Covid-19 than have been confirmed to be infected, Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization's (WHO) regional director for Europe, said on Thursday.

"Based on numbers of confirmed cases, 5.5 per cent of the entire European population has now had Covid-19, while 7 per cent has completed a full vaccination series," Kluge said in a press release, Xinhua reported.

To date, some 215 million vaccine doses have been administered in Europe, he said. Approximately 16 per cent of the WHO European Region's population has received the first vaccine dose.

The WHO European Region has so far registered 51,506,373 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 1,076,173 deaths.

Despite the recent decline in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths, Kluge reiterated his dire warning to citizens in the region to be vigilant and remain "conscious of the fact that vaccines alone will not end the pandemic." "Without informing and engaging communities, they remain exposed to the virus. Without surveillance, we can't identify new variants. And without contact tracing, governments may need to reimpose restrictive measures," Kluge said.

He used the current European Immunization Week (April 24-May 2) to illustrate the importance of vaccines as a guarantee against life-threatening diseases, referencing the 100,000 measles cases that occurred in 2019 as a result of faltering immunization rates in previous years.

"Hard-earned success can slip away fast. That is why I urge you to press hard to maintain high immunization coverage with routine vaccines in the region. We must not loosen our grip on vaccine-preventable diseases," he said.

Kluge also urged the region's health systems to provide essential primary health care, including routine vaccinations, while controlling the pandemic.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Pfizer/BioNTech said Friday they have asked European regulators to authorise their COVID-19 vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds, a move seen as a crucial step toward achieving herd immunity.

The companies already filed a similar request with US authorities earlier this month. Their vaccine is currently only approved for use in people aged 16 and over.

In a joint statement, Pfizer and BioNTech said they had submitted a request with the Amsterdam-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) to expand the use of their jab to include "adolescents 12 to 15 years of age".

Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of Germany's BioNTech, on Thursday said the jab could be available for those age groups from June if EU approval is granted.

The move comes after phase 3 trial data showed that the vaccine provided "robust antibody responses" and was 100 percent effective in warding off the disease among those aged 12 to 15.

"The vaccine also was generally well tolerated," the statement added.

In an interview with Der Spiegel weekly, Sahin said he expected regulators' evaluation of the data to take four to six weeks.

If approved, the green light would apply to all 27 European Union member states.

Pfizer and BioNTech added that they also plan to seek authorisations "with other regulatory authorities worldwide".

No coronavirus vaccines are currently authorised for use on children.

While children and teenagers are less likely to develop severe COVID, they make up a large part of the population and inoculating them is considered key to ending the pandemic.

The prospect of getting older children jabbed before the next school year begins would also ease the strain on parents who are juggling the demands of homeschooling while keeping up with jobs.

"It's very important to enable children a return to their normal school lives and allow them to meet with family and friends," Sahin told Spiegel.

BioNTech and Pfizer are also racing to get their jab approved for younger kids, from six months upwards.

"In July, the first results for five- to 12-year-olds could be available, and those for younger children in September," Sahin said.

Ongoing trials so far are "very encouraging", Sahin said, suggesting that "children are very well protected by the vaccine".

The BioNTech/Pfizer shot is based on mRNA technology and was the first COVID-19 jab to be approved in the West late last year.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
The federal government was kept in the dark about Victorias plans for its purpose-built quarantine facility, which is entirely contingent on $200 million of Commonwealth funding.

Acting Premier James Merlino announced on Thursday morning that the state would invest $15 million to begin designing and planning a 500-bed quarantine facility to house returned travellers on federal land in Mickleham.

But he refused to commit any money for building the facility, insisting Canberra should pay for it because quarantine was constitutionally a federal responsibility. Ultimately this project requires the approval of the Commonwealth, Mr Merlino said.

The Department of Premier and Cabinet finalised its business case for the quarantine facility in recent weeks but the plan was sent to the federal government at 9.42am on Thursday morning. Mr Merlinos media conference began a few minutes later.
John Spencer inspects wheels of cheddar maturing in the ancient Cheddar Gorge caves. The cheddar matured here, Katherine Spencer says, is creamier than other more mature cheeses, as the humidity in the caves is so high. (Courtesy of Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company)

Cheddar From Cheddar: Meet the Cheesemaking Couple Who Brought a World-Famous Cheese Back to Its Home

In their small riverside dairy, cheerful cheesemakers Katherine and John Spencer are unlikely standard bearers for one of the worlds oldest food processes.

The couple are the last cheesemakers in their villagewhich wouldnt be very remarkable if that village wasnt called Cheddar. Among the leafy lanes and rolling farmland of Somerset, in Englands rural West Country, Cheddar is the birthplace of one of the worlds most famous and popular cheeses.

Cheesemaking here had almost disappeared, as mass-produced industrial products swamped the market. With their Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company, the Spencers are fighting back.

Riverside Cottages and Ancient Caves

Seeing Cheddars pastel-painted riverside cottages and 14th-century church, its hard to think of this as a global fulcrum in the story of cheese. Even in England the village is more famous because of the spectacular limestone cliffs of Cheddar Gorge, once voted the countrys greatest natural wonder.

The Gorges rocks are riddled with caves where prehistoric humans lived. Britains oldest skeleton was found here. The caves inspired Tolkiens Helms Deep in The Lord of the Rings and are now a major tourist attraction. More importantly for food lovers, these caverns, part of the vast estate of local aristocrat Lord Bath, are important ingredients to the story of cheese.

Somerset has long been a thriving center of dairy farming, with its lush, green, south-facing pasture adding creaminess to the milk from its herds. Right next to the village was a perfect natural fridge for maturing cheese: the constantly cool, humid caves. Some food historians believe cheese could have been developed here since the Romans. As part of their battle to be truly authentic, the Spencers persuaded Lord Bath to allow them to mature contemporary cheddar in the caves too.

The couple, already both enthusiastic cheese experts, met on a visit to a Brie factory in France. They set up their dairy in Cheddar in 2003 with an idea to produce high-end traditional cheese.

We saw this as an opportunity to make our own cheese together, said Katherine. We both learned about cheese from careers in the dairy industry, and it combined all our expertise and experience. We wanted to concentrate on small-batch production, making authentic cheddar by hand, with local raw milk from one farm.

Supermarkets wouldnt pay the price for this sort of artisan product, and would want far bigger quantities than we wanted to produce, she said.

Handmade, Cave-Aged

From a viewing gallery at the Spencers dairy, todays visitors can see the ancient process.

When milk curdles under gentle heating, it separates into liquid whey and jelly-like curds. Cheesemaking involves draining the whey and pressing and drying the curds. Cheddars medieval cheesemakers refinement of this process was repeatedly chopping the curds into slabs, stacking them, and chopping again, a method called cheddaring. The result is a denser texture and tangier flavor. John, Katherine, and their three cheesemakers still cheddar by hand in a long open vat.

The resulting chips of curd are then salted and pressed into a mold. Traditional makers like the Spencers wrap the cheese in cloth, allowing it to breathe and interact with bacteria, while factory makers might wrap with plastic, leading to more rubbery, soapy textures and less complex flavors.

The Spencerss cheeses are substantialaround 57 poundsand are long-matured, meaning theyre stored in a controlled temperature and humidity environment for between six and 24 months. Their longer matured Vintage Cheddar develops stronger flavors. The Spencers mature some cheese in purpose-built stores, others in the nearby caves.

The environment in which the cheese is matured has a remarkably significant influence on the flavor, Katherine said. Our cave-matured cheddar has been an outstanding success due to its complex flavor, aroma, and texture. Its unique.

Critics seem to agree. In fact, the Spencers won Best Cheddar in the 2008 World Cheese Awards, and in 2019, their 2-year Vintage Cheddar and 1-year Cave Matured Cheddar were shortlisted for the Great British Food Awards.

As a small artisan maker competing against producers from all over the world, we are all thrilled, said John. It does seem fitting that authentic cheddar has returned to its birthplace.

Mass Production

Records show that cheddar was already famous in 1170: There are bills from King Henry II buying 10,420 pounds of it.

During the Second World War, however, British farmers had to make one single cheese, nicknamed Government Cheddar, due to the war economy. Fewer than 100 artisan cheesemakers remained after the war.

In the unregulated days before globalized production, cheddar was considered authentic if crafted within 30 miles of Wells Cathedral in the heart of Somerset dairy country (the glorious church is just nine miles from Cheddar). Somehow this evolved into an EU regional food designation for West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, which applies only to cheddar traditionally made at a single farm anywhere within a vast area of western England. Post-Brexit, its unclear what regional protection, if any, will apply.

But despite the obvious link to its birthplace, normal cheddar cheese can of course be made and sold anywhere. Cheddar is now mass-produced in factories from Australia to the United States, but it often became a bland-tasting victim of its own success.

The name cheddar has never been protected, so [it] can be made all over the world, said Katherine. One day wed love to challenge thisbut no doubt we would need a team of lawyers and researchers. Perhaps well just concentrate on making cheese instead.

Visit CheddarOnline.co.uk for more informationand to buy cheese. It is shipped to the UK and most of the EU. Before the pandemic, John visited the United States to look for reliable importers, but plans have been put on hold temporarily.

Writer Simon Heptinstall has lived and worked all his life in Englands West Country region, including editing its newspapers, writing its travel and food guides, and becoming a trained cider-maker. His writing can be found in BBC Countryfile, the Times, and the Daily Mail.
XIAMEN, China, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Qudian Inc. ("Qudian" or the "Company") (NYSE: QD), a leading technology platform empowering the enhancement of online consumer finance experience in China, today announced that it filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2021 (U.S. Time). The annual report on Form 20-F can be accessed on the Company's investor relations website at http://ir.qudian.com.

Qudian will provide a hard copy of the annual report containing its audited consolidated financial statements, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be directed to Investor Relations department, Level 39, Tower A, AVIC Zijin Plaza, Siming District, Xiamen, Fujian Province, The People's Republic of China, 361000.

About Qudian Inc.

Qudian Inc. ("Qudian") is a leading technology platform empowering the enhancement of online consumer finance experience in China. The Company's mission is to use technology to make personalized credit accessible to hundreds of millions of young, mobile-active consumers in China who need access to small credit for their discretionary spending but are underserved by traditional financial institutions due to lack of traditional credit data or high cost of servicing. Qudian's credit solutions enable licensed, regulated financial institutions and ecosystem partners to offer affordable and customized loans to this young generation of consumers.

For more information, please visit http://ir.qudian.com.

For investor and media inquiries, please contact:

In China:

Qudian Inc.

IR team

Tel: +86-592-591-1711

E-mail: [email protected]

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Jenny Cai

Tel: +86 (10) 6508-0677

E-mail: [email protected]

In the United States:

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Brandi Piacente

Tel: +1-212-481-2050

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Qudian Inc.

Related Links

http://ir.qudian.com


Sinn Fein is refusing to comment on a report which claims that Foyle MLAs Martina Anderson and Karen Mullan have been asked to step down.

A report in the Irish Examiner newspaper suggests that the two local politicians have asked to consider their political futures as part of a major review of Sinn Fein's operations in Derry.

This followed a series of poor election performances by the party in the local area.

Sinn Fein has declined to comment on the claims made in the Irish Examiner report.

Earlier this week, a Sinn Fein spokesperson said: "Sinn Fein established a review group in the Foyle constituency in the context of next year's Assembly election.

"Derry Sinn Fein has accepted a recommendation from that review to set up an electoral strategy group to oversee preparation for those elections."

You can read the full Irish Examiner report here - https://bit.ly/3t2IDA3
Marco Rubio speaks during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration hearing on Capitol Hill (Getty Images)

US Senator Marco Rubio was left seething after a mistake he made in an amendment to a water infrastructure bill resulted in its rejection on the Senate floor.

Mr Rubio apparently added an extra zero to an amendment, changing a figure from .025 to .0025. The typo was not caught until the bill was brought to the floor on Thursday.

The Senator asked to have the typo amended, but Sen. Tom Carper said it was too late to amend the bill, which set Mr Rubio off.

"I just want everybody to be clear, we're not changing the formula, there's an extra zero. It is literally a typo, the kind of typos people make every single day in the Senate. Instead of saying .025 it says .0025. Everyone knows what it was intended to do, that's the way we've talked about it," Mr Rubio said.

He then complained that the polarisation in the Senate had reached a point where even a typo could not be fixed.

"The Senate is now a place where you cannot amend a typo through unanimous consent. That's unbelievable, it is unreal. I frankly find it unacceptable," he said.

Mr Rubio's complaints come after more than a decade of concerted efforts by Senate Republicans to derail and obstruct legislation passed or supported by Democrats.

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The senator's amendment would have changed the way funding is calculated for states seeking sewer upgrades. According to Mr Rubio, the change would have sent more funding to states with expanding populations, like Texas and Florida, which Rubio represents. He claimed the change would benefit 35 states in all.

However, opponents of the amendment claimed it would derail the bill's provisions meant to bolster environmental justice, primarily equity of funding distribution among the states.

The bipartisan Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021 was passed by the Senate Thursday with a vote of 89-2.

US Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, of Texas and Utah, respectively, were the only no votes.

Story continues

If the bill is cleared through the House of Representatives, it will allocate $35bn toward state water infrastructure programs, and it provides for gradual increases in in funding for those systems between 2022 and 2026.

The bill also nearly doubles the funding for grants meant to remove lead from drinking water, increasing allocations from $60m to $100m per year.

That effort is part of Joe Biden's promise to replace all lead-lined drinking water pipes in the nation. Lead leeched from pipes can have ruinous effects on the population, especially toward children.

The bill also includes environmental justice provisions that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to review the way funds have been distributed that were intended for poor and minority communities under the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act.

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Investors with $100,000 of losses are are encouraged to contact the firm before May 7, 2021; click here to submit trade information

LOS ANGELES, April 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Portnoy Law Firm advises investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of XL Fleet Corp. (NYSE: XL) investors that acquired shares between October 2, 2020 and March 2, 2021. Investors have until May 7, 2021 to seek an active role in this litigation.

Investors are encouraged to contact attorney Lesley F. Portnoy , to determine eligibility to participate in this action, by phone 310-692-8883 or email , or click here to join the case.

According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made misleading and/or false statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Workhorse was merely hoping that USPS would choose an electric vehicle as its Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, but had no indication or assurance from USPS that this was the case; (2) Workhorse had concealed the fact that electrifying the USPSs entire fleet would be impractical and astronomically expensive which had been revealed by the postmaster general in explaining the ultimate decision not to select an electric vehicle; and (3) defendants statements about Workhorses prospects, business, and operations were materially misleading and false and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times, as a result. This lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages when the true details entered the market.

A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than May 7, 2021.

Please visit our website to review more information and submit your transaction information.

The Portnoy Law Firm represents investors in pursuing claims arising from corporate wrongdoing. The Firms founding partner has recovered over $5.5 billion for aggrieved investors. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Lesley F. Portnoy, Esq.

Admitted CA and NY Bar

lesley@portnoylaw.com

310-692-8883

www.portnoylaw.com

Attorney Advertising
Workers at Britain's most advanced steelworks are hoping against hope that owner Sanjeev Gupta can keep their site going as he battles to obtain funding after the collapse of lender Greensill Capital.

The future of the giant plant in Stocksbridge, in South Yorkshire  which makes specialist steel for use in aviation, aerospace, defence and medical products  hangs in the balance.

Clive Royston, a national executive committee member of steel workers' trade union Community, and who has worked at the site since 1978, is clinging to the belief that the Indian-born businessman can save the plant.

Threat: The future of the Stocksbridge steel plant  which makes specialist steel for use in aviation, aerospace, defence and medical products - hangs in the balance

This month, Gupta declared none of Liberty's plants would shut 'under my watch' though it remains unclear how he will replace finance from Greensill.

Royston, 59, a crane operator, believes Stocksbridge's position as the UK's only major producer of highly-specialist steel will help ensure its survival, saying: 'It's no good to anybody to lose it.

'We recently marked 175 years and it's an incredible history. The lads are proud to be steel workers.

'At one time nearly everyone in Stocksbridge was at the steelworks and it's still a major employer.'

He said that if Liberty were to go out of business, as well as the 2,900 workforce at its 12 UK sites, thousands more people in the supply chain and other businesses around the company's sites could lose their jobs. You could be looking at 10,000 out of work,' he added.

The Government 'must be ready to intervene to protect our jobs and strategic steel assets,' he said, adding that it is a 'test of (its) commitment to industrial communities across the UK'.

As well as producing high-grade speciality steel for the likes of Rolls-Royce and Airbus, Stocksbridge benefits from the UK's greenest electric arc furnace systems at its sister plant in Rotherham, powered by electricity rather than coal.

Scrutiny of tiny auditor who signed off accounts The tiny firm that audits the accounts of dozens of Sanjeev Guptas firms is set to come under scrutiny as the crisis at the steel magnates empire escalates. King & King, which signs off the accounts of around 60 Gupta businesses in the UK, is little known even in the accounting world. King & Kg, which signs off the accounts of around 60 Gupta businesses in the UK, has offices near Wembley Stadium (pictured, with a traffic cone on the roof above the door) The two-partner firm has offices near Wembley Stadium and above a cosmetics shop on Regent Street. It is led by Milan Patel, 58, a chartered accountant. Parliaments Business Committee has launched an inquiry into the crisis at Guptas Liberty Steel, part of his GFG Alliance empire. Liberty has been on the brink since early March when the biggest lender to GFG, Greensill Capital, went bust. King & King audits were crucial to Greensill lending money to GFG companies. The firm has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has not been named as a group that the committee will seek evidence from. It did not respond to a request for comment.

The furnaces  the second of which was launched by Prince Charles in 2018  are the only ones in the UK and are important assets as the country looks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

They produce the steel which is then transported by rail to Stocksbridge to be re-melted, rolled and processed.

Generations of the Royston family, like many others, have worked in the steel industry. Clive's grandfather had a job at Stocksbridge, while his father worked nearby in Sheffield.

Clive's son Andrew, 32, continues the family tradition at Stocksbridge, a vast, mile-long site at the foot of a steep valley.

One way the Government could help, he believes, is by finding ways to lower energy prices and reduce costs such as business rates.

He added: 'There would be nothing green about letting us close and bringing in imports.'

Although providing far fewer jobs than it used to, Stocksbridge steelworks, established by industrialist Samuel Fox in 1842, is still the main employer in the Pennine town, employing 750. Another 700 are employed at the Liberty plant in Rotherham.

Neighbouring Sheffield and Barnsley are up to half an hour's drive from Stocksbridge, and an hour away by public transport.

One worker on his lunch break at the brand new Fox Valley shopping complex opposite the site gates, said: 'The Government definitely needs to support us.'

'Very few companies can make what we do and a lot of investment which has been made in recent years would go to waste.'

Hopes: Clive Royston (pictured), a national executive committee member of steel workers' trade union Community, has worked at the Stocksbridge plant since 1978

A clutch of bars, cafes and shops say that they rely on businesses from the steelworkers and fear that closure would 'devastate' the town.

Tracey Martin, owner of sandwich shop Samuel's kitchen, located near the steelworks' main gates and named after founder, Samuel Fox, said that if the site were to close 'the supply chain will feel it too and it will impact not only local businesses but (others) nationally'.

She added: 'Many firms may find it hard to survive, especially the numerous small ones the steelworks works with.

Hopefully there will be light at the end of the melting pot and, with a bit of help and support, the future of these businesses  along with speciality British steel  will keep on rolling along.'

Labour councillor Julie Grocutt, who represents Stocksbridge on Sheffield City Council, believes the Government must step in to ensure the works is safe.

She said: 'Locally, unemployment is running at 6 per cent at the moment and we can't afford to add to that number. Where are the alternative jobs here?'

Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, said the industry has been 'forced to compete with one hand tied behind their back' due to energy costs and business rates clobbering owners with huge bills.

He said: 'We welcome Sanjeev Gupta's commitment to keep every British steel plant open, though we will need to be convinced of his plans to accomplish this. These are very challenging times and the Government must be ready to intervene to safeguard the jobs and the assets should that become necessary.

'The fact is so long as our steelworkers are forced to compete with one hand tied behind their back the future is not secure for any of our steel companies. Our energy prices are 86pc more than they pay in Germany, our business rates can be ten times more, we are years behind our competitors on decarbonisation, and the Government is failing to use procurement policy to support British jobs and industry.

'Boris Johnson's government can no longer hide behind EU state aid rules as an excuse for doing nothing.

'In this year of Brexit, COP 26, and massive investment in public infrastructure, our steelworkers need to see decisive game-changing interventions.'

As for Clive Royston, he speaks for many when he says that he doesn't know how Gupta might raise funding.

In the past, he says, the steel magnate 'has a habit of coming up trumps'. Can Gupta defy the odds and do so again?

The town of Stocksbridge, whose past and future is so intertwined with steel, will soon find out.
Teton County Reporter

Previously the Scene editor, Billy Arnold made the switch to the county beat where he's interested in exploring Teton County as a model for the rest of the West. When he can, he still writes about art, music and whatever else suits his fancy.
An Alabama born grandmother is dead after police say she was punched in New Orleans French Quarter last week and sustained a traumatic brain injury.

A memorial service will be held in Decatur Thursday for Margaret Jane Johnson Street, 61, who died April 20 in New Orleans.

According to NOLA.com, New Orleans police arrested Jeremiah Mark, 23, on charges of manslaughter, which under Louisiana law is an unintentional yet unjustifiable killing. He is being held on $100,000 bail. Johnson Street was among nine homicide victims reported in New Orleans over a six-day period beginning April 20.

According to police, Johnson Street got into an argument with Mark in the 100 block of Royal Street on April 18 at about 7:45 p.m. Mark punched Johnson Street in the face, causing her to fall backward and hit her head on the concrete. She was taken to University Medical Center, where she died two days later. Her death was classified a homicide after an autopsy.

Mark met with investigators April 22 after a photo was released to the public. Police said Mark told them he used his hand to push [Street] in the face.

We have no earthly idea why this happened, said Jeffrey Johnson, Johnson Streets brother. It wont bring my sister back, but it helps knowing who did it and that they have him...It just seems like she was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Johnson Street was born in Decatur and retired from General Motors. She had moved to the New Orleans area around 2014 and spent much of her time caring for her 7-year-old grandson, according to family.
A pastor and his wife were beaten by Hindu Nationalists while praying in their home last week after serving India's "Untouchables" a report said.

The pastor, Ram Niwas, and his wife, Pinky, was attacked with sticks in their home located at Sitamarhi City in eastern India's Bihar State, the Christian Post (CP) reported. A church member named Narender, who was praying with the couple, was also attacked. The attackers belonged to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, also known as World Hindu Council or VHP, which is a Hindu nationalist group.

As per CP, the pastor was disabled because of an accident that happened in his childhood. He and his wife were serving the "untouchables" or the Dalit people of India. The VHP has long been targeting the pastor for converting Hindus into Christianity and was accused of forcing others to eat beef, which was forbidden to Hindus as they regard it as sacred.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide-USA said that the attackers involved a villager and the pastor's four brothers who were supporters of the Bajran Dal, which is the militant wing of VHP. The attackers were able to break into the home of Niwas using a hammer and that Narender came to the couple's aid while other supporters of the Bajran Dal were waiting outside the house.

According to CSW, Niwas suffered a fractured shoulder while Pinky suffered severe head injuries like that of Narender. All three were brought for medical attention and treatment to the Muzaffarpur Hospital. The photo posted by CSW in their website of Niwas showed his shoulders in a cast while his right arm was held in an improvised sling while in the hospital. Meanwhile, his wife and Narender had their heads wrapped in bloodied bandages.

The pastor's CCTV, CSW added, was able to document the incident but the video camera and its recording was said to seized by the Bharatiya Janata Party and handed to their leader Arun Singh.

"Our deepest sympathies are with this couple, who were attacked simply for practicing their faith," said CSW Founder President Mervyn Thomas in their website.

"The Indian state must ensure that all citizens are afforded the adequate protection under the law, and it is deeply concerning that the authorities did not act on previous threats to Pastor Niwas, allowing the campaign of fear and intimidation against him to continue," he added. "We urge the local authorities to take this matter seriously and investigate as a matter of urgency, ensuring that the perpetrators of this attack answer for their crimes."

Niwas has been working in Sitamarhi's Scheduled Caste since 2015 as part of his Ministry as a Christian pastor. This has led to him receiving death threats from various nationalist groups in India since 2018 such as the Rashtriya Swayamesevak Sang. The RSS threatened him that he and his Christian converts could stay in Bihar provided that they "must reconvert and go through the rituals of ghar wapsi ceremony," which is a "homecoming" ceremony for converts to Hinduism.

Niwas received new threats two years after that of the RSS, but this time it came from the Bajrang Dal. The Bajrang Dal's 20 members attempted to attack Niwas but failed. The pastor then filed a complained with local authorities citing the Code of Criminal Procedure Section 156 (3) for his case to be investigated on. However, local police did not act upon the matter and the case remains unresolved.
With a suite of predictive maintenance solutions, Shipshape aims to unlock the promised value of the smart home.

Shipshape, a company on a mission to make homes smart enough to take care of themselves, today announced the launch of its Pro Crawl Space solution. Shipshapes Pro Crawl Space solution ensures critical systems located in the crawl space are working properly and aids in the prevention of mold growth, wood rot, pest infestations, water damage, and energy waste.

Many homeowners are not willing or able to go into their crawl space. Therefore, they rely on service providers to perform regular maintenance and repairs on the critical systems located in the crawl space. With the Pro Crawl Space solution, Shipshape announces the roll out of its Service Provider Network and addition of the MyCoverage feature. In partnership with local service providers, Shipshape delivers a complete solution to homeowners for their crawl spaces.

We want to help local businesses grow and thrive, they are the experts at home services and we are the experts at technology. Our job is to help homeowners connect with the right pro when they need maintenance or repairs. said Ryan Thomas, Director of Customer Success at Shipshape Solutions Inc.

Shipshapes new maintenance plan management capability helps homeowners easily connect to their service pros and stay on top of their maintenance needs. This comes at a time when the home services industry is transforming from a reactive homeowner relationship to a proactive service plan-based homeowner relationship. This transformation presents unique challenges for service providers, and Shipshape helps streamline and accelerate the transformation.

The Shipshape partnership has been a game changer for my business. They have helped me to stay in contact with my past customers through their co-marketing program, uncover unknown risks with my customers, identify new leads and sell more maintenance plans. Homeowners love the Shipshape Pro Monitoring solution, and it allows us to provide even more value to the homeowners we serve, said Kevin Weber, CEO of OX Foundation Solutions, Birmingham, Alabama.

Next-Gen Intelligent Features Include:

Service Provider Network  Network to maintain relationships with local service providers and facilitates a seamless connection to those pros when homeowners need help.

MyCoverage - Warranty and maintenance plan information is stored in the Shipshape App to facilitate a seamless connection to providers.

The HomeHealth Record - Complete performance history for each system in the home.

Proactive AlertActions - Notifications that offer actionable recommendations to help the homeowner reduce risks or improve performance associated with the homes critical systems.

Shipshape Assisted Maintenance aka SAM - A virtual assistant that helps resolve issues and connects users to service pros when needed.

Pro crawl space upgrade includes:

Dehumidifier Upgrade - Smart Monitor hardware devices with sensors and controls that can be added to any existing dehumidifier to connect the dehumidifier to the internet and Shipshapes platform.

Sump Pump Upgrade - Smart Monitor hardware devices with sensors and controls that can be added to any existing dehumidifier to connect the sump pump to the internet and Shipshapes platform.

Mobile App  Software that enables homeowners to interact with their systems, input warranty info, access their HomeHealth Record, respond to AlertActions, request help from SAM and connect to service providers.

Shipshape Membership Subscription (optional)



Pro Monitoring  24/7 professional monitoring

Home Assistant  A dedicated Shipshape representative to help you resolve home issues and connect to service pros when needed

Extended Warranty  An extended warranty on the SmartMonitor devices that keep your service connected

About Shipshape Solutions Inc.

Shipshape is on a mission to make homes smart enough to take care of themselves. Shipshape believes every home should be safe, reliable, efficient and well maintained. The company operates a first of its kind proprietary smart home predictive maintenance platform that offers solutions to homeowners to reduce the costs of home maintenance and operations. The Shipshape platform integrates an ecosystem of smart home hardware to enable advanced analytics and recommend actions that will reduce risks and improve system performance. Shipshapes software platform unlocks the value of sensor data to enable a whole new era of the smart home.

Shipshape is based in Austin, TX. For more information, visit http://www.shipshape.ai.


Last year was when I was finally going to get a good nights sleep. My youngest child was turning four, and so the post-midnight disruptions for blanket fixes and stuffed-animal retrieval had ebbed. My work and home life were in predictable rhythms. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, I did hot yoga. I had a firm mattress recommended by many respectable online-review websites.

Instead, a deadly pandemic disrupted the patterns of our days and nights. COVID insomnia was a breakout Google search from March to today, as was Why cant I sleep during quarantine? Studies from India to Italy indicate that sleep quality has been negatively impacted by COVID-related life changes.

A combination of swaddle, side or stomach position, shush, swing and suck reminds a newborn of its mothers womb. Credit:iStock

My biggest issue has always been falling asleep. On a good night, it takes me 45 minutes to drop off; on bad nights, it can be close to two hours. This is not my first ride on the insomnia tilt-a-whirl  pre-pandemic, I had struggles falling asleep that came and went during periods of stress  so I know all of the adult sleep-hygiene tricks.

Right now, I get five to seven hours of sleep on most nights, which is not enough for me, or for most adults, who typically need at least seven hours.
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A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much!
A Manchester committee tasked with recommending uses for vacant school buildings is reaching out to the public for help.

Focused first on the long-shuttered Nathan Hale School, the repurposed schools committee also is to recommend other uses for Washington, Martin and Robertson schools.

As part of the $93 million second phase of school modernization and consolidation, voters in 2019 approved $10 to $12 million dollars for the repurposing initiative. The board of directors resolution forming the committee charged the panel to engage the community with public input opportunities, as appropriate, to ensure participation and inclusion in the decision making process.

Community outreach is crucial to this effort, and we will be actively seeking community input and that will be a key determinant to the repurposing of these schools, committee member and board of education Chairman Darryl Thames said Wednesday.

Directors recently approved the 22-member committees request for $250,000 to hire an outreach consultant to help with the effort, including hosting neighborhood events and contracting architectural planning services.

Outreach also is slated to include virtual and in-person brainstorming sessions, socially distanced building tours and community block parties. The committee will begin phone banking and door-to-door canvassing in May, a news release said.

The school board closed Nathan Hale School in 2012, citing the high cost of heating system repairs. In 2014, directors began gathering ideas on other uses for the Spruce Street building, intending to bring renewed energy, vitality and pride to the neighborhood.

In 2015, they rejected a conversion to apartments, saying the building should be an anchor in the low-income neighborhood and that apartments would not suit that role. Other ideas  including a community health center and leasing space to nonprofit organizations  were floated, but went nowhere.

In 2019, Odyssey Community School, which rents space on West Middle Turnpike, proposed sharing renovation costs and entering a long-term partnership with the town to use the Nathan Hale building. Renovating the building would cost $10.5 million to $12.6 million, officials said at the time. No action has been taken on the proposal, but Thames said nothing is off the table at this point.

Story continues

Washington School closed as part of the ongoing modernization and consolidation project. Robertson School is being used as swing space until 2025, and the committee and school board are considering whether Martin School will be used as a preschool center.

The repurposing committee is tasked with considering neighborhood residents recommendations, the cost of repurposing each building and how the proposed new uses would complement current town facilities.

To sign up for updates on the committees work and upcoming events, call 860-647-3085.

Jesse Leavenworth can be reached at jleavenworth@courant.com
Etihad Credit Insurance (ECI, the UAE International Investor Council (UAEIIC), Dubai Exports, the Italian Trade Agency (ITA and Confindustria, an Italian industrial confederation, recently discussed collaborations in various fields.



The focus included increasing exports, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and trade finance support between the UAE and Italy.



The high-level discussion is in line with Italys objective of promoting Made in Italy products across the world and attract FDI in the European country and it is also consistent with the recently launched Make it in the Emirates initiative that encourages local and international investors to fulfil their ambitions of developing, manufacturing and exporting their products from the UAE.



The core agenda of the meeting was focused on identifying joint strategies to boost the trade and investment opportunities between the two countries. It also cements the long-standing relationship that the UAE and Italy share through the exchange of knowledge and economic expertise in promoting business opportunities and helping local investors to establish or expand their operations in the post-Covid phase.



The meeting also reviewed the latest updates regarding the existing partnerships between the state export credit agencies of both countries. In October 2018, ECI and SACE SIMEST signed an MOU at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MISE) in Rome, followed by a reinsurance agreement to support Italian businesses operating in the UAE, signed in April 2019 in Dubai. With this agreement, Italian companies and their active subsidiaries in the UAE were able to protect their business, mitigate risks, and concretely improve the management of financial flows.



Saed Al Awadi CEO of Dubai Exports & Chairman of the Executive Committee of ECI, said: The UAE and Italy have always had strong trade relations over the years, and this strategic meeting reflects the keenness of both nations to enhance the competitive advantage of our respective business sectors in the international markets.



Carlo Ferro, President of Italian Trade Agency, said: "The traditional friendship and commercial relations between our two countries push us to improve our relations more and more, both through a deeper knowledge and through the implementation of synergies and partnerships and through the sharing of best practices, in order to promote the excellence of Italian products and services. For this reason, ITA and Confindustria will organize, as soon as conditions permit, a UAEIIC visit to Italy to deepen their knowledge of our country and the reality of our business system.



Barbara Beltrame Giacomello, Board Member and Vice President for International Affairs at Confindustria, stated: Despite the strong relations between Italy and UAE, there is still a great potential to be explored and Expo 2020 Dubai would be the first occasion to relaunch Italian presence in the Menasa Region in the post pandemic period. In EAU path of diversification and growth, our entrepreneurial system, with the right institutional and financial support, can truly be a strategic partner of reference for UAE companies.



Massimo Falcioni, CEO of ECI, said: The outlook for bilateral trade looks bright between these two countries. In 2020, Italy was the main European trade partner of the UAE, with AED 37.1 billion ($10.1 billion) of trade value. The UAE has been keen to continuously enhance its existing trade relations with Italy by building partnerships focused on innovation and SMEs, thereby boosting the contribution of these sectors in the countrys GDP.  TradeArabia News Service
Some Cinco de Mayo celebrations will be happening around town now that COVID-19-related restrictions have been lifted. If youre still not comfortable drinking margaritas in a room full of strangers, though, you can observe the holiday at home by watching a movie that explores Mexican culture.

Here are five options, ranging from animation to action.

Pixar

Coco: Pixars Oscar-winning classic tells the story of Miguel, a Mexican boy who wants to be a musician but was born into a shoe-making family that shuns music. Hell cross over to the Land of the Dead and learn some family secrets in pursuit of his goal. The movie is bursting with music  mariachi, ranchera, banda  and vivid Dia de Los Muertos iconography such as calaveras, papel picado and marigolds. Shoes never had a chance. Streaming on Disney+

Columbia Pictures

El Mariachi: Robert Rodriguez and his friend Carlos Gallardo spent a couple of weeks in Ciudad Acuna south of Del Rio, hit some bars and made some noise. The $7,000 they spent would have been an expensive spring break, but it actually was a dirt-cheap movie shoot. The result, a fast-paced, funny crime flick about a baby-faced musician (Gallardo) mistaken for a killer, launched S.A. native Rodriguezs career. He went back to Mexico with $7 million to make the sequel, Desperado. Available to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes and other streaming services.

Peter Sorel / Miramax Films /NYT

Frida: In her award-winning biopic, visionary director Julie Taymor captures the beauty and the pain that coexist in Frida Kahlo paintings such as The Broken Column. But she dwells on the beauty, from Salma Hayeks defiant performance to the supersaturated colors of Mexico City and the ever-present folklorico music. Even the bus crash that broke Kahlos body is a glittering spectacle. Available to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes and other streaming services.

On ExpressNews.com: Bob Odenkirk thriller Nobody now available to stream

Michael Ochs Archives /Getty Images

Like Water for Chocolate: Keep your timpano and your ratatouille. There is no movie meal like the pheasants in rose sauce that Tita (Lumi Cavazos) serves to her family in this adaptation of Laura Esquivels best-selling novel, which brings magical realism into the kitchen of a Mexican home at the turn of the last century. Imbued with Titas passion for the man she loves but cannot marry, its a life-changing dish, especially for one of her sisters  shes last seen riding naked out of town with a revolutionary. Streaming on HBO Max.

Spanglish: Fitting in can be a complicated thing in director James L. Brooks dramedy about a Mexican immigrant (Paz Vega) who takes a job as a housekeeper in L.A. Learning English is a challenge she handles pretty easily. Its not so simple puzzling out how her employers, a wealthy and accomplished couple (Tea Leoni and Adam Sandler) with two great kids can be so stressed out and unhappy. Sometimes, it seems, its best to walk away from dreams, even the American Dream. Available to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes and other streaming services.
Human-AI teaming for DC-based emergency response

Members of Montgomery County, Md.s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) are using an artificial intelligence-based system to find COVID-related items in Twitter posts that may call for action.

As part of research by a team from Brigham Young University (BYU), George Mason University (GMU), the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and Virginia Tech University, CERT volunteers -- dubbed the Virtual Emergency Response Team (VERT) -- are tagging tweets based on relevance to help train the AI to recognize data that indicates a situation that emergency response may want to know about.

Under a grant from the National Science Foundation to study human-AI teaming in emergency response, the researchers had been studying how the AI platform, called CitizenHelper, would work during natural disasters. Last fall, though, they shifted to focus on COVID-19 and spent six months studying tweets posted in the National Capital Region that could indicate COVID-risky behavior, such as indoor venues without strict mask enforcement.

The initiative was a proof of concept that was able to show it could -- keyword could -- be implemented within an [emergency operations center] environment should a local, state or federal [emergency management agency [or] department be interested in attaining situational awareness, VERT lead Steve Peterson said.

From Feb. 25 to early April, VERT volunteers identified 3,300 keywords relative to vaccines and hesitancy that went into CitizenHelper. They then used a team-built interface to label those terms as relevant or irrelevant and for positive or negative sentiment before feeding the data back through the platform to help it learn to automatically identify those categories, said Amanda Hughes, assistant professor of IT and cybersecurity at BYU and a principal investigator (PI) on the project.

Were looking at it from an emergency manager perspective, trying to understand from the tweets if people are upset and, if so, what about, Hughes said. Can we do something? Is there info they are not getting? Are there rumors we need to correct? she said.

After CitizenHelper runs the data, it is curated and presented through a dashboard to emergency managers who decide whether to take action.

Since last year, CERT has run 12 COVID missions, called virtual activations. Last year, it had 89 volunteers, and Peterson expects about 20 to commit to helping with the next step of vaccine hesitancy study.

Because theyre local to the National Capital Region, they can recognize landmarks, and in Twitter, a lot of times things are abbreviated, said PI Keri Stephens, a professor at UTs Moody College of Communication. They have that local knowledge that they can add that computers arent necessarily going to know.

CitizenHelper is the result of an NSF-funded, GMU-coordinated project that mined social media for human behaviors relevant to disaster response, said Hemant Purohit, a co-PI on the project and an assistant professor at the universitys Department of Information Sciences and Technology.

How can computer algorithms find out these things rapidly and quickly in real time? Thats the very challenging task, Purohit said, because the algorithms need humans to help them improve their accuracy. CitizenHelper allows us to create this very seamless interactive mechanism for humans and computers. The humans can provide feedback to the machine on what the machine has predicted.

He likens the process to a child learning about colors by putting red balls into a red bin. In the same way, we are trying to teach the AI algorithms to be more specific, Purohit said. Lets say they have learned with the data that humans provided how to classify. When a new data point comes in, the algorithm is unsure of what to do with it, so a human user can provide feedback, he explained. This is a specific type of activity called active learning in the world of machine learning and AI.

Chris Zobel, another co-PI and professor at Virginia Techs Pamplin College of Business, said the goal is to determine whether this human-AI interaction can make a community more resilient. Volunteers trained to recognize problems can better understand what is happening in the community and what is being done -- or not -- about it.

It really is a team between the humans and the artificial intelligence, Zobel said. The AI cant learn what the important information is without being taught  by the humans. He said humans will always have a role because of the context associated with emergency response and how it varies by place and time.

The researchers used Twitter because its data is the most open and easiest to collect and analyze, Hughes said, and Peterson added that GMU has an API to Twitter that lets the researchers crawl and pull data. The team could use other social media platforms such as Facebook, but that would require getting permission from every user to collect their data, which is impractical, she added.

The Montgomery County CERT isnt new to pairing volunteers with technology. Its been doing that to glean situational awareness from social media since 2013. Using commercial products, they performed hashtag searches but couldnt home in much further.

We were at the mercy of Hootsuite, TweetDeck -- those platforms that are not customizable, Peterson said. You get what they tell you. You have to utilize the results of their filtering mechanism with no knowledge of how they concluded getting something.

CitizenHelper can automatically pull metadata and geolocation information relative to COVID prevention and risk, delivering results specific to the D.C. area and therefore more useful. Still, many emergency managers are hesitant to use such a tool, he said.

The tool is readily available, but like most promising technological advancements that can be helpful in a community, agencies are reserved and will not commit to more than a briefing of the capabilities, Peterson said. The work has been presented to local and federal officials who liked the progress, and importantly, liked the research that was conducted, but we need more commitment.

To get it, the team wants to expand their research, most likely to a Texas CERT to study hurricanes, Stephens said. She added that a long-term goal is creating a training module that CERT could use at a national level.

The team is applying for the NSF Civic Innovation Challenge, a competition for smart and connected communities that carries awards up to $1 million. In January, they were selected as Stage 1 challenge awardees and won about $50,000 to refine the project.
Photo: Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images

When Bill Clinton was at the pre-Lewinsky peak of his powers, he drove Republicans nuts. They alternated between accusing him of stealing our issues with his triangulating pitches on welfare reform and crime and the size of government, and of being liberal, liberal, liberal!  a sort of boomer love child of George McGovern and Janis Joplin in a deceptive deep-fried southern packaging. Eventually the opportunity to depict him as a lying sexual predator solved the conservative dilemma, though you could argue he never stopped throwing them off-balance.

Republicans are similarly having problems getting a clear focus on Joe Biden, as the Los Angeles Times Noah Bierman observes:

Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who has advised Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, [says] that his partys two main messages about Biden are at odds with each other, blunting their impact. The thing you hear Republicans say most is that hes too old for the job, which isnt consistent with saying hes doing too much, Conant said. You cant effectively argue that hes incompetent and that hes too effective.

This dual framing of Biden was evident during the 2020 campaign, when Trump called him Sleepy Joe and with his usual lack of subtlety suggested his opponent was senile, even as he assailed Bidens party of radical socialist aims. The 45th president and his surrogates squared the circle by treating Biden as the half-there puppet of the real powers, particularly the communist Kamala Harris:

Meet Phony Kamala Harris! pic.twitter.com/bBpEGvU9Xq  Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 11, 2020

But now, 100 days into the Biden-Harris administration, even though the new president has kept an unusually low profile, there are no signs of Harris or anyone else manipulating him. Indeed, so far his White House has been remarkably free of the factionalism that often undermines clear presidential leadership. With Clinton as president you had a White House staff famously divided (ironically, given the later reputations of the First Lady and the veep) into progressive Rodhams and centrist Gores who jockeyed for position and placed their varying stamps on administration policies. George W. Bushs presidency was also marked by competing power centers (e.g., his terrifying vice-president and the Boy Genius Karl Rove); to a lesser extent, so was Obamas. As for Donald Trump, hardly a week passed without someone  particularly his rotating cast of chiefs-of-staff  being described by insiders as the real power behind the throne or perhaps as the wild mans lion-tamer.

Trump, of course, created some of the same problems for Democrats that Clinton  and now Biden  posed for Republicans. Was he the toddler president who ran a hollowed-out administration with no real core of convictions or goals? Or was he a putative Il Duce craftily planning an authoritarian takeover of the country? Up until the day he left office there was evidence for both descriptions. Indeed, the coda of his presidency, the January 6 Capitol riot, was variously regarded as a fascist coup attempt and a clown show.

Trumps successor will have an opportunity in his first address to a joint session of Congress to add to the impression that he is quietly but firmly in charge of the executive branch, and has imposed order on his fractious party as he unveils yet another massive proposal. Kamala Harris will be sitting (and often standing and applauding) behind him, likely looking more like an adoring protegee than any sort of puppet-master. But if he stumbles at all, or looks tired, or says things that supposedly centrist Democrats like him dont believe, the knees of many elephants will jerk and out will come the mockery of the old man who is a reassuring front for the Marxists actually running the country.

Such confusion if it continues will be of great service to Biden, much like the current Republican tendency to focus on irrelevant culture-war themes while a mostly united Democratic Party enacts legislative initiatives of a magnitude we havent seen since Ronald Reagans first year in office. For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama  who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies  couldnt come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now. As Republicans watch Bidens speech, they should soberly realize that before long it may not matter that much if they bust up the Democratic trifecta in 2022. The damage to GOP policies and priorities wrought by Uncle Joe and his senile socialist regime could be too large to reverse by then. While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about cancel culture, Biden is eating their lunch.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 20:50:32|Editor: huaxia

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A sign saying shops are temporarily closed or shortened business hours is seen at the entrance of a department store during the start of Japan's Golden Week in Kyoto, Japan, April 29, 2021. The Japanese government imposed a state of emergency until May 11 in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo, which is aimed at curbing a surge in COVID-19 cases during the Golden Week holidays. (Xinhua/Du Xiaoyi)
's ( )( ) Mark Child talks to Proactive London about the completion of their infill drilling at the La India mines starter-pits ahead of a phased development in Nicaragua .

Child explains how the firm is aiming for early production with the intention to mine them early to quicken the payback period and enhance the project's economics. Two starter pits were tested with drill holes in the programme.

A total of 44 diamond-core drill holes were drilled for some 2,290 metres.
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Semicentral or central collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC produce quark-gluon plasma and a cocktail with contributions of other particles. Simultaneously, clouds of photons surrounding the nuclei collide, resulting in the creation of lepton-antilepton pairs within the plasma and cocktail, and in the space around the nuclei. Credit: IFJ PAN

When heavy ions, accelerated to the speed of light, collide with each other in the depths of European or American accelerators, quark-gluon plasma is formed for fractions of a second, or even its 'cocktail' seasoned with other particles. According to scientists from the IFJ PAN, experimental data show that there are underestimated actors on the scene: photons. Their collisions lead to the emission of seemingly excess particles, the presence of which could not be explained.

Quark-gluon plasma is undoubtedly the most exotic state of matter thus far known to us. In the LHC at CERN near Geneva, it is formed during central collisions of two lead ions approaching each other from opposite directions, traveling at velocities very close to that of light. This quark-gluon soup is also sometimes seasoned with other particles. Unfortunately, the theoretical description of the course of events involving plasma and a cocktail of other sources fails to describe the data collected in the experiments. In an article published in Physics Letters B, a group of scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow explained the reason for the observed discrepancies. Data collected during collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC, as well as during collisions of gold nuclei in the RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory near New York, begin to agree with the theory when the description of the processes takes into account collisions between photons surrounding both interacting ions.

"With a pinch of salt, you could say that with sufficiently high energies, massive ions collide not only with their protons and neutrons, but even with their photon clouds," says Dr. Mariola Klusek-Gawenda (IFJ PAN) and immediately clarifies: "When describing the collision of ions in the LHC we already took into account collisions between photons. However, they concerned only ultra-peripheral collisions, in which the ions do not hit each other, but pass by each other unchanged, interacting only with their own electromagnetic fields. No one thought that photon collisions could play any role in violent interactions where protons and neutrons merge into a quark-gluon soup."

In conditions known from everyday life, photons do not collide with each other. However, when we are dealing with massive ions accelerated to almost the speed of light, the situation changes. The gold nucleus contains 79 protons, the lead nucleus as many as 82, so the electric charge of each ion is correspondingly many times greater than the elementary charge. The carriers of electromagnetic interactions are photons, so each ion can be treated as an object surrounded by a cloud of many photons. Moreover, in the RHIC and LHC, the ions move at speeds close to that of light. As a result, from the point of view of the observer in the laboratory, both they and their surrounding clouds of photons appear to be extremely thin patches, flattened in the direction of movement. With each passage of such a proton-neutron pancake, there is an extremely violent oscillation of the electric and magnetic fields.

In quantum electrodynamics, the theory used to describe electromagnetism with regard to quantum phenomena, there is a maximum critical value of the electric field, of the order of ten to sixteen volts per centimeter. It applies to static electric fields. In the case of collisions of massive atomic nuclei in the RHIC or LHC, we are dealing with dynamic fields appearing only for millionths of a billionth of one billionth of a second. For such an extremely short time, the electric fields in the collisions of ions can be even 100 times stronger than the critical value.

"In fact, the electric fields of ions colliding in the LHC or RHIC are so powerful that they generate virtual photons and their collisions occur. As a result of these processes, lepton-antilepton pairs are formed at various points around the ions where there was nothing material before. The particles of each pair move away from each other in a characteristic way: typically in opposite directions and almost perpendicular to the original direction of the movement of the ions," explains Dr. Wolfgang Schafer (IFJ PAN) and points out that the family of leptons includes electrons and their more massive counterparts: muons and tauons.

Photon interactions and the production of lepton-antilepton pairs associated with them are crucial in peripheral collisions. Collisions such as these were described by the physicists from Cracow a few years ago. To their surprise, they have now managed to show that the same phenomena also play a significant role in direct collisions of nuclei, even central ones. The data collected for gold nuclei in the RHIC and lead nuclei in the LHC show that during such collisions a certain "excess" number of electron-positron pairs appears, which diverge relatively slowly in directions almost perpendicular to the ion beams. It has been possible to explain their existence precisely just by taking into account the production of lepton-antilepton pairs by colliding photons.

"The real icing on the cake for us was the fact that by supplementing the existing tools for the description of massive ion collisions with our formalism built on the so-called Wigner distribution function, we could finally explain why the detectors of the largest contemporary accelerator experiments record these sorts of distributions of leptons and antileptons escaping from the site of the nuclear collisions (for a determined centrality of the collision). Our understanding of the most important processes taking place here has become more complete," concludes Prof. Antoni Szczurek (IFJ PAN).

Work on the Cracow model of photon-photon collisions was financed by the Polish National Science Center. The model has aroused the interest of physicists working with the ATLAS and ALICE detectors of the LHC and will be used in the next analyses of experimental data.

More information: Mariola Kusek-Gawenda et al, Centrality dependence of dilepton production via  processes from Wigner distributions of photons in nuclei, Physics Letters B (2021). Journal information: Physics Letters B Mariola Kusek-Gawenda et al, Centrality dependence of dilepton production via  processes from Wigner distributions of photons in nuclei,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2021.136114

Provided by The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences
Through other work she does in the community, I meet the moms and the aunts and the extended family members who pick these children up, she said during the web-video ceremony recognizing the winners. When this happened, I knew that the families that I work with would be directly affected. So it was really important  these are our future decision makers  to make sure that they have healthy food.
Breanna and Brooke Bennett of Montgomery asked for their 12th birthday in 2019 to create Women in Training kits filled with health and hygiene products that included sanitary pads, body wash and self-care items.

The effort by the twins generated headlines and raised awareness to the issue of period poverty, which affects 1 in 5 American girls and millions of women worldwide who cannot afford hygiene products. It also sparked inspiration for one Alabama lawmaker who, on Thursday, oversaw the House approval of legislation requiring schools to provide menstrual hygiene products at no cost to students in grades 5-12.

State Rep. Rolanda Hollis, D-Birmingham, the sponsor of HB88, called the twins her sheroes following the bills 97-0 approval in the Alabama House. The legislation advances to the Senate but is viewed as having no chance of further advancement during the final days of the 2021 legislation session.

Hollis said she plans to reintroduce the same legislation next year and to bring the concern back up for another legislative debate.

Related content: Bill to combat period poverty in Alabama receives public hearing

What is going on right now is there are a lot of counselors and nurses who are providing the products to the schools right now, said Hollis. Not every young lady has the resources to have the product.

She added, When I go inside the schools and Im speaking to counselors and principles, (they are telling me) that we have young girls making the products with their fathers socks or paper towels. Its also causing these young girls to be infected.

The legislation would require local school boards to provide the products at school restrooms beginning with the 2022-2023 school year.

At least one lawmaker expressed concerns that the legislation is an unfunded mandate on local districts.

If this is another provision schools should provide, like breakfast and lunch, then we need to provide a funding line item based on the number of girls who are in the school, said state Rep. Charlotte Meadows, R-Montgomery. She said she felt the program would be a great thing for parent-teacher organizations to administer.

My concern is if its a poverty school and we mandate they purchase the supplies, where is that money coming from? Meadows said. My concern is it comes from curriculum and instruction (budgets).

Hollis said the decision on how to pay for the products would be a local decision.

She later said that had she gotten $30,000 set aside in the states overall $2.4 billion General Fund budget, I would have been happy. That money, she said, could have been used to purchase the products for school districts in need.

State Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville, called it a sad statement for Alabama and its annual budgeting when it cannot provide a line item to purchase the products for young girls whose families cannot afford a box of tampons.

The issue can affect a students education, Hall said. A 2019 survey of 693 women who attended U.S. high schools found that nearly 24% left school early due to a lack of access to feminine hygiene products. Nearly 13% reported that they missed school when they were on their period and couldnt access supplies.

According to one market study released last month, 57,000 girls in the Atlanta area and 38,000 in the Houston area did not attend school last year because of the lack of access to sanitary products.

The lack of having access to menstrual supplies has an impact on education, said Hall. We have young people with a lack of access. They generally miss class and schools. They have heavy cycles.

State Rep. Mary Moore, D-Birmingham, said she felt money from federal relief packages could also help pay for program. She also said the legislation could be approved now and administered while the Legislature is out of session.

We have a gazillion dollars coming from the federal government, said Moore. Its something for health care and education. If this (legislative) body wanted to do something in this short period of time  we can put something in now to allow them to disburse some funds from those federal dollars coming in while we are out of session.

Few states have a similar hygiene mandate in place, though legislation has surfaced in more than a dozen states in recent years. California and Illinois became the first two states to enact similar legislation in 2018, and a number of school boards and universities have started providing the products for free.

Alabama is also one of 30 states that also taxes the purchase of tampons.

Said Hollis, We have to stop being Alabackwards and stop waiting to be the last state to step up and do something especially when its a need and not just in (my district) but through the state of Alabama. This was the start to remove what we call period poverty. There is such thing.
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Porter Place name to change

KW Housing Authority to honor Milian, end link to KKK

In a turnaround, members of the Key West Housing Authority have voted 4-0 this month to change the name of the J.Y. Porter Place Apartments after concerns were raised that the man the housing complex is named after was a leader in the 1921 local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Housing Authority board members voted to change the name to honor Lang B. Milian, the first Black man to serve on the housing authority board and who elected to the Key West City Commission in 1971. Now deceased, Milian was only the second Black man to serve on the Key West City Commission in the 20th Century at that time. He is also the father of current Housing Authority board member Annette Mobley.

The name change request has been submitted to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which finances Porter Place and other local housing authority housing facilities in Key West and Monroe County. If approved, not only will the name of Porter Place be changed, so will all the HUD documents referring to Key West Housing Authority housing facilities in the city, which are identified under a HUD blanket name of J.Y. Porter Place.

The suggestion to change the name was brought forth by [Key West City Commissioner] Clayton Lopez, who has dedicated his life to the well-being of this community, Housing Authority Vice Chairman Bob Dean stated in a written statement. I thought that it served two purposes: the first being to honor a man who was a pillar of this community. Lang Milian was a good friend and in addition to being the first Black city commissioner in many years, he worked hard for his community. Secondly, it occurred to me it would serve to unite us rather than divide us.

Porter Place, located at the corner of White and Eaton streets, was named 81 years ago after Dr. John Porter, Sr., credited with creating the first health department in Florida and who worked to eradicate yellow fever in Key West.

But a J.Y. Porter is also named in the 1921 charter of the Key West Chapter of the KKK as its Exalted Cyclops. The charter caused Key West City Commissioner Sam Kaufman to write a letter to the Housing Authority board earlier this year asking that the name be changed.

You have an opportunity to make a statement by removing the vestiges of racism from a place dedicated for white residents only, J.Y. Porter Place, and rename the public facility with something more consistent with our One Human Family community values, Kaufman wrote in a February letter to the Housing Authority board. I strongly believe that our community, especially our young people, will not stand for this offensive symbol remaining on public land.

Kaufmans letter and subsequent appearance at a Housing Authority meeting that month did not go well. Two resolutions, one to deny the name change and one to support it, both failed for lack of a second. Kaufman was denied an extra minute to finish his public statement and Housing Authority Chairman Frank Toppino ultimately walked out of the meeting in anger.

Since then, Kaufman has renewed his effort to change the name of Porter Place with no results. But it was Commissioner Lopez, working as a private citizen and meeting with each Housing Authority board member separately, who softened the request.

Lopez only wanted the name changed and had no one else in mind, he said. However, as word spread about John Porters affiliation with the KKK, residents of Bahama Village in Lopezs 6th District began putting Milians name forward.

Even though Porter is credited with creating the first health department, one that Lopez eventually spent his career working for, Lopez still supported taking Porters name off the housing complex at the end of White Street.

If were going to tell the story, we have to tell the whole story. There is a dark side to J.Y. Porter, Lopez said this week. Do we want to bring that back up and cause divisiveness or do we want to go ahead to unite people?

Lopez said he was present during the race riot that broke out at Key West High School in 1972. He said he remembers clearly the divide in Key West between white and Black residents at that time and I certainly did not want to go back to that. Kaufman called the name change vote terrific.

It was all done behind the scenes. But the results are good, he said, adding, I think the Housing Authority could have approached this in a better way.

Peter Batty, Sr., Housing Authority public information officer, said Lopez heart-felt letter helped change board members minds.

It was a great resolution and it was a great honor for Lang Milian, he said. Lang Milian is kind of a local hero. He was well-known in the community; a notable family and all-around good guy.

psowers@keysnews.com
Chinas Huawei Says Sales Down 16.5 Percent Amid US Sanctions

Embattled Chinese tech giant Huawei said Wednesday its first-quarter revenue fell 16.5 percent, hurt by a dip in smartphone sales.

Sales declined 16.5 percent from a year earlier to 152.2 billion yuan ($23.5 billion) due in part to lower revenue for its consumer unit, the company said. It gave no earnings but said its profit margin improved by 3.8 percentage points to 11.1 percent.

Huaweis phone shipments to retailers and other sellers within China plunge by half in the first quarter.

The company shipped a total of 14.9 million handsets within China in the quarter ending in March, down from 30.1 million in the same period last year, according to research firm Canalys.

Its market share also dropped to 16 percent from 41 percent a year ago, becoming the third largest after fellow Chinese brands Vivo and Oppo.

Huawei was put on a blacklist by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019 that barred the company from importing critical technology of U.S. origin, affecting its ability to design its own chips and source components from outside vendors.

Washington says the Huawei is a security risk and might facilitate Chinese spying, an accusation Huawei denies.

The sanctions bar access to U.S. processor chips and services including Googles music and other popular apps. Huawei designs its own chips, but manufacturers are barred from using U.S. technology required to produce them.

The ban put Huaweis once lucrative handset business under immense pressure, prompting the sale of its Honor budget smartphone unit to a group of agents and dealers.

Huawei has responded by emphasizing its sales in China and for electric and self-driving cars, industrial networks and other technology that is less vulnerable to U.S. pressure. Huawei has a stockpile of U.S. chips for high-end smartphones but executives have said those were being used up.

Wednesdays announcement gave no details of sales by network gear, consumer and other business lines.

Reuters contributed to this report
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BOISE, Idaho (AP)  An Idaho lawmaker accused of rape by a 19-year-old legislative intern has resigned after an ethics committee found he should be formally censured.

The investigation into Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger began in March after a young staffer reported he raped her in his apartment after the two had dinner at a Boise restaurant. Von Ehlinger has denied all wrongdoing and maintains he had consensual sexual contact with the young woman. He resigned Thursday after an ethics committee unanimously agreed that he engaged in behavior unbecoming and recommended that he be suspended without pay for the rest of the legislative session.

The Boise Police Department is investigating the rape allegations, and von Ehlinger has not been charged.

The Republican from Lewiston wrote in his resignation letter that he hoped stepping down would spare his colleagues from having to deal with the ethics committee's recommendation, which he disagreed with.

After careful deliberation and prayer I have determined that I will not be able to effectively represent my constituents and ... have decided to resign my seat effective immediately, von Ehlinger wrote.  ... I maintain my innocence of any wrongdoing of which I have been accused in this matter.

The ethics panel had also recommend that von Ehlinger be held in contempt for refusing to answer some questions during his testimony on Wednesday. The lawmaker invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself on the advice of his attorney, but Idaho law states that testimony given in a legislative ethics panel can't be used in criminal court cases. That means the Fifth Amendment doesn't apply, the committee said.

The investigation into von Ehlinger began in March after a young staffer reported he raped her in his apartment after the two had dinner at a Boise restaurant. Von Ehlinger has denied all wrongdoing and maintains they had consensual sexual contact. The Boise Police Department is investigating, and von Ehlinger has not been charged.

Story continues

The five-member ethics panel also agreed that they would throw unanimous support behind a motion to expel von Ehlinger if any House lawmaker decides to make one.

The decision came the day after the panel heard hours of testimony, including from the teen who first brought the allegations. She was shielded from public view by a black screen and used the name Jane Doe during the proceedings, but some far-right blogs and at least one lawmaker, Rep. Priscilla Giddings, R-White Bird, has revealed the teen's identity in a social media post and in a link embedded in a newsletter to her constituents. At least one of the blogs was edited days later to remove the teen's photo and name.

The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

After the teen testified, some of von Ehlinger's supporters and one television news reporter pursued her out of the building, attempting to film her as she rushed to her car. The Capitol Correspondents Association, the credentialing entity for news reporters covering the Idaho Legislature, convened an emergency meeting of its Standing Committee after hearing of the reporter's involvement and revoked the reporter's credentials for violating the established press rules for coverage of the hearing.

Rep. John McCrostie, a Democrat from Garden City, lauded the intern for her bravery in coming forward.

Sexual assault survivors are seldom subjected to having their testimony publicly broadcast. But she knew that her truth enabled others to not suffer as she has, McCrostie said.

We owe it to Jane Doe and to future Jane Does to ensure that the work of the House of Representatives is conducted with integrity, he said.

Idaho Falls Republican Rep. Wendy Horman said von Ehlinger was inconsistent in his testimony and wrongly refused to answer pertinent questions, and the evidence showed he maintained a pattern of hitting on subordinates at the Statehouse despite repeated warnings.

She rejected his argument that because there was no written rule against dating staffers, there was nothing wrong with the behavior.

There is no House rule against poisoning another person, yet his behavior has poisoned all of us, Horman said. Conduct unbecoming is an undefined term for a reason per our rules.

Rep. Brent Crane, a Republican from Nampa, said the public's perception of the entire legislative body will be measured by the incident and that the panel needed to ensure that constituents are served by those with the highest moral standards. He said von Ehlinger engaged in a predatory pattern of behavior.

The Idaho House of Representatives existed long before we arrived, and it will be here long after we leave, but history will judge us by our actions today, Crane said. I want our actions to provide a clear directive.

The attorneys who are representing the intern, Erika Birch and Annie Hightower, released a statement thanking the committee for recommending that von Ehlinger be censured and taking the first steps to hold him accountable for raping a teen intern.

The attorneys also noted it has been incredibly difficult for their client, especially when she was accosted by the onlookers after testifying. A television news reporter also followed the teen, the attorneys said, filming her distress. The news station later destroyed the footage and did not broadcast it.

The unrelenting harm that has occurred as a part of this process, and as a result of her being doxxed in blogs and by Rep. Priscilla Giddings, is exactly why two-thirds of Idaho survivors of sexual assault never choose to report the crimes against them, the attorneys said. Every time a system fails to protect survivors it reinforces why survivors of sexual violence choose not to report and to suffer in silence.

Von Ehlinger and his attorney Edward Dindinger did not respond to requests for comment.

___

Sexual assault survivors can receive confidential support, help finding local resources, information about laws and other information by calling the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 (HOPE).
NEW DELHI: Nearly 1.3 crore Indians registered themselves online on the governments dedicated portal CoWin on Wednesday for the mass vaccination drive that is set to begin on May 1.

However, a lot of them literally struggled to get themselves registered and complained about the technical problems they faced while trying to register themselves on the CoWin portal. Some of them even complained that the portal was not responding while others said that it had crashed.

All this happened at a time when the country`s toll from the coronavirus surged past 200,000 on Wednesday, worsened by shortages of hospital beds and medical oxygen.

The second wave of infections has seen at least 300,000 people test positive each day for the past week, overwhelming health facilities and crematoriums and prompting an increasingly urgent response from allies overseas sending equipment.

At this juncture, India`s best hope is to vaccinate its vast population and on Wednesday it opened registrations for everyone above the age of 18 to be given jabs from Saturday.

But the country, which is one of the world`s biggest producers of vaccines, does not yet have adequate stocks for the estimated 600 million people becoming eligible, on top of the ongoing effort to inoculate the elderly and people with other medical conditions.

People who tried to sign up said they failed, complaining on social media that they could not get a slot or they simply could not get online to register as the website repeatedly crashed.

"Tried registering and blocking a slot for vaccination," said one user on Twitter. "Failed multiple times," said another. Even those already eligible were struggling to find doses.

It may be noted that CoWin registration began with an announcement that appointments at state government centres and private centres will depend on how many centres are ready on May 1 for vaccination of 18-plus beneficiaries.

Many state governments have already said that may not be able to begin the drive on May 1 as they are still short of supplies. Another major roadblock is the high number of people registering themselves for vaccination.

As the situation stands, COVID-19 jabs are currently available in private hospitals only for 45-plus people till the end of the month. Thereafter the Centre-supported vaccine rollout for this category will be available only in government hospitals.

The Centre has recently announced that states, private hospitals and corporates can access 50% production of Covishield and Covaxin for the 18 and above category.

The Centre aims to allow states more leeway in planning drives and creating incentives for vaccine manufacturers to boost production. The higher price at private hospitals will also allow those who can pay to reduce the load on government facilities.

RS Sharma, National Health Authority CEO, has clarified why this is happening and when people will be able to book appointments. Speaking to news agency ANI, Sharma said, Some States and hospitals may come on board on May 1 or later, therefore, the visibility into the bookings/vacancy available for vaccination will be available when States, hospitals come on board.

On issues related to CoWin registration, the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday clarified that the media reports that the server has crashed are incorrect and are without any basis. The Ministry said that it witnessed more than 80 lakh people registered themselves on the portal, with 3 hours from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm on Wednesday.

It added that the portal received 383 million API hits, initially as high as 2.7 million hits per minute and a total of 1.45 crore SMSs have been successfully delivered.

The Health Ministry highlighted that vaccination is a critical component of the containment and management strategy of the Government of India in its fight against the Covid pandemic.

"A liberalised and accelerated Phase 3 strategy of Covid-19 vaccination will be implemented from May 1. Registration for the new eligible population groups commenced today from 4 pm. Potential beneficiaries can register directly on the Co-WIN portal (cowin.gov.in) or through the Aarogya Setu app," the Ministry said.

The government claimed that the Co-WIN software is a robust, dependable and agile technology and it offers anytime anywhere registration for Covid-19 vaccination.

"The capacity of the servers and other parameters have been ramped up to match the unprecedented scale of immunisation so that the Co-WIN system can provide citizen-centric services. Inclusivity, speed and scalability have been kept in mind while designing the unique digital platform with all components being portable and synchronous without excessive and unnecessary dependencies," the ministry said.

The Ministry also categorically denied reports suggesting that the Co-WIN platform was unresponsive/overshooting the server capacity and was not able to respond to the unprecedented number of registrations taking place.

People registering on the platform are mostly the age group of 18 to 44 years. Vaccinations will begin on Saturday for everyone above 18 from May 1 (Saturday) under a more "liberalised and accelerated Phase 3 strategy of COVID-19 vaccination". Those who want to take the vaccine are to go to - https://www.cowin.gov.in/home and click on the "register/sign-in" option.

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" " Perfectly seared scallops will have a caramelized crust on the outside and remain tender and sweet inside. Vegar Abelsnes Photography/Getty Images

Do you make a beeline for the scallops dish every time you eat at your favorite seafood restaurant? Well, lucky for you, it's not very difficult to replicate those perfectly pan-seared scallops at home. And depending on the recipe, you can cook and eat scallops in 15 minutes or less.

Scallops are part of the mollusk family, same as octopi, mussels and oysters. While they may look a little intimidating for the average home cook, selecting them and prepping them is easier than it seems.

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Where Can You Buy Fresh Scallops?

The U.S. has the largest sea scallop fishery in the world. But not every U.S. city has the benefit of a local fishmonger to teach us about sustainable seafood  and pick the best scallops for us. So if you're not close to the beach, pick up fresh scallops at your local farmers market or even your local grocery store.

When you're choosing scallops, stay away from those that that look extremely dry, and choose fresh scallops and skip the frozen, if possible.

"Scallops should be firm with a very faint sweet smell," Brandon Chavannes, executive chef at The Betty, a supper club in Atlanta, says. "You can tell if they've been in a container for a long time. If they are floppy, they've been dead too long," Ask the fishmonger at the store to clean them, if necessary. Sometimes scallops will have tiny muscles that need to be removed before cooking; if the muscle remains, it can become very tough when cooked.

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What's the Difference Between Wet and Dry Scallops?

When purchasing your scallops, you want to look for dry scallops. Dry is the industry term for scallops that haven't been treated with any chemicals  most notably phosphates. They're superior to wet scallops and are usually a beige color and have sweeter, more natural flavor. (Note: The scallops aren't actually "dry;" that's just the term used.)

Wet scallops, on the other hand, have been soaked in a preservative solution that helps them absorb more water and often appear pale white in color. Wet scallops are the most common available at major grocery store chains, so carefully check when purchasing. The extra water will evaporate when you cook them, so the scallops will actually shrink and toughen up compared to dry scallops.

"Many scallops have been dipped in a preservative called sodium tripolyphosphate that bleaches them to help extend shelf life, which sucks out the flavor, can make them waterlogged, and impossible to sear," Chavannes says.

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Sea vs. Bay Scallops

Bay scallops are caught in the shallow waters of bays and estuaries. The meat is high-quality, but they are very small (you can expect about 100 pieces in 1 pound [0.45 kilograms]), so they are less common than sea scallops in many stores.

"Bay scallops are generally sweeter than sea scallops, says Adam Evans, chef of Birmingham's Automatic Seafood and Oysters. "When they are in season, I highly recommend buying the bay scallops. The texture is similar; [they are] obviously smaller in size, but better in flavor."

Chavannes suggests buying domestic bay scallops during their peak season, which runs between November and February. They are best served raw, he says.

Sea scallops are more widely available year-round and have a sweet, rich, briny taste.

" " Look for dry scallops when you're purchasing them. Those are scallops that haven't been treated with any chemicals. They're superior in flavor to wet scallops. billnoll/Getty Images

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How to Cook Scallops

Despite how fancy we feel when we eat scallops, they're not very difficult to cook. It's all about paying attention. When you unwrap them, make sure to check for any muscles  it's that small rectangular-like tough tag on the side of the scallop we mentioned earlier. You can just pinch it and pull it off. It is edible but tough when cooked.

Next, lay the scallops out on a cutting board and pat them dry on both sides with a paper towel and season with a bit of salt and pepper. "The biggest rule of thumb is to keep it simple. Don't add powerful flavors that are going to cover up the ingredient you are paying so much for," Chavannes says.

Now simply add a bit of flavorless oil with a high smoke point  grapeseed oil or olive oil are ideal  to a hot cast iron skillet and sear the scallops. "I like to use a little more oil with scallops than I do with fish," Evans says. "The reason for that is the natural sugars that are in the scallops caramelize and produce a sweet flavor and crust on the outside."

Be sure to leave enough space between the scallops. Sear for about two minutes on one side until they brown slightly. Avoid the urge to move them while they're cooking. Then flip them.

It's optional, but here you can add a tablespoon of butter to the skillet for flavor. Allow the flip side to brown and caramelize. Once done, remove from the pan and serve immediately. Perfectly cooked scallops will have a caramelized crust on the outside and remain tender and sweet inside.

Scallops pair very well with grains like couscous, grits or polenta. Evans also recommends adding them to your surf and turf. "I love it with smoked beef brisket or a Spanish style dried chorizo," he says.

Chavannes shared one of his easy recipes for scallops on the grill:

First, chop your scallops, load into a scallop shell with a generous pat of good French butter, like Echire , and some pine nuts. Put the shell on the grill and cook until the butter is bubbly and the scallops are warmed. Finish with a couple of sprigs of fennel and a squeeze of charred lemon. Serve immediately.

Now That's Interesting While they often remain in the exact location in the ocean, they're one of the only mollusks that can propel their bodies by opening and closing their shells and swim away when needed. Scallops can propel themselves by clamping down their shells. They usually only do so when threatened.
Greg May Hyundai will have the 2022 Santa Cruz in its showroom from summer of 2021

The 2022 Santa Cruz is the latest vehicle from Hyundai to hit the market in the summer of 2021. This car will be featured at Greg May Hyundai showroom in Waco, Texas, in the coming months.

The 5-seater pickup truck will be available in four trim levels namely, SE, SEL, SEL Premium and Limited. The SE variant of the truck has a towing capacity of 3,500 pounds, 8-inch color touchscreen display, wireless Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and many other features that are commonly found in SUVs.

The SEL trim level comes with an 8-way heated power driver seat with adjustable lumbar support, 10.25-inch Digital Gauge Cluster, Proximity Key with push button start, while the Limited trim level has features such as Bose Premium Audio, ventilated and heated leather-trimmed seats with heated leather-wrapped steering wheel, 20-inch alloy wheels, Blind-Spot View Monitor and much more.

All variants of the 2022 Santa Cruz come with two distinct powertrain configurations. In addition to that, all trim levels are also available with the following color options:



Ice White.

Phantom Black.

Hampton Gray.

Sage Gray.

Blue Stone.

Desert Sand.

In order to reserve the 2022 Santa Cruz, customers need to choose a particular trim level and a color option. Next, they need to deposit a refundable amount of $100 to the dealership. Afterward, the dealership will contact the customers and discuss the configuration availability, pricing and other important points. It is to be noted that submitting a vehicle reservation request does not guarantee availability.

All interested parties can call 833-310-1026 or visit https://www.gregmayhyundai.com/ for more information.
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Many were angered by the citys newly-imposed curfew, saying its unnecessary since the protests against the shooting death of Andrew Brown had so far been peaceful.

Lawyers for the family of a Black man gunned down by sheriff's deputies last week in North Carolina said a private autopsy showed he died from a "kill shot" to the back of his head, and the FBI on Tuesday opened a civil rights probe of the shooting.

Andrew Brown Jr., 42, was struck by four bullets to his right arm before the fatal shot penetrated the rear of his skull as he tried to drive away, attorneys for his relatives told a news conference in Elizabeth City, a riverfront community near the Virginia border where last Wednesday's shooting took place.
Lucknow, April 29 : Senior IAS officer and chairman of the Uttar Pradesh IAS Association, Deepak Trivedi, succumbed to Covid on Thursday.

He has been hospitalized since the past several days after testing positive for the virus.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has expressed his grief over the officer's demise and has conveyed his condolences to the bereaved family.

Trivedi was posted as the chairman of the Board of Revenue and had been elected as president of the UP IAS Association in March last year.

A 1985 batch IAS officer, Deepak Trivedi was a popular officer, known for his amiable nature.
[April 29, 2021] ExoAnalytic Solutions and NorthStar Earth & Space Expand Collaboration to Protect Satellites

Precision SSA services to meet the threat of space congestion LONDON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - In response to the increasing threat of congestion and space debris in Earth's orbit, NorthStar Earth & Space of Montreal, Quebec, and ExoAnalytic Solutions of Foothill Ranch, California, will expand their strategic collaboration agreement to deliver precision Space Situational Awareness (SSA) services to protect the global satellite community from collisions and ensure safe access to space. The announcement was made today during the 2021 Military Space Situational Awareness Conference. Furthering a relationship established in 2019, data from ExoAnalytic's comprehensive global telescope network of more than 300 ground-based sensors will combine with data gathered by sensors deployed on NorthStar's satellite constellations, enabling the delivery of space situational awareness information services of unique dimension, precision, and timeliness. "The New Space Economy depends on the safety and sustainability of the space environment. This demands collaboration between trusted partners and nations to protect continuous access to space and the services rendered to humanity," said Stewart Bain, CEO of NorthStar Earth & Space. "NorthStar's continued collaboration with ExoAnalytic Solutions demonstrate a strong US  Canada commercial effort to contribute precise real-time services to address the biggest challenges we are facing in space today." Commercial space is headed to a forecasted $2.7 trillion industry. New satellites and planned megaconstellations are launching into an environment congested with traffic and space debris. Increase risk must be mitigated with better SSA services. NorthStar's Skylark constellation and ExoAnalytic's established SSA network combine the best of space-based and ground-based services to ensure the safety of spaceflight.



"Addressing the mounting needs of the increasingly diverse and dynamic space traffic environment requires a data-driven approach," said Dr. Doug Hendrix, CEO of ExoAnalytic Solutions. "Decision making based on sparse data and human-intensive processes is not a strategy for effective flight safety. This year has seen a marked increase in the number of active satellites along with an increase in publicized reports of close approaches. There is also currently a lack of agreement on the quantitative assessments of these publicly-reported close approaches. More timely and more accurate information is required to enable effective and safe satellite operations in this evolving traffic environment. This expanded strategic collaboration agreement represents our mutual commitment to enabling more accurate and timely decision making." ExoAnalytic Solutions was designed from the ground up to provide traditional defense contractor services with exceptional compliance, accountability, security and qualityand to do so with the speed and innovation of a Silicon Valley tech startup. Founded in 2008 by three career physicists, the company's earliest employees and executives were chosen for their commitment to technical excellence. Now recognized throughout the industry as a technology disruptor, ExoAnalytic Solutions is a research and development powerhouse that has a successful record of guiding products from paper to operational fielding.

Starting in 2023, NorthStar will begin operation of Skylark, its debut constellation for SSA services, to enable the delivery of near real-time high fidelity tracking services, elevating traditional SSA to the level of Space Information & Intelligence (SI2). With a comprehensive view of all near-earth orbits, Skylark's space-based sensors will deliver precise observations of more space objects than any current system with higher revisit frequency per object. The result is unprecedented coverage, custody and enhanced predictive capabilities. NorthStar's investors comprise a global coalition of strategic partners, including Telesystem Space (a co-enterprise of the Sirois family office, Telesystem and the Roger's Family Trust of Canada), the Space Alliance (Thales Alenia Space and Telespazio) of Europe, KinetX (USA), the Government of Quebec and the Government of Canada. For more information: https://northstar-data.com/ https://exoanalytic.com/ SOURCE NorthStar Earth & Space Inc.

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Troubled U.S. Vaccine Manufacturer Announces a Shake-Up Emergent BioSolutions, which ran a manufacturing plant where contamination concerns forced millions of doses to be thrown out, is shifting some top roles. All adults in India will be eligible for vaccines starting on Saturday, but doctors say there arent enough doses.

A troubled vaccine manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions, projects record revenues. The biopharmaceutical company Emergent BioSolutions, in Baltimore, Md., threw out millions of vaccine doses at its manufacturing plant over concerns of contamination. Credit... Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock Executives of Emergent BioSolutions, the vaccine manufacturer that was forced to discard up to 15 million doses because of possible contamination, reported a shake-up in leadership on Thursday and offered the most fulsome defense yet of the companys performance. While announcing the high-level personnel changes and taking responsibility for the ruined doses, executives nonetheless forecast record revenues this year of nearly $2 billion. Robert Kramer, the chief executive, speaking on a call with investors, said that one senior vice president overseeing manufacturing would depart the company while another executive would go on leave. A third official, Mary Oates, who recently joined Emergent after a long tenure at Pfizer, is now leading the companys response to a recent federal inspection that found serious flaws at the Baltimore facility that produced the vaccines. The call on Thursday came at a tumultuous time for Emergent, a once-obscure federal contractor that has built a lucrative business selling biodefense products to the government. Production at the companys Baltimore plant was suspended this month after the discovery that workers had potentially contaminated millions of doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Addressing these setbacks, Mr. Kramer offered a vigorous defense of the company on Thursday. He took full responsibility for the manufacturing problems, acknowledging that the loss of a batch for a viral contamination is extremely serious, and we treated it as such, but he also said that Emergent had taken on a herculean task in a crisis. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and

The C.D.C. eases rules for cruises, making mid-July trips possible. People pose for photos near the cruise docks in San Juan, P.R., last week. Credit... Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times Cruise ships that have been docked for more than a year could restart sailing in United States waters by mid-July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a letter sent to the cruise industry late on Wednesday. After several meetings with cruise lines, the C.D.C. clarified several requirements in its Framework for Conditional Sailing Order, which outlined the steps that cruise companies had to follow to resume operations in U.S. waters. The agency said it will let the companies skip test voyages if they attest that 98 percent of the crew and 95 percent of passengers are fully vaccinated. Previously, the agency required cruise lines to give 30 days notice before starting a test cruise and to apply for a conditional sailing certificate 60 days before a planned regular voyage. The Cruise Lines International Association, the industrys trade group, called the guidelines burdensome and ambiguous and asked the C.D.C. to factor in how quickly Americans are being vaccinated. The C.D.C. said on Wednesday that it would review and respond to applications for simulated voyages within five days, putting cruise ships closer to open water sailing sooner. The agency also eased its pre-sailing testing requirements for fully vaccinated passengers and crew, allowing them to take a simple viral test instead of a PCR test, which takes longer to yield results. We acknowledge that cruising will never be a zero-risk activity and that the goal of the Conditional Sailing Orders phased approach is to resume passenger operations in a way that mitigates the risk of Covid-19 transmission onboard cruise ships and across port communities, the C.D.C. said in a statement on Thursday. We remain committed to the resumption of passenger operations in the United States following the requirements in the CSO by midsummer, which aligns with the goals announced by many major cruise lines, it went on. Cruise companies did not immediately comment on the C.D.C.s updated guidelines as many were still reviewing the letter. Florida is the biggest state for cruise operations and it had sued the C.D.C. to force it to restart sailings. But the state has passed legislation mandating that companies that do business with the state or get state subsidies cannot require people to be vaccinated for admission or service. That could make it difficult for cruise lines to guarantee that they have met the vaccination rates set in the C.D.C.s new letter. The cruise news site Cruise Critic asked its readers last week whether they would book a cruise if the C.D.C. allowed U.S. sailings to start this summer. Out of more than 600 respondents, 64 percent said they would book a cruise in 2021, while 27 percent said they would wait until 2022.

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As death tolls rise in South America, scientists say the worst is yet to come. Patients in tents outside Kennedy Hospital in Bogota, Colombia, this month. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population. Credit... Federico Rios for The New York Times With vaccinations mounting in some of the worlds wealthiest countries and people envisioning life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders. Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The length of the regions epidemic makes it even harder to fight. It has already endured some of the strictest lockdowns, longest schools closures and largest economic contractions in the world. And if Latin America fails to contain the virus  or if the world fails to step in to help it  new, more dangerous variants may emerge, said Dr. Jarbas Barbosa of the Pan-American Health Organization. This could cost us all that the world is doing to fight the pandemic, he said. Julie Turkewitz and

As Indias virus caseload reaches new highs, its vaccination drive is faltering. People getting vaccinated at a government-run hospital in Mumbai this month. Credit... Atul Loke for The New York Times India is the worlds leading producer of vaccines, but over the past week it has also been the global leader in Covid-19 deaths, and it is not at all clear that the country can vaccinate itself out of the crisis. As of Thursday, about 26 million people  1.8 percent of Indias population  had been fully vaccinated. That is a better rate than some mostly poor countries, but it is still among the worlds lowest. As a critical supplier in the global vaccination effort, Indias struggles to roll out enough vaccine for its own people are being closely watched abroad. Although Indian drug manufacturers produce tens of millions of doses a month, that is a fraction of the demand in a country where 940 million adults will be eligible for shots starting on Saturday. Many Indians who have received first doses report delays in getting their second, and state health officials say their appeals for fresh vaccine supplies are going unanswered. Balbir Singh Sidhu, the health minister in Punjab State, said: The shortage is everywhere. Sameer Yasir, Shashank Bengali and

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Amazons profit soars 220 percent as pandemic drives shopping online. Amazon has run its warehouses closer to full capacity, and delivery drivers have made more stops on their routes, during the pandemic. Credit... Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters With the pandemic shifting sales online and consumers flush with stimulus checks, Amazon on Thursday reported $108.5 billion in sales in the first three months of the year, up 44 percent from a year earlier. It also posted $8.1 billion in profit, an increase of 220 percent from the same period last year. The first-quarter results surpassed Wall Streets expectations. Shares were up as much as 5 percent in aftermarket trading. The most profitable parts of Amazons retail business boomed. Revenue from merchants listing items on its website and using its warehouses was up 64 percent, to $23.7 billion. Its other business segment, which is largely its lucrative advertising business, increased 77 percent, to almost $7 billion. Amazon previously disclosed that 200 million people pay for Prime memberships, and subscription revenue for that service and others reached almost $7.6 billion in the quarter. In addition to paying Amazon $119 a year or $12.99 a month for free shipping and other perks, households with Prime memberships typically spend $3,000 a year on Amazon, more than twice what households without the membership spend, according to Morgan Stanley. The high volume of orders during the pandemic has let Amazon operate more efficiently. It has run its warehouses closer to full capacity, and delivery drivers have made more stops on their routes, with less time driving between customers. The number of items Amazon sold grew 44 percent, but the cost to fulfill those orders was up only 31 percent. The pandemics shift to remote computing was also a boon to Amazons profitable cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, which had $13.5 billion in sales. We certainly had strong volumes really across all of our businesses, Amazons finance chief, Brian Olsavsky, said on a call with reporters. He said the company is investing heavily in future growth. It spent almost $50 billion in capital expenditures in the last 12 months, largely on building out its logistics operations and data centers, up 80 percent over a year earlier. Mr. Olsavsky said he expected another strong year for capital spending. In just 15 years, AWS has become a $54 billion annual sales run rate business competing against the worlds largest technology companies, and its growth is accelerating, Jeff Bezos, Amazons founder and chief executive, said in a statement. Mr. Bezos plans to step down as chief executive later this year and transition into the role of executive chairman. Amazons total work force dipped slightly between December and the end of March, falling by 27,000 to 1,271,000 employees globally. That was still 51 percent more workers than the same period last year. On Wednesday, Amazon announced it would increase pay for half a million workers and was hiring tens of thousands more.

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Pakistan warns of new strictures as its daily Covid death toll sets a record. The Pakistani government has called out troops to help enforce Covid safety regulations. Soldiers watched a street in Peshawar from the back of a military vehicle. Credit... Fayaz Aziz/Reuters With Covid-19 deaths surging to records in Pakistan this week, the government has sent troops to the streets to help enforce coronavirus precautions, and is warning it may turn to a lockdown if the spread is not controlled. Pakistan reported 201 deaths on Tuesday, the most in a single day so far, and has counted a total of 17,680 Covid deaths since the pandemic began. More than 5,200 patients are receiving critical care in the countrys hospitals. And there are fears that the virus could rampage through Pakistan the way it is doing in neighboring India if immediate steps are not taken to curb its spread. All travel to India has been banned. Fawad Chaudhry, the minister for information, said on Thursday that the government will be forced to impose a strict nationwide lockdown if the situation continues to deteriorate. Right now, the national positivity rate is 11 percent, he told reporters in Islamabad, referring to the share of virus tests that are coming back positive. If it goes up to 14 or 15 percent, we will have no choice but to move toward a lockdown. Soldiers are now patrolling streets and markets in more than a dozen cities, telling people to keep wearing masks and making sure mandatory closing times and other safety protocols are followed. Only essential food items and medicines may be sold after 6 p.m. The approach of the Eid al-Fitr holiday next month, when people typically do more shopping and socializing, has raised concerns. The government has urged caution and simpler festivities this year. Travel between cities and between provinces will be banned from May 8 until May 16, and hotels, public parks and tourist facilities will be closed. Vaccination efforts in Pakistan, with a population of more than 200 million, are progressing slowly. Health officials say 2 million vaccine doses have been administered so far, initially focused on people over 60 and health care workers. Eligibility will expand on Monday to include anyone over 40. By June, the country expects to have received 18.7 million doses, most of them to be distributed free by the government, though the private sector has been allowed to obtain some doses for sale to affluent patients. Mariam Chaudhry, an Islamabad resident, is waiting her turn under the government program. She said she wanted to be vaccinated so she could move around and travel safely, but others were being prompted more by the recent dire news from across the border. People were reluctant to inject new vaccines with unknown side effects, Ms. Chaudhry said. But the situation in India has delivered a powerful wake-up call. With catastrophe at the doorsteps, rising numbers of people are now rushing to inoculate.

Turkey braces for its strictest lockdown yet, as the virus surges and vaccinations lag. Travelers wait to board buses at the Esenler Coach Terminal in Istanbul Thursday, hours before a new new national lockdown was due to take effect. Credit... Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse  Getty Images The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded  but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began. Daily reports of new coronavirus cases rose swiftly in the country after the government started lifting earlier safety strictures in March, and are now generally around 40,000 a day, according to official figures, with some days reaching 60,000 or more. The health care system is swamped with patients, and the country set a grim record last week with 362 Covid deaths reported in a single day. The countrys heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination. Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far  8.8 million out of a population of 83 million  using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. It has had a hard time securing more doses, and has resorted to postponing second doses to stretch its supply. But Mr. Koca said he expects 30 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine in June, and to soon add the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia to its effort. Vaccine procurement will be difficult in the next two months, Mr. Koca said in a video statement on Thursday. But then we expect to have abundance of vaccines. For weeks, scientists have been calling for a total lockdown to stem the surge, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held off, mainly for economic reasons. He changed course after a cabinet meeting on Monday, and announced a new three-week lockdown to take effect Thursday evening and last through the end of Ramadan. Many people will be required to stay home except for essential errands or to go to certain jobs. Schools, kindergartens and day care centers will be closed. Grocery stores will be open, but only for customers who live within walking distance. Even solitary outdoor exercise will be banned. The announcement prompted a rush to stock up on groceries, alcohol and other supplies for the lockdown, which will include Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival to mark the end of Ramadan. And many city dwellers hurried to reach rural hometowns or holiday resorts while travel was still allowed. Though Mr. Erdogan billed the new restrictions as a full lockdown, an association of labor unions known as DISK estimated that 61 percent of all workers in Turkey are employed in sectors that are exempt from the lockdown, including manufacturing, construction, agriculture and transportation. Gokhan Aydin, 45, who works in a cable factory in Bursa, said he and his coworkers would have loved to be part of the full lockdown, without loss of income, as the virus peaked. Though his factory has good Covid precautions, he said, he is still worried because the virus is everywhere. The lockdown will land hardest on the many Turks who depend on informal day work. A single mother with five small children in Istanbul who collects and sells paper said her family can eat only on days when she can work. I really dont know what to do, she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her welfare payments from the government. I wish the state would give me a job.

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Retailers adapt to new U.S. shopping habits, sometimes by raising prices. Increased supply-chain and freight costs for cereal makers could translate into higher retail prices for customers. Credit... Sara Hylton for The New York Times Before the pandemic, when suppliers raised the cost of diapers, cereal and other everyday goods, retailers often absorbed the increase because stiff competition forced them to keep prices stable. Now, with Americans shopping habits having shifted rapidly  with people spending more on treadmills and office furniture and less at restaurants and movie theaters  retailers are also adjusting, Gillian Friedman reports for The New York Times. The Consumer Price Index, the measure of the average change in the prices paid by U.S. shoppers for consumer goods, increased 0.6 percent in March, the largest rise since August 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Procter & Gamble is raising prices on items like Pampers and Tampax in September. General Mills, which makes cereal brands including Cheerios, is facing increased supply-chain and freight costs that could translate into higher retail prices for customers. At the beginning of the pandemic, companies were focused on fulfilling demand for toilet paper, cleaning supplies, canned food and masks, said Greg Portell, a partner at Kearney, a consulting firm. The government was watching for price-gouging, and customers were wary of being taken advantage of. Now that the economy is beginning to stabilize, companies are starting to rebalance pricing so that it better fits their profit expectations and takes into account inflation. This isnt an opportunistic profit-taking by companies, Mr. Portell said. This is a reset of the market.

The virus is surging in Alaskas interior, straining a Fairbanks hospital. Brittany Karns, staff pharmacist at the Chief Andrew Isaac Health Center, prepares a single vial of the Moderna vaccine for travel in Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit... Nathan Howard/Reuters Dr. Angelique Ramirez, the chief medical officer of the main health care system in Fairbanks, Alaska, started the monthly coronavirus briefing in April by saying that she thought Marchs meeting would be the last. But amid a new surge of cases in the state, one of the countrys worst surges, Dr. Ramirez was blunt about her past assessment. I was wrong, she said. With nearly 100,000 people, the Fairbanks metropolitan area is Alaskas second largest and the largest in the states vast interior. According to a New York Times database, the number of new coronavirus cases in the borough of which Fairbanks is the seat, North Star, has risen by 253 percent over the past two weeks. The positivity rate has doubled since March, to about 10 percent from 5 percent, and hospitalizations at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, the areas only hospital, have hit a record number. This place is on fire with Covid, Dr. Barb Creighton, an internist at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, said at the meeting. Experts are unsure what is driving the surge, though a low vaccination rate certainly plays a role. Thirty-six percent of Alaskans are fully vaccinated, and in some boroughs that number is over 50 percent, but in the Fairbanks area just 29 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated. There is no big outbreak or two big outbreaks that are really driving this, said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, the state epidemiologist for Alaska. We have cases and clusters being associated with a wide range of different settings. With two-thirds of the older population in Fairbanks having received at least one dose of a vaccine, those who have recently been hospitalized in Fairbanks are younger than the Covid patients during the winter, when there was a peak in case numbers. Dr. Creighton said people who were hospitalized in April tended to be in their 40s and 50s and were unvaccinated because they were waiting to see what side effects might come from receiving a Covid-19 vaccine. We are seeing them stay longer because they are not dying, Dr. Creighton said. We are giving them noninvasive ventilation and they are staying for two, three weeks and turning around, which Ive never been more proud of. But while those older patients during the winter peak were largely grateful to be receiving care, those hospitalized now feel differently. Some of these folks are folks that are anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and they dont believe they have Covid or are sick because of it, and our staff is getting pretty angry folks, Shelley Ebenal, the chief executive of the health care system, Foundation Health Partners, said, imploring the systems trustees to share their appreciation of the hospital staff with them. She sounded a dire warning: We are not out of Covid, and our staff in particular is not out of Covid. Our morale is really low. Correction : May 4, 2021 A caption in earlier versions of this article misidentified a hospital pharmacist in Fairbanks. She is Brittany Karns, not Brittany Karma.

Vaccine skepticism was viewed as a knowledge problem. Its actually about gut beliefs. Vaccine skeptics are much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty and to have less deference to those in positions of power. Credit... Allison Zaucha for The New York Times For years, scientists and doctors have treated vaccine skepticism as a knowledge problem. If patients were hesitant to get vaccinated, the thinking went, they simply needed more information. But as public health officials now work to convince Americans to get Covid-19 vaccines as quickly as possible, new social science research suggests that a set of deeply held beliefs is at the heart of many peoples resistance, complicating efforts to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control. The instinct from the medical community was, If only we could educate them, said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true. About a third of American adults are still resisting vaccines. Polling shows that Republicans make up a substantial part of that group. Given how deeply the country is divided by politics, it is perhaps not surprising that they have dug in, particularly with a Democrat in the White House. But political polarization is only part of the story. In recent years, epidemiologists have teamed up with social psychologists to look more deeply into the why behind vaccine hesitancy. They wanted to find out whether there was anything that vaccine skeptics had in common, in order to better understand how to persuade them. They borrowed a concept from social psychology  the idea that a small set of moral intuitions forms the foundations upon which complex moral worldviews are constructed  and applied it to their study of vaccine skepticism. What they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits offering a new lens through which to understand skepticism  and potentially new tools for public health officials scrambling to try to persuade people to get vaccinated. Dr. Omer and a team of scientists found that skeptics were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty  the rights of individuals  and to have less deference to those in positions of power.

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New Yorks vaccine czar steps down, costing Cuomo another key aide. Larry Schwartz, one of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos most trusted advisers, stepped down from his role as New York States vaccine czar. Credit... John Lamparski/NurPhoto, via Getty Images Larry Schwartz, one of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos most trusted advisers, has unexpectedly stepped down from his role as New York States vaccine czar, about five months after he was recruited by the governor to take the post. He submitted his resignation on Wednesday, just as the State Legislature restored provisions to the state public officers law that would have affected Mr. Schwartz, had he remained in the position. Mr. Schwartz was not paid for his service in the post. But the changes to the law would have made him subject to rules requiring him to file financial disclosure forms, as well as a two-year lobbying ban after his service, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Cuomo waived those requirements at the beginning of the pandemic so that he could attract a broader pool of volunteers to assist at the highest levels of government. Mr. Schwartz, who served as Mr. Cuomos top aide from 2011 to 2015 and is now the chief strategy officer at OTG, an airport concessions company, decided to step down to avoid the lobbying ban, the two people said. OTG operates in airports run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose executive director is appointed by Mr. Cuomo.

Some people are finding a return to normal to be a big adjustment. A group of friends, some masked and some unmasked, play dominoes in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Credit... Scott McIntyre for The New York Times After a year of isolation, wariness and pandemic precautions, people in the United States are emerging and starting to navigate travel, classrooms and restaurants, and often discovering that when it comes to returning to old ways, they feel out of sorts. Do they shake hands? Hug? With or without a mask? Its a confusion made worse by state and federal rules and social norms that seem to vary widely from place to place, all while the very real threat of infection remains. Many states and cities are scrambling to incorporate the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions new guidance into their own rules, and some are trying to reconcile the clash of cues. We have reviewed and support the C.D.C.s new masking recommendations and are working quickly to align Californias guidance with these common sense guidelines, Dr. Tomas Aragon, the director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. Dr. Susan Huang, of the University of California, Irvine, Medical School, explained the conflicted psychology as a function of rapidly changing risk, and differences in risk tolerance from person to person. Most places now have a foundation of vaccinated people, she said, but are not near to achieving herd immunity  with no children inoculated. Were between the darkness and the light, Dr. Huang said. She compared the psychology of mask-wearing, and when to stop doing it, with the way people approach changing their wardrobes each spring: The more risk-averse continue to wear winter clothes on 50-degree days, she said, while bigger-risk takers move quickly to summer outfit. Eventually, she said, everyone will be wearing shorts.
China has insisted its population grew last year following reports that the latest census was being delayed because it had found a decline.

The Communist Party did not provide a figure on Thursday, simply stating: 'According to our understanding, in 2020, China's population continued to grow.'

It follows a report in The Financial Times that Beijing had delayed publication of the census - completed in December - because party officials were frantically trying to decide how to report that the population of 1.4 billion was shrinking.

Beijing would resent to lose its status as the world's most populous country, particularly to its nuclear and industrial rival India, which could overtake China as early as this year pending the full publication of the census.

India and China's projected population growth according to the United Nations - World Population Prospects. It shows a steady decline for China over the next few decades, while India will continue to increase until at least 2060

China's population has long been expected to peak in the coming decades and decline in line with trends in other Asian countries. But an outright fall so early would increase challenges for leaders who are trying to shore up economic growth and raise incomes.

Beijing has failed to tackle its falling birth rate despite relaxing its strict family planning policy five years ago to allow everyone to have at least two children.

Any fall in growth would prompt fears that the country is heading into an irreversible decline.

The latest Chinese census, was due for publication earlier this month, but has been delayed for unexplained reasons.

The population figure is very sensitive and will not be published until government departments have a consensus on the data and its implications, sources told the FT.

'If China confirms such a decline, it would be a big deal,' said Zhiwei Zhang, the Shenzhen-based chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

'The consensus expects China's population to peak at 2027, based on the projection made by the United Nations. This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected.'

No explanation has been given for the delay in announcing the result, though the bureau said this month that more preparatory work was needed.

Delhi poses a threat to China's status as the world's main producer of goods and has put its foot forward to forge trade deals with newly-liberated Brexit Britain.

Chinese students queuing for their vaccines at the university in Wuhan on Tuesday. The Communist Party will be keen to impose measures to boost the population before falling into an irreversible decline with an ageing populace

India, with a vibrant democracy based on the British tradition, is increasingly attractive to investors who are concerned by China's shady human rights record.

The United Nations projects India's population will continue to grow well into the 2050s as people are much younger on average than in China.

In recent months, China's state media have been increasingly bleak, saying the population may start to shrink in the next few years.

In 2016, China scrapped a decades-long one-child policy in the hope of boosting the number of babies, replacing the measure with a two-child policy.

At the time, it also set a target to boost its population to about 1.42 billion by 2020, from 1.34 billion in 2010.

But the birth rate has continued to decline.

That is partly because urban couples, particularly those born after 1990, value their independence and careers more than raising a family, despite parental pressure to have children.

Smoke billows from a chimney in northern India. The nuclear-armed industrial powerhouse wants to challenge China to strike trade deals with the developed world

Rising living costs in major cities, where large populations lead to the birth of a huge number of babies, have also deterred couples.

'China would likely have to relax the birth control policy completely and put off the retirement age faster,' Zhang said.

Falling birth rates and a fast greying society will add pressure on the working-age population and hit productivity.

'Our projections using the pre-census figures already suggested that the workforce would be declining by 0.5% each year by 2030, with a similar impact on GDP,' Capital Economics wrote in a note on Wednesday.

'Slower growth would make catching the United States economically harder. And there may be an intangible impact on China's global standing too.'
When A Million Little Things Season 3 began, Delilah Dixon (Stephanie Szostak) wasnt gone yet. You didnt just imagine that. She went to the hospital with Katherine Saville (Grace Park) to gather in the waiting room for Eddie Saville (David Giuntoli). The gang was all there except Maggie Bloom (Allison Miller), who was in Oxford. However, within a few episodes, Delilah was gone, and viewers had so many questions. Where is Delilah? When will she return?

Stephanie Szostak as Delilah Dixon on A Million Little Things | Jack Rowand via Getty Images

What night is A Million Little Things on TV?

Although A Million Little Things aired on Thursdays at 10 p.m. for the first half of season 3. However, when the show didnt return on April 8, 2021, fans were baffled. The series moved to Wednesday evenings at 10 p.m. EST beginning with episode 9, which aired on April 7. The remaining nine episodes of A Million Little Things will air on Wednesdays, since the new series, Rebel, took its spot on Thursday nights.

A Million Little Things Season 3  Where did Delilah go?

When A Million Little Things Season 3 began, Delilah not only went to the hospital to visit Eddie, but she was present for the couples vow renewal. In episode 2, viewers could tell something was amiss with Delilahs father.

He thought I was his nurse and not even his favorite one, she said after hanging up with her dad.

Right before A Million Little Things Season 3 Episode 2 ended, Delilah called her dad to ask him to travel to France together. Inspired by her daughter, Sophie (Lizzy Greene), missing her father, Delilah wanted to spend time with her dad before he died. In the next episode, she leaves her two teenagers at home, in the care of Gary Mendez (James Roday Rodriguez).

Hard to argue against the Commonwealth of Gary #AMillionLittleThings pic.twitter.com/p9vQDwbfQp  A Million Little Things (@AMillionABC) April 8, 2021

RELATED: The Real Reason Fans Hate Delilah on A Million Little Things

In A Million Little Things Season 3 Episode 5, Delilah was about to travel home with her father when he broke his hip. She decided to stay in France to give him time to heal. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and countries began closing their borders.

A Million Little Things cast: Is Stephanie Szostak coming back, or is Delilah gone for good?

Actor Szostak explained to viewers exactly why Delilah isnt back on A Million Little Things Season 3 yet in a recent Instagram post.

Some of you have asked, Is Delilah going to be back on A Million Little Things?' Szostak began in a video. Yes, shes going to be back! The reason that I wasnt is because of the pandemic. I wasnt able to go back and forth between where we shoot and where I live and be with my family because there is a quarantine. So, I will be back, though. Thank you for asking and for watching the show.

RELATED: A Million Little Things: 3 Reasons Why Eddie Saville Will Not Die When the Show Returns

According to ABC, Szostak lives outside New York City with her two sons and husband. However, the A Million Little Things cast films the series in Vancouver, Canada. It looks like the series will have her fly back home around the time Szostak can begin filming.

A Million Little Things airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST on ABC.
Alastair Campbell has joined Good Morning Britain as a guest host, though has insisted that he is not replacing Piers Morgan.

Susanna Reids outspoken co-host left the show amid controversy in March after he was criticised for on-air comments about Meghan Markle.

Ofcom received more than 40,000 complaints regarding remarks Morgan made about the Duchess of Sussex following her tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey  including that he didnt believe a word she said about having suicidal thoughts during her time as a senior royal.

Campbell, the former spokesman for the Labour Party, will host the ITV morning show alongside Reid during Mental Health Awareness Week in May.

He tweeted photos of himself in the studio, writing: So weird to be wearing suit and tie. Been in at @GMB checking the presenter chair and seeing if I can cope with the tech! And no I am NOT the new @piersmorgan BUT I will be presenting alongside @susannareid100 May 10-12 thru Mental Health Awareness Week.

GMBs Adil Ray took over to host through April, but Morgan has not been formally replaced.

Earlier this month, ITVs television chief Kevin Lygo said he was surprised that Morgan lasted as long as he did on the show.

In Lygos first comments since Morgan quit, the ITV boss told Deadline: Hes done a good innings for Piers. Im amazed he lasted this long. Trust me, there were some other moments where I thought, Oh, here we go.

He continued: The last time I signed him was about a year-and-half ago, and I remember saying: Well, weve had a great run havent we Piers? I cant believe theres ever going to be a moment where I present you with a carriage clock for long service, so lets just keep it going for as long as we can.

Speaking about Morgans replacement on the show, he added: Piers is a special thing. You cant replace somebody like him. There is nobody like Piers, for good or bad. We have a roster of presenters, including Ben [Shephard], Susanna [Reid], Charlotte [Hawkins], and Kate [Garraway]. Theyre all stepping up and doing a few more days than they would have done Well mix and match until we feel what the right thing is to do. There isnt a single person [who can replace him].
New fund to support regenerative medicine discoveries with high potential impact for patients

TORONTO and MISSISSAUGA, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - New regenerative medicine discoveries, including cell and gene therapies, will never reach patients without access to the funding, expertise and other specialized support that are required to move along the commercialization pathway. To address this need, CCRM, a leader in developing and commercializing regenerative medicine-based technologies and cell and gene therapies, and Amgen, a global leader in the biotechnology industry, are announcing a multi-year fund, for early-stage regenerative medicine-based technologies and therapies to benefit patients and the health-care system. The collaboration is made up of equivalent investments from CCRM and Amgen.

To bridge the gap from bench to bedside, the program will identify, develop and commercialize promising technologies and therapies arising from research conducted in institutions that form CCRM's global network. CCRM and Amgen's contributions will range from financial support to in-kind technical services and expertise.

"CCRM's collaboration with Amgen to create this fund is a perfect example of how public-private partnerships can leverage resources and expertise to support development and commercialization, and change patients' lives," said Michael May, President and CEO, CCRM. "The regenerative medicine research ecosystem across Canada offers a rich discovery pipeline and it is ready for such a program."

"There are few places in the world that have clustered all the necessary resources and talent to drive regenerative medicine from the bench to the bedside. Canada has consistently led the way for decades," said Alan Russell, Vice-President, Research, Amgen Inc. "Amgen is delighted to have the opportunity to partner with CCRM and leverage an extraordinary platform to benefit patients."

To identify opportunities, a Joint Steering Committee, made up of representatives from both CCRM and Amgen, will assess proposals from CCRM's Canadian and international member institutions. Selected projects will possess high scientific merit, be developed by scientists and academics with established credentials and expertise, and demonstrate the greatest potential to have an impact in the industry.

Regenerative medicine, including cell and gene therapy, harnesses the power of (stem) cells, biomaterials, molecules and genetic modification to repair, regenerate or replace diseased cells, tissues and organs. It has the promise of creating revolutionary new treatments for devastating and costly conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

About CCRM

CCRM is a global, public-private partnership headquartered in Canada. It receives funding from the Government of Canada, the Province of Ontario, and leading academic and industry partners. CCRM supports the development of regenerative medicines and associated enabling technologies, with a specific focus on cell and gene therapy. A network of researchers, leading companies, strategic investors and entrepreneurs, CCRM accelerates the translation of scientific discovery into new companies and marketable products for patients, with specialized teams, funding, and infrastructure. CCRM is the commercialization partner of the University of Toronto's Medicine by Design. CCRM is hosted by the University of Toronto. Visit us at ccrm.ca.

About Amgen in Canada

As a leader in innovation, Amgen Canada understands the value of science. With main operations located in Mississauga, Ontario's vibrant biomedical cluster, and its research facility in Burnaby, B.C., Amgen Canada has been an important contributor to advancements in science and innovation in Canada since 1991. The company contributes to the development of new therapies and new uses for existing medicines in partnership with many of Canada's leading healthcare, academic, research, government and patient organizations. To learn more about Amgen Canada, visit www.amgen.ca.

SOURCE Amgen Canada

For further information: CCRM: Stacey Johnson, Director, Communications and Marketing, 647-309-1830, [email protected]; Amgen Canada: Natasha Bond, Head of Corporate Affairs, 905-285-3007, [email protected]
Condemnation from parents, alumni and a national educational organization followed almost immediately after Linfield University fired tenured English professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner in a rare nuclear option without a hearing as the campus grapples with fallout over sexual abuse and harassment allegations against board members and alleged anti-Semitic remarks by the schools president.

One parent of a Linfield graduate said shes changing her will with sincere and deep regret.

I will no longer be bequeathing any sum of money to Linfield University. Due to the recent firing and the attempt at silencing Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner I cannot in good conscience leave money to Linfield, wrote Seattle resident Lise Anderheggen-Leif, whose daughter graduated from the school in 2014.

The chair of the English Department on Wednesday morning stepped aside from that role and from his seat on the universitys faculty leadership council, apparently in protest when the university had no plan for how to cover for Pollack-Pelzners classes and his students grades during finals week.

I have been fielding emails from Daniels students. But because I am no longer chair, I will now be forwarding those inquiries to your office, Professor David Thomas Sumner wrote to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Wednesday morning.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a national campus civil liberties organization that defends the rights of students and faculty across the country, called Pollack-Pelzners termination alarming because the university did not allow a hearing or any due process as set out in its own faculty handbook. It sent a letter to the Linfield president, urging him to rescind the professors firing.

The egregious nature of terminating a faculty critic without process cannot be overstated, nor can the chilling effect on student and faculty expression that will follow Linfields reckless conduct, the groups lawyer, Adam Steinbaugh, wrote.

The private university based in McMinnville fired Pollack-Pelzner on Tuesday for cause, alleging in a statement that he propagated false and defamatory statements, was insubordinate and interfered with the universitys administration of its responsibilities.

Pollack-Pelzner had served as a faculty trustee on Linfields board and publicly complained about the universitys handling of sexual abuse complaints made by students and faculty against other trustees. He also spoke out this month, alleging university President Miles K. Davis made anti-Semitic comments to him while fending off criticism of how the school handled the sexual abuse complaints.

Davis responded by saying Pollack-Pelzner was engaged in a smear campaign against him.

Two other professors subsequently said they remember Davis making inappropriate references to Jews and the Holocausts gas chambers during a psychology faculty department meeting in 2018 when he first became president. Davis said he didnt remember the statements about the Holocaust but apologized if his remarks hurt anyone.

The Linfield University faculty handbook says a professor fired for cause has the right to make a defense before an elected faculty hearing committee and receive a statement of the universitys charges.

But university spokesman Scott Nelson said that doesnt apply to Pollack-Pelzners case because the firing didnt result from concerns about the responsibilities and duties as a professor, such as teaching effectiveness, professional achievement or service, but rather for the stated causes.

Steinbaugh, the attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said Linfields method of skipping out of having any other oversight, before firing Pollack-Pelzner amounts to a big red flag that they dont think their arguments would withstand scrutiny.

I think this is bogus, Steinbaugh said, speaking for the foundation. He does not represent Pollack-Pelzner. Theres no at-will exception for tenured faculty. Its the nuclear option. ... I dont see this sort of dereliction of procedure very often.

Steinbaugh said he hopes Linfields accreditor -- the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities -- takes notice. Their standards say universities are supposed to avoid conflicts of interest, he said.

It is a very obvious conflict of interest to say, Our faculty critic is wrong and therefore defaming us, and therefore, hes fired, he said.

The last time he recalled a university firing a tenured professor was in 2006, when Mount St. Marys University in Maryland abruptly fired two without faculty input -- one who objected to the presidents policies and the other who had been an adviser to the schools student paper. That university ended up reinstating both after the terminations attracted national attention. The president of Mount St. Marys at the time ended up quitting after advocates of academic and journalistic freedom denounced the firings.

The Anti-Defamation League of the Pacific Northwest issued a call for the university president to resign to begin the process of moving forward and healing on campus.

In light of continued media reports of additional antisemitic remarks attributed to you, faculty no votes of confidence and continued lack of accountability on the part of the Universitys leadership, we believe that a change in leadership is in the communitys best interest at this time, league Regional Director Miri Cypers wrote Wednesday.

These posters were found around campus late Tuesday and Wednesday, drawing on the subject line 'Extraordinary step,' that the Linfield University provost used to announce Tuesday's firing of Prof. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.

SCREEN FROZE

Pollack-Pelzner told The Oregonian/OregonLive that he was summoned to a mandatory meeting at 4 p.m. Tuesday with the provost. He was told it had to do with his employment, he said. When no more information was shared with him, he said he wanted to bring a lawyer to the meeting but hadnt yet retained one and asked that it be postponed. About 1 p.m. Tuesday, he received an email from the university human resources director that the meeting was canceled, and hed receive a FedEx package in the mail the next day.

An hour later, he said was in the middle of a work-related Zoom conference when the screen froze and he was suddenly disconnected and his laptop shut down. He tried to restart it but got a message that he no longer had access to it. He attempted to send an email from his personal address to his Linfield email address and got a response telling him that he was no longer employed at the university. That was the first notice he received that he had been fired, he said.

It was devastating. I was in shock. I felt unmoored that the school I devoted myself to for 11 years, that I tried to make safer and more welcoming would fire me without any explanation or process, he said. The truth is speaking up about abuses of power doesnt harm Linfield. Abuses of power harm Linfield, and retaliation against the people who report abuse harm Linfield.

Of course, the real losers in this are the students in my class, he said.

Among other things, Pollack-Pelzner had criticized how the board chair and Davis responded to abuse and harassment complaints, including the actions of former Linfield trustee David Jubb, who has been indicted for allegedly groping four students in 2019 and 2017. Jubb has pleaded not guilty. Two other trustees, including Davis, were accused by another faculty member of inappropriately touching her on her back and shoulders at college functions in 2018 and 2019. Davis and the other trustee denied any wrongdoing, and an outside investigator hired by Linfield found that while the touching had happened, it didnt violate university policy. The faculty passed a no-confidence vote in Davis earlier this month.

Pollack-Pelzners firing immediately caused disarray on campus, leaving students in his two English courses in the lurch, not knowing where or how to turn in their final papers, many of which were due Tuesday.

Linfield University students sending in their final papers to their English professor Tuesday afternoon received this message, "Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is no longer an employee of Linfield University."

About 27 students between Pollack-Pelzners two classes, Shakespeare Tragedies & Tragic Comedies and Sex, Language & Empire - An Introduction to British Literature, 1660 to Present, were stunned to suddenly not be able to access their professors so-called blackboard site and have their emails to his Linfield address bounce back, informing them he was no longer working at the university.

Some students disturbed by the firing scrawled messages in chalk around the campus and some posted printed fliers that read: #NotMyLinfield An Extraordinary Step in the Wrong Direction. The message was a play on the provosts email to staff announcing the firing, which read: Extraordinary Step.

Lainie Sowell, Linfields area director for student success, sent an email to student residence advisers telling them that they couldnt use their position or resources such as paper or crafting materials to make signs or fliers to advocate for what you believe in because theyre student employees paid by the university. Sowell also reminded them that use of sidewalk chalk must be pre-approved and failure to remove chalk would result in a $25 a day fine.

Lainie Sowell, Linfield's area director for student success, cautioned university resident advisors about using residence advisor resources to speak out in the wake of the abrupt firing of an English professor.

Students hung up posters all over campus, and the resident advisers were ordered to go take them down, said professor Rachel Norman, a creative writing instructor and a 2008 Linfield graduate.

The students are distraught, Norman said. I feel so morally and ethically outraged. When I was a student here, there was an openness about diversity of ideas, even if you disagreed on things.

Another parent of a Linfield student said she was outraged that the firing occurred before the end of the semester and at a stressful time for students. Doing this in finals week is unconscionable, with graduation on Sunday and now students cannot contact DPP (Pollack-Pelzner) as they have already dismantled his email, said Stacey M., the parent, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of retribution against her child.

Paige Barton, a Beaverton resident who works in McMinnville, presented a petition Tuesday night to the McMinnville City Council that had been signed by 123 people to speak out against Linfield. She said shes been following the news coverage of the developments that led up to the firing of Pollack-Pelzner.

I perceive a willful ignorance and false narrative from university leadership, and thats painfully obvious to me. Its clear also Linfield students and faculty are suffering in this extremely painful, festering environment. Its also clear that their response to these allegations is an institutional failure of Linfield University, she told the council via Zoom.

Barton said she didnt believe Pollack-Pelzner was speaking out in a smear campaign.

If theres any student in McMinnville who feels like they may be sexually harassed in a college campus by a person in a powerful position, its your responsibility to help end it. Please challenge yourself to consider what Daniel Pollack-Pelzner had to gain from this campaign, she told the council. Please do not allow the university as a powerful institution to damage our community unchecked.

By days end Wednesday, the executive committee of Linfield Universitys board of trustees issued a statement, saying it supported the administrations decision to fire Pollack-Pelzner for cause. During the past year, the Linfield community has been harmed by repeated false and divisive statements. It is time to move forward and focus on the future.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian
New Delhi: The corona epidemic continues to plague the entire country. Meanwhile, there is a huge shortage of oxygen, oxygen cylinders, Remdesivir and corona virus related devices. While the government has laid more emphasis on oxygen production in the last few days, oxygen has been supplied to various states by running oxygen express.

However, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla has said on the situation of corona epidemic that we are working towards achieving more than 500 oxygen production plants from different parts of the world. We are working to acquire 4,000 oxygen concentrations, 10,000 oxygen cylinders from abroad, he further added.

On the other hand, the Foreign Secretary has informed that India generally produces 67,000 doses of Remdesivir daily, but at present we need two to three lakh doses. We have asked our producers to increase capacity, he added. Companies need raw materials. That is where we have the support of the US Government, which has assured to provide raw materials. In addition, the Foreign Secretary informed that he is also working to buy 400,000 vials of Remdesivir from Egypt.

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[April 29, 2021] Vizient Reviews Same Day Discharge, Use of AI in Cardiac Care and Best Practices for Hip Fracture Care in Latest 'Medical Device Tech Watch'

Vizient, Inc. released the latest issue of Medical Device Tech Watch, highlighting new insights for same-day discharge of cardiac patients as well as the potential for leveraging artificial intelligence to help identify patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest. Additionally, among other articles, the report examines a service line approach for how to improve care for patients with hip fractures. The report can be downloaded here: https://info.vizientinc.com/l/73872/2021-04-28/crz32b "Staying abreast of technology advancements, best practices, and updated industry guidelines for optimal patient care in orthopedics and cardiology requires a careful analysis of health care publications, clinical studies, expert insights, data, and metrics," said Bryan Grossman, vice president, Physician Preference Items, Vizient. "This quarter, we have focused our attention on a range of surgical and operational topics and how data and technology can improve both." Featured articles include: "Same day discharge recommended for an increasing number of select interventional cardiology patients:" Average length of stay for interventional cardiology patients continues to decline. Data shows tha for select patients, overnight monitoring can be avoided with no increased mortality, rehospitalization or other complications. With a future that includes more same day discharge for these procedures, a shift in revenue will follow as they transition from inpatient to an ambulatory setting.



"Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to detect patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest:" With more advanced electronic medical records in place and the vast amounts of data that can be generated and analyzed through artificial intelligence, AI could be incorporated into the care continuum. AI can help clinicians identify patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest based on screening protocols that identify low ejection fractions as well as clinical symptoms such as heart failure and electrocardiogram readings. "Applying a service line approach to improve hip fracture care:" More than 300,000 people sustain a hip fracture in the U.S. annually and that number is expected to grow. Research is clear that reducing the wait time from the emergency department to surgery leads to improved outcomes, and a service line approach can help narrow that wait time. The article outlines the four phases of a service line approach and details how to improve the hip fracture system of care from the emergency department to pre-op and surgery to post-discharge care

Vizient Medical Device Tech Watch is a quarterly publication. Previous issues may be accessed here. About Vizient, Inc. Vizient, Inc. provides solutions and services that improve the delivery of high-value care by aligning cost, quality and market performance for more than 50% of the nation's acute care providers, which includes 95% of the nation's academic medical centers, and more than 20% of ambulatory care providers. Vizient provides expertise, analytics and advisory services, as well as a contract portfolio that represents more than $100 billion in annual purchasing volume, to improve patient outcomes and lower costs. In 2021, Vizient acquired Intalere, which expanded its footprint with ambulatory and rural acute care providers. Vizient has earned a World's Most Ethical Company designation from the Ethisphere Institute every year since its inception. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Vizient has offices throughout the United States. Learn more at www.vizientinc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005330/en/

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Ill never forget the time I talked to my baby sister about premarital sex. She was a teenager and I was a college student, and Id been burdened by the need to do my (big) sisterly duty for a while. We were driving to the mall one day and came to a red light that I knew from past experience took a solid five minutes to cycle back around to green. So I open my mouth and tried to share my heart.

I was raised in church and had been active in my youth group before I went off to college. Long before I plunged in with my sister that day (praying the light wouldnt change too soon), Id decided I was going to wait on sex until I was married. I didnt make that decision out of guilt or fear but rather with the hopeful conviction that, in temporarily denying myself some pleasure, I was gaining for myself long-term blessings.

Now, as the mom of one teenager and one young adult, Ive had many more conversations about sex before marriage (none of them at traffic lights). Ive tried to present Gods call to preserve the intimacy of knowing each other for within marriage not as His tight-fisted order against something bad but as His open-handed offer in favor of something good.

Our Christian kids are often told not to have sex before marriage because God says so or because the Bible says so, and it is true that Gods Word on a matterborn out of His goodness, love, and wisdomis all that is required for us to be called to obedience.

But before waves of hormones and attraction and opposing viewpoints from the world and peer pressure and curiosity and natural desires crash in, we as parents do well to equip our kids with a more developed conviction about what, exactly, theyre waiting for when they wait for marriage.

As Ive tried to encourage my children to choose to save sex for marriage, Ive packaged these 5 Scripture-supported gains as worthy gifts.

1. You Gain the Blessing of Obedience

God consistently attaches His favor to following His ways. Go from your country, your people and your fathers household to the land I will show you, He tells Abram. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you (Genesis 12:1-3).

All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God, He tells the nation of Israel. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out (Deuteronomy 28:2,6).

Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching, Jesus tells His disciples. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them (John 14:23).

As parents, we often tell our kids what God says not to do without telling them why. Our children need to see that God establishes limitations not nearly so much to keep them from something as to keep them for somethingnot to deny them a good thing but to preserve them for a better thing.

Too, within Gods restrictions, there is freedom. I think of how we put our babies in play yards. We do this for their protection against harms on the other side of those structured walls. But within those boundaries, they enjoy the freedom of safety, exploration, and enjoyment. And there, they are preserved for future expanded discovery and delight.

2. You Gain the Peace of Protection

Not only does abstinence until marriage protect against physical consequences such as sexually transmitted diseases and premature parenthood, it also provides a safeguard against emotional scarring: the wound of regret, for instance, over having given something precious and valuable to someone who turns out to only be a temporary part of life.

One of the benefits of sexual intimacy is the bond it creates. When this bond is forged prior to marriage through the powerful persuasion of sex, it can create an artificial connection. Choices are made based on heightened, come-and-go emotions rather than deep, long-lasting reasoning. But when this beautiful bond is formed within the sanctity of marriage, it is like gluea very good thing indeed that helps to hold a couple together when forces inside and outside their union try to rip them apart.

3. You Gain the Strength of Self-Control

Self-control is a spiritual muscle, and like other muscles, it has to be used, worked, and developed in order to have any power. But when it is used, worked, and developed, it becomes strong.

Any married couple will tell you that self-control is a muscle they have to use often in all aspects of day-in, day-out life together. Husbands and wives cannot always say what they want to say. They cannot always do what they want to do. They cannot always dish out what they feel justified in letting loose. If self-control is built up in the waiting for sex before marriage, so much the better.

But self-control is not its own end; it is a means to an endthe end of love. Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love (2 Peter 1:5-7).

Several elements in this equation that start with faith and adds up to love are mirrored in James linear path from trials to perfection. Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds, he says (James 1:2)and he doesnt list waiting for sex as an exemption from the many kinds. From there, he continues, you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance (James 1:3).

When a couple is the trial of waiting for sex until marriage, they may not be able to fully see what good that testing will bring them, but they can have faiththe assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1 ESV)that it will bring them good.

Finally, James counsels, let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1:4). What couple doesnt want their marriage, as much as possible, to not lack anything?

4. You Gain Intimacy without History

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh (Genesis 2:24 NRS). One flesh is as close as two people can get. The intimacy sex creates is not only physical but also spiritual, mental, emotional, and relational. This is no surprise to God, who created this expression of marital love on purpose for a good purpose.

When we enter into a relationship with another person, we bring our historiesour past storieswith us. In marriage, when sex is saved for just that unique, one-to-one relationship, the bond of intimacy is not weakened by former experiences, expectations, or comparisons.

A husband and wife can turn to a brand-new clean page in their lifes storywithout any tracings from the past on itand start to write a new chapter together.

5. You Gain a Truly One-of-a-Kind Wedding Gift

Saving sex for marriage allows couples to give each a gift like no other. It grants them the sacred joy of gifting each other with a piece of themselves they have never given to anyone else. It is a rare, custom gift that, when preserved, demonstrates not only how much the giver values the recipient but also how much the giver values themselves.

Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure (Hebrews 13: 4). To honor someone or something is to show reverence and respect for them, to give them the best we have to offer, even ifespecially ifit costs us something to give. Protecting sexual purity for presentation to a mate in marriage may be expensive. It may cost us our temporary pleasure, our reputation in the eyes of those who do not understand our convictions, or our personal preferences.

But when we commit to paying this price, we buy for ourselves a treasure that is not only for one wedding night but for all the nights of a marriage.

In all of this, God isalwaysGod of redemption and grace. Unmarried couples who have not waited for marriage can turn and start to walk a new way toward many of these gains. Married couples who did not wait can humbly approach the throne of grace with confidence and, through confession, begin a new season in their life together. The thief on the cross (Luke 23:39-43) is proof that, up until the moment we draw our last earthly breath, it is never too late to reverently acknowledge the righteousness of Gods ways.

One of my favorite quotes is from the Caroline Ingalls character in the Little House on the Prairie books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder: theres no great loss without some small gain. In the case of choosing to save Gods gift of sexual intimacy for within the covenant of marriage, though, I think it is beautifully fitting to say there is no small loss without many, greater gains.

Photo Credit: GettyImages/Hiraman
The Boston Red Sox are for real.

That much is obvious, after their 1-0 win on Wednesday at Citi Field to sweep a two-game series from the New York Mets.

The Red Sox sit at 16-9, good for a three-game lead in the American League East and the second-best record in the American League (Kansas City Royals: 15-8).

Introducing Yankees Insider: Get exclusive news, behind-the-scenes observations and the ability to text message directly with beat writers

And Boston did it the hard way Wednesday, scratching out one run against Mets ace Jacob deGrom. That was good enough for the Red Sox, with another stellar start from Philadelphia Phillies castoff Nick Pivetta, who threw five shutout innings, improving to 3-0 with a 2.81 ERA.

From there, the Boston bullpen did its job, led by former New York Yankees prospect Garrett Whitlock. The 24-year-old right-hander threw two shutout innings, striking out four. In six relief appearances over 13.1 innings this year, Whitlock hasnt given up a run while striking out 18.

From there, former Yankees reliever Adam Ottavino, traded to Boston in January, took over, throwing a scoreless inning to set up Matt Barnes for the save. And Barnes slammed the door shut on the Mets in the ninth inning, striking out the side.

Boston scratched out its only run in the second inning, when catcher Christian Vazquez doubled to drive in shortstop Xander Bogaerts.

Vazquez drove a shoulder-high 0-2 heater clocked at 100 mph the other way into the right-center gap. I was looking fastball. I was looking up in the zone, Vazquez said. I hit it good.

DeGrom left after six innings, giving up just the one run while striking out nine. Lack of support has been a troubling theme throughout his stellar career, leaving him with 72 wins in eight seasons despite the lowest ERA in franchise history.

Hes allowed two earned runs all year  and lost two games.

I try not to think too much about it, deGrom said. Im more disappointed that I wasnt able to make pitches there in the second inning. I was trying to battle through but just left some balls over the middle of the plate that got hit. So, that comes down to me controlling what I can control and I didnt do a good job of that in that second inning.

DeGroms 0.51 ERA is the best for a Mets pitcher through five starts, and his 59 strikeouts match Nolan Ryan for the most in major league history over the first five outings of a season.

Ryan racked up his Ks in 1978 with the Angels.

Kind of displeased with my mechanics, said deGrom, who threw 93 pitches. Everything seemed to be flat. Just wasnt able to make pitches when I needed to.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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OXFORD, United Kingdom and MARLBOROUGH, Mass., April 29, 2021(NYSE: PKI), today announced that its T-SPOTDiscovery SARS-CoV-2 kit will be used for T cell testing in the DIRECT study. Oxford Immunotec is collaborating with researchers at the University of Leicester on DIRECT (Determining the Immune Response in Ethnic minority healthcare workers to COVID-19 infection). The study, funded through the National Core Studies group, is actively recruiting healthcare workers in Leicester for detailed analysis of their immune response to infection and / or vaccination (including T cells). This analysis, together with information collected through online questionnaires, will enable researchers to understand whether there are differences in the immune response in different ethnic minority groups, including whether there are differences in the magnitude and duration of this response.



The custom version of the T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 kitand antibodies waning over time. The T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 test has also demonstrated in previous studiesthat a high SARS-CoV-2 specific T cell response may be associated with protection from infection.

Dr. Peter Wrighton-Smith, CEO of Oxford Immunotec said, "We are proud to be partnering with the University of Leicester on this critical clinical trial which will help drive the understanding of the effects of COVID-19 across different ethnic groups."

Dr Manish Pareek, Principal Investigator of DIRECT said, "The immune system is critical to the outcome of COVID-19, including protection against future infection. This study, utilizing a wide range of immune measures including the T-SPOT technology developed by Oxford Immunotec, will allow us to determine differences in the immune response to COVID-19 amongst different ethnic minority groups, which is vital if we are to understand why individuals from ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by COVID-19."

Find out more about DIRECT at https://direct.uk-reach.org/

For further information visit: www.tspotdiscovery.com

T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 is for research use only, not for use in diagnostic procedures.

About Oxford Immunotec

Oxford Immunotec is a global, high-growth diagnostics company and part of the PerkinElmer group. We bring energy and invention to a world in need of diagnostic truth. We are uniquely placed as the only company in the world offering regulated ELISPOT assays for T cell measurement, with approval around the globe. Our leading product, the T-SPOT.TB test, is used for diagnosing infection with Tuberculosis, the world's largest cause of death from infectious disease. The Company is an experienced manufacturer of IVD tests, operating under a fully audited Quality Management System, ensuring rigorous batch control. The company has manufactured in excess of 20 million clinical T cell tests for TB infection. The T-SPOT.TB test has been approved for sale in over 50 countries, including the United States). The Company is headquartered near Oxford, U.K. and in Marlborough, MA. Additional information can be found at www.oxfordimmunotec.com.

About PerkinElmer

PerkinElmer enables scientists, researchers and clinicians to address their most critical challenges across science and healthcare. With a mission focused on innovating for a healthier world, we deliver unique solutions to serve the diagnostics, life sciences, food and applied markets. We strategically partner with customers to enable earlier and more accurate insights supported by deep market knowledge and technical expertise. Our dedicated team of about 14,000 employees worldwide is passionate about helping customers work to create healthier families, improve the quality of life, and sustain the wellbeing and longevity of people globally. The Company reported revenue of approximately $3.8 billion in 2020, serves customers in 190 countries, and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Additional information is available through 1-877-PKI-NYSE, or at www.perkinelmer.com.

For Media Inquiries:

US: Mary Conway

MKC Strategies, LLC

Tel: +1

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INAI to Challenge Biometric Registry in Supreme Court



Under the law, telecoms companies would be required to collect fingerprint and iris scans from customers for inclusion in a database managed by Mexico's telecommunications regulator. Mexico City - Mexico's data protection body plans to challenge a controversial new law that requires telecoms companies to gather user biometric data, saying it will argue before the Supreme Court that it violates privacy rights.



The bill, which was approved by the lower house in February and by the senate in April, is aimed at reducing crimes like extortion and kidnapping by making it more difficult for criminals to remain anonymous when purchasing new mobile phones.



The action will be brought by the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI).



"The prosecution of crimes is an issue that should concern us all and the state is responsible for ensuring the safety of the inhabitants, but this cannot and should not be a sufficient reason to restrict freedoms and human rights," said Adrian Alcala, an INAI commissioner.



Under the law, telecoms companies are required to collect fingerprint and iris scans from customers for inclusion in a database managed by Mexico's telecommunications regulator. The information would be available for use in criminal investigations.



"Although criminals and terrorists can use prepaid SIM cards to help stay anonymous and avoid easy detection, they can also use internet platforms and other ways to make calls for criminal purposes. There is no evidence to indicate that mandating the registration of prepaid SIM users leads to a reduction in criminal activities," Lucas Gallitto, the Global System for Mobile Communications' (GSMA) public policy director for Latin America, said last week.



"It is also worth noticing that prepaid SIM cards are generally the most affordable option on the market, and therefore preferred by low-income populations. The registry could negatively affect the digital inclusion of these segments," Gallitto added.



On April 21, 2021, Judge Juan Pablo Gomez Fierro



The judge was quoted by local media as saying the registry does not "positively influence" the state's public security activities.



Sources: Reuters - Mexico's data protection body plans to challenge a controversial new law that requires telecoms companies to gather user biometric data, saying it will argue before the Supreme Court that it violates privacy rights.The bill, which was approved by the lower house in February and by the senate in April, is aimed at reducing crimes like extortion and kidnapping by making it more difficult for criminals to remain anonymous when purchasing new mobile phones.The action will be brought by the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI)."The prosecution of crimes is an issue that should concern us all and the state is responsible for ensuring the safety of the inhabitants, but this cannot and should not be a sufficient reason to restrict freedoms and human rights," said Adrian Alcala, an INAI commissioner.Under the law, telecoms companies are required to collect fingerprint and iris scans from customers for inclusion in a database managed by Mexico's telecommunications regulator. The information would be available for use in criminal investigations."Although criminals and terrorists can use prepaid SIM cards to help stay anonymous and avoid easy detection, they can also use internet platforms and other ways to make calls for criminal purposes. There is no evidence to indicate that mandating the registration of prepaid SIM users leads to a reduction in criminal activities," Lucas Gallitto, the Global System for Mobile Communications' (GSMA) public policy director for Latin America, said last week."It is also worth noticing that prepaid SIM cards are generally the most affordable option on the market, and therefore preferred by low-income populations. The registry could negatively affect the digital inclusion of these segments," Gallitto added.On April 21, 2021, Judge Juan Pablo Gomez Fierro blocked the progression of the bill - the first legal hurdle faced by the registry - and that provisional measure could lead to a definitive suspension.The judge was quoted by local media as saying the registry does not "positively influence" the state's public security activities.Sources: Capacity Media



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New Delhi: Remembering Irrfan, on his first death anniversary sure makes one teary-eyed. But the show must go on, as they say, and today let's celebrate the talent of this great legend, who won a million hearts in his lifetime and continues to inspire a generation with his sheer cinematic brilliance.

Indian cinema lost one of its finest performers on April 29, 2020. Irrfan Khan breathed his last on Wednesday morning after he has rushed to Mumbai's Kokilaben hospital a day before due to a colon infection. He battled a rare form of cancer - Neuroendocrine Tumour for two years and even went to the United Kingdom for its treatment.

The actor par excellence not only is hailed as a brilliant actor on the Indian soil but displayed his acting chops in Hollywood as well. He worked on several global projects and became a known face in the West, representing the country with pride.

IRRFAN'S HOLLYWOOD CONNECTION:

In 2001, he was seen in 'The Warrior', then came Mira Nair's critically-acclaimed 'The Namesake' in 2006. It was written by Sooni Taraporevala and was based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel 'The Namesake. Starring Tabu, Irrfan Khan, Kal Penn and Sahira Nair, the film received all the love from the fans and the audience.

Irrfan was also seen in the 2007 release 'The Darjeeling Limited'.

In 2008, he was seen in the Academy Award-winning film 'Slumdog Millionaire', where he played a police inspector. In 2009, he went to star in 'New York, I Love You'.

It was in 2012 Hollywood biggie 'The Amazing Spider-Man' that Irrfan's presence in global cinema was witnessed at the world stage. The same year Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi' released and yet again it was evident that Irrfan has managed to explore his horizons out in the West too.

In 2015 came yet another Hollywood blockbuster 'Jurassic World', followed by Tom Hanks starrer 'Inferno' in 2016 which gave an immense boost to Irrfan's already shining career.

Irrfan was seen as Simon Masrani, CEO of the Masrani Corporation and the owner of Jurassic World. And in 'Inferno', he played Harry 'The Provost' Sims, head of The Consortium, helping Zobrist in his mission.

In fact, at Oscars 2021, Irrfan was remembered by the 93rd Academy Awards and a special tribute was paid to him 'In Memoriam' section.

With all this and much more, a talent par excellence - Irrfan, you will be missed!

We still miss you, Irrfan!
When I got the call and I heard the word two, it sounded so different from one  I had to think about it for a second, and then my smile was so big it hurt my face, Rouben said. This has always been the goal  to bring beer and food together and to be recognized by Michelin.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  The United Arab Emirates expressed intention to donate half a million Sinopharm vaccine doses to the country, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said Thursday.

I believe yung UAE, they have the intention of donating also yung 500,000 na Sinopharm, Galvez said in a Palace briefing, but gave no details.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration said the state-owned Chinese firm has yet to submit an application for emergency use.

Mayroon pong sumulat sa amin na gustong mag-apply, pero nung hiningan po namin ng requirements, hindi pa po nila binibigay, and we're still waiting for that, FDA Director General Eric Domingo told President Rodrigo Duterte in a televised meeting on April 13.

[Translation: Someone wrote to us seeking to apply for emergency use, but when we asked for requirements, they have not yet submitted those to us, and were still waiting for that.]

A company must first receive emergency use authorization from the FDA before its vaccine can be administered in the country. However, since last year, there have been reports on the smuggling and illegal administration of Sinopharm.

This was confirmed by President Rodrigo Duterte himself last December, when he bared several troops had already been inoculated with the unregistered vaccine. The FDA, the Bureau of Customs, and the National Bureau of Investigation, launched separate probes into the matter.

Two months after, the FDA granted the Presidential Security Group a compassionate special permit to access 10,000 doses of Sinopharm -- a move criticized by medical frontliners. The said permit is not retroactive, however, which means the investigation on the illegal use is ongoing.

Special envoy to China and columnist Ramon Tulfo also admitted to having received the vaccine last year and disclosed that "thousands" of government officials were inoculated by his vaccine source. Besides PSG members, Tulfo claimed others included Cabinet secretaries.
A replacement for the Swinger 340 performance model, the Demon 340 well cover today is properly collectible for three reasons. First of all, its a Mr. Norm GSS sold through Chicagos legendary Grand Spaulding Dodge.Chassis number 222933 also happens to be a low-mileage car that has benefited from a ground-up restoration. Currently showing just 18,509 miles (29,787 kilometers) on the clock, the A-body coupe is believed to be the only blue-black-and-plaid 1971 Dart Demon 340 GSS ever produced.Offered by RK Motors Charlotte of North Carolina, the period-correct survivor packs the original LA V8, three-speed manual transmission, 8.75-inch rear axle with 3.91 gears, 10-inch drum brakes all around, and heavy-duty suspension. It also comes with a plaid-and-black interior with cloth and vinyl appointments, 14-inch Rallye wheels, and a vinyl roof over the original metal. Listed at $69,900, the compact-sized muscle car is thoroughly documented by restoration photos, the broadcast sheet, dealer order form, shipping notice, and bill of sale.Cooler than B-bodies and more accessible than E-bodies, the Demon in the following video is a show-stopping brawler that claimed First Place A-body at the 2004 All-Chrysler Nationals. Refinished in the correct Bright Blue Metallic two-stage paint, this HEMI-engined machine packs three Holley two-barrel carbs, a Ford-style air cleaner, and an Edelbrock intake.Finished in the correct shade of orange, the 5.6-liter V8 develops 300 horsepower and 340 pound-feet (461 Nm) of torque at the very least. Inspired by the 340 Six Pack of the Challenger T/A and AAR Cuda, this engine was underrated because thats what Mopar did back in those days.Now riding on BFGoodrich Radial T/A rubber, this ultra-rare piece of Mopar history is certain to bring a smile to your face whenever you hop into the drivers seat. You can also expect the value to go up in the long run because any Mopar fan knows what Mr. Norm means for the community.
With COVID-19 vaccines more readily available than ever, there remains vaccine hesitancy in diverse communities across metropolitan Houston and beyond. Why such vaccine hesitancy exists is now the business of the University of Houston's HEALTH Center for Addictions Research and Cancer Prevention in partnership with the Houston Health Department.

With a grant of $711,773 from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the UH center seeks to discover what's driving these disparities and to develop a culturally responsive vaccine education program to increase the reach, access and uptake of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in underserved minority communities.

Black adults in Texas represent 13% of the population and more than 18% of the health care workforce, but only about 7% of vaccine recipients. These trends persist in metropolitan Houston, where minorities make up more than 70% of the population.

The proposed research recognizes that systemic racism is real, medical mistrust by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities is earned, and the best way to accelerate scientific breakthroughs regarding SARS-CoV-2 vaccine uptake in BIPOC communities is to include them in the research process." Ezemenari Obasi, Director of UH's HEALTH (Helping Everyone Achieve a Lifetime of Health) Research Institute (HRI)

"The omission of some population segments as investigators and participants in research significantly contributes to the generation and maintenance of health disparities, because less is known about factors affecting health among underrepresented groups and how to address them in culturally-informed ways," he added.

Obasi is forming ethnically diverse focus groups on the Black and Latinx experience to include community members, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, and health care providers who will share their stories and insights about this public health crisis. The results will inspire tailored messaging to address specific needs and concerns and the creation of a culturally responsive vaccine education program.

"We really want to get 'under the hood' and allow the community to voice why they're hesitant rather than have a label slapped onto them," said Obasi, who thinks the reasons will not be as obvious as might currently be believed.

"Historically there's been an oversimplification of why people might not want to be vaccinated and many point to historical medical mistreatment like the Tuskegee experiment. We want to uncover whether it's more nuanced than that and understand the role that recent mixed messaging from politicians has contributed to hesitancy," said Obasi.

With a clear understanding of the issues, prevention and intervention methods will be created.
Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Thursday said that first consignment of oxygen concentrators have arrived from Germany on an Air India flight.

An oxygen concentrators, is a medical device that concentrates oxygen from ambient air.



In a tweet, the minister on Thursday said: "First consignment of Oxygen concentrators from Germany arrives in Delhi on @airindiain Flight AI120. More to follow.a



"Every stakeholder of India's civil aviation sector is making a meaningful contribution in our unrelenting fight against COVID."



Besides, Air India, SpiceXpress, the air cargo arm of SpiceJet, on Wednesday, airlifted 1,000 oxygen concentrators from Hong Kong to Delhi.





In the last two weeks, more than 2,000 oxygen concentrators have been airlifted by SpiceJet for SpiceHealth.



Lately, India is reporting new record daily increases in coronavirus infections, prompting new lockdowns and restrictive measures to curb the spread of the pandemic.



The exponential rise has lifted the demand for these medical equipments which are used to provide oxygen to Covid-19 patients especially as the country faces a supply crunch in the availability of medical oxygen.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 02:36:44|Editor: huaxia

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People walk on the street in Marrakech, Morocco, April 29, 2021. Morocco's COVID-19 tally rose to 510,465 on Wednesday as 493 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours. The death toll rose to 9,015 with 10 new fatalities during the last 24 hours, while 360 people are in intensive care units, according to a statement by the Ministry of Health. (Photo by Chadi/Xinhua)

RABAT, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Morocco's COVID-19 tally rose to 510,465 on Wednesday as 493 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours.

The death toll rose to 9,015 with 10 new fatalities during the last 24 hours, while 360 people are in intensive care units, according to a statement by the Ministry of Health.

The total number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Morocco increased to 496,583 after 552 new ones were added, the statement said.

The COVID-19 fatality rate in Morocco stands at 1.8 percent while the recovery rate is 97.3 percent.

Meanwhile, 4,914,145 people have received so far the first vaccine shot against COVID-19 in the country, and 4,245,154 people have received the second dose.

The North African country launched a nationwide vaccination campaign on Jan. 28 after the arrival of the first shipment of China's Sinopharm vaccines. Enditem
Home cooks are struggling to spot the difference between three trendy cast iron pots, with prices ranging from $24 to $550.

One woman, from Melbourne, asked fellow shoppers whether there was a difference between cheap and expensive Dutch and French oven pots.

She shared a picture on social media showing three casserole pots that look almost identical - but each come with very different price tags.

Spotlight's cast iron pot was on sale for $24, a version from Harris Scarfe cost $59.97, while the luxury Le Creuset casserole retailed at an eye-watering $550.

Home cooks are struggling to spot the difference between three trendy cast iron pots, with prices ranging from $24 to $550.

The difference between cheap and expensive cast iron pots Cast iron pots from cheap and expensive brands come with a huge price difference - but what's the difference? Australian consumer experts CHOICE found the enamel lining inside of the cheaper pots 'significantly discoloured over time'. 'I have noticed that after a year they did lose the smooth interior coating which helps to prevent sticking of food,' kitchen expert Fiona Mair said. In contrast, a high-end Dutch oven can last you 20 years or more before it shows signs of wear and tear, even becoming a family heirloom. Le Creuset usually comes with lifetime guarantees, so you can always replace if you have issues. Advertisement

Many explained the differences between the trio, with one saying: 'It's the lids. The better the top, the more you pay.'

Another shopper said she owns a Chasseur pot, which cost between $259 and $429, and a cheap model from Target.

'Both are good but the main differences I find with the Target one is the lid doesn't seal as well so it's not as good for slow cooking,' she explained.

One woman - who owned 'many brands of cast iron pots' - explained why 'you get what you pay for'.

'I have bought so many brands of cast iron pots. I have used my Le Creuset for more than 10 years and no problems at all. It may seem expensive but they are fantastic quality. The cheaper brands would begin cracking after a few years,' she said.

Another woman said: 'There's definitely a difference. A good one will be able to be passed down for generations. Having said that, I've never been able to afford the good ones and I have the Aldi version and it's amazing.'

The three casserole pots look almost identical - but each come with very different price tags. Spotlight's cast iron pot was on sale for $24, a version from Harris Scarfe cost $59.97, while the luxury Le Creuset casserole retailed at an eye-watering $550

While one added: 'I have Aldi, Baccarat and Le Creuset. The Aldi worked okay but the interior stained quickly. I'd say there is less difference between the other two but the super expensive ones give you bragging rights more than anything.'

Those who have been cooking with the cheaper pots claimed they have worked just as well as the expensive brands.

'I have a small vintage one from my grandmother and a larger one from Aldi. Both are amazing and work the same,' one woman said.

A photography director - who owns almost 30 cast iron pieces - told Chicago Tribune the difference between cheap and expensive models is the finish.

The cheaper pots typically have a 'rough, sandpapery surface', while the high-end brands produce 'glossy, smooth-polished' products.

'Cheaper brands have a rougher finish because they skip a step in the traditional manufacturing of cast iron cookware: the time-consuming grinding process that produces the ideal polish,' the director said.

Earlier this year, consumer experts from CHOICE praised a $29 cast iron casserole pot from Kmart (left) that rivals high-end French brand Le Creuset (right) costing upwards of $529

One home cook who owned a Le Creuset pot was stunned after she made a 'fluffy and crusty' sourdough in a $29 casserole pot from Kmart (pictured)

What makes Kmart's $29 cast iron casserole pot special? With a $29 price tag, Kmart's cast iron casserole pot can be cooked on all types of heat sources just like world-famous brand Le Creuset. The budget buy has an 'exceptional heat retention' that allows slow cooking and keeping foods moist and tender. Other features include an enamel interior, easy cleaning and it's safe to use in ovens, and all types of cooktops. Advertisement

Earlier this year, Australian consumer experts from CHOICE praised a $29 cast iron casserole pot from Kmart that rivals Le Creuset's versions costing up to $529.

Despite a huge $500 price difference, the budget buy performed 'comparatively well' when the experts put market-leading cast iron pots to the test.

'Kmart's cast iron casserole pot was up there with big-name brands such as Le Creuset, Chasseur and Staub when we tested casserole pots and Dutch ovens,' the experts claimed.

The cheaper version scored a stellar 95 per cent in the bolognese sauce test.

'We use this to assess the Dutch oven's ability to slow cook while maintaining low temperature for a long period of time and its ability to brown meat evenly,' they said.

Choice's kitchen expert Fiona Mair offered her review after giving her Kmart Dutch oven a 'good workout' over the past five years.

'I have noticed that after a year [it] did lose the smooth interior coating which helps to prevent sticking of food such as rice or pasta. If I'm cooking a soup or casserole I have to stir it constantly, even on a simmer, to ensure it doesn't stick,' she explained.

Fiona said over time, the staining becomes more obvious, making it trickier to clean.

But despite the downside, she said the budget pots are cheap enough to replace every few years - and they are recyclable.
When employees leave the company, organizations must determine how to deal with departing users accounts to provide protection while limiting company liability.

Messaging Architects, an eMazzanti Technologies Company and email migration expert explains the benefits of employee offboarding and email retention solutions in a new article. The informative article encourages organizations to first define a retention policy.

The author then reviews Microsoft 365 off-boarding and email retention solutions and how they apply in various scenarios. He concludes by exploring practical third-party solutions such as external archives.

When employees leave the company, organizations must determine how to deal with departing users accounts to provide protection while limiting company liability, stated Greg Smith, Vice President of Services Delivery at Messaging Architects.

Below are a few excerpts from the article, Implement Employee Off-Boarding and Email Retention Solutions to Protect Your Organization.

Start by Defining a Retention Policy

A departing employee leaves behind a digital footprint, including email accounts and other data. Organizations need the ability to review and keep relevant content from ex-employees. At the same time, they need to balance information access with data privacy law requirements and potential eDiscovery needs.

Microsoft 365 Off-Boarding and Email Retention Solutions

Microsoft 365 offers several solutions for determining email retention for departing employees. For instance, the organization may choose to retain the mailbox for the ex-employee and grant delegate access to another employee, such as a manager. This delivers a quick and easy solution. However, the organization will still have to pay for the user license.

Alternatively, the email administrator can easily convert the ex-employee mailbox to a shared mailbox. This provides access to the data without the expense of maintaining a licensed account.

Third-Party Solutions

In some cases, organizations may find it more practical to look at third-party solutions, such as external archives. These solutions preserve data for eDiscovery while making that data also available for end users to review, albeit in a more restrictive manner. This option offers several key benefits.

Email and Compliance Experts

The email migration experts at Messaging Architects bring deep experience in both Microsoft 365 and third-party archiving solutions, as well as data compliance. Expert consultants help business leaders determine and implement the right off-boarding and email retention solution for their business.

Have you read?

Understanding Microsoft 365 Mailboxes Improves Efficiency and Saves Money

GroupWise Migration Tool and Proven Expertise Deliver Painless Email Migration

About Messaging Architects

Messaging Architects specializes in effectively managing and securing an organizations most precious asset, its information. With over 20 years of information management and technology consulting experience, the Messaging Architects team has provided corporations, educational intuitions, health care facilities and nonprofits with methodologies, procedures, and technology to keep their data organized, compliant and secure.

About eMazzanti Technologies

eMazzantis team of trained, certified IT experts rapidly deliver increased revenue growth, data security and productivity for clients ranging from law firms to high-end global retailers, expertly providing advanced retail and payment technology, digital marketing services, cloud and mobile solutions, multi-site implementations, 247 outsourced network management, remote monitoring and support.

eMazzanti has made the Inc. 5000 list 9X, is a 4X Microsoft Partner of the Year, the #1 ranked NYC area MSP, NJ Business of the Year and 5X WatchGuard Partner of the Year! Contact: 1-866-362-9926, info@emazzanti.net or http://www.emazzanti.net Twitter: @emazzanti Facebook: Facebook.com/emazzantitechnologies.


A new malware believed to have been developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was spotted from "a collection of malware samples" studied since February 2019.

Kaspersky, the cybersecurity firm that discovered the malware, said that it shared similarities with past CIA malware prompting them to track its activity and gave it the codename "Purple Lambert."

CIA's 'Purple Lambert' Spotted: What Can the Malware Do?

Kaspersky published an APT Trends report on Apr. 27, which details the cybersecurity firm's observations on activities in Q1 2021.

According to the report, the malware that Kaspersky named the Purple Lambert contains a certain network module that passively listens to network traffic and searches for a "magic packet."

The CIA's newly discovered malware can provide the agency with basic information about the system it had infected and can execute a payload it had received.

Kaspersky believes that the malware was compiled and deployed as early as 2014, and may have been continuously deployed until 2015.

The malware's functionality resembles that of a previous malware that was linked to a CIA document exposed in 2017.

Also Read: WikiLeaks Claims CIA Can Kill People By Hacking Cars: The Dangers Of Modern Auto Tech

Longhorn: CIA's Cyber-Espionage Tool

After Wikileaks exposed the CIA's cyber-hacking capabilities, Symantec published a blog on Apr. 2017 about the existence of Longhorn, the same malware Kaspersky called the Lambert family.

The report said that Longhorn uses a range of back door Trojans and zero-day vulnerabilities to infiltrate governments and internationally operating organizations, including natural resources, financial, telecoms, and energy sector.

Active since 2011, Longhorn was first detected by Symantec in 2014 after the malware used a zero-day exploit (CVE-2014-4148) attached to a Microsoft Office document intended to infect a CIA target.

The CVE-2014-4148 exploited Microsoft Windows TrueType Font (TTF) processing subsystem vulnerability to embed and deliver to the intended target.

Since TTFs are processed in kernel mode rather than an executable file, it gives the attacker unrestricted access to the infected system.

This is what made experts believe that Longhorn can spy on organizations or individuals from any internet-connected device.

Symantec has also found evidence that Longhorn had successfully infected 40 targets across 16 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

CIA's Longhorn's Alleged Recent Cyberhacking Activity

Kaspersky reported having identified a malicious library in Mar. 2018 while analyzing another incident involving a suspected keylogger.

The malicious loader, which the Kaspersky named "Slingshot," can interact with a virtual file system and replaces the infected's legitimate Windows library 'scesrv.dll' with a malicious one, giving the attacker SYSTEM privileges.

Fast-forward on Mar. 2020, a Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 revealed that it had caught cyberattacks perpetrated by the CIA hacking group that lasted for eleven years.

The report claims that the CIA targeted several industry sectors including the petroleum industry, scientific research institutions, aviation organizations, and government agencies.

Qihoo 360 said that the malware discovered could be traced to the same malware tool WikiLeaks exposed in 2017.

Related Article: WikiLeaks Exposes CIA Tools Targeting MacBooks And iPhones: Here's What They Do

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Leigh Mercer

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29) -- Former San Juan City mayor Guia Gomez will be hospitalized again due to COVID-19 infection and pneumonia, according to her son former senator JV Ejercito.

"Mom will be admitted again in the hospital today after waiting a week for a room. She was confined already last December after testing positive. Now she again will be back in the hospital due to pneumonia and tested positive," Ejercito said on Twitter. "Initial treatments done at home. Prayers requested."

Gomez was again infected with COVID-19 last April 23. She was first hospitalized in December when she first tested positive for the coronavirus.

Ejercito's father, former president Joseph Estrada, also battled COVID-19 recently. He was discharged from the hospital last April 26.
Scientists in China have developed a small, flexible device that can convert heat emitted from human skin to electrical power. In their research, presented April 29 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the team showed that the device could power an LED light in real time when worn on a wristband. The findings suggest that body temperature could someday power wearable electronics such as fitness trackers.

The device is a thermoelectric generator (TEG) that uses temperature gradients to generate power. In this design, researchers use the difference between the warmer body temperature and the relatively cooler ambient environment to generate power.

"This is a field with great potential," says corresponding author Qian Zhang of Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. "TEGs can recover energy that's lost as waste heat and thus improve the rate of power utilization."

Unlike traditional generators that use the energy of motion to produce power, thermoelectric generators have no moving parts, making them essentially maintenance free. These generators are installed on machines located in remote areas and on board space probes to supply energy.

Zhang and her colleagues have been working on designing thermoelectric generators for years. With wearable devices becoming increasingly popular in recent years, the team wanted to explore whether these reliable generators could replace traditional battery in these devices, including fitness trackers, smart watches, and biosensors.

"Don't underestimate the temperature differences between our body and the environment--it's small, but our experiment shows it can still generate power," she says.

Conventional TEGs are usually rigid and can only withstand fewer than 200 instances of bending. Although the flexible kinds can meet the bending requirement, their performance tends to be inadequate. To overcome this limitation and make the device more adaptable to wearables, researchers attached the core electrical components to a stretchable and more adhesive polyurethane material. Tests showed that the device survived at least 10,000 instances of repeated bending without significant changes in performance.

In addition, commercially available TEGs rely heavily on rare metal bismuth that does not naturally occur in large quantities. The new design partially replaced it with a magnesium-based material, which can substantially lower the costs in large-scale production.

Researchers designed a prototype of a self-powered electronic system. They connected an LED to a TEG band measuring 4.5 in long and 1.1 in wide. Then, the team wrapped the TEG band around the wrist of someone whose body temperature measured at 92.9?F in ambient environmental conditions. With a temperature difference, the generator harvested heat given off from the skin and successfully lit up the LED.

"Our prototype already has good performance if it's introduced to the market," says corresponding author Feng Cao of Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. He adds that with the proper voltage converter, the system can power electronics such as smart watches and pulse sensors.

Looking forward, the team plans to further improve the design so the device can absorb heat more efficiently.

"There's an increasing demand for greener energy, and TEGs fit right in, for they can turn wasted heat into power," Cao says. "While, for example, solar energy can only be generated when there's sun, TEGs can produce power in many scenarios--as long as there's a temperature difference."

###

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China, the Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Guangdong Province of China, Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Plan, Open Fund of Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Energy Storage, and the Natural Scientific Research Innovation Foundation in Harbin Institute of Technology.

Cell Reports Physical Science, Liu et al.: "Efficient Molecular Encoding in Multifunctional Self-Immolative Urethanes" https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(21)00102-8
WESTPORT  The Westport Weston Health District has resumed its Johnson & Johnson clinics after the federal pause.

State officials announced on Saturday that clinics could offer the one-shot vaccine again following a recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine had been paused so officials could look into reports of several women developing blood clots after receiving it.

The FDA has issued revised fact sheets for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine now warning of the risk of blood clots with symptoms to watch for.

When you balance it all out, its still a safe vaccine and its an option, said Mark Cooper, the health director for the district which serves Westport, Weston and Easton.

The Westport Weston Health District currently offers Moderna or Johnson & Johnson at specific clinics.

About 300 people had originally signed up for a scheduled Monday clinic where the J&J vaccine would be given, but about half decided they no longer wanted that option and rescheduled for a Moderna clinic instead, Cooper said.

He said the district had already started seeing less demand for the clinics, but that wasnt necessarily because of the Johnson & Johnsons pause.

I think those who wanted to be vaccinated already have, Cooper said. Its really not hard to find a vaccination site of their choice with the vaccine of their choice.

At least half of the people in the three main age groups the state tracks are vaccinated in some way in the three towns, according to state data.

Within Westport, about 94 percent of those 65 and older have gotten their first dose, 85 percent of those 45 to 64 have at least a first dose and 59 percent for those 15 to 44 have had at least one vaccine dose. For Weston, the breakdown is 100 percent, 78 percent and 58 percent respectively for first doses. Easton has 90 percent, 70 percent, and 50 percent for those same age groups, according to the state data Tuesday morning.

I think theyre good, Cooper said of the numbers. You cant get better than 100 percent.

He said he wasnt sure if the remaining percentages for some of the older demographics were because of hesitancy or because they had trouble accessing the vaccine. The district had been administering Johnson & Johnson to homebound residents because it only required one dose, which Cooper said they hope to continue.

We had done some with Moderna but were hoping to return to homebound with J&J, Cooper said.

Cooper said its important to reach out to those who might not be vaccinated and help educate them on the vaccines.

Part of this is done through the three towns social services departments.

The health district doesnt receive Pfizer  the only vaccine approved for people younger than 18  and so hasnt organized specific clinics for high school students in any of the three towns, but Cooper said they would help a school district organize one in-house if requested.

Its more the school district taking the lead on it, he said.

Cooper said hell adjust the districts Moderna and Johnson & Johnson supply based on public demand. Several weeks ago, more people had wanted Johnson & Johnson, but that has since shifted after the pause with more interest in Moderna.

Westport First Selectman Jim Marpe said he was pleased about the vaccination rates.

These vaccination statistics are encouraging, and it is recommended that all residents who have not received the COVID-19 vaccine do so as soon as possible, he said.

Marpe said the vaccine rate is the reason some restrictions can be eased statewide and Westport can start planning some of its usual activities, including the Memorial Day parade, the Downtown Merchants Associations Fitness and Health Expo set for May 1 and the Fine Arts Festival for May 29 and 30.

The Center for Senior Activities and Toquet Hall are planning for possible outdoor and limited indoor programming in late spring or early summer, he said.

The Parks and Recreation Department is currently preparing to open its facilities and is planning to offer programs that were not available last summer due to COVID-19, Marpe said. The departments goal is to create safe environments for all facility users and program participants by following best practices and state guidelines.

The Levitt Pavilion already announced its first show will be June 14.

Westport is also considering moving its public meetings to a hybrid format that would allow both in-person and remote participation.

The plans for townwide re-opening and the opportunity for Westporters to return to normal are encouraging, but we should be cautiously optimistic, Marpe said. According to the Connecticut Department of Public Health, 122 municipalities out of 169, including Westport, remain in the highest COVID alert level (red). This designation is cause for concern, although more recent daily statistics indicate a downward curve in the spread.

A new same day testing site has also opened in town. Progressive Diagnostics is offering the service at the Saugatuck Railroad Station Parking Lot 8, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday.

It is also important to understand and recognize that being vaccinated does not prevent individuals from being COVID positive and transmitting the virus, Marpe said. Please continue to remain informed and balance COVID safety with personal priorities for physical and mental well being.

He also asked residents to be empathetic about others choices.

I encourage those who are vaccinated to be mindful and respectful of those who are not or have differing opinions about the current guidelines and status of the pandemic, he said. Westport town officials will continue to follow and employ the science experts advice and guidance so that all in our community will be safe and healthy.

kkoerting@newstimes.com
With a comprehensive portfolio of Jeep Performance Parts (JPP) and accessories, Mopar will help power the introduction of the 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

"With an industry-first lift kit for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, Jeep Performance Parts from Mopar will give owners of the new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe the opportunity to amplify the 4x4 capability and the fun-to-drive, open-air experience of the most capable, technically advanced, eco-friendly SUV," said Jim Morrison, Vice President, Jeep Brand North America. "The 2021 Wrangler 4xe is Trail Rated with solid front and rear axles, a full-time 4x4 two-speed transfer case, a fully articulating suspension and 30 inches of water fording capability."

The new Jeep Wrangler 4xe delivers 21 miles of nearly silent, zero-emission, electric-only propulsion, making it commuter friendly as an all-electric daily driver without range anxiety. The hybrid powertrain combines a high-tech 2.0-liter four-cylinder turbocharged engine with two electric motors, a high-voltage battery pack and the TorqueFlite eight-speed automatic transmission. Benchmark 470 lb.-ft. of torque in the Wrangler 4xe arrives instantly on demand from the driver. The powertrain also delivers fuel-saving, seamless, start-stop operation of the engine.

"We continue to expand our off-road Jeep portfolio with more innovative new features, including convenient at-home electric-vehicle chargers for vehicles like the new Jeep Wrangler 4xe," said Mark Bosanac, North America Vice President, Mopar Service, Parts & Customer Care. "Across the entire Jeep lineup, Mopar offers more than 500 quality-tested, factory-backed parts and accessories."

Below are select JPP and Mopar offerings available for the new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe (with Mopar part number and U.S. MSRP). For more information, see the complete JPP catalog at mopar.com/jpp or the Mopar Parts and Accessories eStore at store.mopar.com

JPP 2-inch lift kit (77072522 | $1,495): The industry-first lift kit for a plug-in hybrid vehicle is tuned specifically for the Jeep Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid vehicle application. The kit includes four springs, four FOX shocks, front lower control arms, front and rear stabilizer links, front and rear bump stops, various fasteners and the JPP badge, all packaged in a custom, reusable wooden crate complete with the JPP logo.

240-volt, at-home, electric vehicle wall chargers: The 240-volt wall chargers are available with branding from Mopar or Jeep in hardwired (HCS40 | $621.50) or plug-in (HCS40P | $647.90) versions for at-home use. Customers can enjoy a charging time that is more than five times faster for their iconic off-roader versus the standard cordset cable. Both wall chargers are available at the Mopar eStore.

JPP rock rails (82215165AB | $925): For the serious off-roader, JPP rock rails provide added lower-body protection to the vehicle. Rails are roll-formed and constructed from zinc-coated steel for superior corrosion resistance. The outer surface is e-coated and then DuraBull-coated (truck bedliner coating) to provide superior protection.

JPP tube doors (77072498AC | $1,195): Constructed of 2-inch round, heavy-gauge steel tubes, JPP tube doors create more open-air freedom. Production hinges and rubber bump stops are used for added strength and factory fit and finish, while preventing shakes and rattles.

JPP mirror kit for tube doors (77072562AA | $215): For added functionality of the JPP tube doors, the mirror kit includes two side mirrors that provide an improved range of vision during open-air adventures. Available beginning in early May.

JPP half doors (part of Dual-Door Group  sales code AJB for two-door | $2,350; AJB for four-door | $3,995; AJS for two-door | $2,550; AJS for four-door | $4,395): Ordered as an option during a new-vehicle purchase, the Mopar Custom Shop offers the Dual-Door Group that includes both full and half doors. New half-door option enhances the Jeep Wrangler driving experience with production styling, security and occupant protection. With lower window ledges, visibility is improved while maneuvering on and off road. New upper-window assemblies  available in base vinyl (AJB) or premium acrylic (AJS)  create a weather-tight seal and feature zippered plastic windows for quick, easy removal. Available in late summer.

JPP front bumper (82215691AD | $1,275): Rigorously tested for performance, durability and corrosion, this heavy-duty front bumper is steel e-coated and black-powder coated. D-rings are included for extra towing capability. The bumper is fully compatible with the Jeep Performance Parts Rubicon Warn winch.

JPP Rubicon Warn winch (P5160095AC | $1,595): Completely waterproof and submersible to ensure reliable operation during water fording and other adverse conditions, the Rubicon Warn winch includes 100 feet of Warn Spydura Synthetic Rope and is finished in three-stage zinc phosphate, e-coat and powder coating.

JPP winch mounting kit (82215182AC | $450): Designed to fit on the Rubicon steel front bumper and the JPP front-bumper assembly, the mounting kit ensures proper alignment with the vehicle's airbag deployment strategy.

JPP grille and winch guard hoop (82215351 | $249): The grille and winch guard hoop is constructed from 2-inch black powder-coated steel and bolts to the Rubicon steel front bumper or JPP steel front bumper.

JPP 7-inch off-road LED light kit (82215386AB | $725): Emitting 8,000 lumens each, a pair of 7-inch off-road LED lights provides superior performance without shadows and gives increased visibility for a more illuminating off-road driving experience.

JPP swing gate hinge reinforcement (82215356AB | $625): On the rear of the vehicle, the JPP swing gate hinge reinforcement allows for a larger spare tire to be mounted on the swing gate. The reinforcement is powder-coated black and works with the production hinge for easy installation.

JPP oversized spare-tire carrier modification kit (82215355 | $275): On the rear of the vehicle, the kit provides various spacers to adjust the production spare-tire carrier in order to accommodate the larger wheel/tire assembly. The carrier is painted with a corrosion-resistant black finish.

JPP Center High-Mount Stop Light (CHMSL) relocation kit (82215349AB | $85): The CHMSL relocation kit allows customers to add larger tires on the spare-tire mount on the rear of the vehicle and move the CHMSL to the center of the spare tire.

All-weather floor mats (82215986 | $165): All-weather floor mats feature high-wall, bucket-style construction in order to provide maximum coverage and protect floor areas from wetness, snow, mud, dirt and grime. The black, four-mat set includes a terrain-style surface design and red Jeep logo on the front mats.

Molded cargo tray kit (82215988 | $129): The molded cargo tray kit provides full coverage of cargo area and seat backs. The kit includes a cargo tray for the floor and two seat-back cover pieces (60/40 seat style). The cargo tray is black and features a red Jeep logo.

Jeep Performance Parts

Created in 2012 and offered by Mopar for the Jeep brand, Jeep Performance Parts (JPP) provide off-road enthusiasts with high-end, hard-core quality aftermarket accessories and performance parts. The portfolio of factory-backed, quality-tested parts includes axles, lift kits, bumpers, winches, skid plates, suspension components and more. The products are created in close conjunction with the Jeep brand, engineering and product design-office teams for development, testing and validation. Strict standards and factory-exclusive data  information not available to the aftermarket  are used to seamlessly integrate performance parts and accessories in order to deliver proper fit, finish and quality right down to the color, grain and appearance of each product. To see the full line of Jeep Performance Parts, visit mopar.com/jpp

Jeep Brand

Built on 80 years of legendary heritage, Jeep is the authentic SUV with capability, craftsmanship and versatility for people who seek extraordinary journeys. The Jeep brand delivers an open invitation to live life to the fullest by offering a full line of vehicles that continue to provide owners with a sense of security to handle any journey with confidence. Jeep Wave, a premium owner loyalty and customer care program that is available to the entire Jeep lineup, is filled with benefits and exclusive perks to deliver Jeep owners the utmost care and dedicated 24/7 support.

The Jeep vehicle lineup consists of the Cherokee, Compass, Gladiator, Grand Cherokee, Renegade and Wrangler. To meet consumer demand around the world, all Jeep models sold outside North America are available in both left- and right-hand drive configurations and with gasoline and diesel powertrain options. Jeep is part of the portfolio of brands offered by leading global automaker and mobility provider Stellantis. For more information regarding Stellantis (NYSE: STLA), please visit www.stellantis.com.

Mopar

Mopar (a simple contraction of the words MOtor and PARts) offers exceptional service, parts and customer-care. Born in 1937 as the name of a line of antifreeze products, the Mopar brand has evolved over more than 80 years to represent both complete vehicle care and authentic performance for owners and enthusiasts worldwide.

Mopar made its mark in the 1960s during the muscle-car era with performance parts to enhance speed and handling for both on-road and racing use. Later, the brand expanded to include technical service and customer support. Today, Mopar integrates service, parts and customer-care operations in order to enhance customer and dealer support worldwide.

Complete information on the Mopar brand is available at www.mopar.com. Mopar is part of the portfolio of brands offered by leading global automaker and mobility provider Stellantis. For more information regarding Stellantis (NYSE: STLA), please visit www.stellantis.com.

Follow Mopar and company news and video on:

Company blog: http://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Media website: http://media.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Mopar brand: https://www.mopar.com/

Mopar blog: https://blog.mopar.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mopar

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/officialmopar

Twitter: https://twitter.com/OfficialMOPAR

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/mopar or https://www.youtube.com/StellantisNA

SOURCE Stellantis
The local council will today be asked to support a motion which calls on Stormont to fund the provision of universal free school meals for all children regardless of their social and economic background.

A Western Trust Board meeting was previously told that one in four families within the Trust area experience poverty linked to higher and lasting levels of unemployment and low wages.

Derry City has the highest percentage of children entitled to free school meals at 43.3 per cent compared to a Northern Ireland average of 30.7 per cent.

One of the UKs largest trade unions, UNISON, has launched a billboard campaign calling for free school meals with the message, All we need is lunch!

Speaking about the motion, People Before Profit Cllr Shaun Harkin said: "Child poverty in our communities is a scandal. More than 120,000 children here live in poverty. More than a third of children in Derry live in poverty.

It's the sort of issue that should have pushed even the parties of the political establishment into action. Shamefully it hasn't.

Many children go to school hungry. Many children don't have access to nutritious meals. This has a direct impact on their learning and health outcomes.

We're calling on the Derry and Strabane Council to get behind the demand for Stormont to fund universal free school meals for all children and young people as part of their education package.

Implementing this will not end child deprivation but it is a measure that can be part of a serious attempt to address it. Children from all backgrounds and communities would benefit from it.

This is an issue that cuts right across our divide. The campaign is bringing people together. We should get it implemented as soon as practically possible."
District 47 - West TN  Northern

DYER COUNTY, SR-3 (US-51): The repair of bridges on US 51 (SR 3) over SR 211 in Dyersburg will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project. *Speed limit has been reduced to 55 MPH.

DYER COUNTY, SR-3 (US-51): The repair of bridges on US 51 (SR 3) over the South Fork Forked Deer River will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project.

Restrictions: Beginning January 25, 2021, Traffic will be reduced to one lane in each direction with a 12 6 lane restriction.

DYER COUNTY, SR-3 (US-51): The repair of bridges on US 51 (SR 3) over SR 211 in Dyersburg will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project. *Speed limit has been reduced to 55 MPH.



DYER COUNTY, SR-3 (US-51): The repair of bridges on US 51 (SR 3) over the South Fork Forked Deer River will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project.

Restrictions: Beginning January 25, 2021, Traffic will be reduced to one lane in each direction with a 12 6 lane restriction.

DYER COUNTY, SR-20: The repair of bridge on US 412 (SR 20) over Hogwallow Road will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project. *Speed limit has been reduced to 55 MPH.



HENDERSON COUNTY (New Lexington By-Pass): The grading, drainage, construction of bridges and retaining walls, signals and paving on US 412 (SR 459) from US 412 (SR 20) west of Lexington to near SR 22 south of Lexington. Motorists should watch for trucks entering and exiting the roadway.



HENRY COUNTY, SR-54: The grading, drainage, construction of bridges, retaining wall and paving on SR 54 from near Rison Street to near Smith Road. Motorists should watch for trucks entering and exiting the roadway. *Speed limit has been reduced to 35 MPH.



LAKE COUNTY, SR-79:

Thursday, April 29, 8:00 a.m. through Friday, April30, 4:00 p.m.: The roadway will be closed from MM 6.7 to MM 9.2 to install two cross culverts.

OBION COUNTY, Future I-69 (Phase 3): Grading, drainage, construction of bridges and paving on future I-69 from west of SR 21 to US 51 (SR 3) will cause possible lane closures throughout the project.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020: Bethlehem Road north from Clifford Rives Road to Lindenwood Road will be closed. Claude Tucker Road north from Cloys Road to Section Line Road will be closed. Detour routes are posted.

WEAKLEY COUNTY, US 45E (SR-43): The repair of bridge on US 45E (SR 43) over the North Fork Obion River and Overflow will cause temporary lane closures throughout the project.



TDOT DISTRICT 47 MAINTENANCE:

Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.: There will be possible lane closures at various locations in Region IV to repair pavement and/or retrace pavement markings on an as needed basis.

District 48 - West TN  Middle/Southern

HARDIN COUNTY, SR-69: The construction of a Bulb Tee bridge over Doe Creek along with grading, drainage, and paving may cause temporary lane closures on SR 69 at LM 10.06. Motorists should watch for trucks entering and exiting the roadway.

HARDIN COUNTY, SR-128: The grading, drainage and paving on SR 128 from south of Pyburns Drive (LM 3.11) to north of SR 226 (Airport Road) (LM 6.54). Motorists should watch for trucks entering and exiting the roadway.

HAYWOOD COUNTY, (SR-1): There will be temporary daytime lane closures east and westbound on SR1 LM.26.7 to 27.3 for repair of bridges on SR1 over I-40. One lane will remain open at all times.



HAYWOOD COUNTY, SR-19 (Brownsville Bypass): The construction of an I-Beam bridge along with grading, drainage, and paving may cause temporary lane closures on SR 19 (Brownsville Bypass) from east of SR 87 to west of Windrow Rd. One lane will remain. Motorists should watch for trucks entering and exiting the roadway. Speed limit is reduced to 45 MPH within the project limits. Shaw Chapel and King Road are closed at SR 19 and a detour put in place. Haralson St (Old SR19) is now open.



HENDERSON COUNTY, SR-22: The repair of the bridges on SR 22 over Big Beaver Creek and Little Beaver Creek. Motorists should watch for crews and equipment in the roadways. One lane will remain open in both directions.



Restrictions: February 1, 2020 there was a 12 width restriction put in place.

MADISON COUNTY, I-40: Resurfacing on I-40 westbound from the Haywood County Line to near Lower Brownsville Rd.



Wednesday, April 28 through Friday, April 30 and Sunday, May 2 through Wednesday, May 5, 7:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime temporary inside and outside lane closures on I-40 westbound from MM 67 to LM MM 74.4 for OGFC paving operations. Additionally, there will be intermittent shoulder closures during daytime hours to allow for flowable fill curing time. Speed limit is reduced to 60 MPH during active closures.

MADISON COUNTY, I-40 (Concrete Repair):



Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 7:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.: The On ramps and Off ramps at Exit 93 will have construction activity but will remain open. Flaggers will be present on the ramps.

Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 7:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m.: I- 40 eastbound from

MM 87.6 to MM 95.0 will be down one lane for saw cutting and removal and replacement of damaged concrete.

LOOK AHEAD



Wednesday, May 5 through Wednesday, May 12, 7:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.: The On ramps and Off ramps at Exit 93 will have construction activity but will remain open. Flaggers will be present on the ramps.

Wednesday, May 5 through Wednesday, May 12, 7:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m.: I- 40 eastbound from MM 87.6 to MM 95.0 will be down one lane for saw cutting and removal and replacement of damaged concrete.

MADISON COUNTY, I-40: The widening of I-40 east of US 45 (SR 5) MM 82.0 to east of US 70

(SR 1) MM 87.0 in Jackson, including bridges, retaining walls and installation of TDOT Smartway Intelligent Transportation System.

Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 7:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: (AS NEEDED) I-40 east and westbound from MM 82.0 to MM 87.0 will have intermittent left and right lane closures to repair any potholes/maintenance issues.

One Lane Closed until Summer of 2021: Campbell St. will be down to one lane in each direction over I-40 for Phase 1 bridge construction activities.

Closed until Summer of 2021: Old Henderson Rd. Bridge over I-40 will be closed to thru traffic for Phase 1 bridge demolition activities. Detours will be posted for traffic.

Closed until Summer of 2021: Watson Rd. Bridge over I-40 will be closed to thru traffic for Phase 1 bridge demolition activities. Detours will be posted for traffic.

LOOK AHEAD

Wednesday, May 5 through Wednesday, May 12, 7:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: (AS NEEDED) I-40 east and westbound from MM 82.0 to MM87.0 will have intermittent left and right lane closures to repair any potholes/maintenance issues.

MADISON COUNTY, SR-186 (US 45 Bypass) and I-40: Interchange improvements on SR 186 (US 45) north and southbound from the I-40 ramps to Old Hickory Blvd for paving and construction of retaining walls. Widening of I-40 from just east of Exit 79 to just east of Exit 82.



Thursday, April 29 and Friday, April 30, 9:00 a.m.3:00 p.m.: SR 5 (Highland Avenue) will have intermittent left and right lane closures both north and southbound from Vann Drive to the Carriage House/Ridgecrest intersection for signal installation activities.

Saturday, May 1, 6:00 a.m. through Monday, May 3, 6:00 a.m.: I-40 both east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures from Exit 79 to Exit 82 for paving activities.

Monday, May 3 through Wednesday, May 5, 9:00 a.m.3:00 p.m.: SR 5 (Highland Avenue) will have intermittent left and right lane closures both north and southbound from Vann Drive to the Carriage House/Ridgecrest intersection for signal installation activities.

Monday, May 3 through Wednesday, May 5, 8:00 p.m.6:00 a.m.: I-40 both east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures from Exit 79 to Exit 82 for paving activities

LOOK AHEAD

Thursday, May 6 and Friday, May 7, 9:00 a.m.3:00 p.m.: SR 5 (Highland Avenue) will have intermittent left and right lane closures both north and southbound from Vann Drive to the Carriage House/Ridgecrest intersection for signal installation activities.

Thursday, May 6 and Friday, May 7, 8:00 p.m.6:00 a.m.: I-40 both east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures from Exit 79 to Exit 82 for paving activities.

Friday, May 7, 8 p.m. through Monday, May 10, 8:00 6:00 a.m.: I-40 both east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures from Exit 79 to Exit 82 for paving activities.

Friday, May 7, 8:00 p.m. through Monday, May 10, 6:00 a.m.: FULL CLOSURE SR 5 (Highland Avenue) will be CLOSED both north and southbound from Vann Drive to Carriage House/Ridgecrest intersection for milling, final surface paving, and permanent striping. (BACKUP DATES: Friday, May 14, 8:00 p.m. through Monday, May 17, 8:00 6:00 a.m.)

Monday, May 10 through Wednesday, May 12, 8:00 p.m.6:00 a.m.: I-40 both east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures from Exit 79 to Exit 82 for paving activities.

TDOT District 48: Chester, Crockett, Decatur, Hardeman, Hardin, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, and McNairy Counties, SR-19 (Brownsville Bypass): There will be temporary daytime mobile lane closures on various state routes. One lane will remain open at all times for the retracing of painted pavement marking lines on various State Routes.



TDOT District 48 MAINTENANCE:



Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.: There will be possible lane closures at various locations in Region IV to repair pavement and/or retrace pavement markings on an as needed basis.

District 49 - West TNSouthwest



FAYETTE COUNTY, I-40: Resurfacing of I-40 from Shelby County Line MM 27 to near Exit 35

Wednesday, April 28 through Friday, April 30 and Sunday, May 2 through Friday, May 7, 7PM-7AM: I-40 east and westbound from MM 27 to MM 35 will have lane closures for nighttime resurfacing operations. Speed limit will be reduced to 60 MPH during active closures. Weather Permitting.

FAYETTE COUNTY, SR-196: The repair of bridge over Shaw Creek will cause a lane closure with temporary traffic signal near MM 7.0.

SHELBY COUNTY, I-55: Bridge repair on SR 14/Third St. (US-61) over I-55.

LOOK AHEAD

Friday, May 21 8:00 p.m. through Monday, May 24, 6:00 a.m.: All lanes on I-55 southbound from Mallory to I-240 will be closed to perform bridge repair work. Detours will be provided. Weather Permitting.

SHELBY COUNTY, I-40: Mississippi River Bridge lighting repair.

Sunday, May 1 through Thursday, May 6, 7:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: I-40 east and westbound will have intermittent lane closures on the Hernando Desoto Bridge to allow for bridge lighting repairs. Weather Permitting.

SHELBY COUNTY, SR-14: There will be lane closures on both north and southbound SR 14/Third Street (US-61) over I-55 for bridge repairs.

Restrictions: Traffic will be reduced to two lanes in each direction with a 12-0 lane restriction.

SHELBY COUNTY, SR-14: The grading, drainage, construction of concrete Bulb-Tee and I-beam bridges, signals and paving on SR 14 from east of Old Covington Pike to SR 385 will cause possible lane closures throughout the project. *Speed limit has been reduced to 45 MPH.



SHELBY COUNTY, SR-14: Construction on SR 14 for a widening project from SR 385 to east of Kerrville Rosemark Rd. There will be possible temporary lane closures throughout the project. Access to SR 14 from McCalla Rd West will be permanently detoured to Donnell Rd. *Speed limit has been reduced to 45 MPH.



TIPTON COUNTY, SR-59: The emergency slide repair of SR 59 near MM 1.0 will cause a road closure with full detour signed.

TDOT District 49 Random On-Call Signing



Wednesday, April 28 through May 4, 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime lane closures to install overhead signs in Madison County on SR 223 NB, MM 14.6MM 15.0; one lane will be CLOSED. THP will assist with traffic control. Weather Permitting.

LOOK AHEAD:

Wednesday, May 5 through Tuesday, May 11, 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime ramp closures to install overhead signs in Madison County on SR 223 NB On ramp to I-40 EB and on

SR 223 NB On ramp to I-40 WB. The ramps will be CLOSED. Weather Permitting.

TDOT District 49 On-Call Guardrail/Concrete Barrier Rail Repair



Wednesday, April 28, through Tuesday, May 4, 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime lane closures at various locations on SR-3 (Shelby County), SR-385 (Shelby County), SR 14 (Shelby County), I-40 (Fayette and Shelby Counties), I-269 (Shelby and Fayette Counties), I-55 and I-240. One lane will be CLOSED to repair damaged guardrail. THP will assist with traffic control. Weather Permitting.

Wednesday, April 28, through Tuesday, May 4, 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime ramp closures in Shelby County at I-40 WB EXIT 8 Off ramp to SR 14, I-40 WB EXIT 10 Off ramp to

SR 204, I-40 EB EXIT 16 Off ramp to SR 177, I-240 WB EXIT 25A Off ramp to I-55 SB, I-240 WB EXIT 23B to Airways SB, I-240 EB EXIT 28 On ramp from South Parkway, and I-40 EB EXIT 24/25 Off ramp to SR 385 WB/I-269 SB and SR 205. Weather Permitting. If weather prohibits, the closures will be on the next available night.

Thursday, April 29, through Wednesday, May 5, 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.: There will be daytime lane closures at various locations in Lauderdale County, SR 3, MM 7.0MM 21.0 and SR 209,

MM 15.016.2. Flagmen will be used to direct traffic where necessary. Weather Permitting.

LOOK AHEAD:



Wednesday, May 5, through Tuesday, May 11, 8:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m.: There will be nighttime ramp closures in Shelby County at I-40 WB EXIT 8 Off ramp to SR 14, I-40 EB EXIT 8 Off ramp to SR 14 NB, I-40 EB EXIT 8 On ramp from SR 14 SB, I-40 WB EXIT 10 Off ramp to SR 204, I-40 EB EXIT 16 Off ramp to SR 177, I-240 WB EXIT 25A Off ramp to I-55 SB, I-240 WB EXIT 23B to Airways SB,

I-240 EB EXIT 28 On ramp from South Parkway, I-40 EB EXIT 24/25 Off ramp to SR 385 WB/I-269 SB and SR 205, and I-55 SB EXIT 9 Off ramp to Mallory, I-55 NB EXIT 11 On ramp from McLemore. Weather Permitting.

TDOT District 49 MAINTENANCE



Wednesday, April 28 through Wednesday, May 5, 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.: There will be possible lane closures at various locations in Region IV to repair pavement and/or retrace pavement markings on an as needed basis.

From your desktop or mobile device, get the latest construction activity and live streaming SmartWay traffic cameras at www.TNSmartWay.com/Traffic. Travelers can also dial 511 from any land-line or cellular phone for travel information, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TN511 for statewide travel or for West Tennessee follow https://twitter.com/NicLawrenceTDOT .

As always, drivers are reminded to use all motorist information tools wisely and Know Before You Go! by checking travel conditions before leaving for your destination. Drivers should never tweet, text or talk on a cell phone while behind the wheel.

In 2016, the Tennessee Department of Transportation lost three workers in the line of duty. All three were struck by passing motorists. Those tragedies bring the total number of TDOT lives lost to 112. We dont want to lose another member of our TDOT family. Were asking you to WORK WITH US. Click on the WORK WITH US logo to learn more.
TURKISTAN, Kazakhstan -- A group of inmates in a penitentiary in Kazakhstan's southern Turkistan region have maimed themselves to protest conditions and are refusing to follow guards' orders.

The chief of the State Penitentiary Service (QAZh) in the region, Talghat Abdiranbaev, said late on April 28 that six inmates at the ICh-167/9 maximum-security correctional colony had inflicted cuts on their bodies after a confrontation with guards.

According to Abdiranbaev, the incident took place after the inmates protested searches of their belongings by the prison guards, QAZh officials, and National Guard troops.

"The inmates were provided with medical assistance right away. Their health condition is more or less stable, there is no need for hospitalizations," Abdiranbaev said, adding that internal investigations were under way in the penitentiary, which houses 485 inmates convicted of serious and very serious crimes.

Abdiranbaev's statement came three days after two inmates in the western region of Manghystau swallowed spoons to protest against prison conditions, prompting an inspection of the facility by representatives of the Public Monitoring Commission and the National Preventive Mechanism -- groups created to prevent torture and rights abuse in the Central Asian country's penitentiaries.

Inmates in Kazakh prisons often maim themselves to protest brutality from guards or abuses of their rights. They usually slit their wrists or cut their abdomens. Swallowing spoons or other objects is very rare.

With reporting by Informburo
Buffalo, N.Y.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to see New York fully reopened before July 1, he said today.

Cuomo was responding to a question about comments that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made earlier in the day about the city reopening by that date with no restrictions on businesses.

I dont want to wait that long, Cuomo said during a press conference in Buffalo. I think if we do what we have to do, we can be reopened earlier.

Cuomo said he wants to see businesses return to 100% capacity. Some safety precautions like masks and social distancing will remain, he said.

He said he expects Covid-19 numbers in the state will stay low and keep dropping.

He also pushed back against the idea that de Blasio can unilaterally make plans, as he has often done during the pandemic.

Its a statewide management system and we are managing by the science and by the data, he said.

But Cuomo said the cost of maintaining restrictions is far greater than people realize.

People talk about it in economic terms, he said. I think its the social cost has been phenomenal.

The state has been steadily relaxing Covid restrictions lately. Just yesterday, Cuomo announced the end of New Yorks bar and restaurant curfew.

Separately, the Legislature voted to overturn Cuomos rule requiring food purchases with all drink orders in the state.

Sexual harassment allegations

Cuomo said hes eager to share his side of the story on the sexual harassment allegations against him. He pointed out New Yorkers have so far only heard from his accusers.

Multiple women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, including one aide who said the governor groped her breast in the Executive Mansion in Albany. Cuomo denied all the allegations against him earlier this week.

Previously, he apologized for behavior he said he now understands made people uncomfortable. He said he never intended offense or touched anyone inappropriately.

State Attorney General Letitia James is leading a review of the allegations and the state Assembly is conducting an impeachment inquiry focused on the harassment accusations and other matters. Cuomo said hes not responding in detail to the allegations out of respect for those probes.

At the same time, it has been very difficult letting people make accusations and not responding, he said today. People have only heard one side of the story.

Theoretically, the investigations should happen in private, he added.

Here what has happened is the complainants have continued to go to the press and make their complaint in the press. And I have not been able to respond. Thats not fair and its not right.

Nursing homes

Also today, Cuomo responded to a Wednesday story in The New York Times that reported his top aides worked to hide the true total of nursing home deaths in the state for months. The actions coincided with the period Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, the Times said.

Cuomo said the main concern in releasing the numbers was their accuracy. He also said the total number of Covid deaths in the state, which has not changed, is the only number that means anything.

He noted several times during the press conference that the issue of nursing home deaths became politicized and pointed to a Department of Justice investigation into the matter in states led by Democratic governors. It was a transparently political move, but it was still something the state had to take seriously, Cuomo said.

Our number one concern, especially in this superheated political environment, was whatever number we put out had to be accurate because it was being criticized by both sides, he said. That was what was most important  that the numbers we release were accurate.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have criticized Cuomo for months over his response to the pandemic in nursing homes. The delay in releasing the total nursing home death count angered many of them.

The states nursing home response is one of the matters the Assembly is exploring in its impeachment probe.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

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Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com

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Merck is entering a new era, with sweeping changes across its executive suite and the spinoff off its women's health and other businesses, a bid to enable both resulting companies to grow faster.

FILE - In this Dec. 18, 2014, file photo, a person walks through a Merck company building in Kenilworth, N.J. COVID-19 infections weighed Merck with so many people avoiding visits to hospitals or even the doctor early in the first quarter. The pharmaceutical company on Thursday, April 29, 2021, reported first-quarter earnings of $3.18 billion.(AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

Merck is entering a new era, with sweeping changes across its executive suite and the spinoff off its women's health and other businesses, a bid to enable both resulting companies to grow faster.

The massive management makeover, mostly triggered by longtime Chief Executive Ken Frazier's upcoming retirement, occurs as the drugmaker says hits to sales of many of its medicines amid lockdowns and other impacts from the global coronavirus pandemic will lessen and sales will rise over the rest of the year.

Frazier, who has run Merck & Co. since January 2011, oversaw a quadrupling of revenue and Merck's emergence as a powerhouse in cancer drugs over the decade.

Now 66 and the only Black CEO of a major drugmaker, Frazier will retire on June 30, causing a domino effect of job changes. He'll be succeeded by Chief Financial Officer Rob Davis, who will be replaced by company treasurer Caroline Litchfield. Her replacement hasnt been named yet.

Michael Nally, head of marketing for Mercks huge prescription drug business and a candidate to replace Frazier, departed last month. The chief commercial officer for that business, Frank Clyburn, will become its president and lead both commercial strategy and marketing.

And in January, Dr. Dean Li became head of Mercks highly regarded research labs, taking over for now-retired Roger Perlmutter.

On Thursday, Merck reported its first-quarter profit dipped 1% as people continued to put off doctor and hospital visits early this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it spent more on research and production.

Results were disappointing relative to expectations," Edward Jones analyst Ashtyn Edwards wrote to investors, noting lower rates of new diagnoses, such as for cancer, were greater than expected during the first quarter.

Even though Merck maintained its 2021 profit forecast, its shares plunged more than 5%.

The drugmaker said it's focusing its efforts on fighting the pandemic on two fronts: testing of its experimental COVID-19 treatment molnupiravir with partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, and helping to manufacture Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine under a recent deal. The J&J partnership follows the failure of two experimental vaccines that Merck dropped after early results showed they weren't very effective.

Merck plans to soon begin late-stage testing of molnupiravir, a pill meant for treating outpatients to prevent hospitalizations. The company, based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, also is evaluating the drug's potential for preventing infection in people recently exposed to the COVID-19 virus.

The maker of cancer blockbuster Keytruda and Januvia diabetes pills said net income declined to $3.18 billion, or $1.25 per share, from $3.22 billion, or $1.26 per share, a year earlier.

Adjusted earnings came to $3.56 billion, or $1.40 per share, far below the $1.63 Wall Street was expecting.

Revenue totalled $12.08 billion, up just a tad from $12.06 billion last year.

Frazier told analysts on a conference call to discuss the results that hes confident in Mercks future and new leadership.

But in afternoon training, shares were down $4.01, or 5.2%, at $73.08.

Mercks prescription drug sales were hurt by generic competition to several drugs, and the pandemic reduced sales of doctor-administered drugs and other medicines used in hospitals, a key business for Merck. Sales of Mercks vaccines for children and adults fell as the country focused on a massive COVID-19 vaccination campaign under the new Biden administration.

Prescription drug sales were flat at $10.68 billion, led by cancer immunotherapy Keytruda, which hauled in $3.9 billion  nearly one-third of total revenue. Januvia and combo drug Janumet for Type 2 diabetes brought in a total of $1.3 billion.

Veterinary medicine sales jumped 17% to $1.42 billion, mainly driven by higher sales of products for pets.

During the quarter, Merck started a partnership with Gilead Sciences developing long-acting HIV treatments that combine one drug from each company. And on April 1, Merck completed the acquisition of Pandion Therapeutics, a developer of therapies for autoimmune disorders, an area where Merck hopes to expand.

In addition, during the quarter the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved new heart failure drug Verquvo and began reviewing applications to approve three experimental drugs, for chronic cough, for a rare condition associated with kidney cancer and for an improved pneumococcal vaccine.

Merck expects adjusted earnings per share for 2021 of $6.48 to $6.68 and revenue of $51.8 billion and $53.8 billion; both are unchanged from its January forecast.

Merck plans on June 2 to complete the spinoff of its Organon womens health business, which will now also include off-patent former blockbusters like respiratory drugs Singulair and Nasonex, plus Mercks unit that makes biosimilars, or near-copies of pricey biologic drugs.

If the spinoff happens by then, Merck plans to update its financial forecasts.

____

Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma
Chennai, April 29 : Food products company GRB Dairy Foods Pvt Ltd on Thursday said it has donated 50 10-kg oxygen cylinders and accessories to government hospitals in Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu.

According to GRB Dairy, its officials met the District Collector and handed over the cylinders worth about Rs 9.14 lakh.

"With the present oxygen crisis, we are putting in all our efforts to support and boost India's healthcare infrastructure. As a responsible and committed corporate citizen, this is our collective resolve to fight the pandemic and help the country get through the Covid-19 situation by offering oxygen cylinders. We are hopeful that this initiative of ours will aid the hospitals in providing help to the much needy people," company founder and Chairman G.R. Balasubramaniam said.

On Wednesday, the Chief Executive Officer of software development firm Zoho Corporation said the company has restarted its kitchens and is delivering meals in Chennai (Guduvanchery), Tenkasi and soon Gudalur in Theni.

"We are at 6,000 meals a day and will double that soon," he said.
Pool/Getty Images

In his first address in front of a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden discussed a number of pressing topics, including pitching his American Families Plan and updates on his administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The speech itself was hopeful in tone and ambitious in the scope of Biden's proposals. If you were glued to San Antonio's Tornado Warning instead of the State of the Union, here's a quick synopsis.

Here are 5 takeaways from Biden's first big speech in Congress:
Q Summit: Tyler Burns on the 'pain and power' found in the 'paradox' of being a black Christian

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Tyler Burns, president of the Witness, identified lessons the Church can learn from the African American legacy and experience and shared how there is power to be found in the seeming paradox of being fully black and fully Christian.

During a message titled The Gift of the Black Christian Experience, Burns told those gathered at the Q 2021 Culture Summit on April 22 that at the age of 19, he was forced to confront the seemingly contradictory condition of being black and Christian.

I was born black, grew up black in a black family, and was introduced to Jesus at an early age, but sometimes in the life of black Christians, we must confront this reality that ... a black Christian and a black non-Christian will live in the same world and face the same exploitation. Being fully black and being fully Christian sometimes feels like a bit of a paradox.

For example, Burns said that for many black people, its hard to understand how Jesus can be a "healer" when they don't have adequate access to healthcare, how Jesus can be a provider when their communities lack economic provision, and how people can claim to love them but not care about their lives.

It feels like a paradox, he said. Now the good thing, and the good news for us, is that we are not the first or the only group to have faced this paradox.

From Moses to Esther, the Bible is filled with people who had to operate and navigate seemingly contradictory identities, Burns said. Similarly, other minority groups like Latin Americans and indigenous people understand what it means to be ignored and forgotten, he said.

We're not the only people who have dealt with this. We are just acquainted with the pain and grief. There is pain in the paradox of being fully black and fully Christian, he said.

As he wrestled with this paradox, Burns came across the words of former slave Sojourner Truth, who, in response to abolitionist Frederick Douglass struggling with the question of why God hadnt brought full equality to the black community, posed the rhetorical question, Is God dead?

Here's the thing about being black and Christian: In the midst of a paradox, yes, there's pain there ... but just because we're in the midst of pain doesn't mean that Jesus is not in the pain with us, he said.

Here's the truth. When we were in the paradox we found that Jesus met us in the pain of our paradox, and Jesus addressed our pain, but He also gave us power, he continued.

This is the Jesus who can stand at the dead grave of his friend Lazarus and declare: I am the resurrection and the life. This is the Jesus who can shed tears and speak to the tomb. This is the Jesus who says, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? and Into Your hands I commit My Spirit. This is the Jesus who met us, and this is the black Christian tradition.

He urged the Church to center black voices to both find pain and find power.

In black Christian tradition, we can be prayerful and prophetic, we can be weeping and dancing, we can push for joy and justice. We can say we're not alright, but we are going to be alright as black Christians. We can say that the night may be dark, but the morning is sure to come. It's a paradox, but we found power there.

A recent Barna survey found that most black adults in the U.S. believe that to understand the African American experience, it's necessary to understand the role of religious faith in black people's lives.

Most members of the black church also believe faith is crucial to the black experience, with half (50%) agreeing strongly and 38% agreeing somewhat. Faith is also considered a source of emotional strength, with nearly all black churchgoers today strongly agreeing with this sentiment.

Previously, Barna reported that most members of the black church believe the church provides comfort and agency, countering a broader sense of political powerlessness.

Last summer, Doug Weaver, professor of Baptist studies and director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, told The Christian Post that many churches, particularly white congregations, dont see racial reconciliation as an actionable priority even though they might acknowledge that it is important.

Its not that different racial groups dont think these issues [of race] arent important. Its that theres this question of how important they think it is. If you have a hierarchy of values, which ones are most important to you? I do think thats where the Church at large can be indicted, and that race has not been at the top of the list even though it should be. Churches tolerate racial discrimination. It should never be tolerated, but  history shows that, he said.
Xinjiang first saw a major violent attack by these militants in the 1990s in Urumqi and in southern Xinjiangs smaller towns. A major riot on July 5, 2009, in Urumqi led to the death of almost 200 people.

by Vijay Prashad and Jie Xiong

Kashgar is a key location for the land and sea interface of the Belt and Road, connecting not only westward to West Asia, Europe, the Red Sea, and Africa, but also southward to the Indian Ocean through the port of Gwadar, said Professor Li Bo of the China Research Institute, Fudan University. It is, he told us, a core area of the Belt and Road strategy. Kashgar, one of the westernmost cities in China, is the main urban area of the southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Traders from across Asia have assembled at its Sunday bazaar for 2,000 years.

More than 1,000 kilometers north of Kashgar is the town of Nur-Sultan, previously known as Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Here, in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about the need for a Silk Road Economic Belt. This Belt would include trade deals and transportation networks, cultural interactions and political connections. The project would become the One Belt, One Road initiative, which is now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Chinas National Development and Reform Commission released a report in March 2015 that planned for six economic corridors, which would be funded by more than $155 billion from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund. Since then, many of these corridors, which run from China into Central Asia and also down through Pakistan and Afghanistan, have been completed. In December 2020, a goods train traveled from Istanbul, Turkey, to Xian, China, covering 8,693 kilometers of this new Silk Road. The train carried Turkish appliances, which were meant for the Chinese market.

Accusations by the United States government and its allies about genocide and forced labor in Xinjiang have brought Chinas westernmost province into the gaze of the international media. This approach toward Xinjiang defines the information war prosecuted by Washington. In our conversations with Professor Li Bo and Professor Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, as well as intellectuals from Kashgar and Urumqi (Xinjiangs capital), we developed a storyline that includes the dynamics of Xinjiangs social development, the threats of extremism, and the enfolding of its problems into the wider hybrid war unleashed against China.

Develop the West

The economy of Xinjiang is not as good as that of the eastern coast [of China], Professor Wang Yiwei told us. This reality was understood 20 years ago when the Chinese government launched the Western China Development Program (Xibu Dakaifa) in 1999. In 2010, Kashgar was designated as a special economic zone with the intention of drawing investment into southern Xinjiang to tackle high poverty rates and to shape the province into a gateway to Central Asia and Europe.

At the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the delegates made Xinjiangs development a priority. Construction of infrastructure, development of energy sources, linkage of Xinjiangs economy with the BRI, and the development of talent emerged as the main avenues for the province, Professor Li told us. By 2019, Xinjiangs government announced that between 2014 and 2018, 2.3 million people had been lifted out of poverty and 1.9 million of them lived in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population is concentrated. During the pandemic, the Chinese government made an effort to find a way to improve life for farmers and herdsmen in the Taklamakan Desert of southern Xinjiang. This has helped to continue a pattern of lifting most of the 6.1 percent of the provinces population who were experiencing absolute poverty in 2018 out of that state (the poverty level decreased to 1.2 percent of Xinjiangs population in 2019 and continues to trend downward).

When I visited Xinjiang, Professor Li told us, I was struck by the fact that the province is involved in a great struggle. This struggle is manifested in several ways: in the development of social and economic life, in the integration of minority ethnic groups into the broad social life of China, and in the difficult task of fighting terrorism.

Washingtons Jihad

In August 2013, the 74-year-old imam of a mosque in Turpan, 200 kilometers east of Urumqi, was brutally killed by extremists. These extremistslikely members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) or the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)killed Abdurehim Damaolla because he was part of the Islamic Association, which worked with Chinas government to combat extremism. Within Uyghur society, a gulf opened up between the vast majority of the people who opposed radicalization along religious lines and those who joined the ETIM and the TIP.

The roots of the ETIM and the TIP go back to the 1960s and 1970s when Saudi Arabias World Muslim League began to proselytize a harsh version of Islam to counter communism. Those drawn to these views left Saudi schoolsmany in Pakistanto join Washingtons jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There, the Uyghur extremists joined other disaffected Central Asian extremists to form various outfits that pledged jihad against communism.

When the USSR collapsed, these groups sought to use violence to advance their agenda against the post-communist states in Central Asia, the first among them all was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which was affiliated with Al Qaeda. Uyghur militants joined the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, the IMU, and the global platform known as Hizb-ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Extremists from Xinjiang cut their teeth while fighting for jihad in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and in the Central Asian states.

Xinjiang first saw a major violent attack by these militants in the 1990s in Urumqi and in southern Xinjiangs smaller towns. A major riot on July 5, 2009, in Urumqi led to the death of almost 200 people. Since then, there have been many smaller attacks. Uneven economic development, said Professor Wang, is the basis for terrorism and extremist religious ideology.

Shohrat Zakir, who is the chairman of the government of XUAR, concurs, and notes that his government has put forward an agenda to root out terrorism. There is no point in merely treating this like a warsuch as the U.S. did in Afghanistan. This is not a war that can be won by violence, said Zakir, but it must be won by education and by economic development. Asked about vocational education, Zakir explained, Some residents there [in Xinjiang] have a limited command of the countrys common language and a limited sense and knowledge of the law. They often have difficulties in finding employment due to limited vocational skills. This has led to a low material-basis for residents to live and work there, making them vulnerable to the instigation and coercion of terrorism and extremism. There is still a long way to go for southern Xinjiang to eradicate the environment and soil of terrorism and religious extremism.

New Cold War

In 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a New Silk Road Initiative. The idea was for the U.S. to use Afghanistan as the core of a North-South axis that would break the Central Asian states away from their links to Russia and China; this axis would orient these countries to South Asia and then to the United States. Failure to settle the problems of Afghanistan led the U.S. to abandon that project. Instead, it has turned its focus to undermining Chinas BRI.

The information war now conducted against China centers on Xinjiang. Once again, the U.S. uses longstanding problemssuch as the rise of extremism in Central Asia (fueled to some extent by the U.S. since the 1980s)to create problems for its adversaries. Officials in China tell us that the government has long ignored the economic development of Xinjiang and has not been able to fully handle the various grievances of the minority ethnic groups. But the answer to these problems is not to deliver Xinjiang to disaffected affiliates of Washingtons jihads. As with Syria and Libya, Washington once more plays a reckless game with Islamic extremism.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Jie Xiong is a Chinese technologist, translator and editor. He has participated in the digitization process of multiple leading enterprises in China. He is a founder of Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Ltd., a company that introduces China to Global South readers. He is a senior researcher at the Sichuan Institute for High Quality Development. He has written and translated more than 10 books. His latest translation is Cybernetic Revolutionaries.
Mike Tindall has spoken about the devastating effect Parkinson's disease has had on his father and the isolation his parents have faced during the pandemic.

He paid tribute to his mother Linda, who is the primary carer for his father Philip, as 'a very stoic, northern lady, who refuses to give her man up', but said he is trying to convince her to accept offers of support.

The former England rugby player, 42, who is married to the Queen's granddaughter, Zara Tindall, joined forces with the Duchess of Gloucester for a video conversation to mark World Parkinson's Day.

During the warm exchange with his royal in-law, Tindall also gave an insight into family life with his baby son Lucas, who was born just over five weeks ago.

Mike Tindall (pictured), 42, revealed the devastating impact of Parkinson's disease on his father during a joint video call with the Duchess of Gloucester as he marked his first official royal engagement on Wednesday

The former England rugby player, who is married to the Queen's granddaughter, Zara Tindall, joined forces with the Duchess of Gloucester (pictured) for a video conversation to mark World Parkinson's Day

He told Danish-born Birgitte, who congratulated him on the new arrival: 'Sorry, that's why I was a couple of minutes late. I was just dropping Lucas out of the room, he was snoozing. Zara's about to feed him.'

Birgitte, who is married to the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, said of Tindall's daughters Mia, seven, and two-year-old Lena: 'You've got those two little nursery helpers to do most of the work, haven't you?'

Tindall laughed and said: 'It's a fine balance - I love that they want to help, but maybe they try and help a little bit too much, and smother the baby a little bit.'

Lucas's middle name, Philip, is in honour of both Tindall's father and the Duke of Edinburgh, who died just 19 days after his great-grandson was born.

Princess Royal (centre) and Mark Phillips (back right) leaving with the parents of Mike Tindall after the marriage of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall, at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh

The Duchess of Gloucester (pictured) has been Patron of Parkinson's UK since 1997, which focuses on providing support for people living with Parkinson's and their families, as well as funding and promoting research into the condition

Mike Tindall and Zara Phillips emerging from Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh after their wedding on 30 July 2011

The video call took place on April 7, but its release was postponed because of the duke's death on April 9.

Tindall told the duchess that his parents are both on the vulnerable list and have not left their home for a year.

He added: 'What they've really missed out of this year is... my mum's missed companionship, really - being able to go and see someone else, because she doesn't feel now that she's comfortable leaving my dad alone.'

Tindall is patron of Cure Parkinson's, while Birgitte is patron of Parkinson's UK.

He said his 74-year-old father, who was diagnosed with the disease in 2003, has had a 'tough five years', but that the worsening of his condition stretches back 10 years to 2011 - the year Tindall married Zara.

'I would say he's had a really sort of tough five years, maybe even longer actually,' he said.

'It's our 10-year wedding anniversary and it was that year that ... through his Parkinson's, his spine in his back is obviously curved, and then it caused problems with his discs and then he had to have a wheelchair at the wedding. He could walk some bits of it.'

Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall during day three of the Cheltenham Festival at Cheltenham Racecourse on 12 March 2020

Speaking about how his father lost strength after a back operation and then suffered colitis, Tindall added: 'When you start adding those things up, they've made a massive change over the last 10 years, whereas before that, you know, it was a lot slower process.

'Then you throw in lockdown and literally they're both on the vulnerable list so they have not literally left the house in a year.'

The duchess said: 'It is very tough, and it affects the whole family, not least your mother, who is the prime carer ... for your dad.'

Tindall replied: 'Yeah, we keep telling her that she doesn't need to be that, but she's a very stoic, northern lady, who refuses to give her man up.

'And we're trying to convince her that you're not giving up your man, you're just allowing the frustrating parts of it that, you know, get you sort of riled up, that someone else deals with and it also gives you a life.'

Describing how his mother, 72, was reluctant to leave Philip's care to others, he added: 'We've tried having care, the odd carer come in and look after him to give her time.'

The duchess replied: 'It can be really difficult to persuade somebody like your mother that for her own sake.'

The Duchess of Gloucester, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Gloucester during day two of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on 21 June 2017

The wider royal family, like the rest of the nation, have spent most of the last year separated from one another in lockdown, and Tindall revealed he is missing his royal relatives.

The duchess said: 'It's been lovely to talk with you, Mike, it really has.'

Tindall replied wholeheartedly: 'I can't wait to see you guys, it's been so long.'

The pair praised those involved in supporting people with Parkinson's and working to find a cure.

Tindall said: 'Thank you for everyone who is involved with any parts of Parkinson's, it means a lot to me, especially from my heart and please keep doing it ... hopefully (World Parkinson's Day) will end one day.'

The ex-rugby player, who has long campaigned to raise awareness, has been fundraising for Cure Parkinson's with a 750km (466-mile) bike ride.

Some 145,000 people in the UK are living with the disease, and identified as being clinically vulnerable to Covid-19, with an added risk for the majority who are over 70.
DP World has launched DUBUY.com, a global wholesale e-commerce platform, bringing efficient, reliable B2B eCommerce to Africa and enabling market access for both UAE companies, and global companies.

DUBUY.com is available first in Rwanda with plans to expand across Africa and around the world.

DUBUY.com adds digital trading corridors to the physical corridors DP World has built across the African continent with its investment in ports, terminals and logistics operations. DUBUY.com is partnering with local businesses and the Rwandan Government to help unlock access to global markets for small and medium-sized UAE enterprises, using DP World's end-to-end integrated supply chain services to fulfil orders for export and to receive goods. The platform also enables global companies to find and serve new trading partners in Africa, opening up access to fast growing markets.

Online marketplaces are a significant opportunity for economic growth in Africa which today accounts for less than 0.5 percent of global eCommerce according to the United Nations Conference on Development and Trade. In 2018, trade between the UAE and Rwanda reached AED1. 6 billion ($434.8 million), with the size of trade growing significantly in the last decade as part of wider bi-lateral and economic ties between the two countries.

The combination of DUBUY.com with DP World's physical logistics infrastructure and data-driven logistics solutions will solve some of the key challenges to the growth of eCommerce, including reliable fulfilment, secure financial transactions and the movement of goods.

Clare Akamanzi, CEO, Rwanda Development Board, said: "DUBUY.com will make the previously impossible, possible, for many Rwandan entrepreneurs to trade with the UAE  and beyond. People and companies everywhere are turning to technology to fuel their post-pandemic recovery and improve access to global trade. World class eCommerce platforms backed by innovative, reliable logistical networks can lead the charge, transforming how business is done across the continent."

DUBUY.com is the first online store created for all Rwandan licensed exporters, importers, and manufacturers. In Rwanda, DP World has already invested in a logistics hub which offers container handling, cold chain and bonded warehouses.

Mahmood Al Bastaki, Chief Operating Officer of Dubai Trade World, added: "DUBUY.com represents a new model of partnership with the UAE, designed to strengthen the existing potential in Rwanda, opening businesses and markets organically, by enabling trade and supplying innovation. This technology allows home grown businesses to become international manufacturers and exporters - by linking them with new markets in Africa, the Middle East and eventually the rest of the world. In Rwanda, this includes the promotion of valuable exports like tea, coffee, and horticulture, through a network which significantly upgrades the country's supply chain logistics  both in urban and rural areas. As well as providing access to new digital tools that will help local businesses prosper. We're not just building in Rwanda; we're building with Rwanda  for Rwanda."

Mike Bhaskaran, Chief Operating Officer, Technology and Logistics, DP World said: "DP World is investing to build the future of world trade. Our vision is to create more efficient trading corridors for our customers through our ports and logistics, digital technology to make operations more efficient, and now online platforms for trade. We are proud to play our role supporting economic development and increased prosperity in Africa."

DUBUY.com offers a one-stop-shop, ensuring all transactions on the site are secure, from onboarding only trusted suppliers through to integrating leading payment service providers, like Rosoom. There are pre-negotiated, heavily discounted shipping tariffs in place, with weekly console boxes moving between origin and destination with guaranteed transit times, and incentivized shipping costs. Shipping methods are also customized according to the scale of each transaction, and the urgency of shipments. These benefits culminate to bring a platform which is agile, responsive, and will position the UAE to be centre of Rwandan trade and e-commerce. - TradeArabia News Service
He had taken the money from Sindhura Reddy for investment into real estate but failed to develop the property or return her money. Police also arrested a woman identified as Jayanti Goud who was also threatening the victim on behalf of Narasimha Reddy.

Television actor Lakshmi Narasimha Reddy was arrested on Wednesday on charges of cheating a businesswoman to the tune of Rs 85 lakh here, police said.

Narasimha Reddy, who is the husband of TV anchor Shyamala, had approached Sindhura Reddy and invited her to make the investment. He told her that he owns four acres of land land valued Rs 100 crore in Gandipet area in Hyderabad and plans to build a swimming pool, pub and game zone there.

Sindhura Reddy, in her complaint to the police, said she paid Rs 85 lakh in the form of cash and cheques in 2017 but no construction was taken up. When she demanded her money back, he started threatening her.

The victim alleged that Jayanti Goud, who introduced herself as the sister of Narasimha Reddy, was also threatening her.

Sindhura Reddy lodged a complaint with Raidurgam police station under the limits of Cyberabad police commissionerate on April 19. The police registered a case of cheating and took up investigation. They arrested the accused on Wednesday.

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New York made national new s when body camera footage captured police in Rochester handcuffing and pepper-spraying a 9-year-old girl in January. Last month, the state made headlines again when a 7-year-old boy was arrested in St. Lawrence County.

Many were shocked: Do we really treat elementary school children this way in the U.S.?

Yes we do, but we dont have to.

In Massachusetts, where I was formerly the commissioner of the commonwealths youth justice agency, we raised the minimum age for arrest from 7 to 12 years old in 2018, based on what we know is best for young children and community safety. Now, New York is considering a similar bill that, besides raising the minimum age of arrest to 12, also creates pathways to link children and families with services available through local child welfare and social services. The Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice, a national group of 59 current and former youth justice system administrators, of which I am a member, has endorsed the legislation, along with the Childrens Defense Fund, Legal Aid Society and Bronx Defenders, among others.

Like New York, Massachusetts used to arrest hundreds of elementary school-aged children every year. Our approach to young childrens behavior was not just a failure; it was cruel and ineffective.

Child development and psychology research has shown that young children are negatively affected by stress and trauma, and that their healthy development is contingent on positive relationships. Criminalizing young children runs contrary to this scientific research, and it has been shown that children who have been involved with the youth justice system will be more likely to have mental health issues, display antisocial behaviors, and be involved in the adult justice system later in life. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics endorses raising the minimum age of prosecution to at least 12 years old.

Prosecuting children as young as seven raises significant concerns about their capacity to meaningfully participate in the court process. The United States Supreme Court has held that an individual cannot access his right to due process unless he has sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding  and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him. It has been widely understood that young children do not have that developmental capacity.

Moreover, the youth justice systems more punitive responses  probation, detention and institutional placement  are harmful and inappropriate for very young children. A childs contact with the youth justice system raises the chances, by more than 50 percent, that he or she will someday return to the adult system. And the age of first arrest is one of the biggest predictors of future delinquency and adult criminal behavior  not because these children are inherently crime-prone, but rather due to the negative effects the punitive justice system has on their development.

In 2018, Massachusetts realized that we could do better for young children and the community could be safer when we wrap the right services and supports around a child and family. Children shouldnt have to be arrested to get what they need. States across the U.S. are following this professional expertise: Utah and California have already raised the age, and legislation to do the same is under consideration in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Texas.

This is not just a childrens issue, but an important step toward racial equity. Black and Latinx youth are disproportionately represented in New Yorks justice system at every step from arrest to prosecution, detention, conviction and incarceration. Legislation that diverts the youngest children from the youth justice system and links them with services in the community will help address these disparities.

The time is now for New York to pass legislation raising the age for delinquency to 12 and end the arrest of young children.

Jane E. Tewksbury is a former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services. She also served as an assistant district attorney and assistant attorney general in Massachusetts.
Apr. 29Hawaii lawmakers made a run this year at reining in residential use of farmland where little or no farming occurs, but couldn't agree on effective action.

Leaders in the Senate balked at supporting a recommendation made in December by the state Office of Planning, which was asked two years ago by the Legislature to study the issue and offer up a viable solution.

The agency recommended that homes be permitted on farmland only if agricultural activity generates at least $10, 000 a year for occupants of such housing.

Existing state law requires only that homes on farmland be "used in connection with a farm, " which leaves counties without a clear means of enforcement, according to the office.

"Currently, there is no definition of what constitutes a bona fide farm dwelling, resulting in the proliferation of dwellings in the agricultural district without any significant farm component, " the office said in its report to the Legislature.

Use of less-costly farmland for residential use with little to no farmingsometimes referred to as gentlemen's farmshas been a growing problem, especially on the neighbor islands, in recent decades with developers carving up major tracts of farmland after the almost complete disappearance of sugar cane and pineapple plantations statewide.

A bill to require the minimum income requirement and impose fines for violations, House Bill 247, sailed through House committees with strong support from some farmers, farming organizations and government agencies that included the Hawaii Farm Bureau, Hawaii Cattlemen's Council, state Department of Agriculture, Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting, Ulupono Initiative and the state Real Estate Commission.

The Farm Bureau, which represents 1, 800 members, said in written testimony : "Lands capable of supporting viable agricultural activities should be protected and kept in agriculture for agricultural production."

Story continues

But after a unanimous approval by the full House in March, a campaign to oppose the bill mounted.

Much of the opposition was led by Maui real estate attorney Jakob Wormser, who submitted a petition against the bill with roughly 900 names mainly associated with Maui addresses along with about 140 mainland cities and several foreign countries.

Wormser suggested the issue the bills aim to address applies to Oahu and not Maui. He also said the income requirement would harm farmers who raise food for themselves.

"You must kill this bill, " he told members of two Senate committees.

Other opponents raised more issues with the income requirement, including how it would apply to bad production years or crops that can take years to produce income.

Paul Areus said in written testimony that he owns 2 acres of ag land and farms half of it but doesn't earn close to $10, 000 a year.

"I am not aware of any type of crop that you could grow on 2 acres of land and earn that type of income, " he said.

Jason Stone said in written testimony that homes on ag land help provide affordable rental housing in Maui's high-priced housing market.

The Senate Agriculture and Environment committee and Senate Water and Land committee jointly passed the bill with an amendment eliminating the income requirement.

Hawaii island Sen. Lorraine Inouye, chairwoman of the Water and Land committee, noted that her son and daughter have a 7-acre farm mostly full of fruit trees and don't make $10, 000 a year.

After another public hearing, the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection committee and Ways and Means committee said in a joint report that it needed to address claims that the bill would hurt small family-owned farms and possibly impede the creation of affordable housing particularly on the neighbor islands where most residents live on agricultural land.

Initially, the House disagreed with the Senate amendment but then reversed its position and voted unanimously to support the measure, which tweaks a couple other portions of a law pertaining to permissible uses on farmland.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and expressed concerns over the recent announcement made by U.S. President Joe Biden regarding the events that took place in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire, Aliyevs press service said in a statement on Wednesday.

"During the conversation, President Aliyev touched upon the statement delivered by U.S. President Joe Biden over the so-called 'Armenian Genocide', underlining that Turkey is a close friend and ally of Azerbaijan. Turkey plays a very important and positive role in the post-war time in the region, while Bidens remarks were met with concern in the leadership and public," the statement reads.

Moreover, the sides exchanged opinions on the situation that unfolded after the "Armenian-Azerbaijani war", the press service noted. Aliyev also stressed the importance of unblocking communications in the region. Aliyev and Blinken also exchanged opinions on the future activities of the OSCE Minsk Group, TASS reported.
But at the same time, she continued, there were a lot of people I felt that had pigeonholed me into this idea of what they thought I was. They were calling me an activist without any prior knowledge of me other than this piece, because Im a transgender person who had spoken on something.

So while the appearance got her noticed, it was a very specific sort of notice, at least at first. In those early meetings with production companies, Harrison was brimming with pitches like, say, the one for a show about a dog and its dysfunctional, codependent relationship with the little bird that lives in his rectum. (I gave them my gold ideas, she said.) But all they were interested in were stories about trans girls coming out and getting rejected by their families, she said, or having her come on shows to talk about the difference between being gay and trans.

All of which made Together Together that much more special. Here was a story about a clearly cisgender woman  the plot revolves around her characters pregnancy, after all  in which the relationship between the younger woman and the older man is much more nuanced than one sees in a lot of rom-coms. Not as much will-they-or-wont-they, and more: Where does all this lead, if anywhere?

It really takes a lot of humility to engage in a story like this, and Patti is very humble, and always authentic, Helms said. But then shes also one of the funniest human beings on Earth.

The film came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. I didnt know if I was going to go into acting more, or kind of lean into TV writing or comedy, she said. And I was processing a lot of feelings about my self-esteem, and body dysmorphia. But then I got the script, and it was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.

Beckwith, the director, had spotted Harrison performing on a late night show and realized she had found her Anna. Harrison had an amazing, salty, a little spiky, humor and way about her, Beckwith said, that went hand in hand with her vision of Anna as warm, like Patti, but not a totally open book.
A lone wandering polar bear tried to steal fishing gear from an angler while desperately searching for food after wandering 600 miles from its natural habitat in Russia.

Wildlife inspectors in Russia's largest - and coldest - region of Yakutia have so far failed to snare the adventurous predator amid fears for its survival so far from its Arctic home.

The bear crept up on angler Andrey Rybakov, 41, who was fishing on the Khandyga River - and gave him the fright of his life.

A lone wandering polar bear has tried to steal fishing gear from a local man as it desperately tries to find food after wandering 600 miles across Russia

Wildlife inspectors have so far failed to snare the adventurous predator amid fears for its survival so far from its natural habitat

The fisherman grabbed his ice pick and a rod and fled to take refuge in his Toyota Land Cruiser.

Meanwhile, the bear with the travel bug - nicknamed Polar Paddington - rummaged through his fishing bag and box.

But there was no catch to steal for the beast that has ventured far outside its species' normal habitat into the territory of the brown bear.

'I was sitting and fishing - and this bear suddenly came from behind,' said a clearly shaken Rybakov.

'I heard nothing. And not just any bear. A polar bear.'

He recorded a video - the best footage so far of the wandering polar bear, and admitted: 'He scared me.'

'I only managed to grab my fishing rod and ice pick - and run,' he said.

'It turned my fishing box upside down.'

Rybakov said: 'It approached my rods. There are no fish! Ugh... I can't go back now. It sits and watches. And attacks me when I try to approach.'

From his vehicle, he shouted at the bear: 'Leave my rods alone.'

With no fish in sight, the bear instead stole his spoon lures as a souvenir, infuriating the fisherman.

'What the hell are you doing?', shouted the Russian.

The bear crept up on angler Andrey Rybakov, 41, who was fishing on the Khandyga River - and gave him the fright of his life

Polar Paddington has traveled 600 miles south from his natural habitat, sparking fears he may be lost in unfamiliar territory

The bear is last seen climbing a snowy wooded embankment with the angler's spook lures clutched in its jaw.

Now officials in Yakutia are renewing efforts to catch the bear amid concerns for the safety of locals - and the bear so far from home.

It is highly unusual for bears to move even a short distance south from the Arctic coast where they have a plentiful supply of food.

But this bear has gone 600 miles as the crow flies, and in reality probably much further on its winding journey during which it has followed remote roads, and gone cross country, all the time evading efforts of wildlife inspectors to track it.

Earlier this month it crossed the Arctic Circle in a southerly direction, and is now close to the notorious Road of Bones, built by prisoners in Stalin times, connecting the world's coldest city Yakutsk with former Gulag port Magadan.

Some experts initially believed that the wild animal might be an albino brown bear, because it is so unusual for polar bears to venture here.

The fact the bear appears in good condition, not starving despite its failure to grab any lunch from Rybakov.

'It's sat-nav is awry,' said one local.

Ecology Ministry in Yakutia region, Sakhamin Afanasyev, instructed wildlife inspectors to make a new bid to find and catch the wanderer.

Meanwhile, new safety warnings have been issued to residents to be alert for the creature.

Video taken from a truck following behind the bear shows it bounding through the snow on the Yana Road, heading south towards the regional capital Yakutsk in mid-April

A lost polar bear had wandered 500 miles from its natural habitat in the Russian Arctic by mid-April and has continued to travel away from its home

Previous sightings showed the bear in late March some 300 miles adrift from the Arctic, and more recently in mid-April on the lonely Yana road in Tomponsky district about 500 miles from home.

In 2017, a female cub was rescued in Verkhoyansk district, some 450 miles from the Arctic coast, after raiding a fish processing plant on the Kolyma River.

But now this bear has gone further.

If caught, an assessment will be made on whether Polar Paddington can be moved back to the Arctic and reintroduced to the wild.
Outlook Therapeutics is hoping to become the first and only company to commercialize an FDA-approved ophthalmic formulation of bevacizumab for use in wet AMD

There is something uniquely exciting about being the first company to bring a much-needed product to market.

Inc ( ) is hoping to become the first and only company to commercialize a US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved ophthalmic formulation of bevacizumab, otherwise known as the cancer drug Avastin, for use in a damaging retinal condition known as wet age-related macular degeneration, or wet AMD.

The chronic eye disorder leaks fluid into the retina and causes blurred vision or blind spots, which can eventually lead to loss of sight. For the nearly 700,000 people who suffer from the disease in the US alone, treatment options include expensive anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) drugs that can cost up to $2,000 a sitting and cause painful side effects like intraocular inflammation.

Thats what makes bevacizumab an attractive option  at around $100 per shot, there is a serious cost advantage. The problem, as with any off-label drug, is that there are risks to using unapproved bevacizumab across the value chain: potencies can vary, no physician standards in how to administer the drug, or a syringe malfunction, adding an extra layer of stress to an already unpleasant procedure.

is in the envied position of being the first and only company to develop what is essentially a known quantity with an established market in its lead drug candidate ONS-5010. If approved, ONS-5010, which will be marketed as LYTENAVA, will be the first on-label ophthalmic formulation of bevacizumab.

Physicians already know how to use it, the FDA is comfortable with it and patients are already being treated with it, so its a huge market potential for us, Outlook Therapeutics CEO Lawrence Kenyon told Proactive.

The market potential is significant: an estimated US$13.1 billion value from anti-VEGF drugs alone, not including unapproved bevacizumab, which represents around 50% of the wet AMD treatment market in the US. Whats more, wet AMD is a disease that primarily affects the steadily increasing elderly population.

Breakthrough trials

The FDA is very familiar with the use of bevacizumab for wet AMD, but Outlook Therapeutics still needed trial data to prove that ONS-5010 was safe and effective as a treatment. So the group designed an initial proof-of-concept study called NORSE ONE that would provide more data on a small number of patients that showed bevacizumab was behaving as expected.

The study, which was run in Australia, only included 60 patients and would not achieve statistical significance by design. A control arm for the main anti-VEGF drug Lucentis was also included. As an endpoint, patients were expected to achieve a three-line (15-letter) gain in vision. Patients were either treatment-naive or had a long-term history with wet AMD treatments, meaning they were not as likely to achieve the primary endpoint.

When the data from NORSE ONE was released last year, the results were exactly what we expected to see, according to Kenyon. The company saw that treatment naive patients would have the best chance to see gains, with a third of the ONS-5010 patients achieving a three-line gain. The study also confirmed that ONS-5010 provided the benefit for patients losing their vision without any intraocular inflammation that is common with other anti-VEGF drugs.

But it is the pivotal NORSE TWO safety and efficacy study that investors are watching closely as it will achieve statistical significance.

The firm used the lessons learned from NORSE 1 to help design NORSE TWO, increasing its assurance in the process. Whats more, a Comparison of Age-related Macular Degeneration Treatments Trials (CATT) trial ran in 2011 by the National Eye Institute demonstrated bevacizumab to be equivalent to Lucentis  further adding to Outlook Therapeutics confidence.

NORSE TWO involves US patients. It is a randomized, masked, controlled trial of ONS-5010 versus Lucentis, both study arms include predominantly treatment-naive patients with baseline visual acuity of less than 20/50 at the start of the study. The safety and efficacy data is expected in 3Q 2021 and will support a planned new US Biologics License Application (BLA) filing  essentially, an FDA submission for approval.

Outlook Therapeutics designed a superiority clinical trial, allowing it to enroll far fewer patients instead of doing a much larger non-inferiority study to Lucentis. The study compares monthly-dosed ONS-5010 to quarterly dosed Lucentis with the same endpoint as NORSE ONE. Based on data from the CATT study, that number should be about one-half of the monthly-dosed ONS-5010 patients.

What we're hoping to see, quite frankly, is a difference of 10 points between those two arms, based on the historical data, Kenyon said. We can't use historical data to get approved, but if those numbers are proven out in the NORSE TWO study, we think we easily meet the endpoint.

Topline results

Because NORSE ONE and TWO were so streamlined and efficient, Outlook Therapeutics did not have enough patients in the safety database, which requires a minimum of 300 patients on the drug for approval. It recently ran a NORSE THREE open-label safety trial to bring it up to the required number of patients.

Topline results from NORSE THREE released in March 2021 demonstrated that ONS-5010 showed no unexpected safety trends and had a safety profile consistent with that of prior published data on the use of bevacizumab for ophthalmic conditions  results which Kenyon terms excitingly boring.

Initial response to the trial from the medical community is promising. NORSE THREE enrolled 197 patients in four weeks  a fact that CEO Kenyon called pretty exciting.

It tells us doctors must feel comfortable that ONS-5010 is providing the same benefits that they would expect from any anti-VEGF treatment for wet AMD, he noted.

Assuming NORSE TWO goes according to plan, Outlook Therapeutics expects to receive BLA approval from the FDA by mid-2022, giving it the first and only approved bevacizumab for use in retinal indications. And it has the cash runway to get it through the process, having recently closed a $35 million bought deal offering.

'Right product at right time'

Kenyon, who has been involved in multiple C-level roles at biotech firms for the last 20 years, says NORSE TWO is the lowest risk pivotal trial hes ever seen. It's not a slam dunk by any means, but quite frankly, we know in our minds that our bevacizumab is the same as Avastin. We haven't proven it, but we're confident that's the case.

If the company can get ONS-5010 approved as the first ophthalmic formulation of bevacizumab, it is looking at a 12-year exclusivity period. Avastin will go off patent right around the time and Outlook Therapeutics would likely be approved to use the formulation. Its the right product at the right time, Kenyon said.

Eventually, Outlook Therapeutics will look at using ONS-5010 to treat other retinal conditions, but for now, the firms sights remain firmly set on tackling wet AMD. Its executive team is well-versed in bringing new drugs to market  in fact, chief commercial officer Jeff Evanson previously served as the franchise head of the Lucentis program at Alcon/Novartis [AC3]. The firm has a solid base with which to build the infrastructure needed to bring ONS-5010 to market.

Kenyon is confident that the coming months will prove what Outlook Therapeutics team firmly believes  that ONS-5010 is the safe answer to treat debilitating retinal diseases.

Weve spent the last couple of years focusing on ONS-5010, Kenyon said. Long term, we think ONS-5010 would be a great building block. We have the potential to build an ophthalmic company around ONS-5010 once we get this asset across the finish line.

Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas
President Joe Biden returns to Georgia Thursday to mark his 100th day in office, where he'll meet with former President Jimmy Carter and host a drive-in car rally.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were supposed to headline an Atlanta rally last month, but plans changed after the Atlanta spa shootings, in which Asian women made up the bulk of the victims.

Joe will now head to the Peach state with first lady Jill to sell the American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan that will account for $4.1trillion in spending over the next 10 years - which hasn't yet been approved by Congress.

In his first address to Congress on Wednesday night he laid out a series of tax hikes on the rich in order to fund the two plans, and is facing questions over whether they will be enough.

The president and vice president spent part of the March 19 trip speaking with Asian-American community leaders and delivering remarks aimed at curbing hate crimes against Asians, which have been on the rise since the advent of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now safely able to engage in politics again, Thursday's 'Back on Track' rally will be an attempt to reinforce the president's message from Wednesday night, when he delivered his first address before Congress, where he touted early accomplishments and asked them to do more.

It will also serve as a thank you to the voters of Georgia who delivered for Biden thrice: once in the November presidential election, swinging it blue for the first time since 1992. And then a second and third time on January 5, with the election of Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in two run-off races.

President Joe Biden (pictured) and first lady Jill BIden will head to Georgia Thursday for a meeting with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and then for a drive-in rally to mark Biden's 100th day in office

Former President Jimmy Carter (left) and former first lady Rosalynn Carter (right) are fully vaccinated and will host President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden in Plains, Georgia on Thursday

President-elect Joe Biden (center) is photographed campaigning on behalf of Rev. Raphael Warnock (center left) and Jon Ossoff (center right) in December in the run-up to the January run-off elections

Thursday night's drive-in car rally will likely be one of the last of its kind, as more and more Americans are being vaccinated against COVID-19

Those elections gave Biden a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, allowing him to sign his proposed $1.9 trillion COVID relief package in March.

With the passage of that bill, Biden made good on a promise he made to Georgia voters at a rally in January, the night before the election.

'If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door,' Biden said in Atlanta. 'And if you send Sens. Perdue and Loeffler back to Washington, those checks will never get there. It's just that simple. The power is literally in your hands.'

A round of $1,400 stimulus checks was included in the March COVID-19 relief package, piggybacking on the $600 checks that were included in the package in December, signed by former President Donald Trump.

Now Biden needs to get public sentiment on his side to pass two more trillion dollar-plus packages: his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan.

Biden wants Congress to spend about $4.1 trillion on the two plans.

He'll also likely address Georgia's new Republican-backed voting law, which prompted Major League Baseball to move the all-star game out of the state.

Thursday night's drive-in rally - set up like a drive-in movie theater format to enforce social distancing - may be one of the last of its kind, as more and more Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19.

Biden and the Democrats used drive-in type rallies as a way to pump up the base in the months leading up to the November election, as Trump continued to pack unmasked thousands into his rallies.

Biden was pushing that he took the threat of the coronavirus seriously.

Biden and first lady Jill Biden's first stop in the state Thursday will be to Plains, Georgia for a meeting with the Carters away from the press.

The White House has given no specific reason for the meeting.

The Bidens, along with Jimmy Carter, 96, and his wife Rosalynn, 93, have all been vaccinated.

The Carters had to miss Biden's January inauguration due to COVID-19 concerns for people of their age.

Biden and Carter lost a close friend earlier this month with the death of Walter Mondale, who had served as Carter's vice president.
Northern Ireland's First Minister Arlene Foster talks during a television interview outside the Stormont Parliament building in Belfast, Northern Ireland (Photo : REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo)

Arlene Foster is to step down as Northern Ireland's First Minister at the end of June, bowing to pressure from members of her Democratic Unionist Party unhappy at her leadership over Brexit and social issues.



Her announcement adds to instability in the British province, where angry young pro-British loyalists rioted in recent weeks over the perceived growing power of Irish nationalists and post-Brexit trade barriers with the rest of the United Kingdom.



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Foster, who took power in 2016, said in a statement that she would also step down as party leader on May 28.



Her leadership of Northern Ireland was "the privilege of my life," she said.



The announcement comes a day after a majority of DUP lawmakers signed a letter seeking a confidence vote in Foster, who many blame for mishandling Brexit negotiations.



Foster resisted compromise on the terms of Britain's exit from the European Union when her party wielded huge power in propping up the government of former British Prime Minister Theresa May.



Foster's decision to throw DUP support behind May's successor Boris Johnson then backfired spectacularly when he broke the party's "blood red line" and agreed to Brussels' demand for trade barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.



The resulting Northern Ireland Protocol leaves Northern Ireland within the EU's trading sphere, avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland but infuriating pro-British unionists by undermining the region's place in the United Kingdom.



Although Foster has repeatedly called on the EU to scrap the protocol - something it says it will not do - some party figures have demanded an even harder line.



Others have complained that she is too liberal for what is one of the most socially conservative political parties in Europe and that her opposition to gay rights and women's rights is not stringent enough.



Johnson thanked Foster for her dedication to the people of Northern Ireland over many years. "I hope that she stays in public service for years to come," he said in a tweet.



Analysts have pointed to several possible candidates to succeed her including Northern Ireland Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots, the party's leader in the London parliament, Jeffrey Donaldson and fellow MP Gavin Robinson.



But it was unclear how a new leader might shift the political fortunes of the DUP, which has been losing support to both the moderate cross community Alliance Party and the small hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV).



"There isn't a clear ideological direction for the party to go in and that's the problem with this coup," said Jon Tonge, politics professor at the University of Liverpool.



A harder line from a new leader on either Brexit or social issues could destabilise Northern Ireland's power-sharing government that the DUP leads with Irish nationalist rivals Sinn Fein under the terms of the 1998 peace deal that ended three decades of political and sectarian bloodshed between pro-British unionists and Irish nationalists.



"Sinn Fein will work with all parties to progress social reform, political change and economic prosperity - but we will robustly oppose damaging policies or regressive throwback politics of the past," Sinn Fein's Northern Ireland leader Michelle O'Neill said in a statement.


Washington: US President Joe Biden has said that 100 days since he took the oath of office and inherited the worst pandemic in a century and the worst economic crisis in a decade, America is on the move again.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday (April 28) night, President Joe Biden said that throughout history, presidents have come to the chamber to speak to the US Congress, to the nation and to the world to declare war, to celebrate peace, to announce new plans and possibilities.

"Tonight, I come to talk about the crisis and opportunity. About rebuilding the nation, revitalising our democracy and winning the future for Americans," he said.

"Hundred days since I took the oath of office, inherited our nation, the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis in a decade since the Great Depression.

"Now after 100 days I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. Crisis to opportunity," Biden said.

He said that life can knock people down, but in America, they never, ever stay down. Americans always get up. Today, that is what people are doing.

"America is rising, choosing hope over fear, truth over lies, and light over darkness. After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for take-off."

"We are working again. Discovering again and leading the world again. We have shown each other and the world that there is no quit in America, none," Biden said.

He said that 100 days ago, America's house was on fire and the extraordinary leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the Democrats.

"Together we passed the American Rescue Plan, one of the most consequential rescue packages in American history. We are already seeing results," Biden added.

(Inputs from PTI)

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NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Award winning market research consulting firm Fact.MR's latest report on global halal logistics market forecasts a strong growth through 2021 and beyond. Soaring demand for halal food products among Islamic population within food & beverages industry is expected to majorly sustain halal logistics market growth throughout the current financial year.

Historically, the market registered substantial gains, expanding at a CAGR of over 6.5% between 2016 and 2020. Major factors that aided to the growth of halal logistics market were the increasing number of high-net-worth Islamic individuals, growing demand for halal meat and processed food and rising halal warehousing as well as transportation logistics.

Countries with considerable Islamic population such as India, Nepal, Turkey, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are providing stimulus to the manufacturers investing in the food and beverages industry for halal meat and processed food & beverages. According to the study, South Asia accounted for 30% of the global halal transportation logistics market due to high demand for halal meat in the food & beverage industry. Such factors are projected to expand the halal logistics market at over 9% CAGR through 2031.

"According to the Fact.MR analysis, the market generated over US$ 168 Bn from food and beverages industry due to the surge in number of halal warehousing and halal meat consumption across the globe," says a Fact.MR analyst.

For more Insights into the Market, Request a Sample of this Report

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=5763

Key Takeaways

In terms of component, storage accounts for 60% of the halal logistics revenue share

Food and beverage end-use industry to hold over half of the total market share through 2021

South Asian countries such as India , Nepal , Bangladesh and many more to account for the largest market for halal logistics

, , and many more to account for the largest market for halal logistics Indonesia to emerge as the potential market for the halal logistics through 2031

to emerge as the potential market for the halal logistics through 2031 Being a muslim dominant country, Turkey is poised to reach double digit value by 2031-end

is poised to reach double digit value by 2031-end Transportation component to emerge as the second largest segment for halal logistics market

Competitive Landscape

Al Furqan Shipping & Logistics LLC, DB Schenker, HALA, HAVI, dnata, Yusen Logistics Co. Ltd., Freight Management Holdings Berhad, Kontena Nasional BHD, MASkargo, Northport BHD, Nippon Express, SEJUNG Shipping Co. Ltd., TASCO Berhad and TIBA Group among others. Expansion of existing product portfolios, strategic mergers and acquisitions, and capacity expansion are some of the important growth strategies adopted by some of the aforementioned players.

For instance, in October 2020, dnata announced to be the first one ever to offer fully integrated, temperature-controlled cool chain for temperature sensitive goods between cargo warehouses and aircraft.

Likewise, on 16th March 2021, Nippon express announced the expansion of growing market of muslim and non-muslims consumers attracted to halal's law across Japan.

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Key Questions Covered in the Report

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Which region is leading the halal logistics market?

How is demand for halal logistics market rising?

Which vertical for halal logistics market will create lucrative growth opportunities?

What are the key challenges faced by halal logistics manufacturers?

What is the impact of Covid-19 on halal logistics market?

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State Secretariat for Economic Affairs

Bern, 29.04.2021 - As of 26 April 2021, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) has once again expanded EasyGov.swiss, its online service desk for companies. With release 1.7, users can now record and publish job vacancies on the portal. Another milestone is the integration of working hour authorisations, particularly for night and Sunday working and on-call shifts. Both processes can now be completed entirely digitally on EasyGov.

Vacancy reporting obligation for professions with more than 5 per cent unemployment

Since 1 January 2020, employers have been legally required to report vacancies in professions with at least 5 per cent unemployment in Switzerland to their regional job centre. With this latest update, users can now record vacancies directly on EasyGov and advertise them to the public. If a vacancy is subject to the reporting obligation, it will be sent to the job centres online job portal (PLASTA) for approval via its interface (API). If the vacancy is not subject to the obligation, the data can be sent directly to job-room.ch and the European job mobility portal (EURES) for publication if required.



New application options:



create a job advertisement

 report a vacancy to the regional job centre where required

 view the status confirmation from the job centre in EasyGov

 advertise vacancies to the public:

o immediately for non-reportable vacancies

o after the statutory five-day embargo period for reportable vacancies

Working hour authorisations: from TACHO to EasyGov

Up to now, people have been able to submit requests for working hour authorisations online via TACHO (Travail ch online). These processes are now offered exclusively on EasyGov.

New application options:

 record working hour requests in full

 transmit working hour requests to the responsible authority fully electronically and receive, view and manage its response on EasyGov

 use previously recorded requests as templates or extend authorisations

Other key functions:

 A clear overview of all ongoing transactions, i.e. working hour requests and working hour authorisations

 Once requests have been assessed by the authority, the applicant can view the authorisations on EasyGov

 Employees of the Cantonal Labour Inspectorate (KAI) and SECO can record working hour requests on behalf of companies

Gradual expansion as an implementation objective for eGovernment Switzerland

EasyGov forms part of the strategy followed by eGovernment Switzerland, an organisation of the Confederation, cantons and municipalities, which aims to expand electronic government services. The further development of EasyGov also plays a role in the Federal Councils current Digital Switzerland strategy. It aims to simplify business processes, focus consistently on the needs of users and continuously optimise services. It is based on the idea that government services should be designed in such a way that they can be used in one place without any specialist knowledge of official responsibilities or specialist technical expertise.



EasyGov has already undergone a number of significant updates since its launch in November 2017. At the start, the platform was predominantly used by company founders as it enables them to complete all of the necessary government paperwork required to set up a company online, from registering with the Commercial Register to VAT and social and accident insurance. During the 2020-2023 legislative period, the number of government services available is set to increase considerably and the platform is to be optimised on an ongoing basis.



The coronavirus crisis has accelerated the digitalisation process for many SMEs. This is reflected in the number of companies registered for the service. The number of user accounts on EasyGov has doubled in the past year. The platform has already been used by around 40,000 companies.

Address for enquiries

State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO

Holzikofenweg 36

CH-3003 Bern

Tel. +41 58 462 56 56

Fax +41 58 462 56 00

Publisher

State Secretariat for Economic Affairs

http://www.seco.admin.ch




Police have launched a murder investigation following the fatal stabbing of a 40-year-old man in north London this evening.

Police were called by London Ambulance Service at 5.11pm to a report of a man suffering from stab wounds on High Road, in Willesden, Brent, north London. Officers attended.

Despite the best efforts of the emergency services, the man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

Police were called by London Ambulance Service at 5.11pm this evening to a report of a man suffering from stab wounds on High Road, in Willesden, Brent, north London (pictured)

Work is ongoing to formally identify him and police are in the process of locating and informing his next of kin.

A crime scene is in place and the public can expect to see an increased police presence in the area. Enquiries are ongoing and there have been no arrests.

Anyone with information is asked to call 101 or tweet @MetCC and quote CAD 5109/29Apr. Alternatively, contact the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

A crime scene is in place and the public can expect to see an increased police presence in the area. Enquiries are ongoing and there have been no arrests
Charleston, WV (25301)

Today

A few showers early with overcast skies later in the day. Thunder possible. High 86F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms in the evening, then variable clouds overnight with more showers at times. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Highlights Q1 2021 results:

Operations still heavily impacted by COVID-19 with Icelandairs capacity down by 92% in Q1 2021

Total revenue USD 57.3 million decreasing by 73%

Strong cargo revenues, up by 64%, and freight volumes exceeded pre-COVID levels

Charter and leasing services through Loftleidir-Icelandic generated important revenue streams for the Group

EBIT negative of USD 46.2 million compared to negative EBIT of USD 208.5 million last year

Net loss USD 30.1 million compared to USD 240.2 million in Q1 2020

Equity ratio adjusted for temporary effects of warrants; 23% compared to 25% at the beginning of the year

Total liquidity USD 281.9 million, thereof cash and marketable securities USD 109.9 million

Full integration of Air Iceland Connect with Icelandair completed successfully in March resulting in estimated annual cost synergies of about USD 3 million along with further revenue potential from Icelandairs brand, distribution and network effects

Bookings in the international route network for Q2 2021 are still weak, impacted by COVID-19 and travel restrictions in key markets

Moderate ramp-up expected to start in Q2, further capacity increases expected from Q3 2021 and given the current booking status the outlook for Q4 2021 is good

Following its marketing campaigns, Icelandair is experiencing strong interest for travel to Iceland from the US, subsequently opening up opportunities for the VIA market as soon as Europe opens

Good outlook for the cargo operation

Due to continued uncertainty the Company will not provide a financial guidance





Bogi Nils Bogason, President & CEO

Our focus on disciplined network management and tight cost control coupled with strong performance of our cargo operation has resulted in acceptable financial results given the heavy impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our domestic operation is showing signs of recovery and we believe that its integration into our international operations, completed in the quarter, will result in a stronger and more streamlined airline as well as improved services to our customers.

Despite the prolonged negative impact of the pandemic over the past weeks, we are optimistic that we will be able to start a moderate ramp-up from minimum operations in the second quarter with further capacity increases expected in the third quarter. The progress of vaccinations, especially in certain markets, such as the US, and potential lifting of travel restrictions for vaccinated travelers in Europe are positive steppingstones towards the recovery of air travel.

We see great opportunities for Iceland as a tourist destination when markets open again and the recent and ongoing volcanic eruption close to Keflavik International Airport has further added to Icelands visibility internationally. With robust infrastructure and our agile and flexible approach to route network management, we are prepared for a quick and efficient ramp-up as soon as the situation improves. In addition, our Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that we have now re-introduced into our fleet will further strengthen our route network and provide us with opportunities when it comes to efficiency, environmental performance and new markets.

Furthermore, the outlook for our cargo operation continues to be favorable. With recent investments in our cargo fleet we aim to increase the cargo capacity in our markets and at the same time strengthen Iceland as a cargo hub between continents in a similar way that our passenger hub provides attractive connections between Europe and North America.



We are in a strong position to manage the continued uncertainty and prepared to seize the opportunities ahead thanks to our outstanding employees, their great work and dedication.





Webcast 30 April 2021

An investor presentation will be webcast in relation to the publication of the results at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, 30 April 2021, at http://icelandairgroup.is . Bogi Nils Bogason, President & CEO of Icelandair Group, and Eva Soley Gudbjornsdottir, Group CFO, will present the Companys results and answer questions. The presentation and Q&A will take place in Icelandic. The presentation will be available after the meeting on the Icelandair Group website: http://icelandairgroup.is and under Company News on:

http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/news/companynews





Contact information

Investors: Iris Hulda Thorisdottir, Director Investor Relations. E-mail: iris@icelandairgroup.is

Media: Asdis Petursdottir, Director Communications. E-mail: asdis@icelandair.is

Attachments
Torii Logo While its a challenging market out there, we know our team will be able to win homes for our clients along with saving them money as we pay our clients closing costs

Home buying for many people can be a painful, stressful, and scary process. Born out of the frustration of Toriis CEO James Rogers experience with an ineffectual and archaic system, he founded Torii to reimagine the entire way people buy homes from top to bottom, search to close.

Now, this tech-powered real estate agency is available to buyers in Los Angeles. Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service, resulting in a very familiar feeling interface, similar to Tinder, but with the addition of data-backed real estate tools to empower Toriis home-buying clients, and a reliable team of expert agents too.

Even with the real estate market here and nationwide in an extreme sellers market, Toriis licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, knowledge of the real estate market, and their ability to advise their clients on making offers that win and close. Toriis intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer and live chat with their team, all from their phones. Why would todays phone-based home shoppers buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.

In addition to a wonderful interface and dedicated, talented staff, Toriis business model pays agents salaries (instead of the typical real estate commission structure) and uses the buyers agent commission to pay their buyers closing costs, saving clients an average of $7500 per transaction.

Torii launched in 2017 in Boston and the service is currently available there, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now in Los Angeles. Their team here consists of a number of top real estate agents including Annabelle Brownell who is a real estate broker and mortgage loan specialist representing real estate buyers, homeowners, and investors looking to purchase real estate. She is dual-licensed to service real estate purchasing as well as mortgage financing options linked to real estate assets. With an undergraduate degree from UCLA and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Management, Annabelles career includes seven years in technology marketing, seven years as a successful entrepreneur, and seven years as a real estate and business broker, including mortgage loan origination.

Annabelle is joined in Los Angeles, by LA native Leon Townsend III, who started his real estate career at Century 21 in 2015. Always a bit of a prodigy, Leon was the youngest high school graduate in the history of Pasadena High School and received both his undergraduate degree and MBA from California Lutheran University. Very oriented towards community building, Leon is an Advisory Board Member of the California Association of Realtors Young Professionals Network, the co-founder of the Deliberately Fair Housing group on Facebook, and is a frequent blood donor at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

Torii CEO James Rogers notes, we are thrilled to enter the LA real estate market and to start growing our team there, beginning with these two amazing agents who are used to prioritizing client service up to our extremely high standards. While its a challenging market out there, we know our team will be able to win homes for our clients along with saving them money as we pay our clients closing costs.

About Torii:

Torii has streamlined the home buying process by integrating the power of automation and machine learning with the personal touch of human-to-human customer service. Our licensed real estate team continuously receives 5-star reviews for their flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge of the real estate market. Our intuitive platform allows users to search for a property, schedule showings, submit an offer, live chat with our team, and track an offers progress, all from their phones. Why buy a home any other way? This is the new standard of real estate.

Torii is fully licensed and operates in Massachusetts and California, specializing in homes for sale in Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.
According to the latest figures from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) there were SEVENTEEN news cases of Covid-19 in counties Longford and Leitrim.

The daily statement says that here were 9 new cases in Longford and 8 in Leitrim on Wednesday, April 28.

See county by county table at end of story.

Nationally, NPHET stated that it has been notified of 3 additional deaths related to Covid-19 and 474 new confirmed cases.

Longford's 14 day incidence rate has fallen back down to the 6th highest in the country.

The county's 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 population is 163.9, which is above the national 14-day incidence rate of 124.6 per 100,000.

The incidence rate in Donegal is still the worst in the country and it is 295.9.

NPHET says there have been 67 positive Covid-19 cases in Longford in the 14 days from April 15 to April 28.

Longford's five day moving average of cases is 3.

According to the County Timeline of Confirmed Cases on Ireland's Covid-19 Data Hub the total number cases of Covid-19 in Longford since the pandemic began stands at 1,971 (as at Tuesday, April 27).

Nationally, NPHET reported on Thursday, April 29, that the Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been notified of 3 additional deaths related to COVID-19. There has been a total of 4,899 COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland.

As of midnight, Wednesday 28th April, the HPSC has been notified of 474 confirmed cases of COVID-19. There is now a total of 248,326* confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland.

Of the cases notified today:

239 are men / 232 are women

71% are under 45 years of age

The median age is 32 years old

NPHET highlighted 167 in Dublin, 39 in Kildare, 37 in Cork, 36 in Donegal, 29 in Meath and the remaining 166 cases are spread across all other counties.

The seven day incidence rate is 63.5 per 100 k nationally and the five day average is 426 each day.

As of 8am today, 155 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 44 are in ICU. 14 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours.

As of April 27 2021, 1,452,434 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ireland:

1,041,284 people have received their first dose

411,150 people have received their second dose

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.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 07:18:37|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Wednesday called for efforts to promote the political settlement of the Syria crisis and alleviate the suffering of Syrian people.

"The United Nations should continue its good offices and adhere to the Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political process. The international community should step up its efforts to seek a political solution and push for an early end to the Syria crisis," said Geng Shuang, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.

China calls on all parties in Syria to closely engage and consult UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen and reach consensus on the arrangements for the sixth session of the Constitutional Committee as soon as possible. The committee, in its work, should remain independent and free from outside interference, he told the Security Council.

China has noted Syria's announcement that it will hold general elections next month. China calls on the international community to respect the sovereignty of Syria and the choice of its people, he said. "The future and destiny of Syria must be determined by the Syrian people themselves."

Terminating external occupation and eliminating terrorist forces are necessary security conditions for a political solution to the Syrian problem. Many Security Council members are concerned about terrorist activities within Syria and the risk of their spillover. The international community should work together in accordance with international law and Security Council resolutions to combat terrorist forces in Syria, said Geng.

The international community should enhance the relevance of humanitarian relief in Syria and effectively alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people. UN agencies need to scale up food aid and help Syria maintain its agricultural infrastructure such as water and power supplies, he said.

China supports the United Nations in providing COVID-19 vaccines to Syria through the COVAX Facility. China's shipment of its vaccines arrived in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Saturday. Hopefully, the timely vaccination will help curb the spread of the pandemic in Syria, he said.

Impacted by unilateral sanctions and economic blockades, Syria is suffering from a severe shortage of oil, and many gas stations have been forced to shut down. China urges the countries concerned to heed the calls of the UN secretary-general, the UN high commissioner for human rights, and UN member states and to immediately lift unilateral sanctions against Syria.

The United Nations should respect the status and role of the Syrian government and continuously improve the patterns of humanitarian relief to Syria, he said.

China welcomes the progress in cross-line humanitarian relief operations. In March, the World Health Organization delivered 470,000 cross-line medical services to civilians in the northeast. According to the Syrian government, the Syrian side has approved the cross-line humanitarian deliveries to its northwest. But the UN convoy has yet to make the trip, he noted.

"The Syrian government wants to know exactly what has hindered the cross-line deliveries to the northwest, who is to blame, and what to do next. These issues and concerns deserve attention and warrant response."

China hopes that the United Nations, on the basis of making full use of the existing border crossing, will continue to scale up cross-line humanitarian relief operations and open up cross-line transport routes throughout Syria as soon as possible, he said.

China remains committed to playing a constructive role in taking forward the political process, restoring peace and stability in Syria and alleviating the sufferings of the Syrian people, said Geng. Enditem
Researching the effects of plastic particles on the human body and developing a health policy strategy for assessing the resulting risks is the goal of the new European research network PlasticsFatE. The University of Bayreuth, together with 26 other universities, institutes, and organizations from ten EU member states, is participating in the project.

The European Union is funding the four-year project to the tune of  6 million, with the University of Bayreuth receiving more than  465,000. The project was launched on 28 April 2021 at a virtual kick-off event for its partners.

PlasticsFatE is the first European research project to systematically address the effects of plastic particles on human health. The name stands for "Plastics Fate and Effects in the human body". The research partners will investigate plastic particles of different sizes, ranging from microplastic particles, which are smaller than five millimeters, to tiny nanoplastic particles, which are smaller than one ten-thousandth of a millimeter (100 nanometers).

They also wish to identify the health effects of additives that are added to plastics during their industrial production, as well as the effects of plastic particles on whose surface pollutants from the environment accumulate.

With the aim of developing an in-depth and differentiated scientific understanding of the health consequences of plastic particles, methods, and research technologies from the natural, environmental, health, and social sciences will be brought together in the new network.

At present, our knowledge of the health effects of micro- and nanoplastics is still very limited - not least because methods for detecting the smallest plastic particles in human tissue are only now being developed. A central task of the new research network is therefore to set up a comprehensive measurement and testing programme with which we can test the methods available today and specifically improve them with regard to their performance for micro- and nanoplastics research." Dr. Christian Laforsch, Professor, University of Bayreuth

In the focus of Bayreuth research: Uptake pathways, environmental influences, transport routes in the organism

The work at the University of Bayreuth is particularly concerned with the question of which uptake pathways, and in what quantities, plastic particles enter the human body. This can happen via a wide variety of foodstuffs, for example vegetables, fruit, drinks, or fish, but also through cosmetics, or via the air we breathe.

In addition, the effects of plastic particles on humans are to be investigated. "In model systems, we will analyze how micro- and nanoparticles are taken up by human cells, transported within the cells, and passed on to the surrounding tissue.

One aspect that should not be underestimated here are environmental influences that can change the properties of particles and thus facilitate their path into human cells," says project collaborator Anja Ramsperger M.Sc., who, together with other Bayreuth scientists, has already arrived at important new findings on this issue. (Science Advances)

The Bayreuth researchers will not only work with conventional two-dimensional cell cultures in which the cells multiply on the glass or plastic surface of a petri dish. Novel three-dimensional cell cultures and tissue models will also be used, making it possible to realistically simulate the effects of particles - for example in the gastrointestinal tract or in respiratory organs.

"With these research techniques, we will be able to gain new insights into how long these particles remain in cell tissue, and what possible effects they might have over longer periods of time," says Ramsperger.

A framework of risk assessment

The research partners involved in PlasticsFatE hope to use the knowledge they gain over the coming years to develop a scientifically sound framework of risk assessment for micro- and nanoplastics in relation to humans.

This concept will for the first time comprehensively consider the growing prevalence of micro- and nanoplastics in the human environment, and the resulting pathways by which they enter the human body. "The research results should enable us to provide those responsible in government and industry with well-founded recommendations for action that contribute to the protection of human health - both within the EU and on a global level," emphasizes Laforsch, who also heads the DFG (German Research Foundation) "Microplastics" Collaborative Research Centre at the University of Bayreuth.
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The Los Angeles Police Department has arrested five suspects allegedly involved in the Feb. 24 shooting of Lady Gagas dogwalker and the kidnapping of her two French bulldogs.

Three of the suspects  James Jackson, 18; Jaylin White, 19; and Lafayette Whaley, 27  have been charged with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit robbery and second-degree robbery, according to prosecutors. According to police, the three are documented gang members who targeted the bulldogs because they knew of their high value. They were not aware that Gaga was the owner, the police said.

Two additional defendants  Harold White, 40, and Jennifer McBride, 50  are accused of acting as accessories after the fact. McBride is said to have returned the dogs to the police two nights later, prompted by the offer of a $500,000 reward. She was in a relationship with Harold White, who is Jaylins father, the police said. Harold White is also a gang member, police said.

Detectives served a search warrant and made the arrests on Tuesday. The charges were filed on Thursday. The five suspects pleaded not guilty at an arraignment on Thursday afternoon.

The dogs  Koji and Gustav  were brought unharmed to LAPDs Olympic station. The dogwalker, Ryan Fischer, was shot once but survived.

Jackson is accused of being the gunman, according to the Los Angeles County district attorneys office. In addition to the main charges, he also faces charges of assault with a firearm and possession of a concealed firearm in a vehicle.

This was a brazen street crime that left a man seriously wounded, said District Attorney George Gascon in a statement. We have alleged very serious charges in this case and have faith that justice will be appropriately served as this case unfolds in court.

McBride was also charged with receiving stolen property, and Harold White was accused of gun possession.

At the arraignment, bail was set at $3,030,000 for Jackson, $1,050,000 for Jaylin White, and $1,100,000 for Whaley. McBrides bail was set at $10,000, with the provision that she wear an ankle monitor. Her attorney said that she is diabetic and had not been receiving her insulin while in custody, and asked that she be allowed to report to her job at Universal Waste Systems. Harold Whites bail was set at $35,000. They were ordered to return on May 11 for a preliminary hearing.

Fischer was walking the dogs near the intersection of Sierra Bonita Avenue and Sunset Boulevard around 9:40 p.m. when he was accosted by the armed robbers. Surveillance video, obtained by TMZ, showed Fischer struggling with the two men before being shot and collapsing to the sidewalk. The men grabbed the dogs and fled in a white Nissan Altima. A third dog was not taken.

Lady Gaga, who was filming House of Gucci in Italy at the time of the attack, posted the $500,000 reward in a message on Instagram.

I continue to love you Ryan Fischer, you risked your life to fight for our family, she wrote. Youre forever a hero.

Fischer posted photos from his hospital bed after the dogs were recovered, thanking the first responders and those who had sent well wishes. To Lady Gaga, he wrote: Your babies are back and the family is whole we did it! You have shown so much support throughout this whole crisis to both me and my family.

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The missing 15-year-old daughter of a Newark anti-violence activist was kidnapped and murdered after leaving her home in South Carolina, a local sheriff said.

The three-week search for Sanaa Amenhotep ended early Thursday when investigators discovered her body in a wooded-area of Lexington County, South Carolina, according to officials.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka called the killing a tragedy and offered his condolences to Sanaas father, Sharif Malik Amenhotep, a member of the citys Brick City Peace Collective.

On behalf of the people of Newark, I would like to express my sincere condolences to Sharif Malik Amenhotep, on the tragic loss of his beautiful and intelligent Black daughter, Sanaa Amenhotep, who was kidnapped and murdered in South Carolina, Baraka said.

Mr. Amenhotep works tirelessly to increase justice and reduce violence in our neighborhoods through our Brick City Peace Collective, helping us to re-imagine public safety and prevent tragedies such as this from taking place in our very own community, the mayor said in a statement. No parent should ever have to bury their child. It is an inexplicable loss that defies imagination.

We hope that the South Carolina authorities can bring the suspects in this case to justice. Our entire city is joining with the Amenhotep family in their grief and pain, Baraka added.

In South Carolina, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott told reporters a juvenile was arrested in Sanaas disappearance while authorities were seeking Treveon Jamar Nelson on a kidnapping warrant in the case. The two have not been charged with her death.

Investigators believe Sanaa initially left her Northeast Columbia home voluntarily April 5 with two acquaintances before she was held against her will, according to authorities.

The sheriff released few details on the circumstances surrounding her kidnapping or how she possibly knew the two suspects. He confirmed the teen was murdered, but officials declined to comment on a cause of death ahead of an autopsy scheduled for Friday.

Officials urged anyone with information about Nelsons whereabouts to call authorities.

We need him. He needs to be arrested. I am urging him to turn himself in, Lott said.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? Treveon Jamar Nelson is wanted for kidnapping in connection with the missing persons case of Sanaa Amenhotep. Anyone with information is asked to submit a tip to Crime Stoppers at https://t.co/vpbEOdqfLS, 888-CRIME-SC, or call 911. pic.twitter.com/EGXeKABfau  Richland County Sheriff's Dept. (@RCSD) April 29, 2021

Officials tirelessly investigated the case for weeks and quickly began to fear that Sanaa was in danger after she was reported missing, according to the sheriff.

I cant tell you how tragic and sad this case is when we lose a 15-year-old like we lost this one, Lott said at a news conference. I know deputies and police officers are not supposed to get emotionally involved in cases, but there is no way that when we work a case like [this], our people dont get emotionally attached to this case.

Family members, authorities and others in South Carolina and New Jersey shared missing persons posters of Sanaa and her father flew to Richland County to join the weeks-long search.

She means everything to me, I just truly miss her, Sharif Malik Amenhotep told WIS, a Columbia, South Carolina, television station, earlier this month.

Lott said Sanaas parents were told of her death Thursday morning.

I told the parents that we would bring her home and weve done that, the sheriff said. Unfortunately we didnt bring her home the way that we all had prayed and wished that we could.

The investigation into her slaying was being led by the sheriffs office in Lexington County, where her body was recovered.

Lexington County sheriffs officials on Twitter confirmed an investigation was underway and there were no immediate arrests. The agency did not immediately release more information.

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Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com.
Divisive Married At First Sight couple Bryce Ruthven and Melissa Rawson could be laughing all the way to the bank after signing a deal with podcasting company Podshape earlier this month.

While the decision to sign the pair has been controversial, Podshape's CEO Jay Walkerden - a former executive at Nova FM - has said advertisers are lining up to feature on Bryce and Melissa's 10-part series What Happens After.

Jake Challenor, the publisher of industry website Radio Today, said on his weekly podcast that Mr Walkerden had reassured him Podshape's future was looking bright despite the backlash over its latest high-profiling signing.

There's no such thing as bad publicity? Controversial Married At First Sight couple Bryce Ruthven and Melissa Rawson could be laughing all the way to the bank after signing a deal with podcasting company Podshape earlier this month

Mr Challenor said: 'I did give Jay a quick call before we recorded this podcast on Thursday afternoon to see what his reaction was to all the comments on Radio Today - and there has been a lot of them.

'He said, "Don't worry, Podshape's still alive, we're still kicking, we've still got a heartbeat, and there are some brands that are really interested backing that podcast." So I'm eager to see who those brands are once they've signed a deal.'

Mr Walkerden also apparently told Mr Challenor the listener numbers for the two-minute trailer for What Happens After had been 'very strong'.

If these claims are indeed true, and not just corporate bluster, then it would seemingly prove the mantra 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.

Controversy makes cash: While the decision to sign the pair has been controversial, Podshape's CEO Jay Walkerden - a former executive at Nova FM - has said advertisers are lining up to feature on Bryce and Melissa's 10-part series What Happens After

Bryce's problematic behaviour on Married At First Sight caused plenty of outrage when the show aired on Channel Nine, with some viewers accusing him of gaslighting and manipulating 'wife' Melissa.

Despite this, they agreed to remain a couple at their final vows - which were filmed in December - and they're now living together in Melbourne.

Bryce had been trying to relaunch his radio career after his controversial portrayal on MAFS before he and Melissa landed a deal with Podshape a few weeks ago.

Advertiser interest: 'There are some brands that are really interested backing that podcast,' Mr Walkerden (pictured) reportedly told Radio Today publisher Jake Challenor on Thursday

Bryce quit his last position as an announcer for Hit104.7 Canberra's afternoon show in February. He previously worked as a producer for WSFM's Jonesy and Amanda.

When the Podshape deal was announced on Tuesday, Bryce was trolled on social media and disgruntled radio industry figures complained on online forums.

'Can't wait to listen to it on silent,' one person commented on Bryce's Instagram account, while another wrote: 'I would rather die.'

Villain portrayal: Bryce's problematic behaviour on MAFS caused plenty of outrage, with some viewers accusing him of gaslighting and manipulating 'wife' Melissa. Despite this, they agreed to remain a couple at their final vows and they're now living together in Melbourne

Despite featuring one of the most divisive couples in the history of the show, this year's season of Married At First Sight lost no advertisers for Nine.

There were no financial consequences for the network even though Bryce and Melissa's turbulent relationship attracted hundreds of negative headlines and prompted a Change.org petition calling for Nine to formally apologise.

Outraged viewers even filed multiple complaints about the show to the media watchdog, singling out Bryce, 32, for his problematic behaviour.

No consequences: Despite featuring one of the most divisive couples in the history of the show, this year's season of Married At First Sight lost no advertisers for Nine

Throughout the show, Bryce repeatedly told 'wife' Melissa, also 32, that she wasn't his type because she didn't have blue eyes.

He also voted her the 'fourth hottest' out of this year's brides, flirted with co-star Beck Zemek at the gym and later lied about their conversation.

In addition to getting into a series of altercations with the show's other participants, Bryce was accused of emotional manipulation and gaslighting.

What controversy? There were no financial consequences for the network even though Bryce and Melissa's turbulent relationship attracted hundreds of negative headlines and prompted a Change.org petition calling for Nine to formally apologise

This year's season received four times the usual number of complaints, but despite this no advertisers pulled out.

The Nine program ultimately proved to be Australia's most-watched program of the year so far, with 1.4 million viewers tuning into the finale.

In March, it was reported MAFS may be investigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) after receiving a slew of complaints.

Controversial: Outraged viewers even filed multiple complaints about the show to the media watchdog, singling out radio announcer Bryce, 32, for his problematic behaviour

According to a report by The Wash, many viewers took offence to scenes involving Melissa and Bryce.

ACMA revealed it had received 14 complaints about this year's season of MAFS, and four of those were about the controversial pair.

'Under the co-regulatory system, the ACMA will refer complainants to the broadcaster in the first instance,' the media watchdog said.

Slammed: Throughout the show, Bryce repeatedly told 'wife' Melissa, also 32, that she wasn't his type because she didn't have blue eyes. He also voted her the 'fourth hottest' out of this year's brides, flirted with co-star Beck Zemek at the gym and later lied about their flirtation

'If the complainant does not receive a response from the broadcaster within 60 days, or is not satisfied with the response, they may refer their complaint to the ACMA who may choose to investigate.'

Last month, a Change.org petition began circulating that demanded Nine issue an apology for airing 'triggering' scenes involving the 'gaslighting' groom and his long-suffering wife.

The petition, which garnered 2,500 signatures in under 24 hours, also called for the network to acknowledge its alleged 'failure of duty of care' towards Melissa.

Troubling: In addition to getting into a series of altercations with the show's other participants, Bryce was accused of emotional manipulation and gaslighting

'This season of Married at First Sight Australia features a couple, Melissa and Bryce, who portray an excessive amount of [troubling] signs which are not being handled by the network appropriately,' the petition stated.

'There is a clear failure of duty of care to Melissa during filming of the show, allowing her to remain in a toxic and dangerous environment with her partner for the "benefit" of the network.

'She is being subject to gaslighting, emotional manipulation, isolation, and countless other textbook signs of a controlling and or abusive relationship,' it went on to claim, adding that certain scenes were 'incredibly triggering and stressful to watch'.

Fallout: This year's season received four times the usual number of complaints, but despite this no advertisers pulled out

It continued: 'This petition is for the Nine Network to acknowledge and apologise for letting Melissa go through this and also airing such a horrible relationship on TV without doing anything to showcase that the relationship is clearly not healthy.'

Similar outrage exploded on Twitter, where many viewers called for the show to be cancelled or boycotted over its depiction of toxic relationships.

Married At First Sight will return for another season next year.
The San Francisco-based company will initially release 100 electric mopeds onto the streets of New York. Brooklyn will be the starting point but Lime plans to roll out more mopeds over the following weeks, also covering lower Manhattan and Queens, The Verge reports.Lime claims its mopeds can reach a speed of 28 mph (45 kph) and can go as far as 87 miles (140 km) on a single charge. They can be monitored through wireless connectivity.Lime also provides a helmet with each moped and you can access it by tapping start ride in your Lime app and then pressing the red button on the helmet case in the back of the two-wheeler. You can find all the necessary info in the video at the end of the article.While the Lime e-mopeds are indeed a greener alternative and can get you around fast enough, they also require a safety course for its riders, for obvious reasons. The course, which is a Motorcycle Safety Foundation project, is available via Limes app and consists of multiple chapters.Riders are also required to be over 21 and have a valid drivers license. And if you plan on taking any passengers aboard, they too have to be at least 18.When it comes to e-vehicles monopoly in the city, Lime has to compete with Revel, the other enterprising e-moped operator in New York. The Brooklyn-born transportation company also made an enticing announcement recently. Revel launches an all-electric rideshare service in Manhattan, powered by 50 Tesla cars, sometime this May. The company also plans to expand to other areas in New York.
A 10-MONTH suspended jail term was imposed on a middle-aged man who was convicted of threatening to kick his ex-wife to death or get others to do it, putting her in fear.

Judge Olann Kelleher had put sentencing back for three months to see how the defendant would behave in the meantime. He was told at Cork District Court that there had been no further issues.

Judge Kelleher then imposed the 10-month sentence, suspended on condition that the accused committed no further offences in the next two years.

You will do the 10 months if you are convicted of anything in the meantime, Judge Kelleher warned.

At the sentencing, the accused mans solicitor, Frank Buttimer, said: They [the facts of the case] are absolutely disputed, but you found him guilty.

The complainant testified that her ex-husband also threatened to tell people that she was up and down with other womens husbands and that this upset her greatly.

She said that her ex-partner, more than anyone, knew that this was untrue and that such a thing would upset her.

She added that he knew what buttons to push.

I have dash-cams in my car and I have security cameras in my house and you are asking am I afraid of him, she said when cross-examined by Mr Buttimer at an in-camera hearing in Cork District Court.

The accused man, who is in his 50s, denied a charge of breaching a barring order on September 23, 2019, by putting her in fear during the course of a phone call. However, he was convicted after a trial at the in-camera hearing.

The injured party said: All I wanted was peace and I am still not getting peace.

I am watching my back the whole time. This is going on for two years and I am fearful all the time.

Mr Buttimer asked her why, if she was in such fear, she was the one who rang him on that day. She said it was to ask him about maintenance payments in respect of their children.

Judge Kelleher said: If she has an order for maintenance and she was short of money, any woman in Ireland would take a chance and ring for maintenance.

The defendant said: She has no reason to be in fear of me. That girl [his ex-wife] passes me every day in her car. It dont look to me that she is in fear. She aint in fear of me and that is a fact.
CENTRAL POINT, Ore.  Today Gov. Kate Brown visited the Jackson County Expo to tour the Community Vaccination Center (CVC) and speak with the agencies involved in the clinic. During the Governors meeting with agency representatives, protesters gathered outside, forcing an early end to the Governors tour.

The Governors team cited safety and security concerns as her security team escorted her out the back.

One protester did get inside the building where the Governor was meeting with agency representatives and asked the Governor about long-term studies on the COVID-19 vaccinations and long-term studies on mask-wearing. Governor Brown answered one question before leaving the building.

During the meeting with agency representatives, Jackson County Emergency Management, Oregon Emergency Management, the Oregon Health Authority, Jackson County Public Health, the National Guard and FEMA were all able to provide updates on the vaccination efforts that are a part of the CVC.

The Governor answered reporter questions and discussed the importance of family practitioners in the future of vaccine distribution.

I think it's really important that we educate and empower Oregonians to make good healthcare decisions and we know the most effective messenger is that person's medical provider so I really, really appreciate our healthcare community stepping up, reaching out to their clients, to their patients, to educate and inform them about the key to getting a vaccine, said Brown.

Each representative thanked Brown for the state and federal support that made the CVC possible.

Jackson County officials cited last year's wildfires and a lack of man-power as primary reasons for the needed support that is now being provided through the partnership associated with the CVC.

Our community responded to COVID well, and our public health staff and our nonprofit organizations, and everybody was pulling together to assist in responding to that emergency. Those same people were called upon to assist with the largest natural disaster weve ever had and what we found locally is, we were very tired, said John Vial, with Jackson County Emergency Management.

Gov. Brown stressed the importance of vaccinations and the link to re-opening the state before concluding the event, saying What we do know is that a vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and prevent hospitalizations and deaths; getting Oregonians vaccinated is the key to our reopening strategy.
Two years ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani finally got one thing he had been seeking in Ukraine: The Trump administration removed the U.S. ambassador there, a woman Mr. Giuliani believed had been obstructing his efforts to dig up dirt on the Biden family.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. Mr. Giulianis push to oust the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, not only became a focus of President Donald J. Trumps first impeachment trial, but it has now landed Mr. Giuliani in the cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation into whether he broke lobbying laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The long-running inquiry reached a turning point this week when F.B.I. agents seized telephones and computers from Mr. Giulianis home and office in Manhattan, the people said. At least one of the warrants was seeking evidence related to Ms. Yovanovitch and her role as ambassador, the people said.

In particular, the federal authorities were expected to scour the electronic devices for communications between Mr. Giuliani and Trump administration officials about the ambassador before she was recalled in April 2019, one of the people added.
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Authorities believe invisible force dragged submarine to bottom of the ocean

The submarine that sank off the coast of Bali killing 53 sailors may have been hit by an invisible force that dragged the vessel to the bottom of the ocean.

Indonesian defence force officials believe an internal solitary wave was responsible for the sinking of the KRI Nanggala 402 last Wednesday.

The wave is an underwater surge that occurs when two different ocean depths meet resulting in powerful and dangerous pulls and pushes.

Authorities said an intense internal wave was recorded off the coast of Bali last Wednesday morning, the same time the submarine disappeared.

'Our suspicion falls on natural conditions. Because an internal solitary wave occurred at that time in the north of Bali,' the submarine's former commander Rear Admiral Muhammad Ali told Indonesian media.

Indonesian defence force officials believe an internal solitary wave was responsible for the sinking of the KRI Nanggala 402

The Indonesian military has released a haunting video showing the crew of the KRI Nanggala-402 submarine singing along to a hit song called 'Goodbye'

NASA satellite images from 2016 show a non-linear internal wave ripple through the Bali Sea - the waves have virtually no impact on the surface above but cause huge bodies of changing water below

The KRI Nanggala sunk 838m in the Bali sea after losing contact with its base during an exercise early on the morning of April 21

Search and rescue teams found an oil slick and debris in the area hours later before underwater scans confirmed the sub had sunk and split into three parts.

Experts were split over the cause, some suggesting the sub was attacked by foreign forces and others believing an electrical blackout occurred.

Indonesian authorities rejected any possibility of the submarine being overloaded, saying that despite the 30-bed vessel holding 53 sailors the crew would work in shifts, taking turns to sleep.

The vessel was redesigned to be able to cater to the larger crew and was carrying only four of its eight missiles.

Officials are now confident the incident was the result of internal waves, which are common in the area off Bali.

NASA said these waves 'tend to combine about every 14 days to create an exceptionally strong tidal flow'.

The submarine was conducting a torpedo drill in waters 60 miles north of the island of Bali on Wednesday, but failed to relay the results as expected

Underwater photo released today by the Indonesian Navy shows parts of submarine KRI Nanggala that sank in Bali Sea, Indonesia

Indonesian defence officials said images from a Japanese satellite confirmed large underwater waves were present in the area at the time of the KRI Nanggala 402 sinking, moving a huge mass of water that the vessel couldn't handle.

'It moved up from the bottom to the north, and there's a trench between two mountains,' commander of the Indonesian Navy, Rear Admiral Iwan Isnurwanto, said.

'The wave was about two nautical miles [in speed] and the volume of water was about two to four million cubic litres.'

Another admiral said the incident was 'nature's will'.

The navy is investigating how it can retrieve the submarine and the bodies of the crew, but the depth makes it extremely difficult.

The sub's missiles may be damaged and fragile to exploding, and moving the 1,300 tonnes of metal back to the surface would require an expensive and tough exercise.

The families of the crew demand Indonesia at least bring their bodies back to surface.
If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us

We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom.
Good evening. Im Senator Tim Scott from the great state of South Carolina. We just heard President Bidens first address to Congress. Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words. But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. You promise to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. This was the pitch. You just heard it again. But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes. We need policies and progress that brings us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart. I wont waste your time with finger pointing or partisan bickering. You can get that on TV any time you want. I want to have an honest conversation about common sense, and common ground. About this feeling that our nation is sliding off its shared foundation and how we move forward together. Growing up, I never dreamed I would be standing here tonight. When I was a kid my parents divorced. My mother, my brother and I moved in with my grandparents. Three of us sharing one bedroom. I was disillusioned and angry. And I nearly failed out of school. But I was blessed. First with a praying mom. And let me say this to the single mothers out there who are working their tails off, working hard, trying to make the ends meet wondering if its worth it. You can bet it is. God bless your amazing effort on the part of your kids. I was also blessed by a Chick-fil-A operator, John Moniz. And finally, with a string of opportunities that are only possible here in America. This past year, Ive watched Covid attack every rung of the ladder that helped me up. So many families have lost parents and grandparents too early. So many small businesses have gone under. Becoming a Christian transformed my life. But for months, too many churches were shut down. Most of all Im saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day. Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future. Our public schools should have reopened months ago, other countries did. Private and religious schools did. Science has shown for months that schools are safe. But too often powerful, grown ups set science aside and kids like me were left behind. The clearest case Ive seen for school choice in our lifetimes, because we know that education is the closest thing to magic in America. Last year, under Republican leadership, we passed five bipartisan Covid packages. Congress supported our schools, our hospitals, saved our economy and funded Operation Warp Speed, delivering vaccines in record time. All five bills got 90, 90 votes in the senate. Common sense found common ground. In February, Republicans told President Biden we wanted to keep working together to finish this fight. But Democrats wanted to go it alone. They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bragged was the most liberal bill in American history. Only 1% went to vaccinations, no requirement to reopen schools promptly. Covid brought Congress together 5 times. This administration pushed us apart. Another issue that should unite us is infrastructure. Republican support everything you think of when you think of infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports, airports, waterways, high speed broadband, were in for all of that. But again, Democrats want a partisan wish list, they wont even build bridges to build bridges. Less than six percent, the presidents plan goes to roads and bridges. Its a liberal wish list of big government waste. Plus the biggest job killing tax hikes in a generation. Experts say when all is said and done, it would lower wages of the average American worker and shrink our economy. Tonight, we also heard about a so-called family plan. Even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college. The beauty of the American dream is that families get to define it for themselves. We should be expanding opportunities and options for all families, not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best. Infrastructure spending that shrinks our economy is not common sense. Weakening our southern borders and creating a crisis is not compassionate. The president is also abandoning principles hes held for decades. Now he says your tax dollars should fund abortions. Hes laying groundwork to pack the Supreme Court. This is not common ground. Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions of race. I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while Im shopping. I remember every morning at the kitchen table, my grandfather would open the newspaper and read it, I thought. But later I realized he had never learned to read it. He just wanted to set the right example. Ive also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called Uncle Tom and the n-word by progressives, by liberals. Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my familys poverty was actually privilege. Because a relative owned land generations before my time. Believe me, I know firsthand our healing is not finished. In 2015 after the shooting of Walter Scott, I wrote a bill to fund body cameras. Last year after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I built an even bigger police reform proposal. But my Democratic colleagues blocked it. I extended an olive branch. I offered amendments. But Democrats used the filibuster to block the debate from even happening. My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution. But Im still working. Im hopeful that this will be different. When America comes together, weve made tremendous progress, but powerful forces want to pull us apart. 100 years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic. And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again. And if you look a certain way, theyre an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we havent made any progress at all. By doubling down on the divisions weve worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly. America is not a racist country. Its backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination, and its wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present. Im an African-American whos voted in the South my entire life. I take voting rights personally. Republicans support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. And so do the voters. Big majorities of Americans support early voting, and big majorities support voter I.D. including African-Americans and Hispanics. Common sense makes common ground. But today, this conversation has collapsed. The state of Georgia passed a law that expands early voting, preserves no excuse mail in voting, and despite what the president claimed, did not reduce election day hours. If you actually read this law, its mainstream. It will be easier to vote early in Georgia than in Democrat-run New York. But the left doesnt want you to know that. that they want people virtue signaling by yelling about a law they havent even read. Fact checkers have called out the White House for misstatements. The president absurdly claims that this is worse than Jim Crow. What is going on here? Ill tell you. A Washington power grab. This misplaced outrage is supposed to justify democrats new sweeping bill that would take over elections for all 50 states. It would send public funds to political campaigns you disagree with and make the bi-partisan Federal Elections Commission partisan. This is not about civil rights or our racial past. Its about rigging elections in the future. And no, the same filibuster that President Obama and President Biden praised when they were senators, the same filibuster that the Democrats used to kill my police reform bill last year has not suddenly become a racist relic just because the shoe is now on the other foot. Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants. Its far too important. This should be a joyful springtime for our nation. This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines. Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding. So why do we feel so divided? Anxious. A nation with so much cause for hope should not feel so heavy laden. A president who promised to bring us together should not be pushing agendas that tear us apart. The American Family deserves better. And we know what better looks like. Just before Covid, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime. The lowest unemployment rates ever recorded for African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. And a 70 year low nearly, for women. Wages for, hear me, wages were growing faster at the bottom than at the top. The bottom 25% saw their wages go up faster than the top 25%. That happened because Republicans focused on expanding opportunity for all Americans. In addition to that, we passed opportunity zones, criminal justice reform, and permanent funding for historically Black colleges and universities for the first time ever. We fought the drug epidemic, rebuilt our military, and cut taxes for working families and single moms like the one that raised me. Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you, the American people. Black, Hispanic, white and Asian. Republican and Democrat. Brave police officers in Black neighborhoods. We are not adversaries. We are family. We are all in this together. And we get to live in the greatest country on Earth. The country, where my grandfather in his 94 years saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. So I am more than hopeful. I am confident that our finest hour has yet to come. Original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls and not for our nation. The real story is always redemption. I am standing here because my mom has prayed me through some really tough times. I believe our nation has succeeded the same way. Because generations of Americans in their own ways have asked for grace and God has supplied it. So I will close with a word from a worship song that really helped me through this past year of Covid. The music is new, but the words draw from scripture. May the Lord bless you and keep you. Make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May his presence go before you and behind you and beside you. In your weeping and your rejoicing. He is for you. May his favor be upon our nation for thousand generations. And your family and your children and their children. Good night. And God bless the United States of America.
During the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic, the conditions in the United States nursing homes were horrific. Nursing home residents account for less than 0.5% of the U.S. population but roughly a quarter of the deaths related to COVID-19.

Bodies piled in makeshift morgues; staff who tested positive for the coronavirus were encouraged to come to work; understaffing left residents helpless and alone. One day in March 2020, as the crisis mounted, in a western New York home with 120 residents, a nursing assistant reported being the only person on duty.

The problems in Americas nursing homes wont go away even if we wrestle COVID-19 into submission, however. The pandemic exposed long-standing problems in the nursing home industry that stem from chronic understaffing and underspending on care  problems often motivated by owners who place profit-seeking above their residents welfare. Spurred by the COVID-19 tragedies, some federal and state lawmakers have proposed laws designed to improve the quality of nursing home care. Its a promising start.

Understaffing is possible and profitable because the regulatory system has failed. Federal regulations establish (on paper) a high bar for quality of care. Nursing homes must ensure that all of their residents receive individualized care in accordance with professional standards of practice and that no resident experiences avoidable harm or an avoidable decline in key abilities.

States are deputized to enforce these rules and must send surveyors into homes at least every 15 months. But this scheme largely has failed to protect residents.

Regulators rarely impose meaningful penalties such as fines, holds on new admissions, or payment suspensions. Usually when inspectors find that a nursing home has unlawfully endangered its residents, the facility is directed to fix the problem. A ProPublica database reveals that fines are imposed in fewer than 2% of cases in which inspectors find violations, and the fines usually are little more than a manageable everyday cost of doing business.

According to ProPublicas data, the average fine for a Medicare-certified home ranges from just over $68,000 in West Virginia to under $5,000 in Nevada. The database shows that, as of January, in nine states, not a single home had federal payments suspended.

Sens. Robert P. Casey Jr. and Pat Toomey have introduced legislation that would subject a greater number of poorly performing facilities to inspections, and make it more likely that chronically deficient nursing homes find their Medicare and Medicaid payments cut off if they dont improve.

The House Ways and Means Committee has held hearings on the role of private equity in nursing homes. Such investors have decided that nursing homes can be profit centers.

Some states have begun to experiment with requiring nursing homes to spend a certain percentage of revenue on resident care. In September, Massachusetts announced that it would require nursing homes in the state to spend 75% of revenue on direct-care staffing costs. In October, New Jersey adopted legislation requiring nursing homes to spend 90% of revenue on direct resident care.

In New York, provisions recently signed into law require nursing home owners to devote 70% of their revenue to direct patient care.

This type of spending requirement could prevent unscrupulous providers from pocketing funds needed for resident care and make nursing homes less attractive to private-equity owners. The requirements should be paired with transparency requirements so that facilities cannot hide profit as expenses.

Some of these state laws are better than others. The gap between New Jerseys requirement of 90% and New Yorks 70% is a big one. New York defines direct patient care to include expenses that dont fit that description. New York even permits regulators to waive the requirement on a case-by-case basis, a loophole that could undercut the reform.

States are showing interest in requiring the staffing levels necessary to achieve the positive outcomes that Washington mandates. New Jersey passed legislation requiring that one certified nurse associate be on duty for every eight residents during the day, with somewhat lower requirements at night. Rhode Island is considering a bill that would require nursing homes to provide the 4.1 hours of care per resident per day.

But such proposals face stiff opposition from the industry, which helped scuttle a push for minimum staffing requirements in Virginia and helped develop legislation adopted by Arkansas in April that reduced penalties for understaffing and weakened staffing requirements.

Minimum staffing standards could go a long way toward improving the quality of care. If you read nursing home inspection reports sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by state survey workers, it is routine to see documentation that nursing homes lacked the staff to meet basic standards.

One resident at a facility in Wintersville, Ohio, for example was supposed to be helped each morning back into his bed after breakfast, a 2019 inspection notes. On a day in January 2019, he waited two hours, and, when no one came, tried to move himself. He fractured his face in several places and suffered bleeding within his skull.

Understaffing may contribute to other endemic abusive practices. Human Rights Watch, in a 2018 report, found that U.S. nursing homes routinely overmedicate residents who have dementia to make them easier to manage.

The federal government should consider other reforms. For example, as the primary payer for long-term-care services, via Medicaid, the federal government could pay nursing homes that provide high-quality care more than those that provide substandard care.

Washington could use the power of the purse by introducing more competition for the industry. Medicaid law requires states to pay for long-term-care services that are provided in nursing homes but not those covered in non-institutional settings. This forces people who might prefer home-based services into institutional settings and gives nursing homes an unfair competitive advantage.

Requiring state Medicaid programs to cover home and community-based services would enhance consumers ability to shop for quality care.

We know what needs to be done to improve long-term care. The question is whether politicians care as much about nursing home residents as they do about the nursing home lobby.
TEMPE, Ariz., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- To help bridge the diversity gap in the real estate industry, the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University has partnered with Grambling State University, a public historically Black university in rural Louisiana, to offer real estate development courses to eligible GSU students.

Less than 6% of all real estate professionals are Black, compared to 76% who are white, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) explains that a shortage of Black real estate agents may be a contributing factor to another issue: a widening gap in Black homeownership. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates that only 42% of the Black population in the U.S. owns a home, compared with 64% of the general population.

"This pilot program will create an awareness of real estate development as a viable career option for Black people," said Mark Stapp, executive director of ASU's Master of Real Estate Development (MRED) program and Fred E. Taylor Professor in Real Estate. "Real estate is more than an investment, it's the physical place we see as community. It builds wealth, creates freedom, houses our economy, and offers opportunity  it's the foundation for the success of people and a community."

Under the terms of the year-long agreement, which began March 1, 2021, W. P. Carey will provide institutional guidance, live academic instruction online, and oversight for the pilot program. GSU will be the primary point of contact for eligible student enrollment and academic support during the program.

"This partnership supports GSU students being able to expand their training to include the acquisition of skills associated with real estate," said GSU Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Connie Walton. "GSU students will be able to enroll in online real estate courses that are taught by faculty at Arizona State University. We expect that there will be student interest across disciplines at the university."

Murphy Cheatham, who serves on the Grambling University Foundation Board and an alumnus of the inaugural W. P. Carey MRED program in 2007, connected the universities and helped put the alliance idea before the Louisiana State University Board of Regents. "The partnership will go a long way in helping foster more diversity in the commercial real estate industry," Cheatham said.

The dean of Grambling State University's College of Business, Dr. Donald White, is currently reviewing options related to the establishment of a minor in real estate.

Interested Grambling State University students can sign up for the real estate courses at wpcarey.asu.edu/grambling.

About the W. P. Carey School of Business

The W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University is one of the top-ranked business schools in the United States. The school is internationally regarded for its research productivity and its distinguished faculty members, including a Nobel Prize winner. Students come from more than 100 countries and W. P. Carey is represented by alumni in over 160 countries. Visit wpcarey.asu.edu.

About Grambling State University

Grambling State University, located in Grambling, Louisiana, is a historically black university founded in 1901 that combines the academic strengths of a major university with the benefits of a small college. This combination enables students to grow and learn in a serene and positive environment. The 590-acre campus offers 43 undergraduate and graduate academic programs. A member of the University of Louisiana System, Grambling State University has been accredited by 13 accrediting associations and holds accreditations in all programs required by the Louisiana Board of Regents. With a longstanding tradition of excellence, Grambling State University continues to emphasize the value and importance of each student, exemplified by our motto: Where Everybody Is Somebody.

For more information, contact:

Shay Moser, W. P. Carey School of Business

[email protected]

480-965-3963

Tisha Arnold, Grambling State University

[email protected]

318-243-5012

SOURCE W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University

Related Links

https://wpcarey.asu.edu


A janitor at a New York hospital who admitted last year that he tried to arrange sex at a Burlington County motel with an undercover detective he thought was a 14-year-old girl was sentenced to three years in state prison, officials said.

John Emilio, 44, of Staten Island, pleaded guilty on Dec. 23 to attempted endangering the welfare of children in exchange for the prison term, according to a statement from the Burlington County Prosecutors Office. A judge also ordered that Emilio be placed on the New Jersey sex offender registry upon release and also be under parole supervision for life.

This defendants calculated, predatory behavior presented a very real and very dangerous threat to the vulnerable population he was targeting online, Burlington County Prosecutor Scott Coffina said in a statement. We are thankful that there was no actual victim, but this case underscores the risks to children from online communication, and we urge parents to pay attention to the cyber activity of their kids.

An investigation revealed that Emilio initiated contact in November 2019 with the undercover detective from the Burlington County Prosecutors Office High-Tech Crimes Unit, sent pictures of his naked genitals and said he was very excited that he would be having sex with a girl so young, and looked forward to taking her virginity, the office said.

Emilio discussed coming to Burlington County to have sex with the girl, either at an unnamed Route 130 motel or inside of his vehicle, but the trip never happened, authorities said.

He was arrested in February 2020 at his home after the execution of a search warrant, the office said. He was working as a janitor an unidentified Staten Island hospital at the time, authorities said.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield will be virtually in Tauranga next month.

He will be presenting Waipuna Hospices upcoming Palliative Care in our Compassionate Community Symposium on May 17.

The symposium aims to create a more compassionate community to support people at the end of their lives by bringing together industry leaders, sharing their knowledge and experience on palliative care in todays landscape.

Bloomfield, a 1990 medical graduate with years of clinical work specialised in public health medicine, has been a familiar face in New Zealand media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic; delivering daily updates and announcements, and helping lead New Zealand through unprecedented times.

On May 17, Bloomfield will be virtually presenting at the Waipuna Hospice Symposium, discussing how New Zealand crushed the curve with kindness in 2020, and exploring the lessons he hopes we take into 2021 and beyond.

Waipuna Hospice CEO Richard Thurlow says they are thrilled to welcome Bloomfield to what is already shaping up to be an engaging and thought provoking symposium.

I had the pleasure of hearing Bloomfield present last year and he is definitely an inspiring speaker who has demonstrated sublime leadership for the whole of the country over the last year.

I am really excited to hear Ashley present on how kindness killed the curve  especially as kindness is one of the central pillars of compassionate communities.

Bloomfield is the sixth keynote speaker to be announced by Waipuna Hospice.

He is joined by Bay of Plenty DHB CEO, Pete Chandler; Clinical Advisor to Hospice New Zealand, Professor Rod Macleod; Research Fellow and founding member of the Te Arai Palliative Care and End of Life Research Group, School of Nursing at University of Auckland, Dr. Tess Moeke Maxwell; Starship Childrens Hospital Paediatric Palliative Care Specialist, Dr. Emily Chang; and General Paediatrician and the Medical Lead for Paediatrics in the Bay of Plenty, Dr. Justin Wilde.

When planning their symposium, Waipuna Hospice made it a priority to create a programme which left attendees with a better understanding of how palliative care fits into the community, and the role they play.

To achieve this, discussions on the day are set to range from caring for Maori kaumatua at end of life, and learning from the past to shape the future, to paediatric palliative care and how end of life care fits into a compassionate community.

Health professionals, carers, and interested people from the community are invited to purchase tickets, however, tickets are already selling fast and the event is expected to sell out.

The Palliative Care in our Compassionate Community symposium will be held on May 17, at Waipuna Hospice, 43 Te Puna Station Road, from 8am  3pm.

Tickets are available on the Waipuna Hospice website.
Kolkata, April 29 : Despite some sporadic incidents, the eighth and final phase of Assembly elections in West Bengal concluded peacefully on Thursday with a voter turnout of 76.07 per cent.

In the final phase, voting took place in 11,860 polling stations spread across 35 Assembly constituencies in four districts -- Malda, Murshidabad, North Kolkata and Birbhum.

According to the data released by the Election Commission, Birbhum district recorded the maximum voter turnout of 81.87 per cent till 5 pm, followed by Malda (80.06 per cent), Murshidabad (78.07 per cent) and North Kolkata (57.43 per cent).

As far as individual constituencies are concerned, Hariharpara in Murshidabad district recorded the highest turnout of 84.19 per cent, while Jorashanko in North Kolkata recorded the lowest turnout of 48.45 per cent.

North Kolkata, where 7 Assembly constituencies went to the polls, recorded an overall polling percentage of 57.43 per cent. Among the individual constituencies in the city, Jorasanko witnessed the lowest polling of 48.45 per cent, while Chowrangee recorded a turnout of 51.98 per cent.

Entally recorded the highest polling in the city at 65.79 per cent, while both Beliagahta and Maniktala recorded a turnout of 60 per cent.

The sporadic incidents that took place during polling on Thursday started with the explosion of two crude bombs near the Mahajati Sadan under the Jorasanko Assembly constituency in the early morning before the beginning of polls.

The police have collected CCTV footage from the spot, but no arrests have been made as yet. No one was injured in the incident.

The second incident was reported from 239 Rabindra Sarani under the Posta police station at 9 am when two crude bombs exploded there. The police have arrested six persons in connection with the case. However, the EC later said that they were only heavy crackers.

Clashes and fisticuffs broke out on more than one occasion between rival political groups.

In Kolkata's Beliaghata area, clashes broke out between two groups of people on more than one occasion following which the police resorted to mild lathi-charge to disperse the crowd.

In Maniktala constituency, BJP candidate Kalyan Choubey was allegedly gheraoed by a group of people during his visit to the polling booths.

ADG (Law & Order), Jagmohan, said that the police made 835 preventive arrests on Thursday which included 316 from the Kolkata Police area. Four persons were arrested on charges of violating Section 144, while 20 were held under specific cases.

"We have recovered 78 crude bombs, seized 5 illegal weapons and 21 round ammunition," Jagmohan said.

The EC received 1179 complaints through various platforms on Thursday. There was also drone surveillance at some polling booths in Kolkata for monitoring the elections.

Meanwhile, Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar and his wife Sudesh Dhankhar casted their votes at a polling booth in Chowringhee Assembly constituency.
Svanehj wins major pump order for new Chinese MR tankers

A significant expansion of the setup in China is showing results. In just a few months, Svanehj has landed two major P&C pump orders in China.

Most recently a contract with GSI Shipyard on a total of 96 deepwell pumps for four new MR Tankers. Svanehj has manufactured pump systems for P&C tankers for decades, but the segment is now becoming a significantly larger part of the business. The Danish specialist in deepwell pumps for marine and offshore has a target of increasing sales of P&C cargo pumps by 40% over the next three years and has just won its largest single P&C order since 2005. The customer is Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Limited (GSI), which is to build four 49,900 DWT MR Tankers for White Whale Shipping. A few months ago, Svanehj was chosen by Cosco Dalian Shipyard as the pump supplier for two similar P&C tankers. According to Sales Director Johnny Houmann, the two orders are won as a result of Svanehjs strengthened presence in China. In 2020, the company expanded its Chinese organisation from three to 15 employees with competencies in sourcing, sales and service. Since establishing an office in Suzhou at the end of 2019, we have strengthened our position in China, with our own sales and service people. Through local presence, weve become closer to shipyards in the region, and thus gained greater insight into how we can best meet their needs, says Johnny Houmann, Sales Director, Svanehj. Strong growth in 2020 and 2021 Although the global construction of new ships is at its lowest level for several years, Svanehj is showing strong growth. The company has just released its 2020 annual report with a revenue of USD 62 million against USD 46 million in 2019. Profit has increased from USD 2 million to USD 9 million before tax. We are experiencing an extremely good order intake and can already see that were headed for an even better result in 2021, says Svanehj CEO Sren K. Nielsen. Sales of Svanehjs patented DW Fuel Pump for liquified gas has tripled in 2020, and expectations are for significant growth to continue in coming years. After a few years of historically low activity in the market, the marine industry is anticipating several years of high growth. And theres no doubt that this will give a further boost to the transition from oil to gas, says Sren K. Nielsen. He also points to the servicing of gas tankers as a business area with growth potential. In December 2020, Svanehj doubled the size of its service department through the acquisition of the Danish company FORCE Technology Marine Equipment Service. Svanehj has thus become a full-scope cargo system service provider, with competencies in servicing and calibrating pumps, compressors, valves and instrumentation. The new service setup has already secured framework agreements with several major customers.




Higginbotham Real Estate As an outgrowth of one of the premier home builders in the Midwest, Higginbotham Real Estate has a reserve of institutional knowledge that is uncommon for a real estate company.

Higginbotham Custom Homes & Renovation (Higginbotham), a respected St. Louis-based custom home builder, has re-launched their Real Estate Division to meet the evolving needs of the community in todays growing residential real estate market. With more than 75 years as a trusted name in home building and renovation in the region, Higginbotham is uniquely positioned to serve both returning and new clients for a broad range of real estate transactions.

The company first joined the St. Louis Association of Realtors in 1945 as an add-on for custom build clients who needed to sell their existing homes and continues as a Realtor-Broker today to fully meet the needs of its clients.

Continuing with the legacy and founding principles of the Higginbotham brand, Higginbotham Real Estate has expanded to include a Realtor who is in the family, Sarah Higginbotham; and a mother-daughter team, Laurel Ostertag Arrick and Audrey Arrick. With Elizabeth Higginbotham at the helm as Broker-Officer, Higginbotham Real Estate continues to exceed client expectations.

Higginbotham Real Estate will tap into an extensive network of partners in construction, lending, appraisals, and more, developed over decades in the industry. Real estate clients who need to engage contractors to do repairs before selling or need a quote for a potential renovation during the buying process will have a single partner that can provide a full menu of ancillary services. In addition, Higginbothams extensive experience in land acquisition gives the firm a library of knowledge of the St. Louis area, its neighborhoods, and the inventory available.

As an outgrowth of one of the premier home builders in the Midwest, Higginbotham Real Estate has a reserve of institutional knowledge that is uncommon for a real estate company. Our home building and renovation staff works in tandem with the real estate business to consult on behalf of all of our clients, said Kent Higginbotham, Owner of Higginbotham Custom Homes & Renovation. Our Realtors are knowledgeable and well connected, helping our clients make informed decisions about selling, buying, or investing in real estate. This unparalleled experience helps clients get the best possible result during negotiations, inspections, and closing.

The Higginbotham Real Estate team is impressive. Laurel is a native Saint Louisan who has been in real estate for more than three decades. She graduated from John Burroughs and has a degree in Marketing from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Audrey graduated from Ladue High School before attending the University of Missouri where she earned a Bachelors degree in Hospitality Management. Sarah was born and raised in Saint Louis and graduated from Columbia Christian College. She has been practicing real estate for 5 years, bringing with her not only her knowledge of the St. Louis real estate market, but also the St. Charles market, where she currently resides with her family.

This re-launch comes on the heels of a rebranding by Higginbotham Custom Homes & Renovation as a whole. Higginbothams reputation for superb service and quality craftsmanship will translate into a new iteration of its real estate business focused on concierge service and attention to detail. For more information about Higginbotham Real Estate visit http://www.homesbyhigginbotham.com, or call 314-993-0079 or one of the agents directly: Laurel Ostertag Arrick at 314-541-4343, Audrey Arrick at 314-223-1727, or Sarah Higginbotham at 314-956-2526.

###

About Higginbotham Real Estate

The Higginbotham quality home tradition began in 1945, when three brothers built their first custom home in St. Louis Hills. Today, the family tradition continues with third-generation family business leader, Elizabeth Higginbotham, at the helm of Higginbotham Real Estate. With more than 75 years of experience in the St. Louis home market, Higginbotham Real Estate offers a full-service solution for discerning home buyers who expect quality and attention to detail. With strong company values and an unwavering reputation of superior knowledge, communication, and client support, Higginbotham Real Estate has developed a reputation for excellence. For more information visit http://www.homesbyhigginbotham.com or call 314-993-0079.
New Delhi, April 29 : Most urban Indians and global citizens endorse the introduction of Covid-19 vaccine passports for citizens for travel and other purposes, including visiting events and commercial places, showed a WEF-Ipsos survey.

A 'Vaccine Passport' is a record or health data certificate that would carry information about whether a person has been inoculated or has tested negative for Covid-19. The information would be accessible electromagnetically, on mobile apps, or as printed documents or cards.

An Ipsos statement said that an overwhelming majority of urban Indians and global citizens favour Covid-19 Vaccine Passports for citizens to aid in different ways. Around 78 per cent global citizens and 84 per cent Indians support the use of the vaccine passports for entering any country. Around 73 per cent global citizens and 82 per cent urban Indians agree that the passports would be important for making travel & large events safe.

As many as 67 per cent global citizens and 82 per cent urban Indians agree that the passports should be used for entry at large public places, like concert halls and stadiums. Further 1 in 2 global citizens agree and 78 per cent urban Indians want that such documents should be needed for visiting shops, restaurants & offices.

In fact, at least 81 per cent of urban Indians polled foresee vaccine passports becoming a reality by the end of the year. Two third of global citizens (66 per cent) too expect positive outcomes with the vaccine passport decree.

"Covid-19 Vaccine Passports or Health Certificates will provide the best safety measure to citizens, to usher in normalcy. Majority of urban Indians advocate its implementation and global citizens too," said Amit Adarkar, CEO of Ipsos India.

"After mass vaccination and testing, certification should be the next logical step. Such resounding popular support suggests an overwhelming desire of people to return to a sense of normalcy. Vaccine passports could be a good enabler to overcome vaccine hesitancy," he added.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
A near 50 per cent rise in the price of fuel since the end of last year has given Royal Dutch Shell's bottom line a boost, fresh figures show.

Each barrel of oil the company sold in the first quarter fetched around $55.74, or 40, marking a 20 per cent increase on a year ago and and up nearly half since December 2020. Gas prices are also up significantly, Shell said.

Oil prices dropped sharply during the early phases of the pandemic last year, but have since made a hefty comeback, although experts are divided about how long this will last.

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant's adjusted earnings hit $3.2billion, or 2.3billion, over the first three months of this year, up 13 per cent on the year before, and surpassing the 2.2billion forecast by analysts.

Good for some: A near 50% rise in the price of fuel since the end of last year has given Royal Dutch Shell's bottom line a boost

The rise from this time last year came despite a drop in production from more than 3.7million barrels of oil equivalent, a measure which includes gas production as well, to 3.5million in the most recent quarter.

Higher oil prices and chemicals margins offset a weaker performance in the company's refining and marketing operations, Shell said.

Chief executive Ben van Beurden said: 'Shell has made a strong start to 2021, generating over eight billion dollars of cash in the quarter.

'Our integrated business model is ideally positioned to benefit from recovering demand.'

Despite better-than-expected results, Mr van Beurden was not able to claim victory in his battle against Shell's debt as rival BP did earlier this week.

BP pushed down its debt to below its 25.2billion target thanks to money it made by selling parts of the business.

Meanwhile, Shell is still some way off its $65billion, or around 46million, debt target, but managed to cut net debt to $73.1billion.

When it hits its target, Shell said it will increase the amount of money it distributes to shareholders.

Expensive: Prices at the pumps have been noticeably higher in recent weeks

Today, Shell's top brass announced a dividend of $0.1735 a share for the quarter, a marking a 4 per cent increase on a year ago. Shares in the group rose around 1.5 per cent this morning.

In a bid to save cash, Shell cut its dividend by around two-thirds amid the pandemic last year. This was the first time the dividend had been cut since World War Two.

Current cost of supply earnings attributable to shareholders increased by 58 per cent to 3.1billion in the first quarter.

William Ryder, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: 'Shell has had a reasonable start to the year as higher prices have lifted free cash flow and underlying profits. Granted, group-wide cash flow hasn't quite recovered to where it was a year ago, but it's still a substantial improvement. Profitability has also risen as higher prices pushed up margins, and both underlying profits and headline profits were ahead of last year.

'Stronger prices were always going to help Shell out this quarter, and increased cash flow and gains from asset sales have driven debt down.'

He added: 'We like the discipline of a firm target, and if the vaccine rollout continues to be successful and the economy recovers Shell should get there relatively soon. However, the pandemic is striking with renewed force in India, and a smooth economic recovery must be global. We're not out of the woods yet, and a strong economy will be required to support the oil and gas prices needed to keep the dividend growing.'

On the group's green credentials, Ian McLelland, managing director at Edison Group, said: 'Like many energy companies, Shell is committed to improving its transparency, and is looking to become one of the first energy companies to submit its latest Energy Transition Strategy to a shareholder vote at its AGM on 18 May.

'While only advisory, this vote will be a key indicator of the support Shell has for its transition strategy, both from dividend hungry generalist investors and energy sector specialists, as well as the rapidly growing body of investor groups and NGO's pushing for more rapid adoption of the company's climate measures.

'Under scrutiny is Shell's target to be net-zero emissions by 2050 and realise the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit average global temperatures rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.'
Six years ago, before his election as Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai said he would explore all means, including negotiations with Boko Haram terrorists, to rescue the kidnapped Chibok girls if he were the president, a statement that contradicts his present stance.

After a video clip of his 2015 statement went viral this week, Mr El-Rufai has explained why he as governor has moved in the opposite direction.

No fewer than 270 schoolgirls were abducted when Boko Haram terrorists attacked their school in Chibok, a community in Borno State, in 2014.

While some of the girls managed to escape, others spent over two years with their abductors before the Nigerian government negotiated their release.

Seven years after the kidnap, about a hundred of the girls are still in the captivity of the insurgents.

Reacting to the federal governments handling of the kidnap of the Chibok girls in 2015, Mr El-Rufai blamed former President Goodluck Jonathan for not exploring all possible means.

in an interview with Sahara TV, Mr El-Rufai, whose All Progressives Congress was in the opposition then, said: We have no apologies for pointing out to Nigerias that this government is incompetent and has failed to provide security. If you say we are politicizing it, fix the problem so that we cannot politicize it, okay?

Asked for the way forward, Mr El-Rufai said: The government has the solution to this problem. Several committees have given them recommendations. They should just implement the recommendations in their drawer, okay?

As for rescuing the girls, we have seen examples of what countries do when this situation happens, you should have military action, on the one hand; the negotiation on the other. You should not foreclose anything because the lives of your citizens are at risk and you dont want to lose one life. You dont want to lose the life of one person.

Asked if he was in support of negotiation, he said:

Im in support of every option. When you have the lives of your citizens at risk, you should not take any option off the table. You should be flexible. You should listen. You should negotiate and look at the price. You have to be and get those girls out, he told the interviewer.

In crisis

But today, Mr El-Rufai is faced with a similar situation in Kaduna but has said he will never negotiate with kidnappers or pay their ransom demands to free their victims.

In what seems like a test of Mr El-Rufais previous statements, several attacks have been launched in Kaduna with many kidnapped persons still with their abductors.

Last month, 39 students were kidnapped at Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka. While a few of them have been rescued nearly 30 students are still with the abductors.

Last week, bandits attacked Greenfield University, a private university in Kaduna State, and kidnapped an undisclosed number of students. Five of the University students have been found dead, suspected to have been killed by their assailants.

Others are still in captivity with promises to secure their release by the state and federal authorities.

Meanwhile, Mr El-Rufai has repeatedly emphasised his stance not to negotiate with the bandits.

Our position on Kaduna State has been clear and consistent: bandits, cattle wrestlers and armed militia must be degraded and decimated to a state of unconditional submission to constituted authority.

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While speaking at the presentation of the state 2020 security report last month, Mr El-Rufai said the government would never negotiate with bandits of any kind or support any grant of amnesty to them.

This no ransom, no negotiation was reiterated in a statement signed by his spokesperson, Muyiwa Adekeye, on Tuesday.

In the statement sent to this newspaper, Mr Adeyeye said those sharing the video clip of the previous interview took Mr El-Rufai out of context.

The years since 2014 may have led some people to forget the denial and doubt that defined the FGs response to the Chibok abductions, especially the initial refusal to acknowledge that it happened. That was the context under which civic pressures were brought on the government.

Nigerias journey since the 2014 Chibok tragedy has proven that the solution to violent crimes, including terrorism and banditry, is a robust response from the state and its coercive agencies. The quantum of money paid as ransom following many negotiations with bandits have not stopped kidnappings, reduced their frequency or deterred the criminals.

He said negotiating with the criminals does not conform to the current realities.

Mass abduction was like a novelty in 2014. But the facts have changed since then. Negotiations and ransoms have been undertaken, but these have not stopped the criminals. It has only encouraged them.

Mr Adekeye further stated that the fact that criminals seek to hold the state government by the jugular does not mean it should surrender and create an incentive for more crime.
Enhanced renewal agreement provides IT and security services supporting Zurich's IT transformation in the U.S. and Europe

DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) announced today that Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) has extended its agreement with DXC to provide IT and security services over the next five years as a vital component of the company's IT transformation. This applications-led infrastructure and application modernization will help Zurich improve its overall customer and employee experience.

As part of the enhanced agreement, Zurich will leverage DXC capabilities across the Enterprise Technology Stack. This will provide Zurich with the ability to deploy applications faster through automation, helping them to introduce new products quickly and at scale, and to improve operational resiliency.

"We put our customers' needs at the center of everything we do. Enhancing and automating our core insurance processes will help us to provide customers with a better experience, whether they purchase a new insurance policy or are filing a claim," said Daniel Englberger, Chief Operating Officer, Group Technology Operations, Zurich Insurance Group. "DXC's IT and security services, as well as the joint applications-led infrastructure modernization initiative, will contribute to the overall framework powering our digitization strategy."

"Zurich is a valued DXC customer and we welcome the opportunity to be part of the company's global transformational journey," said Mike Salvino, President and CEO, DXC Technology. "We listened carefully to Zurich's needs and are excited to deliver our capabilities across the Enterprise Technology Stack to benefit the company, its people and customers."

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run their mission critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private and hybrid clouds. With decades of driving innovation, the world's largest companies trust DXC to deploy the Enterprise Technology Stack to deliver new levels of performance, competitiveness and customer experiences. Learn more about the DXC story and our focus on people, customers and operational execution at www.dxc.technology.

About Zurich Insurance Group

Zurich is a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets. With about 55,000 employees, it provides a wide range of property and casualty, life insurance products and services in more than 215 countries and territories. Zurich's customers include individuals, small businesses, and mid-sized and large companies, as well as multinational corporations. For more information visit: www.zurich.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005621/en/

Contacts:

Richard Adamonis, Corporate Media Relations, +1.862.228.3481, radamonis@dxc.com

John Sweeny, Investor Relations, +1.908.315.3665, john.sweeny@dxc.com

Zurich Media Relations, +41 44 625 21
New Delhi, April 29 : Qatar Airways on Thursday said it will ferry key medical aid and equipment to India from global suppliers free of charge.

The airline intends to transport 300 tonnes of aid from across its global network to Doha where it will be flown in a three-flight cargo aircraft convoy directly to destinations in India "where it is most desperately needed".

Qatar Airways' Group Chief Executive, Akbar Al Baker said: "The State of Qatar has a long and special relationship with India, and we have watched with great sorrow as Covid-19 has once again caused a significant challenge to the country." "As one of the world air cargo leaders, with an extensive international network, we stand ready to provide humanitarian support by transporting these much-needed supplies, and help the country fight back against this appalling virus." The airline said the cargo shipment will include PPE equipment, oxygen canisters and other essential medical items, and consists of donations by individuals and companies around the world in addition to existing cargo orders.

In the early stages of the pandemic, the airline had provided similar aid flights to China, shipping supplies to Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai in February 2020.
[April 29, 2021] Ransomware Task Force of 60+ Members From Industry, Government, Law Enforcement, Civil Society, and International Organizations Publishes Comprehensive Framework to Combat Ransomware

Today, the Institute for Security and Technology (IST) is publishing the Ransomware Task Force's (RTF) comprehensive framework for action, the result of a coalition of 60+ experts from software companies, government agencies, cybersecurity vendors, financial services companies, civil society, and academic institutions. Combating Ransomware - A Comprehensive Framework for Action provides 48 practical recommendations to curb the rampant spread of this increasingly destructive type of cybercrime. Our comprehensive recommendations assign a role to everyone, from U.S. and international leaders to industry, lawmakers, and civil society. "The imperative could not be more clear; it's time to increase prioritization of action and limit the damage inflicted by these attacks," said Philip Reiner, Executive Director of the RTF and IST CEO. "In the past 12 months alone, we've seen ransomware attacks delay lifesaving medical treatment, destabilize critical infrastructure, and put our national security at risk. We felt an urgent need to bring together world-class experts across sectors to create a framework that government and industry can pursue to disrupt the ransomware business model and mitigate the impact of attacks." Ransomware is an international cybercrime that is multiplying in frequency and severity. These attacks are executed by criminals around the world who are willing to target schools, hospitals, businesses, and governments alike. This is not a problem that can be solved by any one entity alone, and t is not a threat that can wait for piecemeal solutions. Public and private leaders and organizations must act now, and in unison, to curb this dangerous criminal enterprise.



A crime that threatens so many sectors required a diverse body of experts to develop unique solutions. The RTF was proactively convened with representatives across disparate sectors, large and small, public and private. This breadth of expertise led to deeply informed solutions that, taken together, form a comprehensive strategy to quell the ransomware crisis. The recommended framework consists of four priority goals; to deter ransomware attacks through a nationally and internationally coordinated, comprehensive strategy; to disrupt the ransomware business model and decrease criminal profits; to help organizations better prepare for ransomware attacks; and to respond to ransomware attacks more effectively. The 48 recommended actions provide guidance for dealing with the complexities of the ransomware epidemic, from the role of cyber insurance, to cryptocurrency, to safe havens for threat actors.

These actions must be carried out in full, and as a collaborative, cohesive strategy, as each element on its own is insufficient to address this growing problem. The RTF's recommended framework is not for siloed action; it will take the coordinated effort of many stakeholders to accomplish these four critical goals, which each fill a gap in the current approach to ransomware mitigation. We at IST are honored to have the opportunity to convene and work with this groundbreaking coalition. We thank the RTF members who volunteered their immense time and care for this effort, and whose lively discussions led to these actionable recommendations. The Ransomware Task Force represents the many people who dedicate themselves each day towards making the ransomware problem less of a threat. We remain indebted and grateful to all you do. The time for concerted, coordinated action is now. We urge every stakeholder to read this report, and to join IST and the entire RTF coalition in ransomware mitigation efforts, now and until the threat of ransomware no longer looms over the heads of citizens, teachers, businesses, hospitals, and nations. To read the RTF report, http://securityandtechnology.org/ransomwaretaskforce/report To learn more about the Ransomware Task Force, visit https://securityandtechnology.org/ransomwaretaskforce/ About The Institute for Security and Technology The Institute for Security and Technology designs and advances solutions to the world's toughest emerging security threats. We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit network based in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to advancing solutions to critical national security challenges. For more information, visit securityandtechnology.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005345/en/

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Myanmars parallel government on Wednesday rejected holding talks with the junta that seized power in early February until the military regime releases detained civilian leaders, rebuffing a plan by the countrys Southeast Asian neighbors.

Leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met last Saturday and signed a five-point consensus on resolving the crisis by halting army violence against civilian protesters and holding talks.

Members of the pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG), formed on Apr. 16, said they will not engage in dialogue until detained leaders from the previous civilian-led government, including deposed State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, are freed. They also want ASEAN members and other nations to recognize the NUG as the legitimate government of Myanmar.

In order to have a meaningful dialogue, it is very clear that it is only possible if our leaders who are being detained are freed, Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmars permanent representative to the United Nations, told RFA, speaking for the NUG.

We believe that only when they are freed will the talks be fair and meaningful, he said.

Many leaders, other officials, and lawmakers from the National League for Democracy (NLD) were arrested by the military during and after the Feb. 1 coup, while those who evaded arrest have formed the NUG.

Political leaders and analysts in Myanmar said ASEANs stance on the crisis was unfair to pro-democratic forces and would prolong the current military dictatorship. Human rights groups say that the release of the more than 3,400 people who are being detained by junta forces is a key condition for resolving the crisis.

Security forces, including police, have conducted violent crackdowns on anti-coup protesters in cities and towns nationwide, at times using deadly force. More than 750 people have been killed since the coup began, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thailand-based human rights group.

Myanmar junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing (L) is greeted during his arrival at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Indonesia, to attend an ASEAN summit on the Myanmar crisis, April 24, 2021. Credit: AFP/Indonesian Presidential Palace





Proposal deserves support

Nandar Hla Myint, spokesman for the military-proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), said ASEANs proposal deserves support.

I believe ASEAN is serious about the situation of individual countries in the region, and at the same time it adheres to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country, so it came up with something acceptable to both sides, he said.

The five-point agreement calls for an ASEAN envoy and delegation to visit Myanmar to meet with concerned parties, but junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has said that the visit would be considered only if there is internal stability.

A political analyst who declined to be named said the regime leaders comment could mean that the crackdowns will continue and that the visit will be put off. He also said that the junta would not free detained officials.

None of the five demands in the agreement calls for the release of detained leaders, he said. Min Aung Hlaing has no intention of releasing them. Who are they going to negotiate with, then, if the unlawfully arrested leaders are not released? There is no need to hold discussions with anyone.

Myint Oo, an NLD lawmaker from Bago region who won a seat in the November 2020 elections, said the political crisis could not be solved by ASEANs recommendations and that the groupings suggestions were an insult to people protesting peacefully for democracy.

Look at the way ASEAN said that both sides should cease violence, as if it were the peaceful protesters who are using violence. This fact alone is offensive to the gentle and peaceful citizens who are staging this Spring Revolution, he told RFA.

Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the pro-military think tank the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, said he believed the military council would comply with ASEANs points if the demands were in line with a law enacted in the national interest.

We believe we can do everything that we can in the national interest within a legal framework. he said. We certainly see that it will move forward step by step. It might not move as speedily as they would expect, but each of the five demands could be implemented at appropriate times.

A Myanmar anti-coup protester holds a sign calling for the arrest of junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration in Dawei, southern Myanmar's Tanintharyi region, Apr. 23, 2021. Credit: AFP/Dawei Watch





Junta outlaws AAPP

Continuing its drive to cut off the flow of information about killings and arrests in the crackdown, the junta outlawed the AAPP after accusing the group of producing biased information and incorrect data that hurt the stability and rule of law in Myanmar.

The Ministry for Home Affairs under the State Administration Council, as the junta government is known, announced on Monday that it would take action against the AAPP for releasing what it said was inaccurate data to intimidate and cause anxiety among civil servants and the public, which could be interpreted as inciting violence.

The AAPP publishes daily updates on the numbers of people killed, arrested, and released by the military and police in connection with anti-junta. The statements have been cited frequently by foreign governments, media, and other international organizations.

Pro-army pundit Thein Tun Oo agreed with the juntas move, saying that the AAPP's reports are weak in background checks or references, and the numbers get inflated.

The AAPP, however, said it has compiled lists of detainees since the day of the military coup along with the names of the dead, places where the attacks occurred, dates of deaths, and causes of death.

Everything is recorded with photos and videos, and the data are published daily, the organization said in response to an RFA query.

The military regime is attacking the AAPP because it is recognized by the U.N., foreign governments, and rights groups as a credible source of information about political prisoners in Myanmar, said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

They are trying to silence a very important organization that is doing a very difficult job. It is an attempt to keep the outside world from hearing what is happening in Burma, he said.

Myanmar anti-coup protesters hold signs calling for the arrest of junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration in Dawei, southern Myanmar's Tanintharyi region, Apr. 23, 2021. Credit: AFP/Dawei Watch





More protests, arrests

Sporadic demonstration in support of the NUG and anti-junta protests continued to be held in Yangon, Mandalay, Sagaing, Bago, and Tanintharyi regions, as well as in Shan and Kachin states.

The AAPP said the death toll as of Wednesday was 756 and that 3,449 people were arrested, while another 1,237 people were in hiding while facing charges.

At least two people were killed and 15 were arrested amid protests and clashes between demonstrators and security forces on Wednesday, witnesses said.

In Sagaing region, a military corporal was killed during a brief clash between the Tamu Peoples Defense Force and Myanmar soldiers Tuesday evening near the Indian border, residents said.

Soldiers took away the body of Corporal Aung Aung, a local soldier who had joined the Civil Disobedience Movement of striking workers in March, they said.

In the Sagaing town of Monywa, where residents have been holding daily anti-junta protests, soldiers took away nine people from three neighborhoods Tuesday night, locals said.

Nine got arrested, said a resident who declined to be named. They were accused of communicating with underground forces. There had been a series of explosions in the area recently, so their arrests could be connected to that.

An explosion on a bridge in Kachin state Tuesday night caused the structures foundation to crack and some rafters on nearby railroad tracks connecting the towns of Myitkyina and Mandalay to catch fire, said a resident of Hopin where the blast occurred. It is not clear who was behind the bombings.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden set some Canadian pulses racing again Wednesday with more tough Buy American talk, telling Congress he has "strenuously limited" cabinet members from granting exemptions to the 88-year-old protectionist doctrine.

President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, as Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., look on. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jim Watson, Pool via AP

WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden set some Canadian pulses racing again Wednesday with more tough Buy American talk, telling Congress he has "strenuously limited" cabinet members from granting exemptions to the 88-year-old protectionist doctrine.

In the same breath, however, the speech marking Biden's first 100 days as commander-in-chief offered a measure of comfort by suggesting Buy American would not offend the terms of trade deals like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

"American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products, made in America, to create American jobs. That's the way it's supposed to be, and it will be in this administration," Biden declared.

The notion of keeping U.S. government spending on American soil, a philosophy that dates back to 1933, will be the "one principle" guiding the $2.2-trillion infrastructure package dubbed the American Jobs Plan, he added.

"I might note, parenthetically, that does not violate any trade agreement. It's been the law since the '30s," Biden said through sustained applause in the House chamber, where COVID-19 allowed only a relative handful of lawmakers to attend.

"I've made it clear to all my cabinet people: their ability to give exemptions has been strenuously limited. It will be American products."

Much of what Biden said on the subject, including mention of trade agreements and cabinet members, did not appear in the prepared version of his remarks distributed to reporters before the speech.

And it offered little solace or clarity for Canadian stakeholders still smarting from the punishing steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by Biden's stridently protectionist predecessor, Donald Trump.

"Those policies continue to concern us  'Made in America' failed to embrace the integrated nature that we have in the steel business," said Catherine Cobden, head of the Canadian Steel Producers Association.

"Protectionism between neighbours and allies hurts everyone. We're really hopeful that that's not the way this plays out."

The picture is likely to become more clear by midsummer, when an internal review of the existing rules  including how domestic content is defined and whether information and communication technology should be covered  is due.

"That will be the key to determining impacts on Canada," said Dan Ujczo, senior counsel in the international trade practice at Thompson Hine, based in Columbus, Ohio.

Earlier this week, Biden appointed trade expert and former labour executive Celeste Drake as the director of a new Made in America office, which will clarify and enforce the rules, as well as pass judgment on any exemption requests.

Drake, who played a key role in negotiating the labour provisions that helped get the USMCA through Congress, "knows the loopholes in Buy America policies and waivers better than anyone," Ujczo said.

Maryscott Greenwood, the president and CEO of the Canadian American Business Council, warned Thursday against hitting the panic button, at least in terms of the guardrails that exist for federal infrastructure projects.

Canada has successfully negotiated exemptions in the past, notably in 2009 after then-president Barack Obama imposed his own version of the rules, and more recently under Trump when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was limiting exports of personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I do think that Canada will be able to negotiate a carve-in, if you will," Greenwood told an online panel discussion with members of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

"Governments, interlocutors, business groups, our group  we're all working really hard on this. But it is not the entire enchilada. There is an awful lot of economic collaboration  we can do outside the scope of the particular infrastructure bill."

What worries a lot of Canadian suppliers, contractors and employers isn't so much the federal rules, but the vast array of lower-tier restrictions that exist at the state and local level commonly referred to as "Buy America."

That, combined with the strident political rhetoric of the last four years, as well as the last 100 days, threatens a chill that could discourage procurement officers and regional government officials from looking beyond U.S. borders.

"When you're dealing with the U.S., it's a long game," said Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters president Dennis Darby.

The American objective is less about punishing countries like Canada than it is about competing with other countries that play by different rules, such as China, he added  a scenario that's likely much easier to navigate with Biden than it ever was with Trump.

"We're not specifically the target, but we end up being collateral damage, and we have to find a way to make sure we don't get caught," Darby said.

"This is a more normal discussion with the U.S.  our guys are much happier to have these discussions than the much more unpredictable ones they had with the previous administration."

The time for action is now, Mark Agnew, vice-president, policy and international with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said last week at hearings before a House of Commons committee exploring Canada-U.S. ties.

Agnew laid out six key points, including:

 Ensure high-value Canadian services like support contracts don't get lost in the focus on goods;

 Identify areas like clean energy and critical minerals, key in the manufacture of electric car batteries, where Canada can be a real partner to the U.S.;

 Pay particular attention to shared defence and national security priorities;

 Make sure Canada meets or exceeds new U.S. emissions standards for manufacturing and promotes its available lower-carbon options;

 Closer collaboration between Canadian business and government;

 Better, more detailed data on the complex and esoteric web of rules, regulations and restrictions that exist at all U.S. levels of government, as well as agreements with the World Trade Organization.

"We are at a critical moment in the relationship," Agnew said. "We need to really drive home the point of why it is in the U.S. self-interest to work with us."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.
Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash shares dropped Thursday after Labor Secretary Marty Walsh announced support for gig workers receiving benefits as full employees, CNBC reports.

Why it matters: Walsh's stance reflects growing pressure from the Biden administration to regulate the growing gig economy.

Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.

Uber wants other states to adopt California's policy that allows the company to treat drivers as contractors instead of employees.

Our thought bubble, via Axios' Kia Kokalitcheva: The Biden administration has been clear about its pro-labor views and companies have been anticipating it.

What to watch from the companies: A strategy similar to what Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Doordash, and Instacart used in California  avoiding reclassification by codifying some combination of additional benefits (although that bargain has been criticized as leaving workers with the short end of the stick).

What he's saying: We are looking at it but in a lot of cases gig workers should be classified as employees... in some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not and I think it has to be consistent across the board, Walsh told Reuters in an exclusive interview.

These companies are making profits and revenue and Im not (going to) begrudge anyone for that because thats what we are about in America. But we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker, he said.

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Malta must seek justice for Caruana, European Parliament Resolution, politicians potentially involved should be tried

(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, APR 29 - The latest revelations on the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia spark great concern, in particular over the possible involvement of ministers and politicians in Malta, said a resolution approved with 635 votes in favor, 46 against and 12 abstentions by the European Parliament. The resolution examined the latest developments in the case concerning the Maltese investigative reporter who was killed by a car bomb and other connected probes, after the testimony provided by convicted criminal Vincent Muscat.



Expressing deep concern over the possible involvement in the murder case of sitting ministers and politicians, the lawmakers urged the government to ensure that those implicated in all cases brought to light by the journalist face justice.



The MEPs recognized progress made in the investigation on the murder and other connected cases of corruption and money laundering, "although with great delay", and asked for the probe to go beyond the role of the chief of staff of the previous prime minister. All charges of corruption and fraud should be investigated and pursued "with the necessary rigor and at the appropriate level". (ANSAmed).




Joe Rogan back-pedaled on statements he made on his podcast last week when he suggested young people who are healthy do not need to get the coronavirus vaccine.

Why it matters: Rogan's comments drew swift backlash from critics, including multiple Biden officials.

"Did Joe Rogan become a medical doctor while we weren't looking?" White House communications director Kate Bedingfield quipped when asked about the comments on TV Wednesday.

"You're talking about yourself in a vacuum," said White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci on NBC.

Details: On an episode of his podcast out Thursday, Rogan acknowledged the White House's response to his comments and conceded "there's some legitimate science behind this."

"I'm not an anti-vaxx person," he clarified. "I said I believe they're safe and I encourage many people to take them. My parents were vaccinated. I just said that if you're a young, healthy person that you don't need it."

"Their argument was, you need it for other people ... But that's a different argument. That's a different conversation."

Rogan went on to add that his comments were blown out of proportion in part due to clickbait headlines.

He also said he was scheduled to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before that vaccine was temporarily paused.

"I'm not a doctor, I'm a f***-ing moron," he said. "I'm not a respected source of information, even for me ... But I at least try to be honest about what I'm saying."

Sources tell Axios that Spotify did not direct Rogan to soften his statements.

The tech giant faced criticism for giving the host a platform to spread misinformation about vaccines.

Spotify noted on its earnings report Thursday that increased subscriber growth and user engagement can be attributed in part to the better-than-expected performance of Rogan's podcast, which the company acquired exclusively for over $100 million.

The big picture: This isn't the first time Spotify has had to reckon with Rogan's comments. The audio company faced blowback for airing episodes of his podcast in October that featured far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

At the time, Spotify defended its decision not to remove the episode saying, We are not going to ban specific individuals from being guests on other peoples shows, as the episode/show complies with our content policies."

Go deeper: Spotify reports strong Q1 revenue as Joe Rogan podcast exceeds expectations
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The police in Edo State on Wednesday said they have rescued two of the three persons abducted on Sunday along Ahor Bypass, on the Benin-Lagos Road.

The police spokesperson in Edo State, Kontongs Bello, disclosed this in a statement in Benin City.

Today being 28/04/2021 at about 10:30hrs, men of the Edo State Police Command rescued two kidnapped victims identified as Okeke Emmanuel m age 37 and Rilwan Adewale m age 36.

They were rescued along Lagos Bypass by Ahor community, Benin City, Mr Bello, a superintendent of police, said in the statement.

He said the victims were traveling in a Sienna Bus from Port Harcourt, Rivers State, to Lagos State before three of them were kidnapped by gunmen.

He said the victims were taken into the bush where they met other kidnap victims.

On receipt of the information, the police operatives immediately swung into action and rescued two of the victims after a gun battle with the hoodlums.

One of the victims, Adewale Rilwan, sustained injuries from a machete by the hoodlums.

He is presently receiving treatment in the hospital. Also, the sum of N200,000 was recovered from the scene, Mr Bello stated.

The police said they were on the trail of the fleeing kidnappers.

The Commissioner of Police in the state, Phillip Ogbadu, appealed to the residents in Edo State to volunteer useful information on criminal activities, for the police could take necessary action, the statement said.

Edo is in Nigerias South-south region.

The region, including the South-east, have been grappling with severe security challenges that have been compounded by a spate of deadly attacks on security agencies.

(NAN)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 12:23:46|Editor: huaxia

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by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Nearing 100 days in office, U.S. President Joe Biden is tasked with handling a crisis on the U.S. southern border that shows no signs of abating.

Migrants are illegally pouring over the U.S. southern border, and unaccompanied children are surging through at record levels. Critics call it a humanitarian disaster -- people are being crammed into places like the one in Donna, Texas, which is supposed to house a few hundred people under COVID restrictions, but now houses 4,000.

The Biden administration is scrambling to contain the problem, which critics blast as a major blight on the new president's first 100 days in office.

"I think that it is clear that it has become a crisis ... in terms of the conditions that some migrants, particularly children, are being held in," Jessica Bolter, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told Xinhua.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua: "It is a complicated issue for the administration," adding that while Biden wants to treat people humanely, he "doesn't want a flood of new people crossing illegally."

Some experts said that a host of issues, including hurricanes, poverty and violence, are contributing to the surge. But others maintain the problem is because Biden has changed border policies.

"Biden's first 100 days have been an all-out aggressive assault on America," Republican Strategist and TV news personality Ford O'Connell told Xinhua, adding that the border crisis is one that Biden himself created.

"Democrats see this as a two-year window to transform America into a progressive state," O'Connell said.

In a recent OP-ED on Fox New's website, Sen. Thom Tillis noted that he saw with his own eyes during last month's visit to the border "the surge of unaccompanied minors, the subpar living conditions of migrants, and the state of an overworked and overwhelmed Border Patrol." He added that these have "been direct consequences of the Biden administration's failed policies."

"Through their words and actions, the Biden administration sent a clear signal that our border is open for anyone and everyone, and the world took notice," Tillis argued.

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also chimed in recently, arguing that "expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so."

For its part, the White House said it's seeking a fix that can involve both parties.

WHAT MIGRANTS WILL FACE

Once they have crossed the border, Bolter said, there are different processes for single adult migrants, those traveling as families, and unaccompanied children to go through.

According to the expert, for single adults, most -- 87 percent in March -- are immediately expelled to Mexico or another country. Those who aren't first processed by border authorities are then transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and placed in removal proceedings before an immigration court. Most are detained in immigration detention while they are in immigration court proceedings, but some may be released for humanitarian reasons.

For families, less than half -- 33 percent in March -- are immediately expelled to Mexico or another country. Those who are not expelled are processed by border authorities in a facility like those in Donna, Texas, Bolter noted.

Some are placed into expedited removal proceedings and briefly detained in ICE family detention facilities before being either removed or released to seek asylum. Others are placed into long-term removal proceedings and quickly released into the community for the duration of their immigration court proceedings, he explained.

From there, NGOs typically help released families arrange travel to reunite with family or friends in other parts of the United States, Bolter noted.

For unaccompanied children, they are not being immediately expelled under the Biden administration. Once they have been processed by border authorities, they are transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is within the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Bolter said.

They are transferred to one of three types of facilities, ranging from smaller facilities with extensive services available, like case management and education, to larger, emergency facilities with services limited to meals, basic health care, and minimal recreation, Bolter said.

For children held in all these types of facilities, the goal is to release them as quickly as possible to a sponsor (most often a relative) in the United States whom they can live with while they go through proceedings in immigration court, Bolter noted. Enditem
Copenhagen: Amid the COVID-19 outbreak in India, the Denmark government has decided to suspend flights from India from Thursday (April 29).

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark announced numerous travel restrictions for those from India.

The ministry conducted a risk assessment, following which it changed the travel status of India from "orange" to "red", the highest level which advises against all travels to India.

The decision was made to "limit the risk of importing the virus variant B.1.617 to Denmark," said the ministry in a press release.

The ministry added that foreigners from India will only be allowed entry into Denmark for a recognisable purpose, as per the new travel restrictions.

Whereas, Danish citizens who already reside in Denmark can continue to enter Denmark from India.

Denmark now joins several European countries including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain that have already applied travel restrictions on India.

Meanwhile, The official data on Wednesday (April 28) showed that deaths due to COVID-19 have crossed the 2-lakh mark in India with the highest ever 3,000 deaths in the last 24 hours.

India also reported 3,60,960 fresh coronavirus infections, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,79,97,267, as per data by the health ministry.

(Witn Agency inputs)

Live TV
After two decades of being homeless, James Hixson is grateful to have a door to lock.

Hixson, 59, moved from San Franciscos streets into a city-funded hotel last year. In February, he got a permanent home in the Granada Hotel in Lower Nob Hill. Its not perfect: He doesnt like the food, his small room has a mouse, and he has to share a bathroom  while still struggling to pay 30% of his income in rent. But its better than being outside.

These people have been a tremendous help, he said outside his new home earlier this month.

The single-room-occupancy hotel is one of the citys newest permanent supportive housing projects and a lifeline for nearly 70 people who have struggled to get a roof over their heads. Such hotels have long been part of the citys strategy to house the homeless, but with an influx of local, state and federal dollars, the city might expand the strategy, which can come with challenges. The mostly empty Granada was home to 80 tenants  some of whom settled a lawsuit with the longtime building owner around the time the city took over  who have mixed reactions to the change.

The 232-room property was the first of two hotels the city bought with state help last year  the other, the Diva, is a 130-room tourist hotel  and the only one so far to be converted to subsidized housing. But more could come as the city looks to new funding sources and a less competitive market to create more desperately needed homeless housing and preserve affordability, said Emily Cohen, director of strategy for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Currently the city is reviewing around 70 properties, including single-room-occupancy and tourist hotels, whose owners are willing to sell, Cohen said.

Marissa Leshnov / Special to The Chronicle

Last year the Granada was around a third occupied, mostly by seniors. Conditions in the hotel, more than a century old, had deteriorated for years, culminating in a lawsuit by 31 tenants. Some longtime tenants praised the ownership change, which has meant lower rents, pest treatments and rehabbed rooms for some, but others said loss of services, infestation and security concerns persist  or have worsened. Lawyer Jason Wolford, who previously represented tenants, said continuing issues are definitely concerning, and he is investigating.

To run the Granada, the city contracts with Episcopal Community Services, a major San Francisco subsidized housing provider that also owns the property. ECS subcontracts with Caritas Management Corporation to operate it.

ECS Executive Director Beth Stokes said in a statement that the nonprofit conscientiously strived to balance our efforts to rehouse people in our community experiencing chronic homelessness, with the needs of the existing Granada tenants and is diligently navigating the challenge further complicated by the pandemic and the state mandate to fill half the rooms by the end of February.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose chief of staff described the situation in an email to tenants as a bumpy transition, said the chance to buy the building was not something to pass up. Hes fielded tenant complaints about the Granada for years and said the situation is much better now.

There is no question that its got its bumps in the road, Peskin said. Ultimately its to the good of the existing tenants and future tenants.

Last summer San Francisco applied to the states program to fund housing for the homeless, dubbed Homekey, that has housed thousands at a fraction of the cost of new construction. San Francisco got $41.6 million from the state and used $4.4 million in local funds to buy the Granada. ECS took over in November. The city is spending another $29 million on rehab. The estimated annual operating budget is $1.34 million.

The Granada had already been on the radar of city housing providers. In September 2019, Randy Shaw, executive director of Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said his organization considered taking over the building with another nonprofit but decided against it due to the amount of rehab needed and because they didnt have the bandwidth to mix frail elders with the formerly homeless.

Since then, an interim owner put in significant rehab. An independent property assessment in November 2020 found the building to be in Excellent-Good condition overall.

We really did and continue to feel like it was a really good property, Cohen said. We are actively working with ECS to solve questions as they come up.

Recently homeless tenants pay 30% of their income in rent. After tenant advocacy, ECS offered existing tenants who make at or below 30% of area median income a reduced rent: $504 starting in May.

John Susoeff, 77, was grateful to get a new lease for his own room, instead of sharing with a roommate, for $340 less than he was previously paying. But Susoeff, who moved into the building in 2005 and said he regretted his choice by 2006, still wants to move. New management is stuck with years of building problems, he said.

I dont think they knew what they were in for, he said.

Marissa Leshnov / Special to The Chronicle

ECS said it was not aware of previous litigation. The city did know the building had pests, but Cohen said it wasnt a deal breaker because its common in old properties. ECS brought in pest control to treat the building in January and contracted the company to conduct monthly cleaning in all units, biweekly in problematic rooms.

An ongoing health department investigation shows some infestation remains. Pictures taken by a health inspector on visits in December, March and April to 10 units show a mattress caked with bedbugs, along with rodent droppings. The investigation will remain open until health code violations are abated, the department said. The Chronicle also saw pictures of dead mice in traps.

Some tenants also complained about security, including residents getting codes to the front door that can be given to anyone and a security guard photographed asleep on a night shift. ECS said giving out front door codes was a temporary solution until new keys can be delivered, and its hiring support staff for evenings and weekends to supplement security.

In the most extreme incident, San Francisco police charged a 62-year-old male tenant with the attempted rape of a 90-year-old female tenant on March 24, intercepted by a building employee, according to a spokesman.

Cohen said the attempted sexual assault was obviously an incredibly tragic situation but not necessarily indicative of the safety of permanent supportive housing. Management has started eviction proceedings against the suspect, and the victim obtained a stay-away order.

Some longtime tenants are still worried. Currently, nearly 70 formerly homeless tenants have moved in, with another 89 rooms to fill.

It is great that the homeless are housed, said Jonathan Shockley, 42, who has lived in the building for 22 years. But the rich dont bear the social cost. It is the working class  in this case mostly retired people at the Granada  who did.

Shockley and some tenants are considering pursuing legal action or going to the Rent Board, with the main complaint the loss of services, including housekeeping and three meals a day served in the dining room. The city is funding a daily meal for seniors and adults with disabilities.

Peskin agreed there are some very real issues about a diminution of tenant services. Stokes said ECS is working to remedy individual situations for tenants who have lost services.

Not all long-term tenants are lamenting. Susan Setterholm, 67, who was briefly homeless before moving into the Granada 12 years ago, stopped paying for food and housekeeping seven years ago because she said both were bad. Under new management, she got bedbug treatment, her own bathroom and a rent drop from $1,390 to $504. She hasnt had a problem with the new tenants.

I am off-the-charts hopeful about my own future because of the rent levels, Setterholm said. She said new management is building the airplane as they fly it. There have been some challenges, but theyve overcome them.

Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench
PRAGUE -- Thousands of Czechs have rallied in Prague against President Milos Zeman, calling for his removal from office and condemning what opponents say are his pro-Russia views.



The rally in Wenceslas Square on April 29 came as the Czech government has accused Russias GRU military intelligence of being behind a fatal ammunition depot explosion in 2014.



In response, the Czech government announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats it considered to be spies, setting off a string of tit-for-tat moves that have brought relations between Prague and Moscow to a nadir.



Zeman, whose role is largely ceremonial, appeared to contradict the government in a televised address to the nation on April 25, saying that are two theories about what caused the explosion of a munitions depot near the eastern Czech town of Vrbetice in 2014.



He said that one version of events is that Russian intelligence was involved in the deadly explosion. The other version, he said, was that the blast was caused by the inexpert handling of ammunition.



Zeman is circulating "the same fairy tales as the Russian disinformation pages and Russian propaganda," said Benjamin Roll, head of the group A Million Moments for Democracy that organized the protest, which police estimated at 10,000 people.

The protesters demand the Senate bring treason charges against Zeman.



Slovakia, Romania, and the Baltic states have also ejected Russian diplomats in solidarity with the Czech Republic, while Bulgaria leveled its own accusations at Russia over a series of blasts at its weapons and armament facilities over the past 10 years.

Sofia is also linking Russia to a murder attempt against an arms dealer and two other Bulgarian citizens.

Russia has denied any involvement in the blasts.
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The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) has confirmed the death of a middle-aged man in a road accident at Aguata, Anambra State, after a suspected drunk driver lost control and rammed into another vehicle.

The FRSC Sector Commander in the state, Andrew Kumapayi, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Awka on Thursday that the accident occurred Wednesday evening on Igbo Ukwu-Ezinifite Road.

The crash involved an unidentified driver of a Toyota Hiace bus with registration number ENU544YA and unidentified driver of Mitsubishi L300 bus with registration number JJT677JT.

Eyewitness report indicates that the Mitsubishi bus driver, who was suspected to be drunk, lost control of his vehicle, left his lane and collided with the Hiace bus.

Thirteen persons were involved in the crash, including seven males, four females and two children, a male and a female.

Twelve persons sustained injuries and were rushed to Apex hospital Igbo Ukwu before the arrival of the FRSC rescue team from Igbo Ukwu Command.

A male adult was confirmed dead by the doctor on duty and his body deposited at the morgue, Mr Kumapayi said.

The sector commander warned drivers to desist from driving under the influence of alcohol.

(NAN)
Chinese authorities call for strict anti-virus measures ahead of holiday

Xinhua) 10:33, April 29, 2021

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Wednesday stressed the stringent implementation of epidemic control measures at tourist sites nationwide ahead of the Labor Day holiday starting on May 1.

At a teleconference, the ministry called on tourist sites to limit the number of visitors in key areas such as ticket counters, entrances, core attractions and dining spaces.

Tour routes should be optimized to prevent overcrowding at popular spots, said the ministry.

Supervision was advised to ensure tourists' compliance with COVID-19 containment measures covering transportation, accommodation, catering, shopping and other sectors.

Also on Wednesday, the Ministry of Education issued a notice requiring schools to keep anti-epidemic measures in place during the holiday, strengthen health guidance for outgoing students and staff, and keep track of their health conditions.

China expects to see around 250 million domestic travelers during the upcoming holiday, a majority of whom will be tourists.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Rapid coronavirus tests showed more false than true positives in the first two weeks of mass testing at schools, forcing children to stay at home unnecessarily.

Department of Health data today showed that six out of 10 positive rapid test results between March 4 and March 17 turned out to be wrong when followed up by gold-standard PCR tests.

Out of 1,050 positive results, 605 were wrong, the official numbers showed  58 per cent.

Lateral flow tests are now taken twice a week by staff and some pupils at schools in England in an attempt to make classrooms safer.

But the tests, which can give results in as little as 15 minutes, have been mired in controversy because they produce false positives when infection rates are low and miss true positives when rates are high.

Numerous studies have shown the kits are far less accurate when self-administered  which is how they're used across the UK  and leaked Department of Health emails last week revealed senior officials fear they only pick up on 10 per cent of infections when done this way.

Rapid tests showed more false than true positives in the first two weeks of mass testing at schools, forcing children to stay at home unnecessarily

Lateral flow rapid test have been dished out at schools twice per week since the start of March in England as part of the Government's mass testing drive to make classrooms safe

As part of a Government policy to overcome the flaws of the tests, everyone who tests positive then has to take a proper lab test, which can take up to two days to produce results.

The lab test results are automatically logged in the Government's Covid contact tracing programme.

But children may still be told to self-isolate and miss out on classes after the positive rapid test result  even if the PCR test later comes back negative.

And Professor John Deeks, a biostatistician at the University of Birmingham, said the statistics revealed today show the tests may be doing more harm than good.

Writing on Twitter, Professor Deeks said: 'Remember that the law made kids, teachers, families and bubbles had to isolate for 10 days even when the PCR came back negative, despite the Royal Statistical Society spending days trying to explain the issues to the Department of Health and Social Care.

Britain's drugs watchdog accuses No10 of 'stretching' approval rules of lateral flow tests Britain's medical regulator has accused ministers of 'stretching' its approval of controversial lateral flow tests for coronavirus. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) warned the way they are currently being used risks infected people assuming they are clear and safe to mingle with others. Regulators approved the controversial kits - which give a result in under half an hour - to be used as a way to find Covid cases, helping to keep schools and workplaces Covid-free after lockdown. But due to fears about the accuracy of the tests, the MHRA stressed they were not to be seen as a 'green light' for those who test negative to enjoy greater freedoms. The MHRA has expressed concern that the Government's universal testing programme may blur the line between the two. It warned the twice-weekly testing regime unveiled earlier this month was 'a stretch' of the rules for how the tests should be used. Boris Johnson today doubled-down on the tests, however, saying they 'offer great prospects' for the UK and are 'very useful' n helping to isolate cases. The Government has been criticised for rolling the lateral flow devices out for people to do themselves, despite manufacturers admitting they are built for professional use and on people with symptoms. Numerous studies have shown the kits are far less accurate when self-administered and leaked Department of Health emails earlier this month revealed senior officials fear they only pick up on 10 per cent of infections when done this way. No10 has spent more than 2billion so far on the tests, which were initially used to in schools and offices but are now available to everyone. Advertisement

'Never ever say tests don't do harm.'

The data show that in the first week children returned to classrooms, 352 of the 581 positive rapid tests taken at schools then led to a negative result when the same child had a PCR test.

This means 61 per cent of the rapid tests that were backed up by a PCR test had given false positive results.

In the second week the rate fell slightly to 54 per cent, with 253 out of 469 positives turning negative when a PCR was done.

Data for the following two weeks does not distinguish between negative and void PCR tests.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'Around one in three people with Covid experience no symptoms and there is clear evidence that rapid testing detects cases quickly, meaning positive cases can isolate immediately.

'At times of low prevalence, the proportion of positive LFD results that are false positives is higher, so we are mitigating this by asking people to confirm a positive LFD result with a PCR test.

'The data set is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.'

Critics yesterday told MailOnline Britain's twice-a-week coronavirus testing blitz has been a waste of money.

Boris Johnson launched the near-3billion scheme at the start of April, with everyone in England able to get two free lateral flow tests  the same as were being used in schools  every week regardless of whether they have symptoms.

The kits can either be shipped to people's homes or picked up in a local pharmacy free of charge.

The scheme  a watered down version of No10's ambitious 'Operation Moonshot' 10million-tests-a-day project  launched on April 9. Matt Hancock said at the time it would be 'one of our most effective weapons in tackling this virus'.

But data from the Government's Covid dashboard shows only about 100,000 extra lateral flow kits are being used every day since its introduction, averaging around 800,000.

Officials also won't say how many are from people picking up the tests themselves  some of the increase could be down to businesses offering employees tests under the Government-backed scheme.

High street chemist Superdrug told MailOnline just 12,000 kits have been handed out over the last 16 days across 176 of its English pharmacies. That works out at a rate of 4.2 kits  which include seven tests  being collected per pharmacy each day.

Around 10,000 pharmacies are signed up to the scheme in England in total.

Boots said uptake of the tests at its stores had been substantial, but admitted there are still 'plenty available for asymptomatic customers'.

Dr Angela Raffle, a public health expert from Bristol University, told MailOnline the biweekly testing programme was a 'waste of taxpayers' money'. And the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank said it seemed 'excessively expensive'.

Meanwhile, Labour's shadow health minister Justin Madders said the Government must do 'all they can to publicise this scheme' in the face of low uptake.
Imperial Valley News Center

Federal Employee Indicted by Federal Grand Jury on Charges of Kidnapping His Wife in 2016 in Abduction that Resulted in Her Death

Santa Ana, California - A federal grand jury today returned an indictment that charges a Covina man with kidnapping his wife in 2016 in an incident that resulted in her death.

Eddy Reyes, 35, who lived with his wife in Santa Ana when she was last seen, was arrested in this case on April 15 pursuant to a criminal complaint that also charged him with kidnapping.

Reyes, an employee of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who has been held without bond since his arrest, is scheduled to be arraigned on the indictment on May 3 in United States District Court in Santa Ana.

The indictment alleges that Reyes kidnapped his wife, 21-year-old Claudia Sanchez Reyes, on May 6, 2016.

According to court documents, Claudia Reyes was last seen leaving work on the night of May 6, 2016. After Reyes filed a missing person report four days later, the Santa Ana Police Department conducted an investigation that revealed co-workers heard Claudia Reyes fighting with her husband on May 6 soon before he picked her up in a rented SUV, according to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, which notes detectives later found a drop of Claudia Reyes blood in that vehicle and a cadaver dog indicated that a dead body had been in the SUV.

The affidavit also documents a history of alleged domestic abuse by Reyes against his wife, including several threats to kill her, as well as temporary restraining orders Claudia Reyes obtained against her husband in 2014 and 2016.

An indictment contains allegations that a defendant has committed a crime. Every defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in court.

If he were to be convicted of the charge of kidnapping resulting in death, Reyes would face potential sentences of the death penalty or life in federal prison without parole.

The investigation in this matter is being conducted by the Orange County Violent Gang Task Force, which is comprised of several federal, state and local agencies.

Assistant United States Attorneys Gregory W. Staples and Daniel H. Ahn of the Santa Ana Branch Office are prosecuting this case.
A man has denied murdering two of his young children and the attempted murder of another.

Jordan Monaghan, 29, pleaded not guilty to murdering his three-week-old daughter Ruby and 21-month-old son Logan.

Ruby died at home in Blackburn, Lancashire, on New Years Day in 2013. Her brother Logan died eight months later on August 17, Preston Crown Court heard.

Monaghan also denied two counts of attempted murder of a third child, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

Jordan Monaghan (pictured), 29, pleaded not guilty to murdering his three-week-old daughter Ruby and 21-month-old son Logan

Ruby (left) died at home in Blackburn, Lancashire, on New Years Day in 2013. Her brother Logan (right) died eight months later on August 17, Preston Crown Court heard

Monaghan also denied two counts of attempted murder of a third child, who cannot be named for legal reasons. Pictured, Ruby and Logan together

He is also charged with murdering his ex-partner Evie Adams (pictured) in October 2019, but did not enter any pleas during the hearing yesterday. She was not the mother of the children

Laura Gray (right) was mother to Ruby and Logan. She is pictured with her former partner Monaghan in 2013

He is also charged with murdering his ex-partner Evie Adams in October 2019, but did not enter any pleas during the hearing yesterday.

She was not the mother of the children.

In January 2021, Monaghan was charged with murder following investigations into their deaths.

Monaghan appeared in front of Judge Robert Altham via video link.

He is due to stand trial on October 4 this year, where proceedings are expected to take around ten weeks.
Dr. Karathanasis is a highly accomplished and respected scientist, researcher, and innovator with broad drug discovery and development experience whose intellect and insights will advance Envedas impressive drug discovery portfolio, said Slone Partners President Tara Kochis-Stach.

Slone Partners, a nationwide executive search firm for life science, biotechnology, and diagnostics companies, has announced the placement of Sotirios Karathanasis, Ph.D. as the new Chief Science Officer (CSO) at Enveda Biosciences. In his new role, Dr. Karathanasis will lead the companys small molecule drug discovery portfolio and work with Envedas preclinical team to advance the companys lead programs for NASH and Wilsons disease, among other programs.

Karathanasis is former CSO of endocrine and cardiovascular research at Lilly Research Laboratories, and has held several other key positions in the pharmaceutical industry including Vice President and Head of Biosciences at AstraZeneca, and Director of Cardiovascular Pharmacology at Pfizer Global Research & Development. Over the course of his career, Karathanasis has led drug discovery teams with as many as 250 scientists across a wide scope of geographic locations, disciplines, and functional interfaces. He holds 23 patents and has published more than 100 original manuscripts, review papers, and book chapters.

Dr. Karathanasis is a highly accomplished and respected scientist, researcher, and innovator with broad drug discovery and development experience whose intellect and insights will advance Envedas impressive drug discovery portfolio, said Slone Partners President Tara Kochis-Stach. He will make a terrific addition to the companys executive leadership team.

Sotirios will bring critical expertise and proven executive leadership to our mission of developing a world-class portfolio in cardiovascular, metabolic, and other complex diseases that have proven refractory to conventional methods, said Viswa Colluru, Ph.D., Envedas Founder and CEO. His experience will help our team of biologists and medicinal chemists deliver validated, first-in-class drug candidates inspired by unique chemical starting points.

Having generated the largest dataset of medicinally-important plant metabolomes purpose-built for machine learning, Enveda is unlocking a new era of small molecule discovery, said Dr. Karathanasis. I see tremendous potential in Envedas technology to address challenging targets and fundamental disease-causing processes.

Karathanasis received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Georgia and served his post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School.

ABOUT SLONE PARTNERS

Slone Partners delivers the leaders who build amazing and diverse life sciences organizations  People Are Our Science. Founded in 2000, Slone Partners specializes in delivering world-class C-suite leadership, executive, and upper management talent to the most promising and established biotech, diagnostics, research tools, healthcare, precision medicine, CRO, and laboratory services companies. With coast-to-coast presence in the most active healthcare industry hubs of Boston, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Research Triangle Park NC, and Washington DC, Slone Partners uniquely and precisely provides an array of executive search and advisory services, including diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, to innovative life sciences companies. To learn more about Slone Partners value proposition and processes, visit http://www.slonepartners.com or call 888.784.3422.

ABOUT ENVEDA BIOSCIENCES

Enveda Biosciences is a biotechnology company building the first high-resolution chemical map of the natural world to tackle the toughest problems in drug discovery. Envedas platform is the worlds most advanced drug discovery search engine for dark chemical space, building on years of cutting-edge advancements at the intersection of metabolomics and machine learning. Complementing its breakthrough technology, Envedas team includes seasoned drug hunters with decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry working alongside world-leading data scientists. For more information on Enveda, visit envedabio.com.
The project will consist of five stages: design, develop, test, validation, and finally full production of Pen Aviation UAVs. Sagetech and Pen Aviation are collectively working toward achieving the PEN UAVs certification in 2022.

"Detect and Avoid systems are critical for ensuring that UAVs such as Pen Aviation's are able to meet and complete their mission successfully and safely in ever more crowded airspace," said Tom Furey, CEO of Sagetech Avionics. "We are pleased to partner with Pen Aviation, a recognized leader of aerospace innovation in Asia and Europe, providing certifiable situational awareness solutions which support their innovative unmanned vehicles."

Jean-Bernard Boura, Managing Director and Founder of Pen Aviation stated, "We decided to expand our product and service offerings into unmanned vehicles because we feel it is definitely the future of aviation. Sagetech Avionics' long history of providing robust and certified unmanned situational awareness solutions and their clear path to certifiable DAA will help ensure our UAVs can perform critical missions in dense airspace safely and without incident."

Sagetech's DAA system packages multiple core technologies into a single, low size, weight, and power (SWaP) DAA solution suitable for use on commercial unmanned aircraft as well as urban air mobility (UAM) platforms. Sagetech's DAA system is ACAS-based, featuring technologies including a transponder, an interrogator, an ACAS-based DAA computer, software package, and other essential components. It is compatible with many off-the-shelf low SWaP radar and other traffic sensors.

Sagetech's next-gen MXS miniature transponder provides Mode S and 1090 MHz ADS-B In/Out for worldwide compliance of unmanned systems, all integrated in a single tiny package. Featuring top and bottom monopole antennas, this transponder provides full pattern coverage for the ultimate in visibility and safety.

Pen Aviation is developing mid to heavy size drones, co-designed and manufactured with its French Partner, Cavok-UAS.

PEN 55V is a fully automated VTOL, rotary tactical drone with outstanding performances: high level of safety, easy deployment & low maintenance cost, no runway required, great versatility, large endurance (2.5 hours), high range of speed up to 110 km/h, hardly detectable, low level of vibration to optimize the video quality and payload customization (up to 15kg). This UAV can be operated in harsh environmental conditions, which no other drones may be deployed in.

PEN 1360V is a fully automated multi-mission VTOL, rotary cargo drone, designed to carry heavy payload over long distances. This model offers outstanding performances: unprecedent payload-range capability (up to 770kg over 675km), high level of safety, easy deployment & low maintenance cost, without runway requirement, great versatility, large endurance (3.8 hours).

Both PEN 1360V and PEN 55V are fully integrated in DIGIMIND, Pen Aviation's innovative business enabler platform.

About Sagetech Avionics

Sagetech Avionics is an aerospace technology company empowering safe flight in unmanned aircraft with situational awareness solutions built from mission-critical transponders, software, and related technologies. Currently serving military and civil duty on most small to medium UAVs, Sagetech solutions are mission-proven and offer decades of program experience, certifications, and millions of flight hours to deliver maximum value over the life of an unmanned platform. Today, Sagetech is expanding its technology platform to create comprehensive, certifiable systems such as detect and avoid solutions. Every day, Sagetech works in concert with its extensive ecosystem of OEM customers, technology partners, and resellers to ensure UAVs fly safer with Sagetech on board. Learn more at www.sagetech.com.

About Pen Aviation

Pen Aviation was founded in 2016 in Malaysia, with a vision to be the preferred one-stop customized solutions provider within the aviation niche markets in Asia: Private jet, helicopter, sea plane and professional UAV; Aircraft Sales, Charter, Consulting and Investment. The colorful and robust team at Pen Aviation carries more than 30 years in expertise and experiences in every aspect of the aircraft life cycle, specifically within the aviation industry.

PEN UAS is Pen Aviation brand for UAS and provides governmental bodies and private sector with ecosystem solutions. PEN UAS is the go-to industrial drone shop for organizations looking for customized solutions.

SOURCE Sagetech Avionics Inc.

Related Links

https://www.sagetech.com/


Bombay Dyeing & Manufacturing Company fell 2.31% to Rs 67.65 after the company reported consolidated net loss of Rs 166.74 crore in Q4 FY21 as against net profit of Rs 48.57 crore in Q4 FY20.

Consolidated net sales jumped 59.4% to Rs 498.95 crore in Q4 FY21 as against 313.10 crore in Q4 FY20. The Q4 result was announced post trading hours yesterday, 28 April 2021.

The company reported pre-tax loss of Rs 103.44 crore in Q4 FY21 compared with pre-tax loss of Rs 171.44 crore in Q4 FY20.

Considering the financial result for FY 2020-21, the company said it is unable to declare the dividend for the said year.

Bombay Dyeing & Manufacturing Company is a holding company engaged primarily in the business of real estate development, polyester staple fibre and retail. The company's segments include real estate, polyester and retail/textile.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Health Minister says the vaccination site at the Divali Nagar is not only to be used for the vaccination of those in the manufacturing sector.
ASHGABAT -- Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov's penchant for white is well known among drivers in the Central Asian nation.

For years exporters have been told to ship white automobiles only, while those who already had cars that weren't white were told to paint them in the color that has long been a feature of the carefully constructed personality cult of Berdymukhammedov.

Now, RFE/RL correspondents say, Berdymukhammedov wants all detailing on cars -- including radiator grilles and light frames -- in the tightly controlled Central Asian nation to be painted white as well.

The correspondents said that local authorities in the eastern Lebap region began demanding the new requirement a week ago, prompting locals to complain that the changes have given traffic police yet another reason to demand bribes.

Under Berdymukhammedov's rule, the isolated nation's capital, Ashgabat, has been draped in white marble. He is often seen in public or shown on television riding white stallions, dressed in white amid white carpets, holding white doves or white flowers.

The official explanation for the request, however, is that dark colors attract and absorb more sun and heat in Turkmenistan's subtropical desert climate.

Government critics and human rights groups say Berdymukhammedov has suppressed dissent and made few changes in the secretive country since he came to power after the death of autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006.

Like his late predecessor, Berdymukhammedov has relied on subsidized prices for basic goods and utilities to help maintain his grip on power.

According to Human Rights Watch, Berdymukhammedov, "his relatives and their associates control all aspects of public life, and the authorities encroach on private life."
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has licensed its award-winning artificial intelligence software system, the Multinode Evolutionary Neural Networks for Deep Learning (MENNDL), to General Motors for use in vehicle technology and design. MENNDL uses evolution to design optimal convolutional neural networksalgorithms used by computers to recognize patterns in datasets of text, images or sounds.

General Motors will assess MENNDLs potential to accelerate advanced driver assistance systems technology and design. This is the first commercial license for MENNDL as well as the first AI technology to be commercially licensed from ORNL.

Once trained, neural networks can accomplish specific tasksfor example, recognizing faces in photosfar faster and at much greater scale than humans. However, designing effective neural networks can take even the most expert coders up to a year or more.

The MENNDL AI system can significantly speed up that process, evaluating thousands of optimized neural networks in a matter of hours, depending on the power of the computer used. It has been designed to run on a variety of different systems, from desktops to supercomputers, equipped with graphics processing units.

MENNDL leverages compute power to explore all the different design parameters that are available to you, fully automated, and then comes back and says, Here's a list of all the network designs that I tried. Here are the results  the good ones, the bad ones. And now, in a matter of hours instead of months or years, you have a full set of network designs for a particular application. Robert Patton, head of ORNLs Learning Systems Group and leader of the MENNDL development team





Oak Ridge National Laboratorys MENNDL AI software system can design thousands of optimal convolutional neural networks in hours rather than years. Using CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research, computational scientists at ORNL can evaluate a neural networks ability to perceive objects under different lighting conditions (for example, a rainy day vs. a sunny day). Credit: ORNL, US Dept. of Energy

A 2018 finalist for the Association for Computing Machinerys Gordon Bell Prize and a 2018 R&D 100 Award winner, MENNDL uses an evolutionary algorithm that not only creates deep learning networks to solve problems but also evolves network design on the fly. By automatically combining and testing millions of parent networks, it breeds high-performing optimized neural networks.

For automakers, MENNDL can be used to accelerate advanced driver assistance technology by tackling one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of this technology: How can cars quickly and accurately perceive their surroundings to navigate safely through them?

The use of MENNDL offers potential to better clear that roadblock. Leveraging advanced neural networks that can instantly analyze on-board camera feeds and correctly label each object in the cars field of view, this type of advanced computing has the potential to enable more efficient energy usage for vehicles while increasing their onboard computing capacity.

Since its inception in 2014, MENNDL has been used in applications ranging from identifying neutrino collisions for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to analyzing data generated by scanning transmission electron microscopes. Last year, in a project with the Stony Brook Cancer Center at Stony Brook University in New York, MENNDL was used on ORNLs Summit supercomputer to create neural networks that can detect cancer markers in biopsy images much faster than doctors.

This work is supported by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energys Vehicle Technologies Office and the DOE Office of Science. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
Matt Hancock today received his first dose of the Covid vaccine... from his Downing Street sidekick Professor Jonathan Van Tam.

The Health Secretary posed for a picture while being jabbed by England's deputy chief medical officer at the Science Museum in London.

He described having the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab at the museum as a 'privilege' and thanked Professor Van-Tam for administering it.

Mr Hancock  who said he was 'very excited' to get inoculated  tweeted that he was 'in and out in eight minutes' and that it 'didn't hurt at all'. He called on people to keep coming forward for their jab when invited.

England's vaccine rollout was opened up to 42-year-olds  including Mr Hancock  on Tuesday.

The UK has now dished out 33.9million first jabs and 13.6million adults are now fully vaccinated  more than a quarter of the population.

But the number of first doses being administered each day has fallen from a peak of 750,000 to just 115,000 yesterday, with the NHS focused on dishing out top ups.

Matt Hancock is given his first dose of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine by Professor Jonathan Van Tam at the Science Museum in London

The Health Secretary bumps elbows after being jabbed by England's deputy chief medical officer this morning

Mr Hancock holds up his vaccination card after receiving his first dose of the Covid vaccine

The Health Secretary queues up for his jab in the Science Museum. Britain's roll-out was extended to 42-year-olds on Tuesday

Mr Hancock, wearing a Union Jack face mask, arrives at the Science Museum in London for his first vaccine this morning

The Health Secretary said: 'It was a privilege to get my first jab within the historic walls of the Science Museum in London, where the team are documenting the national pandemic response and preserving items like the first Covid vaccine vial to be used anywhere in the world.

'Learning from science has been central this last year more than ever, so it felt fitting to be at the museum.

'Over 47million doses have now been administered across the country thanks not only to hundreds of hospitals, GP clinics and pharmacies, but to incredible sites like this that have volunteered their unused spaces.

Nearly 70% of adults in England now have coronavirus antibodies About seven in 10 adults in England have coronavirus antibodies, according to official data that suggests the majority of the population now has immunity against the disease. A major Office for National Statistics (ONS) testing survey today revealed 68.3 per cent of people had the virus-fighting proteins in the week ending April 11, up from 53.1 per cent a fortnight prior. The results highlight the success of the huge vaccination drive, which has seen almost 34million Britons  more than half the entire population  receive at least one dose. Some 13.2m of them have been given both injections. Antibody levels are likely to be even higher now because millions more have been jabbed since the blood tests were conducted more than a fortnight ago, and it takes about two weeks for immunity to kick in. Their presence in the blood generally means someone has some at least some protection against the disease and won't fall ill. But they are not the only part of the immune system. Advertisement

'The rollout is continues at pace and we are on track to reach our target of offering all adults a first dose of the vaccine by the end of July.

'I was very excited when my call came, and I'd urge everyone to take up the offer when it comes, and become part of history in the UK's biggest ever vaccination programme.'

He posed for pictures with Professor Van Tam on Twitter and said the jab 'didn't hurt at all'.

Mr Hancock wrote: 'Brilliant! Got the jab. In and out in eight minutes. Didn't hurt at all.

'Massive thanks to JVT and the Science Museum team. When you get the call, get the jab!'

It comes after the Health Secretary last night revealed Britain has bought another 60million doses of Pfizer's Covid vaccine as part of plans to launch a booster jab rollout this autumn.

Ministers hope the extra supplies  which will take No10's total order to 100million  will start to be delivered from September through to early 2022 so everyone in the country can be offered a third vaccine.

Some of the supplies may also be used for second doses for under-30s vaccinated in June and July, who would expect their boosters in September and October. Young adults are not likely to get the AstraZeneca vaccine because of concerns about blood clots.

The autumn vaccine rollout will offer everyone who has been vaccinated a third jab, either of the same type or potentially a different vaccine if studies prove this works, to boost their immunity for the long-term, officials said.

The extra jabs will be the same as the Pfizer ones given out at the moment, not specific ones targeted at the South Africa or Brazil variants, although the company is working on these.

Pfizer, which manufactures the vaccine in factories across Europe, has already supplied the UK with at least 16million doses since its first delivery at the start of December. All 40million doses of the initial order are due by the end of 2021.

Mr Hancock said at a Downing Street briefing last night that 'evidence is stacking up that the vaccine protects you, it protects your loved ones, and it's the way out of this pandemic'.
Washington: President Joe Biden has declared the United States is rising anew and ready to lead the world again in his first State of the Union-style address to Congress.

Speaking on the eve of his 100th day in office, Biden declared that America and its democratic allies would win the battle for the 21st century rather than autocratic rivals such as China.

Joe Biden, flanked by Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, delivers his first major speech to Congress as US President. Credit:Getty Images

Biden used his speech to unveil a $2.3 trillion social policy plan that includes the countrys first paid parental leave scheme, universal preschool and two years of free community college.

The plan would be paid for by tax increases on high-income earners and corporations.
Secret Department of Justice plans to arrest Derek Chauvin in court had he been cleared of murdering George Floyd have been revealed.

Multiple sources told the Star Tribune federal prosecutors were ready to move in and charge the white ex-cop on federal counts moments after a not guilty verdict on charges of second and third-degree murder, as well as manslaughter, or in the event of a mistrial.

Department of Justice prosecutors now also plan to bring civil rights violations charges - akin to hate crimes - of police brutality against Chauvin and the three other cops on duty with him when Floyd was killed in May 2020.

Their secret plot saw DOJ investigators collaborate with their state counterparts at Minnesota US Attorney's Office to arrange to charge Chauvin by a process called criminal complaint which does not require a grand jury and would have sped up the process of bringing fresh charges against the former policeman amid fears a not guilty verdict would have prompted fresh riots.

The Department of Justice had a backup plan in place to immediately arrest Derek Chauvin in court if he was cleared of killing George Floyd, it has been revealed. Chauvin is led away in handcuffs after being convicted of all charges last week

Multiple sources told the Star Tribune federal prosecutors were ready to move in and charge the white ex-cop on federal counts if the jury had found him not guilty of all charges or the case had ended in a mistrial. Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes (above)

Ultimately, the backup plan did not have to be used, after Chauvin was found guilty of all three counts he faced.

He was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter and taken to Minnesota's maximum security prison Oak Park Heights.

He will be sentenced on June 25 after the court pushed it back from its initial date of June 16. He faces up to 40 years in prison.

The DOJ is now planning to indict him and the three other cops involved in Floyd's death on civil rights charges, a source told the Tribune.

The federal investigation into Floyd's death is separate to the state's case which led to Chauvin's trial and conviction last week.

It has been running in parallel with federal authorities presenting evidence before a grand jury of 23 citizens who will decide if there is probable cause to bring charges against the disgraced officers.

The three other cops - J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao - face trial together on August 23 on state charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. They deny those allegations, and were fired from their jobs at Minneapolis PD in the wake of Floyd's death.

The Minnesota AG's Office wants to also add a charge of aiding and abetting third-degree murder to each of their cases.

Now, the DOJ wants to indict Chauvin on federal civil rights violations over both Floyd's death and a 2017 incident where he knelt on a black 14-year-old boy's neck for nearly 17 minutes.

Kueng, Lane and Thao would only be indicted over Floyd's death.

The need for the backup plan failed to materialize as the jury found Chauvin guilty on all charges. Chauvin in court above

Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane left to right in booking photos in June. The DOJ is now planning to indict all four ex cops on federal charges

Chauvin has never faced any charges over the 2017 incident, details of which surfaced last year as state prosecutors asked a judge to allow them to use the case as evidence of the former cop's use of force in his trial.

The judge banned prosecutors from telling jurors about the 2017 incident.

In court documents, prosecutors said body cam video showed Chauvin and another officer responding to a domestic assault September 4 2017 after a mother said she was assaulted by her teenage son and daughter.

The body cam footage has not been released.

The officers arrived to find the 14-year-old boy lying on the floor of his bedroom while on his phone.

They ordered him to get up because he was under arrest.

When he refused, Chauvin grabbed him and struck the teen in the head with his flashlight multiple times, the court documents say.

Chauvin then grabbed him by the throat before hitting him again with the flashlight.

Prosecutors had argued this all occurred less than a minute after the officers first encountered the boy.

Chauvin is to be indicted over both Floyd's death and a 2017 incident where he knelt on a black 14-year-old boy's neck for nearly 17 minutes. Floyd pictured above

Chauvin then applied a neck restraint to the boy, who briefly went unconscious, and then placed him in a prone position with a knee in his back for about 17 minutes until paramedics arrived, court documents state.

He held his knee on the boy, who was bleeding from the ear, even after he said he was in pain and couldn't breathe, prosecutors said.

According to the court documents, the boy's mother asked Chauvin four separate times to take his knee off her son. On one occasion she pointed out her son said he couldn't breathe.

She also noted that her son was in handcuffs and couldn't do anything to Chauvin. At one point, the mother said Chauvin had hit her son with the flashlight for no reason.

Chauvin took his knee off the teenager after paramedics arrived.

A paramedics who assessed the boy briefly while he was held down noted that he would likely need stitches for the wound on his ear.

The teenager was arrested for domestic assault and obstruction with force.

Chauvin is pictured in his booking photo after being convicted of Floyd's murder

Prosecutors said Chauvin's use of force regarding the boy was similar to the incident involving Floyd, after he knelt on the black man's neck for more than nine minutes as he begged him to stop saying 'I can't breathe' during an arrest in Minneapolis last May.

'As was true with the conduct with George Floyd, Chauvin rapidly escalated his use of force for a relatively minor offense. Just like with Floyd, Chauvin used an unreasonable amount of force without regard for the need for that level of force or the victim's well-being,' prosecutors argued in the court documents.

In his response, Chauvin's defense attorney Eric Nelson had argued there were no comparisons because he acted according to MPD policy and was allowed to use a neck restraint in the 2017 incident.

The judge ended up ruling in the defense's favor and banned prosecutors from telling the jury of the arrest.

Federal prosecutors had witnesses testify before a grand jury two months ago regarding the 2017 incident.

It is not clear when the federal charges will be brought with a source saying only that the grand jury indictments are expected soon, sending the four ex-cops to another criminal trial in federal court.

It will be prosecuted by DOJ officials in Minnesota and Washington DC.

A group of Black Lives Matters supporters and members of the Justice For George group held a Community Peace Walk in the Harlem section of New York City following Chauvin's conviction

People rally in Manhattan, New York City, after the guilty verdict of Chauvin was read out last week

It is possible the DOJ will wait until after the state trials of the three other cops so as to avoid risking disruption to the state's case with further publicity.

The murder trial of Chauvin was one of the most high-profile trials in US history and the trials of the other three is likely to be similar and will also be livestreamed to the American public.

Chauvin's defense repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to argue for his trial to be moved or delayed due to publicity surrounding the case.

One of the biggest complications was the $27 million settlement paid to the Floyd family by the City of Minneapolis in the middle of jury selection for the case.

Federal prosecutors had been concerned about jeopardizing the state's case by announcing charges but are said to be moving forward with their own case following his conviction, the Tribune reported.

This was evident in the timing of the announcement of a separate DOJ probe into the Minneapolis Police Department - less than 24 hours after Chauvin was convicted.

The Justice Department announced it had opened a civil rights investigation last Wednesday, to determine whether the police department engages in a pattern or practice of policing that violates federal civil rights laws.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said this will involve 'a comprehensive review of the Minneapolis Police Department's policies, training, supervision and use-of-force investigations.'
The authorities will ban the sale of Turkish goods in Armenia, Armenia's acting economy minister Vahan Kerobyan said.



Yerevan will prolong a ban on imports of Turkish goods to Armenia and will prohibit their sales, Acting Armenian Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan said at a briefing on Thursday.

"We intend to extend the ban on imports of Turkish goods to the country, as well as their sale, since they are imported and sold using some alternative ways," he noted without specifying how long the proposed restrictions will be in place.

Starting January 1, 2021, the Armenian government has put a temporary embargo on imports of goods having Turkish origin, but there have been numerous reports of its violation.
Owners need peace of mind that their employees needs are met and that they are appropriately managing risk, so they can confidently focus on building and growing a thriving business.

Aprio, LLP, a nationally recognized, CPA-led business advisory firm, announced today the formation of Aprio People Advisory Services, created to meet the financial, human capital and operational challenges of todays growing businesses.

Businesses operating in both remote work settings and brick-and-mortar establishments must create new policies, handle conflict resolution and navigate new HR challenges. Aprio People Advisory Services, led by Director Tim Cofrin, helps businesses:



Reduce hiring risks and handle multijurisdictional tax requirements so companies can hire and onboard the best people wherever they are.

Build a solid HR foundation with the right policies and procedures in place so companies can scale their operations with confidence.

Leverage relationships with top HR, payroll, applicant tracking and PEO software providers to deliver secure, cloud-based HR technology solutions.

Get advice and support from Aprios payroll specialists on complex compliance, insurance and withholding matters.

The services are complemented by Aprio Talent Solutions, which helps businesses identify and hire the best IT, finance and accounting talent across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

With the global pandemic shifting employees out of the office and into a remote workforce, employers are faced with complex government regulations surrounding hiring practices, multijurisdictional tax regulations and a myriad of other HR policy guidelines," said Richard Kopelman CEO and Managing Partner at Aprio. Owners need peace of mind that their employees needs are met and that they are appropriately managing risk, so they can confidently focus on building and growing a thriving business.

Aprio People Advisory Services partners with industry-leading technology and software vendors in payroll and human resources, including Gusto People Advisory. Gusto is proud to be a preferred provider to Aprio, whose care for client service has shined through the recent challenging times, said Will Lopez, Head of Gustos Accountant Community. Gustos people-focused technology stack, combined with Aprios expertise in HR, tax and business growth, expands beyond traditional financial advice and guides companies toward becoming great and more resilient places to work.

"With revenue growth over three times last year, our focus is now on growing and retaining our workforce, said Jennifer Silverberg, CEO of SmartCommerce. Aprio People Advisory Services strengthens our employee experience, enabling our focus on talent development to help our clients drive unprecedented eCommerce success.

For more information on Aprio People Advisory Services, visit https://www.aprio.com/services/people-advisory-services/.

About Aprio

Aprio is a premier full-service, CPA-led business advisory firm that advises clients and associates on how to achieve whats next. Aprios associates work as integrated teams across advisory, assurance, tax, outsourced accounting solutions and private client services, bringing the best thinking and personal commitment to each client. Across practices, Aprio brings together proven expertise, deep understanding and strategic foresight for industries including Manufacturing and Distribution; Non-Profit and Education; Professional Services; Real Estate and Construction; Retail, Franchise and Hospitality; and Technology and Blockchain. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Aprio has grown to over 700 team members. To serve clients wherever life or business may take them, Aprios teams speak more than 30 languages and work with clients in over 50 countries. For more, visit https://www.aprio.com.
Amanda Burke covers Pittsfield City Hall for The Berkshire Eagle. An Ithaca, New York native, she previously worked at The Herald News of Fall River and the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise. Find her on Twitter at @amandaburkec.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 06:42:17|Editor: huaxia

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Burning funeral pyres are seen during a mass cremation for those who died from the COVID-19 at a crematorium in Delhi, India, on April 26, 2021. (Photo by Partha Sarkar/Xinhua)

The WHO and the UNICEF are procuring equipment and supplies, including oxygen concentrators, COVID-19 testing machines, and personal protective kits. The WHO is also helping to set up mobile hospital units and is providing for laboratories.



UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations is helping India in its uphill battle against COVID-19, said a UN spokesman on Wednesday.

The UN team in India, led by Resident Coordinator Renata Lok-Dessallien, is supporting the authorities' response to the pandemic by providing equipment and supplies, including to local governments, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) are procuring equipment and supplies, including 7,000 oxygen concentrators and 500 nasal devices for oxygen supply, as well as oxygen-generating plants, COVID-19 testing machines, and personal protective kits, he said.

The WHO is also helping to set up mobile hospital units and is providing for laboratories. Some 2,600 WHO field officers have been immediately deployed to support health authorities. In the western state of Maharashtra, the second-most populous in India, UNICEF has engaged experts to work on risk governance, he told a daily press briefing in New York.

The UN team in India is also continuing its campaign to highlight the three Ws: Wear a mask, Wash your Hands, Watch your distance and stay six feet apart, he added.

India alone accounted for 38 percent of all new COVID-19 cases recorded worldwide in the seven-day period that ended on April 25. India also reported a 93 percent week-on-week increase in the number of coronavirus-related deaths last week. In the past seven days, 15,161 people lost their lives to the virus, the WHO said Wednesday. 
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced hope Wednesday for better relations with Turkey despite US recognition of the Armenian genocide, but renewed warnings of sanctions if Ankara keeps a Russian air defense system.

President Joe Biden on Saturday defied decades of Turkish pressure and recognized the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide, leading Ankara to summon the US ambassador.

Blinken noted that Biden told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by telephone of the decision so there would be no surprises and agreed to meet him in June on the sidelines of a NATO summit.

We owe Turkey the respect of stating our disagreements clearly, directly, honestly, just as we expect and anticipate the same from Turkey, Blinken told a roundtable on international press freedom in response to a question from a Turkish journalist.

I very much hope that we can find a positive way forward, Blinken said, calling on the two countries to work together and deepen our cooperation.

Biden had previously given a cold shoulder to Erdogan, whom he has called an autocrat, and relations were already sour over NATO member Turkeys purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia, the alliances chief adversary.

The United States has repeatedly warned Turkey to dump the S-400s, with a law passed by Congress in 2017 requiring sanctions against other countries over significant purchases of Russian weapons.

We are bound to the so-called CAATSA legislation that Im sure you know well and we will follow the law going forward, Blinken said.

He said that any sanctions would be in addition to measures imposed by former president Donald Trump in December that narrowly targeted Turkeys military procurement agency.

Blinken said the air system provided Russia with revenue, access and influence.

The purchase of the S-400s is dangerous to the security of the United States and allied military technology, personnel as well, and it undermines the cohesion of the alliance, he said.
Arm Holdings has disclosed details of its two new server-processor designs, Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1, as well as an updated high-speed mesh to connect its processors.

The two designs were introduced last September but Arm was mum on performance. Now it's talking numbers.

The Neoverse V1 is designed for scale-up servers, especially high-performance computing (HPC). It supports for Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) and delivers more than a 50% performance increase over the N1 for HPC machine-learning workloads.

It also supports bfloat16, an extension that has become almost standard instruction set for AI and machine learning, along with PCI Express Gen5, DDR5 memory, and HBM memory as well. It will be built on 7nm and eventually 5nm fabrication designs.

With V1, we've targeted the highest performance and widest execution units to take on the highest end of workloads that infrastructure customers are looking to deploy, Dermot ODriscoll, vice president of product solutions in Arms Infrastructure Line of Business said.

The Neoverse N2 platform uses the new Armv9 architecture that the company recently announced and claims can deliver 40% more single-threaded performance for a variety of workloads vs. the N1, but still retains the same level of power and area efficiency as N1.

With N2, it's a slightly more moderate design in terms of performance, but that allows you to build a higher number of them. So when we talk about scale out, we're talking about customers building in excess of 100 cores per monolithic SOC, said ODriscoll.

Arm says it already has several customers lined up for the N2 and V1 as well as N1 wins:

Marvell announced its OCTEON family of networking solutions based on Neoverse N2 will begin sampling by end of 2021, providing a 3x performance uplift over previous generation OCTEON solutions.

Indias Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has announced it will join SiPearl and ETRI in licensing Neoverse V1 for its national exascale HPC project.

Oracle plans to adopt Ampere Altra CPUs for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Arm-powered AWS Graviton2 continues to rapidly expand its EC2 footprint with steady growth and regional expansion.

Alibaba Cloud just tested the upcoming Alibaba Cloud ECS Arm instances using Neoverse N1.

Tencent is making investments in both hardware testing and on software enablement that will allow them to adopt Neoverse technology for cloud applications.

The third bit of news is the Arm Neoverse CMN-700 mesh interconnect for the Neoverse V1 and N2 platforms. CMN-700 is an evolution from the CMN-600 that is used in data centers, and there are some sizable bumps in capacity.

Its total core support has been increased 4x from 128 cores in the CMN-600 to 512 in the 700, system level cache per die is up 4x from 128MB to 512MB, the memory-device port count has gone from 16 to 40, and support for CXL interconnects has been added.

CXL, or the Compute Express Link protocol, is gaining popularity as an alternative to PCIe because it works with PCIe but also acts as a unifying mesh between processor cores and memory pools. PCIe is good for point-to-point transfers but is not a mesh design.

Arm expects products based on N2 and V1 to hit the market by the end of the year.
New Delhi:

Indian Army has finalised one of its biggest procurement plans for infantry modernisation under which a large number of light machine guns, battle carbines and assault rifles are being purchased at a cost of nearly Rs 40,000 crore to replace its ageing and obsolete weapons.

The broad process to acquire around 7 lakh rifles, 44,000 light machine guns (LMGs) and nearly 44,600 carbines has been finalised and the defence ministry is on the same page with the Army in moving ahead with the procurement, official sources said.

The worlds second largest standing Army has been pressing for fast-tracking the procurement of various weapons systems considering the evolving security threats including along Indias borders with Pakistan and China.

Apart from kick-starting the procurement process, the government has also sent a message to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to expedite its work on various small arms, particularly on an LMG.

The sources said a fresh RFI (request for information) to procure the LMGs will be issued in the next few days, months after the defence ministry scrapped the tender for the 7.62 calibre guns as there was only one vendor left after a series of field trials.

The plan is to initially procure around 10,000 LMGs.The Army has also finalised the specifications for a new 7.62 mm assault rifle and the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), the defence ministrys highest decision-making body on procurement, is expected to give the go-ahead for the much-needed procurement soon.

The General Service Quality Requirements (GSQR) for the new assault rifle has been finalised. The procurement plan will soon be placed before the DAC for approval, said a senior official, who is part of the acquisition process.

In June, the Army had rejected an assault rifle built by the state-run Rifle Factory, Ishapore, after the guns miserably failed the firing tests. The procurement of assault rifles has witnessed significant delays due to a variety of reasons including the Armys failure to finalise the specifications for it.

The Army needs around 7 lakh 7.62x51 mm assault guns to replace its INSAS rifles.The Army had issued RFI for the rifles in September last year and around 20 firms responded to it.

An RFI is a process whose purpose is to collect information about capabilities of various vendors.In June, the Army had kick-started the initial process to procure around 44,600 carbines, nearly eight months after a tender for it was retracted, also due to single-vendor situation.

Around half a dozen firms including a few global arms manufacturers have responded to the RFI.Army sources said various specifications for the LMGs and battle carbines were tweaked to ensure that the problem of single vendor does not recur.

The combined cost of the LMGs, assault rifles and carbines will be in excess of Rs 40,000 crore, said an official.On DRDO missing a number of deadlines in finalising the LMG, an official said the defence secretary has called a meeting this week of all stakeholders to discuss the project.

The infantry modernisation plan is a major initiative of the Army and it will significantly bolster the overall capability of the foot soldiers, said a senior army official.

The issue was extensively discussed at the recently-concluded Army Commanders conference which felt modernisation of the Army must be in tune with the evolving security threat facing the country. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman conveyed to the Army during the conference that modernisation of the force was a priority for the government and all its deficiencies will be addressed to strengthen its combat capability.

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[April 29, 2021] TriNet Wins Gold Stevie Award for its Inaugural PeopleForce Conference

DUBLIN, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TriNet, a leading provider of comprehensive human resources for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), today announced the company has won a Gold, multiple Silver, and a Bronze Stevie Award in the 19th Annual American Business Awards. Among a record-setting field of 3,800 applicants, TriNet's inaugural PeopleForce conference received two awards, including the only Gold Stevie award in its category and a Bronze award. TriNet's humanity-centric marketing campaign was awarded Silver for Marketing Campaign of the Year - Corporate Reputation/Professional Services, and Brand Experience of the Year - Business-to-Business. Additionally, TriNet's efforts to help SMBs navigate COVID-19 earned a Silver Stevie award for Most Valuable Corporate Response. "Businesses everywhere have stepped up, pivoted, and evolved to adapt to the ongoing pandemic," said Michael Mendenhall, senior vice president, chief marketing officer and chief communications officer at TriNet. "It's an honor for TriNet to be recognized among such an impressive group of companies that have also had to find innovative ways to service customers and stakeholders this year. We look forward to continuing our work in championing SMBs to persist and succeed, no matter what challenges lie ahead." More than 250 professionals world-wide participated in the judging process to select this year's Stevie Awards winners. One judge called TriNet's COVID-19 corporate response a "great example of an effective pivot amid COVID-19, backed by an impressive speaker line-up." Another judge said it was a "very impressive event that offered a vast variety of information to small and medium business." The award-winning TriNet PeopleForce conference is a three-day virtual event that debuted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and covered an array of crucial and timely topics impacting SMBs, including diversity, equity and inclusion, workplace culture, and the future of work. Headlined by a conversation with former U.S. President George W. Bush and his daughter, New York Times bestselling author and co-host of "Today with Hoda & Jenna," Jenna Hager Bush, the roster was comprised of prominent business leaders, public servants, educators, authors, influencers and health industry experts. "The American economy continues to show its resilience and as we're poised on the beginning of what should be a phenomenal period of growth, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of a wide range of organizations and people over the past 18 months," said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher. "This year's Stevie-winning nominations in The American Business Awards are testament to the ingenuity, the commitment, the passion, the adaptability, and the creativity of the American people. We look forward to celebrating this year's winners during our virtual ceremony on June 30." Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2021 Stevie winners are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA. About TriNet

TriNet (NYSE: TNET) provides small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with full-service HR solutions tailored by industry. To free SMBs from HR complexities, TriNet offers access to human capital expertise, benefits, risk mitigation and compliance, payroll and real-time technology. From Main Street to Wall Street, TriNet empowers SMBs to focus on what matters most-growing their business. TriNet, incredible starts here. For more information, visit TriNet.com or follow us on Twitter.







Investors: Media: Alex Bauer Renee Brotherton TriNet TriNet Investorrelations@TriNet.com PR@TriNet.com (510) 875-7201 (925) 965-8441

TriNet and the TriNet logo are registered trademarks of TriNet. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trinet-wins-gold-stevie-award-for-its-inaugural-peopleforce-conference-301280484.html SOURCE TriNet

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March 2021 Quarterly Activities and Cashflow Reports

Melbourne, April 29, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Cohiba Minerals Limited ( ASX:CHK ) provides below an update in relation to the exploration activities carried out during the March 2021 quarter.Olympic Domain TenementsHorse Well AreaAnalytical work was undertaken by ALS Laboratories on drill core from HWDD03 and HWDD04.HWDD03, which was the eastern most drill hole in the current program of work showed visual evidence of minor sulphide occurrences within altered hematitic granite. HWDD03 (Figure 1*) was analysed from 982 - 1,143m in variable length intervals (from 0.15 - 2.0 m) based on visual determination of zones of interest. Despite the visual determination of these zones of interest HWDD_03 did not return appreciable copper results with one minor intersection as summarised below:1,062.1 - 1,062.4m 0.3m @ 0.31% CuHWDD04 (Figure 2*) was analysed from 950 - 1,432.6m (EOH) in 1 metre intervals except where mineralisation was visually apparent, and the interval length was adjusted accordingly. The results from HWDD04 showed persistent low-level copper throughout with some very good intersections of copper, gold and silver mineralisation as summarised below (refer to ASX Announcement dated 10 March 2021).Cohiba has engaged the services of subject matter experts (SME) in the area of IOCG deposits and they are currently undertaking extensive petrological and geochemical assessments of holes HWDD03 and HWDD04 to aid in the development of the next program of work.Planning is currently underway for up to an additional 12 drill holes in the Horse Well area which are targeting additional discrete IOCG targets as well as potential extensions to the mineralised zone associated with HWDD03 and HWDD04.Pernatty "C" AreaNo on-ground work was carried out at Pernatty C during the period. The drilling program at Pernatty C which was to be undertaken following the Horse Well drilling program was delayed but has now been earmarked for commencement in the current quarter. The Company is intending to increase the program of work at Pernatty which will require the submission of another EPEPR (Exploration Program for Environment Protection and Rehabilitation and the associated Heritage Survey which will be undertaken in cooperation with the Kokatha Aboriginal Corporation.Olympic Domain Farm-in updateThe Company successfully executed a Deed of Settlement (Deed) with Olympic Domain Pty Ltd in relation to the dispute regarding the Company's 80% ownership in the Olympic Domain tenements.Cohiba's 80% interest in the Olympic Domain tenements will now be formally registered with the Department of Energy and Mining, South Australia.Pyramid Lake Update (E74/594)Cohiba Minerals Limited holds (100%) exploration licence E74/594, which covers all of Pyramid Lake in south-western Western Australia, for a total of 11,266 hectares or 112.66 km2. Pyramid Lake itself is a salt-lake covering 6,632 hectares located 115 kilometres northwest of the town of Esperance on the northern limit of the agricultural area (Figure 14*).The E74/594 property (Figure 4*) is located 115 km northwest of Esperance (150 km by road) and is accessed from the highway linking Ravensthorpe and Esperance.Groundwork Plus have completed the Mining Plan and Mine Closure Plan. There is still some additional work to be completed on the Invertebrate Study which will be finished in this current quarter.Wee MacGregor Project UpdateThe Wee MacGregor group comprises three granted mining licences, ML 2504, ML 2773, and ML 90098. These licences are located approximately 60km southeast of Mt. Isa with access via the sealed Barkly Highway and the unsealed Fountain Springs Road.No work was carried out on the tenements during the quarter.Queensland Exploration LicencesThe Company holds various exploration licences through its wholly owned subsidiary Cobalt X Pty Ltd. As at the date of this report the Company is the holder of the following mineral exploration licences pursuant to the Mineral Resources Act 1989 (QLD):- exploration licence EPM26377 (Mt Gordon Mine Area 1),- exploration licence EPM26376 (Mt Gordon Mine Area 2),- exploration licence EPM26380 (Success Mine Area 1); and,- exploration licence EPM26379 (Mt Cobalt Mine Area).All the Queensland tenements are currently in good standing.CORPORATEThe following corporate matters were carried out during the period:CHKOA Option conversionsDuring the quarter the Company converted 25,545,557 CHKOA options into 25,545,557 fully paid ordinary shares following receipt of exercise notices, with $255,456 raised a result of these conversions.Appendix 5B related party paymentsIt is noted that all related party payments included in Section 6 of the accompanying Appendix 5B* for the relate to settlement of directors' fees and salaries for the March 2021 quarter.Cash Balance at 31 March 2021The Company's cash at bank as at 31 March 2021 was $6.75 million.*To view the full quarterly report, please visit:About Cohiba Minerals Limited

Cohiba Minerals Limited (ASX:CHK) is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange with the primary focus of investing in the resource sector through direct tenement acquisition, joint ventures, farm in arrangements and new project generation. The shares of the company trade under the ticker symbol CHK.

The Company recently acquired 100% of the shares in Charge Lithium Pty Ltd, which holds exploration licences in Western Australia.
(Global Times) Chinese population experts predicted that China's annual births may fall below 10 million during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025) and suggested that China should loosen its family planning policy as soon as possible, although the central government has not yet released the specific data from the seventh census.





China kicked off its seventh national population census in November 2020 and the results were previously scheduled to be released in early April. However, the results have not yet been released, sparking speculations from the general public.

At a press conference on Friday, Liu Aihua, spokesperson of the National Bureau of Statistics, said, "We hope to release more detailed information, so the preparation work before the release of the census has increased accordingly.". She also highlighted that work will pick up to release the final results of the census to the society as soon as possible.

While the release of the data has been delayed, demographers continue to explore solutions to the expected drop in the birth rate.

In an interview with yicai.com, Dong Yuzheng, Director of the Guangdong Institute of Population Development, said that in the absence of fertility policy adjustments, according to the current trend, the annual number of births is likely to fall below the 10 million mark in the next few years.

"It is about the people's willingness to have children now. Some people are afraid to have children and some do not want to have children. The whole concept of fertility has changed significantly," Dong said, adding that "the number of women of childbearing age is decreasing, meaning that fewer people can be potential mothers. As the age of marriage is increasingly delayed, the actual number of women of childbearing age each year will be even less."

Dong said that the declining trend of child births in the past few years seems shocking. "As a large country of 1.4 billion people, the number of births a year is dropping to less than 10 million. If we follow this trend, it may not take more than a few years for our total population to have negative growth."

Dong suggested that family planning policies should be completely lifted. "Now the situation is already very serious and it is very difficult to reverse the population development once a major trend of the problem has emerged."

Peng Xizhe, Director of the Fudan University Center for Population and Development Policy Studies, also suggested that the authorities should further ease restrictions in the number of births and encourage young couples to make their own family planning to solve the problem of an aging population.

"We should also further build a family-friendly society by giving more social support to childbearing, such as reducing the employment pressure on women caused by having children and further improving the compensation policy," Peng told the Global Times.

On April 14, China's central bank also published a working paper saying that it should be recognized that China's demographic situation has reversed, that the population will decay faster than expected after the transition, and that education and technological progress will hardly compensate for the population decline.

The paper also recommended that the family planning policy should be fully liberalized and women's difficulties with pregnancy, childbirth, daycare and schooling should be addressed.

According to a report published in February by a research center under the Ministry of Public Security, the number of newborn babies registered with public security organs in 2020 was 10.04 million, 15 percent down from the figure in 2019. The Minister of Civil Affairs, Li Jiheng, said in December that China's population development had entered a critical turning point.

There has been a declining curve of yearly new births in China, from 17.86 million in 2016 to 14.65 million in 2019, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics.
A grand jury has indicted a South Jersey high school JROTC officer on charges that he inappropriately touched a female student.

Staff Sgt. Jame H. Merritt, 60, of Franklinville, was employed with Delsea Regional High Schools Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program in July 2019 when he was accused of touching an 18-year-old student over her clothing while in an ROTC classroom during school hours.

Merritt had formed an inappropriate teacher/student relationship where he engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with the student both during and after school hours, according to court documents. That included allegedly sending the student text messages after school hours, according to details included in an affidavit of probable cause.

He rejected a plea offer in 2019 under which he would have received a 5-year prison sentence.

A Gloucester County grand jury indicted Merritt earlier this month on a second-degree charge of official misconduct and a fourth-degree charge of criminal sexual contact. If convicted, he would face at least five years on the misconduct charge and up to 18 months on the sexual contact offense.

Merritt declined to comment on the case when reached by phone on Wednesday. His attorney did not return a call seeking comment.

Merritt joined Delsea Regional in 2011 and was named teacher of the year in 2017. He remains suspended without pay pending the outcome of the case.

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Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
Former PNC General Secretary, Atik Mohammed has advised that the fight against illegal mining, popularly called galamsey, shouldn't be a nine-day wonder.



He called on the Lands and Natural Resources Minister, Samuel Abu Jinapor and the Government of Ghana to sustain the fight.



President Nana Akufo-Addo has deployed 200 soldiers to remove all persons engaged in mining in waterbodies in Ghana.



The operation began on River Pra in the Central and Western Regions.



The Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah revealed this in a press statement issued on Wednesday, reading, "in furtherance of the resolutions of the final communique, of the Stakeholder Dialogue on Small Scale Mining on April 14 -15, 2021 and to ensure that mining within water bodies is immediately stopped; the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has authorized the Ghana Armed Forces, to commence an operation, to remove all persons and logistics involved in mining from Ghanas water bodies.



"The operation commenced at 0600 hours on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 on the River Pra in the Central and Western Regions of Ghana. Two Hundred (200) officers of the Ghana Armed Forces are involved in the operation."



Atik Mohammed, making submissions on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', asked the government not to relinquish the fight after a few years.



He noted that should the government relax its measures to end the menace, the illegal miners will return to their fields and continue their illegal mining operations.



"If we can sustain what is going on now, give me two years; if we can continue it like we're doing now, I'm sure, in two years, we should be able to get our country to where it ought to be. But if we take knee-jerk actions and after two years, we go back to sleep, trust me; the Chinese will return. The local galamseyers will return and we would have wasted resources for no results," he stated.





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.

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SAN DIEGO (dpa-AFX) - Illumina Inc. (ILMN) said that it has filed an action in the General Court of the European Union asking for annulment of the European Commission's decision asserting jurisdiction to review Illumina's acquisition of GRAIL. The Commission asserted jurisdiction to review the acquisition under the EU Merger Regulation on April 19, 2021, seven months after the deal was announced. 'The European Commission's unprecedented and untimely decision to review this procompetitive acquisition without proper engagement with the parties leaves businesses uncertain as to how the EU Merger Regulation will be applied,' said Charles Dadswell, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Illumina. Illumina said the Court process is ongoing. The company will continue to work with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition to bring the review to a conclusion as quickly as possible. In March, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission challenged Illumina Inc.'s proposed $7.1 billion acquisition of cancer detection test maker Grail, alleging that a merger would harm competition for life-saving Multi-Cancer Early Detection or MCED tests in the United States. 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.
I have important goals for Gift of Hope, the first would be to increase authorization. Everything leads to having more organs available for people on the waiting list, he said. Ultimately I would like to end the waiting list. They should be able to have the organs available, it all begins with the organ donors. If everyone was a registered donor, we could end the wait list.
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- eInfochips, an Arrow Electronics company, today announced it has teamed with NuCurrent, a leading wireless power solutions provider, enabling eInfochips to customize, integrate and license NuCurrent technologies globally to customers needing to incorporate wireless power technologies into their products.

"NuCurrent's wireless charging solutions portfolio offers excellent performance and customer experience. Its Qi-Certified MP-A17 design supports 3X charging volume and 3X separation distance compared to other designs, allowing for differentiated applications in vehicles, furniture, infrastructure and more," said Aiden Mitchell, vice president and general manager of global supplier and engineering services for Arrow Electronics. "The combined capabilities of eInfoChips and NuCurrent mean industry-leading performance, wider options to customers, and speed to market through accelerated design cycles and product certifications."

Over the last 25 years, eInfochips has designed and developed 500-plus products for many Fortune 500 firms and innovative start-ups. eInfochips has expertise across the design value chain covering the full product life cycle.

eInfochips is also developing reference kits based on NuCurrent's Qi and Ki smart kitchen and appliance solutions. With these kits, automotive, consumer, industrial and medical device customers can now quickly incorporate wireless charging technologies into their products. Customers will also be able to leverage Arrow Electronics' supply chain and kitting services to shorten design to manufacturing cycle time.

"eInfochips' engineering expertise and Arrow Electronics' supply chain expertise with global presence can help NuCurrent's innovations reach more companies, while accelerating overall wireless charging technology adoption," said Tim Tumilty, executive vice president of sales and marketing for NuCurrent. "Through these combined strengths, customers can leverage our collective technology and expertise to develop superior wireless powered products faster."

More details can be found here.

About eInfochips

eInfochips, an Arrow Electronics company, is a leading provider of digital transformation and product engineering services. eInfochips accelerates time to market for its customers with its expertise in the areas of IoT, AI/ML, security, sensors, wireless, cloud, and power.

eInfochips has been recognised as a leader in Engineering R&D services by many top analysts and industry bodies, including Gartner, Zinnov, ISG, Nasscom and others.

For more information visit https://www.einfochips.com.

About NuCurrent

NuCurrent supplies Fortune 1000 companies and high-potential product developers with wireless power technologies and product integration expertise. NuCurrent's core technologies span complete wireless power sub-systems from design acceleration tools and magnetics to systems and software technologies. NuCurrent has generated over 150 patents globally. NuCurrent's broad systems integration expertise supports manufacturers of appliances, smartphones, wearables, hearables, consumer electronics, medical devices, robotics, IoT, sporting equipment and other emerging product categories.

NuCurrent solutions are based on inductive and inductive resonant wireless power transfer which offers convenience, safety, efficiency, and enhanced user experience. Founded in 2009, NuCurrent is a venture-backed company based in Chicago with offices in Hong Kong, San Diego and Bangalore. More information at www.nucurrent.com

SOURCE eInfochips

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President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of congress in the House chamber of the Capitol in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Bidens American Families Plan Ends End of Welfare

WASHINGTONAhead of his first address to a joint session of Congress, on April 28, President Joe Biden rolled out his third spending proposal, the American Families Plan, which, according to liberals, would be a great achievement if passed by Congress.

Opponents, however, criticize Bidens massive spending plan, calling it the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

In his first address to Congress, Biden touted his new $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, calling it a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children to win the competition for the future.

His blueprint promises to introduce guaranteed cash assistance to millions of Americans, which would end President Bill Clintons welfare reform of 1996. Clinton signed into law a welfare reform bill to keep his campaign promise to end welfare as we know it.

The bipartisan reform law ended the unpopular cash welfare program dating back to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal.

As part of its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the Biden administration significantly expanded the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year. The new plan now extends this increase in child allowance through 2025 and makes the tax credit permanently fully refundable.

With two parents, two kids, thats $7,200 in the pockets, Biden said, adding that it would help more than 65 million children and help cut child poverty by half.

The American Families Plan also proposes to make permanent the recent expansion of the child and dependent care tax credit, and the earned income tax credit for childless workers.

The plan also promises access to good education, affordable child care, and up to 12 weeks of paid leave and medical leave.

The American Families Plan, which is the second component of Bidens Build Back Better agenda, consists of about $1 trillion in investments and $800 billion in tax cuts and credits for families and workers.

This new plan follows his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan, released on March 31.

Since taking office, Biden has proposed a total of $6 trillion in new spending, including the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package he already signed.

According to Columbia Universitys Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Bidens policies would reduce the national poverty rate next year by 23 percent and the child poverty rate by nearly 47.4 percent.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Irwin Garfinkel, a liberal scholar and co-director of the center, praised Bidens plan, calling it a great achievement.

According to his cost-benefit analysis of the expansion of the child tax credit, for every dollar spent, the benefits to society as a whole would be $8. So if the government spends $100 billion for a one-year enhancement of the child allowance, he said society will gain $800 billion.

And most of that gain is because of benefits to children, he said, as they will grow up healthier, get better education, earn more money, and become less of a burden on the countrys health care and criminal justice systems in the long term.

According to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, Bidens plan would deliver strong economic growth, create millions of jobs, and address the nations caregiving crisis.

This proposal recognizes a fundamental truth: Americas economic growth and competitiveness is inextricably tied to its families ability to thrive, John Podesta, founder of the center, said in a statement.

It includes popular, long-overdue, and critical reforms to build the economy back stronger and more equitably from the pandemic.

In his Kudlow show on Fox Business last month, former President Donald Trumps economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Bidens spending plans would hurt the current booming economy. He criticized his ambitious plan to expand welfare programs without a work requirement, calling it the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnsons Great Society.

Nick Eberstadt, political economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, described Bidens plan as an assault on the welfare reform of the 1990s.

In the depths of the emergency last year, there was a very compelling argument for government action, he told The Epoch Times.

Maintaining emergency measures in non-emergency times may have unintended consequences.

Incentivizing training skills and getting back to work would be better for our country than incentivizing indefinite unemployment, joblessness, he said, criticizing Bidens welfare plan for having no work requirements.

Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, echoed the same concerns, saying Bidens reform is overwhelmingly anti-work and anti-marriage, and therefore its actually harmful to poor people.

According to Rector, Bidens plan would undo the accomplishments of welfare reform in the past 25 years, such as substantially reducing the poverty rate for single parents and the birth rates for nonmarried teenagers.

If Bidens plan is signed into law, we can expect to see the teen birth rates to go up, and we can expect to see the work rates of single mothers to go down, he said.
and

Enters into NDA with Global HVAC and Building Controls Company

TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Kontrol Technologies Corp. (CSE:KNR) (OTCQB:KNRLF) (FSE:1K8) ("Kontrol Technologies" or "Kontrol") a leader in smart buildings and cities through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology is pleased to announce that it continues to make important progress in adding to its strategic supply chain capacity for BioCloud. With the addition of Canadian antibody supply, Kontrol is adding to its necessary supply chain and manufacturing partners required to meet its anticipated global demand from its distribution network and direct customers.

Antibody Supply Important for BioCloud

At the heart of the BioCloud technology is a viral detection system which utilizes antibodies to identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Kontrol has been actively seeking stable supply partners and based on its most recent lab testing has selected a Canadian manufacturer for larger quantity purchases. The Canadian manufacturer will not be disclosed at this time for industry competitive purposes.

"Sourcing high quality North American and specifically Canadian supply of antibodies has been an ongoing priority for BioCloud," said Paul Ghezzi, CEO of Kontrol. "This is a process which requires lab resources and time to test each potential antibody selection. Following a rigorous review and testing process, we are pleased to have the capability to source larger antibody volumes with a trusted Canadian manufacturer."

NDA with Global HVAC Company

Kontrol BioCloud recently entered into a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with a global leading HVAC and building controls company (the "Company") to review the addition of BioCloud to the Company's operating platform. The Company has revenues in excess of $30 Billion USD per annum and operates in thousands of institutional, commercial, and industrial buildings globally. Under the NDA, Kontrol BioCloud will share all of its testing and lab data.

Kontrol BioCloud Enters into Distribution Discussions in Japan Through the Canadian Trade Commissioners Office

Kontrol is in active discussions with two potential distribution partners for Japan. The introductions were made through the Canadian Trade Commissioners Office.

Japan represents a major gateway opportunity for BioCloud into the lucrative Asian market," said Mr. Ghezzi. "We are grateful for the support we are receiving from the Trade Commissioners Office for the region of Japan and other countries as well."



About Kontrol BioCloudTM

BioCloud is a real-time analyzer designed to detect airborne viruses. It has been designed to operate as a safe space technology by sampling the air quality over time. With a proprietary detection chamber that can be replaced as needed, viruses are detected, and an alert system is created in the Cloud or over local intranet. BioCloud has been designed for spaces where individuals gather including classrooms, offices, retirement homes, hospitals, mass transportation and others. Additional information about Kontrol BioCloud can be found on its website at www.kontrolbiocloud.com

About Kontrol Technologies Corp.

Kontrol Technologies Corp., a Canadian public company, is a leader in smart buildings and cities through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology. Kontrol Technologies provides a combination of software, hardware, and service solutions to its customers to improve energy management, air quality and continuous emission monitoring.

Additional information about Kontrol Technologies Corp. can be found on its website at www.kontrolcorp.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com

https://facebook.com/kontroltechcorp/

https://twitter.com/kontrolgroup

https://www.linkedin.com/company/kontrol-group

Neither IIROC nor any stock exchange or other securities regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements contained herein that are not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. In some cases, forward-looking information can be identified by words or phrases such as "may", "will", "expect", "likely", "should", "would", "plan", "anticipate", "intend", "potential", "proposed", "estimate", "believe" or the negative of these terms, or other similar words, expressions, and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy.

Where Kontrol expresses or implies an expectation or belief as to future events or results, such expectation or belief is based on assumptions made in good faith and believed to have a reasonable basis. Such assumptions include, without limitation, that sufficient capital will be available to the Company and that technology will be as effective as anticipated.

However, forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected, or implied by such forward-looking

statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, that sufficient capital and financing cannot be obtained on reasonable terms, or at all, that technologies will not prove as effective as expected, that customers and potential customers will not be as accepting of the Company's product and service offering as expected, and government and regulatory factors impacting the energy conservation industry. Kontrol BioCloud is an air quality technology and not a medical device. 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).

Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements and the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained herein are made as at the date hereof and are based on the beliefs, estimates, expectations, and opinions of management on such date. Kontrol does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or revise any such forward-looking statements or any forward-looking statements contained in any other documents whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required under applicable securities law. Readers are cautioned to consider these and other factors, uncertainties, and potential events carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information.

SOURCE Kontrol Technologies Corp.

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https://www.kontrolbiocloud.com/


New Delhi: On April 29, 2020, Indian cinema and the global stage lost a talented find - Irrfan Khan. The actor breathed his last at Mumbai's Kokilaben hospital where he was admitted a day before due to a colon infection. He battled a rare form of cancer - Neuroendocrine Tumour - for two long years and got it treated in the United Kingdom.

The actor par excellence not only is hailed as a brilliant actor on the Indian soil but displayed his acting chops in Hollywood as well. Irrfan worked in Ang Lee's 'Life Of Pi' co-starring Suraj Sharma, who in an interview with DNA remembered the legend and shared his interesting experience.

Suraj, who played the young Pi in his debut film said, "He was amazing, amazing, humble, funny, fun, intelligent, insightful, caring and had teacher spirit to him. I really was fond of him. Every conversation I had with him, he never took himself seriously, never. He was great. The things I learned from him were mostly like, humanity, 'not taking yourself seriously, taking your work very seriously, knowing what you're doing, but not putting pressure on others ever and having fun. People dream to do this stuff, so you're lucky to get to do it', that's what I learned from him."

Talking about Irrfan and his parents, Suraj Sharma went on to share, "One time, he was telling me the story about his family and he was like, 'they saw me working on these films and they said yeh sab chodo just come back and yeh sab sabzi ka kaam hai, woh karo instead, come back home type of vibe' which shows that even his family was so humble, kind, simple and supportive, it has an effect."

"Everybody who comes across these types of people has a positive effect on them. They realize that you don't have to show off, you don't have to create an ego for other people to respect you. People respect genuineness and authenticity. That honesty and genuineness are what create you, your talent is what makes you shine in this regard. It was obvious that he was, a great talent. So those are the things I learned from him," Suraj concluded.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Students from all grades in Ann Arbor Public Schools will have the chance to see the inside of a classroom before the end of the school year after the district opted to move forward with hybrid learning for grades 4-12.

The districts Board of Education gave the go-ahead on Wednesday, April 28 on its plan to begin bringing students back two days a week on Monday, May 3 by a 5-2 vote. Trustees Ernesto Querijero and Jeff Gaynor opposed the return.

The plan limits students in grades 6-12 to attend in-person classes in the mornings, before learning from home from 1 to 3 p.m.

After children in grades 4-12 had gone without in-person classes since March 2020, board member Susan Baskett said it made sense to continue with the districts previous commitment of offering a chance for students to return,

Part of my frustration is we know we have not all agreed on every decision together but we have voted together, and we voted to move forward with this plan in the past, Baskett said.

We are moving this train here, Baskett said. ... We cant always be 100% knowing everything to make a decision. Thats just not realistic.

Querijero and Gaynor said they were against the plan and hybrid learning moving forward, expressing that they didnt believe it was equitable for all students - especially students participating remotely.

To proceed in a way that, to me, is knowingly inequitable, where we are responsible and have adopted an equity lens when we look at things, I think is wrong, Querijero said. Are we going to actually practice and start doing equity, or are we just going to talk about it? I dont see how anyone could argue that this isnt an inequitable endeavor in returning these students that basically splits them into two cohorts of tiered learning.

Board President Bryan Johnson said going against the timeline the district originally laid out would sabotage the districts plans to get students into the classroom, noting Querijero had expressed hesitation on moving forward with other parts of the districts plan in recent months.

While we can have disagreements as a board and as a body, we should move forward in a unified way - not group think by any means, Johnson said. There is prompting thats going on that would border on sabotage or undermining whats happening.

Gaynor said he was against hybrid learning, reading off extensive community input before expressing that children in remote learning arent experiencing the same quality of education as students attending in-person.

I believe equity has been lost, Gaynor said. My sense of things is that those most in need are still not back in the classroom and those classes who are back, those at home, whether theyre in-person two days a week or fully at home, are getting much less attention and help than they were before.

After cases spiked in Michigan and Washtenaw County in early April, an 18-day decline in COVID-19 cases, along with an increasing number of vaccinations gave the district enough confidence to offer hybrid learning before the close of the 2020-21 academic year, Superintendent Jeanice Swift explained.

AAPS began bringing students back to in-person learning for the first time on March 25, before a spike in COVID-19 cases moved back the target date for in-person classes for middle and high school students to April 26. That date was pushed back another week to May 3 on April 14. Students will have the option to continue with virtual learning if they choose.

The move sets in stone that students in grades 4-12 will get to experience face-to-face learning starting next week, where Swift said the district will continue its focus on maintaining health and safety within the classroom.

Our commitment has been from the beginning and its even more important these last six weeks - we will monitor COVID cases hourly Swift said. We will take action when it is needed to quarantine, to take a pause or a timeout for a classroom, for a grade level, for a school or for a group of schools - we will do whatever is necessary. We have not come this far to put people at risk at this time.

READ MORE:

Ann Arbor Public Schools moves back return to classroom for some grades

Return to classroom for some AAPS students pushed back to May

These are the 25 highest rated Michigan high schools in the new U.S. News ranking
At the invitation of the Director General of Guatemala Customs, Mr. Werner Ovalle Ramirez, in his capacity as WCO Vice-Chair, the WCO Secretary General Dr. Kunio Mikuriya participated in the Heads of Customs Meeting of the Americas/Caribbean Region, hosted by Peru Customs (SUNAT) on 22 April 2021.

The Meeting participants discussed regional priorities and shared their best practices relating to the WCO theme for this year, Recovery, Renewal and Resilience for a Sustainable Supply Chain.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Secretary General Mikuriya expressed his thanks to Vice-Chair Ovalle Ramirez for the effective communication and coordination in the Region at this difficult time. He also thanked SUNAT for hosting the Meeting and congratulated it on the inauguration of the Regional Customs Laboratory. In addition, Dr. Mikuriya commended SUNAT on its recent webinar aimed at sharing expertise on chemical analysis with the Region's Members. He went on to describe WCOs current priorities and new working methods.

The Minister of Economy and Finance of Peru, Mr. Waldo Mendoza, stressed the importance of Customs in revenue collection, trade facilitation and the protection of society at borders.

The Vice-Chair shared a noteworthy report on regional activities and discussed other WCO topics and regional administrative matters.

The WCO Deputy Secretary General, Mr. Ricardo Trevino Chapa, explained the WCO Strategic Plan and the process it follows, as well as the Regional Strategy Update for the Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) Programme.

The Meeting also gave the Region's Members an opportunity to share experiences in the following areas, based on the WCOs theme for 2021 : Recovery - innovative facilitation approach and E-Commerce; Renewal  focus on modernization; and Resilience  developing new competences for Customs officers and adopting the right perspective on gender.

All the Meeting participants enjoyed the hospitality extended by Peru and the sharing of Peruvian Customs' national experience by its Director General of Customs, Ms. Marilu Llerena.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29) -- Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office board member Sandra Cam, tagged by investigators as one of the seven suspects in the 2019 killing of Batuan, Masbate Vice Mayor Charlie Yuson III, surrendered on Wednesday to authorities after a court in Manila issued a warrant for her arrest.

The Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group confirmed the development on Thursday.

PNP chief General Debold Sinas said the warrant for Cams arrest was served in an undisclosed hospital where she is currently admitted following her surrender to the CIDGs Cavite provincial field unit. No further details about her medical condition were given.

The arrest warrant for Cam was issued by the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 42 after the Department of Justice found probable cause to file murder charges against her and seven individuals over Yusons death.

Also listed as co-accused were Cam's son, Marco Martin Cam, then acting Batuan Mayor Nelson Cambaya, and alleged gunmen Junel Gomez, Bradford Solis, Juanito De Luna, and Rigor Dela Cruz.

On October 9, 2019, Yuson was having breakfast with two companions in Sampaloc, Manila when armed men alighted from a van and fired at them. He was rushed to the hospital but died while seeking treatment.

The suspects were also charged with frustrated murder for the attack on Alberto Alforte IV, one of Yusons companions who was wounded.

PNP said no bail was recommended for Cams murder charges, while the bail was recommended fixed at 200,000 for the frustrated murder charges.

The slain vice mayor's wife, Lalaine, tagged Cam as the brains behind the killing after Yusons son Charmax Jan defeated Cams son Marco Martin during the May 2019 mayoral race.

Cam had denied the allegation, saying "Hindi kami mamamatay-tao (We are not murderers)," in a DZMM interview in October 2019. She added her family had already moved on after her son lost in the elections
President Joe Biden is slated to deliver his first joint address to Congress on Wednesday, where he will lay out his next big legislative priority to the American people and celebrate what he sees as his administration's victories during his first 100 days in office.

Viewers can expect the President to acknowledge what has been lost because of the coronavirus pandemic with his trademark empathy and at the same time -- as has often been the case during past addresses -- deliver a message of confidence and optimism. The address in the House chamber of the Capitol building will also offer Biden the chance to bolster his agenda and sell his biggest ideas, particularly a massive jobs and infrastructure plan, in front of Congress and the nation.

Biden has watched a number of presidents deliver addresses to Congress over his decades in the Senate and in the Obama White House, but this will be the first time he's delivering his own address in the chamber since taking office. During his decades of sitting in the chamber watching other presidents give their State of the Union speeches and other major addresses, he could not have imagined the scene that will be before him when he stands on the rostrum Wednesday.

The audience will be thin and the President will wear a face mask before and after delivering his address, according to a person familiar with the plan. Behind him, for the first time, will be two women -- Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom plan to wear masks.

Biden told CNN's Jake Tapper and other anchors in a briefing on Wednesday that he has felt pressure to succeed right out of the box. The two main issues during the briefing were the health of the country physically, in terms of the Covid pandemic, and economically. Biden told the anchors he is eager to work with Republicans but he needs to have a GOP with which he can negotiate.

'Well, I got to figure out if there's a party to do deals with,' Biden said. 'We need a Republican Party. And we need -- we need another party, whatever you call it, that's unified -- not completely splintered and fearful of one another.'

Tapper reported Biden also said he views the challenges ahead of the country as a question of if democracy can succeed in the 21st century, a debate he says he'd had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

'And I've been convinced for a long time -- I doubt whether most of you would agree with me, but I think we're going to -- they're going to write about this point in history,' Biden said. 'Not about any of us in here, but about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century. Not a joke. Whether autocracy is the answer -- they were my discussions and debates I'd have in the many times I met with Xi.'

During Wednesday night's speech, Biden will address the American Families Plan. He told Tapper and other anchors he is willing to make a bipartisan deal on infrastructure but thinks this is an inflection point in the country and the world and now is time to go big.

Given that Biden's speech is the first presidential address to Congress since the coronavirus pandemic began, this year's events will undoubtedly look and feel different than ones in years past. Here are six things you can expect during Wednesday's remarks:

An extra-tight guest list

Trump's final address to Congress was the State of the Union in February 2020 -- a month before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic.

During the joint address this year, the chamber will have far fewer audience members than years past because coronavirus restrictions limit capacity. And given the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year and the subsequent incidents around the Capitol fence, security is expected to be tight.

Invitations have been extended to a limited number of members of Congress and those who are invited cannot bring guests. About 200 people will be allowed into the chamber.

Most of Biden's Cabinet will be watching from their offices or homes, Psaki said on Tuesday. And since they will not be in attendance, there will be no designated survivor -- a Cabinet member who does not attend the speech in case of some sort of catastrophe that wipes out the line of succession.

Chief Justice John Roberts will be the only Supreme Court justice in attendance.

It's unclear how many lawmakers per party will attend. As tickets are limited, the Democratic caucus is holding a lottery for members who are interested in attending Biden's speech, multiple senators and aides told CNN.

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both are expected to be in the audience.

And first lady Jill Biden won't have a traditional viewing box at the address, Psaki said on Friday.

It's been a tradition for first ladies to sit during a State of the Union -- or a joint address to Congress for presidents in their first months in office -- with guests who symbolize the presidential administration's policy priorities. And while the first lady will attend the address in person, she will not bring guests to sit in her box, according to the White House.

Most, if not all, of the White House staff will be watching the speech virtually, Psaki said.

Acknowledging the difficulties of the last year

Biden plans to discuss two major events that seem almost inescapable in the room where he's delivering his address -- the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

He'll reference the January 6 riot at the Capitol during his remarks, according to people familiar with his speech preparations. And before he speaks, he'll meet with Capitol staff who weathered the insurrection attempt.

The coronavirus pandemic will constitute a major portion of Biden's speech, officials said.

Outlining the American Families Plan

During the address, Biden will lay out key components the final piece of a two-part sweeping, $4 trillion spending proposal, which would invest hundreds of billions into education, child care and paid leave.

The measures being proposed in the American Families Plan include: making community college free, enhancing Pell grants, enhancing funding for recruiting and developing the education workforce, funding paid family and medical leave, funding universal preschool, and extending of free summer meals for children. The plan would also extend or make permanent several existing measures.

The plan would cost $1.8 trillion and the President will seek to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans to finance it. His new proposed measures would raise about $1.5 trillion over a decade.

While key elements of the proposal were tweaked, removed or added in just the last several days, the joint session speech has long been viewed as the platform to unveil the proposal and its key elements, several of which Biden's top advisers consistently point out poll quite well with the public.

In the days following the address, Biden will hit the road to make his first sales pitch for the plan at events around the country. Cabinet members and White House officials will take part in the tour as well.

Touting pandemic victories and pushing for vaccinations

Expect Biden to highlight his administration's efforts to combat the coronavirus and keep the economy afloat, like the passage of the President's first legislative priority -- the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

The speech has been teed up by a few markers of optimism for the administration. On Tuesday, the President signed an executive order raising the federal minimum wage for government contractors.

The administration also said this week it plans to send coronavirus vaccines abroad and celebrated the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's decision to ease guidelines on mask wearing by vaccinated individuals.

Biden is also expected to push people to get vaccinated as vaccine supply grows to meet demand and emphasize its incentives, like eased masking guidelines and attending certain gatherings.

The administration indicated last week that they expect daily vaccination rates to 'moderate and fluctuate' during the next stage of the US vaccination program, now that the most at-risk populations and those most eager to get vaccinated have largely been administered a vaccine.

Pelosi and Harris make history

Biden's speech will mark the first time two women in Washington leadership will sit behind a sitting US president during a joint address to Congress. The symbolism is something he'll acknowledge during his speech, according to sources familiar with the plan.

Harris and Pelosi -- the first women to hold their positions in federal leadership -- are expected to sit behind Biden on the rostrum in masks during the entirety of the speech.

Though silent throughout the President's remarks, the vice president and the speaker's body language often serve as guideposts for how parties in the chamber react.

House Speaker John Boehner was sometimes seen grimacing behind then-President Barack Obama during his addresses to Congress. And Pelosi was famously seen ripping up her copy of President Donald Trump's 2020 State of the Union address shortly after he finished speaking.

Given that both Pelosi and Harris are Democrats, expect frequent gestures of approval, like applause and standing ovations.

Policing reform

The White House has said policing reform will be a key topic discussed during Biden's Wednesday evening address.

'As he's thinking about what his joint session speech looks like next week, he has every intention of using that as an opportunity to elevate this issue and talk about the importance of putting police reform measures in place,' Psaki said last week.

Biden's comments about policing reform from the chamber will come one week after Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who knelt on George Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes last year, was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

'The President doesn't believe that he alone can pull the George Floyd (Justice in Policing) Act across the finish line. That is going to be up to Congress,' she said, adding that Biden 'believes the bar for convicting officers is too high.'
Matt Hancock today warned the rise of deadly superbugs poses a bigger threat than Covid and should be taken as seriously as global warming.

The Health Secretary said modern medicine may 'cease to exist' unless the 'silent pandemic' of antimicrobial resistance is urgently tackled.

Drug-resistant diseases such as MRSA already kill 700,000 people around the world each year  including 5,000 in Britain.

But experts fear the annual fatality toll could reach 10million by 2050, with common infections such as gonorrhoea and E. coli learning to evade antibiotics.

Matt Hancock called for countries to fight the emergence of MRSA. He is pictured today receiving the AstraZeneca Covid jab at the Science Museum, London

Drug-resistant diseases such as MRSA already kill 700,000 people around the world each year - including 800 in Britain. But experts fear this could surge to 10million by 2050 without action to tackle the rise of these superbugs

WHAT IS ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE? Antibiotics have been doled out unnecessarily by GPs and hospital staff for decades, fueling once harmless bacteria to become superbugs. The World Health Organization (WHO) has previously warned if nothing is done the world is heading for a 'post-antibiotic' era. It claimed common infections, such as chlamydia, will become killers without immediate solutions to the growing crisis. Bacteria can become drug resistant when people take incorrect doses of antibiotics or if they are given out unnecessarily. Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies claimed in 2016 that the threat of antibiotic resistance is as severe as terrorism. Figures estimate that superbugs will kill 10 million people each year by 2050, with patients succumbing to once harmless bugs. Around 700,000 people already die yearly due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria across the world. Concerns have repeatedly been raised that medicine will be taken back to the 'dark ages' if antibiotics are rendered ineffective in the coming years. In addition to existing drugs becoming less effective, there have only been one or two new antibiotics developed in the last 30 years. In September, the WHO warned antibiotics are 'running out' as a report found a 'serious lack' of new drugs in the development pipeline. Without antibiotics, C-sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements will become incredibly 'risky', it was said at the time. Advertisement

Speaking virtually at a UN convention today, Mr Hancock announced No10 had donated another 1.3million for a World Health Organization-backed project to thwart the rise of superbugs.

He hailed Covid as an example of how countries and medics from around the world can join forces to fight against diseases, as he urged governments to help.

Mr Hancock, who received his Covid jab today from Downing Street sidekick Professor Jonathan Van Tam, added: 'We owe so much of our progress against this deadly disease to the power and ingenuity of science and modern medicine.

'But if we fail to act on antimicrobial resistance, modern medicine as we know it can cease to exist.

'And the silent pandemic of AMR could have consequences far more deadly than Covid. In my view, it's an existential threat as great as climate change.'

The extra funds will go to the Multi-Partner Trust Fund on AMR, which funds research projects into creating new medicines to combat them.

Britain has paid in 7.6million to the project since it launched in 2019, with with 4.1m donated last year.

Antibiotic resistance, known officially as antimicrobial resistance (AMR), begins when bacteria, viruses and fungi learn to survive medications.

When overexposed to medicines, only bacteria which have a mutation allowing them to survive will reproduce.

They pass this trait on to their offspring and, over time, this can eventually lead to a fully resistant strain.

The Health Secretary also backed the United Nations' call to action for nations to push the issue up the political agenda.

Mr Hancock added: 'On behalf of the government of the United Kingdom, I welcome and fully endorse today's call to action on AMR, because we have so much still to do together  learning from the lessons of this pandemic and learning those lessons quickly.

'Working across human, animal and environmental health to make sure that we tackle the next pandemic, so generations ahead of us will have the modern medicine that we are able to benefit from today.'

In a separate statement the Health Secretary also unveiled a further 37million investment in the UK's life sciences industry, as part of the Government's vision to make the country a global sciences superpower.

Genomics England will receive 17million of this grant to back investment in researching new methods for diagnosing cancers using the human genome and exploring public attitudes to sequencing.

Funding will also be used to turbo-charge clinical trials looking into how genetic changes can lead to severe disease.

Speaking at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry's annual conference, Mr Hancock said: 'I'm determined to make it quicker and easier to set up and deliver the high power clinical trials we need.

'And so, bring medicines to market safer and faster, from cancer to cardiovascular, to every disease known to mankind.

'Taken together, all this means better research, better treatment, better clinical decision making, and more lives saved, and lives improved, that is the mission of the life sciences.'

Rapid clinical trials have led to several medicines quickly becoming available to patients during the pandemic, including dexamethasone which studies showed reduced deaths among hospitalised Covid patients.

Ministers are also aiming to get antiviral medicines - which could stop someone exposed to Covid being infected - to patients by early Autumn.
EIGHTY FOUR, Pa., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 84 Lumber, the nation's largest privately held building materials supplier, is launching a recruitment effort to fill immediate openings at its retail and manufacturing locations in the greater Greenville area. The company will host a Hiring Event on May 6 from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Greenville, SC, retail store (675 South Old Piedmont Highway). At the event, job seekers will learn more about the company culture and get the opportunity to be interviewed for nearly a dozen open positions in the area that include manager trainee (MT), driver, and door shop associate. Qualified job seekers may receive an offer of employment during the event.

"84 Lumber has both a retail store and a door manufacturing facility in the area, and we are proud to employ nearly 70 people in the region," said Rob Woodrow, divisional vice president at 84 Lumber. "We're growing along with the growth in the construction industry  here in Greenville and across the nation. We're looking for people seeking a fresh start."

Woodrow went on to detail the openings in the region:

Manager trainees (MTs) hired by 84 Lumber enter an intensive, one-on-one, on-the-job training program that teaches them about the company's business and puts them on a path to become a future leader within the enterprise. Starting compensation for manager trainees is more than $40,000 per year.

hired by 84 Lumber enter an intensive, one-on-one, on-the-job training program that teaches them about the company's business and puts them on a path to become a future leader within the enterprise. Starting compensation for manager trainees is more than per year. Door shop associates need no prior experience and are involved in the manufacturing of doors. These associates can expect a starting pay of between $12 and $17 per hour based on experience.

need no prior experience and are involved in the manufacturing of doors. These associates can expect a starting pay of between and per hour based on experience. Drivers load trucks and deliver materials to customer job sites. Hourly pay for the job is between $12 and $17 per hour depending on experience.

"We are a family-owned company, which means we are committed to helping our employees build and cultivate a career with us. In fact, 95% of our store managers started in our manager trainee program," Woodrow said. "As we see it, 84 Lumber recruits individuals with a can-do attitude, a willingness to work hard, and a desire to learn. Once we find these people and they join the company, we teach and train them and find ways for them to grow with us."

Woodrow added that 84 Lumber expects it might find the right fit from all types of candidates  an individual with no construction experience, military veterans ready to embark on their next career challenge, or people with some previous work experience who seek to redirect their career.

Candidates interested in participating in the Hiring Event are asked to pre-register. To sign up, go to www.84americandream.com/greenville and complete the form. Once you are registered, you will receive an email from 84 Lumber with the link to apply for the desired position. To save time, candidates are strongly encouraged to apply for positions online before they attend the event.

NOTE: 84 Lumber requires all attendees to wear a mask at the event. Recruits will also be asked to practice social distancing during the Hiring Event. In addition, candidates will be required to undergo a background check and drug screening prior to receiving an offer of employment.

To learn more about 84 Lumber, follow the company on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

ABOUT 84 LUMBER

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Eighty Four, Pennsylvania, 84 Lumber Company is the nation's largest privately held supplier of building materials, manufactured components and industry-leading services for single- and multi-family residences and commercial buildings. The company operates nearly 250 stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops, custom millwork shops and engineered wood product centers in more than 30 states. 84 Lumber also offers turnkey installation services for a variety of products, including framing, insulation, siding, windows, roofing, decking and drywall. A certified national women's business enterprise owned by Maggie Hardy Knox, 84 Lumber was named by Forbes as one of America's Largest Private Companies in 2018 and one of America's Best Large Employers in 2019. For more information, visit 84lumber.com or join us at Facebook.com/84lumber and linkedin.com/company/84-lumber.

SOURCE 84 Lumber

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Return-to-Office Workgroup provides recommendations to governor to keep Michiganders safe

Return-to-Office Workgroup provides recommendations to governor to keep Michiganders safe

April 29, 2021

Media Contact: Jason Moon, 517-282-0041

The State's Return-to-Office Workgroup has provided Gov. Gretchen Whitmer with their recommendations for how employers can begin to plan for a safe, phased reopening of offices. The group consisting of business, labor and public health experts, was established on March 15, and has acted quickly to develop concise recommendations regarding Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) polices and additional guidance and best practices to help employers plan for a return to in-person office work.

"Workers and their safety are our top priority," said Michigan COVID-19 Workplace Safety Director Sean Egan. "We have taken a proactive approach to listen and collect feedback from a wide array of stakeholders, as we try to address challenges and concerns of employers who are looking to align their reopen plans with health guidance and safety rules."

In addition to encouraging employers to be transparent and communicate frequently with employees on phased return-to-office plans, the workgroup's key recommendations also include:

MIOSHA GUIDANCE

Provide additional examples to help to employers interpret and implement MIOSHA guidance.

Consider addressing additional questions including: Mentoring and training of employees. Task-based work functions (e.g., some work in-person, some remote). Clarify employer's ability to update the policy as needed and recognize changing conditions. Consider individual feasibility based on an employee's ability to successfully complete their functions remotely (e.g., classification may be remote, but individually employee either struggles or does not have the tools/ability to function remotely). Consider collaboration and team functions. Consider employee well-being/mental health.

Consider communicating that more in-person work is permitted.

MDHHS Guidance:

Provide ongoing updates to the Nov. 6 guidance as necessary and regularly to reflect current trends of vaccination and infection.

Employers - Reducing Office Density:

Focus on task-based collaboration and specific needs for in-person work while allowing other tasks and teamwork to be completed remotely when feasible.

Consider utilizing hybrid work strategies to promote social distancing.

Employers - Addressing Operational Obstacles:

Daily Health Screenings - stagger entry times to avoid congregation at screening checkpoints, consider using screening apps to provide prior to entry.

Entry/exit through common entrances and elevators - stagger start and end times as practical to avoid congregation.

Employers - Quarantine, Isolation and Testing Guidelines:

Ensure policy clearly articulates the ability of employees to quarantine/isolate/test without risk of job loss.

Promote the use of sick leave tax credits available for employers with 500 or fewer employees to provide paid leave.

Employers - Caregiving Resources for Employees:

Establish a return policy that provides employees with caregiving obligations to continue remote work regardless of the cohort group returning, including caregiving of immuno-compromised persons.

Promote the use of family leave tax credits available for employers with 500 or fewer employees to provide paid leave.

Employers - Vaccines:

Provide up-to-date information to employees on the vaccines.

Provide links to vaccination sites/sign-up information.

Consider partnering where possible with local public health to offer on-site vaccination.

Add COVID-19 vaccination to existing wellness programs and benchmarks.

These recommendations come at a time when workplace safety remains a concern. As reported to MDHHS by local public health departments, office workplaces had 385 COVID-19 outbreaks from September 3, 2020 through April 22, 2021, making office settings the fifth highest for outbreaks among the 22 settings being reported. This data demonstrates the need for a strong partnership between diverse stakeholders and subject matter experts who can help develop a phased return-to-office work strategy that ensures the protection of Michiganders.

"As a small business owner, I appreciate the commitment, dedication and strategic planning that the Whitmer Administration has shown," said Tameka Ramsey, owner, T. Ramsey & Associates. "The LEO team has done an amazing job ensuring that all businesses are being heard and represented in creating policies on returning back to the office during this time. This group of experts has worked collectively to make sure that employees and customers are safe as we slowly reopen."

"I'm impressed by how well everyone worked together," Dr. Kate Birdsall, president, MSU Union of Nontenure-Track Faculty, AFT said. "Each member of the team brought valuable insight to our weekly meetings, where we collaborated to ensure the continued health and safety of Michiganders as the state prepares to reopen more fully."

The workgroup consulted a variety of data including MDHHS public health data, MIOSHA information, local economic impact data, and best practice information provided by members of the workgroup."

In addition to the workgroup's efforts on return-to-office work, LEO has recently held several feedback sessions with legislative leaders, small businesses and representatives from many business sectors including financial services, manufacturing, legal and insurance services.

The advisory group complements the collaborative work that MIOSHA and other state agencies are currently performing with businesses in the field. This work includes the MIOSHA Ambassador Program where over 3,700 businesses have been provided free education and one-on-one guidance to understand regulations on workplace safety.

To learn more about the efforts to support a safe reopening in Michigan, visit Michigan.gov/COVIDWorkplaceSafety.
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A mammoth renovation has turned a traditional Victorian terrace into one of Melbourne's most beautiful family homes.

The three-bedroom in Clifton Hill, four kilometres north-east of the CBD, was designed and built in 1885 by entrepreneur Walter Scott who combined his daughters' names to call the house Elsie Leigh.

The house has a fairytale facade straight from a painter's canvas that was salvaged by Perkins Architects, who painstakingly stripped away heavy layers of wisteria that threatened to destroy the historic front.

A mammoth renovation has turned this traditional Victorian terrace into one of Melbourne's most beautiful family homes

The house has a fairytale facade straight from a painter's canvas, but the rear is truly contemporary

The house was designed in 1885 by businessman Walter Scott who combined his daughters' names to call it Elsie Leigh

Renovation works also involved preserving classic floorboards, ornate fireplaces and the high ceilings that were customary in upper-class residences throughout the 19th century.

The street-facing part of the house is occupied by a study, two bedrooms and a magnificent lounge with bay windows.

Listing agent Arch Staver, who is overseeing the sale of the property for realtors Nelson Alexander, described it as 'one of the more elegant rooms I've had the pleasure of walking inside'.

Listing agent Arch Staver, who is overseeing the sale of the property for realtors Nelson Alexander, described it as one of the most elegant houses in the area

Renovation works also involved preserving classic floorboards and ornate fireplaces

The chef's kitchen to the rear of the house is kitted out with premium Miele appliances and a striking lime coloured island

At the rear is a modern extension completed in 2009 which houses a sunlit open-plan living and dining space and a chef's kitchen kitted out with premium Miele appliances.

Upstairs is the spacious third bedroom complete with an ensuite and walk-in wardrobe, as well as the master bathroom.

A large window streams sunlight in over the statement bathtub which is big enough for two.

A large window streams sunlight in over the statement bathtub which is big enough for two

The high ceilings that were customary in upper-class residences throughout the 19th century have also been preserved

The house, which is heritage-listed on the National Trust, has been listed with a guide price of $3.8million to $4.18million (AUD)

Mr Staver told Daily Mail Australia the house has 'one of the districts most stunning facades', renovated in a style that 'seamlessly blends the old with the new'

The house, which is heritage-listed on the National Trust, has been listed with a guide price of $3.8million to $4.18million (AUD).

That's a staggering $2.5million higher than the average price of a three-bedroom in the Clifton Hill area, which was $1.3million in 2020, according to sales records from realestate.com.au.

Mr Staver told Daily Mail Australia the house has 'one of the districts most stunning facades', renovated in a style that 'seamlessly blends the old with the new'.
CLEVELAND, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CBIZ, Inc. (NYSE: CBZ) ("the Company"), a leading provider of financial, insurance and advisory services, announced its wholly-owned subsidiary CBIZ Accounting, Tax & Advisory of Washington, LLC has acquired the non-attest assets of Berntson Porter & Company PLLC ("Berntson Porter") of Bellevue, Washington, effective May 1, 2021. Concurrent with this transaction, Mayer Hoffman McCann P.C., a national independent CPA firm, announced the acquisition of the attest assets of Berntson Porter.

CBIZ, Inc. and Mayer Hoffman McCann P.C. have an alternative practice structure. The two companies are separate and independent legal entities that work together to serve clients' business needs.

Founded in 1985, Berntson Porter provides comprehensive accounting and financial consulting services including tax, forensic, valuation and transaction services. Berntson Porter serves a wide range of industries with specialties including construction, real estate, hospitality, manufacturing, service, wholesale distribution and technology. The firm has 120 employees and approximately $26 million in annual revenue.

Jerry Grisko, President and CEO of CBIZ, stated, "Establishing a presence in the growing Pacific Northwest market has been a long-term goal for CBIZ. In Berntson Porter, we found the ideal partner with a shared commitment to client service, a strong cultural fit and deep expertise within their team of seasoned professionals. Berntson Porter is one of the largest accounting firms in the Puget Sound region. Working together, we will expand the services we offer our clients and continue to pursue growth. We welcome the Berntson Porter team to CBIZ."

Robert Berntson, CEO of Berntson Porter, stated, "We are excited to take this important step in our growth that will greatly benefit our clients and our team with the added resources, services and opportunities CBIZ can provide."

Allan D. Koltin, CEO of the Koltin Consulting Group, advised both firms on the opportunity to come together. Koltin stated, "Berntson Porter was an attractive potential partner to many of the top accounting and consulting firms wanting to enter the Puget Sound market. Berntson Porter selected CBIZ because of its amazing culture, breadth and depth of services and the growth opportunities for their people and clients."

About CBIZ

CBIZ, Inc. is a leading provider of financial, insurance and advisory services to businesses throughout the United States. Financial services include accounting, tax, government health care consulting, transaction advisory, risk advisory, and valuation services. Insurance services include employee benefits consulting, retirement plan consulting, property and casualty insurance, payroll, and human capital consulting. With more than 100 Company offices in 31 states, CBIZ is one of the largest accounting and insurance brokerage providers in the U.S. For more information, visit www.cbiz.com.

SOURCE CBIZ, Inc.

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Around the world, the moon is known for some playful influences  from turning characters into wolves and witches, being the inspiration for some of Indias favorite Bollywood songs, to being the most awaited visual during major festivities. Now, Taco Bell, the world's leading Mexican-inspired restaurant brand, is harnessing lunar powers and the Taco Moon to celebrate tacos with the world.

On May 4th, taco-loving fans in India and across the world may notice that the half moon will resemble the shape of an iconic, craveable taco. Taco Bell, in turn, will celebrate this Taco Moon phenomenon by giving fans across the world free tacos on this special day.

Talking about the campaign, Gaurav Burman, Director, Burman Hospitality Private Limited, Taco Bells Master Franchise Partner in India said, The moon is an integral part of Indian culture  whether it is via Bollywood songs and dialogues, or through our Indian festivals. We, at Burman Hospitality, are excited to celebrate the phenomenon of Taco Moon across the country and look forward to our customers witnessing the Taco Moon and enjoying their free tacos on May 4th. Taco Moon is our way of referencing Taco Bell to consumers across India in a highly engaging and unique manner. Once you see the resemblance of the half Moon to a Taco Bell taco, you will never be able to unsee it.

Taco Moon is the launchpad of Taco Bells overarching global #ISeeATaco campaign that aims to invite consumers to start noticing the shape of a Taco in everyday life. Taco Moon giveaways will take place in more than 20 markets at participating restaurants for a limited time.

In India, fans can get a free Crunchy Taco on May 4th, with any purchase through delivery (via the Taco Bell app or through food-delivery aggregators Swiggy and Zomato). Taco Bell India is following hygiene and safety processes across all delivery and takeaway orders, as well as for in-store dining in states which allow the same. Measures include temperature checking of delivery executives at restaurants and ensuring pick up of orders from a demarcated area to ensure contactless- pickups. Moreover, all Taco Bell orders continue to be double  packed, where each item is wrapped in individual packets followed by an outer bag to ensure contactless transit of the order. Safety Cards are also enclosed with each order, documenting hygiene and safety measures, along with the name and temperature of the delivery rider.
EASTERN PASSAGE, N.S. - A stone monument was unveiled Thursday on the first anniversary of a naval helicopter crash that claimed the lives of six Canadian Forces personnel when the aircraft plunged into the ocean close to its host ship.

A sailor and an aviator observe a moment of silence after unveiling a memorial at 12 Wing Shearwater in Dartmouth, N.S. on the first anniversary of a CH-148 Cyclone helicopter crash that claimed the lives of six Canadian Forces members when the aircraft plunged into the ocean, on Thursday, April 29, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

EASTERN PASSAGE, N.S. - A stone monument was unveiled Thursday on the first anniversary of a naval helicopter crash that claimed the lives of six Canadian Forces personnel when the aircraft plunged into the ocean close to its host ship.

The black granite, six-faced memorial is four feet tall  the height is meant to evoke the fourth month of the year, as the crash occurred on the evening of April 29, 2020, in the Mediterranean Sea.

The top of the obelisk at the entrance of Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Nova Scotia includes the crest of the Cyclone helicopter with its call sign, Stalker 22, embedded in the stone.

The call sign has been permanently retired, in memory of the largest single-day loss of life for the military in more than a decade.

Master Cpl. Matthew Cousins, Sub-Lt. Abbigail Cowbrough, Capt. Kevin Hagen, Capt. Brenden MacDonald, Capt. Maxime Miron-Morin and Sub-Lt. Matthew Pyke died in the crash.

Lt.-Col. Bill Thomey, commanding officer of 423 Squadron at Shearwater, said the ceremony would have normally been a major event, but the pandemic forced a quiet observance with just a few personnel present.

"We're doing what we can within the confines of the pandemic  and to show the families we're here for them and we're behind them," the officer said during an interview earlier in the day.

Some family members who live in the Halifax area  or who travelled to Nova Scotia and self-isolated  visited the monument on Wednesday in small groups, and a virtual ceremony was pre-recorded and released for the anniversary on Thursday.

The monument was unveiled for public viewing by two Canadian Forces personnel at 1:52 p.m. local time, the hour the helicopter went down near HMCS Fredericton.

A few people gathered, socially distanced, to observe in silence, as an aviator and a sailor saluted and then marched away.

During interviews earlier in the week, family members had said the memorial was important to honour the lost.

But the mother of a captain who died had said she is looking for more information from the final report into the cause of the crash, and had concerns about how swiftly the Royal Canadian Air Force allowed the Cyclones to return to service.

In June 2020, the military said preliminary findings indicated the helicopter did not respond the way the crew had expected as the aircraft was coming around to land on the Canadian frigate HMCS Fredericton.

At the time, Air Force officials said the pilot attempted to make a number of manoeuvres while the Cyclone's "flight director,'' or autopilot, was still engaged. Rather than turning off, the autopilot started to work against the pilot before the helicopter crashed into the water at high speed.

Thomey said Thursday the resumption of flights was accompanied by new training and updates to flight manuals so pilots are aware of the problem and how to respond.

Weve been able to really dial down and figure out exactly some of the procedures and put them into place and get educated on the incident that happened, he said.

If were unsure of anything, were going to put the brakes on and figure it out," Thomey said. "Were not going to push forward blindly. We want to make sure if theres an issue, we verify it and we will cancel training missions to ensure everyone feels comfortable and safe to go flying.

Asked if the software of the flight control system has been changed, Thomey responded: That (information) will all come out in due time with the release of the (safety) reports.

A Cyclone recently had to land at a provincial park in Halifax after a warning light turned on, and it was towed back to the base in Eastern Passage.

Thomey said the helicopter had a fault light go on indicating a problem with its main rotorhead's hydraulic system. The rotorhead is the portion of the rotor assembly where the shafts of blades join the rotor.

He said there are multiple backup levels built into the helicopter, known as "redundancies," and the system was simply warning of a fault at one level.

There is lots of redundancy built into the helicopter, triple redundancy in lot of cases, and the helicopter realized that, Heh, we have a fault in one of systems," the officer said.

Thomey referred to the event as a precautionary landing.

He said two of the 16 Cyclones in the possession of the Canadian Forces are assigned to ships: one on HMCS Calgary and the other on HMCS Halifax. There are still 11 helicopters to be delivered to Canada by the American manufacturer.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.
An unidentified man and an officer from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) sustained injuries after engaging in a shootout that stemmed from an altercation. The said officer was reported to be off-duty when he was shot multiple times by a suspect who broke into his private vehicle in the parking lot of the officer's apartment, Fox 11 reported.

The officer who engaged in the fight is also yet to be identified. Both the police and the suspect were brought to a hospital in stable condition. Authorities noted that both men are expected to survive, Associated Press reported.

READ NEXT: 2 Dead, 1 Hurt in Los Angeles Shooting Spree

The shootout between the LAPD Officer and the unidentified man

The gunbattle sparked from an altercation between the police and the suspect in the parking area of Sherman Oaks apartment complex on Wednesday, ABC 7 reported. Authorities noted that the incident happened shortly before 2:30 in the afternoon at the 5200 block of Vesper Avenue.

Police from the Los Angeles Department surrounded the building after the shooting incident occurred.

Meanwhile, authorities identified that the off-duty police was with a female friend when the shooting happened. The woman was not injured.

Los Angeles police Officer William Cooper told Los Angeles Daily News that the officers discovered the body of the police involved in the shootout lying with multiple gunshot wounds. Meanwhile, the suspect was found injured in the breezeway while tossing a firearm magazine from the officer's gun over a fence.

Shooting Stemmed Out From Altercation

The gun that was used by the suspect in the shootout was owned by the LAPD cop.

The suspect was first seen by the off-duty police officer inside his private vehicle when he and his female friend headed to the locked parking garage under the building of the apartment.

Moore noted that the suspect broke inside the private vehicle of the officer, granting him access to the gun inside the duty bag of the police. Moore added that the suspect was wearing the officer's bulletproof vest when he was spotted.

The officer was reported to confront the suspect for breaking inside his vehicle. That was when the altercation between the two ensued, which resulted in the exchange of bullets between the suspect and the LAPD officer.

Moore furthered that the police utilized his backup firearm during the shootout. Meanwhile, the suspect used the primary weapon of the officer. The chief also pointed out that the shooting started in the parking area of the apartment complex. Eventually, the suspect and the officer moved to the street.

The officer secured his bulletproof vest and gun from the suspect when the latter sustained a shot.

"Our expectation of our personnel is that they lock and secure, that they make every reasonable effort to ensure the safety and security of those weapons," said Moore.

The LAPD police caught in the shootout suffered a wound in his upper torso and one in his thigh. The officer immediately underwent surgery, while the suspect is now under the authority's custody.

READ MORE: 13-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Shooting Younger Sister to Death

WATCH: Off-duty LAPD officer shot in Sherman Oaks - from FOX 11
Imperial Valley News Center

Two SoCal Men Indicted in Hate Crimes Case Alleging They Attacked Family-Owned Restaurant and Threatened to Kill the Victims Inside

Los Angeles, California - A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted two Los Angeles-area men on conspiracy and hate crime offenses for allegedly attacking five victims at a family-owned Turkish restaurant while shouting anti-Turkish slurs, hurling chairs at the victims and threatening to kill them.

The indictment was unsealed Tuesday following the arrest this morning of Harutyun Harry Chalikyan, 23, of Tujunga, who is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in United States District Court in Los Angeles.

The second defendant in the case  William Stepanyan, 23, of Glendale  is currently in state custody and is expected to appear in federal court in this case in the coming weeks.

Chalikyan and Stepanyan, both of whom are Armenian-American, are charged with one count of conspiracy and five hate crimes.

According to the indictment, Stepanyan sent a text message on November 4, 2020, saying that he planned to go hunting for [T]urks. Later that day, Stepanyan met with Chalikyan and other Armenian-Americans to protest what they considered to be Turkish aggression against Armenians, express their contempt for Turkey and show their support for Armenia.

Stepanyan, Chalikyan and other Armenian-Americans then drove to the family-owned restaurant, where Stepanyan and Chalikyan stormed into the restaurant and attacked the victims inside, the indictment alleges. Stepanyan and Chalikyan, who were both wearing masks during the attack, allegedly flung chairs at the victims while shouting derogatory slurs about Turkish people. Four of the five victims were of Turkish descent.

The indictment further alleges that at least one of the defendants threatened to kill the victims, shouting: We came to kill you! We will kill you!

During the attack, multiple victims were injured, including one individual who lost feeling in their legs and collapsed multiple times due to the injury, the indictment states. After the victims escaped, Stepanyan and Chalikyan allegedly continued to destroy the restaurant, ultimately causing over $20,000 in damage, forcing the restaurant to close temporarily and causing thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

An indictment is merely an allegation, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.

If convicted, Stepanyan and Chalikyan each would face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for the hate crime charges and five years in prison for the conspiracy charge.

The FBI conducted the investigation in this matter and received substantial assistance from the Beverly Hills Police Department.

Assistant United States Attorney Lindsey Greer Dotson of the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, and Trial Attorney Michael J. Songer of the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division are prosecuting the case.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

The Ukrainian president pushes the Russian leader to resume communications between Russia and Ukraine. A Biden-Putin meeting is also hypothesized. Moscow claims its "neutrality" on the Donbass. Without Ukraine, Crimea suffers from drought.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj told the press yesterday that the Vatican would be the ideal place to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin, to talk about peace in the Donbass. Zelenskii (photo 1) expressed this desire in an interview with the Italian Newspaper La Repubblica, also reported on the official website of the Ukrainian president.

The article notes that the Vatican "is a global moral authority, which always effectively exercises the role of mediator, always being disinterested and having no political and economic purposes to defend". Zelenskii acknowledged that many issues concerning the Donbass still remain unresolved, and it is not clear what the agenda for the negotiations should be. In his opinion, "a real direct communication between Russia and Ukraine is necessary, which has not been undertaken for a long time".

On April 20, the Ukrainian president had proposed to Putin to meet "anywhere in the Donbass, where the conflict is taking place". On the 22nd, the Russian leader replied that "if we talk about the problems of the Donbass, then the Ukrainian president should first meet with the heads of the autonomous regions of Lugansk and Donetsk" and only after that, evaluate the remaining problems with Russia. In this way, Putin continues to "write himself out" of the conflict, proposing himself as a "third party" between nationalists and separatists in Ukraine. The Russian leader also added that, under these conditions, he will be happy to welcome Zelenskii to Moscow at any time.

Zelenskii announced that he had entrusted his deputy Andrej Ermak with the task of organizing a meeting with Putin, underlining that he was more interested in the contents of the meeting, rather than in the place where it took place. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, reiterated on April 27 that Russia does not see the need for such a meeting with respect to the ongoing conflict in the Donbass, in which Russia is not participate directly; moreover, a concrete proposal for a place is expected from Ukraine. Hence the proposal to meet in the Vatican.

The meeting therefore remains pending, also because Ukraine does not intend to meet the Donbass separatists in advance, recognized by Moscow, but not by Kiev. However, the proposed meeting serves to defuse the prospect of a resumption of large scale hostilities, and is intertwined with the possibility of a meeting between Putin and Biden, which has also been talked about for several days.

The US president has announced an upcoming trip to Europe, and it is likely that he also wants to meet the "killer" in the Kremlin. It is unlikely that Biden and Putin will be able to impose conditions on Ukraine, but there will still be some consequences for the conflict in Donbass.

Another chapter of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine concerns the territory of Crimea annexed by the Russians in 2014, which has been experiencing a serious water supply crisis for some time (photo 2). After the separation from Ukraine, the remaining aquifers are limited in number. A particularly dry winter in 2020 and the following months led to drought in the North Crimean canal, which was the main source of water throughout the peninsula, and which has no longer been fed by Ukraine since 2014.

The Russian authorities have declared their intention to search for deposits of drinking water under the bottom of the Azov Sea, prompting strong reactions from the Ukrainian side. Deputy Minister Igor Jaremenko, who has the mandate for the reintegration of the occupied territories of Ukraine, said in an interview with currentime.tv that he considers this idea "absolutely baseless, created by the most banal imagination rather than by science, to reassure the population of the occupied territory with fairy tales

Since 2014 the Russians have made a lot of promises to the inhabitants of Crimea, without achieving anything concrete. The Sea of Azov has always been "in common" between the two countries; not even theoretical lines of aquifer boundaries have ever been drawn, and would therefore become a new conflict zone.

Ukraine would not refuse to renew the water supply to Crimea in the event of a humanitarian catastrophe, but still demand the withdrawal of Russia from the occupied territory.
Sample of images from the data set. Facial features of pigs and cows expressing varying emotions. Credit: biorxiv (2021). DOI: 10.1101/2021.04.09.439122

An animal scientist with Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands has created an artificial-intelligence-based application that can gauge the emotional state of farm animals based on photographs taken with a smartphone. In his paper uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server, Suresh Neethirajan describes his app and how well it worked when tested.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence has shown that farm animals are more productive when they are not living under stressful conditions. This has led to changes in farming practices, such as shielding cows' eyes from the spike that is used to kill them prior to slaughter to prevent stress hormones from entering the meat. More recent research has suggested that it may not be enough to shield farm animals from stressful situationsadapting their environment to promote peacefulness or even playfulness can produce desired results, as well. Happy cows or goats, for example, are likely to produce more milk than those that are bored. But as Neethirajan notes, the emotional state of an animal can be quite subjective, leading to incorrect conclusions. To address this problem, he adapted human face recognition software for use in detecting emotions in cows and pigs.

The system is called WUR Wolf and is based on several pieces of technology: the YOLO Object Detection System, the YOLOv4 that works with a convolution neural network and Faster R-CNN, which also allows for detection of objects, but does so with different feature sets. For training, he used the Nvidia GeForece GTX 1080 Ti GRP running on a CUDA 9.0 computer. The data consisted of thousands of images of cows and pigs taken with a smartphone from six farms located in several countries with associated classification labels indicating which physical features could be associated with which moodraised ears on a cow, for example, generally indicate the animal is excited.

Testing showed the system to be approximately 85% accurate. Neethirajan suggests more tweaks are needed, but notes that once it is finished, it could serve as a useful tool for improving the quality of products produced via continuous monitoring of livestock.

Explore further Study shows how cows reveal feelings using their ears

More information: Suresh Neethirajan. Happy Cow or Thinking Pig? WUR Wolf  Facial Coding Platform for Measuring Emotions in Farm Animals, biorxiv (2021). Suresh Neethirajan. Happy Cow or Thinking Pig? WUR Wolf  Facial Coding Platform for Measuring Emotions in Farm Animals,(2021). DOI: 10.1101/2021.04.09.439122

 2021 Science X Network
To alleviate potential concerns, people with a history of breast cancer can opt to get the vaccine in the thigh if they wish.

People who need a mammogram within six weeks of their Covid-19 vaccine.

Coronavirus vaccinations can cause enlarged lymph nodes in the armpit or near the collarbone that will show up as white blobs on mammograms and potentially be mistaken as a sign of cancer. The Society of Breast Imaging recommends trying to schedule your routine screening mammogram before your first Covid-19 vaccine dose or at least one month after your second vaccine dose. But an alternative plan would be to get the vaccine in your thigh instead.

Injection in thigh would be extremely unlikely to lead to armpit nodes swelling, Dr. Constance D. Lehman, the chief of breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, told The New York Times earlier this month.

If you prefer to get the vaccine in your arm and have already scheduled your mammogram, you can keep that appointment  as well as your vaccine appointment  and call your breast imaging center ahead of time to let them know about the timing of your vaccine.

If you received the Covid vaccine in the arm in the last six weeks, your radiologist will expect to see lymph node swelling on the same side that you received the vaccine. This would be a normal finding unless the swelling continued for more than six weeks or there were other clinical concerns; in that case they would take more images as needed, Ms. Brunelle said.

Which vaccination sites offer thigh injections?

This could take a little persistence. Covid-19 vaccine sites primarily give people arm vaccinations: Its quick, efficient and theres no need to find a private room to disrobe. Because the vast majority of people will receive arm injections, some vaccination sites may not have staff who are trained to inject in the thigh.

I just advise patients to call ahead, let the vaccine clinic know or the pharmacy know that theyre asking for the vaccine in the thigh, Ms. Brunelle said. I also counsel patients that if a local facility or practitioner giving the vaccine is not familiar with the thigh as an approved alternate site, the patient can share the C.D.C. Standing Orders document that lists the thigh as an alternative site for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Tender Victories: an enthralling Christian novel. Tender Victories is the creation of published author, Faith Yvonne James, a loving wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother who writes in honor of her dearest grandmother.

James shares, This is a gripping novel from the start. Colin and her guard dog, Bosch, have found evidence to indicate someone has been in their beach house. Should Colin have listened to her family?

Colin hopes to be a godly example to a new acquaintance (Jessie), when conditions change things.

Colin returns to the beach house after surgery from a fall, and a young native boy appears at the door, hoping for a family.

Jacob, a distant neighbor (staying with his sister Amy), is fluent in Spanish; so Colin and Jessie make plans to ask him to dinner, hoping he can translate what Pedro is trying to tell them.

As the story unravels, they all fall in love with a young boy, Pedro, including Jacobs sister, Amy. They cannot find any relative to claim him. But now that a family in town wants to adopt him, how is Jacob going to fix this problem? He loves Pedro, a son he was unable to have.

What will Jessie do if her husband comes looking for her?

Meanwhile, the plot takes a sudden turn when the outside cottage wall caves in while Colin is in the shower.

The excitement is just beginning as God changes hearts, giving tender victories.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Faith Yvonne James new book is an inspiring tale of love, faith, and the kindness of strangers.

Spinning a unique tale, James hopes to encourage readers to stand fast in their faith and enjoy the ride.

View a synopsis of Tender Victories on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Tender Victories at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Tender Victories, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
(Newser)  With potential retirement looming for the International Space Station, Russia says it plans to launch its own space station by 2030, but China is edging ahead in the space race: The country launched the main part of its new space station on Thursday. The Tianhe"Heavenly Harmony"module with living space for crew members was launched Thursday in the first of 11 missions planned before the station is due to become fully operational next year, the AP reports. Two launches in the coming weeks will send cargo and three astronauts to the Taingong station, reports the South China Morning Post.

story continues below

The completed station is expected to be around a quarter of the size of the ISS. China has been officially banned from the ISS since 2011, when Congress passed a law banning NASA from working with the country's space agency. BBC correspondent Stephen McDonel notes that China's space program has become a "regular feature" in Beijing's propaganda videos. "Having been frozen out of the International Space Station program by the US, Beijing just decided to build its own," he writes. The Chinese station is expected to be in service for at least 10 years, meaning there could be a period toward the end of this decade when it is the only operational space station in orbit. (China and Russia are also planning a moon base.)
The United States is determined to help the people of India in this moment of crisis, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said here as the first shipment of key life-saving medical supplies for the country took off from California.

"The United States is determined to help the people of India. We will continue to stand together in our shared battle against COVID-19," Sullivan said in a tweet on Wednesday soon after the White House announced it was delivering emergency COVID-19 supplies worth more than $100 million in the coming days to India.

The move by the Biden administration came days after Sullivan, in a call with his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval, announced a series of COVID-19 relief aid to India. On Monday, President Joe Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The US President is believed to have pledged all support that India would need in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden has directed the entire administration to work on a war footing to save lives in India. The Pentagon is deploying its resources as well. USIAD said that it is airlifting vital medical supplies to India to save lives, stop the spread of COVID-19, and meet the urgent health needs of the Indian people.

"We're sending critical oxygen and O2 related supplies, N95 masks, & rapid diagnostic testing kits to India w/more on the way soon," it tweeted. In a tweet, Indian-American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi said the US cannot remain isolationist because COVID-19 variants in India can jump on a plane or hop on a ship and easily come and dismantle America's pandemic progress.

"That's why we're sending vaccines & supplies," he added. In a separate tweet, Senator Ed Markey said it was America's moral obligation to support other nations like India that are facing deadly COVID-19 outbreaks.

We're asking Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson for their plans to make their vaccines accessible to those who desperately need them. A global pandemic demands global solutions, he said.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee welcomed the US aid to India. Applauding President Biden for his help for India. We should continue to monitor India's needs and provide resources to them as soon as they need them. needed. I am very pleased to note that Pakistan is offering ambulance support to India, she said.

I hope this will be an opportunity for these two countries to work together. And I mourn the loss of the thousands of people who have lost their lives in India due to COVID-19, Jackson-Lee said.

Also read: Oxygen support, concentrators, PPEs: US deploys COVID-19 relief shipments worth $100 mn to India

Also read: Russia sends over 22 tonnes of medical supplies to help India battle COVID-19 wave
ANN ARBOR, MI -- With the Child Tax Credit now expanded and payments expected to begin hitting bank accounts in July, millions of Americans are wondering what they need to do to receive a payment, or how they can defer receiving the money.

The IRS has confirmed it is developing a portal that will allow parents to choose if they want the monthly cash payments theyre entitled to, or if they simply want to receive the full tax credit in 2021. Youll also be able to update your personal information for qualifying life events, such as the birth of a child or getting married, which could change your income levels or other qualifying markers.

Taxpayers will also have the opportunity to update information about changes in their income, filing status or the number of qualifying children. More details on how to take these steps will be announced soon, reads a portion of the IRS website.

For now, taxpayers who qualify and want the payments simply need to file their taxes and the IRS will send the money to the bank account they have on file for your taxes, or send checks to your home address. Qualified taxpayers will receive monthly payments from July through December 2021 as part of the expansion of the credit.

The credit was expanded when the American Rescue Plan was signed into law last month, and increased the credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000 for each child aged 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under 6. Parents have the option of receiving half of the tax credits through the monthly payments.

Income thresholds determine how much money you can receive and if you even qualify, however there is no limit on the number of children you can receive credit for as long as you qualify for the credit.

For a single person, their adjusted gross income cannot exceed $75,000 a year in order to receive the full credit. The credit will be reduced on incomes up to $95,000 for single people, but anyone earning more than that will not qualify for the larger credit.

Married couples or those who file jointly must be below $150,000 in combined adjusted gross income to receive the full benefit and up to $170,000 for a reduced credit. However, if your income exceeds the thresholds, you can still claim the $2,000 tax credit if your income is less than $200,000 for a single person or $400,000 for a couple.

Afton Branche-Wilson, the assistant director of community initiatives at the University of Michigan, said the expansion of the credit not only provides financial relief, but also gives parents the ability to use the money as needed and not on specifically-approved expenditures.

Theres great flexibility in here for families to decide how they would like to receive the tax credit and of course, great flexibility in how families can actually use the tax credit, Branche-Wilson said, adding the money can help with rent or utilities each month. Theres no restrictions on what you must use it for.

Thats especially helpful for parents because unexpected expenses can cause significant financial challenges, especially in low- or no-income homes. Previously, parents with no income were unable to claim the credit, but that is no longer the case.

You can never expect whats going to come up. So having the flexibility on a monthly basis to choose what to do with this funding is huge for low-income and no-income families, Branche-Wilson said.

The credit benefits middle-income families as well, as it can be used as a buffer for things like child care or tutoring for their children, according to Branche-Wilson.

While the IRS portal will allow families to determine how they want to receive the credit, Branche-Wilson said she was not sure if taxpayers will be able to make monthly decisions on if they want a check or not. The IRS is expected to give more guidance on that part of the portal in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan has also launched a website that helps families navigate the tax credits to ensure they receive everything theyre entitled to. The website has information on how parents qualify, what they can receive, where to file taxes and more. It also has answers for more frequently asked questions regarding the credit.

While there has been pushback from Republicans in Congress on the credit, President Joe Biden has proposed extending it through 2025, making it a guaranteed source of funding for millions of Americans for the next few years.

Branche-Wilson said the universitys community initiatives program fully supports that extension proposal, in part because of how similar credits have been used in other countries.

One thing that is useful to think about when were thinking about this kind of child tax credit is that were not stepping into new territory here. This kind of tax credit has been available for peer countries for quite some time, so we kind of know what families will do with it, Branche-Wilson said, referring to countries like Canada and the U.K.

Another positive is that its an expansion of an existing credit that doesnt prevent parents from going to work. And while parents dont typically get paid for raising their kids, Branch-Wilson says its important to recognize the time that goes into parenting.

Raising children is work. So parents who are raising children are doing important work for our country so this is a way to compensate them for that work that theyre doing, she said.
Markus Leikkonen Wins Final GGSF Event For $650K

April 29 2021 Matthew Pitt

The curtain came down on a massively successful GG Spring Festival on April 27 when the $10,300 Super MILLIONS concluded under the watchful eyes of the PokerNews Live Reporting team. Markus Leikkonen of Finland was the last man standing from the 347 entrants. His reward? A cool $651,821.

GGSF Event H-108: $10,300 Super MILLION$

Place Winner Country Prize (in USD) 1 Markus Leikkonen Finland $651,821 2 David Coleman United States $502,622 3 Yuri Dzivielevski Brazil $387,575 4 Christian Jeppsson Sweden $298,861 5 Daniel Dvoress Canada $230,453 6 Timothy Adams Canada $177,704 7 George Wolff United States $137,028 8 xyzpoker Austria $105,663 9 Konstantin Maslak Russia $81,478

Brazilian superstar Yuri Dzivielevski was the chip leader going into the nine-handed final table, closely followed by Daniel Dvoress. Neither was able to build on their impressive start and become the final champion of the GG Spring Festival.

The final table lost a player when Konstantin Maslak shoved for 9.5 big blinds with and lost a coinflip against Dzivielevskis .

Cooler Hand Claims Tournament Life of xyzpoker

Dzivielevski was the executioner against in a cooler hand that saw xyzpoker hit the rail in eighth-place. xyzpoker must have been rubbing his hands together in delight after looking down at and seeing Dzivielevski all but min-raise in front of him. Delight turned to despair when the Brazilian snap-called xyzpokers 8.5 big blind three-bet all-in, doing so with .

Leikkonen went on the hunt and snared himself George Wolff, who he sent to the rail in seventh place, a finish good for $137,028. Leikkonens prevailed against the dominated in Wolffs hand.

Timothy Adams lost a key coinflip with queen-jack against Christian Jeppssons pocket sixes to leave him with only five big blinds. Adams pinned his tiny stacks hopes on but ran into Dvoress .

Dangerous Dvoress Destroyed

Daniel Dvoress

The final five became four when Dvoress busted. Dvoress lost the majority of his stack to David Coleman when the latters spiked an ace on the flop to crack Dvoress red kings. Coleman got his hands on the rest of Dvoress chips, his prevailing against the of Dvoress.

Colemans march towards the top of the chip counts continued at Jeppssons expense. The talented pair got their chips into the middle, Jeppsson holding , and Coleman the . Coleman flopped a gutshot straight draw and a flush draw in addition to his two overcards. The turn bricked and it was starting to look like Coleman had too many outs. Jeppsson improved to a set on the river, but the six was of hearts, which completed Colemans flush.

Heads-up was set soon after when Dzivielevski open-shoved for 14 big blind with and Leikkonen called out of the small blind with . You need to win your coinflips to take down tournaments, which is what Leikkonen did courtesy of an ace on the river.

Advantage Coleman, But Not For Long

David Coleman

Coleman held the advantage going into heads-up, his 19,303,914 stack up against Leikkonens 15,396,086. Coleman pushed further ahead, but Leikkonen pulled level before forging a lead for himself.

The final hand occurred during the 200,000/400,000/50,000a level, and saw Coleman min-raise to 800,000. Leikkonen called before check-calling an 860,000 bet on the flop. It was a similar story on the turn, Leikkonen checking before calling Colemans 400,000 bet. The river saw Leikkonen check for a third time. Coleman took the bait and jammed all-in for almost twice the size of the pot. Leikkonen instantly called having set a trap with his , which was now a full house. Coleman could only muster the .

Leikkonen, a high-stakes cash game specialist, walked away with $651,821, leaving Coleman to lick his wounds with $502,622 to show for his efforts.

Read a blow-by-blow account of the Super MILLION$

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You are going to need a GGPoker account to enjoy any of the WSOP Super Circuit events. Download GGPoker via PokerNews and your first deposit is matched 100% up to $600, giving you some ammunition if you plan on chasing down a coveted WSOP Circuit ring.
Three Republican lawmakers want the State Departments internal watchdog to investigate John Kerry for allegedly divulging sensitive information about Israeli military operations in Syria to Irans foreign minister.

Kerry, the former secretary of state who currently serves as President Bidens top envoy for climate change, has been accused of betraying an American ally, Israel, by revealing secret information about military operations against Iran.

A leaked recording of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif claims that Kerry told him Israel had attacked Iranian proxies in Syria while serving as Barack Obama's secretary of state, a role he held between 2013 and 2017.

Kerry himself does not appear in the recording, and Israeli officials have themselves previously shared details of some of their attacks on Syria.

Republican lawmakers want an investigation into claims that former Secretary of State John Kerry divulged secret information about Israeli military operations in Syria to Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Kerry (right) and Zarif (left) are seen above in New York in April 2016

Three GOP members of Congress - from left to right: Lee Zeldin of New York; Andy Barr of Kentucky; and Ann Wagner of Missouri - wrote a letter to the State Departments acting inspector general, Diana Shaw, asking for an investigation into the claims

'I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false,' Kerry tweeted on Monday.

'This never happened - either when I was Secretary of State or since.'

Zarif reportedly said that he was astonished at Kerrys revelation. The leak was of a conversation Zarif held in March with an economist, according to The New York Times.

Three GOP members of Congress - Lee Zeldin of New York; Andy Barr of Kentucky; and Ann Wagner of Missouri - wrote a letter to the State Departments acting inspector general, Diana Shaw, asking for an investigation into the claims.

An Israeli soldier runs past a mobile artillery cannon at a position near Moshav Sha'al in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on April 22, 2021

'Given the gravity of the security threat Iran poses to US and Israeli interests, we respectfully ask that you fully investigate these allegations,' the representatives wrote.

'Iran is a serious threat to Israel, a bulwark of democracy and stability in the Middle East. It is in our national security interest to stand by our strategic ally - not sell it out to our adversaries.

The lawmakers demanded that the inspector general look into revoking Kerrys security clearance.

Zeldin said the allegations against Kerry were massively alarming.

If its proven that Kerry actively undermined one of Americas staunchest allies, he needs to resign from the Biden administration immediately and have his security clearance revoked, he added.

Zeldin, Barr, and Wagner also want to know if Kerry is playing a role in the Biden administrations efforts to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 deal struck between the West and Iran over its nuclear program.

As per the terms of the deal, the US and allies agreed to sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for the Islamic Republic putting limits on its nuclear program.

Former President Donald Trump took the United States out of the deal in 2018 - fulfilling a campaign promise. Biden has pledged to rejoin the agreement.

Israel under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has balked at the Iran nuclear deal hammered out during the Obama administration, in part by Kerry and Zarif.

Israel is believed to be behind attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, although it did not comment on the latest explosion at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as ex-President Donald Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, is also an ardent supporter of Israel. She tweeted: 'This is disgusting on many levels. Biden and Kerry have to answer for why Kerry would be tipping off Iran, the number one sponsor of terror, while stabbing one of our greatest partners, Israel, in the back.'

But complicating the picture are numerous public claims by the Israelis about attacking Hezbollah forces in Syria dating to 2013  something Zarif wouldn't need the top U.S. diplomat to inform him about

The information about the former top US diplomat comes amid in an explosive leak where Zarif complained about the late Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qassim Soleimani.

The tape surfaced on Sunday, providing indications of a pronounced rift within the Iranian regime  while showcasing Iran's top diplomat speaking to his own ineffectiveness in contending with powerful internal forces.

'Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr. Zarif said,' according to the Times.

The recording has Zarif saying: 'It was former US Foreign Secretary John Kerry who told me Israel had launched more than 200 attacks on Iranian forces in Syria.'

That drew immediate pushback from conservative supporters of Israel.

Noah Pollak of the Democratic Alliance Group tweeted: 'John Kerry was ratting out Israeli covert operations in Syria directly to the Iranian foreign minister. Let that sink in. Wow.'

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as ex-President Donald Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, is also an ardent supporter of Israel.

She tweeted: 'This is disgusting on many levels. Biden and Kerry have to answer for why Kerry would be tipping off Iran, the number one sponsor of terror, while stabbing one of our greatest partners, Israel, in the back.'

But complicating the picture are numerous public claims by the Israelis about attacking Hezbollah forces in Syria dating to 2013  something Zarif wouldn't need the top U.S. diplomat to inform him about.

Israel also said it launched an attack in Syria last week following a Syrian missile attack.

Iran's foreign minister has complained in a leaked recording that the late Revolutionary Guards commander Qassim Soleimani (center in 2016) forced Tehran to send troops to Syria at Russian President Vladimir Putin's insistence

The White House declined to comment when asked about the potentially explosive information. 'We're not going to comment on leaked tapes,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at Monday's press briefing.

Zarif complained in the leaked recording that the late Revolutionary Guards commander Qassim Soleimani forced Tehran to send troops to Syria at Russian President Vladimir Putin's insistence.

Zarif said he had 'zero' influence over Iran's foreign policy while Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq last year, exerted his power to fulfill his military demands at the expense of diplomacy.

'I have never been able to tell a military commander to do something in order to aid diplomacy,' Zarif said in the tape, aired by the London-based Iran International Persian-language satellite news channel late on Sunday.

In the three-hour leaked recording, the foreign minister criticizes Soleimani for effectively being a pawn for Putin after the commander deployed Iranian ground forces to Syria and allowed Russia's warplanes to fly over Iran to attack Syria.

Russia had wanted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the ground to help Moscow's air campaign in support of the Syrian government.

'He (Soleimani) asked me to make this or that concession or point almost every time I went to negotiate (with world powers),' Zarif said in the recording.

In the interview, Zarif added that Soleimani refused to stop using the state-owned national carrier Iran Air for Syrian operations despite his objections. He said the aircraft was sometimes used without the government's knowledge.

This admission confirms reports that Iran's civilian aircraft was used to deploy military and personnel to Syria.

'The (military) field's success was more important than diplomacy's success. I was negotiating for the (military) field's success,' Zarif said.

'I have sacrificed diplomacy for the battlefield more than the price that (those on) the battlefield (led by Soleimani)... paid and sacrificed for diplomacy.'

In the leaked tape, he also hinted that Soleimani tried to spoil Iran's 2015 nuclear deal by colluding with Russia.

He claims that the Revolutionary Guards had written 'Israel should be wiped off the Earth' in Hebrew in an effort to ruin the deal.

Zarif added that Iran gave up much of what it 'could have achieved from the nuclear deal' for the sake of advancement on the battlefield.

His comments come as talks are underway in Vienna aimed at finding a way for Tehran to return to the nuclear deal with the U.S. and other Western powers.

Leader of the Guards' clandestine overseas Quds Force, Soleimani was a pivotal figure who built up Iran's network of proxy armies across the Middle East before he was killed by the U.S. in a drone strike last year - an attack which at the time brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the airstrike as an 'exquisite strike' that 'had a massive impact on Iran and the Middle East'

Iran retaliated with a rocket attack on an Iraqi air base where U.S. forces were stationed. Hours later, Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger airliner taking off from Tehran. Days later, Iran's Guards admitted that the plane had been shot 'mistakenly'.

'I said (at the Supreme National Security meeting) that the world is saying the plane was hit with missiles. If the plane was really hit with missiles, tell us so we can see how we can fix it,' Zarif said in the recording.

'They told me: 'No, go, go tweet and deny it'.'

Throughout the recording, Zarif offered a blunt appraisal of diplomacy and the limits of power within the Islamic Republic, providing a rare look inside the country's theocracy.

He complained that the Revolutionary Guards and its commander had more influence in foreign affairs and the country's nuclear dossier than him, in remarks that shine a light on ties between the government and the powerful force.

In the interview, Zarif repeated an earlier claim by officials around President Rouhani that they had not been told by the Revolutionary Guard that it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in January 2020, killing all 176 people on board.

Zarif describes Russia as wanting to stop the nuclear deal, something apparently so sensitive that he warns the interviewer: 'You definitely can never release this part.'

Russia had a frosty relationship with then-President Barack Obama, whose administration secured the deal with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Russia and Iran also at times have strained relations, despite being battlefield allies in Syria.

'If Iran hadn't become Mr. (Donald) Trump's priority, China and Russia would have become his priority,' Zarif said. 'If, because of hostility with the West, we always need Russia and China, they don't have to compete with anyone, and also they can always enjoy maximum benefits through us.'

Both China and Russia have been vocal proponents of returning to the nuclear deal. Their missions in Vienna did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Despite his criticism, Zarif acknowledged Soleimani's importance in Iran.

'I believe that the U.S. by hitting Martyr Soleimani dealt a blow to Iran that would not have been as bad even if they had hit one of our towns,' he said.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who pushed the Trump administration's pressure campaign on Iran, later linked to a story about the leaked tapes on Twitter. He described it as an 'exquisite strike' that 'had a massive impact on Iran and the Middle East.'

'You don't have to take my word for it,' Pompeo wrote.

The release of his comments set off a firestorm within Iran, where officials carefully mind their words amid a cut-throat political environment that includes the powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

The conservative Fars news agency criticized Zarif for presenting himself during the conversation as 'a symbol of diplomacy', contrasting with Soleimani as a symbol of the 'battlefield'.

The Fars agency quoted lawmaker Nasrollah Pejmanfar, who demanded 'explanations' from the foreign ministry for the remarks.
Apple CEO Tim Cook believes many of his companys enterprise customers will continue to support hybrid workforces once the threat of COVID-19 recedes.

Work from home very critical

Cook's comments came as he was discussing his companys record-breaking Q2 21 results. It seems like many companies will be operating in a hybrid kind of mode, he said about record-setting Mac and iPad sales. And so, it would seem that work from home and the productivity of working from home will remain very critical.

Apple shared some data that may help illustrate how the pandemic has driven a work (and learn) from home equipment sales jamboree, with record sales in every product category and geography.

About two thirds of people buying Mac or iPad are doing so for the first time in some regions, he said.

Citing cross-industry supply constraints of some components, he also warned: Expect to be supply-gated, not demand-gated when it comes to Mac and iPad sales across the rest of the year.

Apple experiences major enterprise deployment

As is customary during earnings calls, Luca Maestri, Apple's CFO, mentioned several major Apple product deployments that emerged during the just gone quarter. In the enterprise market, customers across many industries are accelerating their adoption of iPhone 12 and 5G as a key platform for the future of their business, he said. Among them:

Delta Airlines : As announced yesterday, Delta is giving tens of thousands of iPhone 12s to flight attendants. These will be used to improve passenger services in numerous ways, including interesting usage of AR.

: As announced yesterday, Delta is giving tens of thousands of iPhone 12s to flight attendants. These will be used to improve passenger services in numerous ways, including interesting usage of AR. UK provider Openreach, which is providing tens of thousands of iPhone 12s to field service engineers to accelerate broadband deployment.

which is providing tens of thousands of iPhone 12s to field service engineers to accelerate broadband deployment. UC Health in Colorado, which reduced patient vaccination time from 3 minutes to 30 seconds by migrating to iPhones from PCs.

Apples WFH opportunity

When it comes to enterprise deployment, Apple will likely continue to benefit from the work-from-home trend. Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster says:

Apple will remain a growth story for the foreseeable future. The company will benefit from a multi-year 5G cycle, an accelerating digital transformation driving demand for its products and services, and eventual new product categories.

Demand feels very strong right now, said Cook. ...On the Mac side, you have the combination of the M1 and work from home and remote learning, and on iPad, you've got remote learning and work from home as well.

Cooks observation that both Macs and iPads benefit from the global adoption of hybrid working models seems particularly appropriate given the recent introduction of the M1-powered iPad Pro. With the same processor now inside both Macs and iPads, industry watchers expect Apple to make some big changes to the iPad UI so users can properly exploit that locked in power.

Cooks understanding that both products serve these markets hints at a wider understanding across Apple of the importance of both product families to the needs of enterprise professionals. What we dont know is whether this will extend to further evolutions in multitasking, or lead to support for professional apps such as Final Cut Pro, Xcode or Logic X.

Meanwhile the macro-trend remains. More than 70% of employees want to continue to work remotely when the pandemic recedes. There is also a great deal of support for hybrid working models.

Writing on LinkedIn, HSBC CEO Noel Quinn said that once the pandemic ends he wants to be able to reconnect with colleagues in an open plan office environment, but also intends moving to a hybrid model across HSBC.

General Motors, MUFG, and others are scaling back real estate investments in favor of hybrid working models. This shift is visible across most nations; even the European Central Bank has announced plans for hybrid work.

Apple has quite clearly benefitted from this trend, which means both personal and professional uses of devices are becoming even more closely combined as in most cases both take place on the same device.

I expect well get some sense as to how Apple sees this transformation at WWDC when we learn to what extent the next iterations of the company's operating systems reflect this deep societal change.

Perhaps the iPad pointer will at least develop a Mac like cursor when used with an external mouse. Perhaps Apple has more profound changes to boost collaboration and communication in mind. We should know more soon.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolics bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.
HOUSTON  When Shalemu Bekele awoke on the morning of Feb. 15, the townhouse he shared with his wife and two children was so cold, his fingers felt numb.

After bundling up in extra layers, Bekele looked out a frosted window: A winter storm had swept across Texas, knocking out power to millions of homes, including his own, and blanketing Houston in a thin layer of icy snow.

It was beautiful, Bekele, 51, recalled thinking as he headed outside to snap photos of his two children, ages 7 and 8, playing in their first snow. After a few minutes, he sent them back inside to warm up under blankets as he cleared ice off his car, unsure if he would be expected to drive into work.

RELATED: ERCOT names new, temporary leader two months after deadly winter storm

Bekeles wife, Etenesh Mersha, 46, meanwhile, made a fateful decision, one repeated by scores of Texas residents who lost electricity that week. Desperate to warm up, she went into their attached garage and turned the key to start her car. As the engine hummed, it provided power to run the cars heater and charge her phone while she talked to a friend in Colorado  at the same time, filling her garage and home with a poisonous gas.

There was no carbon monoxide alarm in place to warn the family of the invisible danger. None was required under local or state law.

When Bekele went back inside 30 minutes later, he found Mersha slumped over in the drivers seat, poisoned by the fumes flowing from the cars tailpipe. Confused, he shook her and called her name. Still on the line, the friend in Colorado pleaded over the cars speakers for someone to explain what was happening.

Not knowing what else to do, Bekele, a devout Christian, ran and grabbed holy water from inside and splashed it on his wifes face, as his children cried and shouted: Whats wrong with Mama? Whats happening?

Thats when Mersha vomited. Suddenly starting to feel ill himself, Bekele wondered if theyd all been sickened by the eggs hed made for breakfast. Panicked, he sent the kids inside to grab towels to clean up their mother. Before they could return, both children collapsed onto the floor inside.

Bekele fainted next, landing with a thud on the garages concrete floor as the car continued to run.

After the power flicked off in millions of homes across Texas during the states historic freeze in mid-February, families like Bekeles faced an impossible choice: risk hypothermia or improvise to keep warm. Many brought charcoal grills inside or ran cars in enclosed spaces, either unaware of the dangers or too cold to think rationally.

In their desperation, thousands of Texans unwittingly unleashed deadly gases into homes and apartments that, in many cases, were not equipped with potentially lifesaving carbon monoxide alarms, resulting in the countrys biggest epidemic of CO poisoning in recent history, according to Dr. Neil Hampson, a retired doctor who has spent more than 30 years researching carbon monoxide poisoning and prevention. Two other experts agreed.

READ ALSO: Texas House targets power grid flaw that worsened February blackouts

In the aftermath of the unprecedented wave of poisonings two months ago, Texas lawmakers have taken few steps to protect residents from future carbon monoxide catastrophes. That choice caps more than a decade of ignored warnings and inaction that resulted in Texas being one of just six states with no statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms in homes, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News found.

Instead, Texas has a confusing patchwork of local codes, with uneven protections for residents and limited enforcement, all of which most likely contributes to unnecessary deaths, health policy experts said.

At least 11 deaths have been confirmed and more than 1,400 people sought care at emergency rooms and urgent care clinics for carbon monoxide poisoning during the weeklong Texas outage, just 400 shy of the total for 2020. Children made up 42% of the cases. The totals dont include residents who were poisoned but did not seek care or those who were treated at hospitals and urgent care clinics that do not voluntarily report data to the state.

Black, Hispanic and Asian Texans suffered a disproportionate share of the carbon monoxide poisonings, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News found based on a review of statewide hospital data. Those groups accounted for 72% of the poisonings, far more than their 57% share of the states population.

Over the past two decades, the vast majority of states have implemented laws or regulations requiring carbon monoxide alarms in private residences, often on the heels of high-profile deaths or mass poisonings during storms.

But in Texas, where top lawmakers often promote personal responsibility over state mandates, efforts to pass similar carbon monoxide requirements have repeatedly failed.

Lawmakers introduced a slew of bills aimed at overhauling the states electric grid after the storm, which had its most devastating effects from Feb. 14-17. Temperatures plunged into the single digits, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses lost power at the peak of the storm, and more than 150 people died, many of them frozen in their homes.

Demands for change triggered a series of resignations but, with virtually all of the media and legislative focus on the regulatory failures that caused the power outage, little attention was paid to carbon monoxide alarms. The result was a significant missed opportunity to pass reforms after an entirely preventable public health crisis, said Emily Benfer, a visiting professor at Wake Forest University School of Law in North Carolina who specializes in housing health hazards.

Lawmakers this year are considering a broader modernization of state building codes that is unrelated to Februarys storm. If the measure passes, it would require carbon monoxide alarms in some new homes and apartments, but not those built or renovated before 2022. And it would allow local governments to opt out.

Its completely shocking, Benfer said. In a single week we have concrete evidence of a state governments willful disregard for the health and safety of the most vulnerable residents of the state.

Public health disaster

Bekele and Mersha came to Houston from Ethiopia a decade ago with dreams of a better life for their family. For years, they lived in a small apartment and set aside their earnings as gas station clerks until they could afford to buy a home. In 2017, they purchased the three-bedroom townhouse in southwest Houston where they planned to watch their son, Beimnet, and daughter, Rakeb, grow up.

Shalemu Bekele with his wife, Etenesh Mersha, daughter, Rakeb, and son, Beimnet. Credit: Courtesy of Bekele Family

Looking back, Bekele doesnt remember if anyone notified them that the home lacked carbon monoxide alarms. State law requires that information to be disclosed when single-family homes are sold, but there is no policy in Houston or across Texas that would have required the previous owners to install one.

Ive never been told about carbon monoxide before, Bekele said, speaking through an interpreter in his native Amharic.

The first thing he remembers after passing out on the morning of Feb. 15 was waking up in the back of an ambulance. He thought hed only been knocked out for a few minutes, oblivious that it was now after midnight. He and his family had spent more than 12 hours unconscious inside while the friend in Colorado, unaware of their address, frantically searched on social media for family members who could direct emergency responders to their home.

Bekele started to ask the paramedics what happened to his wife and children but blacked out before he could get the words out.

The ambulance driver navigated ice-covered roads to deliver Bekele to Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center. The hospital was overrun with patients like Bekele. Medical staff were treating so many people for carbon monoxide poisoning that the department was running out of beds and oxygen tanks, said Dr. Samuel Prater, the medical director of the hospitals emergency department.

Weve never seen anything like this, Prater said later.

Each year, the Memorial Hermann Health System treats about 50 patients for carbon monoxide poisoning at its 20 emergency rooms in Houston and surrounding counties. But that Monday, staff at Praters ER alone treated more than 60. Across the Memorial Hermann system, one of the largest hospital chains in the Houston region, 224 patients sought care for carbon monoxide poisoning during the freeze and power outages  more than four times its annual volume of such patients, according to data provided by the hospital.

Prater worked quickly to get more oxygen tanks to the ER and to set up emergency triage protocols to prioritize the hospitals limited hyperbaric chambers. The chambers, which deliver oxygen at high pressure to more quickly flush carbon monoxide from patients bloodstream, are a standard treatment for halting the damage done by serious cases of CO poisoning.

With the power still out in millions of Texas homes and temperatures dropping, Prater asked the heads of media affairs at Memorial Hermann and UTHealths McGovern Medical School, where hes a professor, to reach out to news outlets to help warn residents about the dangers of carbon monoxide.

In no uncertain terms, this is a public health disaster, Prater said at a televised news conference a day later, urging people whod lost power not to bring charcoal grills or portable generators inside. Additionally, never run your vehicle inside your garage and then get inside that vehicle as an attempt to get warm.

In an interview later, Prater explained what was at stake: Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas that, at high concentrations, can kill within minutes. In serious cases, those who survive may suffer from permanent brain damage and other long-term health problems, including memory loss, blindness and hearing damage.

Almost 80% of patients treated at Memorial Hermann facilities for carbon monoxide poisoning that week were Hispanic or Black, even though those groups account for 55% of the population in the greater Houston region. The majority of patients came from neighborhoods that the hospital identified as home to vulnerable populations.

Part of this disparity is a result of where the power outages occurred. Across the state, areas with a high share of residents of color were four times more likely to lose power compared with predominantly white areas, according to an analysis of satellite and U.S. census data released by the Electricity Growth and Use in Developing Economies Initiative, a nonprofit collaboration among five universities.

Once their power went out, families in lower-income communities generally faced greater challenges. Few had relatives they could stay with. Some didnt have vehicles that could handle icy roads and others lacked awareness of local warming shelters. This left many trapped in freezing homes and at higher risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, said Melissa DuPont-Reyes, an assistant professor at Texas A&M who studies health disparities.

They have no other option to stay warm, she said. Theyre going to use whatever means possible, and unfortunately its toxic.

Benfer, the Wake Forest professor, agreed: The most marginalized communities are also marginalized from information, resources and a safety net they can fall back on in a time of crisis.

More than 24 hours after passing out, Bekele finally regained consciousness inside one of Memorial Hermanns hyperbaric chambers. He immediately asked about his wife and kids, he said. A nurse told him he was very sick and needed to rest.

But Bekele kept asking, he said, until finally a doctor sat down at his bedside. He cried when she delivered the news.

His son, Beimnet, was connected to a ventilator in the intensive care unit, the doctor told him.

His wife and daughter, the doctor said, had died before paramedics arrived, poisoned by a gas that until that moment Bekele had never heard of.

Pleading for help

As Bekele was recovering in the hospital, 911 calls continued flooding emergency operators across the state.

In Austin, the states capital, Franklin Pena felt increasingly powerless as he watched his 3-year-old son shiver from the brutal cold that engulfed his familys apartment. On the evening of Feb. 16, after two days without electricity, Pena brought in a charcoal grill to burn wood for warmth.

My desperation was such that I lost all fear or my head, Pena said in Spanish during an interview. The only thing I could think of doing was to bring the grill in.

Just after 6 p.m., Penas wife and two children started to throw up. His own legs shaking, Pena dialed 911.

Please help me, he pleaded with the operator in Spanish, according to a recording obtained via a public information request. His wife wailed in the background as he told the 911 operator that his older son, 12, who has a developmental disability, had fainted. Because of their high metabolic rates, experts say, children can be more vulnerable to the effects of carbon monoxide.

Is everyone out of danger? the operator asked as Pena explained that they had fled their apartment and were outside in the cold. They are breathing but they are not doing well, he responded.

For 30 excruciating minutes, the 37-year-old Mexico native struggled to answer the operators questions as his wife and 12-year-old son drifted in and out of consciousness. Please, se fuerte mami, he repeated between sobs, begging his wife to be strong.

An incident report later cited extreme levels of carbon monoxide in the familys apartment, which Pena said had no CO alarms.

None were required.

Texas has given local governments the discretion to establish their own carbon monoxide rules. As a result, requirements vary widely, and no single agency tracks them across the state.

Fort Worth and Dallas require the devices in newly constructed homes and existing multifamily units, but not in most single-family homes. Houston requires them only in new or renovated homes, though its now considering a broader requirement that will include existing homes. Most rural communities have less oversight.

Even in cities with stricter regulations, many homes lack the devices.

In 2017, Austin voted to become the first major Texas city to require carbon monoxide alarms in new and existing residences with fuel-fired appliances or attached garages. The change was prompted, in part, by an incident years earlier that left two residents dead.

Penas home only had electric appliances, which excluded his apartment from the requirement.

When emergency responders finally arrived at Penas home, they rushed him, his wife and 12-year-old son to the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning. The 3-year-old was given oxygen but not hospitalized. Pena, who works painting and remodeling houses, said all have since recovered but occasionally suffer from headaches and the trauma of what they lived through that night.

Any time it gets cold, we become afraid, he said. If we see any kind of smoke coming out of the stove, we become afraid and everything that happened that day comes flooding right back.

Emergency room data provided by the state does not reflect the number of residents by city or county who visited hospitals for carbon monoxide poisoning. But 911 call records obtained and analyzed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News show that, in Austin and surrounding Travis County, the majority of the 60 emergency calls for carbon monoxide exposure came from vulnerable neighborhoods, where residents earn two-thirds that of Travis County overall.

The vulnerabilities were more pronounced around Rundberg Lane in North Austin, where Pena lives. A third of the citys carbon monoxide emergency calls came from the community, which has more than double the countys proportion of immigrants and refugees. About 4 in 5 residents in the area are people of color and nearly 2 in 5 are not proficient in English, according to an analysis of 911 calls and U.S. census data by the news organizations.

Three miles from Penas home, Lucila Montoyas family brought inside a gas-powered portable stove to cook lunch and a grill with burning charcoal to help keep their apartment warm, not realizing the white-hot coals still emit fumes even after the flames are down.

About an hour later, Montoya felt weak but thought it was her pregnancy. She was due in March. But then her daughter Tifany, 7, started crying and losing consciousness. Montoya grabbed the phone as her husband, Jose, threw the child on his back and took her outside in the freezing weather.

My little girl got sick, she started throwing up and is not responding, please, Montoya, a Honduras native, frantically told the 911 operator in Spanish through an interpreter. I need you to come quickly. ... Shes barely breathing.

The 28-year-old mother, who was hospitalized for a day along with her daughter, recalled Tifany saying she couldnt breathe. She felt like she was going to die, said Montoya, whose home didnt have a carbon monoxide alarm.

We were so naive  we almost ended her life and mine, added Montoya, who has since given birth to a healthy girl. As a mother, I dont wish this upon anyone.

Failed reform attempts

In the weeks and months after the outages, Texas lawmakers scrambled to introduce and pass bills aimed at overhauling the states electric grid, with the goal of preventing future disasters.

When I see people who die of hypothermia, or carbon monoxide poisoning, when I see the disruption to the business community, the people who cant get a hot meal, cant get water ... this cannot stand, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who sets legislative priorities in the state Senate, declared in February.

But even as lawmakers demanded a wave of complex reforms, they did little to address one of the simplest changes: establishing a statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms in homes. The devices cost as little as $15 and health experts say they are critical to preventing carbon monoxide poisoning.

The states top three Republicans  Gov. Greg Abbott, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Patrick  did not respond to questions about why carbon monoxide safety wasnt a legislative priority.

State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin and a member of the legislative committee where energy reforms were discussed, said carbon monoxide wasnt on her radar. But Howard said the findings from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News show that it should have been.

Clearly weve had to have reminders throughout this discussion of the fact that people died, she said. We all know how tragic it is, but we get caught up in the politics of the policies and sometimes lose sight of that bottom line.

Legislation seeking to create statewide regulations for carbon monoxide alarms has repeatedly failed to pass the Texas Legislature, even following major storms that led to a surge in CO poisonings and deaths. A bill filed in 2019 that would have required the devices in rental housing didnt get a hearing.

Former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat, co-wrote a failed measure in 2007, a year after former state Sen. Frank Madla and his mother-in-law were killed in a house fire. His 5-year-old granddaughter, who was also in the home, died from carbon monoxide exposure.

The measure would have required smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms in newly constructed homes and older homes for sale if the residences had fuel-burning appliances.

But the bill did not advance despite the close connection many lawmakers had to Madla and supportive testimony from fire chiefs, an emergency room doctor and a poison control center representative.

Industry groups like the Texas Association of Builders at the time staunchly opposed it, criticizing carbon monoxide alarms as an unproven technology that would do more harm than good if required.

We believe mandating this would create a false sense of security for homeowners and would open up liability for homebuilders should they fail, Ned Munoz, vice president of regulatory affairs and general counsel for the group, said during a 2007 House hearing. Munoz also pointed out that the devices were not yet included in the international building codes that are widely adopted by state and local governments.

Van de Putte cant shake the feeling that the states failure to pass a statewide carbon monoxide policy cost lives in February.

We have so many things that protect the physical, the tangible, the property, Van de Putte, a pharmacist, said about current regulations. By not putting in carbon monoxide alarms, thats what were valuing. Were valuing property over life.

Since the failure of the 2007 bill, carbon monoxide alarms have become more reliable and are now required by most state governments and recommended by leading health and safety organizations. The International Code Council first recommended them for many newly constructed and renovated single-family homes in 2009 and apartment complexes in 2012.

In light of the new standards, the Texas Association of Builders has changed its position, said Scott Norman, the groups executive director. The group now supports requirements for carbon monoxide alarms in newly constructed and renovated residences, Norman said.

Decades ago, there were questions about the reliability, he said. But the codes evolve.

Fire safety advocates and public health experts say that a statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms would better protect residents and help drive home the message about the deadly hazard.

You dont know if youre going to be exposed until its too late and youre sick or dead from it, said John Riddle, president of the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters, which represents first responders. A statewide law or requirement would absolutely make things easier.

In some states that have passed robust statewide rules, theres been a significant reduction in poisonings, fire safety experts say.

When the state comes in and requires it, there is continuity across the whole state  there is one message, said Jim Smith, the state fire marshal in Minnesota, where emergency department visits for carbon monoxide poisoning fell by 45%  from 411 to 226  in the seven years after the state passed a sweeping law requiring alarms in most private residences. It is no different than a seat belt.

In early April, the Texas House passed a bill that would require cities to adhere to more recent health and safety codes for newly constructed and renovated residences. Under the measure, which has not yet been approved by the state Senate, carbon monoxide alarms would be required in homes built after 2022 that have fuel-fired appliances or attached garages. The requirement wouldnt apply to unincorporated areas unless counties chose to adopt the codes, and cities could opt out of the provision.

The legislation, as written, would not protect millions of Texans who live in already constructed homes and apartments.

Starting over

In Houston, Bekele was well enough to be discharged after a four-day hospital stay, but he did not go home. For days, he sat vigil at his sons bedside, leaving only to shower at a family members house, while a machine pumped oxygen in and out of the boys lungs.

Bekele was there, at Beimnets side a few days later, to mark his ninth birthday.

Initially doctors told him that his son had a very low probability to survive, Bekele said. Even if he did, doctors warned that hed likely suffer from permanent brain damage. Prolonged exposure to carbon monoxide had prevented oxygen from reaching his brain.

Day after day, Bekele held his sons hand and begged God to spare his boy.

Then, nearly two weeks after being admitted, Beimnet regained consciousness. Within days, he was off life support and was up and walking around the hospital, slowly getting stronger until he was finally well enough to leave.

Two months later, Beimnet takes pills to prevent a relapse of seizures like the ones he suffered as a result of his carbon monoxide exposure, but he otherwise shows no signs so far of permanent damage.

He is attending school now and is doing well, said Bekele, who has since returned to work at the gas station.

Bekele and Beimnet in April. Credit: Annie Mulligan for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune/NBC News

This month, Bekele sued nearly a dozen companies that supply power to the states electric grid, one of dozens of lawsuits that seek to hold Texas companies accountable for serious injuries and deaths caused by the winter outages. The power companies have not yet filed a response to Bekeles lawsuit in Harris County District Court but have denied responsibility for outage-related deaths in similar cases filed across Texas.

Bekele doesnt know what will happen with the case, but he said no amount of money can make up for what hes lost.

He still hasnt had the strength to return to the place he and his family called home before his wife and daughter died. Hoping for a fresh start, he took money raised by loved ones on GoFundMe and put it toward the security deposit and rent for a nearby apartment. Its smaller than their old townhouse, but enough space for just the two of them.

Not long after moving in, Bekele discovered a problem, one that he said he planned to fix as soon as possible: The apartment had no carbon monoxide alarms.

About the data: Statewide emergency room data is from Feb. 13-20 and came from the Texas Syndromic Surveillance system. Patients self-reported their race and ethnicity. A total of 11% of individuals who did not report their race or ethnicity were removed from the analysis. A separate analysis on patient ages removed less than 5% of individuals whose age was missing. Economic and demographic data is from the 2019 five-year American Community Survey and was analyzed at the census tract-level. Unless otherwise noted, areas with EMS calls were compared to the entire Austin-Travis County EMS service area.

Disclosure: Memorial Hermann Health System and Texas Association of Builders have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Opinion and were of one voice about the outcome of the Assembly elections that concluded on Thursday with the last phase of polling in West Bengal: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) is heading for a Tamil Nadu sweep; the NR Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will likely form the government in Puducherry; the BJP will retain Assam; and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) will return to power in Kerala.

The exception was West Bengal. While some gave an edge to the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by Mamata Banerjee, others said the BJP was heading towards power in the state. However, it is clear that the BJP is set to make historic gains in Bengal, both in terms of vote share and the number of seats. The growth is clearly at the expense of the TMC, which is expected to drop anything between 30 and 50 seats.

The Congresss gains by tying up with the Bodo Peoples Front (an erstwhile BJP alliance partner) and the Badruddin Ajmal-led All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) appear to have been marginal.

In Kerala, in a major departure from the past, the LDF is headed for a second term, possibly a reward for its delivery of social services. Issues of corruption and smuggling, in which the chief ministers office is currently facing an inquiry, seem to have mattered little to voters.

In Tamil Nadu, despite the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) managing to provide credible governance and holding together after the death of J Jayalalithaa (soon after the government was formed), opinion polls predict it will get a thrashing. The BJP, which was hoping to advance its political agenda by holding on to the AIADMKs coat tails and made many political interventions to keep the government going, may be disappointed, the polls show.

The BJP has reason to celebrate its stupendous victory in Bengal. But its performance, according to the polls, is going to be disappointing in Kerala, though further analysis would depend on the vote share the party is able to get.

The management of the Covid-19 pandemic was hardly an issue in the Assembly elections. But now that they are over, and with the BJPs stellar performance in Bengal, a bitter warfare should be expected between the TMC (if it manages to form the government) and the Centre, and the governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the Centre.

Some polls are predicting the defeat of Mamata Banerjee in her constituency, Nandigram. If that happens, the TMC will need to do a reality check on its inability to halt the charge of the BJP in a state where it posted only a marginal presence in the 2016 Assembly election.
Were proud to have once again achieved Acumatica certification for our payment integration, said Mo Elhanafy, CTO/VP of Software Engineering at Century Business Solutions.

EBizCharge, an integrated payment solution developed by leading provider Century Business Solutions, has achieved distinction as an Acumatica Certified Application (ACA) for Acumatica ERP 2021 R1.

Acumatica, a comprehensive, browser-based cloud ERP solution optimized for ease of use, adaptability, speed, and security, offers a full suite of business management applications and serves customers around the world. The ACA title highlights outstanding development partners whose applications have met the highest standards for integration and functionality, as set and upheld by Acumatica.

As an Acumatica Certified Application, EBizCharge demonstrates commitment to quality and seamless integration by passing the Acumatica software test and aligning to future Acumatica roadmap releases.

Were proud to have once again achieved Acumatica certification for our payment integration, said Mo Elhanafy, CTO/VP of Software Engineering at Century Business Solutions. As a company, were committed to continually improving our products to meet customers ever-changing needs and deliver an unparalleled payment processing experience. Were excited to work alongside Acumatica to provide cutting-edge solutions to customers.

The Acumatica 2021 R1 release includes updates that allow users to work smarter, not harder, enable growth through best-in-class functionality, and enjoy the benefits of future-proof technology. The EBizCharge payment integration supports these capabilities by providing simple payment processing solutions that streamline merchants workflows and save them time.

EBizCharge installation is quick and straightforward, enabling Acumatica users to begin experiencing the payment integrations cost effectiveness and robust functionality benefits immediately. EBizCharge is designed to address todays challenges in the payment space so that businesses can focus their resources on the future.

About Century Business Solutions:

Century Business Solutions is an all-in-one payment solution that provides payment processing technology to over 30,000 merchants in the U.S. and Canada. In 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, Century was ranked on the annual Inc. 5000 list honoring the nations fastest-growing private companies. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, Century was also awarded the Silver Stevie Award for Payment Product and Service of the Year by the American Business Awards, the worlds largest premier business award. Century develops fully integrated payment processing solutions for over 100 major ERP, CRM, and accounting systems. For more information, visit https://www.centurybizsolutions.net or https://www.ebizcharge.com

About Acumatica:

Acumatica provides cloud-based business management software that enables small and mid-size companies to accelerate their businesses. Built on cloud and mobile technology and a unique customer-centric licensing model, Acumatica delivers a suite of fully integrated business management applications, such as Financials, Distribution, CRM, and Project Accounting, on a robust and flexible platform. For more information, visit http://www.acumatica.com
[April 29, 2021] Eagle Eye Networks Continues Global Expansion, Announces Record Q1 Revenue

Eagle Eye Networks, the global leader in cloud video surveillance, today announced record Q1 2021 revenue growth, and greater than 85 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2020. The company's growth is fueling an expanded presence around the world, a new manufacturing facility near its Austin headquarters, as well as a near doubling of its team to meet the growing demand for true cloud video surveillance. Eagle Eye is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) on its true cloud platform to improve safety, security, operations, and customer service for businesses around the world. "We have passed the tipping point in the video surveillance industry's adoption of cloud video, as businesses of all types and sizes have realized the advantages of a true cloud solution," said Dean Drako, Founder and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks. "Resellers, business owners, and IT professionals understand Eagle Eye Networks smart cloud video surveillance, with appropriate privacy and cybersecurity protections, is making businesses more efficient and effective, and communities much safer." In addition to record revenue and growth in 2020 and Q1 2021, the company announced funding from venture capital firm Accel in Q4 2020, spurring additional investment in people, products, and the technology needed to transform the video surveillance industry.



Highlights include: Secured a record number of new customers

Earned nearly 100 percent customer retention

Achieved customer support ratings higher than 95 percent

Onboarded a record number of resellers to the Eagle Eye Networks Reseller Partner Program

Expanded to a new manufacturing facility in the U.S.

Achieved integration with more than 10,000 camera makes and models

Delivered more choice to customers by adding more than two dozen AI technology integrations to our open platform and increasing platform partners by 50 percent year-over-year

Hired developers, engineers, customer service, and sales and marketing professionals across the globe ABOUT EAGLE EYE NETWORKS

Founded in 2012, Eagle Eye Networks, Inc., is number one in cloud video surveillance worldwide, addressing the needs of businesses, alarm companies, security integrators, cities, and individuals. Eagle Eye's 100 percent cloud managed solutions provide cloud and on-premise recording, bank-level security and encryption, and broad analog and digital camera support - all accessed via the web or mobile applications. Businesses of all sizes and types utilize Eagle Eye solutions for operational optimization and security. All Eagle Eye products benefit from Eagle Eye's developer friendly RESTful API platform and Big Data Video Framework , which allow for indexing, search, retrieval, and analysis of live and archived video. Eagle Eye's open Video API has been widely adopted for integration in alarm monitoring, third party analytics, security dashboards, and point of sale system integrations. Eagle Eye sells its products through authorized global resellers and installation partners. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA, Eagle Eye has offices in Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.een.com or call +1-512-473-0500 (US), +31 (0) 20 26 10 460 (EMEA) or +81-3-6868-5527 (JP). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005397/en/

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Entrepreneurs speak at a startup event in December 2020. Photo by VnExpress.

Investment in startups jumped by 34 percent year-on-year in the first quarter to $100 million, with foreign investors being dominant.

But the number of deals continued to fall, almost halving from 2019 to 16, according to a report by South Korean venture fund Nextrans.

Foreign investors outperformed their local counterparts with nine deals, it said.

Seed funding and series A investment, the first two stages, remained dominant, accounting for 70 percent of the deals.

Fintech once again led with four of the 16 deals, followed by logistics, hospitality and real estate.

Vietnam is expected to grow at the fastest rate in Southeast Asia in terms of digital financial services revenues in the next five years, reaching $3.8 billion by 2025, the report said.

Other sectors such as e-commerce and medtech are also expected to boom in the coming years, it added.

The most notable deals in the first quarter included an investment of $2.6-million from a group of investors led by Singapore venture capital firm Jungle Ventures in electric motorbike brand Dat Bike, and a $1 million by investment fund AppWorks in healthcare service booking platform Docosan.

A venture capital fund alliance comprising 17 investment companies are committed to investing $800 million in Vietnamese startups in 2021-25.

The government has also been making efforts to support startups, with former Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc approving the National Digital Transformation Program in June last year.

Startup events have been organized to help new companies promote their ideas and connect with potential investors, attracting thousands of participants.
Spring jazz programming is in full swing again  most of it still virtual, but some of it in person. The big event on Friday is International Jazz Day, an annual UNESCO-sponsored celebration now in its 10th year, which culminates in the All-Star Global Concert, streaming at jazzday.com at 5 p.m. Eastern time, with artists including Herbie Hancock, Melissa Aldana and Angelique Kidjo beaming in from across the world. (PBS stations will air a special documentary on International Jazz Day at 8 p.m.)

Separately, at 7 p.m., as part of a continuing weekly YouTube series, Fire Fridays: The Cats Talk Back, from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the pianist Anthony Wonsey will give a livestreamed trio performance, followed by a lecture on gender roles in African-American music by the musicologist Maya Cunningham.

On Friday and Saturday night, a pair of festivals are happening in other cities: The Chicago Jazz String Summit, organized by the cellist Tomeka Reid, will stream on its website; and the first Bayfront Jazz Festival is taking place in person in Miami but also broadcasting at live.eluv.io/bayfront-jazz-festival.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
With children suddenly home, parents are now facing a unique set of challenges. They are being asked to be workers, teachers and caretakers all at once, and many are feeling the pressure. The situation in Athens is no different.
Joe and Jill Biden leave the home of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in Plains, Georgia on 29 April. (AP)

Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden travelled to Plains, Georgia on Thursday, hours after the presidents first address to a joint session of Congress to debut his expansive domestic agenda, to meet with his longtime ally Jimmy Carter.

Their meeting marked the first time the president has met with the nations 39th president and former First Lady Rosalyn Carter in person since the start of Mr Bidens presidency.

The Carters did not attend the inauguration ceremony on 20 January because of the coronavirus pandemic, the first time he missed the ceremony since his own in 1977, and after a series of health issues that have limited his mobility.

The visit also follows the recent death of Mr Carters vice president Walter Mondale, who died on 19 April in Minneapolis.

Their 45-minute visit marked a a full-circle event  the nations longest-living president, at 96 years old, meeting with his long-time colleague and now the countrys oldest sitting president, at 78 years old.

They did not appear together outside the Carters home, but the Bidens were photographed with Rosalynn Carter, who was supported by a walker as she escorted them to the front door of their home and said goodbye.

Jill and Joe Biden leave the home of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in Plains, Georgia on 29 April.REUTERS

A crowd of people welcomed the presidential motorcade to downtown Plains, where a banner read Plains, Georgia - Home of Jimmy Carter our 39th President, according to White House pool reporters.

The White House said the couples have a longstanding friendship and would stop by and say hello during their Georgia trip.

On his 100th day in office, the president  after appealing to the nation and members of Congress in his hourlong address on Wednesday  will rally in Duluth to pitch Americans directly on his sweeping economic agenda, including trillions of dollars in spending to expand and support federal safety nets, education, childcare and infrastructure.

For decades, he has been my loyal and dedicated friend, Mr Carter said in a filmed statement during the 2020 Democratic National Convention securing Mr Bidens nomination. He understands that honesty and dignity are essential traits that determine not only our vision but our actions. More than ever, thats what we need.

Story continues

In 1976, then-US Senator Biden was the first senator to endorse Mr Carter in his presidential campaign.

The president recently participated in a tribute to the Carters as part of the premiere of the documentary Carterland, which will debut at the Atlanta Film Festival.

President Carter, youve shown us what we can be as individuals, as a nation: courageous, compassionate and humble, he said in remarks. And Mrs Carter, Rosalynn, as first lady and ever since, youve done much to advance and address so many of societys greatest needs.

Mr Carter also joined a public service campaign in March urging Americans to get one of three available Covid-19 vaccines, joining all remaining living former presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama  excluding Donald Trump.

His Carter Center organisation, which has advanced democratic efforts and observed elections abroad, also took the rare step of launching its first-ever US elections campaign in 2020, citing an erosion of democracy in the country.

Their visit marks at least the fourth time Mr Biden has met or spoken with a former president or vice president since taking office, resuming an informal tradition  largely abandoned under Trump, who regularly trashed his predecessors  of presidents maintaining some kind of relationship with the small fraternity of living presidents.

That may include discussions or conversations, comparing notes, or seeking advice or understanding among a small group of living men who held the office  with the exception of Mr Trump. Mr Biden has not spoken to him since their last televised debate in October. The former president has spent the following months falsely insisting that the election was stolen from him.

Mr Biden is reportedly in frequent conversion with Barack Obama, and he had a brief conversation with George W Bush before his announcement that he would fully withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

Read More

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Rishi Sunak withholding support for Joe Bidens global minimum business tax rate

Dogged by Mideast crisis, Blinken visits Denmark
The Securities and Exchange Commission is probing whether Volkswagen's April Fool's day stunt manipulated its share price, according to reports.

The car company had on April 29 and 30 issued false statements saying it would change its brand name to 'Voltswagen,' to stress its commitment to electric vehicles.

Following that announcement its stock price rose nearly 5 per cent. It climbed as high as 12.5% on the Tuesday, Bloomberg reports.

Now the SEC is said to be investigating how the stunt affected its share price, Der Spiegel reports. The probe is at an early stage with information requested from the car maker, they add.

The company's fake news release resulted in articles about the name change in multiple media outlets.

Investors of late have been responding positively to news of companies increasing electric vehicle production, swelling the value of shares of Tesla as well as of some EV startups.

Volkswagen's stock was down at $32.07 Thursday. On Tuesday, March 30 it had been $37.75, a rise from $34.65 on the previous day, March 29.

DailyMail.com has contacted the SEC and Volkswagen for comment.

The car company had on April 29 and 30 issued false statements saying it would change its brand name to 'Voltswagen,' to stress its commitment to electric vehicles

Following that announcement its stock price rose nearly 5 per cent. It climbed as high as 12.5% on the Tuesday, Bloomberg reports

Mark Gillies, a company spokesman, was forced to confirm the name change statement had been a pre-April Fool's Day joke.

Officials had earlier insisted that the release was legitimate and the name change accurate.

Volkswagen's intentionally fake news release, highly unusual for a major public company, coincides with its efforts to repair its image as it tries to recover from a 2015 scandal in which it cheated on government emissions tests and allowed diesel-powered vehicles to illegally pollute the air.

In that scandal, Volkswagen admitted that about 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide were fitted with the deceptive software.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is probing whether Volkswagen's April Fool's day stunt manipulated its share price, according to reports

WHAT'S IN A NAME? The automaker Volkswagen was founded in Germany in 1937 on the orders of Adolf Hitler, who wanted ordinary German people to have access to cars. Its current name comes from the German name Volkswagenwerk, which is translated into English as 'the People's car.' Advertisement

The software reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

That scandal cost Volkswagen $35 billion in fines and civil settlements and led to the recall of millions of vehicles.

In falsely announcing a name change, the company went beyond telling reporters that its news release was legitimate. The company emailed to reporters a press release that quoted its CEO announcing the fake change.

'We might be changing out our K for a T, but what we arent changing is this brands commitment to making best-in-class vehicles for drivers and people everywhere,' Scott Keogh, president and CEO of Volkswagen of America, said in the release.

James Cox, who teaches corporate and securities law at Duke University, said the Securities and Exchange Commission should take action to deal with such misinformation, which can distort stock prices.

'The whole market has gone crazy,' Cox said. 'We need to throw a pretty clear line in the sand, I believe, about what is permissible and what isnt permissible.'

Volkswagen's intentionally fake news release, highly unusual for a major public company, coincides with its efforts to repair its image as it tries to recover from a 2015 scandal in which it cheated on government emissions tests and allowed diesel-powered vehicles to illegally pollute the air

The Volkswagen incident bears some similarity to one in 2018 in which Tesla's CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he had the funding secured to take the company private - a comment that drove up the stock price, Cox noted.

Later, it was revealed that the funding had not been lined up. Musk and Tesla each agreed to pay $20 million in penalties to the SEC.

Late Tuesday, VW issued a statement confirming that it won't be changing its brand name to 'Voltswagen.'

'The renaming was designed to be an announcement in the spirit of April Fool's Day,' the company said.
Photo: The Canadian Press Dr. Howard Njoo, Deputy Chief Public Health Officer at Public Health Agency of Canada, speaks during a COVID-19 press conference at the Sir John A. Macdonald Building in Ottawa on Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/David Kawai

Health Canada data suggest seniors are getting vaccinated in higher numbers for COVID-19 than they did for the flu.

Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo says almost nine in 10 Canadians over the age of 80 have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

He also says at least one dose has been more than eight in 10 people in their 70s.

Health Canada's annual flu shot survey found about seven in 10 seniors were vaccinated for this year's flu season.

Nationally, close to 12 million Canadians have been given at least their first dose of vaccine, with close to a quarter million doses now being injected every day.

Njoo says the harsher outcomes of COVID-19 for seniors may be driving more of them to get vaccinated against it, but he says he hopes this will help encourage increased uptake of all vaccines.
She has been hanging out in her home state of California, while her much older beau Scott Disick takes on New York City.

And Amelia Hamlin flaunted her independence on Wednesday as she appeared on Instagram in a slinky bikini.

'Gonna dream of this tonight,' captioned the 19-year-old model, who posed for the sultry snapshot in front of a mirror in her room.

Her biggest fan: Amelia Hamlin flaunted her independence on Wednesday as she appeared on Instagram in a slinky bikini

Amelia's barely-there bathing suit boasted tones of green and included a standard triangle top and thong-style bottoms.

The youngest daughter of Lisa Rinna and Amelia Hamlin wore her long, brunette hair in its natural wave pattern and parted down the middle.

As for accessories, Amelia could be seen wearing two gold bangles and a matching chain choker.

Despite being a model, Hamlin decided to cover the majority of her face with her cellphone for the Instagram Story snap.

Sizzling: Days prior, Amelia treated her nearly 900,000 followers to more sizzling snapshots as she plugged the fast fashion brand Boohoo on her page

Resting in the background of her bikini portrait was an off white couch that happened to be acting as a landing pad for her woven designer purse.

Days prior, Amelia treated her nearly 900,000 followers to more sizzling snapshots as she plugged the fast fashion brand Boohoo on her page.

She donned a skintight tropical print dress with sexy circular cut-outs on the sides, while posing against a leafy backdrop outdoors.

Hamlin has had plenty of time to work on her modeling skills this week, while her 37-year-old boyfriend Scott spent time in NYC reportedly working on business dealings.

Romance: Amelia and her much older beau Scott were first romantically linked in late October, when they were seen arriving to Kendall Jenner's star-studded birthday party in West Hollywood; Amelia and Scott pictured in February

Going strong: Since then, the couple have made their relationship Instagram official and have gone on several lengthy vacations together to Mexico and Miami, Florida; Scott and Amelia pictured in February

The age gap couple were first romantically linked in late October, when they were seen arriving to Kendall Jenner's star-studded birthday party in West Hollywood.

Since then, the couple have made their relationship Instagram official and have gone on several lengthy vacations together to Mexico and Miami, Florida.

Scott has also introduced Amelia to his three children, sons Mason and Reign and daughter Penelope, whom he shares with ex Kourtney Kardashian, 42.

Meeting the family: Scott has since introduced Amelia to his three children, sons Mason and Reign and daughter Penelope, whom he shares with ex Kourtney Kardashian, 42; Kourtney and Scott pictured in 2017

Amelia recently made it known that she is getting close to his kids by way of a comment she left on his latest Instagram post.

Disick shared a photo of Penelope, eight, as he wrote, 'Driving miss poosh,' prompting an adoring comment from Amelia.

Amelia shared the nickname she has for Penelope, lovingly dubbing her 'Peesh.'

Kourtney had originally named her lifestyle brand, Poosh, after she and Scott's nickname for the middle child, with his girlfriend putting her own spin on it.

Bonding: Amelia recently made it known that she is getting close to his kids by way of a comment she left on his latest Instagram post

Sweet: Disick shared a photo of Penelope, eight, as he wrote, 'Driving miss poosh,' prompting an adoring comment from Amelia

Prior to Amelia, Scott was in a years-long romance with Lionel Richie's now 22-year-old daughter Sofia Richie.

The pair split in May of last year after three years together, followed by a brief reconciliation in early July and a finite breakup in August.

Sofia is now in a full blown romance with music mogul Lucian Grainge's son Elliot, 27, whom she has been sharing photos of to Instagram in recent weeks.

Former flame: Prior to Amelia, Scott was in a years-long romance with Lionel Richie's now 22-year-old daughter Sofia Richie; Sofia and Amelia pictured in February 2020
Karen Melin, far right, visited North Pole High School in 2019 as deputy commissioner for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development to help announce the winner of Alaska's Milken Educator Award, Rebecca Missler, who won $25,000.
OSLO, Norway, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

First Quarter Highlights

Akastor announced the agreement to create a joint venture between MHWirth and Baker Hughes' Subsea Drilling Systems business, forming a global full-service offshore drilling equipment provider. As part of the transaction, Akastor has secured commitment to refinance its current corporate bank facility.

Following this agreement, MHWirth is classified as held for sale per first quarter and presented as discontinued operations in Akastor's consolidated income statement.

DDW Offshore entered into bareboat charter agreements for two vessels. The agreements include sale of the vessels in 2023.

Net interest-bearing debt of NOK 1.6 billion per end of quarter

Akastor CEO Karl Erik Kjelstad comments:

"In the first quarter, we were first of all pleased to announce the strategically important agreement with Baker Hughes to establish a joint venture between their Subsea Drilling Systems business and MHWirth, which we believe will create good value for our shareholders. As part of the transaction, we were able to secure refinancing of the Akastor group bank facility which will provide financial flexibility for Akastor going forward. Over the coming quarters, we will focus strongly on securing a successful integration to ensure that the JV is fully operational as a combined company after closing and ready for a stand-alone listing at the right point of time. Also, it was an important achievement for DDW Offshore to secure bareboat contracts including sale agreements for two vessels during the quarter, providing the company positive cash flow from operations and securing exit values."

MHWirth

MHWirth reported revenues of NOK 591 million in the quarter. EBITDA for the quarter was NOK 12 million, representing an EBITDA margin of 2 percent.

Drilling Lifecycle Services & Digital Technologies revenues were NOK 447 million in the quarter, a decrease of 28 percent compared to last year. Number of active rigs remained stable during the quarter, with potential for further increase over the next quarters based on current contract schedule of the fleet. Despite lower activity in the first quarter driven by lower spare part sale following a very strong 2020, the DLS business continues to create a solid basis for MHWirth with good medium to long term growth opportunities through increased utilization of fleet. Digital Technologies had high activity in the quarter including the delivery of one full CADS system.

Revenues from Projects & Products decreased 73 percent compared with last year, driven by few ongoing projects and low backlog within this segment per start of quarter. Despite several good leads, especially within single equipment for the non-oil market, backlog situation still causes uncertainty related to performance in the near to medium term.

AKOFS Offshore

AKOFS reported revenues of NOK 269 million and EBITDA of NOK 42 million in the quarter.

Revenue utilization for Aker Wayfarer was affected by a scheduled five-year SPS completed in the quarter, resulting in 35 days of off-hire. Skandi Santos delivered 100% revenue utilization in the quarter. AKOFS Seafarer contributed positively, with technical uptime above 90%, however with a certain reduction in revenue utilization due to harsh weather conditions.

Other industrial holdings

AGR delivered good growth and increased margins in the quarter, fuelled by the Norwegian consultancy business. Cool Sorption had low project activity, affecting financial results. Total revenue and EBITDA for the two companies were NOK 188 million and NOK 8 million, respectively.

Financial holdings

Contributions from financial investments were negative NOK 2 million in the quarter. NES Global Talent and the preferred equity in Odfjell Drilling contributed positively with NOK 23 million and NOK 33 million, respectively. The joint venture, AKOFS Offshore, contributed negatively with NOK 58 million.

Financial calendar

Second Quarter and Half-Yearly Results 2021: July 15, 2021

Media Contact

yvind Paaske

Chief Financial Officer

Tel: +47 917 59 705

E-mail: oyvind.paaske@akastor.com

Akastor is a Norway-based oil-services investment company with a portfolio of industrial holdings and other investments. The company has a flexible mandate for active ownership and long-term value creation.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Public/18618/3336225/b69f65e6e8abddd1.pdf Akastor ASA Q1 2021 presentation

SOURCE Akastor ASA
OTTAWA  While the Trudeau government is starting to unveil its approach to prevent Indigenous women from being victims of crime, a Winnipeg advocate says Ottawas scope might be too broad.

OTTAWA  While the Trudeau government is starting to unveil its approach to prevent Indigenous women from being victims of crime, a Winnipeg advocate says Ottawas scope might be too broad.

The massive federal budget delivered last week outlined a five-year funding plan to respond to the recommendations of the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous females.

The Liberals have promised $1.6 billion for Indigenous women, while other cultural supports bring the funding up to $2.2 billion, to be detailed in an action plan that has yet to be released.

The earmarked funding includes local policing to revitalizing Indigenous languages and weeding out racism in hospitals.

"It all sounds a little a bit scattered," said Sheila North, a former Manitoba grand chief.

North said Ottawa has been consulting with Indigenous groups about how to implement the plan. Officials seem to understand the issues and solutions, she said, but they might need a strategy to avoid losing the plot.

"The government is trying to do everything, and maybe thats leading to it looking like its too scattered," said North.

Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said the Liberals intentionally earmarked funding for numerous initiatives that respond to the inquiry, and promised a strategy to implement them.

"They are broad, and they require a thought-through and cohesive response, which is what the government has done, as well as the financial backing of the government," Miller said.

The inquiry issued its final report in June 2019. Since then, Ottawa has funded various projects but has been criticized for failing to keep its promise to release an action plan by June 2020.

Miller said the Liberals wanted to show in the budget that theyre serious about allocating enough funding to make a difference.

Funding for the action plan is part of $18 billion Ottawa has earmarked to get Indigenous people through COVID-19 and try to bridge decades-old socioeconomic gaps, such as poor housing on reserves.

North said its a positive step that Ottawa took a broad view in responding to the inquiry report. However, she said that makes it critical to have an effective monitoring body.

Ideally, that body would ensure Indigenous families are taken seriously by the justice system, and that fewer Indigenous women go missing.

Last weeks budget earmarked $20.3 million for "appropriate monitoring mechanisms to measure progress and to keep the government accountable" on the file.

Yet the Liberals made a similar promise they havent fulfilled, related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools. Five years after the commission wrapped up, Ottawa has yet to establish a monitoring council, despite approving $127 million for one in 2019.

Winnipeg NDP MP Leah Gazan said shes disheartened that theres still no timeline for an action plan to protect Indigenous women and girls, which makes it impossible to assess whether the budget allocations respond to needs.

"More clarity needs to be given on how this money has been earmarked," said Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre.

She noted that domestic-violence calls are on the rise across Canada. "This should have, first and foremost, pushed an urgency, to immediately release a national action plan."

The office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett did not say when the action plan will be delivered, saying it requires provincial contributions and "must remain evergreen."

Throughout the inquiry, Manitoba activists said the commissioners did not address the issues of utmost importance in the province, where inquiries have already outlined problems in Manitobas justice and child-welfare systems.

A grassroots group called the Manitoba Coalition said restorative justice was necessary for some perpetrators, but said the inquiry should still heed grieving families who want punishment, to deter future tragedies.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Computacenter plc (CCC.L) said it expects fiscal 2021 to be a year of good progress in its reported profits, due to the strong organic profit performance. Further, the company noted that although it would generate incremental positive growth from the Pivot acquisition in 2021, this would be almost negated by currency movements and the expected losses from its French acquisition. The company said, 'We have been extremely pleased with the profit growth we have achieved in the first quarter of 2021, which is testament to our continued investment, over many years, in our systems, tools and processes that optimise our business and improve our customer experience. There has been a strong demand across the business particularly for our Professional Services in Germany and the UK, and significant revenue growth in Technology Sourcing in the UK...' 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.
Fines totalling 1,000 have been imposed on a motorist who tried to avoid gardai.

Gerard OBrien, Listerlin, Mullinavat, was charged with driving without reasonable consideration. He was also charged with driving without a valid NCT and without tax.



Kilkenny District Court heard that on February 25, 2020, gardai were conducting a checkpoint at Mullinavat. They saw a car being driven erratically and followed it.

The car drove down a narrow lane trying to avoid the gardai.

Weather conditions were wet and foggy at the time.



Gardai followed the car onto the motorway and it was not safe to stop the car for a while, the court heard. There were passengers in the vehicle.

When stopped Mr OBrien told the gardai he was making an emergency journey.

The defendant had 18 previous convictions.



In a hurry

Solicitor Chris Hogan said his client wasnt trying to evade the gardai. The road was blocked and he was in a hurry to Dublin.

He stopped when he saw the gardai behind him.

Judge Geraldine Carthy convicted Mr OBrien on the three charges. For not having valid tax he was fined 250, a fine of 250 was imposed for not having a valid NCT and for driving without reasonable consideration he was fined 500.
Fiery minister Mario Murillo continues to appeal for repentance among Californians while the misery created by wokeness and obscured by the media persists. He proclaimed that God would honor the prayers and devotion of the remnant.

"Why is this happening all at once? And why is it happening while Californians are displaying a renewed hunger for Christ?" he pondered on Wednesday.

Murillo noted that the Leftist agenda in California had cost the state thousands of jobs and driven tens of thousands of people out. For the first time in the state's existence, California would lose a congressional seat and an Electoral College vote. Many people believe that if the current pattern persists, California will even turn red.

Nonetheless, Murillo pointed to a promise in Isaiah 44:2-8. This promise to Israel applies to all believers now, and it stands true. The God who took care of the faithful in the olden times is more than capable of vindicating His people at present.

"What a weekend! Do the headlines of the last few days reveal the judgment of God on the Woke?" he wrote.

"The unholy trinity of Woke is Racism, Hypocrisy, and Tyranny," revealed the preacher. "Until now it could hide behind frightened corporations and the blind faith of the media. But the veil was torn in two this weekend in California."

Among the headlines he cited were about the following:

Lebron James' failed outburst

NBA player Lebron James raged about and insulted a cop who shot a 16-year-old Afro-American teen who was rushing at people with a knife. His outburst backfired but it raised awareness about "woke-racism" to millions of viewers.

Woke's bigotry was confirmed by the tweet posted by LeBron James. After tweeting and then deleting what was meant to be a message to the Ohio police officer who fatally shot a young black girl who seemed to be about to stab someone.

The all-caps tweet from James read, 'YOU'RE NEXT.' It featured an hourglass emoji as well as the hashtag #ACCOUNTABILITY.

However, in the short video clip caught by a body camera, it showed that the assailant was about to stab another girl who had her back pressed against a vehicle in the split seconds before she was shot down by the police.

Murillo observes that the "only facts that mattered to Lebron is that it was a cop, and he was white. Never mind the black life the officer saved."

The Oscars' dismal ratings

The Oscars' dismal ratings proved that America is over the "hypocritical Hollywood elitists" who keep promoting "hatred" towards former President Donald Trump, America, and liberty.

The 2021 version of the Oscars experienced a 58.3 percent ratings drop from last year. Previously, the lowest total viewership for any Oscars was 23.6 million in 2020. This year, fewer than 10 million people - 9.85 million to be exact - tuned

"Even so, Wokeness never learns," commented Murillo. "The hypocrites called for defunding the police at an event heavily guarded by police."

Newsom's upcoming shutdown

The signatures on the recall petition have been verified, and Gov. Gavin Newsom will shortly face recall for his "tyrannical mishandling" of the pandemic shutdown, as well as his efforts to close down Christianity.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is being recalled after failing to keep schools open and sending his children to private school. A spokesman for the recall said that frustrated parents are a key part of the effort and that 300,000 of the 1.4 million signatories were Democrats.

Additionally, Newsom has lost two major Supreme Court battles.

"He proved that the agenda of the Woke is solidly against the Constitution of the United States," said Murillo of Newsom's previous anti-church stances.

These things, Murillo noted, is creating a "misery" that results in a "hunger" for none other than God. While things don't sound perfectly well at face value, good things are happening beneath the surface. The shaking simply acts as a sign that God is responding to the prayers of the faithful.
MLive political reporter Emily Lawler told her social media audience a story last week that illustrated why she and her colleague Lauren Gibbons knew they had to write about the toxic culture in Lansing for women.

She was 19, still in college and excited to start writing about politics in our state Capitol. She had bought new eyeglasses so she could work better.

Her first day on the job, a male senator greeted her with, Hey, Sexy Specs!

I was like, Im not really comfortable with that, and it just kept happening, Lawler said. I found it so distracting that I retired those glasses. What male colleague of mine has been forced to put aside a medical need to do their job because of sexual harassment? None of them, I would suspect.

What Lawler encountered years ago is representative, not isolated; its one small example of a toxic culture of bias, sexual discrimination and sexual harassment directed at women in political circles in Lansing.

And thats why Gibbons and Lawler tackled the always thorny topic of sexual harassment and the glass ceiling last week in a series stories that included raw stories from women whove gone through the male-dominated meat grinder. If the topic, or the womens experiences, make you uncomfortable  good. Its high time for change.

The duo interviewed more than 40 women who work in politics and public policy; 80 percent said they had been subjected to harassment; 93 percent said theyd forwarded concerns about another persons conduct to colleagues or friends.

We wanted to show that this is not about one specific person. Its not just about who goes public, its not just about a couple of bad actors being brought to light by women who feel comfortable coming forward publicly, Gibbons said.

Gibbons and Lawler sought to provide an avenue for women to share their stories, either behind their own names or anonymously. The latter because, even in the Me, Too era, there still are career repercussions for women who speak out about what they endure.

The project was steeped in a wellspring of firsthand experiences in Lansing. When female veterans of the Capitol need to orient newcomers on which men and which situations to avoid  well, maybe its time to clean the fish bowl, rather than replace the fish.

I was first subjected to an extremely inappropriate comment at the Capitol when I was 22, Gibbons said. I know that its not out of the ordinary. Thats not an anomaly. This is something that a majority of women are experiencing.

Sexist comments are a one element of a pervasive power-and-control dynamic perpetuated by a male-dominated institution. Its also manifested in sexual innuendoes, actual physical sexual overtures, and a rigid glass ceiling paradigm that forces women to accept mens coercive attitudes and behavior in order to get ahead.

When I think about the 21- or 22-year-olds that are coming into the Michigan Capitol  theyre full of potential, and they shouldnt have to put on a suit of armor every day to succeed in this field, said Lawler. As a society, were missing out on some really valuable contributions because of the sexual harassment problem.

The reporting by Lawler and Gibbons already is making an impact: Their story on a pattern of harassment by former Lansing mayor Virgil Bernero led him to announce he would drop plans to seek that office again. And in the midst of their coverage, the Michigan Legislature revealed sexual harassment policies that it had been shielding from the public.

We always talk in journalism about how youre on solid ground if youre telling the truth, and this is just such a widely universal truth that resonated with so many people, Gibbons said.

Its gratifying that it got peoples attention; its sad that were talking about this problem 100 years after women got the right to vote. So, so far to go.

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions youd like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
Unification Minister Lee In-young speaks during a press conference at the Office of the Inter-Korean Dialogue in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap



By Kang Seung-woo



Unification Minister Lee In-young said Thursday that the first half of the year would be the most opportune time to initiate progress in President Moon Jae-in's stalled Korean Peninsula peace process, saying the new American administration needs to engage North Korea as early as possible.



In addition, the minister expected the U.S. policy review on the North Korean regime will recommend adopting a synchronized and phased approach to eliminating Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, adding that the United States could take a flexible stance on international sanctions following the totalitarian state's moves toward denuclearization.



"The government will make efforts to encourage the U.S. to engage North Korea at an early stage in a bid to normalize the Korean Peninsula peace process and achieve tangible results," Lee said during a press conference at the Office for Inter-Korean Dialogue in Seoul.



"As the U.S. policy review of North Korea is expected to be completed, which will lift uncertainty, I believe that the first half will be the best opportunity and perfect time for South and North Korea and the U.S. to move together toward Korean Peninsula peace progress," he said, adding there could be variables in the latter half of the year such as South Korean politics as the country enters its next presidential election race.



His remarks come as inter-Korean ties have been in deadlock since the Hanoi summit between the U.S. and North Korea ended without a deal in February 2019. Although Tuesday marked the third anniversary of the first inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, April 27, 2018, the two sides remained low-key in their celebrations.



In that respect, Lee said the planned summit between President Moon and U.S. President Joe Biden next month would carry weight.



"I hope the summit will serve as momentum to advance the resumption of the peace initiative based on strategic coordination between South Korea and the U.S. on North Korea policy," Lee said.



The minister also expressed his hopes that the Biden administration will respect what the South Korean government's peace initiative has brought about so far and adopt it in its North Korea policy review.



"It is important for the U.S. government to respect the achievements of the peace process from a perspective of allies," he said.



Currently, North Korea has not responded to calls for talks from Washington as well as Seoul, raising speculation that the Kim regime may take action after the Biden administration's North Korean policy review is completed.



Lee echoed the view, saying any action from the North is likely to come after seeing the U.S. policy and the outcome of next month's summit between South Korea and the U.S., along with the coronavirus situation.



However, Lee also said South Korea cannot sit back, just waiting for the U.S. policy review.



"In order to normalize the inter-Korean ties, government-level efforts will be made in the first half of the year," the minister said, adding that Seoul is ready to sit down with the North anytime, anywhere and talk about anything.



The U.S. is now in the final stage of its North Korea policy review and the minster believes Washington will take the path of corresponding measures to the North's denuclearization rather than demanding that it dismantle its nuclear weapons program before receiving economic rewards.



He also vowed to continue efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to North Korea, saying that cooperation in such areas between the two Koreas could help create an atmosphere conducive to building peace and resuming denuclearization talks. The North, however, has not responded to the South's offer of assistance so far.


UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Wednesday called for efforts to promote the political settlement of the Syria crisis and alleviate the suffering of Syrian people.

"The United Nations should continue its good offices and adhere to the Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political process. The international community should step up its efforts to seek a political solution and push for an early end to the Syria crisis," said Geng Shuang, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.

China calls on all parties in Syria to closely engage and consult UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen and reach consensus on the arrangements for the sixth session of the Constitutional Committee as soon as possible. The committee, in its work, should remain independent and free from outside interference, he told the Security Council.

China has noted Syria's announcement that it will hold general elections next month. China calls on the international community to respect the sovereignty of Syria and the choice of its people, he said. "The future and destiny of Syria must be determined by the Syrian people themselves."

Terminating external occupation and eliminating terrorist forces are necessary security conditions for a political solution to the Syrian problem. Many Security Council members are concerned about terrorist activities within Syria and the risk of their spillover. The international community should work together in accordance with international law and Security Council resolutions to combat terrorist forces in Syria, said Geng.

The international community should enhance the relevance of humanitarian relief in Syria and effectively alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people. UN agencies need to scale up food aid and help Syria maintain its agricultural infrastructure such as water and power supplies, he said.

China supports the United Nations in providing COVID-19 vaccines to Syria through the COVAX Facility. China's shipment of its vaccines arrived in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Saturday. Hopefully, the timely vaccination will help curb the spread of the pandemic in Syria, he said.

Impacted by unilateral sanctions and economic blockades, Syria is suffering from a severe shortage of oil, and many gas stations have been forced to shut down. China urges the countries concerned to heed the calls of the UN secretary-general, the UN high commissioner for human rights, and UN member states and to immediately lift unilateral sanctions against Syria.

The United Nations should respect the status and role of the Syrian government and continuously improve the patterns of humanitarian relief to Syria, he said.

China welcomes the progress in cross-line humanitarian relief operations. In March, the World Health Organization delivered 470,000 cross-line medical services to civilians in the northeast. According to the Syrian government, the Syrian side has approved the cross-line humanitarian deliveries to its northwest. But the UN convoy has yet to make the trip, he noted.

"The Syrian government wants to know exactly what has hindered the cross-line deliveries to the northwest, who is to blame, and what to do next. These issues and concerns deserve attention and warrant response."

China hopes that the United Nations, on the basis of making full use of the existing border crossing, will continue to scale up cross-line humanitarian relief operations and open up cross-line transport routes throughout Syria as soon as possible, he said.

China remains committed to playing a constructive role in taking forward the political process, restoring peace and stability in Syria and alleviating the sufferings of the Syrian people, said Geng.
Last week, the Ohio House of Representatives voted 70-27 to pass House Bill 110, a $75 billion two-year state budget that cuts income tax by 2 percent and substantially overhauls funding for K-12 public schools. The bill will likely be revised by the Senate before it reaches the desk of Republican Governor Mike DeWine, who was largely responsible for shaping the original document before it was introduced to the House in January. If passed by the Senate and signed by the governor, the 2022-2023 budget will take effect on July 1.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and President Donald J. Trump in 2019, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and other state and local officials. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

The income tax cut would cost the state an estimated $380 million annually in tax revenue, which will likely be doubled due to a tax-cut prohibition included in the recently passed American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which bars using the federal funds to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue  resulting from a change in law, regulation, or administrative interpretation during the covered period that reduces any tax.

Though Ohio has yet to receive any ARPA funds, the expected $5.4 billion the state is allotted would be reduced by an amount equal to that lost in tax revenue due to any tax cut, meaning the income tax cut would thus cost the state $760 million.

A far less publicized part of the bill would allow capital gains tax deductions for those who invested $1 million or more in Ohio-based businesses, who now have capital gains from selling their ownership interest. Likewise, a third deduction benefits Ohio-based venture capitalist companies, allowing complete or partial deduction of capital gains. Both deductions would take effect in 2026.

The tax cuts are being combined with a much-touted overhaul of K-12 public school funding, called the Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP), which provided cover for 12 of the Houses 35 Democrats to vote in support of the budget. HB 110 co-sponsor Representative Bride Rose Sweeney (D-Cleveland), glowingly said, Its very difficult to separate the two [the tax cuts and FSFP], and Im very happy and excited it was implemented.  I look forward to it passing the House and finally becoming law.

In reality, the ostensible $1.8 billion increase in funding for schools is spaced out over six years and is directly undermined by the cuts. Declines in state revenues from these and other future cuts will be used to claw back any increased funding for schools.

The FSFP is purported to fix a faulty school funding system, first ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court in the 1997 case DeRolph v. State. In a 4-3 ruling, the court found that the state fail[ed] to provide for a thorough and efficient system of common schools. Underscoring the government and media hostility to the working class, then Ohio Governor George Voinovich defied the court and denounced the ruling, calling it a thinly veiled call for a massive, multibillion tax increase, intimating that the state should simply ignore the ruling.

Multiple newspapers decried the decision, including those representing some of Ohios largest metropolitan areas. According to the Columbus Dispatch, the ruling was one highly injudicious lurch, while the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, Almost any other outcome would have been preferable.

In the ensuing quarter of a century, only superficial action has been taken by the state to address the inequities in Ohios school funding. Despite the medias claims today, the latest proposal is totally insufficient to address the decades-long defunding of public education.

Instead of relying heavily on district property tax and income tax, a structure that left many districts woefully underfunded, the FSFP bases funding levels upon individual districts expendituresteacher salaries, technology updates, special needs education, etc.

Districts with higher teacher base salaries and far greater student educational opportunitiesin other words, wealthier districtswould benefit just as much from the new model as from the old. Likewise, districts with underpaid faculty and staff, crumbling facilities and few amenities to increase student achievement would remain far behind their affluent counterparts.

Another glaring problem with the proposed overhaul is that the new model would make individual districts far too beholden to state budgetary whims. Since the state already has too much say in academic standards and the specifics of district spending, it is not hard to imagine a statehouse-mandated tightening of the belt to rein in expenditures. Under the new model, the state can forcibly decrease a districts expenditure one year and perpetually squeeze funding year after year. This is not an unlikely scenario, as evidenced by Governor DeWines attempts to slash more than $300 million from school funding during the previous round of budget negotiations.

In short, the school funding portion of HB 110, formerly a stand-alone bill that passed the Ohio House last December but failed to be brought to a vote in the Senate, was never intended to fix anything.

The inherent contradictions of cutting tax revenue while increasing spending on any project, schools or otherwise, underscores that Ohios current leadership has no intention of guaranteeing increased funding to its schools. The school funding increase is based only upon a two-year budget projection, which means that legislators will have ample opportunity to hack away at the current funding promise in ensuing years as available revenues ebb and flow. Indeed, much of the funding increase could easily be stripped away, even before budget ratification, by a Senate which feels that the bill is not fundamentally changing the system and taking out those unfair aspects of it, says Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima).

Multiple politicians have claimed that no schools would lose money under the FSFP, but this simply is not the case. Nearly 100 schools would lose money at some point over the life of the plan, and, since these numbers are based on current projections, it is impossible to say how much that number could increase.

The issue is even more dire in an era of global pandemic and forced school reopenings. Instead of tinkering with funding models that will have no positive bearing upon education and safety, guaranteed money should be allotted to all districts to allow them to increase their online educational options until the pandemic is contained.

The school funding component of HB 110 was only ever a facade. Though the FSFP has garnered by far the greatest level of media attention of any aspect of HB 110, the tax cuts are the bills centerpiece for the bipartisan group of representatives who have molded the bill and overwhelmingly voted for passage.

According to Policy Matters Ohio, the three-fifths of tax filers who are paid less than $61,000 a year would get just 7% of the total tax cut. Those in the middle fifth of the income spectrum, making between $40,000 and $61,000 a year, on average would pay $7 less a year. Nearly half of the tax reduction would go to the top 5%, who are paid more than $205,000, with the top 1%, who make at least $490,000, averaging a $612 cut and getting nearly a quarter of the tax savings.

Over the past year, both big business parties and their backers in the teachers unions have made it abundantly clear that they have no concern for the lives and well-being of educators, parents and students.

In order to fully fund remote learning until the pandemic is contained, and to secure the right to free, high quality public education, it is necessary to form an Ohio Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committees to coordinate a broad-based struggle against the ruling class attacks on public education. Such committees have been formed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and numerous other states across the US and internationally. We urge all Ohio educators, parents and students to sign up to form a committee today !
The family of a young mother who was allegedly burned to death by her estranged ex-husband have told of the heartwarming sight of her three children playing happily with their cousins after moving in with their aunt.

Kelly Wilkinson, 27, was found dead with severe burns in the backyard of her home in Arundel on the Gold Coast about 6.40am on April 20.

Her ex-husband Brian Earl Johnston - an ex-corporal in the US military - has been charged with her murder and breaching a domestic violence order.

Ms Wilkinson's sister Danielle Carroll and her husband Rhys, who have five kids of their own, have stepped in to look after the 27-year-old's three children who are all under the age of nine.

Kelly Wilkinson was found dead in the backyard of her home in Arundel on the Gold Coast about 6.40am on April 20

Ms Carroll said her family were having 'open discussions' with the children to speak about their lives going forward.

Ms Wilkinson's children were at home during the alleged attack, with a neighbour later saying he found them in a distressed state in the driveway.

'[We have been] letting them know they have a sense of belonging at our house, they are eternally loved and we are one big family now,' Ms Carroll told the Today show.

The sister said she felt a sense of responsibility to look after the children because Ms Wilkinson 'stood up and did what she had to do for them' when she was still alive.

Ms Wilkinson is believed to have visited police on two separate occasions before her American husband allegedly set her on fire in the backyard of her home.

'I think now that has been passed over to me and that is what we need to do,' Ms Carroll said.

She said she and her husband were trying their hardest to make her sister's children's comfortable in their four-bedroom home.

'We have a car that suits a seven person family  We need to find a car that will fit us all in,' they said.

Ms Wilkinson's (left) estranged partner Brian Johnston (right) has been charged with her murder

'We just want to give these guys the best quality of life we can to get them through what they have been through - including our own kids.

'The kids are all working together in that way. The only thing we can do now is give them the best quality of life that we can.'

Ms Carroll said her sister was an 'amazing mum' who 'gave her everything' for her children.

'She lit up a room,' her husband added. 'No matter what she was going through she was the light of the room.'

Ms Wilkinson's sister Danielle Carroll with her husband Rhys. The couple, who have five kids of their own, have stepped in to look after the 27-year-old's three children

Ms Carroll's husband is the stepbrother of businesswoman Tamika Smith, who has launched a campaign to build a home on the Gold Coast for the three children.

Ms Smith said she was motivated to organise construction of the home after a heartbreaking visit to see the children this week.

'Walking in last night, I was there for probably five minutes and this little two-year-old grabbed my hand and called me "mummy" and she's just so confused,' Ms Smith told the Gold Coast Bulletin.

'You've got a two-year-old looking for her mum. We don't have the answers as to why she's not here, which is why I go "How do we give these children any faith in humanity, how do we show them that there are good people when they've experienced so much heartache at the age of two?"'

Ms Wilkinson's three young children are now staying at her sister Danielle Carroll's home

'As a nation I feel like we walked away from their mum, so what are we doing to support the kids so we don't walk away from them?'.

Assistant Queensland Police Commissioner Brian Codd last Thursday confirmed Ms Wilkinson had approached police over 'domestic and family violence issues'.

Mr Codd's remarks came amid community anger over claims Ms Wilkinson and her family had gone to police on several occasions.

Asked if there were systematic issues in the police service, Mr Codd said her death was 'ultimately a failure' and that the matter was being reviewed.

'A woman has died. She has been killed, we will allege, in horrific circumstances. We're certainly going to make sure we look to improve... and correct any parts of the system that we control,' he said.

Johnston was taken to hospital, where he was held under police guard, and remains in an induced coma. He was charged and his case made a brief appearance in court last week.

He was formally refused bail with his case to return to court at a later date.

Ms Wilkinson's father, Reg (centre), and family attended an evening vigil for Ms Wilkinson on Monday evening

More than 1000 locals turned out to pay tribute to Ms Wilkinson, many wearing green, her favourite colour - including her sister and her partner (pictured, first and second from left)

On Monday evening, about 1,000 people, many wearing Ms Wilkinson's favourite colour green, gathered at the Gold Coast Titans training ground to pay a silent tribute to Ms Wilkinson.

Some people brought inflatable green balloons which were released at the end of the vigil, while others carried sunflowers - Ms Wilkinson's favourite flower.

As a guitarist played acoustic versions of Ed Sheeran's 'Perfect' and Coldplay's 'Fix You', Ms Wilkinson's family arrived and made their way to a row of white chairs at the front, her father Reg in tears as he trailed his daughters Natalie and Emma, his arm around daughter Danielle.

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Chief Executive Officer of the Pune-based Serum Institute of India Adar Poonawalla will get Y category security from the Centre. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) will provide this security cover to Poonawalla.

This decision by the Union government came after the director, government and regulatory affairs at Serum Institute of India Prakash Kumar Singh wrote to the Union Home Minister Amit Shah on April 16.

In this letter, Singh had requested the Union Home Ministry to provide security to Poonawalla. Singh also talked about the threats that Poonawalla had received from various groups over supplies of the Serum Institute's coronavirus vaccine.

Singh added, "We are working shoulder to shoulder to fight against COVID-19 pandemic with the Government of India under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi."

This announcement assumes importance as the Pune-based pharma major decided to lower the prices of its vaccine for states from Rs 300 per dose to Rs 400 per dose.

Poonawalla tweeted, "As a philanthropic gesture on behalf of @SerumInstIndia, I hereby reduce the price to the states from Rs 400 to Rs 300 per dose, effective immediately; this will save thousands of crores of state funds going forward. This will enable more vaccinations and save countless lives."





As a philanthropic gesture on behalf of @SerumInstIndia, I hereby reduce the price to the states from Rs.400 to Rs.300 per dose, effective immediately; this will save thousands of crores of state funds going forward. This will enable more vaccinations and save countless lives. a Adar Poonawalla (@adarpoonawalla) April 28, 2021

Edited by Mehak Agarwal; with PTI inputs

Also read: Serum Institute reduces Covishield price for govt hospitals to Rs 300

Also read: 'Organised loot': PIL filed in Bombay HC, seeks sale of COVID-19 vaccines at Rs 150 per dose
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  Half of Filipinos do not have access to a nearby primary care facility or one that patients can reach within 30 minutes, according to the Department of Health.

Health Undersecretary Lilibeth David told a Senate hearing on Thursday that the country has only 2,593 rural health units. Under the Philippine Health Facility Development Plan 2020-2040, the DOH seeks to double the facilities so all Filipinos can have access to primary care in just half an hour.

Target areas are mostly in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Bicol, and Mimaropa, David said.

Senator Pia Cayetano, vice chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Demography, asked David if the target is realistic. The panel, along with the committees on public works, ways and means, and finance, are studying proposals to put up various public health facilities across the country.

Baka (Maybe) its a pie in the sky, Cayetano said.

Yes, baka (maybe) its just a dream, Senator Nancy Binay added, citing the need to review the parameter.

David also said the Philippines only has 1.2 beds for every 1,000 people, a ratio that is comparable to the world's poorest countries. She said the country should transition to an upper middle-income country with an average bed to population ratio of 4-to-1,000.

Cayetano also raised the problem with manpower, saying that even if the government is able to construct over 2,000 more rural health units, no health worker could man them. This is the problem with BARMM, David admitted.

Generally, nakikita namin sa (we see in) BARMM, because its a conflict area so we have difficulty finding HR (human resources) to reside in the area and to serve, David said. Thats the same problem we have with the islands.

Cayetano said the government should find a way to encourage more health workers to serve in far-flung areas, possibly through an intensive immersion program for medical students.

Early this year, President Rodrigo Duterte signed a law granting medical scholarships to aspiring doctors, a measure pushed by lawmakers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cayetano said nurses and other health workers should be given the same privilege. David agreed.

We have to be ready to make that investment We really need local scholarship so they will go back to the area, the health official said.

During the Senate hearing, Dr. Vincent Balanag, Executive Director 4 of the Philippine Lung Center, also called for spirometry tests in all barangay health stations to detect asthma, saying this is a basic need.

Representatives from specialty centers like the Philippine Lung Center, Philippine Heart Center, and the National Kidney and Transplant Institute also lamented the lack of facilities and health specialists. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, they had to reduce the number of hospital beds to observe social distancing and prevent virus transmission.
Copenhagen, April 29 : Denmark will tighten travel restrictions for those from India from Thursday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

The ministry updated its travel guide on India and raised the risk assessment from "orange" to "red," the highest level, and advised against all travels to India, including business trip, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The decision was made to "limit the risk of importing the virus variant B.1.617 to Denmark," said the ministry in a press release.

Foreigners from India will only be allowed entry into Denmark for a recognisable purpose, according to the new travel restrictions.

Danish citizens and people who already reside in Denmark can continue to enter Denmark from India.

Denmark now joins several European countries including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain that have already applied travel restrictions on India.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
April 29, 2021

Nine teams took home thousands of dollars in prizes last week at Idaho States Shark Tank 101 Entrepreneur Challenge.

Every semester the Idaho State University College of Business and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) host the challenge to give students across campus and in all sections of the Management 1101 course the opportunity to develop a business proposal for a unique idea then present it in a four-minute pitch to a panel of judges for a chance at nearly $4,000 in cash prizes. Because the competition is open to all sections, high school students taking the dual enrollment Management 1101 course have also competed.

This semester, 55 ideas were presented with pitches coming from 90 underclassmen students. In total, 110 individual pitches were given in 15-minute intervals to a group of 19 judges including alumni, community business people and Idaho State faculty and staff. According to program advisor and director of CEED, Dr. Jeff Street, the competition spanned over two days taking place on Zoom and consisted of eight hours of judging.

"The Shark Tank 101 Entrepreneur Challenge encourages underclassmen students to explore innovation and their latent entrepreneurial interests, Street said. Idaho is known for its entrepreneurial spirit, and we believe some of the best ideas come from young people like our amazing Idaho State students!

Teams are chosen based on a score range. The first-place prize of $500 went to four teams:

Amy Perez Swift and Alexander Perez: Swiftly Unique

Focuses on helping end the pollution of glass bottles by creating a new way to innovate recycled wine and beer bottles into uniquely designed candles.

Briana Steele: Mobile Note

An online notary platform, linking DocuSign and the National Notary Associations database of educated notaries around the country.

Cristina Roberts and Madi Hernandez: eMirror Fit

A virtual fitting room. When scrolling through the apparel, the customer can choose an item and try it on as the website allows them to create a virtual mannequin of themselves.

Mya McKown and Zayne Dayley: Auto Detailer

On-site auto detailing in which the company travels to the customers/clients themselves to detail their vehicles, making it as convenient for them as we can.

The second-place prize of $350 went to:

Nathan Speck: Little Navarre

A Basque Food Truck for both a cultural and culinary experience. It would bring the cooking experience to the customer by having a cooking area where the customer gets to watch their food being made.

And the third-place prizes went to four teams winning $250:

Adriene Pavek and Mei Ryan: Door2Door

An app that connects our staff with family members of older adults to help them with daily activities like mowing the lawn, cooking meals, walking the dog, etc. The software functions similarly to DoorDash or Uber.

Corey Bingham and Grant Baird: Bumble Gum

A honey exchange. Sourced locally in the area of the customer, natural honey available in individual, small, glass, reusable bottles shipped nationally.

Scott Madrid: Smart Deck

Spa Foundation Kit that can be installed in the same day as purchase of spa, suitable for maintaining warranty of spa unit.

Vivian Daley and Haley Negus: The Daze Bed and Brunch

A beautiful, bright, classy place, where you can wed, bed and brunch.

College of Business Dean, Dr. Shane Hunt also chose a winner for the Deans Choice Award of $500. Hunt chose this winner based on best efforts in marketing and presentation going to Amy Perez Swift and Alexander Perez of Swiftly Unique.

Street said fall semester had an equally large participation of students, consisting of 86 underclassmen.

All-in-all, combining the two semesters, nearly 20 percent of the College of Business undergraduate enrollment has gone through the Shark Tank experience, said Street. He said they are also counting on adding 10 to 15 students to that percentage in the upcoming summer 2021 course.

Students ideas must follow a small criterion including: being a problem, with a proposed solution and the idea must have a targeted customer that the business would impact.

Management 1101 was developed by the group of instructors teaching the different sections, Street explained. Our vision for this class was to create a multi-component course that promotes active learning and engagement with the realities of business, encouraging students to think like business people rather than just learning about them. We treat entrepreneurship as a method that demands practice. Entrepreneurship practice requires creative and nimble thinking leading to a heightened level of experimentation, such as Shark Tank 101.
Vientiane, April 29 : The third batch of China-donated Covid-19 vaccines has arrived in and been handed over to Laos.

The Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccines were handed over by Chinese Ambassador to Laos Jiang Zaidong in the Lao Health Ministry on Tuesday.

The Chinese ambassador said that the China-Laos anti-epidemic cooperation has become an important carrier for building a community with a shared future. "We will not forget that when China was struggling to fight the epidemic, the Lao side donated cash and batches of anti-epidemic materials to China." "Since the outbreak of the epidemic in Laos, China has dispatched two expert teams, provided a large amount of supplies, helped build nucleic acid testing laboratories, and donated three batches of vaccines," the Xinhua news agency quoted the Ambassador as saying.

The Covid-19 epidemic in Laos has spread rapidly this month, Ambassador Jiang said, adding "We believe that under the strong leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and the government, the brotherly Lao people will surely overcome the epidemic. We are willing to continue to provide assistance to this end." Lao LPRP central committee politburo member, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the National Taskforce Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control Kikeo Khaykhamphithoune said on the same occasion that whenever it is in difficulties, Laos will surely receive the precious assistance from the Communist Party of China, the Chinese government and the Chinese people.

China's vaccines are safe, reliable and efficient, Kikeo said, adding that the Lao side has already vaccinated front-line high-risk border personnel, medical staff and some citizens with Chinese vaccines.

"I have also been vaccinated (with Chinese vaccines) without any side effects, and everyone takes it into their confidence here," Kikeo said.

Kikeo believed that his country, with the strong support from China, will surely win the final victory over the pandemic.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Stevie Award judges said, Classifying the support into premium and expert levels gives the CS team focused attention to the ones who need the most [support]. The judges went on to add, the retention rate indicates great customer service by Cyara CS team."

Cyara, provider of the award-winning Automated CX Assurance Platform, today announced it was named the winner of a Silver Stevie Award in the Customer Service Department of the Year category in the 19th Annual American Business Awards.

The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations  public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word meaning crowned, the awards will be virtually presented to winners during a live event on Wednesday, June 30. Tickets for the virtual event are now on sale.

More than 3,800 nominations  a record number - from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Startup of the Year, Executive of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Marketing Campaign of the Year, Virtual Event of the Year, and App of the Year, among others. Cyara was nominated in the Customer Service Department of the Year category for stepping up to provide exceptional customer support in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We realized the tremendous pressures our customers were facing to deliver exceptional customer experiences once the pandemic hit. Cyara is in the business of assuring that our customers deliver a great CX, so we knew we had to be there for them and roll out new services to support them, said Alok Kulkarni, CEO of Cyara. Its an honor to receive this award for our efforts and we will continue to drive towards providing exceptional services, peace of mind and self-service options for our customers.

Cyara provides a customer experience (CX) assurance platform that helps organizations achieve flawless customer experiences through automated testing and monitoring that simulate real world customer interactions across digital and voice channels. Cyara has rolled out several new features designed to support customers through turbulent times and ensure theyre reaping the full value from Cyaras Automated CX Assurance Platform:



For customers who need more guidance, Cyara released two new levels of support during COVID called Premium Support and Expert Services.

Every customer has access to a self-service Knowledge Center that offers a library of videos and knowledge articles on how to use Cyara, which has seen a 200% growth in usage over the last year alone.

Offer free monitoring of customers top five toll-free numbers for 90 days

Cyara consistently sees a retention rate of 95% or higher

Maintained enviable NPS and CSAT scores, currently at 63 NPS and 96 CSAT.

In response to Cyaras success and customer-serving initiatives, Stevie Award judges said, Classifying the support into premium and expert levels gives the CS team focused attention to the ones who need the most [support]. The judges went on to add, the retention rate indicates great customer service by Cyara CS team.

More than 250 professionals worldwide participated in the judging process to select this years Stevie Award winners.

The American economy continues to show its resilience, and as were poised on the beginning of what should be a phenomenal period of growth, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of a wide range of organizations and people over the past 18 months, said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher. This years Stevie-winning nominations in The American Business Awards are testament to the ingenuity, the commitment, the passion, the adaptability, and the creativity of the American people. We look forward to celebrating this years winners during our virtual ceremony on June 30.

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2021 Stevie winners are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

About Cyara

As the worlds leading Automated CX Assurance platform provider, Cyara accelerates the delivery of flawless customer journeys across digital and voice channels while reducing the risk of customer-facing defects. Every day, the most recognizable brands in the world trust the Cyara Platform to deliver customer smiles at scale. For more information, please visit cyara.com.

About The Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The Stevies also produce the annual Women|Future Conference. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

Sponsors of the 2021 American Business Awards include John Hancock Financial Services, Melissa Sones Consulting, and SoftPro.

Media Contact:

Laura Asendio

925-271-8220

10Fold Communications for Cyara

cyara@10fold.com
Its surprisingly easy to fall for an online scam even if youre hyperaware of all the ways bad actors can trick you. Online scammers are playing a numbers game. If they send out their scams to enough people, theyll find a few people who posses a magic combination: Folks who are distracted by life and also concerned with their online accounts.

Thats how I almost fell for an online scam. My credit card bill was coming due, but I was busy that month, and paying the bill was just one of many things percolating in the back of my mind. Then I suddenly got an email stating my bank was freezing my account if I didnt login. Oh no! I thought. Im late paying my bill.

Without another thought, I clicked on the link in the email, even though I knew the right thing to do was type out the URL myself. I was just about to put in my login details when another thought came bubbling to the surface: Something seemed not quite right.

I checked the website address, and sure enough I was about to enter my details into a phony website designed to harvest login credentials from my bank. It was a near miss. I had almost been the victim of phishing. This happened despite the fact that Ive reported on just these kinds of exploits. Heck, Id even written several articles with security tips about how you should never click on a link to your bank from inside an email.

Caught at the right moment of vulnerability, anyone can fall for an online scam. When youre prepared, however, spotting an online scam is fairly straightforward. Then when the stars align to make you susceptible to an online scam, you might save yourself by knowing what to look for.

Here are some basic rules you can use to keep yourself and your online accounts out of the hands of the bad guys.

Rule #1: If youre not expecting it, you shouldnt expect it

IDG An example of a scam banking email.

A standard trick for online scams is to get you to click on a link. This link can show up in an email, a hijacked messaging account of one of your friends, a WhatsApp message, or even an SMS. The idea is to direct you to a malicious website. Then the scammers will try to download malware onto your device, or trick you into revealing your login credentials on a phony website that looks like the real thing.

The best way to combat these scams is to never clink on a link you werent expecting. If you get an email stating your bank account is about to be frozen, or your PayPal email account suddenly needs to be validated, dont click. Even if you check that the email address and the link are leading to the real thing, just as a matter of security dont click. Instead, enter the website address yourself by typing it out in the address bar. Dont search for itinstead type it out yourself.

Then, once youve logged in to the legitimate website, youll be able to see if whatever the email claimed was real.

Tip: A good way to avoid falling for a phishing website is to use a password manager and its browser extension. If you land on a website that isnt legitimate then the extension wont supply your login details. Indeed, even if a website has a tricky URL like paypal.com.098uq3409847890.net it shouldnt fool mainstream password managers.

Rule #2: Dont buy into urgency

DSGpro / Getty Images

A classic scam is for someone to hijack a persons Facebook account and then contact all her friends via the hijacked account. Often the scammer will claim some kind of emergency, saying your friend is in jeopardy such as, Im in London. Ive been robbed, and I have no money.

When you know this is a scam, you can see where its headed. In the moment of urgency, however, it can be harder to spot. Of course, you want to help your friend: Oh my goodness! A foreign country where they might end up on the street? I need to help.

Because an emergency is in play, scammers are banking on the likelihood you wont look too closely at the details, and instead just take action. But on your end, you must resist the urge to act immediately. If your friend is in dire straits, you can still ask to talk to her on the phone, or verify with someone else over the phone that she is truly where she claims to be. The key is to talk to another human being whose voice you can recognize because pretending to be someone else via a text chat is so easy. Do not, however, take the word of some hotel manager or a supposed good Samaritan whos speaking on behalf of your friend.

You can apply the same basic principle when it comes to taking immediate action to unfreeze your account. First, a bank or credit card company is more likely to call you or send a letter about dramatic action versus dropping you a note in Gmail. Nevertheless, if you want to be sure, type in the URL of your bank or credit card manually to visit the site. If there is truly a threat to your account, the institution will alert you once you login.

Rule #3: If its too good to be true

IDG The Better Business Bureaus Scam Tracker.

If its too good to be true, then it probably is. This may be a cliche, but its also a good rule of thumb. Money doesnt just come tumbling out of your inbox, after all. If a lawyer or business contacts you via email about making a tidy profit on a business transaction or reclaiming some kind of inheritance money, dont fall for it. This sort of thing just doesnt happen. No matter how legitimate these offers may seem.

This also goes for online sales. Yes, you can find some fantastic sale prices on Amazon, Best Buy, and other places online. But if you get an email or see a link on social media leading you to an incredible sale price on a site youve never heard of, then take a step back. Do some basic research using consumer sites like Trustpilot, Sitejabber, and the Better Business Bureau to see what others have to say about the business. What youre looking for is overwhelming evidence that the site is legitimate. If you dont find any information about the site or only a few sparse reviews, that is a huge red flag.

Advanced Tip: Hover over links

The next time you get a legitimate email from your bank, try this trick for practice. Use your mouse pointer to hover over the button or link your bank wants you to click without actually clicking it. Next, look in the lower left corner of your browser window. You should see the web address the link will take you to.

Thats an easy way to spot a scam because a bad link will never lead to your banks website, and scammers will often use a link-shortening service to try and hide that fact.

There are a few other things you can watch out for, such as poorly worded emails and chat messages, though this is becoming a less reliable guide in recent years. Another red flag is when someone asks for money in a non-traditional form like a gift card or a cash reload card. Even requests for a wiring money can be suspect. The FTC has a good video on what to watch out for when being asked for money via the phone or online.

The Internet is a great place to find information and manage your life, but it can also be a place where it is far too easy to get duped if youre not paying attention.
Website launch today at www.safeselfstorage.org

HONG KONG, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "Today, the Self Storage Association Asia (SSAA) establishes Asia's first standards and certification programme in Hong Kong: S.A.F.E. Self Storage Standards," says the Chair of the Self Storage Association Asia, Helen Ng. "Consumers and businesses alike will use this AP approved process to have confidence in self storage sites they choose to do business with."

Self Storage Association Asia (PRNewsfoto/Self Storage Association Asia)

The S.A.F.E. Self Storage Standards promotes regulatory compliance, best practice and accountability in the self storage industry in Hong Kong.

S.A.F.E. stands for:

S: Self Storage

A: Assured

F: Fit-out

E: Endorsement

The S.A.F.E. Self Storage Standards follows Fire Service Department and Building Department guidelines to promote safe, sensible and regulatory-compliant working and self-storage environments. Applicants must pass a rigorous, independent, government Authorised Person (AP) approved process to receive a Gold, Silver or Bronze certificate for each location.

The Association has appointed an independent real estate consultancy Knight Frank to exclusively manage the implementation of the programme and independently assess self storage facilities in Hong Kong. The SSAA will maintain oversight and provide an online reference at www.safeselfstorage.org for those seeking to authenticate the status of certified operators and their sites.

"Knight Frank is proud to assist in the elevation of self storage standards in Hong Kong. This will be an invaluable decision-making factor for institutional investors, commercial lenders, insurance companies and financiers making decisions about doing business with self storage operators," says Calvin Chan, Director, Head of Building Services, Knight Frank. "Consumers and businesses will be able to have peace of mind knowing that APs have signed off on the sites represented on the SAFE website."

Gold Certificates will indicate a site is compliant with BD and FSD fire regulations at time of inspection and will be valid for three years.

Story continues

Silver Certificates will indicate plans to bring a site into compliance are AP approved and will be valid for one year while the operator is completing renovations.

Bronze Certificates indicate plans for a new (yet to be built) site are AP approved and should, when built, provide for an AP approved site. They are targeted at the business community.

Industry players are supportive of this move.

"We are encouraged by this move from the self storage association to promote good practice and compliance in the self storage industry, which we believe will restore landlord and customer confidence in what is a much-needed sector in Hong Kong. As a major industrial and business space provider across Hong Kong, we support the development of clear guidelines and policies in this sector," says Mr Kristoffer Harvey, CEO of Goodman Asia, the leading and most diversified provider of modern warehouse space in Hong Kong.

Major operators have embraced the programme and Hong Kong's best firms have registered one location each to start with many more to follow.

Participating firms include:

RedBox Storage

The Store House

StoreFriendly

Hong Kong Storage

SC Storage

StorageWorks

100Storage (The Storage)

"More companies are applying and more sites of these firms will be added in the coming months as they pass the AP process," says Andrew Work, Executive Director, SSAA. "We look forward to the vast majority of locations owned by reputable companies joining the programme in the next 12 to 24 months."

"The S.A.F.E Self Storage Standards programme will ensure enhanced levels of fire safety that support the solutions proposed by relevant Hong Kong government bodies," said Simon Tyrrell, Chairman of RedBox Storage. "We believe the S.A.F.E. programme will reinforce transparency and increase customer confidence. It will establish recognised standards of compliance that landlords, bankers, insurers and prospective investors apply to all operators. Ultimately, we aim to redefine the self storage industry as a trusted partner of the stakeholders it serves."

Photo Album available here: https://bit.ly/3sP82xa

About SSAA

Self Storage Association Asia ("SSAA") is the non-profit industry body representing the Self Storage and Valet Storage industry across Asia and supporting members to drive best practices and professionalism across the storage sector.

For more details about SSAA and the S.A.F.E Self Storage Standards Programme, please visit www.safeselfstorage.org

SOURCE Self Storage Association Asia
Question is how to lure North Korea back to dialogue



U.S. President Joe Biden has reaffirmed his position on how to deal with threats from North Korea and Iran. He has stressed the importance of diplomacy and deterrence to better respond to such threats by stepping up cooperation with America's allies.



In his address to a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, Biden called the nuclear programs of Pyongyang and Tehran a "serious threat" to America and the world. "We are going to be working closely with our allies to address the threats posed by both of these countries through diplomacy, as well as stern deterrence," Biden said a day before marking his 100th day in office.



Such remarks from Biden are nothing new. Yet they are noteworthy as he is in the final stage of drawing up his North Korea policy after conducting a review on the country, which is balking at abandoning its nuclear weapons program. By focusing on diplomacy, he is apparently trying to send a message to not only North Korea but also Iran that the U.S. is ready to resume dialogue with them to find diplomatic solutions.



At the same time, Biden is seeking to send a warning to them that they should refrain from any provocative acts. By using the expression "stern deterrence," he has made it clear that the U.S. will not sit idly by if North Korea or Iran flex their military muscles. They should take seriously what Biden said and return to negotiations sooner rather than later.



Biden's foreign policy is based on multilateralism, a major shift from the unilateralism of his predecessor, Donald Trump. Since his inauguration, the U.S. president has pledged to strengthen America's alliances with other countries, advocate democratic values and restore the U.S.'s global leadership. As he pointed out, the U.S. cannot go it alone in dealing with global issues, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics and cybersecurity.



One such matter is the North Korean nuclear program. Trump failed to achieve the denuclearization of the North, although he held a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June 2018 in Singapore. His top-down approach fell apart when their second meeting in Hanoi in February 2019 ended without a deal. This shows how difficult it is to make real progress in prodding the Kim regime to move toward peace.



Against this backdrop, Biden is certain to take a new approach which is very different from that of Trump. His North Korea policy is expected to be finalized before he has a summit with President Moon Jae-in in Washington next month. Biden and Moon should have closer consultations and coordination to map out a new strategy to push for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the North.



Yet the question is how to lure the recalcitrant North back to dialogue. The Kim regime has shown no signs of accepting any peace overtures from Seoul or Washington. We hope the upcoming Moon-Biden summit will be an occasion to cement the bilateral alliance and restart stalled denuclearization talks with Pyongyang.


3rd batch of China-donated COVID-19 vaccines handed over to Laos

Xinhua) 10:26, April 29, 2021

Staff members unload China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines at Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, Laos, on April 26 , 2021. (Xinhua/Zhang Jianhua)

Laos has vaccinated front-line high-risk border personnel, medical staff and some citizens with Chinese vaccines, which are safe, reliable and efficient, said a Lao official.

VIENTIANE, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The third batch of China-donated COVID-19 vaccines has arrived in and been handed over to Laos.

The Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines were handed over by Chinese Ambassador to Laos Jiang Zaidong in the Lao Health Ministry on Tuesday.

The Chinese ambassador said that the China-Laos anti-epidemic cooperation has become an important carrier for building a community with a shared future. "We will not forget that when China was struggling to fight the epidemic, the Lao side donated cash and batches of anti-epidemic materials to China."

"Since the outbreak of the epidemic in Laos, China has dispatched two expert teams, provided a large amount of supplies, helped build nucleic acid testing laboratories, and donated three batches of vaccines," the ambassador said.

The COVID-19 epidemic in Laos has spread rapidly this month, Ambassador Jiang said, adding "We believe that under the strong leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and the government, the brotherly Lao people will surely overcome the epidemic. We are willing to continue to provide assistance to this end."

Lao LPRP central committee politburo member, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the National Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control Kikeo Khaykhamphithoune said on the same occasion that whenever it is in difficulties, Laos will surely receive the precious assistance from the Communist Party of China, the Chinese government and the Chinese people.

China's vaccines are safe, reliable and efficient, Kikeo said, adding that the Lao side has already vaccinated front-line high-risk border personnel, medical staff and some citizens with Chinese vaccines.

"I have also been vaccinated (with Chinese vaccines) without any side effects, and everyone takes it into their confidence here," Kikeo said.

Kikeo believed that his country, with the strong support from China, will surely win the final victory over the pandemic.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
The Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia commemorated the mid-way mark of the construction of the Dumat Al Jandal wind farm, the kingdoms first utility-scale wind farm of more than 400MW capacity and the largest in the Middle East.

Vestas, the energy industrys global partner on sustainable energy solutions, is playing a vital role in the project, having installed half of the 99 V150-4.2MW wind turbines for the project.

Located in the Al Jouf province, 900km north of Riyadh, the Dumat Al Jandal wind farm project was awarded to the consortium by the Renewable Energy Project Development Office (Repdo) of the Saudi Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources (MEIM) in 2019.

As per the deal, the Dumat Al Jandal wind farm will supply electricity under a 20-year purchase agreement (PPA) with the Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC), a subsidiary of the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), the Saudi power generation and distribution company.

Developed by a consortium led by renewable energy leaders in the region: EDF Renewables and Masdar, the EPC order was awarded to Vestas in 2019.

The scope of work included the supply and installation of 99 V150-4.2MW wind turbines, as well as a 20-year Active Output Management 4000 service agreement for the operation and maintenance of the wind farm.

Vestas was one of the first companies to introduce wind power in the country in 2013. Since then, Vestas has held several training programs and met-mast campaigns in the Kingdom, and is now contributing to Saudi Arabias 16GW by 2030 through the Dumat Al Jandal wind farm.

Once completed and commercially operational in 2022, the wind farm will potentially supply clean electricity to 70,000 Saudi households and will displace 988,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year, in support of the kingdoms climate change.

Minister of Energy Abdulaziz Bin Salman along with Prince Faisal bin Nawaf, Governor of Al Jouf Province, Ole E. Moesby, Ambassador of Denmark to Saudi Arabia, Ludovic Pouille, Ambassador of France to Saudi Arabia, Bruno Bensasson, Group Senior Executive VP Renewable Energies, and CEO of EDF Renewables and Fawaz Al Muharrami, Acting Executive Director, Clean Energy, Masdar, visited the Dumat Al Jandal construction site to commemorate the installation of the wind turbines by Vestas.

Vestas Mena General Manager Muhamed Bou-Zeid said: "Our ambition as a sustainable energy solutions provider with a technology leadership in wind power is to co-create a renewable energy hub in Saudi Arabia and for the wider Middle East together with other sustainability leaders in the region."

"We believe that the Dumat Al Jandal wind farm is the first step to diversifying not only the energy sector but also the Renewable Energy sector by adding wind power into the energy mix and ultimately creating three times more work opportunities for the local talent. As we strive to complete this project with Quality and Safety as priority, we look forward to accelerating Saudi Arabias clean energy transition and sustainability leadership journey," he added.
You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on any of your favorite apps 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 | April 29, 2021

An attorney in Luzerne County left his role as the president of the states Bar Association after being charged with soliciting prostitution. The State System of Higher Educations governing board voted in favor of merging Pennsylvanias six state universities into two. A barn that was used as a field hospital during the Civil War was burned down in a recent Gettysburg fire. And the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board revealed which liquor residents purchased the most during the pandemic.

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:

If you enjoy Today in Pa, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Amazon. Reviews help others find the show and, besides, wed like to know what you think about the program, too.
English French

PRESS RELEASE

April 29th, 2021

Aeroports de Paris SA

Groupe ADP announces the completion by TAV Airports of the full ownership acquisition of Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan

As disclosed on May 8th, 20201, a consortium led by TAV Airports (of which Groupe ADP owns 46.38% of the capital) has signed on May 7th, 2020 a Share Purchase Agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of Almaty Airport and the associated jet fuel activities, which will be delegated to a dedicated operator, and services for an Enterprise Value of $415 million.

The share transfer of Almaty Airport took place on April 29th, 2021. Almaty Airport is now fully owned by the consortium of which TAV Airports is an 85% shareholder. VPE Capital, a specialist fund manager in the capital markets in Russia and the CIS2, holds the remaining 15% stake in the consortium. The airport will be fully consolidated into TAV Airports' accounts and therefore in the accounts of Aeroports de Paris SA.

The previously agreed purchase price was $415 million. The current global crisis in the airline industry has led to submit a part of this purchase price ($50 million) to the condition of the achievement of a certain level of traffic at pre-determined dates (earn-out scheme).

The airport of Almaty, Kazakhstan's economic capital, is the biggest airport in Central Asia: it welcomed approximately 6.4 million passengers in 2019, around half of which were from international routes. Kazakhstan, the biggest landlocked country in the world with 2.7 million square km, is the driver of economic growth in the region, and stands for 60% of Central Asia's GDP.

Investor Relations: Audrey Arnoux, Head of Investor Relations +33 6 61 27 07 39 - invest@adp.fr

Press contact: Lola Bourget, Head of Medias and Reputation Department +33 1 74 25 23 23

Groupe ADP develops and manages airports, including Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly and Paris-Le Bourget. In 2020, the group handled through its brand Paris Aeroport 33.1 million passengers and 1.8 million metric tons of freight and mail at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly, and more than 96.3 million passengers in airports abroad. Boasting an exceptional geographic location and a major catchment area, the group is pursuing its strategy of adapting and modernizing its terminal facilities and upgrading quality of services; the group also intends to develop its retail and real estate businesses. In 2020, group revenue stood at 2,137 million and net result attributable to the Group at -1,169 million.

Registered office: 1, rue de France, 93 290 Tremblay-en-France. Aeroports de Paris is a public limited company (Societe Anonyme) with share capital of 296,881,806. Registered in the Bobigny Trade and Company Register under no. 552 016 628. groupeadp.fr

1 See May 8th, 2020 press release: "Groupe ADP announces the signing of an agreement by TAV Airports for the acquisition of Almaty airport".

2 CIS: Commonwealth of Independent States.

Attachment
New York State Senate Republicans on Tuesday criticized a proposed bill which could increase the states gas tax, raising prices by as much as 55 cents per gallon. It's a proposal which has also drawn the ire of local business leaders.

It would be a tremendous hit for everybody in our state, and specifically in our community," said John Collis, the third generation part owner of Fred F. Collis And Sons Heating in Yorkville. "People would have to pay more for the price to heat their home, they would have to pay more to run their vehicles. An average homeowner could probably be seeing several, you know, three $400 increase per year.

The proposed bill in question is the Climate and Community Investment Act, which advocates say would create over 150,000 jobs in New York state and make large scale investments in renewable energy. It would be paid for by taxing greenhouse gas emissions at $55 per ton, raising over $15 billion per year. But the bill has caused brushback from Democrats and Republicans alike.

This is an excessive amount of funding that would have to be placed down in regards to a tax," said Democratic Assemblywoman Marianne Buttenschon, D-119. "Another added tax that at this point I do not believe is sustainable.

Sen. Joe Griffo, R-47, says this will make New York's gas tax more than 57% higher than any other state.

While we must continue to take action to protect our environment, evidence has shown that New Yorks emissions have fallen by as much as 95 percent since 1990, Sen. Griffo said. We can continue on this trajectory to reduce our carbon footprint but must remain mindful of the affect that proposals such as this will have on the many New Yorkers who use a vehicle every day and who will be severely punished by this new gas tax. This will make it even more expensive to commute to work, bring your children to school, take your family out for a day trip and keep your house warm on a cold night. We should be focused on making New York more affordable and stopping the exodus of people, families and businesses from our state and not making it more difficult for New Yorkers to live and do business here.

The bills advocates cite a rebate for low and middle income residents, saving them from having to pay the tax. They also cite the urgency of the climate crisis, and the need to act now before a point of no return. Assemblywoman Buttenschon agrees with their sentiment, but says moving too fast could cause problems.

I support a slow and steady progression that looks at more strategic planning, and goals that are benchmarks that are much more significant in the sense of small steps," Buttenschon said.

The bill is currently in legislative committee.
Scientists have revealed the migration 'superhighways' that up to 6.5 million Indigenous people likely used to travel across Australia over the past 70,000 years.

While many aboriginal cultures believe they have always lived across Australia, some have strong oral histories of ancestors arriving from the north.

Despite scarce archaeological evidence, experts believe humanity first arrived in Australia in the northwest, to spread all the way down to Tasmania in the southeast.

Researchers used advanced modelling to predict how humanity settled 'Sahul'  the land formed when Australia and New Guinea were linked by low sea levels.

Researchers believe that the first humans likely arrived in Australia around 70,00050,000 years ago, and could have spread across the continent in some 5,000 years.

The investigation was lead from the the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH).

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Scientists have revealed the migration 'superhighways' (pictured) that up to 6.5 million Indigenous people likely used to travel across Australia some 70,000 years ago

'Australia's not only the driest, but also the flattest populated continent on Earth,' said archaeologist Sean Ulm of the James Cook University in Queensland.

'Our research shows that prominent landscape features and water sources were critical for people to navigate and survive on the continent.'

'In many Aboriginal societies, landscape features are believed to have been created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming.'

'Every ridgeline, hill, river, beach and water source is named, storied and inscribed into the very fabric of societies, emphasising the intimate relationship between people and place,' he explained.

'The landscape is literally woven into peoples' lives and their histories'

'It seems that these relationships between people and country probably date back to the earliest peopling of the continent.'

To determine the locations of the ancient migratory routes, the researchers first build the most complete digital elevation model ever constructed for Australia and New Guinea  one which included areas which are now underwater.

This allowed the team to determine which features of the landscape would have been prominent and might have conceivably been used for navigation.

They then considered important factors such as the difficulty of the different terrains, the local availability of water and the physiological capacity of people.

'If it's a new landscape and we don't have a map, we're going to want to know how to move efficiently throughout a space, where to find water, and where to camp,' said paper author and archaeologist Stefani Crabtree of the Utah State University.

'We'll orient ourselves based on high points around the lands,' he added.

In the largest-ever simulation of migrations, researchers identified and tested more than 125 billion possible pathways across Sahul  cross-referencing these against Australia's oldest-known archaeological sites (mapped out left) to reveal the most likely routes. The team also considered key factors such as the difficulty of the different terrains, the local availability of water (mapped out right, with rivers in red) and the physiological capacity of people

'Guided by Indigenous knowledge, we are coming to appreciate the complexity, prowess, capacity and resilience of the ancestors of Indigenous people in Australia,' said paper author and ecologist Corey Bradshaw of Adelaide's Flinders University. Pictured, a map of the landmass of Sahul, with modern-day coastlines overlain in white

In the largest-ever simulation of migrations, the researchers identified and tested more than 125 billion possible pathways across Sahul  cross-referencing these against Australia's oldest-known archaeological sites to reveal the most likely routes.

These patterns revealed a network of 'superhighways' that traversed the ancient continent, as well as numerous secondary routes.

According to the researchers, several of the main migration paths mirror well-documented Aboriginal trade routes.

These included those used to transport pituri native tobacco from Cape York to South Australia via Birdsville and baler shells from Kimberley into central Australia.

'Guided by Indigenous knowledge, we are coming to appreciate the complexity, prowess, capacity and resilience of the ancestors of Indigenous people in Australia,' said paper author and ecologist Corey Bradshaw of Adelaide's Flinders University.

'The more we look into the deep past, the more we understand that many people have long underestimated the ingenuity of these extraordinary cultures.'

According to the researchers, several of the main migration paths mirror well-documented Aboriginal trade routes. These included those used to transport pituri native tobacco (such as made from the plant pictured right) from Cape York to South Australia via Birdsville and baler shells (right) from Kimberley into central Australia

The second arm of the investigation used 120 different simulations  considering factors including survival and fertility rates  to determine how long it would take humans to settle the 3,861,021 square mile supercontinent.

They concluded the Indigenous population spread with an average establishment rate of 1 km per year and a maximum population of up to 6.5 million people.

With their initial study complete, the researchers said that their approach could be used in the future to analyse the migration of humans out of Africa 120,000 years ago  or to search for undiscovered archaeological sites.

It could also be applied to forecast future human migrations  such as those anticipated in the near future from populations fleeing drowning coastlines and other climate-related disruptions.

The full findings of the studies were published in the journals Nature Communications and Nature Human Behaviour.
A mother was left red-faced after a failed bank transfer titled 'funds for Isis' landed her in hot water after she was flagged as a potential terrorist threat.

Susan Govindasamy, from Bolton, says she was left 'speechless' after learning her 500 PayPal transfer to her horse trainer friend was frozen because of the transaction's name.

The 57-year-old had tried sending the cash to cover the costs of 'horse bootcamp' for her nine-year-old Arab horse, Isis.

But Susan's transaction raised eyebrows with international crime agency Interpol, who work to catch some of the world's most dangerous criminals.

Self-professed ancient Egypt fanatic Susan failed to spot the issue with her wording, submitted the payment and went on with her day.

It was only three days later when her friend said she hadn't received the cash, noticed a temporary pending status on the transaction and was contacted by PayPal, that she realised there was a problem.

Susan Govindasamy from Bolton and her 9-year-old horse Isis, (pictured) were at the centre of an international terrorist investigation after a failed PayPal transaction

Susan was left red-faced after the gaffe and explained the reference to the international terrorist organisation 'went right over my head'

Susan said: 'I'm a bit scatty, there are tons of things I've done and my husband has said 'I can't believe you've done that'.

'I named the transfer 'funds for Isis' and sent the money off, at the time it went right over my head.

Red-faced Susan, who has previously owned horses called Pharoah and Nefertiti, says she was forced to explain to PayPal and Interpol that she was paying for her horse's training and not funding international terrorism.

57-year-old Susan had tried to send a 500 bank transfer with the reference 'funds for Isis' - the name of her horse

Now Susan and husband Mark Govindasamy, 47, claimed the ordeal had been a 'lesson learned'

She claims she even had to provide her pet's passport to prove Isis was indeed her real name and sign a declaration confirming she had no links to the infamous terror group.

Now Susan, who is married to 47-year-old Mark Govindasamy, admits she remains vigilant about what names she gives transactions, claiming it has been very much a 'lesson learned'.

'I only realised there was an issue three days later, when my friend said the money hadn't come through.

'We then both got emails from PayPal and Interpol wanting to know the reason why I was sending funds to ISIS.

'My husband had to tell me why it had happened, when the penny dropped I was speechless.

'I'd been flagged as a potential terrorist. I remember thinking: "What does this mean, what will happen now?"

'I was investigated, as was the other side where the money was going to, and I explained in detail what was happening and that my horse was called Isis.

'I had to send Isis's passport details through to show her name was Isis on the passport.

'I had to say I had no connection or affiliation with the IS terrorist group of any sort whatsoever.

'Once I'd signed that declaration and it had gone off then they were happy and they released the funds.'

Susan, an avid fan of Ancient Egypt, said she knew Isis was the name for her horse the day it was born

As an avid fan of Ancient Egypt, Susan has been to Sharm El Sheikh a couple of times and Egyptiana sometimes features in her art.

She also has an Egyptian-themed bedroom and has painted a huge eye of Horus over the top of the bed frame.

Susan said: 'I'm really interested in Ancient Egypt.

'Isis is the goddess of goddesses. She's very revered and astute goddess that's looked up to, she's come through a lot in my life.

'When Isis was born, if she'd been a colt he would have been called Osiris. When I knew she was a filly I knew Isis was the name for her.

Despite friends advising her to change her horse's name after the rise of the Islamic State, Susan was defiant.

'I said 'I'm not changing her name, I absolutely refuse she's called Isis after the Egypitian goddess and if people can't get past that then they've got an issue'.'

When the payment was temporarily suspended and she had to explain the situation, Susan sent an email along with Isis's passport.

Susan's email to PayPal read: 'Hello. Thanks for your communication, I have a horse she is called B.A Isis bint Kadera or Isis for short.

'She is currently out on loan at my friend, who has arranged for some schooling to be done and requested funds for her.

'I thought PayPal's is a convenient option so am just waiting to pay her now -I hope this clears up any confusion.'

Susan admitted it was 'a relief' to no longer be considered a potential terrorist threat, and later saw the funny side of the story

In a Facebook post, Susan's horse trainer pal wrote: 'That embarrassing moment when you get asked a million questions to check if you are a terrorist or not because Susan Govindasamy uses Ice's official name of Isis on a payment reference through PayPal.

'There's me telling him to Google it and it's after a goddess not actually Isis-related oh gosh embarrassing.

'Susan from now on she's Ice especially when sending payment references.'

Horse lover Susan said she was mortified by the mix-up but was relieved that no harm was done.

Susan said: 'The next day when I woke up, my friend who was dealing with it shared it on Facebook.

'I was mortified at first, but then I saw the funny side of it. I remember thinking 'Susan what were you thinking?' Obviously I wasn't, I was just enjoying my cocktails in a little world of my own.

'It was a relief people didn't think I was a terrorist. I do actually think about what I put now when I use PayPal.

'I don't even use the word 'funds' anymore either, it was very much a lesson learned.'

A PayPal spokesperson said: 'Government regulations require that payments companies including PayPal scan all payments for terrorist and other references.

'We do everything we can to eliminate references that have nothing to do with terrorism, and work with customers to resolve quickly any issues that might inadvertently arise.'
Imperial Valley News Center

California Man Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for $4 Million Con Where Clients Were Falsely Promised Government Grants

Los Angeles, California - A man who claimed to be a tax preparer was sentenced yesterday to 84 months in federal prison for defrauding his clients out of more than $4 million by falsely promising them huge windfalls from a sham federal program that purportedly would issue large grants to them.

Edgardo Zeta Montalban, 70, of Valencia, was sentenced by United States District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., who said Montalban exploited human frailty in conducting his fraud. Judge Blumenfeld said the criminal conduct in this case was despicable, cruel and callous, and it caused devastating effects on numerous victims.

From 2013 to September 2020, Montalban, who held himself out as an accountant and tax preparer, asked some of his clients to invest in a federal grant program he called Suppressed IRS Accounts. Montalban told his clients that if they paid him in cash, the federal government would issue them grants many times larger than what they paid. In reality, no such grant program existed.

In furtherance of the scheme, a co-conspirator made counterfeit Treasury checks payable to the victim clients for tens of millions of dollars, which Montalban used as props to entice the victims to pay him. Montalban explained to the victims that they had to pay him in cash to protect the federal grant programs secrecy.

After his victims paid him, Montalban made up excuses as to why the Treasury checks had been delayed, and tricked the victims into paying him more money, purportedly for expenses necessary to overcome the obstacles to their checks issuance.

[Montalban] would promise his victims a huge windfall from the government in exchange for a modest payment up front to [Montalban] in cash, prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. Because the windfall was a fraud, each purported difficulty overcome by an additional cash payment had to lead to yet another difficulty, requiring yet another cash payment. [Montalban] repeated this process until he had bled his victims dry, or they realized they had been defrauded and stopped paying him.

Montalban has been in federal custody since April 6, when Judge Blumenfeld found that he violated the conditions of his bond by continuing to commit the fraud even after pleading guilty in December 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Federal prosecutors recommended Montalban receive a prison sentence of 120 months, but Judge Blumenfeld decided to issue the seven-year sentence after considering Montalbans significant health issues.

The FBI investigated this case with assistance from the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Brown of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.
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Kodak Black, who was in court Wednesday on a sexual misconduct charge stemming from accusations he assaulted a high school student in 2016, has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of first-degree assault and battery in a plea deal, as CBS affiliate WBTW reports.

The victim agreed to all of the conditions of the plea deal, 12th Circuit Solicitor Ed Clements told WBTW. The plea deal stipulated that the rapper take full accountability for the incident and publicly apologize, which he submitted to while in court on Wednesday. He must also undergo counseling. Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was sentenced to 10 years suspended to 18 months probation under the conditions of the plea deal.

Today Bill Kapri took a plea to the legal charge of assault, a non sex offense, and received 18 months probation, his legal team said in a statement. This was a change of charge from the original charge. Having consistently denied these 5 year old allegations, he entered this plea in order to resolve the matter.

Kodak Black was originally charged with first-degree criminal sexual misconduct after he was accused of assaulting a high school student in a hotel room following a concert in Florence, South Carolina, in 2016.

In January on his final full day in office, former President Trump granted commutation to Kodak Black, who was in prison at the time for falsifying information on federal forms to buy firearms in Miami on two separate occasions. The rapper admitted to lying on the forms and pleaded guilty in 2019.
Presidente @FSagasti : Llegamos a Cusco para cumplir con nuestro compromiso de asegurar la vacunacion de los adultos mayores. Ya entregamos 14 040 dosis de vacuna Pfizer a la region y ahora estamos trayendo 17 550 dosis mas para continuar con el proceso de inmunizacion. pic.twitter.com/eE6YKbPwI1

Supervision del proceso de vacunacion a los adultos mayores de 80 anos en la region Cusco, a cargo del presidente @FSagasti y el titular del @gore_cusco, @jp_benavente. Las autoridades estuvieron acompanadas de los ministros del @Minsa_Peru y @MINCETUR.#PongoElHombro pic.twitter.com/a0uxhDD4fD
Australias ageing population will see health services continue to be stretched in coming years unless greater efficiencies are embraced led by modern digital technologies that patients increasingly expect, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

The AIIA - Australias not-for-profit peak industry representative body for innovation technology - says the pressure on hospital systems and emergency medicine is high following a year in which many deferred routine healthcare during lockdowns.

And according to the AIIA, the adoption of telehealth or virtual care during COVID-19 lockdowns highlighted the possibilities for improved patient outcomes and driving efficiencies in the health sector including reducing patient waiting times for medical assessment.

The AIIAs comments come in its whitepaper - Beyond Telehealth Towards Virtual Care - which found that funding, training and greater adoption of digital health technology, including monitoring, diagnostic and co-working tools, at clinics and hospitals is key to the optimal implementation of telehealth.

Further, it found the integration of hardware, software, people, processes, information, security and information technology systems must be encompassed in strategies to break down technology barriers.

AIIA CEO, Ron Gauci said: We must now embrace digital tools and improvements to Australias healthcare system. The widespread adoption of telehealth during 2020 saw a leap forward in the use of technology that we must embed and maximise the benefits.

There are great opportunities to improve patient outcomes and ease the pressure placed on health services.

Procurement processes from governments must include provisions for telehealth and be agile to respond to changing technology and patient preferences. This is reflective of best practices across industries that governments at all levels need to adopt. Strong, local and agile procurement processes are needed to support the best technological practices and will support strong domestic digital capabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for major reform and restructure of many parts of the Australian economy. Investment in innovative technology will support the continued progress from telehealth to virtual care. It is now up to governments to invest further in telehealth and virtual care to support its continued adoption and reduce the health costs passed on to taxpayers, Gauci said.

The AIIA whitepaper details nine recommendations for governments focused on digitally transforming the health industry, in a post-COVID-19 world:

That hospitals, practice managers, and government agencies demonstrate greater adoption of digital health tools and multi-party coworking platforms. That governments adopt an expansive procurement panel enact long-term strategies of procurement and integration for virtual care and digital health tools. That governments invest in digital inclusion and digital literacy campaigns in the health care context for consumers, carers and clinicians to enhance take-up of virtual care tools. That governments approach virtual care through a public health and allocative efficiency lens, funding capable in-home virtual care to reduce inappropriate or unnecessary hospital or clinic attendance That practices and hospitals engage in coordinated risk assessments and mitigation strategies for virtual care processes, with security oversight of each component in the virtual care solution. That governments invest in funding infrastructure at the state and federal levels to progress telehealth towards meaningful, fully-leveraged virtual care. That governments investigate procurement reform for telehealth ensuring procurement habits are agile, frequently refreshed and expansive. That the Federal Government continue to prioritise the application of appropriate technical standards for telehealth and ICT-enabled consultations in Australia, including through the ongoing ADHA telehealth standards consultation project. That Government to accept the recommendations of the Aged Care Royal Commission on Telehealth particularly those that refer to common data sets and reimbursement of telehealth enabled preventative health measures.

The AIIAs Health Policy and Advisory Network (PAN) formed a working group to research and write the whitepaper, with participants who contributed to the whitepaper including:
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines were found in the real world to be 94% effective against Covid-19 hospitalization among fully vaccinated adults ages 65 and older in the United States, according to a new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

The study also found that the vaccines were 64% effective among those older adults who were partially vaccinated, meaning they had only received one dose of vaccine so far.

These findings are consistent with the vaccines' clinical trial results, which showed an efficacy of about 94% to 95%, researchers from the CDC and several other institutions noted.

"These data suggest that continuing to rapidly vaccinate U.S. adults against COVID-19 will likely have a marked impact on COVID-19 hospitalization and might lead to commensurate reductions in post-COVID conditions and deaths," the researchers wrote in their study.

The study included data on 417 adults ages 65 and older with Covid-19-like symptoms who were admitted to 24 hospitals in 14 states between January 1 and March 26. Among those patients, 187 tested positive for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and 230 tested negative.

The researchers found that among those who tested positive, most were unvaccinated. Only 18 of the patients, or 10%, were partially vaccinated with a first dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and just one person -- representing 0.5% -- was fully vaccinated.

Among the 230 adults who tested negative, 44 of them, or 19%, were partially vaccinated and 18, or 8%, were fully vaccinated, the data showed.

Overall, "these findings are encouraging and welcome news for the two-thirds of people aged 65 and up who are already fully vaccinated," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a news release on Wednesday.

"COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective and these real-world findings confirm the benefits seen in clinical trials, preventing hospitalizations among those most vulnerable," Walensky said. "The results are promising for our communities and hospitals. As our vaccination efforts continue to expand, COVID-19 patients will not overwhelm health care systems -- leaving hospital staff, beds, and services available for people who need them for other medical conditions."

The new study included data from California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. More research is needed to determine whether similar findings would emerge across more states to represent the entire US population.

Similar findings have been found previously.

A separate study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that among 417 employees at Rockefeller University in New York who were fully vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Moderna shots, only two of them -- also about 0.5% -- tested positive for Covid-19 later.

In March, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced that real-world evidence from the Israel Ministry of Health show that there have been "dramatically" fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths among people in Israel who have been fully vaccinated. That analysis found that the vaccine effectiveness was 94% in preventing asymptomatic Covid-19, where infections show no symptoms.
BERLIN: BioNTech expects results by September from trials testing the COVID-19 vaccine that it and Pfizer have developed in babies as young as six months old, German magazine Spiegel cited the company's CEO as saying.

"In July, the first results could be available for the five to 12 year olds, in September for the younger children," BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin told Spiegel. He added it takes about four to six weeks to evaluate the data.

"If all goes well, as soon as the data is evaluated, we will be able to submit the application for approval of the vaccine for all children in the respective age group in different countries," he said.

A spokeswoman for BioNTech confirmed the expected timeline for the trial results in younger children.

BioNTech and Pfizer asked U.S. regulators this month to approve emergency use of their vaccine for adolescents aged 12 to 15.

Sahin was quoted by Spiegel as saying the company was "in the final stages before submission" to European regulators for children aged 12 and older. The spokeswoman declined to comment on the timing of that submission, however.

A trial published at the end of March found the companies' COVID-19 vaccine was safe, effective and produces robust antibody responses in adolescents.

The Pfizer/BioNTech two-shot vaccine is already authorized for use in those aged 16 and above.

Young people are less likely to suffer severe cases of COVID-19 and more likely to have asymptomatic infection, allowing them to unwittingly transmit COVID-19 to others.

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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Students living in the Wyndham Ridge Subdivision could find themselves being bused to Mill Creek Elementary, instead of walking a few hundred feet to Beulah Ralph Elementary. The CPS School Board is considering Scenario D, which would move the zoning boundary between the two elementary schoo
The full text of the resolutions can be found in the Notice of Annual General Meeting set out in the Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2020, which has previously been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and is available for inspection at: https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism The results of the poll were as follows:

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.
credit: University of Utah Communications

For college age students the fear of school shootings, sexual assaults, thefts etc., are all major concerns. The University of Utah has taken those fears and found a way to exploit them by creating a university police website dedicated to spreading a climate of fear unlike anything we have seen.

Salt Lake City's, Fox 13 reports "that in an effort to improve campus safety, the University of Utah (UoU) has created a new website that allows students to stay current on the latest safety news and easily find important resources."

"It is important for the campus community to have access to safety information and resources that are available through this new website, said Annalisa Purser, director of administration in the Office of the Chief Safety Officer. The UoU police PR machine is in full-swing where visitors can stay up to date on the latest news about university safety by visiting the Safety News section of their website. The site is updated regularly with new stories about all aspects of public safety. Sounds just like a news website doesn't it? Former Utah Department of Safety Commissioner Keith Squires who also serves as the Governors Homeland Security Advisor and is now UoU's Chief Safety Officer said. "I have always been passionate about public safety and service and look forward to leading with respect and empathy. After three decades of working in law enforcement, including serving as commissioner of Public Safety for the state of Utah, I know that the future of public safety depends on listening to the community, being open to doing our work differently, and acknowledging our difficult past and holding ourselves accountable to it." How will the UoU police do things differently? By creating new public safety websites that look like a Fox News website? The new safety website highlights include the following:

Safety News : The Safety News section is updated regularly with stories about all aspects of University Safety.

: The Safety News section is updated regularly with stories about all aspects of University Safety. Safety Tips and FAQs : The Safety Tips and FAQs page provides information about crime prevention, wellness, online safety, emergency preparedness and other resources.

: The Safety Tips and FAQs page provides information about crime prevention, wellness, online safety, emergency preparedness and other resources. Data and Information : This section highlights federal, state and university regulations regarding safety, houses the Annual Security Report and Crime Log, as well as an archive of campus alerts.

: This section highlights federal, state and university regulations regarding safety, houses the Annual Security Report and Crime Log, as well as an archive of campus alerts. Safety Committees : Visitors can learn about the newly created Public Safety Advisory Committee, Independent Review Committee, Surveillance System Administrators Committee, and the Racist and Bias Incident Response Team.

: Visitors can learn about the newly created Public Safety Advisory Committee, Independent Review Committee, Surveillance System Administrators Committee, and the Racist and Bias Incident Response Team. Feedback form : Individuals may submit compliments, complaints, or other feedback through this form, where they are received by the Office of the Chief Safety Officer for documentation, review and investigation.
Paris: The head of Frances armed forces has pledged to punish 20 French generals and 18 French active soldiers, including officers, who signed an open letter warning of the risks of impending civil war at the hands of fanatics and Islamists, saying they have breached their duty of reserve.

Regarding the generals, each one [will go] before a senior military council, General Francois Lecointre told Le Parisian newspaper, and could be delisted or put into immediate retirement.

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, and French armed forces chief of staff Francois Lecointre in 2017. Credit:AP

As second section reservists, the generals have left active service but are still answerable to the Defence Ministry and thus obliged to remain neutral in public.

As for the 18 still in active service, including four officers, they face dismissal, in particular the higher-ranking signatories. I believe that the higher the responsibilities, the stronger the obligation of neutrality and exemplarity, said Lecointre.
Some people who are going to jump at this  theyre not really interested in quality, theyre interested in access to the classroom, and theyre going to have instructional crises appearing over and over again because theyre going to be ill-prepared to teach, Smith said. On the administrative side, we dont have to hire those kinds of teachers, but with the teacher shortage, Im sure there will be a number of school corporations are going to take whomever they can get who has a license to be in the classroom.
A high ranking paramedic has warned that Sydneys ambulance network could once again be pushed to breaking point as a result of surging demand that has been building for a month.

A NSW Ambulance inspector, who cannot be named because he is not authorised to speak publicly, said he fears emergency response levels seen earlier this week could be repeated within days.

The networks highest possible emergency response level  status three mode  was activated on Monday afternoon, when educators, managers and graduates were pulled off duties to respond to an overwhelming surge in demand.

The NSW Ambulance network was inundated on Monday, with 400 calls in two hours. Credit:Isabella Porras

During the rush, the service received more than 400 calls in two hours, while the network soared into status three mode for 30 minutes, requiring all available operational paramedics.
Demobbed soldiers are angry that they sacrificed their youth for the country only to face often harder lives.

North Korea is mobilizing recently discharged soldiers to toil away in coal mines and construction sites right after they have completed their grueling mandatory 10-year stint in the military, sources in the country told RFA.

As it is still technically at war with prosperous South Korea, North Korea makes every male serve 10 years in the armed forces after finishing high school, and life in the Norths military involves a lot more than combat training.

Soldiers are used as laborers for government projects or to harvest crops, with some even sent to work abroad to earn badly needed foreign currency for the countrys chronically empty coffers. The military recently has also been told to solve its own supply and food shortages, forcing soldiers to turn to their families for food and funds for their decade-long military stint.

After giving the best years of their youth, soldiers in the past could expect to be awarded with membership in the ruling Korean Workers Party and all the opportunities it provides, such as better jobs, housing and schooling. In recent years though, the party has raised the bar for membership, much to the dismay of the soldiers.

But now, the government is sending the soldiers to do manual labor right after theyve been discharged. Like all government jobs, these ex-soldiers are paid very low wages and must still rely on their families for support.

A resident of North Hamgyong province, in the countrys northeast, told RFAs Korean Service that the demobbed soldiers were very unhappy to learn they were to be put to work this month.

They already dedicated their golden youth to the country, by completing their military service, but they are being forced to sacrifice again, the source said.

Dissatisfaction among the discharged soldiers is quite high These guys joined the military right out of high school at the age of 17. After serving a full 10-years they cant just return home because they must go work in coal mines and construction sites.

The source said that two coal mines in the province had discharged soldiers toiling away in work crews numbering in the hundreds to thousands.

The Highest Dignity has told us Young people should be the main character of the era and they should be on the battle line in full force, the source said, using an honorific term for the countrys leader Kim Jong Un.

This is why the authorities dispatched the discharged soldiers to the worksites. The veterans are furious, asking if their reward for 10 long years of hard work and sacrifice is just more work, the source said.

To add insult to injury, the authorities are manipulating the truth by saying that the 10-year vets are volunteering to work in the mines, according to the source.

The authorities even reported that the discharged soldiers held a rally because they wanted so badly to be dispatched to do backbreaking work, said the source.

Since Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, the military has not been well fed, and people even say that parents who have to support their children in the military are serving alongside them. Their military service was that hard. After 10 years of sacrifice, they are putting a great burden on the dispatched soldiers. Where on earth can they go to complain?

Another source, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang, confirmed to RFA Tuesday that discharged soldiers were sent back to work there too.

Complaints are mounting among the discharged soldiers and the residents. The soldiers arent allowed to go home and must report to their assigned workplace in coal mines and construction sites, said the second source.

Parents who had been looking forward to the end of their childs 10-year military service are lamenting the news that their kids are being dispatched as soon as they are discharged from the military. They say that many of the worksites are even worse than what they faced in the military because some of them have unresolved shelter and food shortages, the second source said.

The second source said that not all soldiers will be put to work when they are discharged.

Some of the children of powerful officials and those who come from rich families can get recommendations for college admissions, so only the children of ordinary people will be sent to work, the second source said.

There are no volunteers in the mines or construction sites, but the authorities have been spreading propaganda saying these patriotic young people want to contribute to socialist construction, even though they are being forced, said the second source.

According to the source, prior to their discharge, the soldiers are ordered to attend rallies and make petitions, begging to volunteer.

At the rally, they shout out loud that they wish to be dispatched, attesting to the revolutionary spirit of their youth, and that their only desire is to carry out the decisions of the party leaders. But none of them truly want to volunteer for such hard labor.

According to a Nov. 2020 report by the New York-based Council on Foreign relations the North Korean military is the worlds fourth largest, with 1.3 million personnel.

Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
By Huw Jones and Valentina Za

LONDON/MILAN (Reuters) - Euronext's decision to move its huge data centre from Britain to Italy because of Brexit could mean a costly headache for banks and other stock traders who measure competitiveness in nanoseconds.

The pan-European bourse said on Thursday it would move its data centre from Basildon, a town east of London, to Bergamo near the Italian financial capital of Milan in the second quarter of 2022.

Bergamo is where Borsa Italiana has a disaster recovery site, and Euronext completed its acquisition of the Milan exchange on Thursday and is keen to show Italy the takeover's benefits.

Italian company Aruba, which runs a 200,000 square-metre cloud data centre in Bergamo, will become the main provider of Euronext's data centre services. Aruba built Italy's biggest data centre on the site of a former cotton factory, taking over also a nearby hydroelectric plant to power operations.

Euronext CEO Stephane Boujnah said regulators were eager to have Euronext's data centre in the European Union following Britain's departure from the bloc, which has left the UK's financial sector largely cut off from the continent.

Amsterdam, where Euronext runs the main exchange, became Europe's biggest share trading centre in January after swathes of euro stock trading moved there from London.

"All the talk about the shift of trading to Amsterdam missed the fact that UK data centers still host a large amount of EU equity trading," said Anish Puaar, market structure analyst at Rosenblatt Securities.

Euronext said it had considered migrating the data centre from Basildon back to Paris, where it was located between 2000 and 2011, or Amsterdam.

The choice has instead fallen on Italy, which will become the bloc's largest trading venue, accounting for a quarter of all European equity trades.

Traders who compete on speed "co-located" near the Basildon server to cut the latency, or time difference, between inputting and executing a trade to the smallest fraction of a second possible.

Story continues

Boujnah said Euronext's large sell-side clients with an interest in latency, not just high-frequency traders, would move their physical infrastructure to Italy to be as close as possible to the exchange's servers.

"It's a coordinated effort," he said.

Puaar said the move to Bergamo will require such market makers to install new kit at some cost. "It also redraws trading routes and will require market participants to think about the latency changes," he said.

Boujnah said relocating the Euronext server to Bergamo was a "very material decision" for the group, one of its biggest IT investments in recent years with details provided in October.

(Reporting by Valentina Za in Milan and Huw Jones in London; Editing by Giles Elgood)
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global and China Intelligent Vehicle Personalization Technology Development Report, 2020" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Our Global and China Intelligent Vehicle Personalization Technology Development Report, 2020 highlights the analysis and summary of personalization status of mainstream auto brands at home and abroad.



We select, analyze and summarize 19 typical auto brands: Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Buick, Ford, Geely, SAIC, GAC, Changan Automobile, Great Wall Motor, BYD, Chery, NIO, Xiaopeng Motors, and Weltmeister.



This report takes exterior interaction and active recommendation functions as examples to introduce specific personalized functions of an intelligent vehicle.



The wider use of artificial intelligence leads to a shift in IVI service model from passive IVI service instructed by human to active acquisition of information by IVI system and active recommendation to human. In future, the ever deeper fusion of IVI system and third-party service software will come with more mature algorithms and more data accumulated, realizing a service model where more functions can be engaged in an active way.

The first is the recommendation feature built in music and audiobook software. Open the software and recommendations will come into sight, a common mode integrated into vehicle software of most auto brands. For example, Kuwo Music for Audi cars offers daily, ranking, Ximalaya FM, and high quality content recommendations; BMW QQ Music recommends daily content and new songs.



The second is the active speech-enabled recommendation according to user habits, preferences or scenarios, which is adopted by Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Ford, Geely, Great Wall Motor and BYD. For instance, Buick judges what users like based on scenarios and their habits, and pushes such as music; Ford IVI system recommends music, radio and point of interest, etc according to user habits; BYD IVI system recommends programs according to what the user often tunes in, sends news during the commuting time, and pushes songs and life programs on weekends and holidays.



Parking recommendation

Parking recommendation refers to recommendation of several nearby parking lots available to the user via a pop-up window from the navigation map in the IVI system before arrival at the destination, for example, SAIC's IVI navigation system actively recommends 4 parking lots around the destination; Honda's IVI navigation system enables active pop-up of recommended parking lots when approaching the destination.



Refueling recommendation



Refueling recommendation can be divided into four modes by way to offer services:

When fuel/electricity is low, the system gives a refueling reminder;

When fuel/electricity is low, the system gives a refueling reminder, with an active pop-up of a manual search box for finding a refueling site;

When fuel/electricity is low, the system gives a refueling reminder and automatically recommends refueling sites available to the user;

When fuel/electricity is low, the system gives a refueling reminder, automatically recommends refueling sites available to the user, and displays details of the sites, such as operators and refueling types.

In future, the third and fourth modes will prevail.



Life service recommendation and reminder

Life service recommendation and reminder feature is gathering pace, and by content is led by: safety, environment, important event, behavior habit and preference reminders.

For example, SAIC's Banma system actively recommends the route to the cinema as the user starts up the car within two hours before the film begins with tickets bought on Tao Piao Piao platform, and also the playlist or music about the film after the cinema lets out; Alipay applet introduced into Xpeng IVI system will proactively ask whether the user needs a breakfast reservation or not when the car detects he/she will go to work.



Exterior interaction personalization

Exterior information interaction refers to display of such information as vehicle status (e.g., charging), LOGO, welcoming and various prompts using lamps, windows or exterior display devices.



In Xpeng P7's case, the connection between lamp signal system and audio system enables interior ambient lamps and exterior lighting sets to flicker synchronously with musical rhythms.



Weltmeister interactive window projection: when the user gets close to the car with a phone in hand, he/she will be recognized via Weltmeister ID, and the projector on the inside of the exterior rearview mirror will project welcoming message, remaining battery power, range and other information on the window; when the use gets off the car, others can interact with the car through the projection on the window which displays state of charge for example.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Overview and Status Quo of Intelligent Vehicle Personalization

1.1 Definition and Research Scope of Intelligent Vehicle Personalization

1.2 Development Characteristics of Intelligent Vehicle Personalization

1.3. Comparison of IVI System Personalization between Major OEMs

Theme & Interface

Ambient Lighting & Musical Light Show

IVI Image & Speech

Interior Hardware Interaction, Custom Button & Fragrance System

Active Recommendation

Active Reminder

IVI System & Others

Smart Devices, Headlights & Exterior Interaction

2. Personalization of Luxury Brand OEMs

2.1 Overview

2.2 Audi

2.2.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

2.2.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

2.2.3 Concept Car

2.3 BMW

2.3.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

2.3.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

2.3.3 Concept Car

2.4 Mercedes-Benz

2.4.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

2.4.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

2.4.3 Concept Car



3. Personalization of Joint-venture Brand OEMs

3.1 Overview

3.2 Volkswagen Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.2.1 Personalization Details of FAW-Volkswagen's Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.2.2 Personalization Details of SAIC Volkswagen's Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.2.3 Personalization Details of Smart Devices for SAIC Volkswagen's Mass-produced Vehicles

3.2.4 Personalization Details of Exterior Interaction for SAIC Volkswagen's Mass-produced Vehicles

3.2.5 Volkswagen Concept Car

3.3 Toyota

3.3.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.3.2 Personalization Details of IVI System for FAW Toyota's Mass-produced Vehicles

3.3.3 Personalization Details of IVI System for GAC Toyota's Mass-produced Vehicles

3.3.4 Personalization Details of Exterior Interaction for GAC Toyota's Mass-produced Vehicles

3.3.5 Toyota Concept Car

3.4 Honda

3.4.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.4.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.4.3 Concept Car

3.5 Nissan

3.5.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.5.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.6 Buick

3.6.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.6.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.6.3 Concept Car

3.7 Ford

3.7.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

3.7.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

3.7.3 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle Exterior Interaction



4. Personalization of Chinese Brand OEMs

4.1 Overview

4.2 Geely

4.2.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.2.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.2.3 Concept Car

4.3 SAIC

4.3.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.3.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.3.3 Concept Car

4.4 GAC

4.4.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.4.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.4.3 Concept Car

4.5 Changan Automobile

4.5.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.5.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.5.3 Concept Car

4.6 Great Wall Motor

4.6.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.6.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.6.3 Personalization Details of Smart Devices for Great Wall's Mass-produced Vehicles

4.6.4 Concept Car

4.7 BYD

4.7.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.7.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.7.3 Concept Car

4.8 Chery

4.8.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

4.8.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

4.8.3 Concept Car



5. Personalization of Emerging Auto Brands

3.1 Overview

5.2 NIO

5.2.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

5.2.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

5.2.3 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle Headlamps

5.2.4 Concept Car

5.3 Xiaopeng Motors

5.3.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

5.3.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

5.3.3 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle Headlamps

5.3.4 Concept Car

5.4 Weltmeister

5.4.1 Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System and Personalization Overview

5.4.2 Personalization Details of Mass-produced Vehicle IVI System

5.4.3 Personalization Details of Headlamps and Exterior Interaction for Mass-produced Vehicles

5.4.4 Concept Car

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/5l3rbi

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


The fellowship program aims to amplify Black voices, improve coverage of Black issues in the news and cultivate future Black media leaders. Each fellowship provides a unique opportunity for an early-career Black journalistwith one-to-five years' experienceto be hosted for six months at a CBC/Radio-Canada (English and French) or CTV News newsroom, either in Toronto or remotely this year due to COVID-19.

The fellowships, recipients and their story proposals are:

CJF-CBC/Radio-Canada Black Journalism Fellowship

Tiffany Mboyo Mongu, a freelance associate producer with CBC Kitchener-Waterloo, will explore two health issues: the lack of support in the healthcare system for Black Ontarians amid the pandemic and how Black, Indigenous and other women of colour are more vulnerable to face difficulties during childbirth.





Tiffany Mboyo Mongu, a freelance associate producer with CBC Kitchener-Waterloo, will explore two health issues: the lack of support in the healthcare system for Black Ontarians amid the pandemic and how Black, Indigenous and other women of colour are more vulnerable to face difficulties during childbirth. CJF-CBC/Radio-Canada Black Women's Journalism Fellowship

Dannielle Piper , a Vancouver -based freelance journalist, plans to examine Vancouver's history with the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of the Black community and to create a data project profiling the ethnic, religious and lingual diversity of BC's Black diaspora.





, a -based freelance journalist, plans to examine history with the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of the Black community and to create a data project profiling the ethnic, religious and lingual diversity of BC's Black diaspora. CJF-CTV News Black Journalism Fellowship

Josie Fome, a Montreal -based journalist, will explore questions around intergenerational homes within Black communities, especially during the pandemic, including how their experiences differ from those of smaller households. She will also explore how young people are taking the lead in advocating for mental health in the Black community.

"The submissions for these new fellowships reflect a pool of strong journalistic talent and potential," says jury chair Dexter Brown, executive member of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and a writer at CTV News Channel. "The recipients showed remarkable drive, tenacity and the ability to deliver thought-provoking stories. Josie, Tiffany and Dannielle will be assets to any newsroom."

The three fellows will receive mentoring and training for a variety of skills, including video and audio editing, writing, research and investigative reporting. Each recipient will receive a full-time stipend for the six months and write or produce an article/piece during their fellowship opportunity that will be considered for publication/broadcast by CBC/Radio-Canada and CTV News.

Fellows will be recognized at the CJF Awards virtual ceremony taking place on June 9 at 7 p.m. ET. To watch the free online event and view sponsorship opportunities, visit the CJF Awards page.

Thanks to the generous support of founding sponsors:

- lululemon for the CJF-CBC/Radio-Canada Black Journalism Fellowship;

- Aritzia for the CJF-CBC/Radio-Canada Black Women's Journalism Fellowship; and

- BMO Financial Group for the CJF-CTV News Black Journalism Fellowship.

The jury members are:

Dexter Brown (chair), executive member of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and writer, CTV News Channel

(chair), executive member of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and writer, CTV News Channel Anyck Beraud , national reporter and former foreign correspondent, Radio-Canada

, national reporter and former foreign correspondent, Radio-Canada Ron Charles , retired national reporter, CBC News

, retired national reporter, CBC News Ramneek Gill , acting general manager, CTV News Channel

, acting general manager, CTV News Channel Andree Lau , managing editor of digital news, CBC News

, managing editor of digital news, CBC News Eternity Martis, author, adjunct professor and journalist-in-residence at UBC

Cision is the exclusive distribution partner of the CJF.



About the Canadian Journalism Foundation

Established in 1990, The Canadian Journalism Foundation promotes, celebrates and facilitates excellence in journalism. The foundation runs a prestigious annual awards and fellowship program featuring an industry gala where news leaders, journalists and corporate Canada gather to celebrate outstanding journalistic achievement and the value of professional journalism. Through monthly J-Talks, a public speakers' series, the CJF facilitates dialogue among journalists, business people, academics and students about the role of the media in Canadian society and the ongoing challenges for media in the digital era. The foundation also fosters opportunities for journalism education, training and research.

SOURCE Canadian Journalism Foundation

For further information: Natalie Turvey, President and Executive Director, The Canadian Journalism Foundation, E-mail: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.cjf-fjc.ca


South Africa: No negotiating with child abusers, says KZN MEC

KwaZulu-Natal Social Development MEC, Nonhlanhla Khoza, has vowed to intensify efforts to protect children from neglect and abuse.

This follows an incident involving a seven-year-old boy with special needs. He was found locked up in a four-roomed house with dogs in Umlazi, south of Durban, for over a month. He had no food, water or electricity.

The boy was spotted by members of the public standing inside the locked house secured with burglar bars.

It is believed that he had been left in the care of his father by his grandmother. The father allegedly left the boy locked in the house over a month ago.

We have been taken aback by the conditions the child was left in. We are surprised and shocked ....

The child has been left in such a despicable condition. No child deserves to be treated like this, and there is no explanation that can be accepted from the parents of this poor child, Khoza said.

No mercy for abusers

Khoza said she will be pushing for law enforcement agencies to have no mercy on individuals involved in any form of child abuse.

There should be no negotiating with abusers. As the Department of Social Development, we are leaving no stone unturned in dealing with such cases in our society.

A number of children are brought up in unsafe homes. We encourage parents to make use of government help if they find themselves unable to take care of children, the MEC said.

She said the boy has been removed from the house and taken to a place of safety. A team of social workers has been dispatched to provide him with psychosocial support.

It will not be enough to rescue the child. We have to ensure that both parents face [the law], Khoza said.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
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Editors Note: The original version of this story misidentified the group headed by Greg Mello. It is the Los Alamos Study Group.

Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  The National Nuclear Security Administration announced Wednesday that it has approved the project definition phase and conceptual design of the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project, paving the way for the lab to ramp up production of the triggering devices for nuclear warheads.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip



................................................................

According to an NNSA news release, the estimated cost of the project ranges from $2.7 billion to $3.9 billion. Thats because the estimates will be adjusted as the conceptual design matures to meet performance baselines, which isnt expected until 2023, according to the release.

NNSA leadership and LANL will continue to review this project to improve the fidelity of the current price estimate and schedule, the release states.

Nevertheless, LANLs current budget is $3.8 billion per year, with about $2.7 billion going toward weapons programs, according to LANLs website.

The NNSA announcement already has drawn the promise of a lawsuit.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico was among the groups that called for an environmental impact study to be conducted in advance of any increased activities at LANL.

Unless NNSA changes course, Nuclear Watch New Mexico will litigate to enforce the publics right to review and comment on the agencys expanded production of plutonium pit bomb cores for new nuclear weapons, said Jay Coghlan, the groups executive director. NNSAs unnecessary and provocative plans will cost at least 43 billion taxpayer dollars, create more contamination and radioactive wastes, and help fuel a new nuclear arms race.

Coghlan said the cost estimate he provided is for the life cycle of the entire pit production project and includes costs associated with production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Between LANL and the Savannah River Site, the two national labs have been tasked with producing 80 pits per year by 2030. LANL is scheduled to produce at least 30 plutonium pits per year by 2026, according to NNSA.

Critical equipment is scheduled to be installed in time to achieve the 30 pits per year production capacity in 2026, NNSA said of the project in Los Alamos.

Earlier this month, LANL Director Thom Mason said LANL would undergo a significant upgrade to infrastructure and facility improvement at the lab in the coming years.

There are new facilities we need to build, there are older facilities that we need to make sure are fit for purpose, and improve and upgrade, he said. This laboratory has a lot of facilities that were built in the post-war Cold War era. They were state of the art at the time, but state of the art has moved on since 1954 and they are no longer meeting our needs.

Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group, said LANL cant make enough pits to support the current nuclear weapon stockpile.

So, even with a much small(er) stockpile, LANL could not undertake this mission successfully, he said, adding that, when the Savannah River Site goes online with pit production, there will be no need to produce them in Los Alamos. So why waste all this money at LANL?
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Algiers, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :A leading Algerian opposition activist has been detained and is to appear before prosecutors on Thursday, his lawyer said, weeks ahead of elections he and other opponents have pledged to boycott.

Karim Tabbou, a key figure in demonstrations that forced longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign in 2019, was handed a one-year suspended sentence last year for "undermining state security".

His detention comes as the pro-democracy protest movement known as Hirak has sought to regain some of the momentum it lost when it suspended street rallies just over a year ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tabbou was summoned to the police station on Wednesday evening to respond to a complaint filed against him by Bouzid Lazhari, the president of the National Council for Human Rights, an official body.

The 47-year-old was to appear before a prosecutor on Thursday, lawyer Me Ali Fellah Benali said on social media.

"Algeria's youth is determined to fight for their right to a dignified life," Tabbou told AFP ahead of his detention.

He became one of the most recognisable leaders at mass demonstrations that broke out in February 2019.

The Hirak protest movement was sparked in February 2019 over Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term in office.

The ailing autocrat was forced to step down weeks later, but the Hirak has continued its demonstrations, demanding a sweeping overhaul of a ruling system in place since Algeria's independence from France in 1962.

Since the group's second anniversary in February, thousands have returned to the streets, defying a coronavirus ban on gatherings.

- Ordinary Algerians 'fed up' - Tabbou said his own party, the Democratic Social Union, was now "the largest political party" in the North African country, despite it being unregistered by the authorities.

His detention comes as activists warn of an increasing climate of repression, with political opponents and journalists targeted in the run-up to the legislative elections on June 12.

Earlier this month, security forces arrested eight people they said were linked to the Hirak movement over an allegedly foreign-financed criminal association.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune this month warned Hirak activists against "non-innocent activities" that "attempt to hinder the democratic process".

Authorities say the protest movement is being infiltrated by Islamist activists who are trying to drag it towards violence.

President Tebboune served as a prime minister under Bouteflika and won a presidential election in December 2019, in a poll that was boycotted by the protest movement. Official data put the turnout at less than 40 percent.

In further moves dismissed by the protest movement as window dressing, Tebboune oversaw a constitutional referendum late last year and brought the legislative elections forward, in a bid to soothe the political and socioeconomic crisis.

"This election does not concern us," activist Tabbou told AFP.

"The regime mobilised colossal resources to hold a false presidential election, a false referendum -- and now it organises false legislative elections," he said.

Ordinary Algerians were fed up, he said. "We see the country as a barracks".
New Delhi, April 29 : Facebook has claimed that it mistakenly blocked posts calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the alleged Covid-19 pandemic mismanagement, saying the company did not hide the posts at the behest of the government.

Buzzfeed News first reported that Facebook temporarily hid posts with the hashtag or text #ResignModi because "some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards".

The Facebook users who tried to view the hashtag saw a message saying that Facebook was temporarily hiding the posts in order to keep the community safe.

In a statement given to The Verge late on Wednesday, Facebook said it has now restored the posts and the hashtag was blocked "by mistake".

The company said that the Indian government did not ask to remove the hashtag.

Facebook also said that the block was the result of some of the content that used the hashtag, "but did not specify what kind of content".

Earlier this week, Twitter pulled down at least 50 tweets at the behest of the Indian government, that criticised the government for the poor handling of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The data available on Lumen database showed that the micro-blogging platform deleted more than 50 tweets that belonged to people like Revanth Reddy, an MP from Telangana; Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister; two filmmakers; an actor and others.

A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement that when it receives a valid legal request, it reviews it under both the Twitter Rules and local law.

"If the content violates Twitter's Rules, the content will be removed from the service. In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they're aware that we've received a legal order pertaining to the account," the company said in a statement.

In February, Twitter took a range of enforcement actions against certain Twitter accounts after the Indian government ordered it to take down more than 500 accounts for clear violations of its rules.

In another daily record, India reported nearly 3.8 lakh new cases and 3,645 deaths on Wednesday while 14 states and UTs recorded their highest single-day case count.
THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE by Carol Shields (World Editions 11.99, 448 pp)

THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE

by Carol Shields (World Editions 11.99, 448 pp)

Love is not always a many splendoured thing; sometimes its obsessive, ridiculous, deluded, unrequited and pain-inducing but not the wild, passionate rapture of poets and pop songs.

Shields brilliant depiction of matters of the heart celebrates the love-joys and traumas of a sprightly cast, including wilting, but determined, faithfully long-wed oldies.

The two protagonists are Fay, who says things such as, Isnt love a form of vanity, the wish to be adored, to be the absolute centre for someone else, is bored with her live-in lover and longs for sexual fireworks.

And Tom, divorced three times, yearning for passionate rapture and sick of soulless brief encounters. Will they meet? Will dreams come true? Funny, sharp, sheer turbo-charged brilliance.

THE FIRM by John Grisham (Arrow 8.99, 496 pp)

THE FIRM

by John Grisham (Arrow 8.99, 496 pp)

Young newlyweds, Mitch and Abby, are overjoyed when he lands a dream job with a small law firm  fabulous salary, luxury house, free holidays in the Caymans and a gleaming BMW.

So, whats the catch? Mitch discovers their house and car are bugged, theres secret sinister activity on the office fifth floor and several lawyers have come to sticky ends. Sleuthing around, he even finds Mafia connections. The plot hots up: spies, bent cops, jail breaks, car chases, tax dodgers, fake names, prostitutes as spies, guns, drugs . . . phew!

All a bit too pacy for me, I kept losing track of who was who. It will certainly put you off booking a holiday to the Cayman Islands.
The local unemployment rate held at 8.8% in March, but Steven Zellers, a state industry and business analyst, sees some promising signs for the area.

The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton Metropolitan Statistical Area has done a better job recovering jobs lost during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic than the state did.

From May 2020 to March 2021, the local metro area recovered 64.2% of jobs while the state recovered 63.3%, Zellers said.

"Small, incremental positive moves is how we're going to get to where we need to be until they remove all the restrictions and people get vaccinated," Zellers said.

While the unemployment rate remained unchanged, the local labor force for the area consisting of Lackawanna, Luzerne and Wyoming counties grew by 400.

The fact that employment rose in both the goods producing and service producing sectors over the last month in the region is another positive sign, Zellers said.

Zellers noted some industry groups within the local metro area are doing comparatively better than the statewide totals.

The mining, logging and construction sector was up 500 jobs over the month  a 5.4% gain  while it was up just 1.6% across the state, he said.

Zellers added even through jobs in the transportation, warehousing and utilities sector were down slightly over the month, the area remains up 800 jobs over the year  a 3.2% gain  while there has been a decline of a tenth of a percentage point across the state.

The state unemployment rate dropped one-tenth of a percentage point in March to 7.3%. The national rate dipped two-tenths of a percentage point to 6%.

Satyajit Ghosh, Ph.D., a University of Scranton economist, is encouraged by the drop in unemployment rate in Lackawanna County from 8.4% in February to 7.8% in March. During that time, the county added 500 jobs.

"It seems like we're on the right path," Ghosh said. "One month can't tell us the whole story, but it seems like we could be setting up a good improvement going into the summer months."
Nine appeals against bankruptcy of Promsvyazbank ex-owner Ananyev dismissed

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

10:48 29/04/2021

MOSCOW, April 29 (RAPSI)  The Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals has dismissed nine appeals against a lower court decision to declare bankrupt former owner of PJSC Promsvyazbank (PSB) Dmitry Ananyev, the court's ruling reads.

The appeals instance dismissed the complaints submitted by Promsvyazbank and several other legal entities and individuals against the decision of the Moscow Arbitration Court of February 1, which introduced an assets disposition procedure with respect to the debtor.

The Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals declared Ananyev bankrupt on June 15, 2020 at the request of Nastyusha Grain Company, and a debt restructuring procedure was introduced with respect of that person The board of appeals canceled the determination of a first instance court of November 25, 2019, by which the proceedings on the banker's insolvency sought by the company were terminated.

In also worth noting that in September 2019, the Russian Supreme Court dismissed Ananyevs move to cancel the decision on the initiation of the respective bankruptcy case. The banker appealed against the ruling of the Moscow Commercial Court of April 12, 2019, by which at the request of the bankruptcy commissioner of Nastyusha company a bankruptcy case was initiated against the businessman.

Earlier, in June 2019, the Moscow Commercial Court dismissed a request to seize Ananyevs property worth 2.8 billion rubles ($38 million at the current exchange rate) when examining his bankruptcy case.

At that time the court established that the applicant had not presented evidence proving that the failure to take interim measures could complicate or make impossible the execution of the respective judicial act.

However, on May 29, 2019, the Moscow Commercial Court satisfied an application of Promsvyazbank seeking to seize the property of the former owners of the bank, Alexey and Dmitry Ananyevs, in the amount of 282.2 billion rubles ($3.8 billion) in the framework of a claim to recover losses in the amount of 282.2 billion rubles from twelve former top managers of the bank.

On December 15, 2017, the Central Bank of Russia introduced a temporary administration for the management of Promsvyazbank. The functions of the provisional administration were entrusted to the Management Company of the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund.

As a measure aimed at improving the financial stability of the bank and ensuring the continuity of its activities in the banking services market, it is planned that the Central Bank will participate as an investor using the funds of the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund.

In October 2019 the Moscow City Court upheld the arrest of Alexey and Dmitry Ananyevs in absentia in a criminal case over embezzlement on an especially large scale, as the press service of the court informed RAPSI.

On September 10, 2019, a first instance court ruled to detain the Ananyevs for two months. The term of detention is to be calculated from the date they are apprehended.
Webinar

A Conversation with Dr. Abraham Pizam: The Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series - Thurs. April 29, 2021

We conclude our Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series honoring Dr. Abraham Pizam, founding dean of UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management on the 50th anniversary of his achieving his Ph.D., with a conversation with the exceptional educator and researcher himself, Dr. Abraham Pizam. Join us on Thursday, April 29, 2021, 9:30 AM EDT (NYC, USA). The presentation will focus on The Academic Field of Hospitality Management: 50 Years Ago and Now

Abraham Pizam Ph.D. is the founding dean (2000-2018) of Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida. Currently he serves as Professor and Linda Chapin Eminent Scholar Chair in Tourism Management. Professor Pizam is widely known in the field of Hospitality and Tourism Management and has conducted research projects, lectured, and served as a consultant in more than 30 countries. He has held various academic positions, in Austria, Australia, France, Israel, Japan, New-Zealand, Singapore, Slovakia, Switzerland United Kingdom and the U.S.A, has authored more than 250 publications of which 180 were scientific publications and published ten books. His publications have resulted in more than 20,000 citations and an h-index of 66. He is Editor Emeritus of the International Journal of Hospitality Management and serves on the editorial boards of 26 academic journals. Professor Pizam has conducted consulting and research projects for a variety of international, national and regional tourism organizations.

Professor Pizam holds a Master's degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and is the recipient of several academic awards.

Please click the link below to join the webinar:

https://ucf.zoom.us/j/99004647462?pwd=SG9TK05QQWRkdkU4WVJLNGVRSHZVQT09

Passcode: 680803

Or iPhone one-tap : US: +13017158592,,99004647462# or +13126266799,,99004647462#

Or Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):

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Webinar ID: 990 0464 7462

International numbers available: https://ucf.zoom.us/u/abcE07ZV46

Learn more about the Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series: Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series - Rosen College of Hospitality Management (ucf.edu)

A Conversation with Dr. Abraham Pizam: The Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series is organized by
Singapore, Apr 29, 2021 - (ACN Newswire) - Glasstech Asia Online Conference, powered by BAU and BAU China, happened on the 27th of April 2021. Leading the glass and facades community ahead, the online conference brought together a network of glass and facades professionals around the world, to learn, discuss and to explore new networking opportunities through technology.Following the success of the first online conference, Glasstech Asia Online Conference 2021 drew over 150 registered attendees. Key trending topics of the industry like Manufacturing & Processing Innovations; Digitalisation: The Evolution Towards A Smart Factory; Architectural Designs: Design Trends of Post Pandemic Buildings; Architectural Designs: Advanced Building Skins / Advanced Facade Technology; Built Environment: The New Singapore Standards SS653 and SS654, was covered in the conference and spurred active interactions between the attendees and speakers during the final discussion round.Key highlights:Speaking on Manufacturing & Processing Innovations, Christoph Troska, Head of Marketing & Business Development at Kuraray Europe GmbH, shared interesting insights on structural glazing and the increasing need for security globally. This is critically important due to the changes in the current global climate, affecting the specifications and requirements for glass and facades in buildings.Next up, Tobias Botzenhardt, Vice President Asia Pacific of Siemens Digital Industries, shared on Digitalisation: The Evolution Towards A Smart Factory. During his informative session, key business issues faced amongst customers and partners during the COVID-19 pandemic was shared and later addressed with digital solutions to overcome these challenges.This was then complimented by Lars Anders, CEO of Priedemann Holding GmbH, who talked about Facade Engineering in the Post Covid Era -- "When it comes to digital knowledge, we have seen in Covid times, where anything that was digitalized already had seen a massive growth on deliverables and profits. We need to rethink our view on this problem by building a digital bridge".Timothy Soebroto, Associate Director of Meinhardt Facade Technology Pte Ltd -- "The evolution of architectural style has an implication to the evolution of glass facade industry". During his session, he covered the evolution of glass facades, its' impact, strategy to keep up with the evolution, and the future of glass facades.Taking on a different approach, Mathieu Meur, Director of DP Facade Pte Ltd, touched on the technical aspects of glass where he introduced the New Singapore Standards SS653 and SS654. The session highlighted standards for adoption suitable for the regional climates and temperatures, multiple risks and issues that could result in glass breakage in past products. All of which is highly pertinent for glass manufacturers to take note of.Furthermore, the online conference called attention to Architectural Designs: Design Trends of Post Pandemic Buildings, a highly discussed topic in the industry. It was an interesting segment well presented by two reputable speakers: Stefan Ude, Deputy Head of Product Certification of ift Rosenheim; Thomas Fritzsche, Founder and Head of Design of TFA Architects.Besides these live sessions, Glasstech Asia Online Conference also features on-demand components that are only accessible to delegates that have an account on the Glasstech Asia Virtual platform.Glasstech Asia Online Conference 2021 is the first of many upcoming virtual events in Glasstech Asia series taking place this year, leading up to its physical show in November.With the successful end of Glasstech Asia's Online Conference 2021, Glasstech Asia cordially invites all glass and facades professionals to join us in the upcoming series of events this year. Introducing a new partnership with PERAFI, Indonesian Facade Association, Glasstech Asia will be releasing a sequence of bi-monthly webinars that touches on different aspects of Facades.Additionally, Glasstech Asia Virtual will begin to initiate and facilitate business matching activities amongst delegates via the platform, with the aim to spur and encourage business opportunities and discussions between glass and facades professionals. Interested parties can head over to the platform here (https://virtual.glasstechasia.com.sg/ivs/glasstech) and register themselves for the upcoming business matching activities.Lastly, the annual Glasstech Asia 2021 trade show will continue to take place in Bangkok, Thailand on the 16th to 18th of November this year. As compared to the previous edition, the trade show will incorporate virtual digital components, offering virtual booths, extensive business matching features and enhanced networking functions.Further information on Glasstech Asia / Fenestration Asia 2021 can be found on our website.About Glasstech Asia 2021/ Fenestration Asia 2021Coined "The Glass Hub of Southeast Asia", Glasstech Asia is an annual rotating exhibition that focuses on all things glass. The upcoming 18th edition Glasstech Asia along with the concurrent Fenestration Asia will be held between the 16th to 18th of November next year. Returning to Bangkok, Thailand for the fourth time, the three-day event brings together the best of the Southeast Asian glass and glazing sector, from glass manufacturing, processing, and machinery to accessories, raw materials, and finished glass products. Coupled with high-powered symposiums, forums, workshops, and an exciting Glass Installation Competition, it is an event not to be missed.Additionally, Glasstech Asia and Fenestration Asia aims to meet and satisfy the increasing global demands for eco-friendly windows, doors, and facades by focusing on new industry standards in sustainability, automation, and energy-efficiency topics. With a focus on green and smart fenestration technologies to bring about a more sustainable, energy-efficient, and liveable future, the exposition is strategically geared towards helping the architecture, building, and construction sectors in countries meet their energy targets.About Messe MunchenMesse Munchen is one of the leading exhibition organizers worldwide with more than 50 of its own trade shows for capital goods, consumer goods and new technologies. Every year, a total of over 50,000 exhibitors and around three million visitors take part in more than 200 events at the exhibition center in Munich, at the ICM - Internationales Congress Center Munchen and the MOC Veranstaltungscenter Munchen as well as abroad. Together with its subsidiary companies, Messe Munchen organizes trade shows in China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, Vietnam, and Iran.With a network of associated companies in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America as well as around 70 representations abroad for over 100 countries, Messe Munchen has a global presence.About BAU NetworkBAU is the World's Leading Trade Fair for Architecture, Materials and Systems. Everyone involved in the international community for planning, building and designing buildings comes together here--i.e. architects, planners, investors, representatives of the industrial and commercial sectors, the building trades, etc. It is where future-oriented manufacturers come together with an audience of interested professionals. Their primary interests include the latest techniques, materials and applications that can be used in actual practice. This is where visitors experience the future of building in person.Please contact us if you have any questions or require any additional information: bauasia@mmiasia.com.sgSource: Glasstech AsiaCopyright 2021 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Jon Snow's fans and fellow journalists have lauded the 'brave' and 'indomitable' broadcaster after it was announced that he will quit Channel 4 News after 32 years.

The 73-year-old journalist, who has spent 45 years at ITN, will leave the programme as its longest-serving presenter ever - but will continue to work with Channel 4.

From next year he will front 'longer-form projects' for Channel 4 and focus on his charitable work along with 'peoples' stories, inequality, Africa, Iran and the arts'.

One heartbroken fan took to Twitter to write: 'The only Jon Snow you'll ever need. The shoes will be extremely hard to fill, not to mention the tie rack.'

Channel 4's director of programmes, Ian Katz, said: 'No-one can match the contribution Jon Snow has made to both TV journalism and C4 over more than three decades.

'Brave, irreverent, humane, curious, idealistic - Jon is the embodiment of everything C4 aspires to be. We feel very lucky to have had him presenting C4 News for 32 years.'

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow will quit after 32 years at the helm of the programme

Jon Snow and his wife Precious Lunga at a lunch to celebrate his Bafta fellowship in May 2015

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow is pictured reporting from Sri Lanka in January 2016

Jon Snow has decided to step down as Channel 4 News presenter at the end of 2021.



Here's a look back at a remarkable 32-year career presenting Channel 4 News from around the world, and 45 years as a journalist at ITN. pic.twitter.com/V0rW02ONHX  Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) April 29, 2021

One heartbroken fan took to Twitter to write: 'The only Jon Snow you'll ever need. The shoes will be extremely hard to fill, not to mention the tie rack'

Author and doctor Rachel Clarke said: 'Oh no - such a huge loss to Channel 4 News.

'Has there ever been a reporter & anchor whos so obviously & infectiously loved his job more? Youll be sorely missed.'

Another fan wrote: 'Am gutted but expected this to come at some point.

'Jon Snow has shown gravitas & a very clear understanding of the most complex issues. His questioning is thorough & yet he is always respectful.

'I shall make the most of his C4News presence during the remainder of this year.'

It comes a month after Mr Snow welcomed a baby boy with his wife Dr Precious Lunga, 46. He also has two older daughters with ex-partner Madeleine Colvin, 64.

Mr Snow, who married his Zimbabwean-born academic wife in 2010, said today: 'After three incredible decades on Channel 4 News, it is time to move on.

'I am excited by the many things I want to accomplish but I have to say I have enjoyed every minute of my time with the programme.

'It has brought me adventure, as well as sorrow in some of the stories that I have had to report and also joy in reporting others.

Jon Snow's career and awards timeline ROLES 1973-1976: Begins his journalism career for Independent Radio News (LBC)

1976-1983: Reporter for Independent Television News (ITN)

1983-1986: Washington Correspondent for ITN

1986-1989: Diplomatic Editor for ITN

1989-2021: Channel 4 News main presenter AWARDS 1980: TV Reporter of the Year

1981: Valiant Truth Media Award

1994: Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year

1995: Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year

2002: Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year

2005: Bafta award for Best Factual Contribution to UK Television

2006: Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year

2009: Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year

2011: University of Liverpool honorary graduate

2015: Sussex University honorary graduate

2015: Bafta fellowship

2018: Keele University honorary graduate Advertisement

'But above all, it has brought me community in working with the most fantastic group of people who are bound in intellect, humour and understanding.

'Together, we have forged a wonderful service. I feel proud to have contributed to Channel 4 News let alone to have anchored the programme for the last 32 years. I'm looking forward to new adventures and new challenges.'

Mr Snow, who is known for his array of colourful ties and socks, began his career in journalism with Independent Radio News (LBC) in 1973, before starting at ITN in 1976 where he was Washington correspondent from 1983 to 1986.

He was then diplomatic editor from 1986 to 1989 before becoming the main presenter of Channel 4 News in 1989.

Since then, he has travelled the world to cover the news  from the fall of Idi Amin in Uganda to the Revolution in Iran, and the wars in Iraq and conflicts in Israel.

He has also covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela and earthquakes in Kashmir, Japan and Haiti.

In addition, Mr Snow has covered the elections of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

Mr Snow's replacement has not yet been announced, but former Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan threw his hat in the ring today, saying: 'Shall I dust down my tie collection, Channel 4 News?'

His Channel 4 News colleague Krishnan Guru-Murthy praised his contribution to the programme over the years.

'Jon is a national treasure and is most treasured by us, his colleagues,' he said.

'For 23 years I've sat next to him watching and learning from his extraordinary passion, energy and commitment.

'He cares, massively. I know he has big exciting things ahead. We love you Jon!'

Cathy Newman, another presenter on the show, added: 'It's been a total privilege to present alongside @jonsnowC4 - a Titan of British broadcasting, a brilliant colleague, mentor and friend. Thank you Jon and see you in the studio!'

Other fans flocked to Twitter to commemorate Jon Snow's contributions to Channel 4

Jon Snow reporting for Channel 4 from the Tohoku Earthquake in Japan in March 2011

Jon Snow in Haiti following the earthquake in 2010, which he also covered for Channel 4 News

Jon Snow (left) is pictured as Margaret Thatcher arrives at No 10 Downing Street to take up office as prime minister following the Conservative victory in the general election in May 1979

Who is in the running to replace Jon Snow? 3/1 Piers Morgan

4/1 Kay Burley

6/1 Sarah Jane Mee

7/1 Cathy Newman

8/1 Julie Etchingham

12/1 Alastair Stewart

14/1 Tom Bradby

16/1 Huw Edwards

20/1 Claudia Liza Armah

25/1 Simon McCoy

25/1 Dan Walker

33/1 Jeremy Vine Odds from Coral bookmakers Advertisement

ITV's political editor Robert Peston labelled Mr Snow a 'legend'.

And ITV News royal editor Chris Ship tweeted: 'After an incredible 45 years at news provider @itn - including 32 years at the helm of @Channel4News - its been announced that the indomitable @jonsnowC4 is stepping down at the end of the year. What an innings! Congrats and good luck to Jon from all of us here.'

Mr Snow's awards include the Bafta prize for Best Factual Contribution to UK Television in 2005, and Royal Television Society awards for presenter of the year.

He is also a five times winner of presenter of the year, and in 2015 was given a Bafta Fellowship, which is the highest accolade handed out by the organisation.

Mr Snow was also made an honorary graduate by the University of Liverpool in 2011, by Sussex University in 2015 and then by Keele University in 2018.

In 2017 he delivered the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in which he criticised media organisations for a lack of diversity.

As he announced his departure today, Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear said: 'Jon has been the driving force behind Channel 4 News for the last 30 years.

Mr Snow has shared his name in more recent years with the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, with some Twitter users making light of this in memes today

When Jon Snow was accused of shouting 'f*** the Tories' during a photo at Glastonbury One of Jon Snow's most infamous moments came when he was accused of chanting 'f**k the Tories' while having his photo taken at Glastonbury. He was alleged to have told revellers in 2017, 'I'm supposed to be neutral', after his comment about the Conservatives. But he said he took thousands of pictures during his time at the festival, and did not remember one reveller's account of him shouting the words. The 2017 picture tweeted by @DannyMillea A tweet by @DannyMillea said: 'Boss place that Glasto. Having a dance with Jon Snow and hearing him shout f*** the Tories is what dream are made of.' The tweet, which was later deleted, was accompanied by a photo of Mr Snow surrounded by a group of men. And Mr Snow later told MailOnline: 'After a day at Glastonbury I can honestly say I have no recollection of what was chanted, sung or who I took over 1,000 selfies with.' Tory MPs including Philip Davies and Andrew Bridgen called for him to be sacked over the alleged remarks. Advertisement

'His fearless journalism, inherent compassion, a nose for a good story as well as sympathy for the underdog have been powered by relentless energy, charm and a mischievous sense of fun.

'It has been a great honour to be his editor and friend, and I know that everyone at Channel 4 News and ITN feels that he is far more than a colleague.

'As well as his support and friendship to fellow workers, for decades he has worked tirelessly for a multitude of charities and causes beyond the public gaze and for no other reason than to help those less fortunate than himself.

'He may be leaving us after decades on the front line of history, but his contribution will live on and undoubtedly continue elsewhere. He is a wonderful man, and it has been an honour to call Jon our friend and colleague.'

ITN chief executive Deborah Turness said: 'Over a lifetime dedicated to journalism, and in a life devoted to fairness and humanity, Jon Snow has earned a unique and special place in the hearts of the British audience.

'There is only one Jon Snow  when they made him, they broke the mould. His warmth, intellect and decency have always prevailed, even as he held the powerful to account and sought justice for the weak and powerless.'

Channel 4's chief content officer Ian Katz, said: 'No-one can match the colossal contribution Jon has made to both broadcast journalism and Channel 4 over more than three decades.

'He's a talismanic figure whose combination of integrity, humanity and mischief helped make him the most trusted and well-loved news presenter of his generation, and the embodiment of everything Channel 4 aspires to be.

'I'm immensely grateful for everything Jon has done to help establish Channel 4 News as Britain's most trusted TV news programme and delighted that he will continue to appear on the channel after he steps down from presenting the News.'

Mr Snow has shared his name in more recent years with the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, with some Twitter users making light of this in memes they posted today.
A health care worker at St. Joseph Hospital receives one of Orange County's first COVID-19 vaccine injections in Orange, Calif., on Dec. 16, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Orange Countys Vaccine Verification Plans on Hold

Orange Countys proof-of-vaccination plans have been temporarily paused, health officials said during an April 27 board of supervisors meeting.

The county was previously planning to provide the public with an optional vaccine passport through a smartphone app.

The initiative will not be carried forward until supervisors vote on accepting an amended contract with Composite Apps Inc. The board could decide to remove the electronic vaccine validation option or reject the contract altogether.

During an April 13 meeting, supervisors were faced with 215 public commenters who shared concerns about the system.

The rush of comments came after Orange County Health Care Agency director Dr. Clayton Chau said the agency planned to create what was originally called a vaccine passport. The voluntary system would allow residents to request a scannable QR code on their smartphone to show to businesses that require proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

The board is likely to continue its discussion on the vaccine verification system during its May 11 meeting.

During the April 27 meeting, Supervisor Don Wagner pushed Chau, asking why the county would spend $3.8 million in taxpayer funds on a contract involving the verification program through the countys Othena app when the county could just mail a QR code on a piece of paper to residents who request them.

What Othena has got to do is generate a QR code, Chau told the board. And people who want it will have to request for it, were not pushing it out for everybody. Once you request for it, you have two options. One is going to be electronic, or we can send you a card, whichever one you prefer.

Wagner replied: Why not just eliminate option one? [A resident] asks for it, we generate it, we send you a card, end of business. And its a whole lot cheaper for the public. And itll eliminate all or the vast majority of those concerns. Its win-win.

Chau said the decision is not his to make.

Im not in the authority to make that policy, Chau said. Because from a health care agency perspective of a patient, if they come to me and said, Hey, I want my record this way. I have to comply. Simple as that.

Chau also noted that with the vaccine verification on a digital platform, the QR code will change every time its scanned, so it cant be duplicated, unlike a piece of paper with the code printed on it.

Supervisors again faced public speakers, this time about 65, who argued that the passport would take away freedoms from residents who make a personal choice to not be vaccinated. They also accused the verification program of tracking residents.

Is there any intention of tracking folks? Wagner asked Chau, who said no. Wagner asked, In the vaccine, we heard about an injection of a tracking device, is that being done anywhere?

Chau replied, There is not a vaccine with a tracking device embedded in it that I know of exists in the world.

Supervisor Lisa Bartlett had a different approach on the matter, saying people need to be worried about smartphones tracking them, not the QR code.

Theres no track and trace, Bartlett said. Its not big government following them around. I think people need to realize that relative to if they have a smartphone, theyre already getting tracked  they can track if youve got a car, its got a black box in it. The insurance companies and the auto manufacturers, they can figure out where your vehicle is if youve got it stolen, for instance.
A young mother in Rwanda cuddles her newborn with skin-to-skin contact, wrapped with the Infant Warmer mat. Credit: Professor Anne Hansen, Department of Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital. Photo taken in July 2019 in Butaro Hospital, Rwanda, with informed consent.

Newborn babies, particularly those born under-weight or preterm, are susceptible to hypothermia, since newborns are not yet able to maintain their own body heat. Hypothermia is recognized to be a significant contributor to newborn disease and death, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Health Organization and public health leaders have recommended best practices to prevent hypothermia in newborns. These include skin-to-skin contact with the mother, and if available, a supplemental external heat source. A new infant-warming device developed at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley offers a promising solution that does not require electricity, and is low-cost, convenient, and reusable.

A recent study in EClinicalMedicine found that the infant-warming device, known as the Dream Warmer, proved to be safe and effective at significantly lowering newborn mortality rates associated with hypothermia in Rwanda. The findings from a field trial led by Harvard Medical School showed that use of the infant warmer resulted in a drop in infant mortality from 2.8% to 0.9% in hospitals in Rwanda.

The Dream Warmer is a wrap-around pad containing a phase-change material, which is a substance that can absorb and release large amounts of thermal energy or heat when it melts or freezes. The Dream Warmer maintains a temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the average 020202boiling water and allowed to cool prior to use with newborn infants.

The technology was developed by Berkeley Lab scientists Ashok Gadgil and Vi Rapp, and builds upon an earlier design by Mike Elam, Jonathan Slack, and others at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

Gadgil and Rapp expected to see some effect on infant mortality but were thrilled to see the threefold drop. "That was a huge and quite unexpected result," said Gadgil.

"These results demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the warmer, which will support its progression to an article of routine widespread use, first in Rwanda and then elsewhere," added Rapp.

The Harvard Medical School trial in Rwanda was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, and physicians at Partners in Health, Boston Children's Hospital, and the Rwanda Ministry of Health. The field research in Rwanda was funded by the Banyan Gates Foundation.

Explore further Kangaroo mother care effective in prevention of hypothermia in term infants when practiced

More information: Josee Uwamariya et al. Safety and effectiveness of a non-electric infant warmer for hypothermia in Rwanda: A cluster-randomized stepped-wedge trial, EClinicalMedicine (2021). Journal information: The Lancet Josee Uwamariya et al. Safety and effectiveness of a non-electric infant warmer for hypothermia in Rwanda: A cluster-randomized stepped-wedge trial,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100842
A nurse administers a dose of the Moderna vaccine in Los Angeles, California. Between 20 and 40% of frontline workers in Los Angeles have refused a shot. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Moderna will make up to 3 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine in 2022, the biotech said Thursday.

The CEO said "there will continue to be significant need" for shots and boosters in 2022 and 2023.

The company is testing lower doses as booster shots, which could expand future supply.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Moderna is anticipating a "significant need" for its COVID-19 vaccine through 2022 and 2023, leading the biotech firm to ramp up production efforts, the company said early Thursday.

Moderna is aiming to manufacture up to 3 billion doses in 2022, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company said in a statement, up from as many as 1 billion this year.

CEO Stephane Bancel said the spread of variants will keep demand high for the shots.

"As we follow the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, we believe that there will continue to be significant need for our mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and our variant booster candidates into 2022 and 2023," Bancel said in a statement.

Moderna CEO, Stephane Bancel. Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

We may need to get COVID-19 booster shots

While the shots have proven to be overwhelmingly protective and safe in clinical trials and in the real-world rollout, scientists are unsure how long protection will last. Bancel and Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, have both recently suggested that a booster shot would likely be needed within 12 months of getting vaccinated to maintain protection.

The exact number of vaccine doses Moderna will make next year hinges in part on the size of the doses. Moderna is currently testing whether booster shots can given at a lower dose.

In particular, the company's two-dose vaccine is given as two 100-microgram injections, four weeks apart. In ongoing clinical trials, the company is testing strengths for the booster shot of 20 micrograms and 50 micrograms.

Read more: Moderna's CEO shares his strategy to develop a 'world-changing' single vaccine that protects against COVID-19, the flu, and other respiratory illnesses

Story continues

Moderna is boosting its manufacturing capabilities

In anticipation of future demand, Moderna is investing in its global supply chain, which spans the US, Spain, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. To produce its vaccine, Moderna works with a range of contractors, including Switzerland's Lonza and Spain's Rovi.

But it also has been building up its in-house capabilities, mainly out of its 200,000-square-foot plant in Norwood, Massachusetts, which was formerly a Polaroid factory.

The biotech is also expanding its presence in Norwood. Alexandria Real Estate Equities disclosed earlier this week that it signed a lease with the biotech for a 240,000-square-foot site down the street from its existing manufacturing campus. The property includes another 350,000 square feet of space that could be developed in the future.

Moderna's shot is one of three US-authorized coronavirus vaccines. More than 140 million adults in the US have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, making up 55% of the adult population, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The other two vaccines in use in the US were developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson. About 102 million doses of Moderna's vaccine have been used in the US so far, per CDC data.

Moderna also tightened its 2021 supply forecast Thursday. The company now expects to produce 800 million to 1 billion doses overall this year. Previously, the company was projecting 700 million to 1 billion in 2021 production.

Read the original article on Business Insider
GLEN CARBON  During Tuesdays meeting recognitions and plaques were made for village clerk Ross Breckenridge, trustee Mary Beth Williams and Jackstadt. This meeting was their last one as village elected officials. Several department heads took time at the lectern to hand out compliments, praise and remembrances.

In other action, the trustees unanimously approved the following items:
Perhaps the real tragedy of Hamlet is that it doesnt end with a dance party; too many of its characters lie dead at the final curtain for anyone to shake a leg.

But if Hamlet wallows, Fat Ham, the hilarious yet profound new Hamlet-inspired play by James Ijames, prefers to mellow. Built on the gnawed bones of its predecessor, and reset in the modern-day South among members of a Black family that runs a barbecue restaurant, Fat Ham refuses the tropes of Black suffering even as it engages the seriousness of the Shakespeare. It is the rare takeoff that actually takes off  and then flies in its own smart direction.

Comedy, karaoke and that disco finale are only part of the menu, though Morgan Greens filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, available on demand through May 23, leads with the laughs. Juicy (Brennen S. Malone), the Hamlet character, is a young man taking classes in human relations at a for-profit online college, which even the ghost of his late father, Pap (Lindsay Smiling), derides as a scam. You going to school on a laptop! he moans.

As in Hamlet, Pap has returned to seek revenge on his brother; in Fat Ham, hes Rev (Smiling again), a supposed man of God whose main motives for fratricide seem to be getting his hands on Juicys college money, Paps wife, Tedra (Kimberly S. Fairbanks), and the familys restaurant. If Shakespeares funeral baked meats  the ones that coldly furnish forth the marriage tables  never sounded very appetizing, here, at the backyard barbecue following the quickie wedding, you can almost smell the pork shoulder sizzling in the smoker.
The information contained within this announcement is deemed to constitute inside information pursuant to the EU (Withdrawal) Act and amended pursuant to Market Abuse (Amended) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019. Upon the publication of this announcement, this inside information is now considered to be in the public domain.

For immediate release

29 April 2021

Anglo African Agriculture plc

("AAA" or the "Company")



Corporate Update

The Company is pleased to provide a progress update on the proposed acquisition of the Comarco group of companies (the "Comarco Group"). The Comarco Group is based in Mombasa, Kenya and is engaged in port and marine logistics activities in East Africa.

Comarco business update

Despite the uncertainty created by Covid-related lockdowns and business interruptions, Comarco continues to operate in line with management budgets.

The Comarco management team has focused on new business and Comarco has secured contracts in the coastal waters in and around Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Somalia as well as its first contract on Lake Tanganyika.

In the Comarco Port Division delivery of iron ore into the yard for export has recommenced in early April 2021. Negotiations to secure a substantial coal import contract are at an advanced stage. This will substantially boost throughput volumes and the overall performance of the port.

One of recently executed contracts involve Comarco being contracted by the Kenya Ports Authority ("KPA") to carry assorted equipment for cargo handling and navigation from Mombasa to Lamu port that is being operationalised. Comarco provided a 106-metre shoal-draft flat-bottomed flat top barge C231 to move the equipment, and it was towed by the tug MV Comarco Swift. Comarco will further transfer a Rubber-Tyred Gantry Crane to Lamu Port during May 2021. The current contract with KPA follows a successful contract in September 2021 to transfer four Rubber Tyred Gantry (RTG) cranes from one section of Mombasa Port to another.

In the meantime Comarco's on-going work with the Fujita Corporation in support of the Southern Bypass Road Construction project as well as the soon-to-commence Kilindini harbour bridge construction project, will benefit both the Marine and Port divisions.

Update on LNG project in Mozambique

On Monday 26 April 2021, Total Group announced a "force majeure" on its Mozambique LNG project and Comarco management is monitoring the developments closely as part of its future growth opportunities would have been greatly assisted by providing its port and marine logistics services to the LNG project contractors. Thus far there has not been any material impact on any existing contracts with LNG contractors, however this development is expected to lead into delays in the resumption of works at the project and thus impact the future contract pipeline opportunities of Comarco.

Transaction funding update

The Company is working with Comarco in order to secure the necessary arrangements to provide sufficient working and expansion capital to conclude the RTO and put the combined group on a growth path after Admission. A revised term sheet with a large regional commercial bank is in advanced stages of finalisation that could provide Comarco with access to additional growth funding once the reverse takeover ("RTO") has been completed.

Discussions and due diligences with equity and debt funders are progressing. Further announcements will be made once binding agreements are executed.

Extension of sale agreements

As a result of the ongoing discussions, the Company and shareholders of Comarco group of companies have agreed to extend the existing sale and purchase agreements ("SPAs") until 30 September 2021 to allow for sufficient time to finalise the fund raising process and complete the RTO. Documentation to formalise this extension is currently being finalised.

For further information, please visit www.aaaplc.com or www.comarcogroup.com contact the following:
After he was arrested, Flowers said that he was armed with a BB gun with an extended magazine that he carries for protection and said that he hit the detective first, prosecutors said. He also said that he heard the detective identify himself as a police officer and say, You dont have to do this. Once he realized that the victim was a police officer, he said he tried to get Washington to leave him alone.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Fla. on Feb. 27, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Pompeo Says Biden Outlined a Radical, Socialist Agenda in 100-Day Speech

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo weighed in on President Joe Bidens address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening, characterizing the presidents vision for America as radical and socialist.

Pompeo made his comments following Bidens hour-long speech to Congress where he touted his accomplishments and called on lawmakers to pass a long list of measures to advance the Democrats agenda including on guns, infrastructure, H.R. 1, police reform, and childcare.

The presidents address comes on the same day he unveiled the American Families Plan, which is expected to cost $1.8 trillion and raise the top individual tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent for taxpayers in the top 1 percent of income. The proposal is the third major legislative package Democrats are seeking to ram through Congress in just three months, which would bring the total cost of Bidens agenda to $6 trillion.

So far, President Biden has successfully outlined a radical, socialist agenda for the next 4 years. That should trouble every freedom-loving American, Pompeo wrote on Twitter. The former secretary of state previously fueled speculation that he may make a 2024 presidential bid if former President Donald Trump decides against a second term.

Nearly every policy President Biden has proposed tonight involves bigger government and higher taxes. This does nothing but HURT the American worker.

Pompeo commented on the administrations policy stance against the Chinese Communist Party, urging Biden to take a tough stance to ensure that the United States has a competitive edge over Beijing.

President Biden says that he wants to position us to win the competition of the 21st century. Let me tell youkowtowing to China will ensure we lose that competition. We must be tough, not weak, he said.

Biden outlined his case on dealing with China during his address, arguing that he intends to make Beijing play by the same rules in the global economy.

In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competitionand that we are not looking for conflict, Biden said. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.

America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property.

The White House did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request to comment on Pompeos remarks.

Biden also promoted his two latest signature proposalsAmerican Jobs Plan and American Families Planin which he laid out arguments for passing the measures.

These are good-paying jobs that cant be outsourced. Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan dont require a college degree. Seventy-five percent dont require an associates degree, Biden argued in support of his American Jobs Plan.

In the Republican rebuttal, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) argued that the American Jobs Plan was a liberal wish list, a big government waste that features the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation. Meanwhile, the American Families Plan, he said, would usher in even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college.

Several lawmakers including Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) have expressed concerns about the proposed large spending measures.

Scott also accused the commander-in-chief of taking actions that are further dividing the nation despite Bidens promises to unify America.

Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words. But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite our nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans no matter how we voted. This was the pitch. You just heard it again. But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes, he said.
Deputy Chief Shari Montgomery has been appointed as the interim police chief to replace Chief Cerelyn C.J. Davis after she leaves for a new job.

The appointment was announced Thursday by Durham City Manager Wanda Page.

Davis is leaving Durham June 11 to become the police chief in Memphis, Tennessee.

Montgomery, who has been with the department for 22 years, will start serving in her new role June 12.

Deputy Chief Montgomerys 22 years of service in the Police Department as well as to the Durham community make her an excellent choice to serve in the interim chief position as recruitment begins for a new police chief, Page said in a news release.

Montgomery is a well-respected leader in the department who has risen through the ranks over the last two decades, and Im happy that she was willing to provide continuity until a new police chief is named.

Montgomery has been with the police department since March 1999. She was promoted to deputy chief in May 2020, and was in charge of the departments Administrative Services Bureau, which provides community services, planning and analytical services. She is now assigned to the Investigative Services Bureau, which is in charge of investigating crimes and forensics, according to the department website.

Montgomery will be taking over as chief as Durham saw a record number of shootings last year. The city reported 318 people were shot, almost a 70% increase over the 189 people shot in 2019. It was the most people shot since at least 2016, when the department began tracking the data, The News & Observer has reported.

Last year, the Durham Police Department cleared only a quarter of the gun-related homicides and less than a tenth of the reported shooting incidents. The national average for murder clearance rates has been between 59% and 63% in recent years, The N&O reported.
The roots of her activism and feminism ran deep.

Inji Efflatoun was born on April 16, 1924, the younger of two daughters of an aristocratic family. Her father, Hassan Efflatoun, was a scientist who established a department of entomology at the University of Cairo. Inji had been inclined toward the arts from a young age and was encouraged by her parents.

The girls would accompany their father on field trips, Hassan Mahmoud, a distant relative, said in a phone interview. Inji was great at drawing, so much so that he would ask her to draw the insects for him.

Injis mother, Salha, was unusually independent for women of her day. She divorced her husband at 19, went to Paris to study fashion and opened her own boutique, Maison Salha.

Inji was enrolled at the prestigious College du Sacre-Coeur, a French Catholic institution in Cairo that was known for disciplining its students. She called it my first prison. The schools strict rules and overt discrimination  Egyptian nuns were delegated more work than their foreign-born counterparts  fueled her rebelliousness, leading her to defiantly read books that the school had banned. She later attended the more liberal Lycee Francais du Caire, where she learned of Rousseau, Voltaire, the French Revolution and Napoleons invasion of Egypt.

Marxist theories inspired her to reject her elitist background and stand with working-class Egyptians. And she began to see art as a form of liberation.

Efflatoun studied with Kamel El Telmissany, an artist and filmmaker who started the leftist Surrealist Art and Liberty Group.
New Delhi, April 29 : Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel has written to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Thursday suggesting that Remdesivir injection, Ivermectin tablets, Tocilizumab injection, Favipiravir Capsule, Enoxaparin injection and Dexamethasone tablet should be notified as essential commodities immediately.

In his letter, Baghel said that the demand for Remdesivir injection, Ivermectin tablets, Tocilizumab injection, Favipiravir capsule, Enoxaparin injection and Dexamethasone tablet has increased. The increase in demand has resulted in hoarding and black marketing of these medicines.

He informed the Union Health Minister that the state government has already taken several measures such as constant monitoring of distribution and use of these medicines in hospitals, constituting a special task force for the purpose, surprise inspection and raids on receiving information of black marketing to stop hoarding and black marketing of these medicines.

He added that notifying these medicines under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 will not only help the state government in stopping black marketing but also in ensuring availability of these drugs.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Her sizzling Instagram snaps have made her a social media sensation.

And Demi Rose appears to have caught the eye of someone special, judging by her latest post which saw her posing in front of dozens of white roses.

The influencer, 26, showcased her infamous curves in a barely-there nude bikini by PrettyLittleThing, as she showcased her ten incredible bouquets of flowers.

Wow! Demi Rose appears to have caught the eye of someone special, judging by her latest post which saw her posing in front of dozens of white roses

Demi was wearing a skimpy white bikini top, which she teamed with a matching sarong in the snaps which she captioned: 'Vibe so high the universe matched it.'

She wore her brunette locks slicked back off her pretty features, which appeared to have been enhanced with soft touches of make-up.

On her Instagram Stories, Demi revealed she had been sent the floral delivery as she filmed the bouquets arriving at her house.

Smell the roses: The influencer, 26, showcased her infamous curves in a barely-there white bikini, as she showcased her ten incredible bouquets of flowers

Special delivery: On her Instagram Stories, Demi revealed she had been sent the floral delivery as she filmed the bouquets arriving at her house

She shared the handwritten note which had come with the delivery, which read: 'To Demi, the Goddess, from...', however the sender's name was blanked out.

Demi also wrote: 'Thank you. This is paradise', as she further shared her appreciation.

It comes after Demi showcased her jaw-dropping figure once more in a sizzling clip she uploaded to Instagram on Saturday.

The model displayed her famous hourglass figure as she lifted her crop top, showing off her toned midriff.

Beach glam: She wore her brunette locks slicked back off her pretty features, which appeared to have been enhanced with soft touches of make-up

Looking good: Demi showcased her jaw-dropping figure in a sizzling clip she uploaded to Instagram on Saturday

Also wearing navy tracksuit bottoms, Demi styled her brunette locks into an updo for the day.

The social media influencer hid her face in the clip as she posed outdoors in front of a pool in Ibiza.

Demi completed her look by sporting a pair of white trainers.

The new snaps come after the brunette beauty recently opened up to MailOnline about how she shot to stardom at the age of 14 after being bullied in school.

Pose: The model, 26, displayed her famous hourglass figure as she lifted her crop top, showing off her toned midriff

Demi recalled: 'I was bullied in school, I wanted to make friends outside of it so I ended up spending a lot of time online.

'I was even interested in virtual reality as a kid, I was always on the computer and then MySpace came around and I found my calling.'

She experienced her first taste of fame when pictures of her on the beach as a young teenager went viral on Instagram.

Casual: Also wearing navy tracksuit bottoms, Demi styled her brunette locks into an updo for the day

Birmingham native Demi shared: 'I only ever got Instagram because someone made a fake profile of me on there with 3,000 followers and I was really envious.

'I was like, "wow, how can someone using my pictures get that much?" And then I started an account and it went from there.'

From the age of 18, the bombshell  who currently boasts 16 million followers  signed with a modelling agency and her career went from strength to strength.

Demi has been sharing a slew of snaps from her sunny travels in recent months  including trips to the Maldives and Tanzania.

She is currently residing in Ibiza.
The government of Norway on Wednesday announced that it was pledging USD 2.4 million in funding as medical assistance to support the vulnerable and impacted patients of COVID-19 going without healthcare due to the massive surge of the variant wave in India. Expressing solidarity with the country, the Norwegian government said that it was scaling up monetary help, which will be directed to India via WHO, Red Cross International Federation, and the Red Crescent Societies. The monetary assistance will help India provide ambulance services, launch blood donation services, and medical helplines. It will also help the government buy equipment such as oxygen concentrators for ambulances and procure and distribute hygiene products to migrant workers and other vulnerable groups, the Norwegian embassy said in a statement, accessed by PTI.

''First of all, we send our deepest sympathies and support to all our Indian friends. Norway is making a contribution to the efforts of the Indian government and its people through funds via the WHO and the Indian Red Cross Society,'' Norwegian Ambassador to India Hans Jacob Frydenlund said. ''We stand with you in this time of crisis, with the hope that the second wave will recede soon,'' he continued. The announcement was officially made by Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Sreide, and his statement was rolled out by the embassy. ''There is a dynamic Norwegian business community in India also currently preparing to help in the best and quickest ways possible,'' Frydenlund said.

EU 'alarmed by epidemiological situation' in India

Many European countries as well have stepped forward to stand in solidarity with India in its fight against the COVID-19 health emergency. As the situation spiralled due to cases adding up in lakhs every single day, the European Union activated its Civil Protection Mechanism, saying that it was coordinating with member states to ship oxygen and medicine to India. Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen earlier said she was "alarmed by the epidemiological situation in India. We are ready to support. The EU is pooling resources to respond rapidly to India's request for assistance," she added. Meanwhile Germanys chancellor Angela Merkel also said that Germany "stands in solidarity with India and is urgently preparing a mission of support. She added, "To the people of India I want to express my sympathy for the terrible suffering that COVID-19 has again brought to your communities. The fight against the pandemic is our common fight.
[April 29, 2021] Boralex Signs a New Renewable Power Purchase Agreement, to Benefit IBM France

MONTREAL and PARIS, April 29, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - Boralex Inc. ("Boralex" or the "Corporation") (TSX: BLX) announces the signing of a corporate PPA1, through which the Corporation will supply IBM's France-based locations with renewable electricity. The agreement, effective January 1, 2021, covers a five-year period. Through this agreement, Boralex, a renewable energy pioneer and the largest independent producer of onshore wind power in France, will supply IBM with renewable power, equivalent to 55% of the annual consumption of IBM's France-based sites and data centers. This is part of IBM's effort to use 100% renewable electricity in France. The power will be sourced from Boralex's wind asset portfolio, specifically from assets whose contracts with EDF will have expired. The final agreement involves three companies on the French market: Boralex, as a green energy producer, will apply its industrial asset management expertise to supply power to IBM France, the final customer, and Axpo Solutions, which will aggregate the renewable power codified in the agreement. 2023 strategy and CSR: Boralex confirms its commitments With this third corporate PPA signed with a large power-consuming company since 2020, Boralex is staying the course on its 2023 Strategic Plan's pillars to directly contract with such organizations. Boralex, whose first corporate social responsibility report was published February 25, 2021, is committed to its CSR program and highlights the consistency between the company and its clients' commitments. IBM's demonstrable commitment to sustainability dates back decades with the issuance of its formal corporate environmental policy in 1971. Earlier this year IBM updated its energy and climate goals which included a 3rd generation renewable electricity goal to source 75% of its global electricity consumption from renewables by 2025 and 90% by 2030. Meeting these goals will be key to achieve IBM's goal of net zero GHG emissions by 2030. "We're proud to support such a world-renowned company as IBM, alongside our trusted partner Axpo, and to contribute in a very tangible way to the actions it's taking to promote the energy transition. Since 2019, our Energy Markets Department worked to develop corporate power purchase agreements like this, for industrial and commercial clients throughout France. This new agreement shows that we're staying the course. It also shows our ability to diversify our client portfolio and grow our presence in new business sectors," declared Nicolas Wolff, Vice President and General Manager Boralex, Europe. "Increasing our procurement of renewable electricity in France is an important step towards meeting our 5th generation greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal. We value working with Boralex and Axpo on this important project," said Jay Paidipati, Global Energy Manager, IBM.







__________________________ 1 A corporate power purchase agreement is a contract that allows a corporate to buy green energy from a renewable energy producer (wind or solar).

About Boralex Boralex develops, builds and operates renewable energy power facilities in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. A leader in the Canadian market and France's largest independent producer of onshore wind power, the Corporation is recognized for its solid experience in optimizing its asset base in four power generation types  wind, hydroelectric, thermal, and solar. Boralex ensures sustained growth by leveraging the expertise and diversification developed for the past 30 years. Boralex's shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLX. More information is available at www.boralex.com or www.sedar.com . Follow us on Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/boralex-signs-a-new-renewable-power-purchase-agreement-to-benefit-ibm-france-301279874.html SOURCE Boralex Inc.

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MENLO PARK, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- LIPAC Oncology LLC today announced the conclusion of a successful Type B meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss Phase 2b/3 clinical trials of LiPax in patients with low-grade highly recurrent non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). The feedback from the FDA provides a clear path for LIPAC Oncology to initiate the Phase 2b trial for LiPax in the second half of 2021.

"We appreciate the thoughtful feedback and guidance from the FDA and acceptance of our proposed design for the Phase 2b/3 trial of LiPax," said Michael Oefelein, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of LIPAC Oncology. "Non-muscle invasive bladder cancer is difficult to treat and highly recurrent. With the lack of existing treatment options for low to intermediate risk NMIBC, the unmet medical need is very high."

LIPAC Oncology recently announced the successful completion of a Phase 2a marker lesion clinical trial designed to predict long-term (two-year) recurrence free survival rates in patients with low-grade highly recurrent NMIBC treated with LiPax. In this study LiPax demonstrated a 63 percent marker lesion responder rate in highly recurrent and heavily pretreated patients. Based on these results, the FDA agreed that the Phase 2b trial will be a dose selection study with low dose (90 mg) and high dose (360 mg) arms and will enroll approximately 30 patients in each arm. The Phase 3 trial will be a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in patients with low-grade recurrent NMIBC with a time to event primary endpoint after a one-year treatment phase.

"LIPAC Oncology is pleased to reach this important point in the development of LiPax, bringing us one step closer to providing this therapeutic option to the patients who could benefit from a novel approach to treatment," said Will Robberts, President of LIPAC Oncology. "We have made significant progress with the program, including executing a successful Phase 1/2a trial, securing a strategic partner in South Korea and expanding the global intellectual property protection with formulation patents being granted in Europe, Japan, China and other territories."

About NMIBC

Non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) is a cancer found in the tissue that lines the inner surface of the bladder. Bladder cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the U.S., and 74% of all bladder cancer is non-muscle invasive. Approximately 90,000 patients are newly diagnosed with NMIBC per year in the U.S. alone with as many as 390,000 patients per year newly diagnosed with NMIBC worldwide. The disease is marked by a high recurrence with a five-year recurrence rate averaging 50%.

Treatment of NMIBC is based on risk stratification. Patients are initially treated with a simple outpatient procedure involving transurethral resection of bladder tumor (TURBT) followed by a single, immediate instillation of intravesical chemotherapy to eliminate any residual tumor cells. Based on a patient's biopsy results obtained from TURBT, NMIBC is stratified into three risk categories: low, intermediate, and high risk. To reduce recurrence and prevent progression, the American Urological Association NMIBC guidelines recommend induction and maintenance intravesical therapy after TURBT for intermediate risk patients. The low to intermediate risk category targeted by LiPax is estimated to comprise 95,000 Americans per year, yet no intravesical agent is approved by the FDA for this disease.

About LiPax

LiPax is a precision targeted, locally delivered taxane in Phase 2b development for intravesical instillation in the treatment of NMIBC. Its liposome-bound technology achieves targeted tissue penetration with no systemic exposure and toxicity. NMIBC is the lead program with additional orphan indications in upper tract urothelial cancer (UTUC), peritoneal and ovarian cancers and thoracic cancers (mesothelioma and malignant pleural effusion). LIPAC Oncology's precision nano-technology platform provides targeted local liposomal delivery of taxanes (paclitaxel) to allow for deep tissue penetration in the bladder with no systemic exposure, dose-limiting toxicity or chemo-related side effects. LiPax is designed to enhance the standard of care of outpatient endoscopic tumor removal followed by intravesical instillation using a standard urinary catheter. LIPAC Oncology completed a Phase 2a clinical trial in August 2020 and intends to advance the program to a pivotal study to further investigate LiPax in the treatment of this condition.

About LIPAC Oncology LLC

LIPAC Oncology is a pharmaceutical company focused on advancing the development of new investigational therapies to treat intra-cavitary cancers. Its precision nano-technology platform targets local liposomal delivery of taxanes for the treatment of multiple tumor types. LiPax, its lead investigational candidate for the treatment of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, is in Phase 2b development. The Company's pipeline includes multiple orphan indications based on the established LiPax formulation. For more information, visit lipaconcology.com.

Investors:

Sherri Spear, 212-600-1902

[email protected]

Media:

Leo Vartorella, 212-600-1902

[email protected]

SOURCE LIPAC Oncology LLC

Related Links

http://lipaconcology.com


The price of solar panel installations has dropped in Spain and demand has soared. acilo / Getty Images/iStockphoto

The sun is shining brighter than ever in Spain, and for good reason: the Plan for the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience of the Spanish Economy includes significant subsidies for homes improving their energy efficiency, and it will not only be multi-owned apartment blocks that are eligible, but also stand-alone homes installing photovoltaic solar panels, according to the Transportation, Mobility and Urban Agenda Ministry. Moreover, the number of homeowners who have installed solar panels on the roofs of their homes has reached record figures in the last year, which in turn has boosted demand for solar panel installation technicians.

But while the solar boom is welcome, it has highlighted the poor quality of some installations and lack of training among technicians. The most common error is failing to avoid partial shadows, due to an antenna, for example, says Jorge Morales, director of power company Proxima Energia. You can lose up to 50% of efficiency that way. Other problems include panels that are not properly attached to roofs, meaning they fly off in high winds. And in other cases, the panels are causing leaks in the roof.

People whose jobs have not been affected by the pandemic have saved money to go through with the installation, which costs, on average, between 4,000 and 6,000 Jose Donoso, general manager of UNEF

To avoid this kind of botched job and lack of maintenance that has been prevalent since 2006, the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF) has just created a quality seal for installation companies, establishing a certification system that guarantees that the installation of photovoltaic self-consumption panels is carried out in accordance with rules defined by a committee of industry experts.

There is concern about the lack of experience in a sector that is generating a lot of employment with a lot of new companies being set up, says Jose Donoso, general manager of UNEF. We want solar technicians to have the proper training; to take exams to give them approved certificates. The association says that this quality seal was created in response to the needs of the sector which is seeing soaring demand for photovoltaic self-consumption installations.

In Spain, 596 megawatts (MW) of new photovoltaic power were installed for self-consumption in 2020, 30% more than in 2019, according to UNEF data. After almost 40 years of hesitancy, residential self-consumption has taken a huge leap forward during the coronavirus pandemic. The surprise has been the growth within the housing sector, which already accounts for a 20% share and has gone from 40 MW to more than 100 MW in a year, according to Donoso  a trend that has continued in the first three months of 2021. This has come as a big surprise, he says. It was not predicted and it is due to the fact that people whose jobs have not been affected by the pandemic have saved money to go through with the installation, which costs, on average, between 4,000 and 6,000. There are also an increasing number of cities applying tax deductions to the IBI [property tax].

In Spain, 596 megawatts of new photovoltaic power were installed for self-consumption in 2020, 30% more than in 2019

The main clients for domestic self-consumption are people with homes with an installed capacity of 100 kilowatts (kW) or less that use a system of simplified compensation  the value of the surplus energy is deducted from their electricity bill at a price agreed with the supplier. Shared self-consumption in multi-owned apartment blocks is not yet a big player, though this sector is predicted to grow with European Union subsidies and the forthcoming reform of the Horizontal Property Law (which regulates the rights of ownership of an individual property within a residents association) to facilitate majority agreements.

Large retail companies, such as El Corte Ingles, Fnac, Leroy Merlin, Ikea and MediaMarkt, have jumped at the chance of dominating the photovoltaic solar panel market by signing agreements with electricity companies and retailers. Ikea, for example, partnered with Contigo Energia at the beginning of March to offer turnkey solutions for domestic solar energy.

The partnership offers two types of solar installation to suit all kinds of homes and budgets: one has up to 340 kW of peak power per panel and another has 390 kW per panel and optimizers that make the system 10% more efficient. Savings can amount to as much as 50% of the energy bill. The investment ranges from 4,000 to 12,000, explains Qi Kai Sheng, head of sustainability at Ikea Spain, who spoke during a conference organized by UNEF. For a small house, three or four [panels] are enough, and for larger houses with an electric car, 12 panels are needed. Most of the installations so far have between six and 10 panels.

Ikea expects to have cornered 7% of the market by 2024 and to be reaching thousands of households in the near future. We have already seen a lot of consumer interest and considering that people are spending more time at home due to the pandemic, we could expect sales to exceed forecasts, says Kai Sheng.

Return on investment

As panels last for 20 years, more and more homeowners see these installations as a profitable and long-term investment rather than an expense. But to calculate the potential return on each kind of installation a personalized analysis is required because there are many factors at play, such as the time of day of consumption, the orientation of the roof and the presence of shadows, according to Morales. In some cases, it will be 4% and in others 20%, he says.

Morales explains how the return on investment was calculated for a potential client in Roquetas de Mar in the Almeria region of Andalusia. The return on the installation consisting of 14 panels is 13.1% and the initial layout is 7,990. The estimated saving on the electricity bill over 25 years is 27,425. In this case, self-sufficiency amounts to 43%.

Thriving at last without the so-called sun tax that was eliminated in 2018, the solar sectors most significant obstacle for the promotion of self-consumption is the building permit required by some regions, which can take six to eight months to issue. Last week, UNEF managed to get Navarre to follow in the footsteps of 10 regions and ditch the requirement, but Madrid, Murcia, La Rioja, the Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias are yet to do so.

There is however another equally significant obstacle: Spain is one of the countries with the highest fixed charge on the electricity bill  40%, compared to the European average of 23%. And Morales indicates two further hitches: the regulatory gaps and different procedures between regions and the excessive zeal of the distribution companies, which then take two months to activate the simplified compensation.

English version by Heather Galloway.
NEW YORK, April 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Eight year old stop-motion artist and Rocket Club member Annabelle White has entered the non-fungible token world, launching her debut carbon neutral, NFT series and donating over $1,000.00 in the process. White, who is well known for her successful business Stop & Love, has honed her craft as a stop motion artist and gone on to create personalized greeting cards and advertisements for top brands including Bobbi Brown, Gooselings Scandinavian Luxury Blankets, and Startup Squad to name a few.

You can view a video Annabelle created to explain her NFT series here: https://rocketclub.com/stopandlovenft

A young rising star in the art world, White was featured earlier this year on Good Morning America alongside Rocket Club, a tech entrepreneurship club for kids ages 7-14, where she is an active member and has sharpened her business & STEM skills. Members at Rocket Club learn how to build their own businesses, code, build robotics, and are immersed in cutting-edge technology, including education on how to mint and sell NFT's.

After minting a total of 10 NFT's, Annabelle sent them out to her contacts and previous clients with the goal to raise money to donate ballet shoes and art supplies to refugees from Syria through Welcome Home Jersey City. She priced each at 0.18 Ether ($380) and has already sold 3 for $1,140.

In addition, after learning about carbon emissions used to mint and sell NFTs, Annabelle went on to buy a carbon credit to make sure the transaction of selling 10 NFTs was fully carbon neutral.

Quote from Annabelle White"I recently finished reading the book No Ballet Shoes in Syria. It got me thinking about children of families who had to leave their countries and everything behind. Ballet and art makes me so happy. So I got the idea to raise money to help refugee families get settled in their new homes. I want the money to go to buying ballet shoes and art supplies. I recently learned about NFTs in my Rocket Club class and thought it would be so cool to create and sell some for this cause."

Quote from Alex Hodara, Founder of Rocket Club"Our members just learned about blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTshow these technologies are changing multiple industries, and how they impact the environment. I'm so proud of Annabelle for taking what she learned in class and applying it to her own business. It is inspiring to see her donate all of the proceeds from these NFTs to a cause she truly cares about and has decided to make her NFT series carbon neutral. She is a great example of how the next generation of entrepreneurs are socially responsible and forward thinking."

About Rocket Club:Rocket Club is an award-winning tech entrepreneurship club for kids aged 7 to 14. By the time members graduate, they will be certified in 46 cutting-edge disciplines including robotics, coding, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and company valuation to name a few. Rocket Club is fully virtual with members from 29 U.S. states, England, Ireland, and India. 55% of members are on full or partial scholarships based on family income and 60% of Rocket Club members are BIPOC. Rocket Club won the 2019 NJ Tech Council's Innovation and Education Award, and Propelify STEM Leader to Watch Award. Each day, Rocket Club hosts Rocket Club Live, an interactive, educational game show and Q&A featuring a successful guest. Guests have included the founders of Netflix, Beyond Meat, Warby Parker, Casper Mattresses, Harry's Razors, Vonage, and Bobbi Brown Cosmetics to name a few.

For more information on Rocket Club, please visit www.rocketclub.com

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eight-year-old-stop-motion-artist-launches-carbon-neutral-nft-series-and-donates-over-1-000-to-charity-301276986.html

SOURCE Rocket Club
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Topia, the leader in Global Talent Mobility, announced it has been selected by Groupe SEB, a large a large French industrial group that produces small appliances and the world's largest manufacturer of cookware, to support its global talent mobility program. Groupe SEB will be leveraging the Topia One platform with Topia Plan, Manage, and Go.

With a portfolio of 30 brands including Krups, Tefal, and Rowenta and a presence in over 150 countries, Groupe SEB caters to a wide range of consumers, from professionals to everyday home use. Mobility is a core tenant of Groupe SEB's talent philosophy and is expecting to sharply increase the number of employees deployed around the world to meet the needs of their global customers. Groupe SEB was looking for a solution that would provide the tools and data to streamline their mobility program, significantly improve the employee experience, and better support global HR talent strategy.

"Mobility is a priority for us," said Raphael Marcy, Group VP HR Management and Organisation Development at Groupe SEB. "We know that supporting diverse skill sets and perspectives is a key competitive advantage. That's why it was important to have the right tools to enable talent mobility with greater efficiency, focus on outcomes, and provide a best-in-class experience for employees. Topia gives us that and we are excited to be partnering with them."

Groupe SEB selected the Topia One platform because of the modern, intuitive user experience and powerful, out of the box integrations with key vendors, including leading HCM and COLA (Cost of Living Allowances) providers. The process automation delivered by the Topia product suite will provide Groupe SEB with the right tools to support an increasing number of mobile employees with an enhanced level of care. Lastly, enhanced data reporting available thanks to Topia One will enable Groupe SEB to understand the impact of mobility on talent outcomes and broader business strategy.

Shawn Farshchi, Topia CEO, commented, "We are excited to add Groupe SEB to our growing customer list of European headquartered multinational organizations. Regardless of how companies leverage distributed workforces, talent mobility is increasingly central to global talent strategy both in ensuring you have the right people for the job and that businesses can quickly meet the needs of the global marketplace. By partnering with Topia, Groupe SEB is moving forward to embrace a more agile and mobile workforce."

Career opportunities at Groupe SEB can be accessed here .

About Topia

Topia is the leader in Global Talent Mobility. We empower companies to deploy, manage and engage employees anywhere in the world. The Topia platform enables organizations to deliver mobility as part of a broader talent strategy encompassing all types of employee movement  remote and distributed workforces, business travel, and more traditional relocations and assignments. This drives enhanced employee experiences and competitive advantage by ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time, while staying compliant no matter where they are. The Topia platform automates the entire global talent mobility process, including scenario-based planning, expat payroll, tax and immigration compliance, reporting and more. Topia powers global talent mobility programs for world-renowned brands such as Schneider Electric, Dell, Veolia, Equinor and AXA. Topia has raised over $100M from NewView Capital (formerly New Enterprise Associates), Notion Capital and others, and is a global company with offices throughout the Americas and EMEA. For more information, visit www.topia.com and follow Topia on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

About Groupe SEB

World reference in small domestic equipment, Groupe SEB operates with a unique portfolio of 30 top brands including Tefal, SEB, Rowenta, Moulinex, Krups, Lagostina, All-Clad, WMF, Emsa, Supor, marketed through multi-format retailing. Selling more than 360 million products a year, it deploys a long-term strategy focused on innovation, international development, competitiveness and client service. Present in over 150 countries, Groupe SEB generated sales of 6.9 billion in 2020 and has more than 34,000 employees worldwide.

CONTACT: Kasey Thomas, [email protected]

SOURCE Topia
TULSA, Okla., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P. (NYSE: MMP) today reported net income of $221.3 million for first quarter 2021 compared to $287.6 million for first quarter 2020. Diluted net income per common unit was 99 cents in first quarter 2021 and $1.26 in first quarter 2020.

Diluted net income per unit excluding mark-to-market (MTM) commodity-related pricing adjustments, a non-generally accepted accounting principles (non-GAAP) financial measure, was $1.09 for first quarter 2021. These results were higher than the 75-cent guidance provided by management in early February primarily due to higher-than-expected commodity margins from an improved pricing environment, an overall favorable impact from the recent winter storms and other one-time positive items.

Distributable cash flow (DCF), a non-GAAP financial measure that represents the amount of cash generated during the period that is available to pay distributions, was $276.5 million for first quarter 2021 compared to $306.5 million for first quarter 2020.

"Magellan started the year with stronger-than-expected results, underscoring the essential nature of our services and the flexibility of our asset portfolio to respond to changing market dynamics," said Michael Mears, chief executive officer. "Although our nation continues to recover from the pandemic, Magellan's outlook for the full year has improved based on our outperformance during the first quarter and a more favorable commodity pricing environment for our gas liquids blending activities. We remain confident that Magellan's business fundamentals, financial strength and capital allocation approach will enable us to continue delivering significant long-term value for our investors."

An analysis by segment comparing first quarter 2021 to first quarter 2020 is provided below based on operating margin, a non-GAAP financial measure that reflects operating profit before depreciation, amortization and impairment expense and general and administrative (G&A) expense:

Refined products. Refined products operating margin was $273.6 million, a decrease of $32.2 million. Transportation and terminals revenue decreased $3.6 million primarily due to the absence of revenues in the current period associated with the three marine terminals sold in March 2020. This decline was partially offset by increased transportation revenue as a higher average tariff, in part driven by the partnership's mid-year 2020 tariff increase, more than offset slightly lower volumes. Supply disruptions during the current period caused by recent winter storms created an opportunity for Magellan to meet market demand with its extensive pipeline system, resulting in longer-haul movements and additional volumes in the period. The current period also benefitted from contributions from the West Texas pipeline expansion that began operations in the third quarter of 2020. These increased volumes were more than offset by lingering impacts of COVID-19 and still-recovering drilling activity.

Operating expenses decreased $11.0 million primarily due to the absence of costs in the current period associated with the divested marine terminals as well as lower power costs as a result of the partnership's optimization efforts and gains from power hedging activity driven by the recent winter storms. Earnings of non-controlled entities declined $5.0 million primarily due to decreased volume and margin from blending activities at the partnership's Powder Springs Logistics joint venture, partially offset by additional contributions from its Pasadena marine terminal joint venture due to new storage and dock assets placed into service in early 2020 and recognition of deficiency revenue in the current period.

Product margin (a non-GAAP measure defined as product sales revenue less cost of product sales) decreased $33.0 million between periods primarily due to lower sales volume and reduced margins on the partnership's gas liquids blending activities as a result of the relatively lower commodity pricing environment in first quarter 2021.

Crude oil. Crude oil operating margin was $109.0 million, a decrease of $10.9 million. Transportation and terminals revenue decreased $29.4 million due to lower average tariff rates and less volume shipped. Average tariff rates decreased primarily as a result of the recent expiration of several higher-priced contracts on the partnership's Longhorn pipeline. In addition, deficiency revenue recognized in the year-ago period did not recur in first quarter 2021. Transportation volumes also declined partially due to those recent Longhorn contract expirations, with much of this volume replaced by activities of Magellan's marketing affiliate. Tariff movements on the Houston distribution system partially decreased due to a change in the way customers now contract for services at the partnership's Seabrook export facility joint venture. Further, short-term supply disruptions caused by the recent winter storms also negatively impacted shipments on both Longhorn and the Houston distribution system during the current quarter.

Operating expenses decreased $7.6 million primarily due to lower power costs as a result of the partnership's optimization efforts and gains from power hedging activity driven by the recent winter storms. Product margin increased $8.8 million primarily due to a lower of cost or net realizable value (LCM) adjustment on the partnership's crude oil inventory that negatively impacted first quarter 2020.

Other items. Depreciation, amortization and impairment expense decreased $5.4 million due to an impairment loss in first quarter 2020 related to the partnership's sale of three marine terminals. G&A expense increased $9.7 million primarily due to higher incentive compensation costs to reflect improved economic conditions in 2021.

Gain on disposition of assets was $12.9 million unfavorable due to a gain on the sale of a portion of Magellan's interest in Saddlehorn recognized in first quarter 2020.

Net interest expense increased $5.8 million primarily due to lower capitalized interest as a result of reduced ongoing expansion capital spending as well as higher outstanding debt. As of March 31, 2021, Magellan had $5.02 billion of debt outstanding, including $17 million outstanding on its commercial paper program, with $4 million of cash on hand.

Financial guidance for 2021

Management is increasing its annual DCF guidance by $50 million to $1.07 billion for 2021. The higher guidance is a result of Magellan's strong financial performance during the first quarter and a more favorable commodity pricing environment for the partnership's gas liquids blending activities, partially offset by lower distributions from its Pasadena marine terminal joint venture due to the recently-announced sale of nearly half of Magellan's interest in the venture.

Guidance assumes total refined products shipments will be generally in-line with initial estimates for the year, with an overall increase of 13% still expected versus 2020 as incremental volumes associated with recent expansion projects within the state of Texas are expected to more than offset the lingering impact of COVID-19 and still-recovering drilling activity. These estimates now include 13% higher gasoline, 10% higher distillate and 25% higher aviation fuel shipments, based on general trends so far this year and expected continuing recovery in travel, economic and drilling activity throughout the year. For reference, total 2021 refined products shipments are still expected to increase approximately 3% versus 2019, which is more representative of historical demand, as additional gasoline and distillate volumes from expansion projects are partially offset by lower aviation fuel.

As previously announced, Magellan intends to maintain its quarterly cash distribution at the current level of $1.0275 per unit for the remainder of 2021. Based on the current distribution amount and the current number of units outstanding, distribution coverage for 2021 is expected to be 1.17 times the amount necessary to pay cash distributions for the year.

Free cash flow (FCF), a non-GAAP financial measure that represents the amount of cash available for distributions, unit repurchases, debt reduction, additional investments or other partnership uses, is projected to be nearly $1.27 billion for full-year 2021, or $350 million after distributions, including the proceeds from the recent sale of a partial interest in the Pasadena marine terminal joint venture.

Management does not intend to provide specific financial guidance beyond 2021 at this time but expects to target annual distribution coverage of at least 1.2 times once refined products demand returns to more historical levels.

Based on actual first-quarter results, the current number of common units outstanding and an approximate $70 million gain estimated for Magellan's recent sale of a partial interest in the Pasadena marine terminal joint venture, net income per common unit is expected to be $4.20 for 2021. Second-quarter guidance of $1.15 per unit includes the full impact of the estimated gain on sale of the joint venture interest. Guidance excludes future MTM adjustments on the partnership's commodity-related activities.

Capital allocation

Magellan remains focused on delivering long-term value for its investors through a disciplined combination of quarterly cash distributions, capital investments and equity repurchases. In addition, management regularly reviews the partnership's existing asset portfolio for opportunities to unlock incremental value for investors, as demonstrated by the April sale of a partial interest in its Pasadena marine terminal joint venture.

Based on the progress of projects now underway, the partnership expects to spend approximately $75 million in 2021 and $15 million in 2022 to complete its current slate of expansion capital projects. Following a successful open season, these estimates now include a more than 5,000 barrel-per-day expansion of Magellan's New Mexico refined products pipeline by mid-2022. Management remains committed to the capital discipline that has been a hallmark of its prudent approach and will continue to pursue value-enhancing capital projects that are expected to meet or exceed its targeted 6 to 8 times EBITDA multiple.

Magellan currently has $473 million available under its $750 million repurchase program authorized through 2022. While no equity was repurchased during first quarter 2021, the remaining forecasted 2021 annual FCF after distributions, which now includes the $270 million proceeds from the recent Pasadena sale, could be used to opportunistically repurchase units. The timing, price and actual number of any additional unit repurchases will depend on a number of factors including expected expansion capital spending, excess cash available, balance sheet metrics, legal and regulatory requirements, market conditions and the trading price of the partnership's common units.

Earnings call details

Management will discuss first-quarter 2021 financial results and outlook for the remainder of the year during a conference call at 1:30 p.m. Eastern today. Participants are encouraged to listen to the call via the partnership's website at www.magellanlp.com/investors/webcasts.aspx. In addition, a limited number of phone lines will be available at (800) 954-0603, conference code 21993073.

A replay of the audio webcast will be available for at least 30 days at www.magellanlp.com.

Non-GAAP financial measures

Management believes that investors benefit from having access to the same financial measures utilized by the partnership. As a result, this news release and supporting schedules include the non-GAAP financial measures of operating margin, product margin, adjusted EBITDA, DCF, FCF and net income per unit excluding MTM commodity-related pricing adjustments, which are important performance measures used by management.

Operating margin reflects operating profit before depreciation, amortization and impairment expense and G&A expense. This measure forms the basis of the partnership's internal financial reporting and is used by management to evaluate the economic performance of the partnership's operations.

Product margin, which is calculated as product sales revenue less cost of product sales, is used by management to evaluate the profitability of the partnership's commodity-related activities.

Adjusted EBITDA is an important measure utilized by management and the investment community to assess the financial results of a company.

DCF is important in determining the amount of cash generated from the partnership's operations, after maintenance capital spending, that is available for distribution to its unitholders. Management uses this performance measure as a basis for recommending to the board of directors the amount of cash distributions to be paid each period and for determining the payouts for the performance-based awards issued under the partnership's equity-based incentive plan.

FCF is a financial metric used by many investors and others in the financial community to measure the amount of cash generated by the partnership after considering all investing activities, including both maintenance and expansion capital spending, as well as proceeds from divestitures. Management believes FCF is important to the financial community as it reflects the amount of cash available for distributions, unit repurchases, debt reduction, additional investments or other partnership uses.

Reconciliations of operating margin to operating profit, adjusted EBITDA, DCF and FCF to net income and FCF to net cash provided by operating activities accompany this news release.

The partnership uses exchange-traded futures contracts to hedge against price changes of petroleum products associated with its commodity-related activities. Most of these futures contracts are not designated as hedges for accounting purposes. However, because these futures contracts are generally effective at hedging price changes, management believes the partnership's profitability should be evaluated excluding the unrealized gains and losses associated with petroleum products that will be sold in future periods. Further, because the financial guidance provided by management excludes future MTM commodity-related pricing adjustments, a reconciliation of actual results to those excluding these adjustments is provided for comparability to previous financial guidance.

Because the non-GAAP measures presented in this news release include adjustments specific to the partnership, they may not be comparable to similarly-titled measures of other companies.

About Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P.

Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P. (NYSE: MMP) is a publicly traded partnership that primarily transports, stores and distributes refined petroleum products and crude oil. The partnership owns the longest refined petroleum products pipeline system in the country, with access to nearly 50% of the nation's refining capacity, and can store more than 100 million barrels of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel and crude oil. More information is available at www.magellanlp.com.

Forward-Looking Statement Disclaimer

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release constitutes forward-looking statements as defined by federal law. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as: plan, guidance, assumes, believes, estimates, expected, returns, continue, maintain, priorities, potential, pursue, changes, outlook, future, target, remain, intends, long-term, may, will, should and similar references to future periods. Although management believes such statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual outcomes to be materially different. Among the key risk factors that may have a direct impact on the partnership's results of operations and financial condition are: ongoing impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic; impacts of the oversupply of crude oil and petroleum products; claims for force majeure relief by its customers or vendors; changes in price or demand for refined petroleum products, crude oil and natural gas liquids, or for transportation, storage, blending or processing of those commodities through its facilities; changes in laws applicable to the partnership; changes in the partnership's tariff rates or other terms as required by state or federal regulatory authorities; shut-downs or cutbacks at refineries, of hydrocarbon production or at other businesses that use or supply the partnership's services; changes in the throughput or interruption in service on pipelines or other facilities owned and operated by third parties and connected to the partnership's terminals, pipelines or other facilities; the occurrence of operational hazards or unforeseen interruptions; the treatment of the partnership as a corporation for federal or state income tax purposes or the partnership becoming subject to significant forms of other taxation; changes in its capital needs, cash flows and availability of cash to fund unit repurchases or distributions; and failure of customers to meet or continue contractual obligations to the partnership. Additional factors that could lead to material changes in performance are described in the partnership's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the partnership's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2020 and subsequent reports on Form 8-K. You are urged to carefully review and consider the cautionary statements and other disclosures made in those filings, especially under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Forward-Looking Statements." Forward-looking statements made by the partnership in this release are based only on information currently known, and the partnership undertakes no obligation to revise its forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME

(In thousands, except per unit amounts)

(Unaudited)



Three Months Ended

March 31,

2020

2021 Transportation and terminals revenue $ 458,395



$ 425,170

Product sales revenue 319,120



230,601

Affiliate management fee revenue 5,291



5,302

Total revenue 782,806



661,073

Costs and expenses:





Operating 149,508



130,604

Cost of product sales 249,236



184,867

Depreciation, amortization and impairment 63,534



58,128

General and administrative 36,908



46,580

Total costs and expenses 499,186



420,179

Other operating income (expense) (511)



(462)

Earnings of non-controlled entities 43,660



39,052

Operating profit 326,769



279,484

Interest expense 55,900



56,979

Interest capitalized (4,951)



(508)

Interest income (420)



(153)

Gain on disposition of assets (12,887)





Other (income) expense 807



1,059

Income before provision for income taxes 288,320



222,107

Provision for income taxes 756



789

Net income $ 287,564



$ 221,318









Basic net income per common unit $ 1.26



$ 0.99









Diluted net income per common unit $ 1.26



$ 0.99









Weighted average number of common units outstanding used for basic net income per unit calculation 227,571



223,593









Weighted average number of common units outstanding used for diluted net income per unit calculation 227,571



223,593



MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

OPERATING STATISTICS



Three Months Ended

March 31,

2020

2021 Refined products:





Transportation revenue per barrel shipped $ 1.582



$ 1.672

Volume shipped (million barrels):





Gasoline 66.2



65.0

Distillates 43.8



46.5

Aviation fuel 9.4



6.1

Liquefied petroleum gases 0.4



0.5

Total volume shipped 119.8



118.1









Crude oil:





Magellan 100%-owned assets:





Transportation revenue per barrel shipped $ 0.918



$ 0.789

Volume shipped (million barrels)(1) 75.1



46.5

Terminal average utilization (million barrels per month) 22.7



25.5

Select joint venture pipelines:





BridgeTex - volume shipped (million barrels)(2) 37.1



26.9

Saddlehorn - volume shipped (million barrels)(3) 16.3



16.1







(1) Volume shipped includes shipments related to the partnership's crude oil marketing activities. (2) These volumes reflect the total shipments for the BridgeTex pipeline, which is owned 30% by Magellan. (3) These volumes reflect the total shipments for the Saddlehorn pipeline, which was owned 40% by Magellan through January 31, 2020 and 30% thereafter.

MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

OPERATING MARGIN RECONCILIATION TO OPERATING PROFIT

(Unaudited, in thousands)



Three Months Ended

March 31,

2020

2021 Refined products:





Transportation and terminals revenue $ 314,319



$ 310,768

Affiliate management fee revenue 1,584



1,550

Other operating income (expense) 1,892



239

Earnings of non-controlled entities 14,220



9,171

Less: Operating expense 105,882



94,853

Transportation and terminals margin 226,133



226,875

Product sales revenue 312,986



201,431

Less: Cost of product sales 233,342



154,742

Product margin 79,644



46,689

Operating margin $ 305,777



$ 273,564









Crude oil:





Transportation and terminals revenue $ 145,658



$ 116,214

Affiliate management fee revenue 3,707



3,752

Other operating income (expense) (2,403)



(701)

Earnings of non-controlled entities 29,440



29,881

Less: Operating expense 46,772



39,202

Transportation and terminals margin 129,630



109,944

Product sales revenue 6,134



29,170

Less: Cost of product sales 15,894



30,125

Product margin (9,760)



(955)

Operating margin $ 119,870



$ 108,989









Segment operating margin $ 425,647



$ 382,553

Add: Allocated corporate depreciation costs 1,564



1,639

Total operating margin 427,211



384,192

Less:





Depreciation, amortization and impairment expense 63,534



58,128

General and administrative expense 36,908



46,580

Total operating profit $ 326,769



$ 279,484















Note: Amounts may not sum to figures shown on the consolidated statements of income due to intersegment eliminations and allocated corporate depreciation costs.





MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

RECONCILIATION OF NET INCOME AND NET INCOME PER COMMON UNIT

EXCLUDING COMMODITY-RELATED ADJUSTMENTS TO GAAP MEASURES

(Unaudited, in thousands except per unit amounts)





Three Months Ended





March 31, 2021



Net Income

Basic Net

Income Per

Common Unit

Diluted Net

Income Per

Common Unit

As reported

$ 221,318



$ 0.99



$ 0.99



Commodity-related adjustments associated with future transactions(1)

22,612











Excluding commodity-related adjustments

$ 243,930



$ 1.09



$ 1.09



















Weighted average number of common units outstanding used for basic net income per unit calculation

223,593











Weighted average number of common units outstanding used for diluted net income per unit calculation

223,593

































(1) Includes the partnership's net share of commodity-related adjustments for its non-controlled entities. Please see Distributable Cash Flow ("DCF") and Free Cash Flow ("FCF") Reconciliation to Net Income for further descriptions of commodity-related adjustments.

MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

DISTRIBUTABLE CASH FLOW AND FREE CASH FLOW

RECONCILIATION TO NET INCOME

(Unaudited, in thousands)



Three Months Ended





March 31,

2021 Guidance

2020

2021













Net income $ 287,564



$ 221,318



$ 940,000

Interest expense, net 50,529



56,318



225,000

Depreciation, amortization and impairment(1) 63,086



59,215



242,000

Equity-based incentive compensation(2) (14,545)



(1,472)



13,000

Gain on disposition of assets(3) (10,511)







(70,000)

Commodity-related adjustments:









Derivative (gains) losses recognized in the period associated with future transactions(4) (66,740)



17,409





Derivative gains (losses) recognized in previous periods associated with transactions completed in the period(4) (11,737)



(22,390)





Inventory valuation adjustments(5) 71,730



1,357





Total commodity-related adjustments (6,747)



(3,624)



(38,000)

Distributions from operations of non-controlled entities in excess of (less than) earnings 11,083



12,382



65,000

Adjusted EBITDA 380,459



344,137



1,377,000

Interest expense, net, excluding debt issuance cost amortization (49,632)



(55,542)



(222,000)

Maintenance capital(6) (24,320)



(12,084)



(85,000)

Distributable cash flow 306,507



276,511



1,070,000

Expansion capital(7) (155,045)



(10,504)



(75,000)

Proceeds from asset sales 332,789



656



272,000

Free cash flow 484,251



266,663



1,267,000

Distributions paid (234,774)



(229,423)



(917,000)

Free cash flow after distributions $ 249,477



$ 37,240



$ 350,000















(1) Depreciation, amortization and impairment expense is excluded from DCF to the extent it represents a non-cash expense. (2) Because the partnership intends to satisfy vesting of unit awards under its equity-based long-term incentive compensation plan with the issuance of common units, expenses related to this plan generally are deemed non-cash and excluded for DCF purposes. The amounts above have been reduced by cash payments associated with the plan, which are primarily related to tax withholdings. (3) Gains on disposition of assets are excluded from DCF to the extent they are not related to the partnership's ongoing operations. (4) Certain derivatives have not been designated as hedges for accounting purposes and the mark-to-market changes of these derivatives are recognized currently in net income. The partnership excludes the net impact of these derivatives from its determination of DCF until the transactions are settled and, where applicable, the related products are sold. In the period in which these transactions are settled and any related products are sold, the net impact of the derivatives is included in DCF. (5) The partnership adjusts DCF for lower of average cost or net realizable value adjustments related to inventory and firm purchase commitments as well as market valuation of short positions recognized each period as these are non-cash items. In subsequent periods when the partnership physically sells or purchases the related products, it adjusts DCF for the valuation adjustments previously recognized. (6) Maintenance capital expenditures maintain existing assets of the partnership and do not generate incremental DCF (i.e. incremental returns to the unitholders). For this reason, the partnership deducts maintenance capital expenditures to determine DCF. (7) Includes additions to property, plant and equipment (excluding maintenance capital and capital-related changes in accounts payable and other current liabilities), acquisitions and investments in non-controlled entities, net of distributions from returns of investments in non-controlled entities and deposits from undivided joint interest third parties.

MAGELLAN MIDSTREAM PARTNERS, L.P.

FREE CASH FLOW RECONCILIATION TO NET CASH PROVIDED

BY OPERATING ACTIVITIES

(Unaudited, in thousands)





Three Months Ended



March 31,



2020

2021 Net cash provided by operating activities

$ 384,621



$ 240,239

Changes in operating assets and liabilities

(34,174)



57,914

Net cash provided (used) in investing activities

131,793



(31,161)

Payments associated with settlement of equity-based incentive compensation

(14,700)



(6,151)

Settlement gain, amortization of prior service credit and actuarial loss

(1,113)



(1,646)

Changes in accrued capital items

20,379



9,229

Commodity-related adjustments(1)

(6,747)



(3,624)

Other

4,192



1,863

Free cash flow

$ 484,251



$ 266,663

Distributions paid

(234,774)



(229,423)

Free cash flow after distributions

$ 249,477



$ 37,240













(1) Please refer to the preceding table for a description of these commodity-related adjustments.

SOURCE Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P.

Related Links

http://www.magellanlp.com


Athens, GA (30605)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun during the morning will give way to cloudy skies this afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Cloudy with showers. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
With an annual revenue run rate of over $400 million, the company is currently profitable and has experienced an average of 180 percent year-over-year growth for the past four years.

MOLOCO (http://www.moloco.com), a leader in machine learning and growth solutions for mobile marketers, announced today it has received funding from Shinhan GIB, an investment banking unit of South Koreas Shinhan Financial Group, as well as other new and existing investors, at a valuation of USD $1 billion. With an annual revenue run rate of over $400 million, the company is currently profitable and has experienced an average of 180 percent year-over-year growth for the past four years.

The mobile advertising ecosystem runs increasingly on data, and no one provides better data-driven solutions than MOLOCO, said a Managing Director at SAMSUNG Ventures America. Whether for programmatic user acquisition or intelligent monetization, for in-house control of their data or as a fully managed service, MOLOCOs machine learning-powered solutions give mobile businesses the edge they need to thrive in todays data-driven mobile landscape.

The funding comes as MOLOCOs advertising reach has expanded significantly in recent years. The company has facilitated more than 100 trillion bid requests on behalf of its advertising partners since 2018, and currently serves more than 13 billion ad impressions monthly. MOLOCOs platform reaches nearly 10 billion global devices monthly through 5.58 million publisher apps, including big name publishers such as Nexon, Playrix, Netmarble, and many others.

MOLOCO is a top performing media source according to industry measurement firms such as Singular, which ranked MOLOCO as the seventh best overall ad network in its 2021 Singular ROI Index, and AppsFlyer, which ranked MOLOCO in the top 10 on its AppsFlyer Performance Index XII for numerous categories including Retention on both Android and iOS, Retention for both Gaming and Non-Gaming, its overall Global Power Rankings, and more. MOLOCOs recent growth has come through global expansion, with strong growth throughout Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America, as well as through category expansion, with the company experiencing rapid growth in non-gaming categories such as Commerce, Healthcare, Dating, Travel, Media and more.

MOLOCO provides machine learning and programmatic advertising solutions to help mobile businesses drive fast, sustainable growth. The MOLOCO Engine is an advertising and monetization infrastructure suite that lets developers leverage the power of MOLOCOs proprietary machine learning algorithms to enhance their own advertising features. MOLOCO Cloud, released in September 2020, gives marketers direct control over their programmatic advertising operations through self-serve functionality that lets them bring their mobile marketing in-house.

The company was founded by Ikkjin Ahn in 2013 with a vision to empower mobile businesses to thrive by turning data into advertising performance. Ahn, who previously served as YouTubes first monetization machine learning engineer and was the Big Data team lead for Android, has assembled top talent from Google, Amazon, Twitter and other leading technology companies to help create the best machine learning algorithms in the advertising industry.

About MOLOCO

MOLOCO is a programmatic advertising company that empowers mobile businesses to unleash the power of their data for fast, sustainable growth. Founded in 2013, the company offers a complete suite of proprietary advertising solutions to help mobile companies optimize the performance of their acquisition, retention, and monetization efforts. MOLOCO Cloud is a top-rated cloud platform that provides scale across nearly 10 billion devices. MOLOCO is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. For more information, visit http://www.moloco.com.

Media Contact

Lauren Tascan

Fluid Group for MOLOCO

lauren @ fluidprgroup.com
NASA's Ingenuity was set for its farthest and fastest flight yet, but the helicopter did not liftoff from the surface of Mars Thursday as planned.

The 18-inch tall copter was set to take off from 'Wright Brothers Field' under the watchful gaze of the Perseverance rover at 10:12 EDT (15:12 BST), and soar up 16ft into the sky.

Data returned during a downlink at 1:21pm EDT that showed the copter did not transition to flight mode - meaning it never left the ground.

'Aim high, and fly, fly again. The Mars Helicopter's ambitious fourth flight didn't get off the ground, but the team is assessing the data and will aim to try again soon. We'll keep you posted,' reads an update from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Twitter account Thursday afternoon.

NASA has rescheduled the fourth flight for Friday, April 30 at 10:46am EDT (15:12 BST), with the first data expected back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 1:39pm EDT.

NASA 's Ingenuity was set for its farthest, fastest and flight yet, but the helicopter did not liftoff from the surface of Mars on Thursday as planned. Data returned during a downlink at 1:21pm EDT that showed the copter did not transition to flight mode - meaning it never left the ground

NASA says an issue was identified in the copter earlier this month that showed each time it flies there is a 15 percent chance it will not kick on flight mode.

'Todays delay is in line with that expectation and does not prevent future flights,' NASA shared in the announcement.

The space agency said it would continue to push the four-pound copter to its limit in each subsequent test, this time almost doubling the speed of the third flight.

Due to delays in sending data from the 187 million miles between Jezero crater on Mars and NASA JPL in California, the team waits in suspense for three hours or so.

NASA has rescheduled the fourth flight for Friday, April 30 at 10:46am EDT (15:12 BST), with the first data expected back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 1:39pm EDT.

Ingenuity completed its third (pictured) powered flight on Mars on April 25. The copter covered a light distance of 164 feet while hitting speeds of 4.5mpg

The small craft achieved all of its goals including flight duration, distance and speed, in the first three trips - so the fourth will 'push the envelope' beyond what the small rotorcraft was designed to achieve by NASA JPL engineers.

The fourth flight will see it fly up to 16ft, head south over rocks, sand ripples and impact craters for 276ft and use its navigation camera to collect images of the surface every four feet.

The Perseverance rover will be watching the fourth flight unfold from about 210 feet away, as it did with the previous flights. The third flight captured an image of the SUV-sized rover as it soared 16ft overhead.

INGENUITY: THE SMALL ROTORCRAFT THAT TOOK TO THE MARTIAN SKY Ingenuity was designed as a technology demonstrator rather than carrying any of its own science experiments or equipment. It rode to Mars attached to the belly of the SUV-size Perseverance rover. The helicopter took off from the 'Wright Brothers Field' on Monday April 19, making history as the first powered flight on another world. For the first flight, the helicopter took off, climbed to about 10ft above the ground, hovered in the air briefly, completed a turn, and then landed. It is built to be light and strong to survive the harsh Martian environment. It weighs just under 4lb and is only 19 inches tall as it has to fly in the much thinner atmosphere - about 1% that of the atmosphere found on Earth. It can fly up to 980ft, go up to 15ft in the sky and can spend about 90 seconds in the air before landing. The rotors are 4ft in diameter and the craft includes solar panels that charge lithium-ion batteries. It has a 30 day lifespan, with a total of five flights expected in that time. Advertisement

Flying on Mars is particularly challenging due to the fact its atmosphere is just one percent of Earth's at ground level, and while the lower gravity, a third of that on Earth, helps, it is only a partial offset against the thinner atmosphere.

This means that in order to fly, the helicopter has be ultra-light and rotate its blades extremely fast in order to achieve lift. For today's test flight the blades spun to 2,500rpm, allowing it to hover 10 feet off the ground.

The drone was designed as a technical demonstration to see if a flying component would be viable and possible for future planetary science and exploration missions.

It has no science equipment on board, beyond a navigation camera and a horizon camera in full color.

Ingenuity made history on April 19 when it became the first powered craft to take off and land on another world, something NASA dubbed its 'Wright Brothers moment'.

It travelled up 10ft into the air, hovered and then landed back on Martian soil on the landing site the agency has since named after the famed airplane inventors.

For the second flight Ingenuity went higher and further than during the first, travelling 16ft into the air, hovering and accelerating 7ft sideways.

The third flight pushed this a step further, also going up 16ft, then travelling 164ft at 4.5 miles per hour, before landing back down on the surface of Mars.

'From millions of miles away, Ingenuity checked all the technical boxes we had at NASA about the possibility of powered, controlled flight at the Red Planet,' said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division.

'Future Mars exploration missions can now confidently consider the added capability an aerial exploration may bring to a science mission.'

Mars Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are exploring Jezero crater on the Red Planet

The Ingenuity team had three objectives to accomplish to declare the technology demo a complete success.

They completed the first objective about six years ago when the team demonstrated in the 25-foot-diameter space simulator chamber of JPL that powered, controlled flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars was more than a theoretical exercise.

The second objective  to fly on Mars  was met when Ingenuity flew for the first time on April 19.

The team surpassed the last major objective with the third flight, when Ingenuity rose 16 feet, flying downrange 164 feet and back at a top speed of 6.6 feet per second - even snapping a photo of Perseverance along the way.

The Perseverance rover will be watching the fourth flight unfold from about 210ft away, as it did with the previous flights. The third flight captured an image of the SUV-sized rover as it soared 16ft overhead

WHAT IS MASTCAM-Z USED TO FILM THE INGENUITY FLIGHT The main purpose of Mastcam-Z, a camera mounted on a mast attached to Perseverance, is to take photos and video in high definition. It is also able to capture panoramic, colour and 3D images of features in the atmosphere and on the surface. It has a zoom lens so it can magnify distant targets, making it perfect to track the first Ingenuity flight. It is mounted at the eye level of a 6 and a half foot tall person with two cameras about 9.5 inches apart. NASA says it is the 'main eyes' of the Perseverance rover. Advertisement

'When Ingenuity's landing legs touched down after that third flight, we knew we had accumulated more than enough data to help engineers design future generations of Mars helicopters,' said J. 'Bob' Balaram, Ingenuity chief engineer at JPL.

'Now we plan to extend our range, speed, and duration to gain further performance insight,' and see how far the small craft can be pushed.

Flight Four sets out to demonstrate the potential value of that aerial perspective to future planetary science missions, according to NASA.

The flight test will begin with Ingenuity climbing to an altitude of 16ft and then heading south, flying over rocks, sand ripples, and small impact craters for 276ft.

As it flies, the rotorcraft will use its downward-looking navigation camera to collect images of the surface every 4ft until it travels a total of 436 feet downrange.

Then, Ingenuity will go into a hover and take images with its color high-definition camera before heading back to Wright Brothers Field to land.

'To achieve the distance necessary for this scouting flight, we're going to break our own Mars records set during flight three,' said Johnny Lam, backup pilot for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA JPL.

NASA has named this vantage point overlooking Wright Brothers Field the 'Van Zyl Overlook' after Jakob van Zyl, a longterm member of the Perseverance team who died unexpectedly in August 2020, a month after the vehicle left the Earth

Ingenuity as seen on Mars on April 7, 2021 in a photo taken by the rover Perseverance. The small craft has completed all expected mission objectives

'We're upping the time airborne from 80 seconds to 117, increasing our max airspeed from 4.5 mph to 8 mph, and more than doubling our total range.'

The SUV-sized Perseverance rover will be watching the flight unfold from the 'Van Zyl Overlook' named after Jakob van Zyl, a long-term member of the Perseverance team who died unexpectedly in August 2020, a month after the vehicle left the Earth.

After receiving the data from the fourth flight, the Ingenuity team will consider its plan for the fifth flight.

'We have been kicking around several options regarding what a flight five could look like,' said Balaram. 'But ask me about what they entail after a successful flight four. The team remains committed to building our flight experience one step at a time.'

The flight will be autonomous, pre-programmed into the aircraft because of the 15 minutes it takes for signals to travel from Earth to Mars

The rotors on the 18inch tall vehicle are 4ft in diameter and the craft includes solar panels that charge lithium-ion batteries.

It has a 30 day lifespan, with a total of five flights expected in that time - the final flight is due to happen before the end of May, assuming it survives flight four.

The Ingenuity experiment will end one month from the first flight in order to let Perseverance return to its main task: searching for signs of past microbial life on Mars.
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The aviation MRO community gathered in Orlando this week, in-person for the first time in over a year at Aviation Week Network's 26th Annual MRO Americas (#MROAM). The event was held at the Orange County Convention Center with a sold-out conference and more than 8,500 registered attendees, with more than 75% opting for the in-person experience. The aviation community generated nearly $20 million into Orlandos economy. The event was co-located with the Military Aviation Logistics & Maintenance Symposium (#MALMS), which was also sold out.



Anyone who was unable to travel to Orlando will be able to participate virtually by registering here. Conference sessions will be available on demand, and networking will be accommodated May 4-5.

We were so thrilled with the incredible turn out and the response received from attendees, who were busy networking, signing contracts and receiving premium content from top industry speakers, said Lydia Janow, Managing Director, Events, for Aviation Week Network. We are inspired by how the industry has pulled together to support each other, and weve gotten high demand for our upcoming events, including next years MRO Americas, which will be held in Dallas, April 26-28.

The conference addressed how the industry is moving forward after a year of incredible challenges and change with speakers from American Airlines, Boeing, Airbus, Ameriflight, and more. Speakers included:

David Seymour, COO, American Airlines

Bobbi Wells, Vice President, Safety & Airworthiness, Air Operations, FedEx Express

Paul Kinstedt, SVP & COO, Republic Airways

Paul Chase, CEO, Ameriflight

Danielle Vardaro, Head of Worldwide Customer Support & Aftermarket Sales Embraer

John Brooks, Manager, Commercial Airframe Parts, Boeing Global Services

Giovanni Spitale, VP of Commercial Parts, Boeing Global Services

Daniel Wenniger , VP, Upgrade Services, Airbus

VP, Upgrade Services, Airbus Dana Donati, GM & Director of Academic Programs, LIFT Academy, A Republic Airways Company

Pat Foley, CEO, Lufthansa Technik Puerto Rico

Nicole Huque, Managing Director, Global Aviation, Aerospace & Defense, Krauthamer & Associates (K&A)

Parimal (PK) Kopardekar PhD, Director, NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI), NASA Ames Research Center

Karine Lavoie-Tremblay, Director, Business Relationship, Digital Technologies

Pratt & Whitney

Naveen Poonian, CEO, iBASE

Keren Rambow, Marketing Services Executive, GE Aviation

Fred Sontag, VP of Sales, Americas & VP Distribution Solutions Group, GA Telesis

Caroline Vandedrinck, SVP Business Development, SR Technics

The Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) was thrilled to welcome back Aviation Week Networks MRO Americas and its members to Orlando, said OCCC Executive Director Mark Tester. This week, MRO Americas hosted thousands of attendees in our North-South Building. I saw firsthand how staggered attendance, proper social distancing through signage, floor stickers and safety protocols were implemented to create a safe and controlled gathering. We have a stellar reputation for customer service, flexibility, and doing the right thing. We also have great relationships with our clients and a supportive community that is focused on the health and safety of our guests.

The Military Aviation Logistics & Maintenance Symposium was supported by Elbit Systems of America, FTI, L3 Harris, Logistics Officers Association (LOA), Robbins Gioia and Teledyne Controls.

MRO Americas was supported by our sponsors. Platinum Sponsors are Airbus, Chromalloy, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Lufthansa Technik, and ST Engineering. Gold Sponsors are ATS, Avparts International, BPAero, CTS Engines, Embraer, GlobalParts Aero, IFS, LCI, MB Aerospace, Nordam, Spirit Aerosystems, Vertical Aerospace, and VSE Aviation.

ABOUT AVIATION WEEK NETWORK

Aviation Week Network is the largest multimedia information and services provider for the global aviation, aerospace, and defense industries, serving 1.7 million professionals around the world. Industry professionals rely on Aviation Week Network to help them understand the market, make decisions, predict trends, and connect with people and business opportunities. Customers include the world's leading aerospace manufacturers and suppliers, airlines, airports, business aviation operators, militaries, governments and other organizations that serve this worldwide marketplace. Aviation Week Networks portfolio delivers award-winning journalism, data, intelligence and analytical resources, world-class tradeshows and conferences, and results-driven marketing services and advertising is helping our customers succeed. Aviation Week Network is part of Informa Markets, a division of Informa PLC.

ABOUT INFORMA MARKETS

Informa Markets creates platforms for industries and specialist markets to trade, innovate and grow. Our portfolio is comprised of more than 550 international B2B events and brands in markets including Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Infrastructure, Construction & Real Estate, Fashion & Apparel, Hospitality, Food & Beverage, and Health & Nutrition, among others. We provide customers and partners around the globe with opportunities to engage, experience and do business through face-to-face exhibitions, specialist digital content and actionable data solutions. As the worlds leading exhibitions organiser, we bring a diverse range of specialist markets to life, unlocking opportunities and helping them to thrive 365 days of the year. For more information, please visit www.informamarkets.com.
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Sunny, along with a few afternoon clouds. Record high temperatures expected. High around 95F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies. Low around 70F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Statehouse Reporter

Danny Jin is the Eagle's Statehouse reporter. A graduate of Williams College, he previously interned at the Eagle and The Christian Science Monitor. Danny can be reached at djin@berkshireeagle.com or on Twitter at @djinreports.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 00:43:44|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, April 29 (Xinhua) -- African security chiefs on Thursday resolved to step up stabilization efforts across Somalia.

The Military Operations Coordination Committee (MOCC) for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) agreed on actions that AMISOM should undertake to prevent an eruption of violent conflict in Somalia whilst ensuring the mission's positions are protected and secured, according to a statement issued Thursday.

The virtual meeting of MOCC which was held Wednesday and brought together police and troop contributing countries including Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda, with the participation of AMISOM, described the current situation in Somalia is worrisome and deteriorating steadily.

"MOCC of AMISOM agreed to continue to closely monitor the unfolding political and security situation in Somalia, with the technical backstopping by the AU Commission," it said in a joint statement issued in Mogadishu.

Participants reiterated calls for trust and confidence building measures and the resumption of broad-based and inclusive dialogue to generate consensus on the way forward.

The current political crisis in Somalia started when President Mohamed Farmajo's four-year term officially ended on Feb. 8 as he and two leaders of Puntland and Jubaland, two of the country's five semi-autonomous states, failed to agree on how to conduct elections.

On April 12, the Lower House extended the terms of the executive and the legislative arms of government by two years, escalating tensions which later erupted into fighting on April 25 between government forces and those backing the opposition.

The meeting which was also attended by envoys accredited to the AU, echoed the need for decisive actions by the AU and AMISOM to sustain the substantial gains achieved through AMISOM's support, including the progress made in enhancing governance processes, and the requisite assistance to the electoral processes.

Participants also requested that AMISOM take the necessary steps to ensure that the capabilities exist to allow for rapid implementation of the contingency plans.

MOCC stressed that AMISOM should avoid being drawn into partisan politics in Somalia, but remain neutral vis-a-vis the various political factions and parties.

The security chiefs agreed to empower AMISOM to provide support for the AU mission team to facilitate the resumption of dialogue on the political track in Somalia.

It reiterated the essence of resolving the current political crisis through effective political engagement and action, including the possible holding of a summit for troop contributing countries to provide the necessary strategic guidance to AMISOM. Enditem
The United States on Wednesday deployed the first of several emergency COVID-19 relief shipments to India. The shipment includes 440 oxygen cylinders and regulators, 960,000 rapid diagnostic tests, and 100,000 N95 masks. India is battling with one of the worst Covid-19 waves, with cases rising at an unprecedented pace in the past month.

Thanks to @US_TRANSCOM, @AirMobilityCmd, @Travis60AMW & @DLAmil for hustling to prepare critical @USAID medical supplies for shipping. As I've said, were committed to use every resource at our disposal, within our authority, to support Indias frontline healthcare workers. pic.twitter.com/JLvuuIgV46  Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) April 29, 2021

The latest announcement builds on USAID's (US Agency for International Development) efforts to help India fight the pandemic. "USAID has provided over $23 million in assistance since the start of the pandemic, directly reaching nearly 10 million Indians," a statement said. The USAID will also procure 1,000 medical oxygen concentrators that will be used in 320 primary healthcare facilities.

Also read: COVID-19: Parliamentary panel had warned about oxygen, hospital bed shortage in November

US President Joe Biden had pledged on April 26, 2021, to mobilise support for India. The Biden administration has said it'll deliver supplies worth over $100 million in the coming days to India.

In addition, US state governments, private companies, non-government organisations, and thousands of Americans from across the country have mobilised to deliver vital oxygen, related equipment, and essential supplies for Indian hospitals.

Also read: Centre to set up 551 PSA oxygen generation plants through PM CARES

The assistance flights will start arriving in India today and will continue into next week. "Just as India sent assistance to the United States when our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need," a White House statement said.

Overall, the United States is providing support in terms of oxygen support, oxygen concentrators, oxygen generation units, personal protective equipment, vaccine-manufacturing supplies, rapid diagnostic tests, among others.

The initial delivery of 1,100 cylinders will remain in India and can be repeatedly refilled at local supply centres, the statement said. The US will also deliver around 1,700 oxygen concentrators as part of the initial supply. These oxygen concentrators obtain oxygen from ambient air and provide options for flexible patient treatment.

Besides, the US has partnered with more than 1,000 Indian healthcare facilities to strengthen preparedness, including training over 14,000 people on infection prevention and control. India also received 200 state-of-the-art ventilators to care for critically ill COVID-19 patients from the US.

Also read: Local production discouraged, nearly 100% import-dependent India hunts for oxygen concentrators around the world
DENVER, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- When the COVID-19 pandemic response started in early Spring 2020, drop-off of single-occupancy vehicle traffic across the country was extraordinary. As millions of people stayed home, air quality improved, noise pollution decreased, and there was an unexpected glimpse into a world without quite so many cars. The traffic data now available provides new perspective on the future of transportation for Galloway & Company, Inc.'s traffic engineers.

Current Trends and Their Possible Implications

The data shows that reduced travel by car and public transit are trends that could persist.

Streetlight Data's online vehicle miles traveled (VMT) monitor aggregates and displays daily counts of vehicle miles traveled, tracked by every county in the United States, compared to the average figure in January 2020. Even now, more than a full year since the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions and regulations, metro areas are still experiencing lower VMT averages.

Reduction in nonessential travel has been tracked by Unacast since February 2020. In the Denver metro area, the greatest reduction in nonessential travel occurred in April 2020; however, the December data still shows a reduction between 50 and 65%. Overall, nonessential travel remains lower across many areas of the United States.

An impactful behavioral change that could have long-lasting implications on traffic is the explosion of online shopping. While most transportation-related data points show a significant decline compared with 2019, e-commerce has rocketed upwards. Personal online shopping had grown from 10% of the retail market in 2017 to 16% just before COVID-19 hit the United States. Online shopping nearly doubled in April 2020 and was still about 57% higher in June, according to Bazaar Voice Network.

Additionally, COVID-19 has created significant disruptions in parking demand. Predicting lasting behavioral changes that may impact parking is dependent on several factors:

Increased Long-Term Work from Home : Employers seeking to reduce in-office density by rotating who works in the office or encouraging workers to telecommute may reduce the demand for parking.

: Employers seeking to reduce in-office density by rotating who works in the office or encouraging workers to telecommute may reduce the demand for parking. Office Layout and Footprint : Employers may also look to permanently increase floor area per person to assist with social distancing. This may be both a near-term impact and also a future design concept that could result in review and adjustment of required parking ratios.

: Employers may also look to permanently increase floor area per person to assist with social distancing. This may be both a near-term impact and also a future design concept that could result in review and adjustment of required parking ratios. Resistance to Density: In an effort to escape dense, urban centers, more people may look to the less-populated suburbs. Coworking spaces may reduce the need for a large, central office. What impact will a new era of suburban renewal have on parking demand? Will smaller, satellite office spaces increase the likelihood of foot and bike traffic?

Looking to the Future

The COVID-19 crisis is bound to facilitate new conversations around transportation issues and planning. It is a chance to be deliberate and thoughtful about long-term opportunities, and to take advantage of changing behaviors and systems.

About Galloway

Galloway & Company, Inc. is a multidisciplinary design firm with expertise in engineering, architecture, survey and land planning.

Media Contact:

Galloway & Company, Inc.

Brian Horan, PE

Transportation Team Manager

6162 S. Willow Dr., Suite 320

Greenwood Village, CO 80111

(303) 770-8884

[email protected]

SOURCE Galloway & Company, Inc.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott declared that America is 'not a racist country' as he delivered the GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden's first speech before Congress.

Scott, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate, used a large part of his speech to talk about race - detailing racism he's personally experienced, but making the argument that it's just as racist to teach white kids that they're 'an oppressor.'

He gave his party and its former leader, ex-President Donald Trump, credit for the COVID response - saying Biden had 'inherited a tide that had already turned' - while blasting Democrats for prolonged closures of schools and churches.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott delivered his party's response to President Joe Biden's first address before Congress

Scott portrayed Biden as divisive while, more broadly, saying the Democrats were wrong on race

Sen. Tim Scott was captured walking through the U.S. Capitol Wednesday night before delivering the GOP's response to Biden's address

Scott also defended the GOP-backed Georgia voting bill, blasting Democrats for lying about the controversial legislation and labeling it 'mainstream.'

The South Carolina Republican started out his remarks, delivered elsewhere in the U.S. Capitol, by saying Biden 'seems like a good man,' and adding that his 'speech was full of good words.'

'But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. That was the pitch. You just heard it again,' Scott said. 'But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes.'

Scott blasted Biden and the Democrats for 'pulling us further apart.'

'I won't waste your time tonight with finger-pointing or partisan bickering. You can get that on TV any time you want. I want to have an honest conversation,' Scott said.

Later in the speech he added, 'Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions about race.'

Scott talked about the racism he'd experienced as a black man in the South.

'I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while Im shopping,' he recalled.

He talked about how his grandfather would sit at the table every morning 'reading' the newspaper, only for the senator to later find out he was illiterate. 'He just wanted to set the right example,' Scott said.

'I've also experienced a different kind of intolerance,' he continued. 'I get called "Uncle Tom" and the N-word by progressives, by liberals!'

Scott said that kids are still being taught that the color of their skin defines them.

'And if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor,' he noted. 'From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we havent made any progress,' he claimed.

'Hear me clearly: America is not a racist county,' Scott said.

'It's backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination. And its wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present,' he added.

Scott talked about his previous work on police reform noting how the Democrats blocked it using a filibuster.

'And, no - the same filibuster that President Obama and President Biden praised when they were Senators - that Democrats used just last year - has not suddenly become a racist relic just because the shoe is on the other foot,' Scott said.

'Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants. Its too important,' he added.

Scott has been charged with leading the GOP side of negotiations as the Senate takes on police reform after the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Biden said in tonight's speech he wants a bill on his desk by next month, the anniversary of Floyd's death.

'My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution,' Scott said. 'But I'm still working, I'm still hopeful.'

Scott pointed to the slew of bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills that were passed last year - through a Republican White House and Senate and a Democratic House.

'All five bills got 90 or more votes in the Senate. Common sense found common ground,' he stated.

He knocked Biden for passing his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill with just Democratic votes.

'COVID brought Congress together five times. This Administration pushed us apart,' Scott said.

He then hit Biden for the infrastructure and family plans Republicans also view as too bloated.

On COVID, Scott sounded like Trump when he complained about shutdowns.

'Becoming a Christian transformed my life - but for months, too many churches were shut down,' Scott said.

He also said he was 'saddened' that millions of kids were kept away from schools.

'Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future,' he noted.

Scott also thanked Trump, giving him credit for the development of the COVID vaccines.

'This Administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run!' Scott said.

'Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump Administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines,' he continued. 'Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding.'

But the reason why the nation is feeling 'divided and anxious,' the GOP senator said, was because the nation had a president who promised to bring the U.S. together, tearing Americans apart instead.
Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: The Armenian Genocide, in History and Politics: What to Know

More than a century after the Ottoman Empires killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian civilians, President Biden declared on April 24 that the atrocities were an act of genocide. The action signaled that the American commitment to human rights outweighs the risk of further fraying the U.S. alliance with Turkey.

In this lesson, students will learn about why the United States changed its long-held policy this month and consider what the change means. In the Going Further section, we provide three teaching ideas that invite students to explore the New York Times archive from 1915 and wrestle with important questions about language and remembrance.

Warm-Up

Watch the two-minute video below from Facing History and Ourselves introducing what happened during the Armenian genocide. Take notes on two things you learned and one question you have.
Taxes in Finland: New Tax Benefits for Foreign Companies

Posted by Publisher Internet

Foreign companies can now take advantage of new tax incentives in Finland. The tax breaks can reduce the cost of joint research and development projects by 150%. In addition, tax-free shares will encourage employee commitment and new e-identification and e-authorisations are being introduced.

The new tax incentives are for all companies operating in Finland, both domestic and international and do not constitute state aid under the EU\-\-s definition, explain the Ecovis experts in Finland.

One of the new tax incentives encourages the share-based commitment of employees. It is not limited to start-ups, but applies to all non-listed companies. When non-listed limited liability companies issue shares to employees in Finland, the subscription price may be lower than the market value of the shares. If the subscription price is the share\-\-s mathematical value, an individual employee who buys such shares will not be treated as having received a taxable benefit.

150% Tax Deduction for Joint R&D Projects

Companies conducting R&D activity with a genuine research organisation meet the criteria for a tax deduction in Finland. The new tax law came into effect in January 2021 and gives companies a 150% tax deduction for joint R&D projects from 2021-2025.

If the actual R&D work is performed by a sub-contracted party (university/research institute etc.), the deduction is 50% on top of the existing deduction, which is 100%. The minimum threshold for tax deduction of costs is EUR 10,000/fiscal year, with a maximum of EUR 1,000,000. This means that the actual deduction is between EUR 5,000  500,000 per fiscal year.

Suomi.fi e-Authorisations

The Finnish authorities are modernising their electronic systems. The \KATSO\ service will be replaced by Suomi.fi e-identification and e-authorisations. The authorities in Finland use \KATSO\ as an identification and authorisation service for companies. The \KATSO\ services will cease to operate on 30 April 2021. E-authorisation is an even more secure solution that can not only be used by government services, but also by the private sector. With Suomi.fi e-authorisations, private persons, companies, and organisations can authorise someone else to act on their behalf. A mandate is an electronic power of attorney, the details of which are entered in the authorisation register.

For further information please contact:

Jaana Palomaki, Managing Partner, ECOVIS SGO Finland Ltd, Helsinki, Finland

Email: jaana.palomaki@ecovis.fi

Pertti Kivinen, Senior Partner, ECOVIS SGO Finland Ltd, Helsinki, Finland

Email: pertti.kivinen@ecovis.fi

Ecovis is a leading global consulting firm with its origins in Continental Europe. It has almost 8,500 people operating in nearly 80 countries. Its consulting focus and core competencies lie in the areas of tax consultation, accounting, auditing and legal advice.

The particular strength of Ecovis is the combination of personal advice at a local level with the general expertise of an international and interdisciplinary network of professionals. Every Ecovis office can rely on qualified specialists in the back offices as well as on the specific industrial or national know-how of all the Ecovis experts worldwide. This diversified expertise provides clients with effective support, especially in the fields of international transactions and investments  from preparation in the client\-\-s home country to support in the target country.

In its consulting work Ecovis concentrates mainly on mid-sized firms. Both nationally and internationally, its one-stop-shop concept ensures all-round support in legal, fiscal, managerial and administrative issues.

The name Ecovis, a combination of the terms economy and vision, expresses both its international character and its focus on the future and growth.
By Benjamin Jumbe

President Museveni has vowed to deal with anyone who attempts to block government programs.

While closing the new NRM MPs retreat at Ngoma in Nakaseke District, he accused the current parliament of frustrating government efforts by failing to approve required funds for implementation of government programs.

He cited the anti-tick vaccine project and the Nyaruzinga banana project which he said must get the money needed.

Museveni said he would not lobby or beg anymore but use his authority to ensure that no one slows down government programs in his new term.

He also asked the legislators to help him push for social economic transformation of their people and maintain peace among other things.

Meanwhile, President Museveni also lauded the new NRM MPs for supporting the governments free education campaign.

This was after the MPs in one of their resolutions from the Kyankwanzi retreat committed to supporting the free education program by enforcing elimination of all fees in government schools.

The president who was closing the new NRM Mps retreat at Ngoma state Lodge in Nakaseke district said this practice is being promoted by some head teachers and local elites who want to extort money from parents. He however said such people should not be tolerated

He also asked the MPs to support social economic transformation of their communities by encouraging them to produce items with market locally, regionally and internationally.
NSU alum Kastigar finishes 11th place in the 400IM at Olympic trials

Kastigar finished 11th overall and swam her fourth fastest time in her career as she clocked in at 4:51.28.
The Tribune/BGA investigation found that when violations were sent to administrative hearings or to court, hearing officers and city lawyers often accepted evidence provided by landlords about alleged repairs without sending inspectors to verify those repairs actually took place  even for serious issues such as a lack of smoke detectors. In some cases, city officials accepted the landlords word or a simple photograph of a smoke detector as evidence that a working device was installed.
New Delhi: Amid a shortage of medical supplies including oxygen, drugs and vaccines, the central government is welcoming all the help it can get.

Calling the situation in the country unprecedented, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla on Thursday (April 29) said that over 40 countries have come forward to offer help in the fight against the second wave of the pandemic.

He said that India has helped many of these countries in their hour of need and now they are returning the favour.

It's an unprecedented situation. We've certainly prioritising, we're sourcing many of these items (oxygen, drugs, etc.) from many countries. Many countries have come forward on their own to offer us assistance. Countries said they appreciated our assistance and they're giving us in return, Shringla was quoted as saying by ANI.

We're also expecting tomorrow and over the next couple of days three special flights from the US. President Biden spoke to the PM and offered extensive assistance. We have a cargo flight arriving tonight from UAE with ventilators and carrying Favipiravir medicines, he said.

We also have a flight coming in from Ireland with 700 concentrators. France's flight will be coming in on Saturday. Over 40 countries, not just developed countries but also our neighbours Mauritius, Bangladesh, Bhutan have all come forward to offer assistance, he added.

Shringla underlined the priority areas that include liquid oxygen and any equipment that produces oxygen - oxygen generators, concentrators, cryogenic tankers, transportation equipment for oxygen.

Shringla further said that there is an urgent need for pharmaceutical products like Remdesivir and Tocilizumab.

Although we produce Remdesivir given the requirements the production has not been adequate to meet the immediate shortfall, he pointed out.

We normally manufacture 67,000 doses of Remdesivir a day. But the requirement today might be between 2-3 lakhs a day. So we have to bridge the gap, this is something that our producers are well aware of, they are actually ramping up their production, he said.

He said that the drug manufacturers have ramped up production of Remdesivir up to 4 lakhs a day, but they need raw material. For this the government has got assurance from the US and it is also in touch with manufacturers in Egypt and other parts of the world.

On the travel restrictions imposed by several countries in the wake of surge in COVID cases, Shringla said that the measures were temporary and that similar curbs were placed by India earlier. He added that the cargo connectivity would remain unaffected.

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LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 29,Eternaleaf, a British entry lux skincare brand that has enjoyed high popularity in Europe and America, has innovatively added multiple rare anti-aging ingredients including Linolenic Acid Omega 3/Omega 6/ Omega 6 to its products. Eternaleaf cosmetics are favored by fashion icons in Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia and are sought after by consumers of Rakuten, Watsons and other large e-commerce cosmetics providers and their retail outlets. As of April 1, 2021, Eternaleaf has opened more than 3,000 retail outlets in Indonesia and become one of the fastest-growing skincare brands in the Southeast Asian market.

The UK-based brand is dedicated to delivering the most reliable anti-aging/skin repair products to consumers worldwide. In the future, Eternaleaf will convey unique skin management concepts along with personalized products to every consumer based on their internal needs, with a view to building itself into an entry-level luxury skincare brand with international influence.
India's second wave of infections has overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums and prompted an increasingly urgent response from allies overseas sending equipment.

Amid international aid pouring in, a group of startups have launched a donation programme Mission Oxygen' under their NGO Democracy People Foundation, via Ketto to initially raise about Rs. 2.5 cr to source 500 Oxygen Concentrators (OCs) from China and elsewhere that could be donated quickly to needy hospitals and nursing centres and help save many lives.

Mission Oxygen

Soon, donations scaled up and Mission Oxygen has so far raised Rs 13 crore.

"We raised this money with the support of 10,000 individual donors who really want to do something to help India come out of this crisis. As the fund raise progressed, our group sprung into action to secure the supply and carry out quality due diligence of vendors," it said in a statement.

For anyone that wants to help, Mission oxygen is a campaign that is raising money to provide oxygen cylinders and concentrators to hospitals around the country. Donate, share, retweet. EVERY contribution is IMPORTANT.

https://t.co/aFEJyxpRRQ  Kunal Kapoor (@kapoorkkunal) April 24, 2021





1,365 oxygen concentrators procured

The programme has managed to procure a supply of 1,365 OCs, and have also worked round the clock to successfully arrange logistics working together with partners like Spicejet, DHL, Flexiport and Delhivery.

Mission Oxygen

The first shipment of 500 will start arriving by this week and the remaining 800 will arrive by next week.

The foundation has secured 1365 concentrators from 7 factories, with each having confirmed bookings on flights coming into India in the following manner:

100 pcs getting loaded from Hong Kong for India

50 pcs under custom clearance at Shanghai

50 pcs under custom clearance at Hong Kong

300 pcs reaching Shanghai warehouse today

500 pcs getting dispatched from Factory in Shenyang for Beijing

300 pcs getting dispatched from Factory today in Quindao for Beijing

An oxygen generation plant has also been set up at Deen Dayal Upadhaya Hospital. This will be the first Oxygen Generation plant which will be setup by the Delhi Govt during this time.

They have created a team of 250 entrepreneurs out of Gurgaon working across procurement, QA/QC, certifications, due diligence, freight forwarding, air freight management, customs (China and India), logistics, legal, research, PR, communications, demand/requirement collection and distribution.



Additionally, 40-50 people are working on ground in China across Hong Kong, Shenzen, Shanghai, Guanghzao, Beijing.

While we are doing our fund raised through Ketto, since Friday night where we have raised just over 10 crore, we have already fronted more than 14.5 crore which has been remitted to our vendors and agents, DPF said in a statement.

The NGO says it is confident of bringing in anything between 3000-6000 OCs into India by 14-15th May.
US President Joe Biden has said that as a deterrence to conflicts he would maintain a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific, an area where China is asserting itself aggressively.

China loomed large in Biden's address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday as he made the fast-developing nation the economic and strategic threat to the US.



"We're in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21stCentury. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better," he said.



Biden said that he has told "President Xi (Jinping) that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe -- not to start conflict, but to prevent conflict."



He added, "In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competition -- and that we are not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board."



In his speech on his 99th day in office, Biden presented his report card on progress in achieving the targets he had set for the first 100 days and his multi-trillion-dollar plans for infrastructure, jobs, education, economy and families.



He said, "America is on the move again" after the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the worst attack on democracy -- a reference to the attack on Congress by supporters of former President Donald Trump on January 6.



The hour-long speech was crafted by his Indian American speechwriter Vinay Reddy, who holds the title of director of speechwriting. Since he has not been in office for a year, the speech took the place of the traditional State of the Union address.





As he began his speech with Vice President Kamala Harris and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi behind him on the podium, he noted that he was the first president to have to address the holders of both offices as "Madame".



For the first time the speaker and the Senate president -- vice President Harris -- are both women.



The COVID-19 epidemic hollowed out the House chamber where Biden delivered the annual address. Only about 200 people -- including the spouses of the president and vice president a" were there socially distanced and masked.



Absent were the guests who add colour to the speech and get called upon during the speech by presidents.



Missing was also drama like that of Pelosi angrily ripping up a copy of former President Donald Trump's speech at the podium.



Biden brought up the spectre of China several times to spur his agenda.



"China and other countries are closing in fast" in technology and "we're falling behind in that competition", he warned as he called for increasing allocations for research and development.



He said that the investments he proposed across a range of fields "also advance a foreign policy that benefits the middle class".



"That means making sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China," he explained.



"America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property," he added.



Biden emphasised his vision of the US being the leader of the world.



"We have to show not just that we are back, but that we are here to stay" as the world's leading nation, he said.



But he added, "And that we aren't going it alone -- we're going to be leading with our allies" because "no one nation can deal with all the crises of our time alone".



Biden also recycled Trump's America First policy under the slogan of "Buy American."



He asked why blades for wind turbines can't be made in Pittsburgh and not Beijing or American workers can't lead the world in making electric vehicles.



"American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs," he declared. "That is what it is supposed to be and would be in this administration."



"I have made it clear to all my Cabinet people their ability to give exemptions has been strenuously limited. It will be American products," he added.



To pay for his ambitious $1.8 trillion Families Plan -- which has education, healthcare and other social programmes -- and the more than $2 trillion Jobs Plan -- which focuses on infrastructure development and climate resilience -- as well as the $1.9 trillion COVID rescue plan, he said that he would take the tax rate on the wealthiest back to as much as 39.6 per cent, but would not increase the tax burden on the rest.



He said that he would also crack down on tax evasion and hiding money in accounts abroad.



He pitched proposals for stricter gun control, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and the creation of an Advanced Research Project Agency.
SmartLinx wins five Stevie American Business Awards

SmartLinx, a leading provider of cloud workforce management solutions, took home multiple awards in the 19th Annual American Business Awards today.

SmartLinx was recognized for its swift and pragmatic response to COVID-19, including the development of thermal-sensing touchless time clocks to enhance workforce operations by enabling contactless employee check-ins and authentications. The company also received another customer service excellence award.

Highlights for SmartLinx Award winning product development and customer service:

Gold Stevie Award:



Touchless and Thermal-Sensing Time Clocks and Apps. SmartLinx developed three next-gen time clocks to address new challenges amidst the pandemic. The Touchless Time Clock enables contactless punch in or out through a QR code generated on the SmartLinx Go app. Building on the contactless authentication capabilities, the Thermal-Sensing Touchless Time Clock supports temperature screening for employees as they punch in. Finally, SmartLinx Advanced Timeclock for Employees (SLATE) combines the latest innovations in touchless and thermal-sensing technologies with integrated time tracking and employee scheduling to help operators safeguard their facilities and enhance workforce operations.

Silver Stevie Awards:



Bronze Stevie Award:



Customer Service Department of the Year. In addition to being first to market with touchless time clocks, the SmartLinx Customer Success team supported customers by cross-training other functions to inform content for all educational COVID-19 customer content. The team also proved generous with their time, working flexible hours to provide custom solutions for customers and reaching out to supply customers with PPE and more.

Were honored to serve healthcare providers who deliver care and compassion to long-term care and post-acute care residents every day. We take great pride in providing solutions and personalized service that helps make their operations seamless and safer, said SmartLinx CEO Marina Aslanyan. Its rewarding to be recognized for our continued work as we develop offerings and provide personalized assistance to each of our valued customers.

More than 3,800 nominations  a record number  from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year, including IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and Mastercard. More than 250 professionals worldwide participated in the judging process to select this years Stevie Award winners.

About SmartLinx

Founded in 2000, SmartLinx cares for those who care. Used in thousands of leading organizations, SmartLinxs workforce management solutions help healthcare providers manage people and processes by harnessing the power of real-time data. Solutions include talent acquisition and onboarding, human resources, benefits, payroll, time & attendance, scheduling, compliance, and business analytics. New financing options with preferred commercial lender Ascentium Capital provide several flexible structures and low introductory payment options to help clients utilize the breadth of SmartLinxs capabilities and products. The company is headquartered in Iselin, New Jersey. For more information, please visit http://www.smartlinx.com or call 877-501-1310.
Commentary: Rural vitalization indispensable to China's modernization

Xinhua) 15:27, April 29, 2021

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, talks to people of different ethnic groups who are participating in festive activities outside the Anthropology Museum of Guangxi in the city of Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, April 27, 2021. (Xinhua/Shen Hong)

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- After lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past decades, China is aligning efforts to consolidate the achievements in poverty alleviation with promoting rural vitalization, an indispensable and vital part of modernization.

During his inspection tour in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region from Sunday to Tuesday, President Xi Jinping underlined efforts to pursue rural vitalization based on local specialty industries and make better use of science and technology in promoting the agricultural sector.

It, once again, highlights the persistent high attention that the central authorities have paid to the development of agriculture and rural areas with policies and measures.

With absolute poverty eliminated in rural areas, the country has solved its major weak link in the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects and created a miracle for mankind. This year, the nation is embarking on a new journey of fully building a modernized socialist country with agriculture and rural areas being an important part of the cause.

In the new development phase, rural areas remain a priority and an arduous task due to the imbalanced development, weak areas in public services and the environment as well as financing difficulties for private rural firms.

Therefore, substantial efforts are needed to attract talent and continue improving infrastructure, public services, and the environment. In advancing rural vitalization, technologies and reform are required to strengthen the capacity and competitiveness of agriculture to drive the modernization of the primary sector.

The strategy will help ensure the country's food security and the supply of high-quality agricultural goods.

As life continues to improve, the Chinese people have new aspirations for a better life. The increasing urban population has higher requirements for the agricultural sector, such as quality farm products and rural tourism, bringing new opportunities for rural development.

The implementation of a rural vitalization strategy would contribute to the sustainable development of rural areas where some industries are still in their initial development stage, and foster new momentum in the national economy. It also means rural residents will enjoy a more beautiful and comfortable living environment while having better access to quality services and goods from home and abroad.

Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy. Advancing rural vitalization would support the country's comprehensive modernization drive which will benefit all.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Manna, a Dublin, Ireland-based food delivery startup which uses drones, raised $25M in Series A funding.

The round was led by Draper Esprit, with participation from Team Europe, partners of DST Global, and existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and Elkstone.

The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach, continue to scale its fleet of drones and to begin supporting critical medical deliveries.

Led by Bobby Healy, CEO & founder, Manna designs, builds and operates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which perform high-speed deliveries of takeaway food, groceries and pharmacy goods/supplies of up to 3kgs (6.5lbs) in suburban last-mile settings.

The company is currently trialling its service in Galway, Ireland. The drone hub supports over 100 takeaway deliveries a day directly to the homes of the nearly 10,000 residents of the town.

Manna has also signed partnerships with major brands and retailers, including JustEat, Samsung, Ben & Jerrys and Tesco plc.

FinSMEs

29/04/2021
Gurugram, April 29 : Amid the massive spike in Covid-19 cases, several corporate houses and auto majors in Gurugram will be setting up temporary hospitals and other necessary medical equipment for covid patients under the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme.

These companies have also assured the district administration to cooperate with all the possible help to a Covid patient.

Gurugram Deputy Commissioner Yash Garg has said that Hero Moto Corp, DLF, M3M, Power Finance Corporation Limited, Honda Motor Cycle and Scooter India Private India Limited, Tenco Automotive Private Limited, Minda Group, Rites Limited, IFFCO Tokyo General Insurance Company Limited, Vivekanand Aarogya, Vedanta Group, Principal Cytic Advisor Office of the government, among others have pledged to support the district administration in raising facilities for covid patients.

"Hero Motocorp has started to build a temporary hospital of 100 beds, which is expected to be ready in the next one week or 10 days.

Similarly, a 100 bed temporary hospital will be arranged in Gurugram on behalf of the PSA office of the government. In the newly constructed vacant flat of M3M group in Sector 65, a 100-bed make shift temporary hospital is being arranged," Garg said.

Similarly, DLF Limited has also started to build a temporary hospital of 150 beds, for which it will be coordinated with a hospital in the city so that patients from there can be accommodated in this temporary hospital and for the severely suffering patients. So that additional space could be made in the large hospital.

Such temporary hospitals will be connected with the major hospitals of the city so that these patients can get the services of experienced and senior doctors there.

"Power Finance Corporation Limited has also assured to set up a make shift hospital under CSR programme. Honda Motor Cycle & Scooter India Private Limited will also build a temporary hospital of 100 beds. Minda Group will also set up a temporary hospital and oxygen plant.

Tenneco Automotive India Private Limited has pledged to provide one crore rupees equipment required for Covid treatment. Similarly, 500 Oximeter and 70 Oxygen constant filters will be made available under CSR.

A 65 bed temporary hospital will be built in Vivekananda Arogya Center in collaboration with Mankind Pharma Limited which will also include oxygen consultants, oxygen cylinders and services of experienced doctors," Garg stated.

Garg said that a site has been identified in the Civil Lines area where a 100-bed temporary hospital will be built by Vedanta group which will have 90 ICU beds and 10 ventilator beds.

"In these temporary hospitals, patients and paramedical staff will be required to provide treatment to the patients, for which the district administration has already registered itself with volunteer doctors, retired doctors and paramedical staff willing to provide services. The proceedings have been started for getting it done," the Deputy Commissioner said.

"Gurugram will also get the benefit of increasing the oxygen supply allocation for Haryana. On Wednesday, on the request of the Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, the oxygen allocation of state has been increased from 162 MT to 232 MT," he added.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Dehradun: In the wake of the rising cases of coronavirus, the Uttarakhand government has suspended Char Dham Yatra this year in the state. Issuing an order, Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat said on Thursday that only priests of the four temples will perform rituals and puja this year.

Uttarakhand government has suspended Char Dham Yatra this year in view of #COVID19 situation in the state. Only priests of the four temples will perform rituals and puja: Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat (File photo) pic.twitter.com/No6I9G2WDx  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

The state government had earlier given its green signal to hold the annual Char Dham Yatra from May 14

In this regard, the state government had already started preparation with all COVID guidelines in place. The Uttarakhand government had made negative RT-PCR test reports mandatory, among other guidelines for devotees.

We have made negative RT-PCR reports mandatory for Char Dham Yatra to ensure that the infection does not spread. The Yatra is a matter of faith and we are committed to provide every facility to the pilgrims from all over the world, Uttarakhands Tourism Minister Satpal Maharaj had earlier said.

The Uttarakhand government was also likely to limit the number of pilgrims in a particular shrine on a day. Last year, it was 800 for the Kedarnath shrine, 1,200 for Badrinath, 600 for Gangotri and 400 for Yamunotri.

The move to suspend the Char Dham Yatra comes at a time when Uttarakhand recorded the highest single-day spike of 6,054 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, taking the tally to 1,68,616, while 108 deaths pushed the toll to 2,417.

Dehradun district accounted for the maximum number of 2,329 cases, followed by Haridwar, which reported 1,178 cases, Udham Singh Nagar 849, Nainital 665, Chamoli 175, Pauri 174 Champawat 153, Almora 140, Bageshwar 128 and Tehri 109, a state health department bulletin said.

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Rudy Giuliani found himself trolled by a local landscaping company after the after the FBI raided his New York apartment.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia took to twitter to mock Donald Trumps personal lawyer with a picture of agents outside their office and joked, Wrong apartment. We kicked him out months ago.

The company shot to fame in the days after last Novembers presidential election, when Mr Giuliani hosted a bizarre press conference outside the business.

The unusual location of the high-profile media event led to suggestions that the Trump campaign had actually intended to book the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia.

Shortly after the former mayor of New York began the press conference media organisations called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

The trolling of Mr Giuliani came hours after FBI agents raided his Upper East Side apartment at dawn and removed various electronic devices.

The Manhattan US Attorneys office is conducting a criminal investigation into Mr Giulianis business dealigns in Ukraine, which have been linked to the first impeachment of Mr Trump.

Mr Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello, said that FBI agents had a search warrant focussed on Mr Giulianis alleged failure to register as a foreign agent while lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian government officials and businessmen.

Mr Costello has insisted that his client is innocent and the victim of anti-Trump prosecutors.
Advertisement

The two and a half minute sequence will appear on billboards in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul in the month of May

David Hockney's newest piece of art - a digital sunrise sequence - will be broadcast simultaneously on billboards worldwide in May.

The six image sequence will appear on digital billboards in New York, London, Tokyo, and Seoul.

It was created by Hockney, 83, on an iPad during lockdown and represents a message of hope and collaboration as the world emerges from the pandemic.

The piece, titled, 'Remember, you cannot look at the sun or death for very long', was drawn by Hockney in the early mornings in Normandy, France, where he has lived since 2019.

The two and a half minute sequence transforms from a dark scene with long shadows to a brilliant image of bright sun rays spread dramatically across the scenery.

The world renowned artist started experimenting with drawing on an iPad in 2009, and has praised the medium for not requiring an extensive clean up.

'No cleaning up needed', he told the New York Times, 'and I can always draw at a moment's notice.'

The 83-year-old started drawing digital with his thumb on an iPhone before shifting to using a stylus pen on the new released iPad.

'There was great advantage in this medium because it's backlit and I could draw in the dark. I didn't ever have to get out of bed,' said the artist.

He has now produced hundreds of paintings, portraits, and still lifes, on the Apple product.

Hockney's latest artwork can be viewed across more than electronic billboards at New York's Times Square at 11:57pm every evening in May.

It will also feature on Seoul's Coex K-POP Square screen, in the city's Gangnam district, at 8:21pm KST, Tokyo's Yunika Vision in Skinjuku at 9am JST, and Los Angeles' Pendry West Hollywood, the largest digital media display on the Sunset Strip at 8:21pm PDT each day.

It will also appear at the home of CIRCA London's Piccadilly Lights, Europe's largest screen, at 8:21pm BST.

The piece will also feature on the organisation's website every evening at 8:21pm BST.

The digital show coincides with the release of Hockney's new book 'Spring Cannot Be Cancelled' and the Royal Academy exhibition 'The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020' which is set to open on May 23.

The exhibition is being run by CIRCA.ART, a London-based digital art platform, and Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance.

The London-based platform are also selling a time-limited posted by David Hockney until May 31.

Profits from the sale will be used to help support the creative community which has struggled since the onset of Covid-19 last year. The money will be put into cash grants for artists and institutions as well as used to commission new culture.

David Hockney's newest piece of art - a digital sunrise sequence - will be broadcast simultaneously on billboards worldwide in May

The two and a half minute sequence will appear at the home of CIRCA London's Piccadilly Lights, Europe's largest screen, at 8:21pm BST every evening in May

Hockney, 83, is a world renowned artist and is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century

The sequence will feature on Tokyo's Yunika Vision in Skinjuku at 9am JST every day for the month of May
Warning after scam letters sent to businesses offering covid air purifiers

A warning to businesses has been issued after reports of letters advising businesses that Covid Safe air purifiers must be purchased as a legal requirement.

The letters claim to come from a Covid Safe Taskforce as part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

They falsely state that all businesses have a legal requirement to buy the air purifiers by May 3, 2021.

The purifiers are said to cost 123.80 each and businesses are being advised they must have a minimum of two devices, up to a maximum of 10, depending on the business type and size of premises.





Wrexham Trading Standards say this is a scam, there is no legal requirement for businesses to install such purifiers.

Businesses are asked to complete the application form to order the purifiers, and told someone from the Covid Safe Taskforce will then contact them by phone to complete the payment.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy (BEIS) has issued a statement on Twitter, saying: We are aware of scammers sending BEIS headed letters to businesses telling them that, by law, they need to purchase air purifiers to comply with #Covid19 rules.

This is not true. If you receive a letter, please report it to Action Fraud UK.

A spokesperson for Wrexham Trading Standards said: If you think you may have been the victim of fraud or cyber-crime, you should report this to Action Fraud via their website or by calling 0300 123 2040.

Action Fraud is the UKs National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Centre.

Its really important to follow these three steps when deciding whether its safe to part with your money or personal information:

STOP  Taking a moment to stop and think before parting with your money or information could keep you safe.

CHALLENGE  Could it be fake? Its OK to reject, refuse or ignore any requests. Only criminals will try to rush or panic you.

PROTECT  Contact your bank immediately if you think youve fallen for a scam and report it to Action Fraud.

Consumer advice can be obtained from the Citizens Advice Consumer Service. They can be contacted on 0808 223 1144 (Welsh) or 0808 223 1133 (English).

Stay safe and please stay scam aware.
A longtime leader of the Youth International Party, more commonly known as the Yippies, Mr. Beal is a familiar figure within drug policy circles. He has spent years championing the use of Ibogaine, a derivative of an African shrub that is banned in the United States, to interrupt addiction to opioids, cocaine and methamphetamines.

But his most far-reaching legacy may be the hundreds of smoke-ins, marijuana marches, pot parades and similar events that he has organized in New York City and beyond since 1967.

Brandon Cuicchi of Act Up, an activist group that was started in the 1980s to address the AIDS crisis, said the organization had several reasons for taking part in the joint giveaways. Many people with AIDS or H.I.V., for instance, have turned to medical marijuana to ease the effects of antiretroviral medications, he said. Then there was the chance to work with Mr. Beal.

Dana is the godfather of the modern pot legalization movement, Mr. Cuicchi said. His dedication has been unparalleled.

Mr. Beal says it has also had a cost.

He has been arrested numerous times on marijuana-related charges. In 2008 the police in Mattoon, Ill., confiscated more than $150,000 in cash that he had been traveling with. Mr. Beals lawyer said the authorities had told him the money smelled like marijuana. (Friends said Mr. Beal had told them he was transporting the money to finance an Ibogaine clinic.)

While Mr. Beal may be widely acknowledged as a force within the pot legalization movement, he acknowledges sparring over the years with other marijuana advocates, including some at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), who Mr. Beal said believed the events he organized were too rambunctious.
The listening session will begin with an overview of Executive Order 2020-182 that established the Council on Climate Solutions, followed by an explanation of how the council is structured and its role in advising EGLE and the Office of Climate and Energy on the development of the MI Healthy Climate Plan. The council's input will be informed by the public comments and guidance from five workgroups: Energy Production, Transmission, Distribution, and Storage; Buildings and Housing; Transportation and Mobility; Natural Working Lands and Forest Products; and Energy Intensive Industries.

Those who cannot attend the listening sessions can offer their topical comments at any time by sending an email to EGLE-ClimateSolutions@Michigan.gov.

A recording of the April 22 public listening session has been posted to MIchigan.gov/Climate.

The council is comprised of 14 state residents as well as representatives from nine state departments and agencies. EGLE Director Liesl Clark is the chair of the council, which is scheduled to meet publicly the fourth Tuesday of each month through the end of the year.

The MI Healthy Climate Plan will combat the impacts of climate change, which is having a detrimental impact on Michigan's environment and economy. It also threatens the health and well-being of residents, with communities of color and low-income Michiganders bearing a disproportionate impact of climate disruptions. Gov. Whitmer has also signed Executive Directive 2019-12, in which Michigan joined the United States Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors from 25 states devoted to pursuing the goals of the Paris Agreement.

EGLE does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, age, national origin, color, marital status, disability, political beliefs, height, weight, genetic information or sexual orientation in the administration of any of its programs or activities, and prohibits intimidation and retaliation, as required by applicable laws and regulations.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
Now that President Joe Biden has introduced the second major plank of his economic agenda, the White House is announcing another roster of Cabinet officials who will take lead roles in selling it to the public.

Biden has assigned Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, to serve as his "Families Cabinet," a White House official said.

Their job description: lead the administration's negotiations on Capitol Hill while also communicating with state and local officials and union allies.

"Each of these Cabinet members bring expertise and focus on the components in the Families Plan, and in the coming weeks, they'll be at the forefront of making that case that these sort of transformational investments are vital in strengthening the middle class and ensuring the economic well-being of families across America," the official said.

Related:

Each official, the White House says, has already begun to work and will soon ramp it up.

Yellen met with the Retail Industry Leaders Association on Wednesday to discuss the $1.8 trillion plan. Rouse and Cardona will brief the chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Asian and Pacific American Caucus on Thursday.

Even as this sub-Cabinet takes on the additional assignment, it's Biden himself leading the public sales job.

On Thursday, he'll go to the key battleground state of Georgia to launch the "Getting America Back on Track" tour, which press secretary Jen Psaki said this week is designed to "take the case directly to the American people about the vital need for action on the Jobs Plan and the Families Plan."

Biden's "Jobs Cabinet"  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo  has been doing similar work since he unveiled the more than $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
OROVILLE, Calif. (Update 4:02 p.m.)  Two men are dead and a two and four-year-old have been flown to the hospital after a crash in south Oroville, according to CAL FIRE public information officer, Rick Carhart.

One child was flown to Oroville Hospital, while the other was taken to UC Davis Medical Center, according to Oroville CHP Officer, Ben Draper. He added, the two children are facing life-changing injuries.

The single-vehicle collision happened Thursday early afternoon on Lincoln Blvd. at Baggett-Marysville Rd, Carhart said.

Draper said there was a possible street race involving a black Jeep Cherokee and red Chevy Camaro. Draper said the Jeep Cherokee crashed into a power pole at its base, causing the pole to snap. The two children were ejected from the car after it hit the power pole.

At this time, power is still off in the area, officials are working to get it fixed.

There could be additional victims but Carhart said they are unsure at the moment. CAL FIRE said the roads will remain closed for a while. They are asking drivers to take an alternate route around the area.

Action News Now Esteban Reynoso is on the scene of the crash. View the Facebook Live below for more information.

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OROVILLE, Calif.  People are being asked to avoid the area of Lincoln Blvd at Baggett-Marysville Rd due to a traffic collision, according to CAL FIRE.

Crews said that power lines are down across the road from the crash.

Action News Now has a reporter on the way.

This is a developing story. Action News Now will keep you updated with new information on-air and online.
Ontario has opened up an Expression of Interest system for two PNPs under the Employer Job Offer Category.

Ontario launches EOI system for PNP streams Ontario has opened up an Expression of Interest system for two PNPs under the Employer Job Offer Category.

Ontario launches EOI system for PNP streams Ontario has opened up an Expression of Interest system for two PNPs under the Employer Job Offer Category.

Ontario launches EOI system for PNP streams Ontario has opened up an Expression of Interest system for two PNPs under the Employer Job Offer Category. Shelby Thevenot Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif

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Ontario has opened a new Expression of Interest (EOI) system for two of its provincial immigration programs.

The Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program (OINP) EOI system is now open for the following streams in the Employer Job Offer Category:

According to the OINP webpage, the province expects to open the EOI systems for the In-Demand Skills, Masters Graduate, and PhD Graduate streams in the near future.

Find Out if Youre Eligible for Canadian Immigration

What does this mean for future Ontario immigrants?

If you want to eventually apply for immigration through one of Ontarios base Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs), you can now register an EOI profile at any time. Before, you could only register when the OINP opened its online portal.

After you register, your profile will be entered into a selection pool, and given a score based on your answers. Ontario will then invite candidates to apply for a provincial nomination.

An EOI registration does not guarantee that you will receive an invitation to apply. The OINP will notify you or your representative if you have been invited.

Your EOI registration is valid for up to 12 months or until you receive an invitation. You may also choose to withdraw your registration. After 12 months, your EOI will be deleted automatically.

It is free to register, but if you are invited to apply you will have to submit fees along with your application.

Receiving an invitation does not mean you get the provincial nomination. You will have to meet all the eligibility requirements of the stream you are applying for at that time.

How do I register an Expression of Interest?

The first step is to create a profile in the OINP e-Filing Portal. Then read the applicant requirements for your stream to ensure that you are eligible. After that you can register an expression of interest for one or more streams. You can only register one EOI profile at any given time.

The information you provide must be accurate at the time you register. You can update your profile at any time to keep the information current.

Find Out if Youre Eligible for Canadian Immigration

What are the scoring factors?

Ontario ranks EOI profiles based on your answers. Points are awarded based on the skill level of your job offer and Canadian work experience. The province uses the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system to assign points.

The OINP scoring system is different depending on which stream you apply for. Other than skill level and work experience, it also takes into account your wage, education, official language ability, and the region in which you study or work. The province also allocates 10 points at its discretion to respond to labour market needs.

Here are the scoring factors as listed on the Ontario government webpage:

Job offer: NOC skill level

(Not applied to Masters Graduate or PhD Graduate streams.)

NOC Skill Level A  10 points

NOC Skill Level B  8 points

NOC Skill Level C  0 points

NOC Skill Level D  0 points

Job offer: NOC type

NOC Type 0,1,2,3,9  10 points

NOC Type 4,5,6,7,8  5 points

Job offer: wage

(Not applied to Masters Graduate or PhD Graduate streams.)

$40 per hour or higher  10 points

$20 to $39.99 per hour  5 points

Less than $20 per hour  0 points

Canadian work experience: length

(Cumulative)

12 Months or more  4 points

Less than 12 months  0 points

Canadian work experience: NOC Skill Level

NOC Skill Level A  3 points

NOC Skill Level B  0 points

NOC Skill Level C  0 points

NOC Skill Level D  0 points

Canadian work experience: earnings history

$40k or more earnings in a year  3 points

Less than $40k earnings in a year  0 points

Highest level of education

PhD  10 points

Masters  8 points

Bachelors or equivalent  6 points

College diploma or trade certificate  5 points

Less than college or trade certificate  0 points

Field of study

(Not applied to Foreign Worker or In-Demand Skills streams)

Engineering  10 points

Health care  10 points

Math and Computer Science  9 points

Business and Administration  7 points

Trades  7 points

Social, Legal, and Education  6 points

Arts and Humanities  5 points

Canadian education experience

(Not applied to Foreign Worker or In-Demand Skills streams.)

More than one Canadian credential  10 points

One Canadian credential  5 points

Official language ability

(Not applied to Foreign Worker or In-Demand Skills streams.)

CLB 9 or higher  10 points

CLB 8  6 points

CLB 7  4 points

CLB 6 or lower  0 points

Knowledge of official languages

(Not applied to Foreign Worker or In-Demand Skills streams.)

2 Official Languages  10 points

1 Official Language  5 points

Regional immigration: location of job Offer

(Not applied to Masters or PhD streams.)

Outside GTA  10 points

Inside GTA  6 points

Regional immigration: location of study

(Not applied to Masters or PhD streams.)

Outside GTA  10 points

Inside GTA  6 points

Strategic priorities

(To address immediate labour market needs in the province or a region of the province.)

As determined by OINP on the expression of interest system invitation to apply webpage  10 points (if in use).

Why is Ontario introducing an EOI system?

Ontario needed a new immigrant selection system for its PNPs that operate outside the Express Entry system. Before, Ontario used a first-come-first-served model. In order to apply for a base PNP, candidates would wait for a registration to open, then rush to register. They were competing with every other non-Express Entry candidate who wanted to immigrate to Ontario.

Since Ontario is the most popular destination for new Canadian immigrants, that was a lot of people. Candidates would only have a tiny window of time to register. They would have multiple browsers open to try and get their profile in. Technical difficulties occurred. Some people said the system was unfair to those with slow internet connections.

In the fall of 2020, Ontario started public consultations on how to develop a new EOI system. By then, most other provinces had implemented this selection process.

At the time, an Ontario spokesperson told CIC News that the province was considering the EOI system to manage intake and the high demand for the program, avoiding uncertainty associated with stream openings and the current first-come-first-served model.

Ontario approved the EOI selection system in the spring of 2021. Candidates can now start to apply for Ontario PNPs through the new selection process.

Find Out if Youre Eligible for Canadian Immigration

 CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options.
After waiving off customs duty, the government may now waive Goods and Services Tax (GST) on coronavirus vaccines to reduce their costs. The COVID-19 vaccines are priced up to Rs 1,200 in private hospitals. Serum Institute's Covishield is priced at Rs 300 per dose for state government and Rs 600 for private hospitals, while Bharat Biotech's Covaxin is priced at Rs 600 per dose for state governments and Rs 1,200 for private hospitals. Every person is required to take two doses.

The GST waiver may come as the government is looking to ease the burden on people and encourage more vaccination, as mentioned in a report in Hindustan Times. The government has already waived off import duty on pharmaceutical raw materials required to manufacture drugs for coronavirus treatment. Centre is now mulling removing the 5 per cent GST on coronavirus vaccines on similar grounds, sources told the daily.

A person in the know told the daily that the waiver will require the approval of the GST Council but it is unlikely that anyone would oppose the move. The revenue implication of this waiver will also not be significant, the person said. So far there is no official statement by the Finance Ministry.

The government announced the liberalised and accelerated Phase 3 strategy of COVID-19 vaccination that permits manufacturers to release up to 50 per cent of their stock to state governments and private entities. The manufacturers had announced their rates to this end.

Serum Institute that had initially priced the doses for state governments at Rs 400, reduced it to Rs 300 per dose after the government asked the vaccine makers to reconsider their pricing. CEO Adar Poonawalla said, "As a philanthropic gesture on behalf of @SerumInstIndia, I hereby reduce the price to the states from Rs 400 to Rs 300 per dose, effective immediately; this will save thousands of crores of state funds. This will enable more vaccinations and save countless lives."

Also read: Serum Institute reduces Covishield price for govt hospitals to Rs 300

Also read: COVID-19 vaccine registration for 18 to 45 years: How to register via CoWin portal, Aarogya Setu app
Chennai, April 29 : Private sector Ageas Federal Life Insurance closed last fiscal with an after tax profit of about Rs 119 crore and a total premium of Rs 1,959 crore.

According to the insurer, formerly IDBI Federal Life Insurance Company Ltd, despite the Covid-19 challenges, the total premium rose by six per cent to Rs 1,959 crore in 2020-21 from Rs 1,843 crore in 2019-20.

The growth was driven by a 24 per cent rise in individual new business premium to Rs 504 crore and four per cent rise in renewal premium to Rs 1,327 crore.

The company board has recommended a final dividend of Rs 104 crore, at a rate of dividend of 13 per cent.

Ageas Federal Life saw a change in ownership pattern last year. One of the promoters, Ageas Insurance International NV increased its stake in the life insurer to 49 per cent by acquiring 23 per cent of stake from IDBI Bank.

Federal Bank holds a stake of 26 per cent in the company while IDBI Bank's stake now stands at 25 per cent.
This is an opinion column.

It didnt have to happen, either.

It was yet another curious search. To many, curiously clandestine, too.

Yet it didnt have to happen. Not this way.

At a special call meeting late Wednesday afternoon, the Hoover City Schools Board, which summarilyand surprisinglyrejected five finalists earlier this month, named retired educator Dee Fowler as the next Hoover City Schools Superintendent, pending the negotiation of a three-year contract.

Fowler, a former superintendent at Madison City Schools, did not apply for the opening and was never publicly interviewed.

Instead, he met with no more than two board members at a time, confirmed school board President Deanna Bamman, which avoids scrutiny under the Alabama Open Meetings Act regulating public boards, agencies, commissions, and other governmental bodies. Any meeting attended by a quorum of the body, according to the law, is required to be open to the public.

For the five-member board, a quorum is three members.

After the special called meeting, which lastedPledge of Allegiance, a moment of silence, and everything elseall of seven minutes, Bamman attributed the lack of a public interview thusly: Just timing, she said.

There were no secrets, she added. We went through a full process. Unfortunately, when we listened to our community stakeholders and what they were looking for we didnt find everything in any [of the finalists]. We found a lot of great things in all the candidates, just not one who had everything.

At the time of the purge, Bamman claimed none of the finalists was a perfect fit for Hoover, a term that elicited an understandable side-eye among some residents.

In Hoover, were a family, Bamman. We want to make sure were listening to all of our community stakeholders and community leaders and one thing we kept coming back to was experience.

Family can be messy, of course. And right now, just days after the city council stirred a tempest by failing to follow the traditional process of interviewing all applicants for a vacant school board position, including all three African American candidatesHoovers family is precariously frayed in a vital area: Educating its children.

The school board voted 4-1 to hire Fowler; member Kermit Kendrick was the lone dissenter.

Its been a hard process for everyone, he said before the vote. But I cant support a process of potentially hiring someone without the candidate interviewing or applying for the job.

As word wafted through Hoover earlier this week that the board was naming a superintendent without further public interviews, Hoover Ahead, an advocacy group of residents committed to promoting equity and inclusion throughout our city, sent a letter to the board to express our disappointment with the process by which you have conducted the search

Hoover is still beneath the cloud of a federally mandated desegregation decree, under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Justice, after too many years, lets just say, curious behavior in a city where African Americans comprise 18% of the population and one in four students is Black.

In an email Wednesday to U.S. Northern District Judge Madeline Haikala, who is overseeing the case and agreement, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice, Judge U.W. Clemon and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the group, in part, stated: We would like all legal counsel involved to understand our continually expressed displeasure with these decisions across multiple levels of leaders. The decisions that have been made take our district and community backward toward inequity, distrust, and lack of representation.

I have some concerns about the process, Judge Clemon told me before the meeting. There is a provision in the existing court decree providing for no discrimination in filling administrative and supervisory positions. I have to be concerned if that aspect has been complied with if there is evidence Black applicants are not properly considered.

In total fairness to the congenial Fowler, he is energized by the new opportunity. He was approached this month by a Hoover City Schools attorney. Just timing.

Fowler left Madison in November 2016 to join the office of the State Superintendent of Education in Montgomery as Deputy State Superintendent and Chief of Staff. A little more than a year later, in December 2017, he announced his retirement.

During the last year, however, he served as interim superintendent at Morgan County Schools and consulted with other districts. Those experiences reignited his desire to return to public education.

I started thinking, I got a little bit more in the tank, he said following the vote. This is where I need to be. I enjoy being with children and enjoy being with educators.

Fowler replaces Dr. Kathy Murphy, who resigned last October to become president of Gadsden Community College. Murphy assumed the top job in Hoover in 2015 after serving as superintendent of Monroe County Schools.

A voice for whats right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roys column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj
Some of the donated goods handed to the families affected by the fire tragedy. Ms Kanegai is seen at right talking to members of the family.
State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc sending a message of peace and cooperation to the world

State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc said that Vietnam was honoured to assume the presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the second time.

With the aspiration to become a peaceful and prosperous nation, a reliable partner, and a responsible member of the international community, Vietnam remains steadfast in its foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, diversification, and multilateralisation of relations, promoting international integration and actively contributing to the efforts of the UN and the UNSC, he stated at last weeks high-level open debate of the council on cooperation between the UN and regional organisations in enhancing confidence-building and dialogue in conflict prevention and resolution.

Faithful to our motto of partnership for sustainable peace, Vietnam will spare no effort to strengthen the cooperation between the UN and regional organisations, including ASEAN, and elevate such ties, for peace, security, and development around the world, the president stressed.

While peace, cooperation, and development continue as the prevailing trend and fervent aspirations of all countries and peoples, the world is riddled with challenges. In the past five years, conflicts have taken away half a million lives across the globe. In 2020 alone, the world recorded 20 million refugees, over 50 million people displaced due to conflicts, and around 170 million in need of humanitarian assistance. These are the people who are left behind, and call upon the UNSC to take action.

Against other major challenges such as COVID-19, natural disasters, severe climate change, border and territorial disputes and conflicts, and geo-strategic competition, increased international unity is more crucial than ever.

Yet, State President Phuc said, the paradox at present lies in our waning trust in one another and in multilateral institutions. The strengthening of unity is of great necessity, starting with the cooperation between the UN and the UNSC with regional organisations in our joint efforts to prevent and resolve conflicts through dialogue and confidence-building.

Vietnam has underscored three proposals. Firstly, the interactions and complementarities between the UN and regional organisations are inherent. They offer a two-way linkage to share knowledge and coordinate joint endeavours. The UN should take the lead in increasing cooperation activities and exchanges of experience and best practices in confidence-building and dialogue to prevent conflicts.

On the other hand, regional organisations, with their unique strengths in practical experience, resources, and diverse demands, should bolster cooperation with the UN, engage in dialogues, and share experience at various forums to enhance capacity in preventing and resolving conflicts.

Secondly, it is necessary to further promote the role of multilateralism and uphold the UN Charter and international law, for this is the most concrete and solid foundation to build trust and promote dialogue.

Moreover, early conflict prevention requires inclusive and comprehensive solutions to address the root causes of conflicts, such as poverty, hunger, inequality, and violence. The international community should strive to fulfill the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and other global security and development strategies and initiatives led by the UN, paying greater attention and giving adequate assistance to developing countries who face serious resources constraints.

On their part, regional organisations need to have comprehensive agendas, and integrate the UNs development frameworks and initiatives into their national and regional development plans. They should also strive to narrow political, economic and cultural gaps amongst themselves. In Southeast Asia, ASEAN is making every effort to fulfill the goal of building an ASEAN Community united in politics, diverse in culture, connected in economy, and with increased cooperation with external partners.

As an active ASEAN member, Vietnam has effectively placed COVID-19 under control, enjoyed a high economic growth rate, and actively engaged in international integration.

Thirdly, it is necessary to continue enhancing cooperation between the UNSC and regional organisations through dialogue and cooperation frameworks, and early warning mechanisms for volatilities.

The UNSC needs to continue acknowledging and respecting the perspectives, role, and contributions of regional organisations. It is also needed to mainstream conflict prevention and resolution strategies via dialogue and confidence-building in UN missions, and create favourable conditions for regional organisations to uphold their central role.

In response, regional organisations should further strengthen their proactive and leading role in preventing and resolving conflicts in accordance with international law and the UN Charter. This can only be achieved when each and every member state has strategic trust in each other and share a common political resolve.

Vietnam, which joined the UN in 1977, is rated by the UN and the international community to be a successful model in implementing the UN Millennium Development Goals, and a nation with success and seriousness in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which set out a 15-year plan to achieve the goals and the Paris Agreement on responding to climate change.

Vietnam has also actively boosted initiatives on reforming the organisation. In particular, it is one of the nations taking the lead in carrying out the UN initiative of Delivering as One in order to achieve better operational effectiveness of the UN on a national level.
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Denton police expecting more outings  and DWIs  this summer

Jeff Woo/DRC Motorists drive around the Courthouse on the Square on Wednesday. As the pandemic appears to be winding down, the Denton Police Department is expecting a surge in outings this summer  and with that, more intoxicated drivers.

As we start to see a light at the end of the pandemic, the Denton Police Department is expecting a surge in outings this summer  and with that, more intoxicated drivers.

The Police Department made fewer driving while intoxicated arrests in 2020  a year heavily impacted by a pandemic  compared with 2019. In April 2020 alone, the month the U.S. saw big changes due to the pandemic, Denton saw a drop in DWI arrests by about 42% from April 2019.

Asked whether the drop was surprising, Sgt. Daryn Briggs, one of two traffic sergeants for Denton police, said it was, in one way.

On the yes side of [being surprised], it really showed how serious I think the general public took the lockdowns, and we saw, just on the night shift on the highway, there would be stretches of 10 to 15 minutes where you wouldnt see a vehicle moving. Thats just so abnormal, even at night, he said. Its a freeway. On the no side, we still had 37 DWIs. People were still drinking and getting behind the wheel. They were just drinking at different locations than they were prior.

There were 711 DWI arrests in 2019 compared with 637 in 2020. Arrests in April, June and August of 2020 tracked significantly lower than the previous year. Briggs said by September, Denton was back to what he considered average numbers. He said they knew the numbers would rise again eventually.

Driving while intoxicated is always a risk. Briggs said miraculously, there werent any fatal crashes involving an intoxicated driver in Denton last year.

Now that summer is upon us and COVID-19 vaccines are rolling out quickly, Briggs said the traffic enforcement division is anticipating this summer will be busier than 2019.

[The pandemic] is not over with, but were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and people are coming back to normal routines, Briggs said. Bars are back to 100%. We have kind of a feeling the pendulum is going to swing in excess the other way. We could have a very busy summer.

Despite the Police Departments anticipation of a busy summer, Harvest House general manager Alexander Moon said he doesnt want to look ahead too far.

Last year, I worked incredibly hard to book out Harvest House for the best shows, international and national, that I have ever done in my entire life, he said. And then having to cancel an entire years worth of music crushed me. I dont want to get ahead of myself.

Harvest House reopened its doors last year after being closed for 191 days, Moon said. He said the management applied for a restaurant permit, opened a cafe inside with Java Rocket and began selling merchandise and gift cards to expand their business.

Moon said theyve moved tables around to space out, and if there are two people sitting at an eight-person table, they consider that table to be full to comply with social distancing. The bar has been reopened for months now, and Moon said he still doesnt consider the amount of people coming in to be back at pre-pandemic levels.

A lot of it is us following CDC guidelines, Moon said, noting they havent hosted any big events like they used to. We just dont feel comfortable doing that.

Christine Gossett, the executive director of the Denton Main Street Association, said foot traffic has increased as downtown businesses expanded their capacities again.

With businesses reopening, weve seen more foot traffic downtown of people visiting and going out to eat and shopping, she said. Thats been increasing as we see more people are getting out and about.  We just expect as people get vaccinated, theyll get more comfortable being out in groups.

Gossett said theyre not anticipating a return of pre-COVID crowds for a while, though.

The surge in outings could even start at the end of this week since some university students will be graduating and celebrating the end of their college days, Briggs said.

The University of North Texas has commencement ceremonies Friday and Saturday, while Texas Womans Universitys ceremonies arent until May 7-8 at Texas Motor Speedway.

Briggs said the Police Department will have additional officers around strictly looking for impaired drivers.

As far as the pendulum effect, its human nature, he said. So many people missed out on so many things last year. Were just anticipating itll go back the other way this summer as long as theres not another wave [of COVID-19 cases] and we continue to make progress.
(Corrects Nkengasong's name in paragraph 2, 4)

NAIROBI (Reuters) -The raging state of the COVID-19 pandemic is India is a wake-up call for Africa that its governments and citizens must not let their guards down, the African Union's disease control agency warned on Thursday.

African nations generally do not have sufficient numbers of health care workers, hospital beds, oxygen supplies, and the continent of 1.3 billion would be even more overwhelmed than India if cases surged in a similar way, said John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We are watching with total disbelief...What is happening in India cannot be ignored by our continent," he told reporters.

Nkengasong urged Africans to wear masks and avoid large gatherings, warning: "We cannot and should not find ourselves in (India's) scenario because of the very fragile nature of our health systems."

The AU will convene a meeting with all African ministers of health on May 8, Nkengasong said, to "put everybody on alert".

India, with 1.35 billion people, has a similar population size to the African continent, yet Africa has even weaker health systems, and unlike India does not manufacture significant quantities of drugs or vaccines, he added.

Heeding public health guidance is critical in Africa at the moment because the continent's rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is hindered by the crisis in India, Nkengasong said.

The bulk of the vaccines supplied so far to Africa via the global vaccine-sharing facility COVAX have been AstraZeneca shots manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. India suspended its exports of the shot in March to cope with rising domestic demand.

It remains unclear when exports will resume, Nkengasong said on Thursday, warning the situation in India could impact the predictability of Africa's vaccine rollout "for the weeks and perhaps months to come".

Africa could benefit from additional supplies if two Chinese-made vaccines secure approval from the World Health Organisation next week, a WHO Africa official said.

Story continues

"If we have more vaccines that have been approved for WHO pre-qualification, we know that more of these candidates can enter into our continent without any further issues," Phionah Atuhebwe told an online weekly briefing.

Africa recorded nearly 76,000 new COVID-19 infections from April 19-25, a 8% decline from the previous week, according to Africa CDC data.

India reported more than 379,000 new COVID-19 cases and 3,645 new deaths on Thursday alone. It was the highest number of deaths reported in a single day in the world's second most populous country since the start of the pandemic.

(Reporting by Maggie Fick with additional reporting by Duncan Miriri Editing by Mark Heinrich)
It's not a celebrity, but Taco Bell has enlisted something equally as recognizable for its first-ever global ad campaign: the moon.

On May 4, the moon will closely resemble a taco during its waning crescent phase, so Taco Bell is calling it the "Taco Moon." To celebrate, it's planning to hand out for free the most tacos it ever has gifted on a single day and kick off a new ad campaign promoting its global expansion.

On that day, fans in the United States can get a free Crunchy Taco between 8 pm and 11:59 pm local time if they order in-store  or they can get a free taco at any time May 4 if they order on the Taco Bell app. Other countries will celebrate the Taco Moon, too: Restaurants in United Kingdom, India, Australia and other countries will be giving away a Crunchy Taco in addition to a specialized local offer.

A new digitally focused ad campaign is also launching called "I See a Taco," which marks the first time Taco Bell restaurants across 32 countries will participate in an unified marketing campaign. It has around 600 international locations in addition to the nearly 7,000 currently open in the United States.

"We've hit the inflection point around the world where suddenly we have big scale," said Nikki Lawson, Taco Bell's chief brand officer, in an interview. "We wanted a big experience together, so that had the team thinking what is global and affects everyone, but what also can be local."

That's where the moon comes in: Everyone can see it. The goal is to get the "whole world craving tacos because it looks just like a Taco Bell taco," Lawson said. She added that the brand is "ready for takeoff" globally and hopes the ad creates "rituals" of people coming to Taco Bell when they crave tacos.

Among other iterations, the campaign will compare London's famous Underground signage to a taco and will feature a promotion with the London Eye observation wheel. In India, Bollywood stars will be involved, and in Guatemala, so-called "taconautas" are roaming the streets to raise awareness.

Taco Bell is in the midst of an international expansion and it hopes the global icon can help grow its fan base. The chain, owned by Yum Brands, has plans for further international expansion.

"[Last year] was a difficult year for a lot of our markets," said Julie Felss Masino, president of Taco Bell's international unit, in an interview with CNN Business. "Taco Bell is a such distinctive brand that we're taking a moment to have the world's largest influencer be a billboard in the sky."

Masino declined to say how many new locations will open internationally this year, but said they will be a "big part" of the company's goal of having 10,000 global locations by the end of the decade.

The campaign will continue for several months and be "locally relevant and distinctive," Masino said. Taco Bell hopes that once you see a taco out there in the world, you can't unsee it, she said.
Boris Johnson is facing an investigation by a watchdog the Tories have been trying to axe, having long accused the organisation of being biased and unfairly targeting pro-Brexit campaigners.

The Electoral Commission's critics are now seeking to have it abolished and replaced after a series of scandals including its lengthy investigation of numerous Vote Leave officials.

The quango was especially criticised for its efforts to prosecute pro-Leave activists Alan Halsall and Darren Grimes, which ended last year in police dropping its investigations following discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service.

The case of Mr Grimes, founder of pro-Brexit campaign group BeLeave, who was initially fined 20,000 for allegedly making false declarations over donations, sparked particular anger and resulted in him winning an appeal against the penalty.

The campaigner described the incident as incorrectly ticking a box on a complicated application form.

It was also left red-faced when it referred the case of Arron Banks, the Leave.EU co-founder, to the National Crime Agency, only for detectives to find 'no evidence' of criminal offences, including allegations he faced that 8m of loans came from Russia.

The Commission has also been the subject of further controversy in recent years after it emerged one of the senior members of its executive team, Head of Regulation Louise Edwards, posted a series of anti-Tory messages on Facebook prior to joining the watchdog.

The watchdog announced yesterday it was launching a probe into the funding of his Downing Street flat refurbishment amid mounting pressure from the Prime Minister's opponents.

But many within the Tory party have long claimed the Commission is not fit for purpose.

House of Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg said as recently as last month that the watchdog's operations were 'in serious need of reform... particularly regarding its accountability to the House and how it may bring prosecutions'.

Prior to that, the party's co-chairman, Amanda Milling, argued against the Commission's push for powers to prosecute, writing in the Telegraph: 'After their botched handling of recent cases it cannot be allowed to mark its own homework.'

And senior MP Peter Bone launched a scathing attack on the quango in the House of Commons last year, describing it as 'politically corrupt, totally biased and morally bankrupt'.

Some even suggest Commission bosses have acknowledged the damage its reputation had taken in recent years, after launching an appeal for a new chairman, whose focus will be 'building and maintaining trust'.

The timing of yesterday's announcement of the investigation, just an hour before Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer were to lock horns at Prime Minister's Questions, also raised eyebrows.

Boris Johnson is facing an investigation by a watchdog that has been branded 'politically corrupt, totally biased and morally bankrupt' after it was accused of unfairly targeting pro-Brexit campaigners

The Electoral Commission is headed by an executive team including chief executive Bob Posner (left) and Head of Regulation Louise Edwards (right)

The barrister and former local government boss at the head of the watchdog A barrister and former local government boss, Bob Posner has been the chief executive of the Electoral Commission since April 2019. Before that he served as the watchdog's Director of Political Finance & Regulation and Legal Counsel and has also worked as returning officer at a number of elections. He first joined the Commission in 2007, boasting extensive public sector experience in electoral law and practice, regulatory compliance and governance. Chief Executive Bob Posner His role at the Commission is described as 'putting into practice strategies agreed with our Commission Board'. Mr Posner has previously claimed that Britain's electoral system is 'fraying at the edges' and causing concern for voters. Advertisement

The Head of Regulation who posted anti-Tory messages on Facebook Louise Edwards was appointed as the Commission's Head of Regulation in 2015, having previously worked for the likes of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, Ofgem and the Home Office. The watchdog website says she is responsible for regulatory work, which includes 'funding and spending at elections and referendums, registering political parties and our enforcement work'. Head of Regulation Louise Edwards Following the Commission's probe into Tory spending returns in 2014 and 2015, there were accusations of a 'politically-motivated witch-hunt', after the discovery of Miss Edwards' old Facebook posts, in which she said she did 'not want to live under a Tory government'. After David Cameron was elected PM in May 2010, she wrote: 'Just can't understand what people were thinking  do they not remember the Tories before?' She also posted about how she could 'not believe' she lived 'under a Tory PM again! What is wrong with people? Grrr! Words have failed me.' She added: 'Louise Edwards doesn't want to live under a Tory government'. Advertisement

In arguably the Commission's most notorious case, Mr Grimes was fined in 2018 after being accused of breaching spending rules during the EU referendum campaign two years prior.

But the campaigner insisted he was 'completely innocent' of making false declarations in relation to a 680,000 donation to his youth-focused BeLeave group from the main Vote Leave campaign.

The Electoral Commission - which regulates political parties, members and campaigners - found that BeLeave 'spent more than 675,000 with (Canadian data firm) Aggregate IQ under a common plan with Vote Leave', which should have been declared by the latter but was not.

This spending took Vote Leave over its 7 million legal spending limit by almost 500,000.

Mr Grimes, a former fashion student originally from County Durham, raised 93,956 via an online crowdfunding campaign to appeal against the verdict of the commission at the Mayor's and City of London Court in Central London.

The commission had misinterpreted the law and set a key legal test 'too high' on whether BeLeave had been correctly registered on official forms, the court heard.

Mr Grimes had said that he had intended to register the organisation BeLeave and not himself as an individual on the forms.

His lawyers said he had filled out the complex and difficult-to-understand forms to the best of his ability.

Even if the group BeLeave did not have a formal constitution by January 2016, it was clear it was made up of like-minded people who had an agreement to campaign over the Brexit issue in a certain way, according to Judge Marc Dight.

The judge said Mr Grimes had tried to meet his obligations to the commission in filling out the forms, and that his actions were not dishonest or lacking transparency.

Matthew Elliott, who was Vote Leave's chief executive, said a movie should be made about Mr Grimes' battle with the Commission.

Even anti-Brexit campaigner and Labour peer Lord Adonis was critical, admitting: 'It sounds to me as if the Electoral Commission has not been doing its job properly.

'On the face of it, it seems to have been extremely incompetent.'

Senior Tory Peter Bone raised the issue in the Commons, telling fellow MPs: 'The arrogant, incompetent and vindictive Electoral Commission suffered its final humiliation.

'For four long years it has investigated and hounded four people from four different Leave organisations making their lives and their family's lives hell.

'The police said they were totally innocent and had done nothing wrong.'

Addressing the Prime Minister, he asked: 'For the sake of democracy, will you ensure that politically corrupt, totally biased and morally bankrupt quango is abolished?'

Mr Johnson said in response he 'heard' Mr Bone's concerns, adding that he hoped those who were wrongly accused will receive 'attention to their genuine innocence'.

Meanwhile, efforts to bring down Arron Banks, who funded Leave.EU during the 2016 referendum, also failed after a referral to the National Crime Agency resulted in detectives finding 'no evidence' of criminal offences.

It was alleged the millionaire insurance broker may have hidden the 'true source' of 8million in loans linked to his campaign group.

Mr Banks, nicknamed the 'Bad boy of Brexit', was dogged by claims he was backed by the Kremlin to help bring about the UK's divorce from the EU - but he repeatedly branded it 'b*****s'.

The claims were then put to bed after the NCA confirmed it did not receive 'any evidence to suggest that Mr Banks and his companies received funding from any third party to fund the loans, or that he acted as an agent on behalf of a third party.'

The Commission's executive team is currently made up of five members: Chief Executive, Bob Posner; Director of Electoral Administration and Guidance, Ailsa Irvine; Director of Regulation, Louise Edwards; Director of Communications, Policy and Research, Craig Westwood; and Director of Finance and Corporate Services, Kieran Rix.

It is not known who exactly at the organisation, whose individual commissioners are appointed following approval from both MPs and the Queen, has authorised the probe into how the refurbished flat was funded.

Of the seven major investigations listed on the Commission's website, four are in reference to specifically pro-Brexit organisations and individuals, while another refers to the Conservatives.

The Liberal Democrats' election spending in 2015 and a probe into campaign spending by Momentum, the far-left Labour group, two years later, make up the others.

The watchdog has sweeping police-style powers to investigate potential offences, including the power to demand documents including bank statements and WhatsApp messages.

It also has the power to require anyone to attend a 'statutory interview'. Interviews are taped and it is a criminal offence to knowingly provide false information.

The Commission announced yesterday it was launching a probe into the funding of his Downing Street flat refurbishment

But senior Tories have, for years, insisted that the Commission should not be given powers to prosecute.

Amanda Milling, co-chairman of the party, wrote in the Telegraph last year: 'Despite having an unclear rulebook the Commission is only too willing to push for the prosecution of political and party activists. And as we have seen in recent years this has led to lengthy and often unnecessary investigations.

'Despite this the Commission still wants powers to prosecute. After their botched handling of recent cases it cannot be allowed to mark its own homework. This must remain a matter for the police and the independent Crown Prosecution Service, overseen by the courts.

'This attempt to give itself more powers, without recourse to the Government or Parliament, is exactly why there are serious concerns about the Electoral Commission's lack of accountability, its strategy and its leadership.'

The Commission's probe into Tory spending returns in 2014 and 2015 were also accused of being a 'politically-motivated witch-hunt' after the discovery of Facebook postings by Louise Edwards, its head of regulation, in which she said she did 'not want to live under a Tory government'.

In 2017, prosecutors told up to 30 Conservative candidates and election agents that they would not face criminal action for failing to properly declare their use of so-called battle buses in 2015.

The allegations centred on claims that expenses relating to busloads of Tory activists sent to key seats were reported as part of national party costs rather than falling within the lower spending limits for the constituencies visited.

But the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that even though some spending returns may have been inaccurate, there was insufficient evidence to prove they were knowingly dishonest.

The Commission was especially criticised for its efforts to prosecute pro-Leave activist Darren Grimes, which ended last year in police dropping its investigation following discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service

Meanwhile, the National Crime Agency found 'no evidence' of criminal offences against Leave.EU boss Arron Banks

How the watchdog's commissioners work The watchdog's commission board is made up of its executive team as well as a chairman and a group of nine commissioners who are ultimately appointed by MPs and the Queen. Potential commissioners are nominated by the leaders of political parties and scrutinised by an internal panel known as the Speaker's Committee. Selections are then approved by the House of Commons by means of an Address to the Queen, requesting their appointment. Those nominated by the three largest parties in Parliament - currently the Conservatives, Labour and the SNP - serve terms of four years, while the commissioner nominated by a smaller party serves for a two-year term. The watchdog website describes its commissioners' roles as follows: Set our overall strategic direction, and ensure we deliver our strategic goals

Set our regulatory priorities, and monitor our regulatory activity

Make regulatory or other statutory decisions, if required

Ensure we use public funds efficiently and effectively, and operate within our limits and to high standards of governance Advertisement

The announcement triggered an outpouring of anger from Tories who had been under suspicion.

There was particular fury over the role of Miss Edwards, with the Tories highlighting some of her posts on Facebook, written before she joined the commission.

After David Cameron was elected PM in May 2010, she wrote: 'Just can't understand what people were thinking  do they not remember the Tories before?'

She also posted about how she could 'not believe' she lived 'under a Tory PM again! What is wrong with people? Grrr! Words have failed me.'

She added: 'Louise Edwards doesn't want to live under a Tory government'.

Mr Johnson yesterday insisted he has not broken any laws as news of the Commission's investigation broke.

The watchdog said there are 'reasonable grounds' to suspect an offence may have occurred, dramatically deepening the PM's troubles over the renovations.

Downing Street said Mr Johnson would be 'happy' to assist the commission with its inquiries into who initially paid for the work carried out in his No 11 residence.

Questions have been mounting since former aide Dominic Cummings accused Mr Johnson of wanting donors to 'secretly pay' for the renovations to the apartment in a 'possibly illegal' move.

Shortly after the commission's announcement, Mr Johnson told Prime Minister's Questions he 'personally' paid for the renovations, but refused to answer whether he received an initial loan from the Tory party.

Challenged by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer over the 'incredibly serious' development, Mr Johnson told MPs that 'any further declaration that I have to make, if any' will be advised by his newly appointed independent adviser on ministers' interests, Lord Geidt.

Sir Keir pressed the Prime Minister on whether he believes any 'rules or laws have been broken' over the refurbishment of the flat.

'No, I don't,' Mr Johnson replied, adding that he has 'met the requirements that I have been obliged to meet in full'.

Everything you need to know about the Electoral Commission's inquiry into funding of Boris Johnson flat By Jason Groves, Political Editor for the Daily Mail What will the inquiry look at? The Commission said it had 'reasonable grounds to suspect an offence or offences may have occurred' in the funding of renovations at the flat shared by the PM and Carrie Symonds above 11 Downing Street. It has the power to investigate potential breaches of the Political Parties and Elections and Referendums Act (2000) by both parties and individual MPs, including ministers. But the Commission later clarified the party is the 'subject of the investigation' initially. It means investigators are likely to look at whether donor Lord Brownlow gave 58,000 to the party to recompense it for money it had loaned the PM. But a source said the investigation will go 'wherever the evidence leads' and the inquiry could eventually be expanded to cover questions around the declarations made by the PM. What are the possible sanctions? Investigators are looking at whether electoral law on donations has been followed at every stage. It will look at the full history of how the huge cost overrun on the refurbishment was funded. Mr Johnson says he has now paid the 58,000 cost himself, but evidence seen by the Mail suggests it was originally paid in July by the party. A leaked email suggests Lord Brownlow then repaid the party in October. The investigation is likely to focus on whether the payment to the Conservatives was properly declared by the party. It will also examine whether there were other, as yet unknown, donations and if proper checks were made to ensure they came from permissible donors. Failure to declare donations within a month is an offence under the Political Parties and Elections and Referendums Act (2000). Possible sanctions include fines of up to 20,000. What powers does the Commission have? It has sweeping police-style powers to investigate potential offences. These include the power to demand documents including bank statements and WhatsApp messages. It also has the power to require anyone to attend a 'statutory interview'. Interviews are taped and it is a criminal offence to knowingly provide false information. No10 said Mr Johnson would co-operate with the inquiry, opening up the prospect he could be the first serving prime minister interviewed under caution in relation to alleged law breaking. Could the police get involved? The Electoral Commission has primary responsibility for policing electoral law. Sources said police were likely to get involved only if certain evidence emerges, such as the destruction or forgery of documents or a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The watchdog has the power to refer matters to the police if it uncovers evidence of offences that it does not have the power to deal with itself. Could the PM face other investigations? Yes. The financing of the PM's flat makeover is now the subject of an internal investigation by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and a separate inquiry by his new adviser on ministerial standards, Lord Geidt, as well the probe by the Electoral Commission. It could also be examined by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone, who has the power to issue sanctions against the PM if he is found to have failed to declare relevant donations in the register of MPs' interests. Mr Johnson has been warned he could face enhanced sanctions after being reprimanded for ten previous failures to record financial interests on time. These could include fines or even a temporary suspension from Parliament. What does it mean for Government? Ministers acknowledge it would be deeply damaging if the party is found guilty of breaking the law in order to fund renovations of the PM's private flat. But any sanction is likely to be a fine, allowing the Tories to present it as a 'technical' breach of the law. However, there are concerns the investigation could lead to a wider probe that will eventually involve the PM personally. 'The big problem with an independent investigation is that you just do not know where it will end up,' one senior Tory said. There are also concerns that, with the probe likely to last for months, it will prove impossible to shake off the claims of government sleaze on issues ranging from lobbying to procurement deals. Advertisement
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 07:03:32|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Wednesday called for efforts to promote the political settlement of the Syria crisis and alleviate the suffering of Syrian people.

"The United Nations should continue its good offices and adhere to the Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political process. The international community should step up its efforts to seek a political solution and push for an early end to the Syria crisis," said Geng Shuang, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.

China calls on all parties in Syria to closely engage and consult UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen and reach consensus on the arrangements for the sixth session of the Constitutional Committee as soon as possible. The committee, in its work, should remain independent and free from outside interference, he told the Security Council.

China has noted Syria's announcement that it will hold general elections next month. China calls on the international community to respect the sovereignty of Syria and the choice of its people, he said. "The future and destiny of Syria must be determined by the Syrian people themselves."

Terminating external occupation and eliminating terrorist forces are necessary security conditions for a political solution to the Syrian problem. Many Security Council members are concerned about terrorist activities within Syria and the risk of their spillover. The international community should work together in accordance with international law and Security Council resolutions to combat terrorist forces in Syria, said Geng.

The international community should enhance the relevance of humanitarian relief in Syria and effectively alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people. UN agencies need to scale up food aid and help Syria maintain its agricultural infrastructure such as water and power supplies, he said. Enditem
Labor learnt a valuable lesson at the last federal election; attacking Scott Morrisons religion doesnt work. In fact, it has the opposite effect.

During the 2019 campaign, the opposition thought it had hit the jackpot when Morrison, eyes closed and hands raised, allowed the media into his Pentecostal Church mid-worship. It was an unusual sight to many lapsed Christians and atheists, who were probably more comfortable with dull hymns and tedious sermons.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny sing during an Easter Sunday service at his Horizon Church in Sydney during the 2019 election campaign. Credit:AAP

Labor couldnt believe its luck. As one senior member of Shortens campaign team told me: We were stunned and initially thought it would play badly. There was a view that Australians would feel uncomfortable with such an overt display of faith which is unusual in Australian politics.

Labor didnt directly attack Morrison that weekend but many of the partys left-leaning supporters did. On social media, progressive trolls likened his hand-waving and worshipping to a Hitler salute. Weeks later, Shorten couldnt resist a direct attack at Morrison during a debate about hate speech and religious expression triggered by a tweet by Wallabies star Israel Folau.
A few days after employees at Midwest Warehouse and Distribution System Inc. gathered in its Naperville, Ill., facility breakroom for a luncheon, some workers experienced symptoms consistent with coronavirus exposure. Employees began reporting to the company that they had tested positive for the coronavirus on Oct. 27, 2020.

A U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation alleges the company failed to take immediate steps to identify, inform, isolate and quarantine all potentially exposed employees.

By Nov. 9, 2020, 23 employees tested positive for the coronavirus, including one worker who died from complications on Nov. 4, 2020.

OSHAs inspection found the company failed to follow its own internally developed controls for potential coronavirus exposure or take immediate steps to contain the outbreak. On Nov. 4, 2020, following discussions with the DuPage County Health Department, the facility closed.

The agency has proposed a penalty of $12,288 for one serious violation of OSHAs general duty clause.

Based in Woodridge, Midwest Warehouse and Distribution System is a full-service logistics company servicing grocery, liquor and beverage, electronics, automotive and other industries. The company operates 15 warehouses nationwide.

The company has 15 business days from receipt of its citations and penalties to comply, request an informal conference with OSHAs area director, or contest the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

Source: OSHA

Topics Illinois
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 08:38:13|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- China plans to launch the core module of its space station at around 11:00 a.m. Thursday, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, is filled with propellant and ready for launch, said the CMSA. Enditem
~ Dr. Luc Mercelina remains out, now that De Weever accepts MPs position. ~

PHILIPSBURG: --- Minister of TEATT Ludmilla de Weever who spent just over a year in the executive branch of government has decided to tender her resignation and to now occupy the vacant seat in parliament in the United Peoples Party Faction (UPP). De Weever became eligible to become a member of parliament after the Minister of VSA Omar Ottley resign to take up the ministerial post in the executive branch. De Weever who ran as the number 6th candidate on the UPP slate in January 2020, obtained 266 votes. It is expected that De Weever will be sworn in on Friday, May 7th. 2021.

SMN News has learned from reliable sources that the United Peoples Party is considering two other persons to occupy the vacant seat in the executive branch. One of those persons ran on the UPP slate during the January 2020 snap parliamentary elections. So far, no definite decisions have been taken by the United Peoples Party board and leader Rolando Brison as to the name of the candidate minister they will submit for screening.

In an invited comment party leader and chairman of parliament, Rolando Brison said the Minister of TEATT made a conscious decision to vacate the seat in the executive branch and to take up the seat in parliament.

The United Peoples party wishes to welcome Ludmila de Weever as the next Member of Parliament to fill the open seat left by former MP Ottley who became Minister of VSA. De Weever was informed of this on April 21st, 2021 by the Central Voting Bureau. Minister de Weever informed the party as well as the main voting bureau of her intention to move to Parliament on Wednesday.

In accordance with article 34 paragraph 4 of the Constitution, Minister de Weever will be able to hold both positions temporarily and plans to use that time to create a smooth transition for her successor while performing her duties as a new Member of Parliament.

The leader of the UP Party congratulated her for the work done and welcomed her nomination as MP Minister de Weever has represented us proudly, and Im sure she will bring the same energy and enthusiasm she exhibited throughout her tenure to the floor of Parliament.

The party will have begun the process of selecting her next successor and, as with previous Ministerial appointments, will inform the public once the screening process has been completed.








Haiti - News : Zapping...





Progress of the electoral process

Yesterday Wednesday, the nation was presented with a report on the progress of the electoral process :

- 4.5 million are registered for the referendum;

- an additional $9.2 million disbursed for preparations for the September 2021 elections;

-non-sensitive materials arrive mid May 2021.



2 artificial respirators have arrived

The Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) has received from the Mexican Government, two artificial respirators as part of the fight against COVID-19 in Haiti. These two artificial respirators are part of a donation of four artificial respirators, the other two of which will arrive during the month of May. This donation is part of a program of the Mexican government for the countries of the Caribbean, entitled "Todos juntos contra la COVID-19" "All together against COVID-19".



32 years for the Pyepoudre Cultural Center

Tuesday April 27, Pradel Henriquez, the Minister of Culture paid a courtesy visit to the Pyepoudre Cultural Center which celebrated its 32 years of creation. Minister Henriquez has made no secret of his satisfaction with the career of this institution, which he considers to be one of the "matrices" of cultural institutions in the country.



Meeting with the National Council of Legal Assistance (CNAL)

Tuesday, following the decree appointing its members and as a prelude to their installation, as part of the Governments efforts to facilitate access to justice. Rockefeller Vincent, the Minister of Justice had a working meeting with his colleagues from the National Council for Legal Assistance (CNAL). The installation of CNAL members soon is also part of the fight against "prolonged" pre-trial detention, for the benefit of litigants.



Training on money laundering

This Thursday, April 29, 2021, the Ministry of Justice is organizing a training workshop at the School of Magistrates for prosecutors on the issues and operating methods of money laundering. Friday, April 30, it will be a question of discussing the draft Constitution with prosecutors, clerks and bailiffs.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Everton eye 'out of favour' Juventus defender

| Thursday, 29 April 2021



Demiral is considered by Andre Pirlo to be fourth-choice centre-half at Juve behind the likes of Leonard Bonucci and Mathijs de Ligt and the manager is apparently looking to shake his squad up after a disappointing 2020-21 season.

MailSport are one of the outlets reporting that, if the Blues come in with a bid of between 22m and 27m, they could secure Demiral who is 23.

Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer

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Among the many changes to emphasise Australian indigenous heritage, students who previously studied mainly European and north African ancient history will now study Australias ancient history as a core subject, alongside one other overseas civilisation. Year 4 students will study the significance of trade to First Nations Australians, rather than a world navigator, while year 10 students will study how popular culture encouraged First Nations Australians to become provocative  citing Bangarra Dance Theatre as an example  rather than post-World War II popular culture. Year 9 student Dujuan Hoosan, the subject of documentary film In My Blood It Runs, which told his story of disengagement from Australias education system, said the new content couldnt come soon enough. I hope they make [it] quick while Im still at school, he said.

I feel real happy about those changes because that would mean we are actually telling the truth ... I think this will change peoples lives  all kids lives. So they wont have to grow up thinking that Aboriginal people just gave up this country, he said.

Co-ordinator of the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition, Darumbal woman Hayley McQuire, said young people had been calling for these changes. Its really important that all young Australians are grounded in the truth of our past, she said. This is actually about justice and healing, and how we want to move forward together as a country. There are already references to invasion in the NSW HSC Aboriginal Studies and history syllabus. NSW has its own curriculum, which is also being reviewed. NSW is ... working alongside ACARA to ensure that the Australian Curriculum Review process aligns with the work already under way in the NSW Curriculum Reform, a spokeswoman for the NSW Education Standards Authority said. Loading

Changes to maths prompted debate when the proposals were revealed on Thursday. They included moving times tables from year 3 to 4, linear equations from 7 to 8, and telling the time from 1 to 2. A proposal to emphasise mathematical problem-solving has raised concerns among some educators that the subject will be dumbed down, with opponents of the new approach warning that it is introducing vague, unteachable concepts. Maths was a priority after Australia tumbled further down international rankings in the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment scores. But the emphasis on problem-solving worried some teachers such as Greg Ashman, an advocate of direct teaching and a PhD candidate at the University of NSW. He said problem-solving was a vague, unteachable notion, as if there is a type of maths teaching that somehow does not involve solving problems, and said the curriculum was suggested a particular style of teaching known as inquiry, or student-led learning.

John Sweller, an emeritus professor at UNSW, agreed. As soon as you start putting inquiry learning into the curriculum, you are inevitably dumbing it down, he said. Kids will end up learning even less than they learn now. In that sense, its an astonishing document. However, leading maths groups such as the Australian Association of Mathematics, have argued that teaching content alone is no longer sufficient and problem-solving must be central to the new curriculum. ACARA chief executive David de Carvahlo said the changes aimed to ensure students knew the basics, but also deepen their understanding. Problem-solving is at the core of the Singapore mathematics curriculum, and it is no coincidence that they are among the top performers when it comes to mathematics performance, he said. Content across the curriculum has been reduced by about 20 per cent in a bid to declutter the curriculum. Mr de Carvalho said it had been given the Marie Kondo treatment  so that regardless of how much content is left in the curriculum, it is properly organised, logical in its presentation and sequence, coherent, clear and easily accessible.
The online Workshop on Data Analytics for manager levels in the East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, organized in close cooperation with WCO-Finland ESA Project II, was held from 21-22 April 2021, supported by CCF-Korea. Forty-two participants from 15 Customs Administrations in the ESA region attended the workshop and 2 additional participants from the Korea and Indonesia.

The WCO Director of Capacity Building Directorate, Dr. Taeil KANG welcomed and encouraged participants to promote and share information on how to unlock the potential of data to reinforce the role of Customs.

The data experts from the WCO introduced a comprehensive and holistic overview on Big Data Analytics and practical guiding principles in developing a Capacity Building Framework on this topic. The workshop also provided an opportunity for participants to strengthen the network of data analytics practitioners by sharing Koreas and Indonesias Big Data strategic plans and experiences and good practices of three ESA Members, namely South Africa, Mauritius and Lesotho.

The WCO also updated the participants with the latest developments regarding the BACUDA Project including: 1) the future plan for technical assistance, 2) online and offline training courses to build capabilities in data science including machine learning applications and programming skills, and 3) the recent research and development topics.

The participants' active participation and interactive discussions resulted in a successful workshop. The ESA region managers highly appreciated the activity and shared ideas on the next steps to further cooperate with the BACUDA Project to enhance capacity in Data Analytics nationally and regionally.

For more information, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org
After decades of failure to effectively combat sexual assault in the military, a growing bipartisan group of lawmakers is confident it can pass a sweeping new law that would overhaul prosecution efforts, taking commanders out of the process.

"Sexual assault in the military is an epidemic.  It's clear that this system is not working. The culture on [military] bases is not one of justice, but retaliation," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said Thursday at a press conference on Capitol Hill.

A bill introduced by Gillibrand would remove military commanders from the role of prosecuting sexual assault crimes, something she has long sought. The argument for the change is that commanders rarely have any legal background and have inherent biases when tasked with investigating and potentially prosecuting suspects who are their colleagues.

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The measure would still leave misdemeanors and military-specific crimes in the hands of commanders.

Gillibrand has the backing of a wide bipartisan coalition, including Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who could be key in passing the measure into law after years of stalled efforts. Lawmakers who previously were against the idea of taking commanders out of prosecution decisions have become increasingly fed up with the military's failure to curb the crisis and now believe Congress must step in.

"I have two daughters who are 13 and 10," Cruz said. "I don't know if they [will] choose to serve, but I damn sure want them protected from sexual assault if they do choose to serve. This is not taking the decision of prosecution out of the military. This is responding to the problem we've heard testimony on year after year  which is a commanding officer with divided loyalties, where the assailant and the victim -- the commanding officer is potentially conflicted in those loyalties."

Despite the military touting a "zero tolerance policy," sexual crimes remain rampant in the force and rarely end in conviction. A Defense Department study in 2020 found about 4% of sexual assault cases in the military end in conviction, mostly due to a lack of evidence.

The Defense Department found that there were 7,825 sexual assaults involving a service member in fiscal 2019, a 3% rise from the previous year. However, the number of unreported cases could be much greater.

"Every commander that has come before [Congress] has said they got this; there's no evidence they have this," Gillibrand said. "They're done so poorly on every objective measure."

The bill's introduction comes a week after a Pentagon panel recommended that decisions to prosecute troops for sex crimes be made by independent authorities, not the chain of command.

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.

Related: End Commanders' Power to Block Military Sex Cases, Pentagon Panel Says
A subject of trust A ghostwriter was key to charting a refugees journey. Aminata Conteh-Biger, Rising Heart It can be hard enough to tell your own story sometimes let alone to trust someone else with it. It took some time for Aminata Conteh-Biger, one of the first Sierra Leone refugees to be settled in Australia in 2000, to feel ready to publish a book about her experience being kidnapped, raped and imprisoned by rebel soldiers during a bloody civil war in the West African country. Conteh-Biger established the Aminata Maternal Foundation in 2014 to help women and children in her birth country and performed in the acclaimed theatre production The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe. She had been approached to write a book multiple times but wanted to wait until she became more of herself. When she felt ready, Conteh-Biger wrote a book proposal with her New York agent, Catherine Drayton at InkWell Management, and signed with publisher Pan Macmillan after an auction. The 40-year-old says one of the factors that drew her to Pan Macmillan was the freedom to select a ghostwriter, which is how she met journalist and author Juliet Rieden. It was very important for me to choose a ghostwriter who allowed me the freedom to express myself. It had to be true to experience. She was open and willing and she didnt want to polish any of the ways I expressed myself. A lot of the time people feel like they are talking to me when they read the book. That was what she intentionally did and that was a pure gift, Conteh-Biger says.

The pair spent hours talking (Conteh-Biger says they never once cancelled a scheduled meeting) and travelled together to Sierra Leone and London to interview family members. Conteh-Biger ended the experience with a book - and a lifelong friend. We are family now, she says. I have huge respect for how she respected my story and my voice. I knew she would fight for my voice to be heard. You want that person in your life forever. Laptop in the dark Ewa Ramsey, The Morbids They dont always admit it, but most writers care about the reviews of their novels. When Jessie Tus provocative review of The Morbids, published in this masthead, garnered attention it was an unexpected crash course in being caught in a social media storm for new novelist Ewa Ramsey. It was a strange time for Ramsey who suddenly felt how claustrophobic the Australian literary world can be. People are allowed to not like my book and it comes with the territory - at least people are talking about it, Ramsey, 41, says. So many books dont get reviewed and you always take the risk that people arent going to like your work. The social media attention around it was the hardest bit. It was the first time I felt really exposed and vulnerable.

It felt alive from the beginning. Her agent, Grace Heifetz at Left Bank Literary, told her the chaos would pass after a few days which proved prescient. Fear had held Ramsey back from writing a novel for many years until she decided to make a serious attempt, first writing short stories and joining a writing group. The Morbids, centreing around a young woman who is convinced she is going to die, emerged from a short story. The first draft was written in a matter of weeks, largely in the early morning, with Ramsey in bed using a laptop in the dark. This one just felt very alive to me from the beginning. The characters felt very real. It did just take on this life of its own. The would-be-author sent her manuscript out widely, hoping to get picked up from a publishers slush pile of unsolicited submissions. But it was Heifetz who signed her and brokered a deal with publisher Allen & Unwin where Ramsay ended up completing another 17 drafts of the novel. At every single stage I have always thought part of me thinks it is a giant prank and somebody is going to leap out and tell me no we are not going to publish it, Ramsey says. The typewriter man

Disappointing to miss out on a launch with free wine. Sam Coley, State Highway One Pretty drunk, is how Sam Coley would describe the writing process for his debut State Highway One. If the cheap sauvignon blanc helps the words come, its a typewriter that stops them from coming too fast. Coley uses a Remington 11, from 1963. He first bought a $1.50 typewriter when he was living in London and couldnt afford a computer. He used it to write his university assignments - and still uses it for first drafts before moving onto a computer for further revision. State Highway One, about siblings who embark on a road journey after their parents die, won Hachettes 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The prize included a 12-month mentorship with Hachettes then head of literary, Robert Watkins. Its any unpublished authors dream to have someone in the industry to send a manuscript to, who will pat you on the head and tell you youre doing a good job. You write in such a vacuum, having that confirmation, validation that youre on the right track and being able to check in with someone was very useful.

Coley, 35, dropped out of law school to finish the manuscript in seven months, writing four nights during the week and on the weekend. The pandemic proved challenging on two fronts - Coley works for a not-for-profit in the aged care sector so saw first-hand the havoc wreaked by coronavirus; and a publicity tour of New Zealand was cancelled, as was his book launch. I think because by the time it came out I had been writing for five years and its a long time to spend. Since youre not going to make any money out of it, thats the real fun part of it, drinking wine on our publishers expense account, he jokes. It was disappointing. It was difficult to launch a book online and then still be inside your own house. Writing at lunchtime Vivian Pham, The Coconut Children Who needs maths? Vivian Pham dumped the subject when she was in year 11 so she could have a free period twice a week to work on her novel. She wrote before and after school and lunch times were spent in the library so she could finish The Coconut Children, a coming-of-age novel set in western Sydney for which Pham, now 20, has just been named The Sydney Morning Herald and The Ages Best Young Australian Novelist of 2021.

I needed time to process the publication. When I was writing the first draft I was joyful, frenetic, anxious. I wanted to get as many words as I could on the page. Pham would write five versions of the same sentence before picking the best one. She wrote the first draft in a year, and spent the next two editing and re-writing. Its overwritten now, but before it was like a wilderness. I had to go in and tame certain parts of it, she says. A small quantity of the novel was first printed at the end of 2018 by creative writing centre The Story Factory before a copy ended up in the hands of Zeitgeist Agencys Benython Oldfield who took it to auction where it was snapped up by Penguin Random House. While the coronavirus derailed an itinerary of public events, Pham says the silver lining was that it allowed her time to process the publication. I didnt feel I was ready then. I had no experience going in public or doing public speaking. I was quite relieved when it was all cancelled. I think during last year I have mainly been doing online events and book clubs which feel really personal, Pham says. Its good that it has really slowed things down. Its already been overwhelming. Pham is finding writing her second novel, while she studies philosophy and creative writing at Western Sydney University, a tougher experience than her debut. I dont really know what came over me that year to write a novel because I am finding it so hard this year to try to write. I used to write 1000 to 2000 words a night and literally writing a sentence is painful - hopefully it gets better. From a place of rage

Julie Janson, Benevolence Working with Indigenous editors was transformative. Julie Janson grew up knowing her dad was Aboriginal, and her family was of Darug descent from the Hawkesbury region, but they never discussed it in her family. It was when Janson was employed as a history researcher at the University of Sydney that she sunk her teeth into the stories of Indigenous people in the region during the early years of colonial settlement in Australia. Janson says she wanted Benevolence - a story of first contact told from the perspective of Darug woman Muraging - to be a post-colonial version of the Hawkesbury. It was her answer, she says, to Kate Grenvilles historical novel The Secret River, which was published in 2005 and proved controversial in its representation of Indigenous Australia. I wrote it out of a kind of rage. Its my familys country, its our river. I didnt like to see it represented in a colonial way that glossed over the horror... It distressed me that a lot of people who read that wonderful novel, and Kate is a wonderful writer, then assumed that there was no Aboriginal people in western Sydney who descended from the original inhabitants, Janson says.
But Futterman argues that any delay is the real enemy of integrity when it comes to an investigation. Police need to separate witnesses and interview them promptly to learn what they actually saw and heard, not what other witnesses say they saw or what they might have seen on a video. The more you allow people to talk to one another, the more their perceptions and their stories can be altered.
A 20-year-old from North Lebanon Township died Wednesday evening when the vehicle in which he was a passenger crashed into the side of a tractor-trailer and hit another vehicle head-on, police said.

Cornwall police said Caeleb X. Wesley was in the front seat of a Ford Focus that crashed at about 5:12 p.m. on Route 72, between Williams Drive and Maple Avenue in Gretna Springs.

Eighteen-year-old Dominic H. Gutshall  the Fords driver and Wesleys brother  was headed north when he drove into the left side of a northbound tractor-trailer, and head-on into a southbound GMC Yukon Denali, police said.

The Lebanon County Coroners Office pronounced Wesley dead at the scene, according to police.

A 61-year-old New Cumberland man and 37-year-old Lebanon woman were driving the tractor-trailer and Yukon, respectively. The tractor-trailer had minor damage and could be driven from the scene, but the Yukon and Ford Focus had extensive damage and needed to be towed, police said.

Gutshall was taken to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center for treatment, while the Lebanon woman was taken to Wellspan Good Samaritan Hospital. The extent of their injuries and current condition is unknown.

Police said Route 72 was closed in both directions until about 9:30 p.m. The crash investigation is ongoing.

READ MORE: Motorcyclist dies after hitting deer in Swatara Township

Woman was on her way to buy fentanyl when she caused fatal crash: police
PARSIPPANY, N.J., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PBF Energy Inc. (NYSE:PBF) today reported first quarter 2021 income from operations of $57.7 million as compared to loss from operations of $1,366.8 million for the first quarter of 2020. Excluding special items, first quarter 2021 loss from operations was $317.8 million as compared to loss from operations of $134.0 million for the first quarter of 2020. PBF Energy's financial results reflect the consolidation of PBF Logistics LP (NYSE: PBFX), a master limited partnership of which PBF Energy indirectly owns the general partner and approximately 48% of the limited partner interests as of quarter-end.

The company reported first quarter 2021 net loss of $22.2 million and net loss attributable to PBF Energy Inc. of $41.3 million or $(0.34) per share. This compares to net loss of $1,062.5 million, and net loss attributable to PBF Energy Inc. of $1,065.9 million or $(8.93) per share for the first quarter 2020. Non-cash special items included in the first quarter 2021 results, which increased net income by a net, after-tax benefit of $273.9 million, or $2.27 per share, consisted of a lower-of-cost-or-market ("LCM") inventory benefit, offset by a change in fair value of the contingent consideration associated with earn-out provisions primarily related to the Martinez Acquisition and a net tax expense on remeasurement of deferred tax assets. Adjusted fully-converted net loss for the first quarter 2021, excluding special items, was $315.5 million, or $(2.61) per share on a fully-exchanged, fully-diluted basis, as described below, compared to adjusted fully-converted net loss of $143.2 million or $(1.19) per share, for the first quarter 2020.

Tom Nimbley, PBF Energy's Chairman and CEO, said, "PBF's first quarter results reflect the continuing challenges of lower demand brought on by the pandemic. Our refineries operated well and at rates which mirrored demand." Mr. Nimbley continued, "We did see sequential improvement during the quarter. We ran higher in March than we did in January which reflects more favorable market conditions as the progressive vaccine rollout lead to improving demand. However, even with rising demand, the independent refining sector is facing unsustainable headwinds as a result of escalating compliance costs under the RFS program. If the program is not fixed, it will likely result in a reshaping of the U.S. refining industry and a greater reliance on foreign energy."

Mr. Nimbley concluded, "We exited the first quarter with approximately $1.5 billion in cash and with ample other sources of liquidity that we believe will support our business. We expect demand to continue its gradual improvement as the vaccine rollout and approaching herd-immunity should allow everyone to return to their normal routines."

Liquidity and Financial Position

In response to the pandemic, we have taken several steps to protect our balance sheet and increase the financial liquidity of the company. As of March 31, 2021, our liquidity was approximately $2.3 billion based on approximately $1.5 billion of cash and current availability under our asset-based lending facility. In addition, PBF Logistics LP liquidity included $44.0 million in cash and approximately $311.0 million of availability under its revolving credit facility.

Strategic Update and Outlook

Employee and operational safety continue to be an ongoing priority in our pandemic response. We implemented a number of necessary safety protocols and social distancing requirements, issued personal protective equipment to all employees and enhanced facility cleaning, with these efforts focused on protecting our dedicated front line employees who have remained on the job throughout the current crisis. As a result of our efforts, our operating facilities have remained fully-staffed by our essential workforce throughout the pandemic, and we continue supplying our critical products to our valued customers.

In response to the effects of the global pandemic, we undertook a number of measures to ensure the safety and reliability of our operations. We successfully reconfigured our East Coast refining system to maintain the most profitable elements of two refineries while reducing costs and improving our competitive position. In all of our locations, we focused on creating sustainable cost reductions that we expect will make each of our assets more regionally competitive, and continue to review our operations in order to drive profitability.

In addition to focusing on our core refining operations, we are exploring opportunities to participate in the burgeoning renewable fuels market. We previously announced a potential project to be co-located at the Chalmette refinery. This project is expected to use certain idled assets, including an idle hydrocracker, along with a newly-constructed pre-treatment unit to establish an 18,000 to 20,000 barrel per day renewable diesel production facility. We believe that with the utilization of currently idled assets, and its strategic location on the Mississippi River, our project will have a shorter time to market and reduced construction costs compared to similar greenfield projects. We are currently in advanced discussions with potential partners and expect to provide further updates in the coming months.

Consistent with our previous guidance, our refining capital spending program for the first half of 2021 is expected to be approximately $150 million. Our overall market outlook for the second half of 2021 remains constructive, with continued gradual improvement in demand, and our full-year capital expenditures are expected to be approximately $400 to $450 million. Should market conditions change from our current expectations, we expect that we will review our capital requirements and adjust as needed.

We operated our refineries at reduced rates during the first quarter and, based on current market conditions, we expect to continue to operate our refineries in response to demand for our products. In the second quarter we expect to run at higher rates in every region with total expected throughput regionally as follows: East Coast to average 225,000 to 245,000 barrels per day (bpd); Mid-Continent to average 135,000 to 145,000 bpd; Gulf Coast to average 175,000 to 185,000 bpd; and West Coast to average 290,000 to 310,000 bpd.

Adjusted Fully-Converted Results

Adjusted fully-converted results assume the exchange of all PBF Energy Company LLC Series A Units and dilutive securities into shares of PBF Energy Inc. Class A common stock on a one-for-one basis, resulting in the elimination of the noncontrolling interest and a corresponding adjustment to the company's tax provision.

Non-GAAP Measures

This earnings release, and the discussion during the management conference call, may include references to Non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) measures including Adjusted Fully-Converted Net Income (Loss), Adjusted Fully-Converted Net Income (Loss) excluding special items, Adjusted Fully-Converted Net Income (Loss) per fully-exchanged, fully-diluted share, Income (Loss) from operations excluding special items, gross refining margin, gross refining margin excluding special items, gross refining margin per barrel of throughput, EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Income Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization), EBITDA excluding special items and Adjusted EBITDA. PBF believes that Non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information about its operating performance and financial results. However, these measures have important limitations as analytical tools and should not be viewed in isolation or considered as alternatives for, or superior to, comparable GAAP financial measures. PBF's Non-GAAP financial measures may also differ from similarly named measures used by other companies. See the accompanying tables and footnotes in this release for additional information on the Non-GAAP measures used in this release and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

Conference Call Information

PBF Energy's senior management will host a conference call and webcast regarding quarterly results and other business matters on Thursday, April 29, 2021, at 8:30 a.m. ET. The call is being webcast and can be accessed at PBF Energy's website, http://www.pbfenergy.com. The call can also be accessed by dialing (877) 869-3847 or (201) 689-8261. The audio replay will be available approximately two hours after the end of the call and will be available through the company's website.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release relating to future plans, results, performance, expectations, achievements and the like are considered "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which may be beyond the company's control, that may cause actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ include but are not limited to the risks disclosed in the company's filings with the SEC, as well as the risks disclosed in PBF Logistics LP's SEC filings and any impact PBF Logistics LP may have on the company's credit rating, cost of funds, employees, customer and vendors; risk relating to the securities markets generally; risks associated with the East Coast refining reconfiguration and the acquisition of the Martinez refinery, and related logistics assets; our ability to make, and realize the benefits from, acquisitions or investments, including in renewable diesel productions; the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and related governmental and consumer responses; our expectations regarding capital spending and the impact of market conditions on demand for the balance of 2021; and the impact of adverse market conditions affecting the company, unanticipated developments, regulatory approvals, changes in laws and other events that negatively impact the company. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements except as may be required by applicable law.

About PBF Energy Inc.

PBF Energy Inc. (NYSE:PBF) is one of the largest independent refiners in North America, operating, through its subsidiaries, oil refineries and related facilities in California, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey and Ohio. Our mission is to operate our facilities in a safe, reliable and environmentally responsible manner, provide employees with a safe and rewarding workplace, become a positive influence in the communities where we do business, and provide superior returns to our investors.

PBF Energy Inc. also currently indirectly owns the general partner and approximately 48% of the limited partnership interest of PBF Logistics LP (NYSE: PBFX).



EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (Unaudited, in millions, except share and per share data)

























Three Months Ended









March 31,









2021

2020 Revenues

$ 4,924.8



$ 5,277.5

















Cost and expenses:









Cost of products and other

4,191.0



5,963.3



Operating expenses (excluding depreciation and amortization expense as reflected below)

481.3



531.7



Depreciation and amortization expense

114.1



116.7

Cost of sales

4,786.4



6,611.7



General and administrative expenses (excluding depreciation and amortization expense as reflected

below)

47.8



82.5



Depreciation and amortization expense

3.4



2.9



Change in fair value of contingent consideration

30.1



(52.8)



Gain on sale of assets

(0.6)





Total cost and expenses

4,867.1



6,644.3

















Income (loss) from operations

57.7



(1,366.8)

















Other income (expense):









Interest expense, net

(80.3)



(49.2)



Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability





(11.6)



Change in fair value of catalyst obligations

(10.0)



11.7



Debt extinguishment costs





(22.2)



Other non-service components of net periodic benefit cost

2.0



1.0

Income (loss) before income taxes

(30.6)



(1,437.1)

Income tax benefit

(8.4)



(374.6)

Net income (loss)

(22.2)



(1,062.5)



Less: net income attributable to noncontrolling interests

19.1



3.4

Net income (loss) attributable to PBF Energy Inc. stockholders

$ (41.3)



$ (1,065.9)

















Net income (loss) available to Class A common stock per share:









Basic

$ (0.34)



$ (8.93)



Diluted

$ (0.34)



$ (8.93)



Weighted-average shares outstanding-basic

119,926,267



119,380,210



Weighted-average shares outstanding-diluted

120,905,716



119,380,210

































Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) and adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) per

fully exchanged, fully diluted shares outstanding (Note 1):









Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss)

$ (41.6)



$ (1,076.7)



Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) per fully exchanged, fully diluted share

$ (0.34)



$ (8.93)



Adjusted fully-converted shares outstanding - diluted (Note 6)

120,905,716



120,589,008

















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF AMOUNTS REPORTED UNDER U.S. GAAP (Unaudited, in millions, except share and per share data)





















RECONCILIATION OF NET INCOME (LOSS) TO ADJUSTED FULLY-CONVERTED

NET INCOME (LOSS) AND ADJUSTED FULLY-CONVERTED NET INCOME (LOSS)

EXCLUDING SPECIAL ITEMS (Note 1)

Three Months Ended

March 31,

2021

2020 Net income (loss) attributable to PBF Energy Inc. stockholders

$ (41.3)



$ (1,065.9)



Less: Income allocated to participating securities





0.1

Income (loss) available to PBF Energy Inc. stockholders - basic

(41.3)



(1,066.0)



Add: Net income (loss) attributable to noncontrolling interest (Note 2)

(0.4)



(14.6)



Less: Income tax benefit (Note 3)

0.1



3.9

Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss)

$ (41.6)



$ (1,076.7)



Special Items (Note 4):









Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustment

(405.6)



1,285.6



Add: Change in fair value of contingent consideration

30.1



(52.8)



Add: Debt extinguishment costs





22.2



Add: Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability





11.6



Add: Net tax expense on remeasurement of deferred tax assets

1.7







Less: Recomputed income tax on special items (Note 3)

99.9



(333.1)

Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) excluding special items

$ (315.5)



$ (143.2)























Weighted-average shares outstanding of PBF Energy Inc.

119,926,267



119,380,210

Conversion of PBF LLC Series A Units (Note 5)

979,449



1,208,798

Common stock equivalents (Note 6)







Fully-converted shares outstanding - diluted

120,905,716



120,589,008























Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) per fully exchanged, fully diluted shares

outstanding (Note 6)

$ (0.34)



$ (8.93)



Adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) excluding special items per fully exchanged,

fully diluted shares outstanding (Note 4, 6)

$ (2.61)



$ (1.19)





































Three Months Ended RECONCILIATION OF INCOME (LOSS) FROM OPERATIONS TO INCOME (LOSS)

FROM OPERATIONS EXCLUDING SPECIAL ITEMS

March 31,

2021

2020 Income (loss) from operations

$ 57.7



$ (1,366.8)



Special Items (Note 4):









Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustment

(405.6)



1,285.6



Add: Change in fair value of contingent consideration

30.1



(52.8)

Income (loss) from operations excluding special items

$ (317.8)



$ (134.0)



See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF AMOUNTS REPORTED UNDER U.S. GAAP EBITDA RECONCILIATIONS (Note 7) (Unaudited, in millions)

































Three Months Ended



March 31, RECONCILIATION OF NET INCOME (LOSS) TO EBITDA AND EBITDA

EXCLUDING SPECIAL ITEMS

2021

2020





















Net income (loss)

$ (22.2)



$ (1,062.5)

Add: Depreciation and amortization expense

117.5



119.6

Add: Interest expense, net

80.3



49.2

Add: Income tax benefit

(8.4)



(374.6)

EBITDA



$ 167.2



$ (1,268.3)

Special Items (Note 4):







Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustment

(405.6)



1,285.6

Add: Change in fair value of contingent consideration

30.1



(52.8)

Add: Debt extinguishment costs





22.2

Add: Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability





11.6

EBITDA excluding special items

$ (208.3)



$ (1.7)







































Three Months Ended















March 31, RECONCILIATION OF EBITDA TO ADJUSTED EBITDA

2021

2020











EBITDA

$ 167.2



$ (1,268.3)

Add: Stock-based compensation

7.4



9.6

Add: Change in fair value of catalyst obligations

10.0



(11.7)

Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustment (Note 4)

(405.6)



1,285.6

Add: Change in fair value of contingent consideration (Note 4)

30.1



(52.8)

Add: Debt extinguishment costs (Note 4)





22.2

Add: Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability (Note 4)





11.6

Adjusted EBITDA



$ (190.9)



$ (3.8)





See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEET DATA (Unaudited, in millions)

























March 31,

December 31,









2021

2020 Balance Sheet Data:









Cash and cash equivalents $ 1,541.2



$ 1,609.5



Inventories 2,312.4



1,686.2



Total assets 11,270.1



10,499.8



Total debt 4,657.9



4,661.0













Total equity 2,176.1



2,202.3



Total equity excluding special items (Note 4, 13) $ 1,975.8



$ 2,275.9



















Total debt to capitalization ratio (Note 13) 68 %

68 %

Total debt to capitalization ratio, excluding special items (Note 13) 70 %

67 %

Net debt to capitalization ratio (Note 13) 59 %

58 %

Net debt to capitalization ratio, excluding special items (Note 13) 61 %

57 %









SUMMARIZED STATEMENT OF CASH FLOW DATA (Unaudited, in millions)

























Three Months Ended March 31,









2021

2020 Cash flows used in operating activities $ (13.7)



$ (235.8)

Cash flows used in investing activities (60.5)



(1,315.2)

Cash flows provided by financing activities 5.9



1,458.2

Net decrease in cash and cash equivalents (68.3)



(92.8)

Cash and cash equivalents, beginning of period 1,609.5



814.9

Cash and cash equivalents, end of period $ 1,541.2



$ 722.1

















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES CONSOLIDATING FINANCIAL INFORMATION (Note 8) (Unaudited, in millions)





















Three Months Ended March 31, 2021

Refining

Logistics

Corporate

Eliminations

Consolidated

Total Revenues $ 4,913.2



$ 87.5



$ 



$ (75.9)



$ 4,924.8

Depreciation and amortization expense 104.7



9.4



3.4







117.5

Income (loss) from operations 85.9



47.9



(76.1)







57.7

Interest expense, net 1.8



10.7



67.8







80.3

Capital expenditures 58.1



1.3



1.1







60.5























Three Months Ended March 31, 2020

Refining

Logistics

Corporate

Eliminations

Consolidated

Total Revenues $ 5,260.0



$ 93.0



$ 



$ (75.5)



$ 5,277.5

Depreciation and amortization expense 105.4



11.3



2.9







119.6

Income (loss) from operations (1,386.4)



47.7



(28.1)







(1,366.8)

Interest expense, net 0.8



12.8



35.6







49.2

Capital expenditures (Note 14) 1,304.1



6.1



5.0







1,315.2





Balance at March 31, 2021

Refining

Logistics

Corporate

Eliminations

Consolidated

Total Total Assets $ 10,343.4



$ 932.8



$ 52.9



$ (59.0)



$ 11,270.1













































Balance at December 31, 2020

Refining

Logistics

Corporate

Eliminations

Consolidated

Total Total Assets $ 9,565.0



$ 933.6



$ 54.4



$ (53.2)



$ 10,499.8





















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables









































PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES MARKET INDICATORS AND KEY OPERATING INFORMATION (Unaudited)





























Three Months Ended











March 31, Market Indicators (dollars per barrel) (Note 9) 2021

2020 Dated Brent crude oil $ 61.16



$ 49.70

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil $ 58.13



$ 45.56

Light Louisiana Sweet (LLS) crude oil $ 60.26



$ 47.81

Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude oil $ 61.07



$ 51.07

Crack Spreads:







Dated Brent (NYH) 2-1-1 $ 12.06



$ 9.96



WTI (Chicago) 4-3-1 $ 11.56



$ 7.37



LLS (Gulf Coast) 2-1-1 $ 12.05



$ 10.42



ANS (West Coast-LA) 4-3-1 $ 15.75



$ 13.36



ANS (West Coast-SF) 3-2-1 $ 12.92



$ 9.65

Crude Oil Differentials:







Dated Brent (foreign) less WTI $ 3.03



$ 4.14



Dated Brent less Maya (heavy, sour) $ 4.53



$ 8.87



Dated Brent less WTS (sour) $ 2.26



$ 4.70



Dated Brent less ASCI (sour) $ 2.77



$ 4.29



WTI less WCS (heavy, sour) $ 12.01



$ 16.85



WTI less Bakken (light, sweet) $ 0.50



$ 3.46



WTI less Syncrude (light, sweet) $ 0.97



$ 1.80



WTI less LLS (light, sweet) $ (2.13)



$ (2.25)



WTI less ANS (light, sweet) $ (2.94)



$ (5.51)

Natural gas (dollars per MMBTU) $ 2.72



$ 1.87



















Key Operating Information





Production (barrels per day ("bpd") in thousands) 758.2



867.0

Crude oil and feedstocks throughput (bpd in thousands) 745.5



852.9

Total crude oil and feedstocks throughput (millions of barrels) 67.1



77.6

Consolidated gross margin per barrel of throughput $ 2.07



$ (17.19)

Gross refining margin, excluding special items, per barrel of throughput (Note 4, Note 10) $ 3.65



$ 6.60

Refinery operating expense, per barrel of throughput (Note 11) $ 6.86



$ 6.54

Crude and feedstocks (% of total throughput) (Note 12)







Heavy 36 %

44 %

Medium 31 %

23 %

Light 18 %

19 %

Other feedstocks and blends 15 %

14 %



Total throughput 100 %

100 % Yield (% of total throughput)







Gasoline and gasoline blendstocks 54 %

51 %

Distillates and distillate blendstocks 30 %

32 %

Lubes 1 %

1 %

Chemicals 2 %

1 %

Other 15 %

17 %



Total yield 102 %

102 %

















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES SUPPLEMENTAL OPERATING INFORMATION (Unaudited)





























Three Months Ended











March 31,











2021

2020 Supplemental Operating Information - East Coast Refining System (Delaware City and

Paulsboro)





Production (bpd in thousands) 242.3



327.8

Crude oil and feedstocks throughput (bpd in thousands) 242.8



329.3

Total crude oil and feedstocks throughput (millions of barrels) 21.9



30.0

Gross margin per barrel of throughput $ (0.70)



$ (13.61)

Gross refining margin, excluding special items, per barrel of throughput (Note 4, Note 10) $ 2.48



$ 6.92

Refinery operating expense, per barrel of throughput (Note 11) $ 5.91



$ 5.71

Crude and feedstocks (% of total throughput) (Note 12):







Heavy 26 %

27 %

Medium 41 %

27 %

Light 9 %

28 %

Other feedstocks and blends 24 %

18 %



Total throughput 100 %

100 % Yield (% of total throughput):







Gasoline and gasoline blendstocks 44 %

46 %

Distillates and distillate blendstocks 34 %

36 %

Lubes 2 %

2 %

Chemicals 2 %

1 %

Other 18 %

15 %



Total yield 100 %

100 %

















Supplemental Operating Information - Mid-Continent (Toledo)





Production (bpd in thousands) 120.0



91.0

Crude oil and feedstocks throughput (bpd in thousands) 117.2



90.1

Total crude oil and feedstocks throughput (millions of barrels) 10.5



8.2

Gross margin per barrel of throughput $ 7.88



$ (44.23)

Gross refining margin, excluding special items, per barrel of throughput (Note 4, Note 10) $ 5.18



$ 1.16

Refinery operating expense, per barrel of throughput (Note 11) $ 5.82



$ 8.38

Crude and feedstocks (% of total throughput) (Note 12):







Medium 43 %

39 %

Light 54 %

59 %

Other feedstocks and blends 3 %

2 %



Total throughput 100 %

100 % Yield (% of total throughput):







Gasoline and gasoline blendstocks 59 %

45 %

Distillates and distillate blendstocks 32 %

30 %

Chemicals 5 %

2 %

Other 6 %

24 %



Total yield 102 %

101 %

















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES SUPPLEMENTAL OPERATING INFORMATION (Unaudited)





























Three Months Ended











March 31,











2021

2020 Supplemental Operating Information - Gulf Coast (Chalmette)





Production (bpd in thousands) 159.2



179.4

Crude oil and feedstocks throughput (bpd in thousands) 153.8



174.5

Total crude oil and feedstocks throughput (millions of barrels) 13.8



15.9

Gross margin per barrel of throughput $ 3.63



$ (9.93)

Gross refining margin, excluding special items, per barrel of throughput (Note 4, Note 10) $ 5.44



$ 8.07

Refinery operating expense, per barrel of throughput (Note 11) $ 5.38



$ 4.67

Crude and feedstocks (% of total throughput) (Note 12):







Heavy 8 %

41 %

Medium 44 %

30 %

Light 31 %

13 %

Other feedstocks and blends 17 %

16 %



Total throughput 100 %

100 % Yield (% of total throughput):







Gasoline and gasoline blendstocks 47 %

45 %

Distillates and distillate blendstocks 34 %

33 %

Chemicals 2 %

2 %

Other 21 %

23 %



Total yield 104 %

103 %

















Supplemental Operating Information - West Coast (Torrance and Martinez)





Production (bpd in thousands) 236.7



268.8

Crude oil and feedstocks throughput (bpd in thousands) 231.7



259.0

Total crude oil and feedstocks throughput (millions of barrels) 20.9



23.5

Gross margin per barrel of throughput $ (1.57)



$ (19.43)

Gross refining margin, excluding special items, per barrel of throughput (Note 4, Note 10) $ 2.91



$ 7.09

Refinery operating expense, per barrel of throughput (Note 11) $ 9.36



$ 8.21

Crude and feedstocks (% of total throughput) (Note 12):







Heavy 83 %

81 %

Medium 5 %

7 %

Other feedstocks and blends 12 %

12 %



Total throughput 100 %

100 % Yield (% of total throughput):







Gasoline and gasoline blendstocks 64 %

62 %

Distillates and distillate blendstocks 24 %

27 %

Other 14 %

15 %



Total yield 102 %

104 %

















See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF AMOUNTS REPORTED UNDER U.S. GAAP GROSS REFINING MARGIN / GROSS REFINING MARGIN PER BARREL OF THROUGHPUT (Note 10) (Unaudited, in millions, except per barrel amounts)









































Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended













March 31, 2021

March 31, 2020 RECONCILIATION OF CONSOLIDATED GROSS

MARGIN TO GROSS REFINING MARGIN AND GROSS

REFINING MARGIN EXCLUDING SPECIAL ITEMS $

per barrel

of throughput

$

per barrel

of throughput Calculation of consolidated gross margin:













Revenues $ 4,924.8



$ 73.40



$ 5,277.5



$ 68.00

Less: Cost of sales 4,786.4



71.33



6,611.7



85.19

Consolidated gross margin $ 138.4



$ 2.07



$ (1,334.2)



$ (17.19)

Reconciliation of consolidated gross margin to gross refining

margin:













Consolidated gross margin $ 138.4



$ 2.07



$ (1,334.2)



$ (17.19)



Add: PBFX operating expense 25.0



0.37



29.6



0.38



Add: PBFX depreciation expense 9.4



0.14



11.3



0.15



Less: Revenues of PBFX (87.5)



(1.30)



(93.0)



(1.20)



Add: Refinery operating expense 460.2



6.86



507.5



6.54



Add: Refinery depreciation expense 104.7



1.56



105.4



1.36

Gross refining margin $ 650.2



$ 9.70



$ (773.4)



$ (9.96)

Special Items (Note 4):















Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustment (405.6)



(6.05)



1,285.6



16.56

Gross refining margin excluding special items $ 244.6



$ 3.65



$ 512.2



$ 6.60





























See Footnotes to Earnings Release Tables

PBF ENERGY INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES FOOTNOTES TO EARNINGS RELEASE TABLES

(1) Adjusted fully-converted information is presented in this table as management believes that these Non-GAAP measures, when presented in conjunction with comparable GAAP measures, are useful to investors to compare our results across the periods presented and facilitates an understanding of our operating results. We also use these measures to evaluate our operating performance. These measures should not be considered a substitute for, or superior to, measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. The differences between adjusted fully-converted and GAAP results are explained in footnotes 2 through 6.





























(2) Represents the elimination of the noncontrolling interest associated with the ownership by the members of PBF Energy Company LLC ("PBF LLC") other than PBF Energy Inc., as if such members had fully exchanged their PBF LLC Series A Units for shares of PBF Energy's Class A common stock.





























(3) Represents an adjustment to reflect PBF Energy's estimated annualized statutory corporate tax rate of approximately 26.6% and 26.3% for the 2021 and 2020 periods, respectively, applied to net income (loss) attributable to noncontrolling interest for all periods presented. The adjustment assumes the full exchange of existing PBF LLC Series A Units as described in footnote 2.





























(4) The Non-GAAP measures presented include adjusted fully-converted net income (loss) excluding special items, income (loss) from operations excluding special items, EBITDA excluding special items and gross refining margin excluding special items. Special items for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020 relate to LCM inventory adjustments, change in fair value of contingent consideration, tax expense on the remeasurement of deferred tax assets, debt extinguishment costs and changes in the Tax Receivable Agreement liability, all as discussed further below. Additionally, the cumulative effects of all current and prior period special items on equity are shown in footnote 13. Although we believe that Non-GAAP financial measures excluding the impact of special items provide useful supplemental information to investors regarding the results and performance of our business and allow for useful period-over-period comparisons, such Non-GAAP measures should only be considered as a supplement to, and not as a substitute for, or superior to, the financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. Special Items: LCM inventory adjustment - LCM is a GAAP requirement related to inventory valuation that mandates inventory to be stated at the lower of cost or market. Our inventories are stated at the lower of cost or market. Cost is determined using last-in, first-out ("LIFO") inventory valuation methodology, in which the most recently incurred costs are charged to cost of sales and inventories are valued at base layer acquisition costs. Market is determined based on an assessment of the current estimated replacement cost and net realizable selling price of the inventory. In periods where the market price of our inventory declines substantially, cost values of inventory may exceed market values. In such instances, we record an adjustment to write down the value of inventory to market value in accordance with GAAP. In subsequent periods, the value of inventory is reassessed and an LCM inventory adjustment is recorded to reflect the net change in the LCM inventory reserve between the prior period and the current period.





























The following table includes the LCM inventory reserve as of each date presented (in millions):









































2021

2020 January 1,





$ 669.6



$ 401.6

March 31,





264.0



1,687.2































The following table includes the corresponding impact of changes in the LCM inventory reserve on income (loss) from operations and net income (loss) for the periods presented (in millions):









































Three Months Ended March 31,

























2021

2020 Net LCM inventory adjustment benefit (charge) in income (loss)

from operations

$ 405.6



$ (1,285.6)

Net LCM inventory adjustment benefit (charge) in net income

(loss)

297.7



(947.5)































Change in Fair Value of Contingent Consideration - During the three months ended March 31, 2021, we recorded a change in fair value of the contingent consideration primarily related to the Martinez Contingent Consideration which decreased income from operations and net income by $30.1 million and $22.1 million, respectively. During the three months ended March 31, 2020, we recorded a change in the fair value of the contingent consideration primarily related to the Martinez Contingent Consideration which increased income from operations and net income by $52.8 million and $38.9 million, respectively.





























Debt Extinguishment Costs - During the three months ended March 31, 2020, we recorded pre-tax debt extinguishment costs of $22.2 million related to the redemption of the 2023 Senior Notes. These nonrecurring charges decreased net income by $16.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2020. There were no such costs in the three months ended March 31, 2021.





























Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability - During the three months ended March 31, 2020, we recorded a change in the Tax Receivable Agreement liability that decreased income before taxes and net income by $11.6 million and $8.5 million, respectively. There was no change to the Tax Receivable Agreement liability during the three months ended March 31, 2021. The changes in the Tax Receivable Agreement liability reflect charges or benefits attributable to changes in our obligation under the Tax Receivable Agreement due to factors out of our control such as changes in tax rates, as well as periodic adjustments to our liability based, in part, on an updated estimate of the amounts that we expect to pay, using assumptions consistent with those used in our concurrent estimate of the deferred tax asset valuation allowance.





























Net tax expense on remeasurement of deferred tax assets - During the three months ended March 31, 2021, we recorded an increase to our deferred tax valuation allowance of $1.7 million in accordance with ASC 740, Income Taxes, related to the remeasurement of deferred tax assets. There was no such expense in the three months ended March 31, 2020.





























(5) Represents an adjustment to weighted-average diluted shares outstanding to assume the full exchange of existing PBF LLC Series A Units as described in footnote 2 above.

(6) Represents weighted-average diluted shares outstanding assuming the conversion of all common stock equivalents, including options and warrants for PBF LLC Series A Units and performance share units and options for shares of PBF Energy Class A common stock as calculated under the treasury stock method (to the extent the impact of such exchange would not be anti-dilutive) for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Common stock equivalents exclude the effects of performance share units and options and warrants to purchase 11,699,893 and 11,388,905 shares of PBF Energy Class A common stock and PBF LLC Series A Units because they are anti-dilutive for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. For periods showing a net loss, all common stock equivalents and unvested restricted stock are considered anti-dilutive.





























(7) EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Income Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) and Adjusted EBITDA are supplemental measures of performance that are not required by, or presented in accordance with GAAP. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as EBITDA before adjustments for items such as stock-based compensation expense, the non-cash change in the fair value of catalyst obligations, the write down of inventory to the LCM, changes in the liability for Tax Receivable Agreement due to factors out of our control, such as changes in tax rates, debt extinguishment costs related to refinancing activities, and certain other non-cash items. We use these Non-GAAP financial measures as a supplement to our GAAP results in order to provide additional metrics on factors and trends affecting our business. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are measures of operating performance that are not defined by GAAP and should not be considered substitutes for net income as determined in accordance with GAAP. In addition, because EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are not calculated in the same manner by all companies, they are not necessarily comparable to other similarly titled measures used by other companies. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA have their limitations as an analytical tool, and you should not consider them in isolation or as substitutes for analysis of our results as reported under GAAP.





























(8) We operate in two reportable segments: Refining and Logistics. Our operations that are not included in the Refining and Logistics segments are included in Corporate. As of March 31, 2021, the Refining segment includes the operations of our oil refineries and related facilities in Delaware City, Delaware, Paulsboro, New Jersey, Toledo, Ohio, Chalmette, Louisiana, Torrance, California and Martinez, California. The Logistics segment includes the operations of PBF Logistics LP ("PBFX"), a growth-oriented master limited partnership which owns or leases, operates, develops and acquires crude oil and refined petroleum products terminals, pipelines, storage facilities and similar logistics assets. PBFX's assets primarily consist of rail and truck terminals and unloading racks, storage facilities and pipelines, a substantial portion of which were acquired from or contributed by PBF LLC and are located at, or nearby, our refineries. PBFX provides various rail, truck and marine terminaling services, pipeline transportation services and storage services to PBF Holding and/or its subsidiaries and third party customers through fee-based commercial agreements. PBFX currently does not generate significant third party revenue and intersegment related-party revenues are eliminated in consolidation. From a PBF Energy perspective, our chief operating decision maker evaluates the Logistics segment as a whole without regard to any of PBFX's individual operating segments.

(9) As reported by Platts.

(10) Gross refining margin and gross refining margin per barrel of throughput are Non-GAAP measures because they exclude refinery operating expenses, depreciation and amortization and gross margin of PBFX. Gross refining margin per barrel is gross refining margin, divided by total crude and feedstocks throughput. We believe they are important measures of operating performance and provide useful information to investors because gross refining margin per barrel is a helpful metric comparison to the industry refining margin benchmarks shown in the Market Indicators Tables, as the industry benchmarks do not include a charge for refinery operating expenses and depreciation. Other companies in our industry may not calculate gross refining margin and gross refining margin per barrel in the same manner. Gross refining margin and gross refining margin per barrel of throughput have their limitations as an analytical tool, and you should not consider them in isolation or as substitutes for analysis of our results as reported under GAAP.

(11) Represents refinery operating expenses, including corporate-owned logistics assets, excluding depreciation and amortization, divided by total crude oil and feedstocks throughput.





























(12) We define heavy crude oil as crude oil with American Petroleum Institute (API) gravity less than 24 degrees. We define medium crude oil as crude oil with API gravity between 24 and 35 degrees. We define light crude oil as crude oil with API gravity higher than 35 degrees.







































(13) The total debt to capitalization ratio is calculated by dividing total debt by the sum of total debt and total equity. This ratio is a measurement that management believes is useful to investors in analyzing our leverage. Net debt and the net debt to capitalization ratio are Non-GAAP measures. Net debt is calculated by subtracting cash and cash equivalents from total debt. We believe these measurements are also useful to investors since we have the ability to and may decide to use a portion of our cash and cash equivalents to retire or pay down our debt. Additionally, we have also presented the total debt to capitalization and net debt to capitalization ratios excluding the cumulative effects of special items on equity.





















March 31,

December 31,







2021

2020



(in millions) Total debt $ 4,657.9



$ 4,661.0

Total equity 2,176.1



2,202.3

Total capitalization $ 6,834.0



$ 6,863.3









Total debt $ 4,657.9



$ 4,661.0

Total equity excluding special items 1,975.8



2,275.9

Total capitalization excluding special items $ 6,633.7



$ 6,936.9









Total equity $ 2,176.1



$ 2,202.3

Special Items (Note 4)





Add: Non-cash LCM inventory adjustments 264.0



669.6

Add: Change in fair value of contingent consideration (63.6)



(93.7)

Add: Gain on sale of hydrogen plants (471.1)



(471.1)

Add: Gain on Torrance land sales (85.0)



(85.0)

Add: Impairment expense 98.8



98.8

Add: LIFO inventory decrement 83.0



83.0

Add: Turnaround acceleration costs 56.2



56.2

Add: Severance and reconfiguration costs 30.0



30.0

Add: Early railcar return expense 64.8



64.8

Add: Debt extinguishment costs 47.7



47.7

Add: Change in Tax Receivable Agreement liability (663.9)



(663.9)

Less: Recomputed income taxes on special items 157.8



57.9

Add: Net tax expense on remeasurement of deferred tax assets 260.8



259.1

Add: Net tax expense on TCJA related special items 20.2



20.2

Net impact of special items to equity (200.3)



73.6

Total equity excluding special items $ 1,975.8



$ 2,275.9















Total debt $ 4,657.9



$ 4,661.0

Less: Cash and cash equivalents 1,541.2



1,609.5

Net Debt





$ 3,116.7



$ 3,051.5















Total debt to capitalization ratio 68 %

68 % Total debt to capitalization ratio, excluding special items 70 %

67 % Net debt to capitalization ratio 59 %

58 % Net debt to capitalization ratio, excluding special items 61 %

57 %

(14) The Refining segment includes capital expenditures of $1,176.2 million for the acquisition of the Martinez refinery in the first quarter of 2020.

SOURCE PBF Energy Inc.

Related Links

http://www.pbfenergy.com


Teachers claim they have been left in tears and on their knees with exhaustion after being forced to do pupils' assessments themselves without any extra pay.

Most schools in Britain are setting tests to decide grades after this summer's GCSEs and A-levels were axed for the second year in a row due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Three in five schools plan to rely heavily on tests when deciding pupils' GCSE and A-level grades this summer even though the official exams have been cancelled.

But teachers complain that they are having to mark these papers  and are also unable to earn money from assessing exams for boards outside their normal work.

It comes after children's author Michael Rosen tweeted: 'Dear Boris Johnson, You said that GCSE exams for this year were cancelled. They're not cancelled.

Most UK schools are setting tests to decide grades after this summer's GCSEs and A-levels were axed for the second year in a row due to the pandemic (file picture from August 2020)

This tweet from author Michael Rosen on Tuesday prompted a huge response from teachers

'They're called 'assessments'. And instead of examiners marking them, teachers are. For no money. But the schools have paid the exam boards. Where's the money?'

Mr Rosen's comment has prompted a huge response on social media since it was posted on Tuesday afternoon, attracting 6,500 retweets and 23,000 likes.

ANALYSIS: Schools and colleges have borne the brunt of Government's move to cancel exams By GEOFF BARTON, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders Schools and colleges have borne the brunt of the government's decision to cancel public exams. They are expected to assess all exam year students in all subjects in an extremely short timeframe. It is a situation which would have been a lot less fraught if the government had listened to our repeated warnings last year that it needed to have a Plan B in place and ready to go in the event of exams having to be cancelled. But it did not listen and this has meant that schools and colleges only received detailed guidance at the end of last term about the process they must follow and that they only have until 18 June to assess their students and submit grades to the exam boards. This has created a great deal of additional workload for leaders and teachers on top of the work they must also do in managing Covid safety measures and supporting education recovery. Not only is there no additional payment for this work but the government has in fact signalled that it intends to freeze the pay of teachers, alongside many other hard-working public sector workers. It is a kick in the teeth. The exam boards will incur some expenses this year for tasks such as creating assessment materials and running a quality assurance process, but the costs are likely to be much less than in a normal year and we would expect schools and colleges to receive significant rebates on the fees they've paid. Advertisement

Many of those commenting on his post were teachers, including one chemistry head in Norfolk who said: 'Cried for an hour today due to the stress of all of this. So sick of the public hatred of teachers. Feel free to do this if it's so easy.'

A history teacher also wrote: '100 per cent exams by stealth but with less time to prepare and saving a packet in assessors fees. Oh and if anything goes wrong... it'll be all our fault again.'

And Steve Brain, a chemistry teacher in Durham, said: 'Currently sleeping poorly due to stress. We have our assessment schedule starting next week and have put assessments together that minimise the effects of lockdown, but that give us little to assess on. I felt this was fairer on the students.'

Another teacher tweeted: 'The hidden workload on this is so immense, on top of the visible extra workload. Today, 70 pages of new updates to read (and find time for all my teaching staff to do the same). Thank you for raising awareness of this broken 'fix'.'

And a fifth Twitter user wrote: 'Teachers (including my partner) are on their knees with exhaustion. They are leaving the profession in droves.'

But Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, told MailOnline today: 'Teaching is a vocation with children at the heart of it.

'At this time of crisis teachers need to stop counting the cost of any extra effort they put in and instead count the benefits they can bring children, especially the least privileged.

'It is however a scandal that exam boards are ripping off schools by charging exam fees for non-existent exams.'

The assessments are not officially exams, but are intended for students to show what they know, helping teachers to give them grades that reflect performance.

And a Government source said: 'Teachers are having to undertake the assessments, but these are in many ways things they would do every year.

'Many of our policies have been designed with workload in mind which, with union support, we are seeking to minimise as much as possible.'

The source added that exam boards will need to cover their costs, and have to 'make commercial decisions on fees and refunds on that basis', adding: 'Given the unusual circumstances this year it is not possible for them to have certainty about their 2021 costs in advance.'

But Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told MailOnline today: 'Schools and colleges have borne the brunt of the Government's decision to cancel public exams.

'They are expected to assess all exam year students in all subjects in an extremely short timeframe.

'It is a situation which would have been a lot less fraught if the government had listened to our repeated warnings last year that it needed to have a Plan B in place and ready to go in the event of exams having to be cancelled.

'But it did not listen and this has meant that schools and colleges only received detailed guidance at the end of last term about the process they must follow and that they only have until June 18 to assess their students and submit grades to the exam boards.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has been criticised by teachers over GCSE exams

'This has created a great deal of additional workload for leaders and teachers on top of the work they must also do in managing Covid safety measures and supporting education recovery.

'Not only is there no additional payment for this work but the government has in fact signalled that it intends to freeze the pay of teachers, alongside many other hard-working public sector workers. It is a kick in the teeth.

'The exam boards will incur some expenses this year for tasks such as creating assessment materials and running a quality assurance process, but the costs are likely to be much less than in a normal year and we would expect schools and colleges to receive significant rebates on the fees they've paid.'

The move from most schools to set tests to decide grades came as a blow to some pupils who had hoped for an easy ride, as they still have to study extensively.

And it has also provoked concern about inconsistency, as schools will be assessing pupils differently.

A survey, carried out by the school leaders' union ASCL, found last week that seven per cent of schools will base assessments entirely on exam-style papers.

Primary school pupils reading 'longer books of greater difficulty' Young people's reading skills improved during lockdown as many children picked up longer books of greater difficulty, according to a literacy study. But older pupils in secondary school were still reading books of the same difficulty as upper primary pupils during the pandemic year, the report suggests. The latest edition of the annual What Kids Are Reading report analysed the reading habits of more than 1.1 million young people across the UK and Ireland. The report, produced by Professor Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee, and assessment provider Renaissance UK, found that the number of books read overall dropped by 17 per cent compared with last year. But reading levels increased during school closures as children were inclined to pick up more challenging books for their age, researchers suggest. Primary school children and those up to Year 7 in particular improved on their reading levels by reading harder texts with greater comprehension. Advertisement

A further 53 per cent said they would give greater weight to exam-style papers than to other forms of assessment.

Exam boards are providing mini-assessments which schools can use, or teachers can also set their own.

Only six per cent of headteachers said students' grades will be based solely on 'non-exam evidence'.

The findings came after the Department for Education (DfE) confirmed that teachers in England will decide GCSE and A-level grades after this summer's exams were cancelled for the second year in a row due to the pandemic.

This year, teachers will be able to draw on a range of evidence  including mock exams, coursework, and in-class assessments using questions provided by exam boards.

Heads who have decided to base grades on exam-style papers alone said they felt it would ensure that all pupils are assessed on the same evidence.

They added that the disruption caused by lockdowns made it difficult to identify other consistent quality evidence.

Last week, Ofqual said that even in 2022 exams are unlikely to be back to their normal form.

A Department for Education spokesman told MailOnline today: 'We recognise this is a challenging time for teachers and leaders, and we are grateful to all school staff for their hard work to support students during the pandemic.

'Teachers know their students best, which is why we are giving schools the flexibility to adopt different approaches based on what their cohorts have been taught.

'We continue to work closely with Ofqual and exam boards to ensure teachers are supported in the assessment process, and work to address teacher workload and wellbeing in our long-term strategy.'
Amaravati, April 29 : The Andhra Pradesh government will launch CLAP (Clean Andhra Pradesh) programme on July 8, to commemorate the birth anniversary of late Chief Minister Y.S. Rajashekar Reddy.

During the meeting held on Thursday, Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy reviewed several public welfare schemes such as Swachha Sankalpam, YSR Jala Kala, Jal Jeevan Mission, Jagananna Palle Velugu and construction of roads in villages.

Stressing upon the importance of sanitation in rural and urban areas, he directed the officials to ensure sewage does not pile up in the villages. He told them to focus on sewage pumping and disposing the water safely. "Sewage water must be sent to treatment plants," he said and called for preparation of an SOP to dispose solid waste.

In view of the Covid pandemic, the Chief Minister instructed officials to administer vaccines to sanitary workers in village panchayats and municipalities and provide them additional uniform, gloves, masks and coats.
Long before trash TV titan Jerry Springer hosted 4,969 episodes of The Jerry Springer Show, he was a beloved politician in Cincinnati. But on April 29, 1974, his political ambitions came to a halt over a check his career couldnt cash.

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Johnson & Johnsons one-dose vaccine returned to the large-scale vaccination clinic in Worcester this week.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be offered at the site along with the Pfizer two-dose option, according to Saint Vincent Hospital, which operates the vaccination clinic.

While each vaccine is available at the site, the choice must be made when people are booking their appointment. Appointments on the state website will dictate which vaccine will be provided during certain appointment times.

The vaccines arrived from the Massachusetts Department of Public Healths distribution. The supply currently isnt voluminous, as Saint Vincent Hospital predicts about one or two more clinics will use the remaining single-shot doses.

Johnson & Johnson vaccines were allowed to resume last week in Massachusetts after U.S. health officials lifted an 11-day pause on the vaccine due to blood clot concerns.

An investigation into the vaccine uncovered 15 recipients who developed a highly unusual kind of blood clot out of nearly 8 million people given the J&J shot. All were women, most under age 50. Three died, and seven remain hospitalized.

Ultimately, federal health officials decided that Johnson & Johnsons one-and-done vaccine is critical to fighting the pandemic  and that the small clot risk could be handled with warnings to help younger women decide if they should use that shot or an alternative.

Related Content:
Taipei: Taiwan has bought 150 oxygen concentrators and aims to send them to India this weekend to help it deal with a massive increase in COVID-19 infections, and is also looking at providing further aid, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said on Thursday (April 29).

Countries around the world have been rushing to help India alleviate the crisis. India`s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surged past 200,000 on Wednesday (April 28), worsened by shortages of hospital beds and medical oxygen.

Joseph Wu told reporters that they had been working on an aid package for India and have already purchased 150 oxygen concentrators which should be able to be sent this weekend.

"We are in the process of buying more oxygen concentrators and buying raw materials from overseas so our companies at home can produce even more," he said.

An oxygen concentrator reduces nitrogen from an air supply to produce an oxygen-enriched air supply to a patient.

Taiwan is also looking at providing other aid as requested by India, Joseph Wu added.

While India, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, the two have gotten closer in recent years thanks to their shared antipathy of Beijing.

Taiwan sees India as an important like-minded democracy and friend, and there are close cultural and economic links too.

Last year Taiwan accused China of trying to impose censorship in India after its embassy in New Delhi advised journalists to observe the "one-China" principle after newspapers carried advertisements for Taiwan`s national day.

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We owe special thanks to the people of Georgia, the president said. Because of your two senators, the rest of America was able to get the help they got so far. The American Rescue Plan would not have passed. So much have we gotten done, like getting checks to people, probably would not have happened. So if you ever wonder if elections make a difference, just remember what you did here in Georgia: When you elected Ossoff and Warnock, you began to change the environment.

Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the presidents cabinet are embarking on a post-speech tour to push the economic plans through next week. Administration officials said the focus would include celebrating the increased pace of Covid-19 vaccinations since Mr. Biden took office and the rebound in economic activity.

The president will also push Congress to pass a sprawling package of tax cuts and spending programs intended to address long-running economic inequalities, create jobs and give more Americans flexibility to balance work and family. The most recent batch of plans, which Mr. Biden detailed on Wednesday, include efforts to reduce child care costs, the creation of a federal paid leave program, free community college, universal prekindergarten and expanded efforts to fight poverty.

He and the first lady are returning to Georgia to talk about getting America back on track, Karine Jean-Pierre, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters as they traveled to the state.

First, though, Mr. Biden took a detour to Plains, Ga., where Mr. Carter lives with his wife, Rosalynn Carter. Mr. Carter, the longest-living former president, is 96 years old and a cancer survivor. He has remained largely out of the public view during the coronavirus pandemic, although he appeared at a parade in October for his birthday. He did not attend Mr. Bidens inauguration in January, and the president had promised to visit him.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers have created a new, open-access tool that allows doctors and scientists to evaluate infant brain health by assessing the concentration of various chemical markers, called metabolites, in the brain. The tool compiled data from 140 infants to determine normal ranges for these metabolites.

Published in the journal NMR in Biomedicine, the study describes an easier and more reliable way to evaluate metabolite concentrations in the infant brain than was previously available, said study lead Ryan Larsen, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Metabolites play an important role in normal brain growth, development and function, said study co-author Dr. Ellen Grant, the director of the Fetal Neo-Natal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor of radiology and of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. High or low metabolite levels in the brain may be the first sign of problems with brain function or development.

"For example, we look at choline, which plays a role in building myelin, the sheath that allows electrical impulses to travel along neurons," Grant said. "Another metabolite, called NAA, is important to the healthy growth and proliferation of dendrites, the branches on neurons that receive signals from other neurons."

By measuring the concentration of key metabolites like these, researchers can spot some problems early - allowing interventions in time to prevent damage to the growing brain, she said.

Assessing metabolites in the brain normally involves proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a technology that uses an MRI not for visual imaging but to detect and identify specific molecules in the tissues of interest. The most common approach requires extensive imaging and detailed calculations of the amount of water inside and outside brain tissues to standardize these measures, a costly and time-consuming approach.

To address this difficulty, Grant and study co-author Borjan Gagoski, a radiology instructor at Boston Children's Hospital, used proton MRS to scan the brains of 140 infants at approximately one month and three months of age. In addition to using water as a reference, the team also compiled data from several key metabolites in their calculations. This allowed them to create a tool that makes use of standard values for several metabolites when assessing the concentration of any one metabolite in an infant's brain.

"What most everybody does is they look at a simple ratio between metabolite 1 and metabolite 2," Larsen said. "But if that ratio is low, does that mean that metabolite 1 is low or that metabolite 2 is high? It becomes a problem of interpretation."

Instead, the team painstakingly assessed relationships between seven key metabolites to build a database of normal values for each one at different time points, and to show how metabolite concentrations change in relation to one another as the infant's brain develops.

The tool the team developed offers a checklist of reference brain metabolites that users can select in different combinations to more clearly understand an individual infant's profile.

"Spectroscopy is really tough to do but when it's done in the right way, it can help us find out more about the brain," Gagoski said. "This approach has great potential because we can detect abnormalities and diseases before we can actually see anything on the structural scans. And it's really important to monitor brain health at this stage of life."

###

This work is funded by Abbott through the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Editor's notes:

To reach Ryan Larsen, email larsen@illinois.edu.

To reach Ellen Grant, email Ellen.Grant@childrens.harvard.edu.

To reach Borjan Gagoski, email Borjan.Gagoski@childrens.harvard.edu.

A video explaining how to use the new tool, "Introduction to a database of magnetic resonance spectroscopy results from infants scanned at Boston Children's Hospital," is available here.

The paper "Quantification of magnetic resonance spectroscopy data using a combined reference: Application in typically developing infants" is available from the U. of I. News Bureau.
Optimism in OPEC+ is growing, even that underlying economic fundamentals are in dire shape. Growing concerns about new COVID variations, as shown already in India, or renewed restrictions in major OECD countries, such as Germany, seems not to be taken into account, FXEmprire writes. As indicated already before the start of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMCC), the OPEC+ members, led by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Russia, have decided to keep to the former early April decision of a gradual export cut relaxation.

A decision to cancel even the normal full ministerial meeting, which normally follows the JMCC, it shows its current willingness to take the risk of not adjusting export volumes to market indicators. At the last meeting, OPEC+ decided to gradually raise its collective output ceiling in May-July. At the same time it stated that it will keep vigilant in assessing the global market developments. During yesterdays OPEC+s Joint Technical Committee (JTC), which monitors market conditions, clearly stated that there are concerns about oil demand following a severe surge in Covid-19 cases in India and new lockdowns in Europe.

Still, all OPEC+ parties feel that there is enough room in the market available to absorb new barrels. OPECs secretary-general Mohammed Barkindo stated already yesterday that there are a lot of positive signals. As the group now has decided to keep to its existing strategy, a combined 350,000 bpd will enter extra into the market in May, while another 350,000 bpd are expected in June, and 441,000 bpd in July.

Not clear at present is Saudi Arabias overall position, as the Kingdom plans to unwind its voluntary 1 million bpd cut, so putting an additional 250,000 bpd in May, 350,000 in June and 400,000 bpd in July. Global demand is up for oil, but at present it really is unclear if demand growth will be at levels expected. A total of 1 million bpd or more is still a large move, looking at markets globally.

Current statements about a possible supply-demand deficit in 2021 seem to be based on a normal market situation. Optimism is clear, demand growth is set to increase to 6 million bpd in 2021, compared to 5.9 million bpd last month. Total demand should be hitting 95.6 million bpd, OPEC stated. The oil group reiterated that even in a dark scenario (COVID lockdowns up), demand is expected to increase by 4.6 million bpd.

The next months the market will not be looking at a possible 2020 scenario, in which global storage volumes hit record levels, while crude oil even showed negative price settings. Still, current optimism, especially shown by oil producers seems to be built on a weak fundament. Potential disasters are clearly on the horizon, COVID-19 is not over, a clear picture of economic growth in OECD countries is not available, while potential market disruptors such as Iran, Iraq or Libya are willing to fight for additional market share too.

The Indian COVID situation is dire, to say the least. If the country is going into a major shutdown or hard lockdown approach, a potential 350,000 bpd could be at risk. Germanys new lockdowns, which will be until June, also will have a major effect. In all of Europe, demand will not be at levels of 2019, as during the current May holiday season, normally a major demand splash due to international travel, current situation only allows local holiday arrangements.

OPEC+ will most probably be even more vigilant the coming weeks, not only to counter hidden COVID-risks but also to keep their own horses in the stable. Russias growing unrest over US-EU sanctions, the Iran-JCPOA discussions or a possible confrontation in the South China Sea, are black swans not being fully assessed it seems. At the same time, several others producers are already waiting to get a foot between the door to monetize their own production increases (Abu Dhabi) or available production capacity (Saudi Arabia).

To rely on a continuing OPEC+ bromance is positive, but could be misplaced. Prices are too high at present to keep compliance in place, as most players fear the Net-Zero Stranded Asset Scenario more than the wrath of Riyadh or Moscow.

While not discussed at all, but major producers, especially US shale, are just waiting on the sidelines. Price levels are already high enough to make an interesting profit. We all know that profit for US companies is like a pot of honey for Winnie the Pooh. Maybe the market should take one of Winnies main quotes in mind Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the forest that was left out by mistake.
SpiceXpress, the air cargo arm of SpiceJet, has airlifted 1,000 concentrators from to

According to the company, these concentrators, a medical device that concentrates from ambient air, have been ordered by SpiceHealth for emergency use and distribution across India.

This is the second big consignment of oxygen concentrators ordered and delivered to SpiceHealth.

In the last two weeks, more than 2,000 oxygen concentrators have been airlifted by for SpiceHealth.

SpiceXpress's B737 freighter aircraft airlifted the consignment.

The oxygen concentrators will reach via Kolkata.

"Considering the current situation across the country, our focus is to airlift as many oxygen concentrators, BiPAPs and other medical devices as possible to cater to the increasing demand. and SpiceHealth are collaborating actively to contribute in our country's dedicated efforts to fighting the Covid-19 pandemic," Chairman and Managing Director, Ajay Singh said.

"We have airlifted more than 2000 oxygen concentrators so far and we are looking at bringing about 20,000 oxygen concentrators in the coming days from across the globe."

SpiceHealth has been actively involved in the country's fight against Covid-19.

Since its launch in November 2020, it has conducted more than two million RT-PCR tests and has spread its operations across fives states - Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Kerala, and Uttarakhand.

--IANS

rv/vd

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Click here to read the full article.

Miguel Angel Blanca, selected by Variety earlier this year as one of Spains 10 rising talents, has two new projects in development. His latest documentary, Magaluf Ghost Town, premieres in the International Spectrum competition at Hot Docs.

Both films will be produced by Barcelonas Boogaloo Films (Tolyatti Adrift, Nobodys Home), the company behind Magaluf. Molon as F*ck is a documentary trip about the fashion and ideology of urban subcultures and how they dialogue with the current generation of young people, said the director. Pic is co-produced by Los Hermanos Polo and Japonica Films.

A second feature, Ejercicios para ver a Dios, co-produced by Frances Lilith Films, Blanca described as a mystical comedy about the potential of faith and desire, about the constructed truth, and the total surrender of body and soul based on the experiences of Hildegard von Bingen, the visionary mystic of the late Middle Ages.

Like his latest feature, the two projects continue exploring some of my favorite obsessions: the representation of oneself, and the creation of fictional universes to survive in this strange world, said Blanca.

Magaluf Ghost Town is the directors fifth feature. It follows the impact of mass tourism on the titular Spanish town, a low-cost resort destination on the island of Mallorca whose picturesque beaches are overrun every summer. Britains Taskovski Films is handling international sales.

When we started filming the documentary, we understood that the protagonists of our film were all those anonymous people who live surrounded by tourists, the people who are not talked about in the tabloid news, said Blanca. Like the mostly British sun-seekers who flock to its beaches every summer, these locals are drawn to Magaluf for its air of possibility, even if that romantic ambience is often drowned out by rowdy hordes engaging in beer-fueled frolics and fisticuffs.

But the film is not a criticism of tourism, said Blanca. Spain sold its soul to the tourist devil a long time ago, but that will not prevent us from falling in love on any dirty beaches, with vomit, blood and cheap alcohol.

The director embraced those contradictions in making a film he called a love letter to Magaluf, though he recognized that the profound changes of the past few years are likely to transform a resort town he described as a magical place.

I think the film will become an epitaph of a form of tourism in Magaluf, said Blanca. Im happy that it works as a strange tribute to a form of leisure. COVID and Brexit will transform this kind of tourism. Tourism changes but it will never end because it is the darling of capitalism.

He continued: COVID has confirmed to us that tourist travel is an exceptional economic engine. There will be other kinds of tourism and other forms of leisure, but traveling will always be the best way to feel free. And the hologram of capitalism is that it seems that we are free.

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Xavier Denamur, 58, who owns multiple restaurants on the rue Vieille du Temple, in the trendy Marais neighborhood of Paris, said he, too, is eager for American tourists to return.

They are regular customers, coming every day for two or three months a year, he said, adding that before the pandemic, Americans accounted for at least 30 percent of his clientele. Mr. Denamur said he is hopeful that this summer will be different from the disaster left by the previous one, when he suffered an 80 percent loss in revenue.

For many, the announcement only highlighted the present situation in much of Europe, where vaccinations have been running far behind those in the United States and where lockdowns have been far longer and much stricter.

The U.S. vaccination program has been like a televised miracle happening before our eyes  a country that was going downhill is suddenly full of hope, said Virginia Irurita, the founder of the Madrid-based travel agency, Made for Spain and Portugal. Wed love for Americans to spread that hope over here.

Marina Colombo, a 54-year-old stationery shop owner in Milan, said she was more worried by unvaccinated Italians than about vaccinated internationals. Italy, one of the hardest hit countries at the beginning of the pandemic, has recently experienced vaccine shortages and distribution discrepancies across different regions.

As to Americans visiting: If Milan were to go back being touristy, I would love that, she said.

In Berlin, Ralf Ebling, 69, has been running a small snack booth just yards away from the Brandenburg Gate for three years. Business was booming before the pandemic, he said, but now the place is mostly empty.
First step in the expansion of Hayward Gordon mixers with Weir Minerals

HALTON HILLS, ON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Weir Minerals (DBA Vulco S.A.), a global market leader in mining equipment service and supply, and Hayward Gordon ULC, a leading manufacturer of pumps, mixers and other flow control products, today announce an expanded strategic partnership that will cover all areas of Latin America. This is the first step in expanding the regional sales distribution agreement between Hayward Gordon mixers and Weir Minerals.

The partnership, which started over 25 years ago in Chile, has seen hundreds of successful mixer installations in the Andean region. This agreement will give all LATAM Weir Mineral customers complete equipment solutions for mining supported by knowledgeable and versatile locally-based service teams.

"With this extended partnership we are delighted that we will be able to share our experience with more customers to instill confidence in Hayward Gordon mixers. This agreement allows for Weir Minerals to provide all Latin American customers with complete mining packages to fit their needs", said John Pascual, VP of Global Projects and Mixers at Hayward Gordon.

Weir has been developing new products and solutions for 150 years and have been active in LATAM for close to 90 years, focused on the mining industry.

Weir Minerals has a strong presence at mine sites with most of the mining companies contributing to their continuous growth and efficiency with market leading solutions that incorporate well known global brands, including Warman and GEHO pumps, Cavex hydrocyclones, Vulco and Linatex rubber products, Isogate and Delta Industrial valves, Enduron HPGR and screens to name a few. Hayward Gordon as a strategic partner will allow us to become the preferred supplier of the mining industry, said Martin Brenner, Managing Director of Vulco S.A. and Regional Managing Director LATAM, Weir Minerals.

"We're excited about partnering with Weir Minerals and leveraging their extensive sales and service network. Partnering to cover all of LATAM is an important first step, and we are moving quickly to expand this relationship into other areas of the world where Weir Minerals excels at supporting mining and exploration operations", said Jon Weiner, CEO at Hayward Gordon Group.

About Hayward Gordon

Founded over 60 years ago, the Hayward Gordon Group proudly operates three industry-leading brands under one roof: Hayward Gordon, Sharpe Mixers and Scott Turbon Mixer. Together, the Hayward Gordon Group provides the most complete and comprehensive portfolio of rotating equipment - mixers and pumps - that are durable, reliable, cost-effective, and easy to maintain. We strive to help you cut costs, reduce downtime, improve manufacturing times, and increase profitability.

Website: http://haywardgordongroup.com/

About The Weir Group PLC

Founded in 1871, The Weir Group PLC is one of the worlds leading engineering businesses with a purpose to make its mining and infrastructure customers operations more sustainable and efficient. Weirs highly engineered technology enables critical resources to be produced using less energy, water and waste while reducing customers total cost of ownership. The Group is ideally positioned to benefit from structural trends that support long-term demand for its technology including the need for more essential metals to support economic development and carbon transition. The Group has c.11,000 employees operating in over 60 countries with a presence in every major mining region of the world,



Find out more at www.global.weir.

SOURCE Hayward Gordon Group

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Re: 2021 Suzuki Hayabusa launched at Rs. 16.40 lakh Quote: SnS_12 Originally Posted by



Hayabusa was always about its potent engine and that is what has given it the legendary status over the years. That is why many dont feel that Suzuki did justice by what they managed to get out of the Gen 3 especially when they had over a decade on hand to make it even more legendary.



Finally, this is what the designer of the Hayabusa Mr. Koji Yoshiura had to say in 2008 when Gen 2 was launched. Wonder what he has to say about the Gen 3s power plant now



Attachment 2150238 But the Gen 3 is definitely not Bonkers as the Gen 1 and Gen 2 were when they were launched.Hayabusa was always about its potent engine and that is what has given it the legendary status over the years. That is why many dont feel that Suzuki did justice by what they managed to get out of the Gen 3 especially when they had over a decade on hand to make it even more legendary.Finally, this is what the designer of the Hayabusa Mr. Koji Yoshiura had to say in 2008 when Gen 2 was launched. Wonder what he has to say about the Gen 3s power plant now



However if we look at the status quo as of today from a slightly different perspective, the MY2022 Hayabusa is still a potent/equally bonkers force to contend with.



Let's consider what Kawasaki has done with their super-tourer strategy. They had the ZZR1400, which was a competitor to the Hayabusa. The spiritual successor of the ZZR is now the Ninja H2 SX range, which has a supercharged 998cc I4 that puts out 198 HP/137 NM. Kawasaki managed to satiate the "more-bonkers" demand of it's ZZR customer base with this Ninja H2 SX.



Quarter mile performance figures for the H2 SX: 10.04s



If we compare this with the quarter mile performance of the Gen 2 Hayabusa, there isn't much of difference and as a matter of fact, the Gen 2 is a bit faster: 9.7s



Now if we consider that the Gen 3 Hayabusa is at par with the Gen 2 in terms of quarter mile performance, it means that the Gen 3 Hayabusa is still a potent force to contend with the Ninja H2 SX, which despite the advancement in engine technology, is still at-par or a bit slower as the numbers suggest.



Coming to the key point in this conversation; should Suzuki have come out with a chest-thumping, competition-beating, drumroll-sounding Gen 3 Hayabusa? - yes, but they simply do not have the financial wherewithal to invest in such radical improvements in engine technology.



Suzuki is and has always been a poor-man's bike company, with their entire product strategy appearing to be to keep costs within a certain ceiling, by doing incremental improvements to older generation engines.



The Ninja H2 SX used to cost ~30l OTR (BS4 era), with the H2 SX SE stretching to 35l. Hypothetically speaking, if Suzuki were to have invested funds (which they don't have to begin with) into a supercharged Hayabusa, would they have recouped that investment? Chances of a 30-35l Suzuki being sold in sufficient volume are unlikely.



Another perspective of looking at the Gen 3 Hayabusa is that it still exists and is technologically better than it's older rivals. The ZZR1400 is sold in few markets, but doesn't get technologically advanced goodies. The Honda Blackbird is now dead, murdered by the Peregrine Falcon a long time back. The Yamaha FJR 1300 with its ~150 HP is pretty much irrelevant when compared to even the Gen 1/Gen 2 Hayabusa.



Before we move on to a world with EVs, Suzuki has put out a modern interpretation of the Hayabusa (without changing the design too much) and we motorcycle enthusiasts have that juicy 1340cc I4 with class-leading electronics to enjoy.



Perhaps the Gen 4 Hayabusa will mimic the same technology used in electric shavers, and then we would reminisce about the good old days when the Hayabusa existed and had a soul (the engine).



PS: being an ex-Suzuki owner spoiled by the creamy smooth 750cc I4, some of the opinions mentioned above could be borderline fanboyish/biased. I can totally understand this sentiment.However if we look at the status quo as of today from a slightly different perspective, the MY2022 Hayabusa is still a potent/equally bonkers force to contend with.Let's consider what Kawasaki has done with their super-tourer strategy. They had the ZZR1400, which was a competitor to the Hayabusa. The spiritual successor of the ZZR is now the Ninja H2 SX range, which has a supercharged 998cc I4 that puts out 198 HP/137 NM. Kawasaki managed to satiate the "more-bonkers" demand of it's ZZR customer base with this Ninja H2 SX.Quarter mile performance figures for the H2 SX: 10.04sIf we compare this with the quarter mile performance of the Gen 2 Hayabusa, there isn't much of difference and as a matter of fact, the Gen 2 is a bit faster: 9.7sNow if we consider that the Gen 3 Hayabusa is at par with the Gen 2 in terms of quarter mile performance, it means that the Gen 3 Hayabusa is still a potent force to contend with the Ninja H2 SX, which despite the advancement in engine technology, is still at-par or a bit slower as the numbers suggest.Coming to the key point in this conversation; should Suzuki have come out with a chest-thumping, competition-beating, drumroll-sounding Gen 3 Hayabusa? - yes, but they simply do not have the financial wherewithal to invest in such radical improvements in engine technology.Suzuki is and has always been a poor-man's bike company, with their entire product strategy appearing to be to keep costs within a certain ceiling, by doingto older generation engines.The Ninja H2 SX used to cost ~30l OTR (BS4 era), with the H2 SX SE stretching to 35l. Hypothetically speaking, if Suzuki were to have invested funds (which they don't have to begin with) into a supercharged Hayabusa, would they have recouped that investment? Chances of a 30-35l Suzuki being sold in sufficient volume are unlikely.Another perspective of looking at the Gen 3 Hayabusa is that it still exists and is technologically better than it's older rivals. The ZZR1400 is sold in few markets, but doesn't get technologically advanced goodies. The Honda Blackbird is now dead, murdered by the Peregrine Falcon a long time back. The Yamaha FJR 1300 with its ~150 HP is pretty much irrelevant when compared to even the Gen 1/Gen 2 Hayabusa.Before we move on to a world with EVs, Suzuki has put out a modern interpretation of the Hayabusa (without changing the design too much) and we motorcycle enthusiasts have that juicy 1340cc I4 with class-leading electronics to enjoy.Perhaps the Gen 4 Hayabusa will mimic the same technology used in electric shavers, and then we would reminisce about the good old days when the Hayabusa existed and had a soul (the engine).PS: being an ex-Suzuki owner spoiled by the creamy smooth 750cc I4, some of the opinions mentioned above could be borderline fanboyish/biased. Last edited by GoBlue : 29th April 2021 at 13:52 .
Source: Adobe/david_franklin

South Koreas finance minister and Deputy Prime Minister has risked invoking young voters further ire with a crypto-related tirade  although it appears not everyone pulling the strings in the government is ready to sing from the same hymn sheet on this increasingly divisive issue.

Per Yonhap, the finance chief, Hong Nam-ki, insisted that the government would go ahead with its crypto tax plans for next year, which will see profits taxed at a flat rate of 20%. Hong claimed that tokens such as bitcoin (BTC) were not monetary or financial assets and dismissed talk of a climbdown on the issue.

He also proceeded to criticize the use of the word cryptocurrency  still the term in general use in the media and general parlance in South Korea. He complained that most G20 nations use the term crypto (or virtual) assets, as tokens were not a substitute for [fiat] currency.

Hongs remarks will likely be particularly unwelcome for 20-39-year-olds in the country, who have been incensed by Seouls talk over a proposed crypto crackdown.

The comments, too, come after a particularly well-received warning about the dangers of crypto investment from the chairman of the financial regulatory Financial Services Commission, Eun Sung-soo.

Eun had backed up claims previously made by government executives and the central Bank of Korea, complaining that there was no intrinsic value in the crypto market. He also warned that most majority of crypto exchanges in the country would likely close in September after a grace period for new regulations ends.

But the backlash has been intense. The presidential website is now awash with petitions calling for Euns head and a change in policy  particularly over the tax plans, which are due to come into force on January 1, 2022.

This has worried senior figures in the ruling Democratic Party, who are fearing a reversal in March 2022s general elections. The party has  until recently  enjoyed strong support from younger age groups. But the issue of crypto could undermine all this  with gleeful opposition lawmakers accusing President Moon Jae-in and his administration of betraying younger people with its crypto policy.

Regardless, Moons nominee for the post of Prime Minister, Kim Boo-kyum, has decided to wade into the debate, claiming that there is no country that treats cryptocurrency like other financial products, and that it would be impossible to institutionalize tokens. Per Seoul Kyungjae, Kim insisted that crypto-fiat transactions should be made via bank accounts to provide transparency, and that the alternatives would produce many victims.

But there is apparent disharmony between regulators and the government over this increasingly thorny issue.

Donga reported that the financial regulators position and that taken by the finance ministry are growing further apart. The ministry  and other government organs such as the Ministry of Justice  increasingly want to take control of crypto policy, despite the fact that in the past, such matters were left to the regulators.

The two parties, the media outlet claimed, are now at loggerheads over definitions of the nature of crypto, an issue that could determine where the buck ultimately stops.

And the ruling party seems anything but united on its own stance. Donga reported that voices from within the Democratic Party are now suggesting that the taxation of virtual currency, which will be enforced from January next year, should be suspended.

Democratic Party lawmaker Yang Hyang-ja, a member of the National Assemblys Planning Committee, took to Facebook to opine:

If [the government] says that it will start taxation without adequate preparation, this will only spark more confusion in the market.

She also went on to add that with the introduction of central bank digital currencies, private cryptocurrencies will be somewhat controlled. Speeding up the release of a digital won, Yang claimed, would reduce volatility, and even protect monetary sovereignty.

And other senior figures in the ruling party are also making noises that indicate they may be prepared to soften their stance on crypto, too.

SBS reported that Hong Ik-pyo, Chairman of the Democratic Party's Policy Committee, said at a party meeting held yesterday that crypto could be considered as a new investment vehicle and added that investor protection is very important. He added: We will find a solution.

He also told a radio show that while gambling is illegal, cryptoasset investment is being viewed as a new form of economic activity.

And the Democratic Partys Han Joon-ho also explained, In relation to investment in [crypto], we have recognized [it] as a new means of investment  a legally recognized economic activity.

Seoul-based IT reporter Janet Cho told Cryptonews.com,

There are certain senior government officials who dont see what all the fuss is about when it comes to crypto. But others see how much of a hot potato it is. And they are determined to throw the 20-39 demographic some sort of a bone to quell the anger.

___

Learn more:

- Young & Angry Voters Warn Politicians Over Crypto Crackdown

- Turkey Prepares Crypto Regulations Amid 'Disturbing' Money Outflows

- Ex-US Regulator: Fears of Regulation Suppressing Crypto Have Gone Away

- South Korean Customs Officials Promise their Own Crypto Crackdown

- Here Are the Ways Governments Could Attack Bitcoin  and None of them Sound Hot

- Latest Episode of Indias Crypto Ban Soap Draws Decidedly Mixed Reviews

- Can't Beat Crypto Regulators? Educate Them

- Regulators Ponder Strategy As Bitcoin & Co Are Too Large to Ignore
President Biden is delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night on the eve of his 100th day in office. CBSN Washington reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns and Associated Press White House reporter Zeke Miller join CBSN's "Red & Blue" host Elaine Quijano with analysis.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ELAINE QUIJANO: Hi, everyone. I'm Elaine Quijano. It is good to be with you. Thanks for joining us for our special coverage tonight ahead of President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress. The speech comes on the Eve of his 100th day in office, a symbolic benchmark used to evaluate a new administration. So far, the president has signed 41 executive orders. That is more than presidents Trump and Obama at the same point, but Mr. Biden has only signed 11 bills into law, most notably his COVID relief plan.

That is fewer than his past two predecessors, as he's largely only been able to find Democratic support in Congress, but that soon may change. White House officials have been quietly meeting with Republican lawmakers. It's over the GOP's counter-proposal to his $2.3 billion infrastructure and jobs plan. In addition, President Biden is officially introducing his American Families Plan tonight as a, quote, investment in our kids.

It includes investments in child care to make it more affordable for parents and to pay workers better. The measure would also establish a paid family leave program, free community college and pre-kindergarten, and extend child tax credits to fight poverty. While lower and middle income people will see a tax break, the Biden proposal nearly doubles the tax on capital gains for Americans earning more than $1 million per year.

JEN PSAKI: This is a really bold proposal, the American Families Plan. The American Families Plan is going to ensure that kids across the country, families across the country get four years of additional education. Universal pre-k, that's not a partisan proposal. That's something people across the country really could benefit from, but the president believes we should propose a way to pay for it.

Story continues

So what you're talking about is raising the top rates, the top tax rates, for 1% of Americans, 1%, the top rate, going back to what the rates were during former President George W Bush's presidency to help pay for that, and we think they can afford to do that.

ELAINE QUIJANO: While we look ahead to the speech, there is more news developing. In New York City this afternoon, federal investigators raided the home of former President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Prosecutors reportedly seized his electronic devices when they executed a search warrant. It stems from an ongoing investigation into Giuliani's dealings in Ukraine.

In 2019, Giuliani was involved in then President Trump's efforts to pressure Ukrainian investigators to open anti-corruption probes into his political rivals. At the time, that included the business dealings of Hunter Biden, President Biden's son, and that's where I want to bring in Caitlin Huey-Burns and Zeke Miller. Caitlin is our CBSN Washington reporter. She's on Capitol Hill tonight, and Zeke is a CBSN political contributor and White House reporter for the Associated Press. Welcome to you both.

Caitlin let's start with President Biden's address. There will only be around 200 people in attendance tonight. What do we know about those who are and are not attending?

CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: That's right, Elaine. This speech is going to look unlike anything that we've seen in the past, given the COVID restrictions. So as you mentioned, only 200 members of Congress are going to be in the room. Usually, there's about 1,600. So it shows kind of how pared down this is. On the House side, House leaders determined who would be invited.

They invited House Committee chairs, and ranking members got the first dibs. And on the Senate side, there was a lottery system to who could attend. So it will be a smaller audience, more spread out. It feels very strange because usually on days like this, you see lawmakers going into the chamber in the early hours of the morning trying to save seats for themselves, get as close to the president as possible, to try to touch the president or interact or get an autograph, even. So you're not going to see any of that this time around, given the COVID restrictions.

You're also not going to see all of the members of the Supreme Court who usually attend. Chief Justice John Roberts will represent them. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be representing the military branch. So a much more pared down version, and I think it's also important to note kind of the historical significance of where Biden is giving this speech.

Remember, he had been a Senator for a long time, had been attending these since the 1970s. He, of course, attended eight years worth of addresses to Congress while he was vice president, but just four months ago in this same exact chamber where he will be standing was the insurrection on the Capitol, and insurrectionist trying to prevent the president from being-- the election results from being certified.

So the historic nature of that is something to note as well as the two women who will be seated behind him, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. For the first time, you'll see two women there. So a lot of history being made with COVID restrictions but also in terms of the House Speaker and the vice president.

ELAINE QUIJANO: Yes, a lot of symbolism tonight. Well, Zeke, after tonight's address, President Biden is going back on the road to sell his American Jobs and Families Plans and to visit a former president. Tell us about that.

ZEKE MILLER: Well, the White House, as in normal years, and Caitlin talked about how this joint address is different than other states of the union and joint addresses in that the setting on the Hill will be different, but what will be the same is that the president and White House aides and senior cabinet officials will all be hitting the road over the next week. The president will be going to Atlanta tomorrow, to Philadelphia on Friday. There he'll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Amtrak, and then the White House announced that he'll be going to Virginia on Monday as well.

But while he's in Georgia on Thursday, the president's going to be visiting the 39th President, Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn. They were not able to attend his inauguration 99 days ago because of COVID and because of their advanced age. But obviously, Jimmy Carter is a beloved figure within the Democratic party. He's an icon in that Joe Biden was the first Democratic Senator to endorse his campaign for president 45 years ago.

Carter is also the longest living president in the retirement age, which is exactly now 40 years and 99 days. So the president will see him on the anniversary of 40 years and 100 days after leaving office.

ELAINE QUIJANO: Wow, really remarkable symbolism there as well. Zeke, it seems that things are still in flux for the Biden administration's infrastructure and jobs proposal, and now the president is looking at another ambitious package. So where do negotiations stand?

ZEKE MILLER: Well, we saw that counteroffer from some Republican lawmakers last week. White House aides made a show of saying they were not dismissing it out of hand the way that they dismissed the Republican counteroffer to the president's COVID relief package a couple of months ago. That said, a lot of outside experts and Democrats on Capitol Hill sort of hold up the Republican proposal against the president's proposal and say they are nowhere close, and that is true. They are very, very far apart, but the president wants to give the legislative process a little bit of time.

That said, that $2.3 trillion proposal that the president put forward was already-- sort of sent the Republicans' eyes open and in sort sticker shock as they sort of come back around on deficit spending now that there's a Democrat in the White House, and now the president is proposing another nearly $2 trillion on top of that. It is a very-- you know, between these two legislative proposals, it is a staggering amount of money, a true effort by the president to redefine the role of government in American society.

Democrats are cheering that, but Republicans are finding a lot of fault with that. So the prospects in getting something through Congress will be very challenging for the president, and that's even with the reconciliation process should Democrats decide to go down that road. They've got to keep their whole conference together, and even that has proven to be a bit of a challenge for the Democrats.

ELAINE QUIJANO: Yeah. I mean, staggering really is the word to describe the price tag on these plans. Well, Caitlin, the talks with Republicans are ongoing. And this afternoon, you actually spoke to one GOP Congressman, Michael McCaul of Texas, about his view of President Biden's first 100 days and the president's new proposals. Let's go ahead and listen to some of your conversation.

MICHAEL MCCAUL: Well, it's been ambitious. I think, you know, my concern is he-- I was at the inauguration. He talked about unity and bringing the country together on both sides of the aisle. I'm on the Republican side, and I've been disappointed that we couldn't have a COVID package that was bipartisan. We were looking at an infrastructure bill that has every potential to be bipartisan.

Now we'll have an announcement on a new education health care proposal that will cost another $2 trillion, and now we're talking about $6 trillion in a matter of 100 days. That's a lot.

ELAINE QUIJANO: So Caitlin, is it clear where there's room for compromise, if there's any room at all to do that?

CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: Yeah. It's a good question, Elaine, because when it comes to infrastructure, infrastructure is one of those things that always sounds good on paper and something that both sides always say, sure, yeah, we can get on board with infrastructure. But when you actually get down to the details, and by details I mean how much it costs and what exactly infrastructure means, that's where the two sides are very far apart.

As Zeke mentioned, Republicans are really balking at this big, hefty price tag. They say that's a key sticking point even though there are some provisions that they might be able to support, and it's also important to note that Democrats could also have some issues with this proposal that Biden put forward today because it doesn't include yet a lot of the things that they want to see.

It doesn't include an expansion of Medicare, for example. It doesn't include anything addressing prescription drug prices, which they've wanted to address, and they've also wanted to lift the cap on state and local deductions. So I asked Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, about that earlier today. And he said, look, as the legislative process goes forward, those items might be able to be worked in, but you have to get the Democrats on board for this kind of thing, and so that could also push Republicans further apart.

And what's really interesting is to hear from the White House about what they define as bipartisanship these days because, yes, Biden is someone who campaigned on bringing everybody together, campaigned on bipartisanship, but they don't define it as getting support from Republicans, necessarily. They seem to define it as getting support from the American people.

So they point to polling that shows-- our own CBS News polling shows broad support for the broad parameters of the infrastructure plan and how to pay for it, including support for taxing those who make over $400,000 a year and also increasing taxes on corporations. But again, the devil is really in the details here, and Republicans want to show that they're trying to work on this, although their proposal is a quarter of the size, and Democrats are also facing the reality that the midterms are next year, and that makes the political dynamics very difficult to pass these big, bold reforms that they want.

And if they are in danger of losing the House and the Senate, now is the time to kind of go it alone with some of these big proposals. And so that's kind of how the mindsets are on both sides, very entrenched still.

ELAINE QUIJANO: Very entrenched. All right. Zeke, let's turn back to the searches related to two members of former President Trump's legal team, Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing. What do we know about investigations involving them?

ZEKE MILLER: Well, we know this has to do with Rudy Giuliani's business dealings with Ukraine, potentially related to whether or not he registered as a foreign agent and some of the other efforts overseas. Some of that was obviously the subject of former President Trump's first impeachment trial. This investigation according-- sources tell my colleagues at the AP-- was essentially put on hold when senior department of justice officials in the Trump administration would not sign off on the subpoenas that were executed today, subpoenas of any attorney in general, but also of a high profile attorney representing the President of the United States would obviously be elevated to the highest levels of the Department of Justice.

So this is an effort by the Department of Justice here to signing off on the subpoenas that had been recommended by career prosecutors, and those are taking effect. And it will be interesting to see where this investigation goes in the coming weeks and months.

ELAINE QUIJANO: All right. Caitlin-Huey Burns and Zeke Miller, thank you both very much.

ZEKE MILLER: Thank you.
Social commentator and former NDC Central Regional Chairman, Bernard Allotey Jacobs has advised President Nana Akufo-Addo to apply persuasion in his fight against illegal mining.



The country's waterbodies and lands are destroyed as a result of illegal mining activities.



There are fears that, if not stopped, Ghana might have to import water in offing.



For the sake of future generations and the country's health, the President has opened a dialogue with small-scale miners to find ways to stop illegal mining, also called galamsey.



The President says he isn't backing out of the fight, therefore pledging full commitment to protect the mining communities and the waterbodies from contamination.



Speaking on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme, Allotey Jacobs offered that the President should not use force but have interactions with the players in illegal mining.



He asked the President and the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to task their communicators to go to all mining communities, educating and persuading them to stop engaging in galamsey.



He believed this approach is the best way to address the issue.



"If you declare war, it will boomerang in your face as a government . . . it took 32 years for NPP to come to power . . . . look, you have your troops. You have your communicators. You have the people who have been employed by government. Go to the grounds; get down. It should always be the duty of the security agencies. Look at this alternative livelihood, sit down with them community by community in the areas where galamsey takes place. Talk to the people; persuade them."



"We're human beings. We have the reasoning power which God has given to us. We can decipher from what is good and bad. Look, let's take the advantage. Engage the community where galamsey is being operated and they're a lot. Send people down, let's sit with them; let's school them. I believe that this kind of persuasion can be achieved. At least it won't stop it at ago but gradually we will phase it out," he said.





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.

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Telemedicine covers nearly 90 percent of counties and districts in China: NHC

People's Daily Online) 14:04, April 29, 2021

Telemedicine services now cover around 90 percent of all the counties and districts in China, said Jiao Yahui, head of the Bureau of the Medical Administration of the National Health Commission (NHC), at a press conference on April 27.

Specialists with General Hospital of Ningxia Medical University and Xiangyang Polytechnic Affiliated Hospital in central China's Hubei Province provide support to each other during a tele-consultation at the remote medical consultation center of General Hospital of Ningxia Medical University in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Peng)

Telemedicine coverage has been extended to all the countrys previously impoverished counties owing to its poverty alleviation efforts aimed at improving medical services, Jiao added.

Telemedicine has greatly rebalanced the uneven distribution of medical resources and has improved the availability of medical services, the official relayed. This technology is used to provide technical instructions, assistance and training for medical workers and assists them to complete tasks like ward inspection, while also boosting the capabilities of community-level medical and health service institutions, according to Jiao. She also noted that the internet-based healthcare model could provide greater benefits to more people.

During the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the country made great strides in further expanding its online medical services.

Statistics show that over 50 percent of Chinas hospitals at the grade 3 level, the top level in the country, have already started offering online diagnosis and treatment services for patients based on appointments scheduled over the internet. Moreover, relevant systems have been put in place at over 7,700 hospitals at the grade 2 level and above.

Patients can reduce their queuing times in hospitals and receive their diagnostic reports directly on their smartphones thanks to the new service offerings.

Between 2018 and 2020, China designed a complete policy framework to support the construction of smart hospitals in terms of digital medical treatments, services and management by speeding up the utilization of internet technologies.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
WORST. IDEA. EVER by Jane Fallon (Michael Joseph 12.99, 400 pp)

WORST. IDEA. EVER

by Jane Fallon (Michael Joseph 12.99, 400 pp)

Ive been a huge fan of Fallons beautifully written novels since her fierce and fresh 2006 debut, Getting Rid Of Matthew.

Here she takes us on a deep dive into the emotionally murky waters which exist between protagonists Lydia and Georgia.

They are best friends for ever and, on the surface anyway, still as close despite their lives taking different directions.

Georgia is a successful illustrator of childrens books with bestsellers on the shelves, international publishing deals and award nominations. Lydia also illustrates but alongside a job she dislikes.

A book deal is her dearest wish and constantly having to express happiness for Georgias wins is grating.

On Instagram, Lydias life is a whirlwind of dates and fancy parties. The reality is very different, however, and as Lydias resentment grows, Georgia puts herself in a dangerous position. I adored it.

GREENWICH PARK by Katherine Faulkner (Raven Books 12.99, 464 pp)

GREENWICH PARK

by Katherine Faulkner (Raven Books 12.99, 464 pp)

When Helen books a course of antenatal classes in Londons snazzy Greenwich, she expects to attend with her husband, Daniel, her pregnant sister-in-law and her beloved brother, who is also Daniels business partner.

However, this cosy family foursome Helen has so fondly imagined fails to materialise when the others drop out.

There are plenty of other yummy mummies there but its Rachel, the wild card who smokes, drinks, swears and makes the rest of the group feel uncomfortable, whom Helen bonds with.

Its not long before Helen cant go anywhere without Rachel popping up or, worse, arriving at her house uninvited.

It quickly becomes apparent that Rachels interest in Helen and her family is not so innocent as initially believed.

Its twisty and dark and brilliant on secrets, lies and the extraordinary lengths some people will go to protect perfectly crafted existences. I raced through it.

THE ROAD TRIP by Beth OLeary (Quercus 14.99, 416 pp)

THE ROAD TRIP

by Beth OLeary (Quercus 14.99, 416 pp)

Addie and her sister Deb decide to make an event of their long road trip from London to a friends wedding in Scotland. Theyve planned the snacks, the music and the chat as carefully as theyve mapped the route.

Something they could not have foreseen, however, was someone driving into the back of them when theyd barely left home. The driver is Addies ex, Dylan, whom she hasnt seen or spoken to since their horrendous break-up two years previously.

The passengers in Dylans car are going to the same wedding so, although she cant think of anything more difficult than being trapped together for hours, Addie offers them a lift.

Its not long before Dylans best friend starts accusing her of all sorts, Deb jumps in to defend her sister and theyre all rowing furiously. No big surprises here but its a very easy read.
Migrants from Asia came to North America some 16,500 years ago, but a new geographic discovery could rewrite history books on how they made the epic journey.

Scientists from the US and Italy suggest there was a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles in the Bering Sea that acted as 'stepping stones' for maritime travelers.

The new study points to the last ice age that caused sea levels to dramatically fall, revealing that large chain of islands that acted as a rest stop for the ancient settlers who were making the long voyage in paddled skin boats.

The team named the scattered islands 'Bering Transitory Archipelago,' which they believe existed as much as 30,000 years ago and may have been how the first Americans came across.

This discovery would otherwise debunk the long-held theory that most of the migrants from Asia traveled along the Bering Strait Land Bridge.

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Scientists from the US and Italy suggest there was a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles in the Bering Sea that acted as 'stepping stones' for maritime travelers. The team named the scattered islands 'Bering Transitory Archipelago,' which they believe existed as much as 30,000 years ago and may have been how the first Americans came across

How, when and where the first Americans may have crossed has been called 'one of the greatest mysterious of our time.'

The conundrum was believed to have been solved, pointing to the Bering Strait Bridge, but the new study from University of Kansas (KU) in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy is re-opening the case.

The team has proposed a 'stepping stone' hypothesis that was developed after they found a massive formation hiding beneath the surface, according to the study published in Comptes Rendus.

Jerome Dobson, professor emeritus of geography at KU, said: 'We digitally discovered a geographic feature of considerable size that had never been properly documented in scientific literature.'

The new study points to the last ice age that caused sea levels to dramatically fall, revealing that large chain of islands that acted as a rest stop for the ancient settlers who were making the long voyage in paddled skin boats. The chain of islands, however, has since been submerged

'We named it the Bering Transitory Archipelago; it existed from about 30,000 years ago through 8,000 years ago.

'When we saw it, we immediately thought, 'Wow, maybe that's how the first Americans came across.' And, in fact, everything we've tested seems to bear that outit does seem to be true.'

The study says there were closely spaced islands in the Gulf of Alaska that stretched as far as Middleton Island, which sits approximately 80 miles southwest of Cordova.

There was then a gap of about 124 miles (200km) 'that would have to be navigated alongside the present coast, next a pair of islands close together, and then another 200 km gap with a stretch alongside todays coast as far as Yakutat Bay,' reads the study.

Researchers suggests that the passengers of the skin boats could manage 24 to 36 hours between haul-outs.

When the islands were above the surface, paddlers needed to move around 3mph to 5.1mph (5.6 to 8.3 kph) in order to cross each gap, reads the study.

And this, according to researchers, is why a voyage from Middleton Island to Yakutat Bay would have been feasible.

The findings also answer another mystery  the Beringian Standstill hypothesis.

This was raised when mitochondrial DNA showed migrants were isolated somewhere for up to 15,000 years on their way over from Asia to North America.

How, when and where the first Americans may have crossed has been called 'one of the greatest mysterious of our time.' The conundrum was believed to have been solved, pointing to the Bering Strait Bridge, but the new study suggests they came by sea

This also comes into play with Native American DNA is quite different from Asian DNA, which has a clear indication of genetic drift of such magnitude that it can only have happened over long periods of time in nearly complete isolation from the Asian source population.

Howevever, 'the Bering Transitory Archipelago provides a suitable refugium with internal connectivity and outward isolation,' researchers shared in a statement.

Dobson said people crossing the Bering Sea probably didn't have sails but could have been experienced in paddling skin boats like the kayaks and umiaks that Inuits use today.

'They probably traveled in small groups,' he said, 'either from Asia or islands off the coast of Asia. Some maritime people are known to have existed 27,000 years ago on northern Japanese islands. They probably were maritime peoplenot just living on islands, but actually practicing maritime culture, economy and travel.'
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 04:38:05|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, April 28 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden is ready to make his first joint address to Congress on Wednesday night, on the eve of his 100th day in office.

The president is expected to use the address as a chance to boost his 2.3-trillion-U.S.-dollar infrastructure proposal and his newly unveiled American Families Plan focusing on child care and education largely paid for by higher taxes on wealthy Americans, according to media reports.

The address will also allow Biden to tout his achievements such as pushing his 1.9-trillion-dollar coronavirus relief package through Congress and getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine shots within his first 100 days.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing on Tuesday that the American Families Plan would be the major policy focus of the address while the president would also discuss immigration, gun safety, coronavirus, and police reform.

"Nearly 100 days ago, when you took the oath of office, you pledged in a spirit of great hope that 'Help Is On The Way.' Now, because of your historic and transformative leadership, Help Is Here!" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in an invitation letter earlier this month.

Only 200 people are expected to attend the event in a locked-down Capitol, instead of the usual 1,600, due to strict security and health restrictions, media reported, adding that Chief Justice John Roberts will be the lone member of the Supreme Court on hand.

The address has been delayed for months. Newly inaugurated presidents typically make their first address to Congress within weeks of taking office, but Biden has not done so due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said media reports. Enditem
Oakville, ON & New York, NY, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Iovate Health Sciences International Inc. (www.iovate.com) and Iovate Health Sciences U.S.A. Inc. have announced the addition of new General Managers for the MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, and Hydroxycut brands. These new hires bring more than 50 years of experience and leadership at some of the worlds most well-known CPG companies including Unilever, M&M Mars, GSK, and Pernod Ricard.

Iovate has made these strategic moves on the back of strong sales across the companys brand portfolio to start 2021. The General Managers will report into Iovates Chief Marketing Officer, Jarrod Jordan. The focus of the additional leaders is to facilitate continued growth, innovative practices, product expansion and marketing excellence  including strategic plans to venture beyond the supplement vertical where Iovate has been a leader and market disrupting innovator since its founding 25 years-ago.

We are building a special organization at Iovate and we are very excited to add three experienced and innovative leaders who have cultivated brands used by millions of consumers on a daily basis. Jordan said. These General Managers will be the strategic backbone for our efforts to propel MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition and Hydroxycut to new heights at retail, in media, through the eyes of our buyers, and the hearts of our consumers across the world.

Jennifer Bremner will lead the global ambitions for the MuscleTech brands (www.muscletech.com) continued growth, as well as the worldwide partnership with Global Brand Ambassador, Henry Cavill. Her background includes 18 years at Unilever in both global and US leadership roles on brands such as Suave and Dove. She also led the launch of Dove Men+Care globally.

A graduate of Villanova University and Cornells S.C. Johnson School of Management, Bremner will be based in the New York City area.

Latisha (Tish) Tillie heads up the Six Star Pro Nutrition (www.sixstarpro.com) and XP SportsTM (www.xpsports.com) brands core business after eight years at GSK, including serving as a Global Marketing Director for the Centrum brand. Her other brand experience at GSK included their Cold & Flu portfolio (e.g. Theraflu), Sensodyne and TUMS.

Prior to GSK, Tillie worked at multiple advertising agencies for over nine years with clients that included Uncle Bens, Mars Pet Care, Delmonte, and Moet Hennessy to name a few. A graduate of California State University, Long Beach and Pepperdine University, Tillie is based in New Jersey.

Jessica Hochberg will manage the Hydroxycut (www.hydroxycut.com) business, including CUTTM Energy Drink. She has worked across a variety of brands and industries such as spirits, confections, pharmaceuticals and gaming, most recently serving as the Innovation Director at Pernod Ricard USA.

With brand experience including Jameson Irish Whiskey, Absolut Vodka, Avion Tequila, Altos Tequila, Martell Cognac and Snickers, Hochberg will be instrumental in helping to continue the Hydroxycut brands strong momentum. She holds an undergraduate degree from Lehigh University and a Masters of Business Administration from Cornell University. Hochberg is based in the New York City area.

About Iovate Health Sciences International Inc.

Founded in 1995 and based in Oakville, Canada, Iovate is a dynamic, leading-edge nutrition company that delivers some of the highest quality, most innovative and effective active nutrition and weight management products in the world. With brand innovations like MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, Purely Inspired, Hydroxycut, and Conscious Kitchen the company is committed to be the number one active nutrition and weight management lifestyle company in the world and enabling consumers everywhere to live more active lives. Iovate distributes across all major channels of distribution, including food, drug, mass and club, health food stores and online, as well as in more than 140 countries worldwide. Iovate products are available nationwide at GNC, the Vitamin Shoppe, Bodybuilding.com, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Sams Club, Amazon and other fine retailers.

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Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has had it with President Joe Biden's mask-wearing theatrics. The 58-year-old physician-turned-senator called President Biden's mask-wearing, despite the president having been fully vaccinated, "theater" with a "deleterious effect." He argued that the president's general policy of mask wearing despite being vaccinated is not supported by science and is merely "fear-mongering."

According to WND, it all began with a viral screenshot of President Biden wearing a mask during a virtual climate summit hosted by the White House. In it, the U.S. president was the only world leader wearing a mask. Others such as German Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin were visibly not.

Fact-checker Politifact reported that contrary to what many were quick to believe, the U.S. president was in fact in a room with several State Department officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, prompting the president to wear a mask as with his general policy.

Sen. Paul challenged the president's general policy, saying that "It's discouraging people from getting the vaccine because they're saying, well, if the vaccine doesn't mean anything, it doesn't seem to have any protective benefit, you get no benefit."

"That's the wrong attitude. But this is what's coming from Biden and the so-called scientists that he's putting forward," Sen. Paul argued, adding "there is no science behind any of this."

"It's fear-mongering," he concluded.

Instead of continuing to wear a mask in public despite being fully vaccinated, President Biden should, according to Sen. Paul, "light a torch to it and burn his mask" to encourage others to get the vaccine, Yahoo! News reported. For Sen. Paul, this would encourage more American citizens to go and get the COVID-19 vaccine and subsequently, lower vaccine hesitancy.

According to Forbes, a new Morning Consult poll revealed that Mississippi has the highest rates of people who are unwilling to get the COVID-19 vaccine at 30%, followed by Idaho at 29%, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Oklahoma at 28% each, Arkansas and Georgia at 27% each, Alabama at 26%, and Kansas and Kentucky at 25% each.

North Dakota also leads with vaccine hesitancy rates at 21% followed by Louisiana at 20%, and Montana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia at 19% each. The poll also revealed that vaccine hesitancy and refusal rates were the highest among Republicans at 41%, which is reflected in the Republican states that also show the higher rates of vaccine skepticism.

President Biden isn't the only one taking heat from Sen. Paul. WHAS11 reported last week that the Republican senator also took aim at Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, who offered a compromise: have 2.5 million Kentucky citizens get one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and the government would lift restrictions on businesses that serve less than 1,000 customers.

Sen. Paul called this compromise "unreasonable" and argued that Gov. Beshear is "not pointing to any science" and has merely "snatched a number out of the air."
CHARLESTON, Mo. (AP)  Relatives of a Black man from Tennessee who died in a Missouri jail in 2017 have been asked to accept $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit, court filings show, but the familys attorney says no settlement is pending.

The city of Charleston, Missouri, agreed earlier this month to pay $500,000 to the family of Tony Sanders, of Nashville, who died in the Mississippi County Jail after a white sheriff pinned his neck to the ground with his knee for several minutes.

Now lawyers for Mississippi County jail employees and the former sheriff are asking a judge to require Sanders' family to accept $2 million to settle the rest of the case, according to court documents.

The attorneys said in motions filed Wednesday that a state insurance fund had agreed to the Sanders family's request for $2 million but that the family has increased its demands to $3.5 million, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

An attorney for Sanders' relatives, Sam Wendt, said Thursday that no settlement was pending. He said the county's lawyers changed the terms of the deal by adding the former sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, to the settlement. He said the county was trying to avoid paying $1.5 million from a second insurance policy.

Wendt said this week's filings were much ado about nothing and an attempt to influence a jury if the case went to trial.

The lawsuit said Sanders was suffering from mental health issues when he got lost in May 2017 on his way to Memphis and wound up at a truck stop in Charleston. Police took Sanders to jail because they didnt have enough staff to take him to the emergency room for a mental evaluation.

Eventually, the sheriff at the time, Hutcheson, and nine others went into the cell, and Sanders was tackled, pepper sprayed, shocked with a stun gun and beaten, according to the lawsuit.

Sanders family says Hutcheson pressed his left knee into Sanders neck and kept it there for up to three minutes, even as a police officer urged him to stop. Missouris previous and current attorneys general both investigated Sanders death but declined to bring charges.

Story continues

Sanders death was one reason the NAACP in 2017 issued an advisory warning Black travelers to beware of the safety concerns" in Missouri.

Hutcheson was later sentenced to six months in federal prison for the unrelated crimes of wire fraud and identity theft for using a fraudulent process to track the whereabouts of more than 200 cellphone users, including a judge and a former sheriff. He resigned after pleading guilty and can no longer work in law enforcement.

Mississippi County is about 130 miles (210 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis.
The political crisis is mounting in France since the April 21 publication of a letter by more than 20 retired generals, since signed by over 7,000 military personnel, threatening a coup detat.

The political and media establishment has attempted to cover up the significance of the letter and conceal from the population the existence of fascist networks at the highest levels of the state and military apparatus, and their preparations for dictatorship.

The most widely read daily, Le Monde, has written almost nothing on the letter , after having maintained silence on it for days. Its first article, published on April 26 on page 10 of its print edition, focused on the reply by Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, hailing the letter and calling on the generals to support her election campaign in 2022. Since then, Le Monde has devoted a further two articles to the subject.

The political establishment is consciously working to downplay what has taken place. Socialist Party (PS) senator Helene Conway-Mouret, a member of the Senate commission on foreign affairs, set the tone, claiming that the letter was a storm in a teacup. Its important to put things into relation to one another, in a world where every little change is seen as an upheaval. There is no coup detat being prepared in France.

Jean-Marc Todeschini, the PS Senator from Moselle and a former state secretary for veterans, complained that the letter poses a problem, above all for the image that it sends about the military forces.

President Emmanuel Macron has maintained a total silence on the letter, choosing to instead allow ministers to respond to it. No member of the government has suggested that the authors should be criminally charged for threatening a coup, or that there should be an investigation of what networks already exist and what preparations they have already made.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks to army generals prior to his New Year's speech to the French Armed Forces at Brest naval training center, western France, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021. (Stephane Mahe/Pool Photo via AP)

Florence Parly was the first representative to address the issue on Sunday night, four days after its publication and more than a day after Marine Le Pens public appeal. Her comments were largely an attack on Le Pen from the right, for undermining the military apparatus and its ability to function as an instrument for the defense of French imperialist interests around the world.

Madame Le Pens words reflect a serious misunderstanding of the military institution, which is worrying for someone who wants to become head of the armed forces, she wrote. The politicisation of the armed forces suggested by Madame Le Pen would weaken our military tool and therefore France.

Parly has repeatedly emphasized the fact that the signatories of the letter are retired, to emphasize its political insignificance. Yet it is well known that retired generals and high-level military officials maintain close ties with their active-duty counterparts and act as the public face for them in precisely such overtly political declarations. In a further comment on Monday to France Info, Parly announced that there would be sanctions against any actively serving military officers who had signed the letter.

The Place Armes website, maintained by letters publicly identified editor, former Captain Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, includes a list of the first 1,500 signatories of the letter. It claims that the number of signatories has since increased to more than 7,000 in the days since it was published.

The letter, an overt threat to launch a military coup, combines hatred of Muslims with working class neighbourhoods, warning that Islamism and the hordes of the banlieues [working class suburbs], [are] leading to numerous schisms in the nation, transforming it into territories with ideologies contrary to our constitution.

Military representatives, it states, as servants of the nation, who have always been ready to put our skin on the line for our actions, as was required by our military status, cannot be passive spectators before such actions.

If nothing is done by the government, complacency will continue to spread inexorably throughout society, provoking in the end an explosion and the intervention of our active-duty comrades in a perilous mission to protect our civilisations values and safeguard our compatriots on the national territory.

We see that there is no more time to procrastinate, or else tomorrow civil war will put an end to the growing chaos, and the deaths, that you will be responsible for, will number in the thousands.

If such overt threats of a military coup are circulating, it is because preparations for a coup are being discussed, and made, at high levels in the state machine. In neighboring Germany, it has already been revealed that fascist networks in the military have made far-reaching preparations for a day X, compiling lists of left-wing politicians to be assassinated and stockpiling arms and supplies.

The Macron government is far more fearful of a movement of the working class than it is of a fascistic coup detat. That is why it is determined to cover up the significance of the generals letter. Moreover, the fascist letter largely bases itself on the anti-Muslim campaign waged by the Macron administration. Its argument denouncing the supposed danger of a Muslim separatist movement in France mirrors the thrust of Macrons anti-separatist law, which is directed against the more than five million Muslims in France.

Amid the pandemic, Macrons anti-Muslim campaign is aimed at dividing the working class and diverting attention from his homicidal policy of permitting the virus to spread throughout the population unchecked, in order to prevent any restriction on corporate profit-making.

Macron himself is rapidly moving to build up the forces of a police state. The government recently passed its global security law, which opens up the possibility of criminally persecuting civilians who film acts of police brutality and make the evidence public. Throughout 2018, riot police used tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and attack dogs to repress the yellow vest protests against social inequality. Macron himself infamously hailed the wartime fascist dictator Petain as a great soldier.

There is no progressive faction of the political establishment opposed to the turn toward dictatorship. Capitalist democracy, riven by historically unprecedented levels of social inequality, is breaking down around the world. In the United States, former President Trump sought to launch a coup detat on January 6 and overturn the results of the presidential elections. In Spain, retired generals openly call for a military government and the massacre of 26 million left-wing voters and their families.

The only answer to this drive to dictatorship lies in the political mobilization of the working class as a unified force on an international scale in the fight for socialism. This Saturday, May 1, the World Socialist Web Site is holding an international online rally, to outline a program of action for the working class to organize its struggle against the ruling class homicidal response to the coronavirus pandemic and the drive to war and dictatorship. We urge all our readers to register and make plans to attend.
(Newser)  "Good fences make good neighbors," a farmer said in Robert Frost's famous "Mending Wall" poem. He did not offer an opinion on what kind of neighbors manure fences make. Michigan landowner Wayne Lambarth says the farmer in the next property in Lodi Township built a 250-foot "poop wall" out of cow manure after a dispute over the property line, Fox 2 reports. He says the farmer usually spreads the manure on fields, but "decided to make a fence out of it" this year. Lambarth says tenants in a house near the wall have complained about the smell, but officials say there's nothing that can be done about it. "It's not a poop wall," the farmer argues. "It's a compost fence." (Read more Michigan stories.)
Bengaluru, April 29 : Karnataka Revenue Minister, R. Ashoka on Thursday said that ministers have unanimously decided to contribute their one year's salary for Covid relief work in the state.

After attending the meetings convened by Chief Minister B.S. Yedyurappa at his home office - Krishna - here, Ashoka said that Yediyurappa has also appealed to all legislators to contribute a month's salary, but as ministers, they have voluntarily agreed to constitute a year's salary to this work.

He also stated that due to overburden on existing crematoriums, the state government has identified land parcels measuring total 230.5 acres and it will be handed over to the Bengaluru civic body.

"Our basic aim is to reduce long queues in front of crematoriums and in any eventualities there should not be any shortage of space to cremate or bury," he said and added that already three crematoriums have developed problems following which three more are coming up at Mavallipura, Giddenahalli and Tavarekere on the city's outskirts.

Those at Giddenahalli and Tavarekere with a capacity to cremate 70 bodies have become operational while the one at Mavallipura with a capacity to burn 40 will start operations soon.
Anyone know about Transit regulations , thing is I'm traveling from Colombia to Germany via Madrid, Spain.

I assume as I'm in transit I will not need to register with the Spanish authorities which people normally have to, if going to Spain.

And there is a different covid-19 test for Spain. I have one fir Germany but not for Spain,as I said I did not think I need it in transit.

In fact it said on Spanish website International Travelers in Transit don't need test.

But so much different information and sometimes changes at short notice is difficult to get the right info.

Tried calling the airline but they are useless I called them 30 times , but never get an answer an answer.

Just message we are busy try later.

If I recall on a previous occasion they only asked for covid-19 test for Germany so I'm hoping that is still the case.
Most of the films weve seen about the migrant and refugee situation in Europe in recent years are gritty, often heartbreaking dramas and documentaries. Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And its both heartbreaking and heartlifting.

Amir El-Masry plays Omar, a young Syrian man seeking asylum in Britain. He and a group of other male refugees have been deposited on a remote Scottish island while their applications are processed. How remote? A scene early in the movie shows Omar in a phone booth, speaking to his mother, as a couple of other men wait for him to complete his conversation. They all own cellphones, but there are no bars. (The movie was shot in the Outer Hebrides.)

There are, however, Cultural Awareness classes, taught by two comically stilted instructors who mime close dancing (to a Hot Chocolate song) to demonstrate social dos and donts when interacting with the women of Europe.
TikTok viral videos are mostly composed of hacks and dance video challenges, but this recent one, involves Adam Sandler, IHOP, and a waitress that told him he has to wait 30 minutes to get a seat. The video has amassed more than 9.7 million views in TikTok, which was posted by user Dayanna Rodas, and also the one attending to the Hollywood actor.

It is not every day, a person gets to encounter a popular celebrity or personality on the streets or in a restaurant, especially if it is not in the Hollywood or Los Angeles, California area. The center of film and television in the United States is in the Sunny State over at the west side, so it is pretty rare for actors to pop up in New York's east side.

Read Also: Tiktok 'Blackout' Challenge Hands Latest Death of 12-Year-Old; Peer Pressure Seen to be a Contributing Factor

Adam Sandler Got Turned Away at IHOP in Viral TikTok Video

Dayanna Rodas recently posted a video that was only three days ago (Monday, Apr. 25) via TikTok that already has 9.7 million views and massive comments that talked about the occurrence. That certain event was a real-life Hollywood actor dawning a busy IHOP full of customers that has a 30-minute wait time to get seated and served.

This particular event happened in an International House of Pancakes (IHOP) branch in New York City, which is thousands of miles away from the center of the glitz and glamour of the country. Adam Sandler is known to be a Brooklyn native, so it is only natural for him to stay in New York during this pandemic, especially if he has no pending projects to shoot.

The comments section focused more on Adam Sandler's down-to-Earth attitude and behavior where he understood the waitress's (Rodas) explanation and went away instead of throwing a fit. People commended the actor (who is known to have an estimated net worth of $420 million throughout his career) for not using the "I am an actor" card.

Adam Sandler is the Baggy-Jeans, Hoodie-Wearing Dad You Encounter Everyday

In an everyday setting, people can encounter the "typical Dad" that wears old-school baggy jeans or cargo shorts and a hoodie, which was a plain fit that can be spotted by almost anyone in the streets. Instead of flashy designer clothes or flaunting accessories, Adam Sandler was seen sporting this "typical Dad" look and dining in a chain restaurant.

The 54-year-old lead actor of Netflix's "Uncut Gems," "50 First Dates," "Waterboy," and more should have been demanding a seat, comments say, but has opted to go out fashionably and respectful as ever. TikTok may have been the center of challenges, dance craze, and flexing riches, but this viral video of Adam Sandler shows it can be a diverse platform as it is.

TikTok has been the center of many viral videos over the past year and months, where it has grown as a platform despite the many disputes it faced amidst the Oracle-ByteDance operating rights fiasco last 2020.

Related Article: TikTok Introduces 'Auto Captions' Feature Making Subtitles Easier to Generate

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Isaiah Alonzo

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on the dais behind him on April 28, 2021 in Washington, D.C. On the eve of his 100th day in office, Biden spoke about his plan to revive Americas economy and health as it continues to recover from a devastating pandemic. (Melina Mara-Pool/Getty Images)
(Natural News) Arguably the most loathed fake president in American history is poised to dump 60 million death-inducing jabs from AstraZeneca on India following a spate of reports that the injections are causing serious blood clots.

Now that nobody in the United States wants to take them, Joe Biden is planning to gift AstraZenecas Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) shots to India as a pretend act of goodwill.

While AstraZenecas injection had not yet been approved here in the U.S., it was being used all across Europe where recipients were coming down with deadly side effects. This resulted in some countries, including Denmark, putting a permanent halt on their further administration.

All the bad news about the AstraZeneca jab clearly made it a bad bet here, so Hunters dad  or more accurately, his handlers  have decided to peddle them off onto India rather than incinerate them.

According to reports, the entire stock of AstraZeneca jabs that was intended for the U.S. will soon be shipped off to India, pending federal clearance. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet authorized use of the AstraZeneca jab, even for emergency purposes.

Given the strong portfolio of vaccines that the U.S. already has and that have been authorized by the FDA, and given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not authorized for use in the U.S., we do not need to use the AstraZeneca vaccine here during the next several months, stated White House Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients about the plan.

Therefore the U.S. is looking at options to share the AstraZeneca doses with other countries as they become available.

AstraZeneca jabs are the new smallpox blankets

Much like China Joes deliberate release of Chinese virus-infected illegal aliens into America, this latest act of compassion by the fake president is eerily similar to the smallpox blanket scam of early Americana.

Back in the day, early American settlers tricked Native Americans by giving them smallpox-infected blankets as a gift. The natives took these blankets, assuming they were meant for good rather than evil. Many of them later suffered and died after being infected with the hidden pathogen (which then spread through their people).

The same thing is happening once again in todays world with the government benevolently trying to offload toxic vaccines onto Third World countries. They claim that America is just doing its part to help save lives when the reality is that these injections are ending lives with a vengeance.

Soon, the death toll from the injections will far outpace the death toll among people who tested positive for the Wuhan flu and later died of a car accident. Nearly every death that occurred in 2020, after all, was categorized as a Covid-19 death.

Chances are many of the vaccine-caused deaths will also be blamed on the virus, or perhaps on the unvaccinated who reject having their genes permanently altered with experimental gene therapy.

They are dumping a few million on Syria, too, noted one commenter at GreatGameIndia about other places where the Biden regime is sending toxic injections. That will be the final nail in the coffin for that unfortunate land.

I see a conspiracy here, wrote another. The U.S. is trying to dump its trash vaccines in India just like it dumps EOL (end of life) stockpiles on Syria to accomplish vested interests.

The good news is that many people are now fully aware of the scam and want no part of it. Try as it might to get a majority of this country injected, the current White House occupiers will likely run into problems convincing tens of millions of hesitant Americans to ever get stabbed with their gene therapy poisons. Be sure to do your part by just saying no, no matter what.

More related news about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine death cult can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.

Sources for this article include:

GreatGameIndia.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
Editor

Darren Marcy, a journalist since 1992, is the editor of the Manchester Journal. A New Mexico native, he previously worked for newspapers in the Land of Enchantment before moving to Vermont in 2004. He joined the Journal in October 2018.
India's runaway coronavirus surge is only getting worse, and doctors are growing increasingly concerned about the risks of a new variant.

The state of play: "The current wave of COVID has a different clinical behavior," Sujay Shad, a surgeon at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, told The New York Times. "It's affecting young adults. It's affecting families. It's a new thing altogether. Two-month-old babies are getting infected."

Reports are still anecdotal, and researchers say data is too thin, but reports of dozens of fully vaccinated doctors falling ill have fueled concerns that the virus is finding a way to evade the world's defenses.

Experts also worry that variants may be leading to reinfections, Ravindra Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, told Time.

Where it stands: Hospitals are running out of critical supplies, including oxygen.

The country is averaging 300,000 cases a day and the official death toll is at 200,000, but experts believe that's a severe undercount.

Crematoriums are operating around the clock and expanding into parking lots to add more capacity, per the BBC.

What they're saying: Writing from his home, the New York Times New Delhi bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettleman, described the unsettling nature of the latest surge  and the lack of available help for people living there.
The Kingdoms Institute - AlUla's global hub for archaeological and conservation research announced earlier this month - is providing the platform for pioneering scientific research and discovery in Arabia's 22,000 square kilometre Living Museum.

Detailed study in AlUla and beyond uncovers one of the oldest monumental building traditions yet identified: 'This will transform how we view Neolithic societies.'

Researchers conducted an unprecedented aerial survey of AlUla and the surrounding region followed by extensive ground survey and targeted excavation.

ALULA, Saudi Arabia, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Kingdoms Institute, the recently unveiled centre for archaeological research and conservation studies in AlUla, today announced a significant archaeological discovery in north-west Saudi Arabia: the monumental, complex structures called mustatils are more ancient than previously believed. The update comes on the anniversary of the announcement of Saudi Vision 2030, which was unveiled five years ago this week, and to which The Kingdoms Institute will be a key contributor.

To view the Multimedia News Release, please click: https://www.multivu.com/players/uk/8889651-alula-reveals-new-global-hub-for-archaeology-the-kingdoms-institute/

The study and conclusions will be detailed and published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity on April 30th, 2021.

The Kingdoms Institute, unveiled earlier this month, was established under the auspices of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). The RCU has been conducting a programme of extensive research across AlUla County that is expanding knowledge of the area's human history while also becoming the intellectual foundation of the institute as a global hub for archaeological research and conservation.

His Highness Prince Badr, the Saudi Minister of Culture and Governor of the RCU, said: "Inspired by His Royal Highness the Crown Prince's Vision for AlUla to protect 200,000 years of history, AlUla's cultural legacy continues with the Kingdoms Institute: a global hub for knowledge, research and collaboration, exploring the frontiers of archaeology and unlocking new careers for our community. A place for discovery and celebration, as we unfold Arabia's contribution to humanity."

Largest study to date

While the existence of the mustatils was previously known, the more than 1,000 mustatils that the RCU-commissioned team recorded are roughly twice as many as were previously identified.

The unprecedented aerial and ground research by a team from the University of Western Australia surveyed vast stretches of the region by remote sensing and helicopter. After recording their presence from the air, the team then explored some 40 at ground level and excavated one - altogether constituting the largest study of mustatils to date. These ancient structures in the Arabian desert provide early evidence of ritual activity.

Radiocarbon dating of a cattle horn and tooth that were found in a chamber at one mustatil in AlUla, and which, along with others, appear to have been used as ritual offerings, revealed a Late Neolithic, sixth-millennium BC date.

Mustatil research is a priority for the RCU. The campaign of archaeological research across AlUla, including the mustatil discoveries, is currently featured in the Discovery Channel documentary series Architects of Ancient Arabia.

A centre of discovery

The Kingdoms Institute is being established as a world-class scientific centre for archaeological and conservation research, dedicated to the study of the history and prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula and aiming to preserve its legacy as the crossroads connecting three continents, supported by fieldwork across AlUla County that is already filling gaps in the region's natural and human history.

Inspired by the role of AlUla as a cultural crossroads and its historical importance in the global cultural and trade exchange, the Kingdoms Institute will be an academic centre as well as a cultural platform for knowledge, exploration and inspiration. It will be one of the pillars of the cultural infrastructure in AlUla within The Journey Through Time Masterplan, launched this month.

The Kingdoms Institute will help fulfill Vision 2030's goal of advancing Saudi Arabia as a vibrant society, a thriving economy and an ambitious nation. In addition to developing a global hub on the AlUla County's history, The Kingdoms Institute will also train the next generation of Saudi archaeologists and future leaders of the institute, opening new avenues for the nation's young professionals.

The Kingdoms Institute's permanent home, a red-sandstone structure that will echo the monumental works of the Dadan civilisation, will open its doors to its first visitors by 2030. The RCU estimates that the institute will have 838,000 visitors a year by 2035 in a permanent home covering 28,857 square metres at its location in the Dadan District of AlUla.

Its permanent physical presence is still in the planning stages, but as an active research organisation since the inception of the RCU, over 100 archaeologists are already digging, surveying and conducting associated studies across AlUla during seasonal fieldwork. The institute's permanent collection is growing as well.

Although the Kingdoms Institute's mandate covers AlUla's 200,000 years of human and natural history, the 'era of the kingdoms' - the time of the Dadan, Lihyan and Nabataean kingdoms circa 1000 BCE to 106 CE - will be an area of emphasis for the institute.

The institute will have under its scope dozens of archaeological and conservation missions involving experts of multiple allied disciplines working across AlUla County. Already efforts involve teams from Saudi and international institutions, including King Saud University - which has performed invaluable groundwork at AlUla over the past 15 years - as well as UNESCO, ICOMOS, France's Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Germany's Deutsches Archaologisches Institut and the University of Western Australia, among others.

"We have only begun to tell the hidden story of the Ancient Kingdoms of North Arabia," said Jose Ignacio Gallego Revilla, the RCU's Archaeology, Heritage Research and Conservation Executive Director. "There is much more to come as we reveal the depth and breadth of the area's archaeological heritage, which for decades has been under-represented, but which will finally have the showcase it deserves in the Kingdoms Institute."

Not only will the institute peel back the layers of AlUla's deep history and inter-cultural influence through the lens of archaeological discovery, but also develop national and international training programmes, academic and vocational, highlighting state-of-the-art methods and techniques, deeply investing in the next generation of Saudi specialists to sustain The Kingdoms Institute for generations to come.

Progress has already been made with the appointment of Dr Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani as Acting Director of Museums and Exhibitions, as well as Munirah Almushawh, as the first female archaeologist co-directing an archaeological project in Saudi Arabia.

Dr Rebecca Foote, Director of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Research for RCU, said: "With the many research programmes under way, AlUla County is becoming the most active area of archaeological research in the Middle East. We have just completed surveying its more than 22,000 sq km of terrain from the air and on the ground and recorded more than 30,000 areas of archaeological significance. Targeted excavations at more than 50 of those sites are providing data to inform especially later prehistory (circa 6,000-2,000 BCE) with astonishing results such as our new insights into the mustatils."

To learn more about the Kingdoms Institute and The Journey Through Time Masterplan, visit https://ucl.rcu.gov.sa/

About AlUla

Located 1,100km from Riyadh in north-west Saudi Arabia, AlUla is a place of extraordinary natural and human heritage. The vast area, covering 22,561km, includes a lush oasis valley, towering sandstone mountains and ancient cultural heritage sites dating back thousands of years.

The most well-known and recognised site in AlUla is Hegra, Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site. A 52-hectare ancient city, Hegra was the principal southern city of the Nabataean Kingdom and is comprised of nearly 100 well-preserved tombs with elaborate facades cut into sandstone outcrops. Current research suggests Hegra was the most southern outpost of the Romans after conquering the Nabataeans in 106 CE.

In addition to Hegra, AlUla is home to a series of fascinating historical and archaeological sites such as: an Old Town surrounded by an ancient oasis; Dadan, the capital of the Dadan and Lihyan Kingdoms, which is considered one of the most developed 1st-millennium BCE cities of the Arabian Peninsula; thousands of ancient rock art sites and inscriptions in Jabal Ikmah; and Hijaz Railway stations.

Note to editors:

Kingdoms Institute is plural, no possessive.

It is always AlUla / not Al-Ula

About the Royal Commission for AlUla

The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) was established by royal decree in July 2017 to preserve and develop AlUla, a region of outstanding natural and cultural significance in north-west Saudi Arabia. RCU's long-term plan outlines a responsible, sustainable, and sensitive approach to urban and economic development, that preserves the area's natural and historic heritage, while establishing AlUla as a desirable location to live, work, and visit. This encompasses a broad range of initiatives across archaeology, tourism, culture, education and the arts, reflecting a commitment to meeting the economic diversification, local community empowerment, and heritage preservation priorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 programme.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499035/Kingdoms_Institute_Conceptual_design.jpg
STOCKHOLM, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tobii AB (publ) today announced its results for the first quarter 2021

Comment by Tobii's CEO Henrik Eskilsson:

"During the first quarter, business activity continued to increase in all three divisions. However, the pandemic continues to have a substantial negative impact on sales and Tobii Dynavox was also negatively affected by supply chain disruptions.

Today we are announcing plans to create two independent companies  Tobii Dynavox and Tobii. Thanks to good performance and a strong outlook, we are now ready to take this step and I am optimistic about the potential to thereby create even stronger conditions for our long-term growth and success."

First quarter January- March 2021

Revenue was SEK 339 million (380), corresponding to organic growth of 1%.

Gross margin was 71% (71%).

The Group's operating result improved to SEK -9 million (-23). Tobii Dynavox contributed SEK 27 million (36) and Tobii Pro SEK 2 million (1) to earnings, while investments in Tobii Tech had an impact of SEK -40 million (-61) on the Group's operating result.

The operating result for the period amounted to SEK -3 million (-16).

Earnings per share amounted to SEK -0.03 (-0.17).

Business development

The Group achieved organic growth despite significant headwinds from the pandemic and supply chain disruptions.

The operating result continued to improve, taking Tobii at a good pace toward achieving full-year profitability in 2021.

Tobii Tech received six design wins in several application areas, including personal computing, eye disease treatment, radiology workstations, and ADHD screening and therapy.

Tobii launched several new and improved products, including Tobii Horizon for head tracking in computer games and a solution for reading research in the Pro Lab analysis software.

The Board of Directors initiated a review of the groups structure and started preparations to distribute Tobii Dynavox to Tobiis shareholders with a subsequent public listing.

Comments from the CEO

During the first quarter, business activity continued to increase in all three divisions. However, the pandemic continues to have a substan-tial negative impact on sales and Tobii Dynavox was also negatively affected by supply chain disruptions.

Today we are announcing plans to create two independent companies  Tobii Dynavox and Tobii. Thanks to good performance and a strong outlook, we are now ready to take this step and I am optimistic about the potential to thereby create even stronger condi-tions for our long-term growth and success.

During the first quarter, our business continued to gradually recover from the effects of the pandemic, which was reflected by increased customer activity in all divisions. Both our own ability to drive sales and operations, as well as that of our customers, has however continued to be negatively affected by the constraints in society. Overall, the Group achieved 1 percent organic growth and improved the operating result by SEK 14 million to SEK -9 million.

Tobii Dynavox decreased revenue by 6 percent organically. This decline was a result of the pandemic, which did not affect revenue in the first quarter of 2020, in combination with the effects of the previously announced supply chain disruptions for our flagship product, the I-series, which we have seen since mid-March. Our sales pipeline continued to develop strongly and was unusually high at the end of the quarter. This indicates strong underlying demand and lays the foundation to make up for deferred revenue in the second half of 2021.

The positive trend in reimbursement for assistive technology for communication continues and during the quarter President Biden signed a law allowing ALS patients in the US to receive reimbursement for assistive technology for communication five months faster.

Intensive work is ongoing to resolve the supply chain disruptions, including a small product re-design. Our assessment remains that this will result in deferred revenues of SEK 40-80 million, primarily from the second to the third quarter of 2021.

Tobii Pro increased revenue by 13 percent organically. Very large geographical differences were evident, with the US lagging and a strong performance in Asia. These trends make us optimistic about the prospects for good growth once the US and Europe open up after the pandemic.

Tobii Pro launched a new language and reading module in its Pro Lab analysis software, aimed at academic research. This effort is part of a larger initiative to drive advances in applied reading research and educational psychology. Eye tracking enables better treatment and earlier detection of diagnoses such as dyslexia, as well as contributes to better reading comprehension and faster reading.

Tobii Tech's business activity continued to strengthen after a downturn during the pandemic. During the quarter, we received six new design wins, existing customer projects have made good progress and several new engagements have been added. External revenue increased by 4 percent organically, while total revenue was 1 percent lower organically, mainly due to the supply chain disruptions for Tobii Dynavox. Tobii Tech continued to improve its operating result during the quarter at a good pace to SEK -40 million, from SEK -61 in the first quarter of 2020.

Twenty years of development have built a solid foundation and world-leading positions

Since Tobii was founded 20 years ago, we have been a driving force behind the development of eye tracking technology and applications. Our vision at the start was "An eye tracker in every computer". However, neither the technology nor the world was ready for mass market adoption 20 years ago. We therefore focused on applications and markets where the technology at the time could deliver high value. In recent years, eye tracking has matured  both as a technology and how it is used in different applications. We have therefore accelerated our investment in realizing our original vision, which has evolved to include a wide range of intelligent devices.

Thanks to these investments, we have positioned Tobii as a clear world leader in the core eye tracking technology, and in the market segments in which we operate. Today, the technology enables new innovative solutions, higher performance, transformative experiences and valuable insights across a wide range of industries and application areas. The kettle is boiling with new applications enabled by eye tracking as a core technology. Many of the verticals that were still far away just a few years ago are now much closer to large-scale commercialization.

The time is right for the next step in Tobii's development

Following the past few years solid development and a positive outlook, the time is now right to start the process of splitting Tobii into two companies  Tobii Dynavox and Tobii. This move is a natural step in Tobii's evolution and I am very optimistic about the effects of creating two stand-alone companies, each with a greater focus on its respective mission, with organizations that are even more agile and able to pursue their strategies with greater vigor. Two clean-cut, differentiated and strong investment alternatives are formed, that are easy to understand and appreciate for investors. Both companies are well positioned as world leaders in attractive markets, with good prospects to drive strong growth for a long time to come.

Over the past few years, the collaboration between Tobii Pro and Tobii Tech has gradually increased and clear benefits of the divisions working more closely together have become evident. We have therefore taken the decision that it is now appropriate to begin work on the deeper integration of these two divisions.

After 20 years of hard work laying the foundations for Tobii in its current form, we are excited to embark on the next major phase of the company's journey. I look forward to seeing Tobii Dynavox blossom as an independent publicly traded company, while Tobii continues to capture the opportunities that emerge as eye tracking gains broad traction in society.

Henrik Eskilsson

CEO

Conference call

Today at 10:30 a.m. CET, Tobii will host a conference call with web cast presentation for media, analyst and investors. Please find dial-in details on Tobii's website under Calendar.

This report has not been subjected to review by the Company's auditors.

This is a translation of the Swedish original. In case of any inconsistency between the Swedish and English version, the Swedish version shall prevail.

This information is inside information that Tobii AB (publ) is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out below, at 07.00 CET on Apr 29, 2021.

Contact

Henrik Mawby, Head of Investor Relations, Tobii Group, phone: +46 (0)72 219 82 15, email: [email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/tobii-ab/r/tobii-interim-report-for-the-first-quarter-2021,c3336356

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/2874/3336356/1409613.pdf Tobii AB Interim Report Q1 2021 https://mb.cision.com/Public/2874/3336356/ae3cf55e3715c273.pdf Tobii Interim Report for the First Quarter 2021 - press release - Apr 29 2021

SOURCE Tobii AB
[April 29, 2021] New AI Workflow Capability for Avaya OneCloud CCaaS Infused with New Voice and Digital Engagement Features to Enhance Customer Experience Avaya (NYSE: AVYA), a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, today introduced new capabilities for Avaya OneCloud CCaaS that deliver better outcomes for customers by connecting voice, digital and AI applications using a single visual design environment. The graphical low code/no code conversation composer empowers domain experts to quickly integrate a wide range of AI-enabled insights and processes with advanced OneCloud CCaaS voice and digital capabilities. Contact center staff are now empowered to create more memorable customer experiences. AI-based customer service continues to grow rapidly, by identifying, predicting and enabling better customer experiences faster than traditional approaches. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 40 percent of enterprise applications will have embedded conversational AI, up from less than 5 percent today. These new AI-based benefits enable Avaya (News - Alert) to deliver on the promise and potential of OneCloud CCaaS voice-based automation, in particular. Key benefits of AI workflow: Realize the power of voice-based automation and intelligent interactions using domain-led designs that are effortlessly composed

Compose and modify applications easily for hybrid cloud deployments using a single visual user interface

Leverage pluggable, pre-built, bring or create your own AI?, with multilingual Virtual Agent, Chatbot, and Agent Assist capabilities? and OOTB integrations including Google Dialogflow, Microsoft (News - Alert) LUIS, IBM Watson and Alexa Skills Kit?

Use built-in analytics and insights to better support decisions on what customers want and need

Take advantage of low code / no code feature for flexible, agile integrations

Leverage 20+ languages including English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and more, while also supporting language-independent machine learning models ? According to Gartner Peer Insights, global organizations that have implemented Avaya OneCloud CCaaS to improve customer experience have touted its functionality and performance, as well as the future vision for the solution. Users have called Avaya OneCloud CCaaS a "hugely capable soltion providing group-wide benefits for a digital business," and a "simple and easy to use cloud solution."

"Leveraging the power of AI, machine learning and a multi-cloud platform, Avaya is helping customers move beyond the traditional contact center to create composable customer experience centers that drive revenue and build real brand advocacy," said Anthony Bartolo (News - Alert) , Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Avaya. "Avaya's AI-powered workflow capability enables users to easily compose and customize applications, providing full integration with data repositories ensuring continual improvement of underlying machine learning algorithms within Avaya's multi-cloud ecosystem across the Avaya OneCloud portfolio.? We're making it easier than ever for OneCloud CCaaS users to synchronize resources across the entire organization and deliver the right knowledge at the right time for the optimal outcomes." "Businesses are rapidly becoming composable organizations," said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research. "Digital transformation, COVID-19 and other trends have taught us a valuable lesson and that is business agility is everything, particularly in the area of contact center as customer experience is now the top brand differentiator. The new AI workflow capability for Avaya OneCloud CCaaS enables companies to realize the benefits of AI in a number of different ways. The CCaaS solution has a number of pre-built AI features but then customers can use the low code / no code features to build custom capabilities." Additional Resources: Learn how to create an effortless experience for customers with Avaya OneCloud CCaaS.

Find out the Six Ways to Put Avaya OneCloud CCaaS to Work for Your Business. About Avaya Businesses are built by the experiences they provide, and everyday millions of those experiences are delivered by Avaya Holdings Corp. (NYSE: AVYA). Avaya is shaping what's next for the future of work, with innovation and partnerships that deliver game-changing business benefits. Our cloud communications solutions and multi-cloud application ecosystem power personalized, intelligent, and effortless customer and employee experiences to help achieve strategic ambitions and desired outcomes. Together, we are committed to help grow your business by delivering Experiences that Matter. Learn more at http://www.avaya.com Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This document contains certain "forward-looking statements." All statements other than statements of historical fact are "forward-looking" statements for purposes of the U.S. federal and state securities laws. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "our vision," "plan," "potential," "preliminary," "predict," "should," "will," or "would" or the negative thereof or other variations thereof or comparable terminology. The Company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While the Company believes these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond its control. The factors are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the " SEC (News - Alert) ") available at www.sec.gov, and may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. The Company cautions you that the list of important factors included in the Company's SEC filings may not contain all of the material factors that are important to you. In addition, in light of these risks and uncertainties, the matters referred to in the forward-looking statements contained in this press release may not in fact occur. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law. All trademarks identified by , TM, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Source (News - Alert) : Avaya Newsroom View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005418/en/

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Sentence of former Mayor of Russias Chelyabinsk for bribery upheld

 flickr.com/ Marco Verch

16:18 29/04/2021

MOSCOW, April 29 (RAPSI)  The Seventh Cassation Court of General Jurisdiction on Thursday dismissed appeals against sentence given to ex-Mayor of Russias Chelyabinsk Yevgeny Teftelev for bribery, the courts press service told RAPSI.

On October 28, 2020, Teftelev was sentenced to 3 years in high-security penal colony and fined 37.5 million rubles (over $500,000 at the current exchange rate). He was also banned to take state and municipal service posts for 3 years. Moreover, a court stripped him of his medals, first-class and second-class Orders of Merit for the Motherland.

According to the investigation, from September 2015 to April 2019, the accused acting as the head of Chelyabinsk and then as Vice-Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region along with a capital construction chief of the citys administration received bribes totaling 2.5 million rubles from a construction organizations director for the common protection during conclusion and execution of municipal construction contracts in the city.

The defendant admitted his guilt in full.

During the probe, property and monetary assets of Teftelev and his close relative worth over 60 million rubles were seized.




What Johnson & Johnson's 1-shot vaccine could mean for Ontario's most vulnerable

A nurse fills a syringe with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop-up vaccination site in New York City on April 8. (Mary Altaffer/The Associated Press - image credit)

The first doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine are set to arrive this week in Ontario, where experts say they could do a world of good for some of the province's most vulnerable.

J&J's one-shot vaccine, which does not need to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures, is perfect for populations like migrant workers, prison inmates and people experiencing homelessness, according to Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at University Health Network in Toronto.

"Oh my God, we could do so much good with that in those places," Bogoch, who sits on Ontario's vaccine task force, told CBC News. "This single-shot vaccine makes it a lot easier."

Public health officials have had some trouble administering second doses to people in those groups, Bogoch says. They are also more likely to experience bad outcomes if they get COVID-19, because of barriers to health care.

1-dose vaccine better for certain populations

The province is struggling to contain its third wave of the pandemic, which this month has routinely seen more than 4,000 new cases per day.

According to Bogoch, a one-shot vaccine "makes it a lot easier to provide greater protection to a larger number of individuals in a shorter period of time. It's as simple as that."

WATCH | 1-dose J&J vaccine helpful in settings with barriers to care, Bogoch says:

The J&J vaccine is also exciting because it's effective at preventing illness caused by variants of the coronavirus  including the B117 variant, Dr. Zain Chagla told CBC. That variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, is now driving a majority of cases in the province, according to data published by Public Health Ontario .

Chagla, who is an infectious disease physician at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, Ont., agreed that it will be perfect for populations that are typically hard to reach.

The key will be to get doses of J&J into jails, shelters and emergency rooms, he told CBC via email. Home-care providers could also use it to inoculate patients who are homebound.

Story continues

"The storage requirements make this very favourable to put into places that are hard to reach with other vaccines."

Pharmacies could also be a good place to give out J&J's vaccine, since it's so easily administered, Bogoch said.

The province is already offering other vaccines through some pharmacies.

300,000 doses expected this week

A spokesperson for Ontario's Ministry of Health told CBC via email late Tuesday that it was too early to say exactly how the J&J vaccine will be distributed but said the rollout would be informed by guidance from Canada's National Advisory Council on Immunization (NACI.)

Canada is expecting about 300,000 doses of the J&J vaccine to arrive at the end of this week, with 116,700 allocated for Ontario.

Health Canada approved the J&J vaccine in March, but its use in the U.S. was paused last month amid reports of very rare blood clotting  in 15 of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who got the shot, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The J&J vaccine could be perfect for vulnerable populations because it only requires one dose, says infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

The CDC on Sunday recommended resumption of the vaccine's use, but said women under the age of 50 should be aware of this "rare but increased risk."

Health Canada acknowledged the risk on Monday when it updated its label for the vaccine.

In a tweet about the update, the agency said: "Cases of rare blood clotting events reported in the U.S. after immunization with the  vaccine are similar to those reported after the AstraZeneca vaccine."

Both Health Canada and the CDC say the benefits outweigh the risks. In a study of 43,000 participants, J&J's vaccine was found to be 66 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection starting two weeks after vaccination, according to Health Canada.

Benefits outweigh risk for 'much of the population'

Bogoch says he's heard concerns about giving the J&J vaccine to vulnerable populations because of the "tiny-but-not-zero" risk of blood clots.

"Some people are saying, 'Are you giving people a substandard vaccine?'

"And the answer is no, we're not. We're giving AstraZeneca to anyone who's 40 years and up, that also has small-but-not-zero-per-cent risk of blood clotting events with it. And it's flying off the shelves in all neighbourhoods," he said.

"These are vaccines that were approved in Canada. They work well. And you have an opportunity to provide significant protection to a group of people that, through no fault of their own, are just less likely to come back for a second dose."

Chagla said the benefits of J&J will outweigh the risks for "much of the population."

"This vaccine really does keep people from being hospitalized, dying and spreading COVID-19 with a single dose, and that really needs to be balanced against everything."

Ontario administered 94,819 doses of COVID-19 vaccines Monday, bringing the total number of shots given out to almost 4.8 million. There are now 362,563 Ontarians who are fully vaccinated, according to officials.

Health Canada says recipients should seek immediate medical attention if they notice any of these symptoms within a month of getting the J&J vaccine:
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Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, attends a meeting of parliamentary leaders that focused on the role of legislators in consolidating peace and trust via video link at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator Li Zhanshu said Wednesday that exchanges between legislative bodies provide an important guarantee for the long-term stable and healthy development of state-to-state relations.

Li, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, made the remarks at a meeting of parliamentary leaders that focused on the role of legislators in consolidating peace and trust.

Li said peace and development are still the themes of the times, but peace and trust in the international community have been severely eroded, the international order and the global governance system have been impacted, and there is still a long way to go toward general security and common development, and thus all countries need to make concerted efforts and joint responses.

Noting that exchanges between legislative bodies provide an important guarantee for the long-term stable and healthy development of state-to-state relations, Li called on legislative bodies to adopt a common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security concept and oppose the emergence of a new "Cold War" and ideological confrontation in whatever form.

He said legislative bodies should adhere to opening up and cooperation, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, maintain the stability and smoothness of the global industrial chain and supply chain, and promote the construction of an open world economy.

He called on legislative bodies to enhance mutual trust and reduce suspicion through candid and in-depth dialogue, uphold the principles of extensive consultations, joint contributions and shared benefits, adhere to the true form of multilateralism marked by openness and tolerance, strict rule of law, consultation and cooperation, and promote the development of the global governance system in a more just and reasonable direction.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Li said different from traditional major countries, China is committed to the path of peaceful development.

The NPC stands ready to work with the legislatures of various countries to be a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order, and jointly build a clean and beautiful world featuring lasting peace, universal security, common prosperity, openness and inclusiveness, Li said.

The meeting among parliamentary leaders was hosted by Turkmenistan, and speakers or parliament leaders from Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Pakistan, the Republic of Korea, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan attended the meeting via video link. Enditem
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Nearly 8-10 Azerbaijanis in civilian clothing violated the contact line on April 28 at about 11:40 in the north-eastern part of the state border of Armenia and entered the buffer zone, bringing with them 30-40 meter long pipes, probably for establishing water supply to a nearby Azerbaijani military position. Noticing the servicemen of the Armed Forces of Armenia, the Azerbaijanis left the territory, abandoning the pipes in the buffer zone. The Armenian servicemen demonstrated restraint and did not yield to provocations, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Defense Ministry of Armenia.

According to the information provided by the Armenian National Security Service, no border incidents were registered in Vorotan-Davit Bek section of the Goris-Kapan inter-state road which is under the responsibility of the NSS border troops.

The Armed Forces of Armenia and the NSS border troops confidently control the border situation along the entire borderline.
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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.
The Sky From Here concert series concludes this Thursday, April 29 with a concert featuring Charlie McGettigan with his grandsons Padraig and Cathal Bennett.

The last of The Dock's four exclusive live streamed performances by musicians and bands all with a connection to Leitrim features the wonderful Charlie McGettigan who is joined by his very talented grandson Padraig Bennett and Padraig's younger brother Cathal.

Cathal Bennett



Recorded live in The Dock the concert offers a mix of original songs by both Charlie and Padraig.

It also features a new song specially commissioned by The Dock from Charlie and Padraig. Drumshanbo was the inspiration for that new song. Charlie spoke to us during his recording session about the song.

Its lovely to write songs about places you love - Spancil Hill, the Cliffs of Dooneen spring to mind - and I have written many such songs.

However when asked to write a new song about my home place I thought it might be nice to get a young persons perspective on my home place of Drumshanbo. My grandson Padraig Bennett has been coming here since he was a baby seventeen years ago. He has always loved Drumshanbo and still loves coming here so the two of us set about writing 'The magic of Drumshanbo Town.'



The concert will be streamed on www.thedock.ie on Thursday, April 29 and can be viewed until Sunday May 2.

A longtime and proud resident of Leitrim who can still joke that he is a blow-in Charlie McGettigan will be no stranger to local, national and indeed international audiences.



He started his musical career in the 1960s in various rock bands in Donegal. Moving to Dublin in 1968 he honed in on the thriving folk scene there at the time. In 1973, Charlie formed the highly successful group Jargon, which went on to win the prestigious Letterkenny Folk Festival.

Charlies songs have been recorded by many artists and he joined forces with Paul Harrington and Brendan Graham to win the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland with Rock n Roll Kids.



Padraig Bennett is a 16-year-old 5th year student at Maynooth Community College who has been studying music from an early age. He is an accomplished violin player currently studying for his Senior Certificate and also plays with the Dublin Youth Orchestra, he also sings with his award winning School Choirs and has toured both here in Ireland and abroad with them.

During the lockdown Padraig began to focus on writing his own music, his first single Two of Us is his creative expression of the lockdown and its impact on him and those around him.

Padraig Bennett



The Sky From Here series is a celebration of place and the rich musical talent that exists in the area. It is produced by The Dock with funding from The Arts Council and Leitrim County Council in association with The Leitrim Observer.

Also read: Golfers welcome sunshine and return of golf at Carrick-on-Shannon Golf Club - GALLERY
The Fishmongers' Hall attacker fooled a counter-terrorism chief when he was asked why he was wearing a bulky coat while sitting inside, an inquest jury has heard.

Terrorist Usman Khan, 28, wore the black jacket to hide his fake suicide vest on the day he fatally stabbed Cambridge graduates Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.

Khan had a brief conversation with Steve Machin, governor of counter-terrorism at HMP Whitemoor, during the prisoner education event in central London on November 29, 2019.

Mr Machin said he asked Khan why he was wearing the extra large coat, which he seldom removed, but said jihadi's answer about dressing for the weather was 'plausible'.

Mr Machin told the jurors he couldn't see all ex-offenders as a potential threat.

Terrorist Usman Khan, 28, wore the black jacket (pictured on a train to London on the day of the attack) to hide his fake suicide vest on the day he fatally stabbed Cambridge graduates Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23

He added: 'I couldn't live my life expecting every encounter with the community or ex-offenders is going to lead to devastation, I couldn't live with that level of paranoia.'

On Wednesday, Mr Machin said Khan, from Stafford, tried to give him a hug when the pair met, telling him: 'I have learnt that violence isn't the path.'

But inquest jurors at City of London's Guildhall heard Khan had spent the previous week buying items needed for his murderous plans, including the black coat he wore to the event to disguise his fake suicide vest.

On Thursday, Nick Armstrong, representing the family of Ms Jones who was a guest at the event, asked: 'Why don't you pick up the fact he's wearing the coat?'

Mr Machin replied: 'He provided a backstory and it sort of made sense. I could see below the coat was a base layer.

'He said when he checked the weather he was expecting a cold day. He said: "I don't want this being my outer top".'

Being able to have his own accommodation, after a spell in a probation hostel, and hearing that he would not be escorted by police to the event led him to think that Khan 'must have continued on the path he had taken'.

Mr Armstrong accused Mr Machin of dropping his guard despite being faced with warning signs about Khan's presentation.

Khan had a brief conversation with Steve Machin, governor of counter-terrorism at HMP Whitemoor, during the prisoner education event in central London on November 29, 2019. Pictured, victims Mr Merritt (left), 25, and Miss Jones (right), 23

Mr Machin said: 'I'm not in the same headspace as when I'm at work - I wasn't there as a counter-terrorism governor, I was there as operational manager of HMP Whitemoor.

'My head space would have been completely different.'

Mr Machin rejected Mr Armstrong's suggestion that Khan being an example of a 'good news story' for rehabilitation had effectively 'blunt his antennae' of concern.

Mr Machin said: 'I didn't see it as a 'good news story'.

'I saw him being involved (with Learning Together) as good, it hadn't got to the point of a good news story.'

Mr Armstrong replied: 'The problem with a good news story is they're not always true.'

The inquest jury heard evidence from an event at Whitemoor prison, to which Khan as an ex-offender was invited, at which further evidence later emerged that Khan was planning an attack.

Mr Machin rejected Mr Armstrong's suggestion that Khan being an example of a 'good news story' for rehabilitation had effectively 'blunt his antennae' of concern. Pictured, a bag belonging to Khan

Mr Armstrong said: 'Khan told some of the prisoners he was going to do something. Are you aware of this?'

Mr Machin said he did an intelligence search but there was no similar evidence to corroborate this.

Mr Armstrong pressed Mr Machin on why intelligence about Khan - which inquest jurors previously heard suggested he was seeking 'a return to his old ways' - was not shared with Learning Together.

Mr Machin replied: 'One thing I will be taking back to work will be briefing non-intelligence agencies, what we can and can't share.'

Mr Armstrong said: 'There is momentum building with Khan and Learning Together, he's becoming a posterboy (for Learning Together), he's becoming a success story, but that bubble needs puncturing.

'This looks like a way of doing that. You don't ring up and say: just watch him.'

Learning Together co-founders previous rejected the suggestion that Khan was a 'posterboy' for them.

The inquest jury previously saw images of Khan wearing the coat - bought the day before, in a size larger than he would normally wear - at the Learning Together event. Pictured, the day he bought the coat

Georgina Butler, head of learning and skills at Whitemoor jail, was sitting with Mr Machin, Khan and Ms Jones at the Learning Together event at Fishmongers' Hall.

She told jurors she felt 'flustered and warm' because she had got lost and was late to the event so took her jacket off and flapped her blouse to cool down.

Ms Butler said she had asked after Khan's family and found him 'fairly chatty' but thought the fact he was wearing a bulky jacket was 'a bit peculiar'.

She said: 'I remember seeing Usman in a puffer jacket and thinking it a bit peculiar.

'Obviously a lot more comes to light when you reflect afterwards. I remember seeing a base layer top. I remember thinking he wore the wrong clothes, it looked too tight.'

The inquest jury previously saw images of Khan wearing the coat - bought the day before, in a size larger than he would normally wear - at the Learning Together event.

He took it off once, but wrapped it around his waist to further conceal the fake suicide belt, the court heard.

Jo Boulton, Usman Khan's offender supervision officer at HMP Whitemoor, told the inquests how Khan wanted to air some grievances of the limitations of being a category A, high-risk offender in January 2017.

She said: 'He was very upset because he couldn't call his mum without pre-booking it. I believe at Whitemoor you had to pre-book a week in advance.'

Khan killed two and injured three others before being chased and disarmed on nearby London Bridge by three men armed with a fire extinguisher and a narwhal tusk.

He was then killed by police.

The inquests continue.
A male employee has been injured after a bus tyre fell on him at a depot on the NSW Central Coast.

A NSW Ambulance spokesman said they were called around 7.20am on Thursday to reports a bus had fallen onto a man, aged in his 20s, at Empire Bay Drive in Kincumber.

However, a spokesman for the Westpac Rescue Helicopter later clarified a bus tyre had fallen on a man working at a bus depot.

The man was transported in the helicopter to John Hunter Hospital in a stable condition.

NSW Ambulance paramedics and the Helicopter Critical Care Medical Team have treated the 26-year-old male for lower limb and pelvic injuries after the bus tyre he was changing fell on his lower body, he said in a statement on Thursday.
Half a million enterprises in S China's Guangdong gain access to cloud services

09:47, April 29, 2021 By Chen Weiguang, Li Gang ( People's Daily

Photo shows a facial mask production line of BYD. (Photo from the official account of BYD of Chinas Twitter-like Sina Weibo)

In South China's Guangdong Province, more and more enterprises are hopping on the fast train of smart manufacturing. As of the end of March, over 15,000 industrial enterprises had started digital transformation through industrial internet, while more than 500,000 had embraced cloud services.

Last April, Guangdong-based manufacturer of electronic home appliances Galanz put into use the first phase of its Industry 4.0 base in Shunde District of Foshan, Guangdong Province, which is able to produce 11 million microwaves annually. With an precision of 0.1 millimeter, a microwave rolls off a production line every 6.7 seconds. The production process is digitally controlled by cloud services, and the company's annual microwave production increased by six million sets last year.

"Digital transformation helped us achieve higher efficiency, better quality and stronger competitiveness," said Liang Zhaoxian, president of Galanz.

The Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 proposed to promote in-depth integration of digital technology and real economy, so as to upgrade traditional industries, foster new business forms and models, and strengthen new drivers for economic development.

Under the guidance of the outline, Guangdong Province is going all out to make the manufacturing sector more digitalized, networked and intelligent. A batch of local manufacturers are working to become more advanced and innovative.

BYD, a Chinese automaker headquartered in Guangdong's Shenzhen, decided to manufacture facial masks at the end of January last year, so as to better meet people's demand amid COVID-19. In less than three months, it became the world's largest mask producer regarding the capacity of production.

"What guaranteed the transition were the massive digital and automatic production lines we had built," said Wang Chuanfu, president of BYD Company Limited.

Digital transformation is important for the auto industry, he told the People's Daily. After BYD's global design center established a new digital designing process, ideas, modeling and verification can all be adjusted by programs, he said, adding that the process used to take weeks and even months in the past.

"The key to digital transformation is in-depth reform and optimization of each production link, said Zhang Xiaoyi, chief information officer of Midea, the world's largest producer of major appliances based in Shunde, Guangdong.

With 5G and industrial internet, over 20 types of microwaves produced by the company are sharing one production line, which shortens delivery period by 56 percent, reduces channel inventory by 40 percent, and improves comprehensive efficiency by 28 percent, according to Zhang.

For medium, small and micro enterprises, Guangdong Province has introduced over 370 outstanding industrial internet platforms and relevant service providers to help them with digital transformation. It precisely matches brand owners, processing plants and raw material providers with respective resources, building a new industrial chain for traditional industrial clusters.

Plastic injection moulding is a 30-billion-yuan ($4.62 billion) industry in Jieyang, Guangdong Province. Over 2,500 enterprises in Jieyang are engaged in the business, 85 percent of which are family workshops. By piloting a collective digital transformation program for industrial clusters, Jieyang improved enterprises' production efficiency by 20 percent to 40 percent.

With similar approaches, Shunde's small appliance clusters integrated the whole industrial chain, helping 200 small enterprises shorten delivery period by 1/3, increase per capita output by 1/3 and reduce service staff by 1/3.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Professor Henrik Christesen and a mom to two children living with unexplained low blood sugar has united around research in the rare condition, leading to results that can change the future of children living with this condition all over the world.

A collaboration between experts and a Danish-based, global reaching patient organization has resulted in a groundbreaking medical publication, where guidelines are being presented on how to manage patients with unexplained low blood sugar.

Danielle Drachmann, founder of Ketotic Hypoglycemia International (KHI), spent years being dismissed by doctors due to the outdated perception that her children's dangerous low blood glucose (sugar) and high ketone levels were a normal variation.

Professor Henrik Christesen, Head of the Complex Hypoglycemia Center, Odense University Hospital, Denmark, could not identify the cause of the condition despite intense efforts, but recognized the severity of the children's condition and implemented strict monitoring and management guidelines to support the family.

Closing the gap: Uniting the patients and the experts

Henrik and Danielle shared frustrations due to the lack of knowledge of severe, unexplained ("idiopathic") ketotic hypoglycemia across the wider medical field.

This led Danielle to establish Ketotic Hypoglycemia International with Professor Christesen leading the Scientific Advisory Board.

The patient organization gathered leading experts from the fields of endocrinology and inborn errors of metabolism, uniting them with patient representatives from across the globe. The result is a shared publication in the international medical journal Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases.

Low blood sugar in children is not just normal

For the first time since the term idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia was coined in 1964, the the condition is now being divided in two, a physiological and a pathological (severe) form.

The key message is that pathological ketotic hypoglycemia of unknown cause is more than normal variation in small children. Pathological ketotic hypoglycemia should be diagnosed and treated as any other disease, according to the authors.

"The problem is that an old perception of ketotic hypoglycemia just being a normal variation of childhood has kept children from getting the medical investigations and help they need. The medical textbooks must be rewritten" Professor Christesen states.

Parents and experts are excited

With this paper, the severity-range of the condition has been recognized and family members are labeling the news of the upcoming paper as life changing;

"Multiple seizures and ER visits, and we are still being told that this is normal for children. The news of the paper gives me hope that Ketotic Hypoglycemia International has started a revolution. Hope for my child's future and hope that our voices are finally going to be heard," proclaims Victoria, a KHI group member from the United States.

Hypoglycemia expert Dr. David Weinstein, the former director of the Glycogen Storage Disease Program in the US and co-author of the paper, states;

"These children deserve to get answers and they deserve proper treatment. My one regret is that I never was able to get the medical field to take ketotic hypoglycemia seriously."

Be a part of the revolution

Ketotic hypoglycemia is placed somewhere between the two expert fields, pediatric endocrinology and inborn metabolic diseases, as a real orphan disease. The new patient organization has succeeded in bringing experts from the two different medical fields together in this publication.

On top of giving guidelines for diagnosis and treatment, the new patient organization, Ketotic Hypoglycemia International, is presented in the paper.

The organization urges all medical professionals to increase their knowledge and improve their clinical practice by reading this crucial publication about ketotic hypoglycemia,

The organization aims to help this misunderstood patient-group gain access to critical medical supplies, referrals to specialist providers and finally receive the professional validation that their symptoms warrant a full investigation.

"It's been a fantastic journey from feeling alone with two untreated children to become recognized together with hundreds of other families as having a real disease that deserves treatment", first author Danielle Drachmann says.

Facts about ketotic hypoglycemia

In ketotic hypoglycemia, the glucose metabolism works poorly, which is why the body switches to fat burning more quickly. The poor glucose metabolism results in low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) and the increased fat metabolism results in ketone bodies such as acetone. A patient can therefore directly smell of acetone if he or she has an attack of ketotic hypoglycemia. Both sugar and fat burning are enzymatic processes controlled by a number of hormones. In order to have unexplained (idiopathic) ketotic hypoglycemia, a number of enzyme defects in cell metabolism and a number of hormonal diseases must be ruled out. However, an explanation can be found in some of the patients if the cases are being investigated thoroughly, including major genetic analysis packages.

Over the past ten years, Henrik Christesen has met about 100 children with ketotic hypoglycemia and 15 parents who also had the condition in adulthood. Based on the new research, he estimates that 150 new children and adults annually need medical investigation due to hypoglycemia in Denmark alone.

###

Facts

For more information on ketotic hypoglycemia, see educational materials for both healthcare professionals and families on Ketotic Hypoglycemia International's YouTube channel: https:/ / m. youtube. com/ channel/ UCOKK0J3HarsfX_MdFN6vC3w

The Patient Organization can be found here: http://ketotichypoglycemia. org

Read the scientific article "Towards enhanced understanding of idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia: A literature review and introduction to the patient organization, Ketotic Hypoglycemia International" here: Towards enhanced understanding of idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia: a literature review and introduction of the patient organization, Ketotic Hypoglycemia International | Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases | Full Text (biomedcentral.com)

For further information or request for collaboration, please contact Danielle Drachmann at danielle.drachmann@ketotichypoglycemia.org and / or Professor Henrik Christesen at henrik.christesen@rsyd.dk
Despite the lightning speed development of the covid-19 vaccines, the US got off to a slow start rolling out its vaccination program. Now 100 days into the Biden administration the US has administered over 200 million doses of covid-19 vaccine.

Even though nearly 30 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated the nation still has a long way to go to reach herd immunity. Those that are unvaccinated can still potentially be the source of a new outbreak as restrictions are eased. To counter this, ensure the safety of the population and to return to normal covid-19 vaccination passports have been put forth as a way people can gather and travel. But not everyone is convinced and there has even been backlash to the idea.

What are covid-19 vaccination passports?

Many countries have begun to implement or are considering using covid-19 vaccination passports to allow people to enjoy a more normal life and freedom of movement in very abnormal times. A covid-19 passport can be a paper or digital certification that someone has received the covid-19 vaccine or that they have tested negative for the virus recently.

Some countries are already using them for domestic travel and may require them for international travelers. In addition, people carrying the vaccine passport could gain access to certain venues to attend sporting events, concerts or just to dine out. The LA Dodgers have designated two sections of its stadium for fully vaccinated attendees who won't have to maintain social distancing starting Saturday.

What covid-19 passports are used in the US?

So far, just one state has implemented the use of a covid-19 passport. New York unveiled its Excelsior Pass last month that allows businesses to check if people attending events are vaccinated or have a negative covid-19 test within a certain time frame. Using the pass is voluntary but businesses may require customers to present some proof of vaccination to gain access to an event.

Hawaii announced that it will be using a digital covid-19 pass to skip pre-travel testing and quarantine requirements for flights between islands, starting 11 May. However, the lifting of travel restrictions for fully vaccinated people will not apply to trans-Pacific travelers at this time, but officials are working on expanding the scheme.

One other state is looking into the possibility of using some form of covid-19 vaccination passport. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker thinks the vaccine app would be useful but thinks that it should be voluntary.

At least 17 private businesses and nonprofits are developing technology that may be used by businesses and venues to ensure the safety of staff and customers through vaccination passports according to the New York Times. One of those is The Commons Project which is working with airlines to test their CommonPass. Speaking to the paper Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet said On the face of things, requiring proof of vaccination seems a lot like, No shoes, no shirt, no service.

Will covid-19 passports be mandatory?

Those that support the use of vaccine passports want the White House to be part of the process, to set privacy standards and verify accuracy of the records. However, the press secretary Jen Psaki stated earlier this month The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential. There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.

Like so many other issues the topic has become another hot-button topic in these politically divisive times and caused backlash in some quarters. Eleven states have already banned or their governors have expressed opposition to the use of digital verification of vaccination.

The governors in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Texas have all signed executive orders prohibiting the use of covid-19 passports. While in Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee their state governors have expressed opposition to the use of any verification system. Utah passed a law blocking the state government from requiring people to get the covid-19 vaccine and use vaccine passports.
New Delhi:

Nearly a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation, the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bills returned to banks are still being processed in all earnest through a sophisticated currency verification system, the RBI has said.

In reply to an RTI query, the central bank said it has processed about 1,134 crore pieces of Rs 500 notes and 524.90 crore pieces of Rs 1,000 junked notes, having face value of Rs 5.67 lakh crore and Rs 5.24 lakh crore respectively, as on September 30.

The combined value of the processed notes is Rs 10.91 lakh crore approximately, according to the reply.

Specified Bank Notes are being processed in all earnest in double shift on all available machines (sophisticated counting machines), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in reply to the RTI query filed by a PTI correspondent.

The central bank was asked to provide details of demonetised notes counted so far.

Replying to a question on providing the deadline for completing the counting exercise, it said, The verification of notes withdrawn from the circulation is an ongoing process.

The RBI said at least 66 Sophisticated Currency Verification and Processing (CVPS) machines were being used for counting of junked Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were deposited with various banks post demonetisation.

The government had on November 8 last year banned the use of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and allowed the holders of these currency bills to deposit them with banks or use them at certain notified utilities.

The notes deposited or collected are being verified by the central bank at its offices to establish the total number of currency bills returned and to weed out those that are fake.

Several opposition parties including the Congress and Mamata Banerjees TMC have announced that they would observe November 8, the first anniversary of demonetisation, as Black Day and would hold protests across the country to highlight its ill-effects on the economy.

To counter the opposition protest, the ruling BJP has decided to observe the note ban anniversary as anti-blackmoney day.

In its annual report for 2016-17 released on August 30, the RBI had said Rs 15.28 lakh crore, or 99 per cent of the demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, have returned to the banking system.

In the annual report, which was for the year ended June 30, 2017, the central bank said only Rs 16,050 crore out of the Rs 15.44 lakh crore in old high-denomination notes have not returned.

As on November 8, 2016, there were 1,716.5 crore pieces of Rs 500 and 685.8 crore pieces of Rs 1,000 notes in circulation, totalling Rs 15.44 lakh crore, it had said.

Subject to future corrections based on verification process when completed, the estimated value of specified bank notes received as on June 30, 2017, is Rs 15.28 trillion, RBI had said in the report.

While the counterfeit currency notes made for a minuscule number, RBI post-demonetisation spent Rs 7,965 crore on printing new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 bills and notes of other denominations, more than double the Rs 3,421 crore spent in the previous year, it said.

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When President Joe Biden makes his first address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday, it will look a lot different than speeches made by his predecessors.

The address, which technically is not called the State of the Union, will be the first time a U.S. president speaks to both houses of Congress since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as former President Donald Trump delivered his last State of the Union on Feb. 4, 2020.

COVID-19 precautions are the main reason why Biden's speech will come near his 100th day in office after receiving the invitation to do so from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on April 13. It will be the first time a president will do the annual address in the month of April and the latest in the year since former President Calvin Coolidge in December 1923.

Social distancing guidelines mean only 200 people will be allowed in the House chambers instead of the 1,400 people allowed in past years. Five guests will be invited virtually, breaking the tradition of people sitting alongside the first lady in her viewing box. Six guests were invited by the Trumps in 2017 and 11 in 2020.

President Joe Biden arrives to address a joint session of Congress, Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

All people inside the chamber will be required to wear masks, and Biden will be masked as he makes the traditional walk down the center aisle to the rostrum but will take his mask off during his speech.

History will be made once Biden begins his speech as he will have two women behind him  Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris. Pelosi became the first woman to sit behind the podium in 2007 during former President George W. Bush's address.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (right) during former President George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2017.

In wake of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, Bidens address has been designated a National Special Security Event, meaning the Secret Service will oversee much of the planning. The Department of Defense, U.S. Capitol Police and other area law enforcement will also provide security to the event.

Military personal and Capitol Hill Police department stage outside the US Capitol before U.S. President Joe Biden will address a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol.

Since some members of Congress and the Supreme Court will not be present or seated in the House gallery for the address, there will be no "designated survivor" assigned for the event.

Story continues

Done in the event a major catastrophe kills the people in the House chambers, former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was assigned the role in 2020.

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jord_mendoza.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Differences in Joe Biden's speech and past presidential address
North Augusta, SC (29841)

Today

Cloudy with showers. Thunder possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Cloudy with showers. Thunder possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
US President Joe Biden didnt try to cast blame on Turkey when he talked about the Armenian Genocide committed in the Ottoman Empire. This is what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during an online meeting with foreign journalists, TASS reports.

According to him, the events of the last days of the Ottoman Empire were in the focus of the US government.

Blinken stated that Biden presented his longstanding views in a statement that the White House issued on his behalf, stating that the incumbent US President recognized the Armenian Genocide committed in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Blinken said Biden had had a long talk with President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the two presidents cant wait for the opportunity to meet, adding that Turkey is a key NATO ally of the United States.

The Secretary of State declared that the US will continue to maintain its strong ties with Turkey.
In this June 19, 1969 file photo, Apollo 11 command module pilot astronaut Michael Collins takes a break during training for the moon mission, in Cape Kennedy, Fla., AP-Yonhap



American astronaut Michael Collins, who as pilot of the Apollo 11 command module stayed behind on July 20, 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traveled to the lunar surface to become the first humans to walk on the moon, died on Wednesday at age 90, his family said.



A statement released by his family said Collins died of cancer.



Often described as the "forgotten" third astronaut on the historic mission, Collins remained alone in the command module for more than 21 hours until his two fellow astronauts returned in the lunar module. He lost contact with mission control in Houston each time the spacecraft circled the dark side of the moon.



"Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins," the mission log said, referring to the biblical figure.



Collins wrote an account of his experiences in his 1974 autobiography, "Carrying the Fire," but largely shunned publicity.



"I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have," Collins said in comments released by NASA in 2009.



President Joe Biden said his prayers were with the Collins family.



"From his vantage point, high above the Earth, he reminded us of the fragility of our own planet, and called on us to care for it like the treasure it is," Biden said in a statement. "Godspeed, Mike."

Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk on Wednesday hailed Collins as "a true pioneer."



"NASA mourns the loss of this accomplished pilot and astronaut, a friend of all who seek to push the envelope of human potential. ... His spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons," Jurczyk said in a statement.



Writing on Twitter, Aldrin paid tribute to Collins, saying: "Dear Mike, Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the Fire to Carry us deftly to new heights and to the future."





This NASA photo taken in July 1969 shows U.S. astronaut Michael Collins, part of the Apollo 11 where he served as the command module pilot. AFP-Yonhap
Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy reviewing the implementation of several schemes with ministers and senior officials at his Camp Office. (Photo: Twitter @AndhraPradeshCM)

Vijayawada: The Andhra Pradesh government has decided to launch Clean Andhra Pradesh-Jagananna Swachh Sankalp on July 8 to mark the birth anniversary of late chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy.

Reviewing the implementation of several schemes with ministers and senior officials at his Camp Office here on Thursday, Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy directed officials to take up sanitation works in urban and rural areas and instructed them to take steps to prevent the stagnation of drain water in villages, especially in slum areas, under the Jagananna Swach Sankalp scheme.

He suggested the slogan: Let us clean our village on our own for the governments sanitation works.

The Chief Minister instructed the officials to accord top priority on maintenance of sanitation, supply of drinking water and installation of street lights even by spending a good amount of money and called for roping in municipalities and panchayat raj for sanitation works in both the rural and urban areas. He also asked the officials to avoid any deficiency in service with regard to collection of garbage and other services.

He felt the need to divert the domestic sewage to treatment plants and called for preparation of standard operating procedures on handling solid waste. He also directed the authorities to provide vaccination, uniforms, gloves, masks and other requirements to the sanitation staff in every municipality and gram panchayats.

The officials, meanwhile, informed the Chief Minister that they were going to take up the sanitation drive in the villages for 100 days from May 1 onwards in the state.

Under the YSR Jala Kala programme, it was decided to drill two lakh borewells all over the state and to provide 1.5 lakh pump sets to the small and marginal farmers. This step is expected to benefit three lakh farmers and nearly five lakh acres of land to get water for cultivation of crops.

The CM instructed the officials to come up with SOP on installation of borewell for the benefit of the farmers and said that the farmer should be informed on the date of installation of the borewells in addition to fixing power connection and pump set within one month after finding water in the borewell. He issued a target to drill 20,000 borewells in each Assembly segment per month.

Under Jal Jeevan Mission, the CM directed the officials to pay attention on the source of water, storage and supply so that the JJM could be implemented in the Jagananna Colonies successfully.

He said that as the water consumption in the summer could be more, he instructed the officials to prepare proper plans. He directed the officials to come up with a protocol on periodical cleaning of water tanks in the villages.

The CM also asked the officials to come up with an action plan on installation of four lakh LED bulbs in the state as their usage was helping to save nearly Rs 160 cr per annum.
Biden Says He Learned of FBI Search of Giulianis Home After It Happened

President Joe Biden said Thursday that he learned about the search of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giulianis home after it happened and wasnt given advance notice.

I made a pledge I would not interfere in any way, order or try to stop any investigation the Justice Department had underway, Biden told NBC News.

The president said he was not briefed on any investigation into Giuliani, who had also served as former President Donald Trumps personal attorney.

I learned about that last night when the rest of the world learned about it. My word. I had no idea this was underway, he said.

Federal prosecutors executed a search warrant at Giulianis apartment in New York City on Wednesday before federal investigators confiscated several smartphones, electronic devices, and phones, the former mayors lawyer said, adding that the equipment contains privileged attorney-client information.

The search warrants involve only one indication of an alleged incident of failure to register as a foreign agent, Giuliani lawyer Robert Costello said in a statement Wednesday.

Mayor Giuliani has not only denied this allegation, but offered twice in the past two years through his attorney Bob Costello to demonstrate that it is entirely untrue, he said in the statement. Twice the offer was rejected by the SDNY by stating that while they were willing to listen to anything Mr. Costello had to say, they would not tell Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Costello, the subject matter they wanted him to address.

Speaking to NPR, Costello separately said the FBI search was connected to possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act linked to Giulianis work in Ukraine. Giuliani went to the Eastern European country in 2019 as part of an effort to make a documentary TV series about Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who had previously sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, that has long been accused of corruption.

The actions of Giuliani, also a former prosecutor, became a side-note in the first impeachment effort against Trump. House Democrats and some impeachment witnesses alleged that Giuliani attempted to push out a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, which both Trump and Giuliani have denied. Trump was ultimately acquitted in the Senate.

Costello added that the Justice Department targeted Giuliani due to politically motivated reasons.

It is outrageous that the Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone so far that hatred has driven this unjustified and unethical attack on the United States Attorney and Mayor who did more to reduce crime than virtually any other in American history, his statement said.

Meanwhile, FBI agents also showed up at the home of Victoria Toensing, who had worked with Giuliani and Trump, according to her law firm.

She would have been happy to turn over any relevant documents. All they had to do was ask. Ms. Toensing was informed that she is not a target of the investigation, a spokesperson for her law firm told several news outlets on Wednesday.

The Epoch Times has contacted both Giulianis office and the FBI for comment.
The reforms included in Senate Bill 90 have received broad support from Florida voters because they understand that a secure, transparent election process is vital to the success of our democracy, said Tarren Bragdon, CEO of the Opportunity Solutions Project.

Yesterday, the Florida House passed election reforms in Senate Bill 90, which now heads to the governors desk. The legislation, introduced by Senator Dennis Baxley and Representative Blaise Ingoglia, takes significant steps toward securing Florida elections and includes provisions that prevent ballot harvesting, secure ballot drop boxes, and create a more transparent and accountable election process.

The Opportunity Solutions Project (OSP) applauds the Florida legislatures efforts to provide Americans with secure, transparent elections by implementing reforms that many Florida voters support. Florida's legislation is part of a growing national focus on restoring trust in the democratic process, as states move to prevent tampering with absentee ballots and prohibit voter manipulation through private funding of local elections.

The reforms included in Senate Bill 90 have received broad support from Florida voters because they understand that a secure, transparent election process is vital to the success of our democracy, said Tarren Bragdon, CEO of the Opportunity Solutions Project. By passing this law, the Florida legislature has seized its opportunity to strengthen election integrity with commonsense reformsmaking it easier to vote and harder to cheat in the Sunshine State.

The Opportunity Solutions Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization that specializes in health care, welfare, work reform, and election reform.
Bujumbura, Burundi (PANA) - Burundi has recorded 96 new cases of coronavirus, 93 of which were notified by seven of the country's 47 health districts, against three imported from neighbouring Tanzania, out of a sample of 2,493 tests carried out over the last 48 hours, the Ministry of Health said on Thursday
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  The national government is finalizing details of the clinical trial on the antiparasitic drug ivermectin since there is still no evidence it is effective against COVID-19.

Dr. Jaime Montoya, chief of the Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (DOST-PCHRD), said they are targeting to start the trial by end of May or first week of June.

Over 1,200 mild to moderate COVID-19 patients undergoing isolation in quarantine facilities could participate in the trial, but the number could eventually go up. The clinical trial - personally ordered by President Rodrigo Duterte - could run for six months or less, but it should be completed before yearend.

The DOST eyes recruiting patients in Metro Manila, the epicenter of the local coronavirus outbreak.

Montoya said it is important to conduct this trial since there is still no solid evidence to show ivermectin is effective in treating patients with mild to moderate symptoms.

"Kung sufficient ang evidence, bakit kami gagawa ng trial? [If the evidence is sufficient, why will we conduct a trial?]" he told a media briefing hosted by the Department of Health.

Dr. Marissa Alejandria, president of the Philippine Society for Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, reiterated the recent findings of fellow Filipino experts that there is insufficient evidence for now to recommend or prohibit the use of ivermectin.

The Living Clinical Practice Guidelines, crafted by health experts alongside the DOH and the Food and Drug Administration, also suggested against the use of ivermectin for severe and critical patients. They also advised against the use of ivermectin combined with doxycycline for COVID-19.

"What we are saying is that there is still insufficient evidence to give it to the general population. You can. But you have to explain. We are not preventing," Alejandria said. "When there is insufficient evidence, it means you may or may not use the drug. But it is your responsibility to explain to the patient the status of the evidence."

Alejandria added they are hoping the upcoming trial in the Philippines can provide more clarity on the effectivity of ivermectin against COVID-19. Montoya also said they can forward the results of the trial to the FDA so the ageny can be guided on issuing regulatory decisions.

The FDA, DOH, and several health experts, including the World Health Organization, have cautioned the public against using ivermectin for COVID-19 prevention or treatment.

Experts said there is not enough proof the drug can be used to treat or prevent COVID-19. They also warned high doses could cause brain damage in humans, or even death.

FDA Director General Eric Domingo, however, is not against personalities holding events giving away ivermectin. He said it is legal as long as a doctor will check the recipients before issuing a prescription. He said a compassionate special permit is unnecessary if the medicines will come from licensed compounding pharmacies.

CNN Philippines correspondent Carolyn Bonquin contributed to this report
Houston nurse and DACA recipient Javier Quiroz Castro said he shared his story as a guest of first lady Jill Biden at Wednesdays presidential address to show the contributions immigrants bring to America.

I hope people related to my story and to the American dream, he said. I hope they see that, despite many challenges and barriers, Ive been able to get this far.

Quiroz Castro, a nurse in the COVID-19 unit at Houston Methodist West Hospital, was one of five guests the first lady chose to virtually attend President Joe Bidens first address to a joint session of Congress. Traditionally, first ladies invite guests to join them in their viewing box for presidential speeches to Congress. They usually represent policy issues highlighted by the president.

In lieu of attending the speech in person due to COVID-19 safety measures, a virtual reception was held Wednesday afternoon. Quiroz Castro shared his story of living in the U.S. without citizenship and finding his passion in medicine.

Growing up undocumented was extremely challenging, he said on a livestream of the reception. But I was blessed with hard-working parents...who have been successful despite the challenges.

Quiroz Castro said he was shocked but humbled to have an opportunity to share his story with the world as the first ladys guest.

I genuinely feel a responsibility to represent immigrants in general, but especially DACA recipients, he said.  Despite the rhetoric of the previous administration, Im a real person literally out here trying to make a difference for my community everyday.

Quiroz Castros parents brought him to the U.S. from San Luis Potosi, Mexico when he was 3 to escape poverty. He grew up in Nashville, Tenn. where his mother sold food out of her car to construction workers and his father laid bricks.

The only one of four children without U.S. citizenship, Quiroz Castro said he didnt realize he wasnt a citizen until he couldnt get a drivers license or travel abroad.

Quiroz Castro graduated from Lipscomb University in Nashville in nursing in May 2013. He still couldnt take the nursing licensing exam or legally work.

But right before Quiroz Castro was set to take the exam in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy was established by President Barack Obama.

In September 2017, President Donald Trump ended DACA. Quiroz Castro wrote about how a June 2020 Supreme Court decision could have upended his life as well as the lives of 62,000 other healthcare workers who are DACA recipients. But in a 5-4 vote, the court blocked the Trump administration from ending the program.

With Biden as president, theres a huge sense of relief, said Quiroz Castro. But permanent legislation is needed so another administration cant come in and dismantle the executive order.

Living life in the two-year increments DACA affords, is exhausting, the nurse said. Without permanent citizenship, he still fears he may be deported and leave behind his wife and 2-year-old child.

Like many immigrants, Quiroz Castro said hes made sacrifices to serve his community. The COVID unit nurse said he contracted the virus last year, as did his wife -- also a nurse -- and their infant.

As soon we felt good again, we came right back and started taking care COVID patients again, said Quiroz Castro.

The nurse said he and countless other immigrants have earned their right to permanent citizenship.

This is my home, he said. This is home to us and were valuable people that can help lift America up.

hannah.dellinger@chron.com
On the eastern side of Mt Baw Baw stand a group of some of the largest and oldest trees in Australia.

They include the 57-metre tall Whitelaw tree, an Errinundra shining gum that is the fifth largest tree (by volume) on the mainland.

The Whitelaw tree and surrounding forest.

Soon, three areas of forest very close to these giant trees will be logged by state government logging agency VicForests, and conservationists fear these changes  particularly the increase in wind  will be enough to damage or kill the old trees.

In an urgent letter to Environment Minister Lily DAmbrosio, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and the Victorian National Parks Association have urged her to prevent any work in these three logging coupes to protect the trees, saying these living giants are our shared heritage to care for and hand on to future generations.
MADRID - Norbert Feher, nicknamed 'Igor the Russian', was convicted to life in jail in Spain - a life term that could be suspended under certain conditions after 30 years - over one of three murders for which he has been found guilty. The murder was committed in 2017 in Aragon. The judge also sentenced him to 25 years for each one of an additional two murders he committed.



Last week, Feher was found guilty by a popular jury of the murders of breeder Jose Luis Iranzo and Guardia Civil officers Victor Romero and Victor Jesus Caballero. Prosecutors had requested the harshest sentence in all three cases but defense attorneys claimed that the last two murders were committed in self-defense.



The criminal of Serbian origin had been in prison since 2017, when he was arrested after sowing panic for days in the Aragon province of Teruel, in eastern Spain. He had reached the area after fleeing a massive manhunt launched by Italian security officials in the countryside of the central Emilia Romagna region, where he had committed another two murders a few months before for which he has been sentenced to life by an appeals court.
OTTAWA, TRADITIONAL UNCEDED ALGONQUIN TERRITORY, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) is closely monitoring the number of COVID-19 cases reported in First Nations communities across the country.

As we mark National Immunization Awareness Week (NIAW) 2021, it is a reminder of the importance of vaccines to protect people against disease. This year during NIAW, talk to your family and friends about the importance of getting the COVID-19 vaccine and of keeping up to date with other routine vaccinations. Vaccines protect youand othersfrom serious vaccine-preventable diseases, as well as help reduce the burden on Canada's health care system.

While COVID-19 vaccines roll out across the country, we must also continue to follow public health measures to keep our loved ones, our communities and ourselves safe. This includes minimizing in-person interactions with people outside your immediate household, avoiding crowded places, wearing a mask and washing your hands frequently.

In First Nations communities, as of April 28, ISC is aware of

27,059 confirmed positive COVID-19

723 active cases

26,024 recovered cases

312 deaths.

There is one active case in Nunavik, Quebec. As of April 28, the Government of Nunavut is reporting 50 active cases of COVID-19 in Iqaluit, Kinngait and Rankin Inlet. Canada is committed to supporting Nunavut during this latest outbreak.

As of April 26, 2021, more than 14.4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been distributed across the country. As of April 27, 366,418 vaccine doses have been administered in 661 First Nations, Inuit and territorial communities. Based on Statistics Canada's 2020 population projections, over 59% of adults in First Nations communities, as well as over 72% of adults living in the territories, have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

There are many examples of success across the country as vaccines continue to be rolled out. In Quebec, all First Nations communities have started mass vaccination. Kahnawake community completed its mass vaccination campaign last week. Overall, 74% of eligible community members have been vaccinated at the mass clinic.

In Alberta, vaccination is also underway in all First Nations communities. As of April 27, 52.7% of the population aged 18 and older living on reserve has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, at a rate that is over twice that of Albertas (as of April 17), and 21.9% has been fully vaccinated, based on Statistics Canada 2020 population projections. Indigenous leaders in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo continue to demonstrate leadership and are working diligently on the vaccination rollout and uptake. Vaccine availability has increased, and eligibility has expanded for residents of the Wood Buffalo Region in response to the significant rise in COVID-19 cases. It is encouraging to see the support and partnerships in the vaccination rollout. Despite a recent surge in cases in Alberta, active cases among First Nations communities on reserve remain relatively low, with a total of 223 active cases.

Urban vaccine planning continues to be a priority across the country. A two-day pop-up vaccination clinic for Indigenous Peoples was set up last weekend at the N'Amerind Friendship Centre in London, Ontario. In addition, a clinic for urban Indigenous Peoples opened in Calgary, Alberta on April 21. This is the second clinic run by a coalition of Indigenous-led organizations to open in the city. The Metis NationSaskatchewan (MNS) also launched its "Vaccinated Metis Strong" campaign on Friday, partnering with the Saskatchewan Health Authority to hold a pop-up COVID-19 vaccination clinic at the new downtown MNS building in Saskatoon.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) also continue to assist vaccination teams with the accelerated pace of immunization in a number of on-reserve Indigenous communities in Northern Manitoba. So far, the CAF has assisted 11 communities. Last week, the CAF, alongside community healthcare professionals, assisted with vaccination clinics and community outreach in Barren Lands First Nation, O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation and Northlands Denesuline First Nation. This week, the CAF will plan for the delivery of second-dose clinics.

Since late January 2021, CAF has been assisting provincial vaccination authorities with tasks associated with vaccine administration in more than 25 communities of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in Northern Ontario. This week, the CAF will be assisting Wunnumin and Pikangikum First Nation communities with the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Associated links

Stay connected

Join the conversation about Indigenous Peoples in Canada:

Twitter: @GCIndigenous

Facebook: @GCIndigenous

Instagram: @gcindigenous

Facebook: @GCIndigenousHealth

Twitter: @Min_IndServ

You can subscribe to receive our news releases and speeches via RSS feeds. For more information or to subscribe, visit www.isc.gc.ca/RSS.

SOURCE Indigenous Services Canada

For further information: For more information, media may contact: Adrienne Vaupshas, Press Secretary, Office of the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Indigenous Services, [email protected]; Media Relations, Indigenous Services Canada, 819-953-1160, [email protected]

Related Links

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A Russian frigate narrowly avoided striking itself with its own cruise missile in a weapons test gone wrong, a video has shown.

The failed Kalibr cruise missile left the warship's launcher, rose and rotated alarmingly before crashing into the pacific ocean, it is claimed.

The failed missile posed a major threat to the newly renovated Marshal Shaposhnikov frigate as it hit the water, with flames visible on the surface.

Scroll down for video

A Russian frigate has narrowly avoided striking itself with a cruise missile in a weapons test gone wrong (pictured)

A voice of the officer making the film from the air is heard in a video of the incident saying 'Look, the sea is burning'.

Eventually the Kalibr missile burned out in the Pacific Ocean, as the warship sped away from the site of the crash.

The missile was conventional - but this frigate is destined to carry Vladimir Putin's 6,100 mph 'unstoppable' Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic missile still undergoing tests.

The weapon - reportedly a Kremlin favourite - is designed to destroy Western cities in the event of a nuclear war.

The timing of the Kalibr incident is not clear, and the Russian navy has not admitted to the accident.

The video was uploaded to a Russian site showing the failed launch.

In the video, the missile is seen launching from the ship, but within moments spins out of control before pointing dangerously back towards the vessel.

Fortunately for the crew, the missile appears to break up-mid and falls in multiple pieces down into the sea, yards away from the frigate.

But a few seconds after the missile vanishes below the water, some large flashes are shown beneath the surface, and the water is shown bubbling from the heat.

It is unclear what could have happened had the missile fallen back onto the warship, but from the video it looks like the ship was a matter of yards from disaster.

Pictured: The Kalibr missile is launched from renovated Marshal Shaposhnikov frigate. The warship has been retrofitted to be capable of launching Putin's new 'Zircon' missile

Moments after the missile was launched from the ship, it began to spin dangerously in the air above the vessel, pointing back down towards the Marshal Shaposhnikov

The Russian website commented: 'The rocket left the vertical launcher, rose to a height of several tens of meters, but was unable to go to hit the target. A vertical movement with rotation began.

'Then there was a flash, and the rocket, falling apart, began to fall into the water.

'After falling into the water, a stain remained on the sea surface, burning continued, and flashes were visible.

'The ship departed from the place where the rocket fell.'

The incident was revealed by Topwar the day after the navy announced that the Marshal Shaposhnikov had rejoined the standby forces of the Pacific Fleet after repairs and upgrade.

At the time an official video was released showing a successful Kalibr launch from the warship.

A spokesman was this week quoted by TASS as saying: 'At sea, the warship proved the compliance of its manoeuvrable and speed capabilities and demonstrated the reliable operation of its systems and mechanisms, navigation and radio-technical equipment'.

As the missile span in the air, it appeared to break up over the ship, with a flash of fire seen near the apex of the missile's trajectory

Fortunately for the crew, the missile appeared to break up-mid and falls in multiple pieces down into the sea, yards away from the frigate

The report said that the frigate in 'combat training' had test-fired Kalibr cruise missiles against sea and aerial targets'.

It also 'attacked a notional enemy's submarine with torpedoes and depth charges, struck an air target with Kinzhal surface-to-air missiles and practiced electronic warfare measures'.

The warship 'received the latest Kalibr-NK and Uran strike missile systems and the most advanced artillery armament.

'Its firepower increased several-fold compared to its original designation.

'The warship currently carries two versatile shipborne launchers for 16 Kalibr-NK and Oniks cruise missiles and eventually for Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic weapons.'

But a few seconds after the missile vanishes below the water, some large flashes are shown beneath the surface, and the water is shown bubbling from the heat

It is unclear what could have happened had the missile fallen back onto the warship, but it could have been a very different story

Putin sees the 'truly unparalled' Mach 8 Zircon as his missile of choice to target American cities in the event of a nuclear conflict, it is claimed.

Dmitry Kiselyov, presenter of Russia's main weekly TV news show Vesti Nedeli, previously showed on screen a map of the US identifying targets he claimed the Kremlin would want to hit in a nuclear war.

Kiselyov, seen as a top Putin propagandist, said the Zircon missile could hit the targets in less than five minutes.

Putin has claimed that the West was seeking to steal secrets relating to Zircon and other state-of-the-art Russian weapons such as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle.

Trials of the Zircon missile are planned to be finished in 2021, while mass production of the new weapon is expected to commence in 2022.

The first Zircon test launch of the missile from the Gorshkov was staged in early October 2020 and seen as a 68th birthday present for Putin.

More test launches followed in November and December.

A radiation leak during a military accident which killed two people and wounded six in 2019 was thought to have taken place during testing on the missile.
[April 29, 2021] NicoKick Statement on Biden Administration Ban on Menthol Cigarettes

WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NicoKick, the world's leading e-commerce company in the smokeless industry, today released the following statement in response to the Biden administration's ban on menthol cigarettes. "The Federal government should be focused on following the science and promoting access to harm reduction products rather than implementing a ban on one category of cigarettes," said Markus Lindblad, Head of External Affairs at NicoKick's parent company, the Haypp Group. "President Biden and his administration have a duty to inorm consumers on where they can find safer products, like nicotine pouches, gum, and mints. Otherwise, adult users will not quit smoking and public health will continue to be at risk. We encourage the Biden Administration to focus on expanding access to harm reduction products to help users transition away from cigarettes once and for all."



About NicoKick: NicoKick is the world's leading e-commerce company in the smokeless industry, with customers in 34 countries. As users move away from traditional tobacco products toward healthier smokeless options, NicoKick's sales have continued to surge over the past two years throughout the country. The site is quickly becoming a one-stop shop for consumers interested in learning more about and purchasing smokeless tobacco products. To learn more about NicoKick, visit the website at: https://nicokick.com/learn-more.

### View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nicokick-statement-on-biden-administration-ban-on-menthol-cigarettes-301280651.html SOURCE NicoKick

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal will remain under a modified enhanced community quarantine for the first two weeks of May, with some "flexible" protocols that will be introduced. But how will this be different from the usual lockdown rules?

Citing initial recommendations from Cabinet secretaries and mayors, Metro Manila Development Authority chairman Benhur Abalos told CNN Philippines' The Source on Thursday the potential scenarios involving businesses and activities in MECQ areas from May 1 to 14. These are still subject to change pending the official list that will be issued by the Trade Department.

READ: MECQ extended in Metro Manila, other areas until May 14

"The premise here is these activities must not contribute to the spread of the virus," said Abalos, noting that more outdoor activities will be encouraged.

Al fresco dining will be largely promoted within localities, Abalos said.

"We can ask the LGUs. Sa Mandaluyong we identified certain areas along Pasig River na baka tulungan ang aming restaurants, ibibigay namin sa kanila for the meantime na pwedeng al fresco dining dahil meron silang samahan ng mga restaurants. Baka makatulong din," he shared.

[Translation: We can ask the LGUs. In Mandaluyong, we identified certain areas along Pasig River which could help our restaurants, for the meantime we are hoping to allow al fresco dining especially since they have an organization of restaurants there. This might help.]

Abalos said indoor dining will likely be reduced to 10% or 20% of capacity, with stricter protocols to be imposed by health experts. But Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque stressed in his noontime briefing that indoor dine-ins are still prohibited for now. The government has yet to issue its latest guidelines on this for next month.

Citing a recommendation by Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez, Abalos added that restaurants will be encouraged to display a "seal of safety" to ensure people that these establishments follow health standards.

"Ang suggestion ni Sec. Ramon magkakaroon ka ng seal of safety. If you go to this restaurant and you see this seal of safety, kumakain ka eh, kung makita mong may seal of safety, kakain ka rito. These are some of the things that could be discussed."

[Translation: Sec. Ramon suggested to display a seal of safety. If you go to this restaurant and you see this seal of safety, you will be enticed to eat there. These are some of the things that could be discussed.]

Will personal care services open in MECQ areas? Abalos also brought up the recent proposal of Lopez to reopen salons, barbershops, and other personal care services, with over 200,000 workers in the Greater Manila area who are part of this sector.

The Trade Department is reopening these establishments at a 30% capacity, with some services that can potentially be done outdoors.

"Iniisip nila Sec. Mon, what if may strict protocol yung mga barbero o mga nagma-manicure, nasa outdoor din? Its being all considered here," he said.

[Translation: Sec. Mon is also considering implementing strict protocols, like for barbers, manicurists, can some activities be done outdoors? It's being all considered here.]

READ: Trade Secretary pushes for reopening of personal care services in MECQ areas

What has been established so far is the new unified curfew hours from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. in Metro Manila effective May 1.

"At least 'pag 10:00, flexible, hindi nagmamadali ang mga tao. Ang mga seswelduhin mo they could be paid for the full eight hours. It will give more working time to our workers and at the same time hindi nagmamadali at ang negosyo," Abalos added.

[Translation: At least if the curfew starts at 10:00, business operations are more flexible. People are not rushing. Your workers can be paid for the full eight hours. It will give more working time to our workers and at the same time, operations are not rushed.]

Travelers will still not be allowed to go beyond the NCR Plus bubble to contain virus transmission, he added.

Earlier this week, Metro Manila mayors first recommended a "flexible" MECQ over their cities, a middle ground which would primarily maintain border control and strict protocols while gradually opening some businesses.

"[The MECQ will be] flexible or hybrid. Its getting the best character of MECQ and GCQ  GCQ because there will be more business activities, and the best character ng MECQ because of stricter border protocols within the periphery of NCR Plus."

Roque said the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases will meet later in the day to finalize the list of businesses that will be allowed to operate under MECQ.
The boyfriend of a woman found shot to death in her vehicle has now been charged in her killing.

Bessemer police on Wednesday obtained a capital murder warrant against 26-year-old James Anthony Davis. He is charged in the Monday-night slaying of Shunquesha Dale Patton, 24.

Patton was found dead inside her wrecked vehicle at 11:02 p.m. Monday on Seventh Street South between Hall Avenue and McAdory Avenue. Officers were initially dispatched to the scene on a report of a crash, but then determined Patton had been shot. She was pronounced dead on the scene at 11:02 p.m.

Shunquesha Dale Patton (Contributed)

Chief Mike Roper said investigators believe Patton was driving the vehicle and Davis was in the vehicle with her. An argument broke out and Davis shot Patton, Roper said.

Davis then reportedly jumped out of the moving vehicle before it crashed. When police arrested him a short time later, he was found to be injured, though not seriously.

The suspect was taken UAB Hospital for treatment and then returned to Bessemer police headquarters for questioning. The warrant is for capital murder because the shot was fired inside a vehicle.

Davis will be held without bond in the Jefferson County Jail.

The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to call Bessemer police at 425-2411, the Tip Line at 205- 428-3541 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
The Oval Office must be the loneliest place in the world.

No matter how many officials crowd the room, the president is alone, bearing the full responsibility of the decisions discussed and enacted in those tight quarters.

If the buck stops there, as President Harry S. Truman said, the praise and condemnation begin there.

The fate befalls all presidents, wary of the negativity that any decision may spark. The presidency and the criticism  the two yoked by a system that holds all elected officials, especially the chief executive, accountable to the people.

And when the criticism is valid, when it strikes a nerve among the populace, then it becomes anger, hurt and mistrust. And President Joe Bidens handling of refugee caps has definitely sparked anger, hurt and mistrust.

Biden has done a good job on many fronts since assuming office four months ago. His response to the pandemic has been admirable and refreshing; his policies are popular with voters, although Congress is divided. But his flip-flop on the number of refugees who could enter the country has been head-smacking. The backlash has been swift, impassioned and just.

During the presidential election, Biden promised to raise the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. to 125,000 a year, up from the 15,000 cap President Donald Trump had put in place.

The Trump edict was cruel and draconian, the lowest level in the history of the U.S. refugee resettlement program.

The 15,000 cap was absurd, considering that thousands more refugees have already been allowed entry through the asylum process  that is why they call them refugees. They have been vetted.

So, when Biden mishandled the issue from the start, the bungling seemed to reflect an administration in disarray, unsure of the path it should take or how to take it  or worse, whose rhetoric on refugees was hollow.

On Feb. 12, for example, the State Department announced it would raise the refugee cap to 62,500 for the rest of fiscal year 2021, but the administration failed to sign the order, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights for refugees, and endangering lives.

The mismanagement was both startling and unnecessary, particularly for an administration that had seemed to operate so smoothly amid the pandemic.

Then came more flip-flopping. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last Friday that a new cap  albeit not the 62,500 figure  was still on the table.

Given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited, and burdens on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, his initial goal of 62,500 seems unlikely, Psaki said.

On Monday, however, the Washington Post reported that the White House is still considering the 62,500 figure, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Whatever the final cap turns out to be, the figure seems fluid, often changing from day to day.

Psaki had said the new cap, whatever it is, would be announced May 15.

If the President holds his nerve and resists the reflex to use cruelty to deal with political pressures, he can forge a workable immigration system that is, at once, both orderly and humane, Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group, Americas Voice, said in a statement.

The flip-flopping appears to be politically motivated, with anonymous officials telling the Washington Post that the president does not want to be appear soft on the border. But the irony is obvious. Officials who fail to act based on a fear of appearing soft do so because they are soft. It may take courage to do the right thing, but that is what the voters expect of their president; if the buck stops anywhere, it is in the Oval Office.

Sharry and other immigrant advocates will continue to pressure Biden, as they should. Biden should stick with the 62,500 figure. Its a commendable goal. Such aspiration would reflect the best of American values.
You are here: China

China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Wednesday stressed the stringent implementation of epidemic control measures at tourist sites nationwide ahead of the Labor Day holiday starting on May 1.

At a teleconference, the ministry called on tourist sites to limit the number of visitors in key areas such as ticket counters, entrances, core attractions and dining spaces.

Tour routes should be optimized to prevent overcrowding at popular spots, said the ministry.

Supervision was advised to ensure tourists' compliance with COVID-19 containment measures covering transportation, accommodation, catering, shopping and other sectors.

Also on Wednesday, the Ministry of Education issued a notice requiring schools to keep anti-epidemic measures in place during the holiday, strengthen health guidance for outgoing students and staff, and keep track of their health conditions.

China expects to see around 250 million domestic travelers during the upcoming holiday, a majority of whom will be tourists.
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The wireless charging market is anticipated to reach around USD 95.6 billion by 2026 according to a new research published by Polaris Market Research. In 2017, the consumer electronics segment dominated the global market in terms of revenue. Asia-Pacific is expected to be the leading contributor to the global wireless charging market revenue during the forecast period.

The wireless charging market has substantial potential for the present and future applications, owing to the rise in the mobile phone usage across the world, especially emerging regions such as India, China and South-East Asia. The growing demand for mobile devices and consumer goods drives the growth of the market during the forecast period.

Request For Sample Copy & All Related Graphs & Charts @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/wireless-charging-market/request-for-sample

The wireless charging market is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period owing to increasing popularity of electric vehicles. Wireless charging has multiple applications in the EV technology including fuel supply, and in-car electronics. However, factors such as lack of standardization of mobile devices and their charging potentials, longer charging duration, and limited portability hamper the market growth to a certain extent. Growing demand from emerging economies, increasing adoption of IoT and smart devices are expected to provide numerous growth opportunities in the coming years.

Asia-Pacific generated the highest revenue in the market in 2017, and is expected to lead the global wireless charging market throughout the forecast period. The economic growth in countries such as China and India, leading to rising living standards and high disposable income has increased the penetration of smart phones and other mobile devices in the region, thereby increasing the demand for wireless charging. The increasing environmental concerns and depletion of traditional fuel sources have encouraged consumers to use electric vehicles in the region. China exhibits the highest penetration of electric vehicles, which supports market growth of wireless charging.

Browse for full research summary: https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/wireless-charging-market

The key players operating in the market include Integrated Device Technology, Mojo Mobility, Powercast Corp., Texas Instruments, Energizer Holdings, Leggett & Platt, Incorporated, Qualcomm Incorporated, Powermat Technologies Ltd., ConvenientPower, and Murata Manufacturing Co. Ltd. These companies launch new products and collaborate with other market leaders to innovate and launch new products to meet the increasing needs and requirements of consumers.

Wireless Charging Market Size and Forecast by Technology, 2018-2026

Inductive Radio Frequency Resonant Others



Wireless Charging Market Size and Forecast by End-User, 2018-2026

Consumer Electronics Automotive Healthcare Defense Industrial Others



Wireless Charging Market Size and Forecast by Region, 2018-2026

North America US. Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK France Italy Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Japan Rest of Asia-Pacific Latin America Brazil Middle East & Africa



Avail discount on this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/wireless-charging-market/request-for-discount-pricing

About Polaris Market Research

Polaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide unmatched quality of offerings to our clients present globally. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world.

Contact us-

Polaris Market Research

Phone: 1-646-568-9980

Email: sales@polarismarketresearch.com

Web: www.polarismarketresearch.com
(Natural News) As Natural News exclusively reported yesterday, a non-profit front group for global genocide against humanity  The Center for Public Integrity  has hired a journalist to terrorize family members and relatives of vaccine skeptics as part of a program to silence all vaccine critics.

A reporter there named Liz Essley Whyte trolled through online records to try to identify people who might be related to Ty and Charlene Bollinger, founders of The Truth About Vaccines and pro-Trump, pro-America patriots who dare to ask questions about vaccine safety vs. efficacy.

In emails acquired by Natural News and shown here, Liz Essley Whyte was tracking down and targeting relatives of the Bollingers for dirt on their finances, and she offered to protect the identity of any relatives or family members who would offer up some dirt on background. These are the kind of tactics reminiscent of Pravda in the Soviet Union, and they smack of psychological intimidation carried out on the orders of authoritarian regimes.

Yet this is apparently acceptable today in the world of left-wing journalism, which has now become nothing more than an extension of the totalitarian state and its anti-human agenda. As I explained yesterday:

The Center for Public Integrity feeds its journo-terrorism stories to NPR, Mother Jones, Daily Beast, AP, WashPost, NYT and USA Today, among other deliberately dishonest propaganda outlets that function as overt shills for the CIA and Big Pharma.

What we are witnessing here is the complete abandonment of any last shred of journalistic integrity by the corporate-controlled, pharma-influenced left-wing media. Ironically, this journo-terrorism campaign is being conducted under the banner of public integrity, even when the collaborators who work for this disgusting front group obviously have zero integrity at all.

The Center for Public Integrity was founded on DuPont money and now takes funding from globalist agenda pushers like the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller groups

It didnt take much digging to learn that The Center for Public Integrity was founded with large donations from DuPont, one of the most evil corporations in the world when it comes to environmental crimes and the harming of innocent women and children through chemical violence. Perhaps only Monsanto has a more evil track record than DuPont, but theyre in the same league when it comes to crimes against humanity and crimes against the environment. Source: Sourcewatch.org.

More recently, The Center for Public Integrity takes money from a whos who list of anti-human, global depopulation promoters:

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund

The Ford Foundation

The Carnegie Corporation

The Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation

Knight Foundation

The Board of Director for The Center for Public Integrity includes the following (via Sourcewatch): Bill Buzenberg, Molly Bingham , Charles Eisendrath, Dan A. Emmett, Bruce A. Finzen , Matthew W. Granade, Arianna Huffington, James A. Kiernan, Steve Kroft, Hendrik-Jan Laseur, ennifer Lee, Susan Loewenberg, Bevis Longstreth, Olivia Ma, Craig Newmark, Gilbert Omenn, Scott Siegler, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak , Matt Thompson.

Do those board members approve of these journo-terrorism tactics? Is this something that James A. Kiernan endorses? Or Richard M. Lobo? Hes billed as a veteran of NBC, CBS, PBS, all of which are fake news propaganda outlets that push vaccine violence on innocent women and children around the world.

According to the centers own reporter Liz Essley Whyte, it is perfectly acceptable for other journalists to intimidate and harass the relatives and family members of all these board members, looking for family-related dirt to publicly report on them. These are the new journalistic standard  if you can call them that  now deployed by a non-profit that claims to operate under the banner of integrity.

For the record, we do not condone such journo-terrorism tactics, as we have real standards and ethics. Only a depraved, wicked person would stoop to such low tactics. It begs the question: Who gave Liz Whyte the target list in the first place? Were the Bollingers named by one of the centers donors? Or one of its board members? Who gave Liz Whyte the go-ahead to target family members of the Bollingers?

Ironically, The Center for Public Interest claims its mission as follows:

Our mission is to protect democracy and inspire change using investigative reporting that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.

Yet their own journo-terrorism tactics betray the public trust. Is this acceptable to them? And while their slogan claims to expose betrayals by powerful interests, what theyre actually doing here is attacking the powerless to defame and destroy innocent people who wield no real power.

In other words, The Center for Public Interest appears to be a fraud, and they are defrauding their own donors by failing to carry out their mission as promised.

Hear the full podcast to learn more

In todays Situation Update podcast, I expose the journo-terrorism insanity of Liz Essley Whyte and The Center for Public Integrity, whose board members include Gilbert S. Omenn, director of Population Services International, a globalist depopulation front that promotes abortion and infertility interventions.  that distributes DIY abortion kits to women in India. (More on that in a follow-up story.)

As published on Lepantoin.org:

In a program description of one of its projects in India, PSI explained very plainly how it is distributing safe abortion kits to young women.

PSI is even procuring and providing impoverished areas with manual vacuum aspersion equipment. PSI claims that it is for post-abortion care, but the truth is, these devices can be and are used for abortions themselves.

PSIs website for India lists condoms, oral contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, intrauterine devices, and safe abortion kits among its products.

The Center for Public Integrity is steeped in anti-human, globalist depopulation influences

The bottom line is that The Center for Public Integrity is a non-profit front group pushing global depopulation and anti-human agendas, including the mass vaccination programs that are already killing hundreds of thousands of people in India since the vaccines began there. Notice that the new wave of covid cases only began to surge after covid vaccinations were introduced:

Achieving global depopulation and the total destruction of human civilization requires, of course, the silencing of people who tell the truth about vaccines. Hence the malicious targeting of the relatives of Ty and Charlene Bollinger. Journo-terrorists like Liz Whyte are recruited to terrorize and destroy families as a way to silence those who dare to teach people the truth about vaccine dangers and vaccine deaths.

This is all covered in todays Situation Update podcast, which dares to call out the evil agendas of anti-human globalists and depopulation pushers who are celebrating covid vaccines because they are genocidal euthanasia shots.

Brighteon.com/032404dc-8971-4063-b330-2cf4693d51fd

How to contact The Center for Public Integrity or journo-terrorism reporter Liz Essley Whyte

If youd like to let The Center for Public Integrity know what you think of their journo-terrorism tactics and anti-human depopulation agendas, you can reach them via their contact page:

General editorial inquiries: 202-466-1300

[email protected]

[email protected], media inquiries at 202-481-1205

If you contact this anti-human depopulation front group that pushes deadly vaccine propaganda, do not use threatening language or make threats of any kind. Why? Because we have truth and ethics on our side. We dont use their tactics. Only evil front groups and evil reporters resort to such intimidation tactics.

If you wish to reach Liz Essley Whyte directly, she has shared her contact information with relatives of the Bollingers, and she would love to hear from you, apparently:

[email protected]

202-271-3078

Office: 202-481-1235

Be polite if you contact her, but let her know that what shes doing is utterly unacceptable in any free society.

As I wrote yesterday:

The Center for Public Integrity is nothing more than a Pravda-like smear machine taking orders from the vaccine industry to attack the powerless, smear truth-tellers and silence anyone opposed to the Big Pharma vaccine depopulation experiment thats now being conducted on humanity.

Every genocidal holocaust needs propagandists to help push the lies that lead to mass death, and in 2021, that propagandist appears to be Liz Essley Whyte.

We specifically request that if you contact her, do not threaten or harass her in any way, as we have truth and ethics on our side, so we dont resort to such tactics used by the medical mafia media like NBC News, Mother Jones and The Center for Public Integrity. The very reason they lie and smear and deceive is because they dont have the truth on their side.

Keep watching NaturalNews.com for more investigations into The Center for Public Integrity, its board members, funding sources and their anti-human agendas to depopulate the planet.
You are here: Arts

A newly developed educational robot was incarnated as Li Qingzhao, an ancient Chinese poetess and essayist, at the 4th Digital China Summit held in Fuzhou, Fujian Province.

The AI robot Li is dressed in ancient costumes and looks pretty, attracting a lot of visitors. She is able to blink, nod and raise her hands according to instructions.

She can also recite ancient Chinese poems and teach people to learn Chinese, and help students with their Math. The AI robot Li has functions including face recognition and classroom intelligent equipment management.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Hispanic Americans have died of COVID-19 at a disproportionately high rate compared to whites because of workplace exposure to the virus, a new study suggests.

It's widely documented that Hispanics are overrepresented among workers in essential industries and occupations ranging from warehousing and grocery stores to health care and construction, much of which kept operating when most of the country shut down last spring.

The analysis of federal data showed that, considering their representation in the U.S. population, far higher percentages of Hispanics of working age - 30 to 69 years old - have died of COVID-19 than whites in the same age groups. A separate look at case estimates showed a similar pattern of unequally high COVID-19 infection rates for Hispanics - meaning that the elevated deaths in the working-age Hispanic population is consistent with elevated exposure to the virus.

"There was no evidence before this paper that really demonstrated that the excess cases were precisely in these working age groups," said Reanne Frank, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study.

"Particularly for front-line and essential workers, among whom Hispanics are overrepresented, COVID-19 is an occupational disease that spreads at work. Hispanics were on the front lines and they bore a disproportionate cost."

Identifying a link between essential work and a higher rate of COVID-19 deaths should lead to better workplace protections, said study co-author D. Phuong (Phoenix) Do, associate professor of public health policy and administration at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"If we know the source of the spread, then we can tackle it head on," she said. "This finding is applicable to any disease that is highly infectious. We can't stop the economy - we've learned that. There has to be a way to protect the workers and enforce protection."

All analyses were based on the most recent data as of Sept. 30, 2020. The research is published in the journal Demographic Research.

Because COVID-19 death rates are highest among older ages, the fact that a much higher percentage of Hispanics are in the younger age groups compared to whites meant that excess Hispanic deaths were initially masked. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) age-adjusted data from 2020 showed that Hispanics constituted 19% of the population, but almost 41% of COVID-19 deaths.

When it became apparent that COVID-19 deaths were disproportionately high among minorities, commentators frequently suggested that unequal access to quality health care, higher levels of pre-existing conditions and multigenerational households were key causes, along with exposure as front-line workers.

At the time, however, "there wasn't any case data to support this workplace vulnerability hypothesis, which to us seemed most compelling in trying to understand the excess deaths among Hispanics," said Frank, also a faculty affiliate in Ohio State's Institute for Population Research.

Using CDC death counts stratified by age within racial/ethnic groups, the researchers compared the proportion of COVID-19 deaths attributed to whites and Hispanics with each group's relative population size. Nationally and in most states, in every range below age 75, Hispanic deaths were disproportionately high and deaths among whites were disproportionately low. One example from national data: Hispanics ages 35 to 44 and 55 to 64 experienced a higher-than-expected proportion of deaths of 15.4 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, whites in those same age groups faced mortality advantages of 23 and 17 percentage points, respectively.

Turning to CDC case surveillance data, the researchers found the same patterns at the county level. Overall and within each age group, whites were disproportionately underrepresented among COVID-19 cases, while Hispanics were overrepresented, with the greatest excess in cases among those of working age: 30 to 59.

Among the reported cases, Hispanics had fewer pre-existing health conditions than whites and there were no significant differences between working-age Hispanics and whites in the percentage of infections that resulted in death. Hence, the researchers said, the case data is not supportive of pre-existing comorbidities and/or lower-quality health care being driving factors in the excess Hispanic mortality.

"If case fatality rates are comparable across racial and ethnic groups, and they are, but we see big differences in the amount of death, which we do, then we have to focus on differential exposure," Do said. "So what we see is that these two patterns are consistent with higher case burden being the driving factor of the higher mortality burden among Hispanics.

"The evidence does not support the other hypotheses. The data in this case supported the workplace exposure hypothesis but not unequal access to health care or unequal quality of care, not pre-existing conditions, and not multigenerational household exposure."

The researchers said the patterns revealed in the data ideally will discourage what amounts to victim-blaming - attributing an unequally high rate of COVID-19 deaths among Hispanics to risks associated with individual health behaviors or living arrangements rather than their overrepresentation in the essential workforce, often in low-wage jobs.

"There's this impulse when we're trying to understand racial health disparities - even new ones like COVID that appeared very quickly - to obscure the role of structural factors, which includes work environments," Frank said. "This evidence can hopefully set the record straight about why the Hispanic community, along with other groups overrepresented among front-line workers, took such a heavy hit from this pandemic - that it was because they were doing their jobs, and putting themselves on the line."

#

Contacts: Phoenix Do, dphuong@uwm.edu Reanne Frank, frank.219@osu.edu

Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu

###
For many people, being buried up to the neck in hot, black volcanic sand doesnt seem like a pleasant way to relax. But in parts of southern Japan, sunamushi (sand bathing) on a volcanic beach is a popular form of bathing that helps rest the mind and refresh the body.

Japanese onsens are one of Japans most relaxing activities. An onsen is a hot geothermal springs used for bathing, and its associated facilities. It is the perfect way to relax the body and mind, whether it be in a natural pool, a private Ryokan bath, or in a large public bath house. Onsens are typically separated by gender, and bathing is completely nude. The hot water has wonderful skin rejuvenation qualities, as well as being relaxing and refreshing.

The city of Beppu, in Japans southern island of Kyushu, is one place where one can go sand bathing. Its a geothermally active area, and the city is lodged between the sea and the mountains. To look at the city skyline, you will see great clouds of sulfurous steam rise all around the city in amazing white plumes. Its an incredible view, and reminds you how much heat lies beneath the earth.

The beach is equally geothermally active. If you were to walk along the beachfront and dig a hole in the black volcanic sand, youd find extremely hot water deeper under the ground. To take full advantage of this, special sand bathing centres are set up to help people enjoy the sand bathing experience.

Its not as simple as just laying on the ground and scooping sand over yourself, like at your local beach  theres a particular ritual involved to properly experience the sand bathing. First, bathers change into a yukata, a traditional light garment similar to a kimono. Next, bathers lay in designated rows in the hot sand, and are covered over by the staff until only their supported heads are left peeking out. To protect bathers from the sun, colourful parasols are placed overhead. Meanwhile, the sound of the waves lapping nearby are wonderfully relaxing.

The hot sand can reach about 50-55C (120-130F), so bathing time is limited to about 10-15 minutes before the heat becomes overwhelming. When the time is up, you emerge feeling rejuvenated (and hot)! To clean off, the bathers then move into a standard water onsen (yukatas and all), followed by a shower with soap and water.

Its always a good idea to enjoy an ice cold drink or snack when the bathing is done, to help cool off and rehydrate. A vending machine nearby usually sells water, cold milk, or ice cream to top off the sand bathing experience.
OTTAWA, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - As we continue to roll out COVID-19 vaccines across the country, the Government of Canada is committed to addressing and reducing barriers to vaccination.

Today, during National Immunization Awareness Week, the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, announced an investment of $2.25 million through the Immunization Partnership Fund (IPF) for two projects to support vaccination efforts. These projects will support vaccine uptake by ensuring Canadians have access to credible information on vaccination, as well as equipping healthcare providers and Canadians with proven strategies to manage pain and fear during vaccination.

The Canadian Association of Science Centres, in partnership with COVID-19 Resources Canada and the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, have created ScienceUpFirst, a project to address misinformation in Canada by giving Canadians the tools to spread science-based information about COVID-19 and vaccines. Drawing on a network of scientists, healthcare providers, and science communicators, this national initiative aims to debunk misinformation with credible COVID-19 facts, as well as reach vulnerable populations with culturally relevant and scientifically accurate COVID-19 information.

We are also supporting the University of Toronto's CARD (C-Comfort, A-Ask, R-Relax, D-Distract) System project, which addresses fear of needles among adults through pain management. Using proven best practices, this initiative will design and implement pain mitigation strategies for adults during vaccination to reduce their fears and encourage them to get vaccinated. The information and strategies developed through this project will be shared among health care networks, and the general public, to help people feel more comfortable when it's their turn to get vaccinated.

The Government of Canada is working closely with experts, provinces and territories, and other partners to better understand what barriers Canadians may face to getting vaccinated, and to encourage vaccine confidence. The IPF is one way we are reaching Canadians, through community mobilization, public outreach, and communications efforts across Canada to support Canadians in making informed choices on vaccination. When we get vaccinated, we protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities against COVID-19.

Story continues

Quotes

"This year's National Immunization Awareness Week comes at a critical stage in Canada's COVID-19 response. The vaccines we have in Canada are safe and effective, and I encourage everyone to get vaccinated when it is your turn. This funding will help trusted leaders within the science and healthcare communities share credible information on vaccines, and address barriers people face in getting vaccinated."

The Honourable Patty Hajdu

Minister of Health

"National Immunization Awareness Week is an opportunity to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated and this includes COVID-19 vaccination. The projects funded through the Immunization Partnership Fund aim to address barriers that can delay or discourage people from getting vaccinated. Through projects like these, we are working to build confidence and make COVID-19 vaccines accessible for everyone in Canada."

Dr. Theresa Tam

Chief Public Health Officer of Canada

"Some of the communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic are also our most underserved and vulnerable communities. ScienceUpFirst is working closely with communities so they can access culturally relevant, scientifically accurate, and expertly vetted information. We want everyone to be able to protect themselves and their loved ones with evidence-informed decisions."

Krishana Sankar, PhD

Community Partnerships Lead and Science Advisor for ScienceUpFirst

"The spread of misinformation does real harm. It is having, for example, an adverse impact on vaccine uptake and on the adoption of preventative public health strategies. It is also fueling fears and polarized public discourse. With ScienceUpFirst, we are countering misinformation on social media with proven strategies: humour, creativity, empathy, and the best available scientific evidence."

Timothy Caulfield, LLM, FRSC, FCAHS

Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy

Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Public Health

Research Director, Health Law Institute, University of Alberta

"We can help people feel more comfortable with getting vaccinated. CARD - Comfort, Ask questions, Relax, and Distract - is a tool that helps people to identify sources of fear or anxiety around getting needles and ways to reduce them. By inviting people to choose what suits their needs and preferences, we can improve their experiences and promote confidence in vaccination. This can increase vaccine uptake."

Dr. Anna Taddio, Full Professor

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto

Quick Facts

The IPF supports projects that improve access to vaccinations and encourage vaccine acceptance and uptake. In 2020, as a response to Canada's COVID-19 vaccination efforts and building on the early momentum of the IPF, the Government of Canada invested an additional $64 million for projects aimed at increasing vaccine confidence in Canada and to help provincial and territorial governments enhance their electronic vaccination registries.





Through the IPF, the Canadian Association of Science Centres (CASC) is receiving $1,749,578 for their project ScienceUpFirst and the University of Toronto is receiving $499,792 for their project CARD (C-Comfort, A-Ask, R-Relax, D-Distract) System.





National Immunization Awareness Week (NIAW) is observed each year to highlight and recognize the importance of immunization. Canada's NIAW coincides with Vaccination Week in the Americas and World Immunization Week . This year, NIAW takes place from April 24 to 30, 2021.





ScienceUpFirst is celebrating National Immunization Awareness Week, Vaccination Week in the Americas, and World Immunization Week with a social media campaign featuring trusted healthcare workers across Canada answering COVID-19 vaccine questions. Follow along with the hashtags #ScienceUpFirst and #VaccinesWork.

Associated Links

Backgrounder: New Projects Funded Under the Immunization Partnership Fund

Statement from the Minister of Health on National Immunization Awareness Week 2021

Vaccination and Immunization

Immunization Partnership Fund

Canada.ca/Coronavirus

ScienceUpFirst

SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada

Cision

View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2021/29/c0792.html
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. The heads of the Armenian and Azerbaijani national security services are meeting regularly aimed at solving the issue of the Armenian prisoners of war who are held captive in Azerbaijan. In addition to the direct meetings, there is also a phone contact, Deputy Director of the National Security Service of Armenia Stepan Melkonyan told reporters in the Parliament, asked whether the talks over the return of the POWs continue or not.

Meetings are taking place regularly for giving a solution to the issue relating to the prisoners of war, he said.

Mr. Melkonyan stated that last such meeting took place about a month ago, but, he noted, that this doesnt mean that there is no contact. Besides the direct meetings, there is also a phone contact, he said.

On January 9, 2021, Director of the National Security Service of Armenia Armen Abazyan had a working meeting with Director of the State Security Service of Azerbaijan Ali Nagiyev in the neutral border zone adjacent to Yeraskh community of Armenias Ararat province. During the meeting issues relating to the exchange of prisoners of war and the search for the missing in action were discussed. Another meeting also took place on January 10.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
COLUMBIA  More than two years after a University of South Carolina senior was found dead when she mistakenly got into a car she thought was her Uber ride, her accused killer has a trial date.

Nathaniel Rowland, a 27-year-old from New Zion in Clarendon County, will stand trial for murder July 19 in Columbia, according to online records. Rowland has denied the charges.

Rowland was denied bond in June 2020 on charges stemming from the death of USC senior Samantha Josephson.

The New Jersey native disappeared soon after leaving a Five Points bar where she was out with some friends in March 2019. She requested an Uber rideshare, authorities said.

Josephson was caught on video from surveillance cameras getting into a black sedan. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the video, but her boyfriend testified at the bond hearing that he tracked her phone as it went away from Columbia.

Josephsons body was discovered the next afternoon by turkey hunters 65 miles east of Columbia in a remote wooded area of Clarendon County.

Her parents said they could not identify the 21-year-old in the morgue after she was stabbed 30 times. She was identified by DNA analysis.

Her debit card was used twice at ATMs after she disappeared, and a suspect tried selling Josephsons phone at a store for $300, prosecutors and authorities testified during the 2020 hearing.

The evening after she disappeared, Rowland was arrested after he was spotted in a black Chevrolet Impala in Five Points matching the one that picked up Josephson.

Blood matching Josephsons was found in the car, authorities testified during the 2020 bond hearing. They also discovered that the child locks in the backseat were activated, which could have trapped someone inside the car, prosecutors said.

Josephsons parents have led a national effort to get ride-sharing services to help passengers better confirm who is picking them up. Services have added special identification numbers to match drivers with their rides. South Carolina passed a law requiring that ride-share services put license plate numbers on the front windshield.
Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler has denounced an Illinois churchs consideration of having a drag queen as their pastor, calling it doctrinal annihilation.

Hope United Methodist Church in Bloomington garnered headlines for having an openly gay man who is also a drag queen serve as a leader at their congregation, with a local UMC body advancing him as a candidate for ministry.

In a Wednesday episode of his podcast The Briefing, Mohler blasted the church's advancement of Isaac Simmons as an intentional refutation and revolt against the very order of creation that God has given us, and a direct violation of the clear teachings of Scripture concerning the fact that those whom God has made as men should identify as men.

This is open revolt, and of course, you're going to see a division between those who are appalled by it, deeply troubled by it, deeply concerned by it and opposed to it on the one hand, and those who celebrate it and say that it's arrived far too late on the other hand, said Mohler.

Source:The Christian Post
Prime Minister Florin Citu said on Wednesday that Romania would go to Brussels with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) keeping within earmarked funds, report agerpres.

"The priorities Romania assumed in the governance programme will be represented in this PNRR as well. We are not dropping any project. There has been a discussion on improving what we have had so far. They asked for more details. Some of the ministers will go to Brussels, in the period ahead, to better explain the projects. (...) I believe there are two or three projects where amounts differ, but the projects stand, as they are important. This PNRR must be looked at in its entirety. Part of the projects will be completely financed under the PNRR. Other projects will be partially funded from the PNRR and other sources - budget or European funds. At the moment, we have this cost reduction, we are going to the European Commission and we'll discuss the technical details. We'll go to Brussels exactly with the earmarked amount. There are countries that have exceeded the allotment," Citu said after the governing coalition meeting.

Asked wether there would be more objections from the European Commission, Citu replied: "No one can give guarantees. We have our specialists who will make sure that the details we have be the ones the European Commission requires."
Portland Mayor Ted Wheelers latest call for police and fellow Portlanders to aggressively crack down on a small group of destructive demonstrators has angered left-leaning critics, rankled civil rights groups and now led to at least one veiled public death threat.

Police are investigating a video published to Twitter on Wednesday night that claims militant activists in the city will continue to destroy property and riot until Wheeler resigns and also includes the mayors home address along with a menacing warning.

Blood is already on your hands, Ted, says the videos masked and voice-altered narrator, who appears outside a MAX station and claims to be a member of Portlands anarchist and anti-fascist community. The next time, it may just be your own.

Jim Middaugh, a spokesman for Wheeler, said the mayor and his office learned of the video Wednesday night and that the Portland Police Bureau opened an investigation. Middaugh said the citys police bureau had also notified the FBI, but he declined to comment further.

Sgt. Kevin Allen, a Portland police spokesman, confirmed the bureaus investigation but said he could not release additional details at this time. Beth Anne Steele, an FBI spokeswoman, confirmed the federal bureau was assisting Portland police.

It is not out of the ordinary for the mayor or members of his office to receive harsh condemnation or threats of possible harm in emails and on social media.

The two-minute video, which remained online Thursday morning, appeared less than a week after the mayor urged the public to safely stand up to a group of black bloc demonstrators who continue to plan direct actions around the city that routinely end with shattered windows, fires and other vandalism.

During a press conference last Friday, Wheeler asked residents to note the license plates of people who drive to the events and then don all black clothing and grab shields or weapons from their cars.

Our job is to unmask them, arrest them and prosecute them, he said.

Wheelers comments  made amid ongoing protests decrying racism and police violence, and days after Portland police fatally shot a homeless man in Lents Park  elicited a chorus of condemnation from left-wing activists as well as some other constituents.

Middaugh said the mayors office has seen a dramatic uptick in messages following the press conference, most of them critical of Wheeler and the remarks he made. Some claimed the mayors comments would encourage right-wing vigilantism while others said hardline approach was too-little, too-late.

Civil rights groups also had choice words.

His comments are inappropriate, irresponsible, and dangerous, said the ACLU of Oregon, which also accused the mayor of promoting vigilantism. After more than four years as police commissioner, Ted Wheeler must finally recognize the role that unchecked police violence has in escalating tension in Portland.

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, Wheelers colleague on the Portland City Council and a longtime police critic, said the mayors comments had escalated community tensions during a week that also saw Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

Last summers mass protests called for a transformation of our systems of community safety and criminal justice, Hardesty said Wednesday. This moment in history is not calling for increased punitive action.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632

Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 06:01:39|Editor: huaxia

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Twitter, Inc. on Thursday announced financial results for its first quarter of 2021 with total revenue of 1.04 billion U.S. dollars, up 28 percent year over year.

Its quarterly net income amounted to 68 million dollars, representing a net margin of 7 percent and diluted earnings per share (EPS) of 0.08 dollar, compared to a net loss of 8 million dollars, a net margin of -1 percent and diluted EPS of -0.01 dollar in the same period of the previous year.

The company's average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) were 199 million for the first quarter, compared to 166 million in the same period of the year 2020.

"Average monetizable DAU reached 199 million, up 20 percent year over year and up 7 million sequentially, driven by ongoing product improvements and global conversation around current events," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO.

"Q1 was a solid start to 2021 ... reflecting accelerating year-over-year growth in MAP revenue and brand advertising that improved throughout the quarter," said Ned Segal, Twitter's CFO.

"Advertisers continue to benefit from updated ad formats, improved measurement, and new brand safety controls, contributing to 32 percent year-over-year growth in ad revenue in Q1," Segal noted.

The company's advertising revenue totaled 899 million dollars. Data licensing and other revenue totaled 137 million dollars, an increase of 9 percent year over year.

U.S. revenue totaled 556 million dollars, an increase of 19 percent year over year.

International revenue totaled 480 million dollars, up 41 percent, or 38 percent on a constant currency basis.

"We continue to expect total revenue to grow faster than expenses in 2021, assuming the global pandemic continues to improve and that we see modest impact from the rollout of changes associated with iOS 14.5," the company said.

For the second quarter of 2021, the company expects its total revenue to be between 980 million and 1.08 billion U.S. dollars.

For the whole fiscal year of 2021, its stock-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately 600 million dollars. Capital expenditures are expected to be between 900 million and 950 million dollars, according to Twitter. Enditem
VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Thinkific Labs Inc. ("Thinkific" or the "Company") (TSX: THNC), a leading cloud-based software platform that enables entrepreneurs and established businesses to create, market and sell online courses, will report its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021 after market close on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Management will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the Company's first quarter results at 2:00 pm PT (5:00 pm ET) on the same day. Additionally, Thinkific will participate in the CIBC Technology and Innovation Virtual Conference.

First Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast Information

When: Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Time: 2:00 pm PT (5:00 pm ET)

Dial In: 1.888.664.6383 (US/Canada Toll-Free) or 1.416.764.8650 (Local)

The conference call will be available via webcast on the investor relations section of Thinkific's website at investors.thinkific.com/events-and-presentations

A replay will be available commencing at 4:00 pm PT (7:00 pm ET) on May 11, 2021 by dialing 1.888.390.0541 (US/Canada Toll-Free) or 416.764.8677 (Local). The passcode is 953518#. The replay will expire at 8:59 pm PT (11:59 pm ET) on May 18, 2021.

CIBC Technology and Innovation Virtual Conference Information

Greg Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Thinkific will be presenting at the CIBC Technology and Innovation Conference. The Company will discuss its technology platform, product and strategy during a presentation scheduled for May 13, 2021 at 10:55 am ET.

The conference presentation will be accessible on the Company's Investor Relations website at investors.thinkific.com/events-and-presentations

About Thinkific

Thinkific (TSX:THNC) is a leading cloud-based software platform that enables entrepreneurs and established businesses to create, market, and sell online courses. Course creators can easily build and launch customized learning products for their audiences under their own brand, with no technical expertise required. The platform is designed to create transformative learning experiences for students, and drive sustainable revenue for businesses through enterprise-grade functionality and extensibility for growth.

SOURCE Thinkific Labs Inc.

Related Links

http://www.thinkific.com


A wooden boat is towed by a Spanish Maritime Rescue Service ship as they arrive at the port of Los Cristianos in the south of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, Spain, on April 28, 2021. (Andres Gutierrez/AP Photo)

Spain Recovers 24 Bodies From Migrant Boat Off Canaries

BARCELONA, SpainThe bodies of 24 sub-Saharan migrants, among them two minors, who are believed to have died of thirst and hunger as they tried to cross from the west coast of Africa to the Canary Islands, were brought to land by Spains Maritime Rescue Service Wednesday evening.

Their wooden boat was first spotted by a Spanish Air Force plane drifting in the Atlantic Ocean some 490 kilometers (304 miles) from the island of El Hierro on Monday.

Emergency services carry dead bodies of migrants after being recovered from a wooden boat at the port of Los Cristianos in the south of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, Spain, on April 28, 2021. (Andres Gutierrez/AP Photo)

Only three people on board were still alive but barely moving according to rescuers. Two men and one woman were airlifted in serious condition by a military helicopter to the island of Tenerife and were hospitalized, the Spanish government delegation in the Canary Islands said.

According to Spanish Air Force rescuers speaking to local television, survivors reported they had spent 22 days at sea.

Emergency services carry the dead bodies of migrants after being recovered from a wooden boat at the port of Los Cristianos in the south of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, Spain, on April 28, 2021. (Andres Gutierrez/AP Photo)

The deadly Atlantic sea journey from the Western coast of Africa to the Spanish archipelago has become a major route for migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing conflict, violence, and economic hardship exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Depending on the point of departure along the coast of West Africa, migrant boats have to navigate anywhere from 400 to 1,500 kilometers (250 to 940 miles) to reach the European Islands, and often run out of food, water, and fuel before reaching their destination.

A wooden boat carrying the bodies of dead bodies of migrants is towed by emergency services as they arrive at the port of Los Cristianos in the south of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, Spain, on April 28, 2021. (Andres Gutierrez/AP Photo)

Some 4,300 migrants and refugees have reached the Canaries so far this year while 90 people, including women and children, are known to have perished along the way, the UNs migration and refugee agencies said in a joint statement Wednesday.

In 2020 at least 849 people died or went missing trying to reach the Canaries, while 23,000 reached their destination, according to IOMs Missing Migrants Project. The true death toll, however, is believed to be much higher, the agency admits.
The investigation into Midwest Warehouse is part of a broader national campaign launched last month by OSHA to focus enforcement on companies that put large numbers of workers at risk for contracting the virus that causes COVID-19. It comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased mask-wearing guidelines Tuesday for the more than 30% of Americans who are fully vaccinated against the disease, which has killed more than 570,000 people in the U.S.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 02:28:50|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, April 29 (Xinhua) -- An Iraqi lawmaker said on Thursday that Iraq may re-impose some health restrictions including a full curfew during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, as the Ministry of Health reported 6,926 new COVID-19 cases.

Ghaiyb al-Omairi, a member of the parliamentary health committee, said in a press release that the committee presented several recommendations to the Higher Committee for Health and National Safety regarding the epidemiological situation, including suspending partial study in schools and universities and re-imposing full curfew in the country during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr in mid-May at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

"So far, the higher committee, headed by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, has not taken any new decisions regarding the health restrictions, but there are expectations to impose a full curfew during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which is expected to be on May 12," said al-Omairi.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Ministry of Health reported 6,926 new coronavirus cases during the past 24 hours, raising the total nationwide number to 1,058,794.

A statement by the ministry also reported 41 new COVID-19 deaths, raising the death toll from the infectious virus to 15,433, while the total recoveries in Iraq climbed by 7,360 to 934,935.

A total of 9,292,052 tests have been carried out across the country since the outbreak of the disease in February 2020, with 47,306 done during the day.

It also said 9,757 people were vaccinated against the COVID-19 during the past 24 hours across the country, bringing the total number of doses received to 342,252.

Iraq has taken a series of measures to curb the recent rise in coronavirus infections. The Iraqi National Board for Selection of Drugs has approved the emergency use of China's Sinopharm vaccines, in addition to AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Sputnik V vaccines.

Since the early stage of the pandemic in 2020, the Chinese government has sent medical aid to Iraq and donated two shipments of Sinopharm vaccines to the country to help combat the pandemic. Enditem
Nationwide Grant and Executive Partnership to Boost Effort to Address Racial Wealth Gap

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Many American students never learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre in history class, or about the tragic leveling of a once thriving "Black Wall Street" in 1921. On June 1, 2021, leaders, investors, business owners and entrepreneurs will gather in Tulsa, OK, to observe the 100th anniversary of one of the most devastating race crimes in the history of our nation. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission's Economic Empowerment Day (EED) will mark this milestone with an interactive conference designed to create a collective focal point for the national conversation on the racial wealth gap and inequality in access to capital.

As part of its ongoing commitment to economic empowerment and social justice, Nationwide is supporting this important event with a $100,000 contribution and active participation from three top executives.

Eric Stevenson, President of Nationwide Retirement Solutions, is an Oklahoma native and will serve as co-host for the day. Retiring Nationwide Chief Administrative Officer, Gale King and Nationwide Retirement Institute leader, Kristi Martin Rodriguez will participate in panel discussions.

"What's happening in Tulsa is truly inspiring. Rather than continuing to bury the reality of what happened, the community is embracing its past and using it as a model for how we can accelerate our progress," Stevenson said. "With leadership from Governor Stitt, Senator Lankford, State Senator Matthews, Mayor Bynum, Commission project director, Phil Armstrong and many others, what started as a local effort has become a unifying event and it's driving national awareness and conversations. We are deeply grateful to our sponsors from all over the country who are elevating what happened 100 years ago in the Greenwood District to put words into action and enhance the path forward."

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Stevenson will co-host Economic Empowerment Day along with actor and author, Hill Harper and Ron Parker, President & CEO of the National Association of Securities Professionals. The event includes an interactive conference with in-person and virtual opportunities for education and networking as well as high-profile keynote speakers. It is part of a weeks-long programing lineup that includes the June 2 dedication of Greenwood Rising: The Black Wall Street History Center.

"We are thankful to Nationwide for partnering with the Commission to engage Tulsans and Americans about the Racial Wealth Gap on Economic Empowerment Day," said Phil Armstrong, project director for the Centennial Commission. "Black Wall Street was once thriving and we must create systematic changes to recapture Black wealth in all facets  from personal wealth building, to entrepreneurship and capital. We hope this day is a launching point for change in many lives."

Anyone can register to attend virtually for $19.21 by visiting the event website. Proceeds benefit the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Fund, administered as a donor-designated fund through the Tulsa Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Specific priorities to be funded are:

Access to capital for Black entrepreneurs (TRMCC Economic Development Committee)

Entrepreneurship development programs (Sky's the Limit/Mortar)

Economic development and internship programs for Black youth (Tulsa Regional Chamber/GKFF)

Additional, ongoing, Nationwide efforts to address racial disparity and social justice include:

Launching the Financial Alliance for Racal Equity in 2020, a coalition of financial services industry partners and historically Black colleges and universities dedicated to attracting, developing and retaining a more diverse workforce in the financial services industry.

Advocating for equality for decades through partnerships with the National Fair Housing Alliance, National Urban League and UnidosUS and long-standing relationships with the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the Executive Leadership Council, the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Summit and Catalyst.

Ongoing internal efforts to identify tangible ways for the company to combat racism and promote social justice through the lens of a Social Justice Task Force made up of diverse leaders across the company.

Continued commitment to having a diverse Board of Directors and leadership team alongside robust DEI and supplier diversity programs.

About Nationwide

Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States. Nationwide is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's. An industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation, Nationwide provides a full range of insurance and financial services products including auto, business, homeowners, farm and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; excess & surplus, specialty and surety; pet, motorcycle and boat insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com . Follow us on Facebook and Twitter .

Nationwide, Nationwide is on your side, the Nationwide N and Eagle are service marks of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company.  2021

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Contact:

Mike Switzer

switzem1@nationwide.com

614-370-0001

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His wife Kim Kardashian filed for divorce from him two months ago after nearly seven years of marriage.

And on Wednesday, Kanye West was seen still wearing his wedding ring, despite the ongoing divorce proceedings.

DJ Khaled shared a snap of Kanye, 43, visiting his house and his hand was visible in the shot.

Why is it still on? On Wednesday, Kanye West was seen still wearing his wedding ring, despite the ongoing divorce proceedings. DJ Khaled shared a snap of Kanye, 43, visiting his house and his hand was visible in the shot

The black and white photo featured Kanye with his hands up in the air - with his ring clearly seen on his ring finger.

Kanye wore all black in the image as he sat on an office chair, keeping his eyes closed.

DJ Khaled wrote, in all caps: 'True story: Kanye stopped by my house at 8 am the other day! I didn't know he was coming!'

Adding: 'He had @chefmelissauniga make him some eggs with ketchup and vegan bacon. And we listened to #KhaledKhaled.'

Happier times: His wife Kim Kardashian filed for divorce from him two months ago after nearly seven years of marriage; pictured June 21, 2018 at Paris Fashion Week

Adding: 'You know when you get this expression that it's sounding amazing! This album God's Hands is all over it. #KhaledKhaled this Friday April 30!'

Kim filed for divorce from Kanye in February, after almost seven years of marriage.

Kanye filed his response for divorce in early April, per People; he asked for joint legal and physical custody of their four kids.

They are parents to: North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, and Psalm, who turns two in May.

Former lovebirds: Kim filed for divorce from Kanye in February, after almost seven years of marriage. Kanye filed his response for divorce in early April, per People ; he asked for joint legal and physical custody of their four kids

Family first: They are parents to: North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, and Psalm, who turns two in May

Their divorce proceedings are going 'smoothly,' People's source revealed.

'Kim and Kanye are getting along. They have both stayed true to their commitment to make the best situation for the kids.'

Adding: 'Kim is very happy that they have managed to keep things calm. She thinks Kanye is a good dd. She wants him to be able to spend as much time with the kids as he wants.'

The insider added that Kim 'seems happier' 'for every week that goes by since she filed for divorce.'

She 'known that filing for divorce was the right decision. The kids are doing as she could hope.'

After her February filing, Kim and the children have continued to stay at their $60 million Hidden Hills mansion she previously shared with Kanye.

Kim has recently been at the center of dating rumors involving CNN reporter Van Jones.

While the pair have been pals for years, fans speculate their friendship may have turned romantic during her four-year law apprenticeship with his Oakland-based nonpartisan organization, #cut50.

Sources close to Kim, however, are shooting down speculation of a romance, saying the pair have a long working relationship together and a shared interest in criminal justice reform.

On Sunday, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams expanded on the rumors as she noted he is 'so left,' he 'maybe even influenced her politics.'

'I will not wait while everybody tells me I dont know what Im talking about,' she went on.

Twitter users are divided by the idea of them as a couple, with many accusing Kardashian of 'using' Van to 'further her law career.'

'People are gonna look at Kim as using Kanye to advance her in the fashion world and using Van Jones to help advance her into her next career field in law,' fired one fan.

Another wrote: 'If Kim Kardashian marries Van Jones Im no longer doing this whole life thing. That will be simply too much for me.'

More than friends? Kim has recently been at the center of dating rumors involving CNN reporter Van Jones; seen November 14, 2018 at Variety and Rolling Stone's Criminal Justice Summit at Jeremy Hotel in West Hollywood

In 2018, Kim and Van worked together to successfully get Alice Johnson pardoned from a life sentence stemming from a 1996 conviction on nonviolent drug charges.

Van recently ended a long marriage to his wife of 14 years, Jana Carter, in 2019.

Amid the KKW Beauty's divorce, she has been reportedly been pursued by royals, billionaires and A-lister suitors.

'People are reaching out through mutual friends and people that she's worked with to set her up with everyone from royal family members to A-list actors to athletes to billionaire CEOs,' a source told Page Six.

The insider added: 'People are also trying to reach out to her via DM.'

Although the source added that Kim is 'not looking for anyone right now', they continued: 'She's not looking to jump into anything but is keeping an open mind.'

It comes after it was recently reported that Kanye is looking to date an 'artist and creative person' once their divorce is made final.

Kim and Kanye were friends for years, with Kim even marrying Kris Humphries in 2011 and divorcing him 72 days later during their friendship.

Kim and Kanye became romantic in spring 2012 and got married on May 24, 2014 in Florence, Italy after enjoying celebrations in Paris, France.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sits in a 2019 Chevrolet Traverse, assembled in Lansing, Michigan, at the General Motors display area during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Mich., on Jan. 15, 2019. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters File Photo)

US Grand Jury Adds WMD Charge Against Men Accused of Plan to Kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer

WASHINGTONA federal grand jury added new charges on Wednesday against three men charged with conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying they planned to use weapons of mass destruction to destroy a bridge, the Justice Department said.

Adam Fox, 40, of Wyoming, Michigan; Barry Croft Jr., 45, of Bear, Delaware; and Daniel Joseph Harris, 23, of Lake Orion, Michigan, were charged with knowingly conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction against persons or property, the department said, in addition to a kidnapping conspiracy charge in October.

The superseding indictment on Wednesday alleges that the three planned to destroy a nearby bridge, which would have harmed and hindered Whitmers security detail and any responding law enforcement officers, a Justice Department statement said.

The new indictment also alleged that Croft and Harris possessed a destructive device that was not registered as required by U.S. federal law. It said Harris also possessed an unregistered semiautomatic assault rifle.

Fourteen men were accused of taking part in a plot by right-wing militia extremists to abduct Whitmer. One of them broke ranks with his co-defendants in January and pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping conspiracy charge.

Prosecutors have said all 14 suspects targeted Whitmer in retribution for public health orders she imposed placing restrictions on a wide range of social and business activity to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

By Doina Chiacu
(Newser)  Two deputies were killed and three other people, including a suspected gunman, were found dead after a lengthy standoff in North Carolina, a sheriff's office said Thursday. The Watauga County Sheriff's Office said Sgt. Chris Ward and K9 Deputy Logan Fox were dispatched to a home in Boone at 9:44am Wednesday after the homeowner and his family didn't report to work or answer telephone calls, per the AP. Both were hit by gunfire. Other officers were able to pull out Ward, who later died at a hospital. Fox died at the scene. "The individual suspected of killing the two officers is also suspected of killing two civilians in the residence," said the statement. The names of the civilians weren't released. A Boone police officer also was hit by gunfire during an initial attempt to rescue the deputies, but he was uninjured thanks to his protective equipment.

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Morganton Department of Public Safety Maj. Ryan Lander said the suspect appeared to have killed himself. "This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved, as well as their families and our community," said Sheriff Len Hagaman. "I greatly appreciate the tremendous support we are receiving from law enforcement agencies across the region and the state." The sheriff's office said officers from approximately 15 law enforcement agencies surrounded the home. Other people living nearby were evacuated or told to shelter in place as the standoff lasted throughout the day and Wednesday night.

(Read more North Carolina stories.)
If John McDonald, a space flight engineer, commuted to work at UC Berkeley by car, he usually had a 15-minute window to leave his Pleasanton home in order to make it on time before Interstate 580 got clogged with miserable bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Now, McDonald is on the road fewer days a week as he works from home. When he does drive on the freeway, hes able to get to Berkeley in half the time, shaving the amount of time hes on the road from roughly 15 hours per week to four.

Its quite a dramatic drop, and I just feel so much better about not driving (as much), believe me, McDonald said.

Traffic on Bay Area freeways has drastically changed during the pandemic, and so have the commutes for McDonald and other drivers. Freeways might look more crowded now as the economy gradually reopens, but actual freeway congestion, though steadily increasing, remains a fraction of what it once was for most commute hours.

Data provided by Caltrans, the states Department of Transportation, to The Chronicle illustrates average weekday traffic in the Bay Area has nearly rebounded or actually increased during some points of the day. Congestion levels on most counties freeways  as measured by vehicle hours of delay  remain significantly below what they were before shelter-in-place orders.

The data provides snapshots in time, and experts say many variables contribute to traffic and congestion, such as highway construction and whether schools are open. But the comparisons illustrate how the domino effect of remote work for large swaths of the regions white-collar workers has changed behavior patterns on Bay Area highways.

Michael Barnard, for instance, used to spend about two and half hours a day sitting in his hydrogen-powered Honda Clarity as he drove from his home in North Oakland to the bookstore he owns in Danville six days a week.

In January, when the states COVID-19 hospitalizations reached record highs, and in the early weeks of the pandemic, the freeways were so empty it felt like a post-apocalyptic sight.

It was so nice, Barnard said of the empty roads. Things are so much closer together when theres no traffic.

Traffic has picked up recently, and the tunnel on eastbound Highway 24, before reaching the stretches of highway surrounded by hills and trees, feels more crowded with cars during typical morning rush hours. Still, I dont think Ive sat in stop-and-go (traffic) going to work more than once since last March, Barnard said.

That, in part, is because peak traffic hours during weekday mornings and nights remain less congested compared with pre-pandemic times. Midday traffic between noon to 1 p.m. is likely to now be more congested than before the pandemic. The amount of time drivers spent stuck in traffic during the noon hour has risen during the average weekday, from 5,700 vehicle hours of delay to 7,000, which represents a 23% increase in congestion.

Morning and evening rush hours have seen the greatest changes. Vehicle hours of delay on freeways during the 8 a.m. hour dropped from 30,600 hours to 7,800, a 75% reduction. Congestion on Bay Area freeways during the 6 p.m. hour declined 65%, from 22,200 hours of delay to 7,700.

In order to compare traffic congestion with pre-pandemic times, Caltrans traffic engineers examined average weekday traffic data collected from the tens of thousands of individual detectors on state freeways for two periods  the first two weeks of April 2021 and the last two weeks of March 2019.

Caltrans engineers gathered information on two data points: the average vehicle miles traveled by all traffic on the freeway system, and average vehicle hours of delay, which measures congestion delay. According to Caltrans, freeway traffic is considered to be delayed when vehicles travel 60 miles per hour or less.

Caltrans spokesperson Vince Jacala said vehicle miles traveled and vehicle hours of delay do not directly influence each other, meaning an increase in one data point does not necessarily cause an increase or decrease in the other.

As people are able to work from home and work remotely, theyre traveling during different times of day, but maybe not necessarily reducing the amount they travel, said Chris Barney, a senior transportation planner for the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, who viewed the Caltrans data.

Freeway traffic and congestion varies widely across the Bay Areas nine counties:

 South Bay counties have seen the sharpest drops in traffic. The vehicle miles traveled on San Mateo County freeways during an average weekday have dropped from 9.8 million miles to 7.5 million, a 23% drop. Vehicle hours of delay have gone down from 255,000 hours on a given weekday to 57,000, a 78% drop that also reflects the Bay Areas steepest decline in congestion.

 North Bay counties such as Solano and Marin experienced slight increases in traffic, according to Caltrans data, and congestion on these freeways is looking closer to normal than in other Bay Area counties.

 In Sonoma County, congestion actually increased 28%, from an estimated 39,000 vehicle hours of delay in 2019 to 50,000 hours of delay. Barney said county congestion patterns are historically volatile and increase in the spring.

The north-south disparity does not appear random. Half of the jobs in Santa Clara County are eligible for remote work along with 47% of the jobs in San Mateo County, according to a December report by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Meanwhile, fewer shares of jobs in Contra Costa (32%), Sonoma (32%), Solano (29%) and Napa (26%) counties could be done via telecommuting.

About a third of Bay Area residents plan to commute less after the pandemic. Though, once freeways get more congested, more people will be attracted to taking public transit than, say, sticking it out in their cars, said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

McDonald, the Pleasanton space flight engineer, used to frequently commute to work by BART. Now, hes wary of taking public transit until a greater share of adults in the region become fully vaccinated. Another factor in taking public transit again for McDonald: How often will he be required to show up for work in person?

Once or twice a week, thats not too bad, McDonald said of driving to work. But if I was having to go in four or five days a week, that would also get me back on BART.

For some whove spent the past year working remotely, there could be no going back to the grind of traditional 9-to-5 office commutes.

Urvi Nagrani no longer has to spend 15 to 20 hours a week commuting from San Francisco to Foster City.

It would take Nagrani, who works at a tech company focused on sustainability and vehicle electrification, up to two hours each way to commute from the city to her office on the Peninsula. Now, even with traffic picking up, her commutes take 45 minutes, less than half the time.

When Nagrani goes into the office these days, its no longer for the full workday. Rather, she goes in for specific tasks, such as meetings or to pick up office equipment.

The pandemic forced a lot of companies to invest in the telecom infrastructure necessary to support a remote workplace, and you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, Nagrani said. There are a lot of people who upon having that 10 to 15 hours more per week want to maintain that.

Ricardo Cano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByRicardoCano
A team of scientists from A-Alpha Bio., USA, has recently conducted a large-scale screening of 33 therapeutic antibodies to examine their binding affinity to a number of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants. The team analyzed the impact of potential mutations in the spike receptor-binding domain (RBD) on antibody efficacy. The study is currently available on the bioRxiv* preprint server.

Background

Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies developed against SARS-CoV-2 have shown significant efficacy in reducing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity and mortality both in clinical trials and real-world pandemic situations. Several antibody candidates are currently under phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, with some already received emergency use approval from health authorities worldwide.

The majority of therapeutic antibodies are designed to target the spike RBD of SARS-CoV-2 so that the interaction between RBD and host cell angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) can be disrupted. Therefore, it is evident that mutations arising in the spike RBD can potentially alter the RBD binding efficacy of antibodies. In this context, studies have shown that newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants with spike RBD mutations are capable of escaping antibody-mediated neutralization.

The study

In the current study, the scientists have examined the binding affinity of 33 therapeutic antibody candidates for a large panel of SARS-CoV-2 variants. Among tested antibodies, there are 9 clinically relevant antibodies, including Imdevimab, Casirivimab and Bamlanivimab.

Using the AlphaSeq assay, they have assessed more than 150,000 protein-protein interactions between the antibodies and most of the single amino acid substitution mutations present on the spike RBD. In the analysis, they have also included a number of predominantly circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants with multiple spike mutations.

Furthermore, they have analyzed the protein-protein interactions to identify major epitopes for each antibody, as well as to detect mutations responsible for a loss of epitope binding ability of each antibody.

Important observations

Initially, the scientists screened all tested antibodies against a site-saturation mutagenesis library containing about 75% of all single amino acid mutants of 165 sites within the spike RBD. They identified a number of RBD sites with different patterns of mutation sensitivity among antibodies. This observation highlights the epitope diversity among antibodies.

They analyzed each of these RBD sites to identify antibody-specific epitopes. Their analysis revealed that about 21 antibodies had putative epitope residues. They used previously known structures of antibody-RBD complexes to validate their findings.

Furthermore, they examined the binding of all tested antibodies and ACE2 against a panel of 34 spike RBD variants containing single, double, and triple mutations. The panel also included five recently emerged variants of concern (B.1.1.7, B.1.351, P.1, B.1.427, and B.1.429) and four related coronavirus RBDs.

The analysis revealed that all five variants of concern had significantly increased ACE2 binding affinity. Regarding antibodies, a wide range of binding to the tested RBD variants was observed.

By specifically analyzing the efficiency of 9 clinically relevant antibodies, the scientists observed no significant variation in binding affinities of Imdevimab, Casirivimab or Bamlanivimab for the B.1.1.7 variant. However, they detected a reduction in binding affinity of Casirivimab and Bamlanivimab for the B.1.351 and P.1 variants. A similar reduction in binding affinity they observed for Regdanvimab and COR-101 and Tixagevimab to the B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1 variants and the B.1.351, and P.1 variants, respectively.

Regarding cross-reactivity, they observed that while Imdevimab, Bamlanivimab, Regdanvimab, Tixagevimab, Cilgavimab, and COR-101 were highly specific to SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD, Casirivimab, Sotrovimab, and Etesevimab showed different degrees of cross-reactivity to the RBDs of related coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-1, LYRa11, WIV1, and RaTG13.

Study significance

The study provides a detailed overview of the epitope specificity and binding affinity of 33 therapeutic antibodies targeting spike RBD of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, the study characterizes the binding affinity of clinically relevant antibodies for newly emerged variants of concern, highlighting the impact of RBD mutations on antibody efficacy.

*Important Notice

bioRxiv 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.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 00:11:23|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China's taxation and broadcasting watchdogs said Wednesday that they are investigating allegations against Chinese actress Zheng Shuang concerning tax evasion, sky-high remuneration and contract fraud.

The Shanghai Municipal Tax Service is conducting an investigation into Zheng's tax issues in accordance with tax laws, while the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau has launched a probe into the production costs of a related TV drama and how much she was paid.

Officials from the two government bodies said they would strictly investigate violations of laws and regulations, while resolutely probing issues such as actors' sky-high remuneration and tax evasion, and taking corrective measures.

Contracts for the production of TV programs should be strictly scrutinized to create a positive environment for the high-quality development of the country's TV drama industry, according to the watchdogs. Enditem
When Secret Service Agent Matthew Britsch began trawling for major counterfeiters in the shadowy marketplaces of the dark web, he acted like any smart consumer on eBay  he studied the reviews.

Britsch knew he had struck gold when he found Billmaker, the online moniker of an anonymous counterfeiter who promised a high-quality $100 bill and a money-back guarantee. He even had a loyal fan base who praised his work and customer service with scores of positive reviews.

Very good quality and got here quick, one gushed.

All passed with no issue whatsoever, another wrote, approvingly. FRESH CLEAN BILLS! agreed a third.

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Billmaker was a five-star guy, said Britsch. He wanted those five-star reviews to help him sell more bills. That was clearly his goal.

The agent clicked buy and in September 2017 purchased four fake $100 bills for $120 in bitcoin, the online cryptocurrency. The counterfeits arrived on time and were as good as promised.

An analysis by Secret Service experts linked the fraudulent bills to thousands of others that had been passed with a total face value of $4.1 million. That made Billmaker the nations most prolific domestic counterfeiter.

Britschs buy sparked a nine-month investigation into the murkiest corners of the dark web, where cyber-savvy criminals use online bazaars to anonymously buy and sell goods ranging from firearms and illegal drugs to fake identification and stolen cars.

Its all there for sale, said Glen M. Kessler, the special agent in charge of the Secret Services five-agent Savannah office. Right in the open. But while it provides anonymity to criminals, it also provides anonymity to law enforcement. They cant tell who they are selling to. And so we went fishing.

::

The Secret Service, best known for protecting presidents, was formed in 1865 to fight an epidemic of counterfeiting that was strangling the U.S. economy.

Today counterfeit U.S. bills are only a tiny fraction of currency in circulation. Even so, the Secret Service made more than 1,580 counterfeiting-related arrests last fiscal year, seizing $204 million in phony bills. Banks and retailers collected an additional $107 million.

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Once dominated by artisans who minted carefully forged greenbacks on large offset presses, domestic counterfeiters now typically rely on computers, scanners and laser printers. And some use the dark web to sell their high-quality fakes online.

The dark webs backbone is a system called the Onion Router, known as Tor, a network of software and online connections that mask those who use it. Tor has attracted both criminal and legitimate users  political dissidents overseas, for example  seeking to avoid government surveillance.

In 2017, Kessler turned an office supply room into a hub for dark web counterfeit investigations. He had two rules: Targets had to be real players  Not your guy printing $2,000 off on an inkjet at home, Kessler said  and live in the United States.

We thought it would be too difficult to catch the ones operating in South America or overseas, he said.

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Agents used the customer reviews as a guide and quickly came across Billmaker. In addition to the bitcoin-backed guarantee, Billmaker offered free tracking of his packages through the U.S. mail.

That was a mistake. Secret Service agents were able to track Billmakers shipment to Britsch from the Oklahoma City area, a crucial starting clue.

They were impressed when the red-and-blue envelope arrived. The fakes  reproductions of $100 bills phased out in 2013 in favor of a harder-to-fake currency  had been printed on high-quality laser printers and specialty paper. The bogus Benjamins had a decent fake security strip. They even felt real.

Daniel Johnson (Marissa Elliott)

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Within a month, thanks to analysis by Secret Service experts in Washington, the agents knew they were chasing Daniel Johnson, a notorious counterfeiter who had been printing and passing fake bills since at least 2015. His last known address was near Oklahoma City.

Johnson, 34, was also considered dangerous. He was a firearms enthusiast and a member of the prepper movement, activists who stockpile food, ammunition and other supplies because they believe a nuclear war or other catastrophe is likely to occur.

Johnson had served three years in federal prison for selling pirated copies of Microsoft Office. But he was arrested again in February 2016 on counterfeiting charges.

Released on bond, he turned down a plea deal offer and vanished. In February 2017, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of counterfeiting and growing marijuana.

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Johnson was so angry at the justice system that his lawyer, M. Michael Arnett, worried he might resort to violence if arrested. Arnett said he consulted legal ethics experts before he passed a warning to federal prosecutors.

I was concerned he was not going to be taken alive if officers tried to arrest him, and that toll would be higher if they were not forewarned, Arnett said.

With that danger in mind, agents in Savannah returned to the dark web in October 2017 to buy more counterfeit bills. But the marketplace had disappeared. Billmakers online trail went cold.

::

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Marissa Elliott, a university student and bartender in Norman, Okla., met Johnson when he took a seat at her bar in June 2017 and she caught his big blue eyes lingering on her.

Tall and muscular, he was also quiet and reserved. He didnt even offer his name. But the bartender checked his drivers license before serving him a beer and saw he was Ross Moore, 36, from Florida.

It was the first of many lies.

They soon started dating. They celebrated his fake birthday that July and moved in February 2018 into a converted shed in Noble, about 30 miles south of Oklahoma City. The tiny house was hidden in dense woods.

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The Secret Service seized fake bills with a face value of $300,000 from Johnsons counterfeiting plant and home. (U.S. Secret Service)

A talented artist, Johnson rendered hand-drawn portraits of relatives and friends. He initially said he worked in information technology and had attended college, majoring in psychology. Elliott found a Harvard diploma and ID card in a drawer; she didnt know they were fakes.

Johnson never used credit cards or wrote checks. He explained to Elliott that he relied on cash because he was an investor in a marijuana business that was prohibited from using banks.

He told her he had been divorced, which was true, and that a screen-saver photo of a young girl on his computer was of his niece, which was false. It was his daughter.

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As the months passed, Johnson suffered frequent nightmares and spent time on strange conspiracy websites. Elliott believed his stress stemmed from secret work he claimed he had done for the government.

He told me he had seen horrible things, she said.

When they drove to a cabin where he was preparing for the demise of society, he insisted she put her cellphone in a Faraday bag, a shielded satchel that blocks electronic signals, so they couldnt be tracked.

In the late spring of 2018, he bought tickets so Elliott and her mother could take a bucket-list vacation in Thailand. They spoke daily by phone. But one morning in May, he seemed distant and distracted.

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It was like he was in a rush to get someplace, she said.

::

The Secret Service was closing in.

After falling off the map, Billmaker suddenly had popped up on other dark web marketplaces. In January 2018, agents bought four fake $100 bills from him. They did it again in April.

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Working with agents in Oklahoma City, the Savannah squad narrowed its hunt to around Norman, about 20 miles away.

U.S. postal inspectors studied Johnsons tracking numbers and examined dozens of bags of mail. They discovered he had mailed his packages from blue post boxes across the parking lot from the Norman Police Department.

After several weeks of surveillance, federal agents determined Johnson was driving a black Ford F-250 pickup. It was registered to Ross Moore of Florida, a real person who had reported his identity had been stolen.

Johnson had bought the truck for $58,000 in cash.

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Agents traced him to an apartment in Norman, where he probably collected mail and supplies; a house in the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, which was his main counterfeiting plant; and his secluded home in Noble.

As he drove out of his gravel driveway in Noble on May 17, 2018, a 10-car convoy of federal and local law enforcement officials led by the U.S. Marshals Service closed in, sirens blaring.

Daniel Johnson was a skilled artist and drew this picture of his girlfriend, Marissa Elliott. (Marissa Elliott)

Johnson swerved to the shoulder, hopped out and began firing an AR-15 rifle. A gun battle raged for nearly a minute before Johnson was killed. No agents were injured.

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Searching the house in Yukon, agents found about $300,000 in fake $100 bills, lined up and hanging to dry in neat rows.

Agents also seized several computers protected by encryption, which the Secret Service has not been able to crack.

There are so many questions I would have liked to ask him, said Wesley Gillespie, a Secret Service agent who chased Johnson for a year. How did he learn to make these so well? Who taught him? Where is the bitcoin?

Investigators may have a clue. When they searched Johnsons body, they found a computer thumb drive jammed in an ankle holster. The device contained 50 screen grabs of text messages.

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Agents suspect it is a digital key to unlock a bitcoin or computer vault. Even so, they concede they may never crack the counterfeiters dark web of secrets.
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En 75 ans, les appartements ont perdu 27 cm et les maisons 9 cm. Les Francais, eux, ont gagne 10 cm.
YEREVAN.  The most painful issue for all of us is the issue of the citizens taken captive. Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this at Thursdays Cabinet meeting of the interim government of Armenia.

"Azerbaijan is not fulfilling the [respective] obligation it assumed, and we can record that this fact is already becoming a matter on the international agenda. Yesterday, the European Union issued a very important statement, in which it is recorded in a very specific and targeted way that Azerbaijan must return all the captives; moreover, regardless of the specific circumstances of the captivity of these persons," he said.

Pashinyan underscored that this statement makes reference to the processes taking place in the European Court of Human Rights, which, as per Pashinyan, adds a legal component to this political statement.

"In recent times, international activism related to the plight of detainees is very important, and it increases the optimism that we will have concrete results in this regard. We need to be as patient and consistent as possible, and this issue must definitely be resolved positively," added the acting PM of Armenia.
If federal regulators have their way, 49 states could join Massachusetts in banning the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to introduce regulations banning the mint-flavored cigarettes over the next year, the Associated Press reported. The announcement comes after years of failed attempts to ban menthol cigarette sales, thwarted by tobacco companies and Congress.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law a statewide ban on menthol cigarette sales, which took effect June 1. Convenience store owners say the ban has led to spikes in menthol cigarette sales in neighboring New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Anti-smoking groups praised the new law, saying the sale targeted Black communities

For decades, tobacco companies have intentionally and systematically targeted African Americans with menthol products for their own financial gain, said Dennis Dimitri, chair of Tobacco Free Mass. Menthol targeting by tobacco companies has created serious racial health disparities in Massachusetts.

Dimitri called the FDAs move to ban menthol cigarette sales long overdue. The announcement resulted from a lawsuit filed by anti-smoking and medical groups in 2020 to force the FDA to make a decision on menthol. The lawsuit alleges federal regulators had unreasonably delayed a response to a 2013 petition that proposed banning the flavor, the AP reported.

We applaud the FDA for starting this process, which is years overdue, Dimitri said. We are proud that Massachusetts has already taken a stand against this injustice and acted to prevent future generations from the financial and health harms of tobacco addiction. We hope that other states move quickly to ban menthol sales and protect future generations now, instead of waiting for the FDAs final rules.

California passed a similar law in August, which was set to take effect Jan. 1, 2021, but the laws implementation was delayed after tobacco groups gathered signatures to put the law to a statewide referendum.

House Speaker Ron Mariano called the 2019 statewide menthol cigarette ban protect our public health with a clear emphasis on our communities of color that have been targeted by longstanding marketing efforts.

Marc Hymovitz, director of government relations for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said in a tweet Massachusetts took a bold step in 2019 and said its time for the ban to spread nationwide.

Massachusetts took a bold step in 2019 in being the fist state to ban all flavored tobacco products, including menthol! Now its time to do this across the US! #mapoli https://t.co/ZKLnMcu6so  Marc Hymovitz (@MarcHymovitz) April 28, 2021

Jon Schaer, executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association, said a nationwide ban means Massachusetts wouldnt be losing out on sales to neighboring states, but he says restrictions could still create a black market involving products sold overseas.

This isnt a worldwide ban. Its not a use ban. Its a nationwide sales ban, he said. Where theres demand, theres a market.

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OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Two men were killed when the vehicle in which they were passengers collided with another at the intersection of U.S. 90 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Wednesday night.

According to Ocean Springs police Capt. Ryan LeMaire, officers responded to the scene at 10:37 p.m. Wednesday. Two men were declared dead at the scene -- 46-year-old Robert Dominguez of Tucker, Ga., and 36-year-old Jon Thomas of Ocean Springs.

LeMaire said preliminary investigation indicates one of the vehicles was northbound on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and was attempting to turn west on to U.S. 90 when the other vehicle, which was eastbound on the highway, struck the first vehicle on the drivers side.

The drivers of the two vehicles were both transported to Ocean Springs Hospital with undisclosed injuries. LeMaire said the crash remains under investigation.
CHICAGO (AP)  The Chicago Police Department was well aware of how dangerous foot chases could be long before officers shot and killed two people who had run away from them late last month. It also knew how important it was to have a written policy for what officers should and shouldn't do in such situations.

Four years after the Department of Justice issued a scathing report saying too many Chicago police chases were unnecessary or ended with officers shooting people they didn't need to and two years after a judge signed off on a consent decree requiring the department to adopt a foot pursuit policy, it still doesn't have one.

As the department scrambles to comply with Mayor Lori Lightfoot's order to draft an interim foot pursuit policy before summer begins, questions remain about why it has taken so long to do what many other large law enforcement agencies have already done, including the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department and the police department in Portland, Oregon.

Before she was elected mayor, Lightfoot was quoted after the release of video of a fatal police shooting that the footage underscored the urgency to adopt a foot pursuit policy and that the department shouldn't wait until the 2021 deadline to do so under the consent decree.

For proof of the need for a policy, one need only look to a report by an independent monitor of the decree, which found that from March 2020 through the end of that year, there were 1,300 police foot pursuits, including 382 that involved an officer using force. Not only that, but the Chicago Tribune reported five years ago that a third of the city's police shootings from 2010 through 2015 that resulted in someone being wounded or killed started with foot pursuits. That report also underscored the dangers of foot chases, from the risk of officers, suspects and bystanders being shot to the non-gun-related injuries that can happen.

Jonathan Smith, an attorney and former section chief of the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division who served as a consultant on the consent decree, said one of the reasons Chicago doesn't have a foot pursuit policy is that police departments are reluctant to make changes until they must.

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Sometimes it takes incidents like these to see the cost of noncompliance, said Smith, referring to the fatal police shootings of 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29 and of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez two days later.

Christy Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor who led the Justice Departments probe of the citys police force following the police killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald, said it isn't that surprising that Chicago doesn't have a foot pursuit policy because most agencies don't.

On the other hand, they were told several years ago that this is a problem and its dangerous, she said.

Since the deaths of Toledo and Alvarez, who video shows were holding handguns right before or as officers shot them, Lightfoot has said it's way past time for the police department to act on a pursuit policy. Her office didn't respond to requests for comment about why a policy hadn't already been put in place, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times, she recently said, "Unfortunately, the final version of the consent decree, put this issue off for several years.

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has extensively studied the police department and its use of force, said there is nothing in the decree that has prevented Lightfoot or the department from creating a policy.

The only reason why there isnt one (a policy) in place is because the mayor and the police department have refused to act, he said.

Robert Boik, who is heading the departments effort to comply with the consent decree, said it isn't true that the department has been dragging its heels on the issue.

We are meeting the deadlines, said Boik, the department's executive director for constitutional policing and reform. We aren't waiting to be told what to do.

He pointed out that the order to create a foot pursuit policy as part of the consent decree was only issued in early March, and that the department has already followed the decree's directive to create a training bulletin for officers and has seen to it that the vast majority of officers have studied it.

He said the department is on pace to have a temporary policy in place to meet the mayor's deadline of the start of summer and to have a permanent policy by September, after the original July 1 deadline was extended because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mumbai, April 29 : Urvashi Rautela has donated 27 oxygen concentrators in Uttarakhand to help in the war against Covid. The actress made the contribution through Urvashi Rautela Foundation.

"I was born in Haridwar Uttarakhand. Several hospitals and health institutions across the nation's capital and other parts of the country are running out of oxygen supplies for patients suffering from Covid. I really wanted to do something to help out," she told IANS.

"There are patients suffering and their hard-earned money is being used for their treatments. So, we are doing everything to help," she said.

The actress urges others to help, too.

"I would request everyone to help India with the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. I have the forethought to do much more in the future. I will continue to explore other relevant ways to help in saving lives and am committed to supporting the nation in this time of upheaval," she says.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
As India is battling a ferocious second wave of Covid-19, several countries across the world have put India on their travel ban list or have curtailed it in some form or the other. The US, Hong Kong, the UK, Canada, France, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Maldives, Thailand, Italy are among the countries that have closed themselves for Indian tourists.

While Doha has not imposed a blanket ban or severe restrictions, but it has released a fresh set of guidelines for people travelling from India.

Passengers flying from India to Dubai will now have to submit an RT-PCR negative test report in English with a test done within 48 hours of the scheduled flight departure. Indigo, Vistara have informed the passengers about the new rule through their official Twitter handle.

"Here's a new development in your travel requirements when flying to Doha," IndiGo tweeted.

New guidelines issued for passengers from India travelling to Dubai effective today

Carry a negative RT-PCR report with a test done within 48 hours of the scheduled flight departure from an ICMR certified lab.

The RT-PCR report should be in English, and not hand-written.

Undergo 10 days of Hotel quarantine in a dedicated quarantine facility.

Undergo a repeat RT-PCR test at the quarantine facility (at own cost) within one day of flight arrival in Doha.

Home quarantine is not applicable for any passenger.

Meanwhile, India saw a record singl-day rise of 3,79,257 new coronavirus infections pushing the total tally of COVID-19 cases to 1,83,76,524, while active cases crossed the 30-lakh mark, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated today.









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NaFAA in Liberia and FAO sign agreement to empower women in small-scale fisheries

April 29,2021 | Source: Liberian Observer

The government of Liberia through the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority have signed two cardinal fisheries projects with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) aimed at strengthening the Liberian fisheries sector. According to a NaFAA press release, the agreement was signed on Monday, April 26, 2021. And the two Fisheries projects include the Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) during and after COVID-19 and the Assessment of Sea Cucumber Fisheries along the coast in Liberia. The Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) during and after the COVID-19 project is valued at US$749,000.00 and it will impact about one thousand Liberian fishmongers (women who process fish and sell ). The Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) during and after COVID-19 project is in line with Sustainable Development Goal 1,2,3,8,9, and 14.



At the same time, the Assessment of Sea Cucumber Fisheries project is valued at US$91,000.00 and will last for a period of twelve months with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO providing technical support. The Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) during and after the COVID-19 project is funded by the Japanese government to the Liberian government through NaFAA, and is implemented by the FAO while the Assessment of Sea Cucumber Fisheries project is funded by the FAO.



The expected outcome of the Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) during and after the COVID-19 project is aimed at food security and poverty reduction and the outcome of the Assessment of Sea Cucumber Fisheries project is to develop a sea cucumber management plan which will be the first of its kind in the Gulf of Guinea. Speaking during the signing ceremony which took place at the Mesurado Pier near the Coast Guard Base on Bushrod Island, the Director-General of NaFAA disclosed that FAO has been one of the first international partners to expressed interest in helping the Liberian government to manage sea cucumbers.



Madam Emma Metieh Glassco disclosed that sea cucumbers have been newly discovered in Liberian waters and it is valuable internationally on Asian markets as such the Liberian government attaches great importance to the fisheries. I would like to say thanks FAO for its prompt intervention that would help bring about holistic assessment of sea cucumber fisheries in Liberian waters, the government through NaFAA wrote to FAO for technical support Madam Glassco stressed during the signing ceremony. Commenting on the Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) project the NaFAA Boss pointed out that women play a pivotal role in fish processing, distribution and sales but not much priority is given to them and they are referred to as fishmongers. Madam Glassco noted that the project will be meaningful in helping with the processing of fish through the construction of basic fish smoking infrastructures such as smoke ovens within densely populated fishing communities and also provide storage facilities for fishmongers first of its kind in Liberia.



Speaking further Glassco added that the project will enable the distribution of solar freezers to three fishing counties as a pilot project, this she added will be history-making in the Liberian fisheries sector. Madam Glassco disclosed that the major challenge in the fisheries sector is the lack of storage facilities which always results in a post-harvest loss. Meanwhile, speaking earlier, FAO Country Representative to Liberia Maritztou Njie noted that the Liberian fisheries sector is very important to its citizens, strengthening food security and providing direct employment for those along the coast. Madam Njie said the Livelihood Empowerment of women in small-scale fisheries (SSF) project has two main objects namely to improve the productive capacity and resilience of small scale fisheries operators especially women and the second is to enhance the capacity of fisheries sector stakeholders on the Port State Measure Agreement and Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated fishing for sustainable fisheries resource management.



She mentioned that the achievement of the two objectives will meaningfully contribute to the reduction of poverty, food security and livelihood for women within fishing communities. Meanwhile, speaking on the Assessment of Sea Cucumber Fisheries the FAO Country Representative promised that FAO will provide the technical support to ensure that NaFAA achieves its desire objective to produce a sea cucumber management plan.

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Fisheries Resources, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Landing Centres.
Casey Wardynski, a former superintendent of Huntsville City Schools, has launched a campaign to represent north Alabama in Congress.

Wardynski made his announcement in a campaign video posted Thursday on a campaign Facebook page and on You Tube as well as a campaign website.

The video begins with a voiceover saying, Asked to serve our nation by President Trump and makes clear that Wardynski is adopting a now-familiar Republican campaign strategy of aligning himself as closely with the former president.

The video highlights Wardynskis appointment by Trump to Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. It continued a 30-year career in the Army for Wardynski.

Ive had no higher calling than when President Trump asked me to implement his agenda by appointing me as his Assistant Secretary of the Army, Wardynski said in the video. Wardynski said in the video that he helped Trump build the partial wall on the Mexican border. The video voiceover describes Wardynski as Trumps conservative warrior.

Wardynski served as superintendent of Huntsville schools from 2011-2016. He resigned suddenly and disclosed a romantic relationship with and forthcoming marriage to Karen Lee, the CEO of a private school paid to handle discipline problems for Huntsville. Wardynskis campaign website said he and Karen together have six adult children and five grandchildren with a sixth on the way.

Wardynski, a widower, was not married when he disclosed the relationship with Lee.

On his campaign website, Wardynski touted overseeing a dramatic reversal in the financial fortunes as Huntsville superintendent  turning a $19 million deficit into a $30 million surplus while graduation rates increased 33 percent.

He also had critics in the Rocket City and a month before he departed, voters elected two new school board members who campaigned as critics of Wardynski.

In his Trump-appointed position as Assistant Secretary of the Army, Wardynski was responsible for Army personnel policy and supervision of the Armys 1.3-million-person manpower program. He also supervised development of a $450 billion five-year defense program for the Army, his website said.

Wardynski is the third candidate to announce a campaign for the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks. Madison County Commission Chair Dale Strong and Athens educator Andy Blalock. Brooks is not seeking re-election to the position he has held since 2010. He is running for the U.S. Senate seat coming open with the retirement of Sen. Richard Shelby.
After a year characterized by unprecedented physical and mental health challenges, Alabama lawmakers have decided to focus their attention on denying health care to transgender and nonbinary youth.

The Alabama House of Representatives is currently considering the so-called Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would restrict transgender and nonbinary young peoples access to gender-affirming care.

Not only would this bill threaten doctors who administer medically necessary care with up to 10 years in prison, but it would also apply these penalties to parents who are already administering these treatments at home and require all school officials to out their trans and nonbinary students to their families.

Sadly, Alabama is not alone. More than 75 anti-transgender bills are being considered across a majority of states, in an effort seemingly designed to exclude transgender people from every facet of public life.

The fact of the matter is, if these policies become the law of the land, they would only work to increase the kind of social isolation and stigma that contributes to suicide risk.

As two of the leading suicide prevention organizations in the United States, we know this is not extreme or sensational to posit. Transgender and nonbinary youth already experience disproportionate rates of suicide attempts, largely due to increased victimization. These youth are not inherently prone to suicide because of their gender identity  experiences of rejection, violence, and discriminatory policies, like the ones being passed in Alabama, contribute to higher risk for anxiety, depression, and attempting suicide among trans youth.

Yet, to justify these dangerous and illogical bans on doctor-recommended medical care, we see the same old playbook of misinformation and fear-mongering being used. Proponents would have you believe that this standard care is experimentation and that 7-year-olds are being offered hormones and surgery. This is simply not true.

For one, when a young person is first exploring their gender identity, the process almost always starts with social transitioning, including changing ones name, pronouns, and physical presentation like clothing or hairstyle. This has well-documented psychological benefits.

Then, before the onset of puberty, some transgender and nonbinary youth opt to receive a prescription for puberty blockers to hit a pause button on puberty until they are old enough to make their own decisions about their lived gender. According to the Endocrine Society, gender-affirming hormone therapy is typically reserved for youth ages 16 and older, and that treatment is managed by both medical and mental health professionals.

Medical providers have derived these standards of care from decades of scientific research and on-the-ground experience, and thats why theyve been embraced by doctors across the country and endorsed by every major medical association, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.

Most importantly, gender-affirming medical care is associated with positive mental health outcomes, including showing promise for reducing suicide risk.

A 2020 study found that transgender adults who desired puberty blockers as adolescents but did not receive them were more than three times as likely to report suicidal thoughts in their lifetime compared to those who did receive puberty blockers. Similarly, a 2019 study demonstrated that after approximately one year of hormone therapy, the average level of suicidality among transgender youth dropped by more than 75% from what it was before treatment.

Adversely, transgender and nonbinary youth who report experiencing discrimination based on their gender identity were nearly twice as likely to report attempting suicide in the past year compared to those who did not experience gender identity-based discrimination.

The Trevor Project, which aims to end suicide among LGBTQ youth, constantly hears from transgender and nonbinary youth in crisis, who emphasize the harms of discrimination and rejection. Over the last year, Trevors crisis counselors have supported over 2,300 crisis contacts in Alabama. As troubling as that is, thats less than 9% of the number of Alabamas LGBTQ youth who we estimate to be in crisis and could benefit from our services.

If elected officials are interested in protecting youth, they should be investing in support services and expanding access to evidence-based treatments that can work to save lives, rather than limiting access to care and pushing trans kids further to the margins of society.

Our government should be sending a message to all LGBTQ youth that they deserve to be loved and supported; that they deserve to receive the health care they need, to pursue equal opportunities as their peers, and to live their lives without fear of being treated differently for who they are.

We urge politicians to remember the weight of their words and the real lives at stake here. Take time out of your day to actually spend time with trans youth of Alabama who would be harmed by this legislation and hear their concerns. And listen to the mental health experts, the researchers, and trans people when we tell you: affirming trans youth saves lives. Discriminatory policies put lives at risk.

Jennifer Fields Hall (she/her) is area director for Alabama at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Sam Brinton (they/them) is VP of Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project
South Africa: Government to honour Charlotte Mannya Maxeke

Government is set to launch the Year of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke, as declared by Cabinet in March 2021.

Fridays launch will allow government to unveil its Programme of Action for 2021, as a way to memorialise the struggle icon and trailblazer.

The launch will be led by Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabiltiies, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane and Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu.

uMama Charlotte Mannya Maxeke will become the second woman to be memorialised and honoured in this way since 2018 when struggle icon Albertina Sisulu was honoured.

This, the 150th year since the birthday of uMama Charlotte Mannya Maxeke is an important year for South Africa as we recognise women of courage and fortitude who pursued the same cause as struggle icons like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, to name but a few, said the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture in a statement on Thursday.

Maxeke made an indelible impact in many areas, including education, faith and politics and has been described as a woman of many firsts.

She was the first black woman to graduate and obtain a BSc Degree in Southern Africa in 1901.

She was also the first woman to participate in the Kings Court under King Sabata Dalindyebo of AbaThembu and they started a school under this Royal Family and for all her efforts, she was given the name Nogazo as a salutation of honour.

She then established a school in Evaton, Gauteng, in 1908 (Wilberforce Institute), having been inspired by her experience at Wilberforce in Ohio.

History books attest that she was the only woman that attended the first African National Congress (ANC) conference in 1912 as well as the first President of Bantu Womens League in 1918, which later became the ANC Womens League.

All government departments and entities are expected to have memorialisation activations that accord with the governments 2021 declaration of The year of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke.

Civil Society is also being encouraged to do the same to honour Maxeke. Activities can be shared under the #YearofCharlotteMaxeke hashtag.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
York city police have arrested three teens in a string of robberies that they said were a part of a concerning trend last weekend.

Police said the robberies involved a group of four armed robbers who were targeting people as they were walking to and from work around the city in the early morning hours.

On Tuesday, police got images from surveillance camera footage that helped investigators identify at least one suspect, police said. Police worked with the York City School District to detain him. The suspect then helped identify the three others in the crew.

Police have since recovered some of the stolen property and an illegally possessed ghost gun that investigators believe was used during the robberies.

Three of the four suspects were teens charged as adults, police said. Charges have been filed against a fourth suspect, but that person was not identified by police and is not in custody.

The three teens charged are

16-year-old William Calderon

17-year-old Alexander Chamorro

14-year-old Ethan Rosenboro

Calderon is being held at York County Prison on $75,000 bail. He is charged with four counts of felony robbery, one count of felony receiving stolen property, and misdemeanor possession of a firearm by a minor.

Chamorro is being held at York County Prison on $20,000 bail. He is charged with four felony counts of robbery, one misdemeanor count of possession of a firearm by a minor and one misdemeanor count of receiving stolen property.

Rosenboro is being held at York County Prison on $20,000 bail. He is charged with one count of felony robbery.

Read more on PennLive:
A thin-looking Alexei Navalny has appeared in public for the first time since he ended his hunger strike - describing himself as 'just an awful skeleton'.

The Russian opposition leader appeared in a Moscow court via video link on Thursday, telling his wife he had eaten 'five tablespoons of porridge' as he starts eating food after a three-week hunger strike.

The 44-year-old looked skinny and gaunt in his standard issue prison jumpsuit as he sat in front of a camera in a plain room for an appeal hearing for a conviction for defamation.

Speaking to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, he said he had been taken to the bathhouse to make sure he looked 'decent' for the hearing. He also lashed out at Putin, calling him a 'naked king' and slamming the president's '20 years of mediocre reign'.

'Yesterday, I was taken to the bathhouse, there is a mirror. I looked at myself', he said, 'I'm just an awful skeleton.

'Last time I weighed 72kg (11st 4lbs), I was probably in the seventh grade. If I had taken off my tunic, I would have looked much worse.'

His lawyer said he weighed 94kg (14st 8lbs) in January, when he returned to Russia from Germany.

Navalny told his wife he had eaten 'four tablespoons of porridge a day, today five', adding 'tomorrow I will eat six.'

'When I get to 10 spoons, it will be a breakthrough. To get 60 grams of raw carrots, I wrote a petition, they are still considering it.'

Navalny went on hunger strike on March 31 to demand medical care while in prison, he ended the protest on April 23 after he was seen by a doctor.

A thin-looking Alexei Navalny has appeared in the public for the first time since he ended his hunger strike on Friday. The Putin foe appeared on video link at Moscow's Babushkinsky district court today (pictured)

Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya (pictured) also attended the court for a hearing to consider an appeal against an earlier decision that found the Russian opposition leader guilty of slander

Navalny (pictured here on February 20) was appearing in court for an appeal hearing for defamation charges after he allegedly called World War Two veteran who appeared in a pro-Putin video 'a traitor and corrupt lackey'

Navalny was put on trial in February for allegedly calling a 94-year-old World War Two veteran who appeared in a pro-Putin video 'a traitor and corrupt lackey'.

The video promoted changes to Russia's constitution that would allow Putin to remain leader until at least 2036, despite already running the country for two decades.

Navalny was convicted for defamation on February 20 and fined 850,000 roubles (around $11,400).

He has denounced the Russian judicial system over bringing the charges - which he denies.

He told the court on Thursday, 'My dear court, your king is naked, and millions of people are shouting about it because it is quite obvious', likening Putin to the title character in the children's tale 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.

The 44-year-old opposition leader went on to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said: 'Twenty years of mediocre reign resulted in the crown hanging from his ears.

'We have spent trillions of dollars, and our country continues to degrade. Unsurprisingly, all economists of Russian origin say that recent years are lost decades.'

Navalny added: 'The lost decades will be replaced by the stolen decades. And the naked king can do nothing.'

The opposition leader also warned the judge not to interrupt him calling her, and the prosecutors in the room, 'traitors'.

'You are all traitors', he said. 'You and the naked king are implementing a plan to seize Russia, and the Russians should be turned into slaves. Their wealth will be taken away from them, they will be deprived of any prospects, you have implemented that plan.'

Speaking to his wife Yulia Navalnaya, the Putin foe (pictured looking gaunt on court video link today) said he had been taken to the bathhouse to make sure he looked 'decent' for the hearing

Navalny appeared via video link (pictured) on Thursday for an appeal hearing over a February defamation trial for allegedly calling a 94-year-old World War Two veteran who appeared in a pro-Putin video 'a traitor and corrupt lackey'

The Kremlin critic's appearance comes after his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) campaign was forced to disband its offices and authorities seek to declare the group an extremist organisation.

The Moscow prosecutor's office petitioned a court this month to declare both the regional offices and Navalny's anti-corruption organization as extremist groups.

The label would outlaw their activities, expose members and supporters to lengthy prison terms, and pose a major challenge for Navalny's embattled team.

Leonid Volkov, who as Navalny's top strategist runs the regional offices, said on Thursday that preserving the network in its current state 'is impossible' because of the extremism charges but rebranding them wouldn't help either.

'Unfortunately, it is impossible to work in these conditions. We're officially dismantling the network of Navalny's headquarters,' Volkov said on the messaging app Telegram.

Volkov's statement comes amid a sweeping crackdown on Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic, and his organizations.

The politician is currently in prison, and dozens of his aides and associates have been under arrest, targeted for raids by law enforcement, or facing criminal charges.

Leonid Volkov, who as Navalny's top strategist runs the regional offices, said on Thursday that the campaign's offices would be disbanded

Yulia Navalnaya attended court on Thursday in support for her husband who is appealing a conviction for slander

The hearing, which was attended by Navalny's lawyers Olga Mickailova (left) and Vadim Kobzev (right), comes as the opposition's campaign offices were disbanded

Earlier this week, the prosecutor's office issued an injunction ordering the offices to suspend their activities pending the court ruling, and a court in Moscow imposed restrictions on the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

The foundation's director, Ivan Zhdanov, said the organization will continue to work despite the restrictions.

Navalny set up a network of offices in dozens of regions when he was campaigning to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential election. He eventually was barred from running but kept the infrastructure in place.

The regional 'headquarters,' as the team called them, began their own investigations of graft by local officials and recruited activists, some of whom later ran for public office themselves.

The offices also were instrumental in organizing nationwide rallies in support of Navalny this year.

The offices also were instrumental in organizing nationwide rallies in support of Navalny this year

Navalny's arrest fuelled a series of protests (such as this one in St Petersburg in February) that drew tens of thousands to the streets across Russia and condemnation by Western states

In his statement, Volkov assured supporters that Navalny's team wasn't giving up.

'The networks of Navalny's headquarters doesn't exist anymore, but there are dozens of strong and tough regional politicians, thousands of his supporters, there are strong and independent political organizations which will work on investigations and elections, public campaigns and rallies. You will help them, and they will succeed,' Volkov said.

Navalny was arrested in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin - accusations that Russian officials reject.

Navalny, pictured with his wife and children, spent five months in hospital in Germany where he was receiving treatment for a nerve agent poisoning before returning to Russia in January

His arrest triggered protests across Russia that proved to be the biggest show of defiance in years. But they didn't stop authorities from putting Navalny on trial for violating the terms of a suspended sentence while he was in Germany.

The sentence stemmed from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has characterized as politically motivated.

He was ordered to serve two and a half years in prison and last month was transferred to a penal colony notorious for its harsh conditions.

Some of his top allies were slapped with criminal charges and placed under house arrest, and dozens of his associates in the regions were targeted with detentions and raids.
Mumbai, April 29 : With no work in hand owing to the Covid situation here, television actor Mahdi Parsafar returned to his country Iran last year. The actor, however, is happy with the break.

Parsafar says that he was only being offered mythological shows, and the break will let him start afresh "I was typecast and was only offered to play demons. I was quite bored with the same kind of characters. Hence, this break was a must. I'm waiting for the pandemic to end soon so that I could travel back to India to give a second try to my acting career," he says.

Mahdi, who has been a part of mythological shows like "Baal Krishna" and "Devon Ke Dev... Mahadev", has now gotten into bodybuilding to earn a living.

He says: "After I arrived in Iran last year, I had no source of income here. I didn't want to get into my family business. So, I started working as a fitness trainer. Bodybuilding is something I'm passionate about. By god's grace, I could now pay my bills."
[April 29, 2021] Digihost Announces Appointment of New Chief Financial Officer

TORONTO, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digihost Technology Inc. (Digihost or the Company) (TSXV: DGHI; OTCQB: HSSHF) is pleased to announce that it has appointed Paul Ciullo as the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective April 29, 2021. Mr. Ciullo will be based out of New York and will oversee all accounting and finance functions, while providing strategic recommendations that ensure all financial solutions support the Companys evolving growth strategy and vision.

Mr. Ciullo has a diverse professional background and specialized in financial reporting and project management during his time spent working in senior corporate finance and accounting positions for various Fortune 500 companies. Mr. Ciullo is a CPA who obtained a Bachelors of Science in Accounting from the State University of New York College at Geneseo and an MBA from Pennsylvania State University. Michel Amar, CEO of the Company, stated: We are thrilled to welcome Paul to the Digihost senior management team. The addition of Paul as CFO and his depth of corporate and capital markets experience will contribute greatly to the Companys plans for growth and to the Company as a whole. Mr. Ciullo will replace Ms. Cindy Davis as CFO of the Company. Mr. Amar and the Board would like to thank Ms. Davis for her continuous hard work and endless contributions to Digihost over the past two years. About Digihost Technology Inc.

Digihost Technology Inc. is a growth-oriented blockchain technology company primarily focused on Bitcoin mining. The Company's mining facilities are located in Upstate New York, and are equipped with 78.7 MW of low-cost power with the option to expand to 102MW. The Company is currently hashing at a rate of 190PH with potential to expand to a rate of 3EH upon the completion of the previously announced acquisition of a 60MW power plant. For further information, please contact: Digihost Technology Inc.

www.digihost.ca







T: 1-818-280-9758

Email: michel@digihost.ca Cautionary Statement

Trading in the securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the statements of historical fact, this news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation that is based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Forward-looking information in this news release includes information about potential further improvements to profitability and efficiency across mining operations including as a result of acquisitions of equipment and infrastructure, potential for the Companys long-term growth, and the business goals and objectives of the Company. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: the ability to obtain regulatory approval for and complete acquisitions of equipment and infrastructure on the terms as announced or at all; the ability to successfully integrate the acquisitions of equipment and infrastructure on an economic basis or at all; continued effects of the COVID19 pandemic may have a material adverse effect on the Companys performance as supply chains are disrupted and prevent the Company from operating its assets; a decrease in cryptocurrency pricing, volume of transaction activity or generally, the profitability of cryptocurrency mining; further improvements to profitability and efficiency may not be realized; the digital currency market; the Companys ability to successfully mine digital currency on the cloud; the Company may not be able to profitably liquidate its current digital currency inventory, or at all; a decline in digital currency prices may have a significant negative impact on the Companys operations; the volatility of digital currency prices; and other related risks as more fully set out in the Annual Information Form of the Company and other documents disclosed under the Companys filings at www.sedar.com. 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. In connection with the forward-looking information contained in this news release, the Company has made assumptions about: the current profitability in mining cryptocurrency (including pricing and volume of current transaction activity); profitable use of the Companys assets going forward; the Companys ability to profitably liquidate its digital currency inventory as required; historical prices of digital currencies and the ability of the Company to mine digital currencies on the cloud will be consistent with historical prices; and there will be no regulation or law that will prevent the Company from operating its business. The Company has also assumed that no significant events occur outside of the Company's normal course of business. 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.



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Approximately one million contraband cigarettes, 53 pounds of cannabis and more than $25,000 in cash were seized from a property in the RM of Whitehead last week after a six-week investigation carried out jointly by the Brandon Police Service and Manitoba Finances Taxation Special Services Investigation Unit.

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Approximately one million contraband cigarettes, 53 pounds of cannabis and more than $25,000 in cash were seized from a property in the RM of Whitehead last week after a six-week investigation carried out jointly by the Brandon Police Service and Manitoba Finances Taxation Special Services Investigation Unit.

After a shipment of cigarettes was intercepted on April 23 and three vehicles and three trailers were searched under warrant on April 27, five men between the ages of 46 and 60 were charged with numerous offences.

Of the five, four men are from Brandon and one is from Gilbert Plains.

Each of the men has been charged with possession of unauthorized stamped tobacco and possessing greater than 25 units of unmarked tobacco.

The man from Gilbert Plains received two additional charges, possession for the purpose of distributing and possession of the proceeds of crime. All five have been released and are due to appear in court in July.

Speaking at BPS headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, Staff Sgt. Brian Partridge said the seizure was the culmination of a six-week investigation in partnership with Manitoba Finance. Six representatives from BPS and eight representatives from Manitoba Finance participated in the seizure.

While the bulk of the seizure had already been sent to Winnipeg, a table featured samples of some of the cigarettes and cannabis seized.

"The cigarettes that were seized this time, 930,000 cigarettes, represent a $274,000 loss in revenue to Manitoba," said Ron Bell, a supervisor with the Taxations Special Investigations Unit. "The individuals charged, they face upon conviction triple tax penalties that are equal to $823,000."

Bell said a convenience store in Brandon has been charged for selling some of the contraband cigarettes, but was unable to provide any more information at this time. The officers also said they were unable to comment whether any further arrests or seizures would be coming from this investigation.

The seized tobacco was said to have come from Six Nations, a First Nations community just outside of Hamilton, Ont.

"Its important for people to understand that these cigarettes are not cigarettes that you can buy here in Manitoba under any circumstance," Bell said. "Theyre not legal for sale, theyre not manufactured at a legal manufacturing facility, so you dont know what youre buying ... you could be buying stuff made in somebodys garage with tobacco droppings that have been swept off the floor. Tobacco is already bad for you, its not healthy. These are even worse because theres no control."

According to Partridge, the cannabis seized came in the form of both pre-rolled joints and flower buds.

"Most of it is labelled B.C. Bud, thats where were assuming it originated from," Partridge said. "Weve still got some more work to do to get to the bottom of that."

The BPS will retain custody of the cannabis until the charges against the suspects are disposed of while Manitoba Finance will hold onto the cigarettes for eventual destruction once the investigation is terminated.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
After months of begging and pleading, Michigan business leaders are getting their wish  a specific plan on what triggers the end of the COVID-19 rules.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced her Vacc to Normal plan on Thursday, April 29, linking Michigans vaccination rates to the reopening steps. Business leaders are encouraged, yet concerned the reopenings wont happen fast enough.

Office workers can return two weeks after 55% of Michiganders 16 or older get their first shot. Capacity limits are lightened two weeks after Michigan hits 60%, capacity limits are eliminated two weeks after 65% and the entire state health order  including the mask mandate  is lifted two weeks after Michigan hits 70%.

RELATED: When will Michigan ditch its mask mandate? Whitmer officially ties reopening measures to vaccination rates

This is a good day for Michigan and for the industry, said Justin Winslow, president of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association. Theres a pathway now, and a clear way forward that gets this industry back.

Currently, 48.8% of eligible Michiganders have gotten their first shot. The number has increased about 3 to 5 percentage points each week.

Our industry is ready to go, said Scott Ellis, executive director of the Michigan Licensed Beverage Association. The sooner the better. Our only disappointment would be, how long is this going to take to get there?

The office reopenings could come as soon as late May at this pace, Whitmer said.

That will have a big impact on downtown businesses that rely on workers coming to the office, said Brian Calley, president of the Small Business Association of Michigan. With vaccinations slowing in recent weeks, he thinks this will encourage some to get their shot.

Theres still plenty of people that are planning to (get) and are fine with the vaccine that just havent gotten around to it yet, Calley said. They dont really need to be persuaded, but it just hasnt been convenient enough (for them).

What if Michigan never reaches some of the benchmarks? Whitmer was asked that on Thursday, but didnt answer directly, saying we need to keep working to encourage vaccinations.

Michigans COVID-19 caseload has decreased in the past week. But it still leads the nation in most new cases per 100,000 people per day in the last seven days, with 47. Minnesota is second with 29, per the New York Times.

Demand at restaurants and bars has dipped statewide in the past month because of the high rate of spread, Ellis said. Although he expects a rebound as numbers dip and weather improves.

But Michigans slow reopening pace has some people concerned.

Peak tourism season in Michigan is July and August, Winslow said, and event spaces have already lost business to surrounding states.

Im a bit worried about that industry losing a big chunk of their most important season if hitting that 60% threshold takes too long, Calley said. But Im just going to use that as motivation to try  to help meet that goal as quickly as possible.

Some leaders question if Michigan can get to 70% at all. Whitmer calls the benchmarks very realistic.

Whitmer previously fought off calls to create reopening benchmarks based on cases, hospitalizations and deaths because of the caveats in the numbers and their impacts. But vaccination rates are a clear-cut way to diminish the pandemic  prompting this change in policy, she said.

This is a creative way of challenging us to rise to this moment, Whitmer said. Every one of us can play a part in doing that. It benefits the whole state when we do.

Some states have lifted all of their COVID-19 restrictions, but many in Michigan remain in place.

We are in a fierce competition with other states for jobs, said Rich Studley, president and CEO of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. We cant continue to be an outlier and have the most stringent restrictions in the country and then be painfully slow to remove them.

Reopening based on vaccinations is smarter route than requiring vaccines or creating vaccine passports and having two sets of rules for people, the leaders said.

We definitely dont want something like (vaccine passports), Ellis said. That just puts the front-line worker in the middle of the politics, again.

Whitmers reopening plan does not include the majority of workplace safety rules through MIOSHA, which are in place through October.

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By MICHAEL HILL, The Associated Press

BUCHANAN, N.Y. (AP)  Indian Point will permanently stop producing nuclear power Friday, capping a decades-long battle over a key source of electricity in the heart of New York Citys suburbs that opponents have called a threat to millions living in the densely packed region.

The retirement of the Indian Point Energy Center along the Hudson River could increase New Yorks short-term reliance on natural gas plants, despite the states goal of reducing carbon emissions. But Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others who fought for its shutdown argue any benefits from the plant are eclipsed by the nightmare prospect of a major nuclear accident or a terror strike 25 miles north of the city.

There are 20 million people living within 50 miles of Indian Point, and there is no way to evacuate them in case of a radiological release. And the risk of that is quite real, said Paul Gallay, president of the environmental group Riverkeeper.

FILE  In this April 20, 2017, file photo, a caution sign marks an area surrounding a pool that protects spent nuclear fuel at the Indian Point Energy Center, in Buchanan, N.Y. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)AP

The actual shutdown will be straightforward: a control room operator for Indian Points Unit 3 will push a red button to shut down the reactor Friday night. It will complete a contentious closing of the plants two reactors years in the making.

The Unit 2 reactor shut down a year ago under a 2017 agreement among the Cuomo administration, Riverkeeper and the plants operator, Entergy Corp. Unit 3s shutdown under the same agreement paves the way for a decommissioning that is projected to cost $2.3 billion and take at least 12 years. The tall twin domes visible from the river will eventually be demolished.

The two reactors, which went online two years apart in the mid-70s, had generated about a quarter of the electricity used in New York City and the lower Hudson Valley.

They also generated controversy.

Environmentalists faulted the plant for killing fish by taking in massive amounts of river water for cooling. Critics said the plant was antiquated and pointed to a safety history that included faulty reactor bolts and radioactive tritium detected in groundwater onsite.

Fears that Indian Point could be a terror target intensified after one of the planes hijacked for the Sept. 11 attacks flew by the plant on its way down the river to the World Trade Center.

In theory, the plant was built to withstand an airplane crash in the 70s, Cuomo told reporters recently. Who knows what would happen now with Indian Point?

FILE - This Feb. 28, 2017, file photo shows Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)AP

Entergy spokesperson Jerry Nappi said Indian Point has run reliably and safely virtually without interruption since 1962, when the first long-since-retired reactor went online at the site of an old amusement park.

Entergy says low wholesale energy prices and operating costs factored into its 2017 decision to close Indian Point. Nuclear plants have been closing in recent years amid low natural gas prices, slow growth in electricity demand and competition from renewables.

Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pa., closed in September 2019.

Village of Buchanan Mayor Theresa Knickerbocker, a lifetime resident, said the plant operators are good neighbors and its sad to see them go. The village is among the local beneficiaries of annual payments from Entergy and there were still 750 workers employed there this month.

We were always known as one of the smallest communities with a nuclear power plant. We were kind of proud of that, Knickerbocker said. People would make fun of us, Oh, you glow in the dark? and were like, Yeah, we do.

Indian Points exit is not expected create reliability problems for New Yorks electrical grid. But it comes as the Cuomo administration works to increase the share of electricity generated by clean renewables like wind and solar. The state aims to get 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Indian Point proponents say its retirement will require New York to rely more heavily on fossil-fuel burning natural gas plants. They note that natural gas generation in New York already increased last year after Unit 2 closed.

Now were going to double the damage when Indian Point 3 shuts down, taking us even further backwards, said Keith Schue of New York Energy and Climate Advocates.

Backers of the closure say any potential bump up in New York natural gas generation needs to be considered in context of a decrease in fossil fuel generation since 2016, as well as progress in renewables and energy efficiency. New York has more than 20 large-scale renewable energy infrastructure projects that will be under construction this year with more planned.

Tom Congdon, chairman of Cuomos Indian Point closure task force, said the state has been preparing for the retirement for years and the state remains on target for its clean air goals. He said a fluctuation in natural gas generation is possible.

But whatever that change is, its temporary in nature because of this tremendous pipeline of renewable energy projects that are all coming online over the next few years, Congdon said.

FILE - In this April 20, 2007, file photo, Tracy Sudoko, a control room agent at the Indian Point Energy Center, works on a report at the facility in Buchanan, N.Y. Indian Point will permanently stop producing nuclear power Friday, April 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)AP

Pending state regulatory approval, Entergy will transfer Indian Point to New Jersey-based Holtec International for decommissioning. Spent fuel is being moved to gigantic onsite dry casks until it can go elsewhere.

Holtec said it will provide job opportunities more than 300 Indian Point employees, and local communities will have access to payments and assistance to ease their post-nuclear transition.

Knickerbocker hopes that some of the 240-acre site will eventually be used for residential and commercial development. Its the end of an era for us, she said.
The amendment by the Government of the labour legislation by eliminating the obligation of micro-enterprises to draw up in writing the job description for employees changes the status of millions of citizens from employees to slaves, it is mentioned in a release issued on Thursday by the National Trade Union Bloc (BNS).

"In a sovereign contempt for the Constitution and for Romania's status as a member state of the European Union, the Government, surrounded by a legislative delirium, adopts in the meeting of April 28, 2021 two pieces of legislation that will generate huge problems in labour relations They will affect the rights of millions of workers. (...) Regarding the Emergency Ordinance for amending and supplementing Law no. 53/2003 - Labour Code (...), this comes with the thesis of excluding the obligation of employers to issue the job description and the internal regulations, establishing their possibility to verbally communicate to the employees the attributions incumbent on them. A verbal communication of the attributions of an employee is not in accordance with the principles and the law of the European Union. (...) Once the job description is cancelled, millions of citizens status will turn from employee to slave," the BNS release reads.

The National Trade Union Bloc emphasizes that, on June 20, 2019, EU Directive 2019/1152 of the European Parliament on the transparency and predictability of working conditions in the European Union was adopted, and in the preamble of this Directive, Principle no. 7 of the European Pillar of Social Rights stipulates that workers have the right to be informed in writing when they are employed about their rights and obligations arising from their employment relationship, including any probationary period.

Romania has the obligation to transpose this Directive by August 1, 2022, the BNS notes.

"But what does the Romanian Government do? Instead of transposing the Directive into national legislation, it introduces through this Ordinance the thesis according to which the employees of a micro-enterprise will be verbally informed about the attributions they are to perform! Verbally! The categories of employers that could be excluded from the application of the Directive are expressly provided in its text, and micro-enterprises are not among them! The exclusion of micro-enterprises from the drafting of the Internal Regulation would make it impossible for these micro-enterprise employers to fulfill their legal obligations established by other regulations. The respect of the rights of employees of micro-enterprises regarding occupational health and safety, equal opportunities and treatment, non-discrimination, dignity at work, etc. will no longer be ensured. The job description that should have been communicated in writing to the employee becomes history and once with its disappearance, the capacity of the Labour Inspectorate to control and of the courts to report to this type of document," it is mentioned in the BNS release.

Regarding the Emergency Ordinance adopted by the Government on Wednesday on the use of electronic signatures in labour relations, the trade union organization considers that neither the responsible public institutions nor the citizens have the necessary competencies.

The trade union organization announced that it will ask the Ombudsman to notify the Constitutional Court as a matter of urgency regarding the unconstitutionality of the two emergency ordinances, it will ask the Parliament to urgently debate the laws approving these ordinances, not lastly, it will prepare protests if the two ordinances remain in force.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 11:36:47|Editor: huaxia

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The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. China on Thursday sent into space the core module of its space station, kicking off a series of key launch missions that aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year. (Xinhua/Ju Zhenhua)

WENCHANG, Hainan, April 29 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday sent into space the core module of its space station, kicking off a series of key launch missions that aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of the southern island province of Hainan.

Tianhe will act as the management and control hub of the space station Tiangong, meaning Heavenly Palace, with a node that could dock with up to three spacecraft at a time for short stays, or two for long, said Bai Linhou, deputy chief designer of the space station at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

Tianhe has a total length of 16.6 meters, a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters and a takeoff mass of 22.5 tonnes, and is the largest spacecraft developed by China.

The space station will be a T shape with the core module at the center and a lab capsule on each side. Each module will be over 20 tonnes. When the station docks with both manned and cargo spacecraft, its weight could reach nearly 100 tonnes.

The station will operate in the low-Earth orbit at an altitude from 340 km to 450 km. It has a designed lifespan of 10 years, but experts believe it could last more than 15 years with appropriate maintenance and repairs.

"We will learn how to assemble, operate and maintain large spacecraft in orbit, and we aim to build Tiangong into a state-level space lab supporting the long stay of astronauts and large-scale scientific, technological and application experiments," said Bai.

"The station is also expected to contribute to the peaceful development and utilization of space resources through international cooperation, as well as to enrich technologies and experience for China's future explorations into deeper space," Bai said.

As the foundation of the station, Tianhe will help China's aerospace engineers carry out the verification of key technologies, including flexible solar wings, in-orbit assembly and maintenance, and above all a new life support system.

China will also send the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft and Shenzhou-12 manned craft this year to dock with the core module. Three astronauts will be aboard Shenzhou-12 and stay in orbit for three months, said Hao Chun, director of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

"We will transport support materials, necessary spare parts and equipment first, and then our crew," said Hao.

Tianzhou-3 cargo craft and Shenzhou-13 manned spaceship will also be launched later this year to dock with Tianhe, and another three astronauts will then begin their six-month stay in orbit.

The longest stay in space so far by Chinese astronauts is 33 days. "In previous missions, we sent water and oxygen to space along with astronauts. But for a stay of three to six months, water and oxygen would stuff the cargo craft full with no room for other necessary goods and materials. So we installed the core module with a new life support system to recycle urine, exhaled breath condensate (EBC) and carbon dioxide," said Bai.

After the five launch missions this year, China plans six missions, including the launch of the Wentian and Mengtian lab modules, two cargo spacecraft and two manned spaceships, in 2022 to complete the construction of the space station.

"We have to make sure every launch is reliable and operation of spacecraft in orbit is safe and sound. Every mission is a test for our organization, management, technology and support ability," said Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China's manned space program. Enditem
Sri Lankan PM urges regional cooperation for small countries' recovering from COVID-19

Xinhua) 10:51, April 29, 2021

COLOMBO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has emphasized the need to accelerate South-South cooperation to help small countries in their recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, local media reported Wednesday.

Addressing the 77th Session of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) via a video message, Rajapaksa said Sri Lanka has made remarkable progress in controlling the spread of COVID-19 with a very low death rate and a high recovery rate after efforts made in case detection, contact tracing, quarantining and patient treatment.

He said Sri Lanka's robust public healthcare system provided free access to health and helped control the pandemic.

The prime minister further said Sri Lanka was keen on strengthening its regional ties while emphasizing the need to accelerate the South-South cooperation.

"Towards that end, we believe UNESCAP should commit itself to be relevant and responsive with measures such as assisting small countries with pandemic recovery and vaccination programs encouraging growth of foreign employment opportunities, promoting eco-tourism and health-tourism and encouraging investments into and find markets for emerging nations," he said.

The 77th UNESCAP session is being held at the United Nations Conference Center in Bangkok via video conferencing from April 26 to 29 under the theme "Building back better from crises through regional cooperation in Asia and the Pacific."

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Minnesota United duo Hassani Dotson and Chase Gasper have been fined an undisclosed amount for their part in a postgame skirmish following the team's defeat to Real Salt Lake last weekend, Major League Soccer disciplinary officials said Thursday.

Dotson and Gasper were both hit in the pocket after being found to have incited or escalated the confrontation involving players from both teams which flared after the final whistle on Saturday.

Dotson and Gasper had confronted Real goalkeeper David Ochoa after the Salt Lake stopper kicked the ball into a section of the stands holding Minnesota fans after the whistle.

The MLS disciplinary panel said Ochoa had been fined for his actions while both Real and Minnesota have been issued warnings for violating the league's mass confrontation policy.

In a separate ruling on Thursday, the disciplinary committee announced that Philadelphia Union forward Sergio Santos has been fined for simulation.

The 26-year-old Brazilian was adjudged to have dived in the penalty area in the 30th minute of his team's game against Inter Miami on Saturday.

rcw/bb
A hipster cafe in London has been criticised over a 'racist' Covid joke it made on a shop sign saying: 'This is the longest something made in China has ever lasted.'

F***offee, which has two branches in Bethnal Green, was also accused of fatphobia after a sign allegedly from outside the shop reading 'Sorry, no fatties' emerged online.

The cafe, which is described as 'a provocative coffee shop with a cheeky atmosphere', later responded to the outrage in a divisive post on Instagram.

It insisted: 'We are not racist. We are not sexist,' adding its social media has 'adult content and humour and we make "jokes" because the world can be a harsh place to live in.'

Criticism of the coffee shop emerged earlier this week when an Instagram post made on January 10 was circulated widely on social media.

The photograph, taken outside the branch at 215 Bethnal Green Road, captured a black chalkboard reading: 'This is the longest something made in China has ever lasted.'

F***offee, in east London, described as 'a provocative coffee shop with a cheeky atmosphere'

It has been criticised over a 'racist' Covid joke it made on a shop sign saying: 'This is the longest something made in China has ever lasted'

The message, appearing to refer to Covid-19, provoked outrage, with hundreds of social media users demanding the post be removed and the company apologise.

One user said: 'Disgrace, this is not acceptable. '

Another added: 'How to ruin your business in two simple steps: Step 1: write racist blackboard message; Step 2: post photo of it online.'

Others called for whoever wrote the sign to be fired, adding: 'Whoever allowed this board to be put on the street should also be fired.'

Some commenters worried about the impact the declaration may have on the racial harassment and abuse Asians have received since the start of the pandemic.

A woman said: 'This is not right. Because of these comments, people like me and other Asian receive racial harassment and verbal/physical abuse.

'You do not understand the impact of such racial comments on other ethnic group.'

The cafe also received a backlash after an image allegedly from outside one of its east London branches of a sign reading 'Sorry. No fatties' emerged online

Another added: 'Absolutely disgusting. Shame on you for your blatant, harmful racism.

'It's because of your dismissive attitude to racism that perpetuates the normalisations of it.'

The cafe also received a backlash after an image allegedly from outside one of its east London branches of a 'fatphobic' sign emerged online.

The photograph, posted to Twitter, shows a sign on a bench reportedly outside F***offee reading: 'Sorry, no fatties.'

Sharing the image online, a woman said: 'Just got sent this by a friend and before you defend it as "dark humour" it is not - it's fatphobia.

'If the bench isn't strong [enough] to be sat on then don't put it outside your coffee shop, or alternatively make it strong so anyone / multiple people can sit...'

The cafe later responded to the outrage in a divisive video post on Instagram

It insisted: 'We are not racist. We are not sexist,' adding its social media has 'adult content and humour and we make "jokes" because the world can be a harsh place to live in'

The coffee shop often pitches controversial signs outside its doors, with recent additions shared to Instagram including 'Help. If sales don't pick up the boss is calling immigration.'

Responding to the outrage on Instagram, a representative for F***offee accused a group of people from a 'woke society' of attacking her over the claims.

The woman said: 'Unlike you, I'm not going to repost all of the things that you guys have been saying because I don't care to embarrass you and I just don't care.

'F***offee is an amazing place to work and yes I am proud to work here.

'I'm proud to work here because the coffee that we source is from West Papua.'

She went on to explain how the cafe responsibly sources its products, adding it is 'trying to help as many people as we can' through this endeavour.

The woman, who works for the company, added: 'So all you people saying "I will go and just go to Starbucks", well OK, that's fine.

The message, appearing to refer to Covid-19, provoked outrage, with hundreds of social media users demanding the post be removed and the company apologise

'But F***offee stands for the freedom to express yourself, the freedom to be the person that you are, the freedom to make jokes for adults and people like us.'

However, the statement wasn't received well by many on social media, with one user saying: 'This is it though isn't it?

'Just because you are comfortable with 'jokes' around race, fatphobia and ableism, it doesn't mean that the wider public is comfortable with it.'

Lottie LAmour, a fashion influencer from London, added: 'There's a way to still be edgy and provocative without being massively problematic and offensive.

'As a business you've got a legal requirement to not be racist, to not be fatphobic, to not be ableist or be discriminatory in any way - it would be very easy for someone to sue you for this, and the defense of "we're just a bit edgy and we take the piss and look at what we do for the coffee industry" won't help you.

Others called for whoever wrote the sign to be fired, adding: 'Whoever allowed this board to be put on the street should also be fired'

'Supporting people in west Papua does not absolve the company of racist, fatphobic and ableist "jokes", much like being a Black, queer woman who's comfortable with self detrimental comedy doesn't absolve the effect of the 'jokes' on the wider public.'

Danielle Vanier said: 'Over 3 mins of talking and you said NOTHING.'

Others claimed that F***offee was showing a 'lack of accountability' with the statement, adding: 'Just accept that you have hurt and harmed plus size people.'

The business previously provoked outrage shortly after opening in 2015, when its owner was threatened with legal action after refusing to remove their explicit shop name sign.
(@FahadShabbir)

Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :Two police officers were killed in Boone, North Carolina in a shooting incident that left five people dead, including the shooter, after a 13-hour standoff, police said Thursday.

US police, who are under scrutiny over the deaths of citizens in police shootings or during arrests, say they increasingly face high risks because of the spread of firearms across the country.

The Watauga County Sheriff's Department said the two officers, Logan Fox and Chris Ward, were killed Wednesday after visiting a resident to check on the occupants after one had not shown up for work and did not answer phone calls.

The officers were shot after entering the residence, Fox dying on the scene while Ward was evacuated to hospital where he died, the department said in a statement.

Law enforcement agencies rushed to the scene after the two officers were shot and the shooter barricaded himself in the home.

"The individual suspected of killing the two officers is also suspected of killing two civilians in the residence," the statement said.

County Sheriff Len Hagaman separately told local media that the shooter was dead.

Unconfirmed news reports said the two killed in the home were the shooter's mother and stepfather.

"This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved as well as their families and our community," Hagaman said in the statement.
The coronavirus pandemic has been raging for more than a year now, and during the course of that time the eyes of the world focused first on China, then on Europe and later America. But right now, everyone is looking closely at India, where the situation is spiraling out of control: its health emergency is beyond any other countrys worst experience with Covid-19, measured by the number of daily deaths and new infections.

The international community is responding by sending equipment to a country lacking just about everything  ventilators, oxygen, medication and hospital beds  while scientists say the situation illustrates the importance of faster vaccination in developing countries. Until were all protected, nobody is protected, has become the new mantra.

With a population of more than 1.3 billion, India is more like a continent than like a country. Certainly no other nation had produced so many daily cases: on Tuesday it added 320,000 new infections and reported 2,771 deaths, slightly below Mondays figure but not significant enough to talk about a change in the trend. The 14-day cumulative incidence rate continues to rise, and on Tuesday it had reached 285 cases per 100,000 people, according to Oxford Universitys data repository Our World in Data. And as noted by Fernando Simon, head of Spains coronavirus emergency response, these figures may only be the tip of the iceberg, as Indias detection capabilities are very limited.

Patients receiving oxygen in Ghaziabad on Wednesday. PRAKASH SINGH / AFP

Against this backdrop, Western nations have pledged to send aid. Spains government spokesperson Maria Jesus Montero on Tuesday announced a shipment of healthcare material for India. Meanwhile, the European Union is trying to coordinate its member states response and cover the transportation costs. Brussels is planning to send a shipment of urgently needed oxygen, medicine and equipment in the coming days through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, the European Commission said in a statement on Tuesday. The emergency mechanism was activated on Friday following a plea for international assistance by New Delhi, and it will coordinate contributions by EU member states.

Alarmed by the epidemiological situation in India, said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a Twitter message on Sunday. We are ready to support. The EU is pooling resources to respond rapidly to Indias request for assistance. So far, contributing countries include Ireland (with 700 oxygen concentrators, one oxygen generator and 365 ventilators), Belgium (with 9,000 doses of the antiviral drug Remdesivir), Romania (with 80 oxygen concentrators and 75 oxygen cylinders), Luxembourg (with 58 ventilators), Portugal (with 5,503 vials of Remdesivir and 20,000 liters of oxygen a week) and Sweden (120 ventilators). France, Italy, Austria and Finland have also pledged aid. The EU stands in full solidarity with the Indian people and is ready to do our utmost to support them at this critical time, said Crisis Management Commissioner Janez Lenarcic in a statement.

The United States is also sending oxygen concentrators, medicines and vaccines, according to a White House statement following a conversation between US President Joe Biden and Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

All of this aid is very necessary according to Gerardo Alvarez-Uria, a Spanish doctor who heads the infectious disease unit at Bathalapalli Hospital in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh. The center is owned and operated by the Vicente Ferrer Foundation, a non-profit group founded in 1969 by the Spanish Jesuit missionary Vicente Ferrer. There is a tremendous shortage of ventilators, oxygen and medicine. The system receives very little investment and technical resources are even more scarce than personnel resources, said Alvarez-Uria.

The crisis in India is underscoring the need to speed up the vaccination process in developing countries. Daniel Lopez Acuna, a former emergency director at the World Health Organization (WHO), stressed that we are dealing with a pandemic, and that bringing it under control in a given country does not mean there is no more risk. One of the variants in circulation make the virus potentially more infectious and resistant to vaccines, which could cause additional problems. Lopez Acuna also warned that inequalities in global vaccination could generate significant problems for pandemic control. As Marcos Lopez Hoyos, president of the Spanish Immunology Society, said, the longer the virus is in circulation and the more infections there are, the higher the likelihood of mutations that will bring trouble.

Rafael Vilasanjuan, analysis director at ISGlobal, a health institute backed by the La Caixa Foundation, underscored that we will be at risk until the virus is controlled in the entire world. If governments in developed countries only worry about vaccinating their own population, this will be a poor favor indeed. A member of the Gavi global alliance coordinating the Covax plan to bring vaccines to low and middle-income countries, this expert noted that this is the only way to distribute doses in a more equitable way. But Lopez Hoyos is also asking governments to start donating vaccines before having a surplus. On Tuesday, Spain said it would start contributing vaccines when 50% of its population has been immunized.

India also happens to be the worlds biggest vaccine manufacturer. The Covax initiative is lagging behind substantially, partly because the country halted exports in order to use the doses on its own citizens. Were afraid that with this crisis it will happen again; this kind of nationalism should be avoided, said Vilasanjuan.

So far, Covax has distributed just 52 million doses out of the two billion it hopes to deliver by the end of the year, although this expert believes that the pace will start to pick up now, just as it has in Europe. But that also requires economic resources. Six billion out of the 8 billion required have already been raised, but a further 2 billion are needed to ensure there is no problem with purchases, added Vilasanjuan.

While citizens continue to get vaccinated, countries are imposing restrictions to prevent the variant detected in India from spreading across the globe. There is an urgent need to sequence the greatest possible number of samples to know whether it is expanding outside the country, as happened in the United Kingdom. And a containment strategy has to be contemplated, said Lopez Acuna.

Spain on Tuesday urged all Spaniards currently in India to return as soon as possible. And the Spanish Cabinet on Tuesday approved a mandatory quarantine for anyone arriving from India.

La Embajada de Espana recomienda a los espanoles que se encuentren temporalmente en #India regresen a  lo antes posible. En caso de emergencia contacten con la Embajada o Consulado General en Mumbai.Mas info en recomendaciones de viaje: https://t.co/Hq4xQDEgnm@MAECgob  Emb. Espana en India (@EmbEspIndia) April 27, 2021

With additional reporting by Guillermo Abril.

English version by Susana Urra.




This article appears in the April 30, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

PUTIN GIVES A LESSON IN STATECRAFT

Replace Murderous Sanctions with Economic Reconstruction

[Print version of this article]

April 23As tensions increase dramatically due to the targeting of Russia, China and other nations that refuse to submit to the unipolar, rules-based order enforced by the U.S., UK and NATO, President Putin delivered a stern warning in his 17th annual State of the Nation Address on April 21. While addressing Russian concerns over the state of the economy, his remarks were pointed regarding the strategic crisis stemming from ongoing geopolitical provocations in Ukraine, against Belarus and elsewhere, even as he reiterated his desire for more cooperation, renewing his call for a summit of the Permanent Five (P5) members of the United Nations Security Council.

The crux of his message to those pursuing a unipolar world order is that they should be aware that Russia will not tolerate actions which threaten the nations sovereign interests. The clear language he employed ought to be studied by those trans-Atlantic officials who operate under the delusion that western military and economic power is sufficient to impose a world order based on the classic geopolitical division between the looters and those to be looted, through consolidation of a global central bankers dictatorship known as the Great Reset. He was speaking as NATO is conducting Defender-Europe 21 exercises and considering bringing Ukraine in as a NATO member, which would place NATO troops and weapons systems on Russias western border.

Putin stated:

The meaning and purpose of Russias policy in the international arena  is to ensure peace and security for the well-being of our citizens, for the stable development of our country. Russia certainly has its own interests we defend and will continue to defend within the framework of international law, as all other states do. And if someone refuses to understand this obvious thing or does not want to conduct a dialogue and chooses a selfish and arrogant tone with us, Russia will always find a way to defend its stance.

He continued, polemically criticizing the use of sanctions and the launching of regime-change coups as instruments of foreign policy:

At the same time, unfortunately, everyone in the world seems to be used to the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions and to certain actors brutal attempts to impose their will on others by force. But today, this practice is degenerating into something even more dangerousI am referring to the recently exposed direct interference in Belarus in an attempt to orchestrate a coup detat and assassinate the President of that country. At the same time, it is typical that even such flagrant actions have not been condemned by the so-called collective West. Nobody seemed to notice. Everyone pretends nothing is happening.

But listen, you can think whatever you like of, say, Ukrainian President Yanukovych or Maduro in Venezuela.... You can like or dislike them, including Yanukovych who almost got killed, too, and [was] removed from power via an armed coup. You can have your own opinion of President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenkos policy. But the practice of staging coups detat and planning political assassinations, including those of high-ranking officialswell, this goes too far. This is beyond any limits.

In this regard, we behave in an extremely restrained manner, I would even say, modestly, and I am saying this without irony. Often, we prefer not to respond at all, not just to unfriendly moves, but even to outright rudeness. We want to maintain good relations with everyone who participates in the international dialogue. But we see what is happening in real life....

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Left: kremlin.ru; right: Press Service of the President of the Republic of Belarus

We really want to maintain good relations with all those engaged in international communication, including, by the way, those with whom we have not been getting along lately. We really do not want to burn bridges. But if someone mistakes our good intentions for indifference or weakness and intends to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russias response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough.

Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time.

At the same time, I just have to make it clear, we have enough patience, responsibility, professionalism, self-confidence and certainty in our cause, as well as common sense, when making a decision of any kind. But I hope that no one will think about crossing the red line with regard to Russia. We ourselves will determine in each specific case where it will be drawn.

Sanctions Everywhere

As Putin emphasized in his speech, the use of sanctions as a means of conducting regime-change and imposing the rules-based order has become the de jure policy of the trans-Atlantic alliance. In the last years, the U.S. has imposed sanctions against at least 39 nations, including Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea. This is justified under the specious claim that this is a means of punishing authoritarian governments, a humanitarian intervention to protect the citizens who otherwise suffer under anti-democratic oppression imposed by autocratic regimes.

The handbook for this was Samantha Powers book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, in which she asserts that sanctions flow from the concept of the Responsibility to Protect. What she never answers are who, or what interests, are being protected by sanctions, which deny access to credit, food, medicine, parts and equipment, and other necessary goods to the people of targeted nations. Power served in key positions under President Obama, including as Ambassador to the UN, and has been appointed by President Biden as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which determines which nations will receive aid from the United States. Biden also placed her on the U.S. National Security Council, praising her as a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity. He said that as administrator of USAID, she will be a powerful force for the vulnerable  while promoting American interests.

Power identifies former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as her personal mentor. Albright, who introduced the sanctions against Iraq imposed by the Clinton administration that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children under the age of six, once was asked if this price was worth it. She responded, I think this is a very hard choice, but the pricewe think the price is worth it.

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UN/Manuel Elias

This tradition continues at the center of U.S. policy. On April 21, Trumps Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragged that he imposed 1,500 sanctions on Iran after the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). These sanctions, according to Pompeo, drew down Irans foreign exchange reserves by $123 billion, leaving only $4 billion. We took away 95% of the Iranian exchange reserves, he boasted, in just two-and-a-half years. The result is that, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Iran has been unable to purchase medical equipment and food, while many children are starving and suffer from malnutrition.

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DoS/Ron Przysucha

Bidens Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, confirmed the administration will not lift these sanctions on Iran, and has praised the sanctions against Syriathe so-called Caesar Sanctionsas a means to cause enough suffering as to further the goal of removing Syrian President Assad. Blinken, while serving as Deputy Secretary of State under Obama from 2015 until 2017, frequently expressed disagreement with the administrations policy toward Syria, complaining that not enough was being done to overthrow Assad.

The Caesar Sanctions are based on a fraudulent report produced by Human Rights Watch, and were passed by the Congress in June 2020, influenced by vigorous lobbying for them by Pompeo.

Reconstruction, Not Sanctions

The large-scale threat to human life in Syria resulting from these sanctions was challenged by the Apostolic Nuncio to Syria, Cardinal Mario Zenari, who reported that 90% of the population in Syria has been plunged into extreme poverty, and that humanitarian aid is urgently needed. But aid is not enough, he added, citing the Populorum Progressio encyclical of Pope Paul VI, in which he wrote, Development is the new name for peace. Cardinal Zenari stressed that in addition to lifting the deadly sanctions, economic reconstruction must take place.

This call was seconded by the Schiller Institutes Helga Zepp LaRouche, who is mobilizing support for Zenaris call. There is nothing humanitarian, she said, about sanctions which kill children.

Col. Richard Black (ret.), formerly Chief of the Army Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, made the same point, addressing a Schiller Institute conference on March 21. He debunked the idea that sanctions are useful in punishing dictators and authoritarian regimes:

Sanctions do nothing but attack the innocent, the poor, the helpless! They are the most cruel and barbaric type of warfare that we can wage.

This statement is coherent with conclusions set forth in numerous international agreements, including the Geneva and Nuremberg Conventions, the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all of which prohibit the targeting of defenseless civilians as a crime against humanity.

Instead of murdering children, in Syria, Yemen, and throughout southwest Asia, the Schiller Institute has called for extending Chinas Belt-and-Road Initiative as the true road for peace. It is time to reconstruct the region, which has been devastated by illegal wars, orchestrated by the geopolitical doctrines of the British Empire, and conducted by the U.S. and its NATO allies. This will be a major topic at the Schillers Institutes upcoming May 8 conference, The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm. More information on that conference is available here .
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The people of Hoosick Falls have lived under a dark shadow for more than six years, ever since village trustee Michael Hickey performed the initial tests that detected dangerous levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in the local water supply.

Since then, local, state and federal officials have been forced to confront the legacy of contamination by the international corporations that owned the McCaffrey Street manufacturing plant thats been identified as the source of much of the contamination. In 2017, it was designated as a Superfund site. The community now depends on elaborate filtration systems as it works with the state to find a new permanent water source. Many residents have sought medical monitoring as they wait to learn what years of silent exposure might have done to them and their children.

These people deserve, first and foremost, water free from dangerous chemicals. A close second would be a clear accounting of exactly what was allowed to seep into their soil, brooks and bloodstreams for so many years.

Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the company that owns the plant at the center of this mess, is now the subject of a federal whistleblower complaint filed by Amiel Gross, a former member of its internal counsels office. As the Times Unions Brendan J. Lyons reports, Mr. Gross filing with the U.S. Department of Labor claims he was fired for pretextual reasons (insubordination among them) after he raised concerns about the scope of potential contamination issues at several facilities.

In regard to Hoosick Falls, Mr. Gross alleges that he interviewed witnesses who said it was one of the plants  along with sites in Bennington, Vt., and Merrimack, N.H.  where a product called Fluorad was used. Thats pure, uncut PFOA.

Saint-Gobain says Mr. Gross claims are inaccurate and without merit. His civil claim was rejected on technical grounds. Even so, victims of PFOA contamination who have sued the company have cited his complaint in their request to reopen the discovery process in their case to allow his allegations to be examined and new potential witnesses to come forward. That request has merit. If Saint-Gobain truly believes Mr. Gross is in error, the company should jump at the chance to put these questions to rest.

Saint-Gobains response to questions about this matter is to insist that it never manufactured or distributed PFOA or materials related to it. This is akin to a suspect in a murder mystery who defends himself by insisting he neither made nor sold the dagger sticking out of the victims back  good to know, but a little beside the point. When the company acquired the plant, it took on the liability as well as the profits.

The residents of Hoosick Falls and the other communities befouled by the contamination are less concerned with who made these substances than they are with knowing who brought it to their village and in what form and potency. Those are the questions that need to be answered before true accountability can be achieved. As usual, the best decontaminant for shadow is sunshine.
Fallen Actor Chadwick Boseman Not Honored Posthumously at Oscars

And the reality of police-related violence spilled out unto the Oscar stage

The biggest surprise was that the late, great actor, Chadwick Boseman, did not win an Oscar, posthumously. Those that did win, after death, were Peter Finch (Network) and Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight Rises). Mr. Boseman died after a private battle with colon cancer last year at the age of 43.

I will not lie. There was an audible gasp of surprise heard inside the virtual pressroom when it was clear that Mr. Boseman did not win for his mesmerizing performance in Ma Raineys Black Bottom. Boseman did win the SAG Award, the Critics Choice Award, and a Golden Globe, to name a few.

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But as they say in Hollywood  the show must go on and it did. The Hollywood creative team did not allow COVID-19 to get in their way. The annual salute to excellence in film started with a bang, last Sunday, with strict pandemic precautions firmly in place. Keeping safety first on their minds meant that thousands of heavy-hitter movie stars and powerbrokers were missing from the guest list. 2021 was only nominees, presenters, and a few guests allowed at Los Angeles Union Station, a shift from the massive Dolby Theatre. The intimate (but safe) design was overseen by David Rockwell and the 1939 train station gave a very different backdrop. Sunday nights Oscars ceremony was historic in more ways than one, making the 441-day wait for the 93rd Academy Awards well worth it.

Minaris Yuh-Jung Youn claimed Best Supporting Actress, stepping into the history books as the first Korean actor to do so.

Daniel Kaluuya won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Judas and the Black Messiah for his amazing portrayal of Black Panther Party chairman, Fred Hampton, in a film by Shaka King. This marks his first Oscar win and second nomination, the previous in 2018 in the best actor category for Jordan Peeles Get Out.

Despite having nine actors-of-color earning Academy Award nominations  an Oscar record for diversity in those categories  only two won. Best Makeup and Hairstyling, for George Wolfes Ma Raineys Black Bottom,  Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Mia Neal, Jamika Wilson.

Also walking into the history books is Nomadlands Chloe Zhao who made history, becoming the second woman and the first woman of color to win an Oscar for Best Director. The film also won Best Picture.

A segment of Kaluuyas acceptance speech (about his parents having sex) has already been turned into a meme. But on a serious note, during his speech, he thanked the cast, crew, and producers behind Judas and the Black Messiah, and Kaluuya paid tribute to Hampton and the entire Black Panther party.

Here is what winners of the 2021 Oscars had to share in the virtual press room.

Daniel Kaluuya won the Academy Award for Best Supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah

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ON WINNING

Thank you, God. Thank you, God. I cant be here without your guidance and your protection. Id like to thank my mum. Thank you so much for pouring into me. You gave me everything. You gave me your factory settings. [laughter] So, I can stand at my fullest height. Um, love to my sister, love to my niece, my friends, my family, everyone I love, from London Town to Kampala. Id like to thank my team, incredible support. Bro, we out here, yo. Man. Man. Its good, come and dance. Ryan, Zinzi, Sev, Proximity, everyone at Proximity. Charles King, man, everyone at MACRO, Bron, Participant. Nigel. Everyone at Warner Brothers.

Chairman Fred Junior and Mama Akua, thank you so much for allowing us into your life and into your story. Thank you, thank you for trusting us, you know, with your truth. I appreciate you deeply and its an honor to partner up and stand side-by-side with you. And to Chairman Fred Hampton. Bro, man. Man, what a man. What a man. How blessed we are that we lived in a lifetime where he existed. Do you know what Im saying? I like to thank you for your light. He was on this earth for 21 years, 21 years, and he found a way to feed kids, breakfast, educate kids, give free medical care, against all the odds. He showed, he showed me, he taught me him. Him, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party. They showed me how to love myself. And with that love, they overflowed into the black community and into other communities. And they showed us that the power of union, the power of unity, that when they play divide and conquer, we say unite and ascend.

Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Mia Neal, Jamika Wilson won Oscar awards for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for Ma Raineys Black Bottom.

Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first African-American women to win the Oscar award for best makeup and hairstyling.

The trio transformed Viola Davis into Ma Rainey, styling her crown aka hair and makeup to give her a 1920s look. Neal was the hair department head and hair and wig designer, while Wilson is Davis hairstylist and Lopez-Rivera is her makeup artist.

ON BEING THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN TO WIN

Thank you to our ancestors who put the work in, who were denied, and never gave up. I stand here as Jamika and I break this glass ceiling with so much excitement for the future  because I can picture Black transwomen standing up here, and Asian sisters, our Latina sisters, and Indigenous women. I know one day it wont be unusual or groundbreaking. It will just be normal.

Two Distant Strangers won the Academy Award Sunday for Best Live Action Short Film

Two Distant Strangers won the Academy Award Sunday for Best Live Action Short Film and is currently playing on Netflix. The well-crafted short film is about a young African American man caught in a deadly time loop with a White cop, won the Oscar for best live-action short film on Sunday, bringing more attention to the hot-button issue of police killings of unarmed Black men, which has dominated national headlines this week.

Created by co-directors, Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, and produced by the L.A.-based production company SIX FEET OVER, arrived just days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for murder and manslaughter in the killing last year of George Floyd, which sparked protests around the world.

ON WHY WINNING AN OSCAR FOR TWO DISTANT STRANGERS IS IMPORTANT

Today, the police will kill three people, and tomorrow the police will kill three people, and the day after that, the police will kill three people, Free said. Because on average in America, the police will kill three people a day, which amounts to about 1,000 people a year. Those people disproportionately happen to be Black people.

ON THE JOURNEY

When we started this journey to make this film, I knew it would be a film that would be difficult for people to watch, difficult for people politically engage with  for it to have done what its done, for us to be here holding these [Oscar statuettes] for a movie as potent and as serious as our film is, from the Academy, I think its unbelievable. I think its amazing to think that we can be standing here today holding Oscars for a film about police brutality.

ON DEALING WITH THE PAINFUL REALITY OF BEING AN AFRICAN AMERICAN IN AMERICA

I had an idea while we were out protesting and marching that was spurred by how I was feeling about what I was seeing, how I was feeling about internalizing the pain of seeing so many Black people be killed at the hands of police  and thinking about the emotional roller coaster you go on every time you hear a new name or see a news story, or see a new video. It put me in the mindset this feels like the worst version of living Groundhog Day.

And when I had that thought to myself, it was something that I couldnt put away. It would not go away. Because, it was the pandemic and we werent working, we werent doing anything, I felt like I wanted to sit down and do something with the idea.

Here is the full list of 2021 Oscar winners:

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Anthony Hopkins (The Father) (WINNER)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Frances McDormand (Nomadland) (WINNER)

Best Picture

Nomadland (Frances McDormand, Peter Spears, Mollye Asher, Dan Janvey and Chloe Zhao, producers) (WINNER)

Best Original Song

H.E.R. and Tiara Thomas (WINNER)

Best Original Score

Soul, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Jon Batiste (WINNER)

Best Film Editing

Sound of Metal, Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (WINNER)

Best Cinematography

Mank, Erik Messerschmidt (WINNER)

Best Production Design

Mank. Production Design: Donald Graham Burt; Set Decoration: Jan Pascale (WINNER)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari) (WINNER)

Best Visual Effects

Tenet, Andrew Jackson, David Lee, Andrew Lockley, and Scott Fisher (WINNER)

Best Documentary Feature

My Octopus Teacher, Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed and Craig Foster (WINNER)

Best Documentary Short Subject

Colette, Anthony Giacchino and Alice Doyard (WINNER)

Best Animated Feature Film

Soul (Pixar) (WINNER)

Best Animated Short Film

If Anything Happens, I Love You (Netflix) (WINNER)

Best Live-Action Short Film

Two Distant Strangers (WINNER)

Best Sound

Sound of Metal, Nicolas Becker, Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortes and Phillip Bladh (WINNER)

Best Director

Chloe Zhao (Nomadland) (WINNER

Best Costume Design

Ma Raineys Black Bottom, Ann Roth (WINNER)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Ma Raineys Black Bottom, Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Mia Neal, Jamika Wilson (WINNER)

Mank, Kimberley Spiteri, Gigi Williams, Colleen LaBaff

Pinocchio, Mark Coulier, Dalia Colli, Francesco Pegoretti

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) (WINNER)

Best International Feature Film

Another Round (Denmark) (WINNER)

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Father, Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller (WINNER)

Best Original Screenplay

Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell (WINNER)
Officials in China launched the core element of a new permanent space station into orbit on a Long March-5B Y2 rocket from Wenchang in Hainan Province, Thursday, per the BBC.

Why it matters: The launch from Wenchang Space Launch Center marks a significant step in the space program drive of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, seen as a rival to the U.S. in space.

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China's government is excluded from the International Space Station program  the only space station in orbit.

Of note: The module, called Tianhe, or Harmony of the Heavens, is the first component launched.

Scientists in China had made use of two smaller test stations in orbit that hosted crew before moving on to this more complex design, Axios' Miriam Kramer notes.

What to watch: The goal is to have the Chinese Space Station operational by the end of next year, Space.com reports.

Flashback: The big picture on China's space station that fell out of the sky

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WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government must comply strictly with a requirement that immigrants receive detailed notices about their deportation hearings.

The 6-to-3 decision featured unusual alliances, with the three conservative justices most committed to interpreting statutes according to their plain words  Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett  joining the courts three-member liberal wing to form a majority.

The case concerned a 1996 federal law that allows immigrants subject to deportation to apply to stay in the country if they meet various criteria, including that they had been continuously present for at least 10 years. The law stops that time from accruing once immigrants receive a notice to appear for a deportation hearing listing various kinds of information, including the nature of the proceeding and when and where it will take place.

The question in the case was whether the government had to provide all of the information at once or could do so piecemeal. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the statutes use of the article a in a notice to appear was crucial.
Dimitri Snowden was in court Wednesday as a judge dissolved a temporary restraining order filed against the Seeking Sister Wife star.

Prospective sister wife Christeline Petersen was granted a temporary restraining order in March against Dimitri, 40, after making allegations of domestic violence.

A judge ruled Wednesday that Christeline did not meet her burden of proof and dissolved the temporary restraining order, according to an article by TMZ.

Order dissolved: Dimitri Snowden, shown with wife Ashley in a still from Seeking Sister Wife, was in court Wednesday as a judge dissolved a temporary restraining order filed against him

Christeline testified that Dimitri allegedly slammed her head into a headboard and continued choking her during sex after she told him to stop.

Dimitri countered by showing text messages that he claimed Christeline sent him saying she enjoyed the choking.

The judge could not determine which party was telling the truth and tossed the case.

Christeline also made separate allegations against Dimitri's wife Ashley, but the judge also dismissed that case.

Abuse allegations: Prospective sister wife Christeline Petersen was granted a temporary restraining order in March against Dimitri, 40, after making allegations of domestic violence

Seeking Sister Wife featured Christeline during its current third season on TLC.

The mother-of-two from South Africa visited Los Angeles for a week to be courted by Dimitri and Ashley as a sister wife.

Christeline came to the United States after starting an online relationship with Dimitri.

Reality show: Ashley, Dimitri and second sister wife Vanessa are shown in a still from the TLC show

She claimed that her two daughters were afraid of the Snowdens because of the constant hollering.

Christeline also alleged that Ashley was abusive in January and claimed she 'shoved me to prevent me from leaving the home my husband and I shared with her,' according to court documents.

'She also threw a bottle at me. She was verbally abusive and called me names,' Christeline claimed.
Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday unveiled a sweeping effort to reform policing in Houston by banning no-knock warrants for nonviolent offenses, restructuring the police oversight board, publicly releasing body camera footage when officers injure or kill residents, expanding diversion programs and allowing online and anonymous complaints against officers.

The reform package, which Turner outlined at a City Hall news conference with Police Chief Troy Finner and other city officials, comes nearly 11 months after the mayor appointed a task force to explore changes the city should make after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The group published a lengthy report last September that recommended 104 reforms to policing in Houston. Turner at the time said he supported almost all of the measures.

The city made more modest changes before and after it unveiled the report, such as an executive order curbing certain uses of force, safe harbor court to provide alternatives to jail for people who cannot afford to pay fines and joining a cite-and-release program that gives citations instead of arrests for certain nonviolent crimes.

The slow pace in addressing big-ticket items, though, frustrated advocates looking for more immediate reforms. Turner sought to change that Thursday, addressing many of the central recommendations in the task forces report. He said the city now has implemented more than half its suggestions.

Among the changes: a dashboard to track police misconduct and encounters while also accepting anonymous complaints; a revamped oversight board with full-time investigative staff; the ban on no-knock warrants, one of which resulted in two civilian deaths and unearthed a major scandal for Houston police; and the public release of body camera footage within 30 days of critical incidents.

The online complaint form, available in five languages, and data dashboards will be available by the end of May, Turner said. It will allow for anonymous complaints, which advocates have said is critical.

Scott Henson, executive director of justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty, said a similar change had a profound impact in Austin, where officers began anonymously reporting each other for infractions.

Currently in Houston, people have to fill out a lengthy document with personal information and get it notarized to submit a complaint. State law requires a sworn affidavit for some complaints, but the new system will allow citizens to start the process without it, Finner said.

The dashboard data will cover interactions with the community, including cite-and-release encounters, traffic stops and the use of force by officers. Users will be able to filter the data by the race and gender of the subject and officers involved, the reason for the force and other factors. The dashboard also will show disciplinary actions against officers  though it will not identify them by name  and workforce diversity.

Stephen Ives, the CEO of YMCA of Greater Houston, will lead the new oversight board. The civilian board will consist of 21 members appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council.

The new board, however, will be able to conduct its own investigations. The current board merely reviews investigations conducted by HPDs internal affairs division.

Turner has paired the civilian board with a deputy inspector general, responsible for carrying out those inquiries. The mayor appointed Crystal Okorafor, a Harris County assistant district attorney, as the first deputy inspector general. Okorafor will lead a limited staff, Turner said, to investigate complaints referred by the civilian board. Turner signed an executive order with the changes Thursday.

Effective immediately, Finner said the department will publicly release body camera footage within 30 days in incidents in which a person is injured or killed. It will turn the footage over to prosecutors within 24 hours, as the task force recommended.

The department drew criticism for refusing to release footage in a string of deadly shootings by police last year. Former Chief Art Acevedo said it would jeopardize trials of police officers charged with wrongdoing, though he ultimately did release the footage in one of the killings.

Turner also said he will use more than $25 million in federal pandemic relief dollars over three years to expand diversion programs, a key victory for some advocates who had called for the city to either add mental health counselors to police responding to certain calls or replace them altogether.

The diversion programs include Crisis Call Diversion, which directs certain 911 calls to mental health professionals with the goal of resolving an incident without a police response; Mobile Crisis Outreach Teams, which dispatch mental health professionals without law enforcement; and Crisis Intervention Response Teams, which pair a mental health counselor with a police officer.

The mayor said the city will expand the call diversion program to around-the-clock coverage, at an annual cost of $272,140, and hire 18 new mobile crisis outreach teams at a cost of $4.3 million per year, as the task force recommended.

While the report called for 24 new crisis intervention teams, the city will hire six new teams to add to the current staff of 12, among other efforts.

We do ask our police officers to do way too much and put them in some very precarious situations where the outcomes sometimes are not positive, Turner said.

City officials who pushed for reform hailed Thursdays announcement. At-Large City Council member Letitia Plummer, who unsuccessfully pursued reform in last years budget, celebrated the changes and said they make Houston a national leader.

I feel like its Christmas, Plummer said. Its definitely more than I expected. Its the meat of what the task force had put out, all the important items are touched upon.  I feel safer with my (sons) driving around the city now.

District B City Council member Tarsha Jackson, who cut her teeth as a criminal justice organizer and helped author a report outlining reform proposals last summer before her election, applauded the pending changes.

Weve been fighting for these reforms for years, and the fact that our vision is finally being realized is amazing, Jackson said. I couldnt be more pleased.

Others were less laudatory.

Jaison Oliver, a community advocate who has been organizing around the police budget, said he thinks the online dashboard and complaint process are good and important changes, but he is concerned about using the task forces report as the lone measuring stick for success.

Oliver said it is notable that the reforms funnel more money to address mental health issues and other problems through the police, instead of diverting money from police to focus on solving the societal issues.

If our goal is to not just get the public off our back but to adequately address these challenges, then we see cost-effective ways of doing that, Oliver said. If our goal is to expand the HPD workforce, which is a specific metric and goal in the budget, then I think thats wrong.

Brennan Griffin, deputy director of social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said the expansion of the mobile crisis teams was a welcome investment, but it pales in comparison to the police departments $1 billion budget.

He later called the reform announcement pretty weak sauce on Twitter.

Its progress, and Ill take it, but theres still a lot to do if Houston wants some real change, he tweeted.

One major aspect of the task force report that was not addressed Thursday was the recommendation to strengthen disciplinary rules for officers. The Houston Police Officers Union likely would have to agree to those changes as part of its contract, which expired last year and went unmentioned Thursday.

Douglas Griffith, head of the union, said the organization has asked for some of the changes outlined Thursday, including the release of body camera footage and the expansion of crisis intervention teams.

I didnt see anything there that would harm our officers, he said.

St. John Barned-Smith contributed to this report.

dylan.mcguinness@chron.com

twitter.com/dylmcguinness
Manitoba reserves have come to the rescue of non-Indigenous people who are waiting on the sidelines of a provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout that's one of the slowest in Canada.

Manitoba reserves have come to the rescue of non-Indigenous people who are waiting on the sidelines of a provincial COVID-19 vaccine rollout that's one of the slowest in Canada.

"For First Nations people, kinship means a lot to us," said Virginia Lukianchuk, who oversees the rollout at Sandy Bay First Nation.

"It's difficult for First Nations people to tell people no."

Like many reserves, Sandy Bay has offered doses to numerous non-Indigenous people who work on the reserve, and spouses of band members.

It also welcomed essential workers from the neighbouring town of Amaranth, whose residents use the same services as Sandy Bay residents, whether that's in town or on the reserve.

Sandy Bay has 8,000 band members, and Lukianchuk said about 2,760 live on the reserve.

The band is struggling to use its first shipment of 1,600 Moderna doses before they expire on May 4. It has even invited off-reserve members to drive over for a shot, offered prizes and set up more vaccination days.

For First Nations people, kinship means a lot to us... It's difficult for First Nations people to tell people no.  Virginia Lukianchuk

Lukianchuk said offering shots to non-Indigenous people who work on the reserve or visit frequently also protects Sandy Bay residents.

"If the uptake in the community is low, we have to do everything we can to ensure that we are trying to provide some means of protection against the virus," said Lukianchuk.

That generosity has been extended to others.

Two Winnipeg families with adult children who have special needs told the Free Press they registered with Sandy Bay for shots, and made the 180-kilometre drive to the reserve, despite not being Indigenous or having any ties to the community.

Lukianchuk said band staff who book appointments are supposed to screen out anyone who has no ties to the reserve.

She conceded that walk-ins might not have been asked that question, especially those who showed up for unclaimed, thawed doses that would otherwise be discarded.

"There might not have been proper screening, depending on who was working the door," said Lukianchuk.

We want to think outside the box on whats best for our community.  Virginia Lukianchuk

She said the First Nations COVID-19 pandemic response team did raise concerns, but only about extending doses to first responders in neighbouring communities.

"They questioned some of the immunizations that we did, but we still stand firm on vaccinating all of our staff, within the community, regardless of if they are First Nation," Lukianchuk said.

"We want to think outside the box on whats best for our community."

Another reserve that faced a backlash from the response team after it offered shots to non-Indigenous people was Long Plain. The reserve allowed residents of nearby Portage to get a shot even if they had no ties to the community.

THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES/JOHN WOODS Dr. Marcia Anderson, public health lead, Manitoba First Nation Pandemic Response Coordination Team says its up to each reserve to decide how to use its doses.

The band said it didnt regret its decision given that all Manitobans will have their chance at a shot in a few weeks.

The First Nations pandemic response team told the media three weeks ago that it was a mistake for Long Plain to go beyond the provincial criteria.

Dr. Marcia Anderson, who co-leads the First Nations rollout, said Wednesday its up to each reserve to decide how to use its doses.

"We are not a permission-granting body," she told the Free Press.

"We encourage nations communities to follow the provincial eligibility criteria."

We encourage nations communities to follow the provincial eligibility criteria.  Dr. Marcia Anderson

Anderson said it makes sense to have off-reserve members get shots if its done safely, and noted the kinship many reserves have with their neighbours.

She refused to say whether it's appropriate for non-Indigenous people to get vaccinated at a reserve with which they have no connection.

"Im not going to comment on that specifically," Anderson said.

Sandy Bay and Long Plain both said they struggled to get enough residents to roll up their sleeves, but that more people stepped up when news emerged about highly contagious variants of the virus.

Anderson said there has generally been great uptake on First Nations. She said its hard to get reliable data on how many band members live on their reserve.

"There were times when the number of doses that went out was higher than the actual on-reserve, 18-plus population, and that impacted the availability of extra doses," she said.

Cross Lake, in northern Manitoba, has given first doses to 65 per cent of adults in the community of 8,000 people.

The band has been lauded for providing shots to teachers in Thompson, on the basis that many Cross Lake families live in the city and send their kids to school.

"Once the vaccines are released, they belong to us and they belong to our people," said Cross Lake Chief David Monias.

"We do not discriminate against age, race or gender."

NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine said shes proud of her Sagkeeng reserve for offering shots to teachers and essential workers in neighbouring Pine Falls, as well as truckers and Winnipeg animal-rescue volunteers.

"There are some folks that are hesitant to get the vaccine, so do you waste the vaccines, or do you pick up the province of Manitobas slack, and vaccinate non-Indigenous people," Fontaine said.

"My community has shown, in a very real and material way, that now is the time to come together."

For at least a month, Manitoba has been the second slowest of all 10 provinces at using the COVID-19 doses it has received, and dropped to last place this week.

Chief Nelson Genaille, of Sapotaweyak reserve on Lake Winnipegosis, said it benefits his people to offer shots to non-Indigenous people who visit the reserve for work.

"Their vaccination might not roll out until summertime," he said.

"If you let one virus in, it just skyrockets. It just goes on and on, and its hard to control."

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated an appellate court ruling against a Pentecostal church that was suing California over its worship restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.

In an order Monday, the high court vacated a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that denied South Bay United Pentecostal Church injunctive relief from the pandemic restrictions on in-person worship instituted by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which have since been rescinded.

The order cited the Supreme Court case of Tandon v. Newsom, in which the justices issued a per curiam ruling in favor of multiple plaintiffs suing California over its ban on in-home worship attended by more than three households.

 government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause, whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise, stated the decision.

Source:The Christian Post
SAN RAFAEL, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Dominican University of California's Barowsky School of Business (BSB) has joined the network of business schools accredited by AACSB International (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). AACSB accreditation recognizes demonstrated excellence in faculty research, curriculum development, innovative instruction, student learning, and impact.

Less than six percent of the world's business schools are accredited by AACSB, which has been setting the gold standard for business education since 1916.

"This achievement recognizes the strength of our faculty, the commitment of our staff, the innovation of our leadership, and the dedication of our University to delivering an exceptional education," said Dominican President Mary B. Marcy.

BSB is Marin County's largest and oldest business school. Its location in one of the country's most entrepreneurial and socially-conscious areas attracts students from across California, the United States, and overseas.

AACSB accreditation will increase the San Francisco Bay Area university's national and global visibility, while also allowing the school to develop partnerships with companies providing tuition support for employees, said BSB Dean Dr. Yung-Jae Lee.

"Because the AACSB accreditation is synonymous with a high-quality business education through innovation, engagement, and impact, the accreditation will help BSB in attracting outstanding students to the undergraduate and graduate programs," Dr. Lee said.

"Accreditation will particularly help BSB to recruit more international students, as these students often only consider schools holding AACSB accreditation," he added. "U.S. companies providing tuition support to their employees prefer to work with accredited business schools, and we look forward to developing additional partnerships with San Francisco Bay Area companies and organizations now we are accredited."

BSB's undergraduate Business Administration program weaves ethics and social responsibility into the curriculum. Flexibility allows business students to double major or add minors in a range of disciplines, including coding and software design, biochemistry, communication, literature, science, psychology, environmental sciences, and global public health.

Graduate programs include a tailored one-year MBA that emphasizes strategic management, global business, leadership, negotiation, networking, team-building, and effective communication skills. A 12-month Master of Science in Business Analytics offers coursework in data visualization, programming, data security, machine learning, and cloud computing.

The BSB's new 12-month Master of Science in Accounting features a deep dive into the growing field of accounting analytics. Small classes allow for personalized instruction as graduates prepare for the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam.

CONTACT: Sarah Gardner, [email protected]

SOURCE Dominican University of California

Related Links

http://www.dominican.edu


Highlights Several posts with #ResignModi were hidden by Facebook in India.

Facebook said these posts were found violating the community guidelines.

It also said that the government did not order any takedown.

Facebook made some posts asking for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's resignation from office, hidden from public viewing for a brief time in India, at a time when the country is grappling with the Covid-19 crisis. Facebook said that it did that "by mistake" and not because the Indian government asked it so. This is the second incident where voices critical of the ruling government were snubbed, especially in the middle of the crisis that has made India an epicentre of the pandemic. A few days back, Twitter had to hide as many as 50 posts that were critical of the government's manner of handling the Covid-19 situation in India, in response to the government's order.

The Wall Street Journal first reported it and as BuzzFeed News later pointed out, Facebook Wednesday hid posts containing the hashtag or text "#ResignModi" entirely in India. The social media giant said it did that because "some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards." People in India could not view these posts, but, according to BuzzFeed News, those in the US, Canada, or the UK could see them with a simple search. These posts remained hidden for about three hours, but after the first report on this was out, Facebook allowed these posts to be seen in India, backtracking on its previous decision related to community guideline violations.

On that, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said, "We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it."

The Indian government has called out the original WSJ report, terming it "misleading on facts and mischievous in intent." The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has shared a statement on the Koo app -- India's rival to Twitter -- saying, "A story by Wall Street Journal attributing removal of a certain hashtag by Facebook to GOI's efforts to curb public dissent is misleading on facts and mischievous in intent. Govt has not issued any direction to remove this hashtag. Facebook has also clarified that it was removed by mistake."

The MeitY handle also referred to a previous WSJ report to highlight its stance. It said, "It is pertinent to mention that on 5th March 2021 also, Wall Street Journal had published a fake news with heading- "India Threatens Jail for Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter Employees". Government had sent an official rebuttal of this completely fake and manufactured story to Wall Street Journal. Media has a very important role to play in acting as a force multiplier to the efforts of our front-line workers and medical professionals. At a sensitive time like this, we would urge the media to partner with crores of ordinary Indians as we collectively fight the pandemic."

Since the posts were hidden in India, it is not immediately clear how they were found violating Facebook's community guidelines. And since Facebook is claiming the Indian government had nothing to do with this takedown of posts, there looms a bigger question for the social media giant. And that question straightaway targets the company's community guidelines. And the algorithm that Facebook is using to scan posts across the platform. Since posts with the particular #ResignModi were hidden, Facebook needs to clarify more in terms of what else it found was against the guidelines.

This is the second incident in recent times where a social media company has removed content that does not favour the Modi government or its way of handling the pandemic. Previously, Twitter hid several posts on its platform from viewing in India and these posts were critical of how the government is handling the Covid-19 outbreak. But Twitter did not take the decision arbitrarily. The Indian government asked Twitter to take down these posts. However, later, the Indian government said that it asked Twitter to remove only those posts that were found spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 situation in India, not the ones that criticised the government's ways of managing the pandemic.

Facebook has been under scrutiny ever since a Wall Street Journal investigation alleged a top Indian executive was found protecting a BJP member and other Hindu nationalists from the ban under the community guidelines of the company. Last year, in August, Facebook's India policy head Ankhi Das appeared before a Parliament panel to answer questions related to her going against the company's hate speech guidelines to protect certain people by asking the content moderation team not to censor their questionable posts. Amid mounting allegations, Das resigned from Facebook in October, a move the social media giant said had nothing to do with the controversy but because Das wanted to pursue her interest in public service.
IT Modernization

$2.1 billion in UI modernization comes with oversight

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh (Photo credit: vasilis asvestas / shutterstock.com)

The Labor Department is asking for $100 million in fiscal year 2022 to back the development of information technology for states to administer unemployment insurance, on top of $2 billion already committed in the American Rescue Plan Act for the same purpose.

Agency chief Marty Walsh stressed the seriousness of the problem and the importance of oversight and measuring success of investments in state unemployment tech during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Wednesday devoted to the Labor Department budget.

"These investments focus on deep needsthat have been clearly needed and often cruelly exposed by this pandemic, but they're not new," Walsh said.

The secretary has been vocal about his commitment to working on UI modernization since his nomination. The antiquated systems of many states have been overwhelmed as the number of applicants spiked during the pandemic. The agency's own internal watchdog and many members of Congress have called on DOL to take a more active, central role in UI administration.

"This will be one of the top areas that I work on as Secretary of Labor, to make sure that something like this doesnt happen, God forbid we have a pandemic in the futurewe have to have a system that works for everyone," he said.

Walsh told lawmakers that between $600 million and $700 million of the $2 billion from the latest round of pandemic legislation is slated for technical assistance for states, but during questioning from Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.), said that the funds haven't been spent yet.

Harder said: "It often feels like Groundhog Day where every single economic crisis, we have the same conversation about how broken our unemployment system is," he said. "My question for you is how are we going to know if we fix it?"

Walsh replied: "One way you can tell if it's fixed is the way people are treated on unemployment. If they need unemployment benefits, they apply, they get them. And when they don't need them anymore they dont get them," he said. "I heard every single day about somebody waiting to get unemployment benefits" as mayor of Boston.

Walsh also stressed the importance of oversight.

"We, the Department of Labor, need to put a process, a check and balance in place so that we can monitor these systems across the country to make sure they're working because, again, a $2 billion investment and then I think we're asking for another $100 million in this budget, that's a large investment to make in a UI system and get nothing back for it."

There's interest in Congress in making sure the UI funding works to improving state systems. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) introduced a bill in February to overhaul UI technology by giving DOL funds to develop modular technology solutions to common UI problems  enrollment, eligibility, claims  that states can piece together to create modern systems. The bill's sponsors and other Democrats have encouraged Walsh to use their bill as a guide to spending the funds given in the American Rescue Plan.
[April 29, 2021] Minerva Serrano Awarded 2021 Enterprising Women of the Year Honors

ORLANDO, Fla., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Minerva Serrano, the co-founder of Activus Connect, a premium provider of Customer Experience Outsourced Solutions operating across the Continental U.S. & Puerto Rico, has been named a winner of the 2021 Annual Enterprising Women of the Year Award. Serrano will be honored at the 19th Annual Enterprising Women of the Year Awards Celebration & Conference, to be held from Sunday, November 14 to Tuesday, November 16, at the Wyndham Grand in Clearwater Beach, Florida. This long-running, prestigious awards program recognizes the world's top women entrepreneurs. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious recognition programs for women business owners in the U.S. and globally. Activus Connect, a certified owned and operated Women & Minority organization lives the ethos of Elevating Experiences and has the distinction of being comprised of industry experts who have collectively helped to shape what is commonly referred to as the "at-home, work-from-home, virtual-agent delivery model." "It is a great honor to be recognized among women entrepreneurs who are successfully leading their businesses while at the same time sharing their expertise and knowledge to inspire and guide future women leaders," Serrano said. "This is validation that building a business is ust as much about the impact you have outside of work as it is about the business itself. I have always been passionate about empowering those around me, and through Activus Connect, I have found an even larger stage from which to drive social good. My hope is that this award serves as a beacon of hope, encouragement, and courage for all women who have an entrepreneurial aspiration."



"Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of women around the world were asked to adapt to working from home while also caring for their families when the global pandemic required us to work remotely and safely. As a mother and entrepreneur, I am grateful myself to have the opportunity to build and run a successful business at home and to support others who choose to do the same," Serrano also said. Activus Connect is an industry leader in the evolution of the traditional BPO-Contact Center, leveraging their SmartVirtual platform, the most advanced approach to outsourced CX service delivery in the industry.

This solution brings together the most secure cloud-based ecosystem of technologies, analytics, and virtual management practices, enabling the friendliest, smartest, most efficient & effective outcomes for brands and their consumers. The company provides multilingual, multichannel, voice & non-voice customer care, sales, retention, social media moderation, and technical support across all verticals. At their core and in their actions, Activus Connect is a values-based business focused on doing what is right above anything else. They do so with passion, integrity, respect, authenticity, and joy, aiming to enrich lives and cultivate communities locally and globally. "Winning the Enterprising Women of the Year Award is a lifetime achievement for a select group of outstanding women entrepreneurs from across the U.S. and around the globe. These honorees have shown remarkable business growth, leadership in their communities, and mentorship of other women and girls. I could not be prouder of these phenomenal women leaders," Monica Smiley, Publisher/CEO of Enterprising Women magazine, said. For more information on the 2021 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards Celebration & Conference, visit http://enterprisingwomen.com. For more information about Serrano and Activus Connect, visit www.activusconnect.com. Contact:

Sandy Ellis

pr@activusconnect.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/minerva-serrano-awarded-2021-enterprising-women-of-the-year-honors-301280385.html SOURCE Activus Connect

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The U.S. Senate approved yesterday a return of methane emission regulation from the Obama era that was rolled back during Trump's administration.

The regulation, called Oil and Natural Gas New Source Performance Standards, was implemented in 2012 and 2016 and targeted methane leaks from new oil and gas wells and pipelines, Reuters reports.

"This is the first of many important steps the Senate will take," said Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who was among the Senators who introduced the resolution for the reinstatement of the methane rules.

"If we can fix our methane problem we can quickly turn down the climate-warming impacts," said the lead sponsor of the bill, Martin Heinrich.

"It's a very serious public health issue," Heinrich said during an online event in late March, ahead of this month's vote for the return of the regulation. "In addition, it's a huge waste of a valuable resource. There's a reason the best-in-class producers don't lose nearly as much methane because they're investing, they want to keep that, that's their product, that's what they sell."

Senator Heinrich is from New Mexico, one of the biggest oil-producing states in the United States.

Methane only came in the focus of environmentalist and regulatory attention relatively recently as a continuation of the drive to reduce carbon emissions. Methane leaks are common in the oil industry and, over the short term, more harmful to the atmosphere than CO2 because of their greater greenhouse effect. However, methane has a much shorter life than carbon dioxide.

Last year when the pandemic hit, methane emissions slumped by as much as 60 percent as drillers curbed production. Now, as drilling begins to recover, emissions are recovering, too, and at a much faster rate. So if production ever reaches pre-pandemic levels, methane emissions could hit a new record in the absence of regulatory and voluntary action.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Early Wednesday morning, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the New York City office and apartment home of the former New York mayor and personal lawyer for former President Donald Trump, 76-year-old Rudolph Giuliani.

The aggressive raid on Giulianis workplace and residence by federal agents, a tactic usually reserved for Mafia bosses and supposed terrorists, is highly unusual for any former government official. It is especially so for Giuliani, who as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989 was in charge of the same office that is now investigating him.

New York City Police officers walk out of the apartment building where former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani resides, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in New York. Federal agents on Wednesday raided Giulianis Manhattan home and office, seizing computers and cell phones in a major escalation of the Justice Departments investigation into the business dealings of former President Donald Trumps personal lawyer. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The raid has generated a firestorm of coverage in the corporate press, demonstrating that nearly four months after Trumps attempted coup, divisions within the ruling class remain at a fever pitch.

According to three people with knowledge of the investigation, reported the New York Times, the raid is part of the criminal investigation into Giulianis affairs in Ukraine, specifically concerning Giulianis attempts in 2019 to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating Joe Biden and unearth political dirt regarding Biden and his son Hunters affairs in the country.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Giuliani has been under investigation since at least 2019 by the US Attorneys office in New York and by the FBI for business dealings in Ukraine that could violate federal lobbying laws.

The delay in carrying out the warrants, according to reporting from the Associated Press and the Times, was due to intransigence within the upper echelons of the Trump administration Justice Department. Both the AP and the Times claimed that high-level officials within the department would not approve the warrants based on fears that privileged communications between Giuliani and Trump would be revealed. The appointment and subsequent confirmation of Biden nominee Merrick Garland as attorney general last month cleared the way for the warrants to be executed.

Giulianis activities in dealing with Ukraine were at the center of the first impeachment trial of Trump, who was impeached by the House but acquitted in the Senate in a near party-line vote. Giuliani is head of a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, which sells access to Giuliani and the upper echelon of the Republican party to several clients, including some in Ukraine.

The Times reported that during the raid federal investigators seized cellphones and other electronic devices from Giulianis home and office. A statement released through Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello, claims the electronic devices are replete with material covered by the attorney-client privilege and other constitutional privileges. Costello told the Wall Street Journal that the investigation into Giuliani involved a possible violation of foreign-lobbying rules.

It was also reported that a search warrant was executed at the Washington D.C. home of long-time Republican lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former top official in the Department of Justice and Giuliani associate. The Wall Street Journal reported that Toensing turned over her cell phone to the agents, but her home was not searched.

Toensings law firm released a statement saying she was not the target of the investigation and that Toensing, would have been happy to turn over any relevant documents. All they had to do was ask.

Toensing is the wife of former Reagan administration lawyer and Trump attorney Joe diGenova, who last year called for the execution of former director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs. Krebs had recently been fired by Trump after he refused to give support to Trumps fascistic lies about a stolen election, declaring there was no electronic or cyber manipulation of the vote.

Toensing has previously represented Erik Prince, the founder of notorious mercenary outfit Blackwater and brother of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince served as an informal campaign adviser to Trump.

Giuliani denied any wrongdoing in his statement and claimed that the search warrants revealed a corrupt double standard by the Justice Department, which he claimed ignored blatant crimes by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Biden.

Giuliani claimed that the FBI steadfastly declined to take alleged copies of Hunter Bidens computer drives that he claimed to be in possession of, even though he offered them on several occasions. He added that the attack was aimed at undermining the constitutional rights of anyone involved in, or legally defending, former President Donald J. Trump.

While Giuliani has yet to be charged, the fact the agents executed a warrant on his home and workplace demonstrates that a judge thought enough evidence existed of a possible crime to authorize the warrant in the first place.

A similar raid took place three years ago against Trumps former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who was subsequently charged and sent to prison for three years after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, tax fraud, bank fraud and for lying to a Senate committee. Cohen spent roughly a year in prison before being released to home confinement last July.

Claims of outrageous and unconstitutional treatment at the hands of federal agents are ironic coming from the former mayor of New York City. As mayor from 1994 to 2001, Giuliani defended brutal police killings and promoted zero tolerance law enforcement tactics that ran roughshod over the democratic rights of the citys working-class and minority residents.

While reports of the FBI investigation suggest that it is centered on Giulianis alleged activities in regard to Ukraine, he played an integral part in the attempted fascist coup of January 6.

In the months following Trumps electoral defeat, Giuliani appeared at multiple state election board hearings to lobby on behalf of Trump and his fraudulent claims. In many instances he was joined by people who later participated in the storming of the Capitol, including the notorious QAnon shaman who was photographed wearing a horned helmet with his face daubed in paint as he strode through the building.

Giuliani was one of the featured speakers at Trumps rally in front of the White House on the day of the attack on Congress. During his speech he incited the crowd to violence, urging them, Lets have trial by combat.
[April 29, 2021] 'Pharmacy Benefit Manipulators?' - AHF to Target PBM Abuse in New Campaign

In response to growing consolidation and increasingly monopolistic behavior in the pharmacy and health care industries, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is launching a new advocacy campaign to take on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that are undercutting community pharmacies and driving up drug prices. The national campaign aims to raise awareness about PBMs' undue influence on patients' access to the prescription drugs they may need and to educate the public and press elected officials to call out and prevent PBM abuses. The campaign also hopes to rein in the abusive industry, which broadly functions as middlemen between insurance companies and pharmacies. AHF's 'Stop PBMs' campaign will include direct and online community mobilization, legislative outreach, online and print advertising, a website, social media posts and more, all urging greater regulation of these corporate health care middlemen that are driving up drug prices. "With the launch of our 'Stop PBMs' campaign, we hope to encourage community and legislative action and advocacy against these pharmacy and health care monopolies which grow bigger and greedier each passing day," said John Hassell, national director of advocacy for AHF. "In particular, we also want to stop PBMs from hurting Ryan White and small independent pharmacies and their clients." Ryan White Contract Pharmacies & Independently owned pharmacies are being hurt by PBMs in several ways: PBMs often enforce mandatory mail order of prescription drugs by their patients/clients, and

Force expensive drugs onto patients

Send six months' worth of medications that may, or will expire

Send refrigerated medications that will go bad sitting on doorsteps

Force pharmacies into accepting reimbursement that doesn't cover their costs through take it or leave it contracts and abusive ractices like clawing back reimbursements months or years after payment.



Scott Carruthers, Chief of Pharmacy and Senior Manager for AHF. "Our 'Stop PBMs' campaign shines a light on these abuses and calls for reform." The 'Stop PBMs' website (www.ahf.org/stop-pbms) leads with a probing, play-on-words banner headline: 'Pharmacy Benefit Manipulators?' The website offers visitors concerned about drug prices and access to the drugs they need several ways they may join or support the Stop PBMs campaign as well as a concise three-minute explainer video (direct YouTube link) that neatly distills the complex issue into an easily understood language and imagery.

Elements of the campaign include: Facebook & Google (News - Alert) digital display ads

Bus shelter and other outdoor advertising, including ads on more than a half-a-dozen bus shelters surrounding the White House (in order that legislative staff can see the 'Stop PBMs' campaign messaging as they come and go from the White House and East Wing Executive Office Building). AHF's 'Stop PBMs' campaign launches this week and will run through September. For more information about this campaign to fight back against PBMs who are putting their profit ahead of patient health, please visit: www.ahf.org/stop-pbms AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.5 million individuals in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook (News - Alert) : www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us @aidshealthcare. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005850/en/

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In an editorial in its mouthpiece "Saamana", the on Thursday slammed the Central government over the 'COVID-crisis' across the country. It has also hit out at the for being a 'spectator' till now.

The Supreme Court, itself 'confirmed' that the Narendra Modi-led Central government has failed in handling the COVID-19 situation across the country, said.

It said that the health infrastructure in the country has collapsed and the shortage of medical oxygen, beds, and vaccine is a matter of concern.

Taking a jibe at Bharatiya Janata Party, the publication said, "From whom the leaders will seek resignation over the remarks made by the apex court? The asked for resignation from the state government over the fire incidents in COVID hospitals in Maharashtra. The cremation grounds across the country are flooded with bodies."

The party, through his mouthpiece, also slammed the for being a mute spectator over the elections in West Bengal and Kumbh in Uttarakhand.

"Whatever it may be, the country is facing the crisis due to the being a mute spectator till now. Power tussle in West Bengal, the Kumbh Mela of Haridwar, and a role of a mute spectator is behind the crisis," it said.

The also hit out at Union Home Minister Amit Shah for not wearing a mask while addressing election rallies in West Bengal. The party pointed out that the people were seen without masks at the rallies and during the Kumbh.

"The Election Commission, police, and courts were a mute spectator then," it said.

"The Modi government should put political enmity aside and a should frame a comprehensive national plan with the help of leaders from different political parties," it said.

"The Supreme Court has awakened, it is time that Central government should awake," it 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.)
The Woodstar Cafe, a family-owned shop in Western Massachusetts, has survived every blow dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic. A six-week hiatus that began in March 2020. A skeleton crew wearing masks and gloves serving baked goods to-go. A two-thirds reduction of seating when dining service was allowed to resume in Massachusetts.

Buoyed by a federal loan and a loyal customer base, the Northampton bakery known for its raspberry oatmeal muffins and green smoothies remained afloat the past 13 months.

Which is why the states notice that the business would owe nearly twice as much in unemployment taxes felt like a gut punch for Rebecca and Dmitri Robbins, who own the cafe.

That was a shock, said Rebecca Robbins, who opened the cafe in 2003.

She joins a growing club of business owners who share an outsized unemployment tax bill stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers earned a last-minute reprieve when the states quarterly tax bill deadline was postponed a month to June 1, buying legislators time to respond. But the possibility of a massive bill, indirectly born out of a collective shutdown to reduce infections, hovers over Massachusetts business owners.

It felt pretty unfair to employers like me, who closed out of concern for public safety, and it also felt unfair to employers who have done very well during pandemic, Robbins said. They havent had to use the unemployment system at all, and yet this rate will apply to them.

6 Woodstar Cafe: A year into the COVID-19 pandemic

For the Woodstar Cafe, the unemployment tax increased from $10,000 to close to $20,000 for the year.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Baker administrations orders to close non-essential businesses since March 2020 triggered a historic wave of jobless claims. That flood of jobless claims, which led Massachusetts bear the title of state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation this summer, drained the states unemployment trust fund and left a deficit in the hands of those who pay into the system, business leaders say.

These stories are really disconcerting, and I think the problem for us on the state level is this is about a $4 billion problem, said Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, a Northampton Democrat who has fielded calls and emails from beleaguered business owners since the tax notices went out earlier this month.

The unemployment trust fund had a nearly $5 billion deficit in late 2020. The deficit dropped in early 2021, but the state Department of Revenue projects the trust fund will be more than $4 billion in the red by the end of the year.

How does a business owners unemployment seem to tax double or triple overnight? It all comes back to the solvency fund assessment, one of several factors used to calculate an employers unemployment insurance tax bill.

Most of the time business owners and their accountants pay attention to the experience rate, which also is factored into the final tax bill. The experience rate goes up when a company lays off or furloughs employees, prompting them to rely on unemployment benefits while theyre out of work.

The Legislature tried to mitigate the burden of the tax hikes to business owners. In an unemployment tax bill that passed in March, lawmakers froze the UI payment schedule for two years, locking it at Schedule E and preventing employers from having to pay hundreds of dollars more per worker. The bill, which the governor signed in early April, also authorized the state to borrow up to $7 billion to make the UI trust fund solvent.

What lawmakers, state budget writers and some business leaders missed, however, was the ballooning solvency rate. A little-known provision in the CARES Act directed states to move unemployment claims to the solvency fund so it wouldnt ruin employers individual experience ratings if they complied with state orders and closed shop to reduce COVID-19 spread.

The unresolved debt appeared surfaced through the solvency rate, which affects all employers equally, even those who did not lay off workers during the pandemic. The solvency rate jumped from 0.58% last year to 9.23%.

I think we saw just the tremendous strain especially at the height of the pandemic when you have more than a million people collecting unemployment insurance, said Sen. Eric Lesser, a Longmeadow Democrat who with Sabadosa signed onto a letter calling for relief for employers. The system was just not designed to handle the volume, and I think were seeing the downstream consequences of that now.

The pandemic has also deterred traffic on Main Streets across Massachusetts. A survey of businesses in downtown Northampton, conducted by the private consulting group Civic Space Collaborative, suggests the pandemic cut vehicular traffic in half and reduced foot traffic by 41%. One-third of respondents reported revenue losses of more than 75%.

In a pre-pandemic year, a 5% revenue loss would be troubling, Robbins said. Between the six-week closure and the gradual reopening, the Woodstar Cafe saw a revenue loss of 40% in 2020.

A decrease of 40% was devastating for us, she said.

The closure last March put a staff of 32 out of work. Robbins reopened with a handful of employees in hopes of reducing the risk of spreading COVID-19 and gradually grew back to a staff of 28 over the past year.

Robbins rehired some employees. Others had secured work elsewhere by the time the cafe was ready to bring them back, so many of the employees were new hires she had to train. She and Dmitri also took on IT, human resources, deliveries and other areas of the business they hadnt before.

Then theres the cost of protective gear. Robbins serves coffee and baked goods from behind a plexiglass barrier. She and her staff wear KN95 masks and gloves. She cleared dozens of tables and chairs that crowded the cafe, leaving strips of directional one way tape on the ground in their place.

Woodstar Cafe owner Rebecca Robbins says the news that her unemployment tax bill came as a shock. The cafe closed for 6 weeks and slowly rebuilt its staff to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.Steph Solis

A combination of grants and Paycheck Protection Program loans have helped keep the cafe afloat. Robbins expects the last infusion of funding to come in the next pay period.

Those things have made us completely whole, so thank goodness for that, she said, but that money is rapidly running out ... By mid-may, we need to be standing on our own two feet.

Despite the federal funds, the Woodstar Cafe raised prices by 5% in January. That means another 10 cents for a cup of coffee, but Robbins foresees having to raise prices another 2% if she has to pay a nearly $20,000 in unemployment taxes this year.

So far weve been able to be very affordable, she said. That feels like its changing a little bit.

Robbins and other employers found a brief reprieve. Two weeks after the first tax notices went out, the state Department of Unemployment Assistance postponed the tax payment deadline from April 30 to June 1. The delay buys legislators and the Baker administration time to find a fix.

I feel really encouraged by the delay, she said. The delay came almost instantly.

Lawmakers and business leaders have proposed spending a portion, or even all, of the $4.5 billion in federal aid the state is expected to receive from the American Rescue Plan.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said he plans to earmark a portion of the states federal aid for the unemployment system. Gov. Charlie Baker and Beacon Hill leaders, however, say they plan to wait for the federal guidance to issue its guidance on how to use the ARP funds. The guidance is due around May 10.

I cant give you a hard date on when were going to hear from the feds, Baker said during a recent news conference. The date that most people think we are likely to hear from them is somewhere around the 10th of May ... were obviously are very interested in what they have to say about that.

Lesser said he is working with Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr on a bill to address the solvency rate issue.

My hope is that there can be a resolution before the June 1st deadline, Lesser said.

Sabadosa said a solvency rate jump warrants short-term relief, and the ARP funds might not be the only answer.

I recognize this problem is extraordinarily expensive, and even if we did use the federal money coming into the state, we would have to use almost all of it to resolve this problem, and that is not what we should do, she said. There are better ways for us to use this money to lift everybody up.

At the same time, we have to do something, she added. At the very least, we have to do something for our smallest businesses.

Related Content:
Stacks of $50 and $100 notes totalling about $1.2 million, drugs worth $12 million  including blocks of cocaine stamped with the word Dior  and gold-coloured firearms were seized in police raids in Sydney on Wednesday.

Six men were charged with more than 130 offences between them after police investigating an alleged drug supply syndicate and its links to the Sydney-based Bandidos bikie group swooped on multiple properties across the city.

One of the men arrested in Rose Bay. Credit:NSW Police

In September 2019, the Southern Region Enforcement Squad established Strike Force Kniepp to investigate the supply of prohibited drugs and alleged criminal activities in the states south.

Their inquiries revealed a criminal syndicate was supplying cocaine, MDMA and methylamphetamine (ice) across Sydneys south-west and eastern beaches, as well as the South Coast.
Overview: Blood glucose monitoring is an integral part of the standard diabetes care, and it is very helpful in controlling the glucose levels in individuals with diabetes and impaired glucose tolerance. The incidence of diabetes is increasing globally, and around 90% of the patients have type 2 diabetes mellitus with approximately one-fifth of the people undergoing insulin treatment. Self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) systems and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems are two major types of blood glucose monitoring systems.

The market for blood glucose monitoring systems is driven by increasing incidence of diabetes across various geographies, huge surge in the aging population, and increasing product launch and approvals. Increasing collaboration and funding to develop innovative devices and raising awareness among the patients are providing an opportunity for the market growth. Product recalls and inadequate reimbursements are few of the factors that may hamper the market growth to an extent.

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Market Analysis: The Global Blood Glucose Monitoring Systems market is estimated to witness a CAGR of 6.7% during the forecast period 20182024. The global market is analyzed based on four segments  products, applications, end-users, and regions.

Regional Analysis: The regions covered in the report are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World (RoW). North America is the major shareholder in the global blood glucose monitoring systems market, followed by Europe. The Asia Pacific region is expected to grow at a high CAGR during the forecast period due to an upsurge in access to health care services, increasing patient pool, raising awareness among patients, and growing healthcare expenditure. According to the Asian Diabetes Prevention Initiative, nearly 60% of the total diabetic population resides in Asia. It also estimates that 65.1 million adults in India and 113.9 million adults in China have diabetes.

Product Analysis: The blood glucose monitoring systems market, by product, is segmented into self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) systems and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems. SMBG systems occupied a significant market share in 2017, and CGM systems are expected to grow at a high CAGR during the forecast period. Increasing adoption of minimally invasive procedures makes it the fastest growing segment during the forecast period.

Application Analysis: The market, by applications, is segmented into type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes. Type 2 diabetes occupied a significant market share in 2017 and is expected to remain the same for the next 5 years. This is due to growing patient base for type 2 diabetes and increasing launch of the advanced product in this segment.

End-users Analysis: The market, by end-users, is segmented into hospitals, homecare, private clinics, and others. Among various end-users, homecare occupied a significant market share and is expected to remain the same during the forecast period.

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Key Players: Medtronic plc, Johnson and Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., PHC Holdings Corporation, Ypsomed Holding, Dexcom, Acon Laboratories, Trividia Health Inc., Arkray Inc., Sanofi S.A., Terumo Medical Corporation, Prodigy Diabetes Care LLC, and niche players.

Competitive Analysis: The market has a large number of medium and small players that offer innovative products and has immense growth opportunity, especially in the emerging countries. The key market players are taking advantage of product approvals and new product launches, making their strategies to increase the market share. For instance, in September 2017, the US FDA approved FreeStyle Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring System, the first continuous glucose monitoring system that can be used by adult patients to make diabetes treatment decisions without calibration using a blood sample from the fingertip. In February 2018, Roche Diabetes Care India announced the launch of its new glucometer Accu-Chek Instant S, which marks the entry of the organization into the mass market segment in diabetes self-monitoring.

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Benefits: The report provides complete details about the usage and adoption rate of blood glucose monitoring systems in various therapeutic verticals and regions. With that, key stakeholders can know about the major trends, drivers, investments, and vertical players initiatives. Moreover, the report provides details about the major challenges that are going to impact on the market growth. Additionally, the report gives the complete details about the key business opportunities to key stakeholders to expand their business and capture the revenue in the specific verticals to analyze before investing or expanding the business in this market.




Haiti - Technology : Solar micro-grids, huge potential for rural areas





Almost 75% of Haitian citizens do not have access to electricity due to a limited and unreliable electricity grid, which forces many small towns to seek their own solutions in order to provide electricity to local households, schools and growing economic sectors.



Through a partnership with EarthSpark International, a Washington-based nonprofit, the United States Agency for Trade and Development (USTDA) helps plan and deliver clean microgrid solutions in communities in Haiti.



In 2015, EarthSpark began operating a community micro-network in the town of Les Anglais, in the southwest of Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-14095-haiti-technology-first-solar-powered-microgrid.html



To replicate this success in Haiti, EarthSpark turned to USTDA for help, and the Agency responded by funding a national assessment of the potential of solar-powered microgrids in 89 rural Haitian towns https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-14065-haiti-economy-towards-pre-pay-microgrids.html . This process also assessed critical factors including economic activity, electricity demand and infrastructure requirements.



The study, conducted with EarthSpark's Haitian affiliate, "Eneji Pwop," as well as local universities and a think tank, led to the implementation in 2019 of a new solar-powered micro-grid in the southwest city of Tiburon, where 500 homes and businesses now have access to clean and reliable electricity. In addition, the deployment of advanced SparkMeter equipment has also enabled greater energy efficiency and resilience in case of severe hurricanes.



Tiburon is now one of the few communities in Haiti with reliable 24-hour electricity. EarthSpark now has plans to dramatically scale up its microgrids in Haiti to 24 smart, solar-powered grids in the next four years, to be financed in part by a $9.9 million commitment from the Green Climate Fund.



"Microgrids hold enormous potential to quickly bring electricity to communities across rural Haiti, said Allison Archambault, President at EarthSpark International. With local and national government support as well as international cooperation, the launch of the Tiburon grid https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22359-haiti-technology-solar-energy-continues-to-expand-to-nan-sevre.html is a success story for multi-sector partnerships building a market that can scale-up to sustainably electrify the 70 percent of the Haitian population still living without electricity."



USTDA Acting Director Enoh T. Ebong added, "This project has already helped Haiti vastly expand its microgrid operations, providing more citizens with access to reliable power and clean energy. We are confident that the innovation of U.S. technology will continue to make the decisive difference in Haiti and integrate microgrids in communities throughout the country."



See also :

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-33567-icihaiti-valliere-jovenel-moise-inaugurates-the-valliere-micro-solar-power-plant.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33563-haiti-technology-a-french-firm-will-design-install-and-operate-12-mw-of-solar-energy-in-caracol.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-31933-haiti-world-bank-donation-of-several-millions-for-renewable-energy-in-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20799-haiti-notice-request-for-proposals-for-power-generation-systems-for-microgrids.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22359-haiti-technology-solar-energy-continues-to-expand-to-nan-sevre.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-14095-haiti-technology-first-solar-powered-microgrid.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Bamako, Mali (PANA) - The Malian government adopted on Thursday a draft decree establishing a National Committee for Transhumance and Conciliation Commission, in response to a recommendation from the heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), PANA learned from an official source
CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In-depth analysis and data-driven insights on the impact of COVID-19 included in this U.S. hand sanitizer market report.

The U.S. hand sanitizer market is expected to grow at a rate of over 560% during the period 2019-2021.

Key Highlights Offered in the Report:

The U.S. hand sanitizer market is expected to witness an absolute growth of around 144% and 136% in terms of revenue and unit shipment during 2019 to 2026. The market has been witnessing a surge in demand for hand sanitizers owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. This peak is likely to continue over the two years and will start to normalize after 2022. Rising awareness and consciousness of hand hygiene is expected to boost the market for liquid hand sanitizers. Thus, the revenue for the liquid hand sanitizer segment is expected to witness incremental revenue of over USD 188 million , growing at a CAGR of around 13% during the forecast period. Incremental revenue in the hospitality segment is likely to reach around USD 52 million by 2026, growing at absolute growth of around 123% during the forecast period. Rising awareness on the importance of hand hygiene is expected to boost the market for alcoholic hand sanitizers. The revenue of the ethyl alcohol hand sanitizer market is expected to reach around USD 788 million by 2026, growing at a CAGR of over 14% during the forecast period. Central South Carolina has been flourishing with the hospitality facilities and reopening of corporates and institutions. Thus, the market for alcoholic hand sanitizer in Southern region of the US will grow at a CAGR of approximately 17% with incremental revenue growth of over USD 282 million between 2019 and 2026. Continuous shifts toward digitalization are expected to change the dynamics and online sales of hand sanitizers are expected to grow at high CAGR of over 16% during the forecast period.

Key Offerings:

Market Size & Forecast by Revenue | 2019-2026

Market Dynamics - Leading trends, growth drivers, restraints, and investment opportunities

Market Segmentation - A detailed analysis by product type, end-users, functional ingredient, distribution channels, and geography

Competitive Landscape - 6 key vendors and 18 other vendors

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U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market - Segmentation

The gel-based segment is expected to witness an absolute growth of 164% and 157% in terms of revenue and volume, respectively, between 2019 and 2026. Vendors providing gel-based sanitizers for the healthcare sector should focus on building the brand image and ensuring that their products deliver the promised result.

In 2019, the healthcare segment accounted for around 60% and 64% share of the U.S. hand sanitizer market in terms of revenue and volume, respectively. The healthcare sector has always been one of the key contributors to the U.S. hand sanitizer market share. The consciousness generated amongst patients or visitors or even the health personnel/worker drives the sale of disinfectants in the market.

The ethyl alcoholic market is expected to witness an absolute growth of around 150% and 141% in terms of revenue and volume, respectively, by the end of 2026. Ethyl alcohol dominates the global market as most OTC sanitizers contain ethyl alcohol as their main functional ingredients.

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market by Product Type

Gel-Based

Liquid-Based

Foam-Based

Spray

Hand Wipes

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market by End-Users

Healthcare

Hospitality

Residential

Corporate

Government & Military

Education

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market by Functional Ingredient

Alcohol-Based

Ethyl Alcohol



Isopropyl Alcohol

Non-Alcohol

Quats



Chlorine/Iodophor



Others

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market by Distribution Channels

Retail

Supermarkets & Hypermarkets



Departmental Stores & Discounters



Drug Stores



Other Retail

Online

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market - Dynamics

Manufacturing hand sanitizers is a simple process as they contain very few ingredients. To attract end-users, vendors have started investing in developing various variants of hand sanitizers, moving away from established traditional offerings. This has led to the introduction of fragrant and scented hand sanitizers. Currently, the market has numerous offerings with fragrances of fresh fruit, Japanese blossom, ocean breeze, spring blue, aloe, strawberry, orange, and grape, among others. Vendor innovations in developing hand sanitizers have resulted in the growth of the market. Vendors are using fragrant ingredients certified by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA). IFRA-certified fragrances assure safety from harmful chemicals. However, there are various low-cost hand sanitizers available in the market that use non-certified fragrant ingredients such as neurotoxins, petrochemical and phthalates, and others. These hand sanitizers pose a greater risk to end-users.

Key Drivers and Trends fueling Market Growth:

Increase in Internet Penetration

Effect of COVID-19 on Hand Sanitizer Market

Growth in Promotional Strategies

Rise in Health Consciousness

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market - Geography

The hand sanitizer market in South US includes states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, Delaware, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Retail sales in the region witnessed a jump in 2020, but the COVID-19 lockdown reduced the pace of sales. Retail sales were moderate in the South till March 2020, but in April and May in 2020, the market witnessed negative growth from 2019, as most of the retail products went out of stock due to lockdown restrictions. The market started gaining traction owing to the relaxation of restrictions after June 2020. Hand sanitizers are one of the essential products.

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/hand-sanitizer-market-in-united-states

U.S. Hand Sanitizer Market by Region

South

West

Midwest

Northeast

Major Vendors

The 3M Company

Company GOJO Industries

Procter & Gamble (P&G)

Reckitt Benckiser Group

The Unilever Group

Vi-Jon

Other Prominent Vendors

Elyptol

Bath & Body Works

Best Sanitizers

Chattem

Ecolab

Kimberly-Clark

Kutol Products Company

Medline Industries

Nice-Pak Products

Safetec of America

Vectair Systems

Zoono Group

The Clorox Company

EO Products

Edgewell Personal Care

SC Johnson

Vectair Systems

Bo International

Explore our health and wellness profile to know more about the industry.

Read some of the top-selling reports:

Hand Sanitizer Market Size By Functional Ingredients, Product Type, End-Users, Distribution Channels, Supply Chain, Geography, Industry Analysis and Forecast 2021-2026

Liquid Hand Wash Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026

Professional Cleaning Services Market in the U.S.- Industry Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026

Rubber Gloves Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026

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A man was stabbed on Bourbon Street and three suspects stole alcohol from a CVS in the French Quarter, police reported Thursday. The incidents occurred just days before the NOPD adds more officers and lighting in response to a recent rash of violent crime.

Police said a 38-year-old man was fighting with an unknown individual at Bourbon Street and Orleans Avenue at 2:50 a.m. Thursday. The suspect then pulled out a sharp object and stabbed the man with it.

NOPD adding more officers, lighting to Bourbon Street, where 12 have been shot since early March The New Orleans Police Department announced Wednesday that it will assign more officers to patrol Bourbon Street and add more lighting to the 

He showed up at a hospital via private conveyance, police said.

On Wednesday, at 12:25 p.m., a CVS store in the 800 block of Canal Street was robbed of alcohol and other merchandise by three men, one of whom pulled a knife on the manager. Police arrested 28-year-old Zachariah Woodruff and 32-year-old William Hollinsworth in connection with the robbery, but said they are still looking for a third, unidentified man.

Citing the recent uptick in violent crime, New Orleans Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson announced Wednesday that more officers will be assigned to Bourbon Street and additional lighting will be added to the busy street starting this weekend. Twelve people have been shot in the French Quarter since the beginning of March.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott was compared to the racist 'Uncle Tom' trope that depicts black people as subservient after delivering the GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden's speech before Congress in which he defended the country as not racist.

Scott spoke extensively about race, and made the point that while he had personally experienced discrimination, he did not believe the United States was an inherently racist country.

'I get called Uncle Tom and the N-word by progressives ... I know first-hand, our healing is not finished,' he said.

'Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.'

'Uncle Tim' - a play on the Uncle Tom trope - was soon trending on Twitter as thousands criticized Scott, with one person claiming the South Carolina senator was a 'cunning white supremacist apologist'.

Bishop Talbert Swan, a black pastor from Massachusetts, tweeted: 'Uncle Tim Scott has perfected the art of sycophantic bootlicking. He's a master step n fetch it artist and cunning white supremacy apologist, who demonstrated his buck dancing skills in front of the entire world.'

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott delivered his party's response to President Joe Biden's first address before Congress

Bishop Talbert Swan: 'Uncle Tim Scott has perfected the art of sycophantic bootlicking. He's a master step n fetch it artist and cunning white supremacy apologist, who demonstrated his buck dancing skills in front of the entire world.'

In a now-deleted Tweet which he later apologized for, white TV personality Scott Nevins wrote: 'Sen @TimScottSC is uncle Tom'ing it for his life. So sad. South Carolina should be so ashamed'.

Journalist Yashar Ali pointed out the hypocrisy of employing a derogatory racial term to make a point about race in America.

'To the white liberals saying "but it's true," I can't believe this needs to be said but this is not your term to use ... your political beliefs don't allow you to use terms like this.

'My god do not allow politics to melt your brains like this.'

Scott, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate, used a large part of his speech to talk about race - detailing racism he's personally experienced, but making the argument that it's just as racist to teach white kids that they're 'an oppressor.'

Author Yvette Nicole Brown said: 'Uncle Tim lost me when he said Biden was dividing us after he had sat quietly while Tang destroyed this country for four years. #BoyBye'

Yale professor Phillip Atiba Goff said: 'White people. Please do not use terms like Aunt Jemima, coon, and Uncle Tom. It's gross and racist and not the thing you seem to think it is. Even if you live in Brooklyn. Especially if you live in Brooklyn'

Conservative writer Carmine Sabia: 'Not stunned that Uncle Tim is trending because how dare even one black person not follow the Democrats like the Pied Piper. How dare Sen. Tim Scott have his own opinions and principles?'

Policy analyst Javon Price Flagsaid: 'The fact that 'Uncle Tim' is trending on Twitter tells you all you need to know about the left'

Actress and author Yvette Nicole Brown, who starred in Community, said: 'Uncle Tim lost me when he said Biden was dividing us after he had sat quietly while Tang destroyed this country for four years. #BoyBye'.

'Uncle Tom' is derived from an 1852 novel: It's become an offensive racial caricature The term Uncle Tom is derived from the lead character of white abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Uncle Tom is a gentle character, a smiling, wide-eyed servant who offered no resistance to the horrors of slavery. Described as the most enduring fictional slave, he later became 'synonymous with servility and self-hatred', according to a 2008 NPR documentary Why African-Americans Loathe 'Uncle Tom'. According to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the Tom caricature 'is often old, physically weak, psychologically dependent on whites for approval'. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold over two million copies within two years of its publication. Advertisement

Conservative writer Carmine Sabia: 'Not stunned that Uncle Tim is trending because how dare even one black person not follow the Democrats like the Pied Piper. How dare Sen. Tim Scott have his own opinions and principles?'

Yale Professor of African American Studies Phillip Atiba Goff called out white people for using the 'Uncle Tom' without understanding how offensive it was.

'White people. Please do not use terms like Aunt Jemima, coon, and Uncle Tom. It's gross and racist and not the thing you seem to think it is. Even if you live in Brooklyn. Especially if you live in Brooklyn.'

Speaking directly after Biden's maiden address to Congress, Scott gave his party and its former leader, ex-President Donald Trump, credit for the COVID response - saying Biden had 'inherited a tide that had already turned' - while blasting Democrats for prolonged closures of schools and churches.

Scott also defended the GOP-backed Georgia voting bill, blasting Democrats for lying about the controversial legislation and labeling it 'mainstream.'

The South Carolina Republican started out his remarks, delivered elsewhere in the U.S. Capitol, by saying Biden 'seems like a good man,' and adding that his 'speech was full of good words.'

'But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation.

'To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. That was the pitch. You just heard it again,' Scott said. 'But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes.'

Scott blasted Biden and the Democrats for 'pulling us further apart.'

'I won't waste your time tonight with finger-pointing or partisan bickering. You can get that on TV any time you want. I want to have an honest conversation,' Scott said.

Later in the speech he added, 'Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions about race.'

Scott portrayed Biden as divisive while, more broadly, saying the Democrats were wrong on race

Sen. Tim Scott was captured walking through the U.S. Capitol Wednesday night before delivering the GOP's response to Biden's address

Scott talked about the racism he'd experienced as a black man in the South.

'I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I'm shopping,' he recalled.

He talked about how his grandfather would sit at the table every morning 'reading' the newspaper, only for the senator to later find out he was illiterate. 'He just wanted to set the right example,' Scott said.

'I've also experienced a different kind of intolerance,' he continued. 'I get called 'Uncle Tom' and the N-word by progressives, by liberals!'

Scott said that kids are still being taught that the color of their skin defines them.

'And if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor,' he noted. 'From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress,' he claimed.

'Hear me clearly: America is not a racist county,' Scott said.

'It's backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination. And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present,' he added.

Scott talked about his previous work on police reform noting how the Democrats blocked it using a filibuster.

'And, no - the same filibuster that President Obama and President Biden praised when they were Senators - that Democrats used just last year - has not suddenly become a racist relic just because the shoe is on the other foot,' Scott said.

'Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants. It's too important,' he added.

Scott has been charged with leading the GOP side of negotiations as the Senate takes on police reform after the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Biden said in tonight's speech he wants a bill on his desk by next month, the anniversary of Floyd's death.

'My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution,' Scott said. 'But I'm still working, I'm still hopeful.'

Scott pointed to the slew of bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills that were passed last year - through a Republican White House and Senate and a Democratic House.

'All five bills got 90 or more votes in the Senate. Common sense found common ground,' he stated.

He knocked Biden for passing his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill with just Democratic votes.

'COVID brought Congress together five times. This Administration pushed us apart,' Scott said.

He then hit Biden for the infrastructure and family plans Republicans also view as too bloated.

On COVID, Scott sounded like Trump when he complained about shutdowns.

'Becoming a Christian transformed my life - but for months, too many churches were shut down,' Scott said.

He also said he was 'saddened' that millions of kids were kept away from schools.

'Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future,' he noted.

Scott also thanked Trump, giving him credit for the development of the COVID vaccines.

'This Administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run!' Scott said.

'Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump Administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines,' he continued. 'Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding.'

But the reason why the nation is feeling 'divided and anxious,' the GOP senator said, was because the nation had a president who promised to bring the U.S. together, tearing Americans apart instead.
GET THE niggers, was their slogan, / Kill them, burn, them, set the pace. / Let them know that we are white men. /Teach them how to keep their place. AJ Smitherman, The Tulsa Race Riot and Massacre (1922).

I had just left Harvard University as an assistant professor and was doing Time to Talk, a series of interviews for T&T Television.
Staghorn corals in the reef flat off Hagatna appear bleached as a response to stress from environmental changes. As one of Guam's dominant reef-builders whose habitat experiences temperatures up to 97 degrees Fahrenheit, this species was used in a University of Guam study published in February that found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. Credit: University of Guam

A study by University of Guam researchers has found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. The study, which was funded by the university's National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, was published in February in the peer-reviewed Marine Biology Research journal.

"We wanted to see what role light has in coral bleaching," said UOG Assistant Professor Bastian Bentlage, the supervisor and co-author of the study. "Usually, people talk about temperature as a cause for bleaching, but we show that both light and temperature work together."

Previous UOG research led by Laurie J. Raymundo found that more than one-third of all coral reefs in Guam were killed from 2013 to 2017 over the course of multiple bleaching events. Coral bleaching is the process in which corals stressed by environmental changes expel the essential symbiotic algae that live in their tissues, causing them to turn white and often die.

This latest study examined the resilience of staghorn corals (Acropora cf. pulchra) in heightened seawater temperatures. This species of coral is one of Guam's dominant reef-builders, and its habitats experience temperatures up to 97 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest months of the year, leaving it vulnerable to bleaching episodes and population decline.

A team of researchersincluding lead author Justin T. Berg, a UOG graduate student studying biology; Charlotte M. David, an undergraduate student from the University of Plymouth (England), and Melissa Gabriel, a UOG graduate student studying environmental sciencetook coral samples from the Hagatna reef flat and examined their health in the UOG Marine Laboratory under normal and elevated temperatures.

A shade cloth in the UOG Marine Laboratory partially blocks light for staghorn coral samples that were exposed to elevated seawater temperatures. Researchers assessed their recovery and found that shaded corals recover more quickly from heat stress than corals with no shade. Credit: University of Guam

"One group was subjected to consistent baseline temperatures observed on Guam's reef flats," Bentlage said, "and another was set to temperatures that are projected to become the new normal over the next couple of decades."

The researchers found that the corals took three weeks to recover from a week-long heat stress event. The experiment was then replicated to see how the corals would react if they were given shade while subjected to warmer temperatures.

"We found that when we put the shading over coral with increased seawater temperatures, it greatly increased photosynthetic yield of the symbiotic algae. Shade made a huge difference for coral health when you have high temperatures," Berg said.

Implications for reef management

Shading is a practice already used in coral nurseries, Bentlage said, but it may not be practical to shade whole reefs in the ocean. Future studies can look into practical ways to reduce the impact of light on corals, particularly as they recover from periods of elevated temperatures.

UOG graduate biology student Justin Berg holds a fragment of Acropora cf. pulchra, the species of staghorn coral that was used in an experiment about the impact of shading on corals recovering from heat stress. Credit: Guam EPSCoR Program, University of Guam

"We saw the corals recover rather slowly," Berg said. "The length of recovery indicates that corals are vulnerable during this time and management efforts may be particularly necessary during this period to reduce coral mortality."

Berg said the new knowledge may also help inform the best locations to successfully outplant corals.

"For example, slightly turbid waters could provide some shading to corals, making them less likely to bleach during periods of elevated sea surface temperatures," Berg said.

Explore further Corals go hungry long before they bleach

More information: Justin T. Berg et al, Fluorescence signatures of persistent photosystem damage in the staghorn coral Acropora cf. pulchra (Anthozoa: Scleractinia) during bleaching and recovery, Marine Biology Research (2021). Justin T. Berg et al, Fluorescence signatures of persistent photosystem damage in the staghorn coral Acropora cf. pulchra (Anthozoa: Scleractinia) during bleaching and recovery,(2021). DOI: 10.1080/17451000.2021.1875245
Special advisory during the COVID-19 crisis:





For millennia, before the disruption of European settlers in 1790, Vancouver Island was home to thriving complex cultures who lived in lock-step with the environment, not just using the resources for subsistence, but respecting and protecting the sources of this rich bounty. Most Indigenous peoples on the island identify with three language groups; Nuu-chah-culth, the Kwakwala-speaking Kwakwakawakw and the Coastal Salish who speak several variations of the Salishan language. Indigenous knowledge is gradually gaining the long-overdue respect and recognition it deserves from non-Indigenous populations, thanks largely to the heightened awareness that the survival of the human race hinges upon more sustainable practices. An environmentally conscious way of life has permeated the fabric of island society more so than other regions of the province and is immediately evident when visiting.





This rich natural history and conservation forward mindset makes Vancouver Island one of the most interesting places to visit in the province. Our second Ride Island itinerary is for those who enjoy their pedalling as well as their descending as we aim to provide folks with a more well-rounded experience of the Islands trail offerings. This immersive riding experience provides a prime opportunity to take in the natural beauty of the region and cherish the stunning landscapes. Vancouver Island and the surrounding area, are part of what archeologists refer to as the kelp highway and likely played an essential role in the human settlement of North America. The discovery and subsequent carbon dating of several campsites in the region suggest the first human inhabitants of the continent likely crossed the Beringia land bridge from Asia and traveled south down the Pacific coast, by sea via the kelp highway, as opposed to arriving from the east of the Rockies as was long believed. Scientists are divided on whether this migration happened before or after the last glacial maximum ~19,000 years ago, but regardless of the timeline, leading hypotheses agree British Columbias Pacific coast is one of the longest inhabited regions in North America.For millennia, before the disruption of European settlers in 1790, Vancouver Island was home to thriving complex cultures who lived in lock-step with the environment, not just using the resources for subsistence, but respecting and protecting the sources of this rich bounty. Most Indigenous peoples on the island identify with three language groups; Nuu-chah-culth, the Kwakwala-speaking Kwakwakawakw and the Coastal Salish who speak several variations of the Salishan language. Indigenous knowledge is gradually gaining the long-overdue respect and recognition it deserves from non-Indigenous populations, thanks largely to the heightened awareness that the survival of the human race hinges upon more sustainable practices. An environmentally conscious way of life has permeated the fabric of island society more so than other regions of the province and is immediately evident when visiting.This rich natural history and conservation forward mindset makes Vancouver Island one of the most interesting places to visit in the province. Our second Ride Island itinerary is for those who enjoy their pedalling as well as their descending as we aim to provide folks with a more well-rounded experience of the Islands trail offerings. This immersive riding experience provides a prime opportunity to take in the natural beauty of the region and cherish the stunning landscapes.

Duncan

The Cowichan Valley is home to some incredibly diverse trail offerings. Our last itinerary explored the aggressive trail options on Prevost and Mt. Tzouhalem, while this time well pay closer attention to the more cross-country or all-mountain trails on Mt. Tzouhalem and Maple Mountain.



But first, coffee.

The Garage Cafe is conveniently located next door to Cycle Therapy, incase you need anything before riding

The Duncan Garage Cafe & Bakery is a regular stop of ours whether were fuelling up for a day of riding, grabbing a post ride coffee, or simply just driving through Duncan. The food is delicious homemade vegetarian and has plenty of options to suit all dietary restrictions and will leave you feeling better on your ride than a McMuffin or BigMac ever will. The coffee is local, hot and caffeinated. We usually stock up on breakfast and lunch here, as rest assured, you always end up doing an extra lap or two at Tzou, its too damn fun not to!



Mt. Tzouhalems relatively mellow grade makes it a prime destination for those who prefer their trails with a bit more undulation. For those who desire a more scenic approach than the main forest service road, we would suggest parking in the new lot off Nevilane Drive which allows you to take a more scenic route to the top via A Grand Traverse.

Since its impossible to go to Tzouhalem and not ride Double D, we will assume you ride that as your first lap. After that, wed suggest checking out Rocky Mountain Ridge which combines technical rock roll sections with some equally technical punchy climbs into Danalyzer back down to the main parking lot before finishing with a lap of Show Time to M-One to Bumble Bee back to your vehicle.



Maple Mountain, a stone's throw away from Tzouhalem, is another exceptional trail network in the Cowichan Valley, having played co-host to the infamous BC Bike Race in both 2018 and 2019. Having never ridden Maple prior to this trip, we were impressed with the well built climbing trail Xylem which crossed through a few different ecosystems on its way to the top. This constant change of scenery, along with some intermittent technical features, helped keep the climb interesting. From here we would recommend Upper and Lower Maple Syrup then a slight climb back up to ride Phloem into Solar Coaster to finish.

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Kozman comes in a little too hot into a corner on Phloem

Our night in Duncan was capped off at Jacquie Gordon's B&B, conveniently located right between the trail networks. The warm hospitality, comfy beds and delicious home-cooked breakfast were vastly superior to any hotel's offerings.

Nanaimo

After the 45 minute drive from Duncan to Nanaimo, youre likely ready for your 3rd coffee of the morning before hitting the trails. Regard, just north of the Departure Bay ferry terminal, has been our favourite coffee shop on the island since we first discovered it in 2016. The owner and roaster Andrew is often keen to chat beans, brewing techniques and all other things coffee and Regard offers beans for all coffee drinkers out there; from a rich, bold espresso to a wild and funky floral natural.



Doumont is currently the main sanctioned trail network in Nanaimo. That said, there are more solid trail offerings than a mere mortal can explore in a day and the Nanaimo Mountain Bike Club is working hard to continually update and improve the riding experience in Doumont.

The topography of Doumont rewards those willing to pedal, the shallower grade means getting up to speed sometimes takes a bit of extra effort, but carrying that extra momentum over the roots and rocks really makes the trails spring to life.

Our top 3 Doumont pedal trails are Stairway to Hayden into Hayden, for a technical warmup climb into a low-angle, rooty descent. Monkeys In The Mist, which has recently received a face lift for some dark blue technical descents and finally Styx for a blue xc trail with rolling climbs followed by some pristine singletrack through electric green salal.



When traveling, we try to find food options that we dont have in Whistler/Squamish. In Nanaimo we like Jalapenos Mexican Food for some classic, no-frills Mexican fare or Saigon Kitchen for a Vietnamese kick.

Gabriola Island

Gabriola Island is a short 20 minute ferry from downtown Nanaimo, and is a fun way to break up your riding trip with a mellower sight-seeing day by bike. The small, 58 square kilometre island is home to just over 4000 permanent residents, with the population ballooning to nearly 6000 in the summer as people flock to the area from Vancouver and Nanaimo to live a more laid back lifestyle.

The island has an interesting modern history that places deep-seated hippie culture against that of industrial development from the logging and quarry industry. More stories, old photos and interesting artwork can be found at the Gabriola Museum, a short ride from the ferry.

We spent the morning sipping coffee and perusing the museum, before setting off on a mellow cruise around the island. There are some trails in the centre of the island that offer an aimless pedal around as you get lost amongst the ferns. Be sure to pack some beers in your bag as both Cliffside and Winter Waterfall provide some lookouts with stunning vistas and an opportune place to take 5.



After lapping the island several times, we gorged ourselves on pizza from Woodfire before catching one of the evening ferries back to Nanaimo.



Cumberland

Cumberland is fun on a long travel enduro bike, but the network really shines on a short travel whippet. It is a sign when most of the locals are absolutely shredding on 120mm trail bikes.



Dont let their calm, cool and collected demeanour fool you, Jeremy from the Riding Fool and Martin from Island Mountain Rides will rip your legs off if you ask them to. We had an absolute riot chasing these two around the rats nest of the lower mountain trails in Cumberland. Over beers on the Riding Fools back patio, Dougal from UROC shared some of the organizations plans for future trail development and his personal ethos of trail building and network planning. Its an exciting time for UROC and Cumberland and we cant wait to come back and check out their network again soon!



Our top 3 Cumberland trails for those looking for an xc/trail experience are: Missing link to Found Link, Rugburn to Scat to Brat and Two Flats to Bonestorm. These provide a great variety of riding from some fast singletrack to wide open blue flow and some big steep rock rolls!

Mount Washington





Hawk Express is a high speed quad chair that will get you to the top before you know it.

Mt. Washington has an extensive rental fleet to get anyone and everyone on the mountain for some laps.

Mike Manara, Director of Sports & Guest Services at Mt. Washington has been actively working with the mountain staff and trail crew to expand their product offerings in an effort to support what the Island community is asking for. They take great pride in the growth of their kids rental fleet, which is now 50 bikes deep, signalling that more families are exploring the bike park. This was really evident last summer when we were there on Family Friday, where between 5:30p.m. and 7:30p.m. Kids passes were $5, Seniors $10 and Adults $15.



Will puts his trail bike through its paces on one of the bike park's well built jumps.

Our top 3 trail bike friendly laps in the bike park are: Call it In to Lower Helter Skelter, Highway 19 and Time Warp. These laps have a good mix of high-speed blue tech, some wide open berms and jumps in a range of sizes.

Unlike the ankle deep braking bumps of the Whistler Bike Park that will rattle your trail bike to bits, the Mt. Washington Bike Park is very trail bike friendly!Mike Manara, Director of Sports & Guest Services at Mt. Washington has been actively working with the mountain staff and trail crew to expand their product offerings in an effort to support what the Island community is asking for. They take great pride in the growth of their kids rental fleet, which is now 50 bikes deep, signalling that more families are exploring the bike park. This was really evident last summer when we were there on Family Friday, where between 5:30p.m. and 7:30p.m. Kids passes were $5, Seniors $10 and Adults $15.trail bike friendly laps in the bike park are:toand. These laps have a good mix of high-speed blue tech, some wide open berms and jumps in a range of sizes.

Finger Trail offers some great views along the ride.

Manara revealed some of the trail crew plans to build out the mountain's trail network beyond the bike park. Currently its limited to Finger Trail, a very mellow xc loop of mixed double and single track that provide stunning views of Strathcona Provincial Park and two subalpine lakes. They have also published the GPS coordinates of a trail named Far West Enduro which appears to descend from the top of the resort to the farthest point on the Finger Trail. All good things for those who want to add some variety to their bike park experience.

A morning Finger Trail loop is a great way to get the legs ready for a day of bike park laps

Campbell River

Campbell River is unlike all the other riding destinations in this itinerary in the sense that it wont just hand you a good time, you will need to work a bit harder to navigate and discover the fun trails they have to offer, but the effort is worth it for this unique experience.

There are kilometres of beautiful singletrack everywhere and its highly likely that youll have it all to yourself. In three days of riding, we only saw two other groups, which gave the rides a much more adventurous feel than anywhere else on the island. Shorter elevation profiles also mean you will need to work a little harder throughout the ride, to maintain momentum on the climbs and descents. If youre looking for machine built blue flow, you wont find it here.

There are two main trail networks in Campbell River; Radar Hill and the Snowden Demonstration Forest. Snowden, being the more extensive of the two is worth prioritizing for a day where your body is rested and your legs feel good, plus its a bit of a drive outside of town, so best to make the most of it while youre out there.



Our top 3 trails in Snowden are: Pretzel Logic, Demon Seed and Vlad the Impaler to Cinnamon Girl to Three Pigs. Pretzel is coming off a fresh rebuild in 2019 that saw the steep eroded descent get a much needed re-route and tons of fresh dirt. Demon Seed has some fun technical climbing, scenic vistas on a few rock bluffs and short rock rolls before finishing with fast singletrack turns through salal that reminded us of riding in Oakridge, Oregon. Last but not least, Vlad to Cinnamon to Three Pigs combines tech rock with three of the best loamy turns on Vancouver Island with some high speed singletrack. These trails can all be ridden in one ride fairly easily and should guarantee a good time in the woods.

Radar Hill is a small network in close proximity to town thats great for a quick morning or afternoon lap. Many of the trails originated as trials moto trails, so expect punchy climbs and steep descents. The network is tightly compact, so youre never too far from the car and can sample a significant proportion of the trails in one ride.

Our favourite 3 trails on Radar Hill are Your Sister, A view to a Hill into AF Line and Punk Rock to Phone to Southside Deli to Rock me. Be sure to look before you leap on both the AF Line and Rock me features, as some are larger than you might expect!

If you find yourself with broken parts or just need of a tube, head over to Pedal Your World. Ken will get you sorted.

Ideal Cafe offered us that greasy breakfast that will surely be enough to get you back home.

This concludes our Ride Island Itinerary for those looking to explore some of the best singletrack British Columbia has to offer. If youve ridden some of these places and enjoyed your time, please consider donating to one of the local trail associations on the island who are working tirelessly to maintain and update their existing trails, while simultaneously expanding their trail networks with rad new offerings.



Huge thanks to Martin Littlejohn and Mountain Biking BC for making this possible

High fives to our friend Braedyn Kozman for coming along for the ride

Campbell River has some great options for food and drinks after a day of riding. We visited Beach Fire Brewing for an after ride pint or two. If pizza is your thing, head over to Session Taproom & Kitchen for some of their delicious pies.
MOSCOW  Fighting broke out on Thursday between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over control of an irrigation canal and an access road to an ethnic enclave, raising the specter of instability in Central Asia as the United States prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The clash escalated beyond the typical border skirmishes that break out regularly in the remote, mountainous region of southwestern Kyrgyzstan and are a legacy of the Soviet breakup. The countries dispute water rights and territory.

Border guards and other security forces exchanged small-arms fire, videos posted online showed, and mortars and artillery were fired from the Tajik side, according to Kyrgyz officials. The Kyrgyz authorities also reported that helicopters attacked several positions. Pictures from the area showed a Kyrgyz border patrol post on fire.

At least three people died, including a soldier and a civilian child, according to the Kyrgyz government. The Tajik government said three civilians had died, Reuters reported. By the end of the day, Kyrgyz authorities had evacuated several villages.
New Delhi, April 29 : Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Thursday said that first consignment of oxygen concentrators have arrived from Germany on an Air India flight.

An oxygen concentrators, is a medical device that concentrates oxygen from ambient air.

In a tweet, the minister on Thursday said: "First consignment of Oxygen concentrators from Germany arrives in Delhi on @airindiain Flight AI120. More to follow.aA "Every stakeholder of India's civil aviation sector is making a meaningful contribution in our unrelenting fight against COVID." Besides, Air India, SpiceXpress, the air cargo arm of SpiceJet, on Wednesday, airlifted 1,000 oxygen concentrators from Hong Kong to Delhi.

In the last two weeks, more than 2,000 oxygen concentrators have been airlifted by SpiceJet for SpiceHealth.

Lately, India is reporting new record daily increases in coronavirus infections, prompting new lockdowns and restrictive measures to curb the spread of the pandemic.

The exponential rise has lifted the demand for these medical equipments which are used to provide oxygen to Covid-19 patients especially as the country faces a supply crunch in the availability of medical oxygen.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New York-based dancehall artist Gaps 7 G has expressed concern over an announcement made by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) that police officers can now immediately arrest persons who are found to be in breach of the Disaster Risk Management Act (DRMA) without warning.

This move is just setting up the police force to brutalize the public more. Even before this announcement, the police were terrorizing ghetto communities who were playing water war. Water war? What about fighting real crime? This week, police thump out a mans teeth because he wasnt wearing his mask. Wah dat fah? This COVID-19 is being used as a big distraction to brutalize and terrorize the people. The people have rights, no one is doing that in the US where we have had a terrible death toll so it is wrong, he said.

Gaps 7g pointed to a recent announcement by federal health officials said Tuesday that fully vaccinated people can go without masks outdoors when walking, jogging or biking, or dining with friends at outdoor restaurants.

The rest of the world is opening up, people who have been vaccinated can now roam after a year of masking up and locking down. How will our local police know whether someone who is walking around without a mask is fully vaccinated or not? Thousands of Jamaicans are now fully vaccinated. The US scientists are saying vaccinated people can walk around without masks, so why the government want to set up the police to beat up and accost citizens? Jamaican people arent children. It dont make no sense! he said.

As of Tuesday this week, the daily positivity rate logged at 10.8 per cent, representing one of the lowest since January 2021. The seven-day moving average (April 21-27) for the positivity rate now stands at 16.3 per cent. The Ministry of Health & Wellness is now vaccinating persons who are 40 years and older and who suffer from one or more co-morbid conditions; persons 50 years and older; and members of the public who are employed to the transport sector in Jamaica.

However, the rising death toll pushed lawmakers to amend the DRMA to further curtail the spread of COVID-19. The police cautioned that those found in breach of the measures can now be arrested and charged immediately.

Aside from the press release, the JCF has also warned on its Instagram page in a public advisory, that persons are urged to adhere to the DRMA to avoid prosecution.

The US-based artiste has already been inoculated in New York where he presently resides.

I fully support the vaccination drive in my beloved Jamaica, and I am urging entertainers to get vaccinated because we have to earn our living in crowded places, clubs, and parties. We cant mislead the people, it is the only way to stop this virus, he said.

He is now promoting his latest single, Vaccination, which will be released on the Chase Mills Records label on May 7 via VPAL.

Gaps 7G (given name Paul Cardoza Jr) is known for songs including Di Benz remix featuring Rytikal and Do Di Right Thing. He grew up in Gutters, Old Harbour, St Catherine, before migrating to the United States at age 10. He acquired an associate degree in liberal arts, majoring in physical education.

Other songs include Classic and another banger called A Fi Mi Place.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-28 18:09:01|Editor: huaxia

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A man receives a dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Moscow, Russia, April 28, 2021. Russia confirmed 7,848 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, below 8,000 for the first time since the end of September, taking the nationwide tally to 4,787,273, the country's official monitoring and response center said Wednesday. (Xinhua/Evgeny Sinitsyn)

MOSCOW, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Russia confirmed 7,848 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, below 8,000 for the first time since the end of September, taking the nationwide tally to 4,787,273, the country's official monitoring and response center said Wednesday.

The national COVID-19 death toll rose by 387 to 109,367 in the past day, while the number of the country's recoveries grew by 8,420 to 4,411,098.

Meanwhile, Moscow, Russia's worst-hit region, reported 1,840 new cases, taking the city's total count to 1,086,934.

More than 128.5 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country. Enditem
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New Delhi: The Delhi police arrested two people on Thursday (April 29) in connection to a cheating case.

The duo was held on charges of cheating a woman by selling her a fire extinguisher instead of an oxygen cylinder which she needed for a COVID-19 positive relative.

The matter came to light when a woman named Geeta Arora lodged a complaint with the Dwarka police alleging that two people duped her by selling fire extinguisher in place of an oxygen cylinder.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Dwarka) Santosh Kumar Meena informed that complainant Geeta Arora, a resident of Shishram Park, Bindapur, alleged that two people sold her a fire extinguisher.

The police said that the woman was seeking an oxygen cylinder as her relative was suffering from coronavirus infection. Her relative was suffering from COVID-19 and was having difficulty in breathing due to low oxygen levels. In a bid to arrange an oxygen cylinder, she came in contact with the accused, who duped her, the police stated.

When Arora tried to contact them and demanded her money back for duping her, they stopped picking up her phone calls, the DCP further said.

The two accused named Ashutosh (19) and Ayush (22), residents of Vikaspuri, were arrested from west Delhi's Uttam Nagar area. The police also seized five fire extinguishers from them. The accused were allegedly selling fire extinguisher as oxygen cylinder for Rs 10,000.

Further investigation is underway.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to send experts and staff to a recently reopened U.S. Caribbean refinery as soon as this week to conduct an investigation, the agency said in a Tuesday statement after some residents said an odor coming from the refinery caused them to feel ill.

The Limetree Bay refinery in St. Croix exceeded hydrogen sulfide levels late last week and Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources (DPNR).

The noxious odor caused grammar schools and a technical education center to close in-person learning after students and staff reported feeling nauseous last week.

Limetree Bay said on Saturday said that the odor was not from a gas leak but due to an operating upset, which sent an unusually high amount of sulfur-containing gases to the refinerys flare where they burned as sulfur dioxide.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration describes hydrogen sulfide as a colorless gas known for its pungent rotten egg odor at low concentrations. It is extremely flammable and highly toxic.

The EPA is conducting the investigation with the U.S. Virgin Islands DPNR and the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Health.

The EPA said is looking to determine the level of the exceedances, the composition of the releases, the duration and cause of the incidents, the corrective actions taken or to be taken, the potential public health impacts, and how to best prevent future incidents.

The incidents have been distressing and, in some cases, caused members of this already overburdened community to become ill, the EPA said in a statement.

The agency added that it will work with the U.S. Virgin Islands government to determine the best way to provide regular information to the community.

(Reporting by Laura Sanicola; Editing by Franklin Paul and Aurora Ellis)

Topics USA Pollution
San Diego, California and Melbourne, Australia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Okogen, a clinical-stage specialty ophthalmic biotechnology company announced the interim analysis results from RUBY, the company's Phase 2, double-masked, placebo-controlled clinical trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of OKG-0301 in patients with acute adenoviral conjunctivitis. In 58 patients diagnosed with acute adenoviral conjunctivitis, OKG-0301 was safe and demonstrated an effective, dose-dependent anti-viral response. This data will be presented by Professor Stephanie Watson (Principal Investigator of the RUBY Trial) in greater detail at the ARVO virtual annual meeting, May 1-7, 2021.

To view the full announcement, including downloadable images, bios, and more, click here.

Key Takeaways:

In 58 patients diagnosed with acute adenoviral conjunctivitis, OKG-0301 was safe and demonstrated an effective, dose-dependent anti-viral response.

Data to be presented at Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual conference being held May 1-7, 2021

Building off this data, the company has put forth its planned clinical development steps to the US FDA, outlining a phase 3 program to begin in 2022.

Click image above to view full announcement.



About Okogen



Okogen is a clinical-stage, specialty biotechnology company focused on developing therapeutics to help patients with ocular diseases. The company's lead development candidate, OKG-0502, is a fixed dose combination of a broad-spectrum antiviral (OKG-0301) that functions intracellularly to inhibit viral replication and an ocular decongestant that addresses the associated signs and symptoms of adenoviral conjunctivitis. These mechanisms of action are further expected to provide clinical benefit in addressing adenoviral infections of the eye as well as other classes of viruses that are active in the ocular space, including herpes simplex virus, varicella-zoster virus, and more.



For more information about Okogen, visit www.okogen.com. To learn more about the RUBY trial, visit www.rubytrial.com.au or clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03856645).

Contacts:

Brian M. Strem, Ph.D.

info@okogen.com

Source: Okogen

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82293
A bitter couple have blown $700,000 on legal fees during a divorce battle over assets worth a combined $3.59million.

The Melbourne pair, both in their 60s, were married for 36 years before separating in 2017, sparking a four-year battle over their home, superannuation, jewellery, a cash inheritance and a boat.

Federal Circuit Court judge Alexandra Harland described the incurred legal fees as 'staggering' during her March decision, where she awarded the wife 56 per cent of the property pool and the husband 44 per cent.

A bitter Melbourne based couple have already blown $700,000 in divorce proceedings - on legal fees alone (stock image)

The couple, in their 60s, had a number of shared assets, including a luxury boat (stock image)

'I am troubled by the quantum of legal fees the parties have incurred in these proceedings,' the judge said.

'The parties have incurred approximately $350,000 each. That is a staggering sum.'

Court delays and ongoing disagreements between the warring couple, who have two adult children together, also contributed to the mounting costs.

In the case before Judge Harland, it was revealed the wife was working two jobs and earning about $104,000 a year.

The husband was not working due to medical issues.

In her judgement Judge Harland awarded the wife 56 per cent of the parties' assets due to an adjustment for the inheritance from her father, with the husband receiving the remaining 44 per cent.

Lawyer Peter Szabo, who represented the husband, told The Australian he tried to keep costs down 'but the way the wife pitched her case required intensive and costly legal work to respond'.

Olivia Grobtuch for Kennedy Partners said: 'The wife was deeply distrustful and suspicious about the husbands position, particularly as they had lived overseas, which she felt gave him opportunities for hiding assets.

'She was also deeply distressed at his failure to abide by an agreement reached at mediation and to make what she considered proper disclosure.'

An inquiry into the family law system last month recommended legal fees in property cases be capped at 10 per cent of the disputed amount or $50,000, whichever was higher, after a spate of cases where fees exceeded the value of contested assets.
In this image taken from video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, a Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, April 29, 2021. China has launched the core module on Thursday for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (CCTV via AP Video)

China on Thursday launched the main module of its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long term, the latest success for a program that has realized a number of its growing ambitions in recent years.

The Tianhe, or "Heavenly Harmony," module blasted into space atop a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan, marking another major advance for the country's space exploration.

The launch begins the first of 11 missions necessary to complete, supply and crew the station by the end of next year.

China's space program has also recently brought back the first new lunar samples in more than 40 years and expects to land a probe and rover on the surface of Mars later next month.

Minutes after the launch, the fairing opened to expose the Tianhe atop the core stage of the rocket, with the characters for "China Manned Space" emblazoned on its exterior. Soon after, it separated from the rocket, which will orbit for about a week before falling to Earth, and minutes after that, opened its solar arrays to provide a steady energy source.

The space program is a source of huge national pride, and Premier Li Keqiang and other top civilian and military leaders watched the launch live from the control center in Beijing. A message of congratulations from state leader and head of the ruling Communist Party Xi Jinping was also read to staff at the Wenchang Launch Center.

In this image taken from undated video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, a rendering of a module of a Chinese space station is shown. China has launched the core module on Thursday, April 29, 2021 for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (CCTV via AP Video)

The launch furthers the "three-step" strategy of building up China's manned space program and marks "an important leading project for constructing a powerful country in science and technology and aerospace," Xi's message said.

The core module is the section of the station where astronauts will live for up to six months at a time. Another 10 launches will send up two more modules where crews will conduct experiments, four cargo supply shipments and four missions with crews.

At least 12 astronauts are training to fly to and live in the station, including veterans of previous flights, newcomers and women, with the first crewed mission, Shenzhou-12, expected to be launched by June.

When completed by late 2022, the T-shaped Chinese Space Station is expected to weigh about 66 tons, considerably smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh about 450 tons when completed.

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, April 29, 2021. China has launched the core module on Thursday for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (Ju Zhenhua/Xinhua via AP)

Tianhe will have a docking port and will also be able to connect with a powerful Chinese space satellite. Theoretically, it could be expanded to as many as six modules. The station is designed to operate for at least 10 years.

Tianhe is about the size of the American Skylab space station of the 1970s and the former Soviet/Russian Mir, which operated for more than 14 years after launching in 1986.

The core module will provide living space for as many as six astronauts during crew changeovers, while its other two modules, Wentian, or "Quest for the Heavens," and Mengtian, or "Dreaming of the Heavens," will provide room for conducting scientific experiments including in medicine and the properties of the outer space environment.

China began working on a space station project in 1992, just as its space ambitions were taking shape. The need to go it alone became more urgent after was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program's secretive nature and close military ties.

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, the core module of China's space station, Tianhe, on the the Long March-5B Y2 rocket is moved to the launching area of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in southern China's Hainan Province on April 23, 2021. China plans to launch the core module for its first permanent space station this week in the latest big step forward for the country's space exploration program. The Tianhe, or "Heavenly Harmony" module is set to be hurtled into space aboard a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan. The launch could come as early as Thursday night, April 29, 2021 if all goes as planned. (Guo Wenbin/Xinhua via AP)

After years of successful rocket and commercial satellite launches, China put its first astronaut into space in October 2003, becoming only the third country to independently do so after the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Along with more crewed missions, China launched a pair of experimental, single-module space stationsTiangong-1, which means "Heavenly Palace-1," and its successor, Tiangong-2. The first burned up after contact was lost and its orbit decayed, while the second was successfully taken out of orbit in 2018.

The Tiangong-2 crew stayed aboard for 33 days.

While NASA must get permission from a reluctant Congress to engage in contact with the Chinese space program, other countries have been far less reluctant. European nations and the United Nations are expected to cooperate on experiments to be done on the completed Chinese station.

A Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, April 29, 2021. China has launched the core module on Thursday for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (Chinatopix via AP)

The launch comes as China is also forging ahead with crewless missions, particularly in lunar exploration, and it has landed a rover on the little-explored far side of the moon. In December, its Chang'e 5 probe returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the U.S. missions of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, a Chinese probe carrying a rover is due to set down on Mars sometime around the middle of next month, making China only the second country to successfully accomplish that after the U.S.

The Tianwen-1 space probe has been orbiting the red planet since February while collecting data. Its Zhurong rover will be looking for evidence of life.

Another Chinese program aims to collect soil from an asteroid, a key focus of Japan's space program.

China plans another mission in 2024 to bring back lunar samples and has said it wants to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. No timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, April 29, 2021. China has launched the core module on Thursday for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (Jin Liwang/Xinhua via AP)

In this image taken from video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, a Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Wenchang in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, April 29, 2021. China has launched the core module on Thursday for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. (CCTV via AP Video)

China has proceeded in a more measured, cautious manner than the U.S. and Soviet Union during the height of the space race.

One recent setback came when a Long March 5 rocket failed in 2017 during development of the Long March 5B variant used to put Tianhe into orbit, but that caused only a brief delay.

Explore further China to launch Heavenly Harmony space station core module

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Mining firm Vedanta on Thursday has said it will donate 150 crore to help India in its fight against the deadly coronavirus. The company said the amount is over and above 201 crore that was spent by Vedanta Group in 2020.

"I am deeply concerned and anguished to see the impact of the second wave of COVID-19 and loss of precious lives. Vedanta Group has come forward to pledge 150 crore towards our commitment to fight the pandemic and we stand firmly with our people and the government at this difficult time," Vedanta Chairman Anil Agarwal said.

Besides, the company has promised to create an additional capacity of 1,000 critical care beds in 10 cities across the country. "The critical care beds will be placed in state-of-the-art field hospitals which will be attached to recognised and reputed hospitals. Each facility will have 100 beds in an air-conditioned tent with full electrical support and designed specifically for COVID care. The critical care facilities will have 90 beds equipped with life-saving oxygen support while the remaining will have ventilator support," Vedanta said in a press release.

It further said that additional capacity of critical care beds will be created in states like Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand, Goa, and Delhi-NCR. At present, Vedanta said it is supporting around 700 beds for Covid-19 patients across its business locations, which will be increased to 1,000 in the near term.

Meanwhile, Hindustan Zinc, ESL and Sesa Goa iron ore businesses have stepped in to augment oxygen supplies to Covid-19 patients, the company added. Recently, the Supreme Court allowed the Mumbai-based mining firm to operate its closed oxygen plant at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu amid the shortage of life-saving gas across the country.

Several Indian firms have come forward and assisted the government to mitigate the current Covid-19 crisis. For instance, drug firm Mankind Pharma donated 100 crore for the families of deceased doctors, police personnel, healthcare workers, etc. Hyundai Motor India Ltd announced a 20 crore Covid-19 relief package through its philanthropic arm. Reliance Industries also said it will be setting up a 1,000-bed Covid-19 hospital with an oxygen facility in Gujarat's Jamnagar.

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MEXICO CITY (dpa-AFX) - Gold and silver producer Fresnillo plc (FRES.L) announced Thursday the appointment of Alejandro Bailleres, currently Deputy Chairman, as Chairman with immediate effect. Alejandro Bailleres succeeds Alberto Bailleres, 89, who is stepping down as Chairman and will be leaving the Board of Directors with immediate effect. Further, the company said the Board has invited Alberto Bailleres to become Honorary President of Fresnillo in recognition of his enormous contribution in creating it as a major mining company. Fresnillo also announced that Hector Rangel will be proposed for election as an independent non-executive director and Eduardo Cepeda as a non-executive director, both at the 2021 annual general meeting, which is due to be held on June 24. The Board, at its meeting held on April 28, has also approved several recommendations from the Nominations Committee with respect to the changes to the membership of the different Board Committees which will take immediate effect. 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.
New Delhi, April 29 : Airtel Africa plc has announced Olusegun Ogunsanya as its next MD and CEO.

Ogunsanya who is currently the Managing Director and CEO of the company's Nigeria operations will succeed Raghunath Mandava, as the next MD and CEO of Airtel Africa with effect from October 1, 2021.

Olusegun Ogunsanya joined Airtel Africa in 2012 as Managing Director and CEO Nigeria and has been responsible for the overall management of our operations in Nigeria, our largest market in Africa, the company said in a regulatory filing.

Before joining Airtel in 2012, Ogunsanya held leadership roles at Coca-Cola in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya (as MD and CEO).

Raghu Mandava will be retiring as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, as a Director of Airtel Africa plc and as a member of the Market Disclosure Committee on 30 September 2021.

Following his cessation of employment at Airtel Africa, Mandava will be available to advise the Chairman, the Airtel Africa Board and the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer for a 9-month period, said the filing.

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman said: "We are delighted to appoint Segun Ogunsanya as the Group's next Chief Executive Officer. He has displayed significant drive and energy in turning around the Nigeria business by focusing on network modernisation, distribution, and operational efficiency." "It is this commitment, together with his industry experience, strategic vision, constant customer focus and proven record of delivery that will enable him to continue to deliver our strategic objectives and to lead the Group in the next stages of its development," he said.

Further, the company also announced that Jaideep Paul, the Chief Financial Officer has been appointed as an Executive Director and will join the Board of Airtel Africa plc with effect from June 1, 2021.
The is committed to use every resource at its disposal to support India's frontline healthcare workers in their battle against COVID-19, US Defense Secretary said here.

The Department of Defense on Wednesday airlifted the first shipment of American aid to from a military base in California. The flight is scheduled to land in on Thursday.

Austin thanked various wings of his armed services for hustling to prepare the critical medical supplies.

As I've said, we're committed to use every resource at our disposal, within our authority, to support India's frontline healthcare workers, he said in a tweet along with four pictures of the first shipment.

Help is on the way. Our hearts are with our friends in as they battle this terrible disease, and our first plane of emergency medical supplies is wheels down tomorrow, said Emily Horne, spokesperson of the National Security Council of the White House.

Indian-American Ajay Jain Bhutoria, a Democratic party leader from California, welcomed the timely announcement and shipment of healthcare material to India by the Biden administration.

This includes raw materials for vaccines, therapeutic oxygen generators, ventilators and financial support to India to fight the

The White House on Wednesday announced that supplies worth more than USD100 million, including 1,100 oxygen cylinders, 1,700 oxygen concentrators and 15 million N95 masks would be sent to India in the coming days.

US government assistance flights will start arriving in India on Thursday and will continue into next week, 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.)
Every year, the Manitoba government releases detailed departmental spending estimates following the unveiling of its budget. Its a normal and important part of the budgeting process.

Every year, the Manitoba government releases detailed departmental spending estimates following the unveiling of its budget. Its a normal and important part of the budgeting process.

The line-by-line projections provide the public with specific information about how government plans to spend taxpayers dollars, including the nuts and bolts of staffing, program costs and infrastructure projects. Unlike annual budget documents, which provide limited information, departmental estimates provide detailed breakdowns.

Province withholds detailed budget info in shrunken spending estimates Click to Expand Nahanni Fontaine, MLA for St. Johns, argued Monday the lack of information provided will hamper the Oppositions ability to do its job. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press files) Posted: 4:00 AM Apr. 27, 2021 BREAKING with decades of tradition, the Pallister government is withholding detailed budget information from the public  including estimated staffing and spending levels for critical areas of the provinces pandemic response. Detailed Health Department spending estimates that filled a 145-page book last year have been reduced to a 32-page summary this year. Read Full Story

The budget represents the broad strokes of spending; estimates are the nitty gritty.

For the first time in recent memory, most of that information is being withheld. Without explanation, the Pallister government has released abbreviated versions of departmental estimates, with most of the granular reporting removed.

For example, last years Health Department estimates document was chock-full of detailed spending plans that filled a 145-page book. This year, it was whittled down to a 32-page summary.

Without that level of detail, the public is prevented from knowing how much government plans to spend in areas such as fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, including appropriations for personal protective equipment, contact tracing, lab testing or critical care in hospitals.

Last year, the Families Department provided detailed spending plans in a 128-page document, which included information about child welfare and child-care spending. This year, government released a 33-page summary instead.

Similar formats were released for all departments.

The province has offered no valid reason for this unprecedented move. Finance Minister Scott Fielding, when questioned about it in the legislative assembly this week, said the change reflects "best practices" adopted by other provinces. When asked later by reporters who in Manitoba was calling for the changes, Mr. Fielding could cite none. The minister was unable to provide any rational justification for the move.

Absent a valid explanation, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that government is deliberately keeping Manitobans in the dark about how it plans to spend their money. That is an unconscionable abrogation of governments duty to provide the public with complete and accurate information about the taxes and other revenue it collects, and how it plans to allocate resources. It is an attack on democracy.

So offensive to the principles of openness and transparency are the proposed amendments that even Manitoba Ombudsman Jill Perron has flagged them (in a sixpage letter to government) as having significant implications for access to public records.

The withholding of public information has become a disturbing trend with this government. Throughout the pandemic in particular, the province has consistently refused to release public records, such as statistics around contact tracing, infection-rate projections and regional test-positivity rates. The selective release of information is rooted in governments attempts to control the public message (for its own political benefit) as opposed to following generally accepted disclosure principles.

Its undoubtedly the same reason the Progressive Conservative government has introduced a bill to make it more difficult to access public records through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The proposed changes allow further delays to process applications for information and include vague exemptions that could be used as blanket refusals to release public records.

So offensive to the principles of openness and transparency are the proposed amendments that even Manitoba Ombudsman Jill Perron has flagged them (in a six-page letter to government) as having "significant" implications for access to public records.

Information is power. When government unjustifiably withholds public records, it weakens societys ability to hold elected officials accountable. Refusing to disclose detailed spending estimates darkens another window the public has had into the operations of government.
Direct support to help maintain sheep flocks in remote areas of Scotland will reach farmers' bank accounts from 4 May, the Scottish government has confirmed.

The Scottish Upland Sheep Support Scheme (SUSSS) issues funds to help farm businesses reliant on poorer quality rough grazing.

Payments for ewe hoggs through SUSSS offers an important funding stream to Scotland's hill farmers and crofters.

This year, the scheme is set to inject up to 7 million into the rural economy.

And farmers can expect to receive the support from as early next week, Fergus Ewing, Scotland's rural economy secretary, has confirmed.

"We have already met the payments deadline four months ahead of schedule, providing farmers and crofters with hundreds of millions of support," he said.

"Unlike the Tories who are stopping making direct payments to farmers in England, we will keep paying farmers and crofters here in Scotland to produce our food and actively farm."
Were between the darkness and the light, Dr. Huang said. She likened the psychology around masks and other behavior to the different approaches people take to changing their wardrobes at the end of winter: People who are more risk averse continue to wear winter clothes on 50 degree days, where bigger risk takers opt for shorts.

Eventually, she said, everyone will be wearing shorts.

It seems that this psychology may come to define the way the pandemic ebbs, revolving less around public dictate than personal comfort after a stark trauma. For many, the jurisdictional battle is internal, with head and heart clashing over the right personal policy.

I have hugged friends but in a very clumsy body posture, said Shirley Lin, who lives in Fremont, Calif., where she works on business development at a mobile game company. The bear hugs with the joyful scream will not be seen for a long, long time.

Her partner lost his mother to Covid-19. She died in August in St. Petersburg, Russia, at age 68. Ms. Lin, scarred, is dubious that the risk has passed. I dont think we can slack off on the proper social distancing and masking, she said. But we are much more optimistic.

Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs. They can keep that too-chatty neighbor at bay or help the introvert hide in plain sight. And vanity? Goodbye to that.

It saves me having to put on sunscreen and wear lipstick, said Sara J. Becker, an associate professor at the Brown University School of Public Health.
SAO PAULO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EMBRAER S.A. (NYSE: ERJ; B3: EMBR3) releases its First Quarter 2021 Earnings Results.

HIGHLIGHTS

Embraer delivered 9 commercial jets and 13 executive jets (10 light / 3 large) in 1Q21. Total company firm order backlog at the end of 1Q21 was US$ 14.2 billion ;

; Revenues in 1Q21 reached US$ 807.3 million , representing year-over-year growth of 27.4% compared to 1Q20, with growth in the Commercial Aviation, Defense & Security, and Executive Aviation segments;

, representing year-over-year growth of 27.4% compared to 1Q20, with growth in the Commercial Aviation, Defense & Security, and Executive Aviation segments; On April 23 , the Company signed a firm order for 30 E195-E2 jets with an undisclosed customer, with deliveries starting in 2022. The 30 firm orders will be included in Embraer's second quarter backlog;

, the Company signed a firm order for 30 E195-E2 jets with an undisclosed customer, with deliveries starting in 2022. The 30 firm orders will be included in Embraer's second quarter backlog; Excluding special items, adjusted EBIT and EBITDA were US$ (29.6) million and US$ 18.0 million , respectively, yielding adjusted EBIT margin of -3.7% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 2.2%;

and , respectively, yielding adjusted EBIT margin of -3.7% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 2.2%; Adjusted net loss (excluding special items and deferred income tax and social contribution) in 1Q21 was US$ (95.9) million , with adjusted loss per ADS of US$ (0.52) ;

, with adjusted loss per ADS of ; Embraer free cash flow in 1Q21 was a usage of US$ (226.6) million , which is consistent with normal quarterly seasonality of free cash flow usage in the first quarter. The free cash flow usage represented a significant improvement compared to the US$ (676.6) million in free cash flow consumption in 1Q20 on considerably better inventory levels given steps taken to stabilize production and operations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic;

, which is consistent with normal quarterly seasonality of free cash flow usage in the first quarter. The free cash flow usage represented a significant improvement compared to the in free cash flow consumption in 1Q20 on considerably better inventory levels given steps taken to stabilize production and operations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; The Company finished the quarter with total cash of US$ 2.5 billion and net debt of US$ 1.9 billion ;

and net debt of ; Due to continued uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on the industry, Embraer has decided to not publish 2021 financial and delivery guidance at this point.

MAIN FINANCIAL INDICATORS

US$ Million 1Q20 4Q20 1Q21 Revenue 633.8 1,841.4 807.3 EBIT (46.9) 103.6 (33.1) EBIT margin % -7.4% 5.6% -4.1% Adjusted EBIT 8.7 76.6 (29.6) Adjusted EBIT margin % 1.4% 4.2% -3.7% EBITDA 9.3 172.6 14.5 EBITDA margin % 1.5% 9.4% 1.8% Adjusted EBITDA 64.9 145.6 18.0 Adjusted EBITDA margin % 10.2% 7.9% 2.2% Adjusted net income (Loss) (104.0) (12.5) (95.9) Adjusted earnings (losses) per share - ADS basic (0.5651) (0.0679) (0.5219) Net income (loss) attributable to Embraer Shareholders (292.0) (3.3) (89.7) Earnings (losses) per share - ADS basic (US$) (1.5867) (0.0179) (0.4882) Adjusted free cash flow (676.5) 725.1 (226.5) Net debt (1,331.6) (1,695.7) (1,902.2)

For additional information, please check the full document on our website ri.embraer.com.br

INVESTOR RELATIONS

Eduardo Couto, Chris Thornsberry, Caio Pinez and Viviane Pinheiro.

(+55 11) 3040-6874

[email protected]

ri.embraer.com.br

CONFERENCE CALL INFORMATION

Embraer will host a conference call to present its 1Q21 Results on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 11:00 AM (SP) / 10:00 AM (NY). The conference call will also be broadcast live over the web at ri.embraer.com.br

Conference ID: EMBRAER

Telephones USA / Canada: +1 (412) 717-9627 / +1 (844) 204-8942

Telephones Brazil: +55 (11) 4210-1803 / +55 (11) 3181-8565

We recommend calling 15 minutes in advance.

SOURCE Embraer S.A.
GigaPoints (https://www.gigapoints.com/), a platform that provides personalized credit card recommendations based on a users spending, announced new data insights today. The company found that its average user could earn $1,046 more in rewards each year by switching credit cards. GigaPoints data also shows that on average, users earn just 1.07% back on their credit cards.

Rewards can really add up and a simple switch can mean a lot more money in your pocket, said Erik Budde, CEO and founder of GigaPoints. There are no-fee credit cards that pay 2% cash back on all purchases. Consumers who are earning less than that on their cards are leaving money on the table.

The insights are based on anonymized GigaPoints user data. GigaPoints matches consumers with the credit cards that will earn them the most rewardsin points, miles or cash back. Users securely and privately link their credit cards to GigaPoints, which analyzes their spending and identifies the best cards for them. GigaPoints algorithms also estimate the annual value of those rewards.

The companys data found that with a GigaPoints-recommended credit card, the average user could earn 3.0% back.

Its not consumers fault that theyre not maximizing their rewardsloyalty programs can be confusing and difficult to compare, Budde said. Its not apples-to-apples. Thats why we created GigaPoints, to save people time and money.

GigaPoints, which publicly launched less than a year ago on October 6, 2020, has also been nominated for Best Websites and Mobile Sites, Financial Services/Banking in the 25th Annual Webby Awards, the Internet's highest honor. As a nominee, GigaPoints is also eligible to win a Webby Peoples Voice Award, which is voted online by fans across the globe. From now until May 6th, GigaPoints fans can cast their votes here: http://bit.ly/gigapointswebby

Nominees like GigaPoints are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet, said Claire Graves, executive director of The Webby Awards. It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the 13,500 entries we received this year.

I am incredibly honored to receive a nomination of this caliber so soon after GigaPoints launch last year, said Budde. I would like to extend a big thank you The Webby Awards for the nomination, and to the many talented people who helped us build GigaPoints.

Winners will be announced on Tuesday, May 18, 2021, and honored in a star-studded, virtual show that will be available on demand. The celebration will be hosted by multi-talented actress, writer, podcaster, host and advocate Jameela Jamil. Winners will have an opportunity to deliver one of The Webby Awards famous 5-Word Speeches. Past 5-Word Speeches include: Steve Wilhites Its Pronounced Jif not Gif; NASAs Houston We Have A Webby; and Solanges I Got Five On It.

Media Contact

press@gigapoints.com

About GigaPoints

GigaPoints is a data-driven credit card comparison platform that gives consumers a fast, easy and secure way to get highly personalized credit card recommendations, so they can earn the most rewards possible for their spending. Founded in 2020, the company was built from Founder/CEO Erik Buddes passion for helping consumers maximize their credit-card benefits. GigaPoints patent-pending technology analyzes a users spending, mapping it to hundreds of credit cards and their unique rewards systems.

About The Webby Awards

Hailed as the Internets highest honor by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international awards organization honoring excellence on the Internet in nine categories: Websites and Mobile Sites, Video, Advertising, Media & PR, Apps and Software, Social, Podcasts, Games, and Virtual & Remotes. Established in 1996, this years Webby Awards received nearly 13,500 entries from all 50 states and 70 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS). Sponsors and Partners of The Webby Awards include: WP Engine, Marketerhire, Slack, YouGov, BASIC, KPMG, Wall Street Journal, AIGA, Podcast Movement, Fast Company, and Social Media Week.
By Mayank Bhardwaj

SHAHJANPUR, India (Reuters) - While India battles soaring COVID-19 infections, on the outskirts of New Delhi thousands of farmers still occupy camps where they are keeping up a months-long sit-in protest against government legislation that they say harms them.

Underlining the organised nature of the movement as it tries to force Prime Minister Narendra Modi to revoke reforms aimed at making agriculture more efficient, farmers are being ferried to and from villages in order to harvest this year's wheat crop.

The logistical feat is working, at least from the farmers' point of view. They are on track to gather a record 109 million tonnes this year, posing more headaches for a government that some experts say underestimated the strength of rural anger.

To appease protesters, the state grain purchaser is likely to have to procure large quantities of wheat at guaranteed prices, trade sources said, eating into the budget and bloating already high stock levels.

"The government perhaps believed that the agitation would fizzle out as farmers left for harvesting, but they have come up with a smart strategy," said Devinder Sharma, an independent farm and food policy expert.

"I think they are here for a long haul."

A senior official involved in agricultural policymaking said the government had held several rounds of talks with farmers.

"The government is keen to sit with the farmers and address their grievances, but the farmers also need to come with an open mind," said the official, who did not want to be named as he is not authorised to talk to the media.

Protest leader Amreek Singh has no doubt that protests can last as long as is necessary.

Referring to a stack of thick, beige-coloured registers, he explained how the number of demonstrators at his site had remained constant despite the departure of farmers to the village of Shahjanpur in grain-growing Haryana state.

Volunteers have prepared village rosters to ensure that every time a group of farmers goes to harvest the wheat crop, a group of similar size joins the protests, Singh told Reuters at Singhu, one of three protest camps on the outskirts of the capital.

Story continues

Singh said there was a similar arrangement for Punjab and Uttar Pradesh states, also part of India's grain belt.

At Singhu, organisers have pitched white tents and thatched cottages to house protesters over the summer, and communal kitchens have started stocking up traditional Indian syrups to help farmers stay hydrated.

One of the farmers on Singh's roster is Rajendra Beniwal, who travelled to Shahjanpur, some 100 km (65 miles) north of Delhi, in mid-April to take part in the harvest. He aims to return to the protests as soon as the job is done.

"I have come along with 23 farmers from my village," said the 55-year-old, sitting next to his 12-acre plot carpeted with golden wheat.

"Big wheat harvests have always been challenging logistically, but never has it been so frustrating. At the time of harvests, no one wants to stay away from their fields and their villages."

PRESSURE ON STATE

Farmers began marching towards New Delhi in November to protest against three laws that give the private sector a greater role in buying, pricing and storing agricultural goods and reduce state protection enjoyed by growers for decades.

Modi, his government and some economists argue the laws are needed to modernise India's agriculture, making it more efficient and attractive to private investment.

Three giant protest sites were erected along highways leading into Delhi, and marches into the city involving tens of thousands of people have sometimes ended in violent clashes with police.

As COVID-19 cases spiralled, Agriculture & Farmers Welfare Minister Narendra Singh Tomar asked farmers to call off their campaign to prevent outbreaks of the coronavirus at protest sites. But farmers say they will not budge until the government concedes to their demands.

Volunteers at the camps have started distributing face masks and spraying disinfectant, and hand-washing stations and hand sanitiser dispensers have been installed.

As the movement gathered steam last year, farmers had not forgotten their livelihoods. By late November they had planted wheat on a record 34.5 million hectares, resulting in this year's bumper crop estimated to be worth more than $40 billion.

That has created problems for state grain purchaser the Food Corporation of India (FCI), which is committed to buying more wheat if production rises under the country's generous food welfare programme - the world's biggest.

With private global trading companies largely absent amid the coronavirus pandemic, its purchases go up further.

Trade and industry sources said the FCI's wheat buying would certainly exceed last year's record procurement of about 39 million tonnes, at a time when stocks were already plentiful.

"Our idea is to support the farmers and we are committed to buy as much wheat as possible," said the government official.

Wheat stocks at FCI's warehouses on April 1, when the new marketing season began, were a record 27.3 million tonnes, nearly four times the target. Rice inventories totalled 49.9 million tonnes, compared with a target of 13.6 million.

Last year, FCI had to store more than 14 million tonnes of wheat in temporary sheds, and will have to find more makeshift storage in 2021/22.

Rising prices are adding to India's food bills.

In the past decade, the price at which FCI buys wheat and common rice grade from farmers has climbed by 64% and 73% respectively and storage costs have also risen.

Yet the prices at which FCI sells 5 kg (11 pounds) of wheat and rice each month to more than 800 million beneficiaries of the food welfare programme have remained unchanged at 2 rupees (2.6 U.S. cents) and 3 rupees a kg, respectively.

FCI's debt has ballooned to 3.81 trillion rupees ($51 billion), alarming policymakers.

In the fiscal year to March 2021, the government provided an extra 1.18 trillion rupees to help FCI clear debt on top of 3.44 trillion rupees given to FCI for its 2020-21 food subsidy bill.

India's fiscal deficit widened to 9.5% from 3.5% due to the extra allocation to FCI and amid a revenue shortfall.

'MISSED OPPORTUNITY'

Some traders said India missed a rare opportunity to export wheat when global prices jumped by $70 to $280 a tonne free on board (FOB) in August-December last year.

With a $20 a tonne domestic transport subsidy, India could have shipped more than 5 million tonnes of wheat to overseas buyers, said Rajesh Paharia Jain, a senior trader at Unicorp Pvt Ltd.

"Only once in a blue moon we get opportunities like this," Jain said. "By dragging its feet on announcing a small internal freight subsidy, India missed a rare chance to export wheat."

The government official said authorities could not act with the same freedom as regular traders, and had only limited ability to switch exports on and off as prices fluctuated.

Global prices have eased since, so Indian wheat now costs around $280 a tonne against $220-$225 for higher quality Australian wheat. By June-July, supplies from Russia and Ukraine will arrive, closing the door on Indian exports altogether.

India's recent bumper harvests are the result of the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, a huge agricultural expansion to cut down on grain imports.

It helped the government cushion the blow from droughts in 2014 and 2015 and enabled Modi's administration to distribute free grain during last year's coronavirus lockdown.

But maintaining such a large inventory of wheat could hurt the farm sector in the long run, some economists said.

"The solution lies in formulating an agile export policy," said food policy expert Sharma. "That will be a win-win situation for the government and our farmers."

($1 = 74.85 rupees)

(Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Mike Collett-White)
John Helmer III covered the windows of his hat and apparel shop in downtown Portland with fabric every night last summer. By doing so, he hoped to prevent his shop from becoming a target for vandalism while avoiding the cost and eyesore of putting boards over his windows.

As protests died down in the fall, Helmer decided those measures were no longer necessary. And earlier in April he noticed an increase in sales and foot traffic around his store, giving him hope that normal conditions might be returning downtown.

But on April 16, a group of people marched through downtown Portland, setting several fires and breaking windows at the Oregon Historical Society, Nordstrom, the Nike and Apple stores, and several other businesses, including Helmers shop, John Helmer Haberdasher.

Im frustrated and upset, Helmer said. These arent protests. This is pure vandalism.

Portland businesses dealt with a surge in property damage last summer as nightly protests consumed downtown, often leading to graffiti, window smashing and burning of debris and dumpsters. That led to an outcry from downtown business owners and prompted many to board up their windows.

In recent weeks, some businesses had expressed optimism that the worst of the vandalism was behind them and had started to make plans to take down boards. Thats a step business leaders and city officials have said is crucial to the recovery of downtown and the city.

But a recent resurgence in property damage over the last few weeks, committed by a small group of black bloc demonstrators, once more has business owners on edge. One business recently cited the ongoing vandalism as a factor in its decision to permanently close its downtown office and other businesses say they may leave when their lease is up.

Over the last two weeks, damage that vandals describe as direct actions have caused more than $20,000 in damage at the Blazers Boys & Girls Club in Northeast Portland and ended with the shattering of windows at a church and other businesses in downtown and Northwest Portland. With protests planned throughout the city for May Day, businesses are bracing for another destructive episode.

Many businesses expressed support for last summers civil rights protests, even at times when demonstrations turned unruly, because they supported the underlying aims. Many say they continue to support those calls for racial justice, but cant make sense of this springs episodic destruction, which doesnt appear to have a coherent objective.

I think people are fatigued at this point, said Vanessa Sturgeon, CEO of TMT Development and a spokesperson for the Rose City Downtown Collective, which formed in December to advocate for downtown Portland. Theres not a lot of sympathy for it because its not protesting, its just criminal behavior.

AN ENVIRONMENT OF LAWLESSNESS

Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a press conference Friday that Portland residents are fed up with the small group of self-described anarchists who are intent on property damage and destruction. He called on Portlanders to help police by reporting suspected vandals and noting their license plate numbers.

Over the last year, Wheeler has held numerous press conferences like that one, condemning property damage and promising more action from the city.

But the Mayor said last week that the city is at a turning point as the group of people committing damage gets smaller and the city works to hold accountable those who do commit destruction. He said he was pushing for higher bail and pretrial restrictions for destructive protesters and that the Multnomah County District Attorneys office was reviewing some prior arrests that resulted in dropped charges to ensure that repeat offenders are held accountable.

The Portland City Council last week also approved $250,000 in new grants for businesses that have had their windows shattered or experienced property damage and reallocated $150,000 for additional graffiti removal.

Were seeing law enforcement come together in ways theyve not previously come together, Wheeler said. Were putting those individuals who like to engage in this kind of criminal destruction and violence on notice that were going to attempt to arrest them and hold them accountable.

Some business owners are unconvinced.

Noha Kassab, the owner of Kassab Jewelers, is in the process of filing a lawsuit against the City of Portland, alleging that the Portland Police Bureau and city politicians failed to protect downtown businesses during a May 30 riot last year. Kassab said her store lost $1.5 million in merchandise when it was looted during the riot.

While Kassabs two stores in Portlands suburbs are open, the downtown store has been closed and boarded up since last Mays riot. Kassab said she was in the process of getting bids to replace several display cases that were smashed by looters in anticipation of potentially reopening a portion of her downtown store in the next several weeks.

But the recent incidents of property damage to businesses in downtown has prompted her to put those plans on hold.

Kassab said she no longer feels safe downtown. She faulted Wheeler for creating an environment in Portland over the last year where vandals and criminals feel as if they can cause destruction and damage without being held responsible.

Wheeler is just all talk, no action, Kassab said. Hes the reason were at this point. When you cultivate or tolerate an environment of lawlessness thats what youre going to get -- arson, looting, destroying property. I hope he gets out of the way and resigns.

Sturgeon said that there have been failures at multiple levels of government that have led to the continued destruction.

She said the city and the Police Bureau dont have the resources necessary to address the ongoing property destruction on their own and need more support from the state. She also faulted Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt for not doing more over the last year to ensure that offenders were held accountable.

Schmidt has charged nine people arrested during direct action marches over the last several weeks, including two individuals that damaged buildings downtown on April 16. Brent Weisberg, a spokesperson for the District Attorneys office, said the office is navigating a significant backlog of cases, which has been exacerbated by court closures due to the pandemic.

Its the same group of 100 people committing crimes over and over again, Sturgeon said. Its continued because they havent been held accountable for their behavior.

BOARDS GO BACK UP

Golden Optical told patients in an email this week that it will permanently close its downtown location at the end of May.

Co-owner Caryn Lawson said the building owner at the offices Southwest Broadway location decided to put plywood up after several businesses in the building were vandalized and looted during last Mays riot. Lawson said Golden Optical had its windows broken, while its neighbors, Collier Clothing, suffered thousands of dollars in lost merchandise.

Lawson said the boards made it difficult for patients to find the office and they stopped getting walk-in customers looking for eyewear. That prompted the business to move to a new location at Southwest 8th Avenue and Southwest Yamhill in January.

But Lawson said the boarded up buildings, graffiti, trash and increased homelessness in downtown was still keeping patients away. And she said the continued threat of vandalism, and the citys inability to stop it, remained a concern. Lawson said it ultimately made the most sense for the business to close downtown and focus on its Bethany location.

When youre constantly concerned about whether theres going to be protesting or rioting in front of your office, its really hard to focus on maintaining customer service, Lawson said.

While other businesses remain committed to staying downtown, the recent damage has compelled some to put boards back up or rethink plans to remove boards and protective fencing from around their buildings.

The Oregon Historical Society took plywood off its windows in January, three months after a group smashed nearly a dozen windows in the museums pavilion and tossed flares into the lobby.

But the boards went back earlier this month after vandals broke more windows at the museum on April 16. Oregon Historical Society Executive Director Kerry Tymchuk said the damage the museum has suffered over the last five months has cost it well over $100,000. He said insurance had paid for most of the repairs, but the museum expects its rates will go up.

Tymchuk said the museum ordered new windows immediately after the most recent incident because having boards up doesnt create the environment or message it wants to send. But he said it will take several months before the new windows arrive and the museum cant take the boards down until then.

Its frustrating, its depressing because whats the purpose? Tymchuk said. Weve been leading the way for years, telling the whole history of Oregon, the good, the bad and the ugly. I dont understand the purpose of damaging us or the church next to us or the Boys & Girls Club.

Eric Murfitt, the owner of downtown clothing shop Mercantile, has had boards covering his downtown clothing store since it was looted during last Mays riot, causing $1 million in losses. The resulting insurance claim that Murfitt filed led to his insurer not renewing his policy last fall and forced him to accept a more expensive policy that doesnt cover damage related to civil unrest.

Murfitt said that has prompted him to keep his boards up for the last 11 months. He is in the process of ordering bars to cover the windows at his store to prevent future break-ins. He said when those bars arrive, he will finally remove the boards.

But while he is taking steps to take his boards down, he has seen other businesses near his store putting their boards back up, in some cases covering both their doors and windows with plywood.

I noticed walking around that many more businesses had boards up that werent there before, Murfitt said. I cant blame anyone for doing that with whats going on.

Still, Murfitt said The Woodlark Hotel next to his shop and several other hotels downtown have recently reopened and he has started to see some tourists coming to the area, which has given him hope for downtown. Helmer, too, said he is hopeful that more people will return downtown when the pandemic recedes and that the crowds will deter vandals.

He said vandals smashed the window at John Helmer Haberdasher before 10 p.m. on a Friday, a time when many people would have been milling around downtown in pre-pandemic times.

Sturgeon said downtown Portlands recovery will depend on more people returning to the city center.

But for that to happen, she said, people have to feel comfortable visiting and working downtown and business owners have to feel safe enough to remove the boards from their windows.

Its very important to get the boards down, Sturgeon said. But most importantly, people have to feel comfortable taking them down, which means the rioting has to stop first, there has to be accountability for the criminal behavior.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg
The Electoral Commissions job is to regulate the financial activities of the most powerful people in the country  politicians up to and including the Prime Minister.

As I know from my experience as a Commissioner, it is always unpopular in the highest circles, always being accused of bias and threatened with abolition.

Its resources and powers are not enough, being restricted by the very people it regulates. But what it does is vital to our democracy. As another investigator of the powerful says, it is interested in one thing and in one thing only, and that is open politics.

It might seem extraordinary that the Commission is reaching into Downing Street, but the rule of law means that the highest in the land are not above the law. More than that, the most powerful should be setting the highest example.

We have a law about reporting donations for one main reason: so that we can see which financial interests politicians are aligning themselves with and who they might be beholden to.

It might seem extraordinary that the Commission is reaching into Downing Street, but the rule of law means that the highest in the land are not above the law. More than that, the most powerful should be setting the highest example, writes Professor David Howarth

Money does not have to change hands for a donation to have taken place. If, for example, someone pays off a bill that a politician owes to someone else, that is a donation to the politician.

And if someone pays off a bill the politician owes to someone else but then requires the politician to repay the money, that is a loan to the politician covered by the law.

That is why it matters who paid the bill for the Downing Street redecoration  and when.

If the Conservative Party paid part of the bill and expected Boris Johnson to pay the money back to the party, as long as the redecoration counts as connected with Mr Johnsons political activities, that counts as a loan to Mr Johnson.

If a donor then gave money to the Conservative Party to pay off the loan, that would then be a donation to Mr Johnson.

If the Conservative Party paid part of the bill and expected Boris Johnson to pay the money back to the party, as long as the redecoration counts as connected with Mr Johnsons political activities, that counts as a loan to Mr Johnson

If instead the party paid off part of Mr Johnsons bill without expecting him to pay it back, that is a donation that he must report. If a donor then gave money to the party to offset the partys donation to Johnson, the party must report that donation.

It does not matter whether the donor thought the party would pass the money on to a trust (that never came into existence)  the party would have received a donation.

The law puts the onus on those who receive donations or loans to check that the donor is a permitted donor (most obviously, that the donor is British) and to report the donation or loan if it is more than certain set amounts  7,500 for political parties, 1,500 for individuals. The duty to check and to report is on the recipient, not the donor.

But donors can commit offences if, for example, they deliberately destroy records in an attempt to frustrate an investigation. Recipients have a month to make their checks and to report. It is an offence to fail to report in time.

Usually offenders are given a fine of a few hundred pounds, but the theoretical maximum is 20,000.

The law puts the onus on those who receive donations or loans to check that the donor is a permitted donor and to report the donation or loan if it is more than certain set amounts  7,500 for political parties, 1,500 for individuals. Pictured: The refurbishment using designer Lulu Lytle is believed to have cost almost 60,000

Offenders can be let off if they have a reasonable excuse  for example, illness. If the Electoral Commission thinks a recipient intentionally concealed a donation or loan, it can apply to a court for an order that requires the recipient to hand the donation over to the Commission or, in the case of a loan, reverse the whole transaction.

This can be a very expensive addition to any fine. Perhaps the worst thing anyone can do is to refuse to co-operate with the Commission.

It has investigatory powers that can eventually land people in court for contempt of court. The penalty for that is to languish in jail.

I know from my time at the Commission that the investigation will be detailed and methodical. We should all wish them well in their work.
Advertisement

Dr Anthony Fauci is finally giving Americans some good news. America's top infectious disease doctor predicts a 'a real change, the start of a precipitous drop' in new daily COVID-19 infections now that the share of U.S. adults vaccinated against the virus is nearly 40 percent.

'When you do that, that's when people are going to be able to start doing the things they've been craving,' Dr Fauci told the Wall Street Journal in an interview.

As of Thursday, nearly 38 percent of American adults aged 18 or older are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Data from around the globe shows that once 40 percent of a population is covered by vaccines, daily cases start to decline dramatically, according to a Bloomberg analysis. The pattern has emerged in San Marino, The United Arab Emirates and Israel.

In the U.S. the first signs that vaccinations are turning the tide of cases are becoming apparent. After hovering for weeks around 70,000 cases a day, the U.S. is now seeing 52,522 new infections a day on average - down 26 percent from two weeks prior.

But vaccinations are stalling, and the number of daily deaths has been erratic in recent weeks. On Wednesday, nearly 950 Americans died of COVID-19, bumping the seven-day rolling average of fatalities up to about 704. By comparison, there were 474 deaths on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Dr Anthony Fauci is finally giving Americans some good news. America's top infectious disease doctor predicts a 'a real change, the start of a precipitous drop' in new daily COVID-19 infections now that the share of U.S. adults vaccinated against the virus is nearly 40 percent (Dr Fauci, left, is pictured with Vice President Kamala Harris, right; file)

After holding steady above three million shots a day between April 3 and 21, daily vaccinations in the U.S. have fallen to an average of 2.67 million.

What remains to be seen is whether the encouraging declines in daily infections will level off, too.

About 98 million Americans are fully vaccinated.

But Dr Fauci also pointed out that an even larger share of people should now have some immunity against coronavirus.

More than 32 million Americans have been infected with coronavirus, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, although the real overall caseload is likely much higher.

Depending on when they were infected, most likely still have some degree of protection via antibodies produced in response to coronavirus.

However, there's likely some overlap between those who are vaccinated and those who had COVID-19 already.

And the U.S. has now likely vaccinated most of the population of Americans who are not only willing but eager to get COVID-19 shots.

The slow down in vaccinations is not from a lack of supply, but due to a sharp decline in demand.

Health officials and experts in states with marked decreases in daily vaccinations worry that ending the COVID-19 pandemic by achieving herd immunity will be a challenge unless states can convince more residents to receive the vaccine.

A block of eight Southern states have fallen behind the pace in their vaccine rollout, trailing the national average in vaccinated residents by four to ten percent after weeks where they have struggled to fill vaccine appointments.

Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia each find themselves ranked near last among American states in percentage of vaccine allocation used so far, per the New York Times on Wednesday afternoon.

Each falls within the bottom 13 states in percentage of doses used, with Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia making up the bottom four.

Louisiana in particular has had a hard time finding takers for its vaccines, with five straight weeks of declining first dose sign-ups. A federal vaccine site in Baton Rouge is falling short of meeting five percent of its capacity on some days, per a report by the New Orleans Advocate.

Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are the only three states where at least one third of residents have not received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

All of the states in the block  other than North Carolina  are among the 11 states where less that 37 percent of the population has received at least one shot (39 percent of North Carolinians have received their first dose). The national average is 43 percent.

Dr. Lisa Piercy, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health, told WKRN that the trend was 'disturbing' on Tuesday, as her department ramps up efforts to get more Tennesseans vaccinated.

Vaccine hesitancy has been cited as the reason behind the decline by experts in the states.

There are numerous reasons for vaccine hesitancy around the U.S., including worries about the hasty creation of the vaccine, unknown side effects, conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccines or even that some Americans just do not see COVID-19 as a major problem.

Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation from March shows that many who are somewhat skeptical of the vaccine  who answered they would 'Wait and see' how others react to the vaccine before getting it themselves  have been likely to either get the vaccine or say they will get it as soon as they can.

Those who are most skeptical seem less likely to budge, though. The amount of Americans who say they will either Definitely not get the vaccine or only get the vaccine if required has stayed about the same since the vaccine first became available in December.

Polling by Civiqs, as of April 27, shows that half of Americans yet to be vaccinated say that they definitely do not plan not to get the vaccine, with a small group still remaining unsure.

Vaccine hesitancy over the past four months has ebbed slightly, but 20% of Americans still say they won't get a COVID-19 vaccine unless it is required, or won't do so at all (green)

While vaccine hesitancy can manifest itself for different reasons, certain demographics are more likely to be hesitant to receive the vaccine than others.

Non-college educated Americans are less likely to receive the vaccine that their peers with a college degree, with less having received the vaccine thus far and more saying they will not get it when available.

Nearly half of Republicans also do not plan on receiving the vaccine, per the Civiqs poll, a larger share than the amount who have been vaccinated so far.

White Evangelical Americans, who largely associate with the Republican party, are also the least likely religious group to get the COVID-19 vaccine. A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in February found that 45 percent of white evangelicals did not plan on getting vaccinated.

The eight states contain groups most likely to not want the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Kentucky each are among the five states with the lowest percentage of the population over 25 who hold a Bachelors degree.

Rates of vaccine hesitancy are higher in states with large Evangelical Christian populations (darker blue). Vaccination rates are also lower in these states

Alabama (8th least), Tennessee (11th) and South Carolina (16th) each find themselves among the lowest as week. North Carolina and Georgia fall around the average, with nearly a third of the states residents holding a college degree.

This area of the country is also a Republican stronghold. Donald Trump won all but Georgia in the 2020 Presidential election, with Joe Biden eking out a 11,000 vote victory in the Peach State  only the second time a Democrat won the state in a Presidential election in 40 years.

Trump carried each of the states he won by at least 10 percentage points  other than North Carolina, where he won by 100,000 votes.

The strongest correlation of vaccine hesitancy appears with the large Evangelical population in the eight states. According to data from the Pew Research Center from 2014, a large portion of Evangelicals in the United States reside in the U.S. south.

Tennessee (52 percent of population identifies as Evangelical) is the only state in the nation where more than half the population identifies as Evangelical. Alabama (49 percent), Arkansas (46 percent) and Mississippi (41 percent) are also among the states with the largest share of Evangelical population in the country.

Louisiana (27 percent) notably does not have a large Evangelical population compared to its peers.

While these states may be struggling to get their residents vaccinated, their stagnating vaccination rates have not translated to an increase in new infections - yet.

None of the eight states are among the highest in daily new case rates. None have suffered a surge in cases since their vaccine rates began to decline either, with all reporting consistently low numbers through the month of April.

States like Minnesota and Maine  which are among the nations leaders for having used the largest proportion of the vaccine doses they have been allocated  have seen large spikes in cases this month despite more successful vaccine distribution.

Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the leaders in lowest daily case rate in recent days. Alabama and Louisiana have even rescinded their mask mandates in recent weeks due to lower case levels, with no significant uptick in cases since the decisions.
(Natural News) With a doctorate in racial and political gaslighting, MSNBCs ReidOut host Joy Reid tag-teamed on Tuesday with progressive charlatans Joan Walsh of The Nation and Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark to lambaste the American right as braindead racists whove shunned the coronavirus vaccine, live to be perpetually angry, oppose Obama-era policies because theyre racists, and oppose aid for African-Americans.

(Article by Curtis Houck republished from NewsBusters.org)

And like in a previous segment about Fox News, Reid reveled in recent corrections from News Corp-owned outlets despite multiple recent ethical and factual failures from MSNBC and fellow Comcast-owned network NBC (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). The Fox hysteria was so mind-numbing that Walsh attacked Peter Doocy as a show-boater.

Reid contrasted the supposed tens of millions of racists with her side, which has found success in [t]he radical normalcy of the Biden administration with winning thanks to competence on the part of President Biden.

Despite her history of false claims and hacked blog saga, Reid set the table with the retracted Fox News stories about meat consumption and Vice President Harriss childrens book at a detention center (and the fact that Tucker Carlson has a show) to argue FNC is a bastion of fake news filled with people who think the coronavirus was never real and the election was stolen.

Walsh said while it should be hilarious, it isnt because Biden has driven them absolutely nuts. Sounding as if she was still employed by CNN, Walsh said theres no difference between FNCs daytime and primetime lineups with Doocy being an example of their awfulness:

They have a White House reporter, correspondent, Peter Doocy, he couldnt go and he likes to bug Jen Psaki all the time and, you know, get attention for himself  he couldnt go there and say, hey, whats this about, Biden being the hamburglar, and whats this about Kamala Harriss book being given to every poor, migrant child. Thats what you do. You report out a story. They dont even bother doing that anymore. Its insane, frankly.

If Doocy is pompous prick and people like Jim Acosta and Brian Karem arent, then we have some beachfront property to sell you in Manitoba, Joan.

Moving to construct another strawman, Reid and Sykes took a piece from a far-right columnist saying he wont become vaccinated to own the libs and argued it represents the entire American right as disinterested in constructive ideas or even a rational thought (click expand):
BISHKEK -- Clashes between local residents along a disputed segment of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border left at least three people dead and scores wounded in the volatile region before a truce was announced by both sides.

During the April 28-29 clashes three people were killed, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Leylek district of the Batken region, the Kyrgyz Health Ministry said, adding that at least 84 people were wounded on the Kyrgyz side.

Police in Kyrgyzstan's southern region of Batken blamed Tajik citizens for the escalation, saying they started shooting at a military unit located in the village of Kok-Tash, while gunfire was also reported from the Tajik side near the Kyrgyz village of Ak-Sai.

Tajikistan's Border Guard Service rejected the Kyrgyz account, saying that Kyrgyz military personnel were the first to shoot when they opened fire at Tajik border units near the Golovnoi water distribution center, located in territory that Tajik authorities claim jurisdiction over.

Tajik authorities said earlier in the day that two Tajik citizens sustained gunshot wounds and were taken to the hospital on April 29.

But an RFE/RL correspondent on the ground said 23 people, including the mayor of the city of Isfara, were wounded by bullets, and one resident of Surkh village was killed.

Late on April 29, the two countries' foreign ministries announced they had agreed a cease-fire after hours of talks and would stick to it and pull back troops while resolving the conflict through diplomacy.

A day earlier, Tajik authorities said seven Tajik citizens were injured in a standoff started after local residents on both sides of the border clashed, throwing stones at each other.

The Tajik side also said the clashes had been instigated by Kyrgyz officials, which Bishkek rejected.

Many border areas in Central Asia's former Soviet republics have been disputed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with numerous incidents involving deadly gunfire.

The situation is particularly complicated near the numerous exclaves in the volatile Ferghana Valley, where the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan meet.

The latest outbreak of violence comes amid the installation by Tajik officials of surveillance equipment at the Golovnoi water distribution center that Kyrgyzstan says is located in an area where sovereignty has yet to be defined.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov issued a statement on Facebook calling for calm and for Kyrgyz citizens "to keep their patience and not to give in to provocations."

"With our Tajik brothers, we will always find common ground and solve all issues while preserving and taking into account neighborly interests on our ancient land. Those who try to ignite a conflict are dangerous. I call on all domestic political forces to be patient in such a complicated time for our nation," Japarov said in the statement.

The Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan expressed concerns over the rising tensions along the Kyrgyz-Tajik border.

"We call on the parties to immediately stop the clashes, undertake joint measures to stabilize the situation, and stay away from actions that could lead to a further escalation," the Uzbek Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that Tashkent is ready to contribute to resolving the situation.

Earlier in April, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon said during a visit to Tajikistan's Vorukh exclave within Kyrgyzstan that agreements on almost half of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border had been reached during more than 100 rounds of negotiations between Dushanbe and Bishkek since work on border delimitation started in 2002.

With reporting by AKIPress and Reuters
YEREVAN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a letter addressed to Armenian President Armen Sarkissian, expressed hope for the development and strengthening of bilateral relations, the press service of the Armenian leader said in a statement.

The letter was sent in response to Sarkissian's congratulatory message on the occasion of the Iranian New Year - Nowruz.

"I hope that the relations between Iran and Armenia, taking into account the long-standing bilateral ties and existing potential, will develop and strengthen to ensure common interests, strengthen regional and international peace and security," Khamenei's letter, posted on the Armenian presidential website, says.
ALISO VIEJO, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Syxsense, a global leader in the intelligent automation of IT, patch management, security vulnerability scanning and remediation, today announced the release of White Label console branding for MSP, MSSPs and large enterprises. Building and maintaining brand identity increases revenue and customer awareness. Syxsense now offers the ability to replace and customize logos, labels, and website links in the Syxsense console.

MSP and MSSPs looking to augment their managed service with new functionality can do so without incurring the cost of building a solution from scratch, all while presenting the functionality as a natural extension of their existing offerings. Syxsense increases recurring revenue by automating IT, offering comprehensive patch management, and full security vulnerability scanning and remediation.



In addition to consistent corporate branding and logos, white label users can easily customize the Syxsense reusable dashboards to present exactly the information and results most important to clients or employees. Built on a native cloud infrastructure, the new customizations to the browser-based UI easily integrate into corporate workflows. Reusable elements like reoccurring patching maintenance windows and Syxsense Cortex Workflows quickly empower MSPs and MSSPs to deliver on the promise of a secure, well managed IT environment.



The White Label option is included with Syxsense Manage and Syxsense Secure at no additional cost. Syxsense is offering free, fully-featured trials for up to 100 devices for 14 days. More information on the software and trial can be found here.



About Syxsense

Syxsense is the leading provider of innovative, intuitive technology that sees all and knows everything about every endpoint, in every location, everywhere inside and outside the network, as well as in the cloud. It combines the power of artificial intelligence with industry expertise to manage and secure endpoints by stopping threats before they occur and neutralizing threats when they happen. The Syxsense Endpoint Security Cloud always-on technology performs in real-time so businesses can operate free of disruption from security breaches that cripple productivity and expose them to financial risk and reputational harm. www.syxsense.com



Photo(s):

https://www.prlog.org/12867740



Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Syxsense

Related Links

http://www.syxsense.com


Police have released a gallery of 133 reckless ravers who are wanted after a Tudor-era church was trashed during a booze and hippy crack-fuelled lockdown party.

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines.

The pictures capture youngsters huffing on what appear to be hippy crack balloons, clutching bottles of spirits, gurning and even wearing shades at night.

Police are now hunting the partygoers who broke into the 500-year-old building on New Year's Eve, despite the county being hit with strict Tier 4 regulations.

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines

Images of the revellers who descended on All Saints Church, in East Horndon, Essex, for the illegal party have been made public in a bid to slap them with fines. Images all copyright Essex Police.

Chief Inspector Ant Alcock, District Commander for Brentwood and Epping Forest, said: 'Issuing these images is an unusual step but it highlights the seriousness of the incident and public health threat it posed.

'At the time this event took place Essex was under Tier 4 regulations, infections were rising quickly, a 'major incident' had been declared here because of the pressure on our NHS, and nationally there were around 50,000 positive tests a day.

'This event wasn't just a clear and blatant breach of the Government's Covid-19 regulations but a very real public health risk as well as a slap in the face to all those making sacrifices to do the right thing.

'At a time where doctors and nurses were under extreme pressure trying to save lives and people all over the county were spending Christmas away from their loved ones, those who attended the event acted selfishly, putting themselves and their families health at risk.

'Added to that is the damage they caused to the church itself - at Christmas too.

'You cannot come to Essex and do that, we will not tolerate it.

'If you attended the event or recognise any of those pictured, now is the time to do the right thing.'

Four people have been arrested in connection with the event and another, a 32-year-old man from Wickford, was given a 10,000 fine after admitting being an organiser.

Anyone who attended the event and who is identified will be fined.

In the wake of the party a fundraising drive was launched to repair the church which suffered thousands of pounds worth of damage.

The volunteers that spearheaded the clean-up and fundraising campaign to repair it were presented with an award for their work.

The Rev'd Canon Paul Hamilton MA and Astrid Gillespie have been awarded the Digital Heritage Hero Award at the Heritage Hero Awards in recognition of their 'exceptional' service to the UK's heritage sector.

A crowdfunder set up by the Friends of All Saints group raised over 20,000 towards the clean-up, repairs and security of the church.

Speaking about the award, Ms Gillespie, who is part of the Friends of All Saints group, said: 'It means so much to all of us from the Friends of All Saints Church to have been given this award and to have the support of The Heritage Alliance.

'We have been overwhelmed with the love and support from everyone who has been involved in helping us to raise money for us to repair the damage at the church.

'It's been a very difficult year and we've needed heroes more than ever.'
(CNN)  The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were found in the real world to be 94% effective against Covid-19 hospitalization among fully vaccinated adults ages 65 and older in the United States, according to a new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

The study also found that the vaccines were 64% effective among those older adults who were partially vaccinated, meaning they had only received one dose of vaccine so far.

These findings are consistent with the vaccines' clinical trial results, which showed an efficacy of about 94% to 95%, researchers from the CDC and several other institutions noted.

"These data suggest that continuing to rapidly vaccinate U.S. adults against COVID-19 will likely have a marked impact on COVID-19 hospitalization and might lead to commensurate reductions in post-COVID conditions and deaths," the researchers wrote in their study.

The study included data on 417 adults ages 65 and older with Covid-19-like symptoms who were admitted to 24 hospitals in 14 states between January 1 and March 26. Among those patients, 187 tested positive for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and 230 tested negative.

The researchers found that among those who tested positive, most were unvaccinated. Only 18 of the patients, or 10%, were partially vaccinated with a first dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and just one person -- representing 0.5% -- was fully vaccinated.

Among the 230 adults who tested negative, 44 of them, or 19%, were partially vaccinated and 18, or 8%, were fully vaccinated, the data showed.

Overall, "these findings are encouraging and welcome news for the two-thirds of people aged 65 and up who are already fully vaccinated," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a news release on Wednesday.

"COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective and these real-world findings confirm the benefits seen in clinical trials, preventing hospitalizations among those most vulnerable," Walensky said. "The results are promising for our communities and hospitals. As our vaccination efforts continue to expand, COVID-19 patients will not overwhelm health care systems -- leaving hospital staff, beds, and services available for people who need them for other medical conditions."

The new study included data from California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. More research is needed to determine whether similar findings would emerge across more states to represent the entire US population.

Similar findings have been found previously.

A separate study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that among 417 employees at Rockefeller University in New York who were fully vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Moderna shots, only two of them -- also about 0.5% -- tested positive for Covid-19 later.

In March, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced that real-world evidence from the Israel Ministry of Health show that there have been "dramatically" fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths among people in Israel who have been fully vaccinated. That analysis found that the vaccine effectiveness was 94% in preventing asymptomatic Covid-19, where infections show no symptoms.
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone  The war crimes trial of Gibril Massaquoi, the Sierra Leonean former Revolutionary United Front commander, will begin hearings in Sierra Leone on Friday.

The trial, being held by a court from Finland where Massaquoi was resettled in return for aiding prosecutors in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, has attracted little attention in Sierra Leone.

Local news outlets have published reporting by Finnish and Liberian journalists when the trial held hearings in those two countries but there has been little interest shown by Sierra Leoneans.

I published all of the New Narratives stories of Gibril Massaquois trial when the Finnish court visited Liberia, and not a single comment I got regarding any of the stories. Nobody in Sierra Leone is talking about Massaquois trial, not even the judiciary, said Stephen Douglas Editor of Sierra Leoneans Media Watch newspaper.

Douglas said he thinks people are afraid to talk about the trial for a number of reasons. I think people are afraid of reprisal from the government, because some people, who were part of the revolution along with Massaquoi, are part of the present government of Sierra Leone. Other could be scared because they feel Massaquois allies are still around, while others are afraid of opening old wounds.

Mr Douglas said that even though the location of the court in Sierra Leone is hidden, witnesses testifying before the Finnish court, are terrified, as just as witnesses in Liberia were.

As this journalist walked around to see and hear peoples views on Massaquois trial, people in Freetown, were moving about their normal businesses and did not appear to know or care if a trial is going on.

One local Sierra Leonean youth who did not want to be named, was selling phone credits and doing foreign exchange looked surprised when asked about the trial. When and where is that happening? I do not know anything about a trial taking place here in Sierra Leone. If it is happening, then the entire trial is in hidden. No radio station has announced it, so nobody knows about it, he said.

The Finnish Court left Liberia two weeks after hearing seven weeks of testimony from dozens of witnesses. Witnesses alleged that Massaquoi, under the alias Angel Gabriel carried out massacres, rape and torture of civilians in Lofa County, North of Liberia and in Monrovia from 2001  2003.

The issue of dates has plagued the prosecution case in the trial. Many of the witnesses said the crimes took place in Waterside in Monrovia in 2001 but there was no fighting in the capital at that time.

Others have said the events happened in 2003, at a time when Massaquoi was supposedly under house detention as a witness in Freetown. On cross examination by defence lawyers the witnesses have blamed faulty memory for the discrepancies in dates.

The confusion of dates has baffled Aaron Weah, a leading expert on transitional justice in Liberia. He is the only Liberian scholar to have attended the hearings in Liberia.

I used to live in the center of Monrovia, in an apartment building on Water Street, located between the Old Bridge and New Bridge that has come up in the Massaquoi proceedings as a major landmark. It is very fresh in my mind, said Weah, in an interview with justiceinfo website. 2003 is the more recent period that we saw real violence, when the entire country shut down. You would think that people who suffered directly from this violence would tend to recall it more vividly. Surprisingly they remember these timelines differently. Some witnesses refer to 2001 or 2002 as 2003. What is driving this sort of amnesia and confusion is not very clear. Why are Liberians confusing these recent dates?

Massaquois defence lawyers have suggested there was another Gibril Massaquoi committing atrocities in the two areas at the time. These are the key questions that will be examined by the court in Freetown over the next two to three weeks.

Massaquoi, is being prosecuted in Finland for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Liberia. Massaquoi was a Lieutenant-Colonel of the RUF and an assistant to the rebel groups founder, Foday Sankoh, during the Sierra Leonean Civil War.

In 2005, Massaquoi was granted immunity from prosecution for crimes in Sierra Leone in return for his testimony in the war crimes trials in Sierra Leone. Experts said he was instrumental in the convictions of several rebel leaders including former Liberian president Charles Taylor with whom he was close during the civil conflicts in both countries.

Finland granted Massaquoi residency for his role in the Sierra Leone Special Court. But when Civitas Maxima, of Switzerland and Liberia-based Global Justice Research Project presented Finnish investigators with evidence of Massaquois war crimes in Liberia, they arrested him in March 2020 for his role in that war.

Massaquois trial began on February 1 in the city of Tampere, where he had been living. Rather than transport more than 80 witnesses set to testify to Finland in the midst of a pandemic, the court moved to Liberia.

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Hearings in Freetown will begin on Friday.

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the West Africa Justice Reporting Project. Funding was provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The funder had no say in the storys content.
Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan, left, a Florida-based consultancy, talks about overseeing a 2020 election ballot audit ordered by the Arizona Senate, at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on April 22, 2021. (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)

Maricopa County Election Audit on Pace to Be Done by Deadline: Official

The 2020 election audit taking place in Arizonas largest county is on pace to be done by next months deadline, an official said on April 28.

The count is picking up significantly every day and with the additional shifts that were planning to put on, and other improvements in the process, were on a pace to get the job done in the time we have here at the coliseum, former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, the state Senates liaison for the Maricopa County audit, told reporters.

Bennett was speaking outside the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where contracted workers and volunteers are reviewing 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election. The audit also includes a review of 385 tabulators and other machines used last year.

Bennett wasnt able to provide an update on how many ballots have been audited; as of April 28, the number was just shy of 100,000.

The Senate has reserved the arena for the audit until May 14.

Were doing things that will get us to a number of ballots per day that will allow us to be done with the counting by May 14, Bennett, a Republican, told reporters.

The audit started on April 23. A judge on April 28 rejected an attempt by Democrats to halt the process.

Some of the 2.1 million ballots cast during the 2020 election are brought in for an audit ordered by the Arizona Senate, at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, on April 22, 2021. (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)

Democrats assert that Cyber Ninjas and the three other firms that the state Senate hired to carry out the audit arent properly trained and havent installed proper security procedures.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin, a Democrat-appointed judge, said plaintiffs didnt provide substantive evidence of any breaches or threatened breaches of voter privacy.

Lawyers for the Senate had told the judge that delaying the audit would result in slowing the state Legislatures weighing of election reform bills, because the audit results will directly inform the legislation.

Bennett and other officials involved in the process have argued that ballots and machines are being secured well, by armed guards, and that voter privacy is being protected.

The liaison said he was very pleased with Martins ruling.

Republicans, including state Senate President Karen Fann, say the audit is meant to restore public confidence in elections, noting that polls suggest about one in two voters in the state arent confident in the 2020 results, which saw Democrat Joe Biden, who went on to become president, win the state over former President Donald Trump.

Democrats, including Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, say the audit will change nothing and will actually undermine confidence in the elections.

It is dangerous, Hobbs said this week during an appearance on MSNBC. This is potentially precedent-setting for other states in the country. And if they are able to successfully continue to undermine voters confidence in our election integrity, theyre going to bring this to other states in the country.
Fire crews will on Friday resume their attempts to put out a blaze onboard a so-called ghost ship on the Cork coast.

A Cork County Council spokesperson said firefighting operations ended around 9pm on Thursday night "due to the rising tide and poor light".

The fire was, they said, "substantially extinguished" and is due to be assessed on Friday morning.

Council chiefs and gardai have again urged members of the public to avoid the area and not to attempt to gain access to the wreck which "has been further damaged by the fire and is in an unsafe condition".

Gardai will continue to monitor the situation overnight.

The Cork County Fire Service was called out to the scene of the MV Alta ship near Ballycotton, East Cork, on Thursday afternoon.

Crews began tackling the blaze at around 4pm, and were assisted by other emergency services, according to reports.

Earlier, the council said that two units of Cork County Council's Fire Service were at the scene of the fire on board the shipwrecked MV Alta.

The crews were "monitoring the fire ensuring there is no danger to the public".

The council added: "There are no reports of any casualties and fire crews will continue the monitor situation in this difficult to access location.

"An Garda Siochana and the Irish Coastguard are also in attendance and the public are asked to avoid the area while the emergency services deal with this incident."

The public has been urged not to attempt to gain access to the wreck "which has been further damaged by the fire and is in an unsafe condition".

The MV Alta ran aground near Ballyandreen, just west of Ballycotton, during Storm Dennis in February 2020, and was first spotted by a jogger.

An operation to lift nearly 100 oil drums from the ship followed days later.

All entrances to and from the site, which is on private land at Ballyandreen, near Ballycotton, were sealed off with security guards.

The drums were discovered on board the 77m MV Alta when Cork County Council engineers and contractors first boarded the ship.

Two units of @corkcountyfire are currently in attendance at the scene of a fire on board the shipwrecked MV Alta. Fire Crews are currently monitoring the fire ensuring there is no danger to the public. There are no reports of any casualties. pic.twitter.com/powfQlG1S7  Cork County Council (@Corkcoco) April 29, 2021

Since the ship ran aground, it has been a destination for sightseers. One of the first groups of people to board the ship released a video online last year.

Among the clips available, one showed the ships cluttered wheelhouse, which was dry but strewn with perfectly preserved files, documents, and other items.

Two forklift trucks were among machinery seen aboard the ship.

News of the fire comes just a week after the Irish Examiner reported that a recent video of young people exploring the ship emerged.

Read More Cork ghost ship goes viral as people told to steer clear of wreck

Several people have uploaded videos of themselves exploring the wreck.

One viral video on TikTok has received over 831,000 views and almost 125,000 likes.

TikTok has even attached a warning to one of the videos, saying the actions in this video could result in serious injury or adverse health effects".

Built in 1976, the Tanzania-flagged Alta was sailing from Greece to Haiti in September 2018 when it became disabled about 2,220km south-east of Bermuda.

The 10 crew members were rescued by the US coast guard and brought to Puerto Rico.

It is believed the ship was then towed to Guyana but later hijacked a number of times.

In September 2019 it was reported that the UK Royal Navy's Devonport-based HMS Protector had come across the ship in the Mid-Atlantic.
MIAMI, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GoldConnect, a leading wholesale telecommunications provider in Latin America and the Caribbean, announce a strategic partnership with SONDA, a Latin America based leading IT service provider with over 45 years of experience providing an integral supply of IT services and solutions.

"This distinctive partnership with SONDA represents an important move for GoldConnect to further expand our IT capabilities with complex IT solutions for our LATAM clients. SONDA's extensive experience with their leading data center network and ability to structure mission critical IT solutions affords GoldConnect a new set of tools to enhance our connectivity portfolio," says Justo Valladares, CEO of GoldConnect.

Under the terms of the agreement, GoldConnnect will use SONDA's Data Center network throughout the LATAM region and SONDA will count on GoldConnect's state-of-the-art network infrastructure to support their international connectivity requirements.

"The partnership with GoldConnect is important for Sonda, given our strategy of expanding services in Latin America. We recently added our fifth regional data center named "KUDOS", with Tier IV Certification. Together, GoldConnect and SONDA will offer integral solutions that provide competitive advantages for companies with global operations," says Raul Sapunar, Managing Director of SONDA Chile.

About GoldConnect

GoldConnect is a leading telecommunications provider with a presence in 17 countries in Latin America and The Caribbean. With more than 20 years of delivering network solutions to corporate clients and global carriers, GoldConnect relies on its fully-owned award-winning network infrastructure and extensive partnerships to provide Network Solutions, Cloud Connection, Network Security and Data Center services in more than 33 countries in the region. For more information, please visit www.goldconnect.com.

About SONDA

SONDA is the leading Information Technology (IT) services network in Latin America with nearly 45 years of doing business, with presence in 10 countries in the region and more than 13,000 employees.

SONDA is known for providing an integral supply of IT services, for having a vision of being technology ally in projects, and for having a solid financial position. All these attributes allows it to offer solutions aligned to the business strategies of its customers.

For more information, visit https://www.sonda.com

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GoldConnect

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+1.866.695.3629

SONDA

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EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County Clerk Debbie Ming-Mendoza on Wednesday announced that she will seek a third term in 2022.

Since taking over as clerk in 2012 it has been my goal to provide excellent services to the county while holding the line on the spending, she said. And my team and I have accomplished that while taking on even more responsibilities.

With the combination of the Madison County Recorders Office into the clerks office this year, Ming-Mendoza said she and her team have established a funding method less reliant on the countys general fund, resulting in a savings to taxpayers. Her office also has also worked to increase access to voters and address a declining number of people wishing to be election judges.

Im so very proud of our efforts to ensure access to voting for all residents that ensure fair and free elections, she said. It really is my passion.

It has been my great pleasure and privilege to serve the people of Madison County these last eight years as clerk, and I look forward to the opportunity serve four more years, said Ming-Mendoza.

State Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, said Ming-Mendoza helped her craft House Bill 1871 that expanded voting access throughout Illinois. Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill in early April.

Debbie was instrumental in offering advice on the legislation that we passed last year and is dedicated to ensuring free and fair elections, said Stuart. There is no better clerk in Illinois at running elections and Im proud to support Debbie in her re-election efforts.

State Sen. Rachelle Crowe, D-Glen Carbon, stated that under Ming-Mendoza Madison County now offers some of the best run elections in the state.

Ming-Mendoza and her husband, Mercie, live in Granite City. They have two grandchildren from her son, Richard, and daughter-in-law, Jeana, who also live in Granite City.
[April 29, 2021] Insights from ABC Business Conference 2021: Germany Will See Explosive Growth in the Smart Home Market

DUSSELDORF, Germany, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tuya Smart (NYSE: TUYA), a leading global IoT cloud platform today held the final event in the virtual conference series, The AI+IoT Business Conference Europe. This event, focusing on the German smart home market, is the final in a ten-part series on the European smart home market. The conference invited industry experts to share their insights in virtual presentations. The previous nine events focused on Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, France, Britain, Greece, and Turkey. Henry Sun, Regional Director of Central Europe, Eurasia from Tuya Smart, provided two pieces of data in his speech: a new research report published by MarketsandMarkets shows that the European smart home marketsize is expected to grow to USD 39.6 billion by 2025. Secondly, according to Dr. Jeremiah Lasquety-Reyes, a digital market analyst focusing on e-services, smart home technologies, and IoT, the revenue of the smart home market in Germany is expected to reach USD 9,644 million in 2025.



Sven Buschmann, Business Director from Tuya GmbH, shared his view that the smart home market is growing but there are still challenges around security and data protection, B2B overhead cost and interconnection between equipment. Bjorn Nahler, Head of Business Development at Wesmartify, a German smart home startup, indicated in his presentation that the real advantage of smart home products is that users can connect different devices in the home to provide additional value to the user. However, the connections of many smart home systems now are not established automatically by the system, but must be done manually by the user.

Gunther Ohland, Chairman of the Board at SmartHome Initiative Deutschland e.V., shared the results of a survey in his speech revealing that 40% of Germans use at least one smart home app, and that 38% are interested in the smart home. He suggests manufacturers of smart home products focus on these two groups and strive to address their needs. Jorg Heinemann, Principal, Innovation & Digitalization at OTTO, a German e-commerce company, demonstrated a day in the life of a smart home in his presentation and showed how smart products can greatly enhance the daily needs of consumers, making their home life safer and more convenient. To view the conference presentations, please register at https://www.tuya.com/event/abc/eur SOURCE Tuya Smart

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Now in its third year, this vital program offers faculty teaching at two-year colleges support for research, pedagogy, and community engagement projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is thrilled to name 28 new Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellows for 2021.

Now in its third year, this vital program offers faculty teaching at two-year colleges support for research, pedagogy, and community engagement projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The program is made possible by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This year, 28 scholars will each receive up to $40,000 to advance their respective projects, which significantly expand humanistic study and knowledge. The fellows will also participate in a convening hosted by ACLS to build their cohort, share work in progress, and discuss wider issues related to the humanities in community colleges and the impact of COVID-19.

Community colleges are invaluable sites for deep student engagement with the humanities, with over one-third of the nation's undergraduates enrolled, said ACLS President Joy Connolly. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, we are pleased to announce the third cohort of Community College Faculty Fellows, who bring mission-driven pedagogy and critical humanistic research to diverse student bodies and communities across the country.

This diverse cohort of fellows, more than 60% of whom identify as scholars of color, represent 21 community colleges around the country, and their supported projects encompass a wide range of disciplines, topics, and methodologies. Projects include:



A study of visual narratives in North Africas Amazigh cinema

An oral history examining how restaurants and food markets shape the social, economic, and political development of Asian communities in Dallas

An analysis of narrative structures used by authors during diverse epidemics in Colonial Mexico as a means of narrating hope in difficult times

The creation of an undergraduate textbook about the anthropology of human space exploration

A series of public programs at the Weeksville Heritage Center telling the histories of abolitionists in Brooklyn and the 19th-century free Black community that shaped its streets and neighborhoods.

Learn more about the 2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellows and their projects at this link.

Formed in 1919, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 78 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good. As such, ACLS strives to promote the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society. In addition to stewarding and representing its member organizations, ACLS employs its $140 million endowment and $35 million annual operating budget to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and to advocate for the centrality of the humanities in the modern world.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nations largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
An alarming new spike in Covid cases within the hotel quarantine system has sparked fears the virus cannot be contained within the facilities and will seep out into the community.

Fifteen new cases were recorded in NSW's hotel quarantine facilities in the 24 hours to 8pm on Wednesday, while in the past four days 44 new infections have been detected in returned travellers.

Eight cases were recorded on Monday, 12 on Tuesday, and nine on Wednesday.

The spike comes amid worries that India's 'double mutant' strain will produce cases that will overwhelm the ad-hoc hotel quarantine system and breakout into cities.

India's Covid crisis has reached catastrophic levels with 379,459 cases and 3647 deaths recorded on Wednesday.

The total Covid death numbers for the country has reached 204,812 but these figures are the official toll, and there's doubts they accurately reflect the true extent of the crisis.

In the last four days, 44 new infections have been detected in returned travellers quarantining in hotels across New South Wales (pictured, defence personnel outside Melbourne Airport)

Eight cases were recorded on Monday, 12 on Tuesday, and Wednesday saw nine new infections (pictured, a traveller entering hotel quarantine)

Hotel quarantine facilities in South Australia have also seen a big jump in cases, recording 14 new infections on Monday and nine on Friday.

The Northern Territory recorded 27 cases from overseas travellers over Friday, Saturday and Monday - with 24 of those having arrived on flights from India.

The sudden surge in numbers of active cases in hotel quarantine has prompted renewed calls by experts for built-for-purpose quarantine centres to be quickly established.

Professor of International Health at the Burnet Institute, Michael Toole, urged health authorities to move quarantine out of city hotels.

'It's now time to invest in similar facilities in every state and territory. Quarantine is our first line of defence against the virus,' he wrote in The Conversation today.

'It needs to be 100 per cent effective to maintain our hard-earned status of having zero community COVID cases.

'Given the rate of quarantine leaks during the past six months, without improvements, the system will likely see over a dozen more leaks by October, causing frequent disruptions to our lives. The impact on the economy and public confidence will be immeasurable.'

Dr David Berger, an emergency flying doctor who practices in Lightning Ridge, NSW, published a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia last week which called for regional worker camps to be used instead of high-rise hotels.

His paper says that between November and mid January 'approximately 1 in 200 hotel quarantine cases led to infections outside the system' causing outbreaks in Sydney, Melbourne Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth.

Discussing his paper on 2GB radio, Dr Berger said: 'Almost all of those are variants. This virus is airborne. There is no documented case of transmission from contact such as lift buttons or surfaces. It can be transmitted over significant distances and ventilation is critical to this.

India recorded more than 360,000 new coronavirus cases and 3293 deaths over the past 24 hours, pushing the nation's total death toll to over 200,000. Pictured: A Covid victim is

About 9000 Australians in India now face the reality of no flights home until May 15, but the government has promised a review ahead of that time

'Unfortunately these hotels that we're using were never designed for people to be cooped up in them for two weeks with no opening windows.

'They have gaps under the doors, the ventilation is not designed to be infectious disease proof. They're just not suitable. These facilities are just not designed for it.'

He said the quarantine system needs a total overhaul, adding: 'We need to move to a situation where we have air-gapped quarantine like they do in the Northern Territory. Australia is full of mining camps and such like.

'It is not beyond the wit of Australia to establish mini caravan parks or mining camps close to major cities, where they can have access to fresh air and there is zero risk of cross contamination.

'Until we do that we are not going to be safe. We are going to have to pause travel and get better facilities.'

State leaders have also expressed concerns about the increasing number of cases coming from India into Australia.

Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan said he's 'very concerned about India' and feared the quarantine system would not be able to cope.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government has promised to do all it can to help the thousands of Australians stranded in India return home once flights restart.

The mass vaccination centre in Homebush in Sydney's west is yet to open. It plans to inoculate 30,000 people per week

The Ryde Respiratory Clinic in Sydney's north was empty on Wednesday despite having 300 bookings for the AstraZeneca jab

About 9,000 Australians in India now face the reality of no flights home until May 15, but the Government has promised a review ahead of that time.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison inspected the Howard Springs facility near Darwin on Wednesday, which is being expanded from 800 to 2,000 beds over the next month to take in more overseas arrivals for quarantine.

'What that means is we'll be able to continue to bring our charter aircraft or repatriation flights back into Australia from all around the world,' he told reporters.

'For the next couple of weeks we've had to suspend the flights out of India, but we'll be returning to those flights ... and we'll be continuing to move as many Australians from around the world back to Australia as safely as we possibly can.'

Fears of India's mutant strain leaking into the community come as photos surface showing vaccine centres completely empty despite 300 people being booked in for their jabs.

The vaccination facility in Ryde in Sydney's north had received the bookings on Wednesday but instead next to no one showed up.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to set a date for when every Australian will receive their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine

'If you are looking to be vaccinated the Ryde Respiratory Clinic are operating. They were expecting 300 people a day but it's empty,' a woman posted to a local community page.

'If you are happy to have the AstraZeneca vaccine and are over 50... book!'

Images of the centre show a large empty room full of plastic chairs designed to hold hundreds of people wanting to be vaccinated.

One attendee took his elderly mother to get her shot and ended up receiving the vaccine himself because of how quiet the facility was.

'It was very quiet, operating at about 25% capacity, so they did me as well despite being under 70,' the man said.

'If you're in the district and over 50 you can pretty much walk in this arvo as there are dozens of slots available.'

Dozens of others said their local facilities were also empty and that people over 50-years-old seeking the controversial AstraZeneca jab could easily get an appointment or simply walk in.

Others criticised the vaccination system, saying it 'wasn't really communicated' to locals that they could so easily access it.
HDI Global SE  a Germany-based corporation and the majority shareholder of Vietnamese non-life insurer PVI  has been fined for non-compliance with information disclosure and foreign ownership limit rules

VIR reported that on April 16 the State Securities Commission (SSC) fined HDI Global SE due to non-compliance with information disclosure and violating foreign ownership limit rules.

Specifically, a fine of VND125 million ($5,435) is stipulated in Article 28.2 of Decree No.108/2013/ND-CP dated September 23, 2013 on administrative penalties for violations in the securities market for performing one or more transactions in order to conceal real ownership of a security in order to avoid the obligation to disclose information in accordance with regulations.

The fine imposed on HDI is not a considerable amount. However, the SSCs official decision to require HDI to transfer PVI shares back to their original owners to reduce its ownership ratio has raised tough questions among investors.

In accordance with Article 28.3b of Decree 108, PVI has to comply with the SSC's requirement within 60 days of receiving the decision.

Many investors have asked how HDI will sell these shares and how it will change PVIs management structure.

Currently, the foreign ownership limit in PVI has been raised to 100 per cent, but no single investor is allowed to own more than 50 per cent of the stakes. This raises questions whether HDI will find an insider to negotiate the number of shares that it must sell.

The story of HDI's acquisition of PVI was also mentioned by a German newswire, Handelsblatt Today.

Insurer HDI Global is facing unexpected legal problems due to its business expansion strategy in Asia. The subsidiary of the Talanx Group has been trying for years to bolster its influence in PVI - one of the largest insurance groups in Vietnam. However, regulators in the Southeast Asian country are now accusing the Hanover-based company of using unfair approach, Handelsblatt Today noted. In this particular case, the question is whether HDI has raised its stake in the Vietnamese insurer to more than 50 per cent in the former state-owned PVI in an inadmissible manner. From the point of view of the Vietnamese financial regulator SSC, HDI's actions have violated local securities law.

Jens Holger Wohlthat, member of the Board of Management of HDI Global SE, Hannover, also the chair of PVI's board for 2017-2022 tenure, effective since January 16, 2020

On the other hand, HDI remains adamant that its investment in Vietnam is strictly compliant with Vietnamese regulations.

HDI confirms that its compliance with the local laws always remains its priority. HDI affirms that with respect to HDI's investment activities in Vietnam, prior to making any transactions, the company always reviews and assesses the local regulations, to ensure that HDI's investments in Vietnam are strictly compliant with Vietnamese regulations, a representative of HDI Global SE previously said. HDI has transparently provided its explanations and has been working closely with the SSC as well as other Vietnamese agencies regarding issues presented in OL 4513 and OL 5106 of the SSC within the required period by the SSC. HDI is convinced that we have complied fully with the laws and regulations of Vietnam and we intend to vigorously defend this position.

HDI trusts that the Vietnamese Government will provide judicious guidance to ensure the stability and legal safety for the investment activities of HDI in particular and those of foreign investors in general. HDI once again is committed to working closely with the Government of Vietnam, and especially with Vietnam Oil and Gas Group, to ensure that the relationship is effective and constructive, thus ensuring a significant contribution to the good trade relations between Vietnam and the Federal Republic of Germany, the representative replied in an email response to VIR.
[April 29, 2021] Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas Reports First Quarter 2021 Operating Results

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (Bank) today reported net income of $47.9 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. In comparison, for the quarters ended December 31, 2020 and March 31, 2020, the Bank reported net income of $32.5 million and $51.6 million, respectively. Total assets at March 31, 2021 were $61.1 billion, compared with $64.9 billion at December 31, 2020. The $3.8 billion decrease in total assets for the first quarter was attributable primarily to decreases in the Bank's advances ($6.9 billion), long-term investments ($0.6 billion) and mortgage loans held for portfolio ($0.2 billion), partially offset by an increase in its short-term liquidity holdings ($3.8 billion). Advances totaled $25.6 billion at March 31, 2021, compared with $32.5 billion at December 31, 2020. The Bank's mortgage loans held for portfolio totaled $3.2 billion at March 31, 2021, as compared to $3.4 billion at December 31, 2020. The carrying value of the Bank's long-term held-to-maturity securities portfolio, which is comprised substantially of U.S. agency residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS), totaled $0.8 billion at March 31, 2021 compared to $0.9 billion at December 31, 2020. The carrying value of the Bank's long-term available-for-sale securities portfolio, which is comprised substantially of U.S. agency debentures and U.S. agency commercial MBS, totaled $16.3 billion at March 31, 2021, as compared to $16.8 billion at December 31, 2020. At March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, the Bank also held a $0.1 billion long-term U.S. Treasury Note classified as trading. The Bank's short-term liquidity holdings are typically comprised of overnight interest-bearing deposits, overnight federal funds sold, overnight reverse repurchase agreements, U.S. Treasury Bills, U.S. Treasury Notes and, from time to time, may also include cash held at the Federal Reserve. At March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, the Bank's short-term liquidity holdings totaled $14.8 billion and $11.0 billion, respectively. The Bank's retained earnings increased to $1.452 billion at March 31, 2021 from $1.408 billion at December 31, 2020. On March 30, 2021, a dividend of $3.9 million was paid to the Bank's shareholders. Additional selected financial data as of and for the quarter ended March 31, 2021 (and, for comparative purposes, as of December 31, 2020, and for the quarters ended December 31, 2020 and March 31, 2020) is set forth below. Further discussion and analysis regarding the Bank's results will be included in its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2021 to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 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, which was created by Congress in 1932. The Bank is a member-owned cooperative that supports housing and community development by providing competitively priced loans (known as advances) and other credit products to approximately 800 members and associated institutions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. For more information, visit the Bank's website at fhlb.com.







Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas Selected Financial Data As of and For the Quarter Ended March 31, 2021 (Unaudited, in thousands) March 31, 2021 December 31, 2020 Selected Statement of Condition Data: Assets Investments (1) $ 25,187,292 $ 25,660,696 Advances 25,621,279 32,478,944 Mortgage loans held for portfolio, net 3,206,790 3,422,686 Cash and other assets (2) 7,098,415 3,350,200 Total assets $ 61,113,776 $ 64,912,526 Liabilities Consolidated obligations Discount notes $ 13,336,683 $ 22,171,296 Bonds 41,776,784 37,112,721 Total consolidated obligations 55,113,467 59,284,017 Mandatorily redeemable capital stock 6,811 13,864 Other liabilities 2,273,704 2,057,760 Total liabilities 57,393,982 61,355,641 Capital Capital stock - putable 2,008,260 2,101,380 Retained earnings 1,452,202 1,408,245 Total accumulated other comprehensive income 259,332 47,260 Total capital 3,719,794 3,556,885 Total liabilities and capital $ 61,113,776 $ 64,912,526 Total regulatory capital (3) $ 3,467,273 $ 3,523,489

For the For the For the Quarter Ended Quarter Ended Quarter Ended March 31, 2021 December 31, 2020 March 31, 2020 Selected Statement of Income Data: Net interest income (4) (5) $ 80,055 $ 74,831 $ 45,592 Other income (loss) (1,576) 107 35,390 Other expense 25,287 38,869 23,668 AHP assessment 5,319 3,607 5,734 Net income $ 47,873 $ 32,462 $ 51,580 (1) Investments consist of interest-bearing deposits, securities purchased under agreements to resell, federal funds sold, trading securities, available-for-sale securities and held-to-maturity securities. (2) At March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, the Bank's cash and other assets included excess cash of $6.9 billion and $3.1 billion, respectively, that was held at the Federal Reserve. (3) As of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, total regulatory capital represented 5.67 percent and 5.43 percent, respectively, of total assets as of those dates. (4) Net interest income is net of the provision for mortgage loan losses. (5) The Bank records hedge ineffectiveness associated with fair value hedging relationships in net interest income in accordance with the provisions of ASU 2017-12, "Targeted Improvements to Accounting for Hedging Activities." During the quarters ended March 31, 2021, December 31, 2020 and March 31, 2020, fair value hedge ineffectiveness increased (reduced) net interest income by $19.464 million, $7.856 million and $(36.890) million, respectively. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005932/en/

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 14:33:09|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

- - - -

PHNOM PENH -- A plane carrying the third batch of China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia Wednesday night.

"The arrival of the vaccine today is another testament to the unbreakable iron-clad friendship between Cambodia and China," Cambodia's Health Ministry secretary of state Yok Sambath told reporters while receiving the vaccine at the Phnom Penh International Airport.

- - - -

MANILA -- The Philippines received an additional batch of the Sinovac CoronaVac vaccine from China on Thursday morning, allowing the Southeast Asian country to continue its vaccination drive.

Carlito Galvez, chief implementer of the country's fight against COVID-19, said the government expects the rest of the vaccines it purchased from Sinovac could be delivered within this year.

- - - -

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia -- Beijing Jiaotong University of China and the University of Malaysia Pahang signed an agreement on Wednesday on the offering of dual degree programs related to railway to jointly cultivate Malaysian talents in the field.

According to the Memorandum of Agreement signed between the two universities, three railway related programs of dual bachelor's degrees will be offered initially, including civil engineering, mechanical/vehicle engineering as well as electrical engineering. The tuition fee would be covered by Malaysia's Public Service Department.

- - - -

BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Wednesday reported 20 new COVID-19 cases, all of which were imported, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Thursday.

Of all the cases, 11 were reported in Zhejiang, five in Shanghai, and one each in Shanxi, Hubei, Guangdong and Sichuan.

- - - -

BUENOS AIRES -- Argentina's Ministry of Health on Wednesday reported 23,718 new COVID-19 infections and 348 more deaths in the last day, with a total of 2,928,890 cases and 62,947 deaths.

The country's Minister of Security Sabina Frederic and Secretary of Justice and Security of Buenos Aires Marcelo D'Alessandro agreed on "greater control of terminal station entrances and different transfer centers" in the capital city in response to the new wave of infections. Enditem
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Congressional Democrats argue people paying federal taxes should have federal representation, so the District of Columbia should be a state. Seems fair.

Congressional Republicans say Democrats just want two more senators  D.C. voter registration is 76 percent Democratic, 6 percent Republican  to improve their tenuous Senate control. And you know they do.

Democrats could say, Yeah, well, Republicans grabbed four Senators by making the Dakota Territory two states back in 1889.
Air pollution in the UK is at the lowest since records began, according to official Government statistics.

Three of the most problematic pollutants  nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10)  dropped to all-time low levels last year due to lockdown.

These pollutants are spewed out in high levels by engines, industry, wood-burning stoves and farming.

Air pollution is being increasingly linked to poor health, such as asthma, mental illness and even death.

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Three of the most problematic pollutants  nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10)  dropped to all-time low concentrations last year in the UK. Pictured, the level of PM2.5 since records began in 2009 for urban areas (purple) and by roads (red)

Air pollution in the UK is at the lowest levels since records began, according to official Government statistics (stock)

DEFRA says the year-on-year drop in nitrogen dioxide levels is largely down to a decrease in emissions due to lockdown and lower than normal road traffic.

Levels of the gas, which can cause respiratory distress and asthma, in urban areas dropped by almost a quarter (23 per cent) in 2020.

'In 2020, concentrations of NO2 at the roadside were consistently lower than the average of the previous three years,' DEFRA said in its report.

'However, this difference was greatest between the months of April and May, inclusive.

'It is likely that a reduction in road traffic as a result of COVID-19 restrictions was a large contributing factor to reductions in NO2 during this period.'

Urban background emission levels in the UK Pollutant UK 2020 figure (g/m3) UK 2019 figure (g/m3) WHO recommended limit (g/m3) EU recommended limit (g/m3) PM10 13.2 15.0 20 40 PM2.5 7.9 9.9 10 25 Nitrogen dioxide 15.1 19.6 40 40 Ozone 64.4 61.2 100 120

For PM2.5 - tiny particles smaller than 2.5microns wide which can infiltrate a person's lungs - lockdown also triggered a decline.

The average annual figure for 2020 was 7.9 micrograms per cubic metre of air (g/m3), down significantly from the 9.9g/m3 figure for 2019.

Britain still abides by the air quality guidelines first set out by the European Commission, which sets the limit for the annual average at 25g/m3.

However, campaigners are increasingly urging the UK government to subscribe to the more stringent guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO figure of 10g/m3 for PM2.5 is much lower than that used by Europe.

A UK Government spokesperson said: 'These statistics show progress has been made in improving air quality since 2010  emissions of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) have fallen by nine per cent, while emissions of nitrogen oxides have fallen by 33 per cent and are at their lowest level since records began.

'However we know there is more to do as we build back greener from the coronavirus pandemic.

'Through our landmark Environment Bill we have committed to setting at least two ambitious new air quality targets, with a primary focus on reducing public health impacts.

'One of these will be a new concentration target on PM2.5 - the most damaging pollutant to human health - and as part of this we will be considering the World Health Organisation's guidelines for PM2.5.'

PM10, larger particles which pose less of a health risk to people, dropped from 15g/m3 in urban areas in 2019 to 13.2g/m3 last year  a 12 per cent drop (pictured)

Pictured, a graph showing three measures of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant primarily produced by engines and the burning of fossil fuels. The urban background annual average (purple) dropped by almost a quarter (23 per cent) in 2020

Ozone (O3) levels increased slightly in urban areas (purple), likely as a side effect of nitrogen dioxide emissions decreasing. Ozone is not produced in notable amounts by human activities, but instead is formed when various other emissions react in the atmosphere

Air pollution increases the risk of several conditions, including heart attack, stroke and diabetes

Air pollution increases children's risk of mental health conditions in adulthood Children who grow up in cities with dirty air and high levels of air pollution are more likely to suffer mental health issues as adults, a study has found. Researchers say the detrimental impact of a toxic atmosphere is similar to that of lead exposure. Pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and small carbon particles, called PM2.5, are spewed out by engines, industry, wood-burning stoves and farming. These chemicals are increasingly being linked to health concerns such as asthma, an inhibited immune system and decreased lung damage, with around 36,000 deaths in England every year linked to air pollution. Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina studied several decades of data from a study on more than 2,000 Britons and looked at how the levels of pollution affected mental health. They found a link between childhood exposure and mental illness at age 18. Study author Aaron Reuben, a graduate student in clinical psychology, says the data reveals a modest, but clear, association. Advertisement

A major contributor of PM2.5 is wood-burning stoves, a fashionable way of heating for the middle classes, and this is reflected in emissions.

'PM2.5 pollution tends to peak in spring, the winter months, and in the evening, although there are many pollution sources,' DEFRA says.

'Burning of wood and coal by households in stoves and open fires is a large contributor to emissions of particulate matter both in the UK and across Europe, and is most common in winter months and during the evenings.'

A combination of mild temperatures, brisk winds and lockdown in the first half of 2020 saw PM2.5 emissions fall substantially below historical levels but emissions returned to expected levels from July onwards.

PM10, larger particles which pose less of a health risk to people, dropped from 15g/m3 in 2019 to 13.2g/m3 last year  a 12 per cent drop.

However, ozone (O3) levels increased slightly in urban areas, likely as a side effect of nitrogen dioxide emissions decreasing.

Ozone is not produced in notable amounts by human activities, but instead is formed when various other emissions react in the atmosphere.

For example, the oxygen atoms in nitrogen dioxide can react with sunlight and this can create ozone at ground level.

It is a gas which is damaging to human health and can trigger inflammation of the respiratory tract, eyes, nose and throat as well as asthma attacks.

'Between 2019 and 2020 there was a statistically significant increase of 3.2 g/m3 (five per cent) to 64.4 g/m3, the highest value in the time series,' DEFRA said.

But despite the levels being the highest since records began, the figure is still well within the safe limits laid out by by both Europe and the WHO.

Michael Lewis, E.ON UK CEO, said: 'Poor air quality is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, and while today's report provides some good news, there is still much more progress that needs to be made over the coming years and we all have a role to play in that.

'We are in a key decade of change for both air quality and the climate crisis, and progress must accelerate if we are to reach our shared goals of net zero by 2050.'
OnePlus is doing great in Europe, it seems, as its sales are up by 388%. This information has been revealed by the Head of Strategy at OnePlus Europe, Tuomas Lampen, during an interview with Android Authority.

Just to be clear, these stats are for the European Union, so the countries that are a part of it. OnePlus does ship its phones to most European countries, but not all of them. The stats are from the first quarter of this year, by the way, in comparison to the same period in 2020.

OnePlus is doing great in Europe, its sales are up by 388% in the EU

Not only are the companys sales up by 388% in Europe, but the revenue soared by 286% as well. It is mainly driven by strong sales of the companys flagship smartphones.

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Premium smartphones accounted for 65-percent of total EU revenue in Q1 2021, it has been revealed. The OnePlus Nord probably took a piece of the pie for itself as well, from the remaining 35-percent.

Whats interesting here, is that the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro pre-orders kicked off in the final week of Q1 2021. So, these numbers are mainly for the OnePlus 8, 8 Pro, and 8T, quite probably. Wed guessed the OnePlus 8T above everything else, though, having in mind its release date.

Some OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro sales may be included, though, as its possible quite a few people did get them in that last week of March. It will be interesting to see Q2 stats, thats for sure.

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Mr. Lampen was also asked about the chip shortage issues. He said that such problems should not affect OnePlus, as hes confident about the companys European supply. He does not expect any issues in the near future.

The company has seen amazing growth in India as well

Europe is not the only place where OnePlus soared, the same happened in India as well. The company grew more than 300-percent YoY (Year-over-Year) in Q1 2021, according to Counterpoint.
The Journey Back: An Isolated Road from Addiction to Redemption: a poignant example of faith and determination. The Journey Back: An Isolated Road from Addiction to Redemption is the creation of published author Lesley A. Victoria, a resident of Pennsylvania and loving mother.

An excerpt from the book shares, This book depicts the story of Lesleys journey from the depths of darkness and into the light of a forgiving and gracious God. This is not intended to be a self-help book, but rather a story of hope and forgiveness; hope for better days beyond addiction, and forgiveness to oneself for past mistakes and missteps.

The reader will learn of Lesleys struggles from a raging drug addiction to the shock of a cancer diagnosis, followed by a massive stroke which resulted in the paralysis of her left side. This book depicts the on-going physical struggles Lesley experiences daily, but it also illustrates the numerous and awe-inspiring epiphanies which have brought her back into Gods grace.

The Journey Back is a triumph over the demons that have always remained one step behind, sometimes appearing perilously close. Lesleys story has been written to help others who are living inside the black hole of addiction, know that there is healing Light waiting on the other side.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Lesley A. Victorias new book is a testimony of strength and faith through addiction, stroke, and paralysis.

Through an emotional retelling, the author takes readers through a series of difficult moments in hopes of inspiring others to seek a close relationship with Jesus and find solace in his love.

View a synopsis of The Journey Back: An Isolated Road from Addiction to Redemption on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase The Journey Back: An Isolated Road from Addiction to Redemption at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about The Journey Back: An Isolated Road from Addiction to Redemption, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
HEALTH

THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES

By Suzanne O'Sullivan (Picador 16.99, 336pp)

When one child falls into a mystery coma, its something to worry about. But 169 of them, all in a small geographical area, over several years?

This happened in Sweden in the last decade. The children initially became anxious and depressed. They stopped playing with others. They spoke less and less, and then not at all. Finally, they took to their beds. If they entered the deepest stage, they could no longer eat or open their eyes.

And yet there was nothing apparently wrong with them. Every test came back as normal. According to their brainwave readings, the children were actually awake. And yet no one could wake them. Some of them have now been in this state for several years.

Suzanne O'Sullivan has explored the science between children of asylum seekers in Sweden falling into a mystery coma which doctors called 'Resignation Syndrome'. O'Sullivan studied the children closely and concluded the illness was psychosomatic

A mystery, then, and science writer Suzanne OSullivan, who is also an eminent neurologist, sets her scene nicely. All 169 of these children are the offspring of asylum seekers, and each family had had their application for asylum rejected. Whats doubly strange is that all these asylum seekers were Yazidis, from war-torn Syria.

None of the African children in a similar situation, for example, were affected.

Nor were Yazidi children in countries other than Sweden. Doctors have christened this resignation syndrome. But if no disease is present and theres nothing actually wrong with the children, what on earth is going on?

Having studied the children closely, OSullivan concluded that their illness was psychosomatic. This is a term with a poor reputation  many people assume it means faked or purely imagined. For this reason, doctors and psychologists have started using the term functional disorders, which means absolutely nothing to most people. Which may be the idea, of course.

But OSullivan argues, convincingly, that psychosomatic illnesses are every bit as real to the sufferer as more easily identifiable diseases. No one is forcing those children to stay in bed for several years. They havent decided to be ill. In Sweden, the authorities thought their parents had put them up to it, but you would only need to spend five minutes with the parents to know that wasnt true.

THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES By Suzanne O'Sullivan (Picador 16.99, 336pp)

OSullivans thesis is that resignation syndrome is influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology.

In Sweden, for instance, asylum seekers were initially welcomed with open arms. But, gradually, the national mood changed, immigration became a hot political issue, and asylum seekers who might have been given the official thumbs up five years ago were now being turned down.

From a feeling of security, possibly the first they had ever known, to absolute terror about the future: how would you react to that? The children, without ever consciously being aware of what they were doing, have downed tools and taken to their beds. The body, writes OSullivan, is the mouthpiece of the mind.

This was one young boys experience while asleep: He had felt as if he were in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, he thought, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter. The water would pour in and kill me, he said.

This is the first of eight chapters in which OSullivan travels the world and investigates other mysterious outbreaks of unexplainable medical disorders.

This was one young boys experience while asleep: He had felt as if he were in a glass box... deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, he thought, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter. The water would pour in and kill me, he said.

OSullivan argues, convincingly, that psychosomatic illnesses are every bit as real to the sufferer as more easily identifiable diseases. No one is forcing those children to stay in bed for several years. They havent decided to be ill

In each case, when she discovers the cause, its never a physical thing, its always an unusual circumstance in the lives of the sufferers.

I was reminded of Sherlock Holmess deathless advice: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I read somewhere else recently that in about 37 per cent of cases GPs in the UK have literally no idea what is wrong with their patients.

Do we overtrust doctors? OSullivan, as a neurologist, is obviously batting for the home side, but her book suggests that their thinking is often too narrow, too mechanistic, to solve every problem that arises. Here is an alternative but equally rigorously scientific approach. It makes for a bracing read, a little like a cold shower on a hot summers day.
Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust and Mr. Holders counterpart, said the gaps between the census projections and the final numbers raised suspicion about the figures and could diminish trust in the census, and in government in general. Arizona, Florida and Texas each received one House seat fewer than had been anticipated, and Minnesota, New York and Rhode Island each received one more seat than had been expected.

The Census Bureau, Mr. Kincaid said, has not been transparent about why its projections were off by so much in those states.

Its injecting more uncertainty into an already uncertain process, Mr. Kincaid said in an interview Wednesday. At a time when overall American faith and confidence in the government is low, this census is only going to exacerbate that.

The bureau said last October that it had accounted for 99.7 percent of the nations housing units.

Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said that if the lower-than-expected gains in border states were the result of large undercounts, especially among Latinos, the Hispanic populations would be harmed. What youre going to see is a decrease in representation for those communities and a decrease in funding for those communities, he said. That makes it easier for Republicans to draw favorable maps for themselves in those states.

Because the counting process was delayed by snags in the data-processing effort, the Census Bureau will not release race and ethnicity data until September. Once those figures have been reported, legislatures and commissions will be able to begin drawing boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts, a crucial political process that is the center of persistent partisan acrimony because it can determine the balance of power in Congress.

The results may be a high-stakes example of states getting what they paid for.

Arizona, Florida and Texas all had census self-response rates below the national average, which was 67 percent, according to the Census Bureau. California, which spent $187 million on a campaign to encourage its residents to complete the census forms and has the largest Hispanic population in the country, had a self-response rate of 70 percent. Still, the state lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Minnesota, which led the nation in self-response rate at 75 percent, started its campaign five years early, building a coalition of more than 300 organizations and local governments that contacted more than 1.3 million people  about 23 percent of the states population.
Shahid Kapoor To Turn Producer With A Netflix Trilogy Adapted From Amish Tripathi's Book, To Also Act In It?

Shahid Kapoor has been hitting the ball out of the park for some years now. The actor, who has quite a few films lined up for release, is all set to make his digital debut soon. In fact, he has been shooting for the same in Goa. Reports had also been doing the rounds that he would turn a producer soon and bring out three OTT projects. Now, there seem to be some details available on this.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Shahid Kapoor (@shahidkapoor)

Well, the three projects that were earlier being talked about look to be interconnected. According to Bollywood Hungama, Shahid will be producing a trilogy for Netflix and it would be an adaptation of Amish Tripathi's war trilogy! A source revealed, "Shahid has been paid to the tune of over Rs. 70-80 crore for a trilogy that he's going to star in. It's a period mythological war saga that will be adapted from Amish Tripathi's novel. Not just that, this will also mark Shahid's foray into production."

So what about the Dingko Singh biopic that was being talked about for long? The same source added, "Shahid was almost kick-starting his own banner with the Dingko Singh biopic but it fell apart. Now, Netflix and he have signed a mutual agreement on this project. It will most likely feature him and is going to be an ambitious period venture designed on the lines of a Baahubali but only for the web. This will also be another mythological project for him after Karna."

Also read: Shahid Kapoor To Venture Into OTT As A Producer, To Bring Out Three Projects?

Whoa, now that sounds exciting! Shahid has wrapped up the shoot of the Jersey remake already and will wrap up Raj and DK's web series soon as well. He would also be a part of Surarai Pottru's Hindi remake that is most likely to be helmed by Ram Madhvani and Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Karna.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to overturn Trump-era rollbacks on Environmental Protection Agency methane regulations.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., led the push for the joint resolution to restore federal methane standards at oil and gas pipelines, wells, and storage facilities.

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When we set clear rules and emission standards, most oil and gas operators are on board with updating their equipment and practices to minimize methane leaks and to bring that gas to market, Heinrich said before the 52-42 vote. Thats their business plan, not wasting methane.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and the main ingredient in natural gas.

Senate passage of the resolution, enabled by a law allowing Congress to overturn rules issued by federal agencies, follows a long battle over the EPAs authority to monitor the pollutant.

The EPA under President Barack Obama in 2012 and 2016 finalized methane monitoring at oil and gas production sites, and transmission infrastructure.

The Trump administration officially repealed the rules in 2020. The EPA cited redundant regulations as reason for the rollback and estimated industry compliance cost savings of up to $19 million a year.

Resolution co-sponsor Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., said it would reinstate commonsense rules that had been gutted.

Time is running out. Greenhouse gas emissions are fueling the climate crisis, and present a real and urgent threat to the health, safety, and well-being of New Mexico families, Lujan said.  Each year, New Mexico loses hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from methane flaring, venting and leaking. The cost of inaction is too great.

Last month, New Mexico banned routine venting and flaring of natural gas, and set gas capture targets for operators.

Environmental groups said the Senate action will help oil-producing states reduce harmful emissions.

New Mexico has an enormous methane emissions problem, which requires the federal government, state agencies and industry take immediate comprehensive action, said Demis Foster, executive director of Conservation Voters New Mexico. (This resolution) is critical to this effort.

The House is expected to vote on the resolution next month.

Theresa Davis is a Report for America corps member covering water and the environment for the Albuquerque Journal.
Some fighters in Burkina Faso are putting their faith in traditional spiritual practices to protect them as attacks linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State ravage the West African nation, killing thousands and displacing more than 1 million people.

Since the jihadist violence broke out, some Dozos - ancient hunters who have been drawn into the jihadist fight - have been working with the army to help protect their country, relying on traditions to keep them safe.

Their deeply rooted traditions holds that plants, animals and ritual objects mixed with verses from holy texts can provide protection before going to battle.

"Many Dozos are participating in the fight against the jihadists with the authorities, with the armed forces, we help them because we are true Burkinabe, true fighters," said Idrissa Cisse, who attended a celebration of Dozo culture in the western city of Bobo-Dioulasso in March.

The ceremony brought new initiates about to receive spiritual protections together with seasoned Dozos who fire guns, dance and parade with a dead leopard draped around their bodies.

The support among the Dozos and their unity is what made Dramane Sanou decide to become part of the group.

"I want to join this group because of their honesty. You must be united as members of the same family, as brothers," he said while waiting for the day of his initiation ceremony.

Philosophy professor and university researcher Jean-Baptiste Sanou said the rituals were linked to the "archaic" human need for protection when faced with violence.

Some people say the practice is rooted in animism, the belief that all things, from rocks and trees to animals and places, have a spirit.

Approximately 15% of Burkina Faso's population identify as animists, according to a report from the International Crisis Group, which says the belief holds considerable weight in the majority Muslim country.

Some religious leaders, though, worry the rituals provide a false sense of security for fighters, many of whom are ill-equipped and lack training.

"They use this (magical protection) because they learned it from their parents. But we are Muslims and Islam forbids us to do that," said Ali Kamena, an imam in the capital.

Fighters in Burkina Faso were reluctant to divulge too much about the process and types of plants used, saying those are kept secret even from family members.

But they explained that one way to become "bulletproof" involves mixing 13 plants, inserting the paste into food and eating it out of a hole in the ground.

The meal is prepared with water that was used to soak a metal arrow for 72 hours  the idea being that since the arrow is metal, a person will be protected from the heat of the bullet if shot.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
New Jersey hospitals ranked 14th safest in the country based on how well they prevented infections, accidents and errors and communicated with their patients, the latest Leapfrog Hospital Safety report card released on Thursday found.

The scores for 68 acute care hospitals  26 As, 26 Bs, 15 Cs and one D  helped New Jersey improve its standing from last fall, when it was 17th best, according to the report. Ten hospitals improved a grade and four hospitals slipped a grade. No hospital flunked. East Orange General Hospital scored the lowest with a D, the report said.

Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston maintained its straight-A streak since the report card began in 2012, the report said. Only 27 hospitals in the country have earned an A in each of the 19 report cards, said Linda Schwimmer, president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, which released the report with Leapfrog.

Schwimmer also noted that University Hospital in Newark, the only public hospital in New Jersey, improved from a D to a C.

Overall, New Jersey improved in our standing nationally in the number of A hospitals in our state, Schwimmer said. We are also pleased to see the state-owned University Hospital improve its grade, which is now a C. We look forward to seeing that improvement continue.

The hospital safety score examines how well patients are protected from errors, injuries and accidents based on 27 data points in categories selected by a national panel of medical experts, the report said. The score also relies on survey responses from patients, who are asked how well doctors and nurses communicated with them about their care and explained their medication and discharge plans, Schwimmer said.

The grade is based on data from 2017 to just before the start of the pandemic in March 2020. Data collected for the next report in the fall will reflect the impact of the coronavirus, the report said.

Stephen P. Zieniewicz, president and CEO of Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, thanked his staff for their continued dedication in providing the best-in class care with both clinical expertise and compassion especially during the immense challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Achieving the top grade 19 times demonstrates the commitment and intentional focus on safety and quality by all physicians and employees of Saint Barnabas Medical Center, Zieniewiczs statement said.

26 hospitals earned an A:

* Bayshore Medical Center, Holmdel;

* Chilton Medical Center, Pompton Plains;

* Community Medical Center, Toms River

* Englewood Hospital and Medical Center;

* Hackensack University Medical Center at Pascack Valley;

* Hunterdon Medical Center, Raritan Township;

* Inspira Medical Center Elmer;

* Inspira Medical Center Vineland;

* Jefferson Cherry Hill Hospital;

* Jefferson Stratford Hospital;

* Jefferson Washington Township Hospital;

* Jersey Shore Medical Center, Neptune;

* Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch;

* Morristown Medical Center;

* Newark Beth Israel Medical Center;

* Newton Medical Center;

* Ocean Medical Center, Brick;

* Overlook Medical Center, Summit;

* Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton;

* Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset, Somerville;

* Saint Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston;

* Saint Clares Hospital of Denville;

* Saint Clares Hospital of Dover;

* Saint Peters University Hospital, New Brunswick;

* Shore Medical Center, Somerset Point;

* St. Lukes Warren Campus, Phillipsburg.

26 hospitals earned a B:

* Cape Regional Medical Center, Cape May Court House;

* CarePoint Health-Bayonne Medical Center;

* CarePoint Health-Christ Hospital, Jersey City;

* CarePoint Health-Hoboken Medical Center;

* Centrastate Medical Center, Freehold;

* Clara Maas Medical Center, Belleville;

* Cooper University Hospital, Camden;

* Hackensack Meridian Health Mountainside Medical Center, Montclair;

* Hackensack Meridian Health Palisades Medical Center, North Bergen;

* Hackensack University Medical Center;

* Holy Name Medical Center, Teaneck;

* Jersey City Medical Center;

* Monmouth Medical Center Southern Medical Center, Lakewood;

* Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, Plainsboro;

* Raritan Bay Medical Center of Old Bridge;

* Raritan Bay Medical Center of Perth Amboy;

* Riverview Medical Center, Red Bank;

* Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, New Brunswick;

* Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital-Rahway;

* St. Marys General Hospital, Passaic;

* Salem Medical Center;

* Saint Michaels Medical Center, Newark;

* Valley Hospital, Ridgewood;

* Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital; Camden;

* Virtua Voorhees Hospital;

* Virtua Willingboro Hospital.

15 hospitals earned a C:

* Atlanticare Regional Medical Center, Atlantic City;

* Atlanticare Regional Medical Center, Pomona;

* Capital Health Medical Center - Hopewell, Pennington;

* Capital Health Regional Medical Center, Trenton;

* Hackettstown Regional Medical Center;

* Hudson Regional Hospital, Secaucus;

* JFK Medical Center, Edison;

* Southern Ocean Medical Center, Manahawkin;

* St. Francis Medical Center, Trenton;

* St. Josephs University Medical Center, Paterson;

* St. Josephs University Medical Center, Wayne;

* Trinitas Regional Medical Center, Elizabeth;

* University Hospital, Newark;

*Virtua Memorial Hospital, Marlton;

* Virtua Memorial Hospital, Mount Holly.

1 hospital earned a D:

* East Orange General Hospital.

Leapfrog is a nonprofit founded by large employers and other health care purchasers 21 years ago to improve safety and patient care and reduce preventable errors. The scores do not measure which hospital provides the most effective treatment, but rather how well each hospital kept its patients safe from preventable harm, like hospital-borne infections, and avoided medical errors, such as by the consistent use of an electronic system to order and track prescriptions.

Their biannual reports released every spring and fall are intended to help consumers comparison-shop, as well as apply public pressure on hospital executives to improve the direct care provided during inpatient stays.

Schwimmer said her organization has brought together hospital executives to compare strategies and help each other improve lagging scores. She credited University Hospitals improving score in part to CEO Shereef Elnahals willingness to seek assistance. Elnahal, the former state Health Commissioner, also sits on the institutes board, Schwimmer said.

Looking at all the measures that have to do with culture and leadership, they are doing quite well. It tells us safety and quality have become a priority. They are focused on it, Schwimmer said.

East Orange General Hospital, owned by Prospect Health, has been stuck in a rut of Ds and Fs, Schwimmer said. In this cycle, the reduction in the number of MRSA infections  medication-resistant staph infections  shows promise, but other hospital-acquired infection rates remain high, she said.

East Orange also scored poorly in patient surveys and for the inconsistent use of bar code and electronic prescribing systems to avoid medication errors, the report said.

It wont change if it not a priority from the top, from the leadership, Schwimmer said.

East Orange General Hospital did not respond to a request seeking comment.

Find the entire report at hospitalsafetygrade.org.

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Correction: Clara Maass Medical Center is located in Belleville, not Pompton Plains.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Rockshield Capital Corp. (CSE: RKS) (OTC Pink: RKSCF) (FSE: 6BC) (the "Company") announces that it intends to renew its normal course issuer bid ("NCIB") through the facilities of the Canadian Securities Exchange. Under the NCIB, the Company intends to acquire up to 4,473,534 common shares (the "Shares") in the capital of the Company, representing approximately 5% of its current public float. As at April 28, 2021, the Company had 89,470,687 common shares issued and outstanding. The normal course issuer bid will commence on April 30, 2021 and end no later than April 30, 2022. The Company may terminate the NCIB earlier if it feels it is appropriate to do so.

The Company has appointed PI Financial Corp. to conduct the NCIB. The purchase and payment of the Shares will be made in accordance with all requirements of the CSE. All price paid for the Shares will be the market price at the time of purchase. All Shares purchased will be cancelled.

The Company is commencing the NCIB because it believes that the current market price of its common shares may not fully reflect the underlying value of the Company's business and future prospects.

ROCKSHIELD CAPITAL CORP.

Rockshield is an investment company primarily focused on high-growth companies in the plant-based, renewal energy, and ESG sectors. The Company has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire 100% of one of Canada's largest pulse crop processors, 100% of Sapientia Technology Corp., a leading plant-technology company with over 25 patents, and 75% of BOKU Superfoods, a plant-based superfoods company. Rockshield's management team has an extensive track record of sourcing, financing, and building successful companies across a broad range of industries and maintains a current investment mandate on the health and wellness industry. The team has financed and invested in early-stage venture companies for over 25 years resulting in unparalleled access to deal-flow and the ability to construct a portfolio of opportunistic investments intended to generate superior risk-adjusted returns.

For further information regarding Rockshield, see Rockshield's disclosure documents on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Contact Information

Rockshield Capital Corp.

Investor Relations

ir@rockshield.ca

The Canadian Securities Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the information contained herein and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82196.
As the 22nd day of a hunger strike in search of relief for undocumented immigrants and excluded workers passed, Gov. Phil Murphy said it was a high priority to find a solution, but still hasnt presented one.

A group of undocumented immigrants and allies gathered on the steps of the War Memorial Wednesday ahead of Murphys twice-weekly press conference to demand relief in the form of $600 weekly unemployment payments and $2,000 checks after being excluded from nearly all coronavirus-related relief funds for over 13 months.

The group of 30 continues fasting to call attention to the hunger excluded workers face as they fall into debt, said Make the Road New Jersey, which is organizing the fast. However, due to critical health concerns and lack of health insurance, most participants are staggering days of strikes or eating small snacks.

For the past year, many of these families have been forced to fast, forced to go to bed hungry, been forced to decide whether they were going to eat or their children were going to eat, said Deya Aldena, lead organizer of Make the Road. This is the reality of immigrant essential workers. What a shame that the state of New Jersey has forgotten about them.

Since Murphy officials proposed the idea of a $40 million fund for undocumented workers  which advocates called insulting  national and local labor leaders including Dolores Huerta and Julian Castro have come out in support of a pot of money for excluded workers.

And while the states Latino Legislative Caucus has vocally supported undocumented workers and urged Murphy to use executive powers to create a fund, much of the states Democratic-controlled Legislature hasnt commented on the weeks-long hunger strike. A bill that would allocate $35 million to tax-paying undocumented workers hasnt been posted for a committee vote since it was introduced in May.

Murphy maintains hes waiting for guidance from the American Rescue Plan and still looking at all other available state and federal options to provide support. He said theres been robust exchanges with the state Legislature.

New York and California, two states with progressive legislatures, were able to allocate state funds to help excluded workers. In New York, where $2.1 billion in state dollars will be used as relief, undocumented immigrants can claim up to $15,600. Other states, including New Mexico and Maryland, expanded stimulus checks to unauthorized residents.

I dont have a window into New York and California, but I do have a window into New Jersey, and were trying our level-best to get folks who have been left out of support, the support they deserve, and that includes undocumented brothers and sisters, Murphy said.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage

I promise folks this is high priority and we will stay on this until we get some resolution, he continued.

That commitment wasnt enough for the hunger strikers, who say theyll keep fasting until Murphy proposes a fund.

Please, Governor, think of all the families. Were not alone. We have kids, we have elders, we have parents who need help, said Raquel, a Make the Road NJ member and faster. Were in a pandemic and everything is difficult.

Undocumented workers account for 6.5% of New Jerseys workforce, and contribute $600 million in annual state and local taxes, and $1.3 billion in unemployment taxes over the past decade, according to a study by Make the Road.

Some Republicans have agreed that aid could be provided to taxpaying residents or families with American-born children But they argue the eligibility requirements should be strict, and debate how much should be set aside when other programs and communities are facing hurdles due to the pandemic.

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Statehouse reporter Matt Arco contributed to this report.

Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz.

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Kathmandu, April 29 : The Nepal government has given a nod to the visit of Bipin Rawat, Indias first Chief of the Defence Staff (CoDS), to the country in his conducive time. A formal invitation will be sent to him through diplomatic and military channels, said Nepali officials.

A Cabinet meeting this week has decided to clear Rawat's visit, Nepal's Information and Communication Minister, Parbat Gurung said, adding that the concerned diplomatic and military channels will fix and arrange the visit. Since Covid pandemic has hit Nepal and restrictions have been imposed in several cities, it is difficult to say when the visit will happen, said officials.

General Rawat is the first sitting Chief of Army Staff (CDS) to be appointed to the top post.

When Rawat was Chief of the Indian Army, he visited Nepal in February 2018 and May 2017.

The present Indian Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane had also visited Nepal in November last year.

Nepal Army through its appropriate channel will fix the date of Rawat's visit, said Gurung. Rawat had expressed interest to visit Nepal once again as he also wants to visit and worship some revered Hindu shrines like Pashupatinath and Muktinath.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
An urgent health alert has been issued after two passengers arriving from a 'red zone' country were allowed to mingle with travellers heading to New Zealand at Brisbane Airport in a major coronavirus breach.

The duo had returned from Covid hotspot Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, on Thursday morning and were then allowed to head to a cafe and a retail outlet at the airport for almost two hours before authorities discovered the breach.

One has since tested positive to the virus.

The passengers were at the airport's Hudson Cafe at the same time almost 400 'green zone' travellers were preparing to fly out to New Zealand.

Brisbane Airport Corporation confirmed on Thursday passengers arriving from 'red zone' country Papua New Guinea were allowed to mix with travellers heading to New Zealand (file image of Brisbane Airport)

The Brisbane Airport Corporation has blamed 'human error' for the breach, with an investigation involving Queensland Health underway into why the passengers were allowed to head to the cafe.

BAC said it 'unreservedly apologises for this human error'.

'At approximately 9:30am, two transit passengers arrived on a "red" flight from Port Moresby and proceeded through screening to transit as per normal process,' the airport said in a statement.

'Initial review of CCTV indicates that at approximately 9.55am, these passengers were incorrectly allowed into the "green zone". The passengers were seated at a retail outlet within the green zone until approximately 11.20am.

'The passengers then used the bathroom and attended another retailer before they were located by BAC staff and returned to the "red zone". They were in the green zone for just under two hours.'

New Zealand's Ministry of Health has told travellers arriving in the country from Brisbane to monitor their health for the next 14 days.

The passengers arriving from Papua New Guinea were 'incorrectly allowed into the "green zone"'. Pictured, a staff member in protective medical clothing moves through the arrivals area at Brisbane Airport

'The reported incident was in the Hudson Cafe in Brisbane airport where two individuals from a red zone country were in the cafe at the same time as green zone passengers. The risk has been assessed as low,' the ministry said in a statement.

'The Ministry understands the two red zone passengers returned negative results prior to departure from their home country. A second test result from swabs taken today has returned a weak positive for one test and a negative result for the other.'

The health alert covers passengers on Air New Zealand flight NZ 202 from Brisbane to Christchurch which arrived about 4.30pm on Thursday.

Passengers on Air New Zealand NZ 146 from Brisbane to Auckland which arrived at 5.30pm on Thursday and Qantas QF 135 from Brisbane to Christchurch are also urged to monitor their health.

Papua New Guinea has been fighting to get widespread community transmission of Covid under control

'Queensland Health have informed the Ministry that the two red zone passengers were wearing masks, maintaining social distancing and are not symptomatic. Additional testing is being coordinated by Queensland Health,' the statement said.

BAC added 'thorough cleaning of all areas (have) since been conducted, and we can confirm all workers and passengers within the green area were wearing PPE'.

Papua New Guinea currently has widespread community transmission of Covid.

'There is widespread community transmission of Covid-19 across a number of districts and provinces. It is a serious health risk and is impacting the capacity of local health services,' the Australian Government said.
COLUMBIA  A Columbia teenager was found dead April 29 after she had been reported missing three weeks earlier.

Sanaa Amenhotep, 15, was reported missing from her northeast Columbia home on April 5. Her body was found the night of April 28 in the woods off of Rish Drive in Lexington County, authorities with Richland and Lexington counties said.

"I told her parents we would bring her home, and we've done that," Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said at a news conference April 29. "Unfortunately we didn't bring her home the way we all had prayed and wished that we could.

Jaylon Wilson, 17, was arrested April 28 and charged with kidnaping in the case, Lott said. Treveon Nelson, 18, is wanted on kidnapping charges, the sheriff said.

The Lexington County Sheriff's Department is investigating the death, the Richland County agency said. A Lexington County sheriff's spokesman said no arrests had been made in connection to the death, but that investigators had interviewed people of interest.

In a statement released through Richland School District Two, Northeast High School Principal Mark Sims said additional counselors were brought in to help students cope with Amenhotep's death. She was a freshman at the Columbia school.

"When a tragedy like this occurs, it impacts not only the Cavalier family but also the entire Richland Two family. Our hearts are heavy with sympathy," Sims said. "Sanaa will missed by her friends and teachers and will always be part of the Cavalier family."

Superintendent Baron Davis called her death "heartbreaking."

"There are no words to fully express the significance of this loss to our district family. With grieving hearts, we are united in our support of Sanaa's family," Davis said in a statement.

Amenhotep left her home with two men and was reported missing by her parents when she didn't return, Lott said. Investigators believe she was killed the night she left home, Lott said.

Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher said her office has determined a preliminary cause of death but won't release the details until after an autopsy scheduled April 30 at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

"It was a very difficult scene for our office," she said.

Richland County authorities notified the public about Amenhotep's disappearance April 7 and fielded numerous calls and tips in recent weeks. Lott said the investigation led deputies to the site in Lexington County and that much of the case centers in the neighboring county but declined to be more specific.

Adam Benson contributed reporting from Columbia.
One of the Portland areas most influential business organizations repeatedly violated city lobbying rules last year, resulting in a rare fine by the city auditors office.

The Portland Business Alliance failed to disclose at least 25 times it had contacted city officials in 2020 to request access, funding or action, primarily by email, an investigation by the auditors office found.

Those unreported emails, text messages and other interactions with officials did not appear in quarterly statements the alliance is required to file with the city of Portland as an organization that routinely lobbies City Hall.

The findings, detailed in a notice to the Portland Business Alliance, were first reported Tuesday by OPB.

The city auditors office fined the business group $450, marking only the second time the office has issued a fine for lobbying violations.

In 2016, it imposed a $2,000 penalty against Uber for undisclosed lobbying efforts by political consultant Mark Wiener.

As greater Portlands Chamber of Commerce its normal for our teams to work closely with city staff and leaders, especially during an unprecedented year such as this, to communicate and build resiliency in our community, Amy Lewin, a Portland Business Alliance spokeswoman, said in a statement Wednesday.

We will be carefully reviewing this letter and transparently working with the auditors office to clarify each and every exchange.

For the first three months of 2021, the business alliance reported far more meetings, calls and emails with city officials than any other special interest, records show.

During that time period, which included 61 business days, PBA reported 109 contacts with city officials, most commonly Sam Adams, a senior adviser to Mayor Ted Wheeler who has extensive ties with the business community.

The next most active group lobbying the city, Oregon Smart Growth, reported just one-fourth as many contacts with city officials, 26.

Adams, who previously served as Portland mayor, spearheaded the citys lobbying disclosure rules during his time in elected office.

John Maher, publisher of The Oregonian/OregonLive and president of the Oregonian Media Group, is the chair-elect of the Portland Business Alliances board of directors and takes over in July.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632

Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
EDITORS NOTE: On May 20, NJ Cannabis Insider in collaboration with Advance Media New York hosts a virtual business networking event, featuring some of New York states most prominent industry leaders. Tickets are limited.

As more states allow cannabis use, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez wants to know what impact legal marijuana as on their residents and budgets.

Toward that end, Menendez on Thursday introduced bipartisan legislation to require a study of just that for legal medical and recreational marijuana.

Under the bill, the U.S. Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor departments would join with state health agencies and have the National Academy of Sciences study legal cannabis programs over the next 10 years.

Reports would be issued every two years on the impacts of legal marijuana on state economies, health, criminal justice and employment. The study also would focus on how much money the newly legal cannabis businesses are being into state and local coffers, and what those funds are being spent on.

And the study would look at the medicinal benefits of marijuana, if any, including whether it has reduced the use of opioids or other painkillers.

The results would be submitted to Congress.

As more and more states legalize and regulate marijuana, we must take a thorough examination at how different laws and policies in different states have been implemented, what works, what doesnt, and what can be replicated elsewhere, Menendez said. Having this data at our fingertips and making it available to the public will help drive public policy decisions and dispel any misconceptions about marijuana legalization.

The bill was co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Similar legislation was introduced in the House by Reps. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, and Don Young. R-Alaska.

All but six states, including New Jersey, have either legalized or decriminalized cannabis for either medical or recreational use.

Advocates of legalizing marijuana, including NORML, the National Cannabis Industry Association, and the Minority Cannabis Business Association, have endorsed the bill.

The Marijuana Data Collection Act will ensure that federal discussions and policies specific to cannabis policy are based upon the best, most reliable, and recent evidence available moving forward, NORML Political Director Justin Strekal said. To be clear, this is not a marijuana reform bill, it is a data bill about what is happening around the country.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him at @JDSalant.
GREENVILLE  The state-appointed board that owns hundreds of millions of dollars in hospital assets across the Upstate met this week with an attorney behind closed doors for more than two hours to go over the terms of its lease agreement with Prisma Health and to hammer out its expanding role in the region's health.

John M. Campbell, a 33-year partner with the Nelson Mullins law office in downtown Greenville and a specialist in taxation, corporate governance and nonprofits, hosted the Greenville Health Authority board at his legal office on April 28 to discuss the 33-page lease and contribution agreement the GHA reached in October 2018 with Prisma.

The chairman of the GHA's 14-member volunteer board, Stacey Mills, said after the meeting that members sought clarification on the differences between how the lease itself spells out the board's role and responsibilities, and what those outside GHA believe its role and responsibilities ought to be.

"With counsel, appropriately, we were able to understand what's written in the lease and where those responsibilities lay," Mills said. "There are other boards other than our board that are supposedly active in this process, as well. So we look forward to working groups to help that happen."

The GHA board's responsibilities are twofold. On one hand, it serves as Prisma Health's landlord in the Upstate, collecting and disbursing lease proceeds. On the other, it is the steward of community health in the region, a charge that traces back to enabling legislation, "Act 432," passed in the 1940s to create a public hospital in Greenville County.

That hospital grew into the Greenville Health System before it merged with Palmetto Health in 2017, becoming a private nonprofit and emerging as Prisma Health in 2018. Public assets acquired ahead of the merger remain in the hands of the health system board's successor, the GHA. The GHA has one employee  its president  and donates nearly all of its lease proceeds to charity.

But its responsibility as steward of the community's health remains intact.

Campbell's hiring was among several moves by the 14-member GHA board in recent months as it defines its own role and establishes an arms-length relationship with its lessee, Prisma Health. GHA earlier this year hired Campbell to replace an attorney provided to them by Prisma.

The board also replaced its Prisma-employed president with an employee outside the health system, took control of $1 million in annual administrative funds from Prisma, and turned to Greenville's Community Foundation to handle administrative duties. Until recent months, that $1 million stayed in Prismas hands and was released to GHA in the form of requested reimbursements.

Stakeholders in how GHA defines its role include leaders at Prisma Health, the health system's Upstate board and the health system's statewide corporate board. Also included are state lawmakers from Greenville who have been critical of Prisma's management of health care and of the GHA's delegation of responsibilities to Prisma. Others with a stake: Prisma-employed doctors, thousands of Prisma workers, patients, private-practice doctors who lawmakers say want equal access to Prisma facilities, competing health care systems Bon Secours and the Medical University of South Carolina, and past Prisma executives in the Upstate who have a host of ideas for improving patient care in the region.

Those ideas include restoring plans to build a new psychiatric hospital and reestablishing an emergency room in northern Greenville County  programs from which Prisma walked away in recent years.

Critics have said Prisma's motivations have shifted to making money and supporting the corporation's less financially solvent Midlands operations. But Prisma in its annual presentation to the GHA in February pointed to nearly $130 million in Upstate charity and Medicaid services and $94 million in support to the community and community partners.

A new player is also trying to give doctors, not eager to go public, a voice in Upstate health care. An advocacy nonprofit incorporated on March 31 under the name "Physicians for Act 432," a 501(c)4. Its donors were not disclosed but the group hired an attorney and a lobbyist in Columbia to advocate on behalf of patient care in the Upstate.

Spence Taylor, a physician and former Prisma executive who said he is familiar with and supports what the group is trying to do, said Physicians for Act 432 initially hired Columbia lobbyist Warren Tompkins for the job but have now turned to Howell Clyborne, former vice president for community relations with the old Greenville Health System.

"We can't be so hard on GHA," Taylor said. "We got to teach them, to love them and make sure that, you know, just tell them, it's gonna be OK. And we got to say, 'Y'all need to step up and do the things that Prisma doesn't want to do.'"

That could include GHA advocating for doctors, Taylor said. It could also include acting as a governmental intermediary to hold and raise money for graduate medical education, also known as doctor residencies, for area educational groups and colleges that want to ratchet up medical training in the Upstate.

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"We need a governmental entity, like a special purpose district, e.g., GHA, to house this thing," Taylor said. "Would they be willing to do that? That would be amazing."

The GHA's Mills did not elaborate on GHA's role as it relates to Prisma but said defining that role is part of the work the board is undertaking now.

Asked about GHA's next move, Mills said, "building our infrastructure."

"I think one of the things that the public can rest confidently in is a health authority that is looking forward to building itself out as a strong entity in health care in Greenville," Mills said, "and that is to know what our needs are in this community."

Among topics that Republican Greenville state Rep. Mike Burns  a frequent critic of GHA and Prisma  said he hoped would be on GHA's agenda is employee relations. Burns and Rep. Garry Smith, R-Simpsonville, were behind a concurrent resolution presented earlier this month in the General Assembly that, if passed, would compel GHA to act on behalf of doctors seeking fair treatment and equal access to resources at Upstate facilities owned by the GHA and operated by Prisma Health.

That resolution is currently sitting in the House Medical Affairs Committee, a group Burns chairs.

Mills said employee relations were not part of the board's discussion on April 28.

"Those are spelled out as a responsibility of the lessee," Mills said. "That's Prisma. For us, our relationship is with them, and so we want to continue on that path."

Still, Burns argues that under Section 3.7 of GHA's lease with Prisma Health, a section that concerns "physician development," doctors with the health system ought to be able to appeal to Prisma Health's Upstate board for employment disputes. Section 3.7 says Prisma is charged with maintaining "appropriate procedures for review and amendment of medical staff bylaws of the hospital, and for appointment, reappointment, suspension and termination of medical staff privileges."

Reached by phone April 28, Burns proposed creating a subcommittee composed of members of the GHA and Prisma Upstate boards to hear physician grievances. He said he has spoken with scores of doctors and their representatives dissatisfied with Prisma.

"They've got one of the most prestigious lawyers in the state," Burns said. "And they're getting ready to get serious because they have not been given any appeal process."

The Post and Courier could not independently verify which doctors, or how many, might have a grievance with Prisma. Burns said the public would hear from some of them after the General Assembly adjourns May 13, at which time he plans to schedule a hearing before the House Medical Affairs Committee.

Reached for a response to Burns' statement, Prisma Health's chief clinical officer in the Upstate, Wendall James, characterized it as misinformation.

"This is another example of misinformation regarding the roles and responsibilities of Prisma Health for operating its healthcare facilities and its relationships with its medical staff," James said in an emailed statement from a Prisma spokesperson. "We are confident in our credentialing process and are proud of our many relationships with independent and employed physicians. Just like all other hospitals, Prisma Health already has an appeals process in place for physicians regarding medical staff issues."

Taylor, president of Prisma Health Upstate until stepping down in September 2019, said he had only positive things to say about the quality and professionalism of his former employer. Prisma, he said, is sticking to the letter of its lease with GHA but faces the same economic realities as other health care systems around the country.

"This has nothing to do with hurting Prisma," Taylor said. "This has to do with helping the community and helping fill the gaps that Prisma in the lease doesn't have to fill."
French media Le Figaro released an interview with Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean scholar and diplomat, earlier this month, calling it a strategic error for the U.S. to contain China.

Mahbubani, who notably chaired the United Nations Security Council from January 2001 to May 2002, is now a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.

When asked to define the tension between China and the U.S., Mahbubani pointed out that what the world is witnessing is "a major geopolitical competition, not a cold war".

"This is a classic geopolitical competition that occurs when the world's leading power gets scared and tries to contain the emerging power," Mahbubani explained. "This has been happening for 2,500 years, since the days of Athens and Sparta."

This is not the first time Mahbubani addressed this issue. In his previous interview with the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), Mahbubani called on the U.S. to put the geopolitical contest with China on hold in April last year.

"America wanted to portray itself as the best-performing society in the world so that everybody could become like America. It wanted to export the American dream. China doesnt have that vision," Mahbubani reaffirmed. "The Americans want to lead the world. Now, it seems, China is going to become the Number 1 economy. But China has no desire to lead the world."

Recently, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has backed the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, labeling China as its strategic competitors in multiple areas, including economics, technology and military security, raising new concerns over the relation between the two countries.

"China is one of America's top trading partners," Mahbubani now stressed again a year later on the current situation. "And at the same time, China is more integrated with the rest of the world than the United States."

Find the original article at https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/kishore-mahbubani-la-chine-veut-gagner-sans-avoir-a-se-battre-20210406

[ Editor: WXY ]
Married At First Sight stunner Cyrell Paule looked the picture of happiness as she enjoyed a night out with her partner Eden Dally on Thursday.

The couple left their son Boston, one, at home to attend the Perfect Plate Contest Launch at City Tattersalls Club in Sydney, where they enjoyed a cheeky smooch while posing for the camera.

Cyrell, 31, looked absolutely gorgeous in a demure white blazer, matching shorts and a black low-cut top.

Baby-free evening! Married At First Sight star Cyrell Paule looked the picture of happiness as she enjoyed a night out with boyfriend Eden Dally on Thursday

She teamed her look with a pair of black strappy stilettos, and accessorised with a pretty pendant around her neck.

Cyrell wore a smokey eye and a touch of highlighter to accentuate her striking features, complete with a dark lip colour to add a vampy element to her look.

Meanwhile, Love Island star Eden, 28, looked utterly suave in a navy pin-stripe suit teamed with a crisp white shirt.

Cute: The couple left their son Boston, one, at home to attend the Perfect Plate Contest Launch at City Tattersalls Club in Syndey, where they put on a very loved-up display while posing for the camera

Stunner: Cyrell, 31, looked absolutely gorgeous in a demure white blazer, matching shorts and a black low-cut top

Red hot! Meanwhile, former Bachelor star Juliette Herrera put on an eye-popping display in a snakeskin dress

He complimented his look with a pair of brown dress shoes, and appeared in high spirits as he planted a cheeky kiss on his girlfriend's lips.

Meanwhile, former Bachelor star Juliette Herrera put on an eye-popping display in a snakeskin dress.

The Australian-Latina fashionista oozed sex appeal in the saucy ensemble, which she teamed with a pair of simple slip-on black sandals.

Stunning: Imogen Anthony turned heads in a black and gold metallic Alex Perry frock

Natural beauty: The 30-year-old beauty showed off her natural complexion, opting for little makeup which consisted of light foundation and black eyeliner for the event

Juliette wore her luscious locks in a straight style, and wore a pair of statement earrings to complete her look.

Meanwhile, Imogen Anthony turned heads in a black and gold metallic Alex Perry frock.

The 30-year-old beauty showed off her natural complexion, opting for little makeup which consisted of light foundation and black eyeliner for the event.

She completed her stylish look with strappy heels.

Looking good: Cyrell's fellow MAFS star Nasser Sultan looked great in a white T-shirt, loud red jacket and dark jeans

All smiles! Nasser couldn't wipe the smile off his face while he hammed it up on the media wall

MAFS' most controversial groom ever Nasser Sultan looked great as he rocked up to Thursday night's event.

He wore a white T-shirt, a loud red jacket and dark jeans for the occasion.

Irish Bachelor beauty Emma Roche looked lovely in a white-and-red floral dress, which showed off her svelte legs to perfection.

She teamed her look with a pair of strappy stilettos, while she wore a touch of make-up to enhance her naturally pretty visage.

Lovely: Meanwhile, Irish Bachelor beauty Emma Roche looked pretty in a white-and-red floral dress, which showed off her svelte legs to perfection

Also attending the event was soon to be Big Brother contestant Brenton Balicki.

The 31-year-old Sydney based hunk turned heads in a blue coloured velvet blazer.

He paired his look with a $20,850 Yellow Gold Rolex GMT Master ll watch and Axel Arigato shoes.

This 'very single' guy describes himself as a passionate person, and he's playing Big Brother's game to win.

'I'm going to use every skill I've got, whether it's charming them with cooking or charming them physically. There's not a single challenge that's going to break me.'

Brenton will make his reality TV debut in the coming weeks.

Rising star: Soon to be Big Brother contestant Brenton Balicki (pictured) also attended the event
Volkswagen Group China has begun construction of an all-new MEB plant at Volkswagen Anhui. The third of the Groups pure-electric vehicle manufacturing facilities in China, following completion of the Anting (SAIC VW) and Foshan (FAW-VW) plants, the Volkswagen Anhui plant will be powered by green energy from day one.

Due for completion mid-2022, the plant is set for start of production in the second half of 2023. The plant is another cornerstone of Volkswagens global e-mobility push. By 2025, Volkswagen Group China plans to deliver up to 1.5 million new energy vehicles (NEVs) per year.





Rendering of Volkswagen Anhui MEB plant technical center.

Volkswagen Anhui is set to become a global hub for e-mobility innovation and a cornerstone of the Groups decarbonization strategy. As China is the worlds largest single market for NEV vehicles, we need to strengthen our local competence, and Volkswagen Anhui is a significant part of it. With the plant to be powered by green energy from day one, we are demonstrating our commitment to reducing carbon emissions beyond our fleet. Dr. Stephan Wollenstein, CEO of Volkswagen Group China

New construction at Volkswagen Anhui includes brownfield repurposing and upscaling of the former JAC plant and the establishment of a completely new body shop area.

The new body shop will cover roughly 141,000 m2 and makes up part of the total project area, together covering around 500,000 m2. The new plant will incorporate a number of energy-saving strategies as part of comprehensive efforts to reduce overall carbon emissions, including the adoption of low energy consumption production equipment. A supplier park for battery and components is also planned for construction in the area.

Volkswagen Anhui will have around 500 staff on board by 2025, with a focus on R&D and engineering innovations. Combining R&D, quality assurance, pre-sales manufacturing and testing under one roof, Volkswagen Anhui will provide the Group with a faster time-to-market for new e-mobility products.
The first 100 days of Joe Bidens presidency have improved the global image of the United States almost everywhere surveyed by a new poll.

But despite a trade war, Uighur genocide declarations, and "Kung Flu" rhetoric, China remains the only country where the USs standing was significantly better under Donald Trump.

To mark Mr Bidens 100-day milestone and first speech to a joint session of Congress, Morning Consult and Politico conducted a series of polls to measure the presidents performance against Mr Trump.

Across 14 countries surveyed, favourable views about the US increased by an average of 9 per cent in the three months since Mr Biden was inaugurated on 20 January.

"President Joe Biden inherited a tarnished American image abroad when he took office on 20 January following four years of President Donald Trumps America First foreign policies and the 6 January Capitol riot that called into question the status of the worlds oldest continuous democracy," wrote Eli Yokley for pollsters Morning Consult.

"Nearly 100 days later as the United States and the world meets a symbolic milestone of Bidens presidency, the Oval Offices current occupant is overseeing a sizeable improvement to the American brand across many allied countries."

The biggest improvement was seen in Germany, which recorded a 22 per cent increase in the number of people who see the US favourably compared to the previous administration. Unfavourability in the country dropped 25 per cent over the same time.

Behind Germany was Japan, up 19 per cent to 55 per cent favourability, and France, up 17 per cent to 46 per cent favourability.

More modest increases were seen in the United Kingdom (14 per cent), Italy (12 per cent), Spain (11 per cent), Australia (10 per cent), Brazil (5 per cent), India (2 per cent), and Russia (3 per cent). South Korea was unchanged.

In Canada, 40 per cent view the US favourably, an increase of 14 per cent. Mexico, meanwhile, had an already-high level of favourability, and its 8 per cent increase raised the positive image south of the border to 68 per cent.

Dr Christian Welzel, vice president of the World Values Survey Association and chair in political culture research at the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University Luneburg in Germany, told Morning Consult that Europeans dislike a hawkish US foreign policy, as seen under Mr Trump, while approving of the countrys return to the Paris climate accords under Mr Biden.

Dr David Farber, a University of Kansas professor, put it more succinctly, telling the outlet that international opinion is contingent on what America does.

People in many nations around the world are, I think, hopeful, that the election of Joe Biden marks a rejection of Trumps America First bullying and go-it-alone international policies and a return to a more collaborative, pro-democracy approach to international affairs, he said.

That so-called bullying, meanwhile, seemed to have the opposite effect on China, which was long a target of Mr Trumps foreign policy rhetoric.

Favourability in China decreased by 9 per cent since Mr Biden was sworn into office, with 74 per cent of the country now holding negative views of the United States.

The first major meeting between the two countries officials reflected that trend, with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi sparring in Alaska in March.

We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world, Mr Yang said.

Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.

While confidence among Americans of their own image took a hit during the 6 January Capitol riot, it has improved slightly since Mr Biden took office.

The poll showed a 5 per cent increase for favourability of the US, within the US, since 20 January.
Customers expectations in terms of high-quality bathroom solutions and state-of-the-art design are increasing. But in the end, the decision for a product is often a matter of budget.



GROHE, a leading global brand for complete bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings, is treading new paths.



 Modern, functional and affordable: GROHE Baulines comes with a refreshed design and extended features.



 The right choice for every project: GROHE Baulines simplifies bathroom planning since it perfectly matches Bau Ceramic and Bau Accessories.



 Hassle-free installation: Thanks to the GROHE Fast Fixation system, the installation of GROHE Bau is done quickly and easy.



Customers expectations in terms of high-quality bathroom solutions and state-of-the-art design are increasing. But in the end, the decision for a product is often a matter of budget.



GROHE, a leading global brand for complete bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings, is treading new paths.



The GROHE Baulines faucet portfolio is a real all-rounder at an entry-level, offering a modern design with smart features at an affordable price.



Furthermore, Baulines enables installers and planners to answer increasing customer demands with a convenient complete bathroom portfolio  everything from one single source and without compromises in design and function.



GROHE Baulines  simplifying bathroom planning



No matter if space or budget are limited: GROHE Baulines makes bathroom planning much more convenient as installers and planners can create a modern bathroom ambience in just a few simple steps.



The Baulines faucet, Bau Ceramic and Bau Accessories match in design and function to easily create a fully coordinated design concept. The latest addition to GROHEs Bau Ceramic line is the new Slim Seat with SoftClose. With its less than 45 mm hight the seat makes an easy upgrade for the customer. Thanks to the QuickRelease feature the seat, additionally, is easy to disassembly for cleaning.



Thanks to the relaunched design of Baulines bathroom faucets, customers benefit from an enhanced comfort zone: the extended angle with the tapered spout ensures a more convenient water flow, thereby preventing water from splashing when washing hands.



Moreover, the product offers advantages in terms of safety and health: Thanks to its innovative zinc die casting process at the LIXIL plant in Klaeng, Thailand, one of the most sustainable plants in South East Asia, the faucet offers safe water enjoyment.



Not only is the surface of the faucet seamlessly closed so that impurities cannot enter, there are also dedicated inner waterways to make sure that the water has no contact with lead- and nickel. Above that these inner waterways have no contact to the body material which result in a barrier between hot water and the external surface to avoid scalding on hot surfaces. Thus, extra safe, especially for households with children.



The demand for sustainable product solutions is increasing. Therefore, another important reason for choosing GROHE Baulines is that all faucets are equipped with water-saving GROHE EcoJoy technology. A flow restrictor reduces water consumption from ten liters per minute to just over five liters. Moreover, an aerator enriches the water with air, ensuring the same voluminous experience as with conventional faucets. This way, everyone can easily make their contribution to save water in everyday life without compromising on comfort.



Simplicity for the modern kitchen  GROHE Bau Kitchen



In addition to these bathroom products, GROHEs Baulines kitchen range helps to plan a modern, stylish kitchen that is equally functional and affordable. A selection of different faucet designs and heights allows even the largest pots to be comfortably filled  offering the customer versatile options for their kitchen.



Like their bathroom counterparts, all Baulines kitchen faucets are available with the GROHE Zero technology. Thanks to dedicated inner water ways the water has no contact with lead and nickel. Additionally, for a coordinated design, GROHE also offers stainless steel and composite sinks to match the faucets.



Discover whats next on our new digital experience platform GROHE X and follow us on social media via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.



About GROHE



GROHE is a leading global brand for complete bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings and has a total of over 7,000 employees in 150 countries  2,600 of them are based in Germany. Since 2014 GROHE has been part of the strong brand portfolio of the Japanese manufacturer of pioneering water and housing products LIXIL. In order to offer "Pure Freude and Wasser", every GROHE product is based on the brand values of quality, technology, design and sustainability.



Renowned highlights such as GROHE Eurosmart or the GROHE thermostat series as well as groundbreaking innovations such as the GROHE Blue water system underline the brand's profound expertise. Focused on customer needs, GROHE thus creates intelligent, life-enhancing and sustainable product solutions that offer relevant added value  and bear the "Made in Germany" seal of quality: R&D and design are firmly anchored as an integrated process in Germany.



GROHE takes its corporate responsibility very seriously and focuses on a resource-saving value chain. Since April 2020, the sanitary brand has been producing CO2-neutral worldwide. GROHE has also set itself the goal of using plastic-free product packaging by 2021.



In the past ten years alone, more than 490 design and innovation awards as well as several sustainability awards confirmed GROHE's success. GROHE was the first in its industry to win the CSR Award of the German Federal Government and the German Sustainability Award 2021 in the categories Resources and Design. As part of the sustainability and climate campaign 50 Sustainability & Climate Leaders GROHE is also driving sustainable transformation.



About LIXIL



LIXIL makes pioneering water and housing products that solve every day, real-life challenges, making better homes a reality for everyone, everywhere. Drawing on our Japanese heritage, we create world-leading technology and innovate to make high quality products that transform homes.



But the LIXIL difference is how we do this; through meaningful design, an entrepreneurial spirit, a dedication to improving accessibility for all and responsible business growth. Our approach comes to life through industry leading brands, including INAX, GROHE, American Standard and TOSTEM. Over 60,000 colleagues operating in more than 150 countries are proud to make products that touch the lives of more than a billion people every day. Learn more at www.lixil.com

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Apr. 28The state Capitol Police Department has handed over fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, which were being offered during a rally Tuesday, to state health officials, according to Officer Scott Driscoll.

A group of Connecticut women on Tuesday had been offering the cards  now in the hands of the state Department of Health and Human Services  during a rally in Hartford protesting legislation that repeals religious exemptions from school-mandated vaccinations, which was signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont on Wednesday.

Driscoll said the department was no longer investigating the matter, but had turned its investigation entirely over to the health department.

Yvonna Gamble, communications director for the department of U.S. Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, said the department could not confirm whether it was investigating. However, creating counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards is illegal, she noted, and should be reported to the inspector general office at tips.hhs.gov or by calling (800) 447-8477.

Capitol police did not make any arrests or issue any infractions at the rally Tuesday, which drew crowds of more than 3,000 with no social distancing and very few people wearing masks.

The blue cards, marked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention name and logo and made to look like official vaccination cards, were in a cardboard box  labeled with "lose your card?"  available for anyone to grab. Four women, who said they were from East Windsor and Coventry, had set up an area near the Capitol where they were giving out posters for the rally, fresh fruit and the cards.

The women were wearing matching lime green T-shirts and only wanted to be identified by their first names  Ali, Kim, Rebecca and Nicole. Two of them said the cards were for people who received the vaccine and needed a replacement card.

"They're for people that already got vaccinated and they lost their card. The CDC isn't replacing them, so we're just replacing them," Nicole said.

Story continues

They said they didn't think unvaccinated people would take the cards but weren't monitoring who took them. In a 10-minute period, several people stopped to take a card, or a handful.

A trio of women walking past remarked that they already had purchased fake vaccination cards elsewhere, one saying she'd ordered a dozen for various family members.

"I have more faith in humanity than that," Nicole said. "If somebody uses it for the wrong purpose, I'm sure it's a very small percentage."

Another woman in the group denied that the cards belonged to them.

t.hartz@theday.com
Market Kurly Founder Sophie Kim, left, holds up a business agreement with CJ Logistics CEO Kang Sin-ho, on cooperation in the online grocer's delivery service, at CJ Logistics headquarters in Seoul, on April 27. Courtesy of CJ Logistics



By Kim Jae-heun



The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is facing criticism for remaining silent amid allegations that fresh food delivery platform Market Kurly forced suppliers to offer discounts on their products.



The antitrust watchdog investigated Market Kurly's alleged abuses of power last December. However, the FTC was unable to prove the allegations leveled against the e-commerce firm and also remained silent about the issue.



The FTC said the investigation is still in progress, while the results have not come out yet.



"We've been receiving other accusations and proving a case takes time," an FTC official said.



Industry insiders, however, accused the antitrust watchdog of favoritism.



"The FTC has been a fair trade commission for big companies and unfair trade commission for small- and medium-sized businesses," an industry source said.



Whistleblowers claim the antitrust watchdog is pulling its punches against Market Kurly.



"Even yesterday, I received a call from Market Kurly's merchandiser asking if we could provide our products at a 35 percent discount on May 1. The staffer asked me to give him an answer in 30 minutes," a CEO of one supplier said during an interview with local media, Monday. "Market Kurly's bullying is well-known among its suppliers."



Meanwhile, when FTC Chairperson Joh Sung-wook visited one of Market Kurly's logistics centers in Seoul last year, she said the online grocer is making efforts to seek mutual growth with suppliers by viewing them as business partners and not targets of profit.



Market Kurly, which was founded in 2014 by Sophie Kim, reached annual sales of nearly 1 trillion won last year.



The fresh food delivery platform hired top actors Jun Ji-hyun and Park Seo-joon as advertising spokesmodels to promote its "buy everything for 100 won at first purchase" event. This caused Market Kurly to suffer a loss of 116.2 billion won in 2020, increasing by 15 billion won compared to the previous year.



In addition, rivals like SSG.com and Hello Nature joined the overnight fresh food delivery race this month and competition is likely to heat up.



Customers are worried that such conditions will encourage Market Kurly to lean even harder on its suppliers to slash prices.



"Market Kurly has such a good reputation and I've always wondered how it can come up with products at such cheap prices. Now, I am disappointed that this may be a result of sacrificing small- and medium-sized companies," a 33-year-old customer surnamed Park said. "Maybe I need to think about using another online grocer."


PARIS (AP)  Two Italians convicted of left-wing domestic terrorism in Italy decades ago turned themselves in to French justice authorities Thursday as part of a decisive operation by Paris and Rome to move ahead on a justice issue that had been stalled since the 1980s.

Luigi Bergamin, 72, a former member of the group Prima Linea, voluntarily presented himself at the Paris courthouse in the morning, and Raffaele Ventura, 71, identified as a former member of the Communist Combatant Units, did the same later in the day, according to the Paris prosecutors office.

Seven other Italians were arrested Wednesday at their homes in France. Like the two who surrendered Thursday, they were convicted in Italy of crimes dating to the 1970s and 1980s and included several former members of the Red Brigades. Police are still seeking one other person.

All nine faced a Paris prosecutor on Thursday and were released under court supervision, the prosecutor's office said. The first extradition hearing will be held on May 5.

Bergamin was sentenced to 16 years, 11 months and one day for his role in the murders of two law enforcement officers: Andrea Campagna of the anti-terrorism Digos agency, who was killed in Milan in April 1979, and prison police chief Antonio Santoro, who died in Udine, northeastern Italy, in June 1978.

Bergamin was convicted of belonging to an armed group, instigating attacks aimed at undermining the state, illegally holding and carrying arms, aggravated robbery, aggravated theft, criminal association and aggravated murder.

Italian media also identified him as a co-founder in the late 1970s of the Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), and newspaper articles from the period also cite that association. He was arrested multiple times in Paris but released in 1985 and again in 1990, according to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Ventura was sentenced in Italy to 24 years and four months in prison for the 1977 murder of a police officer, Custra Antonio, in Milan.

Story continues

All those arrested this week had fled Italy and sought refuge abroad before they could be imprisoned to serve their sentences. The arrests followed negotiations between Italy and France after decades during which Paris refused to act on many of the arrest warrants that Italian authorities issued for convicted left-wing terrorists.

France in 1985 established a policy known as the Mitterrand doctrine, named for Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. It said that Italian far-left activists who had fled to France would not be extradited to Italy unless there was evidence that they committed crimes of blood.

A French court now must separately decide whether to approve the extradition to Italy of each person. The French presidency said definitive decisions could take two to three years, depending on appeals.

Five of those arrested were former members of the Red Brigades, which during the 1970s and 1980s carried out killings, kidnappings and kneecappings, in which targets were shot in the legs. The group later fell dormant.

Among those detained Wednesday was Giorgio Petrostefani, 77, a militant from the far-left group Lotta Continua (The Struggle Continues). Petrostefani was convicted of the 1972 slaying of Milan Police Chief Luigi Calabresi and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Also arrested was a member of the Armed Cells Against Territorial Power, which Italian police described as a subversive group, who was convicted of the 1979 killing of a Carabinieri police officer.

___

Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy, contributed to the story.
Photo: The Canadian Press Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro speaks in Calgary, Alta., Friday, May 29, 2020. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Health Minister Tyler Shandro will be speaking to reporters this afternoon on COVID-19 and expansion projects at Calgary's Rockyview Hospital. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

CALGARY - Alberta is ratcheting up the fight in two COVID-19 hot spots by expanding age eligibility for vaccines and directing delivery of more doses.

Premier Jason Kenney says the measures will help address concerns in Banff and Lake Louise, as well as in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes the oilsands hub city of Fort McMurray.

We are at the 10-yard line. The end is very much in sight, Kenney said Wednesday of the surge in COVID-19 cases.

But weve got to get over the hump of this current wave.

Kenney said shipments of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are expected to arrive Monday and will be directed to the hot spots. He said that will continue for the next two weeks as supplies permit.

Also, the age eligibility for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, currently at 40 and up in Alberta, will be reduced to 30 in the troubled areas.

The Moderna vaccine will also be made available to Indigenous people in Wood Buffalo as young as 30 and vaccination times will be extended to 10 p.m. Data is showing there is a lower uptake in the municipality right now compared with the provincial average.

Kenney said the province will explore further health restrictions as necessary.

Banff-Lake Louise and the Wood Buffalo area have been the hardest-hit areas in a province where COVID-19 cases have soared in recent weeks, propelled by more contagious variants that now make up two-thirds of all active infections.

On Wednesday, there were 20,938 active cases, the second-highest total since the pandemic began. The highest was in mid-December: 21,649.

Wood Buffalo Mayor Don Scott said the vaccine changes are a strong first step to corralling the virus, which has led to more than 1,200 cases locally, all but a handful in Fort McMurray.

The surge has also pushed the areas one hospital to capacity, so more beds are being added to the intensive care ward.

Were not out of the woods yet by any means, but I consider this to be substantial progress, said Scott.

Lowering the age eligibility is going to make a big difference.

He said the regions demographic is mainly young families and young workers previously ineligible for the vaccine.

But Chief Allan Adam of the areas Athabasca Tribal Council said Kenney failed to address key questions about more restrictions, including curfews or stay-at-home orders, to bring the caseload down.

We need a field hospital. The (existing hospital) is being filled up with COVID patients, said Adam.

Theyre not putting restrictions on anything. Its business as normal for them. They say if people were to get vaccinated that will divert the curve, and thats a poor excuse.

In Banff, Mayor Karen Sorensen said more inoculations will work in tandem with existing health restrictions, which include mandatory masks outdoors.

We have a very young population and a majority of our population are front-line workers, and we, of course, welcome visitors continually into our community, said Sorensen.

Being able to lower that age (of vaccine eligibility) is crucial.

Banff and Lake Louise were dealing with 158 active cases.

Provincewide, almost 1.5 million doses of vaccine have been administered. Almost 40 per cent of Albertas adult population has received at least one shot.

Kenney has dismissed bringing in more health restrictions. He said more vaccines are on the way and are the best way out of the pandemic.

The province also announced 1,839 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday. There were 643 people in hospital, 145 of them receiving intensive care.

There have been 2,073 deaths.

Alberta Health Services is also reducing reduce scheduled non-essential surgical activity up to 30 per cent in the Edmonton, Calgary and North zones due to rising cases.
Benjamin Franklin said in 1789, Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.

Apparently, there is one other certainty in this world: Democrats will try to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to add justices to the Supreme Court. His reason for doing so? Simple. The court, at that point in time, was prone to overrule many of FDRs New Deal laws.

Fast-forward to 2021. The left is at it again.

This time, Democrats in the House and Senate are proposing adding four new members to the nine-member Supreme Court.

Why? Because, once again, the left is concerned that the Supreme Court, which seats six conservative-leaning justices and three liberal-leaning justices, will not rubber-stamp its radical agenda.

On April 15, several prominent Democrats unveiled court-packing 2.0. The bill, titled the Judiciary Act of 2021, would alter the number of justices on the Supreme Court for the first time since 1869.

According to Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, There is nothing new about changing the size of the Supreme Court. The Constitution leaves the number of justices to the discretion of Congress, and Congress has changed that number seven times already throughout our history. Our founders understood that, as the country and the judicial system evolved, the court would need to evolve with it.

He added, This legislation represents a much-needed next step in that evolution.

But Nadler is mistaken. Changing the size of the Supreme Court would be completely new in the modern era of American politics. Again, the number of justices on the court has remained constant for the past 152 years.

Nadler also claims that, Nine justices may have made sense in the 19th century when there were only nine circuits.  But the logic behind having only nine justices is much weaker today, when there are 13 circuits.  Our predecessors made eminent sense when they pegged the size of the Supreme Court to the number of judicial circuits. As our country has grown, so too should our Supreme Court.

That is demonstrably false.

The original Supreme Court, formed in 1790, included six members. In that same year, the newly formed United States had three (not six) circuits: The Eastern, Middle and Southern.

Yes, it is true Congress has added judicial circuits over the years, but there has never been a direct correlation between the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of circuit courts.

For Nadler to argue that the current number of judicial circuits (13) should coincide with the number of Supreme Court justices is not based on historical precedent, but on his partys frustration with the current make-up of the Court.

However, Nadler is far from the only Democrat making false claims to support court-packing.

Leave it to the left to gaslight this issue. They always do. Throwing race into the argument does little to advance the conversation.

However, in todays America, it is easy (although intellectually lazy) to inject race into any issue, regardless of whether or not race has anything to do with it.

One more thing, for all the talk about democracy and we the people, what do Americans think about packing the Supreme Court?

According to recent polls, most Americans do not support adding justices to the Supreme Court.

Once again, the lefts latest plan to pack the court is not about expanding democracy. It is about one thing and one thing only: Expanding the power of the Democratic Party.

Chris Talgo is an editor at The Heartland Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
The Telegraph

The Duke of Sussexs HRH title is to be removed from a placard at a new exhibition displaying his mothers wedding gown after it was added in error. Prince Harry and Prince William lent two dresses that had belonged to Diana, Princess of Wales to the public display at Kensington Palace. Placards originally described them as "Lent by HRH the Duke of Cambridge and HRH the Duke of Sussex". But the Royal Collection Trust has now admitted that the younger brothers title should not have been used and
AUSTIN, Minn. - The Austin Police Department is using its Facebook page to address the issue of mental health and policing.

Click here to view the page. In the first post, Police Chief David McKichan talks about the three main categories of mental health crises police see when responding to calls. He's making these posts to be open and communicative with the public and show them that many of the services police provide on a daily basis often aren't as publicized.

"If you're only seeing some of the stories that get into the media, you're missing probably 99% of the type of work that we do out there," he explains. "And as we have discussions about the future of our profession, I think it's important that we can share as much information with the general public or with our elected officials about what we do, why we maybe do it and talk a lot about some of the calls and call types you're not going to see when you turn on the TV or open the paper."

APD handles around 100 mental health incidents, 125 calls for people who are suicidal, and 600 welfare checks each year.

Chief McKichan will be making more posts throughout the week, including touching on things police can and can't do when it comes to responding to a mental health crisis.

For someone in crisis who needs something other than law enforcement response, the chief recommends contacting Crisis Response of Southeast Minnesota.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 23:12:09|Editor: huaxia

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SOFIA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday in a statement that it has declared a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Sofia persona non grata.

The statement did not mention the grounds for the expulsion.

The Russian Embassy in Sofia confirmed the expulsion, saying in a statement that an assistant military attache was declared persona non grata.

"The Russian side reserves the right to retaliate," it added.

On March 22, Bulgaria expelled two Russian diplomats for alleged espionage. Enditem
An 18-year-old social media producer based in Maroochydore was reduced to tears and went home early from work after he took a call from Seven rugby league reporter Josh Massoud in 2018, a Sydney court has heard.

Jack Warren leaves court on Thursday. Credit:Brook Mitchell

Former social media producer Jack Warren, now 21, told the NSW District Court on Thursday that Mr Massoud called him from Sydney one evening in May 2018, after he mistakenly ran part of an exclusive story on Twitter before the 6pm news bulletin.

Mr Warren recalled being shocked and upset when Mr Massouds tone, already agitated, escalated to anger. He said the senior reporter told him, if you werent so young Id come up there, rip your throat out and shit down it.

But former Seven TV host Ryan Phelan, who worked with Mr Massoud and gave evidence on his behalf, told the court combative behaviour is part and parcel of the newsroom environment and things were often said in the heat of battle that would be like water off a ducks back .
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  The road from screenplay to big screen is long and winding. In some cases, its paved with rejections, rewrites and revisions.

Screenwriter Matthew Dressel, a native of Grand Rapids, has walked that road from start to near-finish, with his film, Blue Iguana, finishing up shooting. His first full-length feature film starring the likes of Joel David Moore, Bob Saget and Carly Chaikin has more than a 10-year-long story and ends with an historic deal to be set in the Cayman Islands.

It all started in West Michigan when he got a pair of film and advertising degrees at Grand Valley State University.

I started writing screenplays almost immediately, Dressel, 36, told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. I wrote my first feature screenplay when I was 18 years old and immediately went out trying to sell it, learning the process of how you go about pitching or selling a screenplay.

After moving out to Southern California to work in film advertising, Dressel wrote the screenplay for Blue Iguana in 2011 out of being frustrated with his inability to get something made.

The film is a dark comedy where one mans dream of reconnecting with his family in a Caribbean beach house is met with them trying to kill him for his inheritance.

But crafting a screenplay is just the first step. The hardest part then becomes selling it to production companies, he said, which involves piles of query letters. Dressel had been trying to perfect the one-page pitch since college, but to little avail.

If youre going to be a screenwriter, if youre going to work in film at all, you need to have ridiculously thick skin, Dressel said. You need to be able to take rejection because its just constant. If youre the type of person who goes out there and you sell a screenplay with no hassle whatsoever, my hats off to you. But for the most part, screen artists face nothing but disappointment and rejection when trying to get their stuff out there.

With years of letters under his belt, Dressel said he was outright bored with his query letters, which meant that companies were probably bored reading them. So he took his experience working on movie trailers in a film house and used it to his advantage.

I kind of use the knowledge that I had there and the resources that I had there to cut a 45-second promo for the film, Dressel said. That was basically just like, this is what the film is about. This is the tone. This is the style. Done. 45 seconds.

Out of the 600 companies he sent it to, nearly 55 responded, which Dressel was thrilled with. While all of them were rejections, any response was progress.

After nearly four months of silence, Dressel finally got a call from a company because his promo video stuck out, getting them to fall in love with the script after reading through it. That call kicked off eight years of collaboration and marked Dressels first feature film.

Despite acceptance, Dressel said there is a lot of willpower required to get ready to film. There were practically eight years of rewrites, two directors, constant stopping and starting. But to Dressel, that stress allowed him to stay connected to his work where other screenwriters option their work and never touch it again.

I was working very closely with the development executive at Darius films, and they really valued my input and really wanted me to be on the project from start to to finish.

The process came with significant changes, too. In Dressels original vision, the film would take place in Northern Michigan, with shooting in Canada. Then, Darius Films struck a world-first multi-film production partnership with the Cayman Islands, shifting the films setting from a frigid northern cabin to the sunny Caribbean.

The film crew is still in the Cayman Islands shooting the second film in the three-movie deal, with Blue Iguana giving them much-needed experience in shooting on the island. Dressel said that because the islands were so secluded to keep COVID-19 cases down and how limited the film presence is there, there was difficulty finding production studios and wardrobe at times.

Despite that, Dressel said he was itching to get the film made, which meant on-set rewrites and adjusting on the fly.

I was ready to just get moving, he said. It was kind of awe-inspiring, and surreal, but it was just like, OK, you know, this is what weve been spending eight years on, this is what weve honed that script for.

While the film is still in post-production, Dressel said the result so far has been overwhelming. Especially having been told through writing that dark comedies like Blue Iguana wont sell, seeing a team that steps up and makes his vision into a reality is the best he could have asked for.

Its really basically kind of just the exact style of film that Ive always wanted to make, he said. So Im really happy that of the screenplays that I have, that this is the one that gets to kind of kick off my career.

Read more:

Black motorist says Rockford police falsely arrested him in traffic stop

Grand Rapids police chief opens Internal Affairs investigation into officer punching motorist 7 times

Citizens want change as investigation of Kalamazoos 2020 police responses moves to next phase
[April 29, 2021] Passport Technology's DataStream Launches the Next Generation of Secure Cloud-Based ATM Processing

LAS VEGAS, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Passport Technology Inc. ("Passport"), the fastest growing provider of payment technology to the global gaming industry, announced the launch of the nation's first cloud-based debit processing platform utilizing the latest in advanced encryption security with VirtuCrypt HSM by Futurex, a global leader in cryptographic solutions. Launched in 2003, DataStream is one of the largest bank-sponsored ATM processors in North America facilitating ATM, POS, ACH, and retail transactions. DataStream features a robust online reporting portal, innovative mobile portfolio management application, dynamic currency conversion, true 24-hour settlement (including holidays), full PCI/DSS compliance, EMV and custom kiosk certification, real-time transaction feed API, and a variety of white label and custom branding tools. Now completely cloud-based, DataStream elevates industry standards of reliability and security through automated redundancies not available in traditional hosted environments, true hot/hot transaction processing, and cloud-based encryption. "The launch of our fully integrated cloud-based processing platform is a significant technological milestone for DataStream," stated Kent Cain, Senior Vice President of Platform Operations at Passport Technology. "With the integration of VirtuCrypt, DataStream is at the forefront of industry innovation with cloud-based encryption, platform redundancy, uptime, and ability to provide custom processing solutions for any customer. It also allows us the flexibility to augment DataStream with forward-thinking enhanements that exceed industry standards and requirements."



With over 3,500 ATMs deployed across 48 states, DataStream has seen triple-digit growth year over with further expansion plans in 2022. The combination of industry-leading technology and focused sales initiatives will position DataStream as both a profit center and strategic point of difference for Passport. In addition to DataStream, Passport leverages cloud-based solutions to support its diverse portfolio of North American and International FinTech solutions. Through the development of cloud-based infrastructures, Passport maintains a nimble approach to industry innovation while maintaining the highest levels of security, privacy, and redundancy exceeding regulatory and compliance standards internationally.

About Passport Technology Inc.

Passport Technology Inc. is a leading developer of FinTech solutions and services for the worldwide casino gaming and financial services industry. The company's product portfolio includes redemption kiosks, quasi-cash, check warranty, ATM, digital payments, cash and cashless integrations, casino automation, regulatory compliance solutions, bank-sponsored transaction processing, merchant services, agnostic application management systems, and interactive content and loyalty services. Passport, through its privileged and associated gaming licenses, has securely and responsibly settled over $25 billion in funds to casinos across the globe. Passport is recognized as the winner of the Global Regulatory Awards 2018 and 2019 Compliance Payment Service or Solution Provider of the Year. For more information, please visit passporttechnology.com. Press Contact:

Paul Nielsen

Chief Financial Officer

Passport Technology Inc.

paul@passporttechnology.com Related Images passport-technology-inc.png

Passport Technology Inc. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/passport-technologys-datastream-launches-the-next-generation-of-secure-cloud-based-atm-processing-301280779.html SOURCE Passport Technology Inc.

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WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Stating that "time is of the greatest essence," American Legion National Commander James W. "Bill" Oxford wrote to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and called on the administration to speed up the processing of visa applications for interpreters who assisted U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Oxford explained that he sent the letters because of the dire consequences that interpreters face. "A Michigan Legionnaire who served in Afghanistan described the situation in stark terms. Interpreters who are discovered by the Taliban will be swiftly beheaded. The unlucky ones will have to watch their families die first," he said. "While we welcome an end to these endless wars, we must never abandon the brave Afghan and Iraqi allies who took great personal risk to assist our military with its missions. We must not leave them behind. They have earned safe passage to America."

Oxford directed his Washington staff to work with the Biden administration on the best way to fix what has been described by Brown University as a "slow and inefficient" processing program that takes over two years. In his letters to Biden and Blinken, Oxford noted that Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients "go through the strictest vetting and approval process of any category of person coming to the U.S. already, but we must balance security concerns with a commitment to those who fought alongside us."

The American Legion foresaw this issue in 2018 when its National Executive Committee unanimously passed Resolution No. 16, which called for Congress and the president to recognize Afghan and Iraqi SIV recipients who "stood shoulder to shoulder" with U.S. troops and diplomats.

Oxford further promised that "The American Legion will not let this go. Military equipment is being removed from Afghanistan right now. But people are our greatest asset. We urge every American to contact their congressional delegations and insist that they prioritize the protection of our heroic allies and their families."

About The American Legion

The American Legion is the largest veterans service organization with nearly 2 million members in more than 12,000 posts across the nation. Chartered by Congress in 1919, The American Legion is committed to mentoring youth and sponsoring wholesome community programs, advocating patriotism and honor, promoting a strong national security and continued devotion to servicemembers and veterans.

Contact: John Raughter, Media Relations

[email protected] or 317-630-1350

SOURCE The American Legion

Related Links

http://www.legion.org


This recognition speaks volumes to the type of people and environment we have here at Cprime. Zubin Irani, CEO at Cprime

Great Place to Work has honored Cprime as one of the 2021 Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services, coming in at #15. Earning a spot means that Cprime is one of the best companies to work for in the country.

The Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services award is based on analysis of survey responses from more than 463,000 current employees across the U.S. In that survey, 96% of Cprimes employees said Cprime is a great place to work. This number is 37 points higher than the average U.S. company.

The Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services stand out for excelling in one of the nations most competitive marketplaces.

This recognition speaks volumes to the type of people and environment we have here at Cprime, said Zubin Irani, CEO at Cprime. Im proud of the company and team we have assembled and the acknowledgement of our continued focus and tremendous investment in our employees. Adds Irani: This recognition is especially meaningful in light of the past challenging year. The pandemic introduced profound changes to our lives and to the way we work. Im grateful that we were able to maintain a high level of engagement, as employees and as human beings, to carry us through those turbulent times.

The Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services list is highly competitive. Great Place to Work, the global authority on workplace culture, selected the list using rigorous analytics and confidential employee feedback. Companies were only considered if they are a Great Place to Work-Certifiedorganization, an honor that was given to Cprime as one of 2020 Best Small & Medium Workplaces by Great Place to Work and Fortune.

Great Place to Work is the only company culture award in America that selects winners based on how fairly employees are treated. Companies are assessed on how well they are creating a great employee experience that cuts across race, gender, age, disability status, or any aspect of who employees are or what their role is.

These companies are proof that strong company culture is not restricted to the physical workplace, said Sarah Lewis-Kulin, VP global recognition, Great Place to Work. Despite the challenges of the pandemic and remote work, employees at these companies say they feel supported by their leaders, connected to their colleagues and that managers bring out the best in everyone.

About Cprime

An Alten Company, Cprime is a global consulting firm helping transforming businesses get in sync. Cprime is the partner of choice for Fortune 100 companies looking to achieve value and agility. Cprime helps visionary business leaders compose solutions, execute implementations, and exceed against business goals. With key partnership recognitions, including Atlassian Platinum, AWS Advanced, and SAFe Gold partner, Cprimes industry-leading software and services work in synergy to deliver transformations. For more information, please visit cprime.com or follow Cprime on LinkedIn.

About the Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services

Great Place to Work selected the Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services by gathering and analyzing confidential survey responses from more than 463,000 employees at Great Place to Work-Certified organizations across the country. Company rankings are derived from 60 employee experience questions within the Great Place to Work Trust Index survey. Read the full methodology.

To get on this list next year, start here.

About Great Place to Work

Great Place to Work is the global authority on workplace culture. Since 1992, they have surveyed more than 100 million employees worldwide and used those deep insights to define what makes a great workplace: trust. Their employee survey platform empowers leaders with the feedback, real-time reporting and insights they need to make data-driven people decisions. Everything they do is driven by the mission to build a better world by helping every organization become a Great Place to Work For All. Learn more at greatplacetowork.com and on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Syracuse, NY -- A Syracuse man who confessed to participating in a fatal robbery in 2013 had his robbery conviction tossed and will get a new trial on the murder charge in a brain-teasing decision written by an appellate court judge.

Shakeith Stackhouse, now 26, will escape punishment for a robbery that he confessed to participating in. But he could be convicted again of the murder of Marvin Bryant, 65; a crime he was only charged with based on his role in the robbery, even though the robbery charge has now been dismissed.

Justice Shirley Troutmans nine-page decision, written on behalf of a unanimous appellate court, plumbs the depths of criminal law in other ways, too: questioning whether Stackhouse had an adequate defense but not faulting his defense lawyers and declaring that Stackhouses confession wasnt enough to prove the robbery but concluding that the victims death was enough proof of the murder.

To understand the nuances of the case, its important first to understand the murder law. In New York, a participant in a robbery can be charged with murder, even if its a co-defendant who ends up killing the victim. Its called felony murder: in other words, a slaying that happens during the course of a felony -- in this case, robbery.

Theres no question what happened, Troutman notes: Bryant was robbed of money and personal belongings by several assailants -- none of them being Stackhouse -- at the corner of South Salina and Colvin streets. He then left, but returned a short time later looking for his stolen wallet.

Stackhouse confessed to police that he then participated in a second robbery over $10, in which Bryant was killed by someone else.

Under law, Stackhouse was charged with robbery and with Bryants resulting murder.

The appellate court decision now dismisses the robbery charges -- saying there wasnt enough supporting evidence -- while allowing the murder charge to go back for a new trial.

In her decision, Troutman picks apart a rule that requires corroboration of a confession. There was no proof at trial corroborating Stackhouses role in the robbery, the appellate judge ruled. Thats why the robbery charges had to be dismissed.

But there was corroboration that a murder had taken place, she continued: the fact that Bryant was dead. So the murder charge could be taken back for a new trial, even though the robbery charge tying Stackhouse to the murder cant.

How can that be? The law requiring that Stackhouse committed a robbery doesnt say he actually has to be convicted of any specific robbery law.

There was another problem with the case, too.

The appellate court faulted since retired Judge Anthony Aloi for not looking into Stackhouses complaints about his original lawyer before trial. It took six months before the judge asked Stackhouse about those complaints, Troutman noted. Even if Stackhouses complaints lacked any validity, the judge should have asked him about them sooner.

Only days before trial, another lawyer offered to take over the case without having to delay trial. But at trial, portions of Stackhouses videotaped confession were played to the jury that should have been excluded as prejudicial, the judge added.

That showed that the trial lawyer didnt have a real trial strategy, which amounts to an ineffective assistance of counsel.

That ineffectiveness required all of the charges -- including the murder -- to be retried before a new jury, the judge ruled.

But Troutman was quick to note that she wasnt faulting either defense lawyer: the original one who Stackhouse complained about or the replacement lawyer who didnt have a coherent strategy during trial.

We note that, in concluding that defendant was denied effective assistance of counsel, we do not fault either of his attorneys individually, Troutman wrote. Defendants first attorney was not allowed to see the representation through, and his second attorney was given only 10 days to prepare.

So Stackhouse, still jailed, has been sent back to Syracuse for a new murder trial. If convicted again, he faces 25 years to life in prison.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.
[April 29, 2021] CEO Tamara Rabenold acquires 100% ownership of Vaudra International

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The launch into 2021 marked several significant milestones for Vaudra International, an investigation company specializing in brand protection, Intellectual Property (IP) and corporate investigations. Tamara Rabenold, who joined the company in 2004 and transitioned to CEO in 2014, acquired 100 percent ownership, and Vaudra co-founder, Randy Rabenold, announced his retirement. Acquisition of the firm by Tamara Rabenold makes Vaudra among a handful of women-owned investigative firms globally.

In 2020, while many lost momentum amidst COVID-19's wrath, Vaudra thrived as companies pivoted to innovate and reallocate resources to protect their IP in the intensified online climate. Evidenced by a significant rise in IP applications according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), companies were inspired to problem-solve with proprietary solutions.

"In speaking with clients about the extended hours required to keep up with demand," said Tamara Rabenold, "the frantic pace was attributed to everyone trapped in silos, getting creative, and wanting to protect their ideas. Projects that had lingered for months became priorities." With law firms composing over half of Vaudra's client base, busy attorneys beget busy investigators. Case in point, Vaudra experienced a 230 percent increase in trademark-use investigations in Q1 2021 compared to Q1 2020.

According to Rabenold, the pandemic also escalated fraud in ecommerce and counterfeit products. "Resulting from stay-at-home and work-from-home orders, ecommerce boomed as consuers moved online for basic needs," stated Rabenold. "Savvy counterfeiters capitalize on trends to meet market demands. One example is the counterfeit face masks emblazoned with luxury brands' trademarks that quickly propagated online for $20.00 or less."





The volume of online transactions perpetuated a rise in identity theft, scams and compromised payment methods. With more counterfeits in the marketplaces, clients' demand for Vaudra's support with evidential purchases increased 88% in Q4 2020 compared to Q4 2019. Evidential purchases involve completing controlled, discreet buys, whether from online channels or brick-and-mortar locations.



Acquiring ownership also offers opportunities in supplier diversity as a woman-owned enterprise. "Vaudra is in a unique position as a woman-owned investigative firm," confirmed Rabenold. "Our clients, ranging from consumer product brands to automotive aftermarket suppliers, value supplier diversity and seek to collaborate with firms like ours with a proven track record of investigative expertise and capacity." The firm is exploring key certifications in this arena. Rabenold adds, "Woman-owned designations may get our foot in the door with prospects and spur growth with existing clients, but exceptional solutions are what will keep us there."

With a revamped website launched, expansion of her team and strategic partnerships, Rabenold's focus is on forward-moving initiatives that will continue to position Vaudra as a preferred IP investigative provider worldwide.

To learn more, visit www.vaudra.com

About Tamara Rabenold

Tamara Rabenold is a licensed investigator and CEO of Vaudra International. Over the past 17 years, Rabenold has handled thousands of cases. Passionate about their industry, Rabenold's involvements include serving on the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association's (AASA) IP Committee and the International Trademark Association (INTA) Anti-Counterfeiting Committee. In 2019, she was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper to serve on the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board (PPSB). This Board administers licensing, education and training requirements for those engaged in private protective services, like investigators and security guards, within the state.

Photo(s):

https://www.prlog.org/12867694

Press release distributed by PRLog View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ceo-tamara-rabenold-acquires-100-ownership-of-vaudra-international-301280347.html SOURCE Vaudra International

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BlackArch Partners LLC (BlackArch) is pleased to announce that Wholesale Supplies Plus (WSP or the Company), a portfolio company of Incline Equity Partners (Incline), has been acquired by Two Sigma Impact (Two Sigma) and Avance Investment Management (Avance).

WSP is an industry-leading provider of high-quality raw materials, supplies, and packaging for soap, skincare, and candle artisans. The Company's broad product assortment and complementary support enable an expanding artisan community to meet growing consumer demand for authentic, local, and clean label personal products. WSP has attracted a large base of engaged, recurring customers through its Company-owned eCommerce portal and strong social media presence. As a result, WSP has enjoyed more than 15 consecutive years of organic revenue growth across multiple economic cycles.

Evan Weinstein, Partner at Incline, commented, We were confident that BlackArch would deliver for Incline, as they have in the past. Their expertise in positioning companies in the eCommerce, consumer products and specialty distribution sectors ensured that the WSP story was communicated the right way to the right buyers. Their team provided around-the-clock support and senior-level attention that drove an exceptional outcome. We look forward to partnering with BlackArch again in the future.

Sam Solomon, CEO at WSP, added, BlackArch was an invaluable advisor to WSP as we searched for our next partner. They prepared our management team to effectively articulate WSPs unique attributes and vision for the future. BlackArchs skillful usage of data analytics put answers at our fingertips and added additional perspective on the things we experience in our business every day. We greatly valued their teams extra horsepower at crunch time, thoughtful counsel on important topics and top-tier process management from start to finish. They earned our highest recommendation.

BlackArch was retained by WSP to serve as its exclusive financial advisor. The transaction continues BlackArchs strong presence in eCommerce, consumer products, specialty distribution and business services and is representative of the firms focus on providing unique M&A advisory services to market-leading growth businesses.

Transaction Highlights



Two Sigma Impact and Avance Investment Management have acquired Wholesale Supplies Plus from Incline Equity Partners

WSP was established two decades ago to provide customers with affordable and professional quality soap, skincare, and candle making supplies

The Companys unique, data-oriented approach to business decision making and high levels of customer service position WSP as a digitally enabled platform poised to scale efficiently

Management will continue to grow the business and remain a material part of the shareholder group during the Companys next phase of growth

BlackArch leveraged its deep end market and business model knowledge to achieve a superior outcome for management and the shareholders

About Wholesale Supplies Plus

WSP is an industry-leading provider of high-quality raw materials, supplies, and packaging for soap, skincare, and candle artisans. The Company's broad product assortment and complementary support enable an expanding artisan community to meet growing consumer demand for authentic, local, and clean label personal products. Please visit https://www.wholesalesuppliesplus.com/ for more details.

About Incline Equity Partners

Incline Equity Partners, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a private equity firm investing in manufacturing, distribution and business services companies. Incline is generally seeking growing companies with enterprise values of $25  $450 million. Inclines typical investment types are ownership transitions for privately held businesses, buyouts and corporate divestitures within the U.S. and Canada. To learn more, visit https://inclineequity.com/.

About Two Sigma Impact

Two Sigma Impact is a business of Two Sigma. Its mission is to combine active, principled ownership and data science with the goal of achieving superior returns and positive social outcomes. The Two Sigma Impact team is focused on workforce impact  where they anticipate innovative and thoughtful investments in humans will lead to an enhanced employee experience, productivity and long-term financial returns. As part of Two Sigma, Two Sigma Impact has access to expertise in data science, technology and a range of corporate specialties, and seeks to support its portfolio companies with those resources. To learn more, visit https://twosigmaimpact.com/.

About Avance Investment Management

Avance is a private equity firm with a passion for building great businesses in partnership with talented management teams. Avance focuses primarily on thematic investments within the Services and Consumer areas in the US, seeking attractive opportunities with catalysts for growth and fragmented spaces with consolidation opportunities. Avances team has a long history of partnering with founder-owned businesses, industry executives and management teams and aims to add value to each investment through the application of its STAGE value creation framework. Avance has offices in New York and Miami. To learn more, visit https://avanceinv.com/.

About BlackArch Partners

BlackArch Partners is a leading middle-market investment bank offering a full spectrum of advisory services to financial sponsors, private companies and diversified corporations. BlackArch addresses the needs of companies with specialized services that include M&A advisory, strategic advisory and private capital solutions. Headquartered in Charlotte, NC, BlackArch features a total of 12 industry-focused practices that cover all sectors of interest to middle-market investors. BlackArch professionals have closed more than 350 transactions in 16 countries on 4 continents. Please visit http://www.blackarchpartners.com for more details.

Securities offered through BlackArch Securities LLC. Member FINRA and SIPC. Testimonials may not be representative of the experience of all clients. Testimonials are not a guarantee of future performance or success.
The Administrative Court of Cassation as part of the Supreme Court has begun considering cases on appeal against President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky's decree on the abolition of the decree on the appointment of judges of the Constitutional Court (CC) Oleksandr Tupytsky and Oleksandr Kasminin, the Supreme Court told Interfax-Ukraine.

"On April 29, 2021, the Administrative Court of Cassation as part of the Supreme Court began hearing cases on claims in which the plaintiffs challenge the decree of the President of Ukraine dated March 27, 2021 No. 124/2021 'On Certain Issues of Ensuring Ukraine's National Security,'" the court said.

So, in particular, at the suit of Tupytsky, in which he asks to declare unlawful and cancel the decree abolishing the decree on his appointment as a judge of the Constitutional Court, the court heard the position of the plaintiff on the subject of the dispute.

"At the request of a representative of the defendant, a break was announced in the court session. The consideration of the case will continue at 14:00 on May 20, 2021," the Supreme Court said.

Consideration of the case on the claim of Kasminin, in which the plaintiff also asks to declare illegal and cancel the presidential decree in terms of canceling the decree on his appointment as a judge of the Constitutional Court, has also been postponed. According to the court, the next hearing will take place at 10:00 on May 14, 2021.

As reported, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky canceled the presidential decree of May 14, 2013 No. 256 "On the appointment of Oleksandr Tupytsky as a judge of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine." The corresponding decree "On some issues of ensuring the national security of Ukraine" was signed on March 27. By the same decree, Zelensky canceled presidential decree on September 17, 2013, No. 513 "On the appointment of Oleksandr Kasminin as a judge of the Constitutional Court." The document notes that "particular judges of the Constitutional Court, appointed by Viktor Yanukovych, while continuing to exercise their powers, pose a threat to the state independence and national security of Ukraine, which violates the Constitution of Ukraine, human and civil rights and freedoms."
Albert Douglas is pictured above

A millionaire British businessman fears he will die in prison in Dubai after being jailed over business debts run up by his son.

Albert Douglas, 60, has fought a 1m legal battle to prove he was not liable for money owed by his son Wolfgang's business.

And he became so desperate at one point he dramatically attempted to escape the country into neighbouring Oman - but was arrested as he tried to climb a border fence and hauled off to prison.

The grandfather has since spent two months in a 'hell hole' jail where he claimed he was beaten by guards when he asked for his heart medication.

And Albert, who once was so prosperous that he lived in a luxurious villa on the Palm Jumeriah Island and drove a Rolls Royce, has now been given a further three-year prison sentence.

He says his only 'crime' had been to be listed on legal documents of the flooring company his son had set up in 2007.

Under Dubai law anyone linked to a company that owes money can be found liable for their debts - and family members are often pursued for payments.

Albert with his son Wolfgang

Because Wolfgang, 34, was back in Britain when the company got into trouble, creditors took Albert to court and won a judgement against him instead.

Speaking from Bur Dubai prison, he told MailOnline: 'I fear that I will not get out of here alive.

'I am innocent and being made to pay the penalty for the debts of my son. I would not wish this on my worst enemy.

'I had nothing to do with the company other than my name being on the documents when it was founded.'

Wolfgang said: 'Through no fault of his own my father has been financially destroyed and penniless, locked up and treated worse than an animal in a cage in horrific conditions.'

Albert and his wife Naomi emigrated to Dubai in 2003 and he built up a successful business called Alomni Flooring, specialising in real wood floors.

During the massive property boom in the United Arab Emirates, as hotels and holiday homes transformed the country into a top tourist destination, his company thrived.

Father of four Albert lived a luxury lifestyle and persuaded his eldest son Wolfgang to move to Dubai from his home in London.

Albert is pictured at the wedding of his daughter Abigail in 2009

Albert Douglas is pictured above. Douglas, 60, has fought a 1m legal battle to prove he was not liable for money owed by his son Wolfgang's business

Wolfgang started the company TimberWolf and his father was one of the signatories on the business. The business relationship ended in 2018 when Albert gave up any involvement.

But a year later when Wolfgang returned to the UK for medical treatment and cheques written to suppliers began to bounce, creditors launched legal action and filed claims against Wolfgang and his father.

Wolfgang attempted to solve the problems from the UK as he knew he would be arrested if he returned to Dubai over the money owed.

Albert, who has heart problems, was arrested in September 2019. A court found him liable for his son's debts and imposed a three-year sentence. Albert was also ordered to pay 2.5m in fines.

Albert Douglas pictured with his two sons Wolfgang and Albert Douglas

He was given bail while appealing against the sentence and spent more than 850,000 on legal fees protesting his innocence.

But after his appeal failed in February, fearing he would be jailed, he decided to attempt to flee Dubai by crossing the border with Oman.

He paid a people smuggler to take him to a remote border crossing but was arrested before he could escape.

Albert was taken to the notorious 'hell hole' Al Ain prison in Dubai where he was held for two months and claims he was beaten by guards.

After serving the sentence he was taken to the Bur Dubai jail where others convicted of financial crimes are held and given a three year sentence .

Douglas pictured wtith his grandchildren. He has spent two months in a 'hell hole' jail where he claimed he was beaten by guards when he asked for his heart medication

His family fear for his health and have begun a campaign to get him released enlisting the help of pressure group Detained in Dubai.

Founder Radha Stirling said 'Albert had nothing to do with his son's company. He is being held as hostage to force his family to pay for his son's company's liabilities.'

Wolfgang said the family has been torn apart and he is desperate for help.

'My father has lost everything and from being a wealthy business owner and property investor had been totally stripped of his assets and dignity for no reason,' he said.

'He did not commit any crime. He has now been engulfed in an unending onslaught of cases that stack up each day and that he cannot defend or remedy from jail.'

Family members have launched a Facebook page to raise awareness of Mr Douglas's ordeal.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 12:05:26|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, talks to people of different ethnic groups who are participating in festive activities outside the Anthropology Museum of Guangxi in the city of Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, April 27, 2021. (Xinhua/Shen Hong)

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- After lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past decades, China is aligning efforts to consolidate the achievements in poverty alleviation with promoting rural vitalization, an indispensable and vital part of modernization.

During his inspection tour in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region from Sunday to Tuesday, President Xi Jinping underlined efforts to pursue rural vitalization based on local specialty industries and make better use of science and technology in promoting the agricultural sector.

It, once again, highlights the persistent high attention that the central authorities have paid to the development of agriculture and rural areas with policies and measures.

With absolute poverty eliminated in rural areas, the country has solved its major weak link in the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects and created a miracle for mankind. This year, the nation is embarking on a new journey of fully building a modernized socialist country with agriculture and rural areas being an important part of the cause.

In the new development phase, rural areas remain a priority and an arduous task due to the imbalanced development, weak areas in public services and the environment as well as financing difficulties for private rural firms.

Therefore, substantial efforts are needed to attract talent and continue improving infrastructure, public services, and the environment. In advancing rural vitalization, technologies and reform are required to strengthen the capacity and competitiveness of agriculture to drive the modernization of the primary sector.

The strategy will help ensure the country's food security and the supply of high-quality agricultural goods.

As life continues to improve, the Chinese people have new aspirations for a better life. The increasing urban population has higher requirements for the agricultural sector, such as quality farm products and rural tourism, bringing new opportunities for rural development.

The implementation of a rural vitalization strategy would contribute to the sustainable development of rural areas where some industries are still in their initial development stage, and foster new momentum in the national economy. It also means rural residents will enjoy a more beautiful and comfortable living environment while having better access to quality services and goods from home and abroad.

Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy. Advancing rural vitalization would support the country's comprehensive modernization drive which will benefit all. 
Tara Coombs (@tara_coombs) is an influencer, mom and artist from Kentucky who has built a following on TikTok by making memory blankets for parents whose kids have passed away.

Parents send Coombs a box that contains information about the child, as well as the childs clothes. Coombs then creates the memory blankets using the clothes, providing a source of warmth and comfort that parents can hold onto forever.

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In some cases, Coombs goes above and beyond to provide parents with emotional reminders of their children. For this blanket, Coombs sprayed the fabric with the childs favorite shampoo, so that the parents could remember what their child used to smell like.

Unfortunately, Coombs knows firsthand how tough it is for parents to go through periods of hardship and tragedy. When Coombs son Owen was 3, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Coombs toldToday. Thankfully, Owen is now in remission, but Coombs still knows how important it is to support parents who are going through similar, or worse, situations.

Thats why Coombs is working so hard to not only create the memory blankets but also to spread the word about her project so it can reach as many people as possible.

Coombs posted an introductory video explaining her project, and the clip has logged more than 5.9 million views. The viral TikTok led to an overwhelming amount of support, according to Coombs, and the comments section alone proves just how important Coombs work is.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Grief is so difficult. Im so happy humans like you exist, wrote one thankful TikTok user.

This is an incredible act of generosity for people experiencing profound grief. What you do is a gift. Thank you, read a comment from the TikTok account for the charity group Giving Tuesday.

Making memory blankets can be challenging, both physically and emotionally, but Coombs has no plans on pumping the breaks. I will not give up. I will not back down. I will not stop, Coombs wrote in one of her videos.

Story continues

Coombs makes her blankets for free, but she does accept donations and sponsorships. Click on this link for more information on how to support this heartwarming cause.

In The Know is now available on Apple News  follow us here!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this funny dad on TikTok who isnt here for complaints about being tired  unless you have kids!

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LAS VEGAS, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Australis Capital Inc. (CSE: AUSA) (OTC: AUSAF) ("AUSA" or the "Company") is pleased to provide the following corporate update:

Rapid Growth  Balance Sheet Strength

Jon Paul, CFO, commented, "Despite ALPS only contributing approximately 3 weeks to our year end, AUSA's revenues are anticipated to more than double for the entire fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. With an array of current projects in progress and an expanding pipeline of new projects anticipated to be signed, the impact of ALPS on the first quarter of our fiscal 2022 will be even greater. Meanwhile, we expect the sale of a land asset held through our other acquisition, Green Therapeutics, to close shortly, which will add approximately C$2.5 million in cash to our working capital position. With the anticipated growth at ALPS and GT, as well as other liquid assets held, AUSA is in robust shape financially for its current level of operations."

Company Eying New York and East Coast Expansion

Following the legalization of adult use cannabis in New York, the Company is reiterating its intent to expand into this market. The Company is in discussions with a number of potential partners with a variety of partnership models to facilitate entry into the fourth most populous U.S. state (approximately 19.5 million people). The legal cannabis industry in New York State is expected to capture $1.2 billion in sales by 2023 and $4.2 billion by 2027.1

To enable a sound market entry into New York and New Jersey, the Company is in the process of assembling an all-star team of operators, license application specialists and influencers. The AUSA team will be in New York next week to lock down the market entry team and determine its strategy for entering not only New York but the eastern U.S. in general.

Terry Booth, AUSA CEO, commented, "We intend to play a leading role in the Eastern U.S. market, which will take a variety of forms. We initiated discussions and negotiations with potential partners over 8 months ago in anticipation of this significant advancement in the American adult usage cannabis market. We will now accelerate these negotiations to determine the opportunities that these potential partners bring to strengthen our applications and negotiations. We also applaud the social equity components of the new legislation in New York. Diversity and Inclusion will not just be a check mark on our applications, it will be a pillar of our corporate culture. We also believe the cannabis industry owes a debt to advocates, activists, innovators and early adopters. This legislation will enable many of these and otherwise disadvantaged groups to participate in the New York and eastern US markets, which we strongly believe is in the best interest of both the industry and society at large. The team we are putting together to tackle New York, New Jersey and the Eastern U.S. is of all-star caliber, substantially strengthening our execution ability in these exciting new markets."

Terry Booth, CEO continued, "We will enter the Eastern US markets. based on the market opportunity, regulatory framework, population size and the cost of doing business will be key drivers with respect to prioritizing Eastern U.S. markets for entry. Beyond New York and New Jersey, other eastern U.S. markets we are targeting include Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and others. As we have stated previously, we intend to enter new jurisdictions in a capital light fashion and will assess each opportunity on its accretive merits. This is an exciting time to be involved in these markets and we look forward to providing consumers in the Eastern U.S. with access to our award-winning brands. The U.S. cannabis industry will never be as small as it is today. Our commitment to ignite, excite and delight our shareholders remains at the top of our to do list."

SAFE banking Act

U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV), a member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, on March 26, 2021 announced her co-sponsorship of the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act of 2021. The bipartisan bill would allow access to banking services for licensed cannabis businesses operating in states, like Nevada, that have legalized the sale of marijuana.

If passed, the Act would enable financial institutions across the U.S. to engage with the cannabis industry. Many operations, to date, have been hamstrung in their development by lack of access to capital and by the inability to process credit card payments or other card-based transactions. Additionally, passing of the act likely will lift compliance restrictions with many investment houses that have been eager to enter into the space, but were precluded from doing so because of federal restrictions related to cannabis remaining a Schedule I substance.

Jon Paul, CFO of AUSA, stated, "Passing of the SAFE act will be a game changer for the industry. Not only will it facilitate normal banking for cannabis companies, but it is also expected to provide much greater access to capital, likely at lower cost than is presently the case. Rapidly growing companies, such as AUSA, are well positioned to benefit from this change and we look forward to capitalizing on new opportunities created if this Act is adopted by the House and the Senate."

Company Establishes Committee on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

The Company has established a Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Board, headed by Melissa Rolston, CEO of JADA, a highly regarded cannabis industry pioneer, to advise senior management on implementing measures to ensure that diversity and inclusion are at the core foundation of the company as it continues to grow. The new advisory board, reporting to senior management, will ensure the entire company is aligned in supporting the communities that have been greatly impacted by the war on drugs. Through corporate governance and lobbying efforts, the board will create a gold standard as it pertains to Social Equity in the USA and beyond.

"Equality and inclusion have to be fundamental to how we run AUSA," said Terry Booth, CEO. "We strongly believe that formalizing this will send a strong signal to anyone looking to work for or partner with AUSA, strengthening our drive towards creating an excellent, innovative and impactful organization. We are very pleased that Melissa has agreed to take on this important role and help AUSA towards achieving its goal of being the preeminent and responsible corporate leader within our industry."

"I'm excited to join as the Chair of AUSA's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board. I will strive to advance the group's established and future efforts. The company's decision to formalize its efforts towards diversity and inclusion speaks volumes of its dedication to social equity. Together, we will be able to build a more forward-thinking corporate structure, serve as role models to our peers, and aim to set the standard in our industry and beyond."

ALPS Adds APIS Contract and Continues to Expand Potential Project Pipeline

The Company's majority owned subsidiary ALPS has signed a contract with Sigg in Finland, a nursery supplying 8 million plants per year to tomato and cucumber growers, for the provision of its APIS maintenance offering. Based on a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), Sigg will utilize the new services module, which is proven to deliver significant operational costs savings. In particular, predictive scheduling and preventative maintenance help optimize cultivation operations and reduce facility downtime.

Thomas Larssen, President of ALPS, commented, "Interest in our APIS CMMS offering is growing, both within the cannabis and traditional horticultural industries because of the very significant return on investment our platform delivers. Having applied our over three decades of growing experience, we have been able to identify the bottle necks and risk points in a grower's operation. Through APIS, we prevent these from occurring, delivering significant economic benefits to our customers, while generating a recurring and high-margin revenue stream for the Company."

Currently, ALPS is executing as the design, engineering and construction management consultancy on projects with a total Capex value close to $1 billion. The ALPS present potential pipeline continues to grow, now reflecting projects with a total additional Capex value of close to $4 billion.

Mr. Booth commented, "The sheer size of the projects ALPS is working and negotiating on is a reflection of their leadership in design of cultivation facilities in both the cannabis and sustainable horticulture industries."

Green Therapeutics  Continued Execution

Green Therapeutics ("GT") signed a management agreement with a Nevada based cultivator and producer of premium cannabis products in Nevada. Under the terms of the agreement, GT will operate the partner's cultivation facility, with products sold under the GT brands. In consideration, GT will receive a royalty on all products sold.

Dr. Duke Fu, COO of AUSA, stated, "This agreement is a good reflection of our exceptional operational capabilities, our standing in the market and the strength of our brands. The agreement provides GT with the ability to grow high margin revenues, without having to deploy Capex for cultivation infrastructure."

Additionally, GT is close to completing an agreement with another cannabis operator whereby in consideration for operating the facility, GT will get biomass, in line with the Company's capital light expansion strategy.

GT is also in the final stages of completing the acquisition of a 23-acre plot of land in Nevada where it intends building a nexus for cannabis operators in this state. The intention is for ALPS to help develop facilities for third party operators, while securing access to a steady supply of competitively priced biomass to fuel the further scale up of the GT brands in Nevada. The Company is currently going through a 45-day due diligence process prior to completing the land acquisition.

As part of the unwinding of the original transaction between GT and AUSA, the Company is in the process of completing the divestment of a non-operational plot of land. The Company anticipates closing this transaction shortly, which it expects will add close to C$2.5 million on AUSA's balance sheet.

Green Therapeutics is also in the process of launching new product categories in Nevada and other jurisdiction it intends, or is in the process of expanding into, such as Oklahoma and Missouri. The categories include water soluble tinctures and edibles lines, anticipated to be formally launched in the coming months.

First Cocoon Kiosk Installed in Canada

The Company installed its first Cocoon kiosk outside of the U.S. in British Colombia, Canada. Kiaro is a leading independent dispensary chain with 7 operational locations across B.C. and Saskatchewan and plans to expand further across Canada.

Daniel Petrov, CEO of Kiaro, commented, "Utilizing technology to redefine how we transact with our customers is very much part of our corporate philosophy. We are therefore very pleased to be the first company in Canada to deploy the Cocoon Kiosk and be able to assess its potential of having a major positive impact on the customer experience."

Company retains Hybrid Financial to Increase Investor Outreach and Visibility

Hybrid Financial actively helps issuers connect with the investment community across North America. Using a data driven approach and a team of over 70 professionals, Hybrid offers comprehensive coverage of both Canadian and U.S. markets.

Jon Paul, CFO, commented, "We were attracted to the Hybrid model due to its data driven approach that helps connect companies more accurately with potential investors. As we execute on our growth strategy, it is important that we share our developments with investment decision makers and influencers to ensure our capital markets visibility and footprint develop in lockstep. We look forward to working closely with the Hybrid team and share the exciting AUSA story with a growing audience."

About Australis Capital Inc.

AUSA is laser focused on a growth strategy towards establishing a highly competitive and profitable MSO in the U.S. and the global cannabis markets. AUSA's business lines and assets include a 51% ownership interest in ALPS with an option to acquire the remaining 49%, along with investments in Cocoon, Body and Mind Inc., Quality Green and land assets in Washington. The Company also owns the iconic Mr. Natural Brand, has a joint venture partnership with 3 Rivers Biotech for plant tissue culture, genetics clean-up and micro propagation. AUSA has also completed the first phase in the transaction to acquire Green Therapeutics LLC, an award-winning MSO with operations in Nevada, and is taking steps to operationalize related assets in California, Oklahoma and Missouri.

The Company's common shares trade on the CSE under the symbol "AUSA" and on the OTCQB under the symbol "AUSAF".

"Terry Booth"

________________________________

Terry Booth

Chief Executive Officer

Forward-Looking Statement

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein is forward-looking information. Generally, forward-looking information may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "proposed", "is expected", "budgets", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases, or by the use of words or phrases which state that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, or might occur or be achieved. In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information in relation to: the timing and ability to close the second stage of the GT transaction; the anticipated development of the GT business and its ability to complete proposed agreements and grow revenues; the ability of the Company to scale up the GT assets across multiple jurisdictions; the ability of GT to complete the land acquisition and execute on its stated strategy for this land; the ability for the Company to be able to execute on its plans for expansion in new York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Missouri and other markets; the ability of ALPS to convert its pipeline into contracts; the impact of the changes to U.S. federal and state developments with respect to the cannabis industry and the opportunities this may present for the Company; and the Company's current liquidity. This forward-looking information reflects the Company's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to the Company and on assumptions the Company believes are reasonable. These assumptions include but are not limited to the ability of the Company to successfully satisfy the conditions to closing the proposed transaction; the ability of the Company to successfully execute on its plans for the Company and GT; legal changes relating to the cannabis industry proceeding as anticipated; and the Company's continued response and ability to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic being consistent with, or better than, its ability and response to date.

Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks and other factors may include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; general capital market conditions and market prices for securities; the actual results of the Company's future operations; competition; changes in legislation affecting the Company; the timing and availability of external financing on acceptable terms; lack of qualified, skilled labour or loss of key individuals; risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic including various recommendations, orders and measures of governmental authorities to try to limit the pandemic, including travel restrictions, border closures, non-essential business closures, service disruptions, quarantines, self-isolations, shelters-in-place and social distancing, disruptions to markets, economic activity, financing, supply chains and sales channels, and a deterioration of general economic conditions including a possible national or global recession; and a deterioration of financial markets that could limit the Company's ability to obtain external financing.

A description of additional risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in the Company's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated.

Forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking information contained in this press release represents the expectations of the Company as of the date of this press release and, accordingly, are subject to change after such date. However, the Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities law.

The CSE has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release. Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Australis Capital Inc.

Related Links

www.ausa-corp.com


Patna, April 29 : A teacher association of Bihar's Nalanda district has written to the Human Rights Commission after 15 teachers succumbed to Covid in the district in the last two weeks.

Roushan Kumar, district president of Parivartankari Primary Teacher Association (PPTA) has informed that as many as 15 teachers and an Education Officer died of Covid in the Nalanda district in the last two weeks.

"Amid the Covid spike, the state government had shut educational institutions till May 15. At the same time, it has made mandatory for 33 per cent of teachers to be present in the school on a rotational basis.

As the second wave of coronavirus severely affects all sections of people in Bihar, the teachers should also be prevented to get exposed to such a deadly virus," Kumar said.

Mohamad Ehteshamudin, history teacher of collegiate high school died due to Covid. Earlier, Manoj Kumar, the district education officer of Nalanda district also died due to Corona as well.

"A large number of teachers, their family members are infected with the coronavirus in Bihar. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to get beds in hospitals," Kumar said.

"We have sought Human Rights Commission's intervention into the matter and urge the state government to withdraw the decision," Kumar said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
DENVER, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Ovintiv Inc. (NYSE: OVV) (TSX: OVV) today announced that the following matters, as further described in the Company's Proxy Statement filed on March 12, 2021 (the "Proxy Statement"), were voted upon at its 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders held on April 28, 2021.

1. Election of Directors

Each nominee listed in the Proxy Statement was elected as a director of the Company. The results of the vote by ballot were as follows:

Name of Nominee Votes For Percent Votes Against Percent Peter A. Dea 124,840,095 82.41% 26,650,131 17.59% Meg A. Gentle 151,565,268 99.41% 899,878 0.59% Howard J. Mayson 131,218,947 86.04% 21,282,697 13.96% Lee A. McIntire 129,230,647 84.74% 23,265,857 15.26% Katherine L. Minyard 151,508,527 99.36% 981,328 0.64% Steven W. Nance 132,089,940 86.62% 20,408,379 13.38% Suzanne P. Nimocks 147,477,878 96.71% 5,023,606 3.29% Thomas G. Ricks 127,657,137 83.71% 24,843,191 16.29% Brian G. Shaw 151,601,939 99.41% 898,025 0.59% Douglas J. Suttles 151,395,423 99.25% 1,142,710 0.75% Bruce G. Waterman 150,306,874 98.56% 2,192,207 1.44%

2. Advisory Vote to Approve Compensation of Named Executive Officers

The results of the non-binding advisory vote for the compensation of the Company's named executive officers were as follows:

Votes For Percent Votes Against Percent 116,378,475 76.34% 36,075,631 23.66%

3. Ratify PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as Independent Auditors

The results for the ratification of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants, as the Company's independent auditors were as follows:

Votes For Percent Votes Against Percent 169,050,488 97.49% 4,353,795 2.51%

Further information on Ovintiv Inc. is available on the Company's website, www.ovintiv.com, or by contacting:

Investor contact: (888) 525-0304 Media contact: (403) 645-2252

SOURCE Ovintiv Inc.
An investigation run by the U.S. Department of Labor into an oilfield pipeline inspection company turned up more than $3.8 million in backpay owed to 1,100 workers in Massachusetts and 39 other states, according to authorities.

The Department of Labors Wage and Hour Division said it recovered $3,852,968 in back wages for the hundreds of oil pipeline inspectors hired by FIS Holdings LLC of Sand Springs. The federal government found the company had allegedly violated overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The Oklahoma-based company, which does business as Frontier Integrity Solutions Operations LLC, is accused of paying workers a fixed amount per day, regardless of the number of hours they worked, resulting in violations when employees worked more than 40 hours in a week, the labor department said in a statement Wednesday.

The employer is also accused of failing to track workers hours and pay them overtime, leading to records-keeping violations. The employees in 40 states nationwide typically worked between 50 and 60 hours per week, the department noted.

These pipeline inspectors work hard to protect our communities, and now its our turn to protect them, said Jessica Looman, the principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division. They deserve to be paid every cent of their hard-earned wages.

Oilfield pipeline inspectors work long hours, performing critical work that keeps more than 2.6 million miles of pipe in the U.S. secure and the communities around them safe, according to the labor department. When pipelines explode, the damage can be catastrophic to communities, economies and the environment. The oil and gas industry depends on independent inspection companies to protect this infrastructure.

FIS Holdings, which serves customers in the United States and Canada, is a North American leader in oil and gas pipeline inspection services, the department said.

The company has paid overtime back wages to workers in the 40 states where the payments were owed. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were the only New England states in that group, according to officials.

Particularly as we emerge from a global pandemic, the Wage and Hour Division is committed to protecting the workplace rights of essential workers, and to leveling the playing field for employers who play by the rules, Looman said in the departments statement. We invite workers who feel they are not being paid legally and employers with questions about their responsibilities to contact us to speak confidentially with a trained professional to have their questions answered or to file a complaint.
TYLER, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Education Advanced, Inc. ("EAI"), a provider of operations management and workflow solutions for K-12 school districts, today announced it has received a significant investment from Serent Capital, a growth-focused firm that invests in technology and tech-enabled services companies. This investment will accelerate the company's growth plans, including product investments and entry into new geographic markets.

The company's platform empowers K-12 education leaders with intelligent scheduling and planning tools to help them solve their most significant resource management pain points by delivering meaningful time and costs savings. The company's platform serves more than 4 million students across 450 school districts in 28 states nationally.

EAI's suite of products includes TestHound, a test management and enablement tool that can reduce test coordination time by up to 50%. Cardonex is the company's automated master class scheduling and staffing tool that enables districts to accommodate up to 90% of student's course requests requirements, reducing staff's master scheduling time by up to 75%, and ultimately driving better student outcomes. BuildYourOwnCurriculum (BYOC), a curriculum management tool, helps districts maintain state and national compliance for subject-level curriculum standards.

Education Advanced Founder and CEO Dr. Eli Crow said, "Our team of educators, technologists, and business experts has maintained a relentless focus on our goal to empower educators and transform schools. Partnering with Serent Capital enhances our access to the resources and expertise needed to create and deliver world-class products and services to school districts around the country."

EAI has continued its strong growth momentum over the past year, augmenting its senior leadership team, acquiring Wisconsin-based School Software Group, and earning placement on fastest-growing companies lists published by Inc. Magazine and The Financial Times.

"We have been highly impressed by Eli and the team at Education Advanced since our initial meeting," said Lance Fenton, Partner at Serent Capital. "The EAI team has built an impressive software company that delivers tremendous value to K-12 administrators as evidenced by some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings we've seen. We are thrilled to partner with Eli and the whole EAI team as they invest further behind their market-leading products, scale their customer acquisition engine to reach even more districts, and expand their portfolio of offerings through strategic acquisitions."

Education Advanced represents Serent's seventh platform investment in the education sector. Serent's prior investments include ArbiterSports, KEV Group, and USATestprep.

LoneTree Capital joined Serent in its investment in EAI and will support the company's growth plans across organic and acquisition strategies.

Leonis Partners advised EAI on the investment. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP served as legal counsel to Serent Capital.

About Education Advanced, Inc.

Education Advanced is a provider of operations management and workflow solutions for K-12 school districts that enable educators to be more efficient, allowing them to dedicate more of their time and resources to exceeding student needs. EAI's product offering includes Cardonex, TestHound, and BuildYourOwnCurriculum (BYOC). These award-winning and patented technology solutions advance the efficacy of master scheduling, staff planning, curriculum development and delivery, and assessment coordination for K-12 school districts across the country. Learn more at https://educationadvanced.com/

About Serent Capital

Serent Capital invests in growing businesses with compelling solutions that exceed customer needs. As businesses grow and evolve, the opportunities and challenges they face change with them. The principals at Serent Capital have firsthand experience navigating growth through their experiences as CEOs, strategic advisors, and board members to successful businesses. Serent leverages their expertise and capital to help growing businesses thrive. For more information on Serent Capital, visit www.serentcapital.com.

About LoneTree Capital

LoneTree is a growth-focused private capital firm that provides flexible capital, M&A, and operational support to leading companies in high-growth sectors. LoneTree invests $5 million to $30 million per transaction into select sectors including software, digital infrastructure, healthcare IT / services, business and consumer services, and financial technology / specialty finance. For more information, please visit www.lonetreecap.com.

SOURCE Education Advanced

Related Links

https://educationadvanced.com


A review of COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in this industry found that entry quarantine and testing might have reduced introduction of the virus to seafood processing facilities and vessels. The review also identified gaps in the required COVID-19 prevention strategies. Findings were used to revise requirements, which included the addition of serial testing.

Large COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred in high-density workplaces, such as food processing facilities (1). Alaskas seafood processing industry attracts approximately 18,000 out-of-state workers annually (2). Many of the states seafood processing facilities are located in remote areas with limited health care capacity. On March 23, 2020, the governor of Alaska issued a COVID-19 health mandate (HM10) to address health concerns related to the impending influx of workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic (3). HM10 required employers bringing critical infrastructure (essential) workers into Alaska to submit a Community Workforce Protective Plan.* On May 15, 2020, Appendix 1 was added to the mandate, which outlined specific requirements for seafood processors, to reduce the risk for transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in these high-density workplaces (4). These requirements included measures to prevent introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the workplace, including testing of incoming workers and a 14-day entry quarantine before workers could enter nonquarantine residences. After 13 COVID-19 outbreaks in Alaska seafood processing facilities and on processing vessels during summer and early fall 2020, State of Alaska personnel and CDC field assignees reviewed the states seafood processingassociated cases. Requirements were amended in November 2020 to address gaps in COVID-19 prevention. These revised requirements included restricting quarantine groups to 10 persons, pretransfer testing, and serial testing (5). Vaccination of this essential workforce is important (6); until high vaccination coverage rates are achieved, other mitigation strategies are needed in this high-risk setting. Updating industry guidance will be important as more information becomes available.

On May 15, 2020, the state issued HM10 Appendix 1, detailing three entry quarantine options for onshore seafood processors: 1) quarantine workers for 14 days before travel to Alaska (pretravel quarantine), 2) quarantine workers in an Alaskan community with a general acute care or critical access hospital (midtravel quarantine), or 3) quarantine workers at the destination community after arrival (posttravel quarantine) (Table 1). These options also included requirements for safe transit (e.g., chartered air travel) and for each worker to receive one or more (depending on the quarantine option selected) negative reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for SARS-CoV-2. A separate but similar set of options was available for workers boarding processing vessels (4). HM10 Appendix 1 also included a requirement for using safe transit during transfer of workers between facilities (4).

After 13 COVID-19 outbreaks occurred in seafood processing facilities and on processing vessels through early fall 2020, Alaska-based CDC field assignees assisted State of Alaska personnel with revising HM10 Appendix 1 by reviewing data from investigations of the states laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases that occurred during March 1October 13, 2020. Seafood processingassociated cases were identified by querying the states reportable disease database and searching records obtained during outbreak investigations. In addition, the number of cases identified under certain circumstances (e.g., cases identified during entry quarantine or after workers were transferred from one facility to another) was evaluated using detailed notes from public health investigations. This activity was reviewed by CDC and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.

During the period reviewed, 677 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection were identified among seafood processing industry workers (Figure). Among these, 132 cases were either independent cases (i.e., did not result in transmission to another person) during entry quarantine or were part of a cluster of infections within an entry quarantine group (i.e., a group of workers living and working solely with each other). Among the remaining cases, 539 were either part of outbreaks that spread beyond an entry quarantine group or included persons outside of entry quarantine, including local workers; six cases were not classified because of insufficient information.

Among the 132 cases that were independent or part of a cluster within an entry quarantine group, 81 cases (61%) occurred in workers quarantined at an onshore processing facility; 72 (89%) of these cases were part of a cluster. Twelve distinct clusters of 223 cases (median = 3 cases), were identified at facilities conducting entry quarantine in the destination community (Figure). Persons completing entry quarantine at the processing facility in the destination community were usually housed in groups and allowed to work if they were able to maintain a distance of 6 ft or use physical barriers and personal protective equipment to separate themselves from other workers outside of their quarantine group. Although persons with positive SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test results were removed from these groups for isolation once they were identified, transmission within the entry quarantine group occurred. The remaining 51 (39%) cases occurred in workers quarantined off-site in Alaska; 37 (73%) of these were independent cases with no known onward transmission.

Thirteen distinct outbreaks identified in onshore facilities or on vessels involved persons who had either completed entry quarantine, were in a different entry quarantine group, or who were local workers. Attack rates in onshore facilities and vessels ranged from <5%75%. Six outbreaks (range = 239 cases, median = 7 cases) appeared to have originated in an entry quarantine group and then spread (Figure). The remaining seven outbreaks (range = 2168 cases, median = 76 cases) were of unknown origin; these outbreaks were responsible for 470 (87%) of the 539 outbreak-associated cases. One outbreak of 39 cases was the result of a midseason crew transfer in which persons previously not known to be infected were moved via safe transit from a facility that had experienced an outbreak to a closed campus (i.e., a facility with no or limited interaction with local persons) where the workers had previously received negative test results. A separate outbreak of 168 cases was identified only after an employee sought care for a nonCOVID-19 medical issue and was screened as part of that visit.

As a result of the large number of cases that occurred among workers outside entry quarantine, additional prevention measures were developed to further reduce risk (Table 2). These were reflected in revised requirements implemented in November 2020 (5).
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Castlight Health, Inc. (NYSE:CSLT), a leading health navigation platform provider, today announced results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2021.

"We executed well in the first quarter and made meaningful progress against each of our three priorities for 2021 while delivering strong financial results, including sequential ARR growth and our fourth straight quarter of non-GAAP profitability," said Maeve O'Meara, chief executive officer of Castlight Health. "We were pleased with our pipeline generation activity in the quarter, reported our lowest churn quarter since 2016, and expanded a key health plan partnership. We demonstrated our commitment and ability to innovate in the category of next generation navigation with the launch of our market-leading vaccine navigation solution. Finally, we expanded and extended our work with Boston Children's Hospital to support the nation's ongoing COVID-19 vaccination effort. Our progress in the first quarter allows us to increase our financial guidance for 2021."

Financial performance for the three months ended March 31, 2021 compared to the three months ended March 31, 2020 includes:

Total revenue of $35.1 million , compared to $39.0 million

, compared to GAAP gross margin of 63.6%, compared to 62.9%

Non-GAAP gross margin of 66.8%, compared to 65.1%

GAAP operating loss of $3.1 million , compared to $56.6 million

, compared to Non-GAAP operating income of $1.2 million , compared to an operating loss of $2.2 million

, compared to an operating loss of GAAP net loss per basic and diluted share of $0.02 , compared to a net loss per basic and diluted share of $0.38

, compared to a net loss per basic and diluted share of Non-GAAP net income per basic and diluted share of $0.01 , compared to a net loss per basic and diluted share of $0.01

, compared to a net loss per basic and diluted share of Cash provided by operations of $7.6 million , compared to cash used in operations of $14.4 million

Total cash was $56.5 million as of March 31, 2021.

A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results has been provided in this press release in the accompanying tables. An explanation of these measures is also included below under the heading "Non-GAAP Financial Measures."

Business Outlook

For the full year 2021, the Company is increasing its outlook and now expects:

Revenue in the range of $135 million to $140 million

to Non-GAAP operating income between income of $1 million and a loss of $4 million

and a loss of Non-GAAP net income per share between income of $0.01 and a loss of $0.03 , based on approximately 160 million to 161 million shares

For the second quarter of 2021, the Company now expects:

Revenue in the range of $33 million to $35 million

Quarterly Conference Call

Castlight Health senior management will host a conference call to discuss its first quarter 2021 results and business outlook today at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time). A live audio webcast of the conference call, together with detailed financial information, can be accessed through the Company's Investor Relations website at http://ir.castlighthealth.com. An archive of the webcast can also be accessed through the same link. The live conference call can be accessed by dialing (833) 238-7953 and the replay will be available for one week at (800) 585-8367. The conference ID number for the live call and replay is 2847469.

About Castlight Health

Castlight is on a mission to make it as easy as humanly possible for people to navigate the healthcare system and live happier, healthier, more productive lives. As a leader in healthcare navigation, we provide a world-class digital platform with a team of clinical and benefits experts to help members easily connect and engage with the right programs and care, at the right time. Castlight partners with Fortune 500 companies and health plans to transform employee and member benefits into one comprehensive health and wellbeing experience to deliver better health outcomes and maximize returns on healthcare investments.

For more information visit www.castlighthealth.com . Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and Like us on Facebook .

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

To supplement Castlight Health's financial statements presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), we also use and provide investors and others with non-GAAP measures of certain components of financial performance, including non-GAAP gross profit and margin, non-GAAP operating expense, non-GAAP operating income (loss), non-GAAP net income (loss) and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share. Non-GAAP gross profit and margin, non-GAAP operating expense, non-GAAP operating income (loss), and non-GAAP net income (loss) exclude goodwill impairment, stock-based compensation, certain legal expenses, amortization of intangibles, restructuring charges, capitalization and amortization of internal-use software, and lease exit and related charges.

We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful supplemental information to investors and others, facilitate the analysis of the company's core operating results and comparison of operating results across reporting periods, and can help enhance overall understanding of the company's historical financial performance. However, these non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP.

The non-GAAP measures we provide may differ from the non-GAAP information used by other companies, including peer companies, and therefore comparability may be limited. Castlight Health encourages investors and others to review the Company's financial information in its entirety and not rely on a single financial measure.

We have provided a reconciliation of each non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, except that we have not reconciled our non-GAAP operating loss and net loss per share guidance for the full year 2021 to comparable GAAP measures because we do not provide guidance for stock-based compensation expense, and capitalization and amortization of internal-use software, which are reconciling items between GAAP and non-GAAP. The factors that may impact our future stock-based compensation expense, and capitalization and amortization of internal-use software, are out of our control and/or cannot be reasonably predicted, and therefore we are unable to provide such guidance without unreasonable effort. Factors include our market capitalization and related volatility of our stock price and our inability to project the cost or scope of internally produced software.

Safe Harbor for Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "projects," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "can," "may," "will," "would" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of results and should not be considered as an indication of future activity or future performance. The forward-looking statements about Castlight Health's expectations, plans, intentions, and strategies include, but are not limited to, statements regarding certain 2021 financial projections, and our expectations for our future business and financial performance. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions, which, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties include those described in Castlight Health's documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risks set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 as filed with the SEC on February 24, 2021, and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, including the quarterly report for the three months ended March 31, 2021, when filed with the SEC. All forward-looking statements in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements and are based on information available to Castlight Health as of the date hereof. Castlight Health assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

Copyright 2021 Castlight Health, Inc. Castlight Health is the registered trademark of Castlight Health, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

CASTLIGHT HEALTH, INC. CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (In thousands) (unaudited)



As of

March 31, 2021

December 31, 2020 Assets





Current assets:





Cash and cash equivalents $ 56,501



$ 49,242

Accounts receivable and other, net 25,035



31,740

Prepaid expenses and other current assets 6,772



3,800

Total current assets 88,308



84,782

Property and equipment, net 4,966



5,321

Restricted cash, non-current 1,144



1,144

Deferred commissions 8,190



9,556

Deferred professional service costs 4,205



4,462

Intangible assets, net 6,872



7,930

Goodwill 41,485



41,485

Operating lease right-of-use assets, net 9,131



10,238

Other assets 1,838



1,855

Total assets $ 166,139



$ 166,773

Liabilities and stockholders' equity





Current liabilities:





Accounts payable $ 4,383



$ 5,145

Accrued expenses and other current liabilities 7,057



7,898

Accrued compensation 4,755



8,633

Deferred revenue 13,135



6,848

Operating lease liabilities 5,939



5,789

Total current liabilities 35,269



34,313

Deferred revenue, non-current 122



663

Operating lease liabilities, non-current 5,907



7,446

Other liabilities, non-current 480



485

Total liabilities 41,778



42,907

Stockholders' equity 124,361



123,866

Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 166,139



$ 166,773



CASTLIGHT HEALTH, INC. CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (In thousands, except per share data) (unaudited)

Three Months Ended March 31,

2021

2020 Revenue:





Subscription $ 32,110



$ 38,383

Professional services and other 2,949



662

Total revenue, net 35,059



39,045

Cost of revenue:





Cost of subscription(1) 8,099



10,232

Cost of professional services and other(1) 4,657



4,241

Total cost of revenue 12,756



14,473

Gross profit 22,303



24,572

Operating expenses:





Sales and marketing(1) 6,913



10,472

Research and development(1) 12,113



13,822

General and administrative(1) 6,366



6,576

Goodwill impairment 



50,300

Total operating expenses 25,392



81,170

Operating loss (3,089)



(56,598)

Other income, net 93



263

Net loss $ (2,996)



$ (56,335)

Net loss per share, basic and diluted $ (0.02)



$ (0.38)

Weighted-average shares used to compute basic and diluted net loss per share 156,781



148,872













(1) Includes stock-based compensation expense as follows:



Three Months Ended March 31,

2021

2020 Cost of revenue:





Cost of subscription $ 257



$ 169

Cost of professional services and other 236



116

Sales and marketing 350



672

Research and development 1,069



1,163

General and administrative 1,195



1,066



CASTLIGHT HEALTH, INC. CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (In thousands) (unaudited)

Three Months Ended March 31,

2021

2020 Operating activities:





Net loss $ (2,996)



$ (56,335)

Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash provided by (used in) operating activities:





Depreciation and amortization 1,623



1,535

Goodwill impairment 



50,300

Stock-based compensation 3,107



3,186

Amortization of deferred commissions 1,340



2,383

Amortization of deferred professional service costs 580



925

Non-cash operating lease expense 1,107



1,400

Accretion and amortization of marketable securities 



2

Changes in operating assets and liabilities:





Accounts receivable and other, net 6,705



(6,676)

Deferred commissions 26



(318)

Deferred professional service costs (300)



(416)

Prepaid expenses and other assets (2,955)



(494)

Accounts payable (759)



(7,462)

Operating lease liabilities (1,389)



(1,516)

Accrued expenses and other liabilities (382)



19

Deferred revenue 5,746



3,573

Accrued compensation (3,878)



(4,465)

Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities 7,575



(14,359)

Investing activities:





Purchase of property and equipment (212)



(1,264)

Purchase of marketable securities 



(1,989)

Maturities of marketable securities 



12,400

Net cash (used in) provided by investing activities (212)



9,147

Financing activities:





Proceeds from exercise of stock options 128



155

Proceeds from ESPP offering 233



186

Principal payments on long-term debt (465)



(465)

Net cash used in financing activities (104)



(124)









Net increase (decrease) in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash 7,259



(5,336)

Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at beginning of period 50,386



44,342

Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash at end of period $ 57,645



$ 39,006









Reconciliation of cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash:





Cash and cash equivalents $ 56,501



$ 37,681

Restricted cash included in Prepaid expenses and other current assets 



181

Restricted cash, non-current 1,144



1,144

Total cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash $ 57,645



$ 39,006





Three Months Ended

March 31, 2021

December 31, 2020

March 31, 2020 Gross profit:









GAAP gross profit subscription $ 24,011



$ 26,487



$ 28,151

Stock-based compensation 257



215



169

Amortization of internal-use software 79



80



26

Amortization of intangibles 530



530



530

Non-GAAP gross profit subscription $ 24,877



$ 27,312



$ 28,876

GAAP gross margin subscription 74.8 %

77.0 %

73.3 % Non-GAAP gross margin subscription 77.5 %

79.4 %

75.2 %











GAAP gross loss professional services $ (1,708)



$ (2,322)



$ (3,579)

Stock-based compensation 236



219



116

Non-GAAP gross loss professional services $ (1,472)



$ (2,103)



$ (3,463)

GAAP gross margin professional services (58) %

(87) %

(541) % Non-GAAP gross margin professional services (50) %

(79) %

(523) %











GAAP gross profit $ 22,303



$ 24,165



$ 24,572

Impact of non-GAAP adjustments 1,102



1,044



841

Non-GAAP gross profit $ 23,405



$ 25,209



$ 25,413

GAAP gross margin 63.6 %

65.2 %

62.9 % Non-GAAP gross margin 66.8 %

68.0 %

65.1 %











Operating expense:









GAAP sales and marketing $ 6,913



$ 7,713



$ 10,472

Stock-based compensation (350)



(326)



(672)

Amortization of intangibles (528)



(528)



(528)

Non-GAAP sales and marketing $ 6,035



$ 6,859



$ 9,272













GAAP research and development $ 12,113



$ 11,418



$ 13,822

Stock-based compensation (1,069)



(1,041)



(1,163)

Certain legal expenses 







191

Capitalization of internally developed software 







21

Non-GAAP research and development $ 11,044



$ 10,377



$ 12,871













GAAP general and administrative $ 6,366



$ 6,405



$ 6,576

Stock-based compensation (1,195)



(1,085)



(1,066)

Amortization of intangibles 







(17)

Non-GAAP general and administrative $ 5,171



$ 5,320



$ 5,493













GAAP goodwill impairment $ 



$ 



$ 50,300

Goodwill impairment 







(50,300)

Non-GAAP goodwill impairment $ 



$ 



$ 













GAAP operating expense $ 25,392



$ 25,536



$ 81,170

Impact of non-GAAP adjustments (3,142)



(2,980)



(53,534)

Non-GAAP operating expense $ 22,250



$ 22,556



$ 27,636













Operating loss:









GAAP operating loss $ (3,089)



$ (1,371)



$ (56,598)

Impact of non-GAAP adjustments 4,244



4,024



54,375

Non-GAAP operating income (loss) $ 1,155



$ 2,653



$ (2,223)













Net loss and net loss per share:









GAAP net loss $ (2,996)



$ (1,197)



$ (56,335)

Total pre-tax impact of non-GAAP adjustments 4,244



4,024



54,375

Non-GAAP net income (loss) $ 1,248



$ 2,827



$ (1,960)

GAAP net loss per share, basic and diluted $ (0.02)



$ (0.01)



$ (0.38)

Non-GAAP net income (loss) per share, basic and diluted $ 0.01



$ 0.02



$ (0.01)

Shares used in basic and diluted net loss per share computation 156,781



154,739



148,872



Castlight Media Contact:

Caroline Kawashima

[email protected]

415-246-0313



Castlight Investor Contact:

[email protected]

443-213-0500



SOURCE Castlight Health, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.castlighthealth.com


COLUMBUS, Ohio  While Ohios capital city has made significant progress enacting changes to its police department, the city needs additional help because of fierce opposition to reform within the agency, city leaders said Wednesday as they requested a Justice Department investigation following a series of police killings of Black people and other controversies.

The request by Mayor Andrew Ginther and City Attorney Zach Klein  both Democrats  capped several painful months for the city, culminating most recently with the April 20 fatal shooting of 16-year-old MaKhia Bryant as she swung a knife at a woman. Bryant was Black and the rookie officer who shot her was white.

Criticism has included not just fatal police shootings but also the departments reaction to last summers protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. A report commissioned by city council and released earlier this week criticized both the police department and city leaders, saying Columbus was unprepared for the size and energy of the protests.

This is not about one particular officer, policy, or incident; rather, this is about reforming the entire institution of policing in Columbus, Ginther and Klein said in Wednesdays letter. Simply put: We need to change the culture of the Columbus Division of Police.

Its not unusual for mayors or local law enforcement leaders to ask the Justice Department to review an agencys record. Those requests sometimes are made when city officials anticipate a federal probe is looming regardless of their wishes.

When the Justice Department does launch such a review, city officials can do little to stop it, so they generally welcome the investigations, at least in public. The mayors of Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, quickly endorsed the reviews the Justice Department recently announced of those cities police departments following the killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Its likely that the recent police killings in Columbus combined with the mayors push for changes would make the citys request appealing to the Justice Department, said Ayesha Hardaway, a Case Western Reserve University criminal law professor.

I imagine that Columbus will be considered a good opportunity to make lasting change, said Hardaway, who has worked with Clevelands police department in the wake of Justice Department involvement after the 2014 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

A message was left with the Justice Department seeking comment.

The request by Columbus leaders came the same day that the attorney representing the family of Bryant requested a federal investigation into her death and the states foster care system.

Columbus remains an outlier among other American cities under Justice Department scrutiny, with multiple initiatives launched over the last few years to address complaints about the police department, pushed by Ginther and the citys all-Democratic city council.

In 2016, shortly after Ginther took office, the city spent millions of dollars to buy police body cameras for the first time and is now in the process of spending millions more to upgrade them. The city recently created its first-ever civilian review board in a 2020 voter-approved measure pushed by Ginther and the city council.

Despite these efforts, the City has been met with fierce opposition from leadership within the Columbus Division of Police, Wednesdays letter said, which also suggested the Justice Department could use court-ordered measures to force the local police union to comply with changes.

Columbus officers are always willing to work with any entity to improve policing in the communities they protect and serve, Jeff Simpson, executive vice president of the local union, said in a statement. Politicians constantly vilifying officers breeds contempt for authority, emboldens the criminal element and has led to a mass exodus of law enforcement officers from the profession.

Even with its initiatives, Columbus  the countrys 14th largest city  has recorded a number of contested police shootings.

The most recent cases include Bryant, the April 12 killing of 27-year-old Miles Jackson in a hospital ER room, and 47-year-old Andre Hill. The white police officer who fatally shot Hill Dec. 22 has pleaded not guilty to a number of charges made against him by the states attorney generals office.

The case of Casey Goodson Jr., a 23-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by Franklin County Sheriffs deputy in early December in Columbus, has widened criticism of policing in the city to include the county sheriffs office.

In January, interim Columbus Chief Thomas Quinlan was forced out after Ginther said hed lost confidence in the chiefs ability to make needed changes to the department.

Before the recent police shootings, the city was sued over the 2016 shooting of Henry Green, a Black man, by two undercover white police officers working in an anti-crime summer initiative.

Later in the same year, a white officer fatally shot 13-year-old Tyre King, who was Black, during a robbery investigation. In 2017, a video showed a Columbus officer restraining a Black man lying on the ground and preparing to handcuff him when an officer  Zachary Rosen  who was also involved in the Green shooting arrived and appeared to kick the man in the head.

The city fired Rosen, but an arbitrator ordered him reinstated, angering many in the community while underscoring the challenge that police union contracts can pose for cities trying to hold officers accountable.

Records show that Black residents, about 28% of the Columbus population, accounted for about half of all use-of-force incidents from 2015 through 2019.

The agency  like many big-city departments  is juggling calls for internal change even as it battles street violence. Columbus saw a record 174 homicides in 2020 and has recorded 62 so far this year, a figure not reached until early July of last year.

Federal involvement in the Columbus police department over allegations of officer misconduct isnt new.

In 1999, the Justice Department sued the city, accusing officers of routinely violating peoples civil rights through illegal searches, false arrests and excessive force. A year later, the government added a racial profiling complaint, alleging that from 1994 to 1999, Black people in Columbus were almost three times as likely as whites to be the subject of traffic stops in which one or more tickets were issued.

A federal judge in 2002 dismissed the lawsuit after the city, which had fought it, made changes on the use of police force and handling of complaints against officers.

In Wednesdays letter, Ginther pledged to give the Justice Department the citys full cooperation if the agency agrees to take on the review.

We want to be partners with the DOJ to bring about meaningful, sustainable and significant reforms, he wrote. Not only is the elected leadership in the City of Columbus aligned with this request, but the residents of Columbus unquestionably share the same goal.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 13:21:41|Editor: huaxia

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A worker transports Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine at the Phnom Penh International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, April 28, 2021. A plane carrying the third batch of China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia Wednesday night. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua)

PHNOM PENH, April 29 (Xinhua) -- A plane carrying the third batch of China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia Wednesday night.

"The arrival of the vaccine today is another testament to the unbreakable iron-clad friendship between Cambodia and China," Cambodia's Health Ministry secretary of state Yok Sambath told reporters while receiving the vaccine at the Phnom Penh International Airport.

She expressed her profound gratitude to China for generously providing the vaccine to Cambodia, saying that the donation was timely as the Southeast Asian nation has been sparing no effort to contain the third COVID-19 community transmission, which broke out on Feb. 20.

According to Sambath, so far Cambodia had received more than 4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from China and the World Health Organization's COVAX Facility.

The kingdom launched an anti-COVID-19 inoculation drive on Feb 10. To date, some 1.3 million out of the country's 16 million population had been vaccinated against the virus, a government report said.

The kingdom registered 698 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, the highest-ever single-day number of infections, pushing the national tally to 11,761, with 88 fatalities, the Ministry of Health said. Currently, there are 6,968 active cases in the country. Enditem
Donald Trump tells Fox Business the FBI raid of his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was very unfair (Fox Business)

A day after the FBI raided Rudy Giuliani s apartment, Donald Trump has rushed to his defense.

Its very, very unfair. Rudy is a patriot who loves this country, the former president told Maria Bartiromo on Thursday on Fox Business .

Federal investigators on Wednesday executed a search warrant on Mr Giulianis Manhattan office and apartment, seizing cell phones and computers. The raid is believed to be part of an investigation into whether Mr Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukraine in 2019.

On Thursday, Mr Trump seemed eager to shift the focus to other figures, particularly Democrats.

I dont know what theyre looking for or what theyre doing, the former president said. They say it had to do with filings of various papers and lobbying files. Well, did Hunter file? Did Biden file? Because they did a lot of work with other countries. To the best of everyones knowledge, they didnt file.

Mr Trump repeatedly called Mr Giuliani a great patriot and declared him the greatest mayor in the history of New York.

Rudy loves this country so much, he said. It is so terrible when you see the things going on in our country with the corruption and the problems and then they go after Rudy Giuliani. Its very sad, actually.

Mr Giuliani served as Mr Trumps personal lawyer during his presidency. During that time, he and the former president pressured Ukrainian officials to open investigations into Joe Biden s son Hunter , who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Democrats said the effort was designed to hurt the reputation of Joe Biden  who eventually became Mr Trumps election opponent  and it led to Mr Trumps first impeachment.

Now prosecutors are investigating whether Mr Giulianis communications between the two countries not only served Mr Trumps political interests, but the interests of Ukraininan oligarchs. It is illegal to lobby the US government on behalf of another country without disclosing it to the Justice Department.

Story continues

Mr Giuliani has not been charged with any crime, and his lawyer has called the FBI raid a stunt to create bad publicity.

This is totally unnecessary, attorney Bob Costello told Fox News , saying it was designed to make Mr Giuliani look like hes some sort of criminal.

Mr Trumps defense was more full-throated.

Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot, he repeated on Thursday. He does these things, he just loves his country, and they raid his apartment. Its so unfair.

Read More

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Biden speech news  live: Trump claims Giuliani a great patriot during rant at presidents address

Kamala Harris says America not a racist country in first interview after joint address
By Ritah Kemigisa

Police together with the directorate of Immigrations have rescued and repatriated 42 Burundian girls and arrested a suspect who was involved in trafficking them.

The spokesperson of the police criminal investigations directorate, Charles Twine says the suspect has already been charged to Court and remanded.

Of late the number of Burundi girls being trafficked is on the rise.

Just early this month a total of 32 trafficked girls ,all Burundi nationals were intercepted while in transit from Burundi through Uganda to the Middle East.

Twine then said there is information that some of the trafficked persons are victims of involuntary organ removal and according to the UN alert, a kidney costs about Shs113.4m, heart about Shs515.4m and liver about Shs680m.

The latest police annual crime report shows that 214 cases were registered in 2020 compared to 252 cases registered in 2019, giving a decrease of 15.1%.
Collaborative mice study with UC San Diego to study brain development from embryo to old age

Berwyn, Pennsylvania--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Annovis Bio Inc. (NYSE American: ANVS), a clinical-stage drug platform company addressing Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurodegenerative diseases, today announced a new research collaboration with Professor William Mobley and Dr. Xuqiao Chen at the University of California San Diego designed to study the ability of the Company's lead compound, ANVS401, to normalize brain development in Down Syndrome (DS) mice.

"While we know quite a bit about how the brain degenerates in the later stages of life, extraordinarily little is known about how neurodegeneration may start very early in life. We, therefore, plan to look at the brain in embryonic development in DS mice," said Maria Maccecchini, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

The study will dose healthy and DS female mice starting before fertilization with either placebo or ANVS401 and follow the mother through pregnancy to lactation and the fertilized egg from embryo through old age. At different points, the study will measure levels of various neurotoxic proteins, axonal transport, and inflammation in the brains of the mothers and the offspring to see the differences between a healthy brain, a DS brain, and an ANVS401-treated DS brain. The study will also measure learning and cognition throughout the life span of the mice and will obtain interim data at every step of development while following the mice into old age.

"It is commonly understood that those with DS have elevated amyloid which in turn induces the toxic cascade that ultimately drives AD. What is not yet known is the impact on early brain development. Through this study we hope to gain a clearer understanding of brain development and how ANVS401 could play a much earlier role for DS and other patients," continued Dr. Maccecchini.

The study will be led by Dr. Mobley, associate dean for neuroscience initiatives at UC San Diego School of Medicine, the Florence Riford Chair for Alzheimer's Research, and director of the Down Syndrome Center for Research and Treatment (DSCRT). Dr. Mobley is one of the world's foremost experts on the neurobiology of Down Syndrome, and the DSCRT is one of the first programs in the country to connect academic researchers with treatment of adults and children with Down Syndrome.

"We are thrilled to have access to an excellent model of brain development, a great laboratory to collaborate with, and to be able to follow brain development through the life of a mouse. Ultimately, we hope to generate positive data that demonstrates the potential of ANVS401 to normalize brain development in DS," said Dr. Maccecchini.

In September 2020, Annovis announced the publication of peer-reviewed data demonstrating the ability of its lead candidate, ANVS401, also known as Posiphen, to improve axonal transport, the information highway of nerve cells. The publication, "Targeting increased levels of APP in Down syndrome: Posiphen-mediated reductions in APP and its products reverse endosomal phenotypes in the Ts65Dn mouse model," was published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association., and the study was conducted at UCSD in Dr. Mobley's lab.

AD and DS share several characteristics, including high levels of neurotoxic proteins; specifically, amyloid precursor protein (APP), its C-terminal fragment, phospho-tau and alpha-synuclein. High levels of these proteins impair the transport of vesicles carrying neurotrophic factors. The resulting AD pathology is driven by compromised transport of neurotrophic signals. Treatment of DS mice with ANVS401 normalized levels of neurotoxic proteins and reversed deficits in axonal transport, regulated brain homeostasis, lowered inflammation, and normalized mouse behavior.

About Annovis Bio

Headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Annovis Bio, Inc. (Annovis) is a clinical-stage, drug platform company addressing neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's in Down Syndrome (AD-DS). We believe that we are the only company developing a drug for AD, PD and AD-DS that inhibits more than one neurotoxic protein and, thereby, improves the information highway of the nerve cell, known as axonal transport. When this information flow is impaired, the nerve cell gets sick and dies. We expect our treatment to improve memory loss and dementia associated with AD and AD-DS, as well as body and brain function in PD. We have two ongoing Phase 2a studies: one in AD patients and one in both AD and PD patients. For more information on Annovis, please visit the company's website: www.annovisbio.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release contain "forward-looking statements" that are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release may be identified by the use of words such as "anticipate," "expect," "believe," "will," "may," "should," "estimate," "project," "outlook," "forecast" or other similar words, and include, without limitation, statements regarding the timing, effectiveness and anticipated results of ANVS401 clinical trials. Forward-looking statements are based on Annovis Bio, Inc.'s current expectations and are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Further, certain forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate, including that clinical trials may be delayed. These and other risks and uncertainties are described more fully in the section titled "Risk Factors" in the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements contained in this announcement are made as of this date, and Annovis Bio, Inc. undertakes no duty to update such information except as required under applicable law.

Investor Relations:

Dave Gentry, CEO

RedChip Companies Inc.

407-491-4498

Dave@redchip.com

SOURCE: Annovis Bio, Inc.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82263
A view of the One World Trade Centre tower and the lower Manhattan skyline of New York City at sunrise as seen from Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S. (Photo : REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo)

The U.S. Justice Department has repealed a policy put in place during Donald Trump's presidency that cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.



In an internal memo seen by Reuters, acting head of the Office of Justice Programs Maureen Henneberg said that prior grant recipients, including cities, counties and states that were recipients of the department's popular $250 million annual grant program for local law enforcement, will no longer be required to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a condition of their funding.



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She also ordered staff to take down any pending Justice Department grant applications with similar strings attached and start the process over again.



In the memo, Henneberg, who leads the department's largest grant-making arm, said she had instructed staff to "pull down and revise all solicitations that describe requirements or priority consideration elements or criteria pertaining to immigration."



"These solicitations will be reposted and grantees will be required to reapply," she added.



It is one of a series of decisions by Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee of President Joe Biden, to break with policies put in place during the Trump administration. In another high-profile move, the Justice Department has stepped up investigations of U.S. police departments that face charges of brutality or discriminatory tactics.



Shortly after being sworn in, Biden overturned a Trump executive order that had allowed the Justice Department to pressure cities that refused to notify federal immigration authorities when people living in the U.S. illegally have been detained for criminal violations, including minor ones.



Garland on April 14 ordered the department to begin to implement the change.



LEGAL BATTLES PAUSED



The policy reversal marks a major victory for states and cities that have been unable to access awards they received through the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants program, known as "Byrne JAG."



Named for a New York City police officer killed in the line of duty, the Byrne JAG grant program is the Justice Department's leading source of reimbursement to state and local law enforcement to pay for a variety of initiatives, from prosecutions and corrections programs, to drug and mental health treatment centers.



In fiscal year 2020, the program doled out more than $253 million in grants.



Trump made cracking down on immigration, legal and illegal, a centerpiece of his administration.



Some cities and states resisted his efforts by adopting "sanctuary" policies, arguing that close cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities can deter immigrants from coming forward to report crimes.



The fight to withhold Byrne JAG grant money prompted numerous lawsuits, as jurisdictions, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco sued the Justice Department on the grounds that withholding the money was unlawful.



In one of those lawsuits brought by New York state, New York City and six other states, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in February 2020 sided with the Trump administration and ruled it was entitled to withhold millions in grant money.



The plaintiff states appealed to the Supreme Court, but the appeal was later withdrawn after Biden won the 2020 election.



The Justice Department and the plaintiffs jointly asked a federal judge in March to put the matter on hold, while the department finished reviewing the grant conditions at the heart of the case.



The New York Attorney General's office said that during the last four years, the state hasn't been able to tap more than $30 million in grant money from the Justice Department as a result of the pending litigation.



The Justice Department's decision to cease using immigration-related criteria will apply to all of the department's grants, according to the memo, as well as notices posted by several other Justice Department offices that award grants.


Leading independent IT provider in latest acquisition

LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- London-based WW Computer Systems Limited (WWCS) is excited to announce its acquisition of Marsworth Computing Limited (Marsworth). The expansion sees the combined team now numbering 40 members, with 240 clients across the corporate, education, and public sectors.

WWCS, the leading independent IT service provider for small to medium businesses, is thrilled about acquiring Marsworth Computing, a company that also greatly values providing first-class service with client satisfaction at its core. "Our business model centres around authentic customer relationships, transparency, and best-in-class technology. The team at Marsworth share these qualities, and acquiring businesses to integrate into this model is a winning strategy for everyone", expresses Marc Lester, CEO of WWCS.

Commenting on the news, Paul Salter, Director at Marsworth, adds:

"This acquisition allows us to enhance the service we provide while giving us the platform to be more responsive and supportive. We are merging very different skills while remaining focused on the same goals - a decisive win. I am thrilled that Marsworth will be able to expand further on the already exceptional technologies that WWCS offers their clients".

This acquisition brings immense value to all clients involved, including an expansion of services in technology consultancy, network management, VoIP, system implementation, disaster recovery planning, and security audits. "This is all about being able to offer a bigger and better platform for our clients and allowing our staff to continue to develop their market-leading skills", states Marc. "Many of Marsworth's clients are large organisations, and joining forces means we can offer a hugely experienced and robust team along with a more significant investment in technology and internal systems, which will complement all stakeholders. We are now an even greater aspirational team better equipped to achieve our client-focused objectives in the years to come".

About WWCS

One of the first technology companies to be established in London, WW Computer Systems ( WWCS ) started as a small family-run word processing shop in North London in 1983. Nearly 40 years on, we are one of London's top IT consultancies, specialising in business IT networks, security, and technology support. We currently assist clients across the corporate and charity sectors, providing a range of technology-related services and products, from proactive IT support, VoIP telephone systems, and cloud solutions to IT project management and client directorship roles.

please contact media@wwcomputers.co.uk.
(Natural News) Robert Verkerk, a Britain-based multi-disciplinary scientist who received his doctorate from Imperial College London, warns that booster shots can further drive the mutation of the Wuhan coronavirus. He says that prolonging mass vaccination programs can exert a selective pressure on the virus, which can create variants that can outsmart the immune system.

Selective pressure is any cause that increases or reduces an organisms chances of survival and reproductive success, depending on his or her traits. It drives natural selection, the process in which organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

Verkerk, who is the founder of the advocacy group Alliance for Natural Health International, opines that the selection pressure from the most intensive vaccination programs, coupled with widespread infections and the impact of lockdowns and other restrictions, provides the perfect breeding ground for immune escape variants. These are viruses that are resistant to the protection provided by a vaccine or a recent infection.

Geert Vanden Bossche, an immunologist who worked for pharmaceutical companies GSK, Novartis and Solvay Biologicals, as well as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (now known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance) in Geneva, also warned that mass vaccination programs will no doubt create immune escape variants last March.

There can be no doubt that continued mass vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants to become increasingly dominant and ultimately result in a dramatic incline in new cases despite enhanced vaccine coverage rates, he wrote in a public statement. This situation will soon lead to complete resistance of circulating variants to the current vaccines.

These vaccine-resistant variants, in turn, will encourage Big Pharma to further refine vaccines, as The Defender noted. But those refined versions will only fuel a selection pressure, instead of diminishing it. This, in effect, will create more transmissible and potentially more deadly variants in a never-ending cycle. (Related: New Wuhan coronavirus variants will make vaccines ineffective, according to global health experts.)

Look at the mass death wave happening in India right after the covid vaccinations began:

Big Pharma pushes for booster shots

This came as vaccine makers were pushing for the rollout of booster shots. Last week, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that a third dose of the firms COVID-19 vaccine was likely needed within a year of the initial two-dose vaccination. Annual re-vaccinations would follow this third dose, he added.

The likely scenario is a third dose somewhere between six and 12 months, and from there it would be an annual re-vaccination, he stated. The CEO told CNBC that booster shots were important tools for battling more contagious variants.

Meanwhile, Moderna is in the middle of developing a booster shot. Chief commercial officer Corinne Le Goff said during a call with investors in mid-April that Americans could start getting booster shots of its vaccine later this year. She noted that countries that vaccinated a high percentage of their population would shift their focus to booster shots starting 2022 or possibly at the end of this year.

Johnson & Johnson also said that its single-shot vaccine probably needed to be given annually.

According to preliminary data, the protection provided by the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines lasts for at least six months. But it is not yet clear whether a recipients immunity would wane after that.

David Kessler, chief science officer for President Joe Bidens COVID-19 response task force, said that the country is currently preparing for the possibility that a booster shot would be needed between nine to 12 months after the initial vaccination. He added that the most vulnerable individuals would be the first to receive the booster shot if this additional dose were rolled out.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to Biden, assured that the decision about whether to roll out a booster shot would be made by public health officials and not by pharmaceutical companies. However, its worth noting that the National Institutes of Health, which is comprised of the NIAID and other institutes, is a joint owner of the Moderna vaccine.

Follow Immunization.news for more news and information related to coronavirus vaccines.

Sources include:

NaturalHealth365.com

Study.com

ANHInternational.org

ChildrensHealthDefense.org

Healthline.com
New Delhi:

A man was allegedly stabbed to death in Samaypur Badli of Rohini district in Delhi, the police said on Sunday.

Ashoka, 50, a resident of Ambala was lying at the Nangli Puna Flyover in GT Road, they said.

The doctors declared him brought dead when he was taken to the Raja Harish Chander Hospital, the police said.

A stab injury was present on the left side of Ashokas chest, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Rohini) Rishipal said.

Electronic spare parts, equipment like sound amplifiers, AC-DC converters, a handbag and his shoes were found at the place of the incidence, the police said.

A manhunt to nab the accused has been launched by the police.

(With PTI inputs)

ALSO READ | Mumbai: Man stabs woman after she denies withdrawing rape case
Ransomware, the "perfect crime" of the internet era, is spreading rapidly, growing according to some accounts by 150% or more in 2020. There are no signs of a slow-down in 2021. The average ransom demanded by attackers jumped 43% from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021 to $220,298 as threat groups target bigger and more vulnerable organizations, from police forces to hospitals to municipal school districts.

Two significant factors aid the inevitability of ransomware. The first is the ease with which cybercriminals can earn money from their ransomware endeavors. The second factor bolstering the ransomware market is the inability of law enforcement or government officials to do much of anything about these kinds of attacks.

Acknowledging that the ransomware problem has gone from bad to worse, the Biden administration's Justice Department has launched a task force that reportedly targets the entire digital ecosystem that supports ransomware. That task force consists of the Justice Department's criminal, national security, and civil divisions, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Executive Office of US Attorneys, which supports the 93 top federal prosecutors across the country.

Now a 60-plus member coalition of volunteer experts from industry, government, law enforcement, insurers, international organizations, and other areas has put forth a comprehensive framework of 48 actions that government and industry can pursue to disrupt the ransomware market. The Ransomware Task Force, primarily organized by the Institute for Security and Technology, is issuing a report today called Combatting Ransomware, A Comprehensive Framework for Action: Key Recommendations from the Ransomware Task Force.

Five priority ransomware recommendations stand out

Out of its 48 recommended actions, the task force identified five as "priority" recommendations:

Coordinated international diplomatic and law enforcement efforts must proactively prioritize ransomware through a comprehensive, resourced strategy, including using a carrot-and-stick approach to direct nation-states away from providing safe havens to ransomware criminals. The United States should lead by example and execute a sustained, aggressive, whole-of-government, intelligence-driven antiransomware campaign, coordinated by the White House. In the US, this must include: The establishment of an interagency working group led by the National Security Council (NSC) in coordination with the nascent National Cyber Director

An internal US government joint ransomware task force

A collaborative, private industry-led informal ransomware threat focus hub Governments should establish cyber response and recovery funds to support ransomware response and other cybersecurity activities, mandate that organizations report ransom payments, and require organizations to consider alternatives before making payments. An internationally coordinated effort should be mounted to develop a clear, accessible and broadly adopted framework to help organizations prepare for and respond to ransomware attacks. In some under-resourced and more critical sectors, incentives (such as fine relief and funding) or regulation may be required to drive adoption. The cryptocurrency sector that enables ransomware crime should be more closely regulated. Governments should require cryptocurrency exchanges, crypto kiosks, and over-the-counter (OTC) trading "desks" to comply with existing laws, including know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML), and combatting financing of terrorism (CFT) laws.

Unlike many other types of cybercrime, ransomware poses a unique national security threat, imperiling lives with threats to critical infrastructure, risks to public health, diversion of vital public resources, loss of data and privacy, and disruption of schools and colleges, according to the report. The economic impact goes beyond the cost of the ransom and includes downtime and remediation, which can reach multiples of the absolute dollar amounts demanded.

Compounding the problem of ransomware is the role of insurance companies, which might inadvertently encourage more attacks by serving as backstops for organizations hit by ransomware attacks. To that end, the report lists ways the insurance industry can help, including driving baseline security requirements for insurability.

Relationship between ransomware and national governments a top focus

The task force is particularly interested in the relationship between ransomware and national governments. The report notes that "many ransomware criminals operate with impunity as their countries' governments are unwilling or unable to prosecute this form of crime." In contrast, in other cases, the ransomware attackers are state-sponsored.

"We haven't really focused on the ransomware problem, either as a global community or a US community, as much as we need to," Chris Painter of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise Foundation Board and one of the Ransomware Task Force's Working Group co-chairs, tells CSO. "I don't think we have a good sense of the enormity of the costs. This rises to the level of nation-state threats [such as the recent SolarWinds hack]."

Although some developments are underway to help tackle the rising tide of ransomware, they're not enough, Painter says. "There's been a number of good actions against ransomware and ransomware targets. The Emotet take-down was one of them recently, some of the work that Europol has been doing through No More Ransom. All those things are great. But we don't have a concerted approach to this where we're really taking all the instruments we have both nationally and internationally and combining them to make this a priority and go after it. If we don't do that, it's only going to become worse."

The task force's ultimate goal is to make it difficult for cybercriminals to go after what is now easy money in ransomware assaults. "How do we make it more difficult for them? We raise the cost for these actors," Painter says. "You go after how they make money, the cryptocurrency. We go after their infrastructure. The Emotet operation was one of those. You harden the targets and make this less profitable for the ransomware actors."

International goals are key to reducing ransomware's appeal

The international aspect of the task force's operation is central to reducing ransomware's attractiveness. "There are two parts of that to me," Painter, who headed up the first cybersecurity office in the State Department under President Obama, says. "One is building coalitions with other countries to go after these actors, which has been done to some extent like the take-down of Emotet, but expanding on that and having this strategic international approach where you're prioritizing it."

According to Painter, the second part of tackling ransomware is to go after the safe havens of ransomware actors protected by their governments. "I think those safe havens fall into two categories. One is the category of countries that are not doing enough, or maybe not doing anything right now," he says. We should be able to work with those countries to do things like joint investigations, capacity building and incentivize them to think that this is important."

"The tougher nut is how do you deal with countries who are either encouraging it or certainly don't have any interest in cooperating. Russia has always been a tough nut in the past. In the same way, we're trying to respond to Russia with respect to things like SolarWinds, we need to turn up the heat. We need to use whatever tools we have, which could be sanctions, but it could go beyond that.
No Charges in Death of Reelfoot Murder Suspect

By West Kentucky Star Staff

OBION COUNTY - A northwest Tennessee district attorney general says charges will not be filed in the death of a Martin man who was a suspect in the January shooting deaths of two people at Reelfoot Lake.District Attorney General Tommy Thomas said forensic autopsy results on the body of 70-year-old David Vowell did not conclusively determine the cause of his death, but the circumstances surrounding his death and discovery reportedly suggest Vowell either drowned or died of hypothermia.Thomas said his office finds no basis for criminal charges in Vowell's death.Vowell's body was found in Reelfoot Lake on Jan. 30. Prior to his death he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, after police say he shot and killed 26-year-old Chance Black and 25-year-old Zachery Grooms, of Greenfield on Jan. 25 during a duck hunting trip.A witness, Jeffrey Crabtree, reportedly confirmed Vowell was the one who shot the men.Thomas said Crabtree's account was consistent with autopsy findings on both men, and the autopsy findings will be reported to a grand jury in June.
Tamil Nadu: 11 fishermen in missing fishing boat safe, being brought back to Kanyakumari: Coast Guard

April 29,2021 | Source: Outlook India

Eleven Tamil Nadu fishermen who went missing after their boat was allegedly hit by a ship off the Oman coast last week are safe and they are being brought to Kanyakumari, the Indian Coast Guard said on Thursday. "@IndiaCoastGuard ship Vikram escorting fishing boat Mercedes with 11 crew about 25 NM from Suheli Par #Lakshadweep. Ship alongwith FB likely to arrive at Thengapattanam harbour #Kanyakumari #TamilNadu on 01 May", the Coast Guard said in a tweet on Thursday. In a tweet on Wednesday afternoon, the Coast Guard said in a sea-air coordinated operation ICG Dornier located and established communication with the missing Indian fishing boat Mercedes 200 NM NW of #Minicoy. "All 11 crew safe. FB reportedly missing since 24 Apr & search by #ICG and IN ships & aircraft was in progress," it had said.



The South Asian Fishermen Fraternity (SAFF) said the owner of the fishing boat, Joseph Franklin, had spoken to his wife over satellite phone Wednesday morning. Based on the information provided by her, the Coast Guard carried out searches and managed to locate them. SAFF general secretary Fr Churchil said the cabin of their boat had gone off following an accident in the sea. One of the tiny boats attached to the fishing vessel was also damaged in the accident. "Since the system of the boat was OK in its basement, they managed to sail back. But they could not communicate with anybody because their communication system was not functioning," he told P T I. Churchil said the satellite phone started working after five days after the accident and it helped Franklin contact his wife.



The incident came to light on April 24 after their friends in a companion boat found the parts of mangled remains of the fishing boat around 600 nautical miles (over 1,100 kms) off the Goa coast. The Coast Guard immediately rushed a ship from Mumbai on Saturday evening for carrying out rescue operations following a missing complaint received from fishermen organisations. South Asian Fishermen Fraternity (SAFF) said 11 fisherfolk from Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu had ventured into deep sea from Thengapattanam Fisheries Harbour, on April 9 in a mechanised boat. SAFF had said the fishermen were in touch with other fishermen till Friday noon.
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The books have been reissued for the first time in 20 years with new intros

MEMOIR

MERMAID SINGING and PEEL ME A LOTUS

by Charmian Clift (both Muswell 8.99, 210pp)

There is a famously dreamy image which has helped to keep the Greek island of Hydras version of La Dolce Vita alive.

Sitting under an old tree at Douskos Taverna, Leonard Cohen is plucking at his guitar with a fair-haired womans head on his shoulder, a faraway look in her eyes.

The relaxed intimacy of the body language and the womans good looks has led to the assumption that she was Cohens Norwegian lover Marianne Ihlen, famously captured in the eponymous song: So Long, Marianne. But the woman in question was the late Australian writer Charmian Clift  Charm to her friends  who suited her euphonius name.

The picture of her and Cohen was taken by photojournalist James Burke; other photos in his collection show her with her husband George Johnston, novelist and journalist, on the harbour, with their bronzed children, hair lit gold by the sun, plates of fresh fish on the table, beakers full of retsina, broad smiles on every face.

Sitting under an old tree at Douskos Taverna, Leonard Cohen is plucking at his guitar with a fair-haired womans head on his shoulder, a faraway look in her eyes, and it is this dreamy image which has helped to keep the Greek island of Hydras version of La Dolce Vita alive

Many of the frames include Leonard and Marianne, who were helped and supported by the older couple.

When Cohen arrived on Hydra, he stayed with Johnston and Clift and worked on their terrace. Their white-washed stone house, next to the well and smothered in claret bougainvillea, was known as Australia House; a place of legend even in the writers own lifetimes.

The Johnstons were role models for Cohen, living by their writing. In their decade in Greece, they published 14 books between them. As Cohen later said: They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.

Yet behind the sunkissed images was hidden pain. Charmian and her husband, both Australian, had left the financial security of Fleet Street, where he ran the Australian bureau of Associated Newspapers, to pursue their dream of writing novels in the Greek islands.

They spent their first year on Kalymnos and then moved to Hydra, where they bought the house with the last of their capital, hosting and helping many artists and writers drawn by the stories of simple living (no electricity or cars, water lugged from a well), cheap booze and lively discussion.

Well-known names included the artist Sidney Nolan, actor Peter Finch and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, Leonard Cohen. Were he and Clift ever more than just friends? The writers youngest son Jason  the only surviving member of the family  thinks they probably were.

Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus are Clifts accounts of life on both islands, reissued for the first time in 20 years with new introductions by Polly Samson, whose own Hydra-based novel, A Theatre For Dreamers, was inspired by Clifts story.

The first book has a markedly different tone to the second. There are comic mishaps and characters, but while Clift may have enjoyed pushing the boundaries of what was expected of her sex, wearing trousers and drinking alongside the fishermen in the tavernas and bars, the burden of parenting  she worried first about her children not fitting in, then fitting in too well  providing meals for the family, cleaning and keeping house fell on her. Life was pared down to the essentials and was sometimes tough.

Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus are Clifts accounts of life on both islands, reissued for the first time in 20 years with new introductions by Polly Samson

The next year, 1955, the family moved to Hydra. Mermaid Singing had received some terrific reviews and Johnston was writing novels, but the couple were hard up. Beneath Clifts transcendent prose, the reader can detect the depth-charge stirrings of discontent. She is constantly handmaiden to her husbands writing at the expense of her own. Nights of heavy drinking take their toll, compounded by Johnstons declining health and jealousy.

The family returned to Australia in 1964 as soon as the first of three autobiographical novels by Johnston, My Brother Jack, met with success. Clift wrote a weekly newspaper essay, becoming a household name.

Her range of subject, from world politics to portraits of domestic life, investing both with equal importance, was radical and fresh.

She was a known beauty (even when her features became bruised by alcohol and unhappiness in later life), a pioneer in the way she brought the kitchen into the heart of the home, a nurturing pal, a vital personality, and most of all a writer to her core. Yet, just five years after returning to Australia she committed suicide from an overdose, aged 45, on the eve of the publication of Georges novel Clean Straw For Nothing.

Ever since, the decision to end her life has been analysed for clues. It is known that the couple had been drinking heavily and arguing.

The timing has led to speculation that Clift was dreading her readers and public connecting the free-spirited character of the novels heroine Cressida Morley with her own affairs. Her husband  both the fictional and non-fictional one  blamed her infidelity (to which Johnston was no stranger, either, until the medication for his tuberculosis rendered him impotent) for his failing health.

In an essay published posthumously, My Husband George, Clift wrote: I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like. . . but the stuff of which Clean Straw For Nothing is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and ... have felt differently because I am a different person. . .

A year later, Johnston was dead too  after a decade of debilitating illness, not helped by heavy drinking and smoking. Sadder still, the two eldest of their three children followed in the footsteps of their parents, dying young and in a similar fashion: Shane, the couples only daughter, committed suicide five years after her mother at 25. Martin, a poet, died of drink in 1990.

He was quoted as saying, not long before, The way my parents lived has perhaps been disastrous for me in the long term, in that what they did was, they wrote very hard... from say seven in the morning until midday, and then went down to the waterfront and got p***ed. I suppose thats a pattern of life Ive followed ever since.

But Charmian Clift should not be reduced to the confines of her premature passing. Her reputation lives on. She is constantly rediscovered and her books reissued. In the end, for all the tragedy, she achieved what every writer dreams of: her bold, beautiful writing endures.
As a teenager, Precious Sibalo visited the airport in her Zimbabwe hometown of Bulawayo to watch planes flying in and out of the country's second-largest city. She was entranced by the aircraft but dismayed by something else.

"I saw male pilots and never saw a woman there. I said to myself, 'I want to be one of those few women who are pilots,' " she said.

She followed through on her goal, earning a license as an airline transport pilot in November. Now, at age 35, Sibalo is among the growing ranks of female pilots in a field still overwhelmingly dominated by men  though Air Zimbabwe, the national airline, marked its first flight with two female captains in 2015.

Sibalo's route to licensing was neither direct nor smooth. She spoke with VOA in hopes of inspiring others to confront bumps and other challenges in their career paths.

"You cannot expect to climb the ladder with your hands in the pockets," she said. "You need to work hard. You need to put (in) effort, do your research."

Her mother, Catherine, gave birth to Sibalo at the age of 17. But she eventually had to leave the child in her parents' care to work as a maid in South Africa. Catherine sent home money for schooling, and young Precious, whose grandfather was an educator, did well in most classes.

But her mother "fell sick when I was around 17 years old, and that's when I also had a child," said Sibalo, who had a daughter. "I thought my dreams were shattered.  I could no longer go to university."

Sibalo's mother died in her mid-30s. When her own daughter was 2 years old, Sibalo had to leave her child in Zimbabwe with her grandparents and go to South Africa to find a job to help support them all, she said.

Like her mother and many others in Zimbabwe, Sibalo found employment in South Africa  in her case, waitressing at a restaurant in Johannesburg. She impressed people with her work habits and her upbeat character.

"Customers would see potential in me because I was very optimistic," Sibalo said.

One encouraged her to try modeling, which she did on fashion show runways. Another recommended a website leading to better-paying employment in the Middle East. First, she waitressed in Dubai. Then she landed a position as a Qatar Airways flight attendant.

Sibalo described that work as rewarding "because you get paid for traveling.  You get to see different countries.  You get exposure to different cultures. You broaden your mind, basically."

She visited Belgium, China, New Zealand, Russia and other countries. "Too many to name," she said.

The work put Sibalo close to the cockpit. After five years as a flight attendant, she had saved enough money for flight training. She enrolled at 43 Air School, located in a South African town of Port Alfred, south of Johannesburg, in late 2017.

The road to becoming a pilot

At first, Sibalo thought it might be easy to land in the pilot's seat.

"I used to see pilots, when I was a cabin crew member, just drinking coffee," she said, admitting that she wrongly assumed they were "doing nothing."

But she quickly learned that she had underestimated what it took to fly aircraft. She scored poorly on a pilot aptitude test, falling short on the math skills needed to calculate, say, whether a plane's load was too heavy for safe takeoff or landing. That convinced her to work harder. "I spent sleepless nights studying," Sibalo said. " You have to take the lessons seriously because you will be carrying lives. It's very important to be disciplined."

Her efforts produced high scores and, last November, her license as a commercial pilot.

Now Sibalo is building flight hours as the airline industry itself builds toward recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and related shutdowns. She hopes to find steady work among the small but growing ranks of women who are commercial pilots. In 2009, women accounted for 73 out of 1,036 (7%) pilots for six South African-owned airlines operating domestic and regional routes, according to the Airlines Association of Southern Africa. By 2019, they made up 120 of 1,201 pilots (10%).

Maybe sometime soon, Sibalo will return to the Bulawayo airport  as a pilot.

This story originated in VOA's Zimbabwe Service.
In an April 24, 2012, file photo, a herd of bison stand in a pen on the Fort Peck Reservation near Poplar, Mont. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has ended a bison management plan that would have allowed the wide-ranging animals to be restored in more areas of the state. The Republican announced Tuesday, April 20, 2021, that the state had settled a lawsuit brought the year before against the administration of his Democratic predecessor over adoption of the bison plan. Gianforte said he was acting to protect ranchers and farmers.
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The discovery and introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s transformed modern medicine and enabled tremendous progress in health care and life expectancy. Today, this progress is being threatened by a health crisis on the rise: antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR affects at least 3 million Americans and results in 48,000 U.S. deaths annually. The World Bank Group's 2017 report on drug-resistant infections estimates that unless action is taken, AMR globally could take 10 million lives annually by 2050, a higher toll than from cancer. If we fail to address the crisis, many modern medical advances that depend on antibioticssuch as routine surgery, cancer therapy and treatment of chronic diseasemay be jeopardized.

New PhRMA Report Shows Nearly 90 Medicines in Development to Fight Drug-Resistant Infections, but Future Pipeline Remains Challenging

AMR is a natural process that occurs when microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change in ways that make the microorganisms resistant to the medications used to cure the infection. This means the more we use medicines, the more resistance we create. Unfortunately, the current treatments were not developed to treat these resistant strains and the pipeline of new antimicrobials needed to stem the tide of AMR has been on the decline. A robust pipeline of new antimicrobial medicines is critical to ensure that treatments can keep pace with evolving pathogens and continue to fight infections.

To avoid turning back the progress made, biopharmaceutical researchers are working to develop new and effective treatments to combat AMR. These medicines represent more than antibiotics and include innovative, non-traditional antibacterial treatments such as bacteriophage products, live therapeutic products and monoclonal antibodies. A new report released today from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) finds that there are nearly 90 medicines in development against drug-resistant infections.

Now more than ever, we need a robust and diverse pipeline of treatments to manage the growing threat of AMR and ensure more medicines enter the market. Unfortunately, several obstacles including the time needed to research and develop new treatments and lack of incentives stand in the way of needed innovation.

Developing new medicines is a long, complex and risky process taking anywhere from 10 to 15 years and costing on average $2.6 billion for a single medicine. Among antibiotics, this process is fraught by even more risk. Developing new antimicrobial medicines can take anywhere from 10-20.5 years and $568-$700 million to develop a single new medicine. In fact, among investigational medicines in preclinical development for existing classes of antibiotics just one in 15 will ultimately be approved and reach patients. And among new classes of antibiotics these odds are even slimmer with just one in 30 ultimately obtaining U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

The challenge with antimicrobial medicines is that in order to slow and control continued antimicrobial resistance, newer medicines are frequently only used in a limited set of circumstances. Moreover, the U.S. reimbursement system also reinforces misguided incentives which discourage use of new antimicrobials when they are appropriate and favor older medicines that have been around for decades but may be less effective in meeting current AMR threats. Collectively, these challenges make it harder for biopharmaceutical research companies to recoup the substantial costs of R&D.

To address the challenges of early and late-stage clinical development and to overcome the market's failure to drive innovation for new antimicrobial medicines, innovative partnerships and initiatives within and between the public and private sectors have evolved. The biopharmaceutical industry in particular is taking action through the AMR Action Fund. This fund aims to bring two to four new antimicrobials to market by 2030, focusing on innovative medicines that address the highest priority public health needs. This industry-driven effort will also work to drive comprehensive policy reforms that are needed to advance new reimbursement methodologies and create incentives that enable appropriate patient access, creating a sustainable ecosystem for antimicrobial R&D and commercialization.

The fund will also provide technical support to emerging companies, giving them access to the deep expertise and resources of large biopharmaceutical companies to strengthen and accelerate the development of novel antimicrobial medicines.

This issue is further being underscored by a chorus of voices in the biopharmaceutical industry outside of PhRMA, including the World Health Organization which recently spotlighted the insufficient number of medicines in the pipeline to address the growing threat of AMR.

As we look to the future, PhRMA and our members support bolstering pandemic preparedness and health care resiliency to make sure our country, and American patients, are stronger, healthier and better prepared for the next public health emergency. While recent policy changes have enhanced the research ecosystem and have sought to provide support and incentives for researchers to develop new antimicrobial medicines, additional policy reforms are still needed to create a more sustainable environment for antimicrobial R&D and commercialization and ensure a robust pipeline for future treatments.

The current challenge with the AMR pipeline is an example of what can happen when there are insufficient market dynamics to incentivize innovation. Potential changes to the innovation ecosystem could further have a significant detrimental impact on the ability to research and develop new and needed treatments. Those new treatments could be the ones we need to address the next pandemic, or the next superbug. It is crucial to create and strengthen an ecosystem where innovation can flourish rather than fail.

To learn more about medicines in development against drug-resistant infections as well as resources on the role of the innovation ecosystem in overcoming the misaligned incentives that plague the development of medicines to combat AMR, click here.

This post originally appeared on PhRMA's Catalyst blog.

CONTACT: Andrew Powaleny, [email protected], 202-835-3460

SOURCE Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)

SOURCE Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Coast Guard Exchange (CGX) has partnered with RangeMe , the industry standard online product sourcing platform for retailers and suppliers, to streamline discovery and bring more high-quality products to their shelves.

"The CGX merchandising team is excited to leverage this partnership with RangeMe to provide state-of-the-industry access to quality merchandise options for our customers," said Samantha Bishop, CGX Chief Merchandising Officer.

The Coast Guard Exchange (CGX) has partnered with RangeMe, the industry standard online product sourcing platform for retailers and suppliers, to streamline discovery and bring more high-quality products to their shelves. "The CGX merchandising team is excited to leverage this partnership with RangeMe to provide state-of-the-industry access to quality merchandise options for our customers," said Samantha Bishop, CGX Chief Merchandising Officer.

The partnership reinforces CGX's commitment to providing quality merchandise and services of necessity and convenience to Coast Guard men and women and their families. With the ability to leverage RangeMe across the product discovery and sourcing process, CGX buyers will have the technology to accomplish innovation at scale.

"The Coast Guard Exchange is a vital resource for the men, women, and families of the Coast Guard. Our partnership will help the CGX continue to provide high-quality and innovative products to their assortment and give their consumers access to the products they need and want," says Nicky Jackson, CEO and Founder of RangeMe.

With multiple CGX locations across the country, including some in remote areas, the need for first-rate packaged goods is essential for these military service members and their families. Through RangeMe, CGX will have access to more than 175,000 suppliers and the ability to easily search for and source superior products and merchandise and increase selection and value for its consumers.

Suppliers interested in working with CGX can go to https://app.rangeme.com/coast-guard-exchange

About the Coast Guard Exchange (CGX)

The mission of the Coast Guard Exchange is to provide quality merchandise and convenience to our Coast Guard men and women as well as authorized patrons at competitive prices. The Coast Guard Exchange serves all active duty and retired members of the armed services and their dependents, members of the Reserves, Coast Guard Auxiliary, National Guard and civil service employees of the Department of Homeland Security. As a support organization within the Community Services Command of the United States Coast Guard, the Coast Guard Exchange operates 64 exchanges throughout the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Earnings generated by the resale operation is used to provide the Coast Guard with supplemental funding to the service's Morale, Well-being and Recreation (MWR) program. In the past 10 years, CGX has contributed more than $23 million to Coast Guard MWR.

About RangeMe

RangeMe, an ECRM company, is the leading online platform that streamlines new product discovery between suppliers and retailers. The platform empowers retail buyers to efficiently discover innovative and emerging products, while streamlining the inbound product submission process. For product suppliers, RangeMe enables them to grow their retail relationships with a platform that gives them the tools to manage their products, market their brand, and build awareness. Now integrated into the ECRM product offering, RangeMe adds increased breadth and depth to the industry's most complete sourcing solution for top retailers and product suppliers in the US.

Press Contacts:

Dan Dyer

Tier 1 Public Relations

For: RangeMe

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 513-478-7818

SOURCE RangeMe
Italian schools are set to stay open during the summer holidays to allow children to catch up with their education and social interaction.

The country is investing over 440 million into keeping schools open into the summer holidays, with lessons that will be focused on sport, photography and the arts.

Each school is expected to receive about 15,500. Most of the funding will be provided to schools in the country's south, where students have struggled the most with remote learning.

Education minister Patrizio Bianchi said: 'We'll use the summer period to build a new beginning.'

epa09161396 Students attend a class at the Volta Liceum on the first day of reopening, in Milan, Italy, 26 April 2021. Coronavirus-related restrictions in most of Italy are eased as of 26 April and most regions return to the moderate-risk yellow zones of the country's tiered system of coronavirus-prevention measure. EPA/MOURAD BALTI TOUATI

'We will bring the school back to the centre of the community.'

President of the national head teachers association Antonello Giannelli said the programme would particularly benefit families who are unable to send their children to summer camps during the holidays.

The summer programme will be arts focused and children will also be taken to theaters and cinemas as part of their education.

The Liceo Classico Galileo school in Florence will run a month of open-air theater, while a local language school will offer acting courses.

It is hoped that the programme will help children to make up for a year of lost socialising as well as provide some fun as part of the learning process.

Students across much of the country returned to school on Monday as most regions return to the moderate-risk yellow zones allowing Covid-19 restrictiosn to ease.

Students attend a class at the Volta Liceum on the first day of reopening, in Milan on Monday

Italy inched forward towards normality as coffee bars, restaurants, cinemas and theatres reopened in most regions as part of a phased springtime relaxation of COVID lockdowns.

'Finally!' said Lorenzo Campania, an elderly man from a small village near Rome, as he had breakfast seated at an outdoor table near the capital's central Piazza Venezia.

Fourteen of the country's 20 regions have been designated yellow zones, meaning there is a relatively low risk from COVID. Five are classified orange and one, Sardinia, red.

In the yellow zones, coffee bars and restaurants are now allowed to serve customers outdoors after a near-total shutdown of about six weeks.

However, having a quick espresso and cornetto, the equivalent of the French croissant, standing at the bar - a morning ritual for millions - will still be prohibited for another six weeks.
Just three songs from a playlist can be used to identify its curator from a lineup, a new study claims.

Researchers in Israel conducted experiments to see if song choices could be linked to their curator, even without knowing their music tastes.

They found undergraduate students were able to identify others from three pieces of music  but the experts did not deduce how they did it.

The findings are of concern because streaming giants could potentially identify anonymised users by listening habits, which 'constitutes a significant threat to privacy disclosure', they say.

According to the researchers, three songs from a playlist are enough to identify the person who chose the songs. Hence, companies like YouTube and Spotify (pictured) can accumulate a great deal of information about their users based only on their music choices

SPOTIFY USERS FURIOUS AFTER UK PRICE HIKE Spotify will increase the prices of its premium subscriptions in the UK from April 30. Several frustrated users took to Twitter to discuss the price increase this afternoon, with one claiming that Spotify is getting 'too big for its boots.' A Spotify spokesperson said the service has 70 million tracks and 2.2 million podcasts, providing listeners 'greater value than ever before.' Spotify price hikes: - Premium Student - was 4.99/month, increasing to 5.99/month - Premium Duo - was 12.99/month, increasing to 13.99/month - Premium Family - was 14.99/month, increasing to 16.99/month Advertisement

The new study, published in Telematics and Informatics, was conducted by Dr Ori Leshman at Tel Aviv University and Dr Ron Hirschprung at Ariel University.

'Music can become a form of characterisation, and even an identifier,' the authors say.

'It provides commercial companies like Google and Spotify with additional and more in-depth information about us as users of these platforms.

'In the digital world we live in today, these findings have far-reaching implications on privacy violations, especially since information about people can be inferred from a completely unexpected source, which is therefore lacking in protection against such violations.'

The team's study included about 150 young people, all of whom were undergraduate students, divided in four groups of about 35 people each.

The group members did not know each other well  they had the 'slightest acquaintance'  and had no prior knowledge of each other's musical tastes.

In each group, five participants were asked to anonymously select three songs or musical pieces they liked or 'were touched by' from their favourite playlist.

The rest of the participants in each group had to identify these five people based on only these three songs.

'They could see each other, but the subjects identified were separated from the group, and could not provide facial clues for example,' Dr Hirschprung told MailOnline.

Graphical abstract from the researchers' paper. The study shows users can be re-identified by these records even if anonymised

So participants knew what each other looked like, but they weren't allowed to talk to each other beforehand.

The variety of music was diverse, ranging from classic rock and pop, including the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Beyonce and Ariana Grande, as well as old and new Israeli music and international hip hop, like Kendrick Lamar and Eminem.

Results showed participants were able to identify each other according to their musical taste at a very high level of between 80 and 100 per cent.

Researchers are unsure, however, how they did this  although MailOnline suggested the participants' appearance might have been a strong factor.

In the current era we consume music mainly on-demand by streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube (pictured), which is owned by Google

'Defining the factors used in the identification process is a very good question which we have no answer for it at the moment,' Dr Hirschprung said.

'It was our hypothesis that musical selections may lead to identification, and our research proofed it.

'In further research which we are conducting right now, we try to make more progress and address this issue.'

The researchers accounted for the probability of a successful arbitrary guess.

This, they say, 'provides conclusive evidence that re-identification based on music selection is feasible, thus the threat is real'.

A common way to protect our identity when we use online services is to remove certain identifiers, such as name or address, from the records  something called 'anoymisation'.

However, this approach is 'naive', the study authors say, as in many cases re-identification is enabled based on what they call 'quasi-identifiers'.

Quasi-identifiers are pieces of information that describes the individual but is not unique, to that individual, such as age.

In a medical record, for example, even if the dataset is anonymised, there's a risk of re-identification of the individual based on quasi-identifiers like age and blood pressure.

'In this research we examine an interesting and unexpected new quasi-identifier  music selections of an individual which represents their musical preferences,' the authors say.

Spotify, one of the streaming giants mentioned in the study, anonymises its users' personal data if they request it.

In its privacy policy, the firm admits it, along with its advertising partners, 'may process certain personal data' to help 'understand 'interests or preferences to deliver relevant ads.

'Streaming agents can cross data (with Google, Facebook) and this way achieve de-anonimisation,' said Dr Hirschprung.

'This technique has been widely demonstrated and used in other domains; thus, our claim that music selections are quasi identifiers is revolutionary.'

MailOnline contacted Apple, Spotify and Google, which owns YouTube, for comment regarding the study.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: 'We use the information that we collect to customise our services [for its users], including providing recommendations, personalising search results and serving relevant ads.

'While these ads help fund our services and make them free for everyone, your personal information is not for sale.'
A decision to set up a major trauma centre without full neurosurgery access is nonsense and puts patients lives at risk, a top neurosurgeon has warned.

On Tuesday, two major trauma centres, one in Cork University Hospital (CUH) and one at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin, were announced.

The aim is to consolidate trauma care in specialised units.

However, while CUH already has a neurosurgical centre, the Mater does not.

Ciaran Bolger, professor of clinical neuroscience at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, said creating a new mini-neurosurgical centre as proposed, is not workable.

The only solution is either to put the major trauma centre in Beaumont because that is where the neurosurgery is, or relocate neurosurgery to the Mater campus, he said.

People are trying to pass it off as Irish hospital politics. To be honest we dont care where it is, but neurosurgery needs to be with it, like they have in Cork.

More than half the people who die from trauma die of brain injury, he said.

Patients with head injuries make up more than half of those needing immediate life-saving surgery.

Major trauma cases usually make up about 20% of their workload so consultants will lose other emergency skills, he said.

Prof Bolger said: The idea that you pick a surgeon out and he will run everything is just nonsense, it shows a complete lack of understanding of modern medicine. At a really basic level, they dont understand how it works.

It can take up to two years to train a neuro-specialist nurse, and other staff are required to give top-level care.

It is about the care you get in a fully-functioning service, he said. This has not worked anywhere else in the world.

An open letter from all consultant neurosurgeons at the National Neurosurgical Centre in Beaumont Hospital also warns of risks to patient safety.

Echoing Prof Bolgers call for co-location, the letter states: Any in-between solution will result in avoidable loss of patients lives.

Prof Bolger was sharply critical of the lack of neurosurgical input to the decision, saying consultants in Cork and Beaumont were side-lined.

The group has been making representations through the HSE, the Department of Health, and the political system for about 18 months. But he only heard the final decision through the health ministers social media account.

Prof Bolger said a presentation he made to the Independent Assessment Panel had little impact.

However, a HSE spokeswoman said neurosurgeons were welcomed to the process.

The spokesperson said the HSE expects to collaborate with the centre in Beaumont, and she said half the panel are experts in retrieval and acute management of all trauma including head injuries.

She said inclusive trauma systems can reduce the chances of dying following major trauma by 20%.
Clearly disadvantaged in making South China Sea claims under international law, China's gray zone tactics are thin cover for deploying its muscle power.

"China's strategy is being implemented with a power-based approach versus a rules-based approach," said Cmdr. Jonathan Odom, Military Professor of International Law, Marshall Center for Security Studies.

He was speaking Tuesday in his personal capacity at a virtual webinar on the "Rule of Law and Gray Zone Activities in the East and South China Seas," hosted by Pacific Forum, a non-profit, foreign policy research institute based in Honolulu, Hawaii, the U.S.

Odom noted that China's strategy has recently been called cabbage strategy, salami slicing, or win without fighting at sea. Beijing is trying to demonstrate superiority in the situation and to trouble others while refraining for provoking countries enough to trigger use of force and self-defense. He called them "gray activities."

In the United Nation Charter, there is a provision that an armed attack triggers the right of self-defense of the country that's being attacked. Most countries take the view that while the right to self-defense is triggered by an armed-attack, other uses of force enjoin the attacked nation to respond with actions that don't rise to the level of use of force.

In that context, China is engaging in unsafe behavior in the South China Sea. Instead of firing missiles at U.S. Navy warships or U.S. Navy aircraft while they're operating in the area, China uses lasers towards the pilots, shoulders or crosses the bows. Also, it gives warnings like "if you enter this airspace, even though it's international airspace, you will suffer serious consequences."

"I'd rather use the phrase risk-fare, that is, using risk as a weapon," Odom said.

The international rules based approach demands countries to operate safely and peacefully, so its activities call into question whether China is maintaining those obligations, he added.

Explaining the gray zone activities further, Odom said China deploys various gray actors, referring to the role of China's maritime militia that he has catalogued in considerable detail. The militia are funded by the government, organized in a specific hierarchy and structure linked to the local provincial Communist Party as well as the People's Liberation Army (PLA). They are trained both individually as well as in units. They are acknowledged and rewarded and with all kinds of things in the manner of a military organization. However, China claims they are not government agents.

In March this year, a spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines said: "There was no Chinese maritime militia as alleged" at Whitsun Reef.

The fact has proven to be entirely to the contrary, Odom said.

In mid-April, the Philippines Coast Guard released images of Chinese fishing vessels moored at the Whitsun Reef. These were taken by the crew of a Coast Guard ship that went close to the Chinese vessels. Six of the Chinese fishing vessels were tied together in the lagoon.

Odom emphasized that a decade ago, no one was talking about Chinese militia, the talk was about "patriotic fishermen." But what people are seeing now is that that narrative has "completely collapsed."

Chinese vessels, believed to be manned by Chinese maritime militia personnel, are seen at Whitsun Reef, South China Sea, March 27, 2021. Photo by Philippine Coast Guard/National Task Force-West Philippine Sea/Handout via Reuters.

Another gray actor is the Chinese Coast Guard. For years, Chinese narrative has been: "We're not escalating the situation because we're only introducing white hulls into the situation," Odom noted.

Coast guard type forces are commonly called "white hulls," and regular navy forces are called "grey hulls." However, the new China's Coast Guard law and other directives from the Chinese government have placed the Chinese Coast Guard under the Central Military Commission. Therefore, China can no longer say that these are white hulls.

"The narrative that China is not escalating the situation, because they're only using white hulls, is now a false narrative," Odom reiterated.

He said that with its gray activities and gray actors, China is creating "gray effects." China wants to bolster its East Sea claims, but this is impossible at this stage under international law, because it is a disputed area. Therefore, China is creating the gray effects to say later, "Look, we've been doing this law enforcement for years."

China had been flooding the zone with boats in some situations to overwhelm authorities of other countries. Odom recalled the case in 2016 when China deployed over 200 fishing vessels to the area around Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Beijing tried to chip away at the idea that "the Senkaku Islands are under the administrative control of Japan."

Odom said countries need to recognize that China has been using national laws as the justification for its actions for years. Other countries must respect coastal states' laws, but only those that are in conformity with UNCLOS and other bodies of international law, he said.

For that reason, when people talk about the word "lawfare", Odom prefers the phrase legal gamesmanship.

"And I would argue that the legal gamesmanship that China is engaging in is an effort to bend international rules with impunity."
Natwest raked in bumper profits in the first three months of this year after fewer people defaulted on loans than expected during the pandemic.

The bank made a profit of 946million, up from 64million the same time last year when it was setting aside billions of pounds to prepare for coronavirus defaults and losses.

But the lender, formerly known as RBS, sounded the alarm bell over the money-laundering scandal which is set to drag the bank to court next month.

Natwest boss Alison Rose said Britain was still 'very early' into its recovery, and that the bank would reconsider its projections for the economy when it released its half-year results in July

Natwest said the criminal proceedings, which has been brought by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), could result in 'substantial costs'.

Representatives of the bank are due to appear in Westminster Magistrates' Court on May 26 for an initial hearing.

The FCA has accused Natwest of failing to monitor the account of a customer, understood to be Bradford-based gold dealership Fowler Oldfield.

Fowler Oldfield is alleged to have deposited 365million, including 264million in cash, in 'increasingly large' sums between November 2011 and October 2016.

After a police raid in 2016 Fowler Oldfield was shut down and liquidated. At the time, 12 people were arrested for money-laundering offences.

Chief executive Alison Rose, who was not in charge when the incidents occurred between 2011 and 2016, said: 'We're very disappointed with the situation.

'We take anti money-laundering very seriously and we've invested very significantly  we have over 4,000 people across the organisation whose job is to keep our customers safe.'

She declined to comment on whether the breaches of anti money-laundering rules may turn out to be more widespread.

Natwest's first-quarter results were boosted by a release of 102million, which had originally been set aside last year to cover bad loans, as fewer customers were defaulting on their debt than expected.

In total, Natwest set aside 3.2billion in 2020 as it prepared for a slew of borrowers to be hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

But its 102million release for the first three months of the year was smaller than rivals including HSBC and Lloyds Bank, as Natwest refused to revise its growth forecasts for the economy until the summer.

Rose explained that currently Britain was still 'very early' into its coronavirus recovery, and that Natwest would reconsider its projections for the economy when it released its half-year results in July.

She added that the bank was waiting to see what would happen as more of the Government support schemes such as furlough started to taper off, and customers who had borrowed taxpayer-backed loans had to start paying interest.

Rose said: 'As the Government schemes taper off, you're judging whether the speed of the economic recovery has been enough to pull those business up that were struggling, or are you going to see the level of defaults coming up at the back end of the year?'

If Britain's bounce-back does proceed in line with the bank's optimistic projections, Natwest will be able to release 844million that it is holding to cover bad loans.

Even though Rose was cautious on the UK's recovery, she said there were promising signs that economic activity was beginning to pick up.

Households have been squirreling away money since the pandemic began, with little to spend it on  Natwest's deposits were up at 451billion by the end of March, after rising 62.5billion last year and another 11billion in the first quarter of this year.

But Rose, 52, said credit and debit card transactions were beginning to return to more normal levels, after months of lacklustre spending.

Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has previously said the economy is like a 'coiled spring' waiting to rebound when households have the opportunity to get out and spend.

Natwest shares slipped 3.4 per cent, or 6.85p, to 196.65p.

The bank is still 59.8 per cent owned by the taxpayer following its bailout during the financial crisis.
A growing number of U.S. companies are now offering homes built with three-dimensional, or 3D printing technology.

The companies say 3D printers can build homes faster, for a lot less money, and in a much more environment friendly way than traditional building methods. They say the technology may also help solve Americas shortage of affordable housing.

3D printers make physical objects based on 3D models created by a computer. The machines put down many thin layers of material -- such as plastic, metal or concrete -- on top of each other. Objects are created through this process, from the bottom up.

In recent years, 3D printers have mostly been used to create small, specialized items. This includes parts for automobiles, airplanes and medical devices. Many consumer products can also be 3D printed as well, from clothes to foods.

Now, an increasing number of startup companies are using 3D printing to build entire homes. Since the technology is still developing, not many have yet been built. However, the top companies plan to greatly increase production in coming years.

The startup company Icon, based in Austin, Texas, made news in 2018 by completing the first permitted 3D printed home in the U.S. At the time, it said the home had been built in just a day.

Since then, the company says it has been developing new technologies in robotics, software and manufacturing materials. It designed its own 3D printer and says the robot-powered machine can create structures up to 185 square meters. The printing process uses a cement-based mixture that Icon says is stronger and less costly than traditional building materials.

To date, Icon has completed 24 3D printed homes in the U.S. and Mexico. Among them was a community of 3D printed homes in a poor neighborhood in Mexico. The company has also completed a series of structures for homeless people in Austin. And it says it plans to open Americas first housing development of 3D printed homes this summer.

Icon co-founder Jason Ballard told The Associated Press his companys 3D printing system can reduce construction costs by up to 30 percent and produce a home twice as fast as traditional methods. The process can do the work of 10 to 20 workers in several different fields. The machines, unlike humans, can work 24 hours a day.

Sam Ruben is the co-founder of another home building company, Mighty Buildings. "With 3D printing, were able to print exactly what we need, he told the AP. The company uses a 3D printer in Oakland, California to produce all parts, which are shipped to the site of the home. The house can then be put together with simple tools, Ruben said.

Mighty Buildings advertises several home models on its website. A complete, mid-size home up to 65 square meters costs $187,250. The company also produces 32 square meter mighty studios that start at $115,000. The smaller structures are designed to be used as extra bedrooms, home offices, etc. Ruben said the prices are about 40 percent lower than traditional homes.

He added that the 3D printing process removes nearly all building waste, which can save up to three tons of carbon per home. The company has a goal of producing 1,000 structures next year. It has teamed up with a developer to complete a solar-powered community of 3D printed homes in the California desert. Orders have already been sold out, with 500 people on a waiting list.

A New York company, SQ4D, also uses 3D printing technology to build homes. In February, the company showed off a 130 square meter model home to demonstrate its printers abilities. SQ4D plans to sell its homes starting at $299,000. The company has even started listing the homes on the internet selling site Zillow.

Kirk Andersen is SQ4Ds director of operations. He told Reuters the 3D printer will permit buyers to easily create their own home design, room by room.

While 3D printing as a home building method is just getting started, Andersen said others in the construction industry need to get prepared for big changes. This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface, he said.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from The Associated Press, Reuters, and Icon. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

Quiz - More US Companies Now Offering 3D Printed Homes Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

three-dimensional (3D)  adj. having or appearing to have length, depth and height

affordable  adj. reasonably priced and able to be bought by most people

layer  n. an amount of a substance that covers a surface

concrete  n. a hard substance using in building operations

consumer  n. someone who buys or uses goods or services

construction  n. the work of building homes, offices, bridges, etc.

scratch  v. to act on something
The morning after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that fully vaccinated Americans could hedonistically head outside, unmasked, under most circumstances, I left my apartment with a certain set of expectations.

There would be no more KN95s, no more Liberty of London paisleys obscuring the faces of everyone else around. There would be sidewalk conversations that allowed you to hear the other person speaking. (No, no; not Miley Cyrus. Cyrus VANCE.) There would be the thrill of walking down the Brooklyn Promenade staring at the 26 messages from your pandemic text group without having your glasses fog up. Here, finally, was freedom.

The question, though, was whether we were ready for it  ready for this new mood of abandon after a year of rules and protocols and terror and hand sanitizer and taking antibacterial wipes to tubs of hummus. The dam seemed to be breaking all at once.

As the C.D.C. lifted its strictures, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that he would no longer require New York restaurants to serve food along with alcohol  even as drinking has clearly become a problem for many people during the pandemic. Restaurant curfews were also coming to an end; meals with groups larger than 10 were in the imminent future. The governors office said that in early May it would deliver guidance for dancing, which probably ought to be reframed as guidance for dancing in clothes that dont have an elastic waistband.
Aleksei Navalny, a prominent Russian opposition leader who has been jailed since January, issued a scathing assessment of President Vladimir Putin on April 29. Navalny spoke at an appeal hearing for a case in which he was found guilty of defaming a World War II veteran. It was his first appearance since his three-week hunger strike, which he called off last week amid reports that his health was failing.
With the second COVID-19 wave severely straining the healthcare facilities, stepped in to provide much-needed cylinders to a children's hospital in Malviya Nagar.

An SOS message was received on Wednesday from the Rainbow Children's hospital in Malviya Nagar regarding an acute shortage of The police was informed that the hospital only had enough to last another half an hour, the police said.

The Station House Officer of the Malviya Nagar Police Station along with other personnel reached the hospital, where 71 COVID-positive children and pregnant women were on support.

The staff of PS Malviya Nagar acted swiftly and after due efforts, 35 oxygen cylinders were arranged on time and the oxygen supply was normalised providing relief to patients, 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.)
An international online conference on mine action in Ukraine was held at the Ivan Chernyakhovsky National Defence University of Ukraine with the assistance of the Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP).

"The participants discussed the mine action system in Ukraine, the practice of investigating incidents with self-made explosive devices, the existing problems of personnel training methods for countering self-made explosive devices, and the implementation of NATO mine action standards in Ukraine," the press service of the Ministry of Defence reports

The conference was attended by more than 70 scientists and practitioners of the security and defense sector from 12 countries. In particular, the representatives of Azerbaijan, Greece, Georgia, Egypt, Italy, Canada, Poland, Serbia, the United States, Germany, and Ukraine took part in the event.

According to the Ministrys press service, the conference results will be taken into account in the future during the creation of the mine action system in Ukraine, the improvement of the training system for mine clearance specialists, and the educational process of higher military educational institutions.

The Ministry of Defence also informed that the conference participants determined the ways of establishing international cooperation, maintaining and developing international relations in the field of mine action, as well as creating an interagency system in Ukraine to coordinate, collect and analyze information on terrorist threats (cases) with the use of self-made explosive devices.

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Chandler-Cole Tapped to Lead CASA of Los Angeles

Children in L.A. Countys foster care system have a passionate booster in Charity Chandler-Cole. As the new chief executive officer of CASA of Los Angeles, she is fully committed to being a champion for youth and recruiting others to join the cause.

CASAs, Court Appointed Special Advocates, provide guidance and support to children who have entered the juvenile dependency system due to abuse or neglect by their parents. Chandler-Cole, who is the organizations first African American CEO, brings a powerful combination of senior management expertise and lived experience to the nonprofit agency.

I really had a lot of hands-on experience. I was a nonprofit executive with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation where I oversaw a $35 million budget, she explained about her previous position as national director of AHFs Contracts Administration Department. Most importantly, my experience comes from being a former foster youth in L.A. County and bringing a lot of advocacy around child welfare for the last 10 years.

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Chandler-Coles background includes creating Transformative Management Solutions (TMS), a consultancy she founded that is focused on aiding nonprofit, public and political organizations in implementing social, educational and racial justice as well as child welfare initiatives; serving as chair of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), a group focused on empowering formerly and currently incarcerated people; and being vice chair of Fostering Change Network, a global consulting body dedicated to improving child welfare policy.

She was also a member of the Juvenile Justice Standing Committee, which was created by the Board of State and Community Corrections to address concerns impacting adolescent offenders; as well as served on the Prop 47 Executive Steering Committee, which she described as guiding the process for awarding the majority of the states Proposition 47 savings to help rehabilitate and provide resources to those coming out of prison.

In addition, Chandler-Cole was elected president of the Black Los Angeles Young Democrats, a political action committee that trains young African American leaders in advocacy and activism to strengthen our influence in politics and policies that affect our lives, she said.

Also, she received a Masters in Public Administration from Cal State University Northridge, a Bachelors in Communication Studies from Loyola Marymount University, and is currently finishing a Doctorate in Educational Leadership for Social Justice at Loyola Marymount University. She is a mother to four children, and relative caregiver to her nephew.

Critical to her success  both past and future  is her heart for young people along with her belief that building awareness about CASAs will help foster children and communities as a whole. However, key to raising the agencys profile is persuading more people of color to volunteer with the organization, noted Chandler-Cole.

We need more Black and Brown CASAs out there, so if we have a little Black kid thats in the child welfare system, he can be partnered with a Black male or Black female, someone who looks like him and comes from his community and he can say, Wow, I can actually grow up and be like this person. Theyre just not my advocate in court, theyre also my mentor, my friend, my big sister or brother and they look like me.

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In order to be a CASA, your heart really has to drive this for you. And being a CASA isnt for everyone, she admitted. Its for someone that sees the benefit in helping our children and the social responsibility of helping our children and leading from their heart in serving our children. Its an opportunity to make an impact on someones life.

And positively impacting a childs life does not take loads of time, said the new CEO. CASAs donate an average of 10-to-20 hours a month through activities such as regular visits with the child, interacting with foster parents and teachers, and accompanying youth to court hearings and appointments. Other actions, like online reports and phone calls, can be completed from a CASAs home.

Also, becoming a CASA is a relatively simple process. After interviews and a background check, volunteers complete 40 hours of training where they learn about cultural sensitivity, child development, psychotropic mood changing drugs and other information that may affect a child.

Everyone has the opportunity to spend hours upon hours to help our youth, but the reality is we rely on volunteers to commit their personal time to helping transform a life. Were very intentional how our CASAs interact with our youth, making sure that those interactions are impactful and meaningful, so that the short amount of time they spend with the youth is memorable and actually helps change their lives in the process, Chandler-Cole said.

But for the people that step up to be CASAs, its just as rewarding for them as it is for our youth, so its worth it for both parties.

To build the ranks of CASAs, Chandler-Coles aims to encourage more older adults to donate time in the volunteer role and seek partnerships with other youth-oriented nonprofits, such as Big Brothers and Big Sisters, to share resources and programs.

We have amazing folks at home that are over 60, 65 and 70, that want to get involved. Perhaps they are not always mobile or may be health compromised in different ways, [but we want] to reach out to them to allow them to be active and engaged, insisted Chandler-Cole, who added that the pandemic has expanded the opportunity to virtually connect with people, which helps advance communication and relationships between individuals.

Expressing optimism about the future in her new position, Chandler-Cole shared, Having been in the system and seeing the dire outcomes for so many children who feel they have no voice and no one who cares for them, I was drawn to CASA/LA, [which] provides a direct way to change outcomes that so often seem automated in an overburdened system.

A CASA volunteer sends a distinct message, letting everyone that interacts with that child know that they have someone looking out for them. These children are not alone, and they will not be discarded, she said. CASA/LA has the opportunity to upend the status quo of our Child Welfare System and serve as a transformative force in drastically changing the experience of youth in foster care.

To learn more or volunteer as a mentor, visit casala.org.
A LEADING athleisure brand with strong Cork connections has gotten a big boost this week with popstar Niall Horan investing in the company.

The former One Direction band member has invested in Gym+Coffee, becoming a shareholder with an aim to support the business and help raise the profile of the brand internationally.

Gym+Coffee, which is co-founded by Ballincollig native Niall Horgan, launched in 2017 and has quickly become one of the fastest-growing businesses in Ireland and the UK.

Irish rugby legend Brian ODriscoll is already an early investor in the business and celebrities like Joe Wicks, and podcaster and musician Niall Breslin are known fans of the brand. In 2020 Gym+Coffee set their sights on international expansion and despite lockdown, opened two new retail stores in the last six months at Westfield London and The Trafford Centre in Manchester.

Gym+Coffee CEO, Niall Horgan, who studied marketing at UCC, said: We are so excited for Niall to officially come on board and support a business like ours.

"Over the last 10 years Niall has represented Ireland with optimism, inclusivity, energy and positivity on a global stage and has become a household name across the world. He is what we aspire to become as a business. We hope that with his guidance and direction Gym+Coffee can emulate some of the success hes had and proudly represent Ireland internationally.

Investor and advisor Niall Horan commented: Ive been a fan of Gym+Coffee for some time both as a brand and a business. I love the idea of the community they created around the brand and their goals to Make Life Richer. The first time I bought some Gym+Coffee gear I was struck by the high quality of the clothing and I was delighted to see they were an Irish brand with a serious team behind their operation. As I looked into it more, I started to understand their ambition and Im delighted now to become part of the team that will hopefully bring the brand to a wider audience.

Niall visited the new Gym+Coffee Westfield Clubhouse on opening weekend saying, I was struck at how a young brand from Ireland was starting to make an impact on the international market. I realised there were some good synergies between us, and the relationship took off from there, ending with me investing into the company and becoming part of the team.
Oprah Winfrey has opened up in further detail about the abuse she suffered as a child, speaking candidly about how her grandmother would 'whup' her regularly and for the 'slightest reasons'  and how that turned her into a 'world-class people pleaser' who had trouble setting boundaries well into adulthood.

The 67-year-old mogul had detailed the trauma of her own upbringing in her new book, 'What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing,' and has shared some of her harrowing experiences as a young child on Instagram this week.

Oprah is now a billionaire with a longtime romantic partner - however she grew up poor and 'rarely feeling loved,' spending the first six years of her life with an abusive grandmother before moving in with a mother who was 'cold' and allowed her to be banished to sleep on the porch of the boarding house where they lived.

Candid: Oprah Winfrey has opened up about the abuse she suffered as a child, speaking about how her grandmother would 'whup' her regularly and for the 'slightest reasons'

Sad: She spent the first six years of her life in rural Mississippi with her grandma, Hattie Mae, who regularly beat her

'As a young girl, I was "whupped" regularly,' she wrote. 'At the time it was an accepted practice of punishment to discipline a child. My grandmother, Hattie Mae, embraced it'

Repercussions: She said it turned her into a 'world-class people pleaser' who had trouble setting boundaries well into adulthood

Tragic cycle: Her grandmother, too, suffered abuse at the hands of her grandfather

Oprah has shared three rare photos from her childhood on Instagram, posting two sweet images of herself as a toddler and one as a cautiously smiling grade schooler.

'The most pervasive feeling I remember from my own childhood is loneliness,' the mega-star wrote.

'My mother and father were together only once, underneath an old oak tree. Nine months after that singular encounter, I arrived.'

She spent the first six years of her life living in rural Mississippi with her grandmother, who regularly beat her.

'As a young girl, I was "whupped" regularly,' she wrote. 'At the time it was an accepted practice of punishment to discipline a child. My grandmother, Hattie Mae, embraced it.

'But even at three years old I knew what I was experiencing was wrong. I was beaten for the slightest reasons. Spilled water, a broken glass, the inability to keep quiet or still. My grandmother's home was a place where children were seen and not heard.'

Oprah said this mistreatment didn't just harm her as a child, but had lasting repercussions that impacted her well into adulthood.

Flashback: Oprah shared several photos of herself as a young child, including this smiling shot

'The most pervasive feeling I remember from my own childhood is loneliness,' the mega-star wrote

Little girl: At six, she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mom, who had 'no time for nurturing' and was 'distant' and 'cold.' 'I rarely remember feeling loved,' she admitted

'The long-term impact of being whupped  then forced to hush and even smile about it  turned me into a world-class people pleaser for most of my life,' she said.

'It would not have taken me half a lifetime to learn to set boundaries and say "no" with confidence had I been nurtured differently.'

After her grandmother died, Oprah was 'shuttled' between her mother, Vernita Lee, in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville.

'When I went to live with my mother at six years old, I did not feel welcome,' she recalled. 'The night I arrived in Milwaukee, the woman my mother was boarding with, Ms. Miller, took one look at me and said, "She'll have to sleep on the porch."

'Ms. Miller was light-skinned. She could almost pass for white, and she was not going to have this "nappy-headed dark child," as she said, stay in the house,' she wrote.

But while one might naturally hope their own mother would advocate for them, Oprah's did not.

'My mother said, "All right." As I watched my mother close the house door to go to the bed where I thought I'd sleep, I was consumed with a terrified sense of loneliness that brought me to tears,' she said.

'I always felt like a burden, an "extra mouth to feed,"' she said

When she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother, the boarding house owner refused to let her sleep in the house, and her mother didn't argue

Banished: Ms. Miller said she was not going to have this 'nappy-headed dark child' stay in the house, Oprah recalled

'I imagined a robber snatching me from the porch or somehow breaking through the windows and choking me. That first night, I got on my knees and prayed to God to send angels to protect me. HE did. And that was my first lesson in learning other people (even your mother) can disappoint you, but God doesn't.'

In her words: The 67-year-old mogul had detailed the trauma of her own upbringing in her new book , 'What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing'

Living with her mother continued to be difficult, and Oprah does not describe her as a particularly warm person.

'My mother worked as a maid for fifty dollars a week doing what she could to care for three young children. There was no time for nurturing. My mother felt distant, cold to the need of this little girl,' she said.

'All of the energy went to keeping her head above water, surviving. I always felt like a burden, an "extra mouth to feed." I rarely remember feeling loved, which impacted my ability to experience love as an adult.'

Oprah has spoken about about her difficult relationship with her mother before, once revealing that she chose never again to have children 'because I wasn't mothered well.'

But she later made amends with Vernita and, in one touching 1990 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah gave her mother a makeover.

Vernita later said that her proudest moment was seeing her daughter in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple in 1985.

Emotional: Oprah has spoken about about her difficult relationship with her mother before, once revealing that she chose never again to have children 'because I wasn't mothered well'

Moving forward: She later made amends with Vernita and, in one touching 1990 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah gave her mother a makeover

Living on: Vernita later said that her proudest moment was seeing her daughter in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple in 1985

Huge heart: Oprah helped support her mother financially after she found success as a television star, saying she felt a sense of 'responsibility'

Oprah helped support her mother financially after she found success as a television star, saying she felt a sense of 'responsibility.'

But working through what she suffered as a child took time for the star, and she hopes that sharing her story in the new book she authored with Dr. Bruce Perry will 'help us heal and shift from asking Whats wrong with you? to What happened to you?

She explained: 'Most of the struggles I endured as a child resulted in trauma that would define many relationships, interactions, and decisions in my life. It took decades of work, conversations, and healing to break those cycles and make peace with my past.'

Appearing on The Dr. Oz Show today, Oprah spoke further about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her grandmother, recalled a specific incident when she was beaten after bringing a bucket of water back to the family home.

'As I was bringing the water back, I was, like, playing with the water with my fingers like that in the water and my grandmother was looking out the window,' Winfrey said. 'And when I brought the bucket in and Im sloshing the bucket cause Im a little girl, and shes like "Were you playing in the water? Did you have your fingers in that water? Thats our drinking water."

She continued: 'I was like, and I said, "No maam" and she said, "I saw you and your fingers in the water," so she grabbed a switch and I got a really bad whupping for it.'

More talk: Appearing on The Dr. Oz Show today, Oprah spoke further about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her grandmother

The talk show host got emotional while discussing the injuries she had in the wake of the beating.

'Later, when I put on my clothes to go to church, one of the welts from my back opened up and bloodied the dress. So my emotion now is not because I feel such deep pain about it, I just feel pain for that little girl,' she said.

In the exchange with Dr. Oz, Oprah painted a broader picture of her upbringing in rural Mississippi, noting how her grandmother was facing her own abuse at the hands of Oprah's grandfather, and how she still has lingering trauma about sleeping.

'My grandmother and I slept in the bed together,' she said. 'My grandfather was in a room on the other side of the wall and one night, in the middle of the night, my grandfather gets out of bed and comes into the room and I wake up and he has his hands around my grandmother's neck and she is screaming.

'She manages to push him off of her and step over him. He falls. She steps over him and runs to the front door. I run out of the bed with her.'

Oprah said her grandmother began to call out for a family friend they called Cousin Henry who lived nearby.

Details: The talk show host got emotional while discussing the injuries she had in the wake of the beating

No holding back: Oprah has been candid about some of the abuse and trauma she suffered in her childhood and adolescence

'Cousin Henry comes down the road in the middle of the night to help my grandmother get my grandfather up off the floor,' she recalled, choking up as she admitted it was the first time she was publicly telling the story. 'And after that my grandmother put a chair underneath the doorknob and some tin cans around the chair.

'And that is how we slept every night. I'm sleeping, I always slept with, listening for the cans. Listening for what happens if that doorknob moves.'

Oprah has been candid about some of the abuse and trauma she suffered in her childhood and adolescence.

She previously revealed that she was raped and abused by family friends, who have not been publicly identified, while living with her mother in Milwaukee.

After getting pregnant at age 14, she moved to Nashville to live with her father.

She went on to give birth to a son, who died before he left the hospital at just a week old. Oprah never even got to hold him.
OAKLAND (BCN)

On the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of 23-year-old Henry Texada, the Oakland Police Department asked Wednesday for the public's help solving the case.

The department highlighted his case with a video posted on YouTube at https://youtu.be/z4roWasHbGo.

On April 28, 2020, officers responded at 1:46 p.m. to a report of a shooting in the 2900 block of 68th Avenue. An investigation revealed that Texada was shot by individuals in a 2020 Nissan Armada, which had been rented in Reno, Nevada.

Police said Texada was a student at Laney College in Oakland, a graduate of Skyline High School in Oakland and had strong family ties to the Visitacion Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.

The video police released also shared a plea from Texada's mother:

"I beg the community to help get justice for my baby. He/we did not deserve for his life to be taken. Please!! Help us in the name of Jesus please Lord direct the police officers/investigators in the right direction to get justice."

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Homicide Section at (510) 238-3821 or the tip line at (510) 238-7950. The Oakland Police Department and CrimeStoppers of Oakland are offering a reward for an arrest in this case.

Copyright  2021 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

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.
Pop culture, community news and top headlines shared with our blog community in hopes to update just a bit earlier in the morning.



Local Comeback Story

Cafe in Kansas City's City Market hopeful for success with eased COVID-19 guidelines It's a hopeful time if you're running a restaurant. COVID-19 restrictions have forced a lot of them to close in the last year but now those restrictions are changing."This is one of our really popular ones. We call this the Mama-Uma.

Locals Fear Walking Papers

Dozens of Black-owned businesses face displacement under new ownership's redevelopment plans KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Many business owners in the Location One building, located at 1734 E. 63rd Street in Kansas City, Missouri, are feeling disrespected. Clarity Development Company, which is based in Omaha, Nebraska, recently purchased the building. The company is planning to demolish the current structure and construct a new affordable housing apartment complex.

COVID Vaxx Stocked Up

Hy-Vee: All locations offering walk-in COVID-19 vaccines WASHINGTON (NewsNation Now) - President Joe Biden addressed a joint session of Congress Wednesday evening ahead of his 100th day in office to make the case for his administration's agenda. The full text of President Biden's address to Congress is below. Following the address, the full speech will be in the player above.

Slimming Selfie Celeb

Rebel Wilson posts photos wearing figure-hugging lingerie Rebel Wilson was in a flirty mood on Tuesday when she showed off the results of her year of health wearing figure-hugging lingerie - with a flirty detail. The Australian actress took to her Instagram Stories to share two selfies dressed in a risque black outfit.

Prez Talk Postscript

5 winners and 3 losers from President Biden's first congressional address President Joe Biden struck a notably optimistic tone in his first speech before a joint session of Congress, coming after a long pandemic year that has been marked with isolation, loss, and for far too many Americans, death. "After just 100 days - I can report to the nation: America is on the move again," Biden said during his speech.

GOP Disputes Progress

Scott: Biden administration 'inherited a tide that had already turned' on pandemic Sen. Tim Scott President Biden Joe Biden Tulane adds Hunter Biden as guest speaker on media polarization Trump discussing resumption of MAGA rallies: report Biden's unavoidable foreign policy crisis MORE 's first joint address before Congress.

Confronting Homeland Terror

Prosecutors Are Now Calling The Michigan Kidnapping Plot An Act Of Domestic Terrorism The men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were engaged in domestic terrorism, federal prosecutors now claim, signaling a potential shift in how the Justice Department is handling one of its highest-profile cases involving anti-government activities.

Tech Talk

Biden's Infrastructure Plan Would Redefine 'Broadband' To Justify Spending $100 Billion on Government-run Internet As part of a $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, President Joe Biden is pushing Congress to spend $100 billion fixing a problem that mostly doesn't exist: widespread lack of access to broadband internet. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that there were about 14.5 million Americans, living in an estimated 4.3 million households, that lacked access to broadband internet at the end of 2019.

Hotness In Motion

Lisa Rinna Celebrates Hump Day With Slow-Mo Bikini Run Scroll for the video, one that even came with a little motivation as Lisa told fans: "Keep moving forward." The mom of two, who has been in the news for reacting to 19-year-old daughter Amelia Hamlin dating 37-year-old Talentless founder Scott Disick, was giving a nod to being nearly 60 and looking flawless in a bikini, with the shorefront video seeing the actress in a red string bikini as she flaunted her ripped frame and got in some mid-week cardio.

Serving Up Success

When the pandemic closed her tiki bar, a talented bartender launched pop-up bar Condor's Cove Diana Condori remembers the first time she passed through the Puerta del Sol gateway at Tiwanaku, an ancient sacred site in her home country of Bolivia. Angular petroglyphs are carved into a single ten-ton volcanic rock, and through the arch, this megalith offers breathtaking views of the Andes mountains.

Royal Smash Fest

Soler's three hits, three RBIs lead Royals over Pirates 9-6 Jorge Soler had two doubles among his three hits and drove in three runs to lead Kansas City over the Pittsburgh Pirates 9-6 on Wednesday night and improve the Royals' record to a major league-best 15-8.Soler's doubles sparked three-run rallies in the first and sixth innings, the latter stretching the lead to 9-5.Kansas City won for the sixth time in seven games.Salvador Perez also had three of Kansas City's 12 hits.

Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

Thursday will be drier with increasing sunshine Hide Transcript Show Transcript SOUTHEAST, BUT UPPER 60'S NEAR 70 DOWN PORT CLINTON, BUTLER, MARSHALL AS WELL -- DOWN YOUR CLINTON -- NE DOWN NEAR CLINTON, BUTLER, MARSHALL AS WELL. 9:00, HEAVIEST WILL BE EAST OF THE VIEWING REGIO SHOWERS AT MIDNIGHT AND ON.

And this is the OPEN THREAD for night owls & early birds.


Bengaluru, April 29 : Concerned over Karnataka's Covid positivity rate, which has increased to 22 per cent during the second Covid wave, Union Parliamentary Affairs, Coal and Mines Minister Pralhad Joshi on Thursday appealed to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to convert all military hospitals including command hospitals in Karnataka into Covid care centres.

Posting his letter written to Rajnath Singh on Twitter on Thursday, Joshi said: "Have requested Raksha Mantri Shri @RajnathSingh ji to convert all armed forces hospitals in Karnataka into Covid care centres along with DRDO and other military agencies for urgently starting makeshift hospitals in the State." In the next tweet, the minister said that this will help in meeting the urgent medical requirements for Covid patients in Karnataka.

The Minister also requested all the military agencies like the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to come forward to set up makeshift Covid care centres.

In his letter dated April 20, Joshi apprised the Defence Minister that Karnataka is registering more than 35,000 cases daily which includes Bengaluru reporting more than 20,000 cases while the active number of cases in the state stand at 2.2 lakh.

"The situation is unprecedented and is further aggravated due to non availability of Intensive Care Unit (ICUs) facilities in almost all hospitals, therefore, I request you to convert all armed forces hospitals including command hospitals in Bengaluru, military hospital in Belagavi, INHS hospital in Karwar and field hospitals into Covid care centres," the minister said in his letter.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Were plaintiffs eligible for the loan forgiveness benefit, they would have the opportunity to make additional investments in their property, expand their farms, purchase equipment and supplies, and otherwise support their families and local communities, the lawsuit said. Because plaintiffs are ineligible to even apply for the program solely due to their race, they have been denied the equal protection of the law and therefore suffered harm.
The Nigerian government has launched Digital Switch-Over (DSO), a switch from analog television to digital television, in Lagos State.

The event, which held on Thursday, at Ikeja, Lagos, marked the beginning of the second phase of the rollout of DSO across the federation.

The first phase of DSO rollout held in Jos, Abuja, Ilorin, Kaduna, Enugu, and Osogbo between April 2016 and February 2018.

The DSO, which was delivered with the brand name FreeTV, signifies the transition from analog to digital television across the country.

Speaking at the Lagos DSO launch on Thursday, Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information, said it took the DSO train over three years to arrive in Lagos State.

He said the success of the project was made possible through the collaboration of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the Digiteam, Broadcast Signal Distributors, Set-Top-Box Manufacturers, the Middleware providers -Inview and Renmore -, Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria (BON),creative content producers and members of the Ministerial Task

Force on DSO, which he chairs.

The signals distributors for FreeTV across the country are the Integrated Television Services (ITS) and Pinnacle,.

I want to congratulate ITS for making the digital switch-on of Lagos State possible.

The switch-on of Lagos is unique and epochal, because it marks the first time that the DSO project would be beaming 60 choice channels to television households. This is not by accident. Lagos is Nigerians creative hub, hence it is important to harness the creative talents that abound in the state through this project.

Also, the DSO provides us with a great platform to key into the Lagos Smart City Project, which seeks to use technology to enhance service delivery in all spheres of life. The DSO is not just about high fidelity sound and picture, it is about creating jobs, especially for our teeming youth, stimulating local content, and empowering channel owners, the minister said.

Mr Mohammed said the DSO project will enhance the Lagos Smart City Project while revolutionising television viewing for the more than 5 million TV households in the state.

He added that about one million jobs to be created by the DSO project in the next three years will come from Lagos.

Though it took the digital television train over three years to arrive in Lagos State, from its last stop in Osun State, the train is now ready to move faster. The DSO train has now changed from narrow gauge to standard gauge, meaning it will move faster to cover 13 states across the country this year alone in the second phase of the DSO rollout, which begins today, the minister said.

Mr Mohammed disclosed that DSO will launch in Kano State on June 3rd; Rivers on July 8th; Yobe on July 15th; Gombe on August 12th; Imo on August 24th; Akwa Ibom on August 31st; Oyo on September 9th; Jigawa on September 23rd; Ebonyi on October 17th; Katsina on October 21st; Anambra on November 4th, and Delta on November 18th.

This may look like a daunting task. Indeed, it is. But the fact that we are here in Lagos today is a testimony to our resilience and determination to ensure the

success of the transition from analog to digital television across the country, he said.

The DSO offers viewers about 60 digital channels, including sports, music, movies, and news, it also provides Value Added Services.

ADVERTISEMENT

Mr Mohammed said the launch of DSO shows the power and the extensive reach of modern broadcasting, which makes it a veritable tool for national development.

He said there are over one million Set-Top-Boxes ready to be released to households.

A set-top box is a device that enables a television set to receive and decode digital broadcasts.

Once a TV household acquires the Set-Top-Box and pays the once-a-year access fee, which is a token, its free viewing all the way. Our FreeTV brand is not a fluke. There is no monthly subscription payment.

This enables millions of Nigerians who cannot afford to pay the rising subscription fees being charged by the Pay TV platforms to enjoy the benefit of digital television,  he said.

Also speaking at the launch, Armstrong Idachaba, the director general of the National Broadcasting Commission, said the Nigerian government made a huge financial commitment to ensure the success of the project.

He said with the launch of the DSO, a set-top box is all that Lagosians need to enjoy over 30 digital television services, subscription-free.

With this rollout in Lagos, a projected five million Lagosians are instantly going to access digital television services not only for broadcasting but with converged opportunities to Telecom and other ancillary services.

Jobs will be created for creatives and Engineers and technicians, small scale business activities are going to be stimulated around the proposition, sale of boxes, installations, content production and the like, he said.

Mr Idachaba said the NBC has licensed over 140 Digital Terrestrial Television Channels cutting across national, regional, and local channels.

We expect therefore that Lagos will quickly scale up to some 60 channels, within the next few weeks. I am sure that the Lagos state government will also now explore the information outlet on the box to reach citizens, he said.

The NBC boss said within six months, analog broadcasting will be switched off in Lagos, and all households need to purchase the set-top box to view channels.
Top political advisor calls for high-quality education system

Xinhua) 10:59, April 29, 2021

Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, visits the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Branch in east China's Shanghai, April 26, 2021. Wang made a research tour to east China's Shanghai and Zhejiang Province from Monday to Wednesday. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China's top political advisor Wang Yang has urged efforts to build a high-quality education system and boost scientific and technological strength.

Wang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, made the remarks during his research tour to east China's Shanghai and Zhejiang Province from Monday to Wednesday.

Wang urged solid implementation of the strategy for invigorating China through science and education, the strategy for developing a quality workforce, and the innovation-driven development strategy.

During the research tour, Wang visited universities, research institutions, laboratories, sci-tech platforms, high-tech companies and local communities in Shanghai and Zhejiang.

Wang called for properly handling the relations between government and market in allocating resources for innovation, and recognizing the leading role of enterprises in innovation.

Efforts should be made to cultivate more high-quality talents for basic research, and support the development of high-quality research universities, Wang said.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
The Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange (DGCX), a leading derivatives exchange, has signed a strategic agreement with Global Islamic Financial Services (GIFS) to partner on the development of Islamic derivatives and commodities.



The memorandum of understanding (MoU) also aims to promote the DGCXs Shariah gold contract, which adheres to Shariah principles for the ownership of gold.



Under the MoU, both organizations will collaborate on areas of mutual benefit, including the development of Islamic future contracts and products, and the sales and promotion of Islamic financial products.



The agreement will also provide DGGX and GIFS with opportunities to schedule visits, meetings, and workshops to facilitate consideration of new products and services across innovative, emerging areas of Islamic finance.



Les Male, CEO of DGCX, said: As the Islamic economy grows in the UAE, wider region and in a growing number of world markets, the signing of an MoU with the Global Islamic Financial Services firm represents an exciting development for the DGCX, as we seek to diversify our suite of Shariah compliant finance products and services. The MoU presents both parties with significant opportunities to enrich the global market for Islamic finance and collaborate on the development of relevant, innovative new financial products to market participants.



Mufti Ismail Desai, CEO of the Global Islamic Financial Services Firm, said: With the advancement and development of Islamic Finance in the UAE and globally, we at GIFS seek to enhance the industry through the development of unique and innovative structured financial and investment products that are Shariah Compliant.



This collaboration between GIFS and DGCX presents a unique opportunity to provide a truly unique and innovative suite of Shariah Compliant financial solutions in the region and globally. Our global clients from over 26 countries ranging from banks, asset management firms, Takafol companies and Governments including Central Banks can now access these unique shariah solutions via the DGCX platform under this momentous partnership.



Earlier this year, the DGCX announced that it was exploring opportunities to launch a new Shariah based Silver Futures Contract, owing to the growing popularity of the silver metal as well the growing demand for Islamic financial products.  TradeArabia News Service
(CNN)  US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden met with former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter at the Carters' Plains, Georgia, home on Thursday.

The visit, which lasted about an hour, marked the first time the couples had met in person since Biden became president, since the Carters did not attend Biden's inauguration in January because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The press did not go inside the private meeting, but at the end of their visit, Rosalynn Carter was seen walking outside to say goodbye to the Bidens.

The President will also participate in a drive-in car rally in Duluth while he's in Georgia, part of his travel blitz to directly sell his policy proposals to the American public.

Ahead of the meeting the White House described the visit as a quick "stop by and say hello" by the Bidens.

"The President and the first lady have a longstanding friendship with President Carter and Mrs. Carter. President Biden actually spoke to them, President Carter, the night before inauguration. As we all know, they were not able to attend. ... They had said on that call that they would try to connect after the inauguration, and since they were both in Georgia they wanted to stop by and say hello," principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One ahead of the Georgia visit.

Carter's partner in the White House, former Vice President Walter Mondale, died last week in Minneapolis, but Jean-Pierre said the visit was not planned in light of his death.

Presidents Carter and Biden have a longstanding relationship. Notably, Biden was the first senator to endorse Carter's presidential candidacy.

Biden's inauguration was the first one Carter had missed since his own swearing-in in 1977. But Biden saluted him for "his lifetime of service" in his speech.

And more recently, Biden participated in a tribute to the Carters as part of the upcoming premiere of the new documentary "Carterland," which is set to debut at the Atlanta Film Festival this weekend.

"President Carter, you've shown us what we can be as individuals, as a nation -- courageous, compassionate and humble," Biden said during the pre-taped tribute. "And Mrs. Carter, Rosalynn, as first lady and ever since, you've done much to advance and address so many of society's greatest needs."

Carter has maintained an active post-presidency, even into his 90s, with a particular focus on global health issues and helping those in need. He was the only former president who maintained a working relationship with the Trump administration, specifically on issues related to North Korea and China.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "The Bidens visit the Carters in Georgia."
LAWRENCE - Given that he finished his new book on the former president's rhetoric last summer, long before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Robin Rowland seems prescient warning of the threat of authoritarianism arising from the nationalist populism of Donald Trump.

He also correctly predicted that, in the short term at least, American institutions would not permit an anti-democratic putsch, even as he now allows that the events of Jan. 6 came closer to doing so than he expected.

In the longer term, the University of Kansas Professor of Communication Studies warns of the danger of creeping authoritarianism. With recent efforts to limit voting rights and strip power from officials who stood firm in following the law, he fears this prediction, too, is beginning to be realized.

Moreover, he concludes his new book "The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy" ------ link to: https:/ / kansaspress. ku. edu/ 978-0-7006-3196-4. html ------ (University of Kansas Press, 2021) with a warning that a more skillful politician might put Trump's resentment-fueled, hate-filled rhetorical formula to an even more effective - and deadly to democracy -- end.

Rowland is the type of old-school student of American political -- and particularly presidential -- rhetoric who recognizes the rhetorical, even oratorical, power of both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, calling them "once in a generation" communicators, a la MLK and FDR before them. He has published widely about both men.

As opposed to the uplifting "shining city on a hill" and "audacity of hope" tropes that he believes contribute to common national purpose, Rowland takes a dim view of Trump's vicious Tweets, dull speeches, never-ending rallies and divisive appeals to authoritarian personality structure, calling it "disturbing."

"There are two variants of populism," Rowland averred in a recent interview. "Progressive populism is largely policy oriented, and it focuses on real villains who have prospered when the rest of us haven't. Nationalist populism creates an emotional reaction. It isn't a rational solution to the problem. In many cases, there is no problem. Antifa was not rioting. In the last 40 years, there is exactly one far-left, murder, and there are hundreds by white supremacists. There were not dangerous caravans of immigrants. Undocumented immigrants, on average, commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.

"Almost none of what Trump said was true, but he was a master at creating fear and hatred of others.

"He drew on a sense of grievance against the elite and presented himself as the hero who would resolve all these problems by force of will. You often see this in nationalist far-right populist movements, where you have the outsider or the businessman who is himself rich -- and the leaders of nationalist movements are almost always male -- so he is a perfect manifestation of that.

"And then his style: the odd punctuation, the absence of any kind of normal syntax, the lack of organization, the bragging, the swearing. All of that proved his authenticity to his supporters. He wasn't like one of those smooth-talking others."

Rowland's book resolves a puzzle about the incredible loyalty of Trump supporters to their hero through endless gaffes and scandals, two impeachment inquiries, and what has been labeled by his own medical advisers a disastrous pandemic response. That loyalty even survived Republicans losing the House, Senate and presidency. Yet, in recent weeks Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have been forced to journey to Mar-a-Lago to seek forgiveness from Trump for comments that were insufficiently reverential toward him.

According to Rowland, "Trump's hold on his supporters is emotional, rather than ideological or policy-based. That emotional bond is tied to the way his rhetoric creates hate, draws on grievance and then resolves those strong emotions by offering himself as the strongman protector of his supporters."

"This obviously demonstrates enormous dysfunction in American politics. I mean, virtually everything he said was false."

Despite Trump's electoral defeat, the danger of nationalist populism has not faded, Rowland warns.

"Trump demonstrated the power of this, but not necessarily its maximum power," the author said. "If you had someone with genuine accomplishment ... could an Elon Musk or (Oklahoma Sen.) Tom Cotton be more effective with this message? Yes, I think they could."

###
The New York Times

The Food and Drug Administration is on the verge of announcing one of its most contentious decisions in years: the fate of an Alzheimers drug that could be the first treatment approved after nearly two decades of failed efforts to find ways to curb the debilitating disease. On Monday, the agency will rule on the drug, aducanumab, which aims to slow progression of memory and thinking problems early in the disease. If approved, it would be the first new Alzheimers medication since 2003 and the f
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Engineers at General Motors have figured out how to fix a battery problem with the Chevrolet Bolt electric hatchback that caused five of them to catch fire.

The company says they developed diagnostic software to look for anomalies in the batteries of 69,000 Bolts worldwide from the 2017 through 2019 model years. If problems are found, the company will replace faulty parts of the battery.

GM says owners of 2019 Bolts can get the software Thursday, and those who own 2017 and 2018 models can get it by the end of May.

In November GM recalled the electric vehicles after getting reports of the fires. Two people suffered smoke inhalation and a house was set ablaze.

At first the company didn't know what was causing the problem, but it determined that batteries that caught fire were near a full charge. So as a temporary fix, owners and dealers were told to make software changes to limit charging to 90% of a battery's capacity. U.S. safety regulators said the cars should be parked outdoors until the temporary fix was completed.

GM traced the fires to what it called a rare manufacturing defect in battery modules. It can cause a short in a cell, which can trigger a fire. Under the remedy, dealers can diagnose battery issues, and they'll install diagnostic software that will warn owners of any problems, spokesman Dan Flores said.

The company said it is not aware of any fires in vehicles that got the interim fix.

"We extensively validated the software to detect potential battery issues and protect our customers," Flores said.

Each Bolt has 288 battery cells, and engineers worked to analyze data from hundreds of thousands of cells, Flores said.

The recall came after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the fires last year. The agency said in documents that the fires began under the rear seat while the cars were parked and unattended.

Engineers determined the fires took place in Bolts with battery cells made at an LG Chem factory in Ochang, South Korea, from May of 2016 to May of 2019.

Some 2019 Bolts and all 2020 and 2021 versions have cells made at an LG Chem plant in Holland, Michigan, and are not included in the recall.

Once the final recall repairs are made, the Bolts' full range will be restored. Older Bolts can go about 238 miles (383 kilometers) per charge.

Explore further GM recalling nearly 69K Bolt electric cars due to fire risk

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
As the author of Red November, Spies of the Deep, and other submarine/military books, and as a former U.S. Navy Diver and submariner, I have access to inside information about the lost Indonesian submarine KRI Nanggala 402. The 1977-vintage German-built Cakra-class diesel submarine disappeared on Wednesday, April 21. Its a smaller boat, only 195 feet long by 20 feet wide, with four diesel engines that recharge a bank of batteries to provide a few days of power while submerged. The sub then needs to come shallow to snorkel by running its engines to recharge batteries and ventilate the air.

The commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces reported that the Nanggala had gone missing in waters about fifty nautical miles north of Bali. The Indonesian Navy verified that the sub requested permission to dive prior to test firing two Surface and Underwater Target (SUT) torpedoes. An hour later, the training task force commanding officer authorized the shots, and the Nanggala flooded its torpedo tubes. The Chief of Staff of the Indonesian Navy said the Nanggala fired both an unloaded practice and a live torpedo before contact was lost.

What might have happened to the Indonesian submarine that led to its demise? How is this incident similar to the loss of the Russia Kursk submarine in August 2000? The Indonesian navy relayed that the Nanggala may have had battery power issues after submerging in waters more than 2,000 feet deep, which exceeds the subs crush depth by 400 feet. Torpedo test firings can also be hazardous, as the Kursk disaster demonstrated.

The Nanggala had 53 people on board, including 49 crew members, three weapons specialists, and the subs commander, Lieutenant Colonel Heri Oktavian. The commander of 2nd Fleet Command submarine unit was the highest-ranking naval officer aboard, who was accompanied by an officer from the Weapons Materials and Electronics Service. The latter was aboard to observe the test firings of the 1967-built AEG SUT 264 torpedoes, which are 21-inch heavyweight wire-guided weapons of German design.

On April 25, three separate parts of the Nanggala were found and the entire crew of 53 was confirmed dead.

Until the evidence can be examined, we cant know why the submarine was lost, but there are similarities to the Argentinian ARA San Juan and Russian Kursk disasters. Older model diesel submarines are plagued by propulsion system malfunctions, such as battery shorts, fires, and explosions. Similar to the Kursk, the Nanggala was conducting torpedo firing exercises, so a weapons malfunction may be an even more plausible scenario.

On August 12, 2000, the bow compartment on the Russian Kursk submarine exploded, killing most of the subs crew. The Russians claimed that during a test firing of an outdated Type 65 torpedo, an unstable propellant caused the initial explosion. They suggested that the torpedo was loaded into an unclean tube moments before the scheduled firing, and the irritants ignited the fuel. Any torpedoman, whether NATO or Russian, knows that torpedoes are loaded and ready in clean tubes hours before a test-firing. Also, two civilian experts from the Dagdizel military plant were in the torpedo room monitoring the exercise and would not have allowed an unstable weapon to be mishandled.

Several high-ranking officials aboard the Kursk and the target warship, the Peter the Great, observed the exercise. The two vessels were thirty miles apart. A Type 65 torpedo at top speed would have taken thirty minutes to reach the target and would have run out of fuel before arriving -- an event not likely to attract an audience of senior military personnel. Recent evidence reveals that the Kursk was not test firing an old Type 65 weapon, but rather a newer top-secret Shkval rocket torpedo. To observe the exercise, the USS Toledo spy sub snuck in close. The tragic events that unfolded were covered up by Russian and NATO officials for almost twenty years.

Interviews with numerous experts and officials have verified that a Shkval became lodged in the tube during the firing exercise. After the firing mechanism was triggered, the Shkval was programmed to light off the rocket engine. Unable to leave the tube, the torpedo blew off the aft torpedo tube door, and two minutes later, the fire ignited the fuel in other torpedoes and caused the second, catastrophic explosion. Interviews with submariners aboard the Toledo also intimate that a scrape or near-collision with the Kursk may have inadvertently caused the Shkval to become lodged in the tube.

The secondary explosion disintegrated the forward sections of the Kursk, but the aft compartments remained intact. Twenty-three crewmen awaited a rescue that never arrived. New evidence revealed by the dive teams involved in the rescue attempt show that the Russians, while using antiquated rescue vehicles, may have accidentally flooded the aft escape trunk on the Kursk, which led to the demise of the survivors.

If a practice torpedo became lodged in the tube of the Nanggala, or the weapon experienced a hot run where the propeller spun up before leaving the tube, or there was a malfunction with the tube or firing system, this could have resulted in serious flooding that sent the sub to the bottom. Regardless of the reason, the demise of any submarine is always catastrophic, and the loss of life is devastating to the families of the crew. For those of us in the submarine community, this tragedy ignites a host of nightmares, and our prayers go out to those who are suffering during this time of mourning.

William Craig Reed is the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning book Red November and Spies of the Deep: The Untold Truth About the Most Terrifying Incident in Submarine Naval History and How Putin Used The Tragedy To Ignite a New Cold War. This book reveals shocking new evidence about what really happened to the Russian submarine Kursk, lost in August 2000, and why Presidents Putin and Clinton covered up the truth about the incident. Reed is a former U.S. Navy submariner and diver and co-founder of Us4Warriors.org, an award-winning veterans non-profit.

Image: US Navy

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The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) has started a #Fightfamine campaign to encourage everyone to use their voice to save the 34 million people on the brink of starvation worldwide. The crisis is severe right now, with famine threatening Yemen, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Madagascar and many other countries on the brink.

Cleveland-area schools could really make a difference here, using the online trivia game, FreeRice, which raises donations for WFP with every correct answer. Each school can create a team at the groups section of the FreeRice site.

The more people play FreeRice, the more donations and awareness can be raised to help the WFP fight hunger. Share your results with everyone. With famine threatening multiple nations, we need as many people involved as possible. FreeRice is a great outlet for schools to fight world hunger.

William Lambers,

Cincinnati

William Lambers partnered with the World Food Program on the 2009 book, Ending World Hunger: School Lunches for Kids around the World, and recently authored the Hunger Heroes section of FreeRice.
Samsungs big event yesterday had nothing to do with phones  for once. It was still all about the Galaxy family, though, with the company unveiling a selection of new Galaxy Book laptops.

To start with, both the Galaxy Book Pro and Pro 360 (starting at $999 and $1,199) feature vivid AMOLED displays  something Samsungs phones are known for  inside thin, light bodies. The cool part is you can easily switch between four color spectrums, including Adobe RGB and DCI-P3. Its a smart feature for anyone looking to balance vivid colors with color accuracy when editing photos or video. The clamshell and convertible (with touchscreen) laptops will each come in 13- and 15-inch sizes. Interestingly, and despite its size, the 13-inch Book Pro 360 also manages to house a 5G radio, making it Samsungs first 5G PC. Expect to see a WiFi model first, however. Samsung plans to launch the Pro family on May 14th.

The company also revealed a cheaper model, too: the Galaxy Book (from $800) features an LCD display and makes its way to the US later this year. Rounding off the collection, the Galaxy Book Odyssey is the first laptop to include NVIDIA's new RTX 3050 Ti Max-Q GPU.

 Mat Smith

Even in normal years, lots of people get sick at CES.

The Consumer Technology Association has announced plans to hold CES 2022 as a combination in-person and digital event in Las Vegas between January 5th and January 8th, with media preview days starting January 3rd. And yes, big-name brands have committed to CES  Amazon, Google, Intel, Samsung and Sony are among those expected to have a presence.

So... well see you in Las Vegas, maybe? Continue reading.

Meanwhile, Apple's crucial services business hit another all-time high.

Getty

Repeating the pattern of thriving tech companies during the pandemic, Apple says that over the past three months , it made a total of $89.6 billion in revenue  nearly $48 billion of which came as iPhone sales, up 66 percent  and set another quarterly record in the process. Even Mac sales hit a high watermark this quarter. The companys computers netted it $9.1 billion in revenue, more than during back-to-school season or holiday period. The services business, too, reached an all-time high of $16.9 billion. Continue reading.

The Galaxy S21 is selling well and it's shifting to quantum dot TV technology.

Engadget

Samsungs newest Galaxy smartphones are selling well, boosting profits 46 percent higher than the same period last year. However, despite a net profit of 7.1 trillion won (about $6.4 billion) last quarter, the company warned investors that the next few months, and perhaps the rest of the year, the global chip shortage will significantly impact business. When it comes to TVs, Samsung didn't comment on rumors of an OLED deal with LG for next year, merely stating it would continue to focus on its quantum dot displays. Continue reading.

And it installed the first 350kW fast chargers to support the Ultium platform.

Getty

GM says it has a plan to simplify the charging experience for EV owners. Under the Ultium Charge 360 project, it's working with seven charging networks (Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo , FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect) to give drivers "more seamless access" to almost 60,000 plugs across the US and Canada.

Mobile apps for GM vehicles will soon include real-time information for those stations and help drivers find them on their route. EV owners will be able to initiate and pay for charging through the app as well. Continue reading.

But wait, theres more...

Chromecast with Google TV and new Roku devices get certified for HDR10+

Engadget Deals: The Apple Watch Series 6 falls to an all-time low of $299

Google can now email you about COVID-19 travel advisory changes

Fukushima's nuclear meltdown hasn't been the environmental calamity we feared

Epic is deliberately keeping 'Fortnite' off Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Game service

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Engadget Deals: Samsung's excellent Galaxy Buds+ are $50 off right now

Watch Samsung's Galaxy Book Pro event in 10 minutes
Chahat Rana says that being in India right now means constantly asking yourself: When will I get COVID? Its like a circle thats closing in, says the Caravan magazine reporter. You hear of a distant contact, you hear your neighbor has COVID, you hear a friends parent has COVID, friends parent has died, grandparent has died, my fathers colleague has died, stuff like that. It comes closer and closer to you and you wonder how long will you remain unscathed?

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Youve probably heard the stories from India about hospitals that are overfull and simultaneously discharging body after body, about the shortages that are driving people to beg for oxygen on social media. On Thursdays episode of What Next, I talked to Rana about her reporting from COVID wards and how the government has failed to control the surge. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Mary Harris: Do you remember when it felt like India had kind of dodged a bullet when it came to the coronavirus and what that was like?

Chahat Rana: End of last year and early this year, everyone was a little more hopeful. I personally was reading news about the U.S. and seeing the spike in November, December, was really bad, and I would say, oh, its surprising that were still doing OK compared to that. Being in a country that does not have such health care resources, that level of infrastructure and development, it was surprising that we didnt reach the level of apocalyptic chaos that weve reached now. For a minute I thought maybe thats never going to happen, at least not to this extent. And the messaging around where we are in terms of the pandemic and what the government tried to tell people, especially when the two new vaccines were approved in India, was that, yeah, we have the vaccines, the numbers are low, and were going to beat this.

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But while Indias leaders were celebrating manufacturing those vaccines, they werent doing much to convince people to get vaccinated. So far, only 9 percent of Indias population has gotten a shot. Only 1.7 percent is fully vaccinated, according to the latest data. The numbers are low for a lot of different reasons. You say one of them is vaccine hesitancy, but not the kind in the U.Sits something completely new for India.

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We have a very good universal immunization program. There is faith in that system. People line up to get vaccinated. So there is faith in vaccines in general. What happened here is, at least in the earlier phases, it was front-line workers and health care workers who were getting vaccinated. And I think the government did not do enough in terms of communicating the science, the research about vaccines, to instill that faith in them, because the way regulatory approvals were granted to these two vaccines, it seemed quite rushed, only because we wanted to make in India a national vaccine as soon as possible. Thats what the government wanted. So there was a worry that scientific rigor has been compromised, just to show that we have these two made-in-India vaccines and India has done so well.

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The problem is not that we cant trust these vaccines or the science behind it or our scientists. The problem is that we did not communicate in a way that instills faith in these vaccines. A lot of health care workers in the beginning were very hesitant to get these vaccines.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a speech at Davos in January basically saying were at the end of dealing with COVID. So you can see how everything combines and a practical person might think, I can skip it. I dont need it.

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Yeah. Some people said, Ive already been infected, so why take that risk? I went through this last year and it was OK.

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People were assuming theyd developed immunity.

Which clearly is not the case. Reinfections have occurred. We dont have really good data on the rate of reinfection in India, but anecdotally we know that so many people, so many health care workers, front-line workers, just general people, have been infected and have faced somewhat even more severe symptoms this time than last time, especially if they werent vaccinated.

When did you sense something was changing, cases were picking up and it might be getting dangerous?

By the end of February and early March, there was a lot of talk about one specific state, which is Maharashtra. Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra. So there was a spike there, but the government was isolating particular states and being like, These are problem states. Theyre not doing well enough. They need to ramp up their vaccination, ramp up their testing. So it seemed like its not a national problemit was a very specific epidemic, localized, and this is the states problem, but otherwise India is doing well.

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This has been the trendto not listen to subject area experts, the scientists.  Chahat Rana

Was the government giving reasons why COVID cases might be on the rise in particular places?

Well, they were giving reasons, but those reasons didnt add up. A lot of people were asking these questions, like, Maharashtra is peaking, Punjab is peakingwhy is the rest of the country not? And the main answer that they always gave was COVID fatigue, that people are not taking precautions. But that could be applied to any state, so that didnt make sense.

There was some conversation about mutations, but nothing has been done even until now. No significant research has been done to trace that virus. There was a sort of mutant virus that was traced in some districts of Maharashtra early on, but nothing has been done to see whether these are more infectious, more dangerous. So, again, theres no conclusive evidence to suggest that this might have caused a spike in Maharashtra as compared to other places.

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India has a scientific task force on COVID-19, but that task force wasnt meeting in the early days of this surge. Do we have any reasoning for why?

Honestly Im not sure why, but what we know is that the governments priorities were different, clearly. We were focusing more on the election rallies, focusing on the Kumbh Mela, which was this big religious gathering of unmasked crowds. A minister spoke about how religion has a place above COVID-19, and if you have faith, then COVID-19 can do nothing to you. These are government officials saying all of this.

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So Im not so sure why. But this has been the trendto not listen to subject area experts, the scientists. Their advice has clearly not been taken into account from the very beginning. Scientists already knew that cases are on the rise and predicted that something like this is on the horizon. So honestly I cannot understand, I cannot fathom what stopped them from meeting and planning for this.

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You sound so frustrated with your own government.

Yeah. Yeah, I am. Im beyond frustrated. Ive given up hope. Just seeing what I see every day, reading what I read every dayI mean, they cant even acknowledge what is happening. So, thinking beyond that, if you cant even acknowledge theres a problem, what are you going to rectify it with? What are you going to do to make sure that this problem is resolved?

In Uttar Pradesh, one of the states that has been badly hit, the chief minister spoke about how theres no shortage of oxygen, theres no issue about beds, we have everything, theres nothing to worry about, cases are actually going down now. So this is the kind of narrative that they create. While on the other side, if someone does try to speak upfor example, there was this one person yesterday who tweeted about getting an oxygen cylinder for his grandfather who was really sick, and the government responded by filing an FIR against him for spreading lies and misinformation.

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The efforts have been to clamp down on real narratives from the ground and instead pretend that everythings all right.  Chahat Rana

Thats like a criminal charge?

Yeah. An FIR is a first information report. Thats what happened for spreading rumors and lies.

The government does not want to talk about what the situation is on the ground. Theyre very wary of the international coverage that India is getting, instead of trying to actually focus our energy on fixing things. The efforts have been to clamp down on real narratives from the ground and reporting, and instead pretend that everythings all right and everythings good. And the other thing theyre doing is curbing testing, asking private labs to stop testing, so that, I mean, if there are no tests, then obviously numbers are going to go down.

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Thats so reminiscent of what happened here when Trump was in charge. He was saying, well, were doing so much more testingthats why the numbers are going up.

Thats something thats been used also earlier, but now its very explicit orders to curb testing, to stop private labs from taking tests. And even if you do get tested, sometimes you get your results in a week or 10 days. Until then, you either recovered or you died.

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In the last couple of weeks, youve been to hospitals and youve been to crematoriums and youve met people who are desperate. What have you seen?

We went to this hospital in Bharuch. Its in Gujarat. Its a small town. We went to the civil hospital there, which is a district-level hospital, and there was one doctor who was taking care of a ward of 70 COVID patients, all of them on oxygen support. One doctor, one young medical student, resident doctor, along with four, five nurses. And every 10, 15 minutes, he was being called from one bed to anothersomeone was losing oxygen, someone was gasping for breath, couldnt figure out whats happening to them. There werent enough nurses, so family members were tending to patients that were inside these wards. There was not really a segregation between intensive care and nonintensive care or suspected COVID and COVID patients because all of them had the same sort of symptoms. All of them needed oxygen support. Some of them even needed ventilation. But there were no ventilators.

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You chronicled this moment where a man came into the hospital, they werent able to test him for COVID, but he clearly had COVID symptoms, and he died. And his death was marked as a cardiac arrest. That kind of reveals the entire problem, which is we dont even know how many COVID patients there are, even when theyre in a hospital.

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Yeah. Most people are dying before they get hospital care. Most people are either dying inside their homes or in an ambulance or on the side of the road in an auto rickshaw. Most of them are announced dead upon arrival. Ive seen that quite a bit in my reporting.

The data that we haveI dont even know where to begin talking about how fudged that data is. And its not even about being fudged. Its about, in this whole chaos, how are they even keeping account at all of whats happening, when there are no tests? So, yeah, we have no idea of how many people have actually died of COVID. We just know its at least hundreds in one city, not even talking about the statehundreds of unreported deaths.

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Some of the highest infection levels right now seem to be in West Bengal, and that is the state where the prime minister had been doing so much campaigning. Theres an election there thats really important to him because if his party is able to secure a foothold in that state, it unlocks a lot of potential power. And that election is still going on, which some people are saying is driving the infection rate up. Is there a chance that there would be political ramifications for Modi quite soon, given how hes dealt with the COVID crisis?

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I would hope so. I can generally sense a level of disenchantment, disillusionment, with the current regime. But there are some people who are still ready to push that narrative, like, What can the government do? Its on us. Whatll they do if theres a virus? What can Modi do? I know people who would still swear by him and his leadership. And I guess thats what this government has done well, which is image-making, perception management, creating symbols out of these people in power, these larger-than-life symbols.

In the last week, international allies have started offering all kinds of aid to India, vaccines and oxygen, and I wonder if that gives you some sense that relief may be on its way.

Yes, of course. But I feel like this is not the worst of it. The cases, everything is going to rise to an extent that the amount of support we get will not catch up. So I feel like theres sadly much more devastation to see before this gets better.

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[April 29, 2021] National Engineering Firm Announces New CEO

RALEIGH, N.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The board of directors of McKim & Creed, Inc., a 600-person engineering and geomatics firm with offices throughout the US, announced today that Steven W. Smith, PE, has been appointed the company's next Chief Executive Officer, effective May 1. John T. Lucey, Jr., PE, McKim & Creed's CEO since 2014, will continue to serve in the role of chairman of the board. Steven W. Smith, PE, has been named CEO of McKim & Creed, a 600-person, employee-owned engineering and geomatics firm. "Steve is a people-oriented leader and understands our business and what it takes to be successful. He is a civil engineer who worked his way up through the ranks of his first professional employer o become president of his firm. His background includes a strong understanding of McKim & Creed's core engineering and geomatic services combined with the experience of leading and growing an employee-owned professional services firm. Steve's passion will help McKim & Creed continue our fantastic growth trajectory while driving important initiatives such as diversity & inclusion, safety and career professional development," said Mr. Lucey in making the announcement.



"McKim & Creed is an extremely well-run business with a wonderful culture and tremendous opportunities for growth. I am happy to return to my roots in an employee-owned business, working in a people-oriented culture with a strong focus on technical excellence and client satisfaction. I am ready for new challenges and am excited about being able to positively influence the future of McKim & Creed," stated Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith began his career in the engineering industry in 1985 with Chas. H. Sells, Inc., a New York-based transportation and geomatics firm. From 1999 to 2007 he served as President/CEO of the company and orchestrated its growth into seven states. In late 2007 the business was purchased by WSP and Mr. Smith became president of WSP USA's transportation business.

In 2015 Mr. Smith relocated to the United Kingdom and joined WSP UK's 7,500-person business as head of highways & bridges. In this role, he led the integration of WSP UK and the newly acquired Parsons Brinckerhoff business into one cohesive unit. In 2017 Mr. Smith was promoted to managing director of WSP UK's Transport & Infrastructure business and its 3,000 employees. During his six-year tenure, he also served as the WSP UK Executive Committee sponsor leading safety (2016) and Diversity & Inclusion (2018 -2020) across the business. Mr. Smith has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from SUNY at Buffalo and an MBA from the University of Connecticut. About McKim & Creed: McKim & Creed is an employee-owned ENR top 148 professional service firm with 600 staff members operating throughout the U.S., including North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Texas and Pennsylvania. McKim & Creed specializes in site civil, mechanical/electrical/plumbing, water and wastewater engineering; industrial design-build; and surveying and mapping. For more information about McKim & Creed, visit www.mckimcreed.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-engineering-firm-announces-new-ceo-301280505.html SOURCE McKim & Creed

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New Delhi:

Congress leader Ahmed Patel wrote to the Central Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh demanding an impartial probe in regards to Patels alleged link with a suspected ISIS terrorist, who was recently arrested.

Patel informed about the letter to the media during a press conference on Sunday.

Patel, a close aide of Congress chief Sonia Gandhis had demanded Centres intervention in the matter. In the letter to the Centre Patel has said that national security matters cannot be made prisoner of politics ANI reported.

The minister wrote the letter to the Central home minister after Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani had alleged that the man who was arrested on the suspicion of being an ISIS terrorist had worked at a hospital which Anand Patel was a patron. Rupani had also seeked an explanation from Congress leader over the connection between Patel and the arrested.

Also read: Arrested ISIS terrorist worked in Ahmed Patel's hospital, claims Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani



The Congress leader in his letter had also written that framing terror charges must be done by investigating agencies and not by political leaders. The guilty must be brought to justice irrespective of faith or alliance, wrote Patel in his letter.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Son Jong-woo, who operated "Welcome to Video," one of the world's largest child porn sites, leaves the Seoul Detention Center at Uiwang in Gyeonggi Province, Monday, after the Seoul High Court rejected a extradition request for him. Yonhap





The operator of "Digital Prison" has revealed the identities of Son  and the judges who released him  among other criminals and suspects in some of Korea's most notorious cases. Screengrab of "Digital Prison"



By Jung Min-ho




EBRD US$ 2 million financing to one of Azerbaijans largest leather hide producers

Support for construction of new, modern production plant

Loan under Direct Financing Framework for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is extending a US$ 2 million loan to RER Modern Hides LLC, one of the largest producers and exporters of semi-finished and finished leather hides in Azerbaijan.

Building on its successful and growing operations, the company, established in 2013, is now planning to launch a modern production facility that will enable it to improve the quality of manufactured semi-finished and finished leather hides and expand the product range, with the goal of reaching a wider customer base and export markets. The EBRD loan will also be used for the purchase of new equipment.

The financing will be provided in Azerbaijani manat under the EBRD Direct Financing Framework for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, which addresses the growing business needs that are not sufficiently supported by other sources. The EBRD financing is typically used to finance acquisitions, expansion or modernisation investments, efficiency improvements and working capital. More than 1,000 companies have benefited from the framework to date.

The EBRD is an important institutional investor in Azerbaijan. To date, the Bank has invested 3.2 billion through 175 projects in the country.
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Ms Wilkinson's (left) estranged ex-husband Brian Johnston (right) has been charged with her murder after allegedly setting her on fire on April 20

A post-mortem examination has revealed a mother-of-three died from horrific burns she suffered after her US marine ex-husband allegedly doused her in petrol and set her on fire.

Brian Earl Johnston, 34, a former US military corporal, has been charged with his ex-wife Kelly Wilkinson's murder after allegedly setting fire to her at her home in Arundel on the Gold Coast on April 20.

Johnston was found nearby suffering from burn injuries and taken to the Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital - where he remains in an induced coma.

Police said they discovered three knives and duct tape in the same backyard, but the post-mortem found the items did not cause her death.

Instead, the 27-year-old died from her significant burns in the alleged murder at the home in Spikes Court last Tuesday, The Courier-Mail reported.

Johnston has also been charged with breaching a domestic violence order.

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Johnston has also been charged with breaching a domestic violence order. A post-mortem has revealed Ms Wilkinson died from horrific burns, despite police saying they found knives in the backyard of her home

Ms Wilkinson's three children, who are all aged under nine, were in the home at the time she was allegedly attacked.

The youngsters are currently staying at the home of Ms Wilkinson's sister Danielle Carroll, where the living room has been converted into a sleeping space.

Ms Carroll said her family were having 'open discussions' with the children to speak about their lives going forward.

'[We have been] letting them know they have a sense of belonging at our house, they are eternally loved and we are one big family now,' Ms Carroll told the Today show.

The sister said she felt a sense of responsibility to look after the children because Ms Wilkinson 'stood up and did what she had to do for them' when she was still alive.

Ms Wilkinson is believed to have visited police on two separate occasions before her American husband allegedly set her on fire in the backyard of her home.

The couple holding one of their children during a holiday in the US. Johnston (right) is in an induced coma under police guard at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital

Ms Wilkinson's father, Reg (centre), and family attended an evening vigil for Ms Wilkinson on Monday evening

'I think now that has been passed over to me and that is what we need to do,' Ms Carroll said.

Ms Wilkinson's three young children are now staying at her sister Danielle Carroll's home

She said she and her husband were trying their hardest to make her sister's children's comfortable in their four-bedroom home.

'We have a car that suits a seven person family  We need to find a car that will fit us all in,' they said.

'We just want to give these guys the best quality of life we can to get them through what they have been through - including our own kids.

'The kids are all working together in that way. The only thing we can do now is give them the best quality of life that we can.'

Ms Carroll said her sister was an 'amazing mum' who 'gave her everything' for her children.

'She lit up a room,' her husband added. 'No matter what she was going through she was the light of the room.'
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The Ado Ekiti Local Government Area of Ekiti State has sealed off the headquarters of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) over alleged N15 million debt.

Justifying the action, the council chairperson, Omotunde Fajuyi, told journalists that the decision to seal the office was necessitated by the companys inability to pay the backlog of debts it owed the council.

She claimed that BEDC in the state has refused to pay operations permit and mandatory tenement rates since December 2013.

Mrs Fajuyi said all efforts by the council to seek an amicable solution to the issue failed.

We invited the company to a meeting but they failed to appear. We also sent several messages to them, but there was no single response.

Since I assumed as chairman in 2019, I have seen five different letters sent to them as reminders but they have not acknowledged receipt.

Dont forget they are operating as a profit-making organisation. Every other business is paying, but BEDC will not.

Reacting to the sealing, Kayode Brown, the Public Relations Officer of BEDC Operations in Ekiti, denied that the company was owing the council.

Mr Brown said the fee being alleged is not payable in the other three mandate states of the company.

He claimed the company recently paid over N13 million to the state government as tenement rate and other charges.

We are not owing. What happened is this, we (BEDC) operate in Edo, Delta, Ondo, and Ekiti. We do not pay what the Ekiti local government is demanding on these states.

What we are guarding against now is that there are 16 local government areas in Ekiti, about 18 in Ondo, so if we succumb to them now, it means every other council area will now begin to do the same.

We have made a report to our Head office and I think they are handling it. That is the situation, he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the BEDC, located at Ajilosun area of Ado-Ekiti, was sealed with a padlock and government sticker with the inscription:This Premise is Sealed by Ado Local Government Area, boldly placed on the entrance. (NAN)
Emmy Squared to open Germantown location next month

Popular pizza restaurant will take over the former Silo space
New Delhi: Marking the occasion of International Dance Day, actress Sandeepa Dhar pours out her heart to express gratitude towards the art of music and movement that has guided her through the dark times of life.

Having carved a niche for herself as a promising actor with remarkable performances, Sandeepa Dhar is also a trained dancer which is evident via her social media posts.

Highlighting the positive impact of dance in her life, Sandeepa Dhar shared a beautiful dance video shot on a beach. Moving gracefully to the serene music in a white ensemble, Sandeepa Dhar made a post saying, "Life is so short.

We spend so much time sweating the small stuff. Worrying, complaining, wishing, wanting & waiting for something bigger & better instead of focussing on all the Simple blessings that surround us everyday. Life is so fragile & all it takes is a single moment to change everything you take for granted.

I decide to focus on whats important & be grateful !

Dance taught me to stop saying I cant do that  & instilled in me I will be able to do that , just give me time to practice, read her post.

She further added, On this #internationaldanceday I am Grateful for the music & movement which helped me Through all the darkness, pain, anxiety, fear, insecurities . Today, Now , This moment. I am Grateful for the opportunity to experience each day. Its a Privilege. #stayhomestaysafe #reels #reelsinstagram #sandeepadhar #happyinternationaldanceday".

With a scholarship in dance from Australian academy, Sandeepa has been the lead of an international Broadway musical 'The West Side Story' which has over hundred shows across the globe.

Trained in Jazz, Contemporary, Bharatnatyam amongst other dance forms, Sandeepa Dhar often gives peeks into her dance routines on her social media.

Gearing up for the release of her next 'Chattis Aur Maina' wherein she essays a dancer, Sandeepa Dhar is currently riding high on the success of her latest release 'Bisaat', which earned her critical acclaim from all quarters.
By Troy Stangarone





Last month, Hyundai Motor announced its plans to address its declining market share in China. A shift in Chinese consumer preferences toward SUVs, together with retaliation for the deployment of THAAD, resulted in a decline in the automaker's sales from 1.14 million vehicles in 2016, to less than 686,000 in 2019.



For much of the last two decades, China has been one of the world's most promising markets. Initially firms looked to China as a source for production. Since 2000, South Korean firms have set up nearly 23,500 operations in China to produce goods for sale in the global market or domestically in China.



However, the hope has always been that in time, China would become a new market of consumption  similar to the United States  that would drive the global economy.



Over the last two decades, China has grown into the world's second largest economy and largest market for new automobile sales. Its population of 1.4 billion possesses a large and growing urban middle class that has access to the disposable incomes to spend on beauty products, flat-screen TVs, smartphones and other consumer goods.



While rural China remains relatively poor, prior to the pandemic, consulting firm McKinsey estimated that the urban middle class accounts for more than 60 percent of China's GDP growth, and is increasingly important outside of the first-tier cities. Coupled with China's strong rebound from the pandemic, it is the type of market no firm can afford to ignore.



But challenges have been emerging in recent years that undermine China's strength as part of global supply chains and as a growing consumer market.



The ongoing conflict between the United States and China over trade and technology has become a factor in the ability to use China as a production platform. While the current conflict involves issues of national security related to certain technologies, such as semiconductors, it also relates to Chinese investment practices that have required firms to share their intellectual property with local partners, as well as Beijing's "Made in China 2025" plan.



Under "Made in China 2025," Beijing aims to make China self-sufficient in certain cutting-edge technologies, such as semiconductors, green energy, and green vehicles. Its goal is to develop domestic firms to be leaders in these and other areas.



This policy direction has had implications for Korean firms. As part of China's efforts to grow its own domestic firms for electric batteries, electric vehicles equipped with Samsung and LG batteries weren't eligible for government subsidies until last year. Reports indicate that Hyundai may go with a Chinese producer due to these subsidy rules.



Electric vehicles will be critical to Hyundai's longer-term strategy in China. Beijing has set a target for 40 percent of new vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2030, as well as to phase out the sale of all vehicles powered only by combustion engines by 2035.



Tesla's Model 3 was the top-selling electric vehicle in China over the last year, but a series of new Chinese models, along with domestic nationalism, are beginning to erode Tesla's position.



The New York Times recently noted that, as Chinese firms are becoming more technologically savvy and improving their quality, they are increasingly appealing to nationalism to convince Chinese consumers to switch to Chinese brands. According to JD Power, nearly half of all expected car buyers in the next six months plan on purchasing a Chinese model, up from around 20 percent in 2016. For those 35 and under, the number rises to 60 percent.



As the smartphone industry attests, quality products do not assure success in China. Samsung, along with Apple, is the world's top seller of smartphones. Samsung accounted for 23 percent of all smartphone sales globally during the first quarter of this year, and 19 percent for all of 2020. Samsung's share in China, however, is only around 1 percent.



International politics is also becoming an issue for doing business in China. Beyond China's informal sanctions over Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Australia has faced economic consequences for its call for an independent investigation into the origin of the pandemic, while Western firms are now having their logos blurred on Chinese TV, over issues related to concerns about labor practices in Xinjiang.



Whether it is the competition between great powers, domestic Chinese policy, domestic nationalism, or international politics, China is becoming an increasingly challenging market for Korean and other international firms. But it is ultimately a market that Korean firms cannot ignore. In time, some of these issues may abate, but Korean firms should expect to be less profitable for the foreseeable future as they navigate these and other challenges.





Troy Stangarone (ts@keia.org) is the senior director of congressional affairs and trade at the Korea Economic Institute.


Speakers:

Shen Changyu, head of the National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA)

He Zhimin, deputy head of the NIPA

Yu Cike, head of the copyright management division under the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee

Chairperson:

Xing Huina, deputy head of the Press Bureau of the State Council Information Office (SCIO) and SCIO spokesperson

Date:

April 25, 2021

Xing Huina:

Friends from the media, good morning. Welcome to this press conference held by the State Council Information Office (SCIO). The Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 proposes implementing the strategy of building China into a country that is strong on intellectual property rights (IPR). Today, we have invited Mr. Shen Changyu, head of the National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA), to brief you on the progress of implementing the 14th Five-Year Plan and speeding up the building of a country that is strong on IPR, and to answer your questions. We also have with us Mr. He Zhimin, deputy head of the NIPA, and Mr. Yu Cike, head of the copyright management division under the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.

Next, I will give the floor to Mr. Shen.

Shen Changyu:

Thank you. Friends from the media, good morning. First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your interest, attention and support for intellectual property work over the years.

On Nov. 30, 2020, the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee held a group study session on strengthening IPR protection in China. General Secretary Xi Jinping delivered an important speech, profoundly expounding on a series of major theoretical and practical issues concerning IPR protection, which provided fundamental guidelines for comprehensively strengthening IPR protection. Premier Li Keqiang presided over an executive meeting of the State Council to study and make plans on IPR-related work.

In 2020, under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, the intellectual property departments coordinated the epidemic controls with regular work, in accordance with the decisions and deployments of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, and successfully completed the main objectives and tasks of IPR protection and application outlined in the national intellectual property strategy and the 13th Five-Year Plan. Remarkable achievements have been made in various tasks.

First, IPR protection has been comprehensively strengthened. China's Patent Law and Copyright Law have been amended. A punitive compensation system for infringements of patents and copyrights has been established. The Opinions on Strengthening Intellectual Property Rights Protection and its action plan have been implemented. The national inspection and assessment of IPR protection have been carried out, in which 10 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) scored more than 90 points. We have investigated 31,300 trademark infringement cases nationwide and 7,100 cases of counterfeiting patents, with 841 cases being transferred to judicial organs. Over 42,000 administrative adjudication rulings on patent infringement disputes were made. A total of 1,826 infringement and piracy cases were filed for investigation and 213 cases were transferred to judicial organs. A total of 62,000 batches of import and export goods suspected of infringing certain IPR were detained, totaling 56.18 million items. More than 520,000 criminal, civil, and administrative IPR cases were received in the first instance, second instance and retrial, and over 519,000 cases were concluded. We cracked 21,000 criminal cases of IPR infringement and the production and sale of fake and shoddy products, and arrested 32,000 suspects, with the total value involved in the cases reaching 18 billion yuan. The satisfaction score of the IPR protection increased to 80.05 points.

Second, both the quantity and quality of IPR creation have increased. In the whole year, 530,000 invention patents were authorized, and the number of invention patents per 10,000 people reached 15.8, exceeding the targets outlined in the 13th Five-Year Plan. The number of PCT international patent applications submitted by Chinese applicants through the Patent Cooperation Treaty reached 69,000, ranking first in the world. In the whole year, 5.761 million trademark registrations were made, and 7,553 applications for international trademark registration under the Madrid Protocol were received from domestic applicants. The number of registered works reached 3.32 million. The number of registrations for computer software copyright was 1.72 million. In total, 765 geographical indication trademarks were approved for registration, six geographical indication protection products were recognized, and 1,052 companies were approved to use geographical indication special signs. In addition, 2,549 new varieties of agricultural plants and 441 new varieties of forestry plants were granted. In the Global Innovation Index 2020 released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), China jumped 15 slots from 2015 to 14th place.
Quoting Specialist

Location: Johannesburg, Longmeadow Company: Pical

Process quotes for customers

Ensure accurate and timely entry of quotes and delivery of quotes to customers

Ensure all prices quoted remain within established discount guidelines

Ensure all quotes are created utilizing the company's standard quote process

Converting enquiries into quotes

Acting as a facilitator for quotes that need to be amended as per customer requests

Complete quoting cycle, from enquiry, to quote, to sales order. At which point it is handed over to the Project team

When required source materials and pricing in order to complete the quote at hand

Working closely with projects, and sales, and or other teams as required or requested

Calculate and monitor job profitability

Live and breathe our purpose and values every day

Solid experience in customer service, sales and/or pricing management

Willing to learn and grow with the company

Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Sense of urgency and team focus

Ability to work in a fast-paced environment while setting priorities

Strong organizational skills

Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Excellent internal communication skills

Flexibility and desire to take on additional responsibilities

Ability to multi-task while maintaining attention to detail and deadlines

Energetic, friendly, outgoing, and proactive personality

Time management skills

Able to problem solve

Deadline driven

SA citizenship or SA permanent residency essential

We are looking for a quoting specialist (with a minimum of two years' experience in quoting) to join our dynamic and creative team.All successful candidates will be required to sign a three-month fixed term contract that can be made permanent based on the candidates performance and the meeting of minimum set targets.No chancers - if you don't have the relevant experience or see yourself being passionate about our offerings after going on our website, do not apply.For more information about Pical, our team, our values and what we do visit our website www.pical.co.za or social media platforms.Operations managerAn experienced Quoting Specialist who provides customer quotations that result in profitable sales revenue to the Company. Supports the overall Company's sales strategy through efficient and timely responses to internal and external customers. The goal is to increase efficiency, profitability and customer satisfaction. Alternative duties, assignments and projects may be afforded to the employee and the job profile may be amended from time to time as may be required by the company.We want someone who wants to grow and further their career in this exciting and fast paced industry with a winning and dynamic company. As stated above, do not apply if you have not answered yes to all of the above. Please let us know if you have any additional questions, we will be glad to answer them. Posted on 29 Apr 11:25
DENVER, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SCB Global Healthcare Services, LLC, a Denver based healthcare services holding company founded by Warren Olsen and Russ Matthews today announced that one of its portfolio companies, Gallus Medical Detox Centers, a provider of customized inpatient medical detoxification programs for alcoholism and drug addiction has completed a $4 million equity raise to fund the opening of additional clinics. Gallus Medical Detox intends to open 3 additional clinics (Las Vegas, Dallas and San Antonio) in the fall to add to the existing clinics in Scottsdale and Denver, with additional clinics planned to be open in 2022.

SCB Global Healthcare and Gallus Medical Detox were assisted in the raise by W.G. Nielsen & Co. (wgnielsen.com), an independently owned FINRA investment banking firm headquartered in Denver, CO and specializing in advising privately held businesses.

Warren Olsen, Chairman of SCB Global Healthcare Services and Executive Chairman of Gallus Medical Detox Centers said, "Over its 10 year history, Gallus Medical Detox has helped thousands of people on their road to recovery and with our expansion plans we believe we can help tens of thousands in the years to come. Our investing partners now consist of a very select group of professional investors and executives who will even better position the company for continued success in the future. We are especially happy to welcome Sopris Capital (sopriscapital.com) as an investing partner. Sopris and its Founder and CEO, Andrew Paul, have decades of experience and success in the healthcare investing space and we very much look forward to their input. We would also like to thank Wayne Nielsen, John Woodberry and their team at WG Nielsen for their assistance with the successful completion of our raise."

About SCB Global Healthcare Services, LLC (scbglobalcapital.com)

Based in Denver, Colorado, SCB Global Healthcare Services focuses on making control investments in companies that provide healthcare services for correctional facilities and in the addiction treatment area.

About Gallus Detox Centers (gallusdetox.com)

Gallus Detox Centers provide an inpatient IV therapy medical detoxification program to allow patients to safely and comfortably physically withdraw from alcohol and drugs, such as opioids, without becoming cross-addicted to substitute substances such as methadone or suboxone. Gallus Detox Centers was founded by Dr. Patrick Gallus, a board-certified emergency medicine physician with over 15 years of experience treating drug and alcohol related issues. Gallus Detox currently operates Joint Commission accredited centers in Scottsdale, AZ and Littleton, CO (a Denver suburb) that are American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) level III medically monitored inpatient detoxification centers.

For more information, please contact:

Annie Mail

[email protected]

720-501-2223

SOURCE Gallus Medical Detox Centers
CERRO GORDO COUNTY, Iowa - A 68-year-old Mason City man was arrested after being clocked going 136 miles per hour before he attempted to assault a state trooper.

Thomas Markwalter was clocked going 136 in a 65-mph zone Wednesday in a Chevy Corvette before he eventually slowed down on I-35 when a trooper pulled in front of him.

The vehicles came to a slow roll before Markwalter drove into the back of the trooper on two different occasions.

After getting out of the vehicle, authorities said Markwalter punched the trooper in the abdomen before he was forcibly taken into custody. A bottle of Bacardi was located in the suspect's vehicle, court documents state.

He's facing multiple traffic violations and charges of assault on persons in certain occupations.
The company behind the proposed five turbine Umeras Wind Farm has appealed Kildare County Councils decision to refuse planning permission.

The cased is due to be decided by An Bord Pleanala by August 17. The controversial wind farm, if approved, would be located between Monasterevin and Rathangan.

Last month, the council refused the application due to Air Corps flight path, ecological and road network concerns.

Over 170 submissions were made by local residents, politicians, Kildare Failte, the Irish Peatland Conservation Council and the Irish Aviation Authority.

Ummeras Wind Farm Ltd (Statkraft) wants to build the 169m high turbines in the townlands of Ummeras Beg, Coolatogher, Mullaghroe Lower, Ummeras More and Coolsickin/Quinsborough.

Residents raised concerns about the possible impact the facility would have on the Ballykelly distillery project, the 5m investment in the Blueway Grand Canal cycle and walkways, and the development of Umeras Peatland Park.



Location

The Monasterevin and Rathangan Wind Awareness group said; you couldnt pick a worse location for turbines in Ireland if you tried  in the middle of a new tourism hub with over 60 million being invested by the county councils of Kildare, Laois and Offaly on Blueways and Bono on Ballykelly Mills Distilleries and the Just Transition Fund and Kildare Leader on Umeras Peatlands Park.

The group is also party to the appeal and can make submissions to the planning board. It had stressed it would fight the case if an appeal was lodged.

The appeal was submitted by Statkraft on April 14.

When the Leader contacted the company after the refusal a spokesperson said: The company has noted the decision of Kildare County Council is awaiting the relevant reports. It will review same in detail and duly consider its next steps.


President Joe Biden proclaimed that 'white supremacist terrorists' are the worst threat to the homeland today, directly before asking Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by next month.

'By the first anniversary of George Floyds death,' the president said at his first joint address before Congress Wednesday night.

The act is currently stuck in the Senate with Sen. Tim Scott, tasked with rebutting Biden tonight for the Republican Party, leading negotiations for the GOP.

President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by next month, the anniversary of Floyd's death

George Floyd was murdered by officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020

The bill is a police reform package, named for Floyd, a black man who was killed by convicted police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, on May 25, 2020 - Memorial Day weekend of last year.

Floyd's death, a knee to the neck for around nine minutes, reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement and led to protests, and some rioting, around the U.S.

Last year, Scott put forward a package that got the blessing of then President Donald Trump, but Democrats called it a non-starter.

This time around, Sen. Cory Booker is negotiating on behalf of the Democrats.

'I know the Republicans have their own ideas and are engaged in productive discussions with Democrats in the Senate,' Biden said.

But he told his audience, 'Now is our opportunity to make real progress.'

'My fellow Americans, we have to come together. To rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve. To root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system. And to enact police reform in George Floyds name that passed the House already,' Biden encouraged.

He recalled meeting Floyd's daughter Gianna while campaigning for president last year.

'She's a little tyke, so I was kneeling down to talk to her. So I could look her in the eye. She said to me, "Daddy changed the world,"' Biden said. 'After the conviction of George Floyd's murderer, we can see how right she was  if we have the courage to act.'

The biggest sticking point deals with qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes if difficult for victims to sue government officials if their rights have been infringed.

Scott is proposing that the shield be lifted so police departments can be sued.

Democrats would like the threat of lawsuits be extended to individual officers, hoping that would root out bad cops.
Using the Deco Fun pen tablet for remote learning allows both students and teachers to share thoughts and ideas in real-time. With infinite brushes and colors, and patterns options, allows users to create and share tutorials and presentations effortlessly. In remote meetings, Deco Fun allows users to express important points more effectively by writing or sketching on the shared content with graphs and comments. Users can even use Deco Fun to quickly sign documents digitally. Using Deco Fun to play OSU! could follow the rhythm better and hit the rankings. The quick response helps users exceed the level of players with a mouse.

Deco Fun is compatible with Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS and supports Microsoft Office, Zoom, Skype, Adobe, Photoshop, SAI, and more. It's available in three sizes and four colors, to meet users personal preference and needs.

The Deco Fun series will be available on Amazon.com and other XP-PEN authorized partners in April.

Artist Pro 16 TP, XP-PEN partnered with the well-known Artist SHAN JIANG who has cooperated with notable world-class brands. This pen display features a perfect combination of multi-touch control and a 4K high-resolution screen, bringing a natural experience with multiple advanced technologies and will launch soon.

XP-PEN, through its collaboration with Siegel+Gale, the global leading brand consultancy, will deliver a new image to its consumers with its series of products and services, embodying its brand belief 'Dream Brave True', to be an aspirational brand in the pen tablets and pen display industry.

About XP-PEN:

XP-PEN is an internationally renowned brand specializing in the production, R&D and sales of pen tablets, pen display and stylus pens. Our team is committed to endless innovation with the goal of bringing every artist into the digital era with tools and technology to suit their individual needs.

Feel free to contact us via [email protected]

SOURCE XP-PEN
Now that campaign donation limits are legal in Oregon, the specifics that lawmakers are negotiating in private would set much higher limits than voters have approved and allow the broadest possible array of entities to continue pouring big money into state politics.

While the general public cant attend those meetings, big political donors have been allowed in, according to lawmakers and donors testimony referencing the private proposals.

Lawmakers interest in capping political money was never particularly high this session  no Democratic leaders listed it as a priority  and now appears to be withering.

Every year I feel like we get closer and so Im optimistic that maybe this is the year, said Rep. Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, chief sponsor of the proposal under negotiation, in a hearing last month, the last time such plans have been discussed in public.

In an April 22 interview, Rayfield said it was unclear if there would be enough support to pass his donor-negotiated proposal, House Bill 2680, this session. Theres optimism but a lot of skepticism, Rayfield said. He suggested advocates of limits might have to take an initiative to voters in order to get the contribution limits they want, a potentially difficult prospect in an ongoing pandemic.

Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Lake Oswego Democrat who proposed lower donation limits and a simpler system supported by good government advocates in House Bill 3343, did not respond to a request for comment on the outlook for her proposal.

At the March 30 hearing, Salinas said Oregons lack of real campaign contribution limits, coupled with a structure filled with loopholes, has allowed special interests to influence election results, forces lawmakers to spend more time fundraising and undermines the states ability to be a leader in democratic elections.

House Republican Leader Christine Drazan of Canby said she understands Oregonians desire to reduce the cost of campaigns. But courts have ruled political spending is a form of speech, she said, and the government cannot outlaw it  it can only limit the size of donations flowing into campaigns.

Since we cant do that, what are we going for right now? Drazan said in a recent interview. What are we fixing?

Rayfields proposal, House Bill 2680, is the bill most actively being discussed. In addition to contribution limits, it would do two other things: create a public donation matching program and repeal the low contribution limits Oregon voters approved in 2006.

Those limits lay dormant for years due to Oregon Supreme Court rulings that political money limits violate broad free speech guarantees in the state constitution. But in April 2020, the Oregon Supreme Court reversed that long-established legal precedent and ruled that campaign contribution limits are indeed allowed under the Oregon constitution. Then-Secretary of State Bev Clarno, a Republican, and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a Democrat, concluded the new Supreme Court ruling did not revive the voter-approved limits but they refused to explain their reasoning. Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, a Democrat newly elected to the job, also believes the Supreme Courts new ruling did not activate the 2006 voter-approved limits, according to a court filing. Through a spokesperson, Fagan refused to explain her reasoning.

Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in November to allow donation limits, but lawmakers carefully worded the initiative so that it would not revive the 2006 law.

Unlike other recent Oregon proposals to limit campaign contributions, which would only allow people or political action committees to give money to campaigns, Rayfields bill would greenlight direct political donations by corporations, limited liability companies and partnerships, unions, associations, clubs and other entities.

Sen. Jeff Golden, an Ashland Democrat and chief sponsor of another proposal to limit donations, Senate Bill 336, said the latest proposed versions of Rayfields bill outlined in unpublished amendments focus on accommodating major donor groups.

Those whove had input on the Rayfield bill are primarily campaign funders, Golden said in a recent interview. He said those groups look at any contribution limit proposal in terms of how does this fit with our organizational objectives?

Rayfield shot back that Golden should attend the private meetings on House Bill 2680 to have a factual basis for making such inaccurate assumptions 

Public employee unions, which are top campaign supporters of Democrats, want a carveout that would allow them to spend huge and potentially unlimited sums. Their representatives spoke in support of that approach in the March hearing.

Businesses and Republicans have said any contribution limits should not favor one party or interest over another. In an April 2 letter to Rayfield, the states largest business lobbying group, Oregon Business & Industry, wrote, In our current system there are two primary groups that spend big in campaigns  businesses and unions. The bill must treat those equally if we are to have a balanced system.

The business group urged Rayfield to either exclude unions from donating to potentially big-spending small donor committees or cap the amount such a committee could donate. As of late March, Rayfield had proposed leaving union donations completely unlimited.

Rayfield has now created two potential versions of House Bill 2680, one of which is favored more by labor and the other by businesses.

We get ideas from all different kinds of groups, Rayfield said during a March 30 hearing.

Good government groups have also been involved in the discussions, and Rayfield said he sought technical guidance from national groups such as the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

None of Rayfields late March or April proposals were formally published on the Legislatures website, as is typically done with proposed bill changes, although one of the late March iterations appeared online after a person submitted it as testimony. The Oregonian/OregonLive separately obtained copies of the proposals.

One critic of Rayfields approach, attorney Dan Meek who works to limit money in politics, said it would be easy for anyone to get around the individual spending limits  currently proposed by Rayfield in his primary proposal at $2,900 per primary or general election race for a statewide candidate, $2,000 for Senate candidates and $1,000 for House candidates  by forming myriad clubs with at least two members.

The proposed limits of $1,000 to $2,900 per individual donor are at least 10 times the limit Oregon voters approved for most races under the 2006 ballot measure. In Portland, voters approved per-person limits of $500 to campaigns for city offices.

Meek said the option of forming clubs could make it possible for the Oregon mega donor often cited by proponents of campaign contribution limits, billionaire Nike co-founder Phil Knight, to make huge donations in smaller increments. Knight directly gave $2.5 million to the 2018 gubernatorial campaign of Republican physician and former lawmaker Knute Buehler.

Oregon legislative caucus committees could also still accept up to $40,000 per primary or general election from a federal candidate or federal caucus political action committee under one of Rayfields latest proposals.

Rayfield and others are also proposing to create a new classification of political action committee, a small donor committee, that would allow groups with common interests such as unions, business associations, Planned Parenthood or the National Rifle Association to pool small contributions to direct to favored candidates or campaigns.

Under Rayfields latest plan, such a committee would have the ability to dump huge sums into elections: $50,000 to any state candidates campaign or $50 multiplied by the number of people who contributed to the small donor committee or were contributing members of any group that gave to the committee, whichever figure is greater. For example, the 42,000-member Oregon Education Association teachers union could theoretically give more than $2 million, depending upon how many members donate any amount to the group.

In addition, staffers of membership organizations such as business associations or unions that have small donor committees could donate unlimited amounts of time to political campaigns under Rayfields proposal, potentially making it legal for the groups to have their employees run or work on candidates campaigns.

Meek said its also concerning that Rayfields latest proposals appear to allow local governments to opt out of state donation limits, which could lead to huge amounts of money flowing from local campaigns to state political action committees. Rayfield, who is a lawyer, said his intent was to allow local governments to adopt lower limits.

Golden, the Ashland senator, said he hasnt given up hope lawmakers will pass meaningful contribution limits this session. If they dont, he said, Meek and other advocates of campaign finance reforms could take the issue to voters as they did in 2006. He and others have proved their credibility in terms of passing pretty strong measures in Portland and Multnomah County, Golden said.

If lawmakers dont pass contribution limits this year, the upshot could be a new round of record-setting spending in 2022 as Oregonians choose their next governor and select state representatives and senators. Salinas, the representative from Lake Oswego, said at the March hearing on her and Rayfields bills that Oregonians are frustrated by money in politics and rightfully so.

For a state thats built a reputation on expanding access to democracy through innovative methods like as vote-by-mail and automatic registration, its out of line with our values to allow a small handful of wealthy special interests to drown out the voices of the masses and I can see why Oregonians want the system to change, Salinas said. With the pressure to raise money, it often feels like my attention gets pulled away from my No. 1 focus, which is improving the lives of others.

-- Hillary Borrud; hborrud@oregonian.com; @hborrud

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Oregon Insurance Commissioner Andrew Stolfi and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum will host a statewide virtual wildfire insurance town hall on Thursday, April 29, at noon.

Cleanup is progressing, and the arrival of spring means construction will soon be ramping up for people affected by the Labor Day wildfires.

Stolfi and Rosenblum will be joined by Oregon State University Fire Program Manager Carrie Berger and representatives from the Division of Financial Regulation to discuss insurance claims during the rebuilding process, how to avoid construction scams, and tips to prepare for the 2021 wildfire season.

Click HERE to watch the live Zoom video.

Submit questions for the panel HERE.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Older people with vision loss are significantly more likely to suffer mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to dementia, according to a new study published in the journal Ageing Clinical and Experimental Research.

The research by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) examined World Health Organisation data on more than 32,000 people and found that people with loss in both near and far vision were 1.7 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment.

People with impairment of their near vision were 1.3 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment than someone with no vision impairment.

However, people who reported only loss of their far vision did not appear to have an increased risk.

Dr. Lee Smith, Reader in Physical Activity and Public Health at ARU, said: "Our research shows for the first time that vision impairment increases the chances of having mild cognitive impairment. Although not everyone with mild cognitive impairment will go on to develop it, there is a likelihood of progression to dementia, which is one of the major causes of disability and dependency in the older population."

Co-author Shahina Pardhan, Director of the Vision and Eye Research Institute at ARU, said: "Research now needs to focus on whether intervention to improve quality of vision can reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment, and ultimately dementia. More work needs to be done to examine any possible causation, and what the reasons might be behind it."

The researchers examined population data from China, India, Russia, South Africa, Ghana and Mexico from the WHO's Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE). The overall prevalence of mild cognitive impairment was 15.3% in the study sample of 32,715 people, while around 44% of the total number of people surveyed had vision impairment.

Explore further Vision impairment is associated with mortality

More information: Lee Smith et al, The association between objective vision impairment and mild cognitive impairment among older adults in low- and middle-income countries, Aging Clinical and Experimental Research (2021). Lee Smith et al, The association between objective vision impairment and mild cognitive impairment among older adults in low- and middle-income countries,(2021). DOI: 10.1007/s40520-021-01814-1
Thal Ltd plans bag plant in Hub in Balochistan

29 April 2021

Thal Ltd, a subsidiary of House of Habib and paper bag manufacturer to a range of industries including Pakistan's cement companies, is setting up a plant to manufacture polypropylene woven bags in Hub with an investment of PKR1.7bn (US$11m). The state-of-the-art plant that has the capacity to produce 90m bags annually has been procured from Windmoller & Holscher of Germany.

Expressing his views on this new investment, CEO of Thal PPD, Syed Umair Ahmed, said, "Thal Ltd also has a paper bag production with the capacity of 250m paper bags per annum and with a production capacity of 90m WPP bags per annum. We will be able to cater to not only the local market but also grow our export business," he added.

Salman Burney, vice chairman of House of Habib, recently performed the groundbreaking for the plant and it is expected that the unit will be commercially operational by the end of February 2022, the company said in a statement.









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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has a new role - TV show host. Lam Yik/Reuters

A Hong Kong broadcaster is airing a "patriotic" show featuring chief executive Carrie Lam.

The channel said it would air "Get to Know the Election Committee Subsectors" four times a day.

The government-owned broadcaster received backlash after citizens called the show "propaganda."

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Hong Kong broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) has come out in defense of its decision to air a daily "patriotic' television show hosted by the island's chief executive Carrie Lam four times a day.

Lam is a divisive and controversial political figure in Hong Kong. A skilled bureaucrat selected by the Chinese government, her proposal for a new national security law to allow extraditions to mainland China sparked a "summer of discontent" in 2019 as pro-democracy protests carried on for months.

Lam is seen as a mouthpiece for Chinese President Xi Jinping by pro-democracy opposition leaders. Last year, Lam was among more than a dozen officials from Hong Kong and Beijing who were sanctioned by the US government for their support of the national security law.

Lam's presence on RTHK and her new role as a broadcast personality follows Beijing's landmark shift in Hong Kong's legislation last month when it announced that it would be installing "patriots" to govern Hong Kong.

This move by the Chinese Communist Party sparked condemnation from the international community - as it makes it virtually impossible for pro-democracy candidates to be elected to the city's legislative council.

A spokesman for the government-owned broadcaster told the Hong Kong Free Press Lam's daily program would not be reviewed by the channel's management, nor would the number of screenings be scaled back.

"The Charter of Radio Television Hong Kong requires that Radio Television Hong Kong as a public service broadcaster has to engender a sense of citizenship and national identity through programs that contribute to the understanding of our community and nation," an RTHK spokesman told the HKFP.

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"The program 'Get to Know the Election Committee Subsectors' is in line with the Charter," the spokesman added.

According to the Washington Post, an online forum popular amongst young Hong Kongers saw a flood of posts asking if Lam had got a "part-time job," with one commenter remarking that George Orwell's "1984" had come true.

Lam defended the program in a video posted on her Facebook page.

"The restructuring of the election committee is one of the core elements among changes made to the electoral system," Lam said. "I will invite guests from these subsectors to discuss how the restructured subsectors can be broadly representative and achieve balanced participation. You're welcome to tune in."

In March, RTHK replaced its top executive with a Chinese civil servant with no television experience. The move prompted a wave of departures by longtime employees from the network.

Voice of America News also spoke to an anonymous source within RTHK, which called the current slate of programming "propaganda," as "political correctness" has now become the public broadcaster's sole consideration.

"Propaganda is propaganda, and reporting is reporting," the source said. "But then I'd say the boundaries would be blurrier and blurrier, and to the end of that road, it could end up becoming another CCTV (China Central Television Network)."

Read the original article on Insider
After another dry winter that threatens to worsen water shortages across California, state officials have accused a water bottling company of diverting too much water from forests in the San Bernardino area.

The officials issued a draft cease-and-desist letter to the company last week  the latest development in a battle that has dragged on for years.

The company, BlueTriton, which was known as Nestle Waters North America until it changed its name this month after being acquired by a private equity company, includes the bottled-water brands Poland Spring and Arrowhead.

In the letter, sent April 23, the State Water Resources Control Board said that Nestle has 20 days from receipt of this notice to respond. The process could lead to a formal cease-and-desist order, and possible monetary penalties, if it is formally approved by the board.

During the states historic drought, the State Water Boards Division of Water Rights received multiple complaints alleging that Nestles continual water diversions depleted Strawberry Creek, the board said in a statement, referring to a waterway that runs through the San Bernardino area, east of Los Angeles.

It said the water diversion had led to reduced downstream drinking water supply and impacts on sensitive environmental resources.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for BlueTriton said that the company was disappointed with the move and that it would pursue legal options to correct state officials misinterpretation of California law.

For more than 125 years, BlueTriton Brands and its predecessors have sustainably collected water from Arrowhead Springs in Strawberry Canyon, the company said. We take pride in being good stewards of the environment, while providing an excellent product loved by Californians.

Strawberry Creek is not the only place in California where the company collects water, but it has become a focal point for local organizations, residents and environmentalists  especially as California struggles with water shortages, deepening droughts and devastating wildfires.

Should we really be pulling water out of a national forest to stick in plastic bottles to sell at a significant markup? said Michael OHeaney, the executive director of Story of Stuff, an environmental advocacy group based in Berkeley, California, that has filed complaints against Nestle. Its a poor use of our resources.

The U.S. Forest Service charges the company an annual fee of $2,100 to maintain its infrastructure in the Strawberry Creek area, according to The Desert Sun, which investigated Nestles activities in California in 2015 and reported that the Forest Service had been allowing the company to take water from the forest using a permit that had a 1988 expiration date.

Battles over the water diversion carried out by Nestle  and now BlueTriton  have been brewing for years. State officials released a report on Nestles water collection in 2017, and a revised report last week. Both said the company was diverting more water than had been permitted, which the company denies.

This investigation has been a long time coming, and its taken several years due to its complexity, from both a technical and a legal standpoint, said Robert Cervantes, a supervising engineer with the states water board.

We just want BlueTriton to comply with California law, he said, especially now that were heading into another drought.

The water board officials argue that BlueTriton is allowed to collect only about 2.4 million gallons of surface water in the area annually. That restriction applies to water in creeks and streams, as well as the springs that contribute to creeks and streams  not to water that percolates underground.

The company said it collected 59 million gallons from the water system last year, of which about 40 million gallons of overflow were returned to the area.

Nestle, the worlds largest food company, has been involved in similar battles over water collection in other states, including Florida and Michigan.

Critics of the company say that its efforts to drain natural water supplies for bottling have been wasteful, and that the bottles themselves contribute to plastic waste. Since at least last year, the company has been considering selling most of its bottled water operations in the United States and Canada. The sale and renaming of Nestle Waters North America is in line with that push.

The water being siphoned from California streams depletes the natural environment in an area that was already prone to water shortages and wildfires, OHeaney said. The draft of the cease-and-desist letter sent to BlueTriton last week was a significant step, he said, even though it cannot yet be formally enforced.

I hope its a wake-up call for them, he said, that the business they just bought is not being seen in a positive light by the communities in which it operates.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Apr. 28WASHINGTON  When President Joe Biden addresses House and Senate members at the Capitol on Wednesday, marking his first 100 days in office, it will be a far cry from the usual address presidents give to a joint session of Congress near the start of each year.

Presidents typically address a crowd of nearly 1,000 in the House chamber  100 senators, 435 House members and six nonvoting delegates, plus an array of government officials and guests  in January or February, a chance to tout an administration's accomplishments and lay out its plans and aspirations for the year ahead.

Wednesday's event, meanwhile, will have room for just 200 attendees as a result of COVID-19 precautions, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said April 14. Party leaders were charged with issuing invitations as they saw fit. The address is also taking place during a week when the House is in recess and many of its members are in their home districts.

Of the four senators who represent Washington and Idaho, only Idaho GOP Sen. Jim Risch will attend the address, according to his office. Spokespeople for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Spokane, Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside and North Idaho's Russ Fulcher said the Inland Northwest Republicans will not attend.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., will watch the address remotely despite being part of party leadership. While lawmakers normally invite guests to the in-person event, Murray will tune in with four virtual "guests," including Rodney Cawston, chairman of the C onfederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation's Business Council.

Fulcher and nine other House Republicans wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California on April 19, asking the Democratic leader to reschedule Biden's address to a day when the House is in session and all members of Congress are allowed to attend.

"We understand the need to prioritize the safety of Members," the Republicans wrote, "and believe strongly that with the right precautions and social distancing measures a space designed to accommodate almost 1,000 individuals can operate at about 50 percent capacity to safely accommodate all members of the House and Senate who attend."

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Newhouse spokeswoman Amanda Fitzmorris said the central Washington Republican was not invited but would tune in remotely.

"It's odd that President Biden is choosing to restrict access to an event aimed at reaching across the aisle," Newhouse said in a statement. "It's clearly not COVID-related as many members are vaccinated and are already interacting with one another during votes. I look forward to hearing what the President says and whether he will attempt to bridge the partisan divide that's been growing over the first 100 days of his term."

Biden also is breaking with tradition by addressing Congress more than three months into his term. While a commander-in-chief traditionally gives a State of the Union address only after his first year in office, former President Donald Trump spoke before a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28, 2017, just over a month after he took office, and former President Barack Obama addressed lawmakers Feb. 24, 2009.

The timing of the speech aims to highlight the first 100 days of Biden's presidency, during which the White House and congressional Democrats have focused on passing a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and economic stimulus package Congress passed in March with only Democratic votes. After offering a message of unity at his inauguration, Biden's willingness to eschew bipartisan negotiations has frustrated Republicans.

"I'm disappointed President Biden has failed to fulfill his promise of working in a bipartisan manner," Newhouse said. "I hope, for the sake of our country, that he will come to the table, embrace real solutions, and negotiate in good faith as we work to solve the many issues facing the United States."

The president plans to use Wednesday's prime-time speech to sell the public on an ambitious set of legislative goals he has laid out in his first 100 days. His legislative priorities are grouped into two clusters, the roughly $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan he unveiled March 31 and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan he will introduce Wednesday night.

"Combating the COVID pandemic was priority one for the Biden administration," Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a statement. "Their laser focus helped secure more resources to fight the pandemic with vaccines and fight the high unemployment, economic downturn with stimulus checks and benefits for those who lost their jobs."

"Now President Biden is bringing the same laser focus to the infrastructure package, which will put Americans back to work, grow our economy for the future, and secure America's competitiveness."

A spokeswoman for Sen. Mike Crapo, Melanie Lawhorn, said the Idaho Republican objects to the Biden administration "turning previous broadly bipartisan pandemic relief into a partisan wish-list spending spree rather than addressing the targeted needs of Americans most in need, as well as proposals to raise taxes in the middle of an economic crisis."

Biden's new proposal will include making preschool and community college free, helping low- and middle-income families with child care costs, creating a national paid family and medical leave program, and expand food assistance to low-income families, according to a document the White House shared with reporters Tuesday.

The White House plan would also extend several tax cuts as part of the stimulus bill passed in March, including an expanded Child Tax Credit that will send most parents monthly payments of $250 to $300 per child. Those payments are set to begin in July.

In the remainder of his term, Biden and his congressional allies will have to choose between two options: negotiating bipartisan deals with Republicans or using a process known as budget reconciliation to sidestep the 60-vote majority needed to pass most legislation in the Senate and advance their priorities with only Democratic votes.

In a call with reporters Tuesday, Murray signaled her party was ready to act alone to enact its priorities unless Republicans get on board with Biden's agenda, which GOP lawmakers decry as too expensive.

"We will work with our Republican counterparts if they will work with us to move this forward," Murray said. "But at the end of the day, if they cannot or will not work in a way that ensures that we really address the needs of the American people, we will be forced to look for a way to do this as Democrats."

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Orion Donovan-Smith's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  As many as one-third of Mexicans may have been exposed to the coronavirus by the end of 2020, according to a study of random blood samples taken between February and December.

Antibodies were found in 33.5% of samples from blood banks and medical laboratory tests in Mexico unrelated to COVID-19. The levels varied according to regions; the highest exposure rate was in the northwest, from Baja California to Chihuahua, at 40.7%. The lowest was in western states, at 26.6%. In general, areas along the U.S. border had higher rates.

Victor Borja of the Mexican Social Security Institute said the rate may have risen by as much as 10 percentage points on average nationwide following the steep upsurge in cases in January. But even if the exposure rate is currently as much as 43.5 %, Borja stressed the country was still far from herd immunity.

Authorities have suggested that with almost 350,000 virus-related deaths, and about 40 million Mexicans exposed to the virus, the mortality rate could be just under 1 percent.

Moreover, the study suggested about 86% of those infected had developed effective antibodies, but that around 14% hadn't and could be re-infected.

Mexican authorities also announced they detected three cases of the South African variant on Tuesday. The U.K. and Brazilian variants have already been detected in the country, but Mexico does relatively little variant testing.

The country has received about 22.6 million vaccine doses and given almost 17 million shots, covering over 12 million people, some of whom have gotten two doses. That remains a small amount for a country of 126 million. Mexico has vaccinated many of its senior citizens and plans to begin vaccinating people between the ages of 50 and 59 in May.

Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell said Mexico will soon start receiving Pfizer vaccines from U.S. plants, rather than from plants in Europe. That will make the logistics of importing the shots easier.

There have been over 216,000 test-confirmed deaths related to COVID-19, but Mexico does so little testing that many people die without having been tested.

A preliminary government review of death certificates suggested excess deaths attributable to COVID-19 reached 316,344 by the start of March. There have been 29,395 test-confirmed deaths since then, for a total of 346,110.
If you have a weakened immune system, the COVID-19 vaccines may have a reduced effectiveness for you. Experts say it's still very important for you and those around you to get vaccinated, but it may be necessary for those with compromised immune systems to take extra precautions after vaccination.

"We are aware that this population may not have the same beneficial response to vaccines that we see in others who are not immunosuppressed," Dr. Linda Finn, the director of hematology and bone marrow transplant at Ochsner Health, told ABC News. "We do still recommend the vaccines, any benefit they can borrow from it, but still follow other precautions very closely."

Although clinical trials found vaccines were highly effective in preventing symptomatic or severe COVID-19 infections, these trials largely excluded people who were immunocompromised.

That means these estimates may not apply to people with weakened immune systems, such as people with cancer or HIV.

MORE: Why COVID-19 cases haven't seen sharp drop despite spike in vaccinations

It can also include people who are taking medications that weaken the immune system to manage medical conditions, like those with autoimmune conditions or who have had transplants. Approximately 3% of the U.S. population is immunocompromised, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions National Health Interview Survey.

Recent studies suggest that some of the conditions or treatments for the conditions interfere with the body's ability to create antibodies that help protect against COVID-19 after vaccination.

"It's been disheartening, obviously, for the patients to begin to realize, 'Hmm, this number of 95% effective that you hear about in the mRNA vaccine trials does not necessarily apply to me,'" Dr. Ghady Haidar, a transplant infectious disease physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told ABC News.

PHOTO: A medical worker administer the Jansen (Johnson and Johnson) Covid-19 vaccine to the public at a FEMA run mobile Covid-19 Vaccination clinic at Biddeford High School in Bidderford, Maine on April 26, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Normally a fully vaccinated person will produce COVID-19 antibodies, and those antibodies should show up on an antibody test. But some fully vaccinated people who are immunocompromised have been surprised to learn they're not producing enough antibodies to test positive on an antibody test.

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In one study, just over half of patients with blood, bone marrow, and lymph node cancer had antibodies; in another, less than 40% of patients with the blood cancer CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) had an antibody response.

It is not yet known why this may be happening. The reduced antibody response may be due to these patients' underlying diseases, the medications they are taking, or both. Additional studies are needed to figure this out.

Experts think the vaccine should provide some protection for those who are immunocompromised, but they are still working to determine how much.

Researchers noted that antibody monitoring only measures one way the body responds to infections and there are other ways your immune system might be protecting you that wouldn't show up on an antibody test, including T-cell response, which is more challenging to test for than antibodies.

"It's definitely possible that there was still immunity built up even if the test didn't acknowledge the presence of antibodies," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

"We need to develop protocols for those who are antibody negative [after vaccination]," said Dr. Mounzer Agha, a hematologist at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the lead author of the first study mentioned above. "The reason for testing right now would be to tell patients that they may still be vulnerable and should continue to exercise caution."

MORE: HIV testing, treatment decreases during COVID-19 pandemic

"No matter what the antibody results are, that should be the message: Continue living life safely, masking and social distancing," Haidar added.

Experts agreed that a patient's immunocompromised status is not a reason to not get a COVID-19 vaccine and that it is not only safe to do so, but very important, as they could be more at risk of becoming severely ill from COVID.

"Unless there is an absolute contraindication, which may be some allergy guidelines to avoid reactions to prior vaccines, I haven't had a patient yet that I have not advised to get the vaccine if they can," said Finn.

People with weakened immune systems will also be protected if everyone in their surrounding community is fully vaccinated, which is a concept known as "herd immunity."

Finn is recommending people get vaccinated with "what is available in their area." There is no data that favors one type or brand of vaccination over another for people with these conditions.

Experts agree that more data is needed to understand when to give vaccines to people undergoing chemotherapy, and those taking immunosuppressive medications. For now, the CDC recommends that patients starting immunosuppressive therapies get vaccinated at least two weeks prior.

Finn said it's a bit more nuanced and depends on your personal treatment plan. While she generally agrees with following the CDC's recommendations, this isn't always possible, as some patients need tighter treatment schedules with more individualized discussions.

Patients should talk to their doctors about what to do with their immunosuppressive medications and the timing of vaccination, as it may not be safe to space out, pause, or stop their medications.

MORE: As debate swirls, colleges weigh whether to mandate COVID-19 vaccines

Even after vaccination, people who are immunocompromised should continue to take extra precautions to avoid getting COVID-19.

"I think this patient population should expect to be following pretty broad COVID precaution guidelines for a long time," said Finn.

Some people may not know if they have a condition or take a medication that may impact the effectiveness of the vaccine. This is another reason continuing to mitigate risk with masking in crowded or indoor locations is recommended.

Haidar notes that immunocompromised people can also "encourage others around them to live their lives safely, including getting vaccinated," a step which benefits the individual and those around them.

Amanda Benarroch, M.D., is a psychiatry resident at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Olivia Davies is a fourth-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin who will be starting her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital this summer. Karine Tawagi, M.D., is a hematology and oncology fellow at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. All three are contributors to the ABC News Medical Unit.

COVID-19 vaccines may not offer complete protection for people with compromised immune systems originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan participated in the narrow-format meeting of the Eurasian Economic Unions intergovernmental council in the Russian city of Kazan.

Several items on the agenda of the EEU Inter-Governmental Council session were discussed, the Prime Ministers Office said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
An Australian surfer has made waves by calling out prize money disparities in her sport.

Longboard rider Lucy Small has called for female competitors to be recognised as legitimate athletes and says she's 'so sick' of inequalities in the traditionally male-dominated world of surfing.

Small took out the open women's title at the Curly MalJam Pro on Sydney's northern beaches last Saturday.

She was shocked to learn afterwards the open men's champion Declan Wyton walked away with $4,000, more than double the $1,500 winners cheque she received.

She made her feelings known on the winner's podium in an acceptance speech where she took a brutal swipe at tournament organisers and sponsors.

Lucy Small in action at the Curly Mal Jam Pro in Sydney on Saturday. She took out the women's open title but received $2,500 less than the men's winner

Posted by Lucy Small on Saturday, April 24, 2021

'I will just point out  thank you so much to the sponsors for all the money they put into the event, but I would say that it is a bittersweet victory knowing that our surfing is worth less than half of the men's prizes,' Small said.

A few groans were heard in the crowd while other spectators clapped and urged Small on.

'It costs the same amount to fly here, accommodation costs the same, yet our surfing is worth half as much,' Small continued.

'So maybe we could think about that for next time.'

Lucy Small caused a stir at her winners' acceptance speech (pictured) by slamming tournament organisers and sponsors

Organisers insisted they've done nothing wrong and argued the issue would been resolved had it been raised earlier.

'She should have come and seen me. It was an easy thing that could have been fixed,' club president Tim Reilly told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Secretary Phil Nicol added: 'Did we do anything illegal? No. This is a moral issue ... we've done nothing illegal.'

Mr Nicol said prize money would be equal across all categories in the future, but challenged Small's complaint.

'We asked the question why aren't the over 50 men jumping up and down because they didn't get the same money as the men? That's ageism, the ageism card could have been pulled out,' he said.

Up until 2018, female surfers received up to 40 per cent less than their male counterparts before World Surf League overhauled the rules and awarded equal prize money at every WSL-controlled event.

The Curly Mal Jam Pro is not sanctioned by the WSL but have since vowed to equally distribute the prize money across its four categories at future events.

Founded in 2011, the event describes itself as Australian longboarding's premier Sydney event with 'a huge cash prize purse.'

Long board rider Lucy Small (pictured) has called for female competitors to be recognised as legitimate athletes

Small's speech sparked a rowdy round of applause and was well received when she later shared the video to her social media platforms.

'Sometimes you just gotta be prepared to be disliked in order to get what you want,' she wrote on Facebook.

'Today I managed to scrap into some waves to win the final of the open women's at Curly Mal Jam.

'The women's division prize money was less than half than the prize money of the men's. Someone then made the mistake of giving me a mic. Honestly, just be better.'

She has since thanked friends for the overwhelming flood of support and urged surfing fans to express their views to event organisers.

Lucy Small (pictured celebrating her Curly Mal Jam Pro title win) says she had no idea about the disparity in prize money

'We just have to keep going, bit by bit by bit, until we eventually create meaningful change,' Small posted on Wednesday.

'We want equal recognition of women as legitimate athletes.'

Small claims she had no idea about the difference in the prize money prior to the tournament.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted tournament organisers Curl Curl Longboarders Club and Small for comment.

Recently released documentary Girls Can't Surf now screening in cinemas looks back on the struggles the pioneers of Australian women's surfing endured in the 1980s and 1990s and their long and hard fought battle to achieve equality and change surfing forever.
(Alliance News) - Computacenter PLC on Thursday said it has seen "strong demand" in the UK and Germany, but cautioned on currency headwinds due to dollar weakness.

Shares in the company were 0.3% lower at 2,632.00 pence each in London Thursday morning.

The Hatfield, England-based computer services provider said it was "pleased" by its profit growth in the first quarter ended March 31.

"There has been a strong demand across the business particularly for our Professional Services in Germany and the UK, and significant revenue growth in Technology Sourcing in the UK. The cost base reductions we experienced since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic have been maintained through the quarter," Computacenter said.

The company added that the combined performance of its existing US business and recently-acquired unit Pivot was ahead of expectations. However, dollar weakness is an "unavoidable headwind". At current levels, Computacenter expects annual to profit to be hit by GBP4 million as a result.

"Due to the strong organic profit performance we expect 2021 to be a year of good progress in our reported profits," the company said.

"Obviously, we are living through unpredictable times and much work remains to be done, but our good performance in Q1 and our internal forecast for the rest of the year gives us a great deal of confidence in our likely outcome."

By Eric Cunha; ericcunha@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Melbourne, April 29 : Australia leg-spinner Adam Zampa, who returned home from the Indian Premier League (IPL), and had termed the IPL bio-bubble 'the most vulnerable' clarified on Thursday that he didn't mean the Covid-19 virus would enter the bubble.

In a statement issued through his franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), Zampa said, "My comments about the vulnerability of the IPL bubble had nothing to do with feeling like the virus would enter the bubble at any stage.

"The BCCI and RCB had many precautions to make us feel safe. I believe the tournament is in great hands and will definitely see the finish line," he added in the statement.

Zampa had earlier told the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) that the IPL bio-bubble was probably the most vulnerable among the bubbles he had seen.

"We've been in a few (bubbles) now, and I feel like this is probably the most vulnerable," he had told SMH.

Zampa, who confirmed that he had reached Melbourne safely thanked the RCB management for arranging for their departure quickly.

"Thanks to RCB management for the way they dealt with the situation. As soon as we made the choice that we felt the right thing to do was to come home, they were fully supportive and did everything they could to help. Their understanding of the situation made the process a lot easier," he said.

"I am understanding the velocity of the situation in India and my thoughts go out to the whole country. It was a personal choice to leave for several reasons."

Latest updates on IPL 2021
Philippines' Duterte refuses to stop South China Sea patrols The Philippines has boosted "sovereignty patrols" involving the navy and coast guard in the disputed Spratly Islands and other parts of the South China Sea

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he will not withdraw navy and coast guard boats patrolling the disputed South China Sea, insisting the country's sovereignty over the waters is not negotiable.

Tensions over the sea -- which China claims almost entirely -- have spiked as Beijing refuses to pull out vessels from the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone and Manila steps up maritime patrols.

Duterte is under growing domestic pressure to take a harder line, but has been reluctant to confront China over the issue as he fosters closer ties with the economic giant.

He said late Wednesday that while the Philippines is indebted to its "good friend" China for many things, including free Covid-19 vaccines, his country's claims to the waterway "cannot be bargainable".

"I'll tell China, we do not want trouble, we do not want war. But if you tell us to leave -- no," Duterte said.

"There are things which are not really subject to a compromise, such as us pulling back. It's difficult. I hope they understand, but I have the interest of my country also to protect."

Duterte's remarks came after the country's defence department said "China has no business telling the Philippines what we can and cannot do with our own waters".

The Philippine coast guard is conducting drills near Thitu Island and Scarborough Shoal, as well as the Batanes islands in the north and the southern and eastern parts of the country.

Scarborough -- one of the region's richest fishing grounds -- has long been a flashpoint between Manila and Beijing.

In response to the exercises, China's foreign ministry said Monday the Philippines should "stop actions complicating the situation and escalating disputes".

In recent weeks, Manila has boosted "sovereignty patrols" involving the navy, coast guard and fisheries in the Spratly Islands -- an archipelago contested by several countries.

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Beijing has ignored a 2016 international tribunal decision that declared its historical claim over most of the South China Sea to be without basis.

Once-frosty ties between Manila and Beijing have warmed under Duterte, who set aside the ruling in exchange for promises of trade and investment -- which critics say have not materialised.

Delays in Covid-19 vaccine deliveries has left the Philippines heavily reliant on the CoronaVac jab developed by China's Sinovac.

Around 3.5 million doses of CoronaVac have been sent to the Southeast Asian country so far, including one million donated doses.

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A vial with the AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine in Berlin, Germany, on March 16, 2021. (Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)

UK Death Toll From Blood Clots After AstraZeneca Jab Rises to 41

The UK medicines regulator has said that 41 people have died after developing blood clots following vaccination with the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, an increase of nine deaths from last weeks figures.

This was revealed by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on Thursday in a weekly update on the side effects of CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus vaccines, which is based on data up to April 21.

The new data was published after UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine earlier on Thursday, in a public show of support for the jab.

Im feeling great now Ive had my first jab. Massive thanks to JVT for administering my Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccination & doing so much for us all through the pandemic. When I got the call, I got the jab. pic.twitter.com/nmDCwCg5qX  Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) April 29, 2021

A total of 209 blood clot incidents have now been reported following vaccination with AstraZenecas shot, a rise of 41 from last week. These events occurred in 120 women and 89 men aged from 18 to 93, said MHRA.

The UK had administered 22 million first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by April 21. The overall incidence of blood clots is 9.3 per million doses, said the regulator.

It said the advice remains that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks in the majority of people.

There has been scrutiny of the AstraZeneca vaccine on the issue of blood clots, with a higher incidence in younger people.

Last month, more than a dozen European countriesincluding France, Germany, Italy, and Spainsuspended usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine following reports of blood clots as well as several deaths in people who had received the shot. Most countries have resumed using the vaccine but some have suspended inoculations in older individuals.

The European Unions drug regulation agency, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), said on April 7 that there is a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and very rare blood clots but recommended that vaccinations continue and stressed the benefits outweigh the risks.

Some Christians have also expressed ethical concerns over the development process of the vaccine.

In an open letter against the so-called vaccine passports issued earlier this month, UK church leaders said some Christians have serious issues of conscience related to the ethics of vaccine manufacture or testing.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is an adenovirus vector vaccine that has been developed from kidney cell lines derived from a foetus aborted in 1973.

Jack Philips and Reuters contributed to this report.
Pres. Joe Biden returned to the House of Congress to deliver his first address to the joint session to make the case that the Government is back.

Biden Delivered His First Address in a Joint Session in Congress

President Joe Biden returned to the United States Capitol on Wednesday, his home for more than three decades, and used his first speech to Congress to argue that the age of large government is back, according to a recently published article on MSN News.

Pres. Biden said that the country is on the move again following a deadly pandemic that killed over 570,000 Americans, devastated the economy, and rocked everyday life. And he outlined a wide - and costly - plan to repair the nation's highways, bridges, water pipes, and other facilities, as well as to improve public education and extend a slew of other benefits.

Read Also: McConnell Accuses Biden of Breaking His Commitment To Unify the Country

Biden Touts Achievements of His Administration

In a published article on CNBC News, here are some of the takeaways of Biden's speech:

1. Jobs

It is perhaps unsurprising for an administration that has made containing the pandemic and putting Americans back to work the primary goals. Biden used the phrase "jobs" 43 times in his speech.

Biden noted that the country had added 1.3 million new jobs in the first three months of his term, which is more than every other president's first 100 days. But he soon shifted his focus to the need to enact his American Jobs Plan if the nation is to maintain momentum and return to the record low levels of unemployment that existed before the pandemic.

2. America Is On the Move Again

When Biden assumed office, he declared that "America's house was on fire," referring to the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic, its devastating economic effects, and the Jan. 6 insurgency at the Capitol, according to a published article in Hindustantimes.

Biden said "Now - after just 100 days - I can report to the nation: America is on the move again. Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength."

It is the president's tried-and-true tactic to claim credit for the more optimistic moment when coronavirus vaccines have offered a way out of the pandemic. Republicans, on the other hand, made it known that they had a different perspective, with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., indirectly crediting former President Donald Trump with Biden's good fortune.

3. Big Government

Presidents from both sides have used common addresses in the past to discuss the boundaries of democracy. Biden took the opposite approach, emphasizing the part that Washington would play in changing people's lives.

The president ticked off specifics of his $1.8 trillion budget package, which included expanding childcare, creating a nationwide maternity and medical leave scheme, distributing child care subsidies, and other initiatives. This initiative is in addition to his budget for $2.3 trillion in capital funding to repair highways and bridges, improve internet coverage, and initiate other programs.

4. Racial Justice

A week after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged in the death of George Floyd, and while the country continues to deal with a disproportionate number of Black men being killed by police, Biden urged Congress to act.

Biden said, "We have all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black America. Now is our opportunity to make real progress."

Biden, who secured the presidency with heavy Black voter support, has asked Congress to give him a police justice bill named after Floyd by the 25th anniversary of his assassination, May 25. He went on to state that he wanted to eliminate structural inequality in employment, education, and public health.

Related Article: Side Effects After Vaccination Could Mean You Already Got Infected, New Study Suggests

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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle surprised the world last night by announcing they had named their newborn baby daughter after the Queen. The couple's second child was born on Friday, June 4 at 11:40am at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara weighing 7lb 11oz, and is said to be settling in at home. It is understood the Queen was informed by Prince Harry that her great-grandchild would be named in her honour, ahead of their official announcement which was made on their official website. However, Buckingham Palace appeared to be caught off guard by the timing of the Sussexes' news with a spokesman for the palace congratulating the couple 90 minutes after the announcement broke. Lilibet is sister to two-year-old Archie and is the Queen's 11th great-grandchild - poignantly the first of the monarch and Philip's great-grandchildren to be born since the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in April.
Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained 16 supporters of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi youth gang dubbed M.K.U. in nine Russian cities, the FSB said in a statement on Thursday.

"The Federal Security Service and the Investigative Committee in Irkutsk, Krasnodar, Saratov, Tambov, Tyumen, Chita, Anapa, Pushchino (the Moscow region) and Pereslavl-Zalessky (the Yaroslavl region) have detained 16 supporters of the M.K.U. Ukrainian radical youth crew, involved in violent crimes, the propaganda of extremism and preparations to carry out explosions at government buildings and armed attacks on civilians," the statement reads.

The supporters of the M.K.U. plotted to carry out mass killings, one of the detained said in a video issued by the FSB.

"There were plans to carry out mass killings in several Russian cities, including Tambov, St. Petersburg, Samara and Saratov," TASS cited the man as saying.

Bladed weapons, a large number of digital data storage devices and communication means were seized from the detained during searches, which contain manuals for making terrorist tools, information about past and future terror-related crimes and video reports to M.K.U. leader Yegor Krasnov, as well as correspondence with him.

"The detained confirmed during questionings that Yegor Krasnov, based in Ukraine, coordinated their criminal activities, giving then instructions and encouraging them to carry out terrorist attacks and extremism-related crimes in Russia," the FSB said.
In a new study currently available on the bioRxiv* preprint server, a group of US-based researchers developed a panel of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 that can block viral attachment to cells  and pinpointed a specific one that can potently neutralize all tested variants of concern.

As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is still actively unfolding, the ongoing vaccine effort should be supplemented with effective treatment strategies. Thus far, two treatments with monoclonal antibodies were approved for use in affected individuals under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

Previous studies have shown that most protective and potently neutralizing anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies bind the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the viral spike glycoprotein, albeit there are also some inhibitory monoclonal antibodies that target the N-terminal domain (NTD).

Consequently, selection pressure can result in SARS-CoV-2 selecting for mutations in the RBD and NTD that make possible the escape from antibody recognition and neutralization. This is the case with several emerging viral variants of concern that carry such mutations and, in turn, confer resistance to monoclonal or polyclonal antibodies elicited by natural infection or vaccines.

Hence, additional monoclonal antibodies or vaccines that preserve their efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 variants may be needed in our armamentarium in order to tackle all these new and evolving strains that we are faced with.

In this new paper, a research group led by Dr. Laura A. VanBlargan from the Washington University School of Medicine described a panel of very potent, neutralizing murine monoclonal antibodies against the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 that can bind several epitopes proximal to the receptor-binding motif of the RBD.

Binding and neutralization experiments

Here, the researchers have characterized a panel of anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies, explained their mechanism of action on a cellular level, and also appraised in vitro neutralizing and in vivo protection capacity against historical and circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The monoclonal antibodies were also tested for cross-reactive binding to the original SARS-CoV-1 spike protein. Furthermore, this research group has also ascertained the structure of the viral spike protein bound to SARS2-38  a potently and broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibody that recognizes emerging variants of concern.

Neutralizing activity testing was pursued with the use of focus-reduction neutralization test (FRNT) and Vero E6 cells, with the letter representing kidney epithelial cells derived from an African green monkey. Epitope mapping of anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies was also done with the use of neutralization escape analysis.

Monoclonal antibodies against variants of concern

While certain types of potently neutralizing monoclonal antibodies protected K18-hACE2 transgenic mice against infectious processes caused by historical SARS-CoV-2 strains, others induced the rise of escape variants in vivo and lost activity against emerging viral strains.

In this study, two protective monoclonal antibodies (i.e., SARS2-02 and SARS2-38) showed a variable capacity to neutralize variants of concern. More specifically, SARS2-02 was shown to bind an epitope that includes residues E484 and L452 and shows diminished potency against strains that encode these mutations.

Conversely, it was demonstrated that SARS2-38 is able to bind an epitope that is centered on residues K444 and G446, and also potently neutralizes all tested variants of concern. Further structural analysis with cryo-electron microscopy demonstrated that SARS2-38 engages a conserved epitope found proximal to the receptor-binding motif.

Epitopes recognized by anti-SARS-CoV-2 mAbs. mAbs were tested for neutralization potency against a panel of VSV-eGFP-SARS-COV-2-S neutralization escape mutants. (A) + symbol indicates resistance to neutralization when a mutation at the indicated residue number is present. (B-F) Residues from (A) are highlighted on the RBD structure (PDB 6M0J) in red, orange, green, or cyan for mAbs from group A, B, C, or D, respectively, and indicated. Residues that engage hACE2 are highlighted in tan.

Ensuring vaccine potency

In our panel, SARS2-38 potently neutralized viruses encoding any of the above mutations, did not readily select for escape mutations with authentic SARS-CoV-2 strains and retained therapeutic activity in vivo against a virus containing substitutions of one of the key variants of concern (B.1.351), say study authors in this bioRxiv paper.

Furthermore, functional mapping and detailed structural analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 binding footprint revealed a conserved RBD epitope that can be recognized by other protective and potently neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies.

In conclusion, such a treatment approach that induces inhibitory antibodies able to bind conserved spike epitopes may limit the loss of vaccine potency against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, which is definitely something we are concerned in this arms race against the virus.

*Important Notice

bioRxiv 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.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 10:19:10|Editor: huaxia

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WELLINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The overall imports of New Zealand, driven by the almost doubled imports from China, have increased to the highest level for a March month despite a fall in crude oil imports, according to New Zealand's statistics department Stats NZ on Thursday.

Imports from China increased by 624 million NZ dollars (454 million U.S. dollars) to 1.3 billion NZ dollars in the March 2021 month, with 94 million NZ dollars of this increase coming from electrical machinery and equipment, mostly cell phones, Stats NZ said.

Total imports of textile articles were the highest ever, with most of the increase coming from knitted jerseys and cardigans from China, it said.

Overall, imports for March 2021 rose 559 million NZ dollars from the previous March to 5.6 billion NZ dollars, and the value of crude oil imports fell 399 million NZ dollars.

The increase in imports was driven by a range of commodities, with large movements in vehicles, parts, and accessories, mechanical machinery and equipment, textiles and textile articles, and electrical machinery and equipment, statistics show.

"Imports of popular consumer products like cars, cell phones, clothes, and furniture have risen in March," international trade manager Alasdair Allen said in a statement.

"There has also been an increase in imports of a wide range of machinery, including excavators," he said.

Exports fall despite a rebound in logs, while meat exports to China reached the highest monthly total ever, up 42 percent, Allen said.

"Exports of logs to China have more than doubled compared with last year," he said.

"This reflects the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, as this commodity was impacted heavily last year," Allen said. (1 New Zealand dollar equals 0.73 U.S. dollar) Enditem
Tork is going to West Michigan. Riley Greene is headed to Erie. Matt Manning and friends are headed to Toledo.

Most of the Detroit Tigers minor-league affiliates released their Opening Day rosters on Thursday, including the Class A (advanced) West Michigan Whitecaps, the Double-A Erie SeaWolves and the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens.

Its a later start than usual for the minor leagues, which were pushed back one month due to the coronavirus pandemic. Some players assigned the Tigers alternate site have spent April in Toledo; the rest have been going through a minor-league spring training in Lakeland.

The Mud Hens roster two prospects who should be in Detroit before long: Manning, the Tigers top pitching prospect after Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal; and infielder Isaac Paredes, who played in the big leagues last year but has never spent a day in Triple-A.

Toledo will have three catchers -- Jake Rogers, Dustin Garneau and Eric Haase -- plus Brady Policelli, who can play a variety of positions in addition to catching.

A number of veterans will be in Toledo, including pitchers Wily Peralta, Erasmo Ramirez and Ian Krol and infielder Renato Nunez.

The SeaWolves roster has a number of veterans but few significant prospects beyond Greene, who will be the youngest position player by a long shot.

The Whitecaps, who are now an advanced Class A affiliate after previously being a low-A club, will have four of six players from the Tigers 2020 draft class on their roster, including Spencer Torkelson.

Right-handed pitcher Franklin Perez, once the organizations top prospect, will also be in West Michigan as he attempts to restart his career after battling injuries.
Harrison Ford looked as fit as ever while out for a bike ride with a friend in Santa Monica, California.

The 78-year-old Raiders Of The Lost Ark star appeared to be the picture of health as he cycled through the streets on Thursday.

The night before an old clip of Ford reacting to a David Blaine magic trick went viral, earning an enthusiastic retweet from Twitter queen Chrissy Teigen.

Fountain of youth: Harrison Ford looked as fit as ever while out for a bike ride with a friend in Santa Monica

The actor wore the Cyclo Retro jersey by popular Australian riding brand Pedal Mafia for the ride.

The black jersey had the company's name written in cursive and black and white checkered band across the front and back, with the logo displayed on both sleeves.

The tight-fitting polyester material showed off Ford's broad chest and the jersey's short-sleeves emphasized the action star's buff biceps.

Cool threads: The actor wore the Cyclo Retro jersey by popular Australian riding brand Pedal Mafia for the ride

Ford clearly takes his gear seriously. Underneath the jersey, he donned Pedal Magic's Pro Classic Bib.

In riding lingo, bibs are shorts are that are held up by integral suspenders instead of an elastic waistband.

Bibs are preferred by pro and serious riders over shorts with an elastic waistband which often cause tightness and chafing during long and intense rides.

Not messing around: Ford clearly takes his gear seriously. Underneath the jersey, he donned Pedal Magic's Pro Classic Bib

Ready to ride: Ford was wearing a riding bib. In riding lingo, bibs are shorts are that are held up by integral suspenders instead of an elastic waistband. Serious: Bibs are preferred by pro and serious riders over shorts with an elastic waistband which often cause tightness and chafing during long and intense rides

The black bib shorts showcased Harrison's muscular thighs and toned calves.

He also wore a black helmet, black gloves and black wraparound sunglasses.

The Star Wars actor sported black road shoes with gray socks.

Ripped: The black bib shorts showcased Harrison's muscular thighs and toned calves

All the accessories: He also wore a black helmet, black gloves and black wraparound sunglasses

Having fun: Harrison seemed to be in high spirits as he enjoyed one of his favorite hobbies

Harrison seemed to be in high spirits as he enjoyed one of his favorite hobbies.

Last month, the biking enthusiast rode all the way from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The journey is nearly 1,000 miles and can take up to 80 hours by bike.

After his Santa Monica ride, Ford was seen cooling off and sipping from his water bottle.

Hydrating: After his Santa Monica ride, Ford was seen cooling off and sipping from his water bottle

Chrissy Teigen was amazed when she watched a resurfaced viral clip of Ford's reaction to a card trick.

The model, 35, was impressed by a video which showed the actor watching a trick by magician David Blaine in 2013 and was left wondering how he did it.

Sharing the clip on her Twitter Chrissy wrote: 'Someone just explain how he did this to me before I die!'

Funny: Chrissy Teigen was amazed when she watched a resurfaced clip of Ford's hilarious reaction to a card trick on Thursday

Reaction: The model, 35, was impressed by a video which showed actor Harrison watching a trick by magician David Blaine in 2013

In the old video from 'David Blaine: Real Or Magic?', Harrison and David are at the actor's house where the magician asks him to 'think of a card' from the deck.

After telling Harrison his card is no longer in the deck, he asks the Indiana Jones star to choose a piece of fruit he can slice open.

After he finds the chosen card inside an orange, Harrison calmly tells David to 'get the f*** outta my house,' in a hilarious reaction.

Magic: In the old video from 'David Blaine: Real Or Magic?', Harrison and David are at the actor's house where the magician asks him to 'think of a card' from the deck

Impressive: After telling Harrison his card is no longer in the deck, he asks the Indiana Jones star to choose a piece of fruit he can slice open and it turns out the card is inside

The resurfaced clip of Harrison's reaction to the discovery has had the actor trending on Twitter.

People took to social media to say how hilarious his response was, with one writing: 'I wouldn't care if had never done a single film until this point, I'll forever love him for this clip.'

Another wrote: 'I actually legit laughed out loud at his reaction. Perfect.'

A third said: I haven't laughed this hard in a loooong time. Thank you.', while a fourth replied: 'This is the best thing on the internet today.'

Viral: People took to social media to say how hilarious his response was, with one writing: 'I wouldn't care if had never done a single film until this point, I'll forever love him for this clip'

Shock: Inside an orange is the chosen card after which Harrison calmly tells David to 'get the f*** outta my house,' in a hilarious reaction

During the trick David says: 'Think of any card in the deck. Great, hold the deck. You're thinking of a card? Do I know what card you're thinking of?'

Harrison remains silent throughout, watching David intently, as he continues: 'Your card just left the deck, just now. Look through the deck your card isn't there. Go ahead, look. It's not there. You won't see it there. It's nowhere.'

As Harrison shuffles the pack, David says: 'Here's what we'll do, do me a favour grab a piece of fruit for me, like one that we can open up. Yeah grab a piece of fruit, go ahead.'

They pick up an orange, as David asks: 'Can we take a knife and cut it right there? Say your card out loud.'

Baffled: During the trick David says: 'Think of any card in the deck. Great, hold the deck. You're thinking of a card? Do I know what card you're thinking of?'

Finally Harrison reveals the card he's been thinking of - the nine of hearts.

As David slices into the fruit, he says: 'See inside? See there's a card in the orange. See how there's one card inside? Please remove it. Take it out. Pull it out, open it out.'

Harrison unrolls a soggy-looking card, and holds it up to the camera to reveal it's the nine of hearts.

Gobsmacked, he says: 'Get the f*** out of my house.'

The clip resurfaced after it was uploaded to TikTok earlier this week and has now been viewed on Twitter over two million times.
HYDERABAD: The decision to hold elections in these tense Covid-19 times is tantamount to a walk into the jaws of death, the Telangana High Court opined on Thursday. It criticised the State Election Commission (SEC) for going ahead with the election process in the municipal corporations of Greater Warangal and Khammam as also five municipalities.

A divison bench of Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy asked the SEC whether sky would fall if the elections were postponed.

If you are so bent on clinging to your tasks, wasn`t there any delay in conducting elections on time? Wasnt there any situation when a local body was administered by the special officer for the interim? We all witnessed that the state capitals Mayor post was not filled for more than a year and a half without conducting GHMC elections even when there was no Corona or a calamity. But, at the time of the serious surge in Covid-19 cases in the state, you rushed to conduct elections as if the sky will otherwise fall down. This was not a calibrated decision, whatever the reasons be, the bench told SEC secretary Ashok Kumar.

He has appeared before the court on its direction to explain the reasons for conducting the elections in Covid times.

The bench asked SEC why it didnt stall the elections or postpone them by exercising the power vested in it under the statute, keeping in view the serious surge in Covid-19 cases in the state.

Chief Justice Kohli said the SEC has not only put the lives of the voters as also of 7,695 government employees and 2,557 police personnel to risk.

The Chief Justice said that current situation reminded the court of the poem penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson titled Charge of the Light Brigade, wherein the British Cavalry Unit, the Light Brigade comprising 600 soldiers, was directed to charge against the enemy even as such an act was suicidal and a blunder. It rode them into the jaws of death.

Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them, Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell, was how CJ Kohli recited the poem.

When Ashok Kumar informed the division bench that these elections are only confined and restricted to two municipal corporations and five municipalities, CJ Kohli cited the high number of Covid19 Positive cases in these areas and questioned him as to whether the SEC was not aware of the Coronavirus cases in these areas.

The entire world, not only the country or the state, knows of the war-like conditions going on since February 2021. Does the SEC not belong to this planet? Are you living on Mars? You gave the Notification on April 16. Some of the municipalities terms have not been completed by March and mid-April. You have four months' time to conduct elections. Is there such an urgency or statutory compulsion to hold a meeting of newly elected municipal councillors, as of a meeting of the Council of Ministers, the CJ asked counsel for SEC.

The Bench observed that the municipal elections on April 30 when the entire state is gripped by Covid-19 is a deliberate and ironic decision of the State Election Commission. It has really botched up the entire situation in the state. Warangal, Achampet, Rangareddy, Mahbubnagar, Nagarkurnool have seen the highest spurt in Covid-19 cases. This is nothing but jeopardizing the life of the citizens, the court said and directed SEC to file a report by May 5.
BRECKENRIDGE, Texas (AP)  A Texas man died after going into cardiac arrest when he was attacked by an aggressive swarm of bees outside his home, authorities said.

Thomas Hicks, 70, was mowing his lawn Monday when he was repeatedly stung by the bees outside his home in Breckenridge, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) west of Dallas, authorities said.
Military children quite often face challenges their peers seldom do. Theyre uprooted continuously as they follow a parent or guardians military career across the country.

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Military children quite often face challenges their peers seldom do. Theyre uprooted continuously as they follow a parent or guardians military career across the country.

"Sometimes a parent is gone on a six-month deployment (overseas). Theyre away from extended family. Theyre always moving between bases and they move to a different school constantly," said Shannon Chapman, youth programs co-ordinator for the Shilo Military Family Resource Centre.

Thats why the TEAL-UP campaign was launched at two schools at Canadian Forces Base Shilo, the first base in Canada to adopt the day, where the student population, incidentally, consists of roughly 50 per cent military kids.

Similar to the special T-shirt day, like the anti-bullying campaign, where participants wear a pink T-shirt, the TEAL-UP T-shirt campaign is in recognition of the sacrifices military children make during their school careers to support their parents or guardians military careers.

In some ways, military children are like dandelions, Chapman said.

"They can put down roots almost anywhere. They are impossible to destroy. They adapt easily and can survive nearly anywhere. Military children bloom everywhere the wind carries them and they stand ready to fly into the breezes to take them into new adventures, new lands, and new friends."

A dandelion with its seeds caught on the wind sits on the front of every T-shirt.

The campaign started after the Shilo MFRC Youth Program heads researched new and innovative ways to celebrate the Month of the Military Child.

"In the process, we came across Purple Up a popular celebration for recognizing how resilient military children are in the U.S.," Chapman said. Teal is the colour that comes from combining the blue from the Canadian air force, green from the army, blue and white from the navy.

Ecole La Source at CFB Shilo has military 70 children attending. Students participated in the TEAL UP program in recognition of military children. (Submitted)

Originally the brainchild of Caspar Weinberger, the former U.S. Defense Secretary, Month of the Military Child was first established in 1986. While celebrated in the U.S extensively, it has been gaining traction in Canada, according to Chapman.

"Unlike most children, military families are on the move, with children having to leave schools, activities and friends behind," she said. "Family members can also be absent for long periods of time for deployments and training exercises. Despite all challenges, military children continue to flourish and succeed. This resilience deserves a moment of reflection to honour all children of the military community."

The $15 T-shirt fee just covered the cost of the almost 400 T-shirts purchased. Between Ecole La Source and OKelly School on base, almost 400 students from six to 18 and from kindergarten to grade 12 participated. COVID-friendly presentations at both schools were made by Chapman and Stephanie Laviolette, youth programs facilitator at the MFRC.

Military families in Canada and abroad included 81,400 children under the age of 18, according to Lynda Mansers 2017 report, "State of Military Families in Canada."

In CFB Shilo, there were 904 children out of the 2,752 military members and families.

An estimated 10,000 military families are relocated through postings, while 8,000 move to new provinces, accounting for one-quarter of all regular forces military members, according to Vanier Institute of the Family figures from 2018.

There are 220 military children attending school in Shilo. The daycare on base has approximately 70 military children.

Link for Dandelion Poem: militarybratlife.wordpress.com/category/poems

 kkielley@brandonsun.com
When heavy ions, accelerated to the speed of light, collide with each other in the depths of European or American accelerators, quark-gluon plasma is formed for fractions of a second, or even its "cocktail" seasoned with other particles. According to scientists from the IFJ PAN, experimental data show that there are underestimated actors on the scene: photons. Their collisions lead to the emission of seemingly excess particles, the presence of which could not be explained.

Quark-gluon plasma is undoubtedly the most exotic state of matter thus far known to us. In the LHC at CERN near Geneva, it is formed during central collisions of two lead ions approaching each other from opposite directions, travelling at velocities very close to that of light. This quark-gluon soup is also sometimes seasoned with other particles. Unfortunately, the theoretical description of the course of events involving plasma and a cocktail of other sources fails to describe the data collected in the experiments. In an article published in Physics Letters B, a group of scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow explained the reason for the observed discrepancies. Data collected during collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC, as well as during collisions of gold nuclei in the RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory near New York, begin to agree with the theory when the description of the processes takes into account collisions between photons surrounding both interacting ions.

"With a pinch of salt, you could say that with sufficiently high energies, massive ions collide not only with their protons and neutrons, but even with their photon clouds," says Dr. Mariola Klusek-Gawenda (IFJ PAN) and immediately clarifies: "When describing the collision of ions in the LHC we already took into account collisions between photons. However, they concerned only ultra-peripheral collisions, in which the ions do not hit each other, but pass by each other unchanged, interacting only with their own electromagnetic fields. No one thought that photon collisions could play any role in violent interactions where protons and neutrons merge into a quark-gluon soup."

In conditions known from everyday life, photons do not collide with each other. However, when we are dealing with massive ions accelerated to almost the speed of light, the situation changes. The gold nucleus contains 79 protons, the lead nucleus as many as 82, so the electric charge of each ion is correspondingly many times greater than the elementary charge. The carriers of electromagnetic interactions are photons, so each ion can be treated as an object surrounded by a cloud of many photons. Moreover, in the RHIC and LHC, the ions move at speeds close to that of light. As a result, from the point of view of the observer in the laboratory, both they and their surrounding clouds of photons appear to be extremely thin patches, flattened in the direction of movement. With each passage of such a proton-neutron pancake, there is an extremely violent oscillation of the electric and magnetic fields.

In quantum electrodynamics, the theory used to describe electromagnetism with regard to quantum phenomena, there is a maximum critical value of the electric field, of the order of ten to sixteen volts per centimetre. It applies to static electric fields. In the case of collisions of massive atomic nuclei in the RHIC or LHC, we are dealing with dynamic fields appearing only for millionths of a billionth of one billionth of a second. For such an extremely short time, the electric fields in the collisions of ions can be even 100 times stronger than the critical value.

"In fact, the electric fields of ions colliding in the LHC or RHIC are so powerful that they generate virtual photons and their collisions occur. As a result of these processes, lepton-antilepton pairs are formed at various points around the ions where there was nothing material before. The particles of each pair move away from each other in a characteristic way: typically in opposite directions and almost perpendicular to the original direction of the movement of the ions," explains Dr. Wolfgang Schafer (IFJ PAN) and points out that the family of leptons includes electrons and their more massive counterparts: muons and tauons.

Photon interactions and the production of lepton-antilepton pairs associated with them are crucial in peripheral collisions. Collisions such as these were described by the physicists from Cracow a few years ago. To their surprise, they have now managed to show that the same phenomena also play a significant role in direct collisions of nuclei, even central ones. The data collected for gold nuclei in the RHIC and lead nuclei in the LHC show that during such collisions a certain "excess" number of electron-positron pairs appears, which diverge relatively slowly in directions almost perpendicular to the ion beams. It has been possible to explain their existence precisely just by taking into account the production of lepton-antilepton pairs by colliding photons.

"The real icing on the cake for us was the fact that by supplementing the existing tools for the description of massive ion collisions with our formalism built on the so-called Wigner distribution function, we could finally explain why the detectors of the largest contemporary accelerator experiments record these sorts of distributions of leptons and antileptons escaping from the site of the nuclear collisions (for a determined centrality of the collision). Our understanding of the most important processes taking place here has become more complete," concludes Prof. Antoni Szczurek (IFJ PAN).

Work on the Cracow model of photon-photon collisions was financed by the Polish National Science Centre. The model has aroused the interest of physicists working with the ATLAS and ALICE detectors of the LHC and will be used in the next analyses of experimental data.

The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics (IFJ PAN) is currently one of the largest research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences. A wide range of research carried out at IFJ PAN covers basic and applied studies, from particle physics and astrophysics, through hadron physics, high-, medium-, and low-energy nuclear physics, condensed matter physics (including materials engineering), to various applications of nuclear physics in interdisciplinary research, covering medical physics, dosimetry, radiation and environmental biology, environmental protection, and other related disciplines. The average yearly publication output of IFJ PAN includes over 600 scientific papers in high-impact international journals. Each year the Institute hosts about 20 international and national scientific conferences. One of the most important facilities of the Institute is the Cyclotron Centre Bronowice (CCB), which is an infrastructure unique in Central Europe, serving as a clinical and research centre in the field of medical and nuclear physics. In addition, IFJ PAN runs four accredited research and measurement laboratories. IFJ PAN is a member of the Marian Smoluchowski Krakow Research Consortium: "Matter-Energy-Future", which in the years 2012-2017 enjoyed the status of the Leading National Research Centre (KNOW) in physics. In 2017, the European Commission granted the Institute the HR Excellence in Research award. The Institute holds A+ Category (the highest scientific category in Poland) in the field of sciences and engineering.

###

CONTACTS:

Dr. Mariola Klusek-Gawenda

Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences

tel.: +48 12 6628185

email: mariola.klusek@ifj.edu.pl

Dr. Wolfgang Schafer

Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences

tel.: +48 12 6628227

email: wolfgang.schafer@ifj.edu.pl

Prof. Antoni Szczurek

Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences

tel.: +48 12 6628212

email: antoni.szczurek@ifj.edu.pl

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS:

"Centrality dependence of dilepton production via  processes from Wigner distributions of photons in nuclei"

M. Klusek-Gawenda, W. Schafer, A. Szczurek

Physics Letters B, 814, 136114

DOI: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. physletb. 2021. 136114

LINKS:

http://www. cern. ch/

The website of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN).

http://www. ifj. edu. pl/

The website of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences.

http://press. ifj. edu. pl/

Press releases of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences.

IMAGES:

IFJ210429b_fot01s.jpg

HR: http://press. ifj. edu. pl/ news/ 2021/ 04/ 29/ IFJ210429b_fot01. jpg

Semicentral or central collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC produce quark-gluon plasma and a cocktail with contributions of other particles. Simultaneously, clouds of photons surrounding the nuclei collide, resulting in the creation of lepton-antilepton pairs within the plasma and cocktail, and in the space around the nuclei. (Source: IFJ PAN)
HARTFORD  Republicans lawmakers, along with trucking and food-distribution executives, have declared war on Gov. Ned Lamonts proposed regional climate initiative and user tax for heavy trucks on state highways.

They called for the state to invest instead in greenways and open space, and again called for the Connecticuts delegation in Congress to push for air pollution reductions in midwestern states whose emissions drastically affect air quality here through prevailing winds.

On a downtown street corner a block from the State Capitol complex, House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora and Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly charged Wednesday that Lamonts participation in the regional Transportation and Climate Initiative would steadily raise gasoline taxes on working families while providing subsidies for wealthier residents to buy electric cars.

Gov. Lamont and his majority are advocating for $200 million of taxes levied against gasoline and trucks that the middle-class families of Connecticut are going to have to pay at a time when the middle-class family is struggling, Kelly said. These taxes are the most-regressive taxes. Theyre coming after the middle-class wallet. Whats worse is that these taxes wont even deliver on the promised environmental clean air that they are focused to be used for.

Under the TCI, petroleum wholesalers would pay for emission credits, raising pump prices by 5 cents a gallon in the first year, and not more than 10 cents a gallon by 2032, Lamont has said. The GOP lawmakers warned that it is likely to rise steadily over 10 years. Currently only three states in the region, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, along with the District of Columbia, have joined the TCI.

The proposal, which is estimated to bring in about $90 million in new state revenue in 2023, was approved by the legislatures Environment Committee last month and awaits further action in the General Assembly. The money would be used for transit and transportation improvements.

Common sense dictates that three states, some of the smallest states in the union, could somehow come together and have an impact on our overall emissions throughout the state of Connecticut, doesnt make much sense when you think about it, Candelora said. And what this is really all about is another attempt by the Democrats to pickpocket the state of Connecticut.

Joe Sculley, who as president of the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut represents the states haulers, said the TCI could crush small business in the state by raising prices. Its just a money grab, he said, adding that the truck mileage tax has failed in 20 states. He stressed that with no auditing in the rule, out-of-state-based companies would not pay it.

He called for the state to use its emergency reserves of more than $3 billion and federal pandemic relief of $2.7 billion to fund the states transportation infrastructure needs. Additional money may come from the federal government to Connecticut under Presiden Joe Bidens proposed infrastructure program.

For John Pruchnicki, owner of the Ansonia-based Coastal Carriers of Connecticut, Inc., the highway-user tax on heavy trucks, which was approved last week in the legislatures Finance Committee, would add $175,000 to $200,000 a year to his business costs. He said he would pass that cost to his customers.

We dont understand why there seems to be a target on the back of the trucking industry from this governor, Pruchnicki said.

Simply put, the supply chain cannot be disrupted, said Pruchnicki, whose fuel trucks supply gas and heating oil dealers. We as an industry wont let it happen. Those companies will pass on the additional costs at the pump, or the consumer of a house heated by heating oil.

What we would rather see happen is that we utilize our funding to reduce congestion on areas like [Interstate] 95, to reduce greenhouse emissions through that, Kelly said, adding that rebates, credits and changes to building codes could be low-cost ways to fight climate change, combining with conserving green spaces.

Lamont, after an event in Meriden on Wednesday morning, said that the highway use tax is aimed at out-of-state trucks that take advantage of free interstate travel. He said he would listen to alternative proposals on how to fund the states future transit needs at a time when the gasoline tax is failing to provide enough revenue.

They keep making it up, Lamont said of the GOP criticism and campaign against his proposals.

These trucks come in from four different states, he said. Each of those states has either highway user fees or tolls, then they come into the state of Connecticut and get a free ride. I want to make sure these trucks pay their fair share when it comes to keeping up our roads and bridges. If they have a better idea on how they want to pay for the roads and bridges, I am all ears. Last time they said Lets raid the rainy day fund.

The governors campaign pledge of 2018, to establish trucks-only tolls, was turned down by legislative Democrats. But during their attempts to defeat the idea, Republicans suggested that infrastructure costs could be paid through $700 million transferred from the emergency reserves  commonly called the rainy day fund  which is currently more than $3.5 billion.

The Republican leaders on Wednesday backed away from possibly suggesting such a use of the reserves this year.

Lamont recalled a recent news conference in which Republican lawmakers joined him at the Waterbury train station, where he promised improvements including two-way traffic on the train line to and from Bridgeport, if his transit initiatives win approval in the General Assembly.

Everybody usually stands with me and says Im all in favor of two-way service to Waterbury. Im all in favor of infrastructure. And I say, are you going to help me pay for it? Nope.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
A great inflection point in history

In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Biden last night called for investment in infrastructure, education, child care and scientific research, describing them as programs that would propel us into the future and allow the U.S. to win a global competition with China. Highlights from our coverage are here.

Hours before, Biden announced the third blockbuster domestic funding proposal of his presidency. The three proposals add up to about $6 trillion and reflect an ambition to restore the federal government to the role it had played during the New Deal and the Great Society.

Biden also laid out his broader foreign-policy and domestic agenda and described his decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 as a way to make good on his promise to end Americas forever wars even as he warned that the U.S. still faced other threats around the world.

Firsts: Biden kicked off his address to Congress with a string of words that no American president had ever said before: Madam Vice President and Madam Speaker.
The Daily Wire is reporting:

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) on Wednesday released vital immigration-related documents that explain how the federal government is responding to the crisis at the southern border. According to Brnovich, arrest records indicate the federal government is failing to utilize Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite the surge at the border.

ICEs Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) ran historical data to determine how the Biden administrations interim guidance, which halted deportations for the first 100 days of the new administration, would have on arrests. That guidance is allegedly responsible for cutting apprehensions in half.

Rough estimate is book-ins would be reduced by 50% of historical numbers and the vast majority of book-ins would come from CBP transfers, EROs Acting Executive Associate Director Enrique Lucero said in an internal email. A book-in is defined as an individual entering ice custody from a single event (arrest by CBP or ICE).

ERO took the historical data and applied the Biden administrations guidelines to those who were previously apprehended in fiscal year 2020. The following convicted felons would have been released:

3,371 (Assault)

4,174 (Dangerous Drugs)

85 (Homicide)

46 (Kidnapping)

225 (Sex Offenses)

73 (Sexual Assault)

503 (Weapon Offenses)

According to Brnovich, the move is evidence of the Biden administrations disregard for Americans safety.

The DHS records we have obtained convey a shocking disregard for the safety of American communities by the Biden Administration, Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in a statement. The Biden Administration and its radical allies are effectively abolishing ICE through administrative acts.

Data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appears to back up Brnovichs claim.

A table on the DHS website shows a staggering number of apprehensions between October 2020 and April 2021. As Customs and Border Protection (CBP) arrests go up month after month, the number of ICE arrests continues to trend downward.

Along with concerns about Americans safety, Brnovich believes this is a way for the Biden administration to sidestep U.S. District Judge Drew Tiptons decision to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) on the 100-day deportation memo.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, Judge Tipton expressed concerns over the Biden administrations failure to consult with Texas before changing immigration policies, an agreement Texas and DHS came to under the Trump administration.

Tipton said the Biden administration arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its previous policy without sufficient explanation when the 100-day deportation halt was announced. He also stated the halt not only fails to consider potential policies more limited in scope and time, but it also fails to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations, CNBC reported.
Myanmars parallel government on Wednesday rejected holding talks with the junta that seized power in early February until the military regime releases more than 3,000 political prisoners, rebuffing a plan by the countrys Southeast Asian neighbors.

Leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met Saturday and signed a five-point consensus on resolving the crisis by halting army violence against civilian protesters and holding talks.

Members of the pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG), formed on April 16, said they will not engage in dialogue until detained leaders from the previous civilian-led government, including deposed State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, are freed. They also want ASEAN members and other nations to recognize the NUG as the legitimate government of Myanmar.

In order to have a meaningful dialogue, it is very clear that it is only possible if our leaders who are being detained are freed, Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmars permanent representative to the United Nations, told Radio Free Asia, a sister entity of BenarNews, speaking for the NUG.

We believe that only when they are freed will the talks be fair and meaningful, he said.

Many leaders, other officials, and lawmakers from the National League for Democracy (NLD) were arrested by the military during and after the Feb. 1 coup, while those who evaded arrest have formed the NUG.

Political leaders and analysts in Myanmar said ASEANs stance on the crisis was unfair to pro-democratic forces and would prolong the current military dictatorship. They also said that the release of the more than 3,400 people who are being detained by junta forces is a key condition for resolving the crisis.

Security forces, including police, have conducted violent crackdowns on anti-coup protesters in cities and towns nationwide, at times using deadly force. More than 750 people have been killed since the coup began, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thailand-based human rights group.

Myanmar junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing (left) is greeted during his arrival at Jakartas Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang ahead of an ASEAN summit on the Myanmar crisis, April 24, 2021. [AFP/Indonesian Presidential Palace]

Proposal deserves support

Nandar Hla Myint, spokesman for the military-proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), said ASEANs proposal deserves support.

I believe ASEAN is serious about the situation of individual countries in the region, and at the same time it adheres to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country, so it came up with something acceptable to both sides, he said.

The five-point agreement calls for an ASEAN envoy and delegation to visit Myanmar to meet with concerned parties, but junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has said that the visit would be considered only if there was internal stability.

A political analyst who declined to be named said the regime leaders comment could mean that the crackdowns will continue and that the visit will be put off.

None of the five demands in the agreement calls for the release of detained leaders, he said. Min Aung Hlaing has no intention of releasing them. Who are they going to negotiate with, then, if the unlawfully arrested leaders are not released? There is no need to hold discussions with anyone.

Myint Oo, an NLD lawmaker from Bago region who won a seat in the November 2020 election, said the political crisis could not be solved by ASEANs recommendations and that the groupings suggestions were an insult to people protesting peacefully for democracy.

Look at the way ASEAN said that both sides should cease violence, as if it was the peaceful protesters who were using violence. This fact alone is offensive to the gentle and peaceful citizens who are staging this Spring Revolution, he told RFA.

Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the pro-military think tank the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, said he believed the military council would comply with ASEANs points if the demands were in line with a law enacted in the national interest.

We believe we can do everything we can in the national interest within a legal framework. he said. We certainly see it will move forward step by step. It might not move as speedily as they would expect, but each of the five demands could be implemented at appropriate times.

A Myanmar anti-coup protester holds a sign calling for the arrest of junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration in Dawei, southern Myanmars Tanintharyi region, April 23, 2021. [AFP/Dawei Watch]

Junta outlaws AAPP

Continuing its drive to cut off the flow of information about killings and arrests in the crackdown, the junta outlawed the AAPP after accusing the group of producing biased information and incorrect data that hurt the stability and rule of law in Myanmar.

The Ministry for Home Affairs under the State Administration Council, as the junta government is known, announced on Monday that it would take action against the AAPP for releasing what it said was inaccurate data to intimidate and cause anxiety among civil servants and the public, which could be interpreted as inciting violence.

The AAPP publishes daily updates on the numbers of people killed, arrested and released by the military and police in connection with anti-junta. The statements have been cited frequently by foreign governments, media and international organizations.

Pro-army pundit Thein Tun Oo agreed with the juntas move, saying AAPP reports are weak in background checks or references and the numbers get inflated.

The AAPP, however, said it has compiled lists of detainees since the day of the military coup along with the names of the dead, places where the attacks occurred, dates of deaths, and causes of death.

Everything is recorded with photos and video recordings and the data published daily, the organization said in response to an RFA query.

The military regime is attacking the AAPP because it is recognized by the U.N., foreign governments, and rights groups as a credible source of information about political prisoners in Myanmar, said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

They are trying to silence a very important organization that is doing a very difficult job. It is an attempt to keep the outside world from hearing what is happening in Burma, he said.

Myanmar anti-coup protesters hold signs calling for the arrest of junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration in Dawei, southern Myanmar's Tanintharyi region, April 23, 2021. [AFP/Dawei Watch]

More protests, arrests

Sporadic demonstration in support of the NUG and anti-junta protests continued to be held in townships in Yangon, Mandalay, Sagaing, Bago, and Tanintharyi regions as well as in Shan and Kachin states.

The AAPP said the death toll as of Wednesday was 756 and that 3,449 people were arrested, while another 1,237 people were in hiding while facing charges.

At least two people were killed and 15 were arrested amid protests and clashes between demonstrators and security forces on Wednesday, witnesses said.

In Sagaing region, a military corporal was killed during a brief clash between the Tamu Peoples Defense Force and Myanmar soldiers Tuesday evening near the Indian border, residents said.

Soldiers took away the body of Corporal Aung Aung, a local soldier who had joined the Civil Disobedience Movement of striking workers in March, they said.

In the Sagaing town of Monywa, where residents have been holding daily anti-junta protests, soldiers took away nine people from three neighborhoods Tuesday night, locals said.

Nine got arrested, said a resident who declined to be named. They were accused of communicating with underground forces. There had been a series of explosions in the area recently, so their arrests could be connected to that.

An explosion on a bridge in Kachin state Tuesday night caused the structures foundation to crack and some rafters on nearby railroad tracks connecting the towns of Myitkyina and Mandalay to catch fire, said a resident of Hopin where the blast occurred. It is not clear who was behind the bombings.
Royal Caribbean Group said on Thursday it was aiming to restart its U.S. cruises in July after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new measures to speed up approvals, sending its shares up 2.5%.

Late on Wednesday, the CDC made public a letter to the cruise industry that said it was committed to the resumption of passenger operations in the United States by mid-summer.

It followed a lawsuit from Alaska and Florida that sought to overturn the health agencys year-long ban on the cruise industrys operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A ship may skip simulated voyages and directly start open water sailing if it attests that 98% of its crew and 95% passengers are fully vaccinated, the CDC said on Wednesday.

The agency also said it would respond within five days to applications for simulated voyages, down from an anticipated 60 days.

However, there are still many concerns that need to be resolved, Royal Caribbean Chief Executive Officer Richard Fain said, adding the company is hopeful they could be settled quickly.

It could be possible to restart cruising by mid-July the restart does not mean that we will immediately go into full operation. While we are hopeful about restarting, that restart will be gradual and deliberate, Fain said on a call with analysts.

Royal Caribbean on Thursday reported an adjusted loss of $1.1 billion for the first quarter ended March 31, compared with a loss of $310.4 million a year earlier.

The company said it burnt cash at the rate of $300 million per month in the quarter and ended the period with liquidity of about $5.8 billion.

(Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

Topics USA
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego received an Amazon Research Award to develop a voice assistant to better communicate with older adults. Their initial goal is to create a system capable of understanding and answering the medical questions of adults over age 65.

The way the elderly sometimes struggle to use voice assistants like Alexa or Siri may often be joked about, but the problem is real: data show that adults over 65a demographic expected to double between 2010 and 2050tend to give up on using these tools after several unsuccessful attempts at getting their questions answered.

The problem is that existing natural language processing (NLP) systemsthe artificial intelligence models used to train computers to understand spoken and written human languageare trained to understand short, formal questions. This is fine for people who grew up with computer technology and know how to phrase their questions to be understood by the device. But older adults are used to speaking to people, not machines, and often struggle to pare down longer or conversational questions to a sentence the artificial intelligence underpinning the voice assistants can understand.

"Our job is to bridge that gap," said Khalil Mrini, the UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student who will be supported by the Amazon Research Award to work on the project. "We're working on technology that will flip the burden: instead of having older adults change or reformulate their question, we want the AI to be able to learn and understand the older adult."

To accomplish this, Mrini, a graduate student in UC San Diego computer science Professor Ndapa Nakashole's lab, is working to create an end-to-end question answering system that can: 1) shorten the user's question down to its key components, 2) match the shortened medical question to a frequently asked question from a database of 17,000 medical questions sourced from the National Institutes of Health; and 3) select the relevant portions of the corresponding longer answer to share with the user.

Mrini has already completed the first steptraining the AI to summarize a long question into a shorter onewhich he did by training the NLP model jointly on summarizing questions and a classification task called question entailment, in which the model learns to tell if by answering a short question, the initial longer question has been addressed.

"We found that if you're training on both summarizationwhich is basically feeding longer user questions and the model learns to generate the short questionand at the same time training on question entailment, that classification task, then you're able to generate better results," said Mrini.

This question summarization AI model can be implemented as a standalone feature into existing voice assistants like Alexa, or integrated as a first step into any question answering system, where it can shorten user questions.

The team is still working on getting the tool to match the question with one in a pool of FAQsin this case provided by the NIHand then have the AI select the relevant pieces of a longer answer to read back to the user.

"The potential impact of this work is substantial because it aims to broaden the population of people who can benefit from conversational agents, by targeting an important segment of the population, older adults," said Nakashole.

Making AI more inclusive

Why did this segment of the population need an add-on feature after the fact? Why were their user needs not considered in initial voice assistant testing? It's a problem Mrini says is pervasive in AI systems and training, and one that he and researchers in the VOLI team are trying to rectify.

"Among users of existing question answering systems, older adults are underrepresented," he said. "It stems from a lack of representation among internet users, which escalates into not having a lot of data about this particular demographic and so on. You have a problem that escalates into a lack of data, and if there's no data, you can't train an algorithm to meet their specific needs."

Mrini is intimately familiar with this problem. As a native of Morocco, he noticed that virtually no AI models worked for his native language, Darija, a form of Arabic spoken in Morocco.

"I realized there wereand still areclose to no NLP models or AI models that work well for my native language. So my first ever project was making data so that AI can be trained for my native language," Mrini said.

He's interned at Adobe Research and the Alexa group at Amazon, working to make AI models that can predict the syntax of a sentence in an interpretable way, and summarize the important takeaways of longer articles, respectively.

"The global goal of my research is to make human language technology more interpretable and more accessible to wider audiences," Mrini said. "Now I'm mainly working on English-language technology, but to make it more accessible for marginalized or underrepresented audiences, so older adults in this case."
New Delhi: The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) on Thursday (April 29) arrested two Tanzanian nationals at the Mumbai international airport with 151 capsules of cocaine, worth nearly Rs 13.35 crore.

Two Tanzanian Nationals Mtwanzi Carlos Adam and Rashid Paul Sayula, travelling from Dar-e-Salam, Tanzania to Mumbai via Addis Ababa were detained by the officers of DRI, MZU on April 22 based on intelligence inputs. They had concealed the capsules filled with cocaine inside their stomachs.

They were taken into custody at the airport, their medical examination was conducted at the state-run J J Hospital on the court orders.

A total of 810 Grams of white colored powder was recovered from 54 Capsules while 1415 Grams of white colored powder was recovered from 97 capsules. On testing the white powder with field test kit, the same was found to be Cocaine, the press release stated.

As per the official statement, 2.225 Kgs of white colored powder suspected to be Cocaine having a value of Rupees 13.35 Crores in illicit market was seized under the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.

The accused were formally placed under arrest on Thursday and produced before a local court, which remanded them in judicial custody.

Further investigation in the matter is undergoing.

(With PTI inputs)

Live TV
People arrested by a Bay of Plenty police officer who crashed his police car while five times the legal limit  while on duty  could have grounds to question the validity of their arrests, a senior lawyer says.

Hamilton barrister Roger Laybourn says in light of Eastern Bay of Plenty man Andrew Rushs convictions for driving with excess breath alcohol and careless driving, it was incumbent on the New Zealand Police to review arrests he had made  particularly if there was potential for him to have been drinking about that time.

Rush, 38, was sentenced to six months disqualification, a $1000 fine and $2013 in reparation when he appeared in the Whakatane District Court on Tuesday.

Court documents show Rush blew a breath alcohol reading of 1204 micrograms of alcohol per litre of breath  nearly five times the legal limit  following a single-vehicle crash involving a police vehicle in Edgecumbe on April 6.

In a statement to media, police revealed Rush had been on duty at the time.

Laybourn says any future police investigation into Rushs behaviour will need to include an examination of whether he had made any important decisions that could affect peoples liberty while he was under the influence of alcohol.

In taking blood alcohol readings of people, for example, there are very strict procedures that need to be followed and if that does not happen the whole process becomes invalid. It is something that relies very heavily on accurate and honest record keeping by the police officer.

It would certainly be open to people to challenge his record, Laybourn says  however it would be much harder to establish his unreliability if it could not be proved he had been drinking at a certain time.

If a client raised with me that he had been arrested by that police officer, and they had reason to question his sobriety, I would advise them to take the first step of asking the police themselves if he had been drinking.

That line of inquiry could possibly be extended to the courtroom.

There is scope ... that I could be asking the police Can you exclude the possibility that [Rush] was under the influence of alcohol when he arrested the defendant.

A man who witnessed the 8.30pm incident told Stuff a 4WD police vehicle that had been driven by Rush had crashed through fences near the intersection of Otakiri Rd and Main St.

Aside from an initial statement issued to media on Wednesday, police have stonewalled queries about Rushs case, declining to disclose even his rank or how many years he had been a police officer.

The media statement made no mention of the alcohol reading that Rush pleaded guilty to.

They also declined to answer queries about which station Rush was based at, and how many hours he was into his shift when the incident happened.

Other questions that remain unanswered include if Rush had been subject to any previous disciplinary action, either related or unrelated to drink-driving, and how many arrests Rush had made that are currently before the courts.

In all cases a spokeswoman based at the Police National Headquarters in Wellington declined to reveal any information on the basis there was now an employment process under way.

An interview request to talk to the Commissioner of Police, or another senior person in the police about the circumstances and what kinds of oversight exist to prevent such incidents, was also declined.

-Stuff/Mike Mather.
Thales has signed a contract with Lockheed Martin as a tier-one supplier for the delivery of up to 55 airborne anti-submarine warfare sonars.

The ALFS (Airborne Low Frequency Sonar) dipping sonars will be installed on the MH-60R platform for the US Navy and three navies. Delivery of the first 42 systems will occur over the next five years with a delivery of 13 optional systems to occur in year six.

Thales has delivered more than 300 ALFS sonars to the US Navy since the early 2000s and this new contract with Lockheed Martin will continue to support the Navys readiness strategy. The navies of India, Denmark and Greece will receive their first deliveries of the ALFS sonar system through direct US Foreign Military Sales of the MH-60R platforms.

To maintain control over their maritime space and protect security interests around the world, naval forces need reliable, high-performing systems to operate with optimum effect on missions including anti-submarine warfare, maritime search and rescue, defence of maritime approaches and fleet protection for naval forces on deployment.

Offering unparalleled protection to maritime convoys, the ALFS anti-submarine warfare system is capable of detecting, classifying, prosecuting, harassing or attacking submarines, making Thales the benchmark for the worlds major navies. In addition to the US Navy, the other navies that have chosen Thales dipping sonar solutions include the navies of Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Sweden, the UAE, Poland, South Korea and the Philippines.

As a low frequency active sonar, ALFS is designed for the initial detection and tracking of opposing submarines. It offers a long detection range with a wide coverage rate and a low false alarm level, both in deep and coastal waters. It can be used autonomously to clear a particular area or as a complementary anti-submarine warfare asset to sonars on board surface vessels for target relocation and attack.

Earning the trust of the US Navy and its allies and partners around the globe is a source of pride for our team. This contract enhances our position as a strategic supplier to Lockheed Martin and further consolidates the Group's world leadership position in anti-submarine warfare systems. We will continue to improve the performance and competitiveness of our airborne sonars to meet the new anti-submarine warfare operational challenges of our customers, said Alexis Morel, VP Underwater systems, Thales. -- TradeArabia News Service
Prince Edward and his wife the Countess of Wessex have sent a thank you card for the condolence notes they received after Prince Philip's death.

Posting on Instagram, royal fan loopycrown3 shared images of the note sent by The Earl of Wessex, 57, who is the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh's youngest son and his wife, Sophie.

Prince Philip died on April 9 at Windsor Castle, aged 99, while his funeral took place nearly two weeks ago on April 17.

Inside the card, the couple said they were 'extremely grateful' for messages of support from royal fans, and featured a picture of Prince Edward's father Prince Philip in a suit and sunhat.

The picture is used on the DofE website, which is a charity set up by the Duke of Edinburgh to help young people across the UK gain essential skills, experience, confidence and resilience.

Prince Edward and his wife the Countess of Wessex have sent a thank you card for the condolence notes they received after Prince Philip's death, saying they 'are extremely grateful for your thoughtfulness in writing at this sad time'

The note from Bagshot Park, the official residence of the Earl and Countess, which on the front cover read: 'In memory of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 1921-2021.'

The inner note carried the Bagshot Park crest and in italic writing said: 'Thank you for your kind message of condolence.

'We are extremely grateful for your thoughtfulness in writing at this sad time.'

The couple then signed off: 'TRH The Earl and Countess of Wessex and Forfar.'

The note also carried a picture of Prince Philip in memory of his death earlier this month, where he wears a sun hat and a suit

Earlier this week, the Queen carried out her first public engagement since Prince Philip's funeral.

She kept Philip in her heart, wearing a diamond floral brooch she received as a wedding gift.

The monarch's stoic spirit shone through as she welcomed dignitaries to Buckingham Palace via videolink from Windsor Castle.

The fan posted the picture on Instagram, showing the front of the note which said: 'In memory of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 1921-2021'

She opted to wear the glittering rose brooch from Cartier for the meeting, which was given to her by the Nizam of Hyderabad on the occasion of her marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947.

Among the Queens many wedding presents were a stunning Cartier tiara and necklace from the Nizam of Hyderabad, an Indian monarch and one of the wealthiest jewellery collectors in the world.

The tiara, which cost 5,000 in 1947 (equivalent to 189,000 today), was set with 1,033 diamonds and had three detachable roseshaped brooches.

The Queen wore his gift several times over 25 years, including on this visit to the Norwegian Embassy in 1951, but had it broken up in 1973 and asked the then Crown jeweller Garrard to make a new tiara.
A Chinese propagandist who made headlines when he tweeted a doctored photo of a digger holding a knife to an Afghan child's neck has accused Australia of being 'untruthful and immoral' amid escalating tensions between the nations.

Lijian Zhao made the comments during a press conference on Wednesday when he was asked about Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo's hawkish declaration that the 'drums of war' were beating on Australia's doorstep.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman identified the communist nation as the target of Mr Pezzullo's speech, even though he did not mention China, and slammed 'selfish' Australian politicians for perpetuating the 'theory' that China is a threat.

'Australia is being untruthful and immoral with its false allegation of "China threat theory",' Zhao said.

Pictured: Lijian Zhao at a press conference on Wednesday. Last year, he tweeted a doctored image of an Australian digger holding a knife to an Afghan child's neck

'We urge certain individuals in Australia to shake off the Cold War mentality, stop making irresponsible remarks and act in ways that are conducive to regional peace and stability rather than the opposite.'

He also took a thinly veiled swipe at Mr Pezzullo when he accused 'some individual politicians in Australia' of acting irresponsibly while hyping up war threats.

'These people are the real troublemakers,' Zhao said.

'I have noticed that many people in Australia have expressed disapproval on social media, saying that such inflammatory language are outrageous and extremely crazy.'

In December last year, Zhao posted a shocking and highly Photoshopped image of an Aussie soldier holding a knife to a child's neck.

'Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians and prisoners by Australian soldiers,' he tweeted.

Pictured: Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo, who declared 'the drums of war' were beating on Australia's doorstep

Last year, Zhao posted a doctored image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child (pictured)

'We strongly condemn such acts, and call for holding them accountable.'

Zhao was referring to a judicial inquiry which found evidence as many as 39 Afghans may have been murdered by Australia's Special Forces in Afghanistan.

The graphic sparked immediate condemnation from Prime Minister Scott Morrison who demanded China or Twitter remove the 'disgusting' post.

Instead, Zhao pinned the post to the top of his Twitter feed and retweeted comments about how Australia should be 'ashamed'.

In his Anzac Day speech, Mr Pezzullo said Australia must strive for peace, but not at the cost of liberty.

Pictured: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian speaking during a briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Beijing

'In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat - sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer,' he said.

'Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war.

'Let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war.'

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews confirmed she read the 'very strong' speech in advance.

China has called certain Australian politicians troublemakers and urged them to 'shake off the Cold War mentality' amid fierce tensions between the two nations. Pictured: Chinese troops march during a military parade in Tiananmen Square

'The overarching message from government is that we need to be alert but not alarmed,' she said.

'We're obviously very conscious as a government of what is happening in the Pacific region, in particular, and we will always put Australia first, second and third.'

But Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten said Mr Pezzullo's language was inflammatory.

'By all means, we need to stand up for our trade, stand up for human rights, but language like 'drums of war', I think that is pretty hyper-excited language,' he said.

The relationship between the two nations has crumbled in recent times, in part sparked by Australia's early call for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.

China bristled and later slapped damaging tariffs on Australian barley and wine, while trade disruptions to other produce followed. Tensions have heightened since.

Shocking disparities between Australia and China's military power shows we would struggle in a war, amid fears that tensions both nations are nearing tipping point

Defence Minister Peter Dutton has this week expressed concerns about Beijing's stance on Taiwan.

And a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday was told Australia must call out China's widespread use of forced Uighur labour.

Australia last week received an angry response from Beijing after cancelling two Chinese Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure deals with the Victoria state government on national interest grounds.

Defence experts have even suggested the country should consider developing nuclear weapons capability since Australia's relatively small conventional forces are unlikely to be able to defend the vast continent-country from an attack.

Critics have accused the government of manufacturing a crisis to divert attention from a stalled coronavirus vaccine rollout and sliding poll numbers.
There is no progress on the preparations for a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky so far, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

"There has been no progress," he said on Russias Channel One when asked about the organization of the summit.

"Our deputy chief of the [presidential] administration, my colleague Dmitry Kozak is in constant contact with the Ukrainian presidential administration. So far, the Ukrainian presidents office said nothing specific," TASS cited Peskov as saying.

The spokesman noted that Putin is ready to sit down and talk about bilateral relations with Ukraine.
Singapore: Chinas top diplomat in Australia has warned Chinese students and tourists will question whether to return to Australia after the coronavirus pandemic, raising the possibility of further trade blows to Australian goods.

The comments from ambassador Cheng Jingye come as Australian winemakers reel from a 96 per cent drop in the value of their exports to China.

They follow the federal governments decision to cancel Victorias Belt and Road agreement, a move labelled unreasonable and irrational by Cheng on Thursday.

A man compares two bottles of Australian wine at a supermarket in Hangzhou in east Chinas Zhejiang province. Credit:AP

The ambassador has become increasingly critical of Australias actions over the past year, spurred on by a jingoistic Foreign Ministry in Beijing. The criticism has followed Canberras decision to block Chinese investments, institute national security measures, escalate its military spending and rhetoric, and condemn Beijings human rights abuses.
SAO PAULO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. (NYSE: GOL and B3: GOLL4), ("GOL" or "Company"), Brazil's largest domestic airline, provides an Investor Update. All information is presented in Brazilian Reais (R$). The information below is preliminary and unaudited .

Historically, the 2nd quarter of the year is a transition period to low season demand and due to the worsening of the pandemic and the increase in restrictions of circulation imposed by states, GOL's current capacity planning scenario assumes a 40% reduction in 2Q21 compared to 1Q21. To adapt operating costs to current levels of sales and demand, GOL will operate 63 aircraft in its network, which will represent 70% of the average fleet operated at the end of 4Q20 and 377% or 3.8x higher compared to the same quarter of 2020. Revenue for the quarter ended June 2021 is expected to decrease approximately 35% compared to the quarter ended March 2021.

GOL expects to end 2Q21 with R$4.2 billion in liquidity and R$14.8 billion in adjusted net debt. Several important initiatives are relevant to ensure that the Company maintains liquidity at the levels expected for the end of 2Q21.

With the objective of assisting investors and analysts in understanding how GOL is approaching its short-term planning, the Company is also sharing the metrics below:

Metrics 2Q21E

Preliminary Brazil Quarterly GDP Variation (%) Domestic Routes Served (average) / % of 2Q20 Average Operating Fleet / % of 2Q20 Load Factor (%) -2.5% ~114 / ~223% ~63 / ~377% ~79% Net Operating Revenues (R$ BN) / % of 2Q20 Other Revenue (cargo, loyalty, other) EBITDA Margin EBIT Margin CAPEX (R$ MM) Net Cash Burn (R$/day) Average fuel price per liter Average exchange rate Gross Global Scope 1 emissions (000 m t CO2) Total Fuel Consumed (1,000 liters per RPK) Greenhouse Gas Emissions/Flight Hour (t CO2) ~1.0 / ~290% 15% of revenues 11% to 13% -1% to +1% ~160 Neutral R$3.20 - R$3.30 R$5.40  R$ 5.50 ~314.6 ~30.0 ~7.4 Total Liquidity3 (R$ BN) Net Debt4 (R$ BN) Net Debt / LTM EBITDA Ratio4,5 (x) ~4.2 ~14.8 ~11x Passenger unit revenue (PRASK) Operating CASK Ex-fuel RPK - Domestic & Total vs. 2Q20 ASK  Domestic & Total vs. 2Q20 Seats  Domestic & Total vs. 2Q20 Down ~15% Down ~27% Up ~340% Up ~330% Up ~540% (1) Sequential; Source: Brazilian Central Bank. (2) Excluding non-operating expenses and depreciation related to fleet idleness and personnel-related costs of approximately R$950 million in 2Q21 and R$918 million in 2Q20. (3) Cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, accounts receivables and deposits (does not include unencumbered assets). (4) Excluding perpetual bonds and exchangeable notes. (5) Pro-forma, excluding non-operating expenses and depreciation.

Investor Relations

[email protected]

www.voegol.com.br/ir

+55(11) 2128-4700

Media Relations

Becky Nye, Montieth & Company

[email protected]

+1 646 864 3517



About GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A.

GOL serves more than 36 million passengers annually. With Brazil's largest network, GOL offers customers more than 750 daily flights to over 100 destinations in Brazil and in South America, the Caribbean and the United States. GOLLOG's cargo transportation and logistics business serves more than 3,400 Brazilian municipalities and more than 200 international destinations in 95 countries. SMILES allows over 16 million registered clients to accumulate miles and redeem tickets to more than 700 destinations worldwide on the GOL partner network. Headquartered in Sao Paulo, GOL has a team of approximately 14,000 highly skilled aviation professionals and operates a fleet of 127 Boeing 737 aircraft, delivering Brazil's top on-time performance and an industry leading 20-year safety record. GOL has invested billions of Reais in facilities, products and services and technology to enhance the customer experience in the air and on the ground. GOL's shares are traded on the NYSE (GOL) and the B3 (GOLL4). For further information, visit www.voegol.com.br/ir.

Disclaimer

The information contained in this press release has not been subject to any independent audit or review and contains "forward-looking" statements, estimates and projections that relate to future events, which are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this press release including, without limitation, those regarding GOL's future financial position and results of operations, strategy, plans, objectives, goals and targets, future developments in the markets in which GOL operates or is seeking to operate, and any statements preceded by, followed by or that include the words "believe", "expect", "aim", "intend", "will", "may", "project", "estimate", "anticipate", "predict", "seek", "should" or similar words or expressions, are forward-looking statements. The future events referred to in these forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, contingencies and other factors, many of which are beyond GOL's control, that may cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. These forward-looking statements are based on numerous assumptions regarding GOL's present and future business strategies and the environment in which GOL will operate in the future and are not a guarantee of future performance. Such forward-looking statements speak only as at the date on which they are made. None of GOL or any of its affiliates, officers, directors, employees and agents undertakes any duty or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by law. None of GOL or any of its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, professional advisors and agents make any representation, warranty or prediction that the results anticipated by such forward-looking statements will be achieved, and such forward-looking statements represent, in each case, only one of many possible scenarios and should not be viewed as the most likely or standard scenario. Although GOL believes that the estimates and projections in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, they may prove materially incorrect and actual results may materially differ. As a result, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements.

Non-GAAP Measures

To be consistent with industry practice, GOL discloses so-called non-GAAP financial measures which are not recognized under IFRS or U.S. GAAP, including "Net Debt", "Adjusted Net Debt", "total liquidity" and "EBITDA". The Company's management believes that disclosure of non-GAAP measures provides useful information to investors, financial analysts and the public in their review of its operating performance and their comparison of its operating performance to the operating performance of other companies in the same industry and other industries. However, these non-GAAP items do not have standardized meanings and may not be directly comparable to similarly-titled items adopted by other companies. Potential investors should not rely on information not recognized under IFRS as a substitute for the GAAP measures of earnings or liquidity in making an investment decision.

SOURCE GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A.

Related Links

http://www.voegol.com.br/ir


In a recent New York Times essay, I argued that, among the many different tasks for political reform, one of the most urgent is mitigating the forces of political extremism so dangerous to American democracy. The four areas I singled out in which political reforms could potentially have this effect were the presidential nomination process; the structure of primary elections; regulating money in politics; and designing election districts in ways that create meaningful political competition.

With the Census Bureau having released the 2020 population numbers, which trigger the start of states redistricting process, this is the moment to focus on the importance of emphasizing political competition when the states create their new maps of congressional districts. Competitive districts have generally been defined as those in which the winning candidate receives 55% of the vote or less. (Given increasing partisan loyalty among voters, which means fewer voters shift back and forth between the parties, swing districts today might have to include no more than 53% of likely voters for one party to be competitive.)

In safe seats, by contrast, the district is so dominated by the voters for one party that its candidate is going to win the general election almost regardless of a particular candidates ideology and qualifications. As a recent report from the Unite America Institute notes, in the 2020 election, 83% of candidates to the U.S. House were elected from safe seats. Only 17% of members were elected from seats in which they faced significant competitive pressure from the other partys candidate  a dramatic decline from the late 1990s, when 38% of districts were competitive.

The dynamics and incentives for candidates running in competitive districts are dramatically different than those candidates face in safe districts. For competitive seats, candidates know they must win over enough voters in the center, who might swing to either party, while also holding on to their base. If they move too far toward the wings of their party, they risk losing the centrist voters needed to win. These dynamics not only weaken the power of the wings of each party but also create incentives for more centrist candidates to run in the first place. Competitive districts also make legislators more responsive to changes in voter preferences; if public opinion on important policies shifts by five points, legislators who want to keep or gain office will need to respond to that change.

In safe seats, by contrast, incumbents main threat comes from being primaried. Given the make-up of primary voters, that threat mostly comes from the ideological poles of their party. As the authors of a recent book titled Rejecting Compromise: Legislators Fear of Primary Voters find: Legislators believe that primary voters are much more likely to punish them for compromising than general election voters or donors. This point was made in characteristically bald form in Donald Trumps Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse when he mainly attacked Republicans who would not vote to object to the counting of electoral votes: [I]f they dont fight, we have to primary the hell out of the ones that dont fight. We primary them.

When the major competitive threat that safe-seat incumbents face is from the ideological wings of their party, little incentive exists to appeal to the center of the political spectrum. Primary voters in safe-seat districts also have less incentive to compromise and back moderate candidates because the partys candidate will win the general election regardless of where they fall along the partys ideological spectrum; In turn, moderates are less likely to run in the first place, because they know they cant survive the primary electorate. The overwhelming dominance of safe seats in Congress contributes significantly to a Congress that is much more polarized than are citizens themselves.

Over the last decade, gerrymandering has received broader public attention than ever before. And the political system is responding, at least to some extent. Through direct democracy, voters in a number of states have adopted independent commissions to take over redistricting. A centerpiece of the massive voting-reform bill that has passed the House and is now before the Senate are provisions that would require independent commissions to do redistricting and would impose standards of partisan fairness on plans. These are moves in the right direction; I have long argued that we should take redistricting out of the hands of the most self-interested actors  partisan legislatures  and use independent commissions.

But the substantive standards in H.R. 1/S. 1 risk giving short shrift to the importance of competitive districts. A plan can be fair in terms of the partisan outcomes it is likely to generate and yet still result in every officeholder being elected from a safe seat. Indeed, when government is divided and both parties have a say in redistricting, its not uncommon to see sweetheart gerrymanders, in which politicians from both parties agree to give one another safe seats. Incumbents want to be in safe seats  the safer the better (this can be in tension with the partys goal to maximize its prospects overall). But thats not good for creating a Congress actually capable of governing, one in which members have incentives to compromise and forge the coalitions needed to enact most major legislation.

To be sure, its not possible to make all districts competitive. The Voting Rights Act requires, where voting is racially polarized, the creation of districts likely to elect the preferred candidate of the minority community. Those districts are generally safe seats for Democrats. In addition, given the extent to which voters have sorted themselves geographically along partisan lines, creating competitive districts would in some areas might not be possible or would require unusually shaped districts. But imagine if just one-third of Congress, rather than the current 17%, were elected from competitive districts. The dynamics on Capitol Hill would change considerably.

Some academics, however, dissent from the view that competitive districts marginalize ideological extremism and foster moderation in Congress. This disagreement exposes a remarkable disjuncture between these political scientists and journalists who actually cover Congress. Stories with headlines such as House Democrats in Swing Districts Are Torn Over Impeachment are common. Beyond the headlines, stories covering Congress and state legislatures routinely describe the more moderate positions of members from swing districts compared to those in other seats. That there is often a difference between the ideological views of members from swing districts and others is a simple matter of fact among those who cover Congress most closely. Indeed, legislators themselves strongly believe this, as John Boehners recent memoir describes in detail.

Yet the view among this dissenting group of political scientists in recent years is exactly the opposite: that it does not matter whether members are elected from competitive seats or safe seats, because all members of each party vote similarly, regardless of the type of district from which they are elected (see here and here for two important studies). How can there be such a disconnect between those who cover Congress up close and certain social scientists who survey Congress from a greater distance?

One possible answer: These political scientists define the ideology of members of Congress or state legislatures by aggregating all (and only) the roll-call votes taken on bills. This is the easiest data point to measure, but as with quantification in general, basing analysis on the dimensions easiest to quantify can distort reality. For many years now, most legislation has not been put together at the committee level but in leadership-led centralized processes. Behind-the-scenes negotiations among party members take place at this level, when party leaders broker a package that best accommodates the distinct interests within the party. This centralized process also enables party leaders to logroll across bills, giving resistant members on one bill what they want in another bill, thus bringing them along to support both measures. By the time a bill is put on the floor for a vote, the party has largely united behind that package. And if party leaders cant get sufficient party consensus on a bill, they never put it to a floor vote.

Counting up only the final roll-call votes obscures the differences in policy preferences between centrists and the wings of the party. As congressional scholars Frances Lee and James Curry put it, the roll-call vote is censored; the reality is that the parties contend with much more intraparty conflict than one might expect from roll-call votes.

In addition, much of roll-call voting in the modern Congress is designed as party messaging. These are votes taken to sharpen and highlight major party differences, rather than to support bills that have a realistic prospect of being enacted. As Lee documents, Very little actual legislation becomes law by narrow or partisan majorities, but the Congress nevertheless takes many roll call votes that pit one party against the other. Not surprisingly, these messaging roll-call votes display a high degree of party unity  that is part of their point, after all. Yet when political scientists combine all roll-call votes into a single number  without distinguishing bills on minor versus major issues or bills that are purely messaging legislation  they inevitably obscure genuine differences within the parties on significant legislation.

Indeed, sophisticated new work in political science is already starting to undercut the view of those analysts who doubt that safe seats foster extremism. Rather than treat roll-call voting on all issues as the same, Professors Brandice Canes-Wrone and Kenneth Miller focus on only the most significant bills a given Congress votes on, which in their study range from two to six bills a year. On these bills, they find that members in safe seats respond far more to their most polarized donors than do members in competitive districts. This is true for a broad set of issues, including capital gains taxes, partial-birth abortion, the Affordable Care Act, or other highly salient issues.

More specifically, Canes-Wrone and Miller find, first, that national donors are much more polarized than donors from within a members district. They then find that when seats are competitive, representatives respond much more to the preferences of their constituents, but that when seats are safe, representatives are more responsive to the preferences of this highly polarized national donor class. In other words, in safe seats, members can defect more from their districts preferences and endorse the more extreme positions of their national donors. This is not surprising: If youre going to win a safe seat with 75% of the vote, you have a lot of slack to satisfy your national donors with positions that your constituents dont support, even if your victory margin winds up dropping by 10 points next time. But if your district is competitive, you cant afford to stray much from the preferences of your constituents. This is why I have also argued that to reduce extremism, a public financing system that provides $6 for every $1 a candidate raises from small donors  another aspect of H.R. 1  should limit those matching funds to small donors from within a members district.

In sum, those who cover Congress most closely, congressional members themselves, and some cutting-edge work in political science all confirm that members from safe seats tend to be more extreme than those elected from competitive districts. One way to counter political extremism, as new districts for Congress and state legislatures get drawn across the country, is to insist on the importance of creating competitive districts.
Ford Reports 1Q 2021 Financial Results

Click here to view the full 1Q press release

Enhanced Execution, Fresh Portfolio of Exciting Vehicles Drive Fords Strong Q1 Profitability, As Trust in Company Rises

First-quarter revenue increases to $36.2 billion, producing net income of $3.3 billion, best since 2011, and record adjusted EBIT of $4.8 billion

Balance sheet remains strong: cash exceeding $31 billion, total liquidity above $47 billion

Popularity of evolving lineup of must-have products  including Mustang Mach-E, 2021F-150 and Bronco Sport  added to profitable growth in North America

Total automotive EBIT outside North America was $454 million, $980 million better than same quarter a year ago

Underlying trajectory of business improving; full-year adjusted EBIT now expected to be $5.5 billion to $6.5 billion, including ~$2.5 billion adverse effect from semiconductor shortage

DEARBORN, Mich., April 28, 2021 -- Ford Motor Company today reported its 2021 first quarter financial results. Click here or visit media.ford.com to view the news release. Visit shareholder.ford.com for the slide presentation and access the webcast to the Ford earnings call, which begins at 5:00 p.m. ET. The call will feature Jim Farley, president and CEO; John Lawler, chief financial officer; and other members of the Ford senior management team.
Australia's 2.2million minimum wage earners would struggle to afford rent of more than $250 a week, forcing many of them to live a long way from the city.

An Anglicare charity study of 74,000 rental listings in Australia found just 859 or 1.2 per cent were affordable for someone earning just $39,000 a year.

'Affordability has crashed in the last year, and the market is less affordable than ever,' it said.

Australia's full-time minimum wage is $753.80 a week.

Unlike unemployed JobSeeker recipients, minimum wage earners without children are not entitled to Commonwealth rent assistance.

Australia's 2.2million minimum wage earners would struggle to afford rent of more than $250 a week, forcing many of them to live a long way from the city in places like Mount Druitt in Sydney's west

Someone on a low income is considered to be in rental stress if they are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

That means a minimum wage earner is in trouble if they are spending more than $251 a week on rent.

Sydney's median apartment rent stood at $470 in March, compared with $375 in Melbourne, $400 in Brisbane, $350 in Adelaide and $365 in Perth, Domain Group data showed.

Australia's median unit rent is $429 but in Canberra it's even dearer at $500, with leasing costs in the national capital surging by 4.2 per cent during the past year.

Kate Colvin, an economist and spokeswoman for affordable housing group Everybody's Home, said a minimum wage earner would really struggle to find anything in Sydney or Melbourne for $250 a week or less.

'They struggle to afford food, medical care, transport, utility bills when they're paying so much in rent,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'If you're in Sydney or Melbourne, that's pretty much impossible.'

But a one-bedroom apartment at nearby Paddington near Sydney's city centre is available for $280 a week

A low-income worker wanting to live in the city would struggle to afford a $400 a week rent on a studio apartment at Darlinghurst

Minimum wage earners need to move to an outer suburb a long way from the city centre to barely avoid being in rental stress if they don't want to live in a share house.

They could live at Mount Druitt, 42km west of Sydney's city centre, where $250 is enough for a weekly lease on a two-bedroom unit with old carpet.

A low-income worker wanting to live in the city would struggle to afford a $400 a week rent on a studio apartment at Darlinghurst.

But a one-bedroom apartment at nearby Paddington is available for $280 a week.

In Melbourne, $250 is enough for rent on a two-bedroom unit at Sunshine in the city's west

In Melbourne, $250 pays for rent on a two-bedroom unit at Sunshine in the city's west.

North of Brisbane, $260 is the weekly rent for a two-bedroom townhouse at Caboolture, 51km away from the city centre.

The Fair Work Commission's annual wage review is due to decide in coming weeks whether minimum wage earners should receive a pay rise.

Last year, it granted a $13 a week wage increase, equating to a 1.75 per cent increase.

North of Brisbane, $260 is the weekly rent for a two-bedroom townhouse at Caboolture, 51km away from the city centre

The federal government urged the industrial umpire to refrain from giving generous pay increase to minimum wage earners in its submission to the annual wage review.

'Given the current uncertainties in the domestic and international economic outlook, the Government therefore urges the panel to take a cautious approach,' it said.

Across all income groups, Australian wages last year increased by just 1.4 per cent.
New Delhi:

Union finance minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday released the vision document of BJP for Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh, saying that one of their very experienced leaders will be the chief minister of the state.

One of our very experienced leaders will be the Chief Minister, Jaitley said.

While talking to reporters, he said it is a matter of strategy whether it announces or decides the name of chief minister after the elections.

Several senior leaders including JP Nadda, Prem Kumar Dhumal, Shanta Kumar were present on the occasion. The saffron party will highlight corruption as the main issue in the elections.

#HimachalPradesh assembly polls: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley releases BJP's vision document in #Shimla pic.twitter.com/Xkg6fgvEia  ANI (@ANI) October 29, 2017

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Japan has only used about a fifth of the COVID-19 vaccine doses it has imported so far, government data shows, underscoring logistical hurdles such as a shortage of medical staff, as it grapples with a sluggish inoculation campaign.

Japan has secured the largest amount of COVID-19 vaccines in Asia, as it gears up for the Olympics in the summer. But it has inoculated only 1.6% of its population so far, the slowest among wealthy countries.

By the end of April, Japan will have imported enough vials of Pfizer Inc's vaccine for almost 17 million doses, according to a schedule from the Cabinet Office. But as of Wednesday just over 3.2 million shots had been given out, mostly to healthcare workers.

By comparison, South Korea, which began its inoculation campaign after Japan, has administered two thirds of 3.87 million doses of AstraZeneca Plc and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines it had received so far, inoculating 4.7% of its population.

Japan's unused shots suggest its inoculation push is failing to gain steam, even as inbound vaccine shipments triple over the next two months.

BOTTLENECKS

The country began its vaccination push in February, later than most major economies, and was dependent on scarce initial supplies of the Pfizer vaccine flown in from Europe. Vaccine minister Taro Kono has said that municipalities requested a slower rollout to give them time to set up inoculation centers and notify residents.

But as imports started to ramp up, other bottlenecks have become apparent, mainly in manpower. Japanese regulations say only doctors or nurses can administer the injections. The health ministry last week decided that dentists may also deliver shots.
Fire damaged an Eastex area shopping center early Thursday.

The shops at the strip mall on Jensen Drive near Hohl Street were closed when the fire broke out about 1 a.m., officials said. No civilians or firefighters were injured, the fire department confirmed.

When firefighters responded, they found heavy flames bursting from the roof, according to Metro Video.

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The fire was under control by 8:40 a.m., according to the fire department. Arson investigators are conducting an investigation.
Jacinda Ardern has been praised by China's authoritarian regime for 'deepening its cooperation' with Beijing and steering New Zealand away from its Five Eyes allies.

The Kiwi leader has tried to strike a balance between appeasing its largest trading partner China, and maintaining its security partnerships with other western democracies - Australia, the US, the UK and Canada.

New Zealand was the only member of the intelligence network not to condemn China's violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and has largely remained silent on Beijing's campaign of economic coercion against Australia.

Jacinda Ardern (pictured) has been praised by China's authoritarian regime for 'deepening its cooperation' with Beijing and steering New Zealand away from its Five Eyes allies

The Kiwi leader has tried to strike a balance between appeasing its largest trading partner China, and maintaining its security partnerships with other western democracies - Australia, the US, the UK and Canada. Pictured: A sheep farm in Rotherham, New Zealand

What is Five Eyes? Five Eyes is an intelligence sharing alliance compromising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. The origins of the spy network date back to the informal secret meetings held between British and US code-breakers during World War II. Five eyes shares signals intelligence, defence intelligence, human intelligence and geospatial intelligence. After the second World War, the network altered its focus to the Soviet Empire. In more recent years Five Eyes has zeroed in on terror threats and the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes like Russia and China. Advertisement

Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said last week: 'We are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes relationship.'

The statement was music to the ears of the Communist Party who have been attempting to sow division among democratic nations in order to bolster their dominance in the region.

'When it comes to New Zealand, instead of following Washington's cues to contain China, it has pragmatically handled the relationship with the latter,' an article in the Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times said.

'The bilateral ties have been further developed, which effectively benefits New Zealand's economy.

'Furthermore, Wellington's closer ties with Beijing have not triggered sound denouncements from other western countries, including the US. This may irritate Australia.'

State media described Five Eyes as an 'anti-China clique' serving US interests and 'threatening the sustainable development of the world'.

'By pursuing an independent approach, New Zealand is securing a stronger economic recovery and growth path in the post-COVID era,' an article said.

'Maintaining a healthy cooperative relationship with China, which has a massive market and is on a rapid economic recovery path, will yield concrete benefits to New Zealand.'

In stark contrast, Canberra has been embroiled in an unprecedented diplomatic spat with Beijing over the past year.

This month Australia tore up China's controversial Belt and Road Initiative agreement with Victoria, citing national security concerns.

China labelled the Morrison government's decision to ban the infrastructure deal 'unreasonable and provocative'.

China labelled the Morrison government decision to ban the infrastructure deal 'unreasonable and provocative'. Pictured: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (left), Chinese President Xi Jinping (right)

Pictured: The Royal Australian Navy guided-missile frigate HMAS Parramatta is sails in unison with U.S. Navy vessels

The US, the UK and Canada have also been locked in similar diplomatic battles with the belligerent regime.

Australia's relationship with China drastically deteriorated in April last year when Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the origins of coronavirus, which first appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019.

The plea for transparency over Covid-19 infuriated the Communist Party who retaliated by imposing arbitrary bans and tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Australian goods including barley, wine, cotton, seafood, beef, copper, and coal.

Simultaneously, China grew increasingly aggressive in the region stamping out pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong and cracking down on Muslims minorities in Xinjiang.

Under President-for-life Xi Jinping, the belligerent regime has also continued to encroach on territories on Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brunei in the South China Sea - and even carried out a fatal border conflict with Indian last year.

Although Australia and New Zealand released a joint statement acknowledging China's systematic human rights abuses against ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang back in March, the Kiwi's have largely opted for 'quite diplomacy' when it comes to Beijing.

Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers assembling during military training at Pamir Mountains in Kashgar, northwestern China's Xinjiang region

New Zealand's Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta (pictured) said: 'We are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes relationship'
The European Union has called on Ukraine to strengthen its institutional capacity to pursue its European integration, according to Acting Director of the EU Support Group for Ukraine, Deputy Director-General of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Katarina Mathernova.

She said this at a meeting of the commission coordinating the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, according to Ukrinform.

Mathernova said it was important to strengthen the institutional capacity to implement the agenda in the field of Ukraine's European integration. "I understand that there are still many unfilled positions [in the Government Office for the Coordination of European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine], because COVID really affects us all, but we are trying to strengthen our teams so that they work as productively as possible," she said.

Chairwoman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Ukraine's Integration into the EU, MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze put forward a more ambitious proposal on the form of capacity building. She noted that cooperation between the government and the parliament was a necessary prerequisite for advancing the serious and ambitious agenda that exists today between Ukraine and the EU.

At the same time, there is a need to strengthen the examination of draft laws for their compliance with EU law, she said. "It is possible to consider the possibility of such an analysis being carried out by a specially authorized central executive body for approximation of legislation," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

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One of the cops involved in the raid that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor last year, is retiring from the force.

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly's retirement comes just days after the Department of Justice launched a probe into the Louisville Metro Police.

Mattingly's retirement also comes two weeks after his potential book deal with Simon & Schuster fell through.

Mattingly, 48, was the only officer involved in the raid on Taylor's home still on the force, but that will change once his retirement begins on June 1, according to WLKY.

The retiring cop released a statement on Wednesday announcing he was retiring 'in the best interest of his family' and insisting that the DOJ probe 'played no role in this decision.'

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was involved in the deadly execution of a 'no-knock' warrant that resulted in Breonna Taylor's death, has announced that he is retiring from the police

Mattingly (left) was not charged in Taylor's death, while Brett Hankison (right) was only charged with wanton endangerment. He has pleaded not guilty and will go to trial in 2022

'Serving as a police officer for the past 21 years has been one of the greatest honors and privileges of my life. Having this opportunity in the city I grew up in and love has made that choice an even greater honor. I've never taken lightly the responsibility that comes along with serving the great citizens of Louisville,' the statement reads.

Mattingly went on to admit that he wasn't planning on retiring so soon, but is doing so for his family.

'It's my hope and prayer, that moving forward, our city can heal and unite. My plan was not to move on from this calling, but in the best interest of my family, the time has come,' the statement continues.

He also touched upon the recently announced DOJ investigation.

'The current DOJ investigation into the department played no role in this decision,' the statements says.

Breonna Taylor, 26, was killed by police during the execution of a warrant on March 13, 2020

The DOJ investigation was announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday.

It will look at whether or not the Louisville police 'engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force, including with respect to people involved in peaceful expressive activities.'

The investigation will also 'determine whether LMPD engages in unconstitutional stops, searches and seizures, as well as whether the department unlawfully executes search warrants on private homes,' which connects the investigation to Taylor's death.

The Louisville mayor has said that he welcomes the investigation, while the Kentucky governor has promised cooperation.

Taylor was an EMT and aspiring nurse when she was killed. No officers have been directly charged in her death

'This is absolutely wonderful news,' Sam Aguiar, attorney for Taylor's family, said to CNN about the probe. 'We've known for a long time that our police department is plagued by issues that are continuously swept under the rug.'

The Department of Justice also announced an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department last week following the killing of George Floyd.

Mattingly was involved in the March 13, 2020 'no-knock' raid that took the life of Taylor, an EMT and aspiring nurse. He was the only officer injured in the shooting.

He was shot in the leg by Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker III, who believed the officers were intruders to his home.

After the shot was fired, police fired 32 rounds into the home, killing Taylor. No drugs were found in her apartment.

Pictured: Mattingly and his family pictured on Facebook

Pictured: Mattingly and his family pictured on Facebook

Mattingly is set to write a book on the Breonna Taylor case, although he may be looking for a new distributor after Simon & Schuster pulled their support from the project

The FBI determined that Mattingly fired six of the shots during that barrage, but not the one that killed Taylor.

None of the officers were directly charged in connection to Taylor's death, with only officer Brett Hankison charged for wanton endangerment after allegedly firing his weapon into an adjacent occupied apartment.

Hankison has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is set to go to trial in 2022.

Hankison and Myles Cosgrove were fired from the force for their roles in the shooting.

Mattingly broke his silence about the case back on October, months after the shooting took place.

'It's not a race thing like people want to try to make it to be,' Mattingly said in an exclusive interview with ABC News/The Courier Journal.

'There was so much disinformation out. This is not relatable to George Floyd. This is nothing like it. This is not Ahmaud Arbery. It's nothing like it,' he said.

Mattingly also expressed frustration with the mayor and other officials during that interview.

'It's been excruciating. When you have the truth right there in your hands and everything else is getting crammed around you, it's frustrating,' he said.

Prior to that interview, Mattingly sent an email to other LMPD officers in September saying he and his colleagues did the 'legal, moral and ethical thing that night.'

'It's sad how the good guys are demonized, and the criminals are canonized,' Mattingly wrote in the email.

Mattingly is writing a book about the case, titled 'The Fight For Truth: The Inside Story Behind the Breonna Taylor Tragedy,' which is set to be published later this year.

The book is set to be published by Post Hill Press and was initially set to be distributed by Simon & Schuster, but the latter has pulled their support.

'Like much of the American public, earlier today Simon & Schuster learned of plans by distribution client Post Hill Press to publish a book by Jonathan Mattingly,' the company said in a statement two weeks ago.

'We have subsequently decided not to be involved in the distribution of this book.'

NPR reports that Post Hill Press is still planning on moving forward with plans to publish the book.
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So many cruise lines are offering short breaks from British ports this summer that a canny traveller can enjoy six voyages with less than a fortnight's leave from work.

By basing their trips around weekends, cruisers can savour the maiden voyages of two gleaming new ships plus four other beauties from other lines while using up fewer days' holiday allowance than a single two-week break.

Dozens of itineraries are on offer from 12 major companies this year, so there's something to suit everyone on a wide selection of dates, but here's our fun choice of a dream line-up that's easy to do with the help of an understanding boss - or if you work for yourself.

MSC Virtuosa, pictured, will be making its first-ever outing on May 20 on a four-day sailing from Southampton

Marella Explorer, pictured, will be embarking on a three-day voyage from Southampton on Friday, June 25

The six cruises begin with the first-ever outing of MSC Virtuosa on May 20, which is sailing for four days from Southampton, including a weekend - so just Thursday and Friday away from the desk. Days off work: 2.

Next, on June 25, is a three-day voyage on Marella Explorer, which leaves Southampton on a Friday and sails over a weekend. Days off work: 1.

Then it's time to try a little Disney Magic - the ship has a two-night cruise on July 18, again from Liverpool, sailing on a Sunday and Monday, so back to the grind on Tuesday. Days off work: 1.

On August 6, join the maiden voyage of Sir Richard Branson's first ship, Scarlet Lady, from Virgin Voyages. It leaves Portsmouth on a Friday but docks early Monday for the train back to the day job. Days off work: 1.

Britannia waives the rules as well - the P&O Cruises ship sets off from Southampton on a three-night trip on Thursday, August 26. Days off work: 2.

Finally, Cunard offers a four-night voyage on Queen Elizabeth from Southampton on Friday, September 10. Days off work: 2.

Disney Magic, pictured, will set sail on a two-night cruise on July 18 from Liverpool

On August 6, cruisers can join the maiden voyage of Sir Richard Branson's first ship, Scarlet Lady, from Virgin Voyages

The total days off add up to nine - or less than two five-day weeks - away from work, while enjoying 19 days at sea.

The schedule doesn't allow for travelling - you might be late to the office on some disembarkation days, depending on where you live.

But with a choice of departure ports this year, such as Liverpool, Newcastle and Greenock (Glasgow) as well as Southampton, Portsmouth and Dover, it's easy to pack in a few cruises without wasting too much time getting there.

The P&O Cruises ship Britannia, which will be undertaking UK sailings this summer, including a three-night trip on Thursday, August 26

Cunard is offering a four-night voyage on Queen Elizabeth, pictured, from Southampton on Friday, September 10

Most of the companies require passengers to be fully vaccinated for the British cruises and are implementing tests, social distancing and strict hygiene measures to try to keep Covid off the ships.

Many short sailings are sea days only. On longer cruises, trips ashore will only be allowed on official excursions.

Simone Clark, senior vice president at travel agents Iglu Cruise, said: 'There really is something for everyone with the wide range of cruises that will be sailing from the UK, from family-friendly holidays with free kids' clubs and waterparks to an adults-only voyage where you can enjoy West End-style shows, cocktail bars and a choice of gourmet restaurants, as well as superb spa and gym facilities on board.'
PINCKNEY, MI -- Theres no cure and no treatment, but parents Kassondra and William Lambert of Pinckney hope to raise awareness of a rare neurological disorder their son was recently diagnosed with.

KIF1A Associated Neurological Disorder, also known as KAND, affects less than 300 people across 20 countries, according to the KIF1A.ORG nonprofit organization. The Lamberts 3-year-old son Ethan is one of them.

KAND is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is caused by mutations in the KIF1A gene, according to KIF1A.ORG. The condition can affect the brain and body, such as the eyes, muscles and nerves, with a wide range of symptoms and severity that appear at birth or in early childhood.

As they face the harsh realities of dealing with a rare disease, the Lamberts hope to bring awareness to generate more research and funding for treatment and a cure of a disease that is often misdiagnosed.

By bringing awareness to it, you can bring funding to it, bring importance to it, and then really get the ball rolling for therapies to be created, William Lambert said.

Getting diagnosed

Ethan was diagnosed with KAND in February, just before turning three in March, Kassondra Lambert said.

When he was about a year old, I noticed he had stopped progressing through his developmental milestones, she said. He had developed basically on the average track of a child for his first year of life, and around a year mark, he was starting to fall behind.

It took about two years of advocating and going through different specialists and tests before the Lamberts finally got the proper diagnosis, Kassondra Lambert said. Ethan was nearly diagnosed with cerebral palsy, as the conditions share similar symptoms, but genetic testing found the actual diagnosis, she said.

Ethan was diagnosed at the University of Michigan using a genetic test called whole exome sequencing, she said.

So after I got over the absolute heartbreak, and my mind was spinning, honestly, I felt a little bit of relief. We didnt exactly know what was going on with him and to finally get a confirmation of a concrete diagnosis, even though there wasnt a lot of information out about it, that helped us feel empowered, Kassondra Lambert said.

And I feel like were more able to advocate and to stay on top of research now that we actually know what it is.

Because KAND is so rare, many health professionals arent aware of its existence, the Lamberts said, requiring them to educate Ethans therapists on what KAND is and direct them toward resources.

So another takeaway is if there are parents out there that dont feel like their diagnosis, or their journey is being heard by their medical provider, advocate for your child or your family member, Kassondra Lambert said. Because there are these rare diseases out there, and sometimes you do need to educate the medical provider,

Life with KAND

The biggest things Ethan struggles with are communication and mobility, William Lambert said.

He is unable to walk on his own, he never crawled either, he said. And he cant form words. He can only form like the first consonant and syllable but nothing beyond like two letters.

The KIF1A Foundation has diagramed each diagnosis of the disorder and the types of mutations across each case, William Lambert said. Based on that, Ethan is unique in his type of mutation of the KIF1A gene, he said.

Having already been diagnosed with a rare disease, this information felt like a double whammy, William Lambert said.

The Livingston Educational Service Agency has helped with Ethans, weekly or twice-a-week physical, occupational and speech therapy, Kassondra Lambert said.

Ethan also uses a reverse walker and leg braces that help with his mobility, Kassondra Lambert said. To communicate, he uses a device that lets him push pictures on a touchscreen to help him speak, she said.

Through all his obstacles, Ethan is still a happy child whos relentless in his pursuit of mobility, his parents said.

Ethan loves listening to music, shaking tambourines and beating on drums, Kassondra Lambert said, adding that humming any song or tune can immediately stop him from crying.

Its hard to predict how KAND will continue to affect Ethan as it affects each person differently, Kassondra Lambert said.

So we just have to ride this ride, she said.

Raising awareness

Since KAND is so rare, it doesnt get much attention, research or funding, William Lambert said.

As a result, Ethans parents hope telling their story will shed more light on the disorder and show the importance of funding research to help kids like Ethan.

It is a degenerative and progressive disease, Kassondra Lambert said. We know this disease is not going to get better. Its not like a cold that you can just heal from. It robs kiddos of their ability to walk, talk, be themselves and see.

KIF1A.ORG is a nonprofit organization where people can learn more about KAND and current studies being conducted. William Lambert also suggests watching the Ken Burns documentary, The Gene: An Intimate History, to get a better understanding of how the disorder affects people.

That documentary really shed a lot of light on that. Its heartbreaking because it really is brass tacks about the reality of having the KIF1A disease, he said. But it also provides a lot of information about how research for the one disease helps everyone. It helps more than just the KIF1A kids, it helps other kids with other rare diseases as well.

To those who want to donate in support of KAND research, visit the KIF1A.ORG website.

KIF1A.ORG is also currently running a fundraiser on Facebook.

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The is determined to help the people of India in this moment of crisis, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said here as the first shipment of key life-saving medical supplies for the country took off from California.

"The is determined to help the people of India. We will continue to stand together in our shared battle against COVID-19," Sullivan said in a tweet on Wednesday soon after the White House announced it was delivering emergency COVID-19 supplies worth more than USD100 million in the coming days to India.

The move by the Biden administration came days after Sullivan, in a call with his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval, announced a series of COVID-19 relief aid to India.

On Monday, President Joe Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The US President is believed to have pledged all support that India would need in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden has directed the entire administration to work on a war footing to save lives in India. The Pentagon is deploying its resources as well.

USIAD said that it is airlifting vital medical supplies to India to save lives, stop the spread of COVID-19, and meet the urgent health needs of the Indian people.

"We're sending critical oxygen and O2 related supplies, N95 masks, & rapid diagnostic testing kits to India w/more on the way soon," it tweeted.

In a tweet, Indian-American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi said the US cannot remain isolationist because COVID-19 variants in India can jump on a plane or hop on a ship and easily come and dismantle America's pandemic progress.

"That's why we're sending vaccines & supplies," he added.

In a separate tweet, Senator Ed Markey said it was America's moral obligation to support other nations like India that are facing deadly COVID-19 outbreaks.

We're asking Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson for their plans to make their vaccines accessible to those who desperately need them. A global pandemic demands global solutions, he said.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee welcomed the US aid to India.

Applauding President Biden for his help for India. We should continue to monitor India's needs and provide resources to them as soon as they need them. needed. I am very pleased to note that Pakistan is offering ambulance support to India, she said.

I hope this will be an opportunity for these two countries to work together. And I mourn the loss of the thousands of people who have lost their lives in India due to COVID-19, Jackson-Lee 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.)
U.S. President Joe Biden's recognition of 1915 events as genocide is not seeking to pin blame on Turkey, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Speaking at a virtual event with foreign media, Blinken said Biden's recognition should not have been any surprise because the U.S. president "expressed views that he's held for many, many years, and he's been very clear about that."

"As the president noted, the commemoration of Remembrance Day is to honor the victims, not to assign blame. And of course, the focus that we put on this involved events in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire," Anadolu Agency cited Blinken as saying.

Blinken said it is important to note that Biden had a good conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and there are many, many issues and areas where both nations are working closely.

"Turkey is a critical ally to the United States and NATO. We've partnered on many shared regional interests, global interests," he said.

"We continue to see a strong bilateral relationship, which includes expanded areas of cooperation and effective management, where we have disagreements and like most countries, we do have our disagreements where we owe Turkey the respect of stating our disagreements, clearly, directly, honestly, just as we expect and anticipate the same from Turkey and that's been an important hallmark of our relationship," the U.S. Secretary of State added.
DUAL Transactional Risk Hires Marchica as Vice President for New York Team

DUAL Transactional Risk, the newest underwriting team at DUAL North America, has hired Megan Marchica as vice president for its New York-based team.

In this role, Marchica will focus on mergers and acquisitions, related insurance solutions and associated transactional risks.

Marchica brings 15 years of financial lines experience to the role, the majority of which focused on underwriting directors and officers liability coverage for public companies. Prior to joining DUAL in March 2021, she was managing director at The Hartford Financial Services Group, supervising the Midwest region executive liability group. Marchica also spent more than nine years underwriting management liability lines in New York City.

DUAL North America is a specialty program administrator offering property, casualty and financial lines products through several specialized subsidiary companies. DUAL North America currently has nine underwriting offices throughout North America and is a part of the DUAL Group, an international underwriting agency and Lloyds international coverholder with offices in 16 countries.

Source: DUAL North America

Global Indemnity Group Appoints Charlton Chief Executive of Insurance Operations

Global Indemnity Group LLC, parent company of specialty property/casualty insurance providers Penn-America Group, United National Group, Diamond State Group, American Reliable Insurance Company and Collectibles Insurance Services, has appointed David S. Charlton as its chief executive of Global Indemnitys insurance operations as well as a member of its board of directors.

Charlton is a 34-year veteran property/casualty insurance industry senior executive with expertise in excess and surplus, binding authority, small business and other specialty insurance businesses.

Prior to joining Global Indemnity, Charlton served for seven years at Chubb Limited, where he had been recruited to expand its Westchester Specialty excess and surplus small business division. Prior to Chubb, Charlton served at Berkshire Hathaways United States Liability Insurance Company (USLI), including as executive vice president and chief underwriting officer. Charlton began his insurance career at Philadelphia Consolidated Insurance Companies, where he created and managed the companys core professional lines casualty division.

As the companys principal executive officer, Charlton will report directly to the companys board of directors through its chairman. Charltons appointment concludes the chief executive search process initiated by the companys board of directors in January 2021.

Global Indemnity Group LLC, through its several direct and indirect wholly owned subsidiary insurance companies, provides both admitted and non-admitted specialty property/casualty insurance coverages and individual policyholder coverages in the U.S., as well as reinsurance worldwide.

Source: Global Indemnity Group LLC

Alera Group Names Whitney Floyd as Vice President of Sales for the Northeast

Alera Group, an independent, national insurance and wealth management firm, has appointed Whitney Floyd as vice president of sales for the Northeast. She will be based out of the greater Philadelphia area.

Reporting to Vice President of Sales Development Jim Wochele, Floyd will lead all sales initiatives in the Northeast region working directly with 12 Alera Group locations.

In this role, Floyd will train, develop, mentor and motivate the Northeast sales teams. With more than 12 years of sales experience, Floyd joins Alera Group from alphabroder, where she served as regional vice president of sales.

Prior to alphabroder, Floyd worked as a national sales manager for Trion Group, a Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC company. During this time, she managed a team of sales associates across the country while continuing to develop and manage new business opportunities and current client relationships.

Alera Group is an independent, national insurance and wealth management firm with more than $500 million in annual revenue offering employee benefits, property/casualty, retirement services and wealth management solutions to clients nationwide.

Source: Alera Group
"Since we first opened our doors 90 years ago, the Empire State Building Observatory has been the must-visit for travelers from around the world," said Jean-Yves Ghazi, president of the Observatory. "We've welcomed everyone from the Queen of England to the Queen of Christmas (Mariah Carey) through our doors, and our most important visitors are our Observatory guests from around the world who today visit our brand new, $165 million recreation of our entire experience. With New York reopened as of July 1, we look forward to visits from our fans near and far who can safely travel to celebrate this important anniversary."

Brand-New Offerings for Visitors

To mark 90 years, the Empire State Building will kick off a wealth of new offerings, with more announcements to be made over the course of the year-long festivities.

Birthday Lighting: ESB's world-famous tower lights will sparkle in white with a special "90" illuminated in the mast throughout the night.

ESB's world-famous tower lights will sparkle in white with a special "90" illuminated in the mast throughout the night. New Historical Tour : The new 90 in 90 Tour will take guests on a 90-year journey in 90 minutes as they explore the building's rich history. Treated as a VIP with their own ESB Ambassador at their side, guests quickly become insiders and go behind-the-scenes at the Empire State Building.

: The new 90 in 90 Tour will take guests on a 90-year journey in 90 minutes as they explore the building's rich history. Treated as a VIP with their own ESB Ambassador at their side, guests quickly become insiders and go behind-the-scenes at the Empire State Building. 90 th Anniversary Collectors' Items: The Empire State Building's gift shop will offer limited edition, 90 th Anniversary items available only on-site.

The Empire State Building's gift shop will offer limited edition, 90 Anniversary items available only on-site. Birthday Giveaway: With the purchase of a Sunrise, Premium or All Access ticket to the Observatory, guests will be gifted a complimentary, celebratory 90 th anniversary tote bag.

With the purchase of a Sunrise, Premium or All Access ticket to the Observatory, guests will be gifted a complimentary, celebratory 90 anniversary tote bag. David Yurman Window Display: In honor of ESB's 90 th anniversary, America's foremost luxury jewelry brand David Yurman will launch its new "Empire Collection" of women's jewelry and men's accessories  all inspired by the Art Deco architectural wonder  with a window display in the building's famed Fifth Avenue lobby. The Empire collection will be available exclusively at David Yurman retail stores and on DavidYurman.com .

In honor of ESB's 90 anniversary, America's foremost luxury jewelry brand David Yurman will launch its new "Empire Collection" of women's jewelry and men's accessories  all inspired by the Art Deco architectural wonder  with a window display in the building's famed Fifth Avenue lobby. The Empire collection will be available exclusively at David Yurman retail stores and on . Sweeping Views with Starbucks Coffee: For the entire month of May, guests who show their Observatory ticket at the 34th Street Starbucks located inside ESB before or after their visit will receive a $0.90 tall, hot or iced coffee and a Starbucks reusable cup while supplies last.

A Reimagined Guest Experience

Since its construction, the Empire State Building has taken pride in its status as the World's Most Famous Building  an international symbol of technology, imagination, and ambition. Recent renovations and a reimagined visitor experience serve as an example for other buildings and attractions across the globe.

Reimagination of The Observatory Experience : A five-year, $165 million overhaul of the visitor journey to the 86 th Floor Observatory was completed in 2019 and introduced a new dedicated guest entrance on 34 th Street, an immersive 10,000 square foot museum, and additional exhibits on the redesigned 80 th Floor. A brand-new 102 nd Floor Observatory with floor-to-ceiling windows complete the redo. ESB also improved indoor air quality throughout the building and specifically throughout the Observatory Experience with industry-leading MERV 13 filters and AtmosAir bi-polar ionization. The building lives within the larger Empire State Realty Trust real estate portfolio, which was the first in the Americas to achieve the evidence-based, third-party verified WELL Health-Safety Rating for overall health and safety.

A five-year, overhaul of the visitor journey to the 86 Floor Observatory was completed in 2019 and introduced a new dedicated guest entrance on 34 Street, an immersive 10,000 square foot museum, and additional exhibits on the redesigned 80 Floor. A brand-new 102 Floor Observatory with floor-to-ceiling windows complete the redo. ESB also improved indoor air quality throughout the building and specifically throughout the Observatory Experience with industry-leading MERV 13 filters and AtmosAir bi-polar ionization. The building lives within the larger Empire State Realty Trust real estate portfolio, which was the first in the Americas to achieve the evidence-based, third-party verified WELL Health-Safety Rating for overall health and safety. Sustainability Retrofit : Over the last 10 years, the Empire State Building underwent a ground-breaking energy and efficiency retrofit as part of the $550 million Empire State ReBuilding program that transformed it into one of today's most efficient historic landmarks. The building is in the top 20 percent of all Class A commercial assets in the nation and has been recognized by more than ten independent organizations for its sustainability leadership. As a result of these efforts, ESRT earned the highest possible GRESB 5 Star Rating and Green Star recognition for sustainability performance in real estate and was named a Fitwel Champion for healthy, high-performance buildings. ESB looks forward to a more sustainable future with a recently announced target to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.

Over the last 10 years, the Empire State Building underwent a ground-breaking energy and efficiency retrofit as part of the Empire State ReBuilding program that transformed it into one of today's most efficient historic landmarks. The building is in the top 20 percent of all Class A commercial assets in the nation and has been recognized by more than ten independent organizations for its sustainability leadership. As a result of these efforts, ESRT earned the highest possible GRESB 5 Star Rating and Green Star recognition for sustainability performance in real estate and was named a Fitwel Champion for healthy, high-performance buildings. ESB looks forward to a more sustainable future with a recently announced target to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. Updated Tower Lights : In 2012, the Empire State Building upgraded its world-famous tower lights to now display more than 16 million colors. The new lights debuted with the building's first music-to-light show set to Alicia Keys' Girl on Fire and Empire State of Mind . The building recently brought back the classic show during 2020 to bring a moment of joy to all New Yorkers during the pandemic.

In 2012, the Empire State Building upgraded its world-famous tower lights to now display more than 16 million colors. The new lights debuted with the building's first music-to-light show set to and . The building recently brought back the classic show during 2020 to bring a moment of joy to all New Yorkers during the pandemic. Restoration of an Art Deco Classic: In 2009, the celestial ceiling mural of the Empire State Building's Fifth Avenue Lobby was fully restored. The project used aluminum leaf and 23-karat gold, the same materials from 1931, and took more than 20,000 man hours. Just last year, the silhouette of the Empire State Building was also restored to the original design that influenced various architectural styles. With the removal of various antennas and a new coat of silver waterproof paint, ESB sparkles like new.

"Over the past 90 years, the Empire State Building has been the undisputed landmark of the New York City skyline, with its iconic tower lights that shine as a symbol of hope, strength and perseverance," said Mr. Malkin. "We will continue to innovate and push boundaries in technology, sustainability and tourism to ensure that the Empire State Building remains America's Favorite Building for the next 90 years as well."

Images and b-roll of the Empire State Building's archival footage, Observatory Experience, and signature lightings can be found here. With more news and announcements to come, be sure to follow the Empire State Building on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit https://www.esbnyc.com/90.

About the Empire State Building

The Empire State Building, "The World's Most Famous Building," owned by Empire State Realty Trust, Inc. (ESRT: NYSE), soars 1,454 feet above Midtown Manhattan from base to antenna. The $165 million reimagination of the Empire State Building Observatory Experience creates an all-new experience with a dedicated guest entrance, an interactive museum with nine galleries, and a redesigned 102nd Floor Observatory with floor-to-ceiling windows. The journey to the world-famous 86th Floor Observatory, the only 360-degree, open-air observatory with views of New York and beyond, orients visitors for their entire New York City experience and covers everything from the building's iconic history to its current place in pop-culture. Learn more at www.esbnyc.com. 2021 is the 90th anniversary year of the building which officially opened on May 1, 1931. Declared "America's Favorite Building" by the American Institute of Architects, as well as the world's most popular travel destination by Uber and the #1 New York City attraction by Lonely Planet it welcomes more than 4 million annual visitors from around the world.

Since 2011, the building has been fully powered by renewable wind electricity, and its many floors primarily house a diverse array of office tenants such as LinkedIn, Shutterstock, and Global Brands Group, as well as retail options like STATE Grill and Bar, Tacombi, and Starbucks. For more information and Observatory Experience tickets visit esbnyc.com or follow the building's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, YouTube, or TikTok.

About Empire State Realty Trust

Empire State Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ESRT) owns, manages, operates, acquires and repositions office and retail properties in Manhattan and the greater New York metropolitan area, including the Empire State Building, the "World's Most Famous Building." The company's office and retail portfolio covers 10.1 million rentable square feet, as of Dec. 31, 2020, which consists of 9.4 million rentable square feet across 14 office properties, including nine in Manhattan, three in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and two in Westchester County, New York; as well as approximately 700,000 rentable square feet in the retail portfolio.

Empire State Realty Trust is a leader in energy efficiency in the built environment and sustainability space, with 76 percent of the eligible portfolio ENERGY STAR certified and 100 percent fully powered by renewable wind electricity. As the first commercial real estate portfolio in the Americas to achieve the evidence-based, third-party verified WELL Health-Safety Rating for health and safety, ESRT additionally earned the highest possible GRESB 5 Star Rating and Green Star recognition for sustainability performance in real estate and was named a Fitwel Champion for healthy, high-performance buildings. To learn more about Empire State Realty Trust, visit empirestaterealtytrust.com and follow ESRT on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Source: Empire State Realty Trust, Inc.

Category: Empire State Building

SOURCE Empire State Realty Trust, Inc.

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Chinese lawmakers on Thursday voted to adopt an anti-food waste law at a session of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee.

The law, aimed at safeguarding the country's food security, took effect on Thursday.

The law stipulates that catering service providers can charge a disposal fee from customers who leave excessive amounts of food waste, but the rates must be clearly displayed.

Catering service providers are also required to remind customers of food frugality duties. Restaurants found guilty of inducing or misleading behaviors that lead to diners wasting food will receive a warning. Serious violators will be fined up to 10,000 yuan (about 1,546 U.S. dollars).

With the law in place, online bloggers will be banned from livestreaming binge eating. Media outlets that publish such content will receive a warning, and if their violations are deemed severe, they will be shut down, according to the law.

It also puts forward new requirements for governments to curb food waste. Local governments at or above the county level shall inform the public on the developments in their anti-food waste work every year and propose measures to step up the efforts, the law notes.

China's annual grain output remained above 650 million tonnes for five consecutive years during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) period, but food waste has been a lingering problem that poses a potential threat to the country's food security.

Approximately 18 billion kg of food is wasted every year in China's urban catering industry, according to a report based on nationwide field research carried out by NPC deputies.

The country also sees over 35 billion kg of grain loss at pre-consumption stages including storage, transportation and processing, the report added.

To curb the bad practice of food wastage, China has launched a comprehensive "Clear Your Plate" campaign in recent years, with restaurants and canteens displaying anti-food waste posters and banners and media publishing content that promotes the virtue of frugality.

The new law lays down the basic principles for food consumption and will help build a long-term mechanism to curb food waste, said Yuan Jie, an official with the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee.
(Natural News) A conservative legal organization with significant ties to former President Donald Trump is suing the administration of President Joe Biden. The lawsuit claims that the administrations stimulus funds meant for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers illegally discriminates against White agricultural workers.

The lawsuit was filed by America First Legal on April 26 in the District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, on behalf of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. The main defendant was listed as Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. (Related: Antiracist Boston doctors say White patients should be left untreated to die, while Black patients go to the front of the line.)

America First Legal was formed in April 2021 by Trumps former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former senior adviser Stephen Miller. The group says its strategies are inspired by the legal warfare model employed by the Democratic Party during Trumps term to thwart his agenda. The organization further says its mission is to oppose the radical lefts anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police and anti-American crusade.

This is the first lawsuit America First Legal has pursued so far.

Farm subsidies discriminate against White farmers and ranchers

The suit is challenging how the Biden administration defines those who qualify as socially disadvantaged. According to America First Legal, the stimulus program, which was enacted as part of Bidens Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic relief program, discriminates against White farmers because they are unable to receive the same financial aid as non-White farmers.

The Agriculture Department defines a socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher to be a person belonging to groups [that] include, but are not limited to African Americans, American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asians, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, refugees, immigrants.

America First Legal is arguing that the Agriculture Department is lurching America dangerously backward by excluding White farmers and ranchers from accessing the same financial aid opportunities as non-White agricultural workers. The group is arguing that the decision to actively and invidiously discriminate against White people is illegal and unconstitutional and must be stopped.

The lawsuit further argues:

Equal rights under law is the cornerstone of American constitutional jurisprudence: the principle that all citizens, regardless of status, wealth, race, color, religion or creed, have the same rights and are entitled to the same standard of justice. These are the principles etched into our founding documents, fought for on our nations battlefields, written into the Gettysburg Address and delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King.

Stimulus ignores all the White farmers who were equally hurt by the pandemic

During an appearance on Newsmax TV, Miller argued that awarding aid to farmers based on their skin color is fundamentally un-American,

I would argue  and my organization would argue  that that violates federal nondiscrimination rules, said Miller. We are suing to say that this lawless policy needs to be enjoined.

Miller said that the stimulus package provides $5 billion just to compensate Black farmers for their losses during the pandemic. The former Trump adviser said this is racial discrimination on its face because the stimulus does not provide the same opportunities to White farmers.

America First Legals lawsuit seeks a court order finding the administrations plan to provide for non-White farmers and ranchers to be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it discriminates against Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews and Eastern Europeans.

Millions of people were hurt by this pandemic, explained Miller. Millions of people were hurt as a result of the closures, the shutdowns, the disruptions to our lives. And when it comes to getting financial aid, it shouldnt matter what race or ethnicity you are.

You cant make a more equal country, you cant make a more unified country if we split and divide based on race.

Learn more about the anti-White policies of the Biden administration by reading the latest articles at AntiWhite.news.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

Bloomberg.com

WashingtonTimes.com
Boris Johnson was facing the prospect of a fourth inquiry into the financing of his lavish flat makeover last night, after Labour reported him to Parliament's sleaze watchdog.

The Prime Minister insisted yesterday that there was 'nothing to see' as he has now paid the 58,000 cost overrun on the Downing Street flat he shares with fiancee Carrie Symonds.

He described the row as a 'farrago of nonsense'.

But veteran former Labour minister Dame Margaret Hodge called for a formal inquiry into allegations that the bill was initially settled by the Conservative Party, which was reimbursed by millionaire Tory donor Lord Brownlow.

In a letter to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone, Dame Margaret said the PM had 'repeatedly broken' the rules that require MPs to declare donations within a month of receipt.

Mr Johnson has previously been reprimanded for the late declaration of ten other financial interests, and has been warned he faces 'enhanced sanctions' if he breaches the rules again. These include a possible fine or temporary suspension from the Commons.

The Prime Minister insisted yesterday that there was 'nothing to see' as he has now paid the 58,000 cost overrun on the Downing Street flat he shares with fiancee Carrie Symonds

The latest move came 24 hours after the bombshell announcement from the Electoral Commission that it is launching a formal investigation into the affair.

In a statement that infuriated the PM, the watchdog said: 'We are now satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred.'

The tangled financing of the PM's flat refurbishment is already the subject of an internal review by the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and is also being investigated by the PM's new adviser on ministerial interests, Lord Geidt. Downing Street declined to comment on Labour's decision to seek a further inquiry last night. But a parliamentary source said the move could 'backfire' as it was unclear whether Miss Stone has the power to investigate gifts made to Mr Johnson in his capacity as a minister.

As an MP, he has to record all financial interests. But the MPs' code of conduct states: 'Members are not required to register either ministerial office or benefits received in their capacity as a minister.'

Veteran former Labour minister Dame Margaret Hodge called for a formal inquiry into allegations that the bill was initially settled by the Conservative Party

The Office of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner declined to comment last night. Downing Street is expected to argue that details of any financial assistance should be reported in the register of ministerial interests, which has not been updated for almost a year.

Prime ministers are entitled to a 30,000 annual allowance for the maintenance of their Downing Street accommodation, but have to pay any balance above that themselves.

Mr Johnson refused three times on Wednesday to tell MPs who had paid the extra 58,000 thought to have been incurred. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged the PM to come clean. The Mail has revealed that the Tory Party settled the bill for the renovations last July. Lord Brownlow secretly wrote to the party in October to say he was reimbursing the party for the 58,000 it had spent.

Neither of the transactions have been recorded by either the PM or his party, and it is not known whether further payments from other individuals might have been involved.

Mr Johnson yesterday insisted it was time to move on from the row. Speaking at the close of a turbulent 16-month session of Parliament, the PM pledged to remain 'laser-focused on delivering the people's priorities as we work to unite, level up and increase opportunity all across the UK'.
North 6th Agency picks up Outmatch, creator of the Hiring Experience Stack, which provides job seekers with insights to support their career ambitions. N6A will support Outmatch on a variety of external media relations and content marketing initiatives to drive competitive awareness and amplify the companys growth. Finding a partner with a deep wealth of experience in the HR-SaaS space was critical to help us share our message effectively and take our company to the next level, said Outmatch chief futurist Yves Lermusi.

Newlink signs battleface, an insurance provider offering services and benefits to travelers visiting or working internationally. Newlink will provide media relations and facilitate strategic partnerships, as well as providing support at trade and consumer shows, content development, and overall strategic efforts. As we grow our US operation, we needed a hands-on agency with insight into what drives American travel insurance buyers, which will be key to our communication strategies, said battleface CEO Sasha Gainullin.

Clarity PR has been engaged to handle UK and US communications for Gen Z friendship social media app Yubo. The agency will work with the brand to operate a consumer and corporate press office function on both sides of the Atlantic. Clarity will also work to increase Yubos brand awareness and drive user growth through a PR strategy that taps into lifestyle, Gen Z and consumer press, alongside momentum corporate outreach. Paris-headquartered Yubo, which launched in 2015, says it reaches over 45 million users across 40 countries. Were delighted to be working with the teams at Clarity in both London and New York, building a great catalogue of creative activity and importantly for us to begin to share parts of our brand story that we havent told before, said Yubo policy and communications lead Lucien Grandval.

Ditto adds crypto exchange Bitstamp, online bank Douugh and Flatiron School, which teaches skills including software engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and product design. Ditto will work with Bitstamp to raise awareness of the company in the U.S. market. For Douugh, the agencys efforts will be targeted at differentiating the company within the fintech industry and raising its brand awareness with consumer and lifestyle audience. Flatiron School has engaged Ditto to provide messaging, media training, media relations and content.
Beijing, April 29 : China on Thursday sent into space the core module of its space station, kicking off a series of key launch missions that aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year, the media reported.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of the southern island province of Hainan at 11.23 a.m. (Beijing Time), Xinhua news agency reported.

Tianhe will act as the management and control hub of the space station Tiangong, meaning Heavenly Palace, with a node that could dock with up to three spacecraft at a time for short stays, or two for long, Bai Linhou, deputy chief designer of the space station at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), was quoted as saying.

Tianhe has a total length of 16.6 metres, a maximum diameter of 4.2 metres and a takeoff mass of 22.5 tonnes, and is the largest spacecraft developed by China.

The space station will be a T shape with the core module at the centre and a lab capsule on each side. Each module will be over 20 tonnes. When the station docks with both manned and cargo spacecraft, its weight could reach nearly 100 tonnes, the report said.

The station will operate in low-Earth orbit at an altitude from 340 km to 450 km. It has a designed lifespan of 10 years, but experts believe it could last more than 15 years with appropriate maintenance and repairs.

"We will learn how to assemble, operate and maintain large spacecraft in orbit, and we aim to build Tiangong into a state-level space lab supporting the long stay of astronauts and large-scale scientific, technological and application experiments," said Bai.

"The station is also expected to contribute to the peaceful development and utilization of space resources through international cooperation, as well as to enrich technologies and experience for China's future explorations into deeper space," Bai said.

Tianzhou-3 cargo craft and Shenzhou-13 manned spaceship will also be launched later this year to dock with Tianhe, and another three astronauts will then begin their six-month stay in orbit, the Xinhua reported.
MONTREAL - Travel company Transat AT Inc. says it has reached a deal with Ottawa to borrow up to $700 million, nearly half of which will go toward refunding travellers for flights cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Air Transat self service check-in kiosks are seen at Montreal-Trudeau International Airport in Montreal, on Friday, July 31, 2020. Travel company Transat AT Inc. says it has reached a deal with Ottawa to borrow up to $700 million through the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

MONTREAL - Travel company Transat AT Inc. says it has reached a deal with Ottawa to borrow up to $700 million, nearly half of which will go toward refunding travellers for flights cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reimbursement for customers who were scheduled to leave on or after Feb. 1, 2020, will begin immediately, the airline said Thursday as it works to resume flights after grounding its fleet earlier this year.

The money, which arrives after months of negotiations, will come through the federal government's Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility, the same program used to help Air Canada with up to $5.9 billion in funding.

Transat chief executive Jean-Marc Eustache said Thursday was likely the company's "best day" since the pandemic began.

"We are very convinced that the post-COVID environment will be favourable to us because we are operating in the right market, the leisure market," he said at the company's annual shareholder meeting, held virtually.

"Our customers have put money aside during the lockdown and they want to spend it first on leisure, on pleasure travel."

Resumption of flights is expected to begin no sooner than late June.

Transat shares gained altitude after the aid packaged was announced Thursday morning, rising 27 cents, or nearly six per cent to close at $4.80 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The relief comes with conditions, including a $1-million ceiling on executive compensation as long as refunds remain unpaid and a floor of 772 active employees  well below the pre-pandemic workforce of 5,200.

The Montreal-based company said up to $390 million will be used to help support its business, while up to $310 million will be used to provide reimbursements to travellers.

Interest rates for the former start at 4.5 per cent  borrowing rates for Air Canada kicked off at 1.5 per cent  and for the latter 1.2 per cent, similar to Transat's larger rival.

In reporting its most recent financial results in March, Transat estimated it would need at least $500 million to get through the year if a proposed takeover by Air Canada fell through.

Air Canada withdrew its $190 million bid for the company earlier this month after learning European Union regulators would not allow the deal to go ahead.

Initiated two years ago, the takeover was priced at $720 million before shrinking by nearly three-quarters as COVID-19 pounded the transport sector, ultimately dying out on April 2.

Asked Thursday whether any rival bidders had emerged, Eustache wouldn't comment.

"Is it still possible that Transat will be purchased? This is an option that we will consider," he said.

"In the short-term, an opportunity to move in this direction could be presented by the expression of interest by Pierre Karl Peladeau, and we will have to determine in the near future whether this possibility is in the best interest of all stakeholders."

Gestion MTRHP Inc., the investment company of Peladeau, a financier and CEO of telecommunications giant Quebecor Inc., previously made a proposal to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Transat for $5 a share.

In connection with the financing from Ottawa, Transat issued the government 13 million warrants for the right to purchase Transat shares at $4.50 apiece, up to a maximum of 20 per cent of outstanding stock.

Transat has also agreed to hold off on paying dividends and share buybacks. As with the cap on executive compensation, the restrictions are in line with the aid offered to Air Canada.

Transat has endured a tough year, suspending all flights following the federal government's request in January to stop travel to Mexico and the Caribbean due to the pandemic.

The tour operator's refund eligibility criteria is available online at airtransat.com/refunds.

WestJet, the country's second-largest airline, said it continues to negotiate with Finance Department officials over a relief package. The Calgary-based company began to dole out refunds last year and has restored some regional routes since.

 With files from Christopher Reynolds in Ottawa and Tara Deschamps in Toronto.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.

Companies in this story: (TSX:TRZ, TSX:AC, QBR.B)
CONCORD, N.H.  Lawyers for a pickup truck driver charged with causing the deaths of seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire have appealed to the state Supreme Court after a judge rejected their third request for a bail hearing.

Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, 25, of West Springfield, Massachusetts, faces multiple counts of negligent homicide, manslaughter, driving under the influence and reckless conduct in the June 21, 2019, crash in Randolph. Hes been in jail since the crash and has pleaded not guilty. The victims, members of the Jarheads Motorcycle Club, were from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

A Coos County judge recently agreed with prosecutors in denying the bail hearing request for Zhukovskyy. Prosecutors said Zhukovskyy represented a danger and a flight risk, and that the defense has not questioned witnesses for his pending trial. Zhuvkovskyys lawyers asked the court for a review.

Zhukovskyys trial is now scheduled for November.

Related content:
Beware when you tax the rich. They have the means to flee. They have before. That ultimately means less money to help the poor.

Nevertheless, Connecticuts legislature is mulling a tax on the states top earners. Actually, taxes  on income and investments.

Dont do it. Please.

Just when Connecticut is luring well-to-do New Yorkers back to our leafy suburbs, we want to shoo them away? (As Dan Haar reports, Suddenly, people want to live in a place where Fido poops on a stretch of green instead of a Brooklyn sidewalk.)

Granted, Connecticuts top earners do have a lot of money. And hiking their taxes could temporarily bring the state even more riches than its been reaping in federal aid and Wall Street windfalls this year. The taxes could finance programs for those less fortunate, including child tax credits, if legislators keep their word on putting the money there. In the past, well, they havent.

But hiking taxes on the states superrich will also cost Connecticut.

The top 3 percent of filers pay 41 percent of all state income taxes, according to 2016 state tax records. Many of them left the state when taxes went up in that decade. Theyll do it again.

Even former tax-loving Gov. Dannel P. Malloy warned against a millionaires tax:

This is an important industry. It produces a tremendous amount of revenue to our state, Malloy said in 2017. If you blithely throw around the idea youre going to propose a 19.5 percent tax on an industry that is responsible for a disproportionate share of our state personal income tax revenue, then dont be surprised when people start to explore other opportunities.

Some did explore. At least four billionaires left Connecticut for Florida in those years. In Florida, there is no state income tax or inheritance tax.

Some of those billionaires griped about Connecticuts finances as they headed out the door. Connecticuts tax rate had risen to 6.99 percent, up from 4.5 percent a few years earlier, and our state employee pension was then, and still is, one of the worst-funded in the nation.

According to the website How Money Walks, Connecticut lost nearly $20 billion in adjusted gross income from 1992 to 2018. Almost $13 billion of that wealth went to Florida. It wasnt for the states charm.

Fairfield County, by the way, lost the lions share  $8.38 billion in adjusted gross income from 1992 to 2018.

That said, Connecticut is still well-off  especially Fairfield County. The Stamford area is home to the second-highest concentration of millionaires in the nation (and) the state of Connecticut has the third-highest concentration of millionaire households after Maryland and New Jersey, says Kiplinger.com, citing data from Phoenix Marketing International.

So why risk losing any more of our millionaires and especially our billionaires, the people who pay the largest chunk of the states taxes?

We stand with Gov. Ned Lamont, the moderate Democrat, who says he wont sign his partys tax plan. Connecticut is finally going in the right direction financially, as the governor says. Why stop it now?
NJ Lawmaker Proposes Using CARES Funds for Property Tax Relief Instead of Stimulus Payments for Illegal Immigrants

New Jersey Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, a Republican, proposed in April a bill urging the governor to reconsider diverting $40 million in federal economic relief funds to illegal immigrants and instead use the funds for property tax relief to New Jerseys struggling homeowners.

Homeowners in New Jersey have been struggling for years to pay their property taxes, even before the COVID-19 pandemic started, Scharfenberger told The Epoch Times in an interview. The problem was compounded by the impact of pandemic restrictions on the state economy, he added. We have the highest property tax burden in the union.

Moreover, renters who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic cannot pay their rent, which impacts landlords who cannot pay their bills because they have not been receiving their revenue, the lawmaker said.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Pool/Getty Images)

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has considered using $40 million in federal funds to give illegal immigrants in the state stimulus payments or unemployment benefits, according to Politico. The funds were apportioned to the state by a $2.2 trillion rescue package, also known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which provided economic relief amid the CCP virus pandemic.

The CARES Act also provisioned for a 120-day moratorium on eviction for tenants. The governor has extended this moratorium for New Jerseyans, but when it gets eventually lifted, thousands of New Jersey residents will be confronted with the possibility of becoming homeless, Scharfenberger said.

The governor makes decisions on how the funds are distributed, but his intention to give stimulus money to illegal aliens raised concerns, Scharfenberger said.

If we have $40 million to give, literally give, to people who arent supposed to be in the country in the first place, then certainly we could use that money. The money would be better spent providing property tax relief or helping renters whove lost their jobs through the COVID pandemic, or helping landlords to recoup some of the loss of revenue because their expenses continue on, Scharfenberger explained.

This is not to take away [funding] from any humanitarian programs, where even if people who are here illegally, they need medical attention.  This is just cutting a check, a stimulus check to people who are here illegally. Thats where I think its unfair to the legal residents of the state, he continued.

Many of those who pay property taxes lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and many landlords, especially small landlords who own a two-family house, have not been receiving their rent but still have to pay their utilities and property taxes, Scharfenberger said.

American citizens in New Jersey here are struggling. So either were a country of laws, or were not, and for the governor to circumvent those laws to give to people who have broken laws by virtue of coming here illegallyI dont think its fair to the New Jersey taxpayer, Scharfenberger explained. The money should be used first to support citizens who reside in the state, he added.

New Jersey has the highest property tax burden in the union; it is a perennial problem, Scharfenberger said, so any time the state government has an opportunity to give relief to property taxpayers, it should do it.

For the state as a whole, it is detrimental to have this wave of illegal immigration, Scharfenberger said. It costs the United States about $200 billion a year, he added. Whatever monies are allocated to illegal aliens through direct paymentsstimulus paymentshowever you want to term it, will pale in comparison to the cost of illegal immigration overall.

Illegal immigration is a large federal problem, but in this particular instance, the focus should be on the New Jersey taxpayer, Scharfenberger said.

In fairness to people who are here illegally, your heart has to go out to them. But still, were a country of laws. And either we are a country of laws, or were not. We cant pick and choose which ones we decide to enforce and which ones we decide to overlook. Otherwise, youll have anarchy.

I believe that we have to start governing that way, that we have to respect the law, as we ask everyone else to respect the law, Scharfenberger concluded.

The CARES Act funds allocated to New Jersey included direct payments to families and individuals with income below certain thresholds, additional unemployment benefits, various benefits for small businesses, and grants for hospitals, New Jerseys health centers, and other health care entities, according to a joint statement by U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). In addition, it provided assistance for the homeless, funding for low-income residents to offset their energy expenses, support for affordable housing, funding for expansion of early voting and vote by mail, and online registration to prepare for the 2020 election, as well as support for the New Jersey education system, the statement said.

New Jersey has the highest effective tax rate on owner-occupied property at 2.21 percent of a homes value, followed by Illinois (2.05 percent) and New Hampshire (2.03 percent), as of 2018, according to Tax Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. The lowest property tax rate in the nation went to Hawaii (0.30 percent), followed by Alabama (0.40 percent), Louisiana (0.52 percent), and Wyoming (0.55 percent), the Tax Foundation said.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the total number of housing units in New Jersey in 2019 at 3.6 million, of which almost 64 percent were occupied by their owners. The population of the state exceeds 9 million, according to the 2020 Census (pdf).

The number of illegal immigrants living in New Jersey as of 2019 was estimated at 644,000 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Illegal immigration

A group of illegal immigrants wait for Border Patrol after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in La Joya, Texas, on April 10, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

I think that Governor Murphys proposal to allocate $40 million out of the CARES Act funding to undocumented immigrants is a good proposal and a good starting point, said Chia-Chia Wang, organizing and advocacy director for American Friends Service Committees (AFSC) Immigrant Rights Program in Newark, New Jersey.

To be able to provide some relief for undocumented immigrants and their families, we actually need more than $40 million, Wang told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Redirecting that funding to property tax relief is not a good idea because it only benefits a small number of people, she said. And most of them probably have more income than undocumented immigrants and their families, Wang explained, adding that undocumented immigrants do not qualify for any federal economic relief due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Immigrant families struggle to pay their rent; they do not have enough money to provide food and clothing to their children, pay their medical expenses, and they more often than anybody else lack the means to satisfy their basic needs, Wang continued.

Some of AFSCs clients have medical bills to pay or need to buy prescription drugs, and these expenses are substantial compared to their income, Wang said. Without the drugs that someone needs to take, someones health can be hurt, and this can have a sort of devastating consequence to the wellbeing of that person, she added.

Providing assistance to undocumented immigrants in the form of a check will give them more flexibility in spending the funds, Wang said. They can use it according to their needs, such as paying rent, buying food, or covering their medical expenses, she added.

New Jersey is a pretty wealthy state, and therefore any extra resources should be used to alleviate the difficulties that poor families face during this very difficult time, Wang continued.

Wang also mentioned a need to provide some unemployment benefits to illegal immigrants. This way, people who do not qualify for unemployment benefits under the existing system but lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic or family hardship could receive unemployment payments.

The AFSCs Immigrant Rights Program integrates providing legal services to immigrants, organizing in immigrant communities, and advocating for immigration policy changes. It offers a wide range of free humanitarian-based immigration services such as fighting immigrants deportation, helping them to obtain legal immigration status, and bringing their families to the United States, Wang explained.

The primary reason why people cross the border illegally or overstay their visas is that they want to stay [in the United States] and start making money, and send money back home because theres no way of making a living back in [their] home countries, Wang said.

I dont think we believe that [those] people actually broke the immigration law. I think the immigration law is basically dysfunctional and broken, Wang said. The focus should be on how the policies at the federal and local level can be changed rather than on how people broke the law because people come [to the United States] for better opportunities, she added.

Wang thinks that services to people such as health insurance should be based on needs and income regardless of the persons immigration status.

People who have incomeno matter what their status iscan afford private providers, and they should be able to buy out of their pocket, and government resources should go to people who need them the most[to] people who make very, very minimum income. Theyre not going to have any extra money to pay benefits, to buy health insurance, Wang continued.

This way, we can really create a better and more equitable access to services that everybody needs, Wang said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy for comments.
2021-04-28

Maeci

Deputy Minister Benedetto Della Vedova took part today in the resettlement meeting, within the framework of the Government formed by Mario Draghi, of the Steering Committee provided for by the National Strategic Plan on male violence against women.

The Steering Committee, chaired by the Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family, Elena Bonetti, has the function of programming, coordinating, monitoring, and verifying the National Strategic Plan on the subject.



In his speech, Deputy Minister Della Vedova expressed deep appreciation for the initiatives taken by Minister Bonetti to fight violence against women, at a time when the consequences of the pandemic exacerbate their vulnerability, and for the decision of putting women at the core of the recovery measures, including in the area of economic empowerment. Della Vedova then welcomed the introduction of support for women's entrepreneurship in the recently launched National Recovery and Resilience Plan, intending to foster their independence.



The Deputy Minister reminded that to combat gender-based violence, the reference framework for the Italian action is the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention, unfortunately often under attack by various countries, including European ones. Della Vedova also expressed his hope for a prompt completion of the European Union accession process.

"The recent withdrawal of Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, signed in the Turkish metropolis ten years ago and first ratified by Turkey, has inflicted a severe blow to the campaign against violence against women. Such decision directly affects women, girls and the Turkish society as a whole, but also hurts all of us who believe in this campaign and are fully committed, each in our own sphere of activity", said the Deputy Minister.



The Italian Presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (November 2021-May 2022) will open on the tenth anniversary of the Istanbul Convention. Among its priorities, there is the fight against gender-based violence, the promotion of gender equality and the full affirmation of women's rights and role.
Former Republican Gov. Chris Christie is accusing President Joe Biden of hiding a "socialist agenda" in the sweeping spending proposal that will be tackled in the president's first address to Congress this week.

Christie, who is eyeing a 2024 presidency, is accusing President Biden of "not telling the truth to the American people to hide a socialist agenda." The 58 year-old former federal prosecutor leveled his accusations at the president during a conference call meeting in New Hampshire with Right-of-Center, a group of conservative activists and leaders.

WND reported that President Biden's speech will not be a State of the Union address but instead an address before a joint session of Congress, where he is expected to present his agenda for pandemic recovery, economic development, infrastructure, and more. COVID-19 restrictions have limited attendance to just 200 members of the Congress and only secretaries of state and defense will represent the Cabinet. The Supreme Court will be represented by just one person: Chief Justice John Roberts.

According to FOX News, President Biden is looking to propose the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which the White House calls "once-in-a-generation investments in our nation's future." The money that will pay for such a proposal will come from a major tax hike for the U.S. richest individuals, which will see a doubling of capital gains tax on investors who earn over $1 million.

The major tax hike proposal is also looking to increase corporate tax rate and funnel billions of dollars into the Internal Revenue Service for enhanced tax enforcement and auditing of the highest earners in the country. President Biden had previously committed to maintaining tax rates of those who earn less than $400,000 a year.

Christie, who believes Biden is hiding a "socialist agenda" with his major tax hike proposal, argued that "it's a lie that he won't tax anybody under $400,000 per year. It's just simply not true." The former federal prosecutor pointed out that there will be a "family business tax increase" which involves taxing families who want to start a business.

These are the very same people who may be significantly earning less than $400,000 annually but will be subjected to increased taxes under the "family business tax" that the president is proposing.

The former governor called upon Republicans to push back against President Biden's major tax hike proposal, specifically the "family business tax increase" and capital gains increase which Christie called a "tax attack on IRAs and 401ks." Christie predicted that the major tax hike proposal will cause the stock market to fall and cause average investors to "lose their retirement nest egg."

Christie believes that President Biden is set on "weaponizing the IRS'' just as the Obama-Biden administration did in a campaign against conservatives when the two were "in charge of the government." He added that President Biden is looking to continue what the Obama-Biden administration started with the IRS, which Christie believes is "already intrusive enough in our lives."
By Hayley Fowler and Mark Price, The Charlotte Observer (TNS)

A 13-hour standoff in North Carolina ended late Wednesday with five dead, including two deputies and the shooter.

Deputy Logan Fox died at the scene, and Sgt. Chris Ward died at Johnson City Medical Center in Tennessee, the Watauga County Sheriffs Office said.

Two civilians whose names have not yet been released also died. WSOC-TV said they were the shooters mother and stepfather.

The sheriffs office said a Boone Police officer was also hit with gunfire during a rescue attempt but was uninjured.

This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved as well as their families and our community, said Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman in a statement. I greatly appreciate the tremendous support we are receiving from law enforcement agencies across the region and the state.

The standoff unfolded in the Western North Carolina town of Boone, about 100 miles northwest of Charlotte.

Investigators say it began shortly before 10 a.m. Wednesday when Watauga County sheriffs deputies made a welfare check on Hardaman Circle in Boone. An employer of the homeowner reported the person had not shown up for work and was not answering the phone.

Deputies entered the residence after discovering all vehicles belonging to the residents were on the property. Upon entering the home, two Watauga County sheriffs deputies received gunshot wounds from an unknown individual within the residence, the department said.

The shooter, who was barricaded inside the home, periodically fired toward deputies, officials said.

More than 15 law enforcement agencies responded to the site, including the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation and the N.C. State Highway Patrol, according to The Associated Press.

Watauga County Emergency Services had issued an alert just before 11:30 a.m. Wednesday calling for some nearby residents to stay in their homes with their doors and windows closed.

The residential street in Boone is about six miles from Appalachian State University. App State Police said there was no threat to the campus.

More:

Pa. Wawa shooter tried to take vehicles after killing truck driver: police

U.S. indicts three on hate crime charges in 2020 death of Georgia man
Saudi Arabias strongman is sending signals of dialogue and detente towards the Islamic Republic. Divisions and opposing interests remain, but collaboration can benefit everyone. The White House, Gulf nations and COVID-19 are the factors that led to the change. Hinduism and Buddhism are included in Saudi school curriculum.

Riyadh (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) wants openness and good relations with Iran, Saudi Arabias historic enemy.

Speaking to the al-Arabiya network, the prince said that the two countries need to work together to ensure a prosperous future for the Middle East.

In the interview, he also addressed several current issues and outlined future economic plans, highlighting the ambitious Vision 2030 program to free the country from oil dependency.

The call for dialogue comes despite what the prince calls Irans negative behaviour in some areas, such as its nuclear programme, missile testing and support for outlaw militias (a reference to armed groups in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq).

With Saudi Arabias regional and global partners, it is necessary to find a solutions to these problems, he said.

The princes statement comes two weeks following reports about a face-to-face meeting between senior Saudi and Iranian officials in Baghdad, part of an attempt to re-establish relations that broke off in 2016.

Diplomatic sources in Riyadh half-heartedly denied the story, whilst Iran did not issue any official comments but reiterated that it was always open to dialogue.

In fact, the wheels of diplomacy are turning and more meetings are planned in Baghdad for the coming weeks, although no date has been set.

One of the factors that have prompted the current quest for dialogue are the arrival in the White House of Joe Biden, a Democrat, in lieu of hard-liner Republican Donald Trump, who sought to put maximum pressure, with Saudi and Israeli help, on the Islamic Republic.

Another factor is the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, which once again showed the need for the two rivals to work together.

Lastly, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) wants to see an end to the confrontation, which is why Riyadh and the other countries in the region must turn towards a new era of negotiations and de-escalate tensions.

Of course, divisions and opposing interests between the top Sunni power and the most important Shia nation remain, but they must be seen in a perspective of renewed cooperation, formally at least.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself said that he no longer wants the situation with Iran to be difficult, not least because At the end of the day, Iran is a neighbouring country of ours and all that we hope for is to have good relations.

To this end, he added: We are working with our regional and global partners to find solutions to these problems and we hope to overcome them for good relations that benefit everyone.

Such words are far cry from the past. In 2018 the prince compared Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to Adolf Hitler.

The decision to add the ancient Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata into the kingdom school curriculum is part of the orientation to reform the country.

Saudi Arabias first yoga instructor, Nouf Al-Marwaai, posted on social media her sons textbooks which include questions about Buddhism and Hinduism.

Saudi Arabia's new #vision2030 & curriculum will help to create a coexistent, moderate & tolerant generation, she tweeted.

The school curriculum also provides for the mandatory study of English in an attempt to show the outside world a face and society that are increasingly tolerant and open to dialogue.
The ETP, which will track the spot price of Ethereum, will also be listed on the Swiss stock exchange in Zurich

Asset manager WisdomTree has expanded its offering of crypto-based exchange-traded products (ETPs) with the launch of an Ethereum ETP (ETHW) on the Deutsche Borses XETRA market in Frankfurt.

The ETP, which will track the spot price of Ethereum, will also be listed on the Swiss stock exchange in Zurich and follows the launch of a Bitcoin ETP in Frankfurt by WisdomTree two weeks ago.

The group said the ETP will offer the lowest priced physically-backed Ethereum ETP in Europe with a total expense ratio of 0.95%.

The expansion of our digital assets range is a significant milestone and further demonstrates our commitment to delivering innovative digital asset solutions for institutional investors. ETHW is a best-in-class ETP, complementing our market leading bitcoin ETP, and launched at a time when interest in digital assets is at its highest. With this increase in popularity, institutional investors are doing their due diligence on the most liquid cryptocurrencies and we expect the pace of adoption across these to ramp up as the opportunity in digital assets becomes more compelling, WisdomTrees head of capital markets and digital assets Jason Guthrie said in a statement.

In addition to institutional class custody solutions for investors, the ETP wrapper has added new dimensions to the cryptocurrency universe, such as more liquid and transparent trading and more sophisticated market participants entering the arena for these products, he added.

The launch of the Ethereum ETP comes as WisdomTree awaits a review of its application for a US-listed Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard General L.P., the largest equity holder of TEGNA Inc. ("TEGNA" or the "Company") (NYSE: TGNA), today released an independent investigative report done by private investigations firm, Quest Research & Investigations (QRI), outlining multiple first party allegations of discriminatory practices within TEGNA. In conjunction with the report, now live on tomorrowstegna.com, Standard General has issued the following statement:

Dear Fellow TEGNA Shareholders,

After an incident of racial insensitivity involving the CEO of TEGNA, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal, Standard General called for the Board to conduct an independent investigation.

They did not.

In the weeks that followed the article, Standard General received numerous letters from individuals who have worked at TEGNA and suffered from racism and discrimination over a number of years. Simple Google searches unveil issues of discrimination from the top to the bottom  from current board members down to the station-level. We asked TEGNA to conduct an independent investigation into these matters and provide records on what the Company has done to address these issues.

They did not  instead TEGNA offered Standard General access to a limited number of documents conditioned upon Standard General signing an NDA.

TEGNA portrays these DE&I issues as having been resolved  in a letter to shareholders addressing the CEO's racial insensitivity, Howard Elias (Chairman of the TEGNA board) said he was "proud of these steps in which TEGNA has shown leadership" with regards to the Company's DE&I initiatives. Mr. Elias makes this claim despite his own internal investigation consisting of just one independent interview.

The Company's employees, the communities it operates in, and its shareholders deserve better.

In response to this lack of action, Standard General commissioned a leading investigative firm, Quest Research and Investigations (QRI), to conduct an independent study into the various reported allegations of discrimination at TEGNA. We have released it here:

https://tomorrowstegna.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/QRI-Report-Alleged-Discrimination-at-Tegna.pdf

We are research-intensive investors that conduct our own extensive due diligence and do not solely rely on management representations. But, it is a shame that TEGNA's largest active shareholder has had to do the job of its board and management team. We hope this report will enable shareholders to make an informed choice on the future direction of the Company.

Best Regards,

Soo Kim

Founding Partner

Standard General L.P.

Forward-looking Statements

All statements contained in this press release that are not clearly historical in nature or that necessarily depend on future events are "forward-looking statements," which are not guarantees of future performance or results, and the words "anticipate," "believe," "expect," "potential," "could," "opportunity," "estimate," "plan," and similar expressions are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. The projected results and statements contained in this press release that are not historical facts are based on current expectations, speak only as of the date of this press release and involve risks that may cause the actual results to be materially different. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking statements, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as a representation as to future results. Standard General L.P. disclaims any obligation to update the information herein except as may be required by law and reserves the right to change any of its opinions expressed herein at any time as it deems appropriate. Standard General L.P. has not sought or obtained consent from any third party to use any statements or information indicated herein as having been obtained or derived from statements made or published by third parties.

CERTAIN INFORMATION CONCERNING THE PARTICIPANTS

Standard General L.P., together with the other participants named therein, has filed a definitive proxy statement and accompanying WHITE proxy card with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") to be used to solicit votes for the election of its slate of highly-qualified director nominees at the 2021 annual meeting of shareholders of TEGNA Inc., a Delaware corporation (the "Company").

STANDARD GENERAL STRONGLY ADVISES ALL SHAREHOLDERS OF THE COMPANY TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT AND OTHER PROXY MATERIALS BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. SUCH PROXY MATERIALS ARE AVAILABLE AT NO CHARGE ON THE SEC'S WEBSITE AT HTTP://WWW.SEC.GOV. IN ADDITION, THE PARTICIPANTS IN THIS PROXY SOLICITATION WILL PROVIDE COPIES OF THE PROXY STATEMENT WITHOUT CHARGE, UPON REQUEST. REQUESTS FOR COPIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO THE PARTICIPANTS' PROXY SOLICITOR: OKAPI PARTNERS LLC, BRUCE GOLDFARB / JASON ALEXANDER / PAT MCHUGH, 212-297-0720, [email protected]

SOURCE Standard General

Related Links

https://tomorrowstegna.com


East Syracuse, N.Y. -- New Yorks Republicans aim to get behind one gubernatorial candidate in June, an effort to jumpstart fundraising and campaigning to win a seat held by Democrats for the past 15 years.

We need to do something different, GOP state Chairman Nick Langworthy said today. We are a year ahead of our previous timelines.

Usually, parties designate candidates in February and March of the election year, a rule set by the states Board of Elections. Today, Langworthy acknowledged the party must follow that calendar.

But the goal, he said, is to back a single candidate by early summer in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

Were going to come back at that in June and try to coalesce around a single candidate for governor, he said.

The new effort comes as Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat in his third term, is facing an impeachment inquiry and investigations that range from a book deal he secured last year to accusations of unwanted attention and harassment at work. Cuomo has denied any intentional wrongdoing and said he will not resign.

About 10 days ago, state GOP leaders met with Republicans who are interested in running for governor in 2020, a meeting Langworthy characterized as a starter pistol for their campaign.

Those who attended included Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island; Andrew Giuliani and Lewis County Sheriff Mike Carpanelli. Others considered as possible candidates include Rep. Elise Stefanik, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro.

Overall, Langworthy said, about seven Republicans are interested. He said they are now meeting with local Republican leaders, asking for endorsements and support. Zeldin and Carpanelli already have launched campaigns.

Even if the party taps one person this summer, that doesnt preclude other Republicans from mounting primary challenges.

Langworthy was in East Syracuse today to criticize Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Rachel May and Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli, both of Syracuse, for what he called their continued support of Cuomo.

Cuomo must be held accountable, Langworthy said, and he urged Syracuse-area voters to let their local lawmakers know their feelings about the accusations surrounding the governor.

Magnarelli attended an announcement with Cuomo at the New York State Fair on Monday. May has called on Cuomo to resign.

Neither May nor Magnarelli immediately responded to requests for comment.

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.
Josh Duggar, formerly of the TLC reality series 19 Kids and Counting, has been arrested.

The 33-year-old was taken into custody by U.S. Marshals on Thursday, April 29. He has been placed on a federal hold and is being held without bond at the Washington County Detention Center in Arkansas.

KNWA reports that Duggar will appear before a judge on Friday, April 30. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorneys Office told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that more details related to Duggars arrest would be available sometime on Friday.

Josh Duggars booking photo | Washington County Sheriffs Office via Getty Images

RELATED: Anna Duggar Says Josh Duggar is a Diligent Worker After Pregnancy Backlash From Duggar Family Fan

Josh Duggars arrest comes days after Anna Duggars pregnancy news

Duggars arrest comes just days after his wife Anna Duggar revealed she was pregnant with the couples seventh child. The couple married in 2008 and are parents to Mackynzie Renee, 11; Michael James, 9; Marcus Anthony, 7; Meredith Grace, 5; Mason Garrett, 3; and Maryella Hope, 17 months.

Its a GIRL!!!!! Anna Duggar wrote in her April 23 Instagram announcement. We are overjoyed to announce baby seven is on the way and we cant wait to hold her in our arms this fall!

The 19 Kids and Counting personalitys past scandals

Thursdays arrest is not the first time Josh Duggar has generated tabloid headlines.

In November 2019, KNWA reported that Homeland Security agents raided a business associated with Josh Duggar, who is the eldest of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggars 19 children. At the time, a spokesperson for the agency declined to comment on the status of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

In July 2015, TLC canceled 19 Kids and Counting after reports emerged that Duggar had molested multiple girls, including several of his siblings, when he was a teenager. (Other members of his family would go on to appear in the spinoff series Counting On.)

Twelve years ago, as a young teenager I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret, Duggar said in a statement at the time. I hurt others, including my family and close friends. I confessed this to my parents who took several steps to help me address the situation. We spoke with the authorities where I confessed my wrongdoing and my parents arranged for me and those affected by my actions to receive counseling  I sought forgiveness from those I had wronged and asked Christ to forgive me and come into my life.

RELATED: Jinger Duggar Said it Wasnt Popular to Be Her Friend After Josh Duggar Scandal

Later in 2015, Duggar confessed to being unfaithful to his wife and having an account on the cheating website Ashley Madison. Duggar, who had previously been employed by the conservative Family Research Council, called himself the biggest hypocrite ever, in a statement, and said he was ashamed of the double life I have been living.

Showbiz Cheat Sheet has reached out to the Duggar family for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.

This story has been updated.

Check out Showbiz Cheat Sheet on Facebook!


The Eastern Cape and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa currently went through their longest drought in 100 years. The seven-year drought, beginning with the absence of rains in February 2013, wrought disaster on this sheep farming community. The brown locust discovered in this region mainly feeds on grass but will also eat any green plants and has been known to destroy maize fields.

Outbreak of Locust

When the summer rains eventually came in October 2020 the agriculturists had to face the outbreak of locust also. The two provinces are located within the Nama Karoo, a wide, open, arid area that is conquered by low-shrub vegetation.

In 2012, the last outbreak of locust in the region occurred, so the fascinating question is how the insects were able to survive a long drought and could still reproduce the large numbers found in the region after the rain.The answer to the question lies in the fact that the eggs can stay alive for many years in the soil with the embryos growing at distinct rates, responding to the environmental conditions.

Also Read: Experts Say Plague of Locusts in East Africa Linked to Climate Change

The Female Locust and Its Eggs

The brown locust (Locustana pardalina) is a type of locust that adapts to dry environment and is endemic to South Africa. It is a dissimilar species to the swarming locusts seen in other parts of Africa. It has frequent outbreaks in the Nama Karoo region, and these outbreaks can expand into the southern parts of nearby Botswana and Namibia.

The female locust lays about 380 eggs during her life in 6-10 egg pods. The eggs are safeguarded by remaining in the soil and by possessing a foam cap. These drought-resistant eggs will stay in the soil until they get adequate moisture to hatch.

Each egg has an embryo that will ultimately come out as a hopper. As research carried out has shown, the development of the embryo is complicated. In some eggs, there's a delay in the embryo development irrespective of the moisture present, whereas in other eggs the embryo will begin development immediately moisture is available.

Swarms of Locusts Invades Lebanon After Wind Changes Direction

In Beirut, Lebanon - Army helicopters are sprinkling insecticide on agricultural land in northeast Lebanon to assist farmers in fighting swarms of locusts that flew to the country in a "very uncommon" event caused by an alteration in the direction of the wind, United Nations agency said. The agriculture ministry, which is very alert, disclose that on Monday large amount of the locusts had been destroyed.

Abbas Mortada, caretaker agriculture minister said to Reuters, there have been no increased farming losses so far but there are worries that more swarms will be carried to the south of Lebanon due to the wind.

Mortada said: "We managed in limited time to destroy large numbers but some have gotten away and there are large amounts still, mainly in the Hermel area of Marjaheen." The locusts, which threaten crops, are the current inclusion to a long list of challenges encountered by Lebanon, which is combating its worst financial issue in decades.

Related Article: Pheromone Chemical Triggers Locust Swarms and Can Be Used to Prevent Plagues

For more news, updates about locusts and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
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There appears to be no slowing down in the ongoing attacks on police facilities in Nigeria, as some people suspected to be hoodlums on Wednesday attacked yet another police station in Abia State, in the countrys South-east region.

The police confirmed the attack in a statement issued on Thursday in Umuahia, according to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

The police spokesperson in the state, Geoffrey Ogbonna, said the attack occurred at Nkporo Police Station in Ohafia Local Government Area of the state. He blamed it on common criminals whom he said were repelled by the police operatives at the station.

He said the criminals, suspected to have been hibernating around the station, took advantage of the morning rainfall to attack the station.

They threw an explosive at the charge room which caused damage to the counter, chairs and benches therein.

They burnt one unserviceable police motorcycle outside, broke the wind shield of the patrol van and stole two exhibit motorcycles, Mr Ogbonna, a superintendent of police, said in the statement.

No police officer was, however, injured in the attack, he said.

The police, he said, were on the trail of the suspects.

A similar attack was carried out on Uzuakoli Police Station in Bende Local Government Area of the state on April 10 by yet-to-be identified hoodlums.

The attackers were said to have used a dynamite and rocket launcher to burn down the building, including private and official vehicles, tricycles and motorcycles parked at the station.

(NAN)
(Natural News) Doctors in India are being attacked by people who lost loved ones supposedly due to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). These people have lashed out at the doctors and blamed them for the deaths of their relatives as the countrys healthcare system teetered on the verge of collapse.

In one shocking incident that occurred on Tuesday, April 27, in the capital region of Delhi, one family attacked doctors, nurses and other hospital staff at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, located in the citys southeast. This family was enraged after one of their loved ones died of COVID-19 before even getting a bed at the hospitals intensive care unit.

The patient, a 62-year-old woman, was brought to the Indraprastha Apollo early on Tuesday morning. She died a few hours later while waiting in the hospitals emergency area for an ICU bed. (Related: New Delhi records highest ever single-day tally of 357 coronavirus deaths that are most likely caused by dangerous vaccines.)

By 9 a.m., several members of this family gathered outside Indraprastha Apollo. In a video of the incident, the family members could be seen charging at and attacking hospital staff with sticks.

Law enforcement officials who responded to the incident said the fighting resulted in some property damage, as well as minor injuries for several hospital employees.

Pictures have circulated on social media showing the damage done by the altercation. These pictures show blood spatters on the floor, broken glass, damaged walls and broken furniture.

Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals Vice President of Operations and Communications Dr. Karan Thakur said the incident forced the hospital to shut down its emergency department and coronavirus triage area for at least two hours.

Thakur informed local media that seven to eight hospital employees were injured including at least one doctor and several members of the hospitals security staff. None of the injured staff were seriously hurt.

Thakur said several members of the family who assaulted the hospital staff were also injured after they broke the glass in the doors of the hospitals main entrance. They had cuts on their hand, he said.

We understand the family is going through a lot. They have lost someone. We understand how they are feeling. We didnt want to file a complaint, said Thakur. Our only appeal is that, please appreciate we are doing the best. We need everyones support.

Hospital incident not the first time grieving family attacked healthcare workers due to COVID-19

In a statement, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital acknowledged that it received a woman who was in critical condition in the emergency department during the early hours of Tuesday.

Immediate medical attention appropriate to her condition was given by the team, reads the hospitals statement. Given the paucity of beds, the family was advised to shift the patient to another facility with available beds. Unfortunately, the patient died around 8 a.m., post which the patients family members resorted to vandalism, destruction of hospital property and assault on our doctors and staff.

Indraprastha Apollo added that the situation was immediately resolved by the hospitals security staff with the help of the Delhi police.

While the hospital deeply consoles the death of the patient, it is deeply shocked at the behavior of the patients family against doctors and healthcare workers who are providing untiring services amidst the pandemic.

The Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) for South East Delhi said that neither the family of the victim nor the hospital has filed a complaint with regards to the incident. The DCP also said this was the first such incident of a COVID-19 patients family attacking healthcare staff this year within the region.

Outside of Delhi, there have been multiple recorded violent incidents wherein doctors and other healthcare workers were assaulted by people who have lost loved ones supposedly due to COVID-19.

In the city of Pune in the western state of Maharashtra, between 15 to 20 members of one family attacked healthcare workers after a 65-year-old man died of COVID-19. Footage of the incident went viral in India, and one young doctor was assaulted with a metal pipe.

Several days after the incident in Maharashtra and right before the attack at Indraprastha Apollo, the High Court of Delhi ordered the Delhi police to assign detachments to protect hospitals in the region in view of the possible deterioration of the law and order situation in the area. Hospital administrators can simply request the presence of Delhi police in times of need.

You never know how people will react when their near and dear ones are concerned, said a spokesperson for the High Court.

Learn more about the coronavirus situation in India by reading the latest articles at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

IndiaToday.in 1

ZeeNews.India.com

TheHindu.com

IndiaToday.in 2
COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is changed everything in the system of the nation. This tale epidemic has controverted Indias medical and public health infrastructure. Right now the amount of COVID cases is bouncing in millions. The departments of health care around the globe are analyzing for an efficient cure establishment for COVID-19. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India (MOHFW) has raised numerous measures to increase awareness on COVID-19 and the obligatory actions to control the outbreak of the virus. Both central and state governments were initiating protocols to take the control of the outbreak.

These protocols towards the control of COVID cases have increased the activity on social media platforms. Right now social media applications are putting more effort to be a helping hand in this COVID pandemic situation. With the vast reach and live features, social media apps are emerging their role in the essential services, and support on this pandemic era. The troupes in the social media province have made pains on their part to provide significant information to millions for appropriate decision-making. It is very naked that amount of problems raised by this pandemic time is cleared by Social media players which are really appreciable. Here I am briefing about the worlds major leading social media apps which have purveyed towards augmenting the battle against the coronavirus.

During this pandemic era Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter took a major role to reach out to every corner of the country. Facebook and WhatsApp are called the base warehouse to numerous online groups that are tendering sustain to people in this COVID pandemic crisis. These online warriors are bolstering support in several cities and village areas across the country. This wide range of social media groups helped people to outcome their basic needs in this pandemic time. WhatsApp has launched WhatsApp coronavirus Information Hub to collect and deliver live updates. As the second wave of COVID started to destroy the whole nation some Facebook groups enhanced their services and support enormously.

The silent army of housekeepers, porters, security, and kitchen staff working in the background keep the environment clean and safe for everyone. Actually, they are our unsung heroes Dr. Dale Fisher, Chair of the global outbreak alert and response network, WHO

The Humankind Global group is one of the Facebook public groups, which aids in linking people who need anything important with other kind people who are ready to proffer help. The networking circle of this particular group is available across India. This group is an example that shows across India the people who are willing to help each other can reach every corner of the country. The World Maratha Organization, another group on Facebook contributes support connected to health care, and medical help such as the requirement of blood, plasma cells, and hospital support. Basically, this groups network is offered mainly across Maharashtra. This is a private Facebook group means users have to get approved first then only they can access its benefits. Network Capital, a 24 hrs volunteered group in both WhatsApp and Facebook contributing offers mainly to mental health care resources, and COVID-19 collaboration services, also they are providing job support portals with free mentoring time. This is also a private group but its network reaches attained across major metro cities in whole over the world.

The Gurgaon Helpline and Gurgaon Food Freak Group, supply a podium to people to help each other for finding hospital beds, medicine, plasma, doctors, and other essential services on an enduring source. The Food Freak Platform has supported quarantined families by providing homely food. Here also both groups are private in origin and look to deliver help to the people of Gurugram. They also provide a support query system. The Powai Women Networking is a Facebook group led by women who are mostly the populace of Mumbai. The players in this group have offered support to people in other cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, Indore, Jaipur, Lucknow and also Singapore, Bangkok. The Powai Women Networking accords several kinds of support counting medical help (doctor consultation) business support, pregnancy/maternity related, kids welfare, and women issues among others.

Twitter is focusing on awaking people about country-oriented information on the COVID-19 pandemic to its users. Twitter also introduced new features to separate fake and real news which is spreading about COVID. Most sessions provided by Twitter will be Live-in status. Instagram and LinkedIn also provided their role to raise the hand of help in different areas respectively. News and Resources on coronavirus, established by LinkedIn editors which include the latest updates concerning the pandemic helped other social media groups to support common people in certain situations. Mostly InstagramInstagram made people remain in their homes for a long time. For this purpose, they launched new stickers and new features to liberate the users to recover their extra art abilities.

These groups build over time knowledge to deliver any kind of help they can do for the common suffering people with a great ideology, and they are succeeding in it. Apart from these mentioned social media groups, every city have its own social media players to reach out to the common people. Eventually Social media is emerging with the capabilities of Social media players in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amy Schumer looked every inch the doting mom as she enjoyed some quality time with her son Gene, one, on the set of Hulu's upcoming comedy series Life & Beth on Wednesday.

While taking a break from her acting and directing duties, the 39-year-old stand-up comedienne was seen holding hands and strolling around New York City with her adorable toddler.

As the duo soaked up the warm springtime weather, the actress sported a plain grey t-shirt, jeans and her blonde hair in a low ponytail.

Happy: Amy Schumer looked every inch the doting mom as she enjoyed some quality time with her son Gene, one, on the set of Hulu's upcoming comedy series Life & Beth on Wednesday

She completed her laid-back ensemble with a pair of white sneakers with blue shoelaces and a natural no-makeup makeup look.

Meanwhile, her little boy wore navy shorts and Nike sneakers.

At one point, Schumer sat with her baby in her lap on a park bench, before playfully swinging him in the air by his arms.

Sunny afternoon: While taking a break from her directing duties, the 39-year-old stand-up comedian was seen holding hands and strolling around New York City with her adorable tot

Playful: As the duo soaked up the warm springtime weather, the actress sported a plain grey t-shirt, jeans and her blonde hair in a low ponytail

Fun times: As the duo soaked up the warm springtime weather, the actress sported a plain grey t-shirt, jeans and her blonde hair in a low ponytail

Her husband Chris Fischer was present during the visit, but not photographed.

Schumer stars as Beth in the upcoming show, who's 'life looks pretty great on paper,' but takes a turn as she dives into her past, according to the streaming service.

'Impressive to everyone she grew up with. She makes a good living as a wine distributor. Shes in a long-term relationship with an attractive, successful guy and lives in Manhattan. When a sudden incident forces Beth to engage with her past, her life changes forever,' it was shared.

Beauty: She completed her laid-back ensemble with a pair of white sneakers with blue shoelaces and a natural no-makeup makeup look

Doting mom: At one point, Schumer sat with her baby in her lap on a park bench, before playfully swinging him in the air by his arms

New project: Schumer stars as Beth in the upcoming show, who's 'life looks pretty great on paper,' but takes a turn as she dives into her past, according to the streaming service

'Through flashbacks to her teen self, Beth starts to learn how she became who she is and who she wants to become. Well go on her journey toward building a more authentic life. Learning to express herself and living in an intentional way. A trip down memory lane is a strong source of trauma, comedy and moving forward,' the synopsis concluded.

Michael Rapaport recently signed on to play teenaged Beth's father, with Michael Cera also receiving a role in the comedian's new show.

The I Feel Pretty star recently opened up about plans to expand her family with husband.

More to come: When asked about having baby number two by guest host Ashley Graham on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she said: 'Oh God, I hope so. We're trying to figure it out. I mean, you know, it's like there's nothing better. Yeah. What about you?'

When asked about having baby number two by guest host Ashley Graham on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she said: 'Oh God, I hope so. We're trying to figure it out. I mean, you know, it's like there's nothing better. Yeah. What about you?'

Amy previously said she wouldnt be able to carry any future children after the process of welcoming Gene via IVF was 'really tough' on her.

In August, she explained: 'We did IVF and IVF was really tough on me. I don't think I could ever do IVF again. "I decided that I can't be pregnant ever again. We thought about a surrogate, but I think we're going to hold off for right now.'
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Chinese authorities are investigating top Chinese actor Zheng Shuang for tax evasion and a sky-high salary exceeding government-approved limits, the Xinhua news agency said Wednesday. This marks the biggest case of suspected celebrity tax fraud since the downfall of A-lister Fan Bingbing.

The probe comes after screenshots emerged allegedly indicating that she was paid $24.6 million (160 million RMB) for 77 days of filming  $320,000 a day  for her role in the upcoming 50-episode series A Chinese Ghost Story. The project is backed by Tencent and the troubled but still leading production company Beijing Culture, among other firms.

The incredible sum would make Zheng, 29, one of the worlds highest paid actresses, equating to more than Meryl Streep earned in all of 2020. Its a pay-out thats more than double what Gal Gadot earned for Wonder Woman 1984 ($10 million) or Margot Robbie for Birds of Prey ($9-10 million), and more than five times what Joaquin Phoenix was paid for his Oscar-winning performance in Joker ($4.5 million), as reported by Variety.

Last year, the worlds top three highest paid actresses were Sofia Vergara, who made $43 million, Angelina Jolie ($35.5 million), and Gal Gadot ($31.5 million), according to Forbes.

The offending screenshots appeared in a video posted to Weibo by her ex-partner, the celebrity producer Zhang Heng. The pair are already notorious for another viral scandal in January after Zhang accused Zheng of abandoning him and their two children born in the U.S. via surrogate mothers, unwilling amidst a breakup to go through the legal processes that would allow them to leave the States and re-enter China. The issue sparked a nationwide debate over the practice of surrogacy, which is illegal in China.

This time, Zhangs screenshots appeared to reveal discussions between the couple and her parents about the salary negotiations. She was initially offered $23.1 million (RMB150 million) for the job, but tried to bargain up to $27.8 million (RMB180 million).

He also said that she had abandoned her pet dog after it got sick and she didnt want to pay the $300 treatment fee.

Chinas top media regulatory body decreed in 2018 that most actors should receive salaries equivalent to no more than 40% of production costs for film and TV work, and that lead actors could be paid a maximum of 70% of the total budget. A later statement from production firms and streamers declared that actors should not be paid more than $7.7 million (RMB50 million) per production  less than a third of Zhengs alleged haul.

She is now under investigation by the Shanghai Municipal Tax Bureau and the Beijing Municipal Radio and TV Bureau, which is also looking anew into the broader issue of controlling actor salaries.

Zhang alleged that his former partner was guilty of using yin-yang contracts  duplicate contracts where a lower sum is reported on the one sent to the tax bureau and the rest of the payment appears on another.

Zheng signed one contract indicating her pay would be just under the threshold at $7.3 million (RMB48 million), and another sending the rest of the fee to a company that appears to be connected to her mother, he said.

In 2018, Fan Bingbing was found guilty of using the same system of yin-yang contracts. She was fined more than $136 million (RMB883 million) in penalties and back taxes and disappeared from public view for months.

Even after groveling apologies, a proper comeback for the star appears unlikely, given Beijings renewed focus on the importance of celebrity morality and calls for lifetime bans for entertainers found breaking the law. Fans completed projects were never released save one, which went straight to streaming and edited her out of every shot.

Government data last year estimated that 600 million people in China earn a monthly income of $154 (RMB1,000). Zheng would make their annual salary of RMB12,000 ($1,851) in three minutes, the South China Morning Post pointed out.

The news of her potential haul sparked enormous criticism and widespread discussion income disparity and inequality on the Chinese web.

One social media user griped that with an ordinary monthly salary of $770 (RMB5,000), someone would have to start earning money some 2,000 years ago during the Eastern Han Dynasty to match Zhengs fee.

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YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Deputy Director of the National Security Service of Armenia Stepan Melkonyan assures that there is no talk about the Meghri corridor and cannot be.

They can say a lot, but there is no talk about corridor and cannot be, the NSS deputy director told reporters in the Parliament, commenting on the view that Azerbaijan is talking about the Meghri corridor.

He said the working group led by the deputy prime ministers of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan is observing the possible options of logistics and roads. There cannot be a talk on any corridor. There can be railway roads for transit cargo, but no talk connected with corridors, the NSS deputy chief said.

Armenia has repeatedly announced that there is no term corridor in the November 9, 2020, statement signed by the leaders of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan aimed at stopping the war in Artsakh. Point 9 of that statement relates to the unblocking of all economic and transportation communications in the region.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
[April 29, 2021] Port Houston Posts Largest Monthly Container Volume

The Port Commission of the Port of Houston Authority met virtually in regular session on Tuesday for its April meeting. Chairman Ric Campo reflected on the priorities of Port Houston's future, as he emphasized its commitment to continued investment in infrastructure to keep growing and sustaining 1.35 million Texan jobs, and providing opportunities to thrive for small and minority and women-owned businesses (MWBE). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005765/en/ Activity at Port Houston's Bayport Container Terminal. (Photo: Business Wire) The meeting opened with encouragement and support from Harris County officials and the City of Houston, including Harris County Commissioners Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. These officials commended the Port Commission for improving and strengthening opportunities for minorities and women-owned companies to access Port Houston business, through its new MWBE policy, an item on the Port Commission's agenda. Later in the meeting, the Port Commission approved the Minority- and Woman-Owned Business Enterprise Development Policy, accompanied by the Amended and Restated Small Business Development Policy. The officials also expressed supportof Port Houston's efforts to achieve continued improvement of the Houston Ship Channel through the Project 11 deepening and widening project, keeping Port Houston competitive and generating jobs and economic impact for the region and the state.



Notably, the Commission awarded the first Project 11 construction contract at the meeting - and more than half of the total $24 million in contracts approved at the meeting supported Project 11 efforts. "Each step forward in this project represents the future prosperity of over 3.2 million Americans who rely on this channel for their livelihoods, and the future generations who will benefit from these investments for decades to come," Chairman Campo said, concerning this significant milestone.

In his operational update, Executive Director Roger Guenther announced that container volume in March was the highest ever. Port Houston handled 297,397 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in the last month, a 20% gain over March of last year. Guenther also announced the production of a special video offering a unique "behind the scenes" look at what makes Port Houston work. "Navigating the Future" includes Guenther, Chairman Campo, and others as they discuss port activity, the economic outlook, infrastructure, environmental and MWBE initiatives, and much more. The free video will be available Thurs. April 29 starting at 11:00 a.m. (CST) at https://www.youtube.com/user/PortHoustonAuthority The next Port Commission meeting is scheduled for May 25. About Port Houston For more than 100 years, Port Houston has owned and operated the public wharves and terminals along the Houston Ship Channel, including the area's largest breakbulk facility and two of the most efficient and fastest-growing container terminals in the country. Port Houston is the advocate and a strategic leader for the Channel. The Houston Ship Channel complex and its more than 200 public and private terminals, collectively known as the Port of Houston, is the nation's largest port for waterborne tonnage and an essential economic engine for the Houston region, the state of Texas, and the U.S. The Port of Houston supports the creation of nearly 1.35 million jobs in Texas and 3.2 million jobs nationwide, and economic activity totaling $339 billion in Texas - 20.6 percent of Texas' total gross domestic product (GDP) - and $801.9 billion in economic impact across the nation. For more information, visit the website at www.PortHouston.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005765/en/

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Watertown, N.Y.  Troopers have identified the two people shot and killed Wednesday afternoon by a coworker at a Watertown real estate agency.

Maxine M. Quigg, 50, of Wellesley Island, and Terence M. OBrien, 53, of Black River, were reported shot and killed at about 2 p.m. at 145 Clinton St., according to state police. The two victims worked for the Bridgeview Real Estate Agency located at that address, troopers said.

Barry K. Stewart, 55, of Carthage was identified as the shooter, and police began searching for him after the shooting, troopers said. Stewart also worked at the Bridgeview Real Estate Agency, troopers said.

Stewart was later seen in a 2020 Ford F150 pickup truck by a state police K9 unit on Route 11B in the town of Dickinson in Franklin County, troopers said. That was two hours northeast of Watertown.

Troopers attempted to pull over Stewart, but he drove off the road, troopers said. He was later found in his truck with a self-inflicted gun shot wound, trooper said. Stewart was pronounced dead at a hospital, troopers said.

Authorities have not yet revealed the specifics of the shooting in Watertown, but troopers said the investigation is ongoing.

Staff writer James McClendon covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, a story idea, a question or a comment? Reach him at 914-204-2815 or jmcclendon@syracuse.com.
Huntington, WV (25701)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Thunder possible. Low 68F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Thunder possible. Low 68F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Democracy is the best option, believe an increasing number of people in Slovakia

Support for non-democratic solutions and for EU exit has decreased in the Slovak population compared to 2016.

Exit from the EU is supported by 28.9 percent now compared to 34.8 in 2016. (Source: SME)

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The belief that the quality of democracy has a positive impact on peoples living standards is more widespread among Slovakias inhabitants now than it was five years ago. The number of those who desire Slovakia's exit from the EU has decreased.

Related article Basternak case contributed to deterioration of democracy Read more

That is one of the key findings of a representative study conducted at the beginning of April 2021 on a sample of 1001 respondents by the INEKO (Institute for Economic and Social Reforms) non-governmental think tank in cooperation with the Focus polling agency.

A study using the same questions aimed at mapping the perception of the quality of Slovak democracy was conducted in 2016, allowing for the tracking of public opinion and its development over the past five years regarding perceptions of democracy in Slovakia, trends between the quality of democracy and quality of life, and problems facing democracy along with their possible solutions.

One positive is that in the past five years, the portion of people who trust in democracy and prefer democratic changes has increased significantly, the authors of the study wrote.

Democracy perceived as the best option

The INEKO study detected an uptick in support of strengthening and monitoring democracy, which despite being imperfect continues to be seen as the best option available. The people of Slovakia support greater decentralisation and shifting of powers to municipalities and cities.

Related article Every school should be a school of democracy. Slovakia lags behind Read more

The most frequently agreed upon change for democracy in Slovakia is greater involvement of decent people in the administration of public affairs (76.6 percent of respondents agreed in 2021, compared to 66.2 percent in 2016). There is also support for the strengthening of police investigators, persecutors, the judiciary, controlling and regulatory bodies, all to reduce the risk of power being abused (75.3 percent in 2021 compared to 65.2 percent in 2016).

While in 2016, just over half of the respondents indicated they believe in the need to foster and improve democracy, which is not perfect, but there is no better option for us," in the recent poll the share increased to 64.9 percent.

Worse news coming from the survey was that a greater number of people reported dissatisfaction with democracy in 2021 (45.6 percent this year versus 39.8 percent in 2016). Satisfaction with democracy was reported in 29.3 percent in 2021 compared to 25.9 percent in 2016. The remaining respondents consider Slovak democracy as neither good nor bad (24.4 percent in 2021 and 33.3 percent in 2016).

Dissatisfaction with democracy was mainly reported from voters of opposition parties, namely Hlas, Smer, the far-right LSNS, Aliancia and Republika.

The highest satisfaction with democracy was reported by voters of parties like Za ludi, OLaNO, SaS, and in some instances even Sme Rodina and Progressive Slovakia.

Less support for undemocratic solutions

Over the past five years the quality of democracy has decreased, according to 49.9 percent of respondents (compared to 43.1 percent in 2016). Only 20.8 percent of respondents reported that democracy has increased (as opposed to 17.8 percent in 2016). According to the remaining respondents (27.6 percent in 2021 and 36.4 in 2016) democracy hadnt changed for better or worse.

Related article Slovaks more of bear huggers Read more

Among the biggest complaints about democracy were those that politicians dont have public interest and seem to want to line their own pockets or those of their befriended businesspeople, the uneconomic use of state resources, inequality before the law and unjust wealth divides between people.

Respondents also indicated a decrease in undemocratic tendencies among the public. Opinions about dissolving the parliament, a return to the socialist system from before 1989, exit from the EU (supported by 28.9 percent now compared to 34.8 in 2016), or the popularity of a "strong leader" with less checks and balances all lost popularity. People who exhibited more antidemocratic tendencies also reported being voters of parties like Smer, LSNS, and Hlas or abstaining from elections.

29. Apr 2021 at 11:46 | Compiled by Spectator staff
Axis Bank on Thursday announced that the board has approved the re-appointment of Amitabh Chaudhry as MD & CEO of the bank for a further period of three years.

The private bank in an exchange filing before market hours today said, as recommended by the Nomination & Remuneration Committee of Directors, the bank's board on 28 April 2021, considered and approved the proposal relating to re-appointment of Amitabh Chaudhry as the managing director & CEO of the bank, for a further period of 3 years, with effect from 1 January 2022 up to 31 December 2024.

The re-appointment is subject to the approval of the Reserve Bank of India and the shareholders of the bank.

Amitabh Chaudhry, is an Engineer from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and Post Graduate in Business Management from IIM, Ahmedabad. He joined Axis Bank in January 2019.

Shares of Axis Bank were trading 1.58% higher at Rs 719 on BSE.

Axis Bank offers the entire spectrum of financial services to customer segments covering large and mid-corporates, MSME, agriculture and retail businesses. As on 31st March 2021, the private bank had a network of 4,594 domestic branches and extension counters situated in 2,596 centres.

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Four educators  two who are nursing infants and two with older children without child care that aligns with their mothers teaching schedules  spoke at a CTU-hosted news conference Thursday. They said that when the union was negotiating a return to in-person instruction with Chicago Public Schools, they had been assured they would be granted accommodation to remain at least partially remote to nurse, a claim the district refutes. The union initially also had asked that teachers also be provided a schedule that would allow them to pick up their children from care providers without having to take unpaid personal time off work.
Pope Francis sends a telegram to mark the memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, patroness of Italy and co-patroness of Europe, which is celebrated on 29 April.

By Vatican News staff writer

Pope Francis sent a message on Thursday for the liturgical memorial of St. Catherine of Siena, patroness of Italy and co-patroness of Europe, commemorated on 29 April.

St. Catherine of Siena was a member of the Dominican Third Order. She died on 29 April 1380, was canonized in 1461 by Pope Pius II, and was named a doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970. She is particularly remembered for her role in helping the return of the papacy from Avignon, France, back to Rome, and for her continuous prayers for the restoration of the unity of the Church.

In the telegram sent on his behalf by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and addressed to Cardinal Augusto Paolo Lojudice, of Siena-Colle di Val dElsa-Montalcino, the Holy Father extended his greeting to the authorities, the faithful and all present for the celebrations.

He joined with them in thanking the Lord for gifting the Church and humanity such a great figure of a woman and a believer who calls the Church and people of good will to evangelical values.

Pope Francis went on to express hope that, in the context of the 560th anniversary of St. Catherines canonization, her example will foster in everyone, a joyful and fervent witness to faith and charity in order to promote a civilization of love.

Finally, the Pope invoked heavenly favors on everyone who takes part in the celebrations and imparted his apostolic blessing upon all the faithful.
Notorious criminal Patrick McKenna was pronounced dead on April 19 at Spring Valley Hospital after surgery and a string of heart attacks

A murderer on death row who was known as 'the most dangerous criminal in Nevada' has died aged 74.

Patrick McKenna, the longest-serving prisoner on death row in the state, faced execution after killing his cellmate in Clark County jail in 1979.

McKenna was pronounced dead on April 19 at Spring Valley Hospital after surgery and a string of heart attacks, according to the Last Vegas Review Journal.

The notorious criminal spent almost all his adult life in prison. In addition to first-degree murder, he had also been convicted of rape, kidnapping and sexual assault.

McKenna, then 32, choked 20-year-old prisoner Jack Nobles to death after a dispute between the two over a chess game in 1979.

Witnesses claimed that McKenna, who had been drinking bootleg prison liquor at the time, had also demanded that Nobles perform a sexual act on him during a tense confrontation.

McKenna (picture in 1996) choked 20-year-old prisoner Jack Nobles to death after a dispute between the two over a chess game in 1979

However, Nobles was found dead the next morning and McKenna was sentenced to death the following year in 1980.

McKenna's death sentence was overturned twice on appeal, but was later upheld on the third attempt.

He was scheduled to be executed on December 9, 1996, but eventually remained on death row until his eventual passing this year.

In an 1989 interview, McKenna said he did not want the state to kill him, adding: 'I will kill myself before I permit them to do that to me.

'I wont give them that ritual trip. To me, that would be the final indignity.'

The killer had a long and murky criminal history starting when he was just 17.

McKenna was taken in by a friend during a three-year stint out of prison from 1976 and 1979.

While living with the two female friends he brandished a shotgun, used bed sheets to fashion nooses for the women and raped them for hours.

He threatened the women, warning that he would return and kill them if they went to the police.

He was later sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 75 years in prison.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson had previously called him the 'most infamous killer on Nevada's death row', adding: 'In my opinion, he didn't get what he deserved.'

McKenna (1996) was pronounced dead on April 19 at Spring Valley Hospital after surgery and a series of heart attacks

Patrick McKenna: A timeline of his murky criminal history 1946 : Patrick McKenna is born in Leadville, Colorado and later moves to Nevada as a child

: Patrick McKenna is born in Leadville, Colorado and later moves to Nevada as a child 1960 : Spends time in juvenile prison after stabbing a man

: Spends time in juvenile prison after stabbing a man 1964 : Aged 17, he and a friend receive a 20-year prison sentence for raping a woman and beating her with a stick near Sunrise Mountain

: Aged 17, he and a friend receive a 20-year prison sentence for raping a woman and beating her with a stick near Sunrise Mountain 1967 : McKenna escapes from prison after taking a guard hostage

: McKenna escapes from prison after taking a guard hostage 1973 : During another escape attempt he stabs a prison guard in the belly

: During another escape attempt he stabs a prison guard in the belly 1978 : After meeting two women in a seedy Las Vegas motel, he tied sheets around their necks and raped them

: After meeting two women in a seedy Las Vegas motel, he tied sheets around their necks and raped them 1979 : Kills Jack Nobles allegedly over lost chess game. Later on that year, McKenna and other inmates obtain a gun and carry out a jail takeover that lasts two days. The incident ended in a shootout that left two prisoners dead Advertisement

Speaking after his death, his brother Ken McKenna, a retired lawyer, said that his brother had a change of character after his mother sent him to the Spring Mountain Youth Camp on Mount Charleston.

He claimed that his brother encountered people who were 'vicious, vindictive and basically sociopaths who beat and tortured the kids' at the camp.

Ken McKenna added: 'It was a complete change in his personality. When he came back from Spring Mountain, he wasn't there anymore. Pat didn't exist in that body anymore. He was cold.

'He was evasive. He committed all those crimes. Nobody's trying to whitewash that. He did terrible, bad things. But the reality is it would never have happened.'

Born in August 1946 in Leadville, Colorado, McKenna moved to Nevada as a child.

His father, who later killed himself, was an alcoholic who allegedly beat McKenna, his brother Ken and their mother.

Aged just 14, McKenna ended up in juvenile prison after stabbing a man.

At age 20, he faced a 20-year prison sentence after he was convicted of raping and beating a woman near Sunrise Mountain in Clark County.

McKenna managed to escape from prison in 1966 after prison officials discovered that bars in his cell had been cut.

In 1973, he stabbed a correctional officer with an 11-inch homemade knife.

Nobles and another inmate obtained a gun and took hostages during a jail takeover in 1979. Two of his accomplices later died from gunshot wounds.
(Natural News) A world-renowned microbiologist has warned that that the new Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines are contributing to the decimation of the worlds population.

In an exclusive interview with The New American this month, German microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi explained how coronavirus vaccines affect the body at the cellular level. He warned that these vaccines are set to cause a global catastrophe and decimate the human population.

Vaccines are either useless or dangerous

During the interview, Bhakdi emphasized the dangers associated with the new vaccines. For one, the vaccines cannot actually do what manufacturers say they can. According to Bhakdi, it is practically impossible to prevent infection, even after vaccination.

In fact, it is naive to think getting vaccinated can prevent infection. Thats because any antibodies the body may produce following vaccination would be too minuscule to do anything significant. (Related: Researchers confirm antibodies from the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine cause blood clots.)

Bhakdi also stressed the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is not a killer virus, contrary to popular belief. Thats because up to five people only will die of COVID-19 for every 10,000 people infected. For a vaccine to be deemed efficient, it has to guarantee that it will bring that number down further. But that would be incredibly difficult to show.

No clinical trial can be designed to show this, said Bhakdi. To do so, scientists would have to vaccinate millions, if not billions of people. They would then have to count how many died among the vaccinated and the unvaccinated group and compare data from the two. This has never been shown.

Plus, it is near-impossible for people under 70 years and without a preexisting condition to die of COVID-19. If it were a matter of preventing coughs or the cold, then the efficacy of the vaccines wouldnt be such a controversial topic. But this is a matter of protecting against severe illness and death.

I dont want a vaccine that may kill me [but] that may protect me from getting a cold, said Bhakdi.

He also argued that vaccine manufacturers do not have sufficient data on the efficacy of their vaccines on older people with preexisting conditions. Such testing would likely lead to a string of deaths. Therefore, the claim that the new COVID-19 vaccines are efficacious is a lie, said Bhakdi. It is so unethical its criminal.

In a nutshell, the new vaccines are useless for younger adults because the antibodies produced are insignificant and useless for older adults due to lack of testing and data.

Furthermore, Bhakdi emphasized that blood clots as a side effect of vaccination should not be taken lightly because they are potentially fatal. If clotting factors are used up because of the vaccine, the patient could suffer internal bleeding. In severe cases, internal bleeding is fatal even with proper treatment.

Plus, vaccinating younger adults may do more harm than good. Younger adults have stronger immune systems. The vaccine trains immune cells to attack the virus. This training excites immune cells, causing them to be much more aggressive once the actual virus enters the body. As a result, the person might develop more severe symptoms than if he or she hadnt been vaccinated.

This is all leading up to the decimation of the entire population, added Bhakdi. In order to protect ourselves and the next generation, we must decline the vaccines, he concluded. More health experts and medical professionals should also call out the inefficacy of the new vaccines and the harm they may bring.

Bhakdi also criticizes PCR testing

Bhakdi, who studied medicine at several German universities, also stated that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test used to detect a COVID-19 infection is highly fallible. But despite this, health authorities continue to use it as their main diagnostic criteria for COVID-19. This, Bhakdi said, is where the problem lies.

Speaking to the magazines senior editor, Alex Newman, Bhakdi explained that PCR tests can detect active viral particles and dead fragments of the virus. But the test has not been designed to be able to tell active particles from dead fragments.

In other words, a person with COVID-19 and a person who has dead fragments of SARS-CoV-2 will have positive PCR test results. Both will be tagged as COVID-19 patients and subjected to health protocols.

In a nutshell, the PCR test allows health authorities to take every positive result as a confirmed COVID-19 case. To highlight how troubling this is, Bhakdi uses a breathalyzer test as an example.

A person who has been drinking a bottle of vodka would no doubt fail the test and have their license revoked. A person who drank only a glass of vodka hours prior might still pass under normal circumstances. Imagine if police officers revoked a persons license because they detected insignificant amounts of alcohol in the persons system, said Bhakdi. Thats how health authorities are using the PCR test.

Bhakdi also explained that the PCR test cannot distinguish between active viral particles and dead fragments of the virus because it was never calibrated to do so. This is because the laboratory that developed the PCR test never had samples of SARS-CoV-2, to begin with.

Therefore, its highly likely that a COVID-19 diagnosis based on the results of a PCR test is false. Bhakdi, who is of German and Thai descent but was born in the United States, expressed his disbelief at how American physicians are not calling out this faulty system, adding that they were losing their medicine.

Go to Vaccines.news to learn more about the health risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccines.

Sources include:

RumourMillNews.com

Nature.com
Director-General of ASIO, Mike Burgess appears before a Senate inquiry at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on April 29, 2021. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

Terrorist Attack Likely in Next 12 Months: Australian Intelligence Chief

Australias domestic intelligence chief has said he believes that a terrorist attack on Australian soil is likely within the next year.

The comments came during a parliamentary inquiry, where the Australian Federal Police chief called the internet a salad bar of hate responsible for amplifying extremist messaging.

Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), said Sunni-based violent extremism remained the biggest concern for agencies based on caseload. But there was also a marked increase in nationalist or supremacist-related violence.

There is likely to be a terrorist attack in the next 12 months, Burgess told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security during an inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia.

It can come from either ideology and therefore, for me doesnt really matter because theyre both capable of conducting acts of violence, and thats where we focus, he added.

The director-general said Sunni-based violence, or Islamic extremism, occurred mostly in the cities, with foreign fighters still trying to return to Australia.

Representatives of the Muslim community lay flowers at a floral memorial at the scene of a dramatic siege by Islamic extremist Man Haron Monis which left two hostages dead (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Racist, supremacist groups were now on the rise accounting for 40 percent of the agencys workload, increasing from one-third in the previous year.

Some individuals were combining extreme nationalist ideologies with racist ideologies, including anti-Indigenous, anti-Asian or anti-Semitic beliefs.

Scott Lee, the assistant commissioner for counterterrorism, noted that Australians, as young as 13, were being drawn into the groups.

Theyre engaging online in bedrooms, he said.

When we speak to their parents, theyve got no visibility at all on what theyre doing and certainly, depending on their background, and theyre nowhere near as digitally literate as their children.

Ian McCartney, the deputy commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), warned that law enforcement could not monitor all online radicalisation activities.

I have a colleague of mine who describes the internet as a salad bar of hate in terms of what, even at a very young age, a person can access on the Internet, he told the committee.

The online environment, I think, is very much a force-multiplier for extremism, he said.

The AFP is also pushing for the criminalisation of possessing or sharing propaganda, including flags and insignia, that could inspire extremist violence.

In March, the government listed the neo-Nazi Sonnenkrieg Division as a terrorist group, joining the likes of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD) is the British chapter of the U.S.-based Atomwaffen Division (AWD).

The AWD seeks to create a National Socialist government through violent white revolution and believes that a race war is inevitable, according to the Counter Extremism Project.
The anaerobic fungus Anaeroromyces robustus growing on reed canary grass. Credit: Vaithiyalingam Shutthanandan, PNNL/EMSL

Anaerobic fungi, which die in the presence of oxygen, dwell in herbivore guts and help them digest their last leafy meal. In their evolutionary history, these fungi branched off early from aerobic fungi, which can breathe oxygenjust like we do. Oxygen is a rich source of energy, and because anaerobic fungi can't harness it, scientists long held that these fungi don't have the energy to make complex compounds called natural products. Yet, combing through the genomes of four anaerobic fungal species has revealed, for the first time, that this group is unexpectedly powerful: they can whip up dozens of complex natural products, including new ones.

In the past, natural products have been an important source of antibiotics. Indeed, these anaerobic fungi may be using these compounds for self-defense. But the compounds may also be involved in how the fungi metabolize plant biomass, which could inform how scientists can more easily convert plants into carbon-neutral biofuels. What's more, many natural products have potential to be used as precursors for polymers and commodity chemicals, as well as drop-in biofuels. This work shows that anaerobic fungi might be a new source of novel compounds to help bolster the bioeconomy.

A team led by Michelle O'Malley, a chemical engineer at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, collected the droppings of a sheep and a goat at the Santa Barbara Zoo, and those of a horse in Massachusetts, in their hunt for anaerobic fungi. By growing extracts without oxygen in ruminant fluidwhich smells terrible they were able to isolate four strains: Anaeromyces robustus, Caecomyces churrovis, Neocallimastix californiae, and Piromyces finnis. In work reported in 2017, the fungal genomes were sequenced by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Berkeley Lab. More recently, O'Malley's team has begun to understand the outsized role the fungi play in digesting plant material in herbivore guts.

A deeper dive into the genomes and follow-up experiments, recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has now revealed that the fungi also produce a number of natural products.

In the lab, O'Malley and her teamnotably, first author Candice Swiftverified that the fungi expressed biosynthetic gene clusters, which are "building blocks" of natural products. The team then confirmed that these expressed genes translated into expected proteins. That work was done in collaboration with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE Office of Science user facility. The team's research at both the JGI and EMSL was enabled by the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) initiative, which allows researchers to more easily integrate the expertise and capabilities of more than one DOE Office of Science National User Facilities, with the stroke of a single proposal.

The next step for the team was to try to identify what natural products the fungi were making. So, Trent Northen, head of the JGI Metabolomics Technology Group, with scientists Ben Bowen and Katherine Louie conducted mass spectrometry experiments (or analyses) to break up the compounds and to puzzle out their structures. Their results indicate that anaerobic fungi synthesize molecules that are sources of new chemical diversity; the team identified what looked to be three groups of novel compounds, as well as (potentially) one previously known natural product: baumin. Baumin is an antioxidant, previously known to be made only by aerobic fungi.

In order to identify more of the fungal natural products, O'Malley and her team plan to use genetic tools to boost production and isolate the compounds. Although what compounds they make is still largely a mystery, anaerobic fungi clearly have unexpected chemical potential.

More information: Candice L. Swift et al. Anaerobic gut fungi are an untapped reservoir of natural products, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Candice L. Swift et al. Anaerobic gut fungi are an untapped reservoir of natural products,(2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2019855118
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2021 / Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited (the "Company") (HKEx:338)(SSE:600688)(NYSE:SHI) announced today that its Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2020, has been posted to the Company's website at http://www.spc-ir.com.hk/eng/report.asp. The soft copy of the Company's annual report on Form 20-F could also be downloaded through its website.

The Company will deliver within a reasonable time after request a hard copy of its 2020 annual report on Form 20-F, including its complete audited consolidated financial statements, free of charge, to any shareholder upon request.

To request a hard copy of the annual report, please write to:

Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited

48 Jinyi Road, Jinshan District, Shanghai, PRC

Postal Code: 200540

Attention to: the Secretariat to the Board of Directors

SOURCE Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited

Related Links

http://www.spc-ir.com.hk/eng/report.asp

Investor and Media Enquiries:

PRChina Limited

Mr. Jack Liu / Alice Yip

Tel: (852) 2522 1838 / (852) 2522 1368

Email: zyliu@prchina.com.hk /ayip@prchina.com.hk

File: Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited Files 2020 Annual Report on Form 20-F

29/04/2021 Dissemination of a Marketing Press Release, transmitted by EQS Group.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Media archive at www.todayir.com

SOURCE: SINOPEC Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd.





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The image of rows of chairs and desks facing a teacher at a blackboard has been a reality for decades. However, research reveals that this way of organizing the classroom furniture in schools is not the best way for favouring the learning process. Especially if the needs of 21st-century students are taken into account, who, according to the OECD, require a social environment that fosters autonomy, flexibility, decision-making capacity and the connection of knowledge by individual students or through teamwork.

It is also the opinion of 6 out of every 10 teachers that changing the design of the classroom is key to improving learning. This was the result of a recent study conducted by researchers of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat de Vic (UVic) and Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB), in which 847 preschool, primary and secondary school teachers from 40 schools participated. "We assume that's what the spaces should be like without giving it much thought or without connecting what we're innovating in terms of methodology with the place in which we're going to put that into practice," said Guillermo Bautista, member of the Smart Classroom Project research group of the UOC and principal investigator in this study. That's why we need to make the Smart Learning Space a reality: "a space that meets any learning need or proposal, that is flexible and not zoned, in which physical and psychological well-being are prioritized as the foundations upon which the learning activity can take place, in which the pupils play a proactive and autonomous role," said Bautista.

Several studies have already acknowledged the benefits of a suitably-designed classroom. This was one of the reasons why the Consorci d'Educacio de Barcelona started replacing the furniture in 487 classrooms a few weeks ago, whilst also reorganizing the spaces to obtain motivating environments that encourage discovery. And, as the authors of the UOC-led study point out, it's that the skills and learning needs of today's pupils not only oblige us to rethink our teaching practices or the inclusion of digital resources, they also require changes in the learning spaces in general.

Guillermo Bautista demonstrates this with an example: as he explains, science tells us that we learn better and more by collaborating, and therefore the space must favour this collaboration and interaction, also taking into account what research tells us about collaborative learning. If we organize the activity with groups of four students based on a challenge or a project, it would be logical that the space should be suitable to enable the group to collaborate and also enable a certain amount of autonomy for using the resources it needs, for moving, looking around, experimenting, and self-organizing, etc. "This means that not all of the groups will be doing the same thing at the same time, and the same resources will not be necessary for everyone. The activity in the classroom is diverse and the space must constantly respond to this organizational diversity of use, resources, movements," he explained.

However, the strong assumption upheld for decades that the classroom is as it is, has resulted in us proposing few changes. And when these are finally being proposed, the direction of these changes is not easy to decide upon, "and that is why our research is necessary, to help establish criteria so that the space is changed with guarantees," he said.

Changes in the design of secondary school classrooms also

Currently, most teachers negatively rate the organization of the environment in their classroom. This is one of the findings of the study, whereby low or moderate scores were obtained regarding the suitability of current classrooms to serve as comprehensive learning spaces. But differences exist between the different levels of education, as the design of preschool and primary education learning spaces is generally more flexible, collaborative and personal, affirm the authors of the study, who point to a possible reason for this scenario. "It is precisely in the infant and primary stages where teaching trends such as those applied since the early 20th century (in which the spaces, their layout, furniture, etc. were already linked to clear educational meanings) have been most present and usually more visible," said Angelina Sanchez-Marti, researcher of the Smart Classroom Project and Serra Hunter professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

On the other hand, the traditional layout of the spaces is much more established among secondary school centres and teachers. That's why the authors of the study positively value the fact that during the study it was confirmed that there are teachers and centres from this stage of education who are aware that their spaces do not correspond with the methodologies that they want to implement. "The Smart Spaces that we have implemented as part of the research are co-designed, applying a thoroughness, rigorousness, and seeking to meet the highest objectives and results for learning proposed by each centre. And these spaces are needed in all of the stages," said Bautista.

Another result to highlight is that the teachers are especially critical when it comes to appraising the integration of technology in the classrooms. But in the opinion of the authors of the study, this data is not surprising as "it is precisely the new technologies that are threatening the traditional times and spaces, and therefore demand great flexibility and a constant adaptation to change, as well as a reformulation of the learning spaces", said Sanchez-Marti. She added that the possibilities that technological integration offers in terms of creating new ways to relate and learn "completely clashes with the very standardized design derived from the idea that schools must be based on classrooms per se, when this does not necessarily have to be the case."

###

This research by the UOC supports Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 4, on Quality Education

Reference article:

Bautista Perez, G., Rubio Hurtado, M.J. & Sanchez-Marti, A. Towards smart learning spaces in Catalan schools: teachers' perceptions of change. Learning Environ Res (2021). https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s10984-021-09357-y

This study has been financed by the RecerCaixa Smart Classroom project. Codesign of innovative learning environments. Investigating new classroom models.

UOC R&I

The UOC's research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century, by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health. Over 500 researchers and 51 research groups work among the University's seven faculties and two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).

The United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and open knowledge serve as strategic pillars for the UOC's teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu. #UOC25years
ConocoPhillips sent a message to its stockholders and the energy sector with its acquisition of Concho Resources last year.

On Tuesday, the message ConocoPhillips sent was to the Midland community, and it was we have your back.

ConocoPhillips announced $2.5 million in charitable grants and sponsorships across the region. Of that, $1.7 million was presented to more than 50 organizations in the Midland area. Areas focused on by the grants range from education, health and safety, the arts, civic and social services to disaster relief.

It was a very Concho-esque move. For years, Concho was the gold standard when it came to corporate philanthropy in Midland. After all, Concho was Midland born, Midland proud.

Even in its final months before the announced acquisition, Conchos landmark giving included program-creating donations to the citys Centennial Park and Midland Colleges engineering academy.

That giving will continue as will the support for Hillcrest School, Bynum School and the West Texas Food Bank, among others.

In addition to creating value for shareholders, one of the most important parts of this transaction for us was the benefit to local communities where we operate, stated Lower 48 Executive Vice President Tim Leach in Mella McEwens report. Were very pleased with the enhanced competitive position this brings to Midland. ConocoPhillips is committed to investing in and enhancing the places where we live and work.

Leach always understood the value of giving back to Midland. He always was among the first to show support to worthwhile community-building initiatives. What was good for Midland was good for Concho. ConocoPhillips, it appears, will continue to offer actions that match Leachs words.

The company also announced Tuesday it will double its initial investment in the Permian Strategic Partnership by becoming a Tier-1 member company to support the PSPs mission of improving the quality of life for Permian Basin residents.

The fact is those reading this opinion article have heard this newspaper talk apprehensively about the recent round of mergers and acquisitions. Bigger hasnt necessarily been better when it comes to giving back in Midland. We believed Midland was better because of the competitive philanthropy that happened with smaller fish wanting to show nonprofits they could outperform other companies. With fewer players, there is less competition.

Also, bigger companies, especially those based elsewhere, havent always put Midland first. ConocoPhillips gave Midland one less reason to worry or 2.5 million less reasons, depending on your point of view.

It has been interesting to watch the latest resurgence in positioning in Midland and across the basin. Midlanders have seen an explosion of headquarters development, land acquisition and billion-dollar mergers. All of us should be equally as excited to see whats next, not just in the oil fields of the Delaware and Midland basins but with the oversized checks given to nonprofits that can make budgeting a little easier.

ConocoPhillips, thank you again for building on that foundation that Concho laid  deep in the heart of Midland.
[April 29, 2021] Data Foundry Wins Landmark Appeal Against City of Austin in Texas Supreme Court Case Benefitting Texans

Data Foundry, a premier colocation data center provider with facilities in Austin and Houston, Texas won new rights for businesses and residents to challenge discriminatory rates imposed by municipalities in historic Texas Supreme Court decision against the City of Austin. In 2016, Austin Energy (News - Alert) , the City of Austin's municipal power authority conducted a consumer rate review in which Data Foundry participated in. After the rate review completed, new rates were to be imposed beginning January 1, 2017. Recognizing that the rates were excessive and discriminatory, Data Foundry sued Austin Energy in Texas District Court. After the court ruled that consumers like Data Foundry cannot challenge rates set by municipal utilities and are left to the mercy of the municipality, Data Foundry appealed. On appeal, Data Foundry convinced the Texas Supreme Court that Texas law guarantees consumers the right to challenge potentially excessive and discriminatory electricity rates in court. In April of 2021, the Texas Supreme Court notified Data Foundy that it had won its appeal against the City of Austin in a landmark decision and is able to proceed with a suit.



"As an industrial-scale buyer of power, and through efficient design and operations of our facilities, Data Foundry ensures customers achieve optimal utilization when they choose our services and facilities," comments Edward Henigin, CTO of Data Foundry. "Any unfair electric rate impacts our customers both directly and indirectly, and it's in our best interest to protect them. We took on this fight to ensure our customers don't get taken advantage of, to help reduce overall costs, all the while ensuring we can provide the best product at the most competitive prices." Henigin concludes, "This is why it's optimal for companies to outsource their digital infrastructure management and services to data center companies like Data Foundry. With digital transformation driving business decisions to adopt more compute infrastructure capabilities such as internet and cloud services, power costs can make or break a business in the process. This win sets a whole new standard. Data Foundry is bullish on our mission. We know it's a long road ahead and we're committed to do what's right for all Texans."

About Data Foundry: Data Foundry is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that provides data center colocation, disaster recovery, and managed services for enterprise customers in Austin and Houston, Texas. Data Foundry services a variety of industries including technology, energy, healthcare, financial services, and more. The company's premier data centers are supported by experienced on-site technicians, security staff, and customer support 24x7x365. Data Foundry has more than 25+ years of data center operations experience and was one of the first 50 Texas Internet Service Providers. For more information, visit www.datafoundry.com or call 1.888.839.2794. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005292/en/

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Britain's biggest bookmaker has been accused of 'cashing in on coronavirus' after its punters lost 6million per day in the first three months of this year.

Flutter  the giant which controls Paddy Power and Betfair  gained 600,000 UK customers during the pandemic, taking the total number of regular punters to 3.2million.

The figures alarmed MPs and campaigners who fear tens of thousands are being enticed to bet more than they can afford, driving them into 'debt and destitution'.

They claim vulnerable players are turning to online gambling to cope with boredom and the stress of the pandemic.

Flutter  the giant which controls Paddy Power and Betfair  gained 600,000 UK customers during the pandemic, taking the total number of regular punters to 3.2million

Those who lose often played more intensively while in lockdown and devoted more time to gambling during the first set of curbs, the Gambling Commission found.

Flutter, which also owns Sky Betting and Gaming, including Sky Casino, said its online customers lost a third more  6million per day  between January and March than they did in the same period last year.

And the pandemic has driven 593,000 new customers to its website. Chief executive Peter Jackson saw his pay triple to 7.5million last year, while shares jumped two-thirds.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: 'These figures from the country's biggest firm should send a chill down the spine of ministers dragging their feet over the tough regulation we need.

Especially as we know the biggest losers are more likely to come from our poorest communities.' Carolyn Harris MP, chairman of the parliamentary group on gambling, said: 'The third lockdown has been brutal for the legion of gambling addicts.

The figures alarmed MPs and campaigners who fear tens of thousands are being enticed to bet more than they can afford, driving them into 'debt and destitution'

'These massive losses show that gambling companies are cashing in on coronavirus as families are driven into debt and destitution.' There are around 400,000 gambling addicts in the UK, including 55,000 children.

A Lords committee last year found that up to 60 per cent of gambling companies' profits come from just 5 per cent of vulnerable customers who lose the most. The Mail has led calls for tighter laws to protect addicts with its Stop the Gambling Predators campaign.

Ministers have launched a wide-ranging review into gambling laws, which is set to lead to the biggest shake-up in the legislation governing the industry in 15 years.

The items under consideration, dubbed a 'reformer's shopping list', include maximum stakes online and tough checks on whether or not players can afford their losses.

Tory MP Richard Holden, of the Commons public accounts committee, said the review must look at the rise in 'gambling and the damage it can have'.

Paddy Power's shops were closed from January to March but Flutter's takings still rose by 16 per cent compared to last year. Flutter said it was booming due to 'recreational' customers.

Mr Jackson said: 'Safer gambling continues to be a key priority across our markets.'

The Betting and Gaming Council, which represents the industry, said its members had doubled the number of 'safer gambling' messages online since the start of the pandemic and were intervening to protect customers more often.
Galicia, April 28, 2021 (SPS) - In a climate marked by the resumption of the armed struggle in the Western Sahara and the tensions generated by Morocco with neighboring countries, the Galician Parliament supported a motion this Wednesday in which expresses its firm support and solidarity with the Saharawi people and their legitimate representative, the Polisario Front, in accordance with the principles set forth in the Charter of Nations and in the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.

The Galician legislature indicates that "given the current situation of armed conflict, we call for the responsibility of the parties to accelerate the negotiation process and find a peaceful solution to the conflict, which respects the rights and freedoms of the Saharawi people"

Along these lines, the motion sees as "fundamental that the United Nations, through its Secretary General, appoint an envoy or special representative for Western Sahara, with full democratic guarantees and respect for the human rights of the Saharawi population." SPS

125/090/TRA
London, April 29 : A single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine can cut transmission of coronavirus by up to half, a Public Health England (PHE) study showed on Wednesday.

Those who were infected at least three weeks later were between 38 per cent and 49 per cent less likely to pass the virus on to people living in the same household, compared with those who had not been vaccinated, according to the study, Xinhua reported.

People included in the research were those who have had a single dose of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines, the first two authorized for use in Britain.

Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control, told Sky News that the findings are "extremely encouraging." "The evidence was already mounting that vaccination will prevent people from becoming infected. This study shows that even if people who are vaccinated do become infected, they are considerably less likely to be infectious, and to pass the infection on to others," he said.

"This is an extremely encouraging set of findings," he added.

The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, included more than 57,000 people living in 24,000 households related to a vaccinated person. They were compared with nearly 1 million contacts of people who had not been vaccinated.

More than 33.8 million people have been given the first coronavirus vaccine jab, according to the latest official figures.

Meanwhile, a quarter of adults in Britain have been fully vaccinated as the country's vaccination program has been expanded to include people aged 42 and over.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Regulatory News:

Total (Paris:FP) (LSE:TTA) (NYSE:TOT):

Total has signed an agreement with wpd to acquire a 23% interest in Yunlin Holding GmbH, the owner of Yunlin offshore wind farm located off the coast of Taiwan, around 200 kilometers southwest of Taipei. The project, currently under construction, represents production capacity of 640 megawatts (MW) and benefits from a 20-year guaranteed-price power purchase agreement (PPA) with the state-owned company Taipower of USD 250/MWh for the first 10 years and USD 125/MWh for the following 10 years1. For this acquisition of a 23% interest, Total will pay to wpd a consideration based on its share of past costs.

Located around 10 kilometers offshore at water depths ranging from 7 to 35 meters, the wind farm will comprise 80 wind turbines with a unit capacity of 8 MW. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2022. Once on stream, the project will produce 2.4 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity per year, enough to serve the power needs of 605,000 households.

Procurement of the main components has been finalized and marine works are under way. The project reached a major milestone with the installation of the first wind turbine on April 23.

Identified by Taiwan's authorities as a key area in the development of renewable energies, offshore wind power will be a significant contributor to the objective of generating 20% of its electricity from renewables by 2025 while fostering the emergence of a local wind power industry. Taiwan is one of the priority regions selected by Total for its development in offshore wind power in Asia.

"This agreement provides Total with an opportunity to gain a foothold in one of Asia's main offshore wind markets and strengthens the Group's position in this fast-growing segment, in line with its strategy of profitable development in renewables worldwide," said Stephane Michel, President Gas, Renewables Power at Total. "Taiwan has been a pioneer in developing offshore wind power in Asia, and we are proud to contribute to the transformation of its energy mix. We are delighted to enter into this first partnership with wpd, one of the leading independent developers of offshore wind power."

The project is currently 48%-owned by wpd, 25% by EGCO (Electricity Generating Public Company Limited) and 27% by a consortium of Japanese investors led by Sojitz (Sojitz Corporation, ENEOS Corporation, Chugoku Electric Power, Chudenko Corporation and Shikoku Electric Power).

The acquisition, which is subject to government approval, will broaden the Group's portfolio of offshore wind projects under development and construction, that currently represents a cumulative capacity of about 5.5 GW.

Total, renewables and electricity

As part of its ambition to get to net zero by 2050, Total is building a portfolio of activities in renewables and electricity that should account for up to 40 of its sales by 2050. At the end of 2020, Total's gross power generation capacity worldwide was around 12 GW, including 7 GW of renewable energy. Total will continue to expand this business to reach 100 GW of gross production capacity from renewable sources by 2030 with the objective of being among the world's top 5 in renewable energies.

About Total

Total is a broad energy company that produces and markets fuels, natural gas and electricity. Our 100,000 employees are committed to better energy that is more affordable, more reliable, cleaner and accessible to as many people as possible. Active in more than 130 countries, our ambition is to become the responsible energy major.

Cautionary Note

This press release, from which no legal consequences may be drawn, is for information purposes only. The entities in which TOTAL SE directly or indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. TOTAL SE has no liability for their acts or omissions. In this document, the terms "Total", "Total Group" and Group are sometimes used for convenience. Likewise, the words "we", "us" and "our" may also be used to refer to subsidiaries in general or to those who work for them. This document may contain forward-looking information and statements that are based on a number of economic data and assumptions made in a given economic, competitive and regulatory environment. They may prove to be inaccurate in the future and are subject to a number of risk factors. Neither TOTAL SE nor any of its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information or statement, objectives or trends contained in this document whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

1 Based on a rate of 28 NTD/USD

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005440/en/

Contacts:

Total

Media Relations: +33 1 47 44 46 99 l presse@total.com l @TotalPress

Investor Relations: +44 (0)207 719 7962 l ir@total.com
Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion, Tesla focuses on the product.



I trust the people.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2021

???????? exactly  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2021

Teslas apparent disdain for the media was so great that the disappearance of its PR department hasnt been confirmed to this day. It is perhaps the first time that CEO Elon Musk acknowledges it, and only to say that the decision is definitive. There is simply no need for a PR dept because he says Tesla is not in the habit of manipulating its customers.Musk has never made a secret of his opinion of several media outlets and journalists or his general belief that the media will generally run incomplete stories, clickbait titles, and over-sensationalized claims just to get revenue or, even worse, to get back at Tesla for whatever perceived wrong. It seems that the most recent Tesla crash, the fatal Texas accident , which police attributed to no one being in the driver seat when it happened, has convinced Musk that the company can do very well without PR.When one of his followers urged him to reconsider re-instating the PR Department, the self-titled Technoking, Imperator of Mars pointed to the uselessness of it, even if it was to hire just one person. Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion, Tesla focuses on the product, he wrote. I trust the people.The people, in this case, are the ever-loyal Tesla community of owners and supporters, who will gladly and willingly go to war against any company or individual for whatever reason. They help spread the good news and mitigate the bad news and are allowed to interact directly with Musk via Twitter.Without a doubt, Tesla has forged an unprecedented carmaker-customer relationship over the years, and as we discussed at a time , in terms of sales, it doesnt need the media right now. But as the Tesla supporter pointed out to Musk, it might need it one day, given its expansion plans.
Two years ago, San Antonio witnessed a bare-knuckle brawl between Mayor Ron Nirenberg and then-City Councilman Greg Brockhouse for the mayors seat.

It was a bitter fight that often got personal. Brockhouse faced a pair of domestic violence allegations which he has since sought to dispel. Nirenberg and his allies accused Brockhouse, a former consultant for the police and fire unions, of gearing up to raid the citys coffers to pay off his union allies  who had been locked in years-long fights with city leadership over their contracts.

Brockhouse seized on discontent among social conservatives  particularly a City Council vote to nix Chick-fil-A from an airport contract  to whack at City Hall. At the time, some council members cited anti-LGBTQ behavior associated with the fast-food chain.

Brockhouse fought Nirenberg to a runoff  from which the mayor barely escaped with his job.

Now, as the two men face off once more in the May 1 election, that drama is missing.

The mayors race has no spark to it at all, said Christian Archer, a veteran strategist who ran campaigns for former mayors Phil Hardberger and Julian Castro.

Though Bexar County saw record turnout during early voting, the mayors race has been sleepy. Absent are the litany of ads flooding radio and broadcast television airwaves. Residents have seen some mailers from both camps in their mailboxes, but theyre not exactly overflowing. Both campaigns say they have been knocking on doors.

Perhaps most visible is the lack of debates. Mayoral hopefuls have appeared before smaller audiences in candidate forums either on Zoom or in-person.

But the two main candidates havent faced off in a debate because Nirenberg refused to do so  part of a larger strategy to mostly ignore Brockhouse.

The absence of the debates, I think, really takes away from the sense that were in a competitive race, said local Democratic strategist Laura Barberena.

A few signs point heavily in Nirenbergs favor.

In the final stretch heading into Saturdays election, Nirenberg outspent and outraised Brockhouse five-to-one. A recent poll put the mayor up 30 points over his main challenger  a result, political analysts say, of what residents view as Nirenbergs steady, calm handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nirenberg is leaning into the perception. In a recent mailer, he touted the number of residents who have received COVID-19 vaccinations as well as the millions of dollars the city has plugged into economic relief for ailing businesses and struggling residents amid the pandemic.

Nirenberg is also making jobs part of his closing pitch  pointing to more than $1 billion in major manufacturing investments as well as his $154 million workforce development plan, aimed at helping some 40,000 people who lost their jobs because of the pandemic enter college degree or job training programs.

Despite the pandemic, weve never lost sight that a good job is fundamental to a familys security and foundational to a vibrant city, Nirenberg wrote in a recent mailer. Working together, San Antonio is coming back stronger.

But the mayor hasnt discussed new policies he intends to pursue if voters give him a third term. That work comes after re-election, said Gilberto Ocanas, Nirenbergs campaign chairman and chief political consultant.

It would just be political rhetoric to promise stuff, Ocanas said.

Brockhouse is eager to poke holes in Nirenbergs campaign, arguing the mayor hasnt set the stage for the citys economic recovery.

For his part, Brockhouse has sought to position himself as the ideas candidate  releasing lengthy sets of lofty ideas on how to jumpstart the citys economy, overhaul public safety and retool the citys public-owned power provider, CPS Energy, in the wake of the winter freeze.

San Antonio businesses are lagging despite the states COVID-19 restrictions being lifted weeks ago, Brockhouse said. He placed the blame at the feet of Nirenberg, who Brockhouse feels has been an insufficient booster for businesses. Brockhouse also pointed to what he feels are insufficient local vaccination rates among seniors and Hispanic residents  roughly 57 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

What you see is a series of failures that when we deliver that message, Ron crumbles, when people know whats really happening, Brockhouse said.

Ocanas shrugged.

Im not sure what hes talking about, Ocanas said. Its easy to criticize. Its hard to govern.

Neither side expected the surge in voter turnout so far. Some 101,241 people cast a ballot during early voting  busting records going back two decades, election officials said Wednesday. In 2019, about 73,000 cast their ballot during early voting  and more than 110,000 people voted in that race altogether.

Much of that enthusiasm appears to be driven by Proposition B, which would strip the police union of their right to collectively bargain their contract with the city. Police reform advocates argue its necessary to make sure officers accused of misconduct are held to account, while union backers contend it would defund the police  neither of which is true.

Unclear is how turnout for Prop B will shape the mayors race. Brockhouse is a longtime police union ally who opposes the proposition and is banking on the anti-Prop B vote to work in his favor. But the union didnt endorse a mayoral candidate in this election, despite heavily backing Brockhouse two years ago.

Nirenberg, meanwhile, told the police union he supports collective bargaining but has avoided taking a position on the proposition itself.

San Antonio municipal races are non-partisan, but candidates nonetheless tend to fall under liberal and conservative monikers  Nirenberg on the left, Brockhouse on the right.

According to Barberenas estimates, nearly 46,000 Democrats turned out in the city elections during early voting  followed by 33,000 independents and 24,000 Republicans.

Not everyone who opposes Prop B is a died-in-the-wool Republican, Barberena notes. After all, the measure drew opposition from the San Antonio Central Labor Council  a consortium of unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO  on the grounds that it takes away union power. Therefore, neither candidates fate is tied to that of Prop B.

I dont think you can say hard and fast that it supports one or the other because it doesnt fall on partisan lines, Barberena said.

Both candidates have gone without the support of major outside groups they had in the last election.

Despite heavily backing Brockhouse two years ago, the police officers and firefighters unions are sitting out the mayors race  at least for now.

Nirenberg is doing without help from the progressive grassroots group Texas Organizing Project, which deployed its network of block-walkers to help the mayor fend off Brockhouse in the runoff two years ago.

The reason is simple: the Texas Organizing Project is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign to pass Prop B, and Nirenberg doesnt support it.

In our local electoral work, TOP strategically focuses on where we can best have meaningful conversations that will drive progressive change, said Michelle Tremillo, executive director.

For this election, our members decided their priorities were supporting increased police accountability through Proposition B, and candidates who recognize the urgent need in our communities for greater police accountability.

To the Nirenberg camp, thats not a bad sign. The mayor has friends on both sides of the issue, Ocanas said. Nirenberg believes the best way to achieve police reform is at the bargaining table.

Hes trying to do the best thing that he can as mayor, Ocanas said.

Thats not to say Nirenberg isnt getting any outside help. The San Antonio AFL-CIO Central Labor Council endorsed the mayor early in the campaign and has been phone banking and sending direct mail to its 30,000 members urging them to cast ballots for Nirenberg.

In the last election, the AFL-CIO didnt back Nirenberg until the runoff. In exchange for an endorsement, Nirenberg agreed to stop using the phrase union bosses when attacking the firefighters union  then in a big battle with the city over its contract.

This time, its different.

This time around, there is no controversy, said Tom Cummins, the council president.
STAMFORD  Four city residents used stolen identities to purchase puppies from around the country and sell them out of a Glenbrook home, police said.

Assistant States Attorney Elizabeth Moran said the Stamford residents were the masterminds behind a very pervasive and long-running dog-running scheme.

Devon Sherman, 25; Ebony Ayala, 23; and Paul Joseph, 23, were each arrested on charges of racketeering, first-degree larceny, conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny, nine counts of conspiracy to illegally use a payment card, animal neglect and importing a dog without a health certificate.

Nygel Joseph, 23, was arrested on a single charge of second-degree forgery and a citation for operating a pet store without a license.

Ayala and Sherman face an additional charge of trafficking in personal identifying information, while Paul Joseph was also charged with theft of a payment card.

As part of the investigation, Stamford Animal Control seized 22 dogs from the accused.

These puppies are actually evidence, and the city of Stamford has asked the courts for temporary custody of the puppies, Mayor David Martin, two baby French bulldogs cuddled up in his arms, said Tuesday.

Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media

The dogs will likely stay with foster families until the judicial system makes its final verdict. Martin said the whole endeavor would likely take more than three months, but could span even longer, depending on how long the criminal cases take.

Until the city gets ownership of them, we cant adopt them out, Diane Holcombe of Red Lease Rescue, the agency tasked with finding the new puppies homes, said Tuesday. Were at the judges mercy.

Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media

A bulk of the dogs have birth defects  some are easily fixable through surgery  but Red Leash Rescue and Stamford Animal Control both promised that all the dogs are loving and eager to find new homes.

Investigators were first alerted to the alleged dog-running scheme on Feb. 19 when an employee at Cornell University Veterinary

Specialists in Stamford reported that a group of individuals had been bringing multiple dogs in and were using stolen credit cards to pay for the nearly $25,000 that they racked up in medical bills, investigators Michael Stempien and Vanessa Lynn wrote in Shermans arrest warrant affidavit.

The warrant states the suspects brought nine puppies to the vet in varying states of malnutrition and illness between October 2020 and March 2021.

In one trip, vets needed to remove the right eye from a 7-month-old shiba inu because of trauma, according to warrant. In another trip, they brought an 8-week-old French bulldog needed to be euthanized because it arrived comatose and severely emaciated, the warrant said.

During the ensuing investigation, police discovered a dead young looking, black female toy poodle in the garbage of the suspects Glenbrook home, according to the warrant. A later diagnostic exam revealed the dog had died of bronchopneumonia, the warrant said.

Based on this evidence, police executed a search warrant on the Belltown Road home in March. It was during this raid that police arrested and charged Nygel Joseph.

During their search of the home, police confiscated 20 dogs, all of whom had different levels of diarrhea caused by intestinal parasites, giardia, and hook worms, the warrant said. Another two dogs were later turned over by the suspects, police said.

The 22 puppies are currently being cared for and are in good health, said Lt. Nicholas Montagnese on Tuesday.

In the warrant, police describe cramped conditions where up to four dogs were kept in a single portable animal carrier. Other dogs were kept penned off in an unfinished basement that had multiple loose nails scattered along the floor along with feces, the warrant said.

Stempien and Lynn write that they found feces and urine on the floors all over the house including next to empty food and water bowls.

The warrant said the suspects kept the operation afloat by working together to steal account login credentials of DoorDash and Uber employees and the siphoning off funds into separate accounts. The suspects also illegally purchased peoples identities online, the warrant states.

Using these stolen identities, the suspects would then obtain credit cards they used to purchase more dogs from breeders around the country  oftentimes leaving the breeders at a loss when the fraudulent purchases were denied, the warrant said.

These are very serious felony allegations, Judge John Blawie said at their arraignments Tuesday afternoon.

Sherman and Ayala posted the $200,000 bond Tuesday afternoon. Neither will be allowed to possess dogs or see her co-defendants as a part of the conditions of her release. She will also be required to undergo GPS monitoring.

Paul Joseph remains in custody.

All three are scheduled to appear in court on June 14.

Nygel Joseph is next scheduled to appear in court on May 10. He is still being held on a $500,000 bond on an unrelated extradition arrest, according to the state judicial website.

Editors note: This has been updated to correctly spell Diane Holcombes name in the story and photo captions.


Full Stack Software Engineer Santa Clara Valley (Cupertino) , California , United States Software and Services Summary

Posted: Apr 26, 2021 Role Number: 200242758 Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, extraordinary ideas have a way of becoming phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job, and there's no telling what you could accomplish. The ACS Data Science team seeks an extraordinary Software Engineer to support a business analytics platform with sophisticated, scalable, and robust architecture optimized for rapid business intelligence, data analysis, and data science. In this highly technical, hands-on role, you will examine the current production systems to identify areas of improvement and lead future enhancements. You will also be responsible for prototyping and developing new systems. Key Qualifications Expert knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Knowledge of React is a plus.

Excellent knowledge of Java and SQL

Experience in debugging systems issues

Critical thinking, creativity, and perseverance

Ability to generate outstanding and custom solutions to unusual problems

Solid understanding of the entire life cycle development process (SDLC), including comprehending business and functional requirements, developing detailed technical documents, and implementing testable solutions Description - The ACS Data Science is responsible for data analysis and data products. As a full-stack engineer, you will help design and build the next set of features within our products and the shared framework. You will collaborate with other engineers and users to help develop and maintain various production systems. Education & Experience BS / MS in Computer Science


Fireworks banned in parts of King Co.

SEATTLE (AP)  The King County Council has narrowly voted to ban fireworks in unincorporated areas.

The ban, which passed with a 5-4 vote Tuesday, prohibits the retail sale and use of consumer fireworks in the unincorporated parts of the county, KING 5 reported. The ban will go into effect in 2022.

Public firework displays will be allowed with a permit from the fire marshal  with a limit of displays to two per year on a property. Penalties of up to $250 for violating the new law will not be given during the first year, during which educating people about the new law will be the priority.

According to South King County Fire & Rescue, more than 77% of county residents already live within city limits that have banned fireworks.

The ordinance also asks that county officials study and recommend how to provide unarmed, non-police enforcement of the law.




Pres. Joe Biden will deliver his first speech to Congress tonight, Wednesday, and the focus will be his massive American plan, infrastructure, education, and childcare. Pres. Joe Biden will use his first speech to a joint session in Congress tonight, Wednesday at exactly 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Biden To Deliver His First Speech To Congress 9 pm EST

According to a recently published article on Yahoo News, the President is expected to make a pitch for his huge investments in infrastructure, education, childcare, and the American economy.

Biden will unveil the language and measures in his proposed roughly $1.8 trillion American Rescue Plan, which will be the core of his address. This plan includes universal preschool, two years of free community college, and expanded access to childcare.

Biden's speech marks a new legislative challenge to the Democratic lawmakers. They recently passed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package without the support of the Republicans, but the Democratic lawmakers are now divided over the proposed plans of Biden.

Former Pres. Donald Trump Reportedly Moving Operations From Florida to New Jersey

Biden Faced Opposition from Democrats and Republicans

In a recently published article on MSN News, it was reported that Pres. Biden has faced opposition from Conservative Democrats and Republican lawmakers to increase corporate tax to fund his proposals.

This will be a big challenge for Biden to convince the lawmakers from both parties to pass his legislation as both the Congress and Senate are divided. The Democratic-dominated House of Congress is split, and the evenly divided Senate will be an uphill battle for the President.

The first address of Pres. Biden to a joint session in Congress is not called a State of the Union Address because it falls under the inauguration year. Biden is also expected to address issues on racial justice and police reforms.

Centrist Senators Signal Progress Over Infrastructure Bill but Will Not Support Biden's Plan

Who Will be Attending?

According to a published report on CNN News, there will only be around 200 people allowed to attend the joint session from the usual 1,600 due to the global pandemic. The attendees are required to observe COVID-19 protocols, most especially the wearing of a face mask.

Biden's speech on Wednesday night is also the first time in U.S. history that two women will sit behind the President at the dais. These will be Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

How to Watch Biden's Speech?

Biden's address to a joint session will start at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, but CNN will start its special air coverage at 8:00 p.m. ET. CNN's coverage will also be available live on CNN.com's homepage and mobile devices with CNN's applications for iOS and Android from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. ET.

It is also available on CNNgo (at CNN.com/go on your laptop, tablet, and iPad, as well as via CNNgo applications for Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Android TV, Chromecast, and Roku). The special will also be available to viewers on demand via cable or satellite systems, CNNgo networks, and CNN smartphone applications. CNN's live coverage is now available on CNN.com.

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The new law is contested by the democratic movement. Bar Association: the executive can now prevent activists and political opponents from leaving, a decision that is up to the judges. Carrie Lam: the measure serves to contain illegal immigration. Fears for those with a British foreign passport.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The head of the City Immigration Office will be able to ban the entry and exit of people from the former British colony. The measure is contained in a bill approved yesterday by the local Parliament (Legco).

The measure is contested by the democratic front, which has boycotted the Legco sessions for months in protest against the expulsion of some anti-establishment deputies. The fear is that the authorities will apply the same kinds of bans that the Chinese central government uses to block the expatriation of humanitarian activists and political opponents. On the basis of the one country, two systems principle, Hong Kong should maintain a distinct political, economic and legal system to that of the motherland.

The Bar Association maintains that the new law grants discretionary powers to the immigration officer, a non-elective position. According to many jurists, it is up to the courts to decide who can enter or leave Hong Kong, not a bureaucrat.

Carrie Lams executive claims that the measure applies only to those arriving in Hong Kong and is necessary to combat illegal immigration. Several observers reply that the Immigration Bill is worded in such a vague way that it allows the authorities to prevent residents and travellers (including business travellers) from leaving the city. It is the same problem posed by the draconian national security law, the vagueness of which extends its field of action to all forms of dissent.

Democrats fear that the city government may now ban residents with a British foreign national passport from going to live and work in Britain I a further attempt to weaken the democracy movement. Since January London has allowed holders of this document to apply. About 2.9 million Hong Kong residents can benefit, plus 2.3 million dependents.
Mariposa County Sheriff's Office badge View Photo

Yosemite West, CA  The names of the two people killed in a murder-suicide near Yosemite National Park have been released.

Mariposa Sheriffs Officials have identified the male victim as 31-year-old Roland Goldberg from Lebanon, Missouri. The suspect is 22-year-old Elisabeth Shauck of Salinas. Their bodies were discovered on Thursday (April 22) in the Yosemite West area or the county. Detectives reported that evidence collected at the scene indicated it was a murder-suicide with Shauck shooting Goldberg multiple times before turning the gun on herself, as detailed here.

In their update, investigators also disclosed that the gun used in the deadly shooting was a Glock model 17 that was registered to Shauck. They added that the couple was in a long-term dating relationship and at this time it appears the two were on vacation.

It is unclear if evidence sent to the California Department of Justice Fresno Crime Lab has resulted in any clues as to a motive. The case remains under investigation with detectives noting that they are continuing to collect information and evidence. Anyone with any information regarding the incident is asked to contact Detective Carroll at 209-966-3615.
KOMU 8 Reporter/Digital Producer

My name is Drew Cusumano and I'm a senior Mizzou student studying Journalism with an interest area in Sports TV & Radio Broadcasting. If you need to contact me you can e-mail me at dvc62f@mail.missouri.edu
The daughter of the late Crazy John's tycoon John Ilhan has alleged she was raped aged 15 by a private schoolboy at a birthday party and claimed she was 'horrified' by the way police treated her after they decided not to pursue the case.

Yasmin Ilhan aired the allegations in a series of public Instagram posts this week after being told by police no charges would be laid due to insufficient evidence.

Ms Ilhan alleged she was raped at a home in Glen Iris, Melbourne's southeast, when she was a student at Melbourne Grammar School by a teenage boy who was studying at a nearby private school.

Yasmin Ilhan (pictured) alleged she was raped aged 15 by a private schoolboy in a series of public posts

Ms Ilhan said she made a formal complaint to police last year but was told no charges would be laid due to insufficient evidence

The now 23-year-old law graduate, who is living in London, made a formal complaint to police last year but was told on March 15 officers would not be pursuing the matter, a decision which was upheld on April 20 following a review.

Ms Ilhan posted online that she was 'horrified by how police have treated me', claiming 'they antagonised me, made me cry, spoke over me and dismissed me'.

'They have repeatedly refused to answer my questions about their decision. They said I contradicted my own evidence, yet they failed to back this up when I asked for examples,' she claimed.

'Even more shockingly, they said the fact that I have a law degree raises concerns about my story.'

Victoria Police said they supported Ms Ilhan through the reporting process and provided her access to appropriate services for ongoing support and assistance.

Ms Ilhan claimed she had been assured by police her alleged rapist would be charged and that she was not given answers as to why the case had been closed.

Ms Ilhan (pictured) was told on March 15 police would not be pursuing with an investigation into her allegations, a decision which was upheld a month later following a review

Ms Ilhan made a number of claims against police in her Instagram posts and said she had been contacted by other women after airing the allegations

In a statement provided to Daily Mail Australia, Victoria Police said: 'Detectives from Moorabbin Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Team have conducted a thorough investigation into a report of a sexual assault at a house in Glen Iris in February, 2013.

'The matter was reported to police last year and a comprehensive investigation took place.

'After assessing all available evidence, the reporting person was advised that there was insufficient material to commence a criminal prosecution and the investigation had concluded.'

Ms Ilhan's father John (pictured) started the mobile phone retail chain Crazy John's in 1991. He passed away in 2007

Ms Ilhan (pictured left and right) claimed she had been failed by police and said she had not been provided with answers as to why her case was closed

Ms Ilhan said after posting about her alleged rape she received messages from other girls who had similar experiences with the accused.

'The police have not just failed me but all these other victims,' she claimed.

Ms Ilhan father John started Crazy John's, a mobile phone retail chain, in 1991 and amassed a fortune of $300million before he died in 2007 from a hereditary heart condition.

His death at age 42 came when Ms Ilhan, his eldest daughter, was eight.
There is no doubt that they meant well, coming out in their thousands to sincerely express their grief over the deeply tragic kidnap-murder of 23-year-old Andrea Bharatt.

But the organisers of those candlelight vigils held all over Trinidad between February 4 and April 1 did not seem in the least bit concerned that what they were assembling could turn out to be Covid super spreaders.
Premier Li calls on China, Germany to set example for open, mutually beneficial, win-win cooperation

Xinhua) 13:45, April 29, 2021

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday that as two major economies and countries with influence, both China and Germany stand for multilateralism and free trade, and the two countries need to set an example for open, mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation.

Li made the remarks when co-chairing the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video link in Beijing.

The inter-governmental consultation has served as the "super engine" in driving overall practical cooperation between China and Germany, said Li, adding that despite COVID-19, the consultation is being held in a special way of "cloud dialogue" and attended by 25 ministers from both sides, the largest in number in recent years.

"This fully shows how much importance both countries place on the bilateral relationship and cooperation," he added.

Li said in the face of a major pandemic, the international community must send a strong message of cooperation and show the strength of unity.

"Only with unity and cooperation can countries around the world defeat the virus confronting humanity, and only with unity and cooperation can we boost the recovery and growth of the world economy," Li said.

Noting the fresh progress in China-Germany cooperation over the past two-plus years since the last round of consultation, Li said China has been widening its opening up with a range of new measures, and both German companies and other foreign firms have benefited.

Li said despite the impact of COVID-19, trade between the two countries has kept growing, which is strong proof of the strength and potential of cooperation between the two countries. Such cooperation has delivered real benefits to the two peoples, and contributed to the stability of global industrial and supply chains, he added.

Li underlined that despite the fact that the two countries have different views on some issues, both sides need to respect each other's core interests and major concerns, engage in communication and exchanges on the basis of equality and non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

Li called on the two countries to enhance trust, dispel misgivings, narrow differences and concentrate on cooperation, saying that this will create enabling conditions for smooth dialogue and cooperation going forward.

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of China-Germany diplomatic relations.

The Chinese Premier said the two countries need to set sight on their cooperation in the next five decades, keep up sincere and win-win cooperation, and remove unnecessary disturbances to ensure the sound and steady growth of China-Germany relations in the long run.

In her opening remarks, Chancellor Merkel said that, thanks to the inter-governmental consultation, bilateral cooperation covering foreign affairs, trade, agriculture, social progress, food safety, sustainable development and climate response has made new progress in both breadth and depth, and she expressed the hope that the consultation as a mechanism will continue.

Noting that both China and Germany have played an important role in the global response to COVID-19, Merkel said Germany is ready to advance its cooperation with China on vaccine production and mutual recognition.

She said the Comprehensive Investment Agreement between the EU and China is transparent and reciprocal, and will provide more safeguards for economic and trade cooperation between the two sides.

Germany and China are comprehensive strategic partners, and Germany hopes to maintain dialogue and exchanges with China to further increase mutual understanding, Merkel said.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
TIRANA, Albania (AP)  NATO has launched joint military exercises in Albania with thousands of military forces from the United States and other countries in the first such large-scale drills since World War II in the Western Balkans, a U.S. army official said Thursday.

Col. Joseph Scrocca said a staunch NATO ally since 2009, Albania is a valued security partner  both regionally and globally.

Albania is playing a critical part in the DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercise with Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore operations taking place for the first time in Europe since World War II at the Port of Durres, Scrocca said in an online briefing.

The sealift ship USNS Bob Hope will demonstrate the unloading of heavy equipment onto smaller vessels that will transfer the cargo to shore for onward movement.

Since April 26, U.S. troops have been deployed to hold training in five other military land, naval and air bases in Albania until June 10.

Most Western Balkans countries  Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia  are NATO members.

This historic mission demonstrates our ability to serve as a strategic security partner in the western Balkans and Black Sea regions, Scrocca said.

DEFENDER-Europe is an annual large-scale U.S. Army-led, multinational exercise, defensive in nature and focused on deterring aggression, which this year focuses on building operational readiness and interoperability with NATO and a greater number of allies and partners over a wider area of operations than ever before.

Around 28,000 U.S., allied and partner forces from 26 nations will conduct nearly simultaneous operations across more than 30 training areas in more than a dozen nations from the Baltics and Africa to the critical Black Sea and Balkan regions.

Exercises like DEFENDER-Europe 21 are a prime example of our collective capabilities, Scrocca said.
CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In-depth analysis and data-driven insights on the impact of COVID-19 included in this Western Europe and Nordic data center market report.

The Western Europe and Nordic data center market is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 4% during the period 2020-2026.

Key Highlights Offered in the Report:

The Western Europe and Nordic data center market contributed to over 20% of the global investment in 2020. Netherlands and Germany were top countries, receiving over 30% of the overall investments in the region. COVID-19 had a varied impact on the Western Europe & Nordics data center market, with countries such as Frankfurt , London , Amsterdam , and Paris witnessing a lower impact compared to Italy and Spain , that faced higher data center construction and operational impediments in the first half of 2020. Spain and Italy will offer a cumulative revenue opportunity of over USD 4.4 billion to data center investors within the forecast period. In 2021, 25 data center operators and 17 industry associations signed the Carbon Neutral Data Center Pact, resulting in 75% of data center operations in Western Europe and the Nordic powered through renewable energy by 2025 and 100% by 2030. Most countries in Western Europe and all Nordic countries support free cooling for most of the year, with Nordic data center market facilitating free cooling for over 8,400 hours in a year. District heating is also prevalent in the region, with almost all data centers deployed in the Nordic countries using waste heat from servers for community heating purposes. The cumulative revenue opportunity for companies operating in the general construction space in the region will be over USD 23 billion within the forecast period.

Key Offerings:

Market Size & Forecast by Revenue | 2020-2026

Market Dynamics - Leading trends, growth drivers, restraints, and investment opportunities

Market Segmentation - A detailed analysis by IT infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, mechanical infrastructure, cooling systems, cooling technique, general construction, tier standards, and geography

Competitive Landscape - 22 IT infrastructure providers, 24 support infrastructure providers, 20 construction contractors, and 26 data center investors

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/western-europe-nordic-data-center-market

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market - Segmentation

In 2020, the IT infrastructure adoption among newly established and existing data centers grew significantly. Germany is the leading market in IT infrastructure spending, followed by the UK, the Netherlands , France , and Ireland . The emergence of software-defined architectures and converged infrastructure expects to drive the IT infrastructure solutions market in Western Europe .

is the leading market in IT infrastructure spending, followed by the UK, , , and . The emergence of software-defined architectures and converged infrastructure expects to drive the IT infrastructure solutions market in . Several Western Europe facilities have adopted flexible designs to facilitate dual power feeds, 2N redundant UPS and PDU systems, and N+1 generators. The growth of lithium-ion UPS systems is aided by benefits such as reducing the OPEX through lower maintenance costs and decreasing UPS battery failure chances. Vendors are continuously coming out with innovative UPS solutions to boost efficiency and reduce cost.

facilities have adopted flexible designs to facilitate dual power feeds, 2N redundant UPS and PDU systems, and N+1 generators. The growth of lithium-ion UPS systems is aided by benefits such as reducing the OPEX through lower maintenance costs and decreasing UPS battery failure chances. Vendors are continuously coming out with innovative UPS solutions to boost efficiency and reduce cost. Several Western Europe data centers support free cooling systems that include adiabatic coolers, evaporative coolers, and free cooling chiller systems. Water-based cooling includes water-treatment plants and systems that can aid water consumption by up to 20%. Most operators procure 45U-52U rack cabinets. The procurement of 42U racks is declining in the market.

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by IT Infrastructure

Servers

Storage

Network

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Electrical Infrastructure

UPS Systems

Generators

Transfer Switches and Switchgears

PDUs

Other Electrical Infrastructures

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Mechanical Infrastructure

Cooling Systems

CRAC & CRAH Units



Chiller Units



Cooling Towers, Dry Coolers, & Condensers



Economizers and Evaporative Coolers, and Other Units



Racks



Other Mechanical Infrastructure

Racks

Others Mechanical Infrastructure

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Cooling Technique

Air-based Cooling Technique

Liquid-based Cooling Technique

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by General Construction

Core and Shell Development

Installation and Commissioning Services

Engineering and Building Designs

Physical Security

DCIM/BMS

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Tier Standards

Tier I & II

Tier III

Tier IV

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market - Dynamics

About 25 European cloud and data center operators, which include AWS, Google, Equinix, Interxion, OVHCloud, Scaleway, Aruba, and others, and 17 industry associations have signed an agreement to make their data center carbon neutral by 2030, which include powering the facilities through 100% renewable energy. According to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, 75% of the power supplied to data centers in Europe will be supplied through renewable energy or carbon-free energy by December 31, 2025, and the objective is to reach 100% by December 31, 2030. Hyperscale data center providers such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, and AWS are the major investors in renewable energy initiatives. There is a high interest in adopting renewable power sources among global and local data center colocation suppliers such as Equinix and Digital Realty (InterXion), Aruba, and QTS Realty Trust.

Key Drivers and Trends fueling Market Growth:

Innovative UPS Battery Technology

Increased Adoption of 200/400 GBE Switch Ports

Cloud Adoption Driving the Data Center Market

Increasing Demand for Big Data & IoT Investments

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market - Geography

In 2020, the Western European data center market witnessed investments in 80 projects, among which 20 projects became operational as of Q3 2020. The remaining 60 projects are still under development and expected to be operational by Q2 2021. The data center market in Western Europe is witnessing investment contributions from both global and colocation service providers. The market will also witness the continuous adoption of cloud services among SMEs, with the heightened interest shown toward the digital transformation of businesses by adopting solutions such as IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence. The demand for smart devices, coupled with growing internet penetration, will also fuel the growth of data centers and corresponding infrastructure in the region. Data centers in Western Europe are being built to support OCP rack infrastructure solutions.

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/western-europe-nordic-data-center-market

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Geography

Western Europe

UK



Germany



France



Netherlands



Ireland



Belgium



Switzerland



Luxembourg



Italy



Spain



Other Western European Countries

Nordic

Denmark



Norway



Sweden



Finland & Iceland

Key Data Center Critical (IT) Infrastructure Providers

Arista Networks

Atos

Broadcom

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

Extreme Networks

Huawei Technologies

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Hitachi Vantara

IBM

Inspur

Inventec

Juniper Networks

Lenovo

MiTAC Holdings

NEC Corporation

NetApp

Oracle

Pure Storage

Quanta Computer (Quanta Cloud Technology)

Super Micro Computer

Wistron (Wiwynn)

Key Data Center Support Infrastructure Providers

ABB

Airedale Conditioning Systems

Asetek

Alfa Laval

Assa Abloy

Bosch Security Systems ( Robert Bosch )

) Caterpillar

Cummins

Delta Electronics

Eaton

HITEC Power Protection

KOHLER-SDMO

Legrand

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Nlyte Software

Piller Power Systems

Rolls-Royce Power Systems

Rittal

Riello Elettronica (Riello UPS)

Schneider Electric

STULZ

Socomec

Trane Technologies

Vertiv Group

Key Data Center Investors

Acens Technologies

Adam

Aruba

Bahnhof

CyrusOne

Colt Data Center Services (Colt DCS)

Digital Realty

DigiPlex

DATA4 Smart Data Centers

Equinix

Echelon Data Centers

EcoDataCenter

Facebook

Google

Global Switch

GlobalConnect

Green Mountain

Iron Mountain

Microsoft

Nexica - Econocom Group

NTT Global Data Centers

QTS Realty Trust

VIRTUS Data Centres

Telecom Italia Sparkle

T5 Data Centers

Vantage Data Centers

Key Construction Constructors

AECOM

Arup Group

Bouygues Construction

CapIngelec

DPR Construction

Deerns

Fluor Corporation

Future-Tech

HDR Architecture

ISG

Jones Engineering

Kirby Group

Linesight

Mercury Engineering

Mace Group

M+W Group (Exyte)

Metnor Construction

RED-Engineering

Structure Tone

Winthrop Engineering and Contracting

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TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V): GRG

Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE): G6A

OTCQB Venture Market (OTCQB): GARWF



VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Golden Arrow Resources Corporation (TSXV: GRG) (FSE: G6A) (OTCQB: GARWF), ("Golden Arrow" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update on exploration activities at its three most active projects, including the first results from the on-going trenching program at the Esperanza property of the Flecha de Oro gold project, Argentina.

Phase I of the trenching program at Esperanza is focused on a nine square kilometre area where numerous gold-bearing quartz-veins have been identified at surface. Of particular note are results from a single vein, mapped over 540 metres of strike extent, that returned significant gold intervals in two separate trenches located approximately 160 metres apart, including:

five metres averaging 2.98 g/t gold, including two metres averaging 6.21 g/t gold, in trench TE-10, and;

one metre interval averaging 5.52 g/t gold in trench TE-6, located 160 metres east, in the same vein (see Figure 1: https://bit.ly/3udLQOw).

Golden Arrow VP Exploration and Development Brian McEwen commented, "We have seen from our previous surface sampling that there is widespread gold in the system at Esperanza, so we are encouraged to find some broader intervals in the near-surface that will help us vector into the heart of the system."

Additional details from the trenching program, as well as other work in progress, are included below. In addition to its exploration programs, Golden Arrow is continuing with its project acquisition efforts by constantly reviewing new opportunities to add to its exploration pipeline.

Flecha de Oro Gold Project, Rio Negro Argentina

The Flecha de Oro Project includes the La Esperanza, Puzzle and Maquinchao exploration properties, consisting of 9,968, 1,952 and 2,000 hectares respectively, in central Rio Negro Province. The Project lies within the Somuncara Massif, where low and high sulphidation gold systems have been explored for since the first discovery of gold in the area in 1995. Examples of similar projects in the area include the Calcatreu low sulphidation gold-silver project located 165 kilometres to the southwest, hosting 746,000 oz of Indicated gold equivalent resources and a further 390,000 oz of Inferred AuEq resourcesi.

At the La Esperanza property, Golden Arrow has identified similarities in size and geologic style to the Cerro Vanguardia district to the south in Santa Cruz province that has produced 4.5 million ounces of goldii, which is now being used as an exploration model.

[Readers are cautioned that results from other companies, including on properties proximal to those controlled by the Company, are not indicative of expected Golden Arrow results, as there has been insufficient exploration on these properties. These facts are simply used to aid in the exploration of these properties.]

Golden Arrow commenced the trenching program at Flecha de Oro in December 2020, with the initial work undertaken at the Puzzle property. Results from the first 10 trenches at Puzzle identified gold in multiple samples over significant widths in several trenches (see Figure 2: https://bit.ly/2R7PpqU), but at grades below the threshold targeted by the Company. As a result, the Esperanza property has been prioritized for on-going exploration. Esperanza hosts multiple vein corridors defined by outcropping quartz veins, boulders and quartz float. The areas sampled by the trenches reported in this news release returned high-grade gold samples in earlier surface sampling programs (see Figure 1, and Company news releases dated March 2, 2020, December 3, 2019 and September 25, 2019).

Since the commencement of trenching at Esperanza on March 1st, 2021, Golden Arrow has completed 20 trenches totaling 1,693 metres across surface quartz veins and sheeted veinlets that range from a few centimeters to two metres in width. Assays have been received for 10 of these trenches. An additional fifteen trenches are underway, and the Phase I program is expected to continue through most of May. A summary of the results from the first ten trenches is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Summary of Intervals >1g/t Au from Trenches 1  10,

Esperanza target, Flecha de Oro Project.

Trench Width (m) Au g/t Ag g/t T-1 1.4 2.58 1.2 0.3 1.03 0.9 T-2 1.2 0.39 1.7 T-3 1.8 3.19 16.3 0.5 0.96 18.5 T-4 0.9 1.10

T-5 no significant mineralization T-6 1.0 5.52

T-7 no significant mineralization T-8 no significant mineralization T-9 no significant mineralization T-10 5.0 2.98

Incl. 2.0 6.21



Rosales Copper Project, Chile

Golden Arrow has awarded Quantec Geoscience Chile Ltda the contract for completing a new Transient Electromagnetic (TEM) surface geophysical survey at the Rosales Copper Project in May. The goal of the program is to detect and delineate prospective electromagnetic conductor responses, consistent with near-surface copper stockwork mineralization, potentially related to Manto-type mineralized copper systems at depth. The program will be executed in two phases:

An initial test over approximately 300 hectares that includes known copper sulphide mineralization will be conducted and the results assessed to determine if the TEM technique successfully detects the mineralization.

If successful, a second survey covering approximately 800 hectares will be completed.

Tierra Dorada Gold Project, Paraguay

The planned follow-up drill program at the Alvaro target has been delayed until permits are received that will allow deeper drilling. While it is possible to continue with the shallow (<20m) drill hole program allowed by the existing permit, after further review of the initial shallow drilling results and the new targets identified by the IP geophysical survey (see News Release of January 9, 2021) it was concluded that there was greater benefit to waiting to be able to drill the deeper holes. Granting of permits has been delayed by outbreaks of COVID-19 within several government agencies and elsewhere in Paraguay. In the interim, the Golden Arrow exploration team has commenced a detailed soil sampling program over the new geophysical targets that have no surface outcrop to refine drill targets in those areas. In addition, mapping, trenching and surface sampling programs at the Alvaro target, and regionally throughout the project, are ongoing.

For additional details on the Company's main projects, please visit the website www.goldenarrowresources.com.

Methodology and QA/QC

At the Flecha de Oro project, trenches were opened across the vein width and continued into the host rock on either side. Channel samples were cut along the trench walls with an electric saw and sampled in one-metre intervals. Samples were shipped for preparation and analysis at ALS Laboratories, an internationally recognized assay service provider. Samples were prepared at their facility in Mendoza, Argentina and assayed for gold by Fire Assay/Atomic Absorption finish and analyzed for a multi-element package by ICP-OES following a four-acid digestion at their laboratory in Lima, Peru. The Company follows industry standard procedures for the work carried out on the Flecha de Oro Project, with a quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) program. Blank, duplicate and standard samples were inserted in each batch of samples sent to the laboratory for analysis. Golden Arrow detected no significant QA/QC issues during review of the data.

Qualified Persons

The results of the Company's exploration program have been reviewed, verified (including sampling, analytical and test data) and compiled by the Company's geological staff under the supervision of Brian McEwen, P.Geol., VP Exploration and Development to the Company. Mr. McEwen is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, and has reviewed and approved the contents of the news release.

About Golden Arrow:

Golden Arrow Resources Corporation is a mining exploration company with a successful track record of creating value by making precious and base metal discoveries and advancing them into exceptional deposits. The Company is well leveraged to the price of gold, having monetized its Chinchillas silver discovery into a significant holding in precious metals producer SSR Mining Inc.

Golden Arrow is actively exploring a portfolio that includes a new epithermal gold project in Argentina, a districtscale frontier gold opportunity in Paraguay, a base-metal project in the heart of a leading mining district in Chile and more than 180,000 hectares of properties in Argentina.

The Company is a member of the Grosso Group, a resource management group that has pioneered exploration in Argentina since 1993.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Joseph Grosso"

_______________________________

Mr. Joseph Grosso,

Executive Chairman, President and CEO

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future, including, without limitation, statements about the Company's plans for its mineral properties; the Company's business strategy, plans and outlooks; the future financial or operating performance of the Company; and future exploration and operating plans are forward-looking statements.

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: the impact of COVID-19; risks and uncertainties related to the ability to obtain, amend, or maintain licenses, permits, or surface rights; risks associated with technical difficulties in connection with mining activities; and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Readers are encouraged to refer to the Company's public disclosure documents for a more detailed discussion of factors that may impact expected future results. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, unless required pursuant to applicable laws.







i Patagonia Gold Corp, NI 43-101 report with effective date of 31 of December 2018, filed on SEDAR.com ii http://panorama-minero.com/noticias/cerro-vanguardia-ha-sido-y-sigue-siendo-escuela/ (112119)

SOURCE Golden Arrow Resources Corporation
In his new role, Juraschek is responsible for strategic sales efforts directed toward benefit brokers and the targeted employer clients they represent. He is charged with building new broker segments to generate lasting business relationships representing the Purchasing Power program and its financial flexibility advantages for employees. Juraschek's sales activity will be targeted to Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

"Rick's considerable experience and success in the employee benefits and healthcare industries provide valuable insight and understanding of how we can best serve our broker partners and their clients," said Wilbert. "He furthermore is well established in the mid-Atlantic region, where we are firmly positioned for brand growth and expansion. We're confident that Rick will bring new vision and creative strategies to our sales efforts."

With more than 20 years of experience representing employee benefits selling including life, disability, absence management and voluntary products, Juraschek joins Purchasing Power after serving most recently as a national accounts sales director for the south east at Lincoln Financial Group, where he earned National Account Sales Rep of the Year in 2019. Prior to this, he was a group sales consultant for Liberty Mutual, where he was Group Sales Rep of the Year for 2014. He also held senior group sales roles at AIG and Canada Life.

Juraschek earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Among personal commitments, he is a longtime volunteer at Community Matters: Insurance Partners of Charlotte where he helps to raise funds on behalf of the Charlotte Rescue Mission.

Purchasing Power brings employees of large corporations, associations, and government agencies a unique online retail purchasing platform with access to over 45,000 products and services that is delivered interest-free via payroll deduction with no liability or cost to the employer. Purchasing Power's stated mission is to "power people to a better life."

About Purchasing Power, LLC

Purchasing Power, LLC, is an Atlanta-based voluntary benefit company celebrating 20 years as the leading employee purchase program for consumer products and services through payroll deduction. Helping employees achieve financial flexibility, Purchasing Power is available to millions of people through large companies including Fortune 500s, associations and government agencies. Purchasing Power is a Flexpoint Ford, LLC company. For more information, visit www.corp.purchasingpower.com

Purchasing Power is a registered trademark of Purchasing Power, LLC.

2021 Purchasing Power, LLC. All rights reserved.

Media Contact:

Joe Swaney, 404.609.5630

[email protected]



Juliann Kaiser, 770.643.0615

[email protected]

SOURCE Purchasing Power, LLC

Related Links

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The Indian Air Force (IAF) airlifted four empty tankers from Bangkok in to Gujarat's Jamnagar on Wednesday, senior officials said.

Moreover, two C-130 aircraft of the Singapore Air Force brought a total of 256 cylinders to the Panagarh air base in West Bengal, they added.

India is struggling with the second wave of the infection as hospitals in several states are reeling under a shortage of medical and beds.

On Tuesday, the airlifted nine cryogenic oxygen containers from Dubai and Singapore and brought them to Panagarh.

The conducted various domestic flights on Wednesday to transport oxygen tankers from one place to another.|



It used its C-17 aircraft to take eight oxygen tankers -- two each from Agra, Hindon, Gwalior and Chandigarh -- to Ranchi, the officials said.

Another C-17 aircraft was used to ferry two oxygen tankers from Indore to Raipur and one oxygen tanker from Bhopal to Surat, they noted.

Two oxygen tankers were transported by the from Jodhpur to Jamnagar, the officials said.

Another C-17 aircraft airlifted one oxygen tanker from Indore to Jamnagar, they added.

On Tuesday, the IAF airlifted eight cryogenic oxygen containers from Hyderabad to Bhubaneswar, two from Bhopal to Ranchi and two from Chandigarh to Ranchi.

Since last Friday, the IAF has been airlifting empty oxygen tankers and containers to various filling stations across the country to speed up the distribution of the much-needed medical oxygen in treating COVID-19 patients.

The IAF has also transported essential medicines as well as equipment required by the designated COVID hospitals in various parts of the country.

India saw a record single-day rise of 3,60,960 cases, which pushed its tally to 1,79,97,267, while the death toll due to the viral disease crossed two lakh with 3,293 more fatalities, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

A total of 1,48,17,371 people have recuperated from the disease, while the case fatality rate stands at 1.12 per cent, the ministry's data updated at 8 am showed.

(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.)
Minister Coveneys Opening Statement, Joint Committee on EU Affairs

Statement

Cathaoirleach,

I was very glad to receive your invitation to appear before the Committee in what is an important week for the EU-UK relationship.

This week, we will finalise the ratification of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). The European Parliament today completes its scrutiny of the Agreement. I hope and expect it to be endorsed by the European Parliament when the result of its consent vote is announced tomorrow morning. This will allow for the final formalities to be completed.

Dail Eireann of course adopted by acclamation a motion of support in January.

Ratifying the TCA will put a full toolbox at our disposal to make the best of the new framework for EU-UK cooperation.

The Agreement provides for 23 dedicated Committees and Working Groups, under an overall EU-UK Partnership Council to oversee the implementation of all aspects of the EU-UK relationship, with a view to making them work as well as possible. These will become forums where the EU can come together with the UK to iron out the practical details of how we cooperate, on issues from trade to aviation to law enforcement.

Ireland and all Member States will have the right to participate in these meetings as part of the EU delegation. We hope that the work of these joint bodies can begin as soon as possible and we look forward to engaging in them fully, in support of our interests and values.

This weeks developments are something of a milestone, therefore, in opening up new paths for us to maximise the potential of the TCA. They also serve as a timely reminder of what the Agreement has gained for us and what it avoided.

It is not so long ago that the daily headlines questioned whether an EU-UK Agreement would be possible at all. Members of this Committee are all too familiar with what a no deal outcome would have meant for this island. In addition to tariffs and quotas, a no-deal outcome would have severely constrained cooperation in key sectors such as transport, energy and policing. The ESRI found that, over the long term, a trade deal would almost halve the negative impact on our GDP of no deal.

The TCA does not  nor could it  replicate the status quo ante, but it means that these important forms of cooperation and trade can continue, albeit in a new framework.

The adjustment to the new reality created by the UKs decision to leave the EU, and with it the Single Market and Customs Union, has been challenging. There can be no doubt but that the Governments years-long planning and major investment in financial supports and infrastructure were entirely justified.

While we have mitigated against the worst possible outcomes, we were always clear that no level of preparation could have entirely allayed the effects of Brexit. Our fishers, our hauliers, and our importers and exporters are at the sharp end of the unavoidable changes brought by Brexit. We continue to engage with these sectors closely. The Government remains wholeheartedly committed to providing all of the support and guidance that we can as we navigate these challenges together.

The TCA is of course not the only treaty that establishes new EU-UK arrangements. The Withdrawal Agreement, including the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, also provides a vital framework that is of particular importance for this island.

The Protocol is the only solution to the problems created by Brexit for the island of Ireland and we firmly support ongoing contacts between the EU and the UK on its full implementation.

The Government respects and has listened to the concerns voiced by some on aspects of how the Protocol operates. I know from my own engagements with Vice President Sefcovic that the EU is doing everything possible to reflect these concerns and, working with the UK, to implement the Protocol in a way that impacts as little as possible on peoples everyday lives. I welcome particularly the recent commitment to joint EU-UK engagement with NI stakeholders in the weeks ahead on the issues involved.

I firmly believe that acting together, within the framework of the Protocol, the EU and UK can find solutions to the outstanding issues. I welcome the recent constructive engagements between Vice President Sefcovic and Lord Frost. Finding a sustainable and collaborative way forward is ultimately to the benefit of all communities in Northern Ireland, and to the EU and UK as a whole. It will also foster stability that, given recent very concerning disturbances in Northern Ireland, is needed now more than ever.

I know that all of us here want to see the Protocol and the TCA operate as effectively as possible. I look forward to the Members interventions and to answering all of the questions that you have.

Go raibh maith agat, a Cathaoirleach.

ENDS

 Previous Item |
[April 29, 2021] Curative Biotechnology, Inc. Announces Trading Symbol Change to "CUBT"

Kapil Bharti, Ph.D. and Dimiter Dimitrov, Ph.D. Join Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board

Boca Raton, FL, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Curative Biotechnology, Inc. (OTC: CUBT) a development stage biomedical company focused on novel therapies for rare diseases, announced today the Companys trading symbol change from CTYX to CUBT. As previously announced, the Company had changed its corporate name to Curative Biotechnology, Inc. to better represent its mission to discover and develop therapeutics for patients who have few, if any, effective treatments for rare diseases. Curative Biotechnology Inc. Chairman and President Paul Michaels said, This name and symbol change are reflective of our total remaking of this company and our mission to create treatments or cures for unmet medical needs for patients around the world. Michaels added, We are also very pleased to announce two additions to our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board. Both are important thought leaders in their respective fields and have joined our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board to help guide our programs through pre-clinical and clinical development. Dr. Kapil Bharti Kapil Bharti, Ph.D. from the National Eye Institute (NEI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has joined our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board. Dr. Bharti is the lead inventor on the U.S. and Worldwide patent applications licensed exclusively to Curative Biotech to repurpose Metformin into an eye drop to treat degenerative eye diseases like macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, Stargardts disease, and others. He is a world leader in his field, and we look forward to working closely with him as we prepare to move into clinical trials. Dr. Bharti earned his Ph.D. from J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, graduating summa cum laude. He did his postdoc work at NIH, where he published numerous papers on pigment cell biology, transcription regulation and the developmental biology of the eye. Dr. Bharti has won a number of awards including being the first Earl Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator at NEI, NIH Directors award and NEI Directors Dr. Karl Kupfer Visionary award for his groundbreaking research on developing ocular cell-therapies. Dr. Dimiter Dimitrov Dimiter Dimitrov, Ph.D. earned his degrees at the University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, and subsequently joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, in 1990. He left for the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 to start their Center for Antibody Therapeutics, where he serves as director. He was recently named one of 10 Science Superheroes by MediFind.



Dr. Dimitrovs major long-term goal is the development of clinically useful therapeutics and vaccines based on human monoclonal antibodies in different formats including engineered antibody domains, chimeric antigen receptors, bispecific antibodies and antibody drug conjugates. He has authored or coauthored more than 370 articles, several books, and is the inventor or coinventor of more than 100 inventions, patent applications or patents. Dr. Dimitrov is the lead inventor on the Antibody Drug Conjugate patent exclusively licensed to Curative Biotech from the National Cancer Institute to treat glioblastoma and has joined the companys Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board to help guide the development of his invention into the clinic. Recent Addition to CEOs Blog on Company Website

Richard Garr, CEO of Curative Biotech, recently added a post on the CEOs Blog entitled,Sometimes, starting big is the right decision. As noted in the blog, the company has decided to pursue a reformulation of metformin which was licensed from the National Eye Institute for the treatment of wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Curative expects to file an Investigational New Drug Application (IND) to begin human trials before the end of this year. Curative Biotechnology - Novel Solutions for Unmet Medical Needs Future Curative Biotechnology Press Releases and Industry Updates Interested investors and shareholders will receive press releases and industry updates by sending an e-mail to ir@curativebiotech.com . About Curative Biotechnology, Inc., http://curativebiotech.com Curative Biotech is a development-stage biomedical company focusing on novel treatments for rare diseases. Curative Biotech is focused on therapies with potentially accelerated development paths as a result of either the disease, the nature of the therapeutic itself, or the stage of clinical development. At the heart of the Company is a product development engine that rests on our unique S.O.A.R. filter (Science, Opportunity, Acceleration, Rare Disease.) At Curative Biotech, we envision a world where all patients have a therapeutic option. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. CUBT is not yet generating revenues. Although forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking?statements are inherently subjected to known, unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual?results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements, including but?not limited our ability to generate sufficient market acceptance for our products and services, our ability to generate sufficient operating cash?flow, and general economic conditions. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in our reports filed with OTC Markets from time to time which attempt to advise interested parties of the risks and factors that may affect our business, financial?condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release. Contact:

Curative Biotechnology, Inc.

ir@curativebiotech.com

Paul Michaels

(561) 907-8990 Ext 1 SOURCE: ?Curative Biotechnology, Inc.



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In addition to being named a Top Workplace, Noblis was also recognized with workplace culture awards for Appreciation, Direction, Values and Empowering Employees.

Noblis, a leading provider of science, technology and strategy services to the federal government, has been named a 2021 USA Top Workplace. This award honors nationally recognized companies that prioritize a people-centered culture and give employees a voice. The selection is based solely on employee feedback gathered through an anonymous third-party survey administered by Energage, LLC, which measures several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution and connection.

In addition to being named a Top Workplace, Noblis was also recognized with workplace culture awards for Appreciation, Direction, Values and Empowering Employees.

We are proud to make this national list in its inaugural year and excited to have the recognition from our employees, said Amr ElSawy, president and CEO, Noblis. It is particularly gratifying that we continue to be recognized as a top employer, especially given the challenges of the past year due to the pandemic. We continue to raise the bar on fostering an inclusive, engaging culture and ethical workplace and are pleased to see our employees recognize this in their feedback.

The feedback we receive from employees as a result of this yearly survey is so important and provides us with opportunity to take actions to maintain our standing as a top workplace, said Debbie Drake, vice president and chief people officer, Noblis. Being able to anticipate our employees needs and give them an enriching environment contributes greatly to our retention and recruitment. It also inspires all of us to continue delivering outstanding contributions to our clients missions.

This is the inaugural year for this nationwide Top Workplaces list. Noblis has also been recognized as a Top Workplace in the Greater Washington D.C. area for seven years in a row by The Washington Post. Noblis was also recognized for the tenth time by Ethisphere as one of the 2021 Worlds Most Ethical Companies. Additionally, over the past year we have received numerous awards from Comparably including the #1 ranked Best Place to Work in Washington D.C., one of the Top 50 large companies across North America with the Best Engineering Teams, the Happiest Employees, the Best Work-Life Balance, and the Top 100 highest-rated CEOs. Comparably ratings are based on employee feedback and compared to thousands of other companies. Individuals interested in joining the Noblis team may visit the companys career site, careers.noblis.org, for current opportunities and to learn more about our company culture.

ABOUT NOBLIS

Noblis is a dynamic science, technology, and strategy organization dedicated to creating forward-thinking technical and advisory solutions in the public interest. We bring the best of scientific thought, management, and engineering expertise together in an environment of independence and objectivity to deliver enduring impact on federal missions. Noblis works with a wide range of government clients in the defense, intelligence, homeland security and federal civil sectors. Together with our wholly owned subsidiary, Noblis ESI, we tackle the nations toughest problems and apply advanced solutions to our clients most critical missions.


Mumbai, April 29 : Actress Kareena Kapoor Khan on Thursday posted a clip from the "Tom & Jerry" cartoon series in a bid to explain to her son Taimur why it is essential for adults to get vaccinated for Covid-19.

Kareena wrote a note with the video post, too, about how she has been trying to explain the concept of vaccination to Taimur.

"We don't realise that our kids are also absorbing what's going on and they are scared too. We were talking to Tim to try and explain why all the adults need to be vaccinated and I think this sums it up pretty well. It's really that simple. But like we explain to our kids, we too need to be patient and help everyone who is trying to help us -- medics, pharma, authorities and the millions of volunteers -- please register and wait for your turn. #BreakTheChain," she wrote.

The actress has been posting messages on social media, urging people to follow Covid protocols seriously. She posted a message talking about the importance of wearing masks correctly recently.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The government, as a shareholder, not only has the right, but also must react to the ineffective work of the management of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy, which resulted in a deterioration in financial and operational results, therefore, the dismissal of Head of the Naftogaz Board Andriy Kobolev and the change of the Supervisory Board is logical, Acting Energy Minister Yuriy Vitrenko said.

"The government should be an active owner, respectively, the Cabinet of Ministers has the right and responsibility to respond to problems in the company. This decision was made in a package considering the results of 2020 [...] And from this point of view, it is understandable," he told Interfax-Ukraine on Wednesday.

Vitrenko said he is limited in commenting on this personnel decision from an ethical point of view, since he was appointed the new head of the company's board, but he understands its reasons.

He said that if in 2019 the consolidated profit of Naftogaz was more than UAH 63 billion, then according to the results of 2020 the consolidated loss, confirmed by the international company Deloitte, exceeded UAH 19 billion and became the first loss after 2015.

He said that at the very end of 2020, Naftogaz itself submitted a financial plan for 2020, which provided for an unconsolidated profit of UAH 11.5 billion, while as a result, an unconsolidated loss amounted to UAH 18 billion. "When you submit a financial plan and promise something, and then instead of the planned UAH 11 billion of profit, you receive a UAH 19 billion loss, this leads to the fact that your owner reacts. Moreover, the profit of Naftogaz is dividends, which receives the state, and the budget counted on them, but now it will not get it," the acting minister said.

According to him, Naftogaz submitted a package of materials to the meeting of shareholders scheduled for Wednesday the night before, after the end of the working day.

The minister said that in 2020, for the first time in many years, Naftogaz received compensation from the national budget for more than UAH 32 billion for the public service obligations (PSO), and it is easy to imagine what the damage would have been without this.

Vitrenko also said that similar companies in neighboring countries, Poland and Romania, were profitable in 2020. "It is correct to compare with these companies, and not with purely commercial Western ones, since Naftogaz uses free fixed assets that it receives from the state. It did not pay for the vast majority of its production licenses, did not buy fixed assets, it was given storage wells equipped, surface infrastructure, all of this in the overwhelming majority of cases was created by the predecessors of Naftogaz as a separate company, it was just that everything was included in the statutory fund," the acting minister said.

He said that in addition to financial results, operating results were also unsatisfactory, which was indicated at the government meeting: in 2021, Ukrgazvydobuvannia reduced sales of marketable gas and production of gross gas, liquid hydrocarbons, while private companies increased production.

He also said the decision was made in full compliance with the law, since the general meeting is the supreme agency of the company, which can make any decisions. "The Cabinet of Ministers had all the legal grounds, rights and opportunities to make decisions and, accordingly, to dismiss the head of the board," the acting minister said.

Vitrenko said that earlier the shareholder delegated a number of powers to the Supervisory Board, but the current decision of the Cabinet of Ministers terminated the powers of the Supervisory Board.

He said the termination of the powers of the supervisory board is justified, since its work was also recognized as unsatisfactory, like the board.
Impact of Grid Power on Financial and Operational Performance of Five New Jersey Buildings to be Uncovered

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Legend Power Systems (TSXV:LPS) and (OTCQB:LPSIF), a global leader in commercial electrical system solutions, today announced through a partnership with a major energy services company ("ESCO"), it will assess 5 acquisition target properties for a multi-billion-dollar multifamily property owner and operator. The ESCO partner is the Power Solutions / Energy Performance Contracting group of a Fortune 500 facilities operator.

This engagement is the first instance of Legend's SmartGATE Insights service being utilized for evaluating properties being considered for investment and opens a completely new multi-vertical opportunity. The Insights service enhances critical building health due diligence by bringing greater visibility to previously unseen risk in buildings targeted for acquisition.

"After investing significant time and resources to demonstrate the value-add of Legend's solutions, we are pleased to announce our second partnership with another major U.S. ESCO," said Legend Power CEO Randy Buchamer. "With SmartGATE Insights' unique ability to assess hundreds of building power characteristics and quickly deliver easy to understand, actionable solutions to customers, it was only a matter of time before ESCOs discovered the value of offering it to their customers. We anticipate establishing more relationships with U.S. ESCOs, which will provide Legend with low cost / high leverage geographic reach and strong presence in key U.S. regions. Legend gets instant access to decades long, trusted relationships in an expanded set of market verticals with little or no marketing, sales or infrastructure costs. I am excited about the opportunity these partnerships can bring which should quickly help us scale the business in existing as well as new regions."

The ESCO market in the U.S. is a US$10 billion to US$15 billion a year business that bundles energy conservation measures for large public entities such as government organizations and others. SmartGATE is a patented, unique and differentiated offering, which provides our new partner a significant competitive advantage. These advantages include enhanced energy savings performance, electrical systems reliability and power quality management capabilities which boost our ESCO partner's value proposition and delivers it more sales wins.

Legend's SmartGATE Insights and Power Impact Report are valuable tools that provide building owners a better understanding of the financial impact the power grid is having on their buildings and how SmartGATE solutions can solve these challenges for them. The Power Impact Report details these excessive costs across each building in a property portfolio and demonstrates how SmartGATE solutions can reduce these costs.

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.

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/643222/Property-Management-Firm-Leverages-Legend-Power-Insights-Through-Major-Energy-Services-Company-as-Part-of-Pre-Purchase-Property-Assessment
Chennai, April 29 : Even as the coronavirus infection rate is climbing rapidly in Tamil Nadu, the government can look at restricting movement of people for certain number hours without shutting down the industries and others, said industrialists.

They also said the central government should waive off the bank interest so that the units which are recovering from last year's lockdown can now stablise.

"With the learnings from last year's lockdown, all industrial units are following the Covid-19 safety protocols. So one can say that corona spread is not from the industrial units," Dr.V.S.V. Verchezhian, President, Chennai Chapter of Laghu Udyog Bharati (LUB) told IANS.

He said the government can allow movement of people for a limited period of time in a day, say morning three hours and evening three hours so that workers/employees can reach their place of work in the morning and reach back home in the evening.

Industrialists told IANS that another round of total lockdown will cripple them and also the economy.

The industrialists also said lessons have been learnt in managing the migrant workers from last year's lockdown.

"We are having regular dialogue with the migrant workers and assuring them that the situation will not be like last year. Further they are being assured that their basic needs will be taken care," D.Srinivasan, Managing Director, Bascet Engineering India Pvt Ltd told IANS.

The Coimbatore based Bascet Engineering caters to the construction sector with products like wooden window fittings, hardware parts for doors and others.

Srinivasan said Karnataka model is better as the units that are not oxygen dependent are allowed to function. Similarly, the Karnataka government has allowed construction and infrastructure sectors to carry on their activities.

"All industry owners are taking care of their worker's safety against coronavirus. It is only the daily wage migrant workers who are going back to their home state and not those employed by the industrial units," Verchezhian said.

Queried about banks' attitude towards lending against credit guarantee, Verchezhian said it differs from bank to bank.

Demanding delinking of medium units from micro, small and tiny units, TANSTIA past President V.S. Narasimhan told IANS: "Banks should be made to lend against credit guarantee rather than collaterals. The government should also infuse additional capital into the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation so that banks have the confidence to loan, based on the credit guarantee." "Already 40 per cent of our member units are sick for want of working capital and raw material. Further the increase in raw material prices have hit the units hard," Tamil Nadu Small and Tiny Industries Association (TANSTIA) President S. Anburajan told IANS.

He said many units supply the products to public sector units (PSU) and government utilities and are penalised for delayed supplies.

"We would like the PSUs not to penalise their small sized vendors for delay in supplies during the pandemic period. There should be a moratorium for loans and interest could be waived for the small units," Anburajan added.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Ooredoo Group posted a net profit of QR193 million ($53.01 million) in the first quarter of the year, the company has announced.

Group net profit attributable to Ooredoo shareholders decreased by 50% year-on-year to (QR193 million) in Q1, mainly due to foreign exchange impact coming from Myanmar with an FX loss in Q1, 2021 versus an FX gain in Q1, 2020.

Excluding the FX impact, the net profit increased by 120%, Ooredoo said.

Marginal year-on-year revenue decline of 1% to QR7.2bn in Q1, 2021 was due to a negative FX impact. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic (excluding FX impact) revenue increased by 1%, mainly driven by growth in its home market- Qatar and in Indonesia.

EBITDA increased by 6% year-on-year to QR3.2bn in Q1, 2021, as the company maintains its focus on digitalisation and cost optimisation.

EBITDA margin increased to 45% in Q1, 2021 from 41% in Q1, 2020, supported by EBITDA margin expansion in Indonesia, Kuwait, Iraq and Myanmar. Excluding FX impact, EBITDA increased by 9%.

Data revenues account for more than 55% of total revenue driven by data leadership and digital transformation initiatives across the operations, Ooredoo said.

Commenting on the results, Sheikh Faisal bin Thani Al-Thani, Ooredoo chairman said: Ooredoo Group delivered a robust set of results during the first quarter of 2021 despite challenging market conditions across many of our territories. We remained focused on our digital transformation agenda which has enabled us to create value for our customers by offering a seamless and convenient user experience as well as optimise our cost base by streamlining and automating processes. Consequently, our EBITDA margin improved to 45% in Q1, 2021 compared to 41% for the same period last year.

We made good progress with our strategy to move to a more efficient and flexible asset-light model with the successful sale and leaseback agreement valued at $750 million for more than 4,200 of our telecom towers in Indonesia to Edge Point Indonesia. Monetising these assets forms an integral part of our group strategy to create value for both our shareholders and customers.

During the quarter, Ooredoo Group successfully priced its $1bn bond issuance, reflecting the markets confidence in the strength and stability of our balance sheet as well as our strategy to deliver new and innovative solutions to our customers by leveraging our world class technology and infrastructure.

Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, managing director, Ooredoo said: I am pleased to report that Ooredoo Group had a solid start to the year, despite challenging market conditions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ooredoo Group delivered a 6% increase in EBITDA to QR3.2bn in Q1, 2021 compared to the same period last year. The growth was driven by the ongoing implementation of our cost optimisation strategy which includes leveraging technology to drive efficiency.

As a result, our EBITDA margin for the period increased to 45% in Q1 2021 compared to 41% for the same period last year, supported by margin expansion in Indonesia, Kuwait, Myanmar and Iraq.

Revenues remained under pressure due to a soft macroeconomic environment in many of our markets.

Ooredoo Group reported revenues of QR7.2bn during the first quarter, down 1% compared to the same period in the previous year.

Indosat Ooredoo continued to make strong progress with its strategy of offering simple, relevant, and transparent products supporting a 13% increase in revenue and a 36% increase in EBITDA.

Fakhroo said: Ooredoo Group invests further in its infrastructure to bring world class services to its customers. During the quarter Asiacell launched 4G in Iraq and Ooredoo Oman is preparing for the launch of mobile 5G services in Q2, 2021.

OOREDOO OMAN

Ooredoo Omans performance was affected by economic conditions, increasing competition in the prepaid segment and the Covid-19 impact. Revenues declined 4% to QR 610 million in Q1 2021 compared to the previous year, driven by a reduction in prepaid revenue which was partially offset by post-paid revenue gains.

Consequently, EBITDA declined 12% to QR 314 million during the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year. The company remains committed to managing its overall cost structure.

Ooredoo Omans customer base increased by 2% of 2.9 million in Q1 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year, as the company prepares to launch 5G mobile services in Q2 2021.

On 22 March 2021, Ooredoo Oman accepted the resignation of its CEO, Ian Dench effective as of 30 June 2021. The appointment of the new Ooredoo Oman CEO will be announced in due course.

OOREDOO KUWAIT

The Covid-19 pandemic contributed to a softening macroeconomic environment in Kuwait, impacting Ooredoo Kuwaits performance during the period. The companys revenues declined 8% to QR 607 million in Q1 2021 compared to the previous year. EBITDA for the period increased 2% to QR 169 million, compared to the same period in the previous year, supporting an increase in EBITDA margin to 28% in Q1 2021 from 25%.

Recognising the companys long-standing commitment to its customers, Ooredoo Kuwait was awarded the Best Internet Service Provider at the annual Service Hero Awards for the year 2020. The company remained focused on launching new and innovative products for its customers, signing an MoU with the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) to develop digital services, products and solutions that contribute to enriching customer experiences. Ooredoo Kuwaits customer base in Q1 2021 was 2.4 million (Q1 2020: 2.5 million).

ASIACELL  IRAQ

The Iraqi economy was impacted by weakening purchasing power following the 17% devaluation of the Iraqi Dinar and the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Asiacell reported revenue of QR 852 million during the first quarter of 2021 compared to QR 1,085 million for same period in the previous year. Consequently, EBITDA declined 20% to QR 380 million in Q1 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year. The companys cost optimisation initiatives contributed to a healthy EBITDA margin of 45% in Q1 2021.

Asiacell maintained its customer base of 14.6 million (Q1 2020: 14.5 million), supported the launch of 4G and new partnerships with OSN and LaLiga, enabling the company to offer bundled services and increase data usage.

NORTH AFRICA

OOREDOO ALGERIA

Ooredoo Algeria delivered a healthy set of results during the first quarter of 2021, despite a challenging macroeconomic environment. In local currency terms revenues increased 2% in Q1 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year, supported by the bundling of offers in the My Ooredoo App and the launch of plans targeting SOHOs and SMEs. Consequently, an EBITDA margin of 34% has been maintained.

In Qatari Rial terms, the companys performance was impacted by the 9% year on year depreciation of the Algerian Dinar. Ooredoo Algeria reported revenues of QR 551 million during the first quarter of 2021 compared to QR 594 million for the for the same period in the previous year. EBITDA for the period was QR 188 million, a decline of 6% compared to the same period in the previous year. The company maintained an EBITDA margin of 34% as it focused on cost optimisation and implemented a number of initiatives including optimising spend and digital efficiencies.

Ooredoo Algerias customer base was 12.7 million in Q1 2021, up 3% compared to the same period in the previous year.

OOREDOO TUNISIA

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic continuing to impact the macroeconomic environment in Tunisia, Ooredoo Tunisia reported revenues of QR 394 million in Q1 2021, an increase of 3% compared to the same period in the previous year supported by favourable FX trends. The company remains focused on the implementation of its value creation plan which includes expanding its digital proposition and streamlining its operations through the digitisation of its sales and distribution channels.

The company reported EBITDA of QR 162 million in Q1 2021, down 3% compared to the same period in the previous year. The companys focus on efficiency and cost optimisation supported a healthy EBITDA margin of 41% in Q1 2021.

Ooredoo Tunisia changed the reporting of its prepaid customers base from the original life-cycle definition to the 90 days network activity definition, to align with the standard reporting methodology used in Tunisia. As a result, Ooredoo Tunisias reported customer base declined by approximately 2.3 million to 6.9 million customers in Q1 2021. There is no impact on the reported financials.

ASIA

INDOSAT OOREDOO

Indosat Ooredoo reported an excellent set of results in the first quarter of 2021, maintaining the positive momentum from the previous year. Indosat Ooredoos revenue increased by 13% to QR 1.9 billion during the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year. Growth was driven by the strong performance in cellular revenues supported by a rebound in the enterprise business.

Indosat Ooredoos EBITDA increased to QR 956 million in the first quarter of 2021 up 36% compared to the same period in the previous year, due to a combination of top line growth and cost efficiencies.

Supported by its strategy of offering simple, relevant, and transparent products and its network investments Indosat Ooredoos customer base increased 7% to 60.0 million in Q1 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year.

Indosat Ooredoo signed a sale and leaseback agreement with PT EPID Menara Asset Co (Edge Point Indonesia) for more than 4,200 telecommunications towers. The transaction is valued at $750 million and forms part of Ooredoo Groups strategy to move to a more efficient and flexible asset-light model unlocking the trapped value of its infrastructure portfolio.

On April 28, Ooredoo Group extended the exclusivity period of the non-legally binding MoU with CK Hutchison to Jun 30, 2021, in relation to a potential transaction to combine their respective telecommunications businesses in Indonesia. This extension will provide more time to complete the ongoing due diligence and negotiate the final terms of a possible combination of the entities.

OOREDOO MYANMAR

Political developments in Myanmar including restrictions on mobile and wireless broadband impacted Ooredoo Myanmars performance in Q1 2021. The companys priority during this period of emergency was to keep its customers connected by offering an extensive range of affordable voice products.

Ooredoo Myanmar reported revenues of QR 252 million during the first quarter of 2021, a decline of 11% compared to the same period last year, as restrictions impacted data revenues which were partially offset by an increase in voice revenues. The company continued to implement its cost optimisation strategy which included optimising data centres and energy consumption as well as contract renegotiations supporting a 12% increase in EBITDA to QR 56 million in Q1 2021 compared to the same period last year.

Ooredoo Myanmar also launched a number of initiatives to support the community including its donate a recharge program where customers who have an extra balance can donate it alongside Ooredoo Myanmar, which donates MMK 5 million daily to customers who need a top-up. The companys customer base decreased by 14% to 13.4 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year. -- TradeArabia News Service
The has welcomed the recent announcements by the and to help India address its COVID-19 crisis.

"Very glad to see recent announcements by the US and to help India address COVID19," President David Malpass said in a tweet on Wednesday.

In a speech on April 15, Malpass had underlined the need for countries with the prospect of excess vaccine supplies to release them as soon as possible.

"Next, more doses and transparency on delivery schedules are key," he said.

The is financing a fast-track approval process to provide deployment and vaccine payments if supplies become available.

"We urge COVAX donors to encash their commitments and help meet delivery needs," Malpass said.

So far, the World Bank Group has responded to the crisis by closely supporting Indian strategy of tackling the pandemic in three phases, he said.

In the first phase, the bank partnered with the government to support India's immediate health needs. The second phase saw a program to help the poor and vulnerable communities deeply affected by the pandemic.

And the third phase was about economic stabilisation and it included a bank-supported project for medium small and micro enterprises (MSMEs), Malpass added.

By the end of June 2020, the World Bank had approved USD2.75 billion in emergency lending to support India's response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The World Bank will provide USD250m in financing to help India build a social protection system that can respond to disasters and expand the ability of its safety nets to cater to diverse needs across states and vulnerable groups.

It is also preparing a project that will help raise and accelerate MSME productivity by strengthening institutions and markets.

Job creation is also a special focus under its infrastructure projects, the bank 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.)
Negotiators in the conflict in eastern Ukraine have failed to agree a truce ahead of Orthodox Easter later this week amid a surge in fighting since the start of the year.

A cease-fire that took hold in July has been unraveling, with deadly clashes sharply increasing between Ukrainian forces and Moscow-backed separatists in a war that has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.

A Russian troop buildup in recent weeks near Ukraine's borders and in Russian-occupied Crimea has raised concerns of a major escalation of the conflict in Kyiv and its Western backers, but Moscow claimed on April 29 that almost all its troops had now returned to their permanent bases after participating in massive drills.

Participants in a meeting of the trilateral contact group (TCG) comprising Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) "reiterated their commitment" to the cease-fire, the special representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office in Ukraine, Ambassador Heidi Grau, said on April 29.

"However -- regrettably -- no agreement was reached upon a TCG statement on responding to cease-fire violations and their elimination in the future," she added.

Interfax-Ukraine quoted the spokesman of the Ukrainian delegation, Oleksiy Arestovych, as saying that the six hours of talks on an "Easter truce" had been "constructive" but that a final text could not be agreed.

Russian representative Boris Gryzlov blamed the Ukrainian side, telling Interfax that Kyiv had "blocked Russia's proposals on specific mechanisms to prevent violations" of a cease-fire.

The Orthodox Easter holiday falls on May 1.

More than 30 Ukrainian soldiers have been reported killed since the beginning of 2021, compared with 50 in all of last year. The separatists have reported at least 20 of their fighters killed.

Grau noted that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (OSCE SMM) "continues to record a high level" of cease-fire violations.

The "growing number of restrictions and impediments to the freedom of movement of the OSCE SMM is negatively affecting" the implementation of its mandate, the diplomat said, adding that unmanned aerial vehicles used by the international monitors "are targeted daily by small-arms fire as well as by jamming."

Meanwhile, the commander of Russia's Western Military District reported that most of his troops were now back at their garrisons after taking part in major maneuvers around the areas of eastern Ukraine.

Speaking during a meeting of top military brass, Colomel General Aleksandr Zhuravlev said that just one trainload of troops was still on its way to their home base.

General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, said that more than 300,000 troops, nearly one-third of Russia's 1 million-strong military, took part in the exercises earlier this month, along with about 35,000 combat vehicles, 900 aircraft, and 180 ships.

Western officials did not immediately comment on the Russian announcements.

The United States and NATO have said that the Russian military buildup was the largest since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and threw its military, political, and economic support behind separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine.

With reporting by AFP andAP
Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday said he had ordered a full-scale inquiry into the reports of mistreatment of overseas Pakistanis by the country's embassy in Saudi Arabia

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday said he had ordered a full-scale inquiry into the reports of mistreatment of overseas Pakistanis by the country's embassy in Saudi Arabia.

"On my directive, a high-powered investigation is underway to probe the Ambassador and staff on the complaints of mistreatment meted out to Pakistanis," he said in his address at launch of Roshan Digital incentives for expats.

Imran Khan expressed strong displeasure over the reports of the embassy staff allegedly involved in minting money from Pakistani nationals. The maximum staff of the embassy has been recalled, he added.

He warned of strict action against those held responsible for negligence.

"It is the duty of foreign missions to extend best possible services to Pakistanis, particularly belonging to labourers and working-class," he said.

Imran Khan in particular acknowledged the services of labour class Pakistani nationals working abroad in tough conditions and sending their hard-earned money to their families back home.

"These workers deserve our utmost respect and the government will not spare anyone behaving with them wrongly," he said.
Conditions are so dire in a NSW hospital that its doctors are threatening to quit en masse, as a parliamentary inquiry heard tea ladies are sometimes forced to check on newborn babies because no nurses are available.

Doctors and nurses gave alarming testimonies as the inquiry into regional health travelled to Deniliquin on Thursday for the first in a series of regional hearings.

Doctors have threatened to resign en masse from Deniliquin Hospital. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Chair of the Deniliquin Health Action Group Marion Magee gave evidence that doctors in Deniliquin Hospital are forced to work up to 120 hours a week and a nurse practitioner is no longer available at the facility.

Dr Magee said all five doctors at Deniliquin Hospital would meet this weekend to consider resigning en masse from their positions.
A contest for Northern Ireland's first minister began on Thursday, after the head of the British province announced her resignation amid intra-party strife and riots over the impact of Brexit.

Arlene Foster announced Wednesday she would step down as Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader on May 28 and first minister at the end of June -- prompting the contest at a tumultuous time for the region.

Tensions are running high in Northern Ireland, which is home to 1.9 million people and divided between pro-UK unionists and pro-Ireland nationalists.

Hardcore unionists are malcontent with a new post-Brexit "protocol" for the region they feel undermines links with mainland Great Britain -- England, Scotland and Wales.

Earlier this month tempers boiled over into days of rioting across the province that saw at least 88 police officers injured.

The new DUP leader will inherit the crisis in the unionist community and the party itself, which has been vehemently opposed to the post-Brexit "protocol" but powerless to prevent it.

"Whoever succeeds Foster will have to begin his leadership career with some very straight talking about the difficulties of dumping the protocol," said Alex Kane, in the Belfast Telegraph.

"Right now unionism needs a combination of pragmatism wrapped in the strength of a coherent response to the protocol."

- Potential candidates -

No candidate has formally declared but the favourite for the leadership is regarded as Edwin Poots, a regional lawmaker serving as the agriculture minister of Northern Ireland.

Poots is considered as an ambitious hardliner within the DUP, a hard-right party with Protestant roots which sometimes regarded Foster as too moderate.

He is a "young earth creationist" who rejects the theory of evolution and believes the world was made by God around 4000 BC.

UK lawmakers Jeffrey Donaldson and Gavin Robinson are also contenders for the position, although both would be considered moderates compared to Foster.

Story continues

Ian Paisley Jr, the son of the party's firebrand founder, also looms large in the race but he is sometimes regarded as a maverick and has been dogged by a scandal over parliamentary expenses.

Sammy Wilson, who sits in the UK parliament, has been the party's hardline Brexit spokesman, and could be regarded as an uncompromising character to undo the controversial arrangements in Northern Ireland.

"The DUP is overwhelmingly conservative and will now almost certainly lurch to the right. But everyone in it is painfully aware this will paint them further into a corner," wrote Newton Emerson in the Irish Times.

"Most realise the pragmatic choice is to take the hit for setbacks and 'sell' them, as Foster tried to do with the protocol as recently as January. They just cannot bring themselves to do it."

- Internal revolt -

Foster was effectively forced out in an internal party revolt with 80 per cent of regional and national lawmakers backing a change of leadership, the BBC reported.

Regional media said there was discontent with her decision to abstain on a regional vote to ban gay conversion therapy.

There was also said to be bitter rancour within the party over her decision to despatch a DUP official to a summit with Irish leaders, despite a party-wide belief such meetings should be boycotted over the Brexit "protocol".

The "protocol" for Northern Ireland came into effect in January, and effectively keeps the region in the European customs union and single market for goods.

The scheme was designed to prevent a "hard border" with EU member state Ireland -- a former flashpoint in "The Troubles" sectarian conflict between unionists and nationalist which wound down in 1998.

However unionists feel new border checkpoints at Northern Irish ports, on goods arriving from Britain, are severing ties with the mainland and increasing the likelihood of a united Ireland.

The DUP were unlikely power-brokers in the UK parliament in London between mid-2017 and 2019, and were capable of blocking a Brexit entailing any special arrangements for Northern Ireland.

But after current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a landslide majority in December 2019 they were powerless to prevent the "protocol".

In her departure statement Foster said "the protocol being foisted upon Northern Ireland against the will of unionists has served to destabilise Northern Ireland."

jts/phz/jz
VISTA DEL MAR NAMES CELEBATED ADVOCATE KARRIANN FARRELL HINDS, ESQ. AS DIRECTOR OF GOVERNMENT AND STRATEGIC AFFAIRS

Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services is proud to welcome Karriann Farrell Hinds, Esq. to the newly created position of Director of Government and Strategic Affairs.

Building on her multi-faceted career as an accomplished community leader, political appointee, successful attorney and passionate advocate for ensuring justice and equality for the underserved, Karriann joins Vistas leadership team, effective immediately. She will cultivate and champion new opportunities for the 113-year-old, 4 Star Charity Navigator rated Social Service agency and those they serve.

Working in alignment with the Chief Development and Marketing Officer, Craig Prizant, Vista CEO and President, Lena Wilson, J.D., and the Government Relations Committee on the Board of Directors under the leadership of Laurie Konheim, Karriann will develop and coordinate government relations and public affairs strategies, monitor legislative and regulatory issues and analyze pending policy proposals and the impact on Vistas care community.

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Karriann will fortify significant relationships with local, state and federal governing bodies and representatives, including city, county and school districts, public officials and their staff, national thought leaders, and key stakeholders, in order to enhance Vista Del Mars partnerships, image, and public awareness.

Craig Prizant states, We are so excited to have Karriann join our Vista Family. She brings a wealth of experience to our Agency and will help advocate tirelessly for our children, supporting initiatives that will have a positive impact on Vistas community, short term and long.

Lena Wilson adds, Based on her extensive knowledge of National, L.A. City and County government structure, function and operation, and her success engaging community networks, Karriann will have a key role in the innovation and advancement of a comprehensive, proactive strategy that optimizes Vistas values, mission and goals. Were focused on identifying synergistic opportunities that strengthen our ability to deliver leading-edge solutions that benefit Vista children and families, ensuring equity and excellence in education, mental health programs and our umbrella of social services.

Of her new role, Karriann notes, Im proud to follow in the footsteps of my mentors and those who walked before and beside me, working boundlessly to give voice, dignity, purpose and meaning to those in the community, too often unseen and unheard. I look forward to expanding Vistas presence locally and nationally, shining the light on their unique and exceptional mental health, education and wraparound support programs and services. The need has never been greater; Vistas leadership and comprehensive capabilities, never more critical.
Chennai, April 29 : The IT cell in-charge of the Tamil Nadu BJP has denied the allegations of actor Sidharth that he was threatened with murder and his family members with rape through social media including Twitter. He said that the threats were owing to his criticism of the Union government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having failed to handle the second Covid wave.

The actor had tweeted that the IT cell of the BJP Tamil Nadu unit had leaked his mobile number and more than 500 people had issued death threats, abuse and threat of rape of his family members. He said that all the numbers were linked to the BJP.

BJP Tamil Nadu IT wing secretary, CTR Nirmal Kumar while speaking to IANS said, "BJP workers are not involved in issuing death threats to actor Sidharth. We are in the process of supporting people with food and medicines during the Covid crisis. If he can prove that any BJP worker is involved in this, I assure that strict action will be taken against him/her." He added, "Party workers should not listen to people like Sidharth who are simply spending time. We stay focused on serving the public."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Illinois church with drag queen leader has reached 'doctrinal annihilation': Al Mohler

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Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler has denounced an Illinois churchs consideration of having a drag queen as their pastor, calling it doctrinal annihilation.

Hope United Methodist Church in Bloomington garnered headlines for having an openly gay man who is also a drag queen serve as a leader at their congregation, with a local UMC body advancing him as a candidate for ministry.

In a Wednesday episode of his podcast The Briefing, Mohler blasted the church's advancement of Isaac Simmons as an intentional refutation and revolt against the very order of creation that God has given us, and a direct violation of the clear teachings of Scripture concerning the fact that those whom God has made as men should identify as men.

This is open revolt, and of course, you're going to see a division between those who are appalled by it, deeply troubled by it, deeply concerned by it and opposed to it on the one hand, and those who celebrate it and say that it's arrived far too late on the other hand, said Mohler.

By the time any kind of church or church body reaches this point, it has already basically embraced doctrinal annihilation. There is virtually nothing left of the historic Christian tradition.

Mohler went on to explain that you're looking not only at two different positions when it came to whether Simmons should be a church leader, but rather you're looking at two different religions.

Those two different religions cannot possibly continue to exist in one church or in one denomination, he added. Once conservatives are out of the picture in the United Methodist Church, this is only the start of where things will go in the future.

A student at Illinois Wesleyan, Simmons has been known to be involved in online worship as his drag persona, Ms. Penny Cost, including on April 11, known as Drag Sunday.

In an interview with CBS News affiliate WMBD in Illinois, Simmons explained that he wasn't expecting to be approved for clergy candidacy, given the UMCs official stance against homosexuality, noncelibate homosexual ordination and same-sex marriage.

Theyre saying this person is being called to ministry and has our approval to receive the United Methodist support financially and otherwise, Simmons said. My faith and my understanding of God calls me to be a part of that; to be a part of change-making and to be a part of creating spaces where everyone, regardless of their identities [or] orientations, can be and exist without even an inkling of Am I welcomed here?'

News of Simmons and his clergy candidacy comes as many conservatives in the UMC plan to exit the denomination due to many officials' failure to enforce its official teachings on LGBT issues.

Earlier this year, a group of theologically conservative United Methodists announced the creation of the Global Methodist Church, set to launch once the UMC approves an amicable separation proposal at General Conference.

Keith Boyette, spokesman for the Global Methodist Church, told The Christian Post in an earlier interview that UMC leadership has displayed an unwillingness to uphold its teachings on LGBT issues.

In the United States, particularly, some bishops, clergy, and churches are operating in open defiance to the teachings of the United Methodist Church, Boyette said. The Church has become ungovernable as a consequence, such unchecked defiance has destroyed the integrity of the Church.

In light of this, theologically conservative leaders have decided to launch a new denomination that will be true to its doctrine and teachings and end this endless conflict within the United Methodist Church.
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2021 / Horizonte Minerals Plc, (AIM:HZM)(TSX:HZM) ('Horizonte' or 'the Company') the nickel company focused in Brazil, is pleased to announce that it has awarded the contract for the Environmental & Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) for the Company's 100% owned nickel cobalt Vermelho project ('Vermelho' or the 'Project') to Ramboll.

Ramboll is a leading global consultancy firm with 300 offices worldwide, including Belo Horizonte. Ramboll's Impact Assessment services are based on both commercial understanding and technical rigour to deliver projects that are advanced, sustainable and provide value to society. Horizonte has previously worked with Ramboll on the hydrology for its flagship Araguaia ferronickel project.

The ESIA is an essential part of the permitting process for Vermelho and expected to lead to the award of the Preliminary Licence. As Vermelho is located within the Para State, the technical agency responsible for reviewing the Environmental Impact Study and Report will be the Para State Secretariat for Environment and Sustainability, SEMAS.

Previous owner, Vale, conducted multiple environmental and social studies and reached a positive construction decision in 2015. The historical database created by Vale provides an excellent background and basis of the new sustainability studies. Horizonte is also optimising the engineering for Vermelho's dry-stack residue storage facility option. An additional benefit from the Project resulting from this optimisation is the production of a bi-product, kieserite fertilizer which will be sold commercially into the Para state agricultural market.

Ramboll will be completing new field campaigns in a Covid-19 safe manner and is well serviced by its existing sustainability team in the Para state region. The integrated ESIA will reflect the current physical, biological and social settings and will include, but is not limited to:

Water availability and quality

An air and noise baseline study

Soil quality

A flora and fauna inventory

Socio-economic considerations

Community health and safety

Resettlement

Cultural heritage

In addition to local permit studies, further social and environmental impact assessments will be undertaken in line with International Finance Corporation Performance Standards and the Equator Principles (IV).

Horizonte CEO, Jeremy Martin commented: "The appointment of Ramboll highlights our commitment to the highest standards of sustainability practices as we work to develop Vermelho. Vermelho is a tier one nickel-cobalt project that will come online to supply the rapidly growing EV battery market. The planned completion of Araguaia financing will enable Horizonte to expedite the development of Vermelho through feasibility and permitting.

Vermelho is scheduled to start production at a critical point in the nickel market, where the supply deficit is projected to widen, particularly in the battery sector. With limited next generation nickel projects in the global near-term pipeline, Horizonte is in a unique position. Progressing Vermelho through to a construction ready status will significantly de-risk the Project and we believe this will be increasingly reflected in the value attributed to the Project by the market.

Advancing Vermelho and working towards start of construction at Araguaia are all part of our business plan as we move to become a significant nickel producer, allowing shareholders to realise value from our exceptional, wholly-owned asset base."

For further information, visit www.horizonteminerals.com or contact:

Horizonte Minerals plc Jeremy Martin (CEO) Anna Legge (Corporate Communications) info@horizonteminerals.com +44 (0) 203 356 2901 Peel Hunt (NOMAD & Joint Broker) Ross Allister David McKeown +44 (0)20 7418 8900 BMO (Joint Broker) Thomas Rider Pascal Lussier Duquette Andrew Cameron +44 (0) 20 7236 1010

About Horizonte Minerals:

Horizonte Minerals plc is an AIM and TSX-listed nickel development company focused in Brazil. The Company is developing the Araguaia project, as the next major ferronickel mine in Brazil, and the Vermelho nickel-cobalt project, with the aim of being able to supply nickel and cobalt to the EV battery market. Both projects are 100% owned.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

Except for statements of historical fact relating to the Company, certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, the ability of the Company to complete the Acquisition as described herein, statements with respect to the potential of the Company's current or future property mineral projects; the success of exploration and mining activities; cost and timing of future exploration, production and development; the estimation of mineral resources and reserves and the ability of the Company to achieve its goals in respect of growing its mineral resources; the ability of the Company to complete the Placing as described herein, and the realization of mineral resource and reserve estimates. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking information is based on the reasonable assumptions, estimates, analysis and opinions of management made in light of its experience and its perception of trends, current conditions and expected developments, as well as other factors that management believes to be relevant and reasonable in the circumstances at the date that such statements are made, and are inherently subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to risks related to: the inability of the Company to complete the Acquisition as described herein, exploration and mining risks, competition from competitors with greater capital; the Company's lack of experience with respect to development-stage mining operations; fluctuations in metal prices; uninsured risks; environmental and other regulatory requirements; exploration, mining and other licences; the Company's future payment obligations; potential disputes with respect to the Company's title to, and the area of, its mining concessions; the Company's dependence on its ability to obtain sufficient financing in the future; the Company's dependence on its relationships with third parties; the Company's joint ventures; the potential of currency fluctuations and political or economic instability in countries in which the Company operates; currency exchange fluctuations; the Company's ability to manage its growth effectively; the trading market for the ordinary shares of the Company; uncertainty with respect to the Company's plans to continue to develop its operations and new projects; the Company's dependence on key personnel; possible conflicts of interest of directors and officers of the Company, the inability of the Company to complete the Placing on the terms as described herein, and various risks associated with the legal and regulatory framework within which the Company operates. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking 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.

This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com.

SOURCE: Horizonte Minerals PLC

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643216/Horizonte-Minerals-PLC-Announces-Vermelho-ESIA-Contract-Awarded-to-Ramboll
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it will be scrapping a Trump-era proposed rule that would have allowed federally-funded shelters to ban trans-identified men from staying in women-only shelters.

HUD said last week it was withdrawing a proposed rule from the Trump administration that would have amended the Equal Access Rule to allow shelters to establish their own rules regarding single-sex facilities.

HUD Secretary of HUD Marcia L. Fudge said in a statement that the decision was meant to protect the rights of homeless men who identity as female.

Access to safe, stable housing-and shelter-is a basic necessity, Fudge said. Unfortunately, transgender and gender non-conforming people report more instances of housing instability and homelessness than cis-gender people. Today, we are taking a critical step in affirming HUDs commitment that no person be denied access to housing or other critical services because of their gender identity. ...

Source:The Christian Post
In the May 18 primary, Democratic voters will decide which four of the 13 candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring for Harrisburg City Council will get their vote.

It might be a tough choice, but the candidates faced off in a virtual debate Wednesday night to give residents a better idea of who they are, where they stand on the issues, and why they should be on city council to help carry Pennsylvanias capital into the future.

Of the 13 candidates, 12 participated in the debate  Vishal Bajpai, Roy Christ, Shamaine Daniels, Crystal Davis, Carrie Fowler, Sarah Gethers, Ausha N. Green, Lavet Henderson, Jennie Jenkins-Dallas, Robert Lawson, Jocelyn Rawls and Ralph Rodriguez. Lori Ann Beamer-Saulisbury did not participate.

The debate was hosted by Friends of Midtown, Midtown Action Council, and Whos Running for Office (WRFO), and was moderated by PennLive Outreach and Opinion editor Joyce Davis.

You can watch the two-hour debate for yourself on the organizations Facebook page.

Among the issues the candidates discussed were police reform, housing and encouraging families to move to and stay in Harrisburg.

Police reform

Bajpai said he believes the police budget is too high, and residents took umbrage with the significant increase the police received in the last budget.

A lot of that money can be spent on social programs that actually solve the root causes of community violence and community crime, he said.

Long-term, abolishing police departments is a goal, he said, but its a generational goal. He said he is committed to creating a village right here in Harrisburg that can eventually take care of itself without the need for police.

Christ said he is not a supporter of defunding the police, but he would want to look at other programs that would help residents and reduce crime. Reducing recidivism with programs after people get out of prison to help them get on their feet is important.

If they paid their price and their debt to society, that moniker should not follow them for the rest of their lives, he said.

And with the reduction of crime, we might not need the police, he said, but there would still have to be strict rules and oversight.

Gethers said reform has to happen because people are not happy with the police department right now, and she is a supporter of defunding the police department and reallocating those funds to other departments that serve the community.

We have $3-plus million to give to the police department. That money could have been used elsewhere. Our community said they wanted it to be used for the people who are about to be evicted, she said.

Abolition of police departments is the future, she added.

Rodriguez said police reform is needed, and he pointed out that he has been been fighting for police reform and helped pave the way for recent state legislation.

He believes defunding the police starts with budgeting responsibly to make sure the funds are property allocated.

As far as abolishment, anything racist in this world, yes, it should be reformed, it should be re-scripted and rewritten and be equal for everyone across the board, he said .

Fowler said she believes in reform and in defunding the police department by 40 to 50 percent.

We saw in December, where council gave our police department 3 million additional dollars to an already inflated budget, she said.

That money could have been put back into the community and used to support organizations that are doing the hard work of lifting up the communities, she said. With more resources, they can bolster their efforts to the benefit of all, she added.

Daniels, an incumbent, said she believes in defunding and reforming the police department. Right now, the police are relied upon for many different jobs when they should be focused on the serious crimes.

We rely too much on law enforcement to deal with poverty, and we criminalize too many things, Daniels said. I would address some of the things that are crimes in our codes that really shouldnt be crimes.

Henderson said the community is normally over policed and under-protected, but right now, she feels theyre lacking in both areas. Reform is important, but ultimately, she said she supports working toward the abolishment of police departments.

If we looked at the system and abolished slavery, I wouldnt know why we wouldnt abolish the police when they were founded off of racist practices, she said.

Jenkins-Dallas, who is a former Harrisburg police officer, said defunding is a complicated issue and shouldnt be a political slogan.

What we need is a culture change in our police department, she said. We need to be proactive in our communities instead of trying to out-police problems.

She said she is for reform, and the police need new sets of tools, a top-to-bottom review of procedures and a re-examination of the departments priorities.

Rawls said police reform is needed, and that starts with recruitment and retention.

We can start inside of our high schools, pushing programs in our schools, letting our students know that they can be police officers and they are from our community, she said, adding that having police officers who know and understand the community will help build a trust thats currently lacking.

She said the additional $3 million the police received this year could have been redirected to programs to help those who are re-entering the community, as well as youth programs and activities.

Lawson said hes had instances of calling the police and no one showed up, so he would have an issue with abolishing them.

The problem that we have right now is that the police dont necessarily know who they work for, he said. They work for us.

He said strong community oversight is necessary. The police need to understand that the citizens are their top priority, and they protect and serve the citizens, who are not their subjects, he said.

Davis said she would propose instead of defunding the police that the money be redirected and put toward mental-health education, PTSD screenings and training.

She noted the county hired mental-health workers and the city hired community service aides to act as a liaison between community and the police to encourage better communication.

Theres a lot going on in our communities right now. Random gun violence, shootings, and the citizens are scared and afraid, she said, adding there needs to be reform, but the city also needs to have police on the streets.

And Green, an incumbent who serves on the public safety committee, said she agrees there is a need for police reform with more community input and more community policing, which she said is something that will be addressed with the new police advisory committee.

We have to address the root cause of crime, so we have to address poverty, she said. We have to understand that in communities of color there is a high instance of over policing, so we have to make sure we check ourselves so that we are not doing that.

Abolishing the police department is something that cant be done, she said, because state law for third-class cities indicates there must be a police department. But to help the police department better serve the citizens, she added the city must recruit locally so the officers are a part of the community. Funds should also be reallocated but with a plan to make long-term changes, she added.

Encouraging families to live in the city

Rodriguez said Harrisburg is a beautiful place and its about saying Harrisburg is beautiful, come see our city. He said the city shouldnt use terms like blight or condemned buildings, but think of them as opportunities for investors to uplift the city.

Rawls said it comes down to showing the passion residents have for Harrisburg and promoting the beautiful riverfront, festivals, parades and the school district, which is overcoming struggles to flourish. She said city council needs to be the cheerleader for the city.

Fowler said the problem isnt encouraging families to move here, but its a challenge to keep them here. She is currently a member of the school board and, even though the district had to go into state receivership, the district is starting to do wonderful things. It is not raising taxes, she said, and it is on a good footing for the future, which should be an encouraging sign for families moving to the city.

Henderson said before encouraging people to move to Harrisburg, she would want the city to better support the people who already reside in Harrisburg. She said people are moving to Midtown, but other areas of the city are suffering. When residents of all areas are supported, the city will be a draw for new families, she said

Bajpai said he is an advocate for expanding after-school and summer programs for youths that add value to childrens lives and enrich them in ways that schools normally cant. He wants more community centers in the city and he plans to work to revamp the citys green spaces.

Green said the city currently does not do a good promoting all of the positive things that are going on. We may hear about the problems, but the city needs to do more to promote the culture, the Harrisburg experience, the festivals and all of the opportunities that bring people to the region in the first place.

Daniels said there might be issues to solve, but there are great assets and resources here for residents. The schools have a lot of good things going on, and when you invest in the youth, they thrive, she said. Spending more time elevating the positives about the city will be one of the ways to attract new people.

Jenkins-Dallas said selling people on being part of the citys future is key. Loving the city is just the beginning, but city council needs to be sure it can provide the critical services to support those families and do the hard work as citizens.

Christ said its the people of Harrisburg who make it a good place, but the important thing to do is to elect good school board members to change the community. Also, instead of looking at the suburbs to bring people in, the city should try to attract residents from other urban areas, such as Philadelphia.

Davis said she likes the idea of focusing on the positive instead of the challenges when talking about the city, like its excelling students, its parks and all of the good things going on in the city.

Gethers said positivity and passion can only take you so far. Its about transparency and equipping citizens with realistic tools to succeed. She said its impossible to bring people in when they cannot afford to own property.

And Lawson said there is a lot to be proud of in the city, but the big thing that needs to be done is attacking the poverty problem. If poverty can be solved, it opens access to home ownership, gets rid of the slumlords and paves the way for the citizens to thrive.

Affordable and available housing

Green said the biggest need in the city is available and affordable housing, and not just in pockets, like housing projects. Mixed-income housing is needed to boost communities, spread out the wealth and bring up the value of the city, she said.

Rawls said one way to combat the affordable-housing problem would be city programs that allow renting neighbors to buy vacant homes for a low price or in a rent-to-own program, allowing them to restore their home, take pride in their investment, and further the beautification of the city.

Davis said owning a home is the first step to building wealth and combating poverty, but there are still questions about what affordable housing means. She said more housing is needed in the city, and a goal of hers is to rehabilitate some of the housing that already exists.

Lawson said the housing problem can only be solved by targeting regions within the city to improve and putting money behind investors, which encourages the participation of even more investors. Housing needs to include a mix of incomes, too, he said, since part of the problem with generational poverty is when its concentrated in one area. He added there are programs for people to purchase homes for little or no money down, which renters can use to get out of slumlord properties.

Bajpai said the cost of housing is too high for many in Harrisburg, and he is advocating for a community land trust with certain amounts of land being held by the city to further fund affordable housing and community spaces. Additionally, the city should partner with organizations with proven track records of providing affordable, quality housing.

Gethers said the city needs to come to grips with what is really affordable in the city. With a median income of $33,000 for residents, what some consider to be affordable really isnt, she said. Its an issue when residents cannot afford to own property, and the city needs programs to help people own their homes.

Jenkins-Dallas said there needs to be a new approach to housing and development, which includes an affordable housing trust. A ballot initiative can establish a bond issue to invest in the housing trust, giving the entire city the opportunity to buy into it to solve the housing problem.

Henderson said its going to take state and federal investment to bring more affordable housing opportunities to everyone in the city.

Daniels said the issue is more than affordable housing  its habitable housing. Its easy to settle for cheap housing that is not healthy or safe, and the city needs to avoid that, she said. A big barrier for many residents is that landlords use credit scores when choosing their tenants, which forces some residents into lower-quality housing, she said.

Christ said the word affordability has a stigma of being lower quality, but he said he would not want anyone to live in a house that he wouldnt have his mother live in. The city needs to take another look at what affordability means, form a coalition between banks and let residents take financial classes to buy their first homes.

Fowler said when talking about affordable housing, it is important to remember to make the housing accessible to people with disabilities. She said the city can encourage investors and residents to renovated blighted buildings, giving them grants and tax abatements, to increase the amount of affordable housing. The city can also work with landlords and developers for rent-control apartments in an effort to push the slumlords out of the city, she said.

Rodriguez said one of the greatest needs is for developers and owners who are willing to create attainable and affordable housing and ensure the amenities are equal. As a kid, he said he lived in a home that had no water in the pipes at times, showing the need for codes enforcement to boost its efforts.

The next event is scheduled for May 5, in which Larry Binda, editor-in-chief of The Burg, will moderate a debate featuring Harrisburg school board candidates. The final debate will be moderated by ABC 27 reporter Mark Hall, who will question Harrisburg mayoral candidates on May 12.
He's known for his stern demeanor in the boardroom on the BBC's business reality show The Apprentice.

But Lord Alan Sugar showed his softer side when he took to Instagram to share a sweet throwback snap from his wedding day with his wife Ann on Wednesday.

'53 years ago 28th April 1968,' wrote the mogul, 74, alongside the romantic black and white photograph.

'53 years ago 28th April 1968': Lord Alan Sugar showed his softer side when he shared a sweet throwback snap from his wedding day with his wife Ann on social media on Wednesday

Alan and Ann looked in high spirits as they clinked their wine glasses on their special day.

Lord Sugar donned a satin labelled suit with a cute bow tie while his wife looked gorgeous in a large veil and long-sleeved white dress.

A young romance, Ann met Alan when she was just 16 and he was 18 and starting out as a businessman.

The couple then married in April 1968 at Great Portland Street Synagogue and honeymooned in Majorca for two weeks.

Happy as ever: The couple married 53 years ago in April 1968 at Great Portland Street Synagogue and honeymooned in Majorca for two weeks, (pictured in 2009)

Speaking about his low key proposal, Alan previously said: 'It was more along the lines of, "I suppose we should get married then?"

'There was certainly no going down on one knee, with a rose, in a restaurant. In fact we were going over the Stratford flyover in the minivan at the time.'

Over their lifetime, the loved-up couple have welcomed three children, Simon, Daniel and Louise, and have seven grandchildren.

'I suppose we should get married then': Lord Sugar has revealed that his proposal to Ann was far from romantic and took place in a caravan on the Stratford flyover, (pictured in 2008)

In the past, for their 40th wedding anniversary, Alan celebrated their milestone with a huge party, which was attended by Piers Morgan and even had a performance from Sir Elton John.

Talking about the party for Mail On Sunday, Piers previously revealed the business mogul said: 'I can honestly say I have never ever heard anyone say a bad word about Ann.

'As you know you cant say the same about me. Talk about chalk and cheese...

'She always says the day she met me she knew she had met Mr Right; what she didnt know was that my first name was Always...

'A real successful man puts the love of his wife and children first, a real successful mans greatest position in life is to have a great family,' he added.

'I am lucky enough to have had a wife for 40 years, who gave me three great children, who in turn have given us seven wonderful grandchildren.

'You see, everything I have today is because of the love of that lady and the respect my three children have for the both of us. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for coming, lets have a great night.'
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on April 29, 2021

2021/04/29

AFP: My first question is, US President Joe Biden said in the Address to a Joint Session of Congress that the US is "in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century". He said the US welcomes competition and is not seeking conflict. Do you have any comment? The second question is, President Biden said he told China that the US will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as it does with NATO in Europe  not to start conflict  but to prevent conflict. What's your response to his remarks?

Wang Wenbin: I have also noted relevant reports about President Biden's address. I would like to underscore the following points:

First, China follows the path of peaceful development and has been a promoter of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of international order. China is committed to developing a relationship featuring non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation with the US, and finding a new path of peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation. That said, China will resolutely safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests.

Second, democracy is the common value of all mankind, not a "patented product" of one single country. The democratic system of a country should and can only be determined by the people of that country in light of its reality. Imposing one's own democratic system on others, or trying to command the world and instigate intolerance in the name of "democracy" is nothing but an insult on and a travesty of democratic values, and will only create division, intensify tension and disrupt stability.

Third, cooperation should be upheld as the mainstream of China-US relations. It is natural for the two sides to have competition in some fields, but we should advocate fair competition, like competing with each other for excellence in a racing field, not beating each other on a wrestling arena. The two sides should improve and surpass themselves through the competition, instead of trying to stab each other in the back, or initiating vicious competition and zero-sum game.

Fourth, in recent years, the US has repeatedly violated international rules and market principle of fair competition. It has politicized and ideologized economic and scientific issues, abused state power to hamstring the development of China and other countries, and undermined the interests of many, provoking outrage from the international community. The US keeps asking others to play by the rules, but it takes the lead in breaching international rules, a typical behavior of saying one thing and doing another.

China minds its own business of improving people's well-being, while some in the US habitually targets China in every utterance out of Cold War mentality, zero-sum mindset and ideological bias, which reveals their lack of self-confidence. Hopefully the US will not let this sour grapes attitude get the better of itself, and look at China's development in a more rational light. If it believes itself to be a major country, it should consider behaving like one.

China Review News: According to media reports, on April 27, Japan's cabinet meeting, in response to a written question from House of Representatives member, adopted the view that it is appropriate to use "comfort women" instead of "military-following comfort women", citing concerns over misunderstanding. The Japanese government also adopted an official response that advises against the use of the expression "forced conscription" in reference to Korean victims of Japan's wartime forced labor and recommends simply using "conscription". Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology says it believes that the Cabinet decision will be reflected in future textbook screenings.What is China's comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: The war of aggression launched by Japanese militarism has inflicted untold sufferings to the people of the vast number of victim countries in Asia, including China. The forced recruitment of "comfort women" is a terrible crime against humanity committed by Japanese militarism. This is an internationally recognized historical fact with solid proof, which can not be denied.

The Japanese government tried to play with words to blur the historical facts,understate and evade its historical responsibility. This is another negative move by Japan to deny and distort the history of aggression, which once again highlights Japan's long-standing dishonest attitude towards the history of aggression. The international community need to take strict precautions and put things right.

We once again urge the Japanese side to honestly face up to and repent its history of aggression, make a clean break with militarism, properly handle the issue of forced recruitment of "comfort women" and other problems left over from history with a responsible attitude, and take concrete actions to earn the trust of its Asian neighbors and the international community.

China News Service: Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has lately given an exclusive interview to domestic media, in which he expounded on the vision of Saudi Arabia's foreign policy and stressed that the country is seeking to create new partnerships with China and others. What is China's comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: China highly appreciates the positive will of Saudi Arabia to deepen its relations with China. We stand ready to work with Saudi Arabia to elevate our comprehensive strategic partnership to a higher level. We support Saudi Arabia in safeguarding its national sovereignty, security and stability, in following a development path suited to its national conditions, in opposing external interference in its internal affairs, and in playing a greater role in international and regional affairs.

China Daily: The US State Department recently released its 2021 report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, accusing China of failing to adhere to its nuclear testing moratorium and missile non-proliferation commitment and questioning China's compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: In recent years, the US has been putting together the so-called annual report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, making wanton comments on other countries' arms control and non-proliferation policies while exalting its own "exemplary" behavior. It is nothing but a threadbare ploy it uses to deflect international attention and malign other countries.

The allegation against China is purely groundless. We firmly reject it. China has been conscientiously fulfilling its international obligations and commitments in a responsible manner. Committed to multilateralism, we actively engage in international cooperation, making significant contribution to upholding the international arms control and non-proliferation regime, world peace and security and global strategic stability.

The US, in contrast, guided by the tenet of "America first", has been regressing in the field of arms control and non-proliferation in recent years. It has withdrawn from many treaties and organizations, including the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty and the Arms Trade Treaty. It is the only country to stand in the way of negotiations for a protocol that includes a verification regime to the BWC. It still has not destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile. The US has been pursuing a comprehensive military build-up, deliberating the development of new nuclear warheads, advancing outer space and cyberspace military programs, and seeking unilateral military and strategic advantage at all costs, which seriously disrupt regional and global peace and stability and hamper international arms control and disarmament process. The US makes no mention of its poor record and refuses to reflect on itself, but keeps throwing mud on other countries.

It's worth mentioning that the US claims in this report that all its activities are in compliance with the BWC, but when it comes to what happened in Fort Detrick, an issue of serious international concern, it's all hush-hush in the US, and it keeps diverting attention on its many bio-labs overseas. Once again I ask the US to clarify: what activities the US military has conducted in the Fort Detrick base and those bio-labs overseas? Why did it build so many bio-labs all over the world? How can it prove all its activities are in line with the Convention?

Actually, once the verification regime is established under the BWC framework, we will be able to see plainly who is in compliance and who is in defiance, and all problems will be solved instantly. However, as I said, the US is the only country opposing negotiation on such a protocol.

We reiterate our call for the US to act responsibly, address international concerns, offer clarifications for its bio-military activities at home and abroad, and stop obstructing the establishment of a BWC verification regime.

Global Times: We notice that US officials have accused China of "coercive diplomacy" and "economic and military coercion" on many occasions. What's your response?

Wang Wenbin: No one deserves the title of "coercive diplomacy" better than the US, and no one can take this patent away from it. In 1971, Stanford University Professor Alexander George was the first to put forward this concept to summarize the US policy towards Laos, Cuba and Vietnam at that time. The US has shown the world what coercion diplomacy is through its actions in pursuit of its strategic goals by means of military threat, political isolation, economic sanctions and technology blockade.

In terms of military threat, the classic examples of "coercive actions" by the US have all led to war, chaos, turbulence and numerous tragedies. The US government does not shy away from using the term "coercive diplomacy". For example, the US forced the military government of Haiti to step down in 1994, and referred to that as "a textbook example of coercive diplomacy". In 2003, it explicitly characterized the $30.3 billion additional military expenses for "coercive diplomacy" as incurred expenses.

In terms of political isolation and economic sanctions, the US has been wielding the big stick of sanctions against Cuba, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela for years. The previous US administration had willfully waged trade wars against many countries. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan once wrote that the last US administration's Iran policy "is all coercion and no diplomacy".

In terms of technology blockade, the US, in a bid to retain its monopoly in science and technology, abused the concept of national security to wantonly suppress other countries' high-tech enterprises in total disregard of the principles of market competition and international trade rules. Examples like Alstom of France, Toshiba and Toyota of Japan, aerospace industry of the former Soviet Union, and Huawei of China abound.

When it comes to China, the US seeks relentlessly to mount pressure on China. It illegally arrests Chinese citizens, suppresses Chinese enterprises for no justifiable reasons, wantonly interferes in China's internal affairs such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and coerces other countries into forming an anti-China clique. China is not a perpetrator but rather a victim of "coercive diplomacy", and firmly rejects anyone who engages in such practice.

Standing in stark contrast with the "coercive diplomacy" pursued by the US, China is committed to an independent foreign policy of peace. Aggression and hegemony are never in the genes of the Chinese nation. China follows the path of peaceful development and rejects the claim by some that a stronger country is bound to follow the beaten path to seek hegemony. Unlike the US, we have never threatened to use military force against other countries, never engaged in military alliance, and never exported ideology. We have never stirred up trouble on others' doorsteps, or meddled in others' household affairs. We have never taken the initiative to wage a trade war, and never imposed unjustified oppression on foreign enterprises. But when China's national sovereignty and dignity are being coerced and undermined, we undoubtedly need to respond with legitimate and lawful actions to safeguard international equity and justice. Together with all peace-loving countries in the world, we will say no to acts of coercion in whatever form.

Shenzhen TV: The government of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) said in a press release that President Panuelo wrote a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to express concerns over Japan's decision to release nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific. Does China have a comment?

Wang Wenbin: I've also noted this development. President Panuelo stressed in the letter that the FSM's food and financial security is reliant on its maritime and oceanic resources and that the nation's continued survival depends upon environmental protection and sustainable fisheries. He asked Japan to take into account the potential impact its ocean discharge decision might have on countries like the FSM and called on the Japanese government to engage in a formal and multilateral dialogue with countries whose livelihoods depend greatly on the health of the Pacific Ocean.

I've also noted that not long ago, the Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum released a statement expressing concerns on behalf of leaders of members of the Forum. The ROK, together with eight Central American countries, also issued a joint statement voicing deep concerns over the Japanese decision. All this reflects the high concern of the international community and demonstrates further that the disposal of the nuclear contaminated water from Fukushima is by no means Japan's domestic matter.

Once again we urge the Japanese side to earnestly respond to the grave concerns of the international community, voluntarily subject itself to verification and monitoring with substantive international participation, and make sure the disposal issue will be handled with full transparency.

Prasar Bharati: Recently, China's foreign minister Wang Yi said that China is ready to provide support to India in its COVID-19 fight. China's ambassador to India also expressed similar sentiments and said Chinese companies have been guided to fulfill orders from India. At this juncture, Chinese state-owned Sichuan Airlines, which has the largest capacity for cargo shipments to India, has suspended its cargo operations since Monday this week. This has seriously disrupted procurement of oxygen concentrators by Indian businesses. Can you please share some updates as to when Sichuan Airlines will resume its cargo operations to India, in line with announcements made by Chinese government? My second question is, regarding an interview by CEO of US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, China has stopped all the shipments of oxygen concentrators procured by US companies from China to India. Do you have any comment or response to this statement?

Wang Wenbin: I'll take your second question first. You said that China has stopped all shipments of oxygen concentrators procured by US companies from China to India. That is fake news. As India battles a rampant new wave of COVID-19, China feels deeply for the Indian people and extend sincere sympathy. We stand ready to provide support and assistance to the Indian people according to their needs. Some Chinese companies have already taken action with support from the government, delivering the first batch of oxygen concentrators to India. We stand ready to continue various forms of anti-virus cooperation with India to help it fight the epidemic.

With regard to your question on Sichuan Airlines, as I said earlier, it's a commercial decision and I'll have to refer you to the company.

AFP: On April 28, a US State Department spokesperson expressed deep concerns of the amended entry regulations in Hong Kong. Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin:I noted that the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has explained relevant regulations. Hong Kong residents' freedom of movement and rights to enter and exit is protected by the Basic Law which allows no denigration. We urge the US side not to interfere in China's internal affairs.

CCTV: Yesterday, Premier Li Keqiang co-chaired the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. How does China see the outcomes of the consultation and the positive role of the China-Germany inter-governmental consultation mechanism in the past decade since its founding?

Wang Wenbin: Yesterday afternoon, Premier Li Keqiang co-chaired the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A total of 25 ministers from the two sides took part in the consultation, which is the largest group of participants in recent years. The consultation produced positive results and sent a signal that both sides set great store by the bilateral ties and are committed to taking their cooperation across the board to new levels. I'll refer you to relevant press release, which is now available.

The two sides agree that in the past 10 years since the establishment of the mechanism, China-Germany inter-governmental consultations have served as a "super engine" driving China-Germany cooperation. Such a mechanism should be carried on. The two sides agreed to hold a new round of high-level financial dialogue, host a new seminar of the rule of law dialogue in a proper way, and deepen cooperation in such areas as economy and trade, investment, automobile, hi-tech, new energy, digital economy, cultural and people-to-people exchanges to better achieve win-win results.

Premier Li Keqiang said that facts show that both China and Germany embrace openness, and upholds fair competition. China will open wider and is ready to share development opportunities with Germany and the rest of the world. Openness should be a two-way process. It is important to promote free trade and world economic recovery through mutual openness. Chancellor Merkel said she welcomes Chinese enterprises to make investment in Germany. It is hoped that the two sides can work together to bring the economic and technological cooperation between the two countries to new heights.

PTI: You mentioned a batch of oxygen concentrators has arrived in India. Can you specify the number of them? How many actually arrived? Are there any more being sent from China in the coming days?

Wang Wenbin: Like I just said, China stands ready to provide support and assistance to the Indian people in their anti-epidemic fight in light of their needs. As for the specific number, you may follow updates issued by Chinese embassy and consulates.

Beijing Youth Daily: On April 28, Asian Development Bank released the "Asian Development Outlook 2021" report, which projects China's economic growth to surge by 8.1% in 2021. According to another report released yesterday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), China had the largest share of global exports in goods with 14.7% of the total in 2020. What is China's comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: We have taken note of these reports, which we believe reflects the international community's recognition of China's anti-epidemic achievement and the confidence in China's economic growth prospects.

Over the past year, China has been coordinating anti-epidemic and development efforts, and was the first major economy to register positive growth. In 2021, China's economy has sustained the sound momentum of steady recovery. The first quarter of this year saw a year-on-year increase of 18.3% in China's GDP and 39.9% in its FDI inflow. In February 2021, the American Chamber of Commerce in South China issued White Paper on the Business Environment in China 2021, which listed China as the most preferred investment destination, saying that 94% of American companies see a bright future in China's market.

China's sustained economic growth will give a strong boost to the world economic recovery. In the first quarter of this year, China's FDI outflow reached $31.79 billion, up by 4.6% from the same period last year. The OECD projects China to account for over one-third of world economic growth in 2021. As China speeds up its efforts to build a new development paradigm, it will continue to take an active part in multilateral cooperation in trade and investment, and promote a new system of open economy of higher standards. We welcome all parties getting integrated into the Chinese market to share China's development opportunities.

Prasar Bharati: I just want to add something to my second question. CEO of USIPF in the interview said that China has stopped the shipments of oxygen concentrators to India, so it has to reroute to other countries. And it is a lot of time, energy and other things. Can you comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: I have already given my response. The allegation of "China stopping all shipments of oxygen concentrators procured by US companies from China to India" is fake news.
According to Coin Metrics, the price of Dogecoin has risen by 20 percent in the last 24 hours to 32 cents. The meme-inspired cryptocurrency reached a record high of 45 cents earlier this month, sparking rumors of a crypto market bubble.

Is Dogecoin Back?

Dogecoin, which began as a prank in 2013, is currently the sixth-largest digital coin, with a combined market cap of nearly $42 billion, according to CoinGecko. It gets its name and branding from the "Doge" meme, which features a Shiba Inu dog alongside illogical words in a colorful text.

In a recently published article on CNBC News, its value has often risen in response to Elon Musk's tweets. Tesla CEO Elon Musk once dubbed dogecoin his "favorite" cryptocurrency and "the people's crypto." Musk is still a fan of blockchain, having amassed about $2.5 billion of the cryptocurrency from his electric car business.

Read also: Crypto Long & Short No, Bitcoin Is Not in a Bubble

Elon Musk and Mark Cuban Tweeted About the Dogecoin

According to a published article on Fortune, in a tweet, Tesla creator Elon Musk referred to himself as "The Dogefather," referring to his fondness for referencing cryptocurrency and sometimes whipping traders into a frenzy.

The Dogefather

SNL May 8  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2021

Dallas Mavericks owner and TV personality Mark Cuban also praised the money, claiming that the team will complete 6,000 Dogecoin transactions this month. Cuban admired the currency for being one that people use rather than keep. He also mentioned Robinhood as one of the most significant roadblocks.

Because Doge is the one coin that people actually use for transactions. We take many others via @BitPay . But people spend their Doge and that means more businesses will start taking it. The greatest inhibitor to it's growth is that you can't spend the Doge you buy on Robinhood https://t.co/TrhT9pYkcb  Mark Cuban (@mcuban) April 26, 2021

Robinhood immediately responded that it worked on a program to enable people to withdraw and invest in their crypto holdings. At 10:45 a.m. ET, Dogecoin was worth around 30 cents, or 33 percent less than its all-time high of 45 cents.

Will Dogecoin Become a Bubble?

Dogecoin has been around for eight years, and for the majority of the time, it has had a worth of half a cent at most. Ten thousand new Dogecoins will be released every minute for the remainder of the time, implying that the worth will never hold. It is a cryptocurrency that is supposed to keep getting cheaper. Even the coin's maker is perplexed by its recent growth.

However, Dogecoin's crazy rise has prompted concerns from some investors who see it as a speculative bubble. The digital currency is "a prime case of greater fool theory at work," David Kimberley, an analyst at the U.K. trading app Freetrade, told CNBC earlier this month.

Furthermore, at least one individual or organization may be profiting from the dogecoin boom. In February, it was revealed that an unnamed group controls approximately 28 percent of the dogecoin in circulation, totaling 38.6 billion Dogecoin.

Despite arguments from bulls that the digital currency industry has evolved dramatically over the last three years, some analysts still see bitcoin as a bubble. However, unlike bitcoin, dogecoin does not have a hard supply cap, meaning an infinite number can be minted.

Related Article: 4 Aspects to Analyze Before Choosing a Bitcoin Exchange

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[April 29, 2021] Pax8 Honored With 2021 Stevie Award Winner in American Business Awards

DENVER, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pax8, the best place for IT professionals to buy cloud products, today announced it was named the winner of a Bronze Stevie Award in the Communications or PR Campaign of the YearBusiness to Business category in the 19th Annual American Business Awards.

We are honored to be recognized as a 2021 Bronze Stevie Award winner by the American Business Awards, said Nick Heddy, Chief Revenue Officer at Pax8. As the business and technology landscapes evolve, our Corporate Communications continues to elevate the Pax8 brand through strategic and innovative campaigns. Their impressive results are helping us drive toward a phenomenal 2021. The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations  public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large, and small. This award is a reflection of the teams leadership, strategy, and focus, said Amanda Lee, Senior Vice President, Global Communications at Pax8. We are proud to be recognized as an American Business Award winner among such prestigious organizations. We will continue to think differently in our modern storytelling approach and build on our brand equity. More than 3,800 nominationsa record numberfrom organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Startup of the Year, Executive of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Marketing Campaign of the Year, Virtual Event of the Year, and App of the Year, among others. Pax8 was nominated in the Communications or PR Campaign of the YearBusiness to Business category for the technology industry. The American economy continues to show its resilience, and as were poised on the beginning of what should be a phenomenal period of growth, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of a wide range of organizations and people over the past 18months, said Maggie Gallagher, President, Stevie Awards. This years Stevie-winning nominations in The American Business Awards are testament to the ingenuity, the commitment, the passion, the adaptability, and the creativity of the American people. We look forward to celebrating this years winners during our virtual ceremony on June 30.



Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2021 Stevie award winners are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA. To learn more about Pax8, please visit www.pax8.com.

About Pax8

Pax8 is modernizing how partners buy, sell, and manage cloud. As a born-in-the-cloud company, Pax8 simplifies the buying journey, empowering its partners to achieve more with cloud technology. The companys technology displaces legacy distribution by connecting the channel ecosystem to its award-winning transactional cloud marketplace. Through billing, provisioning, automation, industry-leading PSA integrations, and pre- and post-sales support, and education, Pax8 is a proven disruptor in the market. Pax8 has ranked in the Inc. 5000 for three consecutive years  #68 in 2018, #60 in 2019, and #111 in 2020  as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. If you want to be successful with cloud, you want to work with Pax8. Get started today at www.pax8.com. Follow Pax8 on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. About the Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The Stevies also produce the annual Women|Future Conference. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com . Media contact:

John Trent

PR Manager at Pax8

jtrent@pax8.com



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Indonesia is one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world, but consumer data is still hard to find for many businesses, especially smaller ones. Populix wants to make research easier for companies, through a respondent app that now has 250,000 users in 300 Indonesian cities. The startup announced today it has raised $1.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-Series A round led by returning investor Intudo Ventures, with participation from Quest Ventures.

Populix has now raised a total of $2.3 million since it was founded in January 2018, including a $1 million seed round also led by Intudo. The companys revenue grew five times in 2020 and it signed up 52 new enterprise clients in 10 countries, as the COVID-19 pandemic limited traditional forms of consumer surveys, like in-person questionnaires. Its customers range in size from tech startups to multinational conglomerates.

The new capital will be used for product launches, marketing and hiring. Populix is currently in the process of launching a self-service product called Paket Hemat Populix (PHP) for clients like SMEs or university researchers that want to conduct their own surveys and monitor results in real time.

A Zoom group photo of Populix's co-founders: chief executive officer Timothy Astandu, chief operating officer Eileen Kamtawijoyo and chief technical officer Jonathan Benhi

Populix's founding team. Image Credits: Populix

The companys co-founders are chief executive officer Timothy Astandu, chief operating officer Eileen Kamtawijoyo and chief technical officer Jonathan Benhi. Astandu and Kamtawijoyo met while both were graduate students in business management at the University of Cambridge.

When we were studying, we looked at developed markets, and in developed markets, consumer insights is such a big thing that all the brands are using it already, said Astandu. But its something thats not available in developing countries like Indonesia, where many companies still conduct research offline despite its very high smartphone engagement rates. For example, if a coffee brand wants to understand consumer sentiment, it will send people with surveys into a cafe or grocery store and ask customers to fill them out in return for a small gift.

Story continues

We felt it was important to do consumer sentiment in Indonesia, because its going to be a big market and Indonesia has seen very little innovation so far, Astandu added. That gives us a chance to disrupt it, in the sense that it has always catered to the big clients. Its always the multinationals in Indonesia that buy it, but you are seeing an emerging middle class, a lot of SMEs and perhaps they actually need research and data more than big companies.

After returning to Indonesia, Astandu and Kamtawijoyo began working on a more accurate and accessible alternative to traditional surveys, developing Populix while part of Gojeks Xcelerate program. Then they met Benhi, who was previously an engineer at Discuss.io, a Seattle-based video platform for consumer research.

Populixs clients conduct research through its respondent app, also called Populix, which keeps users engaged through daily polls, games and news, in return for incentives like cash offers or rebate programs. Populix can be customized for a wide range of research, ranging from short surveys to longitudinal studies that take place over a period of time, and is used to track brand health, prepare for product launches or gauge customer satisfaction. For example, a coffee brand used Populix to see how it was doing compared to competitors on a monthly basis and study consumer reactions before launching a ready-to-drink coffee. E-commerce companies have also used it to ask people where they shop online, what they look for and how they feel about the customer experience on different platforms.

We can speed up the recruitment process, because we already have respondents available in our database for practically any kind of study, said Kamtawijoyo.

Populix is currently developing new products to track market movements, using data collection tech like optical character recognition to scan invoices from major e-commerce platforms. It says its data classification system can recognize over 73% of all items on invoices.

Other companies in the same space include established players like YouGov and Kantar, and Singapore-based Milieu Insight, a market research and data platform that operates in several Southeast Asian countries. Astandu said one of the main ways Populix differentiates is by focusing on mobile surveys, since Indonesia is the fourth-largest smartphone market in the world (after China, India and the United States) and the penetration rate is still growing.

The founders said Populix will continue focusing on Indonesia with its pre-Series A funding, but plans to look at other developing markets with fragmented consumer data, like the Philippines and Vietnam, after raising its Series A round.

In a press statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Patrick Yip said, With consumer habits undergoing dramatic changes in recent years due to rising incomes and widespread embrace of digital commerce, Populix is providing clients with actionable insights into the latest consumption characteristics and trends of Indonesians. We are excited to double down on our support for Populix as it continues to roll out new technology-driven consumer insights products and solutions to meet the needs of clients both big and small.
[April 29, 2021] Grin Closes $14M Round With P&G, Triventures, and SpringRock Ventures To Modernize Teledentistry at Scale

Grin, a comprehensive digital orthodontic platform that provides orthodontic solutions in partnership with trusted local doctors, today announced a $10M funding round led by Triventures with participation from Procter & Gamble Oral Care (NYSE: PG) and SpringRock Ventures. Combined with financial backing from leading independent orthodontists, this brings the company's total funding to $14M. The funding will be used to invest in technological innovations, onboard talent to support a growing team, and enhance their orthodontic partner network. Founded by Adam Schulhof DMD, Pamela Oren-Artzi, and Alon Lipnik in 2019, the company is now deployed at hundreds of orthodontic practices, and is being used by thousands of patients-who are providing tens of thousands of self-scans to their care teams-across the entire US. The new funding reinforces the Grin commitment to reduce costs and complexity for all dental treatments. Grin will expand their geographic reach and implement even more platform features for an end-to-end solution along the entire patient care continuum. Building on its proven technological platform, Grin will also use these additional resources to further invest in enhanced teeth scanning through the Grin App and Grin Scope. The R&D will focus on new features to assist doctors in treating their patients for even the most complex teeth-straightening cases. The Grin experience consists of the Grin App and Grin Scope, which is an FDA listed medical device. The Grin Scope is an orthodontist created, proprietary device that serves as an intraoral adapter. It is designed to retract the cheeks to allow a full view of a patient's mouth. The entire system is powered by the robust Grin App where patients are guided to self-scan their teeth for an orthodontist-ready video. "All of our investors have a stake in oral health," said Grin CEO Adam Schulhof, DMD. "We understand the need for seamless dental solutions that focus on great customer experiences and local doctor expertise. Our investors live this first hand, and together, we are well on our way to changing orthodontics and dentistry." "The extraordinary events of this past year reinforced our P&G Oral Care mission to provide the best prducts and experiences to enable people everywhere to have healthy, beautiful smiles for life. Our partnership with Grin builds on that goal through innovative and responsible telehealth solutions that strengthen the connection between patients and their dental professional," said Steve Bishop, CEO P&G Health Care. "Grin brings strong products and capabilities which provide new care pathways for P&G, all while complementing our leading oral care brands."



"We're always looking for entrepreneurs with the ability to innovate from within traditional industries," said Triventures General Partner Netalie Nadivi. "Grin has the expertise, understanding, and talent to fundamentally reimagine how dentistry should be practiced. With this oversubscribed financing, the company has the capital to scale its vision and accelerate traction. We look forward to the world Grin is building that will help practitioners to grow their practice and give patients the access and convenience they deserve." About Grin

Grin is a comprehensive digital platform that provides orthodontic solutions for all types of teeth straightening needs. The Grin App and Grin Scope connect patients to real orthodontists in their community. Patients can access quality professional care from the convenience of their smart device. Doctors can remotely monitor patients via virtual check-ins for complete visibility-reducing chair time, increasing patient volume, and ensuring safety. To learn more about Grin, you can visit us at: www.get-grin.com/contact About P&G P&G serves consumers around the world with one of the strongest portfolios of trusted, quality, leadership brands, including Always, Ambi Pur, Ariel, Bounty, Charmin, Crest, Dawn, Downy, Fairy, Febreze, Gain, Gillette, Head & Shoulders, Lenor, Olay, Oral-B, Pampers, Pantene, SK-II, Tide, Vicks, and Whisper. The P&G community includes operations in approximately 70 countries worldwide. Please visit http://www.pg.com for the latest news and information about P&G and its brands. About Triventures Triventures (http://www.triventures.vc) is an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on data-driven healthcare solutions and opportunities that land on the intersection of health and other verticals. With offices in Israel and the Silicon Valley, the fund has a global network of top-tier strategic partners. Among them is Sheba Medical Center, one of the world's top 10 hospitals with which the fund has a unique venture capital collaboration, Triventures ARC, enabling its portfolio to leverage Sheba's 25 years of patient data as well as vast clinical and research assets. Triventures' strategic investors include some of the world's leading health systems and companies, finance groups, consumer electronics enterprises, insurance companies, and telecommunication groups, including Medtronic, Philips, Boston Scientific, Abiomed, Intermountain Healthcare, Cardinal Health, Johnson and Johnson, Samsung (News - Alert) and Nikon. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005433/en/

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Germany's BioNTech biotechnology company expects initial results of its coronavirus vaccine trials involving children aged between 5 and 12 years old in July, and for those younger by September, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin told Der Spiegel on Thursday

BERLIN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) Germany's BioNTech biotechnology company expects initial results of its coronavirus vaccine trials involving children aged between 5 and 12 years old in July, and for those younger by September, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin told Der Spiegel on Thursday.

"In July, the first results could be available for children between the age of 5 and 12, in September for younger children, the assessment will take from four to six weeks.

If everything goes well, as soon as the data is evaluated, we will be able to submit the request for the vaccine's approval for children in the respective age groups in different countries," Sahin said.

The CEO added that the company was about to submit the application for the vaccine's approval for emergency use in minors aged from 12-15 in Europe.

The coronavirus vaccine jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is currently authorized for individuals of at least 16 years old.
Frustrated Victorians whose weddings and holidays were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic are taking legal action in a bid to recoup money.

In one recent case, a couple whose large wedding at the Collingwood Childrens Farm was cancelled received a $9230 refund from an events company after pursuing action in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

Maria and Lou Larubina are taking legal action to recoup money from a travel company that refused to refund their deposit on a trip cancelled because of the pandemic. Credit:Justin MacManue

In another case published last month, a houseboat hire company was ordered to refund $1900 to a man whose holiday on the Murray River with interstate friends was unable to go ahead because of stay-at-home directions.

Maria and Lou Larubina recently filed a VCAT application against travel company Inspiring Vacations after unsuccessfully trying to claw back a $5800 deposit for a 21-day bus tour of Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
New Delhi/Washington, April 29 : As India's healthcare system is finding it harder to cope with the rising Covid-19 cases due to the second wave of the pandemic, the American government has advised its nationals to return to the US.

The Department of State issued the highest level travel advisory asking US citizens "not to travel to India or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so".

In its advisory, the government in Washington said, "Access to all types of medical care is becoming severely limited in India due to the surge in Covid-19 cases. US citizens who wish to depart India should take advantage of available commercial transportation options now. Direct flights between India and the United States are offered daily, with additional flight options available to U.S. citizens via transfers in Paris and Frankfurt.

There are 14 direct daily flights between India and the U.S. and other services that connect through Europe, the department said.

The US urged its citizens to enroll with the embassy in order to receive critical information related to health and safety in India.

New cases and deaths from COVID-19 have risen sharply throughout India to record levels, the advisory said adding that COVID-19 testing infrastructure is reportedly constrained in many locations. Hospitals are reporting shortages of supplies, oxygen, and beds for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 related patients.

The advisory said that the US citizens are reporting being denied admittance to hospitals in some cities due to a lack of space. Some statesa-have enacted curfewsa-and other restrictions -- that limit movementa -- and the operation of non-essential businesses.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a level 4 travel health notice too.

India has reported 18 million cases of infections since the pandemic began, out of which 14.8 million recovered. So far, over 200,000 people have died due to Covid-19. In the last one month, due to a virulent mutation, the pandemic has taken a heavy toll. On Wednesday, over 360,000 people tested positive for the infection and over 3,000 people died across the country due to the pandemic.

Australia has already banned all flights from India. The UK has banned the entry of any visitor who was in India in the last 10 days.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
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The journey for Chinese Americans has been long and often forgotten.

Filmmaker Larissa Lams journey in making Far East Deep South came about while doing family research.

Lam was along for the ride when her husband, Baldwin Chiu, and his relatives began chronicling their familys history in the Deep South.

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We were making our first trip down there, and this series of events began to unfold, Lam says. We went to Mississippi, and what I captured was a short film. With a big response to that, we decided to make it feature film.

Far East Deep South will be broadcast as part of PBS America ReFramed series. It will air at 6 a.m. Wednesday, May 5, and at 9 p.m. Thursday, May 6, on New Mexico PBS World Channel 9.1.

The film also was part of the Chinese American Film Festival in Albuquerque a few years ago.

Lam and Chiu say that as America deals with an increase in anti-Asian sentiment, the documentary is a deeply moving story that offers a poignant perspective on race relations, immigration and the deep roots of Chinese Americans in our national identity.

The documentary follows Charles Chiu and his family  including his son, producer Baldwin Chiu, and daughter-in-law, director Larissa Lam  as they travel from California to Mississippi to find answers about Charles father, K.C. Lou.

A retired Air Force reservist, Charles Chiu was reluctant to discuss his familys complicated past with his sons, Baldwin and Edwin.

The familys emotional journey to a place theyve never seen leads to stunning revelations and a crash course on the surprising history of Chinese immigrants in the segregated South.

Through encounters with local residents who remember K.C., as well as interviews with historians, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and others, the familys trip becomes a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for discovery and healing.

As Asians living in America, we wrestle with our identity and sense of belonging, no matter how long our families have been here, Lam says. Our struggles and contributions have been a significant part of American history yet have been largely invisible in media and rarely taught in schools. As a result, we are treated as the perpetual foreigner and outsider. That is largely why I felt compelled to make this film. After seeing our film, I hope more people realize Asian American families have a long legacy in this country. I also hope that American history lessons will be more inclusive of the Asian American experience, especially as it pertains to learning about the American South.

Baldwin Chiu says he is saddened and angered by the racism today in the United States.

My family has been in the U.S. for generations, and yet Im often treated as someone who is not American, he says. Our film clearly shows we ARE American and we really want everyone in America to finally embrace that.

The couple began the journey in 2014 and are excited to have it air on PBS.

Lam says the goal has always been to educate viewers on Chinese Americans and their legacy.

They have been important to the framework of society, Lam says.

Baldwin Chiu echoes the sentiment.

The Chinese Exclusion Act (of 1882) didnt just work on excluding Chinese Americans from many liberties, he says. It also kept our story out of the history books. This film is our chance to make our story known. There are more of these stories in the world.

ON TV

Far East Deep South will be broadcast as part of PBS America ReFramed series. It will air at 6 a.m. Wednesday, May 5, and 9 p.m. Thursday, May 6, on New Mexico PBS World Channel 9.1.
Aerial view of the Dadaab refugee complex in northern Kenya.  UNHCR

President Uhuru Kenyatta met today with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi in Nairobi to discuss issues surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in the region, as well as receive a briefing on the status of Kakuma and Dadaab refugees camps, following the UN High Commissioner for Refugees meetings with Cabinet Secretaries Dr. Fred Matiangi and Amb. Raychelle Omamo.

This meeting comes in the wake of the Governments communicated intention to work toward the closure of the refugee camps in Kenya. A joint team comprising officials from the Government and the UN agency will therefore be formed to finalize and implement a roadmap on the next steps towards a humane management of refugees in both camps.

The roadmap, which was presented to the Government of Kenya in the beginning of April, includes voluntary return for refugees in safety and dignity, departures to third countries under various arrangements, and alternative stay options in Kenya for certain refugees from East African Community (EAC) countries.

We are serious about completing the repatriation programme which we started in 2016, in full view of our international obligations and our domestic responsibility. We therefore reiterate our earlier position to close both Dadaab and Kakuma camps by 30 June, 2022, said Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi.

The Government of Kenya and UNHCR agree that refugee camps are not a long-term solution to forced displacement and are committed to working together to find alternative solutions that are in line with the responsibility sharing principles and goals of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR).

I believe that the Government and people of Kenya will continue to show their generous hospitality towards refugees as they have done for nearly three decades, while we carry on discussions on a strategy to find the most durable, appropriate and rights-based solutions for refugees and asylum-seekers residing in the refugee camps in Dadaab and Kakuma, said the UN High Commissioner.

Closure of the camps must be seen as an aspiration. We are not chasing people away, but a camp is not a permanent thing. It is a place of limbo. No one should live in a place of uncertainty or indignity generation after generation. What we are now working on is how to achieve this cooperatively which is in line with Global Compact on Refugees, said Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Amb. Raychelle Omamo.

High Commissioner Grandi welcomed the governments continued commitment to the GCR during this process. I am reassured by the governments assurances that they will continue to provide protection and services for asylum-seekers and refugees in Kenya while various solutions are pursued.

Among the precursory activities contained in the governments roadmap is a unanimous resolution that was recently endorsed by ambassadors and representatives from East African countries which have a mutual diplomatic relationship with Kenya when they met a delegation led by Interior Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Fred Matiangi.

Refugees from East African countries will be given the option of being issued a work permit for free so that they can integrate into Kenyan communities or return to their country of origin, said Dr. Matiangi.

Digital verification of Kenyans currently also registered as refugees is set to begin in due course. This will inform the issuance of appropriate documentation to Kenyan citizens and ensure their removal from the refugee database.

Kenya has shouldered the burden of sheltering refugees for almost three decades, and the swelling camps have overstretched their capacity to host populations. The government has also expressed grave concerns over the security of both Kenyans and refugees at the camp.

There are currently 433,765 refugees living in Dadaab and Kakuma camps.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 03:01:06|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Italy's epidemic curve remained stable on Thursday, a few days after the country entered the phase of gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions.

Meanwhile, over four million doses of authorized vaccines have been delivered to the country in the past two days to accelerate the ongoing immunization campaign.

Italy's Health Ministry registered 14,320 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the cumulative total to over four million since the pandemic officially started in late February 2020.

Confirming a downward trend that started in early April, the number of active infections on Thursday fell by 4,062 cases to 438,709. The large majority (416,718) of these patients are currently isolated at home with mild or no symptoms.

Another 19,351 infected patients are hospitalized, and a further 2,640 are in intensive care.

The country also registered 288 new fatalities (against 344 and 373 in the previous two days), which pushed the death toll to 120,544. The total number of recoveries increased by 18,088 to 3,449,955.

Still on Thursday, almost 2.5 million vaccine doses were delivered to the country's military hub near Rome, Italy's coronavirus emergency commissioner Francesco Figliuolo said.

The latest shipment included over two million vaccine doses from AstraZeneca, 270,000 doses from Moderna and about 160,000 from Johnson & Johnson.

On April 27, 2.2 million doses were delivered by Pfizer/BioNTech.

These two deliveries should allow Italy's regions "to consolidate the growing trend in doses administered since the beginning of the campaign," Figliuolo said.

As of Thursday, over 19 million vaccine doses have been administered -- around 85 percent of the 22.4 million doses available, not counting the two most recent deliveries -- and 5.6 million people have been fully immunized, according to the government's statistics.

While most of the country (14 regions out of 20) has been enjoying a gradual easing of restrictive measures since April 26, fresh concerns have emerged over the risks posed by new coronavirus variants entering the country.

On Thursday, Italy's Health Minister Roberto Speranza issued a decree banning people coming from Sri Lanka from entering the country due to fears of the coronavirus variant found in India. A day earlier, a similar ban was issued for people coming from India and Bangladesh.

The prohibition applies to all those who traveled or transited through these three countries in the previous 14 days.

Twenty-three passengers and two crew members of a flight arriving from India to Rome's Fiumicino Airport on Wednesday night tested positive to coronavirus, local health authorities said on Thursday.

The Lazio region (which includes the capital) performed genome viral sequencing to ascertain whether any of them were carrying the variant discovered in India.

Overall, 276 vaccine candidates are still being developed at global level -- 92 of them in clinical trials -- including in Germany, Britain, China, United States and Russia, according to the latest available data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). Enditem
During the first wave of the corona pandemic, 36 per cent fewer men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden than in previous years. On the other hand, the number of patients receiving curative treatment for prostate cancer was unaffected. This is shown by a new register study led by Uppsala University researchers, whose results are published in the Scandinavian Journal of Urology.

"We think the number of cases diagnosed fell because, early on, the Public Health Agency of Sweden urged older people to minimise their social contacts and, by the same token, refrain from non-urgent health care. At the same time, the working group for the Swedish guidelines for prostate cancer care recommended that only men with prostate cancer symptoms should seek medical attention. The results of the study indicate that the recommendations were heeded," says Par Stattin, Professor of Urology at Uppsala University and register holder for the National Prostate Cancer Register (NCPR).

The study is based on data from NCPR, which contains particulars for 98 per cent of the approximately 10,000 men annually diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden. Also included in this register are detailed accounts of cancer characteristics and the primary treatment.

When the researchers compared the period of the first pandemic wave, March-June 2020, with the corresponding months in the years 2017-19, they found that a marked decrease in the number of registered prostate cancer cases had taken place in spring 2020. Most pronounced, 51 per cent, was the fall among men aged 75 and over. In men below the age of 70, the corresponding figure was 28 per cent. Preliminary, as yet unpublished data from autumn 2020 show that the number of cases declined less markedly during the second pandemic wave than in the first.

"The effect this decline will have on the prognosis for men whose cancer was not diagnosed in 2020 now depends partly on whether the health care services get a chance to 'catch up' in diagnosing them. Since most prostate cancer progresses slowly, it's reasonable to believe that some delay will have only a minor effect," Stattin says.

Simultaneously, the study shows that no change took place in the number of men who underwent surgery for their cancer. This can be explained partly by the fact that it was possible to shorten waiting lists for care when fewer diagnoses were made. The number of men being given curatively intended radiation treatment was as much as 32 per cent higher than in previous years. According to the researchers, this reflects a continuation of the upward trend in recent years, in which radiation therapy has been increasingly used in prostate cancer, in particular locally advanced cancer.

"Our study suggests that Swedish health care prioritised cancer treatment during the pandemic, and that prostate cancer care in this country was less affected than was reportedly the case in other European countries," Stattin says.

###

Peer-reviewed/Observational study/People

G Fallara et al. (2021), Prostate cancer diagnosis, staging, and treatment in Sweden during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Scandinavian Journal of Urology. DOI: 10.1080/21681805.2021.1910341
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An astonishing treasure trove of artwork and furniture from a Cotswolds stately home where Winston Churchill's closest military adviser once lived will be sold for an estimated 1million at an upcoming auction.

Wormington Grange in Stanton, Gloucestershire, is currently owned by John Evetts, the grandson of Churchill's chief military assistant Lord Ismay, but the impressive property has been in the family since the 1920s.

However, Mr Evetts is now downsizing from the Grade II* listed manor and has decided to sell more than 1,000 items he collected with 'an enormous amount of care and love' for the property where his grandfather lived.

The sale, considered the 'most important' collection of furniture to emerge on the market for decades, includes items ranging from 50 kitchen glasses to 100,000 works of art.

Mr Evetts, who has sold Wormington Grange for a multi-million figure, was able to curate such an impressive collection due to his background as a furnishing consultant for the Landmark Trust.

The sale from Wormington Grange, considered the 'most important' collection of furniture to emerge on the market for decades, includes items ranging from 50 kitchen glasses to 100,000 works of art. Pictured: Artwork by Algernon Newton

Also among the sale items is an Empire Giltwood metal chandelier, from around 1820, which has an estimate of 25,000

Wormington Grange in Stanton, Gloucestershire, is currently owned by John Evetts, the grandson of Churchill's chief military assistant Lord Ismay, but the impressive property has been in the family since the 1920s

The coronation robes of General Hastings Ismay for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (left) and a 'Cyparissuss' statue (right) are also on sale

Among the items on sale is an oil painting by British landscape artist Algernon Newton - known as the 'Canaletto of the canals' - entitled 'A Dorset Landscape'. The canvas, dated 1928, is valued at 100,000.

Other big ticket items include an Empire Giltwood chandelier dating to the 1820s and a Regence style gilt bronze eight light chandelier, which are both estimated at 30,000.

The crimson velvet coronation robes of General Hastings Ismay for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 are expected to fetch 5,000. Lord Ismay lived in Wormington Grange until his death in 1965.

The British Indian Army Officer and diplomat, born in Nainital, India, in 1887, attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and served with the Camel Corps in the First World War before earning a place at Churchill's side.

He also held numerous notable military roles including Chief of Staff to the Ministry of Defence.

John Evetts is downsizing from the Grade II* listed manor and has decided to sell more than 1,000 items he collected with 'an enormous amount of care and love' for the property.

This regence-style gilt bronze eight light chandelier, from the dining room of Wormington Grange, has an estimate of 25,000

Mr Evetts, who has sold Wormington Grange for a multi-million figure, was able to curate such an impressive collection due to his background as a furnishing consultant for the Landmark Trust

Some of the chairs could sell for 10,000 alone, while a George IV bench is valued at 20,000 and plaster sculpture of Cyparissus could make 6,000

During the Second World War, Lord Ismay was said to be the only man to command the wartime Prime Minister's 'absolute trust.'

Among the sale items are dressing mirrors, dressing tables, writing tables and dining chairs from well regarded cabinet makers including Gillows of Lancaster.

Some of the chairs could sell for 10,000 alone, while a George IV bench is valued at 20,000 and plaster sculpture of Cyparissus could make 6,000.

Speaking of the auction, Mr Evetts, 70, said: 'I collected everything that is in this sale specifically for this house with an enormous amount of care and love.

'I wanted to turn it into a home that was furnished very much as it might have been at the time it was built.

Pictured: Lord Ishmay, Winston Churchill's Chief of Staff to the Ministry of Defence during the Second World War

'It was a century ago that my great-grandmother bought this house and I'm the fourth generation to live here.

'Sadly, the energy and capital required to manage such a house has become beyond me, just as I believe it is now time for others with younger families to enjoy the place.

'It was incredibly sad to sell these items which evoke fantastic memories but this way other people will get to enjoy them.

'I am very grateful to Duke's for agreeing to sell the lot and we are all keeping our fingers crossed for a good result.'

Wormington Grange is nestled on parkland near the village of Broadway, Gloucestershire.

The manor has Tudor origins, but the main house was built for Nathaniel Jeffreys in the 1770s. It was then extended in the 1820s before being purchased by Mr Evetts' great grandmother in 1920.

Cristian Beadman, head of sales for Duke's Auctioneers, said: 'This is arguably the most important collection of English country house furniture to come to auction in recent decades.

'A classic country house conglomeration which, in the best tradition of these old-school sales, is both eclectic and curated all at once.

'This is an increasingly rare opportunity to view and secure the finest examples of the period in the context for which they were intended.'

Of the Newton painting in the sale, which depicts the countryside that inspired author Thomas Hardy, auctioneer Guy Schwinge said: 'Hardy was feted during the final years of his life.

'Visitors to his house, Max Gate, included the future King, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson and T.E. Lawrence. (Lawrence of Arabia).

Wormington Grange is nestled on parkland near the village of Broadway, Gloucestershire. Pictured: The library

Pictured: A sign warning only 'cowmen and authorised persons' are permitted to enter this yard at Wormington Grange

Among the items on sale is an oil painting by British landscape artist Algernon Newton - known as the 'Canaletto of the canals' - entitled 'A Dorset Landscape'. The canvas, dated 1928, is valued at 100,000

Among the sale items are dressing mirrors, dressing tables, writing tables and dining chairs from well regarded cabinet makers including Gillows of Lancaster. Pictured left: The dining room and right: the library

Lord Ismay was Churchill's Chief of Staff to the Ministry of Defence during the Second World War. He accompanied the Prime Minister when he met with US President Franklin D Roosevelt and other world leaders

'Hardy's importance cannot be underestimated, and it is tempting to speculate that this depiction of Hardy's Dorset was a subconscious to tribute to him and his beloved Wessex.

'The painting is estimated to sell for 100,000 but could easily make more.'

Lord Ismay was Churchill's Chief of Staff to the Ministry of Defence during the Second World War. He accompanied the Prime Minister when he met with US President Franklin D Roosevelt and other world leaders.

He oversaw the partition of India as Lord Mountbatten's Chief of Staff and was the first secretary general of Nato.

In his final years, Lord Ismay spent many hours in his library at Wormington writing his memoirs. He died aged 78.

The sale, held by Duke's Auctioneers, will take place between May 12 and 14.
Telangana CM pays tributes to Suddala Hanumanthu on his birth anniversary 06 Jun 2021 | 10:43 PM Hyderabad, Jun 6 (UNI) Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao on Sunday paid tributes to

Telangana Armed struggle cultural activist Suddala Hanumanthu on his

birth anniversary. see more..

Telangana Govt slams Central Govt for failure to procure COVID-19 vaccines 06 Jun 2021 | 10:26 PM Hyderabad, Jun 6 (UNI) Telangana Minister for Industries and IT, K T Rama Rao (KTR) on Sunday strongly criticised the Union Government for its 'inefficiency' in procuring the COVID-19 vaccine doses for the citizens of the country. see more..

Karnataka reports 12,209 fresh nCov cases, 320 deaths 06 Jun 2021 | 9:27 PM Bengaluru, Jun 6 (UNI) Karnataka has reported 12,209 fresh cases of the COVID-19 disease in the last 24-hours taking the total number of people infected from the pandemic so far to 26,95,523 on Sunday. see more..

Lokesh condemns highhanded behaviour by police 06 Jun 2021 | 8:17 PM Vijayawada, June 6 (UNI) Telugu Desam Party(TDP) national general secretary and MLC Nara Lokesh condemned the manner in which the police had dragged and manhandled a girl, who was working as a front-line Covid warrior at the Apollo Hospital in Visakhapatnam. see more..
More than 1 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses are still available with states and UTs and they will receive over20 lakh more doses within the next 3 days, the Union Health Ministry said on Thursday.

On media reports quoting some Maharashtra State Government officials that vaccines in the state are "finished" and adversely impacting the vaccination drive, the ministry said a balance of 7,49,960 vaccine doses is still available with the state for administration to eligible population groups.

"It is clarified that the total COVID vaccine doses received by Maharashtra as onApril 29 (at 8 am) are 1,63,62,470.

"Of this, the total consumption including wastage (0.22 per cent) was 1,56,12,510. Balance of 7,49,960 vaccine doses is still available with the state for administration to the eligible population groups," the ministry said.

TheGovernment of India has so far provided nearly 16.16 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses to states and UTs free of cost.

Of this, the total consumption including wastages is15,10,77,933 doses, the ministry said.

"More than 1 crore COVID vaccine doses (1,06,08,207) are still available with states and UTs to be administered.More than 20 lakh (20,48,890) vaccine doses will be received in addition by the states and UTs within the next 3 days," the ministry stated.

The Liberalised and Accelerated Phase-3 Strategy of COVID-19 Vaccination will be implemented from 1st May 2021.

Registration for the new eligible population groups has started from Wednesday.Potential beneficiaries can either register directly on CoWIN portal cowin.gov.in or through the Aarogya Setu app.

(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.)
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenias foreign ministry strongly condemned the vandalism of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Yerevan.

The ministry made a statement which says:

We strongly condemn the damaging and burning of the pedestal of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, a symbol of India's independence and statehood, peace advocate and humanist.

This is a provocation against the centuries-old Armenian-Indian friendship, dynamically developing since the independence.

The issue of preserving monuments is an obligation of all of us, and any such act of vandalism and desecration is an encroachment on the universal values, the perpetrators of which must be held accountable within the law.
Queensland underpinned Prime Minister Scott Morrisons miracle win at the 2019 election when the party won 23 of the states 30 federal seats and will play a major role at the next poll, due to be held by May next year. But the Coalitionss Queensland stronghold has not correlated on a state level. Labor has held power for 26 of the past 31 years and grown more popular under the leadership of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Enduring loss after loss at the successive state elections, and the complexities of the 2008 Liberal and National party merger, has plunged the LNP into an identity crisis. Moderates are wrestling to move the party closer to the centre while religious conservatives are yanking the party to the right hoping to protect what it perceives as Australian values and way of life. As a party insider explained, the religious right, also known by some as the Christian Soldiers, were different to traditional conservatives: Look at Peter Dutton, he is a conservative and was against changes to the Marriage Act but he voted yes for same-sex marriage because that is what his electorate wanted.

But for the Christian Right it is all or nothing, they are fixated on those culture war issues and dont care if we lose. Another senior party member, who would only speak on background, said the preselection outcome would be a sign of what the Coalition valued. There is a big fight for the heart of the party, they said. There are some wanting to protect the status quo, others who want to see the party become more progressive so we can start winning seats in Brisbane again [at state election] and some who want to fight culture wars. The LNP state council, made up of about 400 members including councillors, federal and state MPs, will gather in Brisbane on Saturday morning to vote on the Senate ticket order.

Party powerbrokers expect the preselection fight to go down to the wire. In one corner there was Senator Stoker, 38, who entered the Senate in 2018 via the casual vacancy created former attorney-general George Brandis. Before politics, she worked as a barrister, a Commonwealth prosecutor, a High Court and Supreme Court judges associate and a solicitor. A staunch pro-life conservative who is fiercely opposed to voluntary euthanasia, Senator Stoker was recently promoted from the backbench to the outer ministry in Mr Morrisons cabinet reshuffle. Her meteoric rise has been helped along by her ability to court controversy, including a run-in with Australian of the Year Grace Tame.

Senator Stoker came under fire last year when she said former Queensland LNP leader Deb Frecklington should not be playing the gender card by speaking out against bullying from the backroom boys of the party. Senator Stoker also found bullying claims by Ann Sudmalis and Julia Banks pathetic and bizarre. She has the backing of Mr Morrison along with the Christian Right, headed by Brisbane businessman David Goodwin, who was suspended from the party in 2019. The LNP women, headed by Mr Goodwins mother Jenny, were also expected to back Senator Stoker. In the other corner was Senator McGrath, 46, a proud conservative and advocate for regional Queensland who played a key role in ousting former prime minister Tony Abbott.

A well-respected party strategist, he directed former Queensland premier Campbell Newmans 2012 landslide election campaign and had the support of traditional conservatives, such as Defence Minister Peter Dutton, as well as the moderate Young LNP. First elected in 2013, Senator McGrath was an assistant minister under Malcolm Turnbull, but resigned in 2018 ahead of the leadership spill that installed Mr Morrison. Prior to that, he had a spell working for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, back when Mr Johnson was mayor of London. His time with Mr Johnson came to a controversial end, when the then-mayor forced him to resign over comments Mr McGrath had made about African Caribbean immigrants. A McGrath supporter said he had won over the bush. When the PM is fumbling the ball and the election is at risk, of course you choose the campaigner, they said.

The party insider said Saturdays preselection would test the religious rights clout in the Queensland LNP. The preselection is not just about the rise of the far right, but how the party grapples with its now-acknowledged women problem. The party insider said Senator Stoker was campaigning on being a woman and the fact she was now a Parliamentary Secretary, though shes not the actual Attorney-General for gods sake. We obviously have a woman problem, so that is compelling but what good is a woman if she is anti-women? they said. The result will also be a gamble for the Prime Minister  he wants Stoker so if she loses it shows he is a bit out of step with the LNP in Queensland. Does he know us better than Dutton?
More than 100 colleges across the United States have said they will require students to receive coronavirus vaccines in order to attend in-person classes in the fall, according to a New York Times survey.

Those requirements come as coronavirus cases have continued to climb steadily this spring at U.S. colleges and universities. More than 660,000 cases have been linked to the institutions since the start of the pandemic, with one-third of those since Jan. 1.

Major outbreaks continue on some campuses, even as students have become eligible for vaccines. Salve Regina University in Rhode Island canceled all in-person events for at least a week after more than 30 students tested positive in seven days. Wayne State University in Detroit, a city that has been one of the worst U.S. coronavirus hot spots, suspended in-person classes and on-campus activities in early April.
Environment activists on a Greenpeace ship documented a Russian navy vessel in 1993 as it pumped liquid nuclear waste directly into the East Sea. Courtesy of Greenpeace



This is the second in a series of articles to highlight the possible effects of, and concerns over, Japan's decision to discharge radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.  ED.



Looking back on Russian ocean dumping of nuclear wastes



By Jun Ji-hye



Japan's recent announcement of a decision to release more than 1 million tons of contaminated water from its wrecked nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean has reminded many people of Russia's use of the seas as a dumping ground for radioactive waste, confirmed in 1993 and something that shocked the international community.



What was notable then was that Japan was on the frontline of protests against Russia, demanding a stop to the dumping of radioactive waste.



The tables have been turned in 2021 as Japan said April 13 that it was preparing to release water contaminated with radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which experienced a meltdown of three of its reactors in March 2011, into the Pacific Ocean from 2023. Russia is expressing grave concern over the plan and has called on Japan to demonstrate due transparency.



This event is provoking criticism that Tokyo now has a two-faced attitude to radioactive waste dumping.



In 1993, Greenpeace exposed Russia's dumping of radioactive waste when one of its ships documented a Russian Navy vessel pumping radioactive liquid waste directly into the East Sea.



It was revealed at the time that Russia had frequently, and illegally, dumped both high- and low-level liquid and solid radioactive waste into the ocean during its years as the Soviet Union. The waste even included spent reactors from nuclear submarines.



At the time, Japan strongly criticized Russia, urging it to stop dumping the waste, and asking countries from around the world to support an international accord halting all such disposal of radioactive material.



Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace East Asia, who was part of the campaign against the Russian dumping in 1993, said Tokyo's 2021 decision to gradually release more than 1.2 million tons of contaminated water from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean was contradictory to its past protests against Moscow.



According to Burnie, Greenpeace, at the time, obtained details of communications between the Russian government and then International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Hans Blix from Oct. 3, 1993 that showed Blix knew of Moscow's plan to dump liquid nuclear waste into the East Sea.



"Within days of the exposure by Greenpeace of the Russian dumping, the Japanese government signaled its opposition and then agreed to a strict application of the International Maritime Organization London Convention, which became a permanent ban on nuclear dumping at sea in 1996," Burnie said in an email interview with The Korea Times. "The Japanese government's plans for Fukushima discharges are completely contradicted by its opposition to Russian and other sea dumping nearly 30 years ago."



The London Convention sets international standards for the disposal at sea of radioactive and industrial waste as well as that from vessels and aircraft.





University student protestors have their heads shaved outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, April 20, to protest Japan's decision to release contaminated water from its wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
In an attempt to alleviate Indias health crisis, Switzerland on Wednesday said it will dispatch emergency medical aid that includes oxygen concentrators and essential equipment like ventilators for the hospitals. Swiss Embassy in India said in an update that the country was preparing to send the Swiss humanitarian aid which consists of medical supply to tackle Indias mounting caseload of coronavirus from the second wave, which is seeing more hospitalizations. The medical assistance sent by Switzerland will include oxygen concentrators, ventilators, and other medical equipment. This material will be distributed with the support of the Indian Red Cross Society. Switzerland stands in solidarity with India in these challenging times," the embassy said.

#Switzerland  supports #India  in this challenging time: we are dispatching urgently needed oxygen concentrators and ventilators to support medical facilities  Thanks to our staff on the ground @SwissEmbassyIND & to @SwissHumAidUnit for the swift coordination   Ignazio Cassis (@ignaziocassis) April 28, 2021

India has been scrambling to provide assistance to all patients that needed the medical intervention but the healthcare systems have been pushed to the brink of their maximum capacities due to the deadlier wave blamed in part on the new "double mutant" variant, known as B.1.617. As the administrations buckled to make the Oxygen available to the overwhelmed hospitals, as many as 190,000 people have succumbed so far due to the overcrowding and tsunami of patients at the healthcare centers looking for ICU beds or oxygen. Help from the European Union, UK, and UAE arrived in India to stem the impact of the devastating surge of variant hit, compounded by depleting availability of oxygen.

EU activates 'Civil Protection Mechanism' to help

As the situation spiralled due to cases adding up in lakhs every single day, the European Union activated its Civil Protection Mechanism, saying that it was coordinating with member states to ship oxygen and medicine to India. Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen earlier said she was "alarmed by the epidemiological situation in India. We are ready to support."

"The EU is pooling resources to respond rapidly to India's request for assistance," she added. Meanwhile Germanys chancellor Angela Merkel also said that Germany "stands in solidarity with India and is urgently preparing a mission of support. She added, "To the people of India I want to express my sympathy for the terrible suffering that COVID-19 has again brought to your communities. The fight against the pandemic is our common fight. UKs foreign secretary Dominic Raab said that he had dispatched 600 pieces of medical equipment, including ventilators and oxygen concentrators to help India fight its battle.
MCLA Community Invited to Vote on 2021 Innovation & Entrepreneurship Challenge

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The MCLA community is invited to view and vote on MCLA senior business plan pitches during the College's virtual 2021 Innovation & Entrepreneurship Challenge (IEC).

Voting is open from 5 p.m. on Monday, May 3 to 8 a.m. on Friday, May 7, and any member of the MCLA community (student, faculty, staff, alumni, or general community member) is eligible to vote once during that time.

To watch and vote, visit https://lnk.mcla.edu/thechallenge

Students began their projects with an idea, laid out a plan, and researched customer demand to determine viability. Each senior will present their business plan in a recorded eight-minute pitch. This year's participants are: Lorenzo Cristofolini '21, Cristo's Consulting; Jake Ferrara '21, Ferrara Lawn Care; Latisha Hargrett '21, Strong Shoulders; Austin Miller '21, Get Hooked Bait & Tackle; Andrew Nygard '21, Wheels Now!; and Jakob Tuponce '21, $ The Dough Place $.

Afterwards, judges will deliberate and the community votes will be tallied to determine the winners. The first-place project will be awarded $7,500, second place $5,000, and third place $2,500 toward start-up funding to cover inventory, equipment, and marketing for the business.

This year's judges include North Adams Mayor Tom Bernard and Bruce Lessels, founder of Zoar Outdoor in Charlemont, Massachusetts.

All IEC participants will continue to be assisted by the Entrepreneur-in-Residence as they pursue their businesses. The IEC has launched several businesses that continue to grow. For more information, contact Entrepreneur-in-Residence Amy Shapiro at Amy.Shapiro@mcla.edu
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 18:55:28|Editor: huaxia

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WELLINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand has offered, and Fiji has accepted, sufficient doses of AstraZeneca for 250,000 people from New Zealand's domestic vaccine portfolio.

"New Zealand and Fiji are working together closely to support Fiji with access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines at the earliest opportunity," New Zealand Associate Minister of Health and Foreign Affairs Aupito William Sio and Fijian Health and Medical Services Minister Ifereimi Waqainabete said in a statement on Thursday.

Both ministers stressed that there are still a number of steps to work through before the vaccines can be delivered. The vaccine still has to be approved by Medsafe before it can be used in New Zealand and donated to Fiji.

The ministers met virtually last week to discuss New Zealand's offer, which also includes two million NZ dollars (1.45 million U.S. dollars) of Official Development Assistance to support Fiji's vaccine rollout.

"Fiji has worked hard to keep COVID-19 contained and New Zealand has been committed to supporting it in this," Sio said.

"But this success has been hard won. Following recent community cases in both our countries, we see a vaccine as key to protecting our people from the virus, and for our economic and social recovery," he said. Enditem
FTSE 100 giants AstraZeneca and Barclays are set to declare first-quarter results on Friday

It has been hard to keep PLC ( ) out of the news and it will get further attention on Friday when it releases a first-quarter trading update.

UBS is forecasting total revenues of US$7.07bn, which puts it above the consensus forecast of US$6.95bn.

It goes for a core operating profit of US$2.76bn (consensus: US$2.55bn) and core earnings per share of US$1.54 versus a consensus forecast of US$1.45.

We expect the COVID-19 vaccine might negatively impact the margin in Q1, UBS said.

We will also look for any commentary around further COVID-19 impact for the rest of the year. Even though the Alexion/AZN deal obtained FTC approval recently we dont expect an update quite yet, UBS said.

is expecting first-quarter sales of US$6.85bn and core earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) of US$2.49bn.

Banks results season continues with ( ) making its way to the crease.

Investment bank revenues are expected to be strong in the quarter, while loan impairment charges in the quarter are expected to be low.

Barclays own banking analysts expect the discussion to increasingly focus on the potential for write-backs of loan loss provisions.

is forecasting net interest income of 1,923mln, gross operating income of 5,842mln, profit before tax of 1,835mln, net profit of 1,188mln and common equity tier 1 ratio of 14.5%.



Significant announcements expected

Trading announcements: PLC ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), PLC ( )

Finals: ( )

Interims: Up Global Sourcing Holdings PLC ( )

Economic data: US personal incomes, US Chicago PMI, UK house prices
President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on April 28, 2021. (Melina Mara/Pool/Getty Images)

Commentary on Bidens First 100 Days From Republicans, Democrats Are Poles Apart

Republicans and Democratic lawmakers issued starkly different commentary on President Joe Bidens first 100 days in office as the president delivered his first address to the joint session of Congress, with the former side full of criticism and the latter full of praise.

Biden, a Democrat, delivered his hour-long, nationally televised address at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday night, a day before his 100th day in office, to a thin crowd at the Capitol due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. He painted the current state of America as one of progress in multiple arenas and declared that America is rising anew, while calling on Congress to cooperate with his radical proposals on a range of issues, including a number of federal programs to drive the economy past the pandemic and broadly extend the social safety net.

President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on the dais behind him at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Melina Mara/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Democratic lawmakers at large praised Biden for his portrayal of a unifying and optimistic future for America, as well as the promises of increased prosperity and jobs, as well as Bidens actions so far in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, maintained that Bidens performance over the past months have done anything but unify the nation, and also warned that his legislative proposals, despite lofty claims, would risk destroying the economy and would, if enacted, threaten jobs and hurt families.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was full of praise for the president. In a statement, she praised Biden for having delivered what she called a unifying message of resilience, resolve, and hope.

President Bidens address laid out an ambitious, transformative vision for seizing this once-in-a-century opportunity for our economy to Build Back Better. It does so by investing in the foundation of our nations strength: our workers and the middle class, which built America, Pelosi said in a statement. The bold investments of the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan will Build Back Better by putting children, women, workers, and families first and by ensuring that every person in every zip code has the opportunity to succeed in the 21st century.

The Democratic Congress looks forward to working with the Biden-Harris Administration to enact this historic vision for lower health care costs, for bigger paychecks, for cleaner government, For The People, Pelosi added.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speak after President Joe Biden addressed a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The ambitious $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal dubbed the American Jobs Plan, which Biden unveiled in late March, has already drawn the scrutiny of Republicans, who are wary of its price tag and argue that it goes well beyond what people normally think of as infrastructure. Pelosi previously said that Democrats may resort to the reconciliation process to push through the measure if it doesnt garner enough Republican support.

Biden on the night touted his American Families Plan, which is expected to cost $1.8 trillion and raise the top individual tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent for taxpayers in the top 1 percent of income.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) posted multiple messages on Twitter in praise of Biden and said that Democrats in the Senate have been working with the president to Restore effective, truthful, responsive government.

President Biden laid out a comprehensive, thoughtful vision that provides a pathway to success for people across this country, Schumer wrote. His plan will help restore the American optimism that has been shaken for the last four years. We will do all we can to make [the presidents] vision a reality.

Schumer praised the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that the president signed in early March, writing on Twitter, Vaccinations are up. Unemployment is down. Schools, small businesses, restaurants, bars are finally starting to re-open. Thanks to the #AmericanRescuePlan: Our economy has gotten its own shot in the arm. #HelpIsHere

The Democratic Senate leader on the night also accused Republican lawmakers across the nation of trying to restrict the right of American citizens to voteespecially Americans of color. Schumer wrote that Senate Democrats are working to pass H.R. 1, the election reform bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Democrats say would protect voters from racial discrimination and vote suppression. Biden said late Wednesday that Congress should send the two measures to his desk right away.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who delivered a nationally televised rebuttal of Bidens address, criticized Bidens American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. In his speech, Scott characterized the American Jobs plan as a liberal wish list of big government waste that features the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation, and said that the American Families Plan would mean even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college.

In this image from Senate Television video, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) delivers the Republican response to President Joe Bidens speech to a joint session of Congress in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Senate Television via AP)

On Twitter, Scott wrote, The beauty of the American Dream is that families get to define it for themselves. We should be expanding options and opportunities for all familiesnot throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.

Scott, who is the only black Republican in the Senate, also countered Bidens assertion that there exists systemic racism that plagues American life in many ways, a view commonly held among Democrats.

Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country, Scott said. While acknowledging that our healing is not finished, Scott suggested that Democrats and liberals have turned the race issue upside down.

Its backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination, he said. And its wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present. He added, Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised Scotts response to Bidens address, writing on Twitter, Republicans stand for the principles and policies that unite Americans and expand opportunity for working families. Not radical agendas designed to push us apart.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stands as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) remains seated during a speech by President Joe Biden before a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)

McConnell called Bidens performance over his first 100 days one that represented Centrist Words, Liberal Actions. A statement from his office reads, Though Joe Biden ran as a unifying figure, the record of his first 100 days is one of partisan ideological left-wing governance.

The Republican Senate leader said in another statement that the Biden administration seems to have given up on selling actual unity in favor of catnip for their liberal base, covered with a hefty coat of false advertising.

Thats how the so-called American Rescue Plan, a grab-bag spending bill that directed less than 10 percent to vaccines and pandemic healthcare, was marketed as a COVID-19 relief measure, he added. In actuality, it sent huge sums of money to state governments whose revenues had already rebounded and declared war on the formerly bipartisan consensus that welfare spending should be linked to work.

McConnell criticized the America Jobs plan as another multi-trillion-dollar smorgasbord of liberal social engineering that would decimate entire industries and spend only a small fraction on roads and bridges.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) throughout the night on Twitter posted a series of Fail messages that alleged the president of having flopped in performance with regard to the COVID-19 relief measure, the infrastructure plan, energy policies, tax hikes, and the border crisis.

This whole thing could have just been an email, McCarthy wrote, commenting on Bidens evening address.

The Republican leader late Wednesday encouraged others to retweet his message on Twitter, quoting Scotts speech: Our best future will not come from Washington dreams or socialist schemes. It will come from YOUthe American people.

The Associated Press, Janita Kan, and Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
[April 29, 2021] How UDB Financial Grew by More Than 30% Since Joining Ameriprise in 2019 to Manage $833 Million in Client Assets

UDB Financial, a wealth management practice located in Alexandria, Louisiana, recently celebrated two years with Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE: AMP) after leaving LPL Financial in 2019. Financial advisors Michael Upton, AAMS, Jeff Draughon, AAMS, and Joey Bollinger, MBA, AAMS lead the team and believe the switch to Ameriprise's branch channel helped them capitalize on market performance and accelerated growth for their practice, while delivering an outstanding and efficient client experience through goal-based financial planning. Today, the team manages $833 million in client assets, a significant increase from the $633 million they managed when they left their previous firm. Notably, in a recent satisfaction survey, clients rated UDB Financial 4.9 out of 5 in overall satisfaction based on 76 reviews.1 This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005916/en/ UDB Financial, a wealth advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial based in Alexandria, Louisiana. Photo courtesy of UDB Financial. UDB Financial conducted due diligence on many firms before deciding to join Ameriprise. Reflecting on the anniversary of their move, the advisors highlighted four qualities of Ameriprise that contributed to their strong growth: Goal-based advice. "I credit our growth in assets, clients, and production to Ameriprise's approach to goal-based planning. The firm is committed to having a financial plan for every client that documents their goals and the advice we're giving to help achieve them," said Draughon. "And clients' response to our move to Ameriprise has been overwhelmingly positive. Last year I had a client in tears after seeing her financial plan online, which showed her progress and high probability of success. She was so relieved to know she was going to be okay."

Integrated technology and streamlined processes. "We moved from independence to a branch model because we were weary from running the business," said Upton. "Ameriprise's integrated technology and streamlined processes has made us more efficient and given us more capacity to go deeper with clients."

Support amid the pandemic."When the pandemic strted, Ameriprise already had digital tools - including a mobile app, e-Signature, virtual meeting capabilities, client site with goals online - and business processes in place, so we were able to continue serving clients without disruption from home," said Bollinger. "And, our region leaders and support teams in the corporate office are available when we need them. They don't try to change who we are, but rather give us best practices that work to grow our business."





Culture of integrity. "Every firm makes promises when recruiting advisors. We had healthy skepticism when talking to other firms, as we wondered if each one would deliver years into the future after winning our business. The Ameriprise team has kept their promises, and we couldn't be happier to be here," said Draughon. "UDB Financial's decision to move to Ameriprise has helped propel their significant growth, and we're excited about the future," said Tom Linn, who supports the team as their Ameriprise branch manager. "They're taking advantage of the support and capabilities we offer as a firm to drive satisfaction and referrals - and they're in a great position to continue expanding and serving more clients who will benefit from their advice and expertise." Ameriprise offers a proven strategy - the Ultimate Advisor Partnership - to help advisors grow their practices at rates that outpace key competitors while providing an outstanding client experience. Combined with the company's culture of support and independence, the strategy enables advisors to scale their businesses, deepen client relationships, and drive referrals for future growth.

UDB Financial, which has stayed consistent since the transition to Ameriprise, includes advisors Sam Marino, Brian Flynn, Stan Bollinger, Crissy Shirley, John Lenahan, CFP, and Lori Decker, as well as client service associates Heather Parker, Monica Meche, Martha Bankston, Ann Murray, and Kimberly Braddy. Ameriprise has continued to attract experienced, productive advisors, with approximately 1,700 joining the firm in the last 5 years.2 To find out why experienced financial advisors are joining Ameriprise, visit ameriprise.com/why. For more information about UDB Financial, visit: https://www.ameripriseadvisors.com/team/udb-financial/ 1 - Clients can respond to an internal Ameriprise survey and rate an advisor or practice based on their satisfaction with the team or practice, on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = extremely dissatisfied to 5 = extremely satisfied). Client experiences may vary and working with any Ameriprise Financial practice is not a guarantee of future financial results. Investors should not consider this rating a substitute for their own research and evaluation of a financial practice's qualifications. Only clients with access to the Ameriprise Secure Client Site may submit a rating. Ratings reflect an average of all client responses received over a rolling two-year period as of 12/31/2020. 2 - Ameriprise Financial 2020 10-K. About Ameriprise Financial At Ameriprise Financial, we have been helping people feel confident about their financial future for more than 125 years. With extensive advisory, asset management and insurance capabilities and a nationwide network of approximately 10,000 financial advisors, we have the strength and expertise to serve the full range of individual and institutional investors' financial needs. For more information, or to find an Ameriprise financial advisor, visit ameriprise.com. Ameriprise Financial Services, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Ameriprise Financial Services, LLC. Member FINRA and SIPC.  2021 Ameriprise Financial, Inc. All rights reserved. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005916/en/

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden administration national security aides met Thursday with the chief of Israel's Mossad spy agency for talks that focused primarily on Iran, according to officials familiar with the meeting.

The two-hour meeting was the second this week in Washington involving senior officials from the two countries and underscored Israel's unease with ongoing indirect nuclear negotiations between Iran and the United States in Vienna and Iran more broadly, the officials said.

Although other issues were discussed, Israel used Thursday's meeting to 'express strong concerns' about Iran, one of the officials said. The officials were not authorized to discuss the private diplomatic talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Blinken attended Thursday's meeting along with his newly confirmed deputy, Wendy Sherman, President Joe Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan and two other senior officials, Brett McGurk from the National Security Council and Derek Chollet from the State Department. Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Gilad Erdan represented Israel.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden administration national security aides met Thursday with the chief of Israel's Mossad spy agency Yossi Cohen for talks that focused primarily on Iran, according to officials familiar with the meeting

The State Department declined to comment on the meeting or even to confirm that it had happened, but said the Biden administration is committed to coordination and transparency with Israel in its nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

On Tuesday, Sullivan, McGurk, Chollet and U.S. special envoy for Iran Rob Malley met with Erdan and Israeli national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat to discuss Iran and other regional matters. Malley departed Washington for Vienna shortly after those talks.

A White House readout of that meeting said the U.S. had 'updated Israel on the talks in Vienna and emphasized strong U.S. interest in consulting closely with Israel on the nuclear issue going forward.'

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday that the Vienna consultations had made some progress, but there is 'still a lot of distance to travel' and the sides are 'not on the cusp of an agreement.'

The Biden administration has said it is willing to lift certain sanctions on Iran if Iran returns to compliance with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018. Under the accord, Iran got billions of dollars in sanctions relief in return for curbing its nuclear program. Much of that relief evaporated when Trump pulled out of the deal and re-imposed tough new sanctions on Iran.

A potential U.S. return to the deal along with the sanctions relief it would entail has unsettled both Israel and its Arab neighbors, which fear increasing Iranian assertiveness in the region. Price said an inter-agency team of senior officials would travel to Gulf Arab countries in the coming days to address those concerns. He declined to offer details.
Third country release according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 of the WpHG

Announcement on Adding Provisional Proposals for the 2020 Annual General Meeting

Qingdao / Shanghai / Frankfurt, 29 April 2021 - Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. (D-Share 690D.DE, A-Share 600690.SH, H-Share 6690.HK, 'Haier Smart Home' or the 'Company') published Announcement on Adding Provisional Proposals for the 2020 Annual General Meeting in accordance with applicable trading rules of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and applicable PRC laws. The Shareholders' Meetings will be held on 25 June 2021 in Qingdao, China.

- Date of the Meetings: 25 June 2021

- Venue: Haier University, Haier Information Industrial Park, No.1 Haier Road, Qingdao City, China

- Online voting system for A-shareholders for the Meeting: Shanghai Stock Exchange Online Voting System for Shareholders' Meetings

- Record Date: 16 June 2021

- For the participation of D-shareholders intending to attend the 2020 Annual General Meeting (and the 2021 Second D-Shares Class Meeting to be convened on the same day), the invitation letter will later be published on the disclosure platforms at https://www.dgap.de/, the German Federal Gazette and the website of the Company at https://smart-home.haier.com/en/sm/. The invitation letter and proxy form for the 2020 Annual General Meeting (and the 2021 Second D-Shares Class Meeting), will be separately dispatched to D-shareholders later.

I. Explanation of adding provisional proposals

1. Prosper: Haier Group Corporation

2. Explanation of the proposal procedures

The Company has published the notice of convening General Meeting on 30 March 2021, Haier Group Corporation, a shareholder that, solely or jointly, holding 33.94% of the Company's shares, proposed provisional proposals and submitted them in writing to the convener of the General Meeting on 29 April 2021. In accordance with the relevant regulations of the Rules of Shareholders' General Meeting of Listed Companies, the convener of the General Meeting hereby publishes this announcement.

3. Details of the provisional proposals

Adding the following proposals:

(1) Proposal on Renewing Engagement of PRC GAAP Auditor

The Company intends to re-appoint the Hexin Certified Public Accountants LLP as the auditors of PRC Accounting Standards financial report and internal control report of the Company for 2021, the auditing service fees is RMB10 million (including the fee for auditing the financial statements is RMB7.15 million and the audit fee for the internal control is RMB2.85 million), which remains the same as that of last year.

(2) Proposal on Renewing Engagement of IFRS Auditor

The Company intends to re-appoint the HLB Hodgson Impey Cheng Limited as the international accounting standards auditor of the Company for 2021, the auditing service fees is RMB3.89 million (including the fee for auditing the financial statements is RMB3.74 million and the audit fee for reviewing the on-going connected transactions is RMB0.15 million), which has slightly adjusted from that of last year.

(3) Proposal on the Renewal of the Financial Service Framework Agreement and its Expected Related Party Transaction Limit with Haier Group and Haier Finance

The Company intends to renew the Financial Service Framework Agreement with Haier Group Corporation, and the estimated the amounts of the daily related party transactions for financial services.

The above-mentioned provisional proposals are not the special resolutions of the general meeting, which do not require for cumulative voting and have been considered and approved at the 18th meeting of the 10th session of the Board of Directors of the Company. For details, please refer to the Announcement on Resolutions of the 18th Meeting of the 10th Session of the Board of Directors published on the website of the Company and of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on the same day as this announcement.

II. Except for adding provisional proposals above, the notices of the original General Meeting announced on 30 March 2021 remain unchanged.

III. Proposals of the General Meeting and type of voting shareholders

No. Name of proposals Type of shareholders A-share shareholders D-share shareholders H-share shareholders Proposals by non-cumulative poll 1 Report on the 2020 Annual Financial Statements v v v 2 2020 Annual Report and Annual Report Summary v v v 3 2020 Annual Work Report of the Board of Directors v v v 4 2020 Annual Work Report of the Board of Supervisors v v v 5 2020 Annual Audit Report on Internal Control v v v 6 2020 Annual Profit Distribution Plan v v v 7 Proposal on the Anticipated Provision of Guarantees for its Subsidiaries in 2021 v v v 8 Proposal on the Conduct of Foreign Exchange Fund Derivatives Business v v v 9 Proposal on Adjusting the Allowance of Directors v v v 10 Proposal on Closing Certain Fund-raising Projects through Convertible Corporate Bonds and Permanently Supplementing the Working Capital with the Surplus Funds v v v 11 Proposal on Granting the General Mandate to the Board of Directors on Additional Issuance of H-shares of the Company v v v 12 Proposal on Granting the General Mandate to the Board of Directors on Additional Issuance of D-shares of the Company v v v 13 Proposal on Granting the General Mandate to the Board of Directors to Repurchase not more than 10% of the Total Number of H-shares of the Company in Issue v v v 14 Proposal on Granting the General Mandate to the Board of Directors to Repurchase not more than 10% of the Total Number of D-shares of the Company in Issue v v v 15 Proposal on Amending the Articles of Association v v v 16 Proposal on Amending the Rules of Procedure for the Board of Directors v v v 17 Proposal on Amending the Rules of Procedure for the Board of Supervisors v v v 18 Proposal on Amending the Management System of External Guarantees v v v 19 Proposal on Re-appointment of PRC GAAP Auditor v v v 20 Proposal on Re-appointment of IFRS Auditor v v v 21 Proposal on the Renewal of the Financial Service Framework Agreement and its Expected Related Party Transaction Limit with Haier Group and Haier Finance v v v Proposals by cumulative poll 22 Proposal on Election of Independent Director(s) Independent director(s) to be elected:(1) 22.01 Wu Qi v v v 23 Proposal on Election of Supervisor(s) of the Company Supervisor(s) to be elected:(2) 23.01 Liu Dalin v v v 23.02 Ma Yingjie v v v

1. Dates and media of disclosure of the proposals

The proposals to be submitted to this meeting have been considered and approved at the 18th meeting of the 10th session of the Board of Directors and the 14th the meeting of the 10th session of the Board of Supervisors. For details, please refer to the Announcement on Resolutions of the 18th Meeting of the 10th Session of the Board of Directors of Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd., the Announcement on Resolutions of the 14th the Meeting of the 10th Session of the Board of Supervisors of Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. and related announcements disclosed by the Company on the website of Shanghai Stock Exchange on the same day as this announcement.

2. Special proposals: 7, 11-15

3. Proposals with separate counting of votes from small and medium investors: 6-8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22

4. Proposals which interested shareholders will abstain from voting: 21

Names of the interested shareholders to abstain from voting: Haier Group Corporation, Haier Electric Appliances Corp Ltd. (Already renamed to Haier COSMO Co., Ltd.), Qingdao Haier Venture & Investment Information Co., Ltd., Qingdao Haichuangzhi Management Consulting Enterprise (Limited Partnership) and Haier International Co., Ltd., HCH (HK) Investment Management Co., Ltd.

5. Proposals which shareholders of preference shares will vote on: Not applicable

It is hereby notified the above.

The Board of Directors of Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. or other conveners

About Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd.:

Haier is one of the world's leading manufacturers of household appliances with a focus on smart home solutions and customized mass production. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. develops, produces and distributes a wide range of household appliances. These include refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, air conditioners, water heaters, kitchen appliances as well as smaller household appliances and an extensive range of intelligent household appliances. The Company distributes its products through leading household brands such as Haier, Casarte, Leader, Candy, GE Appliances, AQUA and Fisher & Paykel. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. has launched Smart Home Experiential Cloud, which connects homes, users, enterprises and ecosystem partners, and facilitates the integration of Haier's online, offline and micro-store businesses and supports user interaction to further optimize the user experience.

IR Contact:

Yao Sun (Sophie) - Haier Smart Home Germany

T: +49 6172 9454 143

F: +49 6172 9454 42143

M: +49 160 9469 3601

Email: y.sun@haier.de
President Biden on Wednesday in his joint session of Congress spoke to transgender youth, saying: "I want you to know that your president has your back."

Driving the news: At least eight bills targeting trans youth have been signed into law by Republican governors across the U.S. this year. A record 89 bills have been introduced so far in 2021 targeting trans youth as of April 20, per the ACLU.

Worth noting: First lady Jill Biden invited 16-year-old Stella Keating, the first transgender teen to testify before the U.S. Senate, as one of her virtual guests to Biden's address, Axios' Orion Rummler reports.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to announce on Thursday that he is postponing the May 22 parliamentary elections, citing alleged Israeli obstruction, Palestinian and Israeli officials say.

Why it matters: Abbas' primary motivation for the last-minute delay is that a split in his Fatah party has opened the door for a potential Hamas victory.

Driving the news: Abbas has summoned all the Palestinian factions for a meeting on Thursday at his headquarters in Ramallah. Hamas representatives were also invited to join.

Palestinian sources say Abbas is expected to announce that he is postponing the elections and sign a presidential decree to do so, without setting a new date for elections.

In an attempt to mitigate the fallout, Abbas will propose a national unity government with the participation of all factions, including Hamas.

The backstory: Abbas and his aides have been planting the seeds for this announcement in recent days, stressing that the elections can only be held if Israel allows voting in East Jerusalem. Fatah formally adopted that policy on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Palestinian minister Hussein al-Sheikh, who is responsible for contacts with Israel, announced he'd been informed that Israel would not allow voting in East Jerusalem.

Senior Israeli officials flatly denied the Palestinian accusations. "Israel is not intervening in the Palestinian elections and hasn't given the Palestinians any response regarding voting in East Jerusalem," an Israeli official told me.

Between the lines: The Israelis share Abbas' concerns about a Hamas victory. Israeli officials say they didn't issue a decision on voting in East Jerusalem because they didn't want to be blamed for blocking the election if they didn't allow it, or box Abbas into holding the vote if they did.

The political director of the Israeli foreign ministry, Alon Bar, met on Tuesday with a group of 13 European ambassadors and told them Abbas would be postponing the elections and blaming Israel. He stressed that Israel didn't sabotage the elections and asked them not to back Abbas' accusations.

What's next: Abbas' political opponents in Hamas and in other factions are expected to condemn the postponement.
We now know a 2019 spanking is the reason Alabama Shakes drummer Steven Johnson is charged with willful abuse of a child.

Today in Limestone County Court, Judge Robert Baker heard a motion submitted by Johnson's attorneys for a "more definite statement" from the Limestone County District Attorney Brian Jones.

Judge Baker told the Jones to be more specific.

That's when both the prosecution and the defense clarified together what Johnson is accused of.

"He's had an opportunity to go before the court, he's had an opportunity to learn more about this allegation - and that's exactly what it is - an allegation at this point - and we'll move forward from here, said Johnson's attorney, Nick Lough.

We know this alleged spanking occurred on or about November 21, 2019.

Johnson's attorneys told WAAY 31 that he is innocent.
Former Minister for Central Region, Kwamena Duncan says President Nana Akufo-Addo must not spare any government official or member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) involved in galamsey to prove his commitment to the fight against galamsey.



Kwamena Duncan believed the President must check his backyard too to expose any person caught in galamsey business.



The President opened a national dialogue on small-scale mining, calling for a national consensus to stop the menace.



In line with the President's objective, the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abu Jinapor has embarked on a mission to address the problem.



He has pledged his full commitment to ending the menace.



On a visit to the Western Region, the Minister vowed to "stop the illegalities without fear or favour. No matter which political party is involved".



Speaking on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme, Kwamena Duncan directed a message to the President.



"The President shouldn't spare any person. If his investigations expose that a leader of his party or government official is involved, he must kill him and save the thousand . . . if the President doesn't take such steps to protect our water and lands, I shudder to think about how the landscape will look like in the next 5/10 years. The possibility looms that, if we don't take the necessary measures quickly and save these things, it won't take long before we start importing water into this country," he told the President.



Kwamena Duncan was however confident that President Nana Addo won't shield any NPP folk, government officials, traditional leaders among others involved in illegal mining.



"I have huge trust in the President".





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Westbound drivers on Staten Island Expressway should be in for a smoother ride thanks to a new auxiliary lane.

On Thursday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the completion of a new westbound auxiliary lane on the Staten Island Expressway, between the northbound Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway entrance ramp and the South Avenue exit ramp.

Auxiliary lanes are extra lanes of traffic constructed between on and off ramps that grant drivers additional time to safely merge onto highways, reducing the amount of congestion caused by shorter on ramps.

New York State is committed to investing in sustainable infrastructure that increases mobility, supports economic growth and improves quality of life, Cuomo said. With the completion of this project, we have improved a critical highway serving Staten Island and improved local streets to better serve the needs of the community.

The new $3.3 million auxiliary lane will provide more time for vehicles to merge onto or exit the Staten Island Expressway, subsequently increasing vehicle capacity, improving mobility and reducing traffic congestion along that stretch.

The lane will also allow motorists coming from the Dr. Martin Luther King Expressway to access the Richmond Avenue (Exit 7) or South Avenue (Exit 6) exits without ever having to fully merge onto the Staten Island Expressway.

Anything and everything that improves traffic flow along the all-important Staten Island Expressway corridor is welcome and appreciated. This was a good project and will serve to get Staten Islanders home, and to where they are going, a little more efficiently, said Borough President James Oddo.

In addition to constructing the new lane, the project included the milling and paving of the affected stretch of the Staten Island Expressway, as well as the installation of new signage, guardrails and LED lights.

Some temporary sign structures remain in place, but are expected to be replaced with new overhead signage by the end of May, according to the state.

Last month, new signage installed within the project area on the westbound Staten Island Expressway came under scrutiny when drivers realized that the name of the Goethals Bridge had been misspelled as Geothals Bridge.

The sign has since been replaced at the expense of the contractor, who the state Department of Transportation claimed to be at fault.

The new westbound auxiliary lane is reminiscent of the southbound auxiliary lane constructed on the West Shore Expressway in 2018, between the Victory Boulevard entrance and the Muldoon/Arden avenues exit.
In the first quarter (1 January  31 March) of the 2021 financial year, Tallink Grupp AS and its subsidiaries (the Group) carried 267 224 passengers, which is 82.9% less than in the first quarter last year. The number of cargo units transported decreased by 14.5% in the same comparison. The Groups unaudited consolidated revenue decreased by 65.3% or EUR 101.2 million to a total of EUR 53.7 million. Unaudited EBITDA was EUR -6.3 million (EUR -1.3 million in Q1 2020) and unaudited net loss was EUR 34.4 million (net loss of EUR 30.2 million in Q1 2020).

Operations during the quarter

Given the uncertainty regarding the duration of the crisis and the course of the post-crisis recovery with progress of vaccinations, the business environment has remained challenging.

In the current situation, the focus has remained on cost and cash flow management to ensure the sustainability of the Groups core business.

Operations of Tallinn-Stockholm route vessels, Baltic Queen and Victoria I, Latvia-Sweden route vessels, Romantika and Isabelle, and Helsinki-Stockholm route vessels, Silja Serenade and Silja Symphony, were suspended. Operations of Tallinn-Helsinki route cruise ferry Silja Europa were also suspended. Tallink Hotel Riga has remained closed since October 2020. Tallink City hotel was undergoing renovation. Tallink Spa & Conference Hotel and Tallink Express Hotel operated in very limited capacity.

Estonia-Finland routes shuttle vessels Megastar and Star, cargo vessel Seawind, Paldiski-Kapellskar route cargo vessels Regal Star and Sailor, and Turku-Stockholm route cruise ferries Baltic Princess and Galaxy continued operating to ensure international movement of cargo. Operations, particularly Estonia-Finland route, were impacted negatively by additional traveling restrictions imposed by Finnish Government concerning commuter traffic since late January.

Sales and segments

In the first quarter of 2021, the Groups total revenue decreased by EUR 101.2 million to EUR 53.7 million. Total revenue in the first quarter of 2020 and 2019 was EUR 154.9 million and EUR 178.9 million, respectively.

Revenue from route operations (core business) decreased by EUR 99.2 million to EUR 44.5 million. The passenger operations and segment results on all routes were significantly affected by the Covid-19 situation and imposed travel restrictions.

The number of passengers carried on the Estonia-Finland routes decreased by 76.2% compared to last year. The number of transported cargo units decreased by 11.0%. Estonia-Finland routes revenue decreased by EUR 34.4 million to EUR 24.8 million. The segment result decreased by EUR 8.2 million to EUR -4.9 million. The segment reflects operations of two shuttle vessels, a cargo vessel and expenses of suspended cruise ferry Silja Europa.

The number of passengers carried on the Finland-Sweden routes decreased by 88.1%. The number of transported cargo units decreased by 17.6%. The routes revenue decreased by EUR 42.4 million to EUR 14.8 million and the segment result decreased by 63.5% or EUR 5.2 million to EUR -13.3 million. The segment reflects Turku-Stockholm operations and expenses of two suspended Helsinki-Stockholm route cruise ferries. The results do not reflect EUR 4.9 million government assistance related to operation of Turku-Stockholm route.

On Estonia-Sweden routes the number of passengers carried decreased by 93.1%. The number of transported cargo units decreased by 4.2%. Despite the decrease in routes revenue by EUR 12.3 million to EUR 4.9 million, the segment result increased by 32.0% to EUR -3.2 million. Estonia-Sweden route reflects operation of two cargo vessel and expenses of two suspended cruise ferries.

The Latvia-Sweden route operations were suspended in the first quarter. The EUR -3.5 million segment results reflects the expenses of the two suspended cruise ferries.

Revenue from the segment other decreased by a total of EUR 3.2 million and amounted to EUR 9.2 million. The decrease was mainly driven by significantly lower accommodation sales and lower revenue from services provided at the hotels. The segment revenue was positively impacted by an increase in online shop sales, opening of Burger King restaurants and revenue from providing mooring services at the Tallinn Old City Harbour.

Earnings

In the first quarter of 2021, the Groups gross profit decreased by EUR 19.8 million compared to the same period last year, amounting to EUR -20.0 million. EBITDA decreased by EUR 5.1 million and amounted to EUR -6.3 million.

In 2020, the Groups main focus was on activities aimed at reducing the cost base and increasing efficiency. As a result, the cost of sales declined by EUR 81.4 million or 52.5% compared to previous year. Sales, marketing and administrative expenses declined by EUR 12.3 million or 45.1%. Management expects improved efficiency also from the coming periods.

Excluding cost of goods sold and depreciation and amortisation, reduction in all other operating expenses (including sales, marketing and administrative expenses) was 53.8% or EUR 66.6 million.

During the quarter, there was an exemption from ships fairway dues in Estonia amounting to EUR 1.1 million. The exemption is valid until April 2021.

The Group used temporary salary support measures offered by Estonian government which reduced personnel expenses by EUR 2.0 million. In addition, government assistance from Groups other home markets amounted to EUR 5.0 million.

Amortisation and depreciation expense decreased by EUR 1.1 million to EUR 23.7 million compared to last year.

Net finance costs increased by EUR 0.6 million compared to the first quarter last year. The change includes an increase of EUR 0.6 million in interest expense.

The Groups unaudited net loss for the first quarter of 2021 was EUR 34.4 million or EUR 0.051 per share compared to a net loss of EUR 30.2 million or EUR 0.045 per share in 2020 and net loss of EUR 25.3 million or EUR 0.038 per share in 2019.

Investments

The Groups investments in first quarter of 2021 amounted to EUR 4.2 million.

Due to the changed economic environment and suspension of vessel operations, ship-related investments were kept to minimum and only critical maintenance and repair works were performed.

Investments were also made in the development of the online booking and sales systems as well as other administrative systems and in relation to the opening of Burger King restaurants.

Dividends

Due to a deteriorated operating environment after the reporting date and considering the Companys long-term interests, the Management Board has decided to propose to the Supervisory Board not to pay dividends from net profit for 2020.

Financial position

In the first quarter, the Groups net debt increased by EUR 36.2 million to EUR 713.5 million.

In order to relieve the liquidity issues caused by the COVID-19 situation, Group entities were allowed to postpone tax payments in 2020 and 2021 by home markets tax boards. The postponed tax liabilities amounted to EUR 4.8 million at the end of the quarter and have different settlement dates over the coming years.

At 31 March 2021, the Groups cash and cash equivalents amounted to EUR 14.8 million (EUR 16.5 million at 31 March 2020) and the Group had EUR 81.7 million in unused credit lines (EUR 62.7 million at 31 March 2020). The total liquidity buffer (cash, cash equivalents and unused credit facilities) amounted to EUR 96.4 million (EUR 79.2 million at 31 March 2020). At the reporting date, the Group had undrawn part of EUR 90.0 million of the EUR 100.0 million working capital loan from Nordic Investment Bank. At the same time, the current trade and other payables amounted to EUR 61.9 million (EUR 100.7 million at 31 March 2020).

During the quarter, the Group was in negotiations with financial institutions to agree on the amendment and the prolongation of the waivers of financial covenants and the postponement of principal payments under existing loan agreements.

Personnel

At 31 March 2021, the Group had 3 953 employees (6 819 at 31 March 2020). The number of employees includes 258 employees on maternity leave.

Due to the Covid-19 situation the following changes regarding personnel were effective in the first quarter of 2021:

the workload and remuneration of a part of Estonian and Latvian personnel reduced to 70%;

most of the Finnish personnel are on unpaid leave, except the staff on duty on vessels;

workload reduced to 20% for a large percentage of Swedish employees and up to 80% of salary remunerated by the Swedish Government.





In the first quarter of 2021, staff costs amounted to EUR 23.4 million (EUR 51.5 million in 2020), which is a 54.6% decrease compared to the same period last year. The staff costs were impacted by salary support in a total amount of EUR 2.0 million from the government of Estonia, paid directly to employees in March. Salary support paid by the government of Sweden amounted to EUR 2.9 million and is recognised as other operating income. Effective reduction in salary costs, including salary support measure in Sweden, amounts to EUR 31.0 million, which is a decrease of 60.2% compared to the first quarter last year.

Economic Environment

The Group considers Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia its home markets with the most exposure to the economic developments in Finland. The Group has also high exposure to the economic developments in Estonia and Sweden. In the first quarter of 2021, the Groups economic environment was dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and stricter restrictions related to international travelling.

The consumer confidence for Finnish consumers worsened by the end of the quarter, mainly reflecting the rigid restrictions imposed by the Finnish government. Despite the slow stabilisation of confidence of the Swedish consumers the overall demand in passenger traffic remained low due to hindrances in travelling. The international travel restrictions and reduced air traffic also effectively meant the absence of demand from the customers from outside our home markets and the state-level travelling and border-crossing restrictions effectively allowed to offer only international cargo operations to and from Sweden.

In the first quarter, the cargo market fared somewhat better relative to the passenger business, supported by the recovering business confidence on all the home markets. Yet the market conditions regarding price competition remained challenging resulting in an overall decline both in the number of carried cargo units and in the average revenue per unit.

Measured in euros the global fuel prices increased, on average, by 10% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year. The Groups overall fuel cost declined by 45% compared to the same period last year, the cost was mainly affected by the changed operating schedule.

The European Union and the Groups home markets made strong progress with the vaccination process late in the first quarter and at the reporting date it can be said that the level of protection against COVID-19 among the adult population in Estonia, Finland and Sweden has reached about 40% (either vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19).

For the foreseeable future, the key risk has to do with global and regional developments with the Covid-19 situation, progress of vaccinations and related restrictions on travel and other economic activities, its economic damage and its impact on local and international trade.

Events in Q1

Opening of Burger King restaurant in Latvia

In January 2021, second Burger King restaurant was opened in Latvia. By the end of first quarter, the Group operated 9 Burger King restaurants.

Legal action against Port of Tallinn

In March 2021, AS Tallink Grupp filed an action against AS Tallinna Sadam with a claim of EUR 15.4 million for the fees paid by the Group in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The compensation is demanded for unjust enrichment or alternatively for damage caused by abusing the dominant position AS Tallinna Sadam has on the market for provision of port services in Old City Harbour.

Events after the reporting period and outlook

Opening of Burger King restaurants

In June 2021, two Burger King restaurants are planned to be opened in Latvia. The Group continues preparations for opening additional Burger King restaurants later in 2021.

Completion of renovation and planned reopening of Tallink City Hotel

The renovation of Tallink City Hotel is estimated to be completed in late spring of 2021. The planned reopening of Tallink City Hotel is expected in June 2021.

Short-term outlook of vaccination against COVID-19

According to the European Union (EU) vaccination program the Member States should have vaccinated 70% of the entire adult population, expected to be required for controlling a pandemic, by summer 2021. Depending on the pace of vaccination and natural infections, the pandemic might be controlled by the end 2021 in Europe, according to EU. In Groups main markets  Finland and Estonia - vaccination has progressed at a vigorous rate, providing a positive outlook for a gradual recovery of traffic between Estonia and Finland.

Earnings

The Groups earnings are not generated evenly throughout the year. The summer period is the high season in the Groups operations. In managements opinion and based on prior experience most of the Groups earnings are generated during the summer (June-August). However, this year, dependent on situation with the cross-border travelling, the period may extend to autumn.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation the earnings outlook is uncertain and continues to be strongly affected by external factors such as the progress of vaccination, states decisions regarding the timing of the lifting of travel restrictions and allowing passenger traffic as well as the duration of the recovery period. Management expects the passenger traffic between Estonia and Finland to recover rapidly after the restrictions have been lifted.

Research and development projects

Tallink Grupp AS does not have any substantial ongoing research and development projects. The Group is continuously seeking opportunities for expanding its operations in order to improve its results.

The Group is continuously looking for innovative ways to upgrade the ships and passenger area technology to improve its overall performance through modern solutions. The most recent technical projects are focusing on the solutions for reduction of the ships CO2 footprint.

Risks

The Groups business, financial position and operating results could be materially affected by various risks. These risks are not the only ones we face. Additional risks and uncertainties not presently known to us, or that we currently believe are immaterial or unlikely, could also impair our business. The order of presentation of the risk factors below is not intended to be an indication of the probability of their occurrence or of their potential effect on our business.

Covid-19 situation and developments

Governmental restrictions on business activities

Accidents, disasters

Macroeconomic developments

Changes in laws and regulations

Relations with trade unions

Increase in the fuel prices and interest rates

Market and customer behaviour







Key figures

For the period Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Change % Revenue (million euros) 53.7 154.9 -65.3% Gross profit (million euros) -20.0 -0.2 - EBITDA (million euros) -6.3 -1.3 -400.6% EBIT (million euros) -30.0 -26.0 -15.2% Net profit/loss for the period (million euros) -34.4 -30.2 -14.0% Depreciation and amortisation (million euros) 23.7 24.8 -4.5% Capital expenditures  (million euros) 4.2 27.1 -84.5% Weighted average number of ordinary shares outstanding 669,882,040 669,882,040 0.0% Earnings/loss per share -0.051 -0.045 -14.0% Number of passengers 267,224 1,566,730 -82.9% Number of cargo units 85,156 99,617 -14.5% Average number of employees 3,986 7,066 -43.6% As at 31.03.2021 31.12.2020 Change % Total assets (million euros) 1,492.5 1,516.2 -1.6% Total liabilities (million euros) 812.4 801.9 1.3% Interest-bearing liabilities (million euros) 728.3 705.1 3.3% Net debt (million euros) 713.5 677.3 5.4% Net debt to EBITDA 238.7 84.2 183.4% Total equity (million euros) 680.1 714.3 -4.8% Equity ratio (%) 46% 47% Number of ordinary shares outstanding 669,882,040 669,882,040 0.0% Equity per share 1.02 1.07 -4.8% Ratios Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Gross margin (%) -37.2% -0.1% EBITDA margin (%) -11.7% -0.8% EBIT margin (%) -55.8% -16.8% Net profit/loss margin (%) -64.1% -19.5% ROA (%) -6.4% 4.5% ROE (%) -15.2% 5.5% ROCE (%) -7.6% 5.3%

1 Alternative performance measures based on ESMA guidelines are disclosed in the Alternative Performance Measures section of this Interim Report.

2 Does not include additions to right-of-use assets.

EBITDA: result from operating activities before net financial items, share of profit of equity-accounted investees, taxes, depreciation and amortization

EBIT: result from operating activities

Earnings per share: net profit or loss/ weighted average number of shares outstanding

Equity ratio: total equity / total assets

Shareholders equity per share: shareholders equity / number of shares outstanding

Gross margin: gross profit / net sales

EBITDA margin: EBITDA / net sales

EBIT margin: EBIT / net sales

Net profit margin: net profit or loss / net sales

Capital expenditure: additions to property, plant and equipment  additions to right-of-use assets + additions to intangible assets

ROA: earnings before net financial items, taxes 12-months trailing / average total assets

ROE: net profit 12-months trailing / average shareholders equity

ROCE: earnings before net financial items, taxes 12-months trailing / (total assets  current liabilities (average for the period))

Net debt: interest-bearing liabilities less cash and cash equivalents

Net debt to EBITDA: net debt / EBITDA 12-months trailing





Consolidated statement of profit or loss and other comprehensive income

Unaudited, in thousands of EUR Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Revenue (Note 3) 53,746 154,930 Cost of sales -73,721 -155,102 Gross loss /profit -19,975 -172 Sales and marketing expenses -5,073 -13,948 Administrative expenses -9,956 -13,424 Impairment loss on receivables Other operating income 5,038 1,532 Other operating expenses -13 -22 Result from operating activities -29,979 -26,034 Finance income (Note 4) 5 1 Finance costs (Note 4) -4,677 -4,112 Share of profit/loss of equity-accounted investees 0 0 Loss before income tax -34,651 -30,145 Income tax 220 -53 Net loss for the period -34,431 -30,198 Net loss for the period attributable to equity holders of the Parent -34,431 -30,198 Other comprehensive income Items that may be reclassified to profit or loss Exchange differences on translating foreign operations 174 585 Other comprehensive income for the period 174 585 Total comprehensive loss for the period -34,257 -29,613 Total comprehensive loss for the period attributable to equity holders of the Parent -34,257 -29,613 Loss per share (in EUR, Note 5) -0.051 -0.045





Consolidated statement of financial position

Unaudited, in thousands of EUR 31.03.2021 31.03.2020 31.12.2020 ASSETS Cash and cash equivalents 14,762 16,462 27,834 Trade and other receivables 25,680 31,112 25,463 Prepayments 12,491 11,631 7,216 Prepaid income tax 25 1 0 Inventories 29,561 39,452 28,707 Current assets 82,519 98,658 89,220 Investments in equity-accounted investees 245 403 245 Other financial assets and prepayments 508 1,847 2,233 Deferred income tax assets 20,270 18,674 20,270 Investment property 300 300 300 Property, plant and equipment (Note 6) 1,349,398 1,353,868 1,363,485 Intangible assets (Note 7) 39,267 44,023 40,448 Non-current assets 1,409,988 1,419,115 1,426,981 TOTAL ASSETS 1,492,507 1,517,773 1,516,201 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Interest-bearing loans and borrowings (Note 8) 149,511 100,784 111,601 Trade and other payables 61,886 100,679 73,477 Derivatives 0 0 0 Payables to owners 6 6 6 Income tax liability 10 0 10 Deferred income 22,238 32,867 23,253 Current liabilities 233,651 234,336 208,347 Interest-bearing loans and borrowings (Note 8) 578,777 490,213 593,518 Derivatives 0 0 0 Other liabilities 0 0 0 Non-current liabilities 578,777 490,213 593,518 Total liabilities 812,428 724,549 801,865 Share capital (Note 9) 314,844 314,844 314,844 Share premium 663 663 663 Reserves 69,516 69,681 69,854 Retained earnings 295,056 408,036 328,975 Equity attributable to equity holders of the Parent 680,079 793,224 714,336 Total equity 680,079 793,224 714,336 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 1,492,507 1,517,773 1,516,201





Consolidated statement of cash flows

Unaudited, in thousands of EUR Q1 2021 Q1 2020 CASH FLOWS FROM OPERATING ACTIVITIES Net loss for the period -34,431 -30,198 Adjustments 28,223 29,387 Changes in: Receivables and prepayments related to operating activities -3,307 1,645 Inventories -854 -2,197 Liabilities related to operating activities -11,814 2,237 Changes in assets and liabilities -15,975 1,685 Cash generated from operating activities -22,183 874 Income tax repaid/paid -39 13 NET CASH FROM OPERATING ACTIVITIES -22,222 887 CASH FLOWS FROM INVESTING ACTIVITIES Purchase of property, plant, equipment and intangible assets (Notes 6, 7) -4,201 -27,070 Proceeds from disposals of property, plant, equipment 7 44 Proceeds from other financial assets 0 0 Interest received 0 1 NET CASH USED IN INVESTING ACTIVITIES -4,194 -27,025 CASH FLOWS FROM FINANCING ACTIVITIES Proceeds from loans received (Note 8) 0 15,000 Repayment of loans received (Note 8) -14,667 -14,667 Repayment of bonds (Note 8) 0 0 Change in overdraft (Note 8) 37,581 12,258 Payments for settlement of derivatives 0 0 Payment of lease liabilities (Note 8) -4,225 -3,915 Interest paid -5,144 -4,748 Payment of transaction costs related to loans -201 -205 Dividends paid (Note 10) 0 0 Reduction of share capital 0 0 Income tax on dividends paid 0 0 NET CASH FROM/USED IN FINANCING ACTIVITIES 13,344 3,723 TOTAL NET CASH FLOW -13,072 -22,415 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of period 27,834 38,877 Change in cash and cash equivalents -13,072 -22,415 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of period 14,762 16,462





Joonas Joost

Financial director

AS Tallink Grupp

Sadama 5

10111 Tallinn, Estonia

E-mail joonas.joost@tallink.ee

Attachments
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On behalf of the Moise administration, the Embassy of the Republic of Haiti is gravely concerned that some U.S. Members of Congress are calling for regime change to replace the democratically elected President of the Republic of Haiti contrary to the Inter-American Democratic Charter. President Jovenel Moise is committed to elections and a democratic transition of power in February 2022.

The letter dated April 26, 2021, to Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, led by Chairman Gregory Meeks (NY-5) and Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (NY-8) undermines the country's democratic processes and contradicts the United Nations' and the Organization of American States (OAS), and other international partners position on the upcoming elections. In coordination with international institutions, the Government of Haiti has announced the dates for the constitutional referendum, parliamentary and presidential elections.

Below is the published electoral calendar:

June 27, 2021 : Referendum on the new Constitution

September 19, 2021 : First round of presidential and parliamentary elections

November 21, 2021 : Second round of presidential, parliamentary, and local elections

January 22, 2022 : Final election results

The Haitian Government has been working with the country's friends and allies, including the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations, to ensure free, fair, transparent, and inclusive elections. An example of this is the determination and ongoing process to issue voter identification registration cards for the first time to all eligible Haitian voters in Haiti and abroad. As of March 28, 2021, roughly 4.5 million Haitian citizens have been registered. Another illustration is President Moise's continuous commitment to reach consensus for a national unity Government. Lastly, to ensure the success of upcoming elections, the Government has established a Basket Fund with an initial 20-million-dollars for financing and jointly managed by the United Nations. The Government of Haiti intends to contribute more funding in the incoming weeks.

Furthermore, the official position of many foreign governments and the international organizations is clear and supportive of the upcoming elections. Contradictory and disruptive comments only serve to endanger the ongoing democratic processes in lieu of strengthening our institutions.

The Government of Haiti is further profoundly concerned by the potential implication of the foreign policy recommendations highlighted in the letter, which could create greater instability and disrupt the electoral process in the country. We must caution that if implemented, whether in part or in whole, these recommendations would directly result in the installment of a transitional Government and would delay elections in the country.

A transitional Government would, by definition, abolish the democratically elected Government and considered illegal under the Haitian Constitution. There is no legal basis for those undemocratic recommendations. Thus, the installation of a transitional government would result in the ruling by decree with no parliamentary oversight and the postponement of presidential and parliamentary elections for many more years.

The Embassy of the Republic of Haiti also rejects the baseless claim that the Moise administration lacks credibility and transparency to organize elections. Consistently, President Moise and his administration have encouraged and included members of Haitian civil society, wide-ranging political representatives, and the Haitian Diaspora to participate in drafting the Constitution and planning of the elections. Eminent Haitian civil societies, political leaders, and 87% of the population, in a recent national poll, have expressed support for a new constitution

The Government of Haiti is committed to engaging its international partners, but this dialogue must be based on mutual respect for the state's sovereignty and the rule of law. We welcome foreign assistance with our electoral process in funding for elections, international observers, or other means. We are committed to hold credible and legitimate elections that will stand up to international scrutiny. We know what is at stake. Without 2021 elections and a peaceful transition from President Moise to his successor in February 2022, the alternative is dangerous to Haiti's democracy.

As the world's first Black Republic, Haiti has a vital role on the world stage and a precedent to set for other nations. We are on the cusp of a historical accomplishment  putting Haiti on a path towards political and economic stability through the electoral process  and must see it through. This positive change must come through Haitians at the ballot box as practiced in all democratic societies.

As the U.S. President Joe Biden recently stated in his remarks at the Munich Security Conference: "Democracy does not happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, and renew it."

SOURCE Embassy of the Republic of Haiti
By Laurence Frost and Riham Alkousaa

BERLIN (Reuters) - Lufthansa lowered its capacity forecast for flights this year as hopes dwindle for an early summer travel rebound, but the German airline's cost-cutting drive narrowed quarterly losses.

The group, which includes Austrian Airlines, Swiss and Eurowings, also stepped up warnings to German unions that it is ready to use forced dismissals to cut more jobs.

The travel industry has suffered many false starts to a hoped-for recovery, beset by new restrictions, virus variant outbreaks and a sluggish European vaccine rollout.

Lufthansa said it expects to fly at about only 40% of its pre-pandemic capacity in 2021, trimming the 40%-50% guidance issued less than two months earlier.

Shares in Lufthansa were trading 1.15 percent lower in Frankfurt at 10.81 euros at 1005 GMT.

The group predicted a gradual demand pick-up in April-June and a "significant market recovery" in the second half, citing moves by the European Union towards opening up transatlantic travel to vaccinated U.S. visitors.

"We know that bookings shoot up wherever restrictions are loosened and travel becomes possible again," Chief Executive Carsten Spohr said.

In a further sign of aviation industry turmoil on Thursday, Britain's Heathrow Airport said its total losses during the crisis had increased to 2.4 billion pounds ($3.4 billion) after a 329 million first-quarter deficit.

JOBS IN JEOPARDY

Lufthansa's quarterly sales came to 2.6 billion euros, down 60% on a year-earlier period that was only partially impacted by the onset of the pandemic.

The adjusted loss before interest and taxes (EBIT) narrowed by 30% to 1.14 billion euros in the first quarter, helped by a 19% workforce reduction and 51% decline in operating expenses, while the net loss halved to 1.05 billion.

Both earnings numbers beat expectations, based on the median analyst estimates in company polling. Free cash flow came in at a negative 235 million euros per month, also better than the monthly 300 million euro cash burn previously flagged.

Story continues

Lufthansa has 10,000 excess full time-equivalent German staff after 8,000 departures and will "address this personnel surplus" in 2021-2, finance chief Remco Steenbergen said.

The company is seeking new union deals on voluntary cuts and part-time work while preparing for compulsory layoffs if needed when current deals expire in 11 months, Steenbergen said.

"We are preparing for forced dismissals," he said. "We expect the necessary legal process to be completed by the end of this year."

The cargo business - a bright spot for crisis-hit airlines as grounded passenger jets squeeze capacity and boost prices - set a 314 million-euro operating profit record in the quarter.

Lufthansa has pledged swift progress in paying down debt from a 9 billion-euro government-backed bailout last year and will seek authorisation from its May 4 shareholder meeting to raise up to 5.5 billion euros in new capital.

Any new share issue is likely to be significantly smaller, Steenbergen said.

Net debt rose by 1 billion euros over the first quarter to 10.9 billion euros at March 31, the airline said.

(Reporting by Laurence Frost in Paris and Riham Alkousaa in Berlin; Additional reporting by Ilona Wissenbach; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (L) meets with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 28, 2021. (Photo by Li Xiaowei/Xinhua)

COLOMBO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka and China vowed here Wednesday to enhance pragmatic cooperation in all sectors between the two countries including the military.

The pledge came after Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe.

During the meeting, the Sri Lankan president, who is also the defense minister, thanked China for providing long-term and precious support to Sri Lanka and hoped to learn the governing experience from the Communist Party of China on poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, among others.

Noting that Sri Lanka has prioritized developing the relations with China and firmly supported China's positions on issues concerning its core interests, the president said his country has been pursuing an independent foreign policy and will never bends to pressure from major powers outside the region as well as never forge an alliance with any country.

Closely following the pragmatic cooperation in the military field between the two countries, the president hoped that the two militaries will carry out closer exchanges so as to further lift the level of pragmatic cooptation.

In his meeting with Wei, the Sri Lankan prime minister said Wei and his delegation visited Sri Lanka at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is still not contained, demonstrating that China attaches great importance to developing the ties with Sri Lanka.

Hailing China for its achievements made in the pandemic prevention and control, economic development and poverty alleviation, the prime minister thanked China for providing unselfish help to his country.

Sri Lanka will always be a sincere friend to China and will firmly support China's position on safeguarding its own core interests, the prime minister said.

Sri Lanka stands ready to strengthen exchanges and pragmatic cooperation with China in various fields including the military, so as to achieve further growth of the bilateral ties, he added.

For his part, Wei said that China and Sri Lanka enjoy a long history of friendship with deep bilateral relations.

The two countries are jointly working for the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road, Wei said, pointing out that they share a bright prospect of development.

The Chinese side appreciates Sri Lanka's position on issues relating to China's Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and will as always support Sri Lanka's stance over issues relating to human rights and national reconciliation, Wei said.

Noting the long-lasting friendship between the two militaries, Wei called on the two sides to further deepen cooperation and promote relations between the two militaries.

Peaceful development and win-win cooperation is the global trend and the right way forward, Wei said, adding that certain major countries are keen to form cliques and factions and seek regional hegemony, which goes against people's shared aspiration and severely harms the interests of the regional countries.

China appreciates Sri Lanka's independent and non-aligned policy and will make joint efforts with Sri Lanka to strengthen coordination and safeguard regional peace and tranquility.

On Wednesday, Wei also held talks with Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne and jointly launched a website of the Chinese National Defence University Alumni Association of Sri Lanka.
KALAMAZOO, MI -- Kalamazoos top leading women will be celebrated at this years YWCA Kalamazoo Women of Achievement event.

This years Lifetime Woman of Achievement award winner is Janice Brown, a former Kalamazoo Public Schools superintendent. Brown and several other women in the community will be celebrated at the event held virtually at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 13.

The event is held annually to celebrate women who have devoted themselves to social justice and system change. To reserve your virtual seat, visit ywcakalamazoo.org.

Brown was superintendent of KPS when The Kalamazoo Promise was announced in 2005. Brown retired as superintendent in 2007 and left the district in 2008. She then served as executive director of the college-scholarship program before stepping down in 2013. In 2014, Brown joined the Promises Board of Directors.

The winner of the 2021 Dorothy I. Height Award for Social Justice Innovation is Nelly Fuentes. She is the founder of Movimiento Cosecha Kzoo, a nonviolent movement that is fighting for the dignity, respect, and permanent protection of immigrants in the United States, the organization Facebook page said. Fuentes also serves as a member of ProKzoo, an organization founded to encourage citizen engagement with politics and galvanize progressive activism throughout Kalamazoo County.

The five women awarded 2021 Woman of Achievement awards are Lissette Mira Amaya, Diane Eberts, LeslieLami-Reed, Danielle Sielatycki and Beth Washington.

The event is sponsored by Stryker. Other award sponsors include The Peterson Company, Consumers Credit Union, First National Bank, Greenleaf Trust, PNC, Kalamazoo College, The Kalamazoo Promise and Western Michigan University.

Also on MLive:

Kalamazoo nonprofit develops resident leaders to revitalize neighborhoods one block at a time

Vicksburg will open downtown social district where outdoor drinking is allowed

We are all immigrants to some extent, says Kalamazoo woman after becoming U.S. citizen
Five people are dead, including two North Carolina sheriff's deputies, after a check on a person who did not show up for work ended in gunfire and a 13-hour standoff, authorities said.

The sheriff's deputies were ambushed and fatally wounded heading down to the basement of the home, Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman told reporters Thursday.

The sheriff's office had been alerted Sunday that the unidentified suspect who killed the deputies as well as his mother and stepfather before taking his own life 'might be a problem,' Hagaman said.

K-9 Deputy Logan Fox died at the scene in the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Boone, and Sgt. Chris Ward died after being flown to a local hospital, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

The suspect was identified as Alton Barnes, 32, who authorities said also killed the residents of the home -- Michelle Annette Ligon and George Wyatt Ligon.

Hagaman said 'concerned folks' who knew the suspect had alerted the sheriff's office but deputies did not 'encounter him where we thought he would be.' The deputies on Wednesday did not think the suspect was home, according to the sheriff.

Deputies had looked for the suspect over the weekend to try to 'get him away from someplace so we could have some more control over him,' Hagaman said.

The deputies were responding to a call for a wellness check Wednesday after the homeowner's employer reported that the person did not show up for work and was not answering their phone, according to the statement.

A Boone Police Department officer was also struck by gunfire while attempting to rescue the downed deputies but his protective helmet prevented injury, the statement said.

A female deputy was able to safely retreat from the house, according to Hagaman.

Gov. Roy Cooper, in a statement, said he had spoken with Hagaman to offer condolences and assistance.

'We grieve for Sgt. Chris Ward, K-9 Deputy Logan Fox and the entire Watauga County law enforcement community today after these tragic deaths in the line of duty,' Cooper said. 'These horrific shootings that claimed lives and loved ones show the ever-present danger law enforcement can encounter in the line of duty.'

Fox was a two-year veteran; Ward was an eight-year veteran who was married to his high school sweetheart and was the father of two, according to the sheriff's office.

The standoff ended shortly before 11 p.m. Wednesday, the sheriff's office said.

'This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved as well as their families and our community,' Hagaman said in a statement.

The investigation is being led by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

The shooter had barricaded in the home and occasionally fired in the direction of law enforcement officers, according to the statement.

Nearby residents were evacuated.

More than a dozen law enforcement agencies responded.
[April 29, 2021] Picton Mahoney Asset Management Named on the 2021 List of Best Workplaces for Women and 8th on 2021 Best Workplaces in Canada List

Picton Mahoney Asset Management ("Picton Mahoney") is proud to announce that our organization has been named on the 2021 list of Best Workplaces for Women and placed 8th on the 2021 Best Workplaces in Canada List** after a thorough and independent analysis conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute in Canada. This list, and related stories, appeared in a Special National Report on Friday April 16, 2021 in The Globe and Mail. A great workplace culture is vital to the success of Picton Mahoney. Owned entirely by employees, Picton Mahoney is a boutique investment management company with a committed, empowered and talented team. The core values at Picton Mahoney guide the employee experience and contribute to the culture which fosters strong, transparent relationships. "We are honoured to be named on the 2021 list of Best Workplaces for Women and also delighted that for the second consecutive year we have been recognised on the 2021 Great Place to Work list," said David Picton, President, CEO & Portfolio Manager, Picton Mahoney. "Through these two landmark surveys our employees tell us that our continued commitment to maintaining a diverse team and living by our core values is ultimately creating a unique workplace culture that we can all celebrate." "Picton Mahoney is proud to have launched a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (D, E & I) Committee that focuses on enhancing the overall career experience with our firm, and also builds upon our firm's reputation as one that is committed to offering equitable career and development opportunities to all of their team members," said Celeste Warren, Head of Talent & Culture, Picton Mahoney. "Picton Mahoney's D, E &I Committee represents the unique interests, values, cultural backgrounds and aspirations across the business and spearheads programs and initiatives that encourage diversity and inclusion from a Culture, New Talent, Client, and Industry perspective."



The 2021 Best Workplaces in Canada list is compiled by the Great Place to Work Institute. The competition process to be ranked on this list is employee driven, based on two criteria: two-thirds of the total score comes from confidential employee survey results and the remaining one-third from an in-depth review of the organization's culture. This offers a rigorous representation of the organization from an employee perspective, and an overall portrait of the workplace culture. Together, they provide crucial data relative to five trust-building dimensions: credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie. This year's list captured the experience and sentiment of 82,000 employees, rolling out to impact over 300,000 Canadian employees. For more information, please contact the Institute at bestworkplaces@greatplacetowork.ca or visit www.greatplacetowork.ca. About Great Place to Work:

Great Place to Work is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and certification programs, GPTW recognizes the world's Best Workplaces in a series of national lists including those published by The Globe & Mail (Canada) and Fortune magazine (USA). Great Place to Work provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures. Visit us at www.greatplacetowork.ca or find us on Twitter (News - Alert) at @GPTW_Canada. About Picton Mahoney Picton Mahoney Asset Management specializes in differentiated investment solutions and rules-based volatility management. Picton Mahoney helps its clients fortify their portfolios based on experience honed over the years through different market cycles and investing environments. Founded in 2004 and 100% employee-owned, Picton Mahoney is a portfolio management boutique entrusted with over $8.65 billion CAD (as at March 31, 2021) in assets under management. Pioneers of Authentic Hedge investment principles and practices in Canada, the firm offers a full suite of investment solutions, including mutual and alternative funds, to institutional and retail investors across the country. * The data has a 90% confidence and a plus or minus 5% margin of error. To be eligible for this list, organizations must be Great Place to Work- Certified in the past year, headquartered in Canada and have a minimum of 15 female employees, and at least 90% of employees must agree that people are treated fairly, regardless of their gender. **This certification is based on direct feedback from employees, provided as part of an extensive and anonymous survey about the workplace experience, in addition to a "Culture Brief" outlining an ongoing commitment to making the career experience with the firm a rewarding one. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005334/en/

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ESI building a foundation for improved long-term growth and profitability

First quarter revenues: +1.2% (+3.7% constant exchange rate cer) at 55.5m

Clear roadmap aligning all Group efforts to accelerate revenue growth

Team focused on growing New Business pipeline in 2021

Committed to continuing to manage costs in 2021

Regulatory News:

ESI Group, Paris, France, (ISIN Code: FR0004110310, Symbol: ESI), today releases its sales for the first quarter of 2021 (period from January 1st to March 31st

Cristel de Rouvray, Chief Executive Officer of ESI Group, comments

"Q1 2021 confirmed the resiliency of ESI Group's business model: our existing customers, and even more so our top 20 customers have clearly signaled their need for more virtual prototyping to navigate the global industry crisis and enable their digital transformation. On this foundation of growing repeat business, we can drive ambitious efforts to increase new business for sustainable and profitable revenue growth. I am committed to lead an energized management team, aligned by industry and by outcome, to release growing employee, customer and partner energy."

Revenues (m) Q1-2021 Q1-2020 Change Change

Constant exchange

rate (cer) Q1 Licenses 49.6 48.8 +1.6% +4.2% Q1 Services 5.9 6.1 -2.5% -0.1% Q1 Total 55.5 54.9 +1.2% +3.7%

In the first quarter of its fiscal year (January 1, 2021 March 31, 2021), ESI recorded revenues of 55.5m, up 1.2% (+3.7% cer); slightly above the range announced (52-55m). We saw growth in revenue in all regions in Q1:

- EMEA by +1.4% (+1.7% cer)

- Asia by +0.2% (+4.7% cer)

- Americas by +2.4% (+10.9% cer)

Licensing revenue was up +1.6% (+4.2% cer) with growth in all regions, led by the Americas, up by 3.1% (+11.5% cer). Services revenues were down -2.5% (-0.1% cer), with EMEA and Americas increasing by 3.5% cer and 3.7% cer respectively, while Asia decreased by -8.6% cer.

The growth is led by Repeat Business with an increase of +1.3% (+3.7% cer). Central to ESI's go to market strategy, Focus Accounts drove the License performance of the Group with a +4.7% increase.

Team focused on growing New Business pipeline in 2021

Identified as a key focus for the Group's management, the New Business activity amounted to 3.1m (-0.2m) in Q1. While down slightly from Q1 2020, this represents the best year over year result since the start of the pandemic and gives confidence for a continued recovery along 2021. To accelerate the pipeline of new business the Group recently aligned all revenue related activities, under Mike Salari in his new role leading Revenue Generation. This effort benefits from the global business tools and methodologies that ESI has deployed over the past 2 years. ESI's transformed approach by industry and by outcome, to deliver industry solutions, enables focus and alignment of R&D and S&M resources for sustained momentum in new business, and early benefits are visible in the Group's go-to-market and marketing activities.

Supporting the industry transformation

The Group's four priority focus industries Automotive Ground Transportation, Aeronautics Aerospace, Heavy Industry, Energy accounted for around 91% of revenues. In Licensing activities, the robustness of the Automotive was once again proven with an increase of 2.8% for the first quarter.

Main customers of the Group renewed their collaboration during this quarter which reinforces the relevance of ESI's value and solutions.

Collaborating with Honda for over two decades, and for ten years in manufacturing, ESI is considered as a key "Assembly" partner helping them to ensure the link between manufacturing and performance. The Group accompanies them in several projects from the accurate prediction of vehicle performance during assembly processes to the validation of their manufacturing processes resulting to cost reduction and increased quality. Extending the collaboration year over year, ESI strengthens and proposes unique solutions to continuously answer to Honda's needs and requirements. Lately, the 2 players started working on Multi-Material Joining Assembly, a brand-new industry solution developed by ESI's team.

Guidance

The Group expects H1 2021 revenue to be in the range of 80.5 million to 82.5 million compared to 80.8m in H1 2020.

Committed to continuing to manage costs in 2021

Management remains committed to disciplined expense management, in order to deliver on the healthy run rate plan and improve its profitability in 2021. In addition, the leadership team is currently working with the Board on a longer-term financial plan to deliver industry standard operating performance for a global software company of its scale. ESI Group will share a multi-year financial plan at an investor day in early fall 2021.

General Assembly Meeting information

ESI Group's Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 4 pm CET behind closed doors with no physical attendance due to the pandemic. Participation and document consulting procedures are detailed in the notice of meeting will be made available on the company's website. Shareholders are invited to regularly consult the section dedicated to the Shareholders' Meeting on the Company's website: HERE

Group's new corporate documents available for shareholders

2020 Universal Registration Document HERE

Investors' notebook HERE

Group's Ethics Charter HERE

Forward-looking Statements

This release contains "forward-looking statements". The Group expects H1 2021 revenue to be in the range of 80.5 million to 82.5 million compared to 80.8m in H1 2020. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those related to the COVID-19 virus and associated further economic and market disruptions; further adverse changes or fluctuations in the global economy; further adverse fluctuations in our industry, foreign exchange fluctuations, changes in the current global trade regulatory environment; fluctuations in customer demands and markets; fluctuations in demand for our products including orders from our large customers; cyber-attacks; expense overruns; and adverse effects of price changes or effective tax rates. The company directs readers to its Universal Registration Document Chapter 3 presenting the risks associated with the company's future performance.

Upcoming event

Annual General meeting June 22, 2021 (4pm CET)

Half year results September 7, 2021 (6pm CET)

Investor day early Fall 2021 (date to be announced)

About ESI Group

Founded in 1973, ESI Group envisions a world where Industry commits to bold outcomes, addressing high stakes concerns environmental impact, safety comfort for consumers and workers, adaptable and sustainable business models. ESI provides reliable and customized solutions anchored on predictive physics modeling and virtual prototyping expertise to allow industries to make the right decisions at the right time, while managing their complexity. Acting principally in automotive land transportation, aerospace, defense naval, energy and heavy industry, ESI is present in more than 20 countries, employs 1200 people around the world and reported 2020 sales of 132.6 million. ESI is headquartered in France and is listed on compartment B of Euronext Paris.

For further information, go to www.esi-group.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005744/en/

Contacts:

ESI Shareholder Relations

Florence Barre

investors@esi-group.com

+33 1 49 78 28 28

Verbatee Press Shareholder Relations

JJerome Goaer, j.goaer@verbatee.com, +33 6 61 61 79 34

Aline Besselievre, a.besselievre@verbatee.com, +33 6 61 85 10 05
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress tonight a common thread will likely run through much of his narrative: resilience. Beyond touting his administration's accomplishments, Biden is expected to use the spotlight to pitch his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, a wide-ranging infrastructure initiative that promises "every dollar" spent on rebuilding highways, airports, water systems and more will be used to "prevent, reduce and withstand the impacts of the climate crisis."

Below, Stanford engineering, climate and geophysics experts discuss why climate change resiliency is at the center of federal infrastructure plans, how it could affect underserved communities and where to target investment for maximum impact. The researchers include Jack Baker, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who leads the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative; Sarah Billington a professor of civil and environmental engineering who studies building design and materials and their impact on human wellbeing; Noah Diffenbaugh, the Kara J Foundation Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and an appointee to the California Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group; Sarah Fletcher, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who studies water resources and climate change adaptation from a socio-technical systems perspective; Jenny Suckale, an assistant professor of geophysics who leads the Stanford Future Bay Initiative and has worked as a scientific consultant for international organizations aiming to reduce the impact of natural and environmental disasters in vulnerable communities.

How could climate change-resilient infrastructure affect the lives of average people?

Suckale: Infrastructure already affects the lives of average people in numerous ways. The main issue with not considering climate change in infrastructure planning is that infrastructure can mitigate but also create risk. A floodwall, for example, keeps water out but also keeps water in if the wall is overrun or if there are other sources of flooding such as rainfall. If we do not consider climate change in infrastructure planning, we will inevitably see more adverse effects or risks that stem from the fact that existing infrastructure is designed for the past, not the future.

Diffenbaugh: Infrastructure is at the nexus of greenhouse gas mitigation, climate change adaptation and environmental justice. Specifically, investments in climate-safe energy, transportation, water and communications systems and technologies offer "win-win-win" opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase resilience to climate stresses and ensure access to energy, food, and clean air and water.

How should we quantify the impacts of the investments outlined in President Biden's infrastructure plan? How can we best ensure that our infrastructure stays resilient in the future?

Baker: We can no longer look at past performance of our infrastructure and say, "we want more of that." Society increasingly has higher expectations for resilience, and systems that worked in the past will not work in the future. We need science and engineering models to help us understand future demands on our infrastructure, help us design for increased demands, including adaptive features and help us quantify benefits relative to a status quo path.

Fletcher: Our infrastructure must be prepared to handle a wider range of climate conditions than ever before. In order to make our scarce resources for resilience go farther, we need to identify which infrastructure systems need to be hardened today vs. where we can take a wait-and-see approach to adapt our infrastructure as the climate changes. We must also consider how infrastructure systems interact with our society, and build community resilience as well. If electricity systems fail during a storm, we need to make sure backup plans are in place so that people still have access to water, heat, and medical care. These plans should start with our most vulnerable communities.

What are some potential downsides of investing in resilient infrastructure?

Suckale: It ultimately depends on what is considered "infrastructure." It is easy to associate "infrastructure" only with "gray" solutions, such as drains, dams or roads, but there are compelling alternatives in working with nature rather than against it. These "green" solutions can range from restored ecosystems mitigating flood risk to trees in urban areas improving air quality and have the advantage of being naturally adaptive. My hope is that this initiative will adopt a broad definition of infrastructure that goes beyond the "gray" and hopefully includes green and other colors of the rainbow.

How does climate-safe infrastructure relate to under-served communities and racial justice?

Baker: Privileged households are more likely to have resources to navigate disasters by relocating, paying for repairs and using savings to compensate for lost income. So, disadvantaged households are often much more affected, even for the same level of physical disruption. They are also often more affected due to living in higher-risk areas. Further, under-served communities often struggle to access recovery funding and advocate for infrastructure repairs.

Billington: Recently, strong linkages have been found between design features of the built environment and historical housing policies that may be directly responsible for disproportionate exposure of underserved populations to current heat events. Addressing urban heat island effects through attention to both built and natural infrastructure in cities can help address these inequities.

How can policymakers at federal, state and municipal levels assess and support decision-making around related issues, such as building codes, resilience planning initiatives and investment decisions?

Baker: Relevant agencies should require infrastructure projects to be designed while considering future risks from climate change. Reinstating the Obama-era Federal Flood Risk Management Standard would be a good step in this direction. Private entities should also be required to assess and report their risk from exposure to climate change impactsincreased transparency about these risks would benefit all decision-makers.

What about the carbon footprint of infrastructure itselfwhat can we do to reduce it?

Billington: In the U.S., buildings alone account for over 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions and 40 percent of total energy consumption. The average building designer has a potentially thousand-fold greater impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide than the behavior of an average citizen over their lifetime. The carbon dioxide avoidance possible through decarbonizing buildings both in terms of materials used and energy for operations is on the order of Gigatons. It's big.
A woman walks past the headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video sharing app TikTok, in Beijing, China, on Sept. 16, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

China, the Second Largest Digital Economy Should Avoid Fights Over Digital Taxes: Former Head of Central Bank

On April 21, Zhou Xiaochuan, the former governor of the Peoples Bank of China, spoke at the Boao Forum for Asia, with an emphasis on digital taxes.

He confirmed that digital taxes will be discussed at the Group of 20 (G-20) Summit this July when every member state is expected to express its views.

Zhou indicated that Chinas discussion of its views should avoid falling into fights with each other over the digital tax, especially about whose wallet the money raised from the digital tax belongs to as the fights could easily emerge as a new tariff war.

Global Dispute Over Digital Taxes

Conflict surrounding how and what digital taxes should be regulated has arisen between the United States, a major exporter of digital services, and European countries that use digital services.

Zhou said, Large cross-border digital service companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google have many European users, but no taxes (have been paid) to the EU member states.

In July 2019, France was the first EU state to enact a digital services tax. Immediately following that, other EU countries such as Britain, Spain, and Italy followed with their own digital taxes.

The United States responded with a trade-related investigation of the digital services tax unilaterally imposed by as many as 14 countries.

Chinas Status in Digital Services

A report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology revealed that Chinas digital economy was valued at $5.5 trillion in 2019, which was second only to the United States worldwide, state-run media China Daily reported.

According to a United Nations report (pdf) titled Digital Economy Report 2019, the United States and China account for 75 percent of all patents related to blockchain technologies, 50 percent of global spending on IoT [Internet of things], and more than 75 percent of the world market for public cloud computing.

Together, they account for 90 percent of the market capitalization value of the worlds 70 largest digital platforms while Europes share is 4 percent.

The U.N. report also revealed the seven super platforms that account for two thirds of the total market value are Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook from the United States, and Tencent and Alibaba from China.

Chinas Digital Service Trade Surplus Soars

Due to the severe non-tariff barriers to trade (pdf) such as firewalls and censorship, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook were blocked out of the Chinese market, but at the same time, Chinas digital economy developed rapidly and gained a large overseas market. The proportion of the digital trade surplus in Chinas overall trade surplus has also continued to increase.

The 2020 China Digital Trade Development Report released by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Centre last October indicates that Chinas digital trade surplus was $28.92 billion in 2019, a year-over-year rise of 46.1 percent. The trade surplus was greatest, $29.4 billion, for telecommunications, computing, and information services.

The report showed that Chinas digitizing services trade rose from $49 billion in 2005 to $272 billion in 2019. The export value increased by seven times, while the import value increased only by three times. The digitizing services trade also turned from a deficit to a surplus, and the surplus was continuing to increase rapidly, reported state-run media China News.

Chinese apps such as TikTok also lead rapid market expansion overseas and Chinas digital exports. Chinas imported digital services largely include the cost of intellectual property rights such as patents. In 2020, the trade volume of cross-border e-commerce alone reached $260 billion, an increase of 31.1 percent.

Downplaying Cross-Border Taxation

Zhou admitted in his speech that China certainly has this problem [cross-border taxation issue], but he emphasized that it is not prominent. We do have many online platforms that provide [overseas] services, but the proportion is very small after all.

On April 16 last year, the regime announced the first group of 12 national digital service export bases. In October last year, Xi Jinping said in a statement that China needed to advance its competitiveness by accelerating Chinas digital economy and proactively participating in making the international regulatory framework for digital currency and digital tax.

Zhou seemed to deliberately downplay the impact of digital tax on exports of Chinas digital services and goods. He said that the digital tax issue is a minor issue in China because the current taxation system already covers the digital sector.

Commentator Alexander Liao told The Epoch Times that to the regime, maintaining the status quo is to its advantage. He believed that the regime would simply wait and see in the short term while the international community disputes over digital taxes.
Ontario marked a grim COVID-19 milestone Thursday as its virus-related death toll passed 8,000 and Alberta brought in tighter public-health measures to try to get rapidly rising infection rates in hot spots under control.

The sun rises over the city of Toronto on Monday, April 26, 2021. Ontario has marked a grim milestone with the provinces death toll pushing past 8,000 accelerated by a deadly third wave of the pandemic as Nova Scotia saw a slight decline in new infections. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

Ontario marked a grim COVID-19 milestone Thursday as its virus-related death toll passed 8,000 and Alberta brought in tighter public-health measures to try to get rapidly rising infection rates in hot spots under control.

The measures target six cities, including Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray, and one county east of the capital for at least the next two weeks.

Junior and senior high school students will have to learn from home and indoor fitness and sports are banned. Kenney said curfews will be considered if case numbers go higher.

"Ultimately, Albertans have to step up to the plate in the next few weeks, Kenney said.

There were 2,048 new cases in the province and 632 people were in hospital, 151 of them in intensive care.

Kenney had said earlier this week that current restrictions would suffice if more people followed them. On Thursday, he said the new measures were "a hard but necessary step."

Alberta also opened up two more groups to be eligible for vaccines.

Other provincial health leaders sped up plans that could get more Canadians vaccinated in the coming months.

In Ontario, where there were41 new virus-related deaths to bring the provincial total to 8,029,Health Minister Christine Elliott said the way out of the pandemic is vaccinations.

"The light at the end of the tunnel grows brighter every day," she said as the province reported another 3,871 infections.

Ontario is forecasting everyone over the age of 18 will be able to book a shot by May 24. The province planned to lower the age eligibility for mass vaccination clinics to 55 and older starting Friday.

Regions are preparing to receive much larger volumes of vaccines.

Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, the officer overseeing vaccine deliver for the Public Health Agency of Canada, said Pfizer-BioNTech's shipments are to double next week to more than two million doses.

Johnson & Johnson's first delivery of 300,000 doses landed in Canada on Wednesday.

Moderna, which is still struggling with production, intends to send one million doses that will be distributed to provinces in two weeks, Fortin said.

The increase in capacity was welcomed across the country as leaders laid out updated plans to ramp up vaccine appointments in the coming months.

Quebec reported 1,042 cases and 10 more deaths as the government opened vaccinations to the general public.Health Minister Christian Dube said Quebecers between 50 and 59 could begin booking appointments Friday.

The age will continue to drop until May 14 when the government expects vaccines to be available for anyone over 18.

Dube said every adult Quebecer would be able to get one dose by June 24.

The province's public health institute predicted the sped-up pace of vaccinations should lead to a rapid drop in new infections by mid-May or early June.

On another front, the impact of a targeted vaccination campaign in Indigenous communities across Canada has become clear, said Dr. Tom Wong, chief medical officer of public health for Indigenous Services Canada. Nearly 60 per cent of First Nations adults have received at least one dose.

"COVID active case rates in First Nations communities on-reserve is at the lowest since last November," Wong said.

There were 723 active cases Thursday, a significant decrease since the second wave brought surging infections across many communities last fall.

Nova Scotia, for its part, reported 70 new cases. That marked a slight decline in new infections after days of record-setting,single-day case counts that prompted a provincial lockdown.

That, and other outbreaks of more contagious variants, contributed to premiers in all four of the Atlantic provinces delaying the reopening of their travel bubble indefinitely.

Nova Scotia Premier Iain Rankin said leaders were optimistic travel would resume by summer.

Meanwhile, Manitoba's government was looking across the border to fulfil some of its vaccination needs. Premier Brian Pallister said he was finalizing a deal with North Dakota to have teachers and other education workers vaccinated in that state.

Pallister said the aim is to allow teachers to drive to the United States border to get a shot, but the plan was quickly panned by the teachers union. The Manitoba Teachers' Society said it falls short of prioritizing its members and includes too many hurdles.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.

 With files from Mia Rabson in Ottawa and Steve Lambert in Winnipeg

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version had the incorrect day in the lead.
The starting point for the project was a 356A, the second iteration of the vehicle, which was produced between 1955 and 1959. Compared to the 1948-1955 model that started it all, the "A" brought a plethora of small improvements, which became more than their sum in the traditional German style..And, up to a point, we can say that the digitally remastered Speedster sitting on our screens right now has received a similar treatment in its aftermarket journey. Since the Neunelfer is one of the favorite children of the custom car world, it was only natural for it to provide the inspiration for this project.At least to these eyes, the most impressive addition to the classic machine is the rear wing. As it did back in the mid-1970s when it debuted on the 911 Carrera RS 3.0 homologation special and the first 911 Turbo (930 generation), this downforce generator sits above an air-cooled motor, so the hardware also has to serve a cooling purpose.Some two decades later, Zuffenhausen returned to the production-based GT racing scene with the 964-gen 911 Carrera RSR, with the 356 pictured here paying homage to its flared fenders. And while the classic front bumper and side skirt ornaments are still here, an extra layer of (aero) complexity was added underneath them.At the back, the generous exhaust tips and hardware lurking underneath the motor are mere clues of the unspecified firepower found at the posterior of the Porscha.Digital artist Khyzyl Saleem, who is considering adding a somewhat similar whale tale spoiler for the 991.2 GT2 RS to his real-life LTO range of custom goodies, came up with an immaculate take on the classic silver for the 356A Speedster.Nevertheless, as you'll see in the description of the Instagram post below, he was also inspired by physical 356 builds , with one of these determining him to bring a black take alongside the one mentioned above.
New York lawmakers have lifted Andrew Cuomo's 'unscientific' rule that food must be served with all booze sales, just hours after the governor announced an end to the midnight curfew across the state's bars and restaurants.

The Democrat-led state Legislature voted unanimously Wednesday to remove Cuomo's controversial pandemic-era rule that required customers to order food when buying alcohol in bars and restaurants.

The repeal was made effective immediately, sending New Yorkers and members of the hard-hit hospitality industry to social media to celebrate the end of the 'Cuomo Chips'.

It came the same day that Cuomo moved to lift other COVID-19-related restrictions impacting the state's bars and restaurants.

The current midnight closing time for outdoor dining areas of bars and restaurants will now expire on May 17, followed by the indoor curfew on May 31, he announced.

Customers will also be able to sit at bars in New York City from May 3.

New York lawmakers have lifted Andrew Cuomo's 'unscientific' rule that food must be served with all booze sales, just hours after the governor announced an end to the midnight curfew across the state's bars and restaurants. Diners in NYC

The vote on the food directive sailed through the state Senate Wednesday with a 61-0 vote, followed by the state Assembly with a 149-0 vote.

The executive order was first introduced by the governor back in July, claiming it would help keep customers seated at tables and reduce crowding, that could fuel a spread of the virus.

But the rule was slammed by many customers and bar and restaurant workers.

The hospitality has been one of the hardest-hit by lockdowns over the last year and the rule was regarded as an additional burden to many establishments already struggling to stay afloat.

Many bars that did not before offer a food menu were left with no choice but to serve options to avoid fines while some argued it acted as a deterrent for many New Yorkers hoping to enjoy a drink after work.

To navigate the rule, many establishments got creative, with $1 snacks such as cheese sandwiches and microwavable hot dogs becoming a staple on many menus.

The now infamous 'Cuomo chips' mockingly paying homage to the governor were a particular firm favorite among businesses and patrons alike.

While the governor's name also cropped up on checks, with some restaurants billing customers for the 'Wasteful Sandwich, Thanks Cuomo.'

The Democrat-led state Legislature voted unanimously Wednesday to remove Cuomo's controversial pandemic-era rule that required customers to order food when buying alcohol in bars and restaurants

KEY DATES FOR NEW YORK RESTAURANTS AND BARS April 28 - restaurants and bars no longer have to serve food with booze

- restaurants and bars no longer have to serve food with booze May 3 - customers can sit at the bar in NYC

- customers can sit at the bar in NYC May 17 - midnight curfew is lifted for outdoor areas

- midnight curfew is lifted for outdoor areas May 31 - midnight curfew is lifted for indoor areas Advertisement

State Senator John Mannion, a Democrat, said the rule was introduced 'in good faith when COVID was ranging and vaccines seemed far away,' but was now 'arbitrary' and 'not based on science'.

'The purchase of food with alcohol [is] arbitrary and not based on science,' he said during discussions in the chamber Wednesday.

'I've yet to find any scientific literature that finds a correlation between ordering food with your drink, and stopping the spread of COVID-19.'

Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said in a statement the rule was no longer necessary as more people continue to get vaccinated.

'As more New Yorkers continue to get vaccinated, and our infection rates continue to decline, it is time to begin removing certain restrictions and regulations that are no longer necessary,' she said.

But state Republicans hit out that Democrats should have repealed the rule long before now.

In early March, state lawmakers stripped Cuomo of his emergency executive powers which were handed to him to help tackle the pandemic.

To navigate the rule, many establishments got creative, with the now infamous 'Cuomo chips' mockingly paying homage to the governor. Social media images above show the creative ways bars and restaurants navigated the rules

The votes came as the governor was faced with mounting accusations of sexual harassment by multiple women and scrutiny was growing over an alleged cover-up of COVID-19 deaths in the state's nursing homes.

Republican state Senator George Borello, who owns a restaurant, said the food order should have been rescinded by state lawmakers as soon as Cuomo lost his emergency powers.

'While the pandemic was certainly not a crisis that we created, the economic crisis was absolutely manmade by one man, enabled by this body and by the Assembly,' he said in the state Senate discussion.

'So here we are 54 days after we were told the governor's powers were rescinded. Fifty-four days after people on both sides of the aisle stood on this floor and said that this particular executive order requiring food be purchased with alcohol was unscientific, and very damaging. We waited 54 more days to do something about it.'

Meanwhile, social media users were more than happy to wave goodbye to Cuomo chips Wednesday posting photos of the workaround snacks they have become accustomed to over the past nine months.

'Goodbye, cuomo chips. see you later microwaved tater tots. au revoir, grilled cheese,' one person tweeted.

'I probably shouldn't be as excited as I am that I will no longer have to buy food with alcohol. That said, my favorite will always be the 'Wasteful Sandwich, Thanks Cuomo,' wrote another.

Another person celebrated no more 'cuomo soup aka bloody mary mix in a water cup'.

The changes came just hours after Cuomo announced the lifting of the curfew on bars and restaurants from next month, letting the Big Apple regain its nickname of the city that never sleeps.

The governor announced that the midnight curfew will be removed outdoor from May 17 and indoor from May 31 across the state and bar seating will return to the city from Monday.

The curfew had been extended from 11pm to midnight earlier this month after establishments had been restricted to 10pm closing time since they reopened last summer.

Social media users were more than happy to wave goodbye to Cuomo chips Wednesday

'We know the COVID positivity rate is a function of our behavior, and over the last year New Yorkers have remained disciplined and continued with the practices we know work to stop the spread of the virus,' Cuomo said in a statement announcing the changes.

'Everything we've been doing is working - all the arrows are pointing in the right direction and now we're able to increase economic activity even more.

'Lifting these restrictions for restaurants, bars and catering companies will allow these businesses that have been devastated by the pandemic to begin to recover as we return to a new normal in a post-pandemic world.'

Meanwhile, the 1 am curfew currently in place for catered events where attendees can prove they are either vaccinated or are have tested negative will also be lifted on May 17.

For all other catered events, the curfew expires May 31.

Catered events can also resume at individual homes starting May 3 above the current gathering limit of 10 people indoors and 25 outdoors if COVID-19 precautions are followed.

Photos of food and checks posted on social media in recent months about Cuomo's food rule

Dance zones at weddings and celebrations will also no longer be required from next week.

Cuomo has slowly rolled back restrictions on the hard-hit restaurant industry, last month expanding indoor dining capacity in New York City from 35 percent to 50 percent.

Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, welcomed the latest changes.

'New York City's restaurants and bars have been financially devastated by COVID-19 restrictions and it's great news that the state will finally undo the barstool ban and lift the arbitrary midnight curfew,' he told The Gothamist.

'These outdated policies made it too difficult for too many small business owners and workers to support themselves and their families, and were a grave inconvenience to customers.

'Lifting these restrictions is an important step forward for restaurants and bars across New York City, and we will continue working with the state to safely and completely reopen our hospitality industry, bring back jobs and sustain vital small businesses.'

Cuomo also Wednesday moved to lift other COVID-19-related restrictions impacting the state's bars and restaurants. New Yorkers dine in Manhattan earlier this month
Outraged by a long-ignored slaying in Honduras, lawyers are urging a human rights court in Central America to force governments to better protect transgender people in a region where they are targets.

April 29, 2021

In a region where experts put the life expectancy for transgender women at only 30 to 35 years, Vicky Hernandez didnt make it even that long.

Ms. Hernandez was 26 when she was found shot in the eye on a Honduras street, a slug of unknown caliber and a used condom beside her body.

Twelve years later, investigators still have not run forensic tests on that evidence. It is still not clear whether the authorities ever performed an autopsy. And two other transgender women who reported having witnessed a police patrol car roll up to Ms. Hernandez just before she ran off and went missing were themselves killed within a year of her death.
Reaffirming its commitment to fast-tracking the localisation of Saudi industry, Arabian Power Electronics Company (APEC), a subsidiary of Eram Group, inaugurated its new, state-of- the-art production facility on February 1. This regional expansion will enable the transfer of power electronics technology to the Kingdom, in line with Saudi Vision 2030 to grow and diversify the economy.

The production facility advances the companys intent to become a pioneer of power electronics in the Middle East.

The focus of companies in the industry must be on localising technologies and create promising job opportunities for young people in the country, especially Saudi engineers, said Eram Group Chairman and Managing Director, Dr Siddeek Ahmed.

Located in Dammam 3rd Industrial City, APECs new 9,600 sq m facility will manufacture a wide range of products that contribute to a robust supply chain. The facility contributes towards the domestic economy by focusing on local products and talent development, using an advanced power electronics training institute created in-house.

The extensive product range covers industrial and commercial UPS systems, industrial battery chargers/rectifiers, frequency converters, system integration capabilities of variable frequency drives, solar projects and customised product development for client-specific requirements.

Jacob Thomas, APEC Chief Executive Officer, opened proceedings in the presence of Saudi Aramco and Eram Group representatives, tracing the exceptional growth of APEC since its inception and highlighting its reputation as a market leader in its field in Saudi Arabia and exporting products to GCC and other countries.

Salem Al Huraish, General Manager of Procurement at Saudi Aramco, highlighted that APECs facility is an important validation of Saudi Vision 2030 and Saudi Aramcos localisation programme, iktva, which is helping to drive it.

Bringing sophisticated technologies to the Kingdom is one component, being able to export products with a 'Made in Saudi Arabia' stamp on them will be another.

He added that the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated the significance of a robust local supply chain. The new manufacturing facility for critical products takes the Kingdom one-step closer to a sustainable economy, contributing to a world-class supply chain and enabling a generation of highly skilled local talent.

Siddeek Ahmed, Chairman & Managing Director of Eram Group, expressed his gratitude to Saudi Aramco for its focus on localisation and setting standards for other companies.

He complimented the In-Kingdom Total Value Add (iktva) programme and its support for locally-manufactured products, adding that Eram Groups other verticals in the manufacturing and services sector had increased their localisation scores.

"iktva intends, over the decade, to drive the supply chain and increase localization levels across the Kingdom, he said. The opening of this world-class facility is a real feather in Eram Groups cap, and we are grateful for the continuous support from organizations in the industry to help us expand our footprint in the Kingdom."

At the event, the Saudi Aramco representatives also launched two new 'Made in Saudi Arabia' Battery chargers, SCR and explosion-proof types, illustrating the potential for local manufacturers to compete at the global level. --Tradearabia News Service
CAMP PENDLETON, California -- The Marine Corps' new infantry training pilot program emphasizes greater development of students through personal mentorship and one-on-one instruction. If the program becomes standard across the fleet, the service is going to need many more combat instructors -- and leaders are already strategizing ways to attract more talented infantry leaders to the job.

On Wednesday here at the School of Infantry-West, some 30 combat instructors and 40 additional support staff facilitated the first of four classes in the 14-week Infantry Marine Course pilot program. As entry-level grunts waited for their chance to be evaluated on firing speed and accuracy and dynamic movement against variable-distance targets on a hilly range, they huddled with instructors in their 14-man squads or larger groups, getting last-minute tips or bonding over broader topics.

"Who's married?" one instructor asked a group of students sitting cross-legged on the ground or leaning back on flak jackets and helmets. A few raised their hands.

"That's great ... that's great."

Read Next: The Marine Corps Is Known as a Force of Young Warriors. That's About to Change

The new infantry training program emphasizes calls for Marine privates to train on a greater variety of weapons, such as heavy machine guns, and to develop proficiency in skills ranging from combat lifesaving to swimming. There are far fewer large-group lectures, and more Socratic-style and hands-on instruction. It's part of a mandate from Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger to prepare the service for a future fight with a peer adversary, and get all Marines, from the most junior ranks up, thinking like strategists.

A combat instructor chats with Marine infantrymen as they wait their turn to be evaluated on the rifle range at Camp Pendleton, Calif. April 28, 2021. (Hope Hodge Seck/Staff)

"A lot of the skill sets required to be an infantry Marine, specifically, are tactile skills," said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Amatangelo "AJ" Pasciuti, gunner for Infantry Training Battalion-West. "So what we did was, we found that there was a lot of loss in translation. We were [teaching], for instance, how to do something like program a radio on a PowerPoint. And then when that was transferred to the tactile needing to do it, there was a loss, or a deviation."

The kind of training the Marine Corps wants requires more and better-trained combat instructors -- about 80 more than the current total. They'd get an additional six to eight weeks of training on top of the existing three-month course they currently complete to earn the 0913 combat instructor additional military occupational specialty, or MOS. To get enough talented infantry Marines interested in the job, the one-star head of Training Command is pushing to restore the special duty assignment status that was stripped from the combat instructor billet in 2017.

"I would say we are just about there. The service is looking at it right now in a very detailed manner," Brig. Gen. Jason Morris told reporters Wednesday. " ... And I think that's good for the Marine Corps. And it's good for the infantry community. If we want to retain good people and make sure that we're having a more mature, more proficient force, it all starts here in the schoolhouses, and we've got to be able to bring our very best infantry men into the schoolhouse to teach our entry-level trainees."

Combat instructor was one of three specialized Marine Corps jobs to lose special duty assignment status in 2017, in what Marine planners at the time said was an effort to set thousands of Marines free from the limbo of the 18-month SDA selection process. At the time, Col. Rudy Janiczek, head of enlisted assignments for the Marine Corps' Manpower Management Division, told Military.com that, unlike drill instructors, who retained SDA status, combat instructors' duties did not fall strictly outside of their primary infantry military occupational specialty.

While combat instructors retained some perks, like a special ribbon and additional monthly stipend of $150, the incentives were subdued compared to those for SDAs, which can include $450 in extra pay per month and fast tracks for promotion. Morris added that SDA status would require the Marine Corps to prioritize the job for highly qualified Marines, potentially at the expense of other billets.

"And right now, the service is in the final sort of stages of studying that and making sure that we fully understand what the impact is of making combat instructors a special duty assignment," he said. "Again, I'm optimistic that it's going to happen in the near future."

More changes may also be on the way for instructors in keeping with the Corps' new approach to infantry training. Col. Coby Moran, commanding officer of School of Infantry-West, said he'd like to see opportunities for instructors to stay longer in the billet and advance as they develop skills and expertise. One option would allow Marines to make a career of combat instructor duty, rather than dropping into the job for a three-year tour.

"We'd work up the instructor progression chain from, you know, baseline instructor to journeyman instructor to eventually a master instructor," Moran said. "And that becomes kind of an MOS pipeline that you can fill as an infantry Marine, if you choose to do so, and literally stay in your MOS the entire time you're in the Marine Corps. ... I think that is a vision of the future between what may become with the SDA assignment and training commands' initiatives with the instructor, the formal instructor MOS, which they're pursuing right now."

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct Pasciuti's rank.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

Related: 'They Just Want it More:' Meet the First Women to Become Marines at Recruit Depot San Diego
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India's second COVID-19 wave may impede economic recovery, says S&P

Credit rating agency S&P Global said on Wednesday the second wave of COVID-19 infections in India could impede the country's economic recovery and expose other nations to further waves of outbreaks. India's healthcare system has been overwhelmed, with the world's second most populous country reporting more than 300,000 new COVID-19 cases daily over the past six days.

COVID-19 second wave can delay Air India divestment: DIPAM Secretary

The second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in the country can delay government's disinvestment plan for national carrier Air India, Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey said on Wednesday. The government is selling its entire 100 per cent stake in Air India, which has been in losses ever since its merger with domestic operator Indian Airlines in 2007. It was targeting to complete disinvestment of the airline by September this year.

COVID-19: Reliance Industries to set up 1,000-bed hospital in Jamnagar

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) will set up a 1,000-bed COVID-19 hospital in Jamnagar with oxygen supply amidst a surge in coronavirus cases in the country, including Gujarat. Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani spoke with RIL CMD Mukesh Ambani and sought his help in augmenting COVID-19 bed capacity.

COVID-19 vaccination: Over 80 lakh registrations on CoWin portal in 3 hours

Within three hours of commencement of registration for 18-44 years age group, more than 80 lakh people registered themeselves on the CoWin portal for COVID-19 vaccination. The system is recording 55,000 hits per second and is completely stable, the government said, adding that more than 1.45 crore SMS were delivered successfully.

Serum Institute reduces Covishield price for govt hospitals to Rs 300

Serum Institute of India has decided to reduce the price of its coronavirus vaccine Covishield to Rs 300 from the earlier rate of Rs 400. The decision was announced by CEO Adar Poonawalla, who said that this reduction of price is a philanthropic gesture on the part of Serum. He added that this price cut will save thousands of crores of state funds as well as save countless lives.

Jio Platforms, Byju's make it to TIME Magazine's first-ever list of 100 most influential firms

Two Indian firms, Reliance Industries' technology arm Jio Platforms and e-learning startup Byju's have figured in the TIME Magazine's first-ever list of 100 most influential companies. On its website, Time said companies shaping the future are at the heart of the first ever TIME 100 Most Influential Companies.
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The redesigned Advanced Management Program from Columbia Business School Executive Education is now admitting participants into its first cohort, which kicks off classes in Fall 2021. The immersive 22-week program that blends both live online, asynchronous, and in-person modules is designed for senior-level executives to learn from and network with today's top business visionaries. This unique new structure provides participants with the opportunity to have access to the high-quality insight of Columbia's faculty no matter where they reside. Participants will be provided with a valuable opportunity to return to their organizations with the knowledge and skills to mobilize their teams around a shared vision, preparing them for dynamic challenges ahead.

Advanced Management Program participants will have the opportunity to connect with thought leaders, diverse talent, and a vast community of business leaders with hands-on experience. Business professionals with substantial leadership experience and professional success are encouraged to apply. Those interested in applying can visit the program's website .

The program's Faculty Director Paul Ingram, a leadership expert and the Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, notes that the redesigned Advanced Management Program will provide participants with a unique opportunity to benefit both themselves as well as their organization.

"We redesigned the Advanced Management Program to harness both the immense networking power of New York and the engaging, global nature of interactive online learning modules. Participants will benefit from in-person networking but also engage thoughtfully in the virtual space, just as they will throughout their careers," Ingram said.

According to Lee Bradshaw, chief strategy officer of Noodle, a leading online higher education network that is partnering with Columbia on the redesign, "the redesigned Advanced Management Program leverages the vast resources of Columbia Business School to give participants an experience that will have a significant benefit to their career."

"This program will allow participants to interact with a diverse range of fellow senior executives, providing a unique and unparalleled global learning experience," says Bradshaw. "From having access to Columbia's 360-degree leadership feedback tool to participating in a five-day immersive NYC experience, the Advanced Management Program gives participants a valuable opportunity to improve as professionals."

The redesigned Advanced Management Program builds off an existing program that has garnered a strong reputation for decades.

"It is a journey which I would recommend to anyone who wants to be challenged to succeed professionally and personally," says Carla Koffel, former Advanced Management Program participant and country director of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Institute.

About Columbia Business School:

Columbia Business School is the only world-class, Ivy League business school that delivers a learning experience where academic excellence meets with real-time exposure to the pulse of global business. The School's transformative curriculum bridges academic theory with unparalleled exposure to real-world business practice, equipping students with an entrepreneurial mindset that allows them to recognize, capture, and create opportunity in any business environment. The thought leadership of the School's faculty and staff, combined with the accomplishments of its distinguished alumni and position in the center of global business, means that the School's efforts have an immediate, measurable impact on the forces shaping business every day. To learn more about Columbia Business School's position at the very center of business, please visit gsb.columbia.edu.

About Noodle:

Noodle, a certified B-corp that creates excellent online and agile programs that elevate campus-wide teaching and technology. Since January, 2019, Noodle has launched almost as many online degree programs with elite US universities as have all of our competitors combined. Our network of universities, higher education leaders, providers and students fuel innovation and efficiency in learning design, marketing, recruitment, technology, student and faculty support, and clinical placement. For more information, visit noodlepartners.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @NoodleEducation.

CONTACT: Renee Young, [email protected]

SOURCE Noodle

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O

n the bad days I would take the box out of the bathroom cupboard, pop one from the packet and then just leave it on the side, eyeing it up over the course of an evening. I had wanted to stop taking the pill for a couple of years, but every time I came close Id give into cowardice, fear of the unknown, a reluctance to rock the boat, or disrupt the cycle of artificial hormones my body had become so accustomed to.

Eventually Id concede, pick up the little yellow pellet and gulp it down (a 12-year-long daily habit means you eventually get too lazy to require water). There was something about its smallness, its weightlessness, that simultaneously meant I could sneak it down my throat ignoring another day of defeat, but also felt insulting as such a tiny pill began to occupy more and more of my waking thoughts.

Id spend hours Googling other peoples experiences, looking for what to expect on the other side. For years the pill had been a convenient liberation, but after a decade (the arbitrary upper time limit youre warned of when starting, but upon probing seems more grey advice than black and white instruction) I became fearful of migraines; riding the waves of moods I wasnt sure were my own; dealing with bad skin I couldnt establish whether was being made better or worse by the pill; and resentful of the associated admin my partner could be totally oblivious to.

I asked more than one doctor, all unable to advise much beyond  if you dont want a baby now keep taking it. But I didnt want to keep taking it, I wanted out.

2021 marks 60 years since the pill was made available to all in the UK. On 4 December 1961, the health minister at the time, Enoch Powell, made the announcement many women had been waiting for, ushering in a new era of sexual, social and medical liberation. Five decades on, the problems that the pill can cause when taken are well documented: weight gain, loss of libido, depression and poor mental health  a 2018 BBC documentary highlighted the potential severity including suicidal thoughts in some. In the longer term, the pill slightly increases the risk of breast and cervical cancer (although lowers risk of other cancers), and marginally increases the risk of blood clots. Although not huge risks, a risk all the same.

On the whole women know this, were told about the risks by prescribing GPs, nurses and clinics while were taking it. But we still have a huge blindspot when it comes to another stage of our relationship with the pill: what happens when you stop taking it.

NHS data from December says there were 731,340 women in England using contraception in 2019-20 (based on data from sexual health clinics, but excluding GPs/pharmacies  the UN estimates 71 per cent of UK women aged 15-49 are using contraception). Of this number around 40 per cent are using a type of pill, making it the most popular method (the next highest is condoms). But this number has fallen from 2014/15 when it stood at 45 per cent as experts see greater numbers switching from the pill to long-acting reversible contraceptives like the coil.

Despite increasing data on pill uptake and the side effects while on it, there is still scant evidence on those who quit  about why they do and what happens when they go cold turkey. Will there be hormonal problems? Bad skin? Fluctuating weight? Loss of sex drive or changes in mood? For me, a snap decision made at the age of 17 to go on the pill wasnt something I anticipated suffering the consequences of 13 years later  I thought Id be an adult by then, who understood her body and the pill. Or at the very least I'd be given fair warning if I was signing an unwritten contract for future consequences down the line.

(Getty)

On the NHS website there is an entire multi-page contraception guide, but the brief section (269 words to be precise) on coming off the pill is dedicated to getting pregnant and the return of periods, implying that this is the primary, if not only reason, why someone might stop. And women's only concern. But a 1998 study (data is sparse) from the USA suggests this does not tally with reality, with nearly half (46 per cent) of women ditching it because of side effects compared to just a fifth (23 per cent) having no continuing need.

The Lowdown, a self-described TripAdvisor for contraception, which has gathered data on 3,500 UK users, found 78 per cent had experienced unwanted side effects, while 51 per cent said the pill negatively impacted their emotions and caused them to reconsider a future on it. Clearly, it is not always women looking to get pregnant who ditch it, and yet official information on what to expect is lacking. Instead, there are plenty of forums, YouTube videos, and tabloid headlines to fill the gap. On Reddit, women try to crowdsource information about what to expect.

Although this is not a new issue, it has been thrown into the spotlight once again during the pandemic as more than a third (36 per cent) of women have suddenly not known how to access their pill, according to research by MSI Reproductive Choices. The findings detailed that 35 per cent of women had experienced worse service, one in seven were unable to get an appointment, and one in 10 said that their clinic had closed due to Covid. Whether women choose to stop, or are forced by circumstance, how do they know what hormonal limbo awaits them on the other side?

I have developed Stockholm Syndrome with the pill - what if it is actually making everything better?

Its been over 16 years since Stacey Benson, 31, from Herefordshire, first started taking the pill. At 14 she had such terrible acne that her mum took her to the GP, where she was prescribed the combined pill Dianette. Within two months her skin had totally cleared up. Over the years there were some mild side effects  headaches mainly, occasionally bad enough to require lying in a dark room  but for Benson it was a price worth paying to avoid acne.

Now, a 31-year-old living in Sydney, Australia, Benson feels differently. Granted, she still dreads waking up and seeing a pimple in the mirror  I am quickly reminded of how insecure I felt  but is beginning to wonder whether taking the pill is worth it for clear skin. When she really thinks about it, Benson has been weighing up this internal dilemma since the age of 23. But its easier to just keep taking it, another packet, another month, another year. Maintain the status quo.

Benson estimates she has tried stopping the pill more than 50 times: she has trawled the internet for advice, has listened to audiobooks, podcasts, any nugget of information she can find. On the first attempt it sent her skin into a downward hormonal spiral, which became so crippling it stopped her socialising. She couldnt stick with it and rejoined the contraception carousel in a bid to reverse the effects.

Alice Pelton, who launched The Lowdown after her own bad experience with the pill and feeling there was a "big lack of useful data", tells The Independent that having spoken to hundreds of women, concerns about post-pill issues like breakouts or more painful bleeding, are among the most common. Especially when it comes to skin, she says. Pelton says the general consensus is that it takes around three menstrual cycles for hormones to settle again. But for those who have taken the pill for years, it might be longer. Better skin and mood is associated with longer time on the pill, but the longer women have been on the pill  the more likely they are to report worse skin and mood after they stop using it. So this adds an extra dynamic. A catch-22.

But even those who have been on the pill a short time arent immune from fears about quitting. When Hannah Davis from north London was first put on the combined contraceptive pill at 16 years old, the side effects were instant and drastic. She would wake up, take the pill before school and then, like clockwork, two hours later she would begin feeling nauseous. An hour later, she would be physically sick. She couldnt keep any food down.

I feel totally hostage to it, I know it isnt perfect but what if coming off it is worse than being on it?

After three weeks of daily sickness, Davis, now 17, went back to the clinic. After some back and forth  in which she says the doctors reassured her short-term side effects were normal  she was eventually prescribed a progesterone-only mini pill. Although the vomiting stopped, there were other changes on this drug  mood swings, emotions running close to the surface. Now, she would like to quit and stabilise her mood but feels perhaps it is better the devil she knows.

I feel totally hostage to it, I know it isnt perfect but what if coming off it is worse than being on it? I go down a rabbit hole of reading the forums and [peoples experiences] are terrifying. I start to think maybe Ill stay on this forever because I cant take the risk. She adds that there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome  I convince myself the pill is perhaps helping me, making things better, and without it I would have worse skin, worse mood swings.

(iStock)

Joanne*, 21, from Bristol, has been on the combined pill for three years for her acne. But the pill caused fatigue, mood swings and periods of extreme lows she could not control (a study at the University of Copenhagen found women taking either type of pill were more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than those not on contraception). She had wanted to come off the pill for months but felt scared by reading other people's experiences online  of course, this is a self-selecting sample, and as a result likely to be those who have had the worst or best experiences.

But with a void of counternarratives from official sources, it cuts through. I was terrified of my acne getting worse. Terrified. I felt very much stuck on it. Amy, 30, from Wolverhampton, who started on the pill at 17, has also been considering quitting for a year but has been deterred by what she reads. Id love to be a bit braver with it.

I felt very much stuck on it

Without more official information, women say they feel uncertain about what awaits them and instead turn to blog posts, forums and outdated magazine articles in a bid to ascertain some roadmap out. Every woman I spoke to was, like me, aware of the unhelpful results that come from a quick Google search on quitting the pill. Molly Rooney, 26, from Merseyside, who has taken the pill for eight years, started considering coming off in Christmas 2019. But like the others, she could only find information in forums filled with others experiences of weight gain and adult acne. I found it really difficult to get a GP appointment to speak about it and I almost feel its too trivial to waste their time in a pandemic.

The Brook sexual health charity is clearer than the NHS on what changes you might expect (acne or skin problems), but crucially says everyone reacts slightly differently to coming off the pill. Sarah Mulindwa, a sexual health nurse, explains: Acne outbreaks are unfortunately to be expected in a high number of women once they stop taking the pill, even if theyve never had [it] before. The contraceptive pill suppresses your hormones, so when you go off it, your skin will more than likely break out. She also says it can impact your sex drive. It is completely normal to feel anxious about stopping the pill, but remember, some women can and do stop contraception with no minimal issues.

Recommended Why I have never taken the contraceptive pill

For some, taking the risk has been worth it. Roxanne Cooper-Costello, 22, from Bournemouth, had been on the combined pill since 17 but came off it after it made her an utter savage to be around and she felt her pill was in control of her. In the lead up to stopping she watched tons of YouTube videos of women documenting their experiences. I was so uneducated on what was happening to my body, she says. But the leap of faith paid off. The first day I had this sigh of relief that I had finally done it and didnt feel like a slave to it anymore.

Mulindwa says that women can expect it to take up to three months for the body to return to its normal menstrual cycle, and when this stabilises most will see an improvement in related-issues like acne.

For many women who are prescribed the pill as teenagers it is the inevitable cliff edge we have to face as we enter the next chapter of our lives

Dr Paula Baraitser, of SH:24 sexual health clinic, says for anyone coming off it is about weighing the advantages and disadvantages. With the combined pill that might be trading the advantages (less acne, lighter periods, controllable bleeding) and the disadvantages (headache, nausea, breast tenderness and possibly mood changes). These are difficult and complicated decisions and the factors [life circumstances, relationships and sexual lifestyles] influencing them change over time. She encourages women to keep records and revisit decisions regularly.

As we mark the 60-year anniversary of one of the greatest medical innovations for women's rights in recorded history, it is worth considering that we have work yet to do. While the pool of research on side effects is growing (although notably such side effects are still not tolerated in male clinical pill studies) we still have little information about what women should expect when they quit, and how to navigate this time. Instead they are lumped into a homogenous group of women, seen as motivated only by getting pregnant, and concerned with when periods might start up again for this purpose.

It has been 58 days since I last took my pill. After taking it everywhere from school to university, post-graduate studies, 12 homes, two years living abroad, three long-term partners, and everyone in between, it was one of the longest relationships Ive ever had. After years of deliberation, lockdown gave me the type of clean run Id never anticipated, hidden away from the world in case the post-pill monsters rear their heads. For many women who are prescribed the pill as teenagers  with few questions asked and little information given  it is the inevitable cliff edge we have to face as we enter the next chapter of our lives.
Relatives of George Floyd and other black Americans shot by cops were on Capitol Hill Thursday to push Congress to pass gun control legislation.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the Floyd family, was joined by Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd who was killed by Minneapolis police during an arrest, and Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner who was killed by a New York Police Department officer using a prohibited chokehold during his arrest.

'We're here today because we need to let everybody know how we feel about our brothers and our families and family members who have been killed for anything that they shouldn't have been killed for. So, were just here to just get our point across and let them know that we're hurting, we're still in pain,' Philonise Floyd told reporters on Capitol Hill.

The group held separate meetings - one with Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and another Republican Senators Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham.

Crump said the meetings got 'got emotional at times' but he said the senators 'listened intensely' to the family members.

'This was about them understanding that this is very real to all of us, but it means more to these families than anybody else because that legislation will literally have the blood stain of their loved ones,' Crump said. 'And that was the tone and the tenor of the meeting. They listened a lot, and talked about how they wanted to make sure it was meaningful.'

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the George Floyd family, is joined Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd who was killed by Minneapolis police during an arrest, and Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner who was killed by a New York Police Department officer using a prohibited chokehold during his arrest, on Capitol Hill

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer posted a photo of his meeting with the family members of four black Americans killed by cops

The group was also joined by family members of Terence Crutcher, who was shot by a Tulsa police responding to reports of an abandoned vehicle and saw him standing by it; and Botham Jean, who was shot by an off-duty Dallas police officer who entered an apartment she thought was hers and that she shot Jean believing he was a burglar.

The advocates were on Capitol Hill the same day a bipartisan group of lawmakers met to discuss potential police reform legislation, kicking off formal negotiations the day after President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 25th, the one year anniversary of Floyd's death.

Scott and Graham were at the sit down as were Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Dick Durbin and Democratic Rep. Karen Bass.

Afterward the lawmakers said 'progress' had been made but offered no specifics.

'I think that we are making progress, and I'm really encouraged. As I've been saying from the beginning, Tim is an honest broker and we're trying to make it work,' Booker said.

'I definitely don't want to get into details,' he said when asked about negotiations.

'There's nothing happened in the meeting that deters me from being optimistic that we can get there,' Scott said.

'I think the best thing we can do is keep in mind why we're doing what we're doing and what we're doing is trying to make our communities and our law enforcement community easier to work together. And I think as long as we keep that as our focus, we will work expeditiously to get to a solution,' he added.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act looks to end racial and religious profiling, bans chokeholds and no-knock warrants, requires deadly force be used only as a last resort after officers have employed de-escalation techniques first, limits the transfer of military-grade equipment to law enforcement agencies and would make it easier to hold officers accountable in court by limiting qualified immunity.

It was named for Floyd, the black man who was killed by white police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020 - Memorial Day weekend of last year. Chauvin was convicted on murder and manslaughter charges.

Floyd's death, a knee to the neck for around nine minutes, along with murder of Breonna Taylor, a black medical worker who was shot and killed by Louisville police officers during a botched raid on her apartment, reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement and the call for police reform.

The Floyd act has passed the Democratic-controlled House but is stalled in the Senate where it needs the support of at least 10 Republicans to move forward.

Democratic Rep. Karen Bass, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and Republican Sen. Tim Scott walk together at the Senate subway after their bipartisan meeting on police reform

Scott, the only black Republican senator, has taken the lead on negotiations for the GOP and proposed legislation of his own.

But his legislation doesn't include the qualified immunity provision that Democrats want.

Bass, who sponsored the Floyd bill in the House and has taken the lead on negotiations for Democrats in that chamber, said qualified immunity remains a 'major issue.'

'It's still a major issue that we are discussing. All of us feel like there's a path forward,' she noted.

Scott is proposing that police departments can be sued but Democrats want the threat of lawsuits extended to individual cops.

Given the striking differences in both parties' wish-lists for police reform, it is unclear what they can agree on.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday expressed optimism lawmakers will come to 'have good, strong bipartisan bill.'

She added: 'And that is up to the Senate and then we will have it in the House. Because it will be a different bill.'
In Connecticut, home to Age of Autism, legislators just removed the Religious Exemption. Our local school district was jabbed with the J&J brand a few weeks ago, and you'd have thought that the staffers were about to drink from the fountain of youth, such was the giddy joy. With precious little thought to side effects or long term effects. One private school in Florida has really bucked the trend of educators' complete obeisance to any and all vaccination for the students and the staff. Of course, they are being pilloried in the media. Schools that have put caution ahead of common sense with masks, distance, in person learning, have taken the vaccines as if mother's milk. Which might be tainted post vax.



###



From Anne Dachel



Apr 27, 2021, Local 10 News, Miami, FL: Miami private school warns staff about taking COVID-19 vaccine, threatening to fire anyone who does

https://www.local10.com/news/local/2021/04/27/miami-private-school-warns-staff-about-taking-covid-19-vaccine-threatening-to-fire-anyone-who-does/

A South Florida private school is making headlines for its vaccine policy, advising teachers not to get their shots.

There has been a firestorm of controversy over an email that went out to faculty and staff at the exclusive Miami private school Centner Academy, warning staff against taking any of the COVID-19 vaccines, saying the school will no longer employ anyone who has received a shot.

Centner Academy has campuses in the Design District and Edgewater.

Its very pricey, with tuition starting at nearly $25,000 a year for Pre-K and elementary school students.

Co-founder Leila Centner sent an email to parents on Monday, laying out the schools policy on vaccines, alleging, without citing any scientific evidence, that vaccinated persons may be transmitting something from their bodies that could harm others, impacting fertility and the reproductive systems of women and also the development of children.

FIU Infectious Disease Expert Dr. Aileen Marty called the schools moves reckless.

This is completely irresponsible, she said. It is spreading rumors about something that is completely unfounded. There is absolutely no basis in fact in any of the allegations that are made against the vaccine there.

Its just frightening that such a high level of misinformation is going out from someone who runs a school. Its terrible.
And now the search giant is back with another update for Google Maps, this time in an attempt to improve the way you plan a road trip.First and foremost, the whole thing is supposed to make the road trip planning process more convenient by bringing desktop computers and phones closer together. Obviously, setting up a long road trip isnt necessarily easy on a mobile device given the limited screen estate, so Google has added new options for Google Maps on the desktop to add different types of places to stop.In other words, you head over to Google Maps on the web on your desktop computer, set up your starting point and the final destination, and then the service lets you add stops like hotels, parks, campgrounds, and rest stops.That way, you can configure your route down to every little detail and, of course, also receive additional information on your stops, such as rates for hotels and everything else.And given youre not supposed to take your desktop computer with you in the car, Google lets users send the journey, along with all directions, stops, and other information to a mobile device using a text message, an email, or the Google Maps app on iPhone and Android. That way, you can then use your phone to start navigating based on your route with just a few taps.The whole thing also works on Android Auto and CarPlay, as you can start navigating on your mobile device and then launch Google Maps on the head unit to continue the route based on the settings you made on the phone.
South Carolinas top law enforcement agency asked for help fighting public corruption. This week, the state Senate delivered  approving a proposed $10 billion state budget that includes funds for the State Law Enforcement Division to hire a forensic auditor this summer to help determine if public monies are being stolen or abused.

The vote comes two months after The Post and Courier reported that SLED doesnt employ a single white-collar crimes investigator, a void that has hamstrung the agencys ability to bring cases against crooked politicians and public officials.

Filling that position is among the recommendations that have emerged from The Post and Couriers Uncovered series, a yearlong project in which the newspaper is partnering with local news outlets throughout South Carolina to report on corruption and abuses of power by public officials.

SLED has investigated more than 1,400 cases of government misconduct over the past decade, even without a dedicated white-collar crime unit. Those cases were handled not by specialists, but by agents who also had to juggle investigations into drug trafficking, violent crime, arsons and police-involved shootings.

SLED Chief Mark Keel asked lawmakers earlier this year for $159,000 to hire a forensic auditor, a number-crunching detective specially trained to identify patterns in illegal spending.

Without such a specialist on staff, SLED has often had to ask local communities to pay for auditors themselves. But doing that can slow a case to a crawl, Keel acknowledged.

"The Legislatures willingness to include this position will allow SLED to meet the demand to investigate financial and public corruption cases statewide," SLED spokesman Tommy Crosby wrote in a statement April 29. "The expertise of a forensic auditor will allow SLED to expand our investigative ability into these types of crimes. We thank the members of the General Assembly for answering the concerns of their constituents to investigate these crimes across the state and in considering our request."

The position didnt make it into the first draft of the budget, written by S.C. House lawmakers who were concerned the coronavirus impact on the state economy wouldnt leave them with much money to spend.

State Sen. Shane Martin, who leads the subcommittee that decides SLEDs budget, promised earlier this month he would fulfill the request. The Spartanburg Republican followed through this week.

We also funded the public corruption investigator, Martin told colleagues on the Senate floor on April 27. "I know thats been a big topic, so we put that in the budget for SLED.

House budget writers, who have since learned they have much more money to spend than expected, hinted they plan to follow suit when they write the third draft of the budget this summer.
BOCA RATON, Fla., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Curative Biotechnology, Inc. (OTC: CUBT) a development stage biomedical company focused on novel therapies for rare diseases, announced today the Company's trading symbol change from "CTYX" to "CUBT". As previously announced, the Company had changed its corporate name to Curative Biotechnology, Inc. to better represent its mission to discover and develop therapeutics for patients who have few, if any, effective treatments for rare diseases.

Curative Biotechnology Inc. Chairman and President Paul Michaels said, "This name and symbol change are reflective of our total remaking of this company and our mission to create treatments or cures for unmet medical needs for patients around the world."

Michaels added, "We are also very pleased to announce two additions to our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board. Both are important thought leaders in their respective fields and have joined our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board to help guide our programs through pre-clinical and clinical development."

Dr. Kapil Bharti



Kapil Bharti, Ph.D. from the National Eye Institute (NEI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has joined our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board. Dr. Bharti is the lead inventor on the U.S. and Worldwide patent applications licensed exclusively to Curative Biotech to repurpose Metformin into an eye drop to treat degenerative eye diseases like macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, Stargardt's disease, and others. He is a world leader in his field, and we look forward to working closely with him as we prepare to move into clinical trials.

Dr. Bharti earned his Ph.D. from J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, graduating summa cum laude. He did his postdoc work at NIH, where he published numerous papers on pigment cell biology, transcription regulation and the developmental biology of the eye. Dr. Bharti has won a number of awards including being the first Earl Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator at NEI, NIH Directors award and NEI Directors Dr. Karl Kupfer Visionary award for his groundbreaking research on developing ocular cell-therapies.

Dr. Dimiter Dimitrov



Dimiter Dimitrov, Ph.D. earned his degrees at the University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, and subsequently joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, in 1990. He left for the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 to start their Center for Antibody Therapeutics, where he serves as director. He was recently named one of 10 "Science Superheroes" by MediFind.

Dr. Dimitrov's major long-term goal is the development of clinically useful therapeutics and vaccines based on human monoclonal antibodies in different formats including engineered antibody domains, chimeric antigen receptors, bispecific antibodies and antibody drug conjugates. He has authored or coauthored more than 370 articles, several books, and is the inventor or coinventor of more than 100 inventions, patent applications or patents. Dr. Dimitrov is the lead inventor on the Antibody Drug Conjugate patent exclusively licensed to Curative Biotech from the National Cancer Institute to treat glioblastoma and has joined the company's Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board to help guide the development of his invention into the clinic.

Recent Addition to CEO's Blog on Company Website



Richard Garr, CEO of Curative Biotech, recently added a post on the CEO's Blog entitled, " Sometimes, starting big is the right decision". As noted in the blog, the company has decided to pursue a reformulation of metformin which was licensed from the National Eye Institute for the treatment of wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Curative expects to file an Investigational New Drug Application (IND) to begin human trials before the end of this year.



Curative Biotechnology - Novel Solutions for Unmet Medical Needs

Future Curative Biotechnology Press Releases and Industry Updates



Interested investors and shareholders will receive press releases and industry updates by sending an e-mail to [email protected].



About Curative Biotechnology, Inc., http://curativebiotech.com

Curative Biotech is a development-stage biomedical company focusing on novel treatments for rare diseases. Curative Biotech is focused on therapies with potentially accelerated development paths as a result of either the disease, the nature of the therapeutic itself, or the stage of clinical development. At the heart of the Company is a product development engine that rests on our unique S.O.A.R. filter (Science, Opportunity, Acceleration, Rare Disease.) At Curative Biotech, we envision a world where all patients have a therapeutic option.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. CUBT is not yet generating revenues. Although forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking statements are inherently subjected to known, unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements, including but not limited our ability to generate sufficient market acceptance for our products and services, our ability to generate sufficient operating cash flow, and general economic conditions. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in our reports filed with OTC Markets from time to time which attempt to advise interested parties of the risks and factors that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release.

SOURCE Curative Biotechnology

Related Links

http://curativebiotech.com


On Wednesday night, President Joe Biden addressed a sparse, masked-up sampling of Congress and acknowledged that America is in fact part of planet Eartha planet on which there is still a raging pandemic.

Theres no wall high enough to keep any virus out, the president said in the middle of a speech that began with him declaring that America, at least, had finally turned the corner on the pandemic. And our own vaccine supply, as it grows to meet our needs and were meeting them, will become an arsenal of vaccines for other countries, just as America was an arsenal for democracy in the world.

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In an address in which Biden used his low-key, moderate-shaped persona to sell infrastructure and family policy plans that had already been announced, that arsenal line may have been the most important point. The president could provide all the stimulus checks in the world to Americans; the only way the pandemic will end is if countries like America start sharing their shots. We have a lot of shots; enough FDA-approved doses to vaccinate every American at least twice (though that figure includes some preorders for doses that are still being made). We also cant ignore what the virus is doing globallynot just for humanitarian reasons, but for self-interested ones, too. Its too soon to start even really thinking about reaching herd immunity in the U.S., as vaccines arent yet approved for use in kids, which means that well still be vulnerable to outbreaks for a while. Meanwhile, global travel is coming back to life, and viruses are awfully good at hopping on planes. Plus, the more the virus circulates and infects people globally, the more opportunities it has to mutate into a concerning variant.

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The U.S. has already begun sharing vaccines, but hardly at arsenal levels. After lots of pressure, Biden announced earlier this week that we would send some 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine abroad. Thats showing up to a four-alarm fire with an eyedropper full of water, one expert noted to the New York Times.

Wednesdays rhetoric marked a change from Bidens past, more conditional comments on sharing our vaccines. (Hed said in March that wed try to help, if we have a surplus.) But one frustrating wrinkle remains: He didnt provide a timeline on which the arsenal-sharing would happen. He noted that every American will have access to vaccines first, which is a wishy-washy target. Given that the rest of us are able to make appointments, and in some places just show up for walk-in slots, Biden should make good on his ambitious vaccine remarks right now.
Wearable glucose monitors shed light on progression of Type 2 diabetes in Hispanic adults

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults.

The findings by researchers from Sansum Diabetes Research Institute (SDRI) and Rice University are available online this week in EClinicalMedicine, an open-access clinical journal published by The Lancet.

"The fresh look at the glucose data sheds new light on disease progression, which could have a direct impact on better management," said Rice study co-author Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor and department chair in electrical and computer engineering and founder of Rice's Scalable Health Labs. "An important aspect of our analysis is that the results are clinically interpretable and point to new directions for improved Type 2 diabetes care."

The study builds on SDRI's groundbreaking research to address Type 2 diabetes in underserved Hispanic/Latino communities. SDRI's Farming for Life initiative assesses the physical and mental health benefits of providing medical prescriptions for locally sourced fresh vegetables to people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes, with a focus on the Hispanic/Latino community. SDRI recently added a digital health technology called continuous glucose monitoring to this research.

Continuous glucose monitors track blood sugar levels around-the-clock and allow trends in blood glucose to be displayed and analyzed over time. The devices typically consist of two parts, a small electrode sensor affixed to the skin with an adhesive patch and a receiver that gathers data from the sensor.

"We found that the use of this technology is both feasible and acceptable for this population, predominantly Mexican American adults," said study co-author David Kerr, SDRI's director of research and innovation. "The results also provided new insights into measurable differences in the glucose profiles for individuals at risk of as well as with noninsulin-treated Type 2 diabetes. These findings could facilitate novel therapeutic approaches to reduce the risk of progression of Type 2 diabetes for this underserved population."

Sabharwal, who is also a co-investigator of the Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations (PATHS-UP) engineering research center, said, "The collaboration with SDRI aligns with our mission to use technology as an important building block to reduce health care disparities."

"We are excited about the application of digital health technologies for underserved populations as a way to eliminate health disparities and improve health equity," Kerr said. "This opens up potential for a larger number of collaborations to support SDRI's evolving focus on precision nutrition and also the expanded use of digital health technologies for both the prevention and management of all forms of diabetes."

###

Sabharwal is the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering.

Study co-authors include Souptik Barua of Rice and Namino Glantz, Casey Conneely, Arianna Larez and Wendy Bevier of SDRI.

The research was supported by the Department of Agriculture (2018-33800-28404), the National Science Foundation (1648451), the Hearst Foundation, the Mosher Foundation, Sun Life Financial, the St. Francis Foundation and the Blooming Prairie Foundation.

Links and resources:

The DOI of the EClinicalMedicine paper is: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100853

A copy of the paper is available at: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. eclinm. 2021. 100853

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https:/ / sansum. org/ images/ Lancet-graphic-print. jpg

CAPTION: Sansum Diabetes Research Institute's Farming for Life initiative addresses Type 2 diabetes in underserved Hispanic/Latino communities by assessing the physical and mental health benefits of providing medical prescriptions for locally sourced fresh vegetables to people with or at risk of the disease. In a study of participants who wore continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), devices that measure blood sugar levels around-the-clock, researchers showed CGM data can provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults. (Image courtesy of Sansum Diabetes Research Institute)

https:/ / news. rice. edu/ files/ 2018/ 01/ 180129-SCATTER-Ashu-lg-157myq6. jpg

CAPTION: Ashutosh Sabharwal is a professor and department chair in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University and the founder of Rice's Scalable Health Labs. (Photo courtesy of Rice University)

https:/ / sansum. org/ images/ David-Kerr-print. jpg

CAPTION: David Kerr is the director of research and innovation at Sansum Diabetes Research Institute. (Image courtesy of Sansum Diabetes Research Institute)

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The amenities were anything but first class for these star crooners: 35 songbirds were discovered hidden inside hair curlers in a mans clothing when he arrived this week at Kennedy International Airport in New York, the authorities said.

The man, Kevin Andre McKenzie of Guyana, is now facing a federal smuggling charge, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which said that he admitted that he had been offered $3,000 to bring the birds into the country from South America.

The birds were identified as finches by customs agents, who the authorities said had selected Mr. McKenzie, 36, for screening when he arrived on Monday aboard a JetBlue flight from Georgetown, Guyana.

Known for their singing ability, finches have become a valuable commodity in places like Brooklyn and Queens, where the caged birds are pitted in competition against one another, often in parks. The ones that can sing fastest or longest typically win, reaping not only bragging rights for their owners but also gambling money  not to mention scrutiny from law enforcement officers that has led to a string of previous arrests. There is also a premium on vocal ability.
BEVERLY, Mass., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ironhorse Funding LLC announces the opening of its western operations center located in Salt Lake City, UT, to offer extended service hours to clients and customers in mountain and pacific time zones. The new loan operations center is located in American Plaza II, a business center in downtown Salt Lake City. Ironhorse Funding, headquartered in Beverly, MA, is a leading non-prime and sub-prime originator, lender, and servicer for the motorcycle, powersports, RV, and marine industries.

The Ironhorse Funding team located in Salt Lake City has been fully operational since April 2021 and is led by the Director of Operations, Bryan Fenger. This center currently provides underwriting services and in the coming months will be expanded to offer additional dealer and customer support, including collections.

Dan Wilensky, Managing Director of Ironhorse Funding says, "We're excited by the unprecedented growth we've experienced in the past year and this office allows us to better align our operation to meet the needs of our growing national client base throughout the western continental United States. The additional staff also allows us to provide greater support for all our clients, dealers, and borrowers."

In addition to the new office in Salt Lake City, Ironhorse Funding has expanded their Beverly, MA headquarters by 9,500 square feet to over 25,000 square feet to accommodate additional staff needed to support the national business expansion. For over fifteen years, the Ironhorse Funding team has been focused on creating and offering access to financing programs so clients can approve borrowers of every credit profile and supporting those programs with exceptional customer service.

About Ironhorse Funding LLC

Ironhorse Funding delivers access to the most comprehensive and efficient non-prime and sub-prime finance programs in the motorcycle, powersports, RV, and marine industries with a full suite of services to dealers, distributors, and OEMs in these markets as well as direct-to-consumer lending. Currently operating in over 25 states, Ironhorse Funding is in the implementation phase of a national expansion and is expected to be operating nationwide by third quarter of 2021. Ironhorse Funding has originated over 75,000 loans and leases and manages consumer retail installment loans and leases for dealers, distributors, OEMs, investors and financial institutions on indirect, captive, and direct-to-consumer platforms. To learn more, visit https://www.ironhorsefunding.com



This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com.

SOURCE Ironhorse Funding LLC
By Elaine S. Povich, Stateline.org (TNS)

Peggy Klappenberger of Crownsville, Md., has a little game she plays with her two teenage sons. Every time she drives by the hospital where they were born, she points to the window of the room where their birth took place. She makes a point of telling them, over and over, that they are seeing the building where they came into the world.

It may seem like a harmless quirk, but theres a reason its so important to her: Klappenberger doesnt know the name of the hospital where she was born. She doesnt know her original name, either.

When Klappenberger was adopted as an infant, she received a new birth certificate with her new name and the names of her adoptive parents. Shes never seen her original birth certificate, because the state sealed it after her birth mother relinquished her.

Shes intent on getting that certificate  the one that identified her for the first 5-1/2 months of her life. While she has been able to track down some information about her origins, seeing the actual document is important to her; it will show her the name of the hospital, her birth parents names and her original name. But Maryland and most other states make it difficult, if not impossible, for adoptees to see their original certificates.

Nine states allow adoptees over 18 or 21 unrestricted access to their sealed birth records, according to the American Adoption Congress, an interest group. In 19 states and Washington, D.C., the records are sealed and cannot be accessed without a court order. The rest have limited access, restricting the records to those born in certain years or allowing release of only partial information.

In Pennsylvania, adoptees can get a noncertified copy of their original birth records.

This year, lawmakers in about a dozen states considered bills that would make it easier for adoptees to see their original birth certificates. Legislation in Florida and Texas would provide unrestricted access. Texas bill is still under consideration, but Floridas is hanging by a thread. Other state bills would allow access with some restrictions. Several, including Texas, are likely to pass, but others are foundering.

Opponents argue that opening original birth certificates to adoptees violates the rights of birth parents who may not want their identities revealed. In some states with open access, birth parents can file a veto petition with the state, saying they prefer to remain anonymous. Sociological research shows, however, that an overwhelming majority of birth mothers are open to being contacted.

Klappenberger said in a phone interview that she considered going to court but decided to set aside her own needs to push lawmakers to widen access for all adoptees.

Modern DNA science, social media and the internet have made it possible for Klappenberger and many other adoptees to collect information on their birth parents. In Maryland and many other states, there is a confidential intermediary law that allows adoptees seeking information on their birth parents to contact an intermediary, who is generally a state-employed social worker. The intermediary then reaches out to the birth parent or parents, who can decide whether to get in touch with their biological child.

Klappenbergers birth mother sent back word that she did not wish to be contacted. But according to Klappenberger, the conversation with the intermediary revealed a little bit of information  enough that she was able to check some records and come up with a pretty good idea of her birth mothers identity. Klappenberger then used an at-home DNA test kit to confirm her suspicions. She also found a relative of her birth father who told her he had died.

So, with all that information, why does Klappenberger still want her original birth certificate?

As an adoptee, even if you have a terrific [adoptive] family  and I do  at the heart of adoption is loss, she said in a phone interview. The very first thing that happened to me when I was born was the loss of my birth mother. The state of Maryland telling me that I am not allowed to see the record of my very own birth  they are telling me I dont matter, and Ive already had to battle the feelings that I dont matter my whole life.

Klappenberger and a host of other adoptees testified before the Maryland legislature on the bill. A Senate committee approved it, but the full Senate defeated it, much to the disappointment of adoption advocates, who pointed out that children born in Maryland after 2000 have the right to see their original birth document when they turn 21, under a modification of adoption law passed in 2000. They argued that giving all adoptees the same right is a matter of fairness.

Opponents argued that birth mothers who did not want their identities revealed would be the losers, although Maryland birth parents would have had the right to file a veto document to protect their privacy even if the bill passed.

Maryland state Sen. Susan Lee, a Democrat, said she supported the bill because of all the other ways adoptees can find information, among other reasons. Theres no real privacy issue because a child can find out their identity by taking a DNA test, she said in an interview. When a mother gives up her child, she knows there is a possibility now that the child can find out who she is by DNA testing.

Linda Clausen, a licensed clinical social worker who lives in Maryland, agreed. A birth mother who eventually was reunited with both of the sons she relinquished, Clausen argued last year in an Annapolis Capital Gazette column that the original birth certificate is the adoptees. A copy should be in their hands because it is theirs.

But Maryland state Sen. Nancy King, also a Democrat, said in an interview that she opposed the bill because it would have legislated an unfair one-size-fits-all solution for adoptees. King has two adopted grandchildren. One of the childrens birth mothers kept her pregnancy a secret, even from her family and husband.

The mother had a little indiscretion, King said. She didnt want anyone to know about it. She signed the papers and the father signed off.

And yet, King said, her granddaughter found her birth mother through one of the online search things. She sent her an email and got to meet her and stuff. You can do it. But to make it open and mandatory like that, I think they would say forget it and have an abortion.

And as far as privacy goes, Gregory Luce, an attorney and founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center in Minneapolis, argues that getting direct access to a birth certificate is often more private than an internet search, which may turn up distant relatives.

The protection for the information is a very weak argument, he said in a phone interview. What happens when you dont release information [is] you provide incentive for a person to use social media, to use DNA registries, to hire a private investigator. You get matches from cousins, aunts, uncles, half siblings. Then you have conversations about, Who do you know in the family that relinquished a child in 1975?

I represent adoptees. I say to the court, weve got all these matches. We can start down this list of cousins, half siblings, and it becomes much more intrusive, which no one wants. Or you can release the birth record. In every case the court has released the record, he said.

More: U.S. Real ID deadline is pushed to May 2023 because of COVID-19
Health & Beauty



1st 'Your Health Expo' in the Riviera Nayarit, April 30



The event, organized by MedTravel Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit, will gather the best medical specialists, hospitals, and certified clinics in the region together in Sayulita on Friday, April 30. Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico - The Riviera Nayarit is pleased to extend an invitation to the first edition of "Your Health Expo," an event that gathers the best medical specialists, hospitals, and certified clinics in the region. The event will take place on Friday, April 30, from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm, in the public square of Sayulita, a Pueblo Magico.



The Expo is organized by MedTravel Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit, a local association for medical tourism and the international patient industry. This event presents a broad portfolio of clinical services available to the foreign and local community.



According to event organizers, the program will be completely interactive. In addition to providing information to the Sayulita community, residents and locals from nearby communities such as San Pancho, Higuera Blanca, Lo de Marcos, and Guayabitos, in addition to other more distant communities such as Punta de Mita, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Bucerias, and Nuevo Vallarta, have been invited to participate in the event.





'Your Health Expo' will welcome the best medical specialists, hospitals, and certified clinics in the region.



Leading the way in medical tourism



In recent years, the Puerto Vallarta - Riviera Nayarit region has become a benchmark not only for its tourist attractions but also for medical treatments such as cardiology, orthopedics, bariatric surgery, and more.



Every year thousands of American and Canadian citizens travel to this destination for its excellent hospital infrastructure and highly qualified doctors (many of them educated and trained in the United States), which allows them to offer competitive prices. Medical costs are estimated to be between 35 and 9 percent lower than in the U.S.A.



Marc Murphy, managing director of the Riviera Nayarit Convention and Visitors Bureau, noted that this destination is well suited for high-quality health care and medical attention.



"Tourists are treated by highly qualified doctors and nurses, with state-of-the-art medical technology, while enjoying the already well-known amenities of the destination like its excellent climate and healthy, regulated environments. We believe it's time to recognize the relevance of medical tourism and support its promotion at an international level," he said.



For more "Your Health Expo" information call 322-121-1380 or visit



The Riviera Nayarit is a safe destination. Our hotels, restaurants, and tourist establishments follow all the health protocols established by the Federal Governmentas Ministry of Health and operate at the allowed capacities. Access to the beaches is limited. Be a responsible tourist: wear your mask and keep your distance.



Original article - The Riviera Nayarit is pleased to extend an invitation to the first edition of "Your Health Expo," an event that gathers the best medical specialists, hospitals, and certified clinics in the region. The event will take place on Friday, April 30, from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm, in the public square of Sayulita, a Pueblo Magico.The Expo is organized by MedTravel Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit, a local association for medical tourism and the international patient industry. This event presents a broad portfolio of clinical services available to the foreign and local community.According to event organizers, the program will be completely interactive. In addition to providing information to the Sayulita community, residents and locals from nearby communities such as San Pancho, Higuera Blanca, Lo de Marcos, and Guayabitos, in addition to other more distant communities such as Punta de Mita, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Bucerias, and Nuevo Vallarta, have been invited to participate in the event.In recent years, the Puerto Vallarta - Riviera Nayarit region has become a benchmark not only for its tourist attractions but also for medical treatments such as cardiology, orthopedics, bariatric surgery, and more.Every year thousands of American and Canadian citizens travel to this destination for its excellent hospital infrastructure and highly qualified doctors (many of them educated and trained in the United States), which allows them to offer competitive prices. Medical costs are estimated to be between 35 and 9 percent lower than in the U.S.A.Marc Murphy, managing director of the Riviera Nayarit Convention and Visitors Bureau, noted that this destination is well suited for high-quality health care and medical attention."Tourists are treated by highly qualified doctors and nurses, with state-of-the-art medical technology, while enjoying the already well-known amenities of the destination like its excellent climate and healthy, regulated environments. We believe it's time to recognize the relevance of medical tourism and support its promotion at an international level," he said.For more "Your Health Expo" information call 322-121-1380 or visit medtravelpv.com.



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An upcoming scheme will see 50 performing arts freelancers collaborate with organisations to improve work practices.

With 60 per cent of London's freelancers having lost all of their income during the pandemic, the project aims to build sustainable models for the freelance community to prevent more calamities like the one seen over the last year.

Fifty freelancers will be assembled from early May to work with a variety of organisations including the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, the Barbican, Battersea Arts Centre, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, the Old Vic and the Young Vic to bolster provisions for the self-employed.

Jessica Antwi-Boasiako will faciliate the project, with Charlotte Mafham, Marie Wilson and Miranda Yates also part of the scheme.

An advisory group of Jamie Beddard, Lily Einhorn, Lilli Geissendorfer, Ameena Hamid, James Hodgson, Tarek Iskander, Jeanefer Jean-Charles, Jennifer Jackson Chi-chi Nwanoku and Jo Tyabji will assist.

The freelance community has had a particularly fraught time during the pandemic  a significant portion have found they are ineligible for the government's Self-Employment Income Support Scheme and, as a result, received very little by way of direct state support while venues remain closed and opportunities are sparse.

Almost 92 per cent of organisations recently surveyed said they were "extremely" or "very" concerned about the freelance workforce's imminent decline if this lack of support continues, while 80 per cent said that freelancers are essential to their long term recovery plans.
The adoption of the amendments to the Land Code of Ukraine is a critical step towards an open and transparent agricultural land market, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said.

"The Rada's adoption of draft law No. 2194 is a critical step towards an open and transparent agricultural land market. When enacted, the law advances decentralization and removes opportunities for corruption. Draft laws No. 2195, No. 3205 are important measures still awaiting Rada action," the embassy said on Thursday.

As reported, the Verkhovna Rada approved amendments to the Land Code and other laws to improve the management and deregulation system in land relations. Some 284 MPs voted at second reading for relevant daft law No. 2194 on amendments to the Land Code and other laws on improving the management and deregulation system in land relations. The daft law received 3,128 proposals and amendments, mainly from MPs from the Opposition Platform - For Life and Batkivschyna factions.
Bangladesh on Thursday approved the emergency use of China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, two days after allowing Russia's Sputnik amidst concern over the availability of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India. The development came as health officials reported 88 deaths in the country due to the coronavirus in one day, taking the total number of fatalities to 11,393.

Directorate General of Drug Administration Major General Mahbubur Rahman told reporters here that the Bangladesh government has issued the emergency use approval for the Sinopharm vaccine. The Chinese vaccine would be procured through the government-to government (G2G) agreement while talks were also underway on manufacturing Sinopharm in Bangladesh itself, he said.

In the last one day, as many as 2,341 people tested positive for the COVID-19, bringing down the infection rate to 9.39 per cent with official statistics suggesting the positivity rate to come down below 10 per cent after 40 days. Health officials earlier said that the second wave of the coronavirus prompted the government to allow the use of Russian and Chinese vaccines though they were yet to get the World Health Organisation (WHO) approval. The WHO, however, said it was expecting to reach a decision on Sinopharm vaccine by the end of the week.

"They (China) by now gave as gift 0.5 million doses which is expected to reach by next two weeks ahead of finalising the procurement arrangement exhausting the official formalities," Rahman said.

According to officials, Russia proposed to co-produce its Sputnik vaccine in Bangladesh but the proposal was yet to be finalised. Three Bangladeshi pharmaceutical companies have the vaccine producing capacities while "the Chinese and Russians will come and inspect the plants" ahead of reaching any co-production arrangement.

Dhaka started vigorously hunting for other vaccine sources, including China, fearing it could run out of vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India, the worlds biggest vaccine manufacturer. Bangladesh purchased 30 million doses of India-made vaccine and under an agreement, received seven million doses in two consignments until February while the third consignment, which was expected in March, is yet to reach. India, however, provided Bangladesh 3.2 million doses as a gift.

Image Credits: AP

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
The pandemic put a halt to travel to many parts of the world. Some countries are not accepting international travelers at all, while others set strenuous restrictions that effectively take leisure travel off the table. Meanwhile, major destinations like Rome, Tokyo and Bangkok have seen dramatic reductions in the number of foreign tourists. At the same time, theres a pent-up demand for vacation travel, especially among newly vaccinated people.

Mexico is one of the relatively few places in the world where there has been an increase in tourism over the course of the pandemic. In a report by the travel booking site Skyscanner released yesterday, Cancun rose a jaw-dropping 42 spots in its rankings of the most-searched global destinations between 2019 and 2021  the most significant increase of any place in the world. It is now the fourth most-searched destination on the planet, according to Skyscanner.

Among Californians in particular, Mexico is a wildly popular getaway. While overland border crossing remains prohibited for nonessential travel, nonessential plane travel between the two countries is allowed (while heavily discouraged). And Mexicos proximity to the U.S. may make it feel like a safer, better option than places farther afield.

Getty Images

Is flying to Mexico as a tourist advised?

According to the U.S. State Departments April 20 travel advisory, the answer is a definitive no. Because of COVID-19, the State Department issued its highest level warning for the country, the Red (or Level 4) Do Not Travel warning.

The State Department referred potential travelers to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, which pointed to Mexicos startlingly high number of COVID-19 cases (2,333,126 confirmed as of April 27). The country also has one of the highest death rates in the world, surpassed only by Brazil and the U.S. in total number of deaths.

And while the State Department warnings cite the Mexican governments documented coronavirus cases and deaths, it is widely believed those numbers are a significant undercount  a belief reinforced by a recent revision in the data that increased the total deaths by some 60%, according to a BBC report.

Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press

What is Mexico's vaccination rate?

Mexico's vaccination effort has been a bumpy road, according to a recent Associated Press story detailing its successes and struggles. Wealthy Mexicans are traveling to the United States to be vaccinated, according to a recent Los Angeles Times story. According to the New York Times's vaccination tracker, Mexico has fully vaccinated only 4.8% of its population and partially vaccinated 9.5%, compared to the 29% and 43% of the United States population that is partially and fully vaccinated, respectively.

As part of its phased rollout, Mexico is still only vaccinating people ages 60 and up. Within the next couple days, that is supposed to open up to people over 50, then people over 40 beginning in May and the remaining population through March of 2022.

What if Im vaccinated? Can I travel to Mexico then?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the answer is still sadly no. Or, at least, you shouldn't.

Because of the current situation in Mexico even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Mexico, reads the CDC advisory for vaccinated travelers to the country, last updated April 2, 2021.

That recommendation, however, does seem to be in some conflict with other recent CDC guidelines. On April 2, the CDC made a major update to recommendations for fully vaccinated travelers, allowing for international travel. The CDC guidance was updated again Tuesday, walking back some of its caution-throwing (perhaps in reaction to Indias devastating outbreak) and emphasizing the increased risk posed by international travel, even for fully vaccinated travelers, while not going so far as to recommend against it.

Fully vaccinated travelers are less likely to get and spread COVID-19, instructed the CDC. However, international travel poses additional risks and even fully vaccinated travelers are at increased risk for getting and possibly spreading new COVID-19 variants.

Whats it like to travel in Mexico during the pandemic?

Mexico is a large country. So, as in the U.S., COVID-19 impacts different regions in different ways at different times. And, like California, the country relies on a tiered system of travel and other restrictions based on how badly the pandemic is impacting a particular state or city.

There are currently no states under the most restrictive red tier. There are, however, six states that are designated as orange, which means many services, including hotels, and restaurants, parks and gyms are operating at 50% capacity while markets operate at 75% and malls, theaters, museums and cultural events are limited to 25%m.

Those orange tier states include three of the countrys major tourist destinations: Quintana Roo, which is home to Cancun, Baja California Sur, where Cabo San Lucas is located, and Mexico City.

It also includes the states of Chihuahua, Hidalgo and Tabasco. These tiers will be reevaluated May 9.

The CDC advises that travelers check region-specific guidance, which can be found on the U.S. Embassys page.

Does Mexico impose any entry restrictions on tourists from the U.S.?

Very few, in fact. Mexico requires neither a negative COVID-19 test no quarantine upon arrival.

Beginning March 21, 2020, travelers from the United States have been restricted from crossing the U.S.-Mexico land border for nonessential reasons. That agreement, made between the two countries, was just extended April 20 and will remain in place until at least May 21, 2021.

The best place to find updated information on entry and exit restrictions is the U.S. Embassy of Mexicos COVID-19 Entry and Exit Requirements.

Alan Solomon/TNS

What happens if I contract COVID-19 in Mexico?

For those who get sick with or test positive for the coronavirus while abroad, there are a few possible outcomes  and none of them are good.

First, anyone boarding a plane to the United States must have either a negative COVID-19 test within three days of reentering the country or be able to show that they have recovered from an infection within the past three months. According to the Jan. 21 executive order by President Biden, that includes U.S. citizens  even those who are fully vaccinated.

In practice, that means that contracting COVID-19 while abroad means you wont be allowed to board a plane home. Instead, youll be required to quarantine where you are until youre virus-free. If youre staying in a pricey resort, you may be stuck footing the bill for anywhere from 10 days to significantly longer, depending on how long it takes you to test negative and get medical clearance to travel. And should you get badly sick, you will need to receive treatment abroad. In a country like Mexico, that might mean inadequate care due to the large number of cases already burdening the medical system.

There have been multiple horror stories reported in the press about U.S. citizens unable to return home after a positive test while on vacation in Mexico, including some cases that involve fully vaccinated people.

What if I decide to go anyway?

While the CDC and every other U.S. government agency is currently strongly advising against travel to Mexico, it does offer some guidance for those who choose to travel anyway.

If you must travel to Mexico, get fully vaccinated before travel. All travelers should wear a mask, stay 6 feet from others, avoid crowds, and wash their hands.

While fully vaccinated travelers should continue to follow CDC recommendations for traveling safely and get tested three to five days after travel, they do not need to get tested before leaving the country, unless required by the destination, and they do not need to self-quarantine upon their return.
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The unwillingness of victims to testify against their assailants is responsible for the low conviction rates for rape, Isaiah Odje, a lawyer, has said.

In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in Lagos, on Thursday, Mr Odje said that unwillingness was a major factor posing great challenges in prosecuting defilement and rape cases to the level of conviction.

Low conviction rate is as a result of the victims and their parents unwillingness to report and diligently prosecute the cases.

The case will be thrown out and the offender will go free and continue in the act, he said.

He said many victims could be reluctant to report or testify against the offenders for various reasons that could include shame and stigmatisation, threat, family exposure and fear of reprisal, among others.

Some refuse if the abuser is a family member and may not want to hurt them, so as to preserve the relationship.

Sexually abused victims are often threatened by the perpetrators. Threat of violence, death against them or family members can also make them reluctant to speak.

Many victims withdraw from testifying because of embarrassment and shame, as people will know that they had experienced sexual violence, he said.

According to him, some offenders even settle the victims family to escape justice.

Most culprits bribe victims or family with money so as to stop the charges against them.

Some sexually abused teens are discouraged when they are being blamed for their own victimisation.

Victims are always intimidated by family members not to press charges because of stigmatisation, he said.

He advised victims not to be intimidated, but to speak up and testify in order to get justice and help other rape victims, while the society should encourage and provide support for victims.

Mr Odje also advised mothers to speak up and stop covering up for husbands who raped their daughters, just because they wanted to save their marriage. (NAN)
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The Hershey Company (HSY) said it now expects full-year adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $6.79 to $6.92, an increase of 8% to 10% from $6.29 in fiscal 2020, and an increase from the previously communicated range of 6% to 8%. Full-year net sales growth is now expected to be in the range of 4% to 6%, an increase from the previously communicated range of 2% to 4%. First quarter adjusted earnings per share was $1.92, an increase of 17.8%. Consolidated net sales were $2.30 billion, an increase of 12.7%. Organic, constant currency net sales increased 12.9%. 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.
The Hudson County Prosecutors Office has initiated an investigation into a shooting incident by Jersey City police early Thursday morning.

The shooting incident occurred in the area of Bergen and Oxford avenues at 1:10 a.m., the prosecutors office said Thursday. It was noted that no one was struck by the gunfire in the incident that was related to a traffic stop.

It is standard procedure for the prosecutors offices Shooting Response Team to investigate all police-involved shooting incidents. The state Attorney Generals Office also has been notified of the incident and investigation.

The prosecutors office released few details on the incident, but said during the course of the motor vehicle stop one of the officers discharged his weapon, striking a vehicle.
Vice President and House Speaker have made history as they shared the stage during President Joe Biden's first joint session to Congress, marking the first time that two women sat behind a US president during an address to Congress.

Harris, 56, who is also the first Indian-American and also the first Black woman to become America's Vice President, sat behind on the president's right side as he delivered his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

Pelosi, 81, who became the first woman in her role in 2007, sat behind on the President's left.

Harris entered the House chamber Wednesday night to a round of applause for Biden's address to Congress.

When asked about the significance of two women sitting behind the President for the address, Harris replied, "Normal," to reporters in the Capitol as she led the Senate delegation to the House chamber.

Asked her view on the historic moment, Pelosi told MSNBC on Wednesday, "It's about time."



"It's pretty exciting. And it's wonderful to make history. It's about time," Pelosi said hours before the speech.

Pelosi already knows what it feels like to sit on the rostrum in the House chamber and introduce a president for speeches. She has sat there for several addresses by Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

In his opening remarks, Biden paid tribute to the historic nature of his vice president, the first woman to serve in that role in American history.

"Thank you all -- Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President," the President said. "From this podium, no president's ever said those words -- and it's about time."



"For the first time in American history, behind the President when he speaks, will be two women: a woman vice president, and a woman speaker of the House. Presidents have been addressing Congress since George Washington did it," White House chief of staff Ron Klain said during a conversation with Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service.

"It wasn't until 14 years ago that the first time one of those seats was filled by a woman. So it took a long time to get to that milestone. Fourteen years later, for the first time, there'll be two women behind the President."



The symbolic seating also connotes the first time that women are first and second in the presidential line of succession, a sign of women in power in their respective roles, CNN 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.)
Martha Koome has pledged to serve Kenyans to the best of her ability after the Judicial Service Commission nominated her to be the next Chief Justice.

You are in safe hands and I thank God you prayed for me, she said on Tuesday shortly after her nomination.

Koome, who will become Kenyas first female Chief Justice once President Kenyatta approves her appointment, attributed her nomination to God.

This is the hand of the Lord. I am a servant of the Lord and I see this is a higher calling from the Lord for me to serve people.

I have so many people who prayed for me, especially the children at Imani Childrens Home who dedicated every Tuesday to praying for me. It is the doing of the Lord, she said.

Madam Chief Justice Koome also issued a statement on Wednesday saying she was honoured and grateful to the Judicial Service Commission for nominating her to succeed David Maraga.

It will indeed be an honour and a great privilege for me to serve this great country as the Chief Justice if confirmed to the office, he said.

I appreciate this was after a thorough, rigorous and a very competitive process that saw some of the best legal minds come forward as capable candidates demonstrating their willingness to serve Kenyans.

As l continue to prepare for the next stage, l wish to convey my profound gratitude to all well-wishers who encouraged and prayed for me. I continue to thank God and seek your prayers as I go through the confirmation process, she said.

I wish to assure Kenyans of my unwavering commitment to serve them to the best of my abilities.
DANBURY  Most court matters are now being handled remotely, but the coronavirus pandemics hold on jury trials has not waned.

The postponement of trials in Connecticut state courts due to COVID has stalled a number of cases, including that of James Maharg.

The 67-year-old Sherman man is facing murder and evidence tampering charges stemming from the death of his husband, Thomas Conley, two years ago.

Maharg  who pleaded not guilty to both charges  has been behind bars since March 2019, after police responded to his Church Road home and found Conleys body at the bottom of a staircase.

Police said in their report the fatal incident was the culmination of months of escalating trouble for the couple.

Maharg told police they had been drinking several bottles of tequila a day as a way of dealing with their failing fashion retail supply business and the fact that they were losing their 20-acre farmhouse to the bank, according to the warrant for his arrest.

Authorities said Conley was found with two wounds to the top of his scalp  the more pronounced of the two being a gaping gash approximately two inches wide and four inches long.

Conley allegedly said something nasty to Maharg in the kitchen and Maharg pushed him, causing Conley to fall backwards into a cabinet shelf, police said.

Maharg stated he must have struck the victim in the head at some point during this time, however he could not provide us with the object or the exact time frame, according to Mahargs arrest warrant.

Maharg, whose case is being handled at state Superior Court in Danbury, remains in custody on $2 million bond.

He is being held at the Cheshire Correctional Institution and awaiting trial  but its unclear when that will happen.

His case is currently on what his attorney, John Walkley, calls the trial list.

If a case cant be resolved with a plea and it looks like its going to have to be tried because theres not a meeting of the minds on a disposition, it means that its probably going to have to be tried at some point, so it goes on a list of cases to be tried, Walkley said.

While its possible that another hearing  or at least a conference with the judge  will take place in Mahargs case, Walkley said, there is no upcoming court appearance currently scheduled.

In the meantime, Walkley said hes been preparing for his clients trial  whenever that may be.

We have no idea when trials are going to resume, and we dont know where this case falls on the trial list, he said. We dont know which case is going to be tried next or third or 10th.

The Connecticut Judicial Branch announced earlier this month that all jury services in the state have been suspended until at least May 31.
Europe's Vega rocket took off overnight Wednesday from French Guiana with Earth observation satellites on board, six months after losing two satellites.

The rocket left Kourou in French Guiana at around 10:50 pm local time (0150 GMT), with the mission lasting just under two hours.

The launch comes half a year after the operation lost French and Spanish satellites when the rocket fell into the sea on November 17 after a technical malfunction.

The April 28 to 29 launch carried Pleiades Neo 3, the first high resolution satellite of a new Earth observation constellation operated by Airbus.

The rocket is also carrying some lighter payload, including a Norwegian observation microsatellite used to detect radar for maritime navigation.

The Pleiades Neo satellites will offer improved geolocation tools which will help during natural disasters, according to launch provider Arianespace.

The launch is the third this year from the Kourou space centre and the 18th from a Vega.

The Vega rocket is a crucial component of Europe's ambitions to compete in the booming aerospace market, where it faces strong competition from rivals including Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Explore further Vega rocket launches from French Guiana

 2021 AFP
Key Executives of the Atebubu-Amanten NPP Council of Elders; Mr Adjei Mathew, Chairman of the Council of Elders and Mr. Gyan John, Secretary of the Council of Elders have granted an interview to a local radio stations in Atebubu-Amanten to diassociate themselves from an earlier Press Conference that was done by some members of the Atebubu-Amanten NPP Council of Elders.



Some few days ago, a group of people known as members of the Atebubu-Amanten NPP Council of Elders, led by Mr Alfred Antwi did a Press Conference calling on the President of Ghana, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo not to reappoint their incumbent MCE, Hon. Edward Owusu.



During the press conference, they alleged among other things that; their MCE, Hon. Edward Owusu does not have very good relationship with the rank and file of the party, he is divisive, he has not been able solve their long standing water crisis, he has taken his wife and kids to the United Kingdom so that they would not feel the hardship of the water crisis, he has amassed wealth and currently has over thirty(30) tipper trucks, etc.



However, during an interview on a local radio station in Atebubu-Amanten, the Chairman and the Secretary of the Atebubu-Amanten NPP Council of Elders diassociated themselves from the said Press Conference



In unison, the duo said they are not aware of any Press Conference by the Constituency Council of Elders. They maintained that they being key members of the Council of Elders, thus Chairman and Secretary, nothing of that sort could happen without their prior knowledge. As Council, they have not held any meeting to discuss the organisation of any such Press Conference so the public should disregard the said Press Conference.



Moreover, they maintained that, as Council of Elders, their core mandate is to ensure that there is peace and unity in the party in order for the party to be more appealing to the public so that they could win elections, however, the purported Press Conference would rather bring division in the party therefore, they disassociate themselves and condemn it without mincing words



Again, they maintained that even if those elders of the party who had the Press Conference has any reservation about the MCE, the party has several internal mechanisms that could be explored in order to address their concerns amicably but the Press Conference was indeed a bad option since that is tantamount to the "washing of our dirty clothes in the public".



The duo again maintained that, as key members of the Party, they can say without equivocation that the current MCE, Hon. Edward Owusu has done his best in terms of Infrastructural development. He also has a very good working relationship with the rank and file of the party and they do not have any problem with him



The duo concluded by saying that they recognise that the President is the only one mandated to appoint an MCE and it is only one person that would get appointed and whoever gets appointed, in the interest of the party, they and the rank and file of the party would support the person



They therefore pleaded with all the party members to cease fire and desist from Press Conferences and behaviours that would bring disunity in the party since "divided, we fall but together, we stand"

Source: Kwabena Manu/Peace fm/Bono East correspondent.









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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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:49:07|Editor: huaxia

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HANGZHOU, April 29 (Xinhua) -- At a workshop in Haibo Group, the team leader's first task each morning was to assign job duties, which could often take an hour or more. Now with a few clicks, assigning the workload can be done within two minutes.

Haibo Group, in Ningbo City, east China's Zhejiang Province, has been using Alibaba's communication app DingTalk since 2018. The new tool has significantly improved work efficiency and lowered costs, according to Lin Yaozuan, general manager of Haibo Group.

"More and more Chinese traditional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like us are beginning to feel the crunch of low efficiency in production and enterprise management," said Lin, stressing the urgency of implementing digital transformation.

"The most important step is to digitize our experiences," said He Shaojie, president of the group.

Now workers can browse their work arrangements, salary and performance via the digital tool, freeing themselves from the tedious work of the past.

"Being able to see performance on the phone in real time is not only helpful to our daily work, but can also impassion us," said Chen Bo, a worker in Haibo.

Inclution is a digital transformation service provider founded in Hangzhou, Zhejiang's capital, in 2018. Over the past three years, it has grown into one of the largest professional MES (Manufacturing Execution System) service provider for SMEs in the manufacturing sector in China.

"I was so excited when our users reached 100 because it demonstrated the increasing recognition of our product," said Wang Kefei, CEO of Inclution. Now that their registered users have exceeded 500, the excitement has become "more of a sense of responsibility."

At a valve manufacturing company in Zhejiang, such technology helped lower the value of warehouse inventory dramatically.

China is speeding up digitalization in the manufacturing sector. As outlined in the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives through the Year 2035, China will promote the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, and empower the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, so as to spur economic growth.

"SMEs' demand for digital transformation is very urgent," said Wang. "We're working with these companies to search for areas that can be optimized, especially to tackle common problems in production, procurement, inventory and error-prone piecework." Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 00:30:58|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, April 29 (Xinhua) -- African heads of state and government on Thursday renewed commitment to eradicate hunger and malnutrition that has derailed socio-economic progress on the continent.

Speaking at the High-Level Dialogue on Feeding Africa virtual forum, the leaders said it was possible for the continent to achieve hunger-free status subject to the transformation of agricultural systems through leveraging on technology, financing, irrigation and improved post-harvest management.

Macky Sall, President of Senegal said that Africa's ability to achieve food and nutrition security hinged on scaling up climate-smart farming combined with access to capital, markets and technology for smallholder farmers.

"Establishing resilient food systems in the continent is imperative given the hunger and malnutrition crisis that has been worsened by climate change and COVID-19 pandemic," said Sall.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in partnership with the Forum for Agriculture Research in Africa (FARA) and the CGIAR System Organization, co-organized the event.

Akinwumi Adesina, President of AfDB said the aim of the two-day forum to be held from Thursday to Friday is to galvanize political goodwill required to revitalize the food security agenda in a continent where about 246 million people suffer from hunger.

"The continent must scale up efforts to feed its growing population while promoting environmental sustainability," said Adesina.

"Strong and accountable political leadership, policy reforms, investing in research, technology and innovations is key to transform farming systems and boost crop yield," he added.

Adesina said that empowering African small-holder farmers who produce nearly 80 percent of food in the continent should be at the heart of hunger eradication programs.

Sahle-Work Zewde, President of Ethiopia said the high-level dialogue summit will provide a platform for African leaders, policymakers and scholars to share best practices that can be harnessed to hasten the realization of the zero hunger goal.

"Dialogue is required to develop a new roadmap for the realization of sustainable development goals on hunger eradication in the continent. We need to harness technologies that boost food production," said Zewde.

She said that the COVID-19 pandemic reminded African leaders of the urgency to strengthen the resilience of food systems amid disruptions to key value chains that suppressed the availability of staples.

Gilbert Houngbo, President of IFAD said that African countries should prioritize domestic resource mobilization, improved land-use practices and adoption of climate-resilient crops in order to end the hunger and malnutrition crisis.

"Incentivising the local private sector could help bridge a financing gap that has slowed down agricultural transformation in Africa," said Houngbo.

He said that governments should encourage small-holder farmers to take up crop insurance alongside nature-based climate adaptation models in order to sustain the production of key staples like maize, rice and legumes.

Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana said that diversification, mechanization and greater farmers' outreach could unlock the potential of Africa's agriculture to achieve food security and boost rural incomes. Enditem
Some budgets are about bringing home the bacon. This one is about chickens coming home to roost. The budget will include more money for residential aged care to act on the royal commission, with more home care packages to keep older Australians at home as well. But this is complex. The debate had to consider how far the home care should go  not just on health, but on companion care or property maintenance. The budget will include more funding for aged care. Credit:Virginia Star Spending will rise on the National Disability Insurance Scheme to reflect demand for help, but the government will go ahead with independent assessments to check claims. The main obstacle is former Labor leader Bill Shorten, now the spokesman on the NDIS, an area he knows well. The governments new minister in the portfolio, Linda Reynolds, has her work cut out for her when she asks the Senate to vote for independent assessments.

Childcare is another spending target. The government has to catch up with Labor leader Anthony Albanese, who promised $6.2 billion more for childcare last October, but it may not need to go as far in helping families on big incomes. Loading Right now, government childcare assistance phases out at household incomes of about $350,000 a year. Labor would lift that to $530,000 a year. The government might be more helpful to most families while asking Albanese a question: why are you being so generous to those at the very top? These are no small challenges, so the mystery of the week was the dangerous talk of war with China. Defence Minister Peter Dutton did not start a debate about war on Insiders last Sunday: asked by host David Speers about a battle over Taiwan, he said it could not be discounted. He was realistic. The folly came when an unelected official, Mike Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, sent an email to staff, leaked to many, that spoke of the drums of war and the lessons of the 1930s. He did not mention China but did not need to: how else could anyone interpret a reference to that decade of appeasement with a totalitarian aggressor?

Mike Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen It does Dutton no credit that so many observers think he needs Pezzullo by his side as secretary of the Department of Defence, teaming them up again. That will depend on Morrison, who did not approve Pezzullos remarks. The Prime Minister thinks, rightly, that this sort of commentary is the domain of elected leaders. Some ministers think the mess will make it harder for Pezzullo to get the job transfer he wants. Loading But the budget takes priority, with the sort of big spending and big deficit that the government would ridicule in a world without COVID-19. And the ultimate judgment on this document will be about whether it delivers what it promises on growth. Frydenberg has reset his ambition on growth in the light of an economic rebound that took everyone by surprise. The unemployment rate fell to 5.6 per cent in March  an astonishingly good result. Frydenberg has made a sensible decision to adjust fiscal policy to get that rate below 5 per cent.

Can it be done? ANZ chief economist David Plank says it is not unobtainable but depends on keeping growth above its trend level. We do think reductions in unemployment will be much harder to achieve once it is back to pre-COVID levels of close to 5 per cent, he says. Thats in part because of skill and location mismatches and other frictions in the labour market. EY chief economist Jo Masters says the new unemployment target is the right one when so many people are still dealing with the economic shock from the recession. Wages growth will depend on the outcome. She points out the United States only just started to see wages growth when it got unemployment to 3.5 per cent before the pandemic. Setting an unemployment target below 5 per cent is considered reasonable. Credit: Mayu Kanamori The other target should be under-employment, which includes those who want to work more hours. This was 7.9 per cent last month. When the unemployment rate is added to this, the result is an under-utilisation rate of 13.5 per cent.
Revealing the Indigenous super-highways of ancient Australia. Credit: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH).

'Superhighways' used by a population of up to 6.5 million Indigenous Australians to navigate the continent tens of thousands of years ago have been revealed by new research using sophisticated modelling of past people and landscapes.

The new insights into how people not only survived, but thrived, in harsh environments provide further evidence of the capacity and resilience of the ancestors of Indigenous people, and help paint a picture of large, well-organised groups navigating tough terrain.

The 'peopling' of Sahulthe combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were lower than todaycould have taken as little as 5,000 years as people moved from the far northwest, all the way to Tasmania in the southeast.

Models also predict that the total population of Sahul could have reached as much as 6.5 million people, according to the studies led by researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH).

Many Aboriginal cultures believe people have always been here, while others have strong oral histories of ancestral beings arriving from the north.

While there are many hypotheses about where, how and when Indigenous Australians first settled in Sahul, archaeological evidence is scarce.

Now, a group of multidisciplinary experts have collaborated to investigate these questions using state-of-the-art modelling techniques, with the findings published in two companion papers in Nature Communications and Nature Human Behaviour.

Real-world data about long-distance dispersal of people, human survival, fertility rates and the chance of natural disasters were used in combination with principles of human ecology and behaviour and with anthropological, ecological and environmental data to model the peopling of Sahul, in the Nature Communications study led by Professor Corey Bradshaw, CABAH Chief Investigator at Flinders University.

Data for the 10 million km2 super-continent were used to develop a simulation model and run more than 120 scenarios to predict population size and growth rate.

Strongest support was found for the arrival of people 50,000 or 75,000 years ago, with the average establishment rate of 1 km per year emerging from the model giving rise to a maximum population of up to 6.5 million people.

"Guided by Indigenous knowledge, we are coming to appreciate the complexity, prowess, capacity and resilience of the ancestors of Indigenous people in Australia," Professor Bradshaw said.

"The more we look into the deep past, the more we understand that many people have long underestimated the ingenuity of these extraordinary cultures."

To investigate travel pathways across Sahul, an international team of archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, geneticists, geologists, and computer scientists built the most complete digital elevation model ever constructed for the continent, including areas now underwater.

The model featured in the sister paper in Nature Human Behaviour allowed researchers to understand what early people would have seenparticularly prominent land features within a relatively flat landscape.

Other factors, including the physiological capacity of people, difficulty of the terrain, and availability of water were also included.

"If it's a new landscape and we don't have a map, we're going to want to know how to move efficiently throughout a space, where to find water, and where to campand we'll orient ourselves based on high points around the lands," said superhighways lead author, archaeologist and computational social scientist Stefani Crabtree, a CABAH Associate Investigator, Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor at Utah State University.

The scientists identified and tested more than 125 billion possible pathways using rigorous computational analysis in the largest movement-simulation project ever attempted, with the pathways compared with the oldest known archaeological sites to help to distinguish the most likely routes.

The patterns that emerged formed distinct 'superhighways' across the continent, as well as secondary routes.

Several of the identified superhighways echo well-documented Aboriginal trade routes criss-crossing the countryincluding the trade of pituri native tobacco from Cape York to South Australia via Birdsville, and the trade of Kimberley baler shell into central Australia.

"Australia's not only the driest, but also the flattest populated continent on Earth," explained CABAH Deputy Director, Distinguished Professor Sean Ulm from James Cook University.

"Our research shows that prominent landscape features and water sources were critical for people to navigate and survive on the continent.

"In many Aboriginal societies, landscape features are believed to have been created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Every ridgeline, hill, river, beach and water source is named, storied and inscribed into the very fabric of societies, emphasising the intimate relationship between people and place. The landscape is literally woven into peoples' lives and their histories. It seems that these relationships between people and Country probably date back to the earliest peopling of the continent."

Professor Lynette Russell, CABAH Deputy Director and Co-Chair of its Indigenous Advisory Committee, said:

"This modelling established the infrastructure for detailed local and regional studies to engage respectfully with Indigenous knowledges, ethnographies, historical records, oral histories and archives."

The results of these new studies suggest that there are fundamental rules people follow as they move into new landscapes, and that these same approaches could shed light on other major migrations in human history, such as the first waves of migration out of Africa at least 120,000 years ago.

Future work could inform the search for undiscovered archaeological sites, or even apply the techniques to forecast the movements of human migration in the near future, as populations flee drowning coastlines and climate disruptions.

Explore further Island-hopping study shows the most likely route the first people took to Australia
(Natural News) Legislators in Oregon have introduced a new legislative bill that would make it a crime for residents to raise livestock animals like cows and pigs for food.

IP13 would reclassify all animal husbandry practices as sexual assault, specifying that animals could only be eaten in Oregon if they died of natural causes. This would effectively turn Oregon into a forced vegetarian state as meat taken from animals that are already dead is rotten and thus unsafe to eat.

Should IP13 pass and get signed into law, it would turn Oregons 12,000 beef producers, which raise roughly 1.3 million head of cattle, into criminals. All traditional ranches and farms would also be shut down and presumably turned into fake meat farms run by eugenicist technocrats like Bill Gates.

Oregon voters would have to approve the bill first before it reaches the desk of Kate Brown, the states head tyrant. IP13 would be presented to voters in the form of an initiative during the next election.

This effort to criminalize all forms of ranching and animal food production is part of the insane lunacy of left-wing nut jobs who also want to outlaw combustion engines and pollute the stratosphere to block the sun and collapse the global food supply, reports SGT Report.

In summary, the attacks on food abundance are being engineered from multiple vectors.

Eugenicist technocrats also want to block out the sun and ban your farm equipment

Similar legislation is being proposed in other states such as Colorado, which like Oregon is a heavy ranching and farming state. The goal in every state is to force the populace to replace meat with meat-like substitutes made from genetically modified (GMO) plants and other poisons.

There is also an effort afoot to block out the sun and geoengineer the weather, supposedly to prevent global warming and climate change. The real purpose, however, is to block photosynthesis of food crops in order to starve the entire country.

In case that is all not enough, eugenicist technocrats are also pushing to ban combustion engines and other technologies used in modern farming equipment. Should they be successful, food would become increasingly scarce and a whole lot more expensive.

And let us not forget the Mark of the Beast initiative such as biometric hand scanning at the grocery checkout, which is already being deployed at Whole Foods Market stores throughout the Seattle area.

According to the SGT Report, the purpose of this conversion to cashless is to control what types of food, as well as how much of it, people are allowed to purchase. This writer would argue that the plan is also to create a system of global governance in which the privilege of eating is completely controlled by the globalists.

Even vegans and vegetarians will be impacted by this system, as well as by the growing restrictions on farming that threaten the things they eat as well.

And yet the same left-wing lunatics who want to outlaw the slaughter of animals are thrilled to slaughter human babies via abortion, the SGT Report explains, pointing out a glaring double standard.

Because theres no one more oblivious to human rights than an animal rights activist, it seems. They also support the maiming of the genitalia of human youngsters, since chemical castration of young boys in the name of LGBT progressivism is considered a positive thing by these lunatics, but castrating a bull will soon be a criminal act.

Be sure to check out the latest Health Ranger Report (HHR) update on these threats below:

More of the latest news about the relentless assault on food freedom in this country can also be found at Tyranny.news.

Sources for this article include:

TheDuran.com

NaturalNews.com

SGTReport.com
Google I/O is the popular annual developer event of the search engine giant. And now, its upcoming I/O 2021 conference is about to take place.

But, before that happens, here are the major updates it could announce. Previously, some speculations and rumors provided that new Google products and innovations could arrive.

Now, Google confirmed some of its upcoming products and software updates, with the company also releasing a blog schedule to help the viewers know what is coming to them.

Google I/O 2021 Registration's Guide and Details

According to Android Central's latest report, the search engine giant's newly released event schedule contains the conference's meetups, workshops, and keynotes.

Also Read: Google vs. Microsoft Q1 2021 Earnings: Who is the Top Earner? Big Tech Prevail Amidst Pandemic

If you want to register, all you need to do is click this link.

Once you are there, you will see a Register button, which is located in the upper right corner of your tab.

After that, all you have to do is create a Google account, or simply sign in using your existing Google account. Aside from these, you can also click the Filters option (the three-line inverted pyramid symbol) to check the listed topics, types, level, and region.

As of the moment, the upcoming event is only available in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, and European regions. Meanwhile, you can also choose various topics such as Chrome OS, Flutter, Google Assistant, Design, and more.

Schedule and What to Expect

Android Police reported that the upcoming Google I/O 2021 event will take place on May 18 at exactly 1:00 PM ET.

On the other hand, one of the things that fans could expect are the updates on Wear OS and Google Tiles.

Recently, the tech giant company released its Tiles feature to third-party developers. Thanks to Google's decision, its Tiles platform now has more features and other functionalities.

Aside from these, Google will also discuss its upcoming foldable smartphones and other models with large screens, which the company has been working on with Microsoft for quite some time now. If you want to know more details about the upcoming Google I/O 2021, all you need to do is click here.

For more news updates about Google and its upcoming innovations, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: Google to Look at 'Hybrid' Work Setup After $1B in Savings Due to 'Work-from-Home' During the Pandemic

This article is owned by TechTimes

Written by: Griffin Davis

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenia will acquire 1 million doses of vaccine against COVID-19 from Russia, Caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said during todays Cabinet meeting, adding that there is already a respective agreement.

Talks are underway also for bringing much more vaccines to Armenia from other partners. And imagine that we bring them, spend huge state resources, and later it will turn out that we are not being vaccinated in principle. It will turn out to be very bad, it will be a double, triple bad effect. Therefore, we should not pay attention to the speculations over the vaccines, he said.

As for the reports that Armenia has brought a vaccine against COVID-19 which expires in May, Pashinyan said everything has its expiry date, adding that citizens will be vaccinated with a vaccine which will not be out of date.

On April 26 Armenia has been supplied with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, envisaged for 14,000 people. On March 28, the first batch of AstraZeneca vaccine (24,000 doses) was delivered to Armenia through the COVAX FACILITY initiative. Back to April 8 the first batch of Sputnik V  15,000 doses, were delivered to Armenia. In early May Armenia will get 100,000 doses of CoronaVac from China as a donation.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
U.S. President Joe Biden intends to discuss Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has said.

According to Ukrinform's correspondent in New York, Sullivan stated this in an interview with MSNBC.

"Joe Biden is a man of his word. He said he would respond to Russia's harmful actions, and he did it. He also said that he wasn't seeking to de-escalate, that he wanted a stable relationship. And so he offered the opportunity to sit down with Vladimir Putin in a third country this summer to talk about the full range of issues in our relationship, including the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine," Sullivan said.

According to him, Biden intends to "follow through on that if we can work out a date and a location that works."

Sullivan also said he was not going "to get into hypotheticals about what might happen if Russia goes into Ukraine."

"The president has communicated directly, privately to President Putin. He is concerned about Russia's military build-up," he said.

On April 13, Biden invited Putin to meet in Europe this summer to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia.

op
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29) - The country logged 8,276 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, the Department of Health said in its latest bulletin.

That raised the tally of infections nationwide to 1,028,738, of which 69,354 or 6.7% are active cases. The DOH added that 94.9% have mild symptoms, 1.6% are asymptomatic, 1.1% are in critical condition , 1.4% are severe cases, and 0.92% have moderate symptoms.

Meanwhile, the nationwide death toll reached 17,145 after 114 more COVID-19 patients died. The DOH noted that 68 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after validation.

Moreover, the number of survivors also climbed to 942,239 after 6,636 more patients recovered. The DOH added that 33 duplicates were removed from the nationwide tally, wherein 24 are recoveries.

The daily positivity rate, or the ratio of infected patients among those tested, declined to 16.9% out of the 49,003 tests conducted as of April 27. However, it still exceeds the recommended rate of less than 5% by the World Health Organization.

No new deaths abroad

The Department of Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, reported 12 new COVID-19 infections among Filipinos abroad, bringing the total to 18,325.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 survivors among overseas Filipino is now at 11,233 after 13 more patients recovered. No new fatalities were reported, with the death toll remaining at 1,145, said DFA.
The family of a Navy petty officer whose body was found three years after he disappeared 'still need answers'.

Anthony Parsons, also known as Tony, went missing aged 63 in 2017 while on a long charity cycle from his home in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, to Fort William.

The grandfather's remains were discovered in January this year near a farm at the Bridge of Orchy, Argyll and Bute.

Two men, both aged 29, had been arrested several weeks before the discovery in connection with his disappearance and were released pending further inquiries.

Anthony Parsons (pictured), also known as Tony, went missing aged 63 in 2017 while on a long charity cycle from his home in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, to Fort William

Mr Parsons's family paid their final respects at Stirling Crematorium this afternoon.

A former Navy colleague in half uniform and carrying a flag walked at the head of the cortege as it entered the crematorium, before later saluting and tipping his hat at the coffin in respect.

In a statement on behalf of the family, Mr Parsons' son Mike said: 'The last three and a half years have been incredibly hard for us as a family and for all those who knew my dad.

'We have been left devastated by what has happened to my dad. As we come together as a family today to celebrate my dad's life and to say our final goodbyes, we hope we can begin to come to terms with his death.

The grandfather's remains were discovered in January this year near a farm at the Bridge of Orchy, Argyll and Bute. Pictured: His funeral procession

'We would like to say a heartfelt thank you for the support given and condolences passed from our friends and family, many of whom have been unable to attend today.

'We still need answers to many questions surrounding my dad's death so I would ask anyone who may have even the smallest piece of information to please speak to the police and help us get the answers and closure we need.'

Mr Parsons, who spent more than two decades in the Navy, was last seen at around 11.30pm on October 2, 2017, outside the Bridge of Orchy Hotel as he travelled south on the A82.

He had left his home on Friday September 29. Police were present at the service and Detective Superintendent Raymond Brown of Police Scotland's Major Investigation Team, said: 'We continue to appeal to anyone who has any information that could assist with our enquiries to contact us as a matter of urgency.

Two men, both aged 29, had been arrested several weeks before the discovery in connection with his disappearance and were released pending further inquiries. Pictured: A retired submariner tips his hat as he passes the coffin at Stirling Crematorium

'It is imperative that we get answers for Anthony's family who have been through many years of heartbreak and distress, which still continues despite Anthony finally being found and being laid to rest today.'

Anyone with information regarding Mr Parsons can contact the Major Investigation Team on 0141 305 4510 or through the team's online public portal.

Information can be submitted anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555111.
WASHINGTON, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :United States (US) President Joe Biden Wednesday defended his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pointing out that some military personnel are serving in the same war as their parents once did.

"American leadership means ending America's forever war in Afghanistan," Biden said in his first nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress.

Biden spoke to a sparsely populated House chamber, with a select number of lawmakers socially distanced due to coronavirus, on the eve of the 100th day since he was sworn into office.

The event took place as America continues to fight the pandemic and less than four months after a mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol.

On the Capitol doctor's advice, only 200 members of Congress and other officials were invited instead of the usual 1,600, and all were wearing masks in assigned seats at least six feet apart.

"We went to Afghanistan to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11," he told lawmakers, with millions watching on television.

"We delivered justice to Osama Bin Laden and we degraded the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. After 20 years of American valor and sacrifice, it's time to bring our troops home." At least 2,500 US troops are part of the 9,600 members of the NATO Afghan mission.

Earlier in the day, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke by phone with Pakistan's Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to discuss regional security and the foreign troop drawdown in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The Pentagon said Austin "expressed appreciation" for Pakistan's support for Afghan peace negotiations and "reaffirmed the importance" of Washington's relationship with Islamabad.

The US withdrawal, which starts Saturday and is to end by September 11, is intended to conclude America's longest war.

In his address, Biden warned that as the US exits it's longest war in Afghanistan that America will remain vigilant against emerging threats around the globe.

"The terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001 and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States, wherever they come from. Al Qaeda and ISIS are in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and other places in Africa and the middle East and beyond," Biden said.

Biden also invoked the military service of his own son  Beau Biden, who was deployed to Iraq for a year and later died of cancer in 2015. He is the first president in 40 years to have a child serve in the US military and operate in a war zone.

Biden's timeline of withdrawal from Afghanistan breaks with a proposed deadline brokered last year by the Trump administration with the Taliban.

According to the deal, by May 1, all foreign forces would have had to leave Afghanistan.

The president also told the gathering that he will hold Russian President Vladimir Putin to account for Moscow's alleged maligned behaviour.

"I made very clear to President Putin that while we don't seek escalation, their actions have consequences," Biden said, referring to a phone call he had with the Russian leader.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration slapped Moscow with a raft of sanctions for allegations of meddling in US elections, human rights abuses and sweeping cyberattacks on American networks. In addition, the State Department announced the expulsion of 10 officials from the Russian Embassy in Washington.

Russia described the latest moves by the White House as a blow to bilateral relations and vowed to impose swift retaliatory measures. The Kremlin also blamed the United States for weakening the diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow.

"I responded in a direct and proportionate way to Russia's interference in our elections and cyberattacks on our government and businesses  and they did both of those things and I did respond," Biden said, adding "but we can also cooperate when it's in our mutual interests." Biden said he welcomed competition with Chinese President Xi Jinping but that his administration would stand up to what he called 'unfair international trade practices'.

"I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board," Biden said, adding that his administration will stand up to the alleged unfair trade practices and theft of American intellectual property.

"I also told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe  not to start conflict  but to prevent conflict," Biden said, referencing tensions in the region.

Biden, who has previously said that his administration would work more closely with allies in order to mount pushback against China, added that he would hold Beijing to account for the alleged human rights abuses.

"America won't back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated. A president has to represent the essence of our country," Biden said.

In his 70-minute address, Biden sought to sell an ambitious agenda to the American people --from climate change and infrastructure to his just-announced $1.8 trillion package of investments in schooling, child care and aid to families, backed by tax hikes for the rich.

His address focused on the economy and made the argument that a robust spending and jobs plan is crucial to the US economy competing globally.
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The launch of the first module of China's new space station - "Heavenly Palace" - on Thursday underlined how far the country has come in achieving its space dream.

The Tianhe core module houses life support equipment and a living space for astronauts, and is another key step in Beijing's grand plans to establish a permanent human presence in space.

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.

- 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.

Story continues

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 months -- well 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.

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 2019 -- a 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 Moon -- the first lunar samples collected in four decades.

And the first images of Mars were sent back by the five-tonne Tianwen-1 in February, 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.

- Palace in the sky -

The Chinese space station named Tiangong -- meaning "heavenly palace" -- will need around 10 missions to bring up more parts and assemble them into orbit.

Once completed, it is expected to remain in low Earth orbit at between 400 and 450 kilometres above our planet for 15 years.

It would realise an ambition to keep a long-term human presence in space.

While China does not plan to use its space station for international cooperation on the scale of the ISS, Beijing has said it is open to foreign collaboration.

But it is not yet clear how extensive that cooperation will be in a project of national prestige and security.

As the rocket carrying the first module tore through the sky, state media was in triumphant mood.

"A palace in the sky will no longer be just a romantic fantasy of the ancients," the TV anchor said.

bur-lxc/apj/oho
The Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) is proud to announce that it will be awarding an honorary doctorate to Edith Cloutier, a dedicated ambassador of Indigenous identity and a defender of Indigenous rights. Ms. Cloutier will receive the highest academic distinction at the INRS virtual convocation ceremony on May 15.

Edith Cloutier's background is nothing short of exemplary. Executive Director of the Val-d'Or Native Friendship Centre (VNFC) for more than 32 years, her remarkable commitment, extensive expertise, and clear humanity have made her the figurehead of the movement towards an open society that not only accepts, but welcomes, differences.

By awarding an honorary doctorate to Ms. Cloutier, INRS is reaffirming its commitment to recognizing Indigenous issues in society and responding to those issues by showcasing Indigenous contributions to university research, science, and the advancement of knowledge. "We have chosen to give an honorary doctorate to Edith Cloutier to celebrate and honour not only her work, but her as a person. She embodies all of our deepest-held values: respect, openness, and inclusion," stated Luc-Alain Giraldeau, CEO of INRS. "Ms. Cloutier represents everything we strive for at INRS. We can all relate to and be inspired by the unifying message she has been sharing for so many years."

Edith Cloutier: building bridges, one step at a time

Born in the town of Ville-Marie in Abitibi-Temiscamingue, Ms. Cloutier is the daughter of an Anicinape mother and a Quebecois father. It was in Val-d'Or, where she grew up, that she first discovered her drive to fight for a just, egalitarian world. She quickly gained a reputation for her proactive, human approach that focuses on finding solutions. A woman of action, her perseverance has led to the completion of tangible projects for the urban Indigenous community. One such project is the Minowe Clinic, a model of Indigenous healthcare that has spread throughout Quebec.

She also oversaw the creation of the First Peoples Pavilion on the Val-d'Or campus of her alma mater, the Universite du Quebec en Abitibi-Temiscamingue, as the Chair of its Board of Directors. She is the first Indigenous woman to have held this position at a Quebec university.

"I consider the INRS to be an institution at the forefront of social sciences and Indigenous studies. I am humbled to receive this honorary doctorate, which I would like to share with the Indigenous women of Quebec and elsewhere who, through their courage, resilience, words and actions, are sources of light nurturing the hope of justice for all," stated Edith Cloutier.

Leadership within the community

Ms. Cloutier has been highly recognized for her work, receiving accolades from governments, community organizations, and universities. She received a Filon Award for Female Personality of the Year from the Val-d'Or Chamber of Commerce in 2004. The following year, she was named a Woman of Knowledge and Action by Quebec Native Women and received the Citizen of Honour award from the Societe nationale des Quebecois et Quebecoises d'Abitibi-Temiscamingue. She was also awarded a knighthood by the National Order of Quebec in 2006 and won the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation's (now Indspire) Award for Excellence in Public Service in 2010. More recently, she was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2013. She was awarded a Quebec Justice Award in 2016, followed by an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in 2018.

The Val-d'Or Native Friendship Centre has also received several awards under her leadership. Among others, it won Quebec's Anne-Greenup Citizenship Award in 2002 and received an honourable mention at the Health and Social Services Network's 2004 Excellence Awards in the "support for vulnerable persons or groups" category.

Edith Cloutier is a conversation starter, an Indigenous ambassador, and a builder of bridges, one step at a time. Her remarkable career has been marked by her determination to defend Indigenous people's rights while improving quality of life and bringing people closer together.

Recognizing the excellence of our graduate members!

More broadly, the graduation ceremony is also an opportunity to present the following awards and distinctions to students from the four INRS centres:

International Outreach Award

Innovation Award

Student Leadership Award

Best Master's Thesis Award

Best Doctoral Thesis Award

Additionally, two graduates (one each at the master's and doctoral levels) will be awarded the INRS Executive Chief Office's Award of Excellence for their outstanding academic achievements. One student will also receive a Governor General's Gold Academic Medal. Through this award, the Governor General of Canada encourages academic excellence across the country and recognizes outstanding students.

INRS Foundation Awards

Once again, the INRS Foundation will be presenting Lumieres Awards to former graduates:

The Firestarter Award, given to a graduate whose promising career debut has inspired the entire student community;

The Trailblazer Award, presented to a graduate who stands out for their remarkable achievements and contributions to the community, in Quebec and beyond; and

The Starburst Award, which honours a graduate's exceptional commitment to the development of INRS and its contribution to the economic, social, and cultural development of Quebec.

###

About INRS

INRS is a university dedicated exclusively to graduate level research and training. Since its creation in 1969, INRS has played an active role in Quebec's economic, social, and cultural development and is ranked first for research intensity in Quebec and in Canada. INRS is made up of four interdisciplinary research and training centres in Quebec City, Montreal, Laval, and Varennes, with expertise in strategic sectors: Eau Terre Environnement, Energie Materiaux Telecommunications, Urbanisation Culture Societe, and Armand-Frappier Sante Biotechnologie. The INRS community includes more than 1,500 students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty members, and staff.

Source :

Sophie Laberge

Service des communications de l'INRS

514 771-8256

sophie.laberge@inrs.ca
The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded  but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.

Daily reports of new coronavirus cases rose swiftly in the country after the government started lifting earlier safety strictures in March, and are now generally around 40,000 a day, according to official figures, with some days reaching 60,000 or more. The health care system is swamped with patients, and the country set a grim record last week with 362 Covid deaths reported in a single day.

The countrys heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.

Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far  8.8 million out of a population of 83 million  using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. It has had a hard time securing more doses, and has resorted to postponing second doses to stretch its supply. But Mr. Koca said he expects 30 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine in June, and to soon add the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia to its effort.
Radio host Mel Greig has announced the tragic death of her beloved godfather.

On Thursday, the 38-year-old shared a touching video of the late gentleman alongside a statement, where she confirmed he'd passed away 'peacefully' aged 101.

'Today I lost my 101 year old godfather, the only man aside from my nephew that is allowed to fat shame me,' she wrote to accompany the footage.

Heartache: Radio host Mel Greig has shared her devastation following the tragic death of her beloved godfather

'He was like a second dad with such a cheeky nature, he had a great innings and went peacefully. I love having a laugh at this video and how he speaks his truth I hope you have a giggle too.'

The video in question saw her godfather speaking directly to a giggling Mel, saying: 'You look beautiful, but you are overweight.'

As Mel asked 'Are you saying I'm fat?' he responded: 'You are fat, yes.'

Fans in their masses sent their condolences to Mel, with one writing: 'Awww Im so sorry for your tremendous loss, sending you love and hugs.'

Passing: On Thursday, the 38-year-old shared a touching video of her late family member alongside a statement revealing the tragic news, confirming he'd passed away 'peacefully' age 101

'So sorry to hear lovely, thinking of you and your family,' another added.

Recently, Mel insisted she would rather be 'happy and healthy' than reach her goal weight of 68kg.

On Monday, she proudly showed off her 'chins' on Instagram and encouraged others to do the same.

'I want to give you a daily dose of realness and I want to introduce you to my chins because it's all about angles on social media and I've got four rippers,' she said.

'I love my chins': Mel recently showed off her 'chins' in a body positive video and told fans to 'not worry about the angles'

'Just embrace it, don't worry about the angles. I love my chins, you should love yours too. Let's end of that,' she added.

Mel also captioned the post: 'Daily dose of keeping it real. Today I want you to meet my chins. Inspired by the @imperfectlyperfectcampaign mental health forum.'

Mel's post comes after she accepted she may never get back to the weight she once was in her twenties and has thrown out her old garments.

She encouraged others to throw out their 'skinny boxes' too, and said: 'No I didn't get back to 68kg, and I don't intend to.'

'I want to give you a daily dose of realness and I want to introduce you to my chins because it's all about angles on social media and I've got four rippers,' she said

The cardboard box, which was labelled 'Skinny clothes. Only open when you are back down to 68 kilos', showed signs of wear, tear and deterioration from being in storage for so long.

Mel has openly discussed her struggle to lose weight in the past.

'I don't aspire to be skinny anymore, I just aspire to be happy and healthy,' Mel wrote on Instagram last month.
Parental dissatisfaction with government schools is escalating as absurd masking requirements for the least vulnerable segment of society, children, continue to be imposed by educrats and their elected supervisors.

After Arizona governor Doug Ducey ended the state's mask mandate in schools with an executive order, a number of parents (described in various media as numbering "hundreds," "around 100," and "dozens") showed up at the scheduled Tuesday meeting of the Vail Unified School District's School Board to demand an end to mandatory masks in the schools. Instead of hearing out the parents, the board of the suburban Tucson school district chose to cancel the meeting.



Twitter screen grab.

KGUN TV 9 reports:

Nearly 100 parents rallied for the district to drop the mask mandate at the schools. The group showed up before the regular study session at 5:30. But the board only made it half way through, when parents pushed their way into the board room refusing to wear masks. The Vail board called 911, and Pima County Sheriff Nanos tells KGUN 9, a sergeant and four deputies showed up in just over a minute. The district tells us one of them advised the board to adjourn the study session because of the crowd was uncontrollable. But the Sheriff says that's not true, the board made that decision on their own and crowd control was not an issue.

Five parents were allowed to speak to the board before it adjourned without formally opening the meeting.

A sheriff's deputy says the meeting has been canceled. Upset parents want to know why. There are dozens gathered at the door... others in the parking lot. pic.twitter.com/MjjEIAWvKT  Eric Fink (@EricMillerFink) April 28, 2021

But the story did not end there. A group of parents cited Robert's Rules of Order and proceeded to claim to elect a new school board. Here is a nearly seven-minute video of the proceedings:

Media reaction, other than on local talk radio, was scathing. The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson's daily newspaper, published a collection of unflattering photos.

Vail, Arizona, population 12,982 in the 2020 Census, is a fast-growing (27% increase since 2010), affluent (average household income $104,047 with a poverty rate of 4.88%) suburb of Tucson.

In the aftermath, another suburban Tucson school board chose to cancel its scheduled Wednesday meeting:

Tanque Verde Unified School District canceled Wednesday's school board meeting at the recommendation of the Pima County Sheriff's Department after reports of an anti-mask protest surfaced earlier that day. (snip) As this new order allowed "K-12 school districts and charter schools still maintain the right to institute and enforce policies to mitigate against COVID-19 spread, including the use of masks," several local school districts, including Vail Unified School District and Tanque Verde School District, elected to maintain its requirement for face masks and coverings while on school grounds. In response to the governor's recent order, TVUSD said in a statement that it will continue its board policy and board-adopted mitigation plan that requires "all persons, including, but not limited to, staff, students, vendors, visitors, and volunteers, shall wear a mask while on any District property, in any District facility, at any District event, whether indoors or outdoors, and in any District vehicle, including District buses or vehicles rented or leased by the District." With the district's governing board originally slated to discuss its options for face coverings during Wednesday's meeting, PCSD received reports that protestors were planning to gather at the meeting. Due to concern that these individuals would not follow meeting protocols related to mitigating the COVID-19 virus, district officials said that they were "concerned that (they would) be unable to conduct the meeting safely," prompting the cancelation of the meeting. "We will continue to work with the Pima County Sheriff's Department to ensure the safety of our community for any future meetings," the district said.

According to Zachary Evans of National Review, the ad hoc election of a new school board was not legal:

The election itself was illegitimate because school board members must be elected by the public, so the mask mandate is still in effect in the district.

I have no knowledge of the relevant Arizona statutes, which may call for an election open to all voters, I suspect, but I would note that the meeting of the board was open to the public. In any event, Robert's Rules of Order do not enjoy the status of state law, so I suspect the board will still be in office the next time it attempts a meeting.

The entire episode is evidence that patience is running out for restrictions on personal freedom imposed on the name of COVID control that are unsupported by science. The school board told local news outlets that "90%" of parents support the mask mandate but presented no evidence.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
New Delhi, April 29 : In view of the rising Covid cases in Maharashtra, SpiceHealth has deployed a RT-PCR mobile testing laboratory in Nagpur.

The company has also dispatched 125 'SpiceOxy' ventilators to the city.

According to the company, this initiative was taken on priority due to the personal intervention of Road Transport and Highways, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Minister, Nitin Gadkari.

Furthermore, SpiceHealth will be supplying oxygen concentrators to Maharashtra government and will soon be setting up mobile testing laboratories in Aurangabad and Nashik.

The company, launched by the promoters of SpiceJet, has been working actively with state governments and hospitals across the country to address the issue of acute shortage of oxygen.

It has imported more than 2,000 oxygen concentrators in the last two weeks for emergency use and distribution across India.

"In addition, we will soon be setting up mobile testing labs in Aurangabad and Nashik. SpiceHealth will also be supplying oxygen concentrators to Maharashtra government and has also dispatched 125 of our 'Made-in-India' SpiceOxy ventilators to Nagpur," SpiceHealth CEO Avani Singh said.

"We are firmly committed to helping our country in these difficult times and are honoured to be a part of various state government efforts towards fighting this pandemic." SpiceHealth has emerged as the fastest growing diagnostic lab in the country having conducted more than 2 million RT-PCR tests since its launch in November 2020.
Newport and Camel cigarettes are stacked on a shelf inside a tobacco store in New York in a file photograph. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

ACLU-Led Coalition Warns Biden Administration Against Menthol Ban, Citing Racial Justice Implications

A coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union is urging the Biden administration not to ban menthol cigarettes.

Such a ban would have serious racial justice implications and would trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction, the coalition wrote in a letter this week to Health Secretary Xavier Becerra and acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Janet Woodcock.

A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with local law enforcement, they added.

The White House, the Department of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not respond to requests for comment.

The federal government is set to answer a citizens petition on April 29. Groups including the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and the American Academy of Pediatrics in the petition asked the FDA to remove menthol cigarettes from the market.

The groups praised the move in 2009 by members of Congress to ban flavored cigarettes but noted that menthol cigarettes, which have a mint flavor, were excluded from the prohibition.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act enables the FDA to ban menthol.

Petitioners said tobacco use remains a leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States and that surveys indicate about half of youth smokers smoke menthol cigarettes, a higher percentage than adult smokers.

Prohibiting menthol in cigarettes is perhaps the single most powerful measure readily available to the FDA to improve Americas health, the groups wrote.

The House of Representatives last year passed a bill that would prohibit menthol cigarettes but it was not brought to a vote in the Senate. Several states have passed menthol bans.

During the Trump administration, the FDA was considering a ban on menthol cigarettes. Scott Gottlieb, the agencys commissioner at the time, said in a statement that menthol serves to mask some of the unattractive features of smoking that might otherwise discourage a child from smoking, and that menthol products disproportionately and adversely affect underserved communities.

The FDA ended up banning flavored e-cigarette products, but not taking action on menthol e-cigarettes or cigarettes.

According to federal data, most African American youth who smoke use menthol, while African American adults have the highest percentage of menthol use compared to other populations.

Menthols are believed to be more harmful than regular cigarettes because menthol makes harmful chemicals more easily absorbed in the body, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tobacco companies oppose the reported ban.

We share the common goal of moving adult smokers from cigarettes to potentially less harmful alternatives, but prohibition does not work, Steven Callahan, a spokesman for Altria, which owns Philip Morris, told the New York Times. A far better approach is to support the establishment of a marketplace of FDA-authorized non-combustible alternatives that are attractive to adult smokers.
SACRAMENTO  One day before a Minneapolis jury convicted a former officer of murdering George Floyd, police officers answering a complaint about someone loitering in a park in the Bay Area suburb of Alameda pinned Mario Arenales Gonzalez to the ground facedown, using their knees, elbows and forearms.

As he cried out, Please dont do that to me, they pressed him into the dirt by a sidewalk, his hands cuffed, for about five minutes until he lost consciousness and went limp. Not long after, Mr. Gonzalez, 26, was declared dead.

An analysis of body camera footage by The New York Times found that the April 19 death occurred after one officer appeared to keep his knee on the upper right side of Mr. Gonzalezs back for 2 minutes 50 seconds. During the five minutes they restrained him, the officers appeared to be concerned about Mr. Gonzalezs ability to breathe.

The city of Alameda said in a statement this week that it was committed to full transparency and accountability in the aftermath of Mr. Gonzalezs death. The offices of the Alameda County sheriff and district attorney are conducting an investigation, as is a private law firm hired by the city. In a statement on Saturday, the Alameda Police Department called the situation a terrible loss of life. The results of an autopsy have not yet been released.
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The new Act makes Delhi's elected government virtually toothless and hands over sweeping powers to Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal who now controls nearly 80 departments and can even stall a Bill enacted by the Assembly, officials said. (Photo: PTI)

NEW DELHI: Even as a vicious second wave of Coronavirus batters Delhi, the Centre has notified a law that gives it more power over the city's elected government. According to the amended law, the "Government of Delhi" now means the "Lieutenant Governor of Delhi", who represents and will directly report to the Centre.

The new Act makes Delhi's elected government virtually toothless and hands over sweeping powers to Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal who now controls nearly 80 departments and can even stall a Bill enacted by the Assembly, officials said.

After the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Act, 2021, was notified on Tuesday night, the L-G is the one running the national capital, officials explained while assessing the import of the Act coming into effect.

The Act, passed by Parliament last month, came into force on April 27, Tuesday, the ministry of home affairs said in an order. Under the new law, "government" now means the LG, officials said.

The Delhi government will have to take permission from the LG before taking any action on subjects that had so far been under its control. These include anti-corruption, education, health, social welfare, tourism, central jail, excise, some colleges as well as hospitals and transport.

The L-G can also pass directions to officials directly without consulting the city government while elected representatives will have to take the L-Gs consent for the implementation of any of its orders as well as transfers, officials explained.

According to officials, Delhi is a Union Territory with a legislature like Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry but does not have powers similar to them.

Three key subjects in Delhi -- public order, police and land  were already with the Central government. But now no law passed by the Delhi Assembly  from the state list or concurrent list  shall come into force until the L-G gives his assent.

"Any of the rules made in contravention of this proviso, before the commencement of the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Act, 2021, shall be void," states the new Act.

In the case of Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry, land is with the local government and public order and police with the Central government. Other UTs -- Chandigarh, Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu -- don't have legislative assemblies and are under the direct control of the Central government.

The Centre has been maintaining the Act is in line with the Supreme Court's July 2018 ruling on the ambit of powers of the Lieutenant-Governor and the Delhi government after a series of run-ins between the two.

Union minister of state for home G. Kishan Reddy had said in Parliament that Delhi is not a full-fledged state and does not have full power.

"The said Bill will promote harmonious relations between the legislature and the executive, and further define the responsibilities of the elected government and the L-G, in line with the constitutional scheme of governance of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, as interpreted by the Supreme Court," the statement of objects of the Bill had said.

In June 2018, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Cabinet ministers had staged a sit-in at the Lieutenant-Governors office as a power tussle between the then lieutenant governor and the AAP government had intensified. The Supreme Court had in July 2018 ruled that the Lieutenant-Governor cannot interfere in every decision of the Delhi government and that he must act on aid and advice of the Council of Ministers.
Madan Mohan Sethi, Indian Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City, has estimated that India still has a rough two months ahead in its battle against the current wave of COVID-19 ripping through his country.

"I am also a doctor. I understand that every disease has its own path of release, so once it goes up, the number [of cases] can come back, Sethi told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Monday.

"Now, people also understand the importance of masks and social distancing, so people will follow it, I think."

Consul General Sethi is a trained doctor who spent four years working at hospitals in Indias Odisha State before serving as a diplomat.

According to Sethi, Indian authorities are scrambling to fight the pandemic and partner with other countries to import much-needed medical supplies, particularly oxygen.

"We have started an oxygen express by a railway," Sethi said.

"I believe things will get better over the next week.

"In one to two months, I expect things to return to normal."

Despite the complicated progression of the pandemic in his country, Consul General Sethi still has lofty expectations for cooperation between Vietnam and India in areas such as trade, manufacturing, investment, education, and tourism.

At a press conference held on Monday, Sethi shared that the Consulate General of India in Ho Chi Minh City has received inquiries from approximately 50 Indian businesses wishing to enter the Vietnamese market, as well as several expressions of interest from Vietnamese enterprises hoping to secure a foothold in India.

Sethi also voiced his hope that once the pandemic situation improves, commercial flights between Vietnam and India will resume and business relations between the two countries will prosper.

The Indian Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City is also putting effort into developing two-way tourism and creating a bridge that promotes educational cooperation between Vietnam and India.

Specifically, the consulate has so far cooperated with universities in both countries to organize short-term online training sessions for students in Vietnam.

India will celebrate 75 years of independence in 2022.

To mark this important milestone, the Indian Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City will organize 75 activities and events in honor of Indian achievements.

According to the consulate, this series of activities will include talks on different aspects of India, exhibitions, cultural events, and other outreach activities.

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The Great White Way might be on its way out of lockdown!

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio announced on TV today that he plans to have the city "fully reopen" on July 1, with no restrictions on restaurants, retail, or any other business. He added that the city will be "ready for stores to open, for businesses to open, offices, theaters, full-strength."

Citing the massive and speedy vaccine roll-out as cause for optimism, De Blasio's comments will be sure to spark excitement in theatregoers, most of whom have been deprived of a live experience in many moons.

As previously reported, De Blasio is developing with the Broadway community to manage crowds before and after shows, and will open pop-up Covid testing sites in the area of the major theatres.

We also expect the Broadway production of UK musical Six to be one of the first shows to reopen, with the piece having teased exciting plans earlier this week. It is likely that the majority of Broadway won't be back before September, but at least this gives a big boost to confidence levels.

All eyes are on the New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has already started to ease capacity limits on stadiums and concert venues.

The vaccine roll-out in the US is relatively meteoric  as of Thursday, more than 54 per cent of all US adults have received at least one dose, and nearly 38 per cent are fully vaccinated.

This side of the Atlantic, the majority of restrictions are currently set to be eased from 21 June, with socially distanced theatre able to return from mid-May.
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The Kaduna State House Assembly has declared the seat of one of its former Speaker, Aminu Abdullahi-Shagali, vacant.

Mr Abdullahi-Shagali, who, until this development represented Sabongari constituency, was removed as Speaker in August last year and replaced by Yusuf Zailani from Igabi constituency.

The House also directed him to apologise in writing within two weeks for disrupting a sitting of the lawmakers.

Mr Abdullahi-Shagali did not apologise to the house.

The assembly, at its sitting on Tuesday, noted that he had not apologised nor participated in its activities for over 120 days.

The lawmakers unanimously adopted a motion moved by Ahmed Mohammed, the member representing Zaria Kewaye, and declared Mr Abdullahi-Shagalis seat vacant.

At the sitting presided by the Deputy Speaker, Isaac Auta-Zankai, the lawmakers also suspended four other members for one year.

Those suspended include Mukhtar Isa-Hazo, a former deputy speaker, who represents Basawa constituency, Nuhu Goroh-Shadalafiya of Kagarko constituency, Yusuf Liman-Dahiru of Kakuri/Makera constituency and Salisu Isa of Magajin Gari constituency.

They were suspended for allegedly causing disaffection and engaging in activities inimical to the unity of members of the assembly.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Affinor Growers Inc. ("Affinor Growers" or the "Corporation") (CSE: AFI) (OTCQB: RSSFF), announced today that they will be participating in Renmark Financial Communications Inc.s live Virtual Non-Deal Roadshow Series to discuss its latest investor presentation on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 4:00PM PST. Affinor Growers Inc. welcomes stakeholders, investors, and other individual followers to register and attend this live event.

The presentation will feature Nick Brusatore, CEO. Topics to be covered will include the latest investor presentation followed by a live Q&A. Investors interested in participating in this event will need to register using the link below. As a reminder, registration for the live event may be limited but access to the replay after the event will be on The Companys Investor website.

REGISTER HERE: https://www.renmarkfinancial.com/live-registration/renmark-virtual-non-deal-roadshow-cse-afi-otcqb-rssff-2021-04-29-130000

To ensure smooth connectivity, please access this link using the latest version of Google Chrome.

Affinor Growers is also pleased to announce the launch of the updated website, this will ensure the public is kept up with all current information on the exciting commercial showcase in Abbotsford, BC. Please visit www.affinorgrowers.com to access our 5 year business plan and join our VIP list for all automatic updates.

About Affinor Growers Inc.Affinor is a biotechnology company acquiring, patenting and commercializing vertical farming technology for both the indoor controlled environment and outdoor greenhouse agriculture industry. Fresh food organic produce is a $33.8 billion industry and is expected to nearly double by 2025. Affinor sells our technology to existing farmers, entrepreneurs wanting to build new state-of-the art growing facilities and larger partners wanting exclusivity in regions or crops with right to re-sell the technology. The world's population has created challenges in food security and pressure on natural resources creating problems that can only be solved through technological advancement. As a practice, traditional farming is not going to disappear, but it is crucial that alternative agricultural practices and technology be devised to alleviate the innate limits of conventional farming methods. As a solution, Affinor Growers Inc. offers patented agricultural technology and proprietary cultivation systems for both the indoor and greenhouse growing environments.

About Renmark Financial Communications Inc.Founded in 1999, Renmark Financial Communications Inc. is North Americas leading retail investor relations firm. Employing a strategic and comprehensive mix of exposure tactics; Renmark hosts Virtual Non-Deal Roadshows as well as in-person corporate presentations and maintains daily communications with thousands of brokers and money managers across Canada and the United States. Renmark empowers its publicly-traded clientele to maximize their visibility within the financial community and strengthen their investor audience.

CONTACT:Renmark Financial Communications Inc.Joshua Lavers: jlavers@renmarkfinancial.com Tel: (416) 644-2020 or (212) 812-7680 www.renmarkfinancial.com

Source: Affinor Growers Inc.
To the Editor:

Re Biden Makes Case to Vastly Expand Government Role (front page, April 29):

I take back every bad thing that I said about Joe Biden during the primaries.

President Biden is actually arguing for investing in Americans and America, even saying that trickle-down economics never worked. This is the first time I have heard a Democratic president truly talk like a Democrat in five decades of watching politics. Mr. Biden understands, like Lincoln (and modern Republicans), that you have to mold public sentiment, not just follow a mythical center to the right.

Mr. Biden understands that you ask for what you want, then compromise at the end of negotiations.

Go Biden Go!

John McGloin

Staten Island

To the Editor:

President Bidens speech to Congress and the nation was a passing of the baton from squeezing American government into a smaller and smaller box (Ronald Reaganism) back to a more expansive and supportive role for government (Lyndon Johnsonism). The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and large corporations prospered mightily, even obscenely, during Reaganism. Now its time for the rest of us to see a better and more equitable economy.

Mary F. Warren

Wheaton, Ill.

To the Editor:

The significance of President Bidens speech was beyond all the policy agendas he laid out  we knew most of them already. Mr. Bidens purpose (which I think was achieved) was to show that he is not Donald Trump, that he is an intelligent, plain-spoken, experienced public servant who is in control, and who can lay out his positions with down-to-earth words and logic and appeal to our hopes and dreams without using fear or lies. The simple, easy-to-follow quality of his speech was something Im not sure even Barack Obama achieved.
Global Thermostat announced today it signed an agreement with HIF to supply its direct air capture equipment to HIFs synthetic fuels (synthetic gasoline) pilot plant in Magallanes, Chile. The unit could remove up to a maximum of 250 kg of carbon dioxide per hour from the atmosphere.

In December 2020, HIF announced the financial support from the German Government for its Haru Oni pilot plant with the participation of Porsche, Siemens Energy, Enel Green Power, ENAP, and ExxonMobil.

Global Thermostat continues to work toward building associations and business partnerships which will allow for the scale-up of their revolutionary technology and make it commercially viable as a cost-effective carbon reduction solution.

Together with HIF and our other business partners, we are accelerating toward the transformation of the world's economy so that it is powered by clean energy, providing commercial uses for carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, and creating millions of green-economy jobs, said Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky, co-founder and CEO of Global Thermostat.

We are very pleased that following months of negotiations we have reached an agreement to incorporate this leading direct air capture technology into our pilot plant. We view this as a first step towards the escalation of this solution to a commercial scale, which will be critical in the race to combat climate change. This is a key component of our plans are to produce the equivalent of Chiles national gasoline consumption in eFuels by 2030, said the president of HIF, Mr. Cesar Norton.

The Haru Oni pilot plant will use wind power to produce hydrogen which will be combined with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere with Global Thermostat technology to produce methanol. The methanol will then be converted into gasoline. HIF intends to move forward with the construction of its first commercial scale facility in 2022. eFuels can be used as a direct substitute for fossil-based fuels, with no changes to existing logistics, infrastructure or engines required.

Global Thermostats technology extracts carbon dioxide directly from the air where it is abundantly available, eliminating the need for expensive trucking or long pipelines.

About Global Thermostat

Formed in 2010, Global Thermostat commercializes its advanced, multi-patented technology to transform Carbon Dioxide from a global liability into an opportunity for global prosperity. Using its proven, breakthrough technology, Global Thermostat economically captures and concentrates CO2, enabling its profitable re-use across multiple large & growing industries  reducing harmful emissions, and helping to prevent catastrophic climate change. More information at http://www.globalthermostat.com. Follow Global Thermostat on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

About HIF

HIF is an affiliate of AME. HIF's mission is to combat climate change through the substitution of fossil-based petroleum products with carbon neutral eFuels. HIF's initial production facilities for this decarbonization initiative are based in Magallanes, Chile, with similar projects under development in the United States and Australia. More info at http://www.hif.cl/en.
China's taxation and broadcasting watchdogs said Wednesday that they are investigating allegations against Chinese actress Zheng Shuang concerning tax evasion, sky-high remuneration and contract fraud.

The Shanghai Municipal Tax Service is conducting an investigation into Zheng's tax issues in accordance with tax laws, while the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau has launched a probe into the production costs of a related TV drama and how much she was paid.

Officials from the two government bodies said they would strictly investigate violations of laws and regulations, while resolutely probing issues such as actors' sky-high remuneration and tax evasion, and taking corrective measures.

Contracts for the production of TV programs should be strictly scrutinized to create a positive environment for the high-quality development of the country's TV drama industry, according to the watchdogs.
Samara Polytech Scientists are developing new eco-technologies for hydrogen production

Employees of Samara Polytech University, the specialists from the Department of Gas Processing, Hydrogen and Special Technologies and the Research Center "Fundamental Problems of Thermophysics and Mechanics", conducted theoretical and experimental studies of hydrodynamics, heat transfer and diffusion during methane pyrolysis (natural gas) in a layer of molten tin. The latest research results are published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.

When methane is heated to high temperatures (over 1000  C), it decomposes (pyrolysis process) into hydrogen and carbon nanoparticles with unique physicochemical properties. Among the existing methods of decomposition of methane, the most energy efficient is its heating during its transition through a layer of metal molts in reactors. This method is environmentally friendly, as it does not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

"The reactors are vertical-cylindrical structures filled with molten metal, in the lower part of which there is a nozzle for supplying methane", Igor Kudinov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, Director of Research Center "Fundamental Problems of Thermophysics and Mechanics" explains. "When designing a reactor, it is necessary to pay special attention to its height and volume, so that methane during its transition through a layer of molten metal, heats up to the pyrolysis temperature and completely decomposes. In this case, it is necessary to determine the concentration and speed of movement of methane, as well as the temperature and pressure of the mixture of methane with tin over the entire height of the reactor. Thus, it is necessary to solve the problem of interconnected heat and mass transfer.

In addition, the staff of the department of Gas Processing, Hydrogen and Special Technologies carried out an experimental study of methane pyrolysis through a layer of molten tin on a specially made experimental stand.

"During the experiment, a large amount of soot was formed on the surface of the tin, which could not be removed from the reactor crucible together with the gas discharged from the facility", Andrey Pimenov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of Gas Processing, Hydrogen and Special Technologies noted. "We have developed a special device that controls the level of molten metal in the reactor and continuously removes solid carbon particles".

The research work was carried out within the framework of the grant "Development of scientific foundations of technology and design of hydrogen generation equipment for the production of a methane-hydrogen mixture and the needs of hydrogen energy" No. 05.607.21.0311 of December 2, 2019 (unique agreement identifier RFMEFI60719X0311) of the Federal Target Program "Research and Development in Priority Areas of the Scientific and Technical Complex of Russia for 2014 - 2020".

###

For reference: Samara Polytech as a flagship university offers a wide range of education and research programs and aims at development and transfer of high-quality and practically-oriented knowledge. The university has an established reputation in technical developments and focuses on quality education, scientific and pragmatic research, combining theory and practice in the leading regional businesses and enterprises. Education is conducted in 30 integrated groups of specialties and areas of training (about 200 degree programs including bachelor, master programs and 55 PhD programs) such as oil and gas, chemistry and petrochemistry, mechanics and energy, transportation, food production, defense, IT, mechanical and automotive engineering, engineering systems administration and automation, material science and metallurgy, biotechnology, industrial ecology, architecture, civil engineering and design, etc.

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 30 giorni fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

This market research report identifies Masimo Corporation, Medtronic plc, GE Healthcare, Philips Healthcare, Smiths Medical, and Nihon Kohden Corporation as the major vendors operating in the global pulse oximetry market. This report also provides a detailed analysis of the market by product type (Table-top Pulse Oximeters, Fingertip Pulse Oximeters, Hand-held Pulse Oximeters, Wrist-worn Pulse Oximeters, and Others), by end-users (Hospitals, Ambulatory Service Centers, and Home Care), and by regions (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World).

Overview of the Global Pulse Oximetry Market Research

Infoholics market research report predicts that the global pulse oximetry market will grow at a CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period. The market has witnessed steady growth in the past few years, and the development in technology with the introduction of lightweight, compact, and easy to use wearable pulse oximeters has increased the acceptance of pulse oximeters in the market. The global market is fueled by government endorsement to use pulse oximeters.

The market continues to grow, and pulse oximeter is one of the most widely used respiratory monitoring systems due to its features and capabilities. The advanced technology has made the device simple and fast along with the precise use of mobility at the point of monitoring. Vendors are focusing on new product launch and targeting the end-users perspective. The majority of the revenue is generated by the leading players in the market with sales dominated by Masimo Corporation, Medtronic, Philips, GE Healthcare, Smith Medical, and Nihon Kohden Corporation.

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According to the Infoholic Research analysis, North America accounted for the largest share of the global pulse oximetry market in 2018. The primary reasons for growth in North America are the increasing incidence of chronic diseases, growing technological advancements, increase in general surgical procedures, and the introduction of smart pulse oximeters with high efficacy. Asia Pacific is likely to witness the fastest growth rate due to the large patient pool and rising healthcare expenditure.

By Product

Table-top/Bedside Pulse Oximeters

Fingertip Pulse Oximeters

Hand-held Pulse Oximeters

Wrist-worn Pulse Oximeters

Others

In 2018, the table-top pulse oximetry segment occupied the largest share due to its ability to monitor for long hours constantly. Also, these systems are versatile and have good efficacy.

By End-users

Hospitals

Ambulatory Service Centers

Home Care

In 2018, hospitals gained the highest share in the pulse oximetry market with the largest diagnostic volumes globally.

By Regions:

North America

Europe

APAC

RoW

Geographically, North America is the global leader with the US accounting for the significant market share, followed by Europe. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region in the pulse oximetry market. In October 2018, Mindray became the first Chinese company to obtain List A CE mark.

Pulse Oximetry Market Research Competitive Analysis  The global pulse oximetry market has massive growth opportunities in both developed and developing regions. Initiatives are being taken by the governments to progress the current application areas of pulse oximeters. In 2017, The European Pulse Oximetry Screening Workgroup recommended pulse oximetry screening (POS) for CCHD. Recently, in June 2018, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Health & Prevention also adopted this for monitoring patients during critical and emergency care. All these endorsements for the devices in various applications have helped the market to grow.

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The integration of AI with pulse oximeters has increased the demand for home care settings. Therefore, many players are concentrating on expanding their product portfolio for home care settings. In June 2016, Nonin Medical introduced Apple iOS-compatible NoninConnect Elite Model 3240 Bluetooth Smart Wireless Finger Pulse Oximeter.

Key Vendors

Masimo Corporation

Medtronic Plc

GE Healthcare

Philips Healthcare

Smith Medical

Nihon Kohden Corporation

Dragerwerk

Omron

Nonin Medical Inc

Becton Dickinson and Company

Mindray Medical International Limited

Key Competitive Facts

The market is highly competitive with all the players competing to gain market shares. Intense competition, rapid advancements in technology, government policies, and the prices are the key factors that confront the market.

Smart devices are designed to improve better management of daily medication. Mobile platform and wearable devices are developed to predict oxygen saturation of the patients at various end-user settings.

Benefits  The report provides complete details about the usage and adoption rate of pulse oximeters. Thus, the key stakeholders can know about the major trends, drivers, investments, vertical players initiatives, and government initiatives toward the pulse oximetry segment in the upcoming years along with details of the pureplay companies entering the market. Moreover, the report provides details about the major challenges that are going to impact the market growth. Additionally, the report gives complete details about the key business opportunities to key stakeholders in order to expand their business and capture the revenue in specific verticals, and to analyze before investing or expanding the business in this market.

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Key Takeaways

Understanding the potential market opportunity with precise market size and forecast data.
Twelve villagers serving prison terms for their roles in a violent land-rights clash in Dong Tam outside Hanoi last year have been transferred from their former prison to detention centers far from their homes, placing a new burden on family members hoping to visit, sources say.

Dong Tam village elder Le Dinh Kinh, 84, was shot and killed by police during the Jan. 9, 2020 raid on the village by 3,000 security officers intervening in a long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles south of the capital.

Kinhs sons, Le Dinh Chuc and Le Dinh Cong, were sentenced to death on Sept. 14 in connection with the deaths of three police officers who were killed in the clash, with other punishments handed out by the court including a life term in prison and other sentences ranging from six years to 15 months of probation.

On April 23, twelve of those receiving jail terms in the case were transferred to new facilities far distant from their homes in Hanoi, one family member told RFA.

Le Dinh Doanh, now serving a life term, was sent by authorities to the Yen Ha detention center in the mountainous province of Son La, said Doanhs younger sister-in-law Nguyen Thi Duyen, who visited him at his new camp on Tuesday.

His health is OK, but he looks a bit thin compared to how he was when I saw him at his appeal trial [in March], Duyen said, adding that Doanh complained of soreness in his eyes and said he had contracted malaria because of the unsanitary conditions at Yen Ha.

He said that hes already getting better, though, Duyen said, adding that her father Le Dinh Cong and uncle Le Dinh Chuc, both sentenced to death, are still being held at the No. 2 detention center in Thuong Tin district in Hanoi.

Others also moved

Doanhs brothers Nguyen Quoc Tien and Bui Viet Hieu have meanwhile been transferred to the mountainous northern province of Yen Bai and central province of Nghe An, while Le Dinh Kinhs adopted daughter Bui Thi Noi was moved to Bac Giang, a city in the countrys northeast, Duyen said she was told.

Everyone has been transferred to a new detention center and has been separated from each other, she said.

Duyen said Doanh told her he would try now to adjust to his new place of confinement and not to be intimidated there, adding that he has also promised to work for a reduction in his sentence so that he can return home as soon as possible.

On Friday, Duyen said, she and other family members will visit Cong and Chuc at their detention camp in Thuong Tin. Both men have refused to appeal their death sentences for murder, declaring themselves innocent of the crime.

While all land in Vietnam is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too little in compensation to farming families displaced by development.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Europe Day - On The Air

Look for the following Spanish stations to be active between May 7-9th, to celebrate/commemorate 'Europe Day - On The Air 2021' which was created in 1950.

The special callsigns are: AO1EU, AO2EU, AO3EU, AO4EU, AO5EU, AO6EU, AO7EU, AO8EU and AO9EU.

As usual, a special QSL and an Award will be available. Contact also valid for the Radio Clubs of the World Award, EANET. QSL all callsigns via EA3RKF.

For more details, see: https://fediea.org/eudota
If Officer Derek Chauvin evaded a guilty verdict in his trial, the Department of Justice had alternative plans. The trial of Chauvin is one where the Democrats leaned in, forgetting impartiality.

Derek Chauvin would not be off the hook for George Floyd's death

Recent reports that the DOJ will not settle for a not guilty verdict in Floyd's death were reported by the Daily Mail.

According to sources that informed the Star Tribune of the move by federal prosecutors to charge the erring policeman even after he was declared innocent on the charges of a second and third-degree murder, as well as manslaughter, even a mistrial.

The Department of Justice would have prosecuted Chauvin and the three other police officers on duty with civil rights violations, similar to hate crimes.

DOJ investigators would have collaborated with their state counterparts at the US Attorney's Office in Minnesota to prepare a criminal complaint targeting Chauvin. There would be no grand jury in this process, and federal prosecutors would have asked a grand jury to indict Chauvin after his arrest.

According to the reports, these conversations are part of a backup apprehension plan to ensure Floyd's murderer does not go free amid fears that a not guilty verdict would have sparked violence in Minneapolis and across the nation.

It was unnecessary as the political pressure on the Derek Chauvin verdict was unanimously guilty on all three charges in the George Floyd case, even if the loss of impartiality was ignored to bolster the current racial politics of the Left.

Read Also: John Kerry Says He Did Not Disclose Secret Information to Iran Regarding Israeli Attacks

Charges that the officer was convicted of are second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Soon after, he was sent to Minnesota's maximum-security prison Oak Park Heights.

After the court deferred his sentencing from June 16 to June 25, he will be sentenced on June 25. He might spend up to 40 years in jail for Floyd's death.

Based on the separate federal investigation of Floyd's death, that is one of the reasons why the Minnesota policeman's trial ended in a guilty verdict last week.

It's been running simultaneously with federal authorities presenting evidence to a grand jury of 23 citizens, who will assess whether there's enough evidence to convict the disgraced officers.

Those also facing trial were J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao, his fellow officers present on that fateful arrest. Charges against the three are aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter, which they said was false and were fired by the Minneapolis PD after Floyd died.

Information given by the DOJ added that a similar incident to what happened to Floyd occurred in 2017, in which he put his knee on a 14-year-old boy's neck (Afro-American) for almost 17 minutes.

But, the 2017 incident was not widely known. It was dug up last minute as state prosecutors requested it as evidence against the cop. The ruling judge said the information be kept not revealed to bias the decision of the present trial.

Court documents said evidence existed that Derek Chauvin with another officer in the domestic assault on September 4, 2017. Unlike George Floyd, the assailant was the teenage son and daughter of the mother, who called the police.

Related Article: New Judge Appointed To Sit On the 2020 Election Audit Case After Resignation of Coury

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  Del Monte Philippines Inc. is giving another try to its initial public offering, which could raise the firm up to 44 billion, its parent company confirmed.

Del Monte Pacific Limited announced to the local bourse on Thursday that its local subsidiary has filed a registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission on its proposed IPO.

The food and beverage company hopes to sell 699.33 million secondary shares along with an over-allotment option of up to 104.9 million shares, its preliminary prospectus revealed. The shares will be sold up to 54.80 apiece.

DMPI initially geared up for an IPO in 2018 but shelved its plans at the time, attributing the move to then-volatile market conditions.

The planned IPO of Del Monte Philippines, Inc. is a moment of pride for the Board and the DMPI management team. It represents the realization of an ambition we have set  to provide the people of the Philippines with the opportunity to share in the continued growth and success of our Asia business, said Joselito Campos Jr., DMPI president and chief executive officer.

The company takes pride in its 95-year history, which led to it and the Del Monte brand becoming household names in the Philippines. Citing data from research firm Nielsen, DMPI reported market shares of 88% in packaged pineapple, 87% in tomato sauce, 74% in packaged mixed fruit, and 39% in spaghetti sauce.

DPMI likewise said it is the largest exporter of fresh pineapples to China, and among the three biggest exporters of the said fruits to Japan, South Korea and the Middle East, citing GlobalData.

Our company has demonstrated resilience during the last 12 months, growing our operations and efficiency in a challenging year. This gives us the confidence to embark on the next phase of our journey. We firmly believe that this will better position us to take full advantage of our market leading position and to further accelerate our strategy across the region, he further said.

DMPI reported a 3.47 billion net income for its fiscal year 2020, which runs from May 2019 to April last year, corresponding to a 10.9% net profit margin.

The DMPL, which holds 87% ownership of the company, will use net proceeds from the offer to partially repay certain facilities extended to it and redeem its Series A-1 Preference Shares, the SEC said in a statement on Wednesday,

The said proceeds will also be used by Central American Resources Inc. (CARI), which owns 13% of DMPI, to cover its share in the offer-related costs in respect of the shares being offered, the SEC added.

Meanwhile, a stock analyst notes DPMIs attempt at a public offering this time around is really an issue of timing.

With the vaccine rollout ramping up, many investors will be watching when the country will make a recovery. Should Del Monte get this right, they might be able to ride the momentum during both the recovery and election thesis, Regina Capital managing director Luis Limlingan told CNN Philippines.

DPMIs IPO could become the second largest maiden offering in the country next to food manufacturer Monde Nissins, which hopes to raise 63 billion.
OLD SAYBROOK  The town high schools senior class will have a traditional prom and graduation ceremony in-person this year  on back-to-back days.

In a message to parents and students, Principal Sheila Riffle said the majority of seniors who attended a recent class meeting identified prom as the one event, other than graduation, that they wanted to be held before leaving high school.

We are writing to let you know that we are still awaiting state guidance on proms and other end-of-school year events, she said.

However, Riffle said the prom has been scheduled for June 15.

During this weeks Board of Education meeting, student representatives said the event will be held at Saint Clements Castle in Portland.

All students are required to get COVID tested within 72 hours of the event and all students attending should be vaccinated, recommends the state Department of Public Health, however, there has been no local decision on these policies yet.

Even without local guidance, the prom and graduation events will include social distancing and masks.

Old Saybrook High Schools graduation ceremony is still in the planning stages, .but will be held outdoors on June 16.

The schools graduation committee is developing plans for three ceremonies  one for a sunny day, one for a day full of run and another for a sunny day that suddenly changes into rain.

The committee will be meeting over the next few weeks to finalize the ceremonys details.
She recently landed a 3million with Tesco for a children's bodycare brand.

And Sam Faiers had plenty to smile about as she headed to a meeting at the Corinthia Hotel in London on Thursday.

The Mummy Diaries star, 30, cut a chic figure in a cosy muted brown long cardigan and cream cigarette trousers.

High spirits: Sam Faiers had plenty to smile about as she headed to a meeting at the Corinthia Hotel in London on Thursday

Sam layered the oversized cardigan atop of a ribbed vest top which hugged her slender physique.

The television personality added a boost to her height with cream heels and toted a pale brown handbag.

Sam wore her long locks in soft curls and accessorised her outfit with aviators.

She's got style: The Mummy Diaries star, 30, cut a chic figure in a cosy muted brown long cardigan and cream cigarette trousers

Businesswoman: Taking to Instagram, Sam penned: 'Keep the promises you make to yourself. I have mine written down.. try it. A day of meetings today'

The former TOWIE star couldn't resist sharing a snap once inside the hotel.

Taking to Instagram, Sam penned: 'Keep the promises you make to yourself. I have mine written down.. try it. A day of meetings today thought I'd dress up a little for the occasion x'.

It comes after MailOnline exclusively revealed the Mummy Diaries star is teaming up with Tesco to launch her own products for children in a multi-million pound deal.

It is understood that Tesco acquired exclusive rights to sell Sam's brand after an intense bidding war among three other major retailers.

Her children's body care brand is expected to earn her more than 3 million in the first year, and Knightleys Adventures will launch with a range of 10 products.

Brand: It comes after MailOnline revealed the Mummy Diaries star is teaming up with Tesco in a multi-million pound deal (Sam pictured with her kids Paul Jr, five, and Rosie, three, in 2018)

Her children's range will be released in every Tesco store in the UK in early May, and it is understood to be the largest deal the retailer has signed with a celebrity pre-launch.

Last month, Sam told Paul Knightley she wants a third child in 'one more year' despite him admitting he is 'not having' another anytime soon.

The couple are already parents to Paul Jr, five, and Rosie, three, and Sam is thinking about expanding their brood as she doesn't want her next baby to be too apart in age from their siblings.

Success: It is understood that Tesco acquired exclusive rights to sell Sam's brand after an intense bidding war among three other major retailers (stock picture)

On an episode of The Mummy Diaries, the couple were kept up until 4am as they tried to get Rosie to sleep in her own bed.

Speaking about their current nighttime difficulties, Sam said: 'It's not going to happen overnight.

'You need to get them into a routine. She's older and wiser so it's going to take a bit of time.'

The conversation then moved to the couple expanding their family, with Sam admitting she wants another child sooner rather than later.
One person got injured in a road traffic accident on the Tema-Accra motorway on Wednesday afternoon.



The vehicle, a white Mitsubishi Canter van with registration number GM 4712-14, travelling from Tema to Accra had a left front tyre burst.



The driver who was travelling with one passenger, lost control and veered into the median.



The vehicle landed on its right side.



The passenger sustained an injury and was taken to hospital [See viedo below].



It happened around midday on the Tema to Accra side near the Toll booth at the Accra side of the motorway.



An eyewitnesses, Isaac Quartey [Nii Baah] told Graphic Online that he heard the tyre burst and saw the vehicle veering off the road.



He joined other rescuers to pull the injured person out of the wreckage into a taxi, which carried him together with the driver to the hospital.





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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BETHLEHEM, Pa., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- St. Luke's University Health Network is a first-time winner of the prestigious 2021 15 Top Health Systems award, part of the Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals national benchmarks series. St. Luke's is the only health system in the Lehigh Valley to receive this honor  and one of only two health systems in Pennsylvania.

IBM Watson Health has identified the top health systems in the United States through a rigorous, objective evaluation of 324 health systems with multiple hospitals. The annual top health system list, published Monday by Fortune, was established in 2009 to identify top performance in, among other measures, clinical outcomes, patient experience and operational efficiency through effective system integration.

For the first time, this year's ranking also introduces a measure of hospitals' contributions to community health with a focus on equity, developed by a team of experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity and the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"Hospitals save lives both by caring for individuals who are sick and by working to keep their communities healthy," said Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement and Director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Many health care "systems" in this country do not operate as actual systems; rather, their various components  hospitals, service lines, practices, information technology, electronic medical records, human resources, etc.  largely operate independently, explained St. Luke's President and CEO Rick Anderson. In contrast, St. Luke's success is a direct result of a legitimate, thorough integration, providing patients with a seamless and consistent patient and clinical experience in all of the Network's 12 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations.

"The IBM Watson 15 Top Health System award recognizes St. Luke's University Health Network's ability to provide fully integrated services and the highest level of quality care at a lower cost than any hospital network in our region. This recognition is especially significant at this time, considering the vital and fundamental role of health systems in the battle against COVID-19," Anderson said.

In addition to the 15 Top Health Systems recognition, individual St. Luke's campuses won IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospital awards for the ninth time:

St. Luke's University Hospital, Bethlehem and Allentown campuses, for the seventh time in a row and the ninth time overall in the Major Teaching Hospital category. THIS YEAR ST. LUKE'S UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL WAS RANKED #1 IN THE COUNTRY IN THE MAJOR TEACHING HOSPITAL CATEGORY  #1 IN THE COUNTRY!

and campuses, for the seventh time in a row and the ninth time overall in the Major Teaching Hospital category. St. Luke's Anderson Campus in Bethlehem Township for the third time in a row in the Medium Community Hospital category.

in for the third time in a row in the Medium Community Hospital category. St. Luke's Miners Campus in Schuylkill County for the first time in the Small Community Hospital category.

IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals, conducted annually since 1993, is one of the health industry's most prestigious honors. Researchers evaluated 2,675 short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals based on the following public data sets: Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data, and data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Compare website.

For more information, visit http://www.100tophospitals.com/.

SOURCE St. Luke's University Health Network

Related Links

http://www.sluhn.org


New Delhi [India], April 30 (ANI): In an effort to meet the increased demand for liquid oxygen in view of the surging COVID-19 cases, the Indian Air Force airlifted three cryogenic oxygen containers from Singapore and another 6 from Dubai to West Bengal's Panagarh on Thursday.



As per an official statement of the Indian Air Force, the IAF C-17 aircraft were used for carrying the cryogenic oxygen containers and another C-17 is presently airlifting 3 containers from Bangkok to Panagarh Airbase.

In addition to that, IAF C-17s also airlifted two cryogenic oxygen containers from Chandigarh to Bhubaneswar, four from Hindan to Ranchi, four from Mumbai to Bhubaneswar, two from Chandigarh to Ranchi and 1 from Indore to Jamnagar today.

IAF said the airlift of two containers from Bhopal to Ranchi, two from Lucknow to Ranchi and two containers from Jodhpur to Jamnagar is in progress.

"In addition, IAF C130 airlifted Navy medical team personnel from Mumbai to Ahmedabad today and have been deployed for airlifting of 75 oxygen cylinder from Baroda to Hindan," the statement added.

The surge in the COVID-19 cases continues to affect India as the country recorded 3,79,257 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday. This was the highest single-day spike in the cases since the pandemic began last year.

According to the Union Health Ministry, as many as 3,645 deaths and 2,69,507 recoveries were also recorded in the last 24 hours. Total active cases of the infection in India have now mounted to 30,84,814. (ANI)
Joe Biden said during his first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening that the Capitol storming on January 6 was the 'worst attack' on democracy since the Civil War.

The claim immediately led to major backlash, especially from those on right-wing Twitter, who pointed to a slew of other tragedies in America between the 1860s and 2021  like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Pearl Harbor, presidential assassinations and others.

'January 6 was worse than 9/11? Or Pearl Harbor?' Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and former attorney wrote in a Twitter thread.

'Or the Oklahoma City bombing? Or the dismantling of civil liberties in the name of the Cold War and War on Terror? Or the mass surveillance program secretly and illegally implemented by NSA aimed at US citzens (sic)?' he continued, calling the president a 'drama queen' for hyperbolizing the January 6 riots.

Joe Biden was excoriated on Twitter Wednesday after claiming in his first address to a joint session of Congress that the Capitol storming was the 'worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War'

People immediately took to Twitter to break down the claim, listing attacks that happened between the 1860s and 2021 like the September 11 terrorist attacks and presidential assassinations

Trump advisor Jason Miller noted 9/11 and Pearl Harbor

'How about the War on Drugs, mass incarceration and Jim Crow?' Greenwald quipped. 'Were those worse 'attacks on democracy' than the 3-hour Capitol riot on Jan. 6?'

'The assassination of JFK? The interference in domestic politics by the CIA? The list of worse attacks than Jan. 6 is endless,' he concluded.

'Worst attack on our Democracy since the Civil War? Not 9/11? Not Pearl Harbor???' Trump advisor Jason Miller tweeted Wednesday.

At the top of Biden's speech, the president lamented the situation he inherited from Donald Trump when he was inaugurated on January 20.

'As I stand here tonight  just one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. 100 days since I took the oath of office, lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation in crisis,' Biden said.

He then listed: 'The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.'

'Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again,' he said, dubbing himself the fixer of all the aforementioned issues. 'Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.

Washington Examiner Justice Reporter noted that 9/11 was a major attack on American democracy from an outside threat

He alsno noted JFK's assassination

The reporter made sure to mention other presidential assassinations and attempts

He noted that the Capitol attack was bad, but then listed other Capitol attacks over the years

'Life can knock us down,' Biden said. 'But in America, we never stay down. In America, we always get up. And today, that's what we're doing: America is rising anew.'

'After 100 Days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for takeoff,' he continued.

'100 days ago, America's house was on fire. We had to act.'

Twitter was not happy with Biden's classification of the January 6 events.

Washington Examiner Justice reporter Jerry Dunleavy wrote on Twitter: '9/11 was an attack on our democracy. Flight 93 was headed for the U.S. Capitol, and if not for the brave actions of those on board, it's very possible the building would've been a smoking crater. Instead, it crashed in a field ~20 minutes from DC, & all 40 passengers & crew died.'

'The terrorist attacks of 9/11 also successfully targeted the Pentagon - a prominent global symbol of our democracy's military might,' he continued. 'The plane smashing into the side of the Pentagon killed the 59 passengers & crew on board the aircraft as well as 125 people inside the Pentagon.'

'President John F. Kennedy was also literally assassinated,' Dunleavy wrote in another post as part of his thread.

He later added: 'Sorry, I forgot a few things here. Lincoln was assassinated a few days after Lee surrendered to Grant (though a few Confederate generals held out for a couple more months). Garfield, McKinley, & JFK were all assassinated. Teddy Roosevelt was shot. Reagan was shot & almost died.'

'The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist attack willfully targeting a federal government building, and it killed 168 people,' he continued in his list.

'The Capitol riot was very bad. Let's get serious about American history tho. The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol in 1971.The May 19th Communist Organization bombed the Capitol in 1983,' Dunleavy tweeted.

'Pearl Harbor,' he wrote in a standalone tweet.

At the conclusion of his speech Wednesday, Biden said world leaders don't think American democracy can 'overcome the lies, anger, hate and fears.' He added: 'They look at the images of the mob that assaulted this Capitol as proof that the sun is setting on American democracy'

The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway noted some of the same instances in her own attack on the president's classification of the attack.

'Biden asserts riot was a worse attack than various bombings and deadly attacks on the Capitol, deadly Summer of Rage with its attacks on the WH and federal court buildings, four presidential assassinations, another five assassination attempts, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. OK,' she tweeted.

A social media associate with right-wing Daily Caller reminded: '3,000 Americans died on 9/11.'

The January 6, 2021 Capitol storming occurred after then-President Trump held a 'stop the steal' rally outside the White House that day when Congress met to certify the Electoral College results for Biden.

After the rally, thousands of Trump supporters marched to Capitol Hill for a protest outside, before many began storming the doors of the building to prevent lawmakers from certifying the results.

Thousands of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol January 6, 2021 to protest Congress as it held a joint session to certify the election results for Joe Biden

The ordeal went on for hours that afternoon into evening, and resulted in a handful of deaths  including that of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.

Hundreds were injured.

Lawmakers later shared their account of hiding in the chambers and their offices while the Capitol was put on lockdown after protesters were able to breach the doors of the building.

That month, the House, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelsi, swiftly moved to impeach Trump for a second time. The Senate did not sway 17 Republicans to vote to convict Trump, making it the second unsuccessful impeachment trial against him.

At the conclusion of Biden's speech Wednesday, where only 200 lawmakers were present due to COVID-19 restriction, he brought back up the attack on the Capitol.

'Can our democracy overcome the lies, anger, hate and fears that have pulled us apart?' Biden questioned.

'America's adversaries  the autocrats of the world  are betting it can't,' he continued. 'They believe we are too full of anger and division and rage. They look at the images of the mob that assaulted this Capitol as proof that the sun is setting on American democracy.'

But Biden assured: 'They are wrong. And we have to prove them wrong. We have to prove democracy still works. That our government still works  and can deliver for the people.'

He called the attack an 'existential crisis'

Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland school shooting survivor, wrote: 'Idk 9/11 was pretty bad' in response to Biden calling it the worst attack on American democracy.

'1/6 worse than 9/11 according to Biden,' a booker for Fox News tweeted along with an infamous image of a man falling down the side of the World Trade Center after the planes hit.
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Leapfrog Group, a national watchdog organization of employers and other purchasers focused on health care safety and quality, today released the spring 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, which assign an "A," "B," "C," "D," or "F" letter grade to more than 2,700 general acute-care hospitals in the U.S. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the only rating solely focused on a hospital's ability to protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries, and infections.

Notably, 27 hospitals across the U.S. have achieved 19 consecutive "A" grades, which represents an "A" in every biannual grading cycle since the launch of the Safety Grade in spring 2012.

"We find that straight 'A' hospitals have strong structures of safety in place," said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. "These hospitals are continuously learning, monitoring data, and addressing areas of improvement."

Straight "A" hospitals have shared how they were better prepared for COVID-19 thanks to their sustained leadership focus on patient safety as a top institutional priority.

"Hospitals with a consistent pattern of protecting patients from errors, accidents, and injuries, like these straight 'A' hospitals, seem to have been more prepared when the pandemic hit," Binder said. "For many, safety and quality are embedded in their daily work at all levels of the organization, which prepared them in turn to respond to the rapidly evolving pandemic. As a part of this culture, straight 'A' hospitals have consistently shown a commitment to their workforce, empowering them to ask questions and share safety concerns."

Testimonial statements and videos from straight "A" hospitals can be found on the Hospital Safety Grade website.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses up to 27 national performance measures to grade hospitals using a methodology developed with guidance from the foremost experts in patient safety. This most recent data was collected immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Binder added that performance measures used in this spring's Grade serve as a proxy for the safety of care provided to COVID-19 patients in many ways. For example, a hospital with infection control procedures in place is better equipped to protect patients and health care workers. Additionally, staffing intensive care units with intensivists and monitoring hand hygiene compliance have been shown to significantly reduce harm to patients, regardless of their condition.

"This pandemic emphasized how much we rely on America's health care workforce," Binder said. "Our straight 'A' hospitals remind us how preparedness protected their patients as well as their workforce and created a high level of organizational resilience. As we emerge from the pandemic, hospitals need to double down on safety, so they save lives, strengthen their organizations, and position themselves to withstand the next crisis. Putting safety first should be the priority of every hospital CEO."

Across all states, highlights of findings from the spring 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade include:

Thirty-three percent of hospitals received an "A," 24% received a "B," 35% received a "C," 7% received a "D," and less than 1% received an "F"

Five states with the highest percentages of "A" hospitals are Massachusetts , Idaho , Maine , Virginia , and North Carolina

, , , , and There were no "A" hospitals in South Dakota or North Dakota

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is reviewed by a National Expert Panel and receives guidance from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is updated twice per year. It is independently assessed, peer-reviewed, fully transparent, and free to the public.

For more information about the Safety Grades, as well as individual hospital grades and state rankings, please visit hospitalsafetygrade.org and follow The Leapfrog Group on Facebook and Twitter.

About The Leapfrog Group

Founded in 2000 by large employers and other purchasers, The Leapfrog Group is a national nonprofit organization driving a movement for giant leaps forward in the quality and safety of American health care. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey and new Leapfrog Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) Survey collect and transparently report hospital and ASC performance, empowering purchasers to find the highest-value care and giving consumers the lifesaving information they need to make informed decisions. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, Leapfrog's other main initiative, assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their record of patient safety, helping consumers protect themselves and their families from errors, injuries, accidents, and infections.

SOURCE The Leapfrog Group

Related Links

http://leapfroggroup.org


This project comes more than a decade after FKMCD first invited Oxitec to pilot its technology in the Keys. The project has received required regulatory approvals from federal and state regulators, including approvals by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS). In August 2020 the FKMCD Board of Commissioners approved the project. Extensive public consultation, education and engagement has been carried out and community support for the project remains high.

Andrea Leal, Executive Director Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, said, "Our primary mission is to protect residents in the Florida Keys from all mosquitoes including the disease-transmitting Aedes aegypti. The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District remains committed to seeking out, environmentally-friendly and targeted tools to protect our residents and to preserve our wildlife."

"With full approval from the US EPA and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, as well as support from the US Centers for Disease Control and an independent advisory board, we are now eager to see the project progress over the coming months," she said.

Grey Frandsen, Oxitec's CEO, said, "We're thankful for the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of Oxitec's technology with such an outstanding partner. The challenges posed by disease-spreading mosquitoes is growing, not shrinking, making this pilot project a major step forward in bringing Oxitec's safe, self-limiting technology to the US."

Oxitec's Aedes aegypti technology is part of an expanding line of Oxitec technologies being developed to deliver safe, targeted biological control of pests. Oxitec's self-limiting technology has been deployed successfully around the world against major agricultural and public health pests.

Oxitec's just-add-water Aedes aegypti technology was successfully proven in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2019, where after just 13 weeks of treatment, the technology suppressed up to 95% of Aedes aegypti. In May 2020, Oxitec received full biosafety approval for this technology from Brazil's national biosafety regulatory authority CTNBio after demonstrating the technology's full safety to human health and the environment. Independent research found community support for the project was overwhelmingly high, with 94% of residents surveyed in favor of Oxitec's mosquito technology and its use in their neighborhoods.

In April, 2021, Oxitec announced that The Wellcome Trust awarded Oxitec $6.8 million in funding to scale up its Aedes aegypti technology.

About the Aedes aegypti:

The Aedes aegypti mosquito is an increasingly global threat, now living alongside half of the world's population. After decades of effort, there is still no cure or specific treatment for many diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti, and public health agencies are trying to stop these devastating diseases at their common source: by controlling the Aedes aegypti mosquito itself.

Unfortunately, existing methods of controlling Aedes aegypti, such as spraying or fogging using chemical insecticides, have failed to stop the spread of disease. This is partly because Aedes aegypti has developed resistance to insecticides, rendering many common chemicals ineffective at killing the mosquito. This project will demonstrate that Oxitec's mosquitoes can be used as a stand-alone control program or as part of an integrated pest management program to suppress Aedes aegypti in the Florida Keys in a way that is safe for humans, animals, and the environment.

Notes for the media:

About Oxitec's Aedes aegypti technology:

Oxitec's non-biting male mosquito was designed to control the invasive, disease spreading Aedes aegypti. It has successfully provided significant suppression of the wild Aedes aegypti in other geographies and does not persist in the environment or cause harm to beneficial insects like bees and butterflies.

This technology also removes all requirements for adult mosquito-rearing and releases, and eliminates the potential for female releases. Combined with other innovations, this technology is anticipated to reduce up to 90% of costs associated with traditional insect release programs.

Similar projects in the Brazilian city of Indaiatuba found that Oxitec's mosquito suppressed disease-carrying Aedes aegypti by up to 95%[1] in urban, dengue-prone environments following just 13 weeks of treatment, as compared to untreated control sites in the same city.

Additional resources:

The U.S. EPA's approval of and complete risk assessment of the pilot project

The U.S. EPA's responses to public comments

The U.S. EPA/U.S. CDC memorandum on vectorial capacity of Oxitec's technology

The U.S. CDC's letter confirming their collaboration in the project

The State of Florida's approval of the pilot project

approval of the pilot project 100+ independent peer-reviewed scientific publications on Oxitec technology

1. 95% was the high 2-week rolling average and the individual weekly high was 98%; the highest 4-week rolling average was 92%.

About Aedes aegypti in Florida

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are an invasive species in Florida and other parts of the U.S.

mosquitoes are an invasive species in and other parts of the U.S. In recent years, the Florida Keys has seen locally transmitted cases of dengue and travel-related cases of Zika.

Video - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1500187/FKMCD_Oxitec_Video.mp4

SOURCE FKMCD; Oxitec Ltd.

Related Links

https://keysmosquito.org


Update, May 12  Alcohol to-go is official, folks. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed this bill into law, allowing restaurants to sell alcohol along with pickup and delivery orders.

---

Texas, we're one signature away from having to-go booze be a permanent thing.

On April 28, the Texas Senate passed a bipartisan bill that will allow restaurants to sell alcohol along with pickup and delivery orders. The bill would make permanent an executive order signed last year by Gov. Greg Abbott as a way to bolster the hospitality industry and become arguably the only good thing to come out of the pandemic.

Now that it's passed almost unanimously (there was one nay vote, according to the Houston Chronicle, but it remains unclear who the party pooper is), it heads to Abbott's desk where it's almost guaranteed to be signed into law.

READ MORE: Willa Eatery settles into downtown San Antonio with vegan-friendly bites

Texas restaurants first got a waiver to sell booze during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was then extended indefinitely. What was meant as a temporary measure quickly picked up support from both the industry and consumers (who doesn't want to order a margarita to go with their tacos?) and was formally introduced as a bill in the beginning of the 2021 legislative session.

"The Texas Restaurant Association and our members applaud Chairman Hancock, Chairman Geren, and all of the restaurant allies whose support resulted in the filing of SB 298 / HB 1094 today, said Emily Williams Knight, President and CEO of Texas Restaurant Association, in a January release. Without Governor Abbotts temporary waiver allowing restaurants to safely sell alcohol with their to-go food orders, Texas would have seen many more restaurants  small and large  close their doors and lose their employees because of this pandemic."

As for Abbott, he's made no secret about where he stands on the new law. In January, in celebration of National Beer Can Appreciation Day, Abbott publicly announced his support for the bill, tweeting the classic Dos Equis catchphrase "Stay thirsty, my friends" while ironically holding a can of Austin Beerworks, a rather small Austin-based craft brewery.

Abbott has 10 days to sign the bill into law. Now if only we could do something about that pesky no alcohol before noon on Sundays rule.
Mammoet has recently completed transporting around 50 pieces of cargo from Thailand to the Southeast Asian country of Laos for its key Nam Theun 1 Hydropower Project.

This project was awarded to Mammoet by Hansa Meyer and saw both teams jointly execute multiple operations at the same time. Each team displayed their strengths and expertise working together with combined capabilities.

The Nam Theun 1 Hydropower Project will be completed this year and will produce approximately around 650MW of energy.

Prior to execution, the duo worked on detailed engineering, involving teams from Mammoets Thailand and Netherlands locations, as well as Hansa Meyers trusted engineering partner in Laos.

Mammoet said its experience in land transportation and Hansa Meyers close coordination with various government offices ensured the approval of permits crucial for the land transportation to take place.

The transport route involved a 1,100-km land journey from Laem Chabang to Ban Phaeng in Nakhon Phanom Province, and another 1.1km river crossing journey across the Mekong River to a jetty across the border in Laos.

Mammoets conventional trailers in various configurations were used for this transportation, across reinforced bridges, along widened roads, and under escort to ensure traffic was safely managed.

As for the river crossing, both teams had experienced supervisors and operators to ensure high standards were maintained in line with the latest regulations from government authorities, and to meet key project deadlines.

Specifically, for barge engineering, a survey was conducted to measure the water depth accurately before the river roll-on was performed. A ramp was also fabricated for the river crossing, due to low water level.

Mammoet and Hansa Meyer were given special permit by authorities in Thailand to use the Ban Phaeng location for this river transportation. All barge crossings were successfully and safely executed observing Covid-19 prevention measures, said the statement from Mammoet.

The heaviest cargo transported weighed 236 tonnes, while the largest measured 1027cm x 370cm x 383cm, it added.-TradeArabia News Service
The name Zoe Roth might not ring any bells. But chances are youve seen her photo.

One Saturday morning in 2005, when Roth was 4 years old, her family went to look at a house on fire in their neighborhood in Mebane, North Carolina. Firefighters had intentionally set the blaze as a controlled fire, so it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed children to take turns holding the hose.

Roth remembers watching the flames engulf the house when her father, an amateur photographer, asked her to smile. With her hair askew and a knowing look in her eyes, Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fire roared behind her. Disaster Girl was born.

In the years since Dave Roth, Zoes father, entered it in a photo contest in 2007 and won, the image has been edited into various disasters from history, with Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks in the distance. Now, after more than a decade of having her image endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon, Roth has sold the original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly $500,000.

The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at an auction on April 17 to a user identified as @3FMusic. As with any currency, the value of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at more than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and will receive 10% of future sales.

The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media known as NFTs, is exploding. All NFTs, including the Disaster Girl meme Roth just sold, are stamped with a unique bit of digital code that marks their authenticity, and stored on the blockchain, a distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In the meme hall of fame, Disaster Girl ranks alongside Ermahgerd, a pigtailed teenage girl posing with Goosebumps books; Bad Luck Brian, immortalized in a grimacing yearbook photo with braces; and Success Kid, a toddler on a beach with a clenched fist and an expression of intense determination.

In an interview, Roth said selling the meme was a way for her to take control over a situation that she has felt powerless over since she was in elementary school.

Before making the decision to sell, Roth consulted Bad Luck Brian himself  his real name is Kyle Craven  and Laney Griner, the mother of Success Kid.

Its the only thing that memes can do to take control, Roth recalled Craven telling her.

Disaster Girl memes have spread far and wide. Once, a group from Poland asked permission to use the meme for educational material about a dying Indigenous language. Someone in Portugal sent Roth pictures of a mural with the meme.

You just make it fit however you want to fit it, she said. I love seeing them because Id never make any of them myself, but I love seeing how creative people are.

Over the years, shes seen hundreds of iterations of her picture. One shared last summer during racial justice protests was among her favorites, she said.

Once its out there, its out there, and theres nothing you can do about it, Dave Roth said. It always finds a way to stay relevant with whatever new kind of awful, terrible bad thing is happening, so Ive laughed at a lot of them.

Roth, now 21, is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying peace, war and defense. She has never been recognized as Disaster Girl outright, she said, but most of her friends and acquaintances know of her meme fame.

People who are in memes and go viral is one thing, but just the way the internet has held on to my picture and kept it viral, kept it relevant, is so crazy to me, she said. Im super grateful for the entire experience.

Even so, she said, she hopes to one day do something meaningful enough to shift Disaster Girl to the second page of search results for her name.

After graduation, Roth plans to take a gap year before pursuing a graduate degree in international relations. She said she would donate the fortune she has made from her likeness  which is still in cryptocurrency form  to charities and to pay off her student loans, among other things.

When shes home, she often walks past the lot where it all started and wonders if locals know that its a meme place, she said.

People who are in memes didnt really have a choice in it, she said. The internet is big. Whether youre having a good experience or a bad experience, you kind of just have to make the most of it.

Ben Lashes, who manages the Roths and stars of other memes including Nyan Cat, Grumpy Cat, Keyboard Cat, Doge, Success Kid, David After Dentist and the Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, said his clients had cumulatively made over $2 million in NFT sales.

He said that NFT sales had helped establish memes as a sophisticated art form and serious pieces of culture.

I think anytime you can find a collector  no matter what the price is  who respects the art behind it and is going to cherish it, thats a successful sale, whether its one Ether or 200 or 300, he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
GRAFTON  The Grafton Ferry will resume operations on Friday for the 2021 season.

This year the ferry is expanding its hours to give people greater access to the Grafton area.

Use of the ferry  which can accommodate personal vehicles, buses and vans  cuts travel time between Missouri and Illinois by about 30 minutes. People are allowed to get out of their vehicles during the river crossing.

Everything is ready to go at 10 a.m. Friday, April 30, said Denise Knight of the Calhoun Ferry Company which operates the Grafton Ferry.

]The Grafton ferry will be open Thursdays through Sundays beginning May 6. The ferry will run from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays; 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays; and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays.

Adding an extra day of operation and increasing Saturday operating hours is expected to drive more travelers to the Grafton region.

When the Grafton Ferry opens for the year, it is a signal that the tourism season is in full swing, said Cory Jobe, President/CEO of the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau which represents Grafton.

We cant wait to host all the visitors that come to the area by ferry, he said. By expanding the ferrys days of operation and hours, we are confident there will be an increase in mid-week tourism in the area.

Travelers can access the Grafton Ferry on the Illinois side near the Grafton Lighthouse and the public boat ramp off Market Street in Grafton. On the Missouri side, the landing is located at the end of Grafton Ferry Road, just off of Highway 94.

Ferry fees include:

 Vehicles (passenger cars and small trucks): $8 one way, $15 round trip

 Bicycles: $4 one way

 Foot passengers: $3 one way

 Motorcycles: $5 one way, $9 round trip

 Dual Over One Ton: $9 one way

 Trailers: $1 per axle one way

 Tandem: $10 one way

 Semi Tractor Trailer: $13 one way.

Cash and check are accepted, but credit cards cannot be processed.

The Golden Eagle Ferry, also operated by Calhoun Ferry Company, is open year-round, seven days a week, Knight said. The Golden Eagle connects Calhoun County with St. Charles, Missouri.

For more details visit www.EnjoyGrafton.com or call the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau at 618-465-6676.
Mary Altaffer

Following a Congressional report that found concerns with these products, Attorney General Letitia James has launched a probe into several manufacturers of baby food regarding the presence of inorganic arsenic found in infant rice cereal products.

James office is requesting information from companies that make Gerber, Beech-Nut, Earths Best Organic (Haine) and HappyBaby (Nurture) brands to see if their infant rice cereals sold in New York contain arsenic at levels above the legal maximum.
She's currently filming season 16 of NBC reality show America's Got Talent.

But on Wednesday, Heidi Klum appeared to have a breather from taping as she enjoyed a relaxed solo outing in LA.

The model and talent competition judge, 47, showed off her long legs as she grabbed an iced beverage to go on the warm spring day.

Model looks: Heidi Klum enjoyed a relaxed solo outing in LA on Wednesday, showing off her long legs as she grabbed an iced beverage to go on the warm spring day

The German-born beauty stepped out in a patchwork shirt that fell to mid-thigh at the front and to the knee at the back.

It was fastened with one button at the bust and Klum rolled up the sleeves to her elbows.

She wore tiny denim shorts and a pair of bubblegum pink lace-up boots.

Her long hair was left loose and she sported round reflective shades.

Eclectic ensemble: The German-born beauty, 47, stepped out in a patchwork shirt that fell to mid-thigh at the front and to the knee at the back which she paired with tiny denim shorts

Sunny style: Her long hair was left loose and she sported round reflective shades. She completed her look with a pair of bubblegum pink lace-up boots

Klum returned to AGT for another season of judging, reuniting with fellow panelists Sofia Vergara, Simon Cowell and Howie Mandel.

The show hosted by Terry Crews is set to premiere on June 1.

Since making a name for herself as a top model, she has translated that success into a string of high-profile TV gigs.

She's been married to German musician Tom Kaulitz since 2019 and is mom to four children whom she shares with ex-husband Seal.
The Connecticut state legislature should not legalize recreational marijuana because the drug will have harmful effects on the public health of residents.

In 2015, someone I knew became addicted to marijuana and I witnessed the ways the drug negatively impacted that persons life. This experience prompted me to research the effects of marijuana extensively as a student at Central Connecticut State University.

The possibility that marijuana may be legalized for recreational use by adults in Connecticut is something every citizen of the state should be concerned about because the drug can cause cancer, it can have damaging effects on the brain (especially in people 25 and under) and it can be addictive. We should all be questioning whether the state has our best interests in mind with the proposal of this legislation.

Marijuana is often viewed as a natural product, but it has been found to be more damaging in some ways than tobacco. A 2009 Canadian study that compared marijuana and tobacco smoke toxicity found marijuana to be more cytotoxic (toxic to living cells), mutagenic and chromosomally damaging than tobacco in certain cases. A study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found it may increase the risk for testicular cancer.

If marijuana is legalized for recreational use for people 21 and older in Connecticut, adults will not be the only residents impacted by this legislation. The legalization of recreational marijuana for those 21 and older in other states, such as California, has caused an increase in marijuana usage in teenagers, according to a report in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Additionally, if children and teenagers gain access to marijuana due to legalization of recreational use in the state, the drug will have several negative effects on their developing brains. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana can have a significant impact on brain development that might last for an extended time or become permanent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that when marijuana users begin using as teenagers, the drug may reduce attention, memory and learning functions.

Finally, according to Deborah Hasin, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, marijuana is more potent than ever before, and the risk of developing cannabis use disorder is higher than in the past. Updated figures show that 20 to 30 percent of cannabis users develop CUD, so the risk for addiction is real, Hasin said.

Advocates for legalization of recreational marijuana in Connecticut say it will reduce the selling and purchasing of the drug on the black market. State Sen. Will Haskell (D-Wilton) said: The benefit to legalization lies in regulation. We know that right now too many Connecticut residents, too many of our constituents purchase cannabis on an illicit and an illegal market.

However, other states that have legalized recreational marijuana, such as Massachusetts, have not been able to keep residents from purchasing the drug in illegal markets. One year after Massachusetts legalized recreational marijuana, 77 percent of marijuana sales in the state were under the table, according to cannabis research firm BDS Analytics. The intent was to rid Massachusetts of the illicit market, but its still here and its thriving, said Walpole Police Chief John Carmichael.

At a time when Connecticut is mandating masks for safety, it would be hypocritical for the state legislature to legalize such a harmful substance for recreational use. Does Connecticut really care about the public health of its citizens, or is it just looking for another way to make money?

Lydia Curtiss of Litchfield is a student majoring in communication at Central Connecticut State University.
[April 28, 2021] Responsive Data, LLC Announces Acquisition of MLMLeads.com

MESA, Ariz., April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Responsive Data, LLC (Mesa, Arizona), an innovative Lead Generation & Software Solutions Provider to the Direct Sales industry, has announced that it has entered into a Definitive Purchase Agreement with MLM Leads, LLC (Manhattan, Kansas), a leading provider of MLM Leads and MLM Traffic services to the Network Marketing industry, under which Responsive Data will acquire MLMLeads.com, MyHomeBusiness.com, its customer database and affiliate network, along with a portfolio of other sites and assets, in an undisclosed all-cash transaction. About Responsive Data, LLC:

Over the past two decades, Responsive Data has led the MLM Lead Generation industry, pioneering key technologies and innovations. Concepts such as "Real-Time Leads," "Area Code Targeted Leads," "Networker Leads," and other advanced real-time sorting technologies, as well as advanced control features to manage delivery, set daily caps, and pause lead flows, were all innovations started by the Responsive Data team. Responsive Data's all-in-one Digital Marketing Platform & Mobile App provides a robust set of tools to help networkers grow and manage their business. In addition to its full-featured contact management system, email broadcast & follow-up system, replicated websites and mobile app, the company's advanced website builder technologies allow users to even create their own customwebsites and sales funnels while providing advanced tracking and reporting at all stages of engagement.



From Dennis Seifert, President & CEO at Responsive Data:

"We are excited about the acquisition, and are looking forward to meeting with all of our customers and affiliates. Enrique (the founder of MLMLeads.com) has been well-respected in the industry for many years and has developed a unique method of generating MLM Leads and MLM Traffic that has claimed an extensive following. With our advanced technologies, we plan to further his vision and expand the functionalities of these amazing products. In addition, to encourage existing affiliates to maintain their links and for new affiliate partners to apply, we have made an unprecedented decision to increase commissions by 50% on all sales beginning May 1, 2021." About MLM Leads, LLC:

Founded in 2003 by Enrique Garibay, MLMLeads.com is one of the internet's oldest and most respected lead generation websites in the industry, providing sales leads and pay-per-click web traffic to the MLM & Network Marketing industry. MLM Leads has gained a loyal following by providing quality products and personalized services and proudly attributes the majority of its sales to repeat customers and direct referrals by its affiliate network.

From Enrique Garibay, Founder of MLM Leads, LLC:

"I could not be happier that we were able to come to an agreement with Dennis Seifert and the Responsive Data team. I have had a great relationship with Dennis over the years and I could not have perceived anyone better to continue my vision as I head into retirement." For More Information, Contact:

Dennis Seifert

President & CEO

Responsive Data, LLC

3514 N Power Rd, Ste 115

Mesa, AZ 85215

(888) 455-3237

info@responsivedata.com

www.ResponsiveData.com Related Images responsive-data-founders-dennis.png

Responsive Data Founders - Dennis and Heidi Seifert

Responsive Data Founders - Dennis and Heidi Seifert View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/responsive-data-llc-announces-acquisition-of-mlmleadscom-301279724.html SOURCE Responsive Data, LLC

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BASSETERRE:--- After 8 days of hearing before the criminal assizes, the suspects that appeared for the courts for the brutal murder of Mathieu Carty were all found guilty.

The jury found the 7 suspects guilty for acts of torture and barbarism, the 7 detainees who appeared before the Assize Court of Basse-Terre were all imprisoned for other crimes prior to the brutal murder of Carty who was killed in his prison cell. Carty a St. Martiner, was detained as a suspect in the murder of a tourist identified as Wendy Montulet. The victim a Belgian tourist was murdered in July 2016.



The jurors ruled that the acts committed by the fellow inmates, against Mathieu Carty, had resulted in death without intention.

The 7 accused have accumulated a total of 151 years in prison. Christian Abrin, Horace Flanders, and Delbert Baker were each convicted to 23 years in prison, Thaice Benjamin and Emmanuel Blaise received 21 years imprisonment each, while David Lumene and Cliffort Matthew each got 20 years.

The defendants wanted to teach Mathieu Carty a lesson in retaliation for his actions against the young Belgian tourist that was also brutally murdered. But the members of the jury did not accept the intentions of the 7 detainees, believing that they had shown violence and humiliation towards their victim.

They were therefore all found responsible, and therefore guilty, confirming the criminal qualification which had been retained by the prosecution. The expression "humiliation" often came up in the court's motives, which may have led the jury to decide, by 6 out of 9 votes, in favor of the conviction.

CREDITS: SMBN
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:14:50|Editor: huaxia

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TOKYO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Japan's upper house of parliament on Wednesday approved the world's largest free trade deal, which comprises 15 Asia-Pacific countries, including all the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which could feasibly enter into force later this year, will create a massive free trade zone covering roughly 30 percent of the world's gross domestic product, trade and population.

FIRST FTA UNITING JAPAN, CHINA, South KOREA

For Japan, it will be the first free trade agreement (FTA) that comprises both China, its largest trading partner and South Korea, its third largest trading partner.

The deal has been signed by Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the 10 members of ASEAN, with India, one of the original members, being absent from negotiations since November 2019.

Nevertheless, the pact will enter into force 60 days after it is ratified by at least six of the ASEAN members and three non-ASEAN countries.

As of Wednesday, China, Singapore and Thailand had completed all their procedures for ratification.

China, the world's second-largest economy, completed the ratification on April 15 this year, according to the ministry of commerce.

At the High-level Forum for RCEP Economic and Trade Cooperation held recently in China's eastern port city of Qingdao, Gao Yan, chair of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said the RCEP would help realize zero tariffs on about a third of China's trade and significantly reduce the operating costs of enterprises in the region by facilitating trade and improving the business environment.

"It's estimated that by 2025, the RCEP can create additional growth of exports, foreign investment stock and GDP respectively by 10.4 percent, 2.6 percent and 1.8 percent in member countries," she added.

Singapore, for its part, ratified the RCEP agreement on April 9, 2021, and was the first RCEP participating country to complete the official ratification process.

Singapore's expeditious ratification of RCEP agreement signals the country's strong commitment to strengthening our trade and economic linkages with our partners, for the benefit of our businesses and people, Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing said.

"We look forward to our fellow RCEP Participating Countries doing likewise, to expedite the entry into force of the agreement," the minister added.

The parliament of Thailand, meanwhile, approved the RCEP agreement on Feb. 11, 2021.

"Some chapters and provisions of RCEP aim to create a conducive environment for e-commerce including protection of personal information and online consumers, as well as cooperation on cyber security," said Sansern Samalapa, Vice Minister of Commerce for Thailand, at a recent forum.

MINIMAL TARIFFS, BIG GROWTH

Once in effect, the deal will eliminate tariffs on over 90 percent of goods traded between its signatories over the next 20 years, and will also standardize rules on investment and intellectual property to promote free trade among members.

The first FTA will benefit both China and Japan with lower tariffs on high-technology equipment, including parts and components, as well as lower levies on machinery, electronic information technology, chemical products and a wide swathe of other key goods.

China's Vice Minister of Commerce, Wang Shouwen, has said that the RCEP will see tariffs eliminated on almost 30 percent of China's exports.

In addition, cost-effective valuations on imports of high-technology equipment, parts and components, as well as consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, will also benefit China.

As for Japan, the world's third-largest economy, which is in dire need of new post-pandemic economic drivers, the government projects the RCEP to boost its GDP by 2.7 percent, nearly doubling the 1.5 percent GDP growth Japan estimated to gain from the 11-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In terms of new job creation brought by the accord, the Japanese government said it expects that around 570,000 new jobs will be created.

While acknowledging the RCEP's significance to the economy, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official told a recent press briefing that it "will cover around 46 percent of Japan's total trade, compared with about 15 percent in the case of the 11-member TPP and about 12 percent in the case of the Japan-EU EPA."

The RCEP groups together the 10 ASEAN members -- Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, plus Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Enditem
Larry Schwartz, one of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos most trusted advisers, unexpectedly stepped down from his role as New York States vaccine czar, about five months after he was recruited by the governor to spearhead the states vaccine rollout.

His resignation was submitted on Wednesday, just as the State Legislature restored state provisions to the public officers law that would have affected Mr. Schwartz had he remained in the position.

Mr. Schwartz, who took on the role as an unpaid volunteer, could have been treated as a public officer following the legislative changes, which would have required him to file financial disclosure forms and be subject to a two-year lobbying ban after his service to the state, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Cuomo had waived those requirements at the beginning of the pandemic so he could attract a broader pool of potential volunteers to assist at the highest levels of government.
Credit Suisse maintains a bullish stance on the UK economic recovery and potential for further Sterling gains this year on economic fundamentals grounds.

Nevertheless, the bank is wary of political risk surrounding the May 6th Scottish parliamentary election and is, therefore, holding back from buying the Pound until this risk event has passed.

Scottish Election Will Amplify Referendum Debate

Credit Suisse notes that markets are not pricing any significant risk premium surrounding the Sottish Parliamentary election.

According to the bank this apparent lack of concern is due in part to uncertainty whether the SNP will be able to return to office with an overall majority or whether it will have to rely on the Green Party.

In the latter case, there are doubts whether the party can credibly call for a second independence referendum if the SNP does not secure an overall majority of 65 seats in the 129-seat parliament.

Above: EUR/USD exchange rate chart

There has been very little change in Euro to Pound (EUR/GBP) exchange rate implied volatilities which indicates that no significant risk has been priced in.

Further Complications from Johnson Controversy

Credit Suisse is concerned that markets are being complacent, especially given the on-going controversies surrounding Prime Minster Johnson.

The bottom line for us at this point is that, with UK PM Johnson facing various forms of sleaze scandals and other political mishaps, it is yet possible that the SNP will find a way to win convincingly enough on 6 May to generate greater fears than market are pricing in.

There would still be numerous steps and barriers to independence, but Credit Suisse does consider that any increase in the possibility of independence for Scotland would render UK assets less palatable for global investors. The implications are, therefore, that an SNP majority would tend to weaken the Pound.

In this context, we will set aside our constructive view on the UK economy linked to post-pandemic re-opening prospects that had made us GBP bulls for most of 2021, and keep a neutral view until after this specific event risk has passed.
Rotunda Rumblings

Road block: Senate President Matt Huffmans proposal to amend the state constitution to allow lawmakers to change redistricting deadlines later this year suffered a blow on Wednesday after a key Democratic group announced its opposition to it. As Andrew Tobias writes, the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus in a statement said its members were deeply concerned that the proposal would reduce public participation. Huffman has said he doesnt want to pursue his plan without bipartisan support.

Taxing issue: A Franklin County judge dismissed a case that had sought to declare illegal the taxing by cities and villages of people who arent currently working or living in those places during the pandemic. The Buckeye Institute argued its illegal to tax people where they neither work nor live. But the judge said deciding to do so is within the legislatures powers, Rich Exner reports. Similar suits are pending in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.

More jabs: Another 49,820 Ohioans completed their coronavirus vaccines between Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total who have received both doses of Pifzer or Moderna or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot to 3.6 million. Laura Hancock also reports another 1,723 new cases were reported.

Case rate drop: Ohios closely watched two-week rate of new coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents has taken a sharp turn for the better. The rate reported Thursday afternoon in the weekly update from the Ohio Department of Health likely will be near 155.5 cases per 100,000 over the last two weeks, Exner projects. This is a significant turnaround from just two weeks ago, when the two-week rate reported by the state had increased for the fourth straight week.

High-speed speed bump: The Ohio Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed the latest version of a much-worked-on bill to offer state grants to expand high-speed internet access around the state. The Senates versions of House Bill 2, however, only includes $20 million in funding for the current fiscal year, stripping out an additional $190 million the House sought for the following two years. State Sen. Steve Wilson, a Warren County Republican, said the Senate will decide in its version of the state budget bill how to fund the program in future years. HB2 now heads back to the House for a vote on whether to approve the Senates changes.

Black gold: New tax records show the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the oil and gas industry, was one of the major funders of the 2019 anti-House Bill 6 campaign. As Tobias reports, the API gave $1.47 million to a pair of dark-money groups that spent nearly $5 million on ads, plus an unknown amount on hiring petition circulators. The new numbers were found in the APIs 2020 tax returns, published this week by Environment & Energy Publishing.

Check it out: Ohio House members again are proposing to call on federal officials to end the E-Check program, which requires drivers in Greater Cleveland to get their cars inspected every two years. As Tobias writes, state Reps. Diane Grendell and Gail Pavliga said their proposal has 15 co-sponsors. The House passed similar measures in 2017 and 2020, although the non-binding resolutions didnt have any effect.

Raising the bench: Judges Cassandra Collier-Williams of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court and Emanuella Groves of the Eight District Court of Appeals have formed the Ohio Black Judges Association to support and mentor Black judges and attorneys who could become future judges, reports SpectrumNews 1s Karlynn Wells. There are only 56 African American judges in Ohio, out of over 700.

Timken vs. Tim: Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Jane Timkens U.S. Senate campaign announced on Wednesday it had launched a series of web ads targeting Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, who announced his own Senate bid earlier this week. The ads say of Ryan: Loud. Proud. Liberal. The Timken campaign said the ads would run on Facebook, Google and other digital platforms. (Twitter has announced it will no longer run political ads.)

In labor: Ryans campaign on Wednesday announced support from 10 labor unions: AFSCME Ohio Council 8, OAPSE AFSCME Local 4, AFSCME Retirees 1184, Communication Workers of America District 4, International Union of Painters & Allied Trades District Council 6, Maritime Engineers Beneficial Association, Ohio State Conference of IBEW, Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, SMART Transportation Division and SMART Sheet Metal Workers. Ill never stop fighting to cut our workers in on the deal, said a statement from Ryan.

STEMming harassment: U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown joined a group of his Democratic colleagues on Wednesday in introducing a bill called the Combating Sexual Harassment in Science Act to improve the understanding of factors contributing to sexual harassment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, examine its impact and to stop it. This legislation takes important steps toward ensuring more inclusive, safe, and equitable opportunities are afforded to scholars in STEM fields, which were already underrepresented by women and especially women of color, well before the pandemic, said a statement from Brown.

Teachers pet: On Thursday, Gov. Mike DeWine will speak at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce virtual event about safely reopening schools, on a panel with representatives of the Walton Family Foundation and National Association of School Nurses.

Healthy debate: Rep. Tavia Galonski, an Akron Democrat, introduced House Bill 269, which would repeal the just-passed Senate Bill 22 that gives the legislature authority to cancel states of emergency  such as the ongoing one due to the coronavirus pandemic -- lasting longer than 30 days. Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed SB 22 but the Republican-dominated legislature overrode it.

And love The better, Ohio: Ohio State University and fashion designer Marc Jacobs have agreed to stop fighting each others attempt to trademark the word The -- at least until the U.S. patent office makes a ruling on the matter. But as Jeremy Pelzer reports, Ohio State still needs to convince the patent office to overrule its earlier ruling against trademarking the word The on the grounds that its merely a decorative or ornamental feature.

Big-pockets Bob: State Sen. Bob Peterson, a Fayette County Republican, announced Wednesday that hes raised $100,000 since announcing his candidacy last week for the Aug. 3 special election for outgoing U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers 15th Congressional District seat. All the donations came from individuals, not political action committees, according to a release.

Knocking on senators doors: The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, Ohio Federation of Teachers, Policy Matters Ohio and the Ohio Education Association formed All In For Ohio Kids, a campaign to persuade state senators to accept the Houses version of the two-year operating budget, since it contains the Fair School Funding Plan. The plan scraps the current funding method for public schools and replaces it with a new funding formula and pays for charter schools separately so theres less competition between them and traditional public schools.

Moving out: JPMorgan Chase is leaving its namesake office tower in Downtown Columbus thats kitty-corner to the Statehouse. As Tristan Navera reports for Columbus Business Journal, the company, which is reducing its real-estate footprint nationwide in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, is moving its employees from downtown to its campus near the Polaris Mall. The building will keep the Chase name for now, according to a company spokesman.

Lobbying Lineup

Five organizations represented by NEA Consulting, a firm made up of former lobbyists for Grant Street Consultants who left and formed the new group after its founder, Neil Clark, was charged in connection with the House Bill 6 bribery case.

1. Intralot Inc.

2. Wholesale Beer and Wine Association of Ohio

3. Ohio Ambulance and Medical TransportationAssocation

4. Smile Direct Club

5. Star House

On the Move

Ohio Sen. Bob Hackett has been named to the Ohio Controlling Board, replacing Sen. Bob Peterson.

Sen. Theresa Gavarone has been named to the Ohio Great Lakes Commission.

Sen. Steve Wilson has been named to the Third Frontier Advisory Board.

President Joe Biden has nominated Daryl Baldwin, who serves as Executive Director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and Co-Director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, to serve on the National Council on the Humanities.

Birthdays

Brittany Warner, CJR Group lobbyist/ex-communications director for the Ohio GOP and Mike DeWines 2018 gubernatorial campaign

Straight From The Source

What has happened to Speaker Rosenberger is a tragedy. No one deserves to have this sort of thing hanging over his head for years, with no ability to defend himself. My heart goes out to him.

- David Axelrod, attorney for former Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, who resigned shortly before the FBI raided his home and storage unit but has never been charged with a crime, reports Laura Bischoff for the Columbus Dispatch.

Capitol Letter is a daily briefing providing succinct, timely information for those who care deeply about the decisions made by state government. If you do not already subscribe, you can sign up here to get Capitol Letter in your email box each weekday for free.
Amazon has good news for all its workers. The Seattle-based company plans to increase the wages of its workers starting mid-May.

Will the company also implement a $15 hourly pay for minimum wage workers?

Amazon's Initiative of Increasing Workers' Hourly Pay

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected a lot of employees. Some have lost their jobs while others have found an alternative to continue sustaining their daily expenses.

The latest drive of Amazon sounds interesting for the workers, as it plans to start increasing their hourly pay beginning next month. This is in conjunction with its effort of hiring thousands of workers across the globe.

In a blog post written on Wednesday, Apr. 28, Darcie Henry, the executive of Amazon said that the company will carry through an hourly pay increase for its workers between $0.50 and $3 which falls to over a billion-dollar total investment.

"This is on top of our already industry-leading starting wage of at least $15 an hour and the more than $2.5 billion that we invested last year in additional bonuses and incentives for front-line teams," VP of People Experience, Technology, and Worldwide Consumer, Henry, said in a report by CNN.

Read Also: Jeff Bezos' Final Letter to Amazon Says It 'Should Treat Employees Better,' Words for Andy Jassy?

Previously, Amazon has faced a social media backlash after #BoycottAmazon trended. An organized protest by the union has been launched in Alabama to prevent the company from collecting its sales. Since then, the feud between the management and the workers continues to escalate.

Before that, there was news about the Amazon delivery drivers who used to pee in bottles to catch some break from work. Comments from different people bombarded the company, but later it apologized to the public.

For Arindrajit Dube, a professor who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amazon should show concern regarding the several unionizations that happen.

Dube pointed out that the company should take note of this reminder especially for the areas which do not receive the substantial pay that they deserve.

Indeed, the pandemic has driven the loss of many jobs. At the same time, this became an opportunity for others to be employed like in the case of Amazon which hired more than 500,000 new employees last year.

Will it Make its Workers' Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour?

At the moment, Amazon has not yet released any statement about raising its employees' minimum wage to $15. This action could be an initiative to compete with Costco which has increased its hourly rate for workers to $16 per hour in February.

In the same month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that he will be succeeded by Andy Jassy in his position. This April, Bezos unveiled his "final letter" which points out Amazon's action towards good treatment to its employees.

Bezos knew what could happen to the company if the issue about their workers continued. To solve this controversy, he decided to release an official statement that will ensure the future of the current and incoming workers: that have a good working environment in Amazon.

Related Article: Amazon US: $300 Holiday Bonus for Frontline Employees to Work for Entirety of December!

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Farmers markets help Stohrs introduce goat dairy products to SD

Stohr Diary invests in the dairy goat industry. Helps grow awareness to the benefits of goat dairy within South Dakota.
Waleed Aly wrote columns for newspapers before becoming a regular host on Channel 10's The Project.

And on Thursday, the 42-year-old shared the strange habit he once had to keep him interested in the subject at hand.

'When I first started writing articles for the newspaper, you know how the very first letter of each article is big...' he began, chatting to panelists Peter Helliar, Lisa Wilkinson and Tony Armstrong.

Jaw-dropping: The Project's Waleed Aly revealed one of his strange habits on Thursday

'Please say your first four articles spelled out "fart",' comedian Peter interjected.

Waleed brushed off the funnyman, before admitting he once set himself a target of beginning each article with a different letter of the alphabet.

Peter asked which letter was the hardest to start a sentence with, and Waleed said: 'Probably Q.'

The 42-year-old explained: 'You know how the very first letter of each article is big, they make big on the page... I set myself a target...'

He continued: 'I think I came up with "Quite what someone was thinking", but it's interesting because it ended up making me write more interesting sentences.'

'Is this the first time you've shared this? Like you've just done this for your own personal satisfaction?' added Lisa Wilkinson.

'I did it for myself, but you're making me feel I shouldn't have done it,' said Waleed.

Quite the challenge: The TV presenter later noted that his quirky challenge 'ended up making me write more interesting sentences'

Panellist and former AFL star Tony joked: 'Weren't you writing for the people?' to which Waleed quipped: 'No!'

Waleed is married to academic Susan Carland.

He has previously written articles for The Guardian, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Summer and Fall Planning Updates for Faculty and Staff

Dear faculty and staff,

As Northwestern approaches the end of the 2020-21 academic year, you are likely thinking about your personal and professional plans for the summer and fall. Today, we provide some updates to offer additional clarity on what we anticipate the next several months will bring.

Todays updates address:

Expected timeline for increasing our on-campus presence in anticipation of the start of classes in the fall.

Details about the final extension and phaseout of the Alternative Work Arrangements policy .

We also are excited to announce a special two-day extension of the Fourth of July holiday weekend that we hope will provide you with a well-earned opportunity to rest and reset for the months ahead.

Planning timeline

Given the safety, efficacy and widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the overall health landscape at Northwestern, we intend to be in-person for the Fall Terms to the extent that public health guidance will allow. A decision on potential vaccination requirements for students is expected in early May.

Hand in hand with our academic planning, Northwestern is working on a strategy that brings employees back to campus while providing flexibility for remote work. That strategy will leverage the experiences of the past 14 months to create a framework for University-wide expectations and ability for schools and units to equitably apply some opportunities for remote and flexible arrangements consistent with their needs.

We know that in order to plan Fall offerings, you rely on us to make and communicate certain decisions in a timely manner, like the extent to which courses may or must be taught remotely or in hybrid form, any social distancing and vaccination requirements, and a clearer understanding of available space and technology. Some of these answers must come from state and local public health authorities. For the decisions within our purview, we are working with schools and units now and will provide as much information as possible by the end of June so you can plan accordingly.

We will soon share with leaders in the schools and units an initial set of guidelines and expectations for in-person work and opportunities for remote flexibility. In contrast to the emergency pivot last spring to predominantly virtual instruction and work, which was driven by health and safety considerations, the return to campus presents unique opportunities for us to think strategically about our work, our workplace and the ways in which we come together. In the coming weeks, you will receive more details about your schools or units plans as these are developed and refined. For now, we share a high-level, preliminary timeline for the coming months:

May: Schools and units will develop plans based on the central guidance, and seek opportunities for targeted in-person student activities before the end of the academic year.

June: Schools and units will begin to introduce some in-person expectations for those staff currently working remotely and encourage more faculty and staff to get reacquainted with the physical workplace.

July 6-Sept. 3: Schools and units will gradually phase in their plans.

Sept. 7: In-person work plans will be fully enacted. These plans will continue to evolve based on ongoing assessment.

This timeline is based on our current assessment of the pandemics trajectory, progress on vaccination in Illinois, and our own campus experience. As always, any return to campus will need to align with current public health guidance, and if the environment deteriorates, this timeline could be delayed. For now, we are optimistic about the summer and fall and are planning under these assumptions.

Alternative Work Arrangements policy extension

While most faculty and staff shifted to remote work when we de-densified campus, some positions required a continuation of in-person work. Northwestern established a temporary provision for faculty and staff who were required to return to in-person work, or who supported ongoing academic research, to request alternative work arrangements due to a variety of needs. The Alternative Work Arrangements (AWA) policy is slated to expire June 20. To support faculty and staff who continue to require this provision, the University will offer a final extension of the program this summer before it is phased out.

Schools and units will determine the date through which the AWA will be extended, based on operational needs, with the phaseout occurring between July 31 and Sept. 3. The qualifying criteria for an AWA will narrow after June 20, in alignment with improving public health conditions.

Employees who wish to extend an AWA arrangement beyond June 20 should speak with their managers about their needs and reconfirm approval, as well as the duration of the extension. Existing AWA arrangements will not automatically extend beyond June 20. Please visit the Office of Human Resources for more information about this policy. Employees seeking an accommodation related to a disability, pregnancy or religion can contact the Office of Equity at accommodations@northwestern.edu or 847-467-6165.

As part of Northwesterns workforce planning, the Office of Human Resources, in collaboration with schools and units, will develop tools, training and policy materials that will address alternative work strategies.

Fourth of July holiday weekend extension

To provide faculty and staff with a well-earned opportunity to pause and prepare for the months ahead, for this year only Northwestern will extend the Fourth of July holiday weekend by two days, beginning Thursday, July 1, and running through Monday, July 5.

During this period, many areas of the Universityincluding the library and Norris Centerwill close or substantially reduce staffing. Some areas of the University, including research and some classes, will be unable to close or scale back staffing because continuity of those operations and services is critical. Faculty and staff required to work on July 1, July 2 or July 5 are permitted to take the equivalent number of approved days off prior to Aug. 31, 2022, and should work with their managers to do so. Staff required to work on the previously scheduled July 5 University holiday may be entitled to holiday pay and/or an alternate day off. Employees who are not required to work on those days are not permitted to carry over the days.

Our hope is that the majority of faculty and staff will be able to unplug from work for a couple of extra days and, as during Winter Recess, be able to do so without worry about professional obligations. The Office of Human Resources will provide more detail closer to the holiday weekend.

We thank you for your steadfast commitment to Northwestern as we navigate the ever-changing pandemic landscape and look forward to sharing more information soon.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Hagerty

Provost and Professor

Craig Johnson

Senior Vice President for Business and Finance

Manuel Cuevas-Trisan

Vice President for Human Resources
If the world doesnt stop the regions surging caseload, it could cost us all that weve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.

BOGOTA, Colombia  In the capital of Colombia, Bogota, the mayor is warning residents to brace for the worst two weeks of our lives.

Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.

Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.

As vaccinations mount in some of the worlds wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America  and in South America in particular  is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
MEDFORD, Ore.  With Jackson County preparing to move back into Extreme Risk status, Jackson County Public Health is urging people to seek out COVID-19 vaccines. At the county's Expo vaccination center, appointments are not needed.

If we want to get back to the things and people we love, the fastest way to do this is to get vaccinated, said Dr. Jim Shames, Jackson County Health Officer.

Vaccination Options at the Jackson County Vaccination Equity Center: Walk-through Moderna Site (for individuals 18 years and older) Vaccine: Moderna

Operation Hours: Monday-Friday 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm

No appointment required Drive-Through Pfizer Site (for individuals 16 years and older) Vaccine: Pfizer

Operation Hours: Sunday- Saturday Wednesday and Thursday: 7:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. All other days: 12:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

No appointment required

Jackson County's Vaccination Equity Center at the Expo is open to anyone 16 and older. Vaccinations are free, and proof of identity, residency, or insurance are not required. Both the walk-through Moderna site and drive-through Pfizer site can be accessed without an appointment.

"The Vaccination Equity Center is a safe place, accessible to all, regardless of legal status. Language interpreters and support for disabilities are available as well," said health promotion manager Tanya Phillips, who is managing the Moderna site.

Jackson County reported 58 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, as it continues to see a surge in cases mirrored in more than a dozen Oregon counties.

The Oregon Health Authority, in its weekly report, identified 5,729 new cases across the state last week  a 21 percent increase over the previous week, and the fifth consecutive week of 20 percent or higher increases in cases. Hospitalizations across the state nearly doubled from 171 to 333, OHA reported.

Despite early access to the vaccine, OHA identified 34 active COVID-19 outbreaks in senior living and congregate living facilities across the state. However, each of those outbreaks have so far remained relatively small  15 cases or fewer  and together have resulted in five fatalities.

Past outbreaks at long-term care facilities resulted in hundreds of cases and dozens of deaths, several of the worst in Jackson County during the fall.

Governor Kate Brown's announcement Tuesday that 15 Oregon counties will move into Extreme Risk restrictions at the end of the week was prompted by Oregon surpassing 300 COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide. However, even among the various Extreme Risk counties, hospitalization stats vary widely.

Several counties have seen recent surges in hospital admissions for COVID-19, according to OHA data  some of the most significant in Deschutes, Klamath, and Marion counties. Jackson County, while not seeing a similarly dramatic spike, has had relatively consistent hospital admissions numbering between 15 and 19 per week since the beginning of April.

By comparison, Multnomah County has remained relatively low on hospital admissions for its massive population, with OHA recording 16 COVID-19 admissions last week, 31 the week prior, and 20 the week before that.

Due to the rise in cases, OHA advised this week that the recommended quarantine period for COVID-19 exposure be extended back to 14 days from the CDC-reduced 10-day quarantine.

"A full 14-day quarantine is the lowest risk approach and helps reduce spread from asymptomatic people, which we know is a significant contributor in this pandemic," Jackson County Public Health said.

Vaccinated people who have been exposed to someone with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 are not required to quarantine if they are more than two weeks past their final dose and have remained asymptomatic since exposure.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Police have released the identity of the man who was shot to death inside a home in Port Richmond Wednesday afternoon.

Luis Ramirez, 24, was found inside his apartment at 10 Palmer Ave. with a gunshot wound to the chest by cops who were responding to a report of an assault, police said in a statement.

The discovery was made about 4:10 p.m.

Ramirez was rushed to Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton where he was pronounced dead, police said.

The NYPD responds to Palmer Avenue in Port Richmond on Wednesday, April 28, 2021. (Steve White for the Staten Island Advance)

The case is being investigated as a homicide.

The killer remains at large and the NYPD did not release any information about a possible motive.

The slaying triggered a massive police response on the block and NYPD helicopters hovered over the neighborhood as they looked for the shooter.

HOMICIDES ON S.I. UP THIS YEAR

The death marks the sixth homicide on Staten Island so far this year, double the figure through the same time period last year.

The early surge this year is not totally unexpected, however, following a staggering string of slayings in the second half of 2020 that law enforcement experts attributed in part to a number of factors related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as well as generational gang warfare.
Im going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote, he texted.

An investigation revealed a former white Georgia sheriffs deputy bragged in text messages to alleged white supremacists about his treatment of Black people while on the job.

Read More: Young Thug, Gunna post bail for 30 incarcerated persons in Georgia

The Bellville News-Democrat reported an FBI affidavit revealed ex-Wilkinson County deputy, Cody Richard Griggers, was fired last November after it was found he shared that he had beaten a Black person he arrested and planned to charge Black Georgians with felonies to keep them from voting.

The FBI contacted the local sheriff to inform them of the investigation.

The 28-year-old and former Marine pleaded guilty to one count of possession of an unregistered firearm on Monday in federal court in Macon. According to the report, Griggers faces a maximum of 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in July. The FBI investigation probed into illegal guns and their alleged ties to a California man said to have made violent political statements on Facebook.

Demonstrators stand outside of the Georgia Capitol building, to oppose the HB 531 bill on March 3, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

The FBI began looking into Griggers in August when agents searched the cellphone of a San Diego man and discovered group text messages with a group where members referred to themselves as Shadow Moses or Shadmo, court documents state. Griggers text messages claimed he had gathered illegal firearms and explosives and also made weaponry.

When the FBI searched Griggers patrol car in November, they found a machine gun with an obliterated serial number, and in his home, an unregistered short barrel shotgun.

According to BND, prosecutors claimed Griggers also expressed viewpoints consistent with racially motivated violent extremism, including the use of racial slurs, slurs against homosexuals and making frequent positive references to the Nazi holocaust.

In some text messages, he bragged about his use of excessive force against Black suspects, citing a specific incident in Aug. 2019 correspondence.

Story continues

I beat the (expletive) out of a (racial slur) Saturday. (Expletive) tried to steal (a gun magazine) from the local gun store.  Sheriffs dept. said it looked like he fell, the affidavit noted, quoting Griggers, according to the report.

Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman said the story was false and Griggers was being braggadocious.

We dont even have a gun shop here, he said.

Chatman continued, I think he may have been working in the jail (at the time).  We looked at all the cases he may have been involved in and we never had any complaints on him of any kind. We looked back and we pulled (records) of anything that he had taken a warrant for, any call that he had gone on, and we found nothing [that raised any red flags].

Read More: Ryan Coogler pens op-ed condemning Georgia voting laws

Revealed in the text messages, Griggers also shared his desire to have purposely charged Black people with felonies to prevent them from voting. The group chat also discussed killing liberal politicians and saying they could make it look like Muslims were at fault.

Its a sign of beautiful things to come, he wrote, according to the affidavit. Also Im going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote.

In Georgia, voting laws have been passed that help Griggers stated goals of suppressing the rights of citizens looking to exercise their civic duty. As theGrio reported, Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a sweeping Republican-sponsored overhaul of state elections that includes new restrictions on voting by mail and gives the legislature greater control over how elections are run.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the law will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. It is part of a wave of GOP-backed election bills introduced in states around the nation after former President Donald Trump stoked false claims that fraud led to his 2020 election defeat.

Stacey Abrams speaks to Biden supporters at Turner Field in Atlanta in 2020. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)

Among highlights, the law requires a photo ID in order to vote absentee by mail, after more than 1.3M Georgia voters used that option during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also cuts the time people have to request an absentee ballot and limits where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be accessed.

The law also reduces the timeframe in which runoff elections are held, including the amount of early voting for runoffs. And it bars outside groups from handing out food or water to people standing in line to vote.

The backlash against the legislation has resulted in corporations removing productions and events from the Peach State. Politician and organizer Stacey Abrams criticized the companies who choose to remain silent.

The companies that stood silently by or gave mealy-mouthed responses during the debate were wrong, Abrams said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about what critics believe amounts to voter suppression. What people want to know now is where they stand on this fundamental issue of voting rights.

Hopefully, well build such a hue and cry that the legislature will have to correct what theyve done, Abrams continued. But these companies sell their products across the country, and across the country, there are Black and brown voters who need to know theyre not being left behind.

This article contains additional reporting by theGrios Blue Telusma.

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 Georgia deputy says hed charge Black people with fake felonies to stop voting appeared first on TheGrio.
Mumbai, April 29 : As the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government grapples with financial constraints to handle the free vaccination drive for all citizens between in the 18-44 age group, the Maharashtra Congress on Thursday announced donations to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund (CMRF).

Revenue Minister and Congress Legislature Party leader Balasaheb Thorat has offered his one year's salary as a public representative while the 54 party legislators in the upper and lower houses would donate their one month's salaries to the CMRF.

"As the leader of a responsible political party and a public representative we have decided to extend a helping hand to the state by donating my one year salary to the CMRF. This will come to a total of Rs 2 crore," said Thorat.

Additionally, the state Congress will donate Rs 500,000 to the CMRF, while the Amrut Group of Industries in Ahmednagar will donate the vaccination expenses of all its employees, said Thorat.

He said that the Covid-19 crisis has taken a serious turn in the country especially in Maharashtra and the best preventive measure is vaccination, in a timebound manner, of all citizens.

Thorat pointed out that Congress President Sonia Gandhi and MP Rahul Gandhi have already raised the demand for free vaccination of all citizens in the country with the government.

"Many vaccination campaigns were carried out during the Congress rule at the Centre, and it is well known that we did not worry about the loss or profit and gave free vaccination to the people by prioritising their health," he said.

Slamming the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "running away from its responsibility" and passing on the responsibility of vaccination responsibility to the states, he said: "Many states are facing financial difficulties as industries, trades and commercial establishments are shut down due to restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of the infection. Far from helping the states in such a situation, the Central government has not even paid the rightful dues of the states." In a similar vein, state Youth Congress President Satyajeet Tambe has appealed to people that all those citizens who can bear the vaccination costs can voluntarily deposit the amount in the CMRF.

State Nationalist Congress Party President and Water Resources Minister Jayant Patil's son Pratik Patil has announced the he would contribute his vaccination cost and of five others to the CMRF.

Thorat also called upon all political parties, cooperatives, industries, corporates and others to donate urgent funds for requirements like oxygen, medicines, medical equipments to the CMRF which can be deployed for the treatment of the poor.
President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of congress in the House chamber of the Capitol in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Biden Proposes Ban on High-Capacity Gun Magazines That Hold 100 Rounds

President Joe Biden, during his speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28, called for a ban on high-capacity gun magazines that can hold up to 100 bullets.

We need a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines again. Dont tell me it cant be done, Biden said. Weve done it before  and it worked. Talk to most responsible gun owners, most hunters; theyll tell you theres no possible justification for having 100 rounds100 bulletsin a weapon.

It isnt clear why Biden specifically made the proposal to ban the 100-round magazines, as Democratic lawmakers and gun-control groups have tried to push for a ban on magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Some states have also attempted to pass legislation that bans magazines holding more than 17 rounds in recent days.

Connor Betts, a gunman who opened fire on a street in Dayton, Ohio, used a 100-round drum magazine in 2019. The shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California that year also had one but didnt use it.

The president also called for a ban on so-called assault weapons, universal background checks for firearms purchases, and regulations on do-it-yourself guns made from parts kits.

We need more Senate Republicans to join with the overwhelming majority of their Democratic colleagues, and close loopholes and require background checks to purchase a gun, he added. In his speech, he referenced a recent mass shooting in Boulder, Coloradowhich has universal background checksthat left 10 people dead at a supermarket.

The House last month passed two bills that would expand background checks on individuals who seek to purchase or transfer firearms and would give authorities 10 business days for federal background checks to be completed before a gun sale can be completed.

Separately, several top Senate Democrats introduced a bill that would federally ban gun magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, echoing provisions currently being implemented in states such as California and New York.

The Department of Justice has previously stated that the 1994 federal ban on so-called high-capacity magazineswhich was promoted by Biden when he was a Delaware senatordidnt lead to a significant drop in shootings and murders. That study has been often cited by gun-rights groups including the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Gun Owners of America for why such legislation would be ineffective.

We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nations recent drop in gun violence, the DOJ stated in 2004. Should it be renewed, the bans effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.

The NRA, meanwhile, reacted to Bidens touting of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban in his speech.

In 94, Americans owned 850,000 AR-15s. Even the Clinton DOJ proved this ban to be a failure. Today, the ban is long gone & law-abiding Americans own 20 million AR-15s. Who beat who, Mr. President? the group wrote.
MEXICO CITY, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Grupo Elektra, S.A.B. de C.V. (BMV: ELEKTRA*; Latibex: XEKT), Latin America's leading specialty retailer and financial services company, and the largest non-bank provider of cash advance services in the United States, today announced first quarter 2021 financial results.

First Quarter Results

Consolidated revenue grew 4%, to Ps.31,385 million in the period, compared to Ps.30,282 million in the same quarter of the previous year. Costs and operating expenses were Ps.25,951 million, from Ps.29,445 million in the same period of 2020.

As a result, EBITDA was Ps.5,435 million, compared to Ps.837 million a year ago. Operating income was Ps.3,493 million this quarter, from an operating loss of Ps.1,117 million in the same period of 2020.

The company reported net income of Ps.3,048 million, compared to net income of Ps.142 million a year ago.



1Q 2020 1Q 2021 Change





Ps. %









Consolidated revenue $30,282 $31,385 $1,103 4%









EBITDA $837 $5,435 $4,598 ----









Operating profit $(1,117) $3,493 $4,610 ----









Net result $142 $3,048 $2,906 ----









Net result per share $0.62 $13.39 $12.77 ----









Figures in millions of pesos

EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization.

As of March 31, 2020, Elektra* outstanding shares were 228.7 million and as of March 31, 2021, were 227.7 million.

Revenue

Consolidated revenue increased 4%, as a result of a 28% growth in commercial sales, partially offset by a 9% decrease in financial income.

The growth in sales of the commercial business  to Ps.13,383 million, from Ps.10,435 million a year ago  is largely the result of a solid increase in sales of Italika motorcycles  which boosts business productivity and the mobility of families  telephony  that strengthens the connectivity of an increasing number of users  and appliances, that are commercialized with optimal customer service, in the most competitive market conditions.

Sales from the commercial business were further boosted with the development of new stores under a format that offers an optimal mix of products and services, and allows the customer to maximize the purchase experience. Similarly, Omnichannel operations, with the online store www.elektra.com.mx, which sells thousands of products at unparalleled prices, from any device and at any time, further strengthened business performance.

The reduction in financial income  to Ps.18,002 million, from Ps.19,847 million in the previous year  reflects lower interest earned by Purpose Financial in the period, derived from the effects of the health contingency in the company's target market in the US.

Costs and Expenses

Consolidated costs for the quarter decreased 21%, to Ps.13,601 million, from Ps.17,233 million in the previous year. The lower costs are explained, to a large extent, by a 58% reduction in the financial cost, to Ps.4,359 million, from Ps.10,361 million the previous year, which largely reflects the creation of lower loan loss reserves this period.

As previously announced, a year ago an important creditor of Banco Azteca initiated a bankruptcy process (Chapter 11) in the United States, for which the institution decided, prudently, to reserve 100% of the credit of Ps.7,243 million, in the first quarter of 2020.

Commercial business costs grew 34%, to Ps.9,242 million, from Ps.6,872 million, in line with the increase in commercial revenue.

Selling, administrative and promotional expenses grew 1% to Ps.12,350 million as a result, mainly, of higher operating and advertising expenses, partially offset by lower personnel expenses.

EBITDA and net result

EBITDA was Ps.5,435 million, from Ps.837 million in the previous year. The company reported operating income of Ps.3,493 million, compared to an operating loss of Ps.1,117 million in the same quarter of 2020.

The main variations below EBITDA were the following:

A reduction of Ps.2,213 million in foreign exchange gains, due to the company's net asset monetary position in dollars, together with a lower depreciation of the peso this quarter compared to the previous year.

An increase of Ps.1,055 million in other financial results, which reflects a 4% gain this quarter in the market value of underlying assets of financial instruments held by the company  which does not imply cash flow  in comparison to a 1% gain a year ago.

Consistent with the results for the quarter, there was an increase of Ps.1,077 million in the provision for taxes in the period.

Grupo Elektra reported net income of Ps.3,048 million, from a net income of Ps.142 million a year ago.

Unconsolidated Balance Sheet

In order to allow the visualization of the non-consolidated financial situation, a pro forma exercise of the balance sheet of Grupo Elektra is presented, excluding the net assets of the financial business, whose investment is valued under the equity method, in this case.

This presentation shows the debt of the company without considering Banco Azteca's immediate and term deposits, which do not constitute debt with cost for Grupo Elektra. The pro forma balance sheet also does not include the bank's gross loan portfolio.

This proforma exercise provides greater clarity regarding the businesses that make up the company and allows financial market participants to estimate the value of the company, considering only the relevant debt for such calculations.

Consistent with this, debt with cost was Ps.34,802 million as of March 31, 2021, compared to Ps.22,632 million in the previous year. The balance of cash and cash equivalents was Ps.17,230 million, from Ps.4,789 million from the previous year. As a result, net debt as of March 31, 2021 was Ps.17,572 million, compared to Ps.17,843 million a year ago.

As previously announced, during the quarter, Grupo Elektra's subsidiary, Nueva Elektra del Milenio, S.A. de C.V., as originator, placed through a special purpose vehicle established under Luxembourg law, Senior Notes for US$500 million, for seven years, at a 4.875% rate, in international markets.

The Senior Notes are used to fund reserve accounts for the payment of obligations under the Senior Notes and strengthen the liquidity of the company, which allows to further boost the financial soundness of Grupo Elektra.

As of March 31, 2021, the company's stockholders 'equity was Ps.97,118 million, and the stockholders' equity to total liabilities ratio was 1.2 times.



As of March 31, 2020 As of March 31, 2021 Change Ps. %



















Cash and cash equivalents $ 4,789 $ 17,230 12,441 260% Marketable financial instruments 38,697 32,562 (6,135) (16%) Inventories 13,980 17,060 3,080 22% Accounts receivables 51,969 49,912 (2,057) (4%) Other current assets 3,843 2,678 (1,165) (30%) Investments in shares 40,010 36,848 (3,162) (8%) Fixed assets 8,133 7,119 (1,014) (12%) Right of use assets 8,807 8,550 (257) (3%) Other assets 1,377 3,248 1,871 136%









Total assets $ 171,606 $ 175,208 $ 3,602 2%









Short-term debt $ 11,516 $ 18,978 7,463 65% Suppliers 8,565 8,008 (557) (7%) Other short-term liabilities 14,964 14,723 (241) (2%) Long-term debt 11,116 15,824 4,708 42% Differed taxes 11,658 9,777 (1,881) (16%) Other long-term debt 9,781 10,778 998 10%









Total liabilities $ 67,600 $ 78,089 $ 10,489 16%









Stakeholders equity $ 104,006 $ 97,118 ($ 6,887) (7%)









Liabilities and equity $ 171,606 $ 175,208 $ 3,602 2% Figures in millions of pesos.

Consolidated Balance Sheet

Loan Portfolio and Deposits

Banco Azteca Mexico, Purpose Financial and Banco Azteca Latin America's consolidated gross portfolio as of March 31, 2021, grew 5%, to Ps.122,091 million, from Ps.116,381 million the previous year. The consolidated delinquency rate was 3.4% at the end of this period, compared to 10.9% the previous year.

The gross portfolio of Banco Azteca Mexico increased 11% to Ps.105,396 million, from Ps.95,361 million a year ago.

The Bank's delinquency rate at the end of the quarter was 3.4%, compared to 11.9% the previous year. The reduction is mainly derived from the credit of Ps.7,243 million that entered the past-due portfolio a year ago, and which at the time was fully reserved.

The average term of the credit portfolio for principal credit lines  consumer, personal loans, and Tarjeta Azteca  was 64 weeks at the end of the first quarter.

Grupo Elektra's consolidated deposits were Ps.189,105 million, 17% higher than the Ps.160,959 million a year ago. Deposits of Banco Azteca Mexico were Ps.190,614 million, 23% higher than the Ps.155,443 million a year ago.

The ratio of deposits to gross portfolio of Banco Azteca Mexico of 1.8 times, consolidates the solid growth prospects of the Bank, with optimal funding cost.

The Bank's liquidity coverage ratio  total of eligible liquid assets / total net cash out  was 626%, an outstanding figure in the Mexican banking sector.

The capitalization index of Banco Azteca Mexico was 14.25%.

Infrastructure

Grupo Elektra currently has 6,736 points of contact, compared to 7,238 units the previous year. The decrease results from the closure of 383 Purpose Financial contact points in the United States  in the context of strategies aimed at boosting online credit operations and strengthening the company's operating efficiency  as well as the closure of 318 contact points in Latin America derived, to a large extent, from the sale of Banco Azteca del Peru in the previous quarter.

In Mexico, in the last twelve months, 32 new Elektra stores were opened in strategic locations, with a format that offers an optimal mix of products and services, and allows the customer to maximize the purchase experience.

The company has 4,960 storefronts in Mexico at the end of the quarter, 1,398 in the United States, and 378 in Central and South America. The important distribution network allows the company to maintain close contact with customers and grants a superior market positioning in the countries where it operates.

Company Profile:

Grupo Elektra is Latin America's leading financial services company and specialty retailer and the largest non-bank provider of cash advance services in the United States. The group operates more than 6,600 points of contact in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Peru.

Grupo Elektra is a Grupo Salinas company (www.gruposalinas.com), a group of dynamic, fast growing, and technologically advanced companies focused on creating: economic value through market innovation and goods and services that improve standards of living; social value to improve community wellbeing; and environmental value by reducing the negative impact of its business activities. Created by Mexican entrepreneur Ricardo B. Salinas (www.ricardosalinas.com), Grupo Salinas operates as a management development and decision forum for the top leaders of member companies. These companies include TV Azteca (www.TVazteca.com; www.irtvazteca.com), Grupo Elektra (www.grupoelektra.com.mx), Banco Azteca (www.bancoazteca.com.mx), Purpose Financial (havepurpose.com), Afore Azteca (www.aforeazteca.com.mx), Seguros Azteca (www.segurosazteca.com.mx), Punto Casa de Bolsa (www.puntocasadebolsa.mx), Totalplay (irtotalplay.mx; www.totalplay.com.mx) and Totalplay Empresarial (totalplayempresarial.com.mx). TV Azteca and Grupo Elektra trade shares on the Mexican Stock Market and in Spains' Latibex market. Each of the Grupo Salinas companies operates independently, with its own management, board of directors and shareholders. Grupo Salinas has no equity holdings. The group of companies shares a common vision, values and strategies for achieving rapid growth, superior results and world-class performance.

Except for historical information, the matters discussed in this press release are concepts about the future that involve risks and uncertainty that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Other risks that may affect Grupo Elektra and its subsidiaries are presented in documents sent to the securities authorities.

Investor Relations: Bruno Rangel

Rolando Villarreal Grupo Salinas

Grupo Elektra, S.A.B. de C.V. Tel. +52 (55) 1720-9167

Tel. +52 (55) 1720-9167 [email protected]

[email protected]

Press Relations:



Luciano Pascoe



Tel. +52 (55) 1720 1313 ext. 36553



[email protected]



GRUPO ELEKTRA, S.A.B. DE C.V. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED INCOME STATEMENTS MILLIONS OF MEXICAN PESOS





































1Q20

1Q21

Change

















Financial income 19,847 66%

18,002 57%

(1,845) -9% Commercial income 10,435 34%

13,383 43%

2,948 28% Income 30,282 100%

31,385 100%

1,103 4%

















Financial cost 10,361 34%

4,359 14%

(6,003) -58% Commercial cost 6,872 23%

9,242 29%

2,370 34% Costs 17,233 57%

13,601 43%

(3,632) -21%

















Gross income 13,049 43%

17,784 57%

4,736 36%

















Sales, administration and promotion expenses 12,212 40%

12,350 39%

138 1%

















EBITDA 837 3%

5,435 17%

4,598 100%

















Depreciation and amortization 1,961 6%

2,029 6%

67 3%

















Depreciation right of use asset

0%



0%

- 0%

















Other expense (income), net (8) 0%

(87) 0%

(79) -100%

















Operating income (1,117) -4%

3,493 11%

4,610 ----

















Comprehensive financial result:















Interest income 272 1%

220 1%

(52) -19% Interest expense (902) -3%

(987) -3%

(85) -9% Foreign exchange loss, net 2,458 8%

244 1%

(2,213) -90% Monetary loss - 0%

- 0%

- 0% Other financial results, net 479 2%

1,534 5%

1,055 100%

2,307 8%

1,011 3%

(1,295) -56%

















Participation in the net income of















CASA and other associated companies (621) -2%

(51) 0%

570 92%

















Income before income tax 569 2%

4,454 14%

3,884 100%

















Income tax (238) -1%

(1,315) -4%

(1,077) -100%

















Income before discontinued operations 332 1%

3,139 10%

2,807 100%

















Result from discontinued operations (190) -1%

(90) 0%

99 52%

















Impairment of intangible assets

0%



0%

- ----

















Consolidated net income 142 0%

3,048 10%

2,906 100%



GRUPO ELEKTRA, S.A.B. DE C.V. AND SUBSIDIARIES









CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEET











MILLIONS OF MEXICAN PESOS







































Commercial Business Financial Business Grupo Elektra

Commercial Business Financial Business Grupo Elektra





















Change























At March 31, 2020

At March 31, 2021

























Cash and cash equivalents 4,789 41,994 46,783

17,230 32,129 49,359

2,576 6%





















Marketable financial instruments 8,305 70,180 78,485

5,183 91,709 96,891

18,407 23%





















Performing loan portfolio - 67,611 67,611

- 70,809 70,809

3,198 5% Total past-due loans - 6,664 6,664

- 3,428 3,428

(3,235) -49% Gross loan portfolio - 74,275 74,275

- 74,237 74,237

(37) 0%





















Allowance for credit risks - 9,316 9,316

- 8,577 8,577

(738) -8%





















Loan portfolio, net - 64,959 64,959

- 65,660 65,660

701 1%





















Inventories 13,980 - 13,980

17,060 0 17,060

3,080 22%





















Other current assets 15,619 28,053 43,672

13,342 14,064 27,407

(16,265) -37%





















Total current assets 42,692 205,186 247,878

52,815 203,562 256,377

8,499 3%





















Financial instruments 30,392 313 30,706

27,379 96 27,475

(3,231) -11%





















Performing loan portfolio - 36,134 36,134

- 47,087 47,087

10,953 30% Total past-due loans - 5,972 5,972

- 767 767

(5,205) -87% Gross loan portfolio - 42,106 42,106

- 47,854 47,854

5,748 14%





















Allowance for credit risks - 6,697 6,697

- 1,682 1,682

(5,015) -75%





















Loan portfolio - 35,409 35,409

- 46,172 46,172

10,763 30%





















Other non-current assets 25,781 189 25,970

26,360 358 26,719

748 3% Investment in shares 1,429 - 1,429

1,629 - 1,629

200 14% Property, furniture, equipment and



















investment in stores, net 8,133 7,817 15,951

7,119 7,768 14,887

(1,064) -7% Intangible assets 658 8,157 8,815

519 7,189 7,708

(1,107) -13% Right of use asset 8,807 2,262 11,069

8,349 2,470 10,820

(249) -2% Other assets 719 683 1,402

2,729 5,857 8,586

7,184 ---- TOTAL ASSETS 118,611 260,017 378,628

126,899 273,472 400,372

21,744 6%











































Demand and term deposits - 160,959 160,959

- 189,105 189,105

28,146 17% Creditors from repurchase agreements - 16,002 16,002

- 18,409 18,409

2,407 15% Short-term debt 11,303 943 12,246

18,744 103 18,847

6,602 54% Leasing 1,727 1,099 2,826

1,331 1,119 2,450

(375) -13% Short-term liabilities with cost 13,030 179,002 192,032

20,076 208,736 228,812

36,780 19%





















Suppliers and other short-term liabilities 19,090 26,172 45,263

21,154 13,766 34,920

(10,342) -23% Short-term liabilities without cost 19,090 26,172 45,263

21,154 13,766 34,920

(10,342) -23%





















Total short-term liabilities 32,120 205,174 237,294

41,229 222,503 263,732

26,438 11%





















Long-term debt 11,062 1,951 13,013

15,804 15 15,820

2,807 22% Leasing 7,653 1,202 8,855

7,817 1,332 9,149

294 3% Long-term liabilities with cost 18,715 3,153 21,867

23,621 1,347 24,968

3,101 14%





















Long-term liabilities without cost 13,786 1,674 15,460

12,739 1,814 14,553

(908) -6%





















Total long-term liabilities 32,501 4,827 37,328

36,360 3,161 39,521

2,193 6%





















TOTAL LIABILITIES 64,621 210,001 274,622

77,589 225,664 303,253

28,631 10%





















TOTAL STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY 53,991 50,015 104,006

49,310 47,808 97,118

(6,887) -7%











































LIABILITIES + EQUITY 118,611 260,017 378,628

126,899 273,472 400,372

21,744 6%

























INFRASTRUCTURE

























1Q20

1Q21

Change

















Points of sale in Mexico















Elektra 1,135 16%

1,142 17%

7 1% Salinas y Rocha 38 1%

36 1%

(2) -5% Banco Azteca 1,834 25%

1,848 27%

14 1% Freestanding branches 1,754 24%

1,934 29%

180 10% Total 4,761 66%

4,960 74%

199 4%

















Points of sale in Central and South America















Elektra 198 3%

107 2%

(91) -46% Banco Azteca 402 6%

205 3%

(197) -49% Freestanding branches 96 1%

66 1%

(30) -31% Total 696 10%

378 6%

(318) -46%

















Points of sale in North America















Purpose Financial 1,781 25%

1,398 21%

(383) -22% Total 1,781 25%

1,398 21%

(383) -22%

















TOTAL 7,238 100%

6,736 100%

(502) -7%







































































Floor space (m) 1,771 100%

1,544 100%

(227) -13%





















































Employees















Mexico 71,560 83%

61,697 88%

(9,863) -14% Central and South America 9,646 11%

5,090 7%

(4,556) -47% North America 4,812 6%

3,186 5%

(1,626) -34% Total employees 86,018 100%

69,973 100%

(16,045) -19%

SOURCE Grupo Elektra, S.A.B. de C.V.

Related Links

http://www.grupoelektra.com.mx


FORT WORTH, TX, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- ADM Endeavors, Inc. (OTCQB: ADMQ) announced today that our wholly owned subsidiary, Just Right Products, Inc., has been awarded a new contract with Hayes CISD for Screen Printing and Embroidery Services.



Marc Johnson, ADMQ CEO, said: It is great that we continue to geographically expand our customer base. This new opportunity will be led by David Kirk, Vice President of Marketing.

Hays Consolidated Independent School District is a public school district in Kyle, Texas. In addition to Kyle, the district serves the city of Buda, and other areas in northern Hays County. Hays Consolidated Independent School District serves more than 20,000 students on 25 campuses.

Hays Consolidated Independent School District - https://www.hayscisd.net/.

About ADMQ: Since 2010, our wholly owned subsidiary, Just Right Products, Inc., has been consistently increasing sales, with sales topping $5.1 million in 2020. The Company sells Anything With A Logo on its website, www.JustRightProducts.com, developing products ranging from unique business cards to coffee cups, T-shirts to boots, with tens of thousands of other unique products from which to select. Just Right Products, Inc. operates a diverse vertical integrated business in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, consisting of a retail sales division, screen print production, embroidery production, digital production, import wholesale sourcing, and uniforms.

Forward Looking Statement:

This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Any statements that are not historical facts contained in this press release are "forward-looking statements" that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as strategy, expects, continues, plans, anticipates, believes, would, will, estimates, intends, projects, goals, targets and other words of similar meaning are intended to identify forward-looking statements but are not the exclusive means of identifying these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, involve known and unknown risks, a reliance on third parties for information, transactions that may be cancelled, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or developments in our industry, to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results include risks and uncertainties related to the fluctuation of global economic conditions or economic conditions with respect to the retail industry, the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance of management, actions of government regulators, vendors, and suppliers, our cash flows and ability to obtain financing, competition, general economic conditions and other factors that are detailed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We intend that all forward-looking statements be subject to the safe-harbor provisions. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contact: ADM Endeavors, Inc.

Paul Knopick | pknopick@eandecommunications.com| 940.262.3584

Attachment
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Concrete Superplasticizer Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global concrete superplasticizer market reached a value of US$ 4.5 Billion in 2020. Superplasticizers are a category of polymers which are used to enhance the suspension flow efficiency by reducing the accumulation of particulate matter. Their major application is in admixtures which are used with concrete as strength boosters. Currently, there are different classes of superplasticizers available in the market including sulfonated naphthalene formaldehydes (SNF), sulfonated melamine formaldehydes (SMF), modified lignosulfonates (MLS), polycarboxylic acids (PC), etc. Each category of superplasticizer is defined by individual properties and uses. Their demands also differ on the basis of their cost, placement and product efficiency.



A number of factors are currently driving the global demand of concrete superplasticizers. Plasticizers help in reducing the water cement ratio and improve the performance of the concrete mixture. They can also provide other advantages such as increase the compressive strength, eliminate fine cracks, reduce adsorption, provide better surface texture, etc.



The demand of concrete superplasticizers has a direct correlation with the performance of the global construction Industry. We expect the global construction industry to exhibit stable growth of around 3%-5% over the next five years catalysed by developed economies recovering from the recent economic downturn and emerging economies continuing to industrialize. The United States, China and India are expected to represent the biggest growth drivers of the construction sector in the coming years. The strong outlook of the global construction industry is expected to create a positive impact on the demand of concrete superplasticizers. Looking forward, we expect the global concrete superplasticizer market to exhibit moderate growth during the next five years.



The competitive landscape of the market has also been examined with some of the key players being Arkema SA, BASF SE, Kao Corporation, Sika AG, W. R. Grace & Company, Enaspol as, Mapei S.P.A., Muhu (China) Construction Materials Co. Ltd and Sure Chemicals.



This report provides a deep insight into the global concrete superplasticizer market covering all its essential aspects. This ranges from macro overview of the market to micro details of the industry performance, recent trends, key market drivers and challenges, SWOT analysis, Porter's five forces analysis, value chain analysis, etc. This report is a must-read for entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, consultants, business strategists, and all those who have any kind of stake or are planning to foray into the concrete superplasticizers industry in any manner.



Key Questions Answered in This Report:

How has the global concrete superplasticizer market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years?

What are the key regions in the global concrete superplasticizers market?

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global concrete superplasticizers market?

What is the breakup of the global concrete superplasticizer market on the basis of form?

What is the breakup of the global concrete superplasticizer market on the basis of product type?

What is the breakup of the global concrete superplasticizer market on the basis of application?

What are the various stages in the value chain of the global concrete superplasticizer industry?

What are the key driving factors and challenges in the global concrete superplasticizer industry?

What is the structure of the global concrete superplasticizer industry and who are the key players?

What is the degree of competition in the global concrete superplasticizer industry?

Key Topics Covered:



1 Preface



2 Scope and Methodology

2.1 Objectives of the Study

2.2 Stakeholders

2.3 Data Sources

2.3.1 Primary Sources

2.3.2 Secondary Sources

2.4 Market Estimation

2.4.1 Bottom-Up Approach

2.4.2 Top-Down Approach

2.5 Forecasting Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Introduction

4.1 Overview

4.2 Key Industry Trends



5 Global Concrete Superplasticizer Market

5.1 Market Overview

5.2 Market Performance

5.3 Impact of COVID-19

5.4 Market Breakup by Form

5.5 Market Breakup by Product Type

5.6 Market Breakup by Application

5.7 Market Breakup by Region

5.8 Market Forecast

5.9 SWOT Analysis

5.9.1 Overview

5.9.2 Strengths

5.9.3 Weaknesses

5.9.4 Opportunities

5.9.5 Threats

5.10 Value Chain Analysis

5.10.1 Overview

5.10.2 Raw Material Procurement

5.10.3 Manufacturing

5.10.4 Distribution

5.10.5 Export

5.10.6 End-Use

5.11 Porters Five Forces Analysis

5.11.1 Overview

5.11.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers

5.11.3 Bargaining Power of Suppliers

5.11.4 Degree of Competition

5.11.5 Threat of New Entrants

5.11.6 Threat of Substitutes

5.12 Price Analysis

5.12.1 Key Price Indicators

5.12.2 Price Structure

5.12.3 Margin Analysis



6 Market Breakup by Form

6.1 Liquid

6.1.1 Market Trends

6.1.2 Market Forecast

6.2 Powder

6.2.1 Market Trends

6.2.2 Market Forecast



7 Market Breakup by Product Type

7.1 SNF

7.1.1 Market Trends

7.1.2 Market Forecast

7.2 MLS

7.2.1 Market Trends

7.2.2 Market Forecast

7.3 PC

7.3.1 Market Trends

7.3.2 Market Forecast

7.4 SMF

7.4.1 Market Trends

7.4.2 Market Forecast



8 Market Breakup by Application

8.1 Ready-Mix Concrete

8.1.1 Market Trends

8.1.2 Market Forecast

8.2 Precast Concrete

8.2.1 Market Trends

8.2.2 Market Forecast

8.3 High-Performance Concrete

8.3.1 Market Trends

8.3.2 Market Forecast

8.4 Shotcrete

8.4.1 Market Trends

8.4.2 Market Forecast

8.5 Others

8.5.1 Market Trends

8.5.2 Market Forecast



9 Market Breakup by Region

9.1 Asia Pacific

9.1.1 Market Trends

9.1.2 Market Forecast

9.2 Middle East and Africa

9.2.1 Market Trends

9.2.2 Market Forecast

9.3 North America

9.3.1 Market Trends

9.3.2 Market Forecast

9.4 Europe

9.4.1 Market Trends

9.4.2 Market Forecast

9.5 Latin America

9.5.1 Market Trends

9.5.2 Market Forecast



10 Manufacturing Process

10.1 Product Overview

10.2 Raw Material Requirements

10.3 Manufacturing Process

10.4 Key Success and Risk Factors



11 Competitive Landscape

11.1 Market Structure

11.2 Key Players

11.3 Profiles of Key Players

11.3.1 Arkema SA

11.3.2 BASF SE

11.3.3 Kao Corporation

11.3.4 Sika AG

11.3.5 W. R. Grace & Company

11.3.6 Enaspol as

11.3.7 Mapei S.P.A.

11.3.8 Muhu (China) Construction Materials Co. Ltd.

11.3.9 Sure Chemicals

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qk5fvp

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


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal have proposed to acting Energy Minister Yuriy Vitrenko to take the post of Executive Board Chairman of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy, Vitrenko said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

"It was not my initiative. When it became clear that the plan to appoint me first deputy prime minister, energy minister could not be implemented because of objective and subjective reasons, then the country's leadership  both the president and the prime minister  suggested considering this option," the acting energy minister, who before joining the Ministry of Energy was the executive director of Naftogaz for a long time, said.

Vitrenko said that this will be his fifth or sixth return to the company. "To be honest, I decided [in 2020] that everything: the page on my work in Naftogaz has been turned over. But it turned out that it is not so simple. I left Naftogaz in 2003, then 2005, then in 2008, in 2009... That is, five times. And each time I thought that it was definitely the last time. But, as you can see, it turned out to be not the last time," he said.

He said that with the current appointment, everything was decided in a matter of hours.

The acting minister rejected suggestions in the media that the factor of his difficult relationship with Executive Board Chairman Andriy Kobolev could have played some role in replacing the executive board chairman of Naftogaz. "If it were so, it could have worked much earlier," he said.

Vitrenko said that discord with Kobolev arose due to the fact that he began to ask the executive board chairman questions, without making them public, about the problems in the company's work, its inefficiency and the need to change approaches in a number of areas.

"I noted back in 2018 that it is necessary to change Naftogaz, because if nothing is done, then Naftogaz will become unprofitable," Vitrenko said.

According to the ex-executive director of Naftogaz, the choice of his candidacy is explained by the fact that the directions in the company he supervised  the launch of reverse gas supplies and diversification of gas supplies, relations with Gazprom, Stockholm arbitration  were successful, in particular, Naftogaz won a large sum of funds and secured the signing of a new transit contract.

"It was not some kind of my personal dream. I just do it [I accept the offer to head the NJSC], because I understand the responsibility. It may sound pretentious, but the company is dear to me. It was always painful for me to look at some problems of Naftogaz that in other areas there were no successes that could be expected," the new executive board chairman said, explaining his motivation.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CCRM Fertility, a global pioneer in fertility treatment, research and science, welcomes Dr. Wael Salem to its San Francisco Bay Area location. Dr. Salem is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and board eligible in reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Dr. Salem joined CCRM Minneapolis in 2018 and relocated to the Bay Area in 2021. The move has brought Dr. Salem to join Drs. Salli Tazuke and Sunny Jun at CCRM San Francisco. New patients can schedule telehealth consults with Dr. Salem and he will begin in-person appointments at the Menlo Park clinic starting June 7, 2021.

During his residency for Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Salem received the Outstanding Resident in Minimally Invasive Gynecology award. After his residency, he completed his fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine.

"I am excited to stay within the CCRM family and join the award-winning team of fertility specialists in the Bay Area," said Dr. Salem. "It's truly an honor to return to my former home town of San Francisco and help individuals and couples grow their families."

In addition to presenting his research at prestigious medical conferences around the globe, Dr. Salem has authored numerous publications for notable peer-reviewed journals. He is currently on the editorial board for Human Reproduction. His interests include fertility for cancer patients, PCOS, fertility preservation (egg freezing) and preimplantation genetic testing for hereditary genetic diseases. Dr. Salem is fluent in Arabic, French and is conversational in Spanish.

"Dr. Salem is devoted to providing high-quality, compassionate care and we are delighted that he will bring his expertise to CCRM San Francisco," said CCRM President and CEO Jon Pardew. "We now have three specialized physicians to meet the community's growing fertility needs while maintaining individualized and custom-tailored care."

CCRM San Francisco is located at 1060 Marsh Road, 1st Floor in Menlo Park, CA 94025. For more information or to schedule an appointment, call (650) 646-7500 or visit www.ccrmivf.com.

About CCRM Fertility

Founded by Dr. William Schoolcraft in 1987, CCRM (Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine) Fertility is the nation's leader in fertility care and research. CCRM Fertility specializes in the most advanced fertility treatments, with deep expertise in in vitro fertilization (IVF), fertility assessment, fertility preservation, genetic testing, third party reproduction and egg donation. Unlike many other fertility clinics that outsource their specialists and testing needs, CCRM Fertility leverages its own data, as well as a dedicated team of in-house reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists and geneticists in order to deliver industry-leading outcomes. CCRM Fertility operates 11 fertility centers (including 25 offices) throughout North America, serving prospective parents in major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Houston, New York, Northern Virginia, Minneapolis, Orange County, San Francisco Bay Area, and Toronto. For more information, visit www.ccrmivf.com , become a fan on Facebook , or follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

SOURCE CCRM

Related Links

https://www.ccrmivf.com


Aboubacar Toure France

Babacar grew up in Senegal, a member of the Bambara ethnic group (from Mali). This tribal life became one of his main sources of inspiration and he quickly developed a passion for graphic design, modelling and construction of any kind. At 20 years old, he decided to isolate himself in the bush to concentrate on what has always interested him: artistic creation. At 28 he arrived in France to live from his art.

Fascinated by architecture and especially walls (painted, tagged, aged by the time), Babacar is inspired by them and associates them. He creates an encounter between normally unrelated worlds, uniting them in his paintings. The walls express the opposing feelings of both imprisonment and protection. This mixture of a variety of constructions creates a harmonious patchwork which erases differences.

Attracted by the culture of ethnic groups in southern Senegal, Babacar painted the Bassaris with their costumes and colourful masks. Moving in 1999 to the banks of the River Saloum in the Serer (south of Dakar), he painted the Niominkas (fishermen). Another ethnic group also marks his works: the Fulani, nomadic herders moving to follow water and vegetation. More recently, the urban atmosphere of Dakar where he was born is recalled in works that express the closeness and bustle of Dakar. Through repetition of small motifs, he shows an Africa that he has seen born and grow. His latest creations are of volumes, statues, totem poles, assembling materials and objects found randomly in life, relying on the mystical dimension in which Africa bathes. A mysticism in which the artist has created himself. Babacar adopts different styles of painting according to the message he wants to convey: figurative painting or filiform characters which evolve in a more abstract setting.

In 2004 the artist opened his own exhibition space to the public. Babacars painting reflects the many cultures of his country, and is the means for him to help others discover them.
Patients breathe with the help of oxygen masks inside a banquet hall temporarily converted into a Covid-19 coronavirus ward in New Delhi on April 27. Earlier in the week, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state would supply India with various oxygen-related equipment. (Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images)
Rudy-Giuliani-raid

Media gather in front of Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan apartment after federal investigators executed a search warrant on April 28, 2021. Credit - Tayfun CoskunAnadolu Agency via Getty Images

By the time federal investigators searched the Manhattan home of Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, they had amassed a trove of evidence from his associates in Ukraine, focusing most intently on Giulianis ties to Ukrainian oligarchs, three witnesses in the case told TIME.

The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described lengthy interviews with investigators in Europe, Manhattan and Washington, starting in the fall of 2019 and continuing through February. The calls and meetings with investigators grew more frequent and intense after Joe Bidens victory in last falls presidential election, says one of the witnesses. Two of the witnesses say they were working with Giuliani while cooperating with federal investigators.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys office in Manhattan declined to comment on the case. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment about his former associates in Ukraine assisting federal prosecutors. In a statement released Wednesday, the former Mayor of New York City and personal lawyer for President Donald Trump called the investigation against him an unjustified and unethical attack, and said he can demonstrate that his conduct as a lawyer and a citizen was absolutely legal and ethical.

The investigation of Giuliani grew out of a federal probe into two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were arrested in Oct. 2019 and charged with violating campaign finance law. Both men have denied the charges and are awaiting trial.

Before they were arrested, Parnas and Fruman assisted Giuliani in his quest to connect Biden, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, to alleged acts of corruption in Ukraine. Drawing on a cast of oligarchs, former prosecutors and alleged Russian agents in Ukraine, Giuliani and his allies spent more than a year trying to tarnish Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was Vice President.

Story continues

The pressure campaign to coerce Ukrainian officials into providing damaging material about the Bidens ultimately resulted in Trumps first impeachment by the House of Representatives in Dec. 2019. The impeachment inquiry found that Trump abused his office while assisting Giulianis mission against Biden. The Republican-controlled Senate later acquitted Trump of these charges.

While the impeachment inquiry was underway that fall, federal investigators began questioning Giulianis associates about the smear campaign against the Bidens in Ukraine, wanting to know everything  every meeting, every text, says one of people they spoke to at the time.

What interested investigators most of all was the relationship between Giuliani and the Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash, who is wanted in the U.S. on corruption charges, this witness says. The main things that interested them was: How would you assess, how would you describe, what do you know about his communication with Ukrainian oligarchs, says this witness, who spoke repeatedly to investigators over the course of more than a year. Firtash was of course their main focus, without a doubt.

A lawyer for Firtash declined to comment when reached by TIME on Thursday.

As TIME reported in a previous investigation, Firtash developed close ties with Giulianis associates in the summer of 2019, hiring several of them to work on his legal team. Firtashs goal was to avoid extradition to Chicago, where he faces charges related to an alleged scheme to bribe officials in India. From his home in Vienna, Firtash has denied those charges and insisted they are politically motivated.

As part of his defense, Firtash hired two lawyers in July 2019 who are close associates of Giuliani: Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, a married couple known for their staunch allegiance to Trump. The couple then sought Firtashs help in their effort to discredit the Biden family.

The nexus between Giuliani, Firtash and the two U.S. lawyers with ties to the 45th President was among the issues that interested prosecutors the most, according to two of the Giuliani associates questioned by federal investigators.

On Wednesday morning, while serving a search warrant at Giulianis apartment in Manhattan, federal agents also arrived at Toensing and diGenovas home outside Washington with a warrant for Toensings phone.

In a statement, the couples law firm said that Toensing was not a target of the investigation. She has always conducted herself and her law practice according to the highest legal and ethical standards, the statement said. She would have been happy to turn over any relevant documents. All they had to do was ask.
Editors Note: In a future edition, the mayor addresses balancing quality-of-life improvements with the expectation to keep taxes low

During a forum last week, Midland Mayor Patrick Payton said the citys economic development should focus on what Midland does best  oil and gas  rather than diversifying into other industries.

I think the fallacy with economic development thinking that we need to address is nobody needs to run away from their primary economic driver, he said during an event hosted by the Midland Liberty Leadership Council.

He then noted that oil is linked with Midland like Las Vegas is linked with the state of Nevada and Disney World is linked with Orlando.

You dont kick Mickey Mouse out just because you think hes going to die, Payton said in a metaphor for the oil industry. You got to keep Mickey Mouse, and he brought you here and we keep running with him and keep walking with him and see what happens.

Payton noted that the Midland Development Corp. was created about two decades ago, before the shale revolution, when city leaders believed the oil industry was ending and they feared for the future of Midlands economy without diversification.

The fact of the matter is that has changed, he said. If were going to diversify, we need to diversify into that which is coming out of the oil and gas industry, in which is going to support the energy industry.

He said that even as the country moves in the direction of energy practices that have been deemed more environmentally friendly, you cannot get green without black gold.

The greatest economic development Midland is going to see is the scientific development that will occur within the oil industry, Payton said.

The mayor said he recently spoke with mayors in other oil epicenters in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. He and the other mayors are planning to speak to Congressional members over the next several months to advocate for the oil and gas industry, he said.

You cant even drive your Tesla without the oil and gas industry, Payton said. And if the entire country went to electric vehicles tomorrow, they couldnt charge them.

Paytons comments came during a forum with Odessa Mayor Javier Joven at Rolling 7s Ranch Event Center last Thursday that was moderated by Reporter-Telegram Editor Stewart Doreen. The mayors also addressed their future plans for the two cities and discussed issues like taxes and sanctuary cities.
New Delhi: Army Chief General M M Naravane told Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday (April 29)that the Army is making its medical staff available to state governments and is setting up temporary hospitals in various parts of the country to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a meeting where Modi reviewed the Army's preparedness and initiatives for COVID management, Naravane also said that the Army is opening up its hospitals for civilians wherever possible and that citizens can approach their nearest Army hospitals, a statement said.

"General MM Naravane informed the PM that the Army is helping with manpower for imported oxygen tankers and vehicles where specialised skills are required to manage them," it added.

PM Modi has been holding daily meetings with various organisations and officials as the government marshals its resources to fight the pandemic raging in various parts of the country.

The country's total COVID-19 caseload has now increased to 1.83 crore (1,83,76,524), of which, 30.84 lakh (30,84,814 ) are active cases. India has also witnessed 2.04 lakh (2,04,832) coronavirus-related deaths.

India has been recording over three lakh cases every day for over a week now.

On the other hand, nearly 1.3 crore Indians registered themselves online on the governments dedicated portal CoWin on Wednesday for the mass vaccination drive that is set to begin on May 1.

Live TV
FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global networking company D-Link today announced the relocation of its US-based headquarters from Fountain Valley, CA to a modern industrial campus in Irvine near the Tustin Marketplace. The new location fits the Company's current business goals and efforts to streamline operational efficiencies.

"Our newly updated offices are an ideal fit, offering convenient workplace features, leading-edge product planning accommodations, and continued residency in the bustling Orange County, CA tech hub," said William Brown, president at D-Link Systems. "The innovative infrastructure was open at just the time we sought an energetic and current space that could seamlessly meet our unique corporate needs nationally and globally."

The new office address for all D-Link Systems future correspondence, as of Saturday, May 1, 2021 is:

14420 Myford Road, Suite 100

Irvine, CA 92606

714-885-6000 (telephone number remains the same)

The tech Company's move also allows them to implement the proper measures to fulfill strategic business objectives for growth in the future, including warehousing capabilities, proximity to existing vendors and multi-site connectivity for remote staff. As D-Link prepares for upcoming business and consumer networking product launches, the new space supports its efforts to accomplish these goals.

About D-Link

D-Link designs, develops, and manufactures award-winning products that connect homes, businesses, and services providers. It implements and supports unified network solutions that integrate switching, wireless, broadband, IP surveillance, and cloud-based network management. For more, visit dlink.com, or connect on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spiceworks , YouTube, and the D-Link Business Blog.

D-Link, mydlink, and the D-Link logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of D-Link Corporation or its subsidiaries. All other third-party marks mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright  2021 D-Link. All Rights Reserved.

SOURCE D-Link Systems, Inc.

Related Links

www.dlink.com


JACKSON, Mich., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CMS Energy announced today reported earnings per share of $1.21 for the first quarter of 2021, compared to $0.85 per share for the same quarter in 2020. The company's adjusted earnings per share for the first quarter of 2021 were $1.21 per share, compared to $0.86 per share for the same quarter in 2020. The primary drivers of CMS Energy's financial performance were customer investments and sustained cost performance from 2020.

"We will continue to invest in Michigan and in our communities while leading the clean energy transformation with support from our 5-year, $13.2 billion customer investment plan which focuses on building out renewable energy and enhancing the safety and reliability of our electric and gas systems as we move toward net zero carbon and methane emissions," said Garrick Rochow, President and CEO of CMS Energy and Consumers Energy.

CMS Energy reaffirmed its guidance for 2021 adjusted earnings of $2.83 - $2.87* per share (*See below for important information about non-GAAP measures) reflecting continued strong growth of 6 to 8 percent, with a bias toward the midpoint.

CMS Energy (NYSE: CMS) is a Michigan-based energy provider featuring Consumers Energy as its primary business. It also owns and operates independent power generation businesses.

CMS Energy will hold a webcast to discuss its 2021 first quarter results and provide a business and financial outlook on April 29 at 9:30 a.m. (EDT). To participate in the webcast, go to CMS Energy's homepage (cmsenergy.com) and select "Events and Presentations."

Important information for investors about non-GAAP measures and other disclosures.

*This news release contains non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (non-GAAP) measures, such as adjusted earnings. All references to net income refer to net income available to common stockholders and references to earnings per share are on a diluted basis. Adjustments could include items such as discontinued operations, asset sales, impairments, restructuring costs, changes in accounting principles, changes in federal tax policy, regulatory items from prior years, unrealized gains or losses, recognized in net income, from mark-to-market adjustments related to CMS Enterprises' interest expense, or other items. Management views adjusted earnings as a key measure of the company's present operating financial performance and uses adjusted earnings for external communications with analysts and investors. Internally, the company uses adjusted earnings to measure and assess performance. Because the company is not able to estimate the impact of specific line items, which have the potential to significantly impact, favorably or unfavorably, the company's reported earnings in future periods, the company is not providing reported earnings guidance nor is it providing a reconciliation for the comparable future period earnings. The company's adjusted earnings should be considered supplemental information to assist in understanding our business results, rather than as a substitute for the reported earnings.

This news release contains "forward-looking statements." The forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause CMS Energy's and Consumers Energy's results to differ materially. All forward-looking statements should be considered in the context of the risk and other factors detailed from time to time in CMS Energy's and Consumers Energy's Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Investors and others should note that CMS Energy routinely posts important information on its website and considers the Investor Relations section, www.cmsenergy.com/investor-relations, a channel of distribution.

For more information on CMS Energy, please visit our website at cmsenergy.com.

To sign up for email alert notifications, please visit the Investor Relations section of our website.

CMS ENERGY CORPORATION

Consolidated Statements of Income

(Unaudited)









In Millions, Except Per Share Amounts







Three Months Ended











3/31/21

3/31/20

























Operating revenue











$ 2,083

$ 1,864

























Operating expenses













1,598



1,496

























Operating Income













485



368

























Other income













44



39

























Interest charges













136



137

























Income Before Income Taxes













393



270

























Income tax expense













51



27

























Net Income













342



243

























Loss attributable to noncontrolling interests













(7)



-

























Net Income Available to Common Stockholders











$ 349

$ 243



















































Basic Earnings Per Average Common Share











$ 1.21

$ 0.86 Diluted Earnings Per Average Common Share













1.21



0.85

CMS ENERGY CORPORATION

Summarized Consolidated Balance Sheets

(Unaudited)









In Millions



As of



3/31/21

12/31/20 Assets













Current assets













Cash and cash equivalents

$ 496



$ 168 Restricted cash and cash equivalents



28





17 Other current assets



1,989





2,219 Total current assets



2,513





2,404 Non-current assets













Plant, property, and equipment



21,207





21,039 Other non-current assets



6,003





6,223 Total Assets

$ 29,723



$ 29,666

















Liabilities and Equity













Current liabilities (1)

$ 1,379



$ 1,568 Non-current liabilities (1)



6,924





6,825 Capitalization













Debt, finance leases, and other financing (excluding securitization debt) (2)













Debt, finance leases, and other financing (excluding non-recourse and securitization debt)



12,080





12,083 Non-recourse debt



2,813





2,888 Total debt, finance leases, and other financing (excluding securitization debt)



14,893





14,971 Noncontrolling interests



575





581 Common stockholders' equity



5,727





5,496 Total capitalization (excluding securitization debt)



21,195





21,048 Securitization debt (2)



225





225 Total Liabilities and Equity

$ 29,723



$ 29,666

(1) Excludes debt, finance leases, and other financing. (2) Includes current and non-current portions.

CMS ENERGY CORPORATION Summarized Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (Unaudited)





















In Millions



Three Months Ended



3/31/21

3/31/20

















Beginning of Period Cash and Cash Equivalents, Including Restricted Amounts

$ 185



$ 157

















Net cash provided by operating activities (3)



832





201 Net cash used in investing activities



(283)





(559) Cash flows from operating and investing activities



549





(358) Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities



(210)





1,062

















Total Cash Flows

$ 339



$ 704

















End of Period Cash and Cash Equivalents, Including Restricted Amounts

$ 524



$ 861





(3) Includes the impact of a $531 million pension contribution in 2020.

CMS ENERGY CORPORATION

Reconciliation of GAAP Net Income to Non-GAAP Adjusted Net Income

(Unaudited)





In Millions, Except Per Share Amounts







Three Months Ended











3/31/21

3/31/20

























Net Income Available to Common Stockholders











$ 349

$ 243 Reconciling items:





















Other exclusions from adjusted earnings**













(1)



3 Tax impact













*



(*) Tax reform













-



(9) Voluntary separation program













-



11 Tax impact













-



(3)

























Adjusted net income  non-GAAP











$ 348

$ 245

























Average Common Shares Outstanding





















Basic













288.6



283.3 Diluted













289.1



285.2

























Basic Earnings Per Average Common Share





















Reported net income per share











$ 1.21

$ 0.86 Reconciling items:





















Other exclusions from adjusted earnings**













(*)



0.01 Tax impact













*



(*) Tax reform













-



(0.03) Voluntary separation program













-



0.04 Tax impact













-



(0.01)

























Adjusted net income per share  non-GAAP











$ 1.21

$ 0.87

























Diluted Earnings Per Average Common Share





















Reported net income per share











$ 1.21

$ 0.85 Reconciling items:





















Other exclusions from adjusted earnings**













(*)



0.01 Tax impact













*



(*) Tax reform













-



(0.03) Voluntary separation program













-



0.04 Tax impact













-



(0.01)

























Adjusted net income per share  non-GAAP











$ 1.21

$ 0.86



























* Less than $0.5 million or $0.01 per share.





















** Includes restructuring costs and unrealized gains or losses, recognized in net income, from mark-to-market adjustments related to CMS Enterprises' interest expense.



Management views adjusted (non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) earnings as a key measure of the Company's present operating financial performance and uses adjusted earnings for external communications with analysts and investors. Internally, the Company uses adjusted earnings to measure and assess performance. Adjustments could include items such as discontinued operations, asset sales, impairments, restructuring costs, changes in accounting principles, changes in federal tax policy, regulatory items from prior years, unrealized gains or losses, recognized in net income, from mark-to-market adjustments related to CMS Enterprises' interest expense, or other items. The adjusted earnings should be considered supplemental information to assist in understanding our business results, rather than as a substitute for reported earnings.

Check out Consumers Energy on Social Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consumersenergymichigan

Twitter: https://twitter.com/consumersenergy

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/consumersenergy

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/consumersenergy

SOURCE CMS Energy

Related Links

http://www.cmsenergy.com


The chief financial officer of an Austin company and her ex-husband will have to pay back over $20 million in restitution after they were found guilty of embezzling money to fund a "life of luxury and extravagance," the Department of Justice said.

Robert "Scott" Villarreal, 49, was sentenced Wednesday to 87 months in prison on three counts of money laundering, possession with intent to distribute cocaine and making and subscribing to a false income tax return.

He was ordered to pay back almost $16 million in restitution to Richardson Enterprises, Ltd., an Austin-based automobile dealership company, as well as another $4.2 million to the IRS.

He was married to Tamra Maurine Villarreal, also known as Tamra Creighton Villarreal, the CFO of the dealership company. She was sentenced in December to 63 months in federal prison for her role in the schemes and is also responsible for paying back the $20 million with her ex-husband.

More for you News The rise and fall of a San Antonio apartment developer

The FBI and IRS began an investigation into the Villarreals in 2009 and later found that they were stealing money from the company despite Tamra's six-figure salary, the DOJ said.

The money was used to buy a $2.7 million home as well as to pay for vacations, vehicles, lavish jewelry, rare American coins, gold bars, art, designer handbags, guns, drugs and more, according to the DOJ. During a four-day period in 2016, the Villarreals charged more than $72,000 for three meals at a Houston restaurant on a company card, the DOJ said.

In April 2018, law enforcement officers executed a search warrant on their Lakeway residence and found many of the valuables the two had purchased during their scheme.

Robert admitted to embezzling funds from Richardson bank accounts, using them for "personal enrichment" from 2019 to 2018 as well as falsifying a 2013 income tax return, the DOJ said.

taylor.pettaway@express-news.net
EUGENE, Ore. -- Students in the Bethel School District are rolling up their sleeves this week for the coronavirus vaccine.

At Willamette High School Thursday, the district held its third vaccine clinic of the week. District officials said about 300 students have received their first dose in the last few days.

The district also opened the clinic to students from nearby schools and even some parents.

Zoe Wenham, a senior at Elmira High School, received a shot Thursday and said she hopes more people her age sign up.

Just because its new or because some people think its political or whatever- its not. Its just as important. We want to keep everybody safe and healthy, Wenham said.

Eugene-Springfield Firefighters administered the doses to the students.

The school district said its already helped vaccinate 3,000 teachers and staff since February, including giving shots to rural districts.

Some students like Matthew McElwain see the vaccine as a ticket to getting back to normal life.

I was excited. I was supposed to go to Costa Rica last year, but we couldnt. Now with that vaccine, thats a possibility, McElwain said.

The students are receiving the Pfizer vaccine, which is approved for emergency use in people 16 and older.
The CEO Of Konkonsa systems Chief Dominic popularly known as Konkonsa who works at the office of the President (Jubliee House) as the Technical Advisor in charge of Transport and logistics has built an ultra modern police station for the Ghana Police Service and the good people of Achimota Mile 7.



This was disclosed by Kwesi Botchway Jnr, a communicator for the NPP who was speaking on Rainbow Radios morning show with Kwabena Agyapong.



According to the NPP communicator, Konkonsa is one person who needs to be commended and applauded for his excellent initiative to contribute his efforts and resources towards the development of the nation.



He revealed that, Konkonsa did not construct the police station for his own interest or political interest but did same in the spirit of good Will and statesmanship.



He added that, Konkonsa does not even stay anywhere close to Achimota.



The main motive for the construction of this ultra modern police station is that, somewhere November last year (2019), Chief Dominic AKA Konkonsa visited the police station and saw the deplorable state of the station.



Per an interaction with some police officers, they told him that, they had no washroom, place to rest, no proper ventilation and any time it rained, they had to find places to hide themselves. Also, the police men told him that, their greatest opposition were not criminals but mosquitoes during the night time and that, none of them even wanted to be on a night shift because same was a receipt for malaria.

Upon hearing the plea of the police officers, Konkonsa took it upon himself to build for them a fully air conditioned ultra modern police station with wash rooms, bathrooms, large space (hall) and 4 office rooms with his own pocket funds without a penny from the government or MP of the community.



The project took less than 12 months for its completion.



This is indeed worth commending and recognizing.



Find attached pictures of the state of the police station before and after the project.









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
Smart device helps students print out mistakes

From:ChinaDaily | 2021-04-29 10:22

Chinese online education firm Zuoyebang launched an upgraded version of its Paperang pocket printer recently, as the company continues to beef up its efforts in intelligent hardware.

The smart device enables students to print out mistakes of their homework exercises through simply taking a picture, which industry insiders said was much more efficient compared with hand-copying.

Compared with old versions, Paperang Pro P3 is equipped with a 800W HD camera and enables 4G or Wi-Fi connection without mobile phones, making it a pure learning hardware without other distraction functions and helping students form a good learning habit.

According to Xie Fayan, co-founder of Paperang at Zuoyebang, the gadget is able to provide students with personalized learning suggestions and plans focusing on their weaknesses, with support of Zuoyebang's leading technologies in AI and big data as well as teaching resources.

It is backed by Zuoyebang's huge database of 300 million questions that covers all subjects for users from first grade to third year of high school, he added.
Three members of an Iranian Arab opposition group have pleaded not guilty to Danish charges of financing and promoting terrorism in Iran with Saudi Arabia's backing.

The three, who are members of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) and were arrested in February last year, risk 12 years in prison if found guilty in the trial that started in Copenhagen on April 29.

ASMLA is based in Denmark and the Netherlands and is considered a terrorist group by Iran.

The three, one of whom is a Danish citizen, are aged 39 to 50.

Gert Dyrn, a lawyer for the eldest of the three suspects, told the media that in his client's opinion "what they are charged with is legitimate resistance toward an oppressive regime."

"They are not denying receiving money from multiple sources, including Saudi Arabia, to help the movement and help them accomplish their political aim," Dyrn said.

He added that this was "the first case in Denmark within terror law where you have to consider who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter."

His client has lived as a refugee in Denmark since 2006.

The three were charged by the Danish public prosecutor on April 27.

"This is a very serious case where people in Denmark have carried out illegal intelligence activities and financed and promoted terrorism from Denmark in other countries. Of course, this cannot take place on Danish soil, and therefore I am satisfied that we can now bring charges in the case, " Lise-Lotte Nilas, a prosecutor for Copenhagen, said in a statement on April 15.

According to the charge sheet, the three received around $4.9 million for ASMLA and its armed branch, through bank accounts in Austria and the United Arab Emirates.

The trio is also accused of spying on people and organizations in Denmark between 2012 and 2020 for Saudi intelligence.

They are also accused of promoting terrorism.

The prosecutor has said the case dates back to 2018 when one of the three was the target of a foiled attack on Danish soil believed to be orchestrated by the Iranian regime in retaliation for the killing of 24 people in Ahvaz, southwestern Iran that year.

Iran has denied the attack plan in Denmark, but a Danish court last year sentenced a Norwegian-Iranian to seven years for his role in the plot.

That attack put Danish authorities on the trail of the actions of three ASMLA members.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Farda and AFP
Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.

Natalie Fallert, EdD, 6-12 Literacy Speech Coordinator, wrote to all middle and high school principals that parents had repeatedly complained that we are pushing an agenda, we are pushing Critical Race Theory (I had to look this one up!), we are making white kids feel bad about their privilege, we are stereotyping, we are teaching kids to be social activists, and we are teaching kids to be democratic thinkers and activists.

The problem was that, for the first time, parents could see what teachers were telling their children thanks to virtual learning, where assignments were visible for at-home learners in a tool called Canvas.

Fallerts solution:

This doesnt mean throw out the lesson and find a new one. Just pull the resource off Canvas so parents cannot see it  Keep teaching! Just dont make everything visible on Canvas. This is not being deceitful. This is just doing what you have done for years. Prior to the pandemic you didnt send everything home or have it available. You taught in your classroom and things were peachy keen. We are going old-school.  You could Duplicate an entry/lesson in Canvas (making 2 copies) Publish ONE for the whole class that is a LEAN version of the lesson. The original that has all the stuff on it, can be published and only assigned to specific students (IF NEEDED), OR you could specifically email those students a copy of what they need. The reason I say make a copy You can publish the NEW one that has less information on it. Then for that kid who is all virtual and needs to full lesson, you can publish it and assign it ONLY that kid Anything that could be picked apart I would suggest using this above approach Again I wouldnt throw it out, but you could just not give them access to the story. When you get to Power Imbalances  You might remove the two examples and just go over them in class (same as above).  I hate that we are even having to have this conversation. 29 days and counting!

Yesterday an email was sent to middle and high school English Language Arts teachers from a district-level staff member that suggested teachers hide or alter content visible to parents in our learning management system. We want to assure you that the message was not reviewed or approved by anyone before it was sent. Asking teachers to conceal anything from parents does not reflect the mission, vision and values of the Rockwood School District and is counter to the goals set forth in our strategic plan, The Way Forward, she wrote.

The April 23 message said that the school district views parents as allies in the education of our children.

We regret that this happened for many reasons, but mostly because it impacts the trust that is crucial for our partnership to be successful. Although we cannot share specifics related to a personnel matter, we can assure you that we find the email unacceptable, and it is certainly being addressed, the message said.

District spokesman David Morrison told The Daily Wire that in an attempt to restore trust, it would continue to post classroom materials online where parents could see it even after coronavirus-triggered distance learning ended  since the technology is set up  rather than reverting to what Fallert called the old-school way when everything was peachy keen.

He also said the district would commit to training our educators on how to curate books so that teachers are giving students a wide variety of choices in their learning materials and asking our educators to provide parents with book choices before a unit of study starts and information about read alouds that will be done in the classroom as part of regular communications with parents (i.e. weekly newsletters).

He said it also planned the formation of a K-12 steering committee that includes building administrators, teachers, students and parents, finance and human resources.

Rockwood School District encompasses 20,000 students across overwhelmingly white towns west of St. Louis, including Ballwin, Chesterfield, Wildwood, and the town of Fenton, which has 15 black people, or 0.3% of the population.

It includes four high schools, all of which were ranked among the top 20 in Missouri by U.S. News & World Report. It is currently searching for a new interim superintendent.

The criticized curriculum included elements like Intersectionality 101, a video produced by Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

One reading sheet handed out to a fifth-grade class teaches that Michael Brown was murdered just steps from his mothers home in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Darren Wilson was not charged with any wrongdoing. Disruption is the new world order. It is the way in which those who are denied power access power, it said.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson is Republican, but the states schools have been thoroughly colonized by equity consultants.

One firm alone, Education Equity Consultants (EEC), says it has at least 30 clients in the state, including the state education office, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Missouri School Boards Association. Rockwood has also hired EEC.

Webster school district, another EEC client, intends to revise its social studies curriculum to be based on social justice standards conceived by Learning for Justice.

Related: Teachers Union Honchos Infiltrate PTAs, Depriving Parents Of Their Own Group

Related: Ohio State Board of Education Sued for Allegedly Banning Criticism of 1619 Project

Related: In Aftermath Of Enemies List, School Committee Pledges To Silence The Opposition

Hat tip to Carole Gunn for sending us this link.
The ambassador of the United Kingdom to Romania, Andrew James Noble, reiterated, on Thursday, in southeastern Constanta, the support of his government for the development of the "smart cities" in Romania and appreciated the Constanta municipality as one with a significant development growth, according to a press release sent by the local authority.

Andrew James Noble was in the Constanta county in order to participate at the NATO certification ceremony of the aerial defence mission of the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom, at the Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase, and at the ceremony there were representatives of the Constanta municipality.

"His Excellence, ambassador Andrew Noble expressed his desire of promoting and consolidating even further the collaboration relations at the level of local authorities between the two countries; in this context, he sent the full support of the UK's Government for the municipalities' projects in Romania of building and modernizing "smart cities". His Excellence, ambassador Andrew Noble specified that he will support local development projects of the municipalities, with priority through facilitating the development of relationships with municipalities from the United Kingdom and the access of the municipality to the technological experience of British big companies," says a press release sent by the Constanta Municipality.

According to the source, at the moment, the Constanta Municipality is actively participating, alongside other large cities in Romania, in the "UK - Romania Smart Cities" program, implemented in Romania by the British embassy. The program represents an integrated platform of collaboration in various fields, with the participation of the UK and Romanian municipalities, as well as specialized companies in the areas of shared interest.
Corporate social responsibility is an integral part of our culture here at Syntax. We hope to lead the IT space by taking steps now that will educate and inform the leaders of our connected future, said Christian Primeau, Global Chief Executive Officer for Syntax

Syntax, the leading multi-cloud and multi-ERP managed cloud provider for mission-critical applications, today announced a new mentorship program within its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, Syntax Cares. The mentorship program seeks to bring new educational, career and support opportunities to the students of Research Triangle High School, a charter school focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in Durham County, North Carolina, by pairing them with volunteer Syntax employees.

As a long-time player in the IT industry, Syntax employees understand its our shared responsibility to empower the next generation of technology professionals, said Melissa Everitt, Senior Human Resources Manager and Global CSR Chair for Syntax. While we have done in-person mentorship programs in the past, the ongoing pandemic required us to find new ways to connect with our community. As a result, we are excited to launch a program virtually this year, having matched Syntax employee volunteers with interested Research Triangle High School students.

The students will meet virtually with their Syntax employee match throughout the semester to receive one-on-one mentorship. In addition to meeting weekly with their mentors, the students are invited to virtual Meet the Experts panels led by Syntax employees in a range of roles, from marketing to cybersecurity, to learn about career paths both within and outside of information technology.

"At Research Triangle High School, we believe the future is in the spaces between subjects, where students will need to be creative in their use of knowledge", said Eric Grunden, Chief School Officer. "We're grateful for Syntax's powerful commitment to helping students visualize this creative future. Together, we hope to use these resources to develop students capable of leading a STEM workforce."

Syntax Cares was founded in 2019 after Syntax acquired Freudenberg IT and EmeraldCube in the same year, unifying their CSR efforts into one program. That year, Syntaxs global workforce overwhelmingly chose education as Syntax Cares leading cause. In addition to the pilot mentorship program with Research Triangle High School students, Syntax employees also participated in food drives for students and families in need throughout the pandemic.

Corporate social responsibility is an integral part of our culture here at Syntax. We hope to lead the IT space by taking steps now that will educate and inform the leaders of our connected future, said Christian Primeau, Global Chief Executive Officer for Syntax. Beyond our monetary commitment to these much-needed programs, all 1,400 Syntax employees are allotted two days off specifically for volunteering. The success of our communities drives success at Syntax, so we do this to ensure work does not prevent our employees from giving back.

To learn more about Syntax Cares and view open positions within the company, visit https://www.syntax.com/why-syntax/careers/.

###

About Syntax:

Since 1972, Syntax has been providing comprehensive technology solutions to businesses of all sizes with thousands of customers trusting Syntax with their IT services and ERP needs. Today, Syntax is a leading Managed Cloud Provider for Mission Critical Enterprise Applications. Syntax has undisputed strength to implement and manage ERP deployments (Oracle, SAP) in a secure, resilient, private, public or hybrid cloud. With strong technical and functional consulting services, and world-class monitoring and automation, Syntax serves corporations across a diverse range of industries and markets. Syntax has offices worldwide, and partners with Oracle, SAP, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, HPE, and other global technology leaders. Learn more about Syntax at http://www.syntax.com.


Santo Antao (Cabo Verde). Credit: Sandra Nogue

Research has shed new light on the impact of humans on Earth's biodiversity. The findings suggest that the rate of change in an ecosystem's plant-life increases significantly during the years following human settlement, with the most dramatic changes occurring in locations settled in the last 1500 years.

An international research team studied fossilized pollen dating back 5000 years, extracted from sediments on 27 islands. By analyzing the fossils they were able to build up an understanding of the composition of each island's vegetation and how it changed from the oldest to the most recent pollen samples.

The study was led by Dr. Sandra Nogue, Lecturer in Palaeoenvironmental Science at the University of Southampton, UK and Professor Manuel Steinbauer from the University of Bayreuth, Germany and University of Bergen, Norway. Ph.D. student Dr. Alvaro Castilla-Beltran was also a member of the Southampton team.

Dr. Nogue said, "Islands provide the ideal environment to measure human impact as most were settled in the past 3000 years when climates were similar to today's conditions. Knowing when the settlers arrived on an island means that scientists can study how the composition of its ecosystem changed in the years before and after."

The results, published in Science, showed a consistent pattern on 24 of the islands where human arrival accelerated the turnover of vegetation by, on average, a factor of eleven. The most rapid changes occurred in islands that were settled more recentlysuch as the Galapagos, first inhabited in the 16th Century. Islands where humans arrived more than 1500 years ago, such as Fiji and New Caledonia, saw a slower rate of change.

Teide Fieldwork - Canary Islands. Credit: Jose Maria Fernandez Palacios

"This difference in change could mean that the islands populated earlier were more resilient to human arrival but it is more likely that the land-use practices, technology and introduced species brought in by the later settlers were more transformative than those of the earlier settlers," explained Dr. Nogue.

The trends were observed across a range of geographic locations and climates, with islands such as Iceland producing similar results to Tenerife and other tropical and temperate islands.

Ecosystem change can also be driven by a number of natural factors such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, extreme weather and changing sea levels, however the researchers have found that disturbance caused by humans surpasses all of these events and the change is often irreversible. They therefore advise that conservation strategies must account for the long-term impact of humans and the degree to which ecological changes today differ from prehuman times.

Field Work in Cabo Verde. Credit: Sandra Nogue

"Whilst it is unrealistic to expect ecosystems to return to their pre-settlement conditions, our findings may help to inform targeted restoration efforts and provide greater understanding into the islands' responsiveness to change," concludes Dr. Nogue.

Explore further Bahamas were settled earlier than believed, settlers dramatically changed landscape

More information: "The human dimension of biodiversity changes on islands" Science (2021). Journal information: Science "The human dimension of biodiversity changes on islands"(2021). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi  1126/science.abd6706
Uganda has registered the deadly COVID-19 variant from India.

According to Ministry of health, the variant was registered today. The Ministry has therefore called upon Ugandans to take the COVID-19 SOPs seriously.

The deadly COVID-19 variant from India has been detected in #Uganda.

Ensure you: Wear a mask when in public, Wash hands with clean water and soap or use a hand sanitizer, Practice physical distancing, Get vaccinated NOW, read a tweet from the ministry.

Currently, only one case of the Indian strain of Covid-19 has been confirmed and the case is being treated at Mulago hospital.

Uganda currently has 41,797 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Down-dip extension of the Polaris Vein 50 meters below historic drilling with hole BFG21-MS13 returning 32.5 meters assaying 0.76 g/t Au.

Extension of the Polaris Vein 175 meters south from the historic pit with hole BFG21-MS11 returning 60.7 meters assaying 0.35 g/t Au before the hole was lost due to poor conditions in the vein zone.

Down-dip extension of mineralization in the Montgomery-Shoshone Vein Zone (MS Vein Zone), with hole BFG21-MS10 returning 26.2 meters assaying 0.52 g/t Au.

Key Mineralized intervals from the Polaris Vein:

32.5 meters assaying 0.76 g/t Au



60.7 meters assaying 0.35 g/t Au



27.3 meters assaying 0.42 g/t Au

Key Mineralized intervals from the MS Vein Zone:

26.2 meters assaying 0.52 g/t Au



39.6 meters assaying 0.34 g/t Au



13.2 meters assaying 1.30 g/t Au



41.1 meters assaying 0.35 g/t Au

Don Taylor, President and CEO commented: "The initial results from our 2021 exploration program have clearly demonstrated the expansion potential around the Montgomery-Shoshone historic pit area. We are encouraged by these results and see the potential to further add incremental ounces and reduce the strip ratio for the currently outlined resource. Exploration continues at the site with four drill rigs tasked to expand the resource and collect required geotechnical and metallurgical samples as we advance the Bullfrog project to development. Current plans are to release a comprehensive resource update in early Q3 and a Mine Plan of Operations in early 2022."

The Montgomery-Shoshone target is located approximately 1.5 km north-east of the Bullfrog pit, it was historically operated as an underground mine and subsequently an open pit until low gold prices caused operations to cease in 1997. The target is coincident with two principal structures, the Polaris Vein and Montgomery-Shoshone Vein Zone (Figures 1 through 6). Gold mineralization occurs in quartz veins, hydrothermal breccias and zones of strong stockwork veining. The current drill program continues to test for extensions of remnant mineralization below and adjacent to the historic pit as well as testing several near surface mineralized trends along strike.

Table 1: Key Intercepts in Current Montgomery-Shoshone Drill Holes

HoleID From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Zone BFG20-MS01 114.8 154.4 39.6 0.34 2.82 MS Vein Zone BFG20-MS01 246.2 259.4 13.2 1.30 2.79 MS Vein Zone BFG20-MS01 275.2 284.8 9.5 0.89 5.60 MS Vein Zone

BFG21-MS02 125.6 166.6 41.1 0.35 1.39 MS Vein Zone BFG21-MS02 229.7 254.0 24.3 0.31 0.23 MS Vein Zone BFG21-MS02 298.3 310.5 12.2 0.22 0.55 MS Vein Zone

BFG21-MS03 105.2 115.4 10.2 0.49 0.37 Polaris Vein

BFG21-MS04 121.2 122.7 1.5 0.60 0.50 Other













BFG21-MS05 100.0 103.0 3.0 0.39 0.35 MS Vein Zone

BFG21-MS06 NSV Other

BFG21-MS07 150.0 151.5 1.5 0.29 1.50 MS Vein Zone BFG21-MS07 175.9 177.3 1.5 0.35 0.10 MS Vein Zone

BFG21-MS08 NSV Other

BFG21-MS09 81.8 109.1 27.3 0.42 5.03 Polaris Vein including 93.9 98.5 4.6 1.10 13.22 Polaris Vein BFG21-MS09 133.5 141.1 7.6 0.19 0.94 Polaris Vein BFG21-MS09 164.0 168.2 4.2 0.27 0.10 Polaris Vein BFG21-MS09 179.7 185.3 5.6 0.39 0.27 Polaris Vein

BFG21-MS10 203.0 229.2 26.2 0.52 3.29 MS Vein Zone including 216.5 219.5 3.0 1.38 5.34 MS Vein Zone and including 224.0 229.2 5.2 0.90 8.66 MS Vein Zone

BFG21-MS11 79.8 84.3 4.6 0.23 0.33 Polaris Vein BFG21-MS11 99.3 160.0 60.7 0.35 2.12 Polaris Vein Hole Lost in Polaris Vn Zone @ 161.24 m

BFG21-MS12 170.1 184.5 14.4 0.26 0.44 Polaris Vein

BFG21-MS13 105.5 116.3 10.9 0.39 0.55 MS Vein Zone including 105.9 108.2 2.3 0.91 0.75 MS Vein Zone BFG21-MS13 179.2 211.8 32.5 0.76 1.58 Polaris Vein including 183.8 192.4 8.6 1.86 4.61 Polaris Vein

Note: 1. It is not possible to determine the true width of the zone(s) based on the drill density and no representation is made here regarding true width of the zone(s). 2. Significant intervals were summarized using a 0.18 g/t Au cut-off.

Table 2: Collar Locations for New Drill Holes

HoleID Easting (m) Northing (m) Elevation (m) Depth (m) Dip Azimuth BFG20-MS01 516813 4085341 1227 502.0 -55 114 BFG21-MS02 516813 4085341 1227 624.2 -70 114 BFG21-MS03 516740 4085123 1144 245.7 -80 115 BFG21-MS04 516910 4084899 1272 499.0 -57 115 BFG21-MS05 517094 4085409 1220 648.6 -60 114 BFG21-MS06 516910 4084899 1272 449.9 -45 115 BFG21-MS07 517094 4085409 1220 560.5 -85 114 BFG21-MS08 516894 4084854 1272 432.2 -65 115 BFG21-MS09 516756 4084917 1242 392.3 -45 115 BFG21-MS10 517009 4085399 1223 161.2 -85 114 BFG21-MS11 516756 4084917 1242 161.2 -65 115 BFG21-MS12 516626 4084977 1199 295.0 -45 115 BFG21-MS13 516665 4085194 1199 350.2 -45 114

Note: 1. The coordinates are in NAD83 11N Datum.

Footnotes:

1) Estimated by Tetra Tech Inc. in August 2017 using a $1,200/oz gold price, 72% heap leach recovery and a 0.36 g/t cut off grade. Excludes significant additional lower grade mineralization within base case pit shells. For further information, refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Technical Report Mineral Resource Estimate Bullfrog Gold Project, Nye County Nevada" with an effective date of February 22, 2021. See Cautionary Note to U.S. Investors Below.

2) Refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Technical Report for the Bullfrog Gold Project, Nye County Nevada" with an effective date of February 22, 2021 for the parameters of the $1,200/oz pit shell.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control

To ensure reliable sample results, the Company has a rigorous QA/QC program in place that monitors the chain-of-custody of samples and includes the insertion of blanks and certified reference standards at statistically derived intervals within each batch of samples. Core is photographed and split in half with one-half retained in a secured facility for verification purposes.

Sample preparation (crushing and pulverizing) has been performed at Paragon Geochemistry ("Paragon"), an independent ISO/IEC accredited lab located in Sparks, Nevada. Paragon prepares a pulp of all samples for analysis at their analytical lab. Paragon analyzes the pulp sample by 30 g fire assay with an aqua regia digestion and ICP-OES finish, samples in which gold is greater than 3 ppm are re-run using fire assay with a gravimetric finish, reported in ppm. All samples are analyzed by multi-element aqua regia digestion (35AR-OES for 35 elements) with an ICP  OES finish.

The Company is not aware of any drilling, sampling, recovery or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy or reliability of the data referred to herein.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release and the sampling, analytical and test data underlying the scientific and technical information has been reviewed, verified and approved by Scott Burkett, Vice President, Exploration of Augusta Gold who is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101- Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. The data was verified using data validation and quality assurance procedures under high industry standards.

About Augusta Gold

Augusta Gold is a rapidly growing exploration and development company focused on building a long-term business that delivers stakeholder value through developing the Bullfrog Gold Project and pursing accretive M&A opportunities. The Bullfrog Gold Project is located in the prolific Bullfrog district approximately 120 miles north-west of Las Vegas, Nevada and 4 miles west of Beatty, Nevada. The Company controls approximately 7,800 acres of mineral rights including the Bullfrog and Montgomery-Shoshone deposits and has further identified significant additional mineralization around the existing pits and defined several exploration targets that could further enhance the Project. The Company is led by a management team and board of directors with a proven track record of success in financing and developing mining assets and delivering shareholder value. For more information, please visit www.augustagold.com.

Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements and information contained in this new release constitute "forward-looking statements", and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking statements"). These statements appear in a number of places in this new release and include statements regarding our intent, or the beliefs or current expectations of our officers and directors, including that we see the potential to further add incremental ounces and reduce the strip ratio for the currently outlined resource; that current plans are to release a comprehensive resource update in early Q3 and a Mine Plan of Operations in early 2022); and that the drill program will test a number of near surface mineralized trends. When used in this news release words such as "to be", "will", "planned", "expected", "potential", and similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements and/or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements since the Company can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to vary materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements, including the risks, uncertainties and other factors identified in the Company's periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such forward-looking statements are based on various assumptions, including assumptions made with regard to the ability to advance exploration efforts at the Bullfrog Project; the results of such exploration efforts; the ability to secure adequate financing (as needed); the Company maintaining its current strategy and objectives; and the Company's ability to achieve its growth objectives. While the Company considers these assumptions to be reasonable, based on information currently available, they may prove to be incorrect. Except as required by applicable law, we assume no obligation to update or to publicly announce the results of any change to any forward-looking statement contained herein to reflect actual results, future events or developments, changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting the forward- looking statements. If we update any one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that we will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements. You should not place undue importance on forward-looking statements and should not rely upon these statements as of any other date. All forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") limits disclosure for U.S. reporting purposes to mineral deposits that a company can economically and legally extract or produce. The technical report referenced in this press release uses the terms defined in Canadian National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (the "CIM")  CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as amended (the "CIM Definition Standards"). These standards are not the same as reserves under the SEC's Industry Guide 7 and may not constitute reserves or resources under the SEC's newly adopted disclosure rules to modernize mineral property disclosure requirements ("SEC Modernization Rules"), which became effective February 25, 2019 and will be applicable to the Company in its annual report for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, unless otherwise applicable earlier. Under SEC Industry Guide 7 standards, a "final" or "bankable" feasibility study is required to report reserves, the three-year historical average price is used in any reserve or cash flow analysis to designate reserves and all necessary permits and government approvals must be filed with the appropriate governmental authority. Additionally, the technical report uses the terms "measured resources", "indicated resources", and "measured & indicated resources". We advise U.S. investors that while these terms are Canadian mining terms as defined in accordance with NI 43-101, such terms are not recognized under SEC Industry Guide 7 and normally are not permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. Mineral resources described in the technical report have a great amount of uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. The SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute SEC Industry Guide 7 compliant "reserves" as in-place tonnage and grade, without reference to unit measures. "Inferred resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that any or all part of an inferred resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. U.S. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into SEC Industry Guide 7 reserves.

Under the SEC Modernization Rules, the definitions of "proven mineral reserves" and "probable mineral reserves" have been amended to be substantially similar to the corresponding CIM Definition Standards and the SEC has added definitions to recognize "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources" which are also substantially similar to the corresponding CIM Definition Standard. However there are differences between the definitions and standards under the SEC Modernization Rules and those under the CIM Definition Standards and therefore once the Company begins reporting under the SEC Modernization Rules there is no assurance that the Company's mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates will be the same as those reported under CIM Definition Standards as contained in the technical reports prepared under CIM Definition Standards.

Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Augusta Gold Corp.
SUV

While battery-powered electric vehicles have become the norm, many automotive giants, including Toyota, Hyundai, or Honda, are also heavily involved in the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology.These companies are joined in this quest by small startups with big plans. The most ambitious of the bunch seems to be UK-based Viritech which plans to build the worlds first production hydrogen-powered hypercar.Its called Apricale, which comes from the Latin word Apricus, meaning touched by the sun. While it wouldve been more appropriate for a solar-powered vehicle, the name was chosen because the star at the center of our solar system is comprised of about 73% hydrogen.One of the main reasons why battery power is the weapon of choice for manufacturers who are developing electric hypercars is the ease of integrating such power packs into the chassis.Fuel cells are connected to large, high-pressure tanks used to store hydrogen, but they are too heavy and volatile for these types of vehicles. Viritech states its solution is a revolutionary, lightweight graphene-composite pressure vessel, capable of being used as a structural component of the Apricales monocoque chassis . The patent-pending design will be made available for other purposes like storing oxygen and nitrogen for various applications.While the company revealed that the powertrain would be capable of producing 1,100 hp, no other details have been made public at this time.However, we have a set of concept images that showcase just how beautiful this zero-emission machine will be. The exterior design rivals what you would expect from a Koenigsegg, and the free-flowing lines hint that this will be extremely aerodynamically efficient. Other nice touches include butterfly doors with side-mounted cameras that replace traditional side mirrors and the curved LED strips that dominate its rear end.Judging by the multiple vents on the back, the fuel cell stacks will be mounted in a central position for optimal weight distribution.The interior is set to accommodate two occupants in slimed-out bucket seats. A digital gauge cluster will probably be integrated into the motorsport-inspired steering wheel, while the center console will feature the main infotainment screen.Along with the innovative fuel tank and control systems, the car is currently in the concept phase, with development set to take place at the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) technology park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.Among the team of engineers who are part of this project is co-founder Matt Faulks, an ex-Formula One engineer, so the Apricale benefits from motorsport expertise.Viritech announced that it plans to build and test the hypercar next year, while production of the 25 units and early deliveries are expected to commence by the end of 2023. Those interested should expect a price tag of around $2.1 million (1.5 million), excluding taxes.The startup also intends to build a hydrogen-powered truck named Jovian and ancalled Tellaro, but its main focus will be developing and improving fuel cell technologies for third-party use.
The report " Starter Culture Market by Microorganism (Bacteria, Yeasts, Molds), Application (Dairy & Dairy-based Products, Meat & Seafood), Composition (Multi-strain Mix, Single Strain, Multi-strain), Form, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025 " , The global starter culture market size is estimated to be at USD 964 million in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 1,314 million by 2025, at a CAGR of 5.3%. Increasing awareness among manufacturers regarding the benefits of starter culture, growing application in cheese & other dairy products, and rising demand for fermented meat & dairy products are some of the main drivers for the growth of the starter culture industry.

Download PDF Brochure:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=213083494

Consumer awareness regarding the benefits of starter culture drives the market for dairy & dairy products

The starter culture market is segmented on application into dairy & dairy products, meat & poultry products, seafood, and others. The dairy & dairy products segment is dominant in the application segment due to the growth of starter cultures in the cheese industry. The demand for dairy and dairy-based products is projected to record the highest CAGR between 2019 and 2025 with the growing demand for dairy-based products across the world.

High demand from end-user industries for bacteria-based starter culture

The starter culture market is segmented based on target microorganisms into yeasts, molds, and bacteria. The market for starter culture in the dairy industry is significant and is used primarily in cheese manufacturing. The use of starter culture has helped in the fermentation process and also helps in retaining the aroma and flavor of different products.

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Europe is projected to account for the largest starter culture market share by 2025.

Europe is projected to account for the largest market share by 2025. The region has some of the leading manufacturers of starter cultures in this world. The combined output of the EU-28 countries in the global dairy industry contributes 44% to global dairy production. Also, the overall starter culture market in Europe is driven by the growing demand for fermented dairy-based products.

The report includes a study of the marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios, of the leading companies. It includes profiles of leading companies such as CHR Hansen (Denmark), DowDuPont (US), Sacco SRL (Italy), CSK Food Enrichment BV (Netherlands), THT SA (Belgium), Dalton Biotechnologies (Italy), Biochem SRL (Italy) , Mediterranea Biotechnologie SRL (Italy), Royal DSM NV (Netherlands), and LB Bulgaricum (Bulgaria).
Medical workers take swab samples from spectators for COVID-19 test before the Singapore Tennis Open semifinal in Singapore on 27 February 2021. (PHOTO: Xinhua via Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Thursday (29 April) confirmed 35 new COVID-19 cases in Singapore, taking the country's total case count to 61,121.

Sixteen of them are local cases in the community while the remaining 19 are imported. This marks the fourth day in a row with reported local cases and the highest daily count of community cases since 24 community infections were reported on 11 July last year.

"Amongst the new cases today, 28 are asymptomatic, and were detected from our proactive screening and surveillance, while seven were symptomatic," said the MOH.

Among the community cases, 15 are linked to previous infections  a fully-vaccinated nurse at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) and an Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officer  while one is currently unlinked. Two of the 16 community cases have also been fully-vaccinated.

Both the TTSH nurse and the ICA officer were among three community cases, all unlinked, announced by the MOH on Wednesday. With Thursday's announcement of new clusters linked to them, Singapore now has eight active COVID-19 clusters.

9 cases in new TTSH nurse cluster

Of the 16 community cases, eight are linked to the TTSH nurse and were detected from the authorities' proactive testing of patients and staff in the affected ward, said the MOH.

The 46-year-old Filipino nurse is deployed at Ward 9D, a general ward in the hospital, and was confirmed to have COVID-19 two days ago. The discovery of the nurse's infection had led to a lockdown of Ward 9D.

The new "Case 62541" cluster, named after the nurse's case number, consists of her, two other TTSH staff members and six patients warded in Ward 9D.

Fully-vaccinated TTSH doctor

The 30-year-old male permanent resident received his first dose of COVID-19 vaccine on 18 January, and the second dose on 8 February

The Malaysian man had attended to patients in Ward 9D but had not gone to work after onset of symptoms. He developed a fever on 27 April and sore throat the next day, and sought medical treatment at a general practitioner clinic on 27 April, where he was tested for COVID-19.

Story continues

His test result came back positive the next day, and he was conveyed to the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) in an ambulance. His serological test result has come back negative, indicating that this is likely a current infection, said the MOH.

TTSH healthcare assistant trainee

The second staff member linked to the new cluster is an 18-year-old Singaporean woman who was deployed at Ward 9D.

The woman is asymptomatic and was detected on 28 April as part of the TTSHs proactive testing of patients and staff in Ward 9D following the confirmation of the nurse as a COVID-19 case.

Her test came back positive for COVID-19 on the same day, and she was conveyed to the NCID in an ambulance. Her serological test result has come back negative, said the MOH.

Six TTSH patients aged between 57 and 94

One of the six TTSH patients who was discovered to be infected with COVID-19 is a 57-year-old Singaporean man who was initially warded in Ward 7D, before being transferred to Ward 9D.

The man developed a fever on 16 April but did not seek medical treatment. On 18 April, as his fever persisted, and he had developed a runny nose and cough, he sought treatment at the TTSHs emergency department.

"He was tested for COVID-19 infection and his test result was negative. He was subsequently warded in Ward 7D," said the MOH, adding that he was transferred to Ward 9D on 20 April.

As the man had a persistent fever, he was reviewed by an infectious diseases physician, and transferred to an isolation ward on 27 April.

On 28 April, he tested positive for COVID-19 and was transferred to the NCID. His serological test result has come back negative, said the MOH.

The five other patients, all Singaporeans aged between 71 and 94, were detected as part of the TTSHs proactive testing of patients in Ward 9D, the ministry added.

Amongst them, three are asymptomatic, while two cases, aged 71 and 79, developed either or both fever and acute respiratory infection (ARI) symptoms on 25 and 28 April, respectively.

Both Ward 7D and Ward 9D are now locked down, said the MOH. "Testing for staff and patients who have been in both wards is still in progress. All close contacts of the cases, including patients, visitors and staff who have been in the affected wards, will also be placed on quarantine," it added,

The hospital has also stepped up clinical surveillance of all inpatients who may develop fever and ARI symptoms. As a precautionary measure, all patients and staff in other TTSH wards will also be tested for COVID-19 infection, including those who are asymptomatic.

"This additional testing will enable us to draw out any hidden links. Our strategy is to aggressively test and draw a wide ring around the cases, to try and prevent further spread," said the MOH.

Additional steps taken by the TTSH include minimising staff and patient movement in all the main wards to prevent any cross-infection and banning visitors, except for critically ill patients, from Thursday.

During this period, elective cases will be deferred except for those that are urgent, and A&E cases that are non-life-threatening will be redirected to other hospitals, the MOH said.

8 cases in new ICA officer cluster

Seven of Thursday's community cases are family members of a 38-year-old Singaporean man who works as an ICA officer deployed at Changi Airport Terminal 1 and was confirmed to have COVID-19 two days ago.

The man is a deputy team leader deployed at the airport's duty officer counter and processes arrival clearance for travellers at T1. His doctor had advised that he was not eligible due to his drug allergy.

The group of eight, including the ICA officer, had gathered for a meal on 25 April, where "transmission was likely to have taken place", said the MOH. All but one family members were placed on quarantine on 27 April, while the remaining case, his wife, was quarantined on 28 April.

The new "Case 62517" cluster, named after the officer's case number, consists of him and his seven family members, including his father and a three-year-old nephew.

TTSH nurse  officer's wife

The 32-year-old Singaporean woman had been identified as the officer's close contact and was placed on quarantine on 28 April. The nurse does not work in TTSH's Ward 9D or Ward 7D, said the MOH.

"Based on our epidemiological investigation, there is no link between (her) and the TTSH cluster. However, the testing of all staff in TTSH wards will serve as an additional check on this," the ministry added.

The woman is asymptomatic but was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and her test result came back positive.

Retiree  officer's father

The 72-year-old Singaporean man lives in the same household as the officer, said the MOH. As he had been identified as his close contact, he was placed on quarantine on 27 April. He is asymptomatic, but was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and his test result came back positive.

Preschooler  officer's nephew

The three-year-old Singaporean boy last attended school on 22 April and had interacted with the officer on 25 April. As he had been identified as the man's close contact, he was placed on quarantine on 27 April.

The boy developed a fever on 28 April and his parents reported his symptom, said the MOH.

On the same day, he was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and his test result came back positive. He was conveyed in an ambulance to the National University Hospital on 29 April.

ION Orchard security officer & private hire car driver

The MOH said that the 39-year-old Singaporean man's last day at work was 27 April and had interacted with the ICA officer over dinner on 25 April.

As he had been identified the officer's close contact, he was placed on quarantine on 27 April. He developed a cough on 28 April but did not report his symptom. On the same day, he was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and his test result came back positive for COVID-19.

SP PowerGrid technical officer

The 38-year-old Singaporean man had interacted with the officer over dinner on 25 April. As he had been identified as his close contact, he was placed on quarantine on 27 April.

He developed a cough and body aches on 28 April. On the same day, he was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and his test result came back positive the next day.

Goodwood Park Hotel telephone operator

The 65 year-old Singaporean man's last day of work was 27 April, said the MOH. The man had interacted with the officer over dinner on 25 April and was placed on quarantine on 27 April after being identified as his close contact.

He is asymptomatic, but was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and his test result came back positive.

Housewife

The 33 year-old Singaporean woman had interacted with the officer over dinner on 25 April. As she had been identified as his close contact, she was placed on quarantine on 27 April.

She is asymptomatic, but was tested for COVID-19 during quarantine and her test result came back positive.

Following the confirmation of the ICA officer as a COVID-19 case, the authority has quarantined 32 of his colleagues who work at Changi Airport.

About 100 ICA officers who were deployed at Terminal 1 will also be tested as a precaution.

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Fully-vaccinated cleaner sole unlinked community case

The remaining case, currently unlinked, is a 39-year-old Vietnamese woman who works as a cleaner employed by Octo Jet Building Maintenance Services, and deployed at a community care facility at Tuas South.

She received her first dose of COVID-19 vaccine on 27 January, and the second dose on 19 February.

"The COVID-19 vaccine is effective in preventing symptomatic disease for the vast majority of those vaccinated, but it is possible for vaccinated individuals to get infected," said the MOH.

At work, the woman dons full personal protection equipment (PPE), including N95 mask, face shield, gown and gloves, the ministry added.

She also periodically helps out at a food stall at The Summit located at the National University of Singapores Bukit Timah campus.

The woman is asymptomatic, and was detected when she was tested on 26 April as part of the rostered routine testing regime.

Her pooled test result came back positive for COVID-19 the next day, and she was conveyed in an ambulance to the NCID. An individual test was done on 27 April, and her test result came back positive for COVID-19, said the MOH.

"Her earlier tests from the rostered routine training  the last being on 14 April  were all negative for COVID-19. Her serology test result has come back positive but we have assessed that this is likely a recent infection," the ministry added.

It also noted that the number of new cases in the community has increased from 10 in the week before to 28 cases in the past week. The number of unlinked cases in the community has also increased from five in the week before to seven in the past week.

Separately, the MOH added 29 new places to a list of public venues visited by COVID-19 community cases while infectious, including City Harvest Church and the TTSH's Healthy Kopitiam.

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19 imported cases, including one-year-old girl

All 19 imported cases on Thursday are asymptomatic. Among them, two are Singaporeans and nine are PRs who returned from India and South Korea.

Three others are dependants pass holders, including a one-year-old baby girl, who arrived from India and Sri Lanka.

The remaining five cases are work permit holders who arrived from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, of whom one is a foreign domestic worker.

All 19 imported cases were placed on the stay-home notice upon their arrival here and were tested while serving their notice.

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99% of total cases have recovered

With 20 more patients discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities on Thursday, 60,738 cases  or 99.4 per cent of the total  have fully recovered from the infection.

Most of the 110 hospitalised cases are stable or improving, while none is in the intensive care unit.

A total of 243 patients  with mild symptoms or are clinically well but still test positive  are isolated and cared for at community facilities.

Apart from the 30 patients who have died from COVID-19 complications, 15 others who tested positive for the virus were determined to have died from unrelated causes, including three whose deaths were attributed to a heart attack and another four, whose deaths were attributed to coronary heart disease.

Among the 217 confirmed cases reported from 23 to 29 April, 86 cases have tested positive for their serology tests, 94 have tested negative, and 37 serology test results are pending.

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Fully vaccinated nurse at TTSH has COVID-19, 4 others preliminarily positive: MOH

Woman behind racist videos had YouTube channel removed, property firm terminated 'associate'
Photo: Alberta RCMP

An Alberta driver faces some stiff fines for driving with a phoney licence plate.

In a Facebook post Wednesday that's been shared and commented on thousands of times, Alberta RCMP revealed the paper licence plate that was being used by a driver nabbed last month near Leduc.

"Last month, an observant RCMP traffic member noticed a tinted licence plate cover on a vehicle on Highway 2," the post reads.

"Once stopped, the member used the in-car camera to zoom in on the plate to get the number. Police data bank checks told the officer that the plate was non-existent."

According to police, the driver admitted to having neither registration nor insurance  and that the plate was actually just a piece of paper.

"Using a made up number, the driver had printed the image on a piece of paper at home that was then placed onto an I (Heart) My Car vanity plate and hidden behind the tinted cover."

The driver was fined just over $2,000  but could face even more bills for the deception.

A mandatory court appearance for driving with no insurance could result in a minimum fine of $2,875, if convicted.

The plate was being used on an older model Nissan Maxima.

Alberta drivers are not required to have a front plate, as in B.C.
Despite strong opposition from its own people and neighboring countries, the Japanese Government has asserted its decision to discharge the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. Western societies, headed by the U.S., however, have thus far managed to provide a display of unprecedented generosity toward Japan. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken publicly "thanked" Japan for "its transparent efforts in its decision to dispose of the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi site." Mainstream media outlets across the West issued their reports with relative objectivity that same day, but the influx of news simmered down within a week. It seems no one cares enough to follow up on the progress.

It stands in sharp contrast that the Occident stays cool in the face of Japan's misdemeanor, but splits hairs when it comes to China. If the Chinese Government were to act this irresponsibly, how would they respond? The Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union is a case in point. The year was 1986. The West propagandized the severity of this accident, harshly condemning the inadequate response and complete disregard for human life on the part of the Soviet Union Government, and even added the term "Chernobyl moment" to the overall vocabulary in reference to a catastrophe. This nuclear accident, in a way, acted as one of the catalysts for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nuclear accident of Fukushima, graded level seven, has been another one of the most serious nuclear meltdowns in history. However, it came and went nearly unnoticed by Western critics, and Japan's plans to release the nuclear wastewater into the Pacific were hailed as a "proper response."

Apparently, the evaluation criteria for good or bad do not root in the nature of the conduct but in the "moral camp" one country is assigned to. An ally is always right; a rival, and China in particular, is always wrong.

To use that approach to comment on China issues is both over-simplistic and problematic.

If Western states insist on confusing right and wrong by adopting double standards, their people will find it hard to distinguish between truth and tale. For instance, the terrorists from Chechnya, Russia, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, were glorified as "freedom fighters," with their acts of violence downplayed to the extreme. Two terrorist attacks, one in Beijing on October 28, 2013, and the other in Kunming on March 1, 2014, were portrayed across the Western media as protests instigated by "Uygur-Han Chinese conflict" together with the "widespread discrimination against ethnic minorities in China." Similar terrorist attacks also occurred in Europe. On March 24, 2017, a ramming attack took place in London. On October 2 that very same year, two young women were stabbed to death in Marseille. It is hard to say whether or not the culprits behind these two terrorist attacks considered their acts to be in protest of tyranny.

The embrace of double standards on behalf of their media has fallen into the tool pool that Western governments dip into when engaging in propaganda warfare. Without the supervision of public opinion, governments have swayed to the more irresponsible end of the spectrum, casting disaster onto all. One more example to illustrate this perspective. As the COVID-19 epidemic surged in the beginning of 2020, the British Government, with no adequate scientific verification whatsoever, put forward the cure of "herd immunity." It did not prepare anything to effectively enter the battle against the epidemic, sticking to the naive notion that the coronavirus was a mere influenza strain and people could automatically acquire immunity.

The loss of so many lives caused by the initial failure cannot be recovered and no politicians were punished for this "manslaughter." The Western media, however, had no qualms smearing China's anti-epidemic plans. This is a blatant failure on the fronts of journalistic ethics, professional integrity and the fulfillment of the social responsibilities of mass media.

The West's pride and prejudice have resulted in the global spread of the coronavirus. If they continue to turn a blind eye to Japan's discharge of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific, they risk setting in motion an unpredictable and irreversible chain of events that might negatively impact all of mankind.
Two top Hudson County officials have signaled their openness to ending a contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a sign of gathering momentum behind the push to end the controversial deal.

In an interview Wednesday, Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise said that, under certain circumstances, he is open to the prospect of exiting the contract, under which ICE pays the county $120 per person per day to house detainees at the Hudson County jail in Kearny.

I would like to do that, he said. And we tried.

Board of county commissioners chairman Anthony Vainieri said in an interview Thursday that, In lieu of whats going on and everything, I think its time now to begin leaving the contract.

The officials comments come just after Essex County officials announced a plan to phase out their own contract with ICE. Under that plan, the Essex County Correctional Facility will house some prisoners currently held at Union County jail, which will make up revenue lost by no longer holding the federal detainees.

DeGise stopped short of saying that Hudson County was actively searching for a way to exit the contract. But within the past month, month and a half, he said, Hudson officials had been in talks with Union County officials in an effort to strike the same deal that Essex struck, he said.

After negotiations as to how much, what do you do, who brings them to court, and all those details to be worked out, they chose to go with Essex, DeGise said. Youd have to ask them why. It was a good meeting. No hard feelings.

An ICE spokesman said the agency has no comment on contractual matters.

Amy Torres, the executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, struck a cautious note about the officials new openness to exiting the contract.

Activists have spent the past six months protesting ongoing abuses in jails, dangerous conditions that often resulted in death, and a lack of accountability and transparency, Torres said. Ending a contract with ICE does not materially change those conditions.

Its great that these statements have been coming out of Hudson, but they sound eerily familiar to 2018, she added, referring to officials 2018 announcement of a path to exit the contract that never materialized.

In November, the county commissioners approved a renewal of the contract.

But county officials seemed unprepared for the backlash to the vote, which saw persistent protests outside fundraisers and the county executives house. DeGise, Vainieri, and four other commissioners are currently embroiled in litigation with the American Civil Liberties Union over a restraining order that limited protests outside their homes.

Its something the commissioners really didnt sign up for, Vainieri said. Is it getting to us? Not really. Do we need it? No.

Vainieri, who has been a stalwart defender of the contract since voting to renew it in November, said he changed his mind after President Biden assumed office in January. And the contract simply isnt generating as much revenue as it used to, he said. In 2018, the prison held about 700 ICE detainees; as of Thursday, there are only 48, according to an ICE spokesman.

Last month, Vainieris sister, Englewood Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle signed on as a co-sponsor to a state bill that would bar counties from contracting with the federal immigration agency.

The main consideration, the Hudson officials said, is money. If the county could find a way to generate recurring revenues in the millions of dollars every year, DeGise said, well jump on it.

None of this was ever personal, he noted.
In 2004, as Assistant Secretary of State to Colin Powell, my charge included setting up police training in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, dead Soviet equipment littered the airport. In both places, cultural discord was everywhere. Bidens desire to get out of Afghanistan is understandable. It is also wrong. If we want to avoid another 9/11, we must secure peace.

Today, Iraq is fraught. Iranian-backed militias threatening democratic governance won at great cost. Iraqs welfare and ours are intertwined, so we stay engaged. Backward Afghanistan, with less education, minimal infrastructure, feuding warlords, endless poppies, and instability  is objectively worse. Nevertheless, our destinies remain connected.

Back in 2003, 2004, and 2005, some things were already clear. Stability would come by inches, not leaps. This was not post-Cold War Europe, not even post-WWII Europe. These were riven countries, Iraq more educated, both tribal, troubled, struggling. On the first meeting with President Karzai, I recall thinking his palace was the first with bullet holes in windows. This was going to be a long engagement.

In those years, try as we might to train, deploy, inspire, and stabilize, Karzai barely controlled Kabul. Beyond the high plain, Afghanistans snow-covered mountains were filled with dark history  and dark purpose. We had yet to find bin Laden, lost planes coming and going, would lose over 1800 American lives in combat, more than 20,000 wounded. My own bureau at State lost civilians, dedicated to making life better for a land racked by internal turmoil.

Oddly enough, then-Senator Biden would call Secretary Powell, Deputy Secretary Armitage, and get patched through to me. He asked endless questions on metrics, how many police we had trained, to what level, with what endgame, at what cost, and were we winning? The last question always stuck in my craw. Winning is often hard to define.

Winning compared to what? Where we started, halting power projection, stopping spread of terrorism, responding to 9/11, reducing heroin flow, creating self-reliance, angling for peace? Compared to how we stabilized Europe against the Soviets, the Philippines against communist insurgency, Japan, South Korea, all after WWII? We were still in those places  and, for the cost, we got returns.

But Afghanistan? We kept putting points on the board, trained, deployed, confronted, tried to dismantle corruption, built roads, academies, legitimate economy. We taught democracy, sought understanding, disincentivized trafficking in drugs and people, tried to ride the tribal tide, and yet  it was a slow process. Were we winning? Yes, by some measures, no by others.

And now, twenty years after the event that led us there, the same Joe Biden  aged and weary, no longer taking a long view, wants out. One wonders if post-WWI diplomats imagined that isolating Germany  out of sight, out of mind  ended their worries? Or if post-WWII diplomats thought staying in two dozen outposts was worth the cost? Or whether anyone remembers a precipitous pullout not so long ago, from Iraq in 2011. Where did that lead?

Allied indifference  even anger  at post-WWI Germany precipitated WWII. WWIIs devastation triggered 70 years of continued military presence, tripwires, intelligence, and engagement in former battlespaces. The 2011 Iraq pullout triggered an upsurge of terror, rise of ISIS, demise of peace, return of US troops. Now, we come to Afghanistan.

After Trumps January 2021 drawdown, US troop strength is roughly 2500  tripwire strength, confirming our commitment, keeping faith with those who served and did not come home. The goal  stated by Trump, military leaders, diplomats  was to hold the line, forcing Taliban, Afghan Government representatives, and US negotiators to secure a final peace. The goal is worthy, numbers right, work arduous, outcome worth the final push. But now we leave?

Suddenly, against history's hard-learned lessons and better instincts of Bidens senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence corps, a weary Biden pulls the plug. The man who used to worry about outcomes, trajectories, and history  is tired. His horizon in near, energy dear, focus on that peace accord  measure of when to withdraw  takes time too. Pull the ripcord, be done.

Here is the problem. Peace  in places from Germany and Japan to Kosovo, Iraq, and Colombia  only comes with teeth-grinding patience, not giving up, understanding tripwire presence, timelines conditioned on benchmarks, written assurances, crosschecks, and mutual commitments are needed.

What Biden has just done is a double error. He not only imperils a formal peace, which with effort could have come but replays the historic post-war invitation to instability. What can we expect? Increased sectarian, tribal, drug lord, and terror group violence, first within and then without the borders of a fragile state. What else? The return of mortars, dead equipment, and bullet holes. Keeping faith in the future  would have taken so little and may yet cost us more than we know. Bidens interest in a sudden, full retreat is understandable. It is also dead wrong.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, a former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, a ten-year naval intelligence officer, author of Narcotics and Terrorism (2003), Eagles and Evergreens (2018), and is the National Spokesman for the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) a 2.3 million-strong, non-partisan group for Americans 50+.
(ANSA) - ROME, APR 29 - Italy's commitment in Afghanistan will not end with the end o the NATO mission there, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the Senate Thursday.

He said it was essential to continue to monitor that "in the peace talks political and social conquests are safeguarded, starting with the rights of minorities, children and women.

"We will do our all to make sure that Afghanistan starts growing again in a democratic and peaceful future". (ANSA).


BEIJING, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PetroChina Company Limited ("PetroChina" or the "Company", SEHK stock code 0857; NYSE symbol PTR; SSE stock code 601857) announced today that it has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), which includes its audited financial statements.

The report can be accessed through SEC's website www.sec.gov and the Company's website www.petrochina.com.cn. A soft copy of the report in pdf format is available for download through the Company's website. Upon request by a shareholder, the Company will deliver a hard copy of the report free of charge within a reasonable time.

To request a hard copy of the annual report, please contact:

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services

P.O. BOX 505000

Louisville, KY 40233-5000

UNITED STATES

Overnight correspondence should be sent to:

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services

462 South 4th Street Suite 1600

Louisville, KY 40202

UNITED STATES

Calling from within the US and Canada (toll-free): 1 888 269 2377

International call: 1-201-680-6825

Email: shrrelations@cpushareownerservices.com

Additional information on PetroChina is available at its website:

http://www.petrochina.com.cn

Cision

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/petrochina-filed-annual-report-on-form-20-f-301280784.html

SOURCE PetroChina Company Limited
Dr. Dalton is currently a Senior Managing Partner at Pfizer Ventures and Vice President, Worldwide Business Development at Pfizer Inc. Since joining Pfizer in 2007, she has led Pfizer's efforts to deploy capital to generate both financial returns and strategic opportunities for the corporation. Under Dr. Dalton's leadership, Pfizer Ventures has invested more than $700 million in more than 90 portfolio company investments, building Pfizer Ventures into one of the leading corporate venture capital groups in the life sciences industry. Barbara is currently on the board of the following Pfizer Ventures portfolio companies: Artios, Cydan, IMARA, Ixchelsis, and Second Genome.

Following her Ph.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University School of Medicine), Dalton's pharmaceutical career started in immunology at Smith Kline & French Research Laboratories. She transitioned to their venture capital group, S.R. One, Limited, where she devoted ten years to growing her expertise in venture investing. In 2000, Dr. Dalton also became a General Partner in the private venture fund, EuclidSR Partners, a position she held until joining Pfizer in 2007.

"We're excited to expand our board with Barbara who will bring an impressive level of pharmaceutical venture expertise and crucial insights to our work," said Eric Converse, CEO of AMRA. "We are a growing company and the opportunities ahead are massive. Having Barbara onboard brings an added level of confidence and calculated thinking that I believe will help guide and accelerate our innovations and business plans."

About AMRA Medical

AMRA is a digital health company at the forefront of medical imaging and precision medicine. The company has developed a new global standard in body composition assessment, the ability to automatically produce multiple fat and muscle biomarkers with unrivaled precision and accuracy, as well as contextual disease insights  all from a single, rapid, whole-body MRI.

SOURCE AMRA Medical

Related Links

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ROME - Pope Francis set a 40-euro ($48) gift cap for all Vatican employees Thursday and issued a new law requiring Vatican cardinals and managers to periodically report on their compliance with clean financial practices in one of his biggest efforts yet to crack down on corruption in the Holy See.

FILE - In this Dec. 21, 2019 file photo, Pope Francis delivers his speech on the occasion of his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican. Pope Francis issued tough new anti-corruption regulations Thursday, April 29, 2021, to keep Vatican cardinals and managers honest, requiring them to periodically declare they aren't under criminal investigation or stashing money in tax havens, and are investing only in funds consistent with Catholic doctrine. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, Pool)

ROME - Pope Francis set a 40-euro ($48) gift cap for all Vatican employees Thursday and issued a new law requiring Vatican cardinals and managers to periodically report on their compliance with clean financial practices in one of his biggest efforts yet to crack down on corruption in the Holy See.

The law requires Vatican superiors to declare every two years that they aren't stashing money in tax havens and aren't under criminal investigation for tax evasion, money laundering or other crimes. They also must declare that any investments they hold are in funds consistent with Catholic doctrine.

The crackdown comes as Vatican prosecutors are nearly two years into a corruption investigation involving the Vaticans investment in a London real estate venture. Francis has preached about cleaning up the Holy See's murky financial practices for eight years, but the new law marks his biggest step yet to ensure his own cardinals and managers are clean.

The most striking part of the law is a measure that, if broadly applied, would amount to a revolution in curial culture: It prohibits any Vatican employee from receiving work-related gifts with a value of over 40 euros ($48).

While work-related will likely be open to some interpretation, the prohibition is clearly aimed at cutting down on the sometimes lavish gifts that Vatican officials are accustomed to receiving from wealthy benefactors, friends and fellow clerics.

The practice was highlighted by the recent scandal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 after the Vatican determined he sexually abused minors as well as adult seminarians. McCarrick was a successful fundraiser and was known for giving checks to Vatican officials, leading to speculation that his largesse helped him avoid punishment for his sexual misconduct, which was known in the Holy See as early as the 1990s.

The Vaticans 2020 in-house investigation into McCarricks rise and fall said while his fundraising prowess weighed heavily in his advancement and nomination as archbishop of Washington, there was no evidence that his customary gift-giving and donations impacted significant decisions made by the Holy See.

In the preamble to the law, Francis wrote that the regulations were necessary because corruption can manifest itself in different forms and ways. Vatican superiors, he wrote, have the particular responsibility of making concrete the fidelity of which the Gospel speaks, acting according to principles of transparency and the absence of any conflicts of interest.

The Rev. Robert Gahl, vice chair of the Program of Church Management at Romes Pontifical Santa Croce University, said the pope is aiming to end conflicts of interest, patronage and corruption in the Holy See hierarchy and beyond.

Most importantly, by limiting gifts to 40 euros, the pope is shutting down the main on-ramp for greed, corruption, and clericalism in the church," he said in an email, calling the law a courageous" and giant step" toward real financial reform in the church.

The pontiff decreed that any new hires must sign a declaration attesting that they have never been convicted of a crime and arent currently under investigation for offences that include money laundering, corruption, fraud, exploitation of minors or tax evasion.

The declaration must be reaffirmed every two years, with possible firing foreseen as the penalty for lying.

Also included in the declaration is the pledge that neither the manager nor third parties hold investments in offshore tax havens and that all investments are in line with the Catholic Churchs social doctrine. Such ethical investments would, for example, exclude holdings in weapons manufacturers.

Pia de Solenni, president and executive director of the Global Institute of Church Management, which aims to spread best financial practices throughout the church, said she hoped the law's implementation plan would be made public so the church can be better served.

She welcomed the new law as a step towards living the transparency and accountability that the Catholic Church should be modeling for the world."

The gift cap is perhaps the most significant reform, since cardinals and Vatican monsignors routinely receive financial gifts to supplement their relatively modest salaries and pay for the secretaries and domestic staff who help them.

It is not unusual, for example, for Vatican higher-ups to receive Christmastime checks from fellow clerics from wealthier dioceses, or for a new cardinal to have his red cassock paid for thanks to a donation from his flock or a benefactor. If the cardinal is a Vatican manager, presumably, such sartorial gifts must now be renounced.

There have long been stories of powerful Vatican cardinals receiving outrageous gifts from fellow prelates, most famously the money and gifts from the disgraced founder of the Legion of Christ to key Vatican cardinals, despite decades of documentation that he was a drug addict who sexually abused his seminarians.

The law was published the same day that the Holy Sees adherence to international standards to fight money laundering and terrorism financing was reviewed by the Council of Europes Moneyval committee. The report will be released in a few weeks.
The Liberal Democrats has pressed the government to create an independent regulator to protect British food and farming standards.

The Ten Minute Bill, put forward by Tim Farron, MP for Cumbria and ex-leader of the party, seeks to ensure that food and agri imports meet UK standards.

The independent regulator would also have the power to force the government to meet its environmental and climate targets.

It comes as the government's own Office for Environmental Protection will be set up from July, which will provide an 'independent oversight' of the UK's environmental progress.

However, this body, to be set up on an interim basis, has been heavily criticised by MPs for 'failing to meet its own ambitions' while marking a 'significant regression' on current standards.

Speaking after Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday (28 April), Mr Farron said the Liberal Democrat's proposed regulator would have 'real teeth to hold the government to account.'

For too long the Tories have treated our environment and agriculture with contempt and got away with it," he said.

Today in Parliament I introduced a bill that would create a new independent environmental regulator which would have the power to force the Government to meet its environmental and climate targets, and protect Britain's world class food and farming standards in future trade deals pic.twitter.com/q1GH60xw0m  Tim Farron (@timfarron) April 28, 2021

Farmers produce the food we eat, protect our beautiful landscape, and are vital allies in the battle against the climate and nature crises, yet this government is leaving them in the lurch.

My bills regulator would ensure that environmental protections and animal welfare standards cannot be undermined  protecting British farmers so they can support work to enhance our natural environment and cut emissions.

This will end the uncertainty caused by this Tory government which has left family farmers fearing for their livelihoods.
The TIMS management decided to crackdown on food being brought from the outside because the officials believed that patient attendants and families were complaining about the deplorable conditions at the hospital. - By arrangement

Hyderabad: Hundreds of Covid-19 patients have not been fed on time for many hours at the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences over the past 36 hours.

This follows the TIMS management, a hospital run by the Telangana State Government, banning patient attendants and families from bringing food from home, or outside, for delivery to their loved ones undergoing treatment for Covid-19 at the hospital.

A patient in the hospital, who reached out to this correspondent was in tears reporting that another patient in a ward he was in, died from hunger. That patient was a diabetic and did not get dinner last night, and breakfast this morning. He just died of hunger. Please help us get food on time, the patient begged.

Please call the Director, the doctors or anyone. We are hungry, the patient pleaded.

With most patients at TIMS on high doses of steroids as part of the Covid-19 treatment, their hunger levels stay high, which in turn means they need to be fed well, and multiple meals if needed.

Deccan Chronicle can also confirm that many patients were not provided their dinner on Wednesday night, well past midnight.

Patients in entire floors are being made to wait for long hours for breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

And even if, and when the hospital-provided food arrives, it is of compromised quality, as per information collected by Deccan Chronicle from multiple sources.

It is learnt that the current canteen contractor is expressing helplessness in finding people to work in a Covid-19 hospital, and because of this, is unable to have food delivered on time to all patients in all the floors of the hospital. It is also learnt that the TIMS management is in the process of replacing the food contractor and new one is expected to take over in a couple of days.

The TIMS management decided to crackdown on food being brought from the outside because the officials believed that patient attendants and families were complaining about the deplorable conditions at the hospital. It may be recalled that Deccan Chronicle, on April 27, carried an expose Covid-19 patients exploited at Telanganas TIMS hospital, about how patients and their families were being put through the grid by staff working at the hospital demanding money for even basic services such as providing drinking water to the patients.

Instead of addressing the issue, the TIMS management, which reports directly to the Telangana State Health Department, decided to cut off access to the hospital for patient families and as part of this exercise, banned delivery of food to patients by families.
US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he was not seeking conflict with China or Russia as he put a renewed focus on diplomacy in his first address to Congress.

In a speech focused on selling major investments at home, Biden told lawmakers who months earlier had dodged a deadly insurrection that they needed to show democracy can work.

"We're in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century," Biden said, warning: "Autocrats think democracies can't compete."

Biden said he told President Xi Jinping in a two-hour first phone conversation after taking office: "We welcome the competition -- and that we are not looking for conflict."

"But I made absolutely clear that we will defend America's interests across the board," he said.

"America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property," he said.

"I also told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe -- not to start a conflict but to prevent one," Biden said to applause from an unusually small audience due to Covid restrictions.

In an aside that was not in prepared remarks, Biden noted his extensive dealings with Xi when both were vice presidents -- and warned that China's most powerful leader in years had firm plans for the future.

"He's deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world," Biden said.

Tensions have sharply risen with China over the past few years as the United States also take issue with China's assertive military moves and human rights concerns, including what Washington has described as genocide against the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority.

- Focus on cooperation -

The speech marked a shift from the hawkish nationalism of his predecessor Donald Trump, with Biden repeatedly speaking of global cooperation.

Story continues

"There is no wall high enough to keep the virus out," Biden said, alluding to Trump's cherished wall on the Mexican border.

Similar to his message on China, Biden said he did not seek worse relations with Russia.

In his first three months in office, Biden has imposed sanctions over Russia's purported poisoning of ailing dissident Alexei Navalny and over its alleged interference in US elections and hacking operations.

But Biden has also proposed a summit in a third country with President Vladimir Putin to bring stability to relations and pointed in his speech to cooperation on climate change and the extension of New START, the last Cold war nuclear reduction treaty.

"I made very clear to Putin that we are not going to seek escalation but their actions will have consequences," Biden said.

Flipping the language of George W. Bush when used the same platform nearly two decades ago to assail an "axis of evil," Biden vowed diplomacy on the "serious threat" of the nuclear programs of both Iran and North Korea.

"We'll be working closely with our allies to address the threats posed by both of these countries through diplomacy and stern deterrence,'" Biden said.

The United States is holding indirect talks with Iran in Vienna in a bid to re-enter a denuclearization accord trashed by Trump.

The Biden administration is separately reviewing policy on North Korea after Trump's unusually personal diplomacy that included three meetings with leader Kim Jong Un.

Vowing to exert US leadership, Biden also said he was reasserting US priorities by ending "the forever war" in Afghanistan -- where he is pulling out remaining troops after 20 years.

sct/ch
REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Georgia's Department of Public Safety says a murder suspect escaped at Atlanta's airport Thursday.

The suspect escaped from police while being extradited to Arizona.

Police said the suspect escaped when sheriff's deputies removed his leg restraints so he could walk down a set of stairs.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Police are searching for a murder suspect who escaped custody at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Thursday, Georgia's Department of Public Safety said on Twitter.

The suspect, 20-year-old Jsaan Carlos Strover, escaped from police on Thursday morning while being extradited by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office of Arizona.

Strover was charged with first-degree murder, attempt to commit first degree murder, and assault earlier this month, according to FOX 5 Atlanta.

The Fulton County Sheriff's Office told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Strover escaped two Maricopa deputies who were escorting him back to Arizona.

Investigators said the deputies removed Strover's leg restraints so he could walk down a set of stairs in the rental car area of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Instead, Strover pushed past them and ran away.

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Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill told Fox 5 Atlanta that Strover was last seen entering a wooded area near the airport in College Park, Georgia.

Police described Strover - who was handcuffed when he escaped - as a Black man, six-foot-three-inches tall, and 150 pounds. Officials said he has a tattoo on his neck and was wearing a blue jacket, black sweatpants pants, and no shoes when he escaped.

Anyone with knowledge of Strover's whereabouts has been asked to call 911 or the Crime Stoppers Atlanta anonymous tip line at 404-577-TIPS (8477) or online at www.StopCrimeATL.com.

Read the original article on Insider
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order banning "vaccine passports."

The ban applies to state agencies and local businesses.

The order comes after DeSantis vowed to oppose efforts for vaccine documentation on Monday.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on Friday banning state agencies from issuing "vaccine passports."

Local businesses also can't require the vaccine passports, according to the executive order.

On Monday, DeSantis said he opposed the idea as President Joe Biden reportedly pushes for vaccine documentation.

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The order requires businesses to comply if they intend to seek state grants and contracts.

"We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida," he said.

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Capelle aan den Ijssel, The Netherlands 29 April 2021 - GeoJunxion shows modest Q1 YoY topline growth, improves its bottom line, and significantly increases order intake, which will convert into revenue in the remainder of 2021.

Covid-19 and the related measures taken over the past 12 months, have proven to be a significant challenge for the global economy. The GeoJunxion team and our underlying business continues to show strong resilience: Revenue during the past quarter has increased by a modest 4% compared to the same period in 2020. The bright spot is the order intake, which has increased by 38% thus far, versus last year. In addition, we are very encouraged by the market response to our new products and the strength of our pipeline of opportunities.

OPERATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS AND STRATEGY UPDATE

Market Developments

Amid the COVID restrictions, companies are still very prudent and at times very reluctant to invest. This is especially valid for businesses in the travel, leisure, and events segment. In this environment and without any precise timelines on when restriction will end, several of our prospects and customer opportunities are waiting for clarity to restart activities and invest in business improvements.

Business Development

In the first quarter of this year, we have focused on expanding our interactions with the industry through our new High Alert Zones family of products. We continue to receive positive feedback, invitations for product demos and requests for test and evaluation samples. Strongest traction is on our Eco Alert Zones, where we have a unique value proposition with fully attributed, global, and authoritative coverage of Low Emission Zones, Congestion areas and Limited Traffic zones. Several prospects have confirmed the quality, freshness, and completeness of our data. This has led to a strong pipeline of opportunities, some of which we expect to close in months to come.

We have also engaged with several prospects for our Outdoor Venue Plan services. Many of these use cases are related to travel, leisure, and tourism. However, these businesses were hit severely by the current COVID measures hence they hesitate to investe in better visitor experience.

Since the launch of our new brand and website in October 2020, we have seen a growing number of relevant visitors to our website. We are also receiving more and more interesting leads for our key services and products: Location Intelligence Services and High Alert Zones. Our monthly webinars are enjoying growing traction and attention. Recordings of all webinars are available on our website, in the resource (https://www.geojunxion.com/resources/) section.

Product Development

For the first few months of the year, we have made significant investments in the improving and expanding our key future products: Safety, Eco, and Health Alert Zones. In addition, we have invested in a mobile app called GeoAlertsLive, planned to launch at the end of April. The launch of this app is a significant development in three ways: Firstly, it creates a new and direct channel into the market. Secondly, it will help us demonstrate the great value of our High Alert Zones suite of products. And thirdly it will enable us to get direct customer feedback, to further tailor and improve our products. The app will be available soon on the Google PlayStore and Apple Store and will be offered with a freemium business model.

Technology Development

With the development of our own app, the team is also developing the necessary underlying APIs to communicate between the mobile users and GeoJunxion's location enabled cloud-based data servers. This suite of APIs, built for high volumes of requests, will demonstrate our technological capabilities to other mobile application builders, smart cities projects, as well as enable our own High Alert Zones content platform.

At the end of last year, GeoJunxion was invited by Esri to be one of their few partners to participate in the Service on Demand (SoD) pilot program. Service on Demand is a new way to sell our data to the ArcGIS users worldwide. Through the Esri ArcGIS platform, GeoJunxion will be enabled to sell its content directly to the complete user base. The SoD technology allows GeoJunxion to keep the content safe, on its own infrastructure, while giving access to it on demand. An interested ArcGIS MarketPlace user can then purchase exactly the data that is relevant to its application by indicating the region or location of interest and pay accordingly via the platform. In the first quarter of this year, we installed and tested the technology for our ZIP+4 content. In the coming months, we will perform further tests and deploy additional content. A successful completion of this pilot will enable GeoJunxion to offer a complete new and more flexible business model, such as micro services.

In response to the increasing demand for hyper local content, we have created a unique suite of algorithms and methods, that enables us to automate the generation of boundaries or polygons. Based on this technology, we are creating a new Built-Up Areas product with worldwide coverage. A build up area, is an area that has a dense concentration of residential or industrial buildings and is typically a subset of a city area. Knowing the exact location of the built-up area is a very critical piece of information for any location solution. It could enable, for example, more advanced routing or display functions.

Partner & Alliances

Our partnership with Esri continues to develop well. Esri is the global market leading solution provider for Geographic Information System (GIS), with over 350,000 customers and more than 45% market share (1). On 15 March, we participated, as guest speaker, to Esri's worldwide partner conference (EPC). Due to the current pandemic situation, this conference took place online with several hundreds of ESRI global partners. The topic of our session was "Delivering Content with Esri Technology" and 120 participants attended. Esri is an important alliance partner for GeoJunxion, both in terms of its market leading technology platform and market reach around the world.

Our Alliance with NavInfo is making great progress, several Smart City projects were identified as we continue to develop our value proposition to the market. NavInfo's deep know how in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and the automotive industry, paired with our focus on location enabled content to foster road safety and sustainability is a unique combination. This collaboration is expected to lead to interesting Smart City projects in the next few months and years to come.

On 4 March, we announced the successful agreement of a collaboration with the Innovative Province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. The aim of the partnership is to consolidate and improve asset management as well road safety.

The Province of North Brabant has always aimed to be among the leading European regions in terms of knowledge and innovation, to provide safety and sustainability to all inhabitants. Building on decades of mapping experience, GeoJunxion focuses on high value, dynamic content that enrich environmentally conscious applications and safety in everyday life. This new agreement paves the way for GeoJunxion to offer to the province its Data as a Service (DaaS).

Order Intake / Bookings developments

Towards the end of Q1 and in April we have seen strong order intake for Location Intelligence Services. We see a growing interest for bespoke and hyperlocal data creation and aggregation. An ever-increasing consumer expectation in location enabled applications drives the need for specific and relevant local information, such as the non-official names of a neighborhoods or districts. In this domain we announced in March the closing of a substantial contract with a global tech company.

Our 2021 order intake to date, has grown with 38% compared to the same period in 2020. Orders for location Intelligence Services booked will convert to revenue primarily in Q2 and Q3.

We like to thank our employees, customers, shareholders, and contractors for their ongoing contribution to the turnaround of the company.

FINANCIAL SUMMARY Q1 2021 RESULTS VERSUS Q1 2020

Revenue for Q1 2021 is growing modestly by 4% compared to Q1 2020.

Increased Operational expenses reflect investment in products, sales and marketing spend.

Operating result improved slightly by 1% to a loss of 439 K, compared to a loss of 444 K in Q1 2020.

Net result after tax improved by 40% to a net loss of 305 K versus 507 K in Q1 2020.

Net cash-flow from operating and investing activities equals an outflow of 41 K Euro, a significant improvement versus a cash outflow of 311 K versus Q1 2020.

Consolidated 31 March 2021 cash-position equals 1.072 K.

KEY FIGURES

OUTLOOK FOR THE FULL CALENDER YEAR 2021

Covid-19 and the related measures to contain its spread, have continued to hamper our business development during the past quarter. This was particularly the case for our products directed towards the travel, leisure, and events industry, which were severely impacted by lockdowns. Despite this, we are experiencing strong market interest in our new product portfolio, resulting in a strong and growing pipeline of opportunities. Some of these are expected to close in the weeks and months to come. Booked orders to date have increased by 38%, compared to the same period as last year, primarily driven by the Location Intelligence Services segment. Based on the orders in hand, and the strength of the pipeline of opportunities, we confirm our expectation to generate a revenue growth for the calendar year 2021, in the range of 40 to 50% compared to calendar year 2020.

FINANCIAL POSITION

GeoJunxion continues to make significant progress in turning its business around from a digital map supplier focused on one-off large deals, to a premium location content and location intelligent service provider with a subscription based, recurring "data as a service" revenue model. During the past quarter GeoJunxion has continued to invest in product development and in sales and marketing. The private placement completed in December 2020 is expected to provide the funding needed to enable GeoJunxion to grow its new business model towards a cash generating and profitable organization. The cash currently available on hand is estimated to be sufficient to cover our operational requirements for at least the next 12 months.

REPLACEMENT OF EXTERNAL AUDITOR

We continue to explore all possible options to replace our previous OOB-licensed auditor, Grant Thornton. Partially to allow time in resolving this issue and move outside of the auditing peak season, GeoJunxion has extended the current accounting year to 30 June 2021. During the past months we have engaged with all available OOB licensed Auditors in the Netherlands, requesting a quote for the Audit of our accounts per 30 June 2021. Mazars is not available to us as they are still in the cool down period as our 2017 auditor. To date we have received 3 rejections for the same reasons as last year and are still waiting for the reply from one of the firms. We do have ongoing talks with one auditing firm. There is however no guarantee that these efforts will conclude in an agreement.

RISK MANAGEMENT

Risk management is an integral managerial task. Our risk management and control procedures take into consideration the size of the company and the character of the business to identify the most significant risks which the company is exposed to. The risks identified are discussed on a periodical basis and mitigated where possible. Such a system cannot provide absolute certainty that objectives will be realized. Neither can it guarantee prevention of potential cases of material mistakes, damage, fraud, or breaches of statutory laws.

The 2019 annual report describes the principal strategic, operational, and financial risks. The risks and uncertainties described in the annual report are still relevant and are deemed incorporated and repeated by reference in this report. There were no cases of material damage, fraud or breaches of law detected in 2020 and Q1 2021. However, the Covid-19 outbreak and the associated and prolonged pandemic control measures have had a disruptive effect on the economy and an adverse effect on our business, most noticeably in our data sales business and our last mile mapping service directed to travel, leisure and events business and the associated revenues. Although we have taken mitigating actions and the expectation that lockdown measures will be gradually lifted with the progress in the vaccination campaigns, there is no guarantee that the pandemic and its associated control measures will not have a further negative impact in 2021 on our business, financial position, and results.

BOARD OF MANAGEMENT STATEMENT

The Board of Management hereby declares that, to the best of its knowledge, the summarized Q1 2021 consolidated financial statements, drawn up in accordance with IAS 34 "Interim financial reporting", represents a faithful rendering of the assets, liabilities, financial position, profit and cash flow of GeoJunxion NV and its subsidiaries as stated in the consolidated financial report, and that the Board report as included in this Q1 2021 Interim Financial report represents a faithful rendering of the information required in relation to item 5:25d subs 8 and 9 of the Dutch Financial Supervision Act.

GROUP STRUCTURE SIMPLIFICATION

The voluntary liquidation of AND Data India Pvt, LTD, continues to progress well: Early January 2021 we completed the repatriation of approximately 50% of the funds available in the company. Expectation is that the remaining funds will be repatriated in Q2 2021. Soon after that, we target to complete the liquidation of the Indian legal entity.

Capelle aan den IJssel, 29 April 2021,

Thierry Jaccoud - Chief Executive Officer

Ivo Vleeschouwers - Chief Finance Officer

Attachment
The quarterly results from the ecommerce titan will be the first since its founder Jeff Bezos stepped back from the role of CEO

The final tech major to report in the week will be ecommerce giant Amazon Inc ( ) when it reports its numbers after the Wall Street close on Thursday, the first set of results since founder Jeff Bezos stepped back from the CEOs chair.

However, the change of leadership (if you can call it that with Bezos still serving as executive chairman) is unlikely to bring much change in company direction, while new lockdown measures in several countries are likely to have produced increased sales as consumers have found themselves shut out of the high street.

The accelerated shift towards digital services caused by the pandemic is also likely to benefit the firm going forward, particularly its Amazon Web Services cloud computing arm despite it facing stiff competition from both Microsoft and Alphabet, both of which reported strong results earlier this week.

Investors may also be hoping that the company has managed to effectively handle the ongoing backlash over the working conditions of some of its warehouse workers after memos surfaced earlier this year chastising workers for urinating and defecating in bottles and bags, sparking outrage from multiple sources and increasing calls for US labour law reform and unionisation.

Speaking of Bezos, while Amazons founder has taken something of a back seat in terms of running the business, his other ventures have landed him back in the spotlight amid something of a billionaires tiff.

Earlier this week, Bezos locked horns with ( ) boss Elon Musk as the Amazon chairman lodged a formal protest over the award of NASAs contract to return astronauts to the Moon.

Space-X, Musks rocket business, won the contract earlier this week sparking the official complaint and another war of Twitter words.

Bezos' has accused US Space agency NASA of a last-minute change of terms for the contracts, sparking a mocking retort from Musk on Twitter.
It is no understatement when we say that the deadly second wave of the Covid-19 has absolutely decimated India, so much so, that all one sees across the country are cries for help, be it the search for hospital beds, medicines, and oxygen.



 Reuters

However, at a time when helpless citizens have been forced to battle each other for resources, there is a refreshing tale of the ultimate sacrifice.



In what was a heartwarming yet heartbreaking incident, an 85-year-old man in Nagpur gave away his reserved bed in the hospital to a younger patient in order to save his life.

According to reports, Narayanrao Dabhalkar had been suffering from the Coronavirus after which his daughter did everything possible to arrange a hospital bed for him at the Indira Gandhi Hospital in the city.

 IGGMRC.ORG

The elder man was rushed to the hospital after his oxygen levels dropped down significantly, leaving him struggling to breathe at the time of admission.



However, he saw a woman crying and begging the hospital staff to find a bed for her ailing 40-year-old husband right outside the hospital window.

 Reuters

Upon seeing her desperation, the 85-year-old opted for a discharge to give away his bed to the man.



Despite his daughter and son-in-law convincing him to not go ahead with the decision, Narayan stood firm and even went against the medical advice of the doctors to save the man's life.

According to reports, Narayan said to the doctors,

I am 85. I have lived my life. Saving the life of a young man is more important. Their children are young...please give my bed to them.

 Reuters

Later, he went ahead with signing the consent form, and upon being brought back home from the hospital, passed away three days later.



The heartbreaking story of kindness and humanity in these dark, dark times led to many people across the country paying tribute to the kind-hearted soul.

Remember his name. His name is Narayan Dabhadkar. Wont make it to TIME magazine cover !!



He is the 85 year old man who gave away his reserved hospital bed to a younger man stating he has lived his life 



He quietly went home and passed away later.



Om Shanti  pic.twitter.com/yz1ZECGi0O  Sqn Ldr S Vinod Kumar (Retd) (@veekay122002) April 27, 2021

God bless this Great man. My salute to him. On one hand theres a Dr from Ghaziabad who has been arrested for selling Remdisivir @ 20 to 40k each and actemra injection @ 2 lakh each and on the other hand this great man even gave up his reserved bed. What a contrast of humanity!!  jagi_mahil (@mahil_jagi) April 28, 2021

Salute to this great person!  Ved Malik (@Vedmalik1) April 28, 2021

Lost for words! May his kind soul attain the highest abode. Prayers 



Thinking about Mr. Dabhadkars sacrifice...cant imagine his familys agony. He became an inspiring icon to us. May God bless his purest soul and his family. Life is precious to all.  | VJ | | (@Vijayalaxmi__) April 28, 2021

I have no words except for..wherever you are may you always rest in peace. Humanity will forever be indebted.  Komal Prasad (@KomalPr29630401) April 28, 2021

Nobody should be in such a situation, where they have to choose. Life is a life. Having said that, I bow my head down for laying down his life in sacrifice of a young person   Mamatha Maben (@MabenMaben) April 28, 2021

Empathy,clarity in assessing the situation,firm resolve,courage and much more,all in one single act of poise & grace. Salute you Sir for the man that you were.  Surinder Shahid (@SPS_Shahid) April 28, 2021

Wonderful, realistic and forward looking. Respect and gratitude. Dil se.

           

 Yogesh Mehta (@madyogifree) April 28, 2021

Rest In Peace warrior

What a great great man  Barca Universel (@BarcaUniverseI) April 28, 2021

RIP to this generous heart n soul!

People need to have this practicality throughout their lives! Remember, You're not going to stay permanent in this world! Be practical, Be generous to the one who needs YOU!  Pragnesh Shah (@goldenheart31) April 28, 2021
NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY) reported first quarter non-GAAP net earnings per share of $1.74, compared to $1.72, a year ago. On average, 13 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $1.82, for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Net earnings attributable to Bristol Myers Squibb was $2.0 billion, or $0.89 per share, in the first quarter, compared to net loss of $775 million, or $0.34 per share, prior year. First quarter revenues were $11.07 billion, an increase of 3%, or 1% when adjusted for foreign exchange. Excluding COVID-19 related buying patterns from the prior year period, first quarter revenues grew 8%. Analysts expected revenue of $11.12 billion, for the quarter. Bristol Myers Squibb updated its 2021 GAAP EPS guidance range of $3.12-$3.32 to $3.18-$3.38. The company affirmed its non-GAAP EPS guidance range of $7.35 - $7.55. The company projects worldwide revenues to increase in the high-single digits. Shares of Bristol Myers Squibb were down more than 2% in pre-market trade on Thursday. 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.
Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 30 giorni fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

Intelligent virtual assistant market is anticipated to reach $21.52 Billion by 2026 according to a new study published by Polaris Market Research. In 2019, the BFSI segment dominated the global market, in terms of revenue. North America is expected to be the leading contributor to the global market revenue during the forecast period.

The growing need to improve customer service, streamline enterprise communication, and increase productivity has boosted the adoption of intelligent virtual assistants. The rising penetration of mobile devices, and integration of virtual assistants with smart home appliances further support the growth of this market. Additionally, the increasing demand of intelligent virtual assistants from small and medium enterprises has supported market growth over the years. Increasing investments by vendors in technological advancements coupled with growing need to improve customer experience would accelerate the adoption of intelligent virtual assistants. However, lack of awareness is expected to hinder market growth. Growing demand from emerging economies is expected to provide numerous growth opportunities in the coming years.

Get sample copy of this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/intelligent-virtual-assistant-market/request-for-sample

The use of digital assistants and bots is expected to increase in the coming years. Computer programs in the form of bots simulate conversation with users through chat windows and voice calls. They have the ability to perform a number of different automated tasks such as scheduling meetings, managing finances, and others. They also assist in successful use of unified communication tools. These bots could be used as an automated attendant monitoring the interactions and offering instructions to users.

Intelligent virtual assistants are gradually replacing traditional interactive voice response systems. Use of intelligent virtual assistants is proving effective by enhancing customer and brand experience, and providing a consumer-friendly environment. The virtual assistants also offer a platform for convenient communication within businesses through voice, text, and other channels.

North America generated the highest revenue in the market in 2017, and is expected to lead the global market throughout the forecast period. The presence of established telecom and cloud infrastructure in this region, and growing trend of BYOD drive the market growth in the region. The growing demand of mobile devices, and technological advancements further support market growth in the region. Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period owing to growing demand of virtual assistant technologies in the developing countries of the region.

Complete Summary with TOC Available @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/intelligent-virtual-assistant-market

The end-users in intelligent virtual assistant market include healthcare, education, retail, BFSI, government, and others. In 2017, the BFSI segment accounted for the highest market share owing to increasing need to offer enhanced customer services, and improve productivity. The demand for intelligent virtual assistants has increased from organizations operating in this sector to improve workforce collaboration, client interaction, and reduce costs.

The well-known companies profiled in the report include Apple Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Google, Nuance Communications, IBM Corporation, Oracle Corporation, [24]7.ai., Speaktoit Inc., CodeBaby Corporation, Next IT Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Clara Labs among others. These companies launch new products and collaborate with other market leaders to innovate and launch new products to meet the increasing needs and requirements of consumers.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Technology Text-based Speech Recognition Text-To-Speech-Based Others

Intelligent Virtual Assistants Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Type Rule-based Conversational Ai-Based

Intelligent Virtual Assistants Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Service Customer service Marketing assistant

Intelligent Virtual Assistants Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by End-User Healthcare Education Retail BFSI Government IT & Telecom Others

Intelligent Virtual Assistants Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Region North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK France Italy Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Japan Rest of Asia-Pacific Latin America Brazil Middle East & Africa



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In the half-year since, the label has continued to put out a string of winning recordings, including, this month, Nature, the first full-length collection of orchestral pieces by the English composer Tansy Davies. Like Bennett, Davies isnt afraid of obvious debts to cinema; some of the high-flown motifs in the first movement of her What Did We See? might bring to mind John Williamss Star Wars scores. But the rest of her four-piece suite has its own ruggedly lyrical identity. And the glinting, melodically fragmented Davies piano concerto that gives the album its title is another showstopper.

When I heard Nature alongside This Departing Landscape, a lush February release from the Scottish composer Martin Suckling, it was clear that NMC entered the pandemic with a strong production schedule already in place. While the label has long balanced nurturing young (sometimes very young) talent with serving as a kind of house label for Britain's established avant-garde, this recent spate of recordings has been noticeably light on veteran names. (Bennett and Davies are in their 40s; Suckling turns 40 later this year.)

A sense of patient, spectral unease is alive in Sucklings second track, Release, which sounds as if its incorporated some lessons from the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg.
In February, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead in the south Georgia neighborhood of Satilla Shores. In the two months that followed, no arrests were made. But local residents and lawmakers protested what they said was a deadly combination of racial profiling and flawed self-defense laws. When they stop you, make sure you got your cameras on. Make sure you got a video. Police did eventually arrest 2 suspects, but it was days after this video of the fatal shooting emerged. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis were charged with murder and aggravated assault. The case has reignited the national debate over racial violence. Im sure you saw the news about Ahmaud Arbery. It looks like murder. The American public saw the video. What exactly happened in the last moments of Mr. Arberys life? Using security camera footage, cellphone video, and 911 calls and logs, The Times has reconstructed the critical 12 minutes from when Mr. Arbery appeared on Satilla Drive to his death, less than 300 yards away. Its around 1 p.m. on Feb. 23 when Ahmaud Arbery is out, less than 2 miles from his home. A security camera at 219 Satilla Drive is recording when Mr. Arbery enters the frame at around 1:04 p.m. He may have been jogging in the area, but he stops on the front lawn of 220 Satilla, a house being built across the street. Arbery glances around and wanders into the open construction site. Inside, security footage briefly captures him looking around. Meanwhile outside, a neighbor walks from Jones Road towards Satilla Drive and calls 911. The neighbor waits by the street corner. He will later tell the dispatcher that Arbery resembles a recent trespasser in the area. On multiple occasions before Feb. 23, several trespassers were caught on camera at 220 Satilla. The owner routinely alerted the police. On four occasions, what appears to be the same man was filmed. Its unclear if this was Arbery, but even if it were, this does not justify his shooting by neighbors outside on the street. The sites owner says nothing was ever stolen from the house during these incidents or on Feb. 23, and no property was ever damaged. But neighbors were aware of the trespasses and the community was on alert. Now, back to the day in question. Its 1:08 p.m. and Arbery is walking around inside the house. Four minutes after he entered, he walks out and runs off. In the top corner of the security footage, we can see down the street to 230 Satilla, the home of Travis McMichael. At 1:10 p.m., Travis and his father, Gregory, grab their guns, jump in a white truck, and leave the house to pursue Mr. Arbery. We dont have footage showing the next 3 minutes, but testimony Gregory McMichael gave police at the scene, and interviews by another witness, Roddy Bryan, indicate what happened. Gregory and Travis McMichael follow Arbery onto Burford Road. Their neighbor Roddy Bryan sees the pursuit, gets in his car and follows. The McMichaels try to cut Arbery off. Arbery doubles back and passes them. Bryan tries to block Arbery, but Arbery runs past him and toward Holmes Road. Gregory McMichael climbs from the cab to the bed of the truck armed with a handgun. We dont know exactly what happens next. But Bryan and the McMichaels end up following Arbery on Holmes Road. And we next see Arbery at 1:14 p.m. running back down Holmes Road away from Roddy Bryan and toward the McMichaels. Roddy Bryan is filming and  a warning  these scenes are distressing. Gregory McMichael dials 911 at this time. Lets watch this back and break down what happens. This is Arbery. He has been running from the vehicles for almost 4 minutes. Travis is standing by the drivers side of the truck, armed with a shotgun. Gregory is in the bed of the truck on the 911 call. Arbery doesnt know where to run. He veers right, then left and then darts around the right side of the vehicle. Arbery comes around the front of the truck. We see his white T-shirt through the windshield and here is Travis now leaning toward him. This is the instant the first shot is fired. Arbery is hit in the chest, his right lung, ribs, and sternum are injured. The two men wrestle over the gun. Gregory shouts: Travis! Arbery punches Travis. In the back of the truck, Gregory drops the cellphone. A second blast goes off out of frame. But we see the shotgun smoke here. Arbery is heavily bleeding. He throws another punch. Travis fires a final shot, which hits Arbery in his left upper chest. Travis walks away holding his gun. Gregory gets off the truck clutching his .357 Magnum. According to the police report, Gregory rolled Arbery over to see if he had a weapon. He did not. Police officers arrive within seconds of the shooting, and a minute or so later at 1:16 p.m., Police Officer R. Minshew reports: Two subjects on Holmes Road. Shots fired. Male on ground bleeding out. The police took Gregory McMichaels testimony and let the two men go. But now the McMichaels both face serious charges. Hi, this is Malachy and I reported this story. For transparency, a note about the security footage used in this video, which was first published by The Atlanta Journal Constitution. The time code you see here is incorrect. We know this because we lined up what we see in this video with what we hear in two 911 calls and we confirmed the time of those calls. These details and police logs also allowed us to determine that Gregory McMichael called 911 from his sons phone just before the fatal shooting. So in this video, we used the real time that events happened. Thank you for watching.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Starting Friday, restaurants in 15 Oregon counties will transition back to extreme risk level requirements, including in Lane County.

RELATED: LANE AND LINN COUNTIES MOVING TO EXTREME RISK

Steve Sheehan, the co-owner of Elk Horn Brewery in Eugene, said he and his peers believe something has to change with COVID-19 restrictions. According to him, the government needs to re-evaluate.

"I don't understand how other states are able to get back to normal and we're not," Sheehan said.

He said this decision was a huge blow for him and his team, as they'd just begun to get adjusted to the lower level restrictions. Contrary to the previous risk levels, indoor dining will not be allowed at all, which means restaurants will have to find different ways to account for that revenue change, and many people will be laid off.

"To see this news crushes not only me but the employees that count on me for a job," Sheehan said.

He also said he's going to do his best to allow his employees to retain their positions, even if it means it's coming out of his own pockets.

KEZI 9 News received more than 500 comments on our Facebook post announcing the elevated risk level, and many of them were against the rule change.

Sheehan said the decision whether to patronize a restaurant or not should be left in the hands of the citizens themselves. He also vowed to follow the government's instructions.

"Mask up, sanitize down, and make the decision if they want to come," Sheehan said.

Dozens of county commissioners across the state have sent a letter to Gov. Kate Brown urging her to give counties more decision-making authority on COVID-19 restrictions. To read the full letter, CLICK HERE.
This is the tragic moment an Australian teenager dying of bone cancer told his parents he wanted to die before taking his own life at home.

Rhys Habermann, 19, recorded the footage in January 2017 - towards the end of a losing 18-month battle with cancer that began in his hip but by then had spread to his shoulders, ribs, spine, skull and lungs.

Faced with an agonising death in palliative care, Rhys chose instead to end his own life, but insisted on recording the video first to absolve parents Brett and Liz of any legal responsibilities.

'I believe in my right to die by my own choosing. This is tough for everybody but I refuse to go through palliative care, after experiencing a little bit of it this last week,' he said. 'It's more painful than I could have ever imagined.'

Just minutes after recording the footage, he took his life in front of his parents. His siblings, unaware of the plan, had been sent away for fear of implicating them.

Hours after that, police arrived. What followed was an 18-month investigation that ended with Brett and Liz being acquitted, largely thanks to the video.

The pair have now released the footage to the ABC and begun an appeal to make assisted dying legal so no other family has to go through the ordeal they endured.

Brett and Liz Habermann's son Rhys (all pictured together) took his own life after it became clear his diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma was terminal

Before he died, Rhys asked his parents to film him from his bed, in a harrowing video that was later handed to police

Debate rages over assisted dying, assisted suicide, voluntary euthanasia across globe The debate around how, and whether, people should be allowed to take their own lives has troubled doctors, ethicists and politicians for decades. But the process is complex and attempts to regulate it have led to a mish-mash of laws and terminology that often complicates the issue further. Below are the terms used by the British Medical Journal which has campaigned on the issue for years, including what they mean and where the processes are legal. Assisted dying What is it? The process of a medical professional prescribing drugs that will allow a person to end their own life, after meeting a strict set of criteria. Where is it allowed? Assisted dying is permitted in the US states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, and in Washington DC. It is also legal in Canada A 2015 bill attempted to introduce similar legislation in the UK, but was voted down by politicians. Assisted suicide What is it? A person giving help to another in order to facilitate them ending their own lives, with drugs that they administer themselves. The person dying may have a long-term condition that significantly impacts their quality of life but isn't fatal, or have a terminal illness. Where is it allowed? Defined as such, the process is legal in Switzerland. Voluntary euthanasia What is it? A doctor directly administering fatal drugs to a patient who has expressed a desire to die and given consent to the process. Where is it allowed? Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Canada Advertisement

The traumatic experience began in 2015 when Rhys, then in his final year of studies at Immanuel College in Adelaide, returned home complaining of a pain in his hip.

He went for an MRI scan which revealed he was suffering from Ewing's sarcoma, which is a form of bone cancer.

An appeal page set up for Rhys that year says: 'For patients detected early, the five-year survival rate is close to 70 per cent.

'In Rhys case, the five-year survival rate is 20 per cent to 30 per cent.'

The teenager quickly began chemo, which his father described as 'terrible' recalling 'listening to him in his room just continuously vomiting' after treatment.

Liz said that as treatment continued, Rhys began to discuss his desire to end his suffering, and she sought out mental health treatment for him.

But following his 18th birthday he made the decision to stop chemotherapy and make the most of the time he had left.

He went on holiday to Thailand with his younger brother and best friend.

By the time he turned 19, a doctor delivered the prognosis he had dreaded but had been anticipating - the cancer had spread, and was going to kill him.

With a terminal diagnosis, Rhys began to seriously discuss the desire to kill himself rather than go through the agony of palliative care.

His plan was to do it alone in a motel room so as not to potentially incriminate his parents. They wouldn't allow it, telling Rhys he needed to be at home.

'And he said, "but you could go to jail" and it's like "so be it, whatever". And with that he taught me unconditional love, to be there with him,' Ms Habermann said.

'Rhys was really worried about what would happen afterwards. That's why he was adamant we shouldn't have been there, but there's no way in hell we weren't going to be there.

'He spent the last 18 months of his life finding the best way to die that wasn't going to totally ruin us.'

To protect his family as best he could, Rhys asked his parents to film him from his bed.

After the short clip, he said his final farewells to his distraught parents and brother Lewis.

His other siblings had already been sent to stay with friends, unaware that they had said their final goodbyes.

Within hours of Rhys' death, police arrived and began confiscating his belongings as evidence. They deemed the family home a crime scene.

Officers spent 12 hours combing through Rhys' room, laptop, phone and personal affects. It took a further 18 months to clear his parents of any wrongdoing.

Ms Habermann said Rhys spent the last 18 months of his life finding the best way to die because he did not want to go through palliative care. The family are pictured at the Rhys' gravesite

In a video made before he took his own life, Rhys said: 'I believe in my right to die by my own choosing'

Rhys had been diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a bone cancer which started in his hip but metastasized to his shoulders, ribs, spine, skull and lungs

Rhys, who was a thrill seeker, had wanted to concentrate on his 12 Year studies but a doctor had told him 'you need to concentrate on just staying alive'

'It could have been so much kinder to all of us. He was dying anyway,' Ms Habermann said.

'He felt so robbed that he didn't have a choice, that he was dying anyway. That choice was taken from him. We could've just all been in such a good place that we could have spent his final moments not being scared of what's going to happen.'

Rhys' only sister, Jorja, took his death particularly hard. Her parents said it wasn't until two years later that she explained the toll it had on her to not be able to say a proper goodbye.

Due to the criminal investigation, the children weren't allowed to see his body after his death.

'The kids never got to say goodbye,' Ms Habermann said.

Gut-wrenching photos taken at Rhys' funeral show his inconsolable siblings doubled over the top of his coffin, saying their goodbyes.

His youngest brother leaned over the railing to kiss the white coffin, while Rhys's two other brothers got down on their knees and cried.

The couple are now calling on Australian state governments to introduce assisted dying laws to give people with terminal illnesses the option to die on their own terms.

Ms Habermann (pictured with Rhys) is calling for terminally ill individuals to be legally given the right to die on their own terms

Rhys (pictured) said in a video that he was adamant he did not want to go through palliative care

They say their family would have coped better with Rhys' death had his siblings been able to choose whether they wanted to be by his side as he took his last breath.

'At least we could have supported each other, not having to ship kids off to friends to hide what was going on,' Ms Habermann said.

The mother-of-five is actively campaigning for sweeping changes to current laws.

'It is their choice. It is voluntary. It is peaceful. It is time South Australian politicians (who seem to think they are God) show these people compassion and pass this Bill,' she said earlier this month on the matter.

'Apparently it needs to be accepted as a part of life that some people will suffer intolerable pain as they are dying and we have no right to "kill" them off.

'The passing of this Bill in SA won't help my son but Im still doing this for you Rhys - you deserved so much more than the crap hand life threw at you.'

Lifeline 13 11 14
Manitoba's teachers will soon be able to head south for a COVID-19 vaccine.

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Manitoba's teachers will soon be able to head south for a COVID-19 vaccine.

During a Thursday morning press conference, Premier Brian Pallister said a deal is being worked out with the State of North Dakota and the federal government to allow Manitoba teachers to get vaccinated at sites in the United States.

According to Pallister, the federal government is prepared to allow an exemption to the cross-border quarantine rule for teachers who enter into the United States for an injection and head immediately back into Canada afterwards.

Full details were not released on Thursday, but the premier said there would be a vaccination site across the border at the crossing on Highway 10 for Brandon and Westman teachers to get vaccinated.

More information on this plan is supposed to be released next week.

 The Brandon Sun
The United States on Wednesday voiced disagreement with Human Rights Watchs allegation that Israel is committing apartheid against the Palestinians but said it was committed to condemning abuses.

It is not the view of this administration that Israels actions constitute apartheid, a State Department spokesperson said.

President Joe Bidens State Department, however, said it would not offer public evaluations of reports by outside groups  a shift from Donald Trumps administration which loudly berated advocacy groups that criticized ally Israel.

The spokesperson renewed a call on both Israel and the Palestinians to refrain from unilateral actions that exacerbate tensions including settlement activity and incitement to violence.

Human Rights Watch in a report Tuesday said that Israel is committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, saying Israel had an overarching policy to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.

Israel, which is facing an investigation at the International Criminal Court opposed by the United States, denounced the report and accused the New York-based group of having an anti-Israel agenda.

Israels ambassador to the United States said the report was full of lies and fabrication that were bordering on anti-Semitic.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenian prosecutors are probing over 100 criminal casefiles on the war crimes committed by the Azeri military-political leadership and troops during the 2020 war.

Foreign mercenaries and another 37 Azerbaijani nationals are charged (2 are arrested while 35 are internationally wanted).

The prosecution said that the Azerbaijani authorities, fueled with ethnic hatred, launched premeditated and targeted attacks on the peaceful civilian settlements of Armenia and Artsakh using artillery and drone strikes.

The Armenian prosecution said the Azeri attacks were an act of aggression, a war of aggression, which resulted in the deaths of both servicemen and civilians  who were protected under international conventions, and civilian infrastructures such as residential homes, kindergartens and roads were destroyed.

The Armenian authorities noted that an Armenia SU-25 warplane was shot down while it was flying in Armenian airspace, and the pilot Valery Danelin was killed. Hostile UAVs breached Armenian airspace and bombed the province of Gegharkunik, hitting residential homes in Sotk, a passenger bus, as well as servicemen on duty. A child was severely wounded when the Azeri military fired on civilians in an agricultural field. A civilian was killed in the bombing of Mets Masrik. The Azeri combat drones even reached the airspace of Kotayk Province but were shot down by the Armenian air defense.

In Armenias south, three soldiers were killed in a bombing and military equipment which was not in combat was hit.

The investigation has gathered evidence that the Azeri military repeatedly tortured, murdered and subjected to inhumane treatment the prisoners of war and other detainees, including civilians both during and after the war. In one case, the Azeri servicemen beheaded an Armenian POW and published photos on the internet.

All cases are under scrutiny to give individual criminal-legal assessment to the actions of the Azeri servicemen.

The investigation also has evidence that the Azeri military vandalized and destroyed Armenian cemeteries and monuments, including churches both during and after the war.

Evidence includes facts that Azerbaijan pre-planned the war back in June 2020 and recruited more than 2000 Syrian mercenaries and deployed them via Turkey. Azeri authorities transferred payments namely to the Suleyman Shah and Sultan Murad terror groups.

Another criminal case concerns the downing of a Russian gunship over Armenian airspace by Azeri military on November 9, 2020, which killed two pilots and wounded another one.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
The company said the acquisition of KNX gives its shareholders significantly greater exposure to any discoveries made on three large Australian gold and gold-silver exploration properties

Essex Minerals will issue 5 million of its common shares to pay for the purchase of KNX

Essex Minerals Inc ( ) (OTCQB:ESXMF) ( ) said it has agreed to acquire its privately-held Australian joint venture partner KNX Resources Ltd in an all-stock transaction.

The company said buying KNX is the best way to acquire the balance of KNX's interest in the Australian gold properties while also giving Essex an Australian operating subsidiary with accumulated tax losses.

The acquisition of KNX gives Essex shareholders significantly greater exposure to any discoveries made on these three large Australian gold and gold-silver exploration properties, Essex Minerals CEO Paul Loudon said in a statement.

The 2021 field season is now commencing, with drill programs being planned for all three properties over the next eight months, Loudon added.

Essex noted it will own an 83% interest in the Cumberland and Compass Creek Projects and 100% of the Mt Turner Project once its acquisition of KNX Resources is complete.

Essex Minerals will issue 5 million of its common shares to pay for the purchase of KNX, with KNX shareholders expected to receive one Essex share for each 4.052 KNX shares held.

Under the terms of the 2020 joint venture agreement between the two companies, Essex earned an initial 50% interest in KNX's share of the three Australian gold properties by spending A$1million on exploration.

Essex then had the right to acquire the balance of KNX's interest in the properties at independent valuation or earn an additional 25% interest in Mt Turner and 20% interest in Cumberland and Compass Creek by financing a further A$3 million on exploration.

The Cumberland property comprises four granted exploration permits covering 250 square kilometres (km), 70 km northwest of the former 5 million-ounce Kidston gold mine, while Compass Creek property comprises two granted exploration permits covering 48 square kilometres in the Pine Creek goldfield, 28 km north of Kirkland Lake's 2Union Reefs mill in Australias Northern Territory.

Essex Minerals is a mineral exploration and development company focused on opportunities where it can adopt an option earn-in and joint venture model, with a particular emphasis gold projects in Tier 1 jurisdictions.

Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com
I saw the need to capture and record the events of this battle as a historical work for current and future Marines to see how this battle was fought and to permanently save this story for the Marines that personally experienced it.

Authors John Arsenault, LtCol, USMA (ret) and Thomas Gourneau, USCG document their involvement in a two-week battle during the Vietnam War in LZ Sitting Duck: The Fight for FSB Argonne ($16.49, paperback, 9781662813139; $31.49, dust jacket, 9781662813146; $8.99, e-book, 9781662813153).

Themselves two of the men who participated in LZ Sitting Duck in 1969, Arsenault and Gourneau relate the stories of 22 Marines over their two-week struggle to survive. Sent to retake Fire Support Base Argonne near the Laos border, they overcame nearly impossible obstacles in order to confront the North Vietnamese Army.

I saw the need to capture and record the events of this battle as a historical work for current and future Marines to see how this battle was fought and to permanently save this story for the Marines that personally experienced it, said Arsenault.

John Arsenault returned from Vietnam and was discharged in 1970. He spent the next 30 years in Alaska working in the Alaska Prudhoe Bay oilfield and the Trans Alaska Pipeline as one of the first Ice Road Truckers in 1974. In 1985, Arsenault reenlisted in the USMC Reserve, Company E, 4th Reconnaissance Bn. Anchorage, Alaska and attained Force Recon qualification. In 1990, he was field commissioned and assigned commanding officer. After 9-11-2001, Arsenault was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and retired as LtCol in 2008. He resides near Chesapeake Bay, Virginia.

###

Liberty Hill Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, is a leader in the print-on-demand, self-publishing industry. LZ Sitting Duck is available online through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Cruise ships that have been docked for more than a year could restart sailing in United States waters by mid-July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a letter sent to the cruise industry late on Wednesday.

After several meetings with cruise lines, the C.D.C. clarified several requirements in its Framework for Conditional Sailing Order, which outlined the steps that cruise companies had to follow to resume operations in U.S. waters. The agency said it will let the companies skip test voyages if they attest that 98 percent of the crew and 95 percent of passengers are fully vaccinated.

Previously, the agency required cruise lines to give 30 days notice before starting a test cruise and to apply for a conditional sailing certificate 60 days before a planned regular voyage. The Cruise Lines International Association, the industrys trade group, called the guidelines burdensome and ambiguous and asked the C.D.C. to factor in how quickly Americans are being vaccinated.

The C.D.C. said on Wednesday that it would review and respond to applications for simulated voyages within five days, putting cruise ships closer to open water sailing sooner.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:27:36|Editor: huaxia

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As the biggest carbon polluter in human history and the largest economy and sole superpower in today's world, the United States indeed bears a special responsibility in the global climate battle.

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- After being a foot-dragger and outright deserter for years, the United States is returning to the global climate battle with much fanfare, and making no secret of its intention to be the commander-in-chief.

The world welcomes the renewed climate commitment of the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases in history, and looks forward to it playing a constructive role. But the United States has at least four deficits to plug before it can convince others of its seriousness.

The first one is a consistency deficit.

Throughout recent history, flip-flopping has been the hallmark of the U.S. federal climate policy. President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol; his successor, George W. Bush, backtracked from it. President Barack Obama brought America to the Paris Agreement; his successor, Donald Trump, withdrew from it.

Now President Joe Biden has recommitted his country to the cause, but no one knows whether the latest commitment will outlast the next election.

Photo taken on Jan. 20, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

The second one is an ambition deficit.

The United States has released more planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other country, but successive U.S. governments have hardly lived up to their country's climate responsibility.

The Biden administration appears serious, but its emissions-cutting ambition -- a 50-52 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2030 -- lags behind that of Britain. Moreover, if the United States has a determination that matches China's, it should cut its emissions, which peaked in 2007, to zero in 2037, instead of 2050.

Photo taken on Sept. 9, 2020 shows a view of San Francisco, the United States, overcast with wildfire smoke from nearby areas. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)

The third one is an assistance deficit.

As human-caused global warming results from cumulative emissions, today's developed countries, particularly the United States, should make sincere and substantive efforts to help their developing peers, including financial support and technology transfers, rather than shirk their historical responsibilities and international obligations.

However, over six years after Washington promised to contribute 3 billion U.S. dollars to the Green Climate Fund, a financial mechanism established to assist developing countries in countering climate change, only 1 billion dollars have been delivered.

People take part in a climate change protest in Times Square in New York, the United States, on Sept. 20, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

Last but not least, there is a morality deficit.

It may seem silly to many to talk about Washington's morality, but climate change, an existential threat to all, should be enough to summon up the better angels in America's ethos and commit the country to wholehearted action.

Sadly, it appears not. Even on this subject, U.S. politicians still have an ulterior motive: to retain U.S. hegemony, or what they call "climate leadership." They view climate change, a planetary crisis that demands all-hands-on-deck cooperation, through the lens of geopolitical competition. That is a big time bomb buried in the global climate response.

As the biggest carbon polluter in human history and the largest economy and sole superpower in today's world, the United States indeed bears a special responsibility in the global climate battle.

It is just that, in a fight that concerns the future of all humankind, it needs much more than fanfare and empty promises for a repeated deserter to ever be trusted again with a leading position. 
With the outpouring of solidarity from partner countries, in view of India's tussle with COVID-19 infections, Romania stepped forward to provide medical aid and supplies. An aircraft with 80 oxygen concentrators, 75 oxygen cylinders and 20 high- flow oxygen therapy equipment took off from Bucharest, Romania on Thursday.

The Embassy of Romania in India said that the medical consignment was expected to arrive in New Delhi by tonight. They said,

"The aircraft took off in the afternoon on April 28 from Bucharest and will arrive tonight in New Delhi."

The assistance was sent by Romania's Department for Emergencies, through its Foundation for Emergency Response (SMURD Foundation). Romania has offered humanitarian assistance to India, pursuant to a request addressed to the European Union by India. Romania expressed its solidarity and joined the European and international efforts to support India which has confronted unprecedented circumstance due to a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Romanian Ambassador to India, Daniela Sezonov Tane said in his statements,

"The support offered by my country reflects the excellent bilateral relations we have with India, through the existing Extended Partnership signed in 2013. The medical field is one of the main domains of cooperation, with special relevance in moments of crisis as the one we are facing now." She added , "Our solidarity manifested during this unprecedented critical moment for Indian people represents another confirmation for Romania's engagement in strengthening and extending our relation with India - key partner for Romania and the European Union in the Indo-Pacific region, as it was underscored by the EU Council Conclusions from April 19 dedicated to a strategic approach on Indo- Pacific."

Romanian medical supplies are amongst the first to arrive in New Delhi and will be followed by additional medical services and equipment shipped by the other European Union Member States within Union Civil Protection Mechanism as consolidated efforts of Team Europe. Romania Foreign Affairs Ministry stated,

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania reiterates on this occasion the importance of global partnerships anchored in common values overwhelmingly relevant in this pandemic context, for our resilience and for combating the virus. Through our support we want to contribute to the international effort to help the Indian people in need."

COVID-19 tally in India

In the last 24 hours, India's clocked 3,79,257 fresh COVID-19 cases with 2,69,507 recoveries and 3,645 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524 cases and the death toll to 2,04,832. Total COVID-19 active cases in India have now mounted to 30,84,814.

(Inputs from ANI)
The suburbs may be known as Mickleham or Donnybrook but the housing estates have other names: Cloverton, Merrifield, Platform.

And when you get to this part of Melbourne, the billboards standing in the empty paddocks spruik all sorts of benefits.

Mickleham resident Susan Grant is against a quarantine facility in her area. Credit:Joe Armao

Less than 50 kilometres from the city! Close to major transport infrastructure! Lots of open space!

All big ticks for accommodation for possibly infectious travellers returning from overseas and needing to be sequestered somewhere safe. But the state governments announcement of its preferred site for an alternative quarantine facility was like another one of those giant hoardings next to the Hume Highway.
Arizona passes law banning abortions based on genetic abnormalities

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Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a sweeping bill into law that makes it a felony to perform an abortion based on genetic abnormalities of unborn babies, such as Down syndrome, and also enacts several other pro-life measures.

Known as Senate Bill 1457, Ducey signed the legislation on Tuesday, saying in a statement that the new law is part of his commitment to pro-life ideals.

Theres immeasurable value in every single life  regardless of genetic makeup, stated Ducey. We will continue to prioritize protecting life in our preborn children, and this legislation goes a long way in protecting real human lives.

SB 1457 was sponsored by State Sen. Nancy Barto and includes exemptions for life-threatening medical emergencies for the mother and when the deformity is itself lethal.

Medical providers who do perform abortions prohibited in the law could face the possibility of prison time.

The bill also prohibits a facility that is run by or that operates on the property of a public educational institution from performing an abortion unless it is necessary to save the life of the woman having the abortion.

Further, SB 1457 bars public funding of university or college research on aborted fetal remains and requires proper burial of the remains of surgically aborted unborn babies.

We need to protect our most vulnerable, especially those with treatable genetic conditions, stated Barto. They are loved, integral members of our community that make Arizona whole  and Im proud to sponsor legislation that gives them a voice before theyre even born.

Critics of the legislation include the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which last week urged Ducey to veto SB 1457. The organization labels the bill as dangerous.

"The decision to have a child is too important to leave to politicians. That's why abortion is a constitutional right. Its critical for people to be able to access abortion if and when they need care," stated ACLU of Arizona Policy Director Darrell Hill.

This law will have a chilling impact on a persons relationship with their doctor and will make it harder for a person to have honest and informed conversations with their health provider."

The federal courts have been divided on the constitutionality of similar laws. Earlier this month, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of an Ohio law banning abortions performed because a baby has been diagnosed with Down syndrome.

In January, the Eighth Circuit ruled against a similar Arkansas law.

In recent years, Arizona has passed several pro-life laws, including ones that mandate a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion and another that bans telemedicine abortions.

Last November, Planned Parenthood Arizona dropped litigation against those laws, though still expressing opposition to the enforcement of the measures.
New Model has GPS Functionality and is Built for Multi-Sport Measurement Tracking

DOVER, N.J., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Casio expands the G-SHOCK MOVE collection of sports watches with the introduction of its first ever G-SHOCK MOVE PRO multi-sport smartwatch with Wear OS by Google. The GSWH1000-1 is built with all the toughness of a G-SHOCK and provides proactive and customized technology that allows users to stay connected and motivated toward their fitness goals, with key functions that can measure a range of sports including- running, trail running, cycling, swimming, surfing, skiing fishing, trekking and more.

GSWH1000

The new GSWH1000-1 brings enhanced toughness to the Wear OS experience. The model comes in an all-black, honeycomb textured case and band with a titanium case back for added strength and corrosion resistance. The model also boasts a high-quality, dual layer touch screen display for ease of use, with a color LCD display that makes it easy to view maps and measure data while simultaneously working out. The dual display is 200M water resistant and provides the world's first shock and 200M water resistant microphone and magnetic charging port.

Additional technical features include an optical sensor that can measure heart rate by detecting the blood flow under the skin, sensors for measuring altitude/barometric pressure, compass and bearing, a gyrometer, and a 3-axis accelerometer that detects body movement to measure step count and distance traveled. The new smartwatch also comes with fast, high-precision GPS that quickly acquires location information and measures speed, pace, and other multi-sports data. The GPS also includes GLONASS and MICHIBIKI support to boost accuracy and connection speed.

The timepiece also features new technical capabilities with Bluetooth connectivity via the updated G-SHOCK Move App. This allows users to choose between three different watch face options, manage measurement data and training history for specific activities, and more. Another new function the app provides is sensor overlay, where users can place their workout data on top of photos/videos from their workouts to easily share on social media.

Story continues

In terms of style, the new timepiece boasts large, non-slip buttons that make it easy to access while on the move. For example, a colored, aluminum Direct Start button allows for a one-touch operation to start your workout at any moment, while a metal bezel functions as a high-quality GPS antenna. The GSWH1000-1 also comes with a magnetic dedicated charging cable.

As part of the release G-SHOCK has unveiled an exclusive landing page taking consumers through the features, which can be viewed HERE.

The GSWH1000-1 comes equipped with G-SHOCK technology including:

Shock Resistance

200M Water Resistance

Corrosion Resistant

Offline Mapping

Built-in Water Resistant Microphone

Vibration Alarm

Sunrise/Sunset Data

Tide Graph / Fishing Time

The GSWH1000-1 will retail for $699 and be available for purchase starting mid-May at select G-SHOCK retailers, the G-SHOCK Soho Store, and gshock.com.

*The Bluetooth word mark and logos are registered trademarks owned by Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such marks by Casio Computer Co., Ltd. is under license.

**Google, Android, Wear OS by Google and other marks are trademarks of Google LLC.

About G-SHOCK

CASIO's shock-resistant G-SHOCK watch is synonymous with toughness, born from the developer Mr. Ibe's dream of 'creating a watch that never breaks'. Over 200 handmade samples were created and tested to destruction until finally in 1983 the first, now iconic G-SHOCK hit the streets of Japan and began to establish itself as 'the toughest watch of all time'. Each watch encompasses the 7 elements; electric shock resistance, gravity resistance, low temperature resistance, vibration resistance, water resistance, shock resistance and toughness. The watch is packed with Casio innovations and technologies to prevent it from suffering direct shock; this includes internal components protected with urethane and suspended timekeeping modules inside the watch structure. Since its launch, G-SHOCK has continued to evolve, continuing to support on Mr. Ibe's mantra "never, never give up." www.gshock.com

About Casio America, Inc.

Casio America, Inc., Dover, N.J., is the U.S. subsidiary of Casio Computer Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, one of the world's leading manufacturers of consumer electronics and business equipment solutions. Established in 1957, Casio America, Inc. markets calculators, keyboards, mobile presentation devices, disc title and label printers, watches, cash registers and other consumer electronic products. Casio has strived to realize its corporate creed of "creativity and contribution" through the introduction of innovative and imaginative products. For more information, visit www.casio.com/home

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SOURCE Casio America, Inc.
Armed Fulani radicals raided a Baptist churchs Sunday service in Nigeria, killing one person, injuring another and abducting four women as violence accelerates in the Kaduna state.

Charity Musa, Rose Zacharia, Alheri Bala and Liatu Zakka, a widow whose husband was murdered in an earlier attack, were the four women kidnapped from the church service at Haske Baptist Church in Manini village of the Chikun Local Government Area, according to the United Kingdom-based human rights organization Chrisitan Solidarity Worldwide.

Sources claim heavily armed men killed health worker Zacharia Dogon Yaro and injured Shehu Haruna.

Government officials confirmed the attacks.

Source:The Christian Post
Frances McDormand is up for another Oscar this year. The 2021 Oscars air live on April 25 at 8 p.m. EST. And Nomadland could win big, being nominated in six categories. Given that McDormand recently won an Oscar, what are the odds shell win again tonight? And how many Oscars does she have total?

Frances McDormand at Rome Film Fest 2019 | Rocco Spaziani/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

Frances McDormand movies

McDormand, 63, has been working for decades and has lots of accolades under her belt. Out of her many films, Fargo is her most memorable. She played a pregnant police officer named Marge Gunderson in the 1996 Coen brothers film. And it won her her first Oscar. The film was the inspiration for the 2014 FX limited series of the same name.

To my grave Ill be Marge, McDormand told Vogue in 2020. Marge was written specifically for McDormand, who has been married to Joel Cohen since 1984.

McDormands other work includes Olive Kitteridge, for which she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, Raising Arizona, Almost Famous, Somethings Gotta Give, North Country, Friends with Money, Burn After Reading, Moonrise Kingdom, Promised Land, Hail, Caesar!, and The French Dispatch, which is coming out in 2021.

RELATED: Oscars 2021: Who Has the Most Oscar Nominations Without a Win?

Did Frances McDormand win for Nomadland?

McDormand delivered another memorable performance in Chloe Zhaos Nomadland. The film leads in nominations at this years ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Actress. This marks McDormands sixth Oscar nomination. She won for Fargo in 1997 and for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2018. Should she win at tonights ceremony, it will mark her third Best Actress win. She already won the BAFTA for Best Actress. She also produced Nomadland. Should it win Best Picture, she will win an Oscar for that as well, making her career total four.

McDormands first Oscar nomination came in 1989 for Mississippi Burning. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2001 and 2006 for Almost Famous and North Country, respectively.

Frances McDormand in Nomadland | Searchlight Pictures

RELATED: Who Is Nomadland and Eternals Director Chloe Zhao?

Frances McDormand Oscar wins

When she won for Three Billboards in 2018, McDormand gave an iconic speech that celebrated women in the industry. She also brought up inclusion riders, which help marginalized demographics get equal pay for equal work. After thanking Coen and their son, among others, a gleeful McDormand said:

And now I want to get some perspective. If I may be so honored to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me in this room tonight, the actorsMeryl, if you do it, everybody else will, cmonthe filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographer, the composers, the songwriters, the designers. Cmon! OK, look around everybody. Look around, ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed. Dont talk to us about it at the parties tonight. Invite us into your office in a couple days, or you can come to ours, whatever suits you best, and well tell you all about them. I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider.'

McDormand has won every time shes been nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars. This year, shes up against Andra Day, Viola Davis, Carey Mulligan, and Vanessa Kirby. The 2021 Oscars air on ABC at 8 p.m. EST.
The Handmaids Tale Season 4 debuted its first three episodes on April 28. And with it came shocking revealsone of them being Serena Joy Waterfords pregnancy. Trailers for the new season confirmed the pregnancy before new episodes began. Now, showrunner Bruce Miller has opened up about what her pregnancy means for Gilead and the world.

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers from The Handmaids Tale Season 4.]

Yvonne Strahovski in The Handmaids Tale | Jasper Savage/Hulu

Is Serena Joy pregnant?

In a trailer released in March 2021, Fred Waterford is seen looking at a sonogram. This led fans to believe Serena would be pregnant in season 4. An April trailer recapping Serenas character arc confirmed as much.

I need to separate my interests from Fred, I am done with him, she says to Mark Tuello.

We can talk about that later, he replies.

No, we can talk about it right now, she shoots back. And then, comes the bombshell.

Youre pregnant, Mark tells her.

Indeed, season 4 episode 2 confirms Serena is pregnant. This revelation changes her behavior (she seeks forgiveness from people who owe her none). But her change of heart doesnt last long. She ultimately rejoins forces with Fred to tackle their legal battle.

Fans will recall Serena and Fred were both in prison in Canada at the end of season 3. Serena had betrayed Fred in order to see baby Nichole, which prompted Fred to reveal the crimes Serena committed on her own.

Freedom is a state of mind. Watch Serena's journey unfold on Seasons 1-3 of The #HandmaidsTale now on @Hulu. New episodes arrive April 28. pic.twitter.com/t5aOfojiWJ  The Handmaid's Tale (@HandmaidsOnHulu) April 5, 2021

RELATED: The Handmaids Tale: What Happened to the Waterfords in Season 3?

Who is the father of Serena Joys baby?

Serenas still in prison when she learns the baby news, and the show doesnt waste time revealing the father. A DNA test proves Fred is, indeed, the biological father of Serenas child.

Past seasons of The Handmaids Tale showed how Gilead was created after a worldwide infertility crisis. Serena assumed Fred was infertile and orchestrated a sexual encounter between June and Nick. This resulted in Junes pregnancy with Nichole. (This act is what ultimately got her arrested.) It was also previously implied Serena couldnt get pregnant because of a gunshot wound she suffered before the Gilead coup. Given that, Fred and Serena naturally conceiving a child together is a shocking revelation.

Production concealed Serena actor Yvonne Strahovskis pregnancy in season 3, and the characters pregnancy in season 4 has nothing to do with this. Miller stated production tossed around the pregnancy idea for a while.

Miller discussed this episode 2 plot twist in an interview with Variety. He said:

We always had discussions about whether Serena was fertile because the fertility crisis really focused so much on men, and also, the more research we did on how infertility work, generally its a continuum, not an on-off switch, in most men. And the stuff theyre doing in Gilead with the environment and the water is all geared towards increasing male motility.

Yvonne Strahovski and Joseph Fiennes in The Handmaids Tale Season 4 | Sophie Giraud/Hulu

RELATED: The Handmaids Tale Season 4: Heres When Every New Episode Comes Out

What does Serena Joys pregnancy mean in The Handmaids Tale Season 4?

However, Just because Serenas dreams are seemingly coming true doesnt mean shell get a happy ending. He said:

Theres always been an idea of, What happens if you give characters what they want more than anything? and when you start out a show like this, thats the first conversation we had. What does she want more than anything? A baby. And we had conversations in the writers room about what would happen if she got that, and then you start tallying it up.

What Serena Joy is feeling about her baby and what it means for her is made all the more terrifying when considering what it means for Gilead: Its practices work. Their horrendous crimes committed in the name of improving the birth rate, paired with its commitment to combatting climate change, have actually helped a couple struggling with fertility to naturally conceive.

I think in a lot of ways its the worst case scenario for the audience because theyre going, Oh sh*t, Gilead works,' Miller said.

Indeed, this is bad news for Gileads critics. Weve already seen countries like Mexico come to Gilead to barter for Handmaids. This indicates other governments are willing to consider Gileads horrific practices in order to help increase the birth rate.
The Arctic is getting greener as the climate warms -- but it's not greening fast enough to absorb very much carbon dioxide, Boston University and UC Irvine scientists find

There was a hope that as more plants start to grow in Arctic and boreal latitudes as our warming climate makes those regions more hospitable for plants, those photosynthesizing plants would work to help sequester the atmospheric carbon dioxide that helped them flourish in the first place. But new research led by scientists at UC Irvine and Boston University, out in Nature Climate Change, suggests that all the new green biomass is not as large a carbon sink as scientists had hoped.

"What does greening really mean? Can we really trust it to save us from climate change?" said Jon Wang, an Earth system scientist at UCI who the led the work alongside BU Earth & Environment professor Mark Friedl. "A big question is: What'll happen to the carbon that's currently stored in these forests as above-ground biomass in the face of a changing climate?"

The answer, it turns out, is that a lot of the carbon isn't staying stored in the plants, because as fires and timber harvests at those latitudes become more and more common as climate change makes those parts of the world hotter and drier and more arable at rates sometimes twice that seen at lower latitudes, much of the new green biomass isn't storing carbon -- it's combusting during wildfires.

"What we found overall is across this whole domain over the past 31 years the carbon stocks have increased modestly," Wang said. "What we estimate is that 430 million metric tons of biomass has accumulated over the last 31 years -- but across this domain it would've been nearly double if it weren't for these fires and harvests that are keeping it down."

The assumption before, Wang explained, was that greening was happening and it was going to help draw climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations down -- but no-one knew the exact extent of that help.

To test the assumption, Wang and his team combined observational data from two different satellite missions from the US Geological Survey and NASA, Landsat and ICESat, so they could model the amount of carbon stored in biomass across a 2.8-million-square-kilometer region spanning Canada and Alaska.

ICESat data provides measurements of the height of forest canopies, while Landsat data extends back 31 years to 1984 and provides data on the reflection of different wavelengths of light from the surface of the planet -- which also provides information about plant biomass abundance. Juxtaposing that with a two-to-three times increase in the severity of wildfires in the region, and the pictures started to take shape.

Wang found that plant biomass still increased, but not as much as previous computer models that aim to simulate climate change suggested they would, as those models have struggled to account for fires as a variable. The results, Wang hopes, will help scientists who construct those models -- models that tell the world what we can expect climate change to look like -- build ever-more-accurate pictures of what's in store as the century unfolds.

Co-author James Randerson from UC Irvine believes these new data are important because they provide an independent means to test climate models, and because of the way they represent feedbacks between the carbon cycle and the climate system. "The rates of carbon accumulation in this region are lower that what previous studies have indicated, and will push the science community to look elsewhere for the main drivers of the terrestrial carbon sink," Randerson said.

Wang added: "The change is good news for climate -- but it's also much lower than we might've expected, because these fires have raged, and gotten more severe."

###

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. 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.
Chinese military vehicles carrying DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles, potentially capable of sinking a U.S. Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in a single strike, drive past the Tiananmen Gate during a military parade in Beijing, China, on Sept. 3, 2015. (Andy Wong/Getty Images)

Japan Expresses Concern Over Chinas Military Expansion

Japan expressed concern over the Chinese regimes military expansion and its activities in the Indo-Pacific in a foreign policy report released on April 27.

Beijings strengthening of its military and activities in the East and South China Seas has become a serious security concern for the region and the international community, states the Diplomatic Bluebook of Japan 2021, an annual report by the countrys Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The bluebook highlighted that during the past 30 years, the Chinese regimes military spending has increased by approximately 44 times. Beijing now has the worlds largest navy. As of early 2020, the U.S. Navy had approximately 293 ships compared to the estimated 350 ships that make up Chinas naval force, according to a 2020 Pentagon report (pdf).

The bluebook stated that incursions by Chinese coast guard ships in waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands violated international law by entering Japanese territorial waters. The inhabited islands are located in the East China Sea and are claimed by both Japan and China, which calls them the Diaoyu Islands.

The report also criticized Chinas new coast guard law, which allows its maritime law enforcement to fire at foreign vessels.

The statements by Japan came amid escalated Chinese activity in the East and South China Seas. The regime recently sent large vessels believed to be manned by maritime militia to the disputed Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea, prompting protest from the Philippines.

The Chinese regime claims sovereignty to almost the entire South China Sea, despite a 2016 international court ruling that rejected these territorial claims. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam have competing claims in the waterway. The South China Sea, one of the worlds major shipping routes, has been regarded as among the most volatile regions in the world.

The bluebook also expressed concern about the regimes crackdown in Hong Kong and human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region.

Beijing reacted angrily to Japans statement, with Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for Chinas foreign ministry, on April 27 saying the bluebook viciously attacks and smears China and unjustifiably interferes in Chinas internal affairs.

Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with President Joe Biden at the White House, in Bidens first face-to-face summit since taking office. The two leaders had serious discussions on the Chinese regimes influence in the Indo-Pacific, Suga said at the White House on April 16.

We agreed to oppose any attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion in the East and South China Seas, and intimidation of others in the region, he said.
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market by Material Type, Filter Module, and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2020 - 2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

At an estimated value of over USD 8.52 billion in 2019, the Global Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market is predicted to thrive at a CAGR of 7.6% and valued at over USD 19.07 billion over the forecast year 2020-2030.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes are a thin and semi-permeable membrane with small enough pores to pass pure water while eliminating the impurities such as dissolved salts (ions) and bacteria. Reverse Osmosis is the water purification method to filter out impurities, and all contaminants, leaving only the pure usable water. The RO membranes are typically capable of removing 90%-99% of contaminants or impurities such as total dissolved solids (TDSs) and viruses from the water. The demand for RO membrane is mainly driven by its application for the seawater desalination.



Market Dynamics and Trends:



The global reverse osmosis membrane market is majorly driven by factors such as water shortage across the globe, growing need of desalination in water scarce regions, and increasing government emphasis on ensuring the water quality. In addition, increased awareness amongst the people about water borne diseases along with growth in the demand for ultrapure water in the healthcare and food & beverage industries is anticipated to promote the growth of reverse osmosis membrane market.

However, loss of vital minerals from water as well as short life span of RO membrane is expected to hamper the market growth during the forecast period. Contradictorily, rise in demand for water treatment across the developing nations is expected to create ample opportunities for reverse osmosis membrane market growth.



Geographical Analysis:



In terms of geography, North America held major share of the market in 2019. This is attributed to the rapid growth in the demand to deliver filtered drinking water to increasing populations as well as to support mining needs, agricultural needs, and electric utility needs. However, Asia pacific is expected to grow rapidly with increasing market size due to upsurge in population along with the lack of potable water in several countries across the region.



Competitive Landscape:



Maximum growth opportunities make the reverse osmosis membrane market highly competitive. Some of the major players in the market are Toray Industries, Inc., Hydranautics (A Nitto Group Company), LG Chem., The Dow Chemical Company, Toyobo Co., Ltd., Lanxess AG, Koch Membrane System, Membranium (JSC RM Nanotech), Microdyn-Nadir GmbH, and Axeon Water Technologies. A number of developmental strategies have been adopted by companies in the past few years.

For instance, in July 2020, SUEZ, a France-based company which operates largely in the waste and water management sectors acquired the Reverse Osmosis (RO) membrane portfolio from LANXESS, the specialty chemical company.



Moreover, in November 2020, Toray Industries signed a contract with Umm Al Quwain Desalination Plant in the UAE and Al Dur 2 Desalination Plant in Bahrain for the supply of reverse osmosis (RO) membrane.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction

1.1. Report Description

1.2. Research Methodology



2. Market Snapshot, 2019-2030 Million USD

2.1. Market Snapshot



3. Porter's Five Force Model Analysis



4. Market Dynamics

4.1. Growth Drivers

4.2. Challenges

4.3. Opportunities



5. Global Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market, by Material Type

5.1. Overview

5.2. Cellulose-Based

5.3. Thin Film Composite



6. Global Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market, by Filter Module

6.1. Overview

6.2. Plate & Frame

6.3. Tubular-Shaped

6.4. Spiral-Wound



7. Global Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market, by Application

7.1. Overview

7.2. Desalination System

7.3. Ro Purification System

7.4. Medical Devices and Diagnostics



8. Global Reverse Osmosis Membrane Market, by Region

8.1. Overview



9. Company Profiles

9.1 Company Overview

9.2 Company Snapshot

9.3 Operating Business Segments

9.4 Product Portfolio

9.5 Business Performance

9.6 Key Strategic Moves and Development

Toray Industries, Inc.

Hydranautics (A Nitto Group Company)

LG Chem.

The Dow Chemical Company

Toyobo Co., Ltd.

Lanxess AG

Koch Membrane System

Membranium (JSC RM Nanotech)

Microdyn-Nadir GmbH

Axeon Water Technologies

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/yqa8q9

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: 646-607-1904

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


In the week of April 19 - 25, 35.6% of all COVID cases were registered in Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara, Prahova and Bihor, informs the National Institute of Public Health (INSP).

According to the weekly monitoring report, 28.6% of all deaths were recorded in Bucharest, Prahova, Constanta, Cluj and Bihor.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 1 in 77 of all COVID cases has been reported in medical staff.85.7% of all deaths were in people over 60, and 58.4% of deaths were in men, according to the INSP.Also, 95% of people who died of COVID had at least one associated comorbidity, report agerpres.
A suburban Chicago chiropractor has been sentenced to a 20-month term in federal prison for fraudulently submitting reimbursement claims to private insurers and Medicare for nonexistent treatment, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois announced.

John Kosloski, who operated Diagnostic & Therapeutic Rehab in Dolton, Ill., also was ordered by U.S. District Chief Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer to pay a $25,000 fine and more than $500,000 in restitution to insurers.

From 2010 to 2017, Kosloski billed the private insurers for services that he purportedly provided to Amtrak employees and their family members, knowing that he was not actively treating them or had never seen them as patients. Kosloski paid cash to the Amtrak employees in exchange for the ability to falsely bill using the employees and their family members personal information. During the course of his scheme, Kosloski submitted more than 18,000 claims to insurers for services that he knew he did not provide, and he received more than $500,000 in reimbursements for the false claims.

Kosloski, 57, of Beecher, Ill., pleaded guilty last year to one count of health care fraud

The sentence was announced by John R. Lausch, Jr., United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois; Emmerson Buie, Jr., Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Field Office of the FBI; and Basil P. Demczak, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Central Region of Amtraks Office of Inspector General.

Topics Fraud
Appointment

29 April 2021

Park Inn by Radisson, Dubai Motor City has appointed Amish Ali as its Front of House Manager.

Amish joins the hotel after spending three years at Radisson Blu Hotel, Dubai Media City where he started as a Meetings & Events Sales Executive until leaving as Assistant Meetings & Events Sales Manager. He has been with Radisson Hotel Group since 2010.

In his new role Amish will oversee front office and the pool while working with the relevant departments to drive new projects, incremental revenue & overall guest satisfaction and creating memorable moments for the guests at Dubai's only motor themed hotel.
But as more international delegations take trips to Xinjiang to see the region for themselves, a different narrative has emerged. According to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, over the past years, more than 1,200 diplomats, journalists, and religious personnel from over 100 countries have visited Xinjiang. They saw the region with their eyes, realizing that what they witnessed was different from some Western media reports.

To shed new light on the ongoing debate about what's happening in Xinjiang, CGTN anchor Liu Xin invited Moin ul Haque, Pakistani Ambassador to China, Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, and Imad Moustapha, Syrian Ambassador to China, for a 30-minute roundtable discussion. The three diplomats shared their firsthand experiences in Xinjiang and tried to uncover the intentions of some Western countries' portrayal of Xinjiang.

The discussion took place in a Chinese-style opera house in central Beijing. Liu Xin just wrapped up a two-week trip to Xinjiang, where she interviewed many local officials, academics, farmers, and local residents.

Xinjiang in the eyes of ambassadors

Pakistani Ambassador to China Moin ul Haque visited Xinjiang this March. He described this trip as "an experience of a lifetime." After visiting various places, including local families, development projects, and mosques, he was attracted by the cultural and religious diversity and harmony in this region. Instead of the so-called "forced sterilization" imposed on ethnic minorities, which some Western "researchers" claim, he said "Xinjiang is a mosaic of 50-plus ethnic minorities, and these ethnic minorities exist in Xinjiang in a very peaceful and harmonious manner."

Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, was impressed by the number of religious places. He visited Xinjiang in 2020 and observed that there were mosques in intersections wherever he looked, and there were five mosques actually in the same neighborhood, and a specialized religious learning institution had been established too.

Some people argue that these diplomats' tours are all staged and do not reflect the real situation. Ambassador Fariz said he thinks such an opinion is not respectful. "One should not believe that diplomats are so naive that they could be maneuvered to take and buy anything," he argued, adding "the diplomats are not part of a conspiracy, that they would justify something against what they had seen."

Anti-terrorism achievements in Xinjiang

In the past, Xinjiang suffered from "the three evil forces": separatism, extremism, and terrorism. But thanks to China's efforts, there have not been any terrorist attacks in Xinjiang for more than four consecutive years.

The reason behind this, the ambassadors said, is that Chinese authorities have done two right things: one is eradicating hardcore terrorists with force, and the other is the emphasis on people and developing the society.

Syrian Ambassador to China Imad Moustapha told Liu Xin that China is doing the right thing. China went to the core issues, which are how to develop the society and how to prevent the people in Xinjiang from falling prey to the propaganda of radical extremism.

Why has Xinjiang become such a controversial topic?

The contrast between the ambassadors' personal experiences and the narratives of the Western world is stark. Why?

Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, explained that it is not about human rights; it is about geopolitical challenges.

Syrian Ambassador to China Imad Moustapha said, "let's look at the issues as they are. The issues have nothing to do with Xinjiang. It has to do with the media campaign in the West against China, demonizing China. China is bad. And whatever China does, it's bad."

The ambassadors expressed hope that China could stay the course, continue its development path, continue opening up, continue to reform, continue the people-centric approach. They agreed that Xinjiang is a beautiful ancient land of diverse people who have hopes and inspirations.

The ambassadors' views do not represent the views of all countries, however. Since February 2021, the governments of Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK have passed non-binding motions declaring China's conduct in Xinjiang amounts to genocide. The U.S. State Department labeled China's actions in Xinjiang genocide in its 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices released in March. China has strongly rejected such allegations.

Link: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-04-27/What-do-three-ambassadors-talk-about-Xinjiang-with-Liu-Xin--ZMA1UeE2T6/index.html

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebeGipO6-gU

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1498776/image.jpg

Related Links

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SOURCE CGTN
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 17:03:54|Editor: huaxia

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The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. (Xinhua/Ju Zhenhua)

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday expressed his congratulations on the successful launch of the core module of China's space station.

On behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the CMC, extended warm congratulations and sincere greetings in a message to all who have participated in the mission.

Xi said in the message that the successful launch of the core module Tianhe marks that China's space station construction has entered the full implementation stage, which lays a solid foundation for follow-up tasks.

He noted that building a space station and national space laboratory is an important goal of the three-step strategy of China's manned space program, and an important leading project to boost the country's strength in science and technology, as well as in space.

In the message, Xi said he hopes all members of the mission, through self-reliance and innovation, will be completely successful in their space station construction mission and make new and greater contributions to building a modern socialist country in an all-around way.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Premier Li Keqiang and member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee Wang Huning, both also members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, watched the launch at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

The congratulatory message was read aloud by Zhang Youxia, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and vice CMC chairman, at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Hainan Province.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site at 11:23 a.m. (Beijing Time).

China's space station is a crewed space station independently built and operated by China. It consists of three modules: the core module Tianhe, and the Wentian and Mengtian lab modules. Tianhe is the management and control center of the space station, and it is the first space station module launched into orbit.

According to the mission schedule, China will complete the construction of the space station in orbit in 2022. The station will have the ability to carry out long-term scientific and technological experiments and explore space resources in low-Earth orbit. 
In late January 2021, a clinical laboratory notified the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern B.1.351 had been identified in a specimen collected from a Maryland resident with COVID-19 (1). The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351 lineage was first identified in South Africa (2) and might be neutralized less effectively by antibodies produced after vaccination or natural infection with other strains (36). To limit SARS-CoV-2 chains of transmission associated with this index patient, MDH used contact tracing to identify the source of infection and any linked infections among other persons. The investigation identified two linked clusters of SARS-CoV-2 infection that included 17 patients. Three additional specimens from these clusters were sequenced; all three had the B.1.351 variant and all sequences were closely related to the sequence from the index patients specimen. Among the 17 patients identified, none reported recent international travel or contact with international travelers. Two patients, including the index patient, had received the first of a 2-dose COVID-19 vaccination series in the 2 weeks before their likely exposure; one additional patient had a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection 5 months before exposure. Two patients were hospitalized with COVID-19, and one died. These first identified linked clusters of B.1.351 infections in the United States with no apparent link to international travel highlight the importance of expanding the scope and volume of genetic surveillance programs to identify variants, completing contact investigations for SARS-CoV-2 infections, and using universal prevention strategies, including vaccination, masking, and physical distancing, to control the spread of variants of concern.

Case investigation, contact elicitation (following CDC guidelines for defining close contacts) (7,8), and contact tracing were conducted for the index patient immediately after the initial diagnostic test result before the sequencing results were available; in Maryland, this is standard procedure for all persons with COVID-19 diagnosed by a SARS-CoV-2 antigen test or nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) (including reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction [RT-PCR]). This process was conducted for all COVID-19 cases identified from among the index patients contacts until no additional cases in the transmission chain could be identified. Interviews of persons with positive test results and their contacts were documented in a central data management system via a scripted electronic form and as audio recordings. For this investigation, electronic forms and recordings were reviewed, and available specimens from associated patients were sequenced by the Maryland Public Health Laboratory. This activity was reviewed by CDC and conducted consistent with applicable federal law and policy.*

The index patient reported two potential exposure settings that might have led to SARS-CoV-2 infection, including a workplace (3 days before symptom onset) and an indoor social gathering (2 days before symptom onset). The patients workplace was excluded as the source of infection: investigation of the workplace identified no close contacts or high-risk exposures and no additional employees with SARS-CoV-2 infections. The index patient also attended an indoor social gathering with six other persons 2 days before symptom onset; the event lasted several hours, and attendees removed masks while eating. Review of contact tracing records for the six other attendees found that all six received positive SARS-CoV-2 antigen or NAAT test results, with specimen collection dates ranging from 3 to 13 days after the gathering. Five of the six attendees had symptomatic COVID-19; symptom onsets ranged from the day of the gathering through 8 days afterward (Figure 1). One attendee named two additional close contacts, both of whom received negative NAAT test results. The index patient identified one additional close contact during the infectious period. The final close contact named by the index patient never experienced symptoms of COVID-19 and received a negative SARS-CoV-2 NAAT test result as well as a negative SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin G antibody test result.

Among attendees at the social gathering reported by the index patient, the earliest self-reported illness onset was on the date of the social gathering. That person was identified as a possible source of infection for the other persons who attended the gathering. Retrospective review of this source patients interview revealed that the patients workplace was a business that had been reported through an anonymous tip line established for reporting COVID-19 safety concerns; several employees working while displaying symptoms consistent with COVID-19 were reported. The local health department initiated an outbreak investigation at the source patients workplace, which found that employees worked in close quarters where physical distancing was not possible and that some employees had attended work while experiencing COVID-19like symptoms. This workplace had seven employees (including the source patient), six of whom were symptomatic and received positive SARS-CoV-2 antigen or NAAT test results. Symptom onset dates occurred over a period of 12 days; symptom onset in three patients preceded that of the source patient, and two occurred later. The seventh employee never experienced symptoms and received two negative test results during this period. The six employees who received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results, including the source patient, named eight nonwork close contacts (in addition to those already identified from the indoor social gathering), five of whom received positive SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test results. The three other close contacts never experienced symptoms; NAAT test results were negative for one contact and inconclusive for another, and the third contact was not tested.

These two linked clusters resulted in a total of 17 laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, including all seven attendees of the social gathering; six of seven employees of the source patients workplace (with the source patient counted in both clusters); and five of 11 close contacts of persons with laboratory-confirmed infection in either setting (Figure 2). No patient reported a history of international travel or close contact with anyone with a history of recent international travel.

Four total specimens from these clusters were sequenced, and all were of the B.1.351 lineage, including the index patients specimen, two specimens from patients also exclusively associated with the social gathering cluster, and one specimen from a patient exclusively associated with the source patients workplace cluster (Figure 3). Two sequences were identical to that of the index specimen. One differed from the index specimen by a single nucleotide polymorphism.

Two patients (aged 42 and 74 years) were hospitalized, including one employee of the source patients workplace and one close contact of an employee in that workplace; one of these patients (aged 74 years) died. Neither had a history of vaccination or previous infection. Two symptomatic infections occurred in persons who had received the first of a 2-dose COVID-19 vaccination series 11 and 12 days before exposure, and one symptomatic infection occurred in a person with NAAT-confirmed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosed approximately 5 months before symptom onset (Figure 1).
A woman is consoled after her husband died due to Covid-19 outside a mortuary of a hospital in New Delhi, India, April 15, 2021. Photo by Reuters/Danish Siddiqui.

Vietnam empathizes with India regarding its current coronavirus crisis and believes the country would make it through these tough times, leaders said.

President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh sent the message to Indian President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi Wednesday, adding Vietnam trusts India would utilize its internal strength to survive these trying times.

The same day, the 23rd ASEAN-India Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM) was conducted online with the participation of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Quoc Dung and his Indian counterpart Riva Ganguly Das, the ministry said in a press release.

Das thanked ASEAN countries for expressing sympathy and solidarity during the fight against a Covid-19 crisis that is getting increasingly complex. He also stressed India and ASEAN need to continue cooperating to deal with the pandemic through experience and technological exchanges, as well as vaccine production and distribution.

ASEAN praised the fact India had contributed $1 million to the ASEAN fund for Covid-19 response, and wished to continue collaborating with the country to facilitate comprehensive and sustainable recovery in the region.

Both sides have agreed to focus resources into prioritized fields like commerce and investment, aiming for trade turnover to reach $200 billion in 2022, as well as marine cooperation, disaster prevention, climate change adaptation and lessening the developmental gap. India has also affirmed to continue providing scholarships for students from ASEAN countries, as well as use $1 billion in credit to support infrastructural connectivity and development projects.

ASEAN and India affirmed to cooperate and contribute to the maintenance of peace, security and stability in the region, including maritime security and safety at the South China Sea. India supports ASEANs stance on the South China Sea and promoting dialogue and trust, ensuring the effective and comprehensive conduct of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and the creation of a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea (COC).

India reported Thursday a record rise in coronavirus cases and deaths over the last 24 hours.

With 379,257 new cases and 3,645 new deaths, India's total number of cases and deaths are now stood at 18.38 million and 204,832, according to health ministry data.
Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he was not seeking conflict with China or Russia as he put a renewed focus on diplomacy in his first address to Congress.

In a speech focused on selling major investments at home, Biden told lawmakers who months earlier had dodged a deadly insurrection that they needed to show democracy can work.

"We're in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century," Biden said, warning: "Autocrats think democracies can't compete." Biden said he told President Xi Jinping in a two-hour first phone conversation after taking office: "We welcome the competition -- and that we are not looking for conflict." "But I made absolutely clear that we will defend America's interests across the board," he said.

"America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property," he said.

"I also told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe -- not to start a conflict but to prevent one," Biden said to applause from an unusually small audience due to Covid restrictions.

In an aside that was not in prepared remarks, Biden noted his extensive dealings with Xi when both were vice presidents -- and warned that China's most powerful leader in years had firm plans for the future.

"He's deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world," Biden said.

Tensions have sharply risen with China over the past few years as the United States also take issue with China's assertive military moves and human rights concerns, including what Washington has described as genocide against the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority.

- Focus on cooperation - The speech marked a shift from the hawkish nationalism of his predecessor Donald Trump, with Biden repeatedly speaking of global cooperation.

"There is no wall high enough to keep the virus out," Biden said, alluding to Trump's cherished wall on the Mexican border.

Similar to his message on China, Biden said he did not seek worse relations with Russia.

In his first three months in office, Biden has imposed sanctions over Russia's purported poisoning of ailing dissident Alexei Navalny and over its alleged interference in US elections and hacking operations.

But Biden has also proposed a summit in a third country with President Vladimir Putin to bring stability to relations and pointed in his speech to cooperation on climate change and the extension of New START, the last Cold war nuclear reduction treaty.

"I made very clear to Putin that we are not going to seek escalation but their actions will have consequences," Biden said.

Flipping the language of George W. Bush when used the same platform nearly two decades ago to assail an "axis of evil," Biden vowed diplomacy on the "serious threat" of the nuclear programs of both Iran and North Korea.

"We'll be working closely with our allies to address the threats posed by both of these countries through diplomacy and stern deterrence,'" Biden said.

The United States is holding indirect talks with Iran in Vienna in a bid to re-enter a denuclearization accord trashed by Trump.

The Biden administration is separately reviewing policy on North Korea after Trump's unusually personal diplomacy that included three meetings with leader Kim Jong Un.

Vowing to exert US leadership, Biden also said he was reasserting US priorities by ending "the forever war" in Afghanistan -- where he is pulling out remaining troops after 20 years.
China's top legislator stresses role of legislative bodies in state-to-state ties

Xinhua) 10:39, April 29, 2021

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, attends a meeting of parliamentary leaders that focused on the role of legislators in consolidating peace and trust via video link at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator Li Zhanshu said Wednesday that exchanges between legislative bodies provide an important guarantee for the long-term stable and healthy development of state-to-state relations.

Li, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, made the remarks at a meeting of parliamentary leaders that focused on the role of legislators in consolidating peace and trust.

Li said peace and development are still the themes of the times, but peace and trust in the international community have been severely eroded, the international order and the global governance system have been impacted, and there is still a long way to go toward general security and common development, and thus all countries need to make concerted efforts and joint responses.

Noting that exchanges between legislative bodies provide an important guarantee for the long-term stable and healthy development of state-to-state relations, Li called on legislative bodies to adopt a common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security concept and oppose the emergence of a new "Cold War" and ideological confrontation in whatever form.

He said legislative bodies should adhere to opening up and cooperation, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, maintain the stability and smoothness of the global industrial chain and supply chain, and promote the construction of an open world economy.

He called on legislative bodies to enhance mutual trust and reduce suspicion through candid and in-depth dialogue, uphold the principles of extensive consultations, joint contributions and shared benefits, adhere to the true form of multilateralism marked by openness and tolerance, strict rule of law, consultation and cooperation, and promote the development of the global governance system in a more just and reasonable direction.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Li said different from traditional major countries, China is committed to the path of peaceful development.

The NPC stands ready to work with the legislatures of various countries to be a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order, and jointly build a clean and beautiful world featuring lasting peace, universal security, common prosperity, openness and inclusiveness, Li said.

The meeting among parliamentary leaders was hosted by Turkmenistan, and speakers or parliament leaders from Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Pakistan, the Republic of Korea, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan attended the meeting via video link.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
A judge in Los Angeles banned photographers on Thursday from picturing the five suspects charged in the 'dognapping' of Lady Gaga's two French bulldogs, issuing a draconian order to shield their identity.

The four men and one woman pleaded not guilty on Thursday afternoon before Judge Victoria Wilson, presiding over Los Angeles Superior Court.

Three of the suspects  James Jackson, 18; Jaylin White, 19; and Lafayette Whaley, 27  have been charged with attempted murder and armed robbery, according to the LAPD.

Judge Victoria Wilson on Thursday shielded the five suspects from photographers' lenses

Deputy District Attorney Michele Hanisee, prosecuting the five, is seen in court on Thursday

Defense attorney Steven A. Seiden was granted permission for the five to avoid photographs

Jackson, who also faces one count each of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and a felon carrying a concealed firearm in a vehicle, had his bail set at more than $3 million.

White also faces one count of assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury.

The three are described by police as documented gang members, who targeted the bulldogs because they knew of their high value. When bought from reputable breeders, the animals can cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

They were not aware that Gaga was the owner, the police said, amid claims robberies were part of a gang initiation.

Two additional defendants  Harold White, a known gang member and the 40-year-old father of Jaylin White, and his girlfriend Jennifer McBride, 50  are accused of acting as accessories after the fact by helping conceal the stolen animals.

McBride was released on bail on Thursday, after her lawyers argued that she was diabetic and did not have her insulin with her. She was ordered to remain under house arrest, leaving only to go to work, and wear a GPS ankle monitor.

Lady Gaga is pictured with her French bulldog Koji, who was stolen on February 24

McBride is said to have returned the dogs to the police two nights later, prompted by Gaga's offer of a $500,000 reward.

McBride surrendered the dogs at the LAPD's Olympic Station, seven miles from West Hollywood, where they were taken.

'This was a brazen street crime that left a man seriously wounded,' said George Gascon, Los Angeles County District Attorney.

'We have alleged very serious charges in this case and have faith that justice will be appropriately served as this case unfolds in court.'

The American Kennel Club lists French bulldogs as the fourth most popular breed in the United States, behind Labradors, golden retrievers and German shepherds. Their small size, however, makes the French bulldog a popular target for thieves.

Gaga's dogwalker, Ryan Fischer, 30, was shot four times while he was out with her three dogs, Koji, Gustav and Miss Asia.

The thieves then ran away with two of the animals - Koji and Gustav.

Miss Asia escaped from the gang before they could put her in their vehicle, and ran back to Fischer.

Gaga was in Rome filming House of Gucci at the time of the dognapping.

She did not pay out the reward, due to police suspicions that the woman who dropped the dogs off had acted with the dog-stealing ring.

The singer offered a $500,000 reward to anyone who returned her dogs safely. Gaga is pictured with Koji, Miss Asia and Gustavo

Ryan Fischer, 30, was shot four times while he was out walking Gaga's three dogs, Koji, Gustav and Miss Asia, before thieves snatched two in February

The woman who found Gaga's two kidnapped dogs was one of those arrested, TMZ reports

Fischer, who has been described as a family friend, survived the assault.

He has posted images of himself in a hospital bed on his social media.

He also thanked the first responders who saved his life and called for his 'attempted murderers' to be brought to justice.

Fischer is expected to make a full recovery after he was punched to the ground and shot in the chest while walking the animals on West Hollywood's Sierra Bonita Avenue at about 10pm on February 24.

TMZ had also cited sources close to the investigation as saying they believe that the incident may have been the result of a gang initiation but they later said the theft was part of a dog-stealing ring.

In the caption of his first Instagram photo, which showed him hooked up to a breathing tube, Fischer described how Miss Asia ran over to him after evading the thieves who fled with the other pooches.

'Four days ago, while a car sped away and blood poured from my gun shot wound, an angel trotted over and laid next to me,' he wrote.

'My panicked screams calmed as I looked at her, even though it registered that the blood pooling around her tiny body was my own.'

Fischer, who has been described as a family friend, survived the assault. He has posted images of himself in a hospital bed on his social media

Fischer described how he feared he wouldn't survive the attack, writing: 'I cradled Asia as best I could, thanked her for all the incredible adventures we'd been on together, apologized that I couldn't defend her brothers, and then resolved that I would still try to save them and myself.

'Hopeful that my calm(ish) and forceful pleas for the urgency of my care as well as the focused descriptions of the dogs would be enough to help me and get enough police and media attention to find the boys, I looked backed at my guardian angel. I smiled at her shaking form, thankful that at least she would be okay.

'From that point, right as the neighbors poured from their homes and restaurant to us on the sidewalk, life has taken a very sudden and unexpected turn.'
If Rogan catches the virus, he could spread it to someone vulnerable, like a young person with a pre-existing condition. Or even just to another unprotected person, who then spreads it himself. The more windows you lock at the jewellery store, the less likely it is that a burglar can get in. Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, was less measured than Fauci in her response to Rogan. Im not sure that taking scientific and medical advice from Joe Rogan is perhaps the most productive way for people to get their information, she said. Loading Yet they do. Rogan is an active promoter of nutritional supplements, with fans putting together extensive lists of what he purports to take. His website includes an ad promoting products by the company Onnit, including a supplement called Alpha Brain. In 2014, Rogan participated in what could be described as an infomercial for Onnit, touting the companys products. Those looking to buy Onnit products can use the promotional code ROGAN for 10 percent off.

So Alpha Brain, which is crafted with earth-grown nutrients like Bacopa, Cats Claw, Oat Straw, and Huperzia Serrata to help you realise your limitless potential and retails for only a little more than a dollar per capsule, is something that Rogan encourages his listeners to use. A vaccine developed by a major pharmaceutical company aimed at curtailing a global pandemic? Well, its time to be cautious. Part of this is that a default position of scepticism for pundits is both easier to defend and less likely to blow up in your face. Its much safer for an elected official or media personality to simply say no or Im not sure about that to proposals than it is to embrace them. Its also easier: one can say I dont think so without poking around at all whereas offering an endorsement necessitates at least some homework. A healthcare worker draws a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Some people think its not for them. Credit:Bloomberg But a bigger part of it is that, in a world where media confidence has consistently eroded over the past several decades, there is a large audience for those who purport to be making their own independent evaluations of situations.

When I would talk to QAnon adherents at rallies for President Donald Trump over the past few years, I was regularly told that they were doing their own research and not taking the medias word for anything. That research led them to embrace wild conspiracy theories, but that was a feature, not a bug. Loading People like reporters for The Washington Post are seen as hopelessly biased and pushing an agreed-upon narrative whereas people like Rogan or the anonymous Q are encouraging people to think for themselves - after a little push in a certain direction. And, in Rogans case, with the help of a cognition-boosting supplement. Scepticism is good and one should critically evaluate the information being received. But what often happens is that thinking for oneself becomes a proxy for believing what I want to believe. And that, as it turns out, is a good way to generate attention and money. Rogans podcast has a lot of benefits beyond this particular approach, but its safe to say that many of his most fervent fans ascribe to it. Last year, Rogan signed an agreement with Spotify to host his podcast through their service, a deal worth more than $US100 million.

Rogan has been criticised in the past for offering misinformation, as when he falsely claimed that left-wing actors were setting fires in Oregon - something he claimed was not widely being reported. (Which was true, since the claim was false.) He later apologised for those comments, admitting that he was very irresponsible for sharing the claim without evidence. His vaccine scepticism seems likely to have been born of a similar instinct, though: questioning the agreed-upon story. Thats different than someone like Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter who evolved over the past year from a sceptic of efforts to contain the coronavirus to a rabid opponent of vaccination programs. His pandemic-focused approach has led to a large following on social media and constant Fox News appearances. This fall, hes releasing a book about the pandemic called Pandemia; it will likely not offer an embrace of the official systems for addressing the coronavirus. Earlier this month, The Atlantics Derek Thompson rebutted Berensons claims about the vaccine one after the other. It was a thorough assessment of all of the ways in which Berenson had been proven wrong or made false claims, but it dissuaded Berenson not one bit.

He continues on the same path, offering his followers the same sort of think-for-yourself-just-like-me rationales for doing things like avoiding getting a shot or wearing a mask. As you might have guessed, Berenson is a frequent guest on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show, a platform where reject the consensus no matter the evidence has been elevated to new heights. Again, all of this is understandable. Its understandable - preferred! - that one consider official information with caution. But its also easy to see why the government is lying to you is a more appealing message than the government makes some good points about having fewer people die. There are a lot more action movies with sympathetic protagonists that take the first approach than the second. This is compounded by the fact that the sceptics information economy bears faster rewards than community-level immunity to the virus. More vaccines means a faster return to normal . . . eventually. West Virginia is taking a novel approach to this, offering younger people savings bonds for getting vaccinated - a financial benefit now (sort of) instead of later. In most places, though, the pitch is less direct: lets all get back to normal. Thats tougher sell than by rejecting the vaccine youre part of an elite group of free-thinkers. So it often sells poorly.
Hours after Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill Wednesday to eliminate Connecticuts religious exemption for required vaccines for students, opponents of the measure said they plan to file state and federal lawsuits as soon as Thursday seeking to overturn the law.

Outside state Supreme Court in Hartford, Brian Festa, co-founder of We The Patriots USA and The Connecticut Freedom Alliance; attorneys Norm Pattis and Cameron Atkinson; and one of the plaintiffs signing onto the lawsuit, Sherry Harmon, argued the legislation not only overreaches, but also is illegal and unconstitutional.

What has been incredibly diabolical about what has been done in that [Capitol] building over there is there has been a campaign to inspire and instigate fear in any person who would oppose this, Atkinson said. Were all nervous. The state has declared war on the children in the state and thats not something any parent wants to hear. Its more than just the bill that was passed over there, it was an underlying occurrence of intimidation of people that oppose it.

The new law will require students attending pre-K-12 schools, day care centers and higher education institutions to receive state-mandated vaccinations, with exemptions only for those who are medically unable to receive a vaccine.

This is an issue that I have spent a lot of time researching and discussing with medical experts, and it is something that I take very seriously knowing the public health impact that it has on our children, families, and communities, Lamont said in a statement after signing the legislation. In recent years, the number of children in our state who have not received routine vaccinations has been steadily increasing, which has been mirrored by significant growth in preventable diseases across the nation.

Lamont stressed the law doesnt take the choice of parents to make medical decisions for their children, and that the bill ensures that other children and their families will not be exposed to these deadly diseases for hours each day in our schools.

Story continues

But Harmon, a mother of four children, said she broke into tears when the bill passed in the state Senate late Tuesday after a nine-hour debate.

Three of her four children receive special education, she said, so homeschooling isnt an option.

My two older boys are thankfully grandfathered in, but my pre-K daughters are not, she added. Im wondering how the state and federal government are going to afford my daughters their free and public education.

House Bill 6423 eliminates the religious exemption for the requirement that children be inoculated against measles, mumps and other communicable diseases before entering school. (The COVID-19 vaccination is not currently among the mandated inoculations.)

The overwhelming majority of parents follow the states immunization rules but in some pockets of Connecticut vaccination rates have dipped in recent years, leading some public health experts to worry about community immunity.

In anticipation of the law being passed, Pattis said he and others have prepared for the lawsuit by reading articles and case law.

The courts in this country are not friendly to the religious exemption to vaccination, Pattis said. There are those who say it should be eliminated and we should have only a medical exemption. That might of been news to the people who came over here and landed at Plymouth Rock, but they came here to create something new and to have freedom to worship as they saw fit and we will fight for that principle.

In 2019, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong wrote a seven-page opinion defending the constitutionality to eliminate the religious exemption.

There is no serious or reasonable dispute as to the States broad authority to require and regulate immunizations for children: the law is clear that the State of Connecticut may create, eliminate or suspend the religious exemption ... in accordance with its well-settled power to protect public safety and health, he wrote.

Connecticut is the sixth state to pass a measure to eliminate religious exemptions for vaccines. The other states are California, New York, West Virginia, Mississippi and Maine.

Aside from believing the law is unconstitutional and abridges the First Amendment, Pattis also argued there is no emergency in the United States that warrants the measure and thinks families should have the right to opt out.

Festa agreed, saying that the legislation had nothing to do with public health.

He said only 1.4% of Connecticut schoolchildren claim religious exemptions. Theres no justification for enacting this legislation.

Jessika Harkay can be reached at jharkay@courant.com.
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Steel Market with Focus on Stainless Steel: Size, Trends & Forecasts (2021-2025 Edition)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

"Global Steel Market with Focus on Stainless Steel: Size, Trends & Forecasts (2021-2025 Edition)"provides an in-depth analysis of the stainless steel market including detailed description of market sizing and growth.

The report provides analysis of the steel market by production and by demand. The report further provides detailed analysis of the global stainless steel market by value, by consumption, by production and by application and includes application; and regional production and consumption analysis as well. The global steel market has witnessed continuous growth in the past few years and is projected to grow even further during the forecast period (2021-2025).



The market is expected to be driven by various growth enhancing factors such as rapid urbanization, growing investments in infrastructure sector, increasing automotive production, growing food industry etc. However, the market is not free from challenges that are hindering its growth. Some of the major challenges faced by the market are volatility in raw material prices and rising market competitors.



Study Coverage



The global steel market has been segmented into carbon steel, alloy steel, stainless steel, tool steel and other steel types. Stainless steel has been further categorized into austenitic grade, ferritic grade and martensitic grade stainless steels. The market has been divided on the basis of production methods into blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-FOF), electric arc furnace (EAF) and others. Applications for the steel market include bridges, industrial structures and others.



Moreover, the report also assesses the key opportunities in the market and outlines the factors that are and will be driving the growth of the industry. Growth of the overall stainless steel market has also been forecasted for the period 2021-2025, taking into consideration the previous growth patterns, the growth drivers and the current and future trends.



The major players dominating the stainless steel market are ArcelorMittal, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation (NSSMC), Outokumpu and POSCO. The four companies have been profiled in the report providing detailed analysis of their financial information and business strategies.

Key Topics Covered

1. Executive Summary



2. Introduction

2.1 Steel: An Overview

2.1.1 History of Steel

2.1.2 Uses of Steel

2.1.3 Steel Production Process

2.1.4 Steel Life Cycle

2.1.5 Production Methods of Steel

2.2 Steel Segmentation: An Overview

2.2.1 Steel Segmentation by Type

2.2.2 Steel Segmentation by Production Method and Application

2.3 Stainless Steel: An Overview

2.4 Advantages of Stainless Steel



3. Global Market Analysis

3.1 Global Steel Market: An Analysis

3.1.1 Global Steel Market by Production

3.1.2 Global Steel Market by Demand

3.1.3 Global Steel Demand by Region (Asia, Europe, North America, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), South America, Africa, Middle East, Oceania, Other)

3.1.4 Global Steel Market by Industries (Construction, Machinery, Automotive, Metal Product, Shipbuilding, Electrical Equipment, Appliances)

3.2 Global Stainless Steel Market: An Analysis

3.2.1 Global Stainless Steel Market by Value

3.2.2 Global Stainless Steel Market Value by Region (China, ROW)

3.2.3 Global Stainless Steel Market by Production

3.2.4 Global Stainless Steel Production by Region (China, Europe, India, Japan, The U.S., ROW)

3.2.5 Global Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

3.2.6 Global Stainless Steel Consumption by Region (Asia, Europe, Americas, ROW)

3.2.7 Global Stainless Steel Consumption by Application (Consumer Goods and Medicals, Chemical Petroleum and Energy, Architecture, Building and Construction (ABC) & Infrastructure, Automotive and Heavy Transport, Industrial and Heavy Machinery)

3.3 Global Stainless Steel Market: Application Analysis

3.3.1 Global Consumer Goods and Medicals Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

3.3.2 Global Chemical Petroleum and Energy Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

3.3.3 Global Automotive and Heavy Transport Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

3.3.4 Global Architecture, Building and Construction (ABC) & Infrastructure Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

3.3.5 Global Industrial and Heavy Machinery Stainless Steel Market by Consumption



4. Regional Market Analysis

4.1 Europe Stainless Steel Market: An Analysis

4.1.1 Europe Stainless Steel Market by Production

4.1.2 Europe Stainless Steel Market by Consumption

4.2 Americas Stainless Steel Market: An Analysis

4.3 ROW Stainless Steel Market: An Analysis

4.4 Asia Stainless Steel Market: An Analysis

4.5 Asia Stainless Steel Market: Regional Analysis



5. Market Dynamics

5.1 Growth Drivers

5.1.1 Rapid Urbanization

5.1.2 Growing Investments in Infrastructure Sector

5.1.3 Growing Food Industry

5.1.4 Rising GDP Per Capita

5.2 Challenges

5.2.1 Volatility in Raw Material Prices

5.2.2 Rising Market Competitors

5.3 Market Trends

5.3.1 Rising Use in Pre-engineered Buildings (PEBs)

5.3.2 Steel Scrap Utilization for Stainless Steel Production

5.3.3 Growing Use in Medical Technology Industry



6. Competitive Landscape

6.1 Global Stainless Steel Market Players: Financial Comparison



7. Company Profiles

7.1 ArcelorMittal

7.1.1 Business Overview

7.1.2 Financial Overview

7.1.3 Business Strategy

7.2 Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation (NSSMC)

7.3 Outokumpu

7.4 POSCO

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ibuuh2

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

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Dungiven native Aideen McCanny and husband Andrew lost their son Eoin last year shortly after she gave birth to twins. The pregnancy came after a lengthy process of IVF. Liam Tunney hears how the couple's story features in a new book documenting women's experiences with infertility.

Aideen McCanny and husband Andrew have just had their 20-week scan when I speak to her. It's an emotional moment.

The Dungiven native, who now lives in Belfast, gave birth to twins Eoin and Lucia last year after a five-year IVF process. Sadly, Eoin passed away at just seven weeks old following an infection.

When the couple got the news in January that they were pregnant naturally, it gave rise to a host of mixed emotions.

It was completely unexpected, just a massive shock, said Aideen.

Because our case was so extreme, and it had taken so many rounds of IVF as well, you don't think it will happen naturally.

For a few days we were just looking at each other laughing, we couldn't get our heads around it at all and it was so surreal.

I think making the decision to have another baby when you've lost one is such a difficult one, but it's amazing Lucia will have a sibling so close in age after everything that has happened.

Aideen pictured with the new book in which the family's story features.

And a lot has happened. So much that Aideen and Andrew's story features in a new book that shares the honest stories of infertility.

'We Are One in Eight' by Lauren Algeo, charts the experiences of 18 different women with infertility and IVF treatment.

Aideen and Andrew's story is typical of those featured in the book, in that none of them are straightforward success stories.

It took us over five years and seven rounds of IVF, said Aideen.

We actually went to England in the middle of it for more testing, and that all came back normal. They couldn't find anything wrong with either of us, so we were labelled 'unexplained infertility'.

We took a break to save for it, and approached the Belfast Fertility Clinic. They were a wee bit more willing to look at what had happened before and were able to make suggestions for changes.

We went through another egg collection and I think I ended up with 18 eggs, and from that we ended up with only two embryos, which is quite a big drop off.

They suggested poor egg quality was a factor. I'd spent years wanting to know what the issue was, and then when I found out, I was devastated.

Aideen and Andrew bringing Lucia home.

The couple were forced to pause the process again after Aideen developed ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome (OHSS), but after resuming, the clinic suggested they try a different approach.

We had transferred six embryos at that point, and I don't think anybody expected it to work, but it was at that point the clinic suggested transferring two.

We had six embryos, and in my head it was not going to work. I didn't know how I was going to go through another six individual transfers and have the same outcome.

They suggested transferring two, and we were both really happy with the decision. Nobody really said anything about risks of multiple pregnancy.

Aideen started to become unwell around 28 weeks into the pregnancy, and after developing cholestasis, the hospital began to monitor her more frequently.

One of the tests flagged up acute kidney failure and she was asked to come back to the hospital the following day, but the schedule was soon to be taken out of her hands.

I was getting ready to go into the hospital when my waters broke, she said.

Andrew was on call, this was at the height of Covid, and I was also worried about driving, so I phoned Andrew's mum.

I remember her dropping me off at the pedestrian crossing and walking in thinking 'I can't believe I have to do this on my own'.

In my head I was just going to go in and they were going to delay labour, but I was examined and brought up to the delivery suite.

It was very obvious that the babies were going to be born that day. I don't even remember thinking it was a bad thing that the babies were going to be really early.

Aideen with Lucia and Eoin in the hospital.

After they were born, Eoin and Lucia had been transferred to the newborn intensive care unit (NICU), but were moved to high dependency after a few days, a positive step.

The twins were then moved to Antrim Area Hospital, and the initial signs were good.

Everyone was happy with the two of them  it was about getting them off breathing support and fed to put on weight, said Aideen.

They were both off everything, being fed milk and things were going fine. I was sitting with both of them on my knee.

I just didn't feel right about him, and one of the nurses said he looked really pale compared to Lucia. I asked them to put him back in the incubator, because I wasn't comfortable.

He started blood tests and all the rest and they realised he had an infection. Over the course of a couple of weeks, he'd started to get better and was back on feeds.

Unfortunately, the improvement in Eoin's condition did not last, and the couple were called into hospital to allow him to undergo surgery after an infection was discovered.

Andrew was back at work, but when I came in and saw Eoin, I just knew it wasn't good. One of the nurses phoned him, got him out of work and he didn't go back for six months after that.

We moved to the Royal and Eoin had two surgeries. They found he had a bowel infection but the first time they opened him up, they were leaving it to see how things would go.

He'd become really unwell in between, but they went back in about a week later and the infection had completely taken over his bowel.

The consultant said he couldn't believe that he had lived so long.

We were then faced with the decision and had decided we'd stop all support, but the day it was supposed to happen, he passed away himself that morning.

Aideen and Andrew were now in a position where they were grieving Eoin while trying to look after Lucia, a situation Aideen says was incredibly difficult.

They were in two different hospitals. Eoin was so sick, but we were trying to establish feeding with Lucia in another hospital, she said.

She was so close to coming home and I knew that by not being in the hospital with her, I was delaying her getting out. You just didn't know what to do.

There were days we just couldn't go and see Lucia, or we were going up at 10, 11 o'clock at night and the nurses were telling us to go home and go to bed.

That was so hard, because we were so torn. We were in two separate rooms in the hospital and you felt bad if you were sitting with one baby longer than the other.

At the end, they transferred Lucia and they had a few days where they could be together. We put her in the incubator with him and got some really nice photos of them both.

During the course of IVF treatment, Aideen had started an Instagram account  ivfmumblings  in an effort to connect to women who had been through multiple cycles.

ALL SMILES: Lucia is thriving.

It was through the account that author Lauren Algeo first got in touch about the book.

There was no doubt in my mind it was the right thing to do. It was really therapeutic for me to write it all down, because I was still dealing with baby loss, said Aideen.

What I liked was that our story wasn't straightforward, and there a lot of women out there who don't have the success of one IVF cycle.

It's been helpful for me from a healing perspective and I've passed it on to a few friends who have had IVF.

My mum was telling me that apparently the GP in Dungiven is reading it, because he thinks it will be helpful for him with patients, which is really good.

The whole point is to help other people and give them that hope. We were at the point where I thought it was never going to work, and it will give hope to other people out there as well.

Each woman featured in the book has chosen a charity to which a percentage of the sales will be donated, with Aideen choosing Tiny Life to benefit from her sharing her story.

With the 20-week scan complete, Aideen and Andrew will be busy with the anxious excitement of pregnancy.

Aideen is due to give birth to a baby boy later this year.

'We Are One in Eight' is available to buy now in both paperback and Kindle form.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) listens while Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the second day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Oct. 13, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)

Hawley Introduces Bill to Reduce Pentagons Reliance on Technology From China and Other Adversary Nations

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has introduced a bill aiming to reduce Chinese control over technology used by the U.S. armed forces.

Called the Protecting Critical Boards and Electronics Through Transparency and Enduring Reinvestment (PCBETTER) Act (pdf), the measure intends to prevent Beijing from inserting and exploiting vulnerabilities in printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are made in China and used throughout the American military, Hawleys office said in an April 28 statement.

Hawleys office said that a disproportionate amount of printed circuit boards used in the Pentagons electronic systems come from China, where they are vulnerable to sabotage by the Chinese regime.

Under the measure, Department of Defense contractors would be required to notify the Pentagon if the systems they provide contain printed circuit boards made in China or other adversary nations so that the U.S. military could take precautionary measures.

The bill would also establish a 10-year supply chain fund meant to strengthen American manufacturing of printed circuit boards and other microelectronics and enhance the security of the electronics supply chain.

Hawleys measure would also establish a testing, remediation, and prevention regime meant to identify and address vulnerabilities in systems that contain or may contain components made in China and other nations such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Chinese printed circuit boards pose a serious threat to the integrity of Americas defense systems. It is imperative that we give the Department of Defense the tools it needs to secure its printed circuit board supply chains, so that our warfighters can have full confidence in the weapons they rely on to protect our nation, Hawley said in a statement.

Wes Hallman, the National Defense Industrial Associations policy chief, told Defense News that industry groups are broadly supportive of the objectives of legislation like Hawleys, namely to reduce reliance on technology provided by strategic rivals, although he expressed reservation about the bills effectiveness and concern about whether its provisions would be cumbersome. The bill, for instance, would require contractors who supply the Pentagon with electronic system to provide a list of each printed circuit board they contain, which would feature information about its country of origin.

Hallman expressed support for the bills provisions that aim to strengthen domestic supply chains.

Nobody wants to be dependent on single source, especially a single source thats problematic, Hallman told the outlet. The defense-industrial base and NDIA has been highly supportive of making investments in domestic capabilities in microelectronics.

The American printed circuit board manufacturing market is valued at $2.7 billion, about a third of what it was 20 years ago, according to The Hill.

The Biden administration is under bipartisan pressure to invest in emerging technologies and counter threats posed by Chinas ruling communist party.

Last month, nearly two dozen Republican House lawmakers wrote a joint letter calling on Biden to work with allies on the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductor chips, and 5G communications in order to challenge Chinas goal of total global technology leadership and tech authoritarianism.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Feb. 24 to bolster the resilience of supply chains in a number of key sectors, including energy, communications technology, public health, food production, and defense.

Biden officials have projected a tough line on China but said they would also focus on building an alliance in a more multilateral approach.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.
Financial Stocks Sector Appears Ready To Run Higher

As we transition into the early Summer months, we are watching how different market sectors are reacting to the continued shifting of capital over the past 60+ days. One this is very clear, certain market sectors are strengthening while others have run into resistance and are consolidating. We believe the next few weeks and months will continue this type of trend where capital continues to shift away from risks and into sectors that show tremendous strength and opportunity.

We wrote about how Precious Metals are likely starting a new bullish price trend on April 18, 2021. You can read that research article here: https://www.thetechnicaltraders.com/metals-miners-may-have-started-a-new-longer-term-bullish-trend-part-ii/.

We wrote about how the recent bullish price trend was based on a wall of worry and how the markets love to climb higher within this environment on April 14, 2021. You can read that research article here: https://www.thetechnicaltraders.com/us-equities-climb-a-wall-of-worry-to-new-highs/.

We also published an article on April 11, 2021 suggesting the Cannabis Sector had reached a Pennant Apex and would likely begin a new bullish price trend after some shakeout price volatility near the Pennant Apex. You can read that research article here: https://www.thetechnicaltraders.com/is-the-cannabis-alternative-sector-rally-ready-to-breakout-again/.

XLF May Rally Another 8%  10% Or More

Today, we are revisiting a recent research article suggesting the Financial Sector may be poised for another rally trend targeting the $38.00 level first, then the $39.40 level based on our research. The financial sector continues to trend higher after the COVID-19 market collapse. Global central banks and government policies are very accommodating to stronger earnings and growth in the Financial sector. Recently, the US Government passed a new COVID stimulus bill that allocates money for at-risk borrowers to help elevate foreclosure actions.

It is very likely that these continued actions to support a stronger US and global recovery will translate into higher price trending in the Financial sector as we move into the Summer months  where weather and Summer activities push people back outside and into more active lifestyles.

Using our Fibonacci Measured Move technique, we have identified a support level in XLF near $34.50. Therefore, as long as price stays above this level, we believe a continued bullish price trend will push future prices towards the target levels near $38.00, then $39.40. We are watching for the next 0.61% Fibonacci level, near $36.93, to be breached as a sign the bullish price trend is accelerating.

Although the market may appear to be very extended and overbought, we still believe there is room to run for certain market sectors. XLF, MJ, GDXJ, SILJ, and many others have recently moved into our watchlist for new bullish trends. Are you ready for profit from these moves?

Our research team believes traders and investors need to be prepared for quickly shifting sector trends over the next 6+ months as this highly leveraged global market event plays out. Our research suggests a price rotation event is near and the global markets are still trending in a moderately strongly bullish trend. The strongest sectors are going to continue to be the best performers over time. Being able to identify and trade these sectors is key to being able to efficiently target profits. You can learn more about how I identify and trade these sectors by registering for my FREE course here.

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 with daily market reports, research, and trade alerts. More frequent or experienced traders have been killing it trading options, ETFs, and stocks using my BAN Hotlist ranking the hottest ETFs, which is updated daily for my premium subscribers.

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.




Schools should hold supervised tooth-brushing sessions and ban sugary food to cut decay, say leading dentists.

They say schools should be doing more to go sugar free and want nutritional guidelines for packed lunches to help parents send children to class with healthier meals.

The call, by the Faculty of Dental Surgeons at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, comes amid concerns over tooth decay and rising levels of childhood obesity.

Before the pandemic, dental decay was the top reason for children aged between five and nine to be admitted to hospital in England

Dentists want schools to take more of an active role in stopping the rot as pleas to parents to ensure their children brush properly at home have not been enough.

Before the pandemic, dental decay was the top reason for children aged between five and nine to be admitted to hospital in England.

And there are fears the problem could get worse because almost three-quarters have not seen a dentist since the start of last year, despite recommendations that children have annual check-ups.

Pain caused by decay can affect pupils concentration in lessons and require them to take time off for dental appointments.

At worst, children with untreated decay may need to have teeth taken out under general anaesthesia.

There are fears the problem could get worse because almost three-quarters have not seen a dentist since the start of last year, despite recommendations that children have annual check-ups

Matthew Garrett, dean of the faculty, said: We would like to see the Government encourage all schools in England to become sugar free. We would also support the publication of nutritional guidelines for packed lunches and the introduction of supervised tooth-brushing sessions in schools.

Sugary food and drink are also fuelling the childhood obesity crisis. The latest figures from the National Childhood Measurement Programme show almost a quarter of children in reception are overweight or obese.

This rises to 35 per cent among children who are starting secondary school.

Meanwhile, a Public Health England report published last month on the oral health of five-year-olds in England in 2019 found almost a quarter showed signs of dental decay.

Analysis of official data from the Local Government Association, published last August, suggests 45,000 hospital operations took place to remove rotten teeth in children and teenagers in England in 2018/19.

British Dental Association chairman Eddie Crouch said: Food and drink loaded with free sugars have absolutely no place in our schools. The Government needs to show the courage of its convictions on prevention. These are products that have little to no nutritional value. No one would lose out from a sugar-free schools policy save irresponsible elements of the food industry.
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The Katsina State Governor, Aminu Masari, has faulted a resolution of the House of Representatives calling for the declaration of a state of emergency in the security sector.

Mr Masari, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, stated his position on Thursday after he met with the Chief of Staff to the President, Ibrahim Gambari, at the State House, Abuja.

The House had, on Tuesday, asked President Muhammadu Buhari to declare a state of emergency on security, following the worsening security situation across Nigeria and the recent taking over of 42 communities in Niger State by Boko Haram.

This lawmakers position followed a revelation by the Niger State Governor, Abubakar Bello, that Boko Haram terrorists are in control of territories in Kaure and Shiroro local governments of the state.

The lawmakers asked the federal government to recruit more personnel into the military and the police, saying the current capacity falls far short of the required number to effectively secure the country.

The lawmakers also resolved to summon the Service Chiefs, the National Security Adviser, and heads of paramilitary agencies.

After state of emergency, what else?

Questioning the effectiveness of the declaration by the lawmakers, the Katsina governor whose state has been under constant attacks by bandits said a state of emergency cannot solve the problem.

I think we better be serious about this issue of security because if you say we declare a state of emergency then what do you do next? You will continue to have the same people; the same security agencies, capacity and resources.

We have a problem whereby, every person has a role to play, we better play it. Politics should be over. The security situation in the country is beyond partisan politics and its a national concern for all of us. State of emergency cannot solve the problem, he stated.

He solicited more resources for the states and local governments so as to engage the youths in meaningful employment.

He said his state have witnessed relative peace compared to the situation months back.

We thank God for how things are now in Katsina but actually the situation is still of high concern. Insecurity is real but we are doing everything to make sure that we control the situation so that it doesnt reach the level it was before and we are hopeful that working together with security agencies, responsible persons and also the repentant bandits, we will be able to have our state go back to normalcy, he said.

Not the first

Katsina is one of the North-west states that has suffered attacks from bandits in the past few years.

Other states that have suffered similar attacks are Zamfara and Kaduna.

The lawmakers had on several occasions in the past called for a declaration of state of emergency on security in the country.

Another step taken by the lawmakers to address the unending security challenges in the country was a security summit organised by the senate in 2019.

The House of Representatives is currently planning another summit.
, 42, was shot and killed by police in North Carolina at 8.30am on April 21

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Hundreds of protesters took to the streets for the eighth consecutive night in North Carolina on Wednesday after a judge refused to release body cam footage of Andrew Brown Jr. being shot dead by police to the media.

The police shooting of Brown, a 42-year-old black man, at 8.30am on April 21 while at the wheel of his car in his driveway has sparked a week of boisterous but peaceful demonstrations in Elizabeth City.

More than 200 protesters last night chanted 'Say his name! Andrew Brown! Hands up! Don't Shoot!' as they marched through the town on Wednesday ahead of a dusk-to-dawn curfew, reports News & Observer.

Police in riot gear reportedly began making arrests about three hours after the city's 8pm curfew and five people were arrested, according to the paper. Most of the crowd of 200 protesters had dispersed by this time, reports ABC 11.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets for the eight consecutive night in North Carolina on Wednesday after a judge refused to release body cam footage of Andrew Brown Jr. being shot dead by police to the media. Pictured: Officers arrest a protester on Wednesday night

The demonstrators had blocked Elizabeth Street at the Camden Bridge, with some protesters standing on cars while fist pumping the air

Police officers in riot gear force people off the street as they protest against the killing of Andrew Brown Jr

More than 200 protesters last night chanted 'Say his name! Andrew Brown! Hands up! Don't Shoot!' as they marched through Elizabeth City on Wednesday

Andrew Brown Jr was shot and killed by police

The demonstrators had blocked Elizabeth Street at the Camden Bridge, with some protesters standing on cars while fist pumping the air.

In the early hours of this morning, Elizabeth City Police Department said a group of 15 protesters 'had refused to disperse' and that 'arrests are being made at this time'. But minutes later, the force said the crowd had dispersed.

The protesters have been calling for all of the body cam footage of the police shooting which killed Brown Jr to be shared with the public.

But the demonstrators came out in force again last night after Judge Jeffrey Foster denied a media petition to release the footage publicly for at least 30 days, saying it might impede the ongoing investigation.

It comes after a prosecutor said Brown Jr hit deputies with his car before they fired the shots that killed him.

Under the judge's ruling, Brown's family will allowed to watch redacted footage from five body cameras and and one dashboard cam within the next ten days. Their attorney said up to eight officers were at the scene. The family can watch the footage but not take copies.

In the early hours of this morning, Elizabeth City Police Department said a group of 15 protesters 'had refused to disperse' and that 'arrests are being made at this time'

Police in riot gear reportedly began making arrests about three hours after the city's 8pm curfew and five people were arrested

District Attorney Andrew Womble had earlier told the judge that he viewed body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by attorneys for the family of Brown Jr. that his car was stationary when the shooting started.

Attorneys for the Brown family called the judge's decision 'deeply disappointing', adding: 'Video evidence is the key to discerning the truth and getting well-deserved justice.'

An attorney for the officers said they are 'very distraught' and opposed the footage being released, but added: 'We believe the shooting was justified.'

The FBI launched a civil rights probe Tuesday into the death of Brown Jr., as his family released an independent autopsy showing he was shot five times, including in the back of the head.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper called for a special prosecutor while pressure built on authorities to release body camera footage of last week's shooting.

Police said they were carrying out an arrest warrant for drugs offenses and claim Brown was a drug dealer with a rap sheet dating back to 1988. Brown had a 180 page criminal record and had been filmed selling narcotics in the weeks leading up to his death, Fox News reported Monday.

Andrew Brown, pictured, a 42-year-old father of 10, was shot in his car on April 21 by sheriffs. Judge Jeffrey Foster denied a media petition to release the footage of his shooting publicly for at least 30 days, saying it might impede the ongoing investigation

District Attorney Andrew Womble told a judge at a hearing Wednesday that he viewed body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by attorneys for the family of Andrew Brown Jr. that his car was stationary when the shooting started. Womble said the video shows that Browns car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard

Lydia Brown,92, (front) the grandmother of Andrew Brown Jr., and other family members arrive at the Pasquotank County Courthouse on Wednesday

DA Womble, who opposed the footage's immediate release, said Wednesday the video shows that Browns car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.

'As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers,' he said, adding that the car stops again.

'The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.'

In response to Womble's remarks in court, lawyer Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who watched the footage with Brown's son, defended her description of the footage.

'At no time have I given any misrepresentations. I still stand by what I saw in that clip,' she said, adding that she watched the clip 'over and over,' taking notes.

Womble argued that body camera video from the shooting, a portion of which was shown to the family on Monday, should be kept from the public for another month so that state investigators can make progress on their probe of the shooting.

Demonstrators, led by clergy, march Wednesday from Mt. Lebanon AME Zion Church in Elizabeth City, N.C., to the site where Andrew Brown Jr. was shot and killed by Pasquotank County Sheriff deputies

A Pasquotank County judge denied the petition by the media to release the body camera footage in the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. Demonstrators, led by clergy, march Wednesday

Foster ruled: 'The release at this time would create a serious threat to the fair, impartial and orderly administration of justice. Confidentiality is necessary to protect either an active internal or criminal investigation or a potential internal or criminal investigation.'

Judge Foster said he would revisit the issue of making the footage publicly available in 30 to 45 days, adding: 'The court will, in its discretion, consider at that time further release of the video based on the factors as they exist at that time.'

A North Carolina law that took effect in 2016 allows law enforcement agencies to show body camera video privately to a victim's family, but it generally requires a court to approve any public release.

Media attorney Michael J. Tadych said there is 'absolute public interest' in releasing the tapes. The sheriff's office supported the release of videos, according to Pasquotank County Attorney R. Michael Cox.

Family members of Brown Jr., arrive at the entrance to the Pasquotank County Courthouse

Journalists line up near to hear Superior Court Judge Jeff Foster decide if the body camera footage will be released of the shooting and killing of Andrew Brown Jr.

A judge is considering formal requests to make the video public Wednesday

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump and co-counsels Bakari Sellers, Harry Daniels, and Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who are representing the family, said in response to the ruling of a judge: 'We are deeply disappointed by the judge's decision to not make body camera footage from the involved officers available to be viewed by the public.

'In this modern civil rights crisis where we see Black people killed by the police everywhere we look, video evidence is the key to discerning the truth and getting well-deserved justice for victims of senseless murders.

'Just look at the murder of George Floyd  if the world had not seen that clear and disturbing footage, there might not have even been an ounce of accountability for those officers.

'We refuse to be discouraged and vow to keep the pressure on these agencies until we get to the truth. We will not stop saying his name. Andrew Brown Jr.'

The FBIs Charlotte field office, which opened the civil rights investigation into Browns death, said in a statement that its agents planned to work closely with the Department of Justice 'to determine whether federal laws were violated.'

Following the news, lawyers for the Brown family said they have 'great faith' in the investigation.

Brown's family will be allowed to watch redacted footage from four body cams. The family can watch the footage within ten days but not take copies

They also called separate footage taken by a neighbor of the moment a large group of cops surrounded Brown Jr.'s car 'an inflamed modern-day lynch mob'.

The independent autopsy was performed Sunday by a pathologist hired by Brown's family. The exam noted four wounds to the right arm and one to the head. The states autopsy has not been released yet.

The family's lawyers also released a copy of the death certificate, which lists the cause of death as a 'penetrating gunshot wound of the head.' The certificate, signed by a paramedic services instructor who serves as a local medical examiner, describes the death as a homicide.

The autopsy results come a day after Brown's relatives were shown a 20-second clip of footage from one deputy's body camera.

One of the Brown family lawyers, Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who viewed the video, said Monday that officers opened fire on Brown while he had his hands on the steering wheel of a car. She said the video showed Brown trying to drive away but posing no threat to officers.

On Tuesday footage emerged of the moment a large group of cops surrounded Brown Jr.'s car. The clip - taken by a neighbor in the moments after officers opened fire - shows in the seconds after Brown's car had crashed into a tree.

Brown's son Khalil Ferebee questioned why deputies opened fire.

'Yesterday I said he was executed. This autopsy report shows me that was correct,' he said Tuesday at a news conference. 'Its obvious he was trying to get away. Its obvious. And theyre going to shoot him in the back of the head?'

The pathologist, North Carolina-based Dr. Brent Hall, noted a wound to the back of Browns head from an undetermined distance that penetrated his skull and brain. He said there was no exit wound. Two shots to Browns right arm penetrated the skin. Two others shots to the arm grazed him.

Witnesses said Brown got into his car (pictured) and was driving away when the deputy opened fire.

The moment a 'militarized' sheriff's vehicle carrying armed deputies rushed to Brown's home

The results of an independent autopsy released by attorneys for Brown's family Tuesday shows he was shot five times; four times in his right arm and once in the head

The shooting prompted days of protests and calls for justice and transparency. Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten II has said multiple deputies fired shots but released few other details. Seven Pasquotank County deputies have been placed on leave.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said: 'If they thought Andrew Brown Jr did something inappropriately and criminal you all would have seen that video by now. There was no need for them to be the judge, the jury and the executioner that morning.'

Local clergy members who called a news conference outside of an Elizabeth City church welcomed the FBI's announcement.

'Amen. Because the people here are inept, incapable and incompetent,' said the Rev. William Barber II, who leads the Poor Peoples Campaign, referring to local authorities.

Brown's lawyers also welcomed the federal agency's involvement: 'We have great faith that this caliber of an investigation will prevent any obscuring of the facts released to the Brown family and public and will overcome any local bias that may prevent justice from being served.'

Attorney's for the family of Andrew Brown, Harry Daniel, left, and Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, right make comments after a judges decision on the release body cam video

A judge denied the request to immediately release body cam video of the incident

Brown, 42, father of 10 children, was shot and killed in his car at around 8.30am in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, while police were executing search-and-arrest warrants for drug offenses, officials said

The State Bureau of Investigation began a probe of the shooting shortly after it happened. It initially said that it would turn its findings over to the local district attorney, as is standard under state laws and procedures.

But the governor, a Democrat, urged the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the state's case.

'This would help assure the community and Mr. Browns family that a decision on pursuing criminal charges is conducted without bias,' Cooper said in a statement.

State Attorney General Josh Stein said state law puts control of criminal prosecutions in the hands of the local district attorney, so his office cannot intervene unless asked. He said he has offered assistance to the local prosecutor, but has only received an acknowledgment.

'For my office to play a role in the prosecution, the District Attorney must request our assistance,' Stein said.

District Attorney Andrew Womble, who oversees Pasquotank County, issued a statement noting that state law gives him the power to decide on prosecuting crimes in his district and he stands 'ready willing and able to fulfill my statutory obligations.'

Wednesday's court hearing on the video will consider petitions to release the footage, including filings by a media coalition and by the county attorney on behalf of the sheriff.

Patrice Revelle stands in front of police in riot gear as they force people off a street as they protest the killing of Andrew Brown Jr. on April 27

The police were enforcing an 8 pm curfew announced after the shooting death of Brown by Pasquotank County Sheriff deputies

Protesters march through the street after the death of Andrew Brown Jr.

The slow movement has prompted an outcry from protesters, the family's lawyers and racial justice advocates, who noted that law enforcement agencies in other states have moved faster.

In Columbus, Ohio, the day before Brown was shot, body camera footage was released within hours of an officer fatally shooting a 16-year-old Black girl who was swinging a knife at another girl.

Democrats in the North Carolina General Assembly filed a measure this month proposing that body camera video be released within 48 hours unless a law enforcement agency asks a court to delay its distribution.

But the legislation faces long odds with the GOP controlling both chambers of the Legislature.

A key Republican lawmaker, state Sen. Danny Britt, issued a statement saying GOP lawmakers are open to considering improvements to the current law. But with a hearing set for Wednesday, he said, the process has had little time to unfold.
Pure Extracts Technologies (CSE: PULL) (OTC: PRXTF) (XFRA: A2QJAJ), a plant-based extraction company focused on cannabis, hemp, functional mushrooms and the rapidly emerging psychedelic sector, announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Pure Extracts Manufacturing Corp., has entered into a tolling agreement. The agreement outlines the extraction of 8085% pure CBD distillate from an initial 500 kgs of hemp biomass, sourced from one of Pure Extracts preferred suppliers. The distillate has a CBD potency of over 10%. The announcement noted that the biomass has a specific particulate mill size and runs efficiently on PULLs Vitalis R200 sub/super-critical CO2 extraction system. The company also observed that extracted CBD distillate is an ideal ingredient for vape cartridges, topicals, beverages and edible gummies and chocolates because of its high level of purity. We are pleased to have entered into this tolling agreement and to have taken delivery of the first 500 kg of milled hemp biomass, said Pure Extracts CEO Ben Nikolaevsky. We are very familiar with this particular biomass having used it before in the manufacturing of our in-house, branded products, so we know it extracts very well.

To view the full press release, visit https://cnw.fm/h3d64

About Pure Extracts Technologies Corp.

Pure Extracts features an all-new, state-of-the-art processing facility located just 20 minutes north of world-famous Whistler, British Columbia. The bespoke facility has been constructed to European Union GMP standards aiming towards export sales of products and formulations, including those currently restricted in Canada, into European jurisdictions where they are legally available. On Sept. 25, 2020, Pure Extracts was granted its Standard Processing License by Health Canada under the Cannabis Act. In addition, the companys stock began trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) on Nov. 5, 2020. For more information about the company, please visit www.PureExtractsCorp.com.

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Kravchuk: text of 'Easter truce' could not be agreed upon in TCG on April 28 due to lack of understanding of subjects of its implementation

Head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) on Donbas Leonid Kravchuk said that the text of the statement on the introduction of the "Easter truce" could not be agreed upon following the results of the TCG meeting on April 28 at the level of the delegations' heads, since the sides could not accurately determine subjects of the ceasefire at Easter.

"In general, the sides supported the proposal not only about a ceasefire due to Easter, but also about achieving a full ceasefire on the entire contact line [...] We did not manage to adopt a single text of the statement [on the 'Easter truce'], and therefore that the subjects of this process and the subjects of the execution of the proposals reflected in the text of the statement were not precisely defined," Kravchuk said on the air of the Ukraine 24 television channel.

He said that "in accordance with the Minsk agreements, the participants in the negotiations [respectively, the executors] are Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE, as well as invited representatives of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions (ORDLO)."

According to representative of Donetsk Serhiy Harmash, "in order to endorse the 'Easter truce,' the representatives of Russia suggested that Ukraine sign a ceasefire statement between it and the ORDLO."

"There are tempting offers, like the one that sounded yesterday at the TCG: sign a statement on the coordination mechanism [control over the ceasefire] on behalf of Ukraine and ORDLO, and you will have a truce," Harmash said on his Facebook page.

According to Harmash, "Ukraine cannot agree to recognize ORDLO as a side to the conflict instead of Russia, thereby crossing the 'red line' defined by the president and society in Donbas."

"Russia wants to instill in the minds of Ukrainians the narrative that the subjectivization of ORDLO as the side to the conflict is the main factor in achieving peace in Donbas. That is, not money, weapons, and 'vacationers' of Russia are the causes of the war, but 'bureaucratic casuistry,' just an admission of the fact civil war," he said.
Multiple theologically progressive congregations in the United Methodist Church are in the process of leaving the mainline Protestant denomination due to its stance on LGBT issues.

For decades, the UMC has debated whether to change its biblically-based position on homosexuality, labeling it as sinful, its ban on the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, and defining marriage as only being between one man and one woman.

Although many expect a large number of conservative congregations to eventually leave the UMC because of the debate and form their own denomination, in recent months, some liberal congregations have already decided to exit.

HopeGateWay, a congregation in Portland, Maine, voted to leave the denomination on March 28, with the New England Annual Conference to vote on their disaffiliation in June.

Source:The Christian Post
Highlights Redmi K40 Gaming Edition was launched this week.

It may be re-branded as Poco F3 GT for India.

The smartphone may launch in India soon.

Xiaomi had launched the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition in China earlier this week. We are already hearing that it may introduce the phone in India but, under a different brand name. Xiaomi, Redmi and Poco have been sharing resources and often re-brand phones for different markets. We recently saw that with the Redmi K40 and Redmi K40 Pro, which were released in India as Mi 11X and Mi 11X Pro, respectively. Interestingly, the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition is tipped to launch as the Poco F3 GT in the country.

The possible launch was spotted in the MIUI code of the phone. It was spotted by Xiaomi leaker Kacper Skrzypek, who claimed that Redmi K40 Gaming Edition will be launched as the Poco F3 GT in India. The Redmi K40 Gaming Edition comes with the model number M2104K10C, where the C at the end denotes its release in the Chinese market.

The code within MIUI 12 suggests M2104K10I, where the 'I' at the end denotes a release in the Indian market, will be called the POCO F3 GT.

This comes as an interesting development as Poco had separated from Xiaomi last year and has maintained that it is an independent brand since then. It had launched the Poco X3 Pro and Poco F3 globally last month but, only the first was launched in India. In fact, Poco has launched a F series phone in the country apart from the Poco F1 which marked its debut. However, It has hinted that the next Poco F smartphone will be priced on the higher side.

To recall, the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition is priced at 1,999 yuan (around Rs 22,995) for the 6GB RAM and 128GB storage variant, 2,199 yuan for 8GB RAM and 128GB storage variant, 2,399 yuan for the 8GB RAM and 256GB storage variant, 2,699 yuan for the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage variant and 2,799 yuan for the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage variant Bruce Lee Special Edition.

It features a 6.67-inch (2400 x 1080 pixels) Full HD+ AMOLED 20:9 HDR10 + display with120Hz refresh rate. It is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The phone is powered by MediaTek's Dimensity 1200 SoC. The phone features a side mounted fingerprint scanner.

The camera system includes a 64-megapixel primary rear camera, 8-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera and a 2-megapixel telemacro camera. On the front, you get a 20-megapixel selfie shooter. The phone has an X-axis Linear Motor and packs a 5,065mAh large battery with 67W fast charging that can charge the phone up to 100% in just 42 minutes.
In this illustration, a single-stranded DNA molecule moves through a nanopore. The nanopore is about 2 nanometers (nm) in diameter. By comparison, a strand of human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nm wide. A water shell (blue) surrounds the DNA strand. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas

Nanopore technology shows promise for making it possible to develop small, portable, inexpensive devices that can sequence DNA in real time. One of the challenges, however, has been to make the technology more accurate.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have moved closer toward this goal by developing a nanopore sequencing platform that, for the first time, can detect the presence of nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. The study was published online and is featured on the back cover of the April print edition of the journal Electrophoresis.

"By enabling us to detect the presence of nucleobases, our platform can help improve the sensitivity of nanopore sequencing," said Dr. Moon Kim, professor of materials science and engineering and the Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Currently, most DNA sequencing is done through a process that involves preparing samples in the lab with fluorescent dye and using lasers to determine the sequence of the four nucleobases, the fundamental units of the genetic code: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Each nucleobase emits a different wavelength when illuminated, allowing scientists to determine the sequence.

In nanopore sequencing, a DNA sample is uncoiled, and the hairlike strand is fed through a tiny hole, or nanopore, typically in a fabricated membrane. As it moves through the nanopore, the DNA strand disturbs the electrical current flowing through the membrane. The current responds differently based on the characteristics of a DNA molecule, such as its size and shape.

"The electrical signal changes as the DNA moves through the nanopore," Kim said. "We can read the characteristics of the DNA by monitoring the signal."

One of the challenges in advancing nanopore sequencing has been the difficulty of controlling the speed of the DNA strand as it moves through the nanopore. The UT Dallas team's research focused on addressing that by fabricating an atomically thin solid-stateor nonbiologicalmembrane coated with titanium dioxide, water and an ionic liquid to slow the speed of the molecules through the membrane. The water was added to the liquid solution to amplify the electrical signals, making them easier to read.

The next step for researchers will be to advance the platform to identity each nucleobase more quickly. Kim said the platform also opens possibilities for sequencing other biomolecules.

"The ultimate goal is to have a hand-held DNA sequencing device that is fast, accurate and can be used anywhere," Kim said. "This would reduce the cost of DNA sequencing and make it more accessible."

Explore further Glass nanopore pulls DNA like spaghetti through a needle

More information: Tomas Novotny et al. Mathematical model of electromigration allowing the deviation from electroneutrality, ELECTROPHORESIS (2020). Tomas Novotny et al. Mathematical model of electromigration allowing the deviation from electroneutrality,(2020). DOI: 10.1002/elps.202000207
Morgan County authorities took action today in hopes of preventing the kind of attack that reportedly occurred last week at the county jail.

WAFF reported that the Morgan County Commission today approved $120,000 to pay for 105 body cameras for correctional officers to wear. The cameras will have sound and will record interactions with inmates. The commission also plans to replace regular cameras in the old part of the jail.

Sometimes we think cameras will influence inmates not to attack a corrections officer because they know its not one word against the other, its actually on video, Commission Chairman Ray Long said.

The action comes a little more than a week after authorities said a federal inmate housed in the Morgan County Jail attacked a corrections officer during meal time.

Lemond Lawerance Burns, 21, of Alpine, reportedly punched Morgan County Jail Corrections Officer Kathy Evans twice on April 19. Evans suffered multiple injuries, including a concussion and contusions around her mouth and eye, and bruises to her back, head and arms from hitting the ground after being punched.

Burns was charged with second-degree assault for the incident and given $50,000 bond. He is set to be sentenced in Birmingham federal court in June on fraud charges and was charged with capital murder in the January shooting death of 22-year-old Alabama A&M student Dallis Patrick Ryan Wolfe.
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 30, 1991

Part of the mystery of the grave unearthed under Sydney Town Hall has been solved but part - the most tantalising part - remains.

Earlier this month, workers digging trenches for the Town Halls restoration uncovered a vaulted brick grave, clearly from the very early days of white settlement when the Town Hall site was the colonys graveyard.

Inside were remnants of a brass studded coffin, a skull and, overlying it, a dislodged gravestone, apparently unmarked. Whose were the remains? And whose was that bafflingly bare tombstone?

The archaeologists on site had little hope of discovering more before the site had to be sealed up again.
A long-running challenge to a controversial natural gas pipeline being built through New Jerseys Pinelands has been rejected.

On Thursday, a trio of judges in the New Jersey Superior Courts Appellate Division dismissed appeals from a pair of environmental groups seeking to overturn state approvals for the Southern Reliability Link, a 28-mile pipeline that will run through Monmouth, Ocean and Burlington counties.

The pipeline, whose price tag has risen from an original $180 million to $308 million, is being built by New Jersey Natural Gas. The company has said the project aims to boost the areas resilience during natural disasters by creating a backup supply of natural gas.

Environmental groups like the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance have long opposed the pipeline, deriding a vessel that would carry more gas from the fracking fields of Pennsylvanias Marcellus Shale. They claim theres no evidence that natural gas infrastructure in the area needs to be more resilient.

The court case dates back to 2017, when the state Pinelands Commission gave the final approval to the pipeline. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities had already given its own approval, and the state Department of Environmental Protection had issued the required permits for construction.

The Pinelands Preservation Alliance and the state Sierra Club, along with Bordentown and Chesterfield, sued the state over the approvals. In the challenge, the environmental groups claimed the state was failing to properly protect the Pinelands by allowing the pipeline to be built.

The process unfolded slowly, before finally being decided Thursday by the Appellate Division. The judges rejected every argument brought by the environmental groups.

Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for New Jersey Natural Gas  a subsidiary of New Jersey Resources, a publicly traded company  said the utility was pleased with the outcome.

These rulings affirm that the SRL project was properly approved by regulatory bodies, Roberts said. Once construction is completed and it is placed into service later this year, it will bring significant reliability and resiliency benefits to over one million people in Monmouth, Ocean and Burlington counties.

Carleton Montgomery, the executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, and Jeff Tittel, the executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, both said they were disappointed but not surprised by the courts decision.

Montgomery said its rare that state judges go against the actions of state agencies.

I think its just another case in the pattern of New Jerseys court system being, I would say, slavishly deferential to state agencies when they make bad decisions, Montgomery said.

Tittel called out Gov. Phil Murphys administration for allowing the pipeline to move forward while the case was being heard.

The biggest shame is that tax dollars were used in court to support the SRL pipeline, Tittel said. Public money was used to help destroy the Pinelands and increase [greenhouse gases] and fracking.

The environmentalists noted the decisions were announced just a day after the Murphy administration was arguing against another natural gas pipeline, the $1 billion PennEast project, before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Its interesting that the state of New Jersey, the governor, the attorney general, they have fought the PennEast pipeline since Gov. Murphy was running for election, Montgomery said. None of them have lifted a finger on the New Jersey Natural Gas pipeline.

Murphys office did not respond to a request for comment.

Work on the pipeline, which began in 2018, hasnt always gone smoothly. In some sections along the route, builders have to use a technique known as HDD to install the pipeline underground. Using HDD brings a risk of environmental damage and spills caused by a liquid injected into the earth as part of the drilling process. There have been at least 12 spills related to the construction.

The most high-profile spill occurred last June, when 77-year-old Barbara Fox-Cooper had her home in Upper Freehold condemned after an HDD spill compromised the structures foundation.

Fox-Cooper, who had lived in the home for 32 years, previously said she had only a few minutes to gather her belongings and get out of the house after a building inspector knocked on her door.

I was almost too terrified to investigate after what had felt like an explosion in my house, Fox-Cooper said in a statement following the incident. I discovered huge cracks in my foundation, my basement floor, and even my walls. As I watched in horror water and sludge came pouring in through the cracks. I ran to the construction site and begged them to stop.

In response to that incident, the DEP suspended permits it had issued to the pipeline for HDD work. Those permits were reinstated in November.

New Jersey Natural Gas has said the liquid spilled during the Upper Freehold incident and others is non-toxic, and that the company responded quickly to the messes.

Montgomery said that once the spills came to light, the environmental groups tried to get the new information considered through an evidentiary hearing, but the court rejected the move.

They did not want to know what the reality has been, Montgomery said.

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Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com.
Oregon lawmakers suggested Wednesday they may ask for an investigation into the states fledgling effort to remove hazard trees from wildfire zones after hearing explosive eyewitness accounts from insiders who allege mismanagement and overharvesting of healthy and non-hazardous trees.

Members of the Senate Natural Resources and Wildfire Recovery Committee also indicated they may ask the Oregon Department of Transportation, or Gov. Kate Brown, to pause more cutting until the allegations can be vetted.

This is complicated, said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, the committee chairman. I think we all agree the stakes are high and I think we have a responsibility to do what we can to clarify this situation and either calm the concerns or do something concrete about the concerns.

Goldens comments came toward the end of a two-hour hearing Wednesday examining the states multi-million-dollar effort to remove hazard trees damaged during the historic wildfires that devastated Oregon last fall. Concerns over the program have been building among arborists and conservationists for months but exploded into full public view in recent weeks amid various whistleblower complaints published first by Oregon Public Broadcasting and by The Oregonian/OregonLive just before Wednesdays hearing.

Lawmakers heard from two panels. One was made up of officials from ODOT; the chief executive of the main contractor monitoring the program, CDR Maguire; and a principal from CDR Maguires local quality-control subcontractor, Mason Bruce & Girard.

The other was whistleblowers coming forward to describe the ways in which the project is being bungled and harming Oregon communities already overwhelmed in the aftermath of the wildfires.

The juxtaposition of their testimony was eye-opening. Officials running the project described a program that was meticulously thought out and carefully, if quickly, executed  for good reason given the risks that burned trees pose to passing motorists, property and workers in the field. The critics, meanwhile, described a program that has gone off the rails, with little oversight, unqualified staff, constantly evolving standards for what constitutes a hazard tree, rampant drug use by workers and instances of possible fraud.

The committees chairman acknowledged the committee has no authority over the transportation departments program, but suggested it could make a formal request to the executive branch to take action, if warranted. After hearing from the two panels, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, suggested that the committee might want to call for a halt in cutting until the state gets an independent assessment of the program, and possibly a criminal investigation by the Oregon State Police.

The governors office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.

At the center of the controversy is the question of what actually constitutes a hazard tree, and who gets to make the call on which should be cut down. State officials estimate there are 140,000 of them along highway corridors and on private properties burned during fall wildfires. Some 29,000 have already been removed.

Reggie Fay, a principal at Mason Bruce & Girard, told lawmakers he designed the protocols to identify hazard trees starting in December in cooperation with Tom Ford, the projects lead arborist at the time. He said those protocols had been vetted by multiple agencies, field tested, then incorporated into an algorithm in a hand-held application that arborists and data collectors carry into the field.

He also described a rigorous process in the field in which experienced arborists and foresters identified trees with a 50% probability of failing in the next three years or are in proximity to a roadway. Decisions about which trees meet those standards, he said, are backed up by detailed data collection and a robust quality-control check by arborists and foresters from his firm.

Arborists, he said, always make the final call on which hazard trees should be cut.

But Fay was almost immediately contradicted by Ford, who was let go by CDR in late January.

As the project arborist, Ford was nominally one of the most senior decision makers. He said the protocols were based on very limited science and were never vetted by outside experts. He said he made numerous requests to CDR managers to solicit feedback but was virtually shut out of any management-level decisions. Instead, he said, his protests started his downhill slide, while CDR rushed the guidelines into the field so employees could begin tagging and cutting trees.

Thats where were still at today, is we still dont have a functional definition of a hazard tree for this project, he told lawmakers.

In this composite picture, Ron Carmickle, mayor of Gates, is standing in front of a scorched stand of trees on the Santiam Highway that are marked for cutting in the state's post-fire hazard tree removal program. The upper picture shows the intact canopy of those trees from above.

On his last day with CDR, he said he sent an email to managers indicating that none of the trees that had been marked for cutting should be considered acceptable without a full reassessment by fully trained crews. For me, there was no sense of communication of oversight from my managers at CDR, he said.

What we basically have is a very shoddily run project at this point, sloppy at best, he added. Thats the best thing you could really say about it.  We shouldnt take for granted that theyre actually doing what they say theyre doing.

Things got hairier from there. Eric Phillips, an aerospace machinist who grew up in Mill City, said he took a bottom of the barrel job as a monitor on the project to help save money to buy his first house. He said he initially thought CDR was running a clean operation. But when he was deployed to the sites of the Echo Mountain, Riverside and Beachie Creek fires, his impression quickly soured.

While he had no experience as an arborist, he said when CDR Maguire started rushing the job, he and other low-level employees were given tags and told to start marking trees for cutting, bypassing the guidelines in the handheld application.

The expectation was at least 50 trees per person. Thats when things really started to freak me out, he said.

He said he was working along tree fallers with no experience in the Northwest. They were boasting about the size of the old growth trees they were falling, sometimes indiscriminately into wetlands.

What I saw was CDR pushing boundaries and possibly committing fraud, he said. I mean, Im a monitor. Im supposed to watch them load trucks and take them to the dump, and Im out here  marking trees and Im not an arborist. Theres dozens, dozens of people out there marking trees right now who are not arborists. Theres no oversight.

He said hed read about the robust due diligence process that was supposedly taking place, but saw stands of trees that his crew marked being cut down a week later with no one double checking their work. He also said he was reprimanded when he raised issues with CDR supervisors.

I was told to be quiet, he said. I was just a monitor.

Lawmakers also heard from Ron Carmickle, the mayor of Gates, who said hes been horrified by what hes seen, first with the tagging and cutting of trees in nearby Detroit and now around his community.

Chris Vaughan, an arborist from Bend, told lawmakers he was asked to confirm paperwork documenting safety briefings that never took place. He said there was infighting between arborists and other staff who were applying their own judgment about which trees should be marked. He said he never observed any ODOT oversight in the field. And he said there were obvious substance-abuse issues taking place on the job, and they were occurring at leadership levels.

Lynne Piper, who owns a cabin near Elkhorn that burned in the Beachie Creek fire, offered powerful testimony. She said shed signed a right of entry to let workers access her property and remove the debris, but specified very clearly that her family didnt want any trees removed or any disturbance of their scorched, fragile soil.

She said she went out to the land recently and found that dozens of trees had been marked to be cut, including those far from the homesite and on a steep slope where the damage from cutting them would be far worse than what a falling tree would cause.

Weve already lost a lot. Were traumatized and we dont want to lose any more, she said. We see it now as a young forest, like a reset. We have a 4-year-old (child) and this is our baby forest. The marking of non-hazard trees and trees less than six inches (in diameter) just seems to be a money grab at our expense.

Please, she added. I ask you to stop what appears to be fraud and taking advantage of fire victims.

Rick Till, an arborist unaffiliated with the project who has visited her property, corroborated what she said. He also said hed toured the Santiam Canyon and spotted some very large Douglas Firs marked for cutting with only moderate bark char and an intact canopy.

These are large mature Doug Firs that are marked for removal, he said. Im a trained qualified tree risk assessor, and I cant imagine how you would mark a tree like that as a hazard. Its inconceivable to me, and I saw that on a scale throughout the valley with a lot of green trees marked for removal in many cases because of cosmetic damage.

Golden, the committee chair, asked the quality-control consultant about concerns over the marking process and the qualifications of those marking them.

Fay said it was difficult to respond without seeing the trees in question. He said it was a large project and he knew some trees had been marked incorrectly for cutting and others missed. But he said he guaranteed that all the arborists and foresters working for his company met the qualifications and experience required in the states contract.

Carlos Duart, CDR Maguires chief executive, said the same.

Mac Lynde, a deputy administrator for the state transportation department, described the accusations hed heard from the panel as alarming and said the agency would follow up on all of them.

Lyndes comments were far more conciliatory than earlier statements to the media by the agencys spokesperson, who not only questioned the motivation and credibility of whistleblowers but also suggested claims of overcutting were part of a coordinated misinformation campaign by conservation groups.

Lynde, meanwhile, said the removal of trees from private property was completely at the discretion of owners. He acknowledged that the agency had some challenges of notifying homeowners of activity at their properties.

This is an emergency operation, he said. Were not able to get hold of everyone, but we are trying.

He also emphasized that anyone with questions or concerns about the program, and what the agency is doing, can call the debris removal hotline at 503-934-1700.

The House Special Committee on Wildfire Recovery Committee will hold a separate hearing on the tree-removal program Friday.

 Ted Sickinger; tsickinger@oregonian.com; 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger
Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

Chicago- headquartered Valor Equity Partners announced that it officially closed its fifth fund - Valor Equity Partners V - at $1.7 billion. The oversubscribed fund closed at its hard cap.

Following the Fund V close, Valor is managing approximately $7.3 billion in regulatory assets from a broad range of global, institutional, family office, and high net worth investors.

Led by Antonio Gracias, Valor is perhaps best known for its investments in Elon Musk-owned companies Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. It's also backed a handful of Chicago startups, such as Cameo, Ocient, Fooda, Catalytic, and Uptake.

Valor Equity Partners V will make initial growth-oriented investments of between $25 million and $75 million in technology-enabled companies, a news release said.

Antonio J. Gracias, Valor's Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer, noted, "We are extremely grateful for the support we continue to receive from our existing investors, many of whom have invested with us over multiple funds, and welcome a new group of the U.S. and international limited partners to Fund V. We are honored to have their trust and confidence."

Investors include the $247.7 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund, Albany; the $51 billion Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, Oak Brook, and the Wyoming State Loan and Investment Board, Cheyenne, which oversees $22.7 billion in state permanent funds.

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(Newser)  Police arrested Victor Serriteno in September and charged him with murder after the body of 32-year-old Priscilla Castro was found at a dam in California's Solano County. Now officials are accusing him of killing two more by setting a deadly wildfire to cover up Castro's death. NBC News reports that Serriteno is blamed for setting the Markley Fire, which began on Aug. 18, 2020, killing 82-year-old Douglas Mai and 64-year-old Leon "James" Bone in their homes, Solano County Sheriff Tom Ferrara said at a Wednesday presser. In September, Castro's burned body was discovered and Serriteno was arrested, with investigators saying they believed he'd gone to meet up with Castro for a date on Aug. 16.

story continues below

Castro wasn't seen again after that. Now, "based on an extensive eight-month investigation, we believe Serriteno deliberately set the Markley Fire in an attempt to conceal his crime," Ferrera said at the news conference. The Markley Fire eventually merged with the Hennessey Fire, which was part of the LNU Lightning Complex blazes that burned more than 363,000 acres and killed six. Insider notes that Serriteno has been in police custody since his September arrest. KCRA reports he'll be arraigned Friday, with prosecutors expected to add arson charges, as well as charges for two more homicides. (Read more California wildfires stories.)
How Long Will This Child Live?

No one can say what the future holds for Crispin Brake, born last month at the Bwaila District Hospital in Malawi. But he and the other babies born in Malawi this year have an expected life span of more than 65 years  an unimaginable outlook just two decades ago, when the nations life expectancy was only 44.

People now live 73 years on average globally, more than twice as long as they did a century ago. And today, all around the world, the gap between rich and poor countries continues to close.

Crispin Brake, a few minutes after delivery.

But the gains are slow, and within some wealthy nations, disparities have lingered or even widened. Global-health experts say that further progress will mean not just lifting up poor nations but also ensuring that no population anywhere is being left behind.

The New York Times Magazine sent photographers to Malawi, Australia and Britain to capture a filament here, a thread there, of the tapestry of health and life expectancy around the globe, including the health workers trying to make it more equal.

Malawi

Any further progress on global life expectancy will need to make inroads in sub-Saharan Africa, which continues to significantly lag the rest of the world. But Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda are a few of the countries proving that progress is very much attainable, even in the absence of wealth and resources.

Today, thanks to government commitment, international action and community engagement, Malawi, which has the worlds third-lowest gross domestic product per capita, boasts a life expectancy that exceeds those in 30 or so richer countries.

Glory, 26, in labor at the Kawale Health Center in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.

Much of what gives Crispin Brake the prospect of living a long and healthy life has already been determined. His mother received antenatal care and gave birth in a medical facility, where health professionals encouraged skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding.

Crispin Brake and his mother, Eunice Soda, 24, the day after his birth.

New mothers nurture their babies skin to skin at the Bwaila District Hospital in Lilongwe.

The nursery at the Bwaila District Hospital.

After Crispin goes home, vaccinations, antibiotics, insecticide-treated bed nets and other free health services will help him survive past age 5, the critical point when childhood infections pose a less serious threat.

Many of the health improvements in Malawi can be attributed to government and international investment in primary care, maternal and child health and H.I.V. reduction and treatment.

Brenda receiving an antenatal checkup at the Kawale Health Center.

In Malawi, many of the most-effective programs tend to be simple and community-based, with villagers trained to provide basic services: monitoring households for malnutrition, giving lessons in family planning.

Tuma, 22, and her son, who was being checked for malnutrition by a community volunteer in Mutawale village.

Looking for signs of edema and malnourishment at the Nsaru Health Center in Lilongwe.

The country has also embraced collaborative and innovative opportunities; it is one of three countries to take part in a pilot program for a new malaria vaccine, for example. Coronavirus vaccinations began there in March, before several other countries in the region with deeper pockets and stronger health systems.

A coronavirus vaccination being given at the Kawale Health Center.

Of course, health is tightly interwoven into a countrys wider socioeconomic fabric. No medicine can make or keep healthy someone who lacks access to clean water, nutritious food, safe housing or a quality education, among many other determinants.

In Kunkhongo village, Felesiya receives guidance in meal preparation as part of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement.

Linda, serving pumpkin tea to her daughter, is able to feed her six children from her garden.

Education, for example: In Malawi, primary-school enrollment reached 91 percent in 2019, while the average in sub-Saharan Africa was closer to 80 percent. Education is crucial to household health. A child born to a literate mother has a 50 percent higher chance of surviving past age 5.

The antenatal care unit at the Chitedze Health Center in Lilongwe.

Justina, who is 22 and pregnant with her second child, at the Chitedze Health Center.

Longer life spans tend to come hand and hand with economic development, but this does not mean that everyone in high-income countries is living longer. Over all, national life expectancy can hide unevenness of those gains, says Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

In reality, the health of a country is only as good as the health of its least healthy people. The global-health experts I spoke with, whether or not they were from the United States, all wanted to talk about the gross inequalities and the recent decline in life expectancy in America. Whats concerning is that some of these patterns seen in the United States are present or emerging in a few other high-income countries, if not yet as starkly.

Australia

In Australia, where people over all can expect to live to 83, the Indigenous population  especially those who live in remote areas like the Yarrabah Aboriginal community in rural Queensland  have long faced comparatively worse health outcomes.

Jamahl Creed, 30, cooling off after work in Yarrabah.

A home in Yarrabah. There is a housing crisis in Indigenous communities across Australia.

Royston Dabah and Iris Davidson outside their home in Yarrabah  a fishing shack.

Life expectancies in the two Indigenous groups  Aboriginal people, which are the majority, and Torres Strait Islander people  lag those of non-Indigenous Australians by more than eight years, and their infants and toddlers die at twice the rate.

Rheumatic heart disease, an illness thats often rooted in poverty and reflects a lack of access to basic health services, occurs almost solely among young Indigenous people in Australia, spotlighting the countrys extreme health disparities.

Finette Mundraby, 33, at home in Yarrabah with her youngest daughter, Reannan Kynuna, 3. Mundraby has rheumatic heart disease.

John Gordon, 13, has rheumatic heart disease and has had surgery to replace his heart valves.

The differences in mortality are mostly a result of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. But mental health presents a harrowing problem too: Indigenous Australians die of suicide at twice the rate of their non-Indigenous counterparts  and among adolescents, that disparity nearly doubles.

James Noble, 50, at home in Yarrabah. He lost his leg to complications from a blood clot and also has rheumatic heart disease.

Maxwell Sexton, a 17-year-old who has rheumatic heart disease and Type 1 diabetes, at his cousins home in Yarrabah.

Many Indigenous communities in Australia have taken over their own health care, through more than 300 primary-care clinics that are designed to focus on their culture and values.

Jimmy Perry, 68, being seen by a health worker at the Gurriny Yealamucka health care center in Yarrabah.

Mina Andrews, 67, undergoing kidney dialysis at the primary-care clinic in Yarrabah. Renal disease is a major cause of illness and death among Indigenous Australians.

The national Closing the Gap initiative launched in 2007 with the aim of eliminating the difference in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a single generation. But the gap has narrowed by only three or so years over the last decade, meaning the goal is unlikely to be met.

Britain

In Britain, the increase in overall life expectancy has nearly stalled. And just as in the United States  where, in Ashish Jhas words, your ZIP code is your destiny  the disparities can vary starkly by neighborhood.

The Legion of Mary Wayside Club, in the center of Glasgow, offers meals to the homeless and needy.

National Health Service workers visiting Michael Wood, 71, who is diabetic and insulin-dependent, in Blackpool, England.

Shannon D., 20, injecting heroin in a private, volunteer-run safe space for drug users in Glasgow.

The residents of Westminster, England, can expect to live roughly a decade longer than those in Glasgow, which is the place with the shortest life span in the four British nations  the Glasgow effect, as it has been termed. A similar disparity is evident when Westminster is compared with Blackpool, one of the most deprived areas in England itself.

Connie Morrison, 97, and a nurse at Loveday Chelsea Court Place, a luxury memory-care home in London.

Roy Dantzic, 76, training with Louise Appel at his home in Westminster.

Lalla Hurst, 92, after a dance-movement psychotherapy session at Loveday Chelsea Court Place.

Michael Marmot, the director of the University College Londons Institute of Health Equity, put out a report a decade ago on the countrys health inequalities. England is faltering, he wrote last year.

Throughout Britain, mortality rates are increasing among some of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, demonstrating that inequalities in health mirror the inequalities in society.

Mick Fleming, 55, a pastor who is in recovery from drug and alcohol use, visiting with Kayleigh Hacking, 34, and her partner in Burnley, England.

Jamie Smith, 44, lives in a tent along the Blackpool promenade.

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have noted that in the United States, working-age white people without college degrees have faced an increase in mortality rates over the last several years. One large factor is deaths of despair  from drugs, alcohol, suicide  which are now being seen in other groups as well.

Robert Griffiths, 44, injecting cocaine in Glasgow. He has been using drugs since he was 13.

Sylvia McGrath, 66, outside her home in Glasgow. She has emphysema and lost both parents and a brother to the disease.

Eileen Hopkins suffered from many illnesses. She died at 67, a few days after this picture was taken.

Put simply, Michael Marmot warns, if health has stopped improving, it is a sign that society has stopped improving.

Fleming offering a blessing to Patrick Marren, 56, a drug user in Burnley.

The Amazing Graze Soup Kitchen in Blackpool provides hot meals and food parcels to those in need.

A nurse with the National Health Service tending to Doris Winston, 75, who is diabetic and housebound, in Blackpool.

As these photographs show, extending life spans doesnt require cutting-edge technologies or advanced, specialized care. In certain places, the greatest returns on health investment come from improving births, preventing infections in children and providing other basic medical services.

But even in the wealthiest nations, which enjoy high average life expectancies, the numbers can disguise how particular segments of the population are being left behind.

Above all, these photographs should be cause for inspiration as well as vigilance. They show how possible it is to drastically expand the promise of long life  but also how exquisitely fragile those extra years can be.

An extended family in Glasgow.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi made history Wednesday night, when, for the first time, two women shared the stage with the president when he addresses a Joint Session of Congress.

President Joe Biden delivered his first prime-time speech to a joint session and will be flanked by Pelosi and Harris, two California Democrats, who will appear behind him in the TV frame as he speaks.

'About time,' he whispered to the two women when he joined them on the House rostrum, his words picked up by the microphones.

He began his speech with: 'Madame Speaker. Madame Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium, and its about time.'

The chamber burst into applause at his words.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi made history Wednesday night, when, for the first time, two women shared the stage with the president when he addresses a Joint Session of Congress

President Joe Biden began his speech with: 'Madame Speaker. Madame Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium, and its about time'

Harris down played the historic occasion.

'Normal,' she told reporters in the Capitol as she walked to the House chamber, when asked the significance of two women seated behind the president.

Pelosi was more enthusiastic.

'It's pretty exciting, and it's wonderful to make history. It's about time,' Pelosi told MSNBC earlier in the day.

Pelosi has been on the dais before. In 2007, she made history as the first woman to sit there - a fact then President George W. Bush noted during his State of the Union address. Bush said he had the 'distinct honor' of saying for the first time 'Madame Speaker.'

She also sat at the rostrum for speeches by Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Pelosi, 81, made history by becoming the first female House speaker during Bush's presidency. She reclaimed the powerful leadership post during Trump's presidency and sat behind him during his final two speeches to Congress, famously ripping up her copy of Trump's remarks in 2020 as cameras continued to roll after he was finished addressing lawmakers.

Harris, 56, made history last year when she became the first woman and first Black and Indian American person elected vice president. In her role as president of the Senate, she joins Pelosi to preside over the joint session of Congress.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi clasped hands to greet one another

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said Wednesday night will show men, women, boys and girls that women can attain and hold high-level positions and that they are as entitled to them as men are.

Walsh also noted Biden's promise to put a woman on his ticket, and pointed as well to the diversity of his Cabinet. She said Biden was likely to begin the speech by turning around to face Pelosi and Harris and feeling proud - not just personally, 'but I also think proud for the country and proud for his party and I think he will clearly see the historic implications of this and the role that he played in making that happen.'

'For all of us who care about womens public leadership, we still look forward to the day when the person standing at the podium, in front, is a woman,' Walsh added. 'But for now this is a particularly gratifying moment.'

Apart from the speech Wednesday, Harris and Pelosi have notched another first in U.S. and women's history. They are first and second, respectively, in the line of presidential succession.
Things to know about all the lies on Xinjiang: How have they come about?

China Daily) 16:05, April 29, 2021

A Uygur family in Yuli county, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, April 15, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

In recent years, manipulated and encouraged by the anti-China forces in the United States, some truth-bending "academic institutions", rumor-mongering "experts and scholars" and "amateur actors" with no moral scruples have created a chain of lies to defame Xinjiang and mislead international public discourse, often through dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns.

Truth shall not be tainted, the world should not be deceived and narrative about Xinjiang mustn't be distorted. The recent reports by independent US news website thegrayzone.com and Australian publication Australian Alert Service, and a series of press conferences held by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have revealed the truth about the fraudulent Xinjiang-related "databases" and the so-called "witness testimonies" and, with abundant facts and figures, exposed the real mastermind behind them. Let us get to the bottom of what's going on and reveal the ins and outs of the lies about Xinjiang.

I. As early as in the last century, the United States and other Western countries started to support separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang out of geopolitical purposes in order to destabilize China and contain its development.

During the Cold War, British scholar Bernard Lewis concocted the theory of "arc of crisis" aiming to fracture countries from the Middle East to India based on ethnic lines to divide the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter, argued that the United States must prevent the realization of "the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean". The United States then launched Operation Cyclone, which lasted from 1979 to 1989 and cost up to US$630 million each year. Together with Saudi Arabia and Britain, the United States provided funding, equipment and training for Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Soviet Union.

Right after the Cold War ended, the United States and Britain started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China, by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the US pivoted from the Soviet Union to containing China's influence in Central Asia. US and British intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism in order to weaken Russia and China and serve their agenda of maintaining a unipolar world. Over the years, there emerged a number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups seeking a state of "East Turkistan" or "independence" of Xinjiang, including the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile. Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy has funneled US$8.76 million to Uyghur diaspora groups campaigning against China's policies in Xinjiang. The above-mentioned factors have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in Xinjiang. Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamored for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.

The CIA suggested in 2003 that should the US find itself in a crisis or confrontation with China in the future, the option of using the "Uyghur card" as a means of exerting pressure should not be taken off the table. Under this strategy, the United States, Britain and their allies, latching on to the Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang,which was spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner. Here are what they seek to achieve:

First, a false impression that Muslims in Xinjiang support "independence". This is often done by instigating certain groups to carry out separatist activities to make the public believe people in Xinjiang all want an independent state.

Second, the illusion that the ETIM is for peace. Nothing has been said about relevant groups' close ties with Al-Qaeda and their violent and terrorit rhetoric. In November 2020, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even removed the ETIM from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Third, the false claim of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Some organizations including Human Rights Watch have fabricated reports on Xinjiang, but their sources are just a small group of extremely anti-China overseas Uyghurs. The baseless accounts in those reports were further hyped up and spread by institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

In January 2017, then US Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted that under US law, it is illegal for anyone to provide funding or support for the Al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist organizations. However, the US government has long been, directly or indirectly, providing funds, weapons and intelligence support to these organizations through certain countries in the Middle East.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired US Army Colonel, when speaking at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 on the threefold purposes of the US presence in Afghanistan, stated unabashedly that "the third reason we were there [in Afghanistan] is because there are 20 million Uyghurs [in Xinjiang]. The CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external".

In a video interview in 2015, Sibel Edmonds, a former interpreter with the FBI, talked about how the US had planned and acted to destabilize Xinjiang. She said that "Xinjiang is the entry artery of energy. We want to, gradually and internally, play the gender card and the race card. For that part of the world, we want to play the minority without land. We say we are going to help them and they are being oppressed, Chinese are gunning them down and torturing them." The plan of the US is to copy the tactics used in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq to Xinjiang, making an issue out of thin air and exploit it. "We hope Xinjiang to be the next Taiwan. As Western nations, we never cared about people. That is not within our interest area, unless it can be utilized, capitalized upon to get our objective."

https://citizensparty.org.au/special-report-xinjiang-anglo-americans-sponsor-east-turkistan-campaigns

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Denton, TX (76205)

Today

Thunderstorms - a few could contain very heavy rain, especially overnight. Low 66F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall possibly over one inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Thunderstorms - a few could contain very heavy rain, especially overnight. Low 66F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall possibly over one inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Today, we are joining over 700 health professionals and academics in sending an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison urging him to take a leadership role in expanding the global production of COVID-19 vaccines and other medical tools to fight the pandemic.

The letter, signed by 207 doctors, 177 academics and 111 public health professionals, asks the government to help remove legal and technical barriers to increasing the production of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostic tests, treatments and other equipment.

We argue there is more Australiaand other wealthy nationscan and should be doing to end the pandemic.

The need to act urgently

The COVID-19 pandemic is escalating sharply in the developing world. In addition to India's spiraling infections, cases are surging across the globe in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Sweden, France, Turkey, Mongolia, and Costa Rica.

The roll-out of vaccines must rapidly accelerate. Uncontained transmission will inevitably lead to the emergence of new variants that may be more infectious and resistant to vaccines.

As of today, more than 1.06 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide. However, 37% of these doses have been given in the world's 27 wealthiest countries. Those countries represent just 10.5% of the global population.

Meanwhile, countries making up the least wealthy 11% have received just 1.6% of the vaccine doses so far. At this pace, most of the world's population will remain unprotected at least until 2023.

Monopolization of vaccines

Two of the chief obstacles to vaccinating the world are the monopolization of vaccines and the means of producing them. The world is relying on the pharmaceutical industry and market forces to solve the problems of inadequate supply and inequitable distributionand this won't work.

Rich countries have monopolized the world's supply of vaccines by pre-purchasing doses in bulk. By November 2020, 7.5 billion doses had been reserved, half of these by rich countries making up only 14% of the global population.

Rich countries have also under-invested in COVAX, the global program for equitably distributing vaccines. COVAX needs an additional US$3.2 billion just to meet its target of vaccinating 20% of populations of participating countries.

Added to this, countries faced with large outbreaks have erected export restrictions to bolster their own supply of vaccines, excluding others.

This includes the European Union's refusal to release 3.1 million doses to Australia this year. India has also restricted vaccine exports, resulting in delays in delivering 90 million doses to low-income countries.

The US, too, has been stockpiling its supplies, though the Biden administration announced this week it will now allow the export of raw materials needed to manufacture vaccines in India.

Monopolies on the means of producing vaccines

While the hoarding of vaccines is a concern, the monopolies on the rights to produce them is an even bigger problem.

The exclusive rights to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines are currently held by a small number of companies. These intellectual property rights are enshrined in the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, otherwise known as TRIPS.

Under TRIPS, WTO members must allow patents of at least 20 years for new pharmaceutical products, along with other types of intellectual property protection.

TRIPS allows nations to invoke compulsory licensing of pharmaceutical products, which enables patented inventions to be produced without the consent of the patent owner in an emergency.

But compulsory licensing can only be applied on a product-by-product basis, and it only applies to patents, not the other types of knowledge and data needed to manufacture vaccines.

Countries also tend to face diplomatic and trade pressure not to enact such licenses. To our knowledge, no country has yet issued a compulsory license for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Pandemic looking very bad in Latin America, too. "Nearly 1 million Latin American lives have been lost here...the pandemic is now accelerating again in countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay"https://t.co/yl7HoWrrvH  Shashank Joshi (@shashj) April 23, 2021

Reliance on the pharmaceutical industry and market forces

So far, the world has placed its trust in the pharmaceutical industry and market forces to solve the problem, hoping vaccine makers would voluntarily enter into licensing arrangements with other manufacturers to increase supply.

But voluntary licensing has been little used to date. When it has been used, it has been done in an ad hoc and opaque way, with restrictive conditions.

AstraZeneca, Gamaleya/Sputnik V and Sinopharm are so far the only companies to implement voluntary licensing for COVID-19 vaccines. AstraZeneca, for instance, has licensed SK Bio in South Korea, the Serum Institute of India and CSL in Australia to manufacture the vaccine.

Other companies' reluctance to enter into these arrangements means available manufacturing capacity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is not being used.

The pharmaceutical industry is heavily invested in the status quo. Pfizer and Moderna expect to generate US$15 billion and US$18.4 billion in revenue respectively in 2021, just based on existing supply agreements.

The People's Vaccine Alliance estimates Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have distributed US$26 billion to their shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks in the past 12 monthsenough to cover the cost of vaccinating 1.3 billion people.

What Australia has done to help so far

Australia has been generous to date, providing AU$80 million to COVAX (specifically for low-income countries).

It has also pledged $523 million to the Regional Vaccine Access and Health Security Initiative, which provides health system support for vaccinations and $100 million to the Quad initiative by India, Japan, Australia and the US, which aims to distribute 1 billion doses in the Indo-Pacific region by 2022.

Australia has also provided 8,840 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to PNG for frontline health workers and negotiated with the EU to free up 1 million of its own doses on order for PNG. Canberra has also pledged doses to Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

These contributions are important stop-gaps to help address immediate needs. But they won't go far enough on their own.

Further steps Australia needs to take

Increasing the global supply of vaccines will require governments to remove legal and technical barriers to their production.

To help remove legal barriers, the Australian government should support a proposal by India and South Africa in October 2020 to waive certain intellectual property rights for COVID-19 medical products.

This proposal, known as the "TRIPS Waiver," is now supported by more than 100 of the WTO's 164 member states. However, it has been blocked or stalled by the US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

Australia will have another chance to support it when it's discussed at a TRIPS council meeting later this week.

To remove technical barriers, Australia must use its leverage to persuade pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge and transfer technology to low and middle-income countries.

Australia should also endorse the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), which was established last May by the World Health Organization but has so far been unused.

C-TAP relies on voluntary commitments by pharmaceutical companies. For it to work, governments need to provide incentives or require pharmaceutical companies to share their IP, data and know-how as a condition of public funding for research and development.

Over 700 health professionals and academics see the government's leadership in these areas as a critical part of our pandemic response.

It's time for Australia to act, and to encourage regional allies such as New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore to do the same.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
California Episcopal Bishop suspended for trying to sell church's property dies at 74

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Former Episcopal Church Bishop J. Jon Bruno, who garnered controversy and a suspension when he unsuccessfully tried to sell a church property still being used by a congregation, has died at age 74.

Bruno, who served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles from 2002 to 2017, died on April 23 of natural causes at his home in La Quinta, California, according to his wife, Mary.

Our family and the many others who knew and loved Jon have been blessed with his magnificent life, said Mary Bruno, as reported by the L.A. Diocese.

We are gladdened to know that he has been greeted by St. Peter and is in the loving hands of God. We ask that our family is included in your prayers and our privacy respected in this time of grief.

LA Diocese Bishop John Harvey Taylor also gave his condolences in a statement published by the diocese, saying that Bruno was a positive influence over the lives of many.

I know I speak for hundreds of lay and ordained folk all over our diocese when I say that the sudden loss of our friend, mentor, counselor, teacher, and advocate triggers a grief too deep for words, Taylor said.

Most of all, I remember Jons encouragement, his love, his smile, his twinkle, and his everlasting yes. His legacy will continue to light us along the way. These early days and weeks, I know well pray hardest for Mary and their family, who feel this loss most of all.

Raised in a Roman Catholic family, Bruno was born on Nov. 17, 1946, in Los Angeles and grew up in the area, eventually becoming an Episcopalian and being ordained in the Church in 1978.

He was elected the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles in 2002, and was known for his support of immigration reform, LGBT activism, international ministries, and interfaith dialogue.

In 2003, when the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire garnered controversy for electing the denominations first openly gay bishop, Bruno released a statement stressing unity.

I will proactively live into the Gospel  and its really simple when you think about the fact that the summary of the Law tells us to love the Lord our God with our whole heart, mind and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves, Bruno said at the time.

It doesnt say anything about agreeing with my brothers and sisters about the presence of Jesus in their lives, or the way they interpret the scriptures, but I will uphold their right to be who they are, and I will continue to be the person God intends me to be.

When St. James Anglican of Newport Beach tried to leave the Episcopal Church over theological disagreements, the diocese under Bruno successfully sued to keep the disputed property.

In May 2015, Bruno announced that he was selling the property to Legacy Partners Residential, which planned to build 22 townhouses on the land, even though a new Episcopal congregation had begun meeting there.

Known as St. James the Great, the congregation found themselves locked out of the property in July 2015, per Bruno's orders as he tried to finalize the property sale.

"We were blindsided," explained one St. James member to the Orange County Register in 2015. "I am stunned the leadership of the diocese is so eager for condos instead of this congregation."

The congregation protested and Bruno was brought before a hearing panel for the Disciplinary Board for Bishops, which recommended in 2017 that he be suspended for three years.

During the period of his suspension Bishop Bruno shall refrain from the exercise of the gifts of the ministry conferred by ordination ... and not exercise any authority over the real or personal property or temporal affairs of the Church," concluded the board in a 4-1 decision.

After thorough and detailed consideration of facts, positions, contentions, testimony and documents, the Hearing Panel has concluded that the scope and severity of Bishop Bruno's misconduct, as described above, have unjustly and unnecessarily disturbed the ministry of a mission of the Church.

In December 2017, Bruno resigned as bishop and in April 2018, St. James the Great Episcopal Church of Newport Beach returned to worshiping at the property.

In addition to his wife of 35 years, Bruno is survived by a daughter, a son, a step-son, and nine grandchildren; he is predeceased in death by his sister, Toni Rae Bruno Taix.
[April 29, 2021] Carvana Expands Utah Footprint, Offers As-Soon-As-Next-Day Delivery in Ogden

Carvana (NYSE: CVNA), the leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars, is now offering as-soon-as-next-day touchless home delivery to Ogden area residents. Customers can shop more than 20,000 used cars for sale, secure auto financing, purchase, trade in, and schedule as-soon-as-next-day vehicle delivery in as little as five minutes. Customers can also sell their current vehicle to Carvana and receive a real offer just as quickly, without even purchasing a vehicle. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005362/en/



Carvana expands to Ogden, offering as-soon-as next-day vehicle delivery to area residents. (Photo: Business Wire)

Carvana can save customers valuable time and money, allowing them to skip the dealership and shop from the comfort of home or on the go via their mobile device. Carvana vehicles come with a seven-day return policy, giving customers the time to ensure the vehicle fits their life. This upgrade to the traditional test drive means customers can take their time to see how the car maneuvers in small spaces or if the console space is compatible with everyday essentials. Carvana pioneered online car buying, including its patented 360-degree virtual vehicle tour, where customers can view vehicles in high-definition, inside and out. Carvana vehicles are Carvana Certified, having passed a rigorous 150-point inspection, have never been in a reported accident and have no frame damage. Features, imperfections and updated information about open safety recalls are listed on every car's vehicle description page. Customers looking to trade in their vehicle, or sell a vehicle, can also skip the dealership by simply entering their VIN or license plate number on Carvana.com, answer a few questions and Carvana can pick up the vehicle and bring them a check, as soon as the next day. "Our expansion to Ogden allows us to schedule as-soon-as next day vehicle deliveries to even more Utah residents and bring new customers great prices and a great selection, 100 percent online," said Ernie Garcia, Carvana founder and CEO. "We look forward to serving Ogden area residents and bringing the ease and convenience of The New Way to Buy a Car to the community." Carvana now offers as-soon-as-next-day vehicle delivery to customers in 279 cities across the U.S. About Carvana (NYSE: CVNA) Founded in 2012 and based in Phoenix, Carvana's (NYSE: CVNA) mission is to change the way people buy cars. By removing the traditional dealership infrastructure and replacing it with technology and exceptional customer service, Carvana offers consumers an intuitive and convenient online car buying and financing platform. Carvana.com enables consumers to quickly and easily shop more than 20,000 vehicles, finance, trade-in or sell their current vehicle to Carvana, sign contracts, and schedule as-soon-as-next-day delivery or pickup at one of Carvana's patented, automated Car Vending Machines. For further information on Carvana, please visit www.carvana.com, or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005362/en/

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Business supports the idea of creating a corridor of goals of the second Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC-2) to the Paris Agreement.

The topic was raised during the discussion of the NDC-2 project between the Economic Development Ministry staff and representatives of business associations, the Ukrainian Business and Trade Association (UBTA) informs.

Participants supported the idea of creating a corridor of NDC-2 goals  a range of values within which the Ukrainian economy and business will be able to fulfill their obligations. UBTA supports the corridor option and emphasizes that it will allow for a more balanced approach to the finalization of the document on NDC-2, the statement reads.

According to Deputy Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture  Trade Representative of Ukraine Taras Kachka, Ukraine has remained one of the leaders in reducing emissions over the past 30 years.

At the same time, emissions have been reduced either at the cost of GDP drop (that is, impoverishment of people), or the occupation and physical destruction of production facilities. For us, NDC-2 is an ambition to transform both climate and economic policy... What worries us the most is how to achieve this result, the Deputy Minister said.

Director of the Center for Economic Recovery Kyrylo Kryvolap pointed out the need for a clear definition of financial instruments to achieve the goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cited examples of countries that announced a range of values of the National Determined Contribution.

Unfortunately, the current draft NDC-2 does not include calculations of whether the population, as one of the sources of funding, will be able to afford it. We need to approve the NDC-2 figure, as well as a roadmap for achieving these goals, and financial mechanisms to help. A large number of countries, even more economically developed than Ukraine, actually speak of a corridor of goals. For example, the United States  50-52% from 2005, Canada  40-45% from 2005 to 2030. In 2015, such a corridor was defined by Brazil and Kazakhstan, he stressed.

Representing the interests of Ukrainian farmers, Dmytro Vasyliyev, the head of the European Green Deal Committee of the Ukrainian Business and Trade Association, stressed the possibility of implementing a corridor of climate goals.

We support the position of the President of Ukraine and colleagues from the Center for Economic Recovery and consider it necessary to establish a certain corridor in NDC-2. There is a need to discuss two possible figures: conditional  as the most ambitious, which can be achieved due to financial opportunities both from within the country and by raising funds from abroad  and unconditional, which we can actually reach, he said.

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You didn't need to watch (p)Resident Biden's dim address to the diminished Congress marking his first hundred days in installation to know what would come dribbling out of his mouth. The party that has made a god of government has seized power, and the figurehead of that government knows he must dance to the Marxist-socialists' tune if he doesn't want to find himself 25th-Amendment-ed (or Jeffrey Epstein-ed!) in short order.

So if you happened to miss Dementia-in-Chief's big speech, here's the official State narrative: there are all kinds of problems in America, and almost all of them should be blamed on the last legitimately elected president and his coalition of Make America Great Again (yuck!) "white supremacists." Every problem created by those terrible sub-humans can be solved if we just spend more money, give the government more power, stifle economic growth by fighting the weather, stay terribly afraid all of the time, and pray five times a day at the altar of "woke" racial grievance.

In addition, it is neither the policy nor the preference of the United States government to "make America great" or to imply that America was once great or to suggest, should it later be determined that America was once great, that its past greatness was ever greater than any other nation's greatness. Also, red hats are banned, and an image of that bespectacled woman screaming at the sky during President Trump's 2017 inauguration has been embroidered on all new American flags.

Now, it has come to the attention of the Rice-Harris administration that some Americans believe that the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community engaged in illegal activities both before and after the 2016 presidential election in order first to spy on the Trump campaign and later to obstruct his presidency by pursuing false criminal charges against him and members of his administration and releasing to the press a steady stream of disinformation and propaganda meant to tarnish the former president as a Russian spy and remove him from office. The new administration takes these charges very seriously and has therefore asked the Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA to confirm or deny whether they did anything wrong. Having seen no show of hands, it was decided that the Department of Justice should instead turn its attention to pursuing charges against Americans recklessly questioning those agencies' actions in online articles. The FISA Court has jumped at the chance to track down dissidents in this regard. Never let it be said that the federal government spies on American citizens or denies them the full protections of the Fourth Amendment when it has Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do such work for it.

It is the policy of this new administration that no constitutional amendment is absolute, and should a court of law later incorrectly determine that the Bill of Rights is absolute, then such a ruling will do nothing more than perpetuate institutional racism and white supremacy. The Founding Fathers' advancements in human liberty, just like Isaac Newton's accomplishments in classical mechanics and calculus, aren't relevant in a modern, multicultural nation.

It's imperative that all constitutional rights first be vetted by trained medical professionals in order to determine whether they can coexist in a "healthy" society. "Unhealthy" parts of the Constitution must go. It is "healthy" to chemically castrate children in the name of feelings and to resettle COVID-positive illegal aliens around the U.S. without worrying about the spread of disease. It is "unhealthy" to value a baby's life as much as a mother's when restricting abortion. Should you have trouble determining which constitutional rights still exist, please consult Dr. Fauci's latest proclamations on what liberties are permitted in a world with germs before inadvertently acting more freely than he believes is in your best interest.

After this latest health emergency stemming from the virus that most likely arose in China but must not be referred to as the "China Virus" out of the obvious need to keep angry infected people from randomly engaging in violence against Asians, it is clear that America is actually in the middle of innumerable "health emergencies," which we must address before Americans are allowed to remove their masks. There's a "systemic racism health emergency" and a "gun violence health emergency" and a "D.C. statehood health emergency." There are even a "filibuster health emergency" and an "Electoral College health emergency" that might mean the end of "democracy" unless Congress acts fast! The good news is, if Congress fails to pass legislation quickly, Attorney General Merrick Garland has already determined that the president actually has the power to rewrite the Constitution and make law through simple "pen and phone" executive orders. Somebody should put that guy on the Supreme Court!

In a particularly touching moment, the president directed some important health warnings to Republicans. First, since conservative speech is now "hate speech," and "hate speech" is "extremist," and "extremism" gets you locked up in solitary confinement without due process or habeas corpus for months at a time, or worse, murdered in cold blood, it's in the best interest of conservatives to forfeit their free speech. Second, since gun-owners are actually "gun nuts" and must be disarmed before they can defend themselves from those who would wish them harm. They should hand over their weapons before government agents are forced to harm them. And lastly, since highlighting the rampant fraud of the last election is "actual violence" against "democracy," conservatives shouldn't be surprised when "democracy" punches back. Fair warnings, I guess.

Oh, and a number of dictionary definitions were officially "improved" by executive order. "Infrastructure project" no longer has anything to do with bridges and roads but instead refers to pork-barrel graft that allows Democrats to launder payoffs to regime-supporters. "Bipartisanship" now simply means that both straight and gay Democrats back Democrat partisanship. And "voter suppression" relates to anything that hinders Democrats from cheating in elections. More new definitions are on their way. (I hear "gulag" might soon become "hotel for Trump-supporters"  yay!)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Out of the top 10 mobile apps with the most active users in China, Tencent developed or is a strategic investor in four of them, according to Analysys International, an internet data services firm in Beijing. Three are Alibabas, two are the search engine Baidus and one is ByteDances Douyin.

Out of the top 30, 14 belong to what Chinese users call the Tencent camp. Five are in the Alibaba camp, four are owned by Baidu, and three are owned by ByteDance. Only four apps arent affiliated with any of the giants.

Tencent will become Samsung, said the stock investor Hou Ning on Weibo, the social media platform, referring to the South Korean conglomerate that sells everything from computer chips to groceries to insurance. It does pretty much everything except giving birth to children. (Weibo is aligned with Alibaba, which owns about a 30 percent stake in the company.)

With that concentration of power came abuse of power.

For years, Alibaba prevented merchants using its services, like the online bazaar Taobao, from selling their goods on other shopping platforms. Tencents WeChat app, which has one billion active accounts, doesnt allow users to share links for Taobao merchandise or Douyin short videos. Meituan, Chinas dominant meal delivery app, raised commission rates for restaurants that refused to sign exclusive agreements. The first page of results from Baidu, the search company, is often filled with links to pages controlled by  well, guess who.

The same limits can be found among start-ups. Once start-up founders accept investment from Tencent, they usually have to agree that they wont seek investment from Alibaba. And vice versa.

The internet industry is fairly concentrated in the United States, too, but not like it is in China. Imagine a world in which, if youre selling a product on Amazon, you can buy ads for it only on Amazon, not Google.
(ANSA) - CAGLIARI, APR 29 - A 50-year-old man from the province of Cagliari has been placed under investigation on suspicion of fighting alongside pro-Russian militia against the Ukrainian army in the armed conflict in the eastern Ukrainian Donbass region, sources said Thursday.

The man, who does not have a criminal record, is being probed for enrolment and training for terrorism purposes.

He has been served an order not to leave the country.

The police's Lone Wolf operation is aimed at stopping international terrorism, police said.

The man's home was searched in the operation.

The man has been to the Donbass region on several occasions, DIGOS security police established in a probe lasting over a year.

He has recently been combing the Web for information on military self-training techniques, police said.

He was planning to return to eastern Ukraine shortly, they said.

(ANSA).


SINGAPORE, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Informa Tech and the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) announced new details around Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG) today.

The invitation-only ATxSummit will gather top government, tech and business leaders to engage in conversations on trends, challenges and opportunities across four key pillars  Tech x Trust, Tech x Good, Tech x Builders, and Tech x Creative  to shape our shared digital future.

The inaugural summit will spearhead ATxSG events, to be held from 13 to 16 July 2021. This will be a hybrid event in Singapore that will bring together the private and public sectors physically and virtually at the Marina Bay Sands. ATxSG is positioned as a unique opportunity to have open and in-depth conversations across government and businesses on the role technology plays in society, and how it serves as both a bridge and catalyst for greater innovation in the digital economy.

Mr Lew Chuen Hong, Chief Executive, Infocomm Media Development Authority, said, "Singapore is the gateway and a Global-Asia node to the world's fastest growing digital economies. We are excited to host this pioneering event in Singapore, bringing together business, tech and government leaders to shape our shared digital future. The best innovations arise at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, international business, creative pursuits, and society at large. We look forward to igniting the conversations of thought leaders and change makers at the inaugural ATxSG."

Delegates can expect to hear from luminary speakers and panellists at the ATxSummit, an exclusive invite-only conference, including Mr Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Engineering Fellow, Google Research Int'l; Mr Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle; Mr James Murdoch, Founder and CEO, Lupa Systems; Ms Sunita Kaur, Senior Vice President, APAC, Twitch; and Mr Uday Shankar, President, Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, former President, Asia Pacific of the Walt Disney Company and the Chairman of Star and Disney India.

Four overarching pillars will guide conversations around the most pertinent issues within today's digital economy. They consist of:

Tech x Trust: Understand the role of tech in engendering trust, in an increasingly "trust-less" world.

Tech x Good: Diversity, inclusivity and sustainability at an individual, company and country level are necessary if tech is to be used for good.

Tech x Builders: Tech does not build itself. From developers to users, from dreamers to investors. How to build innovative products and solutions that maximise the impact of tech.

Tech x Creative: Tech can be beautiful. Creative design and storytelling elevate technology, and is often the key that defines success for products, services and brands.

"Being deeply rooted in the global technology ecosystem and as part of the world's largest B2B event organiser, ATxSG will be the newest addition to Informa Tech's series of global festivals, where we strive to inspire tech communities to design, build and run a better world. We look forward to bringing those international networks and global tech brands such as AT&T, AWS, Google, Huawei, IBM, Nokia, Oracle and Salesforce to facilitate conversations, and share insights and new innovations that will drive Asia's digital economies forward," said Ms Carolyn Dawson, Managing Director, Informa Tech.

With an expected 3,000 attendees at the Marina Bay Sands, ATxSG will host local and international VIPs across four segments:

ATxSummit, an exclusive invite-only summit hosted by IMDA that gathers governments, global enterprises and communities. Delegates will engage in conversations on trends, challenges and opportunities across the four key pillars.

ATxEnterprise, a B2B platform for the Telecommunications, Media and Tech industries, comprising long-running exhibition and conferences  BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia, SatelliteAsia and TechXLR8 Asia.

ATxImpact, a collection of events fostering Social Impact and start-ups including Elevating Founders Asia, Innovfest and accelerateHER Asia.

ATxPlus, which features a selection of conferences providing deeper insights into today's hottest topics in business and technology.

"We are delighted to support IMDA and Informa Tech as they reimagine the future of MICE through the inaugural ATxSG. Singapore is breaking new ground with its steady and safe resumption of larger-scale events, and we will continue to work closely with our MICE industry players to strengthen our position as a trusted Global Asia Node for top business events. We look forward to providing a safe and fruitful experience for all attendees of ATxSG 2021," said Mr Keith Tan, Chief Executive, Singapore Tourism Board.

For more information on the events, please refer to our annex below or visit asiatechxsg.com.

Join our social conversation: LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter

About Asia Tech x Singapore

Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG) is Asia's flagship tech event where technology intersects with society and the digital economy. Taking place from 13 to 16 July 2021, ATxSG is organised by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Informa Tech and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). This inaugural event builds on the foundations of Singapore's Smart Nation Innovation Week and Informa Tech's ConnecTechAsia into a single flagship tech platform led by four main segments  ATxSummit, ATxEnterprise, ATxImpact, and ATxPlus. For more information on the event, please visit asiatechxsg.com.

ATxSG drives conversations only possible in Singapore across business, tech and government that will shape our shared digital future. It enables participants to network and keep their finger on the pulse of latest tech trends, challenges and opportunities.

About Informa Tech

Informa Tech is a market leading provider of integrated research, media, training and events to the global Technology community.

We're an international business of more than 1,000 colleagues, operating in more than 20 markets. Our aim is to inspire the Technology community to design, build and run a better digital world through research, media, training and event brands that inform, educate and connect. Over 14,000 professionals subscribe to our research, with 225,000 delegates attending our events and over 18,000 students participating in our training programmes each year, and nearly 4 million people visiting our digital communities each month.

This flagship event joins Informa Tech's portfolio of global tech festivals including London Tech Week and Africa Tech Fest. Hosted in thriving innovation hubs, these global events aim to unite the tech ecosystem to inspire impactful innovation, building a better digital world for both business and society.

Learn more about Informa Tech

Learn more about London Tech Week

Learn more about AfricaTech Fest

About Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA)

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) leads Singapore's digital transformation with infocomm media. To do this, IMDA will develop a dynamic digital economy and a cohesive digital society, driven by an exceptional infocomm media (ICM) ecosystem  by developing talent, strengthening business capabilities, and enhancing Singapore's ICM infrastructure. IMDA also regulates the telecommunications and media sectors to safeguard consumer interests while fostering a pro-business environment, and enhances Singapore's data protection regime through the Personal Data Protection Commission.

For more news and information, visit www.imda.gov.sg or follow IMDA on Facebook IMDAsg and Twitter @IMDAsg.

About the Singapore Tourism Board

The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) is the lead development agency for tourism, one of Singapore's key economic sectors. Together with industry partners and the community, we shape a dynamic Singapore tourism landscape. We bring the Passion Made Possible brand to life by differentiating Singapore as a vibrant destination that inspires people to share and deepen their passions.

More: www.stb.gov.sg or www.visitsingapore.com | Follow us: facebook.com/STBsingapore or linkedin.com/company/singapore-tourism-board

ANNEX

Details of ATxSG Events

ATxSummit

An exclusive invite-only summit. Gathering governments, global enterprises and communities, delegates will engage in conversations on trends, challenges and opportunities across four key pillars.

Pillars

Tech x Trust, where the role of tech in engendering trust in our increasingly "trust-less" world is dissected by thought leaders in the space.

Tech x Good, which examines how diversity, inclusivity and sustainability are necessary at an individual, company and country level.

Tech x Builders, that spotlights pioneers who have pushed the limits of innovation to build products and solutions that maximise the impact of technology.

Tech x Creative, that brings you behind the scenes to reveal how creative design and storytelling elevate technology.

Date: July 13, 2021

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

ATxEnterprise

The flagship industry events of ATxSG, bringing together telecommunications, broadcast and media, satellite and enterprise solutions into exhibition marketplaces and conferences.

BroadcastAsia

BroadcastAsia is the region's must-attend international trade event where industry leaders present the newest and most innovative technologies reshaping the value chain for pro-audio, film, digital media and broadcasting.

Date: July 14  15, 2021 (hybrid)

July 16, 2021 (virtual only)

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

CommunicAsia

CommunicAsia is Asia's most established and relevant international industry event for the telecommunications sector, showcasing the latest ICT technologies that help companies in Asia evolve and maintain a competitive edge in the communications and digital world.

Date: July 14  15, 2021 (hybrid)

July 16, 2021 (virtual only)

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

SatelliteAsia

SatelliteAsia is the largest gathering of satellite operators in Asia. Previously a segment of CommunicAsia, SatelliteAsia now has its own stage to feature Satellite technology, equipment and their applications in the many industries they serve.

Date: July 14  15, 2021 (hybrid)

July 16, 2021 (virtual only)

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

TechXLR8 Asia

TechXLR8 Asia spotlights technologies that help enterprises from across industry verticals in their digital transformation journey. The event will explore the role new innovations play in connecting cities, businesses, citizens and machines.

Date: July 14  15, 2021 (hybrid)

July 16, 2021 (virtual only)

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

ATxImpact

A collection of events fostering Social Impact. Inspiring start-ups, talents, diversity & inclusivity and topical training for the businesses of tomorrow.

Elevating Founders Asia and Innovfest

Elevating Founders Asia and Innovfest by NUS Enterprise will make up the start-up programme of Asia Tech x Singapore, with the aim to nurture start-ups and promote entrepreneurship in the region.

Date: July 14  15, 2021 (hybrid)

July 16, 2021 (virtual Only)

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

accelerateHER Asia

accelerateHER Asia equips leaders and achievers in tech with invaluable insights and advice from today's eminent women founders, c-suite executives and change makers.

Date: July 15, 2021

Venue: Virtual only

Telecoms & Tech Academy

Telecoms & Tech Academy is the leading training partner to the industry, having trained more than 30,000 professionals and 500 businesses globally. Its training portfolio continues to evolve to help address new and emerging skills gaps telecoms & tech businesses are facing.

Date: July 12 - 16, 2021

Venue: Virtual only

ATxPlus

An especially chosen selection of conferences providing deeper insight into today's hottest topics in business and technology.

AI Governance Conference

The Conference convenes thought leaders and industry experts from East and West to discuss strategic values of AI governance, technology trends and showcase real-life implementations.

Date: July 14, 2021

Venue: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

FutureChina Global Forum

Established in 2010 by Business China, the FutureChina Global Forum is the only Forum going beyond the usual discussions on China's economic and political evolution to provide a holistic perspective of how China is evolving, the various drivers of change and how they interact with one another. The formats of discussion and the layout of the venue are designed to promote genuine, candid discussions as well as high level of interaction.

Date: July 12 and 13, 2021

Venue: Singapore

Enabling Safe and Innovative Visitor Experiences

ATxSG is a pilot event supported by the Emerging Stronger Taskforce (EST)[1] Alliance for Action (AfA) on Enabling Safe and Innovative Visitor Experiences that will take place following the successful pilot of TravelRevive in November 2020 and Geo Connect Asia in March 2021, and the upcoming Architecture & Building Services in June 2021. ATxSG will see rigorous measures put in place to ensure attendees' safety. With the support of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), ATxSG paves the way for calibrated resumption of MICE events in a safe, trusted and innovative manner, piloting new solutions that prioritise safety without compromising the event experience.

[1] The EST was formed under the Future Economy Council (FEC) to review how Singapore can stay economically resilient and build new sources of dynamism to emerge stronger from COVID-19. The EST is co-chaired by Minister for National Development, Mr Desmond Lee, and Group CEO of PSA International, Mr Tan Chong Meng, and comprises members from various sectors, including businesses, and trade associations and chambers. It has convened the Singapore Together AfAs, which are industry-led, government-supported coalitions that act quickly by prototyping ideas in areas of opportunity for Singapore. The AfA on Enabling Safe and Innovative Visitor Experiences is one of these AfAs.

SOURCE The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)

Related Links

http://www.imda.gov.sg


NEW HAVEN  A city woman involved in a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain oxycodone with a former doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital was sentenced to five years of probation.

Jimiesha McKoy, then 30, was charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute in November 2019, prosecutors said previously.

McKoy allegedly allowed Jennifer Farrell, formerly a doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital, to write prescriptions for oxycodone in her name and the names of two other individuals, although Farrell had not evaluated any of them.

She then picked up the prescriptions, gave Farrell some of the pills, used others, and gave the others to her then-boyfriend, who sold them, Acting U.S. Attorney Leonard Boyle and Assistant U.S. Attorney Heather Cherry said in their sentencing memorandum.

In their memorandum, Boyle and Cherry argued that McKoy was a notable participant in the scheme and that some prison time was appropriate.

However, they said a guidelines sentence, 30 to 37 months in prison, was not required in the case.

McKoy was sentenced Monday in U.S. District Court.

In his memorandum, defense attorney James Glasser sought a minimal term of imprisonment, if any, arguing that McKoys conduct was out of character, driven by an addiction to opioids and the relationship with her former boyfriend. She had no prior criminal record, Glasser said.

Glasser said in the memo that McKoy had spent 10 months at the Virginia Wells Transitional Housing facility as part of her pretrial detention, where she was drug tested regularly, coming up clean and receiving plaudits from fellow residents and staffers.

Ms. McKoys deepest wish is to return to obscurity, continue to work hard, hopefully, one day as a firefighter, Glasser said. Ms. McKoy has no prior criminal history and will never again commit a crime. The public does not need to be protected from her. Ms. McKoys remorse for her crime is profound; most devastating to Ms. McKoy is that she has shamed herself before her daughter, mother, father and, most importantly, her loving grandparents who have served as important role models.

McKoy previously expressed her remorse in a statement to the court, Glasser said in the memo, quoting from her remarks.

I find it difficult to find the right words to express what my life has been like this past year. Ever since this situation it felt like my world came crashing down, there is no excuse, no justification, and no apology good enough in this world to explain the crime I committed. When I entered the program for 10 months I have had time to reflect on the recklessness and foolishness of my decisions, said McKoy. I wake up every morning and ask myself was it worth it? I know my life will never ever be the same but hopefully this change will be for the better because beyond all of this, I still consider myself the humble, generous, loving, independent vibrant, strong person I am. I have flaws like any other human being.

Judge Jeffrey Meyer sentenced McKoy to five years probation and 200 hours of community service on Monday, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for Connecticut.

Farrell previously pleaded guilty to distribution of controlled substances outside the scope of her professional practice and without a legitimate medical purpose in March. She faces up to 20 years in prison; her sentencing is scheduled for May 26.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
Click here to read the full article.

It was 18 years ago  how time flies in the indie world  that the married directing team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman brought us American Splendor, an achingly humane, scabrously funny, miraculously playful and inventive lower-depths comedy based on the life and work of the lumpen verite comic-book diarist Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti in a performance of irascible brilliance. The movie was an audacious triumph (it racked up awards, including a National Society of Film Critics nod for best movie of the year), and going forward one wanted, and expected, more great things from Pulcini and Berman. In the years since, however, nothing theyve done (The Nanny Diaries, 10,000 Saints) has come within miles of living up to the promise of that landmark film. The odd thing is that their earnest empathy and craft is always on display; they have an instinct for pace, for camera angles, for how to seek out three dimensions in places where too many filmmakers settle for two. Yet lightning has never struck again for them.

Im always hoping it will, and their latest film, Things Heard & Seen (it drops April 29 on Netflix), offers their usual tease of look-were-honest-commercial-filmmakers-trying-to-aim-high. Its a ghost story, set in 1980, starring Amanda Seyfried and James Norton as Catherine and George Claire, a couple with a young daughter who move from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where George has just gotten his Ph.D in art history from Columbia, to the Hudson Valley, where he lands a job as a professor at Saginaw, a small private college distinguished mostly by its bucolic setting.

To make the move, Catherine is forced to put her own career as an art restorer on hold, which she does with a quiet regret that becomes more tangible when they tour the old farmhouse George has his heart set on buying. Its a fixer-upper with great bones, and Catherine is just the one to renovate it (which she does, with supreme taste). But we can already see that shes not getting off on his boutique dream of being an academic star in the upstate countryside. For George, its always all about him.

The most interesting aspect of Things Heard & Seen are its scenes from a marriage thats falling apart in slow motion. Seyfried knows how to bury Catherines resentment so that it simmers just under the surface of encounters, and Norton (from The Nevers), who looks like a dreamboat version of Michael Murphy, knows how to play a husband whos a narcissist and maybe worse. He does it by trying to reel in the gaslighting side of himself, which only exposes it more.

Then theres the ghost stuff. In the bedroom of four-year-old Franny (Ana Sophia Heger), a rocking chair moves all by itself. A creepy nightlight throbs and pulsates with a David Lynchian glitchy electric buzz. Elsewhere, an electric toothbrush turns on by itself, and a mysterious light-pulse wafts through the kitchen. Theres no ambiguity about whether were seeing something supernatural. But since these motifs, while cleverly executed, are standard enough to be found in a schlock ghost thriller, we assume that the filmmakers have something more elaborate up their sleeves. For several decades now, its been the exception rather than the rule to see a ghost story thats an actual drama  like What Lies Beneath, The Sixth Sense, or Hereditary. For a while, one watches Things Heard & Seen thinking theres a ghost of a chance it might join their company.

It does not. Seyfried and Norton do a vivid job of enacting the testy chemistry of a toxifying marriage, and there are fun performances by the two actors playing Georges academic colleagues. F. Murray Abraham, who is 81 but so crisp and spry he seems 15 years younger, plays the art-history department chairman, a courtly chap with a sinister fixation on Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Swedish theologian who spun his vision of the afterlife out of a mystic communion he claimed to have with angels and demons. As soon as Abraham says the word seance, we know were hes coming from. And Rhea Seehorn, from Better Call Saul, gives a delectable sharp-tongued performance as Justine, an artful weaver of tapestries whos got Georges number from the beginning, but gets it more with every encounter. The filmmakers dont do a lot with the 1980 setting (which comes from the novel the movie is based on, Elizabeth Brundages All Things Cease to Appear), but the reason its there is to fill in the portrait of a beleaguered wife at a time when male caddishness was less questioned.

Why does the horse trainer (Natalie Dyer, from Stranger Things) who George winds up sleeping with pop up in so many convenient locales that she could be an Airplane! character named Connie Coincidence? And why, after Catherine does all that renovating, hiring two local brothers at dirt-cheap prices, does she never get around to peeling and painting the houses scruffy exterior? One more question: Why isnt the film remotely scary? Those brothers, hunky Eddy (Alex Neustaedter) and dutiful Cole (Jack Gore), used to live in the house, but the backstory of what happened to them there has been hidden from Catherine. When she finds out, shes shocked  and you may be shocked, too, at how Amityville banal it is. What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are cliches.

Reviewed online, April 28, 2021. MPAA rating: Not rated. Running time: 121 MIN.

Production

A Netflix release of a Likely Story production, in association with Second Wind Productions. Producers: Anthony Bregman, Stefanie Azpiazu, Peter Cro, Julie Cohen. Executive producers: Robert Pulcini, Shari Springer Berman, Peter Pastorelli, Stephen Lippross.

Crew

Directors, screenplay: Robert Pulcini, Shari Springer Berman. Camera: Larry Smith. Klemens Becker. Editors: Louise Ford, Andrew Monshein. Music: Peter Raeburn.

With

Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Rhea Seehorn, Ana Sophia Heger, F. Murray Abraham, Alex Neustaedter, Natalia Dyer, Karen Allen, Jack Gore, Michael OKeefe, James Urbaniak.

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San Francisco, April 29 : Facebook Marketplace has now more than 1 billion users, the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an update during the company's latest earnings call.

Zuckerberg said that there are now more than 1 million monthly active shops and over 250 million monthly shops and visitors.

"We are also focused on building more native commerce tools across our apps. We recently updated WhatsApp catalog, so businesses can keep them updated from their computers and to include what's in stock," Facebook CEO said on late Wednesday.

"We launched carts on WhatsApp last year, and people have used them to send orders more than 5 million times" he added.

The CEO also said the company is building a broader infrastructure to support commerce, everything from payments to customer service and support.

"WhatsApp Payments is now live in India, and we have gotten approval in Brazil to launch shortly, too," Zuckerberg said.

"We're starting to see a meaningful shift in the way that people communicate with businesses. For a lot of people, online commerce is less about websites and shops and more about messaging," he added.

According to the company, businesses using the WhatsApp business API are already sending more than 100 million messages per day.

Over the last year, during the height of Covid-19, total daily conversations between people and businesses on Messenger and Instagram grew by more than 40 per cent, the company said.

More than 3 million advertisers are already using click-to-message ads to direct people to Messenger. And after introducing click-to-WhatsApp ads, nearly 1 million advertisers have already started using them, too, it added.
Oregon will distribute more than $40 million in grants through the first round of its new Landlord Compensation Fund to cover the missed rent of nearly 12,000 households. Applications for a second round open Thursday.

Nicole Stingh, a spokesperson for Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state agency administering the new program, said the first round will pay 1,940 landlords statewide.

The money comes from $150 million that state lawmakers allocated in December to seed the program, which partially reimburses landlords when tenants fall behind due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Landlords who accept funding will receive grants to cover 80% of their tenants outstanding rent and, in turn, must forgive the other 20%.

The first round covered missed rent accumulated between April 2020 and February 2021. Stingh said the agency funded every eligible landlord who applied.

However, it could take up to two months for those landlords to receive the money as local public housing authorities finalize the grants.

The state approved the grants despite a rocky rollout to the program and technical issues with the online application portal that initially prevented landlords from submitting required documents with their applications. Applications for the first round opened in February, but the technical issues led to major processing delays.

Those technical issues also forced the state to delay the programs second round.

Applications for the second round of funding open at 10 a.m. Thursday and close at 5 p.m. May 17. Landlords can seek funding to cover 80% of outstanding rent tenants accumulated between April 2020 and May 2021. The state plans to make $70 million available during the second round.

The agency says the technical issues that plagued the first round have been resolved.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg
Lowes is in the midst of hiring tens of thousands of associates to its stores across the country, opening up more than 1,000 roles in Massachusetts.

The company has opened up more than 50,000 seasonal, part-time and full-time store associate positions throughout the United States as Lowes heads into the busiest season for home improvement, according to a statement from the retail chain.

On May 4, Lowes said, the company will host National Hiring Day to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start a part-time job or a full-time career at the retailer. Candidates can apply in-person for the roles at stores nationwide from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. They will have the opportunity to meet hiring managers, speak with associates and receive on-the-spot offers.

National Hiring Day has been a simple and convenient way for any job seeker to apply for an open role, get to know us and begin a career with Lowes, Janice Dupre, Lowes executive vice president of human resources, said in a statement. Our associates drive our success in making homes better for all, and we are committed to enabling everyone who touches our business to thrive and contribute to that success.

The open positions at Lowes, which include overnight and daytime roles, are available for any qualified applicant 18 years of age or older, from students and military service members to retirees. The jobs include cashiers, retail associates, stockers and receivers, merchandising service associates, drivers and supervisors.

More than 90,000 associates were hired into permanent roles at Lowes last year, and the companys now rounding out its team to help customers with every project they take on this spring and summer, according to the retail chain.

In 2020, Lowes provided nearly $1.3 billion in coronavirus-related support for associates, communities and store safety, according to the retailer.

This year, Fortune recognized Lowes as the No. 1 Most Admired Specialty Retailer and one of the Worlds Most Admired Companies, the company noted.
New Jersey on Thursday reported another 2,092 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and an additional 20 confirmed deaths as statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations fell below 1,700 and the states transmission rate fell below 0.80 for the first time in eight months.

Gov. Phil Murphy announced the update at an unrelated event in Newark, once again saying the state will take more reopening steps if numbers keep improving, though he did not provide details or a timeline.

We keep up that work together, and were gonna open this sucker up wide, said Murphy, who hinted this week that hell have more news Monday about easing restrictions and boosting vaccinations.

Nearly 3 million people have been fully vaccinated in New Jersey as of Thursday  roughly 43% of the states 6.9 million adults. The states goal is to have 70% of the states eligible population  about 4.7 million people  vaccinated by the end of June. Nearly 4.2 million people  about 61% of adults  have received at least one vaccine dose.

With officials seeking to fight back against dwindling demand, New Jersey announced Thursday that all six of its coronavirus vaccine mega-sites will offer walk-in vaccinations without an appointment from now on.

The states seven-day average for new confirmed positive COVID-19 tests dropped to 1,938, down 33% from a week ago and 47% from a month ago, as the states third wave of the outbreak continues to wane. The seven-day average hadnt been below 2,000 since Nov. 6.

There were 1,691 coronavirus patients hospitalized across New Jerseys 71 hospitals as of Wednesday night. Thats the lowest number since Nov. 9.

The latest statewide rate of transmission is 0.72, a big drop from 0.80 a day earlier. Any number under 1 indicates that the outbreak is slowing and each new case is leading to less than one additional case. The last time the states rate was below 0.80 was Aug. 28, when it was 0.77.

The positivity rate for tests conducted on Sunday, the most recent day available, was 8.19%. Positivity rates tend to be higher on weekend days when fewer tests are conducted. The positivity rate during weekdays last week was under 7%.

New Jersey has now reported 871,333 confirmed coronavirus cases out of more than 13.4 million PCR tests in the nearly 14 months since the state reported its first case March 4, 2020.

There have also been 124,032 positive antigen tests during the outbreak. Those cases are considered probable, and health officials have warned that positive antigen tests could overlap with the confirmed PCR tests because they are sometimes given in tandem.

The state of 9.2 million people has reported 25,529 residents have died from complications related to COVID-19  including 22,904 confirmed deaths and 2,625 fatalities considered probable.

New Jersey has the most coronavirus deaths per capita among American states.

On Thursday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all of the city will fully reopen from COVID-19 restrictions.

Murphy has so far resisted releasing a broad timeline for New Jersey, instead announcing incremental steps. He announced Monday that outdoor gathering limits in the state will increase from 200 to 500 people starting on May 10, in time for college and high school graduations. Plus, private catered events such as weddings and proms will go from 35% to 50% of a venues capacity with a maximum of 250 people, up from 150.

State Sen. Declan OScanlon, R-Monmouth, a frequent critic of Murphys handling of the economy during the pandemic, said Thursday Murphy needs to stop with foot-dragging and talk of baby steps.

While other states, as well as New York City, announce dates of total reopening, the people of NJ are left in limbo and wading through continued compliance with myriad of outdated rules and restrictions which are complicated at best and hopelessly indecipherable at worst, OScanlon said.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage

HOSPITALIZATIONS

There were 1,691 patients hospitalized with confirmed (1,646) or suspected COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday night  77 fewer than the previous night, according to state data.

That included 384 in critical or intensive care (nine more than the night before), with 224 on ventilators (eight fewer).

There were 246 COVID-19 patients discharged Wednesday, while 166 were admitted.

By comparison, hospitalizations peaked at more than 8,300 patients during the first wave of the pandemic in April and more than 3,800 during the second wave in December.

SCHOOL CASES

New Jersey has reported 263 in-school coronavirus outbreaks, which have resulted in 1,157 cases among students, teachers and school staff this academic year, according to state data.

The state defines school outbreaks as cases where contact tracers determined two or more students or school staff caught or transmitted COVID-19 in the classroom or during academic activities at school. Those numbers do not include students or staff believed to have been infected outside school or cases that cant be confirmed as in-school outbreaks.

There are about 1.4 million public school students and teachers across the state, though teaching methods amid the outbreak have varied, with some schools teaching in-person, some using a hybrid format and others remaining all-remote.

Murphy has said New Jerseys schools are expected to return to full in-person classes for the next school year.

AGE BREAKDOWN

Broken down by age, those 30 to 49 years old make up the largest percentage of New Jersey residents who have caught the virus (30.9%), followed by those 50-64 (22.6%), 18-29 (19.9%), 65-79 (10.1%), 5-17 (9.8%), 80 and older (4.4%) and 0-4 (2%).

On average, the virus has been more deadly for older residents, especially those with preexisting conditions. Nearly half the states COVID-19 deaths have been among residents 80 and older (46.57%), followed by those 65-79 (32.97%), 50-64 (15.99%), 30-49 (4.06%), 18-29 (0.39%), 5-17 (0%) and 0-4 (0.02%).

At least 8,027 of the states COVID-19 deaths have been among residents and staff members at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, according to state data.

There are active outbreaks at 218 facilities, resulting in 2,469 active cases among residents and 3,295 among staffers. Those numbers have slowed as vaccinations continue at the facilities.

GLOBAL NUMBERS

As of Thursday morning, there have been 149.8 million positive COVID-19 tests across the globe, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University. More than 3.15 million people have died from coronavirus-related complications.

The U.S. has reported the most cases, at more than 32.2 million, and the most deaths, at more than 574,300.

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Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com.
Beijing: China on Thursday launched the main module of its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long term, the latest success for a program that has realised a number of its growing ambitions in recent years.

The Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, module blasted into space atop a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Centre on the southern island province of Hainan, marking another major advance for the countrys space exploration.

An artists rendering of a Chinese space station module. Credit:AP

The launch begins the first of 11 missions necessary to complete, supply and crew the station by the end of next year.

Chinas space program has also recently brought back the first new lunar samples in more than 40 years and expects to land a probe and rover on the surface of Mars later next month.


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PBS SoCal and KCET, Southern Californias flagship PBS stations, along with national independent satellite network Link TV, has announced the world premiere of the documentary film LIVES NOT GRADES. The new documentary follows a team of college students at the University of Southern California (USC) as they travel to Greek island of Lesvos as part of a unique course to design and build innovations to improve the lives of refugees. The world premiere of LIVES NOT GRADES debuts in Southern California on Tues., May 4 at 8 p.m. on KCET and encores on Wed., May 5 at 7 p.m. on PBS SoCal and on Wed., May 5 at 11 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV (DirecTV 375 and Dish Network 9410).

LIVES NOT GRADES follows 36 USC students from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines as they travel to Europes largest refugee camp, Moria Reception and Identification Center on Lesvos island. Over the course of one year, students develop solutions that provide resources and innovations to empower displaced asylum-seekers, like improved sanitation, shelters, education, access to information, mental health and security. The course itself challenges the traditional view of higher learning by requiring students to apply rigor not for grades or traditional assignments, but to create and innovate real-world products and services. Through an intimate lens, the documentary brings to light the process of humanitarian innovation as the students learn valuable lessons that extend beyond the classroom in going up against what has been described as the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II."

The films director, Daniel Druhora, was also an instructor for the course at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. Featured in the film are Viterbi faculty and course co-founders Dr. Burcin Becerik-Gerber (Deans Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering), Dr. David Gerber (Associate Professor of Practice in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture) and mechanical engineer specializing in product development Brad Cracchiola.

LIVES NOT GRADES facilitates a timely conversation about the role of engineering, technology, education, and young people in addressing global problems. The filmmakers hope to create a synergy between the film and existing campaigns around tech for good, forced migration, social entrepreneurship, youth advocacy and innovation. The film was funded in part by the United Engineering Foundation. Executive Producers are Yannis Yortsos, Sonny Astani and Patrick Natale.

Join the conversation on social media using #LivesNotGrades

About PBS SOCAL and KCET

PBS SoCal and KCET are both part of the donor-supported community institution, the Public Media Group of Southern California. PBS SoCal is the flagship PBS station for diverse people across California and delivers content and experiences that inspire, inform and educate. PBS SoCal offers the full slate of beloved PBS programs including MASTERPIECE, NOVA, PBS NewsHour, FRONTLINE, and a broad library of documentary films with works from Ken Burns; as well as educational content including PBS KIDS programs like DANIEL TIGERS NEIGHBORHOOD and CURIOUS GEORGE. KCET showcases the best of PBS and is a leading source for arts, culture, and news in Southern California. Through innovative storytelling, KCET explores and expresses our dynamic local communities helping residents understand and connect with the region's diverse communities and ideas. For additional information about both KCET and PBS SoCal productions, web-exclusive content, programming schedules and community events, please visit kcet.org and pbssocal.org. KCET Originals and PBS programming are available to stream on the FREE PBS App on iOS and Android devices, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Chromecast. KCET is also available to watch live on YouTube TV.

About LINK TV

Founded in 1999, Link TV is an independent viewer-supported media organization dedicated to providing programs that engage and inform its audiences with unique perspectives, and empower them to become involved in the world. Reaching more than 21 million U.S. satellite households nationally (DIRECTV channel 375 and DISH Network channel 9410), Link TV connects American viewers with people at the heart of breaking events, organizations at the forefront of social change and the vibrant cultures of an increasingly global community. Select programming from Link TV is also available for streaming on Apple TV, YouTube and Roku platforms. For additional information about Link TV productions, web-exclusive content and program schedules, please visit linktv.org.

About USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Founded in 1905, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering was named in 2003 as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering, honoring USC alumnus Andrew Viterbi, who developed an algorithm to connect the world. Located in Los Angeles, a global center for arts, technology, business and innovation in the heart of the Pacific Rim, USC Viterbi draws undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world. With more than 9,000 students, 300 faculty across all ranks and appointment levels, and more than 30 in-residence or affiliated members of the National Academies, USC Viterbi is consistently ranked in the nations top programs. Under the leadership of Dean Yannis C. Yortsos, the school helps re-imagine the 21st century engineer, by pioneering the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, leading national efforts in enhancing diversity, and changing the conversation about engineering. With its vision of engineering a better world for all humanity USC Viterbi embodies the power of engineering (Engineering+) to advance discovery and solutions across all disciplines, to serve California, the nation and the world.
Getting the right retail mix at Perths string of high-profile CBD shopping precincts should be determined by consumers and vendors.

Thats the view of former long-time city resident and current Perth Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas after ongoing retail struggles at Raine Square and Yagan Square either side of coronavirus lockdowns in Western Australia this past year.

Chanel could move its luxury Perth store from King Street to Raine Square after overtures from precinct owners. Credit:aluxum

New shopping areas always take time to evolve but ultimately its for the customers and the vendors to determine the right mix, Mr Zempilas said.

Raine Square owners Charter Hall and its preferred leasing agents are currently creating their own mix for the central precinct, often approaching or luring businesses from other city-based areas in the process.
Global brand ambitions

#EntrepreneurMonth: A premium African surf brand with global appeal Little over a year ago, three friends with thriving creative careers embarked on a mission to combine their love of Africa with their passion for surfing...

Made in Africa

As a premium apparel brand that celebrates Africas diverse and expressive surf culture, Mami Wata, whose name means 'Mother Water' is challenging the global surf industrys image of what it means to be a surfer, and to redefine surfing globally.Were on a mission to connect the world to the power of African surf culture, says Mami Wata co-founder Selema Masekela. Much of the last sixty years has told us you need to emulate being from Southern California, or the south coast of Australia to fit the description of being a surfer. African surf culture will redefine the manner in which people will perceive the activity known as surfing and the lifestyle that comes with it.Mami Watas ambition is to become the worlds first global African surf lifestyle brand. Were challenging what we believe is a stagnant $9bn global industry, ready for disruption. Through our partnership with Crowdcube, were looking for investors who believe in the power of purpose, brand and design to create an exciting, meaningful global business, says Nick Dutton, co-founder and CEO.Since our launch in Cape Town in 2017, weve proven the concept by generating over $500,000 sales to date and extensive global PR. We are now primed to launch internationally and scale the business, adds Dutton.Working in conjunction with Crowdcube, Mami Wata will give investors the opportunity to join its mission and invest alongside entrepreneurial investors including Simon Mottram of Rapha, Tom Singh OBE of Rianta Capital and Pollyking & Co.Mami Wata manufactures its full range of premium products in Africa to create jobs and build skills. The brand says its mission is to make the term 'Made in Africa' synonymous with quality. Mami Wata supports African surf therapy organisations that directly improve lives and advocates for responsible surf tourism to the African continent. This in turn supports local surf communities and their economies.Mami Wata has a deep purpose to be a creative force for good in Africa, says Luke Lang, Crowdcube co-founder and CMO. Its a purpose which will resonate with many of our investors. As a brand, theyre challenging an industry, and this also aligns with our mission to help nurture the growth of innovative businesses. Weve no doubt the campaign will be a real success.
ST. PETERSBURG  A 77-year-old man was thrown from his van and killed after losing control on southbound Interstate 275 on Wednesday, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

The crash took place about 3:15 p.m. south of Gandy Boulevard N.

The St. Petersburg man was driving in the outside southbound lane when troopers say for unknown reasons he lost control of a van.

He drove off the interstate and onto the west shoulder, troopers say, then struck two concrete light poles and a traffic sign before he overturned. The driver, who was not wearing his seat belt, was thrown onto the roadway and died at the crash scene.

The Highway Patrol did not release the mans name due to its interpretation of Marsys Law, an amendment to Floridas Constitution that was meant to protect crime victims but deprives the public of information that had long been available under the states public records laws.
Thiruvananthapuram: With Kerala witnessing a massive surge in COVID-19 cases, the Kerala Government Medical Officers Association (KGMOA) on Thursday (April 29) urged the LDF government to clamp a two-week lockdown to quell the swell.

The state had on Wednesday reported the highest single day spike of 35,013, pushing the total cases to 14.95 lakh and active cases to 2.66 lakh.

Pointing out that since the state was in the grip of a severe spread of the virus, a two-week lockdown was necessary the association said in a letter to stateChief Secretary, Dr V P Joy.

Studies have shown that the mutant strains were getting transmitted from person to person through the atmosphere and this results in the spread of the virus from an infected person to 100 others.

The need now is to ensure people do not move around in public places and remain in their homes, the association said.

It also sought an increasein the strength of doctors and other medical staff, more domiciliary care centres and CFLTCs (Covid First Line Treatment Centres) should be set up at the block level and tele-consultation facilities should be provided.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA) had earlier suggested a week-long lockdown.

However, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had on Wednesday made it clear that there were no plans for a state- wide lockdown as of now, but more restrictions would be put in place in a stringent manner.

"We are not planning for a lockdown now. If it is needed, we will think about it. But that will be a last resort. We will fight the pandemic by implementing stringent restrictions," Vijayan had said.
The Scranton School District will use $57.4 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to expand summer programs and test a two-year transportation program for students in grades nine to 12, Chief Recovery Officer Candis Finan, Ed.D., said Wednesday.

We know these, at least at this time, are one-time funds, she said. But the influx accelerates initiatives in the recovery plan.

During the districts virtual Financial Recovery Advisory Committee meeting Wednesday, Finan went through a detailed list of initiatives the funding will support. Scranton was placed in financial recovery and Finan appointed chief recovery officer in 2019.

The federal fundings allowable uses including continuity of education, immediate needs resulting from the pandemic; technology for remote learning, learning loss and other related programming; activities to address the needs of students who are disabled, low-income, English Learners, racial and ethnic minorities or foster care youth; mental health services and support; and school facility renovations.

The district is planning a summer academy for all students across the district that will not only address learning losses in reading, math and other core subjects, but also provide music and art programs and SAT and Keystone testing preparation, she said. The districts annual extended school year programs will last six hours a day and include in-person programming, meals and transportation. In the past, students had to pay for credit recovery courses; they will be offered at no charge this summer.

The district sent out a survey about the Summer Academy and received 540 responses so far. About half are interested in the academy, said Superintendent Melissa McTiernan. How many students sign up will determine which and how many schools will host the programs, she said.

With the funding, the district will also increase student support services and social/emotional learning during the summer programs and continuing in the 2021-22 school year.

We know thats going to be crucial as our kids continue to come back to school in person, said McTiernan.

Additional academic and extracurricular activities will also be offered before and after school, including tutoring for core subjects and enrichment programs for art, music and drama. The district will expand its virtual campus to include the entire district and build a science, technology, engineering and math program with an additional focus on medicine.

Finan said transportation to the districts two high schools, which has not been offered in the past, has been a barrier for some students.

We will use some of the ... funds to pilot a transportation program to grades 9 to 12 and tie in tracking their attendance and achievement, she said.

High school attendance rates are low in the district, she said, noting one high school is at 79%.

Wed really like to have them in the high 90%, she said, adding she hopes the pilot transportation program will eliminate at least one obstacle for students.

If the program is successful, the district will use money from its general operating budget to continue providing transportation after the federal funding ends, Finan said.

Abington Heights Superintendent Michael Mahon, Ph.D., a member of the advisory committee, applauded the program.

Youre doing something that has never been done before and its a tremendous service to those students, he said. Lets hope it does some great things for the kids that need it.

The Scranton School District received three rounds of funding from the federal government throughout the past year. The money is funneled from the federal government to Pennsylvanias Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds program, also known as ESSER.

$4 million from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or ESSER I, which must be spent by Sept. 30, 2022.

$17.7 million from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA), or ESSER II, which must be spent by Sept. 30, 2023.

$35.8 million from the American Rescue Plan, or ESSER III, which must be spent by Sept. 30, 2024.

In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school year, the district also received $1.9 million in other grants, primarily from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

The recovery plan also calls for replacing text books and upgrading classroom materials. The federal funding will be used to purchase the new materials as well as write new curriculum, conduct teacher training and replace technology.

Additionally, the district will purchase uniform vouchers to provide to families for free and purchase additional translation services for district documents. A districtwide feasibility study is expected to be finished by mid-May and the district will begin researching how to use the federal funding to provide much-needed upgrades to buildings district-wide.

For a very long time, Scranton didnt have any money to offer any of these programs, said Finan. Lets make the best use of these funds ... If the data shows it really makes a difference we will find the money to carry on.
The crucial question is this: In a society with such a diverse array of family forms, which kind of family structure should the government favor? My answer is, None. The role of government is to help people build the kind of family they prefer, not tell them what kind of family they should prefer. Government should be neutral about what kind of family is best.

Joe Bidens American Families Plan has one element that beautifully accomplishes this, by extending the child tax credit, or child allowance. If parents want to use the extra money from the credit to help pay for day care, they can. If they want to use it to reduce work hours time so they can spend more time at home, they can. The child tax credit will help millions of families do what surveys show they already want to do  have more kids than they can now afford, and spend more time at home.

But the Biden administration is not entirely neutral when it comes to family policy. When, during a conference call, I asked three administration officials Thursday about this, they mentioned two other social goals. First, getting people working. We want parents to be in the work force, especially mothers, said Susan Rice, head of the Domestic Policy Council. Second, the administration wants kids in classroom settings, to extend the public school system down two years. The administration is aggressively expanding child care subsidies and pre-K programs.

These are understandable public goals, but I wonder about the emphasis. In the first place, direct parental subsidies  perhaps because they let parents cut back on work and cultivate their kids social and emotional skills  can be a powerful tool to boost kids educational attainment.

As Grover J. Whitehurst, formerly of the Brookings Institution, once put it, It turns out that putting money directly into the pockets of low-income parents, as many other countries do, produces substantially larger gains in childrens school achievement per dollar of expenditure than does a year of preschool or participation in Head Start.
Flag carrier Oman Air has signed a codeshare agreement with EgyptAir, the national carrier of Egypt.

The codeshare agreement on flights between Muscat and Cairo was signed as part of both airlines commitment to work toward a strong restart for air travel to overcome the effects of the spread of Covid-19 on the aviation sector and to expand their destination offering to customers.

The agreement means that guests on both airlines can now benefit from a wider choice of destinations in both countries, and beyondtravellers from Muscat have easy access to EgyptAir domestic destinations - Sharm El-Sheikh, Luxor, Aswan, and Hurghada, as well as Casablanca (Morocco) on the airlines international network; travellers from Cairo have easy access to popular Oman Air domestic destination Salalah as well as international destinations Karachi (Pakistan), Colombo (Sri Lanka), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia).

Engineer Abdulaziz Al Raisi, Chief Executive Officer Oman Air said that the challenges facing all airlines since the onset of the pandemic have led to new strategic partnerships which ultimately create a stronger network ecosystem with more options for passengers. EgyptAir has a remarkable, long-standing history in the Mena region and enjoys a strong international presence as a Star Alliance member. The codeshare agreement with Oman Air offers guests from Muscat more options for discovering Egypt, whether for business or leisure, and plays a vital role in the travel restart endeavours of both airlines.

On the other hand, Pilot Amr Abu El-Enein, EgyptAir Holding Chairman & CEO, said that cooperation with partners is essential for sustainability during this critical period, therefore, signing this agreement between two partners with special attributes like EgyptAir & Oman Air will further add more benefits for both airlines customers. Captain Amr added, EgyptAir was the first airline in MENA to join IATA and our deep industry expertise has allowed us to successfully overcome many obstacles throughout our history.

Flights are currently available for booking. - TradeArabia News Service


Quarterly Activities and Cashflow Reports

Sydney, April 29, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Genex Power Limited ( ASX:GNX ) is pleased to provide the following update on the Company's activities and performance for the quarter ending 31 March 2021 (Q3 FY2021), a period during which the Company made substantial progress with its Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project (K2-Hydro), having successfully raised additional funds to retain 100% ownership of the Project and reached Project Document Contractual Close.HighlightsK2-Hydro- Launch of $115 million equity raise, consisting of $90 million fully underwritten placement and rights issue, and an additional $25 million committed investment by J-POWER;- Subsequent to completion of the capital raising, Genex will be fully funded for the construction of K2-Hydro with financial close and commencement of construction to occur in early Q4 FY2021;- The Queensland Government confirmed its support for the construction of a 275kV transmission line to connect the K2-Hydro project to the National Electricity Market (NEM) by way of a $147 million funding package;- Project Document Contractual Close reached for K2-Hydro with all major project agreements executed, and notice to proceed issued to Powerlink for construction of the Transmission Line;- $47 million in grant funding for K2-Hydro approved by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), with a further $9 million of existing funding to be converted into a non-recoupable grant;Other Projects- 50MW Kidston Solar Project (KS1) delivered $3.5 million in net revenue and 30,261MWh of power generated for the quarter; and- The Jemalong Solar Project (JSP) energised in December and is currently undergoing commissioning and hold point testing.Commenting on the Q3 FY2021 performance Genex CEO, James Harding said: "Our flagship project, the Kidston Pumped Hydro Project, is now only weeks away from financial close and commencement of construction. Over the past quarter we have secured additional funding from the Queensland Government and ARENA, and we also made the decision to raise $115 million in new equity to allow Genex to retain 100% ownership in the project. With the strong support of our financiers and shareholders, we now have the full funding in place to bring the project to financial close.I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our key stakeholders, and both existing and new shareholders for their continued commitment and support which is turning our vision of a pumped hydro project at Kidston into reality. I look forward to updating you as we commence the construction activities at site."Operational Update250MW Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project (K2-Hydro):- The Queensland Government confirmed it will provide $147 million in funding towards the construction of a new 275kV transmission line which is required to enable the K2-Hydro project to connect to the NEM, ultimately underpinning the development of the broader Kidston Clean Energy Hub (refer to ASX Announcement dated 5th February 2021);- On the basis of the Queensland Government co-funding described above, a Generator Connection and Access Agreement was executed with Powerlink (refer to ASX Announcement dated 23rd March 2021) and subsequently notice to proceed was issued (refer to ASX Announcement dated 31st March 2021);- Project Document Contractual Close was reached during the period, signalled by the execution of the following major construction and operation documentation (refer to ASX Announcement dated 31st March 2021):o Energy Storage Services Agreement with EnergyAustralia Pty Ltd;o Generator Connection and Access Agreement with Powerlink;o Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) contract with a JV of McConnell Dowell Constructors (Aust.) Pty Ltd and John Holland Group Pty Ltd;o Design and construct contract with Energy Solutions Pty Ltd (trading as Beon);o Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Agreement with ANDRITZ Hydro GmbH;o Camp Operation and Catering Contract with ISS Integrated Services Pty Ltd;o Module Supply and Install Contract with Ausco Modular Pty Ltd;o Owner's Engineer contract with Hydro-Electric Corporation (trading as Entura); ando Asset Management Services Deed and Facility Management Agreement with Genex to manage the corporate administration of the project special purpose vehicle and ancillary site services.- Approval from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to provide $47 million in grant funding. A further $9 million in previously provided development funding to be converted into a non-recoupable grant on financial close (refer to ASX Announcement dated 24th March 2021);- Launch of a fully underwritten $90 million placement and rights issue to fund the balance of the equity requirement for the K2-Hydro project;- Share Subscription Agreement (SSA) and Technical Services Agreement (TSA) Amendment with J-POWER signed to facilitate their $25 million equity investment alongside the $90 million fundraising (refer to ASX Announcement dated 26th March 2021); and- Following the completion of the fundraising and J-POWER subscription, Genex will proceed with the construction and operation of the Project on a 100% owned basis. 50MW Kidston Solar Project (KS1):- KS1 continued to generate energy into the NEM throughout the quarter;- Net Revenue totalled $3.5 million, with 30,261MWh of power generated for the 3 months to 31 March 2021; and- As previously advised (refer to ASX Announcement dated 21 October 2020), Genex and UGL mutually agreed to end UGL's role as EPC Contractor and O&M provider to the Company's KS1 project. Genex has completed contractual terms with Solarig Australia Pty Ltd (Solarig) and as such, Solarig have been appointed as the replacement O&M provider for KS1. As of 14th April 2021, the O&M role at KS1 was transferred from UGL to Solarig.50MW Jemalong Solar Project (JSP):- Following the successful energisation in Q2 FY2021, JSP is now the second generating asset in the Genex renewable energy portfolio;- The Project will initially operate on a merchant basis, with the Company receiving the spot price for electricity in addition to revenue from the sale of Large-Scale Generation Certificates;- JSP is currently in the commissioning phase and is completing the hold point testing required to allow the project to ramp up to full generation capacity; and- When fully operational, JSP is expected to produce up to 128,700MWh of energy per year. Bouldercombe Battery Project (BBP):- The BBP is a standalone large-scale Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Queensland at an initial size of 50MW;- During the period, the Development Application relating to the BBP was approved by the Rockhampton Regional Council, allowing for a BESS development sized up to 100MW/200MWh;- Further grid connection, module supply and financing workstreams have continued to progress during the quarter with the target of bringing the project to financial close in CY2021; and- The BBP diversifies the Company's portfolio and positions Genex as a leader in renewable energy generation and storage in Australia.Kidston Stage-3 Wind Project (K3-Wind):- Alongside its joint venture partner, J-POWER, Genex continues to monitor the wind resource at a number of potential sites for K3-Wind at Kidston. The Project will connect into the new 275kV transmission line being constructed by Powerlink Queensland for the K2-Hydro project.Events Subsequent to Quarter's End- Subsequent to the end of the period, Genex reached Finance Document Contractual Close (FD Contractual Close) for the K2-Hydro project (refer to ASX Announcement dated 15 April 2021). This involved execution of final documentation to secure a total of $660 million of external financing for the project construction costs:o $610 million 15-year debt facility from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF);o $47 million project grant funding agreement from ARENA; ando A variation deed to the Loan Note Subscription with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to provide a further $3 million of subordinated debt funding to be applied toward the project costs.- Genex successfully completed the capital raise to fund Genex's equity contribution for 100% ownership of the K2-Hydro project. A total of 451,400,000 shares were issued at an issue price of $0.20 per share, raising $90.3 million (before costs).Corporate Update- To finance the K2-Hydro project on a 100% owned basis, Genex launched a fully underwritten $90 million placement and rights issue;- Genex finished the quarter with a strong cash position, with cash at bank of $39.1 million (which includes funds held for construction of Jemalong and bank guarantees) at 31 March 2021;- During the March quarter, the Company's expenditure was primarily incurred through development activities associated with the K2-Hydro & BBP as well as interest repayments to the KS1 and JSP debt facility; and- As noted in section 6 of the Appendix 4C*, the payment amount stated therein was made to the Directors of the entity during the quarter, comprising salaries and fees for Executive and Non-Executive Directors. No other payments were made to any related parties or their associates of the entity.*To view the cashflow report, please visit:About Genex Power Ltd

Genex Power Limited (ASX:GNX) is focused on developing a portfolio of renewable energy generation and storage projects across Australia. The Company's flagship Kidston Clean Energy Hub, located in north Queensland, will integrate large-scale solar generation with pumped storage hydro. The Kidston Clean Energy Hub is comprised of the operating 50MW stage 1 Solar Project (KS1) and the 250MW Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project (K2-Hydro) with potential for further multi-stage wind and solar projects. The 50MW Jemalong Solar Project (JSP) is located in NSW and provides geographical diversification to the Genex Power Limited portfolio. JSP was energised in early December 2020 and commissioning is now underway. Genex is further developing its energy storage portfolio via the early stage development of a 50MW/75MWh standalone battery energy storage system at Bouldercombe in Queensland. With over 400MW of renewable energy and storage projects in development, Genex is well placed as Australia's leading renewable energy and storage company.
PITTSBURGH, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- First National Bank, the largest subsidiary of F.N.B. Corporation (NYSE: FNB), announced that it has promoted Scott Mizerak to Senior Vice President, Director of Digital Channels and Payments, emphasizing the Company's commitment to innovation and the continued enhancement of its delivery channels.

Scott Mizerak

Mizerak plays a key role in the development and execution of FNB's digital strategy, ensuring a consistent implementation across all lines of business. He leads the Digital Channels and Payments product management team, which is responsible for identifying, building and optimizing FNB's innovative solutions to meet customer demands, enhance the Bank's competitive market position and drive profitability.

Reporting to FNB's Chief Digital Officer, Samuel Kirsch, Mizerak has been engaged in advancing Clicks-to-Bricks, FNB's multi-channel approach to the banking experience. Clicks-to-Bricks is meant to provide customers with consistency and convenience by seamlessly integrating the mobile, online and in-branch channels.

"Sam and Scott have assembled a terrific team that is instrumental in driving our digital strategy forward," said Vincent J. Delie, Jr., Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of F.N.B. Corporation and First National Bank. "Leveraging their expertise, we continue to evolve our online and mobile platforms to make it more convenient for customers to purchase products and services at FNB, with planned upgrades including the integration of our Solutions Center e-Store into our mobile app and a universal online application. As digital adoption accelerates, these investments in our leading-edge solutions give us a competitive advantage."

With more than 20 years of industry experience, Mizerak joined FNB in 2013 as Manager of Digital Channels and Payments. Previously, he was a Digital Product Manager with PNC and served in various roles in wealth management, consumer and private banking at BNY Mellon. He earned his bachelor's degree in communications with a focus in advertising from Pennsylvania State University.





About F.N.B. Corporation

F.N.B. Corporation (NYSE: FNB), headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a diversified financial services company operating in seven states and the District of Columbia. FNB's market coverage spans several major metropolitan areas including: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and the Piedmont Triad (Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point) in North Carolina. The Company has total assets of more than $38 billion and nearly 340 banking offices throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, D.C. and Virginia.

FNB provides a full range of commercial banking, consumer banking and wealth management solutions through its subsidiary network which is led by its largest affiliate, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, founded in 1864. Commercial banking solutions include corporate banking, small business banking, investment real estate financing, government banking, business credit, capital markets and lease financing. The consumer banking segment provides a full line of consumer banking products and services, including deposit products, mortgage lending, consumer lending and a complete suite of mobile and online banking services. FNB's wealth management services include asset management, private banking and insurance.

The common stock of F.N.B. Corporation trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FNB" and is included in Standard & Poor's MidCap 400 Index with the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) Regional Banks Sub-Industry Index. Customers, shareholders and investors can learn more about this regional financial institution by visiting the F.N.B. Corporation website at www.fnbcorporation.com .

SOURCE F.N.B. Corporation

Related Links

http://www.fnbcorporation.com


Rev. Lee Dong-hwan, the pastor of Glory Jeil Church in Suwon who was suspended from duty after holding a "blessing prayer" at the 2019 Queer Culture Festival in Incheon, poses during an interview at The Korea Times office in Seoul, April 23. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul



By Park Ji-won



Instead of delivering sermons and rubbing shoulders with his congregation, Rev. Lee Dong-hwan, a Methodist pastor in Suwon south of Seoul, spends most of his time these days discussing legal plans with his attorney and strategizing with a group of activists who banded together to support him.



Lee has been accused by the Korean Methodist Church (KMC) of disobedience and an ecclesiastical tribunal upheld that allegation, suspending him from being a pastor for two years. His crime: holding a blessing prayer at the Queer Culture Festival in the western port city of Incheon two years ago.



"If holding a blessing prayer for sexual minorities can be a punishable sin, why doesn't the church punish those pastors who blessed Chun Doo-hwan, who was behind the May 18 massacre? Why doesn't the church punish a male pastor who raped many female churchgoers? I don't think blessing can be a sin in any case," Lee, pastor of Glory Jeil Church in Suwon, told The Korea Times in an interview, Friday.



The Korea Times interviewed Lee to ask about the Korean church and its disciplinary process, his own beliefs and sexual minority issues.



Lee was referring to the Gwangju pro-democracy uprising in 1980 in which soldiers fired on protesters leaving an estimated 600 people dead.



The 41-year-old pastor has found himself in conflict with his denomination, the KMC. At the first tribunal, it found Lee guilty of "supporting and agreeing with homosexuality" by attending the festival held on Aug. 31, 2019, and holding a blessing prayer for the people there while wearing his religious robe. Such an act is a punishable offense based on the church's Book of Doctrines and Discipline according to the KMC. Lee, however, has been claiming that offering blessings is a pastor's duty and cannot be a sin.



On Oct. 15, the tribunal ended up suspending Lee of his duty for two years, which is the third-highest punishment in a five-tier system, for violating the regulation on homosexuality. He has filed an appeal and is waiting for a date to be set for it.





Rev. Lee Dong-hwan gives a prayer of blessing for the LGBTQ community at the Queer Culture Festival in Incheon, Aug. 31, 2019. Courtesy of Joopeter



"I didn't expect the blessing prayer for sexual minorities could be an issue because it is just a pastor's job to bless someone. I was a little bit hesitant at first when I was asked to do it because I knew rules were created by the denomination regulating homosexuality in 2015, but I accepted the proposal since one of my churchgoers was a sexual minority and I have been blessing the person many times. So I didn't see a huge difference between blessing the person in my church or at the festival," he said.



At the festival, he scattered flower petals while showing solidarity with the other attendees. He said, "The world will change when you and I join hands at the moment. I oppose the stigma, hatred, discrimination and exclusion against sexual minorities and other minorities in society," according to a document submitted to the tribunal.



It has become the first church tribunal against someone for blessing sexual minorities in Korea. It also drew huge media attention amid an ongoing debate on an anti-discrimination legislation movement initiated last year by the progressive Justice Party which aims to pass the bill banning all types of discrimination including on the basis of sexual orientation. The bill has not been passed yet, as Christian groups largely oppose the details of the proposed law and most Protestant churches oppose it citing the fact that it affirms homosexuality.



Anti-gay rule



The KMC, which is considered one of the largest Protestant church groups here, had been largely categorized as centrist or liberal for many years as they have been raising voices on many social issues. However, in terms of homosexuality, the denomination took a conservative stance by adding some rules to its Book of Doctrines and Discipline in 2015, stipulating that one can be punished for agreeing with or supporting gambling or homosexuality, or violating drug laws. The initiative was the first of its kind in Korea, leading other denominations to take similar steps.



But Lee, who had considered himself to be just an ordinary conservative pastor who saw homosexuality as a sin, grew to believe that sexual orientation is something people are born with and cannot be "fixed" by any kind of conversion therapy.



His perceptions shifted in 2015 after a member of his congregation came out to him as a sexual minority. The confession put him in agony but it didn't take long for him to come to the conclusion that homosexuality cannot be a sin and that sexual minorities are God's children who are vulnerable in society, and that Jesus would have stood with them.



"When I was a young churchgoer, there was a crossdresser in my church. He was an outsider. When he approached me, I just ran away. I was full of prejudice, thinking homosexuality was a sin and teaching that to my churchgoers. But that prejudice was broken down when I actually met a sexual minority. After attending my church for about a year, one of my churchgoers came out to me. At first, it was hard to accept it because I have to reverse my long-held beliefs. So I looked over the Bible again and pored over psychological and medical research papers. I gradually came to see that people are born with a certain sexual orientation, which is made by God, and that cannot be altered even by conversion therapy."





The Bible / Korea Times photo by Han Jin-tak



He pointed out there are about seven parts in the Bible that mention homosexuality, but they are not opposing homosexuality itself but rape. "After studying the Bible, I realized that there was no concept of homosexuality as we know it today back when the Bible was written. The Bible prohibits rape made between male individuals and sexual intercourse between individuals who have different power in society like an adult and a minor. As we don't literally follow every word written in the Bible  for example, we don't make food and garments in the exact way the Bible instructs anymore  so the teachings should be interpreted differently according to the current situation. If that is the case, I want to question why homosexuality in the Bible should be literally applied in the present and suggest that we should talk about it."



He added, "People in the church community appear to have deep-rooted prejudice and hatred against homosexuality, but lesbians are not at all on the discussion table, and they despise gay males and especially the thought of anal sex. I think the Korean church strategically picked homosexuality as a common enemy to gather people together in the community as it has done with communists and Muslim refugees."





Rev. Lee Dong-hwan, the suspended pastor of Glory Jeil Church in Suwon, poses during an interview at The Korea Times office in Seoul, April 23. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

Rev. Lee Dong-hwan, the suspended pastor of Glory Jeil Church in Suwon, speaks during an interview at The Korea Times office in Seoul, April 23. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul



Conservative backlash



Given the fact that most Korean churches are outspoken against homosexuality, he has faced a huge backlash from them. Some Christians and pastors of the KMC released a statement asking the church tribunal to expel Lee, saying he mocked their faith by blessing homosexuality. Many people in the denomination even started to accuse him of being gay himself.



As soon as the tribunal proceeding started, Lee said he faced "unreasonable" demands. Many of his senior pastor colleagues started to pressure him to give up the case and urged him to say he was wrong about homosexuality. When he was asked by a member of the tribunal to write a statement about what happened, he wrote about his belief that he acted based on his religious faith, but others from the tribunal asked him to write a letter of oath pledging not to offer such blessings in the future and the tribunal would take the letter into consideration in its decision.



"At first, I was going to change my mind and write the letter for the church. But I wasn't able to do so to get out of trouble because I felt I hadn't done anything wrong based on law and my religious beliefs," he said. "If I wrote the letter, I thought I would not be able to preach and talk about God's love in front of my churchgoers where I know one who is a sexual minority."



He also mentioned the hearing was to be held behind closed doors without any witnesses, which is a rare practice.



"Based on the rules, we have the right to be judged in public. So, I boycotted the closed hearing and won the right to get a public hearing with two witnesses from my side. But a funny thing was the tribunal was like one team. The head of the judges had also been on the investigation committee, which is equivalent to having the police also serve as judges in court."





A group of supporters backing Rev. Lee Dong-hwan scatters flower petals in a show of protest of the tribunal ruling against Lee near the headquarters of the Korean Methodist Church in Seoul on June 24. Korea Times photo by Kwon Kyung-sung



But he was not alone. As the tribunal started its proceedings last June, an emergency committee for Rev. Lee Dong-hwan's tribunal was voluntarily made participated by lawyers, his colleagues and activists helping him with the proceedings and mental health.



He also received several letters of support. For example, the United Church of Canada sent a letter to the National Council of Churches in Korea on Jan. 19, expressing concerns over the decision by the Methodist tribunal and the punitive measures against Lee. "We have written directly to Rev. Lee to express our support for the decisions he made to serve and care for members of the Korean LGBT+ community," the Canadian church said in its statement. "We share his compassion for the community, whose people have suffered discrimination from society and now a Christian institution. The United Church of Canada believes that it behoves all Christians to follow the example of Jesus by caring for such oppressed as these, and that love expressed by Rev. Lee would be a part of the outworking of God's call upon any minister of the gospel."



He also won a special prize of the International Amnesty Media Award in March this year for contributing to society by showing conciliation and love despite the punishment from his denomination, according to the human rights organization.



But the incident caused a tremendous amount of stress and Lee ended up suffering multiple health problems including facial nerve paralysis. When asked why he keeps going, he said the actions of conservative Christians sabotaging the festival shocked him and made him guilty as a Christian.



"The sabotage by the so-called conservative Christians almost stopped the Queer Culture Festival. After the incident, many participants of the festival had to seek treatment citing psychological difficulties. When I watched the video of what happened later, I had to cry and shudder as it was so disastrous. I wasn't able to believe the fact that Christians who talk about love could do that. I felt guilty about everything."



In fact, the effects of discrimination on the mental health of sexual minorities has become a major social issue here. There have been a number of high-profile suicides of transgender people this year, including Korea's first transgender soldier Byun Hee-soo. Also, after the ruling against Lee in October, the member of his church who is a sexual minority became suicidal.



Lee stressed that he is trying not only to take a step toward protecting the socially vulnerable, but also make changes in the conservative church community and contribute to the betterment of society in the end.



"Some told me to just leave the Methodist Church and preach on my own and quit participating in a fight that I have no chance of winning. But I was proud of being part of the KMC and I thought this problem would remain in our community even if I quit the fight, while the sexual minorities will continue to suffer. They are suffering more than I am. Changing the Korean church would not be different from changing Korean society. Even though my effort may not make a huge difference, it may spark debate and lead to small changes in the community. So I don't know when I could stop, but I will not give up. If I lose in the church hearing, I will bring it to a civil court and fight until I can prove I was not wrong and that offering blessings is not a sin."



"The God I believe in doesn't discriminate against anyone. God's love is universal and equal regardless of race, gender, disability or education. As a person and pastor myself who believes in God's love and tries to follow the path of Jesus, I couldn't and cannot selectively show his love toward anyone even though the person is gay. Jesus always stood next to the poor, victims and patients and was crucified to death for that. The only thing I regret about the blessing in the Queer Culture Festival is the fact that I didn't smile. When I have the chance again, I will make a big smile."




Students waving flags of the Communist Party as they prepare to watch a movie "The Founding of a Party" in Yangzhou, in China's eastern Jiangsu province, to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. (Photo: AFP)

In February this year, the Communist Party of China (CPC) started a new campaign called Party History Learning and Education; it will continue in full swing through the year as the CPC celebrates its centenary in July. Neican, a weekly brief on China published from Australia, observed: The CPCs official historiography is a product of politics and serves a political agenda. There is no doubt about this, and India should closely watch the new campaign.

Neicans analysts said: In the case of the current campaign, it aims to strengthen ideological cohesion, confidence, and a sense of historical destiny. In doing so, it will likely reinforce the legitimacy of Xi Jinping as the partys helmsman and his political project of national rejuvenation.

Like everything in China these days, the crusade originated in an important speech by President Xi Jinping, the new Great Helmsman. On February 20, at a gathering in Beijing, Mr Xi spoke of the importance of learning the history of the CPC, so as to let the party better serve the people and lead the country to fully build a modern socialist country.

Xinhua commented that the CPC has achieved its first centenary goal to complete building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and now embarks on the second: The learning [of history] will help ensure the whole party to remain true to its original aspiration.

Being purely an ideological move, archaeology plays a crucial role in the new scheme of national rejuvenation. If Beijing is able to prove that China dominated large parts of Asia, let us say 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, the ideological foundation of the rejuvenation will be established.

Already in September last year, Mr Xi presided over a meeting of the partys politburo and discussed the latest archaeological discoveries in China and their significance. The CPC general secretary showed a great interest in excavating the past; he spoke of developing archaeology to better understand the long-standing and profound Chinese civilization.

He said that he attached great importance to archaeological research to deepen peoples understanding of Chinese civilisation that features a long history and profoundness, thus providing strong support for promoting fine traditional culture and strengthening peoples confidence in Chinese culture.

You could ask: how does this concern India?

Unfortunately, it does, especially after Chinas new territorial claims in Ladakh as well as the older ones in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

On April 14, The China Daily mentioned with fanfare an event highlighting Chinas Top 10 New Archaeological Discoveries of Year 2020; the annual awards function was dubbed the Oscars of Chinese archaeology. The idea was to promote new archaeological findings among the masses, with a 21-expert judging panel selecting the 10 sites.

One of them is the Sangsdar Lungmgo graveyard site in Tsanda county of Ngari prefecture of Western Tibet. Tsanda, or Zanda, is located near the historical vestiges of Tholing, close to the Indian border, north of Uttarakhand. The findings date from the 4th century BC to 7th century AD and though it is not officially said, it belongs to the Kingdom of Zhangzhung, which spread across Western Tibet and Northern India. The site was presented as a key finding of early-stage history of Tibet, showing frequent communication among the region with the area to the south of Himalayas as well as todays central China and Xinjiang.

India should be concerned because political archeology has always helped China to substantiate its territorial claims at a later date. Zhangzhung was an ancient kingdom which spread in Western Tibet and Northern India; it predates the culture of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet and is usually associated with the Bon faith. The inhabitants are often mentioned in ancient Tibetan texts as the original rulers of central and western Tibet. Only in the last two decades or so, have archaeologists started to excavate areas once ruled by the Zhangzhung kings.

Though very little is known about the extent of the kingdom, it is said to have had extensive contacts with its neighbours, particularly Northern India (and not China). While Beijing has now taken up a large number of excavation sites to demonstrate Zhangzhungs relations with the mainland, very little is done in India, where archaeology is still under the slumberous Archaeological Survey of India and the babus of the ministry of culture.

At the same time, China is moving ahead with the blessings of the Peoples Leader; for example in November 2017, China Tibet Online mentioned a group of 2,000-year-old sarcophagi tombs recently discovered in Jomdo County, Chamdo, southwest Chinas Tibet Autonomous Region, in which the cultural features not only possess strong local characteristics, but also have very clear similarities with sarcophagus remains found in the Min Jiang River and Yarlung River basin in the west part of southwest Chinas Sichuan Province.

Quoting a Chinese archaeologist, the article further argues: This discovery confirms that around 2,000 years ago, there had been frequent communication and exchanges between the people living in the east part of Tibet and those in the plateau areas of western Sichuan.

Another article in China News mentions the Western Tibet tombs; quoting Dr Feng Yang from the School of Archaeology, Culture and Science of Sichuan University, it speculated that the tombs dated back to the seventh century BC. During a seminar on 2020 Tibet Cultural Relics and Archaeological Achievements recently held in Lhasa, Dr Feng gave a report on the latest stages of excavations: Seven archaeological surveys and trial excavations were carried out from 1994 to 2001. In order to explore the early society and civilisation of western Tibet and clarify its status in Tibetan civilisation, archaeological excavations in this area continued from 2018 to 2020; 10 new cemeteries were discovered (eight of them were date-tested), 68 tombs were cleared, 10 new sites were excavated and one stone tool site found. Systematic carbon fourteen dating was done, and a basic chronological framework could be established.

According to Feng Yang, the 68 tombs are divided into four phases: Tombs are rich in burial goods, including pottery, iron, bronze, seashells, mussel decorations, beads, woodware, etc. The phenomenon of burial of animals is common, including sheep, horses, and cows.

The article added: The cultural connotation of this area is obviously diverse, and cultural connections with different surrounding areas can be seen, including cultural connections with the mainland.

Unless India decides to heavily invest in the archaeology of the Himalayas, which will prove the Indic origin of the Zhangzhung kingdom, China will rewrite the history of Indias borders. But how many politicians understand this in New Delhi? Probably no one.
Most New Orleans restaurants, bars and other businesses will be able to return to their pre-coronavirus capacity, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Thursday, bringing the city's pandemic restrictions more or less in line with the eased statewide regulations that Gov. John Bel Edwards announced earlier this week.

The new rules, set to take effect on Friday, will also allow outdoor gatherings of as many as 500 people, while indoor events of up to 250 will now be allowed. That raises the limits from 250 outdoors and 150 indoors.

All of the rules come with the caveat that businesses will still need to maintain six feet of space between tables or patrons, which is required statewide. Masks are also mandated in New Orleans despite the lifting of statewide face-covering rules earlier this week.

New Orleans is a safer place to live because of the guidelines we have had in place for the past year-plus and a safer place to visit, Cantrell said at a press conference announcing the new rules.

The restrictions are the least stringent since the beginning of the pandemic last year, and they signaled that public officials were becoming more comfortable with bigger gatherings amid low coronavirus case counts and rising vaccination rates. New Orleans is reporting some of its lowest case numbers of the pandemic, with an average of fewer than 17 cases per day over the past week. During the first spike in cases last April, the city saw more than 440 cases per day.

More than 43% of New Orleans residents have at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, a rate that is leading the state and about on pace with the U.S. as a whole. But it is still far short of what experts believe represents "herd immunity," where the percentage of vaccinated residents halts the coronavirus from circulating altogether.

In talking about the mask mandate, Cantrell once again tied the issue to the citys vaccination rate.

If we want to protect ourselves, protect our community, protect our culture its going to come by way of the vaccination, Cantrell said.

Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the citys health director, also stressed that masks would still be required and were an important public health tool.

There is no national public health organization or leading expert recommending against masks, Avegno said. They are simple, they are effective, they are easy and the protect not just the wearer but the entire community and we've seen that time and time again.

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

Throughout the pandemic, increases to capacity limits have been cheered by bars, restaurants, event spaces and other businesses, as being able to host more people meant more sales of food and drinks. And while many will likely be pleased with the latest changes, the social-distancing requirements may make it hard for some owners to completely return to full capacity.

While some restaurants have opened up outdoor dining spaces to increase overall capacity, many are hamstrung by a lack of space, particularly in the French Quarter and other areas downtown.

Howie Kaplan, owner of the Howlin Wolf music club, praised the way the mayor has handled the pandemic but said that the rules announced on Friday would do little for him due to the social distancing rules.

Though hes had as many as 1,000 people in his venue, he said hes sticking to a cap of 150 for now.

You cant make money doing that, Kaplan said.

He also said more needs to be done to standardize the rules between city and state agencies and bring businesses into parity with religious institutions, which have looser rules. He also was hopeful that city officials would push back last call by at least an hour in the near future.

Bars and live music venues are part of the solution and not part of the problem, he said.

Cantrell said the city will also keep in place a ban on alcohol sales after 1 a.m., before referencing an increase in confrontations and violence in recent weeks.

That has to stay in place right now, yes, because as were opening back up there are other challenges we have to deal with and public safety is one of them, across the board, Cantrell said. And that ties into these conflicts and the need to de-escalate.

As Louisiana lifts statewide mask mandate, here's what else is in the new COVID order Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Tuesday that Louisiana will lift its statewide mask mandate, but local governments and businesses can still re

Asked about those comments  and whether they portend an effort to change New Orleans status as a city that famously has no last call -- City Hall spokesperson Beau Tidwell said by email, The restrictions around alcohol sales are part of the pandemic response, and there are no plans at present to continue them separate from the pandemic guidelines.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine decided not to name the countries whose leaders agreed to come to Ukraine for the constituent summit of the "Crimean Platform," which will be held on August 23, so as not to increase the emotions of Russia, but a number of countries have already confirmed their participation at the highest level, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Emine Dzhaparova has said.

"We decided that we would not announce the countries that have already agreed to come to the founding summit, since Russia said that this is a threat to its territorial integrity and security. Therefore, in order not to increase the emotions of Russia, we decided not to make this information public. However, President of the EU Council Charles Michel publicly announced that he will come and support this initiative. This is the only thing we can say so far. However, a number of countries have already agreed on their participation at the highest level, so we are actively preparing for the summit, which will be held on August 23," Dzhaparova told Interfax-Ukraine in an exclusive interview.

According to her, the summit will have several components, tentatively, the scenario assumes an official part, during which the President of Ukraine, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, the Prime Minister and the heads of delegations will speak.

"We are planning thematic expert discussions, as well as public diplomacy events closely related to Crimea. Undoubtedly, there will be a speech by the leader of the Crimean Tatar people, and this is very important, because there is a disproportionate track of persecution of Crimean Tatars for many reasons, history and the fact that the only bone across the throat in Crimea for Russia is the Crimean Tatar people because of their self-government agencies, their powerful system of organizations, which has been fixed since the times of the Soviet Union," the deputy minister said.

Dzhaparova said it is also planned to adopt a final document during the summit.

"We are in the process of negotiations with our partners, this is such joint creativity. Since each country, before deciding whether to join the document or not, must go through it and understand that it does not contradict his vision. We are now jointly trying as much as possible to draft such a document, which will be based on important principles of international law, so that it does not contradict the policies of other states. Now communication is in a very active stage and in the near future we will finalize it," she said.

According to her, this document should confirm support for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within internationally recognized borders, officially establish the Crimean Platform, and determine the foundations of an international strategy for the de-occupation of Crimea.

"I would also like to note that we are working in various areas in terms of improving the analytical capabilities of our experts on such priorities: ecology, economy, security, militarization, international humanitarian law, human rights, Crimean Tatars, as an identity, as a people. These are a number of priority areas, which are already being processed in a focused way and will be processed in the next year after the summit," she said.

Dzhaparova said the Foreign Ministry is now inviting the top leadership of the countries to take part in the summit.

"It is important for us to hold this event physically, because there is a pandemic, there is still a travel ban, not everyone is ready to come, since for some countries this is still a pressing issue due to the lack of access to a vaccine or the risks that physical travel can carry. However, we are still working with the fact that this is a physical summit and that the level of representation of countries is the highest," the Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine said.

Dzhaparova said the summit of heads of state and government is a significant event, and it will not be annual. During the summit, the activities of the platform will be formally established, further its activities will take place both at the official level (heads of state and government, foreign ministers, parliaments) and at the level of experts.

"Our goal is to ensure synergy of activities at these levels and between them, to form an international coalition for the de-occupation of Crimea and the creation of an appropriate international strategy. Concrete measures at the national and international levels will be aimed at achieving this goal, towards which we will move in the following priority areas: non-recognition policy; security, including freedom of navigation; application of restrictive measures; protection of human rights and international humanitarian law; economic and environmental impact of the occupation," she said.

Dzhaparova also spoke about the plans, within the Crimean platform, to establish an annual Forum on the security of the Azov-Black Sea and Mediterranean regions.

"This year the Forum will be held in the autumn, and preparations for its holding have already started," the deputy minister said.
Letshego Group, the 22 year strong pan-African inclusive finance institution, reiterated that digitisation is driving the success of its Transformation Strategy, extending the reach of its financial solutions to mass and middle income individuals as well as Micro and Small Entrepreneurs (MSEs). To deliver its 5-year targets, the multinational is recruiting digital skills from across the continent, with the most recent addition being Ghanas very own, Mariam Kaleem Agyeman-Buahin.



Mariam has been appointed as Letshego Groups Head of Digital Marketing, and will be responsible for crafting, ideating and executing the marketing strategy for Letshegos LetsGo digital platform, set to catapult the Group towards its vision to become a world-class retail financial institution, improving the lives of its customers across sub-Saharan Africa.



Prior to Letshego, Mariam was employed by Standard Chartered Ghana. She joined the international banking group in September 2016 as Country Manager for Brand, Marketing and Sponsorship, before being promoted to her latest role in the Retail Banking division as Head of Digital Banking and Financial Inclusion and Corporate Partnerships. Prior to banking, Mariam made her creative mark in the telecoms sector as Vodafone Ghanas Head of Brand Engagement and Sponsorship. As a fireball marketer, Mariam has developed and implemented novel marketing concepts through digital and experiential channels to connect with diverse customer segments.



Mariams core strengths are Brand Management, Digital & Experiential Marketing, Marketing Communication and Concept Development.



We are delighted to have Mariam on board, and already inspired by her passion and energy to ignite the hearts and minds of customers and communities with Letshegos digital offering. With its dynamic economic growth trajectory, and rapid in-roads into global digital trends, Ghana is not only an important market in Letshegos regional footprint, but also a valued source of talent for the Letshego Group at large, commented Chipiliro Katundu, Letshegos Group Chief of Products.



Letshego Ghana, a subsidiary of Letshego Group, has more than demonstrated its strategic and potential value to the Group with a cumulative aggregated growth of 600% over the last 5 years, more than tripling its proportion of profit before tax in the same period.



Andrew Fening Okai, Letshegos Group Chief Executive, added, Mariams unique talents have been evident throughout her career, and she is already adding value since joining Letshego. She joins us at an incredibly pivotal phase for the Group and we are pleased to welcome her to our Letshego family.



The Letshego Group is a truly African multinational, first opening its doors in Botswana more than 21 years ago by offering loans to government employees. Today the Group has over 3,000 employees comprising more than 21 nationalities, and supports public and private sector individual customers, as well as micro and small entrepreneurs. Letshego has operations in 11 sub Saharan African markets, including Ghana.



Letshego Holdings Limited (the group holding company) is listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange, with a subsequent listings including a subsidiary listing on the Namibian stock exchange, and bond listings on both the Ghana and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges. Despite economic challenges posed by the pandemic during the course of 2020, the Letshego Group posted over GHS 580million (USD 100million) in profit before tax for the 2020 financial year, growing net assets at 12% year on year.



Letshego in Ghana



In Ghana, Letshego employs over 500 local nationals, with the business led by seasoned Ghanaian banker, Arnold Parker, Country CEO of Letshego Ghana. Letshego expanded into Ghana in 2017 through the acquisition of afb Ghana. Since the acquisition and under Arnolds leadership, Letshego has diversified the entitys product portfolio with the addition of MSME (Micro Small and Medium Enterprise) loans, retail and corporate deposits, as well as opening two new outlets to compliment the brands national, omni-channel network.



Speaking on the value of Ghana in Letshegos regional footprint, Arnold Parker noted that Ghana is proving to be a valued talent pool for regional companies across diverse sectors. He added that Letshego is one of many regional entities that invest and support Ghanas growth potential, while gaining benefit from the passion and expertise of its people. The Ghana team remain proud to be a part of a Group that is committed to supporting inclusive finance initiatives, supporting sustainable business and growth of communities in Ghana, and across our continent.



Letshego Ghana posted record national performance for 2020, more than doubling its profit before tax year on year to GHS47million (USD 8.1million).

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 federal court has approved a settlement in a lawsuit that requires the U.S. Army to review thousands of other-than-honorable discharges issued in the past decade to soldiers with mental health conditions or traumatic brain injuries.

Judge Charles Haight, with the U.S. District Court of Connecticut, approved the agreement Monday in the class-action suit formerly known as Kennedy v. McCarthy, which charged that the service wrongly discharged troops who engaged in misconduct but whose behavior may have been caused by a psychiatric condition or brain damage.

The Army announced in January that it would review all other-than-honorable discharges since April 17, 2011, for eligible service members, an estimated 3,500 active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops affected by post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychiatric conditions, trauma related to sexual assault, or brain injury.

Read Next: 'They Just Want it More:' Meet the First Women to Become Marines in San Diego

Under the settlement, the Army also will notify soldiers who received other-than-honorable discharges from Oct. 7, 2001, to April 16, 2011, of their ability to apply for an upgrade or to appeal a previous denial.

In 2016, the Defense Department announced efforts to increase awareness of the opportunity for veterans to request a review of their discharges and an upgrade. The following year, the DoD released additional guidance to clarify the circumstances that would be covered by a review.

In their lawsuit, Steve Kennedy, a former 82nd Airborne soldier and Iraq War veteran, and Alicia Carson, a National Guard veteran who deployed to Afghanistan for nearly a year, said the Army Discharge Review Board ignored the policy.

Shortly before his discharge, Kennedy was suicidal and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to court documents. He went absent without leave to attend his own wedding; as a result, he was demoted to private first class and kicked out of the service.

Kennedy, now a University of Connecticut School of Law student, received a discharge status upgrade in 2018, but decided to pursue the lawsuit.

Carson also received an upgrade to her discharge in 2018, but chose to remain with the suit, which was certified as a class action that year.

The two were represented by Yale Veterans Legal Services Clinic and the law firm of Jenner & Block.

"What was most important going forward to me was that everyone else got the same review that I did," said Kennedy in a news release Tuesday. "And that's the opportunity that thousands of deserving veterans are going to receive in this settlement."

The settlement in the case, now known as Kennedy v. Whitley, requires the Army to increase training for members of the Army Discharge Review Board.

It also allows soldiers to participate in their review board hearings by phone, a change from the requirement that they appear in person in Washington, D.C., to argue their cases.

To ensure that the service is following the agreement, the Army Discharge Review Board has agreed to update the court every six months on the number of cases it has reconsidered and decided.

The Army also must report the progress it makes on allowing troops to appear at their hearings by telephone.

Other-than-honorable and general discharges, also known as "bad paper" discharges, limit veterans' access to Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, including medical services, disability compensation and education benefits. They also can have an impact on a veteran's long-term earning power, since many employers will not hire anyone with less than a good-conduct discharge.

More than 51,400 discharges under other-than-honorable conditions were issued for active-duty personnel from fiscal 2010 through 2020, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center.

A similar case has been filed against the Navy for decisions made by the Navy Discharge Review Board, which also oversees Marine Corps discharges. The suit, Manker v. Spencer, also is before Judge Haight, who had rejected motions by the Army and the Navy to dismiss the suits.

"For many veterans, this could mean the difference between struggling with PTSD symptoms without adequate health care and finally receiving the benefits guaranteed by law," said Adam Henderson, a law student intern with the Yale Veterans Legal Services Clinic who is also involved in the Manker case.

Attorneys who work with service members from the other branches who received other-than-honorable discharges under the same circumstances hope that the Army case will accelerate decisions in their cases.

Danica Gonzalves, a lawyer and program director for a consortium of veterans service organizations that help former service members seeking discharge upgrades, told Military.com that the process is cumbersome and subject to lengthy delays.

"It's a very frustrating process for advocates and veterans," she said.

Gonzalves's Discharge Upgrade Program is supported by the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust and backed by the American Legion, Paralyzed Veterans of America and the National Veterans Legal Services Program.

-- Military.com reporter Richard Sisk contributed to this report.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: 'Dirty, Embarrassing Secret:' Veterans with PTSD Struggle to Shed Stigma of Bad Paper Discharges
[April 29, 2021] MetroNet Announces Grand Opening of Tallahassee

MetroNet today announced the grand opening of the Tallahassee market with a ribbon cutting at the first MetroNet storefront in the state of Florida. The Tallahassee storefront is located at 1779 Apalachee Parkway, Suite 109, Tallahassee, FL 32301, and is only a few steps away from other large retailers such as BJ's Brewhouse and Dick's Sporting Goods. The storefront will allow customers to learn more about 100 percent fiber optic connections to their home or business with incredible bandwidth allowing for faster internet speeds. "This past year shined a great light on how vital internet access is, as more people than ever before worked and learned from home," said Mayor John Dailey. "I'm proud of the action we have taken through the City Commission to help increase broadband availability in Tallahassee and boost economic development, which has led to innovative solutions that attract new business, support existing ones and benefit local residents. MetroNet's continued investment in our community shows the progress we are making, and I'm proud to celebrate with them as they reach this next milestone." The Evansville, IN.-based company began constructing its state-of-the-art fiber network in 2019. MetroNet builds fiber to the premises networks directly connecting homes and businesses to high-speed, symmetrical internet that allows users to upload as quickly as they download over fiber optic strands. Customers may learn more and sign up for MetroNet's services at construction.metronetinc.com.



"We are thrilled to announce the official grand opening of MetroNet in Tallahassee, and to provide high-speed fiber optic internet to Tallahassee neighborhoods," said MetroNet Executive Vice President Kevin Stelmach. "The Tallahassee community has been incredible to work alongside. We are excited to provide this community with services that will continue to support remote working, online learning and local businesses." Alongside a team of engineering students from Florida State University and Florida A&M University, and a certified arborist, MetroNet was able to make progress through the $75 million build while protecting the Tallahassee tree canopy. With this team, MetroNet was able to survey and protect every single tree throughout the build of the 100 percent fiber optic network. This team has allowed MetroNet the opportunity to provide the City of Tallahassee with unparalleled services while protecting an important and unique asset to the community.

MetroNet provides customers with a future-proof fiber optic network that allows businesses and residents to have access to the fastest internet speeds available in a time when access to reliable internet is necessary. With MetroNet's symmetrical speeds to and from the home or business, customers can conveniently stream, work and learn from home. MetroNet offers a 100 percent fiber optic network, including high-speed fiber internet, full-featured fiber phone, and fiber television with a wide variety of programming. The company started in 2005 with one fiber optic network in Greencastle, Indiana, and has grown to more than 100 communities in nine states. About MetroNet: MetroNet is a 100 percent Fiber Optic Company headquartered in Evansville, Indiana. The customer-focused company provides cutting-edge fiber optic communication services, including high-speed Fiber Internet, full-featured Fiber Phone (News - Alert) , and Fiber IPTV with a wide variety of programming. MetroNet started in 2005 with one fiber optic network in Greencastle, Indiana, and has since grown to serving and constructing networks in more than 100 communities across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. MetroNet is committed to bringing state-of-the-art telecommunication services to communities - services that are comparable or superior to those offered in large metropolitan areas. MetroNet has been named in the top 50 small and medium companies on Glassdoor and has been honored with a Glassdoor Employees' Choice Award recognizing MetroNet among the Best Places to Work in 2020. For more information visit www.MetroNetinc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005122/en/

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Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have developed a new method that makes it possible to control human hormones and metabolism. One of the studys perspectives suggests that the method could be used to develop more effective medicines to treat cancer and a range of metabolic disorders in the future.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with their Swiss colleagues at the University Hospital of Bern, have cracked the code for controlling a group of enzymes that affect our metabolism.

The researchers' findings could help us avoid diseases ranging from high cholesterol to infertility to certain types of cancer, which are all due, among other things, to hormonal imbalances.

They have found a way to influence a special protein called cytochrome P450 reductase (POR) -- popularly characterized as the 'conductor' of the body's protein orchestra, which helps regulate our hormones and makes it possible to break down medicinal products in the liver.

We have developed a method to control this conductor using small molecules that are able to bind to the POR protein and thereby up- or downgrade the formation of certain hormones or help the degradation of certain drugs in the liver. These processes are important for several types of disease." Simon Bo Jensen, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Copenhagen's Department of Chemistry

Together with department colleague Associate Professor Nikos Hatzakis, who led the research project, Jensen found three molecules that can bind to the POR protein, and in doing so, influence how the conductor controls the protein orchestra -- and thereby prevent diseases from developing in the body.

"By affecting the POR protein, we can activate or deactivate proteins with different functions -- just as a conductor controls their orchestra. Imagine a violin that controls testosterone levels, a saxophone that affects cholesterol or a cello that is implicated in cancers. Now we can direct them," explains Nikos Hatzakis.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

A potential prostate cancer remedy

The human body consists of many different proteins. One important group, often involved in several types of disease, is called P450. These proteins are managed by the heavy hand of the POR conductor.

If P450 proteins don't function as they ought to, they can create an imbalance in our sex hormones, which can then lead to prostate cancer or other diseases. Postdoc Simon Bo Jensen explains:

"When it comes to prostate cancer, patients typically have trouble regulating a particular P450 protein known as CYP17. Our new method lets us design a molecule that can bind to the POR conductor and increase or decrease CYP17 without affecting other P450 proteins. By so doing, we can treat diseases like prostate cancer far more effectively, while avoiding serious side effects," he says.

The researchers identified three molecules that can bind to and influence the POR conductor. Two of these are already being used in pharmaceuticals, while the third is a natural product derived from the sorghum plant.

The hope is that these three molecules will pave the way for the design of a greater number of even more effective molecules to prevent or treat diseases.

"By using artificial intelligence to sort data for hundreds of molecules, we can study which molecules bind to the POR conductor and cause it to act the way we want it to. So far, we've found the three mentioned," explains Simon Bo Jensen.

Paving the way for effective medicines of the future

The researchers' quest for just the right molecules to bind to the POR conductor is not over yet.

"We would like to explore whether there are other molecules that are even more effective at influencing the conductor's behavior. For now, we have taken the first step and demonstrated that we can influence the POR conductor. In doing so, we've paved the way for future treatment methods of various types of disease," says Nikos Hatzakis, who concludes:

"So far, we have tested the proteins in isolation, in the laboratory and in cells. When we have a potential drug with promising results, the next step will be to test it on animals and finally, in humans. We hope that our research will lead to the development of medicines in pill form in the near future."
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BOONE, N.C.  Two deputies were killed and three other people including a suspected gunman were found dead after a lengthy standoff in North Carolina, a sheriffs office said Thursday.

The Watauga County Sheriffs office said Sgt. Chris Ward and K-9 Deputy Logan Fox were dispatched to a home in Boone at 9:44 a.m. Wednesday after the homeowner and his family didnt report to work or answer telephone calls. Both were hit by gunfire. Other officers were able to pull out Ward, who later died at a hospital. Fox died at the scene.

The individual suspected of killing the two officers is also suspected of killing two civilians in the residence, the statement said. Sheriff Len Hagaman said they were the suspects mother and stepfather, WSOC-TV reported.

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A Boone Police officer, a Boone firefighter and an Appalachian State University police officer were shot at during an initial attempt to rescue the deputies, and the Boone police officer was hit, but he escaped injury to his Kevlar helmet equipment, Hagaman told WSOC.

Morganton Department of Public Safety Maj. Ryan Lander told The News Herald just before 11 p.m. that the suspect appeared to have killed himself, the newspaper reported.

Hagaman said Ward died at a hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee.

This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved as well as their families and our community, Hagaman said. I greatly appreciate the tremendous support we are receiving from law enforcement agencies across the region and the state.

The sheriffs office said officers from approximately 15 law enforcement agencies surrounded the home. Other people living nearby were evacuated or told to shelter in place as the standoff lasted throughout the day and Wednesday night.

Clarence Wilson, 78, was on his porch when deputies pulled up in front of the house across the street. Gunfire erupted after the deputies arrived, Wilson said.

Then they told me to get back in the house and stay, he said.

Wilson said he later saw officers pull a man from the house.

I dont know if it was a deputy or who it was, he said. I was just worried about keeping myself safe.

Wilson said he heard a second barrage of gunfire around noon as the house remained surrounded.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he spoke with the sheriff to offer support and express his condolences.

We grieve for Sgt. Chris Ward, K-9 Deputy Logan Fox and the entire Watauga County law enforcement community today, Cooper tweeted. These horrific shootings that claimed lives and loved ones show the ever-present danger law enforcement can encounter in the line of duty.
Special for Cronkite News

PHOENIX  On one of her first days working in an Arizona hospital, Kelsi Shawd placed the bodies of COVID-19 patients into cadaver bags.

For months, Katherine Hall watched her patients suffer, not sure whether they would die or recover enough to go home.

Some nights, Johnathan Hopper drank 12 beers just to get to sleep after his shift ended at a New York hospital when the city was the epicenter of the pandemic in 2020.

Ive seen hundreds of people die, Hopper said. You cant sleep, but you have to report to work the next day.

Shawd, Hall and Hopper are among tens of thousands of travel nurses who have filled a growing health care staffing shortage exposed by a once in a generation pandemic.

Lured by lucrative contracts from a largely unregulated industry of staffing agencies, this nomadic workforce cycles between hot spots, adjusting to new work settings, different co-workers, unfamiliar assignments and long hours.

Travel nurses work as private contractors, taking assignments from staffing agencies that place them in hospitals across the country that are pressed for workers.

But after more than a year of witnessing unrelenting death and risking their own exposure on the front lines, some travel nurses are burning out. According to experts, the pandemic will have lasting repercussions on the temporary medical staffing sector and health care industry as a whole.

Rising demand

The $10 billion market for travel nurses was increasing before the pandemic was declared in March 2020, spurred by aging baby boomers, an opioid epidemic and the Affordable Care Act allowing more patients to seek care. Meanwhile, seasoned nurses were planning their retirements, leaving a growing void in the health care industry.

With the pandemic, the industry grew even more. In a recent poll of hospital executives by Avant Healthcare Professionals, 90% of more than 100 respondents reported using travel nurses to help with an influx of COVID-19 patients in 2020, compared with less than 60% in 2019.

On Dec. 2, when COVID-19 cases were surging across the country, there were more than 31,000 job openings for travel nurses, nearly half of which were shorter, more lucrative crisis positions. Demand had increased 44% over the previous month, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, a staffing advisory firm.

As shutdowns crashed the economy and unemployment soared, many core staff nurses sought crisis contracts on the front lines that reached $10,000 a week.

Because of the pandemic, hospitals lost about 30% of their core nursing staff to travel jobs, according to Brian Hudson, senior vice president at Avant Healthcare.

Arizona health care experts said Arizona nurses were among those who left staff positions to become travel nurses, although hospitals tried to incentivize them to stay.

Shawd, whos from Illinois, said that in just one month at Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Glendale, she witnessed about 20 staff nurses leave. As a travel nurse herself, Shawd said, she couldnt blame them.

COVID nurses made a significant amount more to go be a travel nurse, as opposed to being at their home hospital doing the exact same thing, she said. What are they going to do when the pandemics over? I dont know.

Stretched thin

Arizona scrambled to fill hospitals with health care workers to manage surging COVID-19 numbers by cross-training nurses to take intensive-care patients, increasing hospital bed capacities and expediting the nurse licensing process.

Gov. Doug Ducey issued an emergency declaration in March 2020, allowing the State Board of Nursing to quickly usher in registered nurses from other states to work in understaffed facilities.

The number of ICU jobs in Arizona from January to July 2020 jumped to about eight times the normal level, according to a study by NEJM Catalyst.

Even so, COVID-19 has forced nurses to take on more patients and heavier assignments, in some cases exceeding state regulations that establish limits of no more than two patients to every nurse in the ICU.

Banner-University Medical Center Tucson stated in a December email obtained through an Arizona Department of Health Services records request that ICU staffing assignments are being pushed to a 1 nurse to 3 patients in many areas of the hospital.

Nurse-to-patient ratios also were far above normal levels in Yuma, according to Elizabeth Lara, the administrative director for adult acute care and critical care at Yuma Regional Medical Center.

We were so short on nurses nationwide, Lara said. We were, at some times, one to four, one to five.

Hopper, who spent nine months in Phoenix as a travel nurse, likened ICU nurses to the special forces of the nursing world  a workforce he said was in short supply.

We ran out of those nurses, he said. They were taking anyone with critical care experience, and they were putting them into these ICUs to care for the sick COVID patients.

Hopper, a seasoned emergency room nurse who was cross-trained as an ICU nurse to help combat COVID-19, said it was difficult relearning his job.

Hospitals needed people who knew how to run ventilators and kidney machines and ECMO machines, he said, referring to devices that take over heart and lung functions.

His tools changed, and so did his relationships with patients.

An ER nurse stabilizes the patient, and then we send them to the ICU, he said. ICU nurses care for a patient for days and weeks.

But he wasnt the only travel nurse pushed into new specialties. Hannah Quirk, who usually attended to premature and ill infants, worked outside her specialty at Banner Thunderbird, where she was assigned to the adult COVID-19 ICU.

She found herself assisting nurses with bathing adult patients and administering medication, a drastic change from working with underweight babies.

At first, she found her new responsibilities daunting. She turned to neonatal intensive care unit Facebook groups and found colleagues across the country facing the same challenges.

Our adult-nurse friends are, like, drowning, she said. They wouldnt ask for our help if they didnt really need it.

Travel nurse take action

A review of COVID-19-related federal lawsuits from January 2020 to early April 2021 identified four labor-related claims by travel nurses against medical facilities and travel nurse staffing agencies. The lawsuits focused on unsafe working conditions and disputes over pay and contracts.

Lack of personal protective equipment led travel nurse Diana Lange, along with other travel nurses, to file a lawsuit against 24-Hour Medical Staffing Services in California.

Winnie Kagendo sued Atlas Medstaff and several companies, including the Permanente Foundation, claiming she was fired from her job as a travel nurse after she complained about having to care for a COVID-19 positive patient without an N95 mask.

Krucial Staffing, an agency that responded to the March 2020 surge of COVID-19 cases in New York City, has come under fire in two lawsuits filed by travel nurses.

Gregory Antollino, who represents the plaintiffs in both suits, said many travel nurses feared losing their jobs or facing disciplinary action from state nursing boards for speaking out about lack of access to masks and other personal protective equipment and the work they were being asked to do.

The nurses were required to work outside of their fields of competence  not just specialty, but competence, according to court documents.

Referring to Krucial Staffing, Antollino said, They didnt know what they were doing with regard to the pandemic. They didnt know things that they should have known as a nurse staffing agency deploying workers to work in COVID-19 places.

Krucial Staffing declined an interview for this article but responded by email.

As for the lawsuits in question, they are still in litigation so nothing specific can be said about them. Krucial Staffing has issued past statements denying the claims being made and continues to defend itself against the charges, the email said.

Although Antollino is handling only two cases, he said he has been contacted by nearly 100 travel nurses considering legal action.

In light of the additional pressures and safety concerns associated with the pandemic, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which regulates workplace safety, created a new category of complaint for COVID-19-specific working violations.

In Arizona, health care workers filed more than a dozen COVID-19-related complaints to OSHA against hospitals, citing violations from a lack of PPE to quarantine policies.

One OSHA complaint against Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix states that the hospital required employees to reuse PPE, did not follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for social distancing and that employees do not have access to readily available personal protective equipment to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The complaint, filed at the start of the pandemic when the nation was facing a PPE shortage, estimated that 10,000 employees were impacted by such workplace safety issues.

Banner-University Medical Center declined an interview but responded by email.

Banner has adhered to the CDCs COVID-19 guidelines, wrote David Lozano, a spokesman for Banner Health, Arizonas largest health care network and largest employer. If there were isolated instances where a protocol was not followed, we investigate them and take any necessary steps.

Coping with burnout

Hopper said he was drawn to New York at the onset of the pandemic by a sense of ethical duty. Yet more than once he found himself rushing into a COVID-19 patients room when their vitals became critical without the necessary mask pulled over his face.

Some patients survived but many didnt.

If you dont rush into that room, within the next 30 seconds, that patient is going to die, Hopper said. We are putting the lives of our patients before ourselves.

More than 560,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. since February 2020  and that number is climbing. Travel nurses interviewed for this story acknowledged the mental health toll accompanying the loss of so many people in their care.

Weve worked an exceptional amount of hours, Hopper said. Weve been in very dangerous situations. Weve been in very high stress situations. The expectations that have been placed on us are extraordinary.

Whos there to support the health care workers?

Experts agree that losing patients at the rate frontline workers have throughout the pandemic has been traumatic, increasing burnout and leading to mental health worries.

Self-care isnt a priority anymore, Shawd said. Its just like you go to work, youre mentally, emotionally drained. You come home and just pass out and go to bed. And then wake up and do it again.

Hopper said mental health problems in nurses can often look like post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes accompanied by addiction.

This is the dark side of the pandemic that no one wants to discuss, he said.

Experts in the medical industry suggest travel nurses in particular may be at high risk for burnout.

I think well see a pretty large exodus of health care professionals out of the industry for this, said Hudson, of Avant Healthcare Professionals, whose agency conducted a 2021 survey focused on the industrys response to the pandemic. COVIDs not going away  and, who knows what the next pandemic is going to be.

Relocating and working with a new team are just two of the unique challenges travel nurses face, said Robert Longyear, an executive at Wanderly, a digital marketplace for travel nurses. Often, these nurses are given the more difficult patients because they make higher wages than staff nurses, he said.

The travel nurses who are going from hot spot to hot spot arent getting any relief, Longyear said.

Hospitals and agencies have recognized the need for mental health resources for their staff. Hall, the travel nurse, said hospitals frequently have an employee assistance program that provides a hotline nurses can call for emotional support.

Cade Webb, lead marketing associate for AHS Staffing, said the agency offers these benefits through their insurance. There are also other resources available, such as the RNconnect 2 Well-being, a free Arizona Nurses Association program that sends self-care text messages.

Arizona and many other states have begun to lift mask mandates and social distancing requirements, worrying health experts who warn of a possible fourth wave. COVID-19 cases started to rise again in March.

As soon as the dust settles from COVID-19, experts believe there could be a mass departure of skilled nurses from the industry.

One recent survey of nurses by the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment found more than a third of nurses polled are considering leaving the profession.

After more than a year on the front line, Hopper is one of them.

Ive been working in critical care for seven years, he said. And Ive never been faced with the challenges that we have right now. Once were through the problem, Im exiting this profession, because I dont want to have to deal with this again.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
A grand jury indictment of a Pembroke Pines man on a first-degree murder charge in the February 2020 death of a 92-year-old neighbor means the Broward State Attorneys Office can decide to pursue the death penalty.

A state attorneys spokesman, asked if the office planned to seek the death penalty in case of a conviction on the first-degree charge, said the office has 45 days after arraignment to make that decision.

Wesley Perez, 25, will formally face the first-degree murder charge at 8:30 a.m. Friday. He is accused of killing Fernando Frias, the father of Miami Herald food editor Carlos Frias.

No justice will bring back my dad, Carlos Frias said in a statement on Twitter. No vengeance will restore his grandchildrens innocence. What I hope for is accountability  yes, from the justice system, but also from our society, which prioritizes a love of guns over the lives of our loved ones.

Wesley Perez

Perez already was facing a second-degree murder charge. Court records say that on April 19, defense attorney Jose Baez received a 90-day extension on filing a notice of intent to rely on a defense of insanity.

Baker Act, released, then arrested

Pembroke Pines police first sent Perez to Hollywoods Memorial Regional Hospital under the Baker Act on Feb. 29, 2020, before arresting him after he came home on March 2.

An arrest report says an incoherent 911 call ending with a hangup brought Pines police to 10010 SW Sixth Ct., where they found Perez in his pool and fully clothed. What the Hialeah native was babbling to them didnt make sense at the time, so officers had him involuntarily held for psychological observation.

No 911 call was placed by the neighbor who the report said told police shed heard three or four gunshots about 30 minutes before they showed up at Perezs. She said she assumed they were there about the shooting.

The next day, March 1, Rogerio Frias, another son of Fernando Frias, stopped a Pembroke Pines police officer after finding his father shot dead. Fernando had been living with Carlos family in Miami since May 2019, but would go back to the home hed owned since the 1980s to visit friends and pick fruit.

Story continues

Officers say 13 casings and an empty magazine from a .40-caliber Glock were next to Fernando Frias body by the front door. He had been shot 11 times.

The officers from the previous day realized Perezs babbling likely meant something. When they translated Perezs Spanish and English babbling on their body-camera footage, they realized he was yelling, among other things, Fernando, do you know who I am! and 40 by 40! a reference to the Glock.

Surveillance video from a neighbor showed Perez, a neighborhood acquaintance, going toward Frias house at 3:06 p.m. Feb. 29. At 3:28 p.m., Perez came running out with hands in the air.

The report says a search warrant turned up other guns, a box for a .40-caliber Glock, an empty magazine, ammunition for the Glock, but no Glock.

A phone call to my exile father  and a glimpse of the life he left behind

The first ventanita: How Miami invented the windows that imported Cuban coffee culture
London, UK, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Genetec Inc. (Genetec), a leading technology provider of unified security, public safety, operations, and business intelligence solutions, today announced that Reiknistofa Bankanna (RB), an IT service provider for Icelandic financial institutions, has recently overhauled its security infrastructure with Genetec Security Center. With the help of its system integrator Hafnes Ehf, RB is now using Genetec to manage its cameras, access control and video analytics through one unified interface.

RB is a provider of mission-critical IT systems for Icelandic financial institutions, responsible for the countrys central clearance and settlement system, and a number of multi-tenant core banking solutions. As the backbone of Icelandic Financial Services, RB places a very high importance on security; not only to ensure its data stays safe but also to protect employees and visiting clients. While its server rooms and offices were protected via disparate video and access control systems, the technology was old, and maintenance was becoming both a financial and an operational burden.

RB operates its solutions across multiple data centers in a shared, multi-bank environment. This requires a modern, reliable system that brings video and access control into a single solution  making it easy for operators to understand what is happening, when, where, and what action to take next. As an open unified platform, Genetec Security Center was the optimal choice as it simplified daily security operations, allowed for further integration with other tools such as RBs heating and cooling systems, and delivered business-wide value.

From day one we wanted a unified system which could help our teams understand the situation quickly; alerting them if anything required their attention, said Geir Smundsson, Datacenter Manager at Reiknistofa Bankanna. The Genetec solution does just this and is allowing us to build in customized alerts so we gain business intelligence  providing us with better ROI.

Physical security teams are demanding simplicity and greater functionality, said Anthonie van der Ploeg, Director of Sales for Benelux & Nordics at Genetec. Unification can offer them both by bringing together all security system components seamlessly in a single software platform in a way that can vastly improve security management. We are delighted that Icelands Reiknistofa Bankanna has experienced the deep business insights Genetec Security Center is capable of delivering, and we look forward to supporting them as they evolve and grow their operations.

The time savings delivered by Genetec have been immense. Its been a worthwhile investment, especially as it can evolve with us, and allows us to move at our chosen speed. Considering its ease of use, deep integration, and leading analytics, we look forward to continuing the partnership over the coming years, concluded Smundsson.

For more information, please read the case study

About Genetec

Genetec Inc. is an innovative technology company with a broad solutions portfolio that encompasses security, intelligence, and operations. The companys flagship product, Security Center, is an open-architecture platform that unifies IP-based video surveillance, access control, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), communications, and analytics. Genetec also develops cloud-based solutions and services designed to improve security, and contribute new levels of operational intelligence for governments, enterprises, transport, and the communities in which we live. Founded in 1997, and headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Genetec serves its global customers via an extensive network of resellers, integrators, certified channel partners, and consultants in over 80 countries.

 Genetec Inc., 2021. Genetec, and the Genetec logo are trademarks of Genetec Inc. and may be registered or pending registration in several jurisdictions. Other trademarks used in this document may be trademarks of the manufacturers or vendors of the respective product.

Attachment
The attorney for Michelle Troconis filed a series of new motions this week seeking the family psychological report done as part of the Jennifer and Fotis Dulos divorce and custody battle while also trying to compel a court reporter to provide a transcript of a hearing on the report.

Attorney Jon Schoenhorn, representing Troconis, filed a civil writ compelling court reporter Melanie Moss, who works at the Stamford Judicial District, to provide a court transcript of the two-day hearing on the psychological report meant to aid a judge in family court proceedings.

The hearing was held on May 14 and May 17, 2019 just days before Jennifer Dulos disappeared. The hearing was canceled after the reports author, Dr. Stephen Herman, refused to continue his testimony.

Schoenhorn is asking Stamford-Norwalk Judicial District Judge John Blawie to reconsider his decision to deny his client access to the report. He also wants Moss or her successor to provide the transcript of the hearing.

The report has been under seal since the hearing in May 2019.

Jennifer Dulos disappeared on May 24, 2019. Troconis and attorney Kent Mawhinney are the remaining defendants charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the disappearance. Both have pleaded not guilty and are free on bond.

Fotis Dulos, the estranged husband of Jennifer Dulos, died on Jan. 30, 2020, two days after suicide attempt. He had been charged with the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Dulos three weeks earlier.

At the time of Jennifer Dulos disappearance, she and Fotis Dulos were embroiled in a contentious divorce and custody battle over their five children. The findings in the psychological report have never been made public.

Moss declined to provide him with a transcript of the proceedings in March, Schoenhorn said. Although the report has been sealed, Schoenhorn said there appeared to be no prohibition against the public attending the hearing, which would make the transcript public.

To the plaintiffs knowledge the May 14 and May 17, 2019, public courtroom proceedings were never ordered sealed or closed to the public, Schoenhorn said.

By refusing to provide him with the transcript, Moss acted in violation of her statutory authority and the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, Schoenhorn said.

Schoenhorn is also asking Blawie to sanction Chief States Attorney Richard J. Colangelo Jr. by precluding evidence and witnesses or by dismissing the criminal charges against his client since Colangelo has not turned over the remaining evidence in the case.

That evidence included photos and videos captured by the residents of 77 Mountain Spring Road, located near where Fotis Dulos owned property; any documents pertaining to the arrest of Mawhinney on sexual assault and violation of probation charges related to incidents involving his estranged wife; and all cell phone records from Mawhinney, Fotis Dulos, Jennifer Dulos and several others, Schoenhorn said.

In a separate motion this week, Schoenhorn argued that Stamford States Attorney Paul Ferencek had not filed an appearance in the criminal cases against his client so he had no standing to file motions.

Ferenck, in a motion, had asked Blawie to vet any motions from Schoenhorn before they could proceed. Schoenhorn said this was incorrect and misleading, according to filings.

Schoenhorn previously filed several motions that included evidence from the case including snippets of his client being interviewed by state police. Ferencek said in his request to have Schoenhorns motions vetted by the judge that he was causing significant damage to the integrity of the judicial process.

Schoenhorn countered in his objection filed this week that he was demonstrating that the state had included misleading evidence in their arrest warrants for his client.

Attorney Colangelo and several state police investigators have appeared on national television programs to theorize about the case, Schoenhorn said.

Those theories included that his client had knowledge about Fotis Dulos plan to kill his wife, when in fact, she repeatedly denied during three interviews with state police having any knowledge of the crime, Schoenhorn said.

Any alleged damage to the integrity of the judicial process, if it exists, is exclusively due to the repeated comments and interviews given to the media by police investigators and Chief States Attorney Colangelo, and not due to any defense motion filed with the court, Schoenhorn said.

Troconis is due back in court on May 25.
An Illinois House measure with one sponsor that passed in the late evening hours last week will harm families with children in private schools, opponents say.

House Bill 2789 would have the Illinois Department of Public Health provide requirements for in-person instruction at not just public schools, but non-public schools, to include personal protective equipment, cleaning and hygiene, social distancing, occupancy limits, symptom screening (and) on-site isolation protocols.

The measure also would have the state department investigate and potentially shut down not just public, but nonpublic schools, for not complying with COVID-19 mitigation, instead of local public health officials managing such orders.

State Rep. Michelle Mussman, D-Schaumburg, was the sole sponsor of the bill and called it for a vote just after 11 p.m. April 22.

We have a plan that can work effectively for the concerned parties and allow parents, students and staff to feel that they are returning to safe and healthy learning environments, Mussman said.

State Rep. Avery Bourne, R-Raymond, who has complained that bills with more than enough co-sponsors to pass the House arent getting called, was the only one on the House floor speaking in opposition. She said the measure isnt about COVID-19 mitigation oversight and goes too far.

This means that for all of the schools that worked really hard to get students back in seats, Im sorry, the state now says youre closed, Bourne said. This takes away all local control.

Last spring, as the pandemic hit, Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued an executive order that prohibited all in-person education. That also impacted private schools. But for the fall semester, Pritzker let local school officials decide how they would return.

For months, the vast majority of public schools were fully remote. Many families sought full in-person education for their children, something that in many areas of the state was only provided by private schools.

Jessica McGee, a parent of three children in private schools in Springfield, said she fears the worst from the proposed legislation.

I dont want to be Chicken Little here, but I do fear that OK, well if our public schools are closed, so is yours, McGee said. It makes absolutely no sense that we should do that to our schools. Our schools are open, theyve been open, theres no sense to close them simply because the public schools have done so.

McGee had her children in public school before COVID-19 hit. She was concerned the measure passed the House in the late-night hours.

This is a major bill, this is a major piece of legislation, that would allow the governor to shut down private and non-public home schools, she said. So were just concerned that its not being heard and its just going to happen without any kind of response.

The measure is now in the Illinois Senate and is supported by the Illinois Education Association, one of the states leading public school unions.

The associations website said the measure keeps staff safe by finally putting enforcement measures in place.

.

Total cases in west-central Illinois counties as of Wednesday, according to individual county health departments, and vaccination rates, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health, were:

Brown County

691 total, 680 recovered, seven deaths

Fully vaccinated: 20.35%; 65 or older: 69.11%

Cass County

1,972 total, 1,927 recovered, 33 deaths

10 new cases.

Fully vaccinated: 32.09%; 65 or older: 71.48%

Greene County

1,414 total, 1,357 recovered, 48 deaths

Fully vaccinated: 23.54%; 65 or older: 56.61%

Jersey County

2,632 total, 2,556 recovered, 49 deaths

Fully vaccinated: 31.83%; 65 or older: 76.43%

Macoupin County

4,793 total, 4,472 recovered, 110 deaths

Four new cases.

Fully vaccinated: 30.48%; 65 or older: 75.04%

Morgan County

3,908 total, 3,751 released from restrictions, 101 deaths

13 new cases.

Fully vaccinated: 30.52%; 65 or older: 74.57%

Pike County

1,752 total, 1,695 recovered, 47 deaths

Fully vaccinated: 24.62%; 65 or older: 63.1%

Sangamon County

18,192 total, 231 deaths

51 new cases.

Fully vaccinated: 36.16%; 65 or older: 82.17%

Schuyler County

691 total, 676 recovered, 16 deaths

Fully vaccinated: 30.32%; 65 or older: 66.58%

Scott County

471 total, 467 recovered, one death

Fully vaccinated: 24.79%; 65 or older: 62.31%

Statewide, 2,728 new cases of coronavirus disease and 33 deaths were reported Wednesday, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

There have been 1,328,454 cases and 21,891 deaths in Illinois.
A recognised stateless person in the UK sits on a park bench in east London.  UNHCR/Katie Barlow

LONDON, UK  For more than seven decades, Benjamin has lacked something that most people take for granted: a nationality. Born in Namibia, then part of South Africa, he did not acquire nationality at birth because at the time neither of his parents had citizenship or permanent residency in the country.

His Polish-born mother had emigrated from Europe after being liberated from a concentration camp at the end of the Second World War. His parents eventually naturalised as South Africans, but Benjamin was an adult by then and initially unaware that he was a citizen of neither Namibia nor South Africa.

An opponent of apartheid, Benjamin was repeatedly incarcerated in South Africa before fleeing to the UK in 1973. He was detained briefly, requested asylum, but was released without immigration status. For years, he was afraid to regularise his status in the UK, fearing deportation to South Africa. During that time, he was unaware that he was stateless, but found that, over time, his lack of documentation made life difficult. He had wanted to marry a British citizen, but they were unable to.

For many stateless people in the UK, the quest for recognition and status can be a lengthy, debilitating struggle. Through bad luck or circumstance, some in the UK find themselves citizens of nowhere. Without a nationality, they struggle for years or even decades to access services, travel abroad or adequately support themselves.

"I really want the sense of belonging."

In 2013, Benjamin learned that the UK had introduced a statelessness determination procedure, offering a route to stay legitimately. He was among the first applicants. In 2014, he was granted statelessness leave with residence for 30 months. This was renewed in 2016, and in 2019, he received indefinite leave to remain as a stateless person. He was finally able to marry.

Benjamin was delighted to be recognised. But his experience was stressful, expensive and frustrating. He has had two applications and a judicial review rejected in his quest to become a British citizen. Now in his 70s and with health issues, he still hopes to resolve his lack of nationality.

I cant imagine what it will be like to be a citizen, but Id like to find out before I die, he said. I really want the sense of belonging.

I AM HUMAN (UNHCR)

Many stateless people in the UK face major obstacles trying to navigate the procedures, and suffer prolonged periods in limbo, as detailed in a new study by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, entitled I am Human.

Those interviewed spoke of their frustration and distress at the lengthy process and the limitations their lack of status involved. Many cited a deterioration in mental health and raised concerns around the quality of reviews, difficulties obtaining evidence, the use of detention and the overall process.

One of the issues that Benjamin highlighted was the difficulty faced by those trapped in the system to work legally to support themselves during the years without official status.

Some people have had the same issue for 20 years. Why dont they issue a work permit to let them work while they are waiting for documentation? he asked.

The UK is a microcosm of a global problem, which consigns millions to the margins of society, unable to exercise basic rights and access services. It is often an intergenerational trap, with many children born into uncertainty.

UNHCR has a global mandate to identify, prevent and reduce statelessness, and protect stateless people. UNHCR reported that there were 4.2 million stateless people in 76 countries at the end of 2019. However, the number is estimated to be much higher as there is a lack of data.

In 2013, UNHCR developed a global action plan with states, civil society and international organisations to fight statelessness, and in 2014 launched #iBelong, a campaign to end statelessness within a decade.

Progress has been made. Turkmenistan recently introduced measures to ensure all children born in the country have their births registered. And last year, Cote dIvoire became the first African country to adopt a statelessness determination process.

Currently, there are no accurate estimates of total stateless numbers in the UK. The UK procedure has been in place eight years, but only about 180 people have benefitted. Last year, UNHCR UK released an audit drawing attention to good practice as well as concerns in decision-making and delays in granting leave.

"It's two steps forward, always three steps back."

Some of the stateless in the UK have found themselves without an official status through no fault of their own, the victims of administrative oversights or failures.

Paul was born in Goa, an Indian citizen. His parents were both British Overseas Citizens  a class of nationality granted under limited circumstances to people connected with former British colonies  and his father subsequently acquired full British citizenship.

Paul was issued a British passport in India in 2007. Believing he had acquired British citizenship, he then surrendered his Indian citizenship in line with Indian law. After receiving his British passport, Paul travelled to join his father in the UK. A few months later, the British authorities informed Paul that his passport had been issued in error, and he was not in fact entitled to British nationality. Subsequent applications to regain his Indian citizenship were rejected.

Positively, he recently obtained five years leave to remain after his second application for statelessness leave. Speaking before that, he described the impact of the bureaucratic maze.

Its two steps forward, always three steps back, he said.
Vaccination rates in Louisiana have cratered in recent weeks, leaving a million doses sitting on shelves in the state. The pileup of appointments suggests there is a larger number of people hesitant or unwilling to get vaccinated after the initial frenzy for appointments during the first months of the rollout.

To address this, White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci is talking to The Times-Picayune and The Advocate on Friday to answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Fauci, who is also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will be joined by Dr. Cameron Webb, the senior policy advisor for COVID-19 equity.

Questions for Fauci or Webb about the coronavirus vaccines can be submitted to the form below or emailed to ewoodruff@theadvocate.com or bpaterson@theadvocate.com by Friday at noon.

The interview comes as Louisiana is lagging behind the national average for vaccination rates, having given at least one shot to 32% of its residents compared to 43% nationally. The state is behind only Alabama and Mississippi for percentage of population vaccinated. The most vaccinated parish is West Feliciana Parish, with about 45% of vaccines completed. But many parishes are below 20%, with Cameron Parish, an area still recovering from Hurricane Laura, the lowest at 8%.

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

The interview will take place at 1:30 p.m. CT and will be posted on Nola.com and TheAdvocate.com shortly after.

Please submit your vaccine questions in the form below.

Can't view the form? Click here.
This year, more than 60,000 adults in the United States will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, statistically, as few as 10 percent will survive five years after diagnosis, according to the American Cancer Society. Because pancreatic cancer is hidden deep within the body and often symptomless, it's frequently diagnosed after the disease has progressed too far for surgical intervention and/or has spread throughout the body. Research indicates that earlier detection of pancreatic tumors could quadruple survival rates; however, no validated and reliable tests for early detection of pancreatic cancer currently exist.

Now, researchers at the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have successfully created the first three-dimensional (3D) organoid models of the pancreas from human stem cells. Unlike previous platforms for the study of pancreatic cancer, this first-of-its-kind organoid model includes both the acinar and ductal structures that play a critical role in the majority of pancreatic cancers. The new research platform -- which is not expected to guide patient care at this time -- will shed new light on the origins and development of pancreatic cancer, as well as reveal potential means for discovering markers of early diagnosis and monitoring the disease. The team's report appears in Cell Stem Cell.

We thought, if we had a way to use human pancreatic cells to forward engineer cancer, we could begin to understand the earliest steps in the development of this disease. This model could also serve as a platform to potentially discover biomarkers -- measurable changes linked to disease -- that we hope to use in the clinic to monitor cancer development." Senthil Muthuswamy, PhD, Corresponding Author, Director of Cell Biology at the Cancer Research Institute at BIDMC

The pancreas is a hormone-secreting organ consisting of ducts and acinar cell, structures. Researchers suspect that the most common kind of pancreatic cancer (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, or PDAC) arises in the cells lining acinar and ductal structures. However, until now, scientists have not been able to successfully grow and maintain human acinar structures in the lab challenging their ability to test the hypothesis in a model.

To coerce the stem cells down the path to becoming ductal and acinar cells, Ling Huang, Instructor or Medicine at BIDMC in the Muthuswamy laboratory collaborated with Doug Melton's laboratory at Harvard University and methodically tested various combinations of cell growth media used for different lengths of time. The culmination of five-plus years' of work, presented in the study represents the first time researchers successfully generated human acinar cells in culture and maintained them long enough to be able to use them in experiments.

"It's like a cooking recipe -- a complex recipe, with no precedent," said Muthuswamy, who is also Associate Professor Medicine, Harvard Medical School. "Only when you use all the right ingredients in the right proportions and do them in the correct sequence do you get the cells becoming the acinar cells."

Next, Huang and Ridhdhi Desai, a Research Fellow at BIDMC, used the two separate lineages of ductal and acinar organoids, engineered to include gene mutations known to be associated with pancreatic cancer. When the organoids were later implanted into mice, the different lineages behaved in distinct, predictable ways. For example, one mutation caused seven out of 10 of the mice transplanted with acinar-like organoids to develop cellular changes analogous to early pancreatic cancer in humans.

"Understanding the mechanisms that regulate these events will provide important insights into the events regulating the initiation of pancreatic cancer," said Muthuswamy, who stressed that direct use of this acinar organoid technology for patients who have cancer today may be limited. "The idea is to see if we can identify biomarkers to benefit future patients -- including by screening those at high risk for pancreatic cancer, so we can catch it before it's too late."
By revolutionizing the networking arena with its game-changing information exchange platform, MobiCard looks to transform business cards and captivate investors.

CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Joshua Sodaitis, CEO of MobiCard, an exclusive and revolutionary digital business card platform exchange for seamless networking, will be a presenter at the Starlight Capital Technology Investment Forum.

The two-hour event, being held via Zoom at 12 noon EST on Thursday, May 13, will be hosted by Barbra Ongwico, an associate at Venture Management Company with more than 10 years of experience in venture capital, financial event management, and clinical research.

MobiCard is an industry pioneer in the digital business card exchange space. The platform provides users with the opportunity to link video tools, websites, email addresses, social media sites, Google driving directions, and even personalized audio voice recordings to their online cards. Available as a smartphone app, MobiCard provides real-time alerts when information is activated on the platform.

The Starlight Capital Technology Investment Forum will feature compelling and innovative companies presenting their opportunities to and receiving questions and comments from investor guests. The upcoming virtual networking event will function like speed-dating, but with high net worth investors, venture capital firms, and hedge fund representatives as members of the audience. The format is strictly presentations, followed by Q&A with carefully vetted companies of interest, with no industry speakers, sponsor pitches, rankings, or judging.

"I am beyond excited to present MobiCard to such an incredibly qualified group of investors and industry experts," said Sodaitis.

"Our team has put in countless hours to develop and promote a service that we truly believe has the potential to revolutionize the classic exchange of business cards. Users are no longer restricted to the standard phone number, email address, and professional title limitations that are commonly found on physical cards. Our cards are built for engagement, and we are ready to put them in the digital pockets of millions of professionals."

MobiCard strives to replace traditional business cards to create a more efficient information exchange - a demand that has become especially prevalent in a COVID-19 environment. The market's billion-dollar potential stems from its ability to assist every gender, every race, and every age over 18.

To learn more about how MobiCard is changing the networking game through its comprehensive and customizable platform, please visit https://www.freemobicard.com.

Starlight Capital has hosted over 100 similar conferences over the past 21 years. For more information on the Starlight Capital Technology Investment Forum, please visit https://www.starlightcapital.co/event-info/starlight-capital-technology-investment-forum-2.

About MobiCard:

MobiCard has created a game-changer in the networking arena thanks to its exclusive and revolutionary, customizable digital business card platform. This flexible and robust application makes exchanging contact information virtually a seamless experience. There's no limit to the creativity and ingenuity this app can provide for businesses and professionals alike as it provides an innovative networking solution that'll disrupt the traditional paper business card business.

Media Contact:

Amy Kauffman

214.235.6043 (Direct)

amy@newswire.com

www.Newswire.com

SOURCE: MobiCard Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643363/MobiCard-CEO-to-Present-at-Starlight-Capital-Technology-Investment-Forum
He will not do so on his own. Mr. Biden, who has decades of experience and relationships in the Senate, will play a critical role. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has a narrow margin of control, but a wider one than Mr. Schumers, and House rules that give her considerably more leeway to push past Republican opposition.

But already this year, Mr. Schumer has shown that he is willing and able to move big legislation through the evenly divided chamber without any Republican support, as he did when he held Democrats together behind Mr. Bidens nearly $1.9 trillion pandemic-era stimulus law.

For now, Mr. Schumer is putting the onus on others to show that they can produce a compromise. Republicans this week presented their own $568 billion infrastructure blueprint, which includes less than one-tenth the amount of new spending that Mr. Biden has proposed for public-works projects. The president welcomed that effort in his speech on Wednesday, saying he was open to hearing competing ideas, while cautioning that the rest of the world is not waiting for us.

But Republicans have dismissed the outreach as insincere, accusing Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer of offering what Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called a multitrillion-dollar shopping list that was neither designed nor intended to earn bipartisan buy-in.

We heard about the so-called jobs plan, packed with punitive tax hikes at exactly the time our nation needs a recovery, Mr. McConnell said on Thursday. We heard about the so-called family plan, another gigantic tax-and-spend colossus.

Our Democratic friends, he added, have become addicted to divide-and-conquer.

Mr. Schumer, in concert with Mr. Biden and Ms. Pelosi, has not been shy about reaching for what he calls big and bold achievements while he has the chance, with Democrats in control of Congress and the White House  a circumstance that might end in 2022, when Republicans could reclaim House and Senate majorities.
John Cooper, Skillet bassist and vocalist, has released a scathing criticism of "woke theology" and "moral relativism," which he claims has infiltrated the Church. He advised Christians to be "extremely vigilant about the Word of God" in order to counteract certain false teaching.

Cooper disclosed on Abby Johnson's famous podcast "Politely Rude" that he was surprised to learn that people no longer believe in "absolute truth."

"I didn't even know that would be a possibility. I studied postmodernism in college, but I never thought that anyone would actually build a society upon it because it's so untenable," he was quoted saying by the Christian Post.

According to the Grammy-nominated artist, he finds it scary that "philosophy" has crept into Christianity.

"You can't believe in God but not believe in absolute truth because one negates the other. Yet that is what's actually happening in Christianity," he said.

The rocker said he's "outspoken" about what he believes are "scary" changes unfolding in culture.

"We need to be extremely vigilant about the Word of God," he stressed.

"It is wrecking Christianity," he said of the culture of "relativism" in the U.S.

Cooper, who recently published a book titled "Awake & Alive To Truth: Finding Truth In The Chaos Of A Relativistic World," observed that deconstructionism and cynicism are two tenets of postmodernism.

He commented on the amount of prominent Christian figures who have abandoned the church in recent years, including "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" author Joshua Harris and longtime Desiring God contributor Paul Maxwell.

"I do think it's a pretty big warning to all of us to build your life on top of the Words of Jesus Christ," he said. "We need to continue to build our lives upon that, or we will get destroyed ... and I do think that that has happened to a lot of our pastors."

He also cautioned that the same thing might happen to someone who is not steadfast in God's Word, noting that the "woke" society claims to be "more Christian than Christ."

"That's what we have to watch out for," he warned.

Cooper claims that emotionalism is part of the "woke ideology" that has infiltrated the Church, and that many people today worship Jesus because it "feels good," rather than make Him the Lord of their lives.

"What Jesus requires is actually Lordship, and with Lordship comes an understanding that I am not my own God," he said. "This isn't about what makes me emotionally feel good. This is about the Lordship of Christ, He is God, and I am not."

CP noted from a recent study from Barna that two-thirds of teens and young adults (65%) believe that "all religions will lead to everlasting life," compared to 58 percent of teens and young adults polled in 2018. Furthermore, compared to only 25% in 2018, 31% of teenagers and young adults now "strongly agree" that what is "morally right and wrong changes with time, depending on the society."

Furthermore, a previous research from Barna identified Gen Z as a "post-Christian" generation with only 4% claiming that they hold onto their belief in Christianity.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - Gov. Tim Walz announced Tuesday he plans to ease Minnesota's COVID-19 restrictions as the state moves beyond a spring surge in infections and hospitalizations.

Over the last year, Governor Walz has imposed restrictions on businesses and social gatherings throughout the state in an attempt to control the pandemic.

Right now, Minnesota restaurants are operating at 75-percent capacity.

The owner of Rochester's Pappy's Place hopes the governor's announcement will give customers a sense of security.

It's safe again. It's safe to come out. If the governor is lifting it, it must mean that we're at the point now where we can get out and about and we're all feeling easier about doing it, says owner Sheila Pappas.

The specifics of the governor's announcement remain unclear, but restaurant owners hope to have more control over their businesses.

Pappas says, It would be just nice for us to be able to make the decision of what hours we want to be closed and what hours we want to be open at this point.

As Coronavirus numbers improve statewide, the restaurant industry is looking forward to making up for all the business lost during pandemic restrictions.

We're loving it because we're getting to see some faces that we haven't seen in a long time and they're coming in saying we got our vaccinations, and they're excited to have gotten it and feel comfortable about going out again, Pappas explains.

Governor Walz is said to speak on this within the next week.
A new study with the University of Copenhagen represented indicates that the coronavirus variant called P.1, which originated in Brazil, could pose a bigger threat than previously assumed. The researchers conclude that it is likely that P.1 is more transmissible than other strains of SARS-Cov2 and that might be able to evade immunity gained from previous infection with coronavirus.

Even though more and more vaccines against the coronavirus are being administered all over the world, many countries are still battling with outbreaks and face difficulties providing help to those in need.

One of those countries is Brazil. Here, they are facing a massive second wave outbreak, many daily deaths and instances of the health care systems collapsing. In the city of Manaus things have looked exceptionally bleak from December and through to the early spring.

The city was hit so hard by the first wave in 2020 that it was actually thought to be one of the few places in the world to have reached herd immunity. An estimated 75 percent of the population in the city had been infected. But then the second wave hit in November and December.

Now, a new study published in Science with collaborators from Brazil, the UK and University of Copenhagen has shed a light on why Manaus is facing these difficulties again.

Our main explanation is that there is an aggressive variant of the coronavirus called P.1 which seems be the cause of their problems. Our epidemiological model indicates that P.1 is likely to be more transmissible than previous strains of coronavirus and likely to be able to evade immunity gained from infection with other strains." Samir Bhatt, Corresponding Author, Researcher, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen

Emerged in November

The researchers used many forms of data from Manaus to characterize P.1 and its properties including 184 samples of genetic sequencing data. They find that genetically speaking P.1 is different from the previous strains of coronavirus. It has acquired 17 mutations including an important trio of mutations in the spike protein (K417T, E484K and N501Y).

'Our analysis shows that P.1 emerged in Manaus around November 2020. It went from not being detectable in our genetic samples to accounting for 87 percent of the positive samples in just seven weeks. It has since spread to several other states in Brazil as well as many other countries around the world', says Samir Bhatt.

Modeling using machine learning

The researchers then used an epidemiological model to estimate how transmissible P.1 seemed to be. As well as estimating signs of P.1 evading immunity gained from previous infection.

'Roughly speaking, our model incorporates many data sources such as mortality counts and genetic sequences and compares two different virus strains to see which one best explains the scenario that unfolded in Manaus. One was the 'normal coronavirus' and the other was dynamically adjusted using machine learning to best fit the actual events in Brazil', says Samir Bhatt.

This modeling allowed the researchers to conclude that P.1 is likely to be between 1.7 and 2.4 times more transmissible than non-P1-lineages of the coronavirus.

They also conclude that P.1 is likely to be able to evade between 10 and 46 percent of the immunity gained from infection with non-P.1 coronavirus.

'As researchers, we have to caution extrapolating these results to be applicable anywhere else in the world. However, our results do underline the fact that more surveillance of the infections and of the different strains of the virus is needed in many countries in order to get the pandemic fully under control', ends Samir Bhatt.
Batavia, NY (14020)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Overcast. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
FILE PHOTO: A Boeing 737 MAX 8 sits outside the hangar during a media tour of the Boeing 737 MAX at the Boeing plant in Renton, Washington December 8, 2015. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is auditing Boeing Co's process for making minor design changes across its product line after a 737 MAX manufacturing issue grounded dozens of planes, the regulator said on Thursday.

The FAA is also investigating the origin of the electrical manufacturing issue disclosed on April 7 that led to the grounding of 109 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft worldwide, including 71 in the United States, it added. The audit's goal is to identify "areas where the company can improve its processes," it said.

Boeing responded that it looks "forward to ongoing engagement with, and direction from, the FAA as we continuously improve safety and quality in our processes."

The FAA has scrutinized other Boeing production issues.

In September, the FAA said it was investigating manufacturing flaws involving some Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Last month, the agency confirmed it was retaining authority to issue airworthiness certificates for four 787 aircraft.

The FAA on Wednesday ordered Boeing to fix bonding issues in the electrical systems in some 737 MAX planes that could lead to a loss of engine ice protection loss and critical functions on the flight deck.

The FAA warned the issue could impact "engine ice protection, and result in loss of critical functions and/or multiple simultaneous flight deck effects, which may prevent continued safe flight and landing."

The FAA said the affected airplanes were made after a design change in early 2019. Boeing must also fix more than 300 additional undelivered planes, according to FAA documents and people briefed on the matter.

Boeing said Wednesday it had "been working closely with the FAA and our customers to finalize two service bulletins that will ensure a sufficient ground path in those areas."

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Richard Chang)
The European Union [(EU)] welcomes the consolidation of the ceasefire on the ground, following the ceasefire agreement reached by the parties on 9 November 2020, and some positive results achieved on issues such as the repatriation of human remains and the provision of humanitarian assistance to populations severely affected by the conflict. This is noted in the EU Statement on captives from the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The European Union reiterates, however, that renewed efforts are necessary to build confidence between both countries and make progress towards sustainable peace. This includes refraining from hostile and offensive rhetoric, finalizing, as soon as possible, the return of all remaining prisoners of war and detained persons, regardless of the circumstances of their arrest, and cooperating also on other important issues such as demining, the statement also reads.

In this context, following the recent notification by the European Court of Human Rights to the Committee of Ministers regarding the interim measures indicated under Rule 39 of the Rules of the Court in relation to the recent armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, we stress that the Courts case law has clearly established that States Parties to the European Convention on Human Rights are under an obligation to comply with interim measures and we call on Azerbaijan to provide the outstanding information requested by the Court, the EU statement concludes.

The following countries align with this statement: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, Republic of North Macedonia, Norway, and San Marino.
China vows to promote Sino-German relations to higher level

Xinhua) 08:31, April 29, 2021

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang co-chairs the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video link in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Yue Yuewei)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday that China stands ready to work with Germany to keep the overall direction of bilateral relations featuring dialogue and cooperation and promote Sino-German relationship to a higher level.

Li made the remarks when co-chairing the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video link in Beijing.

He stressed that cooperation and win-win results is the main thrust of China-Germany all-round strategic partnership.

Li called on China and Germany to enhance anti-epidemic cooperation, promote fair and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, and reject vaccine nationalism.

He said the two countries should give full play to their fast track for essential travels and jointly safeguard the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains.

Noting that both sides are willing to embrace opening-up and uphold fair competition, the premier said China stands ready to work with EU to jointly promote the signing and entry into force of the China-EU investment agreement as soon as possible to facilitate the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations.

For her part, Merkel said Germany advocates opening-up and cooperation and opposes to protectionism.

She underscored the importance of the investment agreement between EU and China and expressed hope that the two sides can jointly promote entry into force of the agreement at an early date.

After the consultation, Li and Merkel jointly witnessed the "cloud signing" of a series of bilateral cooperation documents including climate response, social security, health, food safety, transportation and sustainable development.

During the consultation, Li and Merkel also attended a bilateral forum on economic and technological cooperation and met with Chinese and German business leaders via video link.

Li said in the first quarter of this year, China-Germany trade went up by 41.5 percent year-on-year, which is a full demonstration of the high-level and huge potential of bilateral cooperation.

He said the more than 7,000 German enterprises in China and more than 2,000 Chinese companies in Germany have become an "active force" of bilateral cooperation.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
GARDAI have renewed an appeal for information about a Cork couple who have not been seen for 30 years.

Conor and Sheila Dwyer from Chapel Lane in Fermoy town, who would be in their 90s if still alive, were last seen on April 30, 1991, at a funeral in St Patricks Church, close to their home.

The last contact they had with anyone was with Sheilas sister, Maisie, when she spoke to her on the phone on May 1.

The couple were reported missing three weeks later, on May 22, when Sheilas two sisters failed to get in touch with her.

They reported the matter to gardai, who went to the house with Maisie, and forced their way in to the Dwyer home.

Inside, all appeared normal, but there was absolutely no trace of the Dwyers.

Personal items such as clothes, passports and money had been left there.

Despite a major search locally, no trace could be found of the missing couple and the search was widened to involve Interpol.

A Crimeline reconstruction of the couples disappearance was aired on February 2, 1993, and a reported sighting of Sheila in Munich led to Interpol being called in by gardai.

However, there was no success in locating the couple.

Conor and Sheila, who were both in their 60s when they vanished in 1991, owned a white Toyota Cresida at the time of their disappearance.

It had the registration number 5797 ZT.

The car has not been seen since they disappeared.

The couple were well known in Fermoy  Conor had worked as a handyman for German businessman Fritz Wolff of Castlelyons House for 20 years.

He also drove Mr Wolffs Rolls Royce.

In March 1997, the couples home was sold at public auction, along with a site in another area of Fermoy that they also owned.

The file remains open on the disappearance at Fermoy Garda Station.

A Garda spokesman said: Gardai in Fermoy continue to investigate the disappearance of Conor and Sheila Dwyer, who are missing since April 30, 1991. Anyone who has any information into their disappearance is asked to contact Fermoy Garda Station on 025 82100, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666111 or any Garda station.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

People living with a child who attends school in-person have an increased risk of reporting evidence of COVID-19, but teacher masking, symptom screening, and other mitigation measures in schools may be able to minimize that excess risk, suggests a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For their study, the researchers analyzed nearly 600,000 responses from an ongoing Facebook-based COVID-19 symptom survey in the United States over two periods between November 2020 and February 2021 before vaccines were widely available in the U.S. The researchers found that those living with a child engaged in full-time, in-person pre-K-to-12 schooling were about 38 percent more likely to report COVID-19-like symptoms such as fever, cough, or difficulty breathing, compared to those living with a child schooled exclusively in a home setting.

A key finding was that school-based mitigation measuresthe survey asked about 14 mitigation measureswere associated with less risk per mitigation measure. For example, 9 percent less risk of COVID-related illness per measure, and 7 percent less risk of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test per measure. Each additional mitigation measure reduced risk. Teacher masking and daily symptom screening appeared to be the strongest risk reducers.

The study was published online April 29 in Science.

The analysis included three outcomes as reported by survey respondents: COVID-19-like illness, i.e., fever and respiratory symptoms within the last 24 hours; loss of taste or small within the last 24 hours; and a positive COVID-19 test in the last 14 days.

The survey responses indicated that most pre-K-to-12 schools had some mitigation measures in place, such as mask mandates for teachers, daily screening of students and teachers for symptoms, and curtailment of extracurricular activities. The researchers found that when schools used seven or more mitigation measures, the excess risk associated with in-person schooling mostly disappearedand completely disappeared when 10 or more mitigation measures were reported.

"These findings support the idea that mitigation measures at schools can greatly reduce the excess COVID-19 risk to adults living with children who attend school in-person," says study first author Justin Lessler, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School.

The issue of in-person schooling has been much debated in the United States from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to different school policies across the country. This policy diversity effectively set in motion a "natural experiment" with schooling and COVID-19 risk in the U.S. population. A chief concern has been that children going to school every day, even if they are not very susceptible to COVID-19 themselves, may bring home the virus to parents and other adult family members who are at higher risk of disease.

To examine these issues, Lessler and colleagues used the COVID-19 Symptom Survey, an ongoing Facebook-based survey managed by Carnegie Mellon University's Delphi Group in collaboration with Facebook that garners about 250,000 responses per week. The researchers looked at responses during two recent periodsroughly from Thanksgiving to Christmas last year and mid-January to mid-February this yearfrom respondents in households where at least one child was enrolled in a school, from pre-kindergarten through high school. Of the 576,051 people in this group, about 49 percent, or 284,789, reported being in a household with a child attending pre-K-to-12 school in-person rather than online or homeschooled.

In their analysis, Lessler and colleagues examined how the in-person school group differed from the online or homeschooled group in terms of reported COVID-19-related symptoms and outcomes. They adjusted the results to account for obvious confounding factors such as differences in local COVID-19 rates.

In addition to the 38 percent increase in the odds of getting a COVID-19-related illness among respondents in households with an in-person-schooled child, the researchers found a 21 percent increase in the odds for the loss of taste or smellone of the core symptoms of COVID-19and a 30 percent increase in the odds for testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection in the previous two weeks.

The strength of these associations appeared to increase with grade level. At the K and pre-K level, the association with COVID-19 outcomes was not significant for all outcomes, but the strength of those associations rose steadily, peaking at the grade 9-12 levelwhere the excess risk of a recent positive SARS-CoV-2 test for household members was over 50 percent. These findings are consistent with past studies suggesting less susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness among younger children compared to older ones.

The survey data included responses about COVID-19 mitigation measures in schools attended by children in the respondent's household. These mitigation measures included mask mandates for teachers and students, extra space between desks, suspension of school clubs, sports, and other extracurricular activities, and daily symptom screening among teachers and students. Respondents with a child in their household attending school in person reported a mean of 6.7 mitigation measures at schoolwith significant variations in that figure across the country, from a mean of 4.6 measures in South Dakota schools to 8.9 in Vermont schools.

The analysis also suggested that most of the increased COVID-19-related risk was concentrated in schools with fewer than seven mitigation measures, and that in-person schooling was not associated with increased risk for any COVID-19-related outcomes among respondents living with children in schools with ten or more measures.

"Because the study is based on a self-reported symptom survey and a setting where we can't randomize students to different schooling modes and mitigation measures, it has limitations," Lessler says. "But having hundreds of thousands of respondents and the ability to control for geographic and individual-level characteristics helps make up for those limitations."

He and his colleagues plan to follow up with studies of how in-person schooling and school-based mitigation measures affect community-wide spread of COVID-19.

"Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling" was co-authored by Justin Lessler, M. Kate Grabowski, Kyra Grantz, Elena Badillo-Goicoechea, C. Jessica Metcalf, Carly Lupton-Smith, Andrew Azman, and Elizabeth Stuart.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: Justin Lessler et al, Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling, Science (2021). Journal information: Science Justin Lessler et al, Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling,(2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abh2939
Buenos Aires, April 29 : Argentina's Ministry of Health reported 23,718 new Covid-19 infections and 348 more deaths in the last day, for a total of 2,928,890 cases and 62,947 deaths, amid a new wave of infections.

As a result, the country's Minister of Security Sabina Frederic and Secretary of Justice and Security of the City of Buenos Aires Marcelo D'Alessandro agreed on "greater control of terminal station entrances and different transfer centers" in the capital, the Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

During a meeting on Wednesday, they analysed "the possibility of restricting access to the city at certain times" to deal with the increase in Covid-19 cases, official sources told media.

Meanwhile, Argentina's vaccination campaign against Covid-19 has administered 7,667,385 doses, while the country remains under social, preventive and mandatory distancing measures until Friday.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:00:53|Editor: huaxia

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DHAKA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's drug regulator has authorized the emergency use of China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine.

Major General Mahbubur Rahman, director general of Bangladesh's Directorate General of Drug Administration, made the announcement at a press conference Thursday in the capital Dhaka.

"We've issued emergency use approval for the Chinese-made jab."

Mahbubur Rahman further said hopefully within 1-1.5 weeks, Bangladesh will receive a batch of Sinopharm vaccine as a gift.

The Bangladeshi government on Wednesday gave the green light to a proposal of producing Chinese and Russian COVID-19 vaccines in the country.

Bangladesh's Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the proposal to produce the vaccines -- China's Sinopharm and Russia's Sputnik V.

The country's drug regulator had earlier cleared the emergency use of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine.

Shahida Akhter, a senior Cabinet Division official, said Wednesday that several leading Bangladeshi pharmaceutical firms in collaboration with the Chinese and Russian companies will produce the vaccines.

The decisions came days after Dhaka suspended the first dosing of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on a supply crunch.

Amid uncertainty over the timely arrival of the next COVID-19 vaccine shipment from India, the Bangladeshi government halted administering the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine across the country from Monday.

Nearly six million people have so far received the first dose of the vaccine in Bangladesh.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the country's COVID-19 vaccination drive on Jan. 28 to rein in the pandemic that has so far spread to nearly every Bangladeshi district.

To limit the second wave of the pandemic, Bangladesh on Wednesday extended the ongoing lockdown again by one week to May 5. Enditem
Ronnie Ortiz-Magro has just been released from jail after being arrested.

No other details were specified at the time of his arrest, other than another alleged domestic violence.

But now, there has been a major update.

Police arrived in Ortiz-Magro's Los Angeles home on Thursday and were released on a $100,000 bond later that day.

At the time of his arrest, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro was with his daughter, 3-year-old Ariana, whom he shares with ex-girlfriend Jen Harley.

But now, a news outlet has learned that it was his current girlfriend, Saffire Matos, who called the police on the night he was detained.

Matos and Ortiz-Magro reportedly got into an argument that later went physical.

When police arrived at the scene, they talked to both parties and were able to determine that the "Jersey Shore" star was the aggressor.

The outlet also mentioned that police saw visible marks on Matos' body which they believe are sustained during their violent fight, which also became one of the reasons why they slapped the cuffs on Ortiz-Magro.

Since Ronnie Ortiz-Magro's arrest, Saffire Matos has tried to downplay the alleged violence.

In an Instagram Story she shared with her followers on Monday, the eyelash technician explained that what's being reported is "misleading" and that she and her boyfriend "are fine."

"Everything that's being portrayed out there is not facts," Matos said.

"I don't think it's fair that people are using false accusations to gain attention. Please leave Ron and me alone."

"You don't know what someone is going through at the end of the day. Don't believe everything you hear or read online."

Meanwhile, the reality star's lawyer Scott Leemon told the outlet that they're still investigating the events that transpired last week and as of the time, they have not received any of the police reports.

"Therefore, we will continue not to comment while our investigation is still ongoing. As we have all learned in the past, initial reports can be and are often incorrect."

READ ALSO: Kim Kardashian Business List: New Venture Unveiled After KKW Beauty, SKIMS Success

Ronnie Ortiz-Magro First Arrest

This is bad news for Ronnie Ortiz-Magro who was on the same issue with his ex-girlfriend Jenn Harley.

In 2019, Harley hit the panic alarm at the AirBnB she and Ortiz-Magro were staying at before fleeing outside.

Harley told police that Ortiz-Magro went off the rails during a session of substance abuse and attempted to stab her with a knife. At the time, held their child Ariana inside. He was booked for kidnapping.

His bail was set at $100,000 and since then, has been put on probation for domestic violence.

READ MORE: El Risitas Meme Died: KEKW Guy's Cause of Death, Last Days, Original Video That Made Him Famous [Watch]

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
LODI TOWNSHIP, MI  A property line dispute between neighbors in Southeast Michigan led to the construction of a 250-foot-long wall of poop  or a compost fence, FOX 2 Detroit reports.

The cow manure is normally spread out on the farmers field next door, said Wayne Lambarth, who owns the adjacent property in Lodi Township, Washentaw County. Now, the turds are piled as a smelly reminder of a property line dispute from last year.

The stench permeates Lambarths rental house near the property line, the report said. Complaints have been lodged but local officials say theres nothing they can do since the feces is on the farmers property.

Its not a poop wall, the farmer told FOX 2. Its a compost fence.

More:

0 Patience Way: Islands only home is up for sale

Man dies after attack by very aggressive bees as he mowed lawn in Texas
The new policy, announced Thursday, will take effect no later than Aug. 23, the first day of the fall 2021 semester, but could be rolled out earlier during the summer, a universitywide email stated. Under the new rules, those who share proof of vaccination with the school, showing that two weeks have passed since receiving the final dose, will be exempt from the testing requirement and granted access to campus buildings.
New Delhi: Indian cinema lost two of its most-loved performers back-to-back in 2020. Who can forget the double tragedies of losing Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor on April 29 and 30th respectively!

While Irrfan battled Neuroendocrine Tumour for two years, and was admitted to Mumbai hospital a day before his death due to a colon infection, Rishi Kapoor battled Leukaemia (blood cancer). He too suffered it for two years before breathing his last at HN Reliance hospital in Mumbai.

Remembering Rishi Kapoor on his first death anniversary, we thought of going back in time and to recall some of his magical moments created on-screen with famous female co-stars. Here are some of the most popular jodis of all time. Right from real-life partner Neetu Kapoor to Dimple Kapadia, people went gaga over these jodis and always craved for more.

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Kapoor

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Kapoor became extremely popular for their unbeatable chemistry, before eventually falling for each other and later getting married. Some of the most popular movies include Pati Patni Aur Woh, Besharam, Amar Akbar Anthony, Yaarana, Kabhi Kabhie, etc.

Rishi Kapoor and Sridevi

Rishi Kapoor and Sridevi delivered some blockbusters on-screen. Their amazing on-screen chemistry was cherished by everyone. Some of their famous films are Nagina, Chandni, Banjaran and Gurudev.

Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia

Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia paired together in 'Bobby.' The film received a lot of appreciation from the critics and the moviegoers. Other important flicks are Ajooba, Luck By Chance, Patiala House to name a few.

Rishi Kapoor and Padmini Kolhapure

Rishi and Padmini had one of the most loved on-screen chemistries. The duo later became good friends because of their popularity. Some of their hits include Prem Rog, Zamaane Ko Dikhana Hai and Pyar Ke Kabil, etc

Rishi Kapoor and Divya Bharti

Rishi Kapoor and Divya Bharti's jodi became very popular among fans after the release of the film 'Deewana.' The film starred Shah Rukh Khan, Rishi Kapoor and Divya Bharti in lead roles. The film became a blockbuster hit and was appreciated by one and all.

We miss you, Rishi!
CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In-depth analysis and data-driven insights on the impact of COVID-19 included in this Western Europe and Nordic data center market report.

The Western Europe and Nordic data center market is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 4% during the period 20202026.

Key Highlights Offered in the Report:

The Western Europe and Nordic data center market contributed to over 20% of the global investment in 2020. Netherlands and Germany were top countries, receiving over 30% of the overall investments in the region. COVID-19 had a varied impact on the Western Europe & Nordics data center market, with countries such as Frankfurt , London , Amsterdam , and Paris witnessing a lower impact compared to Italy and Spain , that faced higher data center construction and operational impediments in the first half of 2020. Spain and Italy will offer a cumulative revenue opportunity of over USD 4.4 billion to data center investors within the forecast period. In 2021, 25 data center operators and 17 industry associations signed the Carbon Neutral Data Center Pact, resulting in 75% of data center operations in Western Europe and the Nordic powered through renewable energy by 2025 and 100% by 2030. Most countries in Western Europe and all Nordic countries support free cooling for most of the year, with Nordic data center market facilitating free cooling for over 8,400 hours in a year. District heating is also prevalent in the region, with almost all data centers deployed in the Nordic countries using waste heat from servers for community heating purposes. The cumulative revenue opportunity for companies operating in the general construction space in the region will be over USD 23 billion within the forecast period.

Key Offerings:

Market Size & Forecast by Revenue | 20202026

Market Dynamics  Leading trends, growth drivers, restraints, and investment opportunities

Market Segmentation  A detailed analysis by IT infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, mechanical infrastructure, cooling systems, cooling technique, general construction, tier standards, and geography

Competitive Landscape  22 IT infrastructure providers, 24 support infrastructure providers, 20 construction contractors, and 26 data center investors

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/western-europe-nordic-data-center-market

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market  Segmentation

In 2020, the IT infrastructure adoption among newly established and existing data centers grew significantly. Germany is the leading market in IT infrastructure spending, followed by the UK, the Netherlands , France , and Ireland . The emergence of software-defined architectures and converged infrastructure expects to drive the IT infrastructure solutions market in Western Europe .

is the leading market in IT infrastructure spending, followed by the UK, , , and . The emergence of software-defined architectures and converged infrastructure expects to drive the IT infrastructure solutions market in . Several Western Europe facilities have adopted flexible designs to facilitate dual power feeds, 2N redundant UPS and PDU systems, and N+1 generators. The growth of lithium-ion UPS systems is aided by benefits such as reducing the OPEX through lower maintenance costs and decreasing UPS battery failure chances. Vendors are continuously coming out with innovative UPS solutions to boost efficiency and reduce cost.

facilities have adopted flexible designs to facilitate dual power feeds, 2N redundant UPS and PDU systems, and N+1 generators. The growth of lithium-ion UPS systems is aided by benefits such as reducing the OPEX through lower maintenance costs and decreasing UPS battery failure chances. Vendors are continuously coming out with innovative UPS solutions to boost efficiency and reduce cost. Several Western Europe data centers support free cooling systems that include adiabatic coolers, evaporative coolers, and free cooling chiller systems. Water-based cooling includes water-treatment plants and systems that can aid water consumption by up to 20%. Most operators procure 45U52U rack cabinets. The procurement of 42U racks is declining in the market.

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by IT Infrastructure

Servers

Storage

Network

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Electrical Infrastructure

UPS Systems

Generators

Transfer Switches and Switchgears

PDUs

Other Electrical Infrastructures

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Mechanical Infrastructure

Cooling Systems

CRAC & CRAH Units



Chiller Units



Cooling Towers, Dry Coolers, & Condensers



Economizers and Evaporative Coolers, and Other Units



Racks



Other Mechanical Infrastructure

Racks

Others Mechanical Infrastructure

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Cooling Technique

Air-based Cooling Technique

Liquid-based Cooling Technique

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by General Construction

Core and Shell Development

Installation and Commissioning Services

Engineering and Building Designs

Physical Security

DCIM/BMS

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Tier Standards

Tier I & II

Tier III

Tier IV

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market  Dynamics

About 25 European cloud and data center operators, which include AWS, Google, Equinix, Interxion, OVHCloud, Scaleway, Aruba, and others, and 17 industry associations have signed an agreement to make their data center carbon neutral by 2030, which include powering the facilities through 100% renewable energy. According to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, 75% of the power supplied to data centers in Europe will be supplied through renewable energy or carbon-free energy by December 31, 2025, and the objective is to reach 100% by December 31, 2030. Hyperscale data center providers such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, and AWS are the major investors in renewable energy initiatives. There is a high interest in adopting renewable power sources among global and local data center colocation suppliers such as Equinix and Digital Realty (InterXion), Aruba, and QTS Realty Trust.

Key Drivers and Trends fueling Market Growth:

Innovative UPS Battery Technology

Increased Adoption of 200/400 GBE Switch Ports

Cloud Adoption Driving the Data Center Market

Increasing Demand for Big Data & IoT Investments

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market  Geography

In 2020, the Western European data center market witnessed investments in 80 projects, among which 20 projects became operational as of Q3 2020. The remaining 60 projects are still under development and expected to be operational by Q2 2021. The data center market in Western Europe is witnessing investment contributions from both global and colocation service providers. The market will also witness the continuous adoption of cloud services among SMEs, with the heightened interest shown toward the digital transformation of businesses by adopting solutions such as IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence. The demand for smart devices, coupled with growing internet penetration, will also fuel the growth of data centers and corresponding infrastructure in the region. Data centers in Western Europe are being built to support OCP rack infrastructure solutions.

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/western-europe-nordic-data-center-market

Western Europe and Nordic Data Center Market by Geography

Western Europe

UK



Germany



France



Netherlands



Ireland



Belgium



Switzerland



Luxembourg



Italy



Spain



Other Western European Countries

Nordic

Denmark



Norway



Sweden



Finland & Iceland

Key Data Center Critical (IT) Infrastructure Providers

Arista Networks

Atos

Broadcom

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

Extreme Networks

Huawei Technologies

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Hitachi Vantara

IBM

Inspur

Inventec

Juniper Networks

Lenovo

MiTAC Holdings

NEC Corporation

NetApp

Oracle

Pure Storage

Quanta Computer (Quanta Cloud Technology)

Super Micro Computer

Wistron (Wiwynn)

Key Data Center Support Infrastructure Providers

ABB

Airedale Conditioning Systems

Asetek

Alfa Laval

Assa Abloy

Bosch Security Systems ( Robert Bosch )

) Caterpillar

Cummins

Delta Electronics

Eaton

HITEC Power Protection

KOHLER-SDMO

Legrand

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Nlyte Software

Piller Power Systems

Rolls-Royce Power Systems

Rittal

Riello Elettronica (Riello UPS)

Schneider Electric

STULZ

Socomec

Trane Technologies

Vertiv Group

Key Data Center Investors

Acens Technologies

Adam

Aruba

Bahnhof

CyrusOne

Colt Data Center Services (Colt DCS)

Digital Realty

DigiPlex

DATA4 Smart Data Centers

Equinix

Echelon Data Centers

EcoDataCenter

Facebook

Google

Global Switch

GlobalConnect

Green Mountain

Iron Mountain

Microsoft

Nexica - Econocom Group

NTT Global Data Centers

QTS Realty Trust

VIRTUS Data Centres

Telecom Italia Sparkle

T5 Data Centers

Vantage Data Centers

Key Construction Constructors

AECOM

Arup Group

Bouygues Construction

CapIngelec

DPR Construction

Deerns

Fluor Corporation

Future-Tech

HDR Architecture

ISG

Jones Engineering

Kirby Group

Linesight

Mercury Engineering

Mace Group

M+W Group (Exyte)

Metnor Construction

RED-Engineering

Structure Tone

Winthrop Engineering and Contracting

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Air Arabia Egypt has announced the introduction of a new service to the capital of Bahrain, Manama, with direct flights from Cairo commencing on May 6.

Air Arabia Egypt will fly three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and the route will be operated using an Airbus 320.

Customers can now book their direct flights between Cairo and Manama by visiting Air Arabias website, by calling the call centre or through travel agencies.

Since the Covid-19 outbreak, Air Arabias customer journey has been upgraded to include all safety measures that are in line with the highest international measures. Air Arabias entire fleet is fitted with HEPA cabin air filters, which help to provide a safer and healthier environment for passengers. Customers are always requested to comply with the conditions and requirements of the countries of departure and destination. - TradeArabia News Service
The American Rescue Plan of President Joe Biden now faces controversy after a legal group founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller has filed a lawsuit against the economic stimulus bill, citing that it discriminates against white farmers.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Stephen Miller, the architect of former President Donald's anti-immigration and child separation policies, said that legal action should be looked at.

Stephen Miller cited Martin Luther King Jr.'s (MLK) immortal words that Americans "should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

The statement noted that the federal lawsuit was filed by America First Legal, which is the group that Stephen Miller founded alongside former Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to challenge "the radical activist left."

Stephen Miller also emphasized that the group will defend the vision of MLK, the Constitution order, and the civil rights of all citizens.

According to NBC News, the America First Legal filed the proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller in his capacity as a private citizen on Monday.

The suit targets the around $5 billion budget for loan forgiveness for farmers and ranchers, who are socially disadvantaged, included in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed by Biden last month.

READ NEXT: Biden Breaks off Press Questions, Says He'll Be In Trouble if He Answers

The Case Filed by Stephen Miller's Group

The lawsuit alleged that the Department of Agriculture interpreted the phrase socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers incorrectly.

Based on the lawsuit, the group argued that the Department only included African Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan natives, and Pacific Islanders. However, white farmers and ranchers are not included in the definition, making them ineligible for aid under the federal programs.

In addition, the suit claimed that the racial exclusions are "patently unconstitutional." It also argued that if the court would not agree on it being unconstitutional, then it should at least declare the phrase "socially disadvantage group" must be construed as a matter of statutory interpretation to include ethnic groups of all types subjected to ethnic and racial prejudice.

In a statement to NBC News, the Department of Agriculture said they are now reviewing the complaint and working with the Department of Justice.

The Department also promised to continue implementing the debt relief to qualified socially disadvantaged borrowers under the economic stimulus bill.

Last month, the White House mentioned that a portion of the American Rescue Plan would support farmers of colors with $4 billion toward debt relief for socially disadvantaged farmers to pay off burdensome debts, The Washington Post reported.

Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture Secretary, said that the money would address long-standing inequities. Last month, Vilsack mentioned that socially disadvantaged farmers have struggled in reaching success for generations due to systemic discrimination and a cycle of debt.

Aside from the economic pain, farmers considered socially disadvantaged also deal with a disproportionate share of the effects of the coronavirus, The Daily Beast reported.

READ MORE: Biden Administration Announces 2 New Initiatives: Operation Sentinel and Limiting Migrant Arrests

WATCH: Stephen Miller: Joe Biden is Violating The Constitution - From Fox News
The Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) have begun an operation to remove all persons engaged in mining in water bodies in Ghana.



The operation, which started yesterday on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos directive, took off on the River Pra in the Central and the Western regions with 200 soldiers, who picked up some people and also seized some equipment.



A statement announcing the operation, which was signed and issued by the Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, yesterday, said the Presidents directive was pursuant to the resolutions of the final communique of the Stakeholder Dialogue on Small Scale Mining held on April 14.



The operation, Mr Oppong Nkrumah explained, was to ensure that mining within water bodies is immediately stopped.



He indicated that the Ministry of Defence and the GAF would provide a detailed brief on developments and sustainability efforts tomorrow.



The action is the latest being taken by the government to curb the menace, after a directive was given by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Samuel Abu Jinapor, suspending all reconnaissance and prospecting in forest reserves, as part of measures to safeguard the nations natural resources.



The directive



The Presidents directive follows a renewed call to fight illegal mining that has become a threat to the environment, particularly water bodies and forest reserves.



At the National Consultative Dialogue on Small Scale Mining in Accra two weeks ago, participants described illegal mining, popularly known as galamsey, as a national emergency that required urgent and concerted effort to deal with.





President Akufo-Addo, opening the forum, called for an impartial and non-partisan dialogue for the country to reach a consensus on a sustainable method of mining minerals.



He said there were things that could be discussed along partisan lines, but issues bordering on small-scale mining and the requirement to do away with illegalities in that sector should be beyond partisan politics.



Collusion



The dialogue agreed there were widespread allegations of the participation of or the support accorded by people of prominence in government, the public and the civil services, traditional authorities, business leaders and other opinion leaders to these illegal mining activities, which had given credence and prominence to the activity.



While admitting that when properly done, small-scale mining could have the key to significant economic benefits, it agreed that galamsey was a major threat to the future of our water resources, particularly, and the environment at large, thereby threatening the countrys integrity.



In a communique issued at the end of the forum, the participants called on all political parties, stakeholder groups and individuals to join the development and execution of this national, not parochial, agenda to rid ourselves of the long-standing issue of illegal small-scale mining and the need to implement measures to eradicate it from our society.



Galamsey has caused the worst forms of pollution and contamination of water bodies, in a lot of instances the turbidity, rendering them unsuitable for domestic use and even for treatment by the water company, and sometimes made toxic with chemicals such as mercury and cyanide, it said.



It, therefore, resolved that the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources take appropriate steps, Legislative and/or Executive action, as the case might be, to give effect to the set of measures arising from the dialogue and approved by the government.



Action



Days after the forum, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources announced the immediate suspension of all reconnaissance and prospecting in forest reserves, directing all persons and companies engaged in those activities, with or without legal authorisation, to suspend them until further notice.



It also directed the Minerals Commission not to, with immediate effect, accept, process and recommend the granting, including renewal and extension, of reconnaissance and prospecting licences in forest reserves.



The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Samuel Abu Jinapor, who issued the directive, said it was part of actions being taken to ensure the sustainable management and utilisation of the nations natural resources.



For the avoidance of doubt, except as directed by the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources in writing, all activities and operations in respect of any reconnaissance and/or prospecting licences in forest reserves are hereby suspended until further notice, it said.



All persons and companies engaged in reconnaissance and prospecting in forest reserves were given a seven-day ultimatum, from the date of the publication of the notice, to cease their operations and evacuate their equipment, accordingly.



The minister has served notice on and requested the various regional security councils to strictly enforce these directives, it said, stressing that the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources has the mandate to ensure the sustainable management and utilisation of the nations lands, forests and wildlife resources, as well as the efficient management of the mineral resources for socio-economic growth and development.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Scandal-ridden Hillsong Church took another hit to its U.S. arm Tuesday when Darnell Barrett, creative director of Hillsong Church Montclair in New Jersey, revealed he resigned from his position citing infidelity in his marriage.

The 32-year-old father and U.S. Navy veteran confirmed his resignation to DailyMail.com after he accidentally shared lewd workout photos of himself wearing nothing but tights in a message to a former volunteer on Instagram last month.

We thought it was best for me to move on. I don't want to get into the details, Barrett told the publication.

The Christian Post reached out to Hillsong Church for comment Wednesday, but a response was not immediately available.

Source:The Christian Post
A look at the major movers on the London market on Thursday

( ) is one of the day's risers after it unveiled a refinancing.

The exploration and production group has begun an offer of $1.8bn worth of senior secured notes due in 2026 and received commitments for a $500mln revolving credit facility and a $100mln letter of credit facility.

The proceeds with be used to push out the timeframe for its debt obligations, including redeeming $650mln worth of senior notes due in 2022 and repaying $300mln of convertible bonds due this July.

Its shares have climbed 13.35% or 6.63p to 56.3p on the news.

2.14pm: Financial website in demand

PLC ( ) has seen its shares surge as a former director almost doubled his stake.

The financial information provider has jumped 69.01% or 24.5p to 60p as Yair Tauman, a professor of economics at State University of New York, raised his investment from 9.44% to 18.31%

Professor Taubman, a proponent of game theory, resigned as a director in 2014 due to the pressure of his academic and business commitments, and at the time he said: " is a great company and should do very well in the future to come."

He has been gradually building up his stake since buying 5.85% in January 2019. Could a takeover bid be on the cards?

10.55am: Explorer issues new shares and warrants

Limited ( ) is among the day's bigger fallers after it announced a placing to raise 1mln.

Its shares have dropped 28% or 0.18p to 0.45p, which to be fair is the price at which 222mln shares have been placed.

The company has also issued 111mln warrants at an exercise price of 0.9p a share for a period of two years with one warrant for every two ordinary shares. If exercised in full this would raise another 1mln giving total proceeds of 2mln at an average weighted price of 0.6p a share.

The proceeds will be used to fund commitments for its PEL0094 oil licence in Namibia which it believes is highly prospective.

Chief executive Peter Hill said: "We are very pleased to have raised additional capital which enables us to progress our exploration activities on PEL0094, and to welcome new shareholders to the company. We look forward to providing further updates in due course."

9.53am: Toy specialist set to beat profit expectations

Some pandemic hit sales may never return but some may just be delayed.

The latter has been the case for toys and games designer and distributor PLC ( ), which saw a weak second half last year but a strong recovery in the first six months of 2021.

So much so it is on target to beat profit expectations and is heading for the best yearly performance in its history.

Revenues rose 44% to 74.5mln which pretax profits jumped from 2.2mln to 7.6mln. It also benefited from a 2mln gain from the sale of a property in Vernon Mill, Stockport.

Character said it had one of the strongest product portfolios it had ever taken to domestic and international markets and this performance was expected to continue through the second half of the financial year and beyond Christmas 2021.

Its top brands all showed significant sales growth, incluing squishy action figures Goo Jit Zu , Peppa Pig, Pokemon, Stretch Armstrong and Scooby Doo.

It plans to launch new products in the summer and autumn ready to capture the 2022 toy market.

Before then its strong performance in ther first half has continued in the second.

It said: "This growth is forecast to continue through to and beyond Christmas 2021 and we are on target to deliver the best performance in any calendar year in the group's history. Accordingly, we expect the 2021 full financial year's underlying profit before tax will be materially ahead of the published market consensus of 10.5m."

The news has sent its shares 17.59% or 83p higher at 555p.

8.47am: Rigs group in talks over energy deals

Star Phoenix Group Ltd (LON:STA) is coming closer to rising up from its previous rigs business and into faster growing areas of the energy sector.

The company has appointed a specialist broker to help sell its eight rigs in Trinidad, with interest from several potential buyers although the restrictions on travel caused by the pandemic mean the sale could take longer than it would normally.

While the sale process is underway, it is seeking lease agreements for the rigs to generate revenues, with one deal already signed.

Meanwhile, after considering several investment opportunities, it is in discussions on a number of potential ventures.

It said: "The board believes these new opportunities would offer shareholders exposure to significant plays in the energy sector and looks forward to sharing the details of these potentially value enhancing opportunities should they progress to binding deals."

There are a couple of outstanding pieces of litigation, with a US$10mln claim against LandOcean Energy Services and a US$22mln dispute with the government of Georgia.

The update has seen Star's shares soar 19.36% or 0.3p to 1.85p.

8.27am: Fashion group in demand

Group PLC ( ) is looking fashionable after an upbeat trading statement in what it called a transformational year.

Its AIM-listed shares have jumped 6.35% or 15.8p to 264.8p after the e-commerce womenswear brand said sales momentum since it floated in March was better than expected.

Turnover for the year is expected to be up 130% to at least 44.5mln, as its new customer numbers jumped by 19%.

It ended the period with 11.9mln of cash, and given its strong trading performance it has returned the financial support previously claimed under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme

Since the year end it has signed a partnership with TV personality Stacey Solomon, as well as a deal with Asda, which will see the brand sold in around 100 of the supermarket's stores.

Chief executive Adam Frisby said: "We have maintained our strong momentum since our successful IPO and delivered a very good performance for the year...a transformational year for ...

"The collaboration with Stacey is one that we are really proud of and the hugely positive reaction to the launch of her maiden collection on 27 April underpins our confidence that this would generate an amazing reception from our customers and Stacey's followers. In addition, our nationwide partnership with Asda is also really exciting for the brand and will give fantastic levels of exposure and greater reach with our customers."

Also heading higher is Salt Lake Potash Limited ( ).

It has climbed 7.08% or 1.7p to25.7p after it received a key environmental go-ahead for its Lake Way project in Western Australia.

Chief executive Tony Swiercizuk said: "Receiving final Environmental Approval over the full Lake Way project will enable our team to commence construction of the remaining on-lake infrastructure and deliver the full scope of the Lake Way project. We look forward to commencing work shortly on this final phase."

Proactive news headlines

( ) swung into profit in 2020 as the cryptocurrency miner said it had crossed a major inflexion point during the year amid a surge in revenues.

( ) ( ) has hailed the full De Novo submission of its Parsortix system to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 as a watershed moment for the company and its goal to achieve the first-ever FDA clearance for a system to harvest cancer cells from patient blood for analysis.

( ) announced excellent results from the drilling campaign at the Havieron deposit and said they further support the delivery of an indicated mineral resource as well as the potential expansion of the gold-copper mineralised system.

( ) has begun the mobilisation of a drill rig ahead of a pivotal programme at the Rukwa helium project in Tanzania.

Ross Andrews, chairman (LON:IDV), the beauty and personal care specialist, said management was confident of a return to historic consumption levels for its products, including the popular Skinny Tan range.

( ) ( ) ( ) (FRA:W1D) has received its Part IV Environmental Approval for the Lake Way Project in Western Australia covering full-scale operations of 245,000 tonnes per annum of sulphate of potash (SOP).

FastForward Innovations Ltd ( ) said its investee company Yooma Wellness Inc, a maker of cannabinoid and hemp-derived wellness products in which it holds a 5.1% stake, has had its cannabidiol (CBD) food products from its MYO Plant Nutrition and Blossom brands added to the UK Food Standard Agencys novel foods list.

( ) reported a sharp reduction in debt for 2020 as the Africa-focused forestry and timber group said its business had remained resilient in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

( ) has acquired a 49% stake in Barts Pub Ltd, owner of the iconic Kensington Park Hotel in Londons Ladbroke Grove for 750,000 and spent 1.18mln to increase its stake in certain companies with the Mosaic Pub and Dining Group to 24% from 14%.

( ) said its focus will be to further expand its portfolio, continue to build its network of partnerships and advance the pipeline of proprietary and partnered projects.

( ) said it is now well placed for substantial future growth after a transformational year.

( ) announced that its subsidiary SLE has been awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise within the Innovation category.

Bidstack Group PLC ( ), the native in-game advertising platform, has enlisted Katherine Hays, the co-founder of in-game adveetising pioneer Massive Inc, as a strategic adviser.

( ) said its shares will begin trading on the OTCQX Best Market in the US on Thursday under the ticker PSDMF after the firm was upgraded from the Pink market.

( ) said the first copper concentrate for refining at Jubilee's Sable Refinery from Project Roan has been delivered on schedule.

Inc ( ) said it is working towards de-risking the Nalunaq Project as much as possible and increase the scale and value of the resource.

( ) has welcomed the commencement of field exploration work at Cobre Limiteds Perrinvale project in Western Australia. In a separate announcement, the company drew attention to s quarterly activities report, released today.

( ) confirmed lower activity levels in South Africa amidst the pandemic as it reported production numbers for its first quarter.

( ) highlighted an upgrade to its 2021 production guidance for the Kwale operations in Kenya as it this morning issued its quarterly activities update.

(LON:CNR, ) has completed a programme of infill drilling at the La India mines starter-pits ahead of a phased development in Nicaragua where the company seeks to boost the economics of early production.

( ) said it will continue to positioning itself strategically on orogenic gold systems.

( ) said it has carried out four follow-on holes in one area at its Toral project in Spain after good visible indications from initial drilling.

( ) said drilling at the Arzu North prospect in Turkey has indicated resources sufficient to extend the Kiziltepe mine by a year.

( ) announced that Dr Llew Keltner will join the board as a non-executive director with immediate effect. He brings over 30 years of experience across the life sciences sector, with extensive experience of public and private financings, M&A, the formation of strategic partnerships and numerous transactions in the CRO, biotech and pharma sectors, including as chairman of Raptor Pharmaceuticals Inc and as a board member at Mannkind Corporation and Immunovaccine Inc.

( ) has been awarded the Queen's Award for its contribution to international trade.

( ) subsidiary SLE Ltd has been awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise for a second time.

( ) announced the appointment of Suzanne Brocks to company secretary with effect from 28th April 2021, a role she will hold alongside that of head of communications.

( ) said Brendan O'Mahony has stepped down as non-executive director of the company with immediate effect.

Esken Limited ( ) said that it has agreed that Warwick Brady will end his role as chief executive on 30 April and step down from the board of directors. He will continue to provide support to Esken on a limited part-time basis until he leaves employment on 30 June.

( ) announced that it now expects to report its 2020 annual report and accounts in May due to the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown.
A sign for the Department of Justice hangs in the press briefing room at the Justice Department in Washington, on April 18, 2019. (Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)

Massachusetts Man Took Over OG Social Media Accounts to Steal Cryptocurrency: DOJ

A Massachusetts man has pleaded guilty to running a scheme to take over peoples social media accounts and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated on April 29.

Eric Meiggs, 23, of Brockton, admitted that he and one or more co-conspirators used an illegal practice known as SIM-swapping to obtain login credentials for the social media accounts of his victims, exploiting them to steal or try to steal more than $530,000 in cryptocurrency, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Meiggs and his accomplices targeted people who they believed held significant amounts of cryptocurrency and those who had high value or OG (slang for original gangster) social media account names, the statement said.

The scam involved convincing the victims cellphone carrier to reassign their phone number from the SIM card of the victim to a SIM card in a phone controlled by Meiggs and his co-conspirators. They would then pose as the victims when contacting online account providers to reset log-in credentials, using those to hack into the accounts.

Using an illegal practice known as SIM-swapping, Meiggs and others conspired to hack into and take control of these victims online accounts to obtain things of value, including OG social media account names and cryptocurrency, the statement said.

At least 10 people fell prey to the hustle, the DOJ stated.

Members of the conspiracy stole, or attempted to steal, more than $530,000 in cryptocurrency from these victims. Meiggs also took control of two victims OG accounts with social media companies.

Meiggs pleaded guilty to seven counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, computer fraud and abuse, and aggravated identity theftcrimes for which he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in jail. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 15.

In a related case that made national headlines, an 18-year-old Florida teenager was sentenced to three years behind bars for a scam that used hacked celebrity Twitter accountsincluding of President Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Muskto dupe ordinary people out of their money.

The perpetrator in the case, Graham Clark, reached a deal with prosecutors, under which he pleaded guilty to 30 countsincluding organized fraud and fraudulent use of personal informationand will serve three years in a juvenile facility, the state attorneys office said in March.

The scam involved Clark taking over a number of high-profile Twitter accounts after persuading a Twitter employee that he worked in the companys IT department, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Once Clark accessed the accounts, he shared a link to a bitcoin address on Twitter and wrote, All bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled! prompting a number of people to send in cryptocurrency in hopes of a quick profit.

Instead, Clark kept the money, the state attorneys office wrote, adding that the so-called Bit-Con grift netted him more than $117,440. The money was seized by law enforcement and is expected to be returned to the rightful owners.

The incident represented an embarrassing security breach for Twitter, which was forced to suspend all verified accounts from sending tweets for several hours while it scrambled to secure the platform.
The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) has run into a wall of bureaucratic denial. The anti-corruption watchdog regularly reviews pending cases and even called for a probe into pending corruption cases, but little has resulted from its efforts. Earlier this year in January, the commission set a timeline to finalise pending cases. It directed all chief executives and vigilance officers in various government organisations to finalise pending cases from the period between January 2011 and December 2018 by end of May this year.

With just about a month left for the deadline, chief vigilance commissioner Sanjay Kothari has now upped the ante and advised Union ministries to sort out complaints against officers within three months of their receipt. Reminding them of the May 31 deadline, Mr Kothari has now mandated that at the end of the third month from the date of receipt of the complaint and after deciding on a course of action, a copy of the complaint shall be made available to the concerned employee within 15 days. Once a decision is made to pursue the vigilance case, the concerned organisation shall send its inquiry report to the CVC or chief vigilance officer seeking first stage advice within three months of registration of a case.

Key appointment hangs in balance

Away from the Covid din, there is a tussle going on between the Punjab government and the Centre over the naming of 2002 batch IAS officer Vijay Namdeorao Zade as the finance secretary of the Chandigarh Administration. Mr Zade was nominated by the UT administration for the post, which is reserved for Punjab cadre officers and is the third most important post after the UT advisor and home secretary.

According to sources, the ministry of home affairs (MHA) has sought details about Mr Zades professional profile and other information in a 17-point proforma. It wanted to know about Mr Zades completion of service in the cadre, the reason for seeking deputation, vigilance status and details of annual property returns, etc.

Sources say that this is the first time the ministry has asked for such details and there is no convention for this. Despite their reservations, the Punjab government has responded by providing all the information that was sought about the official. There has been no action from the MHA since then. It has to be remembered, sources say, that the recommendation of Mr Zade was forwarded to the Centre last year but there is no sign of any movement on the issue.

Maharashtra political rivalries affecting babus

The churning in police circles in Maharashtra continues unabated even after the unsavoury Param Bir Singh episode. And, not surprisingly, politics seems to drive most of what is going around these days between the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and the Opposition BJP.

The state government has now tasked Mumbai police to investigate the leaking of a report on corruption in the state police to BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis. The report, sources say, was prepared by former state intelligence chief Rashmi Shukla but landed into the hands of Mr Fadnavis. As part of the probe, the Mumbai Police has summoned Ms Shukla, who is now ADG of CRPF, to Mumbai to join the investigation.

The back story is interesting. The FIR was filed at the behest of state chief secretary Sitaram Kunte, who had reportedly alleged in a report to chief minister Udhav Thackeray that the finger of suspicion seemed to point at Ms Shukla herself. The episode has split opinion within the babu corridors with many murmurs about the probe as more of a hatchet job than a fair inquiry into the truth. The political waters in Maharashtra are roiled as it is, and this is hardly going to make way for more clarity.
Former Melbourne woman Yasmin Ilhan has publicly alleged she was raped as a teenager by a private school student and criticised the way her case was handled by police.

The London-based law graduate, who is the eldest daughter of late retail tycoon John Ilhan, said she was horrified by the way she was dealt with by several police officers and the recent decision not to lay charges against the man she accused of serious sexual assault.

London-based law graduate Yasmin Ilhan, 23.

Victoria Police defended the investigation and said there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal conviction.

The 23-year-old claims she was raped by a former Caulfield Grammar student when she was 15 and studying at Melbourne Girls Grammar. She made a formal complaint to police last year.
He said the authority was giving the curriculum the Marie Kondo treatment  so that regardless of how much content is left in the curriculum, it is properly organised, logical in its presentation and sequence, coherent, clear and easily accessible. Victoria has its own curriculum, which is used by all government and Catholic schools, while most independent schools use the Australian curriculum. Victoria adapts aspects of the Australian curriculum into its schooling. Speaking at The Age Schools Summit this week, Mr de Carvalho said the review sought to clarify the relationship between the eight learning areas in the curriculum, seven general capabilities, including literacy and numeracy, and three cross-curriculum priorities: sustainability, Asia and Australias engagement with Asia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. Those cross-curriculum priorities are best taught within the eight learning areas  English, maths, science, humanities and social sciences, the arts, health and physical education, languages, and technologies  not as add-ons that would contribute to an overcrowded curriculum, he said.

Civics and citizenship  already identified by the authority as a weak spot for many students  will be revamped, with an increased emphasis on Australias increasingly multi-faith and diverse character. It is the first time the Australian curriculum has been reviewed since the former Abbott government launched a review in 2014. Australian Catholic University senior research fellow Kevin Donnelly, who co-chaired that review, labelled this review a lost opportunity and said it failed in its mission to declutter. There are literally hundreds and hundreds  of indicators teachers have to be familiar with, Dr Donnelly said.

Loading Instead of encouraging a deep knowledge and appreciation, its very fragmented and superficial. He also criticised the stronger emphasis on multiculturalism, arguing it disregarded Australias Western heritage. It adopts a cultural relativist approach where Australia is always described as multifaceted and multicultural and diverse and different and ignores the fact were a Western liberal democracy and ignores that our way of life is actually very much in line with that, he said. Deakin University education academic Rosalyn Black said the Australian curriculum already acknowledged how certain groups have been traditionally excluded, such as First Nations people.

Dr Black said the proposed changes to civics and citizenship would take that acknowledgement to the next level. The issue of who is excluded and who is included, who is fully recognised and understood and who is not  those ideas are really central, and they are some key challenges in the civics and citizenship field, she said. The revised maths curriculum will ignite a pedagogical war over the renewed emphasis on problem-solving methods, which under the proposed changes is a core concept to be taught across the six key content areas: numbers, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Victorian maths teacher Greg Ashman, a PhD candidate who researches the tension between progressive and traditional teaching methods, said the proposed changes overstepped the role of the curriculum to prescribe content, but not teaching styles.

Loading Its not only that it is prescribing a teaching style when it is not supposed to, it is prescribing a less effective one thats been shown to be associated with worse PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] scores, Mr Ashman said. Australias PISA ranking declined to its worst ever level in 2019, dropping to 16th among OECD nations and economies in reading, 17th in science and 29th in maths. Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter said the authoritys revisions had tightened up the curriculum and given teachers more clarity on what they should spend their limited time on. This is a good move, she said. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes the difference for students is the quality  and content  of teaching in the classroom.
Man Facing DUI, Drug Charges Appears in Court

By West Kentucky Star Staff

PADUCAH - A Paducah man facing DUI and drug charges was in court Wednesday.Fifty-one-year-old Bobby Copeland appeared for a pretrial conference. The McCracken Circuit Court Clerk said the hearing was continued to April 30.Copeland was arrested on May 21 following a pursuit on Husband Road. As authorities attempted to perform a traffic stop, Copeland reportedly fled while swerving into the opposite lane of traffic, nearly striking law enforcement.Deputies say he was in possession of meth, pills, and marijuana at the time of his arrest.He faces charges of possession of a controlled substance, DUI, resisting arrest, fleeing or evading police, reckless driving, tampering with physical evidence, contempt of court, possession of marijuana, failure to use signals, and drug paraphernalia possession.
She is no stranger to a designer shopping spree.

And Gemma Collins enjoyed an afternoon of indulgence on Thursday, as she hit the shops in central London before joining some friends for an Italian dinner.

The TOWIE star, 40, who was laden with shopping bags after purchasing items from Louis Vuitton and Selfridges, appeared to have been splashing the cash.

Splashing the cash! Gemma Collins enjoyed an afternoon of indulgence on Thursday, as she hit the shops in central London before joining some friends for an Italian dinner

Gemma opted for a casual look for her outing, as she sported a black velour tracksuit, which was covered in gem stone detailing.

The Diva Forever star styled the look with a pair of camel Yeezy sliders, while accessorising with a pair of oversized square sunglasses.

Gemma wore her signature blonde locks in an up do, and avoided her usual glamorous make-up look in favour of a more pared back look.

Quality time: After hitting the shops, Gemma met up with her mother Joan, 65, and a host of other gal pals as they dined al fresco at Spaghetti House

Designer swag: The TOWIE star, 40, who was laden with shopping bags after purchasing items from Louis Vuitton and Selfridges, appeared to have been splashing the cash

Glam: Gemma opted for a casual look for her outing, as she sported a black velour tracksuit, which was covered in gem stone detailing

It's a vibe: The Diva Forever star styled the look with a pair of camel Yeezy sliders, while accessorising with a pair of oversized square sunglasses

The TV star styled her look with a matching Gucci handbag, which no doubt carried all of her essentials for the day out.

After hitting the shops, Gemma met up with her mother Joan, 65, and a host of other gal pals as they dined al fresco at Spaghetti House.

The group appeared to be having a great time at dinner as Gemma could be seen showing them something amusing on her phone.

Look at this! The group appeared to be having a great time at dinner as Gemma could be seen showing them something amusing on her phone

Girls dinner: Gemma caught up with her group of female companions over dinner

Yum! Gemma tucked into her dinner at the Italian restaurant

Wrapped up: Some members of the party wrapped up in red blankets

Casual: Gemma wore her signature blonde locks in an up do, and avoided her usual glamorous make-up look in favour of a more pared back look

Gucci gang: The TV star styled her look with a matching Gucci handbag, which no doubt carried all of her essentials for the day out

Earlier in the day, Gemma put on a brave face while announcing she was 'heartbroken' by the death of her friend, Rhys Alan Smith.

Rhys, the ex-boyfriend of TOWIE star Harry Derbidge, was found dead in Tenerife last week, and police are not treating the death as suspicious.

Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Gemma spoke about her grief as she posed for pictures with a waitress from her favourite restaurant.

Staying strong: Gemma put on a brave face in an Instagram post on Thursday while announcing she was 'heartbroken' by the death of her friend, Rhys Alan Smith

Peace! Gemma flashed a peace sign to the cameras outside the restaurant

Mother daughter duo: Gemma and Joan beamed broadly for a snap

Alongside the beaming snap, Gemma penned: 'Just felt like dressing up to get a cuppa from my fave @pelliccicafe  they make you feel so special  and it means so much always 

'Ive been so down recently and absolutely heartbroken after my dear friend more a little brother passed away its really cheered me up  sorry Ive been quiet on the gram but you just realise its all kinda BS when real things happen 

'I love you all @pelliccicafe  and thank you for making a fuss of my mum  Im just taking it easy at the moment  @pelliccicafe deserve an award for making people happy [sic]'.

Candid: Taking to Instagram, Gemma spoke about her grief as she posed for pictures with a waitress from her favourite restaurant

Heartbreaking: Rhys, the ex-boyfriend of TOWIE star Harry Derbidge, was found dead in Tenerife last week, and police are not treating the death as suspicious (pictured together in a throwback photo shared by Rhys earlier this year)

Taking a break: Gemma took a load off as she enjoyed dinner after hitting the shops

Check it out! The woman were seen checking something out on Joan's phone

Eye-catching: Gemma tagged her tracksuit as Gucci in a new Instagram post

Smile! Gemma and her mum appeared in high spirits on the evening out

Luxury living: Gemma added to her designer wardrobe with her new purchases

Gemma's outing comes after it was revealed to MailOnline that Rhys' death is not being treated as suspicious by police.

Last week, it was revealed that Rhys had been found dead in Tenerife where he had been living, with the cast of the The Only Way Is Essex paying tribute.

Gemma paid tribute to Rhys commenting on his final Instagram post: 'My heart will never be the same. I won't ever be the same, love you Reece'.

Police sources on the island confirmed on Tuesday that officers had been called to an address in Granadilla de Abona in the south of the island in the early hours of last Thursday morning.

Purchases: Gemma and her mother enjoyed some family time

Delicious! The group tucked into plates of pasta

Dinner date: The group sat outside in accordance with government guidelines which state restaurants and pubs can only open outdoors

An insider told MailOnline: 'The alarm was raised around 3.50am and a man was confirmed as being dead at the address officers went to.

'An investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death is still ongoing and a report has been sent to a local court coordinating the probe.

'But there were no obvious signs of any violence and at this stage the death is not being treated as suspicious or the result of a crime.'

Catching up: They took the relaxing of lockdown as an opportunity to meet for dinner

Rhys' last Instagram post was on April 3 where he shared a photo of himself in Tenerife captioned: 'Quality time with myself.'

Prior to that, he had spent time in Dubai where he had shared several pictures of himself enjoying various activities such as kayaking with friends.

He then returned to his former base in Spain where he is believed to have been training as a masseuse.

Rhys dated TOWIE star Harry in 2013 with the former couple regularly appearing at events together before Harry dated Bobby.

In 2014, Harry split from Bobby after he told the reality star he had slept with an ex at the beginning of their romance.

He said at the time: 'Before I tell you this I absolutely love you so much. Please don't cry, please. When we was in Tenerife I did sleep with my ex. I'm f**king so sorry because I f**king never meant to hurt you, I really didn't.'

Support: Gemma no doubt appreciated the support of her family and friends following the death of Rhys

Say what? Gemma even kept her mask on while at the dinner table

Only recently on TOWIE, Harry and Bobby have been caught in several bitter rows as they addressed their past split, although Rhys was never directly named on the show.

Bobby, who went on to 'take a break' from the ITVBe series, branded Harry a 'compulsive liar' and accused him of trying to 'rewrite the history' of their break-up, which took place seven years ago.

The reality star's pal Amy Childs - who is also Harry's cousin - tried to build bridges between the pair by inviting them both to dinner, however the meeting ended in a bitter row and Bobby stormed off.

Harry had been unhappy with Amy carrying on a friendship with his ex, despite the fact their relationship ended seven years ago and Harry is now engaged.
LOS ANGELES, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- California small business owners went to great lengths to stay afloat through the pandemic, investing an average of $28,000 to operate within government guidelines and remain open during COVID-19, according to new research from Union Bank, a leading West Coast bank.

According to the Union Bank California Small Business Mid-Year Mindshift 2021 Survey, the top four COVID-19-related areas small business owners invested in were personal protective equipment (58 percent), cleaning and sanitization services (54 percent), marketing and advertising (45 percent) and e-commerce (41 percent).

Small businesses in the restaurant and hospitality sectors spent substantially more, investing an average of $74,000, focusing on cleaning and sanitization services (94 percent), delivery services (87 percent), personal protective equipment (85 percent), and updated signage (82 percent).

"California small business owners were hit especially hard and adapted to complex restrictions for longer periods of time than those in other states," said Todd Hollander, Head of Business Banking and Small Business Banking at Union Bank. "But despite the challenges, many small businesses remained resilient and optimistic for the future. At Union Bank, we've been working with small businesses for more than 150 years and we remain committed to helping them recover and thrive for years to come."

California small business owners remain optimistic, above all.

Many small business owners in California said the pandemic had its silver linings, including improved business efficiencies (39 percent), the rewarding feeling of overcoming a challenge (37 percent) and solidifying their passion for what they do (31 percent).

They are moving forward with positivity and resilience. Six in 10 said they are currently optimistic, and 56 percent said they are more optimistic than they were in 2020. This positivity is particularly prevalent among younger business owners:

66 percent of business owners aged 18 to 34 said they feel positive

65 percent of those aged 35 to 54 said they feel positive

45 percent of business owners aged 55 and older said they feel positive

The most widely cited source of optimism among California small business owners was continued COVID-19 vaccine distribution, as 68 percent of respondents said they believe it will help their businesses. Among those in the restaurant and hospitality space, the federal stimulus package led the way (70 percent) as the biggest cause for optimism.

According to the survey, small business owners in California received financial support from the following sources:

Restaurant/hospitality business owners Other small business owners -- 64 percent from the government -- 36 percent from the government -- 38 percent from banks -- 17 percent from personal finances -- 28 percent from personal finances -- 14 percent from family and friends

The pandemic had a disproportionate impact on women-owned small businesses.

Women small business owners said their businesses were hit harder and felt particularly unsupported during the COVID-19 pandemic, which aligns with the overall disproportionate impact that women say the pandemic has had on them.

More women business owners said they felt powerless during the pandemic, with 64 percent saying they felt they had no control over the situation (versus 54 percent for men). They also reported higher median revenue losses: 50 percent revenue loss for women-owned businesses versus 35 percent for men.

Overall, women business owners said they felt less supported by the government at all levels, compared to men:

Felt Supported By Women Men The Federal Government 21 percent 41 percent The California Government 22 percent 38 percent Their Local County Government 18 percent 38 percent Their Local City Government 18 percent 37 percent

Above all, compared to men, women who own small businesses said they invested far less in critical changes and adjustments to help their business remain open during the pandemic. On average, they invested only $17,000, compared to $38,000 invested by men. In fact, while 20 percent of men said they spent at least $50,000 on their businesses, only 7 percent of women did.

"We know from economic data that women were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic overall, and small business owners were no exception," said Devon Barrack, Small Business Program Director for Union Bank. "This year presented many unprecedented challenges for women as they simultaneously navigated complex personal, family and professional circumstances  and to top it off, underwhelming societal support. At Union Bank, we believe diverse small businesses are the economic center of their communities and we remain committed to helping them recover from this pandemic."

Despite the clear gender gaps, women respondents said they remain optimistic and positive. Optimism levels among men and women who own small businesses are comparable, with 63 percent of men and 58 percent of women saying their current outlook is positive.

Through the pandemic, small business owners have remained resilient and closely tied to their local communities.

In the last six months alone, optimism among small business owners has risen significantly. Last October, the Union Bank Small Business Mindshift 2020 Survey showed that only 23 percent of business owners nationally  and only 13 percent in California  could see a path to survival for their businesses, but now 61 percent have a positive outlook.

This aligns with COVID vaccine distribution being well underway. In October, before the vaccine was available, 31 percent of California business owners cited the vaccine as the most important factor to business success. And now, with half of American adults having received at least one dose of the vaccine, 68 percent of business owners said the ongoing distribution will help their small business survive.

A relationship with the local community is also key to small business survival post-pandemic. The survey found that more small business owners (41 percent) felt supported by their local communities, which was more than the percentage who said they felt supported by the federal government (31 percent), their state government (30 percent), their local county government (28 percent) or their local city government (28 percent).

The relationship is also getting stronger; 41 percent demonstrates an improvement since last October, when 33 percent of the earlier Mindshift Survey's respondents reported feeling supported by their local community.

Additionally, in November, the Union Bank Small Business Holiday Spending 2020 Survey showed the importance of the relationship between small businesses and their communities. Forty-three percent of U.S. consumers said they were willing to spend $20 more on an item in order to support a small or local business, and 56 percent said they increased how much they shop and spend at small businesses to keep them afloat during the pandemic.

"Our research continues to demonstrate the critical value of the relationship between small business owners and their local communities," Hollander said. "It's our collective duty as community members to continue to uplift our local business owners as they navigate the long road to recovery."

About the Union Bank California Small Business Mid-Year Mindshift 2021 Survey

Research was gathered through a survey commissioned by Union Bank and conducted by global independent research firm Edelman Data x Intelligence. The survey was completed by 300 California small business owners (including an additional 100 owners in the restaurant and accommodations industries). Data was collected between March 4  19, 2021. The margin of error is +/-6 percentage points.

About Union Bank

Union Bank is a full-service bank with a rich history of investing in our clients, communities, and colleagues throughout the West Coast for more than 150 years. Union Bank provides a wide range of personal and business banking products as well as wealth management services. With 300 branches in California, Oregon and Washington, Union Bank remains committed to serving the needs of its local communities. As a member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world's largest financial institutions, Union Bank holds our clients' best interests to heart and remains committed to investing in their success.

About MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

As of December 31, 2020, MUFG Union Bank, N.A. operated 348 branches, consisting primarily of retail banking branches in the West Coast states, along with commercial branches in Texas, Illinois, New York, and Georgia. We provide a wide spectrum of corporate, commercial, and retail banking and wealth management solutions to meet the needs of our clients. We also offer an extensive portfolio of value-added solutions for clients, including investment banking, personal and corporate trust, global custody, transaction banking, capital markets, and other services. With assets of $132 billion, as of December 31, 2020, MUFG Union Bank has strong capital reserves, credit ratings, and capital ratios relative to peer banks. MUFG Union Bank is a proud member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (NYSE: MUFG), one of the world's largest financial institutions with total assets of approximately 351.7 trillion (JPY) or $3.4 trillion (USD)1, as of December 31, 2020. The corporate headquarters (principal executive office) for MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation, which is the financial holding company, and MUFG Union Bank, is in New York City. The main banking office of MUFG Union Bank is in San Francisco, California.

1. Exchange rate of 1 USD=105.8 (JPY) as of September 30, 2020

2021 MUFG Union Bank, N.A. All rights reserved. Member FDIC. Union Bank is a registered trademark and brand name of MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

Press contact:

Sierra Wilson

(213) 236-5329

[email protected]

Edelman PR

[email protected]

SOURCE Union Bank
SHANGHAI and HONG KONG, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- With the official release and implementation of the Overall Plan for the Construction of Hainan Free Trade Port, patient can now access global innovative medicines in mainland China. Recently, the global first-in-class selective inhibitor of nuclear export (SINE) compound, selinexor (XPOVIO), was prescribed for the first time in mainland China at the Boao Super Hospital in Boao Lecheng Pilot Zone and has been authorized to be expanded beyond the Pilot Zone for the outpatient treatment of relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM). Prescribing selinexor for the first time in China is a significant milestone in changing the hematological cancer treatment landscape in the country as it allows Chinese patients access to this novel antitumor therapy, similar to patients in other parts of the world.

Numerous media outlets including People's Daily, The Paper, and Hainan News of Hainan TV have reported on the first prescription and the Name Patient Program (NPP) inclusion of selinexor, in recognition of the clinical significance of having this novel therapy accessible to patients in China. Among these media outlets, People.cn stated: "the first patient with rrMM treated with selinexor in the Pilot Zone responded well to the therapy with his condition already stabilized. Selinexor achieves its antitumor effects by precision targeting the underlying oncogenic pathways, and has a special mechanism of action compared to other approved therapies. Through the rapid clinical adoption of selinexor in Lecheng, Boao, a much-needed new treatment option has been made available to patients with MM in China."

Previously, Antengene initiated a Named Patient Program (NPP) in Hong Kong for dozens of patients with rrMM and relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (rrDLBCL). After being prescribed at the Boao Super Hospital for the first time, the use of selinexor in such patients will now be a part of real-world research in China.

Multiple Myeloma (MM) and Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) are two of the common types of hematological malignancies in the world. MM is a kind of plasma cell hematologic cancer. In recent years, with the availability of autologous stem cell transplantations and introductions of newer therapies such as lenalidomide, the conventional treatment of MM continues to evolve. Although significant progress has been made in treatment, MM is still incurable, mainly due to primary drug resistance and disease recurrence. In China, patients with MM face a range of challenges including late or missed diagnosis, as well as lack of effective treatment options for relapsed patients to improve overall survival. DLBCL is an aggressive hematologic malignancy that accounts for around 50%-60% of all lymphoma incidences. About half of patients with DLBCL fail to reach complete remission after receiving first-line treatments, and approximately 60% of patients with rrDLBCL lack effective treatment options.

As a first-in-class SINE compound XPO1 inhibitor, selinexor has been approved by U.S. food and drug administration (FDA) for the treatment of rrMM and rrDLBCL, and was included into five recommended regimens by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Guidelines for the treatment of hematological malignancies. Being an oral drug requiring low dosing frequency, selinexor has the advantages of ease of use and high patient compliance. Enabled by the Interim Provisions on the Administration of Imported Drugs of Urgent Need in Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone of Hainan Province, selinexor has successfully entered into clinical application in mainland China, and became the world's first XPO1 inhibitor accessible to patients both inside and outside the country, while being authorized to be used beyond the Pilot Zone for outpatient treatment. As the company that initiated this introduction of selinexor through a collaboration with the Boao Super Hospital and Hainan Chengmei Medicine Co., Ltd., Antengene has provided patients in mainland China a reliable and convenient program to access an urgently needed therapy.

Hongxia Yao, Director of Hematological Lymphoma Department of Hainan Cancer Hospital, said: "This prescription marks the first clinical application of selinexor at the Boao Super Hospital. It is a testament to a clinical breakthrough made possible by the supporting policies of the Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone, and benefit it brings to patients. This patient with rrMM has received multiple lines of therapy, and unfortunately failed all of the approved therapies in mainland China. The special policy in Hainan has brought renewed hope to this patient, giving him the early access to a novel therapy that has already been approved abroad and the possibility of bringing the drug's use beyond the Pilot Zone for outpatient treatment."

About Antengene

Antengene Corporation Limited ("Antengene", SEHK: 6996.HK) is a leading clinical-stage R&D driven biopharmaceutical company focused on innovative medicines for oncology and other life-threatening diseases. Antengene aims to provide the most advanced anti-cancer medicines to patients in the Asia Pacific Region and around the world. Since its establishment in 2017, Antengene has built a broad and expanding pipeline of clinical and pre-clinical stage assets through partnerships as well as in-house drug discovery, and obtained 13 investigational new drug (IND) approvals and submitted 5 new drug applications (NDA) in multiple markets in Asia Pacific. Antengene's vision is to "Treat Patients Beyond Borders". Antengene is focused on and committed to addressing significant unmet medical needs by discovering, developing and commercializing first-in-class/best-in-class therapeutics.

Forward-looking statements

The forward-looking statements made in this article relate only to the events or information as of the date on which the statements are made in this article. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. You should read this article completely and with the understanding that our actual future results or performance may be materially different from what we expect. In this article, statements of, or references to, our intentions or those of any of our Directors or our Company are made as of the date of this article. Any of these intentions may alter in light of future development.

*XPOVIOis a registered trade mark of KaryopharmTherapeutics Inc.;

*NCCN is a registered trademark of National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/antengene-announces-xpo1-inhibitor-selinexor-prescribed-for-the-first-time-in-the-pilot-zone-of-hainan-province-and-authorized-to-be-expanded-beyond-the-pilot-zone-for-outpatient-treatment-301279688.html

SOURCE Antengene Corporation Limited
On Thursday, Apr. 29, Facebook executives said that Apple's App Tracking Transparency is foreseen to have a "manageable" impact on their business beginning the Q2 of the year. The confirmation was made after the social media giant finished its first-quarter report on its earnings for 2021.

How will iOS 14.5 affect the California giant on its latest update?

Facebook Doing a 'Huge Amount of Work' for its Ad Changes

Upon the debut of the iOS 14.5, there are many expectations that Facebook has been waiting for. As per ZDNet's recent report, Dave Wehner, the CFO of the company said that the ad targeting headwinds this year could likely happen upon the iOS 14.5 update.

However, the controversial security update will point out the need for permission from the app developers. This is required before they could access the IDFA intended for tracking activities across several software and sites.

As such, the company is headed to a "huge amount of work," as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained. Since there are upcoming changes that will be made for their personalized ads, the company will be devising a new way to tell the people that those ads are business and people-friendly.

Read Also: Apple iOS 14.5 to Include New Feature Giving Users Control Over Their Data on an App-by-App Level

Moreover, Sandberg said that there is no need for the businesses to have a full understanding of the acronym'' "alphabet soup" that they should follow.

She continued that the business owners should be confident in utilizing Facebook's useful tools so they could reach those who want to avail their services safely and privately.

Sandberg added that the company is confident that they acquire decent results through this drive at the peak of the digital advertising evolution.

Facebook Believes 'Manageable Impact' of App on its Business

As part of the company's objective. Wehner believed that they could manage the impact of iOS 14.5's update on their business. This is in line with the goal of Facebook to develop its performance in generating ads using less amount of data.

But, this also paved some way for him to comment on Apple about the problems that they are experiencing through its API which compliments the Cupertino giant's services and technologies.

Previously, there are disputes that the two companies have been battling.

For instance, Facebook has locked Apple to be its prime competitor when it comes to small businesses. This happened when the social media titan took down the full-page newspaper ads to criticize Apple's privacy changes.

There was a time that the launched campaign of Facebook was questioned by its own employees, It's even worse since the appearance of the leaked letter which tells that the company employees only perceived Facebook's move to be a bad justification for its action.

For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, the aftermath of the App Tracking Transparency could only help them if the Cupertino giant allows its ads to be exclusive on Facebook's platforms.

At the time, not every user could see the App Tracking Transparency as it may take some weeks before being launched in the app.

Related Article: Facebook Newsroom to Help Small Businesses Thrive During Pandemic Through Personalized Ads

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Separate ratings released by the federal government Wednesday showed similar results for some of those low-performing hospitals. St. Bernard and University of Illinois hospitals each earned one star out of five for quality in the ratings from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The ratings are based on deaths, safety of care, patient experience, timeliness and effectiveness of care and readmission rates, which are how often patients have to be readmitted to a hospital after leaving it.


Earn your Associate of Applied Business in Business IT (BIT) degree online from the University of Cincinnati. This program can be completed fully online, with curriculum customized to fit your schedule, interests and how quickly you want to complete your degree. Application deadline July 1, 2021. Learn More 

A surge in online shopping sprung up over the past year due to the pandemic. The rapid adoption pushed the expected timeline for consumers to expand their online shopping forays. It also opened the door to a drone delivery industry to feed a growing demand for increased online deliveries.

Companies scrambling to compete with the advancing delivery capabilities offered by Amazon and UPS are looking to drone delivery options. Will this be the future of delivery?

Aviation is an extremely regulated environment -- drones, or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) included. So what does this mean in terms of safety within the airspace? Will the FAA create special allowances for drones that permit them fly with autonomy to deliver packages faster than ground delivery?

Perhaps, in the long run. But do not expect to see your online purchases dropping from the sky anytime soon, cautions aviation safety expert Mark Baier, CEO of AviationManuals and ARC Safety Management Software Systems. It will not be easy.

TechNewsWorld sought Baier's insights on the implications of the future of drone delivery in terms of aviation safety. Obviously, if federal regulations offer greater latitude to drone deliveries, that accommodation could be a boon to e-commerce.

Hopeful Buzz in the Air

The two concepts -- drone safety and the impact of drones on e-commerce -- are related, Baier noted. Both topics have created a lot of buzz around the potential of drone delivery probably for the last five or six years.

All of that buzz has not converted to reality yet. Some of the safety issues have not really been addressed or resolved.

"That's a big step. First of all, I want to say drone delivery, in my opinion, is a virtual certainty. It is just a matter of time and on what scale and how the rollout will look," he told TechNewsWorld.

Most people envision drone delivery is going to be like the sci-fi that we all have in mind of drones landing in our front yards filled with our packages. More so, people in the industry tend to see it as a far more gradual phase-in process.

Perhaps it will be a blended approach for some time before we get really dedicated drone services for a wider variety of things. Baier thinks the one hurdle that was kind of moved out of the way recently was a decision by the FAA about where to stick commercial drone operations.

More Regulated Than Not

The FAA for a long while was split between drone operations being allowed under general aviation rules or abiding as part of aviation's Part 135 rather than Part 121 regulations. The difference is significant.

Part 121 deals with commercial air service for scheduled flights with paying passengers or customers. Part 135 regulates on-demand flights and scheduled charter flights. Scheduled charter flights are usually limited to a few days a week.

"So that does mean that delivery drones are going to be more regulated perhaps than some of the drone industry accounted for. But at least now they have a roadmap on which to follow, explained Baier.

The FAA had to include some exemptions because those regulations are designed toward passenger travel and passenger carriage. Of course, you can follow the standardizations and the safety management system pipe fit standards and protocols for commercial operators. But exemptions had to take into account existing rules related to just passengers travel and passenger with airports.

We are seeing 100 years' worth of manned flight regulations and learning. Baier thinks we are going to see over the next couple of years the FAA trying to find some middle ground, so that drone rules are not just layering an existing though slightly more onerous regulatory process on top of something that is probably different in its own category.

Getting Deeper Into Drone Delivery Potential

TechNewsWorld engaged Baier in an extensive conversation about how -- and if -- drone regulations and consumer lust for speedy airdrop service will ever safely coexist.

TechNewsWorld: How competitive is the drone certification process under the Part 135 regulations?

Mark Baier: Five operators that have applied for this Part 135 certificate thus far have received permission to operate drone deliveries. But it is really still very, very specific, very limited with one drone operator involved. One certification is only for medical deliveries to a particular hospital in North Carolina.

Another applicant is Flirtey, a transport freight service in Nevada. That company has not yet received certification. If approved, much of that drone's travel will be over open spaces and farmland.

A third company is delivering medical supplies pretty effectively to rural and remote areas. A fourth approved drone delivery service is for a company called Google Wings. I'm not exactly sure what they are going to be doing.

[Editor's Note: Wing (pictured above) is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Also known as Project Wing; it is currently offering trial delivery to parts of Christiansburg, VA.]

The fourth approved drone delivery service of the five applicants is Amazon Prime, according to Baier.

Are some industries more economically viable to support drone deliveries?

Baier: The medical industry is certain to accelerate looking at drone usage for probably anything from plasma to organs, but even something as benign as insulin delivery to somebody that may not be on a typical delivery route. I think the medical industry is really at the forefront of driving some of this because they are also able to get more exemptions from a regulatory perspective.

One thing people need to understand at this point is that it is not an economically viable way to deliver packages. It probably will not be for some time. The drones are not as reliable as surface vehicles so a lot of them are not outfitted with equipment. Hence, in bad weather, you probably have to revert at this stage to road transportation. So the cost-effectiveness of package delivery is probably in some ways down the road.

The companies that are looking into doing drone deliveries have the financial wherewithal to plow ahead. I also think some industries where cost is not an issue -- where time is more important than cost -- you might see drones start to come into play.

How difficult are drone operations on a reliable basis?

Baier: The commercial drone operations are difficult, even if that costs a lot of money. So I think the general package drone delivery thing is probably still a ways away. But to your point, I believe Covid-19 and other factors are driving it ahead faster now than it probably would have happened pre-Covid.

How much of an impact on drone flying is the weight of packages?

Baier: There is a technology limitation and a cost limitation right now. From what I understand, the FAA is talking about package weight being limited to four pounds. But there is a strange little quirk to that. The drone comes and hovers about 20 feet above your property and actually lowers the package with a tether instead of landing and dropping it.

I think that involves safety, privacy, and security issues they have not yet figured out. Those proximity issues involve avoiding pads, kids, etc., so they prefer to keep the drone hovering and 20 feet. They lower the package and then they fly off so that again restricts the amount of weight that you can carry.

In terms of drone operations, do the pilots fly them from fixed locations, or are GPS systems onboard for automated deliveries?

Baier: Right now, drones are operated by people. The only difference with delivery drones is putting navigational equipment in place so you can operate beyond line of sight. So it is instrument enhanced, but there still are operators behind the flight controls; none of it is fully automated yet.

Some of the drones have geofencing and built-in protection mechanisms that are automated. If you lose contact with the drone, it will geofence itself or hover until you can find it.

Is it accurate to draw a parallel between the logistics involved in drone delivery and self-driving automobiles?

Baier: We definitely are looking at two different things. Ground vehicles need a lot more sensors because of the obstacles on the ground. But I think it is also this factor of drones being operated according to slightly more traditional aviation regulations at this point. The two systems might one day both be fully automated. That is a very high probability, but that is a way down the road.

What are other potential barriers for drones flying off the ground?

Baier: People forget that this may be regulated down to 4,400 feet by the FAA. Once you get below that level, you may see a layered patchwork of local, state, and county-level regulations that end up being blended with the FAA. So you may see drone deliveries happening quicker in one place than in another just because the local regulations are going to be different.

Much more depth and complications exist for drone considerations than for an aircraft that is flying in the airspace between airports per se. You are also still going to have privacy issues below 400 feet to address with drones. There will be some liability and legal issues in that regard.

How does drone licensing work?

Baier: Drone operators are now expected to operate according to higher standards. The licensing process is actually a certificate for that particular operator. Imagine that UPS is going to have a drone division. That division would be completely separate from its own operating license. The company running the drone would report directly to the FAA or its local Flight Standards District Offices (FSDO) office.

Two licenses would not be needed. UPS would be the parent company. The certification for the drone operation would go to its divisional office.
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty

Transgender people in Ohio will soon be able to change their birth certificates to reflect a gender different than the one they were assigned at birth, leaving Tennessee as the lone state to still bar such alterations.

The Ohio Department of Health said last week that it will not appeal a December court decision requiring the agency to allow updates to birth certificates requested by transgender people, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

With the change reportedly expected to be in place by June 1, that will mean all U.S. states but Tennessee will permit such alterations.

The ACLU of Ohio is representing plaintiffs in the case, one of whom said she was physically threatened after her birth certificate, which listed her as male, outed her as transgender at work, the Enquirer reported.

Such harassment toward transgender people is not unique  36 percent of Ohioans who responded to a National Center for Transgender Equality survey said they were "verbally harassed, denied benefits or service, asked to leave or assaulted" after showing an ID with a name or gender that did not match their gender presentation, NBC News reported.

RELATED VIDEO: Elliot Page Reveals Why He Spoke About His Top Surgery

Though the state reportedly argued that allowing birth certificate alterations of gender would "undermine the accuracy of vital statistics or fraud prevention," U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson dismissed the argument as a "red herring" during his ruling in December, according to NBC News.

"[The policy is] nothing more than a policy 'born of animosity toward the class of person affected' that has 'no rational relation to a legitimate government purpose,'" Watson said, according to the Enquirer.

RELATED: What's Going on with Anti-Trans Legislation? What You Need to Know and How You Can Help

He also argued that the previous policy was discriminatory against transgender people, since Ohio allowed birth certificate alterations for other reasons, like adding adoptive parents.

Story continues

In Tennessee, several transgender people filed suit in federal court in Nashville last week to challenge the statute that bars them from updating their birth certificates, NBC News reported.

Though the state does allow transgender residents to change their listed gender on driver's licenses and state identification cards, plaintiffs argued that that wasn't good enough.

"In times where anti-trans violence is escalating, especially against transgender women of color, I deserve to have identity documents that reflect who I am," lead plaintiff Kayla Gore said, according to NBC News.

RELATED: Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade Open Up About Their Trans Journey with Daughter Zaya, 13

Meanwhile, the state is also facing criticism from lawmakers after a bill allowing students, teachers and school employees to refuse to share bathrooms and locker rooms with transgender peers (and allowing them to sue public schools over the issue) cleared the Tennessee Senate, The Tennessean reported.

"There are human beings on the other side of these votes who will have to live with the fallout," Sen. Heidi Campbell told the outlet. "And I just ask us to consider: What harm are they causing us? Why are we trying to get into people's bedrooms and doctors' offices and bathrooms and families? Is that the role of government?"
New Yorks 2020 census efforts concluded with the announcement that the state would lose one congressional seat. It was a bittersweet moment because even though the state avoided losing two seats, New York also came incredibly close to holding on to all of them. If just 89 more people had been counted, and the population of all other states kept constant, New York wouldve kept all 27 of its House seats.

City & State spoke with Julie Menin, former director of NYC Census 2020 and a current City Council candidate, to reflect on New Yorks slim loss and what that means about New Yorks census work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

After hearing that New York state would lose one congressional seat, but missed out on keeping it by 89 people, what was your initial reaction? Was it a victory that New York avoided the worst-case scenario of losing two seats or disappointment that we almost kept all our seats?

It was absolutely a victory in the sense that we staved off the worst result, which had been feared. Every pundit, every observer two years ago felt that New York was going to lose two congressional seats, and I think it really was a testament to the organized effort that we put in that we got to the point where we lost one. Its never good to lose any, of course, but we lost one and we almost lost none. Since World War II, this is actually the best result on the census in terms of a loss of congressional representation, to lose just one seat.

I will say, however, that it is beyond frustrating to know that we almost lost no seats. And certainly, if the Trump administration had not cut our work short by two weeks  in those two weeks, of course we could have counted those additional 89 people and then we would have lost no seats. So that is the first frustration. And the second one would have to be the state and Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo because, at the end of the day, the city spent two years organizing. New York City beat almost every other city across the country on the census because we had a well-organized effort.  The governor refused to allocate funding until the census was well underway, and even at that only a fraction of what was needed.  We really were in a go-it-alone approach, unfortunately, with no partnership from the state. And if you look at the numbers upstate, downstate, you can really see that.

What do you think the state should have done and can you explain what difference it would have made if those funds had been released earlier?

If you look at the state of California and what that state decided to do, in terms of allocating close to $180 million of funding. And then you look at what New York state did. They kept saying that they would allocate funding but they didnt, and then the census was underway. If you contrast with the city of New York  I was appointed census director in January 2019. I then spent that time organizing a community grants approach. That takes time to put in place because of government, distribution and procurement rules.  But the state, on the contrary, opted not to do that, and only reluctantly, after quite a bit of badgering, ended up allocating $20 million well after the census had already begun, and then COVID hit.  And not to mention the governor had the power of the bully pulpit, with the COVID briefings. Where was he in using the power of the bully pulpit to help our state?  We asked so many times for his briefings to include messaging on the census like we did at the city.

Cuomo said the state is exploring possible legal options in response to the narrow loss. Do you think it makes sense for the state to pursue legal action in light of the apportionment news?

Absolutely. Im glad that hes now paying attention to this issue.  Absolutely, there needs to be a pursuit of legal action here. We simply cannot trust the Trump administration on the data.

Youve mentioned a lot of these different issues that happened under the Trump administration that complicated the census effort. The apportionment counts are obviously being released under a different administration, but do you have lingering concerns that the data is not accurate?

A problem we have is that the whole process around the census, from the federal government side, was an intentional effort to suppress counts in communities of color and immigrant communities. Thats what the citizenship question was all about. And they also underfunded the census. So, for example, there were no walk-in centers for New Yorkers who may have questions about filling out the census or there were language barriers. Then, you overlay the fact that it is largely an online census and a third of New Yorkers lack access to broadband. So you take all of these things holistically together, plus the legal challenges (from) the Trump administration and (the) roadblocks that they kept putting in place. Absolutely, I have real concerns about the data. Yes, of course were in the Biden administration, but a lot of this data was tabulated and collected during the Trump administration.
Joe Biden pressed lawmakers to prove that democracy still works in his primetime address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, as he outlined an ambitious domestic policy agenda around his first 100 days in office.

He argued that his administration inherited a nation in crisis recovering from the coronavirus pandemic and a deadly Capitol assault that amounted to the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

Now  after just 100 days  I can report to the nation: America is on the move again, the president said. Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.

Mr Biden a his pitch for his sweeping infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan. He called it a blue-collar blueprint to build America, as he made a direct appeal to Americans who feel left behind in the economic fallout from the public health crisis, growing income and wealth inequality, and the administrations shift towards a more sustainable energy sector.

Now, I know some of you at home wonder whether these jobs are for you, Mr Biden said. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy thats rapidly changing. Let me speak directly to you.

He argued that a majority of infrastructure jobs that the $2.2 trillion plan will help create wont require a four-year college or associates degree, and they will be good-paying jobs that cant be outsourced.

Wall Street didnt build this country, he said. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class.

He also outlined his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan and revived his calls to Congress to act on gun control reform, immigration and voting rights  in addition to his multi-trillion economic agenda  as congressional Democrats draft legislation that is uniformly opposed by Republicans.

We have to prove democracy still works, Mr Biden said. That our government still works  and can deliver for the people.

He pointed to legislative progress made with the passage of the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package in March, and argue that the government has worked to restore the peoples faith in our democracy to deliver.

Were delivering real results people can see and feel in their own lives, he said. Opening the doors of opportunity. Guaranteeing fairness and justice.
New Delhi:

The police on Sunday booked Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam for addressing a hawkers rally in suburban Malad on Saturday without taking a prior nod from them, an official said.

MNS goons active since past few days. No FIR registered against them, Nirupam said after the FIR was registered against him.

BJP registered FIR against me just because I went to show solidarity with hawkers, he added.

Earlier, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers who were trying to evict the hawkers from outside the Malad railway station were assaulted on Saturday afternoon after the Congress leader addressed the rally of around 150 hawkers.

BJP registered FIR against me just because I went to show solidarity with hawkers: Sanjay Nirupam, Mumbai Regional Congress Committee Pres  ANI (@ANI) October 29, 2017

Seven hawkers were arrested by the police under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including 307 (attempt to murder).

Speaking on the matter, Mumbai Police spokesperson and DCP Deepak Devraj said, A case has been registered against Sanjay Nirupam at Malad police station for holding the rally without a prior permission.

ALSO READ: MNS activists drive away illegal hawkers from rail bridge

Nirupam has been booked under sections 143 (whoever is a member of an unlawful assembly), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 37 (co-operation by doing one of several acts constituting an offence) of the IPC, according to another official.

The Mumbai Congress president in his rally had said that the hawkers will not tolerate hooliganism of MNS activists.

I would not tolerate such high-handedness of MNS leaders against hawkers. The hawkers are capable enough to retaliate to any aggression from MNS, he had said.

The hawkers had allegedly attacked MNS workers after the rally. In the attack, one of the activists got head injuries.

Fearing backlash from the MNS, heavy police were deployed in the area.

Police have also booked around 40 MNS workers for rioting and arrested 18 of them, an official said.

Further investigation into the matter is underway and more arrests are likely, he added.

After MNS chief Raj Thackeray addressed a rally in south Mumbai earlier this month over the death of 23 people in a stampede on the staircase of the foot overbridge (FOB) at suburban Elphinstone Road railway station last month, MNS workers took upon themselves the task of removing hawkers from station premises.

(With PTI inputs)

ALSO READ: Raj Thackeray alleges Shiv Sena bribed MNS corporators, says Will never forget It

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[April 29, 2021] Digi-Key Electronics Announces New Global Distribution Partnership with Electronic Connector Supplier ERNI Electronics

THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Digi-Key Electronics, which offers the world's largest selection of electronic components in stock for immediate shipment, announced that it has secured a global distribution partnership with ERNI Electronics to offer robust electronic connectors for a wide range of industries, including IoT, automotive, transportation, aerospace, military, industrial, medical, lighting, communications and instrumentation. ERNI connectors and cable assemblies are trusted for the security and strong vibration resistance, achieved through designs that include dual beam female contacts, terminal position assurance (TPA), and scoop proof housings. A number of termination styles are available with ERNI products, including surface mount, pressfit, and solder. "The breadth and depth of the ERNI portfolio is one that designers from all industries look to for quality, robust and reliable solutions," said David Stein, vice president of global supplier management for Digi-Key. "We look forward to marketing and making available ERNI's Maxibridge and other surface mount connector solutions to our global engineering customer base." ERNI first introduced DIN in 1968 and has continued to develop strong, reliable interconnect solutions since. The company's portfolio includes well known board-to-board products such as DIN, 2 mm HM ERmet and ZD as well as a powerful line of wire-to-board products including the 2.54 mm pitch MaxiBridge with 12A and MicroBridge with a 1.27 mm pitch that carries 9A per contact. "ERNI values the strong and growing relationships we have with distribution and we're very excited to now be partnered with Digi-Key Electronics," said Bill Knable, president, ERNI Electronics Americas Region."We look forward to reaching new audiences, those that turn to Digi-Key for quality electronic connectors." For more information about ERNI and to order from their product portfolio, please visit the Digi-Key website.



About ERNI ERNI is an international, family-run company and one of the world's leading manufacturers of connectors with more than 70 years of experience. ERNI develops, manufactures and markets a variety of electronic connection solutions for various industries, including IoT, transportation, automation, medical and more. With a presence in more than 40 countries and state-of-the-art production facilities in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, ERNI is strongly positioned for its customer base. The company's international headquarters are in Switzerland and the Americas' region is headquartered in Midlothian, VA. To learn more about ERNI, please visit, erni.com, ERNIConnects, LinkedIn or YouTube.

About Digi-Key Electronics Digi-Key Electronics, headquartered in Thief River Falls, Minn., USA, is an authorized global, full-service distributor of electronic components, and provides access to unlimited adjacent products and technologies through their online Marketplace. They offer more than 11.8 million components, with over 2.6 million in stock and available for immediate shipment, from over 1,700 quality name-brand manufacturers. In addition, Marketplace Product provides a singular shopping experience for all things related to technology innovation  IoT, industrial automation, test and measurement and more. Additional information and access to the world's broadest resources for technology innovation can be found by visiting www.digikey.com and on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Editorial Contact

Shelli Lissick

Bellmont Partners

+1 651 276 6922

digikey@bellmontpartners.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digi-key-electronics-announces-new-global-distribution-partnership-with-electronic-connector-supplier-erni-electronics-301280502.html SOURCE Digi-Key Electronics

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NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Capchase , a New York-based provider of non-dilutive capital for recurring-revenue companies, has today announced a new initiative that will provide funding exclusively for women and minority-led businesses. The company is setting aside $100M to ensure that these founders, which have historically received a disproportionately small share of total venture funding, will have equal access to sufficient growth capital.

Recent research from the Harvard Kennedy School1 has found that less than 1% of overall venture capital funding has gone to minority-founded businesses and ~2.3% has gone to women-founded businesses. Additionally, women and minority-led businesses typically see lower valuations and as a result, give up more dilution in their fundraising journey. This comes at a time when the number of women and minority-led businesses are growing faster than ever. Data from the Securities and Exchange Commission has found a 38% increase in the number of minority-led businesses since 2007, and a 17% increase in women-led businesses since 2017.

By taking a strictly data-driven approach and basing funding decisions solely on company fundamentals and scenario analysis, Capchase has removed all of the unconscious biases that have traditionally existed in venture funding. To date, more than 15% of the $150m+ in total funding Capchase has made available to tech startups has been delivered to women and minority-led startups.

"At Capchase, we are proud to work with the most inspiring and innovative companies who are leading their respective industries," noted Miguel Fernandez, co-founder and CEO of Capchase. "When you look at the disparity in funding opportunities however, it's almost mind-blowing. Based on our experience with hundreds of companies across the country, we've seen first-hand the struggles that women and minority founders face when trying to access funding. By committing this dedicated growth capital, we hope to play a role in overcoming the roadblocks that have prevented so many quality businesses from securing critical funding."

Additionally, the importance of securing funding that is non-dilutive, such as the programmatic funding advanced by Capchase, cannot be overstated. Research has found that equity is one of the biggest sources of wealth for individuals, making the balance of maintaining ownership crucial. Funding from Capchase, which is unbiased and based on data, helps founders preserve more equity throughout their growth journey and increase the value of that equity at a faster rate.

Capchase was founded in 2020 by an all- immigrant team of former SaaS operatorsMiguel Fernandez, Luis Basagoiti, Ignacio Moreno, and former VC Przemek Gotfryd and helps tech companies grow faster and avoid dilution by unlocking cash that is otherwise tied up in future predictable payments. This allows founders to either reinvest the upfront capital in profitable growth initiatives, or secure cash on hand to extend their runway.

Funding under the initiative is available immediately. To learn more about Capchase, and apply for programmatic funding for your business, please visit www.capchase.com .

1 Harvard Kennedy School, "Improving Gender Equality in the US Venture Ecosystem," By Melissa-Ann Gillies

About Capchase

Capchase is a platform for recurring-revenue companies to secure non-dilutive capital. Founded in Boston, MA in 2020, the company provides financing by bringing future expected cash flows to the present day  thereby extending an immediate line of credit. Companies that work with Capchase are able to secure funding that is fast, flexible, and doesn't dilute their ownership.

Media Contact

Ryan Walker

R.J. Walker & Co.

[email protected]

860-930-3611

SOURCE Capchase

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A state commission has issued a public warning against a Harris County civil court judge who attended a celebratory luncheon paid for by attorneys of defendants in her court, to whom she awarded a $2 million judgment the following day.

Judge Fredericka Phillips, who was elected to the 61st Judicial District Court in 2016, violated state code when she attended the luncheon and failed to inform plaintiffs in the pending case, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct found on April 9.

Phillips did not respond to a request for comment. Judges typically do not answer questions about litigation because of state codes that prevent them.

She testified before the commission and confirmed to members in writing that she conducted a swearing-in ceremony for five attorneys new to the firm representing the defendants, and that she attended their celebratory luncheon afterward.

Phillips left before the lunch was over and later told the commission that she assumed the firm paid the bill at Brennans Restaurant downtown.

Judge Phillips expressed her belief that given the nature of the luncheon as a celebration of the new attorneys, the small price of her meal and the very public nature of the luncheon taking place in the open at a restaurant near downtown Houston that is frequented by attorneys, she did not believe anyone could reasonably view the circumstances of the swearing-in and celebratory lunch as improper, commission members wrote in the public warning.

At the time of the luncheon, Phillips was presiding over a multi-party civil case involving a dispute over a family business. In the case, two brothers sued Houston conservative activist Steven Hotze and two other brothers, accusing them of fraud, securities violations and breaching fiduciary duties in the family business.

Hotze was represented by the AZA law firm, and after a monthlong trial in September and October 2018, a jury reached a verdict favoring him and the other defendants. They awarded the plaintiffs nothing.

On Nov. 7, 2018, one day before a scheduled hearing on attorneys fees, Phillips swore in five new attorneys working for AZA and attended the celebratory luncheon.

The next day, Phillips awarded the defendants $2 million.

Two of the plaintiffs, Hotze and his wife Donna, motioned for a new trial and later motioned to recuse the judge from the case.

Administrative Judge Susan Brown, presiding over the 11th Region of Texas, recused Phillips in January 2019, saying it came down to what it looks to the public as to what the judges did. The motion for a new trial is pending in front of a different judge.

Attorney John Zavitsanos, a partner at AZA, denied that there was any correlation between the luncheon and the awarding of fees. The new judge on the case later confirmed the defendants would receive the full amount, according to court records.

Brown also found during the recusal hearing that the law firm did nothing wrong, according to a court transcript. The new attorneys who were being sworn in had watched the Hotzes trial, and Zavitsanos said he felt it would be fun to have the same judge they observed conduct their ceremony.

Phillips spent possibly fewer than 20 minutes at the lunch, where she ate a $15 salad, he said.

Its just not the case that the lunch played any role in the awarding of fees, Zavitsanos said. In retrospect, I do regret inviting her  It did not occur to me that this would be such a big hullabaloo.

Before plaintiffs filed a motion to recuse Phillips, she and AZA firm members never disclosed her participation in the luncheon, according to the state commissions warning.

Jeff Joyce, the plaintiffs attorney, said his closing arguments from the recusal hearing best represented how he felt at the time.

When this happened, I was some kind of mad, he said at the hearing. Nobody can convince me that theres a reasonable question about the judges impartiality from that setting.

Beyond the public warning, members of the commission ordered Phillips to obtain two hours of additional education related to areas of avoiding the appearance of impropriety and proper ways of conducting extrajudicial activities.

The commission cited three rules in the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct: A judge should not convey the impression that someone is in a special position to influence them, a judges extra-judicial activities shouldnt cast reasonable doubt on their capacity to act impartially and a judges extra-judicial activities shouldnt interfere with their judicial performance.

samantha.ketterer@chron.com
New Delhi:

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to direct his ministers not to issue controversial and conflicting statements on Kashmir issue on Sunday.

Abdullah during a session of a National Conference citing Union Minister Jitendra Singhs remark, There is no such thing as Kashmir issue, he asked why Modi-led Central government appointed a special representative for a sustained dialogue then.

He added that the former intelligence Bureau chief who has been assigned to initiate talks with all stakeholders in Kashmir would get confused due to the conflicting statements of several Union Minister.

Abdullah said, The way central ministers are issuing conflicting issues things wont smoothen in Kashmir. I request the Prime MInister to ask his ministers to stop issuing statements. The way you did note bandi.. In a similar fashion please do zuban bandhi (keep silent) for ministers. Otherwise the initiative would end before it even begins, which would be unfortunate for the state and its people.

Abdullah further added that the central government ministers do not listen to the prime ministers.

The Prime Minister spoke from Red Fort (on Independence Day)... He said Kashmirs problems can only be resolved by embracing Kashmiris. I wished the ministers had listened to your (PM) speech. It seems your cabinet colleague were sleeping then None of them pondered over your speech, added the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister.

(With PTI inputs)

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[April 29, 2021] Grasshopper Bancorp, Inc. Names Michael Butler as Chief Executive Officer

Grasshopper Bancorp, Inc., ("the Company") the parent bank holding company of Grasshopper Bank, N.A. ("the Bank"), a national banking association, announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Michael "Mike" Butler as President and Chief Executive Officer, and a Director of the Company, effective May 3, 2021. Upon receipt of and subject to regulatory approval, Mike will also serve as President and CEO and a Director of the Bank. "We are excited to welcome Mike Butler as Grasshopper's new Chief Executive Officer," said John Flemming, Chairman of the Board of Grasshopper Bancorp and the Bank. "Mike is a highly accomplished executive with a successful track record leading tech-forward banking companies, elevating them to new heights and delivering great value for clients, employees and shareholders. He brings a unique and relevant perspective, and the energy and experience to double down on our commitments and lead our company into the future." Butler follows Judith Erwin, who founded the Bank in 2016. Butler most recently spent 13 years at Radius Bank, where he was the President and CEO. Butler transformed Radius into one of the most tech forward banks in the country, forging strategic partnerships with fintech firms and delivering a robust banking as a service (BaaS) offering to consumers and clients. At Radius, he focused on delivering superior customer service and leading edge technology. Prior to joining Radius, Butler served as President for National Consumer Finance at KeyCorp in Clevelan, Ohio. He is an experienced banking executive with an extensive background in all facets of commercial and consumer banking.



"I'm deeply honored to have the opportunity to succeed Judith and lead Grasshopper on the next phase of its growth trajectory," Butler said. "I'm looking forward to partnering with the Grasshopper team to accelerate the existing business plan and enhance our business model. The vision has and will continue to be centered on making banking simple, secure, effortless and transparent. In the virtual world that we live and operate in, customers are seeking seamless online services to make their everyday lives easier - now is the time to capitalize on the opportunities ahead and to continue driving new innovation." As part of this transition, Erwin will be departing Grasshopper Bank, effective May 2. "On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to thank Judith for her stewardship and her many contributions to Grasshopper over the last five years," Flemming said. "We thank Judith for the service and leadership that she has provided and all the work she has contributed to build Grasshopper from the ground up and wish her all the best on her next projects."

"I'm so pleased that Mike, a strong leader with the experience and track record to support Grasshopper's evolution, will be leading Grasshopper," said Erwin. "The Bank is at a clear inflection point and Mike's perspective on emerging technology will support the Bank's evolving business and long-term growth. I look forward to watching Grasshopper's continued success." Butler serves as a member of the Financial Services Committee for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, on the Board of Trustees for Thompson Island Outward Bound, on the Advisory Board for FinXTech, and has been active with the Habitat for Humanity program. He is a graduate of Providence College and the ABA's Stonier Graduate School of Banking. About Grasshopper Bancorp, Inc. Grasshopper Bancorp, Inc. is a Delaware corporation and the bank holding company of Grasshopper Bank, N.A. The Bank is a national bank offering a full array of commercial banking products to innovation economy companies and the venture capital firms that fund such companies. Based in New York City, the second largest venture capital funding center in the U.S., Grasshopper Bank delivers cloud-based banking solutions and financial services that enable the leadership of innovative, emerging and established companies more efficiently address the day-to-day challenges of their financial operations. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005377/en/

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PUNE, India, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Institution's Innovation Council-MIT ADT University, Pune in association with Research & Consultancy Cell & AIC-MITADT Incubator Forum organized an online National workshop on Intellectual Property Rights & IP Management for Start-ups from April 27 to 28, 2021 to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day.







Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Executive President & Vice-Chancellor congratulated team IIC-MIT ADT University for creating the larger public awareness regarding the pivotal role being played by the IPR in the growth of a Nation in view of the increasing significance of the IPR in the globalized knowledge economy.







The national workshop was attended by more than 170+ Students, research scholars, faculty members, Start-up enthusiasts across India through online mode in the new normal.







Dr. Mangesh Karad emphasized the urgency for creating a mass 'IPR literacy' movement across India. Intellectual property has a great potential to build strategic alliances for the socio-economic and technological growth in the modern world as well as the foundation for the sustenance in the competitive economic state.







MIT Art, Design and Technology University has already published policies on Intellectual Property Rights and Research & Consultancy at the august hands of Dr. Abhay Jere, Chief Innovation Officer, Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India; Dr. Kishore Sreenivasan, Head - CSIR URDIP, Govt. of India; Prof. Dr. Vishwanath Karad, Founder, MIT Group of Institutions, and Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Vice-Chancellor, MIT ADT University, Pune on Dussehra last year to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.







Dr. Karad said, "Our appetite is to create a World Class University for entrepreneurial development of students and to promote talent at the national and international levels. The initiative would surely provide young entrepreneurs the chance to build a new India and our focus is on creating a vast talent pool of job creators with immense employment opportunities for Indian youth."







Prof. Dr. Kishore Ravande, Dean, Research & Consultancy Cell and Principal MIT School of Engineering said, innovation and IPR are of utmost importance in higher educational institutions and exhorted all educationists to be involved in IP activities such as patent, copyrights, designs, and trademark, irrespective of their discipline: arts, design, science, engineering, management, or architecture.







Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani, Associate Dean & President-IIC MITADTU also called upon students, research scholars to involve in orienting their tasks towards innovation for the progress of the university and the nation.







The training was conducted by experts in IPR training - Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani and Prof. Suraj Bhoyar, aimed at creating awareness across key stakeholders to understand various Intellectual property rights, processes, fees involved, how to apply, to cover all the know-how regarding IPR.







The workshop was organized and coordinated by Prof. Suraj Bhoyar - Project Director MIT Centre for Future Skills Excellence & Convener Institution's Innovation Council MITADTU. Soon, Online Masterclass on IPR will be organized to cover detailed topics like Copyright Practice & Procedure, Prior Art Search, Patent Drafting, Prior Art Search, Role of IP & Enforcement.







MIT Art, Design & Technology University, Pune is the place where Innovation and Creativity coexist and offers exclusive courses in the domain of Fine Arts and Applied Arts, Music, Vedic Sciences, Design, Architecture, Bioengineering Sciences, Food Technology, Marine Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechatronics & Automation Engineering complemented by Management studies.







The sessions were concluded with the IP Generation games & exercises to answer How to ignite innovations in young researcher's minds and start-up opportunities & challenges for the student community in India. The national workshop concluded with a pledge to spread IP awareness among the fraternity to generate more intellectual properties and make India move upward in the Global Innovation Index.







Let's urge for Creative India; Innovative India.







About MIT-ADT University







MAEER's Trust which is known to set the strong precedence for the privatization of Engineering education in Maharashtra had taken a first mover's advantage by establishing the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT-Pune), in 1983, which continues to remain the flagship institute of the group.







MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has been established under the MIT Art, Design and Technology University Act, 2015 (Maharashtra Act No. XXXIX of 2015). The University commenced its operations successfully from 27th June 2016. The University is a self-financed institution and empowered to award the degrees under section 22 of the University Grants Commission act, 1956. The University has a unique blend of Art, Design, and Technology as the core of its academics.







Recently, MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has accomplished the following accolades:



Ranked 26th for ARIIA 2020 by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India. Received 5 Star rating for exemplary performance by the Ministry of Education's Innovation Council, Govt. of India. Conferred with Best University Campus Award by ASSOCHAM, New Delhi Granted with Atal Incubation Centre under ATAL Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, Govt. of India



MIT Art, Design and Technology University has been taking a holistic approach towards imparting education wherein the students are being motivated to build a complete winning personality which is "physically fit, intellectually sharp, mentally alert and spiritually elevated". The students are being encouraged to participate in yoga, meditation, physical training, spiritual elevation, communication skills, and other personality development programmes. Currently, we have 7500+ students studying in various schools of higher education under the University viz. Engineering and Technology, Food Technology, Bioengineering, Arts, Design, Marine Engineering, Journalism and Broadcasting, Film and Television, Music (Hindustani Classical Vocal and Instrumental), Teacher Education, and Vedic Sciences







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Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499587/National_Workshop_on_IPR.jpg







Media Contact:



Suraj Bhoyar



suraj.bhoyar@mituniversity.edu.in



+91-9028483286



Project Director



MIT Art, Design & Technology University Pune







(Disclaimer--Features may vary depending on the regions; subject to change without notice.)
Hesser Toyota, the car dealership in Rock County, offers a car rental program for those who need a vehicle to use. Whether taking a road trip down south to enjoy the sunshine, flying into southern Wisconsin for a business trip or borrowing while a vehicle is in the shop, Hesser Toyota can help. Drivers have a variety of vehicles and body styles to choose from at the Janesville-based dealership, including a pick-up truck, along with hybrid, mid-size and compact sedans. These options provide something to complement the needs of each type of renter. Hesser Toyota offers the following selection of vehicles for the rates listed, although the prices are subject to change at any time.



Toyota Tacoma: $65.00/day

Toyota Camry: $55.00/day

Toyota Corolla: $45.00/day

Toyota Prius: $45.00/day

Toyota RAV4: $65.00/day

Drivers who are interested in taking advantage of the car rental opportunities offered at Hesser Toyota are invited to visit the dealerships website and view its Rent a Toyota webpage. There, they can contact the dealership with the model they want and schedule a reservation. The Hesser Toyota website URL is https://www.hessertoyota.com/ and those interested in contacting a member of its team can dial 608-754-7754. Hesser Toyota is located at 1811 Humes Road near Blains Farm & Fleet in Janesville.


BOSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Moxie Scrubs , the first direct-to-consumer medical apparel brand for nurses, announced a campaign in partnership with the American Nurses Association (ANA). As a thank you to nurses for all that they do, the ANA will offer members a $20 Moxie Scrubs gift card towards a set of their nurse-designed scrubs throughout National Nurses Month in May, along with gifts from other brands that Moxie Scrubs has partnered with, including Evolution_18 by makeup artist Bobbi Brown, Lovepop and more.

ANA - Year of the Nurse

Created for nurses by nurses, Moxie Scrubs has leveled up medical apparel with their sleek fits and innovative design solutions. Their state-of-the-art patent-pending comfort waistband and modern designs allow nurses to remain comfortable and confident in their uniform through even the longest of shifts.

"During National Nurses Month this May, 'Moxie Scrubs' main priority is to celebrate these unsung heroes who work at every touchpoint of our healthcare system; We want to make sure that nurses feel seen, heard, and appreciated for all of their altruistic work on the front lines. To propel our mission further, we've partnered with the American Nurses Association who are the oldest nursing organization in the world, working to advance the nursing profession and interests forward for over a century. Through this partnership, we are fostering a strong community among nurses, to inspire, support, and empower them and their life-saving work, today and every day," said Moxie Scrubs founder and CEO, Alicia Tulsee. "There couldn't be a more pressing time for a brand and mission like ours."

About Moxie Scrubs: Born out of Harvard's Innovation Lab, Moxie Scrubs is disrupting the medical apparel market as the first direct-to-consumer brand for nurses. Boston based Moxie Scrubs was founded by Alicia Tulsee, a native New Yorker and Harvard alum. In awe of all of the amazing nurses who cared for her loved ones, Alicia felt a calling to do something meaningful for the nursing profession. 'Moxie' defines the 'force of character, determination, and resourcefulness,' of the nurses across our country on the frontlines today. More than a brand, this is a movement. For more information, visit www.moxiescrubs.com

About American Nurses Association: The American Nurses Association (ANA) is the premier organization representing the interests of the nation's 4.2 million registered nurses. The ANA advances the profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting a safe and ethical work environment, bolstering the health and wellness of nurses, and advocating on health care issues that affect nurses and the public. The ANA is at the forefront of improving the quality of health care for all. For more information, visit www.nursingworld.org.

Press Contacts:

Derek Bado | Media Maison for Moxie Scrubs | [email protected] , 212.799.6100

Shannon McClendon | ANA | [email protected], 301.628.5391

SOURCE Moxie Scrubs

Related Links

https://www.moxiescrubs.com


John Stapleton has revealed that he has had a 'difficult year' since the death of his wife last April.

The 75-year-old broadcaster's wife Lynn Faulds Wood, 72, who had Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS), died in year following a 'massive stroke' at their home at St Margarets in south west London.

Lynn was also diagnosed with bowel cancer 30 years ago when was given a 34 per cent chance of survival and after she got over the illness started campaigning to make people more aware of the early symptoms.

Sad: John Stapleton revealed on Lorraine on Thursday that he has had a 'difficult year' since the death of his wife Lynn last April

Speaking on Thursday's Lorraine, John said: 'It's been a difficult year, obviously. Challenging year but I've been helped enormously by my son, Nick and his wife, Lisa and friends, family and dear neighbours have been fantastic.

'It has been difficult for everybody, not just me this year because of the pandemic and the restrictions imposed upon us, quite rightly.'

Now John has continued to raise awareness of the early symptoms of bowel cancer with a new 'No Butts' campaign which encourages people to see a doctor if they notice certain changes.

Tough: The 75-year-old broadcaster's wife Lynn Faulds Wood, 72, who had Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS), died in April following a 'massive stroke' (pictured together)

The presenter was best known for fronting the BBC consumer show Watchdog alongside Stapleton from 1985 to 1993.

Lorraine, a friend of Lynn's, described her as: 'The first woman to talk about poo on the telly, you could just hear the barriers being broken down.'

To which John responded with: '30 years ago she was first diagnosed with bowel cancer and at that time bowel cancer was very much the Cinderella of the cancers in the UK.

Reflecting: Speaking on Thursday's Lorraine, John said: 'It's been a difficult year, obviously'

'There was very little talked about, there was not much money put towards campaigning about it.

'People didn't know about it, simply.

'When Lynn was diagnosed, neither of us really knew what bowel cancer was. And once she'd been diagnosed and once she'd had the operation she said, 'I'm going to change this.'

Close: Lorraine, a friend of Lynn's, described her as: 'The first woman to talk about poo on the telly, you could just hear the barriers being broken down'

Love: John, who had been married to Lynn for 43 years, is pictured by her side at an event in London in 2009

'The first thing she found out was that there wasn't even an agreed list of symptoms for people to look at. So how were people supposed to know whether they'd got it or not, whether they should see the doctor?'

Lynn then talked to doctors and they came up with an evidence-based list of symptoms, which the Department of Health accepted.

Speaking about the 'No Butts' campaign, Lorraine said: 'But we're standing on the shoulders of a giant. We're just following what she did. We can't quantify how many people she saved, but it's got to be a lot of people.'

Family: Now John has continued to raise awareness of the early symptoms of bowel cancer with a new 'No Butts' campaign (pictured together in 1996)

John explained: 'The office at home is just replete of files of people saying, 'You saved my life' just from talking about it. Because there was this resistance, even now I suppose, but particularly then, this resistance to talk about bottoms and poo.'

Laughing Lorraine remembered: 'I can't believe she talked to Prince Charles about poo!'

John continued: 'She persuaded Prince Charles to come along to the old ITV building and Prince Charles talked about bottoms and poo, which must've been some kind of Royal first, in public at least!'

Special lady: Lynn pictured meeting and speaking with Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, during a reception for Women in Journalism at The Ned in London back in February 2018

Fame: The couple photographed for the Radio Times in connection with the BBC show Watchdog in November 1986

John continued: 'She did some remarkably brave things. She had a colonoscopy and she had it filmed. That was seen by thousands and thousands of people.'

Speaking about when she was diagnosed he said: 'I will never forget, she just walked in from the doctor's surgery ashen, a friend of ours was in the kitchen, and she just said to us, 'I've got bowel cancer'.

'It was two days before my 45th birthday, 30 years ago. What you have to remember is at the time, she had a 34% chance of survival and she survived. So do not despair, it's not the end of the world if you've got it, particularly now.'

Last December John told how he still has some 'really bad moments' following his wife's death - and sometimes wakes up and 'thinks she's here.'

'I still have some really bad moments. I wake up and think shes here, and the pain on realising shes gone its very difficult to live with that,' said John, speaking to The Telegraph. 'I think what I miss most is not having someone to do nothing with.'

John, who had been married to Lynn for 43 years, went on to say that he received 70,000 tweets and over 400 letters of condolence following his wife's death.

'But I could only hug Nick and Lise,' he said. 'We got special permission from my doctor for them to come and live with me for a few weeks, and they helped me with everything, especially the bureaucratic nightmare after a death.'

'I simply cannot believe how hard that was, and I wouldnt have got through it without them.'

He added that many of the bereavement organisations were shut which made matters even worse - adding he'd struggle to sleep worrying about it.
Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor of economics, delivers his lecture under a security surveillance camera mounted above the teacher's podium in a classroom in Beijing on June 12, 2010. Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 on charges of inciting separatism, and his family lost all contact with him in 2017. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Treatment of Teachers in Communist China Versus Around the World: Its Killing Humanity

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has one more blood-red feather in its Marxist cap for not hesitating to persecuteindefinitely incarcerate and even killschool teachers who refuse to submit to its totalitarian ideologies.

Needless to say, it is the duty of citizens and rulers to honor the dignity of their teachers who work hard to lay foundations for a flourishing society. However, the CCP has failed to stay unbiased when it comes to its educators religious faith.

While teachers around the world endeavor to guide children toward their inner moral compassoften by being a leading role model with their own faith and valuestheir Chinese counterparts are denied the right to play this role as their spiritual beliefs are forbidden if they wish to teach.

The communist regime is pursuing strict measures to censor any religious or ideological influence in classrooms, reported Bitter Winter. Their goal is to ensure that education and teaching adhere to the correct political direction, the report said.

Persistent Persecution

The International Christian Concern (ICC) reported in May 2020 that Wenzhou city, Zhejiang Province, had reportedly required school teachers to sign a pledge to not believe in any religion.

Some of the key requirements in the document, titled Teachers Promise to Not Believe in Any Faith, include the following: firmly establish a Marxist religious view, strengthen atheism education, do not believe in any religion, do not participate in any religious activities, do not preach and disseminate religion in any place.

A Christian teacher in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, was coerced to quit her job in August 2019, reported Bitter Winter. Another kindergarten teacher who is a member of the state-run Catholic church told the magazine that specially assigned personnel work to monitor and report on religious teachers and students.

They were told to give up their faith, and some have been designated as key targets of surveillance, the authorities fearing that they will develop counterrevolutionary influence, collude with foreign forces, and cause chaos, the anonymous teacher told Bitter Winter.

Children dressed in uniform sing after raising Chinas national flag at the Beichuan Red army elementary school in Beichuan, in Sichuan Province, on Jan. 21, 2015. (Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images)

In one of the countless other incidences, Zhao Xin, a teacher at the School of Economics in Beijing Technology and Business University, was illegally arrested and detained in June 2000 while she was doing meditative exercises of the Falun Dafa spiritual system in a park in Beijing.

Although she was known as a conscientious person and admired by her colleagues and students for her moral integrity, the 32-year-old Zhao was brutally beaten three days into her arrest. The severe torture fractured her fourth, fifth, and sixth cervical vertebrae and she became blind in her left eye. Sustaining life-threatening injuries, she was left paralyzed before passing away six months later, reported Minghui.org.

In another instance, Zhang Yan, a middle school music teacher from Mianyang City, Sichuan Province, was incarcerated for a total of 2,208 days in various detention centers, prisons, a forced-labor camp, and a brainwashing center before she lost her life at the age of 46 in February 2020. She, too, was a Falun Gong adherent.

Zhang helped students after class at no charge and earned the respect and admiration of parents for not taking money under the table. However, the CCP labeled her, as they have countless others, as a state enemy for refusing to renounce her faith.

Two Chinese police officers arrest a Falun Gong practitioner at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Jan. 10, 2000. (Chien-Min Chung/AP Photo)

Moreover, Zhaos and Zhangs stories are not isolated cases. Since the CCP began persecuting Falun Gong adherents in July 1999, the communist regime has ordered schools at all levels, from elementary to university, to publicly denounce the spiritual practice.

The school activities of teachers and students who are Falun Gong adherents are tightly monitored. The authorities even forcibly make them watch brainwashing videos defaming the practices universal principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance that are, ironically, freely practiced in over 100 countries worldwide.

Teachers Around the World

In stark contrast, teachers in other countries are honored for their high morals and refined character.

Erik Feher, a 39-year-old fine arts teacher at an art school in Nitra, Slovakia, told The Epoch Times that it is crucial to expose Chinas persistent persecution of faith.

It is not that we are not affected, Erik said. Everything is interconnected. We are also a country that was once ruled by a communist regime. In China, people are cruelly persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and their organs are forcibly taken for the purpose of transplantation. It is not all right.

Erik Feher (R), 39, a teacher from Slovakia, collecting signatures for calling an end to the CCPs atrocities of forced organ harvesting and persecution of Falun Gong. (Courtesy of Erik Feher)

Erik, who began practicing Falun Dafa four years ago, said that by refining his character through the core principles of being true, good, and to endure, he has become more selfless. I find it easier to handle conflict situations when I am less egocentric. I am becoming a calmer and more balanced person, he said.

Fortunately, having the opportunity of living in a free society, Erik endeavors to positively influence his teaching-learning process by helping his students appreciate the essence of moral and spiritual values and understand the importance of respecting human rights.

Meanwhile, not far away from China, a 51-year-old school headmaster and education officer in India, C. N. Pradeep Kumar, said he is lucky to be born in a democratic country where he can practice his faith without any fear of persecution.

With over two decades of teaching experience, Pradeep affirms that teachers are the main pillars that support the future of students. He condemned how the communist regime exploits and brainwashes innocent school students to spy on their own teachers of a certain faith, and then report on them, leading to their arrest and persecution.

C. N. Pradeep Kumar, 51, a school headmaster and education officer from India, doing the fifth exercise of Falun Gong. (NTD)

Students are not yet grown up enough to decide good or bad practices. The students may not understand the crooked face of the CCP, Pradeep said.

He said the way the communist regime is persecuting teachers and educators for practicing the fundamental principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance is terrifying. It is killing humanity, he said.

Pradeep, from the town of Kolar in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, strongly believes that his faith has made his teaching profession a wonderful thing.

I am able to understand the educational aspects like curriculum, textbooks, syllabus, and various other activities related to teaching and learning a way better by looking at them from a moral perspective, he said, adding that if moral values are introduced to children in a right way and in a right environment, they can lead to positive behavioral changes.

In the land of communist Vietnam, a 50-year-old school teacher in the capital city of Hanoi echoes the same sentiment as Erik and Pradeep.

Vi Minh upholds that a teachers mission is to empower students with the wisdom to discern what is right from wrong; a tolerant and understanding teacher with their character rooted in upright moral conduct can guide students effectively.

Vi Minh is a teacher in Hanoi, Vietnam. (Courtesy of Vi Minh)

Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance is good, especially for the young generation, she said. Its so sad and disappointing when those ethical values are trampled.

She said, due to the Chinese regimes influence and propaganda, even in Vietnam to some extent, Falun Gong adherents face a risk when going outside to practice the five meditative exercises.

Falun Gong is legal in Vietnam, she said, so we should be allowed to have the freedom to practice and follow our faith.

Arshdeep Sarao contributed to this report.
Eight fraternity brothers have been charged in connection with the death of a Bowling Green State University student Stone Foltz (pictured) who downed 40 shots during a hazing ritual

Eight fraternity brothers have been charged in connection with the death of a Bowling Green State University student who downed 40 shots during a hazing ritual in March.

The Wood County Prosecutor's Office in Ohio announced the indictments on Thursday, nearly two months after 20-year-old Stone Foltz died after he was allegedly forced into a drinking ritual while pledging Pi Kappa Alpha's Delta Beta chapter.

The eight students charged are: Jacob Krinn, 20; Daylen Dunson, 20; Troy Henricksen, 23; Canyon Caldwell, 21; Niall Sweeney, 21; Jarrett Prizel, 19; Aaron Lehane, 21; and Benjamin Boyers, 21.

Six are facing felony charges including involuntary manslaughter and the other two are charged with hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws.

Foltz, a sophomore studying business at the Ohio university, found unconscious by a roommate on March 4 after members of the fraternity allegedly dropped him off at his apartment. He was put on life support and died three days later.

His death was ruled an accident caused by 'fatal ethanol intoxication during hazing incident', according to an autopsy by the Lucas County coroner.

BGSU officials said that Foltz and other pledges at the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter had been blindfolded and forced to down an entire bottle of alcohol each in the basement of the fraternity house hours before he was found unconscious.

His blood alcohol content was 0.394 when he reached the hospital - nearly four times the legal limit for driving - according to his family, who said it was likely even higher when he was at the fraternity house.

Six of the students are facing charges for involuntary manslaughter - including 21-year-old Niall Sweeney (left) and 19-year-old Jarrett Prizel (right)

Pictured: 20-year-old Jacob Krinn (left) and 21-year-old Canyon Caldwell (right)

Pictured: 23-year-old Daylen Dunson (left) and 23-year-old Troy Henricksen (right)

BGSU officials said that Foltz and other pledges at the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter (pictured) had been blindfolded and forced to down an entire bottle of alcohol each in the basement of the fraternity house hours before he was found unconscious

The charges for each defendant are listed below:

Krinn, of Delaware, Ohio - First-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, felonious assault, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws, and obstructing official business.

Dunson, of Cleveland, Ohio: Third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business.

Henricksen, of Grove City, Ohio: Third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws.

Caldwell, of Dublin, Ohio - Third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business.

Sweeney, of Erie, Pennsylvania - Third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business.

Prizel, of Orlean, New York - Third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws.

Lehane, of Loveland, Ohio - Tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business.

Boyers, of Sylvania, Ohio - Hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws.

At a news conference announcing the charges Wood County Prosecutor Paul Dobson said all but one of the defendants are not currently enrolled at BGSU.

He said Krinn is facing the most serious charge of first-degree involuntary manslaughter because as Foltz's big brother in the fraternity he was 'more directly involved' in his death.

First-degree involuntary manslaughter - which alleges that the defendant caused a death by committing or attempting to commit a felony - carries a maximum penalty of 11 years in prison.

Third-degree felony manslaughter - which alleges that the defendant caused a death by committing or attempting to commit a misdemeanor - carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison.

The defendants have not been arrested but were ordered to appear in court on May 19 at 1pm. They could be arrested if they fail to appear.

'I want this to be the last time a case like this is prosecuted in Wood County, and please God, let it be the last time it's prosecuted in the United States,' Dobson said.

Foltz's family issued the following statement about the indictments: 'We are grateful for all of the hard work conducted by local law enforcement and the Prosecutor's office, and we are confident they will make sure justice is served. However, today is just one step in the right direction. Swift action also needs to be taken by government officials and university presidents nationwide to abolish fraternity hazing.

'We are living every parent's worst nightmare and will not be at peace until fraternity hazing is seen for what it truly is  abuse. It's unacceptable, and in Stone's case, it was fatal. How many injuries and deaths will it take for people in positions of power to do the right thing? We demand zero tolerance. Anything less will result in additional innocent lives lost and parents like us pleading for change.'

An attorney for Foltz's family, Rex Elliot called the indictments an 'important first step' in abolishing dangerous hazing at universities around the country.

'There have to be serious consequences for this behavior, otherwise it won't stop,' Elliot told the Fremont News Messenger. 'Our mission is to make sure no other young life is lost.'

He said all universities and colleges need to adopt zero-tolerance policies for hazing that permanently ban organizations that fail to comply.

'We think that is the only way this type of senseless injury and death will stop,' he said. 'We are not going to stop on this effort until there is dramatic reform and we stop these injuries and deaths.'

BGSU initially suspended the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and charged it with six code of conduct violations before officially expelling the chapter from campus on April 9.

Officials said they were still considering suspensions or expulsions for students deemed to have been involved in the hazing ritual that led to Foltz's death.

Last month Foltz's heartbroken parents Shari and Cory (pictured with him) spoke out to insist their son was 'murdered' and call for the students responsible to face felony charges

Last month Foltz's heartbroken parents spoke out to insist their son was 'murdered' and call for the students responsible to face felony charges.

'To me he was forced into something, the outcome is he was murdered,' Foltz's mother told Good Morning America on March 24.

'There needs to be harsher punishments. You get a slap on the hand for basically doing these things and killing someone. If it's a felony, don't you think they're going to think twice before doing something like this?'

Speaking of her son's death, she declared: 'I can't describe the pain - there's a piece of my heart that's gone. It's just unimaginable, I can't even explain to you.'

Shari said she was able to forgive the students responsible but demanded justice.

'I forgive them,' she said. 'But I won't forget.

'I want them to step up. I want them to take ownership, I want them to explain what went on - I think that's gonna help put a stop to this.'

Shari and Cory Foltz are seen speaking to Good Morning America on March 24

Stone Foltz was a sophomore business major at Bowling Green State University

Shari explained that she'd had some concerns when Foltz decided he wanted to pledge Greek life.

'We had many conversations as to, "Make sure you're doing it for the right reasons, make sure you're checking these fraternities out",' Shari said.

Sadly those fears appear to have been well founded after Shari and her husband Corey received a call at midnight on March 4, telling them their son was unconscious.

'He was found not breathing, they had to revive him and [was] on a ventilator keeping him alive,' said father Cory who immediately drove the two hours to the school from their home.

'So we spent two hours, driving to his school, holding my wife's hand, praying in my mind that Stone was going to be okay. No parent should have to sit in their car wondering if their son is going to be okay.'

Two weeks before his death, Foltz declined to return home for a weekend because the fraternity was forcing him to stay at the school until 2am one night, the parents claimed.

On March 4, he relayed to his mother that there was a drinking ritual he felt he was being forced to take part in.

Shari texted her son about it and promised to call and check in an hour after the ritual began, but she 'never made that call.'

An anonymous student came forward after Foltz death and described the initiation pledge that new fraternity members were allegedly forced to undergo.

'We have to drink a handle of any alcohol that our big gives us. We have to finish the whole thing in the time we're there before we leave,' the student told WTOL.

'I've never seen my roommate more drunk in his entire life. He immediately went to the bathroom and was throwing up in the toilet for just 15 minutes to an hour and making himself vomit.'
The ex-girlfriend of Babes in the Wood killer Russell Bishop has said she had 'no choice' but to lie about the murders out of fear of the notorious schoolgirl killer, a court has heard.

Jennifer Johnson, now 55, has denied perjury and perverting the course of justice in relation to Bishop's trial in 1987.

Johnson claimed she was acting under duress while giving evidence at the trial more than 30 years ago.

Jennifer Johnson, 55, (left) was accused of telling 'lies that were important' in the tragic case, including about a crucial piece of evidence - a sweatshirt found near the scene. Her ex-boyfriend Russell Bishop (right) was first tried for the brutal murders of schoolgirls Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in 1987 but was acquitted

Johnson (pictured under a coat outside Lewes Crown Court) - who had three children with Bishop - claims she had no choice due to violent and controlling relationship

On Thursday, she told Lewes Crown Court of being 'treated like a criminal' but that she 'didn't murder anyone'.

Bishop was first tried for the brutal murders of schoolgirls Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in 1987 but was acquitted.

The nine-year-olds were found sexually assaulted and strangled in a woodland den in Brighton in October 1986.

Within three years of the acquittal, Bishop went on to kidnap and sexually assault another young girl, leaving her for dead.

He was later found guilty of attempted murder and sexual assault and jailed for life.

It would be more than 30 years since the deaths of Karen and Nicola before he was convicted and jailed for their murders in 2018.

Blunders that let the killer go free Bishop's first trial in 1987 saw a series of blunders which led to his acquittal. Bishop's sweatshirt, which was central to the case, was initially treated as lost property.

It was put in a brown paper bag as 'no one thought it was important' during the search for the girls.

Forensic science only allowed experts to say the jumper and the girls 'could' have been in contact with each other.

Human hairs and fibres found on Nicola's body were not tested.

The 'Pinto' jumper was widely available in shops across the country, so may not have been Bishop's.

Bishop's partner Jennifer Johnson initially identified the jumper as his, but then denied it when she took the witness stand. Advertisement

Johnson is accused of lying in the tragic case about a crucial piece of evidence, a sweatshirt found near the scene.

On Thursday, the jury heard evidence from Johnson at the beginning of the defence case.

Asked if she would like to declare anything to the court, Johnson responded: 'I had no choice but to lie, I'm sorry, I put my hands up but I had no choice.'

She went on to say: 'I feel sorry for the families, I wouldn't know what it's like to lose a child and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

'But I'm sorry, I didn't do the crime, but I'm in this court being treated like a criminal, I didn't murder anyone.'

Johnson said she would 'rather be dead' than listen to the evidence in court again.

She added: 'I've had to live with this all my life, nobody will know what I've been through.'

Chris Henley, QC, for the defence, also asked Johnson to speak about her relationship with Bishop prior to the murders.

Mr Henley told the court that Bishop had been abusive towards her.

Johnson refused to say Bishop's name as she detailed the abuse.

She said: 'He forced me to do things I didn't want to, strangle me, hit me and I couldn't get help, I was stuck.

'I used to phone the police but they would do nothing, they'd say it was a domestic issue.'

Johnson told the court she stayed in a relationship with Bishop because there was 'nowhere else to go'.

She went on to say her four children have been bullied as a result of Bishop's crimes.

New forensic techniques led to Bishop's conviction over the murders of nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows (left) and Karen Hadaway (right) in 2018 - and he was jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years

Pictured: A blue Pinto sweatshirt, allegedly worn by Russell Bishop and said to contain vital DNA evidence, which was found beside a path behind Moulsecoomb railway station

Johnson said: 'They're my children, they're not his, they're mine, all four of them are my children.'

Breaking down in tears, Johnson sobbed: 'I am sorry. It wasn't me who did the crime but I'm being treated like a criminal and maybe I am because I lied but I didn't murder anyone

'I lied under oath and that's why I'm here. I had no choice but to lie. I'm sorry but I had no choice.

The long road to justice October 10, 1986 - Victims found in woods in Wild Park, Brighton. December 3, 1986 - Bishop charged with the murders. December 10, 1987 - After a four week trial, Bishop is acquitted of both murders and released. February 4, 1990 - Bishop arrested for kidnap, indecent assault and attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl at Devil's Dyke, East Sussex. January 19, 1991 - Bishop convicted of kidnap, indecent assault and attempted murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 14 years. July 2002 - Babes in the Wood case subject to review and DNA profiling, but was not a success. April 2005 - Double jeopardy laws - on people being able to be tried twice for same offence twice - are changed. January 2006 - Forensic tests link Bishop and the Pinto sweatshirt. Autumn 2006 - Families of both victims informed there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a fresh case against Bishop. 2011-2012 - Cold case review of the murders. November 3, 2013 - Full reinvestigation of forensics. May 10, 2016 - Russell Bishop rearrested. December 2017 - His acquittal was quashed. December 2018 - He is finally convicted of the murders. Advertisement

'I feel sorry for the families and I wouldn't know what its like to lose a child and I wouldn't like to be in their shoes.'

She said told Lewes Crown Court she did not trust the police and accused them of using her as a scapegoat.

Johnson said: 'I had no faith in the police, not then and not now. Because they let him go the first time, they're blaming me and it's not my fault.'

Dressed in a black and white coat, black face mask and black trousers, she was appearing at Lewes - the same court where her former boyfriend was tried in 1987 - charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Johnson was a prosecution witness but she lied on oath about key evidence during the 1987 trial.

Three years later Bishop struck again, abducting, molesting and then attempting to murder a seven-year-old girl. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

He was eventually convicted of the double murder of Nicola and Karen after a second trial in 2018.

The court was told Johnson lied about the ownership of a distinctive blue Pinto sweatshirt but says she was under duress from a 'violent and abusive' man.

Police investigating the murder of Karen and Nicola had discovered the sweatshirt close to the murder scene.

Johnson had initially provided a statement to police on October 31 1986 claiming she knew the sweatshirt found near the scene of the murders belonged to her long-time boyfriend.

She was even able to tell officers that red marks found on the jumper came from a compound he had used on his car and also told police a pair of light blue trousers of Bishop's had the same red stains.

But she sensationally retracted her statement and, during the 1987 trial, claiming she had never seen the blue Pinto sweatshirt and it did not belong to Russell.

As a result the judge directed the jurors to acquit Bishop if they were unsure the sweatshirt belonged to him and he had been wearing it on the night of the murders.

However Bishop, who worked as a roofer, was rearrested in 2016 after advances in DNA testing irrefutably linked him to the sweatshirt.

At the Old Bailey in 2018 he faced a second trial for the murders where he was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 36 years behind bars.

As a result of the second trial Johnson, now 55, was arrested in 2020 and charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice.

The jury heard Bishop and Johnson met in 1983 through a shared love of CB 'Citizens Band' radio.

She told the court she fell pregnant the first time they had sex and she gave birth to son, Victor, as Bishop was serving a prison sentence for a series of burglaries.

Johnson said Bishop was 'violent and abusive' towards her, repeatedly beating and raping her.

She said: 'He would strangle me, he would hit me. I couldn't get any help. I was stuck. I always tried to resist but I always lost.

'He used to slap me, pull my hair. I had bruises at the top of my thighs, black eyes, marks on my chest.

'I used to phone the police and they didn't do anything. They'd say: 'It's a domestic' and leave. They wouldn't help.'

Johnson told the court that at the time she was with Bishop she was working as a machinist for Cornelia James, making gloves and scarves for the Royal family.

The court heard that by the time Bishop went on trial for the murders in 1987, Johnson was pregnant with their second child, Hayley.

At the trial she stood by him and the couple went on to have a third child together after he was acquitted but split sometime after he was jailed for the 1990 attack.

The court heard that during an interview Johnson told police: 'When I met him I should have run a mile.

After her arrest for perjury she told police she wished they had put 'Russell in an electric chair and set him on fire,' as she was worried about the safety of her four children and grandchildren.

The trial continues
REESE, MI  Public health officials in Tuscola County are advising anyone who attended a recent unofficial Reese prom event to quarantine after positive cases of COVID-19 were detected among prom-goers.

Please be advised there have been individuals in attendance that are confirmed COVID-19 positive, reads a recent post on the Tuscola County Health Department Facebook page.

The event took place Saturday, April 24, at The Grand Banquet and Conference Center in Bay City, according to health department officials.

Reese Public Schools Superintendent Keith Wetters said it was not a school-sanctioned event, and he does not know how many people attended it.

Reese Public Schools continues to work with the Tuscola Health Department, he said.

Health department officials shared the following guidance for anyone who attended the event:

Due to a lack of adequate information to conduct contact tracing, it is advised to quarantine for 14 days and monitor for Covid signs/symptoms.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who have COVID-19 may experience mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear two to 14 days after exposure to the virus and can include:

Fever or chills

Cough

Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing

Fatigue

Muscle or body aches

Headache

New loss of taste or smell

Sore throat

Congestion or runny nose

Nausea or vomiting

Diarrhea

Ann Hepfer, health officer with the Tuscola County Health Department, said at least one person who attended the event has tested positive for COVID-19, and health officials are trying to prevent an outbreak by raising awareness.

She said not everyone who attended was a Reese High School student; some of the attendees were students from other schools.

Hepfer said the hall did their best to prevent the spread of infection, including by having the facility properly spaced and asking attendees to wear masks and practice social distancing.

The health department only wants events to be held safely. However cooperation with contact tracing, if positive individuals attended the event, is essential to help identify individuals who are exposed to COVID positive individuals, added Dr. Mark Hamed, medical director for Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac and Tuscola counties and District Health Department No. 2, serving Alcona, Iosco, Ogemaw and Oscoda counties.

Hamed also sought to clear up some misconceptions regarding children and COVID-19.

Even though there are dozens of children hospitalized with COVID currently throughout Michigan, theres a false belief that children do not get sick with COVID, he said. Earlier in the pandemic (last year) there were not many children becoming ill enough to require hospitalization, however with this current variant of COVID there has been an increase in hospitalizations of children, in addition to a marked increase in hospitalization and deaths of 30-60-year-old adults, some of whom are parents and grandparents of children who were infected first.

Hamed said contact tracing will help identify those who may have been exposed and help protect their families and households.

Also, cooperation with contact tracing will help ensure that only the exposed children are quarantined and that those who were not exposed do not need to quarantine and if the school is agreeable to it, can go back to in-person learning rather than remote learning, he said. The implications associated with non-cooperation of contact tracing have the potential for direct health impacts on close contacts, as well as the unfortunate indirect impact on other students (and their families) who may not have been in close contact with the COVID positive individual.

Anyone who has questions about the health departments announcement may call the health department at 989-673-8114.

Read more on MLive:

When will Michigan ditch its mask mandate? Whitmer officially ties reopening measures to vaccination rates

Evidence growing on COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy: Virus is dangerous; the shots are not

Coronavirus case average declines for 10th straight reported day, 38 new deaths on Wednesday, April 28

CDC says many Americans can now go outside without masks. Heres the latest guidance and exceptions.

189 infected in new coronavirus outbreaks at 41 schools, says Michigans April 26 school outbreak report
Read the 120-page research report with TOC and LOE on "Global Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market  Procurement Intelligence Report, Pricing Outlook in Geographies that include APAC, North America, South America, and MEA, and insights into best practices to optimize procurement spend."

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Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market 2021-2025: Scope

SpendEdge presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. The Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market Report covers the following areas:

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Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market Trends

Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market Analysis

Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market Geographic Landscape Outlook

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Europe

MEA

North America

South America

Key leading countries

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Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System Market 2021-2025: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2021-2025

Detailed information on factors that will assist Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System market growth during the next five years

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The growth of the Ethylene Oxide Monitoring System market

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Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

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Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

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Paul Budde: "The main complaint is that this price structure makes it impossible for the RSPs to have a good grip on their costs."

The NBN Co needs to undertake a structural change to its wholesale pricing model that takes into account the changing nature of broadband use in the wake of the pandemic, independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says.

He was reacting to the NBN Co's announcement on Wednesday that it would propose a soft cap on variable data capacity charges and more generous data inclusions.

"NBN Co keeps on fiddling in the margins regarding its wholesale price structure of which the CVC [connectivity virtual circuit] is the most hated element of the pricing," Budde told iTWire.

"The main complaint is that this price structure makes it impossible for the RSPs to have a good grip on their costs."

Retail service providers have to pay two kinds of charges to NBN Co. The AVC is a single price per connection based on the peak speed of that connection which means that higher speeds would cost more.

The second charge is for CVC  the total bandwidth that an ISP requests to use across all its services in an area. It is called a CSA which is just a point of interconnect.

Shortly after the NBN Co's announcement, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said it would convene an industry roundtable in June 2021.

This, the consumer watchdog said, was in order to get the views of RSPs and help inform a revised special access undertaking that applies to the entire NBN network.

Said Budde: "The problem with NBN Co is that, as a wholesale monopoly, they basically can do what they want, they dont have competition and the RSPs dont have a choice.

"It is time for the ACCC to step in and end this drama that is now lasting for more than 10 years.

He said the new pricing proposals were basically fiddling in the margins and making the CVC arrangements more complex that they already were.

"In the end, this will force broadband prices up for consumers," Budde added. "[It is] another waste of time that is leading nowhere."

The ACCC said NBN Cos existing special access undertaking spelt out the access and pricing terms for its fibre to the premise, fixed wireless and satellite networks, which only made up a quarter of active NBN connections.

This roundtable will be an important step in this process of designing a revised regulatory model for the NBN that sets pricing and access terms for its whole network, ACCC chair Rod Sims said.

Until now, access pricing has largely been developed by NBN Co, so the prospect of bringing this work squarely within the remit of a special access undertaking with effective ACCC oversight is a very significant change.

This is the start of a long reform process that would effectively put NBN pricing under the ACCCs regulatory umbrella, and would improve access pricing for NBN Co customers."
Palmdale, CA (93550)

Today

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low near 60F. Winds SW at 15 to 25 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low near 60F. Winds SW at 15 to 25 mph. Higher wind gusts possible.
Long-time investment bank lawyer Joe Longo has been named the new head of the corporate watchdog, as the government prepares a radical shake-up of the regulator.

Mr Longo, who worked in senior legal positions at Deutsche Bank for 17 years before joining Herbert Smith Freehills in 2017, will replace current chair James Shipton who has been mired in a controversy after the Auditor-General raised concerns about his expenses.

Joe Longo was at regulatory challenged Deutsche Bank for 17 years including as its General Counsel, UK and EMEA. Credit:

The federal government announced on Thursday it would introduce legislation to create a new body, the Financial Regulator Assessment Authority (FRAA), to oversee the performance of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority.

The government also said it would be issuing a new Statement of Expectations to guide ASIC in its new focus on helping the economic recovery. The changes to ASICs oversight come amid concerns the regulator had become too focused on changing policy.
Ewan McGregor has claimed his forthcoming Disney+ Star Wars show on Obi-Wan Kenobi will 'feel so much more real' than the prequel series ever did.

The actor, 50, discussed the franchise with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, detailing how advances in technology will impact the show in comparison to The Phantom Menace, Attack Of The Clones, and Revenge Of The Sith.

In the prequel films, which were released from 1999 to 2005 respectively, director George Lucas was keen to add more and more CGI, a factor that was blasted by fans and critics alike when the films came out.

Intriguing: Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor claimed in an interview on Wednesday that Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi series will 'feel so much more real' than the prequel films ever did

At the time physical sets and backdrops were replaced with bluescreens for the CGI, and Ewan reflected: 'After three or four months of that, it just gets really tedious  especially when the scenes are I don't want to be rude, but it's not Shakespeare.

'There's not something to dig into in the dialogue that can satisfy you when there's no environment there. It was quite hard to do.'

But the Obi-Wan Kenobi series will use a process called StageCraft, which was used in The Mandalorian and was pioneered by co-creator Jon Favreau.

Candid: In the prequel films director George Lucas was keen to add more and more CGI using bluescreens, which Ewan (pictured as Obi-Wan) said was a 'really tedious' process as an actor

The technology drops characters into realistic virtual backgrounds by projecting them onto a massive LED screen, creating the illusion that the actors are on location.

Ewan explained: 'So if you're in a desert, you're standing in the middle of a desert. If you're in the snow, you're surrounded by snow. And if you're in a cockpit of a starfighter, you're in space. It's going to feel so much more real.'

In March, Disney+ announced the cast of their upcoming series, revealing Joel Edgerton, Kumail Nanjiani, and a slew of others will be joining Ewan and Hayden Christensen in the upcoming Disney+ series.

Thoughts: The Obi-Wan Kenobi series will use a process called StageCraft, which projects realistic virtual backgrounds onto an LED screen which will make it 'feel so much more real'

Ewan and Hayden's involvement in the series was already previously announced, with McGregor returning as the titular Obi-Wan and Hayden, 39, playing Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.

Moses Ingram, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Sung Kang, Simone Kessell, and Benny Safdie are also joining the line-up of stars.

The upcoming series is set a decade after the events of the Revenge Of The Sith, and is believed to see Obi-Wan square off against Anakin once more.

These are the co-stars you're looking for: In March, Disney+ announced the cast of the series, revealing Joel Edgerton, Kumail Nanjiani, and others will join Ewan and Hayden Christensen

Last year, LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy described the rumble as 'the rematch of the century.'

Many fans assumed that Obi-Wan and Anakin didn't meet again until he had fully transformed into Darth Vader in the first Star Wars movie, 1977's A New Hope, when Obi-Wan was played by Sir Alec Guinness.

Since there is roughly a 30-year gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, there was certainly the possibility of their paths crossing again, which has now been confirmed.

'It was such an incredible journey playing Anakin Skywalker,' said Christensen in a statement.

'Of course, Anakin and Obi-Wan weren't on the greatest of terms when we last saw them.

'It will be interesting to see what an amazing director like Deborah Chow has in store for us all. I'm excited to work with Ewan again. It feels good to be back.'
A 44-year-old man who posed as a teenage boy to lure teenage girls online in Tauranga has been sentenced to four years and 11 months in prison.

Hamish Alexander Clark, who worked as a truck driver in Mount Maunganui, used the fake alias of a 17-year-old boy named Jack Lewis to initially interact with his three victims on social media.

He proceeded to use the fake alias to introduce the girls to a false older cousin who could pay them to perform sexual acts. In fact, the older cousin was Clark.

In court today, it is detailed how Clark met all three of the victims, aged between 13 and 14-years-old at the time of the offending, at school whilst they were still in school uniform.

Upon a search of Clarks property, police found 200 pornographic images and up to 90 videos including some involving young girls. One image involved a child as young as four-years-old.

In January, Clark pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual connection with a young person, four charges of indecent acts with a young person, exposing a young person to indecent material and having an objectionable publication.

Victim statements read from those impacted by Clarks activities, highlight the immense damage caused to those involved and their loved ones. One parent speaks of how their familys world has crumbled due to the offenders actions.

In sentencing in Tauranga District Court today, District Court Judge SJ Coyle took into account the offenders guilty plea to afford a discount on the maximum sentence of 10 years, before applying a further smaller discount based on a psychological assessment.

However, that discount is mitigated by a perceived lack of remorse after it emerged Clark had attempted to deceive the author of his psych report regarding a previous charge for indecent exposure involving young girls aged as young as nine-years-old.

DCJ Coyle opines that only ruthless honesty would demonstrate true remorse from the offender.

Speaking directly to the families and friends of the victims in attendance at Tauranga District Court, DCJ Coyle assured them that the only guilt attached to these offences lay at the door of the offender.

Clark will serve a minimum period behind bars of two years and six months, at which point he will be eligible for parole.
BRECKENRIDGE, Texas  A man mowing his lawn died after he disturbed a large nest of honey bees, which swarmed on the man and stung him multiple times, according to firefighters.

The attack by the bees caused the man, identified as Thomas Hicks, 70, to go into cardiac arrest, a news release from the Breckenridge Fire Department says.

Firefighters called to the scene Saturday afternoon say they immediately encountered very aggressive bee activity. Emergency workers had to go through the swarm to get inside Hicks home in an attempt to help him. Rescuers were unable to save Hicks, according to the news release.

One firefighter took off his protective gear and used it to shield Hicks wife, Zoni Hicks, from the bees as she left the home. She was taken to a hospital for treatment for multiple stings.

KTAB reports Zoni Hicks had been away grocery shopping and returned to find her husband covered in bees.

I mean you couldnt even see his back and his whole head, he was just covered in killer bees, Zoni tells KTAB.

A local beekeeper and a firefighter were able to find the massive bee hive inside a hollowed-out tree. The beekeeper used foam to subdue the bees and the hive was removed.

Breckenridge is about 100 miles west of Fort Worth.
Revenue Up 55.3% Year-Over-Year to RMB4.95 Billion

Net Profit Attributable to Owners of the Company Up 394.9% Year-over-Year to RMB1.50 Billion

Diluted EPS Up 369.2% Year-Over-Year to RMB0.61

Adjusted Non-IFRS Net Profit Attributable to Owners of the Company Up 63.6% Year-Over-Year to RMB943 Million

Adjusted Diluted Non-IFRS EPS Up 52.0% Year-Over-Year to RMB0.38[1]

SHANGHAI, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- WuXi AppTec Co., Ltd. (stock code: 603259.SH / 2359.HK), a company that provides a broad portfolio of R&D and manufacturing services that enable companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries worldwide to advance discoveries and deliver groundbreaking treatments to patients, announces its unaudited financial results for the First-Quarter of 2021 ("Reporting Period").

All financials disclosed in this press release are prepared based on International Financial Reporting Standards (or "IFRSs"), in currency of RMB.

[1] In the three months ended March 31, 2021 and three months ended March 31, 2020, we had a fully-diluted weighted average share count of 2,466,120,614 and 2,291,373,043 ordinary shares, respectively

First-Quarter 2021 Financial Highlights

Revenue soared 55.3% year-over-year to RMB4.95 billion on the back of robust demand brought on by strengthened customer market penetration and accelerated customer expansion. Revenue up 4.9% quarter-over-quarter continued our strong quarterly-based growth track record in the past twelve quarters. China -based laboratories and contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) facilities maintained high utilization to meet customer demands. Clinical research services experienced a strong rebound, but headwinds remain strong for US-based laboratory services which has continued to be negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

- China-based laboratory services revenue grew 49.0% to RMB2.56 billion.

- CDMO services revenue grew 100.0% to RMB1.70 billion.

- U.S.-based laboratory services declined 15.3% to RMB329 million.

- Clinical research and other contract research organization (CRO) services revenue grew 56.8% to RMB359 million.

IFRS gross profit increased 67.6% year-over-year to RMB1.84 billion . Gross profit margin was 37.1% vs 34.4% in first-quarter 2020. [2]

. Gross profit margin was 37.1% vs 34.4% in first-quarter 2020. Adjusted Non-IFRS gross profit increased 58.3% year-over-year to RMB1.94 billion . Adjusted Non-IFRS gross margin was 39.1% vs 38.4% in first-quarter 2020.

. Adjusted Non-IFRS gross margin was 39.1% vs 38.4% in first-quarter 2020. EBITDA increased 180.2% year-over-year to RMB2.09 billion .

. Adjusted EBITDA increased 46.1% year-over-year to RMB1.51 billion .

. Net profit attributable to owners of the Company increased 394.9% year-over-year to RMB1.50 billion . Our gain from venture investment portfolios and loss from associates totally contributed a net gain of RMB1.02 billion , due primarily to the stock price increase of certain listed companies and some portfolio companies successfully went IPO during the Reporting Period that led to an increase in their fair market value and an RMB4 million loss from our joint ventures. Conversely, in the first-quarter 2020, we reported a RMB171 million fair value loss from investment portfolios and associates, and a RMB7 million loss from our joint ventures.

. Our gain from venture investment portfolios and loss from associates totally contributed a net gain of , due primarily to the stock price increase of certain listed companies and some portfolio companies successfully went IPO during the Reporting Period that led to an increase in their fair market value and an loss from our joint ventures. Conversely, in the first-quarter 2020, we reported a fair value loss from investment portfolios and associates, and a loss from our joint ventures. Adjusted Non-IFRS net profit attributable to owners of the Company increased 63.6% year-over-year to RMB943 million .

. Diluted EPS increased 369.2% year-over-year to RMB0.61 , while adjusted diluted non-IFRS EPS increased by 52.0% year-over-year to RMB0.38 .

[2] If prepared under Accounting Standard for Business Enterprises of PRC, 2021 the gross profit grew 67.2% year-over-year to RMB1.84 billion. Gross profit margin was 37.1%.

First-Quarter 2021 Business Highlights

We continued to relentlessly execute our strategy of enabling customers to innovate and accelerate drug discovery and development by leveraging our global integrated R&D services platform. We added over 360 new customers in the first-quarter of 2021, giving us a total of more than 4,400 active customers.

- Our global platform continued to enable innovation worldwide. During the Reporting Period, our overseas customers contributed RMB3.62 billion in revenues, increasing 49.5% year-over-year. Our China-based customers contributed RMB1.33 billion in revenues, increasing 73.9% year-over-year.

- We continued to expand our customer base and retain existing customers. During the Reporting Period, our existing customers contributed RMB4.75 billion in revenue, representing a year-over-year growth of 54.3%. Our newly added customers in the first-quarter of 2021 contributed RMB197 million in revenue.

- We aim to simultaneously increase service penetration in large global pharmaceutical companies, whilst increasing the size of our "long-tail" customer base. This strategy has continued to be successful. During the Reporting Period, the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies contributed RMB1.58 billion in revenue, increasing 66.6% year-over-year. Our "long-tail" and other customers contributed RMB3.37 billion in revenue, growing 50.5% year-over-year.

- We continued to increase customer conversion and deliver synergies across our entire platform. During the Reporting Period, customers using services from more than one of our business units contributed RMB3.94 billion in revenue, growing 58.4% year-over-year.

China-Based Laboratory Services: robust growth in all business lines on the back of strengthened customer market penetration and expansion

Chemistry FFS (Fee for Services) achieved over 58% revenue growth while concurrently transferring multiple new projects to our CDMO segment.

Through comprehensive integration of our DNA-encoded library (DEL), protein production and structure-based drug design capabilities, our Target-to-Hit platform(HitS) has enabled over 600 customers globally, and diverted multiple, incremental business opportunities to our downstream business units.

As of March 31, 2021 , our success-based drug discovery service unit had cumulatively submitted 120 IND filings with the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) and obtained 91 Clinical Trial Applications (CTAs) and had two projects in Phase III clinical trials.

, our success-based drug discovery service unit had cumulatively submitted 120 IND filings with the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) and obtained 91 Clinical Trial Applications (CTAs) and had two projects in Phase III clinical trials. Safety assessment / toxicology services revenue grew rapidly at approximately 114% due to strong demand and increased animal room capacity.

We signed over 40 integrated WIND packages (the WuXi IND program or "WIND") in the first-quarter of 2021.

CDMO Services: first-quarter 2021 growth doubled due to core business model execution and capacity increase

We added 169 new molecules into our small molecule CDMO pipeline, including 11 new projects that were transferred from clients' facilities or other CDMOs. We provided CDMO services to over 1,340 active projects, including 46 projects in Phase III clinical trials and 28 projects in commercial manufacturing.

In the first-quarter 2021, new construction at Taixing city has begun and will provide a large scale API and oligonucleotide and peptide API production once complete. Taixing site is designed to provide over 140,000 square meters of manufacturing space in 2022.

The drug product manufacturing facility in Wuxi city slated to begin operation in 2021 will not only improve the development and production capacity of solid dosages, but will also be capable of sterile drug product development, clinical trial material production and commercial scale manufacturing.

operation in 2021 will not only improve the development and production capacity of solid dosages, but will also be capable of sterile drug product development, clinical trial material production and commercial scale manufacturing. The high-potency API manufacturing facility, large-scale oligonucleotide API manufacturing facility and large-scale peptide API manufacturing facility located in Changzhou city began operations, supporting process R&D and small molecule manufacturing, as well as oligonucleotide and peptide APIs from preclinical to commercial.

US-based Laboratory Services: Continued development of a comprehensive US-based cell and gene therapy CTDMO platform, with the integration of OXGENE

Our cell and gene therapy Contract Testing Development and Manufacturing Organization (CTDMO) services enabled customers globally. During the Reporting Period:

- Our laboratories and facilities in the U.S. provided services for 36 clinical stage projects, including 22 projects in Phase I clinical trials and 14 projects in Phase II/III clinical trials.

- The current quarter revenue decline in our U.S. cell and gene therapy business was mainly due to delay in approval of commercial projects and impacted by the pandemic. Some late stage/commercial clients also did not pass clinical trials; however, we are building up our new projects pipeline through significantly enhanced viral vector platforms and through integration with the newly acquired new OXGENE platforms. We expect strong rebound in revenue growth in the second half of 2021.

- In our Medical Device Testing business, the impact of the pandemic continued first-quarter. The delay of elective/non-essential surgeries impacted key projects caused shortfall of the testing demand. We are actively working and supplementing with new opportunities, particularly the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) to grow the medical device testing business in the second half of 2021.

Clinical Research CRO/SMO Services: strong rebound in revenue driven by focused backlog execution and timely project delivery

Our clinical research services continued to enable customers globally during the Reporting Period:

- Clinical development services (CDS) backlog increased approximately 56% on a year-over-year basis and our site management organization (SMO) backlog increased approximately 47% on a year-over-year basis.

- China based clinical research services[3] delivered strong growth in the first-quarter, at 64.7% year over year, while US based clinical trial services continued to suffer from the impact of the pandemic impact.

- CDS team provided services to more than 130 projects for our clients in China and the U.S. and completed registration trials for 3 products.

- Our SMO team maintained its No.1 leadership position in China, with more than 3,500 clinical research coordinators stationed in 150 cities providing services in ~1,000 hospitals. The team assisted in the market approval of 5 customer products that were approved by NMPA in the first quarter in 2021.

[3] China based clinical research services included CDS China and SMO businesses.

Management Comments

Dr. Ge Li, Chairman and CEO of WuXi AppTec, said, "Another record quarter has once again demonstrated the strength and resilience of our platform. We continue to flawlessly execute our business model, increasing customer penetration while increasing "long-tail" customer numbers with the highest quality of our service offerings. For CDMO, we are seeing benefits of aggressive investment in capacity and new modalities come to fruition with revenues doubling in the first-quarter. Our China-based laboratory services and clinical research services segments also out-performed, growing 49.0% and 56.8% respectively. We expect the upward trajectory of these business segments to continue, mitigating any continuing COVID-19 related challenges that U.S. based laboratory services may face."

"A continued strong biotech funding environment, coupled with incremental demand from the pandemic, reinforces our decision to further invest in and expand our integrated platform solidifying our leading position to meet strong and fast growing demands in 2021 and beyond."

Dr. Ge Li concluded, "This is a good start to 2021 and we anticipate this momentum to continue in the coming quarters. Going forward, we will continue to bolster our integrated business model by expanding our platform through investments in new modalities, further enabling our customers to bring the most innovative medicines to patients  fulfilling our vision that: 'every drug can be made and every disease can be treated.'"

Adjusted Non-IFRS Net Profit Attributable to Owners of the Company[4]

RMB Million Year Ended March 31, 2021 Year Ended March 31, 2020 Profit Attributable to the owners of the Company 1,499.8 303.0 Add:



Share-based compensation expenses 126.3 116.6 Issuance expenses of convertible bonds 1.0 1.2 Fair value losses/(gains) from derivative

component of convertible bonds 451.1 (15.3) Foreign exchange related gains (126.3) (15.8) Amortization of intangible assets acquired in

business combinations 11.2 8.8 Non-IFRS Net Profit Attributable the owners of the

Company 1,963.1 398.5 Add:



Realized and unrealized (gains)/losses from

venture investments (1,024.3) 171.0 Realized and unrealized share of losses from

joint ventures 4.1 6.8 Adjusted non-IFRS net profit attributable to the

owners of the Company 942.9 576.3

[4] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding.

Adjusted EBITDA [5]

RMB Million Year Ended March 31, 2021 Year Ended March 31, 2020





Profit before tax 1,695.9 415.8 Add:



Interest expense 35.0 58.0 Depreciation and amortization 359.4 272.2 EBITDA 2,090.3 746.1 % EBITDA margin 42.2% 23.4% Add:



Share-based compensation expenses 153.6 141.8 Issuance expenses of convertible bonds 1.3 1.6 Fair value losses/(gains) from derivative

component of convertible bonds 451.1 (15.3) Foreign exchange related gains (150.7) (17.1) Realized and unrealized (gains)/losses from

venture investments (1,038.2) 171.0 Realized and unrealized share of losses from

joint ventures 4.1 6.8 Adjusted EBITDA 1,511.5 1,034.8 % Adjusted EBITDA margin 30.5% 32.5%

[5] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding.

Consolidated Statement of Profit or Loss[6]

RMB Million Year Ended

March 31, 2021 Year Ended

March 31, 2020 Year-over-

Year

Change Revenue 4,950.5 3,187.5 55.3% Cost of services (3,112.3) (2,090.8) 48.9% Gross profit 1,838.2 1,096.7 67.6% Other income 106.5 51.9 105.0% Other gains and losses 679.0 20.3 3240.6% Impairment losses under expected credit

losses ("ECL") model, net of reversal (15.1) 4.0 -479.3% Selling and marketing expenses (158.6) (119.2) 33.0% Administrative expenses (486.1) (370.3) 31.3% Research and development expenses (204.6) (125.9) 62.5% Operating Profit 1,759.3 557.6 215.5% Share of losses of associates (24.4) (77.0) -68.4% Share of losses of joint ventures (4.0) (6.8) -40.2% Finance costs (35.0) (58.0) -39.6% Profit before tax 1,695.9 415.8 307.8% Income tax expense (188.8) (110.7) 70.5% Profit for the year 1,507.1 305.1 394.0%







Profit for the year attributable to:





Owners of the Company 1,499.8 303.0 394.9% Non-controlling interests 7.3 2.1 253.3%

1,507.1 305.1 394.0%

[6] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding.

Consolidated Statement of Profit or Loss (continued)[7]



Year Ended

March 31, 2021 Year Ended

March 31, 2020 Year-over-

Year

Change







Weighted average number of ordinary

shares for calculating EPS(express in

shares)





 Basic 2,415,124,823 2,282,334,253 5.8%  Diluted 2,466,120,614 2,291,373,043 7.6%







Earnings per share attributable to

ordinary shareholders of the Company

(expressed in RMB per share)[8]





 Basic 0.62 0.13 376.9%  Diluted 0.61 0.13 369.2%

[7] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding. [8] In 2020, pursuant to the 2019 Profit Distribution Plan considered and approved by the shareholders' general meeting, the Company issued 4 shares for every 10 shares of the Company by way of capitalization of reserve. In accordance with the regulations of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the Company has adjusted the basic earnings per share and diluted earnings per share for the comparative period according to the 2019 Profit Distribution Plan.

Consolidated Statement of Financial Position[9]

RMB Million March 31, December 31,

2021 2020





Non-current Assets



Property, plant and equipment 10,770.3 10,137.1 Right of use assets 1,494.8 1,519.9 Biological assets 454.8 418.9 Goodwill 1,966.0 1,391.8 Other intangible assets 911.8 585.3 Interest in associates 694.0 712.3 Interest in joint ventures 51.9 52.5 Deferred tax assets 347.3 300.9 Financial assets at fair value through profit or

loss ("FVTPL") 8,247.5 6,717.2 Other non-current assets 2,126.1 1,395.6 Amount due from related parties - 0.4

27,064.5 23,231.8





Current Assets



Inventories 2,330.5 1,933.8 Biological assets 487.8 501.7 Contract costs 266.6 250.3 Amounts due from related parties 9.7 56.9 Trade and other receivables 4,665.9 4,337.9 Contract assets 604.7 542.0 Income tax recoverable 12.1 19.1 Financial assets at FVTPL 2,110.8 4,617.7 Derivative financial instruments 381.0 562.8 Pledged bank deposits 8.3 9.1 Bank Balances and Cash 10,668.8 10,228.1

21,546.3 23,059.3





Total Assets 48,610.8 46,291.2

[9] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding.

Consolidated Statement of Financial Position (continued)[10]

RMB Million March 31, 2021 December 31, 2020





Current Liabilities



Trade and other payables 4,384.9 4,550.3 Amounts due to related parties 23.0 23.8 Derivative financial instruments 29.8 0.9 Contract liabilities 1,634.8 1,581.0 Borrowings 1,532.4 1,230.0 Income tax payables 474.0 340.4 Financial liabilities at FVTPL 16.6 16.5 Lease liabilities 176.4 177.4

8,271.8 7,920.3





Non-current Liabilities



Convertible bonds-debt component 1,300.8 1,819.0 Convertible bonds-embedded derivative component 1,292.7 1,582.1 Deferred tax liabilities 305.5 283.0 Deferred income 669.3 682.0 Other long-term liabilities 178.7 219.1 Lease liabilities 1,066.2 1,067.1 Total Non-current liabilities 4,813.2 5,652.3





Total Liabilities 13,085.0 13,572.7





Net Assets 35,525.8 32,718.5





Capital and Reserves



Share capital 2,450.5 2,441.7 Reserves 32,843.7 30,052.1 Equity attributable to owners of the Company 35,294.2 32,493.7 Non-controlling interests 231.6 224.7 Total Equity 35,525.8 32,718.5

[10] If the sum of the data below is inconsistent with the total, it is caused by rounding.

About WuXi AppTec

WuXi AppTec provides a broad portfolio of R&D and manufacturing services that enable companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries worldwide to advance discoveries and deliver groundbreaking treatments to patients. As an innovation-driven and customer-focused company, WuXi AppTec helps our partners improve the productivity of advancing healthcare products through cost-effective and efficient solutions. With industry-leading capabilities such as R&D and manufacturing for small molecule drugs, cell and gene therapies, and testing for medical devices, WuXi AppTec's open-access platform is enabling more than 4,400 collaborators from over 30 countries to improve the health of those in need  and to realize our vision that "every drug can be made and every disease can be treated." Please visit: http://www.wuxiapptec.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain "forward-looking statements" which are not historical facts, but instead are predictions about future events based on our beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to our management. Although we believe that our predictions are reasonable, future events are inherently uncertain and our forward-looking statements may turn out to be incorrect. Our forward-looking statements are subject to risks relating to, among other things, the ability of our service offerings to compete effectively, our ability to meet timelines for the expansion of our service offerings, our ability to protect our clients' intellectual property, unforeseeable international tension, competition, the impact of emergencies and other force majeure. Our forward-looking statements in this press release speak only as of the date on which they are made, and we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by applicable law or listing rules. Accordingly, you are strongly cautioned that reliance on any forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All forward-looking statements contained herein are qualified by reference to the cautionary statements set forth in this section. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release and are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

Use of Non-IFRS and Adjusted Non-IFRS Financial Measures

We provide non-IFRS gross profit and non-IFRS net profit attributable to owners of the Company, which exclude share-based compensation expenses, issuance expenses of convertible bonds, fair value gain or loss from derivative component of convertible bonds, foreign exchange-related gains or losses, amortization of intangible assets acquired in business combinations and goodwill impairment. We also provide adjusted non-IFRS net profit attributable to owners of the Company and earnings per share, which further exclude realized and unrealized gains or losses from our venture investments and joint ventures. Neither is required by, or presented in accordance with IFRS. We believe that the adjusted financial measures used in this press release are useful for understanding and assessing our core business performance and operating trends, and we believe that management and investors may benefit from referring to these adjusted financial measures in assessing our financial performance by eliminating the impact of certain unusual, non-recurring, non-cash and non-operating items that we do not consider indicative of the performance of our core business. Such adjusted non-IFRS net profit attributable to owners of the Company, the management of the Company believes, is widely accepted and adopted in the industry the Company is operating in. However, the presentation of these adjusted non-IFRS financial measures is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with IFRS. You should not view adjusted results on a stand-alone basis or as a substitute for results under IFRS, or as being comparable to results reported or forecasted by other companies.

SOURCE WuXi AppTec

Related Links

www.wuxiapptec.com


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DENVER  Colorados Legislature has passed a bill to allow government bodies to disclose the identity of just a single finalist for an executive position, amending state open records law that currently requires public disclosure of all finalists for taxpayer-funded top positions.

The Senate passed the bipartisan bill by a 28-7 vote on Wednesday, sending it to Gov. Jared Polis.

Bill supporters argued that candidates for positions such as a public university president, city manager or public school superintendent should expect confidentiality and that releasing their names could jeopardize their current jobs.

Opponents, including the Colorado Press Association and the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, contend the public has a right to know who is being considered for a taxpayer-financed government position.

The Colorado Open Records Act currently requires that finalists identities must be publicly disclosed at least 14 days before a job offer is made. It allows public access to application records submitted by finalists.

The bill also repeals a CORA requirement that if three or fewer candidates meet minimum requirements for a position, they must be treated as finalists under the act and their identities and applications become a matter of public record.

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One day I just woke up and I couldnt go to work. That was the first time I started lashing out. The aftermath ... thats what I keep remembering. Its in my nightmares. Mr Harris returned to work a few days after the massacre but found it impossible to continue fundraising on Melbournes city streets. Chris Harris says his rescue dog Sandy has been a saving grace in his battle with ongoing trauma. Credit:Justin McManus He transferred to Sydney in the hope he could escape his triggers. But the nightmares, he said, only got worse. It was mainly the lack of sleep, that was the big issue. About a year afterwards is when I really started noticing it and I wouldnt be able to have a good nights sleep for five to six days in a row, he said.

I had it in my mind that Ill just get back to work and everything will be fine. But I didnt recognise that the stress of working was contributing to it, so I just kept trying harder. After returning to Melbourne months later, Mr Harris worked in various roles over the following 18 months. He even attempted to join the army, believing soldiers may be able to relate to the horrors he saw. The bank of flowers the GPO continues to grow. Credit:Eddie Jim Last year, Mr Harris reached his lowest point and finally visited a doctor for help. Even then, the perceived impact on his masculinity led him to avoid a psychologist referral for many months. I thought hes getting paid to see me, so does he genuinely care? I didnt want to just be another sad story, he said.

Loading Eventually I went and it turns out hes been an absolute lifeline. Mr Harris is one of more than 40 people who have made serious injury claims  totalling $9.6 million  as a result of the ongoing trauma they say they continue to suffer following the Bourke Street tragedy. Of those, TAC data shows 14 common law claims were for people who were hit by the car, 12 were mental injury claims for people whose family members were killed or injured and 15 were mental injury claims for first responders or people intimately involved. A TAC spokesman said while they were unable to comment on individual matters, the commission had denied 13 serious injury certificates, all of which involved mental injury claims for bystanders.

Lawyer Jeremy King from Robinson Gill said what Mr Harris witnessed was as bad as it gets. Loading He said while his client received initial TAC payments to cover some medical bills, he believed Mr Harris impairment warranted further support. Its a deeply traumatic incident that affects people in all sorts of different ways and its very unfortunate that Chris now has to go to court in order to get compensation regarding the significant impact from one of the worst days in Victorias history, Mr King said. Gargasoulas was jailed in 2019 for at least 46 years for what was described by the sentencing judge as one of Australias worst examples of mass murder.
Ex-members offer a rare look at the organization's multiple studios and allege that Scientology used the audition process to recruit outside actors: "It's an in-house film and no one's going to see it."

Ten years ago this month, the Church of Scientology purchased Hollywood's historic KCET lot in Los Feliz, which it rebranded as Scientology Media Productions. It is from here that it operates the Scientology Network, which launched March 12, 2018, with a video message from leader David Miscavige. Appearing in a fitted blue suit inside a modern church building, Miscavige promised the TV station would "show you inside Scientology  who we are, what Scientology is and what Scientology can do.  We're not here to preach to you, to convince you or to convert you. No. We simply want to show you."

According to sources, however, proselytizing is exactly what the network is intended to do. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, Scientology has also used its audition process for in-house films to reach out to new recruits, as well as hosted acting seminars to draw in prospective members. Through a spokesperson, the Church of Scientology denies these characterizations.

The Scientology Network  whose website says it's accessible to more than 20 million households throughout the U.S.  comprises nine unscripted series (including Meet a Scientologist and Destination: Scientology), a documentary showcase and in-house films ranging from The Truth About Drugs to The Way to Happiness that reflect the church's dogma. It's available on DirecTV and via Roku, Apple TV, Amazon and Google Chromecast and airs in 17 languages.

Scientology Media Productions sits just five blocks down Sunset Boulevard from the main Church of Scientology International L.A. KCET sold the property to the church in April 2011 for $45 million, according to the Los Angeles Times, which was adjusted to $28.8 million when the local TV station temporarily leased back space before finding a new location. The church reportedly spent $50 million restoring the lot to its 1920s look and updating the facilities. There are three soundstages, postproduction tools (with 20 Avid editing suites and 21 VFX stations), control rooms, music studios, mixing rooms, art departments, scene shops, radio booths, screening rooms, a magazine production space, a live-events hub  all with new, high-end equipment in 136,000 square feet of space and staffed by church members.
"The Florida Department of Health in Hamilton and Madison counties today (4/28/21) issued a joint health alert to residents and visitors near the Withlacoochee River in North Florida.

Until further information is known regarding possible bacterial contamination of the river, residents and visitors in the area are urged to take precautions when in contact with the Withlacoochee River. The Florida Department of Health is conducting water sampling. The results can be viewed on the Florida Department of Environmental Protection site: Floridadep.gov/dear/watershed-monitoring-section/content/suwannee-river-basin-sampling-locations

Water contaminated with elevated fecal bacteria presents several health risks to humans. Microbes normally found with fecal bacteria could cause gastrointestinal issues and other conditions.

Anyone who comes into contact with the river water should wash thoroughly, especially before eating or drinking. Children and older adults, as well as people with weakened immune systems, are particularly vulnerable to disease, so every precaution should be taken if in contact with the river water.

For more information about the potential health effects of wastewater overflow, Floridians are encouraged to contact DOH-Hamilton at 386-758-1059 or hamilton.floridahealth.gov and DOH-Madison at 850-973-5000 or visit madison.floridahealth.gov.

About the Florida Department of Health

The department, nationally accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board, works to protect, promote and improve the health of all people in Florida through integrated state, county and community efforts.

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @HealthyFla. For more information about the Florida Department of Health please visit www.FloridaHealth.gov."

 The Florida Departments of Health in Hamilton and Madison counties have issued a health advisory to residents and visitors near the Withlacoochee River. Their joint statement reads as follows:
New York Train Conductor Finds Rings Worth $107,000 Left on His Train, Returns Them to Passenger

An honest act from an assistant conductor at Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) proved some people still have good old-fashioned values.

Jonathan Yellowday, a Queens resident working on the 6:11 p.m. train from Penn Station to Port Washington, discovered a tray of engagement rings, valued at $107,000, in a plastic bag that a customer had left behind.

The rings belonged to Ed Eleasian, a jeweler who runs his trade in an office in Midtown Manhattan. Eleasian had mistakenly left behind the package on his way home on the evening of Thursday, April 22.

An MTA officer holds up the rings that were found on Yellowdays train. (Courtesy of Marc A. Hermann/MTA)

Detail of the rings, worth $107,000, belonging to jeweler Ed Eleasian. (Courtesy of Marc A. Hermann/MTA)

The LIRR conductor was puzzled upon discovering the valuables, and he knew right away he had to turn in the package to the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) police as soon as possible. I got on the next train going back to Penn, turned it in, and the rest is history, said Yellowday in a press release.

An overly excited Eleasian and his wife took the LIRR to Penn Station on Friday afternoon to retrieve the lost items from the MTA PD District 4 office.

There, they were met by LIRR president Phil Eng and assistant conductor Yellowday. Also in attendance was MTA board member Vincent Tessitore.

Not only did you find and return these 36 rings, but just think about the happiness of 36 couples down the road that will be joined together in happiness, and they will have a story to tell, stated Eng, while commending Yellowday for his swift and thoughtful action.

Yellowday (R) returns the belongings to jeweler Ed Eleasian. (Courtesy of Marc A. Hermann/MTA)

He further added that the assistant conductor had done exactly what he should have done, making them proud of the railroad.

So, thank you for your heroic actions and saving the day for 36 future couples, he said. I understand the value of these diamond rings, but everything found and returned to the customer is immensely important to them. You treated this as you should have, and it is another proud day for us at Railroad.

In the seven years he has worked for Long Island Rail Road, conductor Yellowday has found many items left behind by passengers on the train. But nothing came close to the value of the 36 diamond rings he discovered this time.

(L) Yellowday hugged jeweler Ed Eleasian; (R) LIRR Assistant Conductor Jonathan Yellowday. (Courtesy of Marc A. Hermann/MTA)

Upon receiving the returned rings, Eleasian gave a heartfelt hug to the assistant conductor in appreciation.

I could only imagine what you were going through yesterday when you realized that you didnt have your jewelry, Yellowday told him. You know when you get on the 6:11 you are in good hands.

Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Epoch Inspired newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  A 12,000-square-foot warehouse in the up-and-coming Sawmill District is being converted into a market where New Mexico artists can showcase and sell a wide variety of artisan products.

Heritage Hotels & Resorts is developing the new market across the street from Sawmill Market, the Heritage-owned food hall that opened its doors last year.

Molly Ryckman, vice president of sales and marketing for Heritage Hotels & Resorts, said the new facility will be known as the New Mexico Artisan Market at the Bazaar. She said the market will house up to 70 artisans, from sculptors to painters to small-batch jam makers, once it opens in July.

Ryckman said the goal is to offer another attraction in the area for locals and guests at Heritages nearby hotels, while giving artists a physical location to showcase their goods coming out of a difficult year.

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So many of the art markets have either shrunk in size or were postponed, Ryckman said. So I think it allows another option for them to exhibit.

Artists have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. The national nonprofit Americans for the Arts estimates that arts and cultural organizations across the country have lost $15.2 billion over the course of the pandemic.

Ryckman said the artisan market grew out of programs hosted at other Heritage properties. Hotel Albuquerque used to host a market over Thanksgiving weekend, which Ryckman said drew around 150 artists who wanted the opportunity to showcase their products more frequently.

Sawmill Market hosts a small artisan market inside, which will be absorbed into the large facility once it opens at 1904 Bellamah NW.

I think it will be nice and spacious for guests who come in, Ryckman said.

Vendors will be set up indoors and outdoors at the new market, with white tents reminiscent of art markets in Santa Fe, Ryckman said.

Heritage has commissioned artist Rhett Lynch to design an installation out in the front of the facility to draw in visitors for the grand opening on July 9.

The market is looking for artists working in a wide variety of mediums, including metalwork, ceramics, bath and body products and specialty food products, but Ryckman said the market is seeking creatives from New Mexico specifically.

Our whole idea is to really help promote the creative economy of New Mexico, which we have really become known for in the United States, she said.

Ryckman added that the market will host vendors on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with artists selected by a jury on a rotating basis.

The building connects to Spur Line Supply Co. through a doorway, and Ryckman said visitors will be able to move back and forth between the two businesses.

Spur Line general manager Rebecca Tuccillo said shes hopeful that having the market next door will help increase traffic at her store, while also establishing connections with vendors that could eventually sell products at Spur Line on a more permanent basis. Tuccillo said the market could help Albuquerques creative economy grow and bounce back after a challenging 2020.

We anticipate an influx of new customers and just more traffic coming through this summer, Tuccillo said. Which is an exciting thing after what  a lot of small businesses experienced here in 2020.
LANSING, MI - Republican lawmakers argued during a Thursday oversight committee hearing that the separation agreement paid to former Michigan health director Robert Gordon may have been unconstitutional.

The issue, some state House representatives said was if there was an exchange for work performed in the separation agreement between Gordon and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Gordon was subpoenaed last week to force testimony during the House Oversight Committee April 29.

Related: Former Michigan health director acknowledges disagreements with Whitmer before resignation

Gordon testified that he never sought legal claims against the Whitmer administration for his January separation. Committee Republicans pointed to this as proof Gordon received extra compensation for his exit, arguing a release of claims would be the exchange needed to make this pay legal.

It appears to me quite clear that the state cannot provide you any extra compensation, said Oversight chair Rep. Steven Johnson, R-Wayland, at the hearing. The only reason they could do that would be to release claims, but in order to do that, you actually have to have a claim.

Johnson cited Article XI, section 3 of the state constitution, which states: Neither the legislature nor any political subdivision of this state shall grant or authorize extra compensation to any public officer, agent or contractor after the service has been rendered or the contract entered into.

Matthew Schneider, an attorney in private practice who worked as chief legal counsel under Attorney General Bill Schuette, previously told MLive it would be strange to execute a settlement agreement for a public official who left voluntarily.

You do a settlement agreement because each side gets something out of it. The state gets the employee doesnt sue me. But if he has no grounds to sue the state, why would he get the payout? That doesnt seem to make sense, Schneider said back in March.

Read more: Whitmer said separation agreements like Robert Gordons are used often. In state government, theyre not.

Rep. David LaGrand, D-Grand Rapids, thinks questioning the legality of the agreement is valid, but adjudication needs to happen outside the Legislature, he said. LaGrand practiced law privately in Grand Rapids before his time in the House.

When we get into the question of what our scope is, I think we pretty quickly start spinning our wheels, he said. Thats exactly where I think we need clarification from say the court or the Attorney General. What (does) a public officer mean? What is an agent or contractor?

Johnson also cited an Attorney General opinion from 1990 on the prohibition of extra compensation to state officials. Former AG Frank Kelley wrote that state law bans:

Retroactive salary increase to public officers who did not receive binding commitments for a specific salary increase prior to the performance of the services in question.

Retroactive pay is when someone is paid based on a shortfall from their last pay period. Gordons severance pay of $155,506 came a month after his January resignation, and accounts for nine months of work that he and the Whitmer administration negotiated after his departure, he said Thursday.

I had an initial call with the attorney (assigned to me) at the Department of the Attorney General, he said. She said to me (that she was) able to offer a payment of up to six months plus (health insurance). She sent me an agreement, left it blank, and I inserted the nine months. They agreed.

Meanwhile, the Republican-led Michigan Legislature disclosed last month nearly $700,000 in taxpayer money was spent on severance settlements with staff over the last decade, according to information released by both the House and Senate business offices.

Related: Michigan Legislature had its own series of confidential staff separation agreements

While the law Johnson cited clearly states the Legislature may not provide extra compensation, the definition of political subdivision is unclear. According to state law, the term usually refers to local governments such as municipal, city, county, school or other districts. It doesnt mention the executive branch, which oversees MDHHS.

This potential grey area leaves room for the Legislature to amend the law towards severance agreements, LaGrand said.

It may be that our body wants to forestall the possibility of severance agreements going forward, he said. Whether or not theyre legitimate, I think its something that properly could be brought to the court, in which case all severance agreements made by anybody of any legislative body might be invalidated.

Since all dollars are appropriated through the Legislature, the House is within its rights to supervise how other branches of government spend money, Johnson said.

We cannot allow dollars to be appropriated unconstitutionally, he said. That would be a violation of our oath of office.

Johnson clarified that his issue is not with Gordon, who said he entered the contract unaware of the potential legal conflict.

Were not saying you are the one that broke the law, Johnson said. It was the state that should have never done this.

Johnson told reporters after the hearing that he and fellow Republicans will be consulting with their legal counsel to explore next steps. He did not indicate any people his committee would subpoena after Thursdays hearing.

Read more from MLive:

House Oversight chair seeks subpoena power to compel former Michigan health director to testify

House OKs subpoenas for separation agreements from Gov. Whitmers office

Whitmer, Gordon waive confidentiality agreement after backlash

Former Michigan health director given $155K severance pay after abrupt resignation

Whitmer curbs use of controversial separation agreements in executive directive
[Applause] Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. We have to do more than just build back better. We have to compete more strenuously than we have. Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. 75% dont require an associates degree. The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. Thats what it is. China and other countries are closing in fast. We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future. So lets get to work. I wanted to lay out before the Congress my plan, before we got into the deep discussions. Id like to meet with those who have ideas that are different, that they think are better. I welcome those ideas, but the rest of the world is not waiting for us. I just want to be clear, from my perspective, doing nothing is not an option. The war in Afghanistan, as we remember the debates here, were never meant to be multigenerational undertakings of nation building. We went to Afghanistan to get terrorists, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and after 20 years of value, valor and sacrifice, its time to bring those troops home. Congress needs to pass legislation this year to finally secure protection for Dreamers. [Applause] The young people whove only known America as their home. And permanent protection for immigrants who are here on temporary protective status, who came from countries beset by man-made and natural-made violence and disaster. As well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers who put food on our tables. Look, immigrants have done so much for America during this pandemic and throughout our history. The country supports immigration reform. We should act. Lets argue over it. Lets debate it, but lets act. As I stand here tonight before you in a new and vital hour of life and democracy of our nation, I can say with absolute confidence, I have never been more confident or optimistic about America, not because Im president, because of whats happening with the American people. Weve stared into the abyss of insurrection and autocracy, pandemic and pain, and we the people did not flinch.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 23:01:29|Editor: huaxia

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Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, speaks while presiding over the closing meeting of the 28th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee in Beijing, capital of China, April 29, 2021. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) concluded its 28th session Thursday in Beijing.

At the closing meeting, lawmakers voted to adopt the law on promoting rural vitalization, the law on preventing food waste and the revised Maritime Traffic Safety Law.

Lawmakers also adopted a decision to amend the Education Law, a decision to amend a package of eight laws including the Road Traffic Safety Law, a decision to amend the measures for the election of military deputies to people's congresses, and a decision to appoint Huang Ming as the minister of emergency management.

President Xi Jinping signed seven presidential orders to promulgate the laws and decisions.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, presided over the closing meeting.

The meeting also adopted a revised decision on strengthening the review and oversight of the central budget, and a decision on authorizing the State Council to temporarily adjust the application of relevant laws and regulations in pilot free trade zones.

Lawmakers approved a supplementary protocol to an agreement of Shanghai Cooperation Organization members on holding joint military exercises, two judicial assistance treaties with Iran, and the Square Kilometer Array Observatory Convention.

They also adopted a report on deputy qualifications and personnel-related bills.

Addressing the closing meeting, Li Zhanshu said that to effectively perform the legislative work in the new era, legislation in key, emerging and foreign-related areas must be strengthened.

He called for all-out efforts in performing legislative tasks arranged by the Communist Party of China Central Committee, as well as active efforts in response to the new needs of economic and social development and the new expectations of the people.

While ensuring quality, legislative work should pick up pace, Li said. He also called for better training of legislative personnel.

Li chaired a meeting of the Council of Chairpersons of the NPC Standing Committee before the closing meeting and presided over a lecture for lawmakers after the meeting. Enditem
Space has become a playground for billionaires. And although new technologies are lowering the cost of space exploration and exploitation, it still requires major capital to access the jungle gym  prompting some companies to turn to the public markets to fuel their growth.

That path increasingly runs through blank-check companies, entities already listed on a stock exchange that are looking to merge with a company to take it public.

Among the space-based businesses that have announced mergers with these special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are space tourism company Virgin Galactic and space-based data and analytics company Spire Global.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based Redwire, a one-stop shop for satellite and spacecraft design, software and hardware, is the most recent space company to announce a SPAC merger. It agreed last month to combine with Genesis Park Acquisition Corp. Formed by the principals of Houston private equity firm Genesis Park and aerospace industry executives, the blank-check company raised about $164 million to invest in an aerospace or aviation company with its sale of nearly 16.4 million units in November. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Keeping space in Houston: TexSpace debuts to solidify Houston as Space City

Its a fast-growing industry, said Redwire CEO Peter Cannito. And in order to keep up the momentum, we needed a mechanism for accessing additional capital.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the deal values Redwire at $615 million and gives it about $170 million in the bank post-merger.

We didnt know that we were actually going to do a business combination around the emerging space boom, said Paul Hobby, CEO and director of Genesis Park. If you had made me a bet in September, I would have said aviation services versus space services. But Im wrong all the time. And Im glad I was this time.

Redwire was the fifth space company to announce a merger with a blank-check company this year, up from two last year. As of April 27, 206 SPACs have announced deals since Jan. 1, 2020, said Kristi Marvin, founder of SPACInsider, which provides industry data and analysis.

Recent boost

The popularity of SPACs has ebbed and flowed over the years. But in 2020, Marvin said it really caught fire.

SPACs raise money not based on their operating history  they have none  but on the promise of merging with a viable business in a growth industry. That money is kept in a trust and cannot be touched until a deal is closed. Blank-check companies are required to identify a merging partner within a set amount of time. Genesis Park Acquisition Corp. had 18 months; it announced the deal with Redwire in four.

More on SPACs: Is the blank-check market headed for a bubble?

If a blank-check company doesnt find a company to merge with, it has to return the capital raised to investors. And if investors dont like the deal, they can get their money back by redeeming their shares.

I had a negative predisposition about SPACs, Hobby said. They were always kind of a quirky celebrity driven corner of the market that seemed to come and go in phases. So I had to reconsider all those preconceived notions, and the truth is that the SPAC vehicle has matured. Its gotten much more investor-friendly.

For private companies, going public via a SPAC is often faster and provides more certainty than conducting a more traditional initial public offering. The company goes into a SPAC merger with a much better idea of how much cash will be on its balance sheet when the deal closes. An initial public offering, on the other hand, requires months of back and forth with federal regulators and a road show where the company markets itself to investors. Only then does the company price its shares.

Theres been so much visibility in SPACs, right? Redwires Cannito said. Sometimes people forget that, at the end of the day, a SPAC is just an efficient way to go public.

When Virgin Galactic merged with a blank-check company in 2019, it helped kick-start both the broader SPAC craze and the space trend. That deal received a lot of press and helped put SPACs on the map, Marvin said.

Space race

Seven space companies have since followed Virgin Galactic in announcing SPAC mergers. These eight deals are anticipated to raise $3.6 billion in cash as part of their SPAC combinations, said Manny Shar, head of analytics for BryceTech, an analytics and engineering firm that focuses on space. Thats more than the $3.5 billion in private investment raised by all space companies in 2018. He said space companies raised about $5.7 billion in private investment in 2019 and more than $7 billion in 2020.

Private financing of space companies, driven by the dramatic growth in recent years of seed and venture capital investments, has been climbing since 2015. And because most investors typically want to see a return within five to seven years, Shar said it makes sense that many companies are opting to go public now. That or an acquisition are the two main ways investors get their money back, along with a meaningful return.

The gold rush of space: Venture capital investing in space startups

Redwire, created last year when Florida private equity firm AE Industrial Partners acquired spacecraft component manufacturer Adcole Space and systems engineering company Deep Space Systems, has acquired seven space companies. The mix includes younger companies such as in-space manufacturer Made in Space and heritage companies such as Adcole Space.

Cannito, Redwires CEO, said the money provided by becoming publicly traded will enable additional acquisitions. Redwire is projecting 2021 revenues of $163 million, according to the news release announcing its combination with Genesis Park Acquisition Corp.

The race into the public markets provides an opportunity for more everyday investors, such as individuals using the Robinhood app, to invest in this new era of space technology and exploration, said Meagan Crawford, managing partner of Houston-based venture capital firm SpaceFund.

But she is concerned that some space companies, those that arent generating revenues yet, are jumping into the public markets too quickly. Early stage companies have a higher risk of failure. And if these arent successful, it could change the public sentiment around investing in space companies.

It could turn Robinhood investors off of space companies in the future, Crawford said. I really hope this first batch of companies is highly successful so we can continue to build that robust public market ecosystem.

andrea.leinfelder@chron.com

twitter.com/a_leinfelder
Women who experience anxiety will feel irritable and on edge, and may have heart palpitations. Depression is typically marked by a low mood, a lack of motivation, sleeping and eating more or less than usual, and not enjoying activities that are typically a source of comfort.

What causes them:

When we lose estrogen, were more vulnerable in terms of mood, said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the North American Menopause Society and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Womens Health.

Women who have experienced perinatal depression or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS, are at a higher risk for developing depression around menopause. Hot flashes are also associated with anxiety.

How to treat them:

Depression that occurs around the menopause transition responds well to estrogen, Dr. Faubion said.

If a woman isnt responding to hormones, antidepressants can be helpful, Dr. Adams said. Mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, relaxation techniques and yoga can also improve mood.

Image

Genital and Urinary Symptoms

What they feel like:

Women may experience intermittent vaginal dryness, urinary leakage and an overactive bladder during and after perimenopause. They sometimes report an itching or burning sensation in the vagina or during urination: Some describe it as razor blades or shards of glass, said Dr. Faubion. Sex can be painful; so can wiping with toilet paper or wearing jeans.

What causes them:

Low estrogen levels can lead to genital symptoms. Estrogen helps maintain the health of those tissues with elasticity and blood flow and moisture, Dr. Faubion said. You lose all of that when you lose estrogen.
Connecting African broadcast corporations and marketing agencies with international broadcasters through channel and content distribution, guaranteeing exponential growth in ad sales, sponsorship and promotions.

Colman Murray, managing director of Media Brokerage Africa

The current economic climate is forcing cost-cutting across the board for international broadcast partners in Africa. Media Brokerage Africa, a bespoke pan-African broadcast media brokerage, is committed to delivering cost-effective and innovative media solutions to its boutique portfolio of seminal entertainment, news and sports clients.Launched in July 2020, Media Brokerage Africa specialises inacross Africa,connecting pan-African audiences with international content (via acquisitions, sales, content blocks and pop-up channels) and, including negotiation of sports rights within Africa. The company operates across all broadcasting platforms including, free-to-air (FTA), pay-TV, digital switch over (DSO), mobile and over-the-top (OTT). Media Brokerage Africa consults on behalf of new and existing platforms within the African broadcast ecosystem bringing great international content to African audiences aligning and cultivating deeper meaningful connections.Partnerships are critical to the strategic success of Media Brokerage Africa, both current and future. Existing clients include South Africas public broadcaster, SABC; TV production company Brainwave Productions; and the Ethiopian TV and entertainment OTT platform, Habeshaview, which operates internet protocol television (IPTV) services offering rich content that includes live TV, documentaries, drama, childrens programmes, lifestyle shows and many more.Recently, Media Brokerage Africa has announced numerous pan-African exclusive distribution partnership deals, including IMMediate Platforms official entry into Africas booming online marketing industry, helping marketers create the best content possible. Swig Media, LLC offering a bouquet of original, special-interest channels to Africa. Global Fashion Channel, featuring fashion, beauty, art, luxury lifestyle, culture, music and special events from around the world. Other exclusive partnership deals signed include The Dancehall Channel, introducing the Dancehall culture to the African continent; ENLIVE tv offering Christian entertainment for African viewers; and StoryZoo, a magical place in which animation, music and education combine to create a learning adventure for young children.In line with the evolving media landscape and a demand for a multi-channel solution as opposed to silo offerings, I am thrilled to set up, develop and drive this new company. It is no longer just about selling media platforms, but more about addressing the marketing objective of our clients, says Colman Murray, founder and managing director of Media Brokerage Africa. I am excited to further enhance Media Brokerage Africas exceptional portfolio of brands and revenue streams across the continent. This is an exciting opportunity, and I am looking forward to taking this business to unprecedented heights.Before devoting his work full-time to Media Brokerage Africa, Murray served in pan-African senior executive roles with print, digital and broadcasting corporations, including Yahoo! Time Inc., Fox Networks Group and WarnerMedia. As a journalist, Murray has written foras well as owning, editing and publishing a stable of South African magazines through Hot Mustard Media.For more information on Media Brokerage Africa, visit mediabrokerageafrica.com or commercial queries in Africa, please contact Colman Murray at moc.acirfaegarekorbaidem@namloc Headed by founder Colman Murray, Media Brokerage Africa is a pan-African broadcast media brokerage specialising in channel/affiliate sales and management, advertising and sponsorships, content sales and acquisitions, and sales and negotiation of sports rights within Africa. The company operates across all broadcasting platforms including, free-to-air (FTA), pay-TV, digital switch over (DSO) and over-the-top (OTT). Media Brokerage Africa consults on behalf of new and existing platforms within the African broadcast ecosystem.Find out more at https://www.mediabrokerageafrica.com/
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman on Wednesday rejected Japan's request to delete from his Twitter account a parody picture of an "ukiyo-e" work to criticize its decision to release treated radioactive water from the Fukushima power plant into the ocean.

On Monday, Zhao Lijian posted a collage picture of a piece in the popular "Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji" series by Japanese ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), prompting the Japanese Foreign Ministry to lodge a protest with China.

The picture "reflects Chinese people's concern and dissatisfaction with the Japanese government's unilateral decision" about the "Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water," Zhao, known as one of Beijing's hard-line diplomats, told reporters.

Zhao added that the picture "reflects legitimate public opinion and justice. It is the Japanese government that needs to revoke the wrong decision and apologize."

He said in his Twitter post, along with the picture, "If Katsushika Hokusai, the original author is still alive today, he would also be very concerned about #JapanNuclearWater."
Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday announced a revamped $747 million package to overhaul four strategic military facilities in the Northern Territory, clearly in preparation for a US-instigated war against China.

The announcement came just two days after Home Affairs Department secretary Michael Pezzullo issued an extraordinary public warning that the drums of war are beating and the country must be prepared to send off, yet again, our warriors to fight, as in World Wars I and II.

A Royal New Zealand Air Force NH90 helicopter and an Australian Defence Force MRH90 land at Sam Hill Airfield in Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area in Central Queensland (Source: Australian Department of Defence)

The bases named by Morrison are all in areas around the vital northern port of Darwin. Their upgrades feature weapons-firing ranges, the lengthening of an airstrip to support heavier US aircraft and new training facilities for Australian troops and US marines, thousands of whom have been rotated through Darwin since 2012.

Morrison said the investment was part of an $8 billion fund dedicated to defence infrastructure in the Northern Territory over the next decade. That underscores the importance of Australian bases for US war plans.

The bases slated for upgrades are the Robertson Barracks Close Training Area, Kangaroo Flats Training Area, Mount Bundey Training Area and Bradshaw Field Training Area. The upgrades were said to support greater engagement and combined training with the US under the Force Posture Agreement, which provides for the Marine rotations and extensive US access to Australian military bases.

The upgrades include urban assault and urban operations facilities, indicating the training of troops for urban warfare, and for use domestically to suppress unrest, including anti-war resistance and protests.

Greg Sheridan, the Australians foreign editor, who has sources inside Washingtons intelligence and military apparatus, spelled out the agenda in chilling terms, invoking a scenario of a Pacific-wide war.

[T]he primary strategic purpose of the defence upgrades is to help the US disperse and decentralise its military forces in the Indo-Pacific, he wrote in a front-page column. This means that they are harder to hit and more survivable in the event of any massive, pre-emptive strike by Beijing.

Such language points to detailed planning for war. Sheridan linked Morrisons announcement to a Pentagon effort to move away from an over-dependence on forces concentrated in Okinawa and Guam, where the US has major military bases within striking distance of China.

Sheridan couched this message in terms of alleged Chinese aggression. But the reality is that the US and its allies, with Australia taking a vanguard role, are militarily encircling China and imposing sanctions and other punitive economic measures. The aim, outlined in US strategic documents, is to prevent any challenge to the regional and global hegemony obtained by US imperialism in World War II.

The government timed Pezzullos declaration to be delivered on Anzac Day, a nationalist holiday that promotes militarism by glorifying the disastrous and failed invasion of Turkey by Britain, Australia and New Zealand in 1915 during World War I.

The least we can do for the host of the dead whom we remember this Anzac week is to be prepared to face equivalent challenges with the same resolve and sense of duty that they displayed in years past, Pezzullo insisted.

Pezzullos message was initially sent as a mass email to Home Affairs Department staff and then published as op-ed in the Australian, a Murdoch media flagship. Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said she had approved Pezzullos email, confirming that it is part of a synchronised political campaign.

The aim is to condition public opinion for a potentially catastrophic war fought with nuclear weapons. Australia would be on the frontline because of its geographic location and hosting of key US bases, such as the Pine Gap satellite communications facility in central Australia.

The Australian government, backed by the corporate media, has significantly sped up the pace of these war preparations, and the fomenting of anti-China sentiment, since the inauguration of the Biden administration, which has accelerated Washingtons confrontation with Beijing.

Last weekend, Peter Dutton, recently elevated to defence minister, declared that the prospect of a war with China over Taiwan should not be discounted. He accused China of militarisation of bases across the region.

Days earlier, the Liberal-National government cancelled two vague Victorian state government infrastructure agreements with China, citing security concerns, setting a global precedent for tearing up economic relations with Beijing.

Of immense concern in ruling circles is the widespread popular anti-war sentiment and antagonism to US militarism. That was shown first in the movement against the murderous neo-colonial Vietnam War, and deepened in the huge protests around Australiasome of the largest per capita in the worldagainst the predatory US invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on the lies of weapons of mass destruction.

So great was the discrediting of Washington by the mass killings, abuses and devastation of Iraq that the previous Howard Liberal-National government and the American Australian Association founded a US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in 2006 to attempt to counter the hostility.

Pezzullo sought to directly combat the public opposition to war. Let there not be doubtwar shakes confidence in a civilisations soul, he said. Who could begrudge the sorrow of Europeans after the horror of World War I?

Yet, in their sorrow and their revulsion at the thought of another terrible bloodbath, they did not heed the drums of war that beat through the 1930suntil too late they once again took up arms against Nazism and Fascism.

Pezzullo did not name China, but his target was obvious. In effect, he declared China to be as great a threat to the world as Nazi Germany, and urged faster preparations for war.

Sheridans column set out to reinforce these co-ordinated, grave messages. He stated: Australians would be foolish to think this is just politics. The Australian governments dialogue with its own people reflects parallel dialogues in comparable nations.

At the same time, Sheridan criticised the government for still moving far too slowly. This reflects the Biden administrations ratcheting up of the US conflict with China. During the past month, both the outgoing and incoming heads of the US Indo-Pacific Command have said a war with China over Taiwan is likely within five years.

How far and fast this war agitation is mounting can be seen from yesterdays Australian editorial. Backing Pezzullo and Dutton, it urged the development of the countrys own nuclear weapons, under conditions in which the pandemic has left deep and debilitating scars across the world, including the US, Europe and India.

Some Labor Party figures voiced nervousness about Pezzullos reference to the drums of war. Western Australian (WA) Premier Mark McGowan urged the Morrison government to tone it down. He asked: What good does that do, saying things like that?

Apart from the heavy dependence of the WA economy on exports to China, mainly iron ore and gas, these remarks reflect worry that such comments will backfire, alerting the population to the war dangers and fuelling opposition, rather than overcoming it.

Labor is totally committed to the US military alliance. The most notable feature of its recent national conference was the frequency of the references to Labor governments being best able to impose the sacrifices required in periods of crisis and war.

Party leader Anthony Albanese and other shadow ministers, echoed by trade union bureaucrats, boasted that the Curtin Labor government initiated the US alliance in 1941 during World War II, and the delegates unanimously passed six resolutions denouncing China.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 00:34:57|Editor: huaxia

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ISLAMABAD, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan said on Thursday that it supports an orderly and responsible withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, leaving no security vacuum that could be exploited by spoilers.

Spokesman of the Pakistani Foreign Ministry Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said it is important that the withdrawal coincides with the progress in the overall peace process.

U.S. President Joe Biden announced earlier this month the complete withdrawal of troops by Sept. 11 this year.

The United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in late February last year, which called for a full withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. The Taliban accused the United States of violating the Doha agreement.

Chaudhri said Pakistan has also emphasized the need for continued support by all international stakeholders and concerted efforts by Afghan parties for a negotiated settlement to bring an end to decades-long conflicts in Afghanistan.

"A peaceful and stable Afghanistan is in the larger interest of peace and stability in the region," the Pakistani spokesman said.

He called for reduction in violence in Afghanistan and believed that reduction of violence leading to ceasefire, reconstruction and economic development in post-conflict Afghanistan is also important for ensuring sustainable peace and stability. Enditem
The family of an elderly woman left with severe brain damage and who later died following treatment for cerebral hemorrhage at a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) hospital in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong has accused local officials of trying to cover up the incident.



Ma Guizhen, the elderly mother of Jiang Haixia, was admitted to the People's Hospital in Shandong's Penglai city for surgery for cerebral hemorrhage, before being transferred to the Penglai TCM Hospital on Dec. 24, 2018.



However, an incident involving a hyberbaric chamber on Jan. 6 left Ma with brain damage from hypoxia.



During hyperbaric oxygen therapy, family members tried to alert staff to changes in the oxygen levels, but the nurses had turned down the volume on the intercom linking the chamber to the control room, and couldn't hear the family's warnings.



"This delayed my mother's rescue time and caused my mother to be deprived of oxygen for more than ten minutes," Jiang told RFA.



Jiang also alleges that the chamber was operated by nurses who were pretending to be doctors.



The attending physician -- who wasn't present at the time of the accident -- said he had resigned after the hospital told him not to take responsibility for Ma's brain damage, and to cover up the incident.



" Jie, who was head of department at the time, came to me and told me to hurry up and make this go away," the physician, who gave only the surname Wang, told RFA.



"His solution was to get me to cover the whole thing up, but I wouldn't, so he gave me a hard time at work after that," Wang said.



The hospital director then told him that he should "take care of the situation."



So Wang resigned.



'Left in a hypoxic state'

Jiang said her mother, already brain-damaged, was subjected to a further bout of hypoxia at the same hospital on , 2019.



"My mother was left in a hypoxic state for another hour, I discovered," Jiang said.



The second incident caused Ma's cardiopulmonary functions to collapse, and she was put on a ventilator on Aug. 9, and died on Sept. 14, Jiang said.



Wang, who was still the attending physician at that time, said he found something suspicious in Ma's death.



"I made a timeline analyzing the entire treatment process at TCM hospital, and found that their malpractise had led to the death of the patient," Wang said.



"If the usual resuscitation procedure had been followed, Jiang's mother wouldn't have died," he said.



Jiang believes the hospital deliberately allowed her mother to die sooner than she otherwise might have.



"Keeping someone alive involves ... a great deal of labor, medical resources and personnel, and the longer the patient's lives, the greater the cost to them in terms of cost and resources," she said.



Jiang then began the long and tortuous process of lodging formal complaints against the nurses operating the hyperbaric chamber, for illegally posing as doctors, and against local health bureau officials for dragging their feet on the complaints.



A later investigation by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s disciplinary arm found no evidence of neglect by Penglai municipal health bureau officials, however.



Penglai TCM Hospital was considered one of the top three TCM hospitals in .



The hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment manual clearly states that the equipment is a high-risk form of treatment requiring the presence of a qualified doctor at all times.



Compensation talks break down

Jiang entered negotiations with the hospital for compensation, but talks broke down because the management tried to avoid taking responsibility for harming her mother.



She also complained about the breach of procedure in operating the hyperbaric chamber. Health investigators from the city government agreed that the chamber had only been staffed by nurses at the time of the incident.



Yet despite this finding, the courts continued to delay Jiang's claim for compensation, doubling regular fees and finding bureaucratic excuses to delay accepting the case.



Jiang has since been subjected to threats and harassment from officials at the Penglai municipal health bureau, as well as "warnings" from others linked to the healthcare profession.



"They told me that I should be careful because they won't do it themselves but they'll find a gang of thugs to do it, and you won't be able to eat or walk afterwards," Jiang said.



Jiang Hongmei, head of the supervision division of the Penglai municipal audit depatment, declined to comment when contacted by RFA on .



Hospital director Wu Longchao also declined to comment when contacted by RFA, while Penglai municipal health bureau director Zhang Hongsong hung up the phone.



Jiang Haixia's lawyer, who gave only a surname Zhang, said she had filed two administrative lawsuits and tried to bring one criminal prosecution over the hospital's treatment of her mother.



The court issued a judgment commenting on procedural issues at the hospital, but didn't hold a substantice hearing, Zhang said.



"I filed the criminal complaint because those two nurses should be investigated," he said. "I think they committed the crime of illegally practising medicine."



Zhang is Jiang's fourth defense lawyer. The other three relinquished the case after coming under intense political pressure from the authorities.



Another investigative group was set up after Jiang's British husband filed a complaint at the Chinese consulate in the U.K.



It found that the Penglai TCM Hospital bore sole responsibility for the harm done to Ma Guizhen, and awarded a sum of 610,000 yuan in compensation, far below the 1.9 million yuan that was calculated as an appropriate payment by their own lawyer, Jiang said.



Jiang's criminal case was also ignored.



"I believe in our laws, which are actually very good," Jiang said. "But the difference between here and Europe or the U.S. is that nobody will enforce them, and the government breaks its own laws."



Jiang said she will continue to pursue justice for Ma Guizhen.



Reported by Yi Bing for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose actions during Rwandas 1994 genocide were celebrated in the film Hotel Rwanda, did not order 2018 rebel attacks of which he is accused, a fellow defendant said in court Thursday.

Rusesabagina did not give orders to FLN fighters, said the former senior member of the National Liberation Front (FLN) rebel group, Herman Nsengimana.

Celebrated internationally for the tale depicted in Hotel Rwanda of how he saved thousands of lives during the 1994 mass killings of 800,000 mostly Tutsi people, Rusesabagina had been living in exile in the US and Belgium until his arrival in Rwanda in murky circumstances last August.

He was arrested on the tarmac as he disembarked from a plane he believed was headed for Burundi and now faces nine charges including terrorism.

The charges turn on his founding in 2017 of the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRCD), of which the FLN is seen as the armed wing.

I did not have any meeting or interaction with Rusesabagina. I did not even have his phone number, said Nsengimana, one of 20 former rebels also in the dock.

As a soldier, there was a difference between our structures and structures of civilian leaders, he added.

Rusesabagina admits involvement in founding the FLN, but has repeatedly denied any involvement in attacks that killed nine civilians in June and August 2018.

Rusesabagina did not give FLN fighters orders. Our orders came from general Wilson Irategeka, Nsengimana said.

But another defendant, Callixte Nsabimana, claimed at the opening of the trial that Rusesabagina did in fact give all the orders.

Rusesabagina himself and his lawyers have shunned the court hearings since March 25, saying they havent had enough time to prepare and calling the proceedings biased.

The court has now adjourned until May 6.
By Anna Beebe '22

Counterpart promotes the protection of human rights worldwide. In protecting and promoting human rights, interventions at the intersection of gender and social justice are crucial. Examining gender as a cross-cutting topic in protecting human rights allows practitioners to not only address power imbalances rooted in gender norms but also how development issues, such as access to clean water, impact marginalized populations differently.

Counterparts USAID-funded Promoting Advocacy and Rights (PAR) program in Bangladesh supports civil society to address four citizen-identified, priority advocacy issues: gender-based violence, drug abuse, unplanned urbanization, and environmental pollution. While these issues impact all genders, women and girls are disproportionately affected. To help expand the capacity of our partner CSOs to advocate for solutions to these issues, there must be strong and growing discourse centered around gender and human rights.

Often, gender norms in Bangladesh limit womens freedom to escape dangerous situations, such as domestic violence. Traditional Bangladeshi social institutions place family responsibility on women, which often influences women to stay home and take care of domestic responsibilities, such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. As of 2019, women make up approximately 36% of the total workforce, even though they make up 49% of the total population. Because of this, women are often dependent on their male partners for an income, which means leaving their household in times of danger is often not feasible.

Gender-Based Violence (GBV)

Globally, women are disproportionately affected by violence. Not only are they more likely to suffer physical and sexual abuse, but they are often shamed for it. This social stigma creates an unsafe atmosphere for women to report assault cases or pursue charges. PAR consortium member, Rupantar, is working to combat gender-based violence by identifying policy gaps and forming civil society-based programs to address them.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of reported instances of violence against women has risen 70%. As people are staying home due to public restrictions, women are more likely to be trapped with an abusive partner or family member in the home. And because men hold positions of power and authority in Bangladesh, they have a better chance of getting away with acts of violence, making it difficult to receive justice for victims. According to Human Rights Watch, of the 16,000 reported cases of violence against women in 2016, a mere 3% ended in a conviction.

From their 2020 baseline survey, Rupantar found a lack of enforcement by the Bangladesh government. While policies such as the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act of 2010 ensure women and girls are protected from violence by legal means, more than half of surveyed community members expressed that the national government was enforcing at a limited scale. Additionally, respondents expressed that civil society efforts to address GBV were commonly overlooked by the government, which trivializes many womens experience with violence.

Drug Abuse

Drug abuse is a human rights issue as drug users are often criminalized rather than supported in seeking treatment. Often, law enforcement imprisons drug users to lessen the demand for drugs in the community, but this method does not address the issue at hand. Drugs are disproportionately used in low-income communities, and rehabilitation resources are less available in these areas. Approximately 43% of the unemployed sector of Bangladesh abuses drugs; 80% of all drug abusers in the county are youth.

Men are more likely to suffer from illicit drug use and addiction, while women experience drug abuse much differently. PAR grantee, Light House Consortium, works on the ground to support civil society-based advocacy efforts to combat drug abuse.

Drug use by women is stigmatized much more than male drug use; when women need help with a drug abuse problem, they are more likely to be shunned from society. They find themselves without access to necessary resources. Light House Consortium found that there are limited technological resources in poor communities to circulate crucial information about the dangers of drug use. The United Nations Office and Drugs and Crime noted that women drug users in Bangladesh report that resources were not available to them because of location, inability to pay, family responsibilities, and lack of education about needing treatment. The gap between the need for education and the capacity of the government to educate at-risk communities is wide.



Light House Consortium works to address these issues through peer education training for youth to bring awareness of the risks of drug use to schools and colleges. Not only does this educate students, but it allows girls to act as leaders within their community. In addition, Light House launched anti-drug campaigns, which made resources available to all.

Unplanned Urbanization

The Bangladesh economy is growing; in 2021, the gross domestic product is expected to increase 8.50%. While this growth is beneficial, it does present challenges. PAR will support a local consortium that will work to increase education and citizen-led advocacy efforts that address urbanization and the harmful effects it has on the Bangladesh population, such as environmental pollution.

As Bangladesh develops, the government must prioritize the needs of its entire population, especially women, within the response to rapid urbanization.

Due to rapid urbanization, many people without sufficient housing. As of 2018, 47.2% of the Bangladesh population was living in slums. Poverty affects women, and woman-led households disproportionately. As of 2019 36.3% of all women were participating in the workforce, compared to 81.4% of men. As development continues to increase, not only are women more vulnerable to poverty, they are also more likely to end up living in urban settings. Those who reside in slums are more vulnerable to issues such as poor waste management, environmental pollution, and drug use.

Environmental Pollution

Environmental pollution can lead to health implications that worsen a communitys quality of life. Urbanization leads to industrialization, which in turn leads to air pollution. Development also increases population size, which puts more pressure on the government to provide better waste management services and systems. When the government neglects this responsibility, water for drinking, bathing, watering animals, and irrigating lands are polluted with toxic contaminants.

PAR promotes projects that address poor waste management and water pollution. In Dhaka, households produce a total of 3000 tons of waste altogether, and the city collects less than half of it. As women are more likely to live in slum environments than men, they are more susceptible to contaminated water sources. Death due to water-borne diseases is widespread in Bangladesh, particularly among children.

PAR helps consortium members identify and develop grants that aid projects in reducing environmental pollution and its effects on Bangladesh. Multiple co-creation workshops have been held that allow grantees to collaborate with members of the PAR team to identify gaps in areas such as policy, implementation, and government capacity. In addition, grantees have been increasing the participation of women and girls in these projects. The more women are exposed to educational resources regarding pollution, the better they can protect their health when faced with contaminated air and water sources.

Even as policy is passed to promote gender equality, women cannot fully practice their freedoms without enforcement of law. In PARs Gender-Based Violence Baseline Survey from December 2020, 69% of respondents expressed that the government is not actively implementing policy that is in place to protect women. Because of this, PAR consortium members must include women and girls in programming and advocacy efforts. When there is stronger female representation in activism efforts that address womens issues, it will not only support women to advocate for their rights but also gives them a platform to address issues at the government level.

In addition to enforcement, there also needs to be a shift in discourse that no longer stigmatizes womens experiences with drug abuse and domestic violence. This stigma often creates tension between family members, which can lead to women being shunned or isolated from their loved ones, and even the rest of the community. PAR grantees must provide workshops that support participants with methods to dismantle harmful gender norms so that women are free to enjoy the rights that Bangladesh written policy claims to protect. As long as society continues to trivialize the experiences of women, equality will never be reached.

Anna Beebe is a junior studying Human Rights with minors in Sustainability, Political Science, and a certificate in Nonprofit and Community Leadership. During the 2020-21 school year, she interned with Counterpart International's team in Bangladesh through the HRC, supporting their Promoting Advocacy and Rights (PAR) project.

This article was republished from Counterpart International under a creative commons license. Read the original article.
Secretary Benson announces new era of improved customer service operations

Secretary Benson announces new era of improved customer service operations

APRIL 29, 2021

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced today the Michigan Department of State (MDOS) has entered a new service-driven era of operations that is more convenient and efficient for customers. She noted that the majority of transactions can now be carried out from home or at a grocery store, and residents who are required to visit a Secretary of State Office are typically in and out in 20 minutes.

"Michiganders can now complete most of their transactions online, by mail or at one of our new self-service stations located at their local grocery store," Benson said. "And the remaining in-person transactions are carried out by appointment, ensuring the vast majority of customers have little to no wait time."

More than 60 percent of transactions are already conducted outside of branch offices - up from 30 percent in 2019 - and this year more than 1 million people have already visited department offices. Benson noted that since MDOS began operating by appointment in June of last year, its ratings on Google have doubled - from two to four stars on a five-star scale - and are higher than they have ever been. Many Michiganders have asked for the department to continue operating by appointment, and Benson said their wish is coming true.

"We're going to listen to the people on this," said Benson. "It's clear they do not want us to go backwards to the old way of doing things, where on any given day you could spend hours waiting for a basic transaction in any given branch office. The branch office by appointment model is working and yes, it is a new way of doing things. But it's a better way of doing things."

Benson acknowledged that the system still needs to be improved, as some customers find it challenging to book appointments. To help remedy that, she announced MDOS is increasing its offering of appointments by at least 10 percent, or 35,000 appointments per month, and in the coming weeks will dedicate call center staff to booking online appointments for residents with internet limitations.

Benson also announced her Service Driven Legislative Agenda, and called on legislative leaders to implement reforms that would enable customers to interact less frequently and more efficiently with the department. She called on the state Legislature to allow remote driver's license testing, stop requiring veterans with the military equivalent of a commercial driver's license to retrain and retest for a civilian CDL, and provide funding and authority for the department to develop innovative public-private partnerships to improve operations.

"We need lawmakers to join us as innovators in furthering a vision for the people of Michigan and pass needed reforms that will help us improve customer convenience and satisfaction," said Benson. "That means pushing forward and implementing modern, best practices and available technology along with innovative ideas that support Michiganders in ways that work best for them."

To access online services, locate a self-service station in your area or make a branch office appointment, visit Michigan.gov/SOS.



# # #

For media questions, contact

Tracy Wimmer at 517-281-1876.

We welcome questions and comments at the Contact the Secretary of State page.

Customers may call the Department of State Information Center to

speak to a customer-service representative at 888-SOS-MICH (767-6424).
FORT SMITH, Ark., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Summit Utilities, Inc. ("Summit") announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Arkansas and Oklahoma gas distribution assets of CenterPoint Energy, Inc. ("CenterPoint") for an enterprise value of $2.15 billion.

CenterPoint's Arkansas and Oklahoma gas distribution systems serve approximately 525,000 customers and include 17,000 miles of gas main pipeline across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texarkana, Texas.

"In 2017, Summit expanded its footprint to Arkansas and Oklahoma with our acquisition of Arkansas Oklahoma Gas Corporation. Today, we couldn't be more excited to announce our plans to serve more communities in these two great states with the acquisition of CenterPoint's Arkansas and Oklahoma gas distribution systems," said Summit Utilities President and CEO Kurt Adams. "CenterPoint has built a strong reputation for quality customer service and we are eager to carry on that tradition, and continue to help families, businesses and industries throughout Arkansas and Oklahoma meet their energy needs through the delivery of safe, reliable and affordable natural gas services."

Expanding its service territories in Arkansas and Oklahoma will provide Summit with additional scale and capacity to further its mission of providing exceptional service to natural gas customers in the region. Integration of CenterPoint's Arkansas and Oklahoma operations into Summit's will benefit from the alignment of cultures between these two organizations, which are based on core values of customer service and a commitment to the communities they serve.

Closing Details

The transaction is anticipated to close by the end of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions, including Hart-Scott Rodino antitrust clearance and approval by the Public Service Commission of Arkansas and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

Advisors

Centerview Partners LLC and KeyBanc Capital Markets are serving as financial advisors, and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP is serving as legal counsel to Summit Utilities. In addition, a committed bridge financing facility to support the transaction is being provided by KeyBank National Association.

About Summit Utilities, Inc.

Summit Utilities, Inc. owns natural gas distribution and transmission subsidiaries that operate in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Oklahoma. The company provides safe, clean and affordable natural gas to businesses and residents in five states through Colorado Natural Gas, Summit Natural Gas of Missouri, Inc., Summit Natural Gas of Maine, Inc. and Arkansas Oklahoma Gas Corporation. Each of Summit's subsidiaries constructs and installs natural gas distribution systems with the goal of supporting economic development by providing clean-burning, safe and reliable natural gas to residential and commercial customers through exceptional customer service and commitment to community. Overall, Summit entities serve approximately 100,000 customers and operate more than 5,400 miles of pipeline in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Missouri and Oklahoma.

CONTACT:

Stacie Smith (AR and OK)

479-252-2610 [email protected]

Dave Wilby (national)

207-217-4344 [email protected]

SOURCE Summit Utilities, Inc.

Related Links

https://summitutilitiesinc.com/


PHILIPSBURG:--- PHILIPSBURG:--- On Monday, April 26th, 2021, the Minister of Justice, Ms. Anna E. Richardson, along with her support staff, met with the Director of the Foundation Judicial Institutes Sint Maarten (SJIB), Ms. Cynthia Filemon, and Managing Director of Projects, Consultancy & Management International (PCMI), Mr. Robert Budike to discuss the reintroduction of inmate development programmes at the Point Blanche Prison and House of Detention.

Minister Richardson has made clear her commitment to supporting the establishment of programmes and activities through which inmates, who are currently serving time at the prison, can further develop themselves and be provided the right tools that will help them build an honest life upon release. Its important that when inmates leave the prison that they are able to leave knowing that they have something to help them move on. Development programmes are essential in providing them with the skills and knowledge that they can leave here with and be able to use to further their lives.

The discussion covered a number of proposals, one being the reintroduction of the Inmate Entrepreneurship Programme which was introduced in 2007. The programme was first introduced as a collaborative effort between SJIB and the Probation Department with the purpose of supporting both current inmates and persons who have recently been released. According to the Director of SJIB, since the establishment of this programme, it was executed once and was proven to be a success. The Director went on to state: Former inmates who had undergone the programme have since then shown great strides by becoming business owners and applying the skills that they have learned. The full programme has a duration of one year in which each inmate will go through the various courses with the proper support needed to complete it. Although many of the inmates may have dropped out of high school, they show potential and that can be developed with the right support and guidance, stated the Director.

As a push to provide a variety of development programmes and courses to the inmates, there were further discussions held regarding a QuickBooks course. The interest from the inmates in this course was established on the basis of a survey which was distributed amongst the inmates to identify their level of education, their knowledge of the course, and its skills, along with the general interest of the prison population. Based on the survey, thirty-three (33) inmates have expressed interest in participating in such a course. The QuickBooks course presented entails an extensive list of skills that will be developed by each inmate that participates, guaranteeing a working knowledge of QuickBooks that can be used to further themselves as future business owners and/ or employees.

Prior to this meeting held with SJIB and PCMI, the Minister Richardson received a proposal to offer the General Educational Diploma (GED) to inmates at the prison. The programme was successful in the past and reintroducing it with a more defined approach will contribute to increased participation amongst the prison population. The GED, which has an equivalency of a high school diploma, will be introduced to the inmates in a form of a presentation in order to provide all the relevant information needed such as the purpose, what it entails, and its benefits, so that inmates can make an informed decision.

While the possibilities of providing the abovementioned opportunities at the prison are being explored, an assessment in the form of a survey has been distributed amongst the inmates to discover the level of importance of the courses by inmates, along with an indication of possible registrants per programme. Minister Richardson has stated that it is not only important to have these programmes available, but its also important to know that they will be taken advantage of. It was suggested by the Minister to reach out to former inmates who have benefited from these programmes as a way to positively influence the current inmates as to what these programmes can do for their future.

Minister Richardson added that while these theoretical programmes were being looked into, activities that allow inmates to physically do more are also a point of development. Working out on a regular is something that is of high interest to the inmates. Fitness is an essential part of their lives and a way to keep themselves busy, among other things. We are currently in discussions with a consultant to identify the best and safest equipment that can be purchased to create a new and improved workout space for the inmates.

According to Minister Richardson, the need for the reintroduction and introduction of these programmes not only serves as a positive development tool for the inmates but also acts as a deterrent from succumbing to the same negative environment and pressures when inmates are released.

Minister Richardson has expressed her ambition, stating that she hopes to achieve high attendance of these programmes by the inmates. These programmes provide opportunities for a proper rehabilitation process. When inmates are released, they should be able to have the means to provide for themselves and not have to fall back into their old lifestyle., stated the Minister.

Further discussions are planned to be held regarding the results of the assessment and to further discuss a plan of approach in implementing these programmes.
The German National Tourist Board (GNTB) will lead a country-wide delegation of tourism industry representatives to discuss inbound recovery plans post Covid-19 during the 47th GTM Germany Travel Mart 2021, taking place this week.

The virtual event organised by GNTB in partnership with the Federal State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will see a schedule of seminars between April 27  29. As the largest tourism B2B event promoting Germany as a travel destination, it sets to highlight the best products and services across its tourism sector.

More than 250 German providers from top trade professionals including hotels, tour operators, transport, and local and regional tourist offices will join the online event, which is expected to attract over 480 international buyers from travel agencies and online travel companies. The event will serve as a platform to share trade knowledge and industry experience during these unprecedented times.

Alongside our partners we have been working closely with the travel trade community throughout the pandemic, and GTM Germany Travel MartTM 2021 serves to provide additional information to attendees about offerings across the country, while reassuring traveller confidence with the various safety measures that have been put in place, Yamina Sofo, Director Sales & Marketing, German National Tourist Office (GNTO), the regional office of GNTB, said.

Now in its 47th edition, GTM Germany Travel Mart 2021 serves as a networking platform between around 800 key participants from across international industry suppliers, this digital addition will ensure another successful year of introducing innovative ideas to the tourism industry.

Strategic global partners will also lead extensive workshops and panel sessions on sustainability and how one of Germanys top priorities is diversifying options of production to be well equipped for climate change. The interest of global participants demonstrates Germanys awareness of sustainability and confirms the need for more development of market-specific eco-friendly options.

To kick proceedings off, and welcome GCC delegates to the event, Yamina Sofo will host a virtual meeting at 11:40am (GST) on April 27. Later in the GTM schedule, Sofo will return to host a GCC Market Insights Webinar at 1pm (GST) on April 29. It will serve to provide open discussions for new international safety measures and trends across the region. In addition to the live sessions between suppliers and buyers, the German National Tourist Board will launch webinars and on-demand content for those interested in participating. - TradeArabia News Service
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Greenhill & Co., Inc. (NYSE: GHL) today reported revenues of $68.9 million, net income of $2.1 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.09 for the quarter ended March 31, 2021.

Quarterly revenues of $68.9 million , up 3% from prior year's first quarter

, up 3% from prior year's first quarter Both compensation costs and non-compensation costs lower than last year's first quarter

Continued accelerated debt reduction with $20 million discretionary repayment after quarter end

discretionary repayment after quarter end Repurchased 972,766 shares of common stock and common stock equivalents during the quarter at an average price of $14.95 per share

per share Recruited 2 Managing Directors to expand our M&A coverage of telecom and communications infrastructure and media sectors

Recruited 3 Managing Directors for Private Capital Advisory and 2 other senior professionals to expand our capabilities in primary capital raising

The Firm's first quarter 2021 revenues compare to revenues of $67.1 million in the comparable period in 2020, an increase of $1.8 million, or 3%. The Firm's first quarter 2021 net income and diluted earnings per share compare to a net loss of $7.6 million and a loss per share of $0.40 for the first quarter 2020.

The Firm's revenues and net income can fluctuate materially depending on the number, size and timing of completed transactions on which it advised and other factors. Accordingly, the revenues and net income in any particular period may not be indicative of future results.

"We achieved a solid revenue outcome on the heels of last quarter's record result. Market conditions are currently favorable for M&A, we are winning an increasing number of assignments and are benefiting from improved contributions from many regions and sectors that had been relatively quiet last year. Restructuring opportunities have declined as we expected, and we are refocusing our energies on assisting clients in financing transactions given robust market conditions. On the cost side, we demonstrated continued discipline on both compensation and non-compensation expenses, while our interest expense declined further. Our resulting cash flow allowed us to continue to accelerate the reduction of debt. Lastly, we have made good progress toward our recruiting goals and expect 2021 to be an important year of expansion for our business in both M&A and Private Capital Advisory," Scott L. Bok, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented.

Revenues

Revenues were $68.9 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to $67.1 million in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of $1.8 million, or 3%. The increase in our revenues in the first quarter of 2021 as compared to the first quarter of 2020 resulted from an increase in merger and acquisition transaction completion fees, restructuring advisory fees and financing advisory fees, partially offset by a reduction in private capital advisory fees.

Recruiting Update

The Firm is announcing today several recruiting developments related to our global M&A business. Jennifer Fritzsche has joined the Firm in Chicago as a Managing Director focused on the telecom and communications infrastructure industry. Ms. Fritzsche spent 25 years at Wells Fargo where she was a leading equity research analyst focused on the telecom industry. She received a top ranking from Institutional Investor in the communications infrastructure space for 4 years. Gaurav Madan will join the Firm shortly in New York as a Managing Director focused on the media industry. Mr. Madan has spent the last 13 years at Goldman Sachs, where he has focused on M&A in the technology, media and telecommunication group. Shinichi Ono has joined the Firm as a Principal in Tokyo, where he will focus on M&A for Japanese companies. Mr. Ono joined us from GCA, an advisory-focused firm based in Japan.

In addition, we are announcing today several recruiting developments related to our global Private Capital Advisory business. Tom Donovan has joined us as a Managing Director based in Chicago who will lead a global team focused on primary capital raising. This business is a natural extension of the Firm's existing business advising institutional investors as well as fund general partners on transactions in the secondary market for private equity investments. Mr. Donovan has 17 years of experience raising private capital and joined us from the capital raising specialist Mercury Capital Advisors, where he spent the past 3 years. Prior to that he worked in the capital raising groups at Lazard and Credit Suisse. Four individuals are joining Mr. Donovan as part of our initial senior team focused on primary capital raising. Ryan Carey will join us as a Managing Director in New York focused on eastern U.S. region distribution. Mr. Carey has been with Jefferies in a capital raising role for the past 4 years and prior to that spent 4 years with the capital advisory specialist firm Sixpoint Partners. Prior to that he was with HSBC and Merrill Lynch in similar roles. Paul Tam will join us as a Managing Director in San Francisco focused on distribution in the western U.S. region. Mr. Tam has more than 30 years of relevant investment banking experience and most recently spent 8 years focused on distribution at Mercury. Prior to that he spent 4 years at Brookfield in a capital raising role. Verena Jung will join us as a Principal based in London and focused on European distribution. Ms. Jung has been based in London with Mercury for 7 years in a European distribution role. Amani Teshome will join us from Mercury as a Vice President in New York focused on project management.

The Firm remains in dialogue with numerous additional candidates in the M&A and Private Capital Advisory businesses and expects to finalize additional recruits in the near term and throughout the year.

Including all Managing Directors whose recruitment we have announced to date, we have 70 client-facing Managing Directors as of this date. As of the beginning of 2021, we also had 70 such Managing Directors.

Expenses

Operating Expenses

Our total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2021 were $61.7 million, which compared to $69.8 million of total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2020. The decrease in total operating expenses of $8.1 million, or 12%, resulted from both lower compensation and benefits expenses and non-compensation operating expenses, each as described in more detail below.

The following table sets forth information relating to our operating expenses.



For the Three Months

Ended March 31,



2021

2020



(in millions, unaudited) Employee compensation and benefits expenses $47.3



$54.4



% of revenues 69 %

81 %

Non-compensation operating expenses 14.4



15.4



% of revenues 21 %

23 %

Total operating expenses 61.7



69.8



% of revenues 90 %

104 %

Total operating income (loss) 7.2



(2.7)



Operating profit margin 10 %

NM





Compensation and Benefits Expenses

Our employee compensation and benefits expenses of $47.3 million in the first quarter of 2021 compare to $54.4 million for the first quarter of 2020. The decrease in expense of $7.1 million, or 13%, is principally due to a lower incentive compensation charge for the quarter. The ratio of compensation to revenues was 69% for the first quarter of 2021 as compared to 81% for the same period in the prior year.

Our compensation expense is generally based upon revenues and can fluctuate materially in any particular period depending upon changes in headcount, amount of revenues recognized, as well as other factors. Accordingly, the amount of compensation expense recognized in any particular period may not be indicative of compensation expense in a future period.

Non-Compensation Operating Expenses

For the three months ended March 31, 2021, our non-compensation operating expenses of $14.4 million decreased by $1.0 million, or 7%, compared to $15.4 million in the same period in 2020. During the first quarter of 2021, the benefit of minimal travel expense due to the global pandemic was partially offset by the recognition of a foreign exchange loss as compared to a foreign exchange gain in the same period in the prior year.

Non-compensation expenses as a percentage of revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2021 were 21% compared to 23% for the same period in 2020.

Our non-compensation operating expenses can vary as a result of a variety of factors such as changes in headcount, the amount of recruiting and business development activity, the amount of office expansion, the amount of client reimbursed expenses, the impact of currency movements and other factors. Accordingly, the non-compensation operating expenses in any particular period may not be indicative of the non-compensation operating expenses in future periods.

Interest Expense

For the three months ended March 31, 2021, we incurred interest expense of $3.2 million as compared to $4.8 million for the same period in 2020. The decrease of $1.6 million related to both a lower market borrowing rate and lower borrowings outstanding.

The rate of interest on our borrowing is based on LIBOR and can vary from period to period. Accordingly, the amount of interest expense in any particular period may not be indicative of the amount of interest expense in future periods.

Provision for Income Taxes

For the three months ended March 31, 2021, we recognized an income tax expense of $1.9 million as compared to $0.1 million for the same period in 2020.

The income tax expense recorded for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020 included charges of $0.9 million and $1.8 million, respectively, related to the tax effect of the difference between the grant price value and the market price value of restricted stock awards at the time of the vesting. Excluding these charges, the effective income tax rate for the quarters ended March 31, 2021 and 2020 would have been 26% and 22%, respectively.

The effective tax rate can fluctuate as a result of variations in the relative amounts of income earned and the tax rate imposed in the tax jurisdictions in which we operate. Accordingly, the effective tax rate in any particular period may not be indicative of the effective tax rate in future periods.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of March 31, 2021, we had cash and cash equivalents of $87.9 million and term loan debt with a principal balance of $326.9 million.

During April 2021, we made a voluntary principal repayment of $20.0 million on our term loan. Our next required principal payment is due in March 2023.

During the first quarter of 2021, we repurchased in the open market 337,739 shares of our common stock at an average price of $14.81 per share, for a total cost of $5.0 million. In addition, during the first quarter of 2021, we repurchased 635,027 restricted stock units from employees at the time of vesting to settle tax liabilities at an average price of $15.03 per share, for a total cost of $9.5 million.

For the period through January 31, 2022, our Board of Directors has authorized $50.0 million in purchases of shares and share equivalents (via tax withholding on vesting of restricted stock units). As of March 31, 2021, we have $35.5 million remaining under that authorization. Going forward, we intend to balance further debt repayment with prudent share repurchases subject to market conditions and other factors, such as our results of operations, financial position and capital requirements, use of cash for debt repayments, general business conditions, legal, tax and regulatory constraints or restrictions, any contractual restrictions and other factors deemed relevant.

Dividend

The Board of Directors of Greenhill & Co., Inc. has declared a dividend of $0.05 per share to be paid on June 16, 2021 to common stockholders of record on June 2, 2021.

Investor Presentation

An updated investor presentation highlighting the Firm's results for the first quarter and other matters relevant for investors has been posted on its website today (www.greenhill.com).

Earnings Call

Greenhill will host a conference call beginning at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, April 29, 2021, accessible via telephone and the internet. Scott L. Bok, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, will review the Firm's first quarter 2021 financial results and related matters. Following the review, there will be a question and answer session.

Investors and analysts may participate in the live conference call by dialing (888) 317 - 6003 (toll-free domestic) or (412) 317 - 6061 (international); passcode: 6458450. Please register at least 10 minutes before the conference call begins. The conference call will also be accessible as an audio webcast through the Investor Relations section of Greenhill's website at www.greenhill.com . There is no charge to access the call.

For those unable to listen to the live broadcast, a replay of the call will be available for one month via telephone starting approximately one hour after the call ends. The replay can be accessed at (877) 344 - 7529 (toll-free domestic) or (412) 317 - 0088 (international); passcode: 10154965.

Greenhill & Co., Inc. is a leading independent investment bank entirely focused on providing financial advice on significant mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, financings and capital raising to corporations, partnerships, institutions and governments globally. It acts for clients located throughout the world from its offices in New York, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

The preceding discussion should be read in conjunction with our condensed consolidated financial statements and the related notes that appear below. We have made statements in this discussion that are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as "may", "might", "will", "should", "expect", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "intend", "predict", "potential" or "continue", the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us, may include projections of our future financial performance, based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results, level of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. In particular, you should consider the numerous risks outlined under ''Risk Factors'' in our Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2020 as well as other public filings. We are under no duty and we do not undertake any obligation to update or review any of these forward-looking statements after the date on which they are made, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

Greenhill & Co., Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (Unaudited) (In thousands, except share and per share data)





For the Three Months

Ended March 31,



2021

2020

Revenues $ 68,924



$ 67,099













Operating Expenses







Employee compensation and benefits 47,292



54,360



Occupancy and equipment rental 4,397



5,346



Depreciation and amortization 787



599



Information services 2,358



2,405



Professional fees 2,196



2,322



Travel related expenses 192



2,388



Other operating expenses 4,477



2,350



Total operating expenses 61,699



69,770



Total operating income (loss) 7,225



(2,671)



Interest expense 3,208



4,783



Income (loss) before taxes 4,017



(7,454)



Provision for taxes 1,933



119



Net income (loss) $ 2,084



$ (7,573)













Average shares outstanding:







Basic 19,675,536



18,904,965



Diluted 23,700,175



18,904,965



Earnings (loss) per share:







Basic $ 0.11



$ (0.40)



Diluted $ 0.09



$ (0.40)





Contact: Patrick Suehnholz

Director of Investor Relations

Greenhill & Co., Inc.

(212) 389-1800

SOURCE Greenhill & Co., Inc.

Related Links

www.greenhill.com


ELKHART, Ind., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- THOR Industries, Inc. (NYSE: THO) announced their continued commitment to support children dealing with cancer for the fifth consecutive year with a financial donation to Care Camps. The outdoor camping experience exclusively for children diagnosed with cancer enables campers to have fun, memorable outdoor experiences while receiving medical treatment.

In 2015, THOR Industries, the world's largest recreational vehicle (RV) manufacturer, led the way as Care Camps' first RV industry partner. THOR's continued support of Care Camps builds upon its dedication to make a lasting impact by connecting people with nature. In addition to monetary support, THOR has also provided Airstream, Jayco and Keystone RVs to Care Camps for use in camp programs.

"Care Camps is incredibly grateful for the dedication and ongoing support THOR has shown to our kids," said Care Camps Director of Development, Jennifer Mercer. "When the need for funding grew, THOR was the very first RV company that stepped up and joined the cause to help more children with cancer experience the healing power of the outdoors. Because of THOR's generosity, Care Camps is able to help thousands of children explore the joys of nature, while building the next generation of kids who love the outdoors and camping."

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Care Camps was able to provide adapted programming to thousands of children and their familiesholding events including virtual gatherings and 'Camp-in-a-Box' programs, which sent Care Camps items directly to the homes of families.

"Every child deserves to create lasting memories no matter what challenges they may be facing or where they're at in their journey," said Bob Martin, President and CEO of THOR Industries. "We are grateful for the efforts and the creativity of Care Camps, and we remain committed to providing the children they serve with adventures and experiences which will last a lifetime."

Care Camps is a non-profit charity that supports 135 oncology camps which serve 42,000 children and their families. Through donor generosity, Care Camps is able to promise a completely free experience for all campers, regardless of race, disability or socioeconomic status. The camp provides kids who normally wouldn't be able to go camping with happiness, hope, and connections with others that can empathize with them. At Care Camps, kids with cancer get to forget about the chemo and the radiation and "just be a kid".

If you are interested in joining THOR in their support of Care Camps, please contact Care Camps at [email protected] or call 406-671-0447.

For more information on THOR Industries, and its ongoing programs and initiatives, please visit: www.thorindustries.com

About THOR Industries

THOR Industries is the sole owner of operating companies which, combined, represent the world's largest RVs manufacturer. For more information on the Company and its products, please visit https://www.thorindustries.com/ .

About Care Camps

Care Camps is a non-profit organization that serves kids in every community throughout the US and Canada and strives to ensure every child with cancer has the chance to experience the healing power of the outdoors at no cost to their family, regardless of race, disability, or socioeconomic status. Through Care Camps, kids who would never have had the chance to go camping are exposed to the wonders of the outdoors, creating a love of nature and memories that last a lifetime.

SOURCE THOR Industries

Related Links

https://www.thorindustries.com


Marines scored a direct hit in a first-ever live-fire test in which they launched a Navy missile from the back of an unmanned tactical vehicle to strike a surface target at sea.

The Marine Corps has combined two existing technologies to produce a deadly new way to hit targets offshore. Coined NMESIS, the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System can launch naval strike missiles from the back of a modified Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, to destroy targets on land or at sea.

Raytheon Missiles and Defense, which makes the naval strike missile, announced Wednesday that the Marine Corps used NMESIS to hit a target in the water from Point Mugu Sea Range in California. The missile can take out targets from more than 100 nautical miles away.

Read Next: Hawaii-Based Navy Submarine Commander Relieved Over Morale Problems

Commandant Gen. David Berger showed a photo of the test launch to lawmakers Thursday when discussing the need for funding for ground-based anti-ship missiles. He called the test the result of the "brilliance of a couple of young officers" and Oshkosh Defense, a Wisconsin-based company that makes the JLTV.

"The people at Oshkosh and these couple of majors thought, 'We can do this,' so they took the cab off the back and they put a missile in the back with a fire-control system," Berger said. "Now, we can move this around on vessels or put it ashore and hold an adversary's navy at risk ... to ensure that the lines on the sea are kept open.

"This is the speed at which we have to move," he added.

Getting funding for ground-based long-range precision fires out of the next budget will be crucial for the Marine Corps' mission, Berger told lawmakers. He wrote in his 2019 planning guidance that the service had fallen "woefully behind" in the development of ground-based long-range precision fires.

"We must possess the ability to turn maritime spaces into barriers so we can attack an adversary's sea lines of communication ... while defending our own in support of the Fleet or Joint Force," Berger wrote.

In 2021, the Marine Corps requested $125 million to buy nearly 50 Tomahawk missiles it could launch from land. Congress ultimately did not fund the move. Adm. Phil Davidson, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told lawmakers in March that the decision to slash those funds hurt the military's ability to deter China.

The JLTV used in the test at Point Mugu is an unmanned version known as a ROGUE -- or remotely operated ground unit for expeditionary -- fires vehicle. The naval strike missile fired from the back carries a 500-pound class warhead, according to Raytheon. The Navy uses the missile on littoral combat ships.

Combined, the missile and ROGUE fires vehicle form NMESIS, which is operated by artillery Marines, Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, the deputy commandant of Combat Development and Integration, told reporters this month.

Berger said using a modified JLTV and a proven strike missile gives commanders flexibility since they can fire the munition from a ship or ashore.

"It's the same missile, so as needed, the commander can move the ordnance where it's needed most," he said. "... [It also] speeds up our ability to field it. It's a proven missile. ... This is not a new missile system -- we know how it performs. So, we're riding on the backs of something that is already developed and putting it on a platform that we're very confident in."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Marines Need Funding for Missiles that Can Target Chinese Ships, Top Pacific Admiral Says
Mumbai:

Holding that India is a country of Hindus first and others later, the Shiv Sena on Monday said despite a "pro-Hindutva" government at the Centre, issues like Ram Temple construction in Ayodhya and 'ghar wapsi' of displaced Kashmiri Pandits are still unresolved.



RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had on Friday said in Indore that 'Hindustan' is a country of Hindus, but it does not mean that it does not belong to "others".



"The RSS chief says like Hindus, India belongs to others as well. The Shiv Sena chief says India belongs to Hindus first and others later, because there are more than 50 countries for Muslims," the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.



"Christians have countries like America and (in) Europe. Buddhists have China, Japan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Hindus do not have any country except this.



"Today there is a pro-Hindutva majority government in power. Yet, it is not willing to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya and left its future in the hands of court," it said.



"Despite a pro-Hindutva government, the ghar wapsi of Kashmiri Pandits hasn't taken place," said the Sena, which is a constituent of the NDA government at the Centre and an ally of the ruling BJP in Maharashtra.



It also waded into the ongoing debate over playing the national anthem in public places.



A stubborn attitude prevails towards singing of 'Vande Mataram' despite the president and the prime minister belonging to the "thought process of the RSS", and some also do not find it appropriate to stand up while the national anthem is being played, the saffron ally said.



"If these 'others' are insulting the national anthem by not standing up, the RSS chief should guide the pro-Hindutva government on what stand it should take against them," it said.



The Sena further said Bhagwat's statement that "no one leader or party can make the country great..." also cannot be ignored.



The RSS chief had last week said that no one leader or party can make the country great but it needs a change and we will have to prepare the society for it.

Also read: Modi wave has faded, Rahul Gandhi now capable of leading the nation, says BJP ally Shiv Sena



Also read: Shiv Sena again targets BJP, says only one party has unlimited money

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Celebrating 45 Years of Black Excellence

On Saturday, May 1st at 5:30 pm PST, the University of Southern California Black Alumni Association (USC BAA) will host its [virtual] Annual Scholarship Gala, celebrating 45 years of Black Excellence! If one has attended a USC BAA event before, (s)he knows how elegant and experiential it is. Whether the gala transpires on a private yacht with Grammy-nominated artist Anthony Hamilton, or at the beautiful Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, or at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles listening to the soulful, mellifluous sounds of songstress Lalah Hathaway, USC BAA puts on a classy affair with intent and purpose. With each event, the goal is to raise money for scholarships for Black students, and for the past 13 years under the hegemony of Dr. Michele G. Turner, USC BAA has soared in academics, scholarship, and mentorship of Black students due to the philanthropic spirit of dedicated volunteers, alumni, celebrities, board members, and corporate sponsors.

Due to COVID-19, this years event will be held virtually with the promise of still being excitingly exquisite. Five phenomenal alumni will be honored for their philanthropy, legacy, service, and volunteerism to USC BAA. The honorees are: Mr. Kenneth Frank 89 who will receive the Outstanding Alumnus Award; Mr. Sam Bam Cunningham 73 who will receive the Legacy Award; Mrs. Cassandra Mayfield-Anderson 74 who will receive the Donor Vanguard Award; Ms. Lika Dozier 99 who will receive the Outstanding Mentor Award; and Rev. Cecil Chip Murray 02 who will receive the Kilgore Service Award. USC Black Alumni Advisory Council Board Chair Mr. Simeon Stewart states, We are proud to honor such exceptional alumni who have assiduously made strides to this organization. We cannot do what we do in BAA without the support of people like Rev. Murray, Cassandra, Lika, Sam, and Kenneth, and we pay homage to them and their legacies.

Each year, BAA assists more than 100 scholars with financial aid, and to date, has awarded over $4.5 million in scholarships to Black USC students. Founded in 1976 by Rev. Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr., the USC Black Alumni Association is a leadership network established to strengthen the legacy of educational attainment and excellence of USCs Black students. The BAA provides scholarship assistance, career mentoring, and cultural advocacy through alumni networking, volunteer involvement, philanthropy, and social enterprise.

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Signature programs and events assist students with their academic, career, and holistic development, and these include: the Legacy through Leadership Mentoring Program, the Scholars Program, Toastmasters, Inc., the Pinning & Affirmation Ceremony, and the Aligning for Black Excellence in Higher Education Summit. Additionally, BAAs Advisory Council (BAC) gives strategic guidance concerning BAAs mission, alumni engagement, student matriculation support, scholarship growth, and donor cultivation. The BAC plays a pivotal role in the success of the Black Alumni Association, where members are diligently involved and give their time, talent, and treasure to advance Black student achievement. The core values and principles of compassion, partnership, accountability, stewardship, and service are at the helm of the BAC.

As of March 15, the USC Black Alumni Association welcomed a new Executive Director, Dr. Patricia Tucker, to add to its existing team of Ms. Tensie J. Taylor, associate director, and Mr. Gary D. Brown, assistant director. Taylor and Brown lead BAAs Legacy through Leadership Mentoring Program and the BAA Scholars Program, respectively, and have been instrumental in growing the organization with alumni volunteers and donor support.

To purchase tickets to the 45th Annual Scholarship Gala, visit www.usc.edu/baa.
MAFUTSENI  Once again, Judge Sipho Nkosis home has been visited by police officers and this time around, they seized three firearms, which are allegedly unlicensed.

This incident took place at the judges home at Mafutseni in the Manzini Region yesterday morning. According to an impeccable source, a group of over eight police officers, who were armed with a warrant that permitted them to search and seize guns which were allegedly unlicensed from the judges residence, arrived at his home at around 7am. The search and seizure warrant, which had a stamp from the Manzini Principal Magistrate, David Khumalo, said Section 46 of Act 67 of 1938 as amended, all police officers, where as it appear to the court from information on oath that with Magistrate District of Manzini, there are articles enumerated in schedule annexure A (guns) in which were in the possession or under the control or at upon the person of Sipho Nkosi of Mphandze.

It said the premises were in the Manzini Region, where he was believed to be residing. This is, therefore, in His Majesty the Kings name to authorise to search during daytime the identified person of Sipho Nkosi and/or enter the identified premises to search any person found on or at such premises and to direct you to seize the said items in annexure A (guns), reads part of the search and seizure warrant. Furthermore, the warrant said if found and to deal with according to the law, bring it before court to be dealt with according to the law.

Guard

Upon their arrival, the source alleged that they found a security guard and they introduced themselves as law enforcers who had come to see the judge. Thereafter, the source alleged that the security guard informed Nkosi and he came to meet them at the gate, where they spent some time chatting. Afterwards, the source alleged that the law enforcers, who were wearing plain clothes, went with the judge to his house, where they conducted a search, which lasted for a while. During the search, they seized three firearms; two pistols and a pump action, the source alleged. The source alleged that after satisfying themselves that they had searched the whole house, the law enforcers left. However, the firearms in question are not associated with any offence.

This publication visited the judges home at around 9:33am and found that the police had already left. Two security guards and their superior were found at the gate. After introducing themselves to the security guards, the team from this publication asked to see the judge and was told that he would come as their superior had also come to see him.


(Newser)  President Biden presents a dilemma to some Catholic bishops. He's demonstrative about his faith, attending Mass regularly and saying the rosary when he has a moment of solitude. But Biden supports abortion rights, which the Catholic Church opposes. That difference will come up for discussion by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in June, the Washington Post reports. A panel is working on a document saying that politicians who support access to abortion should not receive Communion, per the AP. "How can he say he's a devout Catholic and he's doing these things that are contrary to the churchs teaching?" said Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kan. A spokeswoman for the bishops said there will be some kind of vote concerning Communion, but it might just be about whether to vote on a policy at another time.

story continues below

Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, is among those who don't like the idea, partly because Pope Francis has asked for an emphasis on climate change, immigration, and inequality. "If a politician is targeted as a negative example by his own church, that sets a sad context in which the church can deal with this Catholic president," Stowe said. "It contributes to the polarization of the church and of society." That's true inside the church, too, per Time. Biden's election "exposes a divide among American Catholics that's been there for a long time," a religion professor said. "There's a big chasm, a growing chasm." Anything the conference decides won't be binding on local dioceses, and bishops in Delaware and Washington, DCwhere Biden most often goes to churchhave said they won't deny the president Communion. (Read more US Conference of Catholic Bishops stories.)
By Prossy Kisakye

Uganda Human Rights Commission has implored security agencies to always investigate and prosecute errant officers who allegedly violate the rights of journalists.

Speaking to the media in Kampala, ahead of the World Press Freedom Day, celebrated every 3rd May, the acting chairperson of the commission Charles Katebalirwe Amooti, said bartering journalists is a form of human rights violation which should be stopped.

He asked top security heads not to take this lightly but investigate and discipline accordingly, individual officers found guilty of violating the rights of members of the fourth estate.

Meanwhile Katebalirwe reminded journalists to ensure professional, responsible and constructive reporting at all times.
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)

German Politicians Call to Stop Funding Confucius Institutes With German Taxpayers Money

Recently, top German politicians held an online conference to discuss the global influence of the Chinese communist regimes Confucius Institutes (CI), calling to stop funding them with German taxpayers money.

According to German media Donaukurier, the Ingolstadt Action Alliance for Uyghur Human Rights and the World Uyghur Congress co-organized the online conference prior to Ingolstadt city councils upcoming voting on whether to continue to support the Audi Confucius Institute in the city with municipal funds, which will take place on May 11.

Prominent German politicians, including members of the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament), spoke at the online conference on April 24, such as Margarete Bause (Greens), Martin Patzelt (CDU), Landtag (Bavarian State Parliament) Vice President Markus Rinderspacher (SPD), along with Ursula Dusolt from the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) and the Ingolstadt city councilor Karl Ettinger (FDP). More than 20 Ingolstadt city council members across all parties attended the conference, according to Donaukuriers report.

In view of the increasing human rights violations of the Chinese regime against dissidents and ethnic groups, which are contrary to Germanys values, the panel stated that the CIs in Germany should no longer be supported with German taxpayers money.

Chinas Confucius Institutes in recent years have encountered increasing backlash in the international community due to concerns over their close ties to the Chinese regime.

CIs are operated under the Chinese government agency Hanban, under its Ministry of Education. They promote communist ideology and the CCPs agenda, including censoring topics the regime deems sensitive such as the persecution of Falun Gong adherents, Uyghurs, and Tibetan Buddhists, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Currently, there are 19 Confucius Institutes in Germany. Among them, the Confucius Institute in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, was established and hosted by the German automaker Audi Group and the city government of Ingolstadt, where Audis HQ is located. It is known as the worlds first Technical Confucius Institute. It is also the worlds first Confucius Institute funded and built by a multinational company.

Audi CEO Rupert Stadler speaks during the companys annual news conference in Ingolstadt, Germany March 15, 2018. (Michael Dalder/File Photo/Reuters)

Participants of the conference were critical of their interactions with CIs around the world, and especially concerned about the CIs influence in Germany and in Bavaria, where there are three CIs: one in Munich, one in Nuremberg-Erlangen, and one in Ingolstadt.

The Audi Confucius Institute has been funded with 50,000 ($60,600) from Ingolstadts municipal budget since five years ago, primarily at the request of Audi, which, like the VW Group, maintains close economic ties with China and is concerned with their presence in the Chinese market, according to Donaukurier.

Margarete Bause, who serves as chairwoman of the Bundestag Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, stated that it is about time to deal with the issue of CIs. She made a clear plea that the Confucius Institutes should not be financed with German tax money. She said that CIs represent communist China and that they cannot be criticized nor accept any intervention. Its been proven that they have exerted pressure over and over again on others in order to silence different voices that they dont like.

Martin Patzelt, who is also on the Bundestag Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, sharply criticized the Chinese regimes agencies behind the CIs. He said that he could not nor wanted to tell the local city councilors what to do, but wanted to ask them are you bringing the wolf in sheeps clothing into the city and let it go around there? The CIs represent the Chinese communist regimes ideology, which is at odds with the liberal and democratic local society and academia, he added.

Vice President of Bavarian State Parliament Markus Rinderspacher warned against Chinas charm offensives, pointing out that it is not just friendly tea ceremonies, but ideological indoctrination in disguise. It is completely incomprehensible why Bavaria is financially supporting a strong world economic power like China, he said.

An Audi A4 presented at the China Auto show in Beijing on June 9, 2004. (Frederic J. Brown /AFP/Getty Images)

The special situation in Ingolstadt due to the interests of the Audi group poses a practical question to the locals  Can you afford to say no?

Margarete Bause suggested resistance by stopping the funding of the Audi CI. In the end, Audi and VW harm themselves with their strategy [of collaborating with the Chinese regime] because their image will suffer, she said. Martin Patzelt said that the situation in Ingolstadt represents the conflict that we have in Germany. The western values of freedom are still too often sacrificed for economic interests in dealing with China.

FDP city councilor Karl Ettinger said that after the online conference, further municipal funding for the Confucius Institute in Ingolstadt is no longer a sure thing, and he will wait to see what happens on May 11.
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The best friend of Richard Okorogheye whose body was discovered two weeks after he went missing has revealed that prank callers continuously called her during the police search to say they had seen him or found his body.

Hala Mohamad, 18, was friends with the 19-year-old student who went missing from his home in Ladbroke Grove, West London, on March 22 and was found dead on the other side of the capital in Epping Forest two weeks later.

She said she received 'really stupid prank calls of people saying I've seen Richard, or I've found his body' and told her friends at the time that she was struggling to handle this 'because in a stupid way it gave me hope'.

Speaking to BBC Radio 1Xtra's 'If You Don't Know' podcast, Miss Mohamad said: 'Every day I'd get calls and texts and people adding me to group chats and people DM'ing me on Insta, on Twitter, people finding my Snap.

Richard Okorogheye (left), 19, is pictured with his best friend Hala Mohamad (right), 18. Mr Okorogheye went missing from his home in Ladbroke Grove, West London, on March 22 and was found dead in Epping Forest two weeks later

The student's body was found at Epping Forest on April 5, where a Metropolitan Police officer is pictured the following day

'It was crazy. And then there was prank calls, really stupid prank calls of people saying I've seen Richard, or I've found his body. In the moment it was all too much.

'I would text my friends and be like 'I can't handle this anymore, it's too much for me', because in a stupid way it gave me hope. I wasn't in the best shape, I'm still not. I'm still trying to push past it.

Watchdog to probe how police handled Richard Okorogheye case Police handling of the disappearance of Richard Okorogheye are to be investigated by a watchdog following complaints by his mother. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said it will investigate Evidence Joel's complaints about the way she was initially treated by police, and how her reports about her son's disappearance were handled. It will also look at the Met Police overall handling of the missing person report. IOPC regional director Sal Naseem said: 'Our thoughts are with Richard's family and friends and all those affected by this tragic loss. We have spoken to his family and explained our role. 'Our investigation will establish whether the police responded appropriately to the concerns raised that Richard was missing. 'We will examine whether the force appropriately risk assessed those reports, and if the amount of resources the Metropolitan Police dedicated to its enquiries were suitable based on the information known by the police and the risks posed. 'As there is a mandatory requirement for police forces to refer to us incidents which result in a death or serious injury, we will examine the actions and decisions of the police when dealing with the missing person report made in respect of a vulnerable young man. 'We will also consider whether Richard's or his mother's ethnicity played a part in the way the initial reports of his disappearance were handled.' Advertisement

'I could barely sleep because every time I'd sleep I'd get a call and think even though it's no caller ID maybe it's the police or maybe someone did find something. I had to answer every call that I could.'

Mr Okorogheye, who had sickle cell disease, went missing on the evening of March 22.

His mother, nurse Evidence Joel, 39, contacted police the following day, but he was not officially recorded as missing until 8am on March 24.

The student's body was found at Epping Forest on April 5 - and his mother later said she was 'disappointed' with the initial police response to his disappearance.

Like Mrs Joel, Miss Mohamad said the police should have acted quicker, telling If You Don't Know podcast hosts De-Graft Mensah and Roshan Roberts: 'They could've checked CCTV earlier, they could've taken us seriously earlier instead of just saying 'he's an adult, he's fine, he'll be with a friend'.'

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog is investigate Mrs Joel's complaints about the way she was initially treated by police, and how her reports about her son's disappearance were handled.

It will also look at the Metropolitan Police's overall handling of the missing person report.

IOPC regional director Sal Naseem said: 'Our thoughts are with Richard's family and friends and all those affected by this tragic loss. We have spoken to his family and explained our role.

'Our investigation will establish whether the police responded appropriately to the concerns raised that Richard was missing.

'We will examine whether the force appropriately risk assessed those reports, and if the amount of resources the Metropolitan Police dedicated to its enquiries were suitable based on the information known by the police and the risks posed.

'As there is a mandatory requirement for police forces to refer to us incidents which result in a death or serious injury, we will examine the actions and decisions of the police when dealing with the missing person report made in respect of a vulnerable young man.

'We will also consider whether Richard's or his mother's ethnicity played a part in the way the initial reports of his disappearance were handled.'

Mr Okorogheye, who had only been going out for regular blood transfusions during the pandemic, left his family home at around 8.30pm on March 22 and headed in the direction of Ladbroke Grove.

Metropolitan Police officers at the scene at the Wake Valley pond in Epping Forest on April 6 after the discovery of the body

Mr Okorogheye's mother, nurse Evidence Joel, 39, contacted police the following day, but he was not officially recorded as missing until 8am on March 24

He was last seen on CCTV in Loughton, walking alone on Smarts Lane towards Epping Forest at 12.39am on March 23

Police said further inquiries have established that he then took a taxi journey from the W2 area of London to a residential street in Loughton, Essex.

Mr Okorogheye, who had sickle cell disease, went missing on the evening of March 22 - and his body was found on April 5

He was last seen on CCTV in Loughton, walking alone on Smarts Lane towards Epping Forest at 12.39am on March 23.

Speaking to Sky News earlier this month, Mrs Joel said: 'At this moment of time I just want answers as how my son lost his life. I want answers. I desperately need closure. I am completely hollow and devastated and empty.

'Life is already empty, there's like a cloud just hovering around, it took the sun away from me. What am I going to look forward to? What is there to look forward to again?'

The Oxford Brookes University business and IT undergraduate's death is being treated as unexplained and police do not believe anyone else was involved.

A post-mortem examination found no evidence of physical trauma or assault.

Mrs Joel had said her son was struggling with remote learning, and had left his wallet and bus pass at home.

She also told how her son had no reason to travel to Essex. 'It's too far for Richard to walk into the darkness alone,' she said. 'How did he get there? We don't know. I feel something happened there.

'The forest is massive and scary, it's a place that one wouldn't wish to go at night. It was not a very comfortable place to be.'

Mrs Joel had criticised the police's initial response to his disappearance, and told reporters that when she made the initial missing persons report to police they asked 'if you can't find your son, how do you expect us to?'

She had said she was initially told police didn't have the resources to check CCTV around her home and did not take the disappearance seriously until Mr Okorogheye had been missing for six days.
A group of EU lawmakers have drafted a resolution that would impose new sanctions on Russia and scupper the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, ignoring recent calls from the blocs top politicians for more constructive relations.

The motion, put forward by representatives of some of the assemblys largest political groupings, says that recent rows with Moscow over the buildup of troops on the border with Ukraine and the jailing of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny shows the need for tough action against the country. However, due to the nature of the EU system, even if adopted it is unlikely to come into effect.

The MEPs "insist that the EU should reduce its dependence on Russian energy," while urging all member states, "therefore, to stop the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline." The project, which is expected to be completed in the coming months, has been supported by the German government despite the U.S. imposing sanctions on firms involved in its construction.

At the same time, the draft resolution condemns Moscows decision to deploy troops on the border with Ukraine, which Russian officials say was in response to increased activity of Kievs own army, as well as NATO forces. If such a buildup were to become what they term as an "invasion," the lawmakers say that "the EU must make clear that the price for such a violation of international law and norms would be severe."

Among the measures they put forward in response to the scenario is that "imports of oil and gas from Russia to the EU be immediately stopped." At the same time, "Russia should be excluded from the SWIFT payment system, and all assets in the EU of oligarchs close to the Russian authorities and their families in the EU need to be frozen and their visas cancelled."

Although the proposals are due to be voted on by a plenary session of the parliament on Thursday, even if adopted in full, the motion would not be binding. Such a move would have to be signed off by the Council of the EU, made up of representatives from national governments. Given growing concern over the impact of hostile ties with Russia, it appears that the prospects of them adopting such a decision is not yet on the cards.
Seats were fully booked weeks before The Dakini Code: Lotus-Born Master and the Event Horizon's sneak previews ran at the Auspicious Thanka Gallery in Beijing's 798 Art Zone from April 25-26.

Shot in 2020 in China, India, Nepal and Bhutan, it is the third installment of award-winning American explorer and film director Laurence J. Brahm's Lotus-Born Master documentary series. All the three documentaries are produced by William Lou and Laurence J. Brahm.

In the documentary series, Brahm, who has long cherished a strong interest in Himalayan cultures, tries to align the spiritual and the science--quantum physics and astrophysics in particular.

The documentaries capture his arduous journey to discover the codes to access secret teachings of Guru Padmasambhava, or Lotus-born Master, a legendary 8th-century figure, widely known as the founder of Tibetan Buddhism who travelled extensively along the Southern Silk Road spreading Buddhism.

The film director's previous two works, Searching for the Lotus-Born Master: Eight Manifestations of Quantum Energy (2018), and Return of the Lotus-Born Master- Decrypting the Dakini Code (2019), have received a dozen international film festival awards and accolades.





After this one, Brahm says he will do a fourth Lotus-Born Master-themed film. But this time, this won't be a documentary. "It'll be a full-length feature, a low-budget sci-fi, spy movie that tells a twisty, modern-day story," he said, declining to reveal more details.




Our team is proud of the results we achieve for our clients. We continue to strive for excellence  in both customer experience and customer success, - John Lincoln.

Ignite Visibility, San Diegos premier digital marketing agency, is pleased to announce its recent recognition as the Number One Amazon Advertising PPC Company by Clutch.co.

This annual list from Clutch.co celebrates the top 15 expert companies in the Amazon PPC Advertising market. The rankings are determined by each companys reviews, market presence, and ability to deliver an unmatched client experience while focusing on pay-per-click and Amazon advertising.

Clutch.co is a leader in data-driven market research. We are honored to be named as their top Amazon Advertising PPC company for 2021, says CEO and co-founder of Ignite Visibility, John Lincoln. I have always been proud of the work that we do here and our unique process to scale Amazon businesses.

Lincoln explains that Ignite Visibilitys approach to Amazon includes the following:

Phase 1: Account launch: back-end set up, product listings, A+ and curate images/videos.

Phase 2: Restructure campaigns and apply best practices. Determine precise client KPIs and scale

Phase 3: Increase spend to grow market share, focus on category/competitor conquesting

Phase 4: Launch on Amazons DSP to leverage their network

Phase 5: Expand outside of Ad Console (Posts, Attribution, & other channels)

Ignite Visibility has experienced incredible success and growth in the past few years and continues to provide stellar customer service and results. They treat every client as their only client and it truly shows. The reviews submitted to Clutch.co speak to Ignite Visibilitys ability to provide excellent customer service while also delivering a high rate of return on investment for their clients.

Our team is proud of the results we achieve for our clients. We continue to strive for excellence  in both customer experience and customer success, says Lincoln.

Ignite Visibility offers a variety of digital marketing services, including Amazon PPC, SEO, social media, email marketing, and more. Its client roster contains an impressive range from medium-sized businesses to global brands. In addition to achieving strong customer success, Ignite Visibility has won numerous awards both on a local and national level.

About Ignite Visibility:

Ignite Visibility is a premier full service digital marketing agency based in San Diego, CA. Consistently named one of the top SEO, paid media, social media, email marketing, Amazon and CRO companies in the USA, Ignite Visibility has used the same strategies they use for clients to become a four-time Inc. 5000 company (2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020). To learn more, visit https://ignitevisibility.com/.
Jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has issued a scathing assessment of President Vladimir Putin and Russia's justice system at a court hearing as his regional network said it will disband amid a push by prosecutors to declare the main pillars of the Kremlin critic's political organization "extremist."

In his first appearance since declaring an end to a hunger strike last week, Navalny appeared on April 29 at an appeal hearing for a case in which he was found guilty of defaming a World War II veteran and defiantly called for "prosecutors to be brought to criminal justice."

Navalny, his head shaved and looking gaunt following his refusal to eat for more than three weeks, referred to Putin as "the emperor with no clothes" and charged that Russia under his rule "continues to degrade every year."

"The crown slipping down over the emperor's ears: There are lies on TV, trillions of rubles have been spent, but our country is falling into poverty," Navalny said.

WATCH: Navalny Delivers Scathing Criticism Of Putin

Shortly after his emotional speech, the judge rejected Navalny's appeal.

Putin's most vocal critic's comments via video link with the court came hours after his close ally, Leonid Volkov, posted a video on YouTube saying the Navalny regional network was shutting down as it had become "impossible" to maintain operations amid a crackdown by Russian authorities.

"This is a gut punch, a punch to my heart," said Volkov, who fled Russia for Lithuania fearing for his security.

"But did we give up? Certainly we aren't giving up," he added, saying some headquarters will continue their activities as independent social and political groups.

The Moscow City Court is expected to rule on a motion put forward by prosecutors to label three organizations tied to Navalny -- the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens' Rights Defense Foundation, and Navalny's regional headquarters -- as "extremist."

Prosecutors said the organizations were "engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans."

Rights activists have sharply criticized the prosecutor's motion as a "scandalous" attempt to silence and oppress any opposition and dissent in the country.

"The preservation of the operations [at Navalny's headquarters across Russia] in its current form is impossible," Volkov said.

The expected court ruling means anyone connected to the operations "immediately will be charged with extremism and this will lead to prison sentences for those who work at the headquarters, those who cooperate with them, and those who help them," Volkov added.

Under Russian law, membership in or funding of an "extremist" organization is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The move, which Amnesty International has called "one of the most serious blows for the rights to freedom of expression and association in Russia's post-Soviet history," is the latest in a series of assaults on Navalny since he suffered a nerve-agent poisoning attack in August 2020.

He and his supporters blame that attack on Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives acting at the behest of authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.

Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, said on April 29 its activities will not cease, regardless of the upcoming court hearing.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation may not exist as a legal entity after the court rules in the case, Zhdanov said on YouTube, but its activities will continue.

Navalny spent weeks in Germany recuperating from the attack. When he returned to Russia in January, he was arrested and charged with violating his parole terms from an old embezzlement case that he says was trumped up to hinder his political activity. He is currently serving a 2 1/2-year sentence at a prison in the Vladimir region.

Navalny launched the hunger strike in prison on March 31, demanding he be examined by his own doctor amid what his supporters have described as a "deliberate campaign" by prison officials to undermine his health. Though he ended the strike on April 22, he said he was still pushing for his legal right to be seen by a doctor of his own choice.

In the case at the heart of his appeal on April 29, Navalny had mocked the people in a Kremlin-organized promotional video, calling them "corrupt lackeys and traitors."

One of the people in the video was a 94-year-old World War II veteran, and a court last month fined Navalny 850,000 rubles ($11,500) for allegedly slandering him.

His allies called the trial a politically motivated sham, while Navalny accused Russian officials of "fabricating" the case against him.

It remains unclear what evidence the authorities have against Navalny's foundation and regional offices in the case to be heard on May 17, as some of the case files have been classified as secret.

Ivan Pavlov, the lawyer representing Navalny's organizations in court, said after a preliminary hearing on April 29 that the defense team had filed a lawsuit to declassify the files. They also filed a motion to allow Navalny to participate in the court proceedings, "since his name is mentioned on every page of the lawsuit."

Pavlov also said that a criminal case had been launched against Navalny, Volkov, and Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, on charges of creating an organization that infringes on people's rights, a criminal offense punishable by up to four years in prison.
Police are searching for a man who escaped custody after allegedly assaulting an officer while he was being escorted from court to the watch house in Warwick, south-west of Brisbane.

Stanthorpe 28-year-old Clayton Alvoen was being escorted by an officer from Warwick Court to the watch house when he allegedly headbutted the officer before fleeing on foot.

Clayton Alvoen. Credit:Police Media

Police searched the area but were unable to find Mr Alvoen, with officers believing he might have been driven away from the scene.

The officer received treatment at the local hospital for a facial laceration.
FINAL OPPORTUNITY: Apply Now for a $10,000 Keep Our Shops on the Block Grant for Personal Care & Retail Businesses

Eligible businesses within Los Angeles County may apply until Sunday, May 2

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Los Angeles, California  Following the success of the LA Regional COVID-19 Recovery Fund, which dispersed nearly $100 million in grants last year to small businesses and non-profits, the Fund is distributing an additional $4.7 million dollars to small businesses in the personal care & retail sector through the Keep Our Shops on the Block Grant. Eligible businesses within Los Angeles County have one more opportunity to apply for a $10,000 grant from today, April 26 through Sunday, May 2 at www.lacovidfund.org/application. If a business applied in the first round of the program, they do not need to reapply.

The Keep Our Shops on the Block Grant is the first of its kind in the County dedicated to supporting brick-and-mortar businesses within the personal care and retail sector. To be eligible for the $10,000 grant, business applicants must be in current operation, have an open storefront within Los Angeles County (excludes the City of Los Angeles), and documentation of financial hardships as a result of COVID-19. Personal care and retail businesses include: hair and beauty salons, nail salons, estheticians, skin care, barbershops, dry cleaners, bakeries, automotive shops, and more. A full list of eligible businesses can be found at www.lacovidfund.org.

As Orange Tier reopening continues for businesses throughout LA County, we remain committed to reviving commercial corridors, said Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs Director Rafael Carbajal. While this funding will help our struggling businesses, we remain committed to advocating for additional funding at this critical moment.

The County of Los Angeles is once again partnering with the non-profit Local Initiatives Support Corporation Los Angeles (LISC LA), the managing organization of the LA Regional COVID-19 Recovery Fund, to administer Keep Our Shops on the Block grants equitably. With over 40 years of experience connecting communities to resources and opportunities, LISC LA has the knowledge of seasoned community partners along with the aptitude for expediency to provide this relief to Angelenos.

As Los Angeles begins to recover from the pandemic, LISC LA and the County of Los Angeles are dedicated to uplifting businesses who endured the economic impacts of COVID-19 this past year. Financial assistance in a time of economic instability can make all the difference in helping diverse, small brick-and-mortar businesses thrive in 2021. The applications second round is now open and closes on May 2 at 11:59 PST. Apply at http://www.lacovidfund.org/application.
With Covid-19 deaths surging to records in Pakistan this week, the government has sent troops to the streets to help enforce coronavirus precautions, and is warning it may turn to a lockdown if the spread is not controlled.

Pakistan reported 201 deaths on Tuesday, the most in a single day so far, and has counted a total of 17,680 Covid deaths since the pandemic began. More than 5,200 patients are receiving critical care in the countrys hospitals. And there are fears that the virus could rampage through Pakistan the way it is doing in neighboring India if immediate steps are not taken to curb its spread. All travel to India has been banned.

Fawad Chaudhry, the minister for information, said on Thursday that the government will be forced to impose a strict nationwide lockdown if the situation continues to deteriorate.
Credit: University of Luxembourg

Physicists from the University of Luxembourg have recently presented a new material which can become a key component of a new infrastructure designed to help robots understand their surroundings. The team shows that the material can be used to introduce tailor-made graphical information in the environment, which is invisible to humans but easily readable by robots. The new material and the innovative procedure by which it is made possible have been recently published in Advanced Functional Materials, one of the world's top journals in the field of materials science.

Reign of automation

Widespread automation is a key component in the on-going fourth industrial revolution. The current interest in automation envisages an enormous expansion of the concept, often involving machines that are not only automatic but also autonomous and mobile, such as self-driving cars or drones. In contrast to what the term "Industry 4.0" might suggest, these machines are also likely to engage in direct interaction with humans, even in places outside industrial production, like our homes or non-industrial work places.

"As beneficial as this transition to ubiquitous automation could be, it also comes with significant challenges of many types. One of the most important thresholds is caused by safety concerns: as demonstrated by recurring tragic fatalities involving autonomous vehicles, they currently have an insufficient understanding of their environment despite state-of-the-art on-board sensor and computation technology. It is simply not easy to make sense of the busy, complex and messy world that we humans create and live in, full of signals, some important, some only distracting, and others yet being pure noise," explains Jan Lagerwall, Professor in the Department of Physics and Materials Science (DPhyMS) at the University of Luxembourg and principal investigator of the study.

New approach using liquid crystals

While most attempts to allow robots access to human-populated environments focus on providing the robots a combination of multiple sensory inputs and massive computational power, a different approach is now proposed by Prof. Jan Lagerwall and his two team members Yong Geng and Rijeesh Kizhakidathazhath from the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with Prof. Mathew Schwartz, who is an expert in automation and design of the built environment at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The key breakthrough presented in the article is the realization of retroreflective spheres made from cholesteric liquid crystals, which are turned into solid state by a process called polymerisation. In one way, these spheres are similar to the retroreflectors we have in the safety vests in our cars, in road signs and in certain clothing, because they send light back to the source regardless of the direction along which they are illuminated. But there are two very important differences that make these Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors (CSRs) so useful. First, the reflection is limited to a narrow wavelength range, explaining why the human eye does not see them. Second, the reflection is circularly polarized, in the same way as each of the two movies simultaneously shown in a 3D cinema are circularly polarized, in opposite ways.

"If you ever took off your goggles while at a 3D cinema you will have noticed that the human eye cannot distinguish different polarisations, as both our eyes then see both movies, and we simply experience a strange "shadow" effect. The goggles contain circular polarisers, one right-handed and the other left-handed, ensuring that our right eye sees only the movie for the right eye, the left only the movie for the left eye. Outside a movie theater, the world is very rarely circularly polarized and this means that the circular polarization of CSRs is quite unique. A robot designed to read out CSR-encoded information will have two cameras, both operating in the ultraviolet and/or infrared regions in which the CSRs reflect, and each will have a circular polariser of different type, just like 3D cinema glasses. The robot subtracts one image from the other, meaning that all visual information that is not circularly polarized, which is all content except the CSRs, is canceled out, because this information appears identical to the two cameras. But the CSRs remain, as they are visible only to one camera but not to the other. This allows the robot to identify the CSR-encoded information extremely rapidly, with minimum computing power, and without risk of false positives," the scientists explain.

Explore further Highly sensitive detection of circularly polarized light without a filter

More information: Yong Geng et al. Encoding Hidden Information onto Surfaces Using Polymerized Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors, Advanced Functional Materials (2021). Journal information: Advanced Functional Materials Yong Geng et al. Encoding Hidden Information onto Surfaces Using Polymerized Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202100399
Nagpur:

French major Dassault Aviation will invest over 100 million euros in a joint venture with Reliance Aerospace to manufacture aircraft components as part of the 'offset obligation' connected to the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from France.

The Dassault-Reliance joint venture represents the largest ever foreign direct investment in the defence sector in India, the companies said in a joint statement.

The foundation laying ceremony of the Dassault Reliance Aerospace Limited (DRAL) manufacturing facility was held on Saturday at the Dhirubhai Ambani Aerospace Park in Mihan SEZ near the Nagpur airport.

The foundation stone was laid in the presence of Florence Parly, Minister of Armed Forces of the French Republic, Reliance Group Chairman Anil Ambani, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Alexandre Ziegler, Ambassador of France to India.

Kokilaben Ambani, the Ambani family matriarch, Tina Ambani, wife of Anil Ambani and his son Anmol were also present.

Also Read: Maruti Suzuki India reports 3.4 per cent rise in Q2 net profit

DRAL will manufacture several components of the offset obligation connected to the purchase of 36 Rafale Fighters from France, signed between the two governments in September 2016, Ambani said.

It will manufacture components for the Legacy Falcon 2000 series of civil jets manufactured by Dassault Aviation and will become part of its global supply chain.

"These first steps are expected to be achieved in the coming years, leading to the possible setting up of the final assembly of Rafale and Falcon aircraft in India," a DRAL official said.

This is for the first time that a business jet will be manufactured in India, the official said.

The DRAL facility will train skilled workers in aviation assembly and integration, and lead to major employment generation in Nagpur and surrounding areas, the official added.

It will also attract and house an organic ecosystem of over 200 MSMEs to secure the component and avionics manufacturing needs of Rafale and Falcon jets.

Dassault Aviation Chairman Eric Trappier said the firm is firmly committed to implementing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Make in India' programme.

Also Read: Sujit Prasad takes over as executive director of SEBI

"This development (DRAL) gives the 65 year-long strong association of Dassault Aviation in India a new momentum and the will of future manufacturing developments," he said.

"The Reliance-Dassault partnership will bring high levels of technology transfer and make India a major supplier in the global aviation supply chain," Ambani said.

Dassault and Reliance will fully support 'Make in India' and 'Skill India' missions and enhance India's pursuit of self sufficiency in the aerospace sector, he added.

Ambani also thanked Gadkari and Fadnavis for their "strong and consistent support" for the project.

The Dhirubhai Ambani Aerospace Park, spread over 289 acres, will be the largest greenfield aerospace park in India with a capital investment of over Rs 6,500 crore. It is being developed in two phases.

Phase one production is expected to start next year.

It will be home to DRAL - the 51:49 joint venture of Reliance Aerostructure and Dassault Aviation.

Also Read: Sensex, Nifty scale new peaks on earnings cheer, F&O expiry

Reliance Group will set up assembly lines and manufacturing facilities of fixed wing aircraft aerostructure for commercial transport aircraft and helicopters for both defence and commercial use.

The park will also house ancillary and component manufacturing units to support after-sales requirements.

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She recently admitted that becoming a first-time mom during the COVID-19 pandemic had been tough.

But with son Isaac now 15 months old, Ashley Graham is taking things in her stride.

On Wednesday, the plus-size model, 33, headed out solo in West Hollywood in a casual ensemble perfect for the very warm spring day.

Staying cool: Ashley Graham headed out solo in West Hollywood on Wednesday wearing a casual ensemble perfect for the very warm spring day

Graham wore a chestnut brown cardigan over a bra and fastened it with just one button at the bust so as to reveal cleavage and midriff.

She added dark brown crochet shorts and a pair of embellished slides.

Her hair was worn in a messy bun and she added pendant earrings and a black face mask.

Flashed skin: The plus-size model, 33, wore a chestnut brown cardigan over a bra and fastened it with just one button. She added dark brown crochet shorts and a pair of embellished slides

She had waited out the pandemic in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband Justin Ervin and their son, who was born in January 2020.

She now seems to be based in Southern California with her family after being seen out and about in LA for the past few weeks.

Earlier this month, she posted photos to her Instagram in which she was seen posing in front of a white-walled modern home and in the caption she wrote: 'She's a part time LA baddie.'

California gal: Graham had waited out the pandemic with her family in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska but now seems to be LA-based

'Really hard': She welcomed her son Isaac with husband Justin Ervin in January 2020 and recently admitted that becoming a first-time mom during the pandemic had been tough

Meanwhile, on a recent episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show where she served as the guest host, Graham shared with the audience: 'Being a new mom has been really hard as it is, but being a new mom during the pandemic is a whole other level.'

But, she revealed, being on lockdown had had its advantages.

'It gave me the maternity leave that my body could have never asked for, she explained. 'Some working moms have to go back to work just after a few weeks and thats assuming they even get a maternity leave at all.'

On April 8, the model returned to work for the Michael Kors presentation during New York Fashion Week.

She joined Irina Shayk , Naomi Campbell and Bella Hadid on Manhattan's Broadway for the outside event in which the city street was turned into a catwalk.

Graham also recently shared images to her Instagram from her new campaign for Calvin Klein's Heron Preston underwear collection.

Curves: Now back at work, Graham recently shared images to her Instagram from her new campaign for Calvin Klein's Heron Preston underwear collection
VMware Tanzu to empower soldiers to use modern cloud technologies and DevSecOps practices; solve problems through agile and more secure software development processes

VMware (NYSE: VMW) today announced that it has been selected by U.S. Army Futures Command to enable a software factory for soldiers, by soldiers. Together, Army Futures Command and VMware will cultivate the first Soldier-led "Silicon Valley software company" inside the Army. The new initiative will equip soldiers to take up cloud native development practices and help produce software to address current and future mission priorities.

Through the Army Software Factory, the U.S. Army will tap into the deep pool of talent across its workforce and upskill tech-minded soldiers and civilians. Cohorts of Army soldiers and Government civilians will go through a comprehensive program that will begin in the classroom and span critical disciplines including software engineering, design and product management, and platform operations. Soldiers will be paired with a VMware Tanzu Labs expert in their fields for deep on-the-job enablement to learn to build, develop, field and operate software in the same way as the best Silicon Valley companies. For each of the next five years, 30 hand-selected soldiers and civilians from the Army will enter the program every six months.

Working with VMware Tanzu Labs, U.S. Army soldiers will learn how to build portable cloud-native apps, rapidly deliver them to production, and run them in any environment. The Army Software Factory will train and enable soldiers to produce modern software organically. It will prepare soldiers with the DevSecOps practices and software development skills they need for future digital battlefields.

"The capability to develop software at the lowest tactical levels will help us provide better software products. We anticipate long-term cost savings and expect the Software Factory to help us maintain a competitive advantage across Army modernization efforts," said Gen. John M. Murray, commanding general, U.S. Army Futures Command.

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The VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services has a proven track record of enabling organizations worldwide transform how they build and deliver apps. By leaning into VMware Tanzu, the U.S. Army will bring to bear an accredited Kubernetes-based DevSecOps platform, modern developer tooling and open source projects. This streamlined path to production will foster rapid software development and delivery, improving software fielding timelines for the U.S. Army.

"Successful organizations build apps to deliver specific outcomes," said Ajay Patel, VMwares general manager, modern applications business unit. "The Army has that focus, and were honored to work with them to enable soldiers to write software that serves mission priorities. It will bring the best of VMware Tanzu products and principles to the Army and help them build capabilities that will have a lasting impact."

The Army Software Factory is the next evolution of the VMware-enabled Government Software Factory concept. It builds on 30 years of strategic commercial partnerships with Silicon Valley companies like Square, Twitter, and Google, and Fortune 500 enterprises like Boeing, JP Morgan, and Home Depot. The U.S. Army Software Factorys Tanzu Platform is in production today, hosting its first accredited apps and products built by the Army Software Factory and VMware Tanzu Labs.

Read more about how Tanzu products will bring the Army Software Factory to life on the VMware Tanzu blog here.

About VMware

VMware software powers the worlds complex digital infrastructure. The companys cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace offerings help customers deliver any application on any cloud across any device. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough technology innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html.

VMware and Tanzu are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions.

About U.S. Army Futures Command

Army Futures Command leads the persistent modernization of the Army in order to provide future warfighters with the concepts, capabilities, and organizational designs needed to dominate a future battlefield. With more than 26,000 people worldwide, AFC Army Futures Command relies on collaborative partnerships with industry and academia to help keep Soldiers safe and America strong. For more information, please visit https://armyfuturescommand.com/.

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System Integrator Klarrio is from now on offering its customers the opportunity to use EU-hosted infrastructure for their cloud needs selecting any of Exoscale's data center locations. Combining Klarrio's system integration expertise with Exoscale cloud infrastructure while adhering to initiatives such as Gaia-X will provide customers with best-of-breed technology and solutions.

"We chose to partner with Klarrio because of their outstanding expertise and experience in cloud native big data solutions. Jointly we are committed to provide our customers with cutting edge Gaia-X compliant cloud infrastructure and data services," explains Mathias Nobauer, Director Cloud at A1 Digital and CEO Exoscale.

"Customers are requesting more flexibility and control over where their data resides, specifically within the EU," explains Kurt Jonckheer, CEO of Klarrio. "By partnering with A1 Digital and using its cloud platform Exoscale, we have found an EU-based partner that is able to offer the cloud infrastructure and services that our customers have come to expect."

Klarrio strongly believes that data loses value over time. In a world where everything is connected the need for real-time data analysis becomes more and more of a requirement instead of a luxury. Evolutions such as 5G connectivity and autonomous driving will pave the way for new low-latency use-cases and grow the need for data stream processing and cloud services. The company assists its customers with the implementation of big data and advanced analytics solutions, leveraging primarily cloud-native open source software which can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure. This enables customers to leverage state of the art technology, have the ability to remain in control over where their data resides while avoiding vendor lock-in regardless of the vertical industry they are in.

Exoscale, an A1 Digital product, offers cloud services focusing on simplicity, scalability, and security for SaaS businesses and web applications. With a simple and intuitive web administration interface, coupled with fixed pricing, Exoscale makes complex infrastructure concepts easy to implement. Exoscale focuses on fast and flexible self-service solutions for customers. At the same time, trustworthy and reliable infrastructure components ensure maximum scalability, reliability, and performance. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and with data centers throughout Switzerland as well as in Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich, and Sofia, Exoscale benefits from Swiss and European data protection regulations and therefore complies with all EU-GDPR guidelines.

About Klarrio

Klarrio is a Systems Integrator specialized in implementing large scale data intensive solutions leveraging state of the art cloud-native and primarily open source software. Klarrio helps its customers with acceleration and creation of a data strategy, business models, blueprint architecture(s), implementation, operation and knowledge transfer of solutions across vertical industries. This with a strong focus on data governance, data protection (GDPR) and privacy regulations.

More at www.klarrio.com

About A1 Digital

A1 Digital advises companies on questions of digital transformation and supports them in the digitisation of their business areas. The focus is on industry-specific applications in the area of Internet of Things (IoT) as well as on cloud-based products for the modern workplace and security solutions for cloud and IoT. With its scalable services, A1 Digital is also an ideal partner for digital projects in medium-sized businesses. As part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group and thus of America Movil, the company has access to the grown infrastructure of one of the world's largest mobile operators. In addition to its German headquarters in Munich, A1 Digital has regional sales organisations and offers cloud solutions via data centres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

More at www.a1.digital

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In recent weeks, people who oppose Covid vaccinations have spread a claim that is not only false but defies the rules of biology: that being near someone who has received a vaccine can disrupt a womans menstrual cycle or cause a miscarriage.

The idea, promoted on social media by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, is that vaccinated people might shed vaccine material, affecting people around them as though it were secondhand smoke. This month, a private school in Florida told employees that if they got vaccinated, they could not interact with students because we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person.

In reality, it is impossible to experience any effects from being near a vaccinated person, because none of the vaccine ingredients are capable of leaving the body they were injected into.

The vaccines currently authorized for use in the United States instruct your cells to make a version of the spike protein found on the coronavirus, so your immune system can learn to recognize it. Different vaccines use different vehicles to deliver the instructions  for Moderna and Pfizer, messenger RNA, or mRNA; for Johnson & Johnson, an adenovirus genetically modified to be inactive and harmless  but the instructions are similar.
ROME, APR 29 - Two of the three former far-left Italian ex-terrorists who evaded arrest in an operation in which seven others were detained in France on Wednesday turned themselves in on Thursday. Luigi Bergamin was accompanied by his lawyer as he turned himself in in Paris in the morning. Raffaele Ventura turned himself later in the day, AFP reported French justice sources as saying, and was released under judicial control. Maurizio Di Marzio remains at large. The first hearings, meanwhile, are being held on Thursday for the seven who were detained on Wednesday - Red Brigades members Enzo Calvitti, Giovanni Alimonti, Roberta Cappelli, Marina Petrella and Sergio Tornaghi, plus Giorgio Pietrostefani of Lotta Continua and Narciso Manenti of the Nuclei Armati Contro il Potere Territoriale group. It is expected to take two to three years for the former terrorists to be extradited to Italy. All 10 have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes during Italy's 'Years of Lead' of political violence in the 1970s and 80s. Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia said France's decision to order the arrest of the former terrorists was "historic". Under the "Mitterrand Doctrine" Paris allowed former left-wing terrorists to stay in France and not get extradited to Italy as long as they pledged to renounce violence. All nine former militants will return home Thursday night under different forms of guarded liberty, ANSA sources said. The extradition process will start next Wednesday. (ANSA).
A returning refugee receives a COVID-19 test at a transit centre in Burundi after returning from Rwanda.  UNHCR/Will Swanson

Ending a two-day visit to Burundi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi praised progress made towards helping refugees find long-term solutions in the heart of Africas Great Lakes Region.

Grandi noted that in a region marked by violent and complex conflicts resulting in forced displacement, he was encouraged to see an increased focus on finding solutions for refugees, especially for Burundians.

Since 2017, at least 145,000 Burundian refugees have been helped to return home, with more than 25,000 coming from Rwanda in recent months. On average, 2,000 people are being assisted to voluntarily return each week from Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania.

The High Commissioner accompanied the most recent convoy from Rwanda transporting 159 Burundian refugees returning home after years of living in exile. He spoke to families who were aware of the challenges awaiting them but expressed happiness to finally be going home.

Grandi reiterated UNHCRs commitment to continue facilitating the return of Burundian refugees who have made an informed and voluntary choice to go back.

The return of refugees places great responsibility on the shoulders of the government, especially in ensuring security in areas of return, said Grandi. Returnee reintegration must include access to property and services and the ability to provide for themselves and their families, otherwise those returning may end up being displaced again.

During his visit the High Commissioner was received by President Evariste Ndayishimiye. They discussed the importance of continuing to build conditions for refugees to return in safety and dignity.

Additionally, they agreed that more support must also be given to the often-impoverished communities to which refugees are returning, for reintegration to be successful.

In February, UNHCR together the government of Burundi and 19 partners launched the Joint Refugee Return and Reintegration Plan, which appeals for US$104.3 million from the international community to assist returnees and the communities where they are returning.

Less than 10 per cent of the funding needed to support re-integration in Burundi has been committed, despite the increase in refugees returning from around the region.

The High Commissioner also commended Burundi for continuing to extend hospitality to some 80,000 Congolese refugees despite the serious social and economic challenges the country faces. He called for additional international support to improve the conditions in the refugee camps hosting them.

News footage is available for media and broadcasters: B-ROLL.

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FORT LAUDERDALE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / SFLMaven Corp. (OTC PINK:SFLM), ("SFLMaven" or the "Company"), a leading provider of high-end luxury goods, has engaged international investor relations specialists MZ Group (MZ) to lead a comprehensive strategic investor relations and financial communications program across all key markets.

MZ Group will work closely with SFLM management to develop and implement a comprehensive capital markets strategy designed to increase the Company's visibility throughout the investment community. The campaign will highlight how SFLMaven, a high-end luxury goods provider operating a leading eBay marketplace, is building sales volume on its top-rated eBay store with over $130 million in sales since inception.

MZ has developed a distinguished reputation as a premier resource for institutional investors, brokers, analysts and private investors. The firm maintains offices worldwide and was recently ranked No. 7 in the world in business communication.

Lucas Zimmerman, Senior Vice President at MZ North America, will advise SFLM in all facets of corporate and financial communications, including the coordination of roadshows and investment conferences across key cities and building brand awareness with financial and social media outlets.

Lucas Zimmerman, Senior Vice President of MZ North America, commented: "The jewelry market has continued to expand with the evolution of digital platforms that brings the shopping experience closer to consumers. The global jewelry market is expected to reach $266.5 billion by 2027, driven by increasing consumer disposable income and a greater proportion of households earning more than $100,000. As eCommerce continues to flourish, SFLMaven is well positioned to bring these two growing markets together.

"The Company's dedicated eBay marketplace store features a wide range of used jewelry including watches, collectibles, heavy jewelry and high fashion items, all sourced from a proprietary dealer network developed from nearly 20 years in the business. SFLMaven has forged a strong reputation within the eBay ecosystem, snagging the coveted Top Rated Seller badge - with their 98,000+ positive reviews standing as a testament to this legacy of growth.

"The Company's current revenue run rate, which stands at nearly $1 million per month, makes it a true hidden gem of the OTC Markets. We look forward to sharing SFLM's solid market position with our wide network of institutional investors, family offices and high-net worth individuals," concluded Zimmerman.

"2021 represents an important inflection point for SFLMaven, as we look to expand our inventory to better service newfound wealth creation in key international markets," said Joseph Ladin, Chief Executive Officer of SFLMaven. "We are well positioned to further develop our marketplace offering through listing optimization and SEO, building upon our stable base of revenue to drive an enhanced margin profile. In the near-term, we are evaluating further expansion of our dealer network and the establishment of showrooms in strategic metro areas to improve sourcing capabilities and meet the demand we are seeing in the marketplace today.

"As we work to mature our capital markets efforts and align with public company best practices, we will transition from weekly reporting of auction results to monthly reporting. We look forward to working with Lucas and the entire team at MZ Group on the back of yet another week with greater than $200K in sales to communicate the immense growth potential in our business to the broader investment community, building long-term value for our shareholders," concluded Ladin.

For more information on SFLMaven, please visit the Company's investor relations website athttps://www.sflmavencorp.com/. To schedule a conference call with management, please email your request to SFLM@mzgroup.us or call Lucas Zimmerman at 949-259-4987.

About MZ Group

MZ North America is the US division of MZ Group, a global leader in investor relations and corporate communications. MZ North America was founded in 1996 and provides full scale Investor Relations to both private and public companies across all industries. Supported by our exclusive one-stop-shop approach, MZ works with top management to support the clients' business strategy in six integrated product and service categories: 1) IR Consulting & Outreach - full service investor relations and roadshow services; 2) ESG iQ & Advisory - reporting technology platform and audit and reporting guidance; 3) SPAC Alpha IR+ & IPO Advisory - providing critical and timely guidance through business combinations and IPOs; 4) Financial & Social Media - lead generation and social media relations; 5) Market Intelligence - real time ownership monitoring; 6) Technology Solutions - webhosting, webcasting, conference calls, distribution services and board portals. MZ North America has a global footprint with offices located in New York, Chicago, San Diego, Aliso Viejo, Austin, Minneapolis, Taipei and Sao Paulo.

About SFLMaven

SFLMaven Corp. (OTC: SFLM), is a premium provider of high-end luxury goods to discerning jewelry clientele globally. SFLMaven has driven over $130 million in sales and 98,000 positive reviews since inception, famous for its Thursday Night Auction events on its top-rated eBay store. For more information, please visit the Company's website at https://www.sflmavencorp.com/ or follow the Company on Twitter at @sflmaven.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements, including information about management's view of SFLMaven Corp.'s future expectations, plans and prospects. In particular, when used in the preceding discussion, the words "believes," "expects," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," or "may," and similar conditional expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Any statements made in this news release other than those of historical fact, about an action, event or development, are forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the results of SFLMaven, its subsidiaries and concepts to be materially different than those expressed or implied in such statements. Unknown or unpredictable factors also could have material adverse effects on SFLMaven's future results. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made only as of the date hereof. SFLMaven cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Finally, SFLMaven undertakes no obligation to update these statements after the date of this release, except as required by law, and also takes no obligation to update or correct information prepared by third parties that are not paid for by SFLMaven.

Investor Relations Contact

Lucas Zimmerman

MZ Group - MZ North America

(959) 259-4987

SFLM@mzgroup.us

www.mzgroup.us

SOURCE: SFLMaven Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/641566/SFLMaven-Corp-Engages-MZ-Group-to-Lead-Strategic-Investor-Relations-and-Shareholder-Communication-Program
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier left fans a sweet picture of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). In their last scenes together, the superheroes enjoyed food, friendship, and family in a sunset dock party in Louisiana.

It was the perfect ending to such an action-packed series. But according to director Kari Skogland, that final party scene wasnt planned as seen, and it came about as a happy accident.

(L-R) Adepuro Oduye, Anthony Mackie, and Sebastian Stan in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier | Marvel Studios

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier party scene was filmed first

Episode 6, the final installment of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, ended with Sam and Bucky back in Louisiana, partying it out with Sams friends and family. While it was one of the final shots of the series, Skogland noted that it was filmed early on, before production was halted due to the pandemic.

We probably shot that on day four, she told Collider. That was actually in the first week of shooting back in October of 2019.

Describe your reaction to the finale with only emojis All episodes of Marvel Studios' The Falcon and The Winter Soldier are now streaming on @DisneyPlus! #FalconAndWinterSoldier pic.twitter.com/Uf3vfTCzHg  The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (@falconandwinter) April 24, 2021

RELATED: Is Julia Louis-Dreyfus Madame Hydra in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the Larger MCU?

Kari Skogland says it was planned much differently

Initially, Skogland and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showrunners had a different plan for Sam and Buckys final scene together. They imagined it would be a much bigger affair.

It was sort of an impromptu thing, Skogland said in her chat with Collider. We had planned a much bigger version of it, and then we sort of scaled it back a bit. And I thought, well, lets put a community together and kind of jazz it up a bit.

That's our Cap All episodes of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier are now streaming on @DisneyPlus. #FalconAndWinterSoldier pic.twitter.com/uU0owIMXxB  The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (@falconandwinter) April 28, 2021

RELATED: Why The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Gave Anthony Mackie Feelings Fear and Horror

Skogland noted that the scene was shot very organically. And she incorporated little details as they popped up.

It was so great because there [were] probably 50 or 60 people there, she said. But each one of them had actually one guy could play the thing. Like I can play the spoons, one guy said. So it actually was exactly what you see, sort of an impromptu party, which is what it needed to feel like.

The finale party scene in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a happy accident

With the glistening water and gorgeous sunset, the final party scene in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was picture perfect. And Skogland revealed that most of it was actually inspired in the moment.

I saw this great sunset, and there we were in this great setting, she told Collider. And I thought, Lets grab this. But I didnt know whether it would stick because it was quite early on to be shooting the end shot of the show.

I typically come into any project knowing what the opening shot is and what the end shot is, she continued. That one, funny enough, stuck, and it was never planned for. It was just me going, Oh, lets just do this. It looks great. And it might be an interesting moment.

It's all led to this. The epic finale of Marvel Studios' The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is now streaming on @DisneyPlus. #FalconAndWinterSoldier pic.twitter.com/xTYHlARWxR  The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (@falconandwinter) April 23, 2021

RELATED: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Star Danny Ramirez on His Future as Falcon in the MCU

Skogland noted that the showrunners fell in love with the scene because of how genuine it felt. And in hindsight, she called it a happy accident.

It truly was more of us kicking off the adventure in the moment than finalizing it, and I fully expected to shoot something else, she added. But those are the lovely, happy accidents of production. Its always a path of discovery.
The number of homeless people in Japan stood at 3,824 as of January, down 4.2% from a year before, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Wednesday.

It was the lowest number since the ministry started compiling such statistics in 2003, apparently reflecting local government support for financially strapped people to prevent them from becoming homeless.

Of the total, 3,510 were men and 197 women. The gender of the remaining 117 people was not identified.

By prefecture, the number of homeless people was the highest in Osaka, at 990, followed by Tokyo, at 862, and Kanagawa, at 687. - Japan Times
Astronaut Michael Collins, who was part of the Apollo 11 crew which first landed on the moon, has died at the age of 90.

Collins' family confirmed the news on Wednesday in a statement on Twitter, saying he passed "after a valiant battle with cancer."

"He spent his final days resting peacefully, with family by his side," the statement said.

"Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge, in the same way."

Family Statement on Passing of Astronaut Michael Collins pic.twitter.com/6OAw7CzFaz  Michael Collins (@AstroMCollins) April 28, 2021

His grandfather, Jeremiah Bernard Collins, emigrated from Dunmanway in Co Cork in the early 1860s to Cincinnati, Ohio in the US.

Collins was part of the three-member crew on Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission in 1969, alongside Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

He served as command module pilot often called "the loneliest man in history" or "the Forgotten Man" as Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon.

I guess youre about the only person around that doesnt have TV coverage of the scene, Mission Control radioed Mr Collins after the landing.

Thats all right. I dont mind a bit, he responded.

Mr Collins was alone for nearly 28 hours before Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin finished their tasks on the moons surface and lifted off in the lunar lander.

Mr Collins was responsible for re-docking the two spacecraft before the men could begin heading back to Earth.

Had something gone wrong and Mr Aldrin and Mr Armstrong been stuck on the moons surface  a real fear  Mr Collins would have returned to Earth alone.

I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have, he wrote in his 1974 autobiography, Carrying The Fire.

This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.

Astronaut Michael Collins, right, speaks to Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana at Launch Complex 39A, about the moments leading up to launch at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, and what it was like to be the first to land on the moon on the Apollo 11 mission. Picture: Frank Michaux/NASA via AP

In a statement, Nasa said that the US has "lost a true pioneer and lifelong advocate for exploration."

The space agency said: NASA mourns the loss of this accomplished pilot and astronaut, a friend of all who seek to push the envelope of human potential.

"Whether his work was behind the scenes or on full view, his legacy will always be as one of the leaders who took America's first steps into the cosmos.

"And his spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons.

Former Nasa astronaut, Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin paid tribute to his Apollo 11 crewmate saying: "Dear Mike, Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the Fire to Carry us deftly to new heights and to the future.

"We will miss you. May you Rest In Peace."

Dear Mike,

Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the Fire to Carry us deftly to new heights and to the future. We will miss you. May you Rest In Peace. #Apollo11 pic.twitter.com/q4sJjFdvf8  Dr. Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) April 28, 2021

Retired astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield also paid tribute to Collins on Twitter saying: "I am so sad that Mike Collins has passed away.

"He inspired my whole life with his grace, humility, and amazing accomplishments - a superb man.

"Godspeed, Mike."
The Massachusetts workforces recovery will depend on job training opportunities for people whose careers vanished in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday.

The Republican governor announced $2.1 million for vocational programs while visiting Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School in Danvers Thursday morning. Essex North Shore was one of 10 vocational schools that received Career Technical Institute grants.

But the governor said the funds dont signal that he favors vocational training in lieu of a college degree. When asked about the value of a college education, Baker said the state is prioritizing job training to offer an alternatives for those who saw their jobs vanish overnight as the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.

We have a lot of people who thought they had a good job in a space where there was employment opportunity and possibility for advancement, and the pandemic certainly took a lot of that away early on, Baker said. Theres an open question about how much of that will come back and when.

Massachusetts saw a historic level of unemployment claims in 2020, reporting the nations highest unemployment rate in the summer. Workers in the arts, hospitality and food industries have struggled to find work in the months since the pandemic.

Baker sees funding boosts for afternoon, evening training programs as a way to offer people the chance to change careers. If the state doesnt create an opportunity for workers to pivot, he said, the state runs the risk of leaving a lot of people behind.

I actually am more worried about that, Baker said. People will make their own choice about the right place for them to play is. The thing we need to do is make sure that there are opportunities for people wherever you want to play.

House Speaker Ron Mariano during a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce identified expanding skills certifications within state job training programs. Asked about the scope of the skills certification expansion in late March, Mariano did not give specifics.

Its out there. Its starting to be used more, but we have to bring our job training programs to match whats going on in the marketplace, he said.

Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School received $540,000, the largest award of all the grantees. The school offers job training and placement services for welders, electronic technicians, HVAC technicians and construction craft positions in Northeastern Massachusetts..

Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg received $125,000 for training and job placement in plumbing and welding in Central Massachusetts.

The state also awarded $375,000 to Greater Lawrence Technical High School, $300,000 to Nashoba Valley Technical High School in Westford and $100,000 to Greater Lowell Technical High School, among others.

Related Content:
MANISTEE COUNTY  The following includes reports made to the Manistee County Sheriffs Office from April 6-10. All calls may not be reported. This is part of a lengthy report and is compiled by assistant editor Arielle Breen.

April 6

 A noise disturbance was reported at 11:52 a.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 A person was reported as driving without insurance at 4:33 p.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 Deputies conducted a vehicle identification number inspection at 4:54 p.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 Deputies assisted child protective services at midnight in Norman Township.

 A two-vehicle property damage crash was reported at 7:46 p.m. in the county.

 Possession of methamphetamine and a felony warrant out of Indiana was reported at 9:51 p.m. in Bear Lake Township.

 Deputies assisted a citizen with a vehicle at 8:52 p.m. in Manistee Township.

April 7

 A civil issue was reported at 12:40 a.m. in Springdale Township.

 Deputies assisted child protective services at 3:08 p.m. in Norman Township.

 Deputies conducted a warrant arrest from Mason County at 4:02 p.m.

 A driving while license suspended incident was reported at 8:26 p.m. in Manistee Township.

 Deputies assisted with a fire at 9:21 p.m. in Bear Lake Township.

 A suspicious situation and assault was reported at 10:33 p.m. in Manistee Township.

April 8

 Deputies assisted Michigan State Police with an incident at 12:11 p.m. in Filer Township.

 Animal control was called to a report of a dog running at large at 9:06 a.m. in Kaleva.

 Property was reported as being found at 5:40 p.m. in Filer Township.

April 9

 A report of a person driving without a license was made at noon in Springdale Township.

 An operating while intoxicated second offense was reported at 1:40 p.m. in Cleon Township.

 A driving while license suspended, open intoxicants, no insurance incident was reported at 3:08 p.m. in Springdale Township.

 Deputies assisted Michigan State Police with an incident at 10:27 p.m. in Norman Township.

 A camper fire was reported at 11:47 p.m. in Springdale Township.

 A person was reported as being unwanted at a location at 2:19 p.m. in Norman Township.

April 10

 A driving while license suspended, open intoxicants, no insurance incident was reported at 11:46 a.m. in Norman Township.

 A person was reported as driving without insurance at 2:21 p.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 A person was reported as driving while license suspended second offense, without insurance and improper registration at 12:22 p.m. in Norman Township.

 A person was reported as driving while license suspended second offense, without insurance and improper registration at 1 p.m. in Norman Township.

 Deputies conducted a welfare check at 12:26 p.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 A person was reported as driving recklessly at 12:42 p.m. in Maple Grove Township.

 A trespassing/property line dispute was reported at 6:58 p.m. in Cleon Township.

 Deputies assisted the Manistee City Police Department at 10:07 p.m. with a personal injury crash in Manistee.
Police officers stand near the Oberlin Clinic, where four people were found dead and another seriously injured, following the arrest of a 51-year-old-woman in Potsdam, Germany, on April 29, 2021. (Michele Tantussi/Reuters)

Four Killed at German Hospital, Employee Arrested

BERLINPolice in Germany detained a 51-year-old hospital employee and opened a murder inquiry after four people were found dead and another seriously injured at a clinic near Berlin.

Police said they had arrived around 9 p.m. (local time) on Wednesday to find people with fatal injuries in several rooms of a ward at the Oberlin Clinic, a specialist orthopedic hospital in Potsdam, capital of Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin.

On the basis of the available information, all the victims injuries were the result of serious violence by a third party, the police said in a statement.

Police officers stand near the Oberlin Clinic, where four people were found dead and another seriously injured, following the arrest of a 51-year-old-woman, in Potsdam, Germany, on April 29, 2021. (Michele Tantussi/Reuters)

Director of the Association of Deaf people in Berlin & Brandenburg Steffen Helbing puts a candle at a makeshift altar outside the Oberlin Clinic in Potsdam, Germany on April 29, 2021. (Michele Tantussi/Reuters)

The regional Tagesspiegel newspaper said they had been attacked with a knife. It said the victims were patients, some of whom had disabilities severe enough to need respiratory support.

Citing police sources, the newspaper said the suspect had told her husband on arriving home that she had killed people that day, whereupon he called the police.

There was no information regarding any motive.

By Thomas Escritt
The hearing may not have been packed to the gills, but it was refreshing to hear how citizens, and not just elected leaders, want to spend the Read more
Islamabad, April 29 : Pakistan will start the local production of CanSinoBio's coronavirus vaccine next month, National Institute of Health's officials said. The development comes after 100,00 people were vaccinated in a day for the first time in Pakistan.

The NIH officials said that the arrangements to prepare CanSinoBio's coronavirus vaccine were done, while the raw material for the vaccine would reach Pakistan in early May, the Geo TV reported on Wednesday.

Chinese experts are also present in Islamabad to help in the preparation of the vaccine, officials said, adding that the NIH had started the venture in collaboration with a Chinese company.

The official said they were hopeful that the single-dose vaccine would be available by the end of May for public inoculation.

It is pertinent to mention here that CanSinoBio's officials had trained NIH experts to prepare vaccine doses.
Two Myanmar air force bases came under rocket attack on Thursday, the military said, as the country grapples with violence in the wake of the February 1 coup.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the generals seized power, ousting civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and unleashing a wave of near-daily street protests calling for a return to democracy.

Security forces have sought to quell the unrest with a brutal crackdown on protests, with more than 750 civilians killed, according to a local monitoring group.

Fighting has also flared up between the military and Myanmar's numerous ethnic rebel armies, some of which have backed the protest movement and sheltered activists on the run from the junta.

A military spokesman said air bases in the central cities of Magway and Meiktila came under rocket fire early on Thursday morning, but no damage was done.

It is not clear who was behind the attacks, but the military has launched air strikes in recent weeks against the Karen National Union (KNU), one of the leading ethnic rebel armies.

The KNU, which holds territory along the border with Thailand, on Tuesday attacked and razed an army post, prompting the military to respond with air strikes.

The surge in clashes between the military and ethnic rebels has prompted some observers, including the UN, to warn that the country's crisis could spiral into a broader conflict.

Some 756 civilians have been killed and more than 4,500 arrested in the military's crackdown on protests, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a local monitoring group.

The military authorities -- which have labelled the AAPP an unlawful organisation -- say 258 protesters have been killed, along with 17 policemen and seven soldiers.

Suu Kyi, held under house arrest since February 1 and apparently kept unaware of the chaos raging in the country, has been hit with a raft of charges that could see her barred from politics for life.

Protest leaders are also facing legal action. One of them, Wai Moe Naing, has been charged with murder and treason, according to state media.

A protester was also sentenced to death by a military court Thursday over the robbery of a military officer and murder of a civilian, state media said. Nineteen others have already been given death sentences in the case.

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According to the Indonesian Defense Minister, Prabowo Subianto wanted to get several F-35s from the US. But Defense Secretary Mark Esper instead had the newest Fighting Falcon 'F-16 Viper' as an option.

F-16 Viper, Lockheed-Martin's best-seller for emerging air forces

Indonesia is one of those Southeast Asian countries affected by China's aggressive attitude. Subianto sees the purchase of the F-35 stealth fighter as a major move to advance Indonesia's air power. The Viper is an upgrade over the recent Fighting Falcons used by many air forces, reported Aerotime.

Read also: US Air Force Wants a 4.5 or 5th Gen close to F-35, F-21 for India

Why the interest in top-of-the-line U.S. fighter planes?

Sources indicate that the Indonesian Air Force (IAF) wants to upgrade its fighter fleet and refresh it significantly with challenges in the Indo-Pacific. So far, the IAF has a ragtag mix of older F-16 A/Bs, about 50 of them, Russian Su-27SKM and Su-30s. There are 10 in all. They, like many nations, are arming up due to the situation in South China Sea waters.

In 2018, the Indonesian Defense was considering buying 11 new Russian Su-35 Flanker E fighters, which costs $1.14 billion. There were financing problems that involved the export of raw materials, and the order was never proceeded with.

Compared to the US-made fighter planes, the ones made by Russia are way cheaper, and the Viper has more upgrades and modern equipment.

One of the major reasons for halting the purchase of Russian jets is it could have created difficulty with the United States, a major ally and trading partner. Indonesia does not want to be sanctioned by the US, based on Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). So, getting the advanced viper is an option.

Read next: US Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon: One of the Best Fighter Designs Built to Dominate

The possible approval of F-35As made by Lockheed Martin is a huge fallback to consider if the Russian deal failed. Indonesia believes its relationship with America is important now more than ever, with the international situation in Asia changing fast.

Still looking to upgrade its fighter inventory, in July 2020, Indonesia has made headlines that Subianto had sent Austrian Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner a letter. He wrote the Bundesheer was looking to retire 15 Eurofighter Typhoons, and there was interest in buying them.

But in July 2020, Indonesia's fighter shopping list broke the news again when it appeared that Subianto had sent a letter to Austrian Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner to express his interest in acquiring 15 Eurofighter Typhoons that the Bundesheer was on the lookout to retire. Reportedly, Tanner said that she was ready to move forward with the negotiations in September 2020. According to reports, the proposal is still being negotiated.

Sorry no F-35s just Vipers

The news came that the Indonesia Air Force will not have the F-35 Lightning II-A in its weapon inventory now or in the future. On November 2, the Indonesian Ambassador to the United States, Muhammad Lutfi, said that Washington couldn't make the sale in less than nine years. Demand for it is great, and other nations are lining up.

To help the Southeast Asian country, the F-16 Viper was suggested, or the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is also a possible deal. Both planes are considered excellent fighters even against 4++ gen. fighter planes. One of Indonesia's territories, the Natuna islands, could be threatened by Chinese claim jumpers close to the South China Sea.

Related article: F-36 Kingsnake Can Replace F-16 Jet: 5th Minus-Generation Without the Stealth

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Drones stage light show to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC

Ecns.cn) 13:51, April 29, 2021

Drones stage a light show in Chongqing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, April 27, 2021. (Photo/China News Service)

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
A care worker who was sacked over a post on her Facebook calling Muslims 'fanatical bigots' has won a case for unfair dismissal, but has been given no payout.

Linda Henderson was sacked after bosses at Ashgill Care Home in Glasgow discovered posts of her social media Muslims should 'go back to [their] own country'.

Other posts on her Facebook said there were 'no decent honest Muslims' and that the Scottish Government should focus on jobs for 'our own kind'.

Linda Henderson was sacked after bosses at Ashgill Care Home in Glasgow (pictured) discovered posts of her social media Muslims should 'go back to [their] own country'

She won her case for unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal after the care home refused to consider a letter from her son claiming he posted the comments

Her Facebook page named her employer, and she was found to have breached their social media policy.

Ms Henderson admitted to writing the post railing against immigration but denied posting the statement about Muslims, claiming it was written by her son.

But managers didn't believe the claims and Ms Henderson was later sacked.

She won her case for unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal after the care home refused to consider a letter from her son claiming he posted the comments.

Employment judge Robert King said Ms Henderson's 'culpable and blameworthy conduct in breaching the respondent's social media policy was the sole cause of her dismissal'.

He added it was 'just and equitable to reduce her award by 100 per cent'.

The tribunal heard that Ms Henderson began working at the care home in November 2015 as an activities co-ordinator.

In January 2019, her manager, Rosemary Jalloh, received an anonymous text which contained screenshots from her Facebook page dating back to September 2014.

One post stated: 'Alex Salmond wants MORE IMMIGRANTS?

'We can't feed and support our own kind as it is we don't NEED more immigrants we need jobs with decent wages for our OWN kind.'

The other read: 'Why are the 'SO CALLED DECENT MUSLIMS' allowing their own kind to cause and create terrorism?

'The answer is there are no DECENT HONEST MUSLIMS.

'They are all fanatical bigots and it's time we stood up to them and tell them THIS IS OUR COUNTRY.

'IF YOU DON'T LIKE OUR LAWS THEN LEAVE.

'GO BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY.'

Ms Jalloh saw Ms Henderson had named the care home as her employer on the site and found the posts breached the home's social media policy.

Ms Henderson appealed the decision and offered a letter from her son claiming he had written the post - but bosses refused to consider it as it had been presented too late.

Judge King found this was an error and the letter should have been considered.
A Kashmiri man receives the COVISHIELD vaccine for COVID-19 at a primary health center in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, Wednesday became the fourth nation to cross 200,000 deaths. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)

India set another global record in new virus cases Thursday, with another 375,000 people infected, as the country gears up to open its vaccination rollout to all adults Saturday.

It now has reported more than 18.3 million cases, behind only the United States. The health ministry also reported 3,645 deaths in the last 24-hour period, bringing India's total to 204,832, according to the health ministry. Experts believe both figures are an undercount, but it's unclear by how much.

India has set a global record for daily new cases for seven of the past eight days.

Starting Wednesday, all Indians 18 and older were allowed to register on a government app for vaccinations, but social media were flooded with complaints the app had crashed due to high use, and once it was working again, no appointments were available.

The mass vaccination drive for the nation of nearly 1.4 billion people began in January and has crawled along since. Nearly 10% of people have received one jab, but only around 1.5% have received both required doses. The latest effort to vaccinate those between ages 18 and 44 is expected to face problems, including whether states even have enough supplies.

On Wednesday, the health minister in hard-hit Maharashtra state promised free vaccines for that age group but clarified the state didn't have enough stock to start giving the vaccines on Saturday.

Beds lie inside an indoor stadium converted into COVID-19 treatment center for emergencies in the wake of the spike in the numbers of positive coronavirus cases in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, Wednesday became the fourth nation to cross 200,000 deaths. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)

A municipal official, second right, reprimands street vendors for not wearing face masks properly during a lockdown imposed due to rising number of COVID-19 cases in Bengaluru, India, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, Wednesday became the fourth nation to cross 200,000 deaths. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

The recent surge has been partly fed by new variants of the coronavirus, mass public gatherings such as political rallies and religious events that were allowed to continue, and relaxed attitudes on the risks fed by leaders touting victory over the virus.

With the country's healthcare system collapsing under the record surge, help has also come from overseas. On Wednesday, the United States sent the first of several COVID-19 medical shipments to India. Britain sent a shipment earlier this week while others like France, Germany, Ireland and Australia have also promised help.

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.
MBABANE - Africas biggest fizzy drinks bottling company Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is said to be considering plans to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) within the next 18 months.

In a recent announcement, the company said this decision was in line with the companys objective of focusing its resources on building consumer-loved brands and innovation. CCBAs African footprint stretches across South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Mozambique, Comoros, Mayotte, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho and here in Eswatini. In 2019, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) announced that it had acquired a 60 per cent share in the soft drinks business of Eswatini Beverages Limited. The deal was signed on October 5, 2018, and all the necessary regulatory approvals were obtained. The remaining 40 per cent of ECCB is owned by Tibiyo Taka Ngwane.

Shareholders

Listing on the JSE would mean the company would be publicly-owned, leaving its current shareholders, The Coca-Cola Company (66.5 per cent) and Gutsche Family Investments (33.5 per cent), losing absolute control.

It is not clear how much shareholding would be offered to the public yet. The company said shares would also be listed in Amsterdam Stock Exchange, as the primary listing exchange. The initial public offer will allow CCBA to operate as an independent, Africa-focused, South African-headquartered, managed and domiciled business. The plans underscore The Coca-Cola Companys continued and long-term belief and commitment to the African continent and the leadership of CCBA from South Africa, reads the announcement. The Coca-Cola Company as the ultimate parent company is listed on the New York Stock exchange. Coca-Cola sells products in more than 200 countries and territories.

CCBA, which is to be listed, is the eighth largest Coca-Cola bottling partner in the world by revenue, and the largest on the African continent. It accounts for 40 per cent of all Coca-Cola products sold in Africa by volume, and has over 16 000 employees in Africa. Bruno Pietracci, the president of The Coca-Cola Companys African operating unit, was quoted saying the company was seeing Africa as a key growth market and viewed a separate listing of CCBA as an opportunity to deliver a broad, supportive, long-term investor base for the ongoing development of the business.
Disneys 'Soul' wins Oscar; composer Jon Batiste honors God: Im thankful' for gift of music

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The 93rd Academy Awards aired Sunday on ABC and Disney walked away with the biggest prizes, including two awards for the Pixar Animation Studios' film Soul. The film's composer, Jon Batiste, publicly honored God in his acceptance speech.

Soul picked up two Oscars  one for Best Animated Film and another for Best Original Score. Jon Batiste, Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored the music for the Pixar feature. And Batiste delivered an emotional acceptance speech.

You know whats deep is God gave us 12 notes. Its the same 12 notes that Duke Ellington had, that Bach had, Nina Simone, he said at the prestigious awards show.

I want to point out that every gift is special. Every contribution with music that comes from the divine into the instruments, into the film, into the minds, hearts and souls of every person who hears it, the stories that happen when you listen to it and watch it and the stories you share, the moments you make, the memories you create. Man, its just so incredibly special.

Regularly seen conducting music on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," Batiste is known as a devout Christian who dedicates time every day to meditation and prayer.

He concluded his Oscar speech by saying, Its just so incredibly special were incredibly humbled and thankful.

Im thankful to God for those 12 notes! he reiterated.

Batiste is an accomplished pianist, composer and artistic director at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

He became the third black winner of the original score category, following in the footsteps of Prince in 1985 for Purple Rain and Herbie Hancock for Round Midnight in 1987.

Soul, directed by Oscar-winner Pete Docter (Up, Inside Out), features themes of what lies beyond this life and how people are created with individual purposes.

Joe is a middle-school band teacher whose life hasn't quite gone the way he expected. His true passion is jazz  and he's good. But when he travels to another realm to help someone find their passion, he soon discovers what it means to have soul, the synopsis reads.

Docter is a practicing Christian, but the film veers off of Christian theology.

The director once opened up about his faith during a Radix Magazine interview.

When you have a kid, you think, Oh, hell be watching this. I dont know how Id feel about that,' he said. As a Christian, having my son has made me even more amazed by the whole Creation when I watch him grow and start to connect things in his brain. It leaves me speechless.
ROME, APR 29 - A jeweller shot dead two robbers during an attempted hold-up of his shop in the northern town of Grinzane Cavour, near Cuneo, on Wednesday. The jeweller had been the victim of a violent robbery in 2015. A third bandit was detained overnight after going to the Santissima Annunziata hospital in the town Savigliano with a shot would to the leg. He remains in hospital and is being guarded by Carabinieri police. (ANSA).
[April 29, 2021]

KP Performance Antennas Debuts New ProLine Horn Adapter Kits

IRVINE, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- KP Performance Antennas, an Infinite Electronics brand and a manufacturer of wireless network antennas, just released new ProLine horn adapter kits to meet the immediate needs of fixed wireless operators.

KP's new ProLine horn adapter kits are specially designed for Cambium, Ubiquiti, Mimosa, and connectorized radios. These kits boast a durable housing to snap in the radio without additional taping or cables. The push-in adapter features patented, quick-connect waveguide technology that simplifies installation to the antenna.

These weatherproof adapter kits are designed to not only withstand harsh environments subject to powerful UV rays, rain, snow and ice, but to also remain highly reliable and ensure a longer product life. They have adjustable horizontal/vertical or 45 slant polarization and are compatible with popular 5GHz CPE radios from Cambium, Ubiquiti and Mimosa.

"These new horn adapters simplify installation and remove the need to waterproof connectors for radio-specific adapters. With adjustable polarization, these toolless, quick-connect adapters are versatile enough to support al applications," said Justin Pollock, Product Line Manager.







KP's new ProLine horn adapter kits are in-stock and can be ordered directly from the KP Performance Antennas website or any of KP's authorized distributors.

For inquiries, please call 1-855-276-5772.

About KP Performance Antennas:

With decades of in-the-field expertise as former WISP operators and Ph.D. antenna engineers, KP Performance Antennas helps wireless internet service providers maximize ROI with products engineered to exceed industry expectations by delivering superior throughput, greater service coverage, dependable performance and reduced maintenance costs, while also providing responsive service, expert technical support and same-day shipping. KP Performance Antennas is an Infinite Electronics brand.

About Infinite Electronics:

Based in Irvine, Calif., Infinite Electronics offers a broad range of components, assemblies and wired/wireless connectivity solutions, serving the aerospace/defense, industrial, government, consumer electronics, instrumentation, medical and telecommunications markets. Infinite's brands include Pasternack, Fairview Microwave, L-com, MilesTek, ShowMeCables, NavePoint, INC Installs, Integra Optics, PolyPhaser, Transtector, KP Performance Antennas, RadioWaves & Aiconics. Infinite Electronics serves a global engineering customer base with deep technical expertise and support, with one of the broadest inventories of products available for immediate shipment.

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KP Performance Antennas

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978-682-6936

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kp-performance-antennas-debuts-new-proline-horn-adapter-kits-301280395.html

SOURCE KP Performance Antennas
Who needs a book launch when you could have a ball? The pandemic might have derailed plans for their books releases last year, but Australias newest authors have now had a chance to put the deb in debutante.

The COVID-19 class of 2020 was introduced to literary society at a Sydney Writers Festival event on Sunday evening. We discover the stories behind the stories of six very different new authors.

Making an entrance: authors (left to right) Aminata Conteh-Biger, Sam Coley, Andrew Pippos, Ewa Ramsey, Vivian Pham, and Julie Janson prepare for Sundays Sydney Writers Festival Debutante Ball. Louie Douvis

The long-term project

Andrew Pippos, Luckys



There was a job change, a doctorate, the death of a loved one, a new baby  life happened and so did Luckys. Andrew Pippos, who is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney, worked on his debut novel, an epic that spans 80 years and set in the milieu of the Greek-Australian cafe, for eight years.

The world of the Greek-Australian cafe. supplied

I lived with it every day. It was like a friend to me and it was hard to let go of it at the end, Pippos, 43, says. It was a friend to me in tumultuous times in my life. It gave my life structure and meaning.

Pippos says the desire to write about the world of the Greek-Australian cafe fuelled the novel, providing the background for a story about how people, and a society, changed during the course of a lifetime. That was a world that fascinated me for personal reasons because from an early age that was the frame through which I saw the world and the wider community but also its a lost world now. I could see where it started and ended, so it seemed to be a good subject and a good setting for a novel.

It was hard for Pippos to let the manuscript go, and his agent Jane Novak and his publisher at Picador, Cate Blake, eventually had to pry the final draft away from him. Now hes onto a second book, a non-fiction work that tells the stories of his father and half-brother, who never met. The first book is special because it is the realisation of this dream, like when I was a kid I told myself that one day I would write a book then I grew up and I did it. Thats very strange even to think about now, he says. Nothing will compare to that. And also, he adds, the next book wont take quite so long to write.

A subject of trust

A ghostwriter was key to charting a refugees journey. supplied

Aminata Conteh-Biger, Rising Heart

It can be hard enough to tell your own story sometimes let alone to trust someone else with it. It took some time for Aminata Conteh-Biger, one of the first Sierra Leone refugees to be settled in Australia in 2000, to feel ready to publish a book about her experience being kidnapped, raped and imprisoned by rebel soldiers during a bloody civil war in the West African country. Conteh-Biger established the Aminata Maternal Foundation in 2014 to help women and children in her birth country and performed in the acclaimed theatre production The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe. She had been approached to write a book multiple times but wanted to wait until she became more of herself.

When she felt ready, Conteh-Biger wrote a book proposal with her New York agent, Catherine Drayton at InkWell Management, and signed with publisher Pan Macmillan after an auction. The 40-year-old says one of the factors that drew her to Pan Macmillan was the freedom to select a ghostwriter, which is how she met journalist and author Juliet Rieden. It was very important for me to choose a ghostwriter who allowed me the freedom to express myself. It had to be true to experience. She was open and willing and she didnt want to polish any of the ways I expressed myself. A lot of the time people feel like they are talking to me when they read the book. That was what she intentionally did and that was a pure gift, Conteh-Biger says.

The pair spent hours talking (Conteh-Biger says they never once cancelled a scheduled meeting) and travelled together to Sierra Leone and London to interview family members. Conteh-Biger ended the experience with a book - and a lifelong friend. We are family now, she says. I have huge respect for how she respected my story and my voice. I knew she would fight for my voice to be heard. You want that person in your life forever.

Laptop in the dark

Ewa Ramsey, The Morbids

They dont always admit it, but most writers care about the reviews of their novels. When Jessie Tus provocative review of The Morbids, published in this masthead, garnered attention it was an unexpected crash course in being caught in a social media storm for new novelist Ewa Ramsey.

It was a strange time for Ramsey who suddenly felt how claustrophobic the Australian literary world can be. People are allowed to not like my book and it comes with the territory - at least people are talking about it, Ramsey, 41, says. So many books dont get reviewed and you always take the risk that people arent going to like your work. The social media attention around it was the hardest bit. It was the first time I felt really exposed and vulnerable.

It felt alive from the beginning. Supplied

Her agent, Grace Heifetz at Left Bank Literary, told her the chaos would pass after a few days which proved prescient. Fear had held Ramsey back from writing a novel for many years until she decided to make a serious attempt, first writing short stories and joining a writing group.

The Morbids, centreing around a young woman who is convinced she is going to die, emerged from a short story. The first draft was written in a matter of weeks, largely in the early morning, with Ramsey in bed using a laptop in the dark. This one just felt very alive to me from the beginning. The characters felt very real. It did just take on this life of its own.

The would-be-author sent her manuscript out widely, hoping to get picked up from a publishers slush pile of unsolicited submissions. But it was Heifetz who signed her and brokered a deal with publisher Allen & Unwin where Ramsay ended up completing another 17 drafts of the novel. At every single stage I have always thought part of me thinks it is a giant prank and somebody is going to leap out and tell me no we are not going to publish it, Ramsey says.

The typewriter man

Disappointing to miss out on a launch with free wine. supplied

Sam Coley, State Highway One

Pretty drunk, is how Sam Coley would describe the writing process for his debut State Highway One. If the cheap sauvignon blanc helps the words come, its a typewriter that stops them from coming too fast.

Coley uses a Remington 11, from 1963. He first bought a $1.50 typewriter when he was living in London and couldnt afford a computer. He used it to write his university assignments - and still uses it for first drafts before moving onto a computer for further revision.

State Highway One, about siblings who embark on a road journey after their parents die, won Hachettes 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The prize included a 12-month mentorship with Hachettes then head of literary, Robert Watkins. Its any unpublished authors dream to have someone in the industry to send a manuscript to, who will pat you on the head and tell you youre doing a good job. You write in such a vacuum, having that confirmation, validation that youre on the right track and being able to check in with someone was very useful.

Coley, 35, dropped out of law school to finish the manuscript in seven months, writing four nights during the week and on the weekend. The pandemic proved challenging on two fronts - Coley works for a not-for-profit in the aged care sector so saw first-hand the havoc wreaked by coronavirus; and a publicity tour of New Zealand was cancelled, as was his book launch.

I think because by the time it came out I had been writing for five years and its a long time to spend. Since youre not going to make any money out of it, thats the real fun part of it, drinking wine on our publishers expense account, he jokes. It was disappointing. It was difficult to launch a book online and then still be inside your own house.

Writing at lunchtime

Vivian Pham, The Coconut Children

Who needs maths? Vivian Pham dumped the subject when she was in year 11 so she could have a free period twice a week to work on her novel. She wrote before and after school and lunch times were spent in the library so she could finish The Coconut Children, a coming-of-age novel set in western Sydney for which Pham, now 20, has just been named The Sydney Morning Herald and The Ages Best Young Australian Novelist of 2021.

I needed time to process the publication. supplied

When I was writing the first draft I was joyful, frenetic, anxious. I wanted to get as many words as I could on the page. Pham would write five versions of the same sentence before picking the best one. She wrote the first draft in a year, and spent the next two editing and re-writing. Its overwritten now, but before it was like a wilderness. I had to go in and tame certain parts of it, she says.

A small quantity of the novel was first printed at the end of 2018 by creative writing centre The Story Factory before a copy ended up in the hands of Zeitgeist Agencys Benython Oldfield who took it to auction where it was snapped up by Penguin Random House. While the coronavirus derailed an itinerary of public events, Pham says the silver lining was that it allowed her time to process the publication. I didnt feel I was ready then. I had no experience going in public or doing public speaking. I was quite relieved when it was all cancelled. I think during last year I have mainly been doing online events and book clubs which feel really personal, Pham says. Its good that it has really slowed things down. Its already been overwhelming.

Pham is finding writing her second novel, while she studies philosophy and creative writing at Western Sydney University, a tougher experience than her debut. I dont really know what came over me that year to write a novel because I am finding it so hard this year to try to write. I used to write 1000 to 2000 words a night and literally writing a sentence is painful - hopefully it gets better.

From a place of rage

Julie Janson, Benevolence

Working with Indigenous editors was transformative. supplied

Julie Janson grew up knowing her dad was Aboriginal, and her family was of Darug descent from the Hawkesbury region, but they never discussed it in her family. It was when Janson was employed as a history researcher at the University of Sydney that she sunk her teeth into the stories of Indigenous people in the region during the early years of colonial settlement in Australia.

Janson says she wanted Benevolence - a story of first contact told from the perspective of Darug woman Muraging - to be a post-colonial version of the Hawkesbury. It was her answer, she says, to Kate Grenvilles historical novel The Secret River, which was published in 2005 and proved controversial in its representation of Indigenous Australia.

I wrote it out of a kind of rage. Its my familys country, its our river. I didnt like to see it represented in a colonial way that glossed over the horror... It distressed me that a lot of people who read that wonderful novel, and Kate is a wonderful writer, then assumed that there was no Aboriginal people in western Sydney who descended from the original inhabitants, Janson says.

The novels title is an ironic undercutting of the idea of the virtuous colonial society. Janson had self-published two previous novels, but an early draft of Benevolence was picked up by Indigenous publisher Rachel Bin Salleh at Magabala Books. Janson says working with Indigenous editors and writers on the novel had proven helpful. I think it is a huge advantage. There are not many Aboriginal editors, usually they are writers themselves who take a paid job as an editor. But you dont have to explain the position of post-colonialism to them because they have grown up with it every day of their lives. You dont have to try to convince anyone of anything. Janson is now working on a crime novel with an Aboriginal woman the protagonist as an amateur detective but hopes to then turn her hand to a sequel for Benevolence.

The authors are guests of the Sydney Writers Festival.
Slashed tires on a yard cart are at the center of an escalating dispute over faculty layoffs at County College of Morris.

The union president whose job is among seven non-tenured teaching positions denied reappointment April 20 said he and four other faculty members  also not reappointed  were questioned by police the next day about alleged vandalism on April 16 at the Mount Olive home of college president Anthony J. Iacono.

James Capozzi, president of the Faculty Association of the County College of Morris, said neither he nor his colleagues had anything to do with it.

Were concerned that five of the people who spoke in defense of their jobs received a call or visit from police the following morning, Capozzi said, referencing the colleges Board of Trustees meeting at which the decision was finalized.

If the president is suffering vandalism at his home, thats terrible and that should not be the case, but none of our faculty would do this, Capozzi said.

All seven are slated to lose their jobs, effective July 1.

Contacted by NJ Advance Media, Mount Olive Police Sgt. Amy Clymer declined to discuss what she characterized as an ongoing potential criminal investigation.

Iacono did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The alleged incident at Iaconos home became public Tuesday when it was disclosed by the faculty union near the end of a lengthy press release on what it characterized as union busting at the college, a charge that has been denied by Iacono.

The seven faculty members denied reappointment last week  six of which, including Capozzi, were notified days in advance of the meeting while a seventh was told in December  include Geoffrey Peck, the unions grievance chair, and communications chair Robb Lauzon.

All of them spoke at the college board meeting on April 20, in opposition to the cuts, Capozzi said.

The following day, Capozzi said he and three others were phoned by police and one was visited by an officer. He said the the officer who spoke with him on the phone was circumspect.

He asked if I knew anything about an incident at the home of one of my colleagues, Tony Iacono, Capozzi said, recalling the conversation.

According to Capozzi, the officer declined to elaborate, so he requested and obtained an incident verification report  an abbreviated version of a full incident report  from Mount Olive police.

Capozzi read the brief report to NJ Advance Media, which listed the day of the alleged incident as April 16, the same day that Iacono notified all employees of the impending layoffs.

He said it included Iaconos name, address and a description  that the victim was reporting that the tires on his yard cart were slashed.

Someone gave the Mount Olive police the names of our faculty members, Capozzi said.

Its not a surprise. Frankly, its the type of intimidating, shakedown behavior weve experienced, Capozzi said.

Iacono, in an interview last week, said union membership was not a factor in the layoffs. He said the college could not grant additional commitments to lifetime employment at a time of financial uncertainty, driven in part by a 14% enrollment decline this spring.

The faculty union, though, has filed a complaint with the New Jersey Public Employee Relations Commission.

Capozzi said he and others are planning to ask the Morris County commissioners to get involved at their meeting on Wednesday night, but a spokesperson for the commissioners has said they have no authority to intercede in the colleges administrative operations.

The dispute at County College of Morris, located in Randolph, comes as the states 18 community colleges continue to contend with fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. While undergraduate enrollment at New Jerseys two-year and four-year colleges has decreased during the past year, the downward trend is especially pronounced at community colleges, where overall enrollment declined by 13% last fall.

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

Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com.
Published: 29 April 2021

Accrued pension entitlements stood at EUR 801 billion at the end of 2018

The accrued pension entitlements of Finlands statutory earnings-related pension scheme stood at EUR 800.5 billion at the end of 2018 with a real discount rate assumption of two per cent, or 343 per cent relative to gross domestic product. The pension entitlements of the earnings-related pension scheme of private branches were EUR 541.9 billion and those of public branches were EUR 258.7 billion.

Accrued pension entitlements at different discount rates at the end of 2018, EUR million

Supplementary pension table complements financial accounts

Pension entitlements refer to the amount of money that would be enough to cover the pensions accrued by that moment discounted to present value. The amount of pension entitlements in the earnings-related pension scheme is critical to the discount rate used in the calculations: with a real discount rate of one per cent the pension entitlements were EUR 965.1 billion or 413 per cent relative to gross domestic product and with a three per cent real discount rate they were EUR 676.9 billion or 290 per cent relative to gross domestic product. Finland's earnings-related pension scheme is partially funded. According to the financial accounts, the amount of earnings-related pension assets was EUR 196.4 billion at the end of 2018. The funding ratio, i.e. the ratio of pension assets and pension entitlements was 25 per cent. More about the topic in the Tieto&trendit blog (in Finnish).

In the revision of the European System of Accounts (ESA 2010), the statistics on pension liabilities were expanded with a supplementary pension table outside the core accounts that contains data on all pension liabilities included in social insurance. Data for 2018 were released concerning all EU countries on Eurostats pages . In Finlands case, new statistical data were the above-mentioned pension liabilities of the statutory earnings-related pension scheme that are not included in the financial accounts but that are included in the supplementary pension table. Data on the pension entitlements of the earnings-related pension scheme have been released in the Finnish Centre for Pensions reports Statutory pensions in Finland  Long-term projections .

In addition to the statutory earnings-related pension scheme, the pension table includes data on the pension entitlements of employment-related supplementary pension schemes that are already included in the pension entitlements of insurance corporations and voluntary pension funds in the financial accounts. The amount of pension entitlements of voluntary supplementary pension schemes describes the technical provisions. At the end of 2018 it stood at EUR 9.2 billion or four per cent relative to gross domestic product.

The supplementary pension table describes the pensions classified as social insurance. The Social Insurance Institutions national and guarantee pensions are classified as social assistance in national accounts and are thus not included in the supplementary pension table. The key difference between social insurance and social welfare is that in case of social welfare, pensions are paid to the pension recipients regardless of whether they participate in the system by paying pension contributions or not.

When calculating the accrued pension entitlements of the statutory earnings-related pension scheme the basis is a fictive situation where the insured are paid all pensions accrued by the moment examined but no new pension is accrued. The amount of pension entitlements does not describe the sustainability of the pension system. The concept depicts future pension expenditure, i.e. pensions paid to pension recipients whose amount is affected, in addition to earned income and the rate of accrual, by life expectancies and other assumptions in the calculation model. Incomes of the earnings-related pension scheme, i.e. pension contributions and the profits from the earnings-related pension assets are not included in the calculation.

In calculations stretching long into the future, background assumptions, like the discount rate and population and economic development, are of high significance for the results. The sensitivity of the results to the discount rate assumption is emphasised by releasing the results with the three real rates mentioned above.

Private and public branches

Finlands statutory earnings-related pension scheme in practice covers all work in both private and public branches. The earnings-related pension scheme is formed of several pension acts that together cover the various sectors of the economy. The pension liabilities based on the following pension acts are included in private branches: Employees Pensions Act (TyEL), Seamen's Pensions Act (MEL), Self-Employed Persons' Pensions Act (YEL), Farmers' Pensions Act (MYEL), supplementary pension provision under the Employees' Pensions Act (TEL-L, abolished at the end of 2016) and the pensions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The pension liabilities based on the following pension acts and rules are included in public branches: Act on public branches pensions (JuEL, excl. church pensions), pension rules of the employees and officials of the Bank of Finland and the Provincial Government of Aland. At the beginning of 2017, the following acts were combined with the act on public branches pensions: Central Government's Pensions Act (VaEL), Local Government's Pensions Act (KuEL), Evangelical Lutheran Church's Pensions Act (KiEL) and the pension rules for the Social Insurance Institution's employees. Pension liabilities based on VEKL (act on the compensation of pensions from central government funds for periods of caring for a child aged under three and during studies) are included in both private and public branches.

The supplementary pension table covers all supplementary pensions managed by voluntary pension funds and foundations, as well as group pension insurance offered by insurance corporations because they are considered to belong to social insurance. In the supplementary pension tables, individual pension insurance taken out by enterprises or private persons is excluded from the definition of social insurance.

Accrual calculations of the pension entitlements in the earnings-related pension scheme

The amount of pension liabilities is calculated with a long-term planning model in the Finnish Centre for Pensions. Information on the calculation model and the pension liability calculations released by the Finnish Centre for Pensions, i.e. accrued pension entitlements can be found in the Finnish Centre for Pensions reports Statutory pensions - long-term calculations , especially in Appendices 3 and 8. The latest report is Statutory pensions  long-term calculations 2019 . The difference compared to the calculation of the Finnish Centre for Pensions report is that the supplementary pension tables use the background assumptions agreed on in the European Unions AWG (Ageing Working Group) and recommended by Eurostat in order to improve the international comparability of the calculations.

The long-term planning model of the Finnish Centre for Pensions describes how the pension scheme works and its current regulations in detail. Future development of pensions is in the model calculated pension act specifically using age and sex-specific data on insured persons and the population of Finland.

When calculating pension entitlements, all pension entitlements accumulated by the time of examination and pensions under payment are considered. Future index increases and the effect of the life expectancy coefficient have also been considered in the amount of pension entitlements. Pension parts that are accrued based on future work or social security benefit periods are not included in accrued pension entitlements. The future part of disability pensions that will start later are not included in accrued pension entitlements.

Source: Financial accounts, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Anna Mustonen 029 551 3651, Heidi Lauttamaki 295 513 029, rahoitus.tilinpito@stat.fi

Head of Department in charge: Katri Kaaja

Publication in pdf-format (245.4 kB)

Updated 29.4.2021

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Financial accounts [e-publication].

ISSN=1458-8145. 13 2018. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 7.6.2021].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/rtp/2018/13/rtp_2018_13_2021-04-29_tie_001_en.html
They have been adapting to life as trio after Jesy Nelson quit the band in December to focus on her mental health.

Yet nothing has slowed down for the remaining members of Little Mix - Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall and Leigh-Anne Pinnock - who have been continuing to work on new music.

Speaking to Euphoria magazine, alongside which they posed for a striking shoot, the trio revealed that they've enjoyed adapting to their new normal, explaining that they often work through their issues in group therapy.

Terrific trio! Little Mix's Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall spoke to Euphoria about how they are adapting to life as a trio following Jesy Nelson's departure

Asked how they continued following Jesy's shock departure, Jade, 28, shared: 'It's still all systems go in Little Mix world. It's just learning to adapt. I think it's quite exciting.'

Discussing the success of their hit Sweet Melody in January, she continued: 'We got off to a good start as a three by having our No. 1 single in the UK.

'That was like, "Oh wow, this is a good sign, good omen, that this year is going to be good for us."'

Candid: Jesy revealed that she was leaving Little Mix after nine years and emotionally admitted that the pressure of being in the band for almost a decade had affected her mental health

Despite the shift in the group dynamic from a quartet to a trio, the group are stronger than ever, with Perrie, 27, explaining that they know they can rely on one another.

'We love going to therapy together,' she admitted. 'We also have each other, which is huge.

'We're each other's support system in a way because we're sisters and feel every emotion together. We can always lean on each other.'

Exciting times: Asked how they continued following Jesy's shock departure, Jade, 28, shared: 'It's still all systems go in Little Mix world. It's just learning to adapt. I think it's quite exciting'

Mantra: Leigh-Anne, 29, added that this year has really been about dumping anything toxic from her life and 'being around people that make you feel good'

Girl power: Despite the shift in the group dynamic from a quartet to a trio, the group are stronger than ever, with Perrie, 27, explaining that they know they can rely on one another'

The group have also been protecting their mental health by cutting out toxicity, starting with social media.

Jade revealed: 'If I had any advice for people, it would be to only follow accounts that make you feel good about yourself. Or ones that don't make you feel like you're not enough or compare yourself to what that person's doing.'

Leigh-Anne, 29, added that this year has really been about dumping anything toxic from her life and 'being around people that make you feel good and that bring something positive into your life.'

Listen out: The trio are now looking forward to the release of their first single without Jesy, 29, a remix of their hit single Confetti, which will feature American rapper Saweetie

The trio are now looking forward to the release of their first single without Jesy, 29, a remix of their hit single Confetti, which will feature American rapper Saweetie.

The group sent fans wild with the announcement earlier this month, as they tweeted: 'The news you've all been waiting for... our brand new single Confetti featuring @saweetie is out 30/04.'

Jesy revealed that she was leaving Little Mix after nine years and emotionally admitted that the pressure of being in the band for almost a decade had affected her mental health.

Listen out: The trio are now looking forward to the release of their first single without Jesy, 29, a remix of their hit single Confetti, which will feature American rapper Saweetie

Her emotional statement online read: 'To all my Mixers, the past nine years in Little Mix has been the most incredible time of my life.

'We have achieved things I never thought possible. From winning our first Brit Award to our sold out shows at the O2.

'Making friends and fans all over the world I can't thank you all enough from the bottom of my heart for making me feel like the luckiest girl in the world. You have always been there to support and encourage me and I will never ever forget it.

'The truth is recently being in the band has really taken a toll on my mental health. I find the constant pressure of being in a girl group and living up to expectations very hard.

The famous four: The single marks the band's first official record since Jesy announced she was leaving the group in December to focus on herself (pictured in 2019)

'There comes a time in life when we need to reinvest in taking care of ourselves rather than focusing on making other people happy, and I feel like now is the time to begin that process.

'So after much consideration and with a heavy heart, I'm announcing I'm leaving Little Mix.'

The Essex native went on to express her gratitude towards her supporters and co-members as she added: 'I need to spend some time with the people I love, doing things that make me happy.

'I'm ready to embark on a new chapter in my life - I'm not sure what it's going to look like right now, but I hope you'll still be there to support.

'I want to say thank you to everyone involved in our journey. All the hard work and dedication that went into making us a success.

Official statement: In December Jesy said she was leaving Little Mix after nine years as she insisted that she wished the best for her bandmates in their future endeavors

'To every single fan who came to see us in concert, who listened to our songs and sung their hearts out, sent me messages and supported me along the way I want you to know I love you all so much and I could never have done this without you and I appreciate it endlessly.

'Most of all I want to say thank you to Jade, Perrie and Leigh-Anne for creating some of the most amazing memories I'll never forget. I hope that you'll continue to fulfil all of your dreams and keep on making music that people love. Love Jesy x.'

Over the past few months, Jesy has dropped several hints she is secretly working on new music by sharing snippets from inside a recording studio on social media.

It has been reported the solo artist is now at the centre of a bidding war between record labels worth 2million as they try to sign her.
Mumbai, April 29 : Two days after US President Joe Biden's pledge to help, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Covid-19 emergency aid materials shall start landing in New Delhi from Thursday onwards, an official spokesperson said here on Thursday.

This would include 10,00,000 Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs), the same used by the White House, to provide reliable results in less than 15 minutes to identity the virus and prevent community spread.

The first consignment on the world's largest military aircraft would bring 440 oxygen cylinders and regulators donated by the State of California, plus 9,60,000 Rapid Diagnostic Tests and 100,000 N95 masks for the India's frontline healthcare teams.

"The US has stood shoulder to shoulder with India for more than 70 years and will continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic together. Just as India sent assistance to the United States when U.S. hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, we are now helping India during its time of need," said the spokesperson.

The latest announcement builds on USAID's earlier assistance of over $23 million which directly reached 10 million Indians, and it now delivering supplies worth over $100 million in the next few days to this country.

Among the materials being sent are 1,100 refillable oxygen cylinders with more to arrive later for hospitals, 1,700 medical oxygen concentrators for 320 primary healthcare facilities, Oxygen Generation Units which can support upto 20 patients each, while the US Center for Disease Control & Prevention has also procured locally oxygen cylinders and will deliver them to local hospitals, besides support of US experts.

The USAID will also send 15 million N95 masks for patients and healthcare professionals, divert its own order of AstraZeneca vaccines manufacturing supplies to India to enable manufacture over 20 million doses of Covid-19 jabs here, and an initial tranche of 20,000 Remdesivir doses for patients here.

The US has already worked closely with India across 20 states and Union Territories partnering with more than 1,000 healthcare facilities, training 14,000-plus people at different levels, including laboratory, surveillance and epidemiology, emergency preparedness, bioinformatics, infection prevention and control, vaccine rollout and risk communication, besides keeping over 2,13,000 frontline workers safety.

The USAID-UNICEF also launched joint messaging on Covid prevention that reached more than 84 million people supplied 200 modern ventilators to 29 hospitals in 15 states for the critically ill patients, etc.

In the past 20 years, the US foreign assistance to India has exceeded $2.80 billion, including more than 1.40 billion for healthcare alone through various agencies like USAID, HHS, CDC, FDA and NIH, aimed at the wellbeing of the most vulnerable communities in the country.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
COLUMBUS, Miss. (WTVA) - The Columbus Fire Department opened a brand new station on Airline Road Wednesday morning.

Representatives of the city showed up to assist in the ribbon cutting of the new Fire Station Four.



CFD received new trucks along with the new station on April 28, 2021. CFD received new trucks along with the new station on April 28, 2021.

This new station allows the new fire trucks to park inside the building.

It also will hold all fire administration under one roof.

Previously, all administration workers were spread among three different stations.

Columbus Fire Chief Martin Andrews said adding this location to the department will be life saving.

Its so important that the community will now know to have this station here at this location to better serve, to better get to response areas a lot faster," said Andrews. "With that said, helping saving lives and property.

Andrews added the city built the station on donated land.
A Border Patrol Union Chief was reported in saying that "nobody has done more to enrich organized crime than President Biden."

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, according to the Daily Caller, blamed President Joe Biden for placing women and children in harm's way at the Texas border and for enhancing organized crime.

Judd was interviewed by Fox News on the status of the border and revealed that Biden's absence there indicates he does not know how to address the situation where he "is clearly failing" at.

"When you look at the first 100 days of this administration as evidenced by the numbers, nobody has done worse on border security than President Biden. Nobody has put women and children under more danger than President Biden has," the Daily Caller quoted Judd in saying during the interview.

"Nobody has done more to enrich organized crime than President Biden," he stressed.

Judd, who has served in the border for 24 years, raised that the situation there "is something that we have never seen before." Customs and Border Protection data show for February to March 2021 that a surge of 172,331 southwest border encounters were recorded. While Fox News' America Newsroom recently reported that $11M worth of drugs were seized at the border.

The Daily Caller added that Judd hoped that Americans do realize that Biden's Administration is failing, especially in its border policies.

In the interview, Judd raised that the pandemic is an "easy" scapegoat for the president's absence in the border but that could easily be remedied for someone who actually "have answers" or "have solutions" to the problem. Judd stressed that Biden has none.

Judd also hit on Harris for refusing "to do her job." He said the border security is such an "important" matter to the American public yet Harris has not gone herself there stating plans are on the way in June yet is able to "travel across the world."

The Daily Caller explained that Harris avoided questions posed by a reporter on Sunday over the southern border and her potential visit there. The Daily Caller cited a report by Fox News that stated a virtual meeting will be held on May 7 by Harris and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on the matter.

In addition, Judd also pointed out during his interview that former President Donald Trump was able to visit the border several times during the pandemic, but clarified that he was non-partisan. He said Trump was able to manage the border effectively than the current administration. He said Trump's wall is "the best way to end the humanitarian crisis on our southern border."

Judd was commended by Trump three years ago for supporting his immigration plan, which included the wall construction and cleaning up "legal and other procedures at the border" for safety and security reasons.

Speaking of safety and security procedures in the border, the National Border Patrol Council released a statement on Wednesday on the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act sponsored by Texas Senator John Cornyn, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, and Texas Representative Tony Gonzales.

NBPC said the bill would be most helpful in targeting "resources to those of us directly responding to the increase of migrants, so that we can do better our jobs and keep American border communities safe." NBPC thanked the legislators who have "firsthand knowledge of the current immigration crisis."
Support from people across County Laois has enabled an ambitious tree planting campaign to reach its one million milestone, this month.

Scores of people from Laois supported Self Help Africas One Million Trees campaign, enabling the Irish development charity to plant a million new trees in sub-Saharan Africa, and a further 100,000 native trees at home in Ireland, over the past year.

Close to 5,000 people across Ireland have backed the initiative, while tens of thousands of shoppers supported the campaign by purchasing One Million Trees branded Glenisk organic BIO yogurt.

A donation of one euro was made to the tree planting effort for every purchase of One Million Trees Glenisk yogurt sold during in-store promotions held in collaboration with SuperValu stores across the country, during 2020.

In late March the one-millionth tree was planted on community-managed land close to Lake Ziway, Ethiopia, at a location where over 400,000 tree seedlings were planted since Spring, 2020.

Elsewhere, the campaign planted hundreds of trees on family farms, on community land and on publicly owned lands in Malawi, Kenya, Uganda and Burkina Faso.

Working on collaboration with local partners Trees on the Land, 18,000 native Irish tree seedlings were planted by the campaign alongside a link road, in a childrens playground, as part of a Tidy Towns project and on private lands in Laois, Kilkenny, Cork and Tyrone, while a large-scale planting of 100,000 was starting this month as part of a 100-acre native tree reforesting project in Offaly.

The One Million Trees campaign was designed to provide people with the opportunity to link local with global action to combat climate change.

A collaboration between Self Help Africa and Glenisk, it also received the backing of the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO), and of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA).

This campaign provided us with an opportunity to raise funds for vital tree planting activities, and also highlight the huge impact that global warming is having on rural poor communities in Africa, where many of the people who are least responsible for climate change are feeling its worst effects, Self Help Africa CEO Ray Jordan said.

Despite the challenges faced as a result of the coronavirus pandemic the campaign had captured the public imagination, he said.

People are really concerned about the impact that climate change is having, and when they saw that by planting trees in Africa they were also contributing to the lives and incomes of rural poor families, they saw it as a win-win opportunity, he added.

One Million Trees was so successful that Self Help Africa will mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22nd by launching Another One Million Trees, once more in collaboration with Glenisk.

During the campaign, contributions of just 5 will enable Self Help Africa to plant 10 trees in sub-Saharan Africa and one native tree at home in Ireland. Information on the campaign is available at: www.selfhelpafrica.org/

onemilliontrees
The publicity department for the Grand Circuit has sent its weekly recap and preview of racing on the Grand Circuit.

This Week: Dexter Cup final and Lady Suffolk, Freehold Raceway, Freehold, N.J., and Graduate Series first leg, The Meadowlands, East Rutherford, N.J.

Schedule of events: The Grand Circuit at Freehold on Saturday (May 1) features the $115,583 Dexter Cup final for three-year-old open trotters and two $36,057 divisions in the Lady Suffolk for three-year-old filly trotters.

Also on Saturday, The Meadowlands has a pair of $50,000 first leg divisions in the Graduate Series for four-year-old open pacers.

Last Time: Rather than accept a bye and guarantee himself two Dexter Cup final starters, trainer Ake Svanstedt decided to let Incommunicado compete in Saturdays (April 24) Dexter Cup elimination at Freehold Raceway. The gamble paid off, as Incommunicado cruised under the wire 2-3/4 lengths in front and established himself as one of the favourites for this weeks Dexter Cup final.

When the entry box closed, 10 horses were entered for the Dexter Cup. Svanstedt was offered two byes with his pair of Ambassador Hanover and Incommunicado, and while he accepted the bye with the former, he decided to race Incommunicado. The Massachusetts Sire Stakes champion was made the 8-5 second choice in the field of eight.

The complexion of the race changed dramatically in the opening eighth, when favoured Ethan T Hanover and Roysons Punch both went off stride. Ethan T Hanover was pulled up by Todd McCarthy, while Roysons Punch got back trotting. Incommunicado stayed trotting and was rated in fourth place in the early stages.

Just before the half-mile, Yannick Gingras pulled Incommunicado off the pylons and moved him first over after early leader Share The Wealth. The leader put up a good fight, but Incommunicado took charge entering the stretch and drew off. He trotted the mile in 1:57, a sharp time for his first pari-mutuel race of the year.

Incommunicado is owned by Knutsson Trotting, Little E, Arthur Geiger and David Stolz. Hes now won five times from 11 career starts, with earnings of $224,492. Along with his stablemate Ambassador Hanover, he gives Svanstedt a formidable pair for this weeks final.

Complete recaps of all the races are available at the Grand Circuit website.

Grand Circuit Standings: In 2021, the Grand Circuit leaders in three categories (driver, trainer and owner) will once again be tracked on a points system (20-10-5 for the top three finishers in divisions/finals and 10-5-2 for the top three finishers in eliminations/legs). Winbak Farms is the sponsor for the 2021 Grand Circuit awards.

Here are the leaders (through the races on April 24, 2021):

Drivers: 1. Yannick Gingras  70; 2. Andrew McCarthy  69; 3. George Brennan  64; 4. Austin Siegelman  61; 5. Todd McCarthy  60.

Trainers: 1. Ron Burke  144; 2. Todd Buter  55; 3. Noel Daley  47; 4 (tie). Jeff Cullipher  40; 4 (tie). Sheena McElhiney  40.

Owners: 1. Renee Bercury  50; 2 (tie). Burke Racing Stable  41.1; 2 (tie). Weaver Bruscemi  41.1; 4. Jesmeral Stable  40; 5. Eric Prevost  38.

Looking ahead: Grand Circuit action will take place next week at Scioto Downs, Yonkers Raceway and The Meadowlands. Scioto will host the Charlie Hill Memorial for open trotters, Yonkers features the Reynolds Memorial for three-year-old colt and filly pacers, and The Meadowlands will offer the first leg of the Miss Versatility Series for older trotting mares.

(Grand Circuit)
Amstrad All Season Air Conditioners aim to solve the weather woes of all Indians with just one appliance. A hot and cold AC works in all weathers by offering instant cooling in summers and warmth during winters, even dehumidifying in the rains.

For the first time at Mumbai Airport, live weather updates, sponsored by Amstrad, built brand synergies with the solution the brand offers. Amstrad All Season Air Conditioners now provide up to the minute updates of weather conditions for all departing passengers via a network of 56 screens spread throughout the passenger journey.

This sponsored update displays the weather at Mumbai to all returning passengers flying out from Mumbai Airport. The campaign also allows for outgoing travellers to think about the temperature in their own hometown. This, coupled with the high dwell time at the airport, the swiftly approaching summer, and people spending more time indoors, would, I imagine, make people ponder over which air conditioner to invest in. This campaign from Amstrad is marketing at its finest!, says Sumit Chadha, Business Head, Mumbai Airport - Times OOH.

Times OOH has also developed this live feed capability at the Mumbai Metro and Indore and Coimbatore Airports.
Ive been on the Riverwalk maybe a handful of times. Children from the South Side are rarely able to visit the Riverwalk, said Moore, whose ward includes parts of Gresham, West Chatham, Englewood and Marquette Park. And the planned site for the park by the Spire skyscraper site downtown is not a location that really helps bring this city together, either. But children do travel on that road, and this name would help them see the possibilities. Im trying to bring this city together, and that road does that.
Yanimed, the Malta-based producer of nitrile gloves and protective masks, has just entered into a joint venture with Chinese nitrile gloves manufacturer Guangdong Guyun Medical Technology Co., ltd. This collaboration will lead to the formation of the new brand Yanimed  YaniPure, exclusively for the US market.



NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Yanimed announced today that it has entered into a joint venture with Guangdong Guyun Medical Technology Co., ltd, a Chinese manufacturing company dedicated to R&D, production, and manufacturing of disposable medical products including nitrile gloves. A Malta-based brand owned and operated by Blokkx Ltd., Yanimed is a noted manufacturer of latex-free nitrile gloves that offer best comfort and effective allergy protection. By joining hands with Guyun Medical, Blokkx Ltd. has taken a firm step towards emerging as a potent force in the medical consumable industry in the US.



Nitrile gloves from Yanimed are latex-free examination gloves that are well tolerated by the skin. Because of its low-irritant nature, the product is suitable for allergy sufferers and individuals with sensitive skin. The companys range of products also includes Yanisoft nitrile gloves with excellent skin compatibility.

The JV between Yanimed and Guyun Medical comprises of a deal for the creation of Yanimed  YaniPure, a new brand that will operate exclusively in the US market. As a result of this alliance, the two organizations will work in tandem to build a distribution network serving hospital groups in the US, providing high quality gloves now and post pandemic. The two companies will also form a strategic partnership, making Yanimed the US representative for Guyun Medical.

Yanimed is pleased to expand its long-term relationship with Guyun Medical as we continue our efforts to become a key player in the medical consumable industry in the United States," said Sergio Raygada, CEO US Operations, Yanimed. "This joint venture will allow us to accelerate our expansion plan and grow our brand value.

Guyun Medical is a high-demand supplier in the American and European markets. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company has been constantly engaged in efforts to increase its production capacity. Guyun Medical already has more than 100 international certifications including EN455, EN374, CE, ISO9001, and is on the verge of receiving its 510k certification from the FDA.

As a leader in medical consumable industry, we are very excited to extend our production footprint and expand our reach in the US. Combination of the strengths of Yanimed and Guyun Medical in our world-class production facility creates a win-win situation for both. We are confident that Yanimed/Guyun soon become a strong player in the post pandemic US market, said Jack Hoo, the owner of Guyun Medical.

To find out more about Yanimed, please visit https://yanimed.com/

About Yanimed: Yanimed is a brand of Blokkx Ltd. based in Malta. Under the brand-name Yanimed, the company produces protective articles like nitrile gloves and protective masks. All its products are manufactured in selected factories in Asia, mainly from Vietnam, China, and Malaysia that meet stringent quality standards.

About Guyun Medical: Guyun Medical is a Chinese manufacturing company committed to R&D, production, and manufacturing of disposable medical products. The company has production lines for nitrile examination gloves, and its products have high demand in the US and Europe. Guyun Medical disposable nitrile medical examination glove daily production capability reach 40,000,000pieces per day, Guyun Medical also the partner-factory of medical PPE products in USA, France, Italy. To find out more about Guyun Medical please visit www.guyunmedical.com.

Contact:

Website: https://yanimed.com/

Email: info@yanimed.com

Phone: + 44 330 02 7 02 07

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0aff9cb5-ada6-487e-b81d-4d9d6ea3b53f
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Amazon's book recommendation algorithms that help customers discover new titles may have a dark side.

A new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says these algorithms steer people to books about conspiracy theories and extremism, sometimes introducing them to the work of conspiracy theorists who've been banned by other online platforms.

People browsing a book about one conspiracy on Amazon are likely to get suggestions for more books on that topic as well as books about other conspiracy theories about everything from QAnon to COVID-19 vaccine, the report found.

Other features, such as auto-complete in the search bar and content suggestions for the author or similar authors can also lead users down an extremist rabbit hole, said Chloe Colliver, head of digital policy and strategy at ISD.

The pattern is similar to problems observed on other major online platforms like Google's YouTube, whose algorithms have been found to direct users to extreme content, sucking them into violent ideologies.

"Given that vaccinations and COVID-19 issues are currently top of mind for many, the potential for recommendation of false or extremist information about these topics is certainly concerning," Colliver told U.S. TODAY. "The type of false information that was found to be recommended by Amazon's algorithms has been shown across the globe to contribute to real-world harms."

Colliver says the scale of the threat is hard to gauge without more transparency from Amazon which dominates the bookselling business.

"However, these recommendation systems are a central cog of Amazon's business model, so their potential negative or dangerous effects need to be better understood both by the company itself and by independent researchers and authorities," she said. "Given how vital the recommendation systems are to Amazon's sales functions, it is safe to assume that recommendations of dangerous extremist or conspiracy content could be extremely pervasive."

In a statement to U.S. TODAY, Amazon said: "We take concerns from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue seriously and are committed to providing a positive experience for our customers. Similar to other stores that sell books, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints and our shopping and discovery tools are not designed to generate results oriented to a specific point of view."

Social media and other technology companies have taken increasingly aggressive steps to purge recommendations for disinformation or extremist content that poses a public threat.

On book pages, Amazon recommends other books to users in several ways including "customers who bought this item also bought," "customers who viewed this item also viewed," and "what other items do customers view after viewing this item?" Paid ads sometimes appear as well to promote "products related to this item."

"For most users, these recommendations are at best a useful way of finding new content they are interested in, and at worst an irritation to be harmlessly ignored," the report said. "For conspiracy theorists, white nationalists and users perhaps only curiously dipping their toes in the murky waters of extremist or conspiratorial content, however, these recommendations could serve as a gateway into a broader universe of conspiracy theories and misinformation, or to increasingly radical far-right and white nationalist content."

For examples, people browsing a book claiming vaccines are unsafe are nudged towards other anti-vaccine titles and to COVID-19 conspiracy content including a book by Judy Mikovits, maker of the widely debunked "Plandemic" video who alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, had manufactured the virus that causes COVID-19 and shipped it to China.

"A bookstore does not have to host content that it deems to be outside the interests of most of its customers. It is similarly within Amazon's power to set clear guidelines on what kind of content it is and isn't comfortable profiting from," Colliver said. "Even without removing this content altogether, Amazon would be able to reduce the accessibility of potentially dangerous content on its site."

2021 USA Today. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A Peachland man's vaccination passport, dating back to the '60s, has been updated to show he's been inoculated against COVID-19. Canadians should expect new-style vaccination passports in the months ahead, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week.
By Lee Hyo-jin



Lee Pil-soo, vice president of the Korea Medical Association (KMA), the largest doctors' group in the country, has been elected as the new president of the association.



His three-year term as the 41st president will begin on May 1, replacing incumbent head Choi Dae-zip.





Lee Pil-soo, 41st president of the Korea Medical Association / Courtesy of Korea Medical Association
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Appointment

29 April 2021

The St. Regis Bal Harbour, the Forbes Five-Star, AAA Five Diamond resort that was recently named a top resort in Florida by Conde Nast Traveler, is proud to introduce award-winning Jessica Sanchez as the luxury resort's new Director of Spa.

A successful professional with over five years of experience directing luxury hotel spas, Sanchez has already established herself as a force in the wellness industry. She joins the St. Regis Bal Harbour team following her position as Assistant Spa Director at The Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove where she earned the 2018 Leader of the Year distinction, the 2017 Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association (GMBHA) Inn Key - Spa Hospitality Leadership Award, and the 2016 Five-Star Employee of the Year. Her pronounced ability to conceptualize initiatives that enhance the guest experience has allowed her to transform the spas she's worked with and create an environment that allows guests to relax and rejuvenate.

Sanchez will oversee all spa operations for Remede Spa known for its revitalizing day spa treatments that indulge mind, body and spirit. Sanchez has already hit the ground running by implementing a new diamond facial to celebrate the village of Bal Harbour's 75th diamond anniversary. The newly added wellness experience will combat premature aging and maintain plump, hydrated, and wrinkle-free skin. The facial will include a 25% Glycolic peel combined with a White Diamond Glowing Mask from Natura Bisse. Sanchez will also execute a new spa experience for St.Regis guests and non-guests.

Sanchez will be responsible for managing and supervising all areas of the spa, including its programs, services, hours of operation, facilities and staff. Sanchez will also coordinate the delivery of spa services, including salon, skincare, fitness and wellness, massage, program coordinating, reservations, reception desk and locker room areas. As a department head, she also directs and works with the management team to successfully execute all spa operations. Sanchez's goal as director of spa is to improve guest and employee satisfaction and maximize the financial performance of the department.
ROME, APR 29 - Ryanair on Thursday appealed to the European Court of Justice against direct funding of around 200 million euros from the Italian government to Alitalia to compensate for the damage done by the COVID emregency. The Irish budget airline says the European Commission is abusing is powers in authorizing fresh support for Alitalia while the airline is the subject of a probe into possible state aid over two bridge loans worth some 1.3 billion euros in total. Alitalia is being relaunched as a new airline called Ita. (ANSA).
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenian HDP deputy Garo Paylan of the Turkish parliament filed a criminal complaint against Turkish politician Umit Ozdag.

The Turkish lawmaker of Armenian descent representing the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) delivered his annual Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day statement on April 24. Shortly afterwards, Umit Ozdag threatened him.

In his April 24 statement, Paylan criticized the naming of streets in Turkey after Talaat Pasha, a political leader of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century who was the architect of the Armenian Genocide.

We are walking on streets 106 years later named after Talaat Pasha, the architect of the genocide. We send our kids to schools named Talaat Pasha. We are living in a Turkey like what Germany would have been if there had been streets and schools named after Hitler in Germany today, tweeted Paylan.

This statement seemingly infuriated the nationalist MP Ozdag, who tweeted: Shameless, provocative man. If you are not very pleased [about living here], go to hell..."

"When the time comes, you will and should also go through a Talaat Pasha experience," Ozdag concluded.

Paylan filed the complaint under the penal code articles of incitement of enmity , insults and threats and incitement to commit a crime.

"Calls for violence against minorities open the way to hate crimes. Discrimination and hate speech should not go unpunished," Paylan said in Ankara on Wednesday.

The Commission against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association, a Turkish organization, also filed a complaint against Ozdag.

Editing by Stepan Kocharyan
A Paris mayor has backed military chiefs who threatened to seize control of the country to fight radical Islam and prevent the 'disintegration' of France.

Eighteen serving officers who were among the hundreds of retired soldiers who signed the open letter to Emmanuel Macron are to be fired, the country's armed forces chief confirmed today.

But despite widespread condemnation, politicians on the right like Rachida Dati, mayor of the 7th arrondissement, continue to throw their support behind the signatories, who included 20 retired generals.

'What is written in this letter is a reality,' Ms Dati told France Info radio today. 'When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a constant and high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities ... we cannot say that the country is doing well.'

Rachida Dati, mayor of Paris' 7th arrondissement, said that the concerns expressed in the letter to Emmanuel Macron were valid. Ms Dati told France Info radio today: 'When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a very regular and very high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities ... we cannot say that the country is doing well'

Army Corps General Christian Piquemal, 80, was the lead signatory of the 20 retired generals who backed the letter. He is pictured at an anti-Islam rally in Calais in 2016.

Division General Emmanuel De Richoufftz during his visit to the central Ivory Coast area of Sakassou August 29, 2003. Gen. De Richoufftz was also among the 20 generals to sign the letter.

Rachida Dati cut her teeth as an adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy before she was appointed his justice minister in 2007 (they are pictured together in Paris in August, 2007)

The 55-year-old was raised in a devoutly Muslim household by an Algerian mother and father. She has made a name for herself as a politician who takes no prisoners, infuriating left-wingers with her law-and-order crackdown as justice minister, and brushing off critics when she decided to take just three days maternity leave after the birth of her daughter.

She said that 'the police have become a target for terrorists.'

A policewoman was stabbed to death last week in Rambouillet southwest of Paris.

Anti-terror officers said the suspect, a Tunisian national, had been watching jihadist propaganda videos prior to the attack.

Ms Dati continued: 'I am afraid that the police will break down one day.'

Referencing the military officers' letter, she added: 'And if they crack, we go well beyond the disintegration of society.'

The 55-year-old served as justice minister under Nicolas Sarkozy from 2007 to 2009.

Raised in a devoutly Muslim household by Algerian immigrant parents, Ms Dati is no stranger to ruffling feathers and has been tipped to run against Macron in 2022.

She is renowned for taking no prisoners, infuriating left-wingers with her law-and-order crackdown as justice minister, and brushing off critics when she decided to take just three days maternity leave after the birth of her daughter.

Asked in September what her plans were over the next two years, Ms Dati told The Times: 'To win the 2022 presidential election.'

Her intervention today comes as the Chief of France's Defence Staff General Francois Lecointre today condemned those who signed the letter, calling it 'absolutely revolting.'

'I hope that their automatic retirement will be decided,' Gen. Lecointre told the Parisien newspaper.

'This is an exceptional procedure, which we are launching immediately at the request of the Minister of the Armed Forces.

'These general officers will each pass before a higher military council. At the end of this procedure, it is the President of the Republic who signs a decree expelling them'.

The 18 serving officers joined thousands of retired ones who had signed an open letter warning that France was heading for 'civil war' because of radical Islam.

It said action was needed to fight the 'suburban hordes' - a reference to the predominantly immigrant population of the housing estates which surround French cities  or else there would be 'thousands of deaths'.

President Macron's government strongly condemned the letter, which was published on the 60th anniversary of a failed coup d'etat by generals opposed to France granting independence to Algeria, its former North African colony.

Prime Minister Jean Castex said the letter by military figures was 'against all of our republican principles, of honour and the duty of the army'.

And Florence Parly, the Defence Minister, said: 'This is unacceptable. There will be consequences, naturally.

The soldiers behind the letter were all said to be anti-immigration activists with racist views and strong ties to the far-Right Rassemblement National (National Rally).

The lead signatory was Christian Piquemal, 80, who commanded the French Foreign Legion before losing his privileges as a retired officer after being arrested while taking part in an anti-Islam demonstration in 2016.

Chief of France's Defence Staff General Francois Lecointre today condemned those who signed the letter, calling it 'absolutely revolting' (Lecointre is pictured standing beside Emmanuel Macron in a car during Bastille Day ceremonies in July last year)

Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National leader, welcomed the letter, which was first published last week in Valeurs Actuelle (Current Values) magazine.

'I invite you to join us in taking part in the coming battle, which is the battle of France,' Le Pen wrote in a response to the letter.

Le Pen, who would become head of France's Armed Forces if she replaces Macron as president next year, was widely criticised by her opponents on both the Left and Right for her words.

France's current Fifth Republic has been threatened by military coups in the past, notably by far-Right activists who were eventually defeated as they tried to keep Algeria in the early 1960s.

There are some five million Muslims in France - the largest community of its kind in western Europe - and many have backgrounds in former colonies, such as Algeria.

The Rassemblement National used to be called the Front National (National Front), and was founded by Ms Le Pen's father, the convicted anti-Semite, racist and Islamophobe, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

No-nonsense Paris mayor raised in a devoutly Muslim household who took just three days maternity leave The mayor of Paris' affluent 7th arrondissement since 2008, Rachida Dati has made a name for herself as a politician who takes no prisoners. The 55-year-old infuriated left-wingers with her tough law-and-order crackdown as justice minister in Nicolas Sarkozy's government from 2007 to 2009. She took no notice of appalled judges when she streamlined the outdated provincial courts. And she brushed off critics who took to the airwaves when she decided to take just three days maternity leave after the birth of her daughter. 'I was in good health, my daughter was in good health, I wanted to go back and I had the means to do it,' she told The Times in September. 'I wasn't asking anyone else to do the same thing. But I reckoned that I should be allowed to do it if I wanted. You see, you have to battle to be free.' Rachida Dati, French former Justice minister, attends a TV debate for 2014 Paris Municipal Election with Paris' deputy mayor Anne Hidalgo. She lost to the socialist incumbent Hidalgo but she was able to secure 34 per cent of the vote - enough of a share for Le Monde to proclaim that she could challenge Macron. Ms Dati grew up in a devout Muslim household in Burgundy, the child of Algerian immigrants, her father was a stone mason. Despite living on a council estate, Ms Dati's father was keen that she get a good education and sent her to a private Catholic school. 'My parents were Muslims and we were brought up as Muslims, but he thought that all religions, including Catholicism, taught you the difference between good and evil,' Ms Dati said. She added that many French Muslims have a similarly open outlook, but nevertheless conceded that radical Islam was taking hold in France. Ms Dati attributes this to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of allowing people to maintain their customs and practices. 'What troubled me about England is the fact that you say you respect peoples differences, but in fact you go further than that, and you allow people to live in isolation. There is very little social mix,' she told The Times. 'The French model is totally different, although I fear that we are slowly moving towards a multicultural and multi-ethnic model that could generate conflicts. 'Everyone now wants to defend an identity and there comes a time when ... what you have are individuals and communities demanding their own rights and their own rules. And that is dangerous. It creates divisions.' Last year she cemented her position as a presidential contender when she ran for office as the mayor of all of Paris. Dati considers Sarkozy her political mentor (pictured together at the site of the Terracota Warriors in Xian, China, in 2007) Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy introduces Rachida Dati during a meeting ahead of the first round of the mayoral elections on March 9, 2020, in Paris She lost to the socialist incumbent Anne Hidalgo but she was able to secure 34 per cent of the vote - enough of a share for Le Monde to proclaim that she could challenge Macron. Throughout her success, Ms Dati said she has faced derision from snobby Parisians, more so because of her working class background than her ethnicity. Under Macron's government she has argued that such class divisions have been made worse. 'Unemployment is high and we have unprecedented levels of youth unemployment,' she told The Times. 'We have protests all the time, the crime rate has exploded and we have an exponential debt.' Advertisement
A California family's home was overrun by more than 800 migrating birds in a scene similar to that of Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds.

Video footage shows the flock performing murmurations above the house before hundreds shoot down the chimney of the family's house in Torrance.

The birds, which appear to be swifts, can be seen flying inside the house, with scores lining the windows as they fluttered manically.

Home owner Kerri said she and her husband and child came home from dinner last Wednesday to find the birds flying all over their house.

Kerri, who did not provide her surname, told KLTA: 'It's so hard to explain. If you don't see it with your own eyes, you'd never believe it.

'We lost count after 800.'

A California family's home was overrun by more than 800 migrating birds in a scene similar to that of Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds

Video footage shows the flock performing murmurations above the house before hundreds shoot down the chimney of the family's house in Torrance

The birds, which appear to be swifts, can be seen flying inside the house which some hanging from the ceiling

As the birds flocked into their house, they were seen flying around in every room with some hanging from the ceiling.

The migratory birds appear to be Vaux's swifts, according to KLTA, which roost in chimneys in large groups. The birds migrate south through California each year down to as far as Mexico.

Kerri she called the Carson Sheriff's office who put Kerri in contact with county animal control officials.

The officials said she should just leave the doors open - but the birds were not flying away - so Kerri called in her relative Patrick Belleville to help out.

'They acted like they wanted to get out, but they wasn't going nowhere,' Patrick said. 'They were just flying around, just everywhere, every room in the house, every bathroom.'

Patrick even had to pull his hood up and put a mask on to protect himself from the swirling flock. 'They were just beaming off my head,' he said.

After a few hours, the birds ended up falling asleep and were seen hanging from the ceiling.

Video footage shows Patrick catching birds which were perched inside before placing them in a cardboard box. He is then seen releasing them outside as the small black birds fly off.

The birds can be seen lining the windows as they fluttered manically inside the California home

After a few hours, the birds ended up falling asleep and were seen hanging from the ceiling

Video footage shows Patrick catching birds which were perched inside before placing them in a cardboard box (left). He is then seen releasing them outside as the small black birds fly off (right)

Kerri, her husband and their child stayed in a hotel while Patrick tried to release all of the birds.

But despite Patrick's best efforts, the invasion lasted a few days.

'The second night I actually woke up to a bird flapping in my room,' Kerri said. 'So I basically just pulled the covers over my head and started screaming.'

The flock also left multiple presents for the owners in the form of bird droppings.

'You couldn't walk in any spot in the living room, the kitchen and the hallway without stepping on bird droppings,' Kerri said.

The flock also left multiple presents for the owners in the form of bird droppings

The invasion comes as a home further up the coast in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, was also hit by an onslaught of birds.

Around 1,000 birds became trapped in the chimney on Sunday night, the Montecito fire department said. They had hoped the flock would fly up and out of the chimney on their own overnight.

But when the fire department returned to the house on Monday, the birds were still trapped at the base of the fireplace.

Santa Barbara County Animals Services worked throughout the day to design a chute system to funnel the flock out of the fireplace and release them through the home's back doors, the firefighters said.

The migratory birds appear to be Vaux swifts, according to KLTA, which roost in chimneys in large groups.

Local bird expert John Honjiyo, who owns bird control company Birdxpert, said he's been busy in recent weeks with calls about birds in homes. He advised residents to close their chimney flue.
A devastating California wildfire that left two dead was intentionally started by a man to cover up a murder he had committed, police say.

Victor Serriteno, 29, of Vacaville, was arrested last year over the death of 32-year-old Priscilla Castro, a woman he had met online. Her burned body was found on September 2 near Lake Berryessa.

Mom-of-one Castro vanished on August 16 after failing to return home from a planned date with Serriteno in Vacaville, authorities said.

Two days later, a blaze dubbed the Markley Fire erupted in the area where Castro's body was found and merged with other blazes to become the LNU Lightning Complex, which caused six deaths and destroyed 1,500 homes and buildings.

Douglas Mai, 82, and Leon 'James' Bone ,64, were then found dead in their homes in unincorporated Solano County on September 4, the Sheriff's Office said.

'Based on the extensive investigation, we believe Serriteno deliberately set the Markley Fire in an attempt to conceal his crime,' they added.

Serriteno now faces additional counts of murder and arson following the deaths of the fire victims.

Victor Serriteno, 29, of Vacaville, was arrested last year over the death of 32-year-old Priscilla Castro. Her burned body was found on September 2 near Lake Berryessa

Castro vanished on August 16 after failing to return home from a planned date with Serriteno in Vacaville, authorities said. The two had met online

A blaze dubbed the Markley Fire erupted in the area where Castro's body was found and merged with other blazes to become the LNU Lightning Complex, which caused six deaths and destroyed 1,500 homes and buildings

Serriteno was booked after an eight-month-long criminal investigation, they added.

He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday.

The LNU Lightning Complex was one of the largest wildfires in the state's history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The other fires were believed to have been sparked after nearly 11,000 lightning strikes hit the northern part of the state as it endured a historic heatwave.

Serriteno pleaded not guilty to Castro's murder. Her mom Lisa Nunez told CBS: 'She left us with her beautiful daughter, and her smile has made an impact, and it's an imprint on our heart, something we hold dear, we'll never forget.' Castro is pictured

Collectively, the fire complex scorched over 363,000 acres across California's famed wine country and burned down almost 1,500 structures after forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents.

The massive inferno tore through the area north of San Francisco for two months and killed six people.

Serriteno has already pleaded not guilty to Castro's murder.

Her mom Lisa Nunez told CBS: 'She left us with her beautiful daughter, and her smile has made an impact, and it's an imprint on our heart, something we hold dear, we'll never forget.'
Irish Wildlife Conservationist Killed in Burkina Faso Attack

DAKARIrelands government confirmed on Wednesday that an Irish citizen, wildlife NGO founder Rory Young, was killed by unidentified gunmen along with two Spanish journalists in an ambush in Burkina Faso this week.

The three foreigners and a member of the Burkinabe armed forces went missing on Monday after an attack on a convoy of security forces, forest rangers, and expatriates, according to Burkina Fasos government.

Mr. Young was part of a group that on Monday morning was attacked by unknown assailants in the eastern part of Burkina Faso, the Irish foreign ministry said in a statement.

The ministry has been in contact with his family and is liaising with authorities and partners on the ground, it said.

Spanish journalist David Beriain speaks in Pamplona, Spain on Dec. 30, 2019. (Jesus Caso/Diario de Navarra via AP)

Young was the co-founder and president of Chengeta Wildlife, a charity that trains anti-poaching rangers in Africa. Born in Zambia, he dedicated his life to wildlife protection, the charity said.

He was leading a wildlife protection patrol in Burkina Fasos Arly National Park when the team was attacked, Chengeta Wildlife said in a statement. The two journalists were documenting his efforts to protect wildlife, it said.

The journalists have been identified as David Beriain and Roberto Fraile by Spains Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who said they were working on a documentary when they were killed.

Burkina Faso, like much of West Africas Sahel region, faces a deepening security crisis as groups with links to al Qaeda and the ISIS terrorist group step up attacks on the army and civilians despite the presence of French and UN forces.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the ambush and Burkina Fasos government said it had not identified the assailants, whom it described as terrorists.

By Nellie Peyton
Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, administers a dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock at a vaccination centre in London, on April 29, 2021. (UK government)

UK Health Secretary Gets AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock received the first dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, in a public show of support for the jab which has been suspected of causing life-threatening blood clots.

Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, administered the jab for Hancock at a vaccination centre in London.

It didnt hurt a bit, just like the Queen said. Barely a scratch, he said.

Im feeling great now Ive had my first jab. Massive thanks to JVT for administering my Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccination & doing so much for us all through the pandemic. When I got the call, I got the jab. pic.twitter.com/nmDCwCg5qX  Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) April 29, 2021

Hancock said he was very excited when he was called for the jab, and encouraged everyone to take up the offer.

The Department of Health confirmed that Hancock received the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.

Last month, more than a dozen European countriesincluding France, Germany, Italy, and Spainsuspended usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine following reports of blood clots as well as several deaths in people who had received the shot. Most countries have resumed using the vaccine but some have suspended inoculations in older individuals.

The UK medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said on April 7 that 19 people had died in the UK after developing blood clots following vaccination with the AstraZeneca jab.

But MHRA insisted that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any risks.

The European Unions drug regulation agency, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), also said that there is a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and very rare blood clots but recommended that vaccinations continue and stressed the benefits outweigh the risks.

Some Christians have also expressed ethical concerns over the development process of the vaccine.

In an open letter against the so-called vaccine passports issued earlier this month, UK church leaders said some Christians have serious issues of conscience related to the ethics of vaccine manufacture or testing.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is an adenovirus vector vaccine that has been developed from kidney cell lines derived from a foetus aborted in 1973.

Last month, U.S. Catholic bishops encouraged Catholics to avoid getting the adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson if alternatives are available because they said the jab was developed, tested, and is produced with abortion-derived cell lines.

Johnson & Johnsons stem cell line comes from an abortion performed in 1985, according to Science.

Like the AstraZeneca jab, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has also been found by the EMA to have a possible link with blood clots.

Jack Philips and Katabella Roberts contributed to this report.
The United States and European states keep brushing off Russias aspiration to construct a good relationship with them, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Bolshaya Igra (Big Game) on Channel One on Thursday.

"The most important thing is Russias wish to have good relations. For some reason, Washington, Brussels and [other] European capitals keep turning a deaf ear to the first part and key message of President [Vladimir] Putin," Peskov noted.

Meanwhile, Peskov stressed that Russia would not tolerate "what the Czechs are doing, they are joined by the Bulgarians, and they are joined by the Baltic states and others in the framework of this so-called alleged solidarity."

"We wont tolerate this," Peskov insisted. "And we are clearly demonstrating this. And like Putin said, this will continue in the future," TASS cited him as saying.
The Texas Department of Public Safety does not have enough evidence to support criminal charges against a lobbyist accused of drugging a Capitol staffer, the agency and the Travis County District Attorney announced Thursday.

DPS has conducted a thorough investigation, the department said in a release. Together, we have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support these allegations and that criminal charges are not appropriate. No crime occurred in this instance.

It wasnt clear Thursday what led them to that conclusion, and DPS would not immediately provide a copy of records in the case.

Reports surfaced over the weekend that a lobbyist allegedly used a date rape drug on the legislative staffer during an off-site meeting earlier this month.

HillCo Partners, an influential Austin lobbying firm, identified one of its employees as a person of interest in the investigation. The lobbyist accused of the drugging, whose identity has not been released publicly, had denied the complaints through his attorneys, David and Perry Minton.

IN-DEPTH: Drugging case prompts Texas lawmakers call for lobbyist sexual harassment training

In a Thursday statement, the lawyers said the man had been wrongly accused, and the story that he had drugged a staffer was made up in order to cover the personal misconduct of another individual. They said the client paid for lawyers, passed a polygraph test and cooperated with DPS in an effort to clear his name and that of HillCo Partners.

Based upon the false information provided to law enforcement against our client and subsequently printed in the press, some State of Texas officials went as far as to ban our client from entering their offices to perform his job, the lawyers said.

The Department of Public Safety has withheld details about the alleged incident, including where and when it was reported to have occurred, how many people were involved, or who went to the authorities.

Bill Miller, a co-founder of HillCo Partners, said in a statement Thursday that the DPS investigation confirms our own internal investigation into the issue, which it had launched after the group was informed of the accusations late last week. The firm hired outside counsel and a retired law enforcement official to investigate.

We noted in the DPS statement today that neither HillCo nor the person of interest associated with our firm had absolutely anything to do with the recent drugging allegation, Miller said. Furthermore, we are informed, both our firm and the individual are named as victims in the final report.

Miller declined to say whether the person is still employed by HillCo Partners, saying the firm does not discuss personnel matters.

Still, the incident has roiled the Texas Legislature, which responded this week with proposed bills to require sexual harassment prevention training for lobbyists.

In the House, Speaker Dade Phelan also said he would create a new email hotline to report allegations of misconduct and move the chambers online sexual harassment training to instead take place in person.

Phelan issued a joint statement late Thursday with Reps. Donna Howard, D-Austin, and Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, reaffirming support for those changes despite the investigations findings.

While the legal process may be over, the conversation about how best to keep our Capitol family protected must continue, they said. The Texas House remains firm in our commitment to move forward with legislation and administrative policy changes that create a safer work environment and culture for our entire Capitol community.

cayla.harris@express-news.net
Calloway Sheriff's Office Seeks Wanted Man

By West Kentucky Star Staff

MURRAY - The Calloway County Sheriffs Office has a new Most Wanted option on their website, www.callkyso.com, and has named Brock Mardis as the first entry.Mardis, a white male with brown hair and gray eyes, is charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse, first-degree wanton endangerment, first-degree unlawful transaction with a minor, first-degree fleeing or evading police, second-degree unlawful imprisonment, trafficking marijuana, possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia.Mardis has also failed to appear for pending cases involving the charges of menacing, resisting arrest, third-degree unlawful transaction with a minor, illegal sale of alcohol, selling alcoholic beverages to minors, second-degree bail jumping, and driving under the influence.Information received since 2018 has indicated Mardis may have traveled to New York and/or Florida. He may also have changed his appearance to avoid detection.Calloway and Marshall County Crimestoppers are offering a reward for information leading to Mardis' arrest.Anyone with information related to his whereabouts is asked to call the Sheriffs Office at 270-753-3151 or email ccso.office@callkyso.com.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The Kingdom of Bahrain has achieved a strategic stock of food security thanks to the directives of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

It came following HM the Kings speech during the opening of the second session of the fifth legislative term of the Shura and Parliament in October 2019, during which he called for the development of a strategic project for national food production.

The Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning said that work was carried out immediately to implement the royal directives by developing national capabilities in the field of food industries, raising the percentage of local production, as well as providing incentives and facilities to preserve the expertise of professionals, especially in areas of food security.

This was confirmed by the Ministrys Undersecretary for Agriculture and Marine Resources, Dr Nabeel Abu Al Fateh, during a government media briefing organised in cooperation with the National Communication Centre.

Dr Al Fateh pointed out that Bahrain is distinguished by the existence of the National Initiative for the Development of the Agricultural Sector, whose advisory council is chaired by HRH Princess Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, Wife of HM the King and Chairwoman of the Supreme Council for Women.

The initiatives projects have contributed to the development of the agricultural sector, in particular, and the social, environmental and national economy, in general.
The OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T both launched in 2018, at various points throughout the year, and so they're both more than two years old. Even so, the company is apparently working on Android 11 updates for them - but that's where the good news ends, unfortunately.

OnePlus has unveiled that it expects the first beta version of its OxygenOS 11 software based on Android 11 to reach the 6 and 6T towards the end of August. And that's just the first build.

Expect to see a bunch of others follow in the next weeks after that, so if you're wondering when a final, stable, non-beta build might be out for these phones, we'd say it could actually be towards the end of the year. Either way, it will be after Google releases Android 12, which is pretty bad for a company (OnePlus) that used to be known for rather quick updates to new Android versions. It's nowhere near that lately, however.

Considering the age of these phones, perhaps we should just be happy they're getting updated at all, and we are, but it's a bit weird to receive the update to last year's Android version when this year's is already out, isn't it?

Source
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Apr, 2021 ) :Amid the nascent signs of economic recovery, Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue Shaukat Tarin Wednesday sought support from development partners to stimulate economic recovery during the third wave of Covid-19, which, he said, was challenging.

"The third wave of COVID-19 is particularly challenging and Pakistan needs support of development partners to stimulate recovery," the minister said while delivering his remarks at a virtual event held on the sidelines of 77th session of United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) titled "Debt Relief in the Aftermath of the Pandemic: How can Regional Dialogue help".

The minister said the country's economy was showing nascent signs of economic recovery as the Large Scale Manufacturing (LSM) sector was posting significant growth but there was a need to continue the momentum, which was not possible without external support.

The finance minister apprised the forum about the economic challenges faced by Pakistan due to COVID-19 pandemic, saying due to precarious economic situation in 2018, the Government of Pakistan had to opt for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme to fix balance of payments crisis.

Pakistan successfully met all benchmarks during the first performance review criteria, he said, adding all fundamental economic indicators reflected significant improvement before the onset of COVID-19.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 shock resulted in considerable economic contraction leading to loss of livelihoods, disruption in supply lines and limited economic activity during partial lockdowns, he added.

To lessen the severe impact on the economy, the government introduced the largest-ever economic stimulus package for the small medium enterprises (SMEs) to shield against insolvency, and facilitated the construction sector and allied industries to stimulate growth during testing times.

Sixteen million families were given direct cash transfers under the Ehsaas programme, which roughly accounted for 46% the total population of Pakistan in order to protect the most vulnerable segments of the society, he added.

The finance minister further stated that at present, Pakistan had resumed the IMF programme and was faced with a difficult choice to strike a balance between need for fiscal consolidation, and ever rising demand for economic stimulus amid COVID-19 and in post-COVID scenario.

According to a Finance Ministry press release, the Finance Minister of Maldives as well as high level delegates from Mongolia and Kyrgyz Republic also participated in the session.

The other delegates highlighted the need for evolving a mechanism to provide maximum debt relief to the developing and under-developed countries, which were facing fiscal constraints and liquidity crises during the pandemic.

The session concluded that there was a need for continued regional dialogue to learn from country experiences and thereby face challenges posed by pandemic in a better manner.
New Delhi: It seems like the second wave of deadly novel coronavirus is not ready to spare anyone. Popular television actress Aashka Goradia and her husband Brent Goble have tested positive now. The duo was planning to go back to their US home when they tested positive for COVID-19. The actress broke the news on her Instagram story and updated about their health condition to fans.

Aashka Goradia wrote in her Instagram story, "In preparation for our trip to my home in the US, @ibrentgoble and I have both tested positive for COVID. We have been reeling from this news since this morning when we were just about to leave Goa. Both of us are feeling fine physically but the test reports say otherwise and that means we have to let the virus run its course. Thankfully with our active and healthy lifestyle we aren't experiencing any deliberating symptoms. We are at our home in Goa, safe, and not in contact with anyone."

She further stated, "Folks, it doesn't matter how healthy you are - everyone, literally everyone, is at risk. This new strain is a nasty and sly devil. We had tested on Saturday, and reports came back negative. Monday we tested again to be double sure, and... lockdown. While we appreciate all the concern and speed recovery wishes, Id implore everyone reading this to please keep those who are really debilitated in your thoughts and prayer. We will be fine, while so many others may not be. Lets all hold a space for THEIR recovery, as well as those who are indirectly impacted."

A few days back, Aashka in one of her interviews announced her exit from the showbiz world. The decision came in as a shocker for all her fans and loved ones. Reasoning it out, she shared that she now is keen to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams and for that she has started her very own make-up brand.

We wish the couple a speedy recovery!
MERIDEN  In an early child care facility, Gov. Ned Lamont announced on Wednesday that he will allocate $120 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding for 4,000 similar programs to help them bridge budget deficits, operating expenses and COVID-related costs.

The initiative will be spread among licensed child care facilities in the state, with 25 percent of the funding required to go to staff bonuses, retirement plans and insurance costs. Those that were able to stay open in the pandemic will get more funding.

I just want to make sure that as we get on the back end of this horrible pandemic, we come out of this stronger, Lamont said. Thanks to the budget weve got from the feds and the state, this is the greatest expansion of day care and child care and infant care in the history of this state, and I want to make it last.

During a morning news conference outdoors in a playground at the YMCA Child Care Center, Lamont was joined by Beth Bye, commissioner of the state Office of Early Childhood, along with Vannessa Dorantes, commissioner of the state Department of Children and Families, to praise what has been a heroic year for such programs that managed to stay open over the last year.

We know its been a heavy lift for child care programs, Bye said. Teachers have put themselves on the front line, but we know that there is recovery still to go. The state can facilitate child care, but its places like the YM that make this happen.

The Child Care Center serves 133 children, so its base grant will be $100,000, along with three bonuses for being accredited; participating in the states low-income Care 4 Kids program; and its location in an inner-city Census tract with high needs. In all, the facility will get $171,000, Bye said.

The intent was to cover about 20 to 25 percent of their operating costs for the year, understanding, like restaurants, like airlines, child care programs have been dealing with reduced revenue, theyve been going to their credit lines, theyve had extra expenses, Bye said, stressing that 15,000 children didnt show up this year for pre-school and kindergarten.

Dorantes said that in order to support the next generation, their parents need help too.

We are exactly where we need to be today, Dorantes said. We are coming together to make sure that children know that we know that they are not tomorrow. They are today. Children have experienced the stress of the pandemic through the adults around them, so its up to us to make sure that they know we are lifting them up and lifting them out of what we have experienced over the last 14 months.

Of the more $2.6 billion that the state expects from the American Rescue Plan, about $1.75 billion will offset revenue shortfalls in the state budget and $900 million is subject to active negotiations  with a May 16 deadline  between state lawmakers and the governor on how to spent it over the biennium.

The $120 million is in additional federal Stabilization funds for child care programs that Lamont can spend at his discretion.

The governor also plans on $5.3 million to pay parent fees through the rest of the year for the lower-income Care 4 Kids program. In addition, $3.5 million has been announced for parent fees for state-funded summer programs including School Readiness and child day care. Another $3.5 million is available to support Family Resources Centers to expand child care with three-to-five-week programs to prepare kids for kindergarten this summer.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT


A refrigerant chemical that is harmful to the environment and has ozone depletion potential is still being used in many household and industrial air conditioners and refrigerators in Vietnam.

Air-conditioners are sold in a shop in Hanoi. Although environmentally friendly products are introduced in Vietnam, there remains a number of used/expired products which cause harms to the environment.  VNA/VNS Photo Do Phuong Anh

Nguyen Xuan Tien, vice chairman and general secretary of Vietnam Society of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers, said that in 2010, more than six million household air-conditioners using R22 were installed in Vietnam, consuming about 6,000 tonnes of the chemical.

There was a lack of understanding of the negative impacts of the refrigerant on the environment and a habit of using used/expired equipment in Vietnam, Tien said, adding that R22 was much cheaper than alternatives like R32 or R410A.

In the last few years, air-conditioner/refrigerator producers shifted to products with R32 or R410A, which helped reduce the number of products with R22, Tien said.

However, Vietnam still lacked policies and financial resources to withdraw, transport, and destroy refrigerants, Tien said.

R22 and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are fluorocarbon gas (F-gas) which could damage the ozone layer.

HFCs are widely used as a refrigerant in household and industrial air conditioners, refrigerators, cleaning precision electronic equipment and spray propellants but they have much higher global warming potential than CO2 and if released, they stay in the atmosphere for decades.

According to a report by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), in 2019, HFCs consumption of Vietnam reached 3,772.621 tonnes. In 2020, HFCs consumption topped 6,000 tonnes, mostly R410A, R13a, R404A, R407C and R32.

Meanwhile, Vietnams HCFC consumption reached nearly 3,600 tonnes in 2019 and more than 2,585 tonnes in 2020.

Due to changes in the environment law, which was revised in November 2020, Vietnam reconfirmed its commitment in joining the global efforts in combating climate change.

Article 92 of the law set important rules and principles for Vietnam to strictly control the consumption of F-gases to ensure the implementation of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty on F-gases, which Vietnam has been an active member of since September 2019.

Vietnam has been taking steps to phase out all ozone-depleting substances and plans to start phasing down F-gases from 2024, said Nguyen Dang Thu Cuc, national ozone co-ordinator in MONREs Department of Climate Change.

Roadmaps to manage and phase out ozone-depleting substances and greenhouse gases will be developed and implemented under a Government decree.

The decree is set to clarify the national consumption of ozone-depleting substances to bring it in line with the countrys commitments. As a result, a consumption quota would be given to specific industries and sectors.

Cuc said the decree would also facilitate plans for Vietnam to better manage, collect, recycle, reuse, or destroy substances that damage the ozone layer or produce greenhouse gases.

International support

On Wednesday, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Vietnam Office and the Department of Climate Change (DCC) under MONRE organised a workshop on 'Exchanging experiences on fluorocarbon gas (F-gas) management'.

The workshop was organised as a part of a 'Survey on promoting the next framework of climate change under the Paris Agreement Rule-book in Vietnam' which JICA has been implementing since July 2020, for Vietnam to exchange experience on F-gas management with countries such as Japan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.

At the workshop, speakers from Japan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia discussed managing F-gases with their Vietnamese counterparts. They agreed that Asian countries need to work together to phase down Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are common F-gases, to meet the targets set in the Kigali Amendment and contribute to the Paris Agreement.,

Together with the Initiative on Fluorocarbons Life Cycle Management of the government of Japan which Vietnam agreed to join in October last year, technical analysis on current management of F-gas in Viet Nam by JICAs Japanese experts will help MONRE in the formulation of specific regulations to control the use and disposal of F-gases, said Murooka Naomichi, Senior Representative of JICA Vietnam Office.

We also hope our experiences on using appropriate technologies for recovery and destruction of F-gases are useful for Vietnamese companies when the Government implements strict measures for F-gas management, he said.

Tang The Cuong, general of DCC, said Article 92 of the revised Law on Environmental Protection provided major responsibilities and requirements for MONRE as the focal point, as well as actions by ministries and relevant stakeholders in phasing out Ozone Depleting Substances and phasing down HFCs.

Learning from the experiences of Japan and other countries will help us come up with effective HFC control measures and particularly to stimulate the private sector to convert into more environment-friendly technologies, Cuong said.

VNS

Vietnam strives to control and forecast changes in air quality by 2025 The nations target of forecasting changes in air quality is mentioned in the plan put forward by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment.
Morocco looks to fear-free hashish farms Morocco is the world's biggest producer of cannabis resin, or hashish

After decades without legal cover, farmer Mohamed Morabet looks forward to selling his hashish this summer on the open market now that Morocco plans to legalise cannabis for medical use.

The government of the world's top hashish- producing nation last month ratified a draft bill to legalise its medical use, and parliament is expected to debate the legislation this week.

"We will finally come out of clandestinity," said Morabet as he tended to his freshly sown fields of "kif" -- literally "pleasure" in Arabic and the term used for cannabis in Morocco.

"We used to live in fear," added the 60-year-old farmer whose fields lie in the fabled northern Ketama region at the foot of the marginalised and underdeveloped mountainous region of Rif.

According to a report released last year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Morocco is the world's biggest producer of cannabis resin, or hashish.

Cannabis output in the North African country was estimated to total more than 700 tonnes in a study last year by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.

That same year more than 217 tonnes of cannabis were seized by authorities, according to official figures.

It was banned in Morocco in 1954 but has been tolerated as its cultivation provides a livelihood for 80,000 to 120,000 families, according to unofficial estimates.

Now the kingdom hopes that cultivating cannabis for medical use will become a lucrative business and place Morocco on the global market.

- Reaping profits -

According to Morocco's interior ministry, the market worldwide is growing at an annual rate of 30 percent, and by 60 percent a year in Europe.

Farmers, who only made a small profit while traffickers for decades reaped the benefits from the sale of cannabis, are also hopeful for a more profitable future.

But some, like Morabet, have voiced reservations.

"When the bill becomes law we will have fewer problems, but we worry that prices will drop," said Fadoul Azouz surveying his ploughed fields in the Ketama.

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But authorities and experts say these fears are baseless.

Officials estimate that farmers could make a 12 percent profit in a "legal market" compared to only four percent now, the official MAP news agency reported.

Botanical researcher Ismail Azza agrees, predicting that "revenues in a legal circuit will certainly be better than those on the black market".

According to several sources in the Ketama region, a kilogram of hashish extracted from hybrid plants would sell for around 2,500 dirhams ($261) a year ago -- and four times as much if the cannabis came from the fabled "beldiya" (local) seed.

But following a crackdown on drug trafficking, a kilogram now sells for around 1,500 dirhams.

- 'Historical' plantations -

The draft legislation calls for the creation of a national agency to regulate the industry, and for the formation of cooperatives to "certify" plants.

The move would "reconvert illicit" cannabis plantations into "legal and durable activities that generate jobs" in the medical, cosmetic and industrial sectors, it says.

But concern remains over where cannabis should be grown, according to Abdallah al-Jout, a member of a rights group that has called for cannabis to be legalised.

The interior ministry is expected to designate certain areas, without mention of recreational use of cannabis.

Farmers hope the areas will be "historical" regions where they and their ancestors have cultivated cannabis for decades.

The interior ministry is also expected, once the bill becomes law, to call on farmers to set up a "cooperative" to sell their crop to a "public agency".

In 2019, about 55,000 hectares (136,000 acres) of land in Rif were used to grow hashish, according to official figures, compared to 134,000 hectares in 2003.

The northern Rif is a marginalised region rocked by social unrest in 2016-2017.

Farmers like 25-year-old Said Yarou, who works on a family plantation, hope legalisation will create jobs for unemployed youths.

isb-ko/sof/hkb/hc
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The clip starts like most any card trick, with Blaine handing Ford a deck and asking him to imagine one card off the top of his head. You're thinking of a card? He asks the star. Do I know what card you're thinking of? he continued, Ford shaking his head no.

However, the illusionist quickly proved the star wrong. The card just left the deck, just now, he said, to Ford's apparent confusion. Look through the deck, your card isn't there." After shockingly parsing through the deck, Blaine then instructed the actor to grab a piece of fruit from an adjacent bowl. Upon selecting an orange, the Indiana Jones player revealed which card he had selected  the nine of hearts.

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When the star cut into the orange, it seems Ford found a very coincidental  and perhaps magical -- surprise waiting for him, a card standing straight up from the citrus. However this was not just any card, but his card, the nine of hearts. Get the f*** out of my house, the shocked star said, the juice-soaked card in hand, proving that unlike another character in the Indiana Jones series, he did not choose poorly.

Like all the best videos on TikTok, the clip found further virality on Twitter, where Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent's chief film critic, shared the video on her page. Please enjoy Harrison Ford watching a magic trick & then reacting in the only way Harrison Ford reacts to anything, she captioned the reposted TikTok, which has garnered upwards of 4.4 million views since hitting the site on Wednesday.

So folks, take it from David Blaine, if you're ever looking to get booted from Han Solo's home, impressive magic tricks are the way to go -- don't everybody thank me at once.

For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram at @HuntressThompson_, on Twitch.tv @HuntressThompson_ and on Twitter @TennesAnyone.
Bank of America Corporation announced today that it will redeem on May 17, 2021 all $2,250,000,000 principal amount outstanding of its 3.499% Fixed/Floating Rate Senior Notes, due May 2022 (CUSIP No. 06051GHH5) (the "Notes").

The redemption price for the Notes will be equal to 100% of the principal amount of the Notes, plus accrued and unpaid interest to, but excluding, the redemption date of May 17, 2021. Interest on the Notes will cease to accrue on the redemption date.

Payment of the redemption price for the Notes will be made through the facilities of The Depository Trust Company. The Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, N.A. is the trustee and paying agent for the Notes.

Bank of America

Bank of America is one of the worlds leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 66 million consumer and small business clients with approximately 4,300 retail financial centers, including approximately 2,700 lending centers, 2,600 financial centers with a Consumer Investment Financial Solutions Advisor and approximately 2,400 business centers; approximately 17,000 ATMs; and award-winning digital banking with approximately 40 million active users, including approximately 31 million mobile users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry-leading support to approximately 3 million small business households through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations across the United States, its territories and approximately 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Forward-looking statements

Certain information contained in this news release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future results or performance and involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions difficult to predict or beyond our control. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement and should consider the uncertainties and risks discussed under Item 1A. "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 and in any of our subsequent Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect the impact of circumstances or events that arise after the date the forward-looking statement was made.

For more Bank of America news, including dividend announcements and other important information, visit the Bank of America newsroom. Click here to register for news email alerts.

www.bankofamerica.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428006089/en/

Contacts

Investors May Contact:

Lee McEntire, Bank of America

Phone: 1.980.388.6780

lee.mcentire@bofa.com

Jonathan G. Blum, Bank of America (Fixed Income)

Phone: 1.212.449.3112

jonathan.blum@bofa.com

Reporters May Contact:

Jerry Dubrowski, Bank of America

Phone: 1.646.855.1195 (office) or 1.508.843.5626 (mobile)

jerome.f.dubrowski@bofa.com

Christopher P. Feeney, Bank of America

Phone: 1.980.386.6794

christopher.feeney@bofa.com
The San Diego Air & Space Museum is remembering Michael Collins, the Command Module Pilot for the historic Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and a member of the prestigious International Air & Space Hall of Fame. Collins passed away on April 28, 2021. He was 90.

Since 1963, the International Air & Space Hall of Fame has honored the worlds most significant pilots, crew members, visionaries, inventors, aerospace engineers, business leaders, preservationists, designers and space explorers. Collins entered the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in 1971.

Michael Collins performance, perfection and skill on Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 were vitally important to the success of both missions, said Jim Kidrick, President & CEO of the San Diego Air & Space Museum. His incredibly successful career after leaving NASA as assistant Secretary of State, and later Director of the National Air & Space Museum, are a credit to his accomplishments as a former experimental test pilot and NASA astronaut. The San Diego Air & Space Museum mourns his loss while remembering him fondly for his compassion and incredible achievements.

Collins graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1952, choosing to enter the Air Force after graduation. An experimental test pilot at the Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB, California, he tested performance, stability, and control characteristics of jet fighters, logging over 4,200 hours flying time.

He was selected as an astronaut by NASA in October 1963. His first crew assignment was as back-up pilot on the Gemini VII mission. As a pilot on the record setting three-day Gemini X mission, launched July 18, 1966, he accomplished a successful rendezvous and docking with a separately launched Agena target vehicle. Using power from the Agena, he maneuvered the Gemini craft into a new orbit and rendezvoused with a second passive satellite. Collins then made two extravehicular space walks, retrieving a micrometeorite detection experiment from the Agena.

As pilot on the epic Apollo 11 first lunar landing mission, Collins remained in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walked the moons surface. The perfection and skill with which he performed this mission, recovering the Eagle and returning the orbiter to earth, were vital to the success of the mission.

After leaving NASA, Col. Collins served as assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from June 1970 until April 1971. He then became director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., guiding the prestigious institution through the planning and construction of its fabulous new facilities.

The International Air & Space Hall of Fame is the most prestigious induction of its kind in the world and is composed of hundreds of air and space pioneers, engineers, inventors and innovators, along with adventurers, scientists and industry leaders. NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts and Russian cosmonauts are honored in the Hall, as well as famous legends such as the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong and Amelia Earhart. Notable inductees also include Buzz Aldrin, Igor Sikorsky, Wernher von Braun, Jack Northrop, Jackie Cochran, William Boeing, Sr., Reuben H. Fleet, Glenn Curtiss, Walter Zable Sr., Fran Bera, Wally Schirra, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, T. Claude Ryan, Jimmy Doolittle, Bob Hoover, Ellen Ochoa, Peggy Whitson, Linden Blue, Patty Wagstaff, and many more. See the following link.

The San Diego Air & Space Museum is Californias official air and space museum and education center. The Museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and it was the first aero-themed Museum to be accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The Museum is located at 2001 Pan American Plaza, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA 92101. The Museum is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. except Thanksgiving and Christmas. For more information visit www.sandiegoairandspace.org
A large part of Roma's attention will be drawn towards Bruno Fernandes when they travel to Old Trafford to face Manchester United in the Europa League on Thursday.

The Portuguese international has played a major role in the upturn in fortunes of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side since he made the move to Manchester in January 2020.

The 55 million euros United spent to bring Fernandes over from Sporting CP now seems like a bargain. In 73 games for the Red Devils, he's scored 36 goals and made 22 assists.

This season, the midfielder has netted 24 times, making 12 assists, compared to the 12 goals and eight assists he got in 2019/20.

In the Premier League, Fernandes registers a shot every 14.7 minutes. Nobody in England's top flight has created more than his 87 chances.

In the assists department, only Kevin de Bruyne has as many as Fernandes with 11 and only Harry Kane has more than that.

In terms of scoring goals, only Kane's 21 and Mohamed Salah's 16 are better than Fernandes' 16 for United this campaign.

Across goals and assists, Fernandes has contributed directly to a goal every 84 minutes in the Premier League, which is better than any other player to have scored at least five goals in Premier League history.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:37:20|Editor: huaxia

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LONDON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing a new investigation into the cost of redecoration of his Downing Street apartment, British media reported Thursday.

Britain's electoral watchdog Electoral Commission opened Wednesday a formal probe into whether an alleged donation to Conservative party funds, intended to pay for the revamp of Johnson's flat, should have been declared.

The watchdog said the probe would find out how the cost of the work was paid for and suspected that an offence may have occurred.

In a statement, the Electoral Commission said it had been in contact with the party since last month and had found grounds to launch a formal investigation.

"We are now satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred. We will therefore continue this work as a formal investigation to establish whether this is the case," it said.

Britain's top civil servant Simon Case has now been asked to review how the refurbishment was funded.

Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds carried out renovations on their private residence, the flat above No. 11 Downing Street. There has been speculation the cost was as much as 200,000 pounds (about 279,080 U.S. dollars), but Johnson only receives an annual public grant of 30,000 pounds (about 41,862 dollars) to spend on the flat.

Johnson's former chief adviser Dominic Cummings claimed the prime minister had planned to have donors "secretly pay" for the work on his flat.

In one of the toughest exchanges in his premiership Wednesday during his weekly Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons (lower house of the British parliament), Johnson insisted that he paid for the flat refurbishment personally, but refused to disclose who made the donation.

Labour leader Keir Starmer and Ian Blackford, the Commons leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), both fired tough questions over what some media is referring to as "Wallpapergate".

The Downing Street row dominated the front pages of most national newspapers in Britain Thursday, when Johnson, Starmer and senior politicians spent the day visiting various regions of Britain on the election trail. Enditem
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The global LiDAR market size is expected to reach USD 2,154.2 million by 2026 according to a new study published by Polaris Market Research. The report LiDAR Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Component; By Installation; By Range (Short Range LiDAR, Medium Range LiDAR, Long Range LiDAR); By Application (Urban Planning, ADAS & Driverless Cars, Corridor Mapping, Environment, Engineering, Exploration, Others); By Region, Segments & Forecast, 2019  2026 gives a detailed insight into current market dynamics and provides analysis on future market growth.

In 2018, the corridor mapping segment dominated the global market in terms of revenue. Regionwise, North America is expected to be the leading contributor to market growth globally. LiDAR, which represents Light Detection and Ranging, is a remote detecting strategy that utilizes light as a pulse beat of laser to quantify ranges to the Earth. These light pulses joined with other information recorded by the airborne frameworkcreate exact, three-dimensional data about the state of the Earth and its surface attributes.

Get sample copy of this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/lidar-market/request-for-sample

A LiDAR instrument mainly comprises a laser, a scanner, and a particular GPS collector. Planes and helicopters are the most generally utilized stages for getting LIDAR information over wide territories. The developing requirement for 3D imaging from different parts and expanding selection of aerial LiDAR frameworks has supported the appropriation of LiDAR arrangements. Expanding government interests in defense, agriculture, and city arranging supports the selection of LiDAR. Furthermore, the expanding interests of LiDAR from mining and transportation ventures have upheld market development throughout the years. Expanding fund raising by sellers in technological pursuits combined with expanding improvement of self-sufficient vehicles and merging of cutting-edge safety systems in vehicles would hasten development of the LiDAR market. Developing interest from rising economies and technological headways are relied upon to give various development openings in the coming years.

North America created significant income in the market in 2018 and is relied upon to lead the worldwide market all through the forecast period. The development of modern mechanization and technological headways in metrological applications has quickened the selection rate of LiDAR innovation in North American area. In airborne applications, LiDAR innovation has displayed remarkable favorable circumstances over Radar technology, for example, improved precision, ongoing mapping capacity and better perception, accordingly, driving the LiDAR market in every one of the nations in North American area. Asia-Pacific is relied upon to develop at the most elevated CAGR during the forecast period attributable to developing interest from rising nations, for example, China, Japan, and India.

Complete Summary with TOC Available @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/lidar-market

The rising interest for 3D images in different application regions, for example, military and defense, land studies, structural designing, and corridor mapping, is relied upon to fundamentally drive the market over the forecast period. Finished 3D imagery is connected in different applications, for example, 3D mapping, city planning and photo-realistic flights. The establishment base of cutting-edge safety highlights is expanding exponentially. Accident data recorder systems, liquor start interlocks, and emergency call systems are just a section n of the instances of advancements where a future interest is relied upon to stimulate the overall market.

The key players in the market include Trimble Navigation limited, Faro Technologies, Inc., Quantum Spatial Inc., Velodyne LiDAR Inc., Sick Ag, Teledyne Optech, Riegl Laser Measurement Systems, Leica Geosystems Inc., GeoDigital and Beijing Surestar Technology.

LiDAR Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Component Navigation and Positioning Systems Laser Scanners Cameras Others

LiDAR Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Installation Ground-Based Airborne

LiDAR Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Range Short Range LiDAR Medium Range LiDAR Large Range LiDAR

LiDAR Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Application Urban Planning ADAS & Driverless Cars Corridor Mapping Environment Engineering Exploration Others

LiDAR Market Size and Forecast, 2017-2026 by Region North America US. Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK France Italy Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Japan Rest of Asia-Pacific Latin America Brazil Middle East & Africa



Avail discount on this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/lidar-market/request-for-discount-pricing

About Polaris Market Research

Polaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide unmatched quality of offerings to our clients present globally. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world. We strive to provide our customers with updated information on innovative technologies, high growth markets, emerging business environments and latest business-centric applications, thereby helping them always to make informed decisions and leverage new opportunities.

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VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Valeo Pharma (CSE: VPH) (OTCQB: VPHIF) (FSE: VP2) has reached an agreement with the Ontario Public Drug Program to cover the costs of Redesca and Redesca HP  anticoagulants that reduce the risks of blood clots.

Launched as a public entity in 2019  Valeo is a specialty pharma company that commercialises prescription products in Canada with a focus on Neurodegenerative Diseases, Oncology and Hospital Specialty Products.

Valeo's business model side-steps the typical pharma-development pipeline of animal-trials, human-trials and applications for regulatory approval.

VPH partners with pharma companies that have drugs already approved in other jurisdictions, providing those companies with the infrastructure and expertise to navigate the Canadian landscape of drug commercialization.

The Product Listing Agreement (PLA) with the Executive Officer of the Ontario Public Drug Program means that eligible Ontario patients requiring Redesca and Redesca HP are insured for the costs of the drugs.

Redesca is a low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) biosimilar.

LMWHs are injectable anticoagulant drugs used primarily to treat and prevent deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism.

Common hospital-associated blood clots:

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT): a blood clot that forms in a deep vein, most commonly the leg or pelvis. Pulmonary embolism (PE): a blood clot that becomes dislodged and passes through blood vessels before reaching the lungs.

"Biosimilar drugs are often confused with generic drugs," explains The Cancer Center, "Both are marketed as cheaper versions of costly name-brand drugs. Generic drugs are identical to the original in chemical composition, biosimilar drugs are "highly similar," but close enough to accomplish the same therapeutic and clinical result".

"Roughly 1 out of 10 hospital deaths are related to blood clots in the lungs," reports the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Blood clots are a leading cause of preventable hospital death in the United States.

About half of all blood clots occur during or within 3 months of a hospital stay or surgery

Many of these blood clots can be safely prevented

Nearly half of all hospital patients do not receive proper prevention measures

Redesca has already clocked more than 150 million patient days in foreign markets.

"The regulatory approval of Redesca is a significant corporate milestone for Valeo and good news for the Canadian healthcare system," stated Valeo CEO Steve Saviuk, "Mandatory use of biosimilars is expected to deliver significant savings to provincial healthcare plans."

On April 27, 2021 VPH announced that it upsized and closed a $6.645 million non-brokered private placement of unsecured non-convertible debenture units.

The Debentures will mature at the latest 9 months after the closing and bear interest at a rate of 8% per annum from the date of issue, payable in cash, semi-annually in arrears.

"I cannot over emphasize what a pivotal year 2021 is becoming with the recent launch of Redesca and the imminent launches of Enerzair Breezhaler and Atectura Breezhaler," added Saviuk.

"With Ontario representing 37% of the Canadian market for LMWHs, the listing of Redesca on the Ontario public formulary is a key milestone for the Redesca commercialization program," stated Frederic Fasano, President and COO of Valeo.

"This is welcome news for millions of Canadians who rely on public insurance to access their prescription medications," added Fasano, "and for the Government of Ontario who will benefit from significant savings resulting from the listing of the first LMWH biosimilar".

VPH anticipates that public insurance coverage for Redesca in other provinces will follow.

Valeo's full product portfolio is available here.

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison says identity politics and the moral corrosion caused by the misuse of social media are forces seeking to undermine society.

In a speech to the United Israel Appeal NSW donor dinner in Sydney on Thursday night, Mr Morrison also said voters should contribute more to the community than they expect from the state.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave a speech at the United Israel Appeal NSW donor dinner on Thursday . Credit:Rhett Wyman

Mr Morrison made the remarks in a speech  in which he repeatedly referred to his Pentecostal faith  called the responsibility of citizens in building community to achieve national success.

As citizens, we cannot allow what we think we are entitled to, to become more important than what we are responsible for, he told an audience that included his best friend and prayer partner, cabinet minister Stuart Robert, and Liberal backbenchers Dave Sharma and Julian Leeser.
Mark Mulligan/Staff photographer

Oil markets on Wednesday ignored a minor increase in U.S. crude inventories, with prices rising $1 a barrel after the Energy Information Administration released its weekly report. increased by 100,000 barrels last week, pushing oil prices up Wednesday.

The EIA said commercial crude oil stockpiles inched up by 100,000 barrels last week to about 493 million barrels. Nevertheless, West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, was trading near $64 a barrel Wednesday afternoon on optimism for a boost in oil demand in the second half of 2021, according to Norwegian energy research firm Rystad Energy.
[April 29, 2021] MAG Interactive and the European Central Bank launch quiz to celebrate Europe Day

STOCKHOLM, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In collaboration with the European Central Bank, MAG has developed a special quiz in New QuizDuel which will be launched in all markets within the EU to celebrate Europe Day. Stockholm, Sweden - 29 April, 2021 - Today MAG Interactive announces a new collaboration with the European Central Bank (ECB): Together with the ECB, MAG has developed a special quiz in New QuizDuel about the EU and the ECB's work to highlight Europe Day, which takes place on May 9th. The special quiz, called #EuropeDay, is available to play in New QuizDuel between the 3rd and 23rd of May in all EU markets. During this period, players participating in the quiz have the chance to win an iPad Pro 11. Europe Day, May 9th, marks the anniversary of the historically important Schuman Declaration in 1950 when French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed a new form of cooperation to promote peace in Europe. This led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner of the European Union. "For us at MAG it feels inspiring to pay attention to Europe Day, which symbolizes cooperation and peace in Europe. With the help of New QuizDuel's great reach, we hope that our EU quiz can increase interest in the U and its important work to achieve climate goals and strengthen the European economy", says Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of MAG Interactive.



MAG previously collaborated with the ECB in 2019 in connection with the 20th anniversary of the Euro. Participate in the #EuropeDay quiz and win an iPad Pro

To enter the #EuropeDay competition and have the chance to win an iPad Pro 11, users need to answer all 18 questions in the quiz correctly, take a screenshot on the last page of the quiz (showing the total score and the green boxes corresponding to the correct answers) and send it to europeday@maginteractive.com by May 23rd. A total of 10 winners will be chosen at the end of the month. The winners will be announced on MAG's social media and on the European Central Bank's website. Find more information on the competition on the ECB website: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/educational/youth-initiatives/ecb-quizduel-competition/html/index.en.html CONTACT: For additional information, please contact:

Tove Bengtsson / Marketing Communications Manager / +46 (0)72-220 73 22 / tove.bengtsson@maginteractive.com This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/mag-interactive/r/mag-interactive-and-the-european-central-bank-launch-quiz-to-celebrate-europe-day,c3335975

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Burma Myanmar Regime Aircraft Bomb Kachin Villagers

Teenagers unload supplies for a temporary camp in Momauk, Kachin State. / Bhamo Platform

Myanmars military has launched airstrikes for six days on Momauk Township, Kachin State, forcing villagers to flee, according to the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC).

Frequent air raids followed fierce fighting between the regimes forces and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Fighting has intensified near Myothit and Kon Law villages after the KIA occupied the strategic Alaw Bum base near the Chinese border and attacked two police outposts and a military base at Tarpein Bridge in Momauk Township in late March and early April.

The military has been fighting in several locations in Momauk to recapture Alaw Bum, Colonel Naw Bu, the KIAs spokesman, told The Irrawaddy.

On Wednesday night, fighting between the KIAs Battalion 25 and the Tatmadaw (Myanmars military) intensified near Myothit village in the township.

Three fighter jets dropped bombs near the village, injuring a resident, according to a villager.

We heard loud artillery explosions from Momauk town, a resident said.

Witnesses reported causalities on both sides during the fighting but the Irrawaddy could not verify casualty numbers.

Another 100 villagers fled to the KBC in the last two days. We are expecting more to arrive, a KBC representative told The Irrawaddy.

Our church is already flooded with people. I am still not sure how to find space for more. We dont have enough space, he said.

By Tuesday evening, more than 5,500 villagers had fled to churches and monasteries in Momauk from Sihike, Kone Law, Myo Haung, Myo Thit, Shwe Myaung, Namt Lan, Mone Khat, Naung Kon and Nant Ngoe villages.

Kachin military tension has risen since March 11 with KIA offensives on the security forces in response to the killing of anti-regime protesters in the state. The KIA refused to recognize the regime and threatened to step up attacks if the junta continues to shoot peaceful protesters across the country.



You may also like these stories:

Myanmar Regime Files High Treason, Other Charges Against Detained Protest Leader

Two civilians were shot by junta forces in Magwe after the attacks.

Villager Dies After Being Abducted and Tortured by Myanmar Junta Forces
University of Guam researchers have found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals

A study by University of Guam researchers has found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. The study, which was funded by the university's National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, was published in February in the peer-reviewed Marine Biology Research journal.

"We wanted to see what role light has in coral bleaching," said UOG Assistant Professor Bastian Bentlage, the supervisor and co-author of the study. "Usually, people talk about temperature as a cause for bleaching, but we show that both light and temperature work together."

Previous UOG research led by Laurie J. Raymundo found that more than one-third of all coral reefs in Guam were killed from 2013 to 2017 over the course of multiple bleaching events. Coral bleaching is the process in which corals stressed by environmental changes expel the essential symbiotic algae that live in their tissues, causing them to turn white and often die.

This latest study examined the resilience of staghorn corals (Acropora cf. pulchra) in heightened seawater temperatures. This species of coral is one of Guam's dominant reef-builders, and its habitats experience temperatures up to 97 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest months of the year, leaving it vulnerable to bleaching episodes and population decline.

A team of researchers -- including lead author Justin T. Berg, a UOG graduate student studying biology; Charlotte M. David, an undergraduate student from the University of Plymouth (England), and Melissa Gabriel, a UOG graduate student studying environmental science -- took coral samples from the Hagatna reef flat and examined their health in the UOG Marine Laboratory under normal and elevated temperatures.

"One group was subjected to consistent baseline temperatures observed on Guam's reef flats," Bentlage said, "and another was set to temperatures that are projected to become the new normal over the next couple of decades."

The researchers found that the corals took three weeks to recover from a week-long heat stress event. The experiment was then replicated to see how the corals would react if they were given shade while subjected to warmer temperatures.

"We found that when we put the shading over coral with increased seawater temperatures, it greatly increased photosynthetic yield of the symbiotic algae. Shade made a huge difference for coral health when you have high temperatures," Berg said.

Implications for reef management

Shading is a practice already used in coral nurseries, Bentlage said, but it may not be practical to shade whole reefs in the ocean. Future studies can look into practical ways to reduce the impact of light on corals, particularly as they recover from periods of elevated temperatures.

"We saw the corals recover rather slowly," Berg said. "The length of recovery indicates that corals are vulnerable during this time and management efforts may be particularly necessary during this period to reduce coral mortality."

Berg said the new knowledge may also help inform the best locations to successfully outplant corals.

"For example, slightly turbid waters could provide some shading to corals, making them less likely to bleach during periods of elevated sea surface temperatures," Berg said.

###
Edison, NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/29/2021 -- Latest released the research study on Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market, offers a detailed overview of the factors influencing the global business scope. Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market research report shows the latest market insights, current situation analysis with upcoming trends and breakdown of the products and services. The report provides key statistics on the market status, size, share, growth factors of the Telecom Cyber Security Solution. The study covers emerging player's data, including: competitive landscape, sales, revenue and global market share of top manufacturers are McAfee Inc. (United States), Symantec Corporation (United States), Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Isreal), IBM Corp. (United States), Panda Security (Sapin), LG Telecom (South Korea), Kaspersky Lab ZAO (Russia), AVG Technologies (Czech Republic), CA Technologies (United States), Cisco Systems Inc. (United States),.



Free Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts @: https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/sample-report/118402-global-telecom-cyber-security-solution-market



Definition:

Alterations in security standards, strict government regulations, and rapid adoption of newer technology are propelling the global telecom cybersecurity solution market. Organizations are demanding advanced security solutions to enable effective preventive systems to all the computing equipment in the network. Furthermore, deployment of security process applications and background authentication is increasing due to the augmenting utilization of network-based applications.

On 25th February 2018, McAfee has announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with TArk Telekom by launching TArk Telekom Total Protection, delivering security protection across multiple and varying devices.



Analyst at AMA have conducted special survey and have connected with opinion leaders and Industry experts from various region to minutely understand impact on growth as well as local reforms to fight the situation. A special chapter in the study presents Impact Analysis of COVID-19 on Global Dichroic Glass Market along with tables and graphs related to various country and segments showcasing impact on growth trends.



Market Trend:

The growing adoption of bringing your own device (BYOD) model

The rising number of mobile workers in companies



Market Drivers:

The Increasing cyber intrusions

The increasing complexities in cybersecurity threats



Opportunities:

The Growing demand for cloud-based solutions



The Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market segments and Market Data Break Down are illuminated below:

by Services (Consulting and Integration, Security and Vulnerability Assessment, Managed Security Services), Solutions (Antivirus, Anti-malware, Personal IPS/IDS, Mobile Application Management, Endpoint Encryption, Antispyware, Mobile Device Development, Personal Firewall, Behavioral Blocking Software, Configuration and Patch ManagementAntivirus, Anti-malware, Personal IPS/IDS, Mobile Application Management, Endpoint Encryption, Antispyware, Mobile Device Development, Personal Firewall, Behavioral Blocking Software, Configuration and Patch Management), Component (Hardware, Software, Services), End User (Small Businesses, Medium Businesses, Large Businesses)



Enquire for customization in Report @: https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/enquiry-before-buy/118402-global-telecom-cyber-security-solution-market



On 7th January 2020, Accenture has agreed to acquire Symantecas Cyber Security Services business from Broadcom, Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition will make Accenture Security one of the leading providers of managed security services, further enhancing its ability to help companies rapidly anticipate, detect, and respond to cyber threats.



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



Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market:

Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Telecom Cyber Security Solution market

Chapter 2: Exclusive Summary  the basic information of the Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market.

Chapter 3: Displaying the Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges of the Telecom Cyber Security Solution

Chapter 4: Presenting the Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market Factor Analysis Porters Five Forces, Supply/Value Chain, PESTEL analysis, Market Entropy, Patent/Trademark Analysis.

Chapter 5: Displaying market size by Type, End User and Region 2015-2020

Chapter 6: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the Telecom Cyber Security Solution 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 (2021-2026).

Chapter 8 & 9: Displaying the Appendix, Methodology and Data Source

Finally, Telecom Cyber Security Solution Market is a valuable source of guidance for individuals and companies in decision framework.



Get More Information:

https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/reports/118402-global-telecom-cyber-security-solution-market



Key questions answered

- Who are the Leading key players and what are their Key Business plans in the Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution market?

- What are the key concerns of the five forces analysis of the Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution market?

- What are different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Global Telecom Cyber Security Solution market?

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?



Definitively, this report will give you an unmistakable perspective on every single reality of the market without a need to allude to some other research report or an information source. Our report will give all of you the realities about the past, present, and eventual fate of the concerned Market.

Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.
For owner Tracy Longoria, seeing Aussakita Acres Farm in the headlines is nothing new. So when she posted a photo earlier this week to her Manchester farms Facebook account of a visit from actors and Connecticut residents Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, she knew what was coming next.

My phone has been blowing up with everybody going Oh my God! You made it! You made it in the papers, Longoria said. I said, Yea, I get it, I have to go feed animals now!

The same animals that earned her photo over 1,000 likes on Facebook and many more on Instagram also earned her some global news coverage in 2017: her goats. Longoria said when the Manchester farm started to offer goat yoga four years ago, she ended up in a zoning dispute.

The dispute went nationwide, she said. The problem was that the town of Manchester deemed us not zoned to do goat yoga, saying it was recreational and not agritourism.

After receiving a cease and desist order that said goat yoga was not a farm activity, the decision ended up before the zoning board of appeals. Longoria recalled the amazing outpouring of support she received not just from locals, including the state's Hindu community who helped protest, but from those around the state, nation (it was covered by the Wall Street Journal) and world.

It went as far as into Australia and New Zealand, she said. It was crazy. So when we went to the ZBA meeting, we completely and utterly filled the room to the point where there were people standing out in the hallway, people outside, we had picketers screaming Baby goats dont hurt anybody. It was insane; it totally took a life of its own.

Four years later, Longoria finds the popularity of her goats still holds. In fact, even before Bacon and Sedgwick made an appearance at her farm this week, she had already filled her appointments for this weekend just off of a post to her social media channels.

I typically have people text me [for an appointment] and on Sunday before Kevin and Kyra even came out, I put up that my piglet socials were starting and I put up the baby goats for the weekend, she said. I went out that evening and I turned my phone off. I came back and I had 44 texts on my phone.

Aussakita Acres Farm offers baby goat socials, piglet socials and farm tours, in which they allow guests ages 5 and older to go into the pastures for an up-close look at her farm animals. Longoria said the farm is also considering adding a few extra activities this spring, including goat hikes.

More Living Living Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick visit CT farm to pick new...

While this weekend is already filled, guests can book future appointments to Aussakita Acres Farm via text message.
(Natural News) As many other states are lifting their mask mandates, Michigan is doubling down on face diapers by expanding the requirement that they be worn by children as young as two years old.

Under the direction of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) has decided that children aged 2-4 should join the adults by wearing Chinese plastic on their faces all day long. Previously, children under the age of five were exempt from the states mask mandate.

Now, a face mask is required for every human two years of age and older, except for those who are medically exempt. Even the exempt, however, are strongly encouraged to block their breathing passages to stop the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

The change means that kids from 2-4 are now subject to the masking requirement just like everyone else, announced MDHHS Public Information Officer Bob Wheaton in a written statement. So if an 18 year old would be required to mask because they were in a gathering at a park, so would a 2-4 year old.

It was actually MDHHS Director Elizabeth Hertel who issued the directive  Wheaton just obeyed his master by issuing a statement about it. Hertel, who recently returned from a beach vacation in Alabama, decided that babies need to mask up in order to cure the Chinese virus.

The order came days after Hertel arrived back from a spring break vacation to Gulf Shores, Alabama, and another top Whitmer aide, Tricia Foster, was found to have vacationed in Siesta Key, Florida, Breitbart News reported.

Critics questioned whether there were different rules for top officials. Whitmer responded, What directors do on their personal time is their business, so long as they are safe.'

Whitmer also traveled to Florida last month  something many of her constituents have been unable to do because they are no longer earning an income thanks to her lockdowns. Whitmer expressed no shame or remorse, and even had the audacity to tell Michiganders not to follow her lead because their travels  but not hers, of course  could contribute to further spread of the Wuhan flu.

Medical face mask fibers found to be infested with worms

Besides restricting oxygen flow, standard issue medical face masks were also recently found to contain worms embedded within their fibers.

Dr. T, as they call her, recently spoke with Not on the BEEBs Mark Playne about her discovery that masks do, in fact, contain black worms that people are breathing in every time they wear one. The same is also true of the swabs being thrust into peoples nasal cavities for testing.

After purchasing five different medical mask brands of different grades, Dr. T used a high-powered microscope to look more closely at them. To her dismay, all of them contained the worms, which exhibited lifelike movements suggesting they are alive.

Enough is enough, wrote one commenter at Newspunch about face masks. Everyone just dont wear a mask and go into the stores and shop. There wont be enough cops. Everyone should surround the cop cars and shout them away if that happens because this is getting ridiculous.

It will just get more and more restrictive if we dont do anything, this person added. We need to make a full revolt.

Others pointed out that all of this was predicted in the Bible, from the rising up of the Beast to the requirement that everyone bear his mark in order to buy and sell. We are already witnessing the early stages of the Revelation in the form of mask mandates and vaccine passports.

More related news about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) mask madness can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

Newspunch.com

NaturalNews.com

Breitbart.com

NaturalNews.com

PrepareForChange.net
Chinese lawmakers on Thursday voted to pass an amendment to the Maritime Traffic Safety Law, stressing the importance of marine epidemic control.

The captain of the vessel shall be responsible for implementing emergency response measures once a crew member on board is found to have or is suspected of having infectious disease that may pose serious health threat to others, says the law revision adopted at a session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, which opened Monday.

The revised law stipulates that relevant personnel shall be put under quarantine, if necessary, along with timely reporting of the situation to authorities.

The revised law will take effect on September 1, 2021.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:30:02|Editor: huaxia

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A worker prepares to load an oxygen cylinder onto a truck at a refilling station in Narayanganj on the outskirts of Bangladesh capital Dhaka, April 29, 2021. Workers at oxygen refilling stations including the one in Narayanganj are now working overtime to meet the growing demand on hospitals. (Xinhua)
An 'unacceptable' prison sentence for a man who left a young police officer needing life-saving surgery has sparked outrage online.

PC Leo Clarke, 24, had been with Cambridgeshire Police for less than a year when he was punched in the head by Joshua Gull, 27, in February.

Speaking at court, Clarke described feeling like 'prisoner' within his own home as Gull was jailed for less than two years - sparking fury online.

Liz Groom, Chair of Cambridgeshire Police Federation, said the official body was 'disappointed' with the outcome of the case.

'The Police Federation is highly disappointed with this sentence, which absolutely is not enough', she said.

'It doesn't send the right message to offenders - and does not portray the effect that this has had on Leo and his family.'

PC Leo Clarke, 24, (above) needed life-saving surgery after he was punched in the head during a routine call out in Peterborough in February

PC Clarke had visited Gull's Peterborough home on February 8, after reports of violence towards members of his family.

Gull became agitated when PC Clark activated his body-worn video camera - and he grabbed the officer, taking on a fighting stance.

PC Clark, who was a new-in-service police officer, attempted to use PAVA spray - a substance similar to pepper spray - but it was to no avail and Gull punched him in the head.

Gull was arrested soon afterwards - but when PC Clark returned to Peterborough Police Station, a welfare check by a supervisor discovered he was squinting and slurring his words.

He was taken to Peterborough City Hospital where doctors discovered he had a bleed on the brain.

Pictured is Joshua Gull, 27, of Oundle in Northamptonshire, who struck his victim on the head - leaving him with a potentially deadly bleed on the brain

John Apter, Chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, took to Twitter to blast the 'unacceptable' sentence handed to Gull.

He wrote: 'The animal who did this got just 20 months in prison. The Criminal Justice system failed this officer.

'What happened to PC Clarke is completely unacceptable - it is not, and must never been seen as just part of the job.

'He suffered life-changing injuries when he was attacked on duty.

'My colleagues keep getting let down by the Criminal Justice System. The system needs an overhaul.

Clarke, who was still on probation at the time of the attack, was left in hospital for five days and is still recovering from surgery which left him with huge scars on his head.

The true devastation of his injuries were revealed in a witness impact statement, read to Peterborough Crown Court yesterday as Gull was jailed for 20 months.

Clarke said: 'This incident has left me feeling like a burden on everyone.

'I feel like a prisoner as such in my own house because the recovery is so slow and I would really like to go out with my family but I can't due to the injury.

'I was a really active person and for that now to be taken away, with the possibility that some of these injuries might never go away, makes me feel quite upset.'

PC Clarke had been in the job for less than a year before the attack. He described feeling 'like a burden on everyone' after his life-saving surgery

Gull admitted causing grievous bodily harm, and was sentence to one year and eight months in jail.

While in custody, Gull told officers he regretted what he had done and had been suffering with his mental health.

The court heard that Gull had missed a psychiatric appointment at Peterborough City Hospital on the morning of the assault, and walked to the family address prior to speaking with a doctor.

DC Mat Belfitt, who investigated, said: 'This was a violent attack against a new-in-service police officer who was simply doing his job in responding to reports of concern for this man.

'Being subjected to such abuse will not be tolerated and we will continue to take strong action.'

On average, there are 42 assaults on officers in Cambridgeshire every month.

PC Clarke's story has sparked fury online, with the chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales blasting the 'unacceptable' sentence

Chief Constable Nick Dean, added: 'Police officers and staff are regularly subjected to violence and threats which too often result in injury.

'It is never acceptable to assume that assaults upon police officers and staff should be tolerated, it is not simply 'part of the job'.

'While it is clear that the nature of policing requires members of the organisation to handle difficult and hostile situations, assaults upon them are serious and unacceptable.

'The public call upon the police to help them when they are most in need.

'We have a duty to protect the public, but we are all too often prevented from doing so due to violent individuals who choose to attack those who are there to help them.

'Most importantly it should be remembered that police officers and staff are people, they are fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

'When they are attacked they become victims just like any other, but victims who have been attacked while trying to protect others.'
CSRF, CORS, and HTTP Security headers Demystified

With an increasing number of breaches, intrusions, and data thefts, securing a web application is extremely important.

On the other hand, programmers often do not have a strong grasp of how attacks work and how to mitigate them. This post attempts to close that gap a little.

CSRF

Cross-Site Request Forgery is an attack where a third party forces a user to execute actions against a site where they are currently logged in.

Here is an example illustrating how this works:

You visit evil.com evil.com has a hidden form that submits on page load to mybank.com/transfer-funds. Since you are logged in to mybank.com, this request is made with your mybank.com cookies and will silently initiate a money transfer out of your account. Since 'evil.com' and 'mybank.com' are different origins, the browser refuses to provide the response to evil.com (because of CORS), but the attacker doesn't care, the money's already been transferred.

Now if mybank.com implements CSRF protection correctly:

Each time mybank.com serves a form to a user, it generates a CSRF token and inserts it into a hidden field in the form If a POST request is received, it checks the CSRF token against its database - if this is present and valid then the request goes through. If the CSRF token is missing or incorrect it is rejected.

CSRF attacks target state-changing requests and not the direct theft of data because the attacker does not see the response of the forged request. The CSRF token provides security by being a stateless token that is never stored in the cookies or permanent storage - doing so would defeat the purpose of the token.

CSRF protection support needs to be added to your application code and cannot be added at the proxy server layer (eg. in Nginx). A detailed look at CSRF from OWASP

It is good practice to always use the SameSite directive with cookies as this provides protection against CSRF attacks.

CORS

Cross-Origin Request Sharing only applies in a browser context and is a security mechanism to allow one origin to make a request to another origin. All browsers follow the Single Origin Policy, meaning by default scripts cannot make requests to other origins - but if the server provides properly configured CORS headers this policy can be selectively relaxed. Thus CORS is a way of selectively loosening security and not of tightening it.

When a website makes an XHR request to another origin, the browser initiates a preflight OPTIONS request first - and the original request is only made if the server responds to this preflight with a list of allowed origins, and this list contains the origin of the current page.

Note that CORS preflight requests are not made for GET HEAD POST requests with default headers.

Some key headers sent as a response to an OPTIONS request:

access-control-allow-credentials: If set, cookies are sent by the browser

access-control-allow-origin: The list of origins allowed to make requests, or '*' to allow anyone to make requests. If access-control-allow-credentials is set then this cannot be set to '*' or the browser will reject the request anyway

access-control-allow-methods: The list of HTTP methods allowed to communicate - POST, PUT, etc.

The reason access-control-allow-origin cannot be '*' when access-control-allow-credentials is set is to prevent developers taking the shortcut of adding a * and then forgetting about it altogether - this behaviour forces developers to think about how their API is going to be consumed.

CORS is often a code smell of sorts - for example, a common use of CORS is to allow multiple properties access to one API, like mybank.com being accessed by mybankpersonal.com and mybankbusiness.com - and in these cases, CORS can be avoided altogether with the use of an API gateway. If all web pages are served from the same domain (mybank.com), no CORS headers need to be set and the browser can apply the full Same Origin Policy and provide maximum security. After all, CORS only serves to selectively decrease security not increase it.

On the other hand, using CORS is unavoidable if you are providing an API for third parties to consume from a browser (eg. after going through an Oauth process).

Of course, CORS is irrelevant for requests made outside the web browser, eg. with Curl or with server-to-server communication.

XSS

Cross-Site Scripting is an attack where an attacker injects a client-side script into a web page. XSS can be used to bypass both the same-origin policy and CSRF protections.

This is done either by compromising the server (eg. by using a known exploit) or by leveraging poorly-sanitised user inputs to add a script to the website, which is triggered whenever a user visits the website.

This is the most commonly exploited vulnerability and can be fixed with careful sanitisation and encoding for display of all user input - even things like email addresses could be vectors for script injection. For instance.,

"><script>alert(1);</script>"@example.org

is a valid email address by RFC 5321!

XSS is best sanitised on the output side, this way raw data is stored in the database as input by the user and is then escaped to an appropriate format at the time it is sent out again - for example, if the result is to be sent as part of HTML page the escaping will be different from if the result is to be sent as JSON or included in a script tag in the HTML page. The escaping should be appropriate to the output format. Additionally, if content is escaped before insert into the database it won't be secure against future changes to business requirements - for example, if the business decides to serve data through a REST API when it was previously only used in a HTML page, the encoding would now be irrelevant.

Care must be taken to ensure the sanitisation is done safely - it may be possible to easily bypass sanitisation and several such attacks exist. For instance, it may be possible to simply add text such as:

<scr<script>ipt>alert(1)</script>

where the sanitisation filter strips out the script tag, but in doing so causes the split script tag to come together and the attack to succeed.

OWASP has a comprehensive section on XSS sanitisation bypasses.

The OWASP cheat sheet on XSS prevention is a good starting point for securing an application against XSS.

CSP

Content Security Policy is an added layer of security to detect and mitigate XSS attacks. By specifying the domains that should be considered valid sources for scripts, a web browser will only execute scripts loaded from these white listed domains. CSP can specify allowed origins for all dynamic origins, including scripts, stylesheets, images, fonts, objects, media (audio, video), frames, and even form-actions.

CSP is set through the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header.

The difference from CORS is that CORS prevents a third party from accessing a server, while CSP prevents a website itself from loading content from a third party, as a defence against XSS.

CSP is not a silver bullet against XSS but it helps. Ultimately XSS needs to be prevented with careful application design and effective user input sanitisation, both on the frontend and the backend.

Of all the mitigations on this page, CSP is the most complicated because of the depth of its options and also likely the hardest to implement because every time a front-end dev adds a new CDN - for fonts, scripts, whatever - that CDN needs to be added to the CSP header. Without a well-designed test setup, this could work fine in dev but break when pushed to production.

CSP is complicated enough to require more than a few paragraphs - a full page would do it more justice.

The Content Security Policy web site describes how to add CSP support to your web server and Google's handy test tool can help test these policies.

HSTS

HTTP Strict Transport Security protects against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking by allowing a server to declare that browsers should only interact with it using HTTPS connections and never HTTP; and the browser should always convert all attempts to access the site using HTTP to HTTPS instead, eg. by rewriting all links to use HTTPS instead of HTTP.

This guards against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks that work by transparently converting a https connection into plain http.

For example, you might connect to a free wifi service at the airport to access your bank website, but the access point is actually a hacker's laptop that performs a MITM attack and redirects you to a clone of the bank's site. HSTS provides security in this scenario as long as you have accessed your bank's web site at least once over HTTPS (and the bank uses HSTS), the browser will reject this request outright.

This page has details on configuring HSTS for Nginx.

HPKP

HTTP Public Key Pinning allows HTTPS websites to resist impersonation using fraudulently obtained SSL certificates by providing the browser a set of public keys which are the only ones to be trusted for future connections to the same origin.

This provides security against a compromised certificate authority as has happened in the past with Comodo.

In the airport scenario above, if the hacker also had a fraudulently obtained certificate for the bank, HSTS alone would not protect you - but with HPKP, even this attack can be mitigated. This is a Trust-on-first-use technique.

HPKP will eventually be superseded by the Expect-CT header. More on HPKP.

Set-Cookie

This is a fairly standard header and by far the oldest on the page, yet is one of the most important (and easiest) to configure correctly.

This can be done by setting a few directives.

The SameSite: Strict directive protects against CSRF attacks by stripping cookies from all cross-domain requests.

directive protects against CSRF attacks by stripping cookies from all cross-domain requests. The Secure directive ensures the cookies are only ever used in a https connection - thus providing additional security over what is provided by HPKP and HSTS.

directive ensures the cookies are only ever used in a https connection - thus providing additional security over what is provided by HPKP and HSTS. The HttpOnly directive ensures JavaScript cannot access the cookie.

You will as a rule want to set all three. More on Set-Cookie

Other Headers

These are generally less important to set but good to be aware of.

X-XSS Protection: This header is outdated and possibly harmful and CSP does a better job of providing protections. The main job of this in Chrome is to trigger the XSS auditor which has been deprecated for being insecure.

X-Frame-Options: This header indicates whether the site should be allowed to be displayed within an iFrame. This has been superseded by CSP's frame-ancestors option which is better supported in modern browsers.

option which is better supported in modern browsers. X-Content-Type-Options: This prevents the browser from attempting to guess the type of content if the Content-Type header is not set. This can prevent XSS exploits for websites that allow users to upload and share files.

X-Download Options: Again useful in scenarios involving user file uploads, when set to 'noopen' this forces the browser to download a file instead of attempting to display it in the browser.

Referrer-Policy: When this is set to 'no-referrer' the browser does not send the referrer when making a request and is useful for privacy. More on referrer-policy.

Overall, as the web grows in terms of features and complexity, the attack surface also grows correspondingly large. A properly configured web server and a well designed application with effective use of HTTPS (eg. with Let's Encrypt) can provide a good degree of protection.

As an added bonus, many of the mitigations on this page can be applied at the proxy server (CSP, HSTS, HPKP) or network level (better server proxying to remove the need for CORS), and only the CSRF and XSS protections really need to be added to the application. of course, the mitigations on this page are only a small subset of what is possible.

Some useful resources to implement these:

That said, the application is likely the biggest source of security threats anyway, most of the OWASP top ten have to deal with application programming bugs - highlighting the importance of good design and application architecture.
Bethany Hamilton has opened up about how she cares for her three children with one arm following the birth of her youngest son, Micah, saying she uses her feet to help change her two-month-old's diaper.

The 31-year-old surfer, who lost her left arm in a shark attack when she was 13, took to Instagram on Wednesday to talk 'a little about mom life with one arm.' She and her husband Adam Dirks welcomed their youngest son, Micah, in February.

'Im raising our third son, so the tricks and adaptations are getting better with each child,' she explained. 'When they are this young and have the wobbly head and need constant attention, nursing, diaper changes, tummy soothing, lots of sleep and of course smiles, kisses and more.'

Motherhood: Bethany Hamilton, 31, shared a candid Instagram post on Wednesday detailing the 'tricks and adaptations' she relies on to care for her children with just one arm

Party of five: Bethany and her husband Adam Dirks welcomed their third son, Micah, on February 14. The couple also has sons Tobias, five, and Wesley, three

Bethany went on to detail the creative ways she cares for her newborn, admitting that it's not always easy with just one arm.

'I use my feet to help with diaper changing, lots of pillows with nursing, a baby carrier all throughout the day and tricky styles of holding to keep babys head up,' she wrote.

'Sometimes it can get frustrating but I just gotta keep moving forward, have lil breaks and keep it positive!' she added. 'Plus I remember Ive done it before. And as a family we make it work!'

Along with the candid post, she shared a photo of herself holding a laughing Micah with one arm while gazing down at him with love.

Making it work: The surgery said she keeps Micah in a baby carrier all throughout the day

Getting creative: Bethany also said she uses her feet to help with diaper changes

'Loving our lil Micah and looking forward to more life with him! Cheering on all you mommas out there grinding, loving and doing your best!' she concluded the post.

The proud mom has shared plenty of photos of her family's newest addition, including a snapshot of herself holding him in a baby carrier on her chest.

Earlier this month, she posted a picture of herself smiling while Micah was lying on her chest, apparently crying. In the post, she talked about the difficulties of motherhood in general.

'Mom life. Not always smiles. The balance. The ups and downs,' she wrote. 'The most beautiful gift but also so incredibly challenging... Sleep deprivation. They cry. They stretch us mentally and emotionally. I cry.

Accident: Bethany (pictured) was 13 when she was attacked by a shark while surfing off the coast of Kauai in 2003. She lost her arm as well as 60 percent of the blood in her body

Making a splash: Bethany (pictured in 2004) did not let the incident impact her dreams of surfing. She began competing professionally four years after the attack

Amazing: The athlete is pictured competing at the VANS US Open of surfing in Huntington Beach, California, in 2019

'But then they smile and coo and nurse sweetly,' she continued. 'Thankful for this life and the beauty of motherhood. 'Thankful for my family, friends, my husband and boys. Grateful to God to have this beautiful challenge and joy.

'You got this mom and dads out there!!! Stay positive.'

Bethany and Adam announced in February that their third son had arrived on Valentine's Day. The couple also has sons Tobias, five, and Wesley, three.

Bethany was 13 when she was attacked by a shark while surfing off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2003. She lost her arm as well as 60 percent of the blood in her body.

Growing family: The mother of three (pictured pregnant with Micah) announced the birth of her son in February. The baby boy was born on Valentine's Day

Keeping it real: Earlier this month, she posted a picture of herself smiling while Micah was lying on her chest, apparently crying. In the post, she talked about the difficulties of motherhood

She did not let the incident impact her dreams of surfing, however, and she began competing professionally four years later in 2007.

In 2010, she was the twentieth ranked woman among surfers and has placed first in at least eight different surfing competitions in her career.



Bethany's story became an inspiration to many after she wrote about it in the book Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board.

The book adapted into the 2011 film Soul Surfer, starring Dennis Quaid and Carrie Underwood in 2011. Anna Sophia Robb portrayed Bethany.
[April 29, 2021] C Spire Fiber accepts pre-orders for ultra-fast Gigabit internet in Tuscaloosa

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- C Spire Fiber is accepting consumer pre-orders now and has begun construction for its ultra-fast, fiber-based Gigabit internet access and related services in the Tuscaloosa County cities of Northport and Tuscaloosa and will soon expand into the unincorporated areas of the county. The broadband division of C Spire, a Mississippi-based diversified telecommunications and technology services company, started construction on the next-generation technology today in four fiberhoods in the two towns with plans to pass thousands of homes in the county covering 50 more fiberhoods over the next several months. Service is planned for the first customers this summer. C Spire Business also will begin offering fiber internet services for businesses in these markets in the coming months. Tuscaloosa County, including the 103,000 plus city of Tuscaloosa with the state's fifth largest population and nearly 26,000 population Northport, are the latest Alabama markets in line for the ultra-fast broadband services from C Spire Fiber. The company already has rolled out service in the Jasper, Trussville, Helena and Pelham markets and is expected to announce additional markets soon. In January 2021, C Spire announced a $1 billion investment to speed the development and deployment of fiber broadband and network enhancements, and about $500 million is set to be spent on fiber expansion in Alabama over a five-year period. C Spire's deployment of all-fiber symmetrical infrastructure and ultra-fast broadband internet helps attract industry and improve Alabamians' quality of life. Residents in Helena, Pelham, Trussville and Jasper are among the first Alabamians to receive C Spire's service, but more communities, including Northport, Tuscaloosa and unincorporated parts of Tuscaloosa and Mobile counties, are either under construction or will soon begin work on the infrastructure. "High-speed,all-fiber broadband internet service can be a game-changer for Tuscaloosa, Northport and other Alabama communities," said Ashley Phillips, general manager of C Spire Home. "Our ability to provide symmetric speeds immediately solves real-world challenges associated with interactive learning, remote work and telehealth applications. That's good news as our Fiber Fast initiative continues."



"High-speed fiber connectivity is crucial for businesses in today's world. We are pleased to be bringing our fiber internet along with our suite of business services to the Tuscaloosa area," said Allen McIntosh, general manager of C Spire Business. As part of its expansion efforts, C Spire also is actively seeking interest from other Alabama communities and towns seeking more reliable and faster broadband internet service based on the firm's crowdsourcing model, which relies on homeowner, business and renter demand to drive adoption.

Alabama ranks 38th nationally in broadband access and state leaders have made access to fast, reliable and affordable internet for rural areas a priority through state funding and creation of the Alabama Rural Broadband Coalition, a group of community, business and government leaders dedicated to job creation, economic development and business growth. C Spire Fiber is actively soliciting residents who want more reliable and faster broadband internet service based on the crowdsourcing model, which relies on homeowner demand to drive adoption. Consumers can place pre-orders for Gigabit fiber-based internet, Smart WiFi powered by Plume, Home Protection Plan and digital home phone service at www.cspire.com/fiber. Unlike some other internet service providers, C Spire Fiber has no data caps, cancellation fees or long-term contracts. The C Spire division provides exact appointment times, world-class 24/7/365 customer service and over 99.99 percent reliability. Local government leaders lauded C Spire's decision to invest in the future of the Tuscaloosa, Northport and Tuscaloosa County. "Fast, dependable and affordable broadband is critical to quality of life, home values and new jobs in our city," said Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox. "We appreciate C Spire choosing Northport for this game-changing infrastructure investment," said Northport Mayor Bobby Herndon. Residents in Northport, Tuscaloosa and in parts of the county's unincorporated area who want to express their interest in the suite of services from C Spire Fiber should go to www.cspire.com/alfiber. Residents can also email fiberchampions@cspire.com to learn more about how they can get service in their area. Prospective business customers can go to www.cspire.com/alfiber to check availability as well. About C Spire Fiber

C Spire Fiber is a division of C Spire, 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. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/c-spire-fiber-accepts-pre-orders-for-ultra-fast-gigabit-internet-in-tuscaloosa-301280544.html SOURCE C Spire

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THE WOODLANDS, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Talen Energy's management has scheduled a conference call to discuss first quarter 2021 results on Thursday, May 6, 2021, at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

Ralph Alexander, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Alex Hernandez, President and Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the company's financial and operating results, during an investor presentation to be teleconferenced and webcast.

Qualified investors and securities analysts can access the conference call and related materials on the Investor Information section of Talen Energy's website at:

https://talenenergy.investorroom.com/investor-information

About Talen Energy Corporation

Talen Energy is one of the largest competitive power generation and infrastructure companies in North America. The Company owns and/or controls approximately 13,000 megawatts of generating capacity in well- developed, structured wholesale U.S. power markets, principally in the Mid-Atlantic and Texas. Talen is developing a large-scale portfolio of renewable energy, battery storage, and digital infrastructure assets across its expansive footprint.

For more information, please visit https://www.talenenergy.com/

Investor Contact

Olivia Sigo

Director of Finance, Investor Relations, and ESG

281-203-5387

[email protected]

Media Contact

Taryne Williams

Media & Community Relations Manager

610-601-0327

[email protected]

SOURCE Talen Energy Corp.

Related Links

https://www.talenenergy.com






Haiti - FLASH : At least 21 dead and 30 injured in an accident





At least 21 people died on the spot yesterday Wednesday and around 30 were injured in the collision of two buses in the locality of Williamson, about 50 kilometers northwest of Port-au-Prince, the civil protection department reported.



The wounded were transferred to hospitals in the Arcahaie region, by rescue teams from the civil protection and the Red Cross.



According to testimonies collected by civil protection, a minibus trying to overtake collided head-on with a bus coming from the opposite direction.



The minibus traveled between Port-au-Prince and Saint-Marc, while the other public transport vehicle traveled between Gonaives and Port-au-Prince.



The Arcahaie municipal committee has activated a crisis unit for further interventions.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan assesses the international communitys activeness over the return of Armenian prisoners of war from Azerbaijan with optimism.

During todays Cabinet meeting Pashinyan said Azerbaijan doesnt fulfill its commitments on returning the captured persons.

We can state that this fact is becoming a matter of the international agenda, and I want to note that yesterday the European Union has released a very important statement, clearly recording that Azerbaijan must return all captured persons regardless of the circumstances of their arrest, Pashinyan said, adding that this statement also made a reference to the ongoing processes in the European Court of Human Rights, which adds a legal component to the political statement, which, according to him, is highly important.

I want to note that the recent international activeness over the issues of the prisoners of war, is very important and increases the optimism that we will have concrete results on this issue. We need to be maximally united, patient and consistent, this issue must definitely get a positive solution, Pashinyan said.

The European Union made a statement on April 28, calling on Azerbaijan to provide the outstanding information about the Armenian prisoners of war to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which was requested by the Court earlier.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Xi extends condolences to Chad's CMT head over death of President Deby

Xinhua) 13:41, April 29, 2021

Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno attends a round table of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 4, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a message of condolences to the head of Chad's transitional military council (CMT) Mahamat Idriss Deby, over the death of Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno.

In his message, Xi, on behalf of the Chinese government and people, and in his own name, expressed deep grief and extended sincere condolences to the Chadian government, people and the relatives of late President Deby.

Xi pointed out that President Deby had led the Chadian people to safeguard the national sovereign security and territorial integrity, promote national economic and social development, and strive to maintain regional peace and stability.

During his lifetime, President Deby had attached great importance to developing relations with China, actively promoted exchanges and cooperation between the two countries in various fields, and made important contributions to promoting the development of friendly and cooperative relations between China and Chad, Xi noted.

Xi said that he attaches great importance to the friendship between the peoples of China and Chad, and that China is willing to work with Chad to push forward their bilateral relations for the benefit of the two countries and their peoples.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
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Abuja, April 28, 2021  Nigerian authorities should thoroughly investigate the attack on journalist Frederick Olatunde Odimayo and hold those responsible to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On April 16, in Lokoja, the capital of the northwestern state of Kogi, five men attacked Odimayo, a freelance reporter and editor with the privately owned broadcaster Grace FM, beating him until he lost consciousness, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Odimayo said he was at a car repair shop at about noon when the group of men approached him and accused him of destroying their drug trafficking business with his reporting. They proceeded to beat him for about 15 minutes, until one of the journalists colleagues intervened and stopped the attack, according to that colleague, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

Odimayo said he regained consciousness later that day at a hospital in Lokoja, where he remained in recovery for 24 hours; he told CPJ yesterday that he still experiences headaches from the attack and has sought further treatment in his hometown in Ondo state.

Authorities in Nigeria must identify those who assaulted journalist Frederick Olatunde Odimayo and ensure they are held to account  including those who planned the attack, said Angela Quintal, CPJs Africa program coordinator, in New York. Journalists safety should be a top priority for Nigerian law enforcement, and that includes curbing impunity for violence against reporters.

On March 31, the privately owned news website Wadata Media published an audio report, filed by Odimayo as a freelancer, on the drug trade in Lokoja. In that reporting, Odimayo went under cover as a drug buyer to expose a local trafficking group.

Odimayo told CPJ that Grace FM had filed a report to police immediately following the attack.

William Aya, the Kogi state police spokesperson, told CPJ over the phone on April 19 that police had taken suspects into custody for questioning, but said they were not the suspected attackers themselves. Aya declined to comment further and said additional details about the investigation would eventually be made public; today, he told CPJ via messaging app that the investigation was still ongoing.
It remains unclear whether Democrats will agree to winnowing down the scope of the economic platform or plans to pay for it by undoing key elements of the 2017 tax plan in order to win a handful of Republican votes. Some Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key moderate, have urged their colleagues to negotiate with Republicans.

I think there is a good reason for us to proceed with sincere bipartisan negotiations in the next few weeks  not indefinitely, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, told reporters on Thursday. He said that making the attempt would be crucial for getting the requisite 50 Democratic votes to pass something unilaterally if those talks stalled.

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said he was optimistic, after conversations with Mr. Biden and White House staff members, that Senate Republicans and the administration could hatch a deal around a narrower definition of infrastructure, leaving other liberal proposals in Mr. Bidens plans for a separate bill.

I dont know where the White House ends up on it, Mr. Portman said. The president last night said the right things, both in his speech and private conversations. I think they want to do an infrastructure package. They also want to do the other things. They understand that they dont work together.

Republican leaders, however, were more skeptical. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on Thursday that Mr. Biden had rattled off a multitrillion-dollar shopping list that was neither designed nor intended to earn bipartisan buy-in.

Bidens 2022 Budget A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what hed like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress. Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade. Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the presidents desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years. Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force. Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as Americas population ages. Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget. How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.



With the nearly $1.9 trillion stimulus plan still popular with a majority of voters, some Democrats are eager to wield their slim majorities in both chambers to push as many liberal priorities into law as possible.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the Budget Committee, said he and his panel had begun work on a budget resolution, legislation needed to unlock the reconciliation process that would allow them to circumvent a filibuster and push through a fiscal package without Republican votes. (Democrats have not yet committed to using the maneuver.)
The prospect of proceeds of crime being kept within the community for the improvement of local safety schemes has been welcomed by Superintendent Seamus Boyle who has been pushing for CCTV to be installed in the Granard District for some time.

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee announced last week that she and Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath have agreed, in principle, to establish the fund, which will see proceeds of Garda and CAB raids funding projects that the communities themselves know will improve their safety.

I think its a fantastic idea. Ive been pushing for CCTV for Granard, Edgeworthstown and surrounding strategic junctions in the district, said Supt Boyle.

Its not going to cost an arm and a leg - itll be about 200,000, and if we can get funding from criminal proceeds, that would be fantastic.

The likelihood of getting CCTV in those areas any time soon is slim, whereas this way would speed up the process.

The announcement has been welcomed locally with Senator Micheal Carrigy stating that the fund will reflect the significant successes of An Garda Siochana and the Criminal Assets Bureau in disrupting criminal activity and seizing proceeds of crime by providing additional funding for investment in community safety projects.

Im delighted that the Minister McEntee has taken on board my proposal in relation to using monies seized by CAB to be returned to our communities. In 2019 CAB allowed for 3.9 million to be returned to the exchequer, with 65 million of assets frozen, he said.

The budget for the CAB has been increased to 9.1 million for 2020 to ensure that the funding is there to fully tackle these issues as they arise.

Criminal gangs are becoming more sophisticated in how they conceal their assets and so this increase in funding will ensure that changes in how they are policed are possible.

In January 2021 Minister McEntee confirmed funding of 250k will be provided for a new pilot community safety partnership scheme in Longford. The partnership in Longford was one of the three launched by the government in an effort to develop more co-ordination and co-operation between various state agencies, communities and local authorities around policing and social issues.

Independent Councillor for Longford Municipal District Cllr Gerry Warnock has also expressed his delight at the prospect of a Community Safety Fund.

The local councillor previously submitted a motion calling on the Longford Joint Policing Committee and Longford County Council to write to Minister McEntee and Minister McGrath to make provisions where monies confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime legislation be redirected from central coffers to a local fund where local groups involved in addiction services, youth activities and community initiatives can avail of much needed revenue options to help them in their work to counter the negative impact of criminality on the local stage.

Im absolutely delighted to see a positive outcome in relation to the Proceeds of Crime proposal with the Minister for Justice giving approval in principle for confiscated proceeds of crime to remain within the community, said Cllr Warnock.

This issue was championed by Independent councillors through a national coordinated effort. Special mention for Cllr Paddy McQuillan from Louth County Council for proposing the concept through our Independent Grouping.

The establishment of new Community Safety Partnerships in every local authority area is a key element of wide ranging reforms under Minister McEntees Policing and Community Safety Bill, which will give effect to the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland.

Once established, the Community Safety Partnerships could seek funding to implement their community safety proposals. Each Community Safety Partnership will bring together residents, community representatives, business interests, councillors, local authorities and State services such as An Garda Siochana, Tusla and the HSE to devise and implement Local Community Safety Plans.

The plans will detail how best the community wants to prevent crime and will reflect community priorities and local safety issues. The goal is to make communities safer for families, residents and businesses.
The Australian Federal Police is pushing for bans on flags and insignia linked to terrorist groups and the spread of extremist material including violent images and videos, saying parts of the criminal law are out of step with community expectations.

Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney said the AFP was particularly concerned about younger people being influenced by graphic material on the internet, which he described as a force multiplier of hate.

AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney says other than for genuine research or journalistic purposes, there are no circumstances where people should be accessing and sharing instructional terrorist manuals, propaganda and graphically violent images and videos. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

He told a parliamentary inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia his agency supported the criminalisation of flags promoting terrorism and other terrorist insignia. There were no circumstances where people should be accessing and sharing instructional terrorist manuals, propaganda and graphically violent images and videos, he said, other than for genuine research or journalistic purposes.

Mr McCartney said there was a gap in the law, adding: We think certain aspects of current criminal laws are out of step with community expectations.




By Lee Hyo-jin







Two crested ibises, a bird species once functionally extinct in Korea, have hatched in Changnyeong, South Gyeongsang Province, Thursday, according to county officials. It is the first confirmed case of the bird being born naturally here in 42 years since the species disappeared.







Three eggs were laid by a pair of crested ibises born at a state-run captive breeding facility in 2016 and released into the wild in 2019, and two of them have successfully hatched.







One chick hatched around 10:12 a.m., Monday, followed by another which hatched around 5:30 a.m., Wednesday, according to county officials. The officials said the two chicks are being taken care of by their parents.







The chicks are expected to leave the nest around June 10, after which officials will continue monitoring them.







The crested ibis, designated as the nation's Natural Monument No.198, is a second-level endangered animal in Korea. It was declared functionally extinct in the wild here in 1979, last being spotted in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).







Since 2008, the Ministry of Environment and local governments have been trying to reintroduce the species to the wild, beginning with a pair of Chinese-born ibises donated by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to Korea.







The government launched a crested ibis restoration center in Changnyeong. So far, a total of 432 crested ibises have been propagated through captive breeding, and 80 of them were released into the wild in the region's Upo Wetland in 2019. The environment ministry plans to release 40 more ibises on May 6.


Most practicing Christians believe the church can enhance race relations in this country by welcoming people of all races and ethnicities, new research finds.

But 29 percent of Black practicing Christians say they have experienced racial prejudice in multiracial congregations, compared to about a tenth who report such an experience in monoracial Black churches. And a third of Black Christians say it is hard to gain leadership positions in a multiracial congregation.

The new report, released Wednesday, April 28, by Barna Group and the Racial Justice and Unity Center, examines the views of what researchers call practicing Christianspeople who self-identify as Christians, say their faith is very important to them, and say they attended worship in the past month.

The research included 2,889 US adults, with 1,364 of them meeting the definition of practicing Christians.

Even as the percentage of multiracial churches has dramatically grown, particularly in Protestant churches, there remain divisions on how to address racial justice among Christians as well as a willingness to do so, says the report, titled Beyond Diversity: What the Future of Racial Justice Will Require of US Churches.

Racial injustice is like a disease, writes Michael Emerson, co-principal investigator, in the reports welcome. Our research has found that the disease has not gone away even as the supposed antibodies of multiracial churches have multiplied. Racial injustice has mutated into new forms, and it has proven highly resistant to the antibodies of multiracial church.

Emerson, a sociologist and co-author of the 2000 book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, said both multiracial and homogeneous congregations can make things better or worse.

The report defines multiracial churches as congregations where no one ethnic or racial group comprises more than 60 percent of the congregation.

It notes a tendency in some multiracial congregationsmany of which have leadership teams that are at least half whiteto normalize white traditions and understandings while expecting congregants of color to assimilate.

For attendees of color, joining diverse worship environments might mean ceding traditions, influence or preferences, it says.

Emerson, a white man and longtime advocate of multiracial churches, acknowledged that given our times, homogeneous congregations led by people of color can serve as a safe haven for people of color and be strong voices for justice.

The report also found that Black practicing Christians (68%) are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts (32%) to link racial inequalities in housing, income and jobs to ongoing discrimination.

On the other hand, white practicing Christians (32%) are almost three times as likely as their Black counterparts (11%) to say such inequality occurs because many Black fathers leave their families.

Glenn Bracey, a Black man and the other co-principal investigator for the research, said in the reports introduction that the new study aims to uplift the Churchnot to shame it.

But he said the differences between white and Black Christian views on historical oppression of people of color demonstrate a pattern in which the powerful and advantaged deny or minimize the social structures that sustain their dominance.

Bracey, assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University, added: it appears that racial divisions and stereotypes in society are not only present, but often more concentrated, in the Church.

The research also showed white practicing Christians in multiracial churches appeared to have a greater sense of awareness about past and present racial injustice and have more of a desire to deal with it.

The report said white churchgoers who attend multiracial congregations are more likely than those in monoracial congregations to agree that Historically, the United States has been oppressive to minorities. Almost half48 percentof white practicing Christians in multiracial congregations agreed, compared with 38 percent of those who attend primarily white congregations.

About half (51%) of white practicing Christians attending multiracial churches say they are motivated or very motivated to address racial injustice, compared with 28% of those who attend primarily white congregations.

The report, which suggests resources for churches seeking racial progress, includes comments from other experts, including one who noted that just reading a report or attending a conference is not sufficient.

Barna Group, a California-based research firm, described itself in the reports preface as having a predominantly white team that has sought out leaders and churchgoers of color as a step in our own repentance toward segments of the Church we havent fully represented and served in our work.

The overall sample of 2,889 respondents had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
Vote may save forest

Many on Sullivans Island feel as I do that our maritime forest is a gift from God and nature.

All over the Lowcountry, we are witnessing the daily loss of our green spaces and trees. Our coastlines are eroding and sea levels are rising.

To have a maritime forest growing on our island to protect us from storm surge and provide root systems to help with drainage is a blessing that we should seek to preserve, not destroy.

It is also a magical place that we all can go to experience solitude, listen to birds singing as well as feel awe and gratitude. All of this is just a few minutes from a rapidly urbanizing Charleston.

Sara Diaz, who runs the bird banding station in the maritime forest, called the plan approved by the Sullivans Island Town Council by a 4 to 3 vote a plan of complete destruction.

I stand with Ms. Diaz, as do many of us on the island. I go there often with my grandchildren and I regularly see many others enjoying this special place.

My hope is that when my grandchildren become grandparents themselves some day, it will still be there for them to take their grandchildren to.

We owe it to all those who come after us to preserve and protect this gift. Future generations will never forgive us for willfully deforesting our island.

Please join me in voting for Patrick ONeil for mayor and Scott Millimet, Justin Novak and Gary Visser for Town Council.

Our choice on May 4 will determine the legacy we leave.

LARRY KOBROVSKY

Seabreeze Lane

Sullivans Island

ONeal a 1-issue mayor

Id like to thank Sullivans Island Mayor Pat ONeil for his Monday commentary.

It proves what many islanders have been saying for a very long time: Mr. ONeil is obsessed with one issue, the settled accreted land lawsuit.

Its all he can talk about. In fact, 80% of his recent op-ed is devoted to it. This article is a metaphor for how he has approached town business, and all else falls into the category of neglect, patching, fixing and staying behind the eight ball.

In the rest of his op-ed, he writes about projects on neglected items that have been pushed by the council to be dealt with.

Mr. ONeil may think things have never been better, but the town is ripped apart. And he has only made the chasm wider, showing little interest in community.

We have borrowed $50 million in bond money because no one has ever thought to budget properly. No one had a vision for the future. Our fire department building was neglected and the practice of resilience ignored.

I agree with Mr. ONeil entirely on one point: Citizens need to rebuild their trust in town government.

With that said, I have no trust in town government led by him.

LAUREN LEWIS

Raven Drive

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Sullivans Island

Sell Santee Cooper

Where is the fire department to put out the dumpster fire at Santee Cooper? If the state Senate leader thinks his plan is real reform, then he is whistling past the graveyard.

The former CEO of S.C. Electric & Gas was convicted for his part in the V.C. Summer nuclear power plant failure. The former CEO of Santee Cooper is rewarded with his golden parachute and no convictions.

The only way to put out the Santee Cooper fire is to sell.

DENNIS COMPTON

Filly Court

North Charleston

Unrestrained growth

A recent news report quoted Charleston Planning Manager Christopher Morgan as saying: The area (at Bees Ferry Road) is well-equipped for the new growth, especially this type of growth (a 358-unit apartment complex). We think its good for the city to have balanced growth.

Let me remind Mr. Morgan that unrestrained growth can become a cancer. Let me also remind Mr. Morgan of the movie Field of Dreams and the phrase, If you build it, they will come.

We do not need to encourage more people to move here.

LEISA LAWRENCE

Savannah Highway

Charleston

Attacks on Asians sad

It is very upsetting to watch televised attacks on Asians in the streets of America.

These innocent people did nothing wrong.

Asian people contribute a lot to Americas greatness, and their children are more likely to be respectful and do well academically.

Did these criminals attack them because of jealousy?

I dont know, but I know how these inhumane and barbaric acts can be stopped. Make the attacks a hate crime, arrest the perpetrators, lock them up and throw away the key.

G.A. MONOCRUSOS

Savannah Highway

Charleston
To be frank, expos were starting, in North America, to become useful to promoters of the economic interests of a city. The expectation was that once you got the registration for an expo the countries would automatically come and support it. It started in 1974 in Spokane. Now, Spokane is a small inland city in Washington State. Nine countries came to the exhibition and it was a success for Spokane. But what were we getting out of it? It has got to be self-interest. To Mr Reid, an expo should be more than an expression of the economic self-interest of a city: I have a philosophy it has to be held in a major centre; it has to be a gathering of the nations of the world for a sublime purpose. The disease that began in the 1970s got worse in the 1980s. With Brisbane, there have been no fewer than five expos this decade, including one run by Mr Reid in Vancouver. Because of the glut, it had been difficult enough getting countries to roll up to Vancouver in 1986, Mr Reid said. Then, in the middle of it all, the Japanese held Tsukuba. That was wrong. The Queen and Prince Philip at the opening of Expo 88 Credit:Greg White

Tsukuba is hardly remembered now (Dwellings and surroundings, it declared as its puzzling theme, adding unhelpfully, Science and technology for man at Home). But it caused a rumpus among the normally calm and urbane international bureaucrats who run the BIE in Paris. Canada had beaten Japan to the right to hold a 1986 expo, but the Japanese came back and lobbied successfully for the creation of a 1985 slot. This meant three expos were held in successive years: 1984 (New Orleans), 1985 (Tsukuba) and 1986 (Vancouver). How did the Japanese manage this? It was an extraordinary process in that the rules really werent tidy enough, Mr Reid recalls. He said the Japanese had great tactical ability, got strong backing from their Government and when it came to getting countries to participate were able to benefit from their international economic clout. When a powerful country politically says they want one, countries feel compelled to do something. They dont want to be seen to be letting down the host country and suffering consequences as a result of that. And one of the things that happens is that expos are held that shouldnt have been held in the first place. Mr Reid has lobbied for a four-year rule; the British want expos allowed only every five years. Whichever rule is chosen, the cure is overdue. The next expo will be held at Seville, in Spain, in 1992. (Spain has an exhibit at Brisbane and is lobbying hard behind the argument, We came to yours: now you come to ours.) The BIE is prepared to register two more expos up to the turn of the century. Candidates for the second? Austria and Hungary are lobbying hard for a joint expo in 1995, and Mr Reids phone has started ringing from Hong Kong, seeking his support for 1997.

Loading Well-connected Expo officials are also keeping a close watch on an international flower show for which BIE endorsement has been given to Osaka for 1989: they suspect that Japan is back for another dip in the expo well by widening its exposition well beyond horticulture. Without reform, Mr Reid says, the medium would die. I think it would just strangle itself. I hope that doesnt happen, but I would sooner see the medium dropped from the scene than become a mechanical thing where people put up a bunch of audio-visual shows. A kind of travelling expo show, I suggested. Thats right. There are some things here that Ive seen before, and quite frankly there were some in Vancouver, so its not exclusive to Brisbane.
Vow ASA again reported strong performance in its Projects Cruise business in the first quarter this year, and it announced important partnerships for industry decarbonisation with leading landbased industrial groups. The order backlog remains solid at NOK 969 million. The aftersales business, meanwhile, continued to be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Group revenues in the first quarter of 2021 came in at NOK 92.7 million, which is NOK 23.4 million less than first quarter last year. The change is mainly a result of the slow-down in Aftersales related to cruise ships being docked as a consequence of Covid-19. This segment would in a normal year have represented around NOK 25-30 million higher revenues in the quarter.

EBITDA before non-recurring items was NOK 10.2 million, down from NOK 14.0 million in the same period last year, mainly explained by the decline in EBITDA in Aftersales, and high activity in Landbased related to commissioning of systems and process integration with the aim of meeting current customers' demand for industry scale solutions.

The order backlog currently stands at NOK 969 million, including orders won in April, up from NOK 952 million at year-end, and from NOK 975 million at the end of the first quarter last year. In addition to the firm backlog, shipowners have placed options on the newbuild series being equipped with Scanship systems amounting to NOK 665 million in likely future revenues related to the Projects Cruise segment.

"Our performance in the Projects Cruise business is remarkable, as is the cruise operators' commitment to renew and upgrade their fleets to new environmental standards. We have signed three new contracts for newbuilds and retrofits so far this year, and in Aftersales we are seeing signs of increased activity", said Henrik Badin, CEO of Vow ASA.

"First quarter 2021 will also be remembered for our launch of Vow Green Metals, a new company which will offer decarbonising as a service. The company will be spun off to Vow's shareholders, with Vow itself retaining 30.5 percent ownership", Badin added.

During the quarter, Vow successfully completed a private placement raising gross proceeds of NOK 230 million. Parts of the proceeds will be used as initial funding of Vow Green Metals. Vow Green Metals is planning to build a full-scale facility for production of biocarbon and CO2 neutral energy based on Vow technology at Follum in Eastern Norway. Vow Green Metals will be an important customer for Vow's Landbased business going forward.

Today, at 09:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST) the company's CEO Henrik Badin will host an onlinepresentation and answer questions from the audience. The presentation will be held in English. A replay of the presentation and Q&A will be made available on www.vowasa.com shortly after.

To register and join, please copy and paste the following link into your browser and fill in the required information:https://www.vhgo.no/vow/q1-2021/.





For further information, please contact:

Erik Magelssen, CFO

Vow ASA

Tel: +47 928 88 728

Email: erik.magelssen@vowasa.com





Attachments(see link at end of document)



Q1 update - report

Q1 update - presentation





About Vow ASA

In Vow and our subsidiaries Scanship and Etia we are passionate about preventing pollution. Our world leading solutions convert biomass and waste into valuable resources and generate clean energy for a wide range of industries.

Cruise ships on every ocean have Vow technology inside which processes waste and purifies wastewater. Fish farmers are adopting similar solutions, and public utilities and industries use our solutions for sludge processing, waste management and biogas production on land.

Our ambitions go further than this. With our advanced technologies and solutions, we turn waste into biogenetic fuels to help decarbonise industry and convert plastic waste into fuel, clean energy, and high-value pyro carbon.

Our solutions are scalable, standardised, patented, and thoroughly documented, and our capability to deliver is well proven. They are key to end waste and stop pollution.

Located in Oslo, the parent company Vow ASA is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (ticker VOW).

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

Attachments
Prince Charles has spoken of his deep sadness at the devastating surge of coronavirus in India, as he urged the public to back an appeal to buy oxygen equipment for the stricken nation.

Charles sent a message to the people of India, telling of his heartbreak at the tragic images we have all seen as Covid-19 takes its horrific toll.

He pledged: Together, we will win this battle.

Indias coronavirus death toll now stands at more than 200,000, as a surge of new infections tears through cities and rural areas alike and leaves healthcare systems on the brink of collapse.

Hospital cases and deaths have reached record highs, overwhelming healthcare workers, while patients are suffocating because hospitals oxygen supplies have run out.

The British Asian Trust, which the prince founded in 2007, has launched its Oxygen For India emergency appeal to raise funds for oxygen concentrators, and, together with local partners in India, will rapidly deploy them to hospitals and patients most in need.

Charles has made a personal donation to the campaign.

The prince said: I have been deeply saddened by the tragic images we have all seen as Covid-19 takes its horrific toll in India.

Like many others, I have a great love for India and have enjoyed many wonderful visits to the country.

Indian aid and ingenuity has been a support to other countries through this immensely difficult time.

As India has helped others, so now must we help India.

He added: I would also want those suffering the effects of this pandemic in India to know that they are in my thoughts and prayers. Together, we will win this battle.

For the past week, more than 2,000 Indians have died every day.

During an urgent question on the issue in the Commons, Nigel Adams, a Foreign Office minister, said the UK had pledged to offer further support to India in response to the countrys alarming spike in infections.

He said the first shipment of 200 ventilators and 95 oxygen concentrators arrived in the country on Tuesday and a further 400 concentrators would follow on Wednesday and Thursday.

This equipment will boost the oxygen supplies in Indias hospitals, which remain under severe pressure, he told MPs. So, its without doubt that support provided by the United Kingdom will save lives.

However, the shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy stressed that Britain can and must do more, suggesting it would be a test of the bond between the two countries.

I welcome the 600 pieces of equipment that we have shipped so far, but he will know through his discussions that India is still badly short of oxygen, cylinders, concentrators, ventilators and therapeutic drugs, she told MPs.

This week, a leading doctor in India, Dr Zarir Udwadia, called the UKs donation a political gesture and said 600 pieces of equipment is a drop in the ocean

Additional reporting by Press Association
Gurugram, April 29 : Registration for Covid-19 vaccination for those aged 18 to 44 years began on the government's CO-WIN portal from Wednesday but the 18 plus population in Gurugram will have to wait till the second week of May as the Covid vaccine will not be available by May 1.

Health officials said it was decided that people from 18 to 44 years can register themselves and information will be provided to them about the vaccination process accordingly.

Deputy Civil Surgeon and Nodal Officer of the Immunization Campaign, Dr MP Singh told IANS that the vaccine will be provided free to all at the government vaccination centres.

"Vaccination sessions for 18 plus will be organized at 37 government and nearly 60 private vaccination centres in Gurugram. The vaccination campaign for health workers and frontline workers and those above 45 years of age will continue as before," Singh said.

The health officials informed that in private hospitals, Covishield vaccine will be administered for Rs 500 and Covaxin for Rs 700.

"The new arrangement would be different as vaccination at government centres and private hospitals will be separated. The hospitals can now obtain vaccines directly from manufacturers and we won't supply the doses any more," Singh said.

Moreover, the Gurugram administration will not carry out vaccinations on Thursday and Friday due to streamlining of the session sites for the coming phase. According to new guidelines, no walk-ins or on-site registration will be allowed to avoid overcrowding at session sites.

Haryana has ordered five million doses of vaccines for the campaign at a cost of of Rs 250 crore, the government said on Wednesday.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
James Duddridge MP, UK Minister for Africa Twitter

The UK Government continues to call for inclusive dialogue that addresses the root causes of the crisis in Cameroons North-West and South-West regions, said James Duddridge, UK Minister for Africa.

We have shared our experience of conflict resolution, and we call on all parties to remain engaged in Swiss-led efforts to facilitate talks, Duddridge said in a letter dated 23 April 2021 and addressed to Rt Hon Ed Davey MP.

The Swiss Confederation had expressed its readiness to support national initiatives that can lead to lasting peace in Cameroon. This was disclosed after an audience granted by President Paul Biya to His Excellency Pietro Lazzeri, the Swiss Ambassador to Cameroon on 4 April 2019.

On June 27, 2019, Switzerland announced it had agreed to mediate talks between Cameroonian authorities and separatists in a bid to end escalating violence in the countrys Anglophone regions.

Switzerland was tasked by a majority of the parties with facilitating an inclusive negotiation process, the Swiss foreign affairs department (FDFA) said in a statement following two days of talks with a number of opposition groups. The aim of the meeting was to prepare the future peace negotiations.

The FDFA has since declined to elaborate on which parties it had met and on the timeline for future talks.

At a time when many think that the Swiss-led talks had hit the rocks, the UK Minister for Africa calls on all parties to remain engaged in Swiss-led efforts to facilitate talks.

On 30 March 2021, Rt Hon Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat MP for Kingston and Surbiton dispatched a correspondence about Cameroon to the UK Foreign Secretary.

The Minister for Africa replied that, The UK Government is deeply concerned about the situation in the North-West and South-West (Anglophone) regions of Cameroon. It is a crisis that continues to have tragic impacts on civilians.

James Duddridge, MP Minister for Africa wrote, We regularly raise our concerns about the crisis with the Government of Cameroon at the highest levels. In a visit to Cameroon in March 2021, I met President Biya, Prime Minister Ngute, and Foreign Minister Mbella Mbella, where I set out the UKs commitment to supporting a peaceful resolution to the crisis. During my visit, I also met the President of the South-West Regional Assembly, civil society organizations, political opposition leaders, and religious leaders to learn more about the situation on the ground and hear directly the experiences of the communities impacted by the crisis.

I would like to reassure you and your constituent that the UK Government continues to call for inclusive dialogue that addresses the root causes of the crisis. We have shared our experience of conflict resolution, and we call on all parties to remain engaged in Swiss-led efforts to facilitate talks.

In September 2020, I announced 4.5 million of additional humanitarian funding for Cameroon, to bring the total for 2020 to 13.5 million. This has provided tens of thousands of vulnerable people with food packs, sanitation provisions, and medical supplies, as well as training for health workers. As part of my visit, I traveled to the South-West region and met international project partners delivering this vital aid, who described to me the challenges of providing humanitarian support. The UK continues to press the importance of unimpeded humanitarian access.

The FCDO [the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] also works in conjunction with international partners to raise the crisis in multilateral fora. At the UN Security Council briefing on Central Africa on 9 December 2020, the UK reiterated the UN Secretary Generals call for an end to violence and for all actors to refrain from attacks against civilians.

Reports of human rights violations and abuses by security forces and armed separatists are disturbing. As the UKs International Ambassador for Human Rights set out at the UN Human Rights Council on 26 February 2021, the violence must end and urgent, impartial investigations must hold the perpetrators to account. We continue to urge the Government of Cameroon to engage fully with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to ensure the protection and promotion of human rights for all.
They're starring as two of the most famous comic stars of the 20th century.

And Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem looked nearly unrecognizable thanks to their makeup and picture-perfect costumes on the set of Being The Ricardos in Long Beach, California, on Tuesday.

Kidman, 53, and Bardem, 52, were spotted chatting on set by the Queen Mary ocean liner during some downtime between takes.

Transformed: Nicole Kidman, 53, and Javier Bardem, 52, were the spitting images of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz while on the set of Being The Ricardos in Long Beach on Tuesday

Kidman paired her costume with a black puffer jacket to stay warm on the breezy day.

She looked lovely in a flowing fuchsia dress that reached down to her ankles, which was paired with simple black flats.

The Oscar winner had her hair dyed red and styled in tight curls to mimic Ball's classic locks.

She rounded out the colorful costume with pink flowers on a necklaces wrapped around her throat.

Staying warm: Kidman looked lovely in a flowing fuchsia dress that reached down to her ankles, which she paired with a black puffer jacket

Glowing: She was also seen on set in a lustrous gold dress which she also wore with her black jacket

Lookalike: Kidman's face appeared closer to Ball's iconic visage, though it wasn't clear if that was solely because of her identical makeup, or if she was wearing any subtle prostheses

Kidman's face appeared closer to Ball's iconic visage, though it wasn't clear if that was solely because of her identical makeup, or if she was wearing any subtle prostheses.

She was also seen on set in a lustrous gold dress which she also wore with her black jacket.

Bardem was outfitted with a white tuxedo jacket to match Arnaz's look in I Love Lucy when he would lead his band at the Tropicana Club.

He looked dapper with his black bow tie, cummerbund and contrasting black trousers, and his slick dark hair was coiffed in the same manner as Arnaz's on the series and in his film appearances with his wife.

Perfect match: Bardem was outfitted with a white tuxedo jacket to match Arnaz's look in I Love Lucy when he would lead his band at the Tropicana Club

Iconic couple: Being The Ricardos focuses on the then-married couple of Ball and Arnaz as they play Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on their hit series I Love Lucy

Pivotal moment: The film follows the on-screen couple over a single week in the 1950s as they film their series when a crisis emerges that could harm their marriage and the show; Ball and Arnaz in a publicity still for The Long Long Trailer in 1954

Being The Ricardos focuses on the then-married couple of Ball and Arnaz as they play Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on their hit series I Love Lucy.

The film follows the on-screen couple over a single week in the 1950s as they film their series when a crisis emerges that could harm their marriage and the show.

The couple, who married in 1940, had plenty of real-life marital problems.

Ball filed for divorce for the first time in 1944, reportedly over Arnaz's infidelities and drinking, but they resuscitated the relationship until divorcing in 1960.

The acting couple welcomed two children during their show's run from 1951 to 1957.

Classics: The couple were married from 1940 to 1960 and starred on I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957; publicity still for I Love Lucy

Honored: Kidman and Barden are both stars at the top of their game and both have Oscars - Kidman for The Hours and Bardem for No Country For Old Men

Sorkin is coming off his Oscar-nominated historical drama The Trial Of The Chicago 7, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.

Sorkin and his collaborators went home empty-handed at the Oscars on Sunday, but the film has received positive (if tepid) reviews.

The writer and newly minted director already has one Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for David Fincher's film The Social Network (2010).
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The White House has said it is investigating unexplained health incidents after a report that two US officials in the Washington area experienced sudden symptoms similar to the Havana syndrome symptoms suffered by American diplomats and spies abroad.

Related: CIA file on Russian ESP experiments released  but you knew that, didn't you?

The wave of mysterious brain injuries, beginning in Cuba in 2016, are deemed by the National Academy of Scientists to be most likely the result of some form of directed energy device, and the CIA, state department and Pentagon have all launched investigations.

CNN reported on Thursday that two possible incidents on US soil are part of the investigation. One took place in November last year near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, in which an official from the national security council suddenly fell sick.

The other was in 2019 and involved a White House official walking her dog in a Arlington suburb of Washington. That incident was reported in GQ magazine last year.

That account said the incident happened after the staffer went past a parked van and a man got out and walked past her.

Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face, the report said.

Officials cautioned that the investigations into these and other incidents have not reached a conclusion.

The health and wellbeing of American public servants is a paramount priority for the Biden administration. We take all reports of health incidents by our personnel extremely seriously, a White House spokesperson said.

The White House is working closely with departments and agencies to address unexplained health incidents and ensure the safety and security of Americans serving around the world. Given that we are still evaluating reported incidents and that we need to protect the privacy of individuals reporting incidents, we cannot provide or confirm specific details at this time.

Story continues

The symptoms of the Havana syndrome attacks include hearing strange sounds followed by dizziness, nausea, severe headaches and loss of memory which in some case can go on for years. There are dozens of victims, most of whom were stationed in Cuba and China with a handful of cases elsewhere.

Most of those affected, as well as many officials and experts, believed they were attacked by a foreign power with some form of microwave energy device. But they fought an uphill struggle, before the National Academy of Sciences study in December, convincing their employers that their brain injuries were the result of an attack while they were on assignment.

The CIA set up a taskforce in December, and the new CIA director, William Burns, has appointed a senior official to coordinate both care of those affected and to investigate the origins of the attacks.

While the inquiries are continuing, the administration has not confirmed whether the injuries suffered were the result of a weapon, the national security council senior director for the western hemisphere, Juan Gonzalez, referred to microwave attacks in Cuba, in an interview with CNN Spanish language service earlier this month.
Researchers assemble error-free genomes of 16 animals--with another 70,000 coming up

The flightless kakapo of New Zealand is in trouble. The world's heaviest parrot--representing one of the most ancestral branches of the parrot family tree--is nearly extinct, with barely 200 adults plodding the underbrush of four small islands. Whether the last of the kakapos had the genetic resilience to survive was a question that only high-quality genomic analysis could answer.

But a high-quality genome assembly did not exist for the kakapo--nor for most of the 70,000 vertebrate species alive today.

Questions about how best to prevent the extinction of species ranging from the flightless kakapos to the adorable small vaquita dolphins were left unanswered. Had inbreeding left these populations genetically non-viable? Were humans the only reason that these animals stood on the brink of extinction, or was something inherently broken in their DNA?

The solution was the Vertebrate Genomes Project, an ambitious initiative launched to generate high-quality reference genomes for every extant vertebrate species. Now in their flagship study published in Nature, they present methods and principles for sequencing and assembling high-quality reference genome.

The team has applied this approach and principles to produce 16 high-quality reference genomes, one of which was the endangered kakapo, to help reveal if it is hardy enough to rebuild its population. The researchers found that extremely small populations of the endangered kakapo and vaquita have been able to survive their low numbers in the past since the last ice age over 10,000 years ago, by purging deleterious mutations that cause disease from inbreeding. As long as humans do not kill of more of the last remaining animals, findings from the high-quality reference genomes give hope that these species could survive from less than 100 individuals each.

"We call it the 'kitchen sink approach'--combining tools from several biotech companies to make this one high-quality genome assembly pipeline," says Rockefeller's Erich D. Jarvis, Chair of the Vertebrate Genomes Project. "Endangered species were the first to benefit from the new technology because, even though conservation is not my area of research, I felt it was a moral duty."

Working with low-quality genomes

High-quality reference genomes only exist for the celebrities of laboratory science--mice, fruit flies, zebrafish, and, of course, humans. For less popular species, there is often no reference genome or, perhaps worse, messy genomes stitched together from sequences obtained via quick and dirty methods. Compared to the new VGP genomes, up to 60 percent of the genes in such genomes have missing sequence, are entirely missing, or incorrectly assembled, the researchers found. It can take years to untangle the thousands of assembly errors per species.

Many false gene duplications were found, most caused by algorithms that due not properly separate out maternal and paternal chromosome sequences and instead interpret them as a two separate sister genes. "We have thousands of genes in the literature that are false duplications. The genes are not actually there!" Jarvis says. "It is unconscionable to be working with some of these genomes."

The Vertebrate Genomes Project was born from the frustrations of hundreds of scientists working in its parent organization, the Genome 10K consortium, whose mission it was to generate genome assemblies of 10,000 vertebrate species. The initial genome assemblies that the G10K and other groups generated were based on short 35 to 200 base pair reads, but these assemblies were highly incomplete. The VGP goal is to build a library of error-free reference genomes for all vertebrate species, which researchers and conservationists will be able to use readily, without dedicating months or years to fixing individual genes. "We said, let's do some hard work on the front end, so that we can get high quality data on the back end," Jarvis says.

The "kitchen sink" approach

Many companies approached the Vertebrate Genomes Project, promising a single sequencing technology that would solve every problem with messy reference genomes. The Vertebrate Genomes Project assembly team tested each method on a single hummingbird, chosen both for its relatively small genome and because of Jarvis' research interests in vocal learning among bird species ("two birds with one stone," he quips). But every technology fell short. "None had all of the necessary components to make a high-quality assembly," Jarvis says. "So we combined many tools into one pipeline."

Their approach works. Organizations including the Earth Biogenome Project, the Darwin Tree of Life Project, and the New Zealand Genome Sequencing Project are already using the most advance version of the novel pipeline. Reference genomes that once took years to generate are now rolling out in weeks and months--all without the false duplications and other errors endemic to previous assemblies. Scientists are already using the new data to study genes that render bats immune to COVID-19, and question long-standing conventions in basic science, such as whether there are meaningful differences between oxytocin and its receptors found in humans, birds, reptiles, and fish.

All told, 20 studies and 25 high-quality vertebrate genomes accompany the rollout of the novel pipeline. "The first high-quality genomes that we sequenced taught us so much about the technology and the biology that we decided to publish in these initial papers," Jarvis says. But plenty of work still lies ahead. "The next step is to sequence all 1,000 vertebrate genera, and then all 10,000 vertebrate families, and eventually every single vertebrate species"

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This story has been published on: 2021-04-28. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  When the Los Angeles Dodgers badly needed somebody or something to pull them out of a weeklong slump, Clayton Kershaw did it with cool confidence.

He has been performing these feats regularly for the Dodgers since 2008, and the 33-year-old lefty doesn't look like he'll relinquish the responsibility any time soon.

Kershaw yielded four hits over seven masterful innings, Justin Turner homered and the Dodgers ended their three-game losing streak with an 8-0 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on Wednesday.

Its always a good feeling knowing weve got Kersh on the mound," said Chris Taylor, who had an RBI triple and scored two runs. "It was huge to have him get us out of this funk. He was outstanding.

Kershaw (4-2) racked up eight strikeouts with one walk while never allowing Cincinnati to get a runner to third base in his first win over the Reds since 2016. He won an impressive pitching duel with Sonny Gray (0-2) before his teammates tacked on six runs in the eighth inning.

Weve been scuffling a little bit, and we wanted to end the homestand on a good note, Kershaw said.

Kershaw's brilliance was the biggest reason the Dodgers avoided their first four-game losing streak since 2018, allowing them to finish a 2-5 homestand with a renewed positivity. Los Angeles still leads the NL at 16-9, but the past week underlined weaknesses that will have to be fixed over the next five months.

Hes been a great pitcher for a long time, and hes a stopper, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. Hes been the ace. He knew how much we needed this game, so for him to go deep in this game, put up zeros, throw a shutout, was big for our club.

Matt Beaty had a two-run single in the eighth on his 28th birthday as the defending World Series champions broke away late for just their third win in 10 games.

Nick Senzel matched his career high with four hits for the Reds, who wrapped up a 2-4 trip by taking two of three at Chavez Ravine. Senzel got three of Cincinnati's four singles off Kershaw, but the Reds were shut out for the fourth time this season.

Story continues

Nick had a great day at the plate, which was great to see, but we just couldnt get anything else going off Kershaw, Cincinnati manager David Bell said. Weve all seen that before.

Gray pitched four-hit ball into the sixth while striking out 11  the most by any pitcher against the Dodgers this year. Gray yielded four hits and three walks, but left trailing 2-0.

I know just coming off the last start, he wanted to make a statement, and he did, Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson said. It was good to see him back to what he can be.

While Grays bounce-back start was good, Kershaw is still firmly on top of his game: He has pitched at least six innings with at least six strikeouts in five consecutive starts since opening day.

Turner hit his sixth homer deep into the left field bleachers in the third. The RBI was the 20th in just 23 games for Turner, a former Reds draft pick.

Taylor tripled over Nicholas Castellanos in right field in the eighth, scoring Turner from first. Beaty and Mookie Betts added two-out, two-RBI singles off Sal Romano.

INFIELDER PITCHING

After Romano yielded four hits, four walks and six runs, Reds infielder Alex Blandino took the mound and recorded the last out of the eighth, getting Turner to fly out on an 86-mph pitch.

Blandino had pitched once previously in 2018, and he preserved his career 0.00 ERA.

TRAINER'S ROOM

Reds: OF Shogo Akiyama will play an intrasquad game Thursday. He is on the 10-day injured list with a strained hamstring, but is likely to make his 2021 debut next week.

Dodgers: SS Corey Seager got a scheduled rest day. ... Reliever Garrett Cleavinger left the game after taking a line drive from Tyler Stephenson off his triceps in the ninth inning. Roberts said they'll know more about the injury Thursday.

UP NEXT

Reds: After an off day, Wade Miley (2-2, 2.45 ERA) takes the mound Friday at home to face the Cubs. He has a career 4.50 ERA against Chicago.

Dodgers: Trevor Bauer (3-0, 2.53 ERA) takes the mound in Milwaukee on Thursday. The Cy Young Award winner struck out 32 in 20 1/3 innings against the Brewers over three starts last season with Cincinnati.

___

More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
Silpo-Food LLC, a member of Fozzy Group (Kyiv) and developing a chain of Silpo grocery supermarkets in Ukraine, in 2020 increased its turnover by 12.2% compared to 2019, to UAH 49.7 billion.

According to the annual report on the management of Silpo-Food over 2020, the company's income amounted to UAH 64.4 billion. Long-term liabilities amounted to UAH 12.3 billion, current - UAH 19.1 billion.

According to the company's website, as of the end of 2020, the Silpo chain, together with Le Silpo gourmet markets, consisted of 276 supermarkets with a total area of 399,500 square meters. Of these, 23 Silpo supermarkets were opened in 2020.

According to the report, in 2021 the company plans to expand its supermarket chain by 18 objects, to 294 stores, and by 2024 to increase their number by 30%, to 360.

Silpo-Food LLC was established in early August 2016.

According to the information in the unified state register, the founder of the company is PJSC Retail Capital closed non-diversified venture corporate investment fund (100%, Kyiv), the ultimate beneficiary is Volodymyr Kostelman.

The charter capital of Silpo-Food LLC is UAH 13 billion.

Fozzy Group is one of the largest Ukrainian retailers with nearly 690 points of sale throughout the country. The company develops retail chains of various formats: Silpo supermarkets, Fozzy Cash & Carry wholesale hypermarkets, Fora convenience stores, Thrash! discounters, Bila Romashka pharmaceutical supermarkets, Ringoo personal electronics stores.
President Joe Biden speaks as he gives a primetime address to the nation from the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 11, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

America Last: President Joe Bidens First 100 Days

Commentary

With the exception of the breakout of the Civil War at the onset of Lincolns presidency, the Biden administrations first 100 days have been the most radical in American history.

The elite media would have Americans believe that President Biden is doing really well, with a slight majority approval rating of 52 percent, according to a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post. But compare President Biden and his 52 percent with President Kennedy, who received 83 percent approval at this stage, or President Obamas 69 percent approval.

The fact is Biden has the third-lowest 100-day approval rating compared to every American president since World War II.

The only two presidents with lower approval ratings were President Donald Trump at 42 percent and President Gerald Ford at 48 percent.

For context, President Trump at this stage of his presidency had been assaulted by the international, academic, and media establishments. He had been dealing with a series of lies spread by the elite leftspecifically, the Russia hoax.

Ford replaced President Nixon after the Watergate scandal, so he didnt have to win an election. As a result, he wasnt well known by the country 100 days into his term.

Yet, Biden, who has been the object of the elite medias adoration since announcing his run for president, received only a slightly higher approval rating than the establishments ultimate challenger and an unknown?

Since January, President Biden and Vice President Harris have put forward a purely radical explosion of ideas and policies that fundamentally break with our American tradition.

President Bidens actions, statements, and policies have been characterized by a few common themes. The first is a reliance upon a series of big lie campaigns. For example, President Biden condemned Georgias new voting law, calling the legislation Jim Crow in the 21st century when, in reality, the law expands access to secure voting.

The lefts alternative to the Georgia voting law is H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act. A more accurate name would be the For the Corrupt Politicians Act because its designed to make elections less secure and keep the Democratic Machine in power.

Furthermore, the Biden administration continues to claim that America is a systemically racist country. Following the announcement of the Minneapolis verdict, rather than emphasizing that the U.S. judicial system works, President Biden said that systemic racism  is a stain [on] our nations soul. Similar statements about Americas systemic racism were made in March in Anchorage, Alaskanot by a U.S. politician, but by the Chinese Communist Party.

Such false statements made by President Bidenand echoed by Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfieldundermine American values. They represent a remarkable departure from President Trumps America First policy.

By putting America down, the Biden administration is putting Americans last.

If it were true that America was systemically racist against minorities, then there likely wouldnt be an enormous crisis at the U.S. southern border. The Biden administrations disillusioned border policies that enable and encourage illegal immigration have resulted in the largest influx of migrants at the southwestern border in 20 years. President Bidens policies (and Vice President Harriss inaction) have created a humanitarian, health, and security crisis at the border that puts Americansand migrantsat risk.

The lefts continuous condemnation of the police and the skyrocketing crime rates in U.S. cities also put American lives at risk. As major U.S. cities saw the homicide rate increase by 33 percent last year and police units struggle with rising retirement rates, the radical left called for defunding the police and Biden pushed stricter gun control laws. Clearly, the safety of Americans appears to be less important than virtue signaling.

All these policies do harm to America and dont put Americans first. The Biden administration has already proven to be insufferably, deliberately, and totally dishonest. The past 100 days have been a tale of two stories. One is propped up by the elite media and based on big lies and the arrogance that crazy radical policies are empathetic. The other is rooted in the reality of the concerns and interests of real Americans.

The American people will have to decide which to believe.

From Gingrich360.com.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican, served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999 and ran as a presidential candidate in 2012.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
AUSTIN, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- RapidDeploy , a cloud-based computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and analytics platform, today announced the completion of a $29 million Series B funding round led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from GreatPoint Ventures , Ericsson Ventures , Samsung Next Ventures , Tao Capital Partners , Clearvision Ventures , Tau Ventures, and others. RapidDeploy will use the capital to fund go-to-market improvements and research and development.

"RapidDeploy has entered a stage of hypergrowth, and with the trust of major companies in public safety and telecommunications like Samsung and Ericsson, we are well-positioned to assist public safety officials across the country as they transform their 9-1-1 centers," said Steve Raucher, CEO and co-founder of RapidDeploy. "Over the last two years, we have fulfilled statewide contracts in Arizona, California, and Kansas, while implementing our platform in over 650 9-1-1 Centers across America. This investment allows us to continue our trajectory and make data-driven Unified Critical Response the industry standard."

Since the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) set its initial goals for Next-Gen 9-1-1 services in 2001, states have slowly adopted a new system of emergency services IP networks, software services and data management processes connected directly to equipment in the public safety answering points (PSAPs). RapidDeploy's products, including RadiusPlus , Eclipse Analytics and Nimbus CAD , represent a major step forward for local, regional and state governments.

"The future of emergency services is in data, which creates a faster, more responsive 9-1-1 center," said Mark Dyne, Founding Partner at Morpheus Ventures, who just recently joined the RapidDeploy Board of Directors. "We believe that the platform RapidDeploy has built provides the necessary breadth of capabilities that make the dream of Next-Gen 9-1-1 service a reality for rural and metropolitan communities across the nation and are excited to be investing in this future with Steve and his team."

Through its integrated mapping platform, RadiusPlus, RapidDeploy delivers data from smart phones, vehicles, home security systems and more directly to 9-1-1 telecommunicators working in one of America's 6,000+ PSAPs. Through Eclipse Analytics, RapidDeploy offers customizable reporting and analytics on real-time call data that supports data-driven, operational performance improvements. Finally, RapidDeploy's Nimbus CAD delivers a comprehensive, highly configurable, web-based dispatch platform that uses sophisticated location mapping and real-time data to ensure rapid and informed response.

RapidDeploy has integrated supplemental emergency data from the most trusted names in technology and public safety, including AT&T, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OnStar among other integrations in RapidDeploy's Unified Critical Response ecosystem.

To learn more about RapidDeploy, visit https://www.rapiddeploy.com/

About RapidDeploy:

RapidDeploy is the industry's only truly open and integrated response platform, transforming 9-1-1 communications centers of any size into data-centric organizations. RapidDeploy achieves new levels of situational awareness and reduces 9-1-1 response time by seamlessly integrating third-party data ensuring it is available when, where and how Telecommunicators and First Responders need it. The company's web-based cloud platform includes analytics, mapping, dispatch and first responder applications. To learn more, visit https://www.rapiddeploy.com/ .

About Morpheus Ventures:

Morpheus invests in the disruption of large markets across the technology landscape from consumer to enterprise technologies including data analytics, machine learning, robotics, transportation, and SaaS. The firm is headquartered in Los Angeles and backs great entrepreneurs worldwide. For more information, see http://www.morpheus.com

Media Contact:

Joel Weyrauch

BLASTmedia for RapidDeploy

[email protected]

317-806-1900 x. 117

SOURCE RapidDeploy
Photo of the central region of the Milky Way. Credit: UCLA SETI Group/Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory

Since the mid-20th century, scientists have been looking for evidence of intelligent life beyond our solar system. For much of that time, scientists who are engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have relied on radio astronomy surveys to search for signs of technological activity (aka "technosignatures"). With 4,375 exoplanets confirmed (and counting!) even greater efforts are expected to happen in the near future.

In anticipation of these efforts, researchers have been considering other possible technosignatures that we should be on the lookout for. According to Michael Hippke, a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center, the search should also be expanded to include quantum communication. In an age where quantum computing and related technologies are nearing fruition, it makes sense to look for signs of them elsewhere.

The search for technosignatures, and what constitutes the most promising ones, has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. This is due in large part to the fact that thousands of exoplanets are available for follow-up studies using the next-generation telescopes that will be operational in the coming years. With these instruments searching for needles in the "cosmic haystack," astrobiologists need to have a clear of what to look for.

In September of 2018, NASA hosted a Technosignatures Workshop, which was followed by the release of their Technosignature Report. By August of 2020, NASA and the Blue Marble Institute sponsored another meetingTechnoclimes 2020to discuss concepts for future searches that would look for technosignatures beyond the usual radio signals. As someone who has dedicated his professional life to SETI, Hippke has many insights to offer.

The Search Thus Far

As he noted in his study, modern SETI efforts began in 1959 when famed SETI pioneer Giuseppe Cocconi & physicist Philip Morrison (both of Cornell University at the time) published their seminal paper, "Searching for Interstellar Communications." In this paper, Coccini and Morrison recommended searching for signs of intelligent life by looking for narrow-band signals in the radio spectrum.

This was followed two years later by R.N. Schwartz and C.H. Townes of the Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA) in Washington D.C. In their paper, "Interstellar and Interplanetary Communication by Optical Masers," they proposed that optical pulses from microwave lasers could be an indication of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) sending messages out into the cosmos.

But as Hippke notes, six decades and more than one hundred dedicated search programs later, surveys that have looked for these particular technosignatures have yielded nothing concrete. This is not to say that the scientists have been looking for the wrong signatures so far, but that it could be useful to consider casting a wider net. As Hippke explained in his paper:

"We are looking (and should keep looking) for narrow-band lighthouse blasts, even though we have found none yet. At the same time, it is possible to expand our search It is sometimes argued in the hallways of astronomy departments that we 'just have to tune into the right band' andvoilawill be connected to the galactic communication channel."

Credit: Universe Today

A Quantum Revolution

While virtually all attempts to create quantum processors are relatively recent (occurring since the turn of the century), the concept itself dates back to the early 1970s. It was at this time that Stephen Weisner, a of professor physics at Columbia University at the time, proposed that information could be securely coded by taking advantage of the principle of superposition.

This principle states the "spin" of an electron, a fundamental property that can be oriented "up" or "down," is indeterminatemeaning that it can be either one or both simultaneously. So while an up or down spin is similar to the zeroes and ones of binary code, the superposition principle means that quantum computers can perform an exponentially greater number of calculations at any given time.

Beyond the ability to perform more functions, Hippke identifies four possible reasons why an ETI would opt for quantum communications. These include "gate-keeping," quantum supremacy, information security, and information efficiency. "They are preferred over classical communications with regards to security and information efficiency, and they would have escaped detection in all previous searches," he writes."

The use of computers has evolved considerably over the past century, from isolated machines to the worldwide web, and possibly to an interplanetary network in the future. Looking to the future, Hippke argues that is not farfetched to believe that humanity may come to rely on an interstellar quantum network that enables distributed quantum computing and the transmission of qubits over long distances.

Based on the assumption that humanity is not an outlier, but representative of the norm (aka. the Copernican Principle) it is logical to assume that an advanced ETI would have created such a network already. Based on humanity's research into quantum communications, Hippke four possible methods. The first is "polarization encoding," which relies on the horizontal and vertical polarization of light to represent data.

The second method involves the "Fock state" of photons, where a signal is encoded by alternating between a discreet number of particles and vacuum (similar to binary code). The two remaining options involve either time-bin encodingwhere early and late arrival is usedor coherent state of light encoding, where light is amplitude-squeezed or phase-squeezed to simulate a binary code.

Security and Supremacy

Of the many benefits that quantum communications would present for a technologically advanced species, Gate-Keeping is especially interesting because of the implications it could have for SETI. After all, the disparity between what we assume is the statistical likelihood of intelligent life in our Universe and the lack of evidence for it (aka. the Fermi Paradox) cries out for explanations. As Hippke puts it:

"ETI may deliberately choose to make communications invisible for less advanced civilizations. Perhaps most or all advanced civilization feel the need to keep the "monkeys" out of the galactic channel, and let members only participate above a certain technological minimum. Mastering quantum communications may reflect this limit."

The idea of quantum communication was first argued by Mieczyslaw Subotowicz, a professor of astrophysics at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin (Poland), in 1979. In a paper titled "Interstellar communication by neutrino beams," Subotowicz argued that the difficulties this method presented would be a selling point to a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization (ETC).

By opting for a means of communication that has such a small cross-section, an ETC would only be able to communicate with similarly advanced species. However, Hippke noted, this also makes it virtually impossible to detect entangled pairs of neutrinos. For this reason, entangled photons would not only provide for gate-keeping, but they would also be detectable by those meant to receive them.

Similarly, quantum communication is also preferable because of the security it allows for, which is one of the main reasons the technology is being developed here on Earth. Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables two parties to produce a shared key that can be used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. In theory, this will lead to a new era where encrypted communications and databases are immune to conventional cyber attacks.

In addition, QKD has the unique advantage of letting the two parties detect a potential third party attempting to intercept their messages. Based on quantum mechanics, any attempt to measure a quantum system will collapse the wave function of any entangled particles. This will produce detectable anomalies in the system, which would immediately send up red flags. Said Hippke:

"We do not know whether ETI values secure interstellar communication, but it is certainly a beneficial tool for expansive civilizations which consist of actions, like humanity today. Therefore, it is plausible that future humans (or ETI) have a desire to implement a secure interstellar network."

Another major advantage to quantum computing is its ability to solve problems exponentially faster than its digital counterpartswhat is known as "quantum supremacy." The classic example is Shor's algorithm, a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for factoring integers that a conventional computer would take years to solve, but a quantum computer could crack in mere seconds.

In traditional computing, public-key encryption (such as the RSA-2048 encryption) employs mathematical functions that are very difficult and time-consuming to compute. Given that they can accommodate an exponentially greater number of functions, it is estimated that a quantum computer could crack the same encryption in about ten seconds.

Last, but not least, there's the greater photon information efficiency (PIE) that quantum communications offer over classical channelsmeasured in bits per photon. According to Hippke, quantum communications will improve the bits per photon efficiency rating by up to one-third. In this regard, the desire for more efficient data transmissions will make the adoption of a quantum network something of an inevitability.

"Turned the other way around, classical channels are energetically wasteful, because they do not use all information encoding options per photon," he writes. "A quantum advantage of order 1/3 does not seem like much, but why waste it? It is logical to assume that ETI prefers to transmit more information rather than less, per unit energy."

Quantum entanglement visualized. Credit: Physics Department, HKUST

Challenges

Of course, no SETI-related pitch would be complete without mentioning the possible challenges. For starters, there's the matter of decoherence, where energy (and hence, information) is lost to the background environment. Where transmissions through interstellar space are concerned, the main issues are distance, free electrons (solar wind), interplanetary dust, and the interstellar mediumlow-density clouds of dust and gas.

"As a baseline, the largest distance over which successful optical entanglement experiments have been performed on Earth is 144 km," notes Hippke. Since the mass density of the Earth's atmosphere is 1.2 kg m-3, this means that a signal passing through a column 144 km (~90 mi) in length was dealing with a column density of 1.728105 kg m-2. In contrast, the column density between Earth and the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is eight orders of magnitude lower (310-8 kg m-2).

Another issue is the delay imposed by a relativistic Universe, which means that messages to even the closest star systems would take years. As a result, quantum computation is something that will be performed locally for the most part, and only condensed qubits will be transmitted between communication nodes. With this in mind, there are a few indications humanity could be on the lookout for in the coming years.

What to Look For?

Depending on the method used to transmit quantum information, certain signatures would result that SETI researchers could identify. At present, SETI facilities that conduct observations in the visible light spectrum are not equipped to receive quantum communications (since the technology does not exist yet). However, they are equipped to detect photons, obtain spectra, and perform polarization experiments.

As such, argues Hippke, they would be able to tease out potential signals from the background noise of space. This is similar to what Professor Lubin suggested in a 2016 paper ("The Search for Directed Intelligence"), where he argued that optical signals (lasers) used for directed-energy propulsion or communications would result in occasional "spillover" that would be detectable.

In much the same way, "errant" photons could be collected by observatories and measured for signs of encoding using various techniques (including the ones identified in the study). One possible method Hippke recommends is long-duration interferometry, where multiple instruments monitor the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic fields in space over time and compare them to a baseline to discern the presence of encoding.

One thing bears consideration though: If by listening in on ETI quantum communications, won't that cause information to be lost? And if so, would the ETI in question not realize we were listening in? Assuming they were not aware of us before, they sure would be after all this went down! One might conclude that it would be better to not eavesdrop on the conversations of more advanced species!

Explore further Researchers send entangled qubit states through a communication channel for the first time

More information: Michael Hippke. Searching for interstellar quantum communications. Michael Hippke. Searching for interstellar quantum communications. arxiv.org/abs/2104.06446 arXiv:2104.06446v1 [astro-ph.IM]
Four actors just up for Academy Awards this past Sunday  Amanda Seyfried, surprise winner Anthony Hopkins, Glenn Close and Olivia Colman  already have their next movies coming out this week, and fellow nominee Gary Oldmans much-delayed The Woman in the Window follows two weeks later.

Lets test your knowledge of movie stars Oscar win follow-ups, from the good to the bad to the what-were-they-thinking.

1. Two months after his Best Oscar win for Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman played the villain in which 2006 entry of a long-running action franchise?

A. Casino Royale

B. Mission: Impossible III

C. Superman Returns

D. X-Men: The Last Stand

2. Weeks after she won her first Oscar for 2006s Fargo, this years best actress winner Frances McDormands next film, Paradise Road, opened, co-starring what fellow 2021 nominee?

3. Michael Caine missed out on collecting his first supporting actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters in person in 1987 because he was filming what turned out to be one of the worst movies of all time, currently holding a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was rushed into theaters that summer, and when asked about it years later, Caine said, I have never seen it, but by all accounts, it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific. Name the movie.

4. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for No Country for Old Men and followed it up with Vicky Christina Barcelona, where he began a relationship with co-star Penelope Cruz (who ultimately won an Oscar for this picture) that culminated in a wedding two years later. They first met on the set of this movie, true or false?

5. Of the four actors who have won back-to-back Oscars  Luise Rainer, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Tom Hanks  three can claim their second winning performance was a direct follow-up to the first. Which one cant, because they released three other films in between?

6. After 30 years in the film business, Shirley MacLaine finally took home an Oscar for 1983s Terms of Endearment, but she followed up that win with an appearance in a dubious 1984 sequel for which she wasnt even involved in the original. What movie was it?

A. 2010: The Year We Make Contact

B. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

C. Cannonball Run II

D. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

7. Highlighting just how out-of-the-ordinary Sally Fields first Oscar win for Norma Rae was at the time (despite her recent Emmy win for Sybil), her immediate follow-up to that pictures release was Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and the next movie after her win was what probable contractually obligated sequel starring her then-boyfriend?

8. Tommy Lee Jones followed his supporting actor win for The Fugitive with the mad bomber dud, Blown Away, co-starring three future Oscar winners: Jeff Bridges, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Forest Whitaker. Which of these men was the last to collect his trophy?

9. About a month-and-a-half after Natalie Portmans best actress win for Black Swan, she appeared in the raunchy, fantasy, stoner comedy Your Highness, co-starring alongside James Franco, Danny McBride, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Theroux and what redheaded Emmy-winning actor who just lost his wife, Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter star Helen McCrory, to cancer two weeks ago?

10. Jack Nicholsons next film after winning his first Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was the western, The Missouri Breaks, which was also the first film to be released for his co-star since taking home his second best actor trophy three years before Nicholson. Who was the co-star?

ANSWERS

1. B

2. Glenn Close

3. Jaws: The Revenge

4. False (They met on the set of her debut film, 1992s Jamon Jamon, and appeared together in four other films before becoming a couple on the set of Vicky Christina Barcelona.)

5. Spencer Tracy

6. C (starring Burt Reynolds)

7. Smokey and the Bandit II, starring Burt Reynolds (Hmm)

8. Jeff Bridges, for 2009s Crazy Heart

9. Damian Lewis

10. Marlon Brando
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China has successfully launched the 22-metric-ton core module of its Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony space station on Thursday in a major milestone towards the countrys space exploration programme.

The 17-metre long module  expected to serve as the living quarters of the Chinese Space Station (CSS) for up to three astronauts, and will contain the stations control centre, power, propulsion and life-support systems  was launched using the Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket from the coastal Wenchang spaceport in China.

According to Chinese media reports, the core module separated from the rockets first stage after 490 seconds of flight, and the solar arrays deployed and over an hour after launch.

SpaceNews reported that the module is expected to raise to its orbit at about 370 km above the Earth.

Two other main modules that will be subsequently launched are expected to house scientific tools to conduct experiments in areas such as astronomy, space medicine, biotechnology, microgravity fluid physics and space technologies.

The CSS, which would be about one-sixth the size of the International Space Station (ISS), is also slated to be joined in orbit by Xuntian optical module, a Hubble-class space telescope.

In 11 missions planned over the next two years or so, China plans to piece together its space station with two more launches planned in mid-late May and June that will help build the 66-ton three-module orbital outpost.

China has been planning to build its own permanent space station since the 1990s since it has not been part of the International Space Station (ISS) and the US has often objected to the secrecy and close military ties of its space missions.

Recent advancements in its space programme, including two successful lunar landings, and growing strong ties with Roscosmos, Russias space agency, have enabled China to inch closer to its own space station.

Previously, China had launched its first crewed space station in 2011  Tiangong-1  but its orbit gradually decayed over the years and in September 2016, officials announced that they had lost control of it.

While its successor Tiangong-2 fared better and allowed two astronauts in orbit for 30 days  enabling them to conduct research on space radiation and weightlessness  it too was decomissioned in 2019 as planned.

The new CSS will be the will be the 11th crewed space station ever built, and Chinas first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term, staying in orbit for at least ten years.
ATLANTA, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

First Quarter and Recent Business Highlights:

Achieved total revenues of $71.1 million in the first quarter 2021 versus $66.4 million in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 7% on a GAAP basis and 3% on a non-GAAP proforma constant currency basis

in the first quarter 2021 versus in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 7% on a GAAP basis and 3% on a non-GAAP proforma constant currency basis Net loss was ($3.1) million , or ($0.08) per share, in the first quarter of 2021

, or per share, in the first quarter of 2021 Non-GAAP net income was $1.4 million , or $0.03 per share, in the first quarter of 2021

CryoLife, Inc. (NYSE: CRY), a leading cardiac and vascular surgery company focused on aortic disease, announced today its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021.

"Despite the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on our business, we saw our business return to growth on both a GAAP and proforma constant currency basis in the first quarter. Growth was driven by our new product launches outside of the U.S., a recovery in procedure volume in the U.S., an improved JOTEC inventory position, and our international expansion efforts, evidenced by double digit revenue growth in both Asia and Europe," commented Pat Mackin, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer.

"Additionally, we made progress on our regulatory strategy and are on-track to file PMAs for PerClot and PROACT Mitral later in 2021, which should help drive growth in 2022 and 2023. We also made solid progress on enrollment in our PROACT Xa clinical trial and advanced R&D programs that should deliver additional growth opportunities beginning in 2024. We are optimistic that the second half of 2021 will be the start of a prolonged period of growth for CryoLife."

First Quarter 2021 Financial Results

Total revenues for the first quarter of 2021 were $71.1 million, reflecting an increase of 7% on a GAAP basis and 3% on a non-GAAP proforma constant currency basis, both compared to the first quarter of 2020.

Net loss for the first quarter of 2021 was $(3.1) million, or $(0.08) per fully diluted common share, compared to net loss of ($6.7) million, or ($0.18) per fully diluted common share for the first quarter of 2020. Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2021 was $1.4 million, or $0.03 per fully diluted common share, compared to non-GAAP net loss of ($2.7) million, or ($0.07) per fully diluted common share for the first quarter of 2020.

The financial results reported in this earnings release are preliminary pending the Company's filing of its quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which it expects to file on April 30, 2021.

2021 Financial Outlook

Due to continued uncertainties resulting from the COVID-19 global pandemic, particularly in Europe, the Company is not issuing full year 2021 financial guidance at this time.

The Company's financial performance for 2021 is subject to the risks identified below.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

This press release contains non-GAAP financial measures. Investors should consider this non-GAAP information in addition to, and not as a substitute for, financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, this non-GAAP financial information may not be the same as similar measures presented by other companies. The Company's non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EBITDA results exclude (as applicable) business development, integration, and severance expense; depreciation and amortization expense; interest income and expense; non-cash interest expense; loss on foreign currency revaluation; stock-based compensation expense; corporate rebranding expense; and income tax expense (benefit). The Company believes that these non-GAAP presentations provide useful information to investors regarding unusual non-operating transactions; the operating expense structure of the Company's existing and recently acquired operations, without regard to its on-going efforts to acquire additional complementary products and businesses and the transaction and integration expenses incurred in connection with recently acquired and divested product lines; and the operating expense structure excluding fluctuations resulting from foreign currency revaluation and stock-based compensation expense. The Company believes it is useful to exclude certain expenses because such amounts in any specific period may not directly correlate to the underlying performance of its business operations or can vary significantly between periods as a result of factors such as acquisitions, or non-cash expense related to amortization of previously acquired tangible and intangible assets. The Company has excluded the impact of changes in currency exchange from certain revenues to evaluate growth rates on a constant currency basis. The Company does, however, expect to incur similar types of expenses and currency exchange impacts in the future, and this non-GAAP financial information should not be viewed as a statement or indication that these types of expenses will not recur.

Webcast and Conference Call Information

The Company will hold a teleconference call and live webcast later today, April 29, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. ET to discuss the results followed by a question and answer session. To listen to the live teleconference, please dial 201-689-8261. A replay of the teleconference will be available through May 6, 2021 and can be accessed by calling (toll free) 877-660-6853 or 201-612-7415. The Conference ID for the replay is 13718912.

The live webcast and replay can be accessed by going to the Investor Relations section of the CryoLife website at www.cryolife.com and selecting the heading Webcasts & Presentations.

About CryoLife, Inc.

Headquartered in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, CryoLife is a leader in the manufacturing, processing, and distribution of medical devices and implantable tissues used in cardiac and vascular surgical procedures focused on aortic repair. CryoLife markets and sells products in more than 100 countries worldwide. For additional information about CryoLife, visit our website, www.cryolife.com.

Forward Looking Statements

Statements made in this press release that look forward in time or that express management's beliefs, expectations, or hopes are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are made as of the date of this press release and reflect the view of management as of the date of this press release. Such forward-looking statements reflect the views of management at the time such statements are made. These statements include our beliefs that our PMAs for PerClot and PROACT Mitral, if approved, should help drive our growth in 2022 and 2023; our PROACT Xa clinical trial and advanced R&D programs, if successful, should deliver additional growth opportunities for us beginning in 2024; and the second half of 2021 will be the start of a prolonged period of growth for CryoLife. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, estimates, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations, including that the benefits anticipated from the Ascyrus Medical LLC transaction and Endospan distribution agreement may not be achieved and the continued effects of COVID-19, including decelerating vaccination or vaccine adoption rates, or government mandates implemented to address the effects of the pandemic could adversely impact our results. These risks and uncertainties include the risk factors detailed in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our Form 10-K for year ended December 31, 2020. CryoLife does not assume any obligation, and expressly disclaims any duty to update any of its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Loss (In thousands, except per share data) (Unaudited)

















Three Months Ended

March 31,



2021



2020 Revenues:









Products $ 53,345

$ 46,420 Preservation services

17,742



20,009 Total revenues

71,087



66,429











Cost of products and preservation services:









Products

14,911



13,040 Preservation services

8,338



9,218 Total cost of products and preservation services

23,249



22,258











Gross margin

47,838



44,171











Operating expenses:









General, administrative, and marketing

38,638



39,002 Research and development

7,754



6,356 Total operating expenses

46,392



45,358











Operating income (loss)

1,446



(1,187)











Interest expense

4,040



3,388 Interest income

(24)



(102) Other expense, net

1,931



3,662











Loss before income taxes

(4,501)



(8,135) Income tax benefit

(1,363)



(1,470)











Net loss $ (3,138)

$ (6,665)











Loss per common share:









Basic $ (0.08)

$ (0.18) Diluted $ (0.08)

$ (0.18)











Weighted-average common shares outstanding:









Basic

38,738



37,390 Diluted

38,738



37,390











Net loss $ (3,138)

$ (6,665) Other comprehensive loss:









Foreign currency translation adjustments

(10,290)



(4,463) Comprehensive loss $ (13,428)

$ (11,128)

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (In thousands)













March 31,

December 31,

2021

2020

(Unaudited)





ASSETS









Current assets:









Cash and cash equivalents $ 56,552

$ 61,412 Restricted securities

550



546 Trade receivables, net

48,320



45,964 Other receivables

2,416



2,788 Inventories

73,375



73,038 Deferred preservation costs

39,250



36,546 Prepaid expenses and other

15,220



14,295 Total current assets

235,683



234,589











Goodwill

253,950



260,061 Acquired technology, net

178,964



186,091 Other intangibles, net

39,274



40,966 Operating lease right-of-use assets, net

39,073



18,571 Property and equipment, net

31,497



33,077 Deferred income taxes

1,657



1,446 Other assets

14,734



14,603 Total assets $ 794,832

$ 789,404











LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY









Current liabilities:









Current portion of contingent consideration $ 16,800

$ 16,430 Accrued compensation

10,644



10,192 Accounts payable

8,952



9,623 Accrued expenses

8,564



7,472 Accrued procurement fees

3,402



3,619 Current maturities of operating leases

1,548



5,763 Current portion of long-term debt

1,174



1,195 Taxes payable

3,229



2,808 Other liabilities

3,705



3,366 Total current liabilities

58,018



60,468











Long-term debt

310,058



290,468 Contingent consideration

44,100



43,500 Non-current maturities of operating leases

38,441



14,034 Deferred income taxes

29,272



34,713 Deferred compensation liability

5,436



5,518 Other liabilities

12,176



11,990 Total liabilities $ 497,501

$ 460,691











Commitments and contingencies





















Shareholders' equity:









Preferred stock

--



-- Common stock (issued shares of 40,585 in 2021 and 40,394 in 2020)

406



404 Additional paid-in capital

301,449



316,192 Retained earnings

13,671



20,022 Accumulated other comprehensive (loss) income

(3,547)



6,743 Treasury stock, at cost, 1,487 shares as of March 31, 2021

and December 31, 2020, respectively

(14,648)



(14,648) Total shareholders' equity

297,331



328,713











Total liabilities and shareholders' equity $ 794,832

$ 789,404

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Statement of Cash Flows (In thousands) (Unaudited)













Three Months Ended

March 31,



2021



2020 Net cash flows from operating activities:









Net loss $ (3,138)

$ (6,665)











Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash from operating activities:









Depreciation and amortization

6,006



4,898 Non-cash compensation

2,480



2,564 Non-cash lease expense

1,758



1,746 Write-down of inventories and deferred preservation costs

1,274



720 Change in fair value of contingent consideration

970



-- Deferred income taxes

(4,241)



(265) Other

787



461 Changes in operating assets and liabilities:









Accounts payable, accrued expenses, and other liabilities

1,590



(2,489) Prepaid expenses and other assets

(1,291)



982 Receivables

(3,301)



3,557 Inventories and deferred preservation costs

(5,933)



(2,874) Net cash flows (used in) provided by operating activities

(3,039)



2,635











Net cash flows from investing activities:









Capital expenditures

(1,502)



(2,539) Other

692



(364) Net cash flows used in investing activities

(810)



(2,903)











Net cash flows from financing activities:









Proceeds from revolving line of credit

--



30,000 Proceeds from exercise of stock options and issuance of common stock

861



1,064 Redemption and repurchase of stock to cover tax withholdings

(1,813)



(1,712) Repayment of debt

(701)



(691) Other

(442)



(146) Net cash flows (used in) provided by financing activities

(2,095)



28,515











Effect of exchange rate changes on cash, cash equivalents, and restricted securities

1,088



1,336 (Decrease) increase in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted securities

(4,856)



29,583











Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted securities beginning of period

61,958



34,294 Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted securities end of period $ 57,102

$ 63,877

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Financial Highlights (In thousands)













(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended

March 31,

2021

2020 Products:









Aortic stents and stent grafts $ 20,205

$ 15,468 Surgical sealants

17,828



16,737 On-X

13,095



12,202 Other

2,217



2,013 Total products

53,345



46,420











Preservation services

17,742



20,009 Total revenues $ 71,087

$ 66,429











Revenues:









U.S. $ 36,318

$ 36,447 International

34,769



29,982 Total revenues $ 71,087

$ 66,429

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Revenues and Adjusted EBITDA (In thousands, except per share data)















(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended

March 31,

2021

2020 Growth

Rate Reconciliation of total revenues, GAAP to











total revenues, non-GAAP:











Total revenues, GAAP $ 71,087

$ 66,429 7% Including AMDS prior to acquisition

--



698

Total GAAP revenues including

AMDS

71,087



67,127 6% Impact of changes in currency exchange

--



1,725

Total constant currency revenues including

AMDS, non-GAAP $ 71,087

$ 68,852 3%



























(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended

$

2021

2020 Reconciliation of operating income (loss), GAAP to









adjusted operating income, non-GAAP:









Operating income (loss) $ 1,446

$ (1,187) Amortization expense

4,260



3,033 Business development, integration, and severance expense

1,470



823 Adjusted operating income, non-GAAP $ 7,176

$ 2,669



























(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended

March 31,

2021

2020 Reconciliation of net loss, GAAP to









adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP:









Net loss, GAAP $ (3,138)

$ (6,665) Adjustments:









Depreciation and amortization expense

6,006



4,898 Interest expense

4,040



3,388 Stock-based compensation expense

2,480



2,564 Loss on foreign currency revaluation

1,886



3,663 Business development, integration, and severance expense

1,470



823 Corporate rebranding expense

15



321 Interest income

(24)



(102) Income tax benefit

(1,363)



(1,470) Adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP $ 11,372

$ 7,420

CryoLife, Inc. and Subsidiaries Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) and Diluted Income (Loss) Per Common Share (In thousands, except per share data)













(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended

March 31,



2021



2020 GAAP:









Loss before income taxes $ (4,501)

$ (8,135) Income tax benefit

(1,363)



(1,470) Net loss $ (3,138)

$ (6,665)











Diluted loss per common share: $ (0.08)

$ (0.18)











Diluted weighted-average common









shares outstanding

38,738



37,390











Reconciliation of loss before income taxes,









GAAP to adjusted income (loss), non-GAAP









Loss before income taxes, GAAP: $ (4,501)

$ (8,135) Adjustments:









Amortization expense

4,260



3,033 Business development, integration, and severance expense

1,470



823 Non-cash interest expense

568



405 Corporate rebranding expense

15



321 Adjusted income (loss) before income taxes,









non-GAAP

1,812



(3,553)











Income tax expense (benefit) calculated at a









pro forma tax rate of 25%

453



(888) Adjusted net income (loss), non-GAAP $ 1,359

$ (2,665)











Reconciliation of diluted loss per common share, GAAP









to adjusted diluted income (loss) per common share, non-GAAP:









Diluted loss per common share, GAAP: $ (0.08)

$ (0.18) Adjustments:









Amortization expense

0.11



0.08 Business development, integration, and severance expense

0.04



0.02 Non-cash interest expense

0.01



0.01 Corporate rebranding expense

--



0.01 Tax effect of non-GAAP adjustments

(0.04)



(0.03) Effect of 25% pro forma tax rate

(0.01)



0.02 Adjusted diluted income (loss) per common share,









non-GAAP $ 0.03

$ (0.07)











Reconciliation of diluted weighted-average common shares outstanding GAAP









to diluted weighted-average common shares outstanding, non-GAAP:









Diluted weighted-average common shares outstanding, GAAP:

38,738



37,390 Adjustments:









Stock options

326



-- Contingently returnable shares

289



-- Diluted weighted-average common shares outstanding, non-GAAP1

39,353



37,390

1- Diluted weighted-average common shares outstanding, non-GAAP does not include the dilutive impact of the Senior Convertible Notes

Contacts:

CryoLife D. Ashley Lee Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Phone: 770-419-3355 Gilmartin Group LLC Brian Johnston / Lynn Lewis Phone: 631-807-1986 [email protected]

SOURCE CryoLife, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.cryolife.com


Could one of the energy industrys longest-running on-again, off-again romances be catching fire again? Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to think so.

There are discussions happening right now about a 1 per cent acquisition by one of the leading energy in the world in state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co, he said in a local television interview on Tuesday.

Prince Mohammed didnt disclose which company might make the investment, but you dont have to be a Jane Austen protagonist to work out the most likely partner. Ltd, owner of the worlds biggest oil refinery, has been dancing the quadrille with for nearly two years. At current prices, 1 per cent of Aramco would be worth about $19 billion  not far off the $15 billion price tag put on 20 per cent of Reliances energy division, at the time the Saudi company first took an interest in buying a stake in 2019.

A tie-up with Reliance is exactly what Aramco has in mind, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The two would initially exchange shares, with cash payments from the Saudis over subsequent years making up the balance of the transaction, the paper reported.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Asian company in possession of an oil refinery must be in want of a West Asian strategic investor. In this case, though, its hard to see the attraction for Reliances chairman,

First, consider why the Saudi company is looking to sell a stake in the first place. Back in 2019 when the deal was first mooted, Reliance was in a tough financial spot. Net debt had more than tripled to Rs 2.05 trillion ($30 billion) in March that year, from Rs 670 billion five years earlier, as the company plowed cash into its fast-growing telecom and internet arm Reliance Jio.

Aramco, meanwhile, was awash with oil cash and expecting to be even more flush after its initial public offering, which eventually raised about $29 billion in December of that year. By offering to put down a 10-figure amount in return for a fifth of Reliances energy business, Saudi Inc was following a time-honoured tradition of using its bottomless funds to get a strategic midstream or downstream asset in one of its consuming countries. That would put the deal in line with long-standing tie-ups over oil storage in Japan, and a venture proposed earlier in 2019 to build a $10-billion refining complex in northeast China.

How things have changed. Faced with paying an over-generous $75 billion annual dividend, as well as the $69 billion purchase price of state-owned chemicals business Saudi Basic Industries Co  at a time when all its peers are cutting their oil-price forecasts  Aramco is no longer swimming, Scrooge McDuck style, through piles of money. Though funds are hardly tight, they can no longer be treated as limitless.

That Chinese refinery project was put on ice last August, while investments in the US and elsewhere are being wound back, the Wall Street Journal reported the following month citing people familiar with the matter. Another $44-billion refinery near Mumbai, in which Aramco and Abu Dhabi National Oil Co would have taken a joint 50 per cent stake, has also ground to a halt. Aramcos most prominent deal this year  the $12.4 billion sale of its pipelines network to EIG Global Energy Partners  saw cash coming into the Saudi business, rather than going out of it.

Reliances balance sheet has moved in the opposite direction. Investments from Alphabet and Facebook in its Jio business, combined with a rights issue, brought in Rs 2.2 trillion last year. That left the company effectively with a net cash position by December. A breakneck pace of growth at Jio will likely cause it to overtake petroleum and chemicals as the biggest contributor to earnings, with or without a stake sale. Right now, Ambani isnt particularly in need of cash. He certainly doesnt need shares in one of his biggest suppliers, least of all when theyre locked up on a foreign stock exchange in a currency whose long-standing dollar peg is looking less secure than it once did.

Looking at his comments at the time of Reliances last annual general meeting in July, its clear that the allure of a conventional petroleum business is rapidly fading: The catastrophic impact of climate change calls for the legacy energy industry to reinvent itself on a war footing, he said, before committing the company to net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 and promising investments in hydrogen, wind, solar, fuel cells and batteries. Already at the time of Reliances 2019 talks with Aramco, it was looking to shift from a traditional focus on road fuels into jet kerosene and petrochemicals.

Its important not to overstate how much Reliance is likely to change. The worlds biggest oil refinery will continue to earn billions from processing crude and producing chemicals for a long time to come, and Ambani wouldnt be the first fossil-fuel boss to overstate the pace of his green makeover for the sake of some shareholder adulation.

Still, a business thats flush with cash and sees its future in technology and zero-carbon chemicals doesnt really need what is offering. If Prince Mohammed wants to seal this betrothal, hes going to have to offer a far more generous dowry.
Members of Congress from both parties, including Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland, want the Navy to put a long-term, $21 billion plan to improve its in-house shipyards on a fast track.

Theyve introduced bills to appropriate all the money now  and to set another $4 billion to help the private shipyards that build and repair Navy ships finance improvements to their facilities.

Fully funding the $21 billion cost of the Navys 20-year Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) for its four shipyards  including Norfolk Naval Shipyard  means the Navy can step up the pace of work on improvements at the yards, rather than parceling out projects over two decades, the bills sponsors say.

If we could do something significant so that the optimization plan didnt have to cross its fingers with every annual appropriation ... that would be a different matter, Kaine said.

Kaine said he and his colleagues also believe it was important to help the private yards that build and repair Navy ships, noting these yards are a vital part of the Hampton Roads economy.

Our shipyards aging infrastructure fails to provide the capacity, configurations, or equipment necessary to maintain fleet readiness ... we can build all the ships we want, but if they are tied at the dock due to maintenance backlogs they dont do us much good, Wittman said.

The four in-house Naval shipyards are responsible for maintenance on nuclear carriers and submarines, but only 12 of their 17 drydocks are big enough to handle Virginia-class submarines, and only seven can handle the newest Block V Virginia class submarines, which are 83 feet longer than the Virginia-class boats. The new Columbia-class submarines on which Newport News Shipbuilding and Electric Boat are getting started building are even bigger.

Norfolk Naval Shipyard is halfway through a three-year, $200 million renovation of its Dry Dock 4, to make sure it can overhaul all Navy submarines. This work was an early SIOP project, and the largest at the time.

Story continues

In addition, Norfolk Naval Shipyard is an early participant in the new Naval Sustainment Systems-Shipyard program, which aims to link private sector and government best practices to streamline planning work and securing supplies.

It launched a pilot program for workers assigned to the submarine USS Pasadena that include daily production meetings to identify problems causing delays and focus on fixes, Vice Adm. William Galinis, commander, Naval Sea Systems Command, said in a recent message to the yards employees.

The Pasadena program includes a new goal tracking system for zone managers that sets weekly milestones for work teams.

A Government Accountability Office report last year reported that three quarters of aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance projects at the yards were late between 2015 and 2019  in all, that kept carriers and submarines out of action for 7,424 more days than planned.

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS Boise waited pierside in Norfolk for nearly four years because there wasnt enough space at a Navy shipyard for it. The Boise has since moved on to Newport News Shipbuilding, which is getting back into the business of maintaining and overhauling nuclear subs.

The Newport News yard could be among those able to tap a new $2 billion fund to fund improvements at shipyards that build new ships for the Navy. It is the only yard that builds nuclear carriers and shares the work of building nuclear submarines with Electric Boat.

Besides Newport News and the Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi that is also owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, this fund would be available to the Austal USA yard in Alabama, Connecticuts Electric Boat yard, Bath Iron Works in Maine, Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin and and NASSCO General Dynamics in California.

In addition, the bill would set aside another $2 billion to help fund infrastructure improvement projects at 20 major commercial repair yards, including the BAE, General Dynamics NASSCO, MHI and Colonna yards in Hampton Roads.

Shipyards are infrastructure, infrastructure that keeps us safe, Kaine said.

Besides Kaine and Wittman, the bills sponsors are Senators Susan Collins, R-Maine, Angus King, I-Maine, and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Norfolk, has signed up as a co-sponsor.

Dave Ress, 757-247-4355, dress@dailypress.com
Ghana is expected to receive another consignment of over 200,000 doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in May this year.



The UNICEFs Regional Advisor for Health Systems Strengthening for Western and Central Africa Regional Office, Ms Susie Villeneuve, disclosed this, explaining that the vaccine would be shipped from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Ghana, Togo and the Comoros.



She said the development was because the DRC did not have the needed systems and structures to use the AstraZeneca doses it received under the global access (COVAX) facility.



At a panel discussion at this years African Vaccination Week (AVW) launch in Accra on Monday, April 26, 2021, Ms Villeneuve explained that the decision to ship the vaccines from DRC

to Ghana, Togo and the Comoros was to prevent them from expiring since the DRC was not using them due to lack of facilities.



She said the vaccines were safe, and encouraged the beneficiary countries to make good use of them.



Advocacy & more



Initiated in 2010,the AVW provides an opportunity for countries in Africa to

strengthen their immunisation services and systems through advocacy, education and outreach activities.



It further seeks to increase community awareness of immunisation, and to strengthen linkages between Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) and other child survival interventions.



This years event, which has been dubbed: Vaccines Bring Us Together, is a reflection of the need for everyone to support the vaccination process in order to reduce vaccine preventable diseases to its barest minimum.



Ghana became the first country in the world to receive 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in February this year.



Other countries, including DRC, later benefited from the COVAX facility.



Other vaccines



The Programme Manager of the EPI, Dr Kwame Amponsah-Achiano, told the Daily Graphic that Ghana was expecting between 200,000 and 300,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines from the DRC shipment.



He said beyond that, the government was making efforts to get other types of COVID-19

vaccines, particularly the Sputnik V vaccine, from different sources.



He said the Pfizer vaccine, which had also been considered at some stage, required a temperature of -70 degrees to store it, pointing out that many African countries were not talking about it due to its storage requirements.



Dr Amponsah-Achiano said even with the AstraZeneca, the government was not only relying on India, but also Korea for it.



He added that the country was expected to receive about 4.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine under the COVAX facility.



Efforts



Launching the AVW, the Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, said the emergence and the continued surge of COVID-19 cases in the wake of vaccine discoveries required more concerted efforts to bring the situation down around the world.



Africa and the global community can only win the fight against vaccine preventable diseases through a collective effort, he said, adding that vaccine preventable diseases have not vanished and may reoccur if we slacken in our effort to immunise all eligible children at the right time.













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.

Featured Video
NEW DELHI  India is the worlds leading producer of vaccines, but over the past week it has also been the global leader in Covid-19 deaths, and it is not at all clear that the country can vaccinate itself out of the crisis.

The answer to that question is a matter of urgent interest in India, where a second wave of infection has left a tableau of death and despair, but it may also have big implications for other countries battling the pandemic.

India is a critical supplier in the global effort to vaccinate people against the coronavirus, and its struggles to roll out enough vaccine for its own 1.4 billion people are being closely watched abroad.

In Africa, especially, ripples from the Indian crisis are already being felt.

Health officials on the continent who had been counting on vaccine shipments from India learned just weeks ago that they may not be arriving when expected. Indias prime minister, Narendra Modi, suspended exports of nearly all 2.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced daily by its top vaccine company, the Serum Institute of India.
Kolkata: Crude bombs were hurled in front of Mahajati Sadan in central Kolkata on Thursday (April 29) morning while the state assembly elections were underway in the area.

The incident happened on Central Avenue in the heart of the city, triggering panic among the people, the police said according to news agency PTI.

BJP's Jorasanko candidate Meena Devi Purohit alleged that the crude bombs were hurled at her vehicle while she was touring different polling booths.

"Bombs were hurled at my car but I am not scared. I will definitely visit the booths," she said.

"They tried to kill me and it is a ploy to scare the voters," Purohit alleged.

A huge police contingent was deployed at the spot, a senior officer of Kolkata Police said.

Evidence was collected and an investigation started, he said.

Seven seats in Kolkata, including Jorasanko, were voting in the final phase of the West Bengal assembly elections.

The polling began at 7 am and would continue till 6.30 pm.

Live TV
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-28 23:36:10|Editor: huaxia

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Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presides over the 92nd meeting of the Council of Chairpersons of the 13th NPC Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Senior Chinese lawmakers met on Wednesday during the country's ongoing legislative session.

The meeting of the Council of Chairpersons of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee was presided over by Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee.

The meeting heard reports on deliberations during the session. Based on the deliberations, revisions have been made to some of the draft normative documents, and draft legal decisions have been prepared.

The meeting decided to submit the revised drafts and draft decisions to the ongoing session of the NPC Standing Committee for review. Enditem
Click here for updates on this story

PORTLAND, Oregon (KPTV) -- Candles and flowers remain at Lents Park in the grass and tucked along the fence line, commemorating the place Robert Delgado lost his life almost two weeks ago.

A Portland police officer shot Delgado the morning of April 16, following reports that he had a gun inside the park. Officers say he was not complying, and they found he had a replica handgun on him.

Many of the words written on the posters tied to the chain link are of love, some of the words call for justice.

Raven Drake thinks his death could have been avoided. Drake got to know Delgado quite well over the last several months of his life, working as the Ambassador Program Manager for Street Roots, a nonprofit homeless advocacy group.

Starting in the fall, Drake said she would visit with Delgado, who was houseless, about every other week as part of her outreach work.

"He always had something positive to say-- 'well there's always tomorrow,' or 'it'll be a beautiful day,'" Drake said.

Behind the tough, quiet exterior, Drake said a kind, funny man started to open up to the outreach workers. He had four kids. She distinctly remembers Delgado's jokes.

"What's black and white, black and white, black and white," Drake recalled, "I said 'I don't know, Robert, what is it,' and he said a penguin rolling down a hill."

Drake also remembers Delgado's selflessness. She was passing out water towards the end of the warm season and ran out of bottles. Drake says Delgado offered up one of his own to give to somebody else. He had two.

"He literally followed me through the park and wouldn't let me leave unless I took one, I felt so bad because I was like, that's all the water you have," Drake told FOX 12.

But Drake says Delgado had his bad moments, too, as he grappled with mental health issues. Speaking from experience, Drake says it's rare to not be in an unstable state of mind when you don't have a roof over your head.

"I'm really good-- my mental health is really good-- but when I lived out there on the street, it was bad," Drake said.

She was homeless for almost eight months. Drake says she got off the street last summer, and within a few months began working with Street Roots to form a more robust outreach program.

"Its my firm belief that PPB has no business responding to non-violent crimes like that, they do not have the training, they do not have the de-escalation training, they do not have the trauma-informed training to do it," Drake said.

She says an armed officer showing up to a possible mental health crisis will likely only escalate the situation. Instead, Drake believes these calls are better suited to mental health professionals and street-level outreach teams already doing de-escalation work.

"We need to fund and support them and maybe even ask them to come train PPB officers, moving forward, in healthier ways to de-escalate these situations and move on," Drake said.

The Portland Police Bureau did not respond to FOX 12's request for comment Wednesday.

Delgado's family, along with some local advocacy groups, sent a letter to the state of Oregon to ask for a grand jury investigation into Delgado's death.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
Left to retain Kerala, BJP tipped to return in Assam, win Puducherry

The results of a majority of the exit polls predict that Trinamul Congress Mamata Banerjee has a hurricane edge that could make her retain power for the third time in West Bengal. (Representational Photo: AFP)

New Delhi: The results of a majority of the exit polls predict that Trinamul Congress Mamata Banerjee has a hurricane edge that could make her retain power for the third time in West Bengal, while the BJP-led NDA will be a key player in the state, giving a robust challenge to the TMC. The DMK led by M.K. Stalin is projected to sweep to power in Tamil Nadu, replacing the AIADMK. The Left Democratic Front is expected to retain power in Kerala, breaking the cyclic nature of the state. The BJP is tipped to retain power in Assam and also coming to power in Puducherry as part of a coalition, in place of the Congress.

In West Bengal, most of the surveys predict that the ruling TMC will win at least around 150 seats, with the BJP putting up a formidable fight. The C-Voter survey data projects the TMC with emerge victorious, with 152 to 164 seats in the state, where a total 292 Assembly constituencies went to the polls. The BJP was projected to get 109-121 seats, and the Congress-Left-ISF alliance 14-25 seats. In the 2016 Assembly polls in the state, the TMC had won 211, the BJP had secured three seats and the Left and Congress had cornered 76 seats.

The Axis exit poll predicts an extremely close finish  with the TMC winning 130-156 seats and the BJP winning 134-160 seats. The survey further states that the voteshare of the TMC is 44 per cent while that of the BJP is 43 per cent.

In Tamil Nadu, the DMK led by M.K. Stalin is expected to make a clean sweep, with all exit polls predicting a landslide for the DMK. This is the first Assembly election being held after the death of political stalwarts J. Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi, and it is expected to witness the return of the DMK-Congress alliance to power with a clear majority. Voting for the 234-seat Tamil Nadu Assembly was held on April 6 in a single phase. The survey data shows that a combination of 10-year anti-incumbency and the absence of a charismatic successor to J. Jayalalithaa is expected to lead to an electoral setback for the ruling AIADMK-led coalition. The C-Voter survey shows that DMK-led alliance might secure 160 to 172 seats in the state, which has 234 Assembly constituencies. The ruling AIADMK-led alliance is expected to be restricted to 58 to 70 seats. The Axis exit poll shows the DMK+ may get 175-195 seats and AIADMK+ to secure 38 to 54 seats.

In Kerala, it is a straightforward electoral battle between the incumbent Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). According to the exit polls, the ruling LDF is expected to retain the southern state and thus buck the trend of the UDF and LDF alternating in power every five years. Kerala went to the polls on April 6 to elect 140 legislators. According to the C-Voter survey, the LDF may get 71-77 seats and the UDF 62-68 seats. The Axis survey shows 104-120 seats for the LDF and 20-36 seats for the UDF.

The BJP is all set to retain power in Assam, according to all the exit polls. The party is ahead in all exit polls so far even after it faced protests over the CAA and NRC. The C-Voter survey projects 58 to 71 seats for the BJP-led NDA and 53 to 66 seats for the Congress-led UPA. The Axis poll predicts 75-85 seats for the NDA and 40-50 seats for the UPA. Assam has a 126-member Assembly.

The exit poll data shows the NDA winning in the Union territory of Puducherry, with an almost two-thirds majority. The exit polls projected 19 to 23 seats for the NDA, comprising the AINRC, BJP and AIADMK. The Congress and DMK, which constitute the UPA, are projected to win eight to 10 seats.

If the exit polls predictions hold on counting day, May 2, it will be a big relief for the BJP, with the party making gains in West Bengal, retaining power in Assam and winning Puducherry. The Congress will have a lot to worry about as it could not win back power in Assam and in Kerala, that is now the state which party leader Rahul Gandhi represents in the Lok Sabha. Despite that, however, his party could not make a comeback in the southern state.
A Minneapolis Police officers unrolls caution tape at a crime scene on June 16, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Five people are dead following an armed standoff in Boone, North Carolina.

Two of those killed in the shooting are law enforcement officers, authorities confirmed Thursday.

The shooting suspect and his parents were also found dead.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Five people are dead, including two law enforcement officers, after an armed standoff in Boone, North Carolina.

The standoff began on Wednesday afternoon in a residential neighborhood when the Watauga County Sheriff's Office responded to a welfare check, WNCT reported.

The standoff lasted hours, authorities said, in which the gunman fired on deputies. By Thursday morning, two sheriff's deputies - identified as Sgt. Chris Ward and K-9 Deputy Logan Fox - had died of their injuries.

Fox was inside the gunman's home when he was shot, according to WSOC.

The Watauga County Sheriff's Office said a Boone police officer that was assisting with the situation was also shot during the standoff, but the bullet struck his helmet, likely sparing his life.

The shooting suspect and his parents were also found dead following the shootout, according to WCNC reporter Hunter Saenz.

Read the original article on Insider
Saturday will see the most significant expansion of the vaccination programme with those aged between 18 and 45 made eligible for the jab. Yet on Wednesday, when the Co-Win database opened for registration, those who managed to register discovered that appointment slots were not being allocated.

This means the uncertainty about how the third phase of the vaccination programme, involving the largest cohort of the population, will be conducted has only been intensified. Questions regarding supply, price and allocations abound for state governments, hospitals and citizens alike, and urgently need to be sorted out to flatten this second Covid-19 wave, the top edit says. Read it here

In other views:

Global climate diplomacy appears to have entered an activist phase but, as Nitin Desai explains, focussing on net-zero emissions by 2050 makes no sense if we do not accelerate emission reductions and raise the targets for 2030 beyond what was promised at Paris. Read it here

In a country notorious for stifling private enterprise, can the next decade be the best ever for new businesses? Neelkanth Mishra examines the question in the concluding part of a series on the future of entrepreneurship. Read it here

The Indian Navys plan to help the government develop ocean-based commercial activities as a distinct economic sector, often termed the blue economy, should be expanded beyond the coastal and mid-sea zones, says the second edit. Read it here
An Indian man recently left an entire country confused after helping his wife of seven years marry the man she had been having an affair with for years.

Uttam Mandal and Sapna Kumari, from Bhagalpur, in Indias Bihar state, got married in 2014, and had two children together. They were happy together for a while, but at some point Sapna fell in love with a relative of Uttmans, a younger man who came around their house every once in a while, and the two started having an affair. The husband learned about Sapnas escapade and they fought over the issue many times, but seeing as Sapna couldnt get over her lover, Uttman decided to do the unthinkable, step aside and help his wife marry the man she loved.

Photo: Vaibhav Nabare/Unsplash

If youre a fan of Bollywood cinema, you probably recognize the plot of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, a 1999 blockbuster in which Aishwaria Rays character is helped by her husband to marry her lover, played by Salman Khan. No one really believed something like that could happen in real life, which is why the plot made such an impression on audiences, but Uttam Mandal decided to prove that real life beats any movie.

I got angry and sad for some time but decided to come out with a solution, Mandal told ETV Bharat. The lives of three people would have been destroyed had I not done this. This was the only solution. Now all of us can be happy.

Over the years, Sapnas parents and in-laws tried to convince her to stay with Uttam and not break up the family, but their efforts were in vain, so in the end Uttam ended up convincing them to attend his wifes wedding ceremony with her lover, Raju Kumar. It was he who arranged their wedding at a Durga temple in Sutanganj, Bihar, and even gave them their blessing, saying that their match was made in heaven

Its unclear whether Uttam and Sapna divorced before she married her lover, but according to Indian media, their two children remained with him, as she reportedly refused to take them with her.
April 29, 2021

German Ambassador Wants More Nazis? - 112 Ukraine Makes A Curious Little Translation Mistake

The privately owned media organization 112 Ukraine, recently banned by the government as 'pro-Russian', reports of a Nazi march in Kiev.

March dedicated to Waffen-SS Division Galicia held in Kyiv

On April 28, about 250 people marched in black embroidered shirts (vyshyvankas) on the occasion of the 78th anniversary of Waffen-SS Division "Galicia" and came on the Independence Square in Kyiv. This was reported by Ukrainian News agency. The march began near the Arsenalna metro station and ended near Independence Square. The marching participants carried the emblems of the Galicia division, the flags of the Cossack Sich, the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, flags with the Sun and the inscription Solaris with a cross inside the letter "o", flags of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The marchers chanted: "Glory to the nation-Death to the enemies", " Glory to Ukraine- Glory to heroes!", "Under the sign of lion!", "Galicia - division of heroes"," Glory to the soldiers of the Ukrainian-Russian war"," One and only free Ukraine!" Among the them were children. Most of those present were dressed in black embroidered shirts, some in white shirts or military camouflage, and people in plain clothes were also present.

I can not find any 'western' media that reported the march.

Anka Feldhusen, the German ambassador to the Ukraine, condemned it. But here is how 112 Ukraine reported that:

German Ambassador condemns March dedicated to SS Division Galicia

Ambassador of Germany in Ukraine Anka Feldhusen has condemned the March dedicated to Waffen-SS Division Galicia that took place in Kyiv yesterday as she reported on Twitter. The detachments of Waffen-SS participated in the gravy military crimes and the Holocaust during World War II. Any volunteer organizations that fight and work in Ukraine today should be associated with them, she wrote.

"Any volunteer organizations ... should be associated with them?"

Really?

Thankfully not. This is the Google translation of Feldhusen's Russian language tweet:

Waffen CC units were involved in the most serious war crimes and the Holocaust during World War II. No volunteer organization that is fighting and working for Ukraine today should be associated with them.

A Bing translation comes to the same result.

One wonders how 112 Ukraine's translation mistake happened.

Or is there a political intent behind it which I do not grasp?

Posted by b on April 29, 2021 at 13:51 UTC | Permalink

Comments

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HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEx:2318; SSE:601318) announced that Ping An is the world's most valuable insurance brand, with a brand value of USD44.8 billion, in the Insurance 100 2021 Ranking by leading brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance. Ping An has retained the top spot as the world's most valuable insurance brand for the fifth year in a row.

Brand Finance is the world's leading independent brand valuation consultancy. It evaluates thousands of the world's biggest brands every year. The Insurance 100 2021 ranking evaluates aspects of the brands' industry performance, brand equity, and contribution to business performance. Brand Finance feeds these factors into the Brand Strength Index (BSI) and quantifies the brand values. This year, Brand Finance also assessed the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on enterprise value, estimating the likely impact on brand value for each sector.

Brand Finance said, "As predicted, insurance brands have taken a hit this year as they negotiate the fallout from the pandemic  They have, however, fared better than our initial predictions at the outbreak of last year, demonstrating the resilience of the world's top insurance brands. Ping An has already begun to show signs of a strong recovery as parts of the world begin to remerge from the pandemic, and therefore, if this trend continues, Ping An should see a solid increase in brand value in the coming year."

Ping An continued to strengthen its technological capabilities and provide high quality products and services to clients amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, Ping An achieved steady business results. The Group achieved operating profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company of RMB39,120 million, up 8.9% year-on-year. In addition, the Group promoted annuity products, improved its protection product portfolio by developing new "product + service" packages for healthy business development. New business value of the life and health insurance business rose by 15.4% year-on-year to RMB18,980 million. Operating profit rose steadily by 4.2% year-on-year to RMB25,580 million. Ping An's retail customers also continued to increase. By the end of March, Ping An's retail customers grew 1.0% in the year-to-date to more than 220 million, including 84.57 million, or 38.3%, who hold multiple contracts with different Group subsidiaries.

Ping An said: "While pursuing steady progress by continuously advancing our 'finance + technology' and the 'finance + ecosystem' strategies, Ping An adheres to the philosophy of 'expertise makes life simple, technology makes financial services heartwarming, and healthcare makes life better'. In the future, Ping An will seize the development opportunities of fintech and healthtech, support the development of smart cities, fulfill social responsibilities and protect society and people's livelihoods."

In addition to Ping An, Chinese insurance brands in general have a significant presence in the Brand Finance Insurance 100 2021 ranking. A total of 12 Chinese insurers are featured, with Ping An, China Life, AIA, CPIC and PICC in the top 10. The cumulative brand value of the 12 Chinese insurance brands accounts for 30% of the total brand value of Insurance 100 2021.

For more information, please visit www.group.pingan.com and follow us on LinkedIn - PING AN.
The Fiscal Year 2021-2022 budget has passed through the General Assembly. The budget totals $42.6 billion and, according to Governor Bill Lee, includes historic investments in literacy, mental health, broadband, and safety.

Im proud that this budget delivers on some of our top promises to Tennesseans and invests in external organizations meeting the needs of our local communities, said Governor Lee. Thank you to the General Assembly for their steadfast commitment to our shared goals and establishing Tennessee as a fiscal leader across the nation.

He said, "As a result of fiscal prudence and over $180 million in spending reductions from the state agencies, Tennessee is able to return to pre-pandemic priorities and invest in public-private partnerships.

The budget includes $100M to provide high speed broadband to every Tennessean, a $250 million investment in the Mental Health Trust Fund, $79 million to eliminate the 11,400 person TCAT waiting list and $145 million for air and rail transportation infrastructure.

Department of Finance and Administration Commissioner Butch Eley said, Id like to thank the General Assembly for their outstanding partnership in passing this historic budget. I am proud of the way state agencies worked hard to curtail spending, allowing us to make long-term strategic investments in the future of our state. This budget will enable us to maintain Tennessees status as one of the best fiscally managed states in the nation.

Governor Lee said the budget includes "strategic investments in public-private partnerships, non-profit organizations, and external partners to support Tennesseans top priorities without growing government." Those highlights include:

Pro-Life & Pro-Family

$500K to Agape Child & Family Services

$250K to Families Free, Inc.

$3M to Human Coalition

$50K to Isaiah 117 House

$183K to Psalm 139 Project



Fighting Human Trafficking & Supporting Victims

$3.5M to End Slavery Tennessee

$1.2M to Her Song, a Ministry of the Tim Tebow Foundation

$600K to Tennessee Anti- Slavery Alliance

Career & Technical Education



$1M to Associated Builders and Contractors Greater Tennessee Chapter

$150K to Center for Employment Opportunities

$40K to Flight Foundation

$700K to Niswonger Foundation

$478K to Tennessee Builders Education Foundation

K-12 Education

$225K to Boys & Girls Clubs of the Clinch Valley  Oak Ridge

$200K to Niswonger Foundation

Criminal Justice Reform

$600K to Carroll Academy

$121K to Lipscomb University, Lipscomb Life Program

$250K to Tennessee Higher Education Initiative

Mental Health & Substance Abuse

$150K to Helen Ross McNabb Center

$305K to The Jason Foundation

$100K to Thistle Farms

The budget includes $50 million to provide a week-long sales tax holiday on groceries and prepared food. The governor initially proposed a two-week sales tax holiday. It does not add new debt and contains the highest reserves in history, bringing the Rainy-Day Fund to $1.55 billion.

Key FY21-22 budget highlights include:

$71M to fully fund the state share of the BEP for K-12 education

Four percent raise for teacher salaries

$100M to invest in the Rainy-Day Fund

$931M for capital maintenance and improvements

$5M for the Health Care Safety Net

$7M to extend postpartum care for the TennCare population to 12 months

$24M for Rural Opportunity Site Grants

$100M for local infrastructure grants

$30M to eliminate deferred maintenance and improve accessibility at state parks

$8M to expand marketing and tourism initiatives

$36 million to fully fund the THEC outcomes-based formula

$37.9 million to fully fund TennCare growth

The FY21-22 budget takes effect on July 1.
Hafsa Burt "An environmentalist, Burt adopted the 2030 challenge a decade ago and is a huge proponent of high-performance buildings."

The Haute Design Network, well known for its exclusive and luxurious lifestyle publication Haute Living, is privileged to present Hafsa Burt as a member and expert in the interior design field. As a Haute Design partner, Hafsa Burt exclusively represents the Interior Design market of San Francisco, California.

Designed as a partnership-driven luxury design portal featuring two leading interior designers in each prominent market across the world, Haute Design focuses on growing its members brands as key influencers on design and deemed to be the best in their specific market.

ABOUT HAFSA BURT

Hafsa Burt has been practicing architecture for 21 years. She has an undergraduate degree and a professional Master of Architecture from the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Burt has been running her own studio, hb+a Architects since 2009. Her portfolio includes work at the San Francisco Airport, institutional buildings, multifamily buildings, hospitality, retail, medical office buildings, and custom single-family homes.

She also founded a development arm for the firm called Box Lab which is focused on active research and development in product and space design and zero energy/zero carbon buildings. An environmentalist, Burt adopted the 2030 challenge a decade ago and is a huge proponent of high-performance buildings. Her focus includes eliminating toxins with indoor air quality as a specialty. She actively speaks on the topic of indoor air quality as it relates to the practice of architecture and is an industry expert on Healthy Building Practices.

She is actively involved with the American Institute of Architects and is a member of the AIA California Councils Committee on the Environment that also looks at legislative decisions as they relate to the building environment. Burt has been awarded the title of ENRs 20 Under 40 Construction Professionals in California and the American Institute of Architects' coveted Young Architects' Honor Award.
Amy Wilhite, 39, has pleaded guilty to a felony delivery or possession of a weapon at a county jail and was sentenced to 10 years in Missouri state prison

A Missouri woman has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling a loaded mini gun into a county jail inside her vagina - and the weapon was not discovered by corrections officers until more than two weeks later.

Amy Wilhite, 39, pleaded guilty on April 19 to a felony delivery or possession of a weapon at a county jail, and was handed a sentence of 10 years in state prison.

According to Missouri Department of Correction's records, Wilhite is currently being held at the Women's Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia.

Wilhite was originally arrested on drug and weapons charges on February 14 and booked into the Boone County jail.

Wilhite underwent both a 'thorough' pat search and a strip search at the jail, but guards failed to locate the miniature gun that was hidden inside her body cavity.

Officials say Wilhite managed to smuggle this .22 caliber loaded gun into the Boone County jail inside her vagina on Valentine's Day

The gun was located in Wilhite's cell at the Boone County jail (pictured) 17 days after her arrest

It was not until 17 days after Wilhite's arrest that corrections officers discovered the smuggled firearm wrapped in plastic among her belongings in her jail cell, reported The Smoking Gun at the time.

The gun, which was fully loaded with five rounds, has been described as a North American Arms .22 caliber revolver.

It is 4 inches long, 2.38 inches tall and .88 inches wide, and weighing 4.6 ounces according to KOMU 8.

Wilhite admitted to possessing the gun, but claimed 'she was only holding it for another female detainee,' according to a probable cause. But fellow inmates in Wilhites housing unit 'all stated Amy was in possession of the firearm.'

On April 19, Wilhite also pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of a controlled substance, and was sentenced to five years for each count, to run concurrently with her 10-year sentence.

State records reveal that Wilhite has been in and out of jail in Missouri since at least 2007 for various offenses, including attempted burglary, passing a bad check, driving while intoxicated, possession of marijuana, theft and first-degree burglary.

Wilhite has been in and out of jail in Missouri since at least 2007 for various offenses, including attempted burglary and DWI

It is not the first time an inmate has smuggled a weapon into a prison by concealing it in a body cavity.

Back in 2017, a female inmate managed to smuggle a 22-caliber pistol into a jail holding cell at Santa Clara County Jail in California.

Officers later discovered the gun wrapped in toilet paper on a bathroom floor.

Meanwhile, in 2012, a North Carolina man managed to smuggle a 10 inch long .38 revolver into prison by hiding it in his rectum.

The man was even told to 'squat and cough' to make sure there was nothing concealed in a cavity, and he passed that test with flying colors.

However, the next day, prison guards uncovered the large weapon in his cell.

He received medical treatment for possible injuries sustained to his rectum.

The weapon was not loaded at the time, but it was test fired by officials who found it was in operational condition.
- Booming urbanization levels, rising disposable income and the increasing popularity of fast food joints across numerous regions will act as a vital growth contributor for the tomato ketchup market during the forecast period of 2020-2030

- Many vital factors are sufficient to indicate a strong growth trajectory for the tomato ketchup market between 2020 and 2030

ALBANY, N.Y., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A fast-paced life and hectic work schedules have urged many individuals around the globe to opt for fast food. The rising urbanization levels and the increasing disposable income of have led many individuals to opt for on-the-go food. These food types are rapidly gaining popularity, especially among Generation Z and the millennials. Ketchup is a vital food item that is used across many fast food types. Thus, these factors will bring tremendous growth opportunities for the tomato ketchup market during the tenure of 2020-2030.

Tomato ketchup is a condiment made from soft tomatoes, salt, and sweeteners. It is usually served with numerous food items such as burgers, grilled meat, fries, sandwiches, and others. Tomato ketchup has been a great condiment for many years and has gained immense popularity. This factor will add extra stars of growth to the tomato ketchup market.

Request for Covid-19 Impact Analysis on Tomato Ketchup Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/covid19.php

The Transparency Market Research (TMR) team expects the tomato ketchup market to observe a promising CAGR for the forecast period of 2020-2030. Exceptional demand for tomato ketchup among many individuals will bring exponential growth.

The frequently changing food habits of many individuals and the addition of new flavors and combinations with tomato ketchup will accelerate the growth of the tomato ketchup market across the assessment period. The growing influence of organic ketchup will also turn the tables of growth.

Key Findings of the Report

Novel Product Launches to Attract Considerable Growth for the Tomato Ketchup Market

The players in the tomato ketchup market are always involved in research and development activities. These activities help in exploring novel insights. The insights further help in launching new formulations and flavors that sync well with the customer. A British craft condiment brand, Sauce Shop recently launched the first wholly unsweetened tomato ketchup. Such ketchups help in improving the heart rate as no sweet is present. These developments will turn the tables of growth across the tomato ketchup market.

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Good Marketing Strategies to Help in Increasing the Revenues of the Players

The companies in the tomato ketchup market invest considerably in advertising strategies. These strategies help in increasing the revenues of the players in the tomato ketchup market. For advertising purposes, many players also revamp the design of the bottles in which the ketchup is sold. For instance, Heinz recently launched 'footy ketchup' designed bottles for the 2021 AFL season. The bottle designs feature various AFL club mascots from the 90s. A change in design invites considerable revenue-generation opportunities for the players in the tomato ketchup market.

Heightening Number of Fast Food Joints to Have a Positive Impact on the Growth of the Tomato Ketchup Market

An increase in the number of fast-food chains across the globe will help in churning substantial growth for the tomato ketchup market. Fast food chains need tomato ketchup on a massive scale. It acts as a good addition to various fast food types such as burgers, fries, and others. Many individuals prefer ketchup while relishing fast food. These aspects bode well for the growth of the tomato ketchup market.

View Detailed Table of Contents at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/524

Organic Tomato Ketchup to Paint Strokes of Growth

The preference for organic tomato ketchup due to the rising awareness about maintaining optimum health levels among a large chunk of the populace will bring good growth opportunities. Organic tomato ketchup consists of healthy and natural ingredients which make them a feasible alternative. These factors will sow the seeds of growth across the tomato ketchup market.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 23:17:52|Editor: huaxia

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BUCHAREST, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Romania confirmed its first case of the coronavirus variant first detected in India in an Indian construction worker from Brasov County, central Romania, the Health Ministry announced in a press release on Thursday.

According to the release, the ministry was informed by the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) that a local laboratory identified the variant B.1.617.2, one of the sub-lineages of the B.1.617 strain, in a 26-year-old person who arrived in Romania about a month ago.

The identified variant differs from the one that would have generated the current serious epidemiological situation in India, according to the INSP.

The person had a mild cough when he went for the test on request on April 26.

An epidemiological inquiry has been launched as a matter of urgency. Of the eight people arriving from India, five have been confirmed with COVID-19 infection and three others tested negative. All contacts were tested and quarantined.

Valeriu Gheorghita, coordinator of the national vaccination campaign, declared soon after the news that there are no reasons to overly worry about the new variant, calling on people to continue to get vaccinated, as this is the way to reduce the risk of new mutations of the virus.

According to the official, the variant may reduce the neutralizing activity of antibodies resulting from vaccination, but this mutation does not reduce the effectiveness of vaccines.

Romania is stepping up its vaccination campaign launched on Dec. 27, 2020. As of Wednesday, more than 3.201 million Romanians had been vaccinated, over 1.880 million of them with two doses.

The government's objective is to vaccinate ten million people -- about half of the country's population -- as soon as possible: five million by June 1 and all ten million by Aug. 1.

Currently, vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca are being used in Romania.

Globally, 276 candidate vaccines are still being developed -- 92 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to the World Health Organization. Enditem
New Delhi, April 29 : Hospitals in the national capital continue to face shortage of oxygen, with the Sehgal Neo Hospitals and Rosewood Hospitals now raising alarm over their depleting stocks.

In a series of tweets, Sehgal Neo Hospital said: "We need Oxygen. One hour of oxygen left for 70 out of 150 patients on O2 support. Latest govt orders removed our old vendor Seth (LMO tank) and assigned Paramount (only cylinder) who can't supply capacity we need." "We are distressed that we have to do this again. We have received so much help. Our staff is working 24X7, but this is the crisis we have faced every few hours for the last 10 days. Please help us save lives and continue to do our work." In a statement, the hospital located at Meera Bagh in Paschim Vihar area of west Delhi, said: "We have allocated over 80 per cent of our beds for Covid patients and have two additional linked hotels with 35 rooms which are fully occupied and are also being used for treatment of Covid patients. We have a total occupancy of 150 patients (including non-Covid patients). 70 out of 150 patients are on medical oxygen support.

"Currently we are operating on a dangerously low supply which can lead to a serious patient incident including loss of life, 13 number of our patients are in the ICU or on ventilator/NIV and their lives will be under threat in case oxygen supply is interrupted." According to the hospital, they received a notice from the Delhi Health and Family Welfare Department on Thursday morning, stating that Seth Air Products, who have been their regular supplier for LMO and D type cylinders will not be delivering oxygen.

"Instead, our name has been allotted to Paramount Cryo Gases, Mundka for delivery of Oxygen. When we spoke to Paramount Cryo Gases, we were told that he does not have the capacity to fulfill our requirement of LMO. He will only provide us some D type cylinders which we have to deliver to him for filling and bring back. He does not have any vehicle to transport cylinders to our site," it said.

Requesting the Delhi government to allocate Seth Air Products as its main supplier of oxygen with immediate effect, the hospital said: "We have oxygen for only 60 minutes with no possibility of receiving LMOs from any vendor. If we do not get your immediate intervention, we will need to ask our oxygen support patients to shift elsewhere." Rosewood Hospital in Najafgarh also raised SOS, saying that it only ad oxygen for two hours.

"We have 32 patient of the 45 in hospital on oxygen. We have trying to get oxygen since morning but to no avail," its Director, Dr Navin Dabas, said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  A Harlem man accused of viciously beating an Asian man in Manhattan had previously been convicted in an assault-related case on Staten Island in 1998, according to the New York Daily News.

Jarrod Powell, 49, is now facing attempted murder and assault-as-a-hate-crime charges in the beating of Yao Pan Ma near E. 125th St., the report says.

Ma is in critical condition and in a medically induced coma, the News reported.

Powell was released on parole in 2000 after serving two years in prison on the Staten Island attempted assault conviction, according to the report.
To accelerate electro-mechanical aptitude, Horizon Bradco selected Ancora to conduct a pre- and post-training skills assessments to gauge outcomes and provide data that validates the return on investment. Ancora's analysis sought to identify both areas of strength as well as opportunities for improvement among its service technicians. Ancora then used this data to create a curriculum tailored specifically to current and future employees who may need training to fortify their skills and bolster foundational knowledge.

"We are so pleased to be working with Ancora Corporate Training," said Mike Jewett, CEO of Horizon Bradco. "Customer service is at the heart of all we do, so our standards for our vendors are extremely high. Ancora has listened to us every step of the way, taking into account our goals for a stronger workforce, and the pilot program they created for us has been a huge success. As Horizon Bradco continues to expand, we see Ancora Corporate Training playing a key role in ensuring our service teams meet our expectations  and those of the customers we serve."

Ancora Corporate Training has been working on new and innovative approaches to workforce retention and growth since its inception. The company has built analytics and technology-oriented expertise in the realm of workforce assessment, remediation, support, and tailored skill development over that time. The partnership with Horizon Bradco is the latest example of the tailor-made approach to training that is the hallmark of Ancora's service offerings.

ABOUT HORIZON BRADCO

Horizon Bradco is the leading service and equipment solutions provider to the retail food industry. With headquarters in Schenectady, NY, Horizon Bradco is the premier partner for delivering an exceptional food shopping experience to major supermarkets, convenience stores and food commissaries throughout the East Coast. Its three divisions, four locations and nearly 300 team members lead the industry in food equipment, refrigeration and HVAC maintenance, repair, sales and installation.

www.horizonbradco.com

ABOUT ANCORA CORPORATE TRAINING

Ancora Corporate Training is a division of Ancora Education, a Texas-based group of private, post-secondary schools in convenient locations throughout Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Ancora Education specializes in allied health, wellness, nursing, IT, business and management, CDL truck driving, professional trades, security, skilled trades, and art and design. Ancora brands include Ancora Corporate Training, Arizona Automotive Institute (AAI), Berks Technical Institute (BTI), Edge Tech Academy, McCann School of Business & Technology, Miller-Motte College (MMC), Platt College, South Texas Vocational Technical Institute (STVT), and The Creative Circus.

www.ancoracorporatetraining.com

SOURCE Ancora Corporate Training

Related Links

https://www.ancoraeducation.com


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:02:09|Editor: huaxia

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Aerial photo taken on April 29, 2021 shows fire at a tire yard in Jahra Governorate, Kuwait. A fire broke out at the tire yard on Thursday, no casualties were reported. (Photo by Asad/Xinhua)
HILLSDALE COUNTY, MI  A man and his dog were shot and killed by police Wednesday evening when an animal-at-large complaint quickly escalated into an animal attack followed by a police shooting in Hillsdale County, police say.

A Hillsdale County Sheriffs Office Deputy was dispatched at 7:45 p.m. Wednesday, April 28, to a dog-at-large complaint at a residence in the 6500 block of S. Edon Road in Reading Township, according to the Michigan State Police.

The deputy arrived at the home and was immediately attacked by the dog and bitten, leading the deputy to fatally shoot the animal, police said.

The dogs owner, 32-year-old Oscar Herrera, was upset the deputy shot his dog and confronted him armed with a knife, according to police. The deputy shot Herrera as well, police said.

He was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

The deputy was taken to an area hospital to be treated for dog bite injuries. Beyond stating the deputy has more than seven years of experience in law enforcement, he is not being identified at this time, police said.

Detectives with the Michigan State Police First District Special Investigation Section are investigating the shooting and will submit its finding to the Hillsdale County Prosecutors Office for review once completed.

The deputy is on administrative leave with the shooting investigation remains open, police said.

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Woman charged with 4-year felony for alleged false claims of sexual assault, kidnapping

Next Laugh Your Mask Off comedy show returns in Jackson

Why Unlock Michigan wants to repeal a law already deemed unconstitutional
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:53:58|Editor: huaxia

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A man wearing a face mask walks on an empty street in Suva, Fiji, April 29, 2021. Fiji reported on Thursday five more COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number of COVID-19 cases to 116 since the Pacific island nation recorded its first such case on March 19 last year. The health ministry has confirmed that the B1617 variant of COVID-19 first detected in India has now been discovered in Fiji. (Xinhua/Zhang Yongxing)

SUVA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Fiji reported on Thursday five more COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number of COVID-19 cases to 116 since the Pacific island nation recorded its first such case on March 19 last year.

According to Fiji's Health Ministry, currently, there are 49 active cases in Fiji, with 19 border quarantine cases, 28 locally transmitted cases and two cases with unknown sources.

A total of 65 cases in Fiji have fully recovered and two have died since the nation's first case in March last year.

The health ministry warned on Thursday of more possible stringent lockdown measures later Friday if more cases will be reported.

The health ministry has confirmed that the B1617 variant of COVID-19 first detected in India has now been discovered in Fiji.

Fiji has maintained a nationwide curfew from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. local time since March last year. Enditem
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 28)  Aboitiz Equity Ventures reported a huge jump in earnings for the first three months of 2021, as it observed strong growth across its businesses.

The listed holdings firm disclosed to the local bourse Wednesday a consolidated net income of 7.6 billion for the first quarter of the year, a significant increase from the 2 billion it reported during the same period a year ago. It likewise recognized non-recurring losses of 219 million during the quarter, down from the 262 million from January to March 2020.

The first quarter of 2021 is solid proof that the Aboitiz Group is already making headway in its recovery and growth plans for the year, said president and chief executive officer Sabin Aboitiz.

Aboitiz Power  which contributed 58% of the conglomerates total earnings for the period  hauled in 4.8 billion, which is thrice its 1.6 billion net income in the first quarter of 2020. AEV attributed this to the higher availability of its thermal facilities, water inflows and spot sales.

These improved performances offset the lower power demand resulting from lingering quarantine restrictions, added the group.

Union Bank of the Philippines contributed 2.4 billion to AEVs total earnings for the period. This is also up from the 1.3 billion logged a year ago. The banks net income with its subsidiaries, meanwhile, rose to 4.7 billion from the 2.6 billion recorded a year ago.

The higher net revenues provided cushion for the bank to book additional loan loss provisions of 2.3 billion even as the NPL (non-performing loans) ratio has declined to 4.7% from 5.1% in December 2020, said the holdings firm. These also allowed UnionBank to absorb the one-time impact on deferred tax assets due to the CREATE law.

Food subsidiaries Pilmico Foods, Pilmico Animal Nutrition, and Pilmico International remitted 630 million in earnings to their parent company for the first quarter of 2021. AEV noted this is also an increase from the 174 million they posted last year.

Meanwhile, real estate arm AboitizLand and its subsidiaries earned 101 million during the period, a reversal of the 110 million in losses incurred in the first three months of 2020.

AEVs infrastructure group Republic Cement & Building Materials likewise raked in 334 million, a stellar improvement from the 61 million recorded during the same period last year.

Our early initiatives on innovation and digitalization propelled the organizations business continuity at the onset of the pandemic and we are prepared and committed to see our businesses through with the same growth pathway and trajectory," said Aboitiz.

AEV shares finished at 35.35 apiece on Wednesday, up 3.97% from yesterdays close.

The Aboitiz Group earlier announced it set aside 48 billion for its capital expenditures this year, nearly 70% higher than its budget for investments in 2020.
What would be the largest expansion yet of the states historically modest medical marijuana program passed in the House on Thursday, adding several new qualifying conditions and raising the legal THC limit by tenfold.

The program has typically been restricted to patients with particular diseases or conditions, such as epilepsy or multiple sclerosis, and even limits certain ones by severity, such as terminal cancer.

House Bill 1535, sponsored by Rep. Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth, would bring into the fold patients who suffer from: cancer at any stage; post-traumatic stress disorder; any condition that causes acute or chronic pain that would otherwise be treated with an opioid; any condition that is approved for a research program and for which the patient is receiving treatment; and any condition approved by the state health department.

The bill passed on a 134-12 vote; members who opposed tended to be among the most conservative members in the chamber. None spoke against the bill publicly this week, nor did anyone testify against it before it passed out of committee unanimously earlier this month.

It now heads to the Senate, which in years past has been reluctant to expand the program.

An original version of the bill limited access to just PTSD patients who are veterans, but Klick amended the bill Wednesday and broadened it to all PTSD patients. She added that sexual assault is more likely to cause PTSD than any other event.

Believe it or not, the numbers actually higher for survivors of sexual assault than it is for veterans, said Klick, who chairs the public health committee and is a registered nurse. And we need to include them in that.

The bill would also increase the legal limit of THC, the cannabis plants main psychoactive component, from 0.5 percent to 5 percent. The limit has been in place since the program was created in 2015.

When the federal and state government legalized hemp in 2019, products containing cannabidiol, or CBD, became widely available in Texas  and those products contain up to 0.3 percent THC, a level not much lower than allowed under the medical program.

The legislation also creates a medical cannabis research program under the states Health and Human Services Commission.

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

Texas is among 47 states and four territories that offer medical marijuana programs; however, its one of the 11 most-restrictive states that limit patients to low-THC products, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While were very grateful to see House Bill 1535 pass out of the House with the amendment that was made, we do hope the Senate will consider a list of recommendations that we have, said Heather Fazio, director of Texans for Responsible Marijuana Policy.

One of those is allowing doctors to decide on THC levels for a patients medicinal marijuana, rather than lawmakers, she said, adding that patients across the country are using higher levels of THC under their doctors supervision with a lot of success.

We want to see doctors having the flexibility to work with their patients to determine what strains of cannabis, what levels of the various cannabinoids are going to work best for their biochemistry and their particular illness, Fazio said. Weve been talking about this for many years and the principle remains: We want to get government out of the doctor-patient relationship.

The group also hopes to see a provision allowing independent lab testing of products coming out of the medical marijuana program, also known as the Compassionate Use Program. Right now, only the companies and law enforcement can test them.

Its not because of any lack of trust in the current operators but just as a matter of public policy and consumer protection, Fazio said. This is an easy way to foster easy market regulation. I dont want to see overregulation of this industry, but we can hold the industry to a much higher standard.

Texas law as of now classifies possession of less than two ounces of marijuana as a Class B misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to 180 days in prison, up to $2,000 in fines and a 180-day driver's license suspension.

Other marijuana-related bills have been making headway as well. On Thursday, the House passed a bill, HB 2593, that would reduce criminal penalties for possession of certain marijuana concentrate products, such as vape pens, to a class B misdemeanor.

Along those same lines, the House also gave initial approval Thursday to a bill, HB 441, that would reduce the penalty for possession of one ounce or less to a Class C misdemeanor, eliminating the possibility of jail time or license suspension and bringing down the maximum fine to $500. Police would issue citations rather than making arrests for the offense.

A similar bill by state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, passed in the House but was rejected on its face by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has traditionally been resitant to such legislation, before it could even be brought to a vote in the Senate.

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
Nasma Luxury Stays, a division of UAE-based Al Tamimi Investments, and a specialist in the executive and vacation rentals sector, has opened its portfolio to support investors and property owners seeking to maximise return on their secondary property assets.

With the vacation and short-term property rental market growing substantially, Nasma Luxury Stays has redefined their business model to ensure that property owners get the maximum return on their investment, while having the flexibility to use their second home for their own purposes, and at their convenience.

Nasma Luxury Stays, which boasts a carefully curated portfolio of 26 properties, is now looking to expand it to more than 80 residences by the year-end - ranging from studio, one and two-bedroom apartments to five-bedroom villas and houses.

Each of the fully equipped homes is managed end-to-end, with guaranteed property protection, to yield higher revenue for owners, all with complete transparency, it added.

According to AirDNA, a short-term rental data and analytics provider, the industry, both in Dubai and across the wider region is still growing, with Dubai rentals securing as much as $220 on an average daily rate, and accounting for around 54% occupancy.

While real estate agency, Knight Frank, said Dubais holiday home market accounts for 2% of Dubais total households, the highest proportion of all other key global hub cities.

Initially founded in 2015 to manage the property assets of Al Tamimi Investments, the division has established a range of partnerships with luxury suppliers and service providers that ensures guests experience the service levels of a five-star hotel, combined with the discretion of a private home.

Cristina Butcaru, General Manager of Nasma Luxury Stays, said: "The market provides a wealth of competition for licensed holiday homes, but our focus is on experience and quality."

"When it comes to selecting the homes in our portfolio, we are always looking for luxe accommodations that match with the five-star offering available, while being able to provide a personalised experience supported by quality partners and suppliers," she noted.

According to her, the team at Nasma Luxury Stays provides a full suite of services to owners, ensuring that properties are professionally maintained and serviced.

They also provide the best advice on seasonal rates and ancillary support such as legal and licensing.

With a full team on the ground, and a wealth of local knowledge to draw on, owners whether based in the UAE, or other international markets, can benefit from the collective expertise from Nasma Luxury Stays, she added.

Nasma Luxury Stays property portfolio features homes in Dubais premier locations including Dubai International Financial Centre, Business Bay, Downtown Dubai, City Walk, Dubai Marina, Jumeirah Beach Residence and Palm Jumeirah.

It also manages properties in vibrant lifestyle destinations such as Bluewaters Island.-TradeArabia News Service
Justice O'Hara said he would make ruling on admissibility issue at 11am on Friday

Joe McCann, 24, was shot dead as he ran from police and Army in Belfast in 1972

He said it was 'remarkable' that two ex-soldiers weren't interviewed by the PSNI

Judge reserved his ruling on whether statements can be admitted as evidence

Lawyers for two retired paratroopers accused of murdering an IRA chief have today said the prosecution are trying to 'launder' inadmissible statements the pair were forced to give in 1972 so they can be heard in court 'through the backdoor'.

Mr Justice O'Hara reserved his ruling on whether the statements can be admitted as evidence in the trial after he was told by a Crown lawyer that his determination would be pivotal to the prosecution case against soldiers A and C proceeding.

The judge also described as 'remarkable' the fact the ex-soldiers had been prosecuted for 24-year-old Joe McCann's murder on the basis of a report by a police legacy unit, the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), and not as a result of a follow-up criminal investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

He said during a discrete hearing on the admissibility issue: 'One of the remarkable features of the case is after the HET interviews they weren't interviewed by the PSNI, they weren't arrested, but they are in court on trial for murder.'

Mr McCann was shot dead as he ran away from police and Army on Joy Street in Belfast in April 1972.

Joe McCann, pictured above, 24, was shot dead by soldiers in the Markets area of Belfast in 1972 while dressed in disguise as he attempted to evade arrest at the hands of Royal Ulster Constabulary officers

Veterans and supporters pictured outside court as the trial began of two former British paratroopers charged with the murder of Mr McCann at Belfast Laganside Courts on April 26

The prosecution was taken following the Northern Ireland's Attorney General referral of the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2014 after receiving the findings of the HET re-examination of the case.

During today's hearing in Belfast Crown Court, it emerged that the prosecution had conceded that witness statements made by the accused veterans to the Royal Military Police in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shooting would be inadmissible as evidence if considered in isolation.

That is due to a series of deficiencies in how the 1972 statements were taken, including the fact the soldiers were ordered to make them, they were not conducted under caution, there was no access to legal representation and the Army policy of not asking soldiers to provide an explanation or rationale for their actions.

The focus of the legal wrangle over admissibility centres on statements and interviews the soldiers gave to the HET 38 years later.

The relatives of Mr McCann and his widow Anne (front centre) arrive with solicitor Niall Murphy at Belfast Crown Court in Northern Ireland on April 26

Joe McCann's long IRA career in full over just seven years of attacks 1965 - Joins the IRA at the age of 17 Dec 3, 1965 - Convicted of possessing Army bayonets and being an IRA member and was sentenced to a year in prison. July 29, 1969 - Fined for assaulting a police officer. March 9, 1971 - Reports he was involved in the murder of Provisional IRA member Charlie Hughes. May 22, 1971 - Believed to have been part of the murders or two soldiers. June 28, 1971 - Convicted of breach of the peace at an IRA funeral and is sentenced to six months, but absconds on bail. August 10, 1971 - Involved in a bakery siege and subsequent firefight. September 21, 1971 - He is implicated in the attempted murder of four police officers. February 22, 1972 - Took part in the bombing of Parachute Regiment headquarters in Hampshire that killed seven civilians. February 25, 1972 - Implicated in the attempted assassination of home affairs minister Lord Kilcooney. April 15, 1972 - He is shot dead in the Markets area of Belfast. The Official IRA say he was responsible for killing 15 British soldiers. Advertisement

In their engagements with the HET in 2010 both soldiers accepted that they made the 1972 statements.

Lawyers for the soldiers expressed concern that the prosecution was trying to 'launder' the inadmissible 1972 statements and get the evidence contained in them before the trial using the 'backdoor' of the 2010 statements and interviews.

They also highlighted flaws in the HET process.

They said the soldiers' lawyers were not told that the 1972 statements were inadmissible and the veterans were under the impression they were participating in a fact-finding exercise to benefit the McCann family, rather than a criminal probe.

Mr Justice O'Hara questioned why when the veterans were cautioned prior to their HET interviews they were not informed what offence they were suspected of committing, namely murder.

Prosecution barrister Louis Mably conceded the soldiers should have been told.

'There were plainly deficiencies in the approach adopted by the HET,' he said.

Mr Mably insisted there was no set legal rule that evidence obtained as a consequence of the 1972 inadmissible statements was itself inadmissible as a consequence.

He said it depended on the circumstances of the case.

He said Soldier A 'voluntarily' relied on the 1972 statement in his 2010 engagement with the HET and he said Soldier C went further, offering new 'incriminating' evidence of his involvement in the shooting during interview.

The Crown lawyer acknowledged that the various statements from the soldiers were the only evidence available to court capable of proving that they fired shots at Mr McCann on the day.

In response, the judge asked: 'So without the interviews the case must inevitably fail?' Mr Mably replied: 'On that basis my lord, yes.'

Justice O'Hara said he would make his ruling on the admissibility issue at 11am on Friday.

A plaque on the spot where Mr McCann was shot dead on Joy Street in Belfast. The image of it is based on a photograph of Mr McCann said to be taken in August 1971
Fully vaccinated Koreans will no longer have to undergo two weeks of coronavirus quarantine when they return to the country from May 5.

"Anyone who has been fully vaccinated in Korea will be exempt from self-isolation if they test negative and have no symptoms on return," a government spokesman said on Wednesday.

But that does not apply to foreigners or Koreans who have been vaccinated abroad because their "vaccination status is hard to verify," he added. In other words, only about 100,000 people who got their second shots by April 21 will be eligible by May 5 as Korea's vaccination drive proceeds at a glacial pace.

But vaccinated Koreans who visit South Africa and Brazil, where coronavirus variants are thought to be more contagious, still need to endure the two-week quarantine on return. Returning travelers will also have to get tested twice in the two weeks after they arrive.


MDOT to lift remaining spring weight restrictions on state highways Monday

Dan Weingarten, MDOT Office of Communications, 906-250-4809 Transportation

April 29, 2021 -- As of 6 a.m. Monday, May 3, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) will lift remaining spring weight restrictions on all state trunkline highways in the entire state of Michigan. State routes typically carry M, I, or US designations.

County road commissions and city public works departments put in place their own seasonal weight restrictions, which usually, but not always, coincide with state highway weight restrictions. Signs are generally posted to indicate which routes have weight restrictions in effect.

Weight restrictions on state highways are implemented during the spring frost thaw period and are now completed for the 2021 season. A typical timeframe for these restrictions is from February to May, with specific dates determined by weather and road conditions. They will be posted again when the 2022 season starts.

For weight restriction information and updates, call 800-787-8960, or you can access this information on MDOT's website at www.Michigan.gov/Truckers, under "Restrictions." All-season routes are designated in green and gold on the MDOT Truck Operators Map, which is available online. You also may sign up to receive e-mail alerts.

Trucking companies located in New Jersey and Canada can obtain information by calling 517-373-6256.
[April 29, 2021] Hellmuth & Johnson Files Class Action Complaint on Behalf of Hyundai Palisade Owners Who Seek Money Back from Hyundai Motor America Due to Interior Cabin Smell

Hellmuth & Johnson has announced that clients Richard Stucki and Travis Tharpe have brought a class action against Hyundai Motor America, Inc. due to a foul odor detected in Hyundai's Palisade SEL and Limited trim models. According to the complaint, the Palisade SEL and Limited trim models do not hold up to what Hyundai promises to consumers. Shortly after purchasing or leasing their Palisade, plaintiffs and class members began smelling a strong foul odor, emanating from inside the vehicle, which was not detectable during test drives. Some owners cannot drive their vehicles because the smell is so strong it makes them or their passengers nauseous. Other owners, while able to drive the vehicle, have experienced the inconvenience or even embarrassment of driving a brand new car that smells. Despite knowing and being made aware of the odor on multiple occasions from vehicle owners across the country, Hyundai has failed or refused to provide any permanent solutions to consumers. Hyundai has represented the smell comes from the headrests, but even though some consumers have received replacement headrests, they report that has not fixed the issue. Hyundai has also not issued a recall, despite the known defect. "I have been in customer service my entire career, including more than 20 years at a car deaership. I know what good and responsible customer service looks like," stated Richard Stucki. "Hyundai has failed to respond to our concerns and repeated calls. We have no other recourse, and we are not the only ones who have been affected by this issue."



Click here https://hjlawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DKT-1-Complaint-4_27_21-5137120.1.pdf for a copy of the complaint filed in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota. For more information about the case, contact Hellmuth & Johnson partner Anne T. Regan at (952) 460-9285. The vehicle owners are represented by Anne T. Regan, Nathan D. Prosser, and Brian W. Nelson of Hellmuth & Johnson, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hellmuth & Johnson Hellmuth & Johnson, a Top 25 Minnesota law firm, represents clients ranging from individuals and emerging start-ups to multinational Fortune 500 companies. Focusing on transactional law, litigation and appeals, Hellmuth & Johnson attorneys are leaders in their fields. Founded in 1994, Hellmuth & Johnson has become one of Minnesota's fastest growing law firms. Learn more at www.hjlawfirm.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429006003/en/

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Here are todays leading news stories:

COVID-19 Updates

-- Authorities in the southern province of Ba Ria - Vung Tau have agreed to provide COVID-19 treatment for 12 crew members of a Vietnamese cargo ship after they returned to the Mekong Delta province of Long An from Indonesia on April 24.

Society

-- It is expected to be sunny across Vietnam during the holiday weekend marking Reunification Day (April 30) and International Workers Day (May 1), the National Center for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting reported, adding that occasional showers and thunderstorms may occur in the evening.

-- More than 13,200 people were found entering and exiting Vietnam illegally along the countrys borders with China, Cambodia, and Laos in January-March, according to the Border Guard Command.

-- Le Loi Street in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City is partially reopened to traffic on Thursday after the developer of the metro line No. 1 project removed some construction barriers along the route.

-- Police in the northern province of Son La are investigating a case where a man committed suicide after fatally shooting his mother-in-law and father-in-law on Wednesday afternoon.

-- Coast guard officers confirmed on Wednesday they had discovered a ship carrying 60,000 liters of diesel oil of unknown origin in the maritime area off southern Vietnam.

-- The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam has requested local airports to take multiple measures to meet a surge in travel demand and prevent overcrowding during the holiday weekend marking Reunification Day and International Workers Day.

Business

-- Vietnam posted a trade surplus of nearly US$1.9 billion in January-April, the Vietnam News Agency quoted the Ministry of Planning and Investment as saying.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Jean Kim, above, who said that she worked on Mr. Stringers 2001 campaign for public advocate, said that Mr. Stringer repeatedly groped me, put his hands on my thighs and between my legs without consent.

Mr. Stringer denied Ms. Kims account, saying that they had a consensual relationship for a few months.

[Ms. Kim said that Mr. Stringer warned her not to tell anyone about his advances.]

Heres what you need to know:

The accusations

Ms. Kim said at a news conference yesterday that she did not speak out earlier because she feared that Mr. Stringer would destroy my career in politics.

I am coming forward now because being forced to see him in my living room TV every day, pretending to be a champion for womens rights, just sickens me, Ms. Kim said.
Democrats in both houses of Congress are demanding fourth stimulus checks to help Americans who are already suffering financially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center's recent analysis, a nonpartisan think tank, such a move could bring more than 7 million people out of poverty.

Did Joe Biden Talk About Additional Stimulus Payments?

As the economy recovers from last year's coronavirus-induced recession and the employment market grows, labor market and tax analysts do not expect fourth stimulus checks in the next relief program. Democrats are now pressuring Biden to expand other stimulus measures, such as the length of unemployment benefits and the payout program for the child tax credit.

Republicans have raised concerns over the rapidly rising budget deficit as they discuss additional coronavirus-aid funding. Many of them have complained that the $300 weekly unemployment benefit included in the new stimulus bill approved in March, called the American Rescue Plan, was too high and would deter Americans from going to work.

Biden was expected to hint at a fourth stimulus check in his speech Wednesday night, according to USA Today. Americans would be monitoring the speech to see if there was any indication that another check could be on the way. But the President made no mention of another stimulus check. He did reference the American Families Plan and the American Jobs Act, all of which could help Americans, but there was no mention of another stimulus check, as per The Deseret News.

Read Also: Fourth Stimulus Check: Momentum Grows for Democrats Pushing for Recurring Payments

Fourth stimulus check: Is there a way to receive another relief payment

As demand mounts to give out further relief payments, Americans could collect a fourth stimulus check in various ways. As policymakers, including Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren, press for further payments, the Biden administration and some legislators are negotiating a new stimulus plan.

President Joe Biden received a letter from about 20 Democratic senators, including Wyden and Warren, asking him to include annual stimulus payments in his Build Back Better infrastructure package. That is one possibility for a fourth stimulus check. There are also other options for relief payments on the horizon, as per The Sun.

House Democrats launched a bill this week that would include regular $300 stimulus checks to parents. It suggests extending the one-year child tax credit increase, a poverty-fighting measure included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed in March.

The child tax credit will be maintained under this proposed package, increasing to $3,600 for children under six and a little less for children aged six to 17, at $3,000. Previously, both were worth $2,000 each. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the chairperson of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the bill's co-sponsors, stated the issue. "We must use this opportunity and pass the American Family Act, which would permanently increase and boost the child tax credit by increasing the payout to households by providing monthly payments," she added.

Will there be a fourth stimulus check?

The IRS has made nearly 161 million payments worth more than $379 billion since Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March. However, two-thirds of Americans believed the new $1,400 check would not last three months, according to a recent Bankrate poll.

Members of Congress are working to deliver a fourth stimulus check to the hardest-hit taxpayers, BankRate via MSN reported. The coronavirus pandemic shook the U.S. economy. While stimulus checks have helped the economy rebound, analysts are concerned that some of the hardest-hit cities will continue to suffer the effects of the pandemic for the next decade.

According to a January poll conducted by Data for Progress, a progressive polling organization, 65 percent of Americans favor $2,000 monthly direct payments before the pandemic is over, with 41 percent "strongly supporting" the proposal and 24 percent "somewhat supporting" it.

The plan had also received broad support from economists, with 156 of the country's leading economists signing an open letter advising policymakers to make recurring direct payments before the economy recovered in July 2020. The president unveiled the American Families Plan on Wednesday night, but there were no specifics for fourth stimulus checks in the proposal.

Related Article: Joe Biden To Deliver His First Joint Session of Congress Tonight, 9pm EST, Here's How to Watch

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South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize, while briefing Parliament's Health Portfolio Committee said there is no direct risk of COVID-19 infections transmission from India to South Africa. He assured people that due vigilance would be exercised for all those coming from India or via other countries. This surfaced a day after Belgium imposed a travel ban on passenger flights from India, South Africa and Brazil over concerns about COVID-19.

The South African health minister said-

"I want to assure you that we are aware of the situation but we must be aware that there is no direct flight from India that would suddenly offload so many people as such. The problem of all these restrictions from countries is that people can go via other parts of the world and by the time they get here they wont be showing anything direct from India so that is an issue which we must just keep in mind."

The minister clarified similar problems had been experienced in the UK, Europe and America, so South Africa just needed to be vigilant to manage such situations. Mkhize said that the concern about what was happening in India was understandable.

India is going through a huge wave and the number of people who are getting infected per day are huge and (because of) those who die, we are seeing people who are panicking, saying that maybe that number is underestimated," he said. I would want to align with those who are expressing sympathy and support to India and condolences on the wave and we understand that this could affect any country as such, he said.

COVID-19 surge in both countries

As of today, South Africa reported 1,578,450 total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases while death toll in the country stood at 54,285. The total number of recoveries 1,503,611 and the total number of vaccines administered are 2,98,153.

In the last 24 hours, India's clocked 3,79,257 fresh COVID-19 cases and 3,645 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524 cases and the death toll to 2,04,832.

Meanwhile, on April 4, India recorded over 1 lakh cases, which has doubled in a span of ten days and witnessing unprecedented rise ever since, with now for the fifth consecutive day, over 3-lakh COVID-19 cases have been reported. India's contribution to the world figure has risen from 9 percent to 35 percent, which is the highest ever figure by any country.

Various countries have either closed their borders or prohibited passenger flights from India. These countries are Bangladesh, Iran, United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. France restricted travel from India, Brazil Chile, Argentina, South Africa and French Guiana; the U.K. also added India to its "red" travel list. Germany halted travel from India started on Monday, their health ministry said it was necessary so as to "not endanger our vaccination campaign."

(With PTI Inputs)
Older people with vision loss are significantly more likely to suffer mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to dementia, according to a new study published in the journal Ageing Clinical and Experimental Research.

The research by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) examined World Health Organisation data on more than 32,000 people and found that people with loss in both near and far vision were 1.7 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment.

People with impairment of their near vision were 1.3 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment than someone with no vision impairment.

However, people who reported only loss of their far vision did not appear to have an increased risk.

Dr Lee Smith, Reader in Physical Activity and Public Health at ARU, said: "Our research shows for the first time that vision impairment increases the chances of having mild cognitive impairment. Although not everyone with mild cognitive impairment will go on to develop it, there is a likelihood of progression to dementia, which is one of the major causes of disability and dependency in the older population."

Co-author Shahina Pardhan, Director of the Vision and Eye Research Institute at ARU, said: "Research now needs to focus on whether intervention to improve quality of vision can reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment, and ultimately dementia. More work needs to be done to examine any possible causation, and what the reasons might be behind it."

The researchers examined population data from China, India, Russia, South Africa, Ghana and Mexico from the WHO's Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE). The overall prevalence of mild cognitive impairment was 15.3% in the study sample of 32,715 people, while around 44% of the total number of people surveyed had vision impairment.

###
Labroots, the leading scientific social networking website, offering premier, interactive virtual events and webinars, is pleased to bring its Forensic Sciences virtual event hosted on May 5th, to a global audience of forensic experts, research scholars, toxicology and healthcare professionals, top scientists, and leading academic institutions, while marking its 3rd consecutive year.

The comprehensive agenda will explore the latest developments in forensic research from evidence to testimony, challenges in forensic research, forensic genealogy, the application of analytical methods, and timely insights into the COVID-19 impact on Forensic Science.

Attendees will also learn from distinguished speakers sharing informative findings in forensic pathology, from crime scene to courtroom: evidence to testimony, decomposition odor research and the impact of COVD-19 on studies, identification and interpretation of fly pattern evidence at crime scenes, the opioid crisis  challenges for forensic toxicologists, leveraging bioinformatic resources to better tackle DNA profiles, combining morphological and chemical identification for the interrogation of forensic traces, ionization analysis to aid the forensic chemist, and microbiomes after death all rounding out the educational discussions throughout the day.

The program kicks off with a keynote delivery titled, Forensic Genetic Genealogy, a Revolutionary New Tool for Solving Cold Cases, presented by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, Founder of Identifinders International. Dr. Fitzpatrick, widely recognized as the founder of modern forensic genealogy, and who pioneered the use of genetic genealogy on cold cases spanning decades, will share her extensive background and expertise explaining the development of genetic genealogy as a forensic tool, the basic forensic genetic genealogy identification methodology, and review practical case studies.

"Forensic genetic genealogy (FGG) has demonstrated itself as a powerful tool for cold case work, arguably the most important development in human identification since the introduction of CODIS in the early 1990s," states Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, Founder of Identifinders International. "While the 2018 identification of the Golden State Killer using FGG was the event that caught the world's attention, FGG had already been successful for generating forensic intelligence and solving cold cases for nearly a decade. Yet there are concerns about the use of FGG by law enforcement. Unlike conventional forensic identification methods, FGG depends on crowd-sourced data that originates from commercial Direct-to-Consumer DNA testing companies. This has raised concerns over privacy versus public safety. During the Labroots conference, we will discuss how FGG has developed as an exciting new tool in the forensic toolbox, along with simple case studies that illustrate how FGG is being used to solve what were thought to be intractable cases sometimes decades old."

Following, Dr. Henry C. Lee, one of the worlds foremost forensic scientists whose work has made him a landmark in criminal investigations and bringing decades of remarkable expertise in some of the most challenging cases over 50 years, will deliver a keynote talk discussing forensic evidence; from scene to lab to court.

We are excited to lead the scientific community in the discussion of current advancements in the field of forensic sciences, while offering our audience the continued opportunity to exchange ideas through collaboration, said Greg Cruikshank, Chief Executive Officer at Labroots. Our lineup of speakers in their respective fields, and hot topics represents fascinating research; and were delighted to explore the latest challenges and innovations at Forensic Sciences, 2021.

Produced on Labroots robust platform, while connecting across all desktop and mobile devices, the interactive environment is complete with a lobby, auditorium, poster hall, and a networking lounge to offer participants an enriched learning experience. By attending this event, you can earn 1 Continuing Education Credit per presentation for a maximum of 30 credits.

To register for the event, click here. Join the online conversation and use the official event hashtag, #LRforensics and stay up to date on the latest information.

About Labroots

Labroots is the leading scientific social networking website, and primary source for scientific trending news and premier educational virtual events and webinars and more. Contributing to the advancement of science through content sharing capabilities, Labroots is a powerful advocate in amplifying global networks and communities. Founded in 2008, Labroots emphasizes digital innovation in scientific collaboration and learning. Offering more than articles and webcasts that go beyond the mundane and explore the latest discoveries in the world of science, Labroots users can stay atop their field by gaining continuing education credits from a wide range of topics through their participation in the webinars and virtual events.
WALLIX maintains its leadership in the industrial market, in all sectors (aerospace, automotive, health, retail, etc.), thanks to a customized offer that guarantees the security of increasingly connected industrial environments (OT).

WALLIX develops its strategic alliances with industrial engineering specialists who share the idea that the transition to Industry 4.0 must include cybersecurity, by offering WALLIX Inside "by design" in their solutions.

Yoann Delomier, a specialist in cybersecurity applied to industrial production environments, joins the WALLIX Channel team as OT Business Developer to expand the network of partners specializing in OT, multiplying alliances, and supporting existing partners on cybersecurity issues in OT.



Paris, April 29th 2021 - WALLIX, (Euronext ALLIX) a European publisher of cybersecurity software and expert in Identity and Access Security solutions, recruits Yoann Delomier as OT Business Developer who joins the team of Kristine Kirchner, recently appointed VP Channel EMEA managing the WALLIX distribution network through the Business Partner Program. Yoann Delomier has been working in cybersecurity for more than 10 years and, for the last 4 years, has specialized in cybersecurity applied to industrial production environments. Before joining WALLIX, he spent most of his career at AXIANS, the VINCI Energies brand dedicated to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) solutions. Yoann Delomier's recruitment echoes the announcement in February of the acceleration of the development of WALLIX's Business Partner Program in key sectors such as industry and healthcare, through partners specialized in industrial technologies (OT).



OT & Cybersecurity: The Challenges

With the digital transformation of industry that began in the 1970s, industrial technologies (machines connected to a local network) called "OT" ("Operational Technology") appeared. Today, with the advent of information technology, the local industrial network is now connected to the Internet and industrial machines are equipped with technologies that allow them to transmit data about their operations. This is Industry 4.0, characterized by the appearance of the industrial Internet. The challenge is to capitalize on this data to optimize activity and energy efficiency, while securing access to it in order to guarantee business continuity, regulatory compliance, and resilience to cyber-attacks. Data is highly coveted by hackers, and industry is not spared. The manufacturing industry is particularly hard hit: in 2020, it became the second most preferred target for attackers, up from eighth place in 2019. A cyber-attack can bring an entire factory to a halt, with catastrophic consequences for people and the environment.

WALLIX supports industrial companies in all sectors with a tailor-made "business transformation" offer, adapted to their needs: securing remote maintenance of heterogeneous industrial equipment, remote access, access to critical resources (PLCs), application passwords, supply chain, etc. Among its customers WALLIX counts leaders in the aerospace, automotive, healthcare, retail, and public sectors, including water management, etc.

Thanks to its expertise in the industrial sector, WALLIX is a partner and active member of GIMELEC, a group of 200 companies in the electronics sector, generating 15 billion euros in turnover, and of GEPPIA, a group of 150 industrialists who achieve a cumulative turnover of 1.8 billion euros with their end customers. WALLIX's role within these groups is to raise the industry's level of maturity in cybersecurity and to support standardization.



The Mission of Yoann Delomier, OT Business Developer at WALLIX

The arrival of Yoann Delomier will allow WALLIX to accelerate its development in the industrial sector. Yoann Delomier will multiply strategic alliances with partners specialized in industrial engineering. One such partner, Fives, shares with WALLIX the idea that the transition to Industry 4.0 must include cybersecurity at its core. Thanks to a technological alliance, Fives now offers its Fives CortX Gateway embedding WALLIX Inside (all WALLIX access and identity security technologies available "by design").

Yoann Delomier will also develop the network of specialized OT partners (distributors, resellers, integrators) in Europe and abroad, to integrate them into the WALLIX Business Partner Program, like Schneider Electric and AXIANS. He will rely on a strong local presence, the result of the Business Partner Program's development strategy in each region, responding to the specificities of each market (regulations, business sectors, etc.).

Finally, Yoann Delomier will support the partners of the Business Partner Program by proposing a structured and differentiating WALLIX offer, meeting the new challenges of these industrial environments in terms of data protection and regulatory compliance. He will also approach influencers (such as research firms) to support them on these issues.



"The cybersecurity challenges in OT have never been higher than today. I am delighted to join a company that is helping to secure Industry 4.0 by relying on a strong network of partners who have the will and skills to do so. I am particularly proud to participate in the development of alliances with industrial engineering specialist partners like Fives who, like WALLIX, assert their digital responsibility by considering that cybersecurity must be integrated "by design" in any digital tool. " explains Yoann Delomier, OT Business Developer at WALLIX.

"The arrival of Yoann Delomier reflects WALLIX's desire to strengthen its position in the OT sector, both in Europe and in the rest of the world. His cybersecurity expertise applied to industrial technologies is a real added value for us and will allow us to closly address the needs of the industrial sector by offering solutions guaranteeing the continuity of activity, regulatory compliance, and resilience to the cyber-attacks. " concludes Kristine Kirchner, VP EMEA Channel at WALLIX.





ABOUT WALLIX

A software company providing cybersecurity solutions, WALLIX is the European specialist in Identity and Access Security Solutions. WALLIX's unified solutions portfolio enables companies to respond to today's data protection challenges. WALLIX solutions guarantee detection of and resilience to cyberattacks, which enables business continuity. The solutions also ensure compliance with regulatory requirements regarding access to IT infrastructures and critical data. The portfolio of unified solutions is distributed through a network of more than 180 resellers and integrators worldwide. Listed on the Euronext (ALLIX), WALLIX supports more than 1,200 organizations in securing their digital transformation. WALLIX is a founding member of the HEXATRUST group and has been included in the Futur40, the first ranking of growth companies on the stock exchange published by Forbes France, and is part of the Tech 40 index.

WALLIX affirms its digital responsibility and is committed to contributing to the construction of a trusted European digital space, guaranteeing the security and confidentiality of data for organizations as well as for individuals concerned about the protection of their digital identity and privacy. Digital technology, whether for professional or personal use, must be ethical and responsible in order to pursue a secure societal digital transformation that respects individual freedoms.

www.wallix.com | info@wallix.com



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The Association of Past Executives and Coordinators-Ashanti (APEC-ASHANTI), has congratulated Hon. John Ampontuah Kumah on his recent appointment as Deputy Minister designate for the Ministry of Finance.



The Association commended him for his hard work and commitment to serving the country which has resulted in his victory in the just ended general elections as the Member of Parliament for Ejisu and his appointment as a Deputy Minister of State. A release signed by the Chairman of APEC-ASHANTI, Patrick Ayittah said the enviable feats that Hon Kumah achieved as the Chief Executive Officer of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan bear ample testimony to his astute competence, hard work and dedication to excellence.



It said "the novelty institution under your supervision was able to meet the entrepreneurial needs in terms of funding and expertise of budding young, innovative start-ups by young people across the country". "We are confident that Hon John Kumahs influence will continue to encourage our proud tradition of a political dispensation that is meaningful, decent and participatory" the Association said.



The Association indicated that Hon John Kumah served as the first President of Ashanti Regional Students Representative Council.



(ARSRC)when it was formed in 1997 and has since instituted a generational impact of service, skills development and mentoring of young student leaders into positions of higher responsibility in corporate governance, politics.

"As a founding member of our dear association, we cannot be more proud to extend our best wishes to him on the assumption of his new role.



We believe that leaders of our country must be held to a higher standard of accountability, transparency and probity. The teaming youth must see a bright future in Ghana and not a bleak one. As a trailblazer for the youth and for the values and beliefs of positive contributions for which we stand, we would like to continually urge you to remain true to the youth agenda in our quest for broader opportunities", the Association stated.



The Association also praised Hon Kuma for his stance for truth and transparency and was confident that it will be brought to bear optimally on the desired development path of the nation.



The Past Executives in the release believe as Deputy Finance Minister, John Kumah will collaborate with the Substantive Minister to work towards the formulation and implementation of better fiscal policies and demystifying the enigma surrounding the financial sector.



They pledged their support to enable the Deputy Minister designate succeeds if he is approved by Parliament in the Association's collective aspirations for a productive and robust Ghanaian economy.

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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Germany's domestic intelligence agency will monitor leading protesters against Covid restrictions, the interior ministry said Wednesday, over concerns they pose a threat to democracy and have ties to right-wing extremism.

The monitoring will focus on members of Germany's "Querdenker" (Lateral Thinkers) movement, which has emerged as the loudest voice against coronavirus curbs and an active promoter of conspiracy theories that deny basic facts about the pandemic.

Some protest organisers "have clearly demonstrated that their agenda goes beyond simply mobilising protests against the government's corona measures", a ministry statement said.

Their main aim appears to be to "permanently undermine trust in state institutions and their representatives", it added.

They are also suspected of seeking links with right-wing extremists such as "Reichsbuerger" (Citizens of the Reich) who question the legitimacy of the modern Federal Republic of Germany, and of spreading anti-Semitic messages and QAnon myths, the ministry said.

The extremists encourage supporters to ignore official orders and challenge the state monopoly on the use of force, it added.

After the agency's announcement, local media reported that the BKA federal police force informed MPs who last week voted for a tightening of coronavirus restrictions that their names were circulating on the Telegram messaging app under the title "death list of German politicians".

"It is the message of a single person. That does not result in an increased threat level," the BKA wrote in the letter seen by news agency DPA.

"Querdenker" demonstrations over the past year have attracted thousands, at times tens of thousands, of supporters, where anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists are seen marching side by side with neo-Nazis and members of the far-right AfD party.

The rallies are notorious for being broken up early by police because protesters fail to comply with rules on social distancing and mask wearing, and have occasionally descended into clashes.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that the monitoring was aimed at "preventing problems" and "preventing crimes".

For intelligence officers to be legally allowed to start observing parts of the anti-corona movement, Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had to create an entirely new category of group because the "Querdenkers" do not fit neatly into the existing classifications of right-wing, left-wing or Islamic extremism.

The new category is for groups suspected of being "anti-democratic and/or delegitimising the state in a way that endangers security".

The designation allows intelligence officers to gather data about individuals and their activities, and can in a further step include shadowing people and tapping their communications.

The BfV is already monitoring Germany's anti-Islam, anti-migrant AfD opposition party.





This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Mitchell Kukulka.

Tuesday, April 27

11:55 p.m.  A 21-year-old Howell man was stopped for speeding in Greendale Township, and it was learned he did not have a license to drive. The man was cited for driving without a license and speeding. A friend arrived on-scene and picked up the man and the vehicle.

11:12 p.m.  A deputy responded to a single-vehicle crash that occurred on a Mills Township roadway. The driver of the vehicle was issued a citation.

8:20 p.m.  A deputy was dispatched to a Jasper Township roadway for a report of a farm tractor and implement tearing apart the roadway. The deputy checked the area and located where the tractor and implement had crossed the dirt roadway, and graded the terrain.

8:11 p.m.  A deputy made contact with a Mills Township woman and her stepfather in reference to a 16-year-old runaway. The runaway was located at a friend's house in Midland. They were spoken to about the matter and returned home safely.

2:37 p.m.  Officers responded to a trespassing complaint in the 2900 block of Bay City Road.

2:04 p.m.  Officers responded to a vehicle crash in the area of Forest Glen Way and Sycamore Square.

2 p.m.  Officers responded to a vehicle crash in the area of East Patrick and South Saginaw roads.

12:21 p.m.  Deputies euthanized an injured deer in Warren Township.

6:51 a.m.  Officers responded to a car-deer crash in the area of East Patrick Road and Waldo Road.

6:35 a.m.  Deputies responded to car-deer crash in Larkin Township.

12:28 a.m.  A 34-year-old Homer Township man called the sheriff's office about a 58-year-old Midland Township man possibly harassing him. The caller said the 58-year-old was at the vacant trailer next door playing loud music. Deputies contacted the 58-year-old  the vacant trailer is where he used to live, and is still owned by his girlfriend. The man had been working on the trailer to rent/lease it out and came back to check on it. He did admit to playing music and said he was leaving for the night. The original caller felt the 58-year-old was watching his house, but was advised it was unlikely the man could even see the caller's house due to the privacy fence, and him being seated in his vehicle. The caller explained he felt threatened by the neighbor but he went and took pictures of him. The deputy spoke to the caller about applying for a personal protection order, as nothing that night appeared suspicious.

Monday, April 26

11:08 p.m.  A 45-year-old Geneva Township woman was arrested for domestic assault against her 58-year-old boyfriend. Both the man and woman suffered minor injuries as a result of the assault, and both were treated by EMS at the scene but refused transport to the ER. Upon investigation, the woman was placed under arrest for domestic assault. Her 4-year-old and 19-year-old sons were turned over to the custody of her 21-year-old son, who arrived on scene.

10:24 p.m.  A 20-year-old Homer Township woman called the sheriff's office to report an employment scam. The woman applied for a job she thought was legitimate through Facebook, and an unknown suspect then sent her a check for $700 so she could deposit the funds for her to pay for equipment. Once the woman realized that the check was from a different company, she ceased her employment endeavors. The woman was given information for identity theft, and she did not believe she was out any money. There are no suspects.

9:13 p.m.  Officers responded to a report of disorderly conduct in the 4000 block of Wellness Drive.

4:51 p.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a Jerome Township residence regarding the theft of a blue gas-powered mini-chopper. Deputies spoke with a 23-year-old male victim, who said the mini-chopper was stolen from the driveway in front of his residence. The 110cc chopper was valued at $1,000. There are no suspects.

4:03 p.m.  Officers performed a warrant arrest in the 900 block of Joe Mann Boulevard.

4:31 a.m.  Officers responded to a vehicle crash in the area of East Patrick Road and the Business U.S.-10 roundabout.

3:06 a.m.  A deputy was sent to Midland Township for a report of a suspicious subject cutting his grass at 3 a.m. Contact was made with the man, who stated he was not tired so he decided to cut his grass. The man agreed to stop cutting his grass for the night.

2:18 a.m.  Officers responded to a fireworks complaint in the 1700 block of Montrose Street.
WHATS GOING ON? Here is a small sample of area happenings  some in-person, others online  you may want to check out in the coming days.

Jim Brickman will appear at Sellersville Theater in Sellersville on May 1.st94.com

Art/Museums

MAY 1

EASTON Song Collection Oral History, virtual workshop with Oral History summer school director Suzanne Snideron historic and contemporary song collection practices, 1-4:30 p.m., Sigal Museum. sigalmuseum.org, 610-253-1222.

Music

APRIL 30

JIM THORPE The Midnight Rock Show, 6:30 p.m., Penns Peak, 325 Maury Road. $50 table for up to four guests. pennspeak.com, 610-826-9000.

SELLERSVILLE Broadway Lives On, revue with Michelle Foster, 8 p.m., Sellersville Theater 1894, Main and Temple streets. $21.50-$29.50. st94.com, 215-257-5808.

MAY 1

SELLERSVILLE Jim Brickman, 3 p.m., also May 1, 8 p.m.; May 2, 3 p.m. Sellersville Theater 1894, Main and Temple streets. $50-$75. Live stream available as well. st94.com, 215-257-5808.

Sports & Recreation

APRIL 30 NORTH WHITEHALL TOWNSHIP 17th Annual Foundation Scholarship Clay Shoot, fundraiser for COVID-19 Student Emergency Fund, 8 a.m., Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays, 2750 Limestone St. $150. lccc.edu/specialevents, 610-799-1929, jwilchak@lccc.edu.

MAY 1

COOPERSBURG Racing For Truth, fifth annual Truth For Women fundraiser with viewing of Kentucky Derby, live music, open bar and southern fare, mint juleps, contests, photos with race horse and jockey, optional early VIP admission and events, 3:30 p.m., Bell Gate Farm, 7081 Bell Gate Road. $125-$250. racingfortruth.org, 610-866-5755. Registration required.

Theater

MAY 1

HACKETTSTOWN, N.J. Schoolhouse Rock Live Jr., outdoor production of Young Audience Series family musical, 11 a.m., Centenary University, Seay Building, 400 Jefferson St. Free but reservations required. centenarystageco.org, 908-852-1400.

MAY 5

HACKETTSTOWN, N.J. Loretta the Yodeling Cowgirl, in-person and live-streaming Women Playwright Series reading of Vita Patrick Morales play inspired by a true story, 7:30 p.m., Centenary University, Sitnik Theater, Lackland Center, 400 Jefferson St. $5 minimum donation for in-person admission by reservation. centenarystageco.org, 908-979-0900.

See more events at lehighvalleylive.com/events

Send event information to events@starledger.com or submit online at lehighvalleylive/myevent
PC builders and gamers are living in a nightmare right now, with graphics cards mostly costing an arm and a leg. But AMD is vowing to fight just that, making a promise in their recent earnings call.

WCCFTech reports that AMD is looking to ramp up the production of their current-gen RX 6000 series graphics cards to hopefully increase supply and ease the market a bit. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su claims that the company will be doing what they can to increase the manufacturing capacity for RDNA2 GPUs in the upcoming quarters of the year.

Aside from this, AMD is also expecting RX 6000 series sales to grow with the hopefully shored-up supply in the coming months. But with their chipmaking partner TSMC currently operating at max capacity, AMD is turning to other methods, such as investing in substrate production, as of the moment, as reported by Tom's Hardware

With the current GPU shortage in full swing, does Team Red's statement mean gamers are finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel?

Read also: RX 6900 XT OC Formula: Asrock's New Beast Of A GPU

The 2021 GPU-pocalypse in a Nutshell

"GPU-pocalypse" is the best term to describe what's happening right now, and that's no exaggeration. The graphics card market is absolutely terrible, that long-time AMD competitor NVIDIA actually restored stocks of older-gen RTX 2060s and GTX 1050 Tis just to give people at least something to buy.

Many people blame the current situation on the cryptocurrency boom, and they're not wrong in a lot of aspects. Crypto miners were snagging all of the most powerful GPUs in the market because of their mining performance (and by extension, potential profitability). And these miners are also more than willing to pay double, triple, sometimes even quadruple the MSRP so they could get everything. You already know what the end result is.

When Will it End, Really?

To try to see a potential end to this crisis, it helps to look back at another time when this same exact thing happened. Let's turn the clock back to 2017 and 2018.

Cryptocurrency was booming (sound familiar?), and recognizing this, miners snatched up almost every graphics card they can get their hands on. ZDNet.com reveals that in 2017, crypto miners bought a massive 3 million GPUs to build their rigs, and things unfolded almost exactly the way things are going today: GPU prices soaring to the high heavens.

Here's a look at graphics card prices in those days, as seen on TechSpot. High-end cards at the time (which were the GTX 1080 and the 1080 Ti) had MSRPs of USD $500 and USD $700, respectively. By 2018, the 1080 Ti cost as much as USD $1200, while the 1080 was at USD $940. That's almost double their MSRP. Even lower-end cards like the 1070 Ti showed markups up to twice their original value.

But everything has an end, and so did the previous crypto boom. The bubble burst, and GPUs which were bought at scalped prices came flooding the market, to the point that even high-end cards were dirt cheap.

This year's crypto bubble is going to burst, and it's only a matter of time. Until then, all that AMD (and NVIDIA) can do with their RX 6000 series and RTX 3000 series is try their absolute best at meeting the insane demand, so prices will go down and gamers can breathe a sigh of relief.

Read also: Cryptocurrency Price Drop: Value Falls Over The Weekend, But Dogecoin Remains In Stock Hype

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Israel and Lebanon will resume U.S.-mediated talks on their maritime borders next Tuesday after a pause of more than four month, Israeli officials tell me

Why it matters: The talks are an attempt to resolve a dispute over natural gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The revenues at stake could reach the tens of billions of dollars.

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The backstory: There have been major natural gas discoveries off the coasts of both countries over the last decade, and the border dispute has halted gas exploration in an area that has attracted the interest of U.S. energy companies.

The U.S.-brokered talks that began last October were the first direct political negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese officials in 30 years, but they stalled in December after four meetings.

Driving the news: A senior Israeli official told me the meeting on Tuesday would take place at the UN base in Naqoura, near the Israel-Lebanon border. U.S. mediator John Desrocher will attend.

Behind the scenes: In recent weeks, the Lebanese press reported that the government in Beirut  under pressure from Hezbollah  considered declaring a new border line with the UN, which is further to the south.

In retaliation, Israel announced it would also declare a new border line further to the north. Those tit-for-tat moves would have broadened the border dispute.

Two weeks ago, undersecretary of state for political affairs David Hale visited Beirut and raised the issue with officials including Lebanese President Michel Aoun. Before and after his trip, Hale also spoke with Israeli officials.

After the visit, Hale and Desrocher convinced both parties to abandon their new border claims and return to the negotiations table, an Israeli official tells me.

What they're saying: The Lebanese climbed down from their tree and there are reasonable conditions for renewed talks. We want to reach a compromise and put this issue behind us," an Israeli official told me.

The State Department declined to comment.

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Queenslands most crowded and in-demand state schools are accepting hundreds of students from outside their catchment areas.

New figures can reveal almost 600 schools enrolled students who did not live in the nearby area, despite signing up to enrolment management plans.

About half of the students who attend Brisbane State High School do not live in the catchment area, which includes West End, South Brisbane and Highgate Hill. Credit:Michelle Smith

The plans are put in place when enrolments at a school reach 80 per cent of capacity to ensure children who live in the area can still gain access.

Almost half of all students who attend the prestigious Brisbane State High School in South Brisbane  or 1603 children  do not live within its catchment.
Dir: John Patrick Shanley. Starring: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm, Dearbhla Molloy, Christopher Walken. Cert 12A, 102 mins

When it comes to Wild Mountain Thyme, the singularly most baffling film since Cats, the worry isnt that revealing the ending might spoil the fun. Its that no sensible soul would ever believe it in the first place. Once this feature-length ad for Ireland  if someones concept of Ireland were surmised entirely from St Patricks Day specials on QVC  reaches its big twist, the whole film starts to feel like an elaborate prank. Is John Patrick Shanley, the Oscar and Pulitzer prize-winning director behind this alleged romcom, simply sitting back and cackling at all our befuddlement?

Somewhere in County Westmeath (which is not on the coast, despite the frequent shots of cliffs), two farms nestle up against each other. One is the home of Tony Reilly (Christopher Walken), whos knee-deep in preparation to kick the bucket  in fact, the film opens with a bit of flashforward narration, where Tony heartily declares: Welcome. Welcome to Ireland. My names Tony Reilly, Im dead. He refuses to bequeath his property to his son Anthony (Jamie Dornan) out of fear hes inherited his mothers familys propensity for madness, evidence of which seems to be the fact he remains unmarried in his thirties and is rumoured to have become a little too friendly with the donkey.

Nearby, separated by an inconvenient piece of land that requires much opening and closing of gates (a metaphor), lives Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt). She is flame-haired and pale-skinned, with a face perpetually streaked with dirt. She doesnt leave the house unless wrapped in an enormous shawl, smokes a pipe seemingly snatched out of Gandalfs hands, and can often be found chasing after her wild-tempered horse (another metaphor). Its clear that Anthony and Rosemary are meant to be. And yet they are not. Thats where the twist comes in. Its one so boldly, tactlessly improbable that once revealed, it will bury itself inside your mind like a parasitic worm. Days will pass. You will think youve moved on  only to suddenly remember that this is how a real film, in the year 2021, decided to end.

Its easy to imagine Shanley was aiming for something close to his script for Moonstruck (1987), which still stands up today as one of the most loving portraits of Italian-American life, despite being written by an outsider. And yet, even though hes of Irish descent, he never pushes this film beyond the most basic, semi-fantastical image Irish-Americans have about their own heritage  which perhaps explains why Outside Mullingar, the play Shanley wrote and then adapted into Wild Mountain Thyme, was both nominated for a Tony in the US and described as mystifyingly awful by The Irish Times.

Its clear that Anthony (Jamie Dornan) and Rosemary (Emily Blunt) are meant to be. And yet they are not (Lionsgate)

Are these characters ever shown eating anything other than stew? No. Do they use technology that existed past the Fifties? No. Has every character kissed the Blarney Stone and had a relative snatched away by the faeries? Quite possibly. Any credit for the prettiness of the landscape, as captured by cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, should arguably go to Ireland itself for being so green and lush in the first place  theres nothing innovative in the way its captured, since were largely exposed to the same old aerial shots of rolling hills. And the way Anthony talks about his homeland is so dour, his idea of flirtation is telling Rosemary that Ireland is a terrible place for a decent person.

And then, of course, there are the accents, which drunkenly stumble through the entire Emerald Isle before sidling up to Tom Cruise in Far and Away. Walken does very little, Blunt does too much, while Dornan has the hardest time of them despite hailing from Belfast. Wild Mountain Thyme will undoubtedly inspire its own cult following. Its just best if Ireland is never exposed to it.
The National Nuclear Security Administrations recent decision to move forward with plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico does not derail or disqualify a proposal to also produce the warhead components at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The two installations, one near Santa Fe and the other near Aiken, were in 2018 recommended as the sites where plutonium pits should be made in the years to come. At least 30 pits per year would be produced at Los Alamos National Lab, the NNSA and the Department of Defense suggested at the time, and at least 50 pits per year would be made at the Savannah River Site.

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday announced it had approved a major project milestone  known as Critical Decision-1  for the Los Alamos end of the equation. Approval of Critical Decision-1 marks the end of the conceptual design phase, among other things, and can be thought of as an early go-ahead. A project is effectively complete at Critical Decision-4.

The nuclear weapons agencys afternoon announcement specifically mentioned the production of 30 pits per year at Los Alamos, leaving room for the Savannah River Site.

There is no indication that the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility is dead, Los Alamos Study Group's Greg Mello said. Relying on Los Alamos to meet pit production demands, he added, would be absurd. LANL's facilities are simply too old and inherently unsafe, its location too impractical. Even with a much smaller stockpile LANL could not undertake this mission successfully.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions earlier this year submitted to the NNSA preliminary plans to make pits at the Savannah River Site, utilizing the footprint of a failed nuclear fuel facility. The NNSA received the packet  reams of documents, pages and data to parse.

The local submission was bound for a multi-month review and approval process that says we either accept it or we dont, or if we accept it, heres how wed like you to proceed, according to Dave Olson, the executive vice president for NNSA capital projects at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is the top contractor at SRS.

A significant decision on Savannah River Site pit production  the forging of nuclear weapon cores  is expected soon. The exact timeline, though, is unclear. A Biden administration review of the nuclear arsenal could gunk up the gears, as could a lawsuit environmental groups are threatening.

The NNSAs disclosure Wednesday comes days before Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm will testify before a House appropriations subcommittee about her departments fiscal year 2022 budget request.

The timing raised the eyebrows of Tom Clements, the director of Savannah River Site Watch, a watchdog organization.

Given that no supporting documentation has been released reflects the political nature of this decision, in my opinion, timed to come out before DOE budget discussions begin, he said.

President Joe Bidens fiscal year 2022 budget blueprint included $46.1 billion for the Department of Energy.
Axis Bank board has approved the re-appointment of Amitabh Chaudhry as the Managing Director and chief executive officer of the bank for three years, starting January 2022 up to December 31, 2024. The re-appointment is, however, subject to the approval of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the shareholders of the bank. "Amitabh Chaudhry is not related to any other director or key managerial personnel of the bank," Axis Bank said in a statement.

Chaudhry, 56, pursued engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and Post Graduate in Business Management from IIM, Ahmedabad. He joined Axis Bank in January 2019, after successfully leading HDFC Life as its MD & CEO for nine years.

Under his leadership, HDFC Life emerged as one of India's largest private life insurers. Prior to HDFC Life, Chaudhry was the MD and CEO of Infosys BPO and the Head of testing unit of Infosys Technologies Ltd. He was instrumental in building the BPO right from its inception and was later credited for making it an extremely profitable business having presence across seven countries.

Also read: Economic recovery to be slow, but business optimism back: Axis Bank chief

Chaudhry started his career with Bank of America in 1987 and played diverse roles such as Head of Technology Investment Banking for Asia, Regional Finance Head for Wholesale Banking and Global Markets, and Chief Finance Officer of Bank of America (India).

He moved to Credit Lyonnais Securities in 2001 as the Head of Investment Banking franchise for South East Asia and successfully structured the finance practice for Asia before joining Infosys BPO in 2003.

Axis Bank this week had reported a net profit of Rs 2,677 crore for the quarter ended March 2021, as compared to a loss of Rs 1,388 crores in the same quarter a year ago. The increase in net profit was attributed to a sharp decline in bad loan provisions.

The Net Interest Income (NII) grew 11 per cent to Rs 7,555 crores in the March quarter compared to Rs 6,808 crores in Q4FY20. Net interest margin (NIM) for Q4FY21 was 3.56 per cent, as against 3.55 per cent for Q4FY20.

Axis Bank stock was trading 0.66 per cent or Rs 4.7 up at Rs 712.85 on the National Stock Exchange.

Also read: Axis Bank share price soars post Q4 results
The Commissioner for Federal Matters in Osun State, Idiat Babalola, has resigned from the administration of Governor Gboyega Oyetola.

Sources told PREMIUM TIMES that Ms Babalola left the cabinet after an attempt to hold two key positions failed.

She got a federal government appointment and wanted to also remain as the commissioner, sources said.

After much pressure on her, Ms Babalola, an ally of former governor, Rauf Aregbesola, quit her job with the state government to take Federal Government appointment as Chairperson of Governing Board, Adeyemi College of Education.

She served as the Special Adviser to Mr Aregbesola on Federal Matters during his tenure as governor in the state.

When contacted about the resignation, Ms Babalola confirmed the development saying: It is authentic. Thank you.

She did not respond to questions about the reasons for her resignation.

An aide to the governor, who does not want his name on print because he is not authorised to speak, told PREMIUM TIMES that she got an appointment from the Federal Government and she cant do the two together. So, she has to resign one for the other.

Another source, who is very close to Ms Babalola, told PREMIUM TIMES that her resignation has an underlying factor beyond the new appointment she got.

Truly, she got a federal government appointment as the Chairman of the Governing Board of Adeyemi College of Education but there are other underlying factors. She is Rauf Aregbesolas ally and very loyal to him. This almost cost her life when Adeleke died.

She is being treated more like a figurehead in the cabinet and needs to quit. She got an offer and decided to leave the government. Amidst all the crisis between Aregbesola and Oyetola, she remained loyal to Aregbe, a source said.

But an aide of Mr Oyetola said Ms Babalola was too ambitious, hence, she had to quit.

We (Oyetola government) gave her latitude to operate even when we knew she belonged to Aregbesola camp without even considering her political value. The truth is that she wanted to take the two appointments together but some people now told her to leave one for another.

She was only too greedy. She wants to hold the two positions and was forced to resign, Mr Oyetola aide told our correspondent.

PREMIUM TIMES reported the rift between Mr Oyetola, and his predecessor, Mr Aregbesola, who is now the Minister of Interior.

It stems from claims that Governor Oyetola has sidelined Mr Aregbesolas loyalists.

While the two old associates tried to manage their differences because of their connection to Bola Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos and national leader of the APC, their aides have continued to attack themselves openly.

Mr Aregbesola has a long history of association with Mr Tinubu while Mr Oyetola has a blood relationship with the APC leader. As a result, the two avoided washing their dirty linens in public.

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Ms Babalola, an Ede born citizen, was attacked at the burial of late senator, Isiaka Adeleke, over rumors that she was planning to be deputy governor after the tenure of Mr Aregbesola.

It was rumored that that deputy governorship ambition was to checkmate the governorship ambition of the late senator, who had openly declared his intention to succeed Mr Aregbesola in 2018.
Highlights Google is holding the Google IO 2021 on May 18 this year.

It is likely Google will launch the Pixel 5a and the Pixel Watch at the event.

The Pixel 5a is already confirmed for the US and Japan.

Google IO is happening very much this year, and just like last year, it will be a free-for-all online event. The annual conference will begin on May 18, which is only a few days away. And that is why the rumours around what Google may have in store are catching up. The first, obviously, is the Pixel 5a, which Google had to eventually prematurely confirm after rumours around its cancellation began to float. And besides the Pixel 5a, there, CEO Sundar Pichai said, may be "significant product updates and announcements" at the Google IO 2021.

In the first-quarter earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai did not exactly say what products we are going to see at the upcoming IO but rumours are rife they may be quite a bunch of them. First, Google Pixel 5a is going to debut at the Google IO. Although the company did not say anything about the timeframe when confirming the Pixel 5a, it is very likely, going by previous trends. Google's Pixel 3a and Pixel 4a have all been announced at IO conferences, giving fuel to the speculation that Pixel 5a is due for launch on May 18.

The next affordable Pixel phone will arrive in the US and Japan first. There is a possibility the Pixel 5a will come to other markets, including India. Last year, Google launched the Pixel 4a in India for a very reasonable price, although the company has been skipping the release of flagship Pixel phones (Pixel 4, Pixel 5) in India.

The Pixel 5a is expected to come with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G processor inside. This is the same chipset that powers last year's Google Pixel 5. It will also borrow photography skills from the big brother, but there are going to be tradeoffs in terms of premium features and build quality. Rumours are rife that the Pixel 5a will sport a 6.2-inch Full-HD+ OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. It may come with a 12-megapixel main camera on the back and it may be assisted by a 16-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera. The upcoming Google Pixel 5a may sport a 3840mAh battery inside with support for 20W fast charging.

Pixel Watch

Apart from the Pixel 5a, Google may also introduce its first smartwatch, called the Pixel Watch. Multiple reports have pointed out that the Pixel Watch is in the making and what else could be a better time to reveal that than the upcoming Google IO?

Some leaked renders show the Pixel Watch will come with a circular dial with bleeding edges of the display and a crown on the right edge. The Pixel Watch may come in silver and black colourways, rumours have suggested. However, we may see more colour variants if Google sets out to be adventurous enough to match Apple's crazy. At the Spring Loaded event, Apple launched a flurry of new colour variants of the iMac and a new Purple iPhone 12. The Pixel Watch may use Google's own custom chip or, if not that, be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100+ SoC. In terms of features, the Pixel Watch may come with blood oxygen level monitoring (SpO2) and sleep tracking, among other things.
Joe Biden is no progressive. Never has been. He wasnt the favorite of California Democrats in last years Democratic primary, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won the state.

But Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Seattle Democrat who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and backed Sanders, has warmed to the president. Her grade of Bidens first 100 days in office:

I would give him an A so far, Jayapal said on my Its All Political podcast. He has done so many of the things that weve wanted him to do.

Key words: So far.

I really think hes done a phenomenal job early, said Jayapal, who will be a keynote speaker at this weekends California Democratic Party convention. But I just need to say, its 100 days in.

Thats a reminder that measuring a presidents first 100 days is a relic from Franklin D. Roosevelts presidency that the Beltway media and political leaders have refused to shelve. Real people spend the first 100 days on a new job listening to their co-workers and learning how to do the gig. Yet we dont apply the same standard to the leader of the free world.

Nevertheless, Jayapal sees hopeful signs in Bidens early moves. For starters, hes framing issues like a progressive would, she said, not like the (comparatively) moderate Democrat he ran as in the primaries.

Biden is saying that the problem is not that we go too big, the problem is that we go too small, Jayapal said. That is the same framing that the progressive movement, and the progressive caucus, has been using for years.

Jayapal was pleased that progressive priorities were included in the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill that Biden signed. She approved of his bold immigration bill and liked that he proposed some really bold climate proposals and goals last week, including a plan to cut the nations greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below 2005 levels over the next decade.

Just as important, Jayapal said, is that Biden is listening to progressives. She is in regular touch with his inner circle, something that her fellow progressives complained didnt happen enough when Barack Obama was president.

That was not something the Obama administration did very much, said Jayapal, who came to Congress after Obama left office. President Bidens White House takes outreach to members of Congress and to the outside movement very, very seriously compared to others in the past.

Alex Brandon / Associated Press

But she added that she doesnt confuse having access to Bidens team with getting results.

It doesnt help me at all to be able to say I talked to the president or I talked to the chief of staff if Im not getting what Im pushing for, she said.

Amar Shergill, chair of the California Democratic Partys Progressive Caucus, also praised the boldness of Bidens jobs and environmental plans. But he emphasized that for now, they are just that: plans.

Biden might be able to win approval for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and a $1.8 trillion plan that includes money for free community college and child care with Democratic votes only. But Shergill worries that other parts of Bidens agenda, like gun control legislation and a new voting rights act to stop voter suppression in states like Georgia, are doomed unless Democrats kill the filibuster in the Senate.

The filibuster allows a minority of 40 senators in the 100-member body to block a vote on many bills, a threshold Republicans can easily reach in the evenly divided Senate. In recent years, the Senate has abolished it for judicial nominations and some budget legislation.

Biden has a long way to go to pass the bills to match his rhetoric, Shergill said. Until he comes to terms with the fact that the filibuster has to be eliminated, most of these plans will remain rhetoric.

Biden opposed doing away with the filibuster during the nearly four decades he served in the Senate, saying it protected the party serving in the minority. But he has softened his opposition in recent weeks. Last month he said it was a relic of the Jim Crow era that helped keep segregation policies in place into the 1960s.

But when asked if he, like his former running mate Obama, supported eliminating it, Biden sidestepped the question.

Successful electoral politics is the art of possible, Biden said. Lets figure out how we can get this done and move in the direction of significantly changing the abuse of even the filibuster rule.

Shergill said Biden needs to take a stronger stance than that.

This is where I think hes failed to use the bully pulpit of the presidency, Shergill said. We need to continue to move public opinion on why (eliminating the filibuster) is a good idea. Hes got to lean in on that fight.

Jayapal thinks Biden will come around on that issue for the same reason the lifelong moderate has come around to support other progressive causes over the past couple of years: Joe Biden is a creature of politics.

Biden adjusted his stances, Jayapal said, after he saw his party supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and realized that supporting a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour would translate into votes in battleground states like Georgia and Arizona.

Jayapal said even though she and Biden havent agreed on many things in the past, she appreciates that he is a compassionate human being. He has seen the suffering created not only by the pandemic but by the racial inequities across this country and the murder of Black people day after day after day.

That combination, she predicted, will move Biden not only on a human level but on a political one.

That combination made him realize hes got a legacy-making moment, she said. This is his last hurrah, as president, and he has the opportunity to be like FDR, and better. And, you know, even do more in this moment of deep, deep need for the country.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
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Turkey Hunting

New York State has both spring and fall hunting seasons. The most successful turkey hunters use a variety of calls (e.g., box calls, slate calls, mouth calls) to bring a bird within gun range (usually 30 yards or less). Head-to-toe camouflage helps hunters to stay undetected prior to the shot. Movement must only occur when the bird is behind a tree or other obstacle. Few hunting experiences can rival the excitement as a turkey approaches a hunter. Turkey hunters need to be extremely careful, however, before taking a shot.

The excitement of a turkey hunt should sharpen the hunter's awareness of key safety rules: Always identify the target before shooting, and be sure that no other person is in harm's way. Some people are tempted to try to stalk a wild turkey. Forget it! First, it is extremely difficult to approach a turkey undetected. You will be much more successful calling the bird to you. Second, stalking turkeys puts both you and other hunters at risk. Let the bird do the walking.

Tips for a successful and safe turkey hunting season

Don't stalk. More than half of turkey hunting injuries happen when one hunter stalks another.

Always assume any call or footsteps you hear are from another hunter. Don't shoot until you clearly see the whole turkey and know its sex.

If you see another hunter, talk to him or her clearly, and don't move. Never wave or use a turkey call to alert another hunter.

Turkeys are tough. You need to be close (30 yards or less is best). You need to get a clear head and neck shot. Do not try to shoot them in the body or when they are flying.

Smaller shot, no. 4, 5, and 6, work better than larger shot, due to denser shot patterns.

When calling, sit still with your back against a big tree, to hide you from turkeys and stalkers.

Never wear turkey colors -- red, white, or blue.

Wear hunter orange when going in or out of the woods and when walking around.

When sitting still waiting for a turkey, put hunter orange on a tree near you.

If you take a turkey or carry a decoy, wrap it in hunter orange.



An orange marker on a

nearby tree identifies a

camouflaged hunter to others. An orange marker on anearby tree identifies acamouflaged hunter to others.

Here are some rules you need to know:

You will need a hunting license and a turkey permit.

You may hunt with a bow or crossbow, but you may not hunt turkey with a crossbow in the fall in the Northern Zone if you are using dogs. A crossbow may not be used in Westchester or Suffolk counties.

You may hunt with a shotgun or handgun only when using shot no larger than #2 and no smaller than #8.

You may not take a turkey with a rifle, or with a handgun firing a bullet.

You must fill out the tag which comes with your permit and attach it to any turkey you shoot immediately.

Be sure to consult your hunting regulations guide for other rules.





More about Turkey Hunting:
The number of refineries emitting illegal and potentially hazardous levels of benzene has grown since 2019, according to a new study, and some of the top violators, such as the Total refinery in Port Arthur, made little improvement in the following year.

A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project released Wednesday found 13 refineries  including three in Texas  reported emissions of the toxic chemical benzene well above allowed levels.

That number is up from 11 refineries in violation of federal regulations in 2019, the first year that EIP was able to collect benzene emission data.

The report focused on benzene due to its infamy for contributing to chronic diseases like leukemia and its history of being an indicator that other pollutants are in the air.

Eric Schaeffer, executive director of EIP and a former director of civil enforcement at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said the current trend of benzene releases also highlights the existing issues with the nations regulatory policy and a good starting place for reform.

If the Biden administration wants to make good on its promise to tackle environmental injustices, it should act immediately to crack down on these dangerous benzene emissions, Schaeffer said.

EPA data revealed that Totals refinery in Port Arthur was the fourth-highest emitter of benzene during 2020 and was 86% above the EPAs allowable levels for the year.

The refinery averaged 16.7 micrograms of benzene per cubic meter in 2020, which was actually down from 17 in 2019.

A suspected link between benzene exposure and leukemia has been found at 10 parts per million, but some states, including California, have reduced the agreed level of hazard far lower.

Schaeffer said the EPA has long understood that benzene has a hazardous health impact for communities near industry, but there is less understanding about how concentrated exposures over time can increase that risk.

Those gaps in knowledge are exacerbated by policies EIP claims are preventing concentrated releases to be reported to residents and investigated by regulators.

But advocates in Port Arthur  which has been identified as having elevated risks of cancer and other chronic diseases since the 1980s  say the city is a living example of how gaps in regulation can impact the lives of people.

If you come here and meet someone and ask if they are from Port Arthur, the next question should be if they survived cancer, knew someone that died of cancer or know someone with cancer, John Beard, president of the Port Arthur Community Action Network and a partnering advocate with EIP, said. In a town of a little over 50,000, you will hardly meet someone who cant say yes.

As with most communities impacted by pollution, people of color in Port Arthur and other southern Jefferson County cities have been found to be disproportionately impacted by health hazards.

Black residents in Jefferson County were 15% more likely to develop cancer than other Texans and were 40% more likely to die from the disease, according from data provided by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Port Arthurs population was estimated to be 38% Black in the latest U.S. Census estimate.

EIP found almost two-thirds of people living within three miles of the 17 refineries across the county with the highest benzene levels in 2020 were people of color and almost half of residents were below the poverty line.

In a statement sent to the Enterprise, representatives with Total said the company already has an extensive monitoring system that allows it to pinpoint problems and address them, which it is currently trying to do.

"Our refinery has made steady improvements in our emissions," Camille Briggs, a spokesperson with the company said. "We have identified the areas of focus and are aggressively working to address the issues. We are executing projects to control the sources we have identified, which will allow those units to consistently run below the EPA action levels."

A few refineries on the list, including the Port Arthur facility, slightly improved between 2019 and 2020, but Schaeffer said its important to consider whether a company is acting to address problems that generate complaints or is working to permanently remain below allowable thresholds.

But, even if a company seems to be showing improvement, there is another problem advocates hope the EPA will address that obscures the actual scope of benzene releases.

The EIP report uses net annual benzene levels, which could be far different from actual benzene levels since EPA rules allow refineries to exclude what is called background amounts of benzene in their calculations, as well as emissions from benzene storage tanks and other non-refining equipment and off-site facilities.

In the report, EIP uses the Motiva refinery in Port Arthur as an example detailing how the company was able to tell the EPA that high concentrations of benzene detected near one of its fenceline monitors for roughly two weeks was actually coming from another facility outside its refinery.

Researchers from EIP posited that those emissions likely came from Motiva nearby chemical plant that was experiencing a documented equipment malfunction during the same period, but the situation was never investigated.

Schaeffer said these loopholes can open the door for companies to try abuse the system, which is compounded by a seeming reluctance from environmental regulators to follow-up with investigations.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

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BOOK OF THE WEEK

BARBAROSSA

by Jonathan Dimbleby (Viking 25, 640pp)

Moscow on a midsummers night in 1941 was a balmy place to be. For the discerning, there was Chekhovs Three Sisters playing to full houses, while opera lovers had a choice between Rigoletto and La Traviata.

Others fished for their suppers on the banks of the river, tended their allotments, or simply strolled through Gorky Park.

All felt safe in the knowledge that, for the past two years (give or take a few weeks), Stalins Soviet Union had been in a pact of friendship and non-aggression with Hitlers Germany.

Though their fundamental political beliefs were polar opposites  one communist, the other fascist  the two biggest nations in Europe had agreed not to go to war with each other.

Until, suddenly, this cosy world turned on its head. The next morning those same Moscow streets were filled with silent, anxious crowds surrounding public loudspeakers, from which came the trembling, echoing voice of Molotov, the minister of foreign affairs.

Until 1941, Stalin's Soviet Union had been in a pact of friendship and non-aggression with Hitler's Germany for two years (pictured: Operation Barbarossa)

Germany, he announced, had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union in what he called an unparalleled act of perfidy. He summoned the nation to fight back in a Patriotic War for our beloved country, for honour, for liberty.

And so began Bar-barossa, German codename for the 20th century clash of titans as Nazi Germanys armies swept into the Soviet Union, bent on subjugating its people and taking its land.

What lay ahead was six months of fighting that was so cruel and so devoid of morality and decency  on both sides  that its hard not to weep. Millions died in terror, soldiers and civilians alike.

It would also turn out to be, argues broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, Hitlers step too far, his over-reach. It was why, how and where he lost World War II, and he only had himself to blame.

In Hitler's blind racial ignorance, he expected the communist untermenschen to scatter before his superior Aryan Nazis but out of courage and patriotism, Soviet troops resisted to the death

It was he who had sought and signed the peace pact with Moscow in 1939, though he never had any intention of sticking to it. Instead, it was a strategic move to buy him time to invade and mop up western Europe before turning east, where his real ambitions lay.

Russia had everything he craved  oil, grain and, above all, land (lebensraum) into which the Nazi settlers of his Greater Germany could expand. He also loathed communists and Slavs and would be glad to wipe them off the face of the earth.

So he set a trap and Stalin  tired of waiting for an alliance with the British that never came and lured by the promise of half of Poland for toeing Hitlers line  strolled into it.

Now  out of the blue, as far as a gullible and stunned Stalin was concerned  that deal was blown apart as, without warning, the Germans advanced on fronts that stretched 3,000 km, from the Baltic in the north to the Balkans in the south.

Russian tanks are pictured rolling towards the battle front on June 22, 1941, to defend Soviet territory from German troops on the first day of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa

The firepower was terrifying  3.3 million troops, 3,350 tanks, 7,000 big guns. And it was in the hands of soldiers who had been convinced by their Fuhrer to believe two things.

First, that the Red Army was not fit for purpose. Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards, Hitler declared. His forces would have the job done in six weeks, he promised.

Second, that as a race, the enemy were sub-human and to be exterminated. Traditional rules of engagement would not apply. Elimination of all active and passive resistance was sanctioned, as was ruthless and vigorous action against Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, Jews.

From the start, this was a conflict of unparalleled savagery, and Dimbleby, as he skilfully tracks the shifts and turns of the campaign, spares no detail. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Joseph Stalin (pictured centre) stands with his Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (right) in Kremlin in Moscow in 1939 after signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Pictured left: German Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop and German Under State Secretary Friedrich Gaus

One German dispatch rider recalled roads strewn with dead Russians mashed up by our tanks. An arm there, a head there, half a foot somewhere else, squashed brains, mashed ribs. You cant believe it was ever a human being.

German tactics were to kettle Soviet formations into pockets and then pick them off. The results were devastating. After a fortnight, 20 out of 44 Soviet divisions had been annihilated and the others were so depleted they were unable to fight.

Atrocity was piled upon atrocity, Dimbleby writes, until the field of battle was contaminated by so much fear and hatred as to obliterate any vestige of common humanity.

No distinction was made between soldiers and civilians in what one German soldier later described as scenes bordering on insane hallucinations and nightmares.

So lacking in humanity was what went on that a German general saw nothing bizarre in telling his officers not to hang partisans within 100 m of his window because it spoilt his view. Then there were war crimes  prisoners buried alive, villages butchered wholesale, Jews slaughtered by SS extermination gangs in what was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.

The cold was unbearable as the Russian winter howled in and the Germans, who were still in their light summer denim uniforms, were forced to flee (pictured: a tank of the SS division crossing a river on the Eastern Front in Russia)

Yet the Soviet forces dug in against what seemed to be an unstoppable onslaught.

After initial panic  and times when Stalin lost his nerve and hid in his dacha  they fought back doggedly, hiding in foxholes and leaping in front of the enemy at the last minute, giving their lives for Mother Russia.

BARBAROSSA by Jonathan Dimbleby (Viking 25, 640pp)

Here was the factor Hitler, in his blind racial arrogance, had overlooked. He expected the communist untermenschen to scatter before his superior Aryan Nazis. Out of courage and patriotism (and egged on by party commissars standing behind the front line to shoot anyone who ran), Soviet troops resisted to the death.

What was meant to be a swift victory reducing Russia to its knees became a drawn-out slog, with every inch of ground contested, every life exacting its price.

Yet its easy to forget how close the Germans came to a famous  and history-changing  victory. With three principal targets, the advancing army captured Kiev in the south, surrounded Leningrad in the north and reached the gates of Moscow in the centre.

But they had had to fight longer and harder than ever expected. It was now November, the weather deteriorating and supplies running out. A German infantryman recalled the last great raid on Moscow, but we lack almost everything. Little in the way of food. The gruelling forced marches are pushing us to the edge of insanity. We are exhausted and miserable.

The cold was unbearable as the Russian winter howled in, and the Germans, still in their light summer denim uniforms (they hadnt thought it necessary to pack for the cold), froze. They were forced to flee, scorching the earth behind them on a vindictive Hitlers orders.

Barbarossa ended in ignominy for Hitler and  as this riveting account argues  ultimately lost him the war. It was, writes Dimbleby, on the killing grounds of the Eastern Front between June and December 1941 that the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed.
Houston ISDs administration has dropped plans to revamp the districts prized magnet program before the next school year, a response to multiple concerns raised in recent weeks by school board members, district leaders confirmed this week.

The announcement means that several magnet recommendations issued by a district-led committee in early 2019 will remain unaddressed for another year. The suggested changes included adding magnet programs at all neighborhood middle and high schools currently lacking one, installing the same type of program at all schools in a given feeder pattern and eliminating magnet funding for elementary schools.

The recommendations resurfaced earlier this month, when district administrators proposed to make those changes by August. However, several trustees expressed skepticism about the timing of the overhaul, particularly given Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathans imminent departure and the relatively short time window for building out new programs.

Based on input from principals, the Board of Education, and various stakeholders, HISD has decided to change our timeline on implementing the magnet program proposal, the administration said in a statement. The 2021-2022 school year will be utilized as a planning year in preparation for phased changes that would take place during the 2022-2023 school year, if approved.

HISD boasts one of the states largest school choice systems, with about 110 of its roughly 275 schools housing specialized programs in such areas as fine arts, advanced academics, and science, technology, engineering and math, commonly known as STEM.

Roughly one-third of HISD students take advantage of the system, leaving their neighborhood zoned schools for other opportunities. Supporters of HISDs magnet system argue it offers students more choice and helps increase the economic, ethnic and racial diversity of some campuses.

At the same time, 21 middle and high schools largely located in less-affluent areas of the city lack magnet programs. Those campuses often have a harder time retaining students living in those neighborhoods and attracting children from outside the school boundary. As a result, the schools receive less funding and offer fewer academic and extracurricular opportunities.

Critics of HISDs expansive school choice system also argue that it drains higher-performing students  and the funding that comes with them  from long-struggling campuses in predominantly low-income, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, stunting efforts to repair their reputations.

A committee of roughly 30 HISD employees, parents and community leaders gathered in 2018 and early 2019 to consider tweaks to the magnet program, aiming to create a more equitable system. HISD administrators implemented several of the committees smaller proposals, such as eliminating entrance requirements at many middle schools and tweaking the entrance scoring matrix to widen magnet access.

The larger and more politically charged recommendations went unaddressed for two years, with administrators and board members showing little interest in taking them up. Lathan and HISD Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer Rick Cruz reintroduced the proposals two weeks ago as part of the districts budget planning for the 2021-22 school year  but trustees recoiled at the move.

HISD Trustee Elizabeth Santos said administrators were moving too hastily to add magnets, failing to gather input from the students and families that would see new programs. The administrations proposal called for installing magnets at two campuses in Santos board district, Fonville Middle School and Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center.

If you dont survey, get to know the community and engage the community, then the community doesnt have a product they can buy into, Santos said.

HISD Trustee Judith Cruz similarly questioned the speed of the proposal, saying she worried the district lacked enough time to install strong new programs that would drive student academic success.

HISD Trustee Sue Deigaard also argued that the district should not undertake major overhauls ahead of a change in leadership. Lathan is expected to leave in June after accepting the superintendent position at Springfield Public Schools in Missouri. HISD trustees are conducting a nationwide superintendent search, with a lone finalist set to be named in late May.

District administrators did not respond to questions about why they resurfaced the magnet proposals this month. Lathan previously cited the coronavirus pandemic as a reason for the two-year gap during a recent board meeting  though she did not move aggressively on significant magnet changes in the year between the committees report and the arrival of COVID-19 in Houston.

Board President Pat Allen said she wants the districts next administration to restart discussions around magnet tweaks, suggesting that maybe the changes shouldnt be so sweeping.

Magnet programs are really valued in HISD, so any time we get ready to make the move with magnet programs, its a very difficult thing to do without a lot of community input, Allen said.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), seated, talks with Committee chairman Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 23. The two co-chairs of the Senate India Caucus have written to President Joe Biden to step up medical aid to India amid the countrys unprecedented crisis. (Drew Angerer/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
This article appears in the April 30, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this article]

International Briefs

Argentina Is First Nation in Ibero-America To Produce Sputnik V Vaccine

In an April 20 press release, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Russias sovereign wealth fund, announced that its partner, Argentinas Laboratorios Richmond, had produced a test batch of 21,000 doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, the first Ibero-American nation to do so. Samples will be sent to Russias Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology, which first developed Sputnik V, where they will undergo quality control tests. Once the tests are completed, Richmond plans to gear up for mass production by June, if all goes well.

RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev, quoted in the press release, said that Argentina was the first Ibero-American nation to approve emergency use authorization of Sputnik V, and now, thanks to technology transfer to Richmond labs from RDIF and its partners, production has begun. The vaccine produced in Argentina can then be exported to other nations of Central and South America, he said. In remarks to Telam news agency, government sources urged caution on expectations of immediate success, given that it is a biological process, and said that next steps in the production process will be complex and challenging.

Russia, Iran Help To Break Wheat and Fuel Blockade of Syria, Say Reports

Various Southwest Asia media reported April 20 that Iran, Russia, and Syria have set up an operations room to ensure Syria is supplied with enough wheat and fuel oil for its people to survive in the immediate period ahead. U.S. and European Union economic sanctions, combined with U.S. seizure of Syrian oil fields and theft of Syrian wheat from its northeast breadbasket region, have reduced 90% of the Syrian people to poverty and led to widespread hunger.

Russian ships are reported to be transporting large quantities of wheat to Syria and will continue to do so until the end of June, under previously existing contracts. That should secure Syrias flour needs until the middle of 2022, putting an end to the current horrendous bread crisis, according to this report. The horrendous conditions in Syria are due to a decade of sanctions which have culminated in the brutal 2020 Caesar Sanctions Act, which should be immediately repealed.

Mexicos UN Ambassador Denounces Indifference to Crime of World Hunger

Juan Ramon de la Fuente, Mexicos Ambassador to the United Nations, published an op-ed in the April 19 edition of El Universal under the headline, The Specter of Hunger Haunts the Planet, in which he denounces the indifference of most people to this gravest of problems, which he suggests should be considered a crime against humanity.

After blaming the rise of hunger on wars, the pandemic and climate change, De La Fuente declares: I dont know what is more alarming: the magnitude of the suffering which hunger causes in the world today, or the indifference with which those of us who dont go hungry react to it  [Hunger] is something that is happening in real time in many places. If deliberately denying people access to food constitutes a crime against humanity, the simple idea of children dying of hunger anywhere should, at the least, weigh heavily on our conscience. The numbers available in the reports I have mentioned lead me to conclude that no, we are not dealing with a specter. We are dealing with an implacable reality.

Depriving the Poor of Energy Is Bad Climate Policy, Lomborg Warns

The President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Bjrn Lomborg, penned an op-ed published by China Daily April 19, which pays lip service to the green paradigm but also insists that those policies cannot possibly be imposed on the developing sector. Some quotes from Lomborg:

To tackle climate change, rich countries are promising to end fossil fuel use in 29 years. As this becomes excruciatingly costly, the G7 is now thinking about making the worlds poor pay for it. That will go badly....

Lomborg continues: Six billion not-rich people also want access to plentiful and cheap energy, lifting them out of hunger, sickness and poverty. They are more concerned about economic growth that will create welfare and resilience against disease and even climate change. The main effect of carbon tariffs is to shift the economic burden of developed-world climate policies to the developing world  [provoking] profound resentment with a rich world that claims to implement climate policies to help, but in reality, shifts the costs onto the worlds poor. Depriving the worlds poor of the twin drivers of development, abundant energy and free trade, is unacceptable.

Indian Situation Dire: Modi Says COVID Second Wave Hit Us Like a Hurricane

India is struggling to handle the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic which, in an April 20 speech on national television, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, hit us like a hurricane. There are an estimated 250,000 new cases a day, with 270,000 the day before his address. If infections continue to increase at the current rate, this figure could reach 500,000 per day within a month, according to University of Michigan biostatistician Brahamar Mukherjee, the Washington Post reported. Six states and Delhi account for about two-thirds of new cases.

In New Delhi the situation is direthe health delivery system is on the verge of collapse, including an acute shortage of oxygen, which is now being trucked in from other states. There are very fewoften zeroavailable beds, especially ICU or critical care beds. On April 19, the government imposed a week-long lockdown in Delhi and also announced that as of May 1, it will begin vaccinating everyone over the age of 18.

In his TV address, Modi also emphasized that a nationwide lockdown should be avoided; states should instead focus on creating micro containment zones.

U.S. Aggravates Taiwan Flashpoint Against China

In the Western Pacific, Taiwan is serving as the same kind of flashpoint vis-a-vis China as Ukraine is with regards to Russia. Taiwans Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters April 7 that U.S. policymakers clearly see the danger of the possibility of China launching an attack against Taiwan. He vowed that if China were to attack, We will defend ourselves to the very last day. At the State Department, spokesman Ned Price said later, Our commitment to Taiwan is rock solid. We think and we know that it contributes to the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and within the region as well. We have, of course, taken note with great concern of the pattern of ongoing P.R.C. efforts and attempts to intimidate in the region, including in the context of Taiwan.

Marc Chesney Warns Of Financial Blowout, Argues for Glass-Steagall

Marc Chesney, Head of Department of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich, warned of a coming blowout of the financial system and called for re-introduction of bank separation (Glass-Steagall). Chesney was interviewed on April 3 by the Swiss daily Tagesanzeiger on the Credit Suisse crisis. Professor Chesney is a frequent speaker at events organized by Impulswelle, friends of the Schiller Institute in Switzerland.

Credit Suisses current troubles are, he said, a new episode of the permanent crisis of the financial gambling casino. There are more and less acute phases, and then such episodes occur as if out of nothing. It is very opaque, but we, the citizens, should know what is going on. Credit Suisse is systemically relevant, and therefore it has a responsibility to the taxpayer.

The mixture of high debt and derivatives is the recipe for acute crises; it was so in 2008, and it is still the case, regularly.

Chesney goes on to say that a separation between pure deposit banks and investment banks is needed and indicates the looming crisis: A blowout is probable. The main indicators are in red: environment, pandemics, instability on the financial markets, social injustice, poverty.

Last Years Hyped Story, Russian Bounties to Kill Americans, Bites the Dust

Of all the fakery invoked by President Joe Biden to justify the new sanctions he announced against Russia on April 15, the story of alleged Russian bounty payments to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan was apparently too fake to fly. A senior administration official explained on a conference call that U.S. intelligence had low to moderate confidence in the reporting on bounties because its based in part on detainee reporting and because of the difficult operating environment in Afghanistan. That is, someone who wanted to get out of his cell had reason to say what he thought his captors wanted to hear.
In recent years, manipulated and encouraged by the anti-China forces in the United States, some truth-bending "academic institutions", rumor-mongering "experts and scholars" and "amateur actors" with no moral scruples have created a chain of lies to defame Xinjiang and mislead international public discourse, often through dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns.

Truth shall not be tainted, the world should not be deceived and narrative about Xinjiang mustn't be distorted. The recent reports by independent US news website thegrayzone.com and Australian publication Australian Alert Service, and a series of press conferences held by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have revealed the truth about the fraudulent Xinjiang-related "databases" and the so-called "witness testimonies" and, with abundant facts and figures, exposed the real mastermind behind them. Let us get to the bottom of what's going on and reveal the ins and outs of the lies about Xinjiang.

I. As early as in the last century, the United States and other Western countries started to support separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang out of geopolitical purposes in order to destabilize China and contain its development.

During the Cold War, British scholar Bernard Lewis concocted the theory of "arc of crisis" aiming to fracture countries from the Middle East to India based on ethnic lines to divide the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter, argued that the United States must prevent the realization of "the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean". The United States then launched Operation Cyclone, which lasted from 1979 to 1989 and cost up to US$630 million each year. Together with Saudi Arabia and Britain, the United States provided funding, equipment and training for Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Soviet Union.

Right after the Cold War ended, the United States and Britain started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China, by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the US pivoted from the Soviet Union to containing China's influence in Central Asia. US and British intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism in order to weaken Russia and China and serve their agenda of maintaining a unipolar world. Over the years, there emerged a number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups seeking a state of "East Turkistan" or "independence" of Xinjiang, including the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile. Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy has funneled US$8.76 million to Uyghur diaspora groups campaigning against China's policies in Xinjiang. The above-mentioned factors have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in Xinjiang. Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamored for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.

The CIA suggested in 2003 that should the US find itself in a crisis or confrontation with China in the future, the option of using the "Uyghur card" as a means of exerting pressure should not be taken off the table. Under this strategy, the United States, Britain and their allies, latching on to the Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang,which was spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner. Here are what they seek to achieve:

First, a false impression that Muslims in Xinjiang support "independence". This is often done by instigating certain groups to carry out separatist activities to make the public believe people in Xinjiang all want an independent state.

Second, the illusion that the ETIM is for peace. Nothing has been said about relevant groups' close ties with Al-Qaeda and their violent and terrorit rhetoric. In November 2020, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even removed the ETIM from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Third, the false claim of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Some organizations including Human Rights Watch have fabricated reports on Xinjiang, but their sources are just a small group of extremely anti-China overseas Uyghurs. The baseless accounts in those reports were further hyped up and spread by institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

In January 2017, then US Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted that under US law, it is illegal for anyone to provide funding or support for the Al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist organizations. However, the US government has long been, directly or indirectly, providing funds, weapons and intelligence support to these organizations through certain countries in the Middle East.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired US Army Colonel, when speaking at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 on the threefold purposes of the US presence in Afghanistan, stated unabashedly that "the third reason we were there [in Afghanistan] is because there are 20 million Uyghurs [in Xinjiang]. The CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external".

In a video interview in 2015, Sibel Edmonds, a former interpreter with the FBI, talked about how the US had planned and acted to destabilize Xinjiang. She said that "Xinjiang is the entry artery of energy. We want to, gradually and internally, play the gender card and the race card. For that part of the world, we want to play the minority without land. We say we are going to help them and they are being oppressed, Chinese are gunning them down and torturing them." The plan of the US is to copy the tactics used in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq to Xinjiang, making an issue out of thin air and exploit it. "We hope Xinjiang to be the next Taiwan. As Western nations, we never cared about people. That is not within our interest area, unless it can be utilized, capitalized upon to get our objective."
IRVINE, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CounselorDirect, powered by HOTB Software, a leading large enterprise software solution developer for federal and state governments, announced its partnership with the state of Georgia's Rental Assistance Program, which provides emergency rental assistance to tenants and landlords.

HOTB Software

HOTB's SaaS platform CounselorDirect enables the state of Georgia to streamline its rental fund allocation program and provides it with a comprehensive software solution that simplifies providing tenants with rental and utility assistance. The solution allows for secure operational tools and compliance processes to be observed and tenant and landlord data to be securely organized.

The CounselorDirect platform includes the ability to handle everything from application, eligibility, automated underwriting, approval, cash flow management, and automated status updates. Additionally, CounselorDirect is providing the fundamental tools needed by the state of Georgia to help allocate $552 million from the U.S. Treasury's Federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program to provide relief to individuals, families, and landlords whose finances have been negatively impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We are providing the most powerful and secure platform to Georgia's Rental Assistance Program to assist in managing and navigating the complex task of allocation on both the side of the tenant and landlord," said Andy Firoved, CEO, HOTB. "CounselorDirect's full functionality capability has a proven track record and our turn-key solution goes well beyond anything else on the market. Our partnership with the state of Georgia is a strong testament to the success, innovation, and competency of CounselorDirect."

The Georgia Rental Assistance Program, run by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, is allocating its funds from the U.S. Treasury and is providing up to 15 months of rental assistance and utility assistance, paid directly to landlords and service providers on behalf of tenants. The program is working towards keeping individuals and families in their homes during the pandemic and is helping to ensure that those greatly affected by the pandemic are housed.

About HOTB Software

Having its founding in developing large and complex enterprise software solutions for federal and state governments that have appropriated more than $6 billion in program and assistance on behalf of the U.S. Treasury and over 14 state agency clients, HOTB provides the leading and most comprehensive enterprise and compliance risk mitigation software applications. HOTB software applications allow information security and governance professionals to reclaim control over sensitive and regulated data through powerful collaboration, process, and automation. In an environment with increasingly complicated regulations, the result of using our applications is fulfilling compliance and passing accreditations and audits with less effort, time, and expense.

About Georgia Department of Community Affairs

The Georgia Department of Community Affairs is devoted to lending a helping hand to communities on their journey to growth and prosperity, helping lay the groundwork for economic opportunities and local development efforts across the state. Their programs reflect diverse efforts to provide an array of community-focused services at the state and local levels.

Contact:

Jason Connolly

[email protected]

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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 Thursday, the Advance/SILive.com visited Jelisas Cafe at 1756 Victory Blvd., which offers indoor dining, pickup and delivery from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The Dominican cafe is closed on Sunday.

For more information, call 718-816-1500 or follow the business on Instagram (@Jelisas_Cafe) or Facebook.

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.

WANT MORE YES, THEYRE OPEN?

Check out the listings below or check out all of our previous coverage here.

Natures Eatery, 1267 Forest Ave.

Alfonsos Pastry Shoppe, 1899 Victory Blvd.

The Original Goodfellas, 1718 Hylan Blvd.

Detox Juice Bar & Kebab Grill, 1612 Forest Ave.

Ritas Italian Ice, 2655 Richmond Ave.

Baya Bar, 2381 Hylan Blvd.

Family Man Empanada Cart, Richmond and Nome avenues

Filled Cafe and Silogan, 701 Bay St.

Taste of India II, 287 New Dorp Lane

Il Sogno, 26 Jefferson Blvd.
STORY: UK PMQs Opposition Taunt - UK leader of opposition addresses Johnson as "Major Sleaze"

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London - 28 April 2021

1. SOUNDBITE (English) Keir Starmer, UK opposition leader:

++VARIOUS ANGLES++

"Mr. Speaker, can I remind the prime minister of the Nolan principles, which are meant to govern the behavior of those in public office? They are these; selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Instead what do we get from this prime minister and this Conservative government? Dodgy contracts, jobs for their mates and cash for access. And who's at the heart of it? The prime minister. Major Sleaze sitting there. Mr. Speaker, meanwhile he talks about priorities, crime is going up, NHS waiting lists are at record levels and millions of people are worried about their jobs including Liberty Steel. Mr. Speaker, don't the British people deserve a prime minister they can trust and a government that isn't mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal?"

STORYLINE:

UK opposition leader Keir Starmer called British Prime Minister Boris Johnson "Major Sleaze" as he grilled the lawmaker on Wednesday over the funding of the refurbishment of his Downing Street apartment.

Britain's Electoral Commission, which regulates political finance in the U.K, is launching a formal investigation of the refurbishment of Johnson's apartment on Downing Street, saying there were "reasonable grounds" to suspect an offense had been committed.

The commission has been looking into whether any funds used to pay for the apartment renovation should have been declared under the law on political donations.

Questions about the refurbishment intensified last week when Johnson's former top aide, Dominic Cummings, claimed that the prime minister planned to get Conservative Party donors to fund the work.

Cummings, who left his job late last year, said he had told Johnson the plan was "unethical, foolish, possibly illegal."

Johnson's office said the prime minister himself paid to renovate the apartment, though it did not say whether he had been lent the money for the work.

The cost of the refurbishment is thought to have been around 60,000 pounds ($83,000).

Starmer accused the government of being "mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal", referring not just to Johnson's flat payments but also to recent accusations around lobbying of ministers.

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A woman is given COVID-19 vaccine at Lang Son provincial General Hospital. (Photo: VNA)

As many as 38,513 people having close contact with COVID-19 patients or entering Vietnam from pandemic-hit regions are currently quarantined across the country.

The ministrys Medical Service Administration reported that a total of 2,516 patients have been given the all-clear from COVID-19 so far, while the death toll related to the disease remains at 35.

Among active patients undergoing treatment, 13 tested negative to the coronavirus once, 15 twice and 20 thrice.

Vietnams COVID-19 vaccination effort is ramping up with 92,445 people vaccinated on April 28, the highest number of doses administered daily to date. A total of 425,638 people have been vaccinated against the virus in Vietnam so far, most of who are frontline medical workers and members of community-based anti-COVID-19 groups and steering committees for COVID-19 prevention and control in localities.

The Health Ministry continuously warns about the high risk of the pandemic to spread to Vietnam, and urges people to remain proactive in pandemic prevention and control by continuing to wear face masks when going out, disinfecting frequently, maintaining a safe distance, refraining from mass gatherings, and making medical declarations./.
Rohingya rest after being rescued by the coast guard off Teknaf sub-district in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh, April 27, 2021.

Bangladesh coast-guard officials said they rescued 30 Rohingya found adrift in the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday, after pirates looted their belongings and destroyed the engine of a boat taking them toward a Malaysia-bound ship.

The Rohingya, who came from various refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, were rescued off the coast of Teknaf, a sub-district in Coxs Bazar, and sent to an island where the government has relocated some 18,0000 refugees.

They arrived on Bhashan Char Island on Wednesday, said Lt. Commander Amirul Haque, a coast guard spokesman.

The trawler carrying Rohingya was floating in the sea for around five days waiting for a big ship bound for Malaysia and was caught by robbers. The robbers destroyed the engine of the trawler after looting the Rohingyas belongings, Haque told BenarNews citing accounts from the rescued refugees about the pirate attack on Monday.

They were rescued after the trawler floated near the beach at Barodail Para in Baharchhara of Teknaf.

Over the years, thousands of Rohingya have paid traffickers to transport them to Thailand and Malaysia where they can find work.

Islamic-majority Malaysia hosts as many as 150,000 of the estimated 1.8 million to 2 million Rohingya in the world, and is a desired destination for Rohingya Muslims fleeing from Myanmar.

Coxs Bazar hosts about a million Rohingya who fled persecution in their native Myanmar. Since last December, Bangladesh has moved thousands of these refugees to Bhashan Char, insisting that the relocation was voluntary.

But the 30 rescued Rohingya were summarily sent to the island, said Asif Munir, an immigration and refugee affairs analyst.

Its a wrong decision to send them to Bhashan Char instead of returning them to their camps, Munir, a former official at the International Organization for Migration, told BenarNews.

It's almost like a punishment for trying to [enter Malaysia] illegally. You tried to go illegally. So now I am sending you to Bhashan Char as punishment.

HRW report

Separately, Bangladesh officials said Wednesday that they had arrested a dozen other Rohingya on Bhashan Char earlier this month on charges of alleged theft  and not because they were trying to leave the island, as international rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleged this week.

Twelve Rohingya have been arrested and sent to court in connection with a theft, and not because they were trying to escape. They are currently in Noakhali jail in Chittagong, Mohammad Mahe Alam, the officer-in-charge of the Bhashan Char Police Station told BenarNews.

HRW said security forces had beaten the 12 Rohingya at the police station on April 6 after they were caught trying to flee the island.

The mother of one detained refugee said that someone claiming to be a police officer threatened to kill her son in crossfire, a euphemism in Bangladesh for extrajudicial executions, unless the family paid a bribe, HRWs statement said.

Navy Commodore Rashed Sattar, director of the Bhashan Char Housing Project, acknowledged that some refugees do try to escape but said this was not the case with the 12 Rohingya in question.

It is true that some Rohingya have been caught trying to escape from here. But that they have been beaten at the police station or threatened with crossfire? . All these are imaginary allegations. How did they [HRW] know this? Do they have any evidence, or are they just making verbal accusations? Sattar told BenarNews.

Alam said they had stopped nine refugees trying to flee Bhashan Char on April 4, and police allowed them go back to their island homes after giving them a warning.

However, Munir, the refugee affairs analyst, said he and others who work with the Rohingya had heard allegations that security forces mistreat some refugees.

Not everything is perfect in Bhashan Char. Those of us who work with the Rohingya get unofficial news from there. We have also heard allegations of Rohingya being tortured by law enforcement authorities there, Munir said.

The authorities may say these are isolated or untrue incidents.

Nurul Islam, a Rohingya who went to Bhashan Char voluntarily, said their movements were being curtailed.

It was very good at first when we came to Bhashan Char. But now the situation is getting worse day by day, Islam told BenarNews.

The governments people do not allow us to go anywhere and talk freely. They are keeping a close watch on our movements.
Voters asked to bring their own pencils for election like no other

Bring your own pencil is the advice for voters visiting their local polling stations next week as Wales faces a democratic process like never before.

You can read our Wrexham and Clwyd South candidate Q&As here: Wrexham.com/election2021

The ongoing realities of living with Covid means that this years Senedd election will be like no other, with counting and electoral staff facing unprecedented challenges to ensure a fair and accurate poll.

With social distancing also meaning that fewer counting staff will be on hand at some of the various counts, the process of sorting and eventually counting the votes wont start until next Friday morning, with the final makeup of the new Senedd not expected until the early evening.

But as well as facing the challenge of hosting as many as four separate counts when taking Police and Crime and other by-elections into consideration, voters will also feel the changes when they enter the polling booths next Thursday.

You can read Q&As with PCC candidates here: North.Wales/pcc2021

Colin Everett of Flintshire Council is the Regional Returning Officer for North Wales, meaning he will be responsible for the smooth running of the regional list count which covers nine separate constituencies.

With planning having been underway for several months, including input from the respective returning officers of all six of the regions authorities, everything is in place to ensure that the democratic process can take place as safely as possible.

Weve been thinking about and planning for these elections for some time so that however people choose to cast their vote in May, they can do so safely, said Mr Everett.

Were putting arrangements in place to help voters and staff stay safe at the polling station. Many of the measures people now expect to see in shops and banks such as hand sanitiser, floor markings and face masks will be in place but you also have the option to apply to vote by post or by proxy.

Among the COVID-19 measures set to be in place at polling stations will be:

Separate entrances and exits where possible

At some polling stations, a door manager will be in attendance to ensure that social distancing can be maintained at all times

Altered layouts to allow for social distancing when waiting to vote and when completing a ballot paper, but still ensuring electors can cast their vote in secret

Polling station staff wearing PPE

Voters encouraged to bring their own pen or pencil

Polling booths regularly sanitised.

In addition, voters are asked to wear a face covering and ensure that only two voters enter a polling station at a time, while maintaining a safe distance throughout their visit.

Such measures mean that voters at busy polling stations may have to wait for longer than usual to be able to cast their vote, with peak times usually being 7am to 9.30am, lunchtime, 3.30pm to 4.30pm and 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

However, anyone queuing to vote at a polling station by 10pm will still be able to vote.

Mr Everett added: These measures may mean electors have to wait for longer than usual to be able to cast their vote but they will be able to do so with confidence in a safe and clean environment.

Next weeks elections will also be the first where 16 and 17 year olds will be entitled to vote, with early estimates on Anglesey showing that 791  or around 70%  have been registered in time.

Annwen Morgan, the islands returning officer, added: Your poll card will tell you where to find your polling station. Make sure you check the information on your polling card, as your polling station might have changed since the last elections.

You do not need your poll card to vote, however, we encourage you to bring it with you to make the process quicker and more efficient.

This will also be a new experience for our 16 and 17 year-olds as they cast their vote for the very first time in the Senedd elections. I would like to wish them well.

Rhydian Thomas, Head of the Electoral Commission Wales, said: If you are voting in person, make sure you remember to bring your face covering and a pen or pencil with you.

At the polling station, help keep yourself and others safe by following the safety measures, including sanitising your hands and keeping a safe distance from others.

Polling stations will be open from 7am to 10pm on Thursday 6 May. Voters who have opted to vote by post must return their postal ballot pack by 10pm and can hand it in at their polling station if they dont have time to return it by post.

For further information on how to apply for an emergency proxy, voters should contact their local authoritys electoral registration team.

By Gareth Williams  Local Democracy Reporter
Sysdig, Inc., a San Francisco, CA-based secure DevOps platform provider, raised $188m in Series F funding round at a valuation of $1.19 billion.

This round, which brought total funding to $394m since inception, was led by Premji Invest & Associates and Third Point Ventures, with participation from Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, DFJ Growth, Glynn Capital, Goldman Sachs, Insight Partners, and Next47. In conjunction with the funding, Robert Schwartz from Third Point Ventures, Sandesh Patnam from Premji Invest & Associates, and Enrique Salem from Bain Capital Ventures, joined Susdigs board of directors.

The company intends to use the funds to:

invest in continued innovation in its open source foundation as well as in its secure DevOps platform,

grow research and development teams in Raleigh, Spain, Italy, Belgrade, and San Francisco,

drive expansion of sales and marketing in existing markets within the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia, as well as

enter into newer markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

Led by CEO Suresh Vasudevan, Sysdig provides a secure DevOps platform that addresses the challenges of securing containers, Kubernetes, and public cloud infrastructure. The solution is used by hundreds of enterprises, including Worldpay by FIS, Yahoo Japan, IBM, and JW Player to secure the software build pipeline, detect and respond to runtime threats, monitor service health, and continuously validate cloud security posture and compliance.

Sysdig is a SaaS platform, built on an open source stack that includes Falco and sysdig OSS, the open standards for runtime threat detection and response.

FinSMEs

29/04/2021
Amid an increase in coronavirus cases, some netizens took to social media to criticise the government and ask Prime Minister Narendra Modi to step down. The hashtag #ResignModi was trending on social media. Subsequently Facebook blocked posts on that hashtag, creating a controversy. Facebook issued a statement saying that it removed it by mistake. The government also issued a statement saying that reports of it ordering the removal of such posts are misleading and mischievous.

The government referred to a report on Wall Street Journal and called it misleading. "A story by Wall Street Journal attributing removal of a certain hashtag by Facebook to GOI's efforts to curb public dissent is misleading on facts and mischievous in intent. Government has not issued any direction to remove this hashtag. Facebook has also clarified that it was removed by mistake," it said in a statement.

Facebook that had blocked posts tagging #ResignModi, restored them. The social media giant said that it barred the hashtag by mistake and not on the behest of the government. Although, the company did not elaborate on the same. The error occurred not because of the hashtag but because of the content associated with it, said a spokesperson.

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it," a Facebook spokesperson said.

The government in its statement addressed another Wall Street Journal report from March 5. "It is pertinent to mention that on 5th March 2021 also, Wall Street Journal had published a fake news with heading - 'India Threatens Jail for Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter Employees'. Government had sent an official rebuttal of this completely fake and manufactured story to Wall Street Journal," the statement said.

The government said that the media has a very important role to play in acting as a force multiplier of the efforts for front-line workers and medical professionals. "At a sensitive time like this, we would urge the media to partner with crores of ordinary Indians as we collectively fight the pandemic," it said.

Twitter had earlier removed 50 tweets following orders of the government to take down posts spreading misinformation. As per reports, tweets by Member of Parliament Revanth Reddy, filmmakers Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das, actor Vineet Kumar Singh and West Bengal state minister Moloy Ghatak that were critical of the government were also taken down.

India is currently battling the second wave of coronavirus. As the healthcare system crumbles, people have taken to social media to seek help, especially Twitter. The social media site is replete with posts of people seeking help organising hospital beds, medical oxygen, drugs and other facilities.

On Thursday, India's recorded 3,79,257 coronavirus cases for the past 24 hours. The health ministry's latest data suggests India recorded the highest deaths of 3,645 in the same period.

Also read: Govt asks Twitter to remove misleading posts around coronavirus

Also read: COVID-19: Burj Khalifa lights up with tricolour, says #StayStrongIndia
Seen is the planned site for President Moon Jae-in's new private residence where he and first lady Kim Jung-sook plan to live after Moon's retirement, located in Pyeongsan Village, Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province. Korea Times file.



By Jung Da-min



Residents of Yangsan in South Gyeongsang Province are divided over the construction of President Moon Jae-in's post-retirement private residence in the region.



Some welcome the move, while others complain the construction has been carried out without enough communication with neighbors over noise issues and other inconveniences.



According to Cheong Wa Dae, Wednesday, the construction of the residence, which started earlier this month, came to a halt last Friday as the President called for consultation with nearby residents who oppose the construction.



"The construction was stopped temporarily to ensure that there was no inconvenience to neighbors such as dust or noise caused by the construction," a Cheong Wa Dae official said. "We plan to resume construction after communicating with the residents and checking the inconvenience."



But the official dismissed the possibility of changing the site for Moon's residence.



In April last year, President Moon and first lady Kim Jung-Sook bought a two-story house located in Pyeongsan Village of Yangsan, near his current private residence in Maegok Village of the city.



The couple and the Presidential Security Service (PSS) purchased more land around the house jointly, for a guard office and an accommodation for the guards to be built along with the couple's new house according to the relevant law. The land covers about 3,800 square meters.



A day before the construction began on April 9, Cheong Wa Dae officials held a briefing session on the construction, inviting around 10 community leaders of Pyeongsan.



But days after the construction started, 17 civic groups in the village and surrounding areas began protesting by installing multiple placards demanding a halt to the construction, which they say disrupts the daily lives of the residents. Most of the placards have since been pulled down by the city government.



The opponents say Cheong Wa Dae and the Yangsan city government are pushing ahead with the construction without enough communication with the residents, although more inconvenience is expected if Moon's residence is built and he moves there, with more visitors expected to come to the region.



Contrary to this protest, some residents of Maegok Village, about 30 kilometers from Pyeongsan Village, installed placards supporting Moon, saying they want the President to come back to Maegok after retirement, where Moon and first lady Kim used to live before he became President.



The couple had initially sought to return to Maegok after retirement but couldn't do so due to some security problems, so they instead chose Pyeongsan Village.




(Updates with more details from event)

By Luciano Costa

SAO PAULO, April 28 (Reuters) - Brazilian power utility Cemig is planning an initial public offering of its gas distribution unit, as well as a raft of investments through 2025 and several divestments, executives said on Wednesday, as shares rose almost 4% on the news.

During an online investors' event, executives said they planned to sell off some 9 billion reais ($1.66 billion) in assets through 2025, including the company's stake in the massive Belo Monte and Santo Antonio hydroelectric dams.

Cemig also said it is planning 22.5 billion reais ($4.16 billion) in investments through 2025, with the largest expenditure reserved for improving its distribution network, as well as 4.5 billion reais to invest in wind and solar generation projects that will add 1 gigawatt in capacity.

As part of its divestment drive, the company, formally Cia Energetica de Minas Gerais SA, also plans to sell its stake in Alianca Energia, a joint power generation venture with Brazilian mining company Vale SA, the executives said.

Reynaldo Passanezi, Cemig's CEO, said the company would not do joint ventures in the future, explaining they have not worked well in the past.

Cemig is the public power company of Minas Gerais, Brazil's second most populous state.

Sao Paulo-listed shares in the company were up 3.9% in mid-day trade, the second biggest gainer on Brazil's benchmark Bovespa equities index.

Earlier in the event, Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema re-affirmed his stated intentions to privatize the company, saying he wanted it completed by the end of his term in 2022.

"I would like the company to be privatized during my tenure," Zema said. "Perhaps not to outright sell it, but for it to receive a (private) capital injection and therefore dilute the state, which has always interfered inappropriately, so it loses its controlling stake and stops hurting Cemig." ($1 = 5.4050 reais) (Reporting by Luciano Costa; Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Louise Heavens, David Gregorio, Alexandra Hudson)
The company will retain the benefit of future upside with a 4% royalty on product sales by Lyramid (8% on sub-licence income).

(ASK:CDY) has signed a binding agreement with Provelmare Holding SA, a Panama-based company, for the sale of Lyramid Limited, Cellmid's wholly-owned research and development subsidiary focused on commercialising its midkine intellectual property portfolio.

Midkine, an important novel therapeutic target, is a growth factor abundant during embryonic development but is almost undetectable in healthy adults and it reappears in certain pathologies, including inflammatory diseases and cancer, becoming readily detectible in blood and other tissues.

The sale is on a going concern basis and Lyramids business, including employees, contractors and collaborators remain intact following the sale.

Delighted to hand over

Although the sale was not required to be approved by shareholders, approval was sought at Cellmids AGM in November 2020 where the resolution to sell Lyramid was passed.

Cellmid chief executive officer Maria Halasz said: We are delighted to hand over this exciting drug development program to its new owner, Provelmare Holdings.

Their commitment to funding the development of the midkine intellectual property, their sole focus and the continuity of operations will increase the likelihood of success of this promising technology.

Notably, Lyramid chief scientific officer Associate Professor Graham Robertson, will continue in his role following the sale.

Royalties provide potential upside

In addition to the immediate cash payment of AS$500,000, the divestment of Lyramid will deliver a number of tangible benefits to Cellmid shareholders.

The company will be able to solely focus on its consumer health business to execute on its growth and profitability objectives.

It will retain the right to participate in the potential upside from the assets through royalties without the need to dedicate further shareholder funds to the commercialisation programs.

Overall, it will save close to A$1 million annually by reducing research personnel and relinquishing the financial responsibility for patent filing and maintenance, amongst other costs related to Lyramid.

Key terms

Key terms of the agreement are:

Cellmid receives a cash consideration of A$500,000, payable at the time of completion;

Cellmid will be reimbursed for costs incurred in relation to midkine research and development between January 1, 2021, and April 28, 2021;

Provelmare will provide funding to Lyramid to execute on an agreed product development program;

The intellectual property licence between Cellmid and Lyramid, signed on August 1, 2020, remains on foot and will provide for a royalty of 4% payable to Cellmid on net sale of products developed and sold and a royalty of 8% payable to Cellmid on net sub-licensing revenue; and

Physical midkine assets essential for the commercialisation of the intellectual property will be transferred to Provelmare.

Looking forward

A service agreement between Lyramid and Cellmid will be signed to provide continuity and ongoing support.

Provelmare Founder Sebastien de Massy said: We are very excited to have the opportunity to develop the midkine drug development program and continue with the significant groundwork by Cellmid and its collaborators to take the project through its next value inflection point.

Provelmare initially intends to fund the IND enabling studies of Lyramids midkine therapeutics, which will include selection of the therapeutic agent, carrying out in vitro and pre-clinical validation, pre-clinical safety and efficacy studies and GMP manufacture of the drug product.

Cellmid shares are more than 7% higher to A$0.07.
Whoa! Joe Biden thinks that the relatively mild, wholly unarmed breach of the Capitol was the "worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!" How historically ignorant are his speechwriters? They seem to have forgotten about the assassination of Lincoln, WWI, Pearl Harbor and WWII, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11! Did they really think that line would resonate with anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge?

While the entire speech was banal, this was the most egregious spoken line. That an American president would utter such an unspeakable lie is the measure of this man. He is a fool. Surely, he knows better, but he and his handlers believe that most Americans are so dumb, so uninformed, that they will accept such a lie as true.



YouTube screen grab.

That one line tells us everything we need to know about who Biden and the cabal running him are; they absolutely believe that the American people are not only simple-minded but virtual toddlers who will believe anything they say.

The rest of his not-SOTU speech only confirmed that Joe is the puppet of some thoroughly ridiculous people. No wonder Jen Psaki, when asked about vaccine hesitancy among "white, Republican men," replied that they are placing ads on country music stations and NASCAR sites! Yeah, that's right, Jen. The only people not submitting to the jab are rubes too dumb to know what's good for them. In fact, no vaccine for COVID was necessary since there are effective treatments and a 99% recovery rate. It's perhaps just a greedy grab for big bucks by Big Pharma. Biden is in their pocket, too.

As for the January 6 event at the Capitol that Biden stunningly called the worst attack since the Civil War, not a single person arrested was armed. The only person killed, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by a member of the Capitol Police who to this day remains unnamed. That the FBI and DOJ have pretended those present that day were all domestic terrorists is a shocking turn of events. They've even placed some on a no-fly list, which is entirely unconstitutional. Their crimes were petty in comparison to the BLM/Antifa riots that destroyed numerous cities over the summer.

We all knew that Obama had weaponized all the federal agencies, from the IRS to the FBI ,but now we know just how far down the road to Marxism they've gone. We suffered a coup. How else do we explain the feds raiding Rudy Giuliani's residence but refusing to take the copy of Hunter Biden's laptop hard drive, which is chock-full of child porn among other disgusting things? Hunter Biden gets a job teaching at Tulane, and Rudy Giuliani is under investigation! There is so much wrong with this picture.

We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, to borrow a phrase from The Wizard of Oz. We are fast becoming a facsimile of Mao's China or, when we see that vaccine passports may be required, Hitler's Germany. Biden is the dim and clueless tip of the spear of the Alinskyite left's Trojan horse. Unless the Republicans develop a collective spine, America and the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are soon to be gone.

Sadly, the fact that the timorous Republicans voted to confirm nearly every one of Biden's radical, racist Cabinet appointees does not bode well for America's survival. They've put us at the mercy of an almost vicious anti-American left. The Biden administration is determined to bring back race-based segregation. The principal message of this White House is "America is systemically racist," which it is not. It is that "white privilege" is the scourge of all our oppressed minorities, which it is not. Why, then, do so many non-Whites risk their lives to get here? Fact: This is the least racist nation on the planet.

The "systemic racism" trope is a lie, and they know it. Biden brazenly said we cannot require voter ID because African-Americans don't know how to navigate the internet or how to get a photo ID! How racist is that? How big a lie is that? The Democrat party has always been and still is the party of racism, which is why so many minority voters voted for Trump in 2016 and they enjoyed the fruits of their votes  the lowest unemployment for Blacks and Hispanics in U.S. history.

No doubt millions of Americans who bothered to watch Biden's speech were horrified by his claim that the January 6 not-insurrection was the "worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War." It was an appalling statement, a monumental lie that betrayed his administration's contempt for the American people. These people must be defeated.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
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Coronavirus cases are down in every region of England and fewer people over the age of 80 are catching the virus than ever, official data revealed today  as the UK's daily Covid deaths and infections remained flat.

Public Health England's weekly Covid report found just 6.3 per 100,000 people in the most vulnerable age group caught the disease in the week ending April 25, the lowest since surveillance data began last June. The infection rate among over-80s peaked at 623 in mid-January.

For over-60s, the rate was 9.1, down from 9.9 the week before and a high of 454 at the peak of the second wave. Both lockdown restrictions and vaccines  which were given to the elderly first  have helped turn the tide on the crisis.

Every English region also saw falls in cases in the past week  despite millions more tests being deployed  with the lowest rates recorded in the South West (14.2), South East (17.2) and the East of England (20.5).

Meanwhile, the Department of Health's daily update revealed there were 2,445 cases in the past 24 hours and 22 deaths, with infections down 10 per cent from a week ago and deaths up slightly on the 18 last Thursday.

Latest figures show another 462,000 second and 134,000 first vaccine doses were dished out on Tuesday. It means more than 34million Britons have had at least one dose and 14m have been fully vaccinated.

Experts said the UK was moving out of the Covid pandemic and into a situation that was much more manageable after separate figures showed the number of people falling ill across Britain is also at a record low.

But despite a plethora of evidence showing the virus is firmly in retreat, England faces at least seven more weeks of restrictions. June 21 has been earmarked as the earliest possible date that most curbs can be lifted.

The country's largest symptom tracking study estimated just 757 people are getting sick with Covid every day in England. Across the whole of the UK, it is believed to be 1,046. Infections have never been lower, even compared to last summer when lockdown rules had been lifted and the virus was in retreat, according to the study which launched in May last year.

Professor Tim Spector, the King's College London epidemiologist who runs the study, praised the 'consistent low levels' of Covid and said: 'Its a great position to be in.' He claimed the findings 'signal that were moving from a Covid pandemic to Covid becoming endemic in the UK'.

Professor Karol Sikora, a medical expert at the University of Buckingham, told MailOnline the pandemic would be declared over now if the Government hadn't been 'frightened by messages from the Government'.

Meanwhile, Test and Trace figures show infections fell by nine per cent in the week up to April 21, despite 600,000 more swabs being carried out. Out of 5.1million tests, just 16,776 were positive  the lowest weekly total since last September.

The positive data add to the continuing huge success of the vaccine rollout, which scientists have found is cutting transmission of the virus and keeping people out of hospital. Almost 70 per cent of England has Covid antibodies, separate figures revealed yesterday.

According to the King's study, the current risk of getting infected with Covid in Britain is one in 45,000  and just one in 100,000 in vaccinated people.

It came as Matt Hancock received his first coronavirus jab this morning after the vaccine programme opened to people aged 42 this week. The 42-year-old Health Secretary was given the jab by England's deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam at the Science Museum in London.

Despite every region seeing Covid cases decrease overall, some councils saw an increase in cases in the week ending April 25. Public Health England data breaks the country down into 149 different areas

Four-fifths of areas in England saw coronavirus infections drop in week ending April 18. Places in Shropshire, South Tyneside, Haringey and East Sussex recorded rises of at least 50 per cent - but because the virus is circulating in such small numbers, even small outbreaks will skew the rate upwards

Just 6.3 per 100,000 people in the age group caught the disease in the week ending April 25, the lowest since last August (7.7). The weekly infection rate in over-80s peaked at 623 in mid-January. The age groups recording a slight rise are 10 to 19-year-olds, with 45.5 cases per 100,000 people in the seven days to April 25, up week-on-week from 44.0; five to nine-year-olds, up from 13.6 to 13.9; four and under, up from 8.4 to 8.9; and 60 to 69-year-olds, up from 12.3 to 12.6

Every English region also saw falls in cases in the past week  despite millions more tests being deployed  with the lowest rates recorded in the South West (14.2), South East (17.2) and the East of England (20.5). Yorkshire and the Humber recorded the highest rate in the seven days to April 25: 44.7 cases per 100,000 people, down very slightly from 46.0 in the previous week

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, 42, receives his coronavirus jab from Jonathan Van-Tam at the Science Museum in central London this morning

Meanwhile Test and Trace figures show infections fell by nine per cent in the week up to April 21, despite 600,000 more swabs being carried out. Out of 5.1million tests in the most recent week, just 16,776 were positive

Despite yet more promising signs in official Covid data, No10 is still not giving way on its roadmap, saying it was still not a case for opening up the country sooner than planned.

But vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said England was on track for a 'further' reopening of the economy on May 17  when pubs and restaurants will reopen for indoor service and foreign travel resumes.

Earlier this week another minister suggested that restrictions on funerals could ease as part of a greater unlocking in the next stage of the roadmap. Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said stringent funeral rules were under 'careful consideration'. At the moment a maximum of 30 mourners can attend and they have to socially distance.

Mr Zahawi also insisted the country was on track to come out of lockdown as planned on June 21, when all legal limits on social contacts are set to be abolished. But critics say life will not fully return to normal because masks, mass testing and Covid passports will likely play a key role in daily life.

Don't hold your hopes up for summer festivals yet, vaccine minister warns Summer festivals could still be banned this year despite a successful vaccine rollout and tumbling coronavirus cases, the vaccines minister warns. Nadhim Zahawi said today Britons should avoid signing up for the mass events, even though the UK remains on course to lift all restrictions this summer. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'If you are now booking, then you do carry some risk, clearly because we have to follow the data.' There was a suggestion that all restrictions on large events and performances could be relaxed by June 21 , when social distancing is due to be legally scrapped. But the Government has refused to commit to specifics about which rules will and won't stay beyond that date, claiming it will be led by 'data, not dates'. Many popular festivals including the world famous Glastonbury and Winchester-based Boomtown have already shelved plans to take place this year. But others such as the Reading and Leeds festival say they are still intending to go ahead in August. Organisers say festivals are being cancelled because of problems getting Covid insurance, and have called for a Government-backed scheme. Mass gatherings have been restricted throughout the pandemic because scientists fear packing people close together could spark an outbreak of the virus. Studies suggest Covid spreads quickly at mass events, and one infected individual could pass it on to more than 100 others. But organisers are looking to reduce the threat by asking attendees to take a Covid test before they enter, to slash the risk of the virus arriving at the event. Scientists found no sign of infection after they ran a test concert in Spain last month, where revellers were asked to wear masks but didn't have to socially distance. Around 5,000 music fans came to the event after getting a negative test result, and two weeks later only six people had tested positive. Researchers concluded four of these people had caught the virus elsewhere, and said they could not establish whether the other two were infected at the event. Advertisement

Today's PHE report found case rates in England have fallen slightly among most age groups, with a slight rise in others, Public Health England said.

The age groups recording a slight rise were 10 to 19-year-olds, with 45.5 cases per 100,000 people in the seven days to April 25, up week-on-week from 44.0; five to nine-year-olds, up from 13.6 to 13.9; four and under, up from 8.4 to 8.9; and 60 to 69-year-olds, up from 12.3 to 12.6.

Case rates in all regions of England have fallen.

Yorkshire and the Humber recorded the highest rate in the seven days to April 25: 44.7 cases per 100,000 people, down very slightly from 46.0 in the previous week. South West England had the lowest rate: 14.2, broadly unchanged from 14.4.

The PHE surveillance study relies on the centralised testing database and is one of the best indicators of the country's Covid situation.

The King's College London Covid Symptom Study relies on around one million volunteers reporting their symptoms and test results through a mobile app.

But coronavirus cases are now so uncommon that the system is struggling to accurately predict the size of the outbreak.

The fact that vaccines mean fewer and fewer people are susceptible to the disease also means the case rate cannot be directly scaled up to the British population.

Professor Spector said: 'Low incidence and high immunisation rates in the UK makes it currently difficult for Covid surveillance surveys to extrapolate infection data to the wider population.

'As a result, were assessing our methodology to make sure ZOE continues to produce accurate and reliable Covid data. Its a great position to be in.

'Its very reassuring that low rates continue despite reopening gyms and outdoor areas in pubs and restaurants, and bodes well for further relaxation of restrictions in line with the government roadmap out of lockdown.'

Other promising data from Test and Trace showed positive tests fell by nine per cent to 16,776 in the seven days to April 21  despite a surge in testing. For comparison, at the peak of the second wave almost 400,000 cases were being transferred for tracing every week.

As many as 5,081,932 swabs for the virus were carried out in the week to April 21, 15 per cent more than the more than 4.4million done in the previous week.

Mr Zahawi said there was nothing in the 'really promising' data that would threaten Britain's return to normality.

He told the Today programme this morning: 'The good news is that vaccinations are working. About 70 per cent of the adult population of England now have antibodies, almost two-thirds have had a single dose, a quarter have had two doses.

'[There are] lots of really good things, but we have to remain cautious and we will continue to look at the data But the good news is May 17 looks good, June 21 looks good too.'

In an interview with LBC, he added that England was on track for a 'further' reopening on May 17.

But, tempering expectations, Mr Zahawi warned the Government was still uneasy about green-lighting mass gathering like summer festivals.

He added: 'If you are now booking, then you do carry some risk, clearly because we have to follow the data.'

It came after Jonathan Van-Tam claimed the UK is 'at or close to the bottom' of its Covid outbreak'.

He told a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday that he was 'hopeful' about Britain getting back to normal in the coming months and said vaccines should mean tough national lockdowns won't happen again.

Professor Van-Tam compared the situation now to last September's, before the devastating second wave ignited by the Kent variant, and said: 'The vaccine has undoubtedly helped... it really is the way out of getting into trouble of the same size and magnitude ever again.'

His comments came on the back of a major Office for National Statistics (ONS) testing survey that revealed nearly seven in 10 adults in Britain now have coronavirus antibodies. It suggests the majority of the population now has some immunity against the disease.

Meanwhile, hopes that restrictions on funerals could ease in weeks were boosted earlier this week as Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey hinted they could change on May 17.

She said the stringent rules were under 'careful consideration' for the next stage of the roadmap out of lockdown after being challenged during an interview on LBC radio over why thousands of football fans can return to stadiums in trial events but funeral mourners are limited to 30.

Miss Coffey said: 'I know that this particular issue is under careful consideration for the next step of the roadmap, which is due to come in the next few weeks.'

Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said data showed England was on track for a 'further' reopening of the economy on May 17 - when pubs and restaurants will reopen for indoor service and foreign travel resumes

It is not clear which rules could be relaxed, but last week the Mail revealed that grieving families may be able to hug at funerals next month. Government sources said they were 'hopeful' that a review would relax social distancing rules within weeks.

At the moment, mourners must stay at least two metres from those outside their household or support bubble. The rules have been branded 'inhumane', and MPs, ministers and charities have joined forces to call for an urgent review.

Separate promising analysis published on Wednesday revealed a single dose of vaccine slashes the risk of spreading coronavirus to a member of your household by up to half. This means not only do they reduce the chance of catching Covid in the first place, the jabs greatly reduce the chances of passing it on.

The analysis, which involved almost 1.5million adults, is the first of its kind to confirm the effectiveness of the vaccines in curbing the virus's ability to spread.

The new study on transmission of the virus found that adults who received the Pfizer vaccine  but still caught the virus  were 49 per cent less likely to spread it to other household members than those who weren't inoculated.

The results for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were not quite as good but nonetheless, those who received it were 38 per cent less likely to transmit it to others in their household.

But the fact that both vaccines dramatically reduce the virus's ability to spread  as well as preventing serious illness  offer renewed hope that they hold the key to a return to normal life.

They have already been shown to reduce coronavirus hospitalisations and deaths by 80 per cent after one dose, rising even higher after full immunity.

NHS England began offering people a jab to people aged 42 and over this week and the programme is expected to open to people in their 30s next week.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Nextleaf Solutions Ltd. (CSE: OILS) (OTCQB: OILFF) ("Nextleaf", "OILS", or the "Company"), the world's most innovative cannabis extractor, announced today that it has been awarded a patent in Europe, vital to the low-cost production of cannabis distillate.





Nextleaf has developed over 70 patents globally for the extraction, purification and delivery of cannabinoids

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5347/82206_nextleaf-skid-new.jpg

"We are optimistic about the trend in Europe of governments following Canada's lead in the legalization of cannabis," said Paul Pedersen, CEO of Nextleaf Solutions. "We have validated our extraction and distillation technology here in Canada, the world's largest and most well regulated federally legal jurisdiction. Nextleaf's global IP strategy allows for speed to market by exporting our 'Made in Canada' technology into emerging cannabis markets," stated Pedersen. "When you look at the companies that own the most cannabis patents throughout Europe, you find Canopy Growth, GW Pharma, Pfizer, and Nextleaf Solutions."

According to a report by international cannabis research firm Brightfield Group, domestic cultivation and pressure on Europe's healthcare system to allow general practitioners to prescribe cannabis as medicine will result in a compound annual growth rate of 98% from 2020-2025. The Brightfield Group expects the entire European market to grow to over $3.1bn by 2025. The report, entitled "European Cannabis 2020," anticipates the UK, which legalized medical cannabis in 2018, to experience the largest cannabis medical market growth rate in Europe during that period.

This issued European patent pertains to a proprietary closed loop chilled solvent feed apparatus for post-extraction cannabinoid processing, and mirrors a patent previously granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. In 2020, the Company validated patents in strategic European jurisdictions including, but not limited to: Germany; Italy; the UK; Spain; Portugal; Poland; and Denmark. Nextleaf's patents in emerging European cannabis markets reinforce the Company's vision of developing IP that improves CBD and THC oil economics globally through the production and standardization of cannabinoid-based products.

According to data from Prohibition Partners, medical cannabis imports to Germany grew 37% in 2020. The Prohibition Partners data also says Germany imported a record 3,264 kilos of cannabis in Q4 2020, bringing the yearly import total to 9,249 kilos.

In February 2021, plant-derived CBD was added as a legal ingredient in cosmetics by a key market regulator for trade in the European Union. The change was the result of the European Union's high court declaration in November 2020 that CBD derived from hemp was not a narcotic under an international drug treaty and would be subject to EU law on the free movement of goods among EU members. The demand for medical cannabis and CBD products continues to increase in Europe, and Nextleaf considers its European intellectual property strategy central to the Company's global aspirations.

"We know that medical cannabis acceptance in Europe will be a major catalyst to jump-start pharmaceutical participation because these jurisdictions collectively manufacture and export over 70% of all drugs and medicines consumed globally," said Pedersen. "We are starting to see the value of IP come to the forefront of the industry with the largest cannabis company in the world, Canopy Growth, launching a cannabis extraction patent infringement lawsuit against GW Pharma this past December."

On February 3, 2021 Jazz Pharmaceuticals ("Jazz") and GW Pharmaceuticals ("GW") entered into an agreement whereby Jazz would acquire GW for $7.2bn USD. A major reason for the transaction is GW's patent portfolio, which includes 57 issued patents in the United States.

Nextleaf is among the global leaders in intellectual property pertaining to the extraction, purification, and delivery of cannabinoids. Nextleaf owns 13 issued US patents and over 70 issued patents globally.

About Nextleaf

Nextleaf is an innovative cannabis processor that owns one of the largest portfolios of US patents for the extraction, distillation, and delivery of cannabinoids. Through its wholly owned subsidiary Nextleaf Labs Ltd, a licensed processor, the Company is a low-cost producer of cannabis distillate and private label THC & CBD oils. Nextleaf's proprietary closed-loop automated extraction plant in Metro Vancouver has a design capacity to process 600 kilos of dried cannabis into oil per day. The Company owns 13 US patents and has been issued over 70 patents globally. Nextleaf is developing delivery technology through its Health Canada Research Licence with sensory evaluation of cannabis via human testing. The Company's proprietary RAPID Emulsion Technology by OILS powers differentiated ingestible cannabis products.

Nextleaf Solutions trades as OILS on the Canadian Securities Exchange, OILFF on the OTCQB Market in the United States, and L0MA on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Follow OILS across social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

www.nextleafsolutions.com

For more information please contact:

Jason McBride

604-283-2301 (ext. 219)

investors@nextleafsolutions.com

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Company,

Paul Pedersen, CEO

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this press release, including, without limitation, those regarding the Company's ability to capitalize on its IP portfolio, the Company's strategy, plans, objectives, goals and targets, and any statements preceded by, followed by or that include the words "believe", "expect", "aim", "intend", "plan", "continue", "will", "may", "would", "anticipate", "estimate", "forecast", "predict", "project", "seek", "should" or similar expressions or the negative thereof, are forward-looking statements. These statements are not historical facts but instead represent only the Company's expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual results may differ materially from what is expressed, implied or forecasted in such forward-looking statements. Additional factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially include, but are not limited to the risk factors discussed in the Company's MD&A for the most recent fiscal period. Management provides forward-looking statements because it believes they provide useful information to investors when considering their investment objectives and cautions investors not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Consequently, all of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and other cautionary statements or factors contained herein, and there can be no assurance that the actual results or developments will be realized or, even if substantially realized, that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and the Company assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect subsequent information, events or circumstances or otherwise, except as required by law. The CSE has not reviewed or approved the contents of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82206.
Washington: The United States is sending COVID-19 relief materials worth over USD 100 million to India in the coming days, the White House said as the first flight carrying urgent health supplies left for the country.

The flight took off from the Travis Air Force Base on the world's largest military aircraft on Wednesday night, the US Agency for International Development said.

The shipment includes 440 oxygen cylinders and regulators, generously donated by the state of California, USAID said. In addition, on this first flight, USAID is sending 960,000 Rapid Diagnostic Tests to identify infections early to help prevent the community spread of COVID-19, and 100,000 N95 masks to protect India's frontline healthcare heroes, it added.

US state governments, private companies, non-government organisations and thousands of Americans from across the country have mobilised to deliver vital oxygen-related equipment and essential supplies to Indian hospitals during the current outbreak, the White House said.

Reflecting the United States solidarity with India as it battles a new wave of COVID-19 cases, the United States is delivering supplies worth more than $100 million in the coming days to provide urgent relief to our partners in India: White House pic.twitter.com/PYsR1Flb69  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

Asserting that this reflects America's solidarity with India as it battles a new wave of COVID-19, the White House said that the immediate emergency assistance includes oxygen support, oxygen concentrators, oxygen generation units, personal protective equipment, vaccine manufacturing supplies and rapid diagnostic tests.

According to the White House, an initial delivery of 1,100 cylinders will remain in India and can be repeatedly refilled at local supply centres, with planeloads more to come.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also locally procured oxygen cylinders and will deliver them to support hospital systems in coordination with the government of India, it said.

The US is providing Oxygen Generation Units (PSA Systems) as well. "Multiple large-scale units to support up to 20 patients each, and additional mobile units will provide an ability to target specific shortages. A team of US experts will support these units, working hand-in-hand on the ground with Indian medical personnel," the White House said.

The US is further providing 15 million N95 masks to protect both patients and Indian health care personnel.

The Biden administration has re-directed its own order of AstraZeneca manufacturing supplies to India. This will allow India to make over 20 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, the White House said.

According to a fact sheet issued by the White House, the US is providing the first tranche of a planned 20,000 treatment courses of the antiviral drug remdesivir to help treat hospitalised patients.

Further, the CDC experts will work hand-in-hand with India's experts in the areas of laboratory, surveillance and epidemiology, bioinformatics for genomic sequencing and modelling, infection prevention and control, vaccine rollout, and risk communication, it said.

Observing that the US and India have closely worked together to respond to the pandemic, the White House said American COVID-19 assistance has reached more than 9.7 million Indians across more than 20 states and union territories.

The US has partnered with more than 1,000 Indian healthcare facilities to strengthen preparedness, including training of over 14,000 people on infection prevention and control, it said.

The US has also helped keep more than 213,000 frontline workers safe by imparting risk mitigation training for doctors, nurses, midwives, community volunteers, sanitation workers, and others actively responding to COVID-19 in India, the White House added.

It has also launched joint public messaging with UNICEF on COVID prevention that has reached more than 84 million people and provided 200 state-of-the-art ventilators to 29 healthcare facilities in 15 states to care for critically-ill COVID-19 patients, it said.

In its fact-sheet, the White House said that for 70 years, US public health experts from across the government, including USAID, HHS, CDC, FDA, and NIH, have worked in partnership with Indian officials to improve the health of India's most vulnerable communities.

Over the last 20 years, US foreign assistance to India has exceeded USD2.8 billion, including more than USD1.4 billion for healthcare. The two countries and other partners have worked together to reduce new HIV infections by 37 per cent between 2010 and 2019, it said.

Since 1998, the United States and India have worked together to combat tuberculosis (TB) through improved patient-centred diagnosis, treatment and prevention, helping treat 15 million people with the disease.

In the last five years, the United States has helped 40 million pregnant women receive vital health information and services, the White House said.

The United States, in partnership with the government of India and the World Health Organization, has supported initiatives at the district, state and national levels to build frontline disease detection capacity.

The two countries are also working together to advance global health security and fight outbreaks before they become pandemics, the White House added.

Live TV
BEIJING, Apr. 29 -- Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for Chinas Ministry of National Defense (MND), rebutted on Thursday the remarks made by Indian Chief of Defense Staff at the 6th Raisina Dialogue that China has tried to change the status quo in eastern Ladakh region, and India will stand firm on the northern borders and not succumb to China's coercive actions.

Snr. Col. Wu responded at a regular press conference of the MND on April 29 that the relevant remarks by the Indian side are completely inconsistent with the facts. Regarding the situations in the western section of the China-India boundary, China has explained the ins and outs in detail, and the responsibility does not lie with China, he said.

Wu said that thanks to the joint efforts of China and India, the border defense troops of both sides have recently disengaged from contact in the Galawan Valley and Lake Pangong, and the situation in the border area has eased on the whole. He added that earlier this month, China and India held the 11th round of Corps Commander-Level Meeting, exchanging views on issues of mutual concern and agreeing to continue to maintain close communication through diplomatic and military channels.

Wu stressed that China's position on the China-India boundary issue is consistent and clear. China hopes that the Indian side will cherish the hard-won situation, abide by the relevant agreements of the two countries and two militaries and the consensus reached in previous corps commander-level meetings, and work with China to safeguard peace and tranquility in the border area, so as to bring the relations between the two countries and two militaries back to the track of healthy and stable development.
China warned the United States on Thursday against imposing its democratic ideals, while criticising trade sanctions and military moves in Beijing's backyard just hours after President Biden's speech on American geopolitical priorities.

The remarks came after Biden's first address to Congress, in which the US leader placed a renewed focus on diplomacy and said the country was in competition with China and others to win the 21st century.

Biden added that "autocrats think democracies can't compete", while noting the US welcomes competition and is not looking for conflict.

Asked about the speech, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said it was normal for the US and China to compete in some areas.

"But this kind of competition should be a track and field race, not a duel to the death," he told a regular press briefing on Thursday.

Wang also warned that "forcing other countries to accept one's democratic system... will only create divisions, intensify tension, and undermine stability."

In his speech, President Biden also said the US would stand up to unfair trade practices such as subsidies for state-owned enterprises and intellectual property theft.

But China lashed out a day later at the US for "violating the market principle of fair competition" and "politicising" issues such as the economy, trade and technology, in reference to the trade war between both countries in recent years.

"China is committed to developing a relationship with the US based on non-conflict and non-confrontation," Wang said.

While Biden said he told Chinese President Xi Jinping the US would maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific to prevent conflict -- just as it did with NATO in Europe -- China highlighted issues with US deployments in the region.

China's defence ministry spokesman Wu Qian added in a separate statement Thursday that, since the inauguration of the current US government, the frequency of US warships sent to China's maritime territory increased by 20 percent from last year.

Story continues

The frequency of reconnaissance aircraft activity in the region also increased by 40 percent, Wu added, saying that China "resolutely opposes this".

"The US frequently sends warships and planes to carry out activities in maritime waters and airspace near China, advancing regional militarisation and threatening regional peace and stability," he said.

bys-lxc/jfx
India's COVID-19 crisis is worsening. The COVID-19 crisis struck India hard at first, as the world's second-most populated nation with a weak health system. In September, however, infections started to decline, perplexing epidemiologists and healthcare workers. It was apparent in February that the virus's grasp on hospitals was loosening.

India's COVID-19 crisis blamed on variants

Thousands of people have died due to the pandemic's current surge, which has wreaked havoc on healthcare systems. The country's official death toll passed 200,000 on Wednesday. And Indian officials set a new global high by reporting 362,757 infections in 24 hours, taking the total number of cases to more than 17.9 million.

Some scientists believe that earlier infections occurred mainly in poorer communities and that richer individuals, who have begun to socialize again, are now being affected more often. Prime Minister Narendra Modi lifted a slew of restrictions this summer.

Modi also refused to cancel a significant religious festival that attracted hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims from across the country, dubbed a "super-spreader event." Experts believed that religious, social, and political events played a role in the second wave's rapid dissemination. But they also note that the virus' spread coincided with the arrival of new variants, Global News via MSN reported.

Antiseptic Throat Spray, Malaria Drug Cut COVID-19 Infection Risk, According to Researchers

The B.1.1.7 variant, which was first discovered in the United Kingdom, is one of them. This strain is much more transmissible, potentially increasing the likelihood of death. Some reports say it could be best placed to evade immune systems, raising the possibility of reinfection in people who have either been vaccinated or infected with the virus.

Most people only had minor symptoms due to the infections, but it only led to their concerns that the virus that caused India's disastrous second wave was different. They wonder whether a more infectious strain that bypasses the immune system is sparking the disease in the world's worst-affected nation.

The data is inconclusive so far, and experts warn that other causes may be to blame for the outbreak's ferocity, which has engulfed India's capital so rapidly that hospitals are completely overburdened and crematoria are blazing nonstop. Nonetheless, the inclusion of the variant could make taming India's COVID-19 crisis more difficult, as per the NY Times.

India's Coronavirus Deaths More Than 200,000 During Surge

India's COVID-19 causes global crisis as vaccine supplies disrupted

The COVID-19 crisis in India has thrown the global vaccine supply chain into disarray, which was already under severe strain. India is the world's largest producer of COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, in 2021, the Serum Institute of India was slated to manufacture a third of the global availability of the AstraZeneca vaccine, ABC News reported.

As India's healthcare system struggles to cope with the second wave of infections, the government has primarily suspended vaccine shipments, preferring to keep stocks onshore to inoculate the country's people. India's ability to manufacture adequate vaccines was already being affected by the activities of wealthy countries before the current crisis.

The United States restricted the sale of raw materials for vaccine manufacture in February, under then-President Donald Trump. Adar Poonawalla, the CEO and director of the Serum Institute of India, appealed to U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month to lift the export restrictions.

Intellectual property laws imposed by wealthy countries often restrict India's ability to manufacture more vaccines, preventing the vaccine-manufacturing superpower from developing vaccines other than AstraZeneca. In October of last year, India and South Africa petitioned the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive laws authorizing pharmaceutical firms to keep their intellectual property to themselves.

They needed vaccine makers worldwide to have access to the COVID-19 vaccine technologies and know-how so that the development of the critical drugs could scale up. However, rich countries, such as Australia, have so far obstructed attempts to loosen the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) laws. Sixty former heads of state and 100 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter supporting Biden's waiver.

Countries Help India Amid Devastating COVID-19 Disaster, Here's How You Can Help Too

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
French cloud computing company OVHcloud has unveiled its newest solutions to help its customers, small and medium enterprises, and large organisations to maintain their competitive advantage and provide the newest innovations.

OVHcloud has launched new solutions in response to the accelerated adoption of cloud technologies.

For example, OVHcloud Connect Solution will be beneficial for businesses and designed for interconnection projects. OVHcloud has also introduced a range of Dedicated Servers that address high performance infrastructure needs.

These solutions, in partnership with Australian data centre provider Nextdc, have doubled OVHclouds capacity in the Australian market, says the company.

With two independent data centres, OVHcloud says, customers have access to dedicated services in two locations, allowing them to manage their infrastructure to create backups and develop a complete Disaster Recovery Plan.

Lionel Legros, OVHcloud VP and GM APAC, says: Working with our Australian and global teams, were able to leverage the best-in-class technologies and processes to provide our customers across SMEs and enterprise industries with accelerated innovative offerings. Were looking forward to further growing our local ecosystem for both partners and customers.

Managed Kubernetes

OVHclouds Managed Kubernetes solution provides a container platform for developers to deploy and run applications. Kubernetes components are deployed, hosted, monitored, and maintained by OVHcloud teams, including security patches, allowing customers to focus on their core business and applications. Customers will only need to pay for the compute resources deployed within the Kubernetes cluster.

OVHcloud Connect

OVHcloud Connect offers customers the ability to interconnect their assets, whether as an on-premises data centre or third-party public cloud through a direct secure connection. Customers can access this service in OVHcloud PoP and long-standing partner Equinix. This offer is now also available with Megaport, an Australian leader in software technologies that recently became an OVHcloud Global Technical Partner to deliver increased solution performance. Moreover, customers can set up a fully automated multi-cloud connection for their SaaS platforms.

New Ranges of Dedicated Servers

OVHcloud's new dedicated range of versatile servers is designed to help both small SMEs and large enterprise organisations maintain competitive advantages. The Advance Range allows businesses to deploy their applications faster, providing a high-performance infrastructure with resilience and scalability. The Scale and High-Grade Servers range also creates an environment that is ideal to support big data, machine learning, critical database workloads as well as other solutions like Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

OVHcloud says its robust local partner ecosystem will continue to support and accelerate these solutions in the market.

Service provider Aptira, which shares values with OVHcloud, supports the distribution of these solutions.
The ambassadors of Ukraine to Qatar and Kuwait emphasize the need to systematize the policy towards the Middle East countries and introduce a post of a permanent representative to the region.

This was discussed during the online presentation of the study on prospects of Ukraine in the Gulf countries, conducted by the Foreign Policy Council Ukrainian Prism, Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"I would suggest considering to return to the position of a permanent representative of the President of Ukraine, or a specially designated representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine to the Middle East and possibly Africa, or separately to the Middle East and to Africa... We want to go to Africa, we see ourselves in Asia. That's right, we have to work everywhere, but there is no consolidated strategy," said Ambassador of Ukraine to Kuwait Oleksandr Balanutsa.

Ambassador of Ukraine to Qatar Andriy Kuzmenko touched upon the policy towards the Gulf countries.

We are hindered by uncertainty and sporadic general policy on cooperation with the Gulf countries... Any country in the world is important, and partner countries such as the Gulf countries should be in the focus of attention, and not only when preparing one or another visit or a decision must be made within the framework of one or another international forum, Kuzmenko said.

The diplomat also expressed hope that the memorandum, signed during the last visit of President Volodymyr Zelensky to Qatar, would give a powerful impetus to determine the needs, opportunities and modalities of action between the countries.

As reported, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine already developed and started implementing the Asian Strategy.

During the state visit to Qatar in April, President Zelensky said that Ukraine and Qatar had signed 13 bilateral documents and two commercial contracts.

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LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Inchcape plc (INCH.L) reported first quarter Group revenue of 1.9 billion pounds, up 2% on an organic basis, and down 3% reported. On an organic basis, Distribution was up 4% and Retail was down 2%. The Group noted that while performance in Distribution improved sequentially, Retail was impacted by stricter pandemic related restrictions. The Group continues to expect material growth in profits and an improved operating margin for fiscal 2021. Duncan Tait, Group CEO, said: 'The performance demonstrates the underlying resilience of the Group - with revenue growth underpinned by a widespread recovery in our Distribution business.' 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.
Earlier this year, Rowan University announced a bold, forward-thinking plan that will continue to transform the University to meet the needs and drive the progress of our ever-changing world. Rowans University of the Future plan outlines specific goals in five critical areas: academics; pricing; diversity, equity and inclusion scholarship; flexible workforce; and facilities and infrastructure needs.

Achieving these robust goals will require focused attention, collaboration, partnerships and resources. President Ali A. Houshmand has asked R.J. Tallarida, vice president for University Advancement, to take on this critically important initiative in the new role of vice president and chief growth officer for Rowan University.

An accomplished leader, Tallarida has exhibited a track record of innovation during his 13 years at Rowan and has been instrumental in building and growing Rowan's fundraising and external engagement program. He will work closely with the president, the Board of Trustees and the Executive Cabinet to position the University for transformational change.

This key leadership position will be responsible for coordination and implementation of the University of the Future strategic plan by driving ideas into sustainable action. He will also help lead the Universitys growth through corporate relationships and economic development initiatives.

Last year, R.J. led Rowan Universitys first comprehensive, university-wide fundraising campaign and met goals earlydespite the difficulties presented by the pandemic, said Houshmand. I know hell bring that same drive to his new role.

Im honored to take on this new role to assist Rowan in its continued growth as a higher education innovator, said Tallarida. I look forward to working collaboratively across the institution to help achieve the University's ambitious goals."

Houshmand has also appointed Jesse Shafer as interim vice president for University Advancement and Rowan University Foundation executive director.

A veteran advancement professional with 28 years of comprehensive advancement experience, Shafer has worked both in higher education and as a consultant serving nonprofit clients. Among other accomplishments, he has planned and directed five successful capital campaigns.

Rowan will benefit from his expertise with fundraising for higher education institutions such as Thomas Jefferson (formerly Philadelphia University, where he served as vice president for development) and Temple universities, and working with such clients as The Salvation Army of Greater Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Devereux Foundation, Chestnut Hill Healthcare and the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.

"Although we just completed a very successful comprehensive campaign, its time to start planning for the next one, said Houshmand. Jesses broad background and distinguished career will most certainly help us better serve our students, our region and the state."

"I've long viewed Rowan University as the prime example of the power of philanthropy to transform an institution and inspire its stakeholders," said Shafer. "Now, as it prepares to launch its bold vision for the University of the Future, it's clear that I have the privilege of joining the University at yet another watershed moment in its history."

"I'm beyond excited at the opportunity to partner with President Houshmand and the University's alumni, faculty, leadership volunteers, administrators and supporters at every level as we tackle the exciting challenges that await us. Of course, I'm also thrilled at the chance to build on R.J. Tallarida's outstanding leadership and accomplishments, and join arms with what I know is an uber-talented and successful Advancement team as we work with our generous donors to realize the University of the Future in full," added Shafer.
PayBito crypto exchange dashboard PayBitos traders are spread throughout the world and by taking a glance at our trading volumes of late, we happen to be eyeing $5 Billion in daily trading volume by the end of 2021. By more trading volume, we aim to ensure more liquidity, thereby assuring traders of the best asset prices.

Concerning a past record of attracting a wide array of global users with hefty trading volumes, global crypto exchange and trading platform PayBito lately crosses $2 Billion in their daily trading volume. By the end of 2021, the crypto exchange is expecting to cross the $5 Billion mark. Owing to their user retention and previous achievements in the form of trader attraction, PayBito looks forward to the mass adoption of crypto encompassing the traders in the world.

Reinforcing measures to provide a safe and secure trading experience for users, PayBito features reliable trading operations with smooth procedures of Fiat deposits and withdrawals, thereby boasting of numerous cybersecurity measures like:

1. Web/APP/DB layer separation

2. Service layer validations

3. DDoS mitigation

4. Firewall

5. 2FA

6. IP tracking

7. GEO Fencing

8. Hot/Cold multi-signature wallet

9. Penetration testing

10. Infra inaccessible to the public (VPC)

Other than that, as far as the licenses are concerned, PayBito happened to partner with the Bank of America, thereby leveraging the Banks support for demanded licenses.



The Managing Directors Standpoint:

Communicating with the media, Raj Chowdhury, Managing Director of PayBito, told, PayBitos traders are spread throughout the world and by taking a glance at our trading volumes of late, we happen to be eyeing $5 Billion in daily trading volume by the end of 2021. By more trading volume, we aim to ensure more liquidity, thereby assuring traders of the best asset prices.

Latest Endeavours:

Of late, there has been a surge in user signups in the trading platform PayBito, and soon after, PayBito has witnessed a rapid boom in its broker registrations. With the broker registration number exceeding 100, PayBito has been navigating towards an increase in the brokerage programs demand. This has lead to PayBitos objective of gaining more users and enhance transaction volume.

About PayBito:

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North Carolina police have launched an investigation after a brazen thief tailed a FedEx truck and posed as a homeowner before taking off with a laptop that was handed to her directly by the courier.

The incident occurred in Huntersville last Thursday morning and was captured on security camera.

The video shows a woman in a silver sedan following the FedEx truck, which pulls to a stop to make a delivery at a suburban home.

The woman in the sedan subsequently slows down behind the truck and pulls into the home's driveway, making it appear as if she actually lives there.

The deliveryman believes the woman is the owner of the house and jumps out of his truck, handing her the package directly.

Unaware that he has just handed a porch pirate a pricey laptop, the unsuspecting courier then hops back into his FedEx truck and drives off.

The woman waits until he is out of sight before she jumps back into her sedan, reverses back out of the driveway and drives off with her stolen bounty.

North Carolina police have launched an investigation after a brazen thief tailed a FedEx truck and posed as a homeowner before taking off with a laptop that was handed to her directly by the courier

The woman in the sedan subsequently slows down behind the truck and pulls into the home's driveway, making it appear as if she actually lives there

The actual owner of the home and the newly delivered laptop alerted police when she checked her security camera later that day and saw the brazen robbery taking place.

It was just this lady pulling behind the FedEx truck and then she parked in my house like she lived there,' homeowner Estefania Rauseo told Channel 9.

'She took the package, like pretending it was for her.'

While porch pirates are usually spontaneous thieves who steal packages they spot sitting at a person's front door, Huntersville police fear a new breed of parcel-nabbing thieves may soon be on the rise.

'This porch pirate is the first one we've seen where someone has intercepted the package and acted as though they were the homeowners,' Huntersville police told Channel 9.

Cops are appealing to the public for help and say the woman could face

Neighbors say the savvy sedan-driving thief could strike again and they are taking precautions.

'I set up motion sensors so that if someone drives onto my porch or someone even drives by the road, I get a notification,' local Bhumil Patel told the news network.

FedEx is set to refund Rasuseo the cost of her stolen laptop.
Rioter Fined $12 Million for Helping Set Minneapolis Police Station on Fire

A man was fined $12 million and will serve four years in prison for trying to set fire to the Minneapolis Police Departments Third Precinct building last year in the midst of protests and riots.

Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, 23, was also ordered to serve two years of supervised release, according to the United States Attorneys Office District of Minnesota.

On the night of May 28, 2020, Mr. Robinson chose to depart from lawful protest and instead engaged in violence and destruction, said Acting U.S. Attorney Anders Folk in a statement. The arson at the Minneapolis Police Departments Third Precinct put lives at risk and contributed to widespread lawlessness in Minneapolis.

Robinson, of Brainerd, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiracy to commit arson.

Robinsons lawyer, William Mauzy, said that his client is being unfairly singled out, adding there is no realistic chance hell be able to pay off the $12 million fine.

He is bearing the sentence for the other thousand people who participated, he told New York Times on Wednesday. Many others, far more culpable than Mr. Robinson, were not identified.

A federal criminal complaint accused him of lighting a Molotov cocktail that another person tossed at the police building on May 28, 2020.

Before that, a crowd of rioters was heard shouting: Burn it down multiple times in front of the building, according to authorities.

Robinson, along with other co-conspirators, breached the fence and entered the building. Robinson, assisted by an unidentified co-conspirator, lit an object held by the unidentified co-conspirator who threw it toward the Third Precinct building with the intent that it would start a fire or fuel an existing fire, the U.S. attorneys office said.

Three other people have pleaded guilty in federal court for their roles in the arson incident. Bryce Michael Williams, 27, Davon De-Andre Turner, 25, and Branden Michael Wolfe, 23, previously pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit arson, officials said.

Mauzy also argued that officials determined there were four dozen separate places of origin for the arson.

Thats a lot of different people setting fires at various spots in a police station, he said. Mr. Robinson was unfortunately one of the few who was captured on video and identified.

But video footage from surveillance cameras, Facebook, and Robinsons own Snapchat account appeared to show him involved in setting the fire, according to a criminal complaint last year. At one point, a person who looks like Robinson appears to light a Molotov cocktail-like device held by someone else, who then threw it at the Third Precinct building. Robinson later allegedly threw another incendiary device at the building, authorities said.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
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Logan, WV (25601)

Today

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 67F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Mumbai: Indias COVID-19 death toll has exceeded 200,000 after a record number of 3293 fatalities were reported on Wednesday, as patients across India continue to pay extortionate black market prices for oxygen and essential medicines.

The second wave of COVID-19, believed to be driven by more contagious variants, has wreaked devastation on India and the current daily death tolls are thought to be up to 20 times higher than recorded figures.

A COVID-19 patient sits inside a car and breathes with the help of oxygen provided by a Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in Delhi, India. Credit:AP

Many state governments are not reporting COVID-19 deaths if there is comorbidity, in order to reduce panic and for political point-scoring, while testing shortages mean many Indians are dying before it is confirmed they have the virus.

I can easily say that around 1000 COVID-19 cases are getting funerals every day. This figure is seven to eight times higher than the official figures, the manager of one crematorium in Delhi said.
For starters, we're dealing with a 1972 car here, the final hurrah of the first-gen model, which, as the sales numbers from back in the day show, was the most popular.The elements that set the '72 aside from its predecessors have received plenty of attention on the proposal showcased in this rendering. As such, the Cadillac-like egg-crate grille now features fewer bars, which stick to the vertical layout. Oh, and the parking lamps that used to flank the grille have been left behind since the V8 monster sitting behind them needs all the cooling it can get.And while the details of the motor aren't mentioned, you can expect a certain form of forced induction to be present. Otherwise, why would the revised hood of the 1972MY have received a power bulge?The massive chrome bumper is still in place and, in conjunction with the LED hardware sitting above it, brings a Cyberpunk approach to mindthe said appearance also owes a lot to the bare metal finish of the vehicle.As you may have noticed, the fenders have been chopped to accommodate monstrously-sized wheels shod in performance tires, with this sort of transformation also requiring the inner wheel arches to be modified.The cutting tools also feasted on the upper side of the retro Chevy , with the chopped top of the pillarless coupe, the only body style offered for the said generation, standing out from a distance.And the remastered posterior is just as radical, with the Longtail-style wing, which is also secured via a pair of rods, accompanied by four exhaust tips of the extrovert type. And the redefined lighting signature goes even deeper than that of the front end.Now, digital art label MalonyxMedia, which is responsible for these wicked pixels, was considerate enough also to introduce a version of the 1972 Monte Carlo that appeals to traditionalists. And you'll find that one in the second Instagram post below.
Ukraine counts on the support of the Baltic states in obtaining the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), First Deputy Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk said at a meeting with chairmen of the foreign affairs committees of the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Marko Mihkelson, Richards Kols and Zygimantas Pavilionis.

"I want Ukraine to have a chance to become the 31st NATO member state and a part of a large European family in the near future. We would like to receive a decision from the Alliance to provide Ukraine with an Action Plan for NATO membership in the near future. We hope to form the necessary consensus among the Allies and fully count for support in this matter," the secretariat of the first deputy speaker quoted Stefanchuk as saying.

He also noted the lightning-fast reaction of the representatives of the parliaments of the three countries to the escalation of the aggression of the Russian Federation, and invited them to join the work of the Crimean Platform.

"Ukraine remains a supporter of resolving any issues at the political and diplomatic level. Therefore, I will be very grateful to the parliaments of your countries if they join the activities of the Crimean Platform, the purpose of which is to de-occupy Crimea and return it to Ukraine peacefully. Your support is decisive for us and will mean solidarity in countering Russia's aggressive policy," Stefanchuk emphasized.

He thanked the Baltic states for their unwavering stance on opposing the implementation of the Nord Stream 2 project.
Thousands of protesters answered calls from Colombias biggest unions to fill streets across the country to demonstrate on Wednesday against a controversial government tax reform.

Unions insisted the strike would go ahead despite a court order to postpone the protests on concerns about a third coronavirus peak that is stretching the health system to breaking point. The Andean country has reported more than 2.8 million coronavirus cases, of which 106,482 are active. More than 72,000 people have died.

The proposed tax reform was originally meant to raise about $6 billion, equivalent to 2% of gross domestic product (GDP).

However, earlier on Wednesday finance official Juan Alberto Londono said the government could lower the targeted sum to between 18 trillion and 20 trillion pesos ($4.8 billion to $5.4 billion) as it looks to build consensus among lawmakers.

The government is proposing a suite of new or expanded taxes on individuals and businesses, as well as reducing or eliminating many tax exemptions, including on product sales.

This protest is legitimate as it represents a national rejection of the economic and social policies of this government, said Francisco Maltes, president of the Central Union of Workers (CUT).

He said on Facebook the reform would plunder the pockets of (ordinary) Colombians, while not touching even a hair of the super-rich.

The reform is crucial for Colombia to keep its investment grade debt rating, according to the government.

The city of Cali put in place a 1pm curfew and deployed the army after several buses were burned.

Security forces will act where incidents of vandalism or violence happen, said Defense Minister Diego Molano.

Wednesdays protests are the most recent in a series of marches which began near the end of 2019 against the social and economic policies of President Ivan Duque, who leaves office next year.

Strike leaders will meet on Wednesday afternoon to take a decision about another protest planned for Saturday, Maltes said.

SOURCE: REUTERS
blocked posts tagged #ResignModi amid raging criticism of the government's handling of the COVID crisis, but restored it hours later calling it a mistake.

The blocking on Wednesday, said, wasn't at the behest of the government.

isn't the first company to censure posts critical of government handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Twitter had removed or restricted access to several critical posts on orders from the government, which called it fake news.

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.

It however did not elaborate.

According to reports, a hashtag calling for the resignation of Prime Minister was blocked on Facebook for hours on Wednesday. Users searching the hashtag were given a message that said such posts were "temporarily hidden here" because "some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards".

Facebook periodically blocks hashtags and posts for a variety of reasons. Some of the blocks are done manually and some are automated.

The blocking of posts tagged #ResignModi came ahead of polling in the last phase of West Bengal assembly elections.

The Modi government has drawn a lot of flak in domestic and international media for handling of the second wave of COVID infections, which on Thursday crossed 1.8-crore mark.

India reported 3,79,257 new COVID-19 cases and 3,645 new deaths - the deadliest day so far for any country hit by the pandemic.

The US government has told its citizens to leave India as soon as possible.

timelines are filled with SOS calls with people looking for oxygen cylinders, medicines, hospital beds, plasma donors and ventilators. Organisations across the spectrum have come forward to support the fight against the COVID pandemic.

Just a few days back, Twitter and other platforms removed about 100 posts and URLs after the government asked them to remove content that was critical of the handling of the current medical crisis or spreading fake news around the pandemic.

Reports citing Lumen database, an independent research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content, suggested that more than 50 posts - including those by a Member of Parliament, MLA and filmmakers - were removed by Twitter on government request.

Government sources had said the social media platforms were asked to remove the posts and URLs (uniform resource locators) to "prevent obstructions in the fight against the pandemic" and disruption of public order due to the said posts.

They had added that the order was issued in view of the misuse of social media platforms by certain users to spread fake or misleading information and create panic about the pandemic in the society "by using unrelated, old and out of the context images or visuals, communally sensitive posts and misinformation about COVID-19 protocols".
'The Handmaid's Tale' is far from perfect. Here's why I'm not giving up on it yet
Acting AAG for National Security Mary McCord speaks in front of a poster of a suspected Russian hacker during FBI National Security Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California joint news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, on March 15, 2017. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Government Official Who Approved Improper Spying on Trump Staffer Tapped for Spy Court Advisory Role

Former Justice Department official Mary McCord will serve in an advisory role for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this month.

McCord was one of the officials who reviewed and approved warrants to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The FISC, which approved the warrants in 2016 and 2017, later excoriated government officials for providing false and misleading information about Page and the infamous Steele dossier.

Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who approved efforts to snoop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, has been appointed to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The same court excoriated government officials in late 2019 for providing misleading information in four applications to surveil Page, who served as a Trump campaign national security adviser.

The surveillance court appointed McCord, who served as assistant attorney general for national security through May 2017, to be an amicus curiae on April 15.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relies on eight amicus curiae to provide advice and expertise on matters related to foreign intelligence collection.

McCord, who currently works at Georgetown University, helped oversee Crossfire Hurricane, the FBIs investigation of the Trump campaigns possible ties to Russia. She also took part in the process of reviewing an application the FBI submitted for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page, a former Naval officer who joined the Trump team in March 2016.

McCord is named 25 times in a Justice Department inspector general (IG) report that details a series of missteps by government officials during the Crossfire Hurricane probe.

While McCord is not criticized in the IG report, she did review and ultimately approve the flawed FISA applications against Page.

The IG report identified 17 significant errors and omissions in the FBIs applications for warrants to surveil Page.

Most of the errors were committed by FBI agents and officials and involved with the bureaus handling of information from former British spy Christopher Steele.

The FBI relied heavily on Steeles information to make the case that Page was working covertly with Russia to help the Trump campaign. Steele alleged in a dossier that the Trump campaign was involved in a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.

Steele also claimed that Page played a key role in the Trump-Kremlin connection.

Several of Steeles claims have since been debunked. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and multiple congressional committees have determined that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to meddle in the election.

The FISC also reprimanded the FBI for making misleading statements in its applications to spy on Page. The Justice Department invalidated two of the four warrants granted to the bureau.

Justice Department officials, including McCord, are largely spared from criticism in the IG report. The FISA failures are largely pinned on FBI agents and officials who failed to tell the Justice Department about evidence that undermined the theory that Page and other Trump aides were working with Russia.

FBI investigators failed to disclose contradictions in the Steele dossier, as well as exculpatory statements that Page and another Trump aide, George Papadopoulos, made during conversations with a covert FBI source.

McCord told the IG that Justice Department officials thought that surveilling Page would help the FBI investigation. She also appeared to acknowledge that the surveillance might one day be criticized.

She said the collective thinking was that filing the application was a legitimate investigative step even though it may later be criticized unfairly, reads the IG report, which was released on Dec. 9, 2019.

McCord told the IG she spoke with Andrew McCabe, who served as deputy director of the FBI, regarding the dossier and its use in the FISA applications. She said she advised McCabe that the FISA application should include more information about who hired Steele.

The FISA applications do not disclose the full details of who funded Steeles work. Steele was ultimately paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC, which hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm, Perkins Coie.

McCord told the IG that she played a limited role in overseeing the FBIs probe of the Trump campaign, which was dubbed Crossfire Hurricane. She said she did not attend any of the DOJ national security divisions weekly meetings about the probe held before the 2016 election.

She said she did attend meetings after the election regarding the FBIs investigations of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, two Trump associates who were initial targets of Crossfire Hurricane. McCord received a comprehensive briefing about Crossfire Hurricane in January 2017, she told the IG.

Three officials who signed FISA applications against Page  former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney Generals Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein  testified last year that they would not have done so if they had known about revelations from the IG report.

McCord did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another amicus curiae for the FISC is David Kris, a former Justice Department official who had defended the FBIs surveillance of Page prior to the release of the IG report.

In 2018, Kris asserted that House Republicans had falsely accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court. He also said that it was not true that the FBI had misled the court about the Steele dossier.

By Chuck Ross

From The Daily Caller News Foundation

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
US President has urged Congress to pass the comprehensive immigration reform, asserting that immigrants have done so much for America during the pandemic as they have throughout the country's history.

On the day one of his presidency, Biden sent a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress which proposes major overhauls to the system, including granting legal status and a path to citizenship to tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants and other groups and reduce the time that family members must wait outside the US for the much-sought green cards.

Immigrants have done so much for America during the pandemic as they have throughout our history. The country supports immigration reform. Congress should act, Biden said in his maiden address to a joint session of the on Wednesday.

Immigration has always been essential to America. Let's end our exhausting war over immigration. For more than 30 years, politicians have talked about immigration reform and done nothing about it. It's time to fix it, he said.

He said that on day one of his presidency, he kept his commitment and sent a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress.

"If you believe we need a secure border pass it. If you believe in a pathway to citizenship pass it. If you actually want to solve the problem I have sent you a bill, now pass it, he said amidst applause from the lawmakers.

We also have to get at the root of the problem of why people are fleeing to our southern border from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. The violence. The corruption. The gangs. The political instability. Hunger. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. When I was Vice President, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration, he said.

This, he said, helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave.

Our plan worked. But the last administration shut it down. I'm restoring the programme and asked Vice President (Kamala) Harris to lead our diplomatic efforts. I have absolute confidence she will get the job done. Now, if Congress won't pass my plan let's at least pass what we agree on, he said.

Biden said the Congress needs to pass legislation this year to finally secure protection for the Dreamers the young people who have only known America as their home.

And, permanent protections for immigrants on temporary protected status who come from countries beset by manmade and natural made violence and disaster.

As well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers who put food on our tables, he said.

New York immigrant rights advocates, led by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), praised Biden's renewed commitment to a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, Temporary Protected Status holders, and essential workers.

In a statement, the NYIC also double-downed on their call for a transformation of the country's immigration system, a promise of the Biden campaign.

FWD.us President Todd Schulte said that in his address Biden made clear the urgent need to provide millions of deserving immigrants with a desperately needed pathway to citizenship that will keep families across the country safe and together.

Millions of Dreamers, TPS (Temporary Protected Status) holders, farmworkers, and other undocumented immigrants have been vital to our nation's continued health response and economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

"They have deep roots in our communities as our neighbours, colleagues and friends, and nearly 6 million US citizen children live with an undocumented family member. Undocumented people are essential to our nation in every sense of the word, he said.

Earlier in the day, a coalition of immigration advocacy groups announced a new USD 50 million campaign aimed at pressuring lawmakers from both parties to pass a pathway to citizenship.

The effort includes a USD 30 million commitment from the We Are Home campaign led by advocacy organisations, as well as a USD 20 million commitment from a handful of other immigration groups including FWD.us.

(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.)
Now Open

29 April 2021

Best Western Hotels & Resorts today announced the opening of its newest Aiden hotel in the vibrant and energetic city of Berkeley, California. Aiden offers a bright and stylish design that embodies the eclectic energy of the northern California city.

Aiden invites creative travelers and mobile workers to indulge in a standout boutique experience that will be local to each developer's vision. Each hotel boasts a multi-functional public area to bring together the best of work and play, while also bringing its locale to life with enticing designs. Featuring abstract and sleek guestrooms, the Aiden look is complete with playful color palates and lush fabrics.

Aiden by Best Western @ Berkeley is a stunning property that perfectly marries the trendy style of the town with modern decor to meet a younger generation of travelers. Guests will enjoy bright and state-of-the-art guestrooms that boast floor-to-ceiling windows and can unwind at the hotel's rooftop terrace with amazing views over Berkeley including landmarks such as the Sather Tower at the University of California, Berkeley, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Sutro Tower in San Francisco. Guests can also indulge in the lavish landscaping throughout the hotel, view unique local artwork in the lobby, and enjoy breakfast and lunch offerings at the onsite marketplace. Visitors traveling by car can take advantage of the hotel's in-house valet service where cars are parked in a safe and secure onsite parking garage that is equipped with two Tesla chargers.
As we have entered the post-Trump era, marked by the forty-fifth presidents absence from the White House, from Twitter, and from most press coverage, we are still left with the repercussions of a presidency that has deeply fractured the nation, both politically and epistemically. A shared fact base or even universally accepted means for determining what is and is not true seem to have slipped out of our shared heritage; QAnon conspiracies and science conflictingly coexist in the public sphere. For journalists committed to pursue, reveal, and defend whatever is left of the truth, the question is: Where do we go from here?

Months after Joe Bidens inauguration, it has become clear that media skepticism and fantastical conspiracies have outlasted his predecessor and promise to remain a challenge to professional journalism. Still, there is a silver lining: most news organizations have, indeed, made it through four years of fake news accusations and uncountable presidential falsehoods. Reflecting on the medias treatment of Trumps truth-bending rhetoric may offer lessons for dealing with future presidentsor, for that matter, any prominent figureswho mislead the public for their personal advantage.

Truthful reporting and the L-word

Throughout his campaign and presidency, legacy newspapers have been accused of failing to call Trump a liar. A few days after the 2020 election, former HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen tweeted, The L word on the NYT homepage right now, along with a screenshot of the Times headline suggesting Trump had been lying about the vote count. Her followers all seemed to leap to the same responseFinally!suggesting they had not only noted but also felt frustrated that the paper had previously been hesitant to label the president a liar. Why did it take the mainstream media so long to get around to calling out Donald Trump for lying?

The premise of the question is not quite right. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others have long documented and kept running totals of Trumps falsehoods. Did they frequently say hes a liar or he lied? No. Would they have been more faithful to reality if they had? No. In fact, we think that would have simplified and distorted something far worse and far more difficult to explain.

Bald-faced lying by presidents has plenty of notable precedent. Eisenhower denied the fact that the US authorized flights by U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union; candidate John F. Kennedy proclaimed a missile gap that put the Soviets arsenal ahead of the Americans (even after he was informed no such gap existed); and, of course, Richard Nixon denied his knowledge of the Watergate cover-up. But none of those men convinced themselves that they alone could measure reality and that all others were interlopers or enemies of the people. In other words, when they lied, they knew that they were intentionally ducking reality, or claiming a clear truth when there was only uncertainty, or hiding a plot in which they were deeply entangled.

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For Trump, the problem has been much worse and far more daunting for journalists: theres little evidence that he credits reality with any authority over his world. On NBCs Today show, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci referred to Trumps reality distortion field. It appears that Trump has over a lifetime accepted that claims about reality are to be judged by whether they advance his desires. If the assertion, rumor, speculation, conspiracy theory, or trial balloon works to keep him in the public eye, to win the applause of devoted fans, to rile up the liberals he despises, or to displace other topics from the headlines, its good enough for him. To name this as lying scarcely does justice to the way Trump warped his life and presidency.

We all stray from the truth. We tell our children theres a Santa Claus, we pad our CVs; we tell an old friend just back from the hospital that she looks great. Less innocently, we hide an affair from a spouse, our drinking from friends, our gambling from family.

Yet, although we all are guilty of lying at times, the term itself is one of intense moral reprobation. In most contexts, and certainly in news reporting, calling someone a liar is an accusation, a clear act of condemnation. It is evident that Trumps assertions and reality typically do not match up. As he uttered or tweeted words that were often reckless, improvised, and generally unsupported, disbelief and frustration were bound to grow. Naturally, the media reporting that Trump spread baseless insinuations, inaccurate claims, or falsehoods felt deeply dissatisfying. The word that signals both untruthfulness and reproof of it is lieand many people yearned to see it in headline type on the front page.

Trump, the Truth, and The New York Times

We searched the Times website for US news articles that used the word lie (or some derivative of it) to describe the presidents statements. Among the articles published from when he announced his candidacy, in 2015, to his departure, in January 2021, we identified just over fifty articles in which the Times news section explicitly used the L-word in the reporters own voice. (Opinion writers were markedly more willing to accuse the president of lying.)

On a few occasions, the Times avoidance of the L-word was overcautious, leading to some clumsy descriptions. In an article from February 2016, White House correspondent Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump denies saying what he said about John McCain, which can only not be described as lying if Trump had somehow lost all recollection of calling the late senator a loser. Similarly, in September 2020, as Bob Woodward published his book Rage and along with it recordings of his interviews with Trump, revealing that the president had knowingly downplayed the pandemic throughout the early months of 2020, the L-word was noticeably absent from the Times reporting. In several articles, the paper observed that the president privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite. This qualifies as lyingeven if, as might be argued in this case, there could have been good reason to lie to avoid contributing to a public panic.

Despite routinely drawing criticism for its scarce adoption of the L-word in relation to Donald Trump, the New York Times was among the first legacy publications to use the term to describe the presidents claims. Over the course of Trumps candidacy and presidency, the Times decided to identify his assertions as lies on two key occasions: In September 2016, as Trump finally conceded that Barack Obama was born in the US, the Times front page, using the word for the very first time, read Trump Gives Up Lie but Refuses to Repent. Throughout his candidacy, Trump had challenged President Obamas citizenship, yet it was not until he publicly retracted and corrected these statements that the Times acknowledged the birther conspiracy to be a lie.

Trumps incessant claims of voter fraud made up a second set of blatant falsehoods that the paper has also declared a lie. Following his inauguration, the presidentwho lost the popular voteinsisted that millions of unauthorized immigrants had voted in the election, leading the Times to publish an article titled Trump Wont Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are the Facts. Curiously, however, the paper also ran a story that described thenWhite House press secretary Sean Spicer affirming that Trump Believes Lie of Millions of Illegal Voters, which is conceptually impossible. Lying implies intentional deception. Can speakers be considered liars if they are convinced of their own hoax?

Whats the word?

In a 1963 piece for the ASNE Bulletin, journalist David Starr declared, Objectivity, we realize now, includes calling a lie a lie. As interpretive reporting began to be more widely acceptedand then defended, not as a falling away from objectivity but as a deeper practice of itStarr continued, Objectivity includes putting facts in perspective.

In the context of conspiracists like Trump, reporters should thus not simply call out statements that are manifestly liesthey must also lay out just how dangerous this type of indifference to the truth can be. To say that Trump has, on occasion, lied would be factual. To further put this fact in perspective would entail pointing out that, beyond that, Trumps relationship to the truth has been wildly inconsistentone day he may, indeed, simply lie; on other days, Trump may even rely on established facts; sometimes he may, in turn, make up his own facts. To call him a liar whenever he lies is not enough.

Journalists need a new vocabulary to describe the varying facets of falsehoods with the level of nuance that the current landscape of truths and untruths requires. Many regard Trump as the embodiment of a post truth era, where emotions or a sheer will to believe hold more influence than facts. We think post truth is close to characterizing Trumps condition, but it is still misleading. It suggests that we have entered a new era that supersedes a world based on truth. Post implies that whatever comes after this prefix no longer is, that we have now entered a time that follows and, importantly, replaces it. And there is enough in postmodern theorizing or in sociological studies of knowledge or of science to confirm that naive belief in some unassailable truths that science affirms or that common sense reveals are now behind us and we are, all of us, doomed to run off epistemological cliffs like Wile E. Coyote.

Yet truth has not departed, expertise is not goneand it is entirely possible for someone to reject expert input in one circumstance and accept it in another. Since these states can coexist (not only within society but even within an individual), we dont think it is right to refer to our (or Trumps) relationship to truth as post.

Perhaps a more fitting prefix can be found in extra. One way to more faithfully denote Trumps rhetoric might be to call it extra factual, a term political scientist Kelly Greenhill has coined and written about. Greenhill understands extra-factual statements to be either unverified or unverifiable at the time of transmission and to typically take the form of emotionally resonant narratives that are intended to influence their recipients attitudes and behavior. This term is a more appropriate and precise characterization of Trumps rhetoric: Like post truth, extra factual centers science, truth, facts, and expertise as the norm. But unlike post truth, the term does not suggest that truth and facts have left the stagerather, that the speech act in question is situated outside of a still existing realm of objective, scientific truth.

Granted, extra factual, as of now, sounds purely descriptive and carries none of the negative imputation conveyed when we accuse someone of lying or when we describe something as post truth. However, before post truth was popularized and proclaimed the word of the year in 2016, most people did not associate anything negative with it, either. Words have to enter public discourse and be used in consistent contexts to reach the depth of meaning we seek from a term that can adequately describe the way Donald Trump and other fabulists, conspiracists, and hoaxers compromise the truth.

So if there is anything we have learned from the past four years (and more) of Trumpian defiance of fact, its that the notion of truth has become much more complicated, and that its time we find the words to describe (and thus deal with) what is going on. We have also learned that American society tolerates and may even smile at some falsehoods. Was the circus the greatest show on earth? In advertising, thats known as puffery, an assertion unverifiable on its face and not worth two seconds of fact-checking. What is locker room talk? What is bullshitting? What is a sales pitch? Too often it may be a well-selected set of facts that intentionally distorts a fair-minded portrait of the product: intentional disinformation without a technical misstatement. What is a fabulistic construction, a wish or dream or mythology parading as reality? These are not just lies.

Truthfully reporting about falsehoods can be complicated business. Montaigne wrote that the truth is clear and singular, but that its opposite has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. Even as Trump has left office, extra-factual conspiracies continue to be perpetuated by him and others who have prioritized power, status, and influence over the value of shared reality. It will be journalists responsibility, as the front line of resistance to the varied array of reality denials, to call out liars on their deception (including, when appropriate, President Biden)but it also entails finding, or creating, the language to describe utterances much more nefarious than a simple lie.

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Michael Schudson and Jueni Duyen Tran are contributors to CJR. Schudson is a sociologist and historian of the news media and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. His latest book are The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975 and, with C. W. Anderson and Leonard Downie Jr., The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know. Jueni Duyen Tran is a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, where she researches how platform affordances and features affect social media users' content sharing decisions.
Richard Cottingham (C) known as the "Torso Killer," pleads guilty to two 1974 murders, at a New Jersey Courts virtual hearing, on April 27, 2021. (New Jersey Courts via AP)

Torso Killer Pleads Guilty in 1974 Cold-Case Murders

NEWARKFor years, a savage murderer called the Torso Killer dribbled out confessions to a New Jersey detective, closing cold cases into the brutal deaths of four young women that dated back to the late 1960s.

But there was one unsolved case the notorious serial killer would never admit to: The slayings of 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and 16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly in 1974.

On Tuesday, Richard Cottingham, 74, sat in a wheelchair in beige prison scrubs as he pleaded guilty to kidnapping the teenage girls and raping them for days before he drowned them in a motel room bathtub.

The teenagers were last seen on Aug. 9, 1974, in North Bergen. Theyd left home for a trip 13 miles north to a Paramus mall, telling family they planned to take a bus there to buy bathing suits for a trip to the Jersey Shore.

Witnesses at the time told police the girls were hitchhiking and had gotten into a mans car. They were found five days after they went missing, identified by their jewelry when their battered bodies were discovered facedown in the woods of North Jerseys Bergen County.

Hes relieved that this cloud thats been hanging over his head for many, many years is now removed, said his defense attorney, John Bruno, adding that Cottingham has serious regret for the crimes and hoped to give the families some closure.

Mary Anns sister, Nancy Pryor, watched the virtual hearing after years of working with detectives.

I keep saying, before my time comes, Id love some answers, and I never give up hope that we will get them, she told The Record newspaper in 2016.

Pryor did not respond Tuesday to messages left by The Associated Press seeking comment.

As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors said Cottingham is expected to get two life sentences in July, to be served concurrently with the time hes already serving. Cottingham didnt make a statement during Tuesdays hearing, but offered one- and two-word answers to questions posed by state Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann and attorneys.

In his April 14 confession to Robert Anzilotti, the Bergen County prosecutors chief of detectives, Cottingham admitted to physically forcing Lorraine into a motel room and threatening to harm her if Mary Ann didnt comply. He confessed to raping them and tying them up as he slept so they wouldnt escape and drowning them in the motel rooms bathtub before dumping their bodies.

He gave details about the murders that only the killer would know, Anzilotti told AP after the court hearing.

The Pryor-Kelly case is among North Jerseys most infamous unsolved crimes and Cottingham is one of the regions most heinous criminals. Known as the Torso Killer for brutally dismembering some of his victims by cutting off their limbs and heads, hes currently in a New Jersey prison on a life sentence for other murders.

While he has claimed he was responsible for up to 100 homicides, authorities in New York and New Jersey have only officially linked him to 11 so far, including the two 1974 killings. He was arrested in 1980 when a motel maid heard a woman screaming inside his room. Authorities found her alive, but bound with handcuffs and suffering from bite marks and knife wounds.

In the 1970s, Cottingham had a wife and children and held a job as a computer programmer for a health insurance company in New York, recalled Alan Grieco, a retired chief of detectives in Bergen County who helped convict Cottingham for the 1977 murder of a woman found outside a motel in northern New Jersey.

Investigators in both states were able to tie Cottingham to other murders and sexual assaults, but Grieco remembered Cottingham played games with investigators for years regarding the Pryor-Kelly murders as he sought to trade information for better treatment in prison.

Seeing how the families are destroyed, you cant help but feel their pain, he said. I think he figured, Im going to just toy with them, and as long as I can drag it out, I will. 

Anzilotti first met Cottingham 17 years ago as the detective sought to close some of the countys cold cases. He believes there are still dozens of outstanding cases in the tri-state area that might eventually be traced back to him.

The killer would ultimately tell Anzilotti about the slayings of four women and teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 29 in Bergen County. Yet he was always reluctant to discuss Mary Ann and Lorraine, Anzilotti said, because their murders bothered him more than any other, probably because of the brutality of it coupled with their ages and the days he spent torturing them.

Anzilotti tried to elicit a confession for years as Mary Anns sister, Nancy, repeatedly checked in with detectives for updates. In March, Anzilotti announced that he was ending his 29-year career in law enforcement. But he had one last case to solve.

I didnt want to retire until this was complete, he said.

He brought Cottingham from state prison in Trenton up to the prosecutors Paramus offices three times in the last montha 75-mile trip each waypushing him to finally admit to the murders of Mary Ann and Lorraine.

Anzilotti got the confession on April 14. Cottingham pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

The detectives last day as a police officer is Saturday.

By Stefanie Dazio and David Porter
ANDERSON COUNTY, SR 61 Bridge over Norfolk Southern Railway and Market Street in Clinton: SR 61 East is reduced to one lane through this bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this area.

ANDERSON COUNTY, US 25/SR 9 Bridge over Clinch River between SR 61 and Carden Farm Drive: SR 9 northbound is reduced to one lane approaching the bridge as crews continue work in this area. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this bridge construction project.

BLOUNT COUNTY, US 129 North and South between SR 35 Hall Road and Tyson Boulevard: Motorists should be alert for workers present, possible lane closures and brief stoppages of traffic through this roadway construction project. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-hall-road-to-tyson-blvd.html

BLOUNT COUNTY, SR 335 Hunt Road between Ambrose Street and Ramsay Street: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures at various times as crews install utilities through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present directing traffic and use extreme caution through this area.

BLOUNT COUNTY, SR 33 between Foothills Mall Drive and Henry Street: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this intersection improvement construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changed conditions, and use extreme caution through this area.

BLOUNT COUNTY, US 321 between Jones Avenue and Lamar Street: Motorists should be alert for possible daily lane closures as crews perform roadside work through this project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, I-75 North and South between Mile Markers 135 and 142: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, I-75 North near Mile Marker 143: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning on Sundays through Thursdays through this project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, I-75 South near Mile Marker 154.4: On Thursday, May 6, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, SR 63 between Myers Lane and Frontier Road/Woodson Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and/or 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CARTER COUNTY, US 19E/SR 37 Bridge over the Doe River and Riverview Road: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

CLAIBORNE COUNTY, SR 63 between Old Town Creek and US 25E/SR 32: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect delays and use extreme caution through this area.

GREENE COUNTY, US 11E/SR 34 both directions between Blue Springs Parkway and Forest Road in Mosheim: Motorists should be alert for lane closures and lane shifts through this area for bridge repair operations. These lane closures will remain in place 24/7 until repairs are complete. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, and

use extreme caution in this area. This bridge repair project is estimated to be complete on or before October 31, 2021.

HAMBLEN COUNTY, SR 34 near Commerce Blvd.: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

HAMBLEN COUNTY, SR 160 near Commerce Blvd.: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

JEFFERSON COUNTY, I-40 West near Mile Marker 413: On Wednesday, May 5, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

JOHNSON COUNTY, SR 167 at Log Mile 7.5: Motorists should be alert for single lane roadway with temporary traffic signal through this slide repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, I-40 East and West between Mile Markers 376 and 383: On Sunday, May 2, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible rolling roadblocks to occur between the hours of 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. as utility crews perform overhead line work. Motorists should be alert for slow or stopped traffic, expect delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, I-40 West near Mile Marker 395.6: On Thursday, April 29, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, Various Interstates through Knoxville: On Thursday, April 29, 2021 and Monday, May 2, 2021 through Thursday, May 6, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible mobile lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform roadway maintenance activities. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, US 129/SR 115 Alcoa Highway between Topside Road and Maloney Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures and lane shifts as crews perform work through this project. Motorists should be alert for new traffic patterns. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduce speed and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-little-river-to-maloney.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 129/SR 115 Alcoa Highway between Maloney Road and Woodson Drive: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures and lane shifts as crews perform work through this project. Motorists should be alert for new traffic patterns. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduce speed and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-maloney-to-woodson.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 441 Broadway Viaduct between Jackson Avenue and Fifth Avenue: US 441 Broadway Viaduct over Norfolk Southern Railroad in downtown Knoxville is closed for bridge replacement. The Broadway Viaduct will be closed to all traffic for the duration of the project. During the closure, Broadway will be closed from the intersection of Oak Avenue, Worlds Fair Park, and Jackson Avenue to just north of the Depot Avenue intersection. Depot Avenue will also be closed. These closures will ensure the safety of workers and motorists as crews demolish the old bridge and reconstruct the new bridge. Primary and Local Detour Routes around the bridge closure will be in place. For detour routes and project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/broadway-viaduct.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 441/SR 71 Chapman Highway between Highland View Drive and Burnett Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/chapman-highway-evans-to-burnett.html

KNOX COUNTY, SR 62 Western Avenue between Copper Kettle and Texas Avenue: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, SR 162 Pellissippi Parkway West at Hardin Valley Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, SR 332 Concord Road between Turkey Creek Road and Northshore: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. and new traffic patterns through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-332-proposed-widening.html

LOUDON COUNTY, I-75 North and South between Mile Markers 79 and 84: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, expect delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

LOUDON COUNTY, SR 2 between Loudon Middle School and Carter Street: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

ROANE COUNTY, I-40 West between Mile Markers 340 and 344: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures at various times through this slope stabilization project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this area.

ROANE COUNTY, I-40 East near Mile Marker 353: Beginning Sunday, May 2, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews set portable barrier rails through this slope stabilization project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

ROANE COUNTY, I-40 West near Mile Marker 365.7: On Thursday, April 29, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

SCOTT COUNTY, US 27/SR 29 between Industrial Lane and Second Avenue: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

SEVIER COUNTY, I-40 East near Mile Marker 406.3: On Tuesday, May 4, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

SEVIER COUNTY, I-40 East and West between Mile Markers 405 and 412: Through Thursday, April 29, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. the following morning as crews perform roadway maintenance activities. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

SEVIER COUNTY, SR 71 between US 411 and Macon Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, I-81 North & South between Mile Markers 57 and 63: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures nightly between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution in this area. This bridge repair project is estimated to be complete on or before May 31, 2021.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, SR 355 between Log Miles 1 and 3: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

UNICOI COUNTY, I-26 East and West near Mile Marker 33: Motorists should be alert for lane closures as I-26 will be reduced to one lane in each direction around the clock through this bridge repair project. Wide loads should follow signed detour routes. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area. This project is estimated to be complete on or before August 31, 2021.

UNICOI COUNTY, I-26 West near Mile Marker 35.3: On Monday, May 3, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform guardrail repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area.

UNICOI COUNTY, SR 81 between Log Miles 0 and 1.8: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. through this resurfacing and safety project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

UNICOI COUNTY, SR 107 between 6th Street and SR 173: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. through this resurfacing and safety project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

WASHINGTON COUNTY, SR 93 between Davis Road and Fire Hall Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, and use caution through this area.

WASHINGTON COUNTY, SR 354 Boones Creek Road at I-26: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this project. Motorists should be alert for new traffic patterns and follow new guide signs and pavement markings through this intersection. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect delays and use extreme caution through this area.

For information on statewide interstate construction motorists can access the Tennessee Department of Transportation SmartWay website at https://smartway.tn.gov/traffic

TDOT is now on Twitter. For up to the minute traffic information in Knoxville and the Tri-Cities follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/knoxville511. For statewide travel information follow www.twitter.com/TN511
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She won two Oscars on Sunday.

And Frances McDormand celebrated by indulging in a night out to a showbiz hot spot in West Hollywood this Wednesday.

The 63-year-old actress was spotted heading to the restaurant Craig's with her filmmaker husband Joel Coen and their son Pedro.

She won two Oscars on Sunday: And Frances McDormand celebrated by indulging in a night out to a showbiz hot spot in West Hollywood this Wednesday

Frances demonstrated her idiosyncratic street style by buttoning a professorial chic brown blazer over a print blouse.

The acclaimed thespian teamed the top with a pair of moss green harem trousers that complemented her mask.

At one point she could be seen affectionately walking arm in arm with her son, whom she and Joel adopted from Paraguay in 1995.

Joel and Frances have been married since 1984 and her first Academy Award was for a movie they made together back in the 1990s.

Family time: The 63-year-old actress was spotted heading to the restaurant Craig's with her filmmaker husband Joel Coen and their son Pedro

Looking fab: Frances demonstrated her idiosyncratic street style by buttoning a professorial chic brown blazer over a print blouse

She scored the best actress gong in 1997 for Fargo which was written and directed by Joel and his brother Ethan who is his longtime collaborator.

Just three years ago she won the same award again for Martin McDonagh's film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Then this past Sunday she won best actress for the third time, now for her performance in Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland.

She triumphed over a tough category made up of Viola Davis for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Olivia Colman for The Father, Vanessa Kirby for Pieces Of A Woman and Andra Day for The United States Vs Billie Holiday.

Legging it: The acclaimed thespian teamed the top with a pair of moss green harem trousers that complemented her mask

Nomadland also got best picture - the lowest-grossing winner of that prize ever - and since Frances was one of the producers she shared in that honor as well.

At the end of the acceptance speech for best picture Frances said: 'We give this one to our wolf,' and let out a huge howl.

Chloe later revealed that the howl was in memory of Nomadland sound engineer Michael Wolf Snyder who tragically committed suicide last month aged 35.

Chloe also went home with best director, becoming only the second woman to win that award and the first Asian woman to do so.

Triumphant: This past Sunday she won best actress for the third time, now for her performance in Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland
The number of dairy producers in Britain has declined over 4 percent compared to last year, a survey of major milk buyers suggests.

In the year to end of March 2021, there were an estimated 8,040 dairy producers in Great Britain.

This is a 4.1% reduction - equivalent of 340 farmers - compared to the year before, AHDB's survey suggests.

The estimate represents the number of producers actively contributing to British milk production.

It is based on the number of active producers and temporary inactive producers from the milk buyers that contribute to AHDB's Daily Milk Deliveries survey.

This covers approximately 78% of volumes in GB, and so the estimate has been adjusted accordingly.

Chris Gooderham, AHDB Dairy's head of market specialists said: "Our most recent survey of major milk buyers suggests that in April there were an estimated 8,040 dairy producers in GB.

"This is a reduction of 340 producers (4.1%) compared with the survey we undertook this time last year."

The latest numbers also suggests that the average volume per farm in GB has now risen to 1.56 million litres per year.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - UK car production increased for the first time since summer 2019, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, or SMMT, said Thursday. Car output grew 46.6 percent in March against Covid hit 2020 when pandemic forced factories to close. Production expanded in March after 18 months of decline, with an output of 115,498 units. Compared with the five-year March average, production decreased 22.8 percent. In the first quarter, output was down 4 percent from the last year. In March, production for domestic market climbed 19.4 percent and that for foreign markets surged 54.1 percent. Exports to the EU climbed 33.5 percent and shipments to the US and Asia by 36.4 percent and 54.1 percent, respectively. The EU remained by far the number one market for UK made cars. Whilst the Covid situation is improving in the UK and in some major export markets, manufacturers are still struggling to manage residual issues, most notably the global semiconductor shortage, Mike Hawes, SMMT Chief Executive, said. 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.
Xiaomi loves rebranding devices between its various sub-brands based on market and... really, who knows what else. The company's lineup has grown increasingly confusing, naming-wise, in no small part thanks to the incessant rebrandings here and there, and it looks like it's not going to stop anytime soon.

Today a new rumor claims that the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition smartphone that was unveiled yesterday for the Chinese market will eventually be offered in India as well. But, obviously, not under the same name - that would be too easy.

No, instead, you will be able to purchase the same device in the subcontinent, branded Poco F3 GT. Now that "GT" moniker affixed to the name is interesting, since the Realme GT exists. And also the GT Neo, which has the same chipset as the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition and was supposed to arrive in India as the X7 Max 5G. See, it's not just Xiaomi playing these games. But it's funny to see it 'borrowing' something from Realme, considering that rumor has it the name Realme itself was created to be similar enough to Redmi without any possible litigation.

Anyway, while we wait for any type of official confirmation on whether the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition will actually be sold in India as the Poco F3 GT, let's do a refresher on the specs on offer. There's a 6.67" 1080x2400 120 Hz OLED screen with 1B colors, the Dimensity 1200 chipset at the helm with 6/8/12 GB of RAM and 128/256 GB of storage, a triple rear camera system (64 MP main, 8 MP ultrawide, 2 MP macro), a 16 MP selfie snapper, stereo speakers tuned by JBL, and a 5,065 mAh battery with 67W fast charging.

Finally, let's mention that the same tipster who uncovered what will happen in India also says there's no chance of the Redmi K40 Gaming showing up in Europe, under any name. That's a shame, for sure.

Source | Via
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Germany on Thursday said that it had cases of a COVID-19 variant feared to be contributing to a devastating surge in India, the latest country to detect the strain.

"We have isolated cases in Germany, we will release a new report tomorrow," Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute infectious disease agency, told reporters when asked about the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19, which was first found in India.

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that the variant had been detected in "at least 17 countries".

"Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, U.S. and Singapore," the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.

India is struggling with skyrocketing new cases and deaths, and fears are rising that the variant could be contributing to the unfolding catastrophe.

The explosion in infections in India has driven a surge in global cases. The virus has now killed more than 3.1 million people worldwide.

Germany is currently grappling with a third wave of the pandemic and on Saturday tightened nationwide shutdown measures to try to contain the outbreak.

Europe's top economy on Thursday reported nearly 25,000 new cases in the previous 24 hours and 264 more deaths, bringing the total to 82,544.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
Romania's diplomatic missions and consular offices will set up in 2021 over 100 itinerant (mobile) consulates, according to the country's Foreign Ministry (MAE).

The sites where the mobile consulates will be set up and the estimate of the time in which they will be open can be found on the website of the MAE: www.mae.ro/sites/default/files/file/anul_2021/2021_pdf/lista_consulate_itinerante_urmare_consultarii.pdf.

At the same time, MAE says that since the beginning of this year, 10 itinerant (mobile) consulates of the initially planned ones have already been set up in Australia (Brisbane), Italy (Reggio Calabria), Malta (Aura), Denmark (Aalborg) , the UK (Newcastle, Bristol, Plymouth, Hull and Coventry), and Spain (Canary Islands).Since the inception of this process on April 1, 2021, more than 1,000 requests and proposals have been received (by e-mail, phone or social media), and based on these recommendations, compared to the initially proposed calendar, itinerant consulates will also be set up in Italy (Trapani, Sicily), the United States of America (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix) and Ecuador (Quito). Also, as a result of this process, the time/location where the mobile consulates are to be set up in Australia, Canada, Greece, France, and the United States of America have changed.
Farmers are being encouraged to boost security in their farmyards as thieves increasingly target expensive GPS kits following the easing of lockdown.

In recent weeks thefts of expensive global positioning system (GPS) equipment has been reported in East Anglia, the Midlands and North West of England.

Opportunistic criminals are stealing all makes and models of GPS control units, together with screens and domes.

Rural insurer NFU Mutual is warning farmers to increase their security amid a 'spring surge' in thefts.

Were seeing a resurgence in GPS theft in some areas and we are concerned it could spread to other parts of the UK, said Bob Henderson, who leads NFU Mutuals Agricultural Engineering Field Team.

Its worryingly similar to last years unprecedented surge in GPS theft, which saw equipment stolen from farms across the UK.

DC Chris Piggott co-ordinates the agricultural vehicle crime unit at the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (NaVCIS).

He said GPS theft was an international crime, with countries across the globe experiencing thefts and attempts to sell stolen equipment back into the farming sector.

"There are also homegrown-criminals stealing GPS systems as people turn to criminal activity to make a quick buck," he added.

NaVCIS is supporting operations across the UK to tackle organised agricultural machinery crime and is working with overseas police forces to disrupt international crime gangs.

Asked about reasons behind the trend, Mr Henderson said thieves were taking advantage of increased spring activity on farms to identify targets.

"With lockdown easing, criminals may feel able to travel without risk of being stopped," he explained.

These criminals are well-organised and know what they are looking for - so its essential that farmers remove GPS kit when possible when its not in use and store it securely.

"Its also well worth beefing up security in farm yards, machinery sheds and on tractors to make it harder for thieves to operate.

Both organisations are urging farmers across the country with GPS systems to activate PIN number security codes.

On older models without PIN security, marking kit with farm names and postcodes in indelible ink can make it harder for thieves to sell on and help police spot stolen equipment.

Demand for GPS equipment is fuelling this type of crime and we are urging people to think twice before purchasing second-hand items online, said DC Piggott.

Although police have shut some bogus sellers down, they are emerging again under false names and purporting to be UK sellers.

Anyone considering a purchase should get photos showing serial numbers before parting with any money and check with the manufacturer that it is not recorded stolen."

How can I increase GPS security?

To protect GPS systems from thieves, NFU Mutual has issued farmers the following advice:

 Activate PIN security on GPS kit with your own unique number if available

 If your system is not pin enabled, mark your postcode to deter thieves and trace your property back to you

 Keep tractors and combines with GPS fitted stored out of sight when possible

 Remove GPS kit when possible from tractors and other machinery and store it securely when not in use

 Record serial numbers and photograph your kit

 Check serial numbers of second-hand kit offered for sale
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and technology public relations and marketing firm, announced that Connect America, the nation's largest independent provider of medical alert systems, has selected the firm to amplify client successes and industry best practices after a competitive review of agencies.

Connect America offers a full suite of reliable connected health solutions, including personal emergency response systems, remote patient monitoring and medication management solutions. Working with more than 1,000 healthcare network partners, Connect America has improved the quality of life for more than a million subscribers and their caregivers during more than 35 years of life safety monitoring.

"I have worked with Amendola previously which gives me the confidence that Amendola is the firm best able to help us achieve our growth goals with highly effective marketing, PR and social media support. They were my first phone call when I sought a PR partner at Connect America. I am thrilled to be working with them again," said Janet Dillione, chief executive officer of Connect America. "The agency's experience in healthcare as well as its deep expertise in marketing and public relations will help us to communicate the value of our connected health solutions that keep patients across the U.S. safe every day."

"Vulnerable populations such as the elderly often need immediate medical intervention in the event of emergencies such as falls, medication mismanagement, or sudden changes in vital signs," said agency CEO Jodi Amendola. "It is so gratifying to work with a repeat client to help tell its story and to educate the company's target market on the value of its personal emergency response and remote monitoring systems. Connect America saves lives."

Amendola is implementing a comprehensive media and communications plan for Connect America that will showcase the company's current technology and services, new offerings, accomplishments, customer wins, and industry partnerships. Recently Connect America announced it has been awarded a three-year contract to provide Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) to Medicaid recipients in New York City.

About Amendola Communications

Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry's best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola's seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry's "A-Team," visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Connect America

Headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Connect America is a leading provider of connected health solutions dedicated to improving access to care, safety, independence, and quality of life. Its growing portfolio of medical alert systems, remote patient monitoring, and medication management solutions help bridge the gap between individuals and their health partners, providing a more connected health experience. Connect America is proud to offer innovative healthcare technologies that help improve the lives of those they serve. For more than 35 years, the company has been delivering value-based solutions committed to quality care, improved health outcomes, increased patient satisfaction, and reduced costs. Its mission is to ensure that every individual, patient, and provider have access to the life-saving benefits of receiving the right care at the right time.

Media Contact:

Kim Warth

Amendola Communications

303-918-9205

[email protected]

SOURCE Amendola Communications

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As the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic rages in Nepal, people have been sharing various kinds of information related to the disease including some supposed home remedies on social media platforms. One such social media post accompanied by a picture suggesting a traditional remedy for low blood oxygen levels has been widely shared on Twitter and Facebook.

The post reads as follows: Take three-four cubes of camphor, three-four cloves, a teaspoon of carom seeds and two-three drops of eucalyptus oil, wrap up the mixture in a piece of soft cotton cloth and sniff it from time to time. [Every time] after sniffing, put the pouch back into a Ziploc bag. If Eucalyptus oil is not available, you can do without it.

On April 26, Rama Singh, a former news anchor of the state-run Nepal Television, shared a picture along with the message on her Facebook page. Facebook users have thanked Singh for the information. One user also shared a Hindi-language video clip with instructions for preparing and using the remedy. Singhs post has received 30 responses and more than 4,000 shares on Facebook. The post along the picture has been shared here and here on Twitter and here and here on Facebook. The post had gone viral in India. In Nepal, it appears that many social media users have shared Singhs post.

South Asia Check found the supposed remedy is misleading and baseless.

According to Prakash Gyawali, a doctor of traditional Ayurveda medicine, although camphor, cloves and carom seeds are natural ingredients used in traditional remedies, the claim that their use boosts blood oxygen levels in humans is unfounded. The Ayurveda hasnt described these items as medicines. In order for something to be an Ayurvedic medicine, it has to be mentioned in the related literature, Gyawali tells South Asia Check.

Camphor helps open the nose in case of cold while cloves dry the phlegm, Gyawali says. Carom seed is also mixed in various medicines. If you have chest problems, it is used because of its expectorant or drying properties, he says.

A mix of eucalyptus oil and herbs can be used to relieve cough symptoms, according to him. It can be used as a nasal decongestant. It makes it easier to breathe, but there is no evidence that it raises oxygen levels, he says.

Dr Pushpa Mani Kharal, the medical superintendent at Mulpani Municipal Hospital in Kathmandu, says there is no evidence that using the herbs would increase the blood oxygen level. To increase the oxygen level, your lungs have to be healthy. Or oxygen should be given artificially, Kharal tells South Asia Check.

There are other ways such as lying in a prone position (sleeping on your knees and belly), deep breathing, etc. These exercises can make breathing easier, he says.

Also, we did an extensive search on Google, but could not find any reliable information to support the claim that the aforementioned mixture boosts blood oxygen levels. You can read about the benefits of camphor and clove on WebMD, a US-based publisher of health-related information.

Based on the statements of the two doctors and other references, the widely shared claim that the use of a mix of camphor, clove, carom seeds and eucalyptus oil increases the oxygen level is misleading and baseless.

This article was first published on South Asia Check.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks in the Harlem section of Manhattan on April 23, 2021. (Mike Segar/AFP via Getty Images)

New York Legislature Begins to Repeal Gov. Cuomos Pandemic Orders

New Yorks Democrat-led legislature repealed several of Gov. Andrew Cuomos pandemic directives on April 28.

The states Assembly and Senate voted to repeal parts of a series of executive orders Cuomo issued over the course of the CCP virus pandemic.

The repealed provisions include the stipulation that bars require patrons to purchase food when ordering alcohol. The restriction was deemed arbitrary and ridiculed by bar owners, some of whom introduced menu items like Cuomo chips to sidestep it. When the governor said chips wouldnt be enough to meet the requirement, one restaurant introduced Cuomo chips and salsa.

I believe the order was conceived in good faith when COVID was raging, vaccines seemed far away and we didnt have the scientific knowledge that we have now about the virus, state Sen. John Mannion, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter.

Its [sic] clear now that some edicts from the executive, including requiring the purchase of food with alcohol are arbitrary and not based on science, he said. I have yet to find any scientific literature that finds a correlation between ordering food with your drink and stopping the spread of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP virus.

The Assembly and Senate also repealed a provision concerning volunteers who worked with the states government during the pandemic. Those volunteers would now have to be treated as public officers and comply with ethics and government disclosure requirements. The change will affect Cuomo advisers, including Larry Schwartz, who volunteered to oversee the states vaccine distribution process.

Before the start of the days legislative session, Cuomo announced a timeline for lifting the curfews for bars and restaurants. The move was seen by some as a result of the repeals planned later in the day by the states legislature.

I assure you the governor was not at all pleased that we are passing these repeals today. And in fact, I dare say the additional announcements he made this morning are a direct result of our taking this action today because we made it very clear we are going to continue to review the existing directives and continue to assert ourselves as we see fit, New York Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris, a Democrat, said on Twitter.

The lawmakers also repealed parts of three executive orders dealing with penalties related to vaccine administration.

These executive orders were issued in order to respond to the constantly evolving health crisis. Now, as New Yorkers continue to get vaccinated, and our infection rate continues to go down, there are executive orders that are no longer applicable or necessary, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, said in a statement.

In March, the legislature passed a bill limiting the governors emergency powers.

Cuomo is fending off an investigation into his administrations handling of nursing home CCP virus deaths and accusations of improper conduct from several women. Top nation and state Democrats have called on him to resign, but the governor has shown no sign that he intends to give up his post.

Cuomos office didnt respond to a request for comment by press time.
While the pre-production of Unni Mukundans home banner film, Meppadiyan, was what kept him going during last years lockdown, this year, the actor says he is praying and hoping the current crises would end soon.

I hope and believe that the second wave of the pandemic will end soon. I am trying to be optimistic about life, thinking that tomorrow will be a better day, shares the actor.

The current situation is horrible. But it shouldnt affect us to such an extent that we cannot stage a comeback. People cannot be depressed and shouldnt get into a shell; its very important to spread hope and positivity at this hour, says the actor, who keeps reading books, listening to inspiring music and singing to stay positive. Unni will be next seen in the Ravi Teja-starrer Khiladi, his third Telugu film after Janatha Garage and Bhaagamathie.

The Malayalam actor shares that he is very choosy when it comes to Telugu films. I have been constantly busy in Malayalam. Moreover, I turned producer recently. So if I have to do a film thats beyond my Malayalam shores it has to be a great and convincing script, and a kickass role. I believe my role in Khiladi is one such role, and is completely different from what I have done in Telugu, he shares, adding that director Ramesh Varma shot the film stylishly.

Unni also thanks the Telugu audience for accepting and welcoming him. As far as learning Telugu is concerned, Unni reveals that language was never a barrier for him. I am fluent in Telugu, and I can also speak Gujarati, and a few other languages, he says.
VACAVILLE  A man charged with killing a woman in Northern California was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of setting a fire to cover up the crime that spread and killed two other people, authorities said.

Victor Serriteno, 29, of Vacaville was booked after an eight-month-long criminal investigation, the Solano County Sheriff's Office said.

Solano County District Attorney Krishna Abrams said he will be charged with additional counts of murder and arson and was scheduled to be arraigned Friday.

Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register.

Serriteno was already jailed without bail after being arrested last year for the death of 32-year-old Priscilla Castro. Her burned body was found on Sept. 2 near Lake Berryessa.

Serriteno pleaded not guilty to her murder.

Castro vanished on Aug. 16 after failing to return home from a planned date with Serriteno in Vacaville, authorities said. The two had met online.

Two days later, a blaze dubbed the Markley Fire erupted in the area where Castro's body was found and merged with other blazes to become the LNU Lightning Complex, which caused six deaths and destroyed about 1,500 homes and other buildings in six counties  Napa, Lake, Yolo, Solano, Colusa and Sonoma.
The old Odlums building on Kennedy Quay has a particular name in our house.

My research assistants are inclined to call it the Matrix house, based on the five minutes theyve seen of the Keanu Reeves film.

The rain streaming down those buttresses, the post-industrial landscape, the eerily wide space stretching out front to the river: they might have a point.

The building is impressive even as a disused shell, dwarfing the people drifting up from the Marina Market further down the quay. More often than not, one or two of them will stop and look up from the coffee or the burrito, and you can almost read their thoughts.

Wouldnt this make a sensational apartment building? Wouldnt this be the coolest address in Cork?

Driver, One Odlum Towers, and step on it.

In one way, its almost disappointing that it hasnt been colonised already. It looks turnkey-ready for a nest of artists, with ideas and creativity and debate and direction flowing out of it. If you close your eyes  mind that coffee and burrito  you can almost imagine the creative types practically spilling out through those long, narrow windows.

But only in one way, as I said.

In another way, is it a blessing that this phase in the life of the building has already been leapfrogged?

Let me explain. At present, your columnist is working his way through New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation, an absolutely terrific book by Tom Dyja about New Yorks ups and downs over the last 40 years.

I hesitate to give a precise order for that rise and fall, or fall and rise, because there are so many moving parts involved  international money and local tax schemes, disco and hip-hop, rocketing crime statistics that then plummet, various fiefdoms in elbows-out political combat, reputations ebbing and flowing with the decades. Its difficult to put your finger on a year, month, or even a particular week when something seismic isnt happening.

Whats noticeable, though, is the recognisable cycle in at least one significant area of the citys life  the rolling gentrification of once-neglected areas, which then become havens for the super-rich.

If this phenomenon didnt actually spring to life in New York, its closely identified with the city through the restoration of parts of Brooklyn, for instance.

This was no small matter. In the late '80s, your columnist visited a couple of Brooklyn neighbourhoods briefly and, with all due respect, at least once, I swallowed hard about my prospects of getting out in one piece after the sun went down.

All change now. A couple of years ago, I visited again in the company of the great John Riordan, once of this parish. He issued a warning on the subway journey, though.

Dont be that guy.

What guy? I asked.

You know, mocking the place. Brooklyn, hipsters, painfully cool. Its not like that at all.

We came up out of the subway station on Flatbush Ave to be greeted by a man offering to write poetry to order. For cash. On a manual typewriter. Which was perched on a little desk in front of him.

(I see this all the time on Patrick St, I said to Riordan afterwards.)

Even then, though, Brooklyn rents were skyrocketing, and John was pointing out premises which once housed small shops but which were now occupied by bank branches, the only organisations which could absorb the increased rents.

The point here is that for a brief period of time the two co-exist: the hipster poet with his consciously analogue props is there, but the faceless, frictionless arrival of serious money is also occurring. This imbalance never lasts for long, and those who have made the area attractive in the first place pack up and move on.

Thats why the cynic in me, never silent for very long, wonders if weve been proactive in Cork by sidestepping this inevitable phase down on Kennedy Quay.

Instead of a couple of years in which an alternative vision for the future can be encountered in the flesh, where you can see artists and makers of all types living and working in the city, why not accelerate directly to the victory of dead-eyed capitalism?

There isnt a seamless match when it comes to the circumstances in Cork and super-cities such as New York. That goes without saying. But lessons learned in the hyper-accelerated urban laboratory across the water can be absorbed here.

Take the unintended consequences of integrating old infrastructure and new developments. One of the great achievements of modern New York, as Tom Dyja teases out, is the High Line, a public park created by repurposing an abandoned stretch of elevated rail line.

Once a derelict steel hulk, now its a soothing park and walking area in the heart of the city: readers whove been to the city will probably recall a high greenway they walked on, or at least saw in the distance.

But part of the original deal in refurbishing that rail line was an interesting agreement with those who owned the land alongside it. In exchange for relinquishing their air rights near the High Line, those landowners could build bigger, higher buildings, writes Dyja, most likely luxury apartments.

(He also points out that when leaving office as mayor, Rudy Giuliani signed a demolition order for the original rail line, but thats for another day.)

If weve moved past the chances of the Odlums building becoming an artists' colony, is this the next incarnation for it? As an adrenalising agent for construction prices, a steroidal booster when it comes to the closest apartment block?

A reader asked me recently why I was so interested in the Docklands, and whether it had anything to do with the good coffee now widely available there.

Achieving something memorable

Shrugging off the calumny, I pointed out that there was an opportunity to achieve something memorable in the area as its being redeveloped.

I added that I couldnt remember the last time such a large swathe of the city was due for such a sweeping change, and we all had a civic obligation to pitch in and contribute to the best possible outcome, in whatever form that contribution could take.

Hence, I said, sweeping to a memorable conclusion, the centrality of somewhere such as Odlums to my vision, or your vision, of what should be done with the area.

This was just one interesting sideshow in Dyjas book, by the way. There are dozens, including the ongoing importance of public parks in the renaissance of New York, and how the viability of those parks as assets to the public is a key indicator of the citys health as a whole (which I may come back to at a later stage.)

One throwaway line summed up the gentrification cycle better than anything else.

At the end of his book, Dyja lists the changes in New York: the fact that Ernst and Youngs headquarters now occupies the space where Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat first hung their paintings jumps out.

Keep that in mind when youre daydreaming about what to do with Odlums.
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (Farmer Mac;NYSE: AGM and AGM.A), the nation's secondary market provider that increases the availability and affordability of credit for the benefit of rural America, today announced that it will release its financial results for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2021, on Thursday, May 6, 2021, after the closing of equity markets. A conference call to discuss the results will be held that day at 4:30 p.m. eastern time.

The conference call can be accessed by telephone or webcast as follows:

Dial-In (Domestic): (888) 645-4404

Dial-In (International): (862) 298-0702

Webcast: https://www.farmermac.com/investors/events-presentations/

When dialing in to the call, please ask for the "Farmer Mac Earnings Conference Call." This call can be heard live and will also be available for replay on Farmer Mac's website following the conclusion of the conference call.

About Farmer Mac

Farmer Mac is a vital part of the agricultural credit markets and was created to increase access to and reduce the cost of credit for the benefit of American agricultural and rural communities. As the nation's secondary market for agricultural credit, we provide financial solutions to a broad spectrum of the agricultural community, including agricultural lenders, agribusinesses, and other institutions that can benefit from access to flexible, low-cost financing and risk management tools. Farmer Mac's customers benefit from our low cost of funds, low overhead costs, and high operational efficiency. More information about Farmer Mac is available on Farmer Mac's website at www.farmermac.com.

SOURCE Farmer Mac

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Crude oil projects involving private companies in Mexico could bring an additional 704,000 bpd to total national oil production by 2030, BNAmericas has reported, citing a commissioner from Mexicos oil and gas regulator, CNH.

This year, the output from projects involving private companies is seen at 264,000 bpd. This means this output is set to grow by some 18 percent annually, according to commissioner Hector Moreira.

Whats more, more than half of that additional oil production in 2030 will come from projects that are exclusively operated by private companies, at 54.2 percent of the total. Another 35.2 percent will come from farm-out contracts between Pemex and private players. The rest will come from projects exclusively operated by the Mexican state-owned energy major.

The contracts that made possible this additional output were introduced by the previous Mexican government, which came into power with ambitious plans for opening up the countrys energy industry to foreign players to stimulate growth.

As part of the reforms that the Pena Nieto government introduced, public and private companies were allowed to bid against each other to develop oil and gas blocks. At the same time, Pemex had the option to sign contracts with private companies to operate blocks originally awarded to the state-owned company in case it could not afford to develop them on its own.

When the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador replaced the Pena Nieto administration, all oil and gas tenders were canceled until further notice, as the new administration began investigating the already signed contracts for evidence of corruption.

At the same time, the government seeks to restore Pemexs dominant position in the local oil and fuels market. Earlier this month, the Mexican Congress passed a bill that would strengthen Pemexs hold over the local fuel market by removing a stipulation that prioritized private company fuel sales over those by the state-owned major.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Michigan has ordered municipalities to replace all lead lines over 20 years. But that is costly, and is being mostly passed onto consumers, raising concerns for those who cant afford it and if that timeline can be met.
From left to right; DCNR Assistant District Manager Scott Rimpa, DCNR Service Forester for the Bureau of Forestry Mark Lewis and Crawford County Commissioner Francis Weiderspahn visit the site of a past county timber sale on Tuesday. This site was chosen for ecology-based cutting and will see the area naturally replenish itself.
Designer-branded drugs, bags of cash and luxury cars have been uncovered by police during a raid on a bikie stronghold, cops allege.

Officers busted their way into the properties across Sydney and Wollongong, allegedly discovering evidence of illicit activity  and the designer clobber bought with the ill-gotten gains.

Six men were arrested in the raids, with one man being hauled out in Gucci slides while another was handcuffed in his underwear.

Police say they seized guns, 12.5kg of illicit drugs with a combined street value of $12million, $1.2million in cash, Rolex watches, Louis Vuitton sunglasses, and even Christian Dior-plated bricks of cocaine.

NSW Police have busted an alleged criminal syndicate linked to bikies who are accused of dealing illegal drugs and guns, after raids across Sydney and Wollongong

Detectives had been investigating the supply of drugs and alleged criminal activities in the state's south since September 2019 - allegedly finding Dior-branded cocaine and a Rolex watch

Strike Force Gommera was set up to investigate the syndicate's link to Sydney-based outlaw motorcycle gangs (pictured, two of the men arrested)

Detectives had been investigating the supply of drugs and alleged criminal activities in the state's south since September 2019.

Police allege a criminal syndicate was supplying illegal drugs - mainly cocaine, MDMA and methylamphetamine across Sydney's eastern beaches, southwest Sydney and the south coast.

In February, Strike Force Gommera was set up to investigate the syndicate's link to Sydney-based outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Officers seized more than $1million cash, three firearms with ammunition, four luxury cars, jewellery with a value of more than $1million, electronic devices, 100L of chemicals used in the manufacture of illegal drugs and items consistent with their supply.

The 12.5kg of illicit drugs included cocaine, MDMA and ice with a street value exceeding $12million.

The men were led away from their homes in Sydney and Wollongong lined with luxury cars

Louis Vuitton sunglasses were among the items seized in raids across Sydney and Wollongong, police say, as well as bags of cash

Cops found $1.2million in cash during the raids across Sydney and Wollongong

On Wednesday, a 36-year-old man was arrested in a car park in Bulli on the south coast.

Officers then raided properties in Dover Heights, Miranda, Revesby, Pyrmont, Peakhurst, Rose Bay, Taren Point and Zetland.

A further five men - aged 26, 28, 31, 31, and 47 - were arrested and charged with drug and firearms offences.

The 47-year-old was charged with supplying a large commercial quantity of a prohibited drug, supplying a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug, participating in a criminal group and dealing with the proceeds of crime.

A 31-year-old was charged with supplying a large commercial quantity of a prohibited drug, supplying a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug and directing the activities of a criminal group.

All were refused bail to appear in various courts on Thursday.

Police allege a syndicate was supplying drugs, mainly cocaine, MDMA and methylamphetamine (ice), across Sydney's east, southwest Sydney and south coast (pictured, white crystals in a bucket allegedly found during the raids)

Police also charged a man in relation to the alleged importing of an estimated $2.7million worth of cocaine hidden in clay bricks.

Australian Border Force officers identified a shipment that arrived in Sydney on Sunday from the United Kingtom.

The cosignment was declared to have two clay blocks, but after examinaton from Border Force they found inconsistencies.

Officers eventually discovered 9kg of a white powder packed into the bricks, which returned a presumptive positive result for cocaine.

A 23-year-old man was subsequently arrested after making inquiries and charged with possess commercial quantity suspect illegal import border control drug.

Investigations are continuing.

Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting the two cases are related.
Earlier this week, some YouTube TV subscribers awoke to an alarming email from Roku, telling them that Google might take away their access to the live TV streaming service.

And thats exactly what happened on Friday morning, at least for users who havent downloaded the app yet. While Roku users who already have the YouTube TV app can keep using it for now, its no longer available to download from Rokus Channel Store.

In its email to customers, Roku essentially accused Google of being a bully, using anticompetitive tactics to manipulate search results, increase costs, and affect how their data is used. Roku has also been making its case to the press, describing a list of seemingly outlandish demands that Google had made as a condition of keeping YouTube TV on the platform. The ostensible goal was to create a public outrage, both among users and a government thats increasingly wary of big tech monopolies.

Initially, I bought into it myself. But after looking more closely at Rokus claimsand Googles subsequent denialsits clear that both companies are stretching the truth to suit their own purposes. Instead of being about one company bullying another, this is really a case of two large corporations battling a petty game of inches, one in which users get jerked around the most.

Rokus side of the story

Below is a paraphrased summary of everything Roku is claiming in this disputebest summarized in this Axios storyalong with my best attempts to suss out whats actually happening:

Roku says: Google forced us to add a dedicated search results row for YouTube.

This appears to have already happened. Try searching for a movie or show on Roku, and if you scroll down enough, youll find a dedicated strip of YouTube results at the bottom.

Jared Newman / IDG YouTube gets its own row on Rokus search results page, but you must click down a few times to find it.

In theory it would be bad if every video app got its own row of search results like this, but YouTube is sort of a special case in terms of the content it offers. Many of the things you search for on YouTube are unlikely to show up elsewhere; besides, the results are so out of the way I never noticed them until I consciously looked for them.

Roku says: For voice searches that start inside YouTube, Google wants to block results from other apps.

Again, Roku devices already work this way. Hit the mic button inside YouTube, and the results will be the same as if youd typed a query in YouTubes text search box. Also worth noting: YouTubes app on Amazon Fire TV devices behaves the same way, so its not as unprecedented as Roku suggests.

The real issue may be that Roku wants to change the status quo in Roku OS 10, which will allow voice searches from inside an app to include both internal and external results. This change would be beneficial for users, and Google would be wrong to protest it; but in this case, Roku is the one doing the meddling.

Jared Newman / IDG Using voice search inside YouTube already takes you to a YouTube-specific results page, both on Roku and Fire TV devices.

Roku says: Google wants YouTube Music to get top billing for music-related voice searches in YouTube, even if users have set another music app as their default.

This sounds like a petty move on Googles part, though its worth noting that Rokus default music settings are extremely limited right now. You can only change your defaults through Rokus website, and the only available apps are Pandora, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio. Roku should perhaps work on adding more voice-controlled music sources, like Spotify or Tidal, before turning this into a major point of contention.

Roku says: Google, which competes with us on hardware, is demanding that we use specific chipsets that are more expensive.

On its face, this claim almost seems unbelievable, but theres a somewhat boring truth behind it. As Protocols Janko Roettgers reports, Google wants Roku to support AV1, a royalty-free video codec with wide industry backing from players like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Google itself. In the same way that Google has conditioned 4K YouTube playback on support of its older VP9 codec, the company may be trying to strongarm companies into adopting hardware that can decode AV1.

Whether this would amount to more expensive Roku players is harder to say. Im hardly attuned to the difference in costs between chipsets, and Roku could very well decide to eat those extra costs if it had to. After all, its business revolves around building a big audience and profiting from ad revenue, not selling hardware.

In any case, broader AV1 support is an admirable goal even if Googles tactics are crude. By providing higher-quality streams at lower bit rates, the result would be lower data consumption and less risk of buffering. One could see why Roku would avoid dredging up the specifics.

Googles response

Compared to Rokus statements, the response from Google has been far more reserved. But heres what weve got:

Google says: Roku often engages in these types of tactics while negotiating with content providers.

Its true the Roku has been butting a lot of heads lately. Peacock took two months to land on Roku after launching last summer, and HBO Max took more than six months, largely because of disputes over how to split ad revenue. A dispute with Fox last year almost caused a Super Bowl blackout, and the Spectrum TV app has been missing from Rokus channel store since December.

Still, this carriage dispute is not like the others. Instead of just squabbling over ad inventory, Google is meddling with more fundamental aspects of the Roku platform, such as how voice search works and what components go into its products. Painting all disputes with the same broad brush is disingenuous.

Google says: Were not trying to interfere with search results.

Even if Roku puffed up its claims somewhat, its hard to believe the company is inventing them out of whole cloth. In lieu of any more specifics, Im going to say Google isnt being totally forthright here.

Google says: Weve made no requests to access user data

Roku itself never got into much detail on this point, so Im not really sure what to make of it. What I do know is that both companies are in the business of hoovering up as much data on their users as they can for the purpose of showing them targeted ads. Neither should be pointing fingers at the other for trying to get more.

Will Roku users lose YouTube TV?

As of now, the YouTube TV app remains available for existing users, and Roku says that wont change unless Google takes actions that require the full removal of the channel.

Id be surprised if that happened. Roku is the most popular streaming platform in the United States, with 38-percent market share according to Parks Associates. YouTube TV, meanwhile, is the second-most popular live TV streaming service (behind Hulu + Live TV), with more than 3 million subscribers.

The reality is that both companies need each other, and risk losing a big chunk of their respective audiences by letting negotiations fall apart. My guess is theyll find a way to work things out despite the bitter public spat, little will noticeably change in the Roku experience, and users will only have suffered a whole bunch of unnecessary stress as a result.

This story originally published on April 29, but has been updated to reflect YouTube TVs removal from the Roku Channel Store.

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FILE PHOTO: Pump jacks operate at sunset in an oil field in Midland, Texas U.S. August 22, 2018. REUTERS/Nick Oxford

By Scott DiSavino

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Oil prices rose to fresh six-week highs on Thursday as strong U.S. economic data, a weak dollar and an expected recovery in demand outweighed concerns about higher COVID-19 cases in Brazil and India.

Brent futures rose $1.29, or 1.9%, to settle at $68.56 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude rose $1.15, or 1.8%, to end at $65.01.

That put both benchmarks up for a third day in a row to their highest closes since March 15.

"Summer season is a synonym for driving season and drivers in the United States, China and the United Kingdom are about to start consuming more fuel, a development the market believes will make up for Indias COVID-19 downturn," said Bjornar Tonhaugen, head of oil markets at Rystad Energy.

He added that oil prices drew additional support from a weak dollar, which made "oil cheaper to buy internationally."

The greenback hovered near nine-week lows, under pressure from a dovish outlook from the U.S. Federal Reserve and bold spending plans from U.S. President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, positive news out of Europe included announcements from Moderna Inc that it will almost double vaccine capacity for the next year and Germany on administering a daily record of almost 1.1 million COVID vaccine doses on Wednesday.

"The crude demand outlook is getting a big boost from Europe and that should overcome some of the risks across India and many emerging markets," said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA in New York.

New York City aims to "fully reopen" on July 1 after more than a year of closures and capacity restrictions, Mayor Bill de Blasio said, citing satisfactory progress in vaccinating its more than 8 million residents.

Analysts at Citibank said vaccination campaigns in North America and Europe should enable oil demand to reach a record high of 101.5 million barrels per day over the northern hemisphere summer months, but warned rising COVID-19 cases in Brazil and India could hit local demand if stricter lockdowns are reimposed.

"The outbreak in India is holding back oil's rally," Howie Lee, an economist at Singapore's OCBC bank, said.

India's total COVID-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday.

In Europe, major energy companies, including BP PLC, Total SE and Equinor ASA, profited from higher oil prices to report big increases in first-quarter earnings.

U.S. economic growth accelerated in the first quarter, fueled by massive government aid to households and businesses, charting the course for what is expected to be the strongest performance this year in nearly four decades.

(Additional reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin in London and Florence Tan and Roslan Khasawneh in Singapore; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio)
Travel Counsellors UAE reported its biggest ever booking month in March 2021, marking a 62 per cent increase on the companys previous highest grossing month of May 2019.

Travel Counsellor franchisees now number 65 in the UAE, running corporate and leisure travel businesses remotely.

General Manager of Travel Counsellors UAE, Holly McCann, said: Working flexibly has ensured our business owners have retained customers throughout the pandemic, but this latest spike in sales has been driven by huge demand for travel during the UAE school spring break.

Our top selling destination was the Maldives, accounting for over 60 per cent of the revenue, followed by UAE staycations which accounted for just over 20 per cent. An additional 10 per cent were bookings for travel to the Seychelles.

The most popular UAE staycation destinations booked were Dubai and Fujairah. The company further reports that over 80 per cent of the bookings made in March were due to depart in the same month or in April. McCann predicts that this last-minute booking pattern is here to stay in the UAE travel market.

McCann added: 47 per cent of the customers who booked with Travel Counsellors UAE in March were first time bookers with us, reflecting customers desire for personalised advice from a trusted travel professional. With travel restrictions continuing across the globe, testing and potential quarantine requirements to navigate, the value of placing travel plans in the hands of an expert has been proven, and never felt more important, than in the last 12 months."

Drawing on extensive experience and up-to-the-minute travel information, our Travel Counsellors take the time to talk through clients personal preferences, provide guidance pre, during and post travel, and offer a 24/7 service, leaving travellers free to focus on enjoying their break or a seamless business trip, McCann said. - TradeArabia News Service
Singapore's first LED-enabled Razer Card is the first of its kind which lights up on payment

Razer Fintech and IDEMIA clinched the Singapore Business Review (SBR) Technology Excellence Award for 'FinTech Payment Cards' for its LED-enabled Razer Card, the first of its kind in Singapore. The physical prepaid card can be used to make payments at any VISA-accepting merchants and is linked to Razer Fintech's e-wallet platform to also allow for seamless virtual payments.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005856/en/

(Photo: Business Wire)

The Razer Card, aimed at the e-wallet's gamer-centric customer segment, absorbs power from the electric payment terminals when tapped, which would then power the LED embedded in the card to light up for several seconds while the payment is being processed making a battery-powered card a thing of the past.

Each card is linked to the respective customer's Razer Pay mobile app and can be used to make contactless payments at credit card terminals, after which the appropriate amount will be debited from the e-wallet balance.

"IDEMIA is dedicated to quality and innovation, which is reflected in our creation of one-of-a-kind products and solutions customised to suit our clients' unique profile and needs. As Razer Fintech is synonymous with innovation and excellence whether within the gaming ecosystem or the fast-growing FinTech market we worked closely with them to provide their end-users with a unique and attractive payment, one that distinguishes themselves as e-wallet users in terms of status and technology," said Romain Zanolo, Managing Director of APAC Financial Institutions, IDEMIA

As part of the Razer Card's initial roll-out, the Razer Card was opened to 1337 select beta users from October 2020 till January 2021. As with all IDEMIA cards, the Razer Pay card also incorporates advanced contact and contactless transaction technology for payment convenience. It also adheres to all typical credit card requirements, including meeting ISO specifications and schemes, and maintaining compliance with EMV chips and standard magnetic stripes.

"As many of our users are part of the high-end gaming segment, they have exacting standards and would settle for no less when it comes to product and solution excellence. Our Razer Card offers them just that and we have received great feedback on it from our customers thus far. IDEMIA has an unmatched track record in card production and security; with their technology, we are offering our discerning customers a product that helps them enjoy more value from our financial services via both style and substance," said Lee Li Meng, CEO of Razer Fintech.

-END-

About IDEMIA

IDEMIA, the global leader in Augmented Identity, provides a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities (such as pay, connect and travel), in the physical as well as digital space.

Securing our identity has become mission critical in the world we live in today. By standing for Augmented Identity, an identity that ensures privacy and trust and guarantees secure, authenticated and verifiable transactions, we reinvent the way we think, produce, use and protect one of our greatest assets our identity whether for individuals or for objects, whenever and wherever security matters. We provide Augmented Identity for international clients from Financial, Telecom, Identity, Public Security and IoT sectors. With close to 15,000 employees around the world, IDEMIA serves clients in 180 countries.

For more information, visit www.idemia.com Follow @IdemiaGroup on Twitter

About Razer Fintech

Backed by the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers synonymous with the youth and millennials, Razer Fintech is the financial technology arm of Razer Inc (1337: Hong Kong). Established in April 2018, Razer Fintech has grown to become one of the largest O2O (offline to online) digital payment networks in emerging markets and has processed over billions of dollars in total payment value. Razer Fintech operates two verticals, Razer Merchant Services ("RMS") and Razer Pay.

Razer Merchant Services is a leading B2B (business-to-business) solution encompassing:

RMS Online: Card processing gateway supporting global scheme cards and over 110 payment methods, powering online payments for global blue-chip merchants in SEA.

RMS Offline: SEA's largest offline payment network of over 1 million physical acceptance points across SEA. RMS Offline also extends point-of-sale services (such as bill payments and telco reloads), cash-over-counter services (including Razer Pay top-ups and fulfilment of e-commerce purchases), distribution of third-party point-of-sale activation (POSA) cards, and merchant acquiring services for Razer Pay and other third-party e-wallets.

Razer Pay is a B2C (business-to-consumer) solution comprising an all-encompassing e-wallet focused on offering a plethora of compelling use cases targeted at the youths, millennials.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005856/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact

Redhill Communications

Felicia Chiriac

Email: felicia.chiriac@redhill.asia
Noted Duchess would be 'unwilling to speak about them apart from her mother'

The Duchess of Cambridge worried about Prince Harry in the lead up to his wedding to Meghan Markle because she 'appeared embarrassed' about certain members of her family, a royal author has claimed.

Kate Middleton, 39, reportedly expressed her concerns to Prince William's brother after he brought his then fiance to stay with them at their Norfolk home Amner Hall for Christmas shortly after they announced their engagement to the world in 2017.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge 'praised Meghan for mucking in and playing with George and Charlotte' following their visit.

However, when Prince Harry later guest edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme and told listeners his loved ones were 'the family I suppose that she's never had, it reportedly didn't go down well with the in-laws.

Speaking to The Sun, Ingrid Seward, editor in chief of Majesty Magazine, claimed: 'She could not understand why Harry had never met his future father-in-law, nor why Meghan, who Harry assured was The One and "ticked all his boxes", appeared embarrassed about her family and unwilling to speak about them apart from her mother.

The Duchess of Cambridge, 39, worried about Prince Harry in the lead up to his wedding to Meghan Markle because she 'appeared embarrassed' about certain members of her family, a royal author has claimed. Pictured, with the Duchess of Sussex arriving to attend the Christmas Day morning church service at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, Norfolk, 2018

Meghan was six years old when her parents divorced and she lived with her mother until she was a teenager, when she moved to live with Thomas (pictured, together)

And according to the royal author, the mother-of-three had worries about Meghan's relationship with her father early on - noting that she seemed 'unwilling to speak' about her dad to The Firm - only ever mentioning her mother, Doria Ragland.

Meghan was six years old when her parents divorced and she lived with her mother until she was a teenager, when she moved to live with Thomas.

Doria was the picture of pride when she watched her daughter marry Prince Harry at St George's Chapel on 19 May 2018.

Doria was Meghan's sole relative inside St Georges Chapel on her wedding day, after her father Thomas Markle - who had been due to walk his daughter down the aisle - revealed he'd suffered a heart attack and would not be travelling from the US to attend.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex emerge from the West Door of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on May 19, 2018 after their wedding ceremony

But following the ceremony, it became clear how quickly Doria has been accepted into the royal fold, as she emerged from the chapel on the arm of Prince Charles, whose wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, was on the other side.

There she posed for her first photograph as the mother to a princess, standing alongside the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Queen herself, and looking chic in a pistachio green coat and matching dress by Oscar de la Renta.

However, during a recent bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan Markle said she cannot fathom hurting Archie the way her own father 'betrayed' her before the royal wedding.

She said she has 'found it hard to reconcile' with her father Thomas for insisting he had not been speaking to the media.

She said: 'I look at Archie, I think about this child, and I genuinely can't imagine doing anything to intentionally cause pain to my child.'

In March, Meghan's estranged father Thomas denied his daughter's claims to Oprah that he had 'betrayed' her before branding his son-in-law Harry 'snotty' and accusing him of failing to properly support her when she was suicidal.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain, he said that he's apologised '100 times' for doing a deal with a paparazzi photographer before the Royal Wedding in 2018 and urged the couple to see him with Archie now they only live '70 miles away' from his Mexico home.

Kate had worries about Meghan's relationship with her father early on - noting that she seemed 'unwilling to speak' about her dad to The Firm - only ever mentioning her mother, Doria Ragland (pictured near Windsor on May 18, 2018)

He explained: 'We all make mistakes - but I've never played naked pool or dressed like Hitler like Harry did'.

And in a further attack on Harry, Mr Markle said that his daughter's admission she was suicidal while living in the UK reflected badly on his son-on-law.

He said: 'It really did upset me, like I said, it would have been easy for her to reach out to me, any of the rest of her family, who she claims she doesn't know. But the other thing is that I would think that she could turn to her husband.' When noted she did speak to Harry, Mr Markle said Meghan's husband Harry had 'obviously not supported her that well'.

Mr Markle than slammed his daughter's decision to refuse to see or speak to him, Mr Markle said: 'The biggest problem here is she's pretty much ghosted all of her family'.

The 76-year-old also denied the Royal Family - or Britain - is racist, saying if it is true an unnamed royal asked about how 'dark' Archie's skin would be, it was probably just a 'dumb question', before calling Meghan and Harry's claims 'bulls**t'.

Mr Markle, who watched the entire two-hour CBS interview, said he was 'upset' when he saw his youngest daughter tell Oprah that royal life was so stressful she was suicidal and 'couldn't be left alone' - but then said Meghan's husband Harry had 'obviously not supported her that well'.
Reuters

DUBLIN (Reuters) -Ireland's finance minister said he remained confident the country's low-tax economy would continue to attract multinational investment and jobs even as an overhaul of global corporation tax rules moved a major step closer on Saturday. The United States, Britain and other leading nations agreed to back a minimum global rate of at least 15% and for firms to pay more tax in the markets where they sell goods and services rather than in countries like Ireland where they book profits. Ireland, long resigned to having more to lose than most from the reforms due to the attractiveness of its 12.5% rate to foreign multinationals, continued to press the case that any final deal must meet the needs of small and large countries.
Jssan Carlos Strover, 20, was barefoot, handcuffed in the front of his body and shackled at the waist when he escaped

Police have launched a manhunt for a 20-year-old murder suspect after he escaped custody while in shackles at one of the busiest, largest airports in the world.

Jssan Carlos Strover, 20, was barefoot, handcuffed in the front of his body and shackled at the waist while being escorted by two Maricopa County Sheriff's Office deputies at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia.

Officials say the two deputies removed Strover's leg restraints to walk him down stairs at a rental car facility and he then powered past them, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat said: 'At the time, there were two Maricopa County deputies with him. At the point that they proceeded out, they removed the leg restraints to escort him down the steps and at that point he pushed past them.'

Strover is wanted in Maricopa County, Arizona, on multiple charges including first-degree murder, attempt to commit first-degree murder and aggravated assault.

He is wanted in connection with a shooting that left one man dead and another injured at a bar in Phoenix on February 19.

Strover escaped custody while in shackles at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia

He was arrested by U.S Marshals in the Atlanta area on April 12 on other charges, but was in the process of being transported back to Arizona.

Officials say Strover is 6 ft, 3 in, 150 lbs. with the word 'risk' tattooed across the front of his neck. He was last seen wearing a blue jacket, white T-shirt and black sweatpants.

He was last seen entering the woods in the 4000 block of Global Gateway Connector, near the airport, in College Park, Georgia.

Dozens of officers from multiple agencies were searching for Strover with dogs and helicopters Thursday.

Officials consider Strover to be dangerous despite not carrying a weapon.

A reward up to $2,000 has been offered for his capture.

The Fulton County Sheriff's Office is alerting those in the area to be on the look out for escaped fugitive Jssan Carlos Strover, 20

He was last seen in College Park, GA near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Officials asks people not to approach Strover.

Instead, officials ask people to call 911 or Crime Stoppers Atlanta at 404-577-TIPS (8477), text information to 274637 or by visiting StopCrimeATL.com.

Officials say an internal investigation will take place to find out how he escaped.
Major industry experts, Issuers and Verifies come together to provide a real-world view of how individuals, commercial and government organizations are assessing new opportunities

TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. (CSE:LQID)(OTC PINK:TRWRF)(FRA:4T51) ("Liquid Avatar Technologies" or the "Company"), a global blockchain, digital identity and fintech solutions company is presenting a major online event to provide an easy to understand and digestible overview of digital identity, wallets and verifiable credentials and how they are changing the way we work, play and live online on Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 12 pm Eastern Time (GMT -5).

The event entitled, Digital Wallets & Verifiable Credentials - The Future of Online Identity will be a combination of fireside chat and panelist discussion formats. Participants include leading identity experts from industry and technology, among others. Attendees will also have opportunities to ask questions of the participants. This interactive event will be broadcast via Zoom and is free to attend, however seats are limited. Please register at: https://hello.liquidavatar.com/digital-id-webinar

RJ Reiser, Chief Business Development Officer of Liquid Avatar, will host the event and will center the discussion around the value of digital identity and the verifiable credentials landscape. Key discussion topics will include how digital identity is addressable to 100% of today's global Internet users and how the future of both digital identities and credentials will shape our activities online and in our everyday lives.

Discussions will also include government and its role in accelerating and harnessing the digital shift through new legislative, regulatory, policy and program development. For instance, the Province of Ontario has already indicated that it would be issuing a new, electronic government-issued ID by the end of this calendar year. In addition, the government of Canada, in their recent Budget, proposed to increase funding for the Standards Council of Canada so that it can continue its work to advance industry-wide data governance standards. In other countries, like Australia, consultations have already begun for the introduction of digital birth certificates, with the State of New South Wales (NSW) fronting the campaign for the new digital ID which is being developed under a cross-jurisdictional consideration.

Liquid Avatar has announced several upcoming programs and exciting projects with industry leading partners. A complete list of registered speakers and presenters will continuously be updated on the Liquid Avatar website at www.liquidavatartechnologies.com

If you would like to join our mailing list and receive updates from the Company, please click here

About Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. - www.liquidavatartechnologies.com

Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc., through its wholly owned subsidiary KABN Systems North America Inc. focuses on the verification, management and monetization of Self Sovereign Identity, empowering users to control and benefit from the use of their online identity.

The Liquid Avatar Mobile App, available in the Apple App Store and Google Play is a verified Self Sovereign Identity platform that empowers users to create high quality digital icons representing their online personas. These icons allow users to manage and control their digital identity and Verifiable Access and Identity Credentials, and to use Liquid Avatars to share public and permission based private data when they want and with whom they want. www.liquidavatar.com

KABN North America has a suite of revenue generating programs that support the Liquid Avatar program, including KABN KASH a cash back and reward program that has over 400 leading online merchants and coming soon, an integrated offering engine. In Canada, KABN also has the KABN Visa Card, a "challenger banking" platform that allows users to manage and control a range of financial services for traditional and digital currencies. The Company is currently exploring expansion of the KABN Visa program to other geographic regions, including the USA.

Oasis Digital Studios is a creative and development agency that supports a wide range of artists, talent, brands, and enterprises with Non-Fungible Token (NFT) solutions.

Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. is publicly listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) under the symbol "LQID" (CSE:LQID).

The Company also trades in the US under the symbol "TRWRF" and in Frankfurt under the symbol "4T51"

If you have not already joined our mailing list and would like to receive updates on Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc., please click here to join!

For more information, please visit www.liquidavatartechnologies.com

For further information, please contact:

David Lucatch

Chief Executive Officer

647-725-7742 Ext. 701

ir@liquidavatar.com

US and Canadian Media Contact:

Nicole Rodrigues

NRPR Group

nicole@nrprgroup.com

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

All websites referred to are expressly not incorporated by reference into this press release.

Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This press release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and may also contain statements that may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking information and forward-looking statements are not representative of historical facts or information or current condition, but instead represent only the Company's beliefs regarding future events, plans or objectives, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of the Company's control. Generally, such forward-looking information or forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans," "expects" or "does not expect," "is expected," "budget," "scheduled," "estimates," "forecasts," "intends," "anticipates" or "does not anticipate," or "believes," or variations of such words and phrases or may contain statements that certain actions, events or results "may," "could," "would," "might" or "will be taken," "will continue," "will occur" or "will be achieved". The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained herein may include, but is not limited to, information concerning the timing for the launch of Liquid Avatar apps, the plans for future features of the Liquid Avatar apps, expected geographic expansion, the ability of the Company to generate revenues, roll out new programs and to successfully achieve business objectives, and expectations for other economic, business, and/or competitive factors.

By identifying such information and statements in this manner, the Company is alerting the reader that such information and statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such information and statements. In addition, in connection with the forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained in this press release, the Company has made certain assumptions. Among the key factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information and statements are the following: failure to obtain necessary approvals in a timely manner or at all; lack of sufficient capital to expand the Company's geographic footprint or to add new features to the Company's offerings; changes in general economic, business, and political conditions, including changes in the financial markets; changes in applicable laws; compliance with extensive government regulation. Should one or more of these risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information or statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated, or expected.

Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing, and the expectations contained in, the forward-looking information and statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information and statements, and no assurance or guarantee can be given that such forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information and statements. The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information and/or forward-looking statements that are contained or referenced herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. All subsequent written and oral forward- looking information and statements attributable to the Company or persons acting on its behalf is expressly qualified in its entirety by this notice.

SOURCE: Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643270/Liquid-Avatar-Presents-Digital-Wallets-Verifiable-Credentials--The-Future-of-Online-Identity-Live-Online-Webinar-May-18th
I sincerely appreciate the recognition from Publishers Weekly, but its the Wolfpack employees, authors, and fans that made this happen."

Publishers Weekly has named Wolfpack Publishing one of the fastest-growing independent publishers of 2020. President Mike Bray credits the management team for the companys growth in 2020. They kept their teams focused through the worst of the pandemic and ramped up production to meet the increased demand in the marketplace, he said.

Wolfpack plans to further grow their catalogue organically, both through continuing to publish their current authors backlists, and through acquisition. Wolfpack has acquired the rights to over 80 Gordon D. Shirreffs backlist titles, as well as 41 backlist titles from author Richard S. Prather. Our existing authors are the true key to our success as a publisher, says Bray. They consistently meet their fans expectations both in the quality of their work and with a consistent release schedule.

Notable titles from Wolfpack Publishing from 2020 include The Repairman: The Complete Series by L.J. Martin, The Saga of Colter Farrow by Peter Brandvold, and The Crocketts: Western Saga One by Robert Vaughan.

I sincerely appreciate the recognition from Publishers Weekly, but its the Wolfpack employees, authors, and fans that made this happen, says Bray.

Founded in 2013, Wolfpack Publishing is a hybrid publishing company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Wolfpack Publishing imprints include CKN Christian Publishing and the new teen/young-adult imprint, Wise Wolf Books.

For the full Publishers Weekly article on how Wolfpack Publishing is a stand-out independent publisher, please visit their website at publishersweekly.com.
[April 29, 2021] Retailers Sue Fed Over Failure to Follow Congress' Direction on Debit Card Swipe Fees

Retailers filed a lawsuit today seeking to have the Federal Reserve lower its 10-year-old cap on "swipe" fees banks charge to process debit card transactions, saying the agency wrongly applied federal law and that merchants have paid billions of dollars more than intended by Congress while banks' costs have fallen. "The Fed allowed fees that were much too high in the first place," National Retail Federation Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel Stephanie Martz said. "Since then, banks' costs have fallen steadily but the Fed has refused to make adjustments, letting the problem grow even worse. Legislation passed by Congress requires that these fees be kept in proportion to costs to protect merchants and their customers, but the Fed has failed to do that. Since the Fed hasn't acted voluntarily, it's time for the courts to enforce the law. Retailers are paying twice what they should and these fees ultimately drive up prices paid by the public. Banks should not be handed a growing windfall at the expense of Main Street stores and consumers." The suit against the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was filed by the North Dakota Retail Association and the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association in U.S. District Court in Bismarck. NRF is not a party but Martz is co-counsel in the case. "North Dakota merchants are willing to pay a reasonable fee for a service, but they're tired of seeing Wall Street banks stick their hands into the pockets of local businesses," said Mike Rud, president of the joint associations. "These fees are far higher than they need to be and take too much money out of the local economy." The lawsuit claims the cap is higher than allowed under the Durbin Amendment, a law passed by Congress in 2010 to address a "broken market" of soaring swipe fees set by Visa and Mastercard and lack of competition among the card-issuing banks that receive the fees. The Durbin Amendment directed the Fed to set regulations resulting in debit card swipe fees that were "reasonable" and also "proportional" to banks' costs. But the suit argues that the Fed exceeded its authority by going beyond costs Congress said could be considered in writing its regulations. It seeks to have the cap recalculated and regularly adjusted if banks' costs continue to fall in the future. "For a decade, the board has failed to properly follow Congress's instructions," the lawsuit said. "Because the board has not done wha Congress said to cure this market failure, American consumers and merchants continue to suffer the same harms that prompted Congress to act in the first place. Enough is enough."



The Durbin Amendment limited costs the Fed could consider to incremental expenses in authorizing, clearing and settling transactions. The law specifically said other costs "shall not" be considered. Based on those costs, the Fed initially proposed that the fees be limited to 7-12 cents per transaction. Under pressure from banks, however, officials "flouted Congress's decision" by going back and taking fixed costs into consideration along with fraud losses, transaction monitoring and network processing fees. The final cap, which applies only to financial institutions with $10 billion or more in assets, was set at 21 cents plus 1 cent for fraud prevention and 0.05 percent for fraud loss recovery.

Banks are free to charge a higher amount provided that they set debit swipe fees themselves rather than following fees set by Visa and Mastercard, but no major banks have done so. Since 2011, the Fed has reviewed banks' costs every two years as required by Durbin but has failed to adjust its regulations to keep fees proportional as costs have fallen despite repeated concerns voiced by NRF and other retail groups, the suit said. A survey by the Fed found bank costs allowed under Durbin averaged 8 cents per transaction as of 2009, the year before the law was passed. Based on that, the 21-cent figure gave banks an average profit of 163 percent, according to the suit. But subsequent Fed surveys show the costs had steadily fallen to 3.6 cents as of 2017, increasing the average profit to a "stratospheric" 483 percent that "in other sectors might prompt antitrust or price-gouging investigations." Banks are now charging almost six times their average cost, compared with less than three times when the regulations first took effect. The amount allowed by the regulations "grows less reasonable and proportional with every passing year" and "issuers have continued to reap tens of billions of dollars in profits from interchange fees even after Congress moved to halt networks' harmful pricing practices," the suit said. The number of purchases paid for with debit cards has nearly doubled since 2009 and has been "turbocharged" by consumers shunning cash during the pandemic, increasing the impact of the fees, the suit said. Brady Lund, owner of the Corner Post truck stop and convenience store in Watford City, N.D., said in a declaration filed with the suit that "inflated" swipe fees have meant higher prices for customers and lower profits for his business. Lowering the fees would let him charge lower prices and would "increase the Corner Post's ability to continue as a going concern." Before Durbin, banks charged about 45 cents to process a typical debit transaction, and regulation has saved merchants $9.4 billion a year, according to payments consulting firm CMSPI. But with growing usage, processing fees for Visa and Mastercard debit cards totaled $19.7 billion in 2019, about the same as before Durbin was passed, according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication that follows the card industry. Debit and credit card fees are among merchants' highest costs after labor and drive up prices paid by consumers by hundreds of dollars a year for the average family. Card processing fees totaled $116.4 billion in 2019, up 88 percent over the previous decade, according to Nilson. NRF sued the Fed in federal court shortly after the Fed issued its regulations, saying 21 cents exceeded the "reasonable" level intended by Congress. A trial judge agreed in 2013 but the decision was overturned by an appeals court in 2014. NRF appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court but the justices declined to take up the case. About NRF The National Retail Federation, the world's largest retail trade association, passionately advocates for the people, brands, policies and ideas that help retail thrive. From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., NRF empowers the industry that powers the economy. Retail is the nation's largest private-sector employer, contributing $3.9 trillion to annual GDP and supporting one in four U.S. jobs - 52 million working Americans. For over a century, NRF has been a voice for every retailer and every retail job, educating, inspiring and communicating the powerful impact retail has on local communities and global economies. PERMALINK View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005779/en/

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Lucknow: In a heart-wrenching incident, a resident of Uttar Pradeshs Amberpur village was forced to carry his COVID positive wifes body on a bicycle after the villagers said that they would not allow her cremation in the local cremation ground.

Two dreadly images of the incident are doing rounds on social media. One of the images shows the old-man carrying his wifes body on a bicycle, while in another image, the 70-year-old man can be seen sitting next to it after the body falls from the bicycle.

The incident took place in Amberpur village of Jaunpur, which is 275 km from Lucknow.

When no one came to help the old man, who is being identified as Tilakdhari, the local police had to intervene.

The police said the government hospital had sent Tilakdharis wife's body back in an ambulance, but the villagers didnt allow him to cremate his wife in the local cremation ground, citing that this step will ensure that the containment of coronavirus spread. The local police revealed a complete story of social boycott and fear.

Following the villagers decision, Tilakdhari decided to consign his wife's body to the nearby Sai river. However, the villagers also refused to help the old man in moving the body., which forced Tilakdhari to carry his wifes body on his bicycle.

The local police took notice of the incident after Tilakdhari was spotted sitting next to his wifes body in the middle of the road. Then the local police made sure that remation was conducted with all the precautions and items. Finally, Tilakdharis wife was cremated with the help of a local Muslim man.

Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh has logged 3,00,041 cases so far and 11,943 deaths. While the country on Wednesday (April 28) recorded the highest single-day rise of 3,60,960 coronavirus cases this morning, which pushed the total to 1,79,97,267.

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Georgia's Health Minister Ekaterine Tikaradze has stated that Georgia is expecting to receive one million doses of Pfizer vaccine in summer.

The minister who addressed the parliament also told MPs that apart from the Pfizer vaccine the country is holding negotiations to receive Johnson & Johnson and Moderna vaccines.

"Today out citizens have the guarantee that they will receive 350,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine, 1,000,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine and up to 100,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine," Tikaradze said.

Georgian health officials call on all citizens to maintain Covid-19 regulations - wear face masks and maintain social distancing, as well as receive the vaccine to curb the spread of the virus.

The National Center for Disease Control (NCDC) has published the vaccination data, saying that as of now a total of 41,801 vaccination doses have been administered, Agenda.ge reported.
A man was shot and killed Wednesday night at a gas station in west Houston, police said.

Officers responded shortly after 9 p.m. to 11557 Bissonnet Street in the Alief area where they found a man in his late 20s shot multiple times, said Lt. Pavel of the Houston Police Department. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.

Investigators said they believe the victim was meeting up with another man, who arrived at the gas station in a black Jeep. The two men spoke for a short time, and when the victim turned around, someone shot him once in the back. As the man fell to the ground, the shooter fired three more shots, Pavel said.

The gunman fled on foot. Police said they believe the black Jeep may have later picked him up. Police did not provide a suspect description.

Detectives are reviewing surveillance video and conducting an investigation.
WASHINGTON  Last week, the city of Long Beach, California, announced it would repurpose its convention center to temporarily house up to 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Officials knew that wrangling that many children would be a tall order, so they launched a drive to fill a library with books for the children to read. Someone donated Vice President Kamala Harris 2019 childrens book Superheroes Are Everywhere.

That book was laid on a cot last Thursday and a news photographer, who declined to comment to the Los Angeles Times, took a photo of it.

The New York Post wrote a front-page story reporting that federal officials were including the book as part of the welcome kits given to migrant children.

Harris hasnt been to the border to address a crisis she was tasked to help fix  but a childrens book she wrote is waiting there for young migrants who are being welcomed into the country, the story originally read.

Other conservative-leaning outlets and top Republicans, including the partys national committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, echoed the falsehood and decried Harris.

The Biden administrations weakness caused a surge of illegal immigration, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., tweeted. Now theyre forcing taxpayers to buy Kamala Harriss book to give to those illegal immigrants?

But no books, including the one in the photo, were included in welcome kits, Zhan Caplan, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.

Children do not receive books as part of a welcome kit, Caplan said in a statement. No taxpayer dollars were used to purchase Vice President Harris book.

After The Washington Post this week fact-checked the tabloids story, the New York paper reportedly deleted then amended its story, according to the Post.

Laura Italiano, the reporter whose byline was on the story, tweeted Tuesday that she had resigned from the publication. Italiano did not respond to requests for comment from the Times but tweeted she was ordered to write the story and failed to push back hard enough.

While some online offered support, others questioned Italianos reporting on at least one other story.

Two representatives from the New York Post did not respond to requests for comment.

The ongoing Long Beach book drive had more than 3,000 books donated, according to Kevin Lee, a city spokesman.

The kids being able to make individual and personal choices on what they read, what they play with, what they wear and the like, is so important during these very challenging times for the children, Lee told the Times in an email.

___

Erin B. Logan of the Los Angeles Times wrote this story.

2021 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
In the past month, there has been a significant rise in the price of edible oils. Prices of packed mustard oil increased by 6 per litre in metro cities, including Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai.

In Kolkata, the prices have increased by a whopping Rs 24 per litre or 16% in just one month, making it unaffordable for many poor people living in the city. Prices of soybean oil and sunflower oils are also on the rise.

In Mumbai, a litre packet of soybean oil is retailing at Rs 152 in Mumbai. Last month, the same packet was reportedly selling at Rs 134. Likewise, the prices have increased in other cities. In Kolkata, a litre packet of soybean oil is selling at Rs 160.

The increased prices of oil have come amid movement restrictions announced by several states across the country. Recently, Maharashtra, Delhi and Karnataka moved into partial lockdowns to control the number of Covid-19 cases. The Consumer Affairs Ministry had previously directed the states to make sure that the prices of essentials remain under control during curfews.

Currently, the Centre monitors the prices of 22 essential commodities selling in the Indian market. Its analysis suggests that prices of pulses like tur or arhar have increased by up to Rs 9 per Kg in these metro cities in the past month. Meanwhile, moong dal prices have surged by Rs 14 per Kg.

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Charity kitchens help Syrians during Ramadan amid tough economic situation

Xinhua) 10:14, April 29, 2021

Volunteers prepare charity food parcels during the holy month of Ramadan in Damascus, Syria, on April 20, 2021. As Syria is passing through a tough economic crisis, some charity kitchens started working during the holy month of Ramadan to help people save money by offering free meals and food parcels. (Photo by Ammar Safarjalani/Xinhua)

DAMASCUS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- As Syria is passing through a tough economic crisis, some charity kitchens started working during the holy month of Ramadan to help people save money by offering free meals and food parcels.

At the historic Hamidiyeh souk in the heart of the capital Damascus, volunteers exert big efforts every day to cook meals that are later distributed to the people in need.

These charity kitchens have become a tradition of Ramadan during the 10-year-long war in Syria.

Essam Habbal, the person in charge of the Saed charity group, told Xinhua that this year the donors are taking part in cooking the meals alongside the volunteers, who are mostly young men and women.

Around 5,000 meals are being cooked and distributed every day by Saed, said Habbal, noting that they are still relying on the donations of local communities.

Near the charity kitchen, people were holding buckets and waiting to get meals.

"These meals help people save money for their kids to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr feast which follows Ramadan, and buy new clothes for the occasion or to bring some sweets to celebrate Eid and Ramadan at the same time," he said.

In another area called al-Mazzeh in Damascus, another volunteer group works every day in Ramadan to pack food parcels to distribute to the poor.

However, this year, the situation is different due to the economic crisis and the skyrocketing prices of all commodities.

Saed Abdul-Ghani, one organizer of a charity group named Kuna Wa Sanabqa, which means "We Were and We Still," said their work has dramatically decreased this year due to the lack of donors and the difficulty of securing food items at reasonable prices.

The number of beneficiaries has dropped from 20,000 food parcels distributed every day last year in Ramadan to 1,000 parcels this year.

However, he noted that his group is reaching people in far and poor places that they didn't reach before, such as the formerly rebel-held Ghouta suburb of the capital.

The food parcel they are distributing includes chicken, rice, groats, oil lentils, and sugar.

In Damascus, the Syrian government managed to raise the value of Syrian pound against the U.S. dollar, but such a move didn't affect the prices as most merchants don't trust the stability of the exchange rate.

The western sanctions have also had a big impact on Syria's crumbling economy as such sanctions don't seem to be lifted anytime soon.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Burma Myanmar Regime Files High Treason, Other Charges Against Detained Protest Leader

Ko Wai Moe Naing addresses a crowd of protesters during an anti-regime rally in Monywa, Sagaing Region in late March.

The Myanmar junta has brought more charges including high treason and unlawful association against Ko Wai Moe Naing, a detained anti-regime figure who led protests in Sagaing Regions Monywa town, bringing to 10 the number of cases filed against the 26-year-old Muslim pro-democracy activist.

Ko Wai Moe Naing, one of the most prominent faces of Myanmars protest movement against the junta, was violently abducted on April 15 as he was leading a motorbike rally.

After having his motorbike rammed, he was beaten and dragged away by a group of armed thugs clad in black T-shirts with military trousers and boots. The injured protest leader was taken into custody at the Myanmar militarys Northwestern Command. A picture of him showing signs of severe torture went viral online one day after he was moved to a military base in the town.

According to his mother, no one including his lawyers have been allowed to see him since his arrest.

On Wednesday night, two weeks after his arrest, the junta made its first announcement about his arrest and the legal proceedings against him. Earlier information had been released by police at the time of his first court hearing.

The junta said cases have been filed against the riot leader under Section 25 of the Natural Disaster Management Law, and also sections 114, 302, 325, 342, 395 and 505(a) of the Penal Code over his involvement in the protest movement in February and March.

The charges include the alleged murder of two police officers in Monywa in late March, abduction with intent to murder, wrongful confinement, unlawful assembly and incitement.

State TV announced that based on his confessions under interrogation, new cases were filed against him under Section 17(a) of the Unlawful Association Act and sections 124 and 511 of the Penal Code, for allegedly affiliating with the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), which the junta has declared an unlawful association.

The CRPH was formed after the coup by a group of lawmakers elected in the 2020 general election. It set up the civilian National Unity Government on April 16 in attempt to defy and discredit the military regime, restore civilian rule and establish a federal union.

The junta said in the announcement that it is also looking for 23 suspects it said were also involved in riots with the detained protest leader.

I have worried about his condition in military custody daily, Ko Wai Moe Naings mother Daw Moe Sandar Kyu told The Irrawaddy.

We dont know how long they will take to interrogate him as they are adding more and more accusations, she added, while calling for an open and transparent court process and for his right to legal counsel to be upheld, as lawyers for her son havent been able to meet with him to obtain power of attorney.

The home-grown pro-democracy activist, who is a former president of the Monywa University Student Union and a member of Sagaing Regional Youth Committee, was affectionately known as the Panda of Monywa for his chubby physique.

He led daily protests in various forms for 68 days till the day of his arrest, and also led the formation of the 13-member Monywa General Strike Committee, the nine-member Monywa Peoples Administration body, and a 150-member town defense team to counter the regimes forces and send groups of youths to areas controlled by ethnic armed groups to attend basic military training, the junta stated in its announcement.

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NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, JAPAN OR SOUTH AFRICA OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF SUCH JURISDICTION.

Largest European SPAC to date

Pegasus intends to target a high potential business combination partner in the European financial services industry

Strong Sponsor alignment with shareholders, committing in excess of 165 million, including unconditional 100 million Forward Purchase Agreement at the time of a business combination from institutional sponsors Tikehau Capital and Financiere Agache



AMSTERDAM, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pegasus Acquisition Company Europe B.V. ("Pegasus"), the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) focused on opportunities in the European financial services industry, today announced that it has successfully raised 500 million in a private placement, making it the largest European SPAC to date. Pegasus will start trading on Euronext Amsterdam this morning.1

In aggregate, the Sponsors, Tikehau Capital, Financiere Agache, Jean Pierre Mustier and Diego De Giorgi, have invested 55 million by subscribing for Units in the private placement, demonstrating strong alignment of interest with all shareholders. The Sponsors have also subscribed for Founder Shares and Founder Warrants for a total amount of up to 12.75 million to be used to cover commissions and costs. In addition, Pegasus may call upon an unconditional Forward Purchase Agreement of up to 100 million, provided by institutional sponsors Tikehau Capital and Financiere Agache. Pegasus also retains the flexibility to raise significant additional funding through a PIPE (private investment in public equity) to provide further investment in the business.

The structural characteristics of Pegasus ensuring strong Sponsor alignment with shareholders combined with the significant investment commitment of the Sponsors have allowed it to attract a broad and high-quality investor base.

Pegasus intends to capitalise on the recognised industry expertise, deal sourcing and execution capabilities of its four sponsors as it targets a partnership with a financial services company operating in the Investment Management, Insurance and Diversified Financials industry verticals. Targets will be either digitally native or benefit from structural tailwinds in their sector, and have strong profit growth potential that could be accelerated via access to capital and strategic guidance.

Pegasus will have 24 months from the settlement date, expected to occur on 3 May 2021, to complete a business combination, subject to a six-month extension period if approved by a shareholder vote. Pegasus shareholders will also benefit from approval rights on any proposed transaction via a general meeting.

Jean Pierre Mustier, Operating Partner, Pegasus Europe, said: "Our successful listing creates an opportunity to bring much needed growth capital to the European financial services sector. We now start on the exciting journey to forming a long-term partnership with a high potential business, guiding their transition from private to public, and driving their growth and development through both investment and strategic counsel."

Diego De Giorgi, Operating Partner, Pegasus Europe, added: "Pegasus is ready to provide a potential partner with operational, financial and strategic support well beyond an initial business combination. As a group, the sponsors have significant financial sector experience, including listed company managerial, risk and governance expertise, allowing the management team of the company we partner with to remain fully focused on successfully running their business."

Citigroup Global Markets Europe AG ("Citi") and J.P. Morgan AG ("J.P. Morgan") are acting as joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners (the "Joint Global Coordinators") in the IPO.

Citi acting as stabilisation manager (the "Stabilisation Manager") on behalf of the Joint Global Coordinators may (but will be under no obligation to), for stabilisation purposes, acquire up to 6,000,000 Units (the "Option Units"), comprising approximately up to 12.00% of the aggregate number of 50,000,000 Units sold in the Offering, during a period of 30 calendar days after the commencement of conditional dealings in the Units with a view to supporting the market price of the Units at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail in the open market. The acquisition of the Option Units by the Stabilisation Manager in the course of the stabilisation transactions will result in the repurchase of such Option Units by the Company pursuant to the exercise by the Stabilisation Manager, on behalf of the Joint Global Coordinators, of a put option that has been granted by the Company to the Stabilisation Manager (the "Put Option"). The Put Option is exercisable in full or in part within 30 calendar days after the first trading date.

In connection with the Offering, the Stabilisation Manager (or any of its agents or affiliates) may (but will be under no obligation to), to the extent permitted by applicable laws and regulations, acquire the Option Units with a view to supporting the market price of the Units at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail in the open market. The Stabilisation Manager is not required to enter into such transactions and such transactions may be effected on any securities market, over-the-counter market, stock exchange (including Euronext Amsterdam) or otherwise and may be undertaken at any time during the period commencing on the first trading date and ending no later than 30 calendar days thereafter. The Stabilisation Manager will not be required to effect stabilising transactions and there is no assurance that stabilising transactions will be undertaken. Such stabilisation transactions, if commenced, may be discontinued at any time without prior notice and must be discontinued within 30 calendar days after the commencement of conditional dealings in the Units. In no event will measures be taken to stabilise the market price of the Units above the Offer Price. Save as required by law or regulation, neither the Stabilisation Manager nor any of its agents intends to disclose the extent of any stabilisation transactions conducted in relation to the Offering.

This announcement also serves as the pricing statement related to the Offering as required by article 17), subject to applicable securities laws.

Details of the Offering

Pegasus Acquisition Company Europe B.V. has completed the private placement of units, each replaceable by one Class A Ordinary Share and one-third (1/3) of a Warrant (the "Units") as announced on 26 April 2021 and launched on 27 April 2021 (the Offering).

The Offering consists of a private placement of 50,000,000 Units (assuming the Put Option is not exercised, or 44,000,000 Units if the Put Option is exercised in full) at a price of 10.00 per Unit (the "Offer Price") raising proceeds of 500 million (or 440 million assuming the Put Option is exercised in full).

Pegasus has applied for admission of all issued Units, Class A Ordinary Shares and Warrants to listing and trading on Euronext Amsterdam, under the symbols "PACEU" (Units), "PACE" (Class A Ordinary Shares) and "PACEW" (Warrants). First trading in the Units on an "as-if-and-when-issued/delivered" basis on Euronext Amsterdam under the symbol "PACEU" will commence today Thursday, 29 April 2021 at 9.00 CET.

Settlement of the Offering and the start of unconditional trading in the Units is expected to take place on Monday, 3 May 2021 (the "Settlement Date"). The Class A Ordinary Shares and the Warrants can be traded separately only from the 37th calendar day after the first trading, from which date the holders of Units will have the option to continue to hold and trade Units or to replace their Units with Class A Ordinary Shares and Warrants.

Investing in Pegasus involves certain risks. A description of these risks, which include risks relating to Pegasus as well as risks relating to the Offering, the Ordinary Shares and the Warrants is included in the Prospectus.

Media Contacts

Pegasus Europe

FinElk: Cornelia Schnepf / Robin Haddrill: +44 7387 108 998 / +44 7920 016 203

pegasus@finelk.eu

Disclaimer

This press release contains information that qualifies or may have qualified as inside information within the meaning of Article 7(1) of the EU Market Abuse Regulation.

These materials are not for release, distribution or publication, whether directly or indirectly and whether in whole or in part, in or into the United States (as defined in Rule 902 of Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended Canada, Australia, Japan or South Africa or any other jurisdiction where to do so would constitute a violation of the relevant laws of such jurisdiction.

These materials are for information purposes only and are not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy the securities of Pegasus Acquisition Company Europe B.V. (the "Company", and such securities, the "Securities") in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration, exemption from registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction.

This announcement is not for publication or distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States. This announcement is not an offer of securities for sale into the United States. The Securities have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States. The Company will not be registered in the United States as an investment company under the U.S. Investment Company Act of 1940. No public offering of securities is being made in the United States.

In the United Kingdom, this document and any other materials in relation to the Securities is only being distributed to, and is only directed at, and any investment or investment activity to which this document relates is available only to, and will be engaged in only with, "qualified investors" within the meaning of Article 2(e) of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 (the "Prospectus Regulation") as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "EUWA") and who are also (i) persons having professional experience in matters relating to investments who fall within the definition of "investment professionals" in Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Order"); or (ii) high net worth entities falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (all such persons together being referred to as "relevant persons"). The securities are only available to, and any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire such securities will be engaged in only with, relevant persons. Persons who are not relevant persons should not take any action on the basis of this document and should not act or rely on it.

In relation to each member state of the European Economic Area (each, a "Member State"), no Units, Class A Ordinary Shares or Warrants have been offered or will be offered in that relevant Member State, except that an offer to the public in that relevant Member State of any of the Units, the Class A Ordinary Shares or the Warrants may be made at any time to any legal entity which is a qualified investor as defined in Article 2 of the Prospectus Regulation, provided that no such offer of Units, Class A Ordinary Shares or Warrants shall require the Company to publish a prospectus pursuant to Article 3 of the Prospectus Regulation or supplement a prospectus pursuant to Article 23 of the Prospectus Regulation.

The Units, the Class A Ordinary Shares and the Warrants are not intended to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and, should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any retail investor in the EEA. For these purposes, a retail investor means a person who is one (or more) of: (i) a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II; (ii) a customer within the meaning of Directive 2016/97/EC (as amended or superseded, the 'Insurance Distribution Directive'), where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II; or (iii) not a qualified investor as defined in the Prospectus Regulation. Consequently no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 (as amended the 'PRIIPs Regulation') for offering or selling the Units or the Warrants or otherwise making them available to retail investors in the EEA has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or the Warrants or otherwise making them available to any retail investor in the EEA may be unlawful under the PRIIPs Regulation.

The Units, the Ordinary Shares and the Warrants are not intended to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any retail investor in the United Kingdom. For these purposes, a "retail investor" means a person who is one (or more) of: (i) a retail client, as defined in Directive (EU) 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments (as amended) and implemented in the United Kingdom as it forms part of the domestic law of the United Kingdom by virtue of the EUWA ("UK MIFID II"); (ii) a customer within the meaning of the Insurance Distribution Directive as it forms part of the domestic law of the United Kingdom by virtue of the EUWA, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in UK MIFID II; or (iii) not a qualified investor as defined in Article 2 of the Prospectus Regulation as it forms part of the domestic law of the United Kingdom by virtue of the EUWA. Consequently, no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 as it forms part of the domestic law of the United Kingdom by virtue of the EUWA (the "UK PRIIPs Regulation") for offering or selling the Units and the Warrants or otherwise making them available to retail investors in the United Kingdom has been prepared and, therefore, offering or selling the Units and the Warrants or otherwise making them available to any retail investor in the UK may be unlawful under the UK PRIIPs Regulation.

No action has been taken by the Company that would permit an offer of Securities or the possession or distribution of these materials or any other offering or publicity material relating to such Securities in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required.

The release, publication or distribution of these materials in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law and therefore persons in such jurisdictions into which they are released, published or distributed, should inform themselves about, and observe, such restrictions.

These materials may include statements, including the Company's financial and operational medium-term objectives that are, or may be deemed to be, 'forward-looking statements'. These forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms 'believes', "aims", "forecasts", "continues", 'estimates', 'plans', 'projects', 'anticipates', 'expects', 'intends', 'may', 'will' or 'should' or, in each case, their negative or other variations or comparable terminology, or by discussions of strategy, plans, objectives, goals, future events or intentions. Forward-looking statements may and often do differ materially from actual results. Any forward-looking statements reflect the Company's current view with respect to future events and are subject to risks relating to future events and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to the Company's business, results of operations, financial position, liquidity, prospects, growth or strategies. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made.

This announcement does not constitute a prospectus. An offer to acquire Securities pursuant to the proposed offering will be made, and any investor should make his investment, solely on the basis of information that will be contained in the prospectus to be made generally available in the Netherlands in connection with such offering. When made generally available, copies of the prospectus may be obtained at no cost from the Company or through the website of the Company.

Each of the Company, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan (the "Global Coordinators") and their respective affiliates expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update, review or revise any forward-looking statement contained in these materials whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

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1 or 440m if the 12% Put Option for the reverse greenshoe is exercised in full.
Kolkata: The eighth phase of the assembly poll in West Bengal on Thursday (April 29) brought to an end the protracted voting schedule in the state. The last phase of the Assembly poll witnessed sporadic violence, assault of candidates, and death of a person during the day.

Voter turnout of 76.07 per cent was recorded till 5 pm in 35 constituencies where polling was conducted on Thursday and is expected to go up further after the polling ends at 6.30 PM, said a PTI report citing the Election Commission sources.

Voting was held in 11,860 polling stations of the 35 constituencies -- 11 each in Murshidabad and Birbhum, six in Malda, and seven in north Kolkata, the sources said. One person was killed and two others were injured when a car hit them in Murshidabad district hours before the polling exercise began, a police officer told PTI.

The CPI(M) claimed that its member Kader Mondal(42) was killed, and two others -- Asim Al Mamoon (43) and Lal Chand Mondal (42) were injured when TMC candidate Jafikul Islam ran his car over them. Islam, TMC's Domkal candidate, rubbished the allegation claiming that he was nowhere near the site of the incident.

Chief Election Officer (CEO) Aariz Aftab has sought a report from district authorities in the matter.

In the Beliaghata area of the city, clashes broke out between two groups which were followed by lathicharge by the police to disperse the people. Two persons who identified themselves as BJP activists alleged that TMC workers roughed them up during the melee.

There were clashes between TMC and BJP activists in Ilambazar area of Bolpur constituency. BJP candidate Anirban Ganguly's car was damaged when he reached there. Ganguly, who was touring the constituency to check the polling process at different booths, alleged that the attack on his vehicle was by TMC-backed goons.

TMC candidate for the constituency and state minister Chandranath Sinha rubbished Ganguly's allegations and said that villagers drove him away as the BJP candidate was trying to influence voters.



In the Nanoor constituency of violence-prone Birbhum district, BJP candidate Tarakeshwar Saha reportedly suffered injuries after his vehicle was ransacked. The BJP candidate reportedly accused TMC cadres of attacking him and the allegation was dubbed as "baseless" by local leaders of the state's ruling party.

In the Domkol area in Murshidabad, district clashes broke out between the TMC and the BJP activists. The police later recovered a huge quantity of crude bombs from a field. Bomb disposal squads rushed to diffuse the bombs.

In the Maniktala constituency of Kolkata, BJP candidate Kalyan Choubey was gheraoed by a group of people during his visit to the polling booths. Choubey alleged that TMC-backed anti-socials tried to create disturbances so that they could rig the polls.

Maniktala TMC candidate Sadhan Pande alleged that agents of his party were assaulted by BJP cadres in several booths. "A lady agent was beaten up by BJP goons. The EC should take note of it," Pande said.

Crude bombs were burst outside Mahajati Sadan on the arterial Central Avenue in central Kolkata on Thursday morning, a Kolkata Police senior official told reporters. An official of the CEO's office said that banned crackers were burst at the spot.

BJP's Jorasanko candidate Meena Devi Purohit alleged that the bombs were thrown at her vehicle when she was touring different polling booths. A huge police contingent was rushed to the spot to control the situation.

Senior TMC leader Sougata Roy alleged that BJP goons along with a section of the central forces had terrorised voters. The BJP and officials of the central forces have dubbed the allegations as baseless.

Since early morning, long queues were seen outside most polling booths raising concerns over the spread of COVID-19. The Election Commission, however, assured that all precautionary measures are in place.

The poll panel deployed 641 companies of central forces in the final phase to ensure fair voting. The eight-phase election to the 294 member West Bengal assembly began on March 27, while votes will be counted on Sunday.

The state today registered its highest single-day deaths of 89 people due to COVID-19, pushing the toll to 11,248, according to the health department bulletin. The coronavirus tally topped the 8-lakh-mark to settle at 8,10,955 after 17,403 tested positives in the last 24 hours, it said.

The state now has 1,10,241 active cases, it said, adding that 12,885 patients recovered since Wednesday. At least 53,724 samples were tested during this period.

(With Agency Inputs)
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Chilling video has emerged of the gunman who killed two people in five separate drive-by shootings in downtown Los Angeles glaring at police moments before they shot him dead when he refused to surrender.

Carlos Lopez, 49, of Los Angeles, was identified by police as the man who carried out the spate of attacks early Tuesday morning.

Lopez launched his shooting spree at around 1am and shot three people from inside his car over the course of about half an hour, killing two of them, the LAPD said.

He then led police on a three-hour car chase that ended in a shootout on a freeway overpass, where a SWAT team fired through his windshield and killed him.

Video showed Lopez sitting behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee surrounded by police as they tried unsuccessfully to convince him to surrender.

Detectives later discovered an arsenal of weapons at Lopez's home, including a legally-owned AR-15, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times.

Lt Raul Jovel said police have yet to determine a motive of the attacks.

'These appear to be random acts of violence. We have no idea what caused this,' Jovel said. 'We will return to the suspects home and speak to family members and try to find out what led to this violence.'

Police previously said they were looking into the possibility that the shootings were hate crimes because two of the victims were Asian men.

The two men killed were identified as Mingzhi Zhu, a 42-year-old Uber driver and father of two, and Alexis Carbajal, a 24-year-old newlywed. Lopez did not appear to know any of the three victims, the Times reported.

Scroll down for video

Carlos Lopez, 49, was identified by police as the gunman who allegedly shot dead two people in five separate drive-by shootings in Los Angeles early Tuesday. He is pictured in his car during a stand-off with cops who cornered him on a freeway

Aerial footage shows Lopez's car surrounded by SWAT vehicles on a freeway

Lopez was killed by police after leading them on a three-hour chase that ended in a shootout

Mingzhi Zhu (left), a 42-year-old Uber driver and father-of-two; and Alexis Carbajal (right), a 24-year-old newlywed, were identified as the two men killed by Lopez during his shooting spree in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday morning

Timeline of the LA shooting on April 27 12.55am LAPD officers respond to shooting at Figueroa/ Exposition in downtown Los Angeles, near the University of Southern California. Officers find an adult male victim who had been shot at and suffered a graze-wound to the head. The suspect was described as a male in a White Jeep, and with the help of the victim's dash cam, officers were able to send out a description and send information out to patrol units. 1.05am Shooting occurs near 28th St & Figueroa at a Starbucks drive-thru. An adult male named 24-year-old Alexis Carbaja was shot in his car which he was in with his wife. The man was pronounced dead, but his wife survived with minor injuries. 1.25am A male motorist is shot at 7th & Figueroa. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The victim was identified as 42-year-old Mingzhi Zhu of South Pasadena, an Uber driver with two children. 3.25am After a three-hour chase, the car is disabled after spike strips are used by officers on the WB 91 Freeway at the Raymond overpass in Fullerton. SWAT officers attempt to negotiate with Lopez, but return fire when he shot through his windshield at them - killing him. Advertisement

The drive-by shootings began around 12.55am Tuesday near the University of Southern California when Lopez, who was driving a white Jeep Cherokee, pulled up alongside a 43-year-old man's vehicle at Figueroa Street and Exposition Boulevard, police said.

Lopez allegedly fired multiple rounds at the man, who suffered a bullet graze wound to his head.

That first victim, who has not been named but was said to be a Korean speaker, is expected to survive.

LAPD Chief Michel Moore said a dashboard camera inside the man's vehicle captured part of the shooting and the Jeep's license plate, which helped officers circulate a description of the car.

About 10 minutes later, another shooting occurred less than a mile away in a Starbucks drive-thru, at 28th St & Figueroa.

Lopez drove alongside another another vehicle in-line for the Starbucks and backed into it, causing a slight crash, police said.

He then fired into the vehicle - a Ford Mustang - killing newlywed Carbajal who was driving with his wife, Moore said.

Police believe there was a 'verbal exchange' between the couple and the gunman, but Moore did not know what was said.

Surveillance footage shows Carbajal's wife running for help when he was shot. She was also injured but it is unclear at this time if she was shot or injured by shrapnel.

The second deadly shooting occurred around 1.25am, about three miles away from the second scene.

An Asian man was driving when Lopez pulled up next to him and began firing through the window.

The coroner identified that victim as Zhu of South Pasadena.

Zhu was an Uber driver and was on his way to pick up a rider, the company said in a statement that called the shootings senseless and heartbreaking.

He leaves behind a wife and two children - an eight-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

Lopez launched his shooting spree at around 1am Tuesday and shot three people over the course of about half an hour, killing two of them, the LAPD said

A camera on one of the victims' cars captured video of Lopez speeding by before shooting

Police are pictured at an intersection where one of the victims was shot by Lopez

Lopez's white Jeep Cherokee is seen jammed between two SWAT vehicles after it was forced to come to a stop following a three-hour car chase on Tuesday morning. Lopez was killed after he refused to surrender and cops opened fire through his windshield

Lopez then continued on the rampage, opening fire on a vehicle in an intersection.

Officers spotted the suspect's Jeep at around 1.45am and began a long pursuit, which included the suspect firing at a white Tesla while driving.

The driver - Seth Jones - was not injured, and captured the shooting on camera.

He said the bullet fired by Lopez came dangerously close to his head rest.

'I just thought this was it, I don't know,' Jones told Eyewitness News. 'He shot and my back window exploded. And I just drove away. I drove as fast as I could. I called 911 and they told me to take the nearest exit. I'm just so grateful to be alive.'

The subsequent chase covered the 60 and 57 freeways freeways in Los Angeles and Orange counties, before coming to an end on the westbound 91 Freeway near Raymond Avenue at about 3.25am.

Police used spike strips to disable the Jeep on an overpass in Fullerton, when a standoff with LAPD SWAT officers began.

The Starbucks where one of the shootings occurred. The suspect led police on a three-hour car chase that ended in a shootout on a freeway overpass, where the suspect was fatally shot

One person was killed at a Starbucks drive-thru above. The suspect, only described as a man in his late 40s or early 50s, killed a newly married man at the site before killing an Uber driver father-of-two during what police described as a 'random' shooting spree

SWAT pinned the Jeep in and attempted negotiations aimed at having Lopez surrender, Moore said.

The Times reported that a member of Lopez's family was recruited to help get him to turn himself over to police, but was unsuccessful.

At around 4.45am, officers were reported to be deploying tear gas into his car.

But the suspect began firing at the officers through the vehicle's front windshield, and an officer returned fire, he said.

Lopez allegedly shot at police a second time, prompting the officer to return fire again.

He was pronounced dead at the scene, and a handgun believed to be linked to the earlier shootings was recovered there, Moore said.

The shootings come amid a surge in anti-Asian violence across America as well as a string of recent mass shootings

Police said they are now probing whether the shootings were hate crimes as two of the shooting victims were Asian men. People walk past the crime scene

The shooting comes amid a surge in anti-Asian violence across America as well as a string of recent mass shootings

Authorities are pursuing a possible line of inquiry that the shootings were anti-Asian hate crimes, the Times reported.

It comes amid a surge in anti-Asian violence across America as well as a string of recent mass shootings.

'We are very mindful of the potentiality for that, and leaning into that very actively,' Moore said.

Police were also investigating if Lopez was connected to any other crimes and if the weapons in his home were owned legally.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to cover the costs of Carbajal's funeral. The page confirmed he was one of the victims of the Tuesday shooting.

'He was only 24 years old and left behind his Mother, sisters, and wife,' the page read. 'He didn't deserve this, he was a gentle soul who always put others before himself, he could light up any room and was such a caring person.'

Carbajal's sister Mia Vaca, told ABC7: 'For this to happen, it's hard. I feel like it's a dream, and he's just going to walk in to the door any minute.'

Biden Executive Actions on Guns Crackdown on 'ghost guns,' which are built from kits

Tighten requirements on pistol braces that allow for more accurate shooting

Department of Justice will publish 'red flag' legislation for the states

Investment in evidence-based community violence interventions

DoJ will issue an annual report on gun trafficking Advertisement

Yuki Cutcheon, president of the South Pasadena Chinese American Club, said on behalf of Mingzhi Zhu's family: 'Hes a hardworking, intelligent, kind, gentle and deeply loving husband, deeply loving father and very dedicated husband. The family is lost without him.

Cutcheon said Zhu's family moved from China in 2016.

The shooting rampage comes amid a surge in violent crime in LA.

The number of people shot in the city has increased 73 percent this year, compared with the same time period in 2020.

The police killing Tuesday also marks the second time LAPD officers have fatally shot a person in the last four days.

On Saturday, 34-year-old Richard Solitro was shot and killed following a car crash with police.

Solitro got out of his vehicle and, holding his hand behind his back, began counting down '3... 2... 1' as he started to bring his hand out, police said.

At least one officer fired, fatally striking him.

Police said they did not find a weapon on the scene. Solitro was previously shot by police in Rhode Island in 2018.

The shooting spree in LA also marks the latest in a string of mass shootings across America in recent weeks which have prompted Joe Biden to clamp down on gun laws.

Back on March 16, Robert Aaron Long, 21, is accused of killing eight people - six of them Asian women - in a series of attacks at three Atlanta spas.

The following week, gunman Ahmad Alissa then allegedly shot dead ten people including a police officer, in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

The next day, a shooting at a Southern California office building left four people dead, including a child.

Eight people were shot and killed at the FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis earlier this month.

The president has unveiled a series of executive actions designed to curb gun violence following the string of shootings.

The six actions include: a crackdown on the proliferation of 'ghost guns,' which are built from kits; tighten requirements on pistol braces that allow for more accurate shooting; the Department of Justice will publish 'red flag' legislation for the states; invest in evidence-based community violence interventions; and DoJ will issue an annual report on gun trafficking.

Biden said mass shootings are a 'public health crisis' and argued he was not trying to impinge on the Second Amendment - a claim gun rights groups and Republicans have made against the introduction gun control laws.
Russia is sending more than 22 tonnes of medical supplies to India to combat the second COVID-19 wave. These supplies comprise 20 oxygen production units, 75 ventilators, and 2,00,000 packs of medicines.

Russian Foreign Ministry shared a video of transport planes being loaded with medical supplies and tweeted, "#RussiaHelps #RussiaIndia #Russia sends oxygen concentrators, ventilators, and 22 tonnes of medical supplies to #India to help fight #COVID19 and save lives. 2 transport planes are already en route @MEAIndia @IndianDiplomacy."





Russian Ambassador to India Nikolay Kudashev emphasised the importance of collective efforts and mutual respect between nations in times of crisis like the coronavirus pandemic. Kudashev added, "We sincerely empathise with the Indian people due to our traditionally warm and friendly relations."

#Kudashev: We sincerely empathize with the Indian people due to our traditionally warm and friendly relations@mfa_russia@IndEmbMoscowhttps://t.co/laTRvGRFCGpic.twitter.com/lc1xq4fqz5  Russia in India  (@RusEmbIndia) April 28, 2021

Russia sent medical supplies after a telephonic conversation between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Russian President Vladimir Putin. During this phone call, Putin assured of extending all possible support to India. Prime Minister Modi followed this up by thanking Putin and noted that Russia's prompt support to India was a symbol of the "enduring partnership" between both countries.

Putin also appreciated the emergency use approval granted to the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine .

We also reviewed our diverse bilateral cooperation, especially in the area of space exploration and renewable energy sector, including in hydrogen economy. Our cooperation on Sputnik-V vaccine will assist humanity in battling the pandemic.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 28, 2021

To add further momentum to our strong strategic partnership, President Putin and I have agreed to establish a 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue between our Foreign and Defence Ministers.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 28, 2021

Several countries like Switzerland, the US, the UK, the EU, the UAE, the EU, and Germany have come to help India when the country is reeling under the second wave of COVID-19.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) also said earlier this week that they have boosted their COVID-19 response in India. The Geneva-based global health watchdog has redeployed 2,600 health experts from other programmes to counter the recent rise in cases and deaths.

Edited by Mehak Agarwal

Also read: Oxygen support, concentrators, PPEs: US deploys COVID-19 relief shipments worth $100 mn to India

Also read: Sending 'whole series of help' to India to tide over COVID-19 crisis: Joe Biden

Also read: COVID-19: Switzerland to send oxygen concentrators, ventilators, other medical supplies to India

Also read: COVID-19 in India: Where oxygen concentrators are coming from
In this April 2, 2021, file photo, Washington Metropolitan Police Department chief Robert Contee speaks during a news conference in Washington. Political hand-wringing in Washington over Russia's hacking of federal agencies and meddling in U.S. politics has mostly overshadowed a worsening digital scourge with a far broader wallop: crippling and dispiriting extortionary ransomware attacks by cybercriminal mafias. All the while, ransomware gangsters have become more brazen and cocky as they put more and more lives and livelihoods at risk. This week, one syndicate threatened to make available to local criminal gangs data they say they stole from the Washington, D.C., metro police on informants. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Political hand-wringing in Washington over Russia's hacking of federal agencies and interference in U.S. politics has mostly overshadowed a worsening digital scourge with a far broader wallop: crippling and dispiriting extortionary ransomware attacks by cybercriminal mafias that mostly operate in foreign safe havens out of the reach of Western law enforcement.

Stricken in the United States alone last year were more than 100 federal, state and municipal agencies, upwards of 500 health care centers, 1,680 educational institutions and untold thousands of businesses, according to the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Dollar losses are in the tens of billions. Accurate numbers are elusive. Many victims shun reporting, fearing the reputational blight.

All the while, ransomware gangsters have become more brazen and cocky as they put more and more lives and livelihoods at risk. This week, one syndicate threatened to make available to local criminal gangs data they say they stole from the Washington, D.C., metro police on informants. Another recently offered to share data purloined from corporate victims with Wall Street inside traders. Cybercriminals have even reached out directly to people whose personal info was harvested from third parties to pressure victims to pay up.

"In general, the ransomware actors have gotten more bold and more ruthless," said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

The U.S. government now deems ransomware a national security threat. The Department of Justice has just created a task force to tackle it.

On Thursday, a public-private task force including Microsoft, Amazon, the National Governors Association, the FBI, Secret Service and Britain and Canada's elite crime agencies delivered to the White House an 81-page urgent action plan for an aggressive and comprehensive whole-of-government assault on ransomware, with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas set to accompany them for a formal online launch at 1 p.m. EDT.

WHERE DID RANSOMWARE COME FROM? HOW DOES IT WORK?

The criminal syndicates that dominate the ransomware business are mostly Russian-speaking and operate with near impunity out of Russia and allied countries. They are a continuation and refinementransomware was barely a blip three years agoof more than two decades of cyber-thieving that spammed, stole credit cards and identities and emptied bank accounts. The syndicates have grown in sophistication and skill, leveraging dark web forums to organize and recruit while hiding their identities and movements with tools like the Tor browser and cryptocurrencies that make paymentsand their launderingharder to track.

Ransomware scrambles a victim organization's data with encryption. The criminals leave instructions on infected computers for how to negotiate ransom payments and, once paid, provide software decryption keys.

Last year, ransomware crooks expanded into data-theft blackmail. Before triggering encryption, they quietly exfiltrate sensitive files and threaten to expose them publicly unless ransoms are paid. Victims who diligently backed up their networks as a hedge against ransomware now had to think twice about refusing to pay. At the end of 2019, only one ransomware group had an extortion site online that would publish such files. Now more than two dozen do.

Victims who refuse to pay can incur costs that far exceed the ransoms they might have negotiated. It happened recently to the University of Vermont Health Network. It suffered an estimated $1.5 million a day in losses in the two months it took to recover. More than 5,000 hospital computers, their data scrambled into gibberish, had to be wiped clean and reconstituted from backed-up data.

The University of California-San Francisco, heavily involved in COVID-19 research, barely hesitated before paying. It gave the criminals $1.1 million last June. Manufacturers have been especially hard-hit this year, with ransoms of $50 million demanded of computer makers Acer and Quanta, a major supplier of Apple laptops.

HOW ARE THESE CRIMINALS ORGANIZED?

Some top ransomware criminals fancy themselves software service professionals. They take pride in their "customer service," providing "help desks" that assist paying victims in file decryption. And they tend to keep their word. They have brands to protect, after all.

"If they stick to their promises, future victims will be encouraged to pay up," Maurits Lucas, director of intelligence solutions at the cybersecurity firm Intel471, told a webinar earlier this year. "As a victim you actually know their reputation."

The business tends to be compartmentalized. An affiliate will identify, map out and infect targets, choose victims and deploy ransomware that is typically "rented" from a ransomware-as-a-service provider. The provider gets a cut of the payout, the affiliate normally taking more than three-quarters. Other subcontractors may also get a slice. That can include the authors of the malware used to break into victim networks and the people running the so-called "bulletproof domains" behind which the ransomware gangs hide their "command-and-control" servers. Those servers manage the remote sowing of malware and data extraction ahead of activation, a stealthy process that can take weeks.

WHY DO RANSOMS KEEP CLIMBING? HOW CAN THEY BE STOPPED?

In Thursday's report, the task force says it would be wrong to try to ban ransom payments, largely because "ransomware attackers continue to find sectors and elements of society that are woefully underprepared for this style of attack."

The task force recognizes that paying up can be the only way for an afflicted business to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the sophisticated cybercriminals often have done their research and know a victim's cybersecurity insurance coverage limit. They've been known to mention it in negotiations.

That degree of criminal savvy helped drive average ransom payments to more than $310,000 last year, up 171% from 2019, according to Palo Alto Networks, a task force member.

Not surprisingly, the still-young cyber-insurance industry is reeling. Premiums have gone up by 50% to 100% in the past year as ransomware became the No. 1 claim, said Michael Phillips, chief claims officer of Resilience Insurance and a co-chair of the task force. On average, cyber-insurance claim payouts can now exceed 70% of what is paid in premiumsprompting some insurers to drop this type of insurance altogether, industry reports show.

The multi-pronged response to ransomware proposed by the task force will require the kind of concerted diplomatic, legal and law enforcement cooperation with key allies that the Trump administration shunned, displacing what the authors call the current "uncoordinated, disjointed" response.

"There is no silver bullet, but if we're going to shift the trajectory of this type of attack the U.S. government has got to get at this with some speed," said task force co-chair Philip Reiner, CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Security and Technology.

Ransomware developers and their affiliates should be named and shamed (they are not always easy to identify) and regimes that enable them punished with sanctions, the report urges.

It calls for mandatory disclosure of ransom payments and a federal "response fund" to provide financial assistance to victimsin hopes that, in many cases, it will prevent them from paying ransoms. And it wants stricter regulation of cryptocurrency markets to make it more difficult for criminals to launder ransomware proceeds.

The task force also calls for something potentially controversial: amending the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to let private industry actively block or limit online criminal activity, including of botnets, the networks of hijacked zombie computers that ransomware criminals use to sow infections.

The odds of successfully stifling ransomware are high, the report's authors acknowledge: "The old adage that a cybercriminal only has to be lucky once, while a defender has to be lucky every minute of every day, has never been more true."

Explore further DC police department hit by apparent extortion attack

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
BOSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VOGSY , the only quote-to-cash Professional Services Automation solution built for Google Workspace users, and Incentro Africa, the Nairobi-based branch of the full digital service company called Incentro, announced today their new partnership. Through VOGSY's global Partner Program, Incentro Africa's customers across Africa will harness VOGSY's unique platform to run their quote-to-cash operations, enhancing productivity and profitability. VOGSY will also expand its global reach.

A Google Cloud premier partner, Incentro Africa specializes in enterprise work transformation services enhanced by Google Cloud and proactively seeks new partnerships and solutions to benefit customers and boost their productivity. Many of Incentro's existing customers needed a fully integrated, affordable solution. Incentro will provide this through its partnership with VOGSY. According to Dennis de Weerd, Incentro Africa's CEO, supplying VOGSY's ERP system to Incentro Africa's customers represents a major advantage in transforming their productivity, team collaboration and efficiency.

"VOGSY gives our customers the ability to streamline and manage their quote-to-cash processes from all sales, operations and accounting sides with a single tool that integrates with Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, achieving the ultimate real-time collaboration and transparency throughout service delivery," de Weerd said.

VOGSY is a singular tool that packs significant value for services firms. Elimination of silos, intuitive UX and real-time business data on a scalable, secure platform are some of the main benefits VOGSY's CEO Mark van Leeuwen aims to bring to Incentro Africa's customers.

"As professional services firms undertake digital transformations, they require forward-thinking partners and access to tools that provide actionable data and real collaboration whether they're two feet or continents apart," van Leeuwen said.

About Incentro

With over 10 years of proven expertise in technical consultation and related services, Incentro, the only Google Premier Partner in East, West and Central Africa has become the go-to partner for successful business transformation in the continent.

For more information, visit www.incentro.com/en-ke

About VOGSY

Based on Google Workspace as the productivity hub, VOGSY streamlines all mission-critical services processes from quote to cash for B2B service firms in all industries, including marketing, consulting, engineering and IT. For more information, visit www.vogsy.com .

To try VOGSY free for 30 days, visit https://vogsy.io/login-free-trial .

SOURCE VOGSY

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Colin has been working with electric and gas utilities since 2007 across multiple disciplines, including: regulatory and policy consulting, customer engagement platforms, design and implementation of demand side management and demand response programs, and smart meter data analytics.

Most recently, Colin was the VP of Strategy and Growth at Bidgely, a customer engagement and AI SaaS company based in Silicon Valley. Prior to that, Colin led Business and Customer Analytics for CLEAResult, the largest provider of energy efficiency programs in North America.

Says Colin: "Sense sits at the confluence of the smart home, decarbonization and grid edge intelligence, which makes this a very exciting time to join the team."

Colin earned his undergraduate degree at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and completed his graduate certificates in Data Science at Johns Hopkins University. Colin lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Amanda.

About Sense

Sense's mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by making homes smart and efficient. We empower people to care for their homes and families while contributing to a cleaner, more resilient future. Founded in 2013 by pioneers in speech recognition, Sense uses machine learning technology to provide real-time insights on device behavior, even for those devices that are not "smart." Customers rely on Sense for a wide range of uses including monitoring their home appliances, determining whether they left appliances running and identifying how to reduce their energy costs. Sense has received investments from two of the world's largest energy technology companies, Schneider Electric and Landis + Gyr. Sense is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. To make sense of your energy, visit: https://sense.com .

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Sense

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New parcel pickup locations in Australia have been introduced to cater customers who prefer to have their package delivered to a pickup location. According to an Amazon survey, one in five Australians want to pick up their package at a location to keep it a surprise from their household.

New parcel pickup networks and locations in Perth, Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland have been launched, Amazon announced, expanding its Amazon Hub Network.

As Australians return to the office in the meantime, the expansion of its parcel pickup network widens customers choices when it comes to package delivery.

Independent research commissioned by Amazon Australia revealed that one in five Aussies (19%) dont have a secure location to leave their parcels at their home and therefore prefer to have their package delivered to a pickup location.

Amazon claims its expanded network will also likely be welcome news for more than 1.8 million Australians for whom having the option to deliver to a nearby, secure location with collection when it suits them, is the most important factor in their delivery experience.

Craig Fuller, Director of Operations, Amazon Australia, says most Australians stayed home last year with nearly half (49%) increased their online shopping habits.

Fuller explains: Many are returning to the office on a full or part time basis and have less consistency about when we will be home. We expect our expanded Amazon Hub network of more than 750 locations will be welcomed for the choice and convenience it offers, and we are pleased to be able to extend this network to our West Australian customers.

The research also revealed that one in five Australians (21%) prefer to have their orders delivered to a parcel pickup point rather than their home in order to keep it a surprise from someone in their household.

Amazon claims shipping to a location is easy and secure.

Customers proceed to checkout and select the Locker or Counter pickup point thats most convenient for them as their delivery location. As soon as their parcel arrives, customers receive an e-mail notification with a unique barcode and six-digit code that theyll use to retrieve their parcel. At the Locker, customers will scan the barcode to retrieve their parcel. For Counter locations, customers will provide the barcode or the six-digit code to store staff, who will scan it, retrieve the parcel, and hand it to the customer. Customers have three days to collect their parcel from a Locker and seven days to collect their parcel from a Counter location, Amazon instructs.

Amazon Hub, launched in Sydney and Melbourne in 2019, Queensland and South Australia last year, and now available in Western Australia, offers hundreds of Locker and Counter locations, situated in shopping centres, banks, newsagents, and retailers.

Amazon Hub, along with doorstep delivery options, are available to Amazon Prime members at no additional charge. In addition, Prime members enjoy free shipping in as fast as two days on Prime eligible products, along with unlimited access to award-winning movies and TV episodes with Prime Video, and a range of other benefits.
A serving garda has been acquitted of sexually abusing a child his mother was minding 40 years ago.

The jury at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court trial heard that the allegation first came to light after the complainant saw the garda on RTE's Crimecall programme.

He recognised the garda as the son of a woman who had minded him for a few years when he was a child. The complainant, now aged 46, went to gardai and alleged that this man had sexually assaulted him on three occasions when he was around 6 or 7 years old.

The 56-year-old man, who can't be named for legal reasons, pleaded not guilty to three counts of indecently assaulting the boy at a Dublin address and in a green area between April 1979 and May 1982. He was aged between 14 and 17 at the time.

The jury of nine men and three women returned not guilty verdicts on all three counts on Thursday following a two-week trial that was held in Croke Park.

The prosecution case was that the accused indecently assaulted the boy in his bedroom on two occasions by touching his penis.

They alleged that on a third occasion, the accused called to the boy's house on his bike, went for a cycle with the boy and bought him a bar of chocolate before indecently assaulting him in a bush in a green area.

During the trial, the accused man took the stand and repeatedly denied he had ever sexually abused the complainant or that he ever called to the boy's house. That never happened, he told the jury. I never touched that child.

The defence submitted there were frailties, inconsistencies and contradictions in the case, including the layout and appearance of the bedroom the complainant was allegedly abused in, which they submitted resembled the boy's own childhood bedroom.

The defence also pointed to a number of childminders who minded the boy shortly after the accused man's mother, including one childminder who was let go because she was letting undesirable people into the boy's house.

The trial heard that the complainant blocked out the memories of the alleged abuse for a number of years until 1994, when he said he encountered the accused man  by then a garda - while he was messing about with friends one night in the city centre. He recognised the garda, who moved the man and his friends on, and then remembered the alleged abuse, the court heard.

Years later, the complainant was watching Crimecall when the accused man appeared as part of his work.

In his closing speech to the jury, Eoghan Cole BL, prosecuting, said the complainant was upset and angry to see the accused man in this role. He went to gardai with the allegations shortly afterwards.

Mr Cole submitted the complainant gave clear and compelling evidence of the alleged abuse and was unshaken in the core elements of his testimony.

Defence barrister, Sean Guerin SC, told the jury there were ample contradictions in the case. He pointed to the fact that this was a very old case in which memories fade and evidence can be lost.

He said the complainant forgot about the alleged abuse for a decade, before he met the accused man in a drunken and fleeting encounter in the city centre in 1994.

Mr Guerin said the complainant's memory of the abuse occurring in a room containing one set of bunk beds and a single bed was significant. The court heard there were two sets of bunk beds in the room.

The complainant described lying on his back on his alleged abuser's chest, looking at the ceiling as he was sexually assaulted. Mr Guerin submitted this could not have occurred in the accused man's bedroom in this case. This one fact alone is capable of giving rise to reasonable doubt, he said.

He pointed to the fact that after the childminding arrangement with the accused man's mother ended, the complainant and his siblings were minded by another childminder in their own home. The court heard she was letting unsuitable people into the house, of whom the complainant's mother disapproved, Mr Guerin said.

If we don't know who these unsuitable people were coming to the house, how can you establish beyond reasonable doubt that what (the complainant) described happened in his own room? Mr Guerin said.

The complainant did not give a physical description of his alleged abuser, and also confused a couple of his brothers, the defence said. Identification is a real issue in this case, Mr Guerin said.

Judge Karen O'Connor thanked the jury for their service. They deliberated for four hours and 18 minutes before returning the verdicts.
By Joshua Franklin, Krystal Hu and Echo Wang

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Business news and information publisher Forbes Media LLC is in talks to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as it attracts new acquisition interest, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

Forbes' owner is also fielding offers from bidders including investment vehicle Borderless Services Inc, which has bid $700 million, and from a consortium led by tech investor Michael Moe, the sources said. Both of these bids would result in Forbes remaining a privately held company.

A deal could result in Forbes' ownership changing hands seven years after Hong Kong-based investor group Integrated Whale Media Investments purchased 95% of the company. The remainder of Forbes is owned by the Forbes family.

A proposed deal with a SPAC would take Forbes public on the U.S. stock market, enabling the existing owners to benefit from any share price increase on their remaining stakes.

The identity of the SPACs in talks with Forbes was not immediately clear.

A Forbes spokesman said: "We have no comment, but investors have consistently shown interest in Forbes, which has produced three years of record results. 2021 is shaping up to be a strong year as well."

Integrated Whale Media could not immediately be reached for comment. Moe and Borderless Services declined to comment.

Moe is founder and CEO of GSV Ventures. Borderless Services is an investment vehicle specializing in blockchain technology and is led by entrepreneur Patrick McConlogue.

The Borderless Services bid has a debt financing commitment from private equity firm Ares Management Corp, the sources added. Were it to acquire Forbes, Borderless Services would install a new management team and introduce cryptocurrency products such as a Forbes digital wallet, where users could manage digital currencies, some of the sources said.

Ares Management declined to comment.

Story continues

The sources, who requested anonymity because the matter is confidential, cautioned it is still possible no deal for Forbes will materialize or another bidder could emerge.

Forbes joins other media companies including Bustle Digital Group and BuzzFeed in pursuing a SPAC deal. SPACs are shell companies that raise funds in an initial public offering with the aim of merging with a private company, which becomes public as result. In the past year, they have become a popular alternative to a traditional IPO.

The digital media industry has been consolidating as media brands try to build scale in order to sell subscriptions and appeal to advertisers. Industry executives and dealmakers see SPACs as a popular option to help finance acquisitions for multiple media properties.

Forbes was valued at $475 million in 2014 when Integrated Whale Media bought a majority stake in the company from the Forbes family and investment group Elevation. Chinese conglomerate HNA Group made an unsuccessful bid to acquire a majority stake in Forbes in 2017, Reuters reported at the time.

As one of the oldest media outlets in the United States, Forbes publishes its flagship magazine which reaches 6 million readers. Founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917, it has long championed capitalism and entrepreneurship and is known for its annual list of the world's wealthiest people.

The company has been undergoing a digital transformation amid declining print revenue. It has been doubling down on expanding key franchises like Under 30 and live events, most of which have become virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic. It says its digital platform now reaches more than 140 million people with 40 global editions.

(Reporting by Joshua Franklin and Krystal Hu in New York and Echo Wang in Miami; Additional reporting by Julie Zhu in Hong Kong; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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NORFOLK, Va., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Affiliates of Harbor Group International, LLC ("HGI"), a privately owned international real estate investment and management firm, today announced the acquisition of a 56-asset multifamily portfolio for $390 million. The portfolio contains well-maintained, single-story workforce housing properties throughout the eastern United States. Image Capital, LLC, partnered with HGI on the transaction.

The portfolio consists of 5,490 units across five states. Approximately 70% of the properties are located in Florida and Ohio, where HGI already has a significant footprint. Other properties are located in Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

HGI plans to invest $25 million in capital improvements and enhancements to the properties, including $3.6 million on unit renovations.

"The portfolio demonstrated strong performance amid the economic downturn resulting from the pandemic, maintaining high occupancies and rent growth, and presenting an attractive opportunity for HGI," said Richard Litton, President, HGI. "This acquisition is indicative of our value-add approach and HGI's ability to identify diverse and valuable opportunities in strong markets for our investors."

Henry Bodek of Galaxy Capital served as broker for the transaction.

About Harbor Group International

Harbor Group International, LLC, including its affiliates, is a private real estate and real estate related investment and management firm which controls a portfolio of worldwide assets valued at $13.5 billion. HGI is headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia with offices in New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. The company's real estate holdings include 4.3 million square feet of commercial properties and 48,000 apartment units. For additional information, please visit www.harborgroupint.com.

Media Contacts:

Morgan McGinnis

[email protected]

323.500.0939

SOURCE Harbor Group International, LLC

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Millionaire skincare mogul Zoe Foster Blake was spotted shopping at Westfield Bondi Junction on Wednesday.

After buying a pair of shoes from The Athlete's Foot, the 40-year-old picked up her car from the valet parking, which costs $15.

Despite looking casual in a pair of cropped trousers and a loose white shirt, Zoe added some glamour with designer accessories.

Stepping out: Millionaire skincare mogul Zoe Foster Blake was spotted shopping at Westfield Bondi Junction on Wednesday

She wore branded embellished slides on her feet and carried a tan designer handbag.

The Go-To founder styled her black hair in a bushy bob with bangs, and kept her makeup light and natural.

With years of beauty and editorial experience under her belt, Zoe decided in 2012 she wanted to create her own skincare line.

After hearing what readers really wanted in skincare over the years, she believed she had what it took to create products for everyone to enjoy.

Casual: Despite looking casual in a pair of cropped trousers and a loose white shirt, Zoe added some glamour with designer accessories

Flashy! She wore branded embellished slides on her feet that were hard to miss

The idea of the company was hatched after she completed a beauty column for Mamamia that same year, closing the book on her full-time writing career and opening a completely new one.

She launched Go-To two years later, in 2014.

'I just wanted it to be simple and uncomplicated, clean, trustworthy products that you wouldn't be wasting money on and would know which ingredients actually worked,' she told The New York Times in 2014.

VIP service: The 40-year-old picked up her car from the valet parking, which costs $15

All smiles: Zoe and the service person shared a few smiles and some friendly chit-chat

Got everything you need? The businesswoman put on an animated display as she paid for her parking

Almost seven years later, Go-To now sells one unit of Transformazing Face Masks every 90 seconds, and has sold more than 200,000 bottles of Face Hero face oil in the last year.

In 2018, Go-To was stocked in 400 Sephora stores in the United States, and about 120 stores in Australia.

Zoe previously told the Business Chicks blog: 'I believe that the universe rewards momentum. Just keep going forward like you know what you're doing  and that is totally what I've done with my whole career.'

Chatty: Zoe continued to chat with another Westfield employee as she headed towards her car

Natural: The Go-To founder styled her black hair in a bushy bob with bangs, and kept her makeup light and natural

Go-To has had a boom in sales during the Covid-19 pandemic, which helped secure Zoe's place on the Australian Financial Review Young Rich List in November.

In December, Zoe and her husband, comedian Hamish Blake, bought a five-bedroom, six-bathroom home in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Vaucluse for $8,925,000.

The couple married in December 2012 in front of friends and family at the Wolgan Valley resort in the Blue Mountains.

The Blakes share two children together, Sonny, six, and Rudy, three. They are now joint ambassadors for Tourism Australia's 'Holiday Here This Year' campaign.
Kenmare Resources plc ("Kenmare" or "the Company")

29 April 2021

Publication of 2020 Sustainability Report

Kenmare Resources plc (LSE:KMR, ISE:KMR) today announces the publication of its inaugural Sustainability Report for the year ended 31 December 2020 and advises that the report is available on the Company's website at www.kenmareresources.com . It can also be downloaded directly here.

The 2020 Sustainability Report, aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative standards, aims to assist stakeholders to further understand our business by providing transparent demonstration and disclosure of Kenmares sustainability performance. The report outlines the strategy, policies, and management approach of Kenmare's longstanding and ongoing commitment to sustainability. These efforts are underpinned by the corporate values and purpose; to responsibly meet global demand for quality-of-life minerals.

Statement from Elaine Dorward-King, Chair of Sustainability Committee:

"Kenmare remains committed to advancing our efforts to be a responsible miner; focused on the safety and development of our people, as well as strong environmental and social performance. We have also enhanced our disclosure, to increase transparency, and set our first public sustainability targets.

In 2020, the Sustainability Committee endorsed strategies for Land Management, Water Stewardship, Energy and Climate Change and External Relations. These strategies brought together the work of many years and provides direction to further improve performance whilst ensuring long-term risks are managed. Of note in these strategies is Kenmare's commitment to building stronger biodiversity aspects into land management programmes and developing long-term greenhouse gas reduction targets."

Statement from Michael Carvill, Managing Director:

"Building on previous years sustainability disclosures in our Annual Reports, this standalone report has been a natural progression for Kenmare. We continue to evolve and improve our approach, with more structured policies, processes and reporting to demonstrate how Kenmare is fulfilling its purpose to responsibly meet global demand for quality-of-life minerals."

2020 Key Sustainability Highlights:

Reduced Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) to 0.25 (down from 0.27 in 2019)

90% of electricity requirements in 2020 were generated from renewable (hydroelectric) sources

180.5ha of mine land rehabilitated, including 10,133 Casuarina trees planted in 2020

97% of the workforce is Mozambican, with 62% of mine employees originating from local communities

Female employees represent 10.6% of the workforce, up from 8% in 2019

US$2 million of continued investment in local communities

US$20.4 million payments to the Mozambique Government

Kenmare was named as the most transparent company in Mozambique by the Centro de Integridade Publica (CIP) Extractive Industry Transparency Index

For further information, please contact:

Kenmare Resources plc

Jeremy Dibb

Investor Relations

Tel: +353 1 671 0411

Mob: + 353 87 943 0367

Murray (PR advisor)

Joe Heron

Tel: +353 1 498 0300

Mob: +353 87 690 9735

About Kenmare Resources

Kenmare Resources plc is one of the world's largest producers of mineral sands products. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Euronext Dublin, Kenmare operates the Moma Titanium Minerals Mine in Mozambique. Moma's production accounted for approximately 5% of global titanium feedstocks in 2020 and the Company supplies to customers operating in more than 15 countries. Kenmare produces raw materials that are ultimately consumed in everyday "quality-of life" items such as paints, plastics and ceramic tiles.
With COVID-19 still affecting lives in Michigan, Republican lawmakers want to investigate one of Gov. Gretchen Whitmers policies that they say may have put senior citizens at greater risk of getting COVID.

The Michigan Senate had approved a supplemental bill to investigate Whitmer and her policy of putting people who had COVID-19 into the states nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Such policies were originally put into place to help free up hospital beds for other COVID-19 patients.

Senate Bill 27 would provide $1.25 million to support investigations by county prosecutors into long-term care and residential care facility policies implemented by the governor and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

State Sen. Dan Lauwers, a Republican from Brockway Township, also co-sponsored Senate Bill 338, which would designate funding for the purpose of investigating nursing home policies implemented by Whitmer as well as data and all of the subdata beyond just total numbers of deaths, including the number of cases and death attributed to transferring patients to and from hospitals, and whether patients died in the hospital or long-term care facility.

That bill also contains a one-time appropriation of $250,000 for a special investigator to be placed on the Legislative Council, who would also investigate the governors policies and the reported data on infection and transmission rates, tracking, tracing, and the number of deaths associated with hospitals or long-term care facilities. The investigator would also provide a quarterly report to the Legislature.

The governors failed polices are responsible for forcing our most vulnerable residents into living spaces with seniors who tested positive for COVID-19, said Lauwers in a statement. Our seniors now account for at least one-third of our states COVID-19 deaths.

Lauwers also claimed that Whitmer refused to work with the Legislature and denied answers to grieving families.

Since both of these bill are appropriations bills, they would have to go through committee and be approved by both legislative chambers to go into effect.

While Republicans have worked on this legislation since March, state Attorney General Dana Nessel has not investigated such nursing home policies.

Along with Michigan, other states such as New York, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey had similar policies in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also facing investigations into such policies.

Senate Bill 27 has been sent to the Michigan House for further consideration while Senate Bill 338 has been referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Islands were never formally decolonized by the United Nations general assembly

Removal from the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (NSGTs): the capstone of decolonization.

Removal from the UN list of NSGTs is the final step in the decolonization of a colony. Only the UN General Assembly is authorized to issue a resolution authorizing the removal from that list.

The example of French Polynesia and New Caledonia:

These are examples of territories which were not included in the 1963 list of NSGTs, while the UN had never declared that Chapter XI of the Charter no longer applied. In the 1940s France had unilaterally stopped reporting on these territories under Article 73e of the Charter. Because France was no longer reporting, the committee charged with drawing up the list in 1963, wrongfully omitted them from the list.

This was brought to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and both territories were relisted and now appear on the list of NSGTs.

Netherlands Antilles:

The committee committed the same error with the Netherlands Antilles. Because the Netherlands had been excused from transmitting the reports under article 73e of the Charter, the islands were wrongfully omitted from the list, even though the UN had refused to declare that Chapter XI of the UN Charter can no longer be applied to the Netherlands Antilles.

Action to be taken:

Because the UN has renewed its call for decolonization in this decade, the Netherlands are under the obligation to return to the UN with the six islands and finalize their decolonization in order to obtain the declaration that Chapter XI no longer applies to the Netherlands Antilles. In order to achieve that, the Kingdom Charter will have to be adjusted to meet United Nations requirements. The UN already made it clear what the problems with the Charter are: The position of Governor and articles 44, 50, and 51 of the Kingdom Charter (Statuut). Those items will have to disappear. COHO and the Cft will also have to disappear as they conflict with aims and objectives of the UN Charter which are, a Full Measure of Self-Government.

PDB April 28, 2021
University of Oregon linguistic analyses explored the language behind hashtags and linked the polarization of opinions to media coverage of mask resisters

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 29, 2021 -- An analysis of Twitter activity between March 1 and Aug. 1, 2020, found strong support by U.S. users for wearing face coverings and that a media focus on anti-mask opinions fueled the rhetoric of those opposed, report University of Oregon researchers.

The study, published April 28 in the journal PLOS ONE, initially focused on linguistics, zeroing in on the language associated with hashtags during the study period, which began a month before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended mask-wearing to protect against COVID-19 infection.

However, to better understand that semantics, which were found to be polarized, angry and emotionally loaded, the research team had to take an interdisciplinary journey into politics and media, said Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, a professor and linguist in the UO's Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.

"There was polarization that was strong and at a rhetorical level, but when we looked at the participatory process there was a huge imbalance in the numbers," Jing-Schmidt said. "After breaking down this imbalance, our findings provide a cautious optimism. Most Americans stepped up in support of mask-wearing, even though the media gave us the impression that there was a huge resistance."

The data analyzed consisted of 149,110 Twitter posts involving 35 distinct types of hashtags, 26 of which were associated with mask supporters. Of the total posts, 138,796 users tweeted pro-mask hashtags and 7,771 posted anti-mask hashtags.

Jing-Schmidt's doctoral student Jun Lang and Wesley W. Erickson, who earned a doctorate in physics from the UO in 2020, then applied their interest in big data to complete multilayer analyses to explore polarizing rhetoric, the pro-mask majority and a possible echo-chamber effect of participants merely engaging with like-minded people.

The analyses also explored public opinion polls on overall acceptance of wearing face coverings and connected Twitter posts with the headlines of continual mainstream media coverage of anti-mask sentiment, including the common opposing rhetoric of the former president and other conservative politicians.

The study's findings supported the overall support of wearing face coverings found in polling by the Pew Research Center.

"We found that there is polarization, but you have to look at it at two different levels," Jing-Schmidt said. "One was the rhetorical, where we saw stark polarization that is angry and shouty. Secondly, we showed that the mask-resisters were a small cluster of users compared to a huge majority of mask supporters."

Media coverage, she said, magnified anti-mask rhetoric. The peak use of polarizing hashtags, the researchers found, was associated with headlines of stories that focused on anti-mask-wearing sentiments.

"We find that the media played a part in the polarization, magnifying the anti-mask rhetoric," she said. "This led us to understand how the anti-mask minority can seem to be so powerful in the public's perception."

That connection, she said, was not unexpected.

"That's the nature of news," she said. "Journalists in a democracy have this responsibility to hold people accountable, and that leads to negative events being covered. We're doing fine, generally, but we must account for these negative cognitive biases amplified by the media in our political discourse. We are still in the pandemic, so there is no reason to celebrate."

Interestingly, Jing-Schmidt said, it was pro-mask Twitter posters who fitted into an echo chamber. Most pro-maskers ignored the rhetoric of the anti-mask minority, especially disinformation that anti-maskers attempted to spread in their responses to tweets of pro-maskers.

"Our results demonstrate that the digital discourse on Twitter about mask wearing was rhetorically polarized whereby the rallying calls of the mask supporters were amplified by other mask supporters, and the battle cries of the mask resistors resonated with other mask resistors but were drowned out and ignored by a vocal and overwhelming pro-mask majority," her team wrote.

###

Links:

Paper PLOS ONE: https:/ / journals. plos. org/ plosone/ article?id= 10. 1371/ journal. pone. 0250817

About Zhuo Jing-Schmidt: https:/ / eall. uoregon. edu/ profile/ zjingsch/

About Jun Lang: https:/ / blogs. uoregon. edu/ junlang/
Morning rises over the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, U.S. (Photo : REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday wrestled with a bid by a group of energy companies seeking to seize land owned by New Jersey to build a $1 billion natural gas pipeline, as the state argues that its rights would be trampled.



The justices heard arguments in an appeal by PennEast Pipeline Company LLC, a joint venture backed by energy companies including Enbridge Inc, of a lower court ruling in favor of New Jersey's government, which opposes the land seizure.



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Other companies in the consortium for the 116-mile (187-km) pipeline from Pennsylvania to New Jersey include South Jersey Industries Inc, New Jersey Resources Corp (NJR), Southern Co and UGI Corp.



At issue in the case is a 1938 U.S. law called the Natural Gas Act that lets private energy companies seize "necessary" parcels of land for a project if they have obtained a certificate from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It effectively gives private companies the power of eminent domain, in which government entities can take property in return for compensation.



A ruling in favor of New Jersey would weaken the Natural Gas Act by allowing states to object to any attempts to seize their land.



Although some justices appeared sympathetic to the state's legal arguments, they also seemed cautious about issuing a ruling that would overturn the longstanding understanding of the law and potentially imperil the PennEast project and others like it.



Chief Justice John Roberts said that it is "quite extraordinary" that private entities have the power normally vested in the federal government to go to court to seize a state's land. But Roberts also noted that New Jersey opposes the project, meaning that if it does win the case there would be a "significant practical problem."



Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that the Natural Gas Act was enacted precisely because states had objected to pipelines being built.



"That's been the understanding for the last 80 years," Breyer said in reference to the current process.



PennEast's lawyer, Paul Clement, said the project would be "at the mercy of New Jersey" if the pipeline loses the case because there is no way to re-route it without the state's involvement.



One way the court could avoid some of the knotty legal issues would be to embrace an argument raised by the Clement that the eminent domain action was technically brought against the land in question and not against the state.



Some justices suggested the legal problem could be resolved by the federal government joining the pipeline's lawsuit. President Joe Biden's administration backs PennEast in the case.



FERC in 2018 approved PennEast's request to build the pipeline. The company then sued to gain access to properties along the route.



New Jersey did not consent to PennEast's seizure of properties the state owns or in which it has an interest. The state cites the U.S. Constitution's 11th Amendment, which bars courts from hearing certain lawsuits against states.



PennEast wants the land to build a pipeline designed to deliver 1.1 billion cubic feet per day of gas - enough to supply about 5 million homes - from the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania to customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.



After a federal judge approved the property seizure, the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that PennEast could not use federal eminent domain to condemn land controlled by the state. Also at issue in the case is whether the 3rd Circuit had jurisdiction to hear the appeal.


Fans of The Real are familiar with Adrienne Bailon and Israel Houghtons love story. But, Bailon admits she took precautions in the beginning. Bailon admits she secretly recorded Houghton when she wasnt in his presence to make sure he was committed to her.

Adrienne Bailon and Israel Houghton at the 2019 NAACP Image Awards | Robin L Marshall/Getty Images

Israel Houghton had infidelity issues in his previous marriage

Bailon is Israels second wife. He was previously married for 20 years to a woman named Meleasa Houghton. Israel admits he was unfaithful throughout his marriage to Meleasa, even having outside children. The two divorced and within months, he began dating Bailon.

But Bailon did not enter into the relationship without having tough conversations with Israel about the mistakes he made in his first marriage. She revealed on The Real that she did her own investigation on Israel amid rumors that he and Meleasa were still married.

Source: YouTube

Related: The Reals Host, Adrienne Bailon-Houghton, Reveals What Inspired Her Weight Loss

Thank god for the Internet these days, things get confusing and you get to clarify, she said. When I first started dating my husband people thought he was married, and that was a lie. If youre being real you want to talk to the man, and youre like You got me out here looking crazy. Let me see the paperwork.

Israel showed Bailon the paperwork, with Bailon realizing the confusion of their divorce was due to them filing under their initials and not their full names for privacy.

Adrienne Bailon secretly recorded Israel Houghton to make sure he was committed

Bailon revealed during a 2019 episode of The Real that shes always recorded people to find out their true intentions, even her close friends.

So theres something called Voice Memo on your phone, and you can literally put it on Voice Memo, lock the phone, put it down, walk out the room, let yall talk about me, walk back in, play it back outside the room, listen to what yall said, walk back in and be like, So Tam, you would say that sometimes I talk a lot?  she explained.

She didnt stop at just her friends. Bailon also did the same for men she dated, including her now-husband, Houghton.

In the car, I left my phone on Voice Memo, put it into the side thing in the car, walked out, and went into a store, she said. I was like, let me see what phone calls he makes. Let me see if he talks to anybody on the phone. Youre just getting to know each other.

Source: YouTube

Related: Adrienne Bailon Is Tired of Being Associated With the Kardashians

Luckily, Houghton turned out to be faithful. When Bailon heard the recording back, she was impressed by what she heard.

He was writing a worship song in the damn car, she admitted. He was like, Lord, I love you! Jesus  Oh, hallelujah! And I was like, Aw, theres nothing here.

She later confessed what she had done to Houghton, telling him, That was a cute song you was singing!

Bailon and Israel married in Paris in 2017, the same place where Israel proposed less than a year earlier.


Quarterly Activity Report

Melbourne, April 28, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Bluechiip Limited ( ASX:BCT ), a developer and leader in wireless tracking solution for the healthcare and life science, security, defence and manufacturing industries is pleased to release its Appendix 4C - Quarterly Cashflow report and update for the quarter ended 31 March 2021.Corporate and Business updates for the Quarter- Progressive discussions and negotiations with potential OEMs including in the IVF market, Cell Therapy and target Biobanking space with interest for the Company's products;- Agreed non-binding OEM term sheet following excellent progress made with a new potential OEM partner in the United States (USA);- Further development of Bluechiip direct to market portfolio of products for the Biobanking market including a range of Bluechiip Enabled and Bluechiip-branded range of cryogenic consumables with off-tool samples received;- Commenced the optimisation stage of the chip commercial production;- Successfully achieved the granting of a new patent - Sample Storage and Monitoring System - European Patent Grant EP2509412;- Cash receipts of $1.626m from the approved Australian Government's Research and Development (R&D) Tax Incentive 2019/2020 rebate;- The Company is financially well supported with closing cash and cash equivalents of $5.97m as at 31 March 2021, with no borrowings;- The private mediation between the Company and Labcon North America is well progressed towards an expected resolution via legal counsel in the USA with regard to the lawsuit filed against Labcon; and- Installation into end customer trial sites in North America and Australia.Additional informationSales and marketing team both in Australia and the USA continue to make progress with potential OEM partners including the establishment of a non-binding term sheet with an OEM in the USA. The sales team in both Australia and the US have also resumed face-to-face product demonstrations where possible following relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions, and installed evaluation systems into customer sites in North America and Australia.As part of its strategy to market Bluechiip's portfolio of consumable products, the Company continues to intensify its resources into R&D of its branded range of cryogenic consumables which it embarked on last quarter.The Company has also successfully made production improvement to the quality, performance and scalability of its chips. The optimisation stage of the chip commercial production is expected to attain higher quality and yield, with the aim of achieving economies of scale and lowering production costs as the Company approaches full volume production.During the quarter, staff costs, R&D expenditure and commercial production of chips continue to dominate cash outflow items - $510K, $406K and $403K, respectively.With the exception of commercial production, the Company expects to receive a refund of 43.5% of its expenditure in the form of 2020/2021 R&D Tax Incentive from the Australian Government.The Company has recently been granted another patent in Sample Storage and Monitoring System - European Patent Grant EP2509412. This takes the total patents to 26, in nine patent families.The current quarter outflows have been mitigated by rebate of $1.626m received from R&D Tax Incentive 2019/2020 and government grants of $29K. Overall, the quarter saw net operating cashflow improved from net operating cash outflow of $1,042K in previous quarter to net operating cash inflow of $363K.The Company is financially well supported with closing cash and cash equivalents of $5.97m as at 31 March 2021, with no borrowings.The private mediation between the Company and Labcon is well progressed towards an expected resolution via legal counsel in the USA with regard to the lawsuit filed against Labcon North America.OutlookThe Company continues to respond to market conditions by progressively reviewing several measures implemented, including:- Resuming in person meetings and product demonstrations with potential OEM partners;- Executing on potential opportunities in the USA, including evaluation systems into customer sites through our sales and marketing team based in the USA;- Progressing towards OEM partner agreements with potential OEMs including in the IVF market, Cell Therapy and target Biobanking space, sectors that have experienced significant market interest for the Company's products and solutions;- Focusing on R&D of a Bluechiip Enabled range of consumables for the Biobanking market which Bluechiip intends to market directly in North America and Australia/New Zealand and through distribution partners globally;- Improving its suite of products including multi vial reader functionality by addressing market feedback to meet current and potential OEM partners' requirements to showcase its stand-alone all-in-one multi-vial reader in forthcoming trade shows when international borders are reopened;- Managing its existing cash reserves and allocating to evaluated R&D activities expenditure in line with the Company's overall strategy;- Managing the scale of production in response to the slowdown in sales activity, while continuing to build stocks with the expectation that when markets normalise, Bluechiip will be well positioned for a return to growth; and- Working with patent adviser on further patent applications to add to Bluechiip's existing nine patent families comprising 26 granted patents.To view the quarterly report, please visit:About Bluechiip Ltd

Bluechiip Ltd (ASX:BCT) understands that every sample - stem cells, blood, eggs, sperm and other biospecimens - is critical, so our objective is to manage each one with optimal quality in the most efficient way. Bluechiip's advanced management solution is the only one that provides sample temperature with ID in cryogenic environments to. Most importantly, this delivers confidence in every sample.

Bluechiip's unique patented technology is a MEMS-based wireless tracking solution that contains no electronics. It represents a generational change from current tracking methods such as labels (hand-written and pre-printed), barcodes (linear and 2D), and Radio Frequency Identification. Bluechiip tags are either embedded or manufactured into storage products such as vials or bags. Each product can be easily identified, and critical information such as sample temperature, is detected by readers and stored in the Bluechiip software. In addition to functioning in extreme temperatures, the Bluechiip(R) Advanced Sample management solution can survive autoclaving, gamma irradiation sterilization, humidification, centrifuging, cryogenic storage and frosting.

Bluechiip's technology has applications in healthcare, including in cryogenic storage facilities (biobanks and biorepositories), pathology, clinical trials and forensics. Other key markets include cold-chain logistics/supply chain, security/defence, industrial/manufacturing and aerospace/aviation.

Bluechiip: Delivering confidence in every sample.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 29, 2021 - 21:23 | World, All

China on Thursday passed legislation to strengthen the power of its maritime safety authorities, state-run media reported, sparking fears that tensions between the Asian nation and other countries, including Japan, will escalate in the nearby waters.

As Beijing claims that the Senkaku Islands, administered by Tokyo, in the East China Sea are part of its territory, the amendment of the Maritime Traffic Safety Law could target Japanese vessels navigating around the uninhabited islets, called Diaoyu in China.

In February, China also enforced a controversial law allowing its coast guard to use weapons when foreign ships involved in illegal activities in waters it claims do not obey orders, making Sino-Japanese relations fragile over maritime security.

The latest revision was passed at the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body. It is scheduled to be put into force on Sept. 1, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

The legislation will enable China's maritime safety agency, which belongs to the transportation ministry, to order foreign vessels to leave what the nation claims as its territorial waters if it judges that they could threaten security.

The agency can also block overseas ships from intruding into the territorial waters if they do not fall under innocent passage under international law.

Recently, the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping has adopted a hard-line posture in the South and East China seas as part of its goal of making the Communist-led country a "maritime power."

China has frequently sent official vessels to waters around the Senkakus in an attempt to lay claim to them, while Washington and Tokyo have agreed that the islets fall under the scope of a Japan-U.S. security treaty.

Beijing argues that the Diaoyu Islands and its affiliated islets are its "inherent territory."

Late last year, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China will safeguard its sovereignty over the islands and justified its sending of official ships to the area, saying "unknown Japanese fishing vessels" entered the waters of the islets.

In the early 2010s, Beijing and Tokyo were mired in a territorial row over the Senkakus. The dispute especially intensified after the Japanese government of then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda brought them under state control in September 2012.

Noda's decision fanned anti-Japanese protests across China, prompting many Chinese people to burn Japanese flags in opposition to Tokyo's nationalization of the islets.

In 2018, Japan and China marked the 40th anniversary of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which served as an incentive to forge better ties. Bilateral relations relatively improved by effectively shelving the territorial spat.

The enforcement of the coast guard law, however, has complicated ties between the two Asian powers again, as they have also been at odds over other issues such as China's alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang and security challenges posed to Taiwan.

In April, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga at their summit in Washington affirmed the significance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, irritating the Chinese government.

Beijing views Taiwan, the self-ruled, democratic island, as a renegade province awaiting reunification, if necessary by force.

Immediately after the summit, the Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned a senior official of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing to lodge a protest against the agreement between Washington and Tokyo, a diplomatic source familiar with bilateral relations said.

"China has started to take a tougher attitude toward Japan," the source said, with Beijing announcing that the country is conducting military drills in the East China Sea for two days through Friday.

Beijing, meanwhile, has rapidly built artificial islands with military infrastructure in the South China Sea, claiming sovereignty over almost the entire maritime area.

China has conflicting territorial claims with four of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam -- as well as Taiwan in the South China Sea.

U.S. warships have carried out "freedom of navigation" operations there in an apparent bid to counter Chinese claims and actions in the sea, a strategic waterway through which more than one-third of global trade passes.

Xi has instructed his People's Liberation Army to bolster exercises to seize islands in the nearby waters, sources close to the matter said.

Foreign affairs experts say that the move is a warning against the United States and other Western democratic countries that have been stepping up their involvement in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
OXFORD, Miss. (AP)  A 69-year-old Mississippi man has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of shooting a protected bald eagle.

Timothy Lee Childers of Aberdeen entered the guilty plea Wednesday in federal court in Oxford.

The U.S. attorneys office in northern Mississippi announced the news Thursday.

Authorities say Childers shot and killed the eagle on his property in Monroe County on Sept. 11, 2020.

A judge put Childers on probation for one year and ordered him to pay $3,500 in restitution to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a fine of $3,500.

Childers also forfeited the gun and scope used to shoot the mature bird.
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The United States is sending supplies worth more than $100million to India to help it fight a record-breaking surge of COVID-19 cases, the White House said in a statement on Wednesday.

The supplies, which will begin arriving on Thursday and continue into next week, include 1,000 oxygen cylinders, 15 million N95 masks and 1 million rapid diagnostic tests, the statement said.

United States government officials have also redirected their own order of AstraZeneca manufacturing supplies to India, which will allow it to make over 20 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, according to the White House.

'Just as India sent assistance to the United States when our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,' the White House said in a fact sheet outlining the aid.

President Joe Biden is seen above delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. The White House on Wednesday announced that the United States would be sending more than $100million worth of aid and supplies to India

India is in the midst of a historic surge in the number of COVID-19 cases. The image above shows a mass cremation of those who died from COVID-19 at a crematorium in New Delhi on Wednesday

India reported 3,293 new cases of Covid on Wednesday, a new one-day record, but amid warnings the true toll is likely far higher because the country only counts those who die in hospitals

India also recorded another 360,960 cases of COVID, also a one-day record, as Delhi's chief minister warned the wave is being driven by a 'supremely infectious' variant that causes more severe cases that last longer

India crossed a grim milestone on Wednesday of 200,000 people lost to the coronavirus as a devastating surge of new infections tears through dense cities and rural areas alike and overwhelms health care systems on the brink of collapse.

The health ministry reported a single-day record 3,293 COVID-19 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing Indias total fatalities to 201,187, as the worlds second most populous country endures its darkest chapter of the pandemic yet.

The country also reported 362,757 new infections, a new global record, which raised the overall total past 17.9 million.

The previous high of 350,000 on Monday had capped a five-day streak of recording the largest single-day increases in any country throughout the pandemic.

A woman is consoled after her mother died due to the coronavirus disease in New Delhi on Wednesday

A man walks away after cremating his relative in New Delhi, India on Wednesday

India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the fourth to cross 200,000 deaths, behind the United States, Brazil and Mexico.

And as in many nations, experts believe the coronavirus infections and fatalities in India are severe undercounts.

The first known COVID-19 death in India happened on March 12, 2020, in southern Karnataka state.

It took five months to reach the first 50,000 dead.

The toll hit 100,000 deaths in the next two months in October 2020 and 150,000 three months later in January this year.

Deaths slowed until mid-March, only to sharply rise again.

For the past week, more than 2,000 Indians have died every day.

India thought it had weathered the worst of the pandemic last year, but the virus is now racing through its population and systems are beginning to collapse.

Hospitalizations and deaths have reached record highs, overwhelming health care workers. Patients are suffocating because hospitals' oxygen supplies have run out.

A man wearing personal protective equipment is seen above waiting to perform last rites of a deceased relative in a crematorium in Bengaluru, India on Wednesday

Desperate family members are sending SOS messages on social media, hoping someone would help them find oxygen cylinders, empty hospital beds and critical drugs for their loved ones.

Crematoriums have spilled over into parking lots, lighting up night skies in some cities.

With its health care system sinking fast, India is now looking at other nations to pull it out of the record surge that is barreling through one state and then another.

Health experts say huge gatherings during Hindu festivals and mammoth election rallies in some states have accelerated the unprecedented surge India is seeing now.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was blasted for holding huge rallies in recent weeks, and for pushing economic reopening measures health experts now blame for the current surge.

They also say the governments mixed messaging and its premature declarations of victory over the virus encouraged people to relax when they should have continued strict adherence to physical distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds.

The national capital New Delhi is in lockdown, as are the southern states of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Some other states, too, have enforced restrictions in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.

India has also called on its armed forces to help fight the devastating crisis.

Indias chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, said late Monday that oxygen supplies would be released from armed forces reserves and its retired medical personnel would join health facilities to ease the pressure on doctors.

Meanwhile, India's vaccination program appears to be struggling.

Packages of medical aid for India to help the country tackle the outbreak of COVID-19 are seen above before they are loaded onto a plane at Zhukovsky Airport near Moscow, Russia on Wednesday

So far nearly 10 per cent of the countrys population have received one jab, but just over 1.5 per cent have received both vaccines.

Indians 18 and older will be eligible for a vaccine from Saturday.

Meanwhile, the loss of lives is accelerating.

Radha Gobindo Pramanik is among the countless Indians who lost a family member to the virus. His daughter, Navanita Paramanik Rajput, died on April 18.

At first, Rajput complained of colds and fever. But when the 37-year-old's oxygen levels started to drop, her father and husband decided to take her to a government hospital.

Pramanik said she came out of the ambulance smiling but by the time her husband finished filling the hospital registration form, her daughter was gasping for breath.

'Before I could understand anything, she collapsed in the arms of her husband,' Pramanik said, sobbing.
Photographs of the silicon multiplexer. Credit: Osaka University

Researchers from Osaka University, Japan and the University of Adelaide, Australia have worked together to produce the new multiplexer made from pure silicon for terahertz-range communications in the 300-GHz band.

"In order to control the great spectral bandwidth of terahertz waves, a multiplexer, which is used to split and join signals, is critical for dividing the information into manageable chunks that can be more easily processed and so can be transmitted faster from one device to another," said Associate Professor Withawat Withayachumnankul from the University of Adelaide's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

"Up until now compact and practical multiplexers have not been developed for the terahertz range. The new terahertz multiplexers, which are economical to manufacture, will be extremely useful for ultra-broadband wireless communications.

"The shape of the chips we have developed is the key to combining and splitting channels so that more data can be processed more rapidly. Simplicity is its beauty."

People around the world are increasingly using mobile devices to access the internet and the number of connected devices is multiplying exponentially. Soon machines will be communicating with each other in the Internet of Things which will require even more powerful wireless networks able to transfer large volumes of data fast.

Schematic of the integrated multiplexer, showing broadband terahertz wave being split into four different frequencies, where each is capable of carrying digital information. Credit: Osaka University

Terahertz waves are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that has a raw spectral bandwidth that is far broader than that of conventional wireless communications, which is based upon microwaves. The team has developed ultra-compact and efficient terahertz multiplexers, thanks to a novel optical tunneling process.

"A typical four-channel optical multiplexer might span more than 2000 wavelengths. This would be about two meters in length in the 300-GHz band," said Dr. Daniel Headland from Osaka University who is lead author of the study.

"Our device is merely 25 wavelengths across, which offers dramatic size reduction by a factor of 6000."

The new multiplexer covers a spectral bandwidth that is over 30 times the total spectrum that is allocated in Japan for 4G/LTE, the fastest mobile technology currently available and 5G which is the next generation, combined. As bandwidth is related to data rate, ultra-high-speed digital transmission is possible with the new multiplexer.

"Our four-channel multiplexer can potentially support aggregate data rate of 48 gigabits per second (Gbit/s), equivalent to that of uncompressed 8K ultrahigh definition video being streamed in real time," said Associate Professor Masayuki Fujita, the team's leader from Osaka University.

Experimentation with the multiplexer, showing connection to external systems. The multiplexer does not have any form of supporting substrate. Credit: Osaka University

"To make the entire system portable, we plan to integrate this multiplexer with resonant tunneling diodes to provide compact, multi-channel terahertz transceivers."

The modulation scheme employed in the team's study was quite basic; terahertz power was simply switched on-and-off to transmit binary data. More advanced techniques are available that can squeeze even higher data rates towards 1 Terabit/s into a given bandwidth allocation.

"The new multiplexer can be mass-produced, just like computer chips, but much simpler. So large-scale market penetration is possible," said Professor Tadao Nagatsuma from Osaka University.

"This would enable applications in 6G and beyond, as well as the Internet of Things, and low-probability-of-intercept communications between compact aircraft such as autonomous drones."

This study, which is published in the journal Optica.

Explore further Terahertz accelerates beyond 5G towards 6G

More information: Daniel Headland et al, Gratingless Integrated Tunneling Multiplexer for Terahertz Waves, Optica (2021). Journal information: Optica Daniel Headland et al, Gratingless Integrated Tunneling Multiplexer for Terahertz Waves,(2021). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.420715
Sir Simon Stevens has today announced he will step down as chief executive of NHS England in July.

He will leave his post 'as planned' after seven years to become a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.

In a letter to colleagues, he described being in charge of the NHS through 'some of the toughest challenges in its history' as a privilege. Sir Simon  who earned up to 200,000 a year  has served through three elections and the Covid pandemic.

Boris Johnson said the outgoing health chief had 'led the NHS with great distinction for the past seven years'.

And politicians have voiced their recognition of Sir Simon, 54, whose planned departure was rumoured in NHS circles for two years.

NHS England's chief operating officer Amanda Pritchard is the favourite to succeed Sir Simon and would become the first woman to hold the role.

And Dido Harding, head of the Government's controversial test and trace programme, has also been linked to the job.

In a statement through NHS England, Sir Simon said: 'Joining the health service in my early twenties was one of the best decisions I've ever made, followed three decades later by the privilege of leading the NHS through some of the toughest challenges in its history.

'The people of this country have rightly recognised the extraordinary service of NHS staff during this terrible pandemic, as well as the success of our Covid vaccination deployment.

'As the pandemic recedes in this country, the NHS's track record in advancing medical progress in a way that works for everyone rightly continues to inspire young people to join one of the greatest causes  health and high quality care for all, now and for future generations.'

Sir Simon Stevens has announced he will step down as chief executive of NHS England in July

In a letter to colleagues, he described being in charge of the NHS through 'some of the toughest challenges in its history' as a privilege. Pictured: Sir Simon receives his vaccine at Westminster Abbey on March 18

Sir Simon became chief executive of NHS England on April 1 2014, having first joined the health service in 1988 through its graduate management programme.

He worked in frontline NHS services and international health care, in both the public and private sectors, before heading up the health service.

From 1997 to 2004 Sir Simon acted as an adviser to Tony Blair's Labour government, including three years in the No10 policy unit.

Sir Simon has been close friends with Boris Johnson since their time at Oxford University together.

He was knighted last year for services to health and the NHS.

The Prime Minister said: 'I want to thank him for his dedicated service throughout  but especially when facing the extraordinary pressures of the past year, and for his huge contribution to our vaccine rollout.'

Sir Simon will become a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords, Downing Street confirmed. Pictured: Members of the House of Lords sit in the chamber during the State Opening of Parliament by the Queen in December 2019

The health boss is understood to have alerted Lord Prior, chairman of NHS England, last summer about his intention to step down.

WHO COULD BE THE NEXT CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF THE NHS? Amanda Pritchard NHS England chief operating officer The current holder of the NHS's number two job is many people's favourite to succeed Sir Simon Stevens as chief executive of NHS England. The daughter of a bishop, Ms Pritchard grew up in Durham and went to Oxford University before spending her entire 25-year career in the NHS. Baroness Dido Harding Head of NHS Test and Trace Dido Harding is currently in charge of the Government's highly controversial 22billion NHS Test and Trace scheme. She studied PPE at Oxford alongside David Cameron before having a long career in the private sector but has no frontline NHS managerial experience. Baroness Harding was the boss of TalkTalk when four million of its customers lost their banking details. Emily Lawson Former NHS England chief commercial officer Emily Lawson is the incoming head of the No10 delivery unit after leaving her post as NHS England chief commercial officer. She has been discussed as an interim leader for NHS England between Sir Simon's departure in July and her start at the delivery unit. Trade magazine HSJ has credited her as one of the outside bets. Advertisement

But it was claimed Sir Simon wanted to see through the health service through the mammoth coronavirus vaccination programme.

Following the announcement, Lord Prior said the country owed Sir Simon a 'huge debt of gratitude'.

And Health Secretary Matt Hancock also paid tribute to Sir Simon's work during his time as NHS England chief.

He said: 'Throughout his tenure Sir Simon Stevens has been a steadfast and sage leader for our NHS, and that has been especially true during this most testing period in NHS history.

'His leadership has helped NHS staff to overcome unprecedented adversity and keep services open for millions of patients in the face of this global pandemic.

'The past seven years has seen Sir Simon make a formidable contribution to the running and transformation of health and care services in England, which will no doubt endure for years to come.

'I want to thank him personally for his service to the NHS in England, and I wish him all the best for the future including his new role in the House of Lords.'

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer praised Sir Simon's 'extraordinary service to our NHS' and his contribution to the Covid vaccination programme.

He said: 'I want to thank Simon for his extraordinary service to our NHS. Simon has been a hugely effective advocate for the NHS, its patients and staff, and has led the service with great distinction through the greatest challenges it has faced since its foundation.

'The NHS Covid-19 vaccination programme under Simon's leadership has shown the NHS at its best.'

Health and Social Care Committee chairman and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt said Sir Simon should feel 'extremely proud' of his role in the NHS response to the Covid pandemic.

He tweeted: 'When we recruited for a successor to Sir David Nicholson in 2013, there was a good deal of trepidation about the role following controversy over the 2012 Act.

'Simon, however, was the standout candidate and hiring him remains one of the best decisions I have ever taken.

'Despite his time as a special adviser in No 10 and in the private sector in the US, Simon has always been NHS to his core.

'But neither he nor I knew just how bumpy things would become with immense operational and financial pressures across the NHS and social care system.

'We had a symbiotic relationship: he gave the NHS confidence they had one of their own at the top and I made sure its voice was heard loud and clear in government circles.'

Mr Hunt said Sir Simon was a 'formidable operator', adding: 'He has the rare quality of being able to stay silent in meetings unless he has something important to say, a rare quality in Whitehall.

'But his skills as an operator should not be allowed to conceal his deeply-held passion and support for everything the NHS stands for.

Sir Simon took on the role on April 1, 2014, and has overseen the health service through three elections and the Covid pandemic

'He will be remembered for giving the world's 5th largest organisation strategic direction at a time of great challenge.

'However the immediate dividend from his leadership has been the superb NHS response to the pandemic: every patient that needed a ventilator or ICU bed got one and we have rolled out the best vaccination programme in Europe. He should feel extremely proud today.'

Jonathan Ashworth, Labour's Shadow Health Secretary, said: 'Simon Stevens has been an outstanding leader for the NHS since 2014, championing both staff and patients alike.

'The challenges of the past year have shown that strong leadership at the top of the NHS is more vital than ever before.

'The success of the vaccination programme is a real testament to his ability to deliver and we owe him a huge debt for his service to the NHS both over the course of the pandemic and the past seven years.'
Feed group sales are rising, but the competition is fierce with more farms outsourcing for husbandry companies. Photo: Le Toan

As the largest animal feed production country in Southeast Asia, the sector in Vietnam witnessed high growth of 13-15 per cent on average during the 2016-2020 period, according to Grand View Research, an India and US-based market research and consulting firm. Consumption output in 2019 and 2020 was around 20 million tonnes, and was as much as 30 million if including aquaculture feed.

In a specific case, from just over one million tonnes in 2013, Cargills output increased to 1.5 million tonnes in three years. Currently, the companys output remains stable.

John Fering, regional managing director of Cargill Animal Nutrition South East Asia, told VIR that pre-2017 the feed industry experienced rapid growth on the strong domestic demand, and pork that was moving to overseas buyers. The feed industry responded with investment plans to increase capacity to fulfil the demand. The overseas demand for pork stopped abruptly in late 2016, resulting in the demand loss of nearly 30 per cent for swine feed.

In 2019, challenges like African swine fever (ASF) also suppressed demand for swine feed by another 30 per cent, which was partially compensated by growth in poultry and aqua segments. As the supply of pork contracted, pork prices increased and offered higher profits for producers, Fering said. This favourable margin for producers has resulted in farmers investing to modernise farms and expand operations  and resulted in improved demand for swine feed.

Cargill has long recognised the importance and huge potential of Vietnam as a top growth market in Asia. Vietnam will continue to be a key market for us, Fering added.

Local emergence

In the same situation, Dutch-based De Heus reported positive growth year-by-year, from 314,000 tonnes in 2013 to 1.2 million tonnes of feed in 2019, but experiencing a 2020 drop down to just over one million tonnes. Talking with VIR, De Heus Vietnam and Cambodia general director Johan van den Ban said, We were able to more or less stabilise our volumes, whilst moving part of our production from Vietnam to Cambodia, where we opened a new feed mill during the course of 2020.

Some other foreign players are maintaining their production, with only modest rises in output. CJ Vina saw its sales from 423,000 tonnes of feed in 2013 to 716,400 tonnes last year; and American Feeds Company has only seen an increase from 203,000 tonnes in 2013 to 530,500 tonnes in 2020.

According to Vietnams AgroMonitor specialised in agricultural analysis, the most sustainable players in the market are those have strong finance and rich experiences like C.P. Vietnam, Japfa Comfeed Vietnam, Emivest, and Newhope with stable sales at 3.44 million, one million, 952,000, and 739,000 tonnes in 2020, respectively.

Bui Hoang Ha, an expert in animal feed distribution, told VIR that the up and down in the sales of the foreign producers could be caused by the emergence of some local players, including Masan Group. Masan acquired 52 per cent of Vietnam French Cattle Feed JSC and 70 per cent stake of Agro Nutrition Company JSC, ranking second in the list of animal feed producers, with the sales of around 1.3-2.3 million tonnes per year, over the last decade.

However, the presence of new local players like Hoa Phat (308,000 tonnes in 2020) as well as the efforts of others like Lai Thieu, Dabaco, Vina, and Hong Ha have been challenging overseas groups, despite their differing performances.

The competition of feed production is quite fierce. Despite the increase of the market scale from 14 million tonnes in 2013 to 20.3 million tonnes in 2020, the development of the players feed production is not as fast as the market, and the sales of each player could change by millions of tonnes on-year, said Ha. And it is getting fiercer. As the number of household farmers is decreasing sharply after the ASF epidemic, most big farms are outsourcing for husbandry companies. Thereby, the more farms a company develops, the more animal feed the company can sell.

This enables more chances for big feed producers, which are operating thousands of farms across the country, while the market share of animal feed is already dominated by them. Despite operating 68 per cent of the total number of factories including some big plants from Dabaco, Masan, Greenfeed, Vina, and Lai Thieu, productivity of local players is making up 35-40 per cent only.

While the number of foreign producers plants is 32 per cent, their output accounts for 60 per cent and could raise in the time to come, according to statistics from the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development.

Foreign expansion

In late-2020, C.P. Vietnam inaugurated the most modern and largest chicken breeding and processing project in Southeast Asia. With a capacity of 100 million broilers a year, CPV Food Complex in the southern province of Binh Phuoc is expected to generate $200 million revenue annually.

Last November Japfa Comfeed Vietnam inaugurated its sixth feed mill in the central province of Binh Dinh, with the total investment capital of $13 million and annual capacity of 180,000 tonnes. It also broke ground on a $230 million self-contained animal husbandry project in Binh Phuoc.

However, local conglomerates have been interested in the market for some time, with Vingroup acquiring aquaculture giant Viet Thang Feed JSC back in 2018. Some local players are strengthening their linkage to build supply chains of production, husbandry, and consumption, and reaching small success first, said Ha. The foreign players should not be subjective, because the finance and experience of these local players are quite good, in addition to the advantages of a home playing ground.

As for Cargill, it is building a $28 million feed mill in the southern region. Overall, as a growth company, we will keep investing in and growing our business here over the medium to long term. This includes expanding our capacity and capabilities besides building strong talent and resilient communities, Fering said.

Animal feed in Vietnam saw fast growth from only 8.5 million tonnes in 2008 to 20.3 million tonnes in 2020, while the total capacity of all plants rose from 12 million tonnes in 2008 to nearly 40 million tonnes last year. Vietnam ranks 10th in the world and first in the region in terms of animal feed, higher than Thailand (18.6 million tonnes) and Indonesia (18.3 million tonnes).

Experts say the demand for feed in Vietnam will rise to 30 million tonnes annually by 2025, valued at $12-13 billion, and annual growth at 13-14 per cent can enable Vietnam to become a promising market. However, expectations could be challenged by feed material price rises.

Depending on overseas material supply could cause a lot of risks, so every animal feed producer should find out its own solutions to proactively manage supply and remain sustainable growth, added Ha.
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / The deadline for the 2021 Davos Communications Awards has been extended to May 17, 23:59 CET. Submit your entry now for a chance to win on www.davosawards.com

The Davos Communications Awards honour the individuals and organizations around the world, who demonstrate exceptional professional work in public relations, marketing, branding, social media, CSR and leadership.

WCFA President Maxim Behar said: "We received a great number of requests from participants for an extended entry deadline, so we decided to give more people the chance to showcase their professional excellence in the industry."

All award entries are judged by 15 highly professional PR practitioners and senior industry leaders from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and Latin America, based on the following criteria: insight and research, strategy and planning, innovation, implementation, creativity and originality

The Davos Communications Awards categories include:

- Best Public Relations Campaign

- Best Marketing Communications Campaign

- Best Digital or Social Media Campaign

- Best use of brand

- Best Corporate Affairs

- Best CSR or ESG

- PR Consultancy of the Year

- Marketing Agency of the Year

- Digital Agency of the Year

- Rising Star - for practitioners under the age of 30

- Silver Star - for practitioners over the age of 50

- Best Leader in Public Relations and Communications

- Annual Davos Award for Global Communications Overall Achievement

- Best Public Relations or Communications Student



The winners will be named during a virtual ceremony in June 2021 and will receive professional certificate and a letter of recognition by the World Communications Forum Association, signed by the WCFA President Maxim Behar and the Jury Chair Stuart Bruce.

For more information, visit www.davosawards.com or contact Maxim Behar, WCFA President, at mainoffice@wcfaglobal.com or +359 888 50 31 13.

About Davos Communications Awards:

The Davos Communications Awards, launched by the World Communications Forum Association in 2021, are global prestigious awards that recognize exceptional professional work done by businesses, governments and academia in public relations, marketing, branding, social media, CSR and leadership. Entries are open to agencies, in-house teams and individuals from any sector to help celebrate and showcase professional excellence in the industry. Winning a Davos Communications Award is an opportunity for professionals and businesses to pitch themselves as the best, to stand out from the competition, increase their credibility, and motivate their teams.

About World Communications Forum Association:

The World Communications Forum was founded in 2010 in Davos, Switzerland, where the Association was registered in 2014. The WCFA is a n organization committed to active global discussions and exchanges focused on the development of communications expertise of its members and be an active voice in its key role in business, society and politics. Every year the forum gathers prominent representatives of the communication and public relations sector from around the world, who, through dialogue and discussion, exchange experiences and ideas to shape the art of global communications. In 2021, the WCFA organized its 'Global Communications Summit' on Zoom, bringing together more than 450 top communications experts globally.

SOURCE: World Communication Forum Association

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643245/Deadline-Extension-for-2021-Davos-Communications-Awards
(Newser)  Three Georgia men awaiting trial on state charges in the death of Ahmaud Arbery are now facing federal charges as well. The Justice Department announced Wednesday that Travis McMichael; his father, Gregory McMichael; and William "Roddie" Bryan have been indicted by a federal grand jury on hate crime and attempted kidnapping charges in the death of the Black jogger last year. Prosecutors say Arbery, 25, was chased down and killed by the three white men as he jogged through a subdivision near Brunswick in February last year, CNN reports. The federal indictment charges the men with interfering with Arbery's right to use the public street because of his race, reports the New York Times.

story continues below

The McMichaels allegedly "chased Arbery through the public streets of the neighborhood while yelling at him, using their truck to cut off his route, and threatening him with firearms," and Bryan allegedly "joined the chase and used his truck to cut off Arbery's route," the Justice Department said in a statement. Trial dates have not been set for the federal charges or for state charges including felony murder. The McMichaels, who initially claimed to have been acting in self-defense, were not charged until months after the killing, when video of the incident caused an outcry. They told police they thought Arbery was a burglar. Bryan, who recorded the killing, was charged weeks later. (The McMichaels have asked a judge to bar prosecutors from describing Arbery as a victim.)
New Delhi, April 29 : UAE's special cargo of medical aid for India to fight the virulent second wave of the coronavirus pandemic arrived here on Thursday.

Official sources said that External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had received a call of support from UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan on April 25.

The UAE Foreign Minister had expressed his solidarity with India as the rise in Covid-19 infections have triggered a massive crisis. To convey their support, iconic buildings in the UAE were lit up in the Indian tricolour.

On Thursday, a special cargo for medical aid of 157 ventilators, 480 BiPAPs and other medical supplies arrived from UAE to India.

An IAF C-17 has so far airlifted 18 cryogenic oxygen containers from Dubai Airport and landed at Panagarh Air Base in three sorties since April 26.

Nations across the world have come forward to help India in its fight against the second wave of coronavirus pandemic which is extremely virulent and ravaged the country in the last few weeks.

The US, the UK, France, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, Kuwait and Russia have assured medical aid to India with much of the aid on its way.
MEMPHIS, Tenn., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (MLH) reached an impressive milestone today with The Leapfrog Group's announcement of its Spring 2021 report card for hospitals across the country. All five MLH adult hospitals have received an "A" grade in patient safety. Leapfrog does not provide report cards for children's hospitals.

"Earning all "A" grades reaffirms our unwavering commitment to provide our patients with the safest and highest quality care," said MLH President and CEO Michael Ugwueke. "Pandemic or not, our patients deserve and expect our very best, and we work to exceed their expectations every day."

Only the highest performing hospitals included in the Leapfrog Hospital Survey are considered for this honor and must meet specific criteria for safe surgery practices, infection prevention, maternity care and medical accuracy.

"Achieving all "A's" for our performance requires extreme focus, exceptional teamwork and consistent, rigorous processes," adds Ugwueke. "We relentlessly pursue the highest level of excellence, which means better health outcomes for our patients, and that remains our primary focus."

Leapfrog uses up to 27 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,700 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice a year. The single letter grade represents a hospital's overall performance in keeping patients safe while providing high quality care. The methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public. MLH chooses to submit safety surveys to Leapfrog as part of its commitment to transparency and continuous improvement.

In addition, Leapfrog recognized Methodist Le Bonheur Germantown Hospital as the only Tennessee hospital to be named a Top Teaching Hospital. Over 2,200 hospitals were considered for the award; 48 were selected as Top Teaching Hospitals. As a 319-bed hospital, Germantown was honored in the category of hospitals with fewer than 500 staffed beds.

MLH continuously makes efforts to improve on its quality and safety performance, and often looks to other industry standards as a means to measure its progress. For example, in November 2020, MLH became the first healthcare system in Tennessee to earn full ISO 9001 Quality Management System certification, which demonstrates systematic, repeatable, and well-deployed practices that ensure consistent high quality across all industries.

About Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare

Based in Memphis, Tennessee, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (MLH) has been caring for patients and families regardless of ability to pay for more than 100 years. Guided by roots in the United Methodist Church and founded in 1918 to help meet the growing need for quality healthcare in the greater Memphis area, MLH has grown from one hospital into a comprehensive healthcare system with 13,000 Associates supporting six hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient facilities, hospice residence and physician practices serving communities across the Mid-South. From transplants and advanced heart procedures to expert neurology services and compassionate cancer care, MLH offers clinical expertise with a focus on improving every life we touch.

About The Leapfrog Group

Founded in 2000 by large employers and other purchasers, The Leapfrog Group is a national nonprofit organization driving a movement for giant leaps forward in the quality and safety of American health care. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey and new Leapfrog Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) Survey collect and transparently report hospital and ASC performance, empowering purchasers to find the highest-value care and giving consumers the lifesaving information they need to make informed decisions. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade , Leapfrog's other main initiative, assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their record of patient safety, helping consumers protect themselves and their families from errors, injuries, accidents, and infections.

SOURCE Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare

Related Links

https://www.methodisthealth.org


DENVER, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nano Tech company Forge Nano Inc. to host ASE SUMMIT: a free, digital event on Advanced Surface Engineering. Nearly 1 year ago, Forge Nano hosted its first event focused around Atomic Layer Deposition. This new event will bring even more members of the scientific community together, to share even more cutting-edge science, in real time!

The [ASE] SUMMIT will be held LIVE on June 9th, 10th, 11th 2021. The ALL new [ASE] SUMMIT will feature the greatest minds in Advanced Surface Engineering. It will include access to Forge Nano's previous events, along with a new lineup of topical sessions and presentations.

The [ASE] SUMMIT is a digital event based around advancements in materials science and engineering. Attendees can register at www.asesummit.com

The live event will feature a series of presentations and keynote sessions with LIVE Q&A. Attendees will be able to interact with leaders, innovators, and pioneers in surface engineering. Additionally, the event will include Digital Poster Sessions and an Industry Roundtable Discussion.

"Our goal is to showcase what can be done with Advanced Surface Engineering technology, and to bring organizations together in order to enable the next wave of technology that has been optimized at the ATOMIC level. We know that by working together, we can advance new technologies into the next century and beyond."

Dr. Paul Lichty, CEO - Forge Nano

The applications for Advanced Surface Engineering are nearly endless. By creating and hosting this event, Forge Nano hopes to bring the global community together to solve technological issues that will enable to products of tomorrow.

About Forge Nano

Forge Nano is a global leader in surface engineering and precision nano-coating technology, using Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD). The Company's proprietary technology and manufacturing processes make angstrom-thick coatings fast, affordable, and commercially viable for a wide range of materials, applications and industries. Forge Nano's suite of ALD and PALD products and services covers the full spectrum from lab-scale tools to commercial-scale manufacturing systems. Over the last year, the Company has received major support and signed meaningful partnerships with Volkswagen, LG Technology Ventures, Mitsui Kinzoku, Air Liquide, and Sumitomo Corporation of Americas.

For more information visit www.ForgeNano.com or please send inquiries to [email protected]

CONTACT

Michael Talarico

Marketing Director

(720) 259-8579

[email protected]

SOURCE Forge Nano Inc
The history of Congressional hearings into the inner workings of Facebook, Twitter, and Google isnt filled with penetrating insights or dogged investigation. For the most part, its been a series of sideshow-style events, with a lot of grandstanding by senators and members of Congress designed to get airtime on TV news shows and/or help with re-election bids, not to mention finger-waving about non-existent fears, such as the alleged bias social platforms like Facebook have against conservative voices. For every hard-hitting question about the ways in which these networks distort information or use personal data for ad targeting, there have been dozens more poorly-informed inquiries, like Republican Senator Orrin Hatchs infamous question in 2018 about how Facebook makes money. We sell ads, Senator chief executive Mark Zuckerberg replied, no doubt overjoyed at such a softball pitch.

Given that backdrop, the likelihood of yet another Congressional hearing producing anything of substance was extremely low, especially since the one that just concluded on Tuesdaytitled Algorithms and Amplification: How Social Media Platforms Design Choices Shape our Discourse and Our Mindsdidnt involve any of the chief executives of Facebook, Twitter, or Google. (Senior staffers came instead.) The fact that there were no high-profile names attached helps explain why there were no front-page headlines with quotes from those involved, or video clips of senior executives being pigeonholed by a senator. In advance of the hearing, some argued the lack of big names might actually be a positive development, since there was less chance of the whole thing turning into a circus.

So was this hearing notable for its depth or perspicacity? Not really. If anything, there was less outrage than there probably should be about the hidden algorithms that control what we see and do on social platforms.

At the start of the hearing, Democratic Senator Chris Coons said theres nothing inherently wrong with how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube use algorithms. He said the committee wasnt considering any actual legislation and that the hearing was designed to be a listening session for legislators and the platforms. That sanguine description was at odds with some of the experts who testified, however, including Joan Donovan, who runs the Technology and Social Change project at Harvards Shorenstein Center. The biggest problem facing our nation is misinformation-at-scale, she told the committee, adding that the cost of doing nothing is democracys end. On Twitter, Donovan criticized the hearing for not going deeper. The companies should have been answering questions about how they determine what content to distribute and what criteria is used to moderate, she said. We could have also gone deeper into the role that political advertising and source hacking plays on our democracy. For its part, Facebook routinely argues that its algorithms merely give you more of what you say you want.

Congress faces a number of challenges when it comes to dealing with the algorithms that power Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Very little is known about how they work, and how and why they are tweaked. Facebook routinely talks about changes it has made to its News Feed algorithms and describes in very general terms what it is trying to do (highlight more personal content, for example) but the specifics are always kept secret. Twitter rarely says anything about the algorithms it uses, and Google never does. And Facebook and the other major platforms are protected by both the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The first protects the rights of these companies to curate their content in whatever way they wish (within certain limits); the second not only reinforces that right to curation, but also protects them from legal liability for any content they host that is created by their users.

There are attempts underway to limit some of Section 230s protections, including two proposed laws that were brought up during the hearing. One is the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, which would remove Section 230 liability protection from any platform if its algorithms are used to amplify or recommend content directly relevant to a case involving interference with civil rights or in cases involving acts of international terrorism. The problem with taking this approach, according to critics like Will Duffield at Techdirt, is that if the platforms are exposed to liability in such cases, they will cleanse [their platforms] of potentially extreme, though First Amendment protected, speech. This amounts to legislative censorship by fiat. In addition, Duffield and others argue, much of the radicalization and disinformation that Congress is concerned about occurs in private groups and messaging services, which the proposed legislation would not address at all. These kinds of laws are not only likely to fail to achieve their goals, but would also make everyones experience on social platforms like Facebook much less safe, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Heres more on the platforms:

Failure to prevent : BuzzFeed News revealed last Thursday that an internal Facebook report criticized the company for failing to prevent the Stop the Steal movement from using its platform to incite the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The report discusses how Facebook missed critical warning signs about the growth and influence of the movement, and concludes the company was unprepared to stop people from spreading hate and incitement to violence. The reports authors published the document to Facebooks internal message board, making it available to company employees, but it was later removed.

Not reconcilable : Justin Hendrix, co-founder, chief executive, and editor of Tech Policy Press, writes that Republican Senator Ben Sasse made the most perceptive point at the hearing when he argued that the answers the platforms were providing about the way their algorithms function were simply not reconcilable with the positions of their critics. This, Hendrix argues, puts the focus back on lawmakers, whose duty it is to reconcile the interests of society and democracy with the business interests of the platforms.

Undue influence : Members of Congress are reportedly looking into whether Google tried to influence a critics testimony at a hearing last week about the future of app stores . Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee have asked for the details of an alleged phone call between a Google employee and a Match Group employee prior to a hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, during which Match and other Google critics accused the company of using its monopoly power to curb competition. According to one report, a Google executive called Match after the testimony to ask why the companys comments didnt jibe with previous comments it had made about Google and its app store.

Other notable stories:

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.
By Prossy Kisakye

The opposition Democratic Party has called for an amendment of the rules of Parliament to have the Human Rights Committee of Parliament headed by the opposition.

DP President Norbert Mao says this is the only way the government will be audited well on human rights issues.

Mao adds that this proposal was also extended to the Human Rights Committee during their visit a few months ago.

Maos call comes as various reports from rights bodies continue to pin security agencies for gross human rights violations with the most notable being the assault on journalists and other Ugandans during and after elections.
The attention of the Ministry of Energy has been drawn to a statement yesterday 28th April 2021 by the Minority in Parliament over the current power outage situation in the country.



In the said statement a number of claims were made on a variety of issues in the power sector.

The Ministry wishes to put on record the following facts;



 Intermittent Power Outages

Since the beginning of the year, there have been some intermittent outages in parts of the country due to the following:



 Feeder outages in Kumasi arising from low water levels in the Bui Dam enclave. 1Bui is a peaking plant for transmissions services to Ashanti, Bono regions and the Northern parts of Ghana. Bui is crucial, in that it is able to energise the low voltages in power being supplied from the south into Ashanti and the north).



 Prestea-Obuasi Transmission line trips, leading to a total system shutdown (the line that tripped affected other adjacent lines. This curtailed supply and caused a system shutdown).



 Gas flow challenges upstream  arising from challenges in the WAPCo supply line.



 Gas Compressor faults reported by Ghana Gas.



 Localised outages within the distribution chain



Despite inherent challenges in the transmission and distribution aspects of the power sector, systematic plans have been put in place by government and our developmental partners like MCC, Siemens and AFD to support the overall stability and create consistency and reliability for the country.



For the record, there has been no nationwide load shedding in the country, neither has there been an attempt to embark on one because there is no need to.



Some of the projects ongoing in Accra and Kasoa, for example, will require outages for some days. The Pokuase timetable is out, starting from May 10 to May 17th 2021.



That of Kasoa is yet to be published and shall be released at the appropriate time when the necessary arrangements and consultations with the relevant stakeholders have taken place. The only reason these outages are being carried is to allow for the contractors to tie in their works into the existing transmission lines.



It is therefore false to claim, as the Minority in Parliament has, that political pressure has been brought to bear on the publishing of a load shedding timetable.



 Ongoing Key Projects to salvage the situation  Transmission



 Pokuase substation (BSP) - The US$60m Pokuase BSP, the fourth Bulk Supply Point in Accra designated as A4BSP, and its associated 33kV and 11kV interconnecting lines will address power supply challenges, such as frequent outages and low voltages resulting from increased power demand in Accra and the surrounding towns. On completion, the quality of power supply and reliability in Pokuase, Kwabenya, Legon, Nsawam and its environs will improve significantly.



 Kasoa GIS BSP - A US$50m project to improve reliability and quality of supply to Kasoa and its environs, including Senya Bereku, Bawjiase and Nyanyanu and also increase power availability to meet growing demand in that area. There will also be significant reduction in transmission and distribution losses. Upon completion, the programme will benefit 241,508 ECG customers by vastly improving GRIDCos power transmission system.



 Kumasi - Kintampo transmission line project - funded by AFD at a cost of US$173m. It will ease the load on the Kumasi substations and become the instrument of power transmission to the north. The substations in Kumasi can then focus on transmissions to areas within the Ashanti and Bono regions.



 Purchasing of a US$15m Static VAR Compensator - it will help sustain high voltages in the transmission system.



 Transfer of AMERI Plant to Kumasi  To stabilize the power in Kumasi and also support the voltage in the northern part of the country which has become worse because of Buis outage.



 Work on the Tema to Accra transmission line upgrade project. Installation of new transmission lines is to increase power transfer capacity from 400 megawatts (MW) to 1,900MW to reduce redundancy of power in the transmission lines



It is obvious that these works cannot be carried out without the relevant financial arrangements in place, for which reason the Minority in Parliaments claim of financial limitations with respect to the current situation is wholly without merit and should be disregarded.

Project Timelines

The Ministry rejects the Minority in Parliaments assertion that different timelines have been given from different outfits in respect of the schedule of works. This is false. It is important to note the following;



Pokuase Bulk Supply Point July 2021

The Bulk Power Supply Point (BPS) being constructed at Pokuase in the Greater Accra Region is 95 per cent complete and on schedule for handover to the government at the end of July 2021.



https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/pokuase-bulk-power-supply-point-to-be-ready-in-july-2021.html



Kasoa Bulk Supply Point  August 2021



Sixty per cent of construction work has so far been done on the $50-million gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) substation, with engineers assuring the minister that the infrastructure will be ready by the end of August this year.



https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/kasoa-power-substation-to-be-completed-august.html



https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/pokuase-bulk-power-supply-point-to-be-ready-in-july-2021.html



Tema to Achimota Line Rehabilitation - September 2021



The project, which is part of a nationwide rehabilitation of lines, started three years ago under the Agence de France de Development financing of $173 million and is expected to be completed by September 2021.



https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/rehabilitation-of-transmission-lines-will-improve-power-supply-gridco.html



It is expected that by the end of 2021, all these and other projects would have come to fruition and the power situation would have been resolved. These different conclusion dates for the various projects cannot by any stretch of the imagination be construed to mean that different and contradictory dates have been issued on when the power situation would be resolved.



 Bui Dam



Bui remains a crucial stakeholder and client of Ghana Grid Company.

It is undeniable that Bui Dams role as a peaking plant remains a significant point in the transmission process. Once the water level drops, this hampers transmission to the Ashanti region and beyond, due to the low voltages that are the resultant effect.





 AFD Loan & Projects



The principal reason for the halt in loan disbursements by Agence Francaise de Development (AFD) was to pave way for the agencys access to a government guarantee.



The projects have all resumed following the provision of the necessary requirements needed by the French Development Agency.



President Akufo-Addos vision for the power sub-sector is safe, dependable and affordable power to bring relief to Ghanaians and also to serve as a solid base for an industrialised economy.



The Ministry of Energy, in furtherance of this vision, is working hard to bring it into fruition and remains focused on delivering this important mandate. The Ministry shall not be drawn into a needles war of words that tends to politicise the situation. However, the Ministry welcomes constructive feedback from all sections of our society.



Government appreciates the patience of affected Ghanaians and respectfully craves their forbearance as these necessary works are undertaken in order to achieve their objective.





ISSUED BY THE COMMUNICATIONS & PUBLIC AFFAIRS UNIT





Source: Ministry of Energy









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
For nearly a decade, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has tried to pass legislation that would remove military commanders from their role in prosecuting service members for sexual assault.

On Thursday, Ms. Gillibrand was flanked by several lawmakers from both parties to announce her latest effort, which has attracted a new and wide array of support that greatly enhances its chances of becoming law.

We owe it to our service members to do more to prevent these crimes and prosecute them when they occur, said Ms. Gillibrand, whose bill would require specially trained military prosecutors to decide whether or not to try assault crimes in the military, taking that decision away from commanders.

Joining her were Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, both Iowa Republicans, as well as Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.
Also charged in the fraud was Robert Kowalski, a Chicago attorney and former bank customer, who was indicted in 2019 on bankruptcy fraud charges as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the banks collapse. Kowalski was a large debtor of the bank when it was closed by regulators in December 2017 with about $66 million in bad loans, the indictment alleges.
Exit polls for four states - West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam - and the union territory of Puducherry will be out today. Voters in West Bengal voted in the eighth and final phase of state assembly elections on Thursday. All eyes are on the state as a neck-to-neck fight between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and incumbent Trinamool Congress is likely to unfold. After a spirited electoral campaign by both parties, the latter is eyeing a third term in the state, whereas the former is trying everything in its power to dethrone the Mamata Banerjee-led party.

In Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin's DMK is pitched in a heated electoral battle against AIADMK led by E Palaniswami and O Panneerselvam. In the red bastion of Kerala, incumbent Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's Left-led LDF is fighting against Congress-led UDF. Coming to the North East, BJP and Congress are locked in a direct fight in Assam. A similarly close fight is expected in Puducherry between the two parties.

Follow BusinessToday.In for LIVE updates on exit poll results for West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, Puducherry assembly elections:

9:54 PM: India Today-Axis My India West Bengal exit poll

TMC - 130-156

BJP - 136-160

Left+ - 0-2

Others - 0-1

9:09 PM: Jan Ki Baat Kerala exit poll

LDF - 68-78

UDF - 48-58

BJP+ - 0

8:59 PM: India Today-Axis My India Tamil Nadu exit poll

AIADMK+ - 38-54

DMK+ - 175-195

AMMK+ - 1-2

MNM+ - 0-2

8:09 PM: Today's Chankaya Kerala exit poll

LDF - 93-111

UDF - 26-44

BJP- 0-6

Others - 0-3

8:05 PM: Jan Ki Baat Assam exit poll

BJP+ - 68-78

Congress+ - 48-58

8:02 PM: ABP News-C Voter Puducherry exit poll

BJP+ - 19-23

Congress+ - 6-10

Others - 1-2

8:02 PM: ABP News-C Voter Kerala exit poll

LDF - 71-77

UDF - 62-68

BJP+ - 0-2

7:59 PM: Jan Ki Baat exit poll for West Bengal

TMC - 104-121

BJP - 162-185

Left+ - 3-9

7:57 PM: ABP News - C Voter exit poll for Tamil Nadu

AIADMK+ - 58-70

DMK+ - 160-172

Others - 0-7

7:55 PM: ABP News-C Voter exit poll for Assam

BJP+ - 58-71

Congress+ - 53-66

Others - 0-5

7:52 PM: India Today-Axis My India exit poll for Kerala

LDF - 104-120

UDF - 20-36

BJP+ - 0-2

Others - 0-2

7:50 PM: Today's Chanakya exit poll for Tamil Nadu

AIADMK+ - 46-68

DMK+ - 164-186

AMMK+ - 0

Others - 0-8

7:46 PM: Republic-CNX exit poll for Kerala

LDF - 72-80

UDF - 58-64

NDA - 1-5

7:44 PM: Republic-CNX exit poll for Puducherry

BJP+ - 16-20

Congress+ - 11-13

7:42 PM: Republic-CNX exit poll for Tamil Nadu

AIADMK+ - 58-68

DMK+ - 160-170

AMMK+ - 4-6

MNM+ - 0-2

7:41 PM: Republic-CNX exit poll for Assam

BJP+ - 74-84

Congress+ - 40-50

Others - 1-3

7:38 PM: Republic-CNX exit poll for West Bengal

TMC - 128-128

BJP - 138-148

Left - 11-21

7:36 PM: Today's Chanakya exit poll for Assam

BJP+ - 61-79

Congress+ - 47- 65

Others - 0-3

7:29 PM: India Today-Axis My India exit poll for Assam

BJP+ - 75-85

Congress+ - 40-50

Others - 1-4

7:24 PM: ABP News-C Voter exit poll for West Bengal

TMC - 152-164

BJP - 109-121

Left - 14-25

7:06 PM: Incidents of violence reported in West Bengal during last phase of polling

BJP and TMC workers clashed in Birbhum district of West Bengal during the last phase of polling for the state assembly elections. Anirba Ganguly, BJP's candidate from Bolpur, came under attack during the incident and blamed TMC of disrupting the election process. Chandranath Sinha, TMC candidate for the seat, refuted the allegations against his party.
New Delhi, Apr 29 (UNI) Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal convened a meeting on Thursday on the COVID-19 vaccination drive in Delhi and along with the officials, he prepared a plan to vaccinate all above 18 years in the next three months.

Mr Kejriwal also said the Delhi government will set up vaccination centres on a large scale to vaccinate all eligible people above 18 years of age in the next three months.

Taking to Twitter, Mr Kejriwal said, "Had a meeting with the officials on vaccination drive in Delhi. Prepared a plan to vaccinate all above 18 years in the next 3 months. We will set up vaccination centres on a large scale. All eligible people must come forward to get vaccinated."
Louisiana lawmakers intend to give K-12 public school teachers a $1,000 pay raise next year, more than double the amount proposed by Gov. John Bel Edwards, the leader of the Senate Education Committee said Thursday.

Sen. Cleo Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat, said legislative leaders plan to include that salary hike in next year's budget, along with a $500 increase for support staff such as cafeteria workers and bus drivers. Louisiana remains well behind the Southern average for its education salaries.

Fields said the agreement was reached with Senate President Page Cortez and House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, along with the heads of the House and Senate budget committees, all Republicans. Edwards had proposed $400 teacher raises and $200 for support workers, though the Democratic governor had said he hoped that could be increased if more money became available.

The smaller raises "are insufficient," Fields said in a meeting of the Senate Education Committee.

Louisiana bill to outlaw paddling in public schools clears first hurdle, heads to full House In a change from previous years, paddling and other forms of corporal punishment would be banned in public schools under a bill that won lopsi

Fields didn't identify how the state will pay for the larger pay raises, which would more than double the $40 million price tag for the governor's proposed increases.

Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

The House Appropriations Committee on Monday will unveil its spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1, which is expected to include the bigger salary hikes and show how lawmakers have chosen to fund them.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Louisiana doesn't have the major financial problems it's seen in prior years as the state's tax collections rebound and federal aid has helped cover some of the remaining gaps.

Bid to toughen teacher retirement rules criticized, shelved likely until next year Amid heavy opposition, the sponsor of a bill that would toughen retirement rules for future teachers and state employees has set aside his pro

Thursday's announcement was followed by a procedural move to accomplish the raises.

The Senate committee rejected the nearly $4 billion public school financing formula for the 2021-22 year that lawmakers received from the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and asked the board to submit a new formula with the larger pay raises included.

Lawmakers can reject or approve the formula submitted by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, but they cannot change it. If the education board and lawmakers don't agree on a new financing formula, the state continues to use the formula already on the books.
It seemed hard to believe that a tiny Chihuahua described as a man hating, animal hating, children hating dog, a 13-pound rage machine and the vessel for a traumatized Victorian child could find a home.

But he has.

Weeks after the Second Chance Pet Adoption League in Oak Ridge, N.J., posted an adoption ad describing him that way, Prancer the dog was taking a morning walk on Wednesday on a downtown street in Connecticut.

At the other end of the leash was Ariel Davis, 36, who refers to herself as mom or owner after she adopted Prancer on April 17 and took him to New Haven, where she lives with a female roommate in an apartment with a backyard and no other pets. Or children. Or men.

I thought I could probably give him a good place, said Ms. Davis in an interview, steering Prancer away from his favorite spot to relieve himself: the neighbors flowers. It was kind of meant to be.
Benjamin Olivo

Sometimes, you just want to relive the days of your youth and play beer pong. Whether you're partaking in the game for the first time in awhile, or you never stopped, try these San Antonio bars for your enjoyment.

Editor's note: The availability of beer pong tables at these bars may be impacted by health regulations related to COVID-19.
Chair of Assembly Tax Committee Authors Bill Providing Billions in Tax Relief to Calif. Businesses

AB 80 authored by Assemblywoman Autumn R. Burke (D-Inglewood) was passed out of the Assembly and is now headed to the Governor for signature.

AB 80 conforms California to federal law, ensuring that no one will pay taxes on forgiven Paycheck Protection Program loans. Additionally, the bill allows for those that had a 25% reduction in gross receipts and are not publicly traded companies, a deduction for all expenses paid for using the forgiven PPP loans. The Department of Finance estimates that the full deduction would be provided to about 75% to 85% of PPP loan recipients.

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AB 80 is the result of months of hard work while the state waited for guidance from the Federal Government on how to give businesses this much-needed tax relief, without jeopardizing billions of Federal aid dollars.

According to Assemblywoman Burke, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation, AB 80 provides significant and immediate tax relief to California businesses devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Assemblywoman Burke further stated, With 76 co-authors from the Assembly and the Senate, this bill shows that the legislature and the administration understands the importance of business to our state and our strong desire to be good partners, not only with our job creators, but with each and every Californian they employ.

Last year, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) which, among other things, created the Paycheck Protection Program. The program provided businesses loans that could later be forgiven if the funds were spent on specific expenses such as payroll, rent, and utilities.
Fox News local news anchor Feven Kiflegiorgis was found passed out naked at the wheel of her Audi - and stumbled from her car reeking of alcohol after police showed up.

Kiflegiorgis, the weekday morning anchor on Fox 5 Las Vegas, told officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department she couldn't remember how she got there.

According to charging documents, police smelled alcohol on her, but she refused to allow them to take a blood test during the March 20 stop at 7:30 a.m., the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

Her anchor shift runs from 4 am to 7 am each weekday. She was stopped on a Saturday.

Police said she was at on a street called Matthew Avenue, near Paradise Road, which appears to be a residential area.

Kiflegiorgis was charged with reckless driving with a disregard for the safety of a person or property.

Fox 5 Las Vegas anchor Feven Kiflegiorgis, left, known as Feven Kay, was arrested after being found naked and asleep at the wheel of her Audi. She was charged by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, right, with reckless driving with disregard for the safety of a person or property and fined $1000 and sent to driving school

Kiflegiorgis is the host of Fox 5 Las Vegas where she has worked since 2018

'As I move forward, I want you to know I have learned from this and I will continue learning,' she told Fox 5 viewers

She was sentenced last Wednesday to a $1,000 fine and will have to also complete driving school.

'Many of you have noticed I've been off air for a few weeks,' Kiflegiorgis, known as as Feven Kay, said in a statement on Fox 5 last week.

'As I move forward, I want you to know I have learned from this and I will continue learning.'

Kiflegiorgis didn't immediately return a request for comment from DailyMail.com.

Feven Kay was born in Ethiopia and grew up in California, where she graduated from Bakersfield College in 2005.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts in journalism at California State University-Northridge in 2013 and has been working at Fox 5 since 2018 as a news anchor and reporter. Her age isn't clear.

According to her biography on the Fox 5 site, she's dedicated to being a 'voice for the voiceless,' she says.

'Outside of work Feven enjoys traveling, attending concerts, spending time with family and friends, and doing anything that involves laughing until her stomach hurts,' the bio says.

Kiflegiorgis is still scheduled to host Las Vegas Strip performer David Perrico's Disney show in the city on Sunday.

After her arrest was publicized, Perrico backed Kiflegiorgis to continue in her role hosting his Perrico's Pop Strings Orchestra this weekend.

'Feven is a total pro, has my full support,' Perrico said on Wednesday.

'I am looking forward to her hosting the Disney concert.'
Corporation intersects multiple high-grade gold intersections from underground and surface exploration drilling.

Best high-grade results include 187.0 g/t Au over 0.5 m, 151.5 g/t Au over 0.5 m and 147.5 g/t Au over 0.3 m.

Monarch has initiated Phase 2 of the surface drilling program to follow up on the recent near-surface results.

The 42,500-metre drilling program is ongoing, with four drills underground and one on surface.

MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / MONARCH MINING CORPORATION ("Monarch" or the "Corporation") (TSX:GBAR)(OTC PINK:GBARF) is pleased to announce additional results from its 2020-2021 42,500-metre exploration diamond drilling program on its wholly-owned Beaufor Mine gold project, located 20 kilometres east of Val-d'Or, Quebec. The results include several high-grade assays, including 187.0 g/t Au over 0.5 m, 151.5 g/t Au over 0.5 m and 147.5 g/t Au over 0.3 m, as Monarch continues to test for potential resources in proximity to the historical mine.

The Beaufor Mine initially began commercial production in the early 1930's and over the years has produced over 1.1 million ounces of gold. The mine is currently on care and maintenance, which has given Monarch an opportunity to drill-test targets throughout the mine area. In June 2020, the Corporation initiated a 42,500-metre diamond drilling program to test two types of targets: the areas around historical high-grade intersections near the existing underground infrastructure, and isolated resource blocks, which are typically defined by a single drill intersection. Both of these "near-mine" targets can often be tested from the existing underground workings, generally by holes less than 200 metres long. Currently, 275 holes are planned or are already being drilled at 25-metre centres. If positive results are received, additional holes will be drilled to allow the zones in question to be converted into reserves and included in a future mine plan.

Assay results have been received for the first 121 holes (14,465 m), representing roughly 34% of the planned metres of drilling. High-grade results previously reported from the program included 783 g/t Au over 0.2 m and 293 g/t Au over 0.5 m (see press release dated October 1, 2020) and 35.87 g/t Au over 9.8 m (see press release dated January 19, 2021). Since the last reported results, the Corporation has drilled 83 additional holes (9,092 m), consisting of 79 exploration holes drilled from underground and 4 holes drilled from the surface. The best results are shown in Table 2 below and illustrated on the attached figures. Several of the holes have multiple intersections due to the stacked nature of the mineralization. The intersection widths reported are core lengths and high-grade intersections have not been capped, as the vein interpretation and statistics have not been finalized for the zones.

Figure 1: Beaufor property recent assay results (longitudinal view looking N)

Figure 2: Beaufor property recent assay results (sectional view looking NW)

"We are thrilled with the results received to date. Our near-mine exploration drilling program continues to yield high-grade results as we intersect new mineralized zones and extensions of known zones outside the previously defined resource envelope. Monarch's goal is to significantly increase the near-mine resource so that a minimal amount of new development and capital will be required to put the mine back into production in the short term," said Jean-Marc Lacoste, President and Chief Executive Officer of Monarch.

Near-mine exploration drilling is ongoing, with four drill rigs underground and one on surface. The focus remains on high-grade composites that are open along strike and existing resource blocks that contain sufficient room for expansion.

In April, Monarch initiated a Phase 2 surface drill program to follow up on recent positive near-surface results, including 35.87 g/t Au over 9.8 m (see press release dated January 19, 2021). This Phase 2 program consists of approximately 40 short holes totalling 4,000 m with the aim of defining additional resources and subsequent reserves.

Sampling consists of sawing the drill core into equal halves along its main axis and shipping one of the halves to ALS Canada in Val-d'Or and AGAT Laboratories in Mississauga, Ontario, for assaying. The samples are crushed, pulverized and assayed by fire assay, with atomic absorption finish. Samples exceeding 10.0 g/t Au are re-assayed using the gravity method and samples containing visible gold are assayed using the metallic screen method. Monarch uses a comprehensive QA/QC protocol, including the insertion of standards, blanks and duplicates.

The technical and scientific content of this press release has been reviewed and approved by Christian Tessier, P.Geo., the Corporation's qualified person under National Instrument 43-101.

About Beaufor

The Beaufor Mine is located within the Bourlamaque Pluton at the eastern contact with the Dubuisson Formation. The Bourlamaque Batholith, a synvolcanic intrusion, is a major geological feature of the Val-d'Or mining camp. It is a quartziferous granodiorite cut by fine-grained dioritic dykes. Gold mineralization occurs in veins associated with shear zones dipping moderately south. Mineralization is associated with quartz-tourmaline-pyrite veins resulting from the filling of shear and extension fractures. Gold-bearing veins show a close association with mafic dykes intruding the granodiorite. A National Instrument 43-101 resource estimate for the Beaufor Mine property was prepared for Monarch Mining in December 2020 by Carl Pelletier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc., and John Langton, P. Geo., JPL GeoServices Inc. The mineral resource estimate is listed in the table below.

Table 1: 2020 mineral resource estimate for the Beaufor Mine

Category Tonnes Grade (g/t Au) Gold (ounces) Measured 121,000 5.62 21,900 Indicated 310,100 7.10 70,800 Total M+I 431,100 6.68 92,700 Inferred 134,600 6.96 30,100

Mineral Resource Estimate notes:

The independent and qualified person for the 2020 MRE, as defined by NI 43-101, is Carl Pelletier, P.Geo. (InnovExplo Inc.), and the effective date is December 18, 2020. These mineral resources are not mineral reserves as they do not have demonstrated economic viability. The mineral resource estimates follow CIM Definition Standards and Guidelines. A capping of 68.5 g/t Au on assays was applied for zones 8, B, M, M1 and Q, and 34.25 g/t for all other zones. The DDH intercepts (min. 2.4 m) were capped at 16.5 g/t. The estimate method was polygonal on cross-sections with a minimum width of 2.4 m using a density of 2.75 t/m3 for the 63 mineralized zones. Measured resource polygons extend 8 m above and below development and up to 10 m laterally. Indicated resource polygons extend up to 20 m from DDH intercepts, along dip and along strike and a minimum of 2 polygons need to be in contact. Inferred resource polygons extend up to 40 m from DDH intercepts, along dip and along strike where a drill spacing ranges from 20 m to 40 m and/or in areas of isolated drill holes where mineralization is known. The reasonable prospect for an eventual economical extraction is met by having a reasonable minimum width for the polygons, a cut-off grade of 3.20 g/t Au, application of constraining volumes on the blocks (potential underground scenario) below a 30 m crown pillar. The cut-off grades inputs are: a gold price of USD1,612/oz, a CAD:USD exchange rate of 1.34; a mining cost of $100/t for the long hole method and $145/t for the room and pillar method; a processing cost of $50/t; and G&A and environment of $13/t and includes the royalty of 1.0% and a refinery charge of $5/t. The cut-off grades should be re-evaluated in light of future prevailing market conditions (metal prices, exchange rate, mining cost, etc.). Results are presented in situ. Ounce (troy) = metric tons x grade / 31.10348. The number of tonnes and ounces was rounded to the nearest hundred. Any discrepancies in the totals are due to rounding effects; rounding followed the recommendations as per NI 43-101. InnovExplo Inc. is not aware of any known environmental, permitting, legal, title-related, taxation, socio-political, marketing or other relevant issue that could materially affect the mineral resource estimate.

About Monarch

Monarch Mining Corporation (TSX: GBAR) is a fully integrated mining company that owns four advanced projects, including the fully permitted past-producing Beaufor Mine, which has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold over the last 30 years. Other advanced assets include the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, all located near Monarch's wholly owned and fully permitted Beacon 750 tpd mill. Monarch owns 28,725 hectares (287 km2) of mining assets in the prolific Abitibi mining camp that host 588,482 ounces of combined measured and indicated gold resources and 329,393 ounces of combined inferred resources.

Forward-Looking Statements

The forward-looking statements in this press release involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Monarch's actual results, performance and achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied therein. Neither TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Jean-Marc Lacoste

President and Chief Executive Officer

1-888-994-4465

jm.lacoste@monarchmining.com

Mathieu Seguin

Vice President, Corporate Development

1-888-994-4465

m.seguin@monarchmining.com

Elisabeth Tremblay

1-888-994-4465

Senior Geologist - Communications Specialist

e.tremblay@monarchmining.com

www.monarchmining.com

Table 2: Beaufor Mine significant assay results

Hole From (m) To (m) Width* (m) Au (g/t) 20-106-158 0.00 1.30 1.30 7.94 20-106-158 14.05 15.05 1.00 8.89 20-115-105 6.50 7.70 1.20 8.79 20-116-123 98.50 99.05 0.55 14.00 20-123-92 57.30 57.80 0.50 67.20 20-126-80 18.20 18.90 0.70 7.55 20-132-56 73.35 75.50 2.15 3.88 20-132-57 49.05 51.50 2.45 2.10 20-132-57 60.00 63.20 3.20 1.80 20-132-58 46.15 48.50 2.35 20.21 Incl. 46.15 46.45 0.30 147.50 20-133-61 45.00 45.50 0.50 22.80 20-133-63 41.80 42.30 0.50 11.60 20-133-63 93.50 97.50 4.00 7.04 Incl. 94.30 95.00 0.70 26.10 20-133-63 116.60 120.10 3.50 7.90 Incl. 116.60 117.20 0.60 29.00 20-133-64 107.00 108.40 1.40 5.69 20-133-66 68.80 71.25 2.45 3.98 Incl. 68.80 69.30 0.50 17.90 20-133-66 100.80 104.55 3.75 4.08 Incl. 100.80 101.65 0.85 16.00 20-133-67 63.50 66.05 2.55 2.61 20-133-67 79.50 85.50 6.00 2.66 20-133-68 84.30 87.25 2.95 3.48 20-133-68 94.30 97.40 3.10 3.20 Incl. 94.30 94.80 0.50 17.00 20-133-73 82.25 87.50 5.25 1.41 20-133-73 90.00 92.00 2.00 2.98 20-133-73 117.75 120.00 2.25 3.58 20-146-42 23.60 24.10 0.50 65.30 20-152-19 8.58 9.58 1.00 94.42 Incl. 9.08 9.58 0.50 187.00 20-152-19 36.80 37.80 1.00 32.92 Incl. 37.30 37.80 0.50 65.10 20-152-19 89.05 90.70 1.65 8.91 Incl. 89.05 89.55 0.50 26.50 20-97-68 3.85 5.20 1.35 57.40 Incl. 3.85 4.35 0.50 151.50 20-97-69 4.05 5.70 1.65 10.07 Incl. 4.05 4.55 0.50 26.70 20-97-70 7.70 8.20 0.50 97.90 BES-20-010 24.80 25.30 0.50 40.90 BES-20-010 59.40 60.80 1.40 5.81 BES-20-010 76.30 80.00 3.70 3.64 BEU-20-10-001 80.50 83.20 2.70 10.81 Incl. 82.50 83.20 0.70 23.90 BEU-20-15-001A 143.65 144.65 1.00 7.17 BEU-20-15-006 46.10 48.40 2.30 6.59 BEU-20-15-008 48.60 51.00 2.40 5.29 BEU-20-15-008 89.40 93.30 3.90 2.35 BEU-20-17-001B 100.90 101.90 1.00 58.14 Incl. 100.90 101.40 0.50 116.00 BEU-20-17-001B 136.30 141.05 4.75 7.11 Incl. 137.75 138.50 0.75 37.80 BEU-20-17-001B 148.35 152.15 3.80 2.67 BEU-20-17-002 12.55 13.15 0.60 66.90 BEU-20-17-002 94.25 96.05 1.80 21.89 Incl. 94.25 94.95 0.70 55.70 BEU-20-17-005 13.00 16.50 3.50 1.69 BEU-20-20-006 41.30 41.80 0.50 11.50 BEU-20-20-007 19.75 23.15 3.40 1.53 BEU-20-20-008 22.80 23.30 0.50 10.65 BEU-21-10-005 100.95 103.80 2.85 5.57 BEU-21-30-004 75.80 77.70 1.90 12.47 Incl. 75.80 76.30 0.50 47.20

*The width shown is the core length. True width is unknown at this time.

Table 3: Beaufor Mine drill hole location

Hole Easting (Mine Grid) Northing (Mine Grid) Elevation (m) Az (deg.) Dip (deg.) Length (m) 20-103-62 1849.08 3158.36 2358.75 183.0 -5.0 41.1 20-103-63 1849.05 3158.25 2360.66 179.0 47.0 31.0 20-106-158 1956.82 3306.93 2517.98 309.0 -41.0 85.2 20-106-159 1958.23 3306.36 2518.03 19.0 -76.0 51.3 20-114-167 2023.42 3258.38 2331.61 39.0 -5.0 192.9 20-114-168 2023.48 3258.08 2331.70 45.0 -2.0 162.0 20-114-168A 2023.48 3258.13 2331.77 44.0 0.0 224.2 20-115-105 2029.77 3245.89 2331.88 188.0 4.0 93.7 20-116-122 2047.59 3260.40 2327.98 22.0 -29.0 145.7 20-116-123 2047.23 3260.22 2327.74 15.0 -39.0 131.3 20-116-124 2048.04 3260.35 2327.57 31.0 -35.0 102.8 20-116-125 2047.41 3253.41 2256.06 29.0 -16.0 28.0 20-120-190 2081.72 3237.95 2260.30 24.0 -31.0 70.8 20-123-92 2144.41 3305.41 2319.39 97.0 69.0 63.0 20-126-79 2152.55 3247.65 2275.90 71.0 -18.0 184.0 20-126-80 2152.78 3247.44 2275.70 76.0 -22.0 178.6 20-132-56 2142.51 3083.75 2739.84 331.0 -85.0 82.2 20-132-57 2142.78 3085.13 2739.78 12.0 -44.0 65.5 20-132-58 2143.42 3085.69 2740.47 27.0 -14.0 77.0 20-133-61 2189.00 3164.00 2741.00 77.0 -4.0 90.2 20-133-62 2189.87 3163.79 2742.02 94.0 56.0 113.4 20-133-63 2190.06 3163.64 2741.64 100.0 42.0 124.0 20-133-64 2189.80 3163.57 2742.14 107.0 58.0 127.7 20-133-65 2190.13 3163.19 2741.44 117.0 37.0 108.0 20-133-66 2189.69 3162.93 2741.82 138.0 51.0 192.3 20-133-67 2188.69 3163.21 2742.25 171.0 60.0 157.7 20-133-68 2190.03 3163.49 2741.76 108.0 47.0 144.7 20-133-71 2184.47 3166.66 2739.16 70.0 -72.0 148.0 20-133-73 2185.91 3166.42 2739.26 78.0 -21.0 150.6 20-133-74 2185.23 3166.58 2739.20 90.0 -50.0 131.7 20-133-75 2185.00 3168.00 2742.00 94.0 -25.0 155.8 20-133-76 2185.00 3168.00 2742.00 96.0 -35.0 152.4 20-146-42 2330.57 3172.41 2598.69 314.0 60.0 75.0 20-152-19 2384.25 3135.53 2598.82 160.0 28.0 126.8 20-152-20 2384.96 3136.25 2566.02 135.0 38.0 9.9 20-152-20A 2384.90 3136.15 2599.04 135.0 38.0 159.1 20-97-68 1786.33 3158.47 2365.93 316.0 -62.0 167.1 20-97-69 1785.84 3158.66 2365.85 322.0 -49.0 175.5 20-97-70 1785.44 3159.39 2366.57 324.0 -14.0 30.9 20-97-71 1786.17 3158.82 2365.96 338.0 -48.0 149.4 20-97-72 1786.46 3158.63 2365.82 344.0 -62.0 145.8 20-97-73 1787.42 3159.10 2366.54 31.0 -20.0 25.8 BES-20-007 1849.74 3782.25 3047.78 45.0 -75.0 95.0 BES-20-010 2480.84 3420.56 3065.03 302.0 -60.0 108.0 BES-20-011 2480.84 3420.56 3065.03 44.0 -78.0 105.0 BES-20-022 1545.00 3105.00 3049.00 51.0 -75.0 432.0 BEU-20-10-001 2117.65 3201.87 2739.63 198.0 -9.0 168.5 BEU-20-15-001 2472.06 2993.14 2598.41 193.0 7.0 106.1 BEU-20-15-002 2472.55 2996.74 2598.85 10.0 19.0 94.6 BEU-20-15-003 2472.71 2996.86 2597.60 13.0 -17.0 58.5 BEU-20-15-004 2471.58 2996.80 2598.28 22.0 12.0 65.6 BEU-20-15-005 2422.89 3021.29 2596.57 3.0 -64.0 116.6 BEU-20-15-006 2362.64 3051.81 2596.23 160.0 -80.0 171.0 BEU-20-15-008 2361.00 3052.00 2599.00 256.0 -74.0 191.8 BEU-20-17-001A 1673.77 3402.22 2518.96 267.0 -36.0 152.7 BEU-20-17-001B 1669.54 3401.86 2518.93 267.0 -36.0 162.2 BEU-20-17-002 1673.17 3402.63 2518.85 278.0 -31.0 142.7 BEU-20-17-003 1679.97 3407.77 2519.59 36.0 -21.0 64.6 BEU-20-17-004 1748.28 3352.39 2518.50 229.0 -85.0 35.5 BEU-20-17-005 1741.83 3357.73 2518.58 307.0 -33.0 39.7 BEU-20-17-006 1750.22 3352.74 2518.57 90.0 -36.0 39.5 BEU-20-17-008 1811.97 3474.32 2519.25 268.0 14.0 196.5 BEU-20-20-001 1872.19 3318.87 2441.98 324.0 -30.0 26.0 BEU-20-20-002 1842.53 3362.22 2443.95 218.0 16.0 22.0 BEU-20-20-003 1866.10 3378.74 2444.45 266.0 79.0 22.5 BEU-20-20-004 1841.93 3362.02 2442.81 200.0 -6.0 26.0 BEU-20-20-005 1805.64 3383.19 2445.12 162.0 42.0 30.0 BEU-20-20-006 1804.63 3385.41 2444.74 29.0 -44.0 55.0 BEU-20-20-007 1804.70 3384.16 2444.85 201.0 60.0 35.0 BEU-20-20-008 1804.26 3383.11 2444.62 201.0 35.0 35.0 BEU-20-20-009 1777.96 3385.63 2442.92 213.0 -13.0 50.0 BEU-20-20-013 1918.16 3234.47 2443.58 30.0 -6.0 126.0 BEU-20-30-001 2031.49 3230.02 2251.52 305.0 -36.0 233.3 BEU-21-10-003 2117.14 3202.46 2739.74 212.0 -10.0 196.5 BEU-21-10-005 2116.98 3202.79 2739.54 223.0 -17.0 144.6 BEU-21-15-010 2027.92 3255.32 2595.31 4.0 -24.0 139.8 BEU-21-17-007 1812.85 3473.84 2520.05 230.0 31.0 130.8 BEU-21-20-010 1957.53 3311.32 2442.66 200.0 -22.0 38.0 BEU-21-20-012 2004.42 3310.28 2444.76 314.0 77.0 35.0 BEU-21-30-004 2051.01 3223.47 2248.44 25.0 -24.0 78.1 BEU-21-30-007 2118.32 3234.05 2240.10 66.0 -53.0 174.0 BEU-21-30-008 2120.06 3266.04 2235.36 40.0 -53.0 30.5 BEU-21-30-011 2156.50 3382.65 2221.59 156.0 42.0 46.6

Table 4: Monarch combined gold resources

Tonnes (metric) Grade

(g/t Au) Ounces Croinor Gold1 Measured Resources 80,100 8.44 21,700 Indicated Resources 724,500 9.20 214,300 Total Measured and Indicated 804,600 9.12 236,000 Total Inferred 160,800 7.42 38,400 Beaufor Mine2 Measured Resources 121,000 5.62 21,900 Indicated Resources 310,100 7.10 70,800 Total Measured and Indicated 431,100 6.68 92,700 Total Inferred 134,600 6.96 30,100 McKenzie Break3 In-pit Total Indicated 1,441,377 1.80 83,305 Total Inferred 2,243,562 1.44 104,038 Underground Total Indicated 387,720 5.03 62,677 Total Inferred 1,083,503 4.21 146,555 Swanson4 In-pit Total Indicated 1,864,000 1.76 105,400 Total Inferred 29,000 2.46 2,300 Underground Total Indicated 91,000 2.86 8,400 Total Inferred 87,000 2.87 8,000 TOTAL COMBINED5 Measured and Indicated Resources Inferred Resources 588,482 329,393 1 Source: Monarch Gold prefeasibility study (January 19, 2018) and resource estimate (January 8, 2016). This resource estimate was prepared for Monarch Gold and has not been reviewed by a qualified person for Monarch Mining as required under National Instrument 43-101 and is thus considered as an historical estimate. 2 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Beaufor Mine, December 18, 2020, Val-d'Or, Quebec, Canada, Carl Pelletier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc. and John Langton, P. Geo., JPL GeoServices Inc. 3 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Evaluation Report on the McKenzie Break Property, February 1, 2021, Val-d'Or, Quebec, Canada, Alain-Jean Beauregard, P.Geo., Daniel Gaudreault, P.Eng., Geologica Groupe-Conseil Inc., and Merouane Rachidi, P.Geo., Claude Duplessis, P.Eng., GoldMinds GeoServices Inc. 4 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Swanson Project, January 22, 2021, Val-d'Or, Quebec, Canada, Christine Beausoleil, P. Geo. and Alain Carrier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc. 5 Numbers may not add up due to rounding.

SOURCE: Monarch Mining Corporation

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Mumbai, April 29 : A month-old infant girl, who faced a double life-threatening challenge of Covid-19 and a congenital heart defect, has been cured at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital (KDAH) here this week, an official said on Thursday.

After spending a month in the hospital, the infant, now two months old, returned home after successfully beating both Covid-19 and cardiac issues.

The unchristened daughter of Krishna Agarwal from Nandurbar was diagnosed with a critical heart defect and needed urgent surgery.

Soon after admission to KDAH on March 25, she was also found to be Covid-19 positive and the heart surgery was postponed by a fortnight as the outcome could have been poor.

After recovering from Covid-19 in a fortnight, she was wheeled back for the complex open heart surgery which she tolerated well and also recovered quickly post-operation.

She returned home to Nandurbar after spending a month in the hospital, said KDAH's pediatric and congenital heart surgeon, Suresh Rao, Director, Children's Heart Centre.

"She weighed barely 3 kg on admission with a low oxygen saturation level of 86 per cent. She was diagnosed with a congenital heart condition called Obstructed Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Connection," Rao explained.

Normally, the oxygen-rich blood from the lungs comes to the left atrium (left upper heart chamber) from where it is pumped to the entire body. But in her case, these vessels coming from the lungs were joined to the right side of the heart instead of the left, leaving the body without adequate oxygen, and congested lungs with high pressures, Rao added.

Tanuja Karande, a doctor at the hospital, said her condition was critical due to extremely high pressure on the right-side of the heart which had weakened its pumping function.

Even as the team prepared for the complicated surgery, the infant girl tested Covid-positive, and it was decided to put off the surgery by a fortnight following the advice of Tanu Singhal and other team members.

Though even the baby's mother tested Covid positive and was isolated from her child, the team regularly monitored the infant whose vitals remained stable.

The unnamed girl's father, Krishna Agarwal, said they were extremely worried over their baby's condition a few days after her birth and had rushed her to a hospital in Surat.

Later, they were directed to the KDAH where the child underwent a complex heart operation after recovering from Covid-19, conquering both major health issues to return home on April 25.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Haven, Conn. -- The choice between two non-invasive diagnostic tests is a common dilemma in patients who present with chest pain. Yale cardiologist Rohan Khera, MD, MS, and colleagues have developed ASSIST, a new digital decision-aiding tool.

By applying machine learning techniques to data from two large clinical trials, this new tool identifies which imaging test to pursue in patients who may have coronary artery disease or CAD, a condition caused by plaque buildup in the arterial wall.

The new tool, described in a study published April 21 in the European Heart Journal, focuses on the long-term outcome for a given patient.

"There are strengths and limitations for each of these diagnostic tests," said Khera, an assistant professor of cardiology at Yale School of Medicine. Patients may have calcium in their blood vessels or a more advanced stage of the disease than can be missed. "If you are able to establish the diagnosis correctly, you would be more likely to pursue optimal medical and procedural therapy, which may then influence the outcomes of patients."

Recent clinical trials have attempted to determine if one test is optimal. The PROMISE and SCOT-HEART clinical trials have suggested that anatomical imaging has similar outcomes to stress testing, but may improve long-term outcomes in certain patients.

"When patients present with chest pain you have two major testing strategies. Large clinical trials have been done without a conclusive answer, so we wanted to see if the trial data could be used to better understand whether a given patient would benefit from one testing strategy or the other," said Khera. Both strategies are currently used in clinical practice.

To create ASSIST, Khera and his team obtained data from 9,572 patients who were enrolled in the PROMISE trial through the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and created a novel strategy that embedded local data experiments within the larger clinical trial.

"A unique aspect of our approach is that we leverage both arms of a clinical trial, overcoming the limitation of real-world data, where decisions made by clinicians can introduce bias into algorithms," said Khera

The tool also proved effective in a distinct population of patients in the SCOT-HEART trial. Among 2,135 patients who underwent functional-first or anatomical-first testing, the authors observed a two-fold lower risk of adverse cardiac events when there was agreement between the test performed and the one recommended by ASSIST. Khera said he hopes this tool will provide further insight to clinicians while they make the choice between anatomical or functional testing in chest pain evaluation.

Functional testing, commonly known as a stress test, examines patients for CAD by detecting reduced blood flow to the heart. The second option, anatomical testing, or coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA), identifies blockages in the blood vessels. Using machine learning algorithms ASSIST provides a recommendation for each patient.

"While we used advanced methods to derive ASSIST, its application is practical for the clinical setting. It relies on routinely captured patient characteristics and can be used by clinicians with a simple online calculator or can be incorporated in the electronic health record," said Evangelos Oikonomou, MD, DPhil, a resident physician in Internal Medicine at Yale and the study's first author.

###

ASSIST is part of a broader enterprise concept called Evidence2Health. Khera will present this new concept at the Yale Innovation Summit on May 19. Hosted by Yale Office of Cooperate Research, the Yale Innovation Summit is the largest gathering in Connecticut of venture capital and institutional investors from around the country.
Scott Distler: Finding a way out of 'the cave'
School & Education, Local News, Press Releases, Politics

By Chris Boyle Published: April 29 2021

Senator Kaplan said "For too long, our public schools on Long Island had been chronically underfunded."

Senator Anna M. Kaplan (D-North Hills) joined Assemblymember Charles Lavine (D-Glen Cove), Westbury School Board President Robert Troiano and the Westbury School Board to announce that the Westbury Schools tax levy would be cut for the first time in decades thanks to record new funding in the New York State Budget.

Earlier this year, the Westbury School Board filed a preliminary tax levy with the New York State Comptroller which would have raised school taxes for Westbury homeowners by 2.96%, a total tax hike of $2,445,802. Following the enactment of the 2021-2022 New York State Budget, in which Westbury Schools received an additional $10,610,874, with a commitment for even greater aid increases in the next three years, the School Board made the decision to cancel the tax increase, and instead cut property taxes by .5%, saving the taxpayers $2,855,992, and delivering the first property tax reduction the Westbury community has seen in many decades.

Because of the State's commitment to continue increasing the State's share of school funding over the coming years, thereby reducing the burden on local taxpayers on Long Island, the Westbury School Board is planning an ongoing tax reduction program with further tax cuts planned for next year and beyond, in order to give relief to overburdened taxpayers, and keep the dream of homeownership attainable for Westbury families.

Senator Anna M. Kaplan said "For too long, our public schools on Long Island had been chronically underfunded, leading to educational disparities in some communities, and a constant need for property tax hikes to make up the shortfall. Since becoming a Senator, I've fought tirelessly to deliver the resources that our public schools need to give every child in our community a world-class education, and the opportunity for a bright and successful future, without reaching into the pockets of hard-working taxpayers. With the passage of this year's State budget, I'm proud to have delivered a dramatic increase in funding for our local schools, so that our kids can finally get the educational resources they deserve, and so that our local taxpayers can finally get the relief they sorely need. I applaud Westbury School Board President Robert Troiano and then entire Westbury School Board for their commitment to use these new resources to give our kids the best of the best, while giving Westbury taxpayers their first tax cut in decades."

Assemblymember Charles Lavine said "I am pleased additional funding in the state budget was able to result in a decrease in school taxes for the hardworking people of Westbury. I am confident that the leadership in the Westbury school district will maximize services and continue to provide students with the highest quality education"

Westbury School Board President Robert Troiano said "The top priority of the Westbury Board of Education will always be providing the children of Westbury with the best educational opportunity possible, but we also owe a duty to the taxpayers who elected us as their representatives to keep property taxes at a reasonable level so that our community stays affordable. Thanks to Senator Kaplan's efforts to deliver record increases in state funding for our schools, Westbury is finally in a position to provide the very best for our kids, while giving much needed tax relief to the hard-working residents of our community. I applaud Senator Kaplan and her partner Assemblymember Chuck Lavine for their efforts to deliver for our schools while alleviating the burden on Long Island families."
The UN's family planning programme says it faces 'devastating' cuts in the amount of money it receives from the UK after the government reduced it's aid budget.

The Government aims to cut about 85 per cent in aid to a United Nations family planning programme in the world's poorest nations, the UN has said.

An initial commitment by the UK to spend 154million on UNFPA Supplies this year will be shrunk to just 23million, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Boris Johnson has insisted the public 'will understand' the cuts to overseas aid and said that spending would return to 0.7% of national income when it was 'fiscally prudent to do so' after he broke a manifesto commitment to slash spending to 0.5%.

The UNFPA Supplies is the agency's flagship programme for family planning.

'These cuts will be devastating for women and girls and their families across the world', UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem said in a statement.

'With the now-withdrawn 13 million, the UNFPA Supplies Partnership would have helped prevent around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions', Kanem added.

The UN has said that the UK Government aims to cut about 85 per cent in aid to its family planning programme which helps women and girls in some of the world's poorest nations

Twelve million pounds will also be cut from UNFPA's core operating funds, the statement said.

It comes after a leaked memo revealed details of cuts in the foreign aid budget including that the Government plans to slash bilateral funding for overseas water, sanitation and hygiene projects by more than 80 per cent.

WaterAid described the cut to projects in developing nations as 'savage', highlighting that sanitation and hand washing is a key line of defence during the coronavirus pandemic.

Further details later emerged from the leak, in the form of a document prepared for FCDO minister Wendy Morton and first reported by the Telegraph.

'We expect criticism on the reduction in spend, particularly as the UK public views water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) as a priority area for UK aid, because hand hygiene is widely recognised as a critical intervention to counter the spread of Covid-19, and because the cuts are being announced in the year that the UK is hosting Cop26,' it says.

'Try to focus their attention on the fact that we are shifting our approach to strengthening sustainable and resilient national Wash services,' it added.

While the overall Wash budget will be cut by 64 per cent in 2021/22 compared to 2019, bilateral aid funding for clean water will be reduced by 80 per cent.

Tim Wainwright, chief executive of the WaterAid charity, said: 'There is never a good time to cut aid for lifesaving water and sanitation but the middle of the worst pandemic for 100 years must be one of the worst.

A leaked memo revealed details of cuts in the foreign aid budget including the Government plans to slash bilateral funding for overseas water, sanitation and hygiene projects by 80%

'What is even more incredible is that these savage cuts to the funding of water and sanitation, which are the first line of defence against the twin threats of Covid-19 and the impacts of climate change in the world's poorest countries, should happen just months ahead of the G7 and Cop26 climate summits at which the UK is wanting to demonstrate global leadership.'

Boris Johnson insisted the public 'will understand' the to cuts to aid and cited the Covid pandemic as the driving force behind the decision.

Asked about the UNFPA cut during a visit to a school in west London, the Prime Minister told reporters: 'We're still spending 10 billion per year on overseas aid, that is a huge amount.

'We are still one of the biggest donors in the world and I think people in this country should be very proud of that.

'But I also think that they will understand, and I know that other countries around the world understand, the particular pressures of the pandemic that mean we have to economise in that way.

'You ask me if we will go back to 0.7 per cent - the Government has always been clear that we will when it is fiscally prudent to do so, when we have the headroom to do so.'

Pictured: Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted the public 'will understand' the to cuts to aid

The Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) said 'tough but necessary decisions' are being made due to Covid-19's financial impact.

It added that the UK will temporarily be reducing the amount it spends on aid due to the 'seismic' impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK economy.

'We are working through what this means for individual programmes. Decisions will be announced in due course', a foreign office representative said in an emailed statement.

'We will still spend more than 10 billion this year to fight poverty, tackle climate change and improve global health.'

The Government will cut down its commitment to foreign aid spending, pledging to spend 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product on aid in 2021 as opposed to the 0.7 per cent promised previously, finance minister Rishi Sunak said in November.

Baroness Sugg, who quit her post in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office late last year over aid cuts, described the Government's decision as a 'double hit' on the world's poorest.

Baroness Sugg said it was 'unprecedented' for the UN to put out a statement saying the money would have helped prevent maternal and child deaths and millions of unintended pregnancies

The Conservative peer said: 'This is money which the UK committed to in the UN chamber, a promise made in front of delegates of every country in the world, a signed agreement which we're walking away from, which is pretty unheard of.'

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it was 'unprecedented' for the UN to put out a statement saying the money would have helped prevent so many maternal and child deaths and millions of unintended pregnancies.

Plan International UK condemned the cut as a 'shameful decision which will result in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands more women and girls during pregnancy and childbirth', and called on the Government to 'urgently change course or forfeit any claims to be a champion of global gender equality'.

Rose Caldwell, the charity's chief executive, said: '(These) cuts are a betrayal of women and girls around the world.

'We urge the Government to come to its senses and reinstate funding for these vital services.'

Dr Edward Morris, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, branded the cut 'an unconscionable attack on the health and well-being of women and girls around the world'.
Oral arguments were held before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday on whether Americans will remain free to give to nonprofit organizations privately and without the fear that nonprofits will be forced to disclose private donor information.

The decision will determine if charities in California will be forced to disclose the names of donors to state regulators, a regulation opposed by both liberal and conservative groups.

Since March 2012, Californias attorney general has harassed Thomas More Law Center, ordering the center to release confidential donor information, such as the names and addresses of major donors.

California is one of four states that require nonprofits to submit a copy of their Schedule B tax form, which provides names and addresses of those who donated more than $5,000 to their causes. Supporters of such measures contend that striking them down could lead to a proliferation of dark money in American politics.

Source:The Christian Post
The secretaries of the security councils of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)-member countries met with the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, in the capital Dushanbe. This was reported on Thursday by the press service of the Security Council of Russia.

"The national security challenges of and threats to Russia, Tajikistan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as issues of cooperation between the countries within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization were discussed," the statement said.

The secretaries of the security councils of the CSTO-member countries are in Dushanbe to hold a meeting of their committee.
oao Vale de Almeida was not given the same status as other ambassadors

Britain is set to grant full diplomatic status to the European Union's first ambassador to the UK, it emerged today.

Joao Vale de Almeida took up the role in February last year after Brexit was confirmed, but he was not given the same status as other ambassadors.

Foreign Office sources now say the move had an 'unhealthy, chilling effect' on talks with Brussels and discussions are taking place with the bloc to grant its ambassador full credentials, reports The Times.

Brussels previously said the EU's 143 delegations and staff in other parts of the world had been accorded a status equivalent to countries' embassies under the Vienna Convention, which governs the rules of international diplomacy.

Without the full protection of the Vienna Convention, diplomats do not benefit from immunity from detention, criminal jurisdiction and taxation.

It follows Mr Vale de Almeida saying that contact will continue to be made with the DUP 'whoever the leader is' after Arlene Foster announced her resignation as leader of the party and First Minister of Northern Ireland.

Britain is set to grant full diplomatic status to the European Union's first ambassador to the UK, Joao Vale de Almeida (left, in September last year), it emerged today. Pictured right: Boris Johnson leaving Downing Street on Wednesday

Who is Joao Vale de Almeida? Joao Vale de Almeida became the EU's first ambassador to the UK in February last year after Brexit was confirmed. Born in Portugal, the 63-year-old father of two and granfather was a journalist before joining the EU commission in 1982 - when Jacques Delors was president. He became a spokesman for the commission before being promoted to take charge of the Education and Culture directorate. He was chief of staff to Jose Manuel Barroso for five years from 2004, before taking on a series of ambassadorial roles. He was the first EU ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2014, launching the abortive TTIP trade negotiations. And after that he spent five years in New York as the bloc's ambassador to the UN. Advertisement

One source told the newspaper: 'It is a silly dispute but has had a corrosive effect.'

A senior government source added: 'I think it will be resolved sooner rather than later.'

In January, Downing Street underlined that the bloc is 'not a nation state' and backed Dominic Raab over his refusal to grant full diplomatic status to the EU's ambassador.

The PM's spokesman had said that Mr Vale de Almeida and his team will get the 'privileges and immunities' necessary to do their work.

He said that the Foreign Office was 'working with the EU' on a long-term settlement, but added: 'It is a matter of fact that the EU is a collection of nations but it is not a state in its own right.'

European Commission spokesman Peter Stano previously said the UK, which, as a member of the EU, was a signature to the Lisbon Treaty which established the European External Action Service diplomatic network, was 'well aware of the EU's status in external relations'.

He added: 'Nothing has changed since the UK's exit from the European Union to justify any change in stance on the UK's part.

'The EU's status in external relations and its subsequent diplomatic status is amply recognised by countries and international organisations around the world, and we expect the United Kingdom to treat the EU Delegation accordingly and without delay.'

He earlier said granting reciprocal treatment based on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations is 'standard practice' between equal partners and we are 'confident that we can clear this issue with our friends in London in a satisfactory manner'.

EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier (pictured left) arriving from the Eurostar with Mr Vale de Almeida at St Pancras International railway station in London last September

Mr Stano had added: 'The European Union has 143 Delegations, equivalent to diplomatic missions, around the world.

'Without exception, all host states have accepted to grant these delegations and their staff a status equivalent to that of diplomatic missions of states under the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, and the UK is well aware of this fact.'

The latest development comes after Mr Vale de Almeida said that discussions are still taking place and he is 'confident that we will find a solution that is in line with international practice'.

Speaking at an Institute for Government event, he said: 'It is about recognition. It is about respect. It is about the formalities of diplomatic life and that is an important aspect.

'I am very hopeful that we can soon come to an understanding on how to organise this diplomatic side of our relationship.

It follows Mr Vale de Almeida saying that contact will continue to be made with the DUP 'whoever the leader is' after Arlene Foster (pictured) announced her resignation as leader of the party and First Minister of Northern Ireland

'Once that is the case, we will be in a better position to contribute to a constructive relationship.'

He also spoke about the prospect of Ms Foster's resignation possible bringing new strains to the Trade and Co-operation Agreement.

The ambassador said: 'I don't want to interfere in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom or of Northern Ireland and, even less so, the internal matters of the DUP.

'We have had a good dialogue and a good relationship with Arlene Foster. In different moments, she has been part of many meetings where we discussed the (Northern Ireland) protocol.'

He added: 'I have had good contacts with the DUP leadership under different representatives, so we will continue to talk to the DUP whoever the leader is.'

Mrs Foster said she will stand down as party leader on May 28 and as First Minister at the end of June.
TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Nubian Resources Ltd. (TSXV: NBR) ("Nubian" or the "Company") is pleased to release metallurgical characterization results from rock chip samples gathered from mine dumps associated with the historic Goldsmith mine at Yandoit, Central Victorian Goldfields, Australia. The 38 square kilometre Yandoit Gold Project is situated in the Daylesford gold corridor.

Six samples, consisting of sulphide-bearing quartz were sent to Gekko Laboratories in Ballarat, Victoria for metallurgical characterization and gold recovery determination. Visible gold was not present in any sample, and consequently all rocks were regarded as waste and discarded during historic production. The metallurgical work was undertaken to assist in the design of a processing circuit to extract gold from Yandoit in a potential future mining operation.

The samples are considered typical of sulphide-mineralized quartz, mined but discarded as barren during historic mining at Yandoit. Similar samples are found on surface dumps around the four sub-parallel gold reef systems discovered to date (Sardinia, Graveyard, Golconda and Welcome Line) which are the focus for the Company's upcoming maiden drill program. All samples correlate with areas of anomalous arsenic in soil sampling. Mapping of the Welcome, Graveyard and Sardinia reefs suggests they are lateral extensions or splays off the Golconda and Goldsmith reefs that were the two dominant historical gold mines.

The six samples were crushed and processed by gravity separation at Gekko to produce heavy mineral concentrates. These concentrates were assayed for gold, silver and arsenic (arsenic being a well-known pathfinder for gold).

High gold grades were identified in all concentrate samples, despite free gold not being visible, indicating the likely presence of gold within sulphide. Gold recovery from the six concentrate samples are as follows:

Sample Mass Yield Gold Distribution Other Elements grams % Cumulative Gold Distribution Cumulative Distribution Cumulative Gold Arsenic Silver % ppm % % ppm ppm ppm Con 1 27.8 5.2 5.2 67.0 11.9 11.9 67.0 12,704 163 Con 2 26.7 5.0 10.2 39.4 6.7 18.6 53.5 12,483 70 Con 3 18.5 3.5 13.7 37.2 4.4 23.0 49.4 11,756 38 Con 4 123.3 23.1 36.8 25.1 19.7 42.8 34.1 7,404 17 Con 5 120.1 22.5 59.3 18.4 14.1 56.8 28.1 2,808 14 Con 6 217.4 40.7 100.0 31.1 43.2 100.0 29.4 2,238 23 Calculated

Feed 5.3 100.0

29.4 100.0



4,947 30

The weighted average grade from the six concentrate samples produced from rock chips was 29.36 g/t and 30 g/t Ag. This preliminary testwork suggests a substantial amount of gold may be present within sulphide, that was not recoverable within historic mining operations. Gravity combined with flotation may be very effective for the Yandoit Gold Project in the future to produce a bulk concentrate for sale or further treatment. Detailed test work from drill core samples along with bulk sampling is required to confirm these results, determine the distribution of gold between free and sulphide-hosted, and determine the quantity of sulphide in quartz veins.

"We are very pleased to see such high gold grades within sulphide concentrates from Yandoit," commented Martin Walter, President and CEO, who added, "This is invisible gold that was missed by early miners who only had the technology to extract free gold from quartz veins. These results while only performed on a modest scale are important as they show gold can be easily liberated and that good recoveries can be achieved at the Yandoit Gold Project through the use of simple conventional gold extraction processes. While more work remains to be done these results provide an early indication on what the project's metallurgical future flow sheet might look like."

QUALIFIED PERSON

The technical information contained in this news release relating to the Yandoit Gold Project has been approved by Mark Saxon, an advisor to Nubian, who is a "qualified person" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mark Saxon is an Honours BSc graduate in Geology from the University of Melbourne, a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, and a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists.

ABOUT NUBIAN

Nubian Resources Ltd. is a publicly traded precious and base metals exploration company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company is managed by a team of experienced mining and geological professionals. Nubian's projects are focused in key mining jurisdictions in central Victoria and Tasmania, Australia and Peru.

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.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance. 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 Nubian's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. Although such statements are based on reasonable assumptions of Nubian's management, there can be no assurance that any conclusions or forecasts will prove to be accurate.

Forward looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Such factors include risks inherent in the exploration and development of mineral deposits, including risks relating to changes in parameters of the Projects as plans continue to be redefined, risks relating to variations in grade or recovery rates, risks relating to changes in mineral prices and the worldwide demand for and supply of minerals, risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic and current global financial conditions, increased competition, access and supply risks, reliance on key personnel, operational risks, regulatory risks, including risks relating to licenses and permits, financing, capitalization and liquidity risks and title and environmental risks.

The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof, and Nubian is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.

Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.

SOURCE Nubian Resources Ltd.

For further information: For further information, please contact Martin Walter, Chief Executive Officer, Nubian Resources Ltd., at +1-416-389-5692 or [email protected]

Related Links

www.nubianr.com


China strengthens solidarity with its neighbors in fight against COVID-19

Xinhua) 08:36, April 29, 2021

Chinese Ambassador Wang Yu (2nd L) hands over medical supplies to Mohammad Sarwar Danish, second vice president of Afghanistan, during a handover ceremony in Kabul, Afghansitan, April 2, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Foreign ministers from China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh held a meeting on coping with COVID-19 on Tuesday via video link.

During the meeting, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi brought forward several proposals on such issues as consolidating consensus on cooperating in the fight against COVID-19, promoting vaccine cooperation, and boosting post-pandemic economic recovery, which were supported by the other foreign ministers. A joint statement on cooperation in fighting the epidemic was also issued after the meeting.

The international community has spoken highly of the proposals, and lauded China for its contributions to the global and regional battle against the pandemic.

NEIGHBORS IN NEED

The resurgence of COVID-19 infections in Nepal started from early April.

The country's health ministry said Sunday that the total tally crossed the 300,000-mark with 3,122 new cases recorded in the last 24 hours. It also reported 28 new deaths from the disease on Sunday, a record high in nearly five months.

Hemanta Chandra Ojha, an official at the health ministry, told Xinhua that due to the high number of hospitalized patients, hospital beds, particularly those in the 15 worst affected districts, are mostly occupied.

In Sri Lanka, the number of the infected reached 102,376 on Tuesday after 997 new cases were reported a day earlier, according to official data.

With the patient count rising in recent days, there was reportedly a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds for the COVID-19 patients in islandwide hospitals.

Sri Lanka has made it mandatory to wear face masks and maintain social distance, and health experts urged the public to stay home.

Besides, the total confirmed cases in Bangladesh have reached 748,628, with 11,150 deaths, while Pakistan has reported 804,939 cases so far with 17,329 deaths and 5,075 critical cases.

ASSISTANCE IN TIME

On Sunday, China handed over a batch of emergency food assistance to Afghanistan.

At the ceremony in Kabul, Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu said China has provided more than 13,000 tons of food aid to Afghanistan in recent years, as well as several batches of medical supplies to fight COVID-19, and will donate vaccine doses soon.

In Pakistan, as the country is facing a serious third wave of COVID-19, the third batch of COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese government was handed over to the Pakistani side on Monday.

The newly-arrived vaccines will help the country build immunity among its society to save lives, Pakistan's Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Omar Ayub Khan said at the handover ceremony.

Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Nong Rong said during the ceremony that Pakistan is not only the first country in the world that the Chinese government provided COVID-19 vaccine aid to, but also the country that has received the largest number of China-donated COVID-19 vaccines so far.

Nepal started administering the COVID-19 vaccines amid resurging cases earlier this month, with a batch of COVID-19 vaccines developed by China's Sinopharm having been delivered to Nepal in late March.

Sri Lanka's president's office has also said that plans are already on to distribute the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine donated by China to Sri Lanka in the next few weeks following the World Health Organization (WHO) 's approval.

"THANK YOU" IN CHORUS

At the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan, the country had little expertise and few medical relief items, which made it struggle, said Saeed Chaudhry, director of the Islamabad Council for International Affairs.

"China sent medics, experts and relief goods in time, which helped Pakistan streamline and systemize its fight against the pandemic backed by a comprehensive policy," he said.

Muzaherul Huq, a former advisor at the WHO, told Xinhua on Tuesday after the foreign ministers' meeting that Bangladesh is "hopeful" of China's proposals to control the COVID-19 pandemic and stabilize the economy.

Afghan expert and political analyst Shamsul Haq Arianfar welcomed China's decision to offer vaccines to his country, saying he and all Afghans would be grateful to China's contributions.

Ajith Dharmawardena, vice president of the Sri Lanka-China Buddhist Friendship Association, told Xinhua that the Chinese government, enterprises and people have provided a large number of medical materials to Sri Lanka to fight the pandemic, and people from all walks of life in Sri Lanka have also supported China in various ways.

In the past, whenever Sri Lanka encountered difficulties, the Chinese government and many ordinary Chinese have expressed their support to Sri Lanka in various ways, he said, adding the cooperation and mutual support during the COVID-19 pandemic have once again fully demonstrated that Sri Lanka and China are long-tested good friends that have shared weal and woe.

Hiranya Lal Shrestha, Nepal's former ambassador to Russia, told Xinhua that during this pandemic, Nepal has benefited from China's contributions in the following two aspects.

"First, it can learn from China's exemplary strategy to contain the infections, and second, it can seek the support of the vaccines and other equipment as China is exporting them to the rest of the world," he said.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Tom Brewer has been trekking across Illinois on foot for the past four years in a bid to raise funds and awareness for OSF HealthCare Childrens Hospital of Illinois and the Heller Center for Kids with Cancer.

On Wednesday evening, Brewer, 75 and a great-grandfather, left his footprints in Jacksonville before heading north on Thursday morning to Virginia.

His mission  Toms Walk4CHOI (Childrens Hospitals of Illinois)  is to walk a path across Illinois in the form of a religious cross to bless and support the healthy development of young lives. He will take the final steps in that mission at noon May 8 as he walks onto the OSF HealthCare Childrens Hospital property in Peoria.

More Information Tom Brewer's fourth annual Tom's Walk4CHOI started Saturday in Alton and will wrap up May 8 in Peoria:  Saturday: OSF St. Anthony's Health Center, Alton to Jerseyville  Sunday: Jerseyville to Carrollton  Monday: Carrollton to White Hall  Tuesday: White Hall to Murrayville  Wednesday: Murrayville to Jacksonville  Thursday: Jacksonville to Virginia  Friday: Virginia to Chandlerville  Saturday: Chandlerville to Havana  Tuesday (following a two-day break): Havana to Duck Creek  Wednesday: Duck Creek to Kingston Mines  Thursday: Kingston Mines to Bartonville  May 7: Bartonville to Peoria (Civic Center)  Noon, May 8: OSF HealthCare Children's Hospital of Illinois, Peoria See More Collapse

We have two flags while walking, Brewer said. One has the childrens hospital logo; the other honors all of the first responders.

Brewer started out Saturday in Alton, making his way to Jacksonville via Jerseyville, Carrollton, White Hall and Murrayville. His path will continue through Virginia to Chandlerville before stopping in Havana.

Weve reached our halfway point, Brewer said.

Brewers wife, Stella, is helping with the journey, meeting him at his end points to pick him up and taking him back the next day to continue his trek from where he left off.

We average about 15 miles a day, Tom Brewer said. It gets a little complicated.

Once arriving in Havana, Brewer will take a two-day break before putting his walking shoes back on and heading to Duck Creek.

These old feet need a break, Brewer said. I plan on paying some bills and mowing the yard.

Brewer has raised $47,000 since he began his journey in November 2018. He expects to add another $20,000 this year.

Brewer was inspired to begin his walk after listening to a talk about the hospital in 2018. It was a choice between raising money for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital or OSF HealthCare, specifically the Heller Center for Kids with Cancer, an organization that helps kids thrive after a cancer diagnosis.

They help them get back to society, Brewer said.

The Heller Center helps educate both patients and families who are dealing with cancer and provides long-term counseling to address treatment side effects.

Brewers final journey will total 153 miles, making his four-year journey cover 526 miles.

Along his route, Brewer has met the most wonderful people, he said, singling out a woman who didnt have much money but approached him and said, All I have are the eight quarters  thank you for what youre doing.

I still have those eight quarters, Brewer said. She was giving from her needs, not her extras.

The people he has met also have stayed in his life.

During his first walk in November 2018, he was resting at a car stop when a woman approached him, introduced him to her daughter, Cloe, and thanked him for raising money because the hospital had helped Cloe.

Cloe has a lot of issues, Stella Brewer said. But shes 2 now.

As Brewer approaches the end of his journey, hes not thinking about putting his feet up.

My mind is going What should I do next, he said.
BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese financial watchdogs on Thursday summoned 13 internet platforms engaged in finance business, including heavyweights Tencent and ByteDance, to order them to strengthen compliance with regulations, the central bank said.

The move by the four regulators is part of widening efforts by Beijing to rein in the country's massive internet "platform economy," which includes an ongoing antitrust clampdown backed by President Xi Jinping.

The country's platform economy has grown rapidly and covers whole range of e-commmerce activities ranging from banking to shopping and food delivery.

"Internet platforms have played an important role in improving the efficiency of financial services and broadening the access of financial services to more people," the People's Bank of China said in a statement.

"At the same time, some financial services were running without licences, and there are serious rule violations in areas such as regulatory arbitrage, unfair competition and damaging consumers' interests," it said.

The companies will have to set up financial holding companies if they meet requirements to do so, as Alibaba's fintech affiliate Ant Group was recently forced to do, a move that tightens capital requirements.

They should also draft "business rectification" plans to comply with regulations, cut "improper" links between their payment tools and other financial products, break "monopolies" in holding data, and prevent risks in internet mutual aid businesses.

They should be more compliant with their issuance of asset-backed securities, and overseas listings, the central bank said in a statement following the meeting between regulators and the companies.

Tencent and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other companies targeted by regulators on Thursday include Du Xiaoman Financial , which is backed by Baidu Inc , as well as Meituan, Ping An-backed Lufax, 360 DigiTech, Trip.com, Xiaomi Corp and JD.com's JD Digits.

Story continues

None of these companies immediately responded to requests for comment.

Alibaba and Ant, the original targets of China's squeeze on what was until recently a loosely regulated internet economy, were not among those named by regulators on Thursday.

Beijing's crackdown on fintech was triggered by an October speech by Alibaba founder Jack Ma criticising the country's regulatory system, which led to the scuppering of Ant's record $37 billion initial public offering that continues to reverberate.

"Tighter supervision is not only aimed at the Ant Group, and the problems of the Ant Group are definitely not an exception," the state-run China News Service wrote in a Thursday commentary.

"Many platform companies have irregularities to varying degrees behind their rapid expansion over the years."

Earlier this month, China's antitrust watchdog called in nearly three dozen internet companies to warn them to stop using any banned practices, such as forcing vendors to use their platform exclusively.

(Reporting by Tony Munroe and Cheng Leng; additional reporting by Yingzhi Yang and Pei Li; editing by John Stonestreet and Jane Merriman)
Some of the most remarkable time capsules unearthed for WWOZs Jazz Festing in Place date to the very first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1970. Historic performances by Mahalia Jackson, the Meters, Pete Fountain, Duke Ellington and Al Hirt are, in some cases, being heard for the first time in a half-century.

For Rachel Lyons, finding those recordings culminated a 20-year quest.

As the archivist for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit that owns Jazz Fest, Lyons is responsible for the collecting, cataloging and caretaking of the festivals history.

Ever since learning that recordings from the first Jazz Fest possibly existed, shes hoped to add them to the archives collection. Thanks to a serendipitous Facebook post and a whole lot of persistence, she finally did.

+6 WWOZ's 'Jazz Festing in Place' 2nd weekend has Allman Brothers, Miles Davis, Carole King The first four days of WWOZs Jazz Festing in Place, filling in for the postponed first weekend of the 2021 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage 

That persistence, as well as her two-decade effort to organize the Jazz & Heritage Foundations holdings, helped make the hugely popular Jazz Festing in Place broadcasts possible.

The work that Rachel and the foundation's archive have done has been invaluable for us to be able to put these Jazz Festing in Place programs together, WWOZ general manager Beth Arroyo Utterback said.

These recordings dont do anybody any good just sitting on the shelf. Now our worldwide audience is able to hear them and have their own Jazz Fest experience. The archives really made that possible.

The four-day second weekend of the 2021 Jazz Festing in Place concludes Sunday, on what would have been the closing day of the 2021 Jazz Fest, had the coronavirus pandemic not postponed it until fall.

From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., WWOZ will showcase, on 90.7 FM and via the stations website, performances from throughout Jazz Fests 50-year history. Last weekends Jazz Festing in Place broadcasts are also still accessible, for a limited time, on WWOZs online two-week archive.

The dozens of Jazz Festing in Place performances were culled from multiple sources, including old WWOZ broadcasts from the Fair Grounds, footage shot by filmmaker Michael Murphy and the catalog of Munck Music, the company that records and sells official Jazz Fest bootlegs.

Others, including the 1970 performances, were sourced from Wolfgangs.com, a massive online collection of concert recordings and rock memorabilia.

All this raw material was distilled into more than 60 hours of programming by WWOZ director of content Dave Ankers and his team. To varying degrees, most of that priceless material first passed through the Jazz & Heritage Foundations archive.

The archive's headquarters is a modest French Quarter cottage. When Lyons was hired in 2000, both the cave-like building and the archive's collection were in need of renovation and restoration. Bricks were crumbling, shelving was sagging and moisture threatened the vulnerable tapes, photos and paperwork, much of which was stored, Lyons recalled, in tomato boxes or whatever was at hand.

With funding from the foundation, she methodically upgraded the archive with museum-quality storage and a library-like filing system. The archive is open to researchers by appointment.

Rachel has dedicated her life to preserving the music, culture and heritage of New Orleans, said Don Marshall, who, as the executive director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, has made improving the archives a priority.

Starting almost 20 years ago with just a few boxes of documents and objects, Rachel has built an internationally important collection of music films and recordings, oral histories, photographs and papers that tell our history.

Additional archive material is stowed away at two other sites in New Orleans. Michael Murphys donated collection of 6,000 master tapes and hard drives is stored in Los Angeles.

Because the Jazz & Heritage Foundation holds the broadcast license for WWOZ, the archive is the repository for the radio stations history, too. Reel-to-reel tapes of old WWOZ broadcasts fill one shelf in the archives tidy but full storage room. Another 1,200 reels of old WWOZ broadcasts are at a secure facility in Tennessee.

John Sinclair, the famed 1960s radical turned blues scholar and one-time WWOZ DJ, handwrote logs on some of those WWOZ tape boxes. Lyons sent him screenshots so he could help decipher his own handwriting.

Its one thing to get the tapes, she said. Its another to know whats on the tape. Sometimes they are so old and fragile that you may only have one chance to play it.

More recently, the archive's focus has been on digitizing the collection for preservation and accessibility. With a grant from the Helis Foundation, the archive hired Joe Stolarick as a full-time digital archivist. Armed with a background in both library science and audio engineering  Stolarick also works with the WWOZ mobile recording truck used at Jazz Fest  he is digitizing the archives audio and video recordings and making sure they are compatible with future technologies.

Were trying to outpace obsolescence, he said.

The archive section of the Jazz & Heritage Foundations website features the Jazz Fest Database, a searchable catalog of every artist who has ever played the festival. Visitors to the site can also view programs from every year of Jazz Fest, and listen to and/or watch nearly 1,000 interviews conducted on the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage from 1989 on.

All that organizing and digitizing came in handy when, in 2019, Smithsonian Folkways produced a five-CD collection of Jazz Fest recordings to coincide with the festivals 50th anniversary. Ankers polled WWOZ DJs for their favorite festival moments; Lyons tracked down the audio. They spent two days listening to highlights from the broadcasts.

Having done that homework for the boxed set paid off again when the 2020 Jazz Fest was canceled and WWOZ resolved to broadcast a virtual greatest hits Jazz Fest on what would have been the festivals two weekends.

With barely three weeks to assemble and produce 64 hours of programming, time was critical. Ankers, who is credited as co-producer of Jazz Festing in Place with Lyons, relied on her familiarity with the archives holding as he and his team scrambled to pull together the broadcasts.

"The very fact that the archive of the Jazz & Heritage Foundation exists is what made these broadcasts possible," Ankers said. "I was familiar with their standard of cataloguing and preservation, but I never realized the true value of all that until we assembled the first Jazz Festing in Place. We were able to almost immediately locate and review thousands of different recordings from many different sources. And the work the Archive has done over this past year is even above and beyond that."

Millions of listeners, spread across 196 countries, tuned in to that first year of Jazz Festing in Place.

When the 2021 Jazz Fest was postponed to October, WWOZ decided to program another year of Jazz Festing in Place. With more time, Lyons said, we could be more thoughtful.

One set of music she definitely hoped could be included: the lost 1970 Jazz Fest recordings.

She had first heard of their existence from Steve Steinberg, a longtime news producer and jazz fan and journalist who died in 2015. He told Lyons that hed interviewed musicians at the 1970 Jazz Fest for Radio Free Europe.

For years, whenever Lyons attended a conference, she asked fellow archivists whether their collections contained tapes of Radio Free Europe broadcasts from Jazz Fest, to no avail.

Twelve years ago, she found a clue. While preparing an exhibit for the 2009 Jazz Fest about the festivals first five years, she came across a transcript of an interview from the 1970 Jazz Fest.

I now had physical evidence that the recordings existed, she said. This is the part of being an archivist where its a lot like being an archaeologist. Those tapes could be anywhere in the world. You try to find them.

Then, two years ago, bassist George Porter Jr. posted on Facebook that hed heard a recording of the Meters 1970 Jazz Fest performance on Wolfgangs.com. Originally called Wolfgangs Vault, the company was founded by an investor in the early 2000s after he acquired a warehouse of legendary promoter Bill Grahams concert recordings and memorabilia.

+7 No Jazz Fest Shabbat this spring, so Touro Synagogue releases a celebratory CD instead Prior to Cantor Kevin Margolius arrival in New Orleans from New Haven, Connecticut, his predecessors at Touro Synagogue briefed him on the an

Later, Wolfgangs bought the assets of a company called Festival Networks. That company had previously purchased Jazz Fest founder George Weins Festival Productions.

Festival Productions archives included tapes from the Newport folk and jazz festivals, which Wein also produced  and from the early years of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Wolfgangs eventually posted its newly acquired Jazz Fest recordings, mostly from 1970, 1976 and 1977, alongside the thousands of other concert recordings on its website. Theyve been hiding in plain sight for years.

Lyons enlisted attorney Marie Breaux to reach out to Wolfgangs about obtaining copies of the Jazz Fest recordings. For months, they received no response. In Lyons line of work, persistence is key: Every three months I was emailing our lawyer: 'Is it time to call them again?

Finally, in February, they were put in touch with Matt Lundberg, Wolfgangs chief technology officer.

He was very open and lovely, Lyons said. He asked what we needed. I said, Everything.

As it turned out, Lundberg already had a Jazz Fest connection: his son, a local doctor, volunteers at Jazz Fests medical tent.

Ultimately, Wolfgangs provided recordings of 57 performances and seven interviews from the dawn of Jazz Fest. They included a full recording of Ella Fitzgerald's 1977 Jazz Fest evening concert with surprise guest Stevie Wonder. The 2020 "Jazz Festing in Place" included a snippet of that show sourced from a long-ago episode of National Public Radio's "Jazz Alive" program.

This year's "Jazz Festing in Place" was able to air much more of that magical show, along with many other great early Jazz Fest moments, thanks to Wolfgang's.

Id been looking for those recordings for 20 years, Lyons said.

They arrived just in time.
Real estate in Michigan is a sellers market this spring, which is all the more reason for buyers to proceed with caution.

Record low inventories of homes for sale have led to bidding wars between eager buyers. Low inventory and limited selections are also leading buyers to forego their dream home and take what is available  especially when life events such as a new child or a work relocation make entering todays market necessary.

In the rush to secure an available home, prospective buyers still must take time to understand what they are buying  the good and the bad. Under Michigans Seller Disclosure Act, residential property sellers are required to provide potential buyers with information on visible and not-so-visible facts about the home.

The law requires sellers to use a specific form and disclose, among others, the following information about the home:

 Existence and condition of numerous appliances and amenities

 Evidence of water in the basement or crawl space

 Condition and age of the roof

 Condition of the plumbing, electrical and heating systems

 Any history of insect infestation

 Environmental contamination

 Shared fences, roadways, driveways or other common areas with neighbors

 Encroachments, easements and zoning violations

 Structural modifications, alterations or repairs made without necessary permits or licensed contractors

 Settling, flooding, drainage, structural or grading problems

 Major damage to the property from fire, wind, flooding or landslide

 Farm or farm operation in the vicinity or proximity to a landfill, airport, shooting range, etc.

 Outstanding municipal assessments or fees

 Pending litigation that could affect the property or the sellers right to transfer the property

Some of these requirements are straightforward. Others, however, are vague, leaving room for interpretation that can lead to disagreements and lawsuits between buyers and sellers. For example, neither the disclosure form nor Michigan law defines what constitutes evidence of water in the basement or crawl space. Neither are clear on what to do when water damage has been mitigated by drainage improvements.

Home inspections are an important tool for buyers, but they do not always catch every defect, especially when the seller actively conceals a problem with the property. In some unfortunate instances, the first time a new homeowner learns about the yearly basement flooding or the leaky roof is when the spring rains come. Depending on the closing date, this can be nearly a year after the sale. Other issues may take years to discover.

Even in todays tight housing market, buyers should still take the steps that will help prevent disappointment and expense after the closing. It is crucial to engage a reputable inspector who can investigate any items the buyer has specific concerns about after viewing the property. Buyers should also scrutinize the sellers disclosure statement and ask the seller questions about any issues that appear on the form.

If a buyer discovers a defect after the sale, it is important to act quickly. Fraud can be difficult to prove in court, and the longer a buyer lives with a problem the less likely a court is to determine it is a serious misrepresentation by the seller.

Adam Bruski is an attorney in the law firm Warner Norcross + Judd LLP who concentrates his practice in real estate transactions and litigation. He can be reached at abruski@wnj.com.
The company is encouraged by Dr Simon Brealeys oil and gas reputation and his ability to find, review, and see through to development unconventional assets in numerous global locations.

The new appointment has more than 30 years of experience in onshore and unconventional oil and gas asset exploration and development.

( ) has appointed Dr Simon Brealey to the role of interim chief executive officer (CEO) to assist in progressing the acquisition of Wizard Lake Oil Field in Canada through a bid for Saltbush Energy.

The interim appointment will also assist the company to plan for the future of Wizard Lake and seek further opportunities.

Dr Brealey has more than 30 years of experience in onshore and unconventional oil and gas asset exploration and development with companies including Amoco Limited, Santos Limited, Beach Energy Limited and Cooper Energy Limited in Australia, Europe, Asia and Africa.

He was most recently Head of New Ventures at Bass Oil Limited and holds a PhD in oil field geology from the University College, University of London.

Whitebark is encouraged by Dr Brealeys oil and gas reputation and his ability to find, review and see through to development unconventional assets in numerous global locations.

Great fit

Whitebark Energy chair Charles Morgan said: We are excited to announce Simons appointment as interim CEO and believe he will be a great fit given his technical capabilities and deep understanding of the oil and gas industry.

Having regard to his excellent work on reviewing Whitebarks operations, we are confident in his ability to take the company forward.

Brealey said: I welcome this appointment and am excited by the potential of Wizard Lake.

I look forward to working with the new board of directors and view it as a great opportunity to positively contribute to the future success of Whitebark Energy.

Saltbush Energy update

Whitebark, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Ironbark Energy Limited, has bid C$2 million for Saltbush Energy Ltd comprising of C$336,000 in cash and C$1,664,000 in forfeit of existing intercompany loan for the Wizard Lake Oil Field.

The bid deadline of April 16 has now passed without the emergence of any superior qualified bids.

Therefore, the company is currently working through the process of asset acquisition and transaction completion is expected on or around May 17, 2021.

Whitebark will provide an update to shareholders once more details are known.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 16:37:07|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday expressed his congratulations on the successful launch of the core module of China's space station.

On behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the CMC, extended warm congratulations and sincere greetings in a message to all who have participated in the mission.

Xi said in the message that the successful launch of the core module Tianhe marks that China's space station construction has entered the full implementation stage, which lays a solid foundation for follow-up tasks.

He noted that building a space station and national space laboratory is an important goal of the three-step strategy of China's manned space program, and an important leading project to boost the country's strength in science and technology, as well as in space.

In the message, Xi said he hopes all members of the mission, through self-reliance and innovation, will be completely successful in their space station construction mission and make new and greater contributions to building a modern socialist country in an all-around way.

Premier Li Keqiang and member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee Wang Huning, both also members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, watched the launch at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

The congratulatory message was read aloud by Zhang Youxia, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and vice CMC chairman, at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Hainan Province.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site at 11:23 a.m. (Beijing Time).

China's space station is a crewed space station independently built and operated by China. It consists of three modules: the core module Tianhe, and the Wentian and Mengtian lab modules. Tianhe is the management and control center of the space station, and it is the first space station module launched into orbit.

According to the mission schedule, China will complete the construction of the space station in orbit in 2022. The station will have the ability to carry out long-term scientific and technological experiments and explore space resources in low-Earth orbit. Enditem
George, the clothing division of UK supermarket group Asda, is to begin selling pre-worn garments across its stores in the UK.

The retailer is partnering with vintage fashion firm Preloved Vintage Wholesale on the concept, which will enable customers to buy vintage, retro and second-hand branded pieces.

Following a successful trial in Asdas sustainability store in Leeds, George is now launching the initiative in a further 50 of its stores, including in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Brighton.

The move is part of the retailers George for Good commitment to drive down textile waste and encourage customers to use less and recycle more.

We know that sustainable fashion is something thats really important to our customers and colleagues, says Mel Wilson, global professional lead, sustainable sourcing and quality. Theyre passionate about us encouraging everyone in the UK to think about the issues of waste and how we can make fashion and textiles more circular, so that we really can reduce the number of garments that go into landfill.



Steve Lynam, managing director or Preloved Vintage Kilo, adds: The more people that buy into the circular economy and shop vintage and retro the bigger impact we will have on climate change. As a business we have saved over 800 tonnes of clothing going to landfill and with the growth of our partnership that is set to increase dramatically.

George recently launched a Take Back scheme that encourages customers to take their unwanted garments to store, rewarding them with a 10% off George voucher.
Wendy Whitman Cobb is a Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, at the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved that lifelong goal  but he wasn't a typical astronaut. Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone.

NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia  looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s  has been the only option available for those looking for this kind of extreme adventure. However, it seems the rise of private space companies is going to make it easier for regular people to experience space.

From my perspective as a space policy analyst, I see the beginning of an era in which more people can experience space. With companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin hoping to build a future for humanity in space, space tourism is a way to demonstrate both the safety and reliability of space travel to the general public.

The development of space tourism

Flights to space like Dennis Tito's are expensive for a reason. A rocket must burn a lot of costly fuel to travel high and fast enough to enter Earth's orbit.

Another cheaper possibility is a suborbital launch, with the rocket going high enough to reach the edge of space and coming right back down. While passengers on a suborbital trip experience weightlessness and incredible views, these launches are more accessible.

The difficulty and expense of either option has meant that, traditionally, only nation-states have been able to explore space. This began to change in the 1990s as a series of entrepreneurs entered the space arena. Three companies led by billionaire CEOs have emerged as the major players: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Though none have taken paying, private customers to space, all anticipate doing so in the very near future.

British billionaire Richard Branson has built his brand on not just business but also his love of adventure. In pursuing space tourism, Branson has brought both of those to bear. He established Virgin Galactic after buying SpaceShipOne - a company that won the Ansari X-Prize by building the first reusable spaceship. Since then, Virgin Galactic has sought to design, build and fly a larger SpaceShipTwo that can carry up to six passengers in a suborbital flight.

The going has been harder than anticipated. While Branson predicted opening the business to tourists in 2009, Virgin Galactic has encountered some significant hurdles  including the death of a pilot in a crash in 2014. After the crash, engineers found significant problems with the design of the vehicle, which required modifications.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respective leaders of SpaceX and Blue Origin, began their own ventures in the early 2000s.

Musk, fearing that a catastrophe of some sort could leave Earth uninhabitable, was frustrated at the lack of progress in making humanity a multiplanetary species. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of first developing reusable launch technology to decrease the cost of getting to space. Since then, SpaceX has found success with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX's ultimate goal is human settlement of Mars  sending paying customers to space is an intermediate step. Musk says he hopes to show that space travel can be done easily and that tourism might provide a revenue stream to support development of the larger, Mars-focused Starship system.

Bezos, inspired by the vision of physicist Gerard O'Neill, wants to expand humanity and industry not to Mars, but to space itself. Blue Origin, established in 2004, has proceeded slowly and quietly in also developing reusable rockets. Its New Shepard rocket, first successfully flown in 2015, will eventually offer tourists a suborbital trip to the edge of space, similar to Virgin Galactic's. For Bezos, these launches represent an effort at making space travel routine, reliable and accessible to people as a first step to enabling further space exploration.

Outlook for the future

Now, SpaceX is the only option for someone looking to go into space and orbit the Earth. It currently has two tourist launches planned. The first is scheduled for as early as September 2021, funded by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman. The other trip, planned for 2022, is being organized by Axiom Space. These trips will be costly, at $55 million for the flight and a stay on the International Space Station. The high cost has led some to warn that space tourism  and private access to space more broadly  might reinforce inequality between rich and poor.

Blue Origin's and Virgin Galactic's suborbital trips are far more reasonable in cost, with both priced between $200,000 and $250,000. Blue Origin appears to be the nearest to allowing paying customers on board, saying after a recent launch that crewed missions would be happening "soon." Virgin Galactic continues to test SpaceShipTwo, but no specific timetable has been announced for tourist flights.

Though these prices are high, it is worth considering that Dennis Tito's $20 million ticket in 2001 could pay for 100 flights on Blue Origin soon. The experience of viewing the Earth from space, though, may prove to be priceless for a whole new generation of space explorers.

-- 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.
Here's a look at some of the big events streaming soon.

A Noise Within is streaming An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare now through May 16. Julia Rodriguez-Elliott directs. The lone witness of an ancient and ravaged Trojan battlefield weaves a tale of tragedy and triumph, with an enduring love for every victim of war. The Poet, an eternal being tasked with a passionate examination of deadly conflict, grapples with grief and dualities of victory and loss, power and fragility, heroism and hubris in an unforgettable modern take on Homer's classic. For tickets and more information, click here.



( New York City Center)

Two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster leads an all-star concert from New York City Center, streaming April 28-May 31. Foster will be joined in Bring Me to Light by Tony winner Kelli O'Hara, Tony nominees Raul Esparza and Joaquina Kalukango, and Wren Rivera. Buy tickets for the event now. And you can watch an excerpt from the concert here.

Roundabout Theatre Company's Tony-nominated production of The Importance of Being Earnest will stream May 1-31. Directed by and starring Tony Award nominee Brian Bedford in his final stage performance, The Importance of Being Earnest features the original Broadway company performing Oscar Wilde's comedic masterpiece. To get access, click here.

Kathleen Chalfant and Elliott Gould will star in the live stream play We Have To Hurry, a new work by acclaimed playwright, actor, and director Dorothy Lyman. The two-hander, about a pair of mature people reigniting their spark in life's third act, will stream live via Broadway on Demand for two performances only, Saturday, May 1 at 8pm and Sunday, May 2 at 3pm. Patricia Vanstone directs. All proceeds will go to the Actors Fund Home East and West. For tickets and more information, click here.

On Sunday, May 2, at 7:30pm ET, TITANIQUE: The Maiden Voyage Concert is sailing straight into your living room. Streaming live from New York City's Le Poisson Rouge, the story reveals what really happened to Jack and Rose on that fateful night, as told by Celine Dion (who hijacks a Titanic Museum tour and re-charts the course of Titanic's beloved moments). The evening will feature a powerhouse cast performing more than 15 of Celine's most iconic hits, including "My Heart Will Go On," "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," and "All By Myself." For tickets and more information, click here.

Mary-Louise Parker and Eric McCormack

( David Gordon)

Mary-Louise Parker, Eric McCormack, and Brandon Burton will star in a virtual production of Paula Vogel's Obie-winning The Baltimore Waltz, streaming April 29 at 8pm ET. On demand playback is available with all tickets through 6pm May 3. Proceeds from the production will be donated to the Actors Fund. For tickets and more information, click here.

Audra McDonald

( David Gordon)

The Billie Holiday Theatre will present the fifth anniversary edition of it's 50in50 monologue series, titled Shattering the Glass Ceiling. The show will have its virtual premiere via the theater's Facebook on May 6 at 7pm. For this year's show, 50 original monologues were selected by women of African descent from across the globe, and will be read by Lisa Arrindell, Marsha Stephanie Blake, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Sanaa Lathan, Dawnn Lewis, Audra McDonald, Celestine Rae, Retta, Angelica Ross, Michele Shay, Gabourey Sidibe, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Wanda Sykes, Pauletta Washington, Vanessa Williams, and more to be announced. For more information on the free event, click here.

Khris Davis in The Royale

( T Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater streams its 2016 archival recording of Marco Ramirez's The Royale, directed by Rachel Chavkin, through May 16 for free via Broadway On Demand. Those looking for access can register on the Lincoln Center Theater website. Ramirez's drama is inspired by the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight world champion. The production opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on March 7, 2016, with a cast made up of McKinley Belcher III, Khris Davis, Montego Glover, John Lavelle, and Clarke Peters.

Hershey Felder will star as Sergei Rachmaninoff in the world premiere of Anna & Sergei  Live From Florence on May 16 at 8pm ET. Taking place as a memory play in the house in which the Russian Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills, this is the story of a very strange meeting between Rachmaninoff and Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be the sole surviving member of the Romanov Dynasty, the Princess Anastasia. Featuring Rachmaninoff's most beloved melodies and music. Purchase includes the live stream and a week of ON DEMAND viewing access to the recording of the live stream (through May 23). For tickets and more information, click here.

Lucinda Coxon's Herding Cats will be made simultaneously accessible online to audiences across the globe via Stellar and in-person in London at Soho Theatre May 1922. Herding Cats is a chillingly funny play about a generation negotiating intimacy and independence in the 21st century. For tickets, more information, and access to the show's $10 lottery, click here.

NAATCO presents an all-Asian American cast to deliver the enduring messages of Thornton Wilder's Our Town: that the eternal exists in the everyday, that knowing true joy and happiness comes from taking the time to look and listen. The work will be presented online one night only, May 19, at 8pm ET. During this divisive time in our country, NAATCO's Our Town reflects and emphasizes the kinship among people of disparate cultures. For tickets and more information, click here.

Sleep Squad is a family-friendly, interactive, virtual theater experience that turns your home into a rocket ship to launch kids into their dreams. Featuring brand-new, unique, kid-driven comedy and music from the Story Pirates that you can't see or hear anywhere else, this world premiere on-demand production creates a new kind of bedtime ritual for kids ages 4-12. Sleep Squad stars Tony Award nominee Lilli Cooper as the Dream Queen, who guides adventurers through three different enchanting virtual experiences, adapted from stories written by real kids. Check out the trailer and buy tickets above.

Christopher Carter Sanderson's film telling of Shakespeare's Macbeth up close and personal in the 9/16 aspect ratio with a stellar cast led by TV's Leajato Robinson (Bull, Orange Is the New Black, Boardwalk Empire), based on the long-running critical success. Check out the trailer and buy tickets above.

From Broadway to off-Broadway, from music to magic, TheaterMania Streaming offers you the best live-streams and videos on demand in the world of performing arts. For more information, click here and watch the trailer below:
Police identify culprits over deliberate fires

Police say they've identified those responsible for starting a number of recent fires.

Isle of Man Fire and Rescue Service have been called to several 'suspicious' fires in the last few months with four incidents in the Onchan area in the last seven days.

Today - police said those responsible will be 'dealt with appropriately'.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would be considered as a potential vice presidential running mate if he runs again in 2024, former President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Trump, speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network, said DeSantis would certainly be a consideration for vice president, and called him a friend and a great guy.

Hes a friend of mine, Trump said. I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocket ship. Hes done a great job as governor.

Trump said the idea of a Trump-DeSantis ticket seems to have appeal.

A lot of people like that  you know, Im just saying what I read and what you read  they love that ticket, Trump said.

But certainly, Ron would be considered. Hes a great guy.

Trump told Bartiromo he is 100% considering running for president in 2024.

Trumps consideration of DeSantis highlights the rift between Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump attacked after Pence refused to play a more active role in reversing the outcome of the 2020 election.

DeSantis has scored points with Republican followers for issues such as his stance on COVID-19, which recently included the Florida House approving a measure that limits local emergency orders and institutes a permanent ban on COVID-19 vaccine passports.

2021 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Visit sun-sentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
La presidenta de la @pcmperu destaco el compromiso del Gobierno de Transicion en lograr un pais mas inclusivo con la participacion de todos los actores involucrados, siendo esta Comision permanente de vital importancia para trabajar con los #PueblosIndigenas. pic.twitter.com/YYNR42yImL
Schapelle Corby bravely joined the limelight with her recent reality TV stints on SAS: Australia and Dancing With The Stars.

But it seems the backlash from parts of the public has made an impact on the 43-year-old as she took to social media to hit back at nasty trolls.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, the convicted drug smuggler shared photos of herself happily frolicking on Sydney's Bondi Beach.

Standing up to the hate: Schapelle Corby urged fans to 'live your truth' as she defiantly hit back at nasty online trolls on Thursday

In the caption, she wrote: 'F** online bullying. If you've got your health, live your truth. Get out there and live.

'Don't let other people's opinions affect the way you live your life and take a few photos while you're at it,' the brunette beauty cheekily added.

She then asked her followers if they've ever experienced online bullying and how they've dealt with it - likely as a way to learn and share positive methods of coping with backlash.

'Get out there and live': She wrote: 'F** online bullying... Don't let other people's opinions affect the way you live your life and take a few photos while you're at it'

Sharing advice: She then asked her followers if they've ever experienced online bullying and how they've dealt with it

Schapelle's defiant message to trolls comes after she recently joined Dancing With The Stars: All Stars as a wildcard contestant.

She appeared on three episodes before she and her professional dance partner Shae Mountain were sent home.

During her time on the show, there was online fury over her casting with many arguing that a 'convicted criminal' shouldn't be classed as a celebrity.

Schapelle and the stars: her defiant message to the trolls comes after she recently joined Dancing With The Stars: All Stars as a wildcard contestant

Short lived stint: She appeared on three episodes before she and her professional dance partner Shae Mountain were sent home

'What was she doing on this show?!' During her time on the show, there was online fury over her casting with many arguing that a 'convicted criminal' shouldn't be classed as a celebrity

Winning praise: Fortunately, there were fans who praised Schapelle for her 'cracking effort'

A critic wrote: 'What was she doing on this show?! Or any show for that matter. Heads up - she most definitely is NOT a star.'

Fortunately, there were fans who praised Schapelle for her 'cracking effort'.

Prior to DWTS, Schapelle was on cast in the first season of SAS: Australia but voluntarily withdrew in episode two.

TV debut: Schapelle made a brief appearance on the first season of SAS Australia last year

In October 2004, Schapelle became a household name when she was arrested at Bali airport with 4.2kg of cannabis wrapped in plastic inside her boogie board bag.

The world watched in May 2005 as she broke down in the Denpasar courtroom after being sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in Kerobokan Prison.

Following a series of sentence reductions, Schapelle was released on parole in February 2014, having served nine years behind bars.
April 29, 2021

Amsterdam and London  HERE Technologies, the location data and technology platform, today announced that Siemens Mobility, a leader in transport solutions, is integrating the HERE corridor travel time API into its Journey Time as a Service solution for the UK market. This new traffic management option, based on data rather than hardware, has already been adopted by Bedford Borough, Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, Hampshire County, and Warrington Borough Councils.



Britons are wasting an annual average of 115 hours in traffic which is costing the UK 6.9 billion pounds every year. The first step in reducing congestion and its many negative impacts is to understand the scope of the challenge. With the HERE corridor travel time API, Siemens Mobility is now able to offer public authorities the possibility to monitor journey times without the need for additional on-street hardware such as ANPR cameras with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi sensors. This data-based solution is easy to set up and fast to deploy. It is based on a subscription model and as a result, is just a click away.

Congestion and the pollution it causes is one of the challenges Warrington Borough Council has committed to tackle. To complement our existing Journey Time monitoring solution, the new Journey Time as a Service (JTaaS) solution from Siemens Mobility and HERE Technologies provides us with the key insights we need to better manage our traffic flow. The solution was quickly implemented, and the savings made in installation costs can be redirected to undertake projects that will help improve traffic flow across Warrington, said Simon Lawrenson from Warrington Borough Council.

For a long time, we had been looking for a data-driven solution to complement hardware-based traffic monitoring. Thanks to HEREs flexibility and expertise, we are now pleased to be in a position to offer UK local authorities and transport bodies an accurate data driven solution which is both fast to deploy and cost effective - and that is key for operating transport networks more efficiently. We are delighted to see customers already benefitting from our new solution and partnership with HERE, said Wilke Reints, Managing Director, Intelligent Traffic Systems for Siemens Mobility.

We are proud to be the key data partner for Siemens Mobility and many public authorities across the UK. Together, we are making traffic management easier with goal to improve the quality of life of British citizens, be it by reducing the time they have to spend in traffic, or the pollution caused by congestion, said Eduard van Mierlo, Head of Strategic Alliances EMEAR at HERE Technologies.

Media Contact

Adrianne Montgobert

+49 151 72 11 67 81

adrianne.montgobert@here.com

About HERE Technologies

HERE, a location data and technology platform, moves people, businesses and cities forward by harnessing the power of location. By leveraging our open platform, we empower our customers to achieve better outcomes - from helping a city manage its infrastructure or a business optimize its assets to guiding drivers to their destination safely. To learn more about HERE, please visit www.here.com and http://360.here.com .

About Siemens Mobility

Siemens Mobility is a separately managed company of Siemens AG. As a leader in transport solutions for more than 160 years, Siemens Mobility is constantly innovating its portfolio in its core areas of rolling stock, rail automation and electrification, turnkey systems, intelligent traffic systems as well as related services. With digitalization, Siemens Mobility is enabling mobility operators worldwide to make infrastructure intelligent, increase value sustainably over the entire lifecycle, enhance passenger experience and guarantee availability. In fiscal year 2020, which ended on September 30, 2020, Siemens Mobility posted revenue of 9.1 billion and had around 38,500 employees worldwide. Further information is available at: www.siemens.com/mobility.





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Israel and the U.S. want to fence their disagreements over the 2015 nuclear deal off from cooperation on other Iran-related issues, a senior Israeli official told me following talks on Tuesday in Washington between White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben Shabbat.

Why it matters: The Israelis see a U.S. return to the deal as a matter of when and not if, Israeli officials say. So while Ben Shabbat arrived in Washington with a prepared message on Iran  stating Israel's objections to the deal and stressing Israel's freedom of operation against Iran  he was keen to move the discussion onto other issues.

Setting the scene: Sullivan and Ben Shabbat met for two hours at the Israeli embassy in Washington for their first in-person talks. National Security Council Middle East officials Brett McGurk and Barbara Leaf joined from the U.S. side, while Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan and foreign policy adviser Reuven Azar joined from the Israeli side.

U.S. Iran envoy Rob Malley joined for part of the meeting to brief the Israelis on the nuclear talks shortly before departing for Vienna.

Ben Shabbat and his team contended that a return to the deal would lower the chances of a "longer and stronger" agreement, but said Israel would be happy to provide input if negotiations on a follow-up deal do take place.

Flashback: In 2015, the disagreements around the nuclear deal turned into a political fight between then-President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, harming the whole bilateral relationship.

Behind the scenes: Israeli officials were concerned about how Tuesday's meeting would go, but were very satisfied with how it went. They said that Sullivan and the other U.S. officials took a positive approach and bore no ideological or personal grudges towards Israel.

"Six years ago everything was politicized. This is not the case today. The U.S. respects our position regardless of the disagreement. Neither side wants to get into a public fight over Iran every other week that will prevent us from making progress on other issues," the senior Israeli official told me.

The Israelis were pleased that the White House chose to stress the threat from Iran and Israel's right to defend itself in its statement after the meeting.

The talks later focused on non-nuclear threats from Iran, the situations in Lebanon and Syria, and ways to press ahead with the Abraham Accords process between Israel and the Arab world, an Israeli official told me.

One action item the White House announced was an agreement to establish an inter-agency working group on the threats from drones and precision guided missiles produced by Iran and provided to its proxies in the region.

Worth noting: In previous administrations, such a conversation would likely have been held at the president and prime minister's level, but the Middle East is a fairly low priority in the early days of the Biden administration.

What's next: Mossad director Yossi Cohen is also in Washington for talks on Iran. Israeli officials say he is expected to meet today with Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
The book says an open mind, open heart and clear thinking are three core capabilities that underlie wise action, which can help people and groups change the world for the better. Credit: Shutterstock.

Addressing the social and global issues that confront us can only be achieved by shifting our focus from 'me' to 'we," and from short-term to longer-term thinking, UNSW Sydney's Visiting Professorial Fellow in the School of Psychology, Felicia Huppert says.

"Ideas from positive psychology that have been shown to benefit individual flourishing have the potential to create flourishing at collective and societal levels," she says.

The Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge is one of several eminent Positive Psychology researchers and practitioners behind "Creating The World We Want To Live In: How Positive Psychology Can Build a Brighter Future."

The book is about hope and a call to action to make the world better for us all.

"Our aim is to inspire readers to see why we urgently need a different approach to how we live our lives and to begin to make changes individually and with others," she says.

Climate change fueled by fear

Prof. Huppert suggests one reason action on climate change has been slow to take off is that it has been mainly fueled by fear.

"Yet fear paralyzes, while the positive emotion of hope can energize individuals, communities, and wider society," she says.

"When enough ordinary people come together to demonstrate their support for a cause, such as School Strikes for Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter and the Women's March4Justice, then politicians start to listen. So even though every small step that an individual takes can make a difference, the major problems of our world can only be solved when people come together and act collaboratively."

The book is based on evidence from psychology and neuroscience about what leads to human well-being, and how our well-being creates a positive ripple effect on those around us and the world we live in. Personal well-being matters, she says.

"It's about leading a happy and fulfilled life, and this includes having a sense of meaningthe sense that we are contributing to something beyond ourselves."

But it's not about feeling positive all the time. "We can only function at our best when we are able to manage the difficult experiences, as well as appreciating the positive ones.

"A fair and sustainable society will only be achieved through acting collaboratively and holding governments to account," she says. "Only by acting together can we solve the big problems in the world."

If people and groups want to change the world for the better, they need to learn or be trained how to act wisely, she says.

"Wise action is understanding the complexity of a situation and choosing to do what brings the greatest long-term benefit for us and others."

Five principles of wise action

The book identifies five principles of psychological well-being and three core capabilities that underly wise action.

The five principles of psychological wellbeing are: feeling connected to others, having a sense of autonomy, feeling competent, paying attention to what's working not just what is wrong, and having a sense of meaning.

The three core capabilities are an open mind, an open heart and clear thinking.

"Open mind is noticing what is happening as it unfolds from moment to moment, within us and outside usin other words, mindful awareness," she says.

"Open heart is acting with kindness and compassion towards ourselves and other living beings.

Clear thinking is making careful evaluations of information, including being willing to recognize bias, both in ourselves and others."

The good news is that people can be trained in these principles and capabilities.

"Training in mindfulness opens our mind to whatever we are experiencing and helps us to manage difficult experiences by acknowledging them, and by pausing before responding rather than simply reacting."

She says it only takes 10 minutes a day of intentional practice to produce noticeable changes.

"Mindful listening is one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person, and there is growing recognition of the importance of mindful leadership and mindful social action," she says.

"When we open our hearts and act with kindness or compassion, it connects us to others, and this connection can benefit other people and other living beings.

"When people act kindly and with compassion this triggers the reward centers in their brains."

Prof. Huppert says thinking clearly helps us make informed decisions, "a capacity which has been so important during COVID and is key to identifying fake news and disinformationsince none of us likes feeling duped."

How our values can align with our actions

Prof. Huppert says there are many examples of how our values can align with our actions in people's attitudes and behaviors towards the environment.

"Most people value nature, the preservation of species and pristine environments, yet so many do not act in ways that benefit the environment," she says.

"This can lead to feelings of discomfort and even shame. By contrast, a growing number of people act in pro-environmental ways that are consistent with their values. Examples include thoughtful patterns of consumption and waste disposal. This alignment between values and actions makes them more likely to feel at peace with their actions, and even take pride in what they do, individually and collectively."

Prof. Huppert acknowledges that change is never easy.

"But when people come together and act collaborativelywith wisdom, courage and realistic hopewe can create a flourishing, fair and sustainable world."

"Creating The World We Want To Live In: How Positive Psychology Can Build a Brighter Future" is published by Routledge.

Explore further New book explores how positive psychology can build a brighter post-COVID world
We are definitely seeing an uptick, even with walk-in guests, said Anil Patel, owner of the Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham Napa Valley. Its crazy.

Patel attributes those short booking patterns to people deciding last minute they want to simply get out and go somewhere, i.e. Napa. This is a trend he expects to continue this summer.

The Archer's Collins said that leisure travel has increased a ton at his downtown Napa hotel. Currently, about 90% of his business is personal travel, although the hotel did host a group last week and will do so next week.

The general manager said that the effect of Napa County dropping into the less restrictive orange tier was instantaneous. Once that changed, We were 75 to 80% occupied that weekend and the next weekend sold out.

It went from zero to 100 in no time, said Collins. It was amazing. It was like the fire hose was turned on.

The majority of the visitors are from within driving distance, he said, such as the Bay Area. But were seeing people from across the country, such as Florida, New York, and Chicago. They know Napa is open and they are traveling again.
The commanding officer of a Navy fast-attack submarine based in Hawaii was removed from his position Tuesday over a loss of confidence in his ability to lead.

Cmdr. Joseph Lautenslager, commanding officer of the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine Charlotte, was relieved by Capt. Michael Majewski, head of Submarine Squadron 7, Navy officials announced Wednesday. A command investigation revealed leadership and command climate problems, which caused Majewski to lose confidence in Lautenslager's ability to lead, according to the news release on the relief.

"Morale of the crew played a large factor in the decision to remove him from command," said Cmdr. Cindy Fields, a spokeswoman for Submarine Force Pacific.

Read Next: Command Master Chief Resigns at Coast Guard Academy; Investigation Underway

Last month, Torpedoman's Mate 3rd Class Petty Officer Manuel H. Julian Jr., a 23-year-old assigned to the submarine Charlotte, died of an apparent suicide while on duty at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. The submarine was moored at the shipyard while undergoing maintenance.

Lautenslager, who assumed command of the submarine in 2019, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has been temporarily reassigned to the staff of the commander of Submarine Force Pacific, Fields said.

"Commanding officers are held to a very high standard," a Navy news release about the relief states. "Their position requires the utmost responsibility, reliability and leadership, and the Navy holds them accountable in cases where they fall short of those standards."

Cmdr. Christopher Hedrick, Submarine Squadron 7's deputy commander, has assumed command of the Charlotte until a permanent replacement is named. Hedrick previously commanded the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine Santa Fe.

Lautenslager earned his commission in 1999 and was promoted to the rank of commander in 2015. Before reporting to the Charlotte, the submarine warfare officer attended the Naval Leadership and Ethics Center in Newport, Rhode Island. He was previously assigned to Submarine Squadron 7 in Pearl Harbor.

His personal awards include the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, four Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals, and four Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals.

Editor's Note: If you or someone you know needs help, the Veterans Crisis Line is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at 800-273-8255, press 1. Services also are available online at www.veteranscrisisline.net or by text, 838255.

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Sailor Assigned to Navy Fast-Attack Submarine Dies by Apparent Suicide
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement director Alex Oh stepped down from office after five days on the job.

Alex Oh, who resigned on Wednesday, was known to be the first Asian American woman that was supposed to lead the securities watchdog's enforcement division, Reuters reported.

The SEC made the announcement in a press release.

READ NEXT: Pres. Joe Biden Assigns VP Kamala Harris to Lead White House in Addressing Migrant Children Issues

Alex Oh Resigns From SEC

The reason behind Alex Oh's abrupt resignation was due to potential conflicts of interest from her previous work as a lawyer, according to SEC, and a person who has direct knowledge of the matter.

In an emailed resignation acquired by Bloomberg, Oh noted that development in one of the cases she worked as an attorney has risen. The resignation letter was addressed to SEC's chair, Gary Gensler.

"I have reached the conclusion that I cannot address this development without it becoming an unwelcome distraction," Oh said in the letter.

The abrupt resignation of Oh is a major challenge for Gensler, who is also new to the commission.

Before becoming working at SEC, Oh worked at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. One of her corporate clients included oil company Exxon Mobil Corp, which she defended against two-decade-old allegations that it supported killings and tortures in Indonesia.

Reuters reported that Alex Oh decided to resign after U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who oversees the case, questioned her conduct during the litigation this week.

On Monday, Lamberth ordered Alex Oh to demonstrate why she should not be sanctioned for alleging that her opposing counsel was disrespectful, agitated, and "unhinged" during a deposition without providing any evidence.

The chairman of Paul, Weiss, Brad Karp, told Reuters that he could not comment on the ongoing litigation. But he added that Alex Oh "is a person of the utmost integrity and a consummate professional."

Melissa Hodgman will return to the role of acting director of the SEC Division of Enforcement after Oh stepped down from her post.

"I am grateful that she [Hodgman] will take on this role again and look forward to working closely with her to fulfill the mission of the SEC," said Oh in a press release.

Oh added that Hodgman is an "exceptional attorney" who has proven to be an effective head of the Enforcement Division.

Hodgman served the same role between January and April this year before Oh was selected for the said position.

Advocacy Groups on Alex Oh's Resignation

Meanwhile, left-leaning advocacy groups have pressured Gensler to appoint someone with fewer ties to firms that the SEC regulates.

The advocacy groups sent a letter to Gensler, expressing concerns over his choice of appointing Oh last April 22.

Chief executive officer of Better Markets, Dennis Kelleher, noted that the commission has repeatedly failed the Americans through selecting Wall Street defense lawyers as the director of enforcement.

"Oh's resignation is an opportunity to break the SEC's corrupting practice of hiring Wall Street defense lawyers," the group said as reported by Bloomberg.

READ MORE: Roberta Jacobson, Biden's Border Czar, Steps Down Amid Migrant Crisis

WATCH: Chair Gary Gensler's Swearing-In - From U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Tensions between the United States, its NATO allies and the Russian government continue, despite the Kremlins pull back of troops last week from the border with US-ally Ukraine and the announcement by the right-wing oppositionist Alexei Navalnyclearly acting on cue from the White Housethat he was ending his hunger strike. Against the backdrop of a possible meeting between the American and Russian presidents in June, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Wednesday of the start of a new cold war.

Sergey Lavrov Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia delivers speech at the Conference on Disarmament (UN Photo / Emmanuel Hungrecker)

After canceling the deployment of navy warships to the Black Sea in mid-April, the US is now sending a Coast Guard vessel into the waters, which Moscow considers key to its geopolitical survival. Russias fleet is starting military combat exercises there this week, including live-fire drills with helicopters.

A diplomatic conflict between Russia and US-allied states in eastern Europe, the Baltics, and the Balkans is also ratcheting up, with Moscow adding embassy staff from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia to a list of individuals instructed to leave the country. Already a total of sixteen American, Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian diplomats have been expelled, with the prospect of dozens more. Russian government representatives have also been kicked out of these countries.

Following on the heels of the Czech governments accusation that Russia was involved in an explosion at a munitions depot in 2014a charge that the Kremlin deniesBulgaria is now claiming Russian involvement in similar incidents on its territory in 2011 and 2012.

Several days ago, Russias foreign ministry announced it is drawing up a formal list of unfriendly states. In addition, the Kremlin declared that it has proof of a plot to assassinate Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko and his family and American involvement in that plot. It has yet to reveal any details, a fact which is also true of recent allegations by the US security services that Moscow sought to influence the 2020 elections.

Even as the United States ceaselessly denounces Russia for meddling in US affairs, the American press continues its nauseating promotion of Navalny as President Vladimir Putins noble opponent, with the clear aim of building a movement that will toss out the current Kremlin leader. These very same forces have long brayed for the blood of Julian Assange, who has been detained and mercilessly tortured for years because of his opposition to imperialism.

On Tuesday, the New York Times featured an opinion piece by the Russian journalist Oleg Kashin titled, Aleksei Navalny Is Russias True Leader that spins a fantastical tale of the immigrant-hating, right-wing politician, declaring him a brave, proud, unbroken man standing up to an inhumane system and the profound leader of a movement of thousands. According to Kashin, an operative in the opposition milieu who was recently denounced by Navalny himself as a liar and scoundrel, Putin wakes up every morning, asks his magic mirror who Russias true leader is and it answers: Aleksei Navalny.

The little that is truthful in Kashins commentary is when he notesclearly not recognizing the implications of his observationthat Navalny realized in 2007 that criticizing corruption was more convincing than slogans advocating democracy.

The supposed human rights defender Navalny, who was, in fact, recently stripped by Amnesty International of his prisoner of conscience status because of hate speech in videos in which he advocated the murder of ethnic minorities and round-up of immigrants, came to understand that anti-corruption was the best vehicle through which to cover-up his reactionary political and economic program. Easy and cheap and capable of being filled with virtually any political content, it is the slogan traditionally seized by right-wing politicians.

In reality, Navalny has little support within the broader population. But in addition to the patronage of the US and NATO, he has the backing of sections of the Russian oligarchy who seek a greater share of the spoils of the Russian economy and to benefit from a closer relationship with American imperialism. It is noteworthy that the media arm of Gazprom, Russias state-owned energy giant, owns the countrys major liberal, pro-Navalny news outletEkho Moskvy.

Leading figures in the Stalinist Russian Communist Party (KPRF), including the partys parliamentary representative from Moscow and the former governor of Irkutsk, have also recently argued that the KPRF should get behind the oppositionist. A few days ago, Gennady Zyguvanov, head of the KPRF, announced he would not expel the two for their pro-Navalny positions, pulling back from provoking a major split in his organization.

In this Saturday, Feb. 20, 2021 file photo, Russian right-wing oppositionist Alexei Navalny looks at photographers standing in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

President Putin fears that, backed by the US, layers of the Russian political and economic elite, and sections of the upper-middle class in major cities, Navalny will be able to challenge his government. Leonid Volkov, a top adviser to Navalny, recently stated on Twitter, the Kremlin is vulnerable to pressure from inside and outside.

On Wednesday, a Russian court banned Navalnys Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) from publishing on the internet, organizing and leading protests, participating in elections, and using bank deposits. The court is also considering whether the FBK should be designated an extremist organization, akin to outfits like ISIS. It ordered the closure of the FBKs regional offices until that determination is made. The pro-US media outlet Meduza has now also been labeled a foreign agent.

The relentless efforts of Washington to bring down the Putin government in Moscow and break apart Russia unfold alongside the escalating US confrontation with Beijing. The fact that both governments face an intransigent foe in the US is driving them towards each other.

When asked on Tuesday to respond to Putins recent comment that Russia would draw red lines that, if anyone should cross, would have dire consequences, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin expressed his agreement and stated that the two countries continue to understand and support each other in safeguarding our respective sovereignty, security and development interests. He described the latest round of anti-Russian sanctions imposed by Washington as power politics and hegemonic bullying.
According to 3D satellite imaging of all the world's mountain glaciers, glaciers are melting higher, losing 31% more snow and ice each year than they did 15 years ago.

Climate change, according to scientists, is hastened by humans.

Losing Mountain Glaciers

According to a report published in the journal Nature, scientists estimated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers have been losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow each year since 2015. Every year, enough melt flows into the world's growing waters to submerge Switzerland by nearly 24 feet (7.2 meters).

From 2015 to 2019, the annual melt rate was 78 billion tons (71 billion metric tons) higher than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, which are separate from the amount of water lost, have doubled in the last 20 years, according to Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France, who led the research.

The United States and Canada are responsible for half of the world's glacial melt.

Hugonnet claims that Alaska's melt rates are "among the strongest on the globe," with the Columbia glacier retreating around 115 feet (35 meters) each year.

Related Article: New Study Revealed: Earth is Losing Ice Faster than Anyone Anticipated



Global Glacier Conditions

According to the report, almost all of the world's glaciers are melting, including those in Tibet that were previously stable. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia fed by increased precipitation, global melt rates are rising.

Hugonnet explained that the near-uniform melting "mirrors the global rise in temperature" and is caused by coal, oil, and gas combustion. Any of the smaller glaciers are entirely melting. In Iceland, scientists, campaigners, and government officials arranged a funeral for a small glacier two years ago.

"Ten years ago, we said the glaciers were an example of climate change, but now they've become a monument to the climate crisis," said World Glacier Monitoring Service Director Michael Zemp, who wasn't involved in the report.

The research is the first to explore all of Earth's glaciers that aren't attached to ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica using 3D satellite imagery. Previous experiments have used only a small portion of the glaciers or used gravity calculations from orbit to quantify the decline of Earth's glaciers. According to Zemp, such gravity readings have wide margins of error and aren't as useful.

An Alarming Picture

According to Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, the new research paints a "alarming picture."

Rapid melting will trigger lethal outbursts from glacial lakes in areas like India, according to Hugonnet. Shrinking glaciers are a challenge for millions of people who depend on seasonal glacial melt for everyday water.

The most serious challenge, though, is rising sea levels. The world's seas are now growing due to warm water expansion and melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but glaciers, rather than ice sheets, are responsible for 21% of sea-level rise, according to the report. Longer-term, the ice sheets pose a greater danger to sea-level rise.

"As we progress into the twenty-first century, it is becoming abundantly clear that sea-level rise will be a bigger and bigger problem," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Also Read: Antarctic: Ocean's Cold at the Surface, but Scorching Deep Down

For more environmental news updates, don't forget to follow Nature World News!
The internet has exciting leaks for what might be the most powerful camera in the smartphone industry. The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S22 has a lot to offer as the company's flagship device, including a possible 200MP camera lens.

Tom's Guide reported that the Samsung Galaxy S22 has multiple leaked upgrades found in internet sources. Some of the speculated features include a punch-hole camera sub-display with a pop-up cover over the selfie camera. When in place, the phone has a true full-screen design, the first to do so in the smartphone industry.

Samsung Galaxy S22 Camera: 200MP Lens!

Photography remains exceedingly popular in today's time, making cameras one of the deciding factors for most of the smartphone purchase. Samsung shows a lot of potential in this section, thanks to its partnership with Olympus-made cameras.

As shared by Tom's Guide, a leak from Chinese site Weibo by leakers Ice Universe and Digital Chat Station revealed that the Samsung Galaxy S22 might have a 200MP camera lens. If true, the smartphone should be capable of delivering high-resolution images even in low-light photography environments. The Samsung Galaxy S22 is also said to be installed with ISOCell 2.0 tech, an intuitive image sensor that provides fine detail to quality photography without compromising the vivid color reproduction.

Other Samsung Galaxy S22 leaks claim that the device will have the Exynos 2100 chipset installed. The chipset supports the camera sensors. Despite being from different origins, these leaks all intersect with the theory that Samsung Galaxy S22 is making significant improvements to its camera.

Dear shutterbug, what do you expect the most from smartphone camera?  pic.twitter.com/HGwmoKYD3V  Samsung Exynos (@SamsungExynos) March 22, 2021

A rumor from TweakTown further claimed that the Samsung Galaxy S22 might be able to shoot 8K video at 60 frames per second. Unfortunately, these videos could only last up to 5 minutes because the device might get too hot to touch. However, the recorded multimedia content could sync well with the few people who own 8K TVs, maximizing both device's premium resolutions.

Read Also: iPhone 13 Mini Competitor Emerges: Asus Zenfone 8 Specs, Snapdragon Chipset Leaked!

iPhone 13 vs. Samsung Galaxy S22

Samsung Galaxy S22 puts itself in a position to compete against the iPhone 13, Apple's alleged incoming flagship smartphone. Samsung builds its edge against the Apple with the open-resource nature of its OS, installing better camera lenses, and producing smartphones at a lower price.

The Samsung Galaxy S22 is rumored to be released sometime on January 2022. The smartphone is anticipated to cost around $800 to $1,199, depending on the variant.

It is crucial to note, however, that these speculations should be taken with a grain of salt. Rumored specs and leaked info for a product still in the development stage are always subject to changes until official details are announced.

Samsung still has more than half a year left to develop the Samsung Galaxy S22 beyond what is leaked about it. Mark your calendars for the big reveal next year for what might be Samsung's best camera specs ever released.



Related Article: OnePlus 9 Camera Update Boasts Improved 'Image Purity'-New Security Patch, Features and Fixes Revealed
Sen. Padilla on Reparations: We Can Walk and Chew Gum

Californias newest and first Latino Democratic Senator, Alex Padilla, says he supports reparations for Black American descendants of enslaved African people. He made the statement during an online news briefing with members of Californias ethnic press organized by Ethnic Media Services.

Its the morally right thing to do, said Padilla. For me, its not a difficult conversation.

Padilla said reparations would go a long way to address institutional injustices.

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For nearly two centuries now, Black American descendants of enslaved Africans have been making the case to an unbudging U.S. government for reparations. Advocates say payments would compensate for centuries of unpaid labor and an opportunity for the federal government to make good on its promise to provide 40 acres and a mule to each formerly enslaved Black person after the Civil War.

A shift in the national consciousness last year  some attribute to organizing around Black economic and political empowerment led in part by the American Descendants of Slaves Movement and the national reckoning on race that began last summer after the killing of George Floyd  has ushered in a political environment in the United States where many legislators are much more open than they have been in the past to reparations.

We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, Padilla said. We should be able to negotiate and advance and infrastructure package, and immigration reform and protect the rights of voters, and work on environmental protection, and address historical injustices like this.

Earlier this month, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve forming a committee to study the idea of providing reparations to African Americans.

Padilla is a veteran politician whos worked his way up the political ladder, previously serving as a Los Angeles city councilman, as a state senator and as secretary of State before he was nominated in January to replace outgoing Sen. Kamala Harris.

Padilla said that he has been senator for less than 100 days, but hes packed a lot into that short period. During his first couple of months, he participated in President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial, and voted to approve the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 intended to help Americans devastated economically by the coronavirus pandemic.

In the Senate, he is pushing and supporting a number of bills on a range of issues, including proposals focused on immigration reform (providing a pathway to citizenship for essential workers) and hate crimes against Asian Americans.

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Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the Pacoima, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. His father worked for 40 years as a short-order cook and his late mother cleaned houses. Both parents were local activists who fought against violence in their community. Padilla said they were the inspiration for his political career.

Through their hard work, we had a modest upbringing to put it mildly, said Padilla. We grew up with the values of service to others, and hard work, but we also saw our parents get very involved in the community.
A former Naas businessman is being prosecuted for allegedly possessing cocaine with a street value of 2.5m.

John Quinn, 59, whose address was given on court documents as Woodside House, Dunnstown Wood, Brannockstown, appeared before Naas District Court on April 28 and faces an allegation of possessing the drug for sale or supply .

Det Gda Dave McKinlay told the court that on November 3, 2018, a container arrived at Rosslare port by ship from Cherbourg, France.

Read more County Kildare news

He claimed a search of it revealed a quantity of cocaine.

The court heard that a the cocaine was hidden in a compartment and the container was carrying pallets.

Gda McKinlay said the floor of the container had been altered.

It was a false floor, he said.

A file had been forwarded to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2018.

The garda said that there were a lot of strands to the investigation and he had no objection to bail being granted.

Solicitor Tim Kennelly said bail terms had been agreed at an independent surety of 5,000 and the defendants own bond of 5,000.

Solicitor Tim Kennely described the defendant as a truck driver and said he had made himself available at the first opportunity.

The defendant must sign on three times a week at Tallaght garda station, surrender his passport and not apply for alternative travel documents.

He was a joint owner of Jondol Furniture Collection in Naas, which folded early in 2011.

The case was adjourned to June 23 for the preparation of a book of evidence
By Nina Baker

bakernin@grinnell.edu

Quick Cold Cases is a column in which various S&B staff members briefly dive into cold cases from across the globe. Each writer provides a brief summary of the case before using their best investigative skills to describe what they believe happened.

On Nov. 24, 1971, a nondescript man calling himself Dan Cooper carried a slick, black briefcase into Portland International Airport in Oregon, and bought a one-way ticket for a 30-minute flight northwards to Seattle, Washington. A half-hour later, Cooper boarded a standard Boeing 727 aircraft, ordered a bourbon-and-soda and waited for the flight to take off.

Inside of his briefcase, there was a bomb.

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper slipped a note to one of the flight attendants, Florence Schaffner, demanding $200,000 in the form of 10,000 20-dollar bills. If these exact demands were not met, he would ignite the explosives.

Thus begins the mystery of the only unsolved air piracy case in U.S. History: The D.B. Cooper case. Though FBI agents have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, interviewed thousands of suspects, and collected over 60 volumes of case files, the 45-year investigation was closed in 2016 without any clear lead as to the identity of Cooper.

Schaffner alerted the pilot William Scott, who called with the FBI in Seattle to comply with Coopers demands. In Seattle, FBI agents collected 10,000 unmarked 20-dollar bills and two civilian parachutes for Cooper. Once the plane landed, the other flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, retrieved the items and delivered them to Cooper.

Once he received the parachutes and the money, Cooper released the Schaffner and the 36 passengers, but not the pilots or Mucklow. Instead, he demanded that the crew refuel the Boeing 727, and ordered the crew to lock themselves in the cockpit and fly southwards to Mexico City. The crew complied.

At 10:15 p.m., as the jet landed for a pitstop in Reno, Nevada, Scott hesitantly opened the cockpit door, believing that Cooper had probably parachuted from the aircraft during the flight. The cabin was empty, bereft of all the money, all of Coopers belongings, and the man himself.

To this day, little physical evidence has been recovered from the hijacking. A black tie with a mother-of-pearl tie clip was found on the plane, along with eight of Coopers cigarette butts  but these butts have since been lost. Additionally, the night of the hijacking was stormy, which wouldve obscured evidence on the ground, and a precise search area was difficult to pinpoint until days after the hijacking.

With scant physical evidence, the FBI had little to go off of  until Feb. 10, 1980, when eight-year-old Brian Ingram discovered three rotting bundles of cash while raking the banks of the Columbia River. The bundles of cash  two packets of 100 twenty-dollar bills each, and one packet of 90 twenty-dollar bills  which were arranged in the same order as when they were given to Cooper eight years prior. Serial numbers confirmed they were part of Coopers ransom. As of April 18, 2021, no other of the 9,710 remaining bills have been retrieved.

Any aficionado of the Cooper case knows just how many compelling suspects there are. But if I had to identify the one suspect, I can say for certain that I believe Walter R. Reca (1933-2014) was D.B. Cooper.

In 2008, Reca, an ex-military paratrooper and former member of the Michigan Parachute Team, recorded a three-hour confession to his friend Carl Laurin and his niece Lisa Story. These recordings include countless details about how he allegedly conducted the hijacking, many of which were unavailable to the public prior to the FBIs information release in 2015.

In his confession, Reca also claimed he met a truck driver at a roadside cafe outside just hours after he landed. Later, Jeff Osiadacz, who was working as a dump-truck driver in northern Washington, Recas alleged landing zone and the location of the ransom money, said a man approached him the night of the hijacking asking for help. Osiadacz described the man as looking identical to Reca. Reca also independently identified Osiadacz as the man who saw him the night of the hijacking.

Based on his confession and all the corroborating evidence, Walt, if still alive, would be prosecuted for the hijacking of Northwest 305. I believe that Walter Reca is D.B. Cooper, said Joe Koenig, a certified fraud examiner and forensic linguist and author of the book Getting The Truth: I Am D.B. Cooper.

Ultimately, what makes this case so difficult to parse out is the range of possibilities. Over the course of the investigation, multiple alternative suspects to Reca have been linked to the case. And in such a sprawling case, with so many different clues, misdirections and red-herrings, even the correct explanation may not be able to tie up all the loose-ends.

The world is unlikely to ever know the exact identity of Cooper  but the legend of the mysterious man who stepped onto that Boeing 727 nearly half-a-century ago will forever live on as an enigma in our countrys collective memory.

Any opinions expressed through columns and other S&B opinions publications belong to the writer and do not reflect the views of any or all members of the S&B staff, nor by any Grinnell associated organization.
Students from New England Law have been awarded Rappaport Fellowships nearly every year since its inception in 2001. Tweet this

Read more about the Fellows Program: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/schools/law/centers/rappaport-center/fellows.html

The Center's Executive Director Lissy Medvedow said, "This year's 12 Fellows were selected from among 100 applicants for their commitment to public service, their enthusiasm to learn about the intersection of law and public policy, as well as their grades and recommendations. This cohort continues the legacy of the Rappaport Fellowship with a strong and passionate group of future lawyers."

Briana Broberg '22 will be interning at the Boston Mayor's Office of Immigrant Advancement (MOIA). A graduate of The City College of New York and the University of Texas at Austin, she came to law school to study immigration law with an interest in immigrant- and immigration-related public policy issues. Broberg is President of New England Law's Immigration Law Association and co-chair of the Student Bar Association Diversity & Inclusion committee. She hopes to work at an immigration non-profit or advocacy organization after graduation.

Jacqueline Dagle '22 will be interning at the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office in the Civil Rights Division within the Public Protection & Advocacy Bureau. Her interest in disability law and advocacy drove her to attend law school after graduating from the University of Rhode Island. At New England Law, Dagle is a member of the school's mock trial team, the Judicial Language Project, and the Mental Health & Wellness Committee where she teaches weekly yoga classes for students. Dagle's professional goal is to uplift her community through advocacy aimed at improving communal accessibility.

"We are incredibly proud of Briana and Jacqueline not only for their accomplishments, but also for their passion and commitment to public service in their unique areas of interest," said Scott Brown, President and Dean of New England Law. "Our school has an impressive track record for competitive placements such as this, and we've seen how these opportunities can be major stepping stones for students launching their legal careers."

Students from New England Law have been awarded this fellowship nearly every year since its inception in 2001. Most recently, Caitlin Whitman '22 spent last summer as a 2020 Rappaport Fellow interning in the General Counsel's office at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Graduates have gone on to start fulfilling careers in government agencies, public policy advocacy, and at esteemed law firms across the country.

In addition to New England Law | Boston, the 2021 Rappaport Fellows represent students from Boston College Law School, Boston University School of Law, Harvard Law School, Northeastern University School of Law, Suffolk University Law School, and University of Massachusetts School of Law.

About New England Law | Boston

New England Law | Boston was founded in 1908 as Portia Law School, the first and only law school established exclusively for the education of women. Today, New England Law offers its co-ed student body full-time, part-time, evening, and flexible programs tailored to the needs of today's students, combining rigorous academics, dynamic community, in-demand concentrations, and early access to practical experience as well as a diverse, global alumni network spanning 29 countries, 50 states, and 99 practice areas. For more information, visit www.nesl.edu .

SOURCE New England Law | Boston

Related Links

http://www.nesl.edu


MILL VALLEY, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Glassdoor , the worldwide leader in insights about jobs and companies, will share critical research and provide testimony to the United States Congress setting forth how enhanced pay transparency can reduce gender and racial pay gaps and improve workplace diversity & inclusion (D&I). Glassdoor Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain will testify before the House Financial Services Diversity & Inclusion Subcommittee during the hearing, "Closing the Racial and Gender Wealth Gap Through Compensation Equity." The hearing will commence at 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Dr. Chamberlain will testify on the status of gender and racial pay inequities, the nature and underlying causes of racial and ethnic pay inequities existing in the workplace today, and how potential transparency-driven solutions can address and help remedy these issues.

Pay Inequities Exist Across Gender, Race & Ethnicity

Although nearly 9 in 10 employees believe men and women should be compensated equally for similar work and experience levels1, Glassdoor Economic Research has tracked the existence of gender pay gaps in the workplace. A 2019 multi-country study, Progress on the Gender Pay Gap , using millions of anonymized salaries on Glassdoor showed an unadjusted pay gap between U.S. men and women2 of 21.4 percent, meaning women earn, on average, $0.79 for every $1.00 men earn. This is a 2.7 percentage point shrink from 2016. Even after controls for education, work experience, location, industry, job title and company are applied to help examine the impact of unexplained barriers, the study shows a 4.9 percent adjusted pay gap still exists. Even though progress was noted in the 2019 study, it'd still take 50 years for steady progress to close the gender pay gap, the research found.

A well-known fact about the U.S. labor market is that there are significant pay gaps among racial and ethnic groups as well as gender, and that gender pay gaps are substantially larger among some race and ethnicity groups. Dr. Chamberlain will preview forthcoming research that shows pay inequities exist for men and women across racial groups. The findings show Indigenous American or Alaska Native women make the least, $0.69 for every $1.00 white men earn. For Black women, it's $0.71 and Hispanic women it's $0.76. Asian women earned more on average than white men at $1.06, data shows. Similarly, Indigenous American or Alaska Native men ($0.84), Black ($0.85) and Hispanic ($0.86) men made less on average to white men, with Asian men the only group to see the highest pay across all groups with $1.27.

"In today's fast-changing economy, the United States can no longer afford to leave millions of women and members of underrepresented groups sidelined in jobs that pay them unfairly, fail to fulfill their full economic potential, and stand in the way of their personal and professional growth. The key to sustaining and building a dynamic and prosperous U.S. economy into the future is to ensure that every American has a pathway to make their best possible contribution and to ensure they are equitably compensated," Dr. Chamberlain said in pre-submitted remarks.

New Research: Black Employees Least Satisfied with Workplace Diversity & Inclusion

Pay is not the only dimension on which inequality is experienced in the workforce today. New Glassdoor Economic Research, America's Workplace Diversity Crisis: Measuring Gaps in Diversity & Inclusion Satisfaction by Employee Race and Ethnicity , released today shows employee sentiment around D&I differs significantly across racial and ethnic groups. The report found Black or African American workers report an average D&I rating of 3.49 on a 1-to-5 star scale, well below the average of 3.73 stars across all workers. Even after accounting for differences in employees' occupations, industries, company sizes, genders, lengths of time on the job and more, the study found that Black or African American employees still rate workplace D&I nearly 8 percent lower than their white colleagues. The study also found that this pattern of lower D&I opinions among Black or African American workers has only worsened since 2019. Addressing perceived workplace satisfaction can help address pay disparities, Dr. Chamberlain said, as research shows pay and workplace satisfaction are closely linked.3

For a copy of the full testimony and to view the virtual hearing, visit https://financialservices.house.gov

Visit Glassdoor Economic Research to subscribe to the latest job market and economic employment reports.

For Job Seekers and Employees: Visit Glassdoor to submit a salary report or anonymous demographic information, research salaries and see if you are being paid fairly by receiving your current salary estimate using Glassdoor's salary calculator tool .

For Employers: Use Glassdoor's free pay audit tool to analyze compensation at your company to determine if and where pay gaps exist.

###

Glassdoor combines all the latest jobs with millions of reviews and insights to make it easy for people to find a job that is uniquely right for them. As a result, Glassdoor helps employers hire truly informed candidates at scale through effective recruiting solutions like employer branding and employee insights products. Launched in 2008, Glassdoor now has reviews and insights for more than one million companies around the world. For more information, visit glassdoor.com.

1 The 2019 survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Glassdoor from March 12-14, 2019 among 1,025 U.S. adults who are employed full- or part-time.

2 All of Glassdoor's research referencing gender or race and ethnicity is based on self-identified information shared by Glassdoor users.

3 Mario Nunez, "Does Money Buy Happiness? The Link Between Salary and Employee Satisfaction," Glassdoor Economic Research report, June 2015. Available online at: www.glassdoor.com/research/does-money-buy-happiness-the-link-between-salary-and-employee-satisfaction/ .

SOURCE Glassdoor

Related Links

http://www.glassdoor.com


FOUR gardai are due to appear before Limerick District Court next month after they were charged with corruption offences following a lengthy investigation.

The four, some of whom are attached to the Limerick garda division, were arrested and charged this Thursday. A fifth person - a private citizen - has also been charged with perverting the course of justice.

"As part of an investigation led by the Assistant Commissioner, Organised and Serious Crime into alleged corruption in public office, four members of An Garda Siochana based in the south of the country and a private citizen were arrested and charged today with offences relating to perverting the course of justice. This follows directions being received from the Director of Public Prosecutions," read a statement issued by the Garda Press Office.

"As this investigation, by gardai attached to the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, is ongoing, An Garda Siochana will not be commenting further," it added.

All five individuals have been released on station bail and are due to appear before Limerick District Court on May 14.
Imperial Valley News Center

California Women Get Prison Sentences for Health Care Fraud and Fraudulently Billing Medi-Cal for Substance Abuse Counseling

Los Angeles, California - An Inglewood woman and her mother-in-law, who both ran a South Los Angeles drug-and-alcohol abuse treatment program, were sentenced today to federal prison for scheming to defraud Medi-Cal out of over $500,000 for services to clients who did not medically need substance abuse treatment and for services that were never provided.

Mesbel Mohamoud, 48, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment by United States District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez, who also sentenced Mohamouds mother-in-law, Erlinda Abella, 66, also of Inglewood, to one year and one day in federal prison. Each woman was ordered to pay $260,101 in restitution.

Mohamoud and Abella pleaded guilty in November 2020 to one count of health care fraud.

Mohamoud was the owner and executive director of The New You Center Inc. (TNYC), located in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of South Los Angeles. Abella, who co-founded TNYC with Mohamoud in 2005, was the companys program director. TNYC was authorized to provide medically necessary substance abuse treatment services through the Drug Medi-Cal program to adults and teenagers in Los Angeles County.

From January 2009 to December 2015, TNYC submitted false and fraudulent claims for counseling sessions that were not conducted at all, were not conducted at authorized locations, or did not comply with Drug Medi-Cal regulations regarding the length of sessions or the number of clients.

Mohamoud and Abella also caused TNYC to bill for clients who did not have a substance abuse problem, to falsify documents related to services supposedly provided to clients, and to forge client signatures on documents such as sign-in sheets.

In September 2013, TNYC submitted a fraudulent claim for Medi-Cal reimbursement in the amount of $62.15 for a three-hour counseling session for a client on August 17, 2013  the same day when the client was hospitalized and did not receive any counseling from TNYC.

In her plea agreement, Mohamoud admitted she knew that Abella directed TNYC counselors to enroll clients in TNYCs substance abuse treatment program even if the clients had used drugs or alcohol only occasionally or even just once.

TNYC submitted approximately $527,313 in false and fraudulent claims for group and individual substance abuse counseling services and was paid $260,101 on those claims.

The FBI, the California Department of Justice, Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General investigated this matter.

Assistant United States Attorney Cathy J. Ostiller of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.
CPS parent Chinella Miller agreed, saying: We need to have a say on how the money is spent in our schools. They want us to get back to normal, but the reality is, our normal is not the same normal. You failed us before the pandemic, and you need to fix those things first.
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On Monday, April 26th, 2021, the Minister of Justice, Ms. Anna E. Richardson, along with her support staff, met with the Director of the Foundation Judicial Institutes Sint Maarten (SJIB), Ms. Cynthia Filemon and Managing Director of Projects, Consultancy & Management International (PCMI), Mr. Robert Budike to discuss the reintroduction of inmate development programmes at the Point Blanche Prison and House of Detention. Minister Richardson has made clear her commitment to supporting the establishment of programmes and activities through which inmates, who are currently serving time at the prison, can further develop themselves and be provided the right tools that will help the build an honest life upon release. Its important that when inmates leave the prison that they are able to leave knowing that they have something to help them move on. Development programmes are essential in providing them with the skills and knowledge that they can leave here with and be able to use to further their lives.





The discussion covered a number of proposals, one being the reintroduction of the Inmate Entrepreneurship Programme which was introduced in 2007. The programme was first introduced as a collaborative effort between SJIB and the Probation Department with the purpose of supporting both current inmates and persons who have recently been released. According to the Director of SJIB, since the establishment of this programme, it was executed once and was proven to be a success. The Director went on to state that: Former inmates who had undergone the programme have since then shown great strides by becoming business owners and applying the skills that they have learned. The full programme has a duration of one year in which each inmate will go through the various courses with the proper support needed to complete it. Although many of the inmates may have dropped out of high school, they show potential and that can be developed with the right support and guidance, stated the Director.





As a push to provide a variety of development programmes and courses to the inmates, there were further discussions held regarding a QuickBooks course. The interest from the inmates in this course was established on the basis of a survey which was distributed amongst the inmates to identify their level of education, their knowledge of the course and its skills, along with the general interest of the prison population. Based on the survey, thirty-three (33) inmates have expressed interest in





participating in such a course. The QuickBooks course presented entails an extensive list of skills that will be developed by each inmate that participates, guaranteeing a working knowledge of QuickBooks that can be used to further themselves as future business owners and/ or employees.





Prior to this meeting held with SJIB and PCMI, the Minister Richardson received a proposal to offer the General Educational Diploma (GED) to inmates at the prison. The programme was successful in the past and reintroducing it with a more defined approach will contribute to increased participation amongst the prison population. The GED, which has an equivalency of a high school diploma, will be introduced to the inmates in a form of a presentation in order to provide all the relevant information needed such as the purpose, what it entails, and its benefits, so that inmates can make an informed decision.





While the possibilities of providing the abovementioned opportunities at the prison are being explored, an assessment in the form of a survey, has been distributed amongst the inmates to discover the level of importance of the courses by inmates, along with an indication of possible registrants per programme. Minister Richardson has stated that it is not only important to have these programmes available, but its also important to know that they will be taken advantage of. It was suggested by the Minister to reach out to former inmates who have benefited from these programmes as a way to positively influence the current inmates as to what these programmes can do for their future.





Minister Richardson added that while these theoretical programmes were being looked into, activities that allow inmates to physically do more is also a point of development. Working out on a regular is something that is of high interest to the inmates. Fitness is an essential part of their lives and a way to keep themselves busy, among other things. We are currently in discussions with a consultant to identify the best and safest equipment that can be purchased to create a new and improved workout space for the inmates.





According to Minister Richardson, the need for the reintroduction and introduction of these programmes not only serves as a positive development tool for the inmates, but also acts as a deterrent from succumbing to the same negative environment and pressures when inmates are released.





Minister Richardson has expressed her ambition, stating that she hopes to achieve high attendance of these programmes by the inmates. These programmes provide opportunities for a proper rehabilitation process. When inmates are released, they should be able to have the means to provide for themselves and not have to fall back into their old lifestyle., stated the Minister.





Further discussions are planned to be held regarding the results of the assessment and to further discuss a plan of approach in implementing these programmes.
A: I started by buying a box of recordable answer buzzers. Theyre super easy to use. You just put batteries in them and press a button and record any word into them. Recently, I partnered with Learning Resources, the company who makes the buttons, and created a pack that comes with the buttons and also activities and tips written by me, so that when people get their first pack of buttons or more later on, they have some more activities that they can do and some guidance of how to get started with their dogs. Thats all really easy to find on Amazon. Its called the Talking Pet Starter Set. And whats really nice about the buttons is you can just keep adding more if you want to. They come in packs of four buttons.
New York, April 29 : US President Joe Biden has said that as a deterrence to conflicts he would maintain a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific, an area where China is asserting itself aggressively.

China loomed large in Biden's address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday as he made the fast-developing nation the economic and strategic threat to the US.

"We're in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21stCentury. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better," he said.

Biden said that he has told "President Xi (Jinping) that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe -- not to start conflict, but to prevent conflict." He added, "In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competition -- and that we are not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board." In his speech on his 99th day in office, Biden presented his report card on progress in achieving the targets he had set for the first 100 days and his multi-trillion-dollar plans for infrastructure, jobs, education, economy and families.

He said, "America is on the move again" after the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the worst attack on democracy -- a reference to the attack on Congress by supporters of former President Donald Trump on January 6.

The hour-long speech was crafted by his Indian American speechwriter Vinay Reddy, who holds the title of director of speechwriting. Since he has not been in office for a year, the speech took the place of the traditional State of the Union address.

As he began his speech with Vice President Kamala Harris and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi behind him on the podium, he noted that he was the first president to have to address the holders of both offices as "Madame".

For the first time the speaker and the Senate president -- vice President Harris -- are both women.

The COVID-19 epidemic hollowed out the House chamber where Biden delivered the annual address. Only about 200 people -- including the spouses of the president and vice president a" were there socially distanced and masked.

Absent were the guests who add colour to the speech and get called upon during the speech by presidents.

Missing was also drama like that of Pelosi angrily ripping up a copy of former President Donald Trump's speech at the podium.

Biden brought up the spectre of China several times to spur his agenda.

"China and other countries are closing in fast" in technology and "we're falling behind in that competition", he warned as he called for increasing allocations for research and development.

He said that the investments he proposed across a range of fields "also advance a foreign policy that benefits the middle class".

"That means making sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China," he explained.

"America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property," he added.

Biden emphasised his vision of the US being the leader of the world.

"We have to show not just that we are back, but that we are here to stay" as the world's leading nation, he said.

But he added, "And that we aren't going it alone -- we're going to be leading with our allies" because "no one nation can deal with all the crises of our time alone".

Biden also recycled Trump's America First policy under the slogan of "Buy American." He asked why blades for wind turbines can't be made in Pittsburgh and not Beijing or American workers can't lead the world in making electric vehicles.

"American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs," he declared. "That is what it is supposed to be and would be in this administration." "I have made it clear to all my Cabinet people their ability to give exemptions has been strenuously limited. It will be American products," he added.

To pay for his ambitious $1.8 trillion Families Plan -- which has education, healthcare and other social programmes -- and the more than $2 trillion Jobs Plan -- which focuses on infrastructure development and climate resilience -- as well as the $1.9 trillion COVID rescue plan, he said that he would take the tax rate on the wealthiest back to as much as 39.6 per cent, but would not increase the tax burden on the rest.

He said that he would also crack down on tax evasion and hiding money in accounts abroad.

He pitched proposals for stricter gun control, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and the creation of an Advanced Research Project Agency.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @arulouis)

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Nerds On Site Inc. (CSE: NERD) (OTCQB: NOSUF) ("NERD" or the "Company"), a mobile IT solutions company servicing Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME) marketplaces in Canada and the USA, is pleased to announce its financial results and operating highlights for the three-month and nine-month periods ended February 28, 2021, highlighted by a record $2.8 M revenue for the quarter. All amounts expressed are in Canadian dollars.

Q3 2021 Financial Highlights:

Slightly increased total Revenue of $2.8 M compared to $2.7 M during the same period in 2020.

compared to during the same period in 2020. Reduced Net Loss to $(76,839) compared to $(206,947) during the same period in 2020.

compared to during the same period in 2020. Reduced Operating Expenses to $(822,749) compared to $(1,054,051) during the same period in 2020.

Charlie Regan, Co-Founder and CEO of NERD, comments: "We have been building NERD from the ground-up with our franchise model delivering consistent and stable revenues in each quarter. Our strategy of providing IT solutions to small business owners and residential clients has proven so successful that we recently signed a country-wide partnership with Staples Canada. We believe that 2021 is a breakthrough year for the Company as we are well on the path towards profitability in the second half of the year."

The Company's complete financial results are available in its Consolidated Financial Statements and Management's Discussion and Analysis for the quarter ended February 28, 2021, each filed with Canadian securities regulators at www.sedar.com .

About Nerds On Site Inc.

Nerds On Site Inc., a company founded in 1995 in London, Ontario, specializes in providing cost-effective, leading-edge solutions to Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME), serving as the complete SME IT solution specialist. NERD currently has annual revenues of approximately $10,000,000 and growing. The Company services more than 12,000 clients per year with a superb 96.5% customer satisfaction rating (more than 90,000 five-star ratings). NERD's business model is based on sub-contracts in Canada and a franchise model for US expansion. Visit the website to learn more: www.nerdsonsite.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information set forth in this material may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding future financial position, business strategy, use of proceeds, corporate vision, proposed acquisitions, partnerships, joint-ventures and strategic alliances and co-operations, budgets, cost and plans and objectives of or involving the Company. Such forward-looking information reflects management's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to management. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. A number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors may cause the actual results or performance to materially differ from any future results or performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions and dependence upon regulatory approvals. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by securities laws.

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.

SOURCE Nerds On Site Inc.

Related Links

www.nerdsonsite.com


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 01:50:48|Editor: huaxia

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World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (on screens) addresses the General Assembly high-level interactive dialogue on antimicrobial resistance at the UN headquarters in New York, on April 29, 2021. UN General Assembly President Volkan Bozkir on Thursday called on member states to take action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). (Manuel Elias/UN Photo/Handout via Xinhua)

UNITED NATIONS, April 29 (Xinhua) -- UN General Assembly President Volkan Bozkir on Thursday called on member states to take action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

"I encourage member states to develop and implement national action plans on AMR, strengthen regulation of antimicrobials, improve knowledge and awareness, and promote best practices, as well as foster innovative approaches, using alternatives to antimicrobials and new technologies, for diagnosis and vaccines," he told a high-level interactive dialogue on antimicrobial resistance.

Effective communication, education and training are critical to raise awareness and encourage expert-driven behavioral change. Multi-stakeholder partnerships are key. The private sector, doctors, medical workers, farmers, the food industry, and regulators, as well as consumers, are critical partners in this battle, he said.

As with so many crises, it is the vulnerable who stand to be most affected by antimicrobial resistance. Stronger systems are needed to monitor drug-resistant infections and the volume of antimicrobials used in humans, animals, and crops, said Bozkir.

The world is already running out of effective treatments for several common infections. Currently, an estimated 700,000 people die each year due to drug-resistant diseases. And with few replacement products in the pipeline, the world is moving toward a post-antibiotic era in which common infectious diseases will once again cause mortality. None of the 43 antibiotics currently in development are enough to combat the increasing emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance, he said.

If current trends continue, sophisticated interventions like organ transplantation, joint replacements, cancer chemotherapy and care of pre-term infants, which all require antimicrobials, will become too dangerous and will no longer be possible. If no action is taken, drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050 and damage to the economy will be as catastrophic as the 2008 global financial crisis. By 2030, antimicrobial resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty, he warned.

Lack of regulation, the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animals, over-the-counter and internet sales have sparked a boom in counterfeit or poor-quality antimicrobials, he said.

"Let me leave you with one thought. Next time you consider using antimicrobials, or are offered a meal treated by antimicrobials, consider the impact your decision will have on your grandchildren's access to these life-saving drugs. We can no longer take them for granted. We have to act now to safeguard the progress we have already achieved," said Bozkir. Enditem
BURLINGTON, Vt., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Vermont Senate today unanimously gave preliminary approval to a bill that would bring Universal School Breakfast to all Vermont schools by 2022. The bill (S.100) would make Vermont the first state in the nation to provide breakfast free of charge to all public school students every school day. The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill on Friday, and then it will move to the House for consideration.

The Senate also committed to a path to providing full Universal School Meals (breakfast and lunch) to all public school students by directing a task force to develop a plan to provide universal lunch by the 2026-27 school year. As S.100 is written, the task force would submit its plan to the Vermont General Assembly in January 2022.

According to recent studies released by the National Food Access and COVID Research Team, and the University of Vermont, 1 in 3 people in Vermont have experienced food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Families with children have been twice as likely to face hunger.

In March 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture took emergency steps to make school and summer meals available to all children for free, regardless of their family's income. School nutrition teams across Vermont acted quickly to implement systems to deliver meals on buses and arrange curbside pickups. Vermont was the only state to increase the total number of breakfasts and lunches served in April 2020 when compared to April 2019, according to a Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) snapshot report. The USDA has extended these emergency measures into the 2021-22 school year.

"Hunger in Vermont before the COVID-19 pandemic was already unacceptably high. Today, it's higher than at any point in the last two decades, including the Great Recession. That doesn't go away right after the emergency order is lifted," said Senator Chris Pearson (P/D-Chittenden), a Senate champion for S.100. "By passing universal school breakfast, and setting Vermont down a path to full universal school meals, we're making the health of our kids and classrooms a top priority."

"When all our kids have regular access to nutritious meals that they can eat together  and when no student is singled out for needing meals or for having school meal debt  they all get a better education," said Senate Education Committee Chair Brian Campion (D-Bennington). "With S.100's passage, Vermont will again lead the nation by demonstrating that food is fundamentally linked to educational outcomes."

In the 2019-2020 school year, 78 Vermont schools provided universal school meals to more than 17,000 students. More schools have indicated that they are eager to implement the program, after seeing the positive impact that it made for students and for school culture overall, during the pandemic year.

The bill would make universal breakfast available to all public schools beginning in the 2022-2023 school year. Breakfast will be offered at no charge to students or their families, while maximizing federal reimbursements that are available.

"When all students receive breakfast and lunch at no charge, students and schools experience extraordinary benefits," said Anore Horton, Executive Director of Hunger Free Vermont. "Student learning improves, behavior and health improves, relationships between school administrators and families improve. It is a specific, feasible intervention that makes our kids, and our communities stronger."

"The Vermont Farm to School Network fully supports this path to Universal School Meals and S.100," stated Betsy Rosenbluth, Project Director of Vermont FEED. "We know that when schools can serve local food and can offer meals at no charge to all students, everyone benefits - students, families, farmers and the entire school community. Students are establishing lifelong eating habits at school and good nutrition is fundamental to their success."

The Senate today also indicated their commitment to the full Farm Fresh School Meals for All vision, by giving preliminary approval to the State Fiscal Year 2022 Budget, which includes $500,000 to launch a new local purchasing incentive program for schools to encourage school meal programs to increase their direct purchasing from Vermont farmers and producers. Together, Universal School Meals and the local purchasing incentive program support children's access to high quality, nutritious school meals and Vermont's local producers and working landscape.

About Hunger Free Vermont

Hunger Free Vermont is a statewide nonprofit organization that works with state agencies and community groups to develop sustainable hunger solutions. Since 1993 Hunger Free Vermont's outreach programs and advocacy have substantially enhanced Vermont's nutrition safety net and increased access to nutritious foods. To learn more about Hunger Free Vermont, visit www.hungerfreevt.org , and to learn more about the Universal School Meals Campaign, visit www.universalschoolmealsvt.org .

About Tusk Philanthropies

Tusk Philanthropies, the family foundation of venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk, is focused on making sure that people who are hungry have enough food to eat, and on fixing our democracy by making it exponentially easier to vote. Tusk Philanthropies is supporting Hunger Free Vermont's campaign to bring universal breakfast and lunch to every public school student in the state. Ensuring people have access to food is an immediate problem that the organization addresses every year by funding, developing, and managing legislative campaigns to expand and strengthen access to nutrition programs like Breakfast After the Bell, Universal School Meals, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To date, Tusk Philanthropies has helped secure more than $176 million in federal funding to support school meals programs serving over 2.1 million food insecure children in Arizona, California, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington. To learn more, visit tuskphilanthropies.com .

MEDIA CONTACT:

Sabina Parker

[email protected]

802-865-0255

SOURCE Tusk Philanthropies
By Crispian Balmer

ROME (Reuters) - Italian prosecutors asked a judge on Thursday to have four senior members of Egypt's security services sent for trial over their suspected role in the disappearance and murder of student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016.

Regeni, a postgraduate student at Britain's Cambridge University, disappeared in the Egyptian capital in January 2016. His body was found almost a week later and a post mortem examination showed he had been tortured before his death.

Italian and Egyptian prosecutors investigated the case together, but the two sides later fell out and came to very different conclusions.

The Rome prosecutors have accused four officials of the "aggravated kidnapping" of Regeni and in addition say one of them, Major Magdi Sharif, from General Intelligence, should be charged with "conspiracy to commit aggravated murder".

Egyptian police and officials have denied any involvement in Regeni's killing. Egyptian prosecutors said last year they "did not support" the Italian findings and asked for the accusations against the four to be removed from case documents.

Italian judicial sources say their Egyptian counterparts have not supplied the addresses of the four suspects and none of them are expected to attend any eventual trial. A source said Italy had not issued international arrest warrants for them.

A judge suspended Thursday's preliminary hearing in the case until May 25 as one of the court-appointed defence lawyers had contracted the coronavirus and could not attend. A full trial is unlikely to start before the summer recess.

TORTURE

Regeni had been in Cairo to research Egypt's independent unions for his doctoral thesis. Associates say he was also interested in the long-standing domination of Egypt's economy by the state and military. Both subjects are sensitive in Egypt.

Prosecutors say they have evidence showing that Sharif got informants to follow Regeni and eventually had him arrested. The charge sheet says Sharif, and other, unidentified Egyptian officials, then tortured the Italian over several days, causing him "acute physical suffering".

Story continues

Giving details from the autopsy, prosecutors say Regeni's teeth were broken, while he also suffered multiple fractures to his shoulders, wrist, hands and feet. He was eventually killed by a blow to the neck.

Egyptian officials could not be reached for comment on the prosecutors' charge sheet.

Prosecutors say they have been approached by new witnesses in recent weeks. Two reported seeing Regeni while he was being questioned, while a third had knowledge of contacts between a union chief and the security forces that related to the student.

Regeni's death soured relations between Italy and Egypt and Rome initially withdrew its ambassador from Cairo in protest. It subsequently restored its top envoy and there has been no let-up in trade relations.

Days after prosecutors called for the trial of the four Egyptians, Italy handed over the first of two frigates to the Egyptian navy in a deal worth up to 1.2 billion euros ($1.45 billion). ($1 = 0.8270 euros)

(Additional reporting by Domenico Lusi; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Francesca Paris is The Eagle's data and public records reporter. She was previously the North Adams reporter. A California native and Williams College alumna, she has worked at NPR in Washington, D.C. and WBUR in Boston. Find her on Twitter at @fparises.
Child Protection Cluster Coordinator (Field Support - Rapid Response Team), Geneva

Organization: UNICEF - United Nations Childrens Fund

Country: Switzerland

City: Geneva, Switzerland

Office: UNICEF Geneva

Closing date: Wednesday, 5 May 2021

Re-Advertisement: Child Protection Cluster Coordinator (Field Support - Rapid Response Team), P4, Geneva, #103057

Job no: 539221

Position type: Fixed Term Appointment

Location: Switzerland Division/Equivalent: Programme

School/Unit: Office of Emergency Operations

Department/Office: Off of Emergency Prog, Geneva

Categories: Emergency Programme

UNICEF works in some of the worlds toughest places, to reach the worlds most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, protection from violence

In order to meet its Cluster Lead Agency responsibilities, UNICEF invests human and financial resources to strengthen and improve the coordination function at global level for each of the Clusters / AoR it leads, as well as in each humanitarian context. In line with UNICEFs commitments to the World Humanitarian Summit and Grand Bargain outcomes, this includes a strong focus on adopting people-centered approaches in cluster coordination and performance management processes.

The UNICEF Field Support Coordinator (RRT) is situated in the Office of Emergency Programmes (EMOPS) Division, Global Cluster Coordination Unit (GCCU), in Geneva, Switzerland. The direct supervisor is the Global Cluster/AoR Coordinator, who in turn, reports to the Chief, GCCU. The GCCU forms a key part in UNICEFs implementation of its Cluster Lead Agency accountabilities.

The UNICEF Field Support Coordinator (RRT) serves as a conduit between UNICEF and standby partners, forming part of the CP AoR Field Support team. As with other UNICEF-led clusters, the position will manage in-country and deployable field support based on requests from country offices and will also provide direct support.

How can you make a difference?

We are looking for an experienced Field Support Coordinator with strong child protection co-ordination experience at the field level with flexibility to deploy to the field 50% of the time to support the Global Child Protection AoR in effectively managing and strengthening frameworks and capacity for country-level Cluster Coordination. The main goal is to enable Field Cluster coordination mechanisms to:

maximise quality and coverage of responses;

minimise duplication, gaps and risks; and

continuously support stronger national leadership of coordination.

Key Tasks and Accountabilities

Technical support through high quality, rapidly deployable Cluster capacity in humanitarian situations to support timely, appropriate and relevant operational and strategic decision-making through:

Deployments (remotely or in-country) for both system wide high-level emergency and other prioritized emergencies (Large-scale, rapid onset or complex emergencies)

Taking on strategic Cluster/Coordination missions to priority countries, and with a focus on assessment missions, and capacity building of staff in-country.

Participating in global missions related to the implementation of the IASC Humanitarian Programme Cycle and the Reference Module for Cluster Coordination at the Country Level, e.g. alongside OCHA or in support of the UNICEF led Clusters.

2. Leadership, capacity building and advisory services to support global cluster efforts to expand and strengthen the pool of available, high quality staff.

Under the supervision of the Global CP AoR Coordinator, lead the field support team and prioritize country deployments and coordinating and tracking field support deployments and remote support

Providing induction for staff who are taking on their first coordination deployment/position.

Providing on-the-job support, including support when needed,

To new staff in the field to help fulfill core coordination functions in line with CP AoR Coordination

To staff leading key processes such as Strategic Humanitarian Response Plan & Cluster Coordination Performance Monitoring,

Acting as regional focal point to support Country level coordinators for Humanitarian Needs Overview/Humanitarian Response Plan

To identify Child Protection in Emergencies capacity gaps and ensure a cohesive response,

To ensure opportunities for knowledge/skills development through mentoring of identified RRTs and

To liaise with Global Protection Cluster Field Support team to ensure coherence and inclusion child protection specificity in collective efforts

3. Cluster development, planning, monitoring, and partnership building:

Keeping core documents up to date including menu of options, regional focal points overview (what we offer), coordinators list, etc.

Acting as a conduit of field realities, identifying key issues and gaps and suggest improvements or measures of escalation.

Supporting the CP AoR through active participation in UNICEF Global Cluster Coordination Unit meetings; the preparation and facilitation of global Cluster meetings with partners; and representation on behalf of the Global Cluster in other relevant fora.

Contribute to specific technical projects related to 1) the Cluster and inter-Cluster coordination in Emergencies; 2) Inter-Agency coordination in general; and 3) Implementation of World Humanitarian Summit and Grand Bargain commitments in Emergencies.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have...

Advanced degree in social sciences or other related field.

A minimum of 8 years of relevant experience.

Demonstrated field child protection coordination experience within humanitarian reform and Cluster approach environments.

Strong analytical skills and a keen interest and motivation for inter-agency coordination.

Demonstrated understanding of cluster/sector programming, needs assessment and monitoring.

Flexibility, diplomacy, leadership, cultural sensitivity and team-spirit are considered essential personal features.

Fluency in English and in French is required; knowledge of Arabic or Spanish is an asset.

For every child you demonstrate

UNICEFs values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA) and core competencies in

Builds and maintains partnerships Level 2)

Self-awareness and ethical awareness (Level 2)

Innovates and embraces change (Level 2)

Drive to achieve results for impact (Level 2)

Manages ambiguity and complexity (Level 2)

Thinks and acts strategically (Level 2)

Works collaboratively with others (Level 2)

Nurtures, leads and manages people (Level 2)

View our competency framework at

http://www.unicef.org/about/employ/files/UNICEF_Competencies.pdf

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Mobility is a condition of international professional employment with UNICEF and an underlying premise of the international civil service.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

This position is re-advertised for and additional 10 days and those who applied previously need not re-apply as their existing applications will be taken into consideration.

Advertised: Apr 26 2021 W. Europe Daylight Time Application close: May 05 2021 W. Europe Daylight Time

Link to the organizations job offer: https://unjobs.org/vacancies/1619465111562
MBABANE  Princess Sikhanyiso wants to make the Kingdom of Eswatini a better place for her son and other generations to come.

The princess says she wants her son, Phikolwezwe Phiko Kukhanya Phasika Elihu Dlamini, to grow up in a different Eswatini that is more advanced, economically and holistically. The princess, who is also the Minister of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), revealed this during a virtual interview she had with American News Channel ABC News under the popular programme called Good Morning America (GMA). In a five minute clip, the princess appears to be at the King Sobhuza II Memorial Park, which appears in the background and she is dressed in a black and white dress while sporting a long black straight weave and ruby red lipstick. The princess, who has been in the spotlight after taking maternity leave which lasted for a year, tells her interviewer that; Motherhood is the best experience yet. I have a new earned respect for women, the sacrifices that we make for our children, you have to juggle everything at the same time, she said.

Appreciate

She went on; I also appreciate the role of men  in childrearing we should all play our part. I have a renewed impetus, even in the workplace, to say I want to make Eswatini a better Eswatini for my son and the generations to come,. Educated at St Edmunds College in the UK and the University of Sydney, Princess Sikhanyiso puts her Masters Degree in digital communication to good use in her role as minister of ICT. It is, however, her role as a mother that she enjoys most at the moment, she told ABC News. Her son turned one on April 10. The news channel reported that Phiko was the Kings seventh grandchild. In the five-minute clip, images of Princess Sikhanyiso with her baby and other family members were shown.

The princess is also captured walking along the corridors of her ministry. GMA said that Princess Sikhanyiso was looking to the future while embracing her roots. She said she was born into a life of service which was how she described modern day royalty. She was asked if being an African royal was different as Americans were mostly used to European royalty. Give us a sense of what it means to be an African royal, said the reporter.

I believe it is the same worldwide, it is not a privilege, it is a life of responsibility, a life of service to the people, she said. The minister, who is also a senator, was asked if this made His Majesty King Mswati III her father and boss.
Jaipur, April 29 : Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Thursday has tested positive for coronavirus, however, he is asymptomatic and is working under isolation.

In a tweet on Thursday, Gehlot said, "After undergoing the Covid-19 test, I have been tested positive today. However, there are no symptoms and I am fine. As per the Covid protocols, I will continue to work under isolation." On wednesday, he tweeted that his wife had also tested positive for coronavirus and she too was asymptomatic. Gehlot, as a precautionary measure, isolated himself soon and held meetings with health officials and others while being under isolation.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

President Arif Alvi on Thursday administered oath of office to Farrukh Habib as Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :President Arif Alvi on Thursday administered oath of office to Farrukh Habib as Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting.

The oath-taking ceremony held here at Aiwan-e-Sadr was attended by Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain and other parliamentarians.

Farrukh Habib was elected as a Member of the National Assembly from Faisalabad's NA-108 constituency in the 2018 elections.

Before his new assignment, he was serving as Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Railways.
New Hampshire State Representative Darryl Abbas said he objected to the Critical Race Theory as a concerned father and husband.(Learner Liu/The Epoch Times)

New Hampshire Rally Urges Schools to Stop CRT Indoctrination

More than 200 people rallied at the New Hampshire State House on April 24 to urge schools to stop indoctrinating children with Critical Race Theory (CRT), which was described by demonstrators as a set of divisive concepts aimed at increasing racial tensions.

A new rule proposed by the U.S. Education Department in April suggested including CRT in history and civics classrooms throughout the country.

Teach MLK (Martin Luther King), not CRT (Critical Race Theory), a sign held by a protester read.

The theoretical frameworks of CRT are rooted in critical theory, a Marxist social philosophy which argues that social problems are created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual factors. CRT incorporates the notion that the white race enjoys certain privileges just because of skin color.

New Hampshire state representative Keith Ammon said that taxpayers money should not be used to promote a Marxist ideology. (Learner Liu/The Epcoh Times)

The Saturday rally was attended by people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Several New Hampshire state representatives and former representatives also joined the rally.

Representative Darryl Abbas said he objected to CRT as a concerned father and husband. Being a person of color, who is married to a person whos white, I found it very concerning, he said. We have a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Every morning, I remind him that he has the best mother in the world. So it comes as no surprise to anyone that I am not going to let anybody teach my son that his mother is racist, because thats not true.

Representative Keith Ammon, who sponsored House Bill 544 to prohibit schools from teaching divisive concepts, said that taxpayers money should not be used to promote Marxist ideology.

Homeschool Mother of 13: Teach the Kids Real History

Cindy Bennett, a New Hampshire resident, said she homeschooled 13 children for 20 years because she realized a long time ago that many schools were essentially against God.

Cindy Bennett, a New Hampshire resident, said she homeschooled 13 children for 20 years. Learner Liu/The Epoch Times)

I believe in teaching the kids real history of our country, about people who fought for freedom, about Christian values, working hard, doing a good job, doing your best, and just loving God, Bennett said.

She said she taught her children to work and help others at an early age. Now all of her children at working age have got satisfying jobs. They are all leaders in their situations, because they were leaders at home. So they transferred that into the world. So it was a successful story, she said.

Radio Host: CRT a Made-Up Theory

Barbara from Harlem, popular radio host and author of Escaping the Racism of Low Expectations, also attended the rally and gave the keynote speech. She praised Martin Luther Kings respect for God, while denouncing CRT as a godless and made-up theory.

A well-known radio host and the author of Escaping the Racism of Low Expectations, Barbara from Harlem, also attended the rally and gave the keynote speech. (Learner Liu/The Epoch Times)

Dr. King, like I said, was a man of God, a big difference between those that come up with this CRT. I dont respect it. And its not what America was founded on or built on, Barbara from Harlem said.

She said that CRT is real racism compared to Kings dream of equality. The correct path (to Kings dream) is to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Just because somebody is white, that doesnt mean that they are automatically racist, she said.

Chinese immigrant: CRT is like the Cultural Revolution

According to Lily Tang Williams, co-chair of the New Hampshire Asian American Coalition and an immigrant from China, the real goal of CRT is to divide people and make them fight each other. She said that by indoctrinating children with notions like America is a systematic racist country, schools only teach them to hate the country, to hate their families, and to hate themselves.

In Critical Race Theory, they divide people into the oppressor group and the oppressed group. So, if youre white, male and conservative, you belong to the oppressor group. It sounds familiar to me, Tang said.

Lily Tang Williams, co-chair of the New Hampshire Asian American Coalition said that CRT is like the Cultural Revolution. (Learner Liu/The Epoch Times)

She said that CRT employs the same tactics as the Chinese Communist Partys Cultural Revolution. During the 10-year political campaign, the CCP divided people into red and black classes, and forced people to hate, fight and even kill their friends and family members who were defined by the Party as landlords, rich peasants, anti-revolutionists, bad people and rightists.

I see the shadow of Maos Cultural Revolution in this populist movement called social justice. But I dont need a trained Marxist to tell me what real oppressions are like. I already lived under oppression. I was enslaved as a little child, until I was 23 years old and fled for America. Tang said.
police have filed an FIR against former police commissioner Param Bir Singh after a police inspector levelled corruption charges against him, a senior official said on Thursday.

The FIR has been registered at Akola in Vidarbha against Singh, DCP Parag Manere and 26 other policemen.

The city Kotwali police in Akola registered the FIR against the police personnel under various sections ranging from criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989.

Akola police filed a Zero FIR (mode of lodging FIR in any police station irrespective of the offence committed in that area or any other area) at the Kotwali police station and it has been transferred to the Thane city police, the official told PTI.

Police inspector Bhimrao Ghadge in his complaint had made a series of allegations of corruption against Singh and other officers, in the period when the former CP was posted with the Thane police.

Ghadge who was posted in Thane police commissionerate during 2015-2018 has alleged that during his tenure, several officers there under Singh had indulged in various acts of corruption. He also claimed that Singh had asked him to not charge-sheet certain individuals against whom FIRs had been registered.

Ghadge, who is now posted in the Akola police control room, had also alleged that after he refused to obey Singh's instructions, five FIRs were registered against him and he was suspended.
STARKVILLE, Miss. (WTVA) - The veterinary school at Mississippi State University is caring for Buddy, a dog from Tate County who suffered severe burns to his face.

He received his injuries in an alleged act of torture.

Buddy is receiving care from Tyler McMurray (pictured) and the staff at the MSU College of Veterinary Medicine. Photo by Tom Thompson

Buddy, a dog who was burned in Tate County, pictured before his injuries. Photo submitted Buddy, a dog who was burned in Tate County, pictured before his injuries. Photo submitted Buddy is receiving care from Tyler McMurray (pictured) and the staff at the MSU College of Veterinary Medicine. Photo by Tom Thompson

Buddy arrived at MSUs College of Veterinary Medicine on Monday.

Buddys vital signs are good but, as with any burn patient, this is very much the bottom of a tall mountain to be climbed, said Dr. Elizabeth Swanson, associate professor and veterinary surgeon. We are keeping him comfortable, changing his bandages, and managing any problems as they arise. Burns can take several days to fully manifest, so we are still assessing the full extent of damage.

According to an MSU announcement on Thursday, Buddy is in good spirits  eating, wagging his tail and kisses anyone he can.

Weve been in the OR twice with him for wound debridement, and we plan to do his first skin graft using North Atlantic Cod fish skin from Iceland, courtesy of KerecisVet, on Friday with subsequent procedures to follow, Swanson said. The main concern will be ensuring that he does not develop infection. Things can change rapidly in this situation, and we are doing everything we can to stay on top of any problems that may arise and to provide him with the very best care.

MSU Chief Communications Officer, Sid Salter made sure to warn us just how serious Buddy's condition is.

We want to be honest about what we share with the public about this and Buddy has a long way to go, he said.

The Tunica Humane Society Facebook page has been sharing Buddy's story and is providing updates. Open this link to follow along.

A child confessed to setting the dog on fire, reported WMC-TV in Memphis, Tennessee. But state law does not allow children younger than 12 to be criminally charged.

Note: Video added at 6:05 p.m.
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.
The aftermath of an after school ruckus this week teaches us all that lessons in gun crime likely start at home.



Read more . . .
Driver of Van Charged With 6 Counts of Homicide After Crash

Police charged the driver of a van with six counts of vehicular homicide after the vehicle crashed and burst into flames on Interstate 85 in Georgia, killing six passengers.

In a statement, Gwinnett County police said that Monica Elizabeth Manire, 32, made a reckless change of lanes on Interstate 85 to Interstate 985, which caused the van to flip on its side.

Manire was also charged with reckless driving, improper lane change, and serious injury by vehicle in the Saturday crash, officials said. Nine other passengers and Manire were injured.

Alishia Carroll, 34, from Columbus; Kristie Whitfield, 44, from Mount Airy; Ashleigh Paris, 26, from Kennesaw; Tina Rice, 53, from Atlanta; Normisha Monroe, 38, from Norcross; and Rose Patrick, 34, from Ellabell, were identified as the six victims who died.

Carroll, according to relatives, was a mother of four children.

She was finally trying to get good for herself and good for kids and God just wanted to take her home, Carrolls oldest child, Kylie Mitchell, told WXIA-TV.

Manire was arrested and is being held in the Gwinnett County jail.

This photo provided by the Gwinnett County Police Department shows tire marks on the pavement near the crash (Gwinnett County Police Department)

Many of the passengers in the vehicle were part of an addiction recovery group We Are Living Proof, according to its Facebook page. Local media said that Manire was driving a van for the group.

We ask that you join us in prayer for the families and loved ones of the ladies we lost as well as the survivors, the organization said.

The Gwinnett County Police Department said the crash is still being investigated and is asking anyone with information or witnesses to come forward who may have seen any other vehicles involved in this crash.

Other details werent provided by the department.
The company which designed the Howard Springs accommodation camp in Darwin is ready and willing to help build a quarantine facility in Western Australia.

New York-listed infrastructure company AECOM built the 3500-person camp 25 kilometres south of the Darwin CBD in 2012 to accommodate workers in the Ichthys LNG project but as of last October it has been converted into an 850-bed COVID-19 quarantine facility.

The Howard Springs quarantine facility near Darwin. Credit:Ben Sale

It has been described by Prime Minister Scott Morrison as the best practice quarantine facility in the country and most states, including WA, are now looking at alternatives to hotel quarantine arrangements as they grapple with airborne transmission of the virus between guests.

AECOM national architectural lead James Dorrat estimated it would cost about $150,000 per bed to build a facility close to Perth, confirming previous estimates putting the cost of a new 850-person camp between $127.5 million and $170 million.
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The House of Representatives, on Thursday, passed the 2021 budget of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).

The total budget for the NCS was put at N257 billion. Out of this, N137 billion was approved for capital projects, N99.7 billion for personnel cost and N19.7 billion for overhead.

Also, a total of N216 billion was approved for the FIRS following the adoption of the report of the Committee on Finance, presented by its chairman, James Faleke (APC, Lagos).

Of the total FIRS budget, N107.5 billion was approved for personnel cost, N56 billion for overhead and N52 billion for capital projects of the agency.

The two budgets had been passed by the Senate and are to run till December 31 after they are signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari.

More for Customs

The House also asked the Central Bank of Nigeria to procure four scanners for the NCS.

The green chamber warned against China made scanners and advised the apex bank to get German or American products.

This followed the adoption of the report of the 2021 budget of the NCS approved by the House on Thursday.

That the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) should as matter of urgency procure the four scanners for Nigeria Customs Service from the best scanners manufacturers either from Germany or America but not China made scanners, the lawmakers resolved.

Leke Abejide (ADC, Kogi), the vice-chairman, Committee on Customs, presented the report on the 2021 budget of the agency.

According to Mr Abejide, the Customs performed poorly in 2020. He also frowned at the unutilized funds of the agency.

The committee interacted with the Controller General of Customs, Hameed Ali, and his management team, and we discovered that there was poor performance in 2020. Also, we expressed reservation about the unutilized funds of the agency. They gave the excuse that they are having difficulties with the Bureau of Public Procurement, he said.

The House also increased the revenue projection of the Customs for 2021 from N1.46 trillion to N1.678 trillion.
April 30, 1989 was supposed to be a typical Sunday morning at church in the small town of Lakeville, Indiana.

Instead, the bodies of the pastor, his wife and her two young daughters were discovered at their nearby home.

'I saw something that day that nobody should ever have to see,' John Botich, the detective who investigated the quadruple homicide, said on a new podcast.

The motive, prosecutors contend, was a teenage rite of passage: prom.

Jeff Pelley, 17, was so angry that his father, Bob, wouldn't let him go to the dance's before and after events  a dinner, a party and a trip to an amusement park  that he shot the pastor. Jeff had to kill his stepmother, Dawn, and his two stepsisters, Janel, eight, and Jolene, six, to leave no witnesses, according to prosecutors.

He then met his date and enjoyed the Saturday night festivities into the next day.

It took until 2006 to bring Jeff Pelley to trial and a jury found him guilty of all four counts. He was sentenced to 160 years, which he is currently serving at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Indiana.

Yet he has maintained his innocence and his case is still making its way through the courts. The murder weapon, believed to be the family's shotgun, was never found nor was physical evidence presented at his trial. His sister, Jacque, who believes he is innocent, runs a website called Justice for Jeff that pointed out the police did not fingerprint the crime scene.

The new third season of CounterClock, audiochuck's true-crime podcast, probes the complicated case and promises fresh leads. 'Information has come to light,' Delia D'Ambra, the podcast's host, told DailyMail.com.

All 20 episodes are being released at once on Thursday, the anniversary of the tragedy. D'Ambra visited Lakeville several times and said on the podcast: 'The buildings are still there today. Thirty-two years ago the parsonage became the scene of one of the worst and most infamous family massacres in Indiana history.'

On April 30, 1989, members of the Olive Branch United Brethren Church wondered why their pastor, Bob Pelley, was running late for Sunday service. Bob and his family lived at the home near the church and parishioners went over to check on them. They discovered the bodies of Bob, his wife, Dawn, and his young stepdaughters, Janel, eight, and, Jolene, six, pictured above in the front row in an undated photo. Top row: Jacque, Jeff and Jessica

'I saw something that day that nobody should ever have to see,' John Botich, the detective who investigated the quadruple homicide, said on a new season of the podcast CounterClock. 'Dawn Pelley was on her knees, had a girl in each arm trying to protect them. And it was a pretty devastating sight.' Witnesses told police that the home was locked - unusual for the small town of Lakeville, Indiana. Above, Dawn, Janel, Jolene and Jessica in an undated photo. Jessica Pelley, who now goes by Jessi Toronjo, was sleeping over a friend's house the night of the murders

Investigators suspected Bob's teenage son, Jeff. His motive, prosecutors contend, was prom. Jeff Pelley, 17, was so angry that his father, Bob, wouldn't let him go to the dance's before and after events  a dinner, a party and a trip to an amusement park  that he shot the pastor. Jeff had to kill his stepmother, Dawn, and his two stepsisters, Janel and Jolene, to leave no witnesses, according to prosecutors. Above, Jeff Pelley at the LaVille High School prom on the night of Saturday, April 29, 1989

Alan Baum, Jeff Pelley's defense attorney during his trial in 2006, pointed out that there was nothing that indicated Jeff acted differently at prom. 'To think he could spend that whole evening doing all of the things they did and just having fun like a kid after murdering his family is preposterous,' Baum told 48 Hours. Above, the parsonage, where the family lived, today

While what some dubbed 'the prom night murders' has been covered extensively in the press, there has been less focus on how the blended family came to be. The relationship between Jeff and his father as well as with his stepmother, Dawn, was 'a huge part of investigation into the crime,' D'Ambra explained.

After the murders, detectives interviewed Jeff with his grandparents. He said this about his stepmother in a video obtained by 48 Hours: 'We didn't get along real well. I mean, we talked hi, bye type thing but we never really talked to each other or anything. I mean I didn't hate her or anything but we just we  we tolerated each other.'

Bob Pelley met his first wife - her name was Ava but everyone called her Joy - while they were both studying at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio in the 1960s. The couple were married by 1970 and Jeff was born in 1971. His sister Jacque followed in 1976.

Jacque recalled: 'I have all good memories of growing up with my mom and dad and Jeff. Our life was normal, I mean comparatively to other people. We were all close.'

In 1980, the family moved to Cape Coral, Florida. While Bob had once focused on religious studies, his interest in computer programming had landed him a job. Still, the church was very much a part of the Pelley family's life. 'Throughout the early '80s, Bob and Joy instilled their strong Christian faith in their two kids,' according to the podcast.

But four years later, Joy Pelley was diagnosed with skin cancer and she died in February 1985.

'My mom was big on she did not want to fight it,' Jacque said. 'She loved Jesus. She wanted to go to heaven and meet her Savior.'

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Dawn Huber lost her husband, Edward. While working on a car in their garage, the 27-year-old was believed to have accidentally died from inhaling exhaust.

Dawn was a widow at 28 with three young daughters: Jessica, five, Janel, four, and Jolene, two. Jessica remembered her relationship with her father as being good. She said on the podcast: 'He was one person that really got me.'

Bob and Dawn met one weekend at his niece's home in Ohio. Jacque and Jeff were visiting relatives and Bob had come to pick them up. Dawn was there visiting Katie, her best friend.

By November 1985, the pair were married. It happened so quickly that Jacque and Jeff weren't at the ceremony. Dawn and her three girls moved to Florida. At the time, Bob had a good job working at a bank's data center but had decided that he was being called to the ministry, according to the podcast.

The family moved from Florida to the rural Lakeville in 1986.

Bob Pelley became interested in computer programming during the 1970s. In the '80s, the family was living in Florida and he had a good job at a bank data center. But after marrying his second wife, Dawn, he decided he was called to the ministry and moved the family to Lakeville, Indiana, according to the podcast. Above, the Olive Branch United Brethren Church today

'I know there was a lot of angst in that family between him and his dad - between Bob and Jeff. I know a situation where Bob punched him one time. I think the neighbors saw a lot of that same thing as well,' Mark Senter, a former detective with the Indiana State Police who investigated the murders, told 48 Hours. According to a new season of true-crime podcast, CounterClock, Bob was strict with his children, Jeff and Jacque, who he had with his first wife, Joy. Joy died of skin cancer in February 1985. Above, Bob Pelley in 1984

In 1989, Jeff Pelley was interviewed by police but prosecutors did not press charges. It was 13 years later, in 2002, when a new prosecutor took over the case that he was arrested and charged. By that time, Jeff was married with a son and working as a computer consultant for IBM in Florida. Above, Jeff Pelley is comforted by friends at the Lakeville funeral for his father, stepmother and two stepsisters in May 1989

When the case went to trial in 2006, the prosecution put forth a theory that hinged on a timeline. There was a 'very, very small window when the family could have been murdered, and it was very clear the only person who could have done this was Jeff,' Frank Schaffer, former chief deputy prosecutor, told 48 Hours. Above, St. Joseph County Prosecutor Chris Toth, announcing the arrest of Jeff Pelley for the murders in August 2002

Reverend Robert Pelley, known as Bob, ministered a congregation of 40 to 50 members at the Olive Branch United Brethren Church. The family lived at the parsonage, a white house that still shares a parking lot with the church in a quiet neighborhood.

Pastor Bob was late for the 9:30 a.m. Sunday service that April 30, 1989.

It was unlike him and one of his parishioners, David Hathaway, went to the parsonage to check on him and his family. He knocked but there was no response. Also unusual for the small town, the house was locked. Blinds were drawn and curtains were shut.

Hathaway headed back to the church. But, D'Ambra said on the podcast: 'Something just didn't feel right to him.'

A little after 10, he and two other church members were able to get a key. 'Dave made it only a few steps into the house before he knew that something was horribly wrong,' D'Ambra said.

He first noticed the pastor's glasses on the carpet in the hallway and then 'saw Bob laying face up in a pool of blood,' according to the podcast. A call was made to 911 and the St. Joseph County Police were on their way.

After the police arrived, it was confirmed that Dawn, Janel and Jolene were dead in the basement. John Botich, former St. Joseph County Police detective, recalled: 'Dawn Pelley was on her knees, had a girl in each arm trying to protect them.

'And it was a pretty devastating sight.'

But three of the Pelley children were still unaccounted for: Jeff, 17, Jacque, 13 and Jessica, nine. Jessica was sleeping over at a friend's house while Jacque had been at a nearby college visiting friends. Jeff was at an amusement park called Great America in the Chicago area, an after-prom activity.

At the parsonage, Botich was soon joined by Mark Senter, then a detective with the Indiana State Police. Senter knew Bob Pelley as they were both members of the Lakeville Lions Club.

The detectives went through the rest of the house and Botich said that 'nothing was in disarray.' Witnesses told them the house had been locked and it did not appear to be a burglary.

Above, a still from a video in which Jeff Pelley, then 17, was interviewed with his grandparents about the murders of his father, stepmother and two stepsisters. 'We didn't get along real well. I mean, we talked hi, bye type thing but we never really talked to each other or anything. I mean I didn't hate her or anything but we just we  we tolerated each other,' Jeff told police about his stepmother Dawn

Above, the two detectives who investigated the Pelley family murders. On the left is former St. Joseph County Detective John Botich and on the right is former State Indiana Police detective Mark Senter now mayor of Plymouth, Indiana. On April 30, 1989, after the bodies were discovered, the two detectives arrived on the scene. They went through the house and Botich said that 'nothing was in disarray.' Witnesses told them the house had been locked and it did not appear to be a burglary

Investigators started to suspect Jeff.

'I know there was a lot of angst in that family between him and his dad - between Bob and Jeff. I know a situation where Bob punched him one time. I think the neighbors saw a lot of that same thing as well,' Senter told 48 Hours for an episode that aired in January last year.

Before prom, Bob had grounded Jeff after he was caught stealing CDs and some money from a home, and he was not allowed to attend dinner before the dance or events after it. 'The embarrassment of his dad driving him not having to do any of the other activities, was crushing to Jeff Pelley,' Senter told 48 Hours.

In 1989, there was not enough evidence to bring charges against Jeff. It wasn't until 2002, that a new prosecutor decided to pursue charges and he was arrested. By that time, Jeff was married with a son and working as a computer consultant for IBM in Florida.

When the case went to trial in 2006, the prosecution put forth a theory that hinged on a timeline. There was a 'very, very small window when the family could have been murdered, and it was very clear the only person who could have done this was Jeff,' Frank Schaffer, former chief deputy prosecutor, told 48 Hours.

The Saturday of that 1989 prom, students had dropped by to show off their outfits to Pastor Bob, who Schaffer said kept his home open to the community, until about 5 p.m. According to the prosecution, the four murders took place between 5 and before 5:30, when visitors who came by found the home locked.

In that around 20 minutes, Jeff took the family's shotgun from its rack, shot his father, stepmother and two stepsisters, hid the weapon and shells, showered, and then went to a friend's house to meet his date, according to prosecutors.

'There's no possible way that he could have done all of those things in the amount of time he had,' said Alan Baum, Jeff's defense attorney during the trial.

Baum also pointed out that there was nothing that indicated Jeff acted differently at prom. 'To think he could spend that whole evening doing all of the things they did and just having fun like a kid after murdering his family is preposterous,' he told 48 Hours.

The jury found the prosecution's case convincing and convicted Jeff Pelley.

'He wouldn't have pulled the trigger, I believe with all my heart,' Jacque, his sister, said in 2007.

However, his stepsister, Jessica, told 48 Hours she thinks the evidence points to Jeff.

Delia D'Ambra, the podcast host, told DailyMail.com she spent hours in living rooms in the tiny town of Lakeville talking to people about the case. Some said Jeff is guilty while others feel there are still unanswered questions more than 30 years later. She said: 'There is a split.'

Jeff Pelley's lawyers appealed the conviction, which was upheld by the Indiana Supreme Court in 2009. After the appeals, his current lawyer, Frances Watson, filed a petition for post-conviction relief, which challenges the legality of his conviction. (Watson is a law professor at Indiana University's Robert H McKinney School of Law and a founding director of its Wrongful Conviction Clinic.)

D'Ambra said there is a court date this month.

'I loved my family dearly and I have lived my life trying to pattern my life after my father,' Jeff Pelley said through tears at his 2006 sentencing. 'I would not, I could not and I did not do this.'
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was caught by C-SPAN cameras dozing off during President Joe Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

And, of course, Twitterverse had plenty to say about it, some even outraged that a sitting senator would fall asleep during a presidential address to the nation.

READ ALSO: Stickers of Ted Cruz with 'Proud Boy' tattoo and leather harness have popped up in San Antonio

One Twitter user, asked how useful Cruz is to Texas if he can't stay awake during a speech. Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro couldn't resist the urge to chime in on social media.

"Ted Cruz is taking a siesta at tonights Biden speech, asleep on the job as usual," Castro tweeted.

Cruz responded to the backlash on Twitter by blaming Biden for being #BoringbutRadical.

The sleeping incident comes on the heels of a public feud on Twitter with "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah earlier in the day on Wednesday.

In response to a clip of the show, Cruz tweeted that "Trevor Noah whines that people are fleeing high-tax blue states & moving in droves to low-tax states like Texas, where the jobs are."

Noah fired back by saying the senator shouldn't use words like "fleeing" and "Texas" in the same sentence  referring to the backlash Cruz faced when he left for Cancu in the middle of February's destructive and deadly winter storms.

The two went back and forth on Twitter for about three hours. Noah later took a swing at Cruz for sleeping during the address, tweeting that "Teds eyes are hooked up to his states power grid."

Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images

taylor.pettaway@express-news.net
New Delhi, April 29 : The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress looks poised to retain power in West Bengal, while the DMK led by M.K. Stalin will come to power in Tamil Nadu with a big majority.

As per the CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News, the NDA is winning Puducherry, barely retaining Assam and losing Tamil Nadu. The exit poll stated that the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool is likely to retain West Bengal, while the Pinarayi Vijayan-led LDF is set to return to power for the second time in a row in Kerala.

The survey stated that in West Bengal, the incumbent Trinamool Congress is likely to retain power for the third consecutive term amid a robust challenge from the BJP.

The survey suggests that the Left, which had ruled the state for more than three decades, is likely to be reduced to a marginal player, despite forming a pre-poll alliance with the country's grand old party - the Congress.

Also, the entry of a Muslim front - comprising the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the influential cleric Abbas Siddiqui's new party Indian Secular Front - into the electoral fray will fail to spell trouble for the Trinamool Congress.

Translated into seats, the survey data project Trinamool to emerge victorious on 152 to 164 seats in the state, which has a total of 294 Assembly constituencies, with 148 being the majority mark.

The survey data clearly indicate that BJP has emerged as a key player on the political landscape of the state as the saffron party is likely to register victory on 109 to 121 seats. The Left-Congress combine is projected to grab 14 to 25 seats.

In the 2016 Assembly elections, the Trinamool had won 211 seats, the BJP had secured 3 seats while the Left-Congress combine had cornered 76 seats.

The survey stated that Assam would see a photo-finish for both the BJP and the Congress, as the UPA is poised to close the gap with the NDA.

As per the survey, the ruling NDA would win the state polls but it would be a tough fight as the UPA will follow closely on its heels.

The exit poll stated that the NDA has a slight edge with 65 seats in the 126-member Assembly, one more than the majority mark of 64, while the UPA would win 59 seats. The projected seats for NDA are between 58 and 71, while for the UPA, they are between 53 and 66.

As per the exit poll, the Congress-led 10-party 'Mahajot' will get 48.8 per cent votes, while the NDA will get 42.9 per cent votes and others 8.3 per cent votes.

In 126-member Assembly, Independents and others will be the key players with the BJP having the edge being the ruling party in the state.

In Kerala, it's a straight-forward electoral battle between the incumbent Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF).

According to the exit poll, the ruling LDF is expected to retain power in the southern state, thus bucking the trend of the incumbent tasting defeat in every second electoral cycle.

The exit poll data for Tamil Nadu show that the first Assembly elections held after the death of political stalwarts of J. Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi will witness the return of M.K. Stalin-led DMK-Congress alliance to power with a clear majority.

Voting for the 234-seat Tamil Nadu Assembly was held on April 6 in a single phase.

The survey data show that a combination of 10-year anti-incumbency factor and the absence of a charismatic successor to Jayalalithaa are expected to lead to an electoral setback for the ruling AIADMK-led coalition.

Translated into seats, the survey shows that the DMK-led alliance is projected to secure 160 to 172 seats in the state having a total of 234 Assembly constituencies. The incumbent AIADMK-led alliance is expected to be restricted to 58 to 70 seats in the state.

The exit poll data show that the NDA will win the Union Territory of Puducherry with two-third majority. The NDA is projected to win 21 out of the 30 Assembly seats in the UT, which went to the polls on April 6.

The exit poll projected 19 to 23 seats for the NDA comprising AINRC, BJP and AIADMK. The UPA, which includes the Congress and the DMK, will win 8 seats with a projected range of 8-10 seats.
(Newser)  Three of the more than a dozen people charged in a kidnapping plot involving Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer now face new weapons of mass destruction charges. Adam Fox, 40, Barry Croft, 45, and Daniel Joseph Harris, 23, were on Wednesday hit with charges they knowingly conspired to use WMDs, CNN reports. They already faced federal kidnapping conspiracy charges. The US Attorney's Office that filed the charges accuses the three of aiming to use the devices for "harming and hindering the governor's security detail and any responding law enforcement officers" amid the plot to kidnap Whitmer.

story continues below

Fox is accused of ordering $4,000 worth of explosives, while Croft and Harris, who also face charges of possessing an unregistered destructive device, are accused of detonating an IED containing shrapnel "to assess its effectiveness as an anti-personnel weapon" near human silhouette targets. A fourth man allegedly suggested using bombs to demolish a bridge near Whitmer's vacation home, and Fox and Croft allegedly checked out potential spots to mount explosives, the Detroit News reports. The new charges could mean the three suspects could face up to life behind bars if convicted. (Read more Gretchen Whitmer stories.)
The Royal Mint has unveiled the largest ever coin in its 1,135-year history, a gold-plated piece with a hefty weight and an even heftier price tag.

The 10,000 gold proof coin is a commemorative piece of work weighing a whopping 10kg, 1,250 times the weight of a standard 50p piece, with a diameter of 20cm.

One of the Mint's so-called 'masterworks', it features 10 of the Queen's 'Beasts', including a lion, a griffin, a falcon and a unicorn, coins displaying each of which have previously been released since 2017.

The special 'Queen's Beats' coin is the largest created by the Mint in its history, which stretches back to 886

They are based on 10 stone statues which lined the route to Westminster Abbey during the Queen's coronation in 1953.

This is the first time all 10 have appeared on one coin, with just one copy of the 10kg version, which took 400 hours to make, being created by the Mint.

It has already been snapped up by a collector who paid a 'six figure' sum for the one-of-a-kind coin.

Although the Mint failed to disclose the exact sales figure, given the prices the Mint has sold similar coins for, it could potentially have been flogged for as much as 700,000.

This is because the Mint is also releasing a limited number of gold proof coins weighing slightly less, with 2kg, 1kg, 5oz and 1oz versions also available.

However, they would still set an aspiring collector back a chunk of change, as they are retailing for 139,200, 63,380, 10,525 and 2,315, respectively.

With the 2kg coin twice the size of the 1kg and selling for 2.2 times as much, the price of the 10kg version would be 696,000 if the Mint charged five times the 139,200 sales price for it.

TABLE TITLE Coin type Denomination Weight Availability Price The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK 5 Brilliant Uncirculated coin 5 28g Unltd 13 The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK 1oz Gold Proof coin 100 31g 625 2,315 The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK 5oz Gold Proof coin 500 156g 135 10,525 The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK Gold Proof 1kg coin 1,000 1kg 16 63,380 The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK Gold Proof 2kg coin 2,000 2kg 4 139,200 The Queen's Beasts 2021 UK Gold Proof 10kg coin 10,000 10kg 1 Undisclosed Source: The Royal Mint

There are just four 2kg versions available, 16 1kg and 135 5oz, the Mint said. Four silver versions, with weights ranging from 1oz to 1kg and prices from 92.50 to 2,270 are also being released.

And for those with slightly shorter pockets and slightly less storage space, an unlimited number of brilliant uncirculated 5 coin versions of the design will be available for 13.

The 10kg is the latest, and one of the most eye-catching, examples of the Royal Mint's increasing pivot towards striking luxury bullion bars and coins for private collectors, as it is expected to mint fewer circulating coins as cash usage falls.

The 10,000 commemorative coin was sold to a private buyer for a 'six figure sum', the Mint said

Other high-profile examples include the 18-carat gold credit card it created alongside Mastercard, which were selling for 18,750.

The Royal Mint's precious metals division, which handles gold, silver and platinum bullion sales, saw revenue increase 46 per cent in 2019-20 to 356.9million.

Its popularity has continued throughout the pandemic, with unprecedented demand for precious metals over the last 12 months.

However, such demand from gold-hungry collectors and investors has put it under strain, with an investigation by This is Money revealing customers being billed for out-of-stock items and having problems with the deliveries of their goods.

It took 400 hours to make and displays 10 beasts around it, including a dragon, lion and griffin

The Mint previously said it was investigating issues with its couriers.

The Royal Mint's Clare McLennan said of the 10kg coin: 'It is the latest in our "Masterworks" series which offer unique works of art for collectors, exclusively from The Royal Mint.

'The Royal Mint's "Queen's Beasts" commemorative coin collection has grown in popularity since the first beast was introduced in 2017 and has become a firm favourite amongst coin collectors across the globe.

'This coin sets a new standard for minting - combining centuries old techniques with innovative technology to create a unique and beautiful work of art.

'It is the largest coin ever created by The Royal Mint, and is testament to the expertise, craftsmanship and skill of our team.'
Japan approves RCEP, world's largest trade deal including China, ASEAN

Xinhua) 13:38, April 29, 2021

TOKYO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Japan's upper house of parliament on Wednesday approved the world's largest free trade deal RCEP which comprises 15 Asia-Pacific countries.

The bloc includes the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Japan's House of Representatives, the lower house of the parliament gave its approval earlier this month.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), signed in November 2020, is expected to create a massive free trade zone across a wide assortment of indicators, and its 15 member states are home to 2.27 billion people, with a total gross domestic product of 26 trillion U.S. dollars and total exports of 5.2 trillion U.S. dollars.

When taking effect, the deal will eliminate tariffs on 91 percent of goods and introduces common rules on investment and intellectual property to promote free trade.

For Japan, it will be the first trade deal that involves both China, its largest trading partner and South Korea, its third largest trading partner.

The pact will enter into force 60 days after it is ratified by six of the ASEAN members and three non-ASEAN countries.

As of Wednesday, China, Singapore and Thailand have completed procedures for ratification.

China, the world's second-largest economy, completed the procedures for ratification on April 15 this year, after it approved the ratification of the RCEP agreement on March 22, according to its ministry of commerce.

Singapore, for its part, ratified the RCEP agreement on April 9.

A ministry statement quoted Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing as saying the ratification "signals Singapore's strong commitment to strengthening our trade and economic linkages with our partners, for the benefit of our businesses and people."

The parliament of Thailand approved the RCEP agreement on Feb. 11, according to Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister and Commerce Minister Jurin Laksanawisit.

Laksanawisit said RCEP member countries are accelerating the ratification procedures of the agreement, which will generate huge development opportunities for Thailand.

China's commerce ministry, in addition, has said that all RCEP signatories have expressed their intentions to complete the ratification process within the year so as to see its taking effect from Jan. 1, 2022.

The Japanese government said in March that its economy could be boosted by 15 trillion yen (140 billion U.S. dollars) by the massive trade deal.

In the country's first publicized estimate on the impact of the trade deal in Japan, the government also expected some 570,000 jobs to be created.

ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Rebecca Willink, from Melbourne, is of Indian descent and claims that she is constantly unable to find any foundation that matches her skin tone at or online from stores like Woolworths, Big W and Coles

A mother-of-two fed up at the lack of variety in foundation offered at supermarkets has called on major retailers to end 'make-up discrimination'.

Rebecca Willink, from Melbourne, is of Indian descent and claims that she is constantly unable to find any foundation that matches her skin tone at or online from stores like Woolworths, Big W and Coles.

Having moved to Australia from the UK when she was a teenager, she claims that for 20 years she's instead had to buy her make up from cosmetic stores or specific brand websites - costing her much more than it would from a supermarket.

In a move to end the constant searching for her shade, Ms Willink has created a petition demanding there is 'fair access' for shoppers from every background.

'Currently in Australia, there is, and always has been, a distinct lack of representation of different cultures in the make-up aisles in supermarkets,' she said.

'This is a form of racial discrimination and must be addressed immediately.

'When these colours are not visible on shelves, there is a subtle message sent that the consumers of these shades do not matter, that we are not valued, and that we don't belong in the same sphere as other Australians.'

Ms Willink said the 'supply and demand' reason wasn't good enough, insisting that those with darker skin tones shouldn't have to ask for make-up to be made available to them.

Ms Willink has started a petition demanding supermarkets diversify their cosmetics range

She said Australian supermarkets were worlds apart from the stores she shopped in while growing up in the UK, which were always stocked with make-up for all skin tones.

Upon the release of a new make-up range by MCoBeauty, Ms Willink said she was hopeful her local Woolworths would have bumped up their stock.

As the new range featured models from various backgrounds, the mother expected the foundation to be offered in both light and darker shades.

'However, to my disappointment there were absolutely no shades anywhere near my skin tone of either of their foundations, despite their website flaunting 13 shades of the product as well as models of various cultural backgrounds,' she said.

When asking staff if they had anymore stock, Ms Willink claims she was told the darkest shade available was 'medium beige'.

She was told she could buy foundation from the MCoBeauty's online site but with the cost of shipping and the price already increased, she was looking at a $38 bottle compared to a $13 bottle from a supermarket.

'It is not just about not being able to buy these products, it is also about our cultures not being seen or recognised as being valid,' she said.

As a busy mother of two young children, Ms Willink said she should be able to pick up some make-up while doing her usual grocery shop.

'I'm sure there are other people of colour who would love the same opportunity as others to access affordable make up products at Woolworths,' she said.

The mother of two says that when visiting her local supermarket she is never able to find a foundation that matches her skin tone while there are always lighter options available

A Coles spokesperson said the store works with their supplies to create inclusive products.

'Coles values and celebrates diversity. We work with our suppliers to provide a range of cosmetics that is inclusive and meets the needs of our customers,' they said.

'We appreciate customer feedback and are always looking for ways to improve our offering. We will review the opportunity to increase our range online in line with customer demand.'

Woolworths said they will continue to listen to customer's feedback.

'We serve a diverse mix of customers and aim to reflect this in our range,' a spokesperson said.

'Across the entire supermarket we select products based on the volume of demand, but we understand a different approach is needed to offer a more inclusive range in cosmetics.

'We've previously trialled a broader selection of cosmetics tones online, and will continue to listen to our customers to help improve our cosmetics offering both in-store and online.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted MCoBeauty for comment.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by slowness of movement and tremors, which often appear asymmetrically in patients. The new model of PD described in this review article published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease may explain these perplexing asymmetrical motor symptoms and other known variations such as different degrees of constipation and sleep disorders.

PD is a heterogenous disorder. Symptoms and the speed with which symptoms progress vary greatly among patients. In three-quarters of patients, motor symptoms initially appear in one side of the body. Some patients develop constipation, loss of smell, sleep disorders, and other symptoms several years before diagnosis, but others do not. Although it is possible to define several subtypes of PD characterized by similar constellations of symptoms, the underlying causes of these differences are poorly understood. Aggregation and neuron-to-neuron spread of the protein alpha-synuclein is thought to be involved.

The alpha-synuclein Origin and Connectome (SOC) model presented by Per Borghammer, MD, PhD, DMSc, Department of Nuclear Medicine & PET, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark, proposes a unifying model, which may explain much of this variation among patients. The SOC model is fundamentally based on two ideas: the location or origin of the first alpha-synuclein aggregates, and the importance played by the neural connectome in transmitting the alpha-synuclein pathology to other parts of the nervous system.

This model was developed by integrating already available evidence from clinical and imaging studies of patients, animal models of PD, and postmortem findings in brain tissue from PD patients. This unifying model seems capable of explaining why PD is often an asymmetric disease in the first place, but also why some patients show more asymmetry than others and some no asymmetry at all. It also explains why certain subtypes of PD seem to exist, including why constipation and sleep disorders emerge prior to diagnosis only in some patients.

Imaging studies of living PD patients and studies of biopsies and gut and brain tissue from biobanks clearly suggest that PD patients display different profiles of neuronal damage. In some patients, the brain is damaged before the peripheral nervous system, and in others the opposite pattern is seen. This new model, which is an extended version of the body-first versus brain-first hypothesis we described in this journal in 2019, proposes a simple explanation for motor asymmetry, while simultaneously offering explanations for several other unexplained phenomena in PD." Dr. Per Borghammer, MD, PhD, DMSc, Department of Nuclear Medicine & PET, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark

The model postulates that the first instance of pathological alpha-synuclein typically starts in a single location, and then spreads from this origin site using permissible neural connections. The origin site can occur in the enteric nervous system of the gut, leading to a body-first subtype of PD. This type is characterized by early symptoms from gut and other peripheral organs and also sleep symptoms stemming from the lower parts of the brainstem.

In contrast, the first alpha-synuclein pathology can also start inside the brain leading to a brain-first subtype. "Such patients will often develop motor symptoms quite quickly, whereas sleep symptoms and autonomic symptoms develop only later," noted Dr. Borghammer. "At later disease stages, the two types of patients will have a similar burden of motor and non-motor symptoms, but early on they are very different."

The second component of the SOC model pertains to how neurons are wired to each other, known as neuronal connectivity. One brain hemisphere communicates mainly to itself with only 1% of neuronal connections crossing the midline to the other hemisphere. Therefore, if the first occurrence of pathological alpha-synuclein arises in a single location in the brain, it will by definition be in either the left or the right hemisphere. The subsequent spreading of pathology will therefore happen primarily via "same-sided" connections including to the dopamine cells on the same side of the brain. This leads to asymmetric damage of the dopamine neurons causing asymmetric motor symptoms in patients.

"In short, we think that the motor asymmetry in PD must be understood in a brain-first vs. body-first context. In brain-first PD, the initial pathology starts in one hemisphere and initially damages that hemisphere via the predominantly same-sided connections, leading to marked asymmetry," noted Dr. Borghammer. "With time, the other hemisphere is also involved, evidenced by the increasingly symmetric motor symptoms in the patient."

Dr. Borghammer explained that the model also predicts that body-first PD patients will be different and generally have more symmetric motor symptoms. This is because the pathology spreads from the gut to the brain in a more symmetric fashion due to left/right overlapping connections in the peripheral nervous system. This then leads to a "wave" of spreading pathology inside the brain, which is more symmetric than that seen in brain-first patients. They therefore display more symmetric dopamine loss and motor symptoms, and this is exactly what clinical and imaging studies have been reporting. The model also predicts that at diagnosis, body-first patients already have a larger, more symmetric burden of alpha-synuclein pathology, which in turn promotes faster disease progression and accelerated cognitive decline.

"It is known that PD patients of the body-first type are at an increased risk of developing dementia. According to the SOC model this increased risk follows from the fact that, at the time of a PD diagnosis, the alpha-synuclein pathology is more widespread, more symmetrical, and shows more involvement of certain brainstem neurons, which are themselves involved in cognitive decline and dementia," Dr. Borghammer added.

Asked about the future outlook for the SOC model, Dr. Borghammer responded that it will now be tested in future studies. "A good scientific model should be testable and falsifiable, and the present model lives up to these requirements. The scientific community now needs to study whether the SOC model has more explanatory power than previous models of PD pathogenesis. It is certainly not a complete description of what goes wrong in PD and needs to be further refined," he concluded.

PD is a slowly progressive disorder that affects movement, muscle control, and balance and is characterized by a broad range of motor and non-motor symptoms. It is the second most common age-related neurodegenerative disorder affecting about 3% of the population by the age of 65 and up to 5% of individuals over 85 years of age.
Pastor Rich Villodas laments celebrity culture invading churches: 'Disease of the soul'

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Pastor Rich Villodas weighed in on the dangers of celebrity-ism that has infiltrated many churches and highlighted the role every Christian has to play in combating the ideology he warned is incompatible with the Christian faith.

Generally speaking, celebrity and Christianity are not necessarily contradictions in terms because notions of celebrity are often projected onto people, Villodas, the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, said at the Q 2021 Culture Summit on April 22.

Jesus Himself could be regarded as a celebrity in the first century, he said: Wherever Jesus went, throngs of people followed him, Jesus of Nazareth was a household name. You can be sure that people asked Him to sign their tunics and autograph their parchment paper. Jesus was very known in those parts.

The problem, then, is celebrity-ism and Christianity, Villodas emphasized.

Christian celebrity-ism is failure with regard to our witness before Jesus because it's trapped in the lie that mass appeal equals maturity, that influence equals integrity, that charisma equals character, he explained.

Celebrity-ism creates a culture in which self-proclaimed influencers assume the role of spiritual mothers and fathers, he said. Celebrity-ism is deceptive and incompatible with Christian faith because it locates authority in the number of followers and blue checks next to our names. Celebrity-ism is not found in the crowds, but in the soul and in the environments that reinforce it. It's a sickness of the soul and a disease of the system.

The Deeply Formed Lifeauthor noted that in the wilderness, Satan tempted Jesus to build a ministry that would be based on a kind of ancient celebrity-ism," one not rooted in self-giving love but in spectacular showmanship.

The story shows us that the celebrity-ism that we are tempted with is one that's marked by entitlement, one that's marked by performance, one thats marked by power, he contended.

Entitlement is found in the expectation that I deserve to be treated differently. Performance is oriented around the lie that my sense of self is predicated on the attention and affirmation of the crowd. This notion of power is expressed in the incessant need to advance my personal agenda, and this is a sickness of the soul.

Celebrities dont form on their own  and behind every celebrity pastor is an adoring congregation that both loves and supports the celebrity atmosphere. Similarly, the development of a celebrity culture also doesn't happen overnight. Rather, it begins when a pastor has a driving ambition for fame, but it can't take root unless the congregation supports that ambition, the pastor said.

Unfortunately, many people want their pastor to be a spiritual hero or celebrity at some level, he said.

Villodas stressed that celebrity-ism is not monopolized by megachurches or big names, adding: Ive seen all kinds of leaders and small churches and medium-sized churches act like they're part of the royal family.

For the health of the Body of Christ, celebrity-ism must be resisted, and that will require every believer asking themselves four questions.

- Have I wrestled honestly with the entitlement I carry?

- Am I submitting myself to authority willingly, joyfully and transparently?

- Am I regularly proximate to people I'm not gaining any social capital from?

- Am I living from the center of God's affirming, unconditional love?

The pitfalls associated with celebrity pastors have been the focus of much discussion in recent years amid the public downfall of well-known Christian leaders, including former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz and legendary apologist Ravi Zacharias.

New York pastor and author Tim Keller told The Christian Post that when pastors get to be well-known, the praise can turn their heads, the criticism can prompt self-pity, and the overwork can cause them to neglect their prayer life.

For all those reasons, very often, so-called celebrity ministers and figures very often live lives less consistent with the Christian faith than Christians who are not so famous, Keller said.

It's the job of the so-called famous Christians to just live ordinary, good Christian lives, and not overwork and burn out and get filled with self-pity and anger over all the people that are criticizing them. Thats the thing that sets them up for these things where they embezzle money, they have affairs or they do things like that.

While Christian leaders who have not been faithful or responsible with the platform God has given them must be held accountable, Keller stressed their moral failure doesn't mean that the Christian faith doesn't work.

A quack doctor doesn't mean that medicine is illegitimate. A quack evangelist doesn't mean that the Gospel isn't true. So on one hand, dont make excuses for your heroes. On the other hand, it doesnt mean that everything theyve ever said is illegitimate, he said.
US citizens and expatriates from Europe are travelling back home amid a sharp surge in Covid-19 cases in India and government advisories asking them to return.

While companies are seeing a surge in inquiries, Air India is operating extra flights from Delhi to New York, Newark, and San Francisco and higher capacity Boeing 777 aircraft from Mumbai to Newark to cater to the demand.

There is a huge surge in inquiries for to the US in the past two-three days. Apart from US citizens, green card holders and Indians whose children work in the US too are looking to But flights to the US are currently are full and getting seats is difficult, said Jyoti Mayal, president of Travel Agents Association of India.

People are willing to travel at a short notice by paying high fares, said Madhav Oza, director of Blue Star Travels. A one-way ticket on non-stop flights from Mumbai to Newark on Friday was priced at over Rs 140,000 for last-minute bookings while one-stop flights via Doha on Saturday was available for around Rs 93,000.

On Wednesday, the US government issued an advisory asking its citizens not to travel to India and or to leave it as soon as safe to do so. The US government cited shortages of medical infrastructure while sharing its advice. Access to all types of medical care is becoming severely limited in India due to the surge in Covid-19 cases, it said. On Thursday, it authorised the voluntary departure of family members of US government employees in India.

A few days back, the German Embassy in New Delhi highlighted health concerns in a communication to its citizens asking them to consider returning temporarily. A source said there was no exodus of German residents from India at present.

An airline executive, however, pointed out that families of expatriate executives working in India have begun returning to Europe and the US. We have seen this trend in the last ten days, he said.

A sharp surge in Covid-19 cases in Delhi has led to a severe shortage of hospital beds and medical oxygen in the national capital. Non- availability of timely medical assistance is the main cause of worry among foreign nationals working in India. Further children of expatriates, too, have completed their academic terms and so it easier for families to proceed home.

Our non-stop flights on the India-USA-India sector have always been very popular. Any surge in interest for seats on our flights to the US can be attributed to various factors. We will not like to make any specific comment on the same, said an airline spokesperson. United Airlines did not immediately respond to a query on the topic.
State Secretary Simona Cojocaru, head of the Department for Defence Policy, Planning and International Relations, and the deputy head of the Defence General Staff, Lieutenant General Vasile Toader, participated on Thursday, at the southeastern Mihail Kogalniceanu 57th Air Force Base, in the ceremony for NATO certification of the detachment of Royal Air Force (RAF) in view of executing the service of enhanced Air Policing.

"The strategic partnership between Romania and the United Kingdom is solid and powerful. Today, the United Kingdom is contributing once more to strengthening the security of Romania, but also of the Black Sea region. The participation of the Royal Air Force in the air policing missions this year, on Romanian territory - the third mission of its kind after the ones in 2017 and 2018, but also the announced intention to participate in the mission next year shows the commitment supported by the United Kingdom for our region. Your presence his is not an exercise. It represents the essence of our discouragement and defence posture that demonstrates unity and solidarity," said State Secretary Simona Cojocaru, quoted in a Ministry of National Defence (MApN) release.

In his turn, the ambassador of the United Kingdom in Bucharest, Andrew Noble stated, during the ceremony that such air policing missions constitute the guarantee that we will be able to counteract any aggression or threat targeting us.

Lieutenant General Vasile Toader addressed the 200 servicemen (pilots and technical staff) who make up the British detachment.

"I addressed the invitation to the British allies that during their mission in our country they participate in the exercises we have planned for the months of May and June which target increasing interoperability and prove the multi-domain commitment of forces, as well as the invitation to allot time to discover the wealth of national culture and the beauty of places and to enjoy Romanian hospitality," said the deputy head of the Defence General Staff.

Present at the ceremony on behalf of the NATO Air Command in Ramstein, Germany, Air Commodore Jason Appleton, the deputy head of General Staff, welcomed the British servicemen and bid them good fortune in fulfilling the enhanced Air Policing mission together with Romanian servicemen, as part of the measures of the North Atlantic Alliance for discouragement and defence on NATO's Eastern Flank.

The British detachment, formed of nearly 200 servicemen (pilots and technical staff), with four Eurofighter Typhoon craft, will execute enhanced Air Policing missions under NATO command in the next four months, together with Romanian Air Force servicemen operating F-16 Fighting Falcons and MiG-21 LanceR.

The RAF mission is the third of its kind at Mihail Kogalniceanu run by the Royal Air Force, after similar missions in 2017 and 2018.

The Air Policing missions run jointly contribute to the development of reaction and discouragement capacities, as well as to consolidate interoperability between the Romanian Air Force and the Royal Air Force, proving involvement and determination in the context of challenges generated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A proposed 60-unit senior housing complex in Sennett is among a group of 20 projects that will receive state funding to help bring them to fruition, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced.

Sennett Meadows, a $14.9 million project being developed by Rochester's Cornerstone Group Ltd., has been awarded more than $4.9 million in New York state affordable housing grants. The governor announced the grants, which will go to 20 projects around the state and total $98 million, on Wednesday.

The Sennett project would be located at 365 E. Genesee St. Road on vacant land that's between the Quincy Hill subdivision and Sleepy Hollow Country Inn Motel. Plans show a 60-unit building, shown in drawings as having an L-shaped footprint, on a 10-acre parcel that would subdivided from a larger 32-acre piece of land that the developers have an contract to buy.

Sennett Meadows A Rochester-based developer is proposing to build a 60-unit senior housing complex on vacant land on East Genesee Street Road in Sennett.

The Sennett Meadows proposal has been under review by the town and Cayuga County's planning department since last fall. The town board approved a planned development district for the project in March in a vote that followed three months of public comment opportunities at town board meetings. It also came after a determination by the county planning department's general municipal law committee that the development district would not have an inter-municipal impact.
Five days later, eight people were killed in a shooting in Atlanta, six of them of Asian descent, accelerating already-growing concerns about anti-Asian hate. A week later, the police released the video of Mr. Harper.

At the news conference last week, at the headquarters of his union, the Detectives Endowment Association, Detective Cheung said he had often encountered verbal abuse before, but that he was surprised that during a demonstration for racial justice and equality, Mr. Harper had gone on what he called an Anti-Asian beratement for over 15 minutes.

That type of hate directed towards myself as an Asian-American is just disgusting, he said.

The lawsuit said that Detective Cheung had suffered severe emotional distress and was permanently and seriously injured by Mr. Harpers conduct, which, it said, had incapacitated him from his usual duties and required him to seek medical attention. It asked that the court compel Mr. Harper to pay unspecified monetary damages.

Image In a video released by the police, Terrell Harper is just feet from Detective Cheungs face as he curses at him, punctuating his comments with racist stereotypes making fun of Detective Cheung, who is Chinese-American.

In interviews, Mr. Harper, 39, apologized for what he acknowledged were racist comments. He said the video had been taken out of context, and that he typically uses racist remarks as part of a broader explanatory monologue to demonstrate what racism looks and feels like.

Ive got to change my method, and I came out and apologized for that, he said.

He said that he had been organizing demonstrations all year and that the lawsuit, along with targeting him specifically, represented a way for the police to stoke tension between Asian and Black communities in New York.

Megan Watson, a Korean-American organizer who has attended several marches with Mr. Harper, said that she had worked with him to organize a February march in solidarity with the Asian-American community against police brutality.
A County Derry museum has been handed a funding boost after an increase was approved at a meeting of a council committee.

Garvagh Museum presented a summary of their activities to Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council's Leisure and Development Committee last week to ask them to renew an existing agreement.

In 2016, the council had agreed to support the community and volunteer-led museum with a grant of 7,500 to be paid annually.

Councillor Richard Holmes praised the work done by the museum and suggested the annual contribution be increased to 10,000, having remained static at 7,500 since 2016.

DUP councillor Michelle Knight McQuillan seconded the motion, saying the museum had an important role in the Garvagh community.

It's a very important piece of our council area in terms of the diverse range of items it holds, but also that it's preserving the heritage of the rural area, she said.

Bann councillor Michelle Knight-McQuillan welcomed the move.

In terms of reminiscing therapy for older generations who are starting to have trouble with their memories, I know a lot of people have taken older relatives there to stimulate their memory.

I don't think an increase to 10,000 will make a big difference to council, but it will make a difference to the museum's ability to continue, hopefully for another 30 years.

The new agreement will see Garvagh Museum benefit from the funding for a further four-year period.

Following the meeting, Cllr Holmes said he was delighted the increase had been approved.

The presentation from the Garvagh Museum representatives at the Council meeting outlined the great work they have carried out to preserve local history and educate people, he said.

The museum has exceeded many of their targets in the previous partnership period with over 5,000 visits and 2,700 volunteer hours from a dedicated band of workers who keep the museum running.

In such challenging times this is the least we could do to support such an amazing effort and a real gem in the local tourism offer," said Cllr Holmes.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - GMV Minerals Inc. (TSXV: GMV) (OTCQB: GMVMF) (the "Company" or "GMV") is pleased to announce that it has commenced work on the environmental baseline studies to support the development of the Mexican Hat gold project in Cochise County, Arizona.

The environmental baseline studies will provide important input into future project development plans, which include a Project design, a National Environmental Policy Act analysis and regulatory permitting. SRK Consulting (U.S.) Inc. ("SRK") is leading the desktop reviews and fieldwork associated with the baseline studies on behalf of GMV. SRK is a leading global provider of environmental permitting and social and sustainability consulting services with decades of experience in the south western USA mining industry.

Ian Klassen, CEO commented that, "The initiation of field-level baseline data studies with SRK marks the next step in the development of the Mexican Hat gold project. By integrating baseline data collection into this stage of planning, GMV will maximize the value to the benefit of both our shareholders and the local community."

About SRK Consulting (U.S.) Inc.

SRK Consulting (U.S.), Inc. is an independent, international consulting practice that provides focused advice and solutions to clients, mainly in the earth and water resource industries. For mining projects, SRK offers services from exploration to mine closure. SRK specialists are leaders in fields such as environmental permitting, due diligence, technical studies, mine waste and water management, and mine rehabilitation. Applying their extensive knowledge and experience, SRK develops innovative approaches and practical techniques that meet clients' unique needs and financial objectives. Among SRK's clients are many of the world's major, medium-sized, and junior metal and industrial mining houses, exploration companies, financial institutions, construction firms, and government departments. Established in 1974, SRK now employs more than 1,400 professionals internationally in over 45 offices on six continents. Please see www.srk.com for more information.

About GMV Minerals Inc.

GMV Minerals Inc. is a publicly traded exploration company focused on developing precious metal assets in Arizona. GMV, through its 100% owned subsidiary, has a 100% interest in a Mining Property Lease commonly referred to as the Mexican Hat Property, located in Cochise County, Arizona, USA. The project was initially explored by Placer Dome (USA) in the late 1980's to early 1990's. GMV is focused on developing the asset and realizing the full mineral potential of the property through near term gold production. GMV. Recently updated its National Instrument inferred mineral resource to 36,733,000 tonnes grading 0.58 g/t gold at a 0.2 g/t cut-off, containing 688,000 ounces of gold.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

________________________________________

Ian Klassen, President

For further information please contact:

GMV Minerals Inc.

Ian Klassen

Tel: (604) 899-0106

Email: Klassen@gmvminerals.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.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82166
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:16:21|Editor: huaxia

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LUSAKA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- A mining conference aimed at reviewing the operations of the sector opened on Thursday with the government promising to tackle challenges that have affected the sector over the years, including unstable tax regime.

The government said that a stable mining tax regime is vital in ensuring sustainable development of the sector.

The two-day Zambia Mining Indaba 2021 being held under the theme, "Building for the Future: Reflecting on Zambia's Mining Taxation Policy towards Sustainable Investment in the Sector," has attracted various stakeholders.

Vice-President Inonge Wina said there is a need to develop a simplified but efficient tax administration that will allow for a win-win situation.

She said simplifying the tax regime will enable the government to properly audit mining firms' reported profits and losses.

"Government's desire is to create an inclusive economy that promotes investment and competitiveness," she said.

According to her, the government's desire is that communities in mining areas benefit from the mining operations through social responsibility measures.

Minister of Mines and Minerals Development Richard Musukwa said the government's vision is to have a vibrant mining sector that will contribute to the country's development goals.

Among the objectives of the conference is to come up with fiscal outcomes for the mining sector in order to achieve a fair, consistent and predictable tax regime. Enditem
U.S. officials have arrested the alleged main operator of the cryptocurrency money-laundering website Bitcoin Fog.

Roman Sterlingov, a citizen of Russia and Sweden, was detained in Los Angeles on April 28 on three money-laundering-related charges.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) accuses Sterlingov of running Bitcoin Fog, acting as a so-called "tumbler" or "mixer" service to conceal the source of the Bitcoins, especially on so-called darknet online markets that trafficked in drugs and other illegal products.

"This process allows Bitcoin Fog customers engaged in unlawful activities to launder their proceeds by concealing the nature, source, and location of their 'dirty' Bitcoin," according to an affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint by IRS special agent Devon Beckett.

Bitcoin Fog was launched in October 2011 and is still operational, according to the legal document.

During this period, Sterlingov is accused of processing 1.2 million Bitcoin, which was worth $336 million at the time of the transactions.

At today's price of $54,000 per Bitcoin, that amounts to $65 billion and almost 6 percent of all 18.6 million Bitcoin in existence.

With reporting by Reuters
Clent Morris stopped driving several years ago, sometime in his early to mid 80s, and when he needed a ride, Cheryl Jones was there for him.

The two were neighbors on Sheridan Avenue in Trenton, not a block from city police headquarters, and Jones looked after Morris, who lived alone, taking him on errands or to medical appointments.

She was the one who took him everywhere. My mother did it when he had one else to, her son Carl Jones said.

My mother was the only one who helped him, added his sister, Latasha Jones.

Thats the kind of person Cheryl Jones was, helping out any way she could, they said.

Which is why the two siblings remain in a puzzled state of shock since they learned that Morris is charged with killing their mom this past Saturday night.

Morris, who turned 90 last summer, walked a few doors down, knocked on Jones door and shot her multiple times when she answered, authorities allege. Cheryl Jones was 65.

City police officers who heard the shots were at the house in seconds. They tried to save Jones, and arrested Morris as he ascended the stairs in her home, possibly headed toward Jones boyfriend, who is ill and who Jones also cared for, her kids said.

The Joneses suspect Morris had some sort of episode, theyre not exactly sure what, and authorities have not said exactly what they suspect caused Morris to allegedly murder a woman who cared for him. Jones boyfriend later told homicide detectives that Morris had previously accused him of breaking into his home and stealing money and food, but he said hes never been in Morris home, court papers say.

Morris is scheduled to appear in Superior Court of Mercer County Thursday morning. Hes been in the Mercer County jail since his arrest.

The Joneses do know theyve lost a mother, who had five children and was a great grandmother, and who served people her entire life and never stopped giving to her family.

Nobody ever left her house hungry, Carl and Latasha said, and she arrived at others homes with carloads full of food. She was a widow and retired from service jobs, her last was at the Salvation Army.

Her birthday was New Years Eve, giving her double the reason to celebrate, but always offered to watch grandkids so others could enjoy the night, Latasha said.

Her death has not only left her family grieving, and inexplicably confused, but also leaves her boyfriend without a caretaker. The Jones kids are having relatives help out until a full-time plan is in place, all while planning their mothers services next week.

Latasha said she still cant believe it. Never could she have imagined such an end. She arrived on Sheridan first last Saturday, pulling onto the block to emergency lights and TV cameras. Shooting? Mommy? What? she said this week outside the home where he mother lived for 32 years.

She fed you for life, constantly encouraging your soul, and nourishing your body, Carl said.

The incident, although tragic and sad, also featured deft police work that likely saved Jones boyfriends life, NJ Advance Media learned. According to accounts from several police officers, including one union official, and court papers filed in the case, this is what allegedly occurred on the evening of April 24:

Sheridan Avenue is one of three small, one-way streets named for leaders in President Abraham Lincolns administration that form a loop off North Clinton Avenue across from police headquarters. (The others, Grant and Seward, connect to Lincoln, a through street.)

Officers on patrol are often in the back parking lot and last Saturday evening, one heard the gunshots. He poked his head in the back door and said, Shots fired, nearby, summoning a group of officers.

One ran to the scene while others hopped into cars, one driving down Grant and another on Sheridan, driving against the one-way.

At that moment, the departments ShotSpotter system alerted officers to gunfire and provided a specific address  Jones home.

They approached the home, and found Jones mortally wounded on the porch near the front door. Officers entered and found Morris ascending the stairs to the second floor, they said.

Jones boyfriend, identified only by initials in reports, later told investigators he and Jones were watching TV on the second floor when they heard a knock, and Jones went to answer it. He heard words, a scuffle, and Jones address Morris by name, then a gunshot and Jones say shed been shot.

As he looked for his phone, he heard two more shots.

The man started to exit his room when he saw Morris coming up the stairs. Then he heard police down below.

Put your hands up! the officers called to Morris.

Morris did, dropping a revolver on the second floor and walking back down, into the custody of detectives Jeffrey Vetter, Michael Gettler and Gregory Woods, authorities said. They recovered the suspected murder weapon and found a holster on the front porch, they said.

Officers say, and Jones family has no reason to doubt, Morris was targeting the boyfriend. (Morris is not accused of crimes against the boyfriend.)

Morris had a wound on his eye, which cops suspect was caused by recoil from one of the shots. They took him to the hospital, then the county jail on murder and related charges.

Officers performed CPR on Jones, but they could not save her.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com.
A dementia sufferer received two coronavirus vaccines just five days apart, after a mix-up at her London clinic.

The 74-year-old got her first AstraZeneca jab on January 23 after she was booked in at Woolwich Late Night Pharmacy by her daughter.

But just five days later the grandmother-of-four, who lives in supported housing, went and had another dose of the AstraZeneca jab  with medics again believing it was her first  at Plumstead Health Centre in Greenwich.

The blunder was only spotted when she turned up for her booster dose appointment from the first jab on April 11 and presented two vaccination cards.

Her family, who asked not to be named, told MailOnline they were furious 'no-one checked the system' before dishing out the jabs.

South East London CCG, which runs GP services in the area, admitted in an email they had 'no idea' the patient had already been vaccinated when it administered the second 'first' dose.

She suffered no ill effects from the double-dosing and has now received her booster 'second' dose  actually her third.

Experts said there would be 'no particular risk' from being jabbed twice in five days but added it was not advisable due to the risk of side effects.

The reason doses are given weeks apart in a 'prime-boost' strategy is the first trains the immune system to recognise the coronavirus. The second tests the reaction after immunity has developed and allows the body to strengthen it.

Britain's medical regulator says at least four weeks should be left between each dose of the Covid vaccine.

They extended this to 12 weeks in December to ensure as many vulnerable people could be jabbed as quickly as possible.

A dementia sufferer received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in five days after a mix-up at a London clinic. Her daughter said she struggles to recall recent memories

Plumstead Health Centre, where she received her second first dose, admitted it had 'no idea' she had already been inoculated when it administered the jab

'MIXING AND MATCHING' COVID JABS TO BE TRIALLED Coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Novavax will be added to a 'mix and match' trial, scientists say. Britain's medical regulator currently requires everyone to have two doses of the same jab  either AstraZeneca, Pfizer or Moderna. But Oxford University experts are testing whether alternating second doses could provoke a stronger immune response. Their trial  which could revolutionise Britain's roll-out  was already assessing the effects of combining doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Another 1,000 volunteers were recruited to the study to test combinations including vaccines made by Moderna and Novavax. Experts say mixing jabs is unlikely to pose any safety concerns and predict it could lead to shots being even more effective at preventing an infection with the virus. In the wake of AstraZeneca's blood clot fears, France approved giving recipients an alternative second dose. Germany made the same move for under-60s. But until evidence is gathered they can't say for certain whether it works or whether it is safe. Britain has only recommended under-30s are offered an alternative and that anyone who has already had their first dose should come forward for their second, unless they suffered the extremely rare complication. Oxford's mix-and-match trial was first launched in February, to investigate whether alternating doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines boosted efficacy. Advertisement

The grandmother's daughter told MailOnline: 'When I took my mother for a second Covid vaccine, she pulled out two cards. I thought maybe this was an error, but it wasn't.

'The pharmacy wouldn't give her a second dose as they said they couldn't administer it until they had confirmation she only had one dose.'

She added: 'I am furious about this. They knew she was a vulnerable adult yet they still gave her the vaccine without checking.

'No one is doing due diligence. I am really angry they put her in that situation.'

The daughter said the grandmother went to the extra appointment because her short-term memory is bad and she didn't remember she had already had a jab. This type of memory loss is common in people with dementia.

When they found out about the error at her third dose appointment, when she was accompanied, the family immediately called the surgery.

But they said the receptionist was 'dismissive' and told them because the initial first dose 'hadn't been registered' their grandmother could have a second one.

SEL CCG called the family a few days later to ask some further questions.

But the organisation then never contacted them again.

The CCG wrote in an email to the family on April 15: 'We had no idea that she had been vaccinated by Woolwich Late Night Pharmacy, hence the reason that we arranged for her vaccination at Plumstead Health Centre.'

In yet another blunder, the surgery kept texting the grandmother to organise a second dose despite already having her booked in for one.

The daughter added: 'The doctors were still texting her for a second second dose. This must have triggered something in my mother's mind to say this isn't okay.'

The grandmother received her second dose of the AstraZeneca jab in mid-April at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Greenwich.

She was not accompanied by her family to either appointment for a first dose.

A spokesman for SEL CCG told MailOnline: 'We are very sorry to hear about this patient's experience and measures are in place to make sure it does not happen again for any patient.

'We encourage the patient and their daughter to get in contact with us so we can discuss any concerns.'

Vaccine expert Professor Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading, told MailOnline it was unlikely the grandmother faced 'any particular risk' from the double dose.

He said: 'I can't see there would be any particular risk but it's questionable that the second shot was useful as it takes at least 10 days for the first to prime the system, hence the usual two to three weeks apart for all vaccines.

But he added: 'I guess it is possible that, had she had severe side effects to the first they may have been amplified by the second.

'This is not advisable on the grounds that it would have been preferable to wait to be sure there were no side effects to the first before the second.

'Also, as they were so close, the second shot was sort of wasted. But as a one-off in millions of doses it does not amount to much.'

Britain's medical regulator the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) says there should be a gap of at least four weeks between doses.

Its guidance adds that experience of overdosing of the vaccine is 'limited'.

'There is no specific treatment for an overdose with Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca,' they say.

'In the event of an overdose, the individual should be monitored and provided with symptomatic treatment as appropriate.'

It comes after it was revealed a woman became the first person in Britain to receive the wrong second dose at Great Western Hospital, Swindon.

The individual said she felt okay afterwards but was left furious over the error.

The hospital has launched an internal review into how the mistake happened.

Covid vaccines should not be mixed, according to guidelines, but scientists don't believe it is unsafe to alternate doses.

Oxford University scientists are investigating whether doses of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines can be alternated, however, with results expected later this year.

Experts say mixing the jabs is unlikely to pose any safety concerns, and predict it could lead to shots being even more effective at preventing an infection.

Professor Matthew Snape, who is leading the trial, previously said he would be 'surprised' if they found the alternated jabs triggered a less potent immune response.
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A group of armed men on Wednesday night attacked Kings School, a Plateau State-based mission school owned by Calvary Ministries, and kidnapped a student.

The school is located in Gana Ropp, Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of the state.

According to Gabriel Ubah, the spokesperson of the police in Plateau, tactical operatives were deployed to the area after the command received a report.

The Command received a report of abduction of a student pastor from Kings School, Gana Ropp in Barkin Ladi LGA. Tactical operatives have been deployed to the area.

Concerted efforts are on towards rescuing the victim and arresting the perpetrators, he said in a text sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday.

The recent incident in Plateau follows a series of attacks launched on schools across the country in recent weeks.

Some students of Greenfield University, Kaduna, were abducted last week and three students, although now freed, were seized at gunpoint in the Federal University of Agriculture in Makurdi, Benue State, earlier this week.
The Michigan Supreme Court ruled last October that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could no longer use a 1945 emergency powers law to issue pandemic orders, but the group Unlock Michigan is still fighting tooth and nail to have the law taken off the books.

Supporters of the initiative gathered more than 500,000 petition signatures in pursuit of a repeal. But the petition effort hit a brick wall with the Board of State Canvassers last week.

So the group is turning back to the highest court in the state.

Unlock Michigan plans to ask the state Supreme Court to review the boards failure to certify the petition to remove the 1945 Emergency Powers of Governor Act from state law, said spokesman Fred Wszolek.

Read more: Unlock Michigan petition certification fails in split vote of state canvassers

If the petition eventually gets certified, the Republican-led state Legislature can officially strip the 1945 law from the books.

Unlock Michigan wants that to happen for fear of any future Supreme Court under a different makeup reversing the October 2020 decision, Wszolek said.

The group plans to file the request with the Supreme Court as early as Friday, Wszolek told MLive. He expects eventual certification after last weeks breaking of precedent by the state canvassers.

The Board (of State Canvassers) has been so consistent over such a long period of time when there were Republican petitions and Democratic petitions, liberal causes and conservative causes, he said. Theyve always ruled this board has an ministerial duty (to certify). They dont have a discretionary role to play.

The canvassing board split 2-2 along party lines on the certification vote during a Thursday, April 22 hearing, failing to certify the more than half a million signatures submitted by Unlock Michigan in October 2020.

The vote came days after the signatures were deemed valid by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and collected with no prosecutable illegal activity, according to Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Read more: Unlock Michigan petition signatures deemed valid by Secretary of State

Julie Matuzak, one of two Democrats on the Board of State Canvassers, introduced a motion for the board to conduct its own investigation. It failed in a 2-2 vote, with fellow Democrat Jeannette Bradshaw voting yes and Republican members Norm Shinkle and Tony Daunt voting no.

Im concerned about the validity of some of these signatures, Matuzak said. Not the questions of how they were registered, not if their signatures match, but rather how these signatures were gathered, and it behooves us to actually exercise our power to look at that.

Bradshaw added that the board has to make sure Unlock Michigan followed the rules, but both she and Matuzak acknowledged another investigation on top of the secretary of states review would be unprecedented.

They dont have the statutory authority to do that, Wszolek said. The only question before the board at that point is: Did we have enough signatures? according to (the secretary of state), and she had a legal duty to say Yes.

Wszoleks argument is similar to those used when the state canvassing board certified the November 2020 election results that declared President Joe Biden won Michigan over former President Donald Trump. Former Republican canvasser Aaron Van Langevelde said at the time that the board cannot and should not go beyond certifying results, speaking about elections in that context.

Unlock Michigan has faced staunch opposition from the group Keep Michigan Safe, which filed a lawsuit on April 15 urging Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to halt the state canvassing board review based on accusations of unethical signature gathering.

Nessel said after her offices investigation that some Unlock Michigan petition circulators encouraged illegal behavior, but that they simply did not rise to the level supporting criminal charges. Additionally, a Keep Michigan Safe operative induced criminal conduct, which got in the way of filing charges, Nessel said.

Read more: Unlock Michigan petition effort was sleazy, but not illegal, AG says

Keep Michigan Safes complaint was ignored as the Bureau of Elections released its report that out of 536,700 signatures submitted by Unlock Michigan in September 2020, the minimum threshold of valid signatures was surpassed by more than 120,000 signatures.

Keep Michigan Safe plans to file its own claim countering Unlock Michigans Supreme Court appeal, said spokesman Mark Fisk.

We intend to fight them every step of the way, raising many of the challenges that we have in the past, Fisk told MLive.

Ten days after Unlock Michigan submitted its signatures last year, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled governors do not have the authority to unilaterally issue executive orders for as long as necessary, as outlined in the 1945 law. The court called that law unconstitutional. The ruling effectively struck down Whitmers initial executive orders, though public health orders issued since then under a different law remain constitutional.

Related: Fact check: Michigans COVID health orders carry the weight of law, have not been proven unconstitutional

With Justice Stephen J. Markman stepping down last year and Justice Elizabeth Welch taking the bench, the court majority shifted in favor of Democrat-nominated judges after the November election.

Wszolek still thinks precedent will lead to certification of the petition signatures and the shift in court makeup gives Unlock Michigan a greater sense of urgency to remove the 1945 law now before a future court changes its mind, he said.

Theoretically, the Supreme Court in the future could say, Nah, thats constitutional. So we want to take it off the books forever, he said.

Unlock Michigan wants Whitmer and future governors to follow the 1976 Emergency Management Act, Wszolek said, which allows for emergency orders for up to 28 days. After that, governors would need the Legislatures approval to extend the orders.

We could either handle these emergencies under the 1976 law, he said, or crazy talk here, the governor and the Legislature could work together on adopting a new framework for emergency management that everyone agrees to.

The people who wrote both the 1945 and 1976 laws couldnt have imagined a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic, Wszolek said, but added that sticking with the 1945 law would lead to ruling by decree for more than a year.

Wszolek sees similar ruling by decree dynamics with the public health orders, as they derive from state law giving the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services director broad authority to limit public gatherings.

However, the goal right now is removing the 1945 law after nearly a year of petition efforts, he said.

Were continuing to confront this administrations determination to go it alone, he said, and they just dont want to collaborate.

Read more from MLive:

AG investigating Unlock Michigan petition group accused of improper signature collection

Petitioners say they have 500K signatures in bid to strip Whitmer of emergency powers
The Brooklyn-born transportation company is trying to stay true to its initial goal of electrifying transportation, and decided for this service that the electric vehicles should be all Tesla Model Ys . The Revel rideshare service will only be available in Manhattan for now, and is scheduled to launch sometime in late May.Revel plans to start its service below 42nd Street and expand from there, depending on demand. For this new rideshare service, people will be able to use the same app offered by the company for their e-mopeds booking.According to Revel, all the cars will be Revel-blue and equipped with an interactive touchscreen so customers can control things like temperature and music. The Teslas will also come with a Covid proof shield, to keep everyone safe and adhere to distancing guidelines.The company also considers infrastructure and wants to ensure people make the shift to electric cars as soon as possible. That is why they're introducing Revel Superhubs where all drivers will be able to charge their electric vehicles, regardless of their make or model.The charging stations will offer fast charging that gives you enough juice for 100 miles in under 20 minutes. They will be open 24/7. The first fast charging Superhub will be located in Brooklyn, New York, but the company plans to build an entire network of them across the entire city.Revels all-electric rideshare service already received approval for its initial application but is still waiting for its fully issued license from the NYCs Taxi and Limousine Commission.However, the company decided to get the word out because it is hiring drivers. Revel wants to get started early with the recruitment process to retain drivers, according to company co-founder Paul Suhey, quoted by TechCrunch
(Natural News) Lawmakers and human rights activists in India on Monday, April 26, slammed Twitters decision to remove dozens of tweets seen to be critical of the Indian governments handling of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Twitter, which has about 17.5 million users in India, removed 52 tweets after a legal request by the Indian government on Friday, April 23. These included tweets from a sitting member of Indias Parliament, two filmmakers, an actor and a West Bengal state minister.

Twitter says it notified the account owners of the censored tweets to make them aware that the action was taken in response to a legal request from the government of India.

When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitters Rules, the content will be removed from the service, stated a Twitter representative. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only.

In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so theyre aware that weve received a legal order pertaining to the account, they added.

It wasnt clear if any of the tweets violated Twitter Rules. Indias Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Critics are blaming Prime Minister Narendra Modis government and state authorities for the recent surge of new COVID-19 infections in India. They say that the government let its guard down earlier this year, allowing big religious and political gatherings to take place when cases fell to below 10,000 a day.

The countrys new coronavirus infections hit a record high for the fifth day in a row on Monday, rising to about 353,000 cases. (Related: Post-vaccine variants: India discovers new double mutant Wuhan coronavirus strain.)

Prominent figures not exempt from censorship

Questioning the government of Indias decision to allow mass gatherings  where people from all across the country gathered and violated COVID safety protocols  cannot be called violating any laws of the country,' said Pawan Khera, a spokesman for the opposition Congress party, whose tweets were among those censored.

The law cited in the governments request to Twitter is the Information Technology Act, 2000. It allows authorities to order the blocking of public access to information to protect sovereignty and integrity of India and maintain public order.

One of the censored tweets was posted by West Bengal State Minister Moloy Ghatak who accused Prime Minister Modi of downplaying the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic.

India will never forgive PM @narendramodi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement. At a time when India is going through a health crisis, PM chose to export millions of vaccine to other nations, the tweet read.

Twitter reportedly made public disclosure of the take-down notices on Lumen Database, which receives and publishes disclosures from private entities, including social media companies, of legal takedown notices they get from governments and private entities all over the world.

Other prominent figures censored by Twitter on the request of the Indian government are Revanth Reddy, a sitting Member of Parliament; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and filmmakers Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das.

Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group in Delhi, said in a statement that there is a lack of transparency in the governments order to delete the Twitter posts.

What is clear is there are more directions being issued across social media platforms in India, it stated.

Mirza Saaib Beg, a lawyer whose tweets were among those withheld, said that suppression of information and criticism of the government is putting people around the world at risk.

Freedom of inquiry is an intrinsic part of freedom of speech and expression. These restrictions are further reflective of the weakening of all institutional spaces in India, said Beg. (Related: Social media censorship reaches new heights as Twitter permanently bans dissent.)

Twitters new censorship buddy

Earlier this year, Twitter withheld hundreds of accounts on the request of the Indian government on grounds that users were posting misleading content related to farmers protests near Delhi. But the social media giant did not fully comply with the governments order, which is to take down more than 1,100 accounts and posts.

It permanently suspended over 500 accounts for engaging in platform manipulation and spam. For many others, it only restricted access within India and their tweets can still be read abroad. Twitter did not go into detail on how it made decisions on which accounts to restrict, although the company said it believed some of the take-down orders were not consistent with Indian laws.

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, Twitter said at the time.

Twitters defiance has riled Modis government. The country rebuked Twitter for not complying with the orders and warned the social media giant that it needs to obey local laws. Indian lawmakers even urged their followers to switch to homegrown social media platform Koo.

Follow Censorship.news for more news and information related to the suppression of freedom of speech by governments and Big Tech.

Sources include:

News.Trust.org

TheVerge.com

MediaNama.com

Aljazeera.com
A hardworking woman who hoped a 'deep tissue' massage might ease her pain has given a harrowing account of her rape on the massage table.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, alleges 75-year old masseuse Michael Sergides violated her in a prolonged attack inside his home in June 2018.

The Berwick masseuse - southeast of Melbourne - has pleaded not guilty in the Victoria County Court of Victoria to a charge each of rape and sexual assault, claiming his alleged victim - whom he had never met before - was making it up.

Michael Sergides is on trial amid allegations he raped a woman during a massage

Michael Sergides denies touching the woman inappropriately. His fate will be decided by a judge alone

'Ninety per cent of people want to take their underwear off,' Sergides told police on his arrest.

'Theres vaginal massage, theres also anal massage.'

Sergides, who claimed massaging women's privates was a 'regular part of his service', further claimed breast massages were 'relaxing' for a females.

The woman, who went to police almost immediately after the alleged attack, claimed Sergides had asked if she had wanted her 'p**sy' massaged after he had already raped her.

'I always ask,' he bragged as he allegedly continued to molest the woman.

The alleged victim had found Sergides through an advertisement on Gumtree.

The court heard he had lured his unsuspecting customer to his home amid claims his car had broken down.

Michael Sergides claimed he was trained in giving 'internal massages'

Michael Sergides faces years behind bars if found guilty of the rape charge

Worried, the woman took down his number plate upon visiting his home and being led to a room toward the rear of his property.

Sergides allegedly asked her if she was 'wearing panties' before suggesting she take them off because it was 'easier' to massage her body without them on.

The woman became distressed recalling the incident in court, declaring she was afraid of what might happen if she did not comply with the masseuse.

While the alleged victim said she did not flat out tell Sergides to stop, she at no stage gave her consent to the grubby massage, telling the court it was 'common sense' she did not want him to touch her sexually.

When not molesting the woman, she alleged the masseuse did more pinching than massaging as she was frozen in fear.

At the end of her alleged ordeal, the woman called her friend in tears.

'We basically just paid for me to be molested,' she told her.

The pair immediately went to the police station where the alleged victim was forensically examined and DNA samples taken.

The friend later recorded Sergides in a telephone call sting where she questioned him over the alleged attack.

Michael Sergides is appearing at the County Court of Victoria in Melbourne

In it, Sergides is heard telling the woman's friend he is trained in the art of doing 'internal' vaginal and anal massages, although he did not perform them on her friend.

In closing the Crown case, prosecutor Lachlan Cameron said Sergides had given inconsistent accounts of what had happened to the friend and police - the latter of which he made complete denials to of any wrongdoing.

Mr Cameron said the alleged victim's evidence was 'credible, clear and detailed'.

'She gave evidence consistently ... she withstood cross examination well,' he said.

Sergides' barrister Matthew Page said his client had admitted to asking women to take off their panties and would perform breast and 'buttock' massages 'with the flat of his hand'.

'He denies pulling nipples,' Mr Page said.

The barrister claimed his client further denied doing any internal massages outside of the classroom and that his alleged victim had turned an honest massage into a sexual assault.

Sergides' fate will be decided by Judge Martine Marich alone.
Cork student Conor King, who lost his life tragically on a West Cork camping trip last weekend was remembered by the Students Union of Munsters Technological University (MTU) on Thursday.

Posting on Facebook, the MTU student executive said on behalf of the 12,800 students in MTU Cork, we would like to send our deepest sympathies to the classmates, staff, family, and friends affected by the death of one of our very own students Conor King.

Conor, your fun loving and caring nature will live on in the hearts of our MTU community.

The student union also made support networks easily available by posting contact details to a number of counselling services.

MTU Cork Counselling Service: counselling.admin@cit.ie

MTU Crisis Text Line, 24/7 free text "CIT" to 50808

Samaritans is open 24/7 on 116123 Pieta House is also open 24/7 on 1800 247247 or Text HELP to 51444

Aware is open 10am to 10pm on 1800 80 48 48 Suicide or Survive 1890 577577

The SU also highlighted that the Student Union itself was also there to help students going through a tough time.

For any students that need any support during this difficult time, there is a huge support network in the college that want to help you.

Your Students Union is always here to help with absolutely anything. Email myself, Aisling, on supresident@cit.ie and call me at anytime on 0879005554 or Cian our VP welfare at suwelfare@cit.ie.

The SU executive emphasized the importance of looking out for each other after this devastating event.

Mind yourself and your buddies. May you rest in peace Conor, forever in our hearts.
Well always remember 2020 as the year that transformed our lives, driven by lockdowns and fear. However, as businesses start to emerge from the pandemic, the overriding question on the minds of all small and mid-sized businesses this year is what do we need to do to emerge from the chaos caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are getting vaccinated and infection rates are dropping. However, we must still follow the New York state guidelines, so please remember that masks are still required upon entry into Fingerlakes Mall, and customers are asked to socially distance from others.

In the meantime, we are not waiting, and we are scheduling events in 2021. Bass Pro Shops had a safe and successful Easter season with a number of families coming from all over to see the Easter Bunny. With spring finally here, we are also scheduling car shows. Visit the 315 Car Meet on May 15 and the Poor Boys Spring Into Summer Super Cruise on June 13, both being held in the front parking lot of the mall. On June 5, the 607 Import Cars Group will be holding a show both inside and outside of the mall. More details will be posted on our website, fingerlakesmall.com, as they become available.


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A terror attack will 'likely' hit Australian shores within the next year, the nation's top spy boss has said in a startling warning.

ASIO's Director-General of Security Mike Burgess told an inquiry in Canberra on Thursday although Islamic extremists still pose a significant risk to Australia, there is also a rising threat from white nationalist groups.

In the past three years investigations into underground neo-Nazi cells other right-wing extremists has surged from 16 per cent of the agencies caseloads to 40 per cent.

A terror attack is likely hit Australian shores within the next year, ASIO's Director-General of Security Mike Burgess (pictured at the inquiry) warned

Pictured: Alleged members of a far-right extremist group seen at Halls Gap and the Grampians

'We have credible intelligence that individuals and small groups have the capability and intent, and we, on that basis, assess that there is likely to be a terrorist attack sometime in the next 12 months,' Mr Burgess told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

Australia's terror threat level remains at 'probable', but the intelligence chief did not specify which group the attack is likely to come from.

'Given the growth that we've seen in nationalist and violent extremism, we anticipate there will be a terrorist attack in this country in the next 12 months and it can come from either ideology,' he reiterated.

'For me, it doesn't really matter because they are both capable of actually conducting acts of violence and that's where we focus.'

He acknowledged Sunni-based violence remains the greatest threat in capital cites, as battle-hardened foreign fighters who travelled to Syria under the ISIS umbrella look to return home to Australia.

Counter-terrorism legislation along with policy settings, and other response options are all under review by the committee.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hugs a mosque-goer at the Kilbirnie Mosque on March 17, 2019 in Wellington after 50 people were killed by an Australian white nationalist

Three people were killed in 2017 after a man went on a rampage in a car through busy Bourke St Mall in Melbourne

As well as fighting extremism with typical surveillance and law-enforcement tactics, the hearing is also trying to examine other ways to combat the threat.

'We need to know why people are driven to these views,' Mr Burgess

Terrorist propaganda continues to resonate with extremists in Australia, and such messaging is drawing a younger audience.

Australians as young as 13 and 14 are involved in Islamic extremist and extreme right-wing circles, according to the national surveillance organisation's written submission.

'It is the white supremacy racist narrative that does resonate with some Australians, not all, but there are a number that it does and that is of concern,' Mr Burgess said.
EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 2021

Time to Get Serious on the War DangerSpeak Out, Mobilize

April 28 , 2021 (EIRNS)Over recent days, there has been an escalation of provocations towards the point of danger of breakout into thermonuclear war. Take just the example of the April 20 posting by U.S. Strategic Command for global deterrence and strike, which, in effect, rationalized that war is likely, in their tweet, The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option, which was accompanied by Stratcom Commander Adm. Charles Richard declaring to Congress that adversaries China and Russia were arming up, so the U.S. must just get ready and figure on war.

This and many other instances were reviewed yesterday by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in a meeting with colleagues, in which she began, When you are looking at the picture as a totality, it is absolutely horrifying. To start with, what I think could be really a detonator of the situation, you remember that when Putin gave his speech on April 21 to the Federal Assembly, he said there are red lines which cannot be crossed, and then he said there was an assassination attempt against Lukashenko and a coup attempt against Belarus, and that that had really gone too far.

So now the director of the Russian Federation Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, is saying that they are investigating the possible involvement of the U.S. government in the planning of a potential, supposed military coup in Belarus, and that sudden investigation of the plot of a military coup against Lukashenko is going on, and that the opposition politician Grigory Kostusev, and the political analyst Alexander Feduta, the lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, according to Lukashenko were involved in an assassination plan against him, and he accuses U.S. special services and U.S. leading forces to be responsible. And also quoting the head of the Belarus KGB [intelligence agency], the project plot was planned for the summer, June or July; the military coup was planned for May 9 in Minsk, during the parade for Victory Day, and that this would have been sponsored from abroad. Then according to a report in the Belarus TV station ONT, the implication is that Michael Carpenter, one of the most important foreign policy advisers of U.S. Vice President Biden and director for Russia at the National Security Council; afterward he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control, was a key figure behind the supposed coup attempt in Belarus, and that next week more interesting new details about this story would be made known....

She pointed out further, that in 2018, Carpenter

made some waves when he accompanied the Ukrainian neo-Nazi, then-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy on a trip to Washington, and when Carpenter was questioned concerning Parubiys connection to the Nazi movement, which was involved in the Ukraine coup in 2014, he defended Parubiy as a patriot and fantastic leading personality.

The same year, Carpenter was co-author with Biden of an article, How to Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies (CFRs Foreign Affairs, January-February 2018).

As Zepp-LaRouche stated, this is absolutely incredible, because if this turns out to be the case, we could be closer to World War III, than anybody realizes, because this is exactly the kind of stuff which happens in the forefront of world wars.

Moreover, the same day as Zepp-LaRouches review, Michael Carpenter blatantly participated in a virtual forum, hosted by the Washington-based Center for European Policy, with speakers including the U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fisher (whose credentials she has yet to present in Minsk), and others, who called for continued concerted action against President Putin, by stirring things up in Belarus, and elsewhere.

There are some Europeans waking up to this crazed behavior. Zepp-LaRouche reported that Germanys Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has modified his tone, saying that the confrontation with Russia should not continue. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is calling for de-escalation.

In the U.S. today, Naval War College analyst Lyle J. Goldstein has an article, Parsing Putins Red Lines, with the warning to stop the confrontationism against China and Russia. We should not be touching the red lines of other major, nuclear armed powers on a daily basis. (Article posted on the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord blog).

Zepp-LaRouche called for people to speak out, and mobilize. The upcoming conference on May 8 is more urgent than ever before, to really get a resistance against the war danger, she said, because, we need a moral resistance against this kind of decadence, which could very well be the beginning of the hours and days before World War III.

Register and attend the May 8 Schiller Institute conference, The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.
All mayors know that they can lose their jobs if they spend too much time and effort building up their downtowns and neglecting the neighborhoods. But what happens to city officials who go hyper-hyper-local, devoting time and resources to small parts of their districts?Zack Reed, a member of the Cleveland City Council, has been trying for years to spruce up the area around a single intersection in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Where a school has been demolished, he would like to see new or expanded recreation and mental health centers, along with a library, in hopes not just of improving services but attracting private investment.His decision to attend to one small slice of his ward hasnt always been popular. At first, there was some pushback, no ifs, ands or buts about it, Reed says.But hes persevered. And hes not alone. Atlanta Councilman Kwanza Hall tries through both the city budget and social media to direct more resources to an area called Boulevard, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the entire Southeastern United States. In Boston, the city has been devoting considerable attention to Dudley Square, hoping it can be improved as a hub that would do wonders for all of the citys Roxbury section.Government officials, like parents, are intensely aware that they must be fair in doling out attention; favoring one part of the city can be a political problem. But they also know that concentrating resources where theyll do the most good can provide the greatest return on investment.Theres not enough money at any one time to fix everything, says Joel Ratner, president of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a nonprofit group. If we dont make difficult strategic decisions, the danger is accomplishing very little over a long period of time.Not all neighborhoods need the same kind of help. Some might require gang intervention, while others might be ready to launch as a commercial center, given a well-timed boost. Politicians always have to worry about the peanut butter problemthe need to spread out resources equally across their entire jurisdiction. But spending the same amount everywhere means there probably wont be enough to make a major impact anywhere.If we can set aside the politics for a moment, the evidence is when you focus your resources, hard cash or other investments, you can begin to have an effect on the wider market and investment in the community, says Erika Poethig, director of Urban Policy Initiatives at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.Thats why city officials are constantly starting pilot projects, putting money into developments that they believe are worthy and that hold out the promise of being replicated elsewhere. Countless mayors and council members have gotten into trouble for apparently playing favorites with neighborhoodsor have been accused of outright cronyismso theyre always careful to preach the benefits that will spread from the targeted area to the surrounding community.Thats the argument Zack Reed has been trying to make. Southeastern Cleveland has been practically devoid of investment for decades. Getting one corner of it alive and humming again would have spillover effects that would help Mount Pleasant as a whole. This is going to benefit everybody in this neck of the woods, he says.Reed continues to make the case even though a restructuring of the city council means he no longer represents that particular corner of the city. Ironically, its not even in my ward anymore, he says.
The brother of an Alabama-born grandmother who was fatally punched on a French Quarter street last week is trying to understand what motivated her killing, but he expressed relief Wednesday that police had captured a suspect.

We have no earthly idea why this happened, said Jeffrey Johnson, brother of Margaret Jane Johnson Street. It wont bring my sister back, but it helps knowing who did it and that they have him.

New Orleans police say Johnson Street, 61, got into an argument with Jeremiah Mark, 23, in the 100 block of Royal Street on April 18 at about 7:45 p.m. Details about the argument havent been available, but Mark punched Johnson Street in the face, causing her to fall backward and hit her head on the concrete, police wrote in a sworn statement filed in Criminal District Court.

She was taken to University Medical Center, where staffers diagnosed her with a traumatic brain injury. She died April 20, and her death was classified a homicide after an autopsy two days later, police said.

Police said they didnt immediately know Marks name, but they released a photo of him to the public and asked for help in identifying him because they wanted to question him. Mark saw the picture in the news media and met with investigators April 22. Police said he told them he used his hand to push [Street] in the face.

They booked him with manslaughter, which Louisiana law defines as an unintentional yet unjustifiable killing. Magistrate Court Commissioner Jonathan Friedman set Marks bail at $100,000, and he remained in custody Wednesday evening.

NOPD adding more officers, lighting to Bourbon Street, where 12 have been shot since early March The New Orleans Police Department announced Wednesday that it will assign more officers to patrol Bourbon Street and add more lighting to the 

Johnson said his family was preparing for his sister's funeral Thursday in her hometown of Decatur, Alabama.

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Her obituary says Johnson Street retired from a job at General Motors. Her survivors included her daughter and two grandchildren. She moved to the New Orleans area around 2014 and spent much of her time caring for her 7-year-old grandson, Johnson said.

He said his family first feared Johnson Street was attacked during a robbery. But then they realized nothing had been stolen from her.

It just seems like she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, Johnson said.

Johnson Street was among nine homicide victims reported in New Orleans during an exceptionally violent six-day period beginning April 20. Three more of those killings led to arrests, and investigators have obtained warrants to book suspects in two of the other cases.

If convicted of manslaughter, Mark could be sentenced to as long as 40 years in prison. The crime carries no mandatory minimum sentence.

An attorney for Mark didnt immediately respond to a message seeking comment Thursday.

+4 Metairie Country Club employee hacks man to death with machete, reports to work before arrest: NOPD A Metairie Country Club employee hacked a man to death with a machete and then reported to work before investigators arrested him last week, a

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported it was Johnson Street's sister who got into an argument with Mark.
Stocktrek

In the midst of recent articles about the climate crisis, it is no wonder that the majority of New Yorkers are very concerned about the degradation of our environment (Residents fear climate change," April 21).

And it is reasonable to assume that many can be overcome with a sense of helplessness when it comes to What can I do, I am only one person?
Her son Brooklyn is set to tie the knot with his fiancee Nicola Peltz next year.

And Victoria Beckham proved her son's bride-to-be is already part of the family as she shared a gushing Instagram post on her feed on Wednesday evening.

The fashion designer, 47, joked that Nicola, 26, had 'been in her wardrobe again', as she modelled her 750 black bustier in a sizzling snap.

Ha! Victoria Beckham proved her son's bride-to-be is already part of the family as she shared a gushing Instagram post on her feed on Wednesday evening

Nicola posed up a storm in the sexy garment in a blurry bathroom snap, pouting for the camera as she wore her bright blonde locks in tumbling waves.

The corset-style garment Nicola was wearing in the photograph is available to buy on Victoria's clothing website.

Victoria captioned the image: 'Looks like the future Mrs Beckham has been in my wardrobe again! [eyes emoji] but you're forgiven because I love this VB bustier on you @nicolapeltz [pink hearts].'

Underneath the image, Nicola wrote: [monkey covering eyes emoji] caught! I love you so much [hearts].'

Close bond: The fashion designer, 47, joked that Nicola, 26, had 'been in her wardrobe again', as she modelled her 750 black bustier in a sizzling snap

Cheeky! Underneath the image, Nicola wrote: [monkey covering eyes emoji] caught! I love you so much [hearts]'

Love you! Nicola also reshared Victoria's post on her own Instagram Story and affectionately wrote: 'I love you', alongside the image

Nicola also reshared Victoria's post on her own Instagram Story and affectionately wrote: 'I love you', alongside the image.

Brooklyn mirrored his fiancee's post by also showing some love for his partner and his mother.

This isn't the first time Victoria has publicly shown support for her son's relationship, as earlier this year she wished Nicola a happy 26th birthday on Instagram.

Alongside a snap of the two of them together, she wrote: 'We love you!'

In December last year, Victoria also praised Brooklyn's fiancee as she spoke about their upcoming wedding in an interview on Lorraine.

Victoria, whose son, 22, popped the question to the American actress in July, enthused about their relationship as she said their engagement came at a 'nice' time.

Speaking to Mark Heyes from her office, Posh Spice gushed: ''We couldn't have asked for him to meet a more adorable lady!'

'We couldn't have asked for him to meet a more adorable lady!' Victoria praised Brooklyn's fiancee in an interview on Lorraine

The photographer and his partner 18 months have been inseparable ever since they went public with their romance last November.

Shedding light on their bond in a rare discussion, businesswoman Victoria said: 'They're so happy. She's wonderful, sweet and kind. She's such a lovely, warm woman. We couldn't have asked for Brooklyn to meet a more adorable lady.

'It's nice with everything that has gone on this year that Brooklyn has found his soulmate and the lady he wants to spend the rest of his life with.

Smitten: The fashion designer, 46, whose son, 21, popped the question to the actress, 25, in July, enthused about their relationship as she said their engagement came at a 'nice' time

'During this time theres been so much uncertainty and that everything felt a little bit sad. So we are very happy and very excited.'

The entrepreneur, who also shares children Romeo, 18, Cruz, 15, and Harper, nine, with her husband David, 45, admitted she hasn't found an outfit for their nuptials - reported to be scheduled for 2022 - as she asked: 'What will I wear?!

'Everyone remembers Brooklyn being a little boy at David's Manchester United game and now he's a 21 year old man.'
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:18:45|Editor: huaxia

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WINDHOEK, April 29 (Xinhua) -- More than 20,315 people in Namibia have been vaccinated against the COVID-19 around the country following the rollout of the nationwide vaccination program, the Health Minister said Thursday.

"This is indeed an encouraging positive public response. We call upon more Namibians to go and get vaccinated," said the Minister of Health Kalumbi Shangula.

Shangula said the vaccination program is being rolled out under the auspices of the existing Expanded Program on Immunization, through which the ministry has implemented vaccination campaigns in the past.

"This approach means that we do not have to create new structures and capacities to roll out the COVID-19 vaccination program. Rather, we are harnessing existing knowledge, expertise, facilities, and infrastructure already in place. In this manner, we are able to benefit from cost savings, administrative efficiencies, and logistical arrangements," he added.

Namibian Health Ministry has established a total of 383 COVID-19 vaccination sites in different health districts around the country, of which, 181 are fixed, 154 are mobile and 48 are outreach points. Enditem




A U.N. committee called on North Korea to provide an explanation on reported cases of human rights violations and to report any progress, its website showed Thursday.







The U.N. Human Rights Committee (HRC) last week urged the North to provide information on whether it has made progress on several human rights issues, including torture and violence against women.







The committee asked the North to specify the measures it has taken to ensure that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a multilateral U.N. treaty, takes precedence over the North's domestic law in practice.







It also requested Pyongyang to provide an explanation to reports that it issued "shoot to kill" orders as part of efforts to prevent the coronavirus from entering the country, and whether or not the shootings resulted in any deaths or injuries.







Countries that have ratified the ICCPR are obliged to report on how the rights are being implemented, initially one year after signing the covenant and whenever upon request, which is usually every four years. (Yonhap)


6 Navalny was arrested in January upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment for a poisoning attack in Siberia in August 2020 that he blames on Putin and Russia's security services. The Kremlin denies any role.
Amidst several problems on constructing space stations, China has been hell-bent to pursue its wanderlust on space travel. At this current period, the "Heavenly Harmony" tends to fit in its space book.

So far, the International Space Station (ISS) remains the most accomplished space station. Over the past years, many countries have been developing their part in space discovery, and they are slowly leaving the ISS behind.

However, there is one country that continues to venture into the making of space stations despite being banned. It seems that China has been pushing its limit to the trials that it has conducted in the past.

China's Heavenly Harmony is Nearing its Launch in Space

For two decades, it's no wonder that ISS has the largest contribution when it comes to space stations. Several countries involved in the collaboration are Russia, the United States, Japan, and even the European countries.

While these countries have been enjoying their visits to the ISS, China has remained to stay afloat despite being banned for this cause. The United States and NASA have decided that Chinese astronauts should be barred from exploring the ISS ever since.

Instead of venturing into other activities, China continues its growing endeavor in space exploration. Lately, what they saw in China is an outstanding step in space missions from both ends.

Recently, the country has managed to complete its quests to the Earth's natural satellite. For this case, China has become the first country to conduct a soft landing on the far side of the moon.

Read Also: Nokia 4G on Moon is Happening; Lunar Rover to Carry Communication Through Space

Moreover, it has also gone on a mission on Mars when the NASA Perseverance rover dropped on the red planet. At this moment, the country is about to start a new adventure - the release of its space station that it could call its own.

This week, China will be sending "Heavenly Harmony," one of the space station's vital components in space exploration, AP reports. The trip was scheduled as early as Thursday evening, but it could still change depending on the decision.

Setting an entire space station is a hard task since there are 11 missions required for this to happen. But, what China did is a big leap en route to the space station's initial configuration.

Currently, it could house up to three individuals, but as the East nation persists to make new modules, the number of spacecraft will increase. This will also allow more people to inhibit the space station.

When Will China's Space Station Expected to Finish?

BGR reported that by the end of 2022, the Chinese space station will be finished. During that time, it can fully support the people inside it who will carry out different experiments while in space.

Presently, at least a dozen people are on training sessions. They will be a part of the initial group which will use the space station.

China's pursuit in erecting space stations is still a long way, but its little progress has grown a lot over time. The country has learned from the past lessons about building a highly advanced and permanent space station.

Having said that, the "Heavenly Harmony" is only a portion of what China shows to the world despite some limitations that hold the country.

Related Article: China Chang'e 6 Lunar Exploration 2024: European Countries' Tech to be Showcased

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Breast cancer diagnosis: Around 88 percent of patients survive the dangerous disease in the first five years. Work is important for getting back to normality. Researchers from the University of Bonn and the German Cancer Society investigated how satisfied former patients are with their occupational development over a period of five to six years since diagnosis. About half experienced at least one job change during the study period. Around ten percent of those affected even report involuntary changes. The researchers conclude that there is a need for long-term support measures for patients. The study is now published in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship.

Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in women. Almost 70,000 cases are diagnosed every year in Germany alone. Studies show that the five-year survival rate is 88 percent.

Returning to work is important; it provides a sense of normality and meaning after a crisis caused by cancer." Kati Hiltrop, Sociologist, Center for Health Communication and Health Services Research at University Hospital Bonn (UKB)

But a breast cancer diagnosis and successful treatment are often followed by long-term difficulties such as fatigue syndrome, which means a feeling of persistent tiredness, exhaustion and listlessness. Other after-effects of chemotherapy and the fear that the cancer will return can also limit productivity.

How do breast cancer patients succeed in returning to work? "There are numerous studies on this. Our long-term study now focuses on the post-return phase from the patient's perspective," says Hiltrop. Together with the head of the research center, Prof. Dr. Nicole Ernstmann, who is also a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Life and Health" at the University of Bonn, and the German Cancer Society, the sociologist investigated how a total of 184 former breast cancer patients fared after returning to work over a period of five to six years after diagnosis.

From the perspective of breast cancer patients

The study focused on how satisfied the patients were with their occupational development since diagnosis. About half experienced at least one job change during the study period. "The main finding is that we found no relationship between the number of job changes and satisfaction, but that greater involuntariness of change was associated with lower satisfaction," Hiltrop says. "The results suggest that the quality of change matters more than the quantity." About 16 percent of job changes did not happen by choice. These changes included, for example, increased workload or retirement. The results suggest that the former breast cancer patients have difficulties in meeting the job requirements in the long term after their return, resulting in changes at work.

The research team's findings show what can contribute to satisfaction at work. "Providing a welcoming work environment and showing patients understanding and support can facilitate a satisfactory return to work," Hiltrop explains. This can help avoid involuntary job changes that are perceived as particularly drastic. The researchers conclude from the results that a satisfactory return to work and, in particular, remaining at work requires long-term support, for example because chemotherapies and aftercare have to be continued, there is a fear of a recurrence of the tumor, or fatigue symptoms have to be managed.

The current study is a follow-up study of the project "Strengthening patient competence: Breast cancer patients' information and training needs" (PIAT), which surveyed approximately 1000 breast cancer patients. The researchers interviewed the PIAT participants again 5-6 years after diagnosis. At four measurement points, surveys and interviews were used to explore the subjective assessment of health status, how often job changes occurred, and how fulfilling the job was. Socioeconomic data, such as age, number of children, and education, were also surveyed. Satisfaction with occupational development was associated with higher age, better perceived health status, and lower levels of involuntariness of job changes.

"Open communication with managers and colleagues about expectations and what can be accomplished is very important," explains Hiltrop. In addition, handling the situation more flexibly, can increase the likelihood that patients will be satisfied when they return to work.

Financial support and participating institutions

The study involved the University Hospital Bonn, the German Cancer Society, the Federal Centre for Health Education, the Institute of Medical Sociology, Health Services Research, and Rehabilitation Science at the University of Cologne, and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. The German Statutory Pension Insurance Scheme and the Federal Ministry of Health funded the projects.
U.S. President Joe Biden has said in an address to Congress that he is not seeking to escalate tensions with Russian President Vladimir Putin after imposing fresh sanctions over cyberattacks, election interference, and other malign actions.



"I made very clear to President [Vladimir] Putin that while we don't seek escalation, their actions have consequences," Biden said in his first major speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28.



Since coming into office in January, the Biden administration has imposed sanctions on Russia over the poisoning of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and for Moscow's alleged interference in U.S. elections and the SolarWinds hack.



"I responded in a direct and proportionate way to Russia's interference in our elections and cyberattacks on our government and businesses --and they did both of those things and I did respond," Biden said.



Biden also extended the New START nuclear arms-reduction treaty with Russia and this month proposed a face-to-face meeting with the Russian leader amid spiraling tensions between the two countries.



"But we can also cooperate when it's in our mutual interests," Biden said. "As we did when we extended the New START Treaty on nuclear arms -- and as we're working to do on the climate crisis."

The United States hosted a two-day online climate summit last week, during which Putin said that despite numerous political conflicts between Russia and the West climate change can be unifying issue.



Biden has repeatedly stated that while he will be tough on Russia over any hostile policies, he is also seeking to cooperate where the two sides have mutual interests.

This includes on such issues as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, North Korea, and fostering peace and stability in Afghanistan.
Amid India's current Covid-19 crisis that has heavily dented the country's health care infrastructure, the Uttarakhand government on Thursday (April 29) took the decision to suspend the Char Dham Yatra.



 BCCL

The yatra to the four Himalayan shrines of Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath was scheduled to begin next month, somewhere between May 14 and May 18, however, was suspended in light of the rising Covid-19 numbers in the state.



Conducting the yatra amid the raging pandemic is not possible. Only priests of the four temples at Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamunotri, and Gangotri will perform rituals and puja, said Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat said while announcing the decision.

Uttarakhand government has suspended Char Dham Yatra this year in view of #COVID19 situation in the state. Only priests of the four temples will perform rituals and puja: Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat



(File photo) pic.twitter.com/No6I9G2WDx  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

In what was the eighth consecutive day of India registering more than 300,000 Coronavirus cases, the country created another alarming record by registering around 3,79,257 new coronavirus cases on Thursday.

 Istock

India has received much criticism for letting the Kumbh Mela major pilgrimage go ahead at a time when the country's health care systems and doctors had become overwhelmed with the sudden surge in Covid-19 cases.



 Reuters

Prior to the suspension decision, the Uttarakhand state government had even prepared a draft standard operating procedures (SOP) for registration of pilgrims and visit in order to let the Char Dham Yatra go ahead as planned.



However, amidst the public outcry on such plans and with Uttarakhand itself recording the highest single-day spike of 6,054 Covid-19 cases on Wednesday (April 28), the state government was forced to review the situation and eventually opted for the suspension of the religious event.

The news of the suspension by the Uttarakhand CM was met with reactions of the Aam Janta on microblogging website Twitter.

Badi Meherbaani Sarkaar  Syed Rizvi (@SyedRiz50787807) April 29, 2021

If he had taken that decision for "kumbh", cases (in India not only Uttarakhand) might be more less than it's now  Vaibhav Awasthi (@VaibhavAwashhi) April 29, 2021

He made sense for the first time since he became the CM.  Anurag (@Anuragkukreti7) April 29, 2021

Finally this guy did something productive. Now ban Kailash Mansarovar Yatra too. Actually ban all such yatras for next two years.  Anurag Singh (@BihariNastik) April 29, 2021

After a kick on the backside this has come about now...  Ajay KAPPS (@ajkapps) April 29, 2021

a much-appreciated decision finally, but I also urge the government to keep in mind the loss of revenue and livelihood for many in the region and try to help them as well.  Aayush Agarwal (@QuoraBhakt) April 29, 2021

This is a good move. May not so be for the economy but have to keep the lives of thousands of Paharis in consideration. There are no big hospitals on the way to Gangotri from Uttarkashi. Kumbh mela was a mistake. Bhagwaan me chaha toh ache se yatra hogi agle saal.  aditya (@AdityaGairola94) April 29, 2021

Finally. Not sure if the people in authorities don't have their own mind or the least, EYES, to see the prevailing situation. But nevermind, we'll get back to this later :)  Himanshu (@HimanshuKhiwal) April 29, 2021

At least one right choice.  Pri_C. (@SilentSilver05) April 29, 2021
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:37:54|Editor: huaxia

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BANGKOK, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Bank of Thailand (BOT) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Thursday launched a linkage of Thailand's PromptPay and Singapore's PayNow real-time retail payment systems.

Calling it "the first of its kind globally," a joint statement by the two sides said the linkage came following several years of collaboration between the BOT and MAS, both countries' payment system operators, bankers' associations and banks.

Customers of participating banks in Thailand and Singapore will be able to transfer funds of up to 1,000 Singapore dollars (about 754.2 U.S. dollars) or 25,000 baht (about 801 U.S. dollars) daily across the two countries, using just a mobile number, according to the statement.

There will be no need to populate information fields such as the recipient's full name and bank account details, as required in a normal remittance.

The statement said the transfers will be completed within several minutes, compared with an average of one to two working days with most cross-border remittance solutions.

"The PromptPay-PayNow linkage represents another key milestone in our digital payments journey. This service by the MAS and the BOT will effectively address customers' long standing pain points in the area of cross-border transfers and remittances including long transaction times and high costs," said BOT governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput.

"MAS' shared objective with BOT is to work with our ASEAN counterparts to expand this bilateral linkage into a network of linked retail payment systems across ASEAN," said Ravi Menon, managing director of MAS. Enditem
New Zealand, Australia show divided stances toward China

Xinhua) 16:32, April 29, 2021

Tourists admire the skyline view of Lujiazui area at the Bund in Shanghai, east China, Jan. 6, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Xiang)

"It's not necessary, all the time on every issue, to invoke Five Eyes as your first port of call in terms of creating a coalition of support around particular issues in the human-rights space," New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta was quoted as saying.

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand, one of the Five Eyes Alliance countries, has distanced itself from Australia, another partner of the group, to blacken China on its human-rights record, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

"It's not necessary, all the time on every issue, to invoke Five Eyes as your first port of call in terms of creating a coalition of support around particular issues in the human-rights space," New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said at a news conference with her Australian counterpart Marise Payne in Wellington, according to the report released on April 22.

Photo taken on Nov. 26, 2020 shows a 5G-themed exhibition held during the World 5G Convention in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province. (Xinhua/Deng Hua)

While Payne said that "We also have to acknowledge that China's outlook -- the nature of China's external engagement both in our region and globally -- has changed in recent years."

"New Zealand is adopting an extremely Beijing-friendly stance on these questions and breaking away from a much stronger position adopted by" the other Five Eyes partners, Clive Hamilton, a professor at the Charles Sturt University, told Bloomberg.

Photo taken on Nov. 3, 2020 shows a milk powder booth from New Zealand at the Food and Agricultural Products exhibition area of the 3rd China International Import Expo in Shanghai, east China. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)

Australia had barred Chinese enterprises from participating in its 5G network construction on trumped-up charges, frequently denied investment of Chinese companies in the country under the pretext of "national security," and arbitrarily raided Chinese journalists based in the country.

Australia had also blatantly torn up cooperation agreements with China and wantonly damaged normal exchanges and cooperation.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Seven United Nation (UN) human rights experts on Thursday demanded the release of a Nigerian atheist and humanist, Mubarak Bala, who has been detained without charge by the police for a year over alleged blasphemy.

The experts demand add to calls by many human rights groups, including Amnesty International, in the last one year for the release of the activist who faces death penalty if convicted under the law being operated in many parts of Northern Nigeria.

Mr Bala who is the president of Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested at his home in Kaduna State on April 28, 2020 over his Facebook post considered to be critical of Islam.

The post reportedly caused outrage among Muslims in many parts of highly conservative northern part of the country.

The detainee whose arrest was prompted by a petition by a lawyer, S.S Umar, backed by some Islamic figures, was later transferred to the neighbouring Kano State.

His whereabouts remained unknown to his family and lawyer for many months before he was later granted access to them.

Delivering judgment in a fundamental human rights enforcement suit filed on his behalf, a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, Inyang Ekwo, on December 21, 2020, declared Mr Balas detention illegal and ordered his immediate release.

The court also ruled that the denial of his ability to choose his own legal representation, constituted gross infringements of his rights to personal liberty, fair hearing, freedom of thought, expression and movement.

It awarded damages of N250,000 damages in his favour.

But the judgment has been ignored by authorities.

Human rights experts condemn Nigerian government

Seven experts and special rapporteurs of the UN, in a statement on Wednesday, denounced the Nigerian government over Mr Balas continued detention.

Today marks one year since Mr. Bala was arrested and detained in Kano State, without any formal charges, on allegations of blasphemy. His arbitrary detention has continued despite our appeals to the Government in May and July last year, the human rights experts said in the statement which was also published by the Office of the High Commission of the UN Human Rights.

Describing Mr Balas prolonged detention as a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights, the experts said it also sends the wrong signal to extremist groups that silencing and intimidation of human rights defenders and others is acceptable.

The arrest and prolonged detention of Mr. Bala is not only a flagrant violation of fundamental rights, but it has also had a chilling effect on the exercise of fundamental freedoms in Nigeria.

Through his continued detention, the Government is sending the wrong signal to extremist groups that the silencing and intimidation of human rights defenders and minority non-believers is acceptable, the experts stated.

Government undermining competence of nations judicial system

The experts expressed disappointment in Nigerian government for what they described as a blatant undermining of the competence of the countrys judicial system through its disregard for the court order ordering Mr Balas release.

We are disappointed that the respondents failed to comply with the courts order and blatantly undermined the competence of the judicial system, the experts said, adding that, The government must take action to ensure that the responsible authorities respect the due process and enforce the judicial ruling.

The experts noted that Mr. Balas lawyer on January 27 filed another application for his release at the Federal High Court in Abuja.

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A hearing was scheduled for 20 April, which has not yet taken place because court personnel are on strike.

As soon as the courts resume, the hearing of the new petition must proceed promptly and the authorities must end this unjustified prolonged detention of Mr. Bala for good, the experts said.

Security concerns

The experts also expressed concern about his security and general well-being in detention, adding that the use of blasphemy law is against human rights law.

We remain deeply concerned for Mr. Balas security due to continuous death threats and his overall well-being in detention. Such prolonged incarceration may also amount to a form of psychological torture that could severely impact on his mental and physical health in consequence.

International law protects everyones freedom of thought, conscience and religion or beliefs and the right to opinion and expression but it does not protect religions or beliefs per se. The use of blasphemy law is against international human rights law and the imposition of death penalty based for blasphemy is doubly egregious, stressed the experts.

Mr Bala was reportedly forcibly taken to a psychiatric facility by his family after renouncing Islam in 2014.

The religious critic was later discharged from the facility in Kano.

The UN experts who signed the statement include, Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief; Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

They also include, Tlaleng Mofokeng, Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health, and Morris Tidball-Binz, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Fernand de Varennes, Special Rapporteur on minority issues.

The rest are, Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of expression and Diego Garcia-Sayan, Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.
Specimens of sand shiner fish in the Field Museum's collections collected in 1972, 1953, and 1907. Credit: Kate Golembiewski, Field Museum

Forget diamondsplastic is forever. It takes decades, or even centuries, for plastic to break down, and nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists in some form today. We've known for a while that big pieces of plastic can harm wildlifethink of seabirds stuck in plastic six-pack ringsbut in more recent years, scientists have discovered microscopic bits of plastic in the water, soil, and even the atmosphere. To learn how these microplastics have built up over the past century, researchers examined the guts of freshwater fish preserved in museum collections; they found that fish have been swallowing microplastics since the 1950s and that the concentration of microplastics in their guts has increased over time.

"For the last 10 or 15 years it's kind of been in the public consciousness that there's a problem with plastic in the water. But really, organisms have probably been exposed to plastic litter since plastic was invented, and we don't know what that historical context looks like," says Tim Hoellein, an associate professor of biology at Loyola University Chicago and the corresponding author of a new study in Ecological Applications. "Looking at museum specimens is essentially a way we can go back in time."

Caleb McMahan, an ichthyologist at the Field Museum, cares for some two million fish specimens, most of which are preserved in alcohol and stored in jars in the museum's underground Collections Resource Center. These specimens are more than just dead fish, thoughthey're a snapshot of life on Earth. "We can never go back to that time period, in that place," says McMahan, a co-author of the paper.

Hoellein and his graduate student Loren Hou were interested in examining the buildup of microplastics in freshwater fish from the Chicagoland region. They reached out to McMahan, who helped identify four common fish species that the museum had chronological records of dating back to 1900: largemouth bass, channel catfish, sand shiners, and round gobies. Specimens from the Illinois Natural History Survey and University of Tennessee also filled in sampling gaps.

"We would take these jars full of fish and find specimens that were sort of average, not the biggest or the smallest, and then we used scalpels and tweezers to dissect out the digestive tracts," says Hou, the paper's lead author. "We tried to get at least five specimens per decade."

A portion of the Field Museum's fish collections, which contain two million specimens and are primarily housed in underground storage in the museum's Collection Resource Center. Credit: Kate Golembiewski, Field Museum

To actually find the plastic in the fishes' guts, Hou treated the digestive tracts with hydrogen peroxide. "It bubbles and fizzes and breaks up all the organic matter, but plastic is resistant to the process," she explains.

The plastic left behind is too tiny to see with the naked eye, though: "It just looks like a yellow stain, you don't see it until you put it under the microscope," says Hou. Under the magnification, though, it's easier to identify. "We look at the shape of these little pieces. If the edges are frayed, it's often organic material, but if it's really smooth, then it's most likely microplastic." To confirm the identity of these microplastics and determine where they came from, Hou and Hoellein worked with collaborators at the University of Toronto to examine the samples using Raman spectroscopy, a technique that uses light to analyze the chemical signature of a sample.

The researchers found that the amount of microplastics present in the fishes' guts rose dramatically over time as more plastic was manufactured and built up in the ecosystem. There were no plastic particles before mid-century, but when plastic manufacturing was industrialized in the 1950s, the concentrations skyrocketed.

"We found that the load of microplastics in the guts of these fishes have basically gone up with the levels of plastic production," says McMahan. "It's the same pattern of what they're finding in marine sediments, it follows the general trend that plastic is everywhere."

The analysis of the microplastics revealed an insidious form of pollution: fabrics. "Microplastics can come from larger objects being fragmented, but they're often from clothing," says Houwhenever you wash a pair of leggings or a polyester shirt, tiny little threads break off and get flushed into the water supply.

A thin, thread-like strand of microplastic from a fish's digestive tract. Credit: Loren Hou

"It's plastic on your back, and that's just not the way that we've been thinking about it," says Hoellein. "So even just thinking about it is a step forward in addressing our purchases and our responsibility."

It's not clear how ingesting these microplastics affected the fish in this study, but it's probably not great. "When you look at the effects of microplastic ingestion, especially long term effects, for organisms such as fish, it causes digestive tract changes, and it also causes increased stress in these organisms," says Hou.

While the findings are starkMcMahan described one of the paper's graphs showing the sharp rise in microplastics as "alarming"the researchers hope it will serve as a wake-up call. "The entire purpose of our work is to contribute to solutions," says Hoellein. "We have some evidence that public education and policies can change our relationship to plastic. It's not just bad news, there's an application that I think should give everyone a collective reason for hope."

The researchers say the study also highlights the importance of natural history collections in museums. "Loren and I both love the Field Museum but don't always think about it in terms of its day-to-day scientific operations," says Hoellein. "It's an incredible resource of the natural world, not just as it exists now but as it existed in the past. It's fun for me to think of the museum collection sort of like the voice of those long dead organisms that are still telling us something about the state of the world today."

"You can't do this kind of work without these collections," says McMahan. "We need older specimens, we need the recent ones, and we're going to need what we collect in the next 100 years."

Explore further Microplastics affect global nutrient cycle and oxygen levels in the ocean

More information: Loren Hou et al, A fish tale: a century of museum specimens reveal increasing microplastic concentrations in freshwater fish, Ecological Applications (2021). Journal information: Ecological Applications Loren Hou et al, A fish tale: a century of museum specimens reveal increasing microplastic concentrations in freshwater fish,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/eap.2320
Nacogdoches, TX (75965)

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Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing late. Low 72F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

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Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing late. Low 72F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
(CNN) -- Last Wednesday, Hong Kong journalist Bao Choy was honored for her investigative work. The following day, she was convicted for it.

In essence, Choy was prosecuted for ticking a box: She had used a government registry to trace license plates connected to a mob that had attacked pro-democracy protesters in a subway station in 2019.

In the past, journalists had been able to specify "media" on the form to explain why they were searching the database. But in 2019 the form changed, so Choy ticked "other traffic and transport related matters."

That was a crime. The 37-year-old was accused of violating Hong Kong's Road Traffic Ordinance by making a false declaration and fined 6,000 Hong Kong dollars ($770).

To many onlookers, however, Choy's case wasn't about misused boxes. It was an attack on journalism.

Although freedom of speech and the press are enshrined in Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, the media's independence and ability to report has come under threat in recent years. The controversial national security law, a sweeping piece of legislation passed last year, urges the government to further regulate media and the internet.

In the past month alone, there have been a slew of attacks on press freedom: A Chinese state-run paper in Hong Kong called for an embattled pro-democracy paper to shut; the city's police chief proposed an anti-fake news law; and thugs accused of being linked to the Chinese Communist Party smashed the printing press of an independent newspaper.

Choy's case is emblematic of the constantly shifting rules in the city  the new reality that actions deemed reasonable one day could lead to prosecution the next.

Ticking a box

On a summer night in July 2019, a mob of about 70 men in white shirts stormed a Hong Kong subway station and began to beat commuters and protesters with iron bars and bamboo sticks.

Videos from the night show commuters screaming in subway cars in Yuen Long station, near the border with mainland China. The men appeared to target those dressed in black returning from pro-democracy demonstrations in another part of Hong Kong.

As people frantically called for help, authorities received more than 24,000 calls in three-and-a-half hours  well over the average daily volume, officials later told the city's legislative body.

But it took 39 minutes for the riot police to arrive. By then, most of the white-clad mob had left, according to an Independent Police Complaints Council report.

Later, the police said officers were busy with protests on Hong Kong island, some 30 kilometers (19 miles) away. None of the white-clad men was arrested that night, although dozens were arrested subsequently.

To the pro-democracy camp, this was a turning point. Tensions were already soaring after more than a month of major protests, but the horrific scenes coupled with the police's slow response only added to a deterioration of trust in officials. Many believed members of the mob  suspected by members of the public to be linked to crime gangs  were colluding with the authorities, although the police denied it.

It was that pivotal event that public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and freelance producer Choy wanted to investigate.

The outlet obtained CCTV footage from around the subway station that night which captured vehicles carrying men in white shirts. So Choy used what had long been a standard journalistic method: She searched the vehicle registration database to see who owned them.

Several of the license plates, Choy found, were linked to village representatives, or local leaders.

Yuen Long, an area closer to mainland China than Hong Kong's iconic Victoria Harbor, has allegedly long been home to so-called triad members, who researchers say have been used as "thugs for hire" in mainland China. Local Hong Kong officials have even faced allegations of working with the criminal gangs.

RTHK's documentary offered more evidence that when the white-clad mob attacked people in Yuen Long's train station, they had some official support.

A violation or a search for truth?

After RTHK's 23-minute documentary, "Hong Kong Connection: 721 Who Owns the Truth," was released last year, it won praise and awards, including one last Wednesday from the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA).

But on November 3, 2020, Choy was arrested on suspicion of violating the Road Traffic Ordinance.

The government said Choy's case was the result of a complaint. At her trial, the judge ruled that vehicle owners expected privacy when they submitted their information to the Transport Department, and found her guilty of violating the ordinance, a charge carrying up to six months in prison.

Choy is believed to be the first journalist convicted of violating the ordinance, and the first person sentenced in connection with the Yuen Long attacks, according to her lawyer, Jonathan Man. Last week, police confirmed they arrested a reporter from state-owned pro-Beijing outlet Ta Kung Pao over the same charge in February.

After the verdict, Choy's eyes grew red as she stood, surrounded by cheering supporters and media, outside a court in West Kowloon where many pro-democracy activists have been prosecuted over the past year.

"I believe that investigative journalism is not a crime," she said. "My journalistic values will not be affected by this case."

Chris Yeung, the chair of the HKJA, called the verdict a "dark day" for Hong Kong journalism.

"Press freedom in Hong Kong is dying," he said. "It's a fine for all journalists."

To Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at Chinese University Hong Kong's school of journalism and communication, said the case is a sign the government is moving the goal posts.

Before the option to specify media was removed from the forms in 2019, journalist requests were common -- in some years, they made up a quarter of all applications. In a statement to CNN Business, Hong Kong Transport Department said the 2019 revision was to "better elaborate the purposes for the avoidance of misunderstanding" and noted that even before the change, the data obtained by the request was only meant to be used for activities related to traffic and transport matters.

But the case set a precedent that looking up a license plate for journalistic reasons is no longer legal  another blow for freedom of information, Tsui said.

Tsui said it also appears to show that authorities are prepared to go after journalists who dig up things that made them look bad. "It's hard to not see this as an attack on truth," he added.

In a statement to CNN Business, the Hong Kong government said any arrest had "nothing to do with the political stance, background or occupation" of the person concerned.

Other blows

For years, Hong Kong was home to a lively media landscape with publications spanning the political spectrum. But the city's media freedoms have slowly diminished in recent years as mainland China's influence over the former British territory grows.

"Everyone in Hong Kong is self censoring," said Tsui said. "In the last couple of years, there has been a sustained attack  not just on press freedom, but on rights in general."

Several events in 2018, for example, had a particularly chilling effect on the media environment.

That year, the Financial Times' Asia editor Victor Mallet's application for a routine extension of his Hong Kong work permit was denied months after he hosted a talk by a pro-independence activist at the Foreign Correspondent's Club. Prominent English-language paper South China Morning Post was criticized for running an interview with a Hong Kong publisher who was detained in the mainland. The interview had been organized by China's public security ministry, raising concerns about the newspaper's decision to run what some saw as a coerced interview. Separately, a cultural institution suddenly canceled a talk with exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian. The venue said at the time it did not want to become "a platform to promote the political interests of any individual."

And media freedom advocates argue that the landscape has only gotten more hostile since last year's national security law came into effect.

While Carrie Lam, the city's leader, said after that law was passed that Hong Kong people should still be able to enjoy freedom of speech and press, the new rule was later used to bring charges against media mogul Jimmy Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily. As police raided his newspaper's offices, they charged him with organizing an unauthorized protest and colluding with foreign forces.

The national security-related charges against Lai are still pending, and the legislation has not yet been used against reporters. But Tsui, from Chinese University Hong Kong, said that could change in the future.

In a statement to CNN Business on Tuesday, the Hong Kong government said it is "firmly committed to protecting and respecting the freedom of the press, which is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Basic Law."

When asked whether it was likely journalists would be prosecuted under the national security law in the future, the government said that "law-abiding people will not unwittingly violate the law."

Pressure on journalists has continued to mount this year. In February, for example, Xia Baolong, the director of China's Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, called for Hong Kong's media to be run by "patriots."

Members of the media are feeling the squeeze, too. Last year, the HKJA found a third of journalists surveyed felt pressured by their seniors to drop or reduce reporting on Hong Kong independence. And Keith B. Richburg, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong and the head of the city's Foreign Correspondents Club, said journalists had noted some sources didn't want to talk anymore.

A recent ranking of worldwide press freedoms indicates that the environment in Hong Kong has changed. The international watchdog Reporters Without Borders  which qualifies such freedoms based on data on abuse and acts of violence against journalists along with a questionnaire to experts  ranked Hong Kong 80 out of 180 countries for press freedom, down from 18 out of 138 in 2002.

Pressures on RTHK

Perhaps no publication in Hong Kong has more soul searching to do than public broadcaster RTHK when it comes to navigating the new landscape. Over the past 12 months, the station  which began broadcasting in 1928, when the city was under British rule  has axed episodes of current affairs shows, stopped broadcasting BBC World news programs, and investigated one its most successful reporters who became known for her probing questions of officials.

In February, the Hong Kong government announced the broadcaster's director Leung Ka-wing would be stepping down early, to be replaced by Patrick Li, a civil servant without any media experience  prompting RTHK's program staff union to say the station had lost its editorial independence.

As he began in his new job in March, Li told reporters there was no "freedom without restraint." And on Tuesday, RTHK announced a new slot for chief executive Lam who will now appear on the channel four times a week to discuss Beijing's overhaul of Hong Kong's electoral system.

In an emailed statement to CNN Business, RTHK said it does not comment on individual court cases or staffing issues. The broadcaster said that it suspended the BBC World Service after the National Radio and Television Administration announced that BBC World News was not allowed to continue within Chinese territory. Its programs must abide by the charter, the producers' guidelines and the laws of Hong Kong, the broadcaster added. "As stipulated in the Charter, RTHK is editorially independent."

As for Choy, the RTHK reporter: When asked by the media Tuesday whether Choy's verdict undermined investigative journalism, Lam said nobody is above the law.

"If the law today doesn't allow you to do certain things  and even though we respect freedom of speech and I recognize your profession  you cannot do it. We need to balance the interests of different parties."

Beijing's economic influence

There are concerns that mainland China's increased economic influence on Hong Kong could exert pressure on media outlets in the city.

Clement So, a Chinese University of Hong Kong professor who studies Hong Kong's media landscape, said in the past decade, a growing number of media organizations had mainland Chinese investment, something he believed could lead to self-censorship.

After prominent English-language paper the South China Morning Post (SCMP) was bought by Chinese tech giant Alibaba in 2015, for example, there was concern the paper's editorial freedom would be compromised. Critics have hyper-analyzed the publication for signs of Beijing's influence  but it has continued to report on topics that Chinese state media don't touch, such as the Hong Kong protests and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Last month Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal reported the Chinese government wanted the Alibaba group to shed some of its media assets  potentially including SCMP  due to its outsize influence over public opinion, after its founder Jack Ma fell from grace for publicly criticizing Chinese financial regulators. If Beijing no longer approved of Ma, one of China's digital darlings and global success stories, owning the newspaper, it raised questions over who might be deemed an appropriate buyer.

An SCMP journalist  who asked not to be named  said they and others in the newsroom felt an "instant panic," fearing the buyer could be a state-owned entity or pro-Beijing company.

In an internal email seen by CNN Business, however, SCMP chief executive Gary Liu said Alibaba's commitment to SCMP "remains unchanged," and the company "will not be responding publicly to these unsubstantiated rumors." CNN Business has reached out to Alibaba for comment.

The reports also provided a silver lining, though. To the employee, the widespread concern over SCMP's future showed the paper's value.

"At least we're having conversations now about why the SCMP is actually playing quite an important role and what that would mean if it was lost," the SCMP journalist said.

Follow the money

To journalist Ronson Chan, vice-chairman of the HKJA, all this points to an unmistakable conclusion: there's now a possible danger in being a journalist in Hong Kong.

"If you ask my heart, of course, I know being a journalist, especially working for a non-Beijing controlled media, must have some caution or possible danger," said Chan, who has worked across 11 media outlets, including at non-profit investigative news agency FactWire, where he worked with Choy.

Now an editor at non-profit pro-democracy news website Stand News, he says he wouldn't be shocked if he was arrested.

Part of the problem is a fundamental disagreement over the purpose of news. While Western journalism theory sees value in objectivity and holding authority to account, Chinese leaders see it has a "tool of political propaganda," he said.

Chan believes China's history of cracking down on dissidents and journalists tells him he should leave the city, before he is prosecuted. That's something he has discussed with his wife. "I don't know if it will become an evidence in my prosecution talking to you today," he said.

It wouldn't be the first time: interviews Apple Daily's Lai gave to international media were cited as evidence in his national security law cases.

But in the end, Chan wants to continue reporting in his city.

"Hong Kong is our home," said Chan. "If we left, the Hong Kong people have no news to read."

-- CNN's Eric Cheung contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Hong Kong has fined a journalist for ticking a box. That shows the city's media freedoms are in jeopardy"
I stand humbled before the high tribunals of Wokeism for my inclusion of the words Anglo-Protestant in my column last week.

When a few of the cognoscenti pointed out my evil, I asked my Christian Post editors to pull the column or delete the offensive words. They made the latter choice, and let the column stand, for which I am grateful.

I did not ask the removal as a surrender to Woke critics, but because I could see that the prejudices ignited by the word Anglo blocked some from reading the core concern of the columnmassive immigration into a nation that has lost its identity.

The term was in this 1980 quote from Dr. Samuel Huntington, late Harvard professor:

Source:The Christian Post
New York City, its bars, restaurants and tourist sites will have a "full reopening" on July 1, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday.

"We are ready to bring New York City back fully on July 1st, all systems go, because you've earned it," de Blasio said. He said that Broadway shows might take more time because they had been aiming for a September return, but that "some of the smaller, more intimate shows, we might be looking more like July, August, and we'll move heaven and earth to help them get that done."

De Blasio said he expects at least 400,000 jobs lost to the pandemic to return by year's end. The mayor cited the city's vaccination rate as crucial to the effort, saying 6.4 million New Yorkers have already been jabbed.

The city was among the hardest hit in the early stages of the pandemic, when long lines formed at hospital emergency rooms and ventilators were at a premium. More than 32,000 New Yorkers have died and more than 900,000 have tested positive for the coronavirus.

"This is going to be the summer of New York City," de Blasio said. "We're all going to get to enjoy the city again. And people are going to flock here from all over the country to be a part of this amazing moment in New York City."

Also in the news:

Brazil joined the U.S. on Thursday as the only countries to report more than 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, losing another 100,000 lives in just one month as it heads toward possibly worse days with the Southern Hemisphere approaching winter.

Arizona state Rep. Alma Hernandez, fully vaccinated for more than two months, has tested positive and is quarantining for a week. Hernandez said she has lost her sense of taste and smell and has a bad headache.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer unveiled a plan Thursday to tie the lifting of restrictions to the state's vaccination rate, setting specific benchmarks that must be reached to return to normal. About half of residents ages 16 and older have received at least one dose.

Story continues

New Orleans is ready to let the good times roll -- with some caution -- as officials said that starting Friday restaurants, bars and other businesses will be able to operate at 100% capacity. City mask mandates, however, will remain in place, and there will be limits for large indoor gatherings.

More than 1 billion doses of vaccines have been administered globally, but 82% of them were in high- and upper-middle-income countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. Only 0.3% were given in low-income countries, he said.

 Today's numbers: The U.S. has more than 32.2 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 575,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: More than 150 million cases and 3.16 million deaths. More than 305 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S. and 237 million have been administered, according to the CDC. Almost 100 million Americans have been fully vaccinated.

 What we're reading: Have a loved one who doesn't want to get the COVID-19 vaccine? Here's how to talk to them.

Keep refreshing this page for the latest updates. Want more? Sign up for our Coronavirus Watch newsletter for updates to your inbox and join our Facebook group.

Pfizer to send smaller vaccine packages as demand decreases

With nearly 55% of U.S. adults vaccinated against the coronavirus and about 25% saying they don't intend to get the jabs, the vaccination campaign is shifting gears and Pfizer is coming up with smaller packaging for its doses.

Instead of providing boxes with 1,170 doses as a minimum order, U.S. vaccination sites will be able to request 450 doses and use only one-third of those at a time. Pfizer designed its initial packaging knowing early shots would be delivered at mass vaccination sites. Now that the vaccination effort is moving to local pharmacies and clinics, the company wanted to provide its shots in a more appropriately sized package, said Tanya Alcorn, who heads the company's supply chain.

Alcorn also said Pfizer is developing a new vaccine formulation to be available later this year that will not have to be diluted at the vaccination site, making it easier to deliver.

-- Karen Weintraub

Takeout booze could become a permanent cocktail in Colorado

People in Colorado could continue to celebrate happy hour at home with beverages from their favorite restaurants under a measure passed by the state House to continue the sale of to-go cocktails even when the pandemic ends. An executive order from Democratic Gov. Jared Polis allowing takeout alcohol expires this summer. If the legislation passes, it would allow such alcohol sales to continue indefinitely.

Colorado Restaurant Association CEO Sonia Riggs said the sales have been a "crucial lifeline" for restaurants during the pandemic. Riggs said 85% of residents favor making takeout and delivery alcohol permanent.

"We urge the Senate to move quickly to advance and pass this bill, Riggs said.

Chicago reopens Navy Pier, United Center, lakefront beaches

Chicago peeled back capacity restrictions and announced a series of reopenings Thursday following a decline in new infections. Speaking at the citys iconic Navy Pier, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the reopening of the pier, lakefront beaches and the United Center indoor arena.

Its time for the pier and the city to be open, Lightfoot said. Today is a day so many of us having been waiting for a very long time.

Restaurants and bars can increase capacity, and large indoor venues  including spectator events, theaters, conventions and places of worship  can operate at 25% capacity. Fully vaccinated guests wont count toward capacity, she said.

Chicago paused reopening in March amid the threat of a case surge. Since then, weve made significant progress in reversing this rise, Lightfoot said, largely because of vaccinations. More than half of adults in the city have received at least a first dose, Lightfoot said.

 Grace Hauck

'Huge victory': 92% of Americans who got first shot returned for second

About one in 10 Americans haven't gotten their second scheduled dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and while that worries epidemiologists, the follow-through is far better than other adult two-dose vaccines. According to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 92% of people who got the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine made it back for their second shot. Experts noted such completion numbers for the two-dose regime of the most widely used vaccines against the coronavirus are a cause for celebration.

"With the biggest mass vaccination program in history, 92% of people coming back for their second shot is a huge victory," said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California-San Francisco.

 Elizabeth Weise

Moderna could make 4 billion vaccines by end of 2022

COVID-vaccine maker Moderna announced early Thursday that it will make as many as 1 billion doses of its shots this year and up to 3 billion next year. Most of next years doses will go toward vaccinating young children and for booster shots, which are likely to be needed as immunity wanes with time and in the face of new variants. Three COVID-19 vaccines are authorized for use in the United States, including Modernas, one based on similar mRNA technology made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech and a single-dose shot by Johnson & Johnson.

As we follow the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, we believe that there will continue to be a significant need for our mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and our variant booster candidates into 2022 and 2023, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a prepared statement.

 Karen Weintraub

US relief reaching overwhelmed India

The first of several emergency relief shipments to India was scheduled to arrive in New Delhi on Thursday from Travis Air Force Base in California. The shipment includes 440 oxygen cylinders and regulators donated by California, 960,000 Rapid Diagnostic Tests and 100,000 N95 masks to protect Indias front-line health care workers, U.S. Aid for International Development said. USAID said it has already provided over $23 million in assistance since the start of the pandemic, directly reaching nearly 10 million people in India.

The country's coronavirus problem continues to worsen: 379,308 cases and 3,645 deaths were reported on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins University data shows. The death toll has doubled in the last 10 days, and cases have doubled in the last 15 days. India accounted for 42% of the world's cases on Wednesday, and the share continues to increase quickly.

 Mike Stucka

Biden mum on push for fourth stimulus check

President Joe Biden did not raise the issue of a possible fourth stimulus check when he spoke before Congress on Wednesday night. Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are clamoring for a fourth round to help Americans who are still struggling financially during the pandemic. Such a move could lift more than 7 million people out of poverty, according to a recent analysis from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Are we recovered? Are people still hurting? Theres some evidence that were not out of the woods yet," said Elaine Maag, a principal research associate for the center.

US may finally be turning corner on pandemic

Potential COVID surges may have collapsed in nearly all states, a USA TODAY analysis of the data shows. National case-count leaders New York, Michigan and now Florida all have reported falling case counts. But the threat has also fallen in most states with smaller populations.

"We should be mostly heading down toward a new normal," tweeted Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, noting that a majority of U.S. adults are now at least partially vaccinated. Clinical trials are underway for vaccinating children as young as 6 months old.

Florida, which still leads the nation in new cases, has seen those case counts fall 12% from the previous week. Florida only became the leader because counts in Michigan have plunged more than 36% from earlier this month.

 Mike Stucka

Contributing: The Associated Press

In this Monday, April 12, 2021 file photo, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio delivers remarks in Times Square after he toured the grand opening of a Broadway COVID-19 vaccination site intended to jump-start the city's entertainment industry, in New York. Blasio expects the city to fully reopen by July 1, with the lifting of the citys COVID-19 restrictions.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID: Mayor Bill de Blasio says New York City reopens July 1; Moderna
A company selected by the Morrison government for a multimillion-dollar contract to deliver coronavirus vaccine injections to Australias most vulnerable has also been one of the biggest health sector donors to the Liberal Party in the past decade.

Sonic Healthcare gave $533,500 to the Liberal Party between 2011 and 2017, with $450,000 of the cash going directly to the federal branch, Australian Electoral Commission records show. Over the same period, it gave in-kind support of $55,000 to Labor.

Sonic Healthcare chief executive Colin Goldschmidt. Credit:Louie Douvis

The donations made Sonic, which has been awarded $312 million worth of contracts since the Coalition came to office in 2013, the fourth-biggest donor from the health industry ahead of the 2016 election.

Health Minister Greg Hunt announced in January that Sonic  along with firms Aspen Medical, Healthcare Australia and International SOS  would deliver vaccines to the nations 2500 aged care homes and hundreds of disability group homes. The Department of Health declined to make public how much the companies were being paid, with a spokeswoman saying on Wednesday that information was commercial-in-confidence.
GREENVILLE  Twenty-one South Carolina students who identify with groups underrepresented in Greenville's only medical school will have an opportunity over the next 10 years to attend for free.

The University of South Carolina's School of Medicine in Greenville, which enrolls about 100 students annually at its campus on the downtown grounds of Prisma Health, has received a $3.8 million BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation grant that will pay the annual tuition in full, $45,000, for these students.

The state's largest private insurer has supported scholarships at the Greenville campus since the school's opening in 2012, but this 10-year commitment to the Levi S. Kirkland Scholars program, named for the Greenville Health System's first Black surgeon, is the longest in the foundation's history, according to an announcement about the scholarships.

It is part of a larger strategy to expand representation in the medical field equally across demographic groups. While an effort to help correct historic disparities, the investment is also good medicine: Studies show patients are far more likely to seek care from individuals who look like themselves.

The Greenville school's dean, Dr. Marjorie Jenkins, said disparities between the general population and in her medical school are most apparent among students who identify as Black, Latino, rural or socio-economically disadvantaged. This can include individuals, for instance, who are the first in their families to attend college, she said. This past year, the school's incoming class drew 24 percent of its students from underrepresented groups and will have a historic high of 26 percent next year.

"That's quite an increase in percentage for a school," Jenkins said. "People might wonder how that occurs, but really it takes a lot of intentionality. You have to think diversity first. It doesn't just happen by chance."

Promoting diversity of thought and life experience, she said, makes the learning environment more invigorating in the school's classrooms but also benefits a profession where studies show patients are more satisfied with, and better persuaded by, doctors who share similar life experiences.

The USC medical school in Greenville has graduated more than 400 students in its nine-year history, Jenkins said.

Dillon Isaac, a Black medical student from Blackville who will graduate next week from the school, said he was on a Zoom call recently with extended members of his family answering questions about the coronavirus vaccine. They have all been vaccinated, he said.

He said they trusted him and asked a range of questions about the technology of mRNA-based vaccines and their safety. He said that he has also, with help from a Black primary care physician back home, been able to counsel his father on adhering to his blood pressure and diabetes medications.

"I think that's a direct representation of having a physician that looks like you and would empathize with you a little more closely," Isaac said.

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Isaac worked hard to get into medical school, graduating with a 3.7 GPA from Claflin University, getting the entrance test scores that landed him an interview, and applying twice to get into the program in Greenville. Standardized tests, including the MCAT entrance exam for medical schools, traditionally do not favor minority groups, he said. That and the lack of Black role models in medicine  just 3 percent of the profession in the U.S. despite a population that is 13 percent Black  are behind the profession's demographic disparities, he said.

"I think it's a combination of those institutionalized and even those personalized factors such as lack of representation," Isaac said.

Getting into the Greenville school is grueling enough, with 110 at most accepted out of roughly 4,000 applications that come in every year. Paying for it, Jenkins said, then becomes a barrier that often pushes debt-ridden students away from less lucrative fields of medicine such as primary care. Medical school students face an additional three to six years of advanced training, also known as residency, after they graduate.

"South Carolina is predicted to have 700 less primary care physicians than they need by 2025 and 800 less by 2030," Jenkins said. "That is quite a shortage."

Between the financial boost and the in-state practice requirement, the scholarship's designers hope the state will also make some progress toward filling that gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the state's growing demand.

Total payout to each student will be about $180,000. The average debt of a medical student in the United States is about $200,000, Jenkins said, so the scholarship is significant. Those chosen for the Levi S. Kirkland Sr. MD Scholarship will also be required to practice medicine in South Carolina for at least four years upon graduation.

"We know statistically that if a student comes to an in-state medical school and stays in the state for residency, there's a 76 percent chance they will stay here to practice," Jenkins said.

The Kirkland Scholars program has done a couple of things for him, Isaac said. It connected him with Black mentors who helped him navigate and finish medical school, something no one in his extended family could provide. It also left him with a quarter of the debt upon graduation that he might otherwise face.

Isaac will start a residency at Prisma Health in Greenville this summer in internal medicine and pediatrics.

"I love Greenville," he said. " I might eventually go outside South Carolina for a fellowship, but I think long term, the goal is to definitely practice in South Carolina."
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Last month, the family was rocked by an interview in which Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, alleged that palace staff had been insensitive toward Meghan and a member of the royal family had made racist comments about the couples first child. Harry, Williams younger brother, stepped away from royal duties last year and moved to California with his wife and son.
This image of the dwarf galaxy Sextans B, taken with the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSFs NOIRLab, contains a menagerie of astronomical objects, from bright stars in the foreground to distant galaxies hiding in the background. The galaxy itself contains both the cradles and the graves of stars, hosting star-forming regions as well as stellar death shrouds. Credit: National Science Foundation

This star-studded image shows the irregular dwarf galaxy Sextans B, which lies around 4.5 million light-years from Earth at the outermost edges of the Local Group. With a total mass of around 200 million times the mass of the Sun, Sextans B hosts an intriguing variety of astronomical objects. Some of the most conspicuous are the ruby-red clouds of atomic hydrogen visible near the center of this image. These vast, glowing clouds are giving birth to brilliant new stars. Supernovae and the stellar winds from these young stars will eventually sweep aside the cool clouds of hydrogen, leaving behind clusters of stars with similar ages and properties.

As well as stellar birthplaces, Sextans B harbors sites of stellar death. Sextans B is one of the smallest galaxies known to contain several planetary nebulae (though they are not visible in this image). Planetary nebulae are the outermost layers of aging red giant stars, thrown out into space at the end of a star's life.

In addition to Sextans B and its contents, this image features both very distant objects and stars much closer to home. Faraway galaxies can be seen littering the background of this image, noticeable by their fuzzy appearance or irregular shapes. Meanwhile, bright stars from our own galaxy shine in the foreground. Several of the bright nearby stars are surrounded by conspicuous diffraction spikesthe prominent crisscross patterns created by light interacting with the structure of a telescope.

Sextans B takes its names from its parent constellation Sextans (the Sextant). The constellation is one of several identified in 1687 by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, and it is named after an astronomical instrument he and his wife Elisabeth would use in their observationsmany of which were conducted without the aid of a telescope.

Though the Heveliuses were able to compile painstakingly accurate star charts without telescopes, astronomical technology has progressed since the 17th century. Rather than working with a sextant, astronomers created this image using the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). Located in the desert of southern Arizona, KPNO is a Program of NSF's NOIRLab and is home to one of the largest and most diverse arrays of optical and radio telescopes in the world.

However, no matter the telescope or instrument you use, the night sky is filled with interesting objects to observeas you can see from the collection of intriguing astronomical objects in this image.
West Australians will be required to keep wearing face masks indoors for another week after emerging from a Covid-19 lockdown.

Premier Mark McGowan has confirmed some interim restrictions will remain for Perth and the Peel region until 12:01am on Saturday, May 8.

It comes after WA recorded a fifth straight day of no locally acquired cases, having completed a snap long-weekend lockdown.

Masks will not be required outdoors from this Saturday unless physical distancing is not possible, such as at major sporting events.

Face masks will no longer be mandatory outdoors in Perth and the Peel region from Saturday but they will still be compulsory in indoor settings until 12:01am on May 8

That includes Sunday's AFL western derby between West Coast and Fremantle at the 60,000-capacity Optus Stadium, which will be allowed to host a 75 per cent capacity crowd.

The 75 per cent limit also applies to other major stadiums and arenas.

Cafes, restaurants and other hospitality businesses will return to pre-lockdown capacity but patrons will be required to wear face masks.

Masks are also mandatory in workplaces, for secondary school students and teaching staff and on public transport.

'If you leave your home, take your mask with you,' the premier said on Thursday.

'I know wearing masks is annoying and frustrating for many people, but I would just ask that we keep following the health advice and always use common sense.'

Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan confirmed some Covid restrictions will remain in Perth and the Peel region until the completion of a 14-day incubation period from when the last locally-acquired case was detected on April 23

Indoor weddings and funerals will be permitted to host up to 200 guests, community sport is allowed to resume with spectators and patients in hospitals, aged care and disability care can have a visit from one household per day.

The restrictions apply to anyone who has been in Perth or Peel since April 17 and subsequently travelled to another region.

Mr McGowan said the May 8 finish date ensured a 14-day incubation period from when the last locally-acquired case was detected on April 23.

Two locally acquired infections were found after it was confirmed the virus had leaked out of the Mercure quarantine hotel last week.

Authorities have identified 399 close contacts of confirmed cases from the latest lockdown and all have returned negative test results.

But Mr McGowan warned that it was possible WA could record more locally-acquired cases next week and close contacts would continue to be closely monitored and re-tested while completing their 14-day quarantine period.

No locally acquired cases of Covid were recorded in Western Australia on Thursday, for the fifth straight day

Initial treasury estimates have suggested a $70 million hit to the economy from the lockdown.

Small businesses that incurred direct costs, such as loss of perishable goods, will be eligible for support grants of $2000, the premier announced.

'I know it might not be everything some businesses would want but it is an acknowledgement of the impact and some support to assist,' he said.

Three 'high-risk' quarantine hotels - the Mercure, Sheraton Four Points and Novotel Langley - will stop taking returned travellers from as early as mid-May.

It will result in an indefinite reduction in WA's cap on international arrivals, which has already been halved to 512 a week for the next month.

Opposition Leader Mia Davies said the lockdown could have been avoided had the government acted on warnings about ventilation issues within its quarantine hotels.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks during a news conference held by U.S. President Donald Trump in the Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 27, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

Giulianis Lawyer Accuses DOJ of Corrupt Double Standard in Executing Search Warrant

Rudy Giulianis attorney accused the Department of Justice (DOJ) of a corrupt double standard by executing a search warrant against Giuliani on suspicion of failing to register as a foreign agent, while allegedly ignoring clear evidence on a laptop purporting to belong to Hunter Biden that would support similar allegations and an investigation.

Federal investigators early on April 28 executed search warrants at the home and office of Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and attorney to former President Donald Trump, and seized electronic devices, Bob Costello, Giulianis attorney, confirmed in a statement.

Costello said the devices seized by investigators at Giulianis office are replete with material covered by the attorney-client privilege, and complained that their seizure amounted to a disturbing example of complete disregard for the constitutionally protected privilege.

The attorney alleged that the DOJ was biased in its actions as it completely ignored clear evidence of apparent wrongdoing on a laptop hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, including failing to register as a foreign agent.

Costello said that the search warrants executed against Giuliani involve only one indication of an alleged incident of failure to register as a foreign agent, charges he said Giuliani has denied and repeatedly offered to prove to investigators that the allegations are untrue.

Twice, Mr. Giulianis counsel offered to sit with the SDNY and demonstrate that Mr. Giulianis conduct was lawful, Costello said, questioning whether the judge who signed the warrants had been informed about the offer and suggesting the decision to proceed with the search warrants was politically motivated. SDNY refers to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

This is totally unnecessary, Costello told Fox News on April 28, adding that the raid was carried out to make him look like hes some sort of criminal.

DOJ officials didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on Costellos statement. FBI officials didnt respond to earlier requests for comment about the warrants.

In his statement, Costello blamed Trump Derangement Syndrome and hatred as driving this unjustified and unethical attack on Giuliani, whose conduct he insisted was absolutely legal and ethical.

In late 2019, amid the first House impeachment inquiry against Trump about a conversation he had with Ukraines president in July of that year, prosecutors charged two alleged former associates to Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with unrelated crimes regarding alleged campaign finance violations.

On Jan. 20 of last year, Giuliani appeared on Fox News The Ingraham Angle and said hes no longer close to Parnas, a former client, and claimed that Parnas was lying about some of his claims. One example, according to Giuliani, was a claim that Parnas met with Trump at the White House during Hanukkah and was deputized by the president.

The meeting never took place, Giuliani told Fox News at the time. The records indicate that it never took place. He lied. The man is a demonstrated liar.

Lev is someone I was close to. Obviously, I was misled by him. I feel very bad. I still feel sorry for him. Im not going to respond to him for each and every one of the misrepresentations hes made, because there were so many, he said. If Im called as a witness, Im prepared to do it.

Before that, Giuliani, who was Trumps personal attorney at the time, told CNN in 2019 that he asked Ukrainian officials to look into then-candidate Joe Biden, before he noted that he asked them to look into the allegations that related to my client [Trump], which, tangentially, involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme, not unlike what he did in China.

I asked Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton, Giuliani said.

When FBI officials searched the home of Trumps former lawyer Michael Cohen, the former president said it was part of a witch hunt against him on behalf of the federal law enforcement agency. Cohen was eventually convicted and sentenced, spending more than a year at a federal prison near Otisville, New York.

Trump has long said that the Russia inquiry and impeachment against him were part of a politically motivated campaign to undermine his presidency and the legitimacy of his 2016 election win.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a test for New York City Council candidates seeking her endorsement in this years elections. She calls the project, run through her political action committee, a certification of sortsa checklist of progressive bona fides that multiple candidates in a given race could fulfill.

One question asks about the longstanding New York City custom known as member deference, in which the city council votes on the approval of, say, a big new affordable housing project according to the wishes of the council member in whose district it sits. Will you vote in favor of zoning changes to include mixed-income housing developments in an affluent neighborhood if the local council member was opposed? the questionnaire asks. In other words: Are you for member deference, or for doing something about New Yorks housing crunch?

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Its not just her. On Wednesday, from the opposite side of the Democratic spectrum, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said he would also support a policy of eliminating member deference.

It feels like a bit of momentum behind the idea that, when it comes to approving new buildings, local control has not produced a more just and equitable city. I wont mess with your district if you dont mess with mine has long been the preferred policy of politicians from rich and poor neighborhoods alike in many of the nations largest cities. But its effect has been to restrict the creation of new housing, foster corruption, and entrench boundaries of race and class.

Theoretically, members of big-city governing bodies only have a say over big changes such as neighborhood upzoningsthat is, when builders are allowed to construct taller, denser structures than before. In reality, however, thanks to outdated zoning codes and other city-run approvals, each local representative exerts a great degree of power over even minute changes to the cityscape.

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Consider Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran for office on ending this practice, known there as aldermanic privilege. Under the Chicago system, even insubstantial changes to buildings and lots require groveling before each wards leader, perpetuating the citys infamous culture of bribery and self-dealing that has sent dozens of Chicago aldermen to prison over the years. The most recent indictment was of South Side power broker Ed Burke, who is facing extortion charges overare you ready for this?the remodeling of a Burger King drive-thru.

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The more important problem in Chicago, according to a study by the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance: The city lets aldermen decide where affordable housing goes, and as a result, lets them maintain rigid racial boundaries. Nothing about that will change, the report concludes, unless and until the structural barriers imposed by aldermanic prerogative are dismantled. This deferral to local pols was infamously deployed to maintain segregation in Chicago during the era of public housing construction, but it continues in force today.

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Aldermanic control, the CFHA study outlines, has shrunk the available land for apartment development to just 20 percent of the city. Three-quarters of that land is outside majority-white wards; 98 percent of new, affordable multifamily housing is built there. One-quarter of that land is in majority-white wards; 2 percent of new, affordable multifamily housing is built there.

One Chicago power broker is facing extortion charges over the remodeling of a Burger King drive-thru.

A version of this privilege policy also exists in Los Angeles, where a San Fernando Valley council member appears to be backtracking on a 55-unit homeless housing project approved for his districtthe only project there from the citys $1.2 billion affordable housing bond measure. Other districts have given the green light for hundreds and hundreds of units; this stretch of the Northwestern Valley has only that one proposed building, permitted but now under reconsideration.

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And it exists in Philadelphia, where a Pew study of one six-year period found that not only did the 10-member city council not once overrule member prerogative, the vote was unanimous on 726 of 730 occasions.

Why does this system yield bad results? Its not rocket science. New housing, subsidized or otherwise, may help alleviate citywide problems with homelessness, overcrowding, affordability, and a dwindling tax base. But it may exacerbate neighborhood-level problems such as traffic, classroom size, and a shortage of parking. By devolving decision-making to individual neighborhoods, cities have internally recreated the fragmented, selfish governance pattern that characterizes their suburbs.

For an example of what happens when a politician tries to take on the issue, look no further than Chicagos Mayor Lightfoot. She stripped aldermen of control of licensing and permitting within hours of taking office. But then she put the fight over aldermanic privilege on hold. A fellow reformer on the city council, Scott Waguespeck, gave a simple reason for why she did so: She would lose the vote.

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That is the core of the problem. In most cities, this policy of neighborhood rights dates back decades, and its philosophical underpinning lies in the mid-century urban-renewal era. Black leaders seized an opportunity to take control, protecting their districts after the devastation of highway projects and other environmental hazards. White neighborhoods feared racial integration in the form of public housing from liberal planners like the Chicago Housing Authoritys Elizabeth Wood.

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Todays urban planners could hardly be more toothless by comparison, yet in all these cities, few politicians have tried to dismantle a system that, as the Chicago fair housing study shows, traded the possibility of citywide desegregation for the assurance of neighborhood control.

These days, its hard to know who earnestly believes this feudal system does good because local control is important and who simply wants to maintain extractive interests in every new project. This latter goal kind of makes sense, by the way: Its hard for cities to raise money to address their many social problems, and its complicated to duke it out at city meetings for a share of the pie. Pay-to-play policies for new construction can directly funnel millions of dollars into new local assets such as community centers, if thats what a council member or an alderman wants.

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Still, the drawbacks of local deference on housing outweigh the benefits. In California, advocates have mostly given up on swaying city politicians. Instead, cutting-edge legislation happens mostly in the statehouse, and consists of more liberal state politicians pre-empting their local peers. One example is the states new policy giving blanket permission for accessory dwellings units, also known as granny flats or backyard cottages. That set of laws overruled hundreds of city prohibitions, and paved the way for an explosion in small-scale infill housing in cities like Los Angeles. (A similar strategy may be afoot in Illinois.)

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In New York City, meanwhile, dont let the AOC-Andrew Yang alignment convince you that politicians are ready to end this practice. On the contrary: The New York City Council is preparing to give members just such veto power over the construction of hotels. Hotel builders say it will all but end new hotel construction just as tourism is getting back on its feet, pushing thousands of tourists into Airbnbs that eat up the citys housing stock and discouraging budget visitors. Three years ago, such a policy was introduced in some city neighborhoods including Tribeca and Long Island City. The result? No new hotels.

The stultifying effect on housing growth is similar, and its consequences are increasingly extreme. No politician wants to unilaterally disarm their district. Still, with rumblings of dissent from AOC to newly elected Los Angeles councilwoman Nithya Raman, from Mayor Lori Lightfoot to candidate Andrew Yang, theres reason to hope that council members privilege might finally be checked.
A WORLD ON THE WING: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, by Scott Weidensaul. (Norton, $32.) Weidensaul takes readers on a gripping journey alongside the worlds feathered wanderers and the people who study them. Hes also on something of a crusade, drawing attention to the large number of birds that have been disappearing from the skies. Weidensaul tasks himself with communicating to both the knowing birder and the layman the epic scale of whats happening in our skies every year, the whys and hows, while offering rays of hope through the gloomy storm clouds, Christian Cooper writes in his review. The success of A World on the Wing in navigating that challenge rivals the astonishing feats of the birds he chronicles.

WHAT COMES AFTER, by JoAnne Tompkins. (Riverhead, $28.) In this debut novel, a pregnant teenager appears in a small town that is reeling in the wake of tragedy. How the residents open their doors to a stranger, and how two neighbors find their way forward after the deaths of their sons, is the backbone of this difficult but elegant story. Its a cautionary tale, one that prompted me to ask a series of probing, unwelcome questions at the dinner table, Elisabeth Egan writes in her latest Group Text column. But its also a powerful and inspiring reminder of how a close-knit community will rally around people in trouble, no matter their age.

GOLD DIGGERS, by Sanjena Sathian. (Penguin Press, $27.) The teenagers at the center of Sathians debut novel drink literal gold in a desperate attempt to fit in as children of immigrants. The book is filled with achingly real reminders of what it was like to be an adolescent in post-9/11 America, feeling the weight of your parents dreams on your shoulders, but mostly just wanting to drink and make out. The tension Sathian builds is one of teenage insecurity swelling into adulthood, Lauren Christensen writes in her review. This intimate glimpse of millennials who are second-generation Americans  shows how history repeats. It is a story of immigrants reaping their futures from property they have found, which is not theirs  or is it?

FIRST PERSON SINGULAR: Stories, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. (Knopf, $28.) Murakamis new stories expound on memorys power to shape us, incorporating confessional musings and touches of his signature supernaturalism: Charlie Parker speaks to us in a dream, a monkey with a strange compulsion comes clean. Our reviewer, David Means, admires the collection: Whatever you want to call Murakamis work  magic realism, supernatural realism  he writes like a mystery tramp, exposing his global readership to the essential and cosmic (yes, cosmic!) questions that only art can provoke.

THE RECENT EAST, by Thomas Grattan. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The rare novel to make a good life interesting, The Recent East follows three generations of one family, each uprooted and relocated across the world at a pivotal moment while growing up. Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame, our reviewer, Patrick Nathan, writes. Is happiness really so uninteresting? Is contentment? Both seem to have developed that reputation, but in Grattans hands, lifes joys are magnetic.
LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- iTrinegy, a world leader in Networked Application Risk Management, is proud to announce that it has been honoured with a Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

Stevenage-based iTrinegy is one of a few organisations to be recognised with the annual Queen's Award for Enterprise which is the UK's most prestigious award for business success and presented by Her Majesty The Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister.

iTrinegy was set up in 2006 and its Software Defined Test Networks (Network Emulation) technology provides organisations with a way to create real-world network conditions in which to analyse, predict and verify application performance before deploying applications into potentially challenging network environments.

"We are thrilled to have been chosen for this award," said Graham Wood, Director. "Although iTrinegy has been widely recognised for our technical achievements and is the proud recipient of many awards over the years, we are a business and can only be successful if our technology is valued by our customers resulting in sales growth. The Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade Award is a fantastic endorsement for iTrinegy as a successful business as well as a great technology company."

iTrinegy technology allows businesses across the globe and almost every industry, including defence, healthcare, financial services, interactive media (games), e-commerce, retail, technology, and utilities, to effectively manage their digital products and brand, reducing deployment costs and risk, mitigating remediation expense and impact on resources at the same time as improving quality.

Now in its 55th year, The Queen's Awards for Enterprise are the most prestigious awards for business success in the country, with winning businesses able to use the esteemed Queen's Awards Emblem for the next five years.

About iTrinegy

iTrinegy is in the business of Application Risk Management. We give peace of mind to all organisations deploying networked applications. Every industry from finance to tech, defence to games, retail to healthcare is undertaking some degree of digital transformation. Success in the digital age is all about application delivery and performance but guaranteeing this isn't easy, especially when it comes to distributed networks that span countries or continents.

iTrinegy's Software Defined Test Networks technology provides organisations with a way to create real-world network conditions in which to analyse, predict and verify application performance before deploying applications into potentially challenging network environments. The insight it provides allows businesses to effectively manage their digital products and brand, reducing deployment costs and risk, mitigating remediation expense and impact to resources at the same time as improving quality.

In an environment where the risk of a failed application launch or migration could cost revenue, brand reputation, jobs, or even lives, the effective assessment, and management of this risk should be an integral part of any development, deployment or migration process.

For more information on iTrinegy Software Defined Test Networks, visit: https://itrinegy.com

Press Contact:

Phil Bull

Email: [email protected]

Tel: 44 (0)1799 252 200

SOURCE iTrinegy
The Lagos State government has denied withholding the N25 million donation made to Mary Daniel, a 26-year-old amputee, whose story went viral about two weeks ago when photos of her selling bottled water in traffic were shared on the social media.

The amputee, who claims to be a single-mother and orphan, shared the story of how she lost her leg in an accident. Her parents also died in the accident and is left to cater for daughter and aged grandmother all alone, she narrated.

Since then, well-meaning Nigerians have donated funds for her to get her off the streets. The Lagos State government, through the office of civic engagement, also took the amputee in and catered for her welfare.

But a report surfaced on social media Wednesday saying the state government had detected lies in Miss Daniels story and withheld the N25 million donated to her.

When PREMIUM TIMES contacted Gboyega Akosile, the chief press secretary to the Lagos State governor, he said the report was untrue.

The story is not that they detected lies from her stories. She requested that she wanted to leave the custody of the state, Mr Akosile said.

The Special Adviser, Civic Engagement felt she couldnt just let her go like that, since it was public knowledge that we took her in. That was why she called in the necessary agencies, NGOs and Police before they let her go.

Why we let her go

Aderemi Adebowale, the special adviser, Office of Civic Engagement, said in a statement Thursday that the state government has handed over Miss Daniel to the leader of the Igala community in Lagos.

The official said the amputee now has the resources to take care of herself and her child which is why the state allowed her go.

A total sum of N25 million was raised for the amputee, which was collected using her bank account.

The ultimate desire of the State government is to ensure that Daniel becomes a civically responsible citizen in the State. She now has the resources to take care of herself and her baby and have a new lease of life.

The government took the step to shield Daniel from possible fraudsters who may target the funds donated to her by well-meaning Nigerians.

Daniel was handed over to a Committee comprising of the representatives of the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Youth and Social Development, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and the Leader of Igala community in Lagos State, Mr. Sanni Yakubu Ejima in the presence of the Divisional Police Officer, Alausa and representative of the Commissioner of Police, Lagos State Command, she said.

Conflicting stories

The Nation newspaper on Thursday quoted the Commissioner of Police in Lagos, Hakeem Odumosu, as saying that said lies were detected in Miss Daniels story prior to the public donation.

The newspaper quoted the police boss as saying that although the amputee is not in custody of the police, she is being investigated and the state government is preventing her from accessing the money.

There were irregularities and lies in the account of her life she gave. It was discovered that contrary to her claim that her parents died during an accident that left her amputated, it was discovered that her father is very much alive and that she was amputated from birth.

It was also discovered that her presence in Oshodi was staged. Those working with her played on the intelligence of Nigerians to get donations for her.

It came to light when the people started threatening her. She promised some N500,000 others different amounts and was planning to return to her home state when the information leaked.

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Presently, the state government is preventing her from accessing the money. The government does not want a situation where it will become a trend for people to cook up stories, manipulate the people to get donations, the Commissioner said.

At a briefing to journalists on Thursday afternoon, Mr Odumosu admitted that he spoke about the amputee telling lies in her story.

I did not investigate the case, but the state government. We all know what went into the viral video. She went on social media, and sympathetic Nigerians contributed a lot of money that amounted to N25 million.

While that was going on, we got information that she was never involved in an accident that led to that and it was not at adult stage that she had the leg amputated.

She alleged that the father was late and all the family responsibilities on her shoulders. Investigation of the state government disclosed that the father is alive and healthy.

In the cause of all these things, so many things came up that made the state government hand her over to the social welfare.

Mr Odumosu said it was not the police that investigated.

He added that when she was being handed over to the social welfare team, the police were invited because they got information that some people might come to disrupt the place.

Mrs Adebowales statement on Thursday, however, made no mention of the police chiefs claims. The official merely said that the police were brought in to demonstrate that the state had taken good care of Daniel while in her custody and to ensure Daniels safety thereafter.

She added that the Committee will oversee Miss Daniels rehabilitation and ensure that the donated funds are judiciously utilized for the improvement of her standard of living and that of her baby.

Donation belongs to amputee

The Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Lagos, Gbenga Omotosho, also said the state government has no plans of denying the amputee of her huge donation.

Mr Omotoso said this during an interview on Star FM on Thursday.

The Commissioner said the state government is ensuring that the amputee remains unmolested and safe to do whatever she intends to do with the money.

That is a confirmation Lagos State is a land of hope and opportunities, Mr Omotosho said, adding that the amputee has been handed over to the Igala community and a non-profit organisation, Irede Foundation.
Liberty High School Principal Harrison Bailey had no idea what awaited him inside of his schools gym Thursday afternoon.

When he walked through the doors, the Grenadier band broke out into song, the majorettes were dancing and his wife, three kids, mother and in-laws sat in a socially-distanced group in the gym.

The Bethlehem Area School District community gathered with Baileys loved ones at Liberty to surprise the schools leader with the news that hes the Pennsylvania Principals Association secondary principal of the year. Bailey took in the news as his colleagues, a student and local dignitaries shared all that he means to the Hurricane family.

I am totally and completely blown away, Bailey said looking around the gym.

Nitschmann Middle School Principal Peter Mayes nominated Bailey for the honor because of his ability to rise up and serve his school and community. His quiet dedication to his work inspires those around him to do the same, Mayes said.

Bailey came to Liberty nine years ago from the Parkland School District and he said he credits Parkland Superintendent Richard Sniscak for helping him develop into the principal he is today.

Bailey set himself apart from Pennsylvanias roughly 3,500 school leaders through his dedication to helping his students overcome obstacles in their educational journey, said Paul Healey, executive director of the principals association.

The principal helped launch the Project Lead the Way curriculum, allowing students to explore engineering and biomedical sciences before college, Healey said.

Three years ago, Bailey plunged Liberty into becoming a trauma-informed high school, challenging his staff to rethink the way they approached their students and urging the district to provide more mental health resources. Trauma -- exposure to abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, drug abuse or mental health issues -- changes a childs brain, causing stress hormones to rise, literally turning off the part of the brain that facilitates learning.

He also integrated restorative justice practices into the school culture, Healey noted.

Out of all of this work, Bailey created the Liberty High School mental health center staffed by mental health professionals and featuring a peace room for struggling students to visit and decompress. The center is supported by state grant funding.

In a 2019 interview about the center, Bailey said he knew with more mental health supports he could effect real change in his students lives.

We were providing supports for students dealing with so many challenges that did not just have emotional ramifications but physiological ramifications, Bailey said in the interview. These experiences were preventing them from learning as they should be.

Bailey said Thursday it is an honor to come to work at Liberty each day with his students and staff.

I do this work because I love what I do, Bailey, who is Libertys first Black principal, said. I want to see them meet their passion and purpose.

Bailey cares deeply and genuinely for his students, said Jack Silva, district assistant superintendent and chief academic officer. He challenges those around him to tackle issues preventing students from learning: trauma, neglect, race and poverty -- issues that long were not talked about in education, Silva said.

Dr. Bailey does courageous work with the dignity and morality you want in a leader, Silva said.

Liberty Senior Selia Tsamoutalidis said Baileys fought for students to have the most normal school year possible despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Bethlehem Mayor Bob Donchez declared Thursday Harrison Bailey III day in honor of the award. And state Reps. Steve Samuelson and Jeanne McNeil presented Bailey with proclamations as did state Sen. Lisa Boscolas office.

On the occasion of Dr. Harrison Bailey of @LibertyHigh being named Pennsylvanias Secondary School Principal of the Year by the PA Principals Association, I congratulate him & am pleased to proclaim today, April 29th, 2021, as Dr. Harrison Bailey III Day in the City of Bethlehem. pic.twitter.com/lXINLpDXmV  Robert Donchez (@BethlehemMayor) April 29, 2021

Bailey lives in Easton with his wife Kim and three children Harrison IV, 16; Torin, 14; and Quinn, 10.

He thanked his wife for being an amazing confidant and life partner. And he told his kids when he is working long hours, not at home, theyre always top of mind.

Im hopefully making the world a better place for you, Bailey said.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com.
Reports in the Greek media have linked US confectionery and snacks giant Mondelez International with a deal to buy Athens-based snacks business Chipita.

The reports suggest the deal could be sealed with a EUR1.7bn (US$2.06bn) offer.

When approached by just-food, a Mondelez spokesperson said the company cannot comment on market rumours and speculation.

The Greek media reports such as from Euro2Day and EMEA Business Monitor suggest an announcement could be made before the end of May and that Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have been appointed as advisers for a potential deal.

It is not the first time Oreo and Cadbury brands owner Mondelez has been linked with acquiring Chipita. Back in 2018, reports suggested a deal was on the cards but a transaction was ultimately thwarted by a reluctance to sell on the part of the Greek firm's founder and CEO Spyros Theodoropoulos.

Chipita makes corn snacks, crisps and baked snacks under brand names including Chipita, 7 Days, Fineti and Chipicao. Its main shareholder is the Saudi Arabia- and Liechtenstein-based investor the Olayan Group, which is reported to own 80% of the business with Theodoropoulos retaining a 14% stake.

just-food has asked Olayan Group for its reaction to the Greek media reports.

Chipita has 14 production plants in 11 countries and sells its products in 56 countries across a number of continents, either directly or through strategic partnerships.
by Gary Daniels

There is finally a little light at the end of the tunnel now, as we all begin to emerge from the surreal events of the past year.

Since March 2020, alongside many other industries, the world of vintage aviation has endured ravaging revenue losses, ranging from cancelled air shows to the shuttering of museums. Happier days appear to be ahead, thankfully, so what better way to celebrate than with a collection of colorful aircraft in flight over the sunny hill country in the Texas heartland.

After its cancellation in April 2020, the 12th Annual Fredericksburg Invitational Texan Roundup finally took place in Fredericksburg, Texas between April 23-25, 2021. Nearly twenty vintage T-6 Texan variants flew in, from all points on the compass, arriving at Gillespie County Airport (T82) to spend the weekend sharpening their formation flying skills, talking airplanes, and enjoying great food with good friends at this perfect aviation venue. It was a great time, with everyone looking forwards to a brighter future. Many of you may know the history of the aircraft pictured here, but for those who may notheres the scoop.

The aircraft shown are all developments of the North American Aviation (NAA) NA-16, the remarkable trainer which, following refinement, emerged into the most significant piston-engined advanced-training aircraft of the 20th century, with the most prolific variants being the U.S. Army Air Forces AT-6 Texan, the U.S. Navys SNJ, and the British Commonwealths Harvard. Although more than 15,000 of these aircraft were built from the 1930s through the early 1950s, many of those pictured in the photos accompanying this article were built during the early-to-late 1940s. More than 13,000 of the breed were built at NAAs massive plant in Grand Prairie, Texas.

These aircraft were used as advanced trainers, and taught tens of thousands of young Allied aviators during WWII. The AT-6/SNJ/Harvard is powered by a 600hp radial engine and introduced cadets to a more powerful and advanced aircraft so they could gain the skills needed to move up to the front-line combat aircraft of the day. Instructors sat in the rear, while students flew from the front cockpit seat. The aircraft were typically colored brightly for high visibility in the crowded skies around a training establishment.

The majority of Texans remained stateside during the war, used as trainers, with only a small number sent overseas to combat theaters, so many of them survived WWII. After the war, the air arms of many nations used Texans and Harvards in various roles for many decades more. Although relatively few still exist, they are perhaps the most abundant WWII warbird extant, with an estimated 500 Texans still flying worldwide.

Texas has a vibrant AT-6/SNJ/Harvard community, but these aircraft are approaching 80 years old now and expensive to own, maintain, and operate. They are historical aviation treasures and keeping them flying honors WWII history and all those who served, in uniform or at home, during those hard years. But a T-6 on static display in a museum is not nearly as exciting as witnessing a formation of Texans roar by overhead and hearing that characteristic snarl of their propellers keeping history alive!
Meru Senator Mithika Linturi was Wednesday afternoon arrested under unclear circumstances, forcing Speaker Kenneth Lusaka to postpone the Senate sitting on the BBI Bill.

Linturi was later released following complaints from Senators who threatened to boycott the debate on the BBI Bill.

When the Meru senator returned to the chambers, he said armed DCI officers who were in three vehicles dramatically arrested him from his home in Nairobi.

The few hours I have been in the hands of my good brother Kinoti has not been one of the best experiences, to say the least. But I must thank this House who have seen it very necessary to stand up and be with menot because I am not answerable to agencies investigating any matter or that I am not supposed to be arrested, said Linturi.

The Senator castigated the DCI saying he should have been treated with dignity.

Today is a serious day in the history of this country. Despite that serious moment in our history that will not probably come in the next few years I find it very absurd. I would have been summoned to go to the DCI on Monday or yesterday or any other day but doing it today is what is very painful. When I left here and went to my house after reading the Bill, I found police officers in three vehicles brandishing guns wanting to arrest me. I dont think I deserve such a treatment, he averred.

Adding: Mr Speaker we require to be treated with dignity we require to be told whenever we have done anything wrong or something is being investigated to appear and shed light. I cant leave Kenya. Im elected. If I was to run away I would lose my seat.

Linturi said he was directed to appear before the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) on Thursday morning.

I have been told to appear tomorrow at 9 oclock but we shall be here to debate this Bill. So I dont know what we shall do. Because I need to be here.
Detectives with our Narcotics Section began an investigation into illegal narcotics distribution in St. Mary Parish in 2018. It was learned that the Weeden Drug Trafficking Organization, led by Lamar Jermaine Weeden of Parks, who was on Federal Parole, and Willie Alfred of Jeanerette, was once again actively distributing drugs in St. Mary Parish despite action by federal law enforcement.

Through the investigation, more than 30 subjects were identified as being a part of the organization, which extended beyond St. Mary Parish. The Louisiana State Police was contacted to assist due to the organizational operations outside our jurisdiction. Arrests were made by us as well as the State Police on most of those who were identified and warrants have been obtained for others.

On April 19, 2021, a multi-agency operation was conducted in order to execute warrants and arrest the leaders of this organization. The agencies included: Assumption Parish Sheriffs Office , Terrebonne Parish Sheriffs Office, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs & Border Protection, Louisiana National Guard Counter Drug Program, Berwick Police Department and Morgan City Police Department.

Warrants for Lamar Weeden and Willie Alfred were executed simultaneously, and both men were taken into custody without incident. Several other warrants were executed that day, with six subjects arrested on warrants for racketeering activity and conspiracy to commit racketeering activity. The investigation is ongoing and more arrests are expected.

Through this investigation, large amounts of drugs and drug proceeds have been seized and taken off the streets of St. Mary Parish and surrounding parishes. The seizures included:

125 g. Heroin

233.8 g. Crack Cocaine

471 g. Powder Cocaine

1,167 dosage vials of Ecstasy

7  dosage vials of Lorazepam

500 dosage units of Xanax

19 grams of Marijuana

2 vials of PCP

$63,000 in cash
ROME  In an effort to fight corruption in the highest ranks of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis issued a sweeping new decree on Thursday compelling top managers at the Vatican  including cardinals  to provide full financial disclosures and to refuse any gifts worth more than roughly $50.

In taking aim at matters both large and small  from real estate holdings and investments to work-related gifts given to any Vatican employee  Pope Francis said his goal was to bring the church into accord with best financial practices to ensure transparency and fight corruption.

According to Scripture, fidelity in small things is related to fidelity in important ones, the pope wrote, citing the Gospel of Luke. Just as being dishonest in matters of little consequence is also related to being dishonest in important matters.

The decree was made in an apostolic letter, under the popes own legal authority, and follows another issued last May that made Vatican procurement contracts more transparent.
In a major act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to permanently remove Blake Baileys biography of American novelist Philip Roth (19332018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them have come forward with any evidence to back up the claims.

Baileys 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the important works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Baileys 2014 memoir.

Blake Bailey, 2011 (Photo creditDavid Shankbone)

In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Nortons president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses. In fact, overnight Bailey has become a non-person, he has ceased to exist.

Grotesquely, the book company also said it would match the amount of Baileys book advance to donate to organisations that fight against sexual assault or harassment and work to protect survivors.

Already, a search on Nortons website for Philip Roth: The Biography lands one at a message that reads: Our apologies! We cant find the page youre looking for.

The publishing firms mission statement asserts that Independent since 1923, employee-owned, and proud to publish books that live, Norton is here for you. The book company promises that we will stick to the business of publishing the best books we can lay our hands on and then keep our hands on them for as long as may be. Or, until some clique of gender-fixated zealots applies a bit of pressure.

Philip RothThe Biography

The purging of Baileys book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner.

The filthy snout of the New York Times has been busily at work in this affair. On April 21, the Times published an article setting out the sexual assault allegations against Bailey.

There is no reason to give the slightest a priori credence to the claims made in the Times article, which conforms to a pattern of trial-by-media that has been perfected since the launching of the #MeToo witch-hunt in October 2017. Bailey has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. None of the alleged incidents were ever reported to the authorities.

Astonishingly, on the basis of these unsubstantiated assertions, Norton, in the Times gleeful phrase on April 21, took swift and unusual action. The publishing firm first revealed that it had stopped a 10,000-copy second printing scheduled for early May. Now, Norton has gone one infamous step farther.

Bailey has labeled the allegations categorically false and libelous. In response to Nortons latest announcement, his lawyer condemned the publishers drastic, unilateral decision  based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.

There is an unreal element to the campaign against Baileys book. No one argues the biography contains falsehoods or that the author plagiarized anothers work. On the contrary, even hostile reviews acknowledge the books thoroughness. No, the biographer has fallen foul of a dubious morals charge.

The National Coalition Against Censorship simply repeated an elementary truth, although an imperiled one, when it pointed out, in opposing Nortons decision, that books must be judged on their content. Many of literatures celebrated authors led troubledand troublinglives. While a writers own biography can certainly impact our interpretation and analysis of their work, the reading public must be allowed to make their own decisions about what to read.

French author Jean Genets criminality was embedded in the very title of one of his most important works, The Thiefs Journal (1949), which remains widely and deservedly read. No one has yet suggested that the remarkable novel by another French writer, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), should be destroyed because the author later became a pro-Nazi anti-Semite.

Individuals convicted of heinous acts have their books published all the time, including death-row prisoners and more. For that matter, of course, a grouping of truly serious criminals, former US government officials and generals, responsible for the deaths of millions in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and generally everywhere around the world, has its (ghost-written) memoirs and banal musings published like clockwork.

But with one Salem witch-trial-like outburst of hysteria, a respected biographer, author of a volume that was to become the standard work on the subject, vanishes into thin air.

The attack on Bailey is unprecedented since the dark days of McCarthyism, when the US government removed thousands of books by left-wing authors and sympathizers from its overseas libraries. It continues and escalates a recent process that has already involved the ruination (or attempted ruination) of individuals such as the late James Levine, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Placido Domingo, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., Charles Dutoit, Garrison Keillor and Geoffrey Rush, and the institutionalization of censorship.

Bailey, who spent nearly a decade on the Roth volume, is an undeserving victim of this scurrilous campaign. The presence of Roth himself looms largely over the present affair.

The April 21 Times' article let the filthy cat out of the bag in this regard. It observed that the controversy that has engulfed Mr. Bailey erupted in part because of the publicity he has received for his Roth biography, which led some of the women accusing him of misconduct to come forward. Some of the latter have noted that they were bothered not only by the praise lavished on Mr. Bailey, but by the way, in his Roth biography, that he seemed to excuse the writers misogyny. Several literary critics seized on the fact that in the biography, Mr. Bailey brushed off Mr. Roths mistreatment of women.

One does not even have to read between the lines here. Bailey is being punished by the accusers, the Times and, now having fallen into line, Norton for his failure to condemn Roth sufficiently for what they claim is the latters mistreatment of women.

Philip Roth

Roths writing has run afoul of the race-and-gender Mafia operating in and around the Democratic Party, including prominently the pseudo-left and feminist set. The late writer made no secret of his distaste for identity politics, a subject he treated scathingly in The Human Stain (2000). In 2018, in regard to the then recently launched #MeToo campaign, Roth commented that he saw no tribunal before which the sexual misconduct allegations might be adjudicated, but instead publicized accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment. I see the accused denied the right of habeas corpus, the right to face and examine his accuser, and the right to defend himself in anything resembling a genuine judicial setting, where careful distinctions might be able to be drawn as to the severity of the reported crime.

Roth has fallen out of favor and faces the prospect of becoming a non-person. His work will likely be increasingly dropped from college courses and demands will be made that his immoral, libidinous novels be removed from libraries.

The accusation that Roth in his novels is a misogynist deserving of banishment is almost beneath replying to. Roth was an artist, that is to say, someone who attempted to represent reality honestly and without idealization. As a result, he stubbornly refused to see anyone, male or female, as blameless. His efforts run counter to the absurd, philistine and thoroughly stupid view now prevalent in establishment circles, something out of a Victorian melodrama, that women are eternally saintly victims who never tell a fib or carry out a betrayal. What passes for the American intelligentsia has fallen to this ridiculous, ignoble level.

In 2014, Roth responded in an interview to the charge of misogyny, noting that the accusation, although absurd, was not necessarily a harmless amusement. He continued, In some quarters, misogynist is now a word used almost as laxly as was Communist by the McCarthyite right in the 1950sand for very like the same purpose.

Indeed, the assault on Roths reputation has this definite right-wing character. His critics despise him in the end because of his most admirable and enduring qualities, embodied in his angry and informed artistic treatment of such subjects as petty bourgeois conformism and repression, anti-Semitism, American fascism, Communism, identity politics and more. At his best, Roth offers a troubling, disruptive view of things. The affluent petty bourgeoisieessentially satisfied with itself and the way things arealways and everywhere mistrusts serious art and, given the proper circumstances, strives to discredit and suppress it.

Instinctively, the American ruling elite, terrified of the inevitable emergence of mass opposition, encourages every attempt to dull popular consciousness and awareness. It inevitably fears any work that sensitizes and alerts the viewer or reader, or encourages a searching, thoughtful approach to public matters. In that sense, every significant attack on democratic rights is an attack on the working class and its political progress.

The Democratic Party wing of the ruling elite is the most vigilant and therefore the most censorious in this regard. No one at the Times, the Washington Post, Salon or the Nation has uttered a serious protest about Nortons scandalous action. On the contrary.

Roth also faces expulsion from the canon because of his personal life, including his numerous affairs. Why should this high-minded campaign stop here? Any writer or artist who has a personal life that in any fashion provokes the disapproval of the moral crusaders risks permanent removal. The current atmosphere almost guarantees a vast culling of writers, leaving untouched only those who embraced monogamy or purely platonic relationships. Who shall escape a whipping under that scheme of things? We are not convinced it will ensure the finest art is left to us. All of this simply has no relation to reality as it is actually lived.

We unequivocally denounce Nortons censorship, call for Baileys defense and defend Roths right to represent the world as he saw it.
The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has inaugurated the Parliamentary Advisory Board with a call on members to work collectively and collaboratively to improve upon the work ethic of staff of the Parliamentary Service.



According to Mr Bagbin, doing this is critical to the sustainable growth and development of the legislature and its personnel if Ghanas parliament was to be a model on the African continent.



The Speaker made the call at the swearing-in ceremony of the six-member parliamentary advisory board in Accra, yesterday.



He said It is a fact that there are some hardworking employees of the Service, who are giving their best for the Service and Parliament.



It is equally true that there is a significant number whose contribution is nothing to write home about. There are some staff who basically have no schedules, and so virtually do nothing, yet are paid at the end of each month.



Monitoring and supervision by superiors are poor and must be improved if we are determined to attain the vision of being a model Parliament in Africa.



The Board is Chaired by the Speaker, and the Clerk to Parliament, Cyril Nsiah, the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, and the Minority Leader, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, are other members.



The rest are General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, and a former Majority Leader and New Patriotic Party member for Tema West, Abraham Ossei Aidooh.



Mr Bagbin said in as much as a lot would be expected of personnel of the Service, everything must be done to address their concerns, pertaining to delays in promotions and career progression.



He said though Ghanas Parliament continued to receive plaudits on the international front, its rating on oversight was surprisingly low because the legislature lacked the needed support and assistance to perform oversight functions.



Mr Bagbin commended his predecessor, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye, for introducing the Private Members Bill, and tasked the Board to work hard to enhance the capacity of the Drafting Unit of the Parliamentary Service, to be able to support members.



The Majority Leader and Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, noted that high attrition rate was a major factor undermining the oversight responsibility of Parliament.



Mr Iddrisu said the board would work assiduously with the Speaker to make the current Parliament more responsive, accountable and transparent in serving the needs of the people.



We will work together to improve oversight for greater accountability particularly in the exercise of Executive authority in Ghana, he said.

Source: The Ghanaian Times









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Featured Video
Boris Johnson's mobile number is available online and has been for 15 years, it emerged tonight.

Popular gossip newsletter Popbitch gave its readers clues on how to find the Prime Minister's number, pointing them to a press release from his time as MP for Henley in 2006.

The number, which the PM hasn't changed in the 15 years since, is written on the bottom of the press release.

It comes just days after it was revealed that Mr Johnson refused to change his number, despite concerns that he was constantly being approached for help because it is so widely known.

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have raised the issue with the PM last year, telling him he was being asked for help by MPs, lobbyists and others in the business world so often because his number was too widely known.

Downing Street declined to comment on the report and attempts to call the number on Thursday night were met with an automated message saying the phone was 'switched off' and an invitation to 'please try later or send a text'.

The number, which the PM hasn't changed in the 15 years since, is available on the internet

Popular gossip newsletter Popb**** gave its readers clues on how to find the Prime Minister's number

Readers quickly worked out the PM's number, rushing to social media to crack jokes at Mr Johnson's expense.

On website Phonefinder, under an entry for the PM's supposed number, dozens of users poked fun at the revelation.

One, using the username Dominic Cummings joked they received a call from the PM's phone and were told his famous hair 'is fake'.

Another referenced the scandal over the Prime Minister's flat renovations, joking the called 'sl**** off my John Lewis furniture'.

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is said to have raised the issue of the PM's number with him

Others took aim at Brexit while one user posed as Keir Starmer to slam Mr Johnson for not answering questions.

It is the latest headache for the PM, who came under fire for the 'Wallpapergate' row, as well as 'sleaze' claims over text messages he sent to billionaire Sir James Dyson and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Last week, Boris Johnson mounted a furious defence as he came under fire over the leaked private texts in which he promised Sir James he would 'fix' a tax rule so the tycoon's staff could help make ventilators for the NHS.

Sir James wrote an official letter to the Treasury asking for the tax status of his staff to remain the same if they moved from Singapore to the UK to produce vital ventilators during the pandemic.

But in a private text seen by the BBC, Mr Johnson told Sir James that he 'will fix it' himself.

He then added 'Rishi says it is fixed!! We need you here'.

Just two weeks later, Rishi Sunak told MPs that those coming into the UK to offer help during the pandemic would not see a change in their tax status.

It was the latest in a string of cronyism and lobbying questions facing the Conservative Party, after accusations that David Cameron used his influence and contacts to lobby ministers and officials behalf of his financier boss Lex Greensill.

Text exchange between Boris Johnson and Sir James Dyson over the tax status of his employees Dyson: 'We are ready. But nobody seems to want us to proceed. Sadly, James' Johnson: 'I will fix it tomo! We need you. It looks fantastic' Johnson: 'Rishi says it is fixed!! We need you here' Dyson: 'Thanks! I will give the ventilator our all. James' Dyson: 'Dear Boris, I'm afraid that we need a response to our letter below from Rishi please? We really need Rishi to answer the letter we sent (attached) - now. Or to make the position clear. Rishi has fixed the Country Day Count issue but not Work Days. The former is now covered under an 'Exceptional Circumstances' umbrella, Work Days are not. So, he has freed up your ability to be in the UK but not to work there - even in support of this National emergency.' Johnson: 'James I am first lord of the treasury and you can take it that we are backing you to do what you need.' Just two weeks later, Chancellor Rishi Sunak told MPs that those coming into the UK to offer help during the pandemic would not see a change in their tax status. Advertisement

This included texting Mr Sunak in an unsuccessful effort to secure coronavirus loans.

Hitting back at the BBC's report, Sir James wrote in the Daily Telegraph: 'There were myriad questions, from the technical to medical and compliance.

'It was in this context that we wrote formally to the Chancellor on March 15 for clarification on how UK tax rules would apply during this period of unprecedented upheaval. Far from concealing the text exchanges, we shared them explicitly with officials at the Treasury and No10 via email on March 28.'

A BBC spokesman said: 'The BBC has led the way on reporting a significant story which is clearly in the public interest. Sir James Dyson has informed us he is not a prominent Conservative supporter.'

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer today trolled Boris Johnson by sampling wallpaper at John Lewis as he gently fanned the flames of the Downing Street flat row.

The Labour leader was seen picking out wallpaper at the department store's Manchester site, in a subtle dig at his Conservative adversary.

It comes as an incensed Mr Johnson furiously defended himself at yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions over the 'Wallpapergate' row - in which he is accused of using 58,000 of Tory funds for a lavish refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.

Yesterday a clearly rattled Mr Johnson used Downing Street to insist he paid for the renovations himself and had abided by the ministerial code.

His animated Commons performance sparked an explosion of memes on Twitter, as people poked fun at the politician's visible fury.

And today, Sir Keir, slightly late to the party, decided to have a go at a humorous take on the row.

It has been claimed that Mr Johnson and partner Carrie Symonds labelled the Downing Street flat - which he inherited from Prime Ministerial predecessor Theresa May- a 'John Lewis nightmare'.

And Sir Keir made a subtle dig at the claims by browsing wallpaper at John Lewis at at the Intu Trafford Centre in Manchester.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that the city hopes to "fully reopen" on July 1.

The mayor did not specify exactly how or when pandemic restrictions would be lifted, which is actually a decision for New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo, with whom he has a difficult relationship.

"We are ready for stores to open, for businesses to open, offices, theaters, full strength," de Blasio told MSNBC.

For his part, Cuomo said making projections was "irresponsible" but hoped that the Big Apple might be able to end restrictions earlier.

"If we do what we have to do we can reopen earlier," he told reporters.

De Blasio said there was still "work to be done" and said the key to reopening would be getting everybody vaccinated.

New York has been subject to various restrictions since the coronavirus first engulfed the city in March last year, going on to kill around 32,000 people.

Some 6.4 million doses of the vaccine have been administered in the Big Apple, according to city figures. Around 2.4 million New Yorkers out of 8.5 million have been fully vaccinated.

The goal is to reach 5 million by the end of June, said the mayor.

Cuomo has loosened a number of restrictions in recent weeks, allowing restaurants, stadiums, cinemas and performance venues to reopen with limited capacity.

Broadway theaters are not expected to reopen until September.

Despite the vaccination drive, a vast majority of New Yorkers continue to work from home, and offices remain deserted.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
Police have uncovered a large and sophisticated hydroponic cannabis operation and released dramatic footage of the moment they found the huge haul.

An estimated 27 kilograms of cannabis was recovered from 100 plants hidden inside four shipping containers at an industrial complex in Leo Valley Drive in Noosa, Queensland.

Four people were arrested in associated raids, including a 38-year-old Cooroy man at the Leo Valley Drive premises.

He was charged with drug trafficking, producing dangerous drugs, and possession.

One of the police search warrants was issued for a premises on Leo Valley Drive - where four shipping containers were searched and 100 cannabis plants found inside

Four people were arrested and charged during the operation, including a 38-year-old Cooroy man who was charged with trafficking, drug production and possession

Dried cannabis was also found in storage bags during the raid, which was part of an ongoing operation called Romeo Rhino.

Queensland police issued four search warrants and made four arrests.

They charged three men and one woman with a range of 11 offences related to drug trafficking, production and possession.

The professional operation was believed to have been run from a pool restoration business, according to the Courier Mail.

A 38-year-old Cooroy man, a 27-year-old Coolum Beach man and a 25 year old Eumundi woman will all face Noosa Magistrates Court on June 1.

The third man, aged 36, charged with possession was referred to a drug diversion program.

Police also seized equipment for producing cannabis including lighting and fans.

The cannabis seized in the raid weighed in at 27 kilograms

Queensland police uncovered cannabis in four shipping containers at the Leo Valley Drive premises

Queensland police Detective Sergeant Tim Byrnes confirmed the premises was a pool business.

'We will allege that was basically a front just to give it the outward appearance that it was something legitimate,' he said.

'We will allege the whole premise was being used for illicit purposes.'
(@FahadShabbir)

Additional forces and assets are being pulled up to the Kyrgyz-Tajik border on both sides, the Kyrgyz State Border Service of Kyrgyzstan told Sputnik on Thursday

BISHKEK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) Additional forces and assets are being pulled up to the Kyrgyz-Tajik border on both sides, the Kyrgyz State Border Service of Kyrgyzstan told Sputnik on Thursday.

"At about 17.00 [11.00 GMT], the Tajik side opened fire at the border posts Kapchygay, Min-Bulak, Dostuk, as well as at the border posts Kozhogar and Bulak-Bashi.

As a result of mortar shelling, the building of the Dostuk frontier outpost of the Batken frontier detachment caught fire," the service's spokesman said.

"In response to the actions of the Tajik security officials, the border service's Boru special-purpose detachment seized the Khoja Allo frontier post of the Republic of Tajikistan," he said.

"Along the entire perimeter of the Kyrgyz-Tajik state border, additional forces and means are being pulled up on both sides," he added.
Legacy Queensland has been forced to sell its Brisbane headquarters, with public donations sliding by $1.4 million after volunteers stopped collecting donations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The veterans charity provides financial, emotional and housing support to almost 7000 Queenslanders who are related to deceased war veterans.

Legacy Queensland chief executive Brendan Cox outside the charitys South Brisbane headquarters, which has been sold because donations in 2020 slumped by $1.4 million. Credit:Tony Moore

Legacy Queensland has been in Fish Lane in South Brisbane, where it is close to trains and buses for their volunteers to get to the office, for almost 25 years.

After COVID hit last year, we looked at the immediate financial impact on our budget, Legacy Queensland chief executive Brendan Cox said.
Lucknow, April 29 : The scare of corona drove a young patient to end his life by suicide at the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS) here on Thursday.

Kamal Kishore, who was suffering from chronic kidney disease and was undergoing dialysis, had tested positive for coronavirus on April 16 and was admitted to Rajdhani Corona Hospital in the SGPGIMS on April 18.

Around noon on Friday, when washrooms were empty on the fourth floor, he jumped out through a window.

He was taken immediately to the emergency and a trauma team was rushed to revive him, but he had died by then.

A statement from the SGPGIMS said that the body had been handed over to police.
New Delhi: The Government of Japan on Thursday (April 29) announced the foreign recipients of the 2021 Spring Decorations. Nripendra Misra, former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of India, and Indira Misra, former President of the Ikebana International Gurgaon Chapter, are among this years foreign recipients, said a statement from Embassy of Japan in India.

Nripendra Misra will receive the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star in recognition of his contributions to strengthening the economic relationship between Japan and India. Indira Misra, however, will receive the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays in recognition of her contributions to promoting Ikebana in India and mutual understanding between Japan and India, it said.

The statement said, "The Embassy of Japan in India has the honor to pay tribute to the above two recipients for their distinguished service on the occasion of the conferral." It said:

Mr. Nripendra Misra



Title of the Decoration: The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star

Service: Strengthening the economic relationship between Japan and India.

Major Positions Held: Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of India (2014-2019), also Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of Telecom-communication, Fertilizer and Chemicals, Chairperson of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India

About Nripendra Misra's contributions to Indo-Japan relations, it said, "Mr. Misra contributed to the development of the Japan-India relationship as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of India from 2014-2019. As Principal Secretary to the PM, he made an enormous contribution to several successful high-level visits between the two countries, including Prime Ministerial visits. During his tenure, three visits by the Indian Prime Minister and two visits by the Japanese Prime Minister were conducted, with far-reaching progress made in various areas of bilateral cooperation. He had tirelessly dedicated himself to the materialization of the current strong Japan-India relationship."

"Japan-India economic cooperation is the traditionally robust area of cooperation between the two countries, and the number of Japanese companies operating in India increased significantly during his tenure. Mr. Misra had been fully aware of the vital importance of the economic relationship between our two countries and played a pivotal role in furthering the Japan-India economic relationship, particularly boosting trade and investment. This was heightened with his assiduous role of facilitator," it added.
IT services major launched Operation C3 Combats Covid-19as to help its associates in India and their communities which are impacted by the outbreak.

These efforts will be focused on three primary areas: supporting Covid care facilities, supplementing oxygen supplies to address the acute shortage, and providing access to vaccinations.

We are immediately providing $1.5 million (approximately Rs 10 crore) through the Foundation to operationalize response efforts with our partners across India. Were also providing an additional $2 million (approximately Rs 15 crore) in emergency funding to Unicef in India to help address acute shortages in life-saving oxygen and deploy medical and testing supplies, said Rajesh Nambiar, Executive Vice President and Chairman, Cognizant India, in a note to the employees.

As part of this initiative, the company is helping establish and support Covid Care Facilities across India, including offering their own facilities to be operated as care facilities. Were supporting the set-up of oxygen generation plants in hospitals to help them overcome oxygen shortages. And were working to facilitate special centers to make vaccination easier for people with disabilities, he said.

In addition to the above, Cognizant is providing access to vaccines for all of its associates and their dependents, medical support for Covid-19 positive associates and their immediate family members, paid leave for Covid care or recovery, and emergency financial support for junior staff in dire cases to help cover medical expenses.

Defeating Covid will take all of us working together, but Im confident that we will persevere together. We will continue to monitor the situation and adjust our response accordingly, and we will provide you with regular updates on changing conditions and what were doing to help, said Nambiar.

On Wednesday, Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO, too reached out to employees in India. As a part of mobilizing efforts supplementing medical coverage to ensure Covid-19 care for IBMers. has put in place a dedicated health line where IBMers in India who are isolating at home can receive medical care and consultations from medical professionals.

When it comes to vaccination IBM is supporting efforts to increase vaccination among IBMers. For those who volunteer, we are creating a decentralized distribution model where IBMers and their covered family members can get the vaccine in any approved center close to where they live or a facility on our own campuses, wrote Krishna in a notification to employees.

Other than this Krishna also said that IBM is leveraging its voice and influence to rally global support. This weekend I joined US business leaders in urging the Biden Administration to expedite assistance. We are also now working with the US and Indian governments as well as the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, the Business Roundtable and the US-India Business Council within the US Chamber of Commerce to accelerate critical aid. This includes donating funds for 2,500 oxygen concentrators and working with local partners to fund emergency hospital beds in communities where our teams live and work, he wrote.
On Monday morning, roughly two hundred faculty members began an indefinite strike at Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) after 18 months of contract negotiations. The faculty are striking for fair wages, secure benefits, and a reasonable and clearly defined workload.

Oregon Tech faculty picket line (Photo: OT-AAUP Facebook)

The struggle is the first public university faculty strike in the states history, and the first contract being negotiated by the Oregon Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors (OT-AAUP) since it was established in late-2018 to cover full-time faculty, instructors and librarians.

Dozens of faculty, staff and students showed their support on picket lines in the first days of the strike at the main OIT campus in Klamath Falls, a small city in the southern part of Oregon near Medford. There are also smaller groups of faculty on strike at the Wilsonville campus, as well as five dental hygiene professors who work at an Oregon Tech program based at Chemeketa Community College in Salem. According to one post on Twitter, local K-12 teachers even joined the picket line on Tuesday.

OIT faculty authorized the strike on April 2 with a 92 percent vote in favor of the strike, setting April 26 as the deadline to come to a tentative agreement. The strike vote was called after OIT administration declared an impasse on March 10 and canceled bargaining the following day, after which final offers were presented by both sides on March 17 and a 30-day cooling off period was implemented according to state law.

After attempting to arrive at an agreement last weekend, the university tried and failed to file a state injunction to declare the strike illegal, and the OT-AAUP announced what they called a win-win offer. While the offer has not been publicly released, the union stated in a press release that it included senior administrations proposed 45 workload hour model, but with clear definitions for non-instructional workload.

The offer also maintained health care benefits through the states Public Employee Benefits Board (PEBB) with the university paying 95 percent of all costs but added an addendum that the benefits could only be changed if all employees at the university also do so. In addition, the bargaining team is encouraging a pay raise model that brings salaries close to the market average based on the educational level and experience of employees.

Andria Fultz, member of the OT-AAUP Executive Committee and associate professor in the Communication Department, promoted the deal in a press release stating, Our package not only satisfies the concerns of Oregon Tech, it aligns with values and pillars set forth in the Presidents Strategic Plan with a commitment to the community and institutional excellence that will ultimately lead to student success.

The university rejected this offer at 5:45 a.m. on Monday, 15 minutes before the strike deadline, claiming that its own offer was generous with a 13 percent salary increase over the 4-year contract period, amounting to 3.25 percent annually, with additional raises and bonuses based on performance. This meager increase would only place OIT faculty closer to the state average, given that they currently earn only 87 percent of what other faculty members at Oregon universities make, according to the union. Cost of living increases would offset that raise significantly by 2025.

Oregon Tech also rejected other elements of the unions offer, demanding to keep the current health care package in place. They also claim that the universitys workload limits match what many universities have in place with other AAUP contracts.

In other words, the university is attempting to guilt faculty into accepting concessions and ending the strike, effectively saying they should be grateful for what they have already.

Just before the strike started, administrators wrote in a press release: Oregon Tech continues to ask the Faculty Union to consider these offers for what they are  exceptional. At this time when 1 in 9 positions in higher education has been eliminated, and when universities and colleges are facing economic uncertainty, it is prudent for Oregon Tech Faculty to value an institution that has made such an offer, and work diligently to conclude negotiations.

In an attempt to keep classes running and break the strike, the university is covering classes with a handful of full-time faculty who crossed the picket line, lower-paid and part-time adjunct faculty, administrators and other instructors brought in from outside the university system. However, students have reported that some classes did not have replacements and were not able to run.

Negotiations are scheduled to continue on Wednesday night, and both the union leadership and the university have stated their hope to conclude the strike as soon as possible.

Despite the best efforts of the university to defame faculty members for walking away from their classes, the strike has received enormous support from students on the campus. Dozens of students have joined staff on the picket lines, signed petitions and spoken out in support of their instructors to combat the universitys malicious lie that teachers and students have different interests.

Alexander Zendejas and another student Shiloh Castelli have been leading the campaign to organize students in support of faculty. We created a student statement of support and have claimed over 275 student signatures in support of faculty, Alex told the World Socialist Web Site .

He continued: We have also been trying our best to get the correct information to students, as most of them are only hearing what the admin is sending to their inboxes, which is often misleading or straight up false. I feel our effort has made a big difference in student support of faculty. We have even been crowdsourcing memes about the situation as a sort of way to get students more interested.

Alex said the administration has been very slimy and dishonest by locking faculty out of their email accounts, removing their profiles off the university website and replacing them with temporary adjunct professors who were not told about the strike. He added, The situation currently is very volatile and quickly changing.

Many students expressed outrage that the university officials have given themselves an 18.7 percent raise while denying faculty a decent salary and increasing tuition rates over the years. [The professors are] not trying to harm us, a third year undergraduate student named Dahiana Padilla told Herald and News. Theyre doing this for the right reasons.

The strike takes place in the wake of renewed struggle among graduate students, steelworkers and miners across the United States. On Monday, two thousand graduate students at New York University (NYU) began their strike for higher wages, improved health care and child care benefits, and the removal of NYPD cops from campus along with protections for immigrant students.

These struggles are being fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been allowed to drag on for over a year with over 3 million lives lost around the world. Oregon has one of the fastest increases in daily new cases in the country, with the fourth wave of the virus soaring at a faster pace than in November.

On Friday, Governor Kate Brown will move 15 counties to the highest extreme risk category of the states tier system, including Klamath County which is leading the states large counties with a rate of about 787 cases per 100,000 residents in the past two weeks. In response to the risk, some restrictions on indoor gatherings will be reinstated while K-12 and college campuses will remain open, even though the share of cases, hospitalizations and deaths are quickly growing.

These risks to human life add to the significance of the OIT strike, which can and must be utilized to mobilize a broader movement of students, faculty and the broader working class in the region. There exists immense potential to carry out such a struggle, which can take up a range of demands to halt the pandemic, fully fund public education and provide staff with decent jobs, secure benefits and work conditions. In order to advance this fight, an independent rank-and-file strike committee must be formed to unite faculty with campus workers, students and K-12 teachers throughout the state.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 20:59:55|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese commission of the Joint Commission on Mongolia-China Border has donated medical supplies to Mongolia to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Mongolia's Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

The anti-pandemic supplies include face masks and shields, goggles and protective suits.

The assistance will be distributed to four provinces, namely Dornogovi, Umnugovi, Dornod and Sukhbaatar which border China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the ministry said in a statement.

Mongolia has so far registered a total of 34,623 COVID-19 cases, with more than 100 deaths.

The number of daily new COVID-19 cases in Mongolia has risen sharply since the beginning of April, and around or more than 1,000 cases have been reported per day in the country. Enditem
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Who would have thought enhanced unemployment benefits of $300 a week over an extended period could stymie employment?

Many business owners say thats exactly whats happening.

Unemployment benefits and rounds of stimulus payments have been a lifeline for many of the 150,000 New Mexicans put out of work by the pandemic. State unemployment benefits range from just $90 to $484 per week, and its virtually impossible to get by on the lower end of that, so the current $300-a-week federal enhancements are keeping many New Mexicans afloat.

But now with businesses trying to reopen, and the states minimum wage at $10.50 an hour, those unemployment benefits have become a disincentive for many to return to the workforce. Twisters COO Bahjat Shariff told the Journal his company is looking to hire 50 employees, but referral bonuses, sign-on bonuses and other incentives just arent working. Ernie CdeBaca, president and CEO of the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce, says the states decision to waive work-search requirements is making it difficult to hire people.

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................................................................

Employee advocates say if employers offered higher wages and better benefits, this would not be an issue. But many small businesses are not in a position to do that  especially at this time.

In a presentation to the business group Economic Forum on Wednesday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham acknowledged the generous unemployment benefits and said we need a balance between residents having the means to provide for their families and the need for people to get back to work. She said new policies will be announced in the next week or so with that goal in mind.

Thats good news. And a good start would be reinstating work-search requirements  unemployment benefits are supposed to be a bridge for those trying to find work.

When we were in the throes of the pandemic, federal stimulus checks and easing unemployment benefit requirements made sense. Now that coronavirus cases are way down and many in the state have been vaccinated, we are moving to reopen the economy. So it is essential any additional assistance goes to those who really need it and for the purposes intended.

To date, those with solid middle-and-higher incomes and who did not lose their jobs got federal stimulus checks along with folks struggling to get by. Our state and federal leaders should ensure any future assistance targets people who lost jobs and/or income because of the pandemic.

For those who say it would be too difficult to target such individuals and would slow the relief they need, consider the states $170 million federal rent and utility assistance program. Applicants must demonstrate the pandemic caused them job loss to qualify. Bernalillo County will distribute about $5 million. Applicants can go to Bernco.gov/rent. The city of Albuquerque has about $24 million. Albuquerque residents can apply at renthelpNM.org.

Unlike three rounds of federal stimulus payments, this assistance will be paid directly to landlords and utilities  important as it will ensure the payments go where they are intended, to help folks dig out of debt.

Its been a tough year economically, much tougher for some, and its time to make sure assistance goes to those still struggling to get back into the workforce and address their debt, not to those who dont need it.

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.
On April 29, the China National Space Administration ( CNSA ) launched the massive Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in the Hainan province. On top of it sat the core capsule of the space station the Chinese have now officially started building.The capsule, called Tianhe (which would be Harmony of Heavens), is the largest and heaviest space object China has ever built. It weighs 22.5 tons, is close to 17 meters long (56 feet), and has a diameter of 4,2 meters (14 feet). It is the section of the space station that will house the astronauts and control stations.Tianhe will be deployed in orbit at an altitude of 400 km (249 miles), and it will eventually be linked to two space laboratories for a total weight of 70 tons. Separately, a space telescope will be launched to study the stars and, if need be, dock with the station.The orbital laboratory was designed to accommodate three astronauts at a time for long periods and even six for short periods when crew rotation is performed. It will be able to dock with both Chinese and foreign spacecraft.China plans to have the station, which is to be named Tiangong (Heavenly Palace), up and running by the end of next year and plans to keep it operational for at least 15 years. To stick to the calendar, the Chinese will launch the Shenzhou XII and XIII crewed missions and two cargo ships this year. In 2022 China will get up there the remaining two modules.The space station is the culmination of a nearly 30-year old plan to make China a space power. Up next, we hear rumors of moon space stations and even bases on the ground.
New Delhi, April 29 : Umpire Nitin Menon has left the Indian Premier League (IPL) to return home in Indore as his immediately family members are down with Covid-19. Menon's mother and wife are unwell and have tested positive. His mother has been admitted to a hospital in Indore.

"His mother, wife are down with Covid-19. His mother has been admitted to a hospital in Indore. His father is unwell too and is also suspected to have Covid-19. He has a small child, around four or five years of age, so it was important for him to return and tend to family," an official told IANS.

It has been learnt that Menon, who has reached Indore, could return to IPL after his family makes progress.

Australian umpire Paul Reiffell too had decided to pull out. However, he was 10 minutes away from leaving the IPL bio-bubble before he learnt that flights to Australia via Doha too have been cancelled. He may now have to leave the country after the end of the IPL along with the remaining Australian players.

"I tried to, but the flight through Doha, I wasn't able to go through as an Australian," Reiffel was quoted as saying by the Herald and The Age on Thursday from his Ahmedabad hotel.

"They shut the avenue off. I know a couple of the guys (Adam Zampa, Kane Richardson and Andrew Tye) got back that way through there, but the avenue was closed so I had to stay. Yesterday, I was booked to go, but it got cancelled. I thought I'd take the opportunity when I could, because you don't know what's going to happen later on."

Latest updates on IPL 2021

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Trinidad and Tobago can see a reduction in the number of people dying from Covid-19 on a daily basis if the drugAzithromycinis immediately stopped, says Dr Ravi Ramjanak.

Ramjanak is a consultant in obstetrics gynaecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery.

It is my view based on the pharmacodynamics of Azithromycin that the death rate will fall if we stop using this drug in Covid-positive cases. Azithromycin has no effect on viruses, yeasts and fungi, said Ramjanak in an interview with the Sunday Express last week.
Read other stories from The Alabama Education Lab here. To get alerts about future stories and events, sign up for its newsletter, Ed Chat.

Bessemer City school officials and Alabama National Guard members teamed up to offer COVID-19 vaccines to students 16 years and older Thursday.

Bessemer schools, with help from multiple state agencies, offered the Pfizer vaccine to 400 juniors and seniors on Thursday at the citys high school, in an effort, student support director Barbara McCoy said, to get more students back to classrooms.

Alabama has opened vaccinations to everyone in the state older than 16.

We know that were anxious to get back to face to face learning, McCoy said, and we knew it would be an opportunity for students to get vaccinated on site.

Around two-thirds of the districts 3500 students are currently back to in-person learning, district officials said.

To sweeten the pot, the school offered a drawing for a free iPhone. About two dozen students lined up Thursday after lunch.

Bessemer City Board of Education member Lee Jones brought his 16-year-old granddaughter Amiya, a junior at the citys high school, to get vaccinated.

Amiya, who currently is learning remotely, said she was happy the shot was offered at school.

I just wanted to get vaccinated to keep myself and others protected and safe, she said.

McCoy said she got the idea to offer vaccines at the school after talking with officials at a vaccine clinic at nearby Watermark Place. Everyone was receptive, she said, and officials offered to set up a site at the school.

We wanted to have them vaccinated in a setting that was comfortable for them, she said. One theyre accustomed to and feel relaxed getting the shot.

Setting up the clinic took only a week from when she asked for help. Students registered in advance, and the school obtained permission from parents.

While a number of schools statewide have helped spread the word of clinics in their community, Lt. Col. Damon Denzin of the Alabama Air National Guard told AL.com this is the first vaccine effort he has conducted specifically designed to vaccinate students on school grounds.

Offering the vaccine in a place the community trusts is important, he said, adding, Im in favor of doing anything we can do to facilitate getting vaccinations into peoples arms.

The school has held two previous clinics where more than 500 community members and school employees were vaccinated, before eligibility was extended to students 16 and older.

Board member Jones said, Im proud that our school system is one of the first that we know of that has this opportunity for children 16 and older to get vaccinated.

On its dashboard, the Alabama Department of Public Health lumps everyone between 16 and 54 years old into one large group, but officials told AL.com that, statewide, 12,638 people 16 to 18 years old have been given at least one dose of the COVID vaccine.

The school will hold another clinic in three weeks, McCoy said, where students vaccinated today can get their second shot, and newcomers can receive their first dose.
The three white men responsible for the killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery while jogging in broad daylight were charged Wednesday with federal hate crimes, the Department of Justice announced. A federal grand jury indicted each of the three men Gregory McMichael, 65; his son, Travis McMichael, 35; and William Roddie Bryan, 51with one count of attempted kidnapping and one count of interference with rights, alleging that the men used force and the threat of force intimidate Arbery, who was Black, from jogging on a public street because of Arberys race.

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All three men are awaiting trial for state murder charges after they confronted, then shot and killed Arbery in February 2020. Arbery was jogging in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia, when the McMichaels armed themselves and began following him in their pickup truck. The pair tried to intercept Arbery, blocking him with their truck. Travis McMichael got out of the truck and got in an altercation with Arbery, who was then shot and killed. Prosecutors said Travis McMichael used, carried, brandished and discharged a Remington shotgun during the scuffle and that his father used, carried and brandished a .357 Magnum revolver. Roddie Bryan, the other man charged with a hate crime, trailed behind the father-son duo and filmed the encounter from his truck.

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No charges were filed and no arrests were made for months after Arberys death on Feb. 23 until video of the shooting was posted online. The case shot to national prominence and the McMichaels were ultimately charged with a host of crimes, including malice and felony murder charges, and counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. The McMichaels pleaded not guilty, claiming they thought Arbery was behind a string of burglaries in the neighborhood and were attempting to make a citizens arrest when the approached Arbery, armed with weapons, while jogging alone on a suburban neighborhood street.
[April 29, 2021] Nextdoor announces Kiran Prasad as head of product

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nextdoor today announced that Kiran Prasad has joined as head of product. Kiran will lead efforts to elevate the neighborhood app's product vision, strategy, and execution and manage the design and research teams in addition to collaborating with the engineering, data science, and go-to-market teams. Sarah Friar, Nextdoor CEO, said, "Kiran is an inspiring leader who is passionate about building communities. Both an engineer and product thinker, his ability to understand the importance of community coupled with his proven success with developing innovative consumer platforms make him a strong addition for Nextdoor, and I'm thrilled to welcome him to the neighborhood." Kiran said, "Helping people find their community and communicate is at the heart of everything I do. Creating a more simple and engaging product experience that enables more neighbors from across the globe to come together is the ultimate goal, and I'm excited to join this accomplished team because Nextdoor's purpose is directly aligned with my core values as a leader, builder, nd thinker."



Kiran has more than 20 years of engineering and product experience, managing global brands and international teams. He most recently served as vice president of product at LinkedIn, where he led strategy and product development for the LinkedIn Consumer experience and Premium businesses. Prior, he managed engineering for the Consumer experience at LinkedIn, rebuilding the mobile and desktop platform before moving into product management in 2017. Before joining LinkedIn, he was the Senior Director of Applications at Palm, Inc. where he started and delivered webOS, Palm's first Windows phone and was the tech lead for the original Treo. Kiran was born in India and moved to the U.S. when he was eight. He cites his family including his wife and two children as his biggest inspiration as they constantly motivate him to be inquisitive, remain curious, and take risks.

About Nextdoor, Inc.

Nextdoor is the app where you plug into the neighborhoods that matter to you. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, and build real-world connections with those nearby  neighbors, local businesses, and public agencies. We believe connecting with others is a universal human need. That truth, and the reality that neighborhoods are among the most important communities in our lives, have been guiding principles for Nextdoor since the beginning. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in 276,000 neighborhoods around the world, including the United States (nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households), the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Canada, with many more to come. Nextdoor is a privately held company based in San Francisco with backing from prominent investors including Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Riverwood Capital, Bond, Axel Springer, Comcast Ventures, and others. For additional information and images: nextdoor.com/newsroom View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nextdoor-announces-kiran-prasad-as-head-of-product-301280438.html SOURCE Nextdoor, Inc.

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Earlier this month, during the Chinese 'tomb sweeping festival, CCP leader and former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao published a personal essay on his 'mother in the Macau Herald. The essay was, ostensibly, a tribute to the lady who had raised him through some of Chinas most troubled periods, enabling him to achieve what he had in life.

The article was subsequently shared on Chinese social media, briefly became a matter of discussion, and was promptly restricted/ taken down by the platforms. This episode reveals a lot about the changing nature of CCP's internal politics, and the growing intolerance of Xi Jinping's dictatorship. Let's consider a few points of note.

Why would a high-ranking Party member such as Wen Jiabao have to publish in a relatively obscure publication like the Macau Herald? A number of analysts have suggested that 'less stringent regulatory norms' on the paper would have prompted this move, which says a lot about the degree of 'freedom' both the people and the press are allowed in Xi's China. Wen himself has been a target of censorship earlier. A CNN interview of his with Fareed Zakaria, was censored throughout China, because he spoke positively about 'freedom of speech'! This essay (Mother) however was largely self-censored and had little which could be seen to 'offend' Xi and his cronies. It certainly did not mention either 'democracy' or 'rule of law' even once! But it did get popular, particularly with 'dissidents' - fast... Maybe that's enough to discomfort the top brass of Xi's CCP. Interestingly, the sequence and speed of events also underscores the extent to which CCP is monitoring and controlling all internal discourse in China.

This leads to another interesting aspect - the efficiency of the censorship hierarchy. One can safely assume that working level censors wouldn't have the authority to act on an essay written by a party leader. Ergo, the decision was referred up the line, most likely to the Central Propaganda Department, and the decision taken promptly.

This level of systemic efficiency has no doubt been established through continuous and regular use. It is, therefore, not surprising that China has (allegedly) more journalists in jail than anywhere else, and discussions and debates with China's population continue to remain within well-defined lines. These 'lines' have been established by Xi since gaining absolute and unfettered power in 2018.

The way in which Xi's CCP has exercised this power is even more pertinent. Xinjiang, where the CCP has undertaken genocide against Uyghurs as per a March 2021 non-political study report by Newlines Institute, makes a good starting point. An official CCP directive to local authorities in the province stated "break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins".

The extent and inhumane nature of the actions which were enabled by this directive have included forced sterilizations and abortions, religious re-education, forced labour, among a host of others. The Newlines Report in-fact finds the CCP guilty of all categories of genocide in the campaign against Uyghurs.

Another example is the steady and unabashed conversion of Hong Kong's political landscape. Notwithstanding its 50 year agreement with UK, or the widespread protests in the city, the CCP continues to push 'reforms' which have robbed Hong Kong of almost everything that made it unique.

Essentially, a city in China, where freedom was near-absolute, was not acceptable to the CCP's top leadership, and the matter addressed. Unfortunately, the inability of the international community to coordinate against these moves, have given Xi greater confidence in his own powers and success.

The outcomes of this are manifesting in China's immediate neighbourhood. Fighters overflying Korean and Taiwanese airspace, Maritime Militia in the Philippines' EEZ, outright threats to Japan and Australia, brazen wolf-warrior diplomacy in Europe, and military adventurism against India. Xi's CCP has shed the faAade of propriety and is making bold statements. However, one wonders - why now? Some possible reasons could be discussed.

Firstly, the impact of the Coronavirus on global health and economy and the concomitant fallout on China's influence have cast a shadow on Xi's leadership, and whispers within China have been getting louder. Secondly, more countries are seeking re-assessment of bilateral agreements, particularly those related to BRI, which is Xi's own 'vision for the world'.

The economic implications of such re-balancing could well be crippling for China's economy and Xi's legacy. Lastly, after removal of the 'term limits' for Chairmanship, Xi has continued to consolidate power. This has triggered a trend of greater show of loyalty by cronies at various levels.

Hence it is eminently possible that actions of CCP functionaries, particularly in recent times, are not always strategic but rather aimed at appeasing the 'Emperor' and gaining favour. To put it simply, all these actions may well be aimed only towards retaining Xi's political primacy and bolstering his image within China.

These matters would not be a cause for global concern but for CCPs ongoing campaign to 'influence how we get and perceive information - everywhere'. The growing CCP control of international media, even beyond its borders, is a significant cause for concern, particularly if the reins are in the hands of a group of individuals who are driven purely by self-interest (In the case of Xi's CCP's this is Xi's interest and not Chinese interest!).

Increasingly, the 'version' of international developments being reported across the world have a 'stamp' of CCP approval. If left unchecked, national leaders may find their own media 'paraphrasing' them as directed by Xi's loyalists.

Moreover, with China set to gain control of vast swathes of the global 5G ecosystem, the CCP's ability to exert influence would increase exponentially. A recent report on the extent to which Huawei had compromised Dutch national telecommunications gives context to what the CCP could try in future! As the report suggests, the CCP could well have control over 'who is able to connect with whom online & what they can discuss...' Chinese military strategy has always given importance to 'winning without fighting' and consequently deception has been a tool of choice. Unfortunately, this battle stratagem has been used by CCPs leadership, particularly on Xi's watch, to use blatant lies, bullying and propaganda to achieve their ends - both internally and internationally. The growing realisation, across the world, of this widespread deceit has deeply unsettled the presumptive 'Emperor' who had already begun to see the countries of the world as his tributaries.

The rapid and unnecessary censoring of an essay, by a former Premier of China, which celebrates China and the spirit of a Chinese woman, simply because it could cast a slight shadow on Xi's leadership - embodies everything which ails the CCP and its current way of working. The problem is exacerbated because no-one in the CCP is even allowed to discuss the future direction of the Party, beyond Xi Jinping's thought and his Great Chinese Dream.

An ancient saying comes to mind... 'from a tighter grip, more sand falls...' While Xi's recent actions seem to suggest he takes a dim view of historical wisdom, these words may serve as a signpost of the growing problems in China's political landscape and their implications in the near future.

(Binay Kumar Singh is an author and columnist. He can be reached at Twitter: @BinayBharat. The views expressed are personal)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:00:55|Editor: huaxia

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MACAO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) is gearing up for welcoming more tourists from the mainland during the upcoming May Day holiday on May 1-5, related government departments said here Thursday.

Macao's border ports with the mainland and the police force have made thorough preparations for the holiday, during which the daily number of visitor arrivals to Macao is expected to be 20 percent higher than the daily highest record since the COVID-19 outbreak, said Ng Kam Wa, commissioner of Macao's Public Security Police Force.

The number of mainland tourists visiting Macao has increased obviously recently as epidemic situations on both sides continued to stabilize, Ng said, adding that Macao recorded 36,500 visitor arrivals on April 18, the highest daily number since the epidemic struck.

Police have also stepped up personnel deployment to handle customs clearance and patrol in tourist spots during the holiday, according to the police force.

Macao has been actively promoting itself as a safe and quality destination for mainland tourists, organizing promotional events in different mainland cities and offering discounts for payments made on electronic platforms.

The SAR has also offered coupons of up to 50 percent discounts for mainland tourists booking hotels in Macao.

As of Thursday, no locally transmitted COVID-19 case had been reported in Macao for 396 days. No death had ever been caused by the virus in the SAR. Enditem
Highlights A chat migration tool has been spotted in one of the WhatsApp beta updates.

The feature will let users transfer their WhatsApp chats from Android to iOS and vice-versa.

The migration tool is expected to make use of Google Drive for the chat transfer.

Transferring your WhatsApp chats from one phone to another has always been a tedious task. The company is now reportedly working to make it easier for the users, with a specialised chat migration tool that can even move chats between iOS and Android.

The upcoming feature had earlier been spotted in a beta release for iOS. The same feature now happens to be visible in the 2.21.9.7 Android beta update, confirming the company's commitment to the cause.

The feature has been spotted by WABetaInfo. In a report sharing screenshots of its development, the publication mentions that WhatsApp is currently working on the export process for chats on its iOS app. On the other hand, the feature is being developed to support chat import on WhatsApp for Android.

The exact method being employed for the task is yet unknown. However, the report predicts that it will make use of Google Drive, which is presently used to store chat backup on Android devices.

It is possible that during the chat transfer, the data will be stored on Google Drive before eventually being imported to WhatsApp on Android. If so, it is anticipated that the company will also work on a reverse process to export chats from Android through Google Drive for an eventual download on iOS.

Whichever way it works, the report confirms that the feature is under development and that it will be available in a future update for iOS and Android.

WhatsApp chat migration tool in works. (Image: WABetaInfo)

For now, such a chat migration is enabled through some third-party apps, that too, not with the utmost efficiency. Some chat messages are lost or disappear almost every time, even when the chats are transferred from one Android to another. A similar transfer from Android to iOS or vice-versa is near impossible.

Once such a feature is available, it will be a real boon to those with multiple devices or those who keep upgrading their smartphones periodically. WhatsApp will also have an increased acceptance in the circle which relies on both iOS and Android for their operations.
On Wednesday night, President Biden will give his first public address to a joint session of Congress, making the case for his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan and basically daring Republicans to challenge the proposal, which starts out with broad public support.

New presidents usually address lawmakers only weeks after taking office. Its a chance to push their major initiatives and to reach out, at least rhetorically, to Americans of all political stripes. But with the coronavirus not yet under control, Mr. Biden is taking up the rite later than most, nearly at the end of his first 100 days in office.

(Not all members of Congress will attend. With social-distancing protocols in place, only about 200 people are expected to be there in person; the usual number for a speech like this is closer to 1,800.)

You might say that Mr. Biden missed his chance to address the country during his honeymoon period. But truthfully, he never had much of a honeymoon, thanks to the countrys deep polarization. Instead he has rallied a solid majority of independent voters and almost all Democrats around his ambitious agenda, and his approval rating now sits in the mid-50s, according to polling averages. He will seek to build on that momentum tonight.
FLINT, MI -- City officials want to sell the shuttered Flint Police Training Academy for $500,000 to a company that wants to convert it into a commercial marijuana grow facility.

The Flint City Council postponed any action on the property sale during its Monday meeting after representatives from the citys Department of Planning and Development asked to proceed with the sale to Evergrow LLC.

We believe our land has value and we want to obtain the maximum value for these types of properties ..., DPD Director Suzanne Wilcox said. We finalized that purchase agreement (but) it obviously requires City Council approval ... This is a fair and valid offer.

At one time, Flint operated a police academy from the building at 3420 St. John St., located just west of James P. Cole Boulevard. Volunteers involved in Flints Blue Badge Volunteer program were also trained there, according to Flint Journal files.

But the last police academy class that was trained there graduated in 2010, leaving the building empty.

Its kind of ironic that the training facility for the police department, that used to go against marijuana, is going to possibly become a marijuana grow shop, said 3rd Ward Councilman Santino Guerra, who called the project a potentially productive use of the building.

Wilcox said city officials were approached about selling the vacant property by Evergrow, advertised the 4.4-acre parcel for bids during a seven-day window, and received just two offers -- $500,000 from Evergrow and a separate offer of $20,000 for the property.

The director proposed the sale during the councils regular April 26 meeting without first sending it to a council committee for action, which is typically done.

Wilcox told council members that she asked for quick approval because Evergrow is interested in closing on the sale within 30 days so it can begin construction on the site as soon as possible.

In order to operate a grow facility, Evergrow would also need the required marijuana license, Flint Planning Commission approval for a site plan, and have building plans approved by the city. It would also be required to file for all needed permits, pay fees, pass inspections and receive a certificate of occupancy.

The property is properly zoned for a marijuana grow operation, officials said.

1st Ward Councilman Eric Mays said the council could meet in a special session to reconsider the sale if the postponement threatens it.

I dont want to blow a deal, Mays said.

Council sent to proposal back to a committee by a 7-2 vote after some members said they had questions about the process for selling city-owned property and about ordinances related to marijuana growing operations.

Councilmen Maurice Davis (Ward 2) and Guerra (Ward 3) avoted against the postponement.

Franko Sallaku, the managing partner for Evergrow, said Tuesday, April 27, that his company still hopes the council will approve the proposed sale.

The intent from the beginning was to get the project going as soon as possible, Sallaku said. Flint seemed like a good city to establish this type of business in ... (The property) has been abandoned for a while.

Sallaku said Evergrow is a new company that potentially could supply retail stores in and around Flint and throughout the rest of Michigan.

Read more on MLive:

100 new jobs expected from new medical marijuana grow operation in Grand Rapids

Large marijuana grow operation recommended for sprawling old factory in Muskegon

18 who filed to run for Flint City Council disqualified after signatures checked
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are worth a combined $373 billion as I write this. That's pretty absurd when you think about it. The two of them alone are worth roughly the gross domestic product (GDP) of Denmark.

You wouldn't think two men with that kind of net worth would have much to fight about. Honestly, if it were me, I'd like to think I have better things to do than get in a feud over one of my side projects losing a $3 billion contract. I mean, I'd be happy just having a side project building rockets meant to eventually carry people to Mars.

Then again, the feud between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos isn't new--at least not when it comes to space. The two have previously battled on multiple occasions in the courtroom, as well as the court of public opinion, over launch platforms, patents, and even dueling press announcements.

This time, in case you missed it, Musk's SpaceX won a contract from NASA to build a lander to return American astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin, which is owned by Bezos, is challenging the $2.9 billion contract on the grounds that NASA misjudged important considerations in proposals from both companies, and because Blue Origin wasn't given an opportunity to revise its proposal--something SpaceX did.

Musk, true to form, took to Twitter to troll Bezos and Blue Origin. I'll just leave the tweet here without comment.

Sure, the contract is worth almost $3 billion, but let's be clear, that isn't what this is about. That's barely a rounding error on the income statement for either man, never mind that neither needs the money. Bezos, for his part, has said he plans to spend about a billion dollars a year of his own money to fund Blue Origin. Musk has regularly touted the success of his rocket test flights, even when they end in a fiery explosion.

Instead, the feud between the two men comes down to something much more simple--pride. I don't think anyone would ever accuse Musk or Bezos of an excess of humility, but in this case, I don't think pride is necessarily a bad thing.

Look, while this relatively small NASA contract is about sending Americans back to the moon, the two companies are trying to eventually send people to Mars. That's not to say that sending people to the moon isn't a big deal, but sending them to Mars most certainly is.

Bezos, in an interview in 2018, put it this way:

This is super important to me, and I believe on the longest timeframe--and really here I'm thinking of a timeframe of a couple hundred years to over millions of decades--I believe and I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I'm doing.

It takes a certain amount of something to make sending people to Mars your company's goal. Both Musk and Bezos clearly have that something, having led two of the most influential tech companies of this century.

But there's one thing this contract gives them that is far more important than a few billion dollars--legitimacy. For both men, their adventures in space have gone from interesting (if expensive) passion projects to a life purpose.

In an interview just this week, here's how Musk explained it:

You know, it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable, it's a long journey, you might not, you know, come back alive. But it's a glorious adventure, and it'll be an amazing experience.

I think it's fair to say that "glorious adventure" is an understatement. In that light, it's not hard to see why this small contract is actually a big deal for both companies. It's about the pursuit of something bigger than themselves.

"The solar system can easily support a trillion humans," said Bezos. "And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited--for all practical purposes--resources and solar power. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in."
Congratulations, mitsob.net got a very good Social Media Impact Score! Show it by adding this HTML code on your site:

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The Ghana National Association of Small-Scale Miners (GNASSM) has welcomed the call by the Lands and Natural Resource Minister, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor to deal with anyone involved in galamsey irrespective of party affiliation as a very bold step in the right direction.



It would be recalled that the Lands and Natural Resources Minister, Samuel Abudalai Jinapor, stated that the fight against illegal mining will be devoid of any form of partisanship under his watch.



Mr. Jinapor said the law enforcement component of galamsey continues to be the mandate of the countrys National Security as well as the District and Regional Security Councils.



In an interaction with MMDCEs in the Western Region on the first day of his tour of the area, the Minister charged the Security Councils to boldly enforce laws and new directives regarding illegal small-scale mining.



The Ghana National Association of Small-Scale Miners has commended the Minister for this call and has urged him to be bold enough to shame at least one or two politicians to serve as deterrent to the others if the Minister really meant what he said.



Speaking to Peace FM reporter Pious Baidoo Banson, the Communication Director for the Ghana National Association of Small-Scale Miners, Abdul Razak Alhassan said those on the field are not the real galamsayers because most are sent to the filed by political figures, therefore the Minister must tighten his measures to delve deep to uncover the real people behind the act.



According to Abdual Razak Alhassan, its absurd and act of wickedness for politicians to enact laws to fight galamsey and then illegally engage in it without paying the necessary taxes to help the country at the expense of the registered miners.



He stated there must be a law that will destool any chief found involving in the galamsey act to help reduce the involvement of chiefs in galamsey.

Source: Pious Baidoo Banson/Peace News









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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Dancehall artist Elephant Man, who allegedly lied to immigration authorities about his trip to Belgium, which was on the list of countries for which Jamaica had imposed travel bans, will return to the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court on May 12.

The mentioned date was set on Wednesday, April 28 when the entertainer appeared in court with his attorney Christopher Townsend.

The lawyer disclosed that he had requested to see a tape of what reportedly transpired in the immigration hall over a year ago only for the prosecution to turn up with the wrong tape.

We have been asking for the videotape for the longest while and because of the length of time, we became suspicious that we could have been presented with a doctored tape. Now, after a year, they gave us the tape of a store, which looks like a pharmacy. How on earth do they make that mistake? The next thing they will tell us is that it can no longer be extracted, an exasperated Townsend told DancehallMag.

The entertainer, whose real name is Oneil Bryan, is facing charges of making a false declaration and false volunteer declaration.

He is charged along with Kevin Shields, a disc jockey who was traveling with him at the time of the incident.

Townsend said he remains suspicious of the prosecutions machinations.

We asked for the tape within the prescribed time, and its been over a year. How must we have faith in the judicial system? The prosecutor gave the undertaking to get the correct tape by the next court date but we are even more suspicious now because our worst expectations, our nightmare is coming through, and so said, so done because they produced the wrong tape, he said.

Bail for both accused were extended.

According to the allegations, on March 20 last year, the accused arrived at the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay and failed to declare on the immigration and customs form that he had visited Brussels, Belgium.

As a result, on March 23, summonses were prepared for breaches of the Immigration (Restriction of Commonwealth Citizens) and Perjury Acts and served on Bryan.

Similar summonses were prepared and served on Shields.

Shields is being represented by attorney Russell Stewart.

Elephant Man will return to court in May to face the charges which allege that he violated Jamaicas Immigration Act, specifically Section 8 (5) which stipulates that arrivals in Jamaica must make a truthful declaration to immigration officers about their recent travel history.

Elephant Man is best known for songs such as Pon De River, Pon De Bank, Willie Bounce, Nuh Linga, and Bun Bad Mind.
PASCAGOULA, Mississippi -- An Ocean Springs man jailed on a DUI charge was airlifted to a Mobile hospital after a fight with a career criminal in the Jackson County Adult Detention Center.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said the fight took place in one of the jail dayrooms on Monday. Corrections officers responding to the situation found 47-year-old Donald Ratcliff of Ocean Springs unconscious.

Medical personnel at the ADC treated Ratcliff before he was transported to Singing River Hospital and subsequently to University of South Alabama Medical Center, where he was still in critical condition as of Thursday.

Ezell says charges are pending against 27-year-old Christopher Bridge Gholar, who was jailed for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

Gholar is no stranger to jail life, having been in and out of prisons since first being arrested in 2012 for possession of alcohol by a minor. Since then, he has served time for aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a firearm, possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is assisting the Jackson County Sheriffs Office with the investigation.
The Greece Cypriot leader and Greece did not bring any new vision to the Cyprus talks, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said following the informal 5+1 meeting on Cyprus on Thursday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) The Greece Cypriot leader and Greece did not bring any new vision to the Cyprus talks, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said following the informal 5+1 meeting on Cyprus on Thursday.

The informal meeting on Cyprus in Geneva hosted by the UN Secretary-General ran from Tuesday to Thursday. Alongside Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders, the three guarantor states Turkey, Greece and the UK joined the meeting. Earlier on Thursday, UN chief Antonio Guterres said that the participants failed to reach an agreement and would reconvene again probably in two or three months.

"The Greek Cypriot leader could not bring a new vision to the Cyprus talks but repeated their old rhetoric like broken record," Cavusoglu said at a press conference.

Cavusoglu also underlined that Turkey will continue to support the two-state solution based on sovereign equality of the two parts of the island.

"We will continue our determined stance to defend the rights of Turkish Cypriots," he added.

Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar also made a statement during the press conference. Tatar underlined that it would be meaningless to sit around the table and begin formal talks unless equal status based on equality is recognized. Tatar added that the Greek Cypriot administration insisted on a federation model and offered "unacceptable" constitutional changes.

The Cyprus dispute is nearly five decades old. The island has been de facto divided since 1974, when an attempt to get Cyprus to join Greece caused Turkey to deploy armed forces there. On November 15, 1983, Turkish Cypriots declared independence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus which is, as of now, recognized only by Turkey.
Mainland warns of countermeasures against Taiwan's "constitutional amendments" separatism

Xinhua) 13:36, April 29, 2021

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday voiced resolute opposition to separatist attempts in Taiwan including those through the so-called "constitutional amendments."

"We will take all necessary countermeasures against such moves. This warning should be heeded before it is too late," said Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, in response to a query on remarks by sources from Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party authority on amending the island's so-called "constitution."

In complete disregard of Taiwan compatriots' interests and well-being, a handful of separatist forces advocating "Taiwan independence" have been carrying out provocative and dangerous actions driven by selfish purposes, said Ma.

"This will only aggravate the tension across the Taiwan Strait, pushing the island into a precarious situation, and bringing suffering to Taiwan compatriots," said Ma.

Noting the legal foundation and reality that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China, Ma said political differences between the two sides can well be resolved through equal negotiations based on the one-China principle.

"We are willing to use our maximum sincerity and do our very utmost to promote the peaceful reunification of China," said Ma. "However, we will never tolerate any 'Taiwan independence' separatist moves, or allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself."

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
CATSKILL  The war games at the Friar Tuck Inn are off, at least for this weekend.

The town of Catskill on Thursday was granted a temporary restraining order to stop a planned military-themed event that was to begin on Friday and run through the weekend at the long-shuttered resort.

This action presents an unfortunate circumstance, Acting State Supreme Court Justice Adam Silverman said Thursday, less than a day before the event, to be put on by Connecticut businessman Thomas ORourke, was scheduled to start.

Silverman blasted ORourke for ignoring weeks of calls by the town about code violations and other problems at the 200-acre Friar Tuck resort. But he also criticized the town for seeking a restraining order so late in the process.

The court battle began in March after town officials said people in military fatigues with replica AK-47 rifles and simulation grenades were seen at the resort.

It turned out to be the early version of what was billed on the internet as the "Catskills Crusade." Participants were to pay $180 to take part in the war game.

After the town sought an injunction halting the activity, ORourke, of the Military Experience Museum in Wallingford, Conn., said the plan was to film the event with an eye toward selling it to a video game maker.

ORourke earlier said he had talked to the Greene County film commission, which encourages filming in the county, and was encouraged. But he said the town balked at signing a confidentiality agreement to protect the intellectual property regarding the event.

The town, represented by attorney Theodore Hilscher, said ORourke would need a special use permit for the event. ORourkes lawyer said that wasnt needed since the war games were actually a training activity.

Thursdays conference and decision in State Supreme Court in Greene County came against the backdrop of a troubled history for the 200-acre Friar Tuck property since it was purchased last September by a New York City investor who said she planned to turn the hulking, empty property into a mindfulness resort.

Friar Tuck was a landmark in the 1970s, when in addition to its hotel rooms, the facility hosted regular concerts featuring Tom Jones and other stars.

By 2009, however, the resort was in bankruptcy. In September, Queens realtor Elena Fu purchased it for $5.8 million. The new owners initially said they planned to have hotel rooms open by this spring.

Instead, the building amassed a slew of violations citing its septic system, asbestos. Neighbors said that illicit gambling may have been going on there and there was a report of a bear shot on the property.

The town of Catskill noted the violations were under the purview of the state Labor and Environmental Conservation departments. But Michael Brandi, a lawyer representing O'Rourke, said those agencies indicated they wouldnt be getting involved since plans for the event had moved outside, not in the building.

But Hilscher ultimately argued, successfully, that a town permit was required for the event, which could have drawn 400 people.

Silverman said he was leaving the door open for further talks between ORourke and the town. But Brandi said he doubted O'Rourke would be interested after the unfavorable decision.

Rkarlin@timesunion.com
His Afghan friend and fellow refugee Farhad (Vikash Bhai, a deadpan ace) nudges Omar toward picking up his instrument, in part so he can become his agent-slash-manager. Much of their banter, like their interaction with the initially belligerent locals as well as refugees from Ghana, Libya and elsewhere, reveals Sharrocks particular comic approach. Its built on fixed camera perspectives, witty arrangements of mute, skeptical faces reacting in unison to one thing or another. The heightened oddness may, in theme and setting, recall the widely loved Bill Forsyth comedy Local Hero (1983), which made crucial and rewarding use of a phone booth as well. But Sharrocks aesthetics owe more to the visual precision of Aki Kaurismaki, especially the refugee folktale Le Havre.
SPRINGFIELD  Police have charged the owner of a car used in a drive-by shooting where a teenage girl was injured with filing a false report claiming the vehicle had been stolen.

Adrian Thomas, 21, of Springfield, was arrested Wednesday afternoon at Springfield police headquarters on a warrant, said police spokesman Ryan Walsh.

The shooting happened about 7 p.m. April 9 at Worthington and Federal streets. Police do not believe the girl, who was hit in the leg by one round, was the intended target.

A short time after the shooting, Walsh said, Thomas called police to report his car had been stolen.

Police determined that Thomas car was involved in the shooting but have not tied him to the shooting itself, Walsh said. He is charged only with filing a false report. An investigation determined that Thomas knowingly gave police false information, Walsh said.

Thomas is the second person arrested as a result of the investigation into the shooting, but neither is tied to the shooting itself.

Jose Estrada, 21, of Agawam, was charged with unlicensed operation of a vehicle and concealing a vehicles license plate. He was initially also charged with receiving a stolen vehicle, but that charge was dropped once it was determined the car had not been stolen. He is now charged with being an accessory after the fact.

Estrada was arrested on Marion Street several minutes after the shooting when police saw him parking Thomass car, which matched the description of the suspect vehicle. No gun was recovered.

Walsh said police have evidence that places Estrada and Thomas in the car roughly an hour before the shooting, and places Estrada in it immediately after. But they have not been able to prove that either was in the car when the shots were fired.

The shooting remains under investigation.

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In late February, Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda gathered with a handful of Shinto priests in a white tent at the foot of Mount Fuji. The group prayed  as is customary when embarking on new builds in Japan  for the smooth completion of a new city to be designed and built by the worlds largest automaker.

At the site of a recently shuttered factory, Toyoda commented on the significance of replacing a plant thats churned out cars since the 60s with a 175-acre community to test future technologies such as autonomous vehicles. Its a new chapter in our story and in our industry, Toyoda, grandson of the carmakers founder, said in an online video commemorating the groundbreaking.

By 2040, a fleet of more than 30 million self-driving vehicles are estimated to be driving on roads globally. Yet today, even the most advanced autonomous features are limited and require driver supervision. Executives and industry experts say the missing link is cities, which need to be wired to funnel massive amounts of data to cars in order for them to meaningfully drive themselves.

Thats why Toyota is building its sensor-laden Woven City from the ground up a two-hour drive outside of Tokyo. There, Toyota will test autonomous vehicles for transport, deliveries and mobile shops alongside the citys hand-picked residents as a kind of living laboratory. When construction is completed in 2024, it will seek to offer a model of what urban centers around the world could look like in the age of autonomous transport. Doing so, of course, will require convincing a broader population.

Right now, limited automated driving is achieved by having sensors onboard cars draw information from their environment. Feeding such information back to vehicles will be the next big leap forward, says Hiroki Kuriyama, senior vice president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. Japans top telecommunications company is partnering with Toyota to develop the technology needed for autonomous car-supporting smart hubs.

The idea, Kuriyama says, is to use sensors and cameras scattered throughout roads, traffic lights and buildings  and perhaps even data from mobile phones  to gather information on everything from pedestrian traffic to precipitation. That massive data stream will then be processed via optical networks, data centers and the cloud to create a digital twin, or mirror image, of the living city. The virtual, synthesized data can then be fed to cars, letting them safely navigate through the real world without human intervention, according to Kuriyama.

The name Woven City is a nod to Toyotas origins as a manufacturer of automatic looms, and refers to the stitching together of software, services, vehicles and streets. All that will guide the companys autonomous E-palettes  transparent shipping container-like vehicles that can accommodate as many as 20 passengers with seats that fold up so that the interior can be re-purposed. E-palettes will run through the city using autonomous vehicle lanes, providing shared transportation, delivering packages and acting as mobile storefronts.

Beyond futuristic mobility options, the city will also feature smart homes that take out trash and restock refrigerators automatically, according to Toyota. The entire ecosystem will also be powered by hydrogen. Its a big and ambitious bet for the automaker  although no investment figures have been disclosed, costs are likely to run upwards of a billion dollars. To help fund the project, Toyota said last month it would sell as much as 500 billion yen ($4.6 billion) in Woven Planet Bonds, the biggest such issue at the time to be used in part for the new city.

As neither a real estate nor construction company, it may seem strange that an automaker is building a city, says Nakanishi Research Institute head Takaki Nakanishi. But for Toyota and others, the push into city development is deeply practical, he says. As cars grow increasingly connected, they become part of a larger value chain that includes homes and urban infrastructure. Thats a new potential source of profit for carmakers, in a global autos market thats projected to plateau over coming decades.

Mobility, living and cities are going to become connected, and control of that standardized software, thats what everyone wants, Nakanishi says.

Still, for companies such as Toyota and NTT, introducing smart city platforms in locations outside of Woven City will mean overcoming substantial aversions to the idea of mining residents data. Google parent Alphabet Inc. attempted to create a smart city  equipped with sensors that support autonomous cars  on Torontos waterfront, throwing millions of dollars and years of lobbying at the project before officially shuttering it a year ago. The stated reason was the pandemics effect on real-estate prices, but before that, the project had faced years of opposition from privacy activists.

From a purely technological standpoint, bringing the Woven Citys platform to existing cities will be possible in 5 to 10 years, according to NTTs Kuriyama. But whats important is whether residents living in other cities will welcome those technologies, he says. NTT has found success winning smart city contracts in the U.S. and Malaysia by promising that the data it collects remains the sole property of residents and local governments.

One interesting added touch that will help Toyota in its push to see Woven City technologies to market is the fact that the center will have residents, says Alexander Soley, an independent consultant focusing on autonomous vehicles. At first, the town will house about 360 visiting scientists, families, retirees and Toyota employees. That number will eventually rise into the thousands, according to Toyota. The company says it has received more than 3,000 applications from individuals and corporations in response to its call for collaborators.

When it comes to new technologies, you cant just release them and expect them to get picked up, they need to sit with people for a good period of time, Soley says. In addition to privacy concerns, incidents such as the 2018 death of a pedestrian hit by a self-driving car in Arizona have led to a fair amount of fear of autonomous driving, he says. Elderly families are a group targeted to live in the city. How will they feel about stepping foot in a car without a driver? Thats what Toyotas trying to figure out.

The development of smart cities and autonomous vehicles is well defined by something called the Gartner Hype Cycle, Soley says. The graphical representation of how technologies mature posits that new innovations are followed by a period of highly publicized success and failure stories. Eventually they reach a period where the discovery of more practical applications leads to mainstream adoption.

Kuriyama says NTT and Toyota aspire to eventually spread their smart city platform abroad. But first, theyll focus on implementing it in rural areas of Japan where declining and rapidly aging populations stand to benefit from autonomous mobility options. NTT is also looking to implement the technologies it develops at the Woven City in Tokyos Shinagawa area, a bustling hub in the south of the city thats close to Haneda International Airport.

Unlike in the privately owned Woven City, there will be challenges when introducing new technologies to an already existing and inhabited setting in Shinagawa, Kuriyama says. When it comes to autonomous driving and the city structures that support it, charging forward with technology is important, but at the end its really about whether or not society accepts your philosophy, Kuriyama says. A smart city is just a city after all.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Personal Auto Autonomous Vehicles
"As a result of consulting on Google Drive security for over 400 companies, we realized that many companies were not able to grasp that internal documents are being shared with the outside without permission," said Justin SW Jung, CEO of Netkiller.

Netkiller, a cloud security company, announced that it offers a full security scanning service for Google Drive, a complement to any company who is risk averse.

As more and more companies adopt the cloud into their corporate intranet, concerns about the unauthorized disclosure of internal documents being shared without the knowledge of the company are growing.

With the 'Netkiller Google Drive Full Scan Service', companies using Google Workspace can see the sharing status of all documents and files of employees in the company's Google Drive and the security level of externally leaked content at a glance. This helps with incident management, audit trails, data leak and DLP rule violations audits.

You define the rules used by Netkiller ISMS. These rules define which content is sensitive and should be protected. These rules also apply to both My Drive and Shared drives on the GCP.

Netkiller ISMS scans your Google Drive contents for rule violations that trigger incident notifications when detected. This enforces the rules you have defined and violations trigger actions, such as alerts and notifications.

For example, granular details such as file or document title, document type, owner and shared users email, last updated date, sharing rights, internal or external sharing type, and file size can be extracted to a spreadsheet and reviewed as an audit trail during risk management reviews.

It is possible to determine whether sensitive documents that are important internally are being shared outside without permission, or whether documents with sensitive personal security information such as social security numbers or credit cards are shared. This helps mitigate risk and helps the risk tolerance of the company overall.

By providing this information security management service to all domestic companies and customers of the existing 'Netkiller ISMS' product, the software will be able to see the status of external sharing at a glance when domestic companies use Google Drive to prevent potential risks or security incidents in advance.

"As a result of consulting on Google Drive security for over 400 companies, we realized that many companies were not able to grasp that internal documents are being shared with the outside without permission," said Justin SW Jung, CEO of Netkiller.

With the launch of the Netkiller Drive full scan service, Netkiller will provide free services to the first 10 companies that are interested.

Meanwhile, Netkiller ISMS rebranded the existing Netkiller DLP product earlier this year, while real-time detection encompassing all files and documents in Google Drive, Google Forms, unlimited change history storage, Google login security and company personnel management (HR) linkage, GDPR It has transformed into a cloud-based ISMS platform that encompasses compliance and the like.


The Arizona vote recount, as per a report, continues after Maricopa County Judge Daniel Martin shut down the Democrats' attempts to stop the election audit.

Judge Martin allowed the recounting to continue in Arizona for the 2020 presidential election ballots amidst Democrats trying to "suppress" the audit in the event "any results might be found," WND reported. WND cited Maricopa Arizona Audit tweeting the Democrat's request being denied.

"Breaking: Maricopa County Judge denies Democrat's request to stop the election audit. The audit continues!" the Maricopa Arizona Audit said on Wednesday.

An account setup to ensure transparency and integrity in the Maricopa County Arizona 2020 election audit that is managed in behalf of Senate Liaison Ken Bennett, the Maricopa Arizona Audit immediately added the reason the Democrats were denied by Martin on their petition was lack of "substantive evidence."

"Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin said the Democrat Party did not provide 'substantive evidence of any breaches or threatened breaches of voter privacy'," Maricopa Arizona Audit disclosed.

AZCentral, on the other hand, reported that Martin's decision meant the auditing will continue at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum alongside the legal battle on it.

"The record presented by plaintiffs, including a number of sworn declarations, contain instances of concerning conduct and expert opinion as to whether the audit complies with law and best practices but no substantive evidence of any breaches or threatened breaches of voter privacy," AZCentral quoted Martin in saying.

As reported previously, the Democrats stopped the ongoing audit on the account of "voter integrity" through a lawsuit that was initially handled by Judge Christopher Coury. However, Coury relieved himself from the case on the account that one of the lawyers of the auditing company, Cyber Ninjas, worked for him previously.

Coury told the Democrats prior to vacating his post that they could stop the recount in exchange of a $1M bond to cover costs in the event of delays to the auditing. However, the Democrats did not pay the bond but continued with the case that was taken in by Judge Daniel Martin who came in on Wednesday.

The Maricopa Arizona Audit also tweeted a video of Bennett after its announcement on the Democrats being denied of their petition to stop the auditing. Bennett's video explained the importance of the audit, which he said is "different" with other election audits already conducted in the County the past months. Bennett, a native Arizonan, was the Secretary of State and Senate President of Arizona for six years.

"This audit is different from anything the County has done because this is a recount of the ballots. This is also looking into the machines. Yes, they did a what's called 'logic and accuracy audit of the machines' but that just verified that the machines were working at that moment. This is going into is there any unofficial or unauthorized software in any of those machines. Even if they looked at that, we're going much deeper and we're recounting every one of the 2,089,563 ballots," he elaborated.

WND raised that Joe Biden won in Arizona only by a slim margin that led to legislators raising objections to the results and presenting voter fraud evidences. The recount will last for weeks and that state officials affirm that the auditing results will not change the election outcome.

In addition, WND pointed out that Martins also denied Cyber Ninja its petition to keep private parts of the auditing and its hearing from the public since they are protecting their trade secrets, citing tweet by NBC Host Brahm Resnik announcing the matter.

"BREAKING Maricopa County Judge Daniel Martin rejects Cyber Ninjas motion to hide policies & procedures from public and media. Expects immediate appeal of ruling," Resnik said.
President Joe Biden marked his first 100 days in office by urging Congress to pass legislation to fix roads and bridges, expand high-speed internet, offer free community college and expand child care.

Those expenditures are included in two spending plans Biden has asked Congress to pass in order to create jobs, shift to clean energy, and help Americans hurt by the coronavirus-induced economic downturn.

America is on the move again, Biden told a socially distanced Congress. After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for takeoff.

The first 100 days of a presidential administration have been a traditional milestone ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Biden already has passed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law, including $1,400 direct payments to most Americans. In a recent Quinnipiac University Poll, 64% of Americans approved of his handling of the pandemic, with just 29% disapproving.

During his address, Biden endorsed several proposals of particular interest to New Jersey. Here are five of them:

Finally building the Gateway Tunnel.

In his speech, Biden put in a plug for his infrastructure proposal, which includes long-sought funding for a new train tunnel under the Hudson River. That will allow the existing tubes to be closed to repair damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

Making the earned income tax credit permanent.

Biden proposed making permanent an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit for lower-income Americans without children, benefitting 354,000 workers in New Jersey. The credit would rise to around $1,500 from $540, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group.

Allowing dreamers to remain in the U.S.

The president used his speech to renew his call for an overhaul of federal immigration laws, including a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants. That includes those brought to the U.S. as children, known as dreamers.

There are an estimated 425,000 unauthorized immigrants and 65,000 dreamers in New Jersey, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a research group. The state ranks sixth in both categories.

Lowering prescription drug prices.

Biden called for reducing drug costs.

We all know how outrageously expensive they are, he said. Lets do what weve always talked about. Lets give Medicare the power to save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. That wont just help people on Medicare  it will lower prescription drug costs for everyone.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-6th Dist., has reintroduced legislation to allow the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare, based on the cost of the same pharmaceuticals in other western nations. Commercial insurers would get the same lower prices.

Its critical that we level the playing field by giving the federal government the ability to negotiate lower prescription drug costs, and this will be one of my top priorities, said Pallone, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported Wednesday that prices for prescription drugs in the U.S. were two to four times higher than in Australia, Canada or France.

Replacing lead water pipes.

High levels of lead first appeared in Newarks schools in 2016, and then elsewhere in its drinking water in 2017 as old pipes corroded. Several other New Jersey municipalities also worked to replace pipes following discovery of lead contamination in their drinking water.

Bidens infrastructure plan calls for replacing every lead water pipe in the country. He said in his speech that this would let every child turn on the faucet and be certain to drink clean water.

Then there were these notable omissions:

State and local tax deduction.

Biden called for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but did not endorse the call by lawmakers from New Jersey and other high-tax states to eliminate the Republican tax laws $10,000 cap on deducting state and local income and property taxes.

We believe in restoring the totality of the state and local property tax deduction, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, a member of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, said during a press conference Monday at Newark Penn Station. We dont see this as a negotiable item.

Permanent Child Tax Credit.

The coronavirus stimulus law provided for a one-year enhanced child tax credit, increasing it to $3,000 for children up to age 17 ($3,600 for those under 6) from $2,000, and Biden proposed extending it through 2025.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker had urged Biden to make the tax credit permanent and said he would continue to do so.

I look forward to continue working with the Congress and the Biden administration to provide children and families the help they need, Booker said.

The provision provided extra help for 1.6 million children in New Jersey, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group.

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

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President Joe Biden has nominated a New Jersey woman for a federal judgeship in the District of New Jersey, his third nomination in recent months in an effort to quell the courts judicial emergency.

Biden announced Thursday that he was nominating Christine P. OHearn, who is currently a partner at Brown & Connery the Westmont section of Haddon Township, to be a federal judge.

Democratic U.S. Sens. Robert Menendez and Cory Booker applauded the nomination.

Christine OHearn is a highly successful and regarded trial attorney with the intellect, thoughtfulness and temperament needed to be a brilliant federal judge, Menendez said in a statement.

OHearn has worked for nearly 30 years as a trial lawyer specializing in labor, employment and complex civil litigation. The senators said OHearn has built a reputation as a highly-regarded advocate for women in the workplace. She also previously worked as as an adjunct professor at Rutgers University School of Law in Camden.

Christine OHearn is a talented, experienced, and distinguished litigator who will serve honorably as a federal judge, Booker said in a statement. Throughout her career, Ms. OHearn has demonstrated a deep commitment to justice and an appreciation for the impact that our courts have on the people of our state.

OHearns nomination comes on the heels of Biden nominating Julien X. Neals, the longtime Bergen County counsel, and current U.S. Magistrate Judge Zahid N. Quraishi to federal judgeships.

The nominations come at a time when the New Jersey federal courts are facing a crisis due to the lack of judges. The court has six vacancies  the most of any state besides California  and has been deemed a judicial emergency by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal court system.

No federal judges were nominated in New Jersey during former President Donald Trumps term.

The lack of judges has forced current and senior judges to handle large caseloads.

The districts chief judge, Freda L. Wolfson, previously said the court was operating at a deficit, but was hopeful it would soon receive much needed help.

I can only hope that several months down the line, sometime in 2021, we will get help, she said in an October interview.

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Washington: After four decades of seeking the nations highest office, Joe Biden entered the presidency as a deadly pandemic and an economic crisis prevented him from doing any of the parts of the job that might typically be considered among its perks.

He cannot review the troops, shake hands along a rope line or host a state dinner for a visiting foreign leader. But on Thursday, Biden finally participated in one sanctified ritual of the presidency: addressing a joint session of Congress.

Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stand and applaud as President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington. Credit:AP

The speech itself was hopeful in tone and ambitious in the scope of Bidens proposals.

America is on the move again, the President said, acknowledging that he took office in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and what he called the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
He's the former Neighbours star who splits his time between Australia and the U.S.

And Ben Lawson has revealed exactly how he deals with the stress of long-haul flights across the globe.

Appearing in a video for GQ magazine, the Logie winner, 41, revealed he regularly eats cannabis gummies before boarding flights to help calm his nerves.

Cannabis gummies are legal in many American states, and can assist with feelings of anxiety and discomfort.

'If you live in a state or a country where these are legal, I highly recommend them. You're not allowed to travel with these but they are completely legal at LAX where I fly out of,' Ben explained.

'What I find works is taking one as I go through security. By the time I'm boarding the plane it's starting to do its job,' he said.

'If you live in a state or a country where these are legal, I recommend them': Ben Lawson has revealed he regularly takes cannabis gummies before long-haul flights when he's in America

'These are just lollies that I bought from Woolworths': Ben, who is currently in Queensland, spoke to the camera while holding a plate of red, yellow and orange gummies

Ben, who is currently in Queensland, spoke to the camera while holding a plate of red, yellow and orange gummies.

'I'm in Australia, edibles aren't legal here, so these are just lollies that I bought from Woolworths. I'm using it as a prop. Still tasty!' he said, popping a gummy into his mouth.

Later in the video, Ben revealed he also relies on alcohol to help cope with the boredom of travel.

'If you do drink, now's the time to do it because it gets real boring real quick': Later in the video, Ben revealed he also relies on alcohol to help cope with the boredom of travel

Ben Lawson's top travel essentials Sleep mask

Spongey ear plugs

Headphones

Cannabis gummies

Local cards

Books

Face mask

Alcohol

Exercise gear

Creative project Advertisement

'If you don't drink, good for you. I respect and admire your choices. If you do drink, now's the time to do it because it gets real boring real quick. I wish you the best,' he said.

Among Ben's other travel essentials were his silk sleep mask, earbuds, headphones, books, a face mask and lightweight exercise gear including resistance bands and a skipping rope.

Ben also said he never forgets to bring his collection of local travel cards when travelling home to Australia.

He also showed off his Boost Juice rewards card, revealing himself as a big fan of the Australian juice company.

'I should be clear, Boost does not pay me [to promote the brand]. They've never paid me. I pay them for smoothies, which I think are pretty good,' he quipped.

'In my opinion, the United States has no idea how to make a smoothie,' Ben added.

Ben rose to fame starring on Australia soap Neighbours as Frazer Yeats from 2006 to 2008.

More recently, he's become known for his roles on various Netflix dramas including 13 Reasons Why, Designated Survivor and Firefly Lane.

Ben also notably starred as Lachlan Murdoch in the 2019 film Bombshell, about the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News.

Australian cards: Ben also said he never forgets to bring his collection of local travel cards when travelling home to Australia

Exercise gear: The star recommended that fans travel with lightweight exercise gear including resistance bands and a skipping rope

LA-based Ben relocated to Brisbane this year to escape Covid-ravaged America.

'Australian summer is my favourite  I dont want to be anywhere else  and everything that comes with it: the surf and sand, live music, drinking beer, just taking it easy,' he told The Daily Telegraph in November ahead of the move.

'I think just being away from the stress of the U.S. and everything going on in the political world with this country, as well as the very real possibility of a second wave of infections... Im very happy to be getting away from all of that.'
A woman who impersonated a Home and Away heart-throb to 'catfish' women online is behind bars after being arrested on new charges.

Melbourne woman Lydia Abdelmalek, 29, was sentenced in June 2019 to a two-year, eight-month prison term for six counts of stalking, employing what one victim called 'sick mind games', impersonating soap star Lincoln Lewis.

But Abdelmalek was bailed almost immediately as she flagged an appeal.

Lydia Abdelmalek (right), and her father leave the County Court of Victoria last year

The former Home and Away (pictured) star explained how powerless the catfishing left him, telling the court at an earlier appearance he felt powerless

She was released with a $10,000 surety and directed to comply with strict social media restrictions.

The cruel scammer had been free in the community up until April 22 when detectives pounced on her over fresh allegations.

It is understood Abdelmalek now faces a swag of new charges, including assault, stalking, using a carriage service to harass and committing offences while on bail.

Abdelmalek made no application for bail and remains behind bars.

On Thursday afternoon, her lawyer Sam Norton said his client intended to vigorously defend the new charges, which he suggested ought be withdrawn by police.

Mr Norton claimed the alleged victim had fabricated evidence to make his client appear guilty.

The victim had done so by deleting text messages Abdelmalek had allegedly sent.

'It demonstrates the complainant has lied to police,' Mr Norton said. 'We've got the undeleted version.'

Abdelmalek appeared in the County Court of Victoria on Thursday where police were expected to make an application to revoke her appeal bail.

Little is known about the alleged new offences, which are scheduled to go before the magistrate again on Friday.

When she appeared in the the County Court last year from the comfort of her dishevelled bedroom where she allegedly drove a young woman to suicide, prosecutors revealed she had already faced eight charges - two more than she was convicted on in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court in 2019.

Her appeal is expected to take anywhere up to six weeks when it eventually gets underway in June.

At that hearing, the court heard police planned to file six new statements to the court.

If convicted again, Abdelmalek faces even more time behind bars.

Abdelmalek had been previously accompanied by her father at her last actual appearances at the County Court of Victoria.

During one appearance, the elderly man lashed out at a television reporter with an umbrella.

The case has been significantly delayed to allow police to obtain the contents of Abdelmalek's computer.

The hunter becomes the hunted: Lydia Abdelmalek leaves court in February last year with her barrister as reporters hit her with a barrage of questions

Tight lipped: Lydia Abdelmalek had nothing to say as she tried to escape a media pack that chased her and her father along Lonsdale Street outside the County Court of Victoria in February last year

Lydia Abdelmalek had remained free in the community on appeal bail

Police had previously said they believed the information contained on it would 'clarify and support' additional evidence that may elevate the seriousness of the charges and potentially identify other targets of Abdelmalek's cruel deception.

Abdelmalek had pretended to be Lewis and used other aliases to stalk seven people for about four years from May 2011.

One of Abdelmalek's victims took her own life last year, but wrote a statement beforehand outlining the trauma of being duped into believing the TV star was in love with her.

The woman said she felt tortured for the 'sick fascination, perverse pleasure and unhealthy satisfaction' of her tormentor.

Another victim said she had turned from the life of the party to a recluse after what the sentencing magistrate described as 'calculated and cruel' offending.

Abdelmalek went as far as sending explicit images of the woman and vulgar messages to her father, mother, sister and brother-in-law.

Another woman, who was similarly scammed by the Lewis alias, said the 'sick mind games' turned her from the life of the party to a recluse.

Soap star Lincoln Lewis explained how powerless the catfishing left him, telling the court at an earlier appearance he felt powerless

One of Abdelmalek's (pictured) victims took her own life last year, but wrote a statement beforehand outlining the trauma of being duped into believing the TV star was in love with her

The former Home and Away star explained how powerless the catfishing left him, telling the court at an earlier appearance he felt powerless.

'It kills your vibe, it ruins your day. It makes you feel powerless and it makes you feel s**t,' he said.

'It just takes away your happiness because now Ive got this constant thought in my mind that somethings happening that Im powerless to stop or even find out.'

Lewis found out about the catfishing scam when one of the two victims got in touch.

He had known her from primary school, A Current Affair reported.

'She said "Linc, Ive thought for the last couple of months that you and I have been dating",' Lewis told the court about his 2011 conversation.

'My first reaction is, "How could you think that? How could you think that were dating when we havent seen each other in years?",' he said.

She will return to court in June for the appeal.

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OTTAWA, ON, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - As we continue to roll out COVID-19 vaccines across the country, the Government of Canada is committed to addressing and reducing barriers to vaccination.

Today, during National Immunization Awareness Week, the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, announced an investment of $2.25 million through the Immunization Partnership Fund (IPF) for two projects to support vaccination efforts. These projects will support vaccine uptake by ensuring Canadians have access to credible information on vaccination, as well as equipping healthcare providers and Canadians with proven strategies to manage pain and fear during vaccination.

The Canadian Association of Science Centres, in partnership with COVID-19 Resources Canada and the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, have created ScienceUpFirst, a project to address misinformation in Canada by giving Canadians the tools to spread science-based information about COVID-19 and vaccines. Drawing on a network of scientists, healthcare providers, and science communicators, this national initiative aims to debunk misinformation with credible COVID-19 facts, as well as reach vulnerable populations with culturally relevant and scientifically accurate COVID-19 information.

We are also supporting the University of Toronto's CARD (C-Comfort, A-Ask, R-Relax, D-Distract) System project, which addresses fear of needles among adults through pain management. Using proven best practices, this initiative will design and implement pain mitigation strategies for adults during vaccination to reduce their fears and encourage them to get vaccinated. The information and strategies developed through this project will be shared among health care networks, and the general public, to help people feel more comfortable when it's their turn to get vaccinated.

The Government of Canada is working closely with experts, provinces and territories, and other partners to better understand what barriers Canadians may face to getting vaccinated, and to encourage vaccine confidence. The IPF is one way we are reaching Canadians, through community mobilization, public outreach, and communications efforts across Canada to support Canadians in making informed choices on vaccination. When we get vaccinated, we protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities against COVID-19.

Quotes

"This year's National Immunization Awareness Week comes at a critical stage in Canada's COVID-19 response. The vaccines we have in Canada are safe and effective, and I encourage everyone to get vaccinated when it is your turn. This funding will help trusted leaders within the science and healthcare communities share credible information on vaccines, and address barriers people face in getting vaccinated."

The Honourable Patty Hajdu

Minister of Health

"National Immunization Awareness Week is an opportunity to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated and this includes COVID-19 vaccination. The projects funded through the Immunization Partnership Fund aim to address barriers that can delay or discourage people from getting vaccinated. Through projects like these, we are working to build confidence and make COVID-19 vaccines accessible for everyone in Canada."

Dr. Theresa Tam

Chief Public Health Officer of Canada

"Some of the communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic are also our most underserved and vulnerable communities. ScienceUpFirst is working closely with communities so they can access culturally relevant, scientifically accurate, and expertly vetted information. We want everyone to be able to protect themselves and their loved ones with evidence-informed decisions."

Krishana Sankar, PhD

Community Partnerships Lead and Science Advisor for ScienceUpFirst

"The spread of misinformation does real harm. It is having, for example, an adverse impact on vaccine uptake and on the adoption of preventative public health strategies. It is also fueling fears and polarized public discourse. With ScienceUpFirst, we are countering misinformation on social media with proven strategies: humour, creativity, empathy, and the best available scientific evidence."

Timothy Caulfield, LLM, FRSC, FCAHS

Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy

Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Public Health

Research Director, Health Law Institute, University of Alberta

"We can help people feel more comfortable with getting vaccinated. CARD - Comfort, Ask questions, Relax, and Distract - is a tool that helps people to identify sources of fear or anxiety around getting needles and ways to reduce them. By inviting people to choose what suits their needs and preferences, we can improve their experiences and promote confidence in vaccination. This can increase vaccine uptake."

Dr. Anna Taddio, Full Professor

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto

Quick Facts

The IPF supports projects that improve access to vaccinations and encourage vaccine acceptance and uptake. In 2020, as a response to Canada's COVID-19 vaccination efforts and building on the early momentum of the IPF, the Government of Canada invested an additional $64 million for projects aimed at increasing vaccine confidence in Canada and to help provincial and territorial governments enhance their electronic vaccination registries.





COVID-19 vaccination efforts and building on the early momentum of the IPF, the Government of invested an additional for projects aimed at increasing vaccine confidence in and to help provincial and territorial governments enhance their electronic vaccination registries. Through the IPF, the Canadian Association of Science Centres (CASC) is receiving $1,749,578 for their project ScienceUpFirst and the University of Toronto is receiving $499,792 for their project CARD (C-Comfort, A-Ask, R-Relax, D-Distract) System.





for their project and the is receiving for their project National Immunization Awareness Week (NIAW) is observed each year to highlight and recognize the importance of immunization. Canada's NIAW coincides with Vaccination Week in the Americas and World Immunization Week . This year, NIAW takes place from April 24 to 30, 2021 .





NIAW coincides with and . This year, NIAW takes place from . ScienceUpFirst is celebrating National Immunization Awareness Week, Vaccination Week in the Americas, and World Immunization Week with a social media campaign featuring trusted healthcare workers across Canada answering COVID-19 vaccine questions. Follow along with the hashtags #ScienceUpFirst and #VaccinesWork.

Associated Links

Backgrounder: New Projects Funded Under the Immunization Partnership Fund

Statement from the Minister of Health on National Immunization Awareness Week 2021

Vaccination and Immunization

Immunization Partnership Fund

Canada.ca/Coronavirus

ScienceUpFirst

SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada

For further information: Cole Davidson, Office of the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, 613-957-0200; Media Relations, Public Health Agency of Canada, 613-957-2983, [email protected]; Public Inquiries: 613-957-2991, 1-866-225-0709
Its possible Manitoba could reach its goal of immunizing 70 per cent of its adult population against COVID-19 by early June.

Its possible Manitoba could reach its goal of immunizing 70 per cent of its adult population against COVID-19 by early June.

Its highly unlikely people under age 40 will reach that threshold, though, given how far behind the province has fallen in its vaccine targets.

Thats problematic, since the variants of concern now circulating appear to cause more severe illness among younger adults.

The provinces vaccine task force set April 15 as the date 70 per cent of Manitobans ages 60-69 would receive their first shot (under its low-range scenario). It still havent hit that target. As of Wednesday, 64 per cent of Manitobans in that cohort had received their first dose.

The target date for ages 50-59 is May 7. The province is nowhere near meeting that goal, with only 32 per cent of that group having received their first shot.

The province will likely fall further behind for Manitobans in their 40s. Age eligibility for the general population is still at 50-plus (40-plus for the AstraZeneca vaccine at pharmacies and clinics). Most people in their 40s are not even booking appointments yet.

Under the provinces low-range scenario, 70 per cent of Manitobans ages 40-49 were supposed to receive their first shot by May 17.

That wont happen. Which means the targets for those under 40 will probably not be met, either.

Vaccine task force officials have fallen so far behind their targets, theyve stopped publishing them by age in weekly technical briefing reports.

Still, the overall 70 per cent goal by early June is attainable  mainly because of the high uptake for Manitobans ages 70-plus.

Its one of the success stories of the vaccine rollout: almost 90 per cent of Manitobans over 70 have received at least one dose of vaccine.

The reason the province has fallen so far behind in meeting targets for younger age groups is not because of a shortage of vaccine supply. The rollout has just been slow.

It has sped up somewhat over the past week, after the province made some adjustments, including dropping eligibility for AstraZeneca to Manitobans over 40.

Its one of the success stories of the vaccine rollout: almost 90 per cent of Manitobans over 70 have received at least one dose of vaccine.

However, even those doses continue to move slowly. As of Wednesday, there were still 24,673 AstraZeneca shots in fridges at pharmacies and clinics, with no target date on when they will be used up.

Most of that supply comes from a 54,600-dose shipment that arrived in Manitoba nearly a month ago. Its ludicrous all those doses havent been administered yet. It was a logistical error to distribute vaccines to third-party providers that cant get shots into arms faster.

Thats not the only reason Manitobas vaccine rollout continues to be sluggish. The task force still had almost 28,000 doses in freezers for super sites, pop-up clinics and focused immunization teams this week, when it received its Pfizer-BioNTech shipment Wednesday.

Between AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna, theres at least 50,000 doses on hand that should be in arms by now.

Failure to do so has made it more difficult for Manitoba to fight the third wave of the pandemic. Every person who is immunized helps interrupt the chain of transmission.

However, the situation may be improving.

The province planned to administer 8,999 doses Wednesday, not including pharmacies/clinics and First Nations. Also, with weekly supply reaching no less than 73,700 doses next week, daily doses are expected to rise to 8,000-12,000 per day in May.

If the province can avoid its previous mistakes of maintaining larger-than-necessary inventories (and pushing too much supply through slow distribution channels), it should be able to reach its overall goal of getting first shots into 70 per cent of adults by early June.

It will likely take a few more weeks for those under 40 to reach that threshold.

By Canada Day, at least 70 per cent of Manitoba adults in all age cohorts will likely have had a first shot.

Thats something to look forward to.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
Biden talks Equality Act, American Families Plan, white supremacist threat in Congress speech

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In his first speech before a joint session of U.S. Congress Wednesday night, President Joe Biden urged the legislative branch to support his progressive agenda, unveiled his American Families Plan and warned of the threat posed by white supremacy.

Biden addressed the 117th Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber one day before his 100th day in office. While Biden spent his speech attempting to portray his proposals as popular among Americans of all political persuasions, the president also made overtures to the progressive base of the Democratic Party.

He specifically expressed a desire to see federal lawmakers send the Equality Act to his desk, which he described as a bill to protect LGBT Americans.

Biden delivered a specific message to the transgender community, one of the intended beneficiaries of the legislation that would codify discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity into federal law.

All transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave, I want you to know your president has your back, the 78-year-old declared.

The Equality Act has already passed the House but has stalled in the Senate. Championed by Democrats, the Equality Act has come under frequent criticism by conservatives, who have expressed concerns about its implications for religious liberty and womens sports.

Throughout his speech, Biden discussed a wide variety of topics, including the coronavirus stimulus package, the progress in distributing the coronavirus vaccine, efforts to fight climate change and foreign policy. The president promoted the American Jobs Plan, his infrastructure plan, in addition to unveiling his American Families Plan.

American Families Plan

The plan seeks to expand access to education, reduce the cost of child care and support women in the workforce while providing upwards of $1.8 trillion in investments and tax credits for American families and children over ten years, according to the White House.

The plan will be financed by raising taxes on high earners.

Discussing the need to compete with other countries, specifically China, Biden stressed that the United States needs to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children.

According to Biden, the American Families Plan addresses four of the biggest challenges facing American families and in turn America.

Biden identified the lack of access to a good education as one of the biggest challenges facing American families.

Arguing that 12 years of free public education was no longer sufficient as the U.S. seeks to compete on the world stage, he explained that the American Families Plan guarantees four additional years of public education for every person in America.

The great universities in this country have conducted studies over the last 10 years that shows that adding two years of universal, high-quality preschool for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old no matter what background they come from puts them in a position to be able to compete all the way through 12 years, he said. It increases exponentially their prospect of graduating and going on beyond graduation.

The research shows when a young child goes to school  not daycare  theyre far more likely to graduate from high school and go to college or something after high school, he added. When you add two years of free community college on top of that, you begin to change the dynamic.

Additionally, Biden explained, the American Families Plan will increase Pell Grants and invest in historically black college[s] and universities, tribal colleges [and] minority-serving institutions.

The American Families Plan will provide access to quality affordable child care, he announced. It would guarantee that low and middle-income families will pay no more than 7% of their income for high-quality care for children up to the age of five while the most hard-pressed working families wont have to spend a dime.

He said the plan would provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave and family and medical leave. He lamented that the U.S. is one of the few industrial countries in the world without such a policy.

No one should have to choose between a job and a paycheck for taking care of themselves and their loved ones or parent or spouse or child, the president said.

The former senator from Delaware maintained that extending a $3,000 child care tax credit for children over the age of 6 and a $3,600 child care tax credit for children younger than 6 years old through 2025 will help more than 65 million children and help cut child care poverty in half.

The president vowed that to pay for his proposals, he would not impose any tax increase on people making less than $400,000.

Instead, the cost would fall on corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans, whom he argued needed to pay their fair share. He proposed increasing the top income tax rate to 39.6% and getting rid of the loopholes that allow Americans to make more than $1 million a year and pay a lower tax rate on their capital gains than Americans who receive a paycheck.

As he addressed foreign policy, Biden warned that terrorism has metastasized to the point where the threat has evolved way beyond Afghanistan. He vowed that its time to bring our troops home.

Racism and policing

While stating that Al Qaeda and ISIS are still in the Middle East and Africa, he cited the intelligence agencies analysis when characterizing white supremacy as the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today.

We have to come together to heal the soul of this nation, Biden stressed as he pivoted to discussing the death of George Floyd and race in America. Weve all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of black Americans. Nows our opportunity to make some real progress.

The vast majority of men and women wearing a uniform and a badge serve our communities, and they serve them honorably, he continued. We have to come together to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyds name that passed the House already.

While he praised Republicans for having very productive discussions with Democrats in the Senate, Biden reiterated the need to work together to find a consensus, urging Congress to pass criminal justice reform by May 25, the first anniversary of Floyds death.

Immigration

Describing immigration as essential to America, the president asked Congress to support a comprehensive immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented folks as well as high tech border security.

He specifically highlighted protection for Dreamers, illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. He called for permanent protection for immigrants who are here on temporary protective status and a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers who put food on our tables as the most important immigration-related priorities that Congress must address.

H.R. 1

In addition, Biden asked Congress to pass H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

Democrats, including Biden, have portrayed the bill as necessary to expand Americans access to the ballot box. But conservatives allege that H.R. 1, which they characterize as a federal takeover of the administration of elections, will make it easier to cheat and make it easier to manipulate election results because it loosens voter ID requirements and signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots.

As his speech concluded, Biden declared, I have never been more confident or optimistic about America because weve stared into the abyss of insurrection and autocracy, pandemic and pain and we the people did not flinch.

While it is not customary for newly elected presidents to give State of the Union addresses, they have given speeches to joint sessions Congress soon after assuming office.

The audience in the Hosue chamber did not include most of the 535 members of Congress as is customary for State of the Union addresses or similar addresses given by presidents shortly after taking office.

To maintain social distancing as the U.S. continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, only a handful of members of Congress were physically present in the chamber.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday (April 30) will hold a COVID-19 review meeting with the Cabinet ministers at 11 am.

The Union Council of ministers will hold a meeting via video conference on April 30 to review the prevailing coronavirus situation, ANI reported.

The Union Council of ministers to hold a meeting via video conference on 30th April.  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

Earlier today, PM Modi met Chief of Army Staff General MM Naravane to monitor COVID-19 preparedness and initiatives of the troops. "They discussed various initiatives being taken by the Army to help in Covid management," the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) said in a statement. Naravane informed that the Army is opening up its hospitals for civilians wherever possible and that citizens can approach their nearest Army hospitals, a statement said.

On Wednesday, he had held a similar discussion with Indian Air Force (IAF) chief Rakesh Kumar Singh Bhadauria.

Meanwhile, India registered 3,79,257 new coronavirus infections in the past 24 hours, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524, as per Union Health Ministry data on Thursday (April 29).

India has been recording over three lakh cases every day for more than a week now.
SPRINGFIELD  Promising to get the Ways and Means Committees work on infrastructure done by July and hopeful of getting something passed the House by the August recess, U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal praised President Joe Bidens Wednesday night speech to a joint session of Congress.

That speech he gave last night was Joe Biden, Neal, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said at a Thursday news conference after returning from Washington. There is no malice in his voice or his tone.

Neal and Biden spoke briefly Wednesday night in the House Chamber. And while Neal wouldnt reveal specifics, he said and Biden did share their mutual appreciation for institutional knowledge. The Springfield Democrat was first elected to the House in 1988. Biden famously served in the Senate from 1973 until becoming vice president in 2009.

He gets the rhythms of legislative life, Neal said.

Biden laid out an ambitious program Wednesday, including a $1.8 trillion program for families and education including universal prekindergarten and free two-year community college, as well as that $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan.

Earlier in the week, Neal laid out a proposal for universal paid family and medical leave, guaranteed access to child care and for the child-tax credit to be made permanent saying it offers a path back from the lingering economic troubles of the pandemic.

His embrace of the American Families Plan is something I support fully, Neal said.

Thursday, Neal said Biden had embraced the Ways & Means plan in his speech in his address.

I thought last night that President Biden laid out a very healing vision of how he foresees America in the coming decade, Neal said. And I thought that the plan that he laid out last night spoke to American resiliency and American resolve highlighting the early achievements that his administration offered and recognizing that when we reach our potential, our potential expands.

But how to pay for it.

Neals committee controls tax policy. Biden has talked about basically rolling back the Trump tax cuts passed by the Republicans in 2016 and 2017. It would be $1.5 trillion of tax hikes over the next decade on the wealthiest households, the Associated Press said.

Neal said the tax cuts benefited only the wealthiest of households.

Congressman Richard E. Neal speaks at a press conference, Thursday, April 29, 2021 in the U.S. District Courthouse on State Street, Springfield. (Don Treeger / The Republican)

Biden wants to raise the top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans from 37% to 39.6%. The rate had been 39.6% before the 2017 tax cuts, the Associated Press said.

I think that it would be a mistake for members of congress to volunteer revenue right now, Neal said.

Talking about revenue now would only allow the opposition to mount.

Tell us what you really want, Neal said. What your desires are. And if you really want it, what are you willing to support in terms of casting revenue for the outcome?

Neal spoke of the need for roads, bridges, water systems, rail.

Infrastructure used to be something we could all agree with, Im optimistic that we can find a path forward.

Hes supportive of the early childhood education plans, saying that its supported by research and would be needed as America competes with China.

I do think it is helpful that some Republicans are talking about childhood poverty, Neal said. I think its very helpful in fact.

The community college plan is good as well, Neal said, citing success at Massachusetts community college system. But he said each state has a slightly different set up for community colleges. Some states already have generous grant programs, some dont have community colleges but four-year institutions that offer two-year degrees.

So states need to smooth out those differences to fit in with a federal program, he said.

Related content
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he will not withdraw navy and coast guard boats patrolling the disputed South China Sea, insisting the country's sovereignty over the waters is not negotiable.

Tensions over the sea -- which China claims almost entirely -- have spiked as Beijing refuses to pull out vessels from the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone and Manila steps up maritime patrols.

Duterte is under growing domestic pressure to take a harder line, but has been reluctant to confront China over the issue as he fosters closer ties with the economic giant.

He said late Wednesday that while the Philippines is indebted to its "good friend" China for many things, including free Covid-19 vaccines, his country's claims to the waterway "cannot be bargainable".

"I'll tell China, we do not want trouble, we do not want war. But if you tell us to leave -- no," Duterte said.

"There are things which are not really subject to a compromise, such as us pulling back. It's difficult. I hope they understand, but I have the interest of my country also to protect."

Duterte's remarks came after the country's defence department said "China has no business telling the Philippines what we can and cannot do with our own waters".

The Philippine coast guard is conducting drills near Thitu Island and Scarborough Shoal, as well as the Batanes islands in the north and the southern and eastern parts of the country.

Scarborough -- one of the region's richest fishing grounds -- has long been a flashpoint between Manila and Beijing.

In response to the exercises, China's foreign ministry said Monday the Philippines should "stop actions complicating the situation and escalating disputes".

In recent weeks, Manila has boosted "sovereignty patrols" involving the navy, coast guard and fisheries in the Spratly Islands -- an archipelago contested by several countries.

Story continues

Beijing has ignored a 2016 international tribunal decision that declared its historical claim over most of the South China Sea to be without basis.

Once-frosty ties between Manila and Beijing have warmed under Duterte, who set aside the ruling in exchange for promises of trade and investment -- which critics say have not materialised.

Delays in Covid-19 vaccine deliveries has left the Philippines heavily reliant on the CoronaVac jab developed by China's Sinovac.

Around 3.5 million doses of CoronaVac have been sent to the Southeast Asian country so far, including one million donated doses.

burs-amj/oho
State-owned insurance behemoth  (LIC)  has emerged as the third strongest and the tenth most valuable insurance brand globally, according to a report by Insurance 100 2021, a London-based brand valuation consultancy firm According to the report, the total value of the worlds top 100 most valuable insurance declined by 6 per cent from $462.4 billion in 2020 to $433.0 billion in 2021. However, LICs brand value increased by almost 7 per cent to $8.65 billion. There are five Chinese insurance companies in the top 10 most valuable insurance globally, with Ping An Insurance emerging the worlds most valuable insurance brand, despite recording a 26 per cent drop in brand value. The US has two companies in the top 10, while France, Germany, and India have one insurance company each in the list. As far as the strongest insurance are concerned, Italys Poste Italiane leads the pack, followed by Mapfre of the US and of India.

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The Delhi administration does not have Covid-19 vaccines available with it currently, said state health minister Satyendra Jain on Thursday while answering a question about inoculation of everybody above the age of 18.

"We do not have vaccines as of now. We have made requests to the company regarding vaccines, we will tell you when it comes," Jain was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Speaking about the spiking cases in the national capital, the minister said that the positivity rate has been below the 10-day average for the last three days.

"In the last 1.5 months, the daily positivity (rate) had never been below the 10-day average. But it has been below for three days now. So, we can see a ray of hope, it seems the positivity rate will gradually come down here," said Jain.

The statements come in the backdrop of the Union health ministry asserting that more than one crore Covid-19 vaccine doses are still available with states and UTs.

"They will receive over 20 lakh more doses within the next three days," the ministry said.

The Government of India has so far provided nearly 16.16 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses to states and UTs free of cost, it said. Of this, the total consumption including wastages is 15,10,77,933 doses.

The liberalised and accelerated phase-3 strategy of Covid-19 vaccination will be implemented from 1 May.

Registration for the new eligible population groups started on Wednesday with 1.32 crore successfully completing the process, said the government.

However, many people took to social media to complain about the technical problems they faced while trying to register after the slot opened at 4 pm.

The health ministry later stated that reports of the CoWIN server crashing "are incorrect and are without any basis".

Even if registered, new signees are not likely to get the vaccines when they become eligible for the jabs on 1 May as appointments for those between 18 and 44 of age will be available when state and private vaccination centres schedule sessions.

Revised data

The Delhi government on Thursday morning released revised cumulative coronavirus figures for the city, raising the case tally by 44,350 and fatalities by 761 than previously reported.

In the revised figures, the Delhi government has put the number of cases at 10,98,051 and deaths at 15,377.

The data released on Wednesday night had put out lower overall figures of 10,53,701 cases and 14,616 fatalities.

The cumulative positivity rate has also been revised upwards from 6.20% to 6.46%.

The number of recoveries too has been revised up to 9,82,922 from 9,39,333.





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Thousands of protesters in Colombia gathered on the streets and demonstrated against a proposed tax reform that was announced on Wednesday.

The proposed measure of the Colombian government is intended to raise some $6.3 billion in 10 years for the country, AFP reported. The country saw a 6.8 percent drop in the gross domestic product (GDP) last year. It was reportedly the worst performance in half a century.

Colombians were not happy about the government's plan and decided to gather and protest against the proposed tax reform. Several cities have reported disturbances and acts of vandalism during the day of the strike, according to Andalou Agency.

READ NEXT: 104-Year-Old Colombian Woman Contracts, Beats COVID-19 Twice

Colombians Protested Over Tax Reform

A large number of people gathered and marched in Colombia as they argued that the tax reform would make them poorer.

The protesters further noted that the said reform is an "unwanted attack" on the middle class during the dire economic straits. The gathering of the protesters comes as the country battles their deadliest phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

In Bogota, which is Colombia's capital, thousands marched on the central square even though courts had banned demonstrations the day before the national strike happened. Students, indigenous groups, and even unions have still decided to take part in the protest. Some protesters even clashed with the police.

"We do not accept the tax reform," said protester Victor Cordoba told AFP. The 33-year-old demonstrator further noted that they are engaging in protest because they think of their children and themselves. "Either we die of the virus, or we die of hunger," said Cordoba.

Meanwhile, people from the Misak indigenous group knocked down a statue of the Spanish conqueror Sebastian de Belalcazar. The incident happened in the city of Cali during the first hours of the national strike.

"We are tired of abuse the population must endure," said Felipe Zapata, a protester in Bogota. Zapata further noted that Colombians are also tired of their president doing nothing.

Protests also occurred in the city of Barranquilla and Medellin. Colombia's rights ombudsman has denounced the mass protests due to its high health risk.

In Colombia, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 12,839 new COVID positive cases in the last 24 hours with 448 new deaths. According to WHO, the country has already administered about 3,165,023 vaccine doses as of April 22.

Colombia's Tax Reform

Under President Ivan Duque, the government wants to tax the incomes of those earning over $656 a month, lowering the threshold to broaden the tax base. It also wants to impose a tax on funerals and essential services in upper-middle-class areas.

Meanwhile, the Colombian government has already lowered the amount of money it hopes to raise from the proposed tax reform to win enough support from Congress, Reuters reported.

The proposed reform has also met resistance in Congress, including those from the coalition of parties that support Duque's government.

"We're looking for consensus, we're looking for ways everyone can do a little more to cover the gap," said Vice Finance Minister Juan Alberto Londono.

Londono added that this is being done to "have peace of mind" that Colombia can pay its debt without the vulnerable population suffering.

Opponents of the proposed tax reform noted that the changes would burden the taxpayers that are already stretched by the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

READ MORE: Thousands of Venezuelans Seek Refuge in Colombia Amid Border Dispute

WATCH: Colombian Police Fire Tear Gas at Protesters - From VOA News
HARTFORD, Conn., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Covr Financial Technologies (Covr), a leading digital life insurance platform, has completed its latest funding round with an investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. This funding comes in conjunction with the launch of Covr's suite of new AI-driven term life insurance products, which bring market-leading capability to the financial institutions and insurance companies that use Covr solutions to support the growing trend of self-directed, shop-from-home, insurance buying experiences that are now possible because of emerging technology and robo-advice tools.

"We couldn't be more thrilled with this investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. Wrapping our latest round of funding with a highly recognizable, global brand like Sony, which is also an insurance distribution leader in Asia, is just incredible," said Mike Kalen, Covr CEO. "This investment and Sony's global network will go far in helping Covr continue to lead the way in digital insurance innovations in the U.S., and eventually abroad, with solutions such as our newly launched multi-carrier term life insurance platform that includes a growing number of instant-purchase journeys and our proprietary LoanMatch Protector product."

"We believe Covr reinvents the way life insurance is distributed by leveraging AI and advanced process automation, enabling insurance carriers to broaden their distribution path. This makes it possible for new entrants, such as banks, credit unions, C2C platforms and FinTechs, to efficiently offer policies to their own customers," said Gen Tsuchikawa, CEO and Chief Investment Officer at Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. "Thanks to its comprehensive and modular software stack, Covr provides a genuine no-code environment for optimizing policy distribution, selection and issuance. We are quite confident in the growth path of Covr, and we look forward to supporting Mike and his team as they further grow Covr's footprint."

Covr's industry-leading digital life insurance platform integrates seamlessly into a financial institution's existing website or other distribution model. This allows these financial institutions to offer a broad range of life insurance products from the leading insurance carriers to their customers. Today's consumers expect choice, simplicity and speed when purchasing life insurance, and Covr's technology is tailored to those demands. "Our partners are finding additional ways to serve their customers with our solutions," Kalen said. "We partner with many of the leading financial planning firms, banks, broker dealers, credit unions, consumer lenders, personal finance apps, and other great brands to bring innovation and affordable insurance to their customers."

With Covr's multi-carrier term insurance platform, customers can apply for life insurance online in minutes, with real-time quotes available from the leading insurance carriers. Leading the way in the journey are product offerings from Bestow, Haven Life, Banner Life and Americo, which all offer fully digital, instant-decision capability, and Covr's technology to help clients find the product that fits best for them.

"Customers today expect simplicity and choice when it comes to protection products  and expect that it's done quickly," Kalen said. "Our platform allows our financial brands and other partners to meet this demand with a digital, white-labeled solution."

Unique among Covr's product offerings is LoanMatch Protector, a new product designed to mirror the remainder of an existing mortgage, small business loan or other debt. The coverage adjusts to the client's precise need, saving consumers up to 30% and offering the market-leading ability to complete the entire process in 15 minutes.

About Covr Financial Technologies Inc.

Covr partners with financial brands to provide life insurance solutions to their customers in an efficient, easy way that streamlines the process of selling and buying policies. Covr offers a choice of trusted life insurance products from leading insurance carriers, an easy way to compare rates, and the ability to purchase policies within minutes. Through its white label solutions, Covr helps financial institutions deliver a great experience under an existing brand their customers already trust. Covr currently serves over 25,000 financial advisors and over 20 million customers across over 30 financial institutions. For more information, visit covrtech.com or follow us @covrtech and on LinkedIn.

Covr's investors include nine leading venture capital firms: Nyca Partners, Commerce Ventures, Allianz Life Ventures, Connectivity Capital Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Aflac Ventures, Fairview Capital, Connecticut Innovations and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. Covr's Advisory Board includes financial services leaders, including Chairman Brian Finn, former president of Credit Suisse First Boston; Joe Plumeri, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of First Data Corporation and former CEO of Citibank North America; Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest as well as senior executive roles at Bank of America, Citigroup and Smith Barney; Hans Morris, managing partner, Nyca Partners, chairman of Lending Club, formerly president of Visa; Brady Dougan, former CEO of Credit Suisse; Gregg Fleming of Rockefeller Capital and Bob Kerzner, formerly CEO of LIMRA.

About Sony Innovation Fund by IGV

Innovation Growth Ventures (IGV) is a venture capital firm formed in 2019 by Sony Corporation, Daiwa Capital Holdings Co., Ltd. and external limited partners. Managed by the Sony Innovation Fund (SIF), IGV invests in mid to late-stage startup companies across Japan, the U.S., Europe, Israel and India.

SOURCE Covr Financial Technologies, Inc.
For public-sector finance professionals, vigilance and caution are daily facts of life: You never know what's coming next. But in periods of major transition  whether through a change in administration, department merger, or strategic pivot  doing the job takes on an added dimension of uncertainty.

"I have definitely faced my share of transitions," said John Kaschak, CPA, CGMA, executive deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. In 22 years, he's worked for two public accounting firms, three state agencies, and five administrations. "Some were by my choice; others were dealt at the hand of the electorate. However, each of these transitions came with their own share of uncertainty and angst."

Fortunately for Kaschak, he thrives on change, one of the foundational characteristics to negotiate workplace transitions with competence and confidence. Yet even when applying their skill sets and experience surrounding transformation, those in public-sector finance may only be able to do so much, given the overarching changes surrounding them.

Why transitions fail

According to research by McKinsey & Co., nearly four in five public-sector transformations, such as changing the delivery of public services, updating technology systems, or cutting redundant processes, in a post-election cycle fail, often because of insufficient time for public-sector leaders to prepare for and manage transitions, insurmountable conflicts created by a wide range of divergent stakeholder interests, and the pressure that high public visibility brings.

But it's precisely in such conditions that finance professionals can have the greatest impact. Tops among the myths that drive public-sector transformation failure, McKinsey contends, is that bottom-line financial concerns are "not applicable in the public sector."

One essential ingredient for success is what McKinsey labels as "radical transparency." And this is something finance professionals can provide: "Impact metrics may include cost savings, revenues generated, or improved employee or customer satisfaction."

Unprecedented transformations

As Kaschak and other veterans of the public sector will tell you, potential changes that loom during a close election cycle can at least be anticipated  while others simply can't. Last year provided a textbook lesson in surviving a changeover that not only originated far beyond the office cubicle but also in essence cordoned it off.

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented period of change, where home offices and spare bedrooms became the primary workplace. Every manner of employee and stakeholder interaction took place via videoconferencing, even as stay-at-home kids interacted unexpectedly with their working parents. (This implies yet another upcoming transition: as the pandemic recedes, returning to office spaces that many workers haven't seen for a year or more.)

How can those in public-sector finance address the challenges of transition, continue to make valuable workplace contributions, and come out shining on the other side? Consider these six positive action and attitudinal steps.

Accomplishing the transition mission

Be prepared to start over. Expertise is one thing; helping newcomers in your department row with you in a common direction is quite another. Here, some humility will help even if your new colleagues lack the experience and savvy you have. "When transition comes, you may find yourself in a situation where the folks you work with don't understand what you bring to the table," Kaschak said. "You may need to prove your worth to a whole new group of individuals. But this is also an opportunity to reinvent yourself. Transition presents opportunities to build new relationships, show off your talents, and advance yourself."

Err on the side of overcommunicating. While communication represents a gold-standard value in any circumstance, a changing of the guard requires that no institutional knowledge, procedure, or shared mission be taken for granted. What's needed, then, is "frequent and consistent communication from all levels of the organization regarding the organizational change and anticipated timelines," said Carrie Kruse, CPA, CGMA, economic development administrator for the City of Des Moines, Iowa. "A higher frequency of communication provides the opportunity for real-time updates on what your team can expect when, and provides the ability to communicate any potential delays for various action items along the way." Not only does this keep things running smoothly: It also makes the new staff look good.

Remain flexible. Why do knowledgeable career finance professionals working in the public sector such as Kaschak thrive on change? As he put it, transition marks an opportunity to sharpen and add to his skill set as a finance professional. It also means letting go of the natural tendency toward resistance. "Other organizations and leaders do things differently, but different does not mean wrong," he said. "When confronted with change, it's important to be open to new ideas. Some of the greatest successes of my career have come as a result of merging of preexisting plans with new ideas."

Focus on your service mission. Getting tied up in turf battles or in emotional roadblocks such as resentment and fear can take one's focus off the big picture. Finance professionals so often stand out because of their commitment to drive positive change for communities and constituencies they serve. Transition marks an ideal time to double down on that mission. "Make it about service," said Don Bice, director in the Public Sector at BDO in Washington, D.C. "Employees that have made their career in public service are the most valuable assets governmental organizations have and are crucial to navigating transitions or uncertain times. Understand that you and your organization are providing a necessary service  while the focus or prioritization of your job may change, the services you provide are needed and valued."

Help the new leadership navigate. Make no mistake: Transition is difficult both for employees staying on and new ones coming on. Though the newcomers may not voice it  perhaps because they are loath to appear inexperienced  they often lack the knowledge to traverse the public-sector maze. "Use your hard-earned expertise to help new leadership navigate the new environment to prove your value to those who may be unfamiliar with the unique requirements and processes of federal or state and local accounting standards," Bice said. Existing statutes and regulations "don't change overnight and the functions you deliver still need to be delivered amid and after the change. Provide solid and objective advice that people can use to operate, especially if you are in a leadership role."

Build community outside work. Whether that means a Zoom "dinner hour" in pandemic conditions, or a night out bowling once conditions return to something approaching normal, "Don't underestimate the value of participating in the nonwork-related company activities," Kruse said. That's how she got to know new team members from a merged department. "Over the summer we participate in an annual event called the Des Moines Corporate Games, and this year we had virtual trivia teams, virtual 'Name That Tune' teams, and a citywide scavenger hunt competition, among many other events. It's a really fun way to get to know your colleagues on a more personal level and helps build stronger cross-departmental relationships."

 Lou Carlozo is a freelance writer based in Chicago. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Drew Adamek, a JofA senior editor, at Andrew.Adamek@aicpa-cima.com.
Stan has co-commissioned a new local drama series Wolf Like Me, in association with NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock.

The six-part, half-hour drama series will star Josh Gad (Frozen, Beauty and the Beast) and Isla Fisher (Arrested Development, Wedding Crashers) and will begin production in Australia in the coming months.

A genre-bending, heartfelt drama produced by Jodi Matterson (Nine Perfect Strangers), Bruna Papandrea (Big Little Lies) and Steve Hutenskys (The Dry) Made Up Stories, Wolf Like Me is written by Abe Forsythe (Little Monsters), based on his own life experience as a 40-something single parent.

Forsythe will also direct all six episodes of the series.

Everyone brings their own set of baggage to a new relationship and in Wolf Like Me, Gary (Gad) and Mary (Fisher) are no different. Gary is an emotional wreck and struggles to provide for his daughter since the death of his wife. Mary has a secret she cant bring herself to share with anyone. The universe brought these two together for a reason, they just need to keep following the signs.

Wolf Like Me is a very meaningful project for me, the stakes are extremely high but grounded by things we can all relate to, Forsythe said. Im so excited to have Isla and Josh on board and I know the audience will be surprised seeing them in a different way as these characters. I was never going to tell this story with anyone other than Made Up Stories and I feel very fortunate for us all to be teaming up with Endeavor Content and to have found a home with Peacock and Stan.

Made Up Stories Jodi Matterson, Bruna Papandrea and Steve Hutensky said: After our partnership with Abe on Little Monsters, we were excited to find another project to collaborate on. Abe is just one of those rare talents, with an incredibly distinctive voice. As soon as he explained the concept for Wolf Like Me, we knew we had to be part of it. And we couldnt be happier to have Isla Fisher and Josh Gad on board, they are perfect for the roles of Mary and Gary.

Stans Chief Content Officer Nick Forward said: Wolf Like Me promises to be a premium Australian made drama that will see Stan expand its partnership with NBCUniversal and Peacock. We look forward to seeing the talented production team at Made Up Stories, alongside Abe Forsythe, Josh Gad and Isla Fisher, bring this world-class Australian story to life.

Production will begin in Australia soon, with further announcements to come.

The Stan Original Series Wolf Like Me is produced by Made Up Stories in association with Peacock, Endeavor Content and Stan. Jodi Matterson, Bruna Papandrea and Steve Hutensky from Made Up Stories serve as executive producers, alongside executive producers Abe Forsythe, Isla Fisher and Josh Gad. Financed with assistance from Screen NSW through the Made in NSW Fund.

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Polytechnique Montreal - where 30.2% of graduates are women



MONTREAL, April 29, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - Polytechnique Montreal has just passed an important milestone - for the first time in its history, 30.2% of undergraduate engineering graduates are women (2020).

While Quebec and Canadian female engineer graduation averages hover around 21%, this breakthrough demonstrates that the national goal of increasing the rate of newly licensed women engineers to 30% by 2030 is indeed very achievable.

While women currently account for 15.3% of practicing engineers in Quebec, and women represent 14% of engineers in Canada.

Engineers Canada, the Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec, and many other notable organizations esteem that the 30% target is a first milestone to be reached in order to bring about a genuine paradigm shift, and contribute to the fundamental transformation of the profession's character.

Exceeding the 30% mark for women graduates is an important milestone for Polytechnique, and is the result of sustained efforts. For over 20 years, Polytechnique has multiplied awareness-raising initiatives in collaboration with stakeholders in the field, governments, and generous donors (companies, foundations, graduates, and friends of Polytechnique). These initiatives translate into science awareness-raising activities in classrooms, as well as science camps, mentoring programs, contests, workshops, lectures, scholarships, and profiles that highlight inspiring women role models actively achieving in careers in technology.

There are numerous elements to the achievement of this objective, including but not limited to an increase in the hiring of female professors, the creation of new programs (such as the bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering), and the increasingly widespread adoption across all programs of a sustainable engineering approach - a approach which resonates with women, where they feel they'll be able to acquire key skills to meet modern challenges.

"We believe it's essential for women to take their rightful place in engineering to contribute to the development and deployment of sustainable solutions to meet the challenges of our time. If a lack of female role models can explain this representation gap, the growing number of women graduates will help attract more young women to this career path," notes Philippe A. Tanguy, President of Polytechnique Montreal.

"Congratulations to the students, faculty, and staff of Polytechnique Montreal on this historic achievement. Post-secondary institutions play an integral role in improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering and helping us achieve "30 by 30". We're encouraged by Polytechnique's impact in advancing gender equity and we are keen to learn from their example", says Jean Boudreau, President, Engineers Canada.

"To fully serve the common good, engineering must rely on all available talent. Increased women's representation within the profession is essential to achieve this. As a partner of the 30 in 30 Initiative, the Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec congratulates Polytechnique Montreal in reaching this important milestone in engineering's journey towards a more diversified and inclusive profession," declares Kathy Baig, Polytechnique Montreal graduate and Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec President.

SEE OFFICIAL REACTIONS



Danielle McCann , Quebec Minister of Higher Education

Quebec Minister of Higher Education Isabelle Charest , Quebec Minister for Education and Minister Responsible for the Status of Women

Quebec Minister for Education and Minister Responsible for the Status of Women Dominique Anglade , Polytechnique Montreal graduate and leader of the provincial official opposition

, Polytechnique Montreal graduate and leader of the provincial official opposition Valerie Plante, Mayor of the City of Montreal

Mayor of the Pierre Arcand , Member of Parliament for Mont-Royal  Outremont

Member of Parliament for  Rachel Bendayan , Member of Parliament for Outremont

Member of Parliament for Deborah Cherenfant, President - Young Chamber of Commerce of Montreal

About Polytechnique Montreal

Established in 1873, Polytechnique Montreal is one of Canada's largest engineering education and research universities, and is located on the Universite de Montreal campus - North America's largest Francophone university campus. With over 52,800 graduates and over 120 academic programs, Polytechnique has trained 22% of the Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec (OIQ)'s current membership. Polytechnique Montreal is also distinguished by its 285 talented professors, more than 9,000 students, and overall annual budget of $260 million, and close to $100 million is reserved exclusively for research.

INTERVIEWS

Philippe A. Tanguy , President of Polytechnique Montreal

, President of Polytechnique Montreal Meredith Alousi-Jones , Master's student in Civil Engineering at Polytechnique, Executive VP of the Poly-Fi student committee, earned her Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Polytechnique

CLIP AND TESTIMONIALS: Video clip wherein members of the Polytechnique community discuss this achievement and the place of women in engineering.



COMPARATIVE STATISTICS AND TRENDS: Women and Engineering website

SOURCE Polytechnique Montreal

For further information: Information and interview requests: Annie Touchette, Communications and Public Relations Service, Polytechnique Montreal, 514 231-8133, [email protected]

Related Links

www.polymtl.ca


Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Kuya Silver Corporation (CSE: KUYA) (OTCQB: KUYAF) (FSE: 6MR1) (the "Company" or "Kuya") is pleased to announce that it has commenced an initial drill program at its 100%-owned Kerr Project, which is part of the Company's larger Silver Kings Project. Kuya has planned to drill at least 2,500 metres in this initial program that is expected to commence shortly.

Kuya's focus for the initial drill program is in the vicinity of the Drummond, Kerr Lake, Crown Reserve and Silver Leaf mines. The four contiguous mines are recorded to have produced more than 52 million ounces of silver, with the vast majority of the production predating 1920, and was generally mined up to 100 metres from surface. Some of the high priority targets in the first program include: a potential new zone that may represent a northward extension of the Drummond Mine, where 2018 drill-hole FCC-18-0093* intersected 2.2 metres of 515 g/t silver and 0.61% cobalt (including 0.7 metres of 1,460 g/t silver and 1.81% cobalt) from 172.1 m; and the Silver Leaf mine area, where 2018 drill-hole FCC-18-0174 intersected 2.5 metres of 1,441 g/t silver and 0.28% cobalt from 66.0 metres. There is a significant concentration of underground workings known above this latter zone, yet it appears to be open at depth. (*Note: Individual assays were capped at 1500 g/t silver in hole FCC-18-0093)

The Company's President and CEO, Mr. David Stein stated, "We are very excited to start Kuya's second diamond drill program in 2021. Since closing the acquisition of the Kerr Project in March, we have been reviewing a vast amount of historical exploration work and other geological data. Even though the Kerr Lake, Crown Reserve, Drummond and Silver Leaf mines have been heavily worked, we have found little evidence of much activity below 100 metres and see tremendous potential to extend known mineralization at depth and discover new silver veins. In its peak year, 1909, this group of four mines alone produced more than 7 million ounces from multi-percent silver ore, so today with better exploration, mining and processing methods, we see a huge opportunity to unlock value in Canada's richest silver camp."

National Instrument 43-101 Disclosure

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. David Lewis, P.Geo., Exploration Manager of Kuya and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

About Kuya Silver Corporation

Kuya is a Canadian-based silver-focused mining company that owns the Bethania Project, which includes the Bethania mine, located in Central Peru. The Bethania mine was in production until 2016, toll-milling its ore at various other concentrate plants in the region, the Company's plan is to implement an expansion and construct a concentrate plant at site before restarting operations. The Bethania mine produced silver-lead and zinc concentrates from the run of mine material, until being placed on care and maintenance due to market conditions and lack of working capital.

For more information, please contact the Company at:

Kuya Silver Corporation

Telephone: (604) 398-4493

info@kuyasilver.com

www.kuyasilver.com

Reader Advisory

This news 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 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 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, including, but not limited to, fluctuations in market prices, successes of the operations of the Company, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such information will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. The Company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required under the applicable securities laws.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82244
The Pasco County (FL) Sheriffs Office decided to bring some of its predictive policing nonsense indoors. It also started looking for smaller targets. The program used to harass residents over things like uncut lawns and missing mailbox numbers was extended to schoolchildren, who were subjected to the same sort of spreadsheet bullshit. Low grades? Miss a few school days? Victim of domestic violence?

According to the Pasco County Sheriff "juvenile intelligence analysts," these were all risk factors that could signify future criminal behavior. The Sheriff claimed it wasnt trying to pre-crime children, but its own documentation said "analysts" should use the so-called "predictors" to "identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime."

Not only is the program arguably morally wrong, its also generally wrong. Predictive policing rarely works as intended since it relies on skewed data. Those inputs produce more skewed data, sending officers into the same areas they already believe criminal activity will occur and aims them at the same people theyve already assumed are criminals. Its basically confirmation_bias.xls. But this program targets kids and uses data its not clear the Sheriffs Office has any legal right to access.

That means the program may also be legally wrong. As in "illegal." Analysis of the program and the data-sharing agreements with schools by student privacy advocates resulted in the determination that this access to student data without parental consent violated FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) -- a federal student privacy law passed in 1974.

This conclusion prompted Congressional reps to step in and request a federal investigation into Pasco Countys pee-wee league pre-crime program. Four months after that request was made by Representative Robert C. Scott, the US Department of Education is moving forward with its review of the program.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in November that the school district shared information on student grades, discipline and attendance with the Sheriffs Office, which used the data to compile a secret list of schoolchildren it believed could fall into a life of crime. The federal education department is now looking into the arrangement, a spokesman said Friday. The investigation follows calls for a review by U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, who leads the House Committee on Education and Labor. In a statement, Scott said he was encouraged that the education department had accepted his request. He called the Pasco program disturbing.

Now that the federal government is involved, the Pasco County Sheriffs Office appears to be hastily revising its program. While it still claims the program does not label kids as criminals (despite what its own documentation says), it has started to change what data it accesses and how it obtains that access.

The law enforcement agency said that deputies, who serve in the role as school resource officers, do have access to student grades. But the agency said for the first time that students were being added to any list for review only if they had committed a crime. Aside from its school resource deputies, the agency said that Sheriffs Office employees can see whether a student has been flagged by the districts early warning system  not whether they had been flagged for a specific reason, such as grades or attendance.

Starting to do the right thing after months of negative press and multiple investigations isnt really doing the right thing. Its just damage control. But the Sheriffs Office already spent months or years screwing up and thats going to still come to light even if its not trying to stop violating federal regulations.

And the Sheriffs Office still seems pretty defensive for an agency that believes its done nothing wrong. Rather than simply defer comment until the investigation concludes, the Sheriffs Office issued a multi-paragraph comment to the Tampa Bay Times that starts out by attacking the credibility of the paper whose initial report was based entirely on the Sheriff Offices own documents.

We have no additional comment beyond what was previously provided to the Tampa Bay Times. However, were proud of our partnership with Pasco County Schools and the work our members do to ensure safety to students, staff and families in our community. Additionally, Im providing you with the below, which details much of the misinformation the Times has misconstrued through the course of their reporting and sets the record straight on facts vs slant. As always, it is our sincere hope that the Times uses this opportunity to set the record straight on their own reporting and the previous fallacies theyve published.

The statement does its own misleading by claiming the things the Sheriffs Office is doing now are the things it has always done, despite that clearly not being the case. Its trying to backdate its culpability with this statement and that may work for small parts of the court of public opinion, but its not going to change the course of the ongoing investigation.

Even if one is inclined to take the Sheriffs Office at its word, the fact that it "only" determined 330 students to be "at risk" for future criminal behavior is still disturbing. While identifying at-risk students can be helpful and perhaps head off future criminal acts, the Offices predictive policing program mainly serves up constant harassment to anyone selected by the software as a potential criminal. Rather than deter criminal activity, the program makes it impossible for people to break free of the criminal justice deathcycle by subjecting them to meaningless citations, extra court appearances, and frequent visits from deputies who apparently have nothing better to do with their time.

This sort of harassment isnt going to help at-risk students. And it will definitely negatively impact those caring for them, making it all the more likely something already tenuous will break completely, resulting in further hardship for everyone involved. The Pasco Sheriffs Office had made it clear its not there to help. It has openly stated the program is there to harass people into suing or moving. And it thinks it okay to direct this same attitude at kids.
and

Enters into NDA with Global HVAC and Building Controls Company

TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Kontrol Technologies Corp. (CSE:KNR) (OTCQB:KNRLF) (FSE:1K8) ("Kontrol Technologies" or "Kontrol") a leader in smart buildings and cities through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology is pleased to announce that it continues to make important progress in adding to its strategic supply chain capacity for BioCloud. With the addition of Canadian antibody supply, Kontrol is adding to its necessary supply chain and manufacturing partners required to meet its anticipated global demand from its distribution network and direct customers.

Kontrol Technologies Corp. Logo (CNW Group/Kontrol Technologies Corp.)

Antibody Supply Important for BioCloud

At the heart of the BioCloud technology is a viral detection system which utilizes antibodies to identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Kontrol has been actively seeking stable supply partners and based on its most recent lab testing has selected a Canadian manufacturer for larger quantity purchases. The Canadian manufacturer will not be disclosed at this time for industry competitive purposes.

"Sourcing high quality North American and specifically Canadian supply of antibodies has been an ongoing priority for BioCloud," said Paul Ghezzi, CEO of Kontrol. "This is a process which requires lab resources and time to test each potential antibody selection. Following a rigorous review and testing process, we are pleased to have the capability to source larger antibody volumes with a trusted Canadian manufacturer."

NDA with Global HVAC Company

Kontrol BioCloud recently entered into a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with a global leading HVAC and building controls company (the "Company") to review the addition of BioCloud to the Company's operating platform. The Company has revenues in excess of $30 Billion USD per annum and operates in thousands of institutional, commercial, and industrial buildings globally. Under the NDA, Kontrol BioCloud will share all of its testing and lab data.

Story continues

Kontrol BioCloud Enters into Distribution Discussions in Japan Through the Canadian Trade Commissioners Office

Kontrol is in active discussions with two potential distribution partners for Japan. The introductions were made through the Canadian Trade Commissioners Office.

Japan represents a major gateway opportunity for BioCloud into the lucrative Asian market," said Mr. Ghezzi. "We are grateful for the support we are receiving from the Trade Commissioners Office for the region of Japan and other countries as well."



About Kontrol BioCloudTM

BioCloud is a real-time analyzer designed to detect airborne viruses. It has been designed to operate as a safe space technology by sampling the air quality over time. With a proprietary detection chamber that can be replaced as needed, viruses are detected, and an alert system is created in the Cloud or over local intranet. BioCloud has been designed for spaces where individuals gather including classrooms, offices, retirement homes, hospitals, mass transportation and others. Additional information about Kontrol BioCloud can be found on its website at www.kontrolbiocloud.com

About Kontrol Technologies Corp.

Kontrol Technologies Corp., a Canadian public company, is a leader in smart buildings and cities through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology. Kontrol Technologies provides a combination of software, hardware, and service solutions to its customers to improve energy management, air quality and continuous emission monitoring.

Additional information about Kontrol Technologies Corp. can be found on its website at www.kontrolcorp.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com

https://facebook.com/kontroltechcorp/

https://twitter.com/kontrolgroup

https://www.linkedin.com/company/kontrol-group

Neither IIROC nor any stock exchange or other securities regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements contained herein that are not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. In some cases, forward-looking information can be identified by words or phrases such as "may", "will", "expect", "likely", "should", "would", "plan", "anticipate", "intend", "potential", "proposed", "estimate", "believe" or the negative of these terms, or other similar words, expressions, and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy.

Where Kontrol expresses or implies an expectation or belief as to future events or results, such expectation or belief is based on assumptions made in good faith and believed to have a reasonable basis. Such assumptions include, without limitation, that sufficient capital will be available to the Company and that technology will be as effective as anticipated.

However, forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected, or implied by such forward-looking

statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, that sufficient capital and financing cannot be obtained on reasonable terms, or at all, that technologies will not prove as effective as expected, that customers and potential customers will not be as accepting of the Company's product and service offering as expected, and government and regulatory factors impacting the energy conservation industry. Kontrol BioCloud is an air quality technology and not a medical device. 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).

Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements and the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained herein are made as at the date hereof and are based on the beliefs, estimates, expectations, and opinions of management on such date. Kontrol does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or revise any such forward-looking statements or any forward-looking statements contained in any other documents whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required under applicable securities law. Readers are cautioned to consider these and other factors, uncertainties, and potential events carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kontrol-biocloud-adds-canadian-supplier-of-antibodies-to-secure-supply-chain-301280216.html

SOURCE Kontrol Technologies Corp.
Chairman James Risch speaks to Brian Hook, State Department Special Representative for Iran, as he testifies during a hearing held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, on Oct. 16, 2019. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Transition From Capitalism to Socialism: Sen. Jim Risch on Bidens Speech to Congress

After President Joe Bidens first speech to Congress Wednesday night, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), among other Republicans, criticized Bidens vision as a socialist agenda.

What the President did tonight was lay out a comprehensive vision for how to transition our society from capitalism to socialism, Risch responded in a statement. We must not be swept up in this current.

Risch serves as the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. He has been recognized by the National Journal as the most conservative member of the Senate.

The third-term Senator from Idaho said the nation is now facing two crisesthe border crisis and an unfettered, out-of-control spending crisis.

During his first week in office, the President halted construction of the border wall and reinstated the disastrous Obama-era policies that have resulted in an uncontrollable wave of illegal entries, Risch said. I was very disappointed the President did not lay out a workable plan to address illegal immigration.

In his speech, Biden touted his comprehensive immigration bill and urged Congress to pass it if you believe we need a secure border.

Risch also criticized Bidens plan for massive spending and tax increases, saying they would crush the economy.

In his first 100 days in office, the President has proposed spending an unprecedented $6.1 trillion on unapologetically far-left priorities through a lethal combination of deficit spending and tax increases that will crush the economy and jeopardize our ability to respond to future challenges, Risch continued.

Last month Biden signed into law the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. He proposed a $2.3 trillion American Jobs Planalso called an infrastructure planand a $1.8 trillion American Family Plan this month.

President Joe Biden delivered an address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on April 28, 2021. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

Other prominent Republicans also criticized Bidens address to Congress.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wrote on Twitter that Biden has adopted the radical lefts agenda to control every aspect of your life.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem wrote that President Biden promised to unite the nation, but hes dividing us with a wish list of big government and a liberal agenda.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Biden has successfully outlined a radical, socialist agenda for the next 4 years.

In an interview with Fox Business Thursday, former President Donald Trump also criticized Bidens speech.

Theyve gone too far. They cant get away with this. We cant allow them to get away with this. Theyre destroying our country.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
[April 29, 2021] Iron Mountain Appoints Charlene Jackson as Global Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer

Iron Mountain (News - Alert) Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), the storage and information management services company enabling digital transformation, today announced that Charlene Jackson has joined the company as Global Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Officer. "The significant racial and social injustices we've witnessed around the world over the past year have reaffirmed and accelerated our commitment to foster meaningful change," said William L. Meaney, President and Chief Executive Officer, Iron Mountain. "We're excited to welcome Charlene to our global Iron Mountain leadership team. With her extensive background in leading, developing, and implementing impactful diversity strategies, she is the perfect fit to create an even more inclusive, diverse, and equitable environment at Iron Mountain, especially as we enter our eighth decade serving our diverse customer base." In her role, Jackson will lead Iron Mountain's DEI strategy, practice and programs, including its Employee Resource Groups. She will work closely with the Iron Mountain leadership team to amplify and embed a culture of belonging that engages and attracts world-class diverse talent, while setting a standard of DEI excellence that deepens the company's commitment through tangible and equitable business practices and outcomes throughout its global business. "I'm thrilled to join Iron Mountain at such an exciting time in their history. I feel it's an important moment for diverse voices and perspectives to engage in driving meaningful change for the good of our society, our customers and our organization," said Charlene Jackson. "I look forward to working together with the leadership team to build a high-performing, inclusive culture where our people can thrive, as well as find belonging and safety." As a well-respected leader in transformational culture change, driving global diversity strategies, and a champion of racial equality and gender parity, Jackson brings more than two decades of experience to this role. She joins Iron Mountain from Girls Inc., where she was the National Director of Affiliate Services. An influential member of the executive team, Jackson worked to set young women up for lifelong success by providing skills necessary to navigate through economic, gender and social barriers. Jackson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Claremont Graduate University's Drucker School of Management. Prior to Girls Inc., she held executive positions in the financial, real estate, and energy industres, serving nearly 10 years as Managing Director at Citi, the multinational investment bank. Jackson has also served as an executive consultant for more than 18 years, providing strategic, operational, and financial leadership to minority- and women-owned businesses.



She will report to Edward E. Greene, Chief Human Resources Officer at Iron Mountain and will be based in Houston, Texas. About Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), founded in 1951, is the global leader for storage and information management services. Trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world, and with a real estate network of more than 90 million square feet across more than 1,450 facilities in 56 countries, Iron Mountain stores and protects billions of valued assets, including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts. Providing solutions that include secure records storage, information management, digital transformation, secure destruction, as well as data centers, cloud services, and art storage and logistics, Iron Mountain helps customers lower cost and risk, comply with regulations, recover from disaster, and enable a more digital way of working. Visit www.ironmountain.com for more information. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005201/en/

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Developer Michael Wibracht became a pioneer adapting old, neglected buildings for apartments in parts of San Antonio that lacked affordable housing.

Through his 210 Development Group, Wibracht converted a century-old peanut factory on South Frio Street on the near West Side into about 100 apartment units  some now occupied by University of Texas at San Antonio students.

On the South Side, 210 Development turned some old military barracks and a dining facility at Brooks City Base into the 280-unit Aviator Apartments.

210 Developments trailblazing developments attracted the attention of former Mayor Henry Cisneros, who invested with partner Victor Miramontes in a project to remake a former seminary school near Mission Concepcion into apartments. A beaming Wibracht and Cisneros were photographed elbow-to-elbow for a 2015 newspaper article about the 230-unit project.

Hes a talented individual who had a solid vision for a business,  Cisneros said Monday of Wibracht. That is to say, investing in very difficult projects that no one else would do at that time.

Google /

It must now all seem so long ago to Wibracht, whos unemployed, bankrupt and possibly headed to federal prison.

In February, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the federal government to secure more than $250 million in government contracts on behalf of construction companies he was a part-owner in.

In the alleged scheme, which stretched from 2004 to 2017, Wibracht and others are accused of passing off companies as small businesses owned by a service-disabled veteran in order to obtain set-aside contracts they werent eligible to obtain.

Wibracht, 47, faces up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of as much as $250,000 and the prospect of owing millions in restitution when he is sentenced in July.

Its a hard fall for the one-time up-and-coming developer.

His troubles worsened in late April when he filed for bankruptcy liquidation. He listed about $585,000 in assets and $17.3 million in debts  though the bulk of the liabilities stem from a court judgment against multiple defendants.

I am sad for him as a family man who has children and finds himself in these straits, said Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton.

Wibracht declined to comment, referring questions to his criminal defense lawyer. She was on vacation, however, and not available for comment.

Michael has been cooperating with the government and will continue to do so, an email from his lawyers office stated.

At least two others have been charged, including one who also has pleaded guilty.

Jerry Lara /Staff file photo

Blackhawk Ventures

The court documents detailing Wibrachts crime make no mention of 210 Development or his time transforming properties into multifamily projects. Some of the wrongdoing occurred while 210 Developments projects were underway, however.

Long before Wibracht and partner Mark Tolley started 210 Development in 2013, Wibracht was a part owner in multiple construction companies. Prosecutors only identify them as Company M, Company F and Company BH in court papers.

Company BH is believed to be Blackhawk Ventures, which did business as Blackhawk Constructors. Wibracht, as company representative, filed an assumed name certificate with the Texas Secretary of State in 2004. His name remained on corporate documents as a vice president, director and/or registered agent for several years.

Over the the course of the alleged conspiracy, prosecutors say Wibracht and San Antonio businessman Michael Padron held out two service-disabled veterans as the ostensible owners of Company BH so it could qualify for set-aside contracts through the Small Business Administration.

One such set-aside program is the Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, intended to increase the number of government contracts awarded to small businesses owned and controlled by disabled veterans.

With the designation, Blackhawk Ventures won more than 1,300 set-aside contracts from various government agencies over the years, a federal database shows.

Some of the bigger jobs awarded to the company:

A $21.2 million contract to construct a parking garage at the Dallas VA Medical Center. The contract was signed in 2013.

A $13.7 million contract for a battle command training center at Fort Sam Houston.

A $10.3 million contract to build an access road at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

All told, prosecutors say Company BH received more than $250 million in government contracts set aside for small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans.

Guilty pleas

By law, a small business is owned by a qualifying person when he unconditionally owns at least 51% of the business, according to a court filing.

One who allowed himself to be presented as the majority or sole owner of Company BH was Ruben Villareal, now 71, a Floresville disabled veteran who served in the Navy for 20 years. Wibracht and Padron were the actual owners, according to prosecutors.

Villareal, who was the first to be charged in the alleged conspiracy, pleaded guilty in October to the same charge as Wibracht and is scheduled to be sentenced in June. He didnt want to comment when reached Monday.

Im not interested, thank you, Villareal said before hanging up.

Wibracht entered a guilty plea Feb. 12, the same day he was charged.

Sheldon Shoemaker, assistant inspector general for operations and management with the SBA, referred questions to the Justice Department. It did not respond to an email.

Conspiring to fraudulently gain access to federal contracts set aside for small businesses owned and operated by disadvantaged individuals or service-disabled veterans is unacceptable, SBA Inspector General Hannibal Mike Ware said in a statement after Wibrachts plea agreement.

Padron, 61, was indicted March 17 on one count of conspiracy to defraud the government and eight counts of wire fraud. He has pleaded not guilty.

Padron declined to comment, referring questions to his lawyer, Scott Noel of San Antonio. Noel had no comment and Padrons criminal defense lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Insurers lawsuit

On July 1, more than three months before Villereal entered his guilty plea, a trio of insurance companies sued Blackhawk, Wibracht and other seeking to collect on a roughly $100,000 judgment obtained against the company in 2018.

The insurers, led by Continental Insurance Co., previously sued Blackhawk over unpaid insurance premiums on performance bonds.

During a deposition last year, Villereal said he was approached to take over ownership of Blackhawk in late 2006 or early 2007 because the company needed to be  at least the way it was explained to me at the time was that it needed to be headed by a veteran, a service disabled veteran. Villareal never purchased an interest in Blackhawk, however. A transcript of the deposition is filed in San Antonio federal court.

The insurers alleged in their complaint that another company connected to Wibracht, Federal Management Solutions, utilized Blackhawk as a strawman or facade to do business and obtain benefits to which they would not otherwise be entitled under applicable law.

It couldnt be determined if the insurers tipped off federal authorities to the alleged scheme. A lawyer for the insurers didnt respond to a request for comment.

The insurers allege Blackhawk fraudulently transferred assets to to Federal Management Solutions and Wibracht. They want FMS and Wibracht held liable for Blackhawks debt. Villarreal said he was informed in 2016 that Blackhawk had no more money.

In Wibrachts plea agreement, prosecutors say an investigation revealed that of the more than $250 million in government contracts awarded to Company BH, more than $8 million went from its bank accounts to accounts controlled by Wibracht and Co-Conspirator 1  believed to be Padron.

Wibracht, whose name is misspelled in the insurers action, said in a response to the lawsuit that Padron was the one who selected Villareal to head Blackhawk. FMS, which did not exist until 2010, provided construction-related services as requested by Blackhawk, Wibracht said.

Wibracht, who is representing himself in the case, said he severed ties with Blackhawk in 2013.

The insurers arent likely to get their money any time soon. On Wednesday, a judge granted a 90-day stay in the case given the criminal case against Padron  who is the sole representative of FMS.

With the concurrent criminal action based on the same facts of the civil case, there will be an issue with Fifth Amendment self-incrimination by Mr. Padron as FMS only agent, a court filing by FMS stated. Mr. Padron denies all criminal allegations and intends to contest the criminal allegations, which makes his rights under the Fifth Amendment even more imperative.

The federal investigation appears to be ongoing.

Billy Calzada /Staff file photo

Apartment projects

Well before Wibrachts criminal activities surfaced, 210 Development Group moved quickly to expand its portfolio of apartment projects.

Besides the Peanut Factory Lofts  which received about $1.4 million in city incentives  and Aviator Apartments, the companys other developments included the 240-unit Villa Espada Apartments by the Mission Del Lago golf course on the far South Side.

In 2014, 210 Development proposed a $25 million project to build 300 housing units and some commercial space on the site of the Mission Branch Library and Mission Drive-in Theater on the South Side.

The company also sought approvals for a 242-unit development on the former Toudouze Market at 700 W. Commerce St. on the near West Side. The $45 million Vitre project was slated to include 5,000 square feet of shops.

The developer got the OK to redevelop the old St. Johns Seminary site adjacent to Mission Concepcion into 230 apartment units.

It also eyed building 144 apartments south of Mission San Jose on a parking lot next to VFW Post 9186.

If you look at our track record, weve pioneered development in underserved areas of San Antonio, Wibracht said in a 2014 interview announcing the project near Mission Branch Library and Mission Drive-in Theater.

210 Development also built two luxury apartment complexes in Richwood in Brazoria County.

210 Development troubles

At some point, though, 210 Development ran into difficulties.

In early 2018, a foreclosure disrupted plans for the Vitre project. The 2.1-acre property was sold at a foreclosure auction to VDP Solutions for $4.5 million.

A 210 Development spokeswoman said at the time that it planned to buy back the property. But property records show a partnership affiliated with Rackspace Technology Inc. co-founder Graham Weston acquired it in early 2019.

210 Development originally was going to redevelop St. Johns Seminary. When Cisneros and Victor Miramontes agreed to invest, a new partnership named Mission DG Ltd., was formed to oversee the project. 210 Development was the general partner.

However, in April 2018, Cisneros Miramontes DG became the managing general partner and 210 Development became a limited partner. Miramontes said the change occurred because the lenders and equity partners wanted him running the project.

At first, I was not sure I wanted to do that because I just wanted to be a limited partner, he said. He realized if he didnt take over, the project wouldnt happen.

Then, in 2019, the partnership fractured.

I had just decided that I could not continue the relationship because we just werent compatible, Miramontes said. Thats when I said (to Wibracht), Either you get bought out or I stop funding this. And I bought Mike out because we just viewed the world differently.

On his bankruptcy schedules, Wibracht listed that hes owed $30,000 from the stock buyout.

Meanwhile, 210 Development had received a $968,000 city incentive loan to develop the Vitre project. The company ended up defaulting on the loan.

City records show nine apartment units at St. Johns and nine apartments at a senior living community in Westover Hills were set aside for renters who earned below 30 percent of the area median income in exchange for forgiveness on the loan.

Other 210 Development projects  those proposed for the VFW site and near the library and drive-in  never got built.

Arbitration award

In Wibrachts 79-page Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition, he lists Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America as his largest unsecured creditor with a $14.8 million claim. It stems from a court judgment Travelers obtained against various parties two years ago to recover losses it says it sustained on performance bonds issued to Blackhawk and others. He disputes the claim.

The next largest claim is held by Wibrachts ex-wife, Laura Wibracht, for $900,000. They were involved in an acrimonious split that ended in divorce in 2016.

Court records show state District Judge Norma Gonzales on April 6 confirmed a nearly $653,000 arbitration award Laura Wibracht obtained against Michael Wibracht, his 210 Development partner Mark Tolley and the company itself two years ago.

Laura Wibracht alleged they failed to honor her employment contract. The day before the divorce was finalized, she received an eight-year contract paying her $7,000 a month to serve as an ambassador for 210 Development.

The dispute went before arbitrator Victor Negron Jr., a former judge, who entered the award for Laura Wibracht. Michael Wibracht and Tolley never appeared for the proceeding. They never agreed to the arbitration, according to a court filing.

Tolley sought to vacate the award, but it was upheld by Gonzales. Laura Wibracht had no comment. Tolley is a partner at Mission DG.

Michael Wibrachts bankruptcy schedules show hes unemployed and earning no income. Hes relying on $1,572 in monthly income from his current spouse, not nearly enough to cover his $18,635 in monthly expenses.

pdanner@express-news.net
Hazleton, PA (18201)

Today

Some clouds and possibly an isolated thunderstorm in the afternoon. High 86F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms in the evening. Cloudy skies overnight. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Loading The cost of constructing the complex would total $200 million, and a 3000-bed facility would cost up to $700 million. The Andrews government expects travellers to be subject to quarantine upon arrival in Australia for the next two to three years, according to the business case, which also revealed the maximum number of people Victoria had considered accepting was 2100 per week. Mr Merlino said the federal government should build the facility and own it, similar to the Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory. Ultimately this project requires the approval of the Commonwealth, he said. The best time to start an alternative quarantine was 12 months ago, the next best time is now.

State government departments will undertake the four-month design work while the Morrison government considers the proposal, which, if approved, could be constructed by the end of the year. A well-placed source aware of the quarantine facility planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private, said state officials had said throughout the negotiations that the Victorian government would probably pay for the capital and operating costs of the facility. The Victorian government has provided renders of what the new facility could look like. Its just bizarre, the source said. If the Commonwealth rejects the Mickleham proposal, the state would then investigate whether the facility could be built near the Avalon airport. The Commonwealth will also be asked to pay for construction for the Avalon proposal, Mr Merlino said.

A federal government spokesperson said the Commonwealth had worked with states and territories throughout the pandemic. The Victorian government has submitted a highly detailed proposal for a possible quarantine facility in Melbourne. Our officials will now review that information and undertake the relevant assessments, they said. The Mickleham site is a 25-minute drive from Melbourne Airport, next to the Hume Highway. The site was chosen based on its proximity to the airport, hospitals, the CBD and health hotels, in addition to having access to services and a workforce. The nominated space is Commonwealth land, next to the existing Mickleham Post Entry Quarantine facility which is used by the federal Agriculture Department to quarantine animals  currently housing cats, dogs, horses, birds and bees for a minimum of 10 days after they arrive in the country.

Loading I would expect the Commonwealth will examine the proposal that has been sent through, and theyll give us a pretty early indication whether Donnybrook Road is appropriate from the Commonwealths perspective  if not, then well transition to an alternative, Mr Merlino said. But were very firmly putting the case ... we think thats the best location. Opposition Leader Michael OBrien described the governments announcement as a hoax. Its not an announcement at all, Mr OBrien said. This state government, theyre being as sly as a fox.

Theyve simply said they want the federal government to build a quarantine facility on federal land with federal money. Thats not a state government announcement, thats just getting out there with a begging bowl. Hume City Council has requested an urgent meeting with the state government about its proposal for a quarantine facility in Mickleham, one of the citys fastest growing suburbs. Council has not been consulted on the proposal prior to todays announcement and seeks clarification about the ongoing management of the facility, mayor Joseph Haweil said. Our community is concerned about what impact a centre of this size and type will have on their health and safety and the amenity of the area.

Mr Merlino said final decisions on Victorias quarantine program wont be made until September when the design works for the complex are completed and will depend on the coronavirus situation locally and globally. It may be that we only need those 500 beds, it may be that we need a hybrid facility, with the alternative quarantine hub for, say, high-risk individuals and hotel quarantine or health hotels for others, the acting Premier said. Once the threat of the coronavirus pandemic has passed, the facility could be used as emergency accommodation during fires and floods, to house people experiencing homelessness and family violence victims, Mr Merlino said. The announcement comes three months after the Premiers department commissioned US construction giant AECOM to assess 10 locations and prepare reports for state cabinet.

The Department of Premier and Cabinet said the business case was developed based on the assumption of the ongoing need to accommodate up to 2100 arrivals per week, which was selected as the maximum weekly arrival cap that Victoria has ever considered. Loading It is noted that this number does not reflect a government decision to accept this number of arrivals, and that all decisions regarding passenger arrivals cap are subject to agreement between the Victorian and Australian governments. The current hotel quarantine program would cost $3.5 billion for the next three years, the department noted. A Victorian delegation also went on a research mission to Howard Springs in the Northern Territory which is being used to quarantine incoming passengers.
Ten days ago when Massachusetts opened COVID-19 vaccine eligibility to everyone in the state 16 and older, officials suggested it may be some time before the entire population can book appointments.

On Thursday and Friday, Marlborough Hospital, part of UMass Memorial Health, is creating two walk-in windows for people to receive the vaccine without an appointment.

From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, folks, without an appointment, can receive their COVID vaccine at the Marriott Courtyard at 75 Felton St. in Marlborough. The clinic is offering both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Walk-in doses will be administered as long as supplies last. If someone arrives without any doses available, UMass will work with the person to schedule an appointment.

The clinic also offers appointments for those looking to get vaccinated at a specific time. Appointments can be booked online.

Free parking is available and the facility is handicap accessible.

The clinic is located inside the hotel through the Banquet and Ballroom Entrance. Signs will guide people to the COVID-19 vaccination registration.

Both vaccines require two-doses and the second dose appointment will be scheduled after a person checks in for their first dose.

The Marlborough Hospital Vaccine Clinic was been set up in partnership with the City of Marlborough and the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Centers.

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(Newser)  German police said Thursday that a 51-year-old woman detained on suspicion of killing four people at a hospital in the eastern city of Potsdam is an employee at the clinic. Officers called to the Oberlin Clinic shortly before 9pm Wednesday found the victims and a fifth person who was seriously injured in patient rooms, Brandenburg state police said. "The victims showed signs of significant external violence," police spokesman Thorsten Herbst told the AP. Police were still investigating the exact circumstances but said the detained woman was "urgently suspected" of the killings. Local newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten reported the victims were residents of the Thusnelda von Saldern House, which cares for people with serious disabilities. (Read more Germany stories.)
Arlene Foster is set to return to Stormont Executive business later as focus within her party shifts to the race to succeed her as DUP leader and First Minister.

Mrs Foster is due to jointly chair a virtual meeting of the devolved powersharing administration on Thursday, less than 24 hours after announcing her planned resignation in the face of an internal revolt against her leadership.

She is standing down as party leader on May 28 and as First Minister at the end of June.

The 50-year-old Fermanagh and South Tyrone Assembly Member has also signalled an intent to quit politics altogether, with Wednesdays resignation statement speaking of preparing to depart the political stage.

Attention now turns to who will replace her at head of both her party and Northern Irelands devolved government.

MPs Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Gavin Robinson, both viewed as moderates, and the more hardline Stormont Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots are among the names emerging as potential successors.

Veteran MP and arch Brexiteer Sammy Wilson, who almost ran against Mrs Foster when she was elected in 2015, may also consider entering the contest this time round.

There is some speculation that when Mrs Foster does depart, the twin roles she currently occupies could be split going forward, with one politician taking on the role of party leader and another being appointed First Minister.

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That would potentially allow an MP to lead the party from Westminster while an MLA takes on the First Ministers job.

While Mrs Foster had been under mounting pressure from disgruntled DUP supporters for months, the pace at which her grip on power slipped this week has surprised many.

Her resignation came a day after party colleagues unhappy with her leadership moved against her, with a majority of senior elected representatives signing a letter of no confidence.

Discontent at the DUPs Brexit strategy was a major factor in the heave, with party rank and file laying some of the blame for the emergence of an Irish Sea border at her door.

Traditionalists from the partys religious fundamentalist wing also harboured concerns over positions Mrs Foster had taken on some social issues.
The Lagos State government Thursday says it awarded contracts of seven jetties within the last year.

The Commissioner for Waterfront Infrastructure Development, Ahmed Kabiru, said during a press briefing to mark the second year in office of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu in Ikeja that the infrastructure is tailored around the Traffic Management and Transportation pillar of the T.H.E.M.E. S agenda of the State.

In this regard, the Ministry is intensifying work on the ongoing construction of fifteen concrete jetties with shelters and shoreline protection across the riverine areas of the State, seven of which are newly awarded in September 2020; while the remaining eight were existing ongoing jetties all at various stages of completion.

He added that the objective is to improve water transportation and ensure the safety of the lives and properties of travelers.

The ministrys mission is to provide infrastructure and services at the Lagos State Waterfront by harnessing resources to ensure a well-protected environment that is attractive to tourists and observers.

In this regard, the ministry is intensifying work on the ongoing construction of 15 concrete jetties with shelters and shoreline protection across the riverine areas of the state, he said.

He said the seven jetties with similar scope of works were awarded in 2020 and located in large waterways like Oke Ira Nla, Ijede, Marina, Ijegun-Egba, Liverpool, Apapa, and Ebute Ero Jetties.

He said the remaining eight were ongoing projects at various stages of completion.

Another modest achievement recorded by the ministry was the removal of abandoned wrecked ships, Mr Kabiru said.

As part of continued efforts to free waterways of wreckages and debris and also prevent erosion and degradation of the shoreline, the State Government removed four abandoned wrecked ships and several debris and unwanted objects from the waterways, he said.

He said 30 illegal dredging operators across the state including the Ibeju Lekki corridor particularly, Bogije, Sangotedo, Langasa, and Awoyaya foreshores have been arrested and prosecuted by the Taskforce on Environmental and Special offences.

The commissioner said the reclamation and shoreline protection of Badagry-Marina is being implemented in three phases.

The first phase which involves the reclamation and construction of the shoreline protection of the whole project site has been completed, he said.

Phase II which involves the reclamation and construction of shoreline protection of the remaining part of the project site is also completed.

The third phase which includes additional works of extension of the shoreline protection by 208M is ongoing and has achieved 90% completion.

In a bid to effectively monitor the reclamation exercise, the state governor approved and took delivery of two surveillance boats, he said.

Giving reasons for the necessity of the surveillance boat, the Commissioner noted that most illegal dredging and reclamation exercises take place on the high sea and abatement notices/contraventions cannot be served neither can they be apprehended without a boat.

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Chinese Lease of Port of Darwin Open to Review: Australian PM

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not ruled out reviewing the controversial 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-backed entity.

If there is advice from the Defence Department or our security agencies that change their view about the national security implications of any piece of critical infrastructure, Morrison told reporters. We have legislation now which is dealing with critical infrastructure.

You can expect me as prime minister to take that advice very seriously and act accordingly.

Morrison was in Darwin announcing a substantial $747 million upgrade to four military facilities in northern Australia.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a visit to Australian Army base Robertson Barracks in Darwin, Australia, on April 28, 2021. (AAP Image/Charlie Bliss)

His comments echo those of Defence Minister Peter Dutton, who said on Sunday, I think it is a question for (Foreign Minister) Marise Payne to look at these individual cases. If it is not in our national interests, then obviously she will act.

Questions have been raised over the possible cancellation of the lease after the foreign minister terminated two Belt and Road Initiative agreements signed by Victorias state Premier Daniel Andrews.

In 2015, the Port of Darwin was leased to Chinese state-owned firm Landbridge for $506 million by the heavily indebted Northern Territory government.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama conveyed his concerns about the deal directly to then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, particularly given the presence of U.S. troops in the region.

In response, Morrisonwho was treasurer at the timeexpanded the remit of the Foreign Investment Review Board so that all Australian asset sales to foreign entities would be subject to federal approval.

In 2016, the billionaire owner of Landbridge, Ye Cheng, boasted that acquiring the Port of Darwin would assist the expansion of Beijings Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI is the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) trillion-dollar global infrastructure building fund and arguably the crown jewel of Beijings geopolitical ambitions.

However, it has been accused of being a trojan horse and leaving developing countries heavily in debt.

Last week, Foreign Minister Payne exercised powers granted to her by the Foreign Relations Act to terminate BRI agreements signed between Victoria and the National Development and Reform Commission.

The Foreign Relations Act opens the door for the foreign minister to step in and potentially cancel other deals signed with the CCP, including Confucius Institutes and sister-city agreements.

However, Australian political leaders have eyed off the Port of Darwin lease for termination under the new law.

Yet, one stumbling block to cancelling the lease is that the $506 million paid by Landbridge is now long gone, having been used by the NT government to address its ballooning debt problems.

Independent Senator Rex Patrick told Sky News Australia that he was unsure whether the Foreign Relations Act had the power to terminate the lease.

During the inquiry into the Foreign Relations Bill, the Port of Darwin was brought up extensively, and it didnt appear to fall within the scope of what the government was proposed, he said.

Its unclear whether or not the minister has the power to do anything to reverse that decision which I think most Australians dont think is a good decision.

Morrison told reporters that any review of the Port of Darwin would occur under the scope of amendments to the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 introduced last year.

The amendments give the treasurer sweeping powers to retroactively reverse foreign investment decisions deemed to contravene Australias national interest.
LOS ANGELES, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CARAVAGGIO: A LIGHT BEFORE THE DARKNESS by Ken Mora is recognized as Winner in the category of Graphic Novel by Independent Press Award, 2021.

Independent Press Award Win, 2021 added to accolades for Caravaggio: A Light Before The Darkness WINNER 2021 Independent Press Award, 2021 in the category of Graphic Novel

Graphic Novel CARAVAGGIO: A LIGHT BEFORE THE DARKNESS is published by Bella Fe Media [US] and distributed Internationally by MARKOSIA ENTERPRISES [UK]. The artist known as Caravaggio must flee to Rome to protect his lover from The Inquisition. In Rome, his art spurs the faithful to return to The Church at the time of The Counter-Reformation. Hubris exposes his secret lover and forces him to flee Rome on a journey of penitence fraught with peril, intrigue, and murder. Previous accolades include Winner of the 2020 Screencraft Cinematic Book Award and finalist in the Eric Hoffer, Wishing Shelf, and National Indie Excellence awards.

The Independent Press Award is judged by experts from the book industry, including publishers, writers, editors, book cover designers, and professional copywriters. Winners and distinguished favorites are awarded based on overall excellence from entries worldwide. English Language publications were considered from the United States, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and worldwide.

"We congratulate this year's 2021 winners and distinguished favorites in the annual Independent Press Award. The quality and quantity of excellent independently published books hit a record. Independents recognized are thriving around the globe. We are so proud to announce these key titles representing global independent publishing." - awards sponsor Gabrielle Olczak.

"We are delighted to have signed Ken Mora's 'Caravaggio: A Light Before the Darkness'. Although we are a small publishing house, we have been around for some 15 years now, so we know quality when we see it. When Ken sent it over, it didn't take me long to recognize how well produced it was, and as such we are proud to be the publisher of such a book. I look forward to getting it out to the masses!" - Harry Markos, publisher Markosia Enterprises

CARAVAGGIO: A LIGHT BEFORE THE DARKNESS available at major international booksellers including Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Caravaggio-Before-Darkness-Ken-Mora/dp/1913359565

BELLA FE MEDIA. https://www.bellafemedia.com/graphic%20novels

MARKOSIA. https://markosia.com/books/worlds-of-wonder/caravaggio-a-light-before-the-darkness/

INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD. https://www.independentpressaward.com

Contact: Ken Mora / (909) 547-4751 [US] / [email protected]

SOURCE Bella Fe Media
Off the eastern coast of Bermuda in Castle Harbour sits a jagged, lush island by the name of Nonsuch. Spanning just over 16 acres, Nonsuch is one of Bermudas most isolated islands, and it houses several endangered and Lazarus species (those that were once thought to be extinct). Among the dense forests filled with lizards, insects, and birds, ornithologist Jeremy Madeiros spends most of his days living in a repurposed quarantine hospital, making him the islands sole human inhabitant.

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On Nonsuch, you can find almost all of the native endangered species in Bermuda, said Madeiros, who is the senior terrestrial conservation officer for Bermudas Department of Environment and Natural Resources. For some species, this is the last place on Earth where they survive. Over the past two decades, Madeiros has dedicated his career to conserving the Bermuda cahowthe archipelagos national bird, which doesnt exist anywhere else on the planet.

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When Spanish seafarers first arrived on Bermudas shores in the early 1500s, Madeiros research suggests, cahows numbered at about 500,000 breeding pairs. Historical records show that the Spanish mistook the harsh cries of the cahow for demons and the souls of shipwrecked sailors, and this kept them from settling the island. However, they brought with them hogs that preyed on the cahow. Things only compounded when the English arrived about a century later and introduced rats, cats, and dogs. They also ate hundreds of the cahows each day to avoid famine. So successful was this slaughter that Bermudas English governor issued a decree in 1616 against the spoyle and Havock of the cahowes  which already wer almost all of them killed and scared awaye very improvidently by fire, diggeinge, stoneinge, and all kinds of murtheringes.

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Unfortunately, the proclamation came too late, and by 1625, the cahow was considered to be extinct. It wasnt until 1951 that 18 breeding pairs were miraculously found on several islets near Nonsuch. Now, 70 years later, Madeiros is leading the effort to keep this fragile species alive. The work has been so successful that conservationists across the globe are using the same methods to protect other endangered seabirds that are suffering from the perils of climate change.

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The cahows plumage is a pattern of dark gray and white, and their long wings span 36 inches. They wander the open ocean for up to six years in search of food like squid and small fish, landing only on the water to rest. They then return to Bermuda twice, once in October to early November to mate, and again in January to lay a single egg in underground burrows or deep rock crevices. But these eggs are fragile, and about half fail to hatch. The chicks that do hatch take a few months to mature before flying out to sea to try to survive on their own. Unfortunately, only 28 to 38 percent of the fledged chicks make it through their first year and return to breed, resulting in slow-growing populations.

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After the rediscovery of the cahow, Bermuda local and ornithologist David Wingate dedicated his career to their conservation. In 1960, Wingate started the Cahow Recovery Program, which aimed to control threats to the birds, better understand their breeding biology, and grow their population in the Castle Harbour Islands Nature Reserve, which includes Nonsuch, three surrounding islands, and a handful of rocky islets. In 2001, Madeiros took over the program. At this point, there were 55 breeding pairsa significant increase from 1951, but not nearly enough to move the bird from the critically endangered category. Madeiros first objective was to relocate the birds from the low-lying, rocky isletswhich are being destroyed by sea level rise, hurricanes, and erosionto the larger and more elevated Nonsuch Island.

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He traveled to Australia to observe how they moved the endangered Goulds petrel from one area to another to establish new coloniesa technique known as translocation. In the case of the cahows, this involves closely monitoring the growth of a group of chicks and moving them to Nonsuch right before they are old enough to fly. If they are moved too soon, Madeiros must spend significantly more time feeding the chicks and risk losing some. Too late, and the birds will have already imprinted on their surroundings, causing them to return to the islet they were born on after their years of maturing out at sea. This is concerning, as two of the rocky refuges are at risk of disappearing overnight if another big hurricane hits, said Madeiros.

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Once translocated to Nonsuch, the chicks are placed in snug artificial burrows that are concrete holes in the ground, which offer them a safe area to nest. The hope is that they will imprint on Nonsuch and come back to these burrows to breed, thus establishing a more secure colony for future generations. Thanks to two successful translocations, more cahows returned to Nonsuch this year than ever before to lay eggs, 13 of which hatched in March. Throughout the reserve, there are a total of 71 chicks and 142 breeding pairs. Its really improved beyond my wildest, most optimistic dreams, Madeiros said.

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Madeiros also installed tiny infrared cameras in the artificial burrows, allowing ornithologists and bird lovers worldwide to watch the birds in real time and learn more about their nesting and breeding process. The details behind everything that happens in those burrows was basically unknown before, said Charles Eldermire, leader for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Cams project. Eldermire is collaborating with Madeiros to get the word out about the cahow. Now, they have more information on how adults copulate, when they come back to feed their young, and how often they incubate the chicks.

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The cameras have also offered a window into nest invasions by other birds, mammals, crabs, and lizards that are hard to study. Thanks to people keeping an eye on the live feed, researchers learned about a flatworm that invaded a cahow nest one year. Viewers are also great at noticing when something different appears to be happening, said Eldermire, like detecting slight variations in behavior or the physical aspects of the adults.

Yet the cahow is still considered one of the rarest seabirds in the world. The long-term goal is to restore the species to 1,000 breeding pairs, which will move them from endangered to threatened. To do this, Madeiros must relocate the birds that are still on the islets to Nonsuch before their homes are destroyed. There are now yearly hurricanes with 30-foot waves coming over the reef and hitting the islands, said Madeiros, who is currently traveling out to Nonsuch regularly to monitor the new chicks.

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There is also concern about rats, which can swim from the mainland to the cahows nesting grounds and devour the eggs and chicks. Its a constant battle every year to intercept the rats, said Madeiros. However, through rigorous eradication efforts, theyve been able to keep most of the cahows safe. This is the last area in Bermuda where we can manage to exclude mammal predators and control humans, he said.

Because the Cahow Recovery Program has been such a success, conservationists around the world are implementing similar programs to save a variety of birds. In Hawaii, for example, the endangered Hawaiian petrel is being moved to a protected haven in the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge. Just last year, the first of the 87 birds translocated as chicks returned after several years out at seaa good sign for the species. And with seabirds being among the most imperiled family of birds in the world, this technique will likely become more popular in the years to come.

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But translocations are extremely labor-intensive, and there are other steps that should be taken before moving bird colonies, said Stephanie Borrelle, the marine and Pacific regional coordinator for BirdLife International. Its easier when you can find remnant populations or colonies and do restoration actions on the island. This includes removing invasive species and predators, building artificial burrows, and controlling soil erosion.

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Regardless of the methods used, protecting seabirds is crucial for marine ecosystems. Many of these birds are top predators and they bring key nutrients back to their breeding grounds, affecting plant growth. They also allow scientists to better understand the oceans health. Seabirds are indicators of the oceanthe canary in the coalmine, said Borrelle. They tell us where there is plastic, what the status of the fisheries are, how birds are breeding.

By protecting the cahow, Madeiros also hopes to educate locals about their exceptional national bird. Most Bermudians didnt know a lot about the bird 20 years ago, said Madeiros. Now, we hope the birds will be safe for centuries.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer - who once represented one of Osama Bin Laden's henchmen - has released the first photo of the jailed socialite since her arrest last year.

So-called 'super lawyer' Bobbi Sternheim shared the close-up snap of Maxwell, 59, on Thursday as her client languishes in jail on suspicion of trafficking and sexually abusing girls as young as 14

Her left eye has a bruise underneath, while Maxwell's usual short dark cropped hairstyle has grown out, and is flecked with gray hairs.

The British socialite's lawyers included the photo in a court filing Thursday as part of their ongoing concerns about Maxwell's treatment at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center.

Following the release of the photo, a judge on Thursday ordered the US government to explain why guards repeatedly flash light into Ghislaine Maxwell's cell overnight, an action her lawyers say may have led to the bruising.

Ian Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's brother, said in a statement that he was 'shocked my sister's guards didn't immediately refer her for proper medical care'.

Maxwell, who is accused of grooming girls for pedophile ex Jeffrey Epstein, and joining in his abuse of them, has only been seen in court sketches until now, as no cameras or recording devices are allowed at hearings.

In a filing to the federal court in New York, Sternheim wrote that on Wednesday evening Maxwell was 'confronted by MDC staff due a visible bruise over her left eye'.

Sternheim, who represented Al Qaeda terrorist Khaled al-Fawwaz over two US embassy bombings in Africa that killed 224, said Maxwell got what she called a 'black eye' despite 24/7 camera surveillance on her at all time.

The filing said: 'No guard addressed the bruise until Ms. Maxwell, who has no mirror, caught a reflection of her aching eye in the glean of a nail clipper.

'At that point, MDC staff confronted Ms. Maxwell regarding the source of the bruise, threatening to place her in the SHU if she did not reveal how she got it' - the SHU is the most restrictive part of the prison.

Ghislaine Maxwell is seen with a black eye and graying hair in her first photo since her arrest last year

Ghislaine Maxwell (pictured in a court sketch from her latest court appearance last week) lost her fourth bail hearing in New York and is therefore likely to remain in prison until her trial, currently scheduled for July 12

The new photo of Maxwell was shared by her attorney Bobbi Sternheim, pictured, a so-called super lawyer whose former clients include Al Qaeda terrorist Khaled al-Fawwaz

Despite claiming to have no mirror, Maxwell appears to manage some level of maintenance with well-plucked eyebrows clearly on display.

The letter continued: 'While Ms. Maxwell is unaware of the cause of the bruise, as reported to medical and psych staff, she has grown increasingly reluctant to report information to the guards for fear of retaliation, discipline, and punitive chores.

Maxwell is accused of recruiting underage girls who were abused by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein

'However, there is concern that the bruise may be related to the need for Ms. Maxwell to shield her eyes from the lights projected into her cell throughout the night'.

Sternheim said it would 'ironic' if Maxwell were put in the SHU as it would indicate she 'needs protection from the very staff so intent on protecting her, since she has no contact with anyone but staff'.

Maxwell has been jailed in what she calls 'hell hole' conditions since July and on Tuesday lost her latest bail hearing in New York, which means she likely to remain in prison until her trial this summer.

US District Judge Alison J. Nathan issued an order for the US government to explain why guards repeatedly flash light into Ghislaine Maxwell's cell overnight.

In her order on Thursday, Ms Nathan directed the government to find out if Maxwell is being subjected to flashlight surveillance every 15 minutes at night or any other atypical flashlight surveillance.

If so, the judge said, the government should explain the basis for doing so and whether Maxwell can be provided appropriate eye covering.

Ian Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's brother, said in a statement that he was 'shocked my sister's guards didn't immediately refer her for proper medical care'.

'Instead,' he said, 'they bullied and harassed her, effectively blaming the victim.

'The simple solution is to review the round-the-clock security camera footage to see what may have occurred.'

He added: 'Apart from whatever happened in this 'House of Horrors', I can report that Ghislaine's family and friends continue to support her.

'We are confident, once this is over, it will be the prosecutor who has a proverbial black eye.'

MAxwell's claims that she is being mistreated in custody were not enough to persuade a panel of three appeals court judges in New York to overturn the decision to deny her bail, meaning she will likely remain in jail until her July 12 trial.

Sternheim represented al-Fawwaz at his 2014 trial for the 1998 Nairobi and Tanzania bombings. The terrorist admitted his crimes on the day his trial was due to begin, and was jailed for life in 2015.

According to the New York Post, Sternheim has been hailed by her peers for her 'outstanding work and commitment to the spirit of the legal profession.'

Maxwell is accused of recruiting underage girls who were abused by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The court considers Maxwell, who has American, British and French passports, a flight risk and she has been denied bail four times.

Maxwell's lawyer said guards in her Brooklyn jail were keeping her awake at night to ensure she wouldn't commit suicide like financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

But in a brief order, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said that to the extent Maxwell is being deprived of sleep, she should seek relief from U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who oversees her criminal case.

In Thursday's filing, Maxwell's lawyer Bobbi Sternheim wrote that on Wednesday evening she was 'confronted by MDC staff due a visible bruise over her left eye'

The British socialite's lawyers included the photo in a court filing alerting the court to their ongoing concerns about Maxwell's treatment behind bars

David Markus, Maxwell's attorney, said he was 'heartbroken' by the ruling and the team are now 'considering our options for next step.'

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and other charges over her alleged role in procuring four teenage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004.

She had been appealing Nathan's March 22 rejection of a $28.5 million bail package which the judge, who has denied bail three times, said did not keep Maxwell from being a 'significant risk of flight.'

In oral arguments on Monday, Markus objected to jail guards' waking Maxwell every 15 minutes with flashlights to make sure she was still breathing.

'We just want a fair opportunity, a fair chance, so she can get ready for the trial of her life,' Markus told the appeals court. 'It's impossible to prepare for trial when you're getting no sleep.'

Maxwell faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted. She is seeking a delay in her trial that is currently scheduled for July 12, 2021.

Earlier this week, Ghislaine Maxwell accused prison guards of intimidating and humiliating her by standing over her while she used the toilet after she was 'falsely accused' of being in possession of illegal documents behind bars.

Just weeks ago, she was called out by guards for not flushing the toilet, a claim she adamantly denied blaming rotting pipes for causing the stench.

Pictured: The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) where Ghislaine Maxwell is being held. After losing her fourth bail hearing on Wednesday, she is likely to remain there until her trial

In a letter submitted to a judge on Monday by attorney Bobbi Sternheim, the British socialite, 59, claimed a senior guard at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn stood 'knee to knee' with her while 'she sat on the commode' on Saturday.

Moments earlier, guards had confiscated some documents from Maxwell which they claimed she had obtained by her lawyers during a visit in breach of prison protocol.

In court papers obtained by DailyMail.com, Maxwell's legal team denied the violation and claimed that the guards waited until her lawyers were gone and 'took undue advantage of her.'

Her lawyers and prosecutors have previously argued about whether Maxwell can wear an eye mask and whether or not she is flushing the toilet in her cell.

In Monday's filing, Sternheim said she and fellow attorney Leah Saffian attended a scheduled two-and-half hour in-person legal conference with Maxwell on Saturday during which they were under 'constant watch of four to five guards.'

After the meeting, she received an email from MDC legal counsel Sophia Papapetru, who claimed had Maxwell 'received paperwork that was not in her possession upon entering the legal visiting area.'

Papapetru cited MDC rules which ban lawyers from giving clients materials during a legal visit and said the documents had been confiscated and would be given back to Sternheim during her next visit.
Boris Johnson's morning run was abruptly disrupted today when Dilyn the dog pulled away from his lead to attack a goose.

The embattled prime minister was all smiles as he headed out for a jog with the dog he shares with his fiancee Carrie Symonds.

But his peace was shortlived when the Jack Russell cross spotted a Canadian goose on a footpath in St James's Park, Westminster.

Photographs show the three-year-old dog bounding after the startled bird while Mr Johnson offers a thumbs up.

It comes after the Electoral Commission yesterday opened a formal investigation into the funding of the lavish refurbishment of Mr Johnson's Number 10 flat.

The embattled prime minister was all smiles as he headed out for a jog with the dog he shares with his fiancee Carrie Symonds

Mr Johnson's peace was shortlived when the Jack Russell cross spotted a Canadian goose on a footpath in St James's Park, Westminster

Mr Johnson and Miss Symonds adopted their dog Dilyn in 2018 before taking the pooch along on the election campaign trail.

Dilyn was rescued by Friends of Animals Wales from a breeder in South Wales.

Among other alleged misdeeds, Dilyn has been accused of cocking his leg over the handbag of a departing No 10 aide, gnawing antiques at Chequers and taking an unfortunate amorous interest in the leg of Dominic Cummings.

Downing Street yesterday said Mr Johnson was willing to co-operate fully with the inquiry into who paid for renovations on his Downing Street flat.

'We are now satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred,' announced the Electoral Commission yesterday.

Mr Johnson and Miss Symonds adopted their dog Dilyn in 2018 before taking the pooch along on the election campaign trail. Pictured, on this morning's run

Downing Street yesterday said Mr Johnson was willing to co-operate fully with the inquiry into who paid for renovations on his Downing Street flat

Among other alleged misdeeds, Dilyn (pictured today) has been accused of cocking his leg over the handbag of a departing No 10 aide, gnawing antiques at Chequers and taking an unfortunate amorous interest in the leg of Dominic Cummings

It has sweeping powers to demand documents and interview witnesses under caution. Failure to comply or tell the truth is a criminal offence.

His fiancee Miss Symonds, who masterminded the costly redecoration, could also face questions.

No serving prime minister has ever been interviewed under caution in relation to an alleged breach of the law.

No serving prime minister has ever been interviewed under caution in relation to an alleged breach of the law

The inquiry follows a string of revelations in the Mail suggesting a 58,000 cost overrun may have been paid originally by the Conservative Party before being covered by Tory donor Lord Brownlow.

Mr Johnson angrily told MPs yesterday that he had settled the bill with his own money. But he ducked repeated questions about who originally paid out when the work at 11, Downing Street was completed last year. Failure to declare donations is an offence under electoral law, punishable by fines of up to 20,000.

The Electoral Commission can pass on investigations to the police if it uncovers evidence of criminal offences or believes its efforts are being frustrated.
New Delhi, April 29 : The exit poll findings released on Thursday dont look very exciting for the Congress, as except in Tamil Nadu, the Congress is unlikely to wrest power in any of the remaining four states/UT that went to the polls.

Former External Affairs Minister and senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid said that the exit poll projections for West Bengal are on the expected lines.

Speaking to IANS, Khurshid said, "The BJP had carried out an expensive and high-decibel campaign in Bengal, using everything at its disposal, but the people there generally believe that despite the short comings, the government led by Mamata Banerjee has empowered them for some time." "Mamata Banerjee would hold her ground -- this was impression I got when I visited the state," he added.

As per CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News data, the incumbent Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee is likely to retain power in the state for the third consecutive term despite facing a tough challenge from the BJP.

The BJP is projected to win 115 seats in the 294-member Bengal Assembly, 33 short of the halfway mark of 148 seats. The BJP, however, will gain 112 seats in comparison to its performance in the last Assembly polls in which the saffron party had won only three seats.

The exit poll shows that despite losing grounds, the Trinamool will still manage to win 158 seats, 10 more than the magic figure of 148.

The exit poll shows data for 292 seats in West Bengal, as elections in two seats were withheld after the deaths of the candidates.

The exit poll shows that the Left, which had ruled the state for more than three decades, is likely to be reduced to a marginal player, despite having a pre-poll alliance with the Congress.

The alliance of Congress, Left and the Indian Secular Front (ISF) of Furfura Sharif's influential cleric Abbas Siddiqui is projected to win 19 seats, 59 less than what it had won in the last polls.

The exit polls projected a seat range of 152 to 164 for the ruling Trinamool, 109 to 121 for the BJP and 14 to 25 for the Congress and its alliance partners.

The exit poll shows that the Trinamool is expected to secure 42.1 per cent votes. In 2016, the party had got 44.9 per cent votes, marking a dip of 2.8 per cent in its vote share in this year's poll.

The vote share of the BJP, which has emerged as the main challenger to the ruling Trinamool, is expected to witness a huge jump of 29 per cent from 10.2 per cent in 2016 to 39.2 per cent in 2021.

The exit poll shows that the vote share of the Left-Congress combine is expected to see a huge decline of 22.6 per cent from 38.0 per cent in 2016 to 15.4 per cent in 2021.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 11:26:26|Editor: huaxia

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TRIPOLI, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Wednesday said that 108 illegal migrants have been rescued off the Libyan coast.

"Today, 108 migrants, including ten women and four children were returned to Libya by the coast guard," IOM tweeted.

"We maintain that the arbitrary detention of migrants must end," IOM said.

According to IOM, a total of 6,174 illegal migrants have been rescued off the Libyan coast so far this year, including 426 women and 277 minors.

In 2020, a total of 11,891 illegal immigrants were rescued and returned to Libya, IOM estimates, noting that 381 migrants died and 597 went missing on the Central Mediterranean route during the same period.

Libya has become a preferred point of departure for thousands of illegal immigrants who attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach European shores.

Rescued migrants end up inside overcrowded reception centers across Libya, despite repeated international calls to close them. Enditem
It is not every day that scientists come across a phenomenon so fundamental that it is observed across fruit flies, rodents and humans.

In a paper published today in Aging Cell, neuroscientists from the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences discovered that a single protein-;a glutamate transporter on the membrane of vesicles that carry dopamine in neurons-; is key to regulating sex differences in the brain's vulnerability to age-related neuron loss.

The protein-;named VGLUT-;was more abundant in dopamine neurons of female fruit flies, rodents and human beings than in males, correlating with females' greater resilience to age-related neuron loss and mobility deficiencies, the researchers found.

Excitingly, genetically reducing VGLUT levels in female flies diminished their protection from neurodegeneration associated with aging, suggesting that VGLUT could be a new target for prolonging dopamine neuron resilience and delaying the onset of symptoms of aging in the brain.

From flies to rodents to human beings, we found that VGLUT levels distinguish males from females during healthy aging. The fact that this marker of dopamine neuron survival is conserved across the animal kingdom suggests that we are looking at a fundamental piece of biology. Understanding how this mechanism works can help prolong dopamine neuron resilience and delay aging." Zachary Freyberg, M.D., Ph.D., Study Senior Author and Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Cell Biology, University of Pittsburgh

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease are more likely to develop as we age. Parkinson's disease-;a slow but relentless loss of dopamine neurons in the brain that impairs one's ability to move or talk-;is known to predominantly affect men.

But while biological sex differences, which arise from a combination of hormonal, genetic and environmental influences, seem to explain why females are protected from early stages of Parkinson's, the driver and regulator of these protections was, until now, unknown.

Using a combination of biochemical and genetic techniques, as well as behavioral studies where flies' locomotion was monitored for a 24-hour period, researchers found that age-related benefits afforded to females disappeared when the levels of VGLUT gene expression were significantly reduced in dopamine neurons.

"We found that VGLUT expression increases with age, and that flies become more vulnerable to dopamine neuron degeneration when we knock down VGLUT," said lead author Silas Buck, a Ph.D. candidate at the Pitt Center for Neuroscience. "We also found that VGLUT expression is higher in females than males, suggesting that VGLUT may play a role in regulating sex differences in vulnerability to neurodegeneration in Parkinson's and other neurological disorders where females are more resilient than males."

As the rates of Parkinson's disease are rapidly rising-;the number of people affected by the illness worldwide is projected to reach 20 million by 2040-;Pitt scientists hope to further probe the role of VGLUT in neuroprotection in humans.

"We are entering an epidemic of Parkinson's disease, and we need to understand how to make our neurons more resilient," said Freyberg. "VGLUT is a tantalizing new target that is key to not only understanding the fundamental biology at the core of dopamine neurons' survival, but ultimately for developing new therapeutics."
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 20:20:23|Editor: huaxia

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Tourists visit terraced fields in Shexiang ancient town in Dafang County of Bijie, southwest China's Guizhou Province, April 14, 2021. (Xinhua/Yang Ying)

BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Most young and middle-aged Chinese are willing to travel with their parents during the upcoming five-day Labor Day holiday, according to a survey Thursday.

The survey, published in China Youth Daily, polled over 1,500 people aged between around 20 and 50.

The survey showed that almost 70 percent of those polled are willing to travel with their parents, including 48.9 percent who said they are planning for it and 21 percent who have already finalized their itineraries.

The willingness is the highest among people in their 30s, or the "post-1980" generation, the survey said, followed by the "post-1990" generation.

The newspaper quoted Li Ran, a woman in her 30s, as saying that accompanying parents on trips is a way of compensation for not being able to spend much time with them during work days.

However, she said they will definitely not consider popular tourist attractions out of concern that it will be too crowed in those places.

Li's opinion was shared by about 61.8 percent of the respondents in the survey, who saw the inconvenience and crowding caused by overflowing holiday tourists as the major element holding back their travel plans. 
iPhone 12 series case "Alpha"

Features of iPhone 12 series case Alpha



1. Military-inspired Design

This case delivers simple and modern style with its matte black color, while the camouflage pattern on the top and bottom provides a unique twist. The logos are placed on the side and back in a subtle and sophisticated way. The cutout in a hexagonal shape on the back gives the case a sharper and more sophisticated look. Recommended for those who like to use something simple yet distinctive.

2. Rigid Structure that Meets U.S. Military Standard

The case is certified Military Grade (U.S. Military Standard) that guarantees high durability. More specifically, the case passed the "MIL-STD 810 Rev. H" test conducted by a third party, proving it meets the Military Standard.

In addition to the shock-absorbing material, air cushions are provided at the four corners for unexpected drops. Furthermore, the inner layer with a hexagonal pattern disperses/absorbs the impact at the time of dropping and provides your smartphone a firm protection against drops.

3. High-quality Special Soft TPU Material that is Flexible and Heat-resistance

With the use of special soft TPU material that does not easily deform even at high temperatures, the case is resistant to deform from the heat generated by the phone. It is highly flexible, and easy to attach and remove.

4. Compatible with Wireless Chargers

Wireless charging (Qi charging) is possible with the case attached. *When using MagSafe, the magnetic force is weaker than when the case is not attached. Please note that the phone may not be fully charged depending on the position where it is placed.

5. Strap Holes on the Left and Right

The case comes with strap holes, which many people like to use for fall prevention, on the left and right. Having the holes on both sides gives you the freedom to choose and is also convenient when attaching a neck strap. Enjoy customizing your phone by combining straps of your favorite design.

ALPHA offers two colors: Tactical black and Recon green.

Product Page: https://amzn.to/2QZUjGy

Overview of TACTISM Launch Campaign

Sale period: APR 30, 2021 - May 31, 2021

20% off from MSRP + 5% off with coupon

Target products: iPhone 12 series case "Alpha"

How to use coupon: Check [Apply coupon] on the product page

Military-inspired lifestyle brand TACTISM

About the brand

Tactical thinking is necessary in our lives.

The brand name "Tactism" is created by combining the word "Tactical" with the suffix "-ism."

These days, we are constantly exposed to various risks such as natural disasters and pandemics.

To live and survive in such an increasingly complex and stressful world, it is imperative that we think ahead, make necessary preparations, and have superior tools.

The very mission of Tactism is to create and provide tools needed by preppers in the modern world  tools that are useful in our daily lives, whether in the city, at school, at the office, or sometimes, in outdoor occasions like camping sites, and of course, in case of emergency.

We also believe that such tools must offer not only convenience but also a sense of reassurance and enjoyment.

The era of just pursuing material abundance is over, and today, we are facing a host of resources and environmental issues to tackle.

Tactism strives to offer tactical products which enrich people's lives to the fullest, with minimal tools.

Naming Concept

In the military phonetic alphabet, "ALPHA" represents the letter "A."

As "ALPHA" also represents "the beginning" or "the first," we named the very first Tactism product "ALPHA."

We believe this will be a very exciting, first big step for Tactism in becoming the A to Z of our customers' lifestyle.

SOURCE Five Star Elements Inc.
Former CNRP President Sam Rainsy faces preliminary charges for allegedly asking people to violate the governments current lockdown measures, which he said was depriving residents of food and income.

The Cambodian government extended a 14-day lockdown by another week until May 5 and imposed a three-color zone system to curb the spread of COVID-19. Residents in red zones  where all private business activity is prohibited and people unable to leave their homes except for medical reasons  have complained of food shortages and lack of income that was affecting their daily lives.

Sam Rainsy released a video on Saturday telling people to leave their homes and return to work if lockdown measures were not lifted, adding that his suggestion was justified because people were suffering under the harsh restrictions.

For the next four or ten days, if the situation is not sustainable, please get out. Get out of your homes to go about activities as normal, like going out to make a living for survival. If we stay inside our homes, we will also be dead, Sam Rainsy said in the video.

Kim Santepheap, a secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice, said a criminal abroad, referring to Sam Rainsy, was being investigated by a Phnom Penh court prosecutor for his call to evade lockdown measures in the capital and Takhmau city.

The Phnom Penh Municipal Courts prosecutor has taken action by charging criminal Sam Rainsy yesterday for obstructing administrative measures and incitement to cause social unrest, he said during a government conference.

The Justice Ministry official said Cambodians should not be swayed by Sam Rainsys statement and continue to follow lockdown measures.

Y Rin, a spokesperson at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, did not respond to requests for comment sent via Telegram on Wednesday, neither did National Police Spokesperson Chhay Kimkhoeun.

An arrest warrant was issued on April 26 cites two charges against Sam Rainsy  Article 11 of the new COVID-19 law relating to the obstruction of implementation of measures and the charge of incitement from Article 494 of the Cambodian Criminal Code.

Article 11 of the COVID-19 law, which was hastily passed in March and contains harsh prison sentences, states that obstructing the implementation of the measures aimed at preventing the spread of the disease was punishable with a prison sentence of six months to three years.

Em Sovannara, a professor of political science, said people would only heed Sam Rainsys call if the government failed to address their concerns during the lockdown.

But if the lockdown measures are being implemented without effective mechanisms to relieve or reduce the burden placed on the people, Sam Rainsys appeal could influence people, he said.
(Newser)  A new study is lending credence to widespread claims from protesters that tear gas messed with their periods. Dozens of protesters told media outlets about period irregularities, which they blamed on tear gas exposure, following protests across the country last summer. Now, those claims take center stage in an anonymous survey of 2,257 adults exposed to tear gas in Portland, Ore., between July 30 and Aug. 20. More than half of the 1,650 respondents who menstruate described some kind of period irregularity after exposure. This included increased cramping (36.6%), unusual spotting (27.8%), increased bleeding (23.6%), and more days of bleeding than expected (18.9%), reports Oregon Public Broadcasting. Others reported bad headaches, diarrhea, nausea, and mental health issues. Some said their health issues lasted for weeks or months.

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People who reported more frequent exposure described more serious period disruptions, study author Britta Torgrimson-Ojerio of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research says, per the Guardian. It's not known whether the chemicals in tear gas, mostly tested on male police officers and soldiers, can affect the endocrine system, and, in turn, menstruation, as high levels of the stress hormone cortisol can. But Chile's government banned the use of CS gas, one of the most common forms of tear gas, on protesters in 2011 after researchers found a possible link to miscarriages, reports Newsweek. Portland police were banned from using CS gas in most situations in September, per OPB. While the study published in the BMC Public Health journal doesn't point to a cause, it does show period irregularity issues after tear gas exposure are "widespread and widely reported," Torgrimson-Ojerio tells OPB. (Read more tear gas stories.)
The event highlighted the multiple benefits of implementing Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in cities, and particularly their contribution to building resilience to climate change while contributing to climate mitigation. A wealth of urban experiments is underway across G20 countries, demonstrating that NbS  adapted to local circumstances  can work in all contexts. To multiply positive experiences, further quantification of the range of benefits, and increasing progress monitoring, are needed, as well as the integration of NbS in planning processes and technical standards for infrastructure, the development of innovative business and finance models and smooth multi-level governance.

On April 16th, Italy and UNEP organized a virtual event on Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in cities, with the aim of exploring how to increase the pace and scale of their implementation.

Cities are at the forefront of both the impacts of, and responses to, the crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, and health resilience. Drawing on remarkable examples of NbS initiatives across G20 countries, the event made a strong case for nature-based solutions in cities as a way to increase their ability to mitigate negative impacts and future risks, and pointed to a surge for a global movement towards NbS in cities.

The strength of NbS lies in their ability to deliver multiple benefits, ranging from increased resilience to climate events such as floods and heat waves, to biodiversity gains, improved well-being and job creation. Developing and deploying NbS in urban areas requires nature-based thinking, in order to integrate them into sector policies and city and infrastructure planning.

The first panel demonstrated wide-ranging options from green and hybrid infrastructure  with wetlands, urban forests, green transport and biodiversity corridors  to vertical forests. Issues such as competition for space, use of a variety of local species and maintenance need to feed into the planning efforts to lead to nature-sensitive urban design.

The second panel examined different business models. Innovative business models, alongside co-creation of supporting policies and technical standards are critical to engage the private sector and help mobilize finance. Novel business models and innovative financing arrangements are to be tested to capture value that is shared and dispersed across public & private sectors. Beyond common financing models such as Public Private Partnerships (PPP), cities were encouraged to think more broadly about available options, securing government ownership to ensure project quality, e.g. local taxes, bonds, but also instruments such as land value capture and non-financial incentives such as green plot ratios.

Turning awareness and recognition of the potential of NbS for on-the-ground investments requires quantified objectives and robust methodologies to decide on the most relevant intervention and assess benefits, using  for example  indicators such green cover ratio, temperature changes, job creation, mobility shifts. Cost-benefit analyses are crucial to make the case for implementation, as is putting in place a monitoring system. The increasing availability of digital technologies allows for better identification of the opportunities for action and can help track progress and maintain NbS effective. Finally, in order to succeed, it is crucial to change the way cities operate, moving away from business-as-usual urban planning to adopt nature-sensitive urban designs. This includes collaboration across several departments at local level, and engaging communities.

In conclusion, urban actors were encouraged to wear nature as a pair of glasses to envision the future of cities and tap into the multiple benefits of NbS to achieve greater air quality, regulate extreme temperatures, save energy, and improve citizens health and well-being. Not least due the job creation capacity of NbS, the provision of green space for recreational purposes and the application potential of NbS in urban infrastructure and sectors impacted by COVID-19, which makes NbS a cornerstone for a green resilient COVID recovery.

Panelists and participants welcomed the opportunity for peer-to-peer exchange and highlighted the importance of South-South collaboration in the dissemination and replication of NbS in other cities.

Panel 1: The multiple benefits of NbS in Cities (moderated by Ingrid Coetzee, Director: Biodiversity, Nature & Health, ICLEI  Local Governments for Sustainability). Panellists: Stefano Boeri, Stefano Boeri Architetti; Yvonne Lynch, Strategic Advisor, the Royal Commission for Riyadh; Sean Odonoghue, Senior Manager: Climate Protection Branch, eThekwini Municipality) Panel 2: Innovation and business models for scaling up NbS in Cities (moderated by Musonda Mumba, Director of the Rome Centre for Sustainable Development  UNDP). Panellists: Boping Chen, Regional Director of Central East Asia, C40; Laszlo Pinter, Professor, Team Leader of the Naturvation Project and Head of Department at Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University; Laurie Stott, Instructor, British Columbia Institute of Technology; Sergio Angon, Coordinator of the CityAdapt project, Xalapa, Mexico)

Source: https://www.g20.org/special-event-g20-unep-resilient-smart-and-sustainable-cities-the-power-of-nature-based-solutions.html
Irvine, Calif., April 27, 2021 -- University of California, Irvine biologists have developed a new genetically engineered mouse model that, unlike its predecessors, is based on the most common form of Alzheimer's disease. The advance holds promise for making new strides against the neurodegenerative disease as cases continue to soar. Their study appears in the journal, Nature Communications.

Link to study: https:/ / www. nature. com/ articles/ s41467-021-22624-z

While over 170 Alzheimer's mouse models have been in use since the 1990s, those models mimic early-onset AD, also known as "familial AD," which accounts for less than 5 percent of total AD cases. Until recently, scientists introduced mutations found in familial risk human genes, such as the amyloid precursor protein and presenilin 1, into the mouse genome to generate the mouse models. The UCI team decided to take a new approach by developing a mouse model better positioned to analyze causes of late-onset AD. Also called "sporadic AD," this new model encompasses the remaining 95 percent of cases.

"We believed models developed on the rare familial type might be a reason therapies have worked in the lab but haven't translated into clinical trial success," said Frank LaFerla, professor of neurobiology & behavior and the study's co-senior author; he is also dean of the UCI School of Biological Sciences and director of the UCI Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. "We decided it was time to begin developing a model that embodies the far more common late-onset form of AD."

"The existing AD models have been invaluable to the field by helping provide a better understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease." said David Baglietto-Vargas, assistant research professor of neurobiology & behavior and the study's first author. "Unfortunately, many of those same models have unique physiological alterations that have led scientists to misinterpret some experimental findings."

Rather than introduce mutations from familial-AD risk genes into the mouse, the UCI team generated the new model by using genetic engineering to switch three amino acids in the mouse amyloid precursor protein to make it more closely mirror its human counterpart. The result is what the researchers are calling a "platform model" for late-onset AD.

While the mice don't display the more advanced brain plaque and tangle pathology linked with the disease, the model manifests AD-associated conditions that precede and likely underline more advanced pathology. These AD-related conditions include age-related alterations in cognition, inflammation, brain volume and others consistent with human changes.

"This model can be used to understand very early events in the brain that may be relevant," said Kim Green, professor and vice-chair of neurobiology & behavior and co-senior author of the study. "We can use environmental and genetic factors to examine which aspects of aging are important in developing late-onset AD."

"This mouse is a foundational step toward modeling late-onset AD with its hallmark features of plaques and tangles," said Grant MacGregor, professor of developmental & cell biology and study co-author. "It will take a lot more time and inclusion of additional subtle AD-associated genetic changes to achieve it, but the result of this study suggests we are on the right path and that our approach may bear fruit."

Unless there are medical breakthroughs, the number of Americans 65 and older with Alzheimer's could rise from 6.2 million currently to 12.7 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

###

Support for this research was initiated by the generosity of Mr. Harry Bubb through the Cure Alzheimer's Fund. Additional support was provided by the Alzheimer's Association, the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the BrightFocus Foundation, Minister of Science and Innovation, Carlos III Institute of Health, the American Federation for Aging Research, UCI and the UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders.
Susan L. Heller, a shareholder at global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP, has been recognized by the World International Property Review (WIPR) among its WIPR Influential Women in IP for 2021. World IP Reviews Influential Women in IP honors the development and progress that women in IP have made in creating, protecting, and securing intellectual property (IP).

Heller was named Outstanding IP Practitioner in 2021 and is routinely recognized by World IP Review. She has been included annually in the WIPR Leaders Guide since 2017. World IP Review profiles leading IP practitioners across the world who provide guidance on the challenges active in intellectual property.

Heller, co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurigs Orange County office, chair of the firms Global Trademark & Brand Management Group, and co-chair of the global Greenberg Traurig Womens Initiative, is consistently recognized as having one of the preeminent international trademark practices in the country and for being a game-changer in the field. When the stakes are high and critical brands are at risk, Fortune 500 companies, world champion athletes, high-net-worth individuals, A-list celebrities, and highly visible pre-IPO companies turn to Heller for her strategic thought leadership and counsel, honed by three decades of experience. At the forefront of global strategic management and monetization of big-name brands on a worldwide level, she is known for developing cutting-edge branding strategies, most notably in "bet-the-brand," high stakes trademark cases. Heller works directly with CEOs and senior executives, in and out of corporate boardrooms. Her practice has spanned over 30 years across virtually every industry and in most jurisdictions throughout the world

Heller serves on the Board of Visitors of University of California, Irvine (UCI) Law School, Deans Advisory Board of the UCI Merage School of Business, Executive Committee of the University of Southern California (USC) IP Institute, and Cornell Universitys President's Council of Cornell Women. She is also a board member of Orange Countys Human Options, an organization focused on breaking the cycle of domestic violence and sits on the Leadership Committee of 5050 Women on Boards.

The National Diversity Council named Heller one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in the U.S. and she was honored with the 2020 Client Choice Award for the Intellectual Property (Trademarks) in California (voted for exclusively by corporate counsel). Euromoney twice named her the winner of its Americas Women in Business Law Awards, Best in Trademark, and Best Lawyers in America named her Lawyer of the Year in Trademark Law for Los Angeles for two years. Heller was named Trademark Lawyer of the Year by Finance Monthly Global Awards, Lawyer of the Year for Intellectual Property by Lawyer Monthly, one of Daily Journals Top IP Lawyers, and was selected as a Woman Leader in The Law by ALM Legal Leaders. She was chosen to be a member of the United Nations Artificial Intelligence Initiative (AI For Good), joining an elite team of law firm leaders, business executives, university deans, and UN thought leaders. Heller was also honored by her alma mater, Cornell University, which has named her a Distinguished Classmate.

About Greenberg Traurigs Intellectual Property & Technology Practice: With more than 200 intellectual property attorneys and patent agents in the United States, Asia, and Europe, Greenberg Traurig provides a broad range of patent, trademark and copyright protection and strategic counseling. Greenberg Traurig was named Law Firm of the Year for Trademark Law and a National Tier 1 Law Firm for IP Litigation, Patent Law and Litigation, Copyright Law, and Technology Law by U.S. News and Best Lawyers, 2020 Best Law Firms."

About Greenberg Traurig: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT) has approximately 2200 attorneys 40 locations in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. The firm is net carbon neutral with respect to its office energy usage and Mansfield Rule 3.0 Certified. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com
REDDING, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market research report, "Precision Medicine Software Market by Deployment Mode (On-premise, Cloud-based), Application (Oncology, Pharmacogenomics, CNS), End User (Healthcare Providers, Research, Academia, Pharma, Biotech) - Forecast to 2028," published by Meticulous Research, the precision medicine software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.2% from 2021 to reach $2.55 billion by 2028.

Download Free Sample Report Now @ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5011

For many years, various medicinal approaches have been used for providing accurate treatment to patients. Precision medicine is an upcoming approach to patient care through which physicians select a treatment method based on the patient's genetic makeup and lifestyle habits. Using software in personalizing this treatment method further helps in the accurate analysis within time. Thus, the introduction of software with improved clinical workflows enhances patient care.

The paradigm shift in treatment, rising pressure to decrease healthcare costs, scientific & technological advances in the genomics field, and growing focus towards providing companion diagnostics & biomarkers for various therapeutic areas are some of the major factors expected to drive the growth of this market. However, the lack of awareness about precision medicine practices and fragmented healthcare systems in developing countries hinder the growth of this market to a certain extent.

Impact of COVID-19 on the Precision Medicine Software Market

With the healthcare industry facing a crisis amidst the pandemic, it has been working on various solutions to combat the pandemic. The healthcare industry is engaged in conducting precision medicine research to enable a better understanding of COVID-19 and to measure the impact caused by the virus to discover potential therapies. Governments have taken initiatives to accelerate the use of precision medicine for coronavirus. For instance, in July 2020, the San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics announced funding of three collaborative COVID-19 research efforts in San Antonio. These projects will support a strong foundation of transformative COVID-19 research happening in San Antonio. Cleveland Clinic also launched a genomic medicine project to identify genetic factors that drive susceptibility to the virus and use these to develop prevention and therapeutic strategies against the virus. Emory University researchers are also investigating an antiviral compound that works like Remdesivir, which inhibits viral replication.

Speak to our Analysts to Understand the Impact of COVID-19 on Your Business: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/cp_id=5011

Apart from this, many research initiatives have been undertaken amidst the pandemic, thereby providing opportunities for the precision medicine software market in the upcoming years. For instance,

 A team at Texas Biomed is studying the role of a protein called furin that potentially impacts individual responses to COVID-19. There are indications that furin may be related to an increased risk of death from COVID-19 for individuals with underlying cardiovascular problems. Better understanding the role of furin and its unique effects on certain individuals may help develop patient-specific therapeutics that can be used to treat COVID-19. With the help of precision medicine, this study will understand why certain individuals have greater disease severity and why specific underlying conditions affect outcomes.

 A team at the University of Texas (UT) Health San Antonio is performing the second research initiative and examining how the COVID-19 virus evades the body's immune system and can block certain aspects of the immune system in some individuals. The team's goal is to identify antiviral compounds either among existing FDA-approved treatments or in vast libraries of drug-like molecules that could effectively combat the ability of the virus to evade the immune defense.

 The UT Health San Antonio is also studying specific pathways that allow the COVID-19 virus to evade the human immune system. This will allow researchers to understand how the disease caused by the virus behaves differently in different people.

Precision medicine emphasizes more precise diagnosis and treatment based on a range of biomarkers, including genetic variants, data about patients' environment, lifestyle, and behaviors. These approaches may be useful in understanding variations in individuals' susceptibility and responses to COVID-19. A better understanding of biological vulnerabilities could offer leads for targeted therapies. Apart from these, the advancements in the precision medicine industry and the innovations such as the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and big genomic data are expected to accelerate the growth of the precision medicine software market. Thus, the pandemic has surged the use of precision medicine treatments, which is expected to propel the demand for precision medicine software in the upcoming years.

Key Findings in the Precision Medicine Software Market Study

The precision medicine software market is mainly segmented based on deployment mode, application, end user, and geography.

Based on deployment mode, the precision medicine software market is segmented into on-premise and web & cloud-based. In 2020, the on-premise segment accounted for the largest share of the overall precision medicine software market. The large share of this segment is primarily attributed to the broad range of advantages associated with the use of on-premise software, such as high security of data, low risk of data breaches, and control over software upgrades & data storage. In addition, higher adoption among end-users and flexibility with connection bandwidth further support the growth of this market.

Quick Buy  Precision Medicine Software Market Research Report: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/Checkout/65917856

Based on application, the precision medicine software market is segmented into oncology, pharmacogenomics, and other applications (rare diseases, CNS disorders, and cardio & metabolic disorders). In 2020, the oncology segment accounted for the largest share of the overall precision medicine software market. The large share of this segment is primarily attributed to the growing prevalence of cancer, shift towards personalized treatment, rising funding in cancer research, applications of precision medicine in oncology research, and increased investments by government organizations in precision medicine and related software industry.

Based on end user, the precision medicine software market is segmented into healthcare providers, research & government institutes, and pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies. In 2020, the healthcare providers segment accounted for the largest share of the overall precision medicine software market. The large share of this segment is primarily attributed to the rising number of tertiary/specialty care hospitals, rising incidence of chronic diseases, growing healthcare infrastructure, increasing demand for quality healthcare, and shift towards personalized/precision medicine. In addition, rising pressure to curtail soaring healthcare costs, technological advancements, and focus towards genomic-based treatment further supports the precision medicine software market for healthcare providers, worldwide.

This research report analyzes major geographies and provides comprehensive analysis for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. In 2020, North America accounted for the largest share of the global precision medicine software market. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to register the highest growth during the forecast period. The growing shift in treatment from one-size-fits-all medicines to precision medicine, increased spending on healthcare, rising funds for research activities, and growing focus of international players to expand their presence in this region are some of the key factors expected to propel the growth of the precision medicines software market in Asia-Pacific region.

The report also includes an extensive assessment of the product portfolio, geographic analysis, and key strategic developments adopted by leading market participants in the industry over the past four years (20182021). The precision medicine software market has witnessed several new software launches & approvals, collaborations & partnerships, expansions, and acquisitions in recent years. For instance, in 2020, 2bPrecise LLC (U.S.) partnered with Vidence, LLC (U.S.) for using the 2bPrecise platform, a precision medicine data delivery solution in precision oncology.

The key players operating in the global precision medicine software market are Syapse, Inc. (U.S.), Fabric Genomics, Inc. (U.S.), SOPHiA GENETICS SA (Switzerland), Human Longevity, Inc. (U.S.), GenomOncology LLC (U.S.), Sunquest Information Systems Inc. (U.S.), LifeOmic Health, LLC (U.S.), Translational Software Inc. (U.S.), N-of-One (U.S.), PhenoTips (Canada), PierianDx (U.S.), Foundation Medicine, Inc. (U.S.), and 2bPrecise (U.S.) among others.

To gain more insights into the market with a detailed table of content and figures, click here: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/precision-medicine-software-market-5011

Scope of the Report:

Precision Medicine Software Market, by Deployment Mode

On-premise

Web & Cloud-based

Precision Medicine Software Market, by Application

Oncology

Pharmacogenomics

Other Applications

Precision Medicine Software Market, by End User

Healthcare Providers

Research & Government Institutes

Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies

Precision Medicine Software Market, by Geography

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

Germany



France



U.K.



Italy



Spain



Rest of Europe (RoE)

(RoE) Asia-Pacific (APAC)

(APAC) Japan



China



India



Rest of APAC (RoAPAC)

Latin America

Middle East and Africa

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Amidst this crisis, Meticulous Research is continuously assessing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on various sub-markets and enables global organizations to strategize for the post-COVID-19 world and sustain their growth. Let us know if you would like to assess the impact of COVID-19 on any industry here- https://www.meticulousresearch.com/custom-research

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About Meticulous Research

Meticulous Research was founded in 2010 and incorporated as Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd. in 2013 as a private limited company under the Companies Act, 1956. Since its incorporation, the company has become the leading provider of premium market intelligence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

The name of our company defines our services, strengths, and values. Since the inception, we have only thrived to research, analyze and present the critical market data with great attention to details. With the meticulous primary and secondary research techniques, we have built strong capabilities in data collection, interpretation, and analysis of data including qualitative and quantitative research with the finest team of analysts. We design our meticulously analyzed intelligent and value-driven syndicate market research reports, custom studies, quick turnaround research, and consulting solutions to address business challenges of sustainable growth.

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Content Source: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/pressrelease/289/precision-medicine-software-market-2028

SOURCE Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd
Magmas pioneering catalyst technology delivers unparalleled energy efficiency and production yield benefits to our customers around the world, said Mr. Erfan.

Unicat Catalyst Technologies (Unicat), a portfolio company of White Deer Energy (White Deer), has announced the acquisition of Jemmtec Limited, dba Magma Group, (Magma or the Company). Magma is a UK-based leader in ceramics and catalyst manufacturing and related services. Unicat, headquartered in Alvin, TX, is a global supplier of heterogeneous catalyst products and technical services. Together, the combined businesses will offer vertically-integrated global manufacturing and distribution of innovative catalyst and ceramics products and services for the refinery, syngas, chemical, steel, agriculture, and green energy industries. Mark Stuckey, Magmas Chief Executive Officer and founder, will oversee the enlarged business, with Mani Erfan, co-founder of Unicat, staying on as the Chief Technical Officer.

Magmas pioneering catalyst technology delivers unparalleled energy efficiency and production yield benefits to our customers around the world, said Mr. Erfan. This transaction will expand on our existing partnership by bringing complementary products and manufacturing capability into one portfolio.

Unicat is an expert in developing and distributing innovative catalyst solutions with high-tech technical support, said Mr. Stuckey. I am excited to partner with the Unicat team to realize the many opportunities this combination will offer to both customers and employees.

White Deer invested additional capital in Unicat to support the acquisition. The fund has a long history of partnering with entrepreneur owners and their management teams to support the growth of their businesses. Mr. Stuckey will roll a portion of his ownership stake, aligning his commitment to the future of the combined business.

Jim Meneely, Managing Partner at White Deer, commented, Mark and his team have built an incredible company with a strong brand resulting in impressive growth over the last decade. We look forward to partnering with Mark and the Magma team in supporting the Companys future growth as it continues to innovate and supply to its loyal customer base.

Meghan Leggett, Principal at White Deer, added, Magma is a transformative acquisition for Unicat, and we believe by combining Magmas manufacturing technology with Unicats product portfolio and sales network we will support growth in industrial activities across the U.S. and internationally.

White Deer was advised by Locke Lord LLP and Alvarez and Marsal LLC. Magma was advised by Squire Patton Boggs and BDO.

About Magma: Founded in 2009 and centred in the north of the United Kingdom, Magma is a leading global provider of specialist ceramics, innovative catalyst technology and related services. Innovation is at the heart of Magma, who have developed and commercialised catalyst manufacturing and product technology over the last 5 years to lead the way in Hydrogen and Ammonia production. The company has four UK and one Vietnamese manufacturing facilities, along with a fully equipped catalyst research and development facility in the UK.

About Unicat: Founded in 2000 and located in Alvin, Texas, Unicat is a leading global provider of heterogeneous catalyst products and related services. With over 200 unique catalyst products, Unicat has consistently provided its customers with innovative solutions. In addition to its product portfolio, the Company provides on-site technical support to assist its customers worldwide. In addition to its Alvin facility, the Company maintains offices in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

About White Deer: White Deer is a middle market private equity firm that invests in companies participating in the supply chain that supports the energy, industrials and infrastructure sectors. The firm relies on a thematic, research-based investment approach and deep industry knowledge to create sustained value for its companies, investment partners and employees. The firm, which is based in Houston and New York, has raised in excess of $2.7 billion of committed capital since its founding in 2008.

Contact:

James Meneely

Managing Partner, White Deer Energy

jmeneely@whitedeerenergy.com

Mark Stuckey

Chief Executive Officer, Magma

m.stuckey@magmagroup.com
China in Focus (April 28): US Commanders: Declassify China Files

Nine out of the eleven top U.S. commanders plead to declassify more documents. This rare move seeks to confront threats from China and Russia.

Australia will spend $580 million to upgrade its military. Four northern military bases will be renovated.

Chinas ambitions expand into space. The Chinese regime is planning to build a permanent space station, and the first section of it launches this week. Once completed, itll join the International Space Station as one of the only fully operational space stations in orbit.

A Chinese internet user has been arrested after posting online about her brothers death. He died shortly after getting a Chinese-made vaccine shot.

A dance used to show loyalty to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong returns to Chinese schools. This time, its praising the current leader of the Communist Party.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.
Last week, Americans across political parties celebrated and recommitted to environmental stewardship with renewed spirit. Absent from much of the conversation, however, was clarity on what solving climate change will actually require: policy solutions that can win and sustain bipartisan support.

Just consider the following: between now and 2050, the US will be led by at least four presidents and 15 different Congresses. o meet the decades-long climate challenge, our country will have to introduce and sustain solutions that can deliver on ambitious decarbonization goalspolicies that can pass and last across the inevitable swings in political administrations.

President Obamas climate approach highlights the weakness of efforts that hinge on one party maintaining control of the executive branch. His Clean Power Plan was well-intended but came to life with strokes of the executive pen. Lacking bipartisan support, this regulatory approach was promptly dismantled by the next administration.

Executive action is also prone to legal and bureaucratic delay. It often takes years for regulations to take effect due to the complicated rule-writing process and the risk of court challenges. This only fuels uncertainty for businesses who need clarity about the future in order to innovate the next generation of clean technologies. With the urgency to address the climate challenge, America should not bet on such a tenuous approach.

Luckily, history points to a winning formula for environmental progress. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush marshalled bipartisan support to tackle acid rain, a vexing environmental problem of the day. Today, this effort is considered one of the most significant environmental achievements in U.S. history.

The ingredients of success? Republican leadership, bipartisan support, and a market-based approach. With this, President Bushs initiative slashed the pollutants causing acid rain ahead of schedule and under budget. Weve done this before, and we can do it again.

Those skeptical that the parties can come together on climate may be interested to know about the growing momentum toward environmental bipartisanship in Congress. Senators Braun (R-IN) and Coons (D-DE) have united 14 senators in the Climate Solutions Caucus, which is committed to setting aside party divisions and advancing commonsense solutions.

Meanwhile, the historic Energy Act of 2020, shepherded by Senator Murkowski (R-AK) and Senators Manchin (D-WV), garnered overwhelming support from both Republicans and Democrats. Other recent proposals, like the Growing Climate Solutions Act and The Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act, have also earned bipartisan support. These efforts deserve our applause, as they lay the foundation for sustained climate progress.

The Biden administration hopes to pursue policies that stick. In order to appeal to both parties, President Biden should bypass the divisive regulatory process and instead steer toward market-based solutions, which can generate the broad support needed to stand the test of time.

The carbon dividends plan is one such approach that--through pricing emissions--can achieve dramatic environmental impact. For this reason, it has attracted the support of environmentalists, businesses, and thought leaders across the political spectrum. Even young people have gravitated toward this approach.

Earlier this academic year, over 400 student government presidentsrepresenting all 50 states and more than 4 million studentssigned a joint-statement in support of the carbon dividends framework. The largest ever public declaration of student government leaders, it united Republicans and Democrats alike.

Bipartisanship takes extra work, but it is also what addressing climate change requires. As we build toward the next Earth Day and the many more to come, we must remember Americas climate response is a relay race. It demands hustle but also smooth baton-passing from one political administration to the next. Our race against time is one we can win, but only if we pave the pathways critical for long-term coordination.

George Gemelas is the Executive Vice President of Students for Carbon Dividends and a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment.
[April 29, 2021] Covr Financial Technologies Launches New Insurance Product Suite with Investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV

HARTFORD, Conn., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Covr Financial Technologies (Covr), a leading digital life insurance platform, has completed its latest funding round with an investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. This funding comes in conjunction with the launch of Covr's suite of new AI-driven term life insurance products, which bring market-leading capability to the financial institutions and insurance companies that use Covr solutions to support the growing trend of self-directed, shop-from-home, insurance buying experiences that are now possible because of emerging technology and robo-advice tools. "We couldn't be more thrilled with this investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. Wrapping our latest round of funding with a highly recognizable, global brand like Sony, which is also an insurance distribution leader in Asia, is just incredible," said Mike Kalen, Covr CEO. "This investment and Sony's global network will go far in helping Covr continue to lead the way in digital insurance innovations in the U.S., and eventually abroad, with solutions such as our newly launched multi-carrier term life insurance platform that includes a growing number of instant-purchase journeys and our proprietary LoanMatch Protector product." "We believe Covr reinvents the way life insurance is distributed by leveraging AI and advanced process automation, enabling insurance carriers to broaden their distribution path. This makes it possible for new entrants, such as banks, credit unions, C2C platforms and FinTechs, to efficiently offer policies to their own customers," said Gen Tsuchikawa, CEO and Chief Investment Officer at Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. "Thanks to its comprehensive and modular software stack, Covr provides a genuine no-code environment for optimizing policy distribution, selection and issuance. We are quite confident in the growth path of Covr, and we look forward to supporting Mike and his team as they further grow Covr's footprint." Covr's industry-leading digital life insurance platform integrates seamlessly into a financial institution's existing website or other distribution model. This allows these financial institutions to offer a broad range of life insurance products from the leading insurance carrers to their customers. Today's consumers expect choice, simplicity and speed when purchasing life insurance, and Covr's technology is tailored to those demands. "Our partners are finding additional ways to serve their customers with our solutions," Kalen said. "We partner with many of the leading financial planning firms, banks, broker dealers, credit unions, consumer lenders, personal finance apps, and other great brands to bring innovation and affordable insurance to their customers."



With Covr's multi-carrier term insurance platform, customers can apply for life insurance online in minutes, with real-time quotes available from the leading insurance carriers. Leading the way in the journey are product offerings from Bestow, Haven Life, Banner Life and Americo, which all offer fully digital, instant-decision capability, and Covr's technology to help clients find the product that fits best for them. "Customers today expect simplicity and choice when it comes to protection products  and expect that it's done quickly," Kalen said. "Our platform allows our financial brands and other partners to meet this demand with a digital, white-labeled solution."

Unique among Covr's product offerings is LoanMatch Protector, a new product designed to mirror the remainder of an existing mortgage, small business loan or other debt. The coverage adjusts to the client's precise need, saving consumers up to 30% and offering the market-leading ability to complete the entire process in 15 minutes. About Covr Financial Technologies Inc.

Covr partners with financial brands to provide life insurance solutions to their customers in an efficient, easy way that streamlines the process of selling and buying policies. Covr offers a choice of trusted life insurance products from leading insurance carriers, an easy way to compare rates, and the ability to purchase policies within minutes. Through its white label solutions, Covr helps financial institutions deliver a great experience under an existing brand their customers already trust. Covr currently serves over 25,000 financial advisors and over 20 million customers across over 30 financial institutions. For more information, visit covrtech.com or follow us @covrtech and on LinkedIn. Covr's investors include nine leading venture capital firms: Nyca Partners, Commerce Ventures, Allianz Life Ventures, Connectivity Capital Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Aflac Ventures, Fairview Capital, Connecticut Innovations and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. Covr's Advisory Board includes financial services leaders, including Chairman Brian Finn, former president of Credit Suisse First Boston; Joe Plumeri, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of First Data Corporation and former CEO of Citibank North America; Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest as well as senior executive roles at Bank of America, Citigroup and Smith Barney; Hans Morris, managing partner, Nyca Partners, chairman of Lending Club, formerly president of Visa; Brady Dougan, former CEO of Credit Suisse; Gregg Fleming of Rockefeller Capital and Bob Kerzner, formerly CEO of LIMRA. About Sony Innovation Fund by IGV

Innovation Growth Ventures (IGV) is a venture capital firm formed in 2019 by Sony Corporation, Daiwa Capital Holdings Co., Ltd. and external limited partners. Managed by the Sony Innovation Fund (SIF), IGV invests in mid to late-stage startup companies across Japan, the U.S., Europe, Israel and India. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covr-financial-technologies-launches-new-insurance-product-suite-with-investment-from-sony-innovation-fund-by-igv-301279941.html SOURCE Covr Financial Technologies, Inc.

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U.S. President Joe Biden marked his first 100 days in office with an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, saying America is on the move again.

The president noted that he took office in a time of crisis. He called it the worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

He praised how his administration dealt with the COVID-19 health crisis. He repeatedly said that an infrastructure plan proposed by Democratic Party lawmakers would create millions of jobs. He also called for $1.8 trillion in spending to expand government support for children, families and education.

The president added, "We have to prove democracy still works. That our government still worksand can deliver for the people."

Biden gave the speech in the U.S. Capitol building which is still surrounded by a fence and barriers after the January 6 riot. Behind Biden sat the nations first female vice president, Kamala Harris. She was next to Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House.

Because of pandemic restrictions, the speech came before a smaller than usual group of 200 lawmakers wearing face coverings.

The president called his latest proposal, the American Families Plan. The plan calls for an additional four years of free, public education. It includes $200 billion for pre-school for 3 and 4-year-olds. It calls for an additional $109 billion for two years of free community college education and more than $80 billion to aid poor students.

For families, there would be $225 billion for childcare and increased payments for childcare workers, $225 billion for a medical and family leave program, and another $200 billion for healthcare.

The latest spending proposal came after the $2.3 trillion spending plan proposed last month to pay for roads and bridges, to help research and manufacturing, and to provide housing for the poor. Last month, Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion spending plan that included direct payments to Americans during the pandemic.

Mindful of the closely divided Congress, Biden took his message directly to Americans. He said, "Now, I know some of you at home wonder whether these jobs are for you. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy thats rapidly changing. Let me speak directly to you.

Biden proposed to pay for the spending with higher taxes on Americans making over $400,000. He would cancel the 2017 tax cuts under the last administration and would tax investment gains like regular income.

The spending plans, if approved by Congress, would greatly expand social programs. They would also increase government involvement in peoples everyday lives.



Foreign affairs

On foreign affairs, Biden reminded China that the U.S. will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific area, in his words, not to start conflict  but to prevent conflict. He promised to answer Russias interference in U.S. elections and cyberattacks on government and businesses.

The president called Iran and North Koreas nuclear programs a serious threat to Americas security and world security. He said the U.S. would deal with the threats through diplomacy and deterrence.

Biden also asked Congress to pass legislation this year to create a path to citizenship for Dreamers  children of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors.

Republican answer to Biden

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina gave the Republican answer to Bidens trillion-dollar spending proposals.

Scott said the presidents actions are pulling Americans apart. He blamed the Democrats for keeping public school children away from their schools during the pandemic. He said the spending proposals would hurt jobs and noted, Our best future wont come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you  the American people.

Im Mario Ritter, Jr.

Hai Do wrote this report for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

Editor's Note: Dreamers were brought to the U.S. as minors. An earlier version of this story incorrectly described dreamers' status in the U.S.

____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

century n. a period of one hundred years

deliver v. to do what you say you will do or what people expect you to do

deterrence n. (politics) the policy of developing a lot of military power so that other countries will not attack your country

scheme n. a clever and often dishonest plan to do or get something

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Escrow Out Loud San Francisco Real Estate Podcast If you're serious about understanding racism in California real estate, these podcasts are a great place to start.

Escrow Out Loud, the podcast about San Francisco real estate from co-founders Matt Fuller and Britton Jackson of Jackson Fuller Real Estate, has released a three-part podcast series that looks at racism in California Real Estate. Prop 14: The California Fair Housing Massacre of 1964, One Community Activist & Four REALTORS Discuss Racism, and Real Estate Racism in 2021 with Nate Johnson are all available for immediate download on leading podcast apps and stores.

Episode 108, Prop 14: The California Fair Housing Massacre of 1964, features the first Black president of the San Francisco Association of Realtors, retired real estate broker Don Saunders. Together with Matt, he shines a light on the fair housing massacre of the 1963 Rumford Act by 1964s state ballot initiative known as Proposition 14. Prop 14 was sponsored, written, and supported by the state trade association now known as the California Association of Realtors. The outcome of that election truly changed the course of American history in ways that affect us to this day.

Episode 109, One Community Activist & Four REALTORS Discuss Racism, begins with a powerful statement from Dave Walsh, 2021 President of the California Association of Realtors. The panelists then discuss the progress, setbacks, and impacts of racism in the Bay Area. Its a lively roundtable that tells a more complete story than youve likely heard about housing racism in the Bay Area. Yes, even in tree-hugging progressive San Francisco, we have a deep history of housing racism.

Episode 110, Real Estate Racism in 2021 with Nate Johnson, features fair-housing advocate and Realtor Nate Johnson of Red Key Realty in St. Louis. Nate joins Matt to talk about the dog-whistle of bad neighborhoods, what racism in real estate looks like in 2021, and what we can all do to increase our awareness and decrease our biases when confronting racism in real estate.

Now in its fifth season, Escrow Out Loud is available through Apple, Google, Spotify, and directly from jacksonfuller.com. Its an educational, insightful, and humorous discussion about San Francisco real estate based on Matt and Brittons decades of experience. "If you're serious about understanding racism in California real estate, our 3-part podcast series is a great place to start," says podcast co-host ands brokerage co-founder Matthew Fuller.

Matt Fuller and Britton Jackson are both noted for their contributions to the real estate industry and work along the innovative edge of what is possible in real estate. While TIC sales are no longer a focus of their business, they closed the first fractional TIC loan in San Francisco during the sale of a Noe Valley TIC share. Britton Jackson has been quoted in the New York Times, and Matt has appeared on local media as a frequent San Francisco real estate expert, including Fox KTVU-2 and NBC 5. Britton was the 2018 chair of the San Francisco Standard Forms Committee. Matt served as an elected Director from 2014 - 2019 for the San Francisco Association of Realtors, served as the SF Association of Realtors 2017 President, and was a Director for the California Association of Realtors from 2015 - 2019.
Google Pay is adding support for UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions over NFC in India. If you have a UPI account configured on Google Pay in your NFC-enabled smartphone, you can now easily and quickly make contactless payments for purchases at merchant establishments. UPI is an instant real-time payment system facilitating inter-bank transactions in India.

According to a Google support page, the Google Pay app will open automatically when you hold your phone near to a compatible NFC terminal, given you meet the prerequisites and your phone is unlocked. You can then enter the amount you want to transfer followed by the UPI pin to complete the transaction. You will be notified once your payment is successful.

Google says only Pine Lab terminals are supported currently for UPI payments over NFC (via). However, we can expect more NFC terminals to come onboard in the near future.

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Google Pay UPI payments become easier and faster in India

Google Pay is one of the most popular online payment apps in India, so much so that it is almost synonymous with UPI  the very platform it is based on. Formerly called Tez, the app keeps gaining new features every now and then. In April last year, the Indian version of Google Pay gained support for debit and credit card payments over NFC. Now, with the latest update, UPI payments have become as much easier as well.

Currently, making UPI payments for purchases at merchant establishments via Google Pay requires you to scan a QR code or manually type in a UPI ID. Both these methods are cumbersome and take more effort. Of course, you can still use your debit or credit card to make payments over NFC via Google Pay. The app currently supports Visa credit and debit cards from Axis, SBI, Kotak, and HDFC banks. It also supports HSBC Visa credit card cards.

However, if your card is not supported or you dont want to store your card information in the app, UPI is the best solution. UPI works with all major banks in India. And with NFC support for UPI payments, things get a whole lot better. Of course, your phone must have an NFC chip for all this to work. And needless to say, you need to turn on NFC as well.

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Its unclear though whether the new feature is already live nationwide or Google is just starting the rollout. Nonetheless, Google Pay UPI payments have now become a lot easier and faster in India, thanks to NFC support.
In context: Science fiction has always been based on science fact, but the two have always been very distinct. As technology continues to become more advanced, the line between the two begins to become blurred. In turn, it becomes easy for people who have no intimate knowledge of how technologies like robots and AI work to become afraid that without human intervention, these devices will become like their science fiction counterparts on their own.

It was only last December that the New York Police Department began deploying a heavily modified Spot quadruped on missions in New York City. The department intended to use it in situations involving hazardous materials, bomb threats, and other situations where citizens' or officers' lives were at risk. The few times it did get called out were surveillance scenarios, such as checking out the inside of a house involved in a reported burglary before officers entered.

"This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers and that's our goal," NYPD Technical Assistance Response Unit Inspector Frank Digiacomo told WABC Eyewitness News at the time.

Unfortunately, the robot nicknamed Digidog didn't get a chance to show its true worth. Only months after the NYPD began leasing it from Boston Dynamics, it returned itnot because it was damaged or malfunctioning, but because it is scary.

The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970's to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents. This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our Emergency Service Unit and Bomb Squad. https://t.co/134Xl0ezox  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) February 25, 2021

Led by US House of Representatives member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, people expressed their concerns over the robotic first responder's potential to become like Metalhead from "the dystopic TV series 'Black Mirror,' reports the New York Post. The criticism arose in February after a video of officers deploying Digidog in a reported home invasion/hostage situation in the Bronx went viral.

Along with Representative Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told the NYPD to "rethink" how it used the robot. Instead of rethinking anything, the NYPD canceled its $94,000 contract with Boston Dynamics last week and returned the robot. The lease was good through August.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller told the New York Times that Digidog became a "target" for activists fueling irrational arguments over racism and mass surveillance.

"People had figured out the catchphrases and the language to somehow make this evil," said the deputy commissioner.

Not only were activists expressing fear, but prominent city officials were as well. City Councilman Ben Kallos likened the robotic dog to Metalhead, adding that what New York needs is more "beat cops on the street, [instead of] trying to replace them with robots." Similarly, Mayor de Blasio spokesman Bill Neidhardt called Digidog "creepy."

"[I'm] glad it was put down," stated Neidhardt. "It's creepy, alienating, and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers."

The NYPD only deployed Digidog on about six missions, all without causing any harm or incident to civilians, before it fell victim to the so-called "cancel culture mob."

Image credit: New York Post
Authorities in Can Tho have decided to postpone the trial opening of a pedestrian street in Ninh Kieu District, the first of its kind in the Mekong Delta city, amid growing concerns over extreme COVID-19 outbreaks in countries throughout Southeast Asia.

The opening of the promenade on Hai Ba Trung Street along Ninh Kieu Wharf, a top tourist attraction in Can Tho, was initially scheduled for this Saturday but it has since been postponed until further notice.

The pilot program for the street involved opening the area between 6:00 pm and 10:00 pm every Saturday, Nguyen Ngoc Anh, deputy chairman of Ninh Kieu District, said at a press conference on Monday.

However, just one day after the press conference, Anh announced that the street opening would be postponed until further notice.

As the COVID-19 situation remains complicated, we must actively prevent infections and ensure the health of people and visitors, Anh said.

According to the original plan, the street would be divided into three areas - shopping and dining services, traditional space, and folk games and cultural shows.

The businesses that operate within each of these three areas are expected to boost Can Thos tourism industry, attract investment into the district, and open up opportunities for the rapid development of local commercial industries and travel services.

Eleven nearby areas have been designated as free parking lots for visitors to the street during its operating hours.

Recently, local authorities also announced plans to work with business households to ensure they operate in line with the purpose of the pedestrian street.

The district will review the pedestrian steets effectiveness after the pilot phase before putting it into full operation.

At least five enterprises have put forward proposals to become the streets operator after the pilot phase, according to Anh.

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Dallas police apprehended a suspect in a Denton domestic violence shooting Wednesday in which the victim later died, according to the Denton Police Department.

The shooting was reported about 1:45 p.m. in the area of I-35E and McCormick Street in Denton.

Officers responded to reports of a domestic disturbance, Denton police said in a news release. A caller reported seeing a man force a woman into a vehicle. The caller also said the woman appeared to be covered in blood.

Officers found the woman, who had sustained gunshot wounds, and she was taken to a local hospital in critical condition.

Police initially asked anybody in the area to stay indoors until Dallas police found the suspect, who had left Denton in a ride share vehicle. The end point of the ride was Dallas, and Denton police tracked the vehicle as it traveled into the city.

Police identified the suspect as 22-year-old Simeon Bonilla, who was transported back to Denton after his arrest.

Investigators later learned that the shooting victim had died and they obtained an arrest warrant charging Bonilla with murder. The victims name has not been released.

Bonilla remained in the City of Denton Jail with a $500,000 bond.
BOSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jon Fetherston and 9 other non partisan concerned citizens from Massachusetts have submitted petition to Massachusetts Attorney General to fight back against cancel culture and cyber bullying. The petition, filed with the Massachusetts Attorney General Office on Thursday 4/14/2021, would make it a felony in Massachusetts to target another's ability to make a living because they disagree with postings on Social Media and or other media platforms.

The committee working on this Massachusetts ballot initiative is a bipartisan group. They support free speech, and do not respect or condone hate or violent speech. Disagreement is a way of life in American history. If you don't like what you are seeing or hearing in the social media or public media world, turn it off, not target people's right to make a living.

The goal of They Could Do It To You Committee is to have the ballot question placed on the 2022 November Election ballot.

Cancel the Cancel Culture and stop cyber bullying.

Jon Fetherston, spokesman for committee, is a long time elected local and state official. Selectman, Board of Health, Affordable Housing Commissioner, Redevelopment Authority, MAPC Commissioner are some of the roles Fetherston has held.

Questions or to schedule interviews, please contact:

Jon Fetherston at:

[email protected]

or 508-816-6674

Follow us on Twitter @TheyCanDoItToY1

SOURCE Jon Fetherston
Keller Williams

Fanta

Keller Williams Greater Seattle announced the recent addition of residential broker Adisu Fanta. He makes the move from Skyline Properties, where he last year closed over $10 million in deals. KW's Angie Mykel said in a statement, We are extremely excited to welcome Adisu. We believe in succeeding through people, and having Adisu on our team is a huge win for us. Fanta added, Even though I have only been with the firm since March, I have already seen incredible gains!




Private higher education institutes, VET colleges and English language schools will share in a $53 million federal budget lifeline to fund an extra 5000 short course places, adapt their business models and avoid costly registration fees to help the sector survive without international students.

Many private colleges were forced to shed jobs or shutter their operations over the past year as border closures hit overseas student numbers, prompting the sector to plead for a rescue package from the federal government.

Federal Minister Alan Tudge will announce $53 million in funding for the struggling international student education sector on Friday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge will on Friday respond to this call with a package aimed at helping colleges survive the coming months amid uncertainty about when Australias borders will reopen for international students.

The measures will include $26 million to fund 5000 course places for Australian students across 100 colleges known as non-university higher education providers, which typically enrol high numbers of international students. The government will spend another $17.7 million to waive registration fees for colleges, English language schools and up to 3500 VET providers until December.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 03:55:18|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Italy on Thursday approved a recovery and resilience plan worth 222.1 billion euros (269 billion U.S. dollars) which aimed at restarting the economy affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

The green light from Prime Minister Mario Draghi's cabinet came one day ahead of the Friday deadline set for European Union (EU) member states to send their recovery plans to the European Commission for review and final approval.

Italy's plan outlined six specified macro-areas of intervention, which were called "missions," each encompassing different key sectors, and the related investment plan.

The missions were: digitalization, innovation, competitiveness and culture -- which would receive investments worth 49.2 billion euro; green revolution and ecological transition; infrastructures for sustainable mobility; education and research; inclusion and cohesion; and healthcare.

The recovery plan will be financed up to 191.5 billion euros by the Next Generation EU program launched by the EU last year to support the member states most affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Further 30.6 billion euros will be covered by domestic resources, according to the government.

The plan was meant to address long-standing structural problems, including reforming the public administration and the justice system, said the government, adding that the multi-year recovery plan would help push the country's gross domestic product (GDP) up by 3.6 percentage points and the national employment by 3.2 percentage points by 2026.

The Italian economy, the euro-zone's third largest, shrank by 8.9 percent in 2020 over the previous year due to the impact of the pandemic, according to the preliminary estimate by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT).

As for year 2021, the central Bank of Italy in its latest bulletin said a lasting and stable growth over 4 percent would be "plausible." Enditem
[April 29, 2021] Global edtech upGrad in major funding announcement

Funding to provide boost to UK's international student population LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- South Asia's largest online higher education company, upGrad, today announced that it has raised USD 120 million from Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore. upGrad plans to use a portion of the fresh capital to support UK institutions whose international student population has suffered as a result of the pandemic. The edtech platform plans to help more universities accessible to the world by taking services online. The cost-effective proposition offers university partners with a new revenue stream at no extra cost, with only limited faculty time required in the first year. upGrad Co-Founders Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompalli said in a joint statement, "We welcome Temasek in our mission to power career success for each and every member of the global workforce as their trusted LifeLongLearning partner and drive meaningful career outcomes. This capital will further fuel our commitment towards the UK market, which will houses upGrad's first international headquarters in London." Elsewhere, upGrad will be using the funding to strengthen its team scale its global market operations, bolster its technology and product capabilities, pursue M&A opportunities, expend graduate and post-graduate degree portfolio in India, and scale up operations to achieve its USD 2 billion revenue goal by 2026.



This is the first external funding raised by the online edtech platform. Since its founding six years ago, upGrad has been 100% owned, funded, and run by its co-founders as a capital-efficient business. Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive financial advisor to upGrad, and Rajaram Legal acted as legal advisor.

About upGrad upGrad is South Asia's largest online higher edtech company offering 100+ courses in collaboration with top-notch global universities like Duke Corporate Education (US), Michigan State University (US), Liverpool John Moores University (UK), Deakin Business School (Australia), Swiss School of Business Management, (Geneva), IIT Madras (India), IIM Kozhikode (India), and others. Founded in 2015, the international edtech leader has impacted over 1 million total registered learners over 50+ countries across the world. upGrad has ranked No.1 in the LinkedIn Top Startups India 2020 list. This is the third time in a row that upGrad has been featured in the LinkedIn Top Startup list after 2018 and 2019. It is also amongst GSV Global EdTech 50 and has ranked amongst the Top 50 in the FT Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies 2021. To know more, visit: www.upgrad.com About Temasek Temasek is an investment company with a net portfolio value of S$306 billion (US$214 billion) as of 31 March 2020. Its three roles as an Investor, Institution and Steward, as defined in the Temasek Charter, shape Temasek's ethos to do well, do right and do good. Temasek actively seeks sustainable solutions to address present and future challenges, through investment and other opportunities that help to bring about a better, smarter and more sustainable world. For more information on Temasek, please visit www.temasek.com.sg

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Back in the fifth month of the pandemic, when the city needed joy more than ever, Kiri the Japanese Fire Truck arrived in San Francisco.

Since then, the 1990 Daihatsu fire truck  maybe one-sixth the size of the typical American fire truck and 2 feet shorter than a Mazda Miata  has been quietly making the rounds. Like an out-of-town tourist or an international exchange student, Kiri has been meeting the locals and having its photograph taken at fire stations, at San Francisco landmarks, on Bay Area back roads and, in one Herbie the Love Bug moment, at the Sonoma County Raceway.

Kiri has an Instagram page, @teenytinyfiretruck, where the fire truck shares its adventures and speaks in the first person. For more information, we talked with Todd Lappin, a content designer and longtime Bernal Heights resident who seems like less of an owner and more like the father in a host family for the vehicle, which negotiates San Francisco hills like a native and can actually put out fires.

Q: How did you end up with a tiny Japanese fire truck?

A: I was not looking for a Japanese fire truck. But I do own another Japanese car. I imported a Nissan Skyline from Japan about three years ago, a right-hand-drive car. And when I did that I ended up learning about the system. How the importation process works. How the whole registration process works.

Under federal law we can import anything thats 25 years old.  Once I figured that out, I realized I should get something completely alien to the United States. Something that weve never seen, that we have no analogy for and is very uniquely Japanese. And that led me to a little Kei (or micro-vehicle) fire truck.

Courtesy Todd Lappin

Q: Where did Kiri come from?

A: I imported Kiri directly from Japan with a local importer I got to know. Essentially it was retired by the town, went through the auction system. It sold for almost nothing, because who wants a 30-year-old tiny fire truck? Then we plucked it out of there and basically put it on a boat.  Theyre really cheap and its really easy. Its one of those things that seems really intimidating until you do it. If anyones thinking about it, Id say do it.

Q: What was Kiris life like in Japan? Where did the fire truck live and what did it do?

A: The fire truck served for almost 30 years in the town of Kirigamine, Japan, which is a small town in Nagano. (The population) is probably only a couple hundred. Kirigamine has a couple of resorts, a couple of hotels and it has a bunny hill ski area which is active in the winter. And a hundred yards from the ski resort is the municipal volunteer fire department lodge. (Kiri) was the towns volunteer fire department truck.

Q: Tell me more about the town.

A: Heres the really sweet thing  kiri means fog and gamine means summit of the mountain. The town is literally called foggy peaks in Japanese, which is amazing. Which is why my family named the truck Kiri.

Whats been really sweet, is that through Instagram all these people from the town found out their tiny fire truck ended up in San Francisco, and they love it.  Its helped forge a bridge between these two places in this funny way, because people are able to see this decontextualized thing having silly adventures in a place its not supposed to be. (Kirigamine) has become like a sister city.

Courtesy Todd Lappin

Q: What was the journey to San Francisco like for Kiri?

A: (Kiri) went on a boat, which went to Long Beach, and then got trucked up here.

Heres the other nifty thing about it  because the truck basically spent 30 years sitting in a firehouse shed, it has 4,000 miles on (the odometer) total. It didnt get driven very much.

The day it arrived it was sort of like buying a very weird eBay purchase, and you dont know what its going to be. I had seen a bunch of pictures, but you just dont know. But it turned out perfect. Its basically brand new. Ive had to do absolutely nothing to it.

Q: Whats it like driving a small Japanese fire truck in San Francisco?

A: Its so fun to drive. Its a Kei vehicle, and thats a legal classification. Basically theyre required by law to be small. Because of that its designed to be a local use vehicle; its not really meant for highway travel. Its top speed, if theres a tailwind, is about 60 miles per hour.

But below 50, its actually very quick. It drives more like a Jeep than a Volkswagen Bug. Its very torque-y. It loves the hills  it sprints up San Francisco hills like you wouldnt believe. Bernal Heights is actually a lot like a small Japanese town, so driving around here just feels comfortable.

It kind of feels like driving a goat. It just has that goat-like energy. Lets go! Lets go!

Courtesy Todd Lappin

Q: The Instagram feels like youre going on fun adventures, as if Kiri is a tourist from out of town or an exchange student.

A: It makes even driving across town to do an errand feel like an epic road trip in the best way. Its not about the distance; its about the time and the things that happen along the way. Well pick a food goal on the other side of town. My family really needs a Portuguese egg tart from Mr. Bread over on Taraval. And then you have all these little adventures along the way.

And it brings out the absolute best in people. The best analogy is walking down the street with a puppy, in the way that everybody becomes their nicest, sweetest, best-behaved self. Doesnt matter  men, women, young, old. They stop and laugh and have kind of a confused look on their faces. Its just priceless.

Q: What are the specs on Kiri?

A: The tires are 12-inch wheels. Just for context, most cars these days are at least 17 inches. Its 131 inches long.

Its hard to tell whats 131 inches so heres an easy comparison: Its 2 feet shorter than a Mazda Miata. Not 2 inches, 2 feet. Its unfortunate theyre not very easy to get. In the city these vehicles make so much sense.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

Q: In an emergency situation, could the tiny fire truck put out a fire?

A: Absolutely. The answer to that is absolutely yes. And thats a scenario we plan for.  One of my cars is always in Sonoma. So (Kiri) does spend time in Sonoma quite a bit, in an area that has burned twice in the past five years. So its not a theoretical scenario.

It came as a bare truck, not with any of the firefighting equipment. So some of the fun has been putting all of that back together. These kinds of fire trucks never had a water tank, because they use suction. They use streams, rice paddies or cisterns.  Basically you drop the hose in a water source and then the pump in the back of the truck is removable.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

Q: Your Instagram notes that the PA system is louder than it looks.

A: The PA is super impressive. Ive used it a couple of times. After the election was called, I basically just drove around the city playing When the Saints Go Marching In really loud. ... That was really great. Around Christmas I played some classic holiday tunes. Pumping Tony Bennett and Dean Martin out of the thing.

A friend of mine here in the Bay Area is Japanese, and she was in her high school public address club  thats a thing. And she has really, really good skills. So she recorded some disaster announcements for me, for San Francisco, in English and Japanese. They say There have been confirmed Godzilla sightings in the area. Please remain calm and leave Godzilla alone.

They sound very authentic.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
Five Vietnamese scientists have been listed among the 100 most outstanding researchers in Asia this year by Singapores Asian Scientist magazine.

The 100 in the list have made contributions to solving urgent global issues such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic or have made breakthroughs in their own fields.

Le Thi Quynh Mai of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology Vietnam in Hanoi leads a team of women researchers who were awarded the 2019 Vietnamese Kovalevskaia Award for their successful isolation of a new strain of the novel coronavirus.

Her team has spent the last two decades fighting deadly diseases, most notably SARS, A/H5N1 bird flu and H1N1.

Tran Thi Thu Ha from Thai Nguyen University in the northern province of the same name also won the 2019 Vietnamese Kovalevskaia Award for her research into the breeding and intensive cultivation of trees, the propagation and rearing of non-timber forest products and medicinal herbs and the development of medicinal plants.

Vuong Thi Ngoc Lan from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy was one of three recipients of the 2020 Ta Quang Buu Awards, an annual prize given by the Ministry of Science and Technology to encourage and honor scientists with outstanding achievements in basic research in the fields of natural sciences and engineering, for her research comparing the transfer of fresh and frozen embryos for in vitro fertilization.

Pham Tien Son of Da Lat University was also a recipient of the 2020 Ta Quang Buu Awards for his studies into generic properties for semi-algebraic programs.

Nguyen Truong Thanh Hieu of HCMCs Ton Duc Thang University was yet another recipient of the 2020 Ta Quang Buu Awards for his studies into determining electron inelastic mean free paths in materials. The inelastic mean free path (IMFP) is an index of how far an electron on average travels through a solid before losing energy.

(From top L to bottom R) Scientists Tran Thi Thu Ha, Vuong Thi Ngoc Lan, Le Thi Quynh Mai, Pham Tien Son and Nguyen Truong Thanh Hieu. Photos courtesy of Asian Scientist.

Every year since 2016 the Asian Scientist Magazine has been compiling a list of the continents most outstanding researchers to celebrate the success of the regions best and brightest, highlighting their achievements across a range of scientific disciplines.

To make the list, scientists must have received a national or international prize in the preceding year for their research, made a significant scientific discovery or provided leadership in academia or industry.

Asian Scientist is published by a team of professional science and medical journalists with contributions from industry and academia.
MCLEAN, VA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Inspirit Senior Living ("Inspirit") and Venue Capital ("Vencap") co-sponsored a joint venture with Drake Real Estate Partners ("Drake") to acquire a 79-unit, assisted living and memory care community located in Lecanto, FL. The property, formerly known as Brookdale Citrus, will be rebranded to The Reserve at Citrus in connection with a large-scale renovation project.

The renovation will transform the community into a welcoming and restorative environment for both residents and visitors, with comfortable furnishings paired with artwork that reflects and celebrates everything Citrus County has to offer. In addition to the interior enhancements, the renovation will establish pleasant outdoor spaces, inviting residents and their families to enjoy the vast grounds available.

Like other Inspirit communities, The Reserve at Citrus offers assisted living and Inspirit's Sage Program, which is specifically designed for the memory impaired. The Sage Program's mission is to honor its residents - creating meaningful interactions, in safe hands, while working within its residents' memories and abilities.

Dave McHarg, Chief Executive Officer of Inspirit, said, "We're honored to welcome the residents, their families, and the heroes working at this community into the Inspirit family. It is our mission to provide great care and service to residents at an affordable price and in a setting where residents can feel safe, proud to call home, and thrive."

Michael Goldberg, Chief Executive Officer of Vencap added, "We continue our steadfast approach to finding attractive opportunities, while working with great partners and enhancing the lives of seniors."

Nicolas Ibanez, co-founder of Drake Real Estate Partners remarked, "We're thrilled with this follow-on acquisition as we grow our partnership with Inspirit and Vencap, bringing high quality, resident centric assets to the central Florida market. Drake has been focused on the senior housing sector for some time - and we see a very interesting moment to invest driven by a fundamentally temporary dislocation - but more importantly, we remain enthused by the tailwinds this property type offers, driven by longer term demographic shifts."

ABOUT INSPIRIT SENIOR LIVING

Inspirit Senior Living is an owner/operator of senior living communities in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and Southern regions of the United States. Founded in 2015 by some of the senior-care industry's most respected leaders, Inspirit aims to identify under-performing struggling communities and to acquire, modernize, and professionalize them, taking advantage of the network's economies of scale while preserving each property's home-like atmosphere and the individual attention to each resident that defines a successful senior living experience. Inspirit is committed to be a force for good in every community where it operates, creating good jobs, contributing to the local economy, and above all, providing senior care that respects the dignity and gifts of every resident. For more information, visit inspiritseniorliving.com

ABOUT VENUE CAPITAL LLC

Venue Capital LLC is a New York City based investment and asset management firm dedicated to the seniors housing sector. Vencap partners with premier regional operators to provide exceptional experiences for residents while enhancing value for investors. Vencap targets well-located properties that can be improved through superior operations, strategic capital improvements, and steadfast asset management oversight. The combined components of real estate, hospitality, needs-driven service, and demographic tailwinds make seniors housing a unique asset class that offers the opportunity for both growth potential and consistent performance. Vencap currently owns 13 senior living communities in the Southern and Midwestern regions of the United States. For more information, visit venuecapital.com.

ABOUT DRAKE REAL ESTATE PARTNERS

Founded in 2012, Drake Real Estate Partners is a real estate investment and asset management firm based in New York City. Drake seeks to invest in high quality, income-producing real estate assets at a significant discount to replacement cost, and drives value by focusing on repositioning, leasing, and improving operations. Drake uses the flexible, long term nature of its capital to its advantage by seeking out opportunities that have been overlooked by other investors. Drake has completed over $1.5 billion in transactions to date and has invested across a variety of geographies and property types, including multifamily, industrial, office (including medical office and creative office), self-storage, senior housing, retail, and hospitality.

To further impact the local communities in which Drake invests, the firm has partnered with 1% for the Planet, a conservation-focused nonprofit whose mission and values are consistent with those of Drake's founders. Drake donates 1% of the firm's annual revenues to nonprofit conservation-related initiatives in the markets in which it invests. Specific to its investments in Florida, Drake is partnering with The Everglades Foundation, a well-respected authoritative source for scientific research on the Everglades. The Everglades Foundation, with support from Drake, is pursuing a study to understand the effects of climate change on the natural ecosystems and industries of Florida. For more information on The Everglades Foundation, visit evergladesfoundation.org. For more information on Drake Real Estate Partners, visit drakerep.com.

CONTACT:

David McHarg, CEO

703-815-5800

dmcharg@inspiritseniorliving.com

Related Images

SOURCE: Inspirit Senior Living

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/642975/Inspirit-Senior-Living-and-Venue-Capital-Add-to-Southeast-Senior-Living-Platform-in-Partnership-With-Drake-Real-Estate-Partners
Downing Street today rejected claims Boris Johnson visited the Covid Memorial Wall in central London in secret in the evening to 'dodge' meeting bereaved families.

The Prime Minister went to the memorial located next to the River Thames in Westminster on Tuesday night.

Campaigners accused the PM of visiting 'under cover of darkness' as they blasted him for failing to respond to a formal invitation to attend the memorial to meet people who have lost loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic.

But Number 10 said Mr Johnson had undertaken a 'private visit' in order to hold a moment of 'quiet reflection'.

Boris Johnson, pictured today during a visit to school in Marylebone, London, went to the Covid Memorial Wall on Tuesday evening

Campaigners accused the PM of visiting 'under cover of darkness' in order to 'dodge' meeting bereaved families

Mr Johnson's visit was not announced to the press ahead of time and no cameras were present.

Asked if he had timed the visit to avoid meeting bereaved families, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said: 'No. He went Tuesday evening. This was a private visit.

'As many others have done the Prime Minister visited the Covid Memorial Wall in private for quiet reflection.'

The memorial wall, located opposite Parliament on the south bank of the River Thames, consists of more than 150,000 individually hand-painted hearts representing every person who has died with Covid-19 listed on their death certificate.

It was coordinated by the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group which is pushing for an independent and judge-led inquiry into the crisis.

The campaign group is considering legal action against the Government as it demands ministers set a date for the probe.

Co-founder Matt Fowler said: 'For weeks we've asked him to come to the wall and meet bereaved families. He's refused to even acknowledge our request.

'Then, the day after it's revealed he said he'd let "bodies pile high", he makes a late evening visit under cover of darkness, just so that he can dodge meeting bereaved families.

'This is a cynical and insincere move that is deeply hurtful. Our invitation for him to walk the wall with families who've lost loved ones is still open, and we await a response.'

Mr Johnson has repeatedly denied saying he would rather let 'bodies pile high' than impose a third coronavirus lockdown.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited the memorial earlier this month and said the time for an independent probe into the Government's handling of the pandemic 'must be coming close'

A Number 10 spokeswoman said: 'The Prime Minister offers his deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one during this very difficult pandemic.

'On Tuesday the Prime Minister visited the Covid Memorial Wall in private for quiet reflection.'

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, visited the memorial wall earlier this month and said the time for an independent probe into the Government's handling of the pandemic 'must be coming close'.

He said a formal investigation into the handling of the pandemic should focus on 'lessons to be learned' and that it should be 'very independent' and 'very wide-ranging'.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell will announce the latest update to the city's coronavirus restrictions at a press conference Thursday morning.

Cantrell is expected to ease the city's restrictions  which currently limit restaurants and some other businesses to 75 percent of their pre-pandemic capacity, among other rules.

The new rules come on the heels of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards lifting the state's requirement to wear masks in most public places and private businesses. Edwards' order also includes a host of other new rules, but he also left open the possibility for local governments or business owners to set their own.

On Wednesday, Cantrell announced that New Orleans will continue to require masking.

Cantrell's press conference is expected to start at 10 a.m. You can watch and follow live updates from Cantrell's announcement below.

Can't see live updates below? Click here.
One of Boston Dynamics' robotic dogs in Lisbon during a tech summit in November 2019

New York police will stop using a robotic dog similar to ones that inspired an episode of dystopian Netflix series "Black Mirror" after a backlash over its deployment, the force said Thursday.

The NYPD ended its contract with manufacturer Boston Dynamics over the remote controlledfour-legged machine, which police dubbed "Digidog"on April 22, a spokesperson confirmed to AFP.

The force had rented the futuristic fido last year, with chiefs declaring that the AI device would help "save lives, protect people and protect officers."

The robots, the standard model of which Boston Dynamics calls "Spot," are able to navigate tricky terrain and dodge obstacles as they collect information by photographing and filming their surroundings.

The NYPD sparked outrage when it tested Digidog during an arrest in a public housing building in Manhattan in February before using it in a hostage situation in the Bronx earlier this month.

Critics also said the robots illustrated the increased militarization of US police.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the dog as a "robotic surveillance ground drone" while the American Civil Liberties Union expressed fear that if unchecked it could one day make law enforcement decisions.

New York's counterterrorism chief John Miller told The New York Times that the dog would be returned to Boston Dynamics because it had become a "target" for people who criticized the police.

The $94,000 contract was initially due to run until August.

"Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker has said that Boston Dynamics' robotic dogs influenced the 2017 episode "Metalhead" in which the main characters try to flee from violent four-legged robots following the collapse of society.

Explore further Largest police force in the US steps into the drone age

 2021 AFP
Navalnys sentence for defaming Great Patriotic War veteran upheld

 Moscow's Babushkinsky District Court

13:38 29/04/2021

MOSCOW, April 29 (RAPSI)  Moscows Babushkinsky District Court on Thursday upheld an 850,000-ruble fine ($11,500) imposed on Alexey Navalny as a punishment for defaming veteran of the Great Patriotic War Ignat Artemenko, RAPSI reports from the courtroom.

Navalny took part in the hearing through videolink.

In February, the court found the blogger guilty of defamation and ordered him to pay the fine for his statements about the veteran.

In early June 2020, Russia Today TV channel published a video where the 93-year Artemenko and other respondents were reading the Constitution preamble. Following that, Navalny released a video with comments on his social networks insulting the veteran. He pled not guilty.

In February, Moscows Simonovsky District Court overturned a suspended sentence given to Navalny in the Ives Rocher embezzlement case and ordered him to 3.5 years in jail. On February 20, the Moscow City Court upheld the ruling.

Currently, the blogger is serving sentence in a penal colony in Pokrov, a town in the Vladimir Region.
Patong gets a new mayor as election results confirmed

PHUKET: Chalermsak Maneesri has been confirmed as the new Mayor of Patong following formal confirmation of the Mar 28 municipality election results yesterday (Apr 28).

patongpolitics

By The Phuket News

Thursday 29 April 2021, 11:40AM

Chalermsak Maneesri, now confirmed as the new Mayor of Patong, offers a wai to people along the street during his campaign to office. Photo: Patong Palang Mai Party

The Phuket office of the Election Commission of Thailand (PEC) posted the formal notices confirming the election of mayors and councillors at the 12 municipalities in Phuket yesterday afternoon (Apr 28).

The notices confirmed only the names of the winning candidates, not the final tally of confirmed votes for each position.

In accepting his election victory, Mr Chalermsak in a video posted on the Patong Palang Mai Party (Patong New Power Party) Facebook page said Thank you for all the votes and the trust from my sisters and brothers in Patong. During these four years, I will work my best. I will not disappoint you all. I will be a normal person like I have always been for my whole life. If you have any problems, you can come and meet me anytime. Thank you so much

Now that the ECT has approved [the election results], fixing the beachfront road is the first issue that we will work on.

In the preliminary vote count, Mr Chalermsak bested previous Patong Mayor Chalermluck Kebsup by 2,924 votes to 2,811.

Pakrit Keesin, who also contested the seat of Patong Mayor, garnered 2,686 votes.

The PEC initially noted that of the 13,503 eligible voters in Patong, 8,887 votes cast, with 8,421 votes deemed valid.

The PEC yesterday also confirmed the 19 candidates who have been elected to serve as the new Patong Town Council.

However, of the confirmed election results announced yesterday, the seats for three Phuket mayors have yet to be confirmed.

The 18 councilors elected for Phuket Town have been confirmed, but not the mayor; the 18 councilors elected for Kathu have been confirmed, but not the mayor; and the 12 councilors elected for Pa Khlok have been confirmed, but not the mayor.

The three mayors who have not been approved are still being reviewed by the ECT in Bangkok, Passakon Siripakayapon, Director of the Phuket office of the Election Commission (PEC), told The Phuket News this morning (Apr 29).

However, the ECT has 60 days after the election day to review the qualifications of the elected persons and announce the successful candidates. The 60 days will expire on May 27, he added.

In the meantime, the councillors who have been approved to take office can start work in their new positions, Mr Passakon said.

They can start work and choose the council head and deputy head. Later, in accordance with the Municipality Act, the provincial governor must call the mayor and council members to have their first full meeting, he said.

The other successful candidates elected to the position of mayor in their municipal areas announced yesterday were as follows:

Chalong: Thanaporn Ongsantiphap

Preliminary count:

1 Thanaporn Ongsantiphap - 6,203 votes

2 Samran Jindaphol - 5,099 votes

3 Somchai Thechathaworncharoen - 339 votes

Eligible voters: 19,282

Votes cast: 12,266

Votes deemed valid: 11,641

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Rawai: Aroon Solos

Preliminary count:

1 Aroon Solos - 5,582 votes

Eligible voters: 12,646

Votes cast: 7,327

Votes deemed valid: 5,582

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Rassada: Nakarin Yorsaengrat

Preliminary count:

1 Nakarin Yorsaengrat - 12,401 votes

2 Somkit Suphap - 5,325 votes

Eligible voters: 35,217

Votes cast: 20,024

Votes deemed valid: 17,726

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Wichit: Kreetha Chotiwichpipan

Preliminary count:

1 Kreetha Chotiwichpipan - 12,827 votes

Eligible voters: 38,793

Votes cast: 18,023

Votes deemed valid: 12,827

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Srisoonthorn: Chalermphon Kertsup

Preliminary count:

1 Chalermphon Kertsup - 8,410 votes

Eligible voters: 19,209

Votes cast: 10,460

Votes deemed valid: 8,410

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Thepkrasattri: Prasong Trairat

Preliminary count:

1 Prasong Trairat - 2,867 votes

2 Wittaya Sinkha - 1,052 votes

Eligible voters: 6,018

Votes cast: 4,192

Votes deemed valid: 3,919

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Cherng Talay: Suniran Rachatapluk

Preliminary count:

1 Suniran Rachatapluk - 2,001 votes

2 Aphisit Nganprasertkit - 828 votes

Eligible voters: 4,124

Votes cast: 2,964

Votes deemed valid: 2,829

- 12 councilors now confirmed

Karon: Jadet Wicharasorn

Preliminary count:

1 Jadet Wicharasorn - 2,312 votes

2 Ittiphon Sangkaew - 1,370 votes

Eligible voters: 5,572

Votes cast: 3,888

Votes deemed valid: 3,682

- 12 councilors now confirmed
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs), long-term collaborations between researchers, policy makers and practitioners, represent an especially promising strategy for making sure that all children benefit from early childhood education, according to a journal released today by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

The journal, Future of Children, edited by Daphna Bassok of the University of Virginia and Pamela Morris of New York University's Steinhardt School, argues that RPPs are crucial for solving today's most pressing question in early childhood educationhow to deliver high-quality prekindergarten programs at scale.

"Too often there is a disconnect between the questions researchers tackle and the ones that are more urgent and salient for policy makers or practitioners," said Bassok. "The findings from rigorous, well-designed research studies may not be particularly useful for addressing the real-life complexity that educators and policymakers face."

"The idea of research practice partnerships is that through close collaborations, researchers can do work that really helps policy makers address the big problems they are tackling and do the work fast enough to actually inform change," continued Morris. "Our hope is that this journal makes that clear."

RPPs are Designed to Improve Educational Outcomes

RPPs are defined by longevity, mutual decision-making and compromise, and the commitment of both parties to large-scale, systems-level problem solving, rather than a single project or research question.

In study after study, early childhood education programs developed by researchers have shown large benefits, holding out the promise of substantially narrowing the achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off peers. But when cities and states establish large-scale prekindergarten programs, Bassok and Morris noted, the results are often far more modest. The important questions today aren't about whether early childhood education "works," but about how to invest limited resources to improve the quality of large-scale prekindergarten programs, support the early childhood workforce, and reach the children who need the most help.

"Delivering effective early childhood education at scale remains elusive," said Bassok. "Findings from promising research studies rarely make their way into early childhood practice; at the same time, policy and practice decisions are often made without research evidence to guide them."

That's partly because policy makers and practitioners have different priorities and work on different timelines than researchers do. Through collaboration, compromise, and long-term commitment, RPPs can help bridge the gap and produce research that's relevant and useful to policy makers and practitioners, while at the same time offering scholars opportunities for broad and innovative research wouldn't be possible in one-off studies of a single program or topic.

The Journal is a User Manual for Partnerships

Each article in the journal describes how a successful early childhood RPP confronted a major challenge or exploited an unexpected opportunity in the process of working together to create a research or funding agenda, develop measurement tools, take innovation to scale, navigate conflicting timelines, find a balance between academic rigor and feasibility, or build research capacity. In this sense, the journal offers both a user manual and a road map for future partnerships to follow.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the benefits of RPPs," Morris said. "Where RPPs were in place, researchers used their familiarity with the local context to help ease the sudden transition to remote learning."

For example, as COVID-19 spread in New York City, researchers in an established RPP there quickly assembled materials about remote learning, including a tool kit for teachers citywide, and offered resources to answer policy makers' most urgent questions.

"The pandemic has created large gaps in the services provided to our youngest learners, and opened the door for new collaborations as policy systems race to meet children's needs," continued Morris. "In this context, RPPs can support efforts to rebuild and reimagine early childhood education systems that can help all of our nation's children acquire strong foundations for kindergarten and beyond."

Explore further Pandemic highlights urgent need to address America's child development woes
Looking at spreadsheets and map plots of trees is far beyond Rhian Brynjolsons typical day as a visual artist, but she became entranced and inspired by data collected by Canadian scientists for a new art project.

Looking at spreadsheets and map plots of trees is far beyond Rhian Brynjolsons typical day as a visual artist, but she became entranced and inspired by data collected by Canadian scientists for a new art project.

Her hope is to try and bring the numbers, map dots and statistics to life in a new way to help the public better connect to climate science.

SUPPLIED Rhian Brynjolsons Life Support

Falcon Lakes Brynjolson is one of 12 Canadian artists who participated in an art-science collaboration exhibit, co-ordinated by the Global Water Futures program out of the University of Saskatchewan. The project saw the artists paired with researchers and scientists across the country who then engaged in conversations to try to inspire a new angle to their art.

"The whole idea behind it is: water is life," says Louise Arnal, the project lead, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Hydrology and Coldwater Laboratory.

The project focuses on water but brings climate change to the foreground, Arnal explains, since it will affect hydrology in so many ways. The art exhibit examines climate effects such as permafrost thaw, the degradation of Albertas Peyto glacier and the vulnerability of groundwater sources.

"Science does not always involve people emotionally, so that is why we need to add this creative, emotionally connective component," Arnal says.

Brynjolson was paired with the University of Waterloos Jennifer Baltzer, the Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change; together they started talking about permafrost thaw and its impact on forest ecology.

SUPPLIED Brynjolsons Holes

"It was a pretty steep learning curve, I have to say," Brynjolson says.

"Our conversations evolved to include links to academic papers, and so on. And it was very interesting listening to her speak. Shes very passionate about what she is talking about; very knowledgeable. But what was also interesting was I thought that I was pretty aware of climate change and the rate at which it was happening, but what theyre discovering in the North about how quickly permafrost is thawing is, is pretty alarming."

She quickly became focused on the increasing prevalence of drunken trees  trees or entire swaths of forest that lean at angles out of the ground as the thawing permafrost weakens the trees anchors in the soil.

"I built a mobile. You know, the idea of hanging by a thin thread. But then I started painting and what became really interesting to me was to look at the data, to look at the graphs and the plot grids, the maps of tagged trees they were keeping track of, and then superimposing that on the landscape," Brynjolson says.

Tricia Stadnyk, an associate professor who specializes in hydrology at the University of Calgary, says she was excited about being asked to work on the project, but that it was far from her comfort zone.

"I was actually super-nervous coming into this project. When they asked me to participate, Im like, Oh no, I cant do this. Im probably the furthest removed from an artist that anybody can possibly be. I draw stick people, right?" Stadnyk says with a laugh.

She was paired with Manitoba artist Bob Haverluck to explore the impact of the Manitoba Hydro Churchill River diversion into the Nelson River. She was floored by how freeing it was to think of all she knew from a new perspective, she says.

Using photos from before and after hydro generating stations were established, Stadnyk and Haverluck engaged in emotional discussions about what they were bearing witness to.

SUPPLIED In Grieving Forests, Manitoba artist Bob Haverluck explores the impact of the Manitoba Hydro Churchill River diversion into the Nelson River.

"And then thinking about the effects of climate change and participating with all the other artists and scientists who were doing the same. There were a couple times that a few of us on the call were, like, tearing up, because it really is disheartening, scary," Stadnyk says.

Working in a field where science and data are typically detached from emotion, Stadnyk says the experience helped deepen her connection to her work, but she adds that it isnt something all scientists would be willing to explore.

Haverluck hopes his pieces documenting the changes in the Nelson River system serve as a reminder that even Manitobas so-called clean energy has a substantial cost to it.

"Theres a way in which the North is sort of non-existent for the south. We know our electricity comes from up there, theres dams up there. But the edge of cottage country has long been seen as the end of Lake Winnipeg (to southerners), which has long been a problem. So part of it is to remind the South whats happening in the North to which our life is tied, our lights and heat are tied," Haverluck says.

SUPPLIED Haverluck's River Music Wreck.

Brynjolson hopes to see more collaborations between artists and scientists to help reframe how we view human relationships with the planet.

"I think what these conversations between artists and scientists can help us do is imagine the scenarios more fully; use surprising metaphors that jolt us out of our comfort zones and our now-outdated patterns of thinking; provide images that depict the seriousness of what the data is revealing  and also show the heartbreaking beauty of whats being lost."

The Virtual Water Gallery opens online April 29 at www.virtualwatergallery.ca.

sarah.lawrynuik@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @SarahLawrynuik
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-28 19:54:30|Editor: huaxia

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A prototype space mining spacecraft was sent into its planned orbit on Tuesday from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China's Shanxi Province.

The spacecraft NEO-01, developed by Chinese commercial aerospace company Origin Space Co., Ltd., was among a total of nine satellites sent into space by a Long March-6 rocket on Tuesday.

Su Meng, founder of Origin Space, said experiments will be carried out to test the spacecraft's capabilities in asteroid mining and space debris removal.

Su added that NEO-01 will serve as a prototype of future space mining robots, which can use rich mineral resources on asteroids to support the development of the space industry.

Founded in 2019 and based in the southern Chinese tech hub Shenzhen, Origin Space has been dedicated to exploring and utilizing space resources, according to the company.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Shares in Google parent Alphabet leapt higher after the tech giant's profits more than doubled to 143million per day.

The company's internet advertising sales have rocketed as the pandemic drives more people towards online services.

That helped Google's revenues, mostly from advertising, to rise from 29.6billion to 39.7billion in the first three months of this year, with profits surging up from 4.9billion to 12.9billion.

Google's internet advertising sales have rocketed as the pandemic drives more people towards online services

It beat forecasts by Wall Street analysts, who had predicted revenues of 30.5billion. Google's shares surged as much as 6 per cent higher yesterday.

Technology rival Apple was also set to unveil massive earnings for the same period, boosted by strong demand for the company's gadgets.

The iPhone maker was expected to post second-quarter sales of 55.6billion, up by a third, and profits of 12billion, a rise of almost half.

Tech giants have emerged as the major winners from the pandemic, as lockdown restrictions have pushed families and businesses to rely more heavily on digital devices and services at home.

For Google, that translated into an extra 7.8billion worth of ad sales during the first quarter as businesses followed consumers online, including on its video streaming platform, Youtube.

Sales at its cloud computing division, which provides data storage and website hosting, rose by 913million.

The social networking giant Facebook, which also makes most of its money from ads, is thought to have increased sales by one-third.

Sundar Pichai, Google owner Alphabet's boss, said: 'Over the last year, people have turned to google search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained.

'We have continued our focus on delivering trusted services to help people around the world.'

He added: 'Our cloud services are helping businesses, big and small, accelerate their digital transformations.'

The results are also being seen as a sign that Google services such as search and Youtube may hold on to the gains that they have made during the pandemic.

Some 17 per cent of people in the US, which is the company's biggest market, had been given Covid-19 vaccines by the end of the first quarter, and in-person dining resumed in many cities last month.

Philipp Schindler, who is Google's chief business officer, said that consumers 'are spending more time online. They're buying more online.'

However, Alphabet finance chief Ruth Porat warned that it was still not certain that the acceleration of the shift to digital would last.

'It's too early to forecast the extent to which these changes in consumer behaviour and advertising spend will endure,' she told analysts.
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Notorious gangster Reggie Kray was fame-obsessed and kept a scrapbook charting his and brother Ronnie's first brushes with the law, a new documentary reveals.

A clip from the upcoming documentary series Secrets of The Krays, which airs on streaming platform BritBox, shows Reggie's personal scrapbook for the first time.

In there, he pasted articles which detailed his and his brother's early crimes in the 1950s. One article headline displayed by crime researcher Ray Rose in the programme reads: 'Youth beaten up by gang'.

Another details the 'razor threat' made by Reggie to a 'girl witness' after an attack in which the pair used bicycle and old-fashioned lavatory chains, as well as coshes, as weapons.

Ronnie and Reggie went on to be involved in murder, armed robbery, assault and arson, as well as the running of protection rackets.

The nightclub owners mixed with politicians and prominent entertainers including Barbara Windsor and Frank Sinatra.

Their misdeeds finally came to an end when they were arrested in 1968 before being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment a year later.

Pictured: Early police mugshots of Reggie which are seen in the upcoming Secrets of The Krays, which airs on streaming platform BritBox

In the new series, which is available from May 13, Mr Rose reveals the scrapbook and says that Reggie stuck articles 'lovingly' into it over a 15-year period.

He said the book is a 'hugely important' document which reveals how Reggie, who was born with his brother in Haggerston, East London, in October 1933, 'wanted to be famous' from an early age.

On article from March 1950, when Reggie was aged just 16, quotes a magistrate in an article headlined: 'Youth beaten up by gang'.

Mr Rose said: 'The magistrate states this boy has been beaten by beasts, these people think theyre above the law, they have to be taught a lesson.'

A second article headline refers to a razor threat made to a girl who witnessed one of Reggie's crimes.

'So in the text, a prosecution witness had been threatened that if she gave evidence the razor would be put across her face,' Mr Rose said.

'The article goes on to list the specific weapons used in the attack. A piece of bicycle chain, two lavatory chains with handles. And a cosh. Its quite a vicious attack. This is the start of them appearing in the press.'

Notorious gangster Reggie Kray was fame-obsessed and kept a scrapbook (pictured) charting his and brother Ronnie's first brushes with the law, a new documentary reveals

In the scrapbook, Reggie pasted articles which detailed his and his brother's early crimes in the 1950s. One article headline displayed by crime researcher Ray Rose in the programme reads: 'Youth beaten up by gang'

Another details the 'razor threat' made by Reggie to a 'girl witness' after an attack in which the pair used bicycle and old-fashioned lavatory chains, as well as coshes, as weapons

On article from March 1950, when Reggie was aged just 16, quotes a magistrate in an article headlined: 'Youth beaten up by gang'. Mr Rose said: 'The magistrate states this boy has been beaten by beasts...'

The magistrate added: 'These people think theyre above the law, they have to be taught a lesson'

Ronnie and Reggie went on to be involved in murder, armed robbery, assault and arson, as well as the running of protection rackets. The nightclub owners mixed with politicians and prominent entertainers including Barbara Windsor and Frank Sinatra. Their misdeeds finally came to an end when they were arrested in 1968 before being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment a year later. Pictured: The pair in 1965

'All through the 50s there are instances of them getting involved in scraps, getting involved in some more serious fights as they got older,' he added.

The show will also feature interviews with people who knew the Krays best, including former fellow gang members, surviving relatives and close friends.

Celebrity photographer David Bailey, who famously photographed the brothers, also features.

And Micky Fawcett, who was a key member of 'The Firm' - the Krays' East End gang - from its early days speaks for the first time.

Reggie Kray with actress Barbara Windsor and her then husband Ronnie Knight, an associate of the Krays, at the twins' El Morocco nightclub, in Soho, London, 30th April 1965

As well as Reggie's scrapbook, personal photographs and audio recordings which he made while in prison are also revealed in the show.

Viewers will also see poem which Ronnie wrote to his brother, as well as files on the siblings compiled by MI5.

After their conviction for murder in 1969, the pair were sentenced to life imprisonment, Ronnie was committed to Broadmoor Hospital in 1979 and remained there until his death from a heart attack in March 1995.

Reggie was released from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2000. He died two months later from bladder cancer.

Watch Secrets of the Krays on BritBox from May 13.

The Daily Mail's coverage after Ronne and Reggie were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969
[April 29, 2021] Clever and Google Partner to Streamline Access to Google Classroom

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Google has selected Clever, one of the most widely used digital learning platforms in the U.S., to provide automated rostering for Google Classroom, starting this Back to School season. With increased digital learning and more teachers turning to Google Classroom as the home for classroom assignments and discussions, many educators and school leaders have been looking for a way to automatically set up classes and keep rosters in sync with their Student Information System. Starting this summer, school districts with Google Workspace for Education Plus will be able to use Clever to sync all their Classroom classes, saving time for teachers and ensuring equitable access for all students. Districts who have purchased Google Workspace for Education Plus and use Clever will be able to sync rosters directly to Google Classroom fro any Student Information System. Once a school technology administrator sets up Google Classroom via Clever, teachers will no longer need to manually create and invite students to join their classes, saving teachers time and enabling them to focus on what they do best: helping students reach their full potential.



As the global pandemic drove instruction online last year, teachers accelerated the integration of digital learning tools into their teaching practices. On the Clever platform alone, which serves 65% of K-12 schools in the U.S., app usage increased by 92% last year alone. And, today, more than 150 million students and educators worldwide rely on Google Classroomup from 40 million at the beginning of 2020. "Educators have overcome incredible obstacles this past year to support student learning," said Tyler Bosmeny, Chief Executive Officer of Clever. "Through this new partnership with Google Classroom, we're proud to be removing one of those obstacles: making sure every teacher's digital classroom will be fully set up and ready for learning on the first day of school."

"Setting up classes has often been a manual, time consuming distraction for teachers," said Shantanu Sinha, lead for Google for Education. "This new partnership will simplify workflows and empower educators to focus on what they do best: helping students reach their full potential." "COVID-19 has fundamentally changed education; the adoption and understanding behind technology has increased in students and teachers. In a district our size, manually updating information is a difficult and time-consuming task for all involved," said Erick Buenrostro, Digital Resource & Content Specialist for Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso, TX. "The integration between Google Classroom and Clever allows our district teachers to spend their valuable time preparing their academic resources for the school year ahead. With this tool, our teachers will have up-to-date rosters in their Google Classrooms, ensuring students and staff have 24/7 access, are secure, and are ready to learn." The Clever integration for Google Classroom will be available for U.S. districts using Google Workspace for Education Plus this upcoming school year. To learn more, please visit https://go.clever.com/googleclassroomrostering About Clever

Clever is on a mission to unlock new ways to learn for all students. More than 65% of U.S. K-12 schools now use Clever to simplify access and improve engagement with digital learning. With our free platform for schools and a network of leading application providers, we're committed to advancing educational equity. Clever has offices in San Francisco, CA and Durham, NC but you can visit us at clever.com anytime. For Clever:

Liz Stein, 240.461.3053, liz.stein@whiteboardadvisors.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/clever-and-google-partner-to-streamline-access-to-google-classroom-301279747.html SOURCE Clever

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A MEDIATOR within the Travelling community received a month suspended sentence for assaulting a 73-year-old after a sulky crash.

Last November, Martin McDonagh, aged 66, of Riverview Estate, Kilmallock, had pleaded not guilty to assault causing harm and dangerous driving at Riversfield, Kilmallock, on September 9, 2018.

However, after a lengthy contested case in Kilmallock Court, Judge Marian OLeary adjourned the matter to December to give her decision. She found Mr McDonagh guilty of assault causing harm but not guilty of dangerous driving.

The judge gave an overview of the 73-year-old injured partys evidence.

He was on his way to his sons residence on a straight stretch of road. He saw flashing lights but kept going because there was space for the driver (Mr McDonagh) to pull in. He said he saw a horse behind the jeep (driven by Mr McDonagh) and stopped to let it pass.

He said Mr McDonagh opened his jeep door and began punching him into the face. He said his glasses fell off and his hearing aid was knocked out. After he drove off he turned the dashcam around, said Judge OLeary.

This footage was played at the original hearing. It showed blood coming from the 73-year-olds nose and on his jumper. Mr McDonagh can be heard shouting: My son could have been killed. Come out you c***. Who do you think you are? I waved you down. You want to be careful, boss.

The judge summarised the defences case by saying Mr McDonagh was driving a jeep with his son in a sulky behind him.

He said a jeep (driven by the injured party) was 200 metres away, did not slow down and forced him off the road causing the sulky and pony to run into the back of Mr McDonaghs jeep.

They said the injured party hit his head off the steering wheel and there was no noise on the dashcam suggesting somebody had been struck, said Judge OLeary.

The case was adjourned until last week for a victim impact statement. Judge Patricia Harney presided following Judge OLeary taking up a new role in Cork.

Reading from the victim impact statement, Judge Harney said the pensioner felt terrified and trapped during the assault.

He said he was assaulted repeatedly by blows to the head. He said his hearing aid was blown out of his ear. He felt disorientated and didnt know what to do. His nose was bleeding for 20 minutes.

Since the incident he is living in fear of it happening again as he travels that road regularly. He is fearful of repercussions against himself and his family, read out Judge Harney from the victim impact statement.

Reginald Garrett BL, who represented Mr McDonagh, said his client has never accepted the verdict.

He says he did not assault him. He pleaded not guilty. He was convicted. He is 66-years-old. He was married for 43 years, has 10 children and 24 grandchildren.

At the time he was under considerable pressure. His wife was passing away slowly. He acts as a mediator within the travelling community and has worked with gardai. His wife has sadly passed away, said Mr Garrett.

The barrister said it was his clients jeep that was run off the road.

His two grandchildren in the vehicle were very frightened. Mr McDonagh suffers from anxiety, a heart condition, diabetes and depression, said Mr Garrrett.

Judge Harney said she was not going to impose a custodial sentence.

I gave it considerable thought. One month prison sentence suspended, said Judge Harney.

Recognisance was fixed in the event of an appeal.
I began my journalism career in Nashville in 1990, with my current position with Nashville Post having evolved since October 2000 (when I was with the now-defunct The City Paper, a sister publication of the Post starting in 2008).

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BEIJING -- Foreign ministers from China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh held a meeting on coping with COVID-19 on Tuesday via video link.

During the meeting, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi brought forward several proposals on such issues as consolidating consensus on cooperating in the fight against COVID-19, promoting vaccine cooperation, and boosting post-pandemic economic recovery, which were supported by the other foreign ministers. A joint statement on cooperation in fighting the epidemic was also issued after the meeting.

The international community has spoken highly of the proposals, and lauded China for its contributions to the global and regional battle against the pandemic.

NEIGHBORS IN NEED

The resurgence of COVID-19 infections in Nepal started from early April.

The country's health ministry said Sunday that the total tally crossed the 300,000-mark with 3,122 new cases recorded in the last 24 hours. It also reported 28 new deaths from the disease on Sunday, a record high in nearly five months.

Hemanta Chandra Ojha, an official at the health ministry, told Xinhua that due to the high number of hospitalized patients, hospital beds, particularly those in the 15 worst affected districts, are mostly occupied.

In Sri Lanka, the number of the infected reached 102,376 on Tuesday after 997 new cases were reported a day earlier, according to official data.

With the patient count rising in recent days, there was reportedly a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds for the COVID-19 patients in islandwide hospitals.

Sri Lanka has made it mandatory to wear face masks and maintain social distance, and health experts urged the public to stay home.

Besides, the total confirmed cases in Bangladesh have reached 748,628, with 11,150 deaths, while Pakistan has reported 804,939 cases so far with 17,329 deaths and 5,075 critical cases.

ASSISTANCE IN TIME

On Sunday, China handed over a batch of emergency food assistance to Afghanistan.

At the ceremony in Kabul, Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu said China has provided more than 13,000 tons of food aid to Afghanistan in recent years, as well as several batches of medical supplies to fight COVID-19, and will donate vaccine doses soon.

In Pakistan, as the country is facing a serious third wave of COVID-19, the third batch of COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese government was handed over to the Pakistani side on Monday.

The newly-arrived vaccines will help the country build immunity among its society to save lives, Pakistan's Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Omar Ayub Khan said at the handover ceremony.

Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Nong Rong said during the ceremony that Pakistan is not only the first country in the world that the Chinese government provided COVID-19 vaccine aid to, but also the country that has received the largest number of China-donated COVID-19 vaccines so far.

Nepal started administering the COVID-19 vaccines amid resurging cases earlier this month, with a batch of COVID-19 vaccines developed by China's Sinopharm having been delivered to Nepal in late March.

Sri Lanka's president's office has also said that plans are already on to distribute the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine donated by China to Sri Lanka in the next few weeks following the World Health Organization (WHO) 's approval.

"THANK YOU" IN CHORUS

At the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan, the country had little expertise and few medical relief items, which made it struggle, said Saeed Chaudhry, director of the Islamabad Council for International Affairs.

"China sent medics, experts and relief goods in time, which helped Pakistan streamline and systemize its fight against the pandemic backed by a comprehensive policy," he said.

Muzaherul Huq, a former advisor at the WHO, told Xinhua on Tuesday after the foreign ministers' meeting that Bangladesh is "hopeful" of China's proposals to control the COVID-19 pandemic and stabilize the economy.

Afghan expert and political analyst Shamsul Haq Arianfar welcomed China's decision to offer vaccines to his country, saying he and all Afghans would be grateful to China's contributions.

Ajith Dharmawardena, vice president of the Sri Lanka-China Buddhist Friendship Association, told Xinhua that the Chinese government, enterprises and people have provided a large number of medical materials to Sri Lanka to fight the pandemic, and people from all walks of life in Sri Lanka have also supported China in various ways.

In the past, whenever Sri Lanka encountered difficulties, the Chinese government and many ordinary Chinese have expressed their support to Sri Lanka in various ways, he said, adding the cooperation and mutual support during the COVID-19 pandemic have once again fully demonstrated that Sri Lanka and China are long-tested good friends that have shared weal and woe.
ANN ARBOR, MI  A man who pleaded guilty to trying to rob an undercover narcotics officer at gunpoint will not have his case heard by the states high court.

The Michigan Supreme Court issued an order Tuesday, April 27, declining to hear the appeal of Scott Michael Allen who pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges for trying to rob an undercover narcotics officer at gunpoint during a drug deal in 2017 in Washtenaw County.

The order stated the court was not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this court.

The Michigan Court of Appeals previously denied hearing his appeal as well, stating it lacked merit, court records show.

Allen, 31, had pleaded guilty in August of 2018 to charges of armed robbery, unlawful imprisonment, four counts of assaulting, resisting or obstructing police and four weapons charges associated with the incident which occurred May 8, 2017, after Allen arranged to sell heroin and cocaine to the undercover agent, records show.

The officer agreed to meet Allen in the 9400 block of MacArthur Boulevard in Superior Township to buy drugs, but when the undercover officer pulled up and parked his car, Allen jumped in the backseat, armed and without warning, police said.

The undercover officer quickly identified himself and chased Allen out of the vehicle, police said. Allen fled on foot, but was captured a short time later, police said.

Sentencing deal revoked for man who pleaded guilty to robbing undercover cop

Allen was originally set to be sentenced to 11 years in prison as part of a plea offer with a sentencing agreement, but Washtenaw County Trial Judge Carol Kuhnke revoked the deal after finding it fell far below sentencing guidelines.

Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team officials involved in the case called the original 11-year recommendation a slap in the face.

How can anyone believe 11 years is a sufficient sentence when the minimum is 20 years, said the LAWNET detective who was held at gunpoint by Allen during the incident. When he put a gun to my head that day, all I thought to myself was, Did I tell my wife I loved her before I left for work? He wanted me to drive to another location. I know he was going to kill me.

Man sentenced for robbing undercover cop at gunpoint

Allen was later sentenced to 19 to 50 years in prison, consecutive to two years for a felony firearm charge for a minimum of 21 years to serve before he can become eligible for parole. He was given no credit for time served.

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As the number of covid cases in India continues to rise, healthcare facilities are under severe strain. As a result of the increase in cases, hospitals are experiencing severe shortages of beds and other medical resources.

As the number of covid cases in India continues to rise, healthcare facilities are under severe strain. As a result of the increase in cases, hospitals are experiencing severe shortages of beds and other medical resources. Delhis health infrastructure has been overwhelmed by the spike in the number of cases and facing acute shortages of Oxygen beds. Even after getting help from various sources, the Delhi crisis is not abating. On Thursday, Union Health Minister briefed the media about the beds and O2 availability during his visit to the Lady Hardinge Medical College.

A day before yesterday, four tankers of Liquid Medical oxygen reached Delhi. The Delhi HC also asked the central government to resolve the oxygen crisis. Despite the fact that the oxygen shortage has not been resolved, the situation has improved a little bit but logistic issues are still there. Many people, on the other hand, are taking their loved ones to the neighboring states because of the shortage of beds in Delhi. People are still not getting hospital beds, even after the Kejriwal government introduced a real-time data App on bed availability. Doctors and nurses have also been exhausted as a result of working nonstop for the past few weeks.

However, Delhi is not alone in this battle and other states are also witnessing the same scenes. Unavailability of beds in Gujarats Rajkot sparked a ruckus within the hospital, with relatives of covid patient thrashing hospital workers. In Uttar Pradesh, patients were seen sharing the same beds and oxygen cylinders. Where one side, Metro cities have witnessed this major problem, Other small cities and towns are also starting to face a shortage of medical supplies and beds.

Read More: #RampUpTheVax: Vaccine reality check, whats the hold up?

Several deaths have been registered in government hospitals in Madhya Pradesh due to a lack of oxygen equipped beds. There are no oxygen-equipped beds available in government hospitals in the worst-affected districts of Indore, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Ujjain, and Gwalior. Given the present situation, it is difficult for the average person to find a hospital bed. To address this issue, all state governments must take drastic measures and ensure the availability of beds as soon as possible.
Channel Nine has delayed the premiere date for quiz show reboot The Weakest Link, hosted by Magda Szubanski.

But despite the set back, the 60-year-old comedian still managed to flash a smile as she stepped out in Melbourne on Thursday.

The Kath & Kim star kept warm in a black puffer jacket, a red jumper and grey track pants as she enjoyed a walk.

Brave front! Magda Szubanski (pictured) flashed a smile as she stepped out in Melbourne on Thursday despite Nine delaying the launch of her new quiz show The Weakest Link

Magda teamed the casual ensemble with a pair of blue sneakers and also wore a pink scarf around her neck.

She tied her blonde locks in a high bun and wore sunglasses as she strolled around the city.

Magda's outing comes after Channel Nine delayed the premiere date for her quiz show The Weakest Link.

The network had originally scheduled the program to launch on Tuesday, May 4, at 8:50pm, but it's now expected to air later in the month, reports TV Blackbox.

Casual: The Kath & Kim star kept warm in a black puffer jacket, a red jumper and grey track pants as she enjoyed a walk

Comfortable: Magda teamed the casual ensemble with a pair of blue sneakers and also wore a pink scarf around her neck

Nine will fill the vacant time slot with two movies: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle on May 4, and Central Intelligence the following week.

A Nine spokesperson blamed the programming change on The Weakest Link's 'tight production schedule' - with TV Tonight reporting that filming only started last week.

'Due to the tight production schedule Weakest Link will now launch at the end of May on Channel 9,' the representative said.

The Weakest Link previously aired on Channel Seven from 2001 to 2002, and was hosted by the late Cornelia Frances.

Keeping a low profile! She tied her blonde locks in a high bun and wore sunglasses as she strolled around the city

Delayed: Magda's outing comes after Channel Nine delayed the premiere date for her quiz show The Weakest Link

The delay could be a blessing in disguise for Nine, as Magda made headlines for all the wrong reasons earlier this month when she fired off a series of bizarre and widely condemned tweets about Prime Minister Scott Morrison's wife, Jenny.

She later defended her tweets - which compared a conservatively dressed Mrs Morrison to a character from dystopian TV series The Handmaid's Tale - by arguing the PM's wife was fair game for criticism because she had 'opted in' to public life by offering her husband policy advice.

Magda also suggested the outrage was distracting from ousted Australia Post boss Christine Holgate's scorching testimony against the PM at a Senate Inquiry - even though this had been covered extensively by news outlets at the time.

The network had originally scheduled the program to launch on Tuesday, May 4, at 8:50pm, but it's now expected to air later in the month, reports TV Blackbox. Magda is pictured in Melbourne in November 2019

The Weakest Link previously aired on Channel Seven from 2001 to 2002, and was hosted by the late Cornelia Frances

The delay could be a blessing in disguise for Nine, as Magda made headlines for all the wrong reasons earlier this month when she fired off a series of bizarre and widely condemned tweets about Prime Minister Scott Morrison 's wife, Jenny

She faced criticism from female politicians for comparing Jenny Morrison to a character from The Handmaid's Tale in this Twitter post from April 11

Responding to criticism from Liberal MP Nicolle Flint - one of several conservative female politicians who took issue with her Handmaid's Tale tweet - Szubanski wrote: '1) seriously, my comment is "appalling" says Flint. "Appalling"?!

'2) I never said a single word about Jenny. 3) why is this headline news when... Christine Holgate is testifying?! Blatant attempt to use "sisterhood" to distract. Now THAT'S appalling.'

She then denied any suggestion she was 'walking back' her initial comments about Mrs Morrison.

Magda tweeted: 'Oh no you don't! I'm not "walking back" from anything! Simply stating facts. Nor will I be forced into an apology for... nothing.

'I see what the "Christian Soldiers" are doing here. They have drawn a "pink line" and I'm the Big Game. Let the fat shaming begin!

'THIS is what this is really all about. Well, I'm not backing down. The infiltration of the religious far right into Australian politics is... disturbing.'

She defended her Twitter post - which compared a conservatively dressed Mrs Morrison to a character from dystopian TV series The Handmaid's Tale - by arguing the PM's wife had 'opted in' to public life by offering her husband policy advice. Magda is pictured in October 2019

Magda tried to justify her criticism of Mrs Morrison by saying the PM had 'weaponised' his wife by admitting he speaks to her about policy matters

During a subsequent interview on A Current Affair - which was viewed by many as Nine's attempt at 'damage control' ahead of the launch of The Weakest Link - Magda reiterated her position that her tweets were not about Jenny personally but about the influence of the Christian right in politics.

'That was a mild way of drawing attention to the fact I do have concerns about, and trust me this is not about the majority of Christians, but the element of the far-right,' she said.

'And - they are really going to come for me now - I think that is a concern. I think that is quite legitimate to say in this country. I don't like extremes of any kind is my stance.'

Mr and Mrs Morrison are evangelical Christians and have made no apologies for their strong beliefs, with the Liberal leader having met his future wife at a Christian youth camp.

Responding to criticism from Liberal MP Nicolle Flint - one of several conservative female politicians who took issue with her Handmaid's Tale tweet - Magda wrote: '1) seriously, my comment is "appalling" says Flint. "Appalling"?!'

During a subsequent interview on A Current Affair - which was viewed by many as Nine's attempt at 'damage control' ahead of the launch of The Weakest Link - Magda reiterated her position that her tweets were not about Jenny personally but about the influence of the Christian right in politics

A glum-looking Magda had celebrated her 60th birthday on April 12 by taking a solo stroll in Melbourne, after being criticised by female politicians for comparing Mrs Morrison to a character from The Handmaid's Tale.

The funnywoman, who won fame for her roles on comedy shows Fast Forward, Full Frontal and Kath & Kim before becoming a prominent activist, had retweeted a photo of Mrs Morrison in a high-neck black dress as she watched her husband sign a condolence book for the late Prince Philip.

Magda captioned the image: 'I genuinely thought this was a photoshopped Handmaids Tale meme. But no. Its 21st century Aussie life.'

Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, HBO series The Handmaid's Tale is set in a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property of the state.

Magda had retweeted the photo with a message from a left-wing Twitter account, which read: 'Good morning to everyone else to whom this feels creepy, chilling, terrifying, ominous, enraging, despairing and utterly, completely f**king depressing.'

She faced widespread backlash for her commentary, which suggested Ms Morrison was part of the machinery of a misogynist society.

The actress - who played loveable misfit Sharon Strzelecki in ABC sitcom Kath & Kim - faced backlash from a number of conservative female politicians over her tweet.

Dystopian: Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, HBO series The Handmaid's Tale is set in a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property of the state. Pictured: actors Yvonne Strahovski and Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid's Tale

NSW Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes told The Daily Telegraph: 'Ms Szubanski has herself been the target of obscene trolls, yet the hypocritical nature of the Left is here on display.'

Liberal MP Nicolle Flint also launched a scathing attack on Magda, saying her tweet represents a 'double standard' in the way female politicians are perceived.

'I cannot believe the appalling personal attacks on Mrs Morrison, especially by Ms Szubanski, a woman who has received one of our nations highest honours,' she said.

'Ms Szubanski's completely disrespectful comments are yet another example of the double standards demonstrated towards women on the centre-right of politics.

'The sisterhood need to stop picking and choosing which sisters to protect; all women deserve to be treated with respect.'

Magda had also re-tweeted an image of the Morrison family posing with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, zooming in on Mrs Morrison's hand which showed her forefinger and thumb joined.

While it is mostly used as a benign sign for 'OK', a similar signal had been used by the far right, using the digits to create a W and P for White Power.

'What's this little hand signal thingy??' Magda tweeted.

While her question may have been innocent, it prompted a string of replies suggesting the hand gesture was somehow sinister.

Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting Jenny Morrison's hand gesture was in any way signifying 'white supremacy'.

More backlash: Magda had also re-tweeted this image of the Morrison family posing with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, zooming in on Mrs Morrison's hand which showed her forefinger and thumb joined. While many understand the symbol to be a benign sign for 'OK', darker corners of the Internet allege it's been appropriated to signify 'white supremacy'

On April 13, Magda took to her social media platform again to address the backlash against her controversial Handmaid's Tale tweet.

'Let me be clear...' she wrote, 'I'm not actually making a disparaging comment about Jenny. I just genuinely thought it was a meme!'

After one follower called her 'bitter and twisted', she replied: 'I know, right?! I'm terrible Muriel. A bitter twisted wreck of a once talented (debatable) funny gal.

'Sigh. So do yourself a favour and spare yourself the awful spectacle and don't follow me or read my tweets. Actually, I'll save you the effort and just block you.'
They announced they were expecting their third child in an Instagram post last December.

And Conor McGregor beamed with joy as he cuddled his pregnant fiancee Dee Devlin for a glamorous evening out in Dubai on Wednesday.

Dee, 33, showcased her blossoming baby bump in a red floral maxi dress and shared the sweet photos on Instagram.

Expecting: Conor McGregor beamed with joy as he cuddled his pregnant fiancee Dee Devlin for a glamorous evening out in Dubai on Wednesday

Dee looked radiant in the floral dress which sheathed over pregnancy curves, while Conor, 32, showed off his tattoos in a checkered T-shirt.

The pair, who are parents to Conor Jnr, three and daughter Croia, showed off a huge bottle of Proper Whiskey after Conor sold a major stake in his brand in a deal worth up to 430m.

Cuervo owner Becle confirmed it had purchased the remaining 51% stake in Eire Born Spirits, with the UFC fighter said to remain 'actively engaged in the promotion' of Proper Whiskey.

Bumping along: Dee, 33, showcased her blossoming baby bump in a red floral maxi dress and shared the sweet photos on Instagram

Captioning the snaps, Dee said: 'Here's to the greatest whiskey on earth, @properwhiskey! Amazing!! I love you Conor SO much and I am so proud of you!! Thank you so much for all the hard work you do everyday for our family!! I cant wait to have a Proper toast with you in a couple more weeks'.

The couple announced they were expecting their third child in an Instagram post last year.

The UFC fighter posted the adorable picture of the family clad in matching pyjamas holding an ultrasound scan.

He captioned the picture: 'Happy Christmas everyone, from my family to yours. So much to look forward to in 2021'.

Family: Conor recently shared a holiday snap with a sea lion in Dubai with his pregnant fiancee (centre) two children, Conor Jnr and Croia, and sister Aoife McGregor

The couple announced their engagement on August 8 last year after being in a relationship for 12 years.

The mixed martial artist will go head-to-head with rival Poirier on July 10 after Conor was defeated in a knockout in Abu Dhabi in January.

He has reportedly been training hard in Dubai to ensure he is in peak shape in anticipation for the lightweight fight.

But his strict training regime hasn't stopped Conor happily munched a slice of golden steak prepared for him by Salt Bae as he enjoyed a night out at Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Dubai last month.

The UFC star appeared in great spirits as he delightedly seasoned his meat in the style of the Turkish chef, 37, in a fun Instagram video.

Open up: Conor happily munched a slice of golden steak prepared for him by Salt Bae as he enjoyed a night out at Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Dubai last month

That's how it's done: The UFC star appeared in great spirits as he delightedly seasoned his meat in the style of the Turkish chef, 37, in a fun new Instagram video

In a video shared to Salt Bae's grid, the butcher, real name Nusret Gokce, is seen elaborately slicing up a huge piece of gold leaf covered meat in his usual fashion, as Conor watched on.

Conor appeared transfixed as he watched Salt Bae demonstrate his superior knife skills while looking into the camera, with Conor encouraging everyone to watch.

The mixed martial artist then channeled Salt Bae himself as he sprinkled a pinch of salt over his meat.

Connor, who traveled to the UAE last month on his work trip, previously spent some of lockdown in a 1million Algarve mansion with views of the Atlantic with family.

Conor was renting the villa in November and it boasted an infinity pool and cinema room for guests.

It comes after Conor made his highly-anticipated comeback in a lightweight clash against Dustin Poirier, with hopes that a win would act as a springboard for a run at the title he won in 2016.
WASHINGTON  After four decades of seeking the nations highest office, Joseph R. Biden Jr. entered the presidency as a deadly pandemic and an economic crisis prevented him from doing any of the parts of the job that might typically be considered among its perks.

He cannot review the troops, shake hands along a rope line or host a state dinner for a visiting foreign leader. But on Wednesday night, Mr. Biden finally participated in one sanctified ritual of the presidency: addressing a joint session of Congress.

The speech itself was hopeful in tone and ambitious in the scope of Mr. Bidens proposals.

America is on the move again, the president said, acknowledging that he took office in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and what he called the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

Here are four takeaways.

History is made with two women on the dais.

Nothing about Mr. Bidens speech looked like the annual address has in the past, with more brown chairs visible in the audience than masked faces. But the most arresting image of the night had nothing to do with coronavirus precautions. For the first time in history, two women sat on the dais behind the presidential podium.
(CVE: CDX) CEO Robert Kaul and Maple CEO Brett Belchetz joined Steve Darling from Proactive to bring news the companies are partnering for a new Canadian COVID-19 home monitoring program.

Kaul telling Proactive that the program will equip homes with remote automated monitoring technology, clinical oversight and daily disease management support via virtual care.

Belchetz shares with Proactive more about Maple and why they thought this was a great fit to partner with Cloud DX.
Vietnam will protect the rights of detained fishermen and has asked Malaysia to provide evidence for further investigation, says foreign ministry deputy spokesman Doan Khac Viet.

The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) had on April 26 said it had detained four Vietnamese fishing vessels along with its crew members for allegedly fishing illegally in its waters and not possessing appropriate legal documents.

"Right after receiving the info, the foreign ministry instructed the Vietnamese Embassy in Malaysia to contact local authorities and request humane treatment for the fishermen, while verifying relevant information and taking other steps to protect Vietnams citizens if needed," Viet said at a press meet Thursday.

"The embassy also requested Malaysia to provide evidence related to the fishing vessels on the basis of which Vietnamese authorities can investigate the incident and punish any violations found," he added.

The four vessels, with 32 crew members on board, were seen flying Malaysian flags, with one ship possessing both Vietnamese and Malaysian vessel numbers. The crew members allegedly had no legal personal documents or fishing licenses.

Malaysia said the Vietnamese fishing vessels were illegally fishing in Malaysian waters and that the incident was being investigated further.

Vietnam has consistent policies to protect its marine resources, Viet said, adding that its fishermen are always informed of and asked to abide by both Vietnamese and international laws.
Anti-coup protesters hold a banner that reads "What are these? We are Yangon residents!" as they march during a demonstration in Yangon, Myanmar, April 27. AP-Yonhap



Myanmar authorities are seeking to file charges of murder and treason against one of the main leaders of the protest campaign against military rule, the state broadcaster said on Wednesday.



Wai Moe Naing was arrested on April 15 when security men rammed him with a car as he led a motorbike protest rally in the central town of Monywa.



Myanmar Television, in its main evening news bulletin, broadcast a list of charges being sought against him, including murder and treason, that it said had been filed with police.



Wai Moe Naing, a 25-year-old Muslim, has emerged as one of the most high-profile leaders of opposition to the Feb. 1 coup that overthrew an elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.



It is not clear if he has a lawyer.



Pro-democracy protests have taken place in cities and towns across the country since the coup, with Monywa one of the main centres of opposition.



The military has cracked down with lethal force on the protesters, killing more than 750 people, an activist group says. Reuters is unable to confirm the casualty toll.



Fighting has also intensified between the military and ethnic minority Karen insurgents in the east with more air strikes sending villagers fleeing into neighbouring Thailand, Thai officials said.



Earlier on Wednesday, Myanmar's pro-democracy unity government, formed to oppose the junta, ruled out talks on the crisis until all political prisoners are released.



The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), alarmed by the turmoil in one of its members, has been trying to find a path for Myanmar out of the crisis and held a meeting on Saturday in the Indonesian capital with the leader of the junta, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.



The pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG), which includes members of parliament ousted by the coup, was not invited to the talks. It said ASEAN should be engaging with it as the legitimate representative of the people.



"Before any constructive dialogue can take place, however, there must be an unconditional release of political prisoners including President U Win Myint and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi," the NUG prime minister, Minister Mahn Winn Khaing Thann, said in a statement.



There was no immediate comment from any senior ASEAN official, and a spokesman for the Myanmar military did not answer calls seeking comment.





Ethnic minority Karen troops are seen after they set fire to a building inside a Myanmar army outpost near the Thai border, which is seen from the Thai side on the Thanlwin, also known as Salween, riverbank in Mae Hong Son province, Thailand, April 28. Reuters-Yonhap
Line Of Duty fans were left stunned after they finally realised where the actor behind DS Chris Lomax is from.

New theories have come to fruition this week the Detective Sergeant is working for the OCG, after he mentioned he was heading to the notorious Red Lion pub.

And with the character's suspicious behaviour pushed into the spotlight, eagle-eyed fans have noticed where they have seen actor Perry Fitzpatrick before.

Discovery: Line Of Duty fans were left stunned after they finally realised where the actor behind DS Chris Lomax is from (pictured with Vicky McClure in I Am Nicola in 2019)

Some viewers were shocked that Perry starred alongside Vicky McClure, 37, in a number of shows including I Am in 2019, where their characters played onscreen lovers, and as Flip in This Is England.

And Perry previously told The Sun, the pair have been friends for more than 20 years having both grown up in Nottingham.

He said: 'Me and Vicky, we've been best mates for 20-odd years and, no, we've never gone out with each other. We're so close, we're more like brother and sister and our families know each other, so I think it would be weird if we did.

Bent? New theories have come to fruition this week that the Detective Sergeant is working for the OCG after he mentioned he was heading to the notorious Red Lion pub

Look familiar? Some viewers were shocked that Perry starred as Flip in This In England (pictured in 2014)

Shocked: Fans couldn't believe it when they connected the dots and realised Perry played Flip in This Is England

Throwback: Vicky also starred in This Is England as Lol Jenkins in 2006 alongside Joe Gilgun as Woody

'We know each other so well, we've been friends since we were 11 and we trust each other so much. And her partner, Jonny Owen is great, were good friends too.'

Oh how he bagged his role in the BBC drama, Perry said his role in I Am Nicola caught the attention of Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio.

Perry said he had to audition for the part 'like everyone else' but managed to secure the role of DS Lomax for the sixth series.

And fans couldn't believe it when they connected the dots and realised Perry played Flip in This Is England.

One wrote on Twitter: 'Lomax in #LineofDuty played this legend in This Is England... a fine actor is Perry Fitzpatrick.'

Another added: 'Very late to the party but ive just realised chris lomax was flip in this is england,' to which a third viewer chimed: 'I knew I'd seen him somewhere before!'

Close friends: Perry previously said the pair have been friends with more than 20 years having both grown up in Nottingham- but they have never dated (pictured in I Am)

Character: 'Hard to believe that Flip from This is England is now an accomplished policeman', typed one viewer

Police drama: Perry also starred in Suspects as TDC Gary Roscoe (pictured with Clare-Hope Ashitey and Damien Molony)

'Hard to believe that Flip from This is England is now an accomplished policeman', typed another.

It comes after some viewers believe DS Chris Lomax dropped a huge clue that he's working for the OCG during Sunday night's show.

At the end of the penultimate episode of series six, Lomax was seen talking to a crime scene investigator- with some fans saying they recognised the very familiar pub name, The Red Lion, he wanted to head to.

In the scene, DI Kate Fleming [Vicky] and DI Steve Arnott [Martin Compston] were shown walking towards the unit on an industrial estate where Lomax was standing.

Could it be? It comes after some viewers believe DS Chris Lomax dropped a huge clue that he's working for the OCG during Sunday night's episode

As they approached Lomax could be heard telling his colleague, who was wearing a full white crime scene suit, they could 'be in the Red Lion by 8pm'.

Although a passing comment, many fans have suggested that Lomax's mention of the Red Lion was actually a big clue placed to tip viewers off that he's bent.

Sharing the theory on Reddit, user u/ross-stew wrote: 'During the telephone call Chris Lomax was on before Steve and Kate approached him at the industrial unit, Chris finished the called by saying "meet you at the red lion at 8pm".

'Isn't this the same pub Carl Banks boasted about the murder of Gail Vella before he was killed? Might be a OCG meeting ground.'

Considering the theory, one person replied: 'Oooh I didn't catch that. He seemed reluctant to get the floors dug up too.'

The series finale of Line Of Duty airs on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday.
Get ready for produce shopping and baked good munching, because the Midland Area Farmers Market returns this weekend.

At 7 a.m., May 1, the market will open for its 2021 season at the Dow Diamond East parking lot. The season will carry on through November, said market manager Emily Lyons.
TORONTO, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Supply Chain Canada, in collaboration with Supply Chain Alliance, has partnered with York Region and the City of Markham, City of Richmond Hill, and the City of Vaughan to study the resilience of the manufacturing sector supply chain in York Region due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building Supply Chain Resilience is a unique report in its exploration of the resilience of the supply chain in one of the nation's largest manufacturing regions and supports Supply Chain Canada's mission to provide leadership to the Canadian supply chain community and elevate the supply chain profession.

"Supply Chain Canada is proud to have brought together the expertise and collaborative spirit to deliver such an important report with York Region and its member municipalities, and I want to applaud the Region for its innovative approach in partnering with us. Partnering to deliver this report with Supply Chain Alliance and York Region is a model for other jurisdictions across Canada. Bringing together our community of experts has delivered a report that not only supports the supply chain resiliency of manufacturers in the Region but has meaningful insights for supply chain leaders throughout the country and for policy makers at all levels of government who want to foster the supply chain conditions for economic recovery and future prosperity,"

- Christian Buhagiar, President and CEO of Supply Chain Canada.

There are over 2,500 manufacturing businesses operating within York Region's nine cities and towns, making it the third largest manufacturing cluster in Ontario and fifth largest in Canada. The Building Supply Chain Resilience report provides key recommendations for manufacturers to safeguard their businesses in times of uncertainty, plus actions all levels of government may take to support this industry.

The Building Supply Chain Resilience report provides key recommendations for manufacturers to safeguard their businesses in times of uncertainty, plus actions all levels of government may take to support this industry.

"As the economy re-opens, manufacturers are realizing that it's not enough to have efficient and cost-effective supply chains; they must re-think their approach to business continuity planning, considering key inputs such as safe workplaces, labour availability, supplier capabilities and shifting customer demand," explains Rob Fenwick, Senior Director with Supply Chain Alliance. "A company's ability to mobilize quickly depends on preparation. Businesses can improve resilience by incorporating best practices into their own operational plans."

Thirty York Region-based manufacturers from five manufacturing sub-sectors were consulted to form the basis of the analysis and recommendations of the report, including:

Electronics and Electrical

Agriculture and Food and Beverage Processing

Building Materials

Automotive Components

Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

"We know many businesses, including those in the manufacturing sector, have been impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic," said York Region Chairman and CEO Wayne Emmerson. "Supply chain resilience is fundamental to economic recovery at local, provincial and national levels. Assessing our manufacturers' state of readiness will help us better understand business recovery."

Key findings of the report include:

MANUFACTURERS

Focus efforts on business continuity planning and supply chain resilience measures such as dual sourcing, split volumes, critical components inventory, alternative manufacturing and labour capacity, and explore nearshoring feasibility

Accelerate supply chain digitization, which can allow technology to share demand signals with trading partners and automate communications

Secure systems and data against cyber attacks

GOVERNMENTS

At the municipal level, continue to strengthen relationships with local manufacturers, bring the manufacturing community together to share best practices and resources, facilitate the move to ecommerce and digitization.

At the provincial and federal levels, increase cybersecurity funding and resources, establish a supply chain focal point within government and a national early warning system, introduce smart, enabling supply chain policies, review emergency financial programs for effectiveness, and invest in workforce training programs aimed toward future economic activity.

The full report is available online at https://www.supplychaincanada.com/initiatives/building-supply-chain-resilience-report.

The Regional Municipality of York consists of nine local cities and towns and provides a variety of programs and services to 1.2 million residents and over 54,000 businesses with 650,000 employees. More information about the Region's key service areas is available at york.ca/regionalservices .

About Supply Chain Canada

Supply Chain Canada is the voice of Canada's supply chain, representing and serving more than 7,500 professionals across the country, as well as the wider supply chain community. It is a federation with a national secretariat and 10 provincial/territorial Institutes. Its mission is to provide leadership to the Canadian supply chain community, provide value to all members, and advance the profession. Through its education, advocacy and resource-development initiatives, the association endeavours to advance its vision, to see that Canadian supply chain professionals and organizations are recognized for leading innovation, global competitiveness and driving economic growth. The association's Supply Chain Management Professional (SCMP) designation is Canada's most-sought-after professional designation for those entering the field and advancing as leaders in supply chain. To learn more, please visit www.supplychaincanada.com.

About Supply Chain Alliance

Supply Chain Alliance is helping some of North America's fastest-growing companies and most recognizable brands reimagine their supply chains. Recognized as a leader in supply chain strategy, they've worked with a diverse portfolio of more than 250 businesses to cut through the many complexities they face today. Their team of results-driven and experienced supply chain professionals focus on innovative, cost-effective, and pragmatic solutions to accelerate the change their clients need to advance their business. To learn more, please visit www.supplychainalliance.ca.

SOURCE Supply Chain Canada

For further information: Simona Zar, Director, Industry Affairs & Public Policy, Supply Chain Canada, [email protected], 416-977-7111 x3129
Following on from the success of Czapeks Orion Nebula and Abyss models featuring dials inspired by the mysteries of space, the Geneva-based watchmaker is back with an equally mystical limited edition inspired by emerald-coloured icebergs.

Emerald Icebergs

Since man started exploring the icy world of the Antarctic, this coloured glacial ice has intrigued all those who have stumbled across them. Their deep green hues have given them the nickname of emerald icebergs after the 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge described an Antarctic sailor seeing ice, mast highas green as emerald.

Antarctique Emerald Iceberg  Czapek

The Theories

For the longest time, scientists were unsure where the green hue was coming from. At first, they suspected that microscopic organic particles from prehistoric marine plants and animals in the ice were causing the unusual colour. But in 2019, a report by the Journal of Geophysical Research concluded that the deep green colour was actually the result of large deposits of iron from rock dust that was captured in the frozen mass.

Looking into the Dial

This extraordinary natural phenomenon is reproduced on the dial of the Antarctique Emerald Iceberg Limited Edition using a proprietary hand-varnishing technique developed by its partner Metalem in Le Locle. The dial is first varnished before being hand painted, lacquered, and then polished to reveal these mesmerizing hues of green. All the steps are completed by hand, making each piece truly unique.

Antarctique Emerald Iceberg  Czapek

The Emerald Iceberg is the illustration of a new approach in watchmaking, explains Xavier de Roquemaurel, CEO of Czapek & Cie. It is a sort of open source where supplying partners, team members, and customers join forces to come up with totally new ideas.

All the Details

The Antarctique Emerald Iceberg comes in a 40.5 mm stainless steel case with a water resistance of 120 metres. It is powered by the brands Calibre SHX5 that was conceived in-house by a multifaceted team. The automatic movement features a powerful micro-rotor made of fully recycled platinum, a free-sprung balance wheel with variable inertia provided by four gold balancing weights, and a power reserve of 60 hours. The functions include hours, minutes, and seconds that are indicated with sword-shaped hands enhanced with Super-LumiNova for excellent legibility at night.

Antarctique Emerald Iceberg  Czapek

The collection is limited to 10 pieces and comes on an integrated stainless steel Czapek bracelet whose links join to form a modern C shape. There is also the possibility for a black leather or rubber strap which can be easily interchanged via a quick release system.



So, wherever your adventures take you, the Czapek Antarctique Emerald Iceberg will remind you of the magic of nature. And who knows, maybe it will even inspire you to explore the South Pole in search of this natural icy phenomenon. It would be worth it just for the wrist shot!
Sage Curry, 19, of Largo, Florida, allegedly confessed to following two women to their home and fatally stabbing them early on Monday morning

A 19-year-old man followed a mother and daughter to their Florida home, crawled through a window while they were sleeping early on Monday morning, grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen, and fatally stabbed them, according to police.

Sage Curry was arrested on Monday and charged with two counts of first-degree murder and burglary, according to an arrest report issued by the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office near Tampa Bay.

According to investigators, Curry confessed to the killings. Police said they believe the murders were random and that there was no known relationship between Curry and his victims, WFLA-TV reported.

Investigators did caution, however, that that assessment could change over the course of their probe.

The victims are believed to be a mother and a daughter who lived inside the home. Their identities have yet to be released.

The victims family has invoked Marsys Law, a new statute that was added to the state constitution. It prohibits police from revealing the identities of victims of violent crime in their public reports.

Police were called to a home on 8th Avenue NW in Largo just before 2am on Monday after Curry ran to a neighbor and asked for help.

When investigators went inside the home, they found two bodies on the floor. Curry allegedly told police that he followed the women to their home.

He is alleged to have told investigators that he entered the home through a bedroom window and killed his first victim by stabbing her several times in the chest.

Curry is seen above during a virtual court appearance in Pinellas County, Florida on Tuesday

According to police, the other woman in the home heard the attack and came to the defense of the woman being stabbed.

Curry is then alleged to have stabbed the other woman several times in the face and neck.

According to investigators, Curry was injured by the second woman who came to the defense of the first victim. It is unclear whether the mom or daughter was first to be attacked.

Curry is then alleged to have gone to a neighbor and asked for help in treating the injuries that he had sustained during the fatal stabbing of the second victim.

According to investigators, Curry confessed to grabbing the sharpest kitchen knife he could find and stabbing both women multiple times.

He also is alleged to have told investigators that he rolled the body of one of his victims off of the couch in an attempt to make her death look like an accident.

Curry is being held at Pinellas County Jail. He has no prior criminal record as an adult.

The victims are believed to be a mother and a daughter who lived inside the home. Their identities have yet to be released

Authorities believe Curry suffers from mental illness.

Jordan Martin, a local resident who said he worked with Curry at a nearby car wash, described the suspect as a quiet, nice young man who kept to himself.

'Just shock overall, Id never think someone like this could do something like that. So just shocked right now,' Martin told WFLA-TV.

During a court appearance on Tuesday, Curry told the judge that he had no money to pay for an attorney.

The court assigned a public defender to represent him during legal proceedings.
Public health officials in the largest county in Kansas abandon a controversial public health precaution and shift the burden of pandemic precautions to small biz.

Reality check . . .

EXPECT ARGUMENTS AMONG STRANGERS AND FEISTY CUSTOMERS OVER COVID DECORUM AND DRESS CODES!!!

One of the smartest people we know offered this rule of etiquette . . .

If workers are required to wear masks at a biz, then it's polite to do the same.



However, after more than a decade of running this dump of a blog, we know that relying on politeness from people is always a mistake.

Here's a look at the decision . . .



Commissioners voted 5 to 1 to transform the public health order into a series of strong recommendations, beginning Saturday.

HOWEVER . . .

Here's public health advice . . .

New "strong" recommendations include:



- Continuing to wear masks or face coverings within indoor public spaces.

- Business operators should strongly encourage or require their customers, employees and visitors to wear masks indoors.

- People, businesses and organizations will be strongly encouraged to require customers, visitors and workers to maintain six feet of separation from people they don't know.

- A strong recommendation for business operators to adopt additional mitigation measures to reduce the spread of the virus.

- A strong recommendation for businesses, organizations and individuals to follow current guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state and local public health authorities.



Meanwhile . . .

KCMO mask orders continue as rules throughout the metro become more confusing.



Links . . .

Fox4: Johnson County votes to lift mask mandate; Businesses can still require masks

KCTV5: Johnson County lifts mask mandate starting Saturday; businesses can still set policies

KMBC: Mask mandate will be allowed to expire in Johnson County, Kansas

Developing . . .
Institution's Innovation Council-MIT ADT University, Pune in association with Research & Consultancy Cell & AIC-MITADT Incubator Forum organized an online National workshop on Intellectual Property Rights & IP Management for Start-ups from April 27 to 28, 2021 to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day.

Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Executive President & Vice-Chancellor congratulated team IIC-MIT ADT University for creating the larger public awareness regarding the pivotal role being played by the IPR in the growth of a Nation in view of the increasing significance of the IPR in the globalized knowledge economy.

The national workshop was attended by more than 170+ Students, research scholars, faculty members, Start-up enthusiasts across India through online mode in the new normal.

Dr. Mangesh Karad emphasized the urgency for creating a mass 'IPR literacy' movement across India. Intellectual property has a great potential to build strategic alliances for the socio-economic and technological growth in the modern world as well as the foundation for the sustenance in the competitive economic state.

MIT Art, Design and Technology University has already published policies on Intellectual Property Rights and Research & Consultancy at the august hands of Dr. Abhay Jere, Chief Innovation Officer, Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India; Dr. Kishore Sreenivasan, Head - CSIR URDIP, Govt. of India; Prof. Dr. Vishwanath Karad, Founder, MIT Group of Institutions, and Prof. Dr. Mangesh Karad, Vice-Chancellor, MIT ADT University, Pune on Dussehra last year to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Karad said, "Our appetite is to create a World Class University for entrepreneurial development of students and to promote talent at the national and international levels. The initiative would surely provide young entrepreneurs the chance to build a new India and our focus is on creating a vast talent pool of job creators with immense employment opportunities for Indian youth." Prof. Dr. Kishore Ravande, Dean, Research & Consultancy Cell and Principal MIT School of Engineering said, innovation and IPR are of utmost importance in higher educational institutions and exhorted all educationists to be involved in IP activities such as patent, copyrights, designs, and trademark, irrespective of their discipline: arts, design, science, engineering, management, or architecture.

Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani, Associate Dean & President-IIC MITADTU also called upon students, research scholars to involve in orienting their tasks towards innovation for the progress of the university and the nation.

The training was conducted by experts in IPR training - Prof. Dr. Virendra Bhojwani and Prof. Suraj Bhoyar, aimed at creating awareness across key stakeholders to understand various Intellectual property rights, processes, fees involved, how to apply, to cover all the know-how regarding IPR.

The workshop was organized and coordinated by Prof. Suraj Bhoyar - Project Director MIT Centre for Future Skills Excellence & Convener Institution's Innovation Council MITADTU. Soon, Online Masterclass on IPR will be organized to cover detailed topics like Copyright Practice & Procedure, Prior Art Search, Patent Drafting, Prior Art Search, Role of IP & Enforcement.

MIT Art, Design & Technology University, Pune is the place where Innovation and Creativity coexist and offers exclusive courses in the domain of Fine Arts and Applied Arts, Music, Vedic Sciences, Design, Architecture, Bioengineering Sciences, Food Technology, Marine Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechatronics & Automation Engineering complemented by Management studies.

The sessions were concluded with the IP Generation games & exercises to answer How to ignite innovations in young researcher's minds and start-up opportunities & challenges for the student community in India. The national workshop concluded with a pledge to spread IP awareness among the fraternity to generate more intellectual properties and make India move upward in the Global Innovation Index.

Let's urge for Creative India; Innovative India

About MIT-ADT University MAEER's Trust which is known to set the strong precedence for the privatization of Engineering education in Maharashtra had taken a first mover's advantage by establishing the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT-Pune), in 1983, which continues to remain the flagship institute of the group.

MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has been established under the MIT Art, Design and Technology University Act, 2015 (Maharashtra Act No. XXXIX of 2015). The University commenced its operations successfully from 27th June 2016. The University is a self-financed institution and empowered to award the degrees under section 22 of the University Grants Commission act, 1956. The University has a unique blend of Art, Design, and Technology as the core of its academics.

Recently, MIT Art, Design and Technology University, Pune has accomplished the following accolades: 1. Ranked 26th for ARIIA 2020 by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India.

2. Received 5 Star rating for exemplary performance by the Ministry of Education's Innovation Council, Govt. of India.

3. Conferred with Best University Campus Award by ASSOCHAM, New Delhi 4. Granted with Atal Incubation Centre under ATAL Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, Govt. of India MIT Art, Design and Technology University has been taking a holistic approach towards imparting education wherein the students are being motivated to build a complete winning personality which is "physically fit, intellectually sharp, mentally alert and spiritually elevated".

(Disclaimer: This press release is arranged by PTI. Republic World does not take any responsibility for the same.)

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Kodak Black has avoided prison in a South Carolina sexual assault case against him by pleading guilty to a lesser charge Wednesday.

The rapper, real name Bill Kapri, was accused of raping a teenage girl in a Florence hotel room after a 2016 concert, outlets reported.

According to prosecutors, Black pushed the girl against a wall and onto a bed, biting her neck and breast during the assault, the Associated Press reported. The victim told Black to stop, but he didnt.

Authorities found out about the alleged rape after the girl told a school nurse the next day, the outlet reported, and the nurse called police.

Standing in a Florence County courthouse Wednesday, Black pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and was given a 10-year suspended sentence and put on 18 months of probation, TMZ reported. If he goes the full 18 months without violating the terms of his probation, Black wont spend any time behind bars.

Black spoke to the victim, who was watching the proceedings online: I apologize this happened, and Im hopeful we can all move forward.

Following the verdict, Black quickly took to social media, tweeting a single grinning emoji wearing sunglasses.

He tweeted again minutes later, saying he and the victim just wanted to get this s--t over (with) and adding I aint have to come off no money.

Black also said his heart goes out to all the girls out here getting raped and s--t FORREAL, But I Aint Did That.

Many Twitter users spoke out against Black.

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In 2019, Black was sentenced to more than three years in prison for falsifying federal forms in order to buy firearms from a Miami-area gun shop, outlets reported. However, then-President Donald Trump pardoned the rapper on that conviction during his final days in the Oval Office.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 17:00:37|Editor: huaxia

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A COVID-19-positive patient gets primary treatment inside an ambulance as she waits for admission into a government hospital in Ahmedabad, India, April 26, 2021. (Str/Xinhua)

Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesperson was quoted by The Times of India as saying that "right now we are moving through the UK prioritization list and don't have surplus doses" to share with countries in need such as India.



NEW DELHI, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Britain has no surplus of COVID-19 vaccines to give to India as it faces a deadly wave of COVID-19, Reuters reported Thursday quoting British Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

Asked whether the government can release any doses to support India at a press conference, Hancock said "we don't have any excess doses of vaccine in the UK at the moment."

Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesperson was quoted by The Times of India as saying that "right now we are moving through the UK prioritization list and don't have surplus doses" to share with countries in need such as India.

India has been facing a deteriorating COVID-19 situation. As of Wednesday, the country has recorded 17,997,267 infections and 201,187 deaths.

The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that India alone accounted for 38 percent of all infections recorded in the seven-day period that ended on April 25. 
Bloom Energy, a leading provider of distributed energy solutions, today announced the appointment of Philippe Cochet and Yves Rannou to its international leadership team to strengthen the company's expansion efforts, enhance competitive positioning and support deployment of its fuel-flexible, clean energy technology across Europe.

Mr. Cochet will advise Bloom Energy's commercial strategy across Europe. His career in business leadership, production and manufacturing spans more than two decades, including senior leadership positions at the world's leading energy and technology companies such as General Electric and Alstom.

Mr. Rannou is a seasoned business leader with a proven track record for driving growth, turnarounds and restructuring at international businesses in the renewables industry such as Senvion, Alstom and General Electric.

Mr. Cochet and Mr. Rannou will respectively advise and lead Bloom Energy's commercial strategy across Europe, with an initial focus on France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. They will report to Bloom Energy's executive vice president, international business, Azeez Mohammed.

"We are thrilled to welcome Philippe and Yves to Bloom Energy," said Azeez Mohammed. "They bring vast experience as well as valuable perspectives and relationships that will help European organizations reduce carbon emissions, enhance resiliency and chart a path toward a net-zero carbon future."

Bloom Energy's technology is the most advanced thermal electric generation technology on the market today. Bloom Energy's fuel-flexible, non-combustion fuel cells use biogas and hydrogen, in addition to natural gas, to create electricity at significantly higher efficiencies than traditional, combustion-based resources. In addition, Bloom Energy's technology can be used to create hydrogen, which is increasingly recognized as a critically important tool necessary for the full decarbonization of the energy economy.

About Bloom Energy

Bloom Energy's mission is to make clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone in the world. The company's product, the Bloom Energy Server, delivers highly reliable and resilient, always-on electric power that is clean, cost-effective, and ideal for microgrid applications. Bloom's customers include many Fortune 100 companies and leaders in manufacturing, data centers, healthcare, retail, higher education, utilities, and other industries. For more information, visit www.bloomenergy.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements should not be taken as guarantees of results and should not be considered an indication of future activity or future performance. Actual events or results may differ materially from those described in this press release due to a number of risks and uncertainties as detailed in Bloom's periodic SEC filings. Bloom undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly update any forward-looking statements unless if and as required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005144/en/

Contacts:

Jennifer Duffourg

Bloom Energy

Jennifer.Duffourg@bloomenergy.com
Chennai, April 29 : International Finance Corporation (IFC) part of the World Bank group is planning an equity investment up to $15 million in Seabright IV, L.P (the "Fund", operating as Prime Venture Partners).

The IFC also plans another $15 million as a co-investment envelope to invest alongside the Fund.

The Fund will invest primarily in companies focused on India.

According to IFC, the Fund will focus primarily on seed to series-A stage investments in Indian technology-enabled companies.

The Fund plans to invest in Indian companies across healthcare, education, financial services, logistics, consumer internet and enterprise technology sectors.

The Fund will be managed by Yashas IV, LLC, Delaware, USA, whose Managing Member is Raj Mashruwala.

The Management Company is Azure91 Management LLC, a Delaware USA entity.

The sub-advisor to Azure91 Management LLC is Priven Advisors LLP, Bangalore, India established in 2015 by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani (together the "Sub Advisory Partners"), which shall render non-binding advisory services to Azure91 Management LLC.

IFC proposes an equity investment of up to US$15 million in the Fund, not to exceed 20 per cent of the Fund's total capital commitments.
Two high schools in the region are among the top 75 in the state and the top 2,000 nationwide, according to a U.S. News & World Reports Best High School rankings.

Abington Heights is ranked 52 in Pennsylvania and 1,515 nationwide, while Delaware Valley is close behind at 64 statewide and 1,846 nationwide.

Really great things are happening at our high school, said Abington Heights Superintendent Michael Mahon, Ph.D., adding hes proud of the high school students, Principal Andrew Snyder and the entire staff.

The 2021 edition of Best High Schools, released Tuesday, includes a numerical ranking of nearly all public high schools nationwide, according to the organization. U.S. News coordinated with RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm, to rank around 17,860 public high schools out of the nearly 24,000 reviewed that had a 12th grade enrollment of 15 or greater, or otherwise had sufficient enrollment in other high school grades during the 2018-19 school year.

The organization used six indicators of school quality and collects data from independent sources, including the United States Department of Education, statewide math and reading level assessment tests and high school graduation rates, the College Board and International Baccalaureate. Schools are ranked on students college readiness, 30%; math and reading proficiency, 20%; math and reading performance, 20%; underserved student performance, 10%; college curriculum breadth, 10%; and graduation rate, 10%.

At Abington Heights High School, 44% of students took at least one Advanced Placement Exam, and 30% passed at least exam. District students have an 88% rate in mathematics proficiency and 95% in reading proficiency; the district has a 96% graduation rate, according to the rankings.

They have high levels of achievement, tremendous amounts of opportunities for extracurricular and co-curricular activities and great spirit in the building, Mahon said.

At Delaware Valley, 56% of students took at least one Advanced Placement Exam and 38% passed at least one. District students have an 78% rate in mathematics proficiency and 86% in reading proficiency; the district has a 93% graduation rate, according to the rankings.

Delaware Valley High School has made the list eight times in the past 10 years. Abington Heights has also ranked high in the past.

To make this list and get real high up  is obviously quite an honor, said Delaware Valley Superintendent John Bell.

The ranking is a reflection of not just the high school but the entire district and community, he said.

The teachers K-12 deserve credit. You dont magically become great students when youre a freshman, Bell said. Our kids are very studious, very serious and its also a reflection on their parents.

Abington Heights was also ranked first for the Best High Schools in the Scranton area, which includes schools in Lackawanna, Wyoming and Luzerne counties, according to U.S. News & World Report.

For local rankings, Dunmore Junior/Senior High School came in second; Wilkes-Barre Area STEM Academy, third; Dallas Senior High School, fourth; North Pocono High School, fifth; Lake-Lehman Junior/Senior High School, sixth; Valley View High School, seventh; West Scranton High School, eighth; Hazleton Area High School, ninth; and Lakeland Junior/Senior High School, tenth.

Five other Northeast Pennsylvania high schools also ranked in the top 200 for Pennsylvania. They include Dunmore, ranked 132 in Pennsylvania and 3,250 nationally; Honesdale High School, 137 statewide, 3,402 nationally; Dallas, 152 statewide, 3,777 nationally; North Pocono, 187 statewide, 4,560 nationally; and Wallenpaupack Area High School, 194 statewide, 4,680 nationally.
The Texas Legislature is considering bills that would ban homeless encampments statewide, almost two years after the city of Austin decided to lift a similar local ban  a move that critics say triggered the proliferation of tent cities throughout Austin.

If lawmakers approve the legislation and Gov. Greg Abbott signs it into law, it would become the latest instance of the Republican-led state government overruling local ordinances. State lawmakers also are trying to stop cities from decreasing police funding after the defund the police movement sparked by last years national protests against police brutality.

READ MORE: Texas will gain two seats in Congress as residents of color drive population gains

We've seen a huge increase in not only the number of homeless living under bridges or on the streets, but also the rise in crime, said state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, the author of House Bill 1925. And really the difference has been that, at least in this case, this city has overturned their own ban.

Austins City Council decided to lift the ban on public encampments in certain areas in July 2019, arguing that the policy had led to citations for people experiencing homelessness and hurting their ability to find housing. The move was quickly criticized by Abbott, who promised to take action against Austin and in his budget priority list asked the Legislature to withhold state grant money from cities that dont ban such encampments.

The proposed bills  HB 1925 and its companion, Senate Bill 987  would make camping in an unapproved public place a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $500.

We as a state act to make sure that our public spaces are safe and that our homeless population is taken care of. The situation has simply gotten out of control, state Sen. Dawn Buckingham, R-Lakeway, said during a hearing for SB 987, which she authored.

The House bill was debated on the floor Monday, and Democrats attempted to amend the bill to decrease the penalties against people experiencing homelessness. After state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, raised a point of order claiming a discrepancy in the bill's witness list while in committee, it was sent back to the Urban Affairs Committee; it's expected to receive a new hearing soon.

During Monday's floor debate, some Democratic legislators criticized the bills, saying that they would criminalize people experiencing homelessness.

What Im concerned about is folks that cant pay these fines and they are caught in the system and they get deeper and deeper in the hole, state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, said during debate on the House floor Monday. [Its a] fine that they cant pay, we are setting people up for failure.

State Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, said the bill would disproportionately impact Black Texans because they are more likely to experience homelessness than white Texans.

We should not criminalize those who can not afford a place to stay, Crockett said. What weve seen specifically here in the state of Texas is that minorities are criminalized at a lot higher rate.

Austin voters to decide on camping ban

Although the visibility of homeless encampments has increased in Austin in recent years, both the Dallas and Houston areas have more people living in the streets, according to 2020 data. Some Austin residents have complained that allowing the encampments on public property  many are beneath overpasses or next to major roads  has created health and safety problems.

Other residents and most advocates for people experiencing homelessness said lifting the ban on encampments has made it easier to offer services to people experiencing homelessness and helped them avoid fines that they frequently cant pay.

The citys residents will be able to decide on the matter Saturday, after the group Save Austin Now managed to get more than 24,000 signatures to put a proposition on the ballot to reinstate the camping ban. Early voting began April 19 on Proposition B, which would reinstate not only the camping ban, but also penalties for panhandling, sitting and lying in public areas.

IN HOUSTON: 'Emily Takes Notes' project recaps Houston city council meetings for locals

The Legislature could make that vote moot by imposing an encampment ban throughout Texas.

Save Austin Nows co-founder, Cleo Petricek  a Democrat who has said the group has bipartisan support  said during the committee hearing on the Senate bill that she has heard many complaints about the encampments being safety and health risks, especially in Hispanic neighborhoods.

It is these communities that have shouldered most of the destruction to their neighborhoods, parks, schools, playgrounds from unregulated homeless encampments, compared to rich parts of Austin, Petricek told the committee members.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler has criticized both the city proposition and the Senate and House bills.

All SB 987 does is impose possible jail and fines for those without homes. At best, it will force those without shelter to hide, and thats even less safe, Adler said in a written statement. This bill, like Proposition B, offers no help and no solution. We cant go back to the failed policies of the past that we know dont work, like threatening jail and fines to make people move  when theres nowhere for those people to move to.

Homeless advocates agreed that the bill wont help efforts to house people experiencing homelessness.

Banning people from sleeping or sitting down in public wont help them find housing; itll just further ostracize them from our community because they cant afford rent, Matthew Mollica, executive editor at Austins Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, said in his written statement to the Senate Committee on Local Government. Evidence shows that, far from ending anyones homelessness, criminalizing basic human functions like sleeping increases the trauma associated with experiencing homelessness and makes it harder for someone to end their homelessness.

It ties their hands

Homeless service providers in other Texas cities say they also are worried about how a state law banning encampments could play out. Regulations and enforcement related to camping in public places vary greatly among cities. Some, like Austin, dont have a universal ban, but camping is not allowed in places like public parks. Others, like Dallas, dont have a ban but will remove encampments if there are safety concerns.

In Houston, a city that has been touted as a national model for how to handle the homelessness crisis, tents and makeshift structures are banned, but the city does removals only when there is available housing for the people involved. Mike Nichols, CEO and president of the Coalition for the Homeless in that city, told lawmakers that he opposed the bills theyre considering.

We have to have collaboration with the police, with the city, with the county.  This bill will kill our collaboration because it ties their hands, Nichols said in the Senate committee hearing.

TWITTER V. ABBOTT: Twitter has beef with Abbott for tweeting fake Fox News story

In Brown County, Linda Heitman, executive director of Brown County Home Solutions, said she has a similar worry.

Weve worked very hard to foster a good relation between the police and the homeless population. If the police are forced to do the enforcement and ticket people, that would totally undo what weve done, Heitman said in an interview. If the police are out there trying to get them to go to a shelter, they would be afraid that they would be taken to jail.

Eric Samuels, president and CEO of the Texas Homeless Network, is also concerned about lawmakers threat to cut state funds to cities, even though the states contributions to homeless solutions are considerably smaller than what the federal government and many local governments provide.

Any cut in that funding would be substantial, and it would really weaken our efforts to end homelessness, Samuels said. And if a community says that we're not going to put a ban on camping in public, then I think we need to respect what that local community has decided.

He called the proposed statewide encampment ban the stick method  all it does is end up pushing people further in the shadows, pushing people behind the tree line, and that does not serve to get more people into services.

Camping bans have led to court battles across the country. In February, the city of Boise, Idaho, had to commit $1.3 million for homelessness as part of a settlement in a decadelong case that six people experiencing homelessness filed against the city. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas sued the city of Houston in 2017 for its encampment ban, but the lawsuit was withdrawn in 2019.

Nick Hudson, policy and advocacy strategist with the ACLU of Texas, said the group is closely watching what happens with the legislation.

Criminalizing Texans who are trying to meet their basic needs is unconstitutional. Under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, it is cruel and unusual to punish someone for status they cannot control, such as experiencing homelessness, Hudson said. Courts have found that it is unconstitutional to criminalize someone for sleeping or camping outside when they have no place else to go.

Disclosure: Steve Adler, a former Texas Tribune board chair, has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
She always knows how to dress to impress, no matter the occasion.

And Paris Hilton was sure to turn heads in a clip she shared via Instagram stories on Wednesday that saw her dance at home to Diana Ross and The Supremes.

The socialite, 40, looked sensational as she slipped into a semi-sheer white dress that had dramatic puffy sleeves.

Wow! Paris Hilton looked sensational as she slipped into a semi-sheer white dress with puffy sleeves while dancing at home in a stylish clip she shared via Instagram on Wednesday

Paris' ensemble had a low-cut scooped neckline and was semi-sheer to show off a glimpse of her cleavage while she twirled around a room in her house.

The outfit also had a tulle skirt that fell to the floor and which the reality star pulled up around and over her face.

Her golden locks were brushed into a sleek, straight style and she wore a light palette of make-up for the occasion.

Paris also made sure that all attention remained on her ensemble by keeping her accessories to a minimum and just wearing diamond stud earrings.

Getting her groove on: Paris danced to Diana Ross and The Supremes

Stunning: Paris' also had a tulle skirt that fell to the floor and which the reality star pulled up around and over her face

Stunning: Paris' ensemble had a low-cut scooped neckline and was semi-sheer to show off a glimpse of her cleavage while she twirled around a room in her house

Paris got engaged to Carter Reum after he popped the question while celebrating her 40th birthday on a private island in February.

They began dating in 2019 after meeting through mutual friends, and their relationship has clearly gone from strength to strength.

Paris and Carter's wedding could still be a way in the future, however, as her sister Nicky recently told New You magazine that the former reality TV star has not started planning the wedding yet.

'I don't think she's doing it in the immediate future. She wants to do it when everyone is safe and theres a bit more clarity but I'll definitely be helping her, especially with the fun things like the bachelorette party.'

Gorge: Her golden locks were brushed into a sleek, straight style and she wore a light palette of make-up for the occasion

Fashionista: Paris also made sure that all attention remained on her ensemble by keeping her accessories to a minimum and just wearing diamond stud earrings

She added her sister will have a joint bachelor/bachelorette party possibly in Las Vegas or Miami.

The New York resident then said Paris has been very busy with her ventures: 'Or maybe it's because she's been so busy with launching her podcast and her production company but she hasnt really had time to even think about it.'

And Nicky also shed light on what kind of bride Paris, 40, will be, noting: 'Paris is the opposite of a Bridezilla.

Nuptials: Paris got engaged to Carter Reum after he popped the question while celebrating her 40th birthday on a private island in February

'I told her, If you want to have a wedding anytime soon, you better get on it. Venues get booked up. Some of these dresses take a few months to make. But she seems very focused on her business right now.'

As far as Carter, Nicky said he is 'really nice' and they are very happy together.

'They are very similar. They are very focused and passionate about their work. They get along great,' she added.
Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state in 1794, was eagerly awaiting a meeting with French physician and botanist Joseph Dombey. The Frenchman was supposed to meet Jefferson in Philadelphia to discuss a couple of critical international trade issues between their governments.

He was also going to revolutionize the way Americans did business.

But instead of meeting Jefferson in Philadelphia, Dombey found himself in the Caribbean, where his ship was being boarded by British privateers. Upon learning he was a Frenchman, and a famous scientist at that, he was captured and taken prisoner.

The metric system would have to wait.

At the time, the United States was enjoying its newly won freedom and the closeness that French assistance in the Revolution had brought to the two countries. Meanwhile Napoleonic France was at war with England and a number of other countries in the War of the First Coalition. So Dombey had to cross the Atlantic with a bit of deftness and luck. He had neither.

Dombey attempted three Atlantic crossings and never once had a successful trip. (Library of Congress)

Despite its ongoing war with Europes monarchies, few admired the French ways of life and business more than Jefferson. One of the French ways he was trying to get the new Congress to adopt was the metric system of weights and measures. As secretary of state, he wanted to standardize the way the entire country measured everything.

Upon winning independence, the former colonies still held some of their mother countrys old customs, including its weights and measures. The British system was filled with holdovers from a history of more than a thousand years. It still used Anglo-Saxon measurements, Roman measurements and other systems from the times of King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth I.

This meant that instead of an understandable and scalable base-10 system that could be converted easily, it used depth measurements like a fathom, the arm span of a human from fingertip to fingertip. In terms of distance, one measure was a league, which was about an hours worth of travel. In volume, a pint was two gills or four jacks, depending on the tools at your disposal.

When it came to weights, a stone was about 14 pounds, but a hundredweight was about eight stone. You get the idea: It could be confusing.

If that wasnt bad enough, different regions throughout the U.S. used different systems. For example, New England used the English system while next door in New York, they were using a Dutch system.

Jefferson didnt think much of any of these systems, instead favoring the French metric system, especially for science and economics. The bevy of different weights and measures made commerce difficult both inside and outside the country, so standardizing measurements to match Americas closest ally was just good business. Thats why he sought a meeting with Dombey.

Dombey was bringing with him a cylindrical, one-kilogram copper weight (called a grave) that Jefferson was going to use as the basis for the new American system of weights. He also was bringing a copper rod that measured one meter to be the basis of a system of measurements. But on the way across the Atlantic, a storm forced his ship south into the Caribbean, where privateers lay in wait.

Today's "graves" are made of iridium and platinum and kept inside of vaults because they can affect global trade somehow. (NIST)

A privateer isnt exactly a pirate ship, except that its pretty much a pirate ship. Fighting ships could be issued a kind of piracy hall pass, called a letter of marque, by one government to raid the shipping of a government with which they were at war. Since France was at war with England, Dombeys ship was fair game for the British privateers. Two privateers descended on his ship and boarded it. Dombey tried to hide among the Spanish crew but was quickly discovered and captured.

The famous French scientist died in captivity that year. Americas hopes for using the metric system died with him. The U.S. continued using its standard but converted to a reformed British Imperial system in 1824. Since then, the United States has tried -- many times -- to force a conversion to the metric system.

In 1875, the U.S. joined an international body to maintain metric standards. The 1893 Mendenhall Order adopted the metric system in the United States. The Metric Conversion Act designated the metric system as the measurements for American trade and commerce. Later legislation also tried to push America toward the metric system, like the Omnibus Foreign Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, the Savings in Construction Act of 1996 and the Department of Energy High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004.

And yet, we still measure distance in miles, gasoline by the gallon and hamburgers by the quarter pound.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:17:57|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The United States and China should expand cooperation on natural gas development and trade, as such dealings will help smooth relations between both countries and achieve win-win results, said a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

The United States, an increasingly significant natural gas exporter to Asia, is still locked in a battle for market share with Qatar, Australia and others. "Future U.S. export terminals would be more likely to become a reality with Chinese help," wrote columnist Nathaniel Taplin in the article on Sunday.

Meanwhile, China has announced that it will strive to bring carbon dioxide emissions to a peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060. This pledge means that China, the world's largest developing country, will complete the world's most dramatic reduction in carbon emission intensity.

More cooperation with the United States in the natural gas industry might help China achieve its climate pledge, said Taplin.

"Climate cooperation between the U.S. and China is important not only to guard against worst-case environmental scenarios in the decades ahead, but also to help put some guardrails back" on the relations between the two countries, read the article. Enditem
OTTAWA - Internal documents suggest it took about half a year for the federal government to take action on air-passenger refunds after it first identified "gaps" in the rules.

Airline passengers walk by a check-in desk at Trudeau International Airport in Montreal, Friday, March 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

OTTAWA - Internal documents suggest it took about half a year for the federal government to take action on air-passenger refunds after it first identified "gaps" in the rules.

Emails between Transport Canada and the Canadian Transportation Agency, the federal airline watchdog, reveal that back in May 2020, officials highlighted regulatory blind spots around reimbursing passengers whose flights were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One discussion document, recently released to the House of Commons transport committee, says the pandemic exposed holes in the regulatory framework.

"There are no clear and consistent ground rules for how passengers should be treated in circumstances when it is impossible for the airlines to complete passengers' itineraries," the document says.

But the correspondencesuggests the issue barelyresurfaced internally until shortly before then-transport minister Marc Garneau directed the agency on Dec. 21 to strengthen the refund rules, which have not yet been put into place.

Bloc Quebecois transport critic Xavier Barsalou-Duval says the government showed"no sign of willingness" to tackle the issue through most of 2020.

"I think he wasnt super interested," Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie, who co-chairs the transport committee with her Bloc colleague, said of Garneau.

NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach says Canadians deserve an explanation as to "why it took so long" to act.

"If you just look through the documents, it looks like they took the summer off, almost. Its troubling because the amount of money that Canadians are owed  most of them are still owed that money  is a huge amount," Bachrach said.

Earlier this month, Ottawa announced an aid package for Air Canada in exchange for a pledge to refund passengers, among other conditions, but several other airlinesincluding Air Transat and Sunwing Airlines are still refusing reimbursement.

The Air Canada deal came exactly 365 days after the federal government issued an advisory to avoid non-essential travel abroad, as border restrictions and grounded fleets across the globe cratered demand and set off hundreds of thousands of flight cancellations by Canadian carriers over the next 13 months.

Initially, most airlines offered vouchers  travel credit  valid for one to two years, leaving those urgently in need of cash in the lurch.

"Some people may have lost their jobs. And we dont know when it will be safe to travel again," said Sylvie De Bellefeuille, a lawyer Quebec-based consumer rights group Option Consommateurs.

"Theyre worried about their health and say, We dont know whats going to happen in two or three years.'"

The emails underscore Canada's weak passenger protection laws compared to some countries, despite a new passenger rights charter that came fully into effect in December 2019.

Details included in the correspondence note that the United States and European Union require airlines to fully refund passengers "if the airline cancelled a flight, regardless of the reason." In Canada, however, reimbursement hinges on the tariff  the contract between passenger and carrier  as "no refund obligation" exists.

"Repeatedly the minister already said that he had no ability to mandate the refunds, that the (transportation agency) was an arms-length body, that we should look at the waivers that come with the airline tickets," Bachrach said.

"And yet we see in December that indeed the minister was able to do something. But at that point airlines had been sitting on billions of dollars of Canadians hard-earned money in the midst of a pandemic, when a lot of families had been financially devastated."

The Transport Department said Wednesday that the government has been aware of the refund issue from the outset, "and thats why we began to assess options and next steps as early as last spring."

"We will continue to be there for Canadians and we expect airlines to do everything they can to find solutions for their customers," the department said in an email.

In December, Garneau instructed the agency to craft a new regulation that would provide passengers with refunds when flights are cancelled for reasons outside airlines control.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a gap in the air passenger protection framework, which did not foresee the potential for large-scale and lengthy flight cancellations and groundings of air carrier fleets not only in Canada but globally," he said, using language mirroring what was written in the documents more than seven months earlier.

Scott Streiner, chair and chief executive of the quasi-judicial agency, has said it aims to have the new regulations in place by the summer.

Consumer protection laws in a majority of provinces safeguard passengers' right to reimbursement, even if that right is not spelled out in the 2019 passenger bill of rights, said advocate Gabor Lukacs.

He questioned the premise of a "gap" in the rules, saying the government is "misleading the public about their rights."

Consumer Protection BC, a provincial regulator, said in a release Wednesday that airline customers "should be provided with a full refund in the same way they paid, as outlined in the law."

"If they choose to ignore these laws, were willing to take action to bring them into compliance and help get consumers their money back," said vice-president Shahid Noorani.

For the NDP, the back-and-forth between the Transport Department and the federal transport regulator suggests a relationship that is uncomfortably closer than the term "arm's length" suggests.

"When you look at the degree of co-ordination and collaboration thats evident in these documents, I dont think thats a fair characterization," Bachrach said.

The emails were heavily redacted, with Access to Information Act provisions cited above the blackouts.

"Its unclear whether indeed the redaction reflects information that is commercially sensitive or related to privacy under the relevant legislation, or whether its simply embarrassing for the government," Bachrach said.

"All we get is a black box, literally."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 28, 2021.
This is the terrifying moment a brave couple confronted three masked men who charged at them with a power tool while trying to steal their vehicle's catalytic converter.

Marta Fernandez-Aneas, 37, and her fiance Amjad Reza Mehdi, 44, were alerted by a noise coming from the driveway outside their Bristol home on Monday night.

They realised what was happening and as Ms Fernandez-Aneas began filming the criminals, one charged at the couple on their doorstep with a power tool.

Three thieves targeted the car belonging to Marta Fernandez-Aneas, 37, and her fiance Amjad Reza Mehdi, 44, outside their home on the outskirts of Bristol on April 26

One of the gang threatened Mr Mehdi with a power tool before they fled the area

Marta Fernandez-Aneas and her fiance Amjad Reza Mehdi were alerted by the sound of drilling from their driveway

In the footage Ms Fernandez-Aneas can be heard screaming as she runs back inside, where their three-year-old son was sleeping upstairs.

Mr Mehdi however stands his ground and asks the three men, who have jacked up their Toyota Prius, what they are doing, before warning them that the police are coming.

Undeterred, the drill-wielding thief again lunges for Mr Mehdi, but the brave father once again stands his ground, and puts his fists up.

Realising the clock is ticking, the three criminals soon make a run for it and escape in their car.

The couple try to get the car's registration number but the trio leave their boot open so they cannot see it.

Reflecting on what happened, Mr Mehdi said: 'I don't know if I put us in harm's way.

'They charged at my other half, I felt they might end up hurting her.

'I thought if I get any of this wrong, they could kill me. It's not hard when you've got power tools and three people - they could have finished me off.

'It's all adrenaline - just impulsive. You're not thinking at all about what you're going to do - you just react. I wouldn't recommend doing that to anyone.

'I've grown up in a rough area so it's not the first time I've seen this. It's a matter of trying to do what you can in the safest way.

'That is not easy to judge - it can go wrong. You hear about these heroes being killed all the time.'

The couple described hearing noises outside their Henbury home shortly after Ms Fernandez-Aneas returned from work around 9.30pm on April 26.

The criminals had jacked up the couple's Toyota Prius to get easier access to the catylitic converter underneath, causing up to 1,500 in damage

The pair then came face to face with three masked men holding powerful machinery, including a large power tool and car jack.

Musician Mr Mehdi said one of the men told her that he was sent out because they had unpaid bills.

But within seconds, they realised it was all a ploy and the man was really trying to 'distract' from the incident taking place.

After verbal exchanges one man charged at Ms Fernandez-Aneas, who runs her own balloon modelling business, causing her to scream as she ran into their home.

Mr Mehdi, pictured standing beside his Toyota Prius, was threatened with a power drill by one of the gang members

But the threat of being filmed did nothing to deter the thieves. Instead, the men stood nearby while aiming their tools at the couple who kept asking them to leave.

Mr Mehdi said the men charged at them multiple times even after the couple had informed them that the police were on their way.

At that point he said he had no choice but to try and defend his family and stand his ground after one of the men lunged at him with a drill.

'I went out to see the noise was - I thought maybe someone needing help or someone broken down,' Mr Mehdi said.

'I didn't think it was a crime in progress. When I went out saw them, one of the lads said: "You haven't paid your bills," in what I think was an Irish accent.

'That distracted me for a few seconds and then I stared shouting and swearing at them.

'The mechanic who inspected the car for damage the following morning explained that for these gangs - in some cases it is a simple as putting high vis vests on and going around a supermarket car park putting cones out.

'People think it's a mobile mechanic doing a repair, they jack the car off and nobody cares.'

The pair moved to the area five years ago and have no relatives nearby for additional support. The ordeal has left the couple traumatised.

'We haven't slept,' Mr Mehdi said. 'Any little noise and we think it's them again.

Several wires were cut by the thieves while they were stealing Mr Mehdi's catalytic converter - increasing the cost of the repair

'The reality is our car hasn't got a converter on now because it's waiting for a repair. They can just come back and rinse and repeat once the new one is fitted.

'All they need to do is leave the boot up to hide the plate - they've been doing it for months.

'We did think, "God what have we got ourselves into?" We thought we were wrong about everything.

'We thought have we moved to the wrong area? Have we got mistaken identities? Has someone got a grudge?

'But since talking to the police we've realised this is happening all over the place. It's not area specific, it's not family specific.

Mr Mehdi said their insurance company said the costs of replacing the catalytic converter will most likely be over 1,500.

A spokesperson from Avon and Somerset confirmed they are investigating the attempted theft.

Officers said the criminals fled the scene in a blue vehicle.

Anyone with information that could assist officers with their inquiry is asked to get in touch by calling 101, quoting crime reference number 5221089920.
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At first glance, this footage of a motorbike being driven through the streets of India amid the country's Covid crisis appears to show nothing more unusual than three people sharing the saddle.

But in fact, the heartbreaking video shows two sons gripping their mother's dead body between them as they take her for burial due to a lack of ambulances after she died of the virus.

The brothers, Narendra Chenchu and Ramesh, had been trying to get their mother - in her 50s and named locally as G Chenchu - admitted to hospital in Andhra Pradesh state on Tuesday when she collapsed and died.

With nobody available to take her for cremation, the pair were forced to put her on their bike and ride nine miles so she could be given her last rites.

Meanwhile in Ambarpur, a town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, more images emerged of a 70-year-old man forced to slump his wife's body across his bicycle and push her to a neighbouring village for cremation after locals refused to carry out the ceremony fearing they might catch the virus.

Images show the frail-looking man attempting to push the bike along, and then crouched at the side of the road after the bike and body fell into a heap. Police were called and managed to summon an ambulance for the man, so his wife's body could be cremated.

The shocking images emerged as India reported yet another day of record numbers - 379,257 cases and 3,645 deaths - with the country's crisis showing no sign of easing.

But in Uttar Pradesh state, chief minister Yogi Adityanath was accused of trying to cover up the dire situation by threatening to arrest and seize the property of anyone reporting a shortage of oxygen and hospital beds.

Mr Adityanath, a right-wing ally of Prime Minister Modi, has previously denied any shortage of 'beds, oxygen or life-saving drugs' in the state and accused those saying otherwise of spreading 'rumours and propaganda'.

Police subsequently arrested a man who had been posting on social media searching for oxygen for a his 88-year-old relative, saying his 'false tweet' had prompted others to accuse the government of wrongdoing.

Elsewhere in India today:

Elections were allowed to go ahead in West Begnal state with millions of people heading to the polls and little sign of social distancing in place

Government chief scientific advisor K Vijay Raghavan admitted more should have been done to prepare for the second wave, and that people got complacent after the first wave ended

Medics said the infection has spread from cities to rural areas where healthcare is often non-existent, with people turning to witch doctors for 'cures'

Delhi's chief minister said the city currently has 'no vaccines' available despite the government inviting everyone over the age of 18 to apply for one, and has no idea when more will arrive

Facebook temporarily blocked posts calling on Prime Minister Modi to resign, just days after Twitter blocked posts criticising the government's response to the crisis

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan claimed India has the 'lowest Covid fatality rate in the world' when comparing cases to deaths, even though most observers believe the death figure to be massively under-estimated

Officials confirmed 9.1million Hindu pilgrims attended this year's Kumbh Mela festival which took place between January and April, with Covid cases in the state where it took place soaring 1,800% in the final weeks

Brothers Narendra Chenchu and Ramesh had been trying to get their mother, named locally G Chenchu and aged in her 50s, admitted to hospital in Andhra Pradesh state when she collapsed and died of Covid

With no ambulances available to take her for cremation, the brothers were forced to pin her dead body between their own and ride on a motorbike for nine miles so she could be given her last rites

A 70-year-old man in northern Uttar Pradesh state was pictured pushing the body of his wife along on a bike to a creation ground after locals refused to give her the last rites, fearing they would catch Covid from her

Family members bring a relative suffering from to a hospital in Allahabad, India, for treatment

A woman suffering from Covid-19 coronavirus sits on a stretcher before being admitted in a hospital for in Allahabad

A Covid-19 patient with breathing problems lays inside an ambulance while waiting to be admitted in a hospital in Allahabad

Funeral pyres are lit at a crematorium in New Delhi, India, as the country's Covid crisis continues unabated - with another record-breaking day of cases and deaths reported

Gayesh Ansari watches as the body of his eight-months-pregnant wife Gulshan is lowered into a grave in Mumbai, India, after she died of Covid amid the country's brutal second wave

A crematorium worker wearing protective gloves wipes tears from the eyes of a woman who arrived with the body of her mother who died of Covid in New Delhi, India

India reported 379,257 new Covid cases today, pushing its seven-day average to 350,000 (left), while another 3,645 deaths were logged, pushing the seven-day average to just short of 3,000 (right)

India's Covid response: 1st wave vs 2nd wave India is suffering the world's worst second wave of Covid, driven by what the WHO says is a mixture of more infectious variants and government complacency. While India reacted to the first wave with a complete national shutdown and strict social distancing measures, mass gatherings and political rallies were allowed to go ahead even as the second wave of cases mounted. Here, MailOnline examines two very different responses that produced two very different results: 1st wave Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the country's first 'lockdown' - a request for everyone to stay at home for 14 hours - on March 22 as cases reached 100 with one death, but followed up with a mandatory nationwide shutdown just three days later as cases hit 600. All industrial activity was closed down with only essential businesses allowed to open and everyone told to stay in their homes, with measures initially due to last until April 14. Mumbai train station during India's lockdown in March 2020 The move caused chaos in a country that relies heavily on migrant labour, as millions of people fled cities for their villages in the countryside - some travelling for days on foot to get there. Modi subsequently extended the lockdown until May 3 with liquor stores allowed to reopen on May 4 - but they were closed just hours later after drawing huge crowds with police using baton-charges to disperse people. The nationwide lockdown was then extended, first until May 18 and then until June 4. A gradual unlocking process began June 5 and lasted through to the end of the year, with states slowly reopening their economies while trying to enforce social distancing and mask rules - though in reality many measures were abandoned sooner than scheduled. 2nd wave As many western countries experienced a second wave of Covid during the winter, the Indian government congratulated itself as cases and deaths continued to decline even with most lockdown measures lifted. Normal life was largely allowed to resume with mass political rallies taking place for elections due in March and April - some of which were attended by Modi himself. The Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela was also given the go-ahead, with millions of devotees gathering on the banks of the Ganges during four months of celebrations that began in January and lasted until this week. Crowds were also allowed back into sporting events, with England playing India in front of stands of maskless cricket fans in January. In February, with infections at their lowest point, the ruling BJP party passed a resolution that declared 'victory' against Covid 'under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi'. A Hindu festival goes ahead despite rising cases in April 2021 But just days later, cases began rising again and have now hit record levels, accounting for more than 40 per cent of global daily totals. Despite the situation deteriorating throughout March and then rapidly worsening in April, it was not until April 15 that Mumbai declared a city-wide lockdown to try and slow the spread, with Delhi following suit on April 19. Several states - including Karnataka and Assam - have now applied Covid curbs to try and contain cases, election victory parades have been largely banned, and Modi has passed emergency orders to try and get medical supplies to overrun hospitals. However, there has been no talk of another nationwide shutdown even as the country's healthcare system all-but collapses due to the weight of cases. India appears instead to be relying on vaccines to get itself out of trouble, with appointments offered to anyone over the age of 18 starting today. But it will take months at least to inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity even if India - which produces most of the world's vaccines - can manufacture enough jabs for its 1.4billion population. In the meantime, doctors warn that packing people into vaccination centres is helping to spread Covid and that more measures are needed to stop the virus spreading. Advertisement

While cities such as Delhi and Mumbai were early epicentres of infection, the virus has now spread to more rural areas where it is causing havoc - as medics say people are turning to witch doctors to help them.

Dr Ashita Singh, head of medicine at Chinchpada Christian Hospital in a remote part of Maharashtra state where Mumbai is located, said she is seeing increasing numbers of patients arriving with branding marks given to them by witch doctors to drive out 'spirits' they believe cause the infection.

Others rely on herbal cures while some have fled their villages out of fear of demons which they believe are spreading the disease, which is helping the infection to spread further and faster.

Those who do seek out help at her hospital - which is only equipped to deal with 80 patients - often come only as a last resort, she added, and are usually too sick to save.

The crisis is particularly severe in New Delhi, with people dying outside packed hospitals where three people are often forced to share beds.

Speaking to Radio 4, she said: '[There is] a lot of dependence on indigenous medicine, in ancient beliefs.

'We have a lot of patients who are on our wards right now who have marks on their abdomen because they first went to the witch doctor who gave them hot iron branding in the hope that the evil spirit that is supposed to be causing this illness will be exorcised.

'[The witch doctor] is their first port of call, only a small proportion will come to the hospital, most will go to the witch doctor or the indigenous practitioner, who will give them herbal medication for their illnesses.

'A lot of time is wasted and people come in very late and very sick, and a lot of them never come to the hospital so what we see in the hospital is really just the tip of the iceberg.'

Cities and states have rushed to bring in new lockdown measures as the crisis worsens, but there is still no talk of another nationwide lockdown from Prime Minister Modi - who just weeks ago was declaring 'victory' over the virus.

Instead, it appears India's strategy is to try and vaccinate its way out of the crisis, with the government allowing everyone over the age of 18 to book a vaccine via a website from Wednesday.

But the site repeatedly crashed as it received 250,000 clicks per minute, while questions were asked about how quickly India can produce enough shots to cover its 1.4billion population.

On Thursday, Satyendar Jain - the health minister of Delhi which is one of the worst-affected cities - warned he has 'no vaccines' left and has not been given a schedule for when more are likely to be delivered.

'We don't have vaccines as of now. We have made requests to the company regarding vaccines, we will tell you when it comes,' he said.

Until lockdowns slow the infection or enough people are vaccinated to stop the virus spreading, its is unlikely that India's crisis will ease.

The explosion in infections, blamed in part on a new virus variant as well as mass political and religious events, has overwhelmed hospitals with dire shortages of beds, drugs and oxygen.

Despite rallies being blame as one of the causes of infection, India has pushed ahead with state elections - packing people into polling stations with little thought to social distancing.

Many in rural parts of the state failed to observe social distancing rules, with some wearing masks but others hanging them loosely on their chins or from their ears.

Sporadic violence was reported from several constituencies, with crude bombs thrown and vehicles damaged.

Thousands have been killed in political violence in West Bengal over the decades, and this year's polls - held in eight phases over the course of a month - have also triggered deadly clashes between rival parties.

Winning power in the state of 90 million would be a major victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which is seeking to end a decade of rule by the state's firebrand leader Mamata Banerjee.

Nearly 8.5 million people are eligible to vote in the eighth phase of polling in the state. Results will be released on May 2.

By mid-afternoon, turnout was being reported at 70 per cent - meaning some 6million people had attended polling stations.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have faced criticism over the last few weeks for holding huge election rallies in the state, which health experts suggest might have driven the surge there too. Other political parties also participated in rallies.

The state recorded more than 17,000 cases in the last 24 hours - its highest spike since the pandemic began.

The government's chief scientific advisor K Vijay Raghavan admitted more could have done to prepare for the second wave, in an interview with the Indian Express newspaper.

'There were major efforts by central and state governments in ramping up hospital and healthcare infrastructure during the first wave... But as that wave declined, so perhaps did the sense of urgency to get this completed,' he said.

He added that tests which showed a high level of natural antibodies in the population led scientists to predict that the second wave, if it came, would be smaller than the first and move much slower - when in fact the opposite has proved to be true.

Asked why scientists got it so wrong, Mr Raghavan admitted there is no clear-cut answer - but a drop-off in natural immunity, poor data collection which led scientists to make bad assumptions, and immunity-busting variants are all likely to blame.

But, seeking to defend the government's response, he said that even if preparation efforts had continued at the same pace they did during the first wave, India's healthcare system would still not have been prepared for this.

'If the requirements were in the same range as in the first wave, it could have been handled,' he said.

People wait to cast their votes outside a polling station as India pushes ahead with elections despite the Covid crisis

Women wearing masks but failing to observe social distancing wait in line to vote in the final round of elections in West Bengal, which are being held today despite the Covid crisis

Catholic nuns line up to vote in West Bengal, where 8.5million are eligible to cast their votes today with turnout over 50 per cent by midday, according to local media

A priest and a relative of a person who died from Covid pray next to the body before the burial, at a graveyard in New Delhi

A family member places flowers inside the coffin of a person who died from Covid in Delhi, as the virus runs rampant

Relatives wearing PPE pray before the burial of persons who died from coronavirus at a graveyard in New Delhi

Relatives lower the body of a person who died from coronavirus into a pit at a graveyard in Delhi

A cremation ground in New Delhi is prepared for the mass burning of the bodies of Covid victims

An exhausted cremation workers slumps to the ground in between shifts burning the bodies of Covid victims in Bengaluru

A female cremation worker helps to construct temporary platforms to burn the bodies of Covid victims in Bengaluru, Indi

India DOES have enough oxygen - the real problem is transporting it India's acute oxygen shortage has become a defining feature of its second wave of Covid, with people forced to buy it on the black market for thousands of dollars per tank as supplies run short. But analysis say the country does actually produce enough to cover its needs - around 7,000 tonnes a day - and the real problem is not the supply but distributing it to the areas where it is needed. Most of India's oxygen producers are located in the east, where it is mainly used in industry, but infection centres like Mumbai and Delhi are in the west and north meaning it has to be transported there. But transporting oxygen is difficult - it has to be carried as a liquid in special cryogenic tankers and India has a shortage of them. It also has to be moved by road or rail, meaning the process of transporting it is slow, because it is too dangerous to fly with. 'The supply chain has to be tweaked to move medical oxygen from certain regions which have excess supply to regions which need more supply,' the head of one of India's biggest medical oxygen suppliers Inox Air Products, Siddharth Jain, told AFP. Meanwhile, many hospitals do not have on-site oxygen plants, often because of poor infrastructure, a lack of expertise and high costs. Late last year, India issued tenders for on-site oxygen plants for hospitals. But the plans were never actioned, local media report. Advertisement

'You can build about 20-50 per cent more capacity in one year in some locations. Even there, lack of personnel will soon debilitate the response. A five-fold increase in capacity cannot be built in a year.'

Dr Suvrankar Datta, general secretary of the Federation of All India Medical Association, told the BBC that it may take up to two months for the crisis to peak - and even then it is likely that infections will plateau rather than fall, meaning hospitals and clinics will continue to be overrun.

In the meantime, funeral pyres will have to keep burning day and night to dispose of the huge number of bodies, with cremation workers and grave diggers forced to work all hours to keep up.

Two or three months into the COVID-19 crisis, Mumbai gravedigger Sayyed Munir Kamruddin stopped wearing personal protective equipment and gloves.

'I'm not scared of COVID, I've worked with courage. It's all about courage, not about fear,' said the 52-year-old, who has been digging graves in the city for 25 years.

India is in the midst of a second wave of coronavirus infections that has seen at least 300,000 people test positive each day for the past week, and its COVID-19 death toll rise past 18 million.

Health systems and crematoriums have been overwhelmed. In Delhi, ambulances have been taking the bodies of COVID-19 victims to makeshift crematoriums in parks and parking lots, where bodies are burned on rows and rows of funeral pyres.

Kamruddin says he and his colleagues are working around the clock to bury COVID-19 victims.

'This is our only job. Getting the body, removing it from the ambulance, and then burying it,' he said, adding that he hasn't had a holiday in a year.

Though it is the middle of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Kamruddin told Reuters his trying job and the hot weather has kept him from fasting.

'My work is really hard,' he said. 'I feel thirsty for water. I need to dig graves, cover them with mud, need to carry dead bodies. With all this work, how can I fast?'

Yet Kamruddin's faith keeps him going, and he doesn't expect aid from the government anytime soon.

'Our trust in our mosque is very strong,' he said. 'The government is not going to give us anything. We don't even want anything from the government.'

Elsewhere, Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar told ITV that complacency after the first wave of infections led to the devastating second wave.

'I think this has happened because of arrogance,' he said.

A COVID-19 patient waits in an ambulance outside a hospital in Jaipur as India's healthcare system buckles due to Covid

A patient breathes with the help of oxygen provided by a Gurdwara, a place of worship for Sikhs, under a tent installed along the roadside in Ghaziabad, India

Patients breathe with the help of oxygen provided by a Gurdwara, a place of worship for Sikhs, in Ghaziabad

Beds are seen in an indoor stadium converted into a COVID-19 care facility in Srinagar, India

An employee fills oxygen cylinders inside an oxygen filling centre in Bengaluru, India

Facebook blocks 'Modi Resign' hashtag Facebook temporarily blocked a hashtag calling on the Indian Prime Minister to resign amid criticism over the country's Covid response. Posts containing #ModiResign was blocked for several hours on Wednesday, before being restored. A Facebook spokesman said the move was made 'in error', but did not say whether that was by a human moderator or machine algorithm. 'We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it,' the spokesman said. It comes days after Twitter revealed it had complied with a request from the Indian government to block posts that were critical of its Covid response. Ministers said the posts were factually inaccurate, and were taken down to stop panic being spread. Advertisement

'In February we announced to the world that we had defeated Corona, we have not been doing Covid appropriate behaviour - people were coming to elections in their hundreds and thousands, we've had religious gatherings with hundreds of people coming together and we did not prepare we did not do that, and this is where we are.'

Meanwhile the US has confirmed it will send more than $100 million in supplies to Covid-ravaged India, including nearly one million instant tests on a first flight.

The White House said the first flight would arrive Thursday in New Delhi on a military plane, days after President Joe Biden promised to step up assistance to the emerging US ally.

The first shipment includes 960,000 rapid tests, which can detect Covid in 15 minutes, and 100,000 N95 masks for frontline health workers, the US Agency for International Development said.

The White House said total aid on flights in the coming days would be worth more than $100 million and include 1,000 refillable oxygen cylinders and 1,700 concentrators that produce oxygen for patients from the air.

'Just as India sent assistance to the United States when our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,' a White House statement said.

The White House said it was also sending supplies to India to produce more than 20 million vaccine doses.

The supplies are being diverted from US orders to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not been approved for use in the United States.

The White House had promised Sunday to free up material to let India produce Covishield, its low-cost version of AstraZeneca, after criticism that the United States was hogging supply even as it succeeds with mass vaccination.

Biden said Monday that the United States would also ship overseas up to 60 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses that have already been manufactured, but it remained unclear how many would go to India.

Meanwhile, the US advised its citizens to leave India as soon as possible to avoid getting caught up in the chaos, advising them that its ability to provide assistance has been severely limited by the crisis.

Nations have rushed supplies to India as it contends with one of the world's most catastrophic surges of Covid-19 since the pandemic began, overwhelming hospitals and pushing crematoriums past capacity.

The devastation comes even though India is a leading producer of vaccines.
In the past couple of years, Sony has followed an unusual strategy of announcing phones without pricing and availability. The same applies to the recently announced Xperia 1 III but now we have our second hint at pricing for the top dog in Sonys mobile division thanks to a listing in a Chinese online shop.



Sony Xperia 1 III leaked pricing and launch date for Chinese market

The 256GB storage is listed for CNY 8,499 ($1,313/1,084) while the 512GB version will go for CNY 9,499 ($1,468/1,212). These prices are more or less what we saw from the pre-order listings on Sonys official web store in Russia. The Xperia 1 III will be announced on May 20 in China.

Check out our Hot take on the new Xperia lineup and do let us know what you think of the pricing on Sony's latest flagship.

Source (in Chinese)
"Our research shows that those who say they trust media and journalists are more informed about the benefits and risks of COVID-19 vaccines than those who do not trust media and instead get information from other sources," said Natalie Turvey, President and Executive Director of the CJF.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29) The Justice Department on Thursday said it is law enforcers' call for now if the lawmakers who recently distributed the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which is not yet registered for human use in the country, can be arrested.

"For now, call 'yan ng (that's the call of) law enforcement agents," Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra told reporters when asked if there is basis for a warrantless arrest.

"Our prosecutors will make a ruling when the issue is actually before them," he added.

Anakalusugan Party-list Rep. Mike Defensor and House Deputy Speaker Rodante Marcoleta on Thursday held an "ivermectin pantry" in Quezon City, where the drug was given away for free.

Asked about this initiative, Guevarra said the distribution of the drug as a possible COVID-19 treatment appears to violate laws under the Food and Drug Administration.

"Under the FDA existing law, the importation, sale, distribution or administration of unregistered drugs or vaccines are prohibited," Guevarra told a television interview.

"So in the case of ivermectin, it's not registered, particularly as a drug against COVID-19," he noted. "On its face, it would appear that the distribution of ivermectin as possible treatment for COVID-19 apparently violates the FDA law."

Guevarra, however, pointed out that the FDA itself laid out exemptions on the possible use of ivermectin. These include the granting of compassionate special permits, or if the drug is compounded by licensed pharmacies.

"If the act of distributing ivermectin would fall under any of these two situations, it would appear that they can put this up as a defense just in case a complaint is filed against them," Guevarra said.

Medical experts have repeatedly warned there is still no concrete evidence that the drug can be used as treatment against the coronavirus. The Health Department earlier said only the five hospitals granted compassionate special permit by the FDA can "legally" distribute ivermectin.

DOH, FDA urged: Make a clear stand on ivermectin use

Amid these contrasting statements, the Quezon City Health Department urged both the DOH and FDA to issue a "clear stand" on the general use of ivermectin

City Health Department officer-in-charge Dr. Esperanza Arias said a firm stand by the agencies will help set the record straight with regards to the legality and efficacy of the drug.

Arias also expressed hope the concerned lawmakers "would accept accountability" should ivermectin cause adverse effects in the future.
LendingClub (LC) came out with a quarterly loss of $0.49 per share versus the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of $0.82. This compares to loss of $0.44 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of 40.24%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company that connects borrowers and lenders online would post a loss of $0.24 per share when it actually produced a loss of $0.24, delivering no surprise.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates two times.

LendingClub, which belongs to the Zacks Financial - Miscellaneous Services industry, posted revenues of $105.84 million for the quarter ended March 2021, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 19.26%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $120.21 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates two times over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

LendingClub shares have added about 41.7% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 11.5%.

What's Next for LendingClub?

While LendingClub has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Story continues

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for LendingClub was unfavorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to underperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is -$0.60 on $105.65 million in revenues for the coming quarter and -$1.97 on $478.59 million in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Financial - Miscellaneous Services is currently in the top 45% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.



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WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- International law firm McDermott Will & Emery announced the addition of Kenji M. Price to its Litigation practice in the Washington, DC, office. A former US Attorney and Army Ranger, Kenji joins the Firm's growing list of former federal prosecutors who add both an invaluable skillset and perspective as they help clients navigate sophisticated white-collar matters. Kenji is the most recent hire, following the addition of former Assistant US Attorney Julian Andre in Los Angeles and Barrister Simon Airey who leads Investigations in London. Both Julian and Simon joined McDermott in March.

"Clients will immediately benefit both from Kenji's legal experience and his extensive connections in the government and private sectors," David Rosenbloom, global head of McDermott's Litigation Practice Group, said. "His roles at the Department of Justice and on the battlefield as an active member of the US Army have made him a strong and thoughtful leader and we're excited to have him join our investigations and white-collar defense lawyers."

Kenji focuses his practice on white-collar government investigations, internal investigations, compliance counseling and complex litigation.

"I joined McDermott for the exciting opportunity to collaborate with seasoned litigators in the white-collar and government investigations practice," Kenji said. "I look forward to contributing my expertise as a career prosecutor and United States Attorney to help our clients knock down barriers to success and fuel their missions."

Kenji served as US Attorney for the District of Hawaii from January 2018 to February 2021. In that capacity, he led an office responsible for enforcing federal law across Hawaii and its approximately 1.4 million residents. Under Kenji's leadership, the office handled a diverse array of prosecutions, including those involving organized crime, national security, child exploitation, fraud, drug trafficking, money laundering and firearms offenses. Kenji also served as the Vice Chair of the Controlled Substances Subcommittee of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee.

Kenji previously served as an Assistant US Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, where he tried cases to a verdict and argued before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Prior to beginning his legal career, Kenji was an infantry officer in the US Army. During approximately four years of active duty service, he deployed overseas on four occasions, leading soldiers in the 75th Ranger Regiment and the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal twice for his service.

Kenji received his JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and his BA, magna cum laude, from Gonzaga University.

About McDermott

McDermott Will & Emery partners with leaders around the world to fuel missions, knock down barriers and shape markets. Our team works seamlessly across practices and industries to deliver highly effectiveand often unexpectedsolutions that propel success. More than 1,200 lawyers strong, we bring our personal passion and legal prowess to bear in every matter for our clients and the people they serve.

SOURCE McDermott Will & Emery

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Shunsuke Kikuchi, the composer for the popular Dragon Ball anime series, died on Saturday at a medical facility in Tokyo, according to the Japanese music industry outlet Oricon News. He was 89.

According to Oricon, Kikuchi was undergoing medical treatment for aspirational pneumonia.

Kikuchi began his composing career in the 1960s, and the first film he worked on was 1961s The Eighth Enemy. He went on compose the music and theme songs for several long-running anime series and TV dramas into the 2010s.

The Japanese anime Dragon Ball, produced by Toei Animation, premiered in 1986, and Kikuchi composed the music for the series, which gained massive popularity around the world. He also joined the sequel series Dragon Ball Z in 1989, a follow-up movie and the remastered series Dragon Ball Z Kai, and composed the music for them as well.

Some of his other composing credits include The Unfettered Shogun (Abarengo Shogun), the theme song for Doraemon, Masked Rider (Kamen Rider), Tiger Mask, Gaiking, Tosho Daimos, Dr. Slump and dozens more. Kikuchi retired in 2017 due to illness.

Overlook Events, a production company that hosts concerts featuring the music of Dragon Ball and composers like John Williams and Ennio Morricone, paid tribute to Kikuchi on Twitter.

Our work and concerts are dedicated to him from the beginning, the company wrote.

The composer Shunsuke Kikuchi, known for Dragon Ball, Dr Slump, Doraemon, Kamen Rider, Gamera, Grendizer, Tiger Mask, Getter Robo and many more, has passed away at the age of 89. Our work and concerts are dedicated to him from the beginning #ShunsukeKikuchi # pic.twitter.com/ngmhBCMO7K  Overlook Events (@Overlook_Events) April 28, 2021

Kikuchi was nominated for a Japan Academy Award for outstanding music in 1983 for his work on The Gate of Youth and To Trap a Kidnapper. He received an award of merit at the Tokyo Anime Awards in 2013 and a lifetime Japan Record Award for distinguished service in 2015.

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BEIJING (Reuters) - China's aviation regulator will slightly relax suspension rules on international flights due to COVID-19 as it seeks to facilitate more flexible capacity arrangement for airlines, it said on Wednesday.

Airlines can now choose to cap the load factor on a flight, or percentage of seats filled, to no more than 40% for four weeks if more than five but less than 10 passengers on a previous flight test positive for COVID-19 after arriving in China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said in a statement.

Previously, such flights would have to be suspended for two weeks. The new rules would be effective since May 1, CAAC added.

"The move is to better meet the needs of normalisation of China's epidemic prevention and control efforts, and to facilitate capacity arrangements by airlines and travel plans by passengers on the basis of equal control measures on imported (COVID) risks," the CAAC said.

China has drastically cut international flights since March last year to allay concerns over infections brought by arriving passengers. A so-called "Five One" policy allows mainland carriers to fly just one flight a week on one route to any country and foreign airlines to operate just one flight a week to China.

But it has been tweaking the "Five One" policy as Beijing faces growing international pressure from other aviation regulators and mounting criticism from Chinese travellers stranded abroad. It has allowed more foreign airlines to resume services to China and has designed a dynamic suspension-based system to curb imported COVID-19 cases.

(Reporting by Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Michael Perry)
TORONTO, April 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Red White & Bloom Brands Inc. (CSE: RWB and OTC: RWBYF) (RWB or the Company) is pleased to announce that, further to its press release of February 25, 2021, its new subsidiary, RWB Florida LLC, has completed the acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Acreage Florida, Inc. (Acreage Florida) from High Street Capital Partners, LLC (the Seller), a subsidiary of Acreage Holdings Inc. (Acreage) (CSE: ACRG.A.U; ACRG.B.U) (OTCQX: ACRDF, ACRHF). RWB also completed the acquisition of certain owned and leased real estate assets used in Acreage Floridas operations (the Florida Real Estate).



RWB Florida is licensed to operate medical marijuana dispensaries, a processing facility, and a cultivation facility in the state of Florida. The Company wishes to correct the previous disclosure from the news release issued on April 28, 2021 and advises that the deal also includes the sale of property in Sanderson, Florida that includes over 15 acres of land and approximately 114,000 SF facility for cultivation and a 4,000 SF freestanding administrative office building, not an 11,000 SF facility as previously disclosed. In addition, RWB Florida has 8 leased stores in prime locations throughout the state.

The Florida cannabis market is poised for tremendous growth and is forecasted to be a top 5 State by the year 2025, said Brad Rogers, CEO of Red White & Bloom. With approximately 450,000 medical cannabis patients currently registered in Florida, we see this as an amazing growth opportunity for the company. Combine this with a population of 20M and we are delighted this deal has been finalized and look forward to delivering the highest quality medical products to the market.

Jim Frasier, formerly of Acreage, has been appointed the position of Florida General Manager for Red White & Bloom. Our employees are impressed with Red White & Blooms commitment to the local communities as they expand their ESG program around the environment, jobs, social justice and governance. We are excited to play a major role in the benefits cannabis can bring to the state of Florida.

Deal Terms:

RWB, RWB Florida and Seller entered into a definitive Stock Purchase Agreement on February 21, 2021, as amended on April 27, 2021, to acquire Acreage Florida and the Florida Real Estate from Seller for an aggregate purchase price of US $60,000,000 in cash, stock and other considerations including:

an up-front cash payment of US $5,000,000 previously paid on execution of the Stock Purchase Agreement;





a cash payment of approximately US $16,500,000 made on closing (the  Cash Purchase Price );





); US $7,000,000 in common shares of RWB ( RWB Shares ), amounting to 5,950,971 RWB Shares based on a Volume weighted average price of RWBs Shares on the CSE for the 5 trading days prior to closing, subject to a 12 month lock-up agreement dated April 27, 2021 between Seller and RWB (the  Lock-Up Agreement ) pursuant to which 1/6 of the RWB Shares will be released to the Seller each month commencing the 6 th month after the entering into of the Lock-Up Agreement, or immediately upon a change of control transaction;





), amounting to 5,950,971 RWB Shares based on a Volume weighted average price of RWBs Shares on the CSE for the 5 trading days prior to closing, subject to a 12 month lock-up agreement dated April 27, 2021 between Seller and RWB (the  ) pursuant to which 1/6 of the RWB Shares will be released to the Seller each month commencing the 6 month after the entering into of the Lock-Up Agreement, or immediately upon a change of control transaction; US $28,000,000 in vendor take back promissory notes (comprised of a US $10,000,000 7 month note bearing interest at 8% per annum, a US $18,000,000 13 month note bearing interest at 8% per annum and an approximate US $3,500,000 5 Business Day Note bearing interest at 1% per annum) (collectively, the  Promissory Notes );





); The Promissory Notes are secured by a pledge agreement between RWB Florida and Seller pursuant to which the shares of Acreage Florida were pledged to Seller and the Promissory Notes are guaranteed by the Company; and





The parties entered into a transition services agreement dated April 27, 2021 (the TSA) whereby Seller agreed to provide certain transition services to RWB with respect to continued operations of Acreage Florida by RWB until September 1, 2021 including certain financial reporting and general accounting support, the use of the Botanist Brand until such time as RWB receives regulatory clearance in respect of the High Times brand or other alternative brand in Florida as well as certain HR and IT support.



To assist in the funding of the transaction:

RWB closed on an aggregate principal amount of US $11,000,000 unsecured debentures (the Debentures) on April 21, 2021 from arms length investors (the Debenture Purchasers). The Debentures bear interest at the rate of 12% per annum and mature 150 days from the date of issuance. In consideration of the purchase of the Debentures by the Debenture Purchasers, RWB issued the Debenture Purchasers an aggregate of 900,000 RWB Shares at a price of $1.184 per Origination Share; and



RWB and RWB Florida entered into a binding expression of intent (the Binding Term Sheet) with four (4) arms-length investors (the Term Sheet Investors) pursuant to which the Term Sheet Investors would invest US $8,000,000 to purchase:



an aggregate amount of US $3,000,000 of equity RWB Florida (representing approximately 3.75% of the equity of RWB Florida) (the Term Sheet Equity) subject to the right of RWB to repurchase this equity from the Term Sheet Investors for the amount equal to the EBITDA of RWB Florida with a multiple of 8x; and



purchase an aggregate principal amount of US $5,000,000 unsecured convertible debentures of RWB (the Term Sheet Debentures). The principal of Term Sheet Debentures plus interest in the amount of 24.0% (8% per annum) will be due and payable on the 3rd anniversary of the Term Sheet Debentures; provided that the Term Sheet Investors may convert their Term Sheet Debentures into RWB Shares at a conversion price equal to US $2.75 per RWB Share; provided, further, if the RWB Shares are valued at US $6.00 per RWB Share, RWB may force conversion. RWB will have the option to repay the Term Sheet Debentures after one year along with 8% annual interest.



To date, a total of US $5.5M towards the purchase of Term Sheet Equity and Term Sheet Debentures has been funded and used by RWB towards the Cash Purchase Price. The Term Sheet Investors, RWB Florida and RWB will enter into certain definitive agreements in respect of their investments in the coming days.



A finders fee is payable on the transaction.

About Red White & Bloom Brands Inc.

The Company is positioning itself to be one of the top three multi-state cannabis operators active in the U.S. legal cannabis and hemp sector. RWB is predominantly focusing its investments on the major US markets, including Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Arizona and California with respect to cannabis, and the US and internationally for hemp-based CBD products.

For more information about Red White & Bloom Brands Inc., please contact:

Tyler Troup, Managing Director

Circadian Group IR

IR@RedWhiteBloom.com

Visit us on the web: www.RedWhiteBloom.com

Follow us on social media:

Twitter: @rwbbrands

Facebook: @redwhitebloombrands

Instagram: @redwhitebloombrands

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This press release contains forward-looking statements and information that are based on the beliefs of management and reflect the Companys current expectations. When used in this press release, the words estimate, project, belief, anticipate, intend, expect, plan, predict, may or should and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. There is no assurance that these transactions will yield results in line with management expectations. Such statements and information reflect the current view of the Company with respect to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information.

By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following risks: risks associated with the implementation of the Companys business plan and matters relating thereto, risks associated with the cannabis industry, competition, regulatory change, the need for additional financing, reliance on key personnel, market size, and the volatility of the Companys common share price and volume. Forward-looking statements are made based on managements beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.

There are a number of important factors that could cause the Companys actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by forward-looking statements and information. Such factors include, among others, risks related to the Companys proposed business, such as failure of the business strategy and government regulation; risks related to the Companys operations, such as additional financing requirements and access to capital, reliance on key and qualified personnel, insurance, competition, intellectual property and reliable supply chains; risks related to the Company and its business generally; risks related to regulatory approvals. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of material factors is not exhaustive. When relying on the Companys forward-looking statements and information to make decisions, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. The Company has assumed a certain progression, which may not be realized. It has also assumed that the material factors referred to in the previous paragraph will not cause such forward-looking statements and information to differ materially from actual results or events. However, the list of these factors is not exhaustive and is subject to change and there can be no assurance that such assumptions will reflect the actual outcome of such items or factors. While the Company may elect to, it does not undertake to update this information at any particular time.

THE FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESS RELEASE REPRESENTS THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE COMPANY AS OF THE DATE OF THIS PRESS RELEASE AND, ACCORDINGLY, IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AFTER SUCH DATE. READERS SHOULD NOT PLACE UNDUE IMPORTANCE ON FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND SHOULD NOT RELY UPON THIS INFORMATION AS OF ANY OTHER DATE. WHILE THE COMPANY MAY ELECT TO, IT DOES NOT UNDERTAKE TO UPDATE THIS INFORMATION AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME EXCEPT AS REQUIRED IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE LAWS.
Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer, left, and Bill Thomas meet with Fred Vreeman, owner of Yukon Cruise & Tours, Alaska Grizzly Lodge, during a visit Tuesday to Interior Alaska in which he talked to business owners about how they are handling tourism in the pandemic.
Auburn, IN (46706)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 68F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.
The mother of three children killed in a horror car crash last year has been left reeling again after their family home was ransacked in broad daylight.

Leila and Danny Abdallah's house in Telopea, in Sydney's north-west, was targeted by a callous thief at 11.45am on Wednesday.

The Abdallah's lost three of their children in an instant on February 1 last year at Oatlands near Parramatta, when they were hit by an out of control 4WD with drug-affected Samuel Davidson, 30, at the wheel.

Mrs Abdallah's children - Antony, 13, Angelina, 12 and Sienna, 9 - perished in the horrific crash along with their cousin Veronique Sakr, 11.

The hearts of the nation were with Leila Abdallah and Danny Abdallah (pictured) after three of their children were killed by a drunk and drug affected driver in 2020 in Sydney

Now the family is reeling again after a thief (pictured) entered the Abdallah family home on Wednesday and stole a handful of items before fleeing the scene in a stolen car

The heartbroken mother was inside her home looking at photos of her kids when she spotted a man walking out her front door with a bag full of stolen family items.

'They took my bag, our jewellery, one of my children's phones, but the biggest thing is they took memories,' she told The Daily Telegraph.

'They opened my bedside table where I have a photo of my kids on badges of my kids and Veronique [Sakr] and they didn't care.'

Recently released CCTV footage from NSW Police shows a man in black pants and a black hoodie running from the home.

He then fled the scene with an accomplice in what police believe was a stolen white Audi.

Cumberland Police Area Commander Detective Superintendent Darryl Jobson labelled the thief 'abhorrent' after what the Abdallah family has endured the past year.

'I appeal to the conscience of the people responsible for the crime to hand themselves into the police,' he said.

'It is absolutely disgusting. It is abhorrent to enter anyone's home whilst the person is in there.'

Police also hold the belief the robbery was opportunistic and was not intentionally targeting the Abdallah family.

The intruder is described as Caucasian in appearance, about 183cm tall and aged in his 20s with light hair.

Siblings Antony, (pictured right) Angelina and Sienna Abdallah all lost their lives in a shocking car crash in Sydney last year

Family at the scene (pictured) of the horrific car crash in 2020 which claimed the lives of three innocent children in Oatley in Sydney

Police, using a helicopter and dogs, were unable to locate the men, who remain at large.

The pair are also believed to attempted another home invasion in nearby Dundas.

Earlier this month, Davidson was jailed for a minimum of 21 years in the Parramatta District Court for four counts of manslaughter.

With time already served, he will be eligible for release in January of 2041.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Appia Energy Corp. (CSE: API) (OTCQB: APAAF) (FSE: A0I.F) (FSE: A0I.MU) (FSE: A0I.BE) (the "Company" or "Appia"), is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with Research Capital Corporation as sole underwriter and sole bookrunner (the "Underwriter"), whereby the Underwriter will purchase, on a bought-deal basis, securities of the Company (the "Securities") for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of $4,000,000 (the "Offering"). The Offering shall consist of a combination of: (i) units of the Company (each, a "Unit") at a price of $0.60 per Unit; and (ii) flow-through units of the Company (each, a "FT Unit") at a price of $0.70 per FT Unit.

Each Unit shall consist of one common share of the Company ("Common Share") and one Common Share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). Each FT Unit shall consist of one Common Share that will qualify as a "flow-through share" within the meaning of subsection 66(15) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (each, a "FT Common Share") and one Warrant. Each Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share (each, a "Warrant Share") at an exercise price equal to $0.75 per Warrant Share for a period of 24 months following the closing of the Offering.

The net proceeds from the sale of Units will be used for working capital requirements and other general corporate purposes. The gross proceeds from the sale of FT Units (other than the minimal amount allocable to the Warrants) will be used for exploration expenses on the Company's mining projects as permitted under the Income Tax Act (Canada) to qualify as CEE (as defined herein).

The Company has also granted the Underwriter an option (the "Over-Allotment Option") to increase the size of the Offering by up to an additional 15% of the total number of Units and FT Units to be issued under the Offering at any time on or before 48 hours prior to closing of the Offering.

The Offering is scheduled to close on or about May 19, 2021, or such other date (but not later than May 26, 2021) as the Underwriter may determine (the "Closing Date" or "Closing"), and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange. The Units and FT Units to be issued under the Offering will have a hold period of four months and one day from Closing.

The Underwriter will receive an aggregate cash fee equal to 7% of the gross proceeds from the Offering, including in respect of any exercise of the Over-Allotment Option. In addition, the Company will grant the Underwriter, on date of Closing, compensation warrants (the "Compensation Warrants") equal to 7% of the total number of Units and FT Units sold under the Offering, including in respect of any exercise of the Over-Allotment Option. Each Compensation Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one Unit at an exercise price equal to $0.60 for a period of 24 months following the Closing Date.

The securities described herein 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 accordingly, may not be offered or sold within the United States except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities requirements or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any securities in any jurisdiction.

About Appia

Appia is a Canadian public-listed company in the rare earth element and uranium sectors. The Company is currently focusing on delineating high-grade critical rare earth elements ("REE") and uranium on the Alces Lake property, as well as prospecting for high-grade uranium in the prolific Athabasca Basin on its Loranger, North Wollaston, and Eastside properties. The Company holds the surface rights to exploration for 65,601 hectares (162,104 acres) in Saskatchewan.

The Company also has a 100% interest (subject to a 1% Uranium Production Payment Royalty and a 1% Net Smelter Return Royalty on any precious or base metals payable, provided that the price of uranium is greater than US$130 per pound) in 12,545 hectares (31,000 acres), with rare earth element and uranium deposits over five mineralized zones in the Elliot Lake Camp, Ontario. The Camp historically produced over 300 million pounds of U 3 O 8 and is the only Canadian camp that has had significant rare earth element (yttrium) production. The deposits are largely unconstrained along strike and down dip.

Appia has 97.6 million common shares outstanding, 108.6 million shares fully diluted.

For more information, visit Appia's website at www.appiaenergy.ca

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For further information, please contact:

Tom Drivas, CEO and Director: (cell) 416-876-3957, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) appia@appiaenergy.ca

Frederick Kozak, President: (cellular) 403-606-3165 or (email) fkozak@appiaenergy.ca

Frank van de Water, Chief Financial Officer and Director, (tel) 416-546-2707, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) fvandewater@rogers.com

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" which may include, but is not limited to, statements with respect to completion of the Offering and use of proceeds of the Offering. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and are based on various assumptions. We do not intend and do not assume any obligation to update these forward- looking statements and shareholders are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such statements.

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/82273
An IT contractor has been cleared of 20 charges after he was accused of posting confidential documents to the internet and dark web in a data breach that exposed names, addresses, phone numbers and financial information.

Stephen Bruce Grant, 51, faced trial in the NSW District Court accused of taking documents from valuation firm LandMark White and posting them on file-sharing website Scribd and the dark web. Links to the data were then shared on a website frequented by hackers.

Not guilty of 20 charges: Stephen Grant. Credit:Facebook

Mr Grant pleaded not guilty to 22 charges, including 15 counts of dealing with identity information to commit an indictable offence. He argued that LandMark Whites system had a security vulnerability which meant its valuation database was effectively open to anyone on the internet.

On Wednesday, a jury of four men and seven women found him not guilty of 20 charges after deliberating for about a day. The jury has not yet reached a verdict on the other two charges.
On an October evening five years ago, Elon Musk used a former set for Desperate Housewives to show off Teslas latest innovation: roof shingles that can generate electricity from the sun without unsightly solar panels.

After delays, Tesla began rolling out the shingles in a big way this year, but it is already encountering a major problem. The company is hitting some customers with price increases before installation that are tens of thousands of dollars higher than earlier quotes, angering early adopters and raising big questions about how Tesla, which is better known for its electric cars, is running its once dominant rooftop solar business.

Dr. Peter Quint was eager to install Teslas solar shingles on his 4,000-square-foot home in Portland, Ore., until the company raised the price to $112,000, from $75,000, in a terse email. When he called Tesla for an explanation, he was put on hold for more than three hours.

I said, This isnt real, right? said Dr. Quint, whose specialty is pediatric critical care. The price started inching up. We could deal with that. Then this. At that price, in our opinion, its highway robbery.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Empress Royalty Corp. (TSXV:EMPR)(OTCQB:EMPYF) ("Empress" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has funded the initial payment of US$2M of the US$5M silver stream agreement (the "Stream") on the Tahuehueto project in Mexico owned by Telson Mining Corporation ("Telson").

As announced on April 16, 2021, Empress executed the Stream agreement on production of 100% of the payable silver production from Telson's Tahuehueto for the first 1,250,000 payable ounces, thereafter, the percentage will step-down to 20% of the payable silver production to a maximum of 10 years from first production after which the Stream terminates.

The Stream is part of a US$25M full financing solution being provided to Telson by Empress and its strategic partners, Accendo Banco (" Accendo ") and Endeavour Financial (" Endeavour "). The US$25M financing included a Telson US$8M equity private placement which closed on March 30, 2021, a US$5M silver stream created by Empress and a US$12M debt facility from Accendo. With the first tranche initial payment of the Stream completed, the remaining US$3M second tranche will be funded on the closing of the Accendo debt facility and re-structuring of existing loans. Telson has informed the Company that documentation for the Accendo Banco loan is progressing well and anticipates closing in May 2021.

ABOUT EMPRESS ROYALTY CORP.

Empress Royalty is a new precious metals royalty and streaming company focused on the creation of unique financing solutions for mining companies. Empress has a portfolio of 16 investments and is actively focused on finding industry partners with development and production stage projects who require additional non-dilutive capital. The Company has strategic partnerships with Endeavour Financial, Terra Capital and Accendo Banco which allow Empress to not only access global investment opportunities but also bring unique mining finance expertise, deal structuring and access to capital markets. Empress is looking forward to continuously creating value for its shareholders through the proven royalty and streaming models.

ABOUT TELSON MINING CORPORATION

Telson's Tahuehueto mining project is located in Durango State, Mexico and construction has been advanced to an estimated 60% of completion. Upon closing of the US$25M funding package, Telson will have funding available to finish construction of its processing facility and related mine infrastructure to initiate production of gold, silver, lead, and zinc in concentrates at Tahuehueto. Telson is targeting initial production by end of 2021 and ramping up to full production capacity during the first quarter of 2022. For further information, on Telson Mining Corporation's, Tahuehueto project in Mexico, please see the Telson Mining Corporate website for more information ( www.telsonmining.com ).

ON BEHALF OF EMPRESS ROYALTY CORP.

Per: Alexandra Woodyer Sherron, CEO and President

For further information, please visit our website at www.empressroyalty.com or contact Alexandra Woodyer Sherron, CEO and President, by phone at +1.604.331.2080 or email at info@empressroyalty.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.

This news release contains statements about Empress' expectations regarding the Stream Purchase Agreement which are forward-looking in nature and, as a result, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "expects", "believes", "anticipates", "aims to", "plans to" or "intends to" or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will" occur. Although Empress believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include the timing and success of Telson constructing its plant at the Tahuehueto project and bringing the project into profitable production. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof, and Empress undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, except as required by law. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.

SOURCE: Empress Royalty Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643436/Empress-Funds-Silver-Stream-on-the-Tahuehueto-Project-in-Mexico
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Germany gave the coronavirus vaccine to 1.1 million people in a day, Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday, a new daily record for a European country in a massive ramp up of the inoculation campaign.

With 1.089 million jabs into the arms of Germans on Wednesday, Europe's biggest economy for the first time vaccinated more than one percent of its population in 24 hours, Spahn said.

"That shows how much speed we've gained," he said of the accelerated inoculation pace after a stuttering start of the campaign late last year.

Only China, India and the United States have so far been able to top that daily inoculation rate.

In Europe, Britain had previously held the highest number of jabs in 24 hourswith 874,000 doses given on March 20.

In all, 21.6 million people or 25.9 percent of the population in Germany have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
Acting Justice Minister of Armenia Rustam Badasyan answered to the questions of Armenpress regarding whether Nikol Pashinyan can be considered as Acting Prime Minister after resigning from this position and whether there is a legal opportunity for replacement. Below is the text of this interview.

Mr. Badasyan, after the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan aimed at triggering snap parliamentary elections, the discourse whether he can continue serving as acting PM or not still continues. After all, is there a concrete response to this question?

Of course, there is a clear response, but the discourse is highly artificial. After resigning, the prime minister, as well as the other members of the Cabinet continue fulfilling their duties until the formation of a new Cabinet. In particular, according to Article 158 of the Constitution, the government submits its resignation to the President of the republic also when the prime minister resigns. According to that same article, it is envisioned that the Cabinet members continue fulfilling their duties until the formation of a new Cabinet. And the composition of the Cabinet members is defined already by Article 147, according to which the government is composed of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers, and ministers.

Various parallels are drawn between the resignation cases of [ex-President and PM] Serzh Sargsyan and Nikol Pashinyan [in 2018]. Is there a difference between these two resignation processes?

Look. On April 23, 2018, a decision was adopted by the government according to which the government, based on the respective regulations of the Law on Composition and Activity of Government and the statement of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, decided to state the impossibility of Serzh Sargsyans fulfilling his powers.

At that moment, in the cases of the absence of prime minister and the impossibility of fulfillment of powers, according to the governments decision defining the procedure of replacement of PM, Serzh Sargsyan has been replaced by first deputy prime minister Karen Karapetyan because of the impossibility of the fulfillment of duties by the PM; that is, leaving aside the grounds of impossibility, in this case the issue of applicability or non-applicability, it has been, in fact, stated by the decision in April 2018 of the government of the previous authorities that the PMs resignation doesnt result in the exclusion of him from fulfilling his duties, and a necessary act is needed to replace Serzh Sargsyan with Karen Karapetyan.

Let me say more. When Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan resigned on October 16, 2018, he continued fulfilling his duties until the formation of a new government in 2019.

That is, not only the aforementioned articles of the Constitution clearly regulate this matter, but also there has never been another perception over this matter.

Mr. Minister, lets imagine that the PM doesnt continue fulfilling the duties of the PM after resignation. In that case, is there a legal opportunity for replacement of the PM?

Thank you for a good question. Lets accept that the PM should not continue fulfilling his duties after his resignation until the new Cabinet is formed. In that case, where is his replacement procedure? Such a procedure, moreover, should have been defined exclusively by the Constitution because, in fact, we are talking about the constitutional security component. According to the decision of the government as I mentioned above, replacement procedures for the PM are envisioned only in the cases of the absence of the PM and the impossibility of the PM from fulfilling his duties, none of which includes the case of resignation of the PM.

And today I notice that one part says that one deputy prime minister should hold office, the other partthe other, but not a single legal basis for what is said is presented; that is, those people, who claim that only the prime minister cannot continue fulfilling the duties of the PM until the formation of a new Cabinet, in fact, claim that the republic of Armenia should not have a head of the executive [branch of] power until the formation of a new Cabinet, and I believe we all realize such claim being baseless and, permit me to say, absurd.
Class of 2021: Darren Burton

Honors College accounting graduate to pursue master's at UofSC

Darren Burton, who grew up in the tiny town of Estill, South Carolina, and attended high school in Irmo, will graduate with leadership distinction in May with a degree in accounting from the Darla Moore School of Business and the South Carolina Honors College.

While at UofSC, hes been involved in leadership activities, including serving as a resident mentor in Green Quad, vice president of the Black Honors Caucus and a member of the National Association of Black Accountants. He also is a UPS Global Scholar, an award given to outstanding and diverse Moore School students with international business interests.

He will stay on campus after graduation to earn his master of accountancy degree on his way to a career in tax accounting.

When I was looking at colleges, USC had the best business school in the state of South Carolina. I knew if I came here, Id be able to go anywhere.

When I was coming to college, it was between USC and College of Charleston. Charleston had accepted me to their honors college; USC didnt. I remember talking to my mom and saying if I could go to the Honors College at South Carolina, that would be my ultimate goal.

I forgot about being in the Honors College when I got here. But after my first semester I received a recruitment email. I had made a 4.0. It said, We think youd be a great applicant for transfer into the Honors College. I went to the information session and the ambassadors for the Honors College talked about how beneficial their experiences were.

I decided to give it a shot. This is honestly where I wanted to come in the first place. I reached out to my U101 professor and accounting professor to get recommendations. I polished my application in the spring semester, and I got in.

The Honors College has been great. It has let me know that on an academic level I can do pretty much anything I set my mind to if I apply myself.

Leadership is a moving target. Its best to stay tuned to who you are. Darren Burton, Darla Moore School of Business and South Carolina Honors College



Most people think the Honors College is super rigorous. It is, but its a different type of rigor. Its less about memorization and more about having real world applicable experiences. We get to talk about things outside a textbook.

There are not a lot of African American students in the Honors College. With the Black Honors Caucus, we create a community for Black students to come together, share experiences and share ideas. At end of the day, we provide a community to empower African American students.

The goal is to promote diversity and recruit students to apply or transfer in. Weve seen students weve talked to as high school students and as freshmen and sophomores who have transferred in. We let them know they have a community here.

On admitted students day, I took a tour of Green Quad and I fell in love with how everything looked there. Ive been an RM (resident mentor) at Green Quad since my second year. It gives me a chance to work on peer leadership.

Anything residents need, Im their first point of contact. I remember when I came in as a freshman, not knowing what is going on. Its cool to be there and to tell students, Its OK if you dont have things figured out or if youre not successful at first. I help people figure out what works for them.

Growing up, you see archetypes of what a leader is. The bravest, loudest, strongest. What my U290 class (Special Topics in Residential Leadership), taught me is that leading is less about what youre trying to become and more about what you are. You build on the traits you already possess.

Leadership is a moving target. Its best to stay tuned to who you are.

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People cut up bombs or carry them while driving their motorbikes to sell them as scrap metal. So, we need to teach people to be afraid of unexploded bombs, said Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh.

Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh

At a seminar with VietNamNet, Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh, who is the Deputy Minister of National Defence, and Do Hung Viet, Director General at the Department of International Organizations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, talked about international cooperation and the great efforts to ensure safety for the mine clearance force.

Vinh, what are the difficulties in mine clearance?

The problems in financial and technical resources are the most mentioned. They really exist, but they are not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is peoples awareness.

If people are aware of UXO (unexploded ordnance) and have a sense of self-protection, and report to appropriate agencies when they discover bombs and mines, this will be very helpful to mine clearance in Vietnam.

People cut up bombs or carry them while driving their motorbikes to sell them as scrap metal. So, what we need to do is educate people to make them afraid of bombs and mines and report to the responsible agencies when they discover bombs. It is necessary to teach students about bombs and mines in the first school lessons.

Second, it is necessary to build capacity for specialized agencies. First of all, we need to have an accurate and sufficient database about the situation in localities, so that we can decide which localities need to be dealt with first and then build a complete plan. We need to improve the capability of management agencies and of people who clear mines on the sites.

Admitting mistakes

The US is one of the countries that most actively cooperates with Vietnam in addressing the war consequences and implementing demining projects. How did the first days of cooperation go?

General Vinh: We need to thank the American people, especially veterans and their families, the families who have relatives who died in the war and the consortium of missing soldiers in the war for their struggle to demand that the US Government be accountable to the children who have suffered from landmines and UXO (unexploded ordnance) after the war.

I, along with a group of US senators, went to see children with amputated limbs caused by tragic UXO accidents, though the war had ended many years ago. They cried and shared the common view that everyone needs to struggle to be sure that this will not occur in the future. The US and some other countries, including South Korea, have shown high responsibility in this issue.

I think that about 95 percent of resources for mine clearance is from the State, while the remaining is from contributions from other countries and organizations. We really appreciate the support in financing, information and technology from other countries.

I assume that in order to obtain such great achievements as we see today, there might be unprecedented stories occurring with the two countries which formerly were on two sides of the front line?

Admitting war crimes, admitting mistakes, and admitting the responsibility of a country after the war is an extremely difficult job. This reminds me of US Senator Patrick Leahy, who said it is a miracle that the handling of the aftermath of the war, which seemed to be a difficult problem in the two-way relationship, turns out to be the most effective field of cooperation.

Director General at Department of International Organizations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Do Hung Viet

No one could imagine that just several months after the signing of the Paris Agreement, we established an organization specializing in searching for the remains of missing American soldiers in order to return them to their families. This had a profound impact on American peoples feelings and thoughts.

A question for Viet. Can you describe the international cooperation in dealing with land contaminated with UXOs?

The US is a typical example of the great efforts in mine clearance. This is obviously a cooperation of great significance to the bilateral relationship. And from a multilateral perspective, we also can see that it has a positive impact: it helps the international community and countries in conflicts realize that countries that were enemies in the past can cooperate with each other.

In addition to the US, we also have international cooperation with many other partners, including Norway, Ireland, and the UK in the Security Council.

The President of Ireland, during his visit to Vietnam some years ago, came to Quang Tri to see with his eyes the mine clearance operations in Vietnam. We also received cooperation and support from the United Nations, international organizations and non-government organizations.

Heroes in real life

Could you please give us more details about the recent open discussion session of the Security Council in Hanoi?

General Vinh: The discussion session caught the high attention and attendance from the United Nations and Security Council member countries.

There was a ministerial meeting with the participation of nine ministers and deputy ministers of countries, including Vietnam, the United Nations Secretary General, and two famous actors, including Daniel Craig, who is a United Nations Global Advocate for Elimination of Mines and Other Explosive Hazards, and Michelle Yeoh, who is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.

Yeoh spent one-third of her speech to talk about Vietnam and Vietnams efforts in mine clearance.

Do Hung Viet: Other countries highly appreciated Vietnams efforts in mine clearance and showed their response to Vietnams comprehensive approach in addressing bomb and mine consequences, as well as their agreement with what Vietnam proposed to the Security Council  paying a lot of attention to this issue in association with efforts for sustainable development and post-conflict reconciliation.

As Vinh said above, two famous actors attended the meeting. Right after the meeting ended, there was a tweet on Twitter, maybe from Norway, saying that the two actors were heroes on the screen, while Vietnam has heroes in real life.

We invited Dieu Linh to the meeting. She was head of the demining female team in Quang Tri province. She represented thousands of army engineers and hundreds of volunteers participating in mine clearance.

The presence of Dieu Linh really created repercussions at the discussion session.

Accidents are unacceptable

I myself last week was present in Quang Tri province for a business trip and I could see with my eyes the operations of the mine clearance team. The members of the team are young, careful and professional on the site, and are not afraid of the dangers lurking around them.

General Vinh, which measures are being used and will be applied to ensure safety for mine clearance forces and minimize fatalities in peace time?

We have been applying a lot of measures to ensure safety for them. But honestly speaking, there have been unfortunate accidents. However, no army engineer and no volunteer has refused the tasks assigned to them.

I think there are some measures. First, it is necessary to learn about the situation, and determine the exact ERW areas (explosive remnants of war) and types of explosives in order to decide which areas to focus on.

Second, regularly upgrade the capability of people who directly do the demining on the site. It is a must to follow standard procedures in demining.

Third, regularly check the capability of the agencies and units doing this work. Specialized units must get certificates from the appropriate agencies.

Also, we need to modernize demining operations.

These are major measures to prevent accidents during the demining process which have brought effects in the last years. The accident rate is low. However, accidents, though occurring at minor rate, are unacceptable.

At the open discussion session of the United Nations Security Council in Hanoi on April 18, Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son emphasized that peace will be sustainable only when the consequences of wars and conflicts, including bombs and mines, are resolved.

D. Thuy

General Nguyen Chi Vinh: We are paying the debt to soldiers step by step The Government spends money to clear bombs and mines. Wherever the soil becomes clean, soldiers remains have been exhumed and moved. That means the debt to soldiers is being paid step by step, said Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh.
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Spectacular pictures of the D-Day landings have been superimposed onto modern day scenes for a new book titled 'Normandy Ghosts.'

Black and white landing ships are seen speeding towards Omaha Beach as it appears today, with green shrubbery on the sand dunes where 77 years ago Nazi machine-gunners rained bullets on US troops.

In another image, the ruins of Montebourg - which fell on June 19, 1944, after intensive bombing - are contrasted against the new-rebuilt commercial district.

Others showed a Sherman tank rolling down a modern high street in Bayeux and a large warship being refuelled at the Port-en-Bessin, in stark contrast to the quiet fishing harbour of today.

The Normandy landings began on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and were the largest amphibious invasion in history.

It was the beginning of the end for the Nazis, leading to the liberation of Paris in late August and laying the foundations for the march on towards Berlin where Adolf Hitler was defeated.

The new book is the work of military historians Nigel Stewart and Sean Claxton.

'The "ghosting" technique, although not new, has become relatively well known on the internet but not so much in book form,' the authors wrote.

'It seemed a fitting means through which to evoke the sense of history we experience daily.

'Rather than a familiar narrative of the Normandy campaign, we hope this book, through words and pictures, serves as a reminder of the tumultuous events depicted herein.'

Flight Lieutenant H G Garwood landed his Spitfire MK IX MJ255 near the village of Audrieu on June 11, 1944. The engine had failed and the fighter plane was written off but Garwood got into the cockpit of another plane the very next day. Air superiority was fundamental to the Allied success during the Normandy invasion. Retreating German troops became terrified of the fighter pilots who would run them down on country lanes. General Erwin Rommel himself was wounded on July 17 when his motorcade was peppered with bullets by a Spitfire

Two German soldiers sit on the wall of William the Conqueror's castle overlooking Caen. The Battle for Caen (June to August 1944) was one of the most bloody during the invasion of Normandy. Historians have criticised the British for not marching more aggressively on Caen after the D-Day landings and allowing the Germans to shore up defences and commit most of their panzer divisions to holding the city. This led to a brutal battle of attrition which cost the Second Army, comprising British and Canadian divisions, up to 4,000 casualties from June 26 to 30 alone. The Germans would not be ousted until August when the Allies break-out to the west meant that the enemy forces remaining became isolated. Little of the pre-war city remained after the battle and reconstructions continued until 1962

Allied forces on track vehicles and Ariel motorcycles move inland through Saint-Come-de-Fresne. The town is located to the west of Gold Beach, which the 50th British infantry division were charged with capturing. British troops sustained around 1,000 casualties at Gold, including 350 killed. But by the end of the day they had forced their way up the beach and taken hold of the German strongholds, allowing them to bring in reinforcements and land Cromwell and Sherman tanks

Black and white landing ships are seen speeding towards Omaha Beach as it appears today, with green shrubbery on the sand dunes where 77 years ago Nazi machine-gunners rained bullets on US troops. The Allies planned to land along a 50-mile stretch of coast that was divided into five zones code-named: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. It was the US V Corps which landed at Omaha, five miles of sand which live on in infamy as the bloodiest of all the D-Day beaches. Surrounded by steep cliffs and heavily defended by the Germans, around 2,400 US troops were killed, wounded or went missing in the action

British soldiers marching through Bayeux on June 27, 1944. When British troops marched into the city on June 7, the Germans had already scarpered, headed for the more significant stronghold of Caen where the Allies were to meet stiff resistance. Less than a week later, Bayeux would be visited by General Charles de Gaulle, who received a hero's welcome by the jubilant inhabitants. Two months later De Gaulle would arrive to liberate Paris and give a famous speech to a crowd from the Hotel de Ville.

A large ship being refuelled at the Port-en-Bessin 'petrol port.' The day after D-Day a battle for the port took place, also known as Operation Aubery. The village was between Omaha Beach to the west, attacked by US troops, and Gold to the east, where the British had landed. The fortified port was captured by No. 47 Royal Marine Commando who landed on the Normandy coast early on June 6. Around 300 men mustered on the beach after dozens were killed or went missing during the approach. They then avoided contact with the enemy, moving across land to access Port-en-Bessin. They bravely rushed into German fortifications where they outnumbers in some cases by four to one. It was described as 'the most spectacular of all commando exploits during the actual invasion,' by historian Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. It linked together the beaches of Omaha and Gold, allowing for warships to enter the port and refuel

Barrage balloons were used at Vierville-sur-Mer. Here, one is tethered about a double-embrasure bunker. The balloons raised up steel cables which pose a risk to enemy aircraft and force them to avoid an area. The village was defended by four German strong points which the Americans arriving at Omaha Beach were in charge of capturing on D-Day.

A Sherman tank rolling down a modern high street in Bayeux. British troops marched into the city the day after D-Day to jubilation from the locals, whose buildings had been left largely intact, unlike many other settlements which were bombed to pieces. The Germans had already scarpered, headed for the more significant stronghold of Caen where the Allies were to meet stiff resistance. Less than a week later, Bayeux would be visited by General Charles de Gaulle, the liberator of France who was welcomed with jubilation by the inhabitants. Two months later De Gaulle would arrive to liberate Paris and give a famous speech to a crowd from the Hotel de Ville.

The ruins of Montebourg - which fell on June 19, 1944, after intensive bombing - are contrasted against the new-rebuilt commercial district we see today. Montebourg was located on the Cotentin Peninsula which was a key tactical ambition of the Allies after landing. Cherbourg, at the end of the peninsula, could provide a deep water port which was vital for the Allies to refuel their larger ships which were bombarding German defences. Montebourg to the south of Cherbourg was heavily bombed during the move across the Cotentin Peninsula

The image shows where German forces had installed a crude roadblock in the form of large logs. Many of the German troops during the Allied invasion where keenly aware that the enemy's strength was vastly superior to theirs. It was only the Waffen SS units who held firm to the idea that Adolf Hitler would somehow lead them to victory. Many of Hitler's commanders had already given up hope by the summer of 1944 and were attempting to propose peace terms to the Allies
SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria on Thursday announced the expulsion of a Russian diplomat after prosecutors said they suspected Russian involvement in four explosions at arms depots in Bulgaria.

At a meeting with the Russian ambassador, Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva requested full Russian cooperation with Bulgaria's investigation of the explosions and of attempts to poison Bulgarian arms trader Emilian Gebrev.

Moscow, which has dismissed the Bulgarian probe, said it would respond to the expulsion.

The Bulgarian move follows a series of diplomatic disputes between Russia and other former Soviet-bloc countries in the wake of Czech accusations that Russia was behind a blast in an arms depot in 2014.

Bulgaria, once the Soviet Union's closest ally in eastern Europe, has expelled eight other Russian diplomats for alleged spying since October 2019.

Zaharieva said Sofia reserved the right to take further measures and demanded that Russian diplomats refrain from actions incompatible with their status.

"Bulgaria wants to keep equal and mutually beneficial relations with Russia and that is why it insists on an active and result-orientated cooperation from Russia to shed light on the circumstances around the incidents," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

On Wednesday, prosecutors said they had reason to believe there was a link between the blasts in Bulgaria that took place between 2011 and 2020, the attempted murder of Bulgarian arms trader Emilian Gebrev and the blast in the Czech Republic.

Sofia has charged three Russians, which it said were very likely to belong to Russia's GRU military intelligence service, with the poisoning of Gebrev and two other Bulgarians in 2015.

Prague has also accused GRU agents of carrying out the Czech blast in 2014.

Moscow has rejected the Czech allegations as absurd.

(Reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova; Editing by Kevin Liffey, William Maclean)
Exports to China doubled last year, and Ukraine is interested in increasing trade and expanding commodity items.

China is a key trading partner of Ukraine in the Asian region. At year-end 2020, the trade turnover between our countries increased by 20.5% up to $15.4 billion, of which exports doubled up to $7.1 billion. Half of the Ukrainian exports to China are agricultural products and we are interested in further increasing trade supplies and expansion of commodity items, Deputy Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture  Trade Representative of Ukraine Taras Kachka said during a meeting with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Peoples Republic of China to Ukraine Fan Xianrong, the Ministrys press service informs.

The parties discussed Ukraine-China cooperation in trade, investment, and agriculture. The priorities of bilateral cooperation for 2021 were also outlined, in particular, regarding the prospects of holding meetings of bilateral bodies of sectoral cooperation in the mentioned areas this year.

The meeting participants paid special attention to the topical issues of expanding the access of Ukrainian agri-food products to the Chinese market.

In January-February 2021, Ukraine-China trade turnover amounted to $2 billion 494.2 million (+18.4%); exports totaled $1 billion 092.8 million (+ 43.8%), imports  $1 billion 401.4 million (+ 4.1%).

The share of agri-food products in the total structure of Ukrainian exports to China accounted for 53.1% ($579.8 million).

ol
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29) - The Department of the Interior and Local Government on Wednesday laid out guidelines on holding community pantries, one of which prohibits putting up signs to endorse politicians.

"Hindi namin papayagan na magkakaroon ng epal o tinatawag nating maglalagay ng mga signage, billboards, posters, pictures, pangalan, initial or images ng mga tao na nagsasagawa ng community pantry, lalo na mga politicians na gusto pumapel dito sa community pantry," Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano said during President Rodrigo Duterte's weekly public briefing on the COVID-19 crisis.

[Translation: We will not allow "epal" or what we call the practice of displaying signages, billboards, posters, pictures, names, initials or images of people organizing the pantry, especially politicians who want to take advantage of these community pantries.]

Ano also reiterated that permits are not required to set up pantries, but he stressed there must be coordination between organizers and the local government units so they remain compliant to city laws. Ano said LGUs should determine the venues for the pantries to ensure they would reach communities in need.

"Dapat ang venue na ito doon mismo sa nangangailangan na lugar, purok, sitio, o barangay," he said.

[Translation: The venue must be in the area where there are people in need, such as districts, sitios, or barangays]

The local government should also aid the pantries in getting local suppliers. It will also be responsible for assigning security personnel to maintain order in the pantry area as well as developing a system for the pantries to reach far-flung areas and people like senior citizens who are discouraged from leaving their homes.

Ano reminded that distributing cigarettes, liquor and illegal items are prohibited.

The rights of everyone at the pantry must be respected, the secretary added.

Ano said he was instructed by the President to come up with the guidelines as the popularity of the pantries may unintentionally cause a surge in COVID-19 infections. He mentioned the incident in Barangay Holy Spirit in Quezon City where thousands flocked to the pantry organized by actress Angel Locsin - eventually breaking distancing measures.

Hundreds of these community pantries have sprouted in the country since the first of its kind was put up on April 16 along Maginhawa Street in Quezon City. The pantries provide necessities to passersby for free - including food, toiletries, and medical supplies.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 11:16:57|Editor: huaxia

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TRIPOLI, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Special envoy of the United Nations (UN) secretary-general for Libya Jan Kubis on Wednesday discussed with senior Libyan officials the implementation of the Libyan ceasefire agreement and the upcoming national elections during meetings.

The meetings were held "to advance the implementation of the Ceasefire Agreement and the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) Roadmap leading up to the holding of national elections" scheduled for Dec. 24, said the UN Support Mission in Libya in a statement.

Kubis, also head of the UN mission, held talks with Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah on the recently-adopted UN Security Council resolutions and ways to implement them as well as the progress in Libya's political process and the preparations for the national elections.

The Libyan Government of National Unity was recently formed to end the Libyan political division after the UN-led LPDF selected a presidency council and a prime minister in February. The new executive authority's main task is to prepare for the general elections, as agreed by the LPDF. Enditem
Premier Brian Pallister and Municipal Relations Minister Derek Johnson today announced $25 million in funding to create 8,000 summer-job opportunities for youth.

Premier Brian Pallister and Municipal Relations Minister Derek Johnson today announced $25 million in funding to create 8,000 summer-job opportunities for youth.

"Our team remains committed to develop the right programs at the right times," Pallister said at a press conference with Johnson Thursday.

The premier said COVID-19 has impacted employment opportunities for young people across Canada, and Manitoba's youth have been hit particularly hard.

Getting them back to work will be part of Manitoba's pandemic recovery, Pallister said.

The $15-million Manitoba Youth Jobs Program provides employers with a 50 per cent subsidy on wages paid to eligible employees from May to September, with a maximum of up to $25,000 per employer. Pallister said he expects it will help more than 2,000 Manitoba employers recover from the pandemic and create sustainable long-term, seasonal and short-term jobs for more than 6,000 young Manitobans.

It streamlines the Manitoba Summer Student Recovery Jobs and Back to Work This Summer programs that helped create 6,000 jobs last year. Pallister said the new program gets money to businesses faster, with employers able to apply for an advance payment of up to $750 per eligible employee, up to $7,500, and broadens eligibility criteria to include all Manitobans under 30 hired as early as April 1.

It provides a 50 per cent wage subsidy on all regular, overtime and statutory wages earned during the 18-week period as opposed to a flat per-hour wage subsidy.

The province is also spending $10 million on Green Team grant programs to put 2,000 young Manitobans to work this summer. This includes nearly $9 million for the Urban and Hometown Green Team Program and more than $1 million for the Manitoba Parks Green Team.

The demand from communities is huge, Johnson said.

"We have received requests for a record amount of funding this year," the municipal affairs minister said. The province has completed its review of project applications and will begin to notify applicants of funding decisions today.

Through Urban and Hometown Green Team grants, communities can hire youth aged 15 to 29 to work on community projects between May 1 and Sept. 30. Non-profit groups in Winnipeg and rural Manitoba are eligible to receive 100 per cent of wage costs and $250 per position for support costs, while eligible municipal governments in rural Manitoba receive 50 per cent of wage costs and $125 per position for support costs, on a cost-shared basis.

More information is available online for the Green Team program at www.manitobago.ca and Manitoba Youth Jobs Program at http://wfp.to/Gjp.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Should we really be pulling water out of a national forest to stick in plastic bottles to sell at a significant markup? said Michael OHeaney, the executive director of Story of Stuff, an environmental advocacy group based in Berkeley, Calif., that has filed complaints against Nestle. Its a poor use of our resources.

The U.S. Forest Service charges the company an annual fee of $2,100 to maintain its infrastructure in the Strawberry Creek area, according to The Desert Sun, which investigated Nestles activities in California in 2015 and reported that the Forest Service had been allowing the company to take water from the forest using a permit that had a 1988 expiration date.

Battles over the water diversion carried out by Nestle  and, now, BlueTriton  have been brewing for years. State officials released a report on Nestles water collection in 2017, and a revised report last week. Both said the company was diverting more water than had been permitted, which the company denies.

This investigation has been a long time coming, and its taken several years due to its complexity, from both a technical and a legal standpoint, said Robert Cervantes, a supervising engineer with the states water board.

We just want BlueTriton to comply with California law, he said, especially now that were heading into another drought.

The water board officials argue that BlueTriton is allowed to collect only about 2.4 million gallons of surface water in the area annually. That restriction applies to water in creeks and streams, as well as the springs that contribute to creeks and streams  not to water that percolates underground.

The company said it collected 59 million gallons from the water system last year, of which about 40 million gallons of overflow were returned to the area.
As for lost sales, I assume your firm weighed the value of inclusivity against possible backlash before they instituted the policy. Report this episode to your manager if you like. And if youre comfortable doing so, please share my concern about pressuring employees to share sensitive information. I applaud the spirit of your firms policy, but I think it could use some fine-tuning.

Image Credit... Christoph Niemann

No Protocols? No Party.

My sister is refusing the Covid vaccine. Her adult children are having a birthday celebration for their children, but my nieces (the hosts) are refusing to tell invitees whether they are vaccinated or will be by party time. They say they dont want to upset their mother. The party will be held indoors, and the number of guests will exceed the current limit on indoor gatherings in our state. I know some guests will not wear masks. My husband wants to go; he feels as if hes already missed out on too much family time. If we dont go, it will be a blow to relations with my sister and her family, which have always been great until the pandemic. Is this a lost cause?

K.S.

Disagreements dont have to be lost causes. And avoiding them is no reason to humor people (who are making bad choices) or put ourselves at risk. I sympathize with your nieces predicament with their mother, but wise people are making decisions about parties based on data points now: vaccination status, the size of indoor gatherings and mask use. Its disingenuous to pretend these facts dont matter!

Call your nieces and your sister. Say: You know I love you, but were handling the pandemic differently. I wont be able to see you indoors until the C.D.C. tells us its safe to gather in large groups with unvaccinated and unmasked people. Im sorry that Ill miss your party.

This is an even-tempered approach to a problem thats beyond your power to fix. And I trust that your husbands totally understandable desire to mingle again will be outweighed by the real-world prospects of becoming ill or infecting others with the virus.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. is still hopeful the country can reach its year-end target of inoculating 70 million Filipinos against COVID-19, as he expects some 500,000 doses will be administered daily once bigger vaccine shipments start arriving in June.

In a Palace briefing on Thursday, Galvez said there are 5,000 available vaccination sites nationwide, and with enough supply, these are seen to each administer 100 doses in a day.

"Pagka nagkaroon po tayo ng full vaccination program...makaka-vaccinate tayo ng 500,000 a day," Galvez said. "Tataas pa rin po 'yun kasi gagawa pa po tayo ng mega vaccination sites na kayang-kaya mag-vaccinate ng 1,000 to 2,000 a day."

[Translation: Once we have a full vaccination program, we'll be able to vaccinate 500,000 a day. This will still increase with the opening of mega vaccination sites which can vaccinate 1,000 to 2,000 people a day.]

RELATED: Gov't eyes converting testing, quarantine facilities to mega vaccination centers

Government data showed around 1.56 million Filipinos, or just slightly over 1% of the country's population, have so far been inoculated against COVID-19 two months since the rollout began. These include over a million healthcare workers, 240,000 senior citizens, and 256,000 persons with comorbidities.

Officials have cited low supply as the reason behind the slow pace, but Galvez has repeatedly gave assurances it will pick up speed in the coming months.

Around 9 to 10 million doses are slated to arrive this June, while another 13.5 million are scheduled for delivery in July. From August to December, the country expects a steady supply of 15 to 20 million doses per month.

In the briefing, Galvez also said foreigners residing in the country are part of the national vaccination program, subject to priority listing.

"Ang ginagawa po natin, kung saan po sila nakalagay na category. Meron nga po tayong mga expats at foreign nationals na nasa A3 tsaka A2 na nabakunahan po natin," he said. The A1 group -- or the foremost priority -- are healthcare workers, A2 are senior citizens, and A3 are persons with comorbidities.

[Translation: We do it according to what category they're in. We have expats and foreign nationals in the A3 and A2 who have already been vaccinated.]

According to Galvez, inoculating foreigners is also for "reciprocity," noting that Filipinos living abroad are likewise being provided with vaccines by their host countries.
Another staff of Hillsong Church resigned after it was revealed that he showed inappropriate photos to a former female volunteer. He claimed that the images were sent accidentally.

Darnell Barrett, creative director of Hillsong Montclair, New Jersey, confirmed to The Daily Mail that he stepped down from his post on Tuesday for the said misconduct in February, sharing a couple of photos to a woman on Instagram. He is a married U.S. Navy veteran with two children.

"We thought it was best for me to move on. I don't want to get into the details," he told the news outlet.

He insisted that the incident was an "honest mistake," telling his wife immediately after it happened.

"I was not at all trying to lure her. I get that she, within the context of what's happening with Hillsong, that she would draw those conclusions. But I barely know her. That was not my intention," he added.

But the woman who received the photos told The Mail that the incident was not an accident as Barrett is claiming. She said that Barrett even wrote captions on the photos, writing on one photo that he was suffering from depression but was "proud" of himself for going to the gym.

She then forwarded the photos to her friend and found those to be inappropriate. The woman decided to block Barrett's account after receiving the pictures but unblocked him briefly to express her anger.

In her messages, she confronted Barrett of his action and pointed out that she does not believe the photos were "accidentally" sent.

Barrett replied by saying "I'm sorry?" before the woman could block him again.

The woman, who volunteered for the church from 2014 to 2016, revealed that Barrett had contacted her in January when he was planning to go to the state where she had moved. Barrett asked for suggestions on places to visit and specifically asked for a liquor store.

Hillsong explained in a statement sent to The Sun that Barnett officially resigned April 27, and that while it accepts his resignation, the church is disappointed that he made the wrong choices.

"Darnell Barrett, the creative oversight for Hillsong's Montclair location, resigned on April 27, 2021. Hillsong accepted his resignation and agreed that he could not continue as part of our team," the statement read.

"We were disappointed to learn about choices he made that were unacceptable for any Hillsong staff member."

Hillsong added that it has "countless" staff and volunteers who work with "trustworthiness, integrity, and excellence," and that these people "represent the heart of Hillsong Church," not just leaders such as Barrett and former East Coast pastor Carl Lentz, who Hillsong also dismissed over moral failures..

The Brian Houston-led church added that it thanks its staff and volunteers "for the work they do."

Captured by The Christian Post, Barrett joined Hillsong Church in January 2019.

Because of his parents' drug addiction, he and his brother were given up for adoption. He reconnected with his father, Hampton Robinson, and presented him to the church in December 2018.

"I cared about drugs more than I cared about being a good father at that time in my life. It's hard to look you in the eyes and say that to you, but ... that's the truth," Robinson told Barrett.

Barrett reportedly told Steve Harvey that he struggled about his father's statement and tried to work through it by undergoing prayer and therapy.

"He told me, he looked me in the eyes and said, 'I loved drugs more than I loved you.' Just hearing that, I still struggle with this idea of being enough for someone to stay in my life. So it's something I'm working on and I'm in therapy for and lots of prayer," he told Harvey.

Hillsong Church has been figured in a number of recent controversies involving pastors and staff. In its latest incident, the church decided to pause its Dallas operation following the resignation of former pastor Reed Bogard and his wife. The couple were exposed to have used donations to fund their lavish lifestyles.
T

he resignation of Arlene Foster as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and first minster for Northern Ireland coincides almost to the day with the 100th anniversary of the Partition of Ireland on 3 May 1921. The coincidence is appropriate since unionism in Northern Ireland is in a state of general crisis and Partition looks shakier today than at any time in its history.

The union with Britain will not end soon and nor is Irish unity around the next corner but there is a historic change taking place in the balance of power between unionists and nationalists, Protestants and Catholics, the UK and the Irish Republic, and  the newest element  between the UK and the EU.

The departure of Foster is one important symptom of this transformation. Her serial unforced errors since she became DUP leader in December 2015 exacerbated existing trends that weaken unionism and Partition, but she did not create them and her successor will have to grapple with them.

Foster overplayed her hand for almost six years and did more damage to the union with Britain than Republicans could have dreamed of (DUP/YouTube)

The key question now is whether a new DUP leader will deliberately inflate the unionist sense of threat, which is never far from paranoia, to claw back the support of harder-line unionists before the Northern Ireland Assembly election in May 2022. This would then be fought on a straight sectarian basis between unionists/Protestants and nationalists/Catholics.

The DUP will argue that Partition, dividing Ireland into the two states of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, is under threat as never before, though in many respects it is their own intransigence that has undermined it. Again and again, Foster overplayed her hand in the five-and-half years that she was DUP leader, doing more damage to the union with Britain than Irish Republicans could have dreamed of.

A crude and unjust settlement in many respects, Partition had the advantage of settling The Irish Question for nearly half a century. Partition with a capital P became the short-hand word for the creation of two very different states. The biggest losers were the Catholics of the north, making up one third of its population in 1921. Isolated politically from the south by the new border, they were in a permanent minority, subjected to discrimination at every level, in a statelet run in the sole interests of the Protestant majority.

August 1969: soldiers and civilians in Northern Ireland during the Troubles (Getty)

Partition was largely detested by Irish nationalists north and south, but there was not much they could do about it and it did, at least, bring about a sort of cold peace.

The 1921 settlement contained the seeds of its own destruction as a constitutional settlement, though these might not have germinated if the unionists had not excluded the Catholics from political power and economic opportunity. Northern Ireland was, as one British newspaper headlined it in the 1960s, John Bulls Political Slum. Electoral districts were gerrymandered, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the paramilitary B Specials were both overwhelmingly Protestant, while government jobs and housing were allocated on a sectarian basis.

The Irish Republic, for its part, is more prosperous, more secular and has greater international influence in the US and EU than in the past

The system was unsustainable, but when the inevitable explosion came it was not over the issue of Partition, but over the demand for political, social and economic equality within the Northern Ireland state.

Militant republicans and unionists might tell it differently, claiming from diametrically opposing angles that the conflict was all about the maintenance or destruction of the union with Britain, but this was never the case. The low-level warfare known as the Troubles lasted from the first civil-rights marches by Catholics in 1968 to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. The agreement recognised what should have been obvious 30 years earlier, that there are two separate communities, unionist/Protestant and nationalist/Catholic, in Northern Ireland, each with their own distinct identities, interests and loyalties.

The GFA sought, with a surprising degree of success, to accommodate both communities within an accepted set of rules that looked both west-east across the Irish Sea towards Britain and north-south across the border towards the Irish Republic.

The line on the map denoting the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic remained just as it had been since 1921. But the nature of the border, and of the division it embodied, was transformed as what had once been one of the more heavily fortified frontiers in Europe was dismantled.

Travellers crossing it no longer found the road ahead closed by concrete blocks or were funnelled through a limited number of military checkpoints. People living in a former IRA stronghold like south Armagh were no longer under the permanent surveillance of military watch towers.

April 2021: nationalists attack police on Springfield Road just up from Peace Wall interface gates, which divide nationalist and loyalist communities in Belfast (Getty)

The GFA sought to recognise realities on the ground that were much changed from what they had been 30 years earlier in 1968, and differed even more radically from those of 1921. What nationalists had described as the Orange State  in which they were second-class citizens deprived of civil and economic rights  no longer existed. It was not buttressed any more by the British army and security services which had unwittingly acted as the chief recruiting sergeants for the Provisional IRA.

The IRA did not win its armed struggle for an end to Partition and the creation of a united Ireland, but nor did it lose it or look like doing so. Contrary to the British government claim that it was a tiny group of terrorists without popular backing, the IRA had at least the political support  going by election results  of about a third of the nationalist population in the north, which was enough to sustain its pin-prick military campaign.

August 1969: newly arrived British soldiers on guard in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast (Getty)

Beginning with the hunger strikes in 1981, the IRA found that the electoral opportunities for Sinn Fein, its political wing, far outstripped its military prospects. The calculation turned out to be correct. A crucial feature of the political landscape in Northern Ireland today is that Sinn Fein routinely gets about two-thirds of the nationalist vote in elections, something that may make it the largest party in the Assembly elections in May 2022.

As one local commentator put it: Nationalist voters like republican politics much more than they like republican violence. The new balance of power between the two communities is driven by short- and long-term developments. When Partition was first introduced, Protestants were two-thirds and Catholics one-third of the population in the north, but the current census  the results of which are to be announced in 1922  is likely to show that the numbers are now about equal, with Protestants and Catholics each numbering about one million, the Catholics probably in a small majority.

Where do these complex political convulsions leave Partition? The divide from mainland Britain is weaker and the connection with the Irish Republic is closer than it was

Social and economic change has disproportionately hit the Protestant working class, which once dominated industrial employment in the shipyards and engineering factories. As in the rest of Britain, these jobs have largely disappeared, while Catholics are increasingly better educated and predominant in the universities and professions.

The Irish Republic, for its part, is more prosperous, more secular and has greater international influence in the US and EU than in the past. The American role in opening the door to the GFA is often underestimated and British governments have always been acutely aware of the impact of what they do in Ireland on their relations with the US.

This is particularly true with President Biden, known for his pro-Irish sympathies. All sides purport to revere the GFA, referring to it as if its status was somewhere between holy writ and the Magna Carta. Practical support for it is more equivocal. Foster and the DUP, which dominate unionist politics in Northern Ireland, never liked it and have done as little as possible to share power with Sinn Fein as their partners in government. The interests of the Protestant community might have been better served by seeing the GFA as shoring up their position rather than weakening it.

Tony Blair, US Senator George Mitchell (centre) and Irish PM Bertie Ahern smiling after they signed a historic agreement for peace in Northern Ireland in 1998, ending a 30-year war (AFP/Getty)

Adamantine intransigence on the part of unionists, typified by the slogans No Surrender and Not an Inch, once automatically produced political dividends. But that time has passed. The Orange Card is not what it was because Protestant Ulster can no longer be presented as the first line of defence of the British empire. The DUP blames Boris Johnson for betraying them over the Irish Protocol, but his actions show that the unionists of Ulster can no longer expect to be backed by the Conservative Party.

The GFA might have had the long-term staying power of the Partition settlement had the UK not voted to leave the EU in the referendum in 2016. British politicians tend to know nothing about Northern Ireland until it blows up in their faces. Johnson and the proponents of Brexit never gave any thought to the impact of turning the Irish border  a frontier that scarcely existed except as a line on the map thanks to the GFA  into the only land border between the EU and the UK. Suddenly Partition, something which Irish nationalists had been vainly trying to make an international issue since it first divided Ireland, became a problem discussed by world leaders in Brussels, Washington, Paris and Berlin.

Misjudgements by the DUP over the past five years will one day be the subject of a PhD or some other form of academic study on the disastrous consequences of overplaying a political hand. First the DUP supported the Leave campaign under the impression that it would make Northern Ireland more British and restore a hard border with the covert intention of weakening the GFA settlement. It was a naive miscalculation and, in any case, Northern Ireland voted strongly to remain in the EU. Foster and her DUP colleagues never took on board that the UK needed a withdrawal agreement more than the EU and was never going to torpedo it for the sake of the Ulster unionists.

Theresa May and Arlene Foster visit Belleek Pottery in Fermanagh, in 2018 (Getty)

Instead of strengthening Partition as the DUP had imagined, Brexit has wounded it, perhaps mortally. For a few glorious years from the DUP point of view, the old alliance between the unionists of Northern Ireland and the Conservative Party seemed to be reborn. Between 2017 and 2019, Theresa Mays government depended on DUP votes for its majority. DUP leaders were flattered by invitations to Downing Street and obtained the respectful attention of the British media.

It was an illusion. Foster and her colleagues mistook temporary and accidental influence for real power. They double-downed on the mistake by trusting the blandishments of Johnson in the naive expectation that as prime minister he would stand by them.

What they got instead was the Irish Protocol with a commercial border running down the Irish Sea and no barriers between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. In the Executive, the DUP ended up simultaneously denouncing and implementing the Protocol, which loses it votes both to the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice and to the moderate Alliance Party. The recent riots across Northern Ireland show how the political temperature is rising and will get hotter still as the DUP seeks to shore up its position as the prime champion of unionism.

Read More:

Where do these complex political convulsions leave Partition? The divide from mainland Britain is deeper and the connection with the Irish Republic is stronger than it was. Political support for unionism has eroded. Post-Brexit, fewer Catholics in the north want to stay in the union and the same is true of a smaller number of Protestants. Unionism is visibly in crisis, but unionists do not know what to do to reverse the trend.

Yet crucial aspects of the political landscape have not changed since 1921. The bedrock of Partition was the wish of the majority of the Protestant community to stay within the UK and outside a united Ireland  and that determination is, for a large part, still what it was. But by treating every change as an existential threat to unionism, it is the DUP that is destabilising Northern Ireland and putting the future of Partition in doubt.
The United States welcomes and supports Ukraine's Crimean Platform peace initiative and is ready to join it so as to achieve the ultimate goal of ending Russia's occupation of the Crimean peninsula, according to a State Department spokesperson.

"The United States welcomes Ukraine's new initiative, the Crimea Platform, and looks forward to continuing to work with Ukraine and our allies and partners to end Russia's occupation of the Crimean Peninsula and aggression in eastern Ukraine," the State Department's Office of the Spokesperson told an Ukrinform correspondent on Wednesday, April 28.

It also said that the United States "reaffirms its support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, extending to its territorial waters."

The Crimean Platform is a new consultative and coordination format initiated by Ukraine to improve the efficiency of the international response to the occupation of Crimea, respond to growing security challenges, step up international pressure on Russia, prevent further human rights violations, protect victims of the occupation regime and to achieve the de-occupation of Crimea. Ukraine actively invites other states to join this international initiative.

The first Crimean Platform summit is scheduled for August 23 in Kyiv. Preparatory work in this direction is underway.

The issue of the Crimean Platform was discussed at the level of the foreign ministers of Poland, Romania, Turkey, Georgia and Ukraine at a working meeting on security in the Black Sea region in Bucharest last week. In addition, the inaugural meeting of the support group for the Crimean Platform within the NATO Parliamentary Assembly was held on Tuesday, April 27.

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At least 24 people people have died following the latest tragedy at sea.  UNHCR/Markel Redondo

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) are warning today of the continued increase of refugee and migrant deaths at sea after the latest reports of at least 17 people* dying in the North Atlantic while attempting to reach the Canary Islands.

According to initial reports, the Spanish search-and-rescue teams came to the aid of a vessel in distress detected some 500 kilometres south of the Canary Island of El Hierro on 27 April afternoon. A Spanish Air Force helicopter found only three survivors on board the vessel, two men and a woman, and 17 bodies on the deck of the boat.

The helicopter crew lifted the three severely dehydrated survivors to safety and took them to hospitals of the island of Tenerife, where the ill-fated boat is also being towed for identification of the deceased.

Some 200 people are estimated to have lost their lives at sea this year along the route to the Canary Islands and the Western Mediterranean route to Spain. Of those, nearly 90 perished at sea en route to the Canary Islands, including at least eight children and six women.

Since January, more than 4,300 migrants and refugees, including unaccompanied children in need of protection, have arrived by sea to the Canary Islands. The rough seas at this time of year and the long distances travelled  from 400 to more than 1,500 kilometres depending on where along the coast of West Africa the journey began  make this route particularly dangerous. Boats may be adrift for days, running out of water and food.

UNHCR and IOM thank the Spanish authorities, Salvamento Maritimo and the State Security Forces and Corps for their life-saving work in search and rescue at sea. From Friday 23 to Sunday 25 April authorities rescued more than 200 people in the sea south of the Canary Islands.

Both UN organizations call on all states to strengthen legal and safe pathways to provide alternatives to dangerous sea crossings. The states, all international, regional and local actors should also enhance their cooperation in the fight against human smuggling and trafficking networks that continue to profit from the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants and refugees.

*Update: After the boat was towed to Puerto de los Cristianos, Tenerife, on the night of 28 April, Spanish Authorities confirmed that the number of bodies now totals 24.

For more information on this topic, please contact:

At UNHCR:

In Spain, Maria Jesus Vega, [email protected] , +34 670 661263

, +34 670 661263 In Geneva, Shabia Mantoo, [email protected] , +41 (22) 739 7138

At IOM:
Eight people have been charged in the death of an Ohio college student after a hazing incident at a fraternity event in March, Wood County Prosecutor Paul Dobson announced Thursday.

Stone Foltz, 20, was a sophomore at Bowling Green State University when he attended Pi Kappa Alpha fraternitys Big Brother Night, an off-campus event, on March 4, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

During the event, pledges  including Foltz  were forced to drink a handle of liquor, roughly 40 shots, as part of the fraternitys initiation process, according to the newspaper.

Sean Alto, the familys attorney, said fraternity members dropped off Foltz at his apartment following the event, McClatchy News reported. His roommates found him and called 911. He was rushed to a hospital.

Foltz was on life support for several days so his family could donate his organs WCMH reported.

He died March 7.

Foltzs death was ruled an accident by the Lucas County Coroner as a result of a fatal level of alcohol intoxication during a hazing incident, the Bowling Green Sentinel Tribune reported. His blood-alcohol level was nearly 0.4.

The fraternity has since been expelled from the University, according to the Tribune.

Now, eight people are facing charges in connection to his death, ranging from hazing to involuntary manslaughter.

Alto released a statement from the family who called the charges one step in the right direction.

Swift action also needs to be taken by government officials and university presidents nationwide to abolish fraternity hazing, the statement said, per WTVG. We are living every parents worst nightmare and will not be at peace until fraternity hazing is seen for what it truly is  abuse. Its unacceptable, and in Stones case, it was fatal.

The charges are as follows, as reported by several news outlets:

Jacob Krinn, 20, of Delaware, Ohio  first-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, felonious assault, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business

Daylen Dunson, 20, of Cleveland  third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business

Troy Henricksen, 23, of Grove City, Ohio third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws.





Canyon Caldwell, 21, of Dublin, Ohio  third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business

Niall Sweeney, 21, of Erie, Pennsylvania third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business

Jarrett Prizel, 19, of Olean, New York  third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter, hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws

Aaron Lehane, 21, of Loveland, Ohio  tampering with evidence, hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business

Benjamin Boyers, 21, of Sylvania, Ohio  hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws. The county prosecutor said Boyers misdemeanor charges would be dismissed at this time, according to WTOL.

The charges of hazing, failure to comply with underage alcohol laws and obstructing official business are misdemeanors, the Tribune reported.

Story continues

Some of the alcohol-related charges stem from serving alcohol to underage people and permitting the latter at their residence, according to the newspaper.

First-degree manslaughter carries a penalty of up to 11 years in prison, according to WTOL. Felonious assault carries a maximum penalty of eight years.

Third-degree manslaughter, reckless homicide, tampering with evidence and obstructing justice each carry a maximum penalty of three years, the outlet reported.

The eight people charged are due in court May 19, according to the outlet.

Read next:

College student dies after hazing at fraternity event in Ohio, attorney says
At the meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which took place on April 28, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Emine Dzhaparova presented a draft decision on the situation with respect to human rights in the occupied Crimea.

"During the meeting, Emine Dzhaparova presented a draft decision of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe 'The human rights situation in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (Ukraine)', initiated by Ukraine, aiming to intensify the involvement of the Council of Europe in monitoring the human rights situation in the temporarily occupied Crimea," the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reports.

She stressed the importance of joint action to end Russia's blocking of access to Crimea for Council of Europe bodies and relevant monitoring procedures.

Dzhaparova also informed the meeting participants about Russia's provocation of tension by accumulating armed forces on the border with Ukraine and in the occupied territories, as well as in the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait.

She also said that the escalation is taking place against the background of continuing systematic violations of human rights in the occupied Crimea and drew attention to the fact that Russia, as an occupying state, is committing repressions against both citizens and organizations that are disadvantageous to it.

"For four years now, the Russian occupation administration has been ignoring the order of the UN International Court to resume the activities of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people," she said.

"Ukraine will use all available opportunities to protect human rights and freedoms in the occupied territories, because they require special attention and enhanced protection from the Council of Europe," Dzhaparova said.
"Our posture's gonna be that we're posted outside of DC, awaiting the president's orders. We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia."

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, in November, looking ahead to Jan. 6
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The crew of Britain's 3 billion warship HMS Queen Elizabeth are making last-minute preparations before it will set sail to Asia on its first global mission

The commander of the UK's 'Premier League' Carrier Strike Group which is set to sail on its first operational deployment next month has said the mission shows the Royal Navy's 'ambition to be active on the global stage'.

Commodore Stephen Moorhouse said that final preparations are being made as the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is readied to set sail on Saturday from Portsmouth Naval Base for exercises off Scotland before heading to the Indo-Pacific region.

The side of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is painted at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, as final preparations are made ahead its first operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific region

Merlin helicopters on the flight deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, as final preparations are made ahead its first operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific region

Two Navy personnel inspect the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, as final preparations are made ahead its first operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific region

The 3 billion warship, with eight RAF and 10 US Marine Corps F35B stealth fighter jets on board, will depart for Asia accompanied by six Royal Navy ships, a submarine, 14 naval helicopters and a company of Royal Marines.

The Carrier Strike Group (CSG), which will carry out visits to India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, will include the US destroyer USS The Sullivans and the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen.

Mr Moorhouse said: 'Morale is fantastic with a real sense of excitement, the deployment has been a number of years in planning, for youngsters setting off on their first deployment or more seasoned sailors like myself it's a trip of a lifetime deployment that everyone is looking forward to.'

Merlin helicopters on the flight deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire

The side of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is painted at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, as final preparations are made ahead its first operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific region

The 3 billion warship, with eight RAF and 10 US Marine Corps F35B stealth fighter jets on board, will depart for Asia accompanied by six Royal Navy ships, a submarine, 14 naval helicopters and a company of Royal Marines

He added: 'This is an amazing capability and pulling that all together with our international partners is a real statement that the Royal Navy is very much in the Premier League.

'The deployment takes us through the Mediterranean, the Middle East then operating with key partners in the Indo-Pacific just shows the Royal Navy has an ambition to be active on the global stage and operate wherever our politicians may feel fit.'

Mr Moorhouse said that managing the threat of Covid-19 was a major challenge, adding: 'Managing Covid in a fairly dynamic situation across the world, it's a picture that changes daily and looking after our people is one of the biggest challenges we face.'

Two Navy personnel inspect the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base. The Carrier Strike Group (CSG), which will carry out visits to India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, will include the US destroyer USS The Sullivans and the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen

Mr Moorhouse said that managing the threat of Covid-19 was a major challenge, adding: 'Managing Covid in a fairly dynamic situation across the world, it's a picture that changes daily and looking after our people is one of the biggest challenges we face'

The side of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is painted at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, as final preparations are made ahead its first operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific region

Colonel Simon Doran, the senior US representative in the CSG, said: 'We have been planning this deployment together for 10 years and it's a unique opportunity for us to share lessons learned while we learn them together'

AB Helayna Birkett poses for a photograph in front of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base

Colonel Simon Doran, the senior US representative in the CSG, said: 'We have been planning this deployment together for 10 years and it's a unique opportunity for us to share lessons learned while we learn them together.

'It sends a message to potential adversaries but also to our allies to reinforce should they ever be needed, we will be there, we generally always fight together so to deploy together really helps strengthen our relationship.'

Able seaman Helayna Birkett, 21, from the Wirrall, Merseyside, said: 'I am just so happy and very grateful to be part of it, it's the flagship of the Royal Navy so it was really important to me to come on this ship, just so excited, it means a lot that I'm here.'

Commodore Steve Moorhouse, Commander UK Carrier Strike Group, poses for a photograph in front of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base

Merlin helicopters on the flight deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire

Able seaman Helayna Birkett, 21, from the Wirrall, Merseyside, said: 'I am just so happy and very grateful to be part of it, it's the flagship of the Royal Navy so it was really important to me to come on this ship, just so excited, it means a lot that I'm here'

Stephen Hopper, head of Portsmouth Naval Base operations, said that preparations started 12 years ago for the first CSG deployment and has involved up to 500 base staff and involved loading 924 pallets of food and two F35B jet engines worth 20 million each.

He said: 'In the last six weeks we have been in the process of getting the ship loaded and ready to go, that's everything from going up to Scotland to load bombs and bullets to the final process of loading.'

He said the preparations included setting up a Covid-19 isolation facility to enable crew to be cleared prior to embarkment.
[April 29, 2021] Outmatch Appoints Wilson Warmack as Chief Operating Officer

Outmatch, the hiring experience leader, today announced the appointment of Wilson Warmack as its Chief Operating Officer to accelerate the company's growth and facilitate wider adoption of the Hiring Experience Stack. Warmack joins Outmatch from Idera, Inc., the developer of global B2B software productivity brands, and brings over a decade of operational experience and financial leadership in modern SaaS (News - Alert) technology companies. Warmack will report to Greg Moran, CEO and Co-Founder of Outmatch. "I'm grateful for the opportunity to join such a transformative company that is making great strides in upgrading the recruitment process during a time when it's most needed. I'm looking forward to helping Outmatch realize the full potential of the Hiring Experience Stack and scaling the company's growth in the coming year," says Warmack. Throughout his career, Warmack has acquired more than a dozen companies and restructured them to deliver growth and world-class profitability. In his former role as General Manager at Idera, Inc., he was responsible for rapidly scaling the growth of its DevOps Tools business to deliver more vaue to QA Testers and Developers. Prior to that, while serving as Lead Financial Analyst at BMC Software (News - Alert) , he was also instrumental in supporting the $6.9 billion take private of the company by Bain Capital.



"Outmatch is preparing for its most dynamic stage of growth yet and needs the right people at the helm to make sure we are making the right decisions to realize that. I'm confident that Wilson is the most capable person to drive our momentum forward and help Outmatch reach new heights," says Greg Moran, CEO and Co-founder of Outmatch. Warmack joins Outmatch as the company is undergoing a period of significant growth and expansion. In 2020, Outmatch completed several strategic acquisitions, formed new partnerships and launched new product updates in response to the challenges that companies were facing due to the pandemic. The company recently consolidated all of its technology solutions under Hiring Experience Stack, a seamless orchestration of assessments, video interviewing and reference checking to deliver a more humanized, candidate-driven hiring experience.

About Outmatch Outmatch is the industry's first and only Hiring Experience Stack. We composed a layer of assessments, video interviewing and reference checking to breathe life into your ATS and humanize the hiring process at scale. Leading global companies choose Outmatch to boost talent acquisition performance and to deliver an engaging hiring experience for all. We're big on data, intelligent about efficiency and urgently passionate about experience. Find Outmatch online at Outmatch.com. Outmatch. Let the Candidate Drive. Outmatch is a portfolio company of Rubicon Technology Partners (headquartered in Boulder, Colorado) and Camden Partners (headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005680/en/

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Minutes matter when someone has overdosed on opioids, and although all St. Tammany Parish emergency personnel carry Narcan, if someone already on the scene has the life-saving medication, it could save a life.

Funded by a $169,500 federal grant, St. Tammany Parish has launched a program that will make nearly 2,000 Narcan kits available, free of charge and without questions, to St. Tammany residents. Narcan is a brand-name version of naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses. Narcan comes in a spray bottle.

The kits, which contain two doses of the nasal spray, will be available at St. Tammany fire stations and two clinics operated by the Florida Parishes Humane Services Authority.

St. Tammany Parish President Mike Cooper announced the initiative on the steps of the St. Tammany Parish courthouse Thursday, flanked by St. Tammany Parish Coroner Charles Preston and Sheriff Randy Smith and other officials. Also on hand was Dan Schneider, who starred in the Netflix documentary "The Pharmacist," to lend his support for the program.

Schneider, a pharmacist, recounted the death of his son 22 years ago, who was fatally shot while trying to purchase drugs. His son's death sent Schneider on a years-long quest to find the murderer, and, later, to expose the source of thousands of prescriptions for highly-addictive painkillers flooding the region.

He called Narcan a life-saver.

"What if it was your kid? You'd be thankful to God that either you had Narcan or the fire department or the police department gets there," he said.

Cooper said that in 2019, St. Tammany Parish had the second-highest number of overdose deaths in the state, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

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"While Narcan is not a solution to addiction, it does offer our citizens a second chance to save their loved one's life, to start them on the path to recovery through treatment," Cooper said.

St. Tammany Parish had at least 93 overdose deaths in 2019, Preston said, and 72% of those had some kind of opiate in their systems. That number jumped to 126 in 2020, with 87% involving opiates.

"Year to date, we're right on track with 31 overdoses, 25 of which involved opiates," the coroner said. But the most concerning statistic is the increase in overdose deaths involving fentanyl, he said, which has jumped from 60% to 80%.

"Narcan is a critical tool," he said. "Think of it as an epi-pen in an allergic reaction."

Smith said that his deputies are often first on the scene, even before Emergency Medical Services, and they are equipped with Narcan and trained to use it.

"We have already saved lives," Smith said, but he said that's only part of the response, which also includes getting those with addictions into treatment.

St. Tammany Fire Protection District No. 1 Chief Chris Kaufmann said that using fire stations ensures that a distribution site will be close to where people live, and he and the other fire chiefs wanted to be involved.

"We have identified we have an opioid problem...we're responding to these calls every day" Kaufmann said. "Now we have another step allowing family member to administer the Narcan before we even get there, because time is life in our business."
A federal appellate court on Wednesday reversed a ruling that prevented California from enforcing a new labor law that trucking companies contend will force them to discontinue the use of independent owner-operators and classify all drivers as employees.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that a federal judge in San Diego abused his discretion by issuing an injunction that prevented the state labor commissioner from enforcing Assembly Bill 5, passed in 2019.

The legislation codified a Supreme Court ruling that created a strict test for determining whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor and created a presumption that truck drivers are employees unless terms of that test are met.

The California Trucking Association contended that the California law was pre-empted by a federal law that prohibits the states from imposing any restrictions relating to the price, route or service of motor carriers. The appellate panels majority, however, noted other decisions that upheld state labor laws even though they potentially increased costs.

The panel opinion, written by Judge Sanda Segal Ikuta, said laws of general applicability that affect a motor carriers relationship with its workforce, and compel a certain wage or preclude discrimination in hiring or firing decisions, are not significantly related to rates, routes or services.

The ruling may impose new employment practices and workers compensation liabilities on trucking companies and their insurance carriers. Labor advocates said the decision affirms Californias right to protect its workers.

The courts ruling confirms that Californias AB 5 law can be enforced against trucking companies that misclassify their workers  and it should be obvious to everyone that drivers who perform work for a trucking company are employees of that company, not independent contractors, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said in a press release.

The California Trucking Association issued a statement suggesting that the fight might not be over. The association can ask for reconsideration or appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The California Trucking Association will take any and all legal steps necessary to continue this fight on behalf of independent owner-operators and motor carriers operating in California, the CTA said in a statement.

The CTA filed suit after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 5 into law in September 2019. The law borrowed from the 2018 California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex Operations West v. Superior Court that created the ABC test to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor.

In short, a California worker is an employee unless (A) he or she is free from the control and direction of the hirer, (B) performs work outside the scope of the employers regular scope of business or (C) is engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hirer.

The association and the truckers said in their complaint that motor carriers would face significant criminal and civil penalties is they continue to use owner-operators to serve customers because they can never meet part B of that test. The suit contends that enforcement of the law would violate the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, the law that was passed by Congress in 1994 to put the trucking industry on par with aviation, which had been deregulated in the 1970s.

Two truck drivers who owned their own trucks  Ravinder Singh of Fremont and Thomas Odomof Madera  were named as plaintiffs, along with the CTA.

The California legislature has since revised the law to add exemptions to the ABC test for some industries, such as motion pictures, but lawmakers refused to create a loophole for the trucking industry. Voters last year approved a ballot initiative to create an exemption for gig workers who work for ride-hailing firms such as Lyft and Uber.

U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez agreed with the plaintiffs that the new law would violate the FAAAA and issued a temporary restraining order to block enforcement on Dec. 31, 2019, a day before the law was slated to take effect. He later imposed an injunction that continued the bar on enforcement.

The 9th Circuit panel lifted that injunction on Wednesday. Writing for the majority, Ikuta said that the Supreme Court has narrowly interpreted the language of the FAAAs prohibition against laws relating to motor carrier routes, prices or service. She noted that one can assert that everything is related to everything else. The courts attempt to draw a distinction between laws that are only tenuously related to rates, routes or services and laws that have a significant impact.

Ikuta noted that the 9th Circuit also ruled against a similar lawsuit that the California Trucking Association filed that sought to overturn laws that impacted trucking companies relationship with their workers.

We see no basis for departing from our precedent holding that a law increasing motor carriers employee costs, but not interfering at the point where the motor carrier provides a service to its customers, does not simply fall into the field of laws that Congress intended to preempt, the opinion says, citing a previous decision.

Judge Douglas P. Woodlock joined Ikuta in the majority opinion. Judge Mark J. Bennett dissented.

Bennett said that the ABC test so seriously impacts the services that can be offered by motor carries that it undermines the balance of state and federal power that was contemplated by the FAAAA.

It requires them to use employees rather than independent contractors as drivers, thereby significantly impacting CTA members relationships with their workers and the services that CTA members are able to provide to their customers, Bennett wrote.

A spokesman for the California Department of Labor said the department does not comment on ongoing litigation.
Australian Curriculum to Give Greater Emphasis on First Nation Australians

Schools around Australia will now prioritise teaching the culture, perspectives, and history of First Nation Australians in the subjects of History, and English under a newly proposed curriculum that has been opened up for public review.

Under the new curriculum, students will learn that First Nation Australiansthe new term for indigenous Australiansperceived the First Fleets arrival as an invasion, and will no longer learn about the ancient civilisations of the Meditterrean in year 7 and instead will take Deep Time History of Australia, which focuses on Indigenous history.

The new curriculum also proposes Indigenous authors will be promoted for reading text materials in english and high school children will also explore basic language used by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders.

The proposed changes to the curriculum come after the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) conducted a comprehensive review of the school curriculum for the last 12 months and is now seeking public consultation for their proposals.

Grade one students enjoy returning to the classroom at Lysterfield Primary School on Oct. 12, 2020, in Melbourne, Australia. (Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)

The review received feedback saying that there was not enough truth telling of the experience of First Nation Australians and that it failed to mention how Australia was the home to the oldest continuing culture in the world.

Mark Rose, chair of the indigenous advisory committee at ACARA, told the Sydney Morning Herald that children needed to be taught different perspectives.

We do it not because were pandering to a minority, and were politically correct, he said. We think embedded in indigenous knowledge for all kids is an ability to anchor themselves in competing world views.

However, David Hodgett, the Victorian shadow education minister, has criticised the proposed changes arguing that schools were spending too much time on fads, cluttering the curriculum, while literacy and numeracy skills were falling.

Every time theres a new fad, they pile it into the school curriculumthings like cyber bullying, stranger danger or respectful relationships, he told The Herald Sun.

Applying the Marie Kondo Method to the Australian Curriculum

ACARA chief executive David de Carvalho wrote in The Australian that the organisation had the job of improving the Australian curriculum by refining, realigning, and decluttering the content of the curriculum.

Decluttering doesnt just mean removing unnecessary material. It means giving the national curriculum the Marie Kondo treatment so that regardless of how much content is left, it is properly organised, logical in its presentation and sequence, coherent, clear and easily understood, he said.

He noted that during the review that teachers and other experts had said the current curriculum was too bulky and difficult to interpret, so the review has cut a significant amount of content in response and streamlined other subjects as needed including science and mathematics.

Mathematics, in particular, is an area that we have identified needed additional work, he said. The basics of learning mathematics  such as our time tableswill always have a place in the mathematics classroom. But we also need to ensure that our young people know how to apply that knowledge to solve real world problems.

De Carvalho also said that Australia currently was seeing a decline in our results in the OECD PISA tests which showed our school kids did not know how to transfer knowledge from one context to another.

PISA tells us that when it comes to mathematics, while Australian students are not bad at knowing the what, they are not so good at the why of mathematics; that is, being able to think mathematically and see how mathematical concepts can be applied in different situations. They are good at knowing the rules of mathematics, but not good at understanding the reasons for those rules, he said.

ACARA consulted with 18 teacher and curriculum reference groups made up of 360 teachers and curriculum authority representatives, peak national subject bodies and key academics from around Australia. De Carvalho also met with staff from 24 primary schools across the country.

De Carvalho is encouraging the public to participate in reviewing the proposed new curriculum and provide feedback via a survey.

The national curriculum represents the aspirations we have as a community for what the next generation should learn. It is a conversation between the generations, and through the consultation period everyone can join in, De Carvalho said.
From todays Down in Alabama podcast:

Some lawmakers are taking another look at the state coat of arms, which currently includes a display of flags that includes the Confederate battle flag.

And here in our current political environment, it should be pretty easy to quickly come up with a new single symbolic image that makes everyone happy for generations to come.

Right?

On todays news briefing we talk about the Alabama coat of arms, daylight saving time and an annual ranking of schools.

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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Two Offaly photographers have advanced to the next stage of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) Reach for the Stars astrophotography competition.

The photographers feature in the online public vote that was launched this week by Tanaiste Leo Varadkar, during a private visit to DIASs Dunsink Observatory.

The two Offaly photographers included in the online public vote are Seanie Morris and Tom OHanlon who are both from Tullamore. Tom has three pictures in the public vote. You can see them all below the links

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR ONE OF TOM'S PICTURES

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR SEANIE'S PICTURE

Reach for the Stars aims to find the best astro-photographs taken in Ireland over the past year. While a high-profile judging panel will select the overall winning entries, an online vote is running over the coming weeks, so members of the public can also have their say.

Members of the public can now view all images shortlisted for the competition and cast their vote for their favourite via an online gallery on the DIAS website. Over 170 images have been shortlisted this year  the inaugural year of the competition. The winning images selected by the judging panel and the public vote will be announced towards the end of May, and an outdoor exhibition will be staged by DIAS to showcase the best images.

Commenting today (28.04.21), Professor Peter Gallagher, Head of Astrophysics at DIAS and a member of the judging panel for Reach for the Stars, said: We are blown away by the images submitted to the competition. From stars and galaxies to meteor showers and the moon  there are dozens of fantastic entries. We are delighted to be able to showcase all the eligible submissions online, so that the public can enjoy them too.

The enthusiasm for the competition has really proven to us the interest there is in astronomy amongst the public, and the many talented photographers that are out there. We encourage people to take a look online and cast their vote for their favourite.

Alongside the Public Choice Award, an overall winner and runners-up will be chosen by the judging panel, which includes: Professor Gallagher; Brenda Fitzsimons, Picture Editor of The Irish Times; John Flannery, Vice-President of the Irish Astronomical Society; and Martina Quinn, Managing Director of Alice PR & Events.

Commenting today, Dr. Eucharia Meehan, CEO and Registrar of DIAS, said: Were delighted the competition has captured the imagination of people in all corners of the country. We received entries from right across the island of Ireland.

The competition is being run as part of the DIAS80 programme of events, marking 80 years since DIAS was established, and builds on our proud astronomical heritage. The Public Choice Award will give people an opportunity to engage with these fascinating astronomy photographs and have their say on who their winner is.

Votes for the Public Choice Award are restricted to one vote per person, and voting will close at midnight on Sunday, 9th May 2021.

DIASs Reach for the Stars competition is being run in partnership with The Irish Times and is sponsored by Alice PR & Events. The Irish Astronomical Society are initiative supporters.

Further information, including the online gallery and background information on the competition, is available at: https://www.dias.ie
Madame Speaker. Madame Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium, and its about time.

The First Lady. The Second Gentleman. Mr. Chief Justice. Members of the United States Congress and the Cabinet - and distinguished guests.

My fellow Americans.

While the setting tonight is familiar, this gathering is very different - a reminder of the extraordinary times we are in.

Throughout our history, Presidents have come to this chamber to speak to the Congress, to the nation, and to the world. To declare war. To celebrate peace. To announce new plans and possibilities.

Tonight, I come to talk about crisis - and opportunity. About rebuilding our nation - and revitalizing our democracy. And winning the future for America.

As I stand here tonight - just one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. 100 days since I took the oath of office, lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again. Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength. Life can knock us down. But in America, we never stay down. In America, we always get up.

And today, thats what were doing: America is rising anew. Choosing hope over fear. Truth over lies. Light over darkness.

After 100 Days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for takeoff. We are working again. Dreaming again. Discovering again. Leading the world again. We have shown each other and the world: There is no quit in America. 100 days ago, Americas house was on fire. We had to act.

President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (Caroline Brehman/Pool via AP)

And thanks to the extraordinary leadership of Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer - and with the overwhelming support of the American people - Democrats, Independents, and Republicans - we did act. Together - we passed the American Rescue Plan. One of the most consequential rescue packages in American history.

Were already seeing the results. After I promised 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots in 100 days - we will have provided over 220 million COVID shots in 100 days. Were marshalling every federal resource. Weve gotten the vaccine to nearly 40,000 pharmacies and over 700 community health centers. Were setting up community vaccination sites, and are deploying mobile units into hard-to-reach areas.

Today, 90% of Americans now live within 5 miles of a vaccination site. Everyone over the age of 16, everyone - is now eligible and can get vaccinated right away. So get vaccinated now.

When I was sworn in, less than 1% of seniors were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. 100 days later, nearly 70% of seniors are fully protected. Senior deaths from COVID-19 are down 80% since January. Down 80%. And, more than half of all adults in America have gotten at least one shot.

At a mass vaccination center in Glendale, Arizona, I asked a nurse what its like. She looked and said every shot feels like a dose of hope. A dose of hope for the educator in Florida who has a child who suffers from an auto-immune disease. She wrote to me that she was worried about bringing the virus home. When she got vaccinated, she sat in her car and just cried. Cried out of joy, cried out of relief.

Parents are seeing smiles on their kids faces as they go back to school because teachers and school bus drivers, cafeteria workers have been vaccinated. Grandparents hugging their children and grandchildren instead of pressing their hands against a window to say goodbye It means everything to both of them.

Theres still more work to do to beat this virus. We cant let our guard down now.

But tonight, I can say because of you - the American people - our progress these past 100 days against one of the worst pandemics in history is one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen.

What else have we done these first 100 days? We kept our commitment and we are sending $1,400 rescue checks to 85% of all American households. Weve already sent more than 160 million checks out the door. Its making a difference.

For many people, its making all the difference in the world. A single mom in Texas wrote to me. She said when she couldnt work, this relief check put food on the table and saved her and her son from eviction.

A grandmother in Virginia told me she immediately took her granddaughter to the eye doctor - something she put off for months because she didnt have the money.

One of the defining images of this crisis has been cars lined up for miles waiting for a box of food to be put in the trunk. Did you ever think youd see that in America?

Thats why the American Rescue Plan is delivering food and nutrition assistance to millions of Americans facing hunger - and hunger is down sharply already.

Were also providing: Rental assistance to keep people from being evicted from their homes. Providing loans to keep small businesses open and their employees on the job. During these 100 days, an additional 800,000 Americans enrolled in the Affordable Care Act because I established a special sign up period to do that.

Were making one of the largest one-time investments ever in improving health care for veterans. Critical investments to address the opioid crisis. And, maybe most importantly, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, we are on track to cut child poverty in America in half this year.

In the process, the economy created more than 1.3 million new jobs in 100 days. More new jobs in the first 100 days than any president on record.

The International Monetary Fund is now estimating our economy will grow at a rate of more than 6% this year. That will be the fastest pace of economic growth in this country in nearly four decades.

America is moving. Moving forward. And we cant stop now. Were in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better.

Throughout our history, public investments and infrastructure have transformed America. The transcontinental railroad and interstate highways united two oceans and brought us into a totally new age of progress. Universal public school and college aid opened wide the doors of opportunity. Scientific breakthroughs took us to the Moon and now to Mars, discovered vaccines, and gave us the Internet and so much more.

These are the investments we make together, as one country, and that only government can make. Time and again, they propel us into the future.

Thats why I proposed The American Jobs Plan - a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself. The largest jobs plan since World War II. It creates jobs to upgrade our transportation infrastructure. Jobs modernizing roads, bridges and highways. Jobs building ports and airports, rail corridors and transit lines. Its clean water.

Today, up to 10 million homes and more than 400,000 schools and child care centers have pipes with lead in them, including for drinking water. A clear and present danger to our childrens health. The American Jobs Plan creates jobs replacing 100% of the nations lead pipes and service lines so every American, so every child can turn on the faucet and be certain to drink clean water.

It creates jobs connecting every American with high-speed internet, including 35% of rural Americans who still dont have it. This will help our kids and businesses succeed in a 21st Century economy. And I am asking the Vice President to help lead this effort.

It creates jobs by building a modern power grid. Our grids are vulnerable to storms, hacks, and catastrophic failures - with tragic results as we saw in Texas and elsewhere during winter storms. The American Jobs Plan will create jobs to lay thousands of miles of transmission lines needed to build a resilient and fully clean grid.

The American Jobs Plan will help millions of people get back to their jobs and their careers. 2 million women have dropped out of the workforce during this pandemic, too often because they couldnt get the care they need for their family, their children. 800,000 families are on a Medicaid waiting list right now to get homecare for their aging parent or loved one with a disability. This plan will help these families and create jobs for our caregivers with better wages and better benefits.

For too long, we have failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Jobs. Jobs. For me, when I think about climate change, I think jobs.

The American Jobs Plan will put engineers and construction workers to work building more energy efficient buildings and homes. Electrical workers installing 500,000 charging stations along our highways. Farmers planting cover crops, so they can reduce carbon dioxide in the air and get paid for doing it.

Theres no reason the blades for wind turbines cant be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing. No reason why American workers cant lead the world in the production of electric vehicles and batteries.

The American Jobs Plan will create millions of good paying jobs - jobs Americans can raise their families on. And all the investments in the American Jobs Plan will be guided by one principle: "Buy American." American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs. The way it should be.

Now - I know some of you at home are wondering whether these jobs are for you. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy thats rapidly changing. Let me speak directly to you. Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth for years to come. These are good-paying jobs that cant be outsourced. Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. 75% do not require an associates degree.

The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. And, it recognizes something Ive always said. Wall Street didnt build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions build the middle class.

And thats why Im calling on Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act - the PRO Act - and send it to my desk to support the right to unionize.

By the way - lets also pass the $15 minimum wage. No one should work 40 hours a week and still live below the poverty line.

And we need to ensure greater equity and opportunity for women. Lets get the Paycheck Fairness Act to my desk for equal pay. Its long past time.

Finally, the American Jobs Plan will be the biggest increase in non-defense research and development on record. We will see more technological change in the next 10 years - than we saw in the last 50 years.

And were falling behind in that competition. Decades ago we used to invest 2% of our GDP on research and development. Today, we spend less than 1%. China and other countries are closing in fast. We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, and clean energy.

The Defense Department has an agency called DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - thats there to develop breakthroughs to enhance our national security - which led to the internet and GPS and so much more. The National Institutes of Health, the NIH - should create a similar Advanced Research Projects Agency for health. To develop breakthroughs - to prevent, detect, and treat diseases like Alzheimers, diabetes, and cancer.

This is personal to so many of us. I can think of no more worthy investment. And I know of nothing that is more bipartisan. Lets end cancer as we know it. Its within our power

Investments in jobs and infrastructure like the ones were talking about have often had bipartisan support. Vice President Harris and I meet regularly in the Oval Office with Democrats and Republicans to discuss the American Jobs Plan. And I applaud a group of Republican Senators who just put forward their proposal.

So, lets get to work. We welcome ideas. But, the rest of the world isnt waiting for us. Doing nothing is not an option. We cant be so busy competing with each other that we forget the competition is with the rest of the world to win the 21st Century.

To win that competition for the future, we also need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families - in our children. Thats why Im introducing the American Families Plan tonight, which addresses four of the biggest challenges facing American families today.

First, access to a good education. When this nation made 12 years of public education universal in the last century, it made us the best-educated and best-prepared nation in the world. But the world is catching up. They are not waiting. 12 years is no longer enough today to compete in the 21st Century.

Thats why the American Families Plan guarantees four additional years of public education for every person in America - starting as early as we can. We add two years of universal high-quality pre-school for every 3- and 4- year-old in America. The research shows that when a young child goes to school - not day care - they are far more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college.

And then we add two years of free community college. And we will increase Pell Grants and investment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions.

Jill is a community college professor who teaches today as First Lady. She has long said any country that out-educates us is going to outcompete us - and shell be leading this effort.

Second, the American Families plan will provide access to quality, affordable child care. We guarantee that low- to middle-income families will pay no more than 7% of their income for high-quality care for children up to the age of 5. The most hard-pressed working families wont have to spend a dime.

Third, the American Families Plan will finally provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. No one should have to choose between a job and paycheck or taking care of themselves and a loved one - a parent, spouse, or child.

And fourth, the American Families Plan puts money directly into the pockets of millions of families. In March we expanded a tax credit for every child in a family. Up to a $3,000 Child Tax Credit for children over 6 - and $3,600 for children under 6. With two parents, two kids, thats up to $7,200 in your pocket to help take care of your family. This will help more than 65 million children and help cut child poverty in half this year. Together, lets extend the Child Tax Credit at least through the end of 2025.

The American Rescue Plan lowered health care premiums for 9 million Americans who buy their coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Lets make that provision permanent so their premiums dont go back up.

In addition to my Families Plan, I will work with Congress to address - this year - other critical priorities for Americas families.

The Affordable Care Act has been a lifeline for millions of Americans - protecting people with pre-existing conditions, protecting womens health. And the pandemic has demonstrated how badly it is needed.

Lets lower deductibles for working families on the Affordable Care Act, and lets lower prescription drug costs. We all know how outrageously expensive they are. In fact, we pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world right here in America - nearly three times as much as other countries.

We can change that. Lets do what weve always talked about. Lets give Medicare the power to save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. That wont just help people on Medicare - it will lower prescription drug costs for everyone.

The money we save can go to strengthen the Affordable Care Act - expand Medicare coverage and benefits - without costing taxpayers one additional penny. Weve talked about it long enough - Democrats and Republicans. Lets get it done this year. This is all about a simple premise: Health care should be a right, not a privilege in America.

So how do we pay for my Jobs and Family Plans? Ive made clear that we can do it without increasing deficits.

Lets start with what I will not do. I will not impose any tax increases on people making less than $400,000 a year. Its time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to pay their fair share. Just pay their fair share.

A recent study shows that 55 of the nations biggest corporations paid zero in federal income tax last year. No federal taxes on more than $40 billion in profits. A lot of companies evade taxes through tax havens from Switzerland to Bermuda to the Cayman Islands. And they benefit from tax loopholes and deductions that allow for offshoring jobs and shifting profits overseas. Thats not right.

Were going to reform corporate taxes so they pay their fair share - and help pay for the public investments their businesses will benefit from.

And, were going to reward work, not wealth. We take the top tax bracket for the wealthiest 1% of Americans - those making $400,000 or more - back up to 39.6%.

We take the top tax bracket for the wealthiest 1% of Americans - those making $400,000 or more - back up to 39.6%. Thats where it was when George W. Bush became president.

Were going to get rid of the loopholes that allow Americans who make more than $1 million a year pay a lower rate on their capital gains than working Americans pay on their work. This will only affect three tenths of 1% of all Americans.

And the IRS will crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes. Thats estimated to be billions of dollars.

Look, Im not out to punish anyone. But I will not add to the tax burden of the middle class of this country. Theyre already paying enough. What Ive proposed is fair. Its fiscally responsible. It raises the revenue to pay for the plans Ive proposed that will create millions of jobs and grow the economy.

When you hear someone say that they dont want to raise taxes on the wealthiest 1% and on corporate America - ask them: whose taxes are you going to raise instead, and whose are you going to cut?

Look at the big tax cut in 2017. It was supposed to pay for itself and generate vast economic growth. Instead it added $2 trillion to the deficit. It was a huge windfall for corporate America and those at the very top. Instead of using the tax savings to raise wages and invest in research and development - it poured billions of dollars into the pockets of CEOs.

In fact, the pay gap between CEOs and their workers is now among the largest in history. According to one study, CEOs make 320 times what their average workers make.

The pandemic has only made things worse. 20 million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic - working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, the roughly 650 Billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 Trillion. Let me say that again. Just 650 people increased their wealth by more than $1 Trillion during this pandemic. They are now worth more than $4 Trillion.

My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics has never worked. Its time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle-out. A broad consensus of economists - left, right, center - agree that what Im proposing will help create millions of jobs and generate historic economic growth.

These are among the highest value investments we can make as a nation. Ive often said that our greatest strength is the power of our example - not just the example of our power. And in my conversations with world leaders - many Ive known for a long time - the comment I hear most often is: we see that America is back - but for how long?

My fellow Americans, we have to show not just that we are back, but that we are here to stay. And that we arent going it alone - were going to be leading with our allies.

No one nation can deal with all the crises of our time alone - from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to mass migration, cybersecurity, climate change - and as were experiencing now, pandemics.

Theres no wall high enough to keep any virus away. As our own vaccine supply grows to meet our needs - and we are meeting them - we will become an arsenal of vaccines for other countries - just as America was the arsenal of democracy in World War 2.

The climate crisis is not our fight alone, either. Its a global fight. The United States accounts for less than 15% of carbon emissions. The rest of the world accounts for 85%. Thats why - I kept my commitment to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on my first day in office.

And I kept my commitment to convene a climate summit right here in America, with all of the major economies of the world - from China and Russia to India and the European Union in my first 100 days. I wanted the world to see that there is consensus that we are at an inflection point in history. And the consensus is if we act, we can save the planet - and we can create millions of jobs and economic growth and opportunity to raise the standard of living for everyone in the world.

The investments Ive proposed tonight also advance a foreign policy that benefits the middle class. That means making sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China. In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competition - and that we are not looking for conflict.

But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board. America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and industries, like subsidies for state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technologies and intellectual property.

I also told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe - not to start conflict - but to prevent conflict. And, I told him what Ive said to many world leaders - that America wont back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated. A president has to represent the essence of our country.

America is an idea - unique in the world. We are all created equal. Its who we are. We cannot walk away from that principle.

With regard to Russia, I made very clear to President Putin that while we dont seek escalation, their actions have consequences. I responded in a direct and proportionate way to Russias interference in our elections and cyberattacks on our government and businesses - and they did both of those things and I did respond. But we can also cooperate when its in our mutual interests. As we did when we extended the New START Treaty on nuclear arms - and as were working to do on the climate crisis.

On Iran and North Koreas nuclear programs that present a serious threat to Americas security and world security - we will be working closely with our allies to address the threats posed by both of these countries through diplomacy and stern deterrence.

And American leadership means ending the forever war in Afghanistan. We have the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. And Im the first President in 40 years who knows what it means to have had a child serving in a warzone. Today we have service members serving in the same war as their parents once did. We have service members in Afghanistan who were not yet born on 9/11.

War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking of nation-building. We went to Afghanistan to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. We delivered justice to Osama Bin Laden and we degraded the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. After 20 years of American valor and sacrifice, its time to bring our troops home. Even as we do, we will maintain an over-the-horizon capability to suppress future threats to the homeland.

But make no mistake - the terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001 and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States, wherever they come from. Al Qaeda and ISIS are in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and other places in Africa and the Middle East and beyond.

And, we wont ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined - the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism. And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.

It was nearly a year ago before her fathers funeral, when I spoke with Gianna Floyd, George Floyds young daughter. As I knelt down to talk to her so we could talk eye-to-eye, she said to me, "Daddy changed the world." After the conviction of George Floyds murderer, we can see how right she was - if we have the courage to act.

We have all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black America. Now is our opportunity to make real progress. Most men and women in uniform wear their badge and serve their communities honorably. I know them. I know they want to help meet this moment as well.

My fellow Americans, we have to come together. To rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve. To root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system. And to enact police reform in George Floyds name that passed the House already.

I know the Republicans have their own ideas and are engaged in productive discussions with Democrats. We need to work together to find a consensus. Lets get it done next month, by the first anniversary of George Floyds death. The country supports this reform. Congress should act.

We have a giant opportunity to bend to the arc of the moral universe toward justice. Real justice. And with the plans I outlined tonight, we have a real chance to root out systemic racism that plagues American life in many other ways. A chance to deliver real equity. Good jobs and good schools. Affordable housing. Clean air and clean water. Being able to generate wealth and pass it down through generations. Real opportunities in the lives of more Americans - Black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American.

I also want to thank the Senate for voting 94-1 to pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from the vicious hate crimes weve seen this past year - and for too long. I urge the House to do the same and send that legislation to my desk as soon as possible.

I also hope Congress can get to my desk the Equality Act to protect the rights of LGBTQ Americans. To all the transgender Americans watching at home - especially the young people who are so brave - I want you to know that your president has your back.

And another thing. Lets reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which has been law in this country for 27 years since I first wrote it. It will close the so-called "boyfriend" loophole to keep guns out of the hands of abusers. Its estimated that more than 50 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner - every month in America. Pass it and save lives.

And I need not tell anyone this, but gun violence is an epidemic in America. Our flag at the White House was still flying at half-staff for the 8 victims of the mass shooting in Georgia, when 10 more lives were taken in a mass shooting in Colorado. In the week between those mass shootings, more than 250 other Americans were shot dead. 250 shot dead.

I know how hard it is to make progress on this issue. In the 1990s, we passed universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that hold 100 rounds that can be fired in seconds. We beat the NRA. Mass shootings and gun violence declined. But in the early 2000s, that law expired and weve seen the daily bloodshed since.

More than two weeks ago in the Rose Garden, surrounded by some of the bravest people I know - the survivors and families who lost loved ones to gun violence - I laid out several steps the Department of Justice is taking to end this epidemic.

One of them is banning so-called "ghost guns." They are homemade guns built from a kit that includes the directions on how to finish the firearm. The parts have no serial numbers, so when they show up at a crime scene, they cant be traced. The buyers of ghost gun kits arent required to pass a background check. Anyone from a criminal to a terrorist could buy this kit and, in as little as 30 minutes, put together a lethal weapon. But not anymore.

I will do everything in my power to protect the American people from this epidemic of gun violence. But its time for Congress to act as well. We need more Senate Republicans to join with the overwhelming majority of their Democratic colleagues, and close loopholes and require background checks to purchase a gun. And we need a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines again.

Dont tell me it cant be done. Weve done it before ... and it worked. Talk to most responsible gun owners, most hunters - theyll tell you theres no possible justification for having 100 rounds - 100 bullets - in a weapon. They will tell you that there are too many people today who are able to buy a gun, but who shouldnt be able to.

These kinds of reasonable reforms have the overwhelming support of the American people - including many gun owners. The country supports reform, and the Congress should act. This shouldnt be a Red vs. Blue issue. Its an American issue.

And heres what else we can do. Immigration has always been essential to America. Lets end our exhausting war over immigration. For more than 30 years, politicians have talked about immigration reform and done nothing about it. Its time to fix it.

On day one of my Presidency, I kept my commitment and I sent a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress. If you believe we need a secure border - pass it. If you believe in a pathway to citizenship - pass it. If you actually want to solve the problem - I have sent you a bill, now pass it.

We also have to get at the root of the problem of why people are fleeing to our southern border from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. The violence. The corruption. The gangs. The political instability. Hunger. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. When I was Vice President, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration. It helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave.

Our plan worked. But the last administration shut it down. Im restoring the program and asked Vice President Harris to lead our diplomatic efforts. I have absolute confidence she will get the job done.

Now, if Congress wont pass my plan - lets at least pass what we agree on. Congress needs to pass legislation this year to finally secure protection for the Dreamers - the young people who have only known America as their home. And, permanent protections for immigrants on temporary protected status who come from countries beset by man-made and natural made violence and disaster. As well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers who put food on our tables.

Immigrants have done so much for America during the pandemic - as they have throughout our history. The country supports immigration reform. Congress should act.

And if we are to truly restore the soul of America - we need to protect the sacred right to vote. More people voted in the last presidential election than ever before in our history - in the middle of one of the worst pandemics ever. That should be celebrated. Instead its being attacked.

Congress should pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and send them to my desk right away. The country supports it. Congress should act.

As we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol - desecrating our democracy - remain vivid in our minds. Lives were put at risk. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage was summoned.

The insurrection was an existential crisis - a test of whether our democracy could survive. It did. But the struggle is far from over. The question of whether our democracy will long endure is both ancient and urgent. As old as our Republic. Still vital today.

Can our democracy deliver on its promise that all of us - created equal in the image of God - have a chance to lead lives of dignity, respect, and possibility? Can our democracy deliver on the most pressing needs of our people? Can our democracy overcome the lies, anger, hate and fears that have pulled us apart?

Americas adversaries - the autocrats of the world - are betting it cant. They believe we are too full of anger and division and rage. They look at the images of the mob that assaulted this Capitol as proof that the sun is setting on American democracy.

They are wrong. And we have to prove them wrong. We have to prove democracy still works. That our government still works - and can deliver for the people.

In our first 100 Days together, we have acted to restore the peoples faith in our democracy to deliver. Were vaccinating the nation. Were creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Were delivering real results people can see and feel in their own lives. Opening the doors of opportunity. Guaranteeing fairness and justice.

Thats the essence of America. Thats democracy in action. Our Constitution opens with the words, "We the People". Its time we remembered that We the People are the government. You and I. Not some force in a distant capital. Not some powerful force we have no control over. Its us. Its "We the people."

In another era when our democracy was tested, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us-In America: we do our part. Thats all Im asking. That we all do our part. And if we do, then we will meet the central challenge of the age by proving that democracy is durable and strong. The autocrats will not win the future. America will. The future will belong to America.

I stand here tonight before you in a new and vital hour in the life of our democracy and our nation. And I can say with absolute confidence: I have never been more confident or more optimistic about America.

We have stared into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy - of pandemic and pain - and "We the People" did not flinch. At the very moment our adversaries were certain we would pull apart and fail. We came together. United. With light and hope, we summoned new strength and new resolve. To position us to win the competition for the 21st Century. On our way forward to a Union more perfect. More prosperous. More just. As one people. One nation. One America.

Its never been a good bet to bet against America. And it still isnt. We are the United States of America. There is nothing - nothing - beyond our capacity - nothing we cant do - if we do it together.

May God bless you all. May God protect our troops.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte holds a vial of Sinovac Biotechs CoronaVac as the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines arrives in the country, at Villamor Air Base in Metro Manila, Feb. 28, 2021.

The Philippine president said he was grateful that Beijing supplied his country with coronavirus vaccines amid a global shortage, but he would not withdraw patrols in Manila-claimed waters of the South China Sea because Chinese vessels had not left.

President Rodrigo Duterte also criticized Washington for what he claimed was a lack of U.S. support for Manila amid this latest standoff with Beijing in the contested waterway.

China is a good friend. We owe them a debt of gratitude for the vaccines. So China, let it be known, is a good friend, and we do not want trouble with them, especially a war, Duterte said during a cabinet meeting late Wednesday, transcripts of which were released Thursday.

Bilateral tensions in the South China Sea have risen lately over Beijings refusal to remove its ships and boats from Manilas exclusive economic zone.

The diplomatic spat between began after the Philippines said it had spotted some 240 Chinese vessels at Whitsun Reef in early March. Beijing also claims the reef in the Spratly Islands as part of its territories in the waterway.

China ignored the Philippines demands for a pullout, prompting Manila to file daily diplomatic protests with Beijing, including on Thursday. Manila claims the Chinese ships are crewed by maritime militia.

The number of Chinese vessels in the Philippine EEZ stood at about 160 as of April 20, Manila said Wednesday.

The Philippine government said recently it was complementing its military patrols and drills in the sea with patrols by its coast guard, fisheries bureau and national police.

By deploying non-military patrols to protect and assist Filipino fishing boats, Manila hopes to avoid provoking a naval standoff with Beijing, officials had said.

Removing patrol boats is out of the question, Duterte said.

There are things that are not really subject to a compromise, such as us pulling back [our patrols]. Its difficult. I hope they understand, but I have the interest of my country also to protect, the president said.

Duterte on Wednesday also questioned Washingtons resolve to help protect the Philippines, its long-time defense ally.

[So] I can tell China, You know China, we can always call the Americans, Duterte said.

But in so many instances, they [the Americans] are just about empty words . That would have been the moment to show the world that they were with us by sending their superior ships. Why did they not do it?

BenarNews called the U.S. Embassy in Manila for its comment on the issue, but did not immediately hear back.

In early April, the U.S. State Department said it was backing the Philippines in the dispute over the Chinese ships in the Philippine EEZ and would come to Manilas defense, if needed.

As we have stated before, an armed attack against the Philippines armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea, will trigger our obligations under the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty, Ned Price, the departments spokesman, told a press briefing on April 8.

Early this month, as the dispute was still unfolding between Manila and Beijing, the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group sailed into the South China Sea to carry out maritime strike exercises, anti-submarine operations, coordinated tactical training and other activities, according to the U.S. Navy.

Under the auspices of the 70-year-old treaty, the armed forces of the United States and the Philippines will come to each others military aid in the event of an external attack on one of them.

Americans are about empty words

Meanwhile, the Philippines has been relying heavily on China for COVID-19 vaccines, after other drug makers delayed deliveries of shipments.

According to Manila, Chinas state-owned Sinovac Biotech has sent the Philippines 3.5 million doses of its CoronaVac jabs, including one million doses that were given as a gift. The Philippines had earlier received 525,600 doses of AstraZeneca, all of which have been administered.

As of this week, only 1.5 million people had been vaccinated with their first of two shots, the government said. The Philippines population is a little more than 108 million. Only 246,986 people have received the full vaccine dose.

Froilan Gallardo and Richel V. Umel contributed to this report from Cagayan de Oro, southern Philippines.
Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Presidents Office Ihor Zhovkva and Adviser to the President of the Republic on Foreign Affairs Smiljana Knez have discussed the escalation of the security situation in eastern Ukraine and temporarily occupied Crimea, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Ukrainian Presidents Office.

"The parties discussed the recent escalation of the security situation in eastern Ukraine and temporarily occupied Crimea, including a buildup of troops at the Ukrainian border, which has led to increased tensions on the European continent and growing concerns of our international partners. The interlocutors paid special attention to the further militarization of Crimea and the ongoing human rights violations on the Ukrainian peninsula, reads the report.

According to the Presidents Office, Smiljana Knez assured of Slovenia's full support for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.

Ihor Zhovkva also informed Smiljana Knez about the inaugural summit of the Crimean Platform in Kyiv in August 2021, outlined key elements of the Ukrainian initiative and confirmed the invitation from President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor to take part in this important event.

The interlocutors also discussed the current bilateral cooperation in the context of implementing Ukraine's course towards European integration, given Slovenia's forthcoming presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2021. They reaffirmed the importance of successful implementation of reforms in Ukraine for further progress on the European track.

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Among farmworkers employed by a fruit grower in Washington, SARS-CoV-2 incidence was higher among those living in the community (12%) than among those living in congregate temporary housing (4%). Incidence was higher among farmworkers packing and sorting fruit indoors (28%) than among those working alone or in small groups indoors or working outdoors (6%10%).

Okanogan County, Washington, experienced increased community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, during summer 2020 (1). Multiple COVID-19 outbreaks occurred in agricultural settings, including a large outbreak among employees of a fruit grower during MayAugust. Because of this outbreak, Okanogan County Public Health and the Washington State Department of Health initiated one-time, on-site screening testing (2) of all orchard and warehouse employees in August 2020 and assessed risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Among 3,708 known orchard employees, a valid SARS-CoV-2 test result or information on COVID-19like symptoms in the absence of a test was available for 3,013 (81%). Cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection during approximately 3 months among tested orchard employees was 6%. Cumulative incidence was 12% in employees residing in the community, compared with 4% in employees residing in farmworker housing (p<0.001); point prevalence during the single screening testing event was 1% in both groups. Among 1,247 known warehouse employees, a valid result was available for 726 (58%). Cumulative incidence over approximately 3 months among tested warehouse employees was 23%, with substantial variation across job roles. Positive test results were received by 28% of employees who worked packing and sorting fruit, 24% of those in other roles in the packing and sorting area, 10% of forklift operators, 7% of employees in other warehouse roles, and 6% of office employees. Point prevalence among all warehouse workers was 1% at the screening testing event. Collaboration among employers, community groups, and public health authorities can reveal risk factors and help decrease farmworkers risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in the community and the workplace. Creation of a COVID-19 assessment and control plan by agricultural employers, with particular focus on indoor workers whose jobs limit physical distancing, could reduce workplace transmission.

The Okanogan County fruit grower began referring symptomatic employees for SARS-CoV-2 testing in late May 2020. One-time SARS-CoV-2 screening testing of all employees was conducted on-site in late August.* Before then, asymptomatic employees were not systematically tested. Employees were eligible for inclusion in this investigation if they received at least one SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) or antigen test with a positive or negative result, or if they were symptomatic but declined testing. A confirmed case was defined as the first positive SARS-CoV-2 NAAT or antigen test result received by an employee. A suspected case was defined as the presence of symptoms compatible with COVID-19 identified during work site symptom screening in an employee who declined testing.

Employees were classified by job site: orchard or warehouse. Orchard employees were further classified by housing location: congregate temporary farmworker housing (provided by the grower) or personally obtained housing in the community. All warehouse employees resided in the community. Warehouse employees were further classified into the following job roles: 1) sorting and packing fruit, 2) other roles supporting the fruit packing line, 3) forklift operation, 4) administrative (office setting), and 5) other warehouse roles (e.g., cleaning, maintenance, and transportation). Orchard employees worked predominantly outdoors. Warehouse employees generally worked indoors, although some warehouse roles involved some outdoor work. Warehouse employees performed similar work at three separate locations of differing size.

Descriptive analyses included cumulative incidence during approximately 3 months, stratified by housing category, job role, and work site. Chi-square tests and log-binomial regression models with robust error variance were used to evaluate differences in relative risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection across job roles and housing locations, with adjustment for work site among warehouse employees. Data were analyzed using Stata (version 15; StataCorp). This activity was reviewed by CDC and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.

During the 2020 harvest season, the fruit growers 4,955 employees included 3,708 orchard employees and 1,247 warehouse employees. Overall, 3,739 (75%) employees were included in this analysis, including 348 (9%) who received a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result (i.e., confirmed cases) and 71 (2%) suspected of having COVID-19. Among the 3,013 (81%) included orchard employees, 628 (21%) resided in the community and 2,385 (79%) in farmworker housing (Table 1). Among included orchard employees, 178 (6%) confirmed cases were identified, including 158 during symptomatic testing (MayAugust) and 20 during screening testing (August), along with 71 (2%) suspected cases. Among 196 symptomatic orchard employees tested, 158 (81%) received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results; 72 of 100 (72%) resided in the community, and 86 of 96 (90%) resided in farmworker housing. Over a period of approximately 3 months, the cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in orchard employees was 6%. Incidence was significantly higher among those residing in the community (12%) than among those residing in farmworker housing (4%) (p<0.001). Among orchard employees, the point prevalence during screening testing was similar across housing locations (1% in both groups; p = 0.950).

Among 726 (58%) included warehouse employees, 170 confirmed cases occurred, including 162 identified during symptomatic testing and eight during screening testing; no suspected cases were identified in these employees (Table 2). The percentage of tests that returned positive results during symptomatic testing could not be ascertained. Cumulative SARS-CoV-2 incidence during approximately 3 months among warehouse employees was 23%, with substantial variation across job roles (ranging from 28% in employees packing and sorting fruit to 6% in office employees) and across work sites. Point prevalence during screening testing of warehouse workers was 1%. Information on employees use of face masks while working was not available.

The first multivariate regression model used a binary outcome of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection among warehouse workers, with forklift operators and work site A as reference categories. The model identified a relative risk for infection of 2.7 for employees packing and sorting fruit (p = 0.002) and 2.4 for other packing roles (p = 0.015). The relative risk for office workers and other warehouse workers did not significantly differ from that of forklift operators (Table 3). The relative risk for infection was 6.8 (p<0.001) for employees at work site B and 5.8 for employees at work site C (p<0.001), compared with those at work site A. The second model examined SARS-CoV-2 infection in relation to job role and housing location for all employees. Results for warehouse job roles were similar, with significant associations between the packer and sorter role and other packing line roles and risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Orchard employees did not have a significant relative risk compared with forklift operators (relative risk = 1.2; p = 0.663). The relative risk for infection among those living in the community compared with those living in farmworker housing was 2.8 (p<0.001).
Alexei Navalny is seen on a screen via video link before a court hearing in Moscow, Russia, on April 29, 2021. Press Service of Babushkinsky District Court of Moscow/Handout via Reuters

Alexei Navalny appeared in a Moscow court via video link on Thursday.

It was the first time he had appeared in public since he went through a hunger strike.

His hunger strike lasted about 23 days. Doctors had warned that he could die from it.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Alexei Navalny has appeared in public for the first time after going through a hunger strike in Russian prison.

The Russian opposition leader appeared in a Moscow court, via video link from prison, on Thursday.

He could be seen looking gaunt, with a shaved head.

He started a hunger strike from Russian prison on March 31, to protest against his medical conditions in prison, and announced on April 24 that he was "beginning an exit" from the strike. His doctors had warned that he was going to "die any minute" because he had become so weak.

Here's what he looked like months before his hunger strike, in a video released by his team on January 18:

Navalny appears in a video published by his team on January 18, 2021. Navalny Live/YouTube

Navalny appeared in the Moscow court on Thursday to appeal an accusation for defaming a World War Two veteran, Reuters and Sky News reported.

He is currently serving a 2 1/2 sentence in prison for skipping parole meetings. His lawyer said he had missed the meetings because he was in Berlin undergoing treatment for nerve-agent poisoning. Navalny has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning.

Read the original article on Business Insider
14,000-metre drill program to focus on infill drilling at the Serra Alta deposit and testing several highly prospective satellite targets

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Cerrado Gold Inc. (TSXV: CERT) ("Cerrado" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that is has begun its Phase II drill program consisting of regional exploration and infill drilling of the Serra Alta deposit at its Monte do Carmo ("MDC") Project located in Tocantins State, Brazil. Aside from infill drilling at Serra Alta, the Phase II program will commence exploration drilling on several of the highly prospective satellite targets along the corridor between Serra Alta and Capitao as well as at Fartura, to the west, in order to better define the district potential of the Monte Do Carmo property. This Phase II drill program follows on the success of the Phase I program that saw 55 holes completed totaling 18,998 metres which focused on the Serra Alta deposit by both upgrading and expanding the Company's maiden mineral resource estimate (MRE). An updated MRE is expected by July.

Mark Brennan, CEO and Co-Chairman commented, "While we await the final results from a highly successful Phase 1 drill program, we are excited to commence our Phase 2 program which we anticipate will not only further upgrade the Serra Alta deposit but also highlight the highly prospective nature of our land package by drilling several regional targets." He continued, "Over time we would expect these regional targets to add further ounces to support a larger global resource demonstrating the district scale potential of Cerrado's Monte Do Carmo property (Figure 1)."

The Phase II drill program of 14,000 metres began April 26, 2021 and is expected to be completed by September 2021. The proposed targets have been developed from current and historical work, field mapping, sampling, trenching and some past drilling (Capitao, Bit-3 and Ferradura). The aim is to further develop the understanding of the regional potential that the Company anticipates could add significant additional ounces over time.

Drilling has begun at the Serra Alta deposit that is 1.5 kilometres long, 400m wide, and remains open along strike and at depth. Drilling will mainly be step-outs and a modest amount of infill drilling to expand and upgrade a portion of the resource base to the Measured and Indicated resource categories outlined in Phase I. The infill drilling is expected to total 3,000 to 4,000 metres of the Phase II program.

Of note, the Phase II program will also focus on drilling the structural corridor from Serra Alta to Capitao as shown in Figure 1. This corridor is 5 kilometres long and includes several highly prospective targets (Eldorado, Sucuri and Capitao). From a geological perspective these targets are lookalikes to Serra Alta, hosted by the same granite and the same style of mineralization and alteration. Capitao is the only target that has been drill tested in the past. Previous drilling was encouraging and warrants further drill testing. Exploration drilling of the highly prospective satellite targets along the corridor between Serra Alta and Capitao is expected to total 6,000 metres.

Another highly prospective target is Fartura. It lies 2 kilometres west of the Serra Alta deposit. Again, it is a lookalike to Serra Alta, hosted by the same granite and the same style of mineralization and alteration. There are also some large old artisanal mining operations scattered across Fartura exposing quartz veins similar to Serra Alta. Cerrado has put a number of trenches across the area and has found gold values that we will follow up with the drill program. Exploration drilling of the targets in this area is expected to total 2,000 metres.

Two other highly prospective targets, Bit-3 and Ferradura, have different geological settings from the others, but warrant drill testing due to current and previous owners work that identified encouraging targets with gold values worthy of follow up.





Figure 1: Phase II drill Targets

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7487/82160_0433e99074b87a4b_002full.jpg

Review of Technical Information

The scientific and technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Robert Campbell, P.Geo., Vice President, Exploration for Cerrado Gold Inc., who is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101.

For further information, please contact:

Mark Brennan

CEO and Co Chairman

Tel.: +1-647-796-0023

mbrennan@cerradogold.com

Nicholas Campbell, CFA

Director, Corporate Development

Tel.: +1-905-630-0148

ncampbell@cerradogold.com

About Cerrado Gold

Cerrado Gold is a public gold producer and exploration company with gold production derived from its 100% owned Minera Don Nicolas mine in Santa Cruz province, Argentina. It also owns 100% of the assets of Minera Mariana in Santa Cruz province, Argentina. The company is also undertaking exploration at its 100% owned Monte Do Carmo project located in Tocantins, Brazil. For more information about Cerrado Gold, please visit our website at: www.cerradogold.com.

Disclaimer

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This press release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking information" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that discusses predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements.

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The name Zoe Roth might not ring any bells. But chances are youve seen her photo.

One Saturday morning in 2005, when Ms. Roth was 4 years old, her family went to look at a house on fire in their neighborhood in Mebane, N.C. Firefighters had intentionally set the blaze as a controlled fire, so it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed children to take turns holding the hose.

Ms. Roth remembers watching the flames engulf the house when her father, an amateur photographer, asked her to smile. With her hair askew and a knowing look in her eyes, Ms. Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fire roared behind her. Disaster Girl was born.

In the years since Dave Roth, Zoes father, entered it in a photo contest in 2007 and won, the image has been edited into various disasters from history, with Ms. Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks in the distance. Now, after more than a decade of having her image endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon, Ms. Roth has sold the original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million dollars.

The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at a Foundation auction on April 17 to a user identified as @3FMusic. As with any currency, the value of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at more than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and will receive 10 percent of future sales.
"It is an honor to receive this recognition," said Eric Gurley, Immanuel president and CEO. "Over the years, I've seen The Landing family come together to make this campus one that puts people first. Beyond our focus on enhanced services and amenities, our compassionate employees and welcoming residents are at the foundation."

Lincoln's Choice Awards are nominated and voted for by fans. The winners were announced via virtual ceremony this past March with nominees and winners featured in a Lincoln Journal Star special edition in April.

The Landing, serving Lincoln since 2001, is a signature choice for area seniors. The community solidified that position this past year, with the completion of many campus construction projects. A few of the many renovations included the creation of three onsite restaurants which included a fine dining option, renovations to the onsite fine arts gallery, an added ice cream shop, a reimagined library and more. Technology-driven projects were also added including a fully interactive portal that enables residents to learn of campus services and activities with the touch of a screen, and virtual tours for area seniors using interactive matterport technology.

The projects were scheduled to be celebrated publicly in 2020 but the grand reopening has been rescheduled for later this year.

The community is one of the few area non-profit senior living providers. As an Immanuel community, The Landing is guided by the organizations' 134-year mission-driven work of Christ-centered service in the community. As a non-profit senior living provider, income above operating expenses is invested directly into resident wellbeing such as enhanced infection control practices over the past year and recently completed renovations.

"You'll know you're at The Landing the minute you walk through the door," said Gurley. "Senior living is so much more than no-maintenance apartments. It's about friendships, lifelong learning, thriving wellness and connection."

Learn more about The Landing and Immanuel's mission at Immanuel.com

Since 1887 Immanuel has been providing Christ-Centered Service to Seniors, Each Other and the Community. As a not-for-profit, serving arm of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) Immanuel's house of brands includes: Immanuel Classic Courtyards, Lifestyle Villages, Signature and Care Communities, Lakeside Lofts, Immanuel Pathways, Immanuel Community Foundation and The Immanuel Vision Foundation.

Immanuel owns and operates 14, 55+ active living, independent living, assisted living and long-term care retirement communities on nine campuses; Immanuel Pathways operates three PACE Centers in Iowa and Neb.; the Immanuel Community Foundation, a Resident Assistance Fund provides financial assistance to independent living residents; and the Immanuel Vision Foundation extends financial support to non-profit, charitable 501(c)(3) organizations that share purposes in alignment with Immanuel's service centered mission.

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A federal appeals court ordered the government Thursday to severely limit or ban chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that was kept on the market by the Trump administration despite evidence that it can cause brain damage in children.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the Environmental Protection Agency had concluded in 2016 that the pesticide was probably unsafe, never withdrew that conclusion and had no basis for its decisions in 2017 and 2019 to postpone any further action.

The EPA has spent more than a decade assembling a record of chlorpyrifoss ill effects, Jed Rakoff, a federal judge from New York temporarily assigned to the appeals court, said in the 2-1 ruling. Further delay would make a mockery, not just of this courts prior rulings and determinations, but of the rule of law itself.

When its ruling becomes final, the court said, the agency must either ban all agricultural use of chlorpyrifos within 60 days or set a new, lower level of permitted use, based on evidence that it would cause no harm at that level. California has already banned all uses of the pesticide, an action by Gov. Gavin Newsoms administration in 2019.

Judge Jacqueline Nguyen joined Rakoffs opinion. In dissent, Judge Jay Bybee said the court majority had improperly substituted its own judgment for the assessment by the EPA, which has conscientiously examined the evidence and concluded the pesticide poses no danger at currently allowed levels.

The ruling was praised by environmental groups that first petitioned the EPA in 2007 to halt use of the chemical.

EPA must now follow the law, ban chlorpyrifos, and protect children and farmworkers from a pesticide we know is linked to numerous developmental harms, said Patti Goldman, a lawyer for Earthjustice, representing health and disability advocates and farm labor groups.

The Trump EPA had allowed the continued use of this toxic pesticide, even though they knew it is damaging to human health, especially the developing brains of children, said Jennifer Sass, a scientist with Natural Resources Defense Council, also a plaintiff in the case. This will ensure that kids can eat fruits and vegetables free of this neurotoxin.

The EPAs action had also been challenged by a group of states, including California. State Attorney General Rob Bonta said parents across the country had been forced to question whether everyday fruits and vegetables were poisoning their children, and that he hopes Thursdays ruling allows them to rest a little easier.

Ken Labbe, a spokesman for President Bidens EPA, said the agency is committed to ensuring the safety of pesticides and other chemicals and is reviewing its options in the case. So far, the court majority said in its ruling, the current EPAs position is effectively more of the same as its predecessors stance.

Pesticide manufacturers, including Dow Chemical, and agricultural groups filed arguments supporting the EPA and said chlorpyrifos was both safe and effective.

Chlorpyrifos was first developed as a nerve gas in World War II. It has been in commercial use since 1965 to kill insects on more than 80 crops, including apples, strawberries, grapes, corn, alfalfa and walnuts.

The EPA banned its use as a household product in 1998 after research showed that the chemical caused brain damage in rats. But it is still used in agriculture despite scientific studies, cited in EPA reports from 2008 onward, that have increasingly found a likelihood of danger to humans.

The studies have found that chlorpyrifos is a likely cause of low birth weight, delays in mental development, and attention and behavior problems in youths who are exposed before birth or by food consumption in early childhood. A 2016 EPA report also found risks to workers who mix and spray the pesticide.

President Barack Obamas EPA announced plans in 2015 to ban all uses of chlorpyrifos by March 2017. But when that deadline arrived, Trumps EPA said more study was needed and granted an extension for as long as five years.

The court said the law requires immediate action, even if further study might produce additional information. Unless there is evidence conclusively showing current exposure levels cause no harm, Rakoff said, the EPAs time is now up.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
New Delhi, April 29 : The Delhi High Court on Thursday pulled up the Centre, asking it why Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra were given more oxygen than what they asked for, while Delhi's allocation was not increased.

A high court bench comprising Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli asked said that the Centre should show some justification for this or make amends.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court that the Central government will respond to the court's query and will also explain the reason behind supplying more oxygen to Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Mehta said there are many states which had received less oxygen than what they had asked for and so the Centre is rationalising the matter.

Meanwhile, senior advocate Rahul Mehra placed before the court a list of oxygen demand by several states and the allocations made to them.

Mehra contended that only Delhi was not given the quota of oxygen that was being asked for, while the other states got more than what they had demanded.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court also said that the revenue department should issue an order to release the Remdesivir seized from the hoarders and black marketeers. Sanghi and Palli directed to ensure that the seized drugs are given to the patients who need them.
Despite the growing number of states that have legalized medical or recreational use of marijuana, it remains illegal under federal law for gun owners to smoke up, no matter if its legal in their state or not. Now, some Republican members of Congress are hoping to address the situation with the Gun Rights and Marijuana (or GRAM) Act.

HR 2830, which was introduced last week, would simply remove the federal prohibition on gun ownership and cannabis use in states where both are legal, according to co-sponsor Rodney Davis, a Republican from Illinois' 13th District. In a press release, Davis argues that the federal government needs to get out of the way of states when it comes to the issue.

"State-legal marijuana use should not be used as a pretext to bar individuals from purchasing or possessing firearms, which is a clear and well-defined Constitutional right," said Davis. "I've long believed that laws regulating the production and use of marijuana should be left to the states, not the federal government. With more and more states legalizing marijuana each year, we have to make sure that we are protecting the Second Amendment rights of Americans who reside in those states and use marijuana legally based on their state's laws. I'm proud to introduce this bill with Congressman Young and look forward to working with him to move it through Congress."

Rep. Don Young of Alaska is the primary sponsor of the GRAM Act, which he calls a "a critical step to protect our Constitution and secure individual liberty." Somewhat surprisingly, Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida who's previously called for a ban on modern sporting rifles, is also a co-sponsor of the new bill.

"It should be up to individual states to determine their own marijuana laws, not the federal government. The Constitution says nothing about marijuana but the Second Amendment clearly outlines every American's right to bear arms," Mast said. "This legislation makes it so individuals who use marijuana in a State that permits legal adult-use are still able to purchase firearms." .....
The Connecticut General Assembly Senate voted and passed HB 6423, which will require Connecticut residents to be vaccinated in order to participate in certain activities, including K-12 and higher education institutions, public or private, or organized child care with an amended change to grandfather students that are currently enrolled in kindergarten up through 12th grade.

As the co-ranking leader on the Public Health Committee with cognizance on this issue, I was extremely disappointed in the legislative process as I believe it was neither transparent nor collaborative.

There are many who opposed this bill and believed in a different approach that was neither heard nor respected as the committee considered this bill. The public hearing was closed at the 24-hour mark and nearly 1,800 people were denied the opportunity to testify. The subject of removing the vaccine religious exemption generated more than 3,500 pieces of written testimony from both sides of the debate.

Also, the unusual manner in which the Democratic Party leaders chose to send identical bills to the state House and Senate simultaneously speaks to the extreme measures they will take to pass this measure to remove the religious exemption void of proper public or minority party input.

Opinions for or against these issues have come before the Public Health Committee for a number of years as similar measures have been introduced. No matter the year or the challenging COVID-affected Zoom video public hearing process, every person has a position that should be heard and respected.

The COVID-19 pandemic and concerns for public safety on infection have created a heightened sense of medically urgent emergency for this mandate debate. The bill under consideration does not address the COVID-19 vaccine; instead it impacts the 70-plus vaccine shots that students are required to take during their K-12 education. This bills vaccine medical emergency mandate is significantly undermined by the current language to grandfather unvaccinated and noncompliant students and keep them in school. Why pass this mandate with undermining provisions and ignoring the voices of the nearly 4,000 people who protested outside the Capitol, other than to exert the overriding power of government over people?

My no vote is not a statement to minimize the seriousness of this public health crisis we have been coping with for the past year but rather to voice my deep concern with an overreaching state mandate over personal body and parental choice. We should strive to raise awareness and vaccination participation through education and outreach, not by statutory mandates and threats to take away academic and social emotional interaction of children and families.

As the co-chair of the bipartisan Connecticut General Assembly Bioscience Caucus, I have been a relentless advocate for the science and safety of pharmaceutical innovations for public and personal health. I absolutely believe and trust in the research and science behind the COVID-19 vaccine and I am grateful for the incredible contributions from Connecticuts own bio-science companies that are world leaders in developing, producing and distributing the vaccine in an expedited time frame. I have received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine myself.

My personal belief in getting myself and my family members vaccinated is exactly that  personal. I respect that we as legislators and state government should not have the right to dictate and override the personal choice of Connecticut residents and parents.

The mischaracterization and social media proliferation attacks on anyone who oppose this bill, rampantly identifying them as dangerous and callous anti-vaxxers  this social smearing has already hit cyberspace. I find it unfortunate and an injustice to the merits of this public health policy debate as well as an example of the disappointing state of our political and policy discourse. Today in Connecticut, you cannot disagree with the status quo on these public policy issues dictated by one-party Democratic rule and potentially risk being demonized and scurrilously defamed.

I have always maintained the principle of protecting personal body choice freedoms. I support a womans right of choice. I have supported the right of an individual with terminal illness to choose dignity in death. Those principles have guided me to support a parents and an individuals right to refuse injection of pharmaceutical products, for whatever reason, into their bodies.

Ultimately, state authorities and powers should not override personal and religious beliefs, despite the noble and well intended idea of greater public health. A clear, bright line needs to be drawn and respected.

I firmly believe Connecticut residents and families should not have the state government making decisions as to what goes into their bodies.

Furthermore, people should not have to fear they will have to choose between their personal and religious beliefs against access to important life necessities and state Constitution rights such as access to a public education.

While the rejecting vote in the Senate was made along mostly party lines, with two Democratic senators joining all Republicans, I maintain that this particular issue is neither Republican or Democrat. It is my hope that an open discussion can continue on both bills in both chambers, inclusive of feedback from all stakeholders as we move forward.

State Sen. Tony Hwang is a co-ranking leader of the Public Health Committee and a co-chair of the Connecticut General Assembly Bioscience caucus. He serves the 28th District, which includes Fairfield, Easton, Newtown, Weston and Westport.
Moonlight makes a wine lovers kind of beer. If you ask anyone what sort of trait defines the beers produced by this 29-year-old Santa Rosa brewery, the answer youre most likely to hear is balance. In Moonlights Death & Taxes black lager, Reality Czeck pilsner, Bombay by Boat IPA and other beers there is a sense of perfect proportions. None of the various elements  bitter, sweet, rich, crisp  obtrude. They melt together harmoniously.

I was thinking a lot about Moonlight recently while writing a story about how COVID-19 has changed the way a lot of Bay Area beer geeks are drinking. I was interested in the fact that certain Northern California breweries like Humble Sea, Alvarado Street and Cellarmaker have intensified their fan bases during the pandemic, thanks to their constantly changing lineup of beers  theyre each often brewing three or four brand-new recipes per week, and theyll never repeat them  and the colorful, zany, cartoon-adorned cans that contain them.

Design and novelty, clearly, are big drivers in craft beers popularity right now. But style has something to do with it, too. Anyone whos been paying attention to our local craft beer scene in recent years can see that the dominant trend has been toward fuller, bigger flavor. Hazy IPAs (and hazy double IPAs), with their explosively juicy, tropical-fruit notes, are having a real moment. Hazys are definitely the reigning champion right now, Beth Wathen, co-owner of City Beer Store in San Francisco, told me for the story.

Offshoots of the hazy IPA include the smoothie IPA and the milkshake IPA (essentially a hazy brewed with milk sugar), which turn the flavor and the texture up to 11. These have their own offshoots, like the sour smoothie IPA. Humble Sea even breaks out a slushie machine at its Santa Cruz taproom to turns its smoothie beers into a full-blown frosty treat, and will sometimes push its pastry stouts through a soft-serve machine.

Im here for all of it, and I love that craft beer is having so much fun right now. Goodness knows we need some fun! I adore the nostalgia factor of the slushie and soft-serve machines, the indefatigable creativity of the brewers who are coming up with new beer recipes every day, and the knowledge that I dont have to look far to find a beer that tastes like nothing Ive ever tasted before.

But I wouldnt describe this craft-beer moment as balanced, and theres no doubt in my mind that the full-flavored intensity is creating some degree of longing for lighter, subtler styles. (This isnt a brand-new feeling: I wrote last year about the comeback of craft lagers.) This sort of dynamic will sound familiar to California wine geeks, who have agonized over the last 15 years over the shift away from the bigger, bolder wines that became popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those hedonistic fruit bombs, as one famous wine critic liked to call them, yielded to a new era of bright, acid-driven, lower-alcohol wines.

Ramin Rahimian / Special to The Chronicle 2018

Thats what makes me all the more appreciative of Moonlight, which has been gloriously oblivious to trends for almost three decades now. Its founder, Brian Hunt, is a lager specialist (PSA: anyone whos curious to learn his backstory should read Lou Bustamantes excellent 2018 profile). Moonlights flagship, Death & Taxes, is such a non-trendy beer  a Schwarzbier, or black lager, delivering the toasty, malty richness youd expect from a dark beer but in a crisp, ultra-light package. The Reality Czeck pilsner (a type of lager) reminds me of really good Chardonnay: floral, silky, ever so slightly creamy, but refreshing above all.

Theyre not big-flavor beers, but to my palate, they deliver plenty of flavor  you just have to look for it.

Last weekend, at my local brewpub, Richmond Republic, I drank a Moonlight beer Id never had before, called Toast. Billed as slightly burnt, its an aged lager, which is about as unfashionable a beer style as I can think of. I loved it. Like Death & Taxes, it had many of the gratifying notes youd expect in a fuller-bodied beer: caramel, freshly baked bread, coffee beans when theyve just been through the grinder. But the beer stayed light on its feet, never heavy, refreshing at every sip, pleasantly frothy.

Ill keep drinking the hazy IPAs. But when they go out of style, someday, Ill still be drinking Moonlights balanced, refreshing lagers.

What else Im writing

 Pey-Marin Vineyards, which carried the torch for high-quality winemaking on the chilly, extreme Marin County coast for the last 21 years, will shut down and no longer make wine. The move has been a long time coming, Jonathan Pey told me, but the increasing difficulty of farming there amid drought, wildfire smoke and other effects of climate change catalyzed the decision.

Esther Mobley / The Chronicle

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

 My wine pick this week is a cuvee called Garrigue, from Domaine de la Terre Rouge in the Sierra foothills. Its a complex wine, especially for its $25 price, and pays tribute to the unusual Cabernet-Syrah blend from a quirky winery in southern France called Domaine de Trevallon.

What Im reading

 Traditional Malaysian beverages like toddy, tapai and tuak  fermented from coconut, rice, cassava and other starches  are in danger of being lost, but some producers are trying to increase awareness and demand for these drinks. In Whetstone, Annie Hariharan and Alia Ali explore these efforts.

 In Alta, Sydney Love writes about the open letter that two Central Coast wine-industry workers, Simonne Mitchelson and Justin Trabue, wrote to their local wine community after the killing of George Floyd, asking for their support of racial justice. The letter, and the activism that followed it, has led to a university scholarship, a fund with a California nonprofit and a mission-based wine club.

 A minor controversy has erupted in Quebec after police in the province seized large quantities of sacramental wine from California. Beyond the complexities of Canadian liquor law, I found this interesting for the requirement that wines used in Catholic Mass must be natural, meaning uncorrupted and free of foreign substances. Maybe theres an untapped market for hardcore natural wines here!

Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicles wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob
ZUG, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / GoldenPeaks Capital secured a 35m bridge facility from Eiffel Investment Group to support the ongoing expansion of its Polish solar PV portfolio. Eiffel Energy Transition Fund and Eiffel Energy Transition Fund II subscribed to the bonds through a private offering.

The proceeds from the bonds enable GoldenPeaks Capital to accelerate the early construction work for its PV projects located in Poland. The facility will be first used for projects Alpha and Charlie that will have a total capacity of between 150MW - 200MW. The facility will then be recycled into other projects. Concurrently, it allows the group to secure preferential terms, and mitigate long lead times on key equipment procurement. This is particularly pertinent in the current era of disrupted global logistics.

The framework agreement that was signed between GoldenPeaks Capital and the Eiffel funds permits future proceeds to be allocated towards GoldenPeaks Capital's nascent Hungarian portfolio, the first projects are expected to be entered into the national auctions later this year.

Daniel Tain, President of GoldenPeaks Capital commented: "We are delighted to be partnering with Eiffel Investment Group and being able to leverage their considerable expertise in financing the green economy. We look forward to a long relationship that will eventually expand beyond our initial projects in Poland."

Pierre-Antoine Machelon, CIO Energy Transition at Eiffel Investment Group, commented: "We are very happy to support the acceleration of GoldenPeaks Capital's investment program in Poland and its strategy to expand within central Europe. These markets are key to making the energy transition happen homogenously at the European level."

GoldenPeaks Capital is an international investor primarily active in the renewable energy and real estate sectors. Based in Europe, the group is building a strong pipeline of new projects in Poland and elsewhere within the EU.



Note: Eiffel Energy Transition and Eiffel Energy Transition II are close-ended funds, closed to new subscriptions and strictly reserved to institutional investors.

Disclaimer Golden Peaks Capital: This press release was produced by and the opinions expressed are those of GoldenPeaks Capital as of the date of writing and are subject to change. It has been prepared solely for information purposes. Any reference to past performance is not necessarily a guide to the future. To the extent there are any forward-looking statements, these statements are based on the company's current expectations and projections regarding its business, operations and other factors relating thereto. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors. The information and analysis contained in this publication have been compiled or arrived at from sources believed to be reliable but GoldenPeaks Capital does not make any representation as to their accuracy or completeness and does not accept liability for any loss arising from the use hereof.

Media Queries:

GoldenPeaks Capital

Siro Barino

Tel.: +41 79 335 24 24

E-Mail: siro@barino.ch

Sabrina Gisler

Tel.: +41 41 444 10 10

E-Mail: sg@goldenpeakscapital.com

About Eiffel Investment Group

Eiffel Investment Group is an asset management firm specializing in corporate finance. The group now manages more than three billion euros and offers companies a wide range of private and listed debt and equity financing solutions. The group, which has significant equity capital, has established an institutional infrastructure and ensures a very strong alignment of interest with the fund's institutional investor clients. Eiffel Investment Group is an independent company owned by its team alongside Impala.

Contacts:

General address:

contact@eiffel-ig.com

Project Owners:

financement@eiffel-ig.com

Press:

Samuel Beaupain +33 (0)6 88 48 48 02

samuel@edifice-communication.com

www.eiffel-ig.com

Member of Finance for Tomorrow

SOURCE: GoldenPeaks Capital Holding Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643300/GoldenPeaks-Capital-and-Eiffel-Investment-Group-Announce-a-35m-Bridge-Facility
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On Twitter @jpegjoshua recently posted about a staggering health care bill for going to the hospital for a life-threatening condition and then receiving an outrageous statement, which reminded me of a similar story that I had.

I also received a bill for nearly $40,000 but luckily managed to have it cleared through an unmentioned secret. For me, it all started the second week of May, back in 2009. I had this excruciating pain from just above the periumbilical region of my abdomen and the epigastrium, which ran downwards to the right iliac fossa  it felt like the worse pain of my life. Being the stubborn medical student I was, I still went about my days and just pretended to ignore it the best possible.

A few days later, the pain became a sharp burning pain localized directly at McBurneys point. As I was a medical student, I knew exactly what was wrong  I had appendicitis. I performed the Psoas sign test only to confirm what I had known already. As stubborn as I was, I ended up wandering into the emergency room of a local hospital which, surprisingly, I had never stepped foot in before.

The hospital staff was amicable and took me in, and treated me promptly even though I had no medical or health insurance of any kind. The emergency physician was pretty cool; he reminded me of myself a lot. After a short series of tests and CT scans, I was rushed into emergency surgery to remove my appendix.

The surgery went well, except for the part where the anesthesiologist couldnt wake me up immediately. But, not to worry, these kinds of things happen from time to time. I ended up leaving the hospital a day later, feeling like a million bucks  minus the scars across my abdomen and the post-surgery pain. I didnt think much more of my visit to the emergency room and my subsequent surgery until all the medical bills started flooding in.

My jaw dropped; I couldnt believe what the hospital wanted to charge me. The hospital wanted to charge me $2,000 just for using iodine during my surgery, so you can imagine how much all of the bills ended up coming to. The bills for my surgery, hospital stay, and other medical expenses ended up totaling a staggering $40,000 since I didnt have any health insurance.

Did you know that medical bills cause 60 percent of bankruptcies in America?

Knowing this, on top of studying for medical school and finding money to pay for medical school. I just felt like I was doomed. It all just made me stress out  and in turn, freak out that much more. I was going nuts trying to figure out how to pay for such incredible bills on top of paying for medical school and everything else  which ended up only leading me to have some short-term depression.

So what did I do? What was this secret?

I searched far and low for a solution: talking to the hospital, billing representatives, and even the physicians who treated me. As a non-resident of the state, I didnt qualify for aid. Then finally, someone mentioned that most hospitals have an unmentioned charity fund for cases like mine. After all the talking, blog posts, and letter writing, it finally paid off.

A few months later, I received a letter in the mail from the hospital and a few generous physicians who decided not to bill me for services and cover my medical bills in full. Making me forever grateful to these kind souls.

While this still occurs, this is just proof that the health care system does work  you have to believe in it. I got a chance to see how the health care system works. I got a chance to feel it and see what millions of Americans go through firsthand  which was great because now I know how to change it.

Ziyad Nazem is a health informatics professional.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
World-class congress to take place virtually from June 15-16.

Congress will bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders to map out a bold new approach to how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed.

LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- dmg events announced the launch of the Citizens Energy Congress, a unique energy industry event committed to resetting the energy agenda, post COVID-19, to drive the transition to a low carbon energy system that balances affordable energy access and climate change commitments.

The Citizens Energy Congress will be a virtual event taking place from June 15-16. It will connect the fragmented, divergent, and polarising perspectives around energy and accelerate the industry's response to growing pressure for a bold new approach to how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed.

The Citizens Energy Congress will bring together a broad spectrum of energy industry professionals, policy makers, investors, and civil society to challenge the concepts and constraints of the existing energy models and to foster consensus-driven foundations for a low carbon energy system.

The Congress will seek to build on the growing momentum around the need to tackle global warming, reinvigorated by the virtual summit hosted by US President Joe Biden this month. At the two-day summit, attended by 40 world leaders, the world's leading economies either reaffirmed pledges, or committed to new targets, to reduce carbon emissions to address climate change. The Citizens Energy Congress will look beyond these pledges and examine how these ambitions can be met.

The Citizens Energy Congress will address the challenging questions at the heart of the energy transition, recognising the multifaceted nature of the energy system. Attracting global ministers, CEOs and influencers from across the energy ecosystem, the speaker line-up will provide diverse opinions and ensure vigorous debate to help shape future strategic direction.

A selection of confirmed speakers include Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development and President of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, according to The New York Times "probably the most important economist in the world"; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Former Danish Prime Minister and Former CEO of Save the Children, named by Forbes magazine in 2017 as one of the world's greatest leaders; Peggy Liu, Chairperson, Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), one of the leading catalysts of a green China; Lorenzo Simonelli, Chairman & CEO, Baker Hughes and Mark Campanale, Founder and Executive Chair, Carbon Tracker.

Supporting organisations include OGCI, the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative, a CEO-led directive that aims to accelerate the industry response to climate change, and Boston Consulting Group, one of the world's leading management consulting firms and the official Strategic Insights Partner for the Citizens Energy Congress.

Bob Dudley, Chair of OGCI and former Group CEO of bp said: "Solving the climate challenge will require new ideas, new technologies, new investments, and new government policies, all executed at scale and at speed. Commitment and collaboration across industry, finance, research, government and society are critical."

Alan Thomson, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG as well as global leader of BCG's Energy practice said: "Private and public-sector organisations must collaborate more consistently, in order to develop and scale technologically and economically impactful solutions to be able to tackle global climate change challenges efficiently."

Christopher Hudson, President of Global Energy, dmg events, said: "The Citizens Energy Congress will provide a uniquely balanced and inclusive debate between a broad audience of stakeholders across the energy value chain. Recognising we are all interconnected, our goal is to enhance understanding, not enforce agreement. Our intent is to deliver a world-class forum for a broad-based examination of the competing perspectives on how to achieve a sustainable energy future through strategy, collaboration and innovation."

https://www.citizensenergycongress.com/press-release/

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The Michigan Education Association announced the recipients of the 2021 MEA Scholarships, honoring exemplary public school students from across the state who will be attending a Michigan public university next fall.

Among the 444 applications submitted for scholarship awards this year, the MEA Scholarship Fund Trustees chose 22 new award recipients who will each receive $1,450. In addition, 26 repeat winners who are already enrolled in college will receive $725 each.
[April 29, 2021] TruWeather Solutions and Spire Announce a Commercial Relationship to Enhance TruFlite V360 Precision and Accuracy Across the Globe

TruWeather Solutions ("TruWeather"), a leading micro weather data and analytics company, and Spire Global, Inc. ("Spire"), a leading global provider of space-based data and analytics, announced today that they have signed a letter of commitment to support TruWeather's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant with NASA. This commitment enhances previous agreements that align the strengths of both companies with the goal of enabling safer and more reliable Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) as the emerging industry and air traffic density accelerate in growth. TruWeather will have access to Spire's weather observational data sets and global predictions to fuel TruFlite V360 micro-weather prediction models and hyper-local weather decision support APIs. Spire will leverage TruWeather's 35 years of aviation weather operations experience and unique positioning in the unmanned systems market, and most importantly, have access to TruWeather's last mile weather solutions to address bespoke UAS and AAM weather needs. TruWeather and Spire expect the relationship to result in a comprehensive and reliable end-to-end global weather service focused on increasing global awareness from the stratosphere to urban city building canyons for drones, air taxis and flight control and management systems and service providers. TruWeather was recently awarded the NASA grant to develop an urban wind hazard service demonstration as part of NASA's Weather Data Infrastructure initiative. The partnership's precision micro weather analysis and urban predictions will contribute to decreasing operators' flight pattern uncertainty and increasing their potential revenue, safety and utilization in urban areas. Future reliability and predictability of drone and air taxi services will depend on better weather services to detect Venturi wind and wake turbulence effects, micro-burst detection, localized fog and cloud icing that pose significant risk to drone and air taxi operations. "My experience as the National Weather Science and Technology Director informed TruWeather's decision to partner with Spire and leverage what we believe to be the most promising global weather prediction system in the world. TruWeather only works with the best weather partners to deliver the most advanced pinpoint weather intelligence possible to drone and air taxi operators, UAS Test Ranges, UTM and AAM systems, and federal and local governments worldwide," said Don Berchoff, CEO of TruWeather Solutions. "TruWeather is aligning sensor and data partners now to address the toughest weather challenge, localized urban wind variances and building induced wake turbulence, and micro-climate icing, and IFR conditions that are sub-grid to weather systems today and must get better for a safe, predictable and reliable drone and air taxi industries." TruFlite V360 simplifies decision-making with subscription-based APIs that provide actionable weather insights designed to increase vehicle utilization rates and optimize stakeholder resources and scheduling for the best flight windows. TruWeather is the first weather solution provider to offer a deeply immersive weather experience built specifically for drone pilots and air taxi operations, all focused on helping the pilot meet FAA Part 107 weather minimums and Part 135 weather requirements. "We believe the combination of Spire's weather data sets and prediction model with TruWeather's TruFlite V360 will help ensure that end-users will receive highly accurate forecasting allowing them to make smarter weather-driven decisions," said Keith Johnson, Vice President and General Manager for Government Solutions at Spire. "We know how critical these decisions can be to mission success and we're proud to partner with TruWeather, a leader in micro-weather data and analytics, to create what we expect to be one of the most robust global weather prediction systems that can predict the weather of today, tomorrow and the future." About TruWeather Solutions, Inc. Established in 2015, TruWeather Solutions, Inc. is a leading provider of weather data analytics and innovative weather risk management products in the US market and beyond. TruWeather's customized translation of real-time and predictive weather data into discrete workflow decision insights sharpen resource scheduling, planning and mission execution resulting in safer, more productive operations and business success. About Spire Global, Inc. Spire is a global provider of space-based data and analytics that offers unique datasets and powerful insights about Earth from the ultimate vantage point so organizations can make decisions with confidence, accuracy, and speed. Spire uses a multi-purpose satellite constellation to source hard to acquire, valuable data and enriches it with predictive solutions. Spire then provides this data as a subscription to organizations around the world so they can improve business operations, decrease their envirnmental footprint, deploy resources for growth and competitive advantage, and mitigate risk. Spire gives commercial and government organizations the competitive advantage they seek to innovate and solve some of the world's toughest problems with insights from space. Spire has offices in San Francisco, CA (News - Alert) , Boulder, CO, Washington DC, Glasgow, Luxembourg, and Singapore. On March 1, 2021 Spire announced plans to go public via a planned business combination with NavSight Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: NSH), and expects to be traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol "SPIR." To learn more, visit spire.com.



About NavSight Holdings, Inc. NavSight Holdings, Inc. ("NavSight") is a 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. NavSight was organized with the opportunity to pursue a business combination target in any business or industry, with the intent to focus its search on identifying a prospective target business that provides expertise and technology to U.S. government customers in support of their national security, intelligence and defense missions.

Additional Information and Where to Find It In connection with the planned business combination with Spire (the "Proposed Transaction"), NavSight intends to file a Form S-4 Registration Statement (the "Registration Statement") with the SEC (News - Alert) , which will include a preliminary proxy statement to be distributed to holders of NavSight's common stock in connection with NavSight's solicitation of proxies for the vote by NavSight's stockholders with respect to the Proposed Transaction and other matters as described in the Registration Statement, a prospectus relating to the offer of the securities to be issued to the Company's stockholders in connection with the Proposed Transaction, and an information statement to Company's stockholders regarding the Proposed Transaction. After the Registration Statement has been filed and declared effective, NavSight will mail a definitive proxy statement/prospectus, when available, to its stockholders. Investors and security holders and other interested parties are urged to read the proxy statement/prospectus, any amendments thereto and any other documents filed with the SEC carefully and in their entirety when they become available because they will contain important information about NavSight, the Company and the Proposed Transaction. Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the preliminary proxy statement/prospectus and definitive proxy statement/prospectus (when available) and other documents filed with the SEC by NavSight through the website maintained by the SEC at http://www.sec.gov, or by directing a request to: NavSight Holdings, Inc., 12020 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 100, Reston, VA 20191. Participants in Solicitation NavSight and the Company and their respective directors and certain of their respective executive officers and other members of management and employees may be considered participants in the solicitation of proxies with respect to the Proposed Transaction. Information about the directors and executive officers of NavSight is set forth in its Form 10-K filed on March 29, 2021. Additional information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be included in the Registration Statement and other relevant materials to be filed with the SEC regarding the Proposed Transaction when they become available. Stockholders, potential investors and other interested persons should read the Registration Statement carefully when it becomes available before making any voting or investment decisions. When available, these documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. No Offer or Solicitation This press release shall 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 jurisdiction 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 U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Forward-Looking Statements The information in this press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws with respect to the Proposed Transaction. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as "estimate," "plan," "project," "forecast," "intend," "will," "expect," "anticipate," "believe," "seek," "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 expectations of accelerating Spire's sales and marketing efforts, expectations of product development, including the success of the weather service being developed in partnership with TruWeather, across Spire's weather segment and the applicability of such products to Spire's market, the strengthening of Spire's competitive advantage, the importance of weather forecasting to Spire's target markets, Spire's ability to advance its offering of valuable and business-oriented weather prediction solutions to its core markets, the expansion of Spire's business to new regions and markets, Spire's future growth, estimates and forecasts of financial and performance metrics, expectations of achieving and maintaining profitability, projections of total addressable markets, market opportunity and market share, net proceeds from the Proposed Transactions, potential benefits of the Proposed Transaction and the potential success of the Company's market and growth strategies, and expectations related to the terms and timing of the Proposed Transaction. These statements are based on various assumptions and on the current expectations of NavSight's and the Company's 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 will differ from assumptions. Many actual events and circumstances are beyond the control of NavSight and the Company. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including (i) the risk that the Proposed Transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all, which may adversely affect the price of NavSight's securities; (ii) the risk that the Proposed Transaction may not be completed by NavSight's business combination deadline and the potential failure to obtain an extension of the business combination deadline if sought by NavSight; (iii) the failure to satisfy the conditions to the consummation of the Proposed Transaction, including the approval of the Proposed Transaction by the stockholders of NavSight, the satisfaction of the minimum trust account amount following any redemptions by NavSight's public stockholders and the receipt of certain governmental and regulatory approvals; (iv) the inability to complete the PIPE investment in connection with the Proposed Transaction; (v) the failure to realize the anticipated benefits of the Proposed Transaction; (vi) the effect of the announcement or pendency of the Proposed Transaction on Spire's business relationships, performance, and business generally; (vii) risks that the Proposed Transaction disrupts current plans of Spire and potential difficulties in Spire employee retention as a result of the Proposed Transaction; (viii) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against NavSight or Spire related to the business combination agreement or the Proposed Transaction; (ix) the ability to maintain the listing of NavSight's securities on the New York Stock Exchange; (x) the ability to address the market opportunity for Space-as-a-Service; (xi) the risk that the Proposed Transaction may not generate expected net proceeds to the combined company; (xii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts, and other expectations after the completion of the Proposed Transaction, and identify and realize additional opportunities; (xiii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the business combination agreement; (xiv) the risk of downturns, new entrants and a changing regulatory landscape in the highly competitive space data analytics industry; and those factors discussed in NavSight's final prospectus filed on September 11, 2020 under the heading "Risk Factors," and other documents of NavSight filed, or to be filed, with the SEC. If any of these risks materialize or the Company's assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. There may be additional risks that neither NavSight nor the Company presently know or that NavSight and the Company 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 NavSight's and the Company's expectations, plans or forecasts of future events and views as of the date of this press release. NavSight and the Company anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause NavSight's and the Company's assessments to change. However, while NavSight and the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, NavSight and the Company specifically disclaim any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing NavSight's and the Company's assessments as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed upon the forward-looking statements. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005129/en/

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Historic cultural artifacts are returning to Afghanistan.

U.S. officials seized 33 Afghan pieces worth $1.8 million from a New York art collector. Officials say the man stole artifacts from countries all over the world.

Roya Rahmani is Afghanistans ambassador to the U.S. She says the recovery of the material is extremely important to the countrys culture.

Each one of these pieces are priceless depictions of our history, she said.

The Manhattan District Attorney along with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recovered the artifacts as a part of an investigation into the illegal sale of antiquities. Rahmani formally took back the pieces from the U.S. on April 12.

The items include masks and sculptures, some from the second and third centuries. They were on display for a short period of time at the Afghan embassy in Washington, D.C. They will be placed in the Afghanistan National Museum in Kabul.

The National Museum of Kabul is the place where members of the Taliban destroyed artifacts in 2001. The group believes human images are offensive.

The Taliban is now out of power, but it controls much of the country outside of Kabul. Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have slowed down, and U.S. and NATO troops are expected to leave the country after 20 years of war.

Rahmani says its a dangerous time for the country.

However, what I know is that our security forces are determined to defend our people. The government is committed to do its part for peace, she said.

Before 9/11, the Taliban had become infamous for its strict form of Islamic law. Under the Taliban, most art and culture was banned, and women were not allowed in public. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed sixth century statues of the Buddha built into the side of a cliff in Bamiyan province.

Rahmani says the items are returning to an Afghan government that respects their culture and history. She says the Taliban would never destroy the precious artifacts again.

Our security forces and our government would not let that happen, she said.

Like the statues, some of the recovered antiquities are of the Buddha. Theres also a statue of Shiva and a Greek mask.

Fredrik Hiebert is an archaeologist who is an expert on Afghanistan. He says the artifacts show the many cultural influences on the country, which was once a worldwide center for trade.

Afghanistan is one of the richest countries in archaeology and history in the world, he said. For 6,000 years theres been civilization based in Afghanistan.

That makes Afghanistan a good target for those who want to steal.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is a government agency that deals with cases of smuggling across international borders. In 2007, it received information about stolen artifacts brought to the New York City area from India.

Eventually, New York art gallery owner, Subhash Kapoor, and seven others were brought up on smuggling charges. The government took back more than 2,600 artifacts worth more than $140 million.

For now, the U.S. government is working to return the stolen material, much of it found around New York City.

HSI has already returned items to Nepal and Sri Lanka and soon will turn over artifacts to Thailand.

Stephen Lee is in charge of HSIs cultural property, arts and antiquities unit. The 33 items being sent to Afghanistan are the first to return as part of the investigation.

They belong to the people of Afghanistan, Lee said. Thats their cultural history.

Im Dan Friedell.

Ben Fox wrote this story for the Associated Press. Dan Novak adapted it for VOA Learning English. Susan Shand was the editor.

________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

artifact n. a simple object (such as a tool or weapon) that was made by people in the past

priceless -adj. extremely valuable or important

depictv. to show (someone or something) in a picture, painting, photograph, etc.

antiquity-n. objects from ancient times

maskn. a covering for your face or for part of your face

sculpture-n. a piece of art that is made by carving or molding clay, stone, metal, etc.

vow-n. a serious promise to do something or to behave in a certain way

loot-n. something that is stolen or taken by force

civilization-n. the condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc.

smuggle-v. to move (someone or something) from one country into another illegally and secretly
STOCKHOLM, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In collaboration with the European Central Bank, MAG has developed a special quiz in New QuizDuel which will be launched in all markets within the EU to celebrate Europe Day.

Stockholm, Sweden - 29 April, 2021 - Today MAG Interactive announces a new collaboration with the European Central Bank (ECB): Together with the ECB, MAG has developed a special quiz in New QuizDuel about the EU and the ECB's work to highlight Europe Day, which takes place on May 9th.

The special quiz, called EuropeDay, is available to play in New QuizDuel between the 3rd and 23rd of May in all EU markets. During this period, players participating in the quiz have the chance to win an iPad Pro 11.

Europe Day, May 9th, marks the anniversary of the historically important Schuman Declaration in 1950 when French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed a new form of cooperation to promote peace in Europe. This led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner of the European Union.

"For us at MAG it feels inspiring to pay attention to Europe Day, which symbolizes cooperation and peace in Europe. With the help of New QuizDuel's great reach, we hope that our EU quiz can increase interest in the EU and its important work to achieve climate goals and strengthen the European economy", says Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of MAG Interactive.

MAG previously collaborated with the ECB in 2019 in connection with the 20th anniversary of the Euro.

Participate in the EuropeDay quiz and win an iPad Pro

To enter the EuropeDay competition and have the chance to win an iPad Pro 11, users need to answer all 18 questions in the quiz correctly, take a screenshot on the last page of the quiz (showing the total score and the green boxes corresponding to the correct answers) and send it to europeday@maginteractive.com by May 23rd. A total of 10 winners will be chosen at the end of the month.

The winners will be announced on MAG's social media and on the European Central Bank's website. Find more information on the competition on the ECB website: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/educational/youth-initiatives/ecb-quizduel-competition/html/index.en.html

CONTACT:

For additional information, please contact:

Tove Bengtsson / Marketing Communications Manager / +46 (0)72-220 73 22 / tove.bengtsson@maginteractive.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/mag-interactive/r/mag-interactive-and-the-european-central-bank-launch-quiz-to-celebrate-europe-day,c3335975
Lusaka [Zambia]/Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 29 (ANI/BusinessWire India): Merck Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Merck KgaA kickstarted the 8th Edition of "Merck Foundation Africa Asia Luminary" on 27th April 2021, through an online videoconference.

It was co-chaired by Esther Lungu, The First Lady of the Republic of Zambia and Senator, Dr Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation.

"I am very glad to be hosting this important conference together with Merck Foundation, our long term strategic partner. It is a great honor to inaugurate the conference alongside the First Ladies of Africa. I am certain that this conference will help us to further explore partnership opportunities and introduce new frameworks for cooperation in the area of health care capacity building and to define interventions to break infertility stigma and support girl education," said The President of Zambia, Dr Edgar Chagwa Lungu, during his keynote speech, while inaugurating the conference.

Prof Dr Frank Stangenberg-Haverkamp Chairman of both of Executive Board of E Merck KG and Merck Foundation Board of Trustees expressed, "I would like to welcome and also thank our partners, African First Ladies, African Ministers and health experts from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the rest of the world to join hands with us in order to realize Merck Foundation's vision: 'Everyone in the world should lead a happy and fulfilling life', we have achieved together, a huge success and we are going to continue and extend our support to achieve more."

"I am very happy to co-chair and host this important conference of Merck Foundation and also to celebrate together the 4th anniversary of Merck Foundation, our long term partner in building healthcare capacity and improving access to health, information and breaking the infertility stigma. Also, I am delighted to have my dear sisters, The First Ladies of Africa at this conference," said Esther Lungu, The First Lady of Zambia and Co-chairperson of Merck Foundation Africa Asia Luminary 2021, during her Keynote address and welcome speech.

"We welcomed The First Ladies of 13 African Countries, who are also the Ambassadors of Merck Foundation More than a Mother, to this important conference. Together, we have worked closely throughout the years on a strong strategy to build healthcare capacity by providing specialized training in various specialties; and define interventions to break infertility stigma and support girls' education," said Merck Foundation CEO, Senator, Dr Rasha Kelej.

"I am very proud that we have so far provided for more than 1100 Doctors from 42 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America with one & two-, three-year specialty training in multiple fields such as Oncology, Diabetes, Preventative Cardiovascular Medicine, Endocrinology, Sexual and Reproductive Medicine, Acute Medicine, Respiratory Medicine, Human Assisted Reproduction and Embryology & Fertility specialty, to be the first in their countries. Moreover, we have now widened our horizons by introducing more scholarships for young doctors in many new underserved specialties across Africa and Asia," added Dr Rasha Kelej.

The 8th Edition of the Luminary marked another important milestone: the 4th Anniversary of Merck Foundation.

As part of the Luminary, Merck Foundation First Ladies Initiative Committee (MFFLI) High-Level Panel was conducted, which was attended by the 13 African First Ladies, who are the Ambassadors of Merck Foundation More Than a Mother.

The keynote address was delivered by H.E. Mrs. ESTHER LUNGU, The First Lady of the Republic of Zambia as the host and co-chairperson of the conference along with

* Ana Dias Lourenco, The First Lady of the Republic of Angola

* Neo Jane Masisi, The First Lady of the Republic of Botswana

* Sika Kabore, The First Lady of Burkina Faso

* Angeline Ndayishimiye, The First Lady of the Republic of Burundi

* Brigitte Touadera, The First Lady of Central African Republic

* Denise Nyakeru Tshisekedi, The First Lady of the Democratic Republic of The Congo

* Rebecca Akufo-Addo, The First Lady of the Republic of Ghana

* Djene Conde, The First Lady of the Republic of Guinea Conakry

* Clar Marie Weah, The First Lady of the Republic of Liberia

* Monica Chakwera, The First Lady of the Republic of Malawi

* Isaura Ferrao Nyusi, The First Lady of the Republic of Mozambique

* Monica Geingos, The First Lady of the Republic of Namibia

The Day 1 of the 8th edition of Merck Foundation Africa Asia Luminary was attended by more than 75,000 participants, Healthcare providers, policymakers, academia, researchers, and media from more than 70 Countries in three languages English French and Portuguese.

On Day 2 of the conference, MARS- Merck Foundation Africa Research Summit will be held where a High-Level Panel Discussion with Ministers of Health, Science and Technology, Education, Information And Gender and MARS Researchers will be held with the objective to empower African young researchers & women researchers, advancing their research capacity and empower them in STEM.

On the third day, 29th April, Merck Foundation Health Media Training will be organized for the African and Latin American Media fraternity to emphasize the important role that media plays to break the stigma around infertility, in raising awareness about infertility prevention, and empowering girls and women through education.

Other important scientific sessions in different medical fields will also be held in parallel on Day 2 and Day 3 of the Luminary.

Countries participating include Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central Africa Republic, Cambodia, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Guinea - Bissau, Guinea - Conakry, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Thailand, The Gambia, Togo, Tunisia, U.A.E, UK, Uganda, US, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe and more.

The 8th Edition of Merck Foundation Africa Asia Luminary will be streamed live on 29th April 2021 from 13h to 18:00h (Gulf Standard Time), @Merck Foundation Facebook page and Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej Facebook page.

Click on the link below to Download Merck Foundation App

(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.merck.foundation & hl=en)

Join the conversation on our social media platforms below and let your voice be heard

Facebook: Merck Foundation

Twitter: @Merckfoundation

YouTube: MerckFoundation

Instagram: Merck Foundation

Flickr: Merck Foundation

Website: (www.merck-foundation.com)

This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)

DISCLAIMER

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The United Nations has revealed that the UK is to slice more than 100 million from its contribution to tackling global child deaths and unsafe abortions.

With a drip-feed of reports about the Governments proposed aid cuts emerging in the press in recent weeks, here is what has been claimed  and countered by ministers  so far.

 Firstly, why is aid spending being cut?

Economic damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has led the Government to shelve its manifesto commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on overseas aid, cutting that to 0.5%.

The Government expects just under 10 billion to be allocated to departments for aid spending in 2021/22.

 Where is that cash likely to be spent?

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab set out in a written statement how 8.11 billion of the aid budget will be allocated by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)  approximately 80% of the total UK spend  including 906 million for humanitarian preparedness and response.

Work involving that money will focus on countries most affected by risk of famine, including Yemen, Syria, Somalia and South Sudan.

Former Tory international development secretary Andrew Mitchell (UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA)

But senior MPs, including former Conservative international development secretary Andrew Mitchell, were unhappy with the manner of the declaration, accusing the Government of attempting to announce foreign aid cuts on the quiet.

Mr Mitchell criticised Mr Raab for having slipped out details of reduced spending rather than announcing it in front of MPs in the House of Commons.

 What has been cut so far?

Funding for China will be slashed by 95%, with official development assistance departmental allocations (ODA) for 2021-22 cut to 900,000  although there will be some additional money this year to meet former contractual agreements, the Government said.

Aid to China has been drastically reduced (Arthur Edwards/The Sun/PA)

A leaked memo, meanwhile, has suggested that the UK will slash bilateral funding for overseas water, sanitation and hygiene projects by more than 80% in a move WaterAid described as savage.

The memo said the UKs water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) budget faces an overall cut of 64% in 2021/22 compared with 2019, with bilateral aid funding for clean water scaled down by 80%.

Separately, a report by industry-focused media outlet Devex said ministers are planning to peg back funding for polio eradication by 95%.

 Is that the full extent of the cuts to aid?

It doesnt seem so. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said on Thursday that the Governments expected contribution to its flagship programme for family planning this year will fall from 154 million to 23 million.

The 85% cut to the UKs contribution has been described by UNFPA as devastating for women, girls and their families around the world, with the cash originally earmarked to prevent tens of thousands of maternal and child deaths, millions of unintended pregnancies and millions of unsafe abortions.

Reports have emerged in the press about cuts to the UK aid budget (Stefan Wermuth/PA)

The organisation said that, in addition, 12 million is to be cut from the UNFPAs core operating funds and that several country-level agreements are also likely to be affected.

 What has the Government said about the reported cuts?

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has called the cut to foreign aid perfectly lawful, while Mr Raab has denied sneaking out the cutbacks, arguing that his department acted in a fully transparent way over the recent announcement.

When previously asked about the reports, an FCDO spokeswoman said: The seismic impact of the pandemic on the UK economy has forced us to take tough but necessary decisions, including temporarily reducing the overall amount we spend on aid.

We will still spend more than 10 billion this year to fight poverty, tackle climate change and improve global health.

We are working through what this means for individual programmes. Decisions will be announced in due course.
A North Carolina judge ruled on April 28 against the immediate public release of body camera footage in the officer-involved shooting death of Andrew Brown Jr.

Browns family attorneys, Black Lives Matter activists, and a coalition of media outlets have demanded the release of five body camera videos, which purport to show deputies fatally shooting Brown while he was behind the wheel of his vehicle last week.

Judge Jeffrey Foster said that after hearing lawyers arguments from county officials and media outlets that sought the release of the footage, the videos contain material of a highly sensitive and personal nature and the release would create a serious threat to the fair, impartial, and orderly administration of justice.

Foster ruled that Browns family will be allowed to see all of the videos, but they wont be released to the public for at least several weeks. The videos are being withheld for at least 30 days and no longer than 45 days. Browns son Khalil Ferebee, his immediate family, and a licensed North Carolina lawyer will be allowed to see all the videosbut the judge said they need to be redacted to hide officers identity.

While the bodycam footage only shows one perspective for a limited period of time, it might give the public some ability to understand what happened that day, Mike Cox, attorney for Pasquotank County, told the judge. Cox said he favors the release of the video to the media and Browns family, adding it wont impede investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble argued against releasing the footage, saying that the release would hinder a fair trial, risk deputies safety, and affect investigations. The video, he said, should be released as evidence if and when there is a trial.

H.P. Williams, an attorney on behalf of unnamed clients, said the footage shouldnt be released but said he wouldnt oppose releasing the video to the family as long as officers faces are redacted so they cant be identified.

The officers are very distraught over what happened. They feel for the family of Andrew Brown, Williams told the judge. But, as Mr. Womble described to you, we believe that the shooting was justified.

The family of Brown and their attorneys said they viewed the footage earlier this week. In a statement to The Epoch Times on April 27, attorney Ben Crump said that the video leaked earlier today shows what we already suspected: Andrew Brown Jr. was brought down by an inflamed modern-day lynch mob.

The footage shows an eerie resemblance to what we saw in Ahmaud Arberys modern-day lynching, except these were no vigilantesthese murderers were on the clock as law enforcement. We believe that once the long-awaited body camera footage is released, we will be able to fill in the gaps to this story and hold the officers responsible for Andrew Browns death accountable, he said.

Crump didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment about the judges ruling.

Earlier on April 28, Womble said that he disagreed with Browns family attorneys characterization of the mans death, saying that Brown struck the deputies twice with his vehicle.

As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers, he said, noting that in the video, the car stops again. The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.

The deadly encounter unfolded on April 21 when Pasquotank County sheriffs deputies were serving a warrant on Brown and opened fire as he allegedly attempted to evade capture. Reports, citing arrest records, have said that Brown had a lengthy rap sheet stretching back to 1988, namely involving the dealing of crack cocaine, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine.

From The Epoch Times
Chinese Luban workshop launched in Ethiopia to boost vocational training

Xinhua) 09:31, April 29, 2021

Representatives from China and Ethiopia attend the inauguration ceremony of Ethiopian Luban Workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 28, 2021. China on Wednesday launched the Ethiopian Luban Workshop aiming to provide high-end technical skills training to help college students meet the requirements of the emerging global market. (Xinhua/Wang Ping)

ADDIS ABABA, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday launched the Ethiopian Luban Workshop aiming to provide high-end technical skills training to help college students meet the requirements of the emerging global market.

The workshop facility, hosted by the Ethiopian Technical University (ETU) in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, was established by the Chinese Tianjin University of Technology and Education (TUTE), under the guidance of the Ministry of Education of China.

The workshop is envisaged to serve as a center of excellence across four major areas that are industrial sensor technology, mechatronics technology, industrial control technology and industrial robotics technology.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the Ethiopian Luban Workshop, Teshale Berecha, President of ETU, said the establishment of the workshop by the famed Chinese TUTE inside the premises of the ETU will improve the teaching-learning process in the areas of mechatronics, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

"It will make our graduates familiar with the 21st century skills and knowledge. It will also be used as a training and research hub for industry practitioners to cope up with the very changing industrial requirements," the ETU President said.

The facility, equipped with world-class technologies in the AI sector, is expected to boost Ethiopia's industrial development aspiration that would see it becoming the manufacturing hub of Africa by 2025.

Getachew Negash, Director-General of the Ethiopian Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) at the Ethiopian Ministry of Higher Education, also echoed Berecha's remarks as he emphasized the workshop would not only serve as a training facility for students, but it will also serve as a capacity building center for researchers as well as industry practitioners across the East African country.

"It will remain as a center of research and development to nurture new skills and enhance indigenous knowledge and practices," the director general stressed.

He stressed that the successful launching of the Ethiopian Luban Workshop signifies the two countries' strategic cooperation that continued in all development sectors in assuring vast options by scaling up technical skills of young Ethiopians.

The workshop brings together three undergraduate majors of manufacturing technology, electronics and communication technology, electrical and control technology that are available at the ETU.

Zhao Zhiyuan, Chinese Ambassador to Ethiopia, said the Ethiopian Luban Workshop "is the latest fruit of deepening cultural and education cooperation between China and Ethiopia."

"I firmly believe that with support from the two governments, the Tianjin municipality and other relevant parties at different levels, the exchanges and cooperation between institutes of higher education in the field of vocational training will be further strengthened and enjoy greater development," Zhao said.

"I wish the Ethiopian Luban Workshop even greater success ahead, and I hope it will soon become a new highlight of Ethiopia-China cooperation," the ambassador added.

The Ethiopian Luban Workshop launching ceremony involved two separate events that were held both in Ethiopia and China via a video link, bringing together senior Ethiopian and Chinese government officials and diplomats.

The event witnessed the handing over of Luban workshop training books, teaching materials and standards of Luban Workshop to the Ethiopian side.

Ethiopia's Ambassador to China, Teshome Toga Chanaka, addressing the event via a video link from China, said the world-class workshop will enable Ethiopian youth's capabilities in line with the emerging global technological advancements.

Noting that Ethiopian and China attach great importance to their partnership in human capacity development, the Ethiopian ambassador stressed that the newly launched Ethiopia Luban Workshop injects much-needed momentum in further deepening the two countries' ties across education and training.

In September 2018, China announced that 10 Luban workshops would be established in Africa to provide vocational skills training for African youths, under the framework of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.

Since Africa's first Luban Workshop was launched in Djibouti back in March 2019, a number of African countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda have launched world-class Luban Workshops with the aim of providing quality vocational training to local people, the country's youth in particular.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Victoria has proposed a new quarantine facility in north Melbourne that could house up to 3,000 returned travellers at once.

The facility would be built from scratch in Mickleham and operated by the state government.

Victoria wants the Commonwealth to fund the design and construction of the site which would be on federal land.

The facility (pictured is an artist's impression) would be built from scratch in Mickleham and operated by the state government

Victoria has proposed a new quarantine facility in north Melbourne that could house up to 3,000 returned travellers

Acting Premier James Merlino - who is filling in while Daniel Andrews recovers from a broken back - has sent the proposal to Scott Morrison and has asked for a decision by September.

The design of the facility, which would start with 500 beds and could be scaled up to have 3,000, would take four months and the construction another four months after that.

Mr Merlino said the location - next to an animal quarantine facility - had been chosen out of ten possible sites because it is close the airport and hospitals.

'Towards the end of the year, we can have this up and running. The virus, is going to continue to be with us for some time,' he said.

Queensland has also proposed a quarantine facility west of Brisbane - but the Commonwealth has refused to approve it, saying it has not been given a detailed costing plan.

It comes after the federal government released figures showing fewer than one in 10,000 hotel quarantine guests cause coronavirus to escape into the community - after WA Premier Mark McGowan called for a system overhaul.

A total of 140,355 travellers have been through quarantine since October 27 but the virus has leaked only 13 times.

In other words, Covid-19 has transmitted into the community from just 0.009 per cent of guests.

A total of 140,355 travellers have been through quarantine since October 27 but the virus has leaked only 13 times, federal figures show

Outbreaks from hotel quarantine since October 27, 2020 State NSW VIC QLD WA SA NT ACT TAS TOTAL Quarantine guests 57,467 11,661 29,015 21,870 11,107 8,652 435 148 140,355 Leaks 5 2 3 2 1 0 0 0 13 Percentage 0.009% 0.017% 0.010% 0.009% 0.009% 0% 0% 0% 0.009%

However, some doctors say a better way to rate the system is to count the number of leaks resulting from Covid positive guests.

Based on that method, about 1 in 200 cases lead to community transmission, or 0.5 per cent, according to a recent paper in the Medical Journal of Australia.

The stats were released by the federal government after the WA premier slammed the hotel quarantine system as 'not fit for purpose' and demanded the Commonwealth use defence bases and migration facilities instead.

Mr McGowan said he was 'at the end of his tether' with the prime minister over the issue after the hardline premier locked down two million residents for three days on Friday when the virus escaped from quarantine and caused three local infections.

'I think it's becoming more urgent and I suspect all the states are getting pretty heartily sick of it that they have these facilities that are available and they refuse to use them, so we're saying to the Commonwealth it's time they step up,' Mr McGowan said over the weekend.

'I'm getting to the end of my tether with the Commonwealth handing responsibility to the states and not helping with this responsibility.'

Defence Minister Peter Dutton hit back, saying the states had previously agreed to the hotel quarantine scheme.

A Commonwealth spokesman said defence bases are needed for our soldiers and migration detention centres are not appropriate because they contain criminals facing deportation.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who supports the hotel quarantine system, also lashed Mr McGowan and told him to stop playing the 'blame game.'

'Every time you have an outbreak, it isn't healthy to have these blame games. You have to get on with it and do the job,' she said on Monday.
WALLOON LAKE, MI - When it comes to fly fishing in Northern Michigan, there might be nothing more iconic than casting a line into rivers and streams frequented by famous American author and sometimes-summer resident Ernest Hemingway.

As part of the areas year-long Hemingway Homecoming celebration, Hotel Walloon on Walloon Lake is offering guests a special fly fishing package that comes complete with accommodations and a guided half-day or full-day adventure led by True North Trout.

The hotel special is designed to get people out on the water, either with a walk-in or float trip experience, and bring them back to simpler times, as enjoyed by Hemingway in this same area of Northern Michigan.

RELATED: Hemingway Homecoming events to celebrate famed authors ties to Northern Michigan

This world-renowned outdoorsman cast his first line  likely from a simple cane pole  in the quiet waters of Northern Michigan not far from his familys beloved summer cottage, Windemere, on Walloon Lake, said Dianna Stampfler, president of Promote Michigan. It was here, Up In Michigan, where Ernest discovered his love of fishing and where he later drew inspiration for many of his later adventures and the stories that followed  particularly those in The Nick Adams Stories, which was published posthumously in 1972.

Details of the Fly Fishing package:

Overnight guests can enjoy a 25% discount on a guided half day walk-in wading or float trip, or a full day float trip, for 1-2 people.

Packages can be booked spring, summer and fall 2021, based on schedule availability.

To check pricing or book an overnight Fly Fishing Package with Hotel Walloon, call (231) 535-5000, or visit HotelWalloon.com.

Sitting along Walloon Lake, Hotel Walloon is a 32-room boutique hotel. Photo provided by Hotel Walloon.

Brian Kozminski, a True North Trout guide, actually portrayed the author in the fishing scenes of George Colburns documentary Young Hemingway.

It is really special to me to fish Horton Creek, the Pigeon River or other waters in this area and know that doing so clears my mind just as it did for Hemingway 100 years ago, said Kozminski, who has been fly fishing Michigan waters for over 30 years.

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Orlando Octave is vibrating on what is for him a new philosophical frequency.

Octave recently embarked on a spiritual journey. The groovy soca artistes open search for truth and enlightenment led him through the teachings of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism then eventually towards the Hebrew Israelites  a group who believe they are the descendants of the ancient Israelites written of in the Torah and Bible.

Octave was introduced to their teachings by a friend in 2014. He developed a deeper understanding for the groups philosophy during a pilgrimage he made to Israel in 2016.
Follicular lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells, is usually incurable. Patients cycle through periods of therapy that partially shrink their cancers, before the disease progresses again. Thats what appeared to be happening with a 61-year-old man in Italy: Diagnosed with cancer in August of 2019, he promptly began a course of chemotherapy, completing it in February 2020. All that was left to do was monitor the tumors growth.

So when a June scan revealed that the patients tumor appeared to be growing, Martina Sollini, a professor of nuclear medicine at Humanitas University in Italy, and her colleagues werent surprised. Until the biopsy came back negative. Another biopsy and a follow-up scan in September confirmed the original findings: The cancer had gone into complete remission. His medical team was left to figure out how. They turned to a curious explanation: Perhaps the cancers sudden remission had something to do with the fact that the patient had, that spring, been infected with SARS-CoV-2. After ruling out other possibilities, they published a case study in February, documenting one of a few instances over the course of the pandemic in which researchers suspect that a case of COVID-19 might have caused a tumor to shrink. And while the phenomenon is rare, it shows the potential of carefully administered viral therapies to treat cancer in the future.

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Its well-known that some viruses, like the human papillomavirus and hepatitis B, can cause cancer. But whats far less understood is the flip side of infections: their potential to cure rather than cause diseases. Cases of infections linked to cancer remissionincluding blood, kidney, lung, and skin cancers, and even cancers that have spread to other organshave been documented for thousands of years. The earliest mention dates back to 1550 B.C. and the words of the Egyptian polymath Imhotep, whose recommended cancer treatment involved purposefully infecting tumors and then cutting into them. And then theres the 13th-century story of Peregrine, an Italian priest who later became canonized as the patron saint of cancer patients. Afflicted with a tumor of the leg that eventually burst through his skin and caused a massive infection, his physician was stunned to find that the cancer had disappeared shortly before Peregrine was due for an amputation. He lived until the age of 85. The cancer never returned.

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Viruses are friends and foes.  Mitesh Borad, medical oncologist, the Mayo Clinic

Centuries later, in 1891, a New York bone surgeon named William Coley began his decadeslong attempt to cobble together sporadic case reports into a system of cancer treatment. Mixing together several strains of heat-killed bacteria into a vaccinea formulation hed change well over a dozen times over his careerhe injected cancer patients with the hope of the infection burning the disease out of them. And, in a startling number of cases, it worked. In the 1990s, pharmacologists at the biotechnology company Amgen analyzed 170 patient records of advanced cancer patients treated only with Coleys toxinsabout one-third by Coley himself and found that 64 percent went into remission. But Coley struggled to explain why his method worked, and his successes proved difficult for others to replicate. In 1894, the Journal of the American Medical Association issued a scathing critique of Coleys toxins: During the last six months, the alleged remedy has been faithfully tried by many surgeons, but so far not a single well-authenticated case of recovery has been reported. Coleys boss at Memorial Hospital in New Yorkworld-renowned cancer pathologist James Ewingbanned the use of the toxins in the hospital, though for a while, they were still used elsewhere.

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Coleys toxins gradually faded out of the limelight, supplanted by advances in radiation therapy and chemotherapy and their more reliable results in treating cancer. In 1962, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration classified Coleys toxins as having new drug status, meaning that they could not be prescribed outside of clinical trials. The American Cancer Society placed Coleys toxins on its list of unproven methods of cancer treatment in 1965. But that wasnt the end of the story for the peculiar treatment. A resurgence of interest in Coleys work came on the back of the efforts of his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, who spent much of her life championing his cause after his death in 1936. In studying and compiling more than 1,000 meticulous records of the patients that he treated, she found that one of the key problems in replicating his work was that others were using different formulations of Coleys toxins. Her comprehensive analysis of Coleys nascent immunotherapy and her relentless advocacy eventually earned her the allyship of several eminent researchers, including cancer specialist Lloyd J. Old. Together, they managed to have Coleys toxins removed from the blacklist by the late 1970s and inspired a wave of researchers who went on to make groundbreaking advances in immunotherapy. Today, oncolytic virotherapyusing genetically engineered viruses to attack and destroy tumorsis a burgeoning area of research with new therapies being tested in clinical trials for cancers ranging from rare, deadly brain tumors to skin cancer. Viruses are friends and foes, says Mitesh Borad, a medical oncologist at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona who is studying the use of viruses to treat liver cancer.

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There are two major mechanisms by which viruses can combat tumors, says Howard Kaufman, a medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who researches oncolytic virotherapy for the treatment of melanoma and other skin cancers. The first is through directly infecting and killing tumor cells. Generally, this is easier than attacking normal cells because the warning system that alerts the immune system about infections is often defective in tumor cells. The second involves recruiting many parts of the innate immune system, including T-cellsdepending on the type of T-cell, they either search out and destroy specific pathogens or help produce antibodiesand cytokines, which are proteins that help different parts of the immune system communicate. Cytokines are capable of amplifying an immune response so that it doesnt only attack a specific targetthe virusbut causes more widespread damage, including to tumors. COVID-19 in particular triggers a massive inflammatory response, which some researchers describe as a cytokine hurricane. While SARS-CoV-2 is an extreme example, its likely that viruses in general cause inflammation that is kickstarting the immune system to not only recognize the pathogens, but also the cancer at the same time, says Grant McFadden, the director of the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines, and Virotherapy at Arizona State University.

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There are, of course, reasons other than a viral infection that a tumor could shrink. After Sollinis patient came back with a negative biopsy, she and her team considered reasons other than the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Perhaps it was an enduring effect of his chemotherapy. Its also possible that his cancer went into spontaneous remission, which, by one estimate, may happen in 1 in 80,000 cases. But neither of these explanations proved convincing. In either of them, we would have expected to see a progressive reduction in the size of the tumor, says Sollini. Instead, the tumor appeared to enlarge before it went into remissionan effect suspiciously similar to the flare phenomenon sometimes seen in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy. This happens because T-cells are infiltrating the tumor to mount an immune response, Sollini says. But the man wasnt on immunotherapy. It was likely that the virus helped the mans body rally against the tumor, they concluded.

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In another instance, the connection between COVID-19 and remission seems even more clear-cut: A case study published in the British Journal of Haematology in January described the strange recovery of a 61-year-old man diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma and, soon afterward, COVID-19. Despite receiving no treatment for the cancer itself, his condition gradually improved over the course of his 11-day hospital stay. Four months later, scans revealed that his tumors had shrunk.

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To be clear, COVID-19 is unquestionably a foenot a cancer cure. Nor is any other infection. The phenomenon is both unpredictable and very uncommon. Another case of remission in a treatment-resistant blood cancer was reported in August. Hospitalized with COVID-19, the patients cancer symptoms and blood test results suddenly began to improve during the second week of his hospital stay. But the improvement in that case was temporaryshortly after the patients recovery from COVID-19, signs and symptoms of the cancer recurred. And many, many more cancer patients are at risk of suffering serious complications from COVID-19 rather than experiencing any sort of benefit.

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What all these cases highlight is that infections activate the immune system in ways that are not yet fully understood. One day, it could be harnessed to our benefit. So far, the only oncolytic virus approved by the FDA is Amgens Imlygic, a modified version of type 1 herpes simplex virusbest known for causing cold soresgiven the green light in 2015 for the treatment of advanced melanoma. Its effectiveness, and side effects, is comparable to cancer therapies known as immune checkpoint inhibitors like Opdivo and Keytruda, but its not nearly as widely used. (Cold sores have been reported in some cases of patients receiving the drug). Some of the barriers to widespread use have to do with logistics, says Kaufman. Imlygic needs to be stored in a freezer that maintains a temperature range of -70 to -90 degrees Celsius, for example, and carefully disposed of to prevent viral contamination.

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Beyond that, questions remain about how best to use viruses to go after tumors. Researchers are working on figuring out if there are ways to predict which patients and cancers may be most receptive to virotherapy, and if preexisting immunity to a virus may interfere with treatment. And, of course, theres a lot left to learn about how exactly viruses may cause tumors to shrink. Anything we can learn about how to induce cancers to regress is positive information, says McFadden. Ultimately, understanding how infections like COVID-19 attack tumors may bring us a step closer toward a future in which viruses are recruited as reluctant allies in treating cancer.
As solidarity is pouring in from all around the globe, United Arab Emirates (UAE) lent their support to India's ongoing tussle with COVID-19 record-breaking figures nationwide. A special cargo with medical aid including 157 ventilators, 480 Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAPs) and other medical supplies arrived from UAE to India on April 29.

Sources have informed that Indian Air Force (IAF) C-17 has so far airlifted 18 cryogenic oxygen containers from Dubai Airport and have landed at Panagarh Air Base in three sorties since April 26.

External Affairs Ministry on April 25, 2021, received a call from the UAE Foreign Minister HH Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan where the latter expressed his solidarity with India solidarity worsening COVID-19 situation in India. They also informed that a message of solidarity from the UAE over the COVID-19 situation prevalent in India was depicted by lighting up their iconic buildings in tricolour on April 25. World's tallest building which is located in the heart of Dubai was lit up with tricolour as on Indian national flag. This was carried out to showcase support in India's battle against the unprecedented COVID-19 situation. In a tweet, the Indian Embassy at Abu dhabi posted a video of this highlight.

Earlier today, the Indian embassy had also established their dispatchment of medical consignment to India on Twitter. Pursuant to the post, Arindam Bagchi, the official spokesperson of Ministry of External Affairs acknowledged receipt of the same and paid his gratitude. As follows,

India and UAE continue their strong cooperation in the collective fight against Covid-19. We are grateful to receive timely and valuable medical supplies from the Government of the UAE. #IndiaUAEDosti@MEAIndia @IndianDiplomacy @AmbKapoor @cgidubai @DrSJaishankar @MoFAICUAE https://t.co/4sEWLv94Hg  India in UAE (@IndembAbuDhabi) April 29, 2021

Amid raging COVID-19 figures, media reports, and gutting images of a dislocated medical infrastructure, many countries have poured in their solidarity with India. Romania, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, European Union, Singapore, Bhutan amongst few others have come forward to provide assistance to India in procuring tonnes of liquid medical oxygen, transporting mobile oxygen plants, drugs, and vaccines against destructive COVID-19 second-wave. This would ensure requisite medical oxygen across states which are facing shortages. In the recent past, COVID-19 patients have succumbed to the virus due to a dearth of medical oxygen supply at hospitals.

COVID-19 tally in India

In the last 24 hours, India's clocked 3,79,257 fresh COVID-19 cases with 2,69,507 recoveries and 3,645 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524 cases and the death toll to 2,04,832. Total COVID-19 active cases in India have now mounted to 30,84,814.

On April 4, India recorded over 1 lakh cases, which has doubled in a span of ten days and witnessing an unprecedented rise ever since, with now for the fifth consecutive day, over 3-lakh COVID-19 cases have been reported. India's contribution to the world figure has risen from 9 percent to 35 percent, which is the highest ever figure by any country.
San Francisco's daunting challenge: 4,000 simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted.

By Christopher F. Rufo, RealClearInvestigations

April 28, 2021

San Francisco is coming undone. In recent years, the city has manifested a series of visible and persistent inequalities, with a spoils-to-the-victor world for its technological elite, and a chaotic, brutalized world for its dispossessed. In the citys Tenderloin district, men openly hawk drugs on the street corners, desperate addicts are crumpled across the sidewalks, and first responders dart through the chaos to revive overdose victims.

The city has become a web of contradictions. There are thousands of new millionaires, and, by the latest estimates, 18,000 people in and out of homelessness. The headquarters of Uber, Twitter, and Square are blocks away from the open-air drug markets of the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and SoMa. Wealthy families attending an art opening at the Civic Center have to cross through the tent encampments that line the sidewalks.

Residents, property owners, and small businesseswho pay an enormous premium to live and work in San Franciscohave begun to erupt in frustration. Citizens tell pollsters that homelessness is the citys most pressing issue and business owners tell pollsters that "conditions on [the] streets have progressively deteriorated.

City Hall has begun coming to terms with the crisis. Mayor London Breed recently hired a director of mental health reform, Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, who compiled a statistical summary of the problem. People have long known that San Francisco has a homelessness problem, but Nigusse Bland discovered a population-within-a-populationthe so-called perilous trifecta: 4,000 men and women who are simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted to alcohol, meth, or heroin. About 70 % of them have been on the streets for more than five years; 40% have been on the streets for more than 13 years.

This is the citys fundamental predicament. How do you help people in the grips of the perilous trifecta? What interventions could make progress? Where do social workers even start? Its almost impossible to understate the depths of this challenge.

San Franciscos current policy toward the perilous trifecta can be best described as compassionate neglect. Every year, the chronically homeless cycle through the institutions of the socialized state, from hospitals, jails, and shelters, to sobering centers, case management appointments, and 72-hour psychiatric holds. Local government provides enough to meet an outward standard of compassion, but not enough to alter the trajectories of the homeless. The result is a disaster, which has drawn criticism across the political spectrum. Progressives are demanding more funding for existing programs, while moderates are bewildered by the eternal recurrence of tents, needles, and feces in their neighborhoods.

The current policy regime can be divided into three domains -- the hospital, the jail, and the subsidized apartment. Together, these institutions represent the new orthodoxy of the modern urban approach: Homelessness is reduced to a set of social-scientific variables, to be manipulated through the intensive application of the medical and social sciences.

As part of its medical system, San Francisco currently spends more than $255 million per year on mental health and substance abuse programs, many of which cater to the citys homeless. In a recent audit of the behavioral health system, the citys budget and legislative analyst found that 70% of all psychiatric emergency visits involved a homeless individual and that 66% of all visitors had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders. In total, the top 5% of super-users, totaling 2,239 adults, the majority of whom fall into the perilous trifecta, accounted for 52% of total systemwide service use. Doctors at San Francisco General see the same set of patients so frequently that they have developed an entire vocabulary to describe the population that circles in and out of their doors.

The jail system is next. According to the San Francisco County Jail, the homeless account for 40% of all inmates -- despite being less than 1% of the citys overall population, and even after San Francisco decriminalized many quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness. Again, the perilous trifecta looms large. Inmates with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders are more likely to be homeless and more likely to be charged with a violent crime compared to the general jail population. The pithy observation about deinstitutionalization is largely true: The people who might have once lived in the state mental hospital have simply been transferred to the county jail.

Finally, the public-housing complex is the new great hope, and fastest-growing public expenditure, for the homeless. Like many major West Coast cities, San Francisco has gone all in on Housing First, the theory that the municipal government must provide free housing for the homeless in perpetuity, with no expectations of sobriety, work, or participation in rehabilitation programs. For a city with a recurring homeless population of 18,000, this is an enormous expense. In 2019, San Francisco spent $285 million on shelters and permanent supportive housing, plus $65 million on traditional public housing, vouchers, and SRO units. At the same time, voters passed an additional $600 million bond to build affordable housing. But still, 67% of the Bay Areas homeless are unsheltered.

Even as they tout evidence-based interventions, data-driven solutions, and best practices, leaders in San Francisco have recognized the failure of the current system and proposed an ambitious reform agenda. However, in broad terms, this agenda only deepens its dependency on the social-scientific model and doubles-down on its worst assumptions. It can be summarized this way: deinstitutionalization, destigmatization, and decriminalization.

In 2019, Mayor Breed and Supervisors Matt Haney and Hillary Ronen championed legislation for sweeping mental health reform. The plan would increase total spending on mental health and substance abuse to $500 million per year, and prioritize the homeless, create a central service center, and pressure private insurers to cover more costs. When it passed unanimously through the Board of Supervisors, Ronen celebrated it as a progressive milestone: We just created the first universal mental health and substance use system in the country.

But this universality is only a theoretical formulation. The legislation does not include a funding source and, more important, simply expands the existing behavioral health system rather than reforming it. For the perilous trifecta, the problem is often not access to services, but participation in services. According to the latest one-night count, only 17% of the homeless reported using mental health services and only 11% reported using substance abuse services. For the unsheltered population, these figures are almost certainly lower.

The problem is that members of the perilous trifecta are the least likely to seek services. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, approximately half the patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder suffer from anosognosia, which is the inability to understand their own disorder, often leading to a refusal to enter treatment and take medication. Adding a serious addiction to methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, and violent behavior, only compounds the problem.

In the past, the solution to this paradox was compulsion. The state took custody of the gravely disabled and treated them in long-term residential institutions. However, with the exposure of civil rights abuses and the release of Ken Keseys 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, the United States gradually dismantled its mental health system, reducing the number of mental health beds per capita by an astonishing 95% between 1955 and 2016. Today, California has fewer beds per capita than the national average, with San Francisco having only 219 adult psychiatric beds available at a given time -- drastically insufficient for the number of people in need.

Although Mayor Breed has tentatively moved towards a return to short-term conservatorships, a form of involuntary commitment for individuals who present a grave danger to themselves or others, the plan has neither the scope nor the force to significantly reduce the numbers of the perilous trifecta. Because of pressure from disability activists and the ACLU, which have called conservatorships the greatest deprivation of civil liberties aside from the death penalty, the plan is limited to individuals who have had eight or more involuntary psychiatric holds in the past year, which, in practice, would mean less than 100 people citywide.

Mayor Breed did not return a request for comment.

Many progressive socialists argue that there is too much force in the system, not too little. San Franciscos district attorney, Chesa Boudin, took office in January 2020 pledging to substantially reduce the county jail population, end cash bail, and decriminalize quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness, including public camping, drug consumption, prostitution, and public urination. Boudin contends that the criminal justice system in San Francisco is a domain of persistent inequalities  locking up a disproportionate number of poor and minority residents  and has become the dumping ground for the addicted and mentally ill. Rather than continue this system, Boudin argues, the city must implement a comprehensive transformation of the criminal justice system to decriminalize and treat mental illness, housing instability, and substance use as public health issues rather than criminal justice issues.

Boudins formulation does align with a single-day snapshot of the San Francisco County Jail population from 2016, which found that 48% of inmates were African American, 70% self-reported substance abuse, and 10% were deemed to have a serious mental illness. However, the narrative that the city is somehow targeting non-violent drug offenders and criminalizing homeless is specious. The snapshot also shows that 68% of inmates were arrested for violence, weapons possession, and serious felonies. Contrary to progressive rhetoric, only 4% were arrested for drug crimes -- a vanishingly small number of people for a city in the midst of a heroin and methamphetamine epidemic.

The hard reality is that the perilous trifecta has fueled a boom in property crime and public disorder. In 2019, at least 1,120 individuals in the trifecta spent time in the county jail. Although the homicide rate remained static during Boudins first year office, burglaries have soared in a city that already had one of the highest property crime rates in the nation, while authorities enabled massive open-air drug markets in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, which is a central hub for the homeless population.

The nexus between homelessness, addiction, and crime is clear: According to city and federal data, virtually all of the unsheltered homeless are unemployed, while at the same time, those with serious addictions spend an average of $1,256 to $1,834 a month on methamphetamine and heroin. With no legitimate source of income, many addicts support their habit through a hustle, which can include fraud, prostitution, car break-ins, burglaries of residences and business, and other forms of theft.

Boudins plan to decriminalize such property offenses  the mirror opposite of the low-tolerance broken windows approach adopted in the late 1980s as crime rates began historic declines  has contributed to the sense that he is not holding criminals accountable. In 2019, the city had an incredible 25,667 smash-and-grabs, as thieves sought valuables and other property from cars to sell on the black market. The following year, rather than attempt to prevent or even disincentivize this crime, Boudin has proposed a $1.5 million fund to pay for auto glass repair, arguing that it will help put money into San Francisco jobs and San Francisco businesses. In literal terms, Boudin is subsidizing broken windows, under the notion that it can be transformed into a job-creation program.

Boudin did not return a request for comment.

Some San Franciscans are pushing back. Earlier this year, a group of residents and business owners launched a recall effort targeting Boudin, arguing that his policies have enabled crime and not done enough to protect victims.

The final plank of San Franciscos policy platform is destigmatization. Public health experts in the city have gradually abandoned recovery and sobriety as the ideal outcome, preferring the limited goal of harm reduction. In a recent task force report on methamphetamine, the San Francisco Public Health Department noted that meth users are likely to experience high levels of stigma and rejection in their personal and social lives, which are often reinforced by language and media portrayals depicting individuals who use alongside images of immorality, having chaotic lives, and perpetual use.

On the surface, this is a strange contention. If San Franciscos perilous trifecta is any guide, methamphetamine use is heavily correlated with chaotic lives, perpetual drug abuse, crimes against others, and various transgressions against traditional morality. The harm reductionists argument, however, rests on the belief that addiction is an involuntary brain disease, akin to Alzheimers or dementia. In this view, addiction is better seen as a disability, and any stigma associated with it is therefore an act of ignorance and cruelty. According to the Department of Public Health, the goal of harm reduction policy is to reduce this unjustified stigma and focus public policy on non-abstinence-based residential treatment programs, supervised injection services, trauma-informed sobering site[s], and training for staff on how to engage marginalized or vulnerable communities in ways that do not perpetuate trauma or stigma.

In practice, the task force recommendations would create an entire infrastructure to service addiction, rather than to reduce it. Although proponents of harm reduction claim the mantle of compassion, its a fatalistic theory. It assumes that most people cannot recover from serious addiction and, therefore, the social obligation is to provide the space and resources for addicts to pursue their own ends, which, for 40% of the perilous trifecta population, means 13 or more years in and out of homelessness. Activists have suggested that addicts can reduce harms by [using] indoors instead of on the street, reducing how much [they are] using, transitioning from injecting to smoking, and continuing to use one type of drug but quitting another drug. But in the face of the pathological overload of the perilous trifecta, these recommendations are negligently naive, relegating a large portion of the homeless to a lifetime of chaos, sickness, and despair.

In the long term, the real danger of destigmatization is that it would lead to the normalization of serious addiction and its consequences. In San Francisco, progressives have attempted to normalize the worst aspects of street homelessness, minimizing the drug use, toxic waste, psychotic episodes, and related crimes; they have blurred the lines between sickness and health, madness and sanity. Moreover, without a trace of irony, they have weaponized destigmatization itself, stigmatizing anyone who opposes the breakdown of public order as fascists and homeless haters.

The implicit wager of San Franciscos policy is that the social-scientific apparatus can rescue people faster than the perilous trifecta expands its ranks. But the evidence suggests the opposite: that San Francisco has become a magnet for the troubled homeless. Methamphetamine deaths are up nearly 400% over the past five years; fentanyl overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2020. Meanwhile, the socialized state has reached a point of near exhaustion. First responders, police officers, and emergency room nurses are burning out. Psychiatrists at San Francisco General Hospital despair about the mass migration of out-of-state residents in search of the San Francisco Special: housing, a psychiatrist, case manager, primary care provider, and transfer of Medicaid or general assistance.

The political class has insisted on greater control over the corporations, developers, and landlords, while deregulating life at the bottom. The result has been a deepening inequality, and an even more anarchic world for the poor. There is an entire social media community of mostly anonymous accounts who document the squalor of the encampments and psychotic episodes in the streets; they are the last resistance to the normalization of the perilous trifecta, and maintain their anonymity, it seems, out of fear of retribution. Its a dark reality, but perhaps a warning of whats to come.

In the end, San Francisco finds itself fighting a monster. Homelessness isnt just a problem; its a symptom, says its mayor. The symptom of unaffordable housing, of income inequality, of institutional racism, of addiction, untreated illness, and decades of disinvestment. These are the problems. And if were going to fight homelessness, weve got to fight them all. But this is part of the reason homelessness has become so intractable -- the political class has haunted its own world with abstractions; it has projected its own ideological premises onto the brutal reality of the streets.
Travel exemption applications to open tomorrow

The Manx Government has confirmed immediate family members and partners will be able to apply travel exemptions to travel to the Island from tomorrow.

Applications will open on the Government website at 12pm on Friday ahead of the border restrictions moving to Level Three from Saturday.

During today's COVID-19 briefing, Chief Minister Howard Quayle said: " Travellers will need to declare the family relationship as part of their application, whilst those with property on the Island will need to provide evidence of ownership."

"I can also announce that from 1 May anyone with a contract of employment for at least three months can apply for an exemption to travel to the Island, a reduction from the current minimum of six months."

"I know that our border restrictions, whilst necessary and widely supported, have been hard for many in our 6 community and of course for families and loved ones off-Island."

"On the subject of isolation, I also have changes to announce.

Both resident and non-resident travellers, who have been in the UK, Jersey and Guernsey for 14 days before their arrival onto the Island, will now only have to 7 isolate for seven days instead of 14. To benefit from the reduced isolation period, a negative COVID-19 test result will be required on arrival and on day six of isolation."

"After seven days of isolation, and subject to negative test results on arrival and on day six, travellers will be able to leave isolation. There will, however, be restrictions on where travellers can go between day seven and day 10."
Inspired by native flora and wide-open vistas  in packaging as clean as the desert air  these stylish Texas products bottle up the states essence for a head-to-toe relaxation ritual.

A former winemaker, Marcus Holley now uses his nose for fragrances in San Saba Soap Co., the luxury skin care line he created with his wife, Leanne Holley, also a sixth- generation Texan. Their historical residence, which doubles as a boutique and manufacturing space, is just off Fredericksburgs Main Street (which was once called San Saba Street). Pink clay, tobacco, lavender and Texas honey are some of the natural products folded into their small-batch bar soaps. The same scents are used in lotions made with cold-pressed raw pecan oil, which Leanne says is rich in antioxidants, fatty acids, lipids and squalene  aiding with fine lines and sun damage. Their new hotel collection provides amenities to Commodore Perry Estate in Austin and La Cantera Resort & Spa in San Antonio. At Sloan/Hall; sansabasoap.com

Canyon Candle Co.

A mother-daughter law student and litigation consultant, Libby and Stacey Manela split their time between Houston and Utopia, Texas. In their tiny cabin near the Sabinal River, the pair listen to Charley Crockett while hand-pouring double-wick scents for their Canyon Candle Co.  including Hill Country Rain, Lady Bird, Blackjack Vista, High Plains and Yellow Rose. Customers say the scents remind them of experiences in the Hill Country like vacations and camp, says Stacey. For their bestselling candle, the Ranch Water, they mix locally harvested sotol, grapefruit rind and Topo Chico. At the Flea at Silver Street in June, theyll roll out handmade vessels. Along with a QR code unlocking a playlist theyve curated for each scent, candles arrive with a card thats an ode to the slower pace theyve found in their second home. At Local Foods, 2424 Dunstan; canyoncandleco.com

Fray Ardens

Made in West Texas, Fray Ardens fragrances speak to the free-spirited customer, says Stephanie Williams of Houston shop Forth & Nomad. The Marfa fragrances are feminine yet masculine at the same time, and can carry from winter to summer, she says. For the hand-carved walnut, cherry and mesquite bottle toppers, founder Ash Compton collaborated with West Texas artist Camp Bosworth. Promising notes of high desert air and new money, Nouveau Ranch is the bestseller at the Heights Mercantile lifestyle boutique. Other unisex scents available are Frau and Anima. At Forth & Nomad, 731 Yale; frayardens.com
Benchmark indices ended higher for the fourth consecutive session on Thursday amid a largely positive trend in global equities. Sensex ended at 49,765, up 32 points and Nifty advanced 30 points to 14,894.

In the last four sessions, Sensex has gained 1,887 points and Nifty as zoomed 553 points. The rally came despite the country reporting over 3 lakh coronavirus cases on a daily basis.

The rally in benchmark indices added Rs 6.68 lakh crore to investors' wealth during the period.

Market capitalisation on BSE rose to Rs 209.05 lakh crore today against Rs 202.37 lakh crore on April 23.

Top Sensex gainer was Bajaj Finserv, rallying 6.60 per cent, followed by Bajaj Finance, Axis Bank, Reliance Industries, IndusInd Bank, Dr Reddy's and Sun Pharma.

On the other hand, HDFC, HCL Tech, Bajaj Auto, L&T, SBI and M&M were among the major laggards, losing up to 1.76 per cent. Of 30 Sensex stocks, 19 closed in the red.

Morepen Labs share hits 52-week high as firm to raise over Rs 433 cr

"The domestic market was torn between negatives and positives on volatile trade owing to the monthly F&O expiry. The Fed in its meeting sealed economic confidence by keeping its monetary policy loose and reaffirming aggressive support through bond buying.

"Metal stocks continue to outshine other sectors on strong outlook," said Vinod Nair, Head of Research at Geojit Financial Services.

BSE metal index was the top sectoral gainer rising 885 points to 17,809.

However, auto stocks dragged the market lower with BSE auto index losing 243 points to 21,980.

Stocks of telecom, capital goods and consumer durables sectors also ended in the red.

PowerGrid InvIT IPO: Should you subscribe to the issue?

Nagaraj Shetti, Technical Research Analyst, HDFC Securities said,"The short-term uptrend status of Nifty remains intact and the present minor negative setup at the resistance is unlikely to change the bullish sentiment in the market. Any decline from here down to 14800-14700 is going to be a buy on dips opportunity (higher bottom formation) and the market could retest the upper 15K mark in the near term."

BSE mid cap and small cap indices ended 36 points lower and 27 points higher, respectively.

Meanwhile, India saw a record single-day rise of 3,79,257 new coronavirus infections, pushing the total tally of COVID-19 cases to 1,83,76,524, while active cases crossed the 30-lakh mark, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Thursday.

Market breadth was positive with 1,394 stocks ending higher against 1,545 closing lower on BSE. 183 stocks were unchanged.

On the outlook for Nifty, Gaurav Ratnaparkhi, Senior Technical Analyst, Sharekhan by BNP Paribas said, "After a volatile action, the index ultimately managed to post a positive daily close for the fourth consecutive session. The overall structure shows that the index is on the course to the all time high of 15431; however it can go for a brief consolidation near 14800-15000 before heading higher."

Global markets

London's FTSE 100 jumped 0.7% to 7,013.40. In Paris, the CAC40 climbed 0.6% to 6,344.17. Germany's DAX slipped 0.2% to 15,262.39 as a report showed weakening consumer confidence. The future for the Dow industrials rose 0.4% and that for the S&P 500 surged 0.6%.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.8% to 29,303.26 and the Shanghai Composite index picked up 0.5% to 3,474.90. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 0.3% to 7,082.30. Markets in Tokyo were closed for a holiday.
Microalgae of the dinoflagellate group are known for their ability to survive in other animal cells. These tiny single-cell organisms have engaged in mutually beneficial relationships with corals since primeval times. By passing on critical nutrients to their hosts, dinoflagellates allow corals to thrive even in barren areas. A research team from the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) of Heidelberg University recently discovered that such symbioses within the cell essentially depend on the ability of the algae to suppress the immune system of their host cell and thereby avoid being "spit out" again. At the same time, the researchers found indications that this cellular immune response is an evolutionarily ancient immune mechanism that is more widespread than previously assumed.

This mechanism is known as vomocytosis. Contrary to previous assumptions, microalgae ingested by corals are not digested by the cell if they prove unsuitable as symbionts - that is, partners in a symbiotic relationship. Instead, they are "spit out" again in the process of vomocytosis. Special dinoflagellates are able to specifically suppress this immune response of their host cells in order to remain in the cell. A study led by cell biologist Prof. Dr Annika Guse at the COS demonstrated how they are able to do that. "The challenge for the corals is to differentiate between beneficial and potentially harmful microorganisms. For their part, the algae have to circumvent the immune response of the host cell, establish an intracellular niche where they can survive, and coordinate their own cell functions with those of their host to efficiently exchange nutrients," explains the researcher.

Until now, there has been no experimental evidence that could explain any of the conventional theories. Using the model system Exaiptasia diaphana (Aiptasia) of the sea anemone species, Prof. Guse's team recently uncovered how immune suppression by the symbionts helps the host cell to recognise suitable microalgae and tolerate them for the long term. The Aiptasia anemone larvae ingest the symbionts from the environment in the same way as coral larvae. Furthermore, their size and transparency make the larvae of this sea anemone perfect for high-resolution imaging and cellular experiments.

Aiptasia continually ingests various particles from the environment without differentiating between suitable and unsuitable particles or organisms. Incompatible particles are "spit out" again after a certain amount of time. Symbionts avoid this process of vomocytosis, presumably by disrupting the signal pathways of the toll-like receptors (TLRs) of the host cell. These receptors play a critical role in activating the cell's own immune system and ensure that unwelcome intruders are detected and removed. In most animals, the toll-like receptors are controlled by the MyD88 gene. "We were able to prove that the algae symbionts suppress MyD88 and thus initiate symbiosis. That is how they elude vomocytosis," explains Prof. Guse.

At the same time, the findings of the Heidelberg researchers indicate that vomocytosis involves a mechanism that is more widespread than assumed. Until now, it was believed that the expulsion of harmful intruders was self-initiated to evade the in part highly specialised immune responses of the potential host cell. The study of the Aiptasia model, however, suggests that this process can also be triggered by the host cell. The researchers therefore assume that vomocytosis is an evolutionarily ancient immune mechanism that corals or cnidarians like Aiptasia use to select appropriate symbionts. Prof. Guse: "This suggests that vomocytosis is an important process that led in the first place to the emergence of the intracellular lifestyle of the coral symbionts."

###

The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Microbiology. Funding was provided inter alia through the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union and by the German Research Foundation.
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Through its partnership with the Baltimore City Health Department, the UMB COVID-19 Vaccination Clinic at the SMC Campus Center has received approval to vaccinate anyone regardless of whether they live, work, or learn in the city. The UMB Vaccination Clinic will prioritize Baltimore City residents, workers, and students.

In addition, the clinic is offering walk-up vaccination slots from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Thursdays and 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturdays for:

UMB students and employees

Native Americans and tribal agency employees

Baltimore City residents, workers, and students

Baltimore metro area residents

The Pfizer vaccine is available to those 12 and older. A parent or legal guardian must accompany individuals under age 18.

UMB has partnered with Indian Health Service to provide COVID-19 vaccine doses directly to the Native American community. You can read more about the partnership here.

A one-stop website has been launched for the clinic, GetTheVaccineBaltimore.org.

The clinic will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Vaccination Required for UMB Employees and Students

On April 23, it was announced that UMB employees and students are required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine before returning to campus this fall.

If you are interested in being vaccinated at the SMC Campus Center Vaccination Clinic, please visit GetTheVaccineBaltimore.org to schedule an appointment, walk up from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, or call the SMC Campus Center Vaccination Clinic Call Center at 410-706-3000.

Please contact Human Resource Services or your supervisor if you need to request a religious or medical exemption.
"Digital innovation lies at the foundation of Abacus' value proposition," said Abbas Khan, CEO of Abacus Cambridge Partners. "We believe that successful digital adoption comes through investment in enterprise systems, deep innovation, and exceptional execution. We are extremely proud to have been working in partnership with Google Cloud and especially with the BAP portfolio. Together with Google Cloud, we have helped numerous customers innovate, leverage digital assets (inside and outside), deliver new business models and position themselves as digital leaders. And we've done this across business sectors: Financial Services and Fintech with open banking, Telecom with next-generation developer API initiatives, large-scale smart government supporting IoT-led initiatives, and in Retail by leveraging digital assets to drive superior customer experience and loyalty."

"We're delighted to recognize Abacus Cambridge Partners' expertise and contributions for driving our customers' success over the past year," said Rob Taylor, Head of Alliances & Partnerships at Google Cloud's BAP team. "Abacus has demonstrated strong capabilities across business verticals, delivering timely API-driven solutions that solve our customers' complex business challenges and help them innovate at a faster pace. We're excited to continue working with Abacus to help our customers succeed in their digital journeys."

Shoaib A. Khan, Managing Director for North America at Abacus, who also leads Abacus' Global Digital Transformation Practice said, "We are thrilled to receive this award by Google Cloud in recognition of our capabilities to create extraordinary experiences for our clients. With the recent disruptions caused in the previous year, it becomes even more critical to encourage accelerated innovation across business verticals. We are proud to be part of this journey with our clients and congratulate everyone at Abacus Cambridge Partners and Google Cloud for creating a conducive, digitally-enabled ecosystem for our clients worldwide, helping them to embrace new technologies for expanded growth and innovation," he added.

Abacus' Google Cloud services span the key areas such as API implementation, governance and maturity, developer experience, cloud managed services, smart analytics, Anthos, application modernisation, and cloud platform migration.

About Abacus Cambridge Partners: 'Abacus' is a technology firm headquartered in London with offices in New York, Dubai, Riyadh, Lahore and Cairo. The company works with customers across industry, helping them innovate, navigate technology and implement solutions through their digital transformation journey. Abacus works in three primary dimensions: Enterprise Systems, Innovation Solutions and Managed Services. For more on the company, please visit www.abacuscambridge.com

Contact: Fatima Rizvi, [email protected]

SOURCE Abacus Cambridge Partners

Related Links

https://abacuscambridge.com/


Ukraines government has dismissed the long-serving head of state-run oil and gas company Naftogaz Ukrainy, threatening to complicate talks to access a $5.5 billion international bailout, Bloomberg reported.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhals cabinet on Wednesday dismissed Andriy Kobolyev, Naftogazs chief executive officer since 2014, citing $684 million loss last year, according to a statement published on its website. Acting Energy Minister Yuriy Vitrenko was appointed as CEO.

The unexpected move risks unnerving western donors, including the International Monetary Fund, who have supported Kobolyev and have already been rattled by a raft of reformists departing President Volodymyr Zelenskiys two-year-old administration.

Kobolyev was the chief architect of an energy overhaul that helped the former Soviet nation to narrow its fiscal gap and he lead Ukraine to a multibillion-dollar win in legal dispute against Russias Gazprom in 2018. Domestically, he was criticized for gradual increases in heating costs.

The ousted CEO said on Facebook that he wasnt aware of the dismissal and hadnt stepped down. The companys position is that the move violates the law on Naftogaz as well as wider corporate governance rules, Naftogaz spokeswoman Aliona Osmolovska said by phone.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Moneta Porcupine Mines Inc. (TSX: ME) (OTC Pink: MPUCF) (XETRA: MOP) ("Moneta") is pleased to announce the results from drilling on the extensions of the Discovery Deposit outside of the current NI 43-101 resource. The drill holes were drilled as part of the expanded 2020/2021 winter drill program on the Golden Highway Project, 100 kilometres ("km") east of Timmins, Ontario.

Highlights:

Drilling has intersected significant gold mineralization to extend the NI 43-101 underground gold resource estimate at Discovery:

MGH20-165, located up-dip of the current Discovery resource: Intersected 13.00 m @ 1.80 grams per tonne "g/t" gold "Au", including 3.00 m @ 3.34 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 4.05 g/t Au Intersected 4.00 m @ 2.70 g/t Au, including 2.00 m @ 4.25 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 5.63 g/t Au

MGH20-166, located west and up-dip of the current Discovery gold resource: Intersected 7.00 m @ 2.06 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 3.91 g/t Au

MGH20-167, located west and down plunge of the current Discovery resource: Intersected 20.40 m @ 0.89 g/t Au, including 0.90 m @ 2.39 g/t Au

MGH20-171, located 500 m west of the current Discovery resource: Intersected 6.50 m @ 1.30 g/t Au, including 2.70 m @ 2.28 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 4.55 g/t Au



"We are pleased to be continuing to intersect new gold mineralization outside of our current gold resources with our latest drilling," commented CEO, Gary O'Connor. "The drilling has intersected extensions of gold mineralization at Discovery, located on the northern splay of the Destor Porcupine Fault Zone, north of the South West underground resource and Windjammer South open pit deposit. Significant gold mineralization has been intersected up to 500 m west, 150 m east and up to 100 m below the current Discovery resource. The drill results highlight the opportunity to continue to expand the underground resources at Discovery. The adjacent Discovery and Windjammer North underground resources currently contain 39,100 ounces gold in the indicated category and 191,200 ounces of gold in the inferred category at a 3.0 g/t Au cut-off, within a total project gold resource endowment of 3,967,000 ounces gold indicated and 4,399,000 ounces gold inferred."

The latest assay results are from seven (7) drill holes, including one hole extension, for a total of 2,680.0 m of drilling, completed as part of the current 70,000 m 2020/2021 winter drill program. The seven reported holes were targeting extensions of the Discovery resource that occurs north of the current Windjammer South and South West resources. Drilling was focussed on extending the mineralization to the west and east as well as at depth. The resource expansion drill program is continuing on the Westaway, 55 Zone, South West, Windjammer South and new Halfway areas and further results are pending.

Discussion of Discovery Drill Results

Seven (7) drill holes, including one drill hole extension, were drilled to test the extensions of the Discovery deposit located north of the South West and Windjammer South deposits. The holes successfully tested the eastern, western and depth extensions of gold mineralization within carbonate altered and quartz veined ultramafic volcanic rocks.

Drill hole MGH20-163 was collared 100 m east and up-dip of the current Discovery resource and intersected zones of gold mineralization of up to 5.75 m @ 1.05 g/t Au including 0.85 m @ 4.06 g/t Au, and 1.00 m @ 1.41 g/t Au. The drilling confirmed the eastern and up-dip extensions of the Discovery gold mineralization. Drill hole MGH20-165 was drilled 50 m up-dip of the current mineralization at Discovery and intersected up to 13.00 m @ 1.80 g/t Au, including 3.00 m @ 3.34 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 4.05 g/t Au and 4.00 m @ 2.70 g/t Au, including 2.00 m @ 4.25 g/t Au, including 1.00 m @ 5.63 g/t Au. The drill holes extended mineralization up-dip of the current resource.

Drill hole MGH21-166 was drilled over 50 m above the current resource at Discovery and intersected up to 7.00 m @ 2.06 g/t Au including 2.85 m @ 3.06 g/t Au, and 1.00 m @ 3.91 g/t Au. Drill hole MGH20-167 was drilled to extend the down plunge extensions of the resource to the west by over 100 m and intersected up to 20.40 m @ 0.89 g/t Au including 0.90 m @ 2.39 g/t Au.

Drill hole MGH20-171 was drilled to test the extensions of mineralization 500 m west of the Discovery resource and intersected up to 6.50 m @ 1.30 g/t Au including 2.70 m @ 2.28 g/t Au, and 1.00 m @ 4.55 g/t Au.

Table 1: Selected Significant Drill Results

Hole From To Length Au (#) (m) (m) (m) (g/t) MGH20-163 276.00 281.75 5.75 1.05 includes 280.90 281.75 0.85 4.06 MGH20-163 330.00 331.00 1.00 1.41 MGH20-165 200.00 213.00 13.00 1.80 includes 207.00 210.00 3.00 3.34 includes 207.00 208.00 1.00 4.05 MGH20-165 224.00 228.00 4.00 2.70 includes 224.00 226.00 2.00 4.25 includes 225.00 226.00 1.00 5.63 MGH20-166 158.00 165.00 7.00 2.06 includes 160.15 163.00 2.85 3.06 includes 162.00 163.00 1.00 3.91 MGH20-167 220.00 240.40 20.40 0.89 includes 238.60 239.50 0.90 2.39 MGH20-167 437.57 439.42 1.85 1.02 includes 438.55 439.42 0.87 1.74 MGH20-167 580.30 584.00 3.70 0.87 includes 582.00 584.00 2.00 1.23 MGH20-170 411.00 412.00 1.00 1.81 MGH20-171 352.00 353.00 1.00 3.05 MGH20-171 293.50 300.00 6.50 1.30 includes 297.30 300.00 2.70 2.28 includes 299.00 300.00 1.00 4.55

Intercepts are calculated using a 1.00 g/t Au cut-off, a maximum of 3m internal dilution and no top cap applied. All intercepts are reported as drill widths and estimated to be 75% to 95% of true width.

Figure 1: Location Map- Golden Highway Project

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4852/82195_14d9b42b24f7daa1_002full.jpg

Table 2: Drill Hole Details

Hole Easting Northing Elevation Azimuth Inclination Depth (#) (mE) (mN) (masl) () () (m) MGH20-163 572150 5370950 330 50 -55 348.0 MGH11-58X 571908 5370644 333 339 -53 291.0 MGH20-165 571876 5370892 334 340 -55 300.0 MGH20-166 571678 5370871 333 340 -55 298.0 MGH20-167 571813 5370615 336 340 -60 630.0 MGH20-171 570954 5370522 325 300 -60 408.0 MGH21-173 570828 5370447 325 300 -60 405.0

Figure 2: Discovery Deposit - Drill Hole Locations

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4852/82195_14d9b42b24f7daa1_003full.jpg







Figure 3: Discovery Deposit - Long Section

To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4852/82195_14d9b42b24f7daa1_004full.jpg

QA/QC Procedures

All core drilling conducted by Moneta is oriented. Drill core is cut with half sent to AGAT Laboratories Inc. (AGAT) for drying and crushing to -2 mm, with a 1.00 kg split pulverized to -75 m (200#). AGAT is an ISO 17025 accredited laboratory. A 50 g charge is Fire Assayed and analyzed using an AAS finish for Gold. Samples above 10.00 g/t Au are analyzed by Fire Assay with a gravimetric finish and selected samples with visible gold or high-grade mineralization are assayed by Metallic Screen Fire Assay on a 1.00 kg sample. Moneta inserts independent certified reference material and blanks with the samples and assays routine pulp repeats and coarse reject sample duplicates, as well as completing routine third-party check assays at Activation Laboratories Ltd. Kevin Montgomery, P.Geo. is a qualified person under NI 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this press release.

About Moneta

Moneta is a Canadian based gold exploration company focussed on the Timmins Gold Camp in Ontario. The Company's flagship project, covering the Golden Highway and Garrison Gold deposits, is located 100 km east of Timmins and hosts a total indicated resource of 3,967,000 ounces contained gold and a total inferred resource of 4,399,000 ounces contained gold. The project includes a total of 3,335,000 ounces of open pit indicated resources contained within 116.7 Mt @ 0.89 g/t Au and 2,270,000 ounces of open pit inferred resources contained within 79.4 Mt @ 0.89 g/t Au, at a cut-off grade of 0.30 g/t Au. The project also includes 632,000 ounces of indicated underground resources contained within 4.9 Mt @ 4.05 g/t Au and 2,129,000 ounces of inferred underground resources within 15.7 Mt @ 4.21 g/t Au, at a 2.60 g/t Au cut-off grade at South West and 3.00 g/t Au cut-off grade at the other underground deposits.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Gary V. O'Connor, CEO

416-357-3319

Linda Armstrong, Investor Relations

647-456-9223

The Company's public documents may be accessed at www.sedar.com. For further information on the Company, please visit our website at www.monetaporcupine.com or email us at larmstrong@monetaporcupine.com.

This news release includes certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements, collectively "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are frequently identified by such words as "may", "will", "plan", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "intend" and similar words referring to future events and results. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to information with respect to the future performance of the business, its operations and financial performance and condition such as the Company's drilling program and the timing and results thereof; and the ability of the Company to finance and carry out its anticipated goals and objectives.

Forward-looking statements are based on the current opinions and expectations of management. All forward-looking information is inherently uncertain and subject to a variety of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, fluctuating commodity prices, competitive risks and the availability of financing, as described in more detail in our recent securities filings available at www.sedar.com. Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected in the forward looking-statements and we caution against placing undue reliance thereon. We assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82195
[April 29, 2021] SOL Global Provides Interim Unaudited Financials for the First Quarter Ended February 2021

SOL Global Investments Corp. ("SOL Global" or the "Company") (CSE: SOL) (OTCPK: SOLCF) (Frankfurt: 9SB) is pleased to provide its investors with unaudited financials for the first quarter ended February 28, 2021 and a general operational update concerning the Company's assets and investments. All figures in this press release are in Canadian dollars, unless otherwise indicated. Unaudited Quarter-End Results For the quarter-ended February 28, 2021, the Company recorded a positive net income of $208 million VS quarter-end February 29, 2020 of $2.9 million. This represents a favourable change of $205.2 million.

Total gain from investments totalled $244 million for the quarter-ended February 28, 2021, compared to $2.6 million for the quarter-ended February 29, 2020. This represents a favourable change of $241.5 million between periods.

The Net Asset Value (" NAV ") per share is equal to $7.12 at February 28, 2021 VS $1.98 at February 29, 2020.

") per share is equal to $7.12 at February 28, 2021 VS $1.98 at February 29, 2020. SOL Global has significantly strengthened its asset base as compared to previous quarters when market multiples were higher. The gains reported in the financial statements are reflective of material operational improvements and growth in the underlying investments. Core portfolio investments have either completed or entered into agreements to complete liquidity events that may unlock value for investors. "I'm pumped for our stockholders and beyond proud of my team and partners for today's results," said SOL Global's Chairman and CEO, Andy DeFrancesco. "Our year end results were strong, but we shattered expectations with this most recent quarter. Going forward, our sectors and holdings may change but our strategy, risk management and dedication to our stockholders will not." The Company's financial statements for the quarter ended May 31, 2021 will be released on July 30, 2021 Forward looking guidance into the Company's Q2 results: Bluma Wellness Inc. (" Bluma ") was acquired by Cresco Labs Inc. (" Cresco Labs ") in an all stock transaction valued at USD$213 million. The Company announced its intention to increase its ownership interest in Captor Capital (the parent company of One Plant California) to 15.7%. The Company co-led Fyllo's $30 million dollar Series B Financing, with a USD$4 million investment. The Company made its first investment in the psychedelic sector, investing $2.6 million into Wesana Health. The Company structured and led a recent financing into Green Scientific Labs, LLC ("GSL"), investing approximately $2.84 million for a 14.5% interest. The Company intends to increase its ownership in GSL by investing further into its RTO financing round, which is imminent.

Verano Operational Update On March 31, 2021, Verano Holdings Corp. ("Verano") announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire all of the issued and outstanding equity interests of The Healing Center, LLC, adding three highly productive, award-winning dispensaries in the Pittsburgh-metro area. On April 6, 2021, Verano announced its full year results for the year ended December 31, 2020. Highlights include: 2020 revenue of $355 million, growth of approximately 200%

Gross profit margin of 63% for full year 2020

2020 net income of $245 million

2020 adjusted EBITDA of $170 million, 48% margin On April 22, 2021, Verano announced it had entered into definitive agreements for all of the issued and outstanding equity interests in Agri-Kind, LLC, Agronomed Holdings Inc. and Agronomed Biologics, LLC, which collectively will add the equity in two cultivation licenses (one active location plus another facility for additional cultivation and production that is currently under construction) and the equity in a permit to add six dispensaries (non-active, to be developed) in Pennsylvania. These equity transactions will enhance Verano's presence in Pennsylvania and further the Company's position as a U.S. market leader. Bluma Wellness Operational Update On April 14, 2021, Cresco Labs closed its acquisition of Bluma. As a result of the acquisition, Bluma is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cresco Labs. On April 12, 2021, Cresco launched a new brand of branded gummies under the name Wonder Wellness Gummies. On April 22, 2021, Cresco announced the appointment of Tarik Brooks to its board of directors and the retirement of Dominic Sergi. Other Highlights for Q2 On March 15, 2021, the Company announced ts first green tech investment in award-winning electric motorcycle company Damon Motorcycles ("Damon"). Damon recently raised USD$30 million after completing a bridge financing round led by SOL Global, Benevolent Capital Partners, LLC, Zirmania Investments Limited, and other investors. SOL Global invested CAD$6.1 million into Damon. Update on Litigation with lender, 1235 Fund LP: As previously disclosed, the Company commenced litigation in New York against its lender seeking, among other relief, a declaration that the lender is only entitled to have a $50 million non-convertible debenture (the "Debenture") repaid in cash, and not in Verano shares owned by the Company with a current market value of more than $350 million. Subsequently, the lender issued a claim against the Company and others in Ontario for repayment of the Debenture through Verano shares or in the alternative damages of not less than $550 million. The Company will be asking to stay the Ontario claim on the basis that the issues are already before the New York courts. The lender has asked that the proceedings in New York be stayed or dismissed, arguing that these matters should be decided by a court in Ontario. As announced on March 2, 2021, the Company commenced a normal course issuer bid on April 1, 2021 (the "NCIB"). Under the NCIB, the Company may purchase up to 2,737,805 of the Company's common shares (the "Common Shares"), representing approximately 5% of its issued and outstanding Common Shares on the date the NCIB was initiated. All Common Shares purchased under the NCIB will be purchased on the open market through the facilities of the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE") and will be at the prevailing CSE market price for the Common Shares at the time of purchase. Common Shares acquired by the Company under the NCIB are being purchased for cancellation.



COVID-19 Update SOL Global and its investments and portfolio companies have continued to deliver for both clients and shareholders despite challenges in the overall cannabis space and uncertain market conditions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. SOL Global's portfolio companies and companies in which they retain a non-controlling economic interest, including Bluma have adapted to the current environment through the continued scale-up of existing Florida cannabis production facilities, the continued expansion of Bluma's operating subsidiary, One Plant Florida's, already robust home- and curbside-delivery network and online ordering system in Florida, and the continued oversight of strategic business opportunities. SOL Global remains confident that it will continue to weather the COVID-19 storm and will emerge from the pandemic as a strengthened leader in the larger cannabis marketplace.

About SOL Global Investments Corp.: SOL Global is a diversified investment and private equity holding company engaged in the small and mid-cap sectors. The Company's investment partnerships range from minority positions to large strategic holdings with active advisory mandates. The Company's seven primary business segments include Retail, Agriculture, QSR & Hospitality, Media Technology & Gaming, and New Age Wellness. Non-IFRS Financial Measures This press release includes references to net asset value, which is a financial measure that does not have a standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS. Net asset value is calculated as the value of total assets less the value of total liabilities at a specific date. The Company believes this non-IFRS measure does not only provide management with comparable financial data for internal financial analysis but also provides meaningful supplemental information to investors. In particular, management believes this financial measure can provide information useful to its shareholders in understanding the performance of the Company and may assist in the evaluation of its business relative to that of its peers. Investors are cautioned that this non-IFRS measure should not be construed as an alternative to the measurements calculated in accordance with IFRS as, given the non-standardized meaning, it may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. Cautionary Statements This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements contained herein that are not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. In some cases, forward-looking information can be identified by words or phrases such as "may", "will", "expect", "likely", "should", "would", "plan", "anticipate", "intend", "potential", "proposed", "estimate", "believe" or the negative of these terms, or other similar words, expressions and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy. The forward-looking information contained in this press release includes, without limitation, , future operational plans of Verano, the completion of the transaction between Verano and The Healing Center, LLC, the completion of the transactions between Verano and Agri-Kind, LLC, Agronomed Holdings Inc. and Agronomed Biologics, LLC, the estimated impacts on the transactions on the business of Verano, future equity investments in Captor Capital, future plans in relation to litigation with 1235 Fund LP, purchases under the NCIB, and the Company's expectations regarding its ability to operate and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Forward-looking information is based upon certain material assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection, including management's perceptions of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other considerations that are believed to be appropriate in the circumstances. While we consider these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available to management, there is no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. By their nature, forward-looking information is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. A variety of factors, including known and unknown risks, many of which are beyond our control, could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking information in this press release including the inability or failure of the Company's portfolio companies to execute their business and strategic plans as contemplated or at all, the failure by Verano, The Healing Center, LLC, Agri-Kind, LLC, Agronomed Holdings Inc. and Agronomed Biologics, LLC to obtain all requisite corporate, regulatory and court approvals for the proposed transactions, the outcome of litigation in respect of the Debenture, changes in national or regional economic, legal, regulatory and competitive conditions and a resurgence in the COVID-19 pandemic. Other risk factors include: the risks resulting from investing in the US marijuana industry, which may be legal under certain state and local laws but is currently illegal under U.S. federal law; the risks of investing in securities of private companies which may limit the Company's ability to sell or otherwise liquidate those securities and realize value; reliance on management; the ability of the Company to service its debt; the Company's ability to obtain additional financing from time to time to pursue its business objectives; competition; litigation; inconsistent public opinion and perception regarding the medical-use and adult-use marijuana industry; and regulatory or political change. Additional risk factors can also be found in the Company's current MD&A, which has been filed on SEDAR and can be accessed at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned to consider these and other factors, uncertainties and potential events carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained herein is made as of the date of this press release and is based on the beliefs, estimates, expectations and opinions of management on the date such forward-looking information is made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005648/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
Research conducted by IBM and the Ponemon Institute shows the time to detect a data breach for businesses averages 280 days - a significant gap between the time a network is compromised and its discovery. The Codecov and SolarWinds are strong, loud proof points to the widespread damage possible if hackers achieve undetected, unfettered access to a companys systems, networks and partners or customers.

But stealthily surveilling a network is not a tactic exclusive to highly sophisticated threat actors targeting enterprise businesses. While the chances of being targeted for a long-term, covert surveillance operation by state-backed actors with deep pockets are slim for most small to mid-sized businesses, increasing reliance on third-party vendors means its possible for any business to fall victim. The 2021 Webroot BrightCloud Threat Report provides insight into which industries are more targeted than others, with the highest infection rates in 2020 belonging to Wholesale Trade (up 32.2%), Mining/Oil/Gas (up 32.0%), Manufacturing (up 25.9%) and Public Administration (up 25.0%).

Reducing the time to discovery is significant for businesses; it means less data on the dark web, fewer important pieces of intellectual property leaked, ransomware attacks thwarted and less reputational damage. Here are some ideas IT admins can use to detect a network compromise sooner, potentially limiting the damage of an adverse cyber event.

Consider booby-trapping your network

As swashbuckling as it sounds, adopting an offensive defensive posture against cyberattacks can help level the playing field against attackers. Because so much of cybersecurity relies on passive forms of protection (think firewalls, antivirus solutions, password protection, etc.), hackers have an asymmetrical advantage when probing defenses. Passive protection is good and necessary, to be sure, but network booby traps, sometimes called canary tokens, can help reduce the advantage held by hackers.

These measures rely on the principal of an action being taken by an attacker that would typically not occur otherwise. While they may not reveal who is behind the attack or their motivations, booby traps trigger a response alerting admins and allowing time to react. This could include setting up a domain administrator account that is bound to look like a juicy target to a network intruder. It may be configured according to default settings or with a particularly weak password  some way that makes it easy for a determined hacker to access. Once inside, though, the intruders presence triggers alarms alerting IT staff that an attack is underway and even locking out the suspicious user.

Configure and pay close attention to failed login attempts

Allowing attackers unlimited tries at cracking passwords is never wise, but sometimes the configurations for preventing this are overlooked. This is especially dangerous when remote desktop protocol (RDP) is enabled. RDP-enabled machines can often be located using search engines like Shodan.io, making them sitting ducks for attackers armed with brute-force tools.

When configured properly, however, RDP and other password-protected tools should lock users out after a given number of incorrect attempts and alert an admin. This would force a user, legitimate or otherwise, to wait some predetermined time before attempting to login again. Reaching out to the locked-out user could then help determine if the credentials have been stolen or if it is a genuine case of fat fingers.

If credentials have been compromised, it is a good idea to force password resets and keep an eye out for further failed login attempts. If there is no limit to the number of times a password can be tried without being timed out, an organization may never know it is in an attackers crosshairs.

Monitor anomalous web traffic

Skilled threat actors like those involved in the SolarWinds attack take steps to conceal their true locations when attempting to compromise a network. This can prevent alarm bells from ringing when an IP address from Eastern Europe is suddenly trying to connect to a network housed in Silicon Valley. Other times, malicious hackers do not have the skills or resources to cover their tracks. Their attack may also be so broadly aimed they simply do not care to.

That is why the difference between looking for malware and looking for weird stuff matters. It takes time to gather the data to truly know what constitutes anomalous activity, but once it is there it can automatically alert admins when it occurs. This could include communication with previously unknown IP addresses or uncommon application traffic patterns. In other words, a platform that has never talked to a domain in China but now does so often should be cause for alarm.

Monitoring access lists, including who is logged into what and whether anything is out of the ordinary, is another good option for spotting potential breaches early on. These so-called spot-checks can be too resource-intensive for small businesses without dedicated IT positions, and too expensive to farm out to MSPs, but they are good to consider for businesses with dedicated IT resources.

Stay on guard against attacks

The best strategies for ensuring that cyberattacks are unsuccessful  or do not go unnoticed  involve a mix of active and passive defenses. But poor configurations can undermine both. There are steps to make sure defenses are not undermined by the same common tactics.

Here are a few quick tips:
The China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) last week signed a 25-year deal with Iraqs Ministry of Oil that gives it a 49 per cent stake in the Mansuriya non-associated natural gas site. The contract, which may be extended for an additional five years, follows Sinopecs signing of a long-term purchase and sales agreement with Qatar Petroleums for 2 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for a term of 10 years. It also comes shortly after the official announcement of the multi-faceted 25-year deal between China and Iraqs chief sponsor state, Iran, although the actual deal was struck and exclusively reported in 2019, and its later developments exclusively covered at OilPrice.com.

For its part, the U.S. State Department has been looking to re-establish a more constructive association with Iraq since relations soured months after the fall of former Iraq President, Saddam Hussein, in 2003, and the later rise of ISIS. A key element of these efforts has been to decrease the longstanding role of Iran in Iraqs political, military, and economic spheres. The more immediate focus of Washington has been to reduce Iraqs dependence on Iran for supplies of gas and electricity that are essential to the running of Iraqs power grid. The idea has been to grant Iraq waivers to continue to import these products whilst concomitantly attempting to provide it with other options to source them. Most notably these options have included projects that will enable Iraq both to increase its output of non-associated gas from its own fields and to reduce the flaring of its associated gas to oil fields. From the U.S. perspective, which has made a massive investment in terms of blood and treasure in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, such projects should be done ideally by Washingtons allies or by U.S. companies. Related: Oil on Guard over Yemen as Saudi, Iran Meet in Secret

In empirical terms, there is absolutely no reason why Iraq cannot produce enough gas to sustain its own power needs, without Irans help, and even to become a significant exporter of gas within a relatively short time. Official estimates are that Iraqs proven reserves of conventional natural gas amount to at least 3.5 trillion cubic metres (tcm), or about 1.5 per cent of the world total, placing Iraq 13th among global reserve-holders, with around three-quarters of this figure comprising associated gas that is found in the same reservoirs as oil. The International Energy Agency, though, estimates that ultimately recoverable resources will be considerably larger, at 8.0 tcm, of which around 30 per cent is thought to be in the form of non-associated gas. Despite these huge potential gas resources, Iraq has made little substantial progress over the years on developing this potential either for associated or non-associated gas, although a heads-of-agreement deal with French oil and gas giant, Total, to jointly work on four major projects that include developing the associated gas sector may begin to change this, if it goes ahead.

The Iraq deal with Total is exactly the sort of deal that the U.S. wants to see in Iraq. Totals withdrawal from the high-profile South Pars Phase 11 gas development in Iran, despite having already spent over US$1 billion on it, highlighted Frances willingness to comply with Washingtons wishes after then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018. On the eve of the signing of the next wave of financing for SP11, the U.S. Treasury Department telephoned senior bankers at the bank that was organising the money and told them that if the financing went ahead then the U.S. would instigate a full historic investigation of all of the banks dealings since 1979 to every country that had been blacklisted by the U.S., and it told the French government the same thing, a senior source who works closely with Irans Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com at the time. The U.S. Treasury also said that all French companies would not win any major contracts with U.S. companies whilst Total stayed in Iran, but if Total withdrew then the U.S. would make similar projects available to it to compensate, he added. Given this, some may conclude that the Total deal in Iraq is one such compensatory deal.

Possibly the very last country that the U.S. wanted to see further increasing its footprint in Iraq is China. Not only is China set to overtake the U.S. as the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP by 2030 at the latest (it is already the worlds largest economy by purchasing power parity, the largest manufacturing economy, and the largest trading nation) but also Chinas One Belt, One Road program is insidiously cutting across many of the U.S.s own spheres of influence. [Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012/13] The leadership of China has stressed the virtues of self-reliance and has sought to develop relationships with global partners to make up for the ending of the constructive engagement with the U.S. and its allies of the past four decades, Jonathan Fenby, chairman of the China research team at TS Lombard, in London, exclusively told OilPrice.com. This political-economic nexus is set to bring growing divergence from the U.S. as part of the wider agenda of the national strengthening being pursued by Xi Jinping, and Beijing is shifting from being an economic adversary to the U.S. to a geopolitical alternative and this could result in a step change in the nature of the confrontation between the two countries. Related: Goldman: Oil To Hit $80 On Largest Ever Demand Jump

This political-economic nexus in China finds external reflection in Russia, with the two countries operating in a closely co-ordinated manner across key strategic areas, including their activities in the Middle East. In essence, in any country that requires direct military intervention to extend the Sino-Russia axis (that may prompt direct confrontation with the U.S., notably Syria) it is Russia that takes the lead, whilst for any other countries, in which only money is required (many, ranging from Sri Lanka in the U.Ss Asia-Pacific sphere of influence to Iraq itself), it is China that takes the lead. This said, given the importance of Mansuriya to Russia, it is to be expected that a number of Russian companies will also be present on the Mansuriya development working alongside Sinopec, principally on the technical and equipment side.

Extremely close to the Iranian border, and just north of Baghdad, the Mansuriya gas field has an estimated 4.5-4.6 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in place, with plans to increase production to at least 320 million standard cubic feet (Mmscf) per day. This is a valuable deposit in and of itself once gas prices have fully recovered, with a previous contract remuneration of around US$7 per barrel of oil equivalent, but its significance for Russia is much greater than money and comes in two parts. The first part was that Iraq had previously always sought to offer three particular gas fields together as one development package  Mansuriya, Akkas, and Siba. These three sites form a skewed triangle across southern Iraq, stretching from Mansuriya near the eastern border with Iran, down to Siba in the south (extremely close to the key Iraqi Basra export hub), and then all the way west across to Akkas (extremely close to the border with Syria).

The second part was highlighted with the signing in September 2019 of a preliminary contract between Russias Stroytransgaz and Iraqs Oil Ministry to develop the hitherto virtually unknown Block 17 in Iraqs lawless wasteland Anbar province, a place so violent and unpredictable that it was even avoided where possible by Islamic State. The key reason why Russia took over the Block 17 site, according to sources close to the deal spoken to by OilPrice.com at the time, is that the Block is right in the middle of what the U.S. military used to call the spine of Islamic State where the Euphrates flows westwards into Syria and eastwards into the Persian Gulf, extremely close to the border with Iran. Along the spine running from east to west are the historical ultra-nationalist and ultra-anti-West cities of Falluja, Ramadi, Hit and Haditha, and then were into Syria, and a short hop to the key strategic ports of Banias and Tartus that are extremely important to the Russians, said one of the sources.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The 18-year-old charged in the crash that killed Auburn announcer Rod Bramblett and his wife, Paula, was sentenced Wednesday.

The length of sentence for Johnston Edward Taylor, however, is not being released because he was granted youthful offender status earlier this month. The youthful offender status eliminated a jury trial and left his maximum punishment at three years.

Because of the confidentiality of the status, Taylors online records are no longer public. His attorney, Tommy Spina, said after sentencing, The sentence was fair and balanced in light of all facts and circumstances.

Taylor was charged with manslaughter in the May 25, 2019 deaths of the Brambletts. Lee County Circuit Judge P.B. McLauchlin, a retired judge handling the case, granted the teen youthful offender status on April 13.

At the time of the accident the defendant was a 16-year-old teenager with no prior criminal history, who had smoked or used marijuana and had been diagnosed with marijuana use disorder,' McLauchlin wrote in his order. None of this justifies what happened; however, it does lend itself to treatment as a Youthful Offender.

.It was just after 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 25, 2019 when the Brambletts were killed. Taylor -- then a 16-year-old Lee Scott Academy student -- was traveling south in the outside lane on Shug Jordan Parkway approaching West Samford Avenue in his Jeep Laredo.

The Brambletts, in a 2017 Toyota Highlander, were stopped in the southbound outside lane of Shug Jordan parkway at a traffic light.

The Jeep struck the Brambletts SUV to the right of center, according to the crash report. The impact caused the Jeep to hit a pedestrian and a traffic light pole before coming to a final rest.

The Brambletts vehicle was pushed into the intersection and through the opposing lanes of traffic before coming to a final rest on the curb.

Taylors blood sample contained THC, which is the primary psychoactive component of marijuana, and is indicative of recent usage of marijuana at the time of the collision, records state. The teen was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

Paula Bramblett, 53, was airlifted from the scene but had to be diverted to East Alabama Medical Center due to the severity of her injuries. She was pronounced dead in the emergency room from multiple internal injuries.

Rod Bramblett, 52, who was the driver of the Highlander, was airlifted to UAB Hospital in Birmingham, where he later died from a closed head injury.

At the time of the deadly crash, Taylor was driving 89 mph in a 55-mph zone, under the influence of marijuana, and still accelerating, authorities said, when he rammed into the back of the couples SUV.

The judge noted in his youthful offender order that Taylor had only had his drivers license for three months when the deadly crash happened. He also chronicled facts of the case, which included that Taylor was traveling at 90 to 80 miles per hour and in the five seconds before the crash, the vehicle was not slowed or steered.

He said Taylor told authorities he was on his way home from the lake after spending the day with a friend and her family, that he was tired and fell asleep, remembered only a loud crash, his vehicle spinning and smoke everywhere.
 Flash

The European Parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly gave its seal of approval to the trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) that had been agreed on Christmas Eve last year.



The decision was adopted by 660 votes in favour, five against and 32 abstentions, while the accompanying resolution, setting out the parliament's evaluation of and expectations from the deal, passed by 578 votes, with 51 against and 68 abstentions.

The vote took place on Tuesday, with results announced on Wednesday.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen immediately welcomed the news, which brings to an end more than four years of acrimonious negotiations between the two sides.

"I warmly welcome the@Europarl_EN vote in favour of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. The TCA marks the foundation of a strong and close partnership with the UK. Faithful implementation is essential," she wrote on Twitter.

The UK joined the EU in 1973 but announced to withdraw in 2016 after a referendum. It officially left the bloc on Jan. 31, 2020.

After 11 months of intense negotiations on their future partnership, EU and UK negotiators reached the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) in a last-ditch attempt with one week left before the transition period ended on Dec. 31, 2020.

To minimise disruption, the agreement has been provisionally applied since the beginning of this year, valid until the end of April.

In the accompanying resolution, the European Parliament said the TCA limits the negative consequences of the UK's withdrawal from the EU, which it, however, considered a "historic mistake" as no third country can enjoy the same benefits as an EU member.

The zero quota and zero tariff trade agreement was viewed positively by MEPs, who believed it guarantees fair competition and can serve as a model for future trade agreements.

However, the legislators regretted that the UK did not want the agreement to extend to foreign, security and development policies and did not want to participate in the Erasmus+ student exchange programme.

"The EU and the UK have created the basis for a relationship among equals. Most importantly, today is a beginning, not the end," said Andreas Schieder, rapporteur for the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs, in a statement.

"We agreed on many important areas, such as securing mutual market access and building a good relationship on trade. Much work remains on foreign policy and educational exchange programmes," Schieder added.

"For years, if not for decades, we will have to deal with the consequences of Brexit," said David McAllister, chair of the foreign affairs committee of the European parliament on Tuesday.

McAllister hailed the TCA as an agreement that puts the EU-UK future partnership on a solid legal basis, but ruled out the possibility of maintaining "a completely frictionless trade."

The EU-UK trade in goods has been deeply affected by Brexit, according to latest figures published by Eurostat, the EU's statistical office.

In the first two months of 2021, exports from the bloc to the UK fell 20.2% compared to last year, while the EU's imports from the UK recorded an even sharper decrease of 47%.

The UK is now the EU's third biggest trade partner in goods after China and the United States.
NEW YORK (AP)  The long-running federal investigation into Rudy Giuliani's dealings in Ukraine moved back into public view Wednesday when federal agents seized electronic devices from the former mayor's home and office.

The search was the latest development in an inquiry that overlapped with the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, who was accused of pressuring the leaders of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son.

The probe involves a complex web of international characters who dealt with Giuliani as he tried to stir up support for a Ukrainian investigation of the Bidens.

Federal prosecutors haven't disclosed which elements of Giuliani's work are the focus of their probe, currently being led by Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

But at least one part is an examination of whether Giuliani failed to disclose to the U.S. government work he did on behalf of foreign entities.

WHY IS GIULIANI UNDER INVESTIGATION?

Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello, said the search warrants involved an allegation that Giuliani failed to register as a foreign agent.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, originally passed before World War II to expose Nazi propaganda, requires people to disclose to the Justice Department when they have been hired to lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign governments, figures or political entities.

Criminal prosecutions under the law were once rare, but there have been a number of high-profile cases in recent years, including during special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference. Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted of failing to register work he'd done for a political party in Ukraine. Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, admitted making false statements about work he'd done for Turkey.

In addition, Imaad Zuberi, a political fundraiser who attracted attention for large donations to Trump's inaugural committee, was sentenced in February to 12 years in prison for a violation of the foreign agents' act and other crimes.

WHAT WORK DID GIULIANI DO ON BEHALF OF UKRANIAN INTERESTS?

In numerous interviews, Giuliani has said that his work in Ukraine was intended to benefit only one person: Trump.

His goal, he has said, was to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden's son, Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

However, at least some of the Ukrainian characters dealing with Giuliani as he tried to dig up dirt on the Bidens have said they also wanted his help with matters related to the U.S. government.

They included Ukraine's then-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko. In interviews, Lutsenko has said he asked for Giuliani's help arranging a meeting with the U.S. attorney general to discuss efforts to recover looted national assets. He also spoke with Giuliani about his clashes with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The Trump administration later removed Yovanovitch from her post.

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If Giuliani lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian figures, he might have been obligated to disclose that work.

WHAT HAS GIULIANI SAID?

Costello, Giuliani's lawyer, castigated Wednesday's FBI raid as corrupt and said he can demonstrate that the former New York mayor did no work as a foreign agent.

Giuliani previously told The Associated Press he "never represented a foreign anything before the U.S. government."

In the past, Giuliani has acknowledged that he considered taking on some Ukrainian figures and the Ukrainian government as paying clients, including Lutsenko, but said he ultimately decided not to do so.

That included deals that would have paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a New York Times report in 2019.

"I thought that would be too complicated," Giuliani told the newspaper at the time. "I never received a penny."

HAVE GIULIANI OR HIS ASSOCIATES BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING?

Giuliani has not been charged with any crime and federal prosecutors have not publicly accused him of any misconduct.

Some of Giuliani's associates in his campaign to dig up dirt on the Bidens have, however, been indicted.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who helped arrange Giuliani's meetings with Ukrainian figures, face federal charges that they helped foreigners make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians, including a pro-Trump political action committee, while trying to gain influence in government.

Initially, prosecutors had accused them of also secretly working on behalf of an unnamed Ukrainian official who wanted the removal of the U.S. ambassador, but that allegation was subsequently quietly erased from a superseding indictment.

It isn't part of the criminal case, but Parnas in 2019 also helped arrange for an Ukrainian tycoon, Dmitry Firtash, to hire lawyers to lobby the U.S. Justice Department to drop an international bribery charge pending against him in Chicago.

Firtash has said in interviews that at one time he was paying $300,000 per month to those lawyers, Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, who were also involved in Giuliani's campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

The FBI also executed a search warrant Wednesday on a phone belonging to Toensing, who has said she is not a target of the investigation.

Some documents that Toensing or diGenova gathered, ostensibly as part of Firtash's attempts to fight extradition from Austria, wound up being the basis of conservative media reports that Joe Biden had tried to block a Ukrainian prosecutor from investigating the gas company that had put Hunter Biden on its board.

Biden did press for the prosecutor's firing, but that's because he was reflecting the official position of not only the Obama administration but many Western countries that the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  President Rodrigo Duterte said on Wednesday that the country owes China a huge debt, including the supply of COVID-19 vaccines for the Philippines.

However, he also stressed that he cannot compromise on some matters, specifically those related to sovereign rights in the West Philippine Sea.

China is a good friend. Mayroon tayong utang na loob na marami, pati iyon bakuna natin. (We are in debt, even with our vaccines.) So China, let it be known, is a good friend and we do not want trouble with them, especially war, he said in his weekly address. But, there are things which are not really subject to a compromise I have the interest of my country also to protect.

He said this after the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea reported that at least five Chinese Coast Guard ships have remained in the disputed waters, despite the Philippine governments continued filing of diplomatic protests.

Duterte also said the country's vessels will remain in the West Philippine Sea and wait and see how the Chinese will act amid the Philippine's pleadings for a peaceful settlement of the matter.

RELATED: Chinese coast guard ships remain in West PH Sea, says task force

On Thursday's Palace briefing, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque clarified the Philippines is also indebted to nations that helped make the COVAX facility happen.

"Hindi naman natin sinasabi na wala rin tayong utang na loob doon sa mga bansa na nag-contribute sa COVAX facility," said Roque, adding Duterte himself thanked them when he personally welcomed the delivery of the country's first 515,000 doses from the World Health Organization-led initiative.

[Translation: We're not saying we don't owe countries that contributed to the COVAX facility a debt of gratitude.]

COVAX had allocated 44 million doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines for the Philippines. Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said 33 million of these are donations, while the country paid $100,000 (around 4.84 million) for the remaining 11 million.

Duterte hits Carpio, Del Rosario: Kung bright kayo, bakit nawala ang WPS?

The countrys top executive once again criticized ex-Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio and ex-Foreign Affairs chief Albert Del Rosario, who were in office when the arbitral ruling was made in 2016 that invalidated Chinas claims to the disputed waters. China has repeatedly refused to recognize the decision.

Isang tanong lang ako kay Carpio, pati kay Albert, kung bright kayo, bakit nawala ang West Philippine Sea sa atin? Panahon ninyo iyon eh, he asked.

[Translation: I have one question for Carpio and Albert, if you are bright, why did we lose West Philippine Sea? That was during your time.]

Carpio earlier said that the countrys diplomatic protests over the presence of Chinese vessels in Philippine waters are being ignored due to verbal fishing agreement allegedly made by President Rodrigo Duterte with China. This was denied by the Presidential spokesman.

On the other hand, Del Rosario noted that standing up for the country's rights in the West Philippine Sea is not the same as an act of war against China. He added that China itseld will not wage a war against the Philippines due to its possible impact.
Amid the tsunami of Covid-19 second wave infections that has decimated India and paralyzed its health care system to create a prolonged feeling of doom in the minds of Indian citizens, there are a few stories that still continue to give us hope.

 iStock

At a time when people from all walks of life are being adversely affected by the deadly virus, with Tuesday (April 27) recording the highest single-day rise in the Covid-19 death toll, a 105-year-old man and his 95-year-old wife succeeding in beating the virus.



Suresh Chavan's entire family of five people in Maharashtra's Katgaon Tanda village had tested positive for the virus, which included his 105-year-old father, Dhenu Chavan, and 95-year-old mother, Motabai.

 BCCL

As Suresh was struggling to find a hospital to admit his elderly parents, he was warned by his neighbours against it, as the belief has been that any old person going to the hospital does not come back home.



However, Dhenu Chavan and Motabai, both proved everyone wrong after spending nine days in the ICU of Vilasrao Deshmukh Institute of Medical Sciences in Latur and eventually beating the virus.

Talking about the incident later, Suresh said,

We live as a joint family. Other than my parents, the three children had tested positive too. My parents were running high temperatures and my father had a severe stomachache as well, and so I decided to admit them both to a hospital, Suresh told The Times of India.

 Reuters

My parents were very scared and so was I, but I knew that keeping them at home would be a wrong decision, said Suresh, while speaking to TOI.



The doctor treating the elderly couple had revealed that upon admission, they had a CT (computed tomography) score of 15/25, which was a cause for concern due to the age factor.

They were provided oxygen support and given five doses of the antiviral at the hospital as their condition was monitored.

He would always ask me if they would ever get better and would see our village again. And every day I kept telling them they will be discharged tomorrow, said Suresh.

 Reuters

However, after spending a number of days in the ICU, the elderly couple beat all the odds in recovering from the virus at the age of 105 and 95.



When they were discharged, people from across the district told me that it is his good deeds that have helped him fight the virus, said Suresh.

The news of the extraordinary recovery garnered the reactions of social media users, who on Twitter lauded the elderly couple for winning the fight against the deadly virus.

Real immunity power of old times.  Dojha1981 (@D_ojha1981) April 28, 2021

Asli ghee khaya hai..     (@ManishKotharee) April 28, 2021

Amid gloomier times, this brings in so much of positivity and hope.. pray for their good health..  kripa (@kripa_18) April 29, 2021

What a great positive news to start my day with. Hope to hear such positive news throughout the day, today.  Rahul Khatri (@RahulBarmer1) April 29, 2021

Kaunsi chakki ka atta khaate hain! But good for them. Hope others are as lucky too.  Angiee (@always_angiee) April 28, 2021

Thanks for sharing this news!!  Subham Keshari (Alive) (@KccSubham) April 29, 2021

Age is just a number  eswar dutt (@peepal59) April 29, 2021
Showing no sign of decline, India's Covid-19 daily tally touched 3,79,257 on Wednesday. The health ministry's latest data suggests India recorded the highest 3,645 deaths in the past 24 hours.

As many as 2,69,507 patients were also discharged in the last 24 hours, the ministry data suggests.

Total cases: 1,83,76,524

Total recoveries: 1,50,86,878

Death toll: 2,04,832

Active cases: 30,84,814

Total vaccination: 15,00,20,648

Ten states including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Rajasthan report 73.59 per cent of the new cases. Maharashtra is the most affected state, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Kerala.

As per the latest available data, India's total active caseload has reached 29,78,709. It now comprises 16.55 per cent of the country's total positive cases. A net incline of 96,505 cases recorded from the total active caseload in the last 24 hours. Nine states cumulatively account for 71.91 per cent of India's total active cases.

Meanwhile, over 1.32 crore people registered on the government's portal CoWIN and Aarogya Setu mobile app to apply for Covid-19 vaccination on Wednesday. Over 35 lakh people had registered for vaccination in the first hour of opening of the registrations. The government has allowed vaccination for all above the age of 18 from May 1, registrations for which started at 4 pm on April 28.

Both the CoWIN portal and Aarogya Setu app had also faced minor technical glitches on Wednesday minutes after the government opened the registrations for all. However, services were back again soon and people were able to register for vaccination phase 3.

Also read: Maharashtra, Delhi, 8 other states account for 78% of COVID-19 deaths in India

Also read: DRDO to set up 500 oxygen plants under PM CARES Fund
The full ranking of Asia's 50 Best Bars 51-100 list 2021 is included at the end of this press release.

With one week to go before the announcement of Asia's 50 Best Bars 2021, sponsored by Perrier, 50 Best has revealed the bars voted onto the extended list for the first time. The ranking is created from the overall Asia's 50 Best Bars voting process and comes as part of 50 Best's overall strategy to recognise a greater number of hospitality establishments as they seek to emerge from restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

Mark Sansom, Content Editor for Asia's 50 Best Bars, says: "The last year has been devastating for hospitality and it is vital that we support as many businesses as possible at part of their recovery. In a historic first for the Asia's 50 Best Bars awards programme, the extended ranking is designed to shine the spotlight on more bars than ever before. As guests begin planning their next bar experiences, this extended list will provide double the choice of exceptional, expert-approved drinking destinations for the months and years ahead."

Japan dominates the 51-100 list with 14 bars featured. New entry Ishinohana in Tokyo places ahead of the pack at No.56, while the other nine bars from Tokyo on the list this year include Bar Landscape at No.57, Mixology Heritage at No.60, The Bellwood at No.69, Bar Orchard Ginza at No.72, Liquid Factory at No.84, Mixology Salon at No.87, Tender at No.88, Memento Mori at No.98, and Gen Yamamoto at No.99. From Nara, Lamp Bar is awarded the No.62 spot, while Kyoto's Bar Rocking Chair is placed No.80. Two bars from Japan are also tied at No.94  Ark Lounge from Aomori and Bar D from Kanagawa.

Singapore's bars secure six spots on the list including three newcomers  Ah Sam Cold Drink Stall at No.71, Live Twice at No.75 and Junior The Pocket Bar at No.82. Gibson by the Jigger & Pony Group is at No.66, Employees Only at No.70 and The Other Room at No.79.

Thailand is represented by six bars including four new entries for Bangkok  Niks Anuman's Asia Today at No.52, Thaipioka at No.53, 008 Bar at No.81 and Sugar Ray You've Just Been Poisoned at No.85. Rabbit Hole ranks at No.67 and Smalls comes in at No.93.

China boasts five entries on the extended list: Shanghai's Epic is a new entry at No.64 and is named the Campari One To Watch. The Old Man Hong Kong is at No.54, 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana and Shady Acres, both from Hong Kong, place at No.65 and No.68 respectively, while Macau's Goa Nights rounds off at No.100.

South Korea makes a strong showing with Seoul's Pussyfoot Saloon leading the pack at No.63. Mixology Bar (No.86), Soko (No.89), Southside Parlor (No.92) and Pine & Co (No.97) are featured by Asia's 50 Best for the first time.

Sri Lanka and Vietnam each make their first appearance on the list this year, with two bars from the former: Botanik Rooftop Bistro & Bar in Colombo at No.73 and Smoke & Bitters in Hiriketiya at No.91. Vietnam grabs three entries: Ne Cocktail Bar in Hanoi at No.76, Summer Experiment in Ho Chi Minh at No.77, and Hybrid in Nha Trang at No.96.

Manila leads the way in the Philippines, led by The Back Room at No.51, Oto at No.61, and Buccaneers Rum & Cocktails at No.100. Two new bars from Indonesia break into the ranking  Wishbone from Semarang is placed No.74, while A/A Bar from Jakarta earns the No.83 spot. Other notable entries include New Delhi's Hoots' at No.59, Kuala Lumpur's Pahit at No.78, and Taipei's Mu at No.90. Mu is helmed by Bannie Kang, the winner of this year's Mancino Bartenders' Bartender Award.

The sixth edition of Asia's 50 Best Bars, sponsored by Perrier, will be announced in a virtual ceremony on 6th May, beginning at 6pm HK/Singapore time (3.30pm India; 5pm Thailand; 7pm Japan). Bar and cocktail lovers are invited to join the digital countdown of the list of Asia's 50 Best Bars 2021 through The World's 50 Best Bars Facebook page and 50 Best Bars TV YouTube channel.

EDITOR'S NOTES

51-100 List





Ranking Establishment City Country

51 The Back Room Manila Philippines

52 Asia Today Bangkok Thailand

53 Thaipioka Bangkok Thailand

54 The Old Man Hong Kong China

55 Draft Land Taipei Taiwan

56 Ishinohana Tokyo Japan

57 Bar Landscape Tokyo Japan

58 Coley Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

59 Hoots' New Delhi India

60 Mixology Heritage Tokyo Japan

61 Oto Manila Philippines

62 Lamp Bar Nara Japan

63 Pussyfoot Saloon Seoul South Korea

64 Epic Shanghai China

65 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana Hong Kong China

66 Gibson Singapore Singapore

67 Rabbit Hole Bangkok Thailand

68 Shady Acres Hong Kong China

69 The Bellwood Tokyo Japan

70 Employees Only Singapore Singapore

71 Ah Sam Cold Drink Stall Singapore Singapore

72 Bar Orchard Ginza Tokyo Japan

73 Botanik Rooftop Bistro & Bar Colombo Sri Lanka

74 Wishbone Semarang Indonesia

75 Live Twice Singapore Singapore

76 Ne Cocktail Bar Hanoi Vietnam

77 Summer Experiment Ho Chi Minh Vietnam

78 Pahit Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

79 The Other Room Singapore Singapore

80 Bar Rocking Chair Kyoto Japan

81 008 Bar Bangkok Thailand

82 Junior The Pocket Bar Singapore Singapore

83 A/A Bar Jakarta Indonesia

84 Liquid Factory Tokyo Japan

85 Sugar Ray You've Just Been Poisoned Bangkok Thailand

86 Mixology Bar Seoul South Korea

87 Mixology Salon Tokyo Japan

88 Tender Tokyo Japan

89 Soko Seoul South Korea

90 Mu: Taipei Taiwan

91 Smoke & Bitters Hiriketiya Sri Lanka

92 Southside Parlor Seoul South Korea

93 Smalls Bangkok Thailand

*94 Ark Lounge Aomori Japan

*94 Bar D Kanagawa Japan

96 Hybrid Nha Trang Vietnam

97 Pine & Co Seoul South Korea

98 Memento Mori Tokyo Japan

99 Gen Yamamoto Tokyo Japan

*100 Goa Nights Macau China

*100 Buccaneers Rum & Cocktails Manila Philippines

*Bars that are tied on the list

For press materials, kindly register via the Media Centre to receive login details.

Registration: https://www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia/media-centre-registration.php

Online media centre: https://mediacentre.theworlds50best.com/#/sign-in

For more information, kindly send your enquiry to:

E: [email protected]

Notes to the Editor:

About Asia's 50 Best Bars

The story started in 2002 with the launch of The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, which has since grown into the most important international dining guide in the world and a hugely influential voice in gastronomy. In 2009, The World's 50 Best Bars list was created, with an annual awards ceremony launched in 2012. Asia's 50 Best Bars was added to the portfolio in 2016. The 50 Best brand now champions a global community of bartenders and chefs, cocktail aficionados and gourmets, who travel the globe to explore and experience the only worldwide ranking for premium drinking and dining. Beyond lists, 50 Best showcases leading trends and highlights upcoming food and drink destinations, while acting as an agent for positive change in the hospitality sector. William Reed Business Media, which owns the 50 Best brand, is entirely responsible for the organisation of the awards, the voting system and the respective lists.

Our Partners

Perrier  Official Water Partner; sponsor of The Best Bar in Asia Award

Michter's  Official American Whiskey Partner; sponsor of Michter's Art of Hospitality Award

Nikka Whisky  Official Whisky of the World; sponsor of Nikka Highest Climber Award

Ketel One Vodka - Official Vodka Partner; sponsor of Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award

Asahi Super Dry  Official Beer Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award

The London Essence Co.  Official Mixer Partner; sponsor of London Essence Best New Opening Award

Disaronno  Official Italian Liqueur Partner; sponsor of Disaronno Highest New Entry Award

Heering Cherry Liqueur  Official Cherry Liqueur Partner; sponsor of Heering Legend of the List Award

Mancino Vermouth  Official Vermouth Partner; sponsor of Mancino Bartenders' Bartender Award; supplier of Commemorative Shakers

Campari  Official Bitters Partner; sponsor of Campari One To Watch Award

Matusalem  Official Rum Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award; supplier of Commemorative Scarves

Tia Maria  Official Coffee Liqueur Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award

Roku Gin  Official Gin Partner; sponsor of Roku Industry Icon Award

Bellino  Official Non-Alcoholic Cocktail Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award

Fact Sheet

Date of Awards Ceremony: 6 May 2021

Time of Awards Ceremony: 6.00pm HK/Singapore time

Website: www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia

Twitter: @50BestBars

Instagram: @50BestBars

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/50BestBars/

Hashtag: #Asias50BestBars

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1497627/Asias_50_Best_Bars_2021_51_100_List.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1497626/Asias_50_Best_Bars_2021_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Asias 50 Best Bars 2021

Related Links

https://www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia/


A California brushfire triggered evacuation orders on Wednesday as it quickly grew to cover more than 650 acres while crews worked to battle the blaze.

Progress in fighting the blaze had temporarily stopped earlier in the day when it burned near a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department facility that stores live weapons and ammunition, KABC reported.

Officials had advised firefighters to hold back for their safety at the time.

A helicopter reporter for KCBS-TV tweeted that 'flames creeping near homes are being snuffed out' by firefighting crews after wind had calmed down. The outlet noted that no injuries were immediately reported.

The evacuations were lifted around 10pm when crews were able to stop the fire's forward progress and had contained 25% of the inferno, the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff's Station tweeted.

No property damage or injuries have been reported as a result of the blaze.

Firefighters work to contain the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic, north of Los Angeles, California

A California brushfire triggered evacuation orders on Wednesday as it quickly grew to cover more than 650 acres while crews worked to battle the blaze

The evacuations were lifted around 10pm when crews were able to stop the fire's forward progress and had contained 25% of the inferno

Crews are seen battling flames in the backyard of a home with pool on Wednesday

Firefighters work to contain the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic, north of Los Angeles

Progress in fighting the blaze had temporarily stopped earlier in the day when it burned near a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department facility

The flames creeping near homes were being 'snuffed out' by firefighting crews after wind had calmed down

Dubbed the 'North Fire', the blaze was first spotted around 2pm in the Wayside Canyon area in Castaic before it spread to the Valencia and Santa Clarita area, KABC reported.

It was initially described as about one acre but grew to 4-10 acres within minutes. It had burned about 90 acres by 4pm and reached an alarming 650 acres by 8pm before it was decidedly under control.

Firefighting crews used fixed wing aircraft, air tankers, and helicopters - as well as ground crews - to contain the fire.

California is facing a 'long dry summer' and droughts that may cause the fire season to start early, Paul Lowenthal, an assistant fire marshal for Santa Rosa, has said.

Photos reveal how Lake Oroville is at 42 percent of its 3,537,577 acre foot capacity while about 85% of California suffers 'exceptional' drought.

Lake Oroville, a reservoir formed by the Oroville Dam impounding the Feather River in northern California, has been seen with a dry and cracked riverbed - a sobering reminder of the massive drought that ran from 2012 to 2016.

Last month, Lake Oroville was at just 38% of its capacity - which was alarming for officials considering the reservoir was described as 'the poster child in that spate of drought images seven years ago,' SFist.com reported.

Water district boards in Marin County and Santa Clara Valley have met to discuss possible restrictions on water usage and encourage conservation, the outlet reported.

'We have no idea how long it will last or how bad it might get,' said Tony Estremera, chairman of the Santa Clara Valley Water District board, according to the Mercury News. 'Clearly we can't just sit back and wait for more rain.'

The mood has been described as 'increasingly grim' by The Los Angeles Times while the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Lake Mead, the country's largest reservoir which provides much of the water for southwestern states, may face its first federally declared water shortage.

A new study from QuoteWizard.com, an insurance company, has examined data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as well as property risk evaluations while seeking to find out what states are facing the highest wildfire risk in 2021.

A firefighter is seen battling the quick-spreading North Fire in the Santa Clarita Valley

A fixed-wing tanker makes a drop of fire retardant on the North Fire in Castaic on Wednesday

Firefighters prepare to battle the North Fire from a backyard on Via Patina, Wednesday

A firefighter prepares to battle the North Fire from a backyard on Via Patina, Wednesday

A helicopter makes a drop over the fire as firefighters work at containing the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic

A helicopter makes a drop over the fire as firefighters work at containing the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic

A firefighter is seen working to put out a blaze that scorched more than 650 acres

Firefighters work to contain the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic, north of Los Angeles, California

A helicopter makes a drop over the fire as firefighters work at containing the North Fire burning near Valencia and Castaic

Nick VinZant, who works for QuoteWizard.com, told KABC-TV that '85% of California is in severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.'

'Compare that to last year only 12% of the state was at that same level,' VinZant said.

Last week, projections released by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show that the elevation of the water in Lake Mead, which sits near Las Vegas at the Nevada-Arizona border, will be just 1,067 feet at the end of this year, the Review-Journal reported.

If the water hits that low of a level, there would be a federal shortage declaration for the first time since the lake was filled in the 1930s. The declaration would reduce the annual amount of water sent to Arizona and Nevada.

Patti Aaron, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Bureau of Reclamation, told that the projections 'are not cause for immediate concern' despite being in a drought for 22 years, the outlet reported.

Lake Mead's water level was at about 1,082 feet on Monday meaning the water is under 40 percent of the lake's 28,945,000 acre-feet capacity. Lake Mead loses about 800,000 acre-feet of water annually through evaporation, according to the Water Education Foundation.

The Arizona Republic noted that the water level of Lake Mead has dropped more than 130 feet since the beginning of 2000- the last time the surface of the lake 'lapped at the spillway gates on Hoover Dam.'
Excavated medieval bone from the spine showing cancer metastases (white arrow). Credit: Jenna Dittmar

The first study to use X-rays and CT scans to detect evidence of cancer among the skeletal remains of a pre-industrial population suggests that between 9-14% of adults in medieval Britain had the disease at the time of their death.

This puts cancer prevalence in a time before exposure to tumour-inducing chemicals from industry and tobacco at around ten times higher than previously thought, according to researchers.

Prior research into historic cancer rates using the archaeological record has been limited to examining the bone exterior for lesions. It suggested that cancer was rare, affecting less than 1% of the population.

A team led by the University of Cambridge have now coupled visual inspection with radiological imaging to analyse 143 skeletons from six medieval cemeteries in and around the city of Cambridge, UK, dating from the 6th to the 16th century.

The findings of the study are published today in the journal Cancer.

"The majority of cancers form in soft tissue organs long since degraded in medieval remains. Only some cancer spreads to bone, and of these only a few are visible on its surface, so we searched within the bone for signs of malignancy," said lead author Dr. Piers Mitchell, who conducted the research as part of the 'After the Plague' project.

"Modern research shows a third to a half of people with soft tissue cancers will find the tumour spreads to their bones. We combined this data with evidence of bone metastasis from our study to estimate cancer rates for medieval Britain."

CT scan of bone from a medieval skull showing metastasis hidden within (white arrow). Credit: Bram Mulder

"We think the total proportion of the medieval population that probably suffered with a cancer somewhere in their body was between nine and fourteen percent," said Mitchell, from Cambridge University's Department of Archaeology.

"Using CT scans we were able to see cancer lesions hidden inside a bone that looked completely normal on the outside," said study co-author and After the Plague researcher Dr. Jenna Dittmar.

"Until now it was thought that the most significant causes of ill health in medieval people were infectious diseases such as dysentery and bubonic plague, along with malnutrition and injuries due to accidents or warfare."

"We now have to add cancer as one of the major classes of disease that afflicted medieval people," Dittmar said.

However, the researchers point out that in modern Britain some 40-50% of people have cancer by the time they die, making the disease 3-4 times more common today than the latest study suggests it was during medieval times.

They say that a variety of factors likely contribute to contemporary rates of the disease, such as the effects of tobacco, which began to be imported into Britain in the 16th century with the colonising of the Americas.

The researchers also point to the cancerous effects of pollutants that have become ubiquitous since the industrial revolution of the 18th century, as well as the possibility that DNA-damaging viruses are now more widespread with long-distance travel. Moreover, our longer lifespans give cancer much more time to develop.

The remains of numerous individualsunearthed on the site of the former Hospital of St. John the Evangelist. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit/St John's College

The skeletal remains investigated for the latest study came from sites near three villages in the vicinity of Cambridge, as well as three cemeteries uncovered within the medieval centre of the university city, including the site of a former Augustinian friary, and the site of a former charitable hospital that cared for the sick and destitute (now part of St. John's College).

Very few of the excavated remains were complete, so the team limited themselves to individuals with intact spinal column, pelvis and femora (thigh bones). Modern research shows these to be the bones most likely to contain secondary malignanciesor metastasesin people with cancer.

The remains of 96 men, 46 women, and an individual of unknown sex, had their vertebrae, femurs and pelvis inspected and then imaged using X-rays and CT scans. The team found signs of malignancy in the bones of five individualsa minimum prevalence of 3.5%. These were mostly in the pelvis, although one middle-aged man had small lesions throughout his skeleton suggesting a form of blood cancer.

Research shows that CT scans detect bone metastases around 75% of the time, and only a third to half of cancer deaths involve spread to the bone, so the team projected that 9-14% of medieval Britons developed cancer.

However, they caution that the sample size is inevitably limited and diagnosing cancer in those lain dead for many centuries is somewhat challenging.

"We need further studies using CT scanning of apparently normal skeletons in different regions and time periods to see how common cancer was in key civilizations of the past," added Mitchell.

Explore further Evidence of bone disease found in medieval skeletons

More information: The Prevalence of Cancer in Britain Before Industrialization, Cancer (2021). Journal information: Cancer The Prevalence of Cancer in Britain Before Industrialization,(2021). acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wile  i/10.1002/cncr.33615
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:47:53|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- China's financial regulators on Thursday summoned 13 domestic internet platform companies including Tencent, JD Finance and ByteDance for talks on their financing businesses.

The People's Bank of China, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange initiated the regulatory talks.

The talks show China is stepping up its supervision of internet platform companies' financing businesses, strengthening its anti-monopoly efforts, and preventing the disorderly expansion of capital to promote the regulated, healthy and sustainable development of the platform economy. Enditem
The LieNA development program will culminate in a preliminary feasibility study to evaluate its viability in a number of jurisdictions, including Australia and Europe.

The agreement will expire if DRAG fails to construct a LieNA plant in Europe within a period of 10 years from the commencement date.

s ( ( ) (FRA:3MW) commercialisation of its next-generation LieNA caustic conversion process for the recovery of lithium from spodumene is progressing well.

On April 28, 2021, the company executed a commercialisation agreement with Deutsche Rohstoff AG (DRAG), a German natural resources holding and investment company.

The agreement provides for the issue of an exclusive LieNA licence in Europe, subject to DRAG:

Subscribing for 3.125 million fully paid ordinary shares in the capital of Lithium Australia for A$250,000 at commencement;

Subscribing for A$400,000 of fully paid ordinary shares in the capital of Lithium Australia priced at 125% of the 30-day VWAP for those shares on the day that construction of the pilot plant is completed;

Paying Lithium Australia A$400,000 on delivery of a positive, European-based pre-feasibility study; and

Paying a 2% gross royalty on product generated through application of the LieNA process in Europe.

The agreement will expire if DRAG fails to construct a LieNA plant in Europe within a period of 10 years from the commencement date.

Commercialisation well underway

Lithium Australia managing director Adrian Griffin said: The lithium-ion battery industry does need to reduce its environmental footprint, and the improved recoveries afforded by LieNA could lead to the production of more lithium chemical units from the same sized mining excavation  and at a lower unit cost.

The company's R&D program, which is co-funded by a federal government research grant, will provide a more sustainable pathway for battery production.

Lithium Australia's commercialisation of its LieNA process is well underway.

Pilot plant construction

Construction of an autoclave for the pilot plant is underway in India and at this stage, COVID has had no impact on the construction schedule.

The company anticipates delivery of the autoclave to Australia in October 2021, with plant construction at ANSTO to be completed before the end of the year to enable the first pilot run.

LIT was awarded a CRC-P grant as part of a $3.6 million development program that includes the construction and operation of the pilot plant in February, partnering with ANSTO, Essential Metals Ltd, VSPC Ltd, ALS Metallurgy Pty Ltd, Murdoch University, Curtin University and Carnac Project Delivery Services.

Preliminary feasibility study

Along with the commencement of the pilot plant construction, spodumene has been recovered from drill samples recovered by drilling at the Pioneer Dome project of Essential Metals Ltd (ASX:ESS), with a spodumene concentrate then produced by ALS Metallurgy to provide initial feed for the pilot plant.

That feed will be used to produce a refined lithium phosphate product suitable for the direct production of lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) cathode powder.

The LieNA development program will culminate in a preliminary feasibility study to evaluate its viability in a number of jurisdictions, including Australia and Europe.

Shorter path to battery production

The LieNA process is flexible enough to produce a range of lithium chemicals, including lithium hydroxide, lithium carbonate and lithium phosphate.

Significantly, lithium phosphate can provide direct feed for the production of LFP cathode powder, already produced by the company's wholly-owned subsidiary VSPC Ltd at its Brisbane pilot plant and R&D facility.

VSPC will take the lithium phosphate generated by LieNA at the ANSTO pilot plant and use it to create LFP cathode powder, which in turn will be used to produce commercial format lithium-ion battery cells for testing.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)  An Omaha police officer has been charged with felony counts and placed on leave after being accused of using a gun to threaten teens who pounded on doors in the officer's neighborhood late at night.
Illinois, Nebraska scientists propose improvements to precision crop irrigation

URBANA, Ill. - With threats of water scarcity complicating the need to feed a growing global population, it is more important than ever to get crop irrigation right. Overwatering can deplete local water supplies and lead to polluted runoff, while underwatering can lead to sub-optimal crop performance. Yet few farmers use science-based tools to help them decide when and how much to water their crops.

A new University of Illinois led study identifies obstacles and solutions to improve performance and adoption of irrigation decision support tools at the field scale.

"We wanted to offer our perspective on how to achieve field-scale precision irrigation with the most recent and advanced technologies on data collection, plant water stress, modeling, and decision-making," says Jingwen Zhang, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois and lead author on the article in Environmental Research Letters.

Zhang says many farmers rely on traditional rules of thumb, including visual observation, crop calendars, and what the neighbors are doing, to decide when and how much to water. Better data and more advanced technologies exist to help make those decisions, but they aren't being leveraged currently to their full potential.

For example, some fields are equipped with soil moisture sensors or cameras that detect changes in crop appearance, but there aren't enough of them to provide accurate information across fields. Satellites can monitor vegetation from space, but the spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images is often too large to help make decisions at the field scale.

Kaiyu Guan, assistant professor in NRES, Blue Waters professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and project leader on the study, pioneered a way to fuse high-resolution and high-frequency satellite data into one integrated high spatial-temporal resolution product to help track soil and plant conditions.

"Based on remote sensing fusion technology and advanced modeling, we can help farmers get a fully scalable solution remotely," he says. "That's powerful. It can potentially be a revolutionary technology for farmers, not only in the U.S., but also smallholder farmers in developing countries."

With modern satellite technology and Guan's fusion model, data acquisition won't be a limiting factor in future precision irrigation products. But it's still important to define plant water stress appropriately.

Historically, irrigation decisions were based solely on measures of soil moisture. Guan's group recently called for the agricultural industry to redefine drought, not based on soil moisture alone, but on its interaction with atmospheric dryness.

"If we consider the soil-plant-atmosphere-continuum as a system, which reflects both soil water supply and atmospheric water demand, we can use those plant-centric metrics to define plant water stress to trigger irrigation," Zhang says. "Again, if we use our data fusion methods and process-based modelling, we can achieve precision irrigation with very high accuracy and also high resolution."

The researchers also looked at challenges regarding farmer adoption of existing decision support tools. Because current products are based on less-than-ideal data sources, Guan says producers are reluctant to switch from traditional rule-of-thumb methods to tools that may not be much more reliable. Non-intuitive user interfaces, data privacy, and inflexible timing compound the problem.

Trenton Franz, associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and a coauthor, says farmers will be more likely to adopt precision irrigation decision tools if they are accurate down to the field scale, flexible, and easy to use. His and Guan's teams are working on technologies to fill this need and are actively testing the technology in irrigated fields in Nebraska. This includes participating with Daran Rudnick, assistant professor at UNL and co-author of the study, in the UNL Testing Ag Performance (TAPS) program, which focuses on technology adoption and education for producers across the region.

"We're pretty close. We have real-time evapotranspiration data, and we're adding the soil moisture component and the irrigation component. Probably in less than a year this will be launched as a prototype and can be tested among the farmer community," Guan says.

###

For more detail, see the article, "Challenges and opportunities in precision irrigation decision-support systems for center pivots," published in Environmental Research Letters [DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe436]. Additional Illinois co-authors include Bin Peng, Chongya Jiang, Wang Zhou, Yi Yang, Yaping Cai, and Madhu Khanna, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and interim director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

This project is primarily funded by the USDA NIFA Cyber-Physical System Program and an NSF CAREER Award through its Environmental Sustainability Program.

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics are in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois. The Agroecosystem Sustainability Center is a joint research center of ACES and iSEE.

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Pune, India, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global antidepressants market size is projected to reach USD 18.29 billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 2.9% during the forecast period. The skyrocketing demand for depression management drugs amid the COVID-19 pandemic will rapidly broaden the horizons of this market, observes Fortune Business Insights in its report. According to a joint study conducted by researchers from Boston University, Brown University, and the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute, depression symptoms were three times higher during the coronavirus-induced lockdown.

List of Key Companies Covered in this Market Report:

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Petah Tikva, Israel)

AstraZeneca (Cambridge, U.K)

Pfizer Inc. (New York, U.S)

Eli Lilly and Company (Indiana, U.S)

H. Lundbeck A/S (Denmark, Europe)

Bristol-Myers Squibb (New York, U.S)

Merck & Co. Inc. (New Jersey, U.S)

Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Beerse, Belgium)

GlaxoSmithKline plc (Brentford, U.K)

The sudden spike in the prevalence of anxiety and depressive tendencies among populations has created major shortages of essential antidepressants worldwide. In Canada, for instance, Pfizers anti-depressant, Nardil, went out of stock in June 2020 and Health Canada predicts that the drug shortage is likely to last till August 2021. Furthermore, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed in June 2020 that the antidepressant Zoloft is facing huge shortages as the pandemic has disrupted pharmaceutical supply chains. The dramatic rise in the demand for depression medications and the consequent surge in sales enabled the market to showcase a prolific CAGR of 28.0% in 2020, reaching USD 14.93 billion in value.





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Out research methodology is robust and includes data triangulation based on bottom-up and top-down approaches. We validated the approximate market number with the help of primary research. Secondary research was conducted to find out detailed information about mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, joint ventures, and agreements. At the same time, we have derived significant information about the market dynamics associated with growth drivers, trends, and obstacles.

Increasing Application of AI in Detecting Depression to Open Floodgates of Innovation

The employment of artificial intelligence (AI) in identifying depressive behaviors in individuals is paving new pathways for the market growth. Several startups, healthcare technology entities, and academic institutions have been AI-based algorithms, systems, and tools for depression. For example, Baltimore-based Sunrise Health, a startup incubated under Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, has developed a system that uses AI-based predictive analytics to regulate patient activity and inhibit the onset of mental health breakdown episodes through support-group texting.

On the other hand, California-based startup, Mindstrong Health, utilizes machine learning (ML) to aid the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral health disorders by leveraging data generated from smartphones. In June 2020, psychiatry researchers at Stanford University developed an AI-based algorithm to study brainwave patterns specific to depression patients, aiming to identify which symptoms change with treatment in a more pinpointed manner. Thus, AI has displayed vast potential in enhancing the efficacy and accuracy of antidepressants, thereby brightening the outlook of this market.





Click here to get the short-term and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on this Market.

Please visit: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/antidepressants-market-105017





Presence of Leading Market Players to Catalyze the Market in North America

North America is expected to dominate the antidepressants market share during the forecast period, backed by the strong presence and widespread operations of large pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and Merck, in the US. These conglomerates, due to their sound financial health, are constantly engaged in the creation and launch of novel depression therapies, which has been the primary factor for the regions apex position in this market. The North America market size stood at USD 6.00 billion in 2019.

In Europe, rising investments in clinical trials and huge funding for research & development activities will foster lasting growth of the regional market. On the other hand, Asia Pacific is set to present lucrative opportunities over the next decade as the increasing incidence of depression and anxiety disorders will stoke the adoption of anti-depressants.





Quick Buy - Antidepressants Market Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/checkout-page/105017





The recent coronavirus outbreak has brought major businesses to a standstill. Due to travel bans, companies in this sector are likely to take a huge hit in the coming years. Ultimately, the rapid spread of the disease has urged governments to take strict measures. The report includes the impact on Covid-19 pandemic on the global Pharmaceuticals market and discusses how major companies are coping with this.

The report provides a detailed evaluation of the market by highlighting information on different aspects which include drivers, restraints, opportunities, and threats. This information can help stakeholders to make appropriate decisions before investing. The financial parameters which are assessed include the sales, profits and the overall revenue generated by the key players of Market. Furthermore, the report offers a detailed analysis and information as per Pharmaceuticals Market Growth Analysis by manufacturers, market segments helping our readers to get a comprehensive overview of the global market. Several players are planning to focus on developing cost-effective products or services, aiming to maintain a strong foothold in the market.





Have Any Query? Ask Our Experts: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/speak-to-analyst/antidepressants-market-105017





Some major points from Table of Content:

Introduction Market Scope Market Segmentation Market Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Prevalence of Anxiety & Depression Key Regions/Country New Product Launch Pipeline Analysis Impact of COVID-19 on the Market Key Industry Developments - Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships

Global Antidepressants Industry Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Drug Class Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs) Atypical Antidepressants Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCAs) Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Disorder Major Depressive Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Generalized Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Distribution Channel Hospital Pharmacy Retail Pharmacy Online Pharmacy Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Geography North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East & Africa

North America Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Drug Class Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs) Atypical Antidepressants Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCAs) Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Disorder Major Depressive Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Generalized Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Distribution Channel Hospital Pharmacy Retail Pharmacy Online Pharmacy Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Country U.S. By Disorder Major Depressive Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Generalized Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Others Canada By Disorder Major Depressive Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Generalized Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Others



Continued...





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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  The Philippine government has reached out to countries like the United States and Israel for access to unused supply of coronavirus shots, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez, Jr. said on Wednesday.

During the televised Cabinet meeting, Galvez said he has discussed the matter with Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel "Babe" Romualdez to hopefully release the US unused AstraZeneca vaccines to the country.

He also said that they also reached out through diplomatic channels in the hopes to gain access to unused vaccine supplies of other countries.

Sumulat na nga po si [Health] Secretary [Francisco] Duque through diplomatic channels... pati sa Israel po sumulat na rin kami ng letter of intent na makakuha ng access para iyong mga excess ng countries po na ito ay magkaroon din tayo, Galvez explained.

[Translation: Secretary Duque has written through diplomatic channels, we also wrote a letter of intent to Israel, to have access to these countries' excess supplies.]

Earlier, the US said it is planning to share its AstraZeneca doses in the coming months. Galvez, meanwhile, said in March that the government is in talks with the Israeli government for a possible donation of COVID-19 vaccines.

The government has so far received over three million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from China and other donating countries, including initial shipments of those it purchased.

Galvez said they expect the bulk of the supply to arrive in June. Some 10 million doses from four manufacturers and the World Health Organization-led COVAX facilty are scheduled to arrive then.

Inoculation of general public expected to start in August

On vaccination, Galvez said they target to complete immunization of healthcare workers, senior citizens, and people with comorbidities by July.

Once enough supplies arrive in June, economic frontliners and indigent population are expected to be given their vaccine shots.

Sa August po, we are targeting na pagka-dumagsa na po ang ating mga vaccine, pwede na po tayong magkaroon ng general public vaccination, Galvez explained.

[Translation: In August, we are targeting to vaccinate the general public once the supplies come in.]

Since the start of the rollout in March, around 1.8 million individuals have received their vaccine. Of this, around 1.5 million people were given their first shot and around 240,000 have been fully vaccinated.

The government targets to purchase around 140 million vaccines to immunize up to 70 million Filipinos.
More than two dozen stolen dogs have been seized at an illegal kennel, police have said.

Three women aged 20, 23, and 30 were also arrested for fraud offences following the raid in Epsom, Surrey, yesterday.

All 26 dogs found on the site were examined by a vet and will continue to receive medical treatment.

Also found on site were three stolen caravans, two stolen vehicles and a stolen trailer which were also seized.

Surrey Police said enquiries were ongoing to try and track down the owners of the stolen animals.

Surrey Police say they rescued 26 suspected stolen dogs from a kennel (pictured) in Epsom during an operation which also saw three women arrested on suspicion of fraud offences

Following initial enquiries, a police spokesperson said images of the dogs will be released with owners encouraged to get in contact with the dog's details, including microchip number if possible.

Inspector Jon Vale, Borough Commander for Epsom and Ewell, said, 'This was a highly successful operation, with several animals and vehicles recovered.

'I hope that today's result, and the investigation that follows it, will reassure our partners and the public that we will not tolerate criminal activity in Epsom.'

Reacting on social media, one resident said: 'Thank you for doing a grand job, these dog thefts needs to be stopped and to know you are working hard to catch these thieves and to reunite dogs with their owners is brilliant.'

And another said: 'Well done! Hope these lovely dogs reunited with their owners. Wish the sentence for these thieves was life, that's what would be justice.'

The Covid pandemic saw a huge surge in the demand for dogs to keep them company at home, with designer dogs such as Cockapoos selling for as much as 3,500 during the first lockdown.

The force says all the dogs were examined by a vet at the scene (pictured) and that they will continue to receive medical treatment until they can be returned to their rightful owners

According to the RSPCA, a total of 3.2 million households added a new pet to their family during the first lockdown.

Research by the Pet Food Manufacturers Association (PFMA) showed that although 74 per cent claim their new pet has helped their mental health through the pandemic, there are pet welfare concerns.

Earlier this month, police investigating dog thefts in Essex arrested a 54-year-old woman and two teenage boys as they rescued 27 animals.

Officers said 19 adult dogs and eight puppies were seized from the address in Dunmow, Essex, on April 1.

Police, supported by the RSPCA, found a range of breeds including spaniels, terriers, lurchers, a French bulldog and a Rottweiler.
A rural Manitoba teacher has been suspended for attending an anti-mask rally in Winnipeg Sunday after parents raised concerns she might expose their children to COVID-19.

A rural Manitoba teacher has been suspended for attending an anti-mask rally in Winnipeg Sunday after parents raised concerns she might expose their children to COVID-19.

A photo circulating among concerned parents shows the Altona teacher at the rally, which drew hundreds of protesters of all ages who milled around maskless and disobeyed social distancing guidelines.

INSTAGRAM Hollie Buhler, who teaches Grade 1 at Elmwood School in Altona, is pictured shoulder-to-shoulder with rally organizer Chris Saccoccia.

Hollie Buhler, who teaches Grade 1 at Elmwood School in the town, 100 kilometres south of Winnipeg, is pictured posing shoulder-to-shoulder with another woman and rally organizer Chris Saccoccia. Text on the image reads "Its time to stand up Manitoba" and "Fight for your freedom" and "Just say no."

The Free Press reached out to Buhler, but she didn't respond.

While the Border Land School Division refused to talk about the suspension to the Free Press, a parent who had complained, received a message from the division that said the teacher would not be at school.

"While I am unable to share more details for privacy reasons, I can confirm that the employee will not be present in the workplace while the division investigates this matter," said the statement from superintendent Krista Curry.

"Border Land School Division takes direction from Manitoba Education and we have worked hard this last year to ensure protocols are in place and followed in our schools."

"The division will issue reminders to all staff about the importance of the orders and protocols, particularly given we are in the midst of a third wave."

Holly Pappel, whose daughter attends Grade 1, was relieved.

"I think its the right thing for the school to be investigating and not having her attend classes right now for the protection of everyone involved," said Pappel.

Some parents were angry the school allowed the teacher to work on Monday. Pappel decided to pull her daughter from school because she feared she might catch the virus.

I think its the right thing for the school to be investigating and not having her attend classes right now for the protection of everyone involved."  Holly Pappel, whose daughter attends Grade 1

Pappel runs a home daycare with her husband, which influenced her decision. The 41-year-old's teenage nephew, who has a heart condition, lives with her family.

"If my daughter has to quarantine, that means I have to close my daycare. That would be our income and our livelihood for however long we have to quarantine for," Pappel said. "If my nephew with a heart condition gets it, we dont know what the outcome would be."

Pappel called Health Links on Monday to find out how to minimize her familys risk of catching the virus, in the event the teacher contracted it during the rally or came into contact with someone who tested positive.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hollie Buhler, seen at the rally in brown toque and striped mitts, who teaches Grade 1 at Elmwood School in Altona, has been suspended for attending the anti-mask rally in Winnipeg Sunday. Parents raised concerns after seeing the photo that she might expose their children to COVID-19.

"I totally believe that everyone has the right to their own beliefs and perceptions about whats happening with COVID," Pappel said. "My concern was how it was going to impact me and my family and my livelihood. Now that I know the teacher is not at school, Ill feel safe sending my daughter back."

A father of another student had similar concerns.

"People should think about their actions when theres children involved," he said.

A number of other parents from the kindergarten to Grade 3 school opted to temporarily pull their children from school after hearing about Buhler's attendance at the rally, he said.

Chiropractor removed as president The Manitoba Chiropractors Association has accepted the resignation of its president, Dr. Steven Gall, after he was spotted in the crowd at Sundays anti-mask rally at The Forks. As a profession, the (association) does not condone or tolerate behaviour which stands in clear contravention of public health orders, said acting president Dr. Gerald Chartier in a news release. click to read more The Manitoba Chiropractors Association has accepted the resignation of its president, Dr. Steven Gall, after he was spotted in the crowd at Sundays anti-mask rally at The Forks. As a profession, the (association) does not condone or tolerate behaviour which stands in clear contravention of public health orders, said acting president Dr. Gerald Chartier in a news release. Throughout the pandemic, and as part of Shared Healths essential services network, we have stood united with the provincial government in its fight to protect Manitobans, said Cartier. (We) will continue to do so by mandating strict adherence by our members to all orders. Gall runs Linden Ridge Family Chiropractic on Kenaston Boulevard. An employee at the clinic declined to give a message to Gall and directed questions to the chiropractic association. Speakers at the rally condemned public health orders and spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. Organizer Chris Saccoccia was arrested in Thunder Bay Tuesday, with police citing his blatant disregard of Ontarios emergency orders. Two attendees at the rally were given tickets of $1,296 for breaking pandemic rules. Close

He said he supports the divisions choice to suspend the teacher and plans to send his child back to school next week.

Monday morning, one parent emailed school principal Scott Hiebert to express concern about the teacher's conduct.

An email from Hiebert obtained by the Winnipeg Free Press states, "Prior to arrival at work each day, all staff are expected to self-screen for COVID symptoms. Assuming they are symptom-free and have not been directed by Public Health to isolate, they are expected to be at work."

The message goes on to explain enforcing public health orders outside of school hours is the responsibility of law enforcement.

Another parent with children who attend the school saw the photos of Buhler and was "furious" but not surprised because the teacher has been outspoken about her anti-mask beliefs, she said.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Chris Sky Saccoccia speaks at an anti-mask rally at The Forks Sunday.

"If youre OK to put yourself in jeopardy, youre OK to stay home and quarantine for two weeks. Youre not only risking the well-being of yourself, youre risking the well-being of the kids," she said.

In another case, Lord Selkirk School Division suspended one of its bus drivers with pay for attending Sundays rally.

"We heard information and acted on the information that came to us as soon as we could," said superintendent Jerret Long.

The division, which represents 15 schools in the region just north of Winnipeg, said its conducting an internal review.

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca
Standardbred Canadas Member & Stakeholder Relations Department is seeking an enthusiastic summer student/intern to assist with various member and stakeholder related activities. Knowledge of horse racing is an asset but is not required.

The position requires an energetic self-starter with strong interpersonal and computer skills, outstanding organizational and presentation skills, and experience in social media and digital communications. This individual will have the ability to work independently while contributing to a team.

The successful candidate will work remotely from their own home office.

Some of the duties include:

Data entry & analysis

Report writing

Writing for website

Assisting with SCs Member Value Program

Assisting with writing web stories for National Caretaker Appreciation Day

Assisting with industry research and member surveys

Graphic Design of Social Media images

Administrative duties as required

Qualifications:

Currently enrolled in a Communications, Marketing, Journalism, Graphic Design, or Business Administration program

Detail oriented with outstanding time management skills

Customer Service training an asset

Computer skills required:

Excel/MS Office/Power Point

Experience with Survey Monkey & sending E-Flyers/newsletters

Experience with social media tools

Experience with using Canva is an asset

Basic Graphic Design skills are an asset

Applicants must be returning to a post secondary program in the fall of 2021. Duration: 8-9 weeks (start date of May 31, 2021)

Please submit applications via email no later than Tuesday, May 11 at 5:00 p.m. to:

Kathy Wade Vlaar

Manager of Member & Stakeholder Relations

[email protected]
The United States does not seek to escalate tensions with Russia, but Moscow's actions will have consequences. This is according to the speech by US President Joe Biden. The White House published the remarks on its website by the time the President began to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress.

"With regard to Russia, I made very clear to President Putin that while we dont seek escalation, their actions have consequences," Biden said, TASS reports.

"I responded in a direct and proportionate way to Russias interference in our elections and cyberattacks on our government and businesses - and they did both of those things and I did respond," he noted.

Biden added that Moscow and Washington can cooperate when its in their mutual interests. "As we did when we extended the New START Treaty on nuclear arms - and as were working to do on the climate crisis," he said.

"I kept my commitment to convene a climate summit right here in America, with all of the major economies of the world - from China and Russia to India and the European Union in my first 100 days," Biden said speaking about the climate change.
Andrew Cuomos Antipathy to Older People Didnt Begin With COVID

Commentary

Its worth a glimpse back to see how most news organizations covered Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2020. A classic in this journalism hall of shame was a Washington Post column, in which our governor was lionized as the strongman who can admit hes wrong. He speaks fluently about the facts. He worries about his mother, and by extension, yours too.

With such fawning coverage from mainstream media, its no wonder that Cuomo won an Emmy for his updates on the COVID-19 crisis. Now we know that the governors briefings were misleading, with manipulated, shell-game statistics as to how many nursing home residents actually died from COVID-related complications. Finally, even the New York Times is reporting on the lengths to which Cuomo and his aides went to conceal the true number of New York nursing home patients who died from the virus.

Total deaths of nursing home residents related to COVID-19 are approaching 16,000, but by Gov. Cuomos calculus, more than 5,000 of these tragedies should be hidden from the public, since they technically died after transfers to hospitals and other arrangements.

Cuomos antipathy to the elderly didnt begin with COVID-19, but given the veneration hes enjoyed, youd never know it.

When I was commissioner at the NYC Department for the Aging, I was in Washington in 1998 on city business. While meeting with New York congressional staff, they complained about the actions of the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in taking his hatchet to the popular Section 202 housing program for the elderly. That secretary was Andrew M. Cuomo.

Public housing, nearly everywhere in the nation, is usually adjudged to be a failure in serving its lower income residents.

However, the success of the 202 program is due to the fact that it is privatized. The HUDs Section 202 program issues competitive grants to private, non-profit agencies, who oversee the construction and operation of residences for low-income seniors.

Enter the lobby of a 202 residence and you might think youre in a Hyatt or a Marriott, not in a typical public housing property.

The Clinton-Cuomo budget request for Section 202 housing was $595 million in fiscal year 1997, but was chopped down to only $300 million for fiscal 1998, nearly a 50 percent cut. If Jack Kemp, Ben Carson, or another Republican HUD secretary had proposed that, the howls might still be echoing.

It was because of 202s popularity, said congressional aides, that Secretary Cuomo calculated he could rob $295 million (nearly $500 million in 2021 dollars) from it to fund his homeless initiatives, and figured Congress would restore the senior housing dollars.

He was right. Congress did replenish the funds for the 202 housing, and Secretary Cuomo kept the money he had re-directed to homeless programs.

Secretary Cuomos raid on senior housing was a precursor to his deadly decisions to rush COVID-infected patients into New Yorks nursing homes.

In coming decades, New York state is projected to lose population in all age categories, except one: those 65 and older. By 2040, the number of state residents over 65 will increase by fully 25 percent. The 85+ population, our frailest, will grow by an astounding 75 percent.

A CUNY study funded by the Association on Aging in New York (pdf) concludes that softer services such as meals for the home-bound, senior centers, and the Expanded In-home Services to the Elderly Program (EISEP), can prevent rapid deterioration in frail elderly, often resulting in very expensive reliance on Medicaid and institutionalization.

Based on past outreach to over 1,900 individuals awaiting services [such as EISEP home care and home-delivered meals] in eight [New York] counties, the Association [on Aging in New York] determined that 10 percent of them had been admitted to nursing homes, while 6 percent had received Medicaid home-based or community-based care, the study states.

For fiscal year 2022, which began April 1, the governor proposed to reduce the budget of his State Office for the Aging (NYSOFA) by 2 percent while the senior population is rapidly expanding. Similar proposed cuts to the aging budget have been the general pattern during the Andrew Cuomo era.

But by being penurious with these relatively inexpensive NYSOFA-funded services, the Cuomo administration is driving fragile seniors into hospitals and nursing homes. The cost to offer part-time home care to a frail senior is less than $7,000 per year, yet that study exposed that one of every six people on waiting lists soon winds up on much more expensive Medicaid home care, or even in nursing homes costing $150,000 and up.

New York spent $84 billion on Medicaid this year, and Gov. Cuomo is proposing to spend $91.6 billion (pdf) in fiscal year 2022, which began this month.

Thats surely the single largest increase in annual Medicaid spending in any U.S. state, ever. Wouldnt a $7,000 investment in senior home care be an obvious choice versus risking a $150,000 Medicaid nursing home payment before very long?

Our governor is facing multiple scandals, but disturbing as they all are, he deserves due process before final judgments are rendered.

Gov. Cuomos treatment of seniors, however, is apparent. Forcing COVID-19 patients into nursing homes had fatal consequences. And his actions at HUD and pinching state aging services reflect a decades-long indifference to the problems of older people. To begin atoning in a small way, why not eliminate those waiting lists for home care and meals for the home-bound elderly?

Youd save many times that expense in Medicaid costs this very year.

Herbert W. Stupp is the editor of Gipperten.com and served in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stupp was also Mayor Giulianis Commissioner (19942002) at the NYC Department for the Aging. Early in his career, he won an Emmy award for television editorials.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 03:23:12|Editor: huaxia

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PARIS, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia has submitted a letter of candidature to the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) to organize World Expo 2030 in Moscow, the France-based organization announced on Thursday.

BIE said in a press release that Russia's candidature is based on the theme "Human Progress. Shared vision for the World of Harmony." If successful, the expo would take place in Russia's capital, Moscow in 2030.

This is the first candidature submitted to the BIE to host World Expo 2030 and a six-month countdown is now enacted. During that period, all other countries wishing to organize the Expo may notify the BIE of their candidature, it said.

World Expos, known officially as the International Registered Exhibitions, are organized every five years and can last up to six months.

Shanghai hosted World Expo 2010 and Milan hosted the last World Expo in 2015. World Expo 2020 will be organized in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates between Oct. 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, under the theme "Connecting Minds, Creating the Future."

The following one will take place in Osaka and Kansai in Japan under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives" between 13 April and 13 October 2025, according to the press release. Enditem
There is a difference of opinions between the Romanian Government and the European Commission regarding the National Resilience and Recovery Plan (PNRR), declared, on Thursday, the minister of Investments and European Projects, Cristian Ghinea, at private broadcaster Digi24, mentioning the motorways, irrigations and culture.

"There are 350 investment lines in PNRR. I went through with it last night with the coalition leaders. In most cases we are talking about a reduction of sums because there were cases where, just as we were expecting, we did not have a very good substantiation of flows. It is not dramatic. I would abstain from giving details because I would be speaking about ongoing negotiations. Also, if you haven't noticed, I held these negotiations with the European Commission, pretty low profile, so to speak, meaning that I did not feel the need to make negotiations public. Nowhere, in any country, were negotiations made public," Cristian Ghinea highlighted.

The Minister of Investments and European Projects said that negotiations, being ongoing, "one must have patience to finish them and to come out at the end of the month with details and what we agreed with the European Commission".

He explained that there are still points where there is a difference of opinion between the Government and the European Commission, such as the fund for Territorial Administrative Units or culture funds.

"Where we did not agree, I told you: motorways, irrigations, culture and a few other. We cannot want everything and especially we must have very good technical arguments where we want them to be. For motorways we have projects which can be done by 2026. The absolute priority is the Motorway to Moldavia, the A7. There we are firm, we are maintaining this position," Cristian Ghinea declared.

Furthermore, he mentioned that Romania has an auditing system which surpasses the criteria of the European Commission. The minister declared that there have been discussions regarding which type of audit to be used and decided to use the one for classic European funds and that is a guarantee for the Commission that the money will not be stolen.

He also said that the term for submitting the plan is May 31 and that there is a lot of work on the technical side.
CCTV footage from a clothing store in Seoul, South Korea, shows the scene of an incident in which the Chinese wife of Belgium Ambassador Peter Lescouhier assaulted two store employees. The footage went viral on South Koreans social media and provoked anger. (Screenshot of CCTV footage)

South Koreans Dont Accept Belgian Ambassadors Apology for His Chinese Wifes Assault on Shop Worker

The Belgian ambassador to South Korea apologized on April 22 for his wifes assault on a clothing store assistant in Seoul, after CCTV footage spread on social media.

Peter Lescouhiers Chinese wife, Xiang Xueqiu, slapped a female shop assistant. Her co-worker had suspected Xiang of shoplifting as she left the store.

Lescouhier said that Xiang was currently in the hospital due to a sudden stroke, and that she will cooperate with a police investigation into the incident as soon as she is able.

The Ambassador of Belgium sincerely regrets the incident involving his wife which happened on April 9 and wants to apologize on her behalf, the Belgian Embassy said in a statement posted on its website and on Facebook.

No matter the circumstances, the way she reacted is unacceptable.

The day before the release of the apology statement, South Korean police confirmed that they had received a complaint and were preparing to investigate Xiang.

The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs also stated on the same day (April 21) that it had urged the Belgian Embassy to cooperate in the matter, and it would take appropriate measures based on further police investigation, according to Reuters.

The CCTV footage of the assault went viral on South Koreas social media and angered many Koreans, who demanded that Xiang apologize to the victim face to face.

The footage shows that Xiang tried on different clothes in the clothing store including trying on a pair of white pants without taking off her shoes. This alone sickened many Koreans.

She stayed in the store for about an hour then left without making a purchase. A female assistant followed her out of the shop, because the clothes she wore looked similar to store items. The assistant checked Xiangs clothes and offered an apology when she realized Xiang was wearing her own clothes.

Xiang followed the assistant back into the shop, pointing her finger and yelling at her. Another female employee tried to intervene but, Xiang pushed her out of the way then suddenly slapped her on the face. The employees cheek turned red and swollen, prompting the store owner to notify the police.

The police verified the identity of Xiang as the ambassadors wife, but since family members of diplomats have immunity, the police did not detain her. Xiang left the store without apologizing to the clerk.

South Korean media quoted the victim as saying, I didnt know who the woman was when I was assaulted, but she looked confident and didnt seem to feel sorry.

Korean nationals did not accept the Belgian ambassadors apology on behalf of his wife. Many people left comments below the embassys Facebook post, asking why Xiang had the physical strength to beat other people, but could not apologize for her actions.

Korean nationals did not accept the apology of the Belgian ambassador on behalf of his wife. Many people left comments below the embassys Facebook post to express their anger. (Screenshot from Facebook)

Some also suspect that Xiang is trying to evade police investigation by claiming she is hospitalized, implying she looked very healthy when hitting the shop worker.

Others called on President Moon Jae-in to expel the Belgian ambassador, and some went to the Belgian embassy in Seoul to protest, demanding that the Belgian ambassador return to Belgium.

Korean nationals also searched Xiangs personal profile and learned that she was born in Beijing and is now 63 years old. Xiang had worked in Chinese foreign affairs agencies and met Lescouhier in Beijing.

A Chinese netizen left a comment under a Chinese-language news program about the incident, linking Xiangs behavior with Kong Linlin, a female reporter for Chinese state media CGTN. Kong had slapped an activist with Britains governing Conservative Party during a public debate over Hong Kong.

They are the same type of people. They are accustomed to being arrogant and ignoring rules. Thats why they behave like abnormal people in other countries, the netizen wrote.
Global economic performance post-pandemic will, for better or worse, be affected by the success or otherwise of China. Photo: Le Toan

Ballooning exports have helped Chinas GDP grow a record 18.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2021, rebounding from the 6.8 per cent contraction in the same period last year at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Nikkei Asia reported that the figure released earlier this month by the National Bureau of Statistics topped median estimates. Chinas GDP growth for January-March followed a 6.5 per cent gain in the final quarter of 2020.

The astonishing growth figure is the highest since China began to publish quarterly data in 1992. The greater demand by trading partners in the midst of the pandemic has fuelled both Chinese industrial production and investments.

Exports jumped 49 per cent during the quarter to $710 billion, while imports rose 28 per cent to $593.6 billion.

Exports to the United States and Europe in particular also surged. Chinas trade surplus with the US grew to near-record levels late last year, while Eurostat reported that China was the only country to increase its exports to the EU in 2020, helping it overtake the US for the first time to become Europes largest trading partner.

China projected 6 per cent GDP growth for 2021 as a whole, as part of the first year of the governments 5-year economic plan. Policymakers envision growth from domestic consumption driven by national development of advanced technologies. But economists expect growth to fall back in the coming quarters.

There is a possibility that we may not sustain the rapid growth because of the economic condition in other countries, Rui Mingjie, a professor of industrial economics at Fudan University in Shanghai, told Nikkei Asia.

DHgate, a Beijing-based international e-commerce service provider, said the demand for Chinese household goods, womens apparel, and wearable devices jumped at least threefold during the first quarter.

The company, whose biggest export markets include the US, France, and Italy, expects the demand to grow with the coronavirus pandemic under control in some countries.

In the next three quarters, outdoor equipment, consumer electronics, health and beauty, and pet products will grow faster, said Diane Wang, chairwoman of DHGate.

Regional knock-on effects

Southeast Asian countries exports are meanwhile growing on the back of Chinas sharp rebound from the pandemic, latest official statistics show, brightening the regions economic picture.

For ASEAN, Chinas growth pace is a key external factor, as most countries are entrenched in Chinese supply chains. China accounted for 14.2 per cent of total ASEAN exports in 2019 just before the pandemic hit, according to the ASEAN Secretariat, topping the US at 12.9 per cent and the EU at 10.8 per cent. Now China is providing a tailwind with brisk growth and a fairly steady outlook.

For example in Singapore, the city-states benchmark non-oil domestic exports grew 12.1 per cent in March compared to a year earlier, according to official data released a fortnight ago.

As for China-bound non-oil exports, the figure grew 46.4 per cent, surpassing a 17.3 per cent rise in February, thanks to an increase in machinery and petrochemicals. It is welcome relief for Singapore, which suffered a record 5.4 per cent GDP contraction last year.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, total exports grew over 30 per cent on-year in March  the highest rate in nearly four years  thanks to improving conditions in key trading partners, especially China. Indonesias statistics authorities said that during the three months through March, China remained the largest export destination.

Malaysia has yet to announce data for March, but exports to China grew over 35 per cent in February, underpinned by higher exports of electronic products, petroleum, and liquefied natural gas, the government said.

Thailands exports to China also increased 14 per cent in February.

Vietnam has also reported its March trade figures, showing a 24 per cent on-year increase in overall exports, according to global economic data forecasters CEIC.

In Q1 as a whole, Vietnams total export turnover from China hit $12.5 billion, up 34.3 per cent on-year, and the import turnover from the market reached $23.8 billion, up 47.3 per cent on-year. As much as 30.8 per cent of Vietnams imports are from China.

Across much of Southeast Asia, exports slumped early last year due to the pandemic lockdowns, except for essential supplies such as pharmaceutical products.

Some export-oriented economies, particularly Singapore and Thailand, had already been feeling the effects of a global trade slowdown due to US-China tensions.

On the other hand, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has raised hopes for greater trade momentum in the region. The 15-member trade accord, signed last November, encompasses ASEAN, Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

Just over a week ago China completed its official RCEP ratification process, becoming only the second country to do so after Singapore. The members of what would be Asias biggest trade pact expect it to take effect in January next year.

Resilient to shocks

Ge Hongliang, deputy director with the College of ASEAN Studies at Guangxi University for Nationalities, told Global Times, Vietnams recent economic growth is directly related to Chinas economy. From January to November 2019, before the pandemic hit, the trade volume between China and Vietnam reached $145.54 billion, up 8 per cent on-year. It indicated deepening ties between the two countries industrial chains.

Financial data group VietnamCredit last year outlined some factors regarding the relationship between Vietnam and Chinas economy.

China is the second-largest economy in the world and shares a border of over 1,200km with Vietnam. Trade relations between the two countries are a necessity, and if there is a correct strategy, it will be beneficial for the development of both countries, expert Henry Tran at Vietnam Credit said.

However, in this relationship, Vietnam has always suffered from a trade deficit and the situation is not improving. The reason behind this is that Vietnams methods have hardly changed over the years as production always depends on imported inputs.

However, there are also prospects for Vietnam to increase attraction of Chinese investors. Writing for the Asia and the Pacific Policy Society, Heimkhemra Suy, a Monitoring and Evaluation advisor based in Cambodia noted, Chinese investors are more likely to invest in Vietnam rather than Cambodia because of the recent free trade agreement it signed with the EU, as well as Vietnams economic proximity, size, and competitive labour resources and productivity.

These links between export-import and foreign direct investment in terms of China has concerned policymakers and experts, especially in the pandemic era and alongside US-China tensions, but most agree that Vietnams extensive international integration over the years remains the correct path forward.

Shifting diplomatic relationships around the world may also present new opportunities for Southeast Asia as a whole, as nations elsewhere also look to back away from reliance on just one market.

Countries like Australia have also been trying to seek out solutions to diversify its economy and rely less on the Chinese market, and that could eventually bring the former closer to Vietnam in terms of economic ties, according to Melbourne-based political analyst Grant Wyeth writing for The Diplomat.

Last year clearly demonstrated why overreliance on China is a pressing problem, with Australian barley, beef, seafood, coal, and wine all targeted with either import bans or excessive tariffs, Wyeth explained.

While Vietnam may lack the population of the likes of India and China, its realignment over the past several decades away from a planning economy and towards an internationally-engaged mixed economy has afforded Vietnam sustained economic growth, and considerably increased its populations living standards, he added.

Facilitating the emergence of Asian economies has been a smart and thus far successful strategy for Australia, and forming a closer bond with Vietnam should be considered a priority, Wyeth added.

Two-way trade between Australia and China, of course, will never realistically be matched but there is potential for further growth of Australias trade with Vietnam, he said, pointing out that although there is not yet a bilateral agreement between the two nations, both countries are signed up to the RCEP as well as the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, and also the ASEAN Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement.
A supermarket employee who showed off his 'swastika' tattoo at work has won his unfair dismissal case after a judge ruled he should have been give a 'stern warning' instead.

Lidl caretaker Istvan Horvarth won an unfair dismissal claim after the budget chain sacked him from his job at the Telford Hadley store in Shropshire after he showed the tattoo to a colleague.

Horvarth, originally from Hungary, argued it was actually a 'Buddhist peace symbol'.

But this was challenged by Lidl chiefs, whose research revealed that the angle of the tattoo resembeled the Nazi symbol rather than the similar-looking Buddhist sign.

Despite this, Horvarth appealed his sacking. And now a judge ruled in Horvarth's favour.

He is now in line for compensation after a judge concluded that while the swastika was offensive, bosses at Lidl - who said his behaviour was 'massively inappropriate' - should not have sacked him.

Judge Ian Miller instead said he should have received a warning about the company's uniform policy,

Lidl employee Istvan Horvarth won an unfair dismissal claim after the budget chain sacked him after he showed the tattoo to a colleague

An employment tribunal in Birmingham heard that Mr Horvarth started worked at the Telford Hadley store as a caretaker in 2013.

In April 2019 a colleague - identified only as MB - complained that he had approached him on his second shift at the store to ask about his tattoos.

He claimed Mr Horvarth then showed him his swastika tattoo whilst laughing and saying it was his country's national symbol.

Do you know Istvan Horvarth or did you work with him? Contact us via email: james.robinson@mailonline.co.uk Advertisement

The colleague said: '(Horvarth) exposed the top of his arm and shoulder and pointed to a tattoo of the swastika symbol.

'I thought it was disgusting for someone to brazenly show it as a proud symbol.

'I come from a military background so I was not impressed for that to be displayed so publicly in a company that promotes equality and the acceptance of people from different backgrounds.'

MB added that he saw other far right symbols tattooed on Mr Horvarth and that the swastika was surrounded by barbed wire.

This colleague reported the incident to boss Craig Taylor who suspended Mr Horvarth after also receiving a complaint that he had kicked another colleague.

The supermarket worker who was allegedly kicked complained to Mr Taylor upon hearing about the swastika tattoo incident, saying that because she is gay the fact that he showed off the hate symbol made her 'uncomfortable.'

The supermarket's investigation determined that the symbol on Mr Horvarth's arm was in fact a Nazi swastika rather than, as he claimed, a Buddhist symbol, because it was rotated clockwise tilted at a 45 degree angle.

He was fired after the investigation by Mr Taylor led to a disciplinary hearing conducted by Lidl Area Manager Andrew Shaw.

The supermarket's investigation determined that the symbol on Mr Horvarth's arm was in fact a Nazi swastika (like the one pictured here) because it was rotated clockwise tilted at a 45 degree angle.

Mr Shaw said in his evidence as to why he fired Mr Horvarth: 'These are sensitive issues and I felt it was massively inappropriate for (Horvarth to be) behaving this way.

'I felt that him showing the tattoos at work was damaging to Lidl's reputation.'

Mr Taylor said that Mr Horvarth would often make references to his Hungarian culture and how powerful the country used to be.

'(Horvarth) would always make reference his culture and how powerful they used to be and how much land they used to have,' he said.

'He used to make reference to his race a lot and would say things like Hungary used to rule the world.'

Employment Judge Ian Miller agreed that the symbol was offensive and that Lidl's research into the tattoo did show that it resembled a swastika.

Judge Miller said: 'Clearly it is beyond any sensible doubt that a Nazi swastika is offensive to most people for obvious reasons.'

But he ruled that a 'stern warning about uniform policy' would have been more reasonable than firing Mr Horvarth.

In relation to the kicking incident, Judge Miller said that, again, a warning to be more careful and sensitive around new employees would have been the most appropriate response to his behaviour.

Upholding his claim for unfair dismissal, the judge found that Mr Horvarth was not given the opportunity to respond to all the allegations against him during the investigation and disciplinary hearing processes.

Judge Miller also found he was fired because Mr Taylor and Mr Shaw had biased perceptions of him as a 'troublemaker' and 'bully.'

However, his claims for race discrimination were dismissed. A hearing to determine compensation will take place at a later date.
Longford tourism is set to go stateside this summer. Multi-award winning production crew, Peninsula Television visited the county from April 21 - 23 to film Ireland: County by County.

The series will be aired coast to coast on American Cable TV this Summer and will feature on inbound Aer Lingus flights reaching a potential audience of 80 million as it is syndicated around the States.

On Thursday last, the crew received a Norman welcome from Knights and Conquests General Manager Bartle DArcy and Tours and Education Officer Deirdre Orme.

We are delighted to have the opportunity to showcase our history and heritage across America. Irelands Hidden Heartlands truly is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. And at the centre of it all is Granard.

One can literally take a walk through time; from ancient sun worshipping days of King Cairbre to the ruling days of Gaelic Chieftain O Fearghail, stated Deirdre Orme.

The crew received a full guided tour of the Knights and Conquests Exhibition centre by Bartle and got to grips with Norman times while also coming right up to speed with Ireland's more recent past.

After which the crew ascended the Motte to interview Deirdre and capture the breathtaking views of three provinces, nine different counties and five different lakes.

All filming was conducted in compliance with Covid-19 Safety Protocols.
IOWA FALLS, Iowa - A north Iowa college student died in a drowning incident Tuesday night, prompting Ellsworth Community College to cancel activities Wednesday.

Iowa Falls police said it received a 911 call at 6:21 p.m. reporting a male in distress after jumping into the Iowa River.

At 9:55 p.m., emergency crews were able to recover the body of an adult male.

The Des Moines Register reported that the deceased male is Robert Givens, Jr., 21.

Givens was listed on the school's website as a wrestler.

The Iowa Falls Police Department and Hardin County Sheriffs Office were assisted by the Iowa Falls Fire Department, Iowa Falls Ambulance, Hardin County E-Squad, Iowa State Patrol, Alden Fire Department, Hardin County Emergency Management, Franklin County Emergency Management, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Story County Dive Team, Story County UAS, Hardin County Medical Examiners Office and several citizen volunteers with their boats and sonar detection equipment.
In recent weeks, there have been two so-called "non-papers" on sensitive political issues that have whipped up part of the Western Balkans into a state of frenzy.

Whats different about these discussion papers, compared to the ones that usually swirl around the corridors of Brussels, is that very few, if any, European politicians and diplomats seem to actually possess this pair of documents.

This indicates a couple of things: that things appear to be moving in the region, especially between Serbia and Kosovo, and that someone either wants to test the waters with various ideas or, perhaps more sinisterly, wreck things.

Non-papers are part and parcel of the Brussels process. There are usually hundreds of them circulating among diplomats, dealing with every kind of issue.

The whole idea of the exercise is to stimulate discussions within the bloc and come up with fresh ideas in an informal way. A non-paper is not an official document signed by anyone or approved via a vote in an elected chamber; hence the term.

All of these non-papers normally have two things in common:

First, they are quite anodyne, written by officials and bureaucrats about something very specific and often not of earthshaking significance.

Secondly, the country that has authored a non-paper usually likes to have others on board so it carries a bit more weight; therefore, they are usually quite happy to share the non-paper. You want to have some publicity for your brilliant ideas, after all.

But the two alleged non-papers that have surfaced in the media in recent weeks dont follow any of these patterns.

The first non-paper is the most striking one. It has been dubbed the "Slovenian non-paper" after a Bosnian news site earlier this month alleged that Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa gave it to European Council President Charles Michel.

Written without regard to the cautious diplomatic-speak of Brussels, it unashamedly proposes the redrawing of the borders of the former Yugoslavia, plus Albania, along ethnic lines. The paper has continued to live on in the media due to the failure of Jansa to deny its existence, even though he has vehemently stated that he didn't write it or send it around, and by the inability of Michels office to confirm or deny that they have received it.

The other non-paper, published in Kosovar-based media earlier this week, is slicker. Stating that it is a Franco-German non-paper, it outlines a future final settlement in the ongoing dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. There arent too many new elements in it, apart from stating that a deal should be done by February 2022 and that a special regional district in the Serb-dominated north of Kosovo is envisaged.

France and Germany quickly denied they had written the non-paper. But they also did not rule out that such a non-paper may exist, which further increased speculation.

There are some striking similarities between the two documents that separate them from traditional non-papers.

For starters, they lack titles and dates and no one in Brussels appears to have copies -- making diplomats jokingly refer to them as "the non non-papers" or "the phantom papers." It is odd that the "Slovenian non-paper" was reportedly only given to Michel and no one else (and equally odd that his office can neither confirm nor dismiss this) and strange that the Franco-German non-paper seems to emanate from Pristina but hasnt traveled any farther.

Of the two, the Franco-German non-paper might be seen as a trial balloon, even if we are unlikely to ever find out who let it fly. There are, however, some question marks: Why spell out your endgame? You might want to highlight the steps needed to achieve something, but why reveal all of your cards at once? Also, France and Germany hardly see eye-to-eye when it comes to the Western Balkans, with Berlin being quite active in bringing the region closer to the EU, while France has been openly skeptical in this regard, seeing enlargement of the union as an obstacle to its main goal of further deepening the bloc by taking on even more joint debt or having more European defense cooperation.

For the Slovenian non-paper, speculation is rife that it was leaked and published to undermine the government in Ljubljana ahead of its EU presidency later this year, or that Hungary might be behind it.

European officials have said privately that they suspect Russia might have had a hand in it, to sow confusion and doubt. And when one considers that journalists keep asking question about the document and that politicians are forced, time and again, to state their support for the territorial integrity of the Western Balkan states, it certainly has accomplished that.

Either way, the non-papers -- real or not -- indicate that things are finally happening again in the region.

In Albin Kurti and Aleksandar Vucic, Kosovo and Serbia now have two strongly backed leaders with a mandate to reach a deal if they so wish. Germany might be heading into an uncertain election in the autumn but remains committed to the talks regardless of the outcome of the vote. But look out for French President Emmanuel Macron, who faces what appears to be a nervously tight face-off against nationalist Marine Le Pen in the French elections next spring.

Macron postponed North Macedonias march toward the EU a couple of years ago due to local elections in France. The stakes are even higher this time around -- meaning that a window to strike a Belgrade-Pristina deal might be open now, but not for too much longer.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:47:42|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar and his Syrian counterpart Bassam Touma discussed here on Thursday the possibility of transporting Egyptian natural gas to Iraq through the Syrian territories.

A statement by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil said that Abdul-Jabbar received in his office Touma and his accompanying delegation, and the two sides "discussed issues of common interest and future visions regarding the benefiting from the Egyptian gas and the possibility of transporting it through the Syrian territories."

Abdul-Jabbar said that the move to benefit from the Egyptian gas came as Iraq is keen to strengthen its relations with the countries of the region and the world in all fields, the statement said.

For his part, Touma said that his talks with Abdul-Jabbar "included ideas and visions for future projects, cooperation in training, and exchange of experiences," according to the statement.

It is worth noting that Iraq depends mainly on imported Iranian natural gas to produce electric power, but due to the unpaid bills, Iran slashed the supply of natural gas to Iraq, causing an acute electricity shortage.

Moreover, Iraq is under pressure from the United States to stop importing gas from Iran, which is subject to U.S. sanctions, but Iraqi officials have repeatedly said that they need more time to find an alternative source. Enditem
Mondi plc

Incorporated in England and Wales

Registered number: 6209386

Tax registration number: 454 12394 14454

LEI: 213800LOZA69QFDC9N34

LSE share code: MNDI ISIN: GB00B1CRLC47

JSE share code: MNP

29 April 2021

Mondi Group - 2020 Final Dividend euro/sterling Exchange Rate

On 25 February 2021 Mondi plc announced that it will, subject to shareholder approval at the AGM, pay a final dividend for the year ended 31 December 2020 of 41.00 euro cents per ordinary share on Thursday 13 May 2021. The dividend will be paid in euro.

However, ordinary shareholders resident in the United Kingdom will receive the final dividend in sterling (unless shareholders have elected to receive their dividends in euro). The last date for euro currency elections was 23 April 2021. It was stated in the announcement on 25 February that the exchange rate for the final dividend payment would be set today. Accordingly, it is confirmed that sterling dividend payments will be converted at a rate of EUR 1 to GBP 0.86907. Therefore, the equivalent final dividend in pence per ordinary share will be 35.63187.

Mondi plc South African branch register shareholders will receive the final dividend in South African rand cents, converted at a rate of EUR 1 to ZAR 17.91045. Therefore, the equivalent gross final dividend in rand cents per ordinary share will be 734.32845.

Information relating to the dividend tax applicable to Mondi plc South African branch register shareholders can be found in the ZAR/euro exchange rate announcement released by Mondi on 25 February 2021.

About Mondi

Mondi is a global leader in packaging and paper, contributing to a better world by making innovative packaging and paper solutions that are sustainable by design. Our business is integrated across the value chain - from managing forests and producing pulp, paper and plastic films, to developing and manufacturing effective industrial and consumer packaging solutions. Sustainability is at the centre of our strategy and intrinsic in the way we do business. We lead the industry with our customer-centric approach, EcoSolutions, where we ask the right questions to find the most sustainable solution. In 2020, Mondi had revenues of 6.66 billion and underlying EBITDA of 1.35 billion.

Mondi has a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange (MNDI), and a secondary listing on the JSE Limited (MNP). Mondi is a FTSE 100 constituent, and has been included in the FTSE4Good Index Series since 2008 and the FTSE/JSE Responsible Investment Index Series since 2007.

Sponsor in South Africa: UBS South Africa (Pty) Ltd
A Hanoi court Thursday found Hoang guilty of "violating regulations on management and use of state assets, causing loss and waste."

Hoang, 67, did not show up at the court for the sentencing because of health problems. He was present through the four-day trial.

Phan Chi Dung, former head of the Light Industry Department at the ministry got nine years for the same charges.

The defendants violations involved mismanagement of a land plot of 6,000 square meters in downtown HCMC. The plot, estimated to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, has become private property after several illegal transfers.

The wrongdoings were unearthed in November 2018 when authorities were investigating former vice chairman of the HCMC People's Committee, Nguyen Huu Tin.

According to the investigators, Ho Thi Kim Thoa, as former deputy minister, knew in 2016 that the land plot on Hai Ba Trung Street in District 1 was arranged to be assigned to Vietnams largest brewery Sabeco, under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, for it to invest and build a six-star hotel and convention center.

While both Thoa and Hoang knew that Sabeco was not allowed to establish a new entity to use the land allotted to it, she got the former minister to permit the establishment of the Sabeco Pearl Company.

Based on Hoangs approval and Thoas direction, Phan Dang Tuat, board chairman and head of the state capital management board at Sabeco, signed a letter to the HCMC People's Committee, requesting approval for Sabeco Pearl to own the project.

He also asked HCMC authorities to let Sabeco Pearl perform financial obligations and for Sabeco to transfer its land use right to the newly formed joint venture.

Thoa took advantage of the government's capital divestment policy and under Hoangs direction, signed two documents for Sabeco to divest its 26 percent stake in Sabeco Pearl and approved a starting auction price of VND13,347 ($0.58) a share. Hoang also directed the divestment procedure and auction price approval to be expedited.

These actions led officials at departments of HCMC People's Committee to advise the city's former vice chairman Nguyen Huu Tin to approve lease of the prime land to Sabeco Pearl in contravention of regulations, leading to the land becoming a private property.

The Me Linh Square Investment Joint Stock Company, which used to be Sabeco Pearl, a wholly private company, is currently the owner of the plot.

Inspectors concluded that the actions of Hoang, Thoa and their accomplices have cost the exchequer more than VND2.7 trillion ($117.18 million).

Hoang was the industry minister from 2007 to 2016 under Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dungs cabinet.

Throughout the trial, Hoang only admitted his responsibility as the head of the industry ministry, saying that the main responsibility is this case was that of Thoa and Sabeco as Thoa was the direct manager of the firm when the violations took place.

Thoa is absconding, having fled the country.

The court also handed out sentences for eight others in the case. These are former municipal officials who were also found guilty of violating land management regulations.

Nguyen Huu Tin got 6.5 years; Lam Nguyen Khoi, former director of the Department of Planning and Investment, 4.5 years; Dao Anh Kiet, former director of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment, five years; and Le Van Thanh, former head of the citys office, four years.

The violations of the defendants were particularly serious, the court said. They had high professional qualifications and management experience, yet committed illegal acts for a long time, intentionally violating regulations on state property, causing serious consequences, it added.

The court also ruled that the land plot on Hai Ba Trung Street will be transferred to the city administration.

Of four other defendants, officials of agencies under the municipal departments, three were given jail terms of 3-3.5 years each and one received a 30-month probation.
Parliaments Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources and Energy has voted against an investigation into the Department of Energys Risk Mitigation IPP Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP).

This vote came after the DAs shadow minister of mineral resources and energy, Kevin Mileham proposed the probe.

Mileham also called on Minister Gwede Mantashe to come clean about the real basis of the Karpowership SA bid, and why the RMIPPPP was set up to favour this solution.

Two-thirds of the new emergency risk mitigation power programme  1,220MW of the 1,845MW  went to Karpowership SA.

This decision is facing severe criticism from energy experts for its high cost, the lack of local gas resources, and the negative impact on the environment.

The CSIR estimated that Karpowership SA can get as much as R218 billion from the 20-year deal.

Energy expert Chris Yelland added that the liquid gas for the powerships will need to be imported and paid for in US Dollars.

Currency fluctuations and the price for liquefied natural gas can therefore significantly influence the future cost of the project.

Another problem with the Karpowership SA bid is that South Africa will never own the powerships as they are rented from Karpowership SA.

It is not a South African asset, and all the money goes abroad to the Turkish Karadeniz Energy Group, Yelland said.

Mileham added that George Mokoena, former special advisor to ex-State Security Ministers David Mahlobo and Bongani Bongo, is involved in the Karpowership SA deal.

This, Mileham argued, calls into question the legitimacy of the powerships as a solution to South Africas electricity crisis.

The Daily Maverick reported that Mokoena is a 20% shareholder in Powergroup SA, the BEE partner to the Karadeniz which is behind Karpowership SA.

Mileham said the BEE shareholding is highly questionable because there is little local benefit to leasing these powerships for a 20 year period.

It appears to be little more than fronting to line the pockets of the connected few. In comparison, other RMIPPPP projects are investing significantly in infrastructure and local manufacturing, he said.

Mileham said the DA demanded that the records of the bid adjudication be made public, as well as the minutes of any deliberations in which the various bidders were evaluated.

While we acknowledge the urgent need to secure a consistent and viable electricity supply for our country, this cannot come at the expense of our environment or our values as a country, he said.

We have seen the damage that politically connected contracts have done at Medupi and Khusile. South Africa cannot afford to be locked into a long-term deal with Tenderpreneurs.

Mileham failed to convince most members of the Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources and Energy, who voted along party lines.

Karpowership SA director, Sechaba Moletsane said they are currently going through all administrative processes which are required to bring the solution to South Africa.

This includes environmental and related permits needed to operate liquified natural gas (LNG) powerships in the country.

He sidestepped questions about the fact that powerships are not as clean as other solutions like solar and wind power.

Instead, he said gas was included in the International Resource Plan (IRP2019) as a necessity for South Africas energy future. Karpowership SA is merely fulfilling that need.

Moletsane previously highlighted that they are working to comply with all environmental legislation and to prevent or mitigate any environmental risk identified as part of the EIA process.

We are fully compliant and, in many instances, well below the limits set out in both international and SA environmental regulations, he said.

He added that solar and wind power do not fulfil the requirement of baseload power, which is needed in this round of the risk mitigation programme.

There must be a lot of power dispatchable throughout the day. LNG as a dispatchable fuel for our power is actually assisting the renewable energy programme because it stabilises the grid, he said.

He said the project will create 1,000 jobs and they will invest at least R18 billion directly into local economy.
A Southwest Airlines flight attendant is suing the airline after her husband died of COVID-19 following a training session in which she says she caught the virus.

Carol Madden, 69, said her airline utterly failed to implement the most basic precautions to safeguard the health and wellbeing during a mandatory training session last July at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Shes asking for $3 million in damages.

Her lawsuit says that she was exposed to COVID-19 during the training and that both she and her husband were positively diagnosed a few days later. Maddens husband, William, died a month later.

According to her lawsuit, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines failed to enforce guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding social distancing, cleaning surfaces and enforcing what kind of masks to wear. It also alleges that the carrier didnt communicate with flight attendants at the training after other employees there came down with the virus.

Had Ms. Madden not attended and participated in the BWI training conducted by Southwest, Ms. Madden would not have contracted the illness, Mr. Madden would not have contracted the illness, and Mr. Madden would be alive today, the lawsuit said.

Maddens husband, 72-year-old William Madden, was a retired railroad worker. Carol Madden lives in Pennsylvania and filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Maryland, where the training took place. USA Today first reported the lawsuit.

The flight attendants suit broaches the worrying liability that employers have faced over the past year in regards to COVID-19. Millions of employees have been working from home to limit the spread of the virus that has killed more than 569,000 people to date in the U.S., according to the CDC.

Airlines such as Southwest mandated that employees and customers wear masks and touted high-powered air filters and cleaning standards to convince travelers it was safe to fly. Southwest was among those that blocked middle-seat sales for much of the pandemic so travelers wouldnt have to sit next to strangers.

Such fears and restrictions have led in part to disastrous financial results that caused airlines to lose $35 billion in 2020 and continued losses in 2021. Business travel is still minuscule and Southwest leaders said last week that major corporate clients are only now starting to show interest in traveling again.

Maddens lawsuit said many of those precautions disappeared inside the confines of Southwests training space at BWI Airport.

In response to Maddens lawsuit, Southwests lawyers wrote:

Southwest is incredibly sympathetic to the many people worldwide, including Carol Madden, who have lost family members to COVID-19. However, the blame laid on Ms. Maddens employer for the death of her husband in the complaint is misplaced.

Southwest also denied Maddens allegations that the airline failed to take precautions to protect flight attendants during the training.

Crew members at Southwest and other airlines had complained last summer that contract tracing efforts were slow. It often would take one or two weeks for an employee to receive a positive COVID-19 test and notify the company, then for the airlines to trace contacts and notify other potentially exposed crew members.

Madden said she found out through social media that other people in the class were sick and infected with COVID-19, and she notified the company that she was sick and showing symptoms. A full two weeks after the training, Madden said, she was notified by the airline that she was exposed, but that her required quarantine period was over.

Courts have been busy fielding COVID-19 liability cases since the pandemic began a year ago, but few plaintiffs have been able to make progress without significant evidence that employers intentionally disregarded health and safety recommendations, said Scott Warrick, a human resources law consultant who advises business clients on risks such as COVID-19.

There was a major effort by congressional Republicans last fall to pass COVID-19 civil liability protections for employers, but Warrick said those efforts were largely unnecessary because its been rare for workers to successfully sue their employers for getting sick.

There are cases where there are horrible employees and they didnt want to follow any of the OSHA or CDC standards, Warrick said. But the courts have consistently thrown out these kinds of cases.
BISHKEK -- Raimbek Matraimov, the controversial former deputy chief of the Kyrgyz Customs Service who was placed on the U.S. Magnitsky sanctions list for his involvement in the illegal funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars abroad, has withdrawn his libel lawsuit against RFE/RL, its former correspondent, and two other media outlets.

Lawyer Akmat Alagushev -- who represents RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Radio Azattyk, its former reporter Ali Toktakunov, and the Klopp and 24.kg news agencies -- told RFE/RL that a court in Bishkek ruled on April 27 that the case had been closed due to a move by Matraimov's lawyers to withdraw the lawsuit.

Matraimov and his family filed the libel lawsuit after the media outlets published a 2019 investigation by RFE/RL, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and Kloop implicating him in a corruption scheme involving the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars out of Kyrgyzstan by Chinese-born Uyghur businessman Aierken Saimaiti, who was subsequently assassinated in Istanbul in November 2019.

"RFE/RL's award-winning investigative reporting into Mr. Matraimov's corrupt dealings has always spoken clearly for itself," the broadcaster's president, Jamie Fly, said in a statement.

"Our intrepid journalists reported this story despite months of serious threats, online harassment, and an organized pressure campaign. We continue to call on the Kyrgyz government to investigate those who threaten journalists and hold them accountable for their actions," he added.

The court decided to stop the libel suit less than two weeks after Kyrgyzstan's State Committee for National Security (UKMK) said that the corruption probe against Matraimov had been halted, as investigators failed to find any cash or property belonging to Matraimov or members of his family abroad.

When Matraimov was rearrested in February, the UKMK said he was being held as a suspect for laundering money through the purchase of real estate in China, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

A Bishkek court in February ordered pretrial custody for Matraimov in connection with the corruption charges after hundreds of Kyrgyz protested a previous ruling mitigating a sentence after a guilty plea to no jail time and fines of just a few thousand dollars.

The court justified the mitigated sentence by saying that Matraimov had paid back around $24 million that disappeared through schemes that he oversaw.

That decision was based on an economic-amnesty law passed in December that allows individuals who obtained financial assets through illegal means to avoid prosecution by turning the assets over to the State Treasury.

The idea of economic amnesty was announced in October by Sadyr Japarov, then acting Kyrgyz president, just a day after Matraimov was detained and placed under house arrest.

Japarov has since been elected president on a pledge to stamp out graft and enact reforms. Japarov also championed a new constitution -- approved by voters earlier this month -- that expands the power of the president.

Critics say the amnesty legislation was proposed and hastily prepared by lawmakers to allow Matraimov and others to avoid a conviction for corruption, while the constitutional changes create an authoritarian system and concentrating too much power in the hands of the president.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the estimated $700 million scheme involved a company controlled by Matraimov bribing officials to skirt customs fees and regulations, as well as engaging in money laundering, "allowing for maximum profits."

A U.S. report on human rights around the world, released in March, spotlighted threats to freedom of expression and a free press in Kyrgyzstan.

In a section on respect for civil liberties, including freedom of the press, the State Department noted threats to journalists involved in that report, which implicated Matraimov.

In January, the 49-year-old Matraimov changed his last name to Ismailov, while his wife, Uulkan Turgunova, changed her family name to Sulaimanova. The moves, confirmed to RFE/RL by a spokesperson for Kyrgyzstan's state registration service, were seen as an attempt to evade the U.S.- imposed sanctions.

There has been no official statement from Matraimov or his lawyers to explain the name change.
ALBERT LEA, Minn. - The owner of the popular Albert Lea Restaurant "The Interchange Wine & Coffee Bistro" is continuing her battle against Minnesota's Covid-19 restrictions with an event called 'Stand For Liberty' Saturday from 2-7 p.m.

Lisa Hanson is facing several charges for opening her business to indoor dining when it was temporarily banned under pandemic executive order. Hanson says this event is a stand to what she calls a misuse of power by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

"We're in this fight for liberties and freedoms for all," Hanson said.

The 'Stand For Liberty' event, held at Fountain Lake, will feature Republican speakers such as gubernatorial candidate Dr. Scott Jensen, Minnesota State Rep. Erik Mortensen and Sen. Mark Koran.

Hanson says the event is aimed to bring like-minded people together.

"Educate, first of all, give hope and encouragement for those who are like-minded that want to see us regain our liberties and freedoms," she said.

Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chairman Ken Martin issued a statement condemning Jensen's appearance, saying he has pushed dangerous conspiracy theories about the virus.

Brian Evans, communications director of the DFL, says the party fears more people may follow in Hanson's footsteps.

"If everyone violates them, if nobody listens to them, then this pandemic tears through the state of Minnesota," Evans said. "It tears through our country and a lot more people lose their lives."

Hanson says she's not afraid of the consequences of making a public appearance. With two misdemeanor warrants out for her arrest for failing to make a court hearing, she understands she could be detained Saturday.

"It's worth the risk absolutely and I do probably expect to be arrested," she said. We have a boatload of cases that keep me busy every single day, many hours a day, this is my work now."

Hanson said she has not turned herself into police because she says she has not received a court summons. A civil lawsuit has been filed by the State of Minnesota and criminal charges have been filed in Freeborn County.
We hope the district drills down, and is looking at the reasons students are not coming to school and what (CPS) can do to get them to come back in, Jennie Biggs, a spokeswoman for the advocacy Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education, said Thursday.
Bridget Reed, Head of Content at GR0 I love working in organic SEO because I succeed by helping other women in tech succeed.

Built In has announced that Bridget Reed, Head of Content at GR0, was honored in its 2021 Moxie Awards. The annual awards program recognizes 50 outstanding women in tech who have made outsized contributions to their places of work, communities and the industry as a whole. GR0, a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles. GR0 specializes in search engine optimization through the creation of compelling online content to help brands own their audiences.

Built Ins open call for nominations saw more than 400 applications this year. An esteemed panel of judges, all women who joined in a shared mission to empower women in tech, reviewed the nominations and chose the 50 women who they believe showed the most moxie  a combination of courage, determination, energy and know-how. The winners of the 2021 program show outsized passion, achieve excellence in their respective fields and uplift other women.

These women raise the bar for what it means to be a rising leader in technology, says Sheridan Orr, Chief Marketing Officer, Built In. Their courage, determination, energy and know-how will drive them to the pinnacle of their careers in tech, and motivate other women to do the same along the way.

Kevin Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of GR0, concurred: This recognition couldnt go to a more deserving employee whose work and contributions we consider to be a model for excellence.

Reed, a mother of three with a B.A. of Business Administration from St. Petersburg College, has played a crucial role in digital marketing agency GR0s first year. She works to create engaging and purposeful content that helps brands rank on Google, and receives high accolades from her colleges for supporting them. As a wife and mother of three, Reed exudes passion in her work at GR0 and motivates those around her, while also delivering impressive results.

Im honored to be recognized by Built In as a 2021 Moxie Award winner. The tech world is a dynamic industry, and there's no better place to be than at a company like GR0. I love working in organic SEO because I succeed by helping other women in tech succeed. Here's to many more years of professional and personal growth in tech! says Reed.

Built Ins Moxie Awards Program was eligible for individual contributors, managers, directors and VPs  those with room to grow in their careers  who work in the technology industry. Moxie Award nominations were accepted for any person who identifies as woman, whether through gender identity, gender expression or sex.

You can learn more about all of Built Ins 2021 Moxie Award winners here.

ABOUT BUILT IN

Built Ins mission is to connect the world through a shared passion for tech and the human need for purpose. The technology recruitment platform helps 1,800 customers of all sizes attract best-in-class talent to their technical roles of the future. Through content and digital recruitment solutions, Built In amplifies these companies brands, whether they want to be known as national, local or remote employers of choice, or leaders in DEI. Monthly, 2.5 million tech professionals visit Built In to read our industry coverage, including trends and breaking news, and discover stories about companies with missions they want to join. The venture-backed platform has been included in Deloittes Technology Fast 500 for two consecutive years and was included in the 2020 Inc. 5000 list. http://www.builtin.com

ABOUT BUILT INS MOXIE AWARDS

Built Ins Moxie Awards ran for seven years, highlighting the most innovative companies in Chicago tech before pausing in 2018. The program returned in 2021 to honor outstanding women in tech across the nation. The program recognizes up-and-coming women in tech and tech-adjacent roles who go above and beyond in their organizations and the industry as a whole.


[April 29, 2021] Reducing Prison Risks Through AI-Based Threat Intelligence

NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Originally written for Corrections1 by Johnmichael O'Hare, sales and business development director of Cobwebs Technologies. From federal and states prison to local jails, corrections personnel face a common problem: understanding who, exactly, they are bringing into their facilities. Does the newcomer pose a safety risk to other inmates or corrections officers? Is the arriving prisoner affiliated with a gang? Needless to say, a gang member housed among his or her rivals becomes instantly "marked" for violence and an opening for all-out war. Department of corrections (DOC) investigators are on point for knowing their prisoners and preventing conflict where possible. But to do so, they face the dual challenge of investigating the criminal networks operating within the jail or prison and keeping tabs on external networks and their relationships with inmates. It is complex work with no margin for error. DOC investigators, which consist of DOC intelligence units and DOC officers, working alongside external law enforcement agencies when necessary, face a number of obstacles. They may lack ready access to actionable intelligence or become bogged down in complicated investigative processes. They may use disparate investigative solutions that fail to provide a comprehensive view of the threat landscape. Other challenges include prisoners with contraband. The list of illicit gear includes internet-enabled devices such as cell phones, which let inmates manage their enterprises while in prison. In the case of tech-savvy prisoners, cell phones provide an onramp to the deep or dark web. In those regions of the internet, which operate beneath the familiar "surface" web, threat actors can conduct business using anonymizing browsers that conceal their online activities from authorities. This brings up another technical issue: DOC investigative teams typically lack the know-how and technical tools for probing the deep and dark web. The upshot? Investigators struggle to uncover inmate affiliations, whether within a facility's walls or with external associates. As a result, prisoners can continue to manage their business dealings and interact with external networks while incarcerated. The organizational structure remains intact inside and outside the facility. The situation worsens when contraband technology is added to the mix. Cell phones can prove difficult for corrections officers to detect, which means conventional internet and dark web communications can continue uninterrupted. WANTED: TECHNOLOGY What's needed is a technology equalizer that puts DOC investigators in a better position to uncover threat actor relationships that encompass external gang members and the incarcerated population. DOC personnel, however, often go about their missions without effective technology tools that provide threat intelligence. As a consequence, the investigative process becomes slow - as does case resolution. The quality of intelligence is questionable. Crime networks persist and corrupt prison staff can continue to smuggle contraband. The reputation of the jail or prison, along with its management and employees, suffers. So, what do DOC investigators need to break up relationships between organized crime groups, or gangs, in prison and their external counterparts? Fundamentally, investigative teams should have access to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology that delivers trustworthy and actionabl intelligence. AI and ML automate the investigative process, which is critical for prisons constantly vetting arrivals. The largest complexes may process hundreds of new inmates every day.



The influx of newly incarcerated people is too large to evaluate effectively without technology assistance. With AI and ML in place, DOC investigators gain continuous situational awareness regarding threats to officers, inmates, and the facility itself. This level of protection stems from the ability of AI and ML to conduct a deep analysis of groups and threat actors.

Traditionally, determining whether a new inmate is a member of a security threat group relied on the prison's knowledge of insignia such as tattoos or a prisoner's declaration of affiliation. Absent those indicators, investigative teams need to know the inmate's social network. Here, technology can help investigators look into a person's social media presence prior to incarceration. Such social media analysis could reveal relationships with gangs. That insight helps corrections officials properly gauge the prisoner's threat to other inmates or, conversely, determine whether the inmate will be vulnerable to attack. The social media examination can also determine whether the inmate has any connections to corrections officers, which protects officers from harm or, at the other extreme, sheds light on potential insider threats. Gaining insight into an inmate's friends and foes outside the prison is also important. If DOC investigators focus solely on what they observe inside the facility, they could be missing some vital intelligence. A person that had a beef with the prisoner while on the outside becomes an obvious threat if admitted to the same complex. The ability of AI and ML to churn through big data plays a key role in social media analysis. Attempting to manually process the millions of social media posts that accumulate daily would be impossible without advanced technologies that let investigators scale their analyses. In addition, investigators can train AI and ML to flag the posts most valuable to their current inquiries. AI also provides image recognition. Finding visual clues has become increasingly important as more social media posts revolve around images and videos. Gangs may post music videos, for example, that could point to affiliations or outgroups targeted for violence. In summary, social media analysis helps DOC investigators know their prisoner, know what's happening on the street and get the jump on possible insider threats. The ability to conduct in-depth analyses of social connections also provides insights into hierarchies that span jails, prisons, and the outside world. DOC officials, equipped with such knowledge, can break up nodes within prison networks and transfer prisoners who could destabilize a facility. DIGGING BELOW THE SURFACE The deep and dark web provides hiding places for threat actors. While most prisoners probably won't access those internet layers, a few may have the technical knowledge to do so. Members of homegrown violent extremist groups, for example, may turn to the dark web once they've been expelled from, or choose to abandon mainstream social media sites and forums. DOC officials need to stay ahead of the technology curve, given the rise of such groups. The scope of threat intelligence, therefore, should include the forums and communications channels lurking below the surface web. AI-driven web intelligence can help investigators monitor the dark web, using complex keyword searches. DOC investigative units may already possess a trove of useful keywords if they have compiled dictionaries of prison language and code. Let those terms fly across all the layers of the internet - dark websites as well as familiar social media outlets on the surface web. Signals intelligence, or SIGINT, is another advanced technology capability that can help DOC investigators uncover threats that would normally be hard to interdict. SIGNIT can identify the presence of unlawful electronic devices such as cell phones within the boundaries of the prison. Once investigators are aware that an illicit mobile phone is being used by inmates, they are then able to utilize location data to identify the rough position of the device. AI can help with the processing of signal data, much as it does with web and social media data. BENEFITS OF TECHNOLOGY-BASED THREAT INTELLIGENCE From social media analyses to SIGINT, investigations enabled via AI and ML give DOC investigators a critical edge. Here are some of the benefits: Diffuse the potential for violence among inmates or toward corrections officers.

Gain threat intelligence that uncovers the key players in security threat groups, mitigating the risk of prisoners running internal and external networks from their cells.

Find and remove the tools of communication, further disrupting networks and threat actors' ability to coordinate plans.

Support police forces and prosecutors: DOC investigators, as they gather accurate data on gang affiliations, can serve as expert witnesses in court cases.

Become a better intelligence partner: DOD intelligence units, corrections officers, state police forces and other law enforcement agencies share data on incoming prisoners. With AI and ML technology, a DOC can offer more actionable, trustworthy data. The task of identifying and classifying incoming prisoners presents a daily challenge for DOC investigators. The numbers are daunting. But AI and ML technology provide a force multiplier that helps investigators keep tabs on arrivals and expose potential conflicts before they become problems. About the author Johnmichael O'Hare is the sales and business development director of Cobwebs Technologies . He is the former commander of the Vice, Intelligence, and Narcotics Division for the Hartford (Connecticut) Police Department.

Contact him on john.ohare@cobwebs.com Related Images reducing-prison-risks-through-ai.jpg

Reducing Prison Risks Through AI-Based Threat Intelligence View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reducing-prison-risks-through-ai-based-threat-intelligence-301280249.html SOURCE Cobwebs Technologies

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COMMENTARY

Why and how GovCon CEOs should use LinkedIn

Millions of your customers on the platform; you need to be there too

Back in 2010, GSA negotiated with social networks on how those networks could use federal employee data. Since then LinkedIn slowly emerged as the dominant network not just in B2B, but also in B2G. LinkedIn is now an integral part of the GovCon ecosystem.

Which leads me to why and how CEOs should be participating. Though some executives persist in the notion that Feds are either not on or dont use social media, the evidence is entirely to the contrary.

Having chronicled marketing to the government for 36 years, in two books, 100+ articles in Washington Technology, hundreds of public presentations, and fifteen years of weekly radio shows, I can safely state that we are neck deep in an era defined and driven by web 2.0 tools and tactics, and in the middle of that for GovCon is LinkedIn.

Those companies and executives that utilize how LinkedIn can help them communicate to the market are the ones whose companies go further and go faster. Those lacking the ability, time or desire to fully leverage the platform are doomed to lag behind.

There are several examples of executives who lead their companies by posting thought provoking articles that help shape the thinking around specific topics. Dan Helfrich, Chairman and CEO of Deloitte posts great articles and videos around subjects that are core to what Deloitte offers. He has a commitment to the thought leadership Deloitte brings to each market segment it serves and he demonstrates this through these posts.

His BD people can point to these posts when speaking with federal program managers to show that top down commitment.

Seven years ago I wrote What Do CEOs Risk by Ignoring LinkedIn? Plenty.

The article outlined some of the benefits for CEOs and other executive to engage on LinkedIn, including

Creating higher visibility for your company in a targeted community

A stronger company brand

A clear message on what your company offers

Stronger and deep relationships with current clients and prospects

Easier access to new accounts

Better relationships with partners and suppliers

More GovCon media visibility

More credibility is a defined niche

Since then many CEOs and other executives have seen the value of engaging on LinkedIn by posting articles, connecting to peers, key clients and prospects, and even by endorsing or recommending key people in their companies and at client agencies.

However, there remains a significant percentage of executives from the CEO down who do little or nothing to support their company, their staff or their programs on LinkedIn. They often have profiles with little or no description of who the exec is or what the company does. And this reflects an indifferent attitude to the market.

My annual census of Feds on LinkedIn found 2.028 million in 305 departments, agencies, operating divisions and offices. My research shows that at least 15% have IT related job functions and that over 30% have program or project management responsibilities. Further, it is clear that many Feds are open to connecting with industry.

LinkedIn is often the first place companies and individuals are vetted by feds and others in the contracting community.

If for some reason you harbor the notion that Feds dont use LinkedIn, think again.
New Delhi:

The Narendra Modi led BJP-government has granted long-term visas to as many as 431 Pakistani nationals, mostly Hindus. The grant allows them eligible for PAN and Aadhaar cards and permission to purchase property in the country.

A home ministry official told the PTI, that the Modi governments policy is to help minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who come to India after facing alleged persecution in their home country.

The official further told the agency that that the ministry of home affairs granted long-term visas to 431 Pakistani nationals last month.

According to the latest policy of the BJP-led central government, people belonging to minority communities including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan staying in India on long-term visas are allowed to purchase a small residential unit sufficient to serve the needs of a family and suitable accommodation for carrying out a business.

Also read: Deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar to avail govt schemes extended to March 31, 2018: Centre to SC



However, the policy bars them from buying immovable property in and around restricted or protected areas including cantonment regions.

The policy allows the minorities coming from neighbouring countries to obtain a PAN card, Aadhar Number and a driving license. They are allowed free movement in the within the state they are staying and transfer of long0term visa papers from one state to another.

Also read| Jharkhand girl starvation death: Villagers attack mother, probing team claims girl died due to malaria



The Pakistani nationals who have been provided with long-term visas will now be also to bank accounts with prior approval of Reserve Bank of India.

(With PTI inputs)

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
A Mount Pleasant woman who spent years keeping the books for a thriving Charleston real estate group has pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $1 million from the company.

Karen Rhett, 58, faces up to 20 years in prison. Her sentencing date is pending.

Rhett had worked for Simmons Realty Co. for decades by the time authorities accused her of wire fraud and tax evasion. Since the mid-1990s, federal authorities said, she faked business ledgers to move company money into her personal accounts. Eventually, she began padding her own salary and stealing from other employees' paychecks.

The FBI and IRS examined the hard drive that Rhett used while working at Simmons and found detailed spreadsheets that showed how she shifted the money around. According to court records, more than $1 million was missing from Simmons and its partners.

"The Simmons family is relieved that this is the beginning of the end," said the company's attorney, Bart Daniel. "Justice is finally going to be served."

Rhett never reported the income on her taxes, authorities said, failing to pay more than $380,000 on the illicit income.

As part of her guilty plea, which was entered April 28, Rhett agreed to forfeit more than $640,000. Tax records show she recently sold a Mount Pleasant home for more than $980,000.

Rhett didn't respond to questions from The Post and Courier. Court records show she was released from custody April 28 on $25,000 bond.

Her defense attorney, George Rutledge DuRant, could not be reached for comment.

Gregory Yee contributed to this report.
Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy distribute Jagananna Vasathi Deevena cheque to students at the camp office on Wednesday, Ministers A Suresh (right), Ch Venu (left), and M Sankara Narayana others also seen. (Photo: DC)

VIJAYAWADA: The state government, asserting that SSC and Intermediate examinations were crucial for students, has decided to conduct them amidst strict corona protocol.

Stating that poverty should not deprive a child from pursuing higher education, Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on Wednesday credited Rs 1,048.94 crore into the accounts of mothers of 10,89,302 students under Jagananna Vasathi Deevena for the academic year 2020-21.

Speaking on the occasion, the Chief Minister said that only education has the power to change the world, eradicate poverty and backwardness of the society, which is why every child was entitled for getting education. He said that SSC and Intermediate examination are very important to the students as their future depends on those certificates and hence the government has decided to conduct the examinations taking all precautionary measures.

Mentioning that Vasathi Deevena would benefit nearly 10.89 lakh students in the State, the Chief Minister said that Rs 2,270 crore has been spent on the scheme since YSRC came into power.

To boost the education sector and schemes like Amma Vodi, Vidya Deevena, Vasathi Deevena, Goru Muddha, Vidya Kanuka and Nadu-Nedu, the State government had spent a whopping Rs 25,714 crore in just 22 months, he pointed out.

Speaking on reforms in the education sector, he said that the government will be implementing CBSE syllabus from the coming academic year and also transform anganwadis as YSR pre-primary schools offering PP1, PP2 and Pre-first class education.

He said that the decision to conduct examinations to class X and Intermediate has been left to the state governments by the Centre. He explained that examinations are underway in some states following strict measures.

Jagan Mohan Reddy said that the criticism of opposition on conducting 10th and Inter examinations was uncalled for. He wanted to know if students will get admissions into premier institutions if they just have pass certificates, as only pass certificates would be issued by states that do not conduct the Board exams.
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian received a French parliamentary delegation led by Guy Teissier, Vice-President of the French National Assemblys Armenia-France Friendship Group and Chairman of the France-Artsakh Friendship Caucus, the Presidents Office told Armenpress.

The delegation consists of Senator, Vice-President of the French Senates Armenia-France Friendship Group and Founding Member of the France-Artsakh Friendship Caucus Valerie Boyer, MPs Jacqueline Dubois, Francois Pupponi and Xavier Breton.

I am glad for your visit to Armenia and Artsakh, and I am doubly happy and know that you are the good friends of Armenia, the Armenian President said while welcoming the guests at the Presidential Palace.

Guy Teissier in turn stated that he and his colleagues have long been the friends of Armenia and Artsakh, and noted that their number could be much more because Armenia has many friends in France. He said the adoption of the resolutions by the French Senate and the National Assembly on the need to recognize the Republic of Artsakh is the outcome of their long fight.

Guy Teissier said during the recent war they were sharing the grief and sufferings of the Armenian people, because, he added, that France as well has seen many wars, passed through difficult trials and had millions of losses.

The French parliamentary delegation representatives presented their impressions from the visit to Artsakh. They highlighted talking about the war, its consequences, as well as raising awareness within the international community.

The French lawmakers said they will continue supporting and assisting Armenia and Artsakh.

The Armenian President thanked the French MPs for their activities and stated that the friendship of Armenia and France is multilayered as it covers the history, values, culture of the two peoples, individuals who have created and continue creating that history. According to President Sarkissian, in the 21st century, power, strength are connected with the development of modern technologies, education and science, therefore, he stressed the need for joint efforts aimed at making Armenia an advanced and strong country.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Hits and misses for a legal tool, Writ of Kalikasan, to protect the environment in Philippines

by Purple Romero

April 29,2021 | Source: Mongabay

Filipino fishers call it the secret island  a group of three sandbars that emerge when the tides low enough, located a mile or so away from Pag-asa Island, known outside the Philippines as Thitu. They go there because its teeming with fish. But since 2017, the area has been largely inaccessible due to an international maritime dispute over parts of the South China Sea: Pag-asa, which is 390 kilometers (240 miles) northwest of the Philippine province of Palawan, is one of the areas to which China has staked a claim.



The Philippines has successfully challenged Chinas claim, lodging a case at a U.N. tribunal and winning recognition of its sovereignty over Pag-asa in 2016. China, however, has refused to recognize the tribunals jurisdiction and insists on addressing the maritime dispute bilaterally. Even after the ruling was handed down, the fishers have still been unable to access the secret island, they say, with the Chinese Coast Guard blocking their access to the sandbar since 2017. We cannot fish there anymore, its forbidden, already forbidden, Robert Asiado, president of the local fishers group, told Mongabay.



The National Task ForceWest Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS), a government body created in 2016 to enforce maritime security in the areas that fall within the Philippines exclusive economic zone, alleges that Chinese vessels have wreaked havoc on the area, harvesting protected species including coral, giant clams, and sea turtles. Asiado is one of 37 fishers who signed a petition for Writ of Kalikasan on April 2019. Its an attempt to use a unique legal mechanism to force the Philippine government to take action to ensure that national environmental protection laws are enforced in the area. By August 2019, four months later, Asiado and 17 other fishers asked for the case to be withdrawn, highlighting the complexity and limitations of this legal remedy.



- In 2010, the Philippines Supreme Court set the provisions for what it calls the Writ of Kalikasan, a landmark legal remedy that compels the government to act and halt environmental degradation that impacts more than one municipality.

- ore than a decade since it was first defined and used in court, the writ has been invoked for various cases, from closing open dumpsites and illegal landfills, to prompting the government to protect important bodies of water like the rehabilitation of Manila Bay.

- While many petitions have been approved this way, the rulings havent always been implemented by local governments.

- In 2019, fishers deprived of access to a fishing site in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Beijing filed a petition for Writ of Kalikasan; however, they backed out of the case soon after, citing a lack of understanding of the legal complexities.



Since 2010, Filipinos have had a distinctive legal weapon: the Writ of Kalikasan (nature) is based on the constitutional mandate for the state to protect and advance the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology. Created by the Supreme Court, the writ can be invoked in cases where this constitutional right is violated by environmental damage of such magnitude as to prejudice the life, health or property of inhabitants. In the subsequent decade, attempts to use the Writ of Kalikasan to force a government response have yielded both high-profile successes and failures.



In the case concerning disputed territories in the South China Sea, including Pag-asa Island, fishers from the provinces of Palawan and Zambales filed a petition for a Writ of Kalikasan on April 16, 2019. Jose Manuel Chel Diokno from the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), the official organization of lawyers in the country, represented them. The petition called on the Supreme Court to order government agencies overseeing the protection of environment, fisheries and aquatic resources  the Philippine Navy, Coast Guard, national police force, its maritime division, and the Department of Justice  to implement Philippine laws in areas that are part of the Philippines exclusive economic zone but whose ownership is being disputed by China in the South China Sea: Scarborough Shoal, Second Thomas Shoal, and Mischief Reef.



The petition alleged that government agencies had failed to prevent Chinese vessels from harvesting coral, giant claims and sea turtles within the Philippines EEZ, thereby failing to carry out their obligations under the CITES wildlife trade convention; the Philippine Fisheries Code; and Presidential Decree No. 1586, which requires environmental impact statements. Petitioners said their constitutional right was violated by environmental crimes committed by foreigners in 2012 and 2013 that resulted to massive destruction  Their constitutional right continues to be violated by Public Respondents failure, if not refusal, to vindicate the Petitioners constitutional right by prosecuting the foreigners who committed the crimes. The High Court issued a Writ of Kalikasan on May 3, 2019, which meant the petition was found to be sufficient in form and substance, and scheduled oral arguments on July 2 and 9, where both parties presented their case.



This petition had the potential to be a landmark case, said Antonio La Vina, an environmental lawyer not involved in the case. It would be a landmark ruling because it would be finding that the executive branch was not doing its job to implement Philippine fisheries environmental law in the West Philippine Sea, La Vina said. Depending on how prescriptive the SC [Supreme Court] decision is, it could also be a victory of judicial activism versus the conventional view that foreign policy and national security are the exclusive domain of the executive branch. Then, on July 9, Solicitor General Jose Calida dropped a bombshell: he said the petitioners had withdrawn their signatures and submitted affidavits saying they didnt know anything about the petition for the Writ of Kalikasan nor did they support it. These statements show deception, Calida said. The IBP lawyers involved in this case foisted egregious deceit not only on the fisherfolk but also on the honorable court.



Asiado and Abogado, another officer of the Kalayaan Palawan Farmers and Fisherfolk Association, alleged that the lawyers did not fully inform them about the nature of the petition they were signing. We were so confused because were not really well-educated, this was the first time this happened to us, it became so messy, it was like a nylon, everything was tied up, you cannot uncoil it, Asiado said. That was where the problem totally came from, they were able to explain what the petition for the writ is but we didnt know that the impact on us will be that big. They signed immediately because they did not understand what it was about  they thought it was aid from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, Asiado added, referring to the government agency that oversees the management and protection of marine resources. Diokno, the lead lawyer on the case, did not respond to several requests for comment.



Legal experts not affiliated with the case note that marginalized communities, such as fishers, are vulnerable to pressure from outside forces, such as the government, and that lawyers need to work carefully to build ties and trust with petitioners. Without second-guessing the IBP lawyers or judging the fisherfolk as I truly understand them, clearly the lesson here is to try to find petitioners that are not vulnerable to such pressure, La Vina said. That means the lawyers must have a strong relationship with such petitioners established over years of struggle. To succeed, cases like this require lawyers fully vetting the prospective complaining parties and ensuring their full commitment to the case by insulating them from external influences, said maritime law expert Jay Batongbacal. I think the problem here is that the petitioner-fishermen were quite vulnerable to government pressure due to their respective situations. Future petitioners have to be selected very carefully, and must be sure of pursuing their cases to the very end.



Previous petitions for Writs of Kalikasan that did progress showed what the writ can do, from seeking damages to stopping projects that can potentially damage the environment. One of the highest-profile attempts to use the Writ of Kalikasan came in 2014, after a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Guardian, ran aground on the Tubbataha Reefs, a natural park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. A group that included environmentalists, bishops and other notable figures filed a petition against then-president Benigno Aquino III and three U.S. military officials, seeking 58 million pesos, or around $1.9 million from the U.S. as compensation for the damages. The Supreme Court dismissed the petition because it was considered a case against the U.S. itself, and states are shielded from lawsuits under the principle of sovereign immunity. However, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs later raised the demand for compensation with its U.S. counterpart. In 2015, the U.S. paid the Philippines $2 million for the damages.



There were other clear victories. In March 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a 2017 ruling by the Court of Appeals that granted a Writ of Kalikasan sought by then-city councilor Joel Capili Garganera, who filed it on behalf of the cities of Cebu and Talisay and future generations. Garganera had asked that then-mayor Tomas Osmena stop the operations of the Inayawan landfill, which the Department of Health said fell short of sanitary requirements. The Supreme Court ruled in Garganeras favor and ordered the landfills permanent closure. In 2013, the Court of Appeals also ordered the closure and rehabilitation of an open dumpsite in the northern province of Bontoc after the Kalinga Anti-Pollution Action Group filed a Writ of Kalikasan saying the waste had polluted irrigation water.



However, even when a Writ of Kalikasan is granted, the verdict is not always implemented. For example, a 2012 verdict by an appeals court ordered the permanent closure of the Irisan dumpsite in Baguio City. Typhoon Nanmadol had caused a trash slide at the dumpsite in 2011, killing five people. Despite the verdict, operations at the dumpsite continued six years later. It was eventually closed, however, and was turned into an ecological park. Several petitions for Writ of Kalikasan have also been rejected. In April 2018, the Supreme Court denied a petition filed by Ang Aroroy ay Alagaan Inc., an NGO, against the mining company Filminera Resources Corp. The court found no merit in the petitioners argument that the companys operations had destroyed the environment in the province of Masbate.



In 2017, the court also rejected a Writ of Kalikasan petition asking government officials to adopt a road-sharing policy, where half the road is allocated for motor vehicles and the other half for bicycles and trams. The Supreme Court said the petitioners had presented insufficient evidence that a failure to designate a portion of the road for bike lanes would violate their right to a balanced and healthful ecology. In May 2015, the Supreme Court overturned a 2013 decision by a lower court that granted a Writ of Kalikasan filed against Redondo Peninsula Energy for its planned construction of a 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant. The court said the petitioners had failed to prove that the project carries health risk, thereby paving the way for the plants construction.



For the future



In the case of the fishers in Palawan, despite the failure of the lawsuit, the general sentiment is that the government has already stepped up in coming to their aid against Chinese authorities and even fishers from other countries. Theres been 70% improvement, the patrol ships of China dont stay as much as they do so in Pag-asa, Abogado said. But despite this improvement and his withdrawal from the 2019 case, Abogado said local fishers are not ruling out filing another petition of the Writ of Kalikasan, provided they are consulted extensively and as a group next time. He said that, more than ever, the filing of such a petition would benefit those who will come after them. It will not only be for this generation, but for the one succeeding us, Abogado said, because the ocean will still be there.

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Communities and Organisations, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Landing Centres, Others, Fisheries Resources, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.
A woman has been arrested for allegedly murdering her husband  a wealthy man who called himself Japans Don Juan.

Saki Sudo, 25, is suspected of killing Kosuke Nozaki, 77, by making him ingest a lethal amount of an illegal drug.

Ms Sudo was married to Nozaki, the president of a liqour sales company and real estate business, for just three months.

The police arrested Ms Sudo at her home in Tokyos Shinagawa Ward and transferred her to Wakayama Prefecture, Japan Times reports.

Nozakis death caused widespread rumour three years ago.

He was notorious for publishing an autobiography titled Don Juan of Kishu: The Man Who Gave 3 Billion Yen to 4000 Beautiful Women in 2016. Three billion yen is 19.7m.

Nozaki was found dead at his home in Wakayama Prefecture, Tokyo, and found traces of an illegal stimulant drug in his body but no needle marks, leading them to believe it was a case of poisoning.

Police have also said Ms Sudo was alone with Nozaki before his death and had also ruled out suicide.

Soon after his death, the Nozaki murder case gained widespread attention.

The local government had earlier said Nozaki had mentioned in his will that he would donate all of his property, worth around 1.3 billion yen (8.6m), to the city.

However, as his legal heir, Ms Sudo was entitled to a portion of his assets despite the will. The family of Nozaki, meanwhile, have contested the will and claimed someone else wrote it.

In 2016, Nozakis ex-girlfriend, a 27-year-old woman, was arrested for allegedly stealing cash and jewellery from his home.

In 2018, he wrote a second memoir that garnered even more media attention. The Japan Times reported that the memoir revealed how the tycoon had met Sudo, a model 55 years his junior, in the autumn of 2017 at Tokyos Haneda airport.

It said he intentionally fell down to make her help him up and asked her out for a meal together.

According to Ms Sudo mother, she had hidden the fact that she had married Nozaki.

Meanwhile, in his first Don Juan memoir, which sold more than 50,000 copies, he said: When I find a woman of my type, tall and voluptuous, I would tell her I want to go out with you and have sex with you... Ill give you 400,000 yen (2,600) if you agree.
SAN DIEGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Billy Gene, CEO of Billy Gene Is Marketing, has launched a new certification program for advertisers. The four-month intensive program is for people who want to start a career in advertising, or marketing teams who want to advertise their own business in-house. Class is in session starting May 4 to August of 2021.

The Certified Advertising Geneius Program will be taught in weekly lessons, but this isn't a standard classroom. This is a "million dollar experience".

Billy Gene, CEO of Billy Gene is Marketing

Each class is broadcasted live from their million dollar studio with a 15'8" by 9'5" LED wall and multi-cam online experience, 25 luxury theater recliners, production team, and curriculum designed to prepare students for the real world.

Over 80% of businesses fail within the first 10 years according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1). There are 400 million small businesses around the world. When times are bad, businesses need customers. When times are good, they want more customers. And with over $121 billion spent on internet advertisements in 2020, world-class advertisers are desperately needed (2).

Billy Gene and his in-house marketing team will guide students as they build the in-demand skill set required to help businesses gain customers by using direct response advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The program is geared toward creating advertisements that sell, and attracting ideal customers consistently and predictably.

Billy Gene Is Marketing intentionally went the total opposite direction of a traditional marketing program: instead of costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and taking four years, this certification is $5,000 and can be completed in four months. The class will be taught by Billy Gene personally and class sizes are being kept small and intimate. Students must register before May 4, 2021, if they want access to the advertising certification. Students can attend training virtually or in-person at the Billy Gene Is Marketing headquarters in downtown San Diego.

Commencement will take place in November 2021 with a speech from a special guest. No spoilers, but you're probably following this person and they're a game-changer when it comes to growing businesses.

Those who are interested in getting their advertising certification from Billy Gene Is Marketing can speak with an enrollment advisor over the phone.

Billy Gene Is Marketing is a marketing education company based in San Diego with over 135,000 students in 75 countries. They've worked with some of the largest franchises in the world including Massage Envy, Orange Theory Fitness, Crunch Fitness, and many more. For more information, visit www.BillysCert.com, or email [email protected].

(1) https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.html

(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/191926/us-ad-spending-by-medium-in-2009/

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 03:29:49|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), Natalia Kanem, on Thursday regretted the British government's announcement of steep funding cuts.

UNFPA, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency, has been informed that the British government intends to cut by 85 percent of its funding to UNFPA Supplies, the UNFPA flagship program for family planning, this year, said Kanem in a press release.

This means that the expected contribution of 154 million pounds (211 million U.S. dollars) for 2021 will be reduced to around 23 million pounds (32 million dollars). In addition, 12 million pounds (17 million dollars) is to be cut from UNFPA's core operating funds. Several country-level agreements are also likely to be impacted, she said.

"These cuts will be devastating for women and girls and their families across the world. With the now-withdrawn 130 million pounds (180 million dollars), the UNFPA Supplies partnership would have helped prevent around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions," said Kanem.

UNFPA recognizes the challenging situation facing many donor governments, yet deeply regrets the decision of its longstanding partner and advocate to step away from its commitments at a time when inequalities are deepening and international solidarity is needed more than ever, she said.

"The truth is that when funding stops, women and girls suffer, especially the poor, those living in remote, underserved communities and those living through humanitarian crises," said Kanem.

The needs of women and girls and their right to modern contraceptives have not changed, and UNFPA remains resolute and dedicated to its mandate. Her agency is assessing the full scope and impact of the cuts and is actively formulating mitigation strategies, she said.

"We count on the continued support of the international community and call on all our partners and allies to come together and secure the vitality of UNFPA Supplies and of all our programs," said Kanem. Enditem
In a ruling that could impact business statewide, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a no-hire or no-poaching provision between two logistics firms is unenforceable and a violation of public policy regarding freedom of employment.

The provision between Beemac Trucking LLC and Pittsburgh Logistics Systems Inc. was intended to bar either firm from hiring away the others employees.

It became fodder for a court case when Beemac, which had a shipping contract with PLS, hired four PLS employees. PLS attempt to enforce the no-hire deal was denied by a Beaver County judge and the state Superior Court before the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Thursdays opinion authored by Justice Sallie Mundy upholds the Superior Courts rejection of PLSs plea to allow enforcement of the no-hire provision. Mundy noted that, while the no-hire clause issue is a new one for her court, Pennsylvania policy in the main opposes restrictions on the rights of workers to change jobs.

In the Beemac/PLS case, a sticking point for the justices was the fact that the employees of the firms were not parties to negotiation of the no-hire provision and didnt receive any form of compensation for the attempt to bar them from switching employers.

The court battle at least temporarily barred the former PLS workers that Beemac hired from starting their new jobs, Mundy noted.

The no-hire provision is a restraint on trade because the two commercial entities agreed to limit competition in the labor market by promising to restrict the employment mobility of PLS employees, she wrote. She also found the provision is both greater than needed to protect PLSs interest and creates a probability of harm to the public.

In the broader sense, the no-hire deal undermines free competition in the labor market in the shipping and logistics industry, which creates a likelihood of harm to the general public, Mundy concluded. Therefore, that deal is unreasonably in restraint of trade and therefore unenforceable, she found.
Peel Hunt has a 22p price target which suggests some 45% upside for the AIM-quoted share.

Stockbroker Peel Hunt repeated a buy recommendation for Base Resources Plc ( ) whilst pointing to the companys stronger-than-expected production results for the March quarter.

Analyst Peter Mallin-Jones noted that the stronger performance was driven by both higher mining rates and grades, as well as slightly higher-than-expected recoveries of ilmenite in particular.

With a price target of 22p the stockbroker sees some 45% upside to the current price of 15.17p.

Mallin-Jones said that ilmenite and rutile volumes were well ahead of the brokers own estimates, meanwhile, added that realised prices were also well ahead. Altogether this helped the company retire debt as Peel Hunt had previously expected, he added.

In a statement this morning, Base highlighted an upgrade to its 2021 production guidance for the Kwale operations in Kenya as it this morning issued its quarterly activities update.

The company said it expects higher volumes of both ilmenite and zircon.

Also, it pointed to the prices of ilmenite and rutile trending upwards during the quarter, and, said it had secured higher zircon prices for the June quarter.

In the statement, the mineral sands miner also noted that Kwale has maintained operational consistency through the quarter, with protocols in place to minimise the risk of COVID-19 to personnel and surrounding communities.

The company produced 84,178 tonnes of ilmenite during the three months ended March 31 along with 19,448 tonnes of rutile, 7,388 tonnes of zircon (and 482 tonnes of low grade zircon).

Ilmenite sales for the quarter totalled 97,179 tonnes and rutile amounted to 26,074 tonnes, while 6,612 tonnes of zircon was sold (plus 502 tonnes of low grade zircon).

During the period Base completed a pre-feasibility study for the Kwale North Dune project, with the study focused on mining higher grade subsets of the North Dune and Bumamani deposits.

In terms of financials, the company said it repaid an outstanding debt balance of US$25mln under its revolving credit facility and added that the facility had now been retired ahead of schedule.
A firefight between Kyrgyzstans and Tajikistans military servicemen has broken out on the border between the two countries, the Border Service of Kyrgyzstans State Committee for National Security reported on Thursday.

"The situation in the Golovnoy populated area of the Batken District of the Batken Region (Kyrgyzstan) has escalated. The Tajik side has deliberately incited a conflict on the Kyrgyz-Tajik section of the state border and continues to exacerbate the situation. A shootout between units of the parties troops has erupted. According to preliminary data, the Tajik side is setting up positions of mortar crews," TASS cited the report as saying.

The Border Service added that the Kyrgyz side, along with local authorities, had been taking all necessary measures to resolve the situation. "The Border Service of the Kyrgyz Republic is calling on its Tajik counterparts to do their utmost to de-escalate the situation on this section of the Kyrgyz-Tajik state border," it assured.
Growing populations are giving two additional seats in Congress to Texas and one to Florida. New York and California are each losing a seat, not because their head counts are falling but because they're not rising as fast.

Do these population changes also alter the states' politics? In many cases, yes, and that generally does not bode well for Republicans. Texas, for example, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but many of its urban areas did not -- and those are the parts of Texas booming with transplants from outside the state.

The capital, Austin, one of America's hottest cities attracting newcomers, is a liberal supernova in what was a securely red Texas. Austin is the No. 1 destination for tech workers leaving San Francisco. Another is Georgia, a former Republican stronghold that just shocked the world by favoring Joe Biden for president and sending two Democrats to the U.S. Senate.

Austin and the surrounding Travis County gave President Joe Biden 72 percent of its votes. Nearly every officeholder in Travis County is now a Democrat.

Apple will soon open a $1 billion Austin campus with 5,000 workers. Alphabet (Google's parent), Amazon and Facebook, meanwhile, are expanding their footprints in the city. Suffice it to say, Austin is unlikely to become less liberal -- or less important in Texas politics.

But what made politicos truly take notice was Williamson County. Home to Austin's fast-growing and historically Republican northern suburbs, Williamson also went for Biden.

Biden took other booming states that have been destinations for blue-state Americans -- Colorado, Nevada and Washington. Another, Arizona, just flipped its presidential preference from Republican to Democrat.

And so, while Republicans in the rapidly growing states tout the magnetic pull of their lower taxes and laxer regulations, they can't help but notice that the newcomers are not entirely with their program. Some recent arrivals may even consider themselves conservative but regard the Trump takeover of the Republican Party with distaste.

Mark Pulliam fancies himself a Paul Revere of the right, warning conservative regions against these "colonizing" leftists. Writing in the conservative City Journal, Pulliam casts scorn on Austin's "fashionable but impractical urbanist transportation initiatives" -- he has a problem with bike lanes -- and "business-unfriendly ordinances." (Right. Austin's "business-unfriendly ordinances" must be why half the businesses in America, it seems, want to move there.)

On The Federalist website, Pulliam warns that "wokeness is everywhere, even in the brightest-red areas of Republican-majority states." One would be his small town in east Tennessee, which he doesn't name but I will. It's Maryville. Apparently, Maryville College, a 200-year-old Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts college, exposed the community to a visiting religious studies professor who praised Karl Marx and said nothing about Jesus. Pulliam also went apoplectic over some choices on the local library's "antiracism" reading list. And a "leftist activist," he rails on, was elected to the city council.

I happen to share some of Pulliam's skepticism toward the nether regions of wokeness, but you know, the liberal had a right to run for council, and the voters had a right to elect her. Labeling everyone you disagree with as "activist" or "leftist" or both -- as Pulliam does -- is not a great way to engage.

As a reality check, Maryville's county, Blount County, did give Trump 71 percent of its votes. Eastern Tennessee seems a long way off from becoming the Brooklyn of the South.

In 2020, Biden won 85 percent of the counties with a Whole Foods store. Austin has six Whole Foods stores. There's no Whole Foods in Maryville -- yet. There are two Starbucks, though. How about that?

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At the intensive care unit (ICU) of Bheri Zonal Hospital, a man in his early twenties is fighting for his life. On oxygen support, the boy, restless, is using all the energy he has got to survive.

Beside him, his mother is praying and reminding him how much she loves him and wants him to live. She knows that her boy is critical and it is going to take a miracle to get better. But, for now, she is clinging to hope, along with support from the doctors.

There are 18 critically ill Covid-19 patients at the ICU of Bheri Zonal Hospital. On April 24, six people died in the hospital and since then, over 30 have succumbed. On Thursday alone, by 10am, five people lost their lives to Covid-19.

At the ICU of the hospital, each patient has their loved one beside them, caring for them. Some are rubbing their back, helping them to breathe, while some are waving fans at them trying to give them some respite from the heat. One person is rubbing the ills hands to keep them awake. But, no one is sure if their hopes materialise.

Distressing days

There are over 250 patients at the hospital. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

Outside, it is even distressing. People, with oxygen cylinders beside them, are in just a bad state. Everyone is waiting for a bed to be empty. People who cannot live without oxygen support have been adjusted in other wards while some, whose health conditions are vastly deteriorated, have had to be sent elsewhere.

New Covid-19 patients are brought in, in dozens, every day.

A boy is heard on the phone telling how his mother was in so much distresses that he thought she would die as a search for a bed at another hospital looked to be unsuccessful.

The doctors are also in a fix. Understaffed, their ICU is already full and other wards do not have facilities that an ICU has.

A few minutes later, one person starts to get fidgety and starts to behave as if he is going to get a seizure, scaring others. They had a resigned look on their face as they knew his health was getting worse.

Covid has gotten out of hand, yet no one cares. Expecting anything from the government is stupidity, a guy is heard yelling at the hospital.

Lack of resources

People wait for test results outside the hospital. The number of Covid-19 patients has significantly increased since April 14. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

A patient, quivering, waits for some doctors to see him. His family members even agitated due to that. But, the lack of doctors at the hospital is creating a hard time for all.

Who would have thought that the situation would get so dire, says the person who came along with him.

A doctor approaches them and tells them that they can give the patient oxygen, but they will have to make do on the floor.

The family, grateful for the doctors help, took the patient to the ICU.

Almost every patient at the hospital is on oxygen support. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

The hospital can accommodate 142 Covid-19 patients, but currently, there are over 200. Wards for other patients are also being used to treat those suffering from Covid-19. But, due to the high number of ill people in the hospital, the doctors and nurses cannot attend to all. Some suffer so much that they die without even being attended to.

There are 39 nurses at the hospital. Out of them, nearly a dozen have contracted Covid-19. The rest are deployed in three shifts. Sometimes, there are only five nurses to look after over 200 patients. The hospital has only one anesthesiologist.

We could do better if we had more people. We need all the help we can get, says the hospitals doctor Rajan Pandey. The virus is going to do some damage.

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Impact on the ill

A woman consoles her son at Bheri Zonal Hospital. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

This has resulted in the people looking after the patients being alert at all times. Santosh Thapa, who is staying at the hospital taking care of his wife says that many die within hours of being brought to the hospital. With only four doctors on duty at the hospital, the situation, according to Thapa is dire.

From what Ive observed, patients who are kept at the ICU for over a week are the only ones who have a chance to survive. Even they need to be lucky, he says.

More problems arise during the night when people are asleep. Both the people caring for their family member and nurses are not awake and most patients die without being attended to, say the patients family members.

Thapa was lucky when he woke up one night to see his wife struggling to breathe. Instantly, he called the nurse and was able to save her.

If I hadnt gotten up, she would be dead, says Thapa.

Alarming changes

Due to lack of human resource, the hospital can only deploy five nurses at a single time to look after over 200 patients. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

Dr Pandey says that 80 per cent of the patients brought in for contracting Covid-19 are seriously ill. Last year, only 20 per cent of Covid-19 patients were in such dire conditions.

But despite the lack of human resource and beds, doctors and nurses persevere. People who dont come here and see the reality for themselves will never understand what we are going through. What we saw in the West is exactly whats happening here and its only going to get worse, says Dr Pandey.

The numbers are on a steady rise since April 14 as the Banke district has seen over 50 deaths since then. Those who have not got beds at hospitals are at their respective houses hoping that they do not get too serious.

Doctors and nurses, who contracted the virus, do not have a place at the hospital. On April 28, eight doctors and 32 nurses tested positive. A total of 75 hospital staff have now tested positive since April 14, says the hospital.

Doctors are doing their best to save lives but say that they need more help to do a better job. Photo: Chandra Bahadur Ale

Before April 14, the HDU ward of the hospital was not in operation as there were hardly any patients. Now, the hospital wishes it had a bigger ward to accommodate everyone.

Before the pandemic, our ICU had six beds. Now, we have over 142 and were still not being able to cope, says Dr Pandey.

He says that even though they are working 24 hours, they still cannot attend to all the patients in the hospital.

With the hospital calling for help, the Health Ministry on April 26 sent around 80 health workers to the hospital to help them cope with the virus. In addition, applications have been called to fill the vacancies.
Scientists studying Xylella remedies, prevention essential Results of EU's XF-ACTORS project presented

(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, APR 29 - It is necessary to maintain a high level of surveillance to prevent Xylella fastidiosa contagion while continuing to work on resistant olive cultivars and research into new possible treatments with the anti-bacteria viruses discovered in Spain - these were the elements that emerged during the final conference of XF-ACTORS, an EU-financed project devoted entirely to the plant pathogen.



The project brought together researchers from 29 organizations from 14 countries around the world, with with Bari's IPSP Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection of the National Research Council (CNR) playing a lead role.



"Combining different instruments, such as statistical models, images taken from above and sensors, could boost the early detection of infection," said IPSP-CNR's Maria Saponari, the coordinator of the international research project.



"Surveillance remains essential for prevention while research continues into the resistant varieties and encouraging new roads for treatment open up".



These include microorganisms capable of wiping out the Xylella fastidiosa population of infected plants, which were identified for the first time by a group of researchers from Valencia, Spain.



If the subsequent phases of experimentation confirm these results, these microorganisms could be used in products for the biological control of the bacteria.



The XF-ACTORS scientists carried out in-depth studies on the role of the meadow spittlebug in the spread of the bacteria, gathering, for the first time, data about the cicada's life cycle, its feeding habits and the vector's communication methods in order to create sustainable systems of population control and provide input to improve the forecast models for the spread of the bacteria that are useful to the plant-health authorities to set up effective territorial inspection activities.



As part of the XF-ACTORS project, researchers managed to date the presence of Xylella fastidiosa in Europe to the 1990s, earlier than previously thought, with traces in the Balearic Islands and in Corsica of a subspecies different to the one in Puglia.



The data presented at the conference showed that Xylella is not the same all over Europe and the Puglia strain is the most aggressive discovered so far anywhere in the world.



The data also shows that olive tress resist infections of the strains found in Spain and similar ones in Corsica, Portugal and Tuscany.



The video-convention will be followed on Thursday and Friday by the third European conference on Xylella fastidiosa, organized bt EFSA.



The week of meetings enables scientists to take stock of six years of EU-financed research, which started in 2014 with the POnTE project. (ANSAmed).




As the only support and service agency for those who sustain a spinal cord injury in Ireland, SII provides support for the injured person and their family and friends at every stage, with counseling, community outreach, peer mentoring and activity programs. Their mission and work mirrors many aspects of the Reeve Foundation's National Paralysis Resource Center (PRC), which offers comprehensive information, resources, and referral services for the community to achieve a better quality of life.

"The mission of our PRC is to foster involvement in the community, promote health and improve quality of life," said Maggie Goldberg, President, and COO, Reeve Foundation. "Our new alliance with SII will help our organizations cultivate and grow community connections while learning from each other about the best ways to care for and promote the independence of people living with paralysis, a spinal cord injury, or mobility impairment."

"Spinal Injuries Ireland is delighted to partner with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation to advance the mission of providing the best care post injury in the community for people who have sustained a life changing injury. To date both organisations have shared best practice in a number of services and in addition our collaboration will allow SII to participate and fund future research projects with Reeve and other partners to accelerate research in to therapies and a cure for spinal cord injury," commented Fiona Bolger, CEO of Spinal Injuries Ireland.

With this new partnership, the Reeve Foundation continues to deliver on its dual mission, "Today's Care. Tomorrow's Cure." set forth by the founders Christopher and Dana Reeve to provide a continuum of hope for individuals living with paralysis worldwide. This Reeve-SII collaboration follows an alliance with the International Spinal Research Trust (ISRT), announced earlier this year, as a joint strategic approach to research with a focus on accelerating the progress of therapies and their delivery to the millions of people around the world living with the life-altering effects of paralysis.

Visit the Reeve Foundation website to learn more about the free PRC programs and resources.

About Spinal Injuries Ireland

Spinal Injuries Ireland is the only support and service agency in Ireland for people who have sustained a spinal cord injury. According to the World Health Organization, a spinal cord injury (SCI) is one of the most devastating and life-changing injuries that a person can sustain. Founded in 1994, Spinal Injuries Ireland (SII) is a registered charity that actively supports people who sustain a spinal cord injury and the family and friends who love them. SII's mission is to engage, people with a spinal cord injury, along with their family members and together, address barriers to full participation in society and empower their service users to work towards achieving personal, social and vocational goals once again. For more information, please visit www.spinalinjuries.ie or call +353-1- 6532180

About the Reeve Foundation

The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation is dedicated to curing spinal cord injury by funding innovative research and improving the quality of life for individuals and families impacted by paralysis. By uniting the brightest minds in the field, we are working tirelessly to accelerate scientific discovery across the field of spinal cord research by investing in labs across the globe. Additionally, through a cooperative agreement with the Administration for Community Living, the Reeve Foundation's National Paralysis Resource Center (PRC) promotes the health, well-being, and independence of people living with paralysis, providing comprehensive information, resources, and referral services assisting over 100,000 individuals and families since its launch in 2002. The Reeve Foundation is committed to elevating our community's voices and needs to achieve greater representation and independence. We meet all 20 of the Better Business Bureau's standards for charity accountability and hold the BBB's Charity Seal. For more information, please visit www.ChristopherReeve.org or call 800-225-0292.

SOURCE Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation

Related Links

www.christopherreeve.org


A Uygur family in Yuli county, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, April 15, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

In recent years, manipulated and encouraged by the anti-China forces in the United States, some truth-bending "academic institutions", rumor-mongering "experts and scholars" and "amateur actors" with no moral scruples have created a chain of lies to defame Xinjiang and mislead international public discourse, often through dirty funding, fact-twisting stories and massive smear campaigns.

Truth shall not be tainted, the world should not be deceived and narrative about Xinjiang mustn't be distorted. The recent reports by independent US news website thegrayzone.com and Australian publication Australian Alert Service, and a series of press conferences held by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have revealed the truth about the fraudulent Xinjiang-related "databases" and the so-called "witness testimonies" and, with abundant facts and figures, exposed the real mastermind behind them. Let us get to the bottom of what's going on and reveal the ins and outs of the lies about Xinjiang.

I. As early as in the last century, the United States and other Western countries started to support separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang out of geopolitical purposes in order to destabilize China and contain its development.

During the Cold War, British scholar Bernard Lewis concocted the theory of "arc of crisis" aiming to fracture countries from the Middle East to India based on ethnic lines to divide the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter, argued that the United States must prevent the realization of "the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean". The United States then launched Operation Cyclone, which lasted from 1979 to 1989 and cost up to US$630 million each year. Together with Saudi Arabia and Britain, the United States provided funding, equipment and training for Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Soviet Union.

Right after the Cold War ended, the United States and Britain started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China, by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the US pivoted from the Soviet Union to containing China's influence in Central Asia. US and British intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism in order to weaken Russia and China and serve their agenda of maintaining a unipolar world. Over the years, there emerged a number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups seeking a state of "East Turkistan" or "independence" of Xinjiang, including the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile. Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy has funneled US$8.76 million to Uyghur diaspora groups campaigning against China's policies in Xinjiang. The above-mentioned factors have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in Xinjiang. Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamored for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.

The CIA suggested in 2003 that should the US find itself in a crisis or confrontation with China in the future, the option of using the "Uyghur card" as a means of exerting pressure should not be taken off the table. Under this strategy, the United States, Britain and their allies, latching on to the Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang,which was spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner. Here are what they seek to achieve:

First, a false impression that Muslims in Xinjiang support "independence". This is often done by instigating certain groups to carry out separatist activities to make the public believe people in Xinjiang all want an independent state.

Second, the illusion that the ETIM is for peace. Nothing has been said about relevant groups' close ties with Al-Qaeda and their violent and terrorit rhetoric. In November 2020, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even removed the ETIM from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Third, the false claim of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Some organizations including Human Rights Watch have fabricated reports on Xinjiang, but their sources are just a small group of extremely anti-China overseas Uyghurs. The baseless accounts in those reports were further hyped up and spread by institutions such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

In January 2017, then US Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted that under US law, it is illegal for anyone to provide funding or support for the Al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist organizations. However, the US government has long been, directly or indirectly, providing funds, weapons and intelligence support to these organizations through certain countries in the Middle East.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired US Army Colonel, when speaking at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 on the threefold purposes of the US presence in Afghanistan, stated unabashedly that "the third reason we were there [in Afghanistan] is because there are 20 million Uyghurs [in Xinjiang]. The CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external".

In a video interview in 2015, Sibel Edmonds, a former interpreter with the FBI, talked about how the US had planned and acted to destabilize Xinjiang. She said that "Xinjiang is the entry artery of energy. We want to, gradually and internally, play the gender card and the race card. For that part of the world, we want to play the minority without land. We say we are going to help them and they are being oppressed, Chinese are gunning them down and torturing them." The plan of the US is to copy the tactics used in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq to Xinjiang, making an issue out of thin air and exploit it. "We hope Xinjiang to be the next Taiwan. As Western nations, we never cared about people. That is not within our interest area, unless it can be utilized, capitalized upon to get our objective."
Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: If I were Commander-in-Chief, I would shoot myself if there were such situation

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Iran loses right to vote at UN due to non-payment of dues

Trump: All Joe Biden had to do was sit back and do nothing

At least 88 people killed in Nigeria attacks

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Armenia acting PM's election campaign is carried out with large-scale use of administrative resources

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78,004 more passengers leave Armenia by air in first 5 months of 2021 than arrive

Putin-Biden possible meeting place in Switzerland is named

UN condemns "heinous attack" in Burkina Faso

Prosperous Armenia Party leader: Only Russia can ensure security of our country

Stoltenberg warns Russias Putin, Belarus Lukashenko against destabilization in NATO eastern flank

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Turkey airstrike kills at least 3 Kurdish refugees in Iraq

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Bright Armenia Party leader: We are on verge of civil war

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37 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

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In Christiansburg, Virginia, Girl Scout cookies are falling from the heavens.

Well, not exactly. They are being delivered not by young girls in uniform but by Google-developed Wing drones, a futuristic twist on how to get your fill of Thin Mints.

Wing, a subsidiary of Googles parent company Alphabet Inc., reached out to the Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline about making cookie drops to help boost cookie sales, which are still being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even with loosening COVID restrictions, the traditional method of selling cookies outside of grocery stores or shops is difficult this year, and sales are down about 50% from prior years, Lia Reich, Wing global communications lead, said in a statement to USA TODAY. It was a natural fit to partner with the Girl Scouts to help out in this situation.

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Cookies are currently available to order for drone delivery through the Wing app or website in Christiansburg until the end of May. Reich says Wing is committed to 3,000 boxes of cookies but if needed will deliver more.

The annual start of cookie season is recognized nationally in January but timing and specific cookie availability can vary by region.

For decades, cookies have been sold at booths outside grocery and other stores, door-to-door in local neighborhoods, and through family and friends bringing order forms to work to tempt their co-workers.

In March 2020, the national organization suspended door-to-door sales and in-person cookie booths because of the spread of COVID-19 and took the 2020 cookie season online. The 2021 cookie season also has had online sales and sales through "virtual cookie booths" on social media.

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National Nurses Day 2021: Chipotle giving away 250,000 free burritos to nurses, health care workers. How to sign up.

Story continues

Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline Council CEO Nikki Williams said there have been challenges to selling cookies in traditional ways and the partnership with Wing has helped local troops in getting cookies delivered. While the girls don't fly the drones themselves, they help prepare the orders and learn about the technology.

"We're seeing a nice response as people are learning about it, Williams said, adding that following national sale trends, Thin Mints are the most popular drone cookie order followed by Samoas, also known as Caramel deLites in some parts of the country.

Wing, a subsidiary of Googles parent company Alphabet Inc., reached out to the Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline about making cookie drops to help boost cookie sales, which are still being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Virginia Girl Scouts werent the only troops handling cookie sales differently. Some girls did contactless delivery for their neighbors, dropping off boxes on doorsteps.

The Girl Scouts had a nationwide partnership with on-demand delivery service Grubhub, which ran from March 6 to April 11.

In New Jersey, troops hosted outdoor drive-by booth sales with contactless payment and one troop even got permission from an empty fast-food restaurant to sell cookies, NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.

The great thing about Girl Scouts is that were flexible and innovative, said Betty Garger, president and CEO of Girl Scouts of Northern New Jersey. We had to be creative and flow with the times. Every business has had to adapt.

Williams believes the program will grow and drones could one day be delivering more cookies.

I expect that the future is going to have an opportunity for drones to be delivering to everyone across the country, she said. I think this is just a really great microcosm as what that can look like as we prep for the future.

Wing drone deliveries

Wing was the first drone delivery company in the U.S. to receive an air operator's certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2019, which allowed the service to make drone deliveries in parts of Virginia.

Last week, Virginia Tech released a survey from Christiansburg  the site of Wings first U.S. drone delivery operations  where 87% of residents liked the idea of residential drone delivery after the first year of service in the community.

"Weve seen incredible growth of the Wing service over the last year and a half. COVID gave people who may not have had a reason to try drone delivery a reason to, and we saw deliveries increase more than 500% in 2020," Reich told USA TODAY. "The convenience of drone delivery has not only sustained that growth but increased it, even as restrictions have lifted."

Girl Scouts Gracie Walker and Alice Goerlich help prepare orders with Wing for drone cookie deliveries in Christiansburg, Va.

Girl Scout Cookies sales

The Girl Scout Cookie Program is considered "the largest girl-led entrepreneurial program in the world" and helps provide programming to 1.7 million girls, the national organization said.

Nationwide, cookies can be purchased on the Digital Cookie platform at www.girlscoutcookies.org where you can also find a list of troops selling near you. Supplies are limited and cookies may not be available everywhere.

If you're in Christiansburg go to Wing's website at www.wing.com/va to order for drone delivery.

Contributing: Rebecca King, NorthJersey.com

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Girl Scout cookies being delivering by Google Wing drones in Virginia
Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The Chronicle

The 2020 Markley Fire in Solano County that killed two people and eventually became part of the deadly LNU Lightning Complex was allegedly started by a man covering up a murder, authorities said.

Officials said an 8-month investigation by the Solano County Sheriffs Office and Cal Fire revealed the fire was arson. The deaths of Douglas Mai, 82, and Leon Bone, 64, who were killed by the fire in their homes in unincorporated Solano County, will now be charged as homicides, police said.
In 1999, for a program included in the Chicago International Film Festival, Harryhausen introduced a double bill at the Music Box Theatre. In a Tribune interview he said: "The modern digital effects are very effective, but I don't think they're the be-all and by-all. You shouldn't eliminate everything just because CGI (computer-generated imagery) came. It's a wonderful tool, and I think you should treat it as a tool. It can enlarge everything we do with puppet animation  with hand puppets, with string puppets  and stop-motion. But it's not right to kill off everything just because CGI came into the picture."
BEIJING, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PetroChina Company Limited ("PetroChina" or the "Company", SEHK stock code 0857; NYSE symbol PTR; SSE stock code 601857) announced today that it has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), which includes its audited financial statements.

The report can be accessed through SEC's website www.sec.gov and the Company's website www.petrochina.com.cn. A soft copy of the report in pdf format is available for download through the Company's website. Upon request by a shareholder, the Company will deliver a hard copy of the report free of charge within a reasonable time.

To request a hard copy of the annual report, please contact:

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services

P.O. BOX 505000

Louisville, KY 40233-5000

UNITED STATES

Overnight correspondence should be sent to:

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services

462 South 4th Street Suite 1600

Louisville, KY 40202

UNITED STATES

Calling from within the US and Canada (toll-free): 1 888 269 2377

International call: 1-201-680-6825

Email: [email protected]

Additional information on PetroChina is available at its website:

http://www.petrochina.com.cn

SOURCE PetroChina Company Limited

Related Links

http://www.petrochina.com.cn


Syndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations.
Even now, perimenopause is described in medical research as an ill-defined time period primarily marked when the ovarian reserve is depleted and by irregular periods (but if one has a history of irregular periods, as 14 percent to 25 percent of women do, it may be tougher to tell when the transition has begun). This time period is still often referred to as menopause in common parlance, but the medical definition of menopause is just one day  the last day of your final period  though it is only diagnosed when a whole year has gone by without menstruation.

Because hormones fluctuate wildly during perimenopause, it can be difficult to test for. The average age of the beginning of perimenopause is 47, and the average age of menopause is 51, but again, the length of the transitional period may be much longer, and the onset of symptoms can happen earlier or later.

There are four symptoms of perimenopause that are most common: hot flashes, sleep disruption, depression and vaginal dryness, known as the core four among menopause experts. But the full panoply of symptoms related to the perimenopause transition is not yet known with any great degree of certainty, said Dr. Nanette Santoro, the chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. At this point, the perimenopausal period is associated with as many as 34 different maladies ranging from hair loss to burning mouth syndrome, which is a tingling or numb feeling in your lips, gums and tongue.

Theres also what Dr. Faubion refers to as the menopause management vacuum. As she explained to Lisa Selin Davis, a Times contributor, no one medical specialty really owns treatment of perimenopausal and menopausal women, because the symptoms affect so many different systems and parts of the body. Furthermore, less than 7 percent of medical residents surveyed said they felt adequately prepared to manage women going through menopause.

Though images of midlife women have definitely improved  a popular meme compares Jennifer Lopez, who at 50 was pole dancing at the Super Bowl, to Rue McClanahan, who at 51 in 1985 was on Golden Girls drinking coffee on the lanai  there is still much progress to be made. It was only this year that an online Arabic dictionary changed the description of menopause from age of despair to age of renewal.

With so much negative cultural baggage, so much still unknown around symptoms and timing, and so few doctors confident in the treatment of midlife women, no wonder people are confused, Dr. Nachtigall said. And it helps explain why so many companies and writers are jumping into the morass.

Having a Moment

What Angie McKaig is trying to do on a micro level by freely sharing her perimenopause travails with colleagues, health care start-ups, beauty companies and writers are trying to do on a macro level: raising awareness about the experience of this period of a womans life (and sometimes selling them products and services along the way).
North Carolina judge Jeff Foster refused Wednesday to release the body-camera footage of the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr., agreeing with prosecutors to delay making the footage public for at least 30 days. The only release scheduled was to the family and one lawyer in 10 days under the condition that they do not release it to the public.

The lawyer for the police argued that the shooting was justified, and the argument, accepted by the judge, was that he did not want body-camera footage shown until a possible trial of the officers who killed Brown. Seven officers involved in the shooting have been placed on leave, but no criminal charges have yet been brought against them.

Protesters march along the streets to protest the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, N.C., Wednesday, April 28, 2021. A judge denied the request to immediately release body cam video of the incident. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Brown, a 42-year-old African American father of 10, was shot and killed by deputies from the Pasquotank County Sheriffs Office serving a drug search warrant around 8:30 a.m. on April 21 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. A private autopsy ordered by Browns family found that he was shot five times, with four of the shots hitting his right arm and one shot to the back of the head killing him. The official autopsy has not been released.

Members of Browns family were shown just 20 seconds of redacted footage that omitted officers faces on Monday. The familys lawyer who was authorized to view the footage said that the footage showed Brown was executed while sitting in his car with his hands firmly on the wheel when deputies began shooting.

Hundreds of residents of Elizabeth City, population 18,000, have been protesting in the streets since the killing of Brown and demanding that the body-camera footage from the shooting be released to the public. Democratic mayor Bettie J. Parker ordered an 8 p.m. curfew Tuesday in response to the protests, and the city and surrounding county are under states of emergency. Six protesters were arrested for curfew violations as militarized riot police confronted peaceful protesters Tuesday night.

Nearly 200 people protested peacefully, chanting, No charges, no peace! and Release the tape! The real tape! The whole tape! When police began arresting people following the curfew, protesters shouted, Shame on you!

Democratic governor Roy Cooper has called for a special prosecutor to investigate Browns death and the FBI has launched a civil rights investigation as well, indicating the extent to which the ruling class is concerned over the outrage sparked by the killing.

The only footage that is publicly available was obtained by a local news channel via a Freedom of Information Act Request. The footage from the citys camera shows deputies arriving in the back of a pickup with tactical gear. The deputies immediately dismounted once in the driveway of Browns home, can be heard yelling to Brown to put your hands up! then open fire almost as quickly as they dismounted. Afterwards, video shows Browns car riddled with bullets with the back window of the car blown out and bullet holes through the remaining windows.

The operation echoes the US-supported, trained and armed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Afghanistan, or the death squads in the Philippines who murder poor people under the pretext of an antidrug crackdown.

Benjamin Crump, who has taken many high-profile cases of African Americans killed by the police including Browns, claimed, This has become a constant sight across America, the evolution of policing thats now terrorizing communities of color, framing police violence as a purely racial problem, despite its impact on workers and poor people of every race and ethnicity. Crump has been criticized by the family of victims of police violence, such as Samaria Rice and Lisa Simpson, who called on him and others affiliated with Black Lives Matters to stop monopolizing and capitalizing off our fight for justice and human rights.

Alameda, California

Body-camera footage of the death of Mario Arenales Gonzalez was released on Tuesday. Gonzalez was killed in Alameda County, California by being pinned with his body and face to the ground for five minutes in the same way that George Floyd was. Gonzalez became unresponsive while held down by the police and was later declared dead at the hospital. The killing took place on April 19, 2021, one day before the conviction of former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of Floyd.

Mario Gonzalez is restrained by Alameda police officers on April 19 in a video from an officer's body-worn camera. (Alameda Police Department)

Police were responding to two separate calls about a man who was loitering in a park. The body-camera footage shows Gonzalez struggling to answer basic questions made by the officer, trailing off at points or abruptly changing topics. While the questions are being asked, before the confrontation he can be seen accidentally dropping objects out of his hands while fidgeting with a comb. During this, the officer can be heard requesting another police unit to the scene.

Once the other officer is present, they ask if Gonzalez has an ID to which he cannot answer.

What follows in the footage is extremely disturbing. The officers force Gonzalezs hands behind his back and ram him into the ground. One officer is asking Gonzalez questions as he is slowly killed by the other officer who aggressively drives his knee and then elbow into Gonzalezs back, as Gonzalez cries out in pain while also answering the officers questions. Three officers were on him at this point, telling him to stop resisting. One of the officers asks if they should roll him over on his side with another denying this, saying, I dont want to lose what I got. This continues up until the point that Gonzalez goes limp, after which an officer states that hes gone unresponsive. Shortly thereafter an officer states that he has no pulse and they attempt to resuscitate him with CPR.

At no point did Gonzalez portray any aggressive behaviors towards the officers. The footage exposes as a lie the initial Alameda police report that claimed that after officers attempted to detain Gonzalez a physical altercation ensued.

Gonzalezs brother Gerardo Gonzalez said at a press conference Tuesday that Alameda police officers murdered my brother.

The lawyer for the family, Julia Sherwin, explained, His death was completely avoidable and unnecessary, and that Drunk guy in a park doesnt equal a capital sentence.

The three officers involved in the killing, Eric McKinley, Cameron Leahy, and James Fisher, have been placed on administrative leave.

Chicago, Illinois

Body-cam footage of the killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez by a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer, which shows that he was gunned down as he was running from police, was released Wednesday. The killing came just days after another CPD officer shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo while the latters hands were in the air.

The police have not said whether Alvarez was suspected of a crime. What can be seen from video in the early morning of March 31 is that Alvarez was walking away from a gas station with some bags when a CPD SUV came around the corner. Alvarez dropped his bags and started running. After that the video shows Alvarez running away from the police into a residential area, tripping, getting back up and then the police officer raising his gun and shooting Alvarez as he ran. After being shot in the back, Alvarez asks, Why are you shooting me? to which the officer responded, You had a gun.

The officer who shot Alvarez attempted to handcuff him while he was bleeding on the ground, yelling Cuff him! Cuff Him! with his partner insisting that he be rendered aid. Alvarez was later pronounced dead at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

After the exposure of the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald, the United States Department of Justice found that CPD officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someoneincluding unarmed individuals.

Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot was apologetic towards the police, telling reporters ahead of the release of the video of Alvarezs killing: I understand, having investigated many of these shootings, that officers are in many instances called upon to make split-second decisions, particularly in instances like this one where theres a gun.
New Delhi, April 29 : The Muslim population in West Bengal dumped the Left-Congress combine and voted for the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the just-concluded Assembly elections in the state, while the community backed the Congress and the AIUDF in Assam, according to the CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News released on Thursday.

The two districts of West Bengal where the Muslim population voted for the Left-Congress combine are Murshidabad and Malda, but everywhere else they voted for Mamata Banerjee, as per the exit poll survey.

In Bengal, 22 per cent Muslim voters supported the Left-Congress combine, while a whopping 67.3 per cent voted for the ruling Trinamool Congress. The BJP received only 6.1 per cent Muslim votes in the state, as per the exit poll data.

"The sheer size of the Muslim population in the state gives a head start to the Trinamool in West Bengal, while the same happens for the Congress and the AIUDF in Assam," C-Voter founder and psephologist Yashwant Deshmukh told IANS.

The survey also stated that in West Bengal, the entry of a Muslim front - comprising the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the new party Indian Secular Front formed by influential cleric Abbas Siddiqui - into the electoral fray failed to spell trouble for the Trinamool Congress.

In Assam, 76.2 per cent Muslim voters voted for the Congress and the AIUDF, 6.4 per cent voted for the BJP and 17.5 per cent voted for others.

West Bengal had a population of 9.13 crore as per the 2011 Census data. According to the 2011 Census of India, West Bengal had over 2.47 crore Muslims, who formed 27.01 per cent of the state's population.

As per the 2011 Census, Assam had a population of total 3.12 crore people, including 1.07 crore, or 34.22 per cent, Muslims.
Pashinian said that only about 2, 700 people making up less than 0.1 percent of Armenias population have been vaccinated since the campaign was launched on April 13. This is a shamefully low figure, he told a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan.

Pashinian said the vaccination is critical for not only minimizing coronavirus infections and resulting deaths but also accelerating the countrys recovery from a recession caused by the pandemic.

If we dont register a significant vaccination rate over the next month our tourism industry may have very serious problems this year as well, he warned.

Armenia received 24,000 doses of AstraZenecas COVID-19 vaccine on March 28 and 43,000 doses of Russias Sputnik V jab in the following weeks. The government plans to import more vaccines in the coming weeks.

The campaign was initially limited to medical workers, seniors and people suffering from chronic diseases. With few of them apparently showing an interest in the vaccines, Health Minister Anahit Avanesian allowed medical centers late last week to administer AstraZeneca shots to all adults willing to take them.

Many Armenians remain wary of doing so because of recent reports linking the Astra Zeneca vaccine to a rare blood clotting disorder. Both Pashinian and Avanesian insisted on Thursday that the risk of serious side-effects is minimal.

Avanesian and Deputy Minister Tigran Avinian publicly took AstraZeneca shots on Wednesday in an effort to allay the fears and encourage Armenians to follow their example.

Im feeling very well and hope that this example will be contagious, the health minister told fellow cabinet members. She urged them to also get vaccinated.

Pashinian said in this regard that all government members must receive vaccine injections within a week.

Armenia has been hit hard by the pandemic, with a total 215,528 infections and almost 5,090 coronavirus-related deaths officially confirmed to date. The Armenian Ministry of Health reported on Thursday that 20 more people infected with COVID-19 have died in the past day.

An ongoing third wave of infections in the country of about 3 million began in late February. Critics blame the resurgence of COVID-19 on the authorities failure to enforce their physical distancing and sanitary restrictions.
[April 29, 2021] Capitalxtend Group Ltd. Announces Accreditation Agency of Regulation and Development

ALMATY, Kazakhstan, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Capitalxtend Group Ltd., a globally acclaimed and trusted foreign exchange broker, adds another feather to the cap  revolutionizing financial trading even further. The company has recently been registered as the Financial Service Provider with the Ministry of Economy.

Capitalxtend has received accreditation by the Agency of Regulation and Development of the Financial Market of the Republic of Kazakhstan, for CFD investment  payment processing including e-wallets, cryptocurrency activities, and foreign exchange services. As of 24/02/2021, the company is entitled to provide its financial services to customers within and outside the Republic of Kazakhstan. The company bears the business identification number - 201240028219. Capitalxtend is a multi-asset, global brokerage firm that provides traders and investors with a seamless trading experience with an advanced and intuitive trading platform. The company currently offers financial services including the trading of a wide range of instrumentsi.e., Foreign exchange, CFDs, Indices, Commodities, Equities, and many other assets. The company operates as an offshore financial service provider, based out of Vincent and the Grenadines.



Capitalxtend team has been helping traders ace their trading journey since 2005 and has emerged as a leading financial service provider around the globe. The company specializes in leveraged trading, providing traders thousands of opportunities to trade the most popular assets and excel in both rising and falling markets. It is also equipped with intuitive tools such as Copytrading, Partners Program, and more, which give the traders an edge in the market. What sets Capitalxtend apart is its extraordinary trading tools, exceptionally flexible trading environment, lightning-fast execution, low spreads, 0% commission, and a great understanding of what the customers need to become successful in the financial world. Capitalxtend combined with MT4 create an exceptional trading experience where traders have everything at the tips of their fingers  an easy-to-use & easy-to-navigate trading platform, with full control over their finances!

Media Contacts 

Name - Phillipos Tsangris

E-mail - marketing@capitalxtend.com

Company - Capitalxtend Group Ltd



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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 05:50:27|Editor: huaxia

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TUNIS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Tunisian Health Ministry reported on Wednesday 1,729 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total number of infections in the country to 305,313.

The death toll from the virus rose by 119 to 10,563 in Tunisia, the ministry said in a statement.

The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the North African country reached 2,791, including 523 in intensive care units, while the total number of recoveries reached 255,870, it said.

A total of 1,298,972 lab tests have been carried out in Tunisia so far, said the ministry.

Since the start of the national vaccination campaign against the coronavirus on March 13, a total of 345,914 Tunisians have received the vaccine, according to the latest figures published by the ministry. Enditem
Germans denying Covid put under surveillance

Germanys domestic intelligence service is surveiling members of the increasingly aggressive denier movement because they posed a risk of undermining the state. The movement  fueled in part by wild conspiracy theories  has grown from criticising lockdown measures and hygiene rules to targeting the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the press and globalism, to name a few. The movement, called Querdenken, German for lateral thinking, communicates and recruits over social media and has a large presence on the encrypted chat service Telegram, where its main channel has 65,000 subscribers. Read here

Let's look at the global statistics Global infections: 149,642,605 Global deaths: 3,151,176 Nations with most cases: US (32,230,019), India (18,376,421), Brazil (14,521,289), France (5,626,985), Turkey (4,751,026). Source: John Hopkins Research Center

New York to end its curfew on bars and restaurants next month

New York will end a curfew next month that forced bars and restaurants to close early in a bid to fight the spread of the coronavirus. The announcement by governor Cumo came as state lawmakers voted to suspend an unpopular directive that required customers to order food when purchasing alcohol at bars and restaurants. The curfew, which currently requires establishments to stop serving customers at midnight, will end statewide on May 17 for outdoor dining areas and May 31 for indoor dining. Read here

Japan to allow vaccine rollouts without clinical trials

Japan will consider making vaccines and medical treatments that have yet to be domestically approved available in an emergency after regulatory hurdles delayed its vaccination campaign. Amid criticism over Japan's slow pace of inoculation, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga hopes to update existing legislation. If approved, new vaccines and treatments that are already in use overseas would temporarily be made available to the public before a clinical trial can be completed in Japan. Read here

Europe pins hopes on vaccine campaigns as Covid curbs relaxed

European leaders are lifting restrictions across a lockdown-weary bloc as they see it as calculated risk that accelerating vaccination campaigns will keep high infection rates in check. Frances president, Emmanuel Macron, is set to present details of a progressive relaxation of Covid measures. Germany raised its economic growth forecast for 2021 and also citing the gathering pace of vaccinations as light at the end of the tunnel. Poland and Netherlands have eased restrictions and curfews with more members walking on the similar lanes. Read here
A sheriff's deputy bitten by a dog in southern Michigan killed the animal and then fatally shot the angry owner who confronted him with a knife, state police said Thursday.

The incident happened Wednesday night around 7.45pm after the deputy responded to a call about a dog on the loose in the 6500 block of S. Edon Road in Reading Township.

'When the deputy made contact at the residence of the dog, the deputy was immediately attacked by the dog and bit,' Michigan State Police said in a written statement.

A Hillsdale County sheriff's deputy bitten by a dog in southern Michigan killed the animal and then fatally shot its owner, Oscar Herrera, 32, who confronted him with a knife, state police said Thursday

'The deputy fired shots at the dog, which resulted in killing the dog,' authorities added.

Upset by the killing of his dog, the canine's owner, Oscar Herrera, 32, allegedly confronted the Hillsdale County sheriffs deputy with a knife.

The deputy then shot Herrera, police said, without giving any other details. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Authorities said the deputy, who has more than seven years of experience and whose name wasn't released, was treated at a hospital for dog bites.

According to the Hillsdale Daily News, Herrera was arrested in march after deputies and troopers responded to the same home for a 'shots fired' complaint.

Herrera was allegedly intoxicated and fired several rounds into a wooded area near his home.

The deputy has since been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

The Michigan State Police First District Special Investigation Section are investigating the shooting.
[April 29, 2021] Minister Carr highlights support for small and medium-sized businesses in Budget 2021

WINNIPEG, MB, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Budget 2021 is the Government of Canada's plan to finish the fight against COVID-19 and ensure a robust economic recovery that is inclusive of all Canadians. Today, the Honourable Jim Carr, Special Representative for the Prairies, met with the Saskatchewan Chambers of Commerce to discuss investments to support small and medium-sized businesses in Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience. The COVID-19 recession is the steepest and fastest economic contraction since the Great Depression. It has disproportionately affected low-wage workers, young people, women, and racialized Canadians. For businesses, it has been a two-speed recession, with some finding ways to prosper and grow, but many businessesespecially small businessesfighting to survive. We need them to get back on their feet. They are the backbone of our economy, our main streets, and our communities. Budget 2021 is an historic investment to address the specific wounds of the COVID-19 recession, put people first, create jobs, grow the middle class, set businesses on a track for long-term growth, and ensure that Canada's future will be healthier, more equitable, greener, and more prosperous. The Government of Canada's top priority remains protecting Canadians' health and safety, particularly during this third, aggressive wave of the virus and its variants. Vaccine rollout is underway across Canada, with federal government support in every province and territory. Budget 2021 invests in Canada's bio-manufacturing and life sciences sector to rebuild domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity, and has a plan to put in place national standards for long-term care and mental health services. Budget 2021 is a plan to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through the crisis and towards a robust recovery. It proposes to extend business and income support measures through to the fall and to make investments to create jobs and help businesses across the economy come roaring back. It will support almost 500,000 new training and work opportunities including 215,000 opportunities for youth; support businesses in our most affected sectors such as tourism and arts and culture; and accelerate investment and digital transformation at small and medium-sized businesses. Budget 2021 is a plan that puts Canada on track to meet its commitment to create 1 million jobs by the end of the year. Canada entered the pandemic in a strong fiscal position. This allowed the government to take quick and decisive action, supporting people and businesses, and put it in the position to make historic investments in the recovery. Quote "Many Canadian businesses, especially small businesses, are fighting to survive during the COVID-19 recession. Through Budget 2021, the Government of Canada will make targeted investments in Canada's businesses so they can hire and train workers, adopt new technologies and come back stronger than ever beore."





"The connection between business and the federal government is critical to our province's future success. We are pleased to have Minister Carr join us to discuss the recent budget and what we in Saskatchewan can do to make sure it works for this province and for Canada."

- Steve McLellan, CEO of the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce

Quick Facts Budget 2021 includes $101.4 billion over three years in proposed investments as part of the Government of Canada's growth plan that will create good jobs and support a resilient and inclusive recovery. Key measures include:

over three years in proposed investments as part of the Government of growth plan that will create good jobs and support a resilient and inclusive recovery. Key measures include: Establishing a Canada -wide early learning and child care system, in partnership with provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners, which will help all families access affordable, high-quality, and flexible child care no matter where they live, and no longer shoulder the burden of high child care costs. The budget proposes new investments totaling up to $30 billion over the next five years. Combined with previous investments, a minimum of $9.2 billion per year ongoing will be invested in child care, starting in 2025-26.

-wide early learning and child care system, in partnership with provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners, which will help all families access affordable, high-quality, and flexible child care no matter where they live, and no longer shoulder the burden of high child care costs. The budget proposes new investments totaling up to over the next five years. Combined with previous investments, a minimum of per year ongoing will be invested in child care, starting in 2025-26.

Extending emergency supports to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through to recovery, including:



Extending the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy and Lockdown Support until September 25, 2021 .

Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Emergency Rent Subsidy and Lockdown Support until .



Extending the number of weeks for important income support for Canadians, such as the Canada Recovery Benefit and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit.



Enhancing Employment Insurance sickness benefits from 15 to 26 weeks.



Increasing Old Age Security for seniors age 75 and older to provide them with better financial security.



Supporting small and medium-sized businesses through several transformative programs, such as:



A new Canada Digital Adoption Program that will assist over 160,000 businesses with the cost of new technology. And it will provide them with the advice they need to get the most of new technology with the help of 28,000 young Canadians who will be trained to work with them.





Allowing Canadian small businesses to fully expense up to $1.5 million in capital investments in a broad range of assets, including digital technology and intellectual property. This represents an additional $2.2 billion investment in the growth of Canada's entrepreneurs over the next five years.

in capital investments in a broad range of assets, including digital technology and intellectual property. This represents an additional investment in the growth of entrepreneurs over the next five years.

Revitalizing Canada's tourism sector through $1 billion to help tourism businesses recover and support festivals and cultural events that provide jobs and growth in many of our cities and communities.

tourism sector through to help tourism businesses recover and support festivals and cultural events that provide jobs and growth in many of our cities and communities.

Supporting women, Black Canadians, and other underrepresented entrepreneurs who face barriers to launching and owning businesses through $300 million to enhance initiatives like the Black Entrepreneurship Program and the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy.

to enhance initiatives like the Black Entrepreneurship Program and the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy.

Establishing a $15 federal minimum wage.

federal minimum wage.

Enriching the Canada Workers Benefit, which will support about 1 million more Canadians and lift nearly 100,000 people out of poverty. This will result in additional support of $8.9 billion over six years for Canada's low-wage workers.

over six years for low-wage workers.

Helping to build, repair, and support 35,000 affordable housing units for vulnerable Canadians through an investment of $2.5 billion and a reallocation of $1.3 billion in existing funding.

and a reallocation of in existing funding.

Investing $17.6 billion in a green recovery that will help Canada to reach its target to conserve 25 per cent of Canada's lands and oceans by 2025, exceed its Paris climate targets and reduce emissions by 36 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and move forward on a path to reach net-zero emission by 2050.

in a green recovery that will help to reach its target to conserve 25 per cent of lands and oceans by 2025, exceed its climate targets and reduce emissions by 36 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and move forward on a path to reach net-zero emission by 2050.

Closing the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, supporting healthy, safe, and prosperous Indigenous communities, and advancing meaningful reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and the Metis Nation through an historic investment of over $18 billion . Related Links Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience

Budget 2021: Address by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Associated Links Fall Economic Statement 2020: Supporting Canadians and Fighting COVID-19

Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan SOURCE Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs

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TEL-AVIV, Israel, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Connecteam , an all-in-one employee app that empowers organizations with non-desk employees to communicate, engage, and operate their teams, has announced the closing of a $37M funding round led by Insight Partners, OG tech, and Wix's leadership team.

Founded in 2016, Connecteam's 10,000-plus global customers span 60 countries and include leading brands such as Nike, Sodexo, SodaStream, ISS, and Plasson.

"We have built the platform from the ground up to meet the needs of organizations with frontline employees. Most people don't realize it, but deskless employees comprise 80% of the global workforce - 2.7B employees around the world ," said Amir Nehemia, Co-Founder and CEO of Connecteam. "So many organizations still rely on bulletin boards, phone calls, printed spreadsheets, and face-to-face training to run their businesses. We have plans to change that and help organizations and their employees improve communication, work processes, and collaboration."

During 2020, the company saw massive customer growth of more than 400%, and now has over 150,000 active users. The company grew its team by 300% to meet the rising demand, to better connect teams and improve operational efficiency.

Avishai Abrahami, Wix's CEO and an early stage investor at Connecteam said, "Like Wix, Connecteam is a great product-led company that doesn't just focus on the problem it solves, but also on the people behind it. I am not surprised to see its accelerated growth: it has the right mindset, an outstanding product, and a vast market that is pro-actively looking to do things differently as they are tired of the old ways. I believe we are going to hear much about Connecteam in the future."

Connecteam's focus remains on providing a top tier product for deskless employees globally. The company is constantly enhancing its platform capabilities and is expected to grow its team by over 300% again in 2021. Key milestones for the company have placed an emphasis on growing its R&D team, improving the end-user experience, and scaling its localization and language offerings.

"Running a business with non-desk employees is difficult, and when it comes to technological solutions, so many deskless industries are overlooked and underserved," said Jeff Horing, Insight Partners Co-Founder and Managing Director. "Connecteam changes the way its customers run their business. In just a few minutes, companies can communicate digitally with their team and better manage their workforce, allowing them to operate more efficiently. We are excited to partner with Connecteam to scale up and bring their solution to even more companies globally."

About Connecteam

Connecteam is a deskless workforce management app providing an all-in-one experience for communication, engagement operations and training. Connecteam serves over 10,000 customers around the world in over 60 countries from over 200 deskless industries. Providing its product under a SAAS model, the company offers a two weeks free trial and a free version for all companies.

About Insight Partners

Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight Partners has invested in more than 400 companies worldwide and has raised through a series of funds more than $30 billion in capital commitments. Insight's mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Across its people and its portfolio, Insight encourages a culture around a belief that ScaleUp companies and growth create opportunity for all. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.

About O.G. Tech

O.G. Tech is a founder-friendly VC primarily focused on fast growing Early Growth investment opportunities, typically in their B and C rounds. O.G. Tech teams up with passionate founders and ambitious teams seeking to disrupt existing industries and create new markets. O.G. Tech is a single LP fund founded and backed by Eyal Ofer's, Ofer Global. O.G. Tech's unique structure allows it to be fully flexible and enables its portfolio companies to benefit from fast decision-making, long term commitment, and a broad global network.

Eyal Ofer and the private portfolio of international businesses within Ofer Global use their vast experience, insight, and global network to help O.G. Tech's portfolio companies and founders grow and succeed.

For more information on O.G. Tech and all its investments, please visit og-tech.vc

SOURCE Connecteam

Related Links

https://connecteam.com


Millions of young salmon raised at fish hatcheries in the Central Valley will be trucked to San Francisco Bay and other coastal sites for release, because the rivers theyd normally travel to get to the ocean are drying up, state and federal officials said Wednesday.

The ambitious trucking program, a response to the states escalating drought, is intended to maximize survival of the hatchery fish that prop up Californias fall-run of chinook  the mainstay of the states commercial and recreational salmon industries.

Officials in charge of the five major inland hatcheries that rear the fish say convoys of tanker trucks are the only way to ensure the 3-inch smolts make it to sea. The rivers are either too low or too warm for the fish  or both.

Trucking young salmon to downstream release sites has proven to be one of the best ways to increase survival to the ocean during dry conditions, said Jason Julienne, north central region hatchery supervisor for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The chinook normally begin their lives upriver then swim to the Pacific, where they remain for three years before returning to their birthplace to spawn. A crash in just one years juvenile numbers can have lasting effects on the total salmon population.

The situation so far is not nearly as severe as it was during last decades drought, when the bulk of hatchery fish were transported to sea via truck. This year, hatchery managers were able to release the majority of their juveniles upriver before they deemed river conditions too dicey to proceed.

State officials estimate that 16.8 million fish will have to be trucked from the four state-run hatcheries through the beginning of June, about 20% more than in a normal year. Some trucking is done every year to increase survival probabilities. The state hatcheries are located along the Feather, American, Mokelumne and Merced rivers.

Federal officials, who run the Coleman National Fish Hatchery along a tributary of the Sacramento River in Shasta County, dont normally truck any salmon, but this year will send about 950,000 fish. Its less than 10% of their total.

The risk when moving fish to a different release point is that they wont find their way back to their spawning grounds.

We perceived a prospective drought ahead of time and worked to prepare so we didnt have to truck (many) fish, said Bob Clarke, fisheries program supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Pacific Southwest Region. We were out in front.

The state began transporting fish to coastal sites last week, and federal officials plan to join them starting Monday, when smolts are scheduled to be trucked to Point San Quentin in Marin County for release.

John McManus, president of the Golden State Salmon Association, which advocates for fishers, said he appreciates the extra effort to save the fall-run chinook amid the drought. However, he says the underlying problem for salmon is that state and federal water officials have allowed too much water to be pulled from rivers and creeks in the first place.

These river conditions are made worse by decisions that put salmon last, he said.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
[April 29, 2021] Cboe Europe Derivatives Secures Support of Key Participants for September 2021 Launch

- Cboe's new Netherlands-based derivatives exchange plans to launch on Monday, 6 September 2021, subject to regulatory approvals - Wide range of participants have committed to supporting the exchange - Exchange will introduce a modern, vibrant pan-European derivatives market, which promotes an on-screen market structure - Cboe-owned EuroCCP will provide clearing services for the exchange, subject to regulatory approvals LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cboe Europe, a pan-European exchange operator and a subsidiary of Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE), announced it plans to launch Cboe Europe Derivatives, a new Amsterdam-based futures and options market, on Monday, 6 September 2021, subject to regulatory approvals. Cboe has secured the support of a broad range of participants, including banks, clearing firms, market-makers and proprietary trading firms who are expected to help contribute to the provision of liquidity and client order flow on Cboe Europe Derivatives. Participant bank and clearing firms currently include ABN AMRO Clearing, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Participant market-makers and proprietary trading firms currently include All Options, Da Vinci Derivatives, DRW, Flow Traders, Liquid Capital Markets and Susquehanna International Securities. Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to leverage Cboe's global derivatives expertise and European equity trading and clearing footprint to bring a modern, on-screen market structure utilized in the U.S. to Europe and to grow the region's equity derivatives market overall. EuroCCP, Cboe's pan-European clearing operator, will provide clearing services for the venue, subject to regulatory approval. By taking a pan-European approach, Cboe Europe Derivatives will enable market participants to access a vibrant derivatives market through a single access point, creating efficiencies in trading and clearing. David Howson, EVP, President of Europe and Asia-Pacific for Cboe Global Markets, said: "We are delighted to bring together such a strong group of participants to support the anticipated launch of Cboe Europe Derivatives. We have listened to the needs of market participants and are designing this new market from a pan-European point-of-view, leveraging our global derivatives expertise, European equities trading footprint, ownership of EuroCCP and world-class technology to build a more efficient equity derivatives market." Robbert Booij, CEO Europe at ABN AMRO Clearing Bank N.V, said: "Cboe Europe Derivatives represents an attractive new marketplace for European equity derivatives. It is being created by a highly-respected exchange operator and we look forward to having our clients benefit from this new market." Elizabeth Martin, Global Head of Equities Electronic Trading at Goldman Sachs, said: "Partnering with Cboe Europe Derivatives aligns with our support of innovative electronic marketplaces and offers another opportunity to provide additional market access and liquidity to our clients." David Russell, Global Co-Head of Institutional Equities at Morgan Stanley, said: "By increasing competition in the European equity derivatives market, our clients benefit from having more choice, while lower friction pricing models also promote greater liquidity. Over the past 10 years, European exchange traded derivative volumes have lagged global markets, and we are supportive of this new initiative to bring further competition and innovation to this space." John Keogh, Managing Director at Susquehanna International Securities, said: "We are committed to working with exchanges to support product innovation and grow the listed options markets in Europe. We are excited to become a liquidity provider on Cboe Europe Derivatives as we are aligned with its goal of developing a strong, liquid orderbook-focused exchange." Cboe Europe Derivatives is expected to form part of Cboe NL, Cboe's Netherlands-based exchange, and initially offer trading in futures and options based on six Cboe Europe Indices: the Cboe Eurozone 50, Cboe UK 100, Cboe Netherlands 25, Cboe Switzerland 20, Cboe Germany 30, and Cboe France 40  all calculated using Cboe market data1. Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to add futures and options on additional European benchmarks, along with single stock options, at a later date, based on customer demand. Ade Cordell, President of Cboe NL, said: "We have had an extremely positive response to our vision for Cboe Europe Derivatives from participants across the trading community. Firms not currently active in European markets are excited by the prospect of a transparent, efficient, lit pan-European equity derivatives market, which will help to unlock its true potential and grow the market overall." About Cboe Global Markets, Inc. Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) provides cutting-edge trading and investment solutions to market participants around the world. The company is committed to defining markets through product innovation, leading edge technology and seamless trading solutions. The company offers trading across a diverse range of products in multiple asset classes and geographies, including options, futures, U.S., Canadian and European equities, exchange-traded products (ETPs), global foreign exchange (FX) and volatility products based on the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX Index), recognized as the world's premier gauge of U.S. equity market volatility. Cboe's subsidiaries include the largest options exchange and the third largest stock exchange operator in the U.S. In addition, the company operates one of the largest stock exchanges by value traded in Europe, and owns EuroCCP, a leading pan-European equity clearing house. Cboe also is a leading market globally for ETP listings and trading. The company is headquartered in Chicago with a network of domestic and global offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia, including main hubs in New York, London, Kansas City and Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.cboe.com.







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CBOE-OE Cboe and Cboe Global Markets are registered trademarks of Cboe Exchange, Inc. The content of this press release is for information purposes only and does not constitute or form part of, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information Certain information contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. 1 With the exception of the Cboe Switzerland 20 Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/622233/Cboe_Logo.jpg

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The driver who caused a catastrophic pile up on Sydney's M4 that killed a tradesman on his way to work told police that he 'didn't see' the collision before fleeing the scene.

Francis Omigie, 53, changed lanes in his Toyota Echo and suddenly stopped on the M4 at the Church Street off-ramp in Sydney's west on May 9, 2019 - causing a multi-vehicle crash at about 5.50am.

An Isuzu truck carrying beer kegs was unable to avoid the 11-vehicle pile up on the 'Death Valley' exit before hitting a ute that killed Irish tradesman Francis Shanley, 36, from Wentworthville.

Francis Omigie (pictured) has been charged with dangerous driving occasioning death and failing to stop and assist after telling officers he 'didn't see' the fatal M4 crash in 2019

Omigie, 53, changed lanes in his Toyota Echo and suddenly stopped on the M4 that caused an 11-vehicle pile up (pictured)

Francis Omigie, 53, is now in custody and is facing a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison

Omigie, who migrated to Australia from Nigeria, drove away unscathed and told NSW Police that he 'didn't see' the crash after 200 metres of debris was left sprawled along the motorway.

The Parramatta Local Court was shown footage of Omigie's interrogation on Thursday, where he slammed his hands on the desk before responding to a police officer in an expletive-ridden rant.

'I swear to god I didn't see it,' he said.

Police questioned the part-time electrical trades assistant on whether he stopped his vehicle to avoid paying tolls.

Irish tradesman Francis Shanley, 36, (pictured)was killed after truck carrying beer kegs unable to avoid the pile up crashed into his ute

Omigie drove away unscathed and told NSW Police that he 'didn't see' the crash after 200 metres of debris was left sprawled along the motorway (pictured: aftermath of the fatal crash)

Police questioned the part-time electrical trades assistant on whether he stopped his vehicle along the exit dubbed 'Death Valley' to avoid paying tolls.

Irishman Francis Shanley, 36, from Wentworthville (pictured) died from the 11-vehicle crash

'Did you decide that you didn't wanna pay the toll and decide to try and exit the freeway at Church Street, is that what you were trying to do?' An officer asked.

Omigie denied the claim and said his car had lost power earlier that morning but police found no mechanical issues.

He was also questioned about a text message he sent to his wife saying he nearly got hit in a collision.

'It didn't happen, I just sent it just to have sympathy that's all,' he explained to police.

The 53-year-old was found guilty of dangerous driving occasioning death and failing to stop and assist.

During the trial the Nigerian national attempted to shift the blame of the fatal crash on truck driver Luke Tisdell, claiming he had marijuana in his system 30 minutes before the collision.

Omigie (pictured) denied police claims that he tried to exit the freeway at Church street to avoid paying tolls

Omigie, 53, (pictured) was found guilty of dangerous driving occasioning death and failing to stop and assist

An Isuzu truck carrying beer kegs (pictured) was unable to avoid the 11-vehicle pile up that killed Irishman Francis Shanley

The 34-year-old truck driver said he had a cigarette and coffee the morning of the deadly crash while driving from his Winmalee home to the Toohey's brewery at Lidcombe.

After the collision, Mr Tinsdell told the court: 'I was scared and not in a very good mental state. I just killed someone and I'm still not over it', the Daily Telegraph reported.

The court heard the truck driver of 15 years had never had an accident after he described the collision as 'cars out to war'.

Omigie is now in custody and is facing a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

At the time of the fatal crash, Mr Shanley's devastated fiancee Broc Nicholson shared an emotional message about his death to Facebook.

'He will be forever in our hearts and sadly missed. I thank you all for your love, support and messages of kind words.

'Going to be a long road ahead getting back on our feet... Fly high my beautiful angel I love you forever and always.'
WASHINGTON, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Press Club (NPC) will host a virtual event at 10:00 a.m. ET on Monday, May 3  World Press Freedom Day - highlighting the cases of three journalists who need our help: Maria Ressa, Austin Tice, and Emilio Gutierrez-Soto.

To register for the event click here.

All three journalists - Ressa, Tice, and Gutierrez-Soto - are past recipients of the Club's John Aubuchon Award  the NPC's highest honor for press freedom. Each is still struggling for freedom.

Attendees will experience a virtual platform that looks and feels just like a visit to the National Press Club, The World's Leading Professional Organization for Journalists, and can navigate between three main events:

A major address by Maria Ressa , who will provide an update on her case in the Philippines, where she faces up to seven years in prison for a conviction on trumped-up charges of "cyber libel." After her remarks she will be in conversation with Jason Rezaian of The Washington Post .

, who will provide an update on her case in the Philippines, where she faces up to seven years in prison for a conviction on trumped-up charges of "cyber libel." After her remarks she will be in conversation with Jason Rezaian of . A unique perspective on the case of Austin Tice , the Marine veteran and Polk Award-winning journalist that has been held in Syria for more than eight years. Austin's niece Maia who just turned 11 will discuss her memories of her uncle and her advocacy for him in school and her neighborhood. Maia will be interviewed by National Press Club President Lisa Matthews.

, the Marine veteran and Polk Award-winning journalist that has been held in Syria for more than eight years. Austin's niece Maia who just turned 11 will discuss her memories of her uncle and her advocacy for him in school and her neighborhood. Maia will be interviewed by National Press Club President Lisa Matthews. An update on the case of Emilio Gutierrez-Soto, a Mexican journalist driven from his hometown by death threats from the military, which was acting on behalf of cartels. Gutierrez-Soto has been fighting for asylum ever since. He was almost deported in late 2017. Now, with a new administration, there is renewed hope for asylum in this case. Joining in the conversation will be Kathy Kiely of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Lynette Clemetson of the Knight Wallace Program at the University of Michigan. John Donnelly, Chair of the Club's Press Freedom Team, will moderate the program.

Guests are welcome to experience one or all of these programs and may also visit the social lounge for conversation about these cases with NPC members and press freedom advocates from many of our other sponsoring organizations.

Registration is free, however donations are encouraged, and will support the National Press Club's ongoing press freedom efforts and activities  including offsetting costs of programs like this one.

PRESS CONTACT: Lindsay Underwood for the National Press Club; lunderwood@press.org, (202) 662-7561

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/monday-national-press-club-to-highlight-three-major-cases-on-world-press-freedom-day-301279457.html

SOURCE National Press Club
Tunis, April 29 : Amid the surge of Covid-19 cases in Tunisia, Tunisian authorities on Wednesday announced a series of stricter prevention and control measures to curb the spread of the virus.

"These new measures will be applicable from May 3 to May 16, depending on the evolution of the situation in the country...and all the health protocols announced on April 17 will be maintained," Hasna Ben Slimane, spokesperson of the Tunisian government, said at a press conference held at the government's headquarters.

With regard to the arrivals of tourists and Tunisians living abroad, a mandatory seven-day self-quarantine will be imposed after they present a negative result of PCR test, which should be carried out within 72 hours before entry into the country, the Xinhua news agency reported.

"Another PCR test should be carried out during the 5th or the 7th day of self-quarantine," Ben Slimane added.

According to the government's spokesperson, "all schools will remain closed with the exception of the levels concerned by national exams." Distanced learning at universities will continue except those concerned by national competitions.

"Governors are called upon to take adequate measures when necessary," she said, adding that in cafes and restaurants, only the terraces will remain open.

Tunisian Health Ministry on Tuesday reported 1,957 new Covid-19 cases, raising the total number of infections in the country to 303,584.

Tunisian authorities imposed on April 17 new preventive measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. The decision put a ban on all vehicles from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. local time, on top of the existing curfew which forbids people leaving their homes from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

All businesses that do not respect the health protocols or the curfew hours will be closed immediately.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
A United Methodist megachurch based in Georgia has filed a complaint against regional church leadership as part of its effort to leave the denomination for multiple reasons.

The leadership of Mt. Bethel United Methodist Church, a Marietta-based congregation with approximately 10,000 members, voted earlier this month to begin the process of disaffiliation.

One issue was the decision of the UMC North Georgia Conference, the regional body that Mt. Bethel is part of, to reassign lead pastor, Jody Ray, to another position within the conference.

In the UMC, pastors are typically assigned to a congregation for one year at a time, with the possibility of being assigned to a different congregation or another role occurring on an annual basis.

Source:The Christian Post
SCHENECTADY  Acting Superintendent Aaron Bochniak is leaving the district over the summer and going back to his roots.

Bochniak announced at Wednesday nights virtual Board of Education meeting that he had accepted a job as an assistant superintendent at the Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery (HFM) Board of Education. His last day is Aug. 31.

The agenda for that districts HFM BOE meeting indicates that the panel approved a five-year deal beginning Sept. 1 for Bochniak to serve as the assistant superintendent for BOCES Operations and Component District Services.

His impending departure comes as Schenectady school leaders are poised to begin searching for a superintendent again after contract negotiations with their preferred candidate, Pedro Roman, recently fell through. Roman is an assistant superintendent in the Newburgh Enlarged City School district in Orange County and a former Schenectady administrator.

Bochniak, 47, was not among the field of candidates, opting not to put his name in the mix during the Capital Region BOCES-led search.

I am really grateful for the 5 amazing years that Ive had at the Schenectady school district but I am really thrilled also to be going to a position where I can serve in the community where I grew up, said Bochniak. So August 31 is still a long ways away, we got a lot of work to accomplish, and Im going to keep us moving forward.

Bochniak grew up in Amsterdam.

He has led the district since March 25, 2020, the same night that then-Superintendent Larry Spring abruptly resigned. Spring recently filed a $7.8 million notice of claim alleging district officials coerced him to resign amid what he contends were groundless harassment claims.
JTI Ukraine tobacco company plans to invest $45 million in the expansion and renovation of the production facilities of its factory in Kremenchuk in 2021-2022, General Manager of Japan Tobacco International (JTI) Ukraine Paul Holloway has said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

"This is the modernization of the entire production complex, and not an investment in a separate production line, as it was the case two years ago. The plans for this year are the expansion of the factory, the construction of a new warehouse, the modernization of the tobacco shop, new production lines, the modernization of buildings, structures, infrastructure and much more," he said.

According to Holloway, the company intends to increase the export of tobacco products, and make it more efficient. An important factor that influenced the company's plans was its obtaining the status of an Authorized Economic Operator (AEO), which will reduce customs formalities for the import of raw materials and the export of finished products.

The general manager of the company said that JTI, which received this status for the first time in Ukraine, will have a number of advantages when going through customs clearance in Ukraine, including the opportunity to use a special traffic lane for commercial vehicles.

Holloway said that in 2020, the company paid six times more dividends than in the entire history of JTI's work in Ukraine, and the investments provided for the development of the factory will not affect the further payment of dividends to shareholders. According to him, the factory in Kremenchuk is an independent center of profit, and it will provide money that it earned earlier for investments.

JTI paid out more than UAH 300 million in dividends to shareholders for 2018-2019 and plans to pay about the same amount for 2020.
NASHVILLE  An Alabama woman is charged with TennCare fraud and theft of services for allegedly reporting false information to the state to obtain TennCare healthcare insurance benefits.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG), in a joint effort with sheriffs offices in Lawrence County, Alabama and Marshall County, Tennessee, today announced the arrest of 33-year old Jessica Skinner, who is currently a resident of Town Creek, Alabama. Shes charged with TennCare fraud, a class D felony and theft of property over $10,000 but under $60,000, a class C felony.

Investigators allege that for a three-year period, Skinner reported that she had custody of her children in addition to falsely reporting that she resided in Tennessee. These factors made her eligible for TennCare and as a result TennCare paid approximately $56,900.00 in fees and claims on her behalf.

Our law enforcement partners, both in and outside Tennessee, are critical to our mission, Inspector General Kim Harmon said. By partnering with both Lawrence County, Alabama and Marshall County, Tennessee sheriffs offices, we were able to apprehend one of our Most Wanted subjects.

The case is being prosecuted by District Attorney General Robert J. Carter of Marshall County.

The OIG, which is separate from TennCare, began full operation in February 2005 and has investigated over 5,760 criminal cases leading to more than $10.8 million being repaid to TennCare, with a total estimated cost avoidance of more than $163.6 million for TennCare, according to latest figures. To date, 3,113 people have been charged with TennCare fraud. TennCare is funded with approximately 65% federal and 35% state tax dollars.

The OIGs most wanted for TennCare fraud are posted online at https://www.tn.gov/finance/fa-oig/fa-oig-most-wanted.html. Anyone with information about their whereabouts is urged to use the contact information on the page.

Through the OIG Cash for Tips Program established by the Legislature, Tennesseans can get cash rewards for TennCare fraud tips that lead to convictions. Anyone can report suspected TennCare fraud by calling 1-800-433-3982, toll-free or by logging on to www.tn.gov/oig/ and following the prompts that read, Report TennCare fraud.
Rituals is an interview series which highlights the different ways of boosting productivity.

For established businesses, the decision to adopt sustainable practices is an expensive one, as every replacement has to be done at scale. Thats why its important to set commitments  covering everything from sourcing to manufacturing and packaging.

This is the idea behind the Green Beauty initiative of global beauty brand Garnier, described by its Marketing Director Isabel Falco as an end to end approach to sustainability.

By 2022 we want to aim for 100% of our renewable ingredients to be sustainably sourced by 2025, 100% of our industrial sites will be carbon neutral... and 100% of our products will be made with zero virgin plastic.

With fourteen years of experience, the veteran marketer  who also leads LOreal Paris Excellence  is behind two of the fastest growing beauty brands in the country.

Everyone, as you would have heard, calls me Falqi, she says with a laugh. On a call with CNN Philippines Life, the head of digital, media and consumer intelligence for LOreal Philippines walks us through some global standards, her personal regimen, and wins worth celebrating at work.

Look for the bunny

Earlier this year, Garnier was officially certified as cruelty-free under the Leaping Bunny Program for cruelty-free cosmetics, personal care, and household products globally.

"You know its actually been over thirty years, since 1989, that Garnier has been committed to a world without animal testing. And as the next step in our sustainability journey, this 2021, we are now officially approved by Cruelty Free International, under the Leaping Bunny Program. The Leaping Bunny is a globally recognized gold standard for cruelty-free products in terms of cosmetics, personal care, and household care. We really see it as a stamp of reassurance and this is because the Leaping Bunny requires brands to really investigate their entire supply chain, which includes all of the suppliers, starting from raw materials. For Garnier, this really meant working for over the last eighteen months  with over 500 suppliers who source over 3,000 ingredients for our products worldwide, to really get all of the declarations and documentation that there is no trace of animal testing all throughout the supply chain.

One of the alternative methods [of testing] that LOreal has actually pioneered is using reconstructed human skin models, which we call Episkin. Our loyal scientists started working on this technology as way back as 1979, and now we have three Episkin centers worldwide in Lyon, France; Shanghai, China; and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Sustainable Sourcing

Garnier Micellar Cleansing Water Pink (For Sensitive Skin), 99 (125 mL), from Garnier Philippines

The way we define sustainable sourcing in light of Garniers Green Beauty program is if you can trace the origin of the ingredients. So it has a known origin; you can trace it all the way through its supply chain; it meets the most critical sustainability standards: Does it respect human rights in line with standards from the International Labor Organization? Does it respect biodiversity and conservation? Does it respect social development?

One of our star products is micellar cleansing water and we have a variant which is Micellar Cleansing Water and Argan Oil. Its a bi-phase product thats very good for both cleansing, as well as nourishing the skin, with argan oil as a star ingredient. The argan oil that we use is sourced from Morocco. Theres a collective there of local women whom we have an agreement [with] to have sustainable sourcing.

Another example: We launched a limited edition of our Sakura White Serums last [Quarter 4 of 2020] in e-commerce. The star ingredient there, which is the sakura flowers, is actually sourced from locally contracted farmers in Japan, where we have a similar sustainable community arrangement. I guess the good thing about having a global brand is you can leverage the scale as well, to really get the sourcing from these locations.

Packaging adds up

Made in partnership with Indonesias SainBag, Garniers new packaging can be melted, composted, or simply thrown away, and it will decompose within 90 days.

I think weve all lived it in 2020, which is this massive consumer shift to e-commerce, given the lockdown that weve all had to live through. This was a key pivotal moment for Garnier. On the one hand, I do think we've successfully made that agile shift to e-commerce. You know, we ended up ranking in the top five skincare brands during the past 11.11 sale. So on the one hand, I think its been really good for Garnier to have that achievement.

Now on the other hand, I think the other achievement that weve been really, really proud of is that we've also been able to achieve both the business results, as well as our sustainability initiatives hand in hand. Last year in October, we actually launched [Garnier] Green Parcel in Shopee. Because we do know that with the rise of e-commerce, there's also the rise of the packaging material  which is predominantly plastic.

With the Green Parcel, we were able to come up with a zero-plastic alternative. Instead of the plastic bag, we were able to partner up SainBag to come up with a bag thats primarily made of cassava. It has zero plastic and its fully biodegradable within 90 days. And then instead of the plastic bubble wrap inside, we partnered with EcoNest to instead use 100% kraft paper, using the Geami Honeycomb 3D die cut solution. Its also going to be packaged in Shopees reusable carton box. So its 100% plastic-free. We estimate that that will actually help save us about a ton of plastic per year, just for Garnier alone.

Zoom-ready glow-up

In the Philippines, the Light Complete Vitamin C Serum (for dark spots) (499, Garnier Philippines) was Garniers top selling product in lockdown.

With the pandemic, we saw a shift among consumers to have increased preference for skincare. Because they were at home, they had more time to really invest in a more multi-step skincare regimen. And of course, the pandemic and the lockdown came with its own set of impacts on peoples skin with the increased mask-wearing. So, there was this need among consumers to take care of their skin a bit more  plus they had the time to do it.

There was also, you know, this heightened usage of digital to really research skincare products. Before we launched the vitamin C serum, serums had been predominantly more in the premium mass luxury segment. [Whereas] the [Garnier] vitamin C serum is priced at 499. The key benefit is that it feeds dark spots in three days. Its star ingredient is of course vitamin C, which is very good at lightening dark spots and addressing dull and uneven skin. So, you get that nice, bright glow.

Regimen

Kiehls Calendula Alcohol-Free Toner (2,425, Kiehl's Philippines). LOreal Paris Revitalift Crystal Micro Essence Toner with Salicylic Acid (799, LOreal Philippines). Garnier Light Complete Vitamin C Serum (499, Garnier Philippines). LOreal Paris Revitalift Hyaluronic Acid Moisturizer Serum for Face (374, LOreal Philippines). Kiehls Midnight Recovery Concentrate (2,950, Kiehl's Philippines). IT Cosmetics Your Skin But Better CC+ Cream Oil-Free Matte with SPF 40 (2,560, Sephora Philippines). L'Oreal Paris Infallible Pro-Matte Pressed Powder Foundation (599, LOreal Philippines).

I definitely start with cleansers. And then I do use toner, which is the Calendula Toner from Kiehls. And afterwards I use LOreal Paris Crystal Micro-Essence to prep the skin and to balance [its] pH [level], because I do have combination skin.

I do use Garniers Vitamin C Serum in the morning, and then at night I use LOreal Paris Hyaluronic Acid Serum. But I also use Kiehls midnight oil, because the lavender scent is very relaxing at night. And then of course sunscreen!

Right now, I use another LOreal Group product which is IT Cosmetics, the CC Cream for oily skin. Its the matte version, and it has 50 SPF. Its a CC cream and sun product in one. My top up when I get oily is LOreal Paris Infallible Pro-Matte, which is a great matte product.
Sheriff Pinky Gonzales of Refugio County, Texas, at a press conference in Anzalduas Park near McAllen, Texas, on April 28, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Texas Sheriffs Overwhelmed by Spillover Crime From Border Surge

MISSION, TexasSheriff Pinky Gonzales is charged with public safety in Refugio County, Texas, which sits 180 miles north of the U.S.Mexico border. The county is home to about 8,000 residents and 13 deputies.

Were a rural town, weve got a limited budget, and were just overwhelmed with this, he said about the effects of the border surge, during a press conference at Anzalduas Park on the U.S.Mexico border on April 28.

We have never seen anything like this. We have dealt with these illegal [aliens] coming across, coming through our townnow, theyre stealing vehicles. We just got through working a case where we had 20 of them bail out.

A bailout is when a vehicle full of illegal immigrants stops and they flee in different directions to avoid capture.

Gonzales held up a stack of 911 call slips related to border issues that his office has received since January.

Weve had these human smugglers go through our town going 80 miles an hour in 35-mile speed zones. I mean this is serious stuff, he said. They have no regard for property or human lives. I mean, at all.

Gonzales said each call slip, or case, requires anywhere from eight to 12 hours of work from his deputies.

I have calculated over 3,000 deputy man hours since January, he said. We have just been overwhelmed, overwhelmed with these cases. I have 13 deputies working around the clock and sometimes, I have to call those that are off to come help us.

Further north, in Lavaca County, Sheriff Micah Harmon said his deputies have dealt with numerous vehicle pursuits and bailouts.

In one recent pursuit, a pickup truck carrying 18 to 20 illegal aliens crashed into a tree and caught fire.

There were numerous, numerous injuries, Harmon said. We had to deploy all of our EMS people, our fire departments, all of our law enforcement. And its a burden and its a strain on our community having to deal with this. Its not just a border problem. Its not just a Texas problem. Its an America problem. 

Last week, four Texas counties declared a local state of disaster as they struggle to cope with increased crime.

Counties in Texas are currently calculating the fiscal cost of dealing with illegal immigration and cross-border crime in their counties, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requested the information on April 26.

Abbott said he intends to bill the federal government for costs incurred on behalf of the state and the counties affected.

On the state level, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star on March 6 in response to the burgeoning number of illegal border crossings, as well as human and drug smuggling throughout the state.

During the first four weeks of the operation, Texas Department of Public Safety officers referred more than 16,000 illegal immigrants to Customs and Border Protection and arrested 598 criminals, Abbott said on April 1. In addition, state troopers seized 14 pounds of cocaine, 23 firearms, and almost $1 million in currency and arrested nine gang members involved in smuggling contraband, he said.

Lt. Chris Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) told The Epoch Times that theres been a significant increase in human smuggling this year.

Dont ignore the fact that theres also criminal activity involved as well, Olivarez said. I know the focus for now is the families, the unaccompanied children. But we cant ignore the fact that theres still criminal activity taking place.

Border Patrol estimates that every day at least 1,000 illegal aliens enter the United States from Mexico and evade capture.

Were also dealing with those single adults that are being smuggled in vehicles, trucks, that are trying to get out of the state into other states, Olivarez said.

He said DPS has also been involved in busting stash houses, stopping drug smuggling, and dealing with stolen vehicles, weapons, and gangs.
WA Premier Mark McGowan is expected to provide details about plans to ease COVID-19 restrictions at 7.30pm Thursday following a state disaster council meeting.

This afternoon, when Parliament rises, well have a meeting of the state disaster council to work out what the arrangements are from Saturday, he said.

Premier Mark McGowan arrives at Parliament for the first day of the new term of government. Credit:Peter De Kruijff

If we have an outcome this evening, which I expect we will, well be able to provide advice to the people this evening.

Mr McGowan said on Thursday morning there had been no new locally acquired COVID-19 cases recorded in Perth over the past 24 hours, however there were four cases detected in returned travellers who arrived via India.
PLANO, Texas, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Abuelo's Mexican Restaurant, famous for its authentic, made-from-scratch Mexican cuisine, announced today that the restaurant chain will celebrate Cinco de Mayo with festive drink specials all day and a fundraiser to help end childhood hunger. For each El Jefe Margarita or Flag Margarita sold at any of its locations, Abuelo's will donate $1 to No Kid Hungry, a national campaign working to end childhood hunger in America.

Flag Margaritas will be served in a souvenir party ball that guests can keep. Guests who purchase an El Jefe Margarita get to keep the Cuervo shaker while supplies last. Each Abuelo's guest who purchases one of these drinks or makes a cash donation will receive a No Kid Hungry sticker to show their support for the campaign's vital work providing nutritious meals for children living with hunger.

Abuelo's will also have other $5 drink specials on Cinco de Mayo, including the La Grandeza Margarita, Sangria Rocks and 22-ounce Grande Mexican Draft Beer. Special pricing for all three items will be in effect all day on Wednesday, May 5.

"The Abuelo's team has a strong connection to the communities we serve, and that's why we create partnerships with programs that help children, benefit education and honor our military heroes," said Robert Lin, President of Abuelo's. "We've been proud to work with No Kid Hungry for years to celebrate special occasions and raise money at the same time because we believe no kid should go hungry."

No Kid Hungry has a plan to make sure children are fed, both during the pandemic and in the recovery to follow. Through a combination of emergency grants, strategic assistance, advocacy and awareness, No Kid Hungry is helping kids, families and communities get the resources they need. Learn more at www.nokidhungry.org. Find an Abuelo's Mexican Restaurant near you at www.abuelos.com/restaurants.

About Abuelo's

Since its first opening in 1989, Abuelo's has consistently been on the leading edge of Mexican cuisine, combining menu creativity, outstanding food and beverage quality, colorful plate presentations and superior service in a true Mexican courtyard atmosphere. Abuelo's has received national accolades as the top-ranked Mexican food restaurant and as one of America's top overall restaurant chains in four consecutive biennial surveys by a leading national consumer rating magazine. Owned and operated by Food Concepts International in Lubbock Texas, the company currently has 29 full-service restaurants located in nine states. For more information, visit www.abuelos.com or Abuelo's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Abuelos.

About No Kid Hungry

No child should go hungry in America. But in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, one in six kids could face hunger. No Kid Hungry is working to end childhood hunger by helping launch and improve programs that give all kids the healthy food they need to thrive. This is a problem we know how to solve. No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength, an organization committed to ending hunger and poverty.

Related Links

https://www.abuelos.com/

https://www.nokidhungry.org/

Media Contact

Ashley Glenn

719-247-3661

[email protected]

SOURCE Abuelos

Related Links

https://www.abuelos.com


[April 29, 2021] Yanimed Announces Joint Venture with Guangdong Guyun Medical Technology Co., ltd to Strengthen Its Footprint in the US Medical Consumable Industry

Yanimed, the Malta-based producer of nitrile gloves and protective masks, has just entered into a joint venture with Chinese nitrile gloves manufacturer Guangdong Guyun Medical Technology Co., ltd. This collaboration will lead to the formation of the new brand Yanimed  YaniPure, exclusively for the US market.

NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Yanimed announced today that it has entered into a joint venture with Guangdong Guyun Medical Technology Co., ltd, a Chinese manufacturing company dedicated to R&D, production, and manufacturing of disposable medical products including nitrile gloves. A Malta-based brand owned and operated by Blokkx Ltd., Yanimed is a noted manufacturer of latex-free nitrile gloves that offer best comfort and effective allergy protection. By joining hands with Guyun Medical, Blokkx Ltd. has taken a firm step towards emerging as a potent force in the medical consumable industry in the US.

Nitrile gloves from Yanimed are latex-free examination gloves that are well tolerated by the skin. Because of its low-irritant nature, the product is suitable for allergy sufferers and individuals with sensitive skin. The companys range of products also includes Yanisoft nitrile gloves with excellent skin compatibility. The JV between Yanimed and Guyun Medical comprises of a deal for the creation of Yanimed  YaniPure, a new brand that will operate exclusively in the US market. As a result of this alliance, the two organizations will work in tandem to build a distribution network serving hospital groups in the US, providing high quality gloves now and post pandemic. The two companies will also form a strategic partnership, making Yanimed the US representative for Guyun Medical. Yanimed is pleased to expand its long-term relationship with Guyun Medical as we continue our efforts to become a ey player in the medical consumable industry in the United States," said Sergio Raygada, CEO US Operations, Yanimed. "This joint venture will allow us to accelerate our expansion plan and grow our brand value.



Guyun Medical is a high-demand supplier in the American and European markets. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company has been constantly engaged in efforts to increase its production capacity. Guyun Medical already has more than 100 international certifications including EN455, EN374, CE, ISO9001, and is on the verge of receiving its 510k certification from the FDA. As a leader in medical consumable industry, we are very excited to extend our production footprint and expand our reach in the US. Combination of the strengths of Yanimed and Guyun Medical in our world-class production facility creates a win-win situation for both. We are confident that Yanimed/Guyun soon become a strong player in the post pandemic US market, said Jack Hoo, the owner of Guyun Medical.

To find out more about Yanimed, please visit https://yanimed.com/ About Yanimed: Yanimed is a brand of Blokkx Ltd. based in Malta. Under the brand-name Yanimed, the company produces protective articles like nitrile gloves and protective masks. All its products are manufactured in selected factories in Asia, mainly from Vietnam, China, and Malaysia that meet stringent quality standards. About Guyun Medical: Guyun Medical is a Chinese manufacturing company committed to R&D, production, and manufacturing of disposable medical products. The company has production lines for nitrile examination gloves, and its products have high demand in the US and Europe. Guyun Medical disposable nitrile medical examination glove daily production capability reach 40,000,000pieces per day, Guyun Medical also the partner-factory of medical PPE products in USA, France, Italy. To find out more about Guyun Medical please visit www.guyunmedical.com. Contact: Website: https://yanimed.com/ Email: info@yanimed.com Phone: + 44 330 02 7 02 07 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0aff9cb5-ada6-487e-b81d-4d9d6ea3b53f



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Andriy Kobolev, Executive Board Chairman of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy, does not intend to do the club scene and leaves the keys to his office to Yuriy Vitrenko, who takes office on Thursday.

"I leave the office's keys to Yuriy Vitrenko. The last pleasure that I allowed myself as the head of Naftogaz: I signed a decision to start seismic work on the Black Sea shelf," he wrote on his Facebook page.

Kobolev said that he has claims to the decisions of the Cabinet of Ministers on Wednesday, which actually put an end to corporate governance reform.

"One yesterday's government decision shut the door on all the developments. And we are still ready to fight against this. It is important to clarify. I do not intend to do the club scene and pull the rug out from under Naftogaz. Now the main task of the team is to maintain the pace of work that has been set in our company recently, and to ensure the development of production, retail business and other strategic directions of the group," he said.

At the same time, according to a posting on the Facebook page of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy, Kobolev, while communicating with the company's staff, announced his intention to challenge his dismissal in court.

"Andriy Kobolev intends to appeal against his dismissal, but stressed that these processes will not affect the work of the group," the group said.

"I thank everyone for the seven incredible years of working together, wish you success and assure that I stay in Ukraine and do not intend to emigrate anywhere, as some media write. I will note that no one has any complaints about the quality of our work, and we can be proud of the fact that what we did," the press service of Naftogaz said, citing him as saying.

As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, at a general meeting of shareholders of NJSC Naftogaz Ukrainy on April 28, 2021, recognized the work of the supervisory board and the board of the company as unsatisfactory.

The government prematurely terminated the powers of Kobolev, dismissing him from his post on April 28, and appointed Vitrenko head of the company effective from April 29 for a period of one year.
A homeless woman whose tent was dismantled by cops in a ritzy neighborhood of New York City had previously concealed the murdered corpse of a teenage girl, it is claimed.

Amber Wilson, 35, recently set up the tent in the median on Broadway at West 86th Street in the Upper West Side neighborhood with her partner Devonte Rose, 28. But their makeshift dwelling was taken down on Wednesday after complaints from neighbors.

After Wilson's prime pitching spot hit the headlines, it emerged she was freed with no bail last month after allegedly helping cover-up the body of a murdered teenage girl in an abandoned Manhattan fish market, the New York Post noted.

The body of Rosalee Sanchez was found wrapped in plastic in the abandoned Fulton Fish Market on March 6. Wilson was arrested the same day for helping two other homeless suspects allegedly cover-up the 19 year-old's body after she was murdered.

Scroll down for video

Amber Wilson, 33, Devante Rose, 28, have pitched a tent smack in the middle of Broadway to claim a street divider as their own little piece of paradise

Wilson and Rose are pictured inside of their tent before it was dismantled by police

Some of their Upper West Side neighbors are not happy campers that they had set up their tent in the ritzy neighborhood

They say hello to everyone that passes by and seem to keep their little piece of the world clean

Amber Wilson, 33, Devante Rose, 28, are seen waving to neighbors in the Upper West Side

Videos taken on Wednesday show cops helping Wilson pack up the makeshift home into a number of garbage bags.

Cops at the scene are heard telling the couple they are going to try to help them get into a hotel while the excited couple responds: 'God Bless You.'

Rose told a photographer for DailyMail.com that he was grateful that the tent was taken down.

'I'm grateful though because I'm getting the help that I need,' he said. 'I'll be a lot better when I come out and get everything together like I'm supposed to. I didn't get no help before, I was worse than this. Worse. Way worse.'

Wilson went to a shelter with their belongings while Rose was taken to a detox program, they told a DailyMail.com photographer.

Wilson told DailyMail.com that she moved to the city from Cumberland, Maryland about eight months ago. The couple then met at a deli in Harlem.

'I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing, and she wanted a cigarette. So I walked up to her and I said, You I'll get you a cigarette no problem. So I got one for her,' Rose said.

Wilson added: 'And we've been together since.'

When asked why the couple decided to set up in the middle of Broadway, Wilson said they had been in front of another building nearby after someone notified them it had been abandoned 'so nobody would bother us.'

'But then they sent six cops and sanitation workers,' she said.

Devante Rose, 28, says hello to an elderly woman who walks past his tent

Devante Rose, 28, says hello to an elderly woman who walks past his tent

Wilson and Rose are seen dismantling their tent

Wilson and Rose pose in front of their tent while another person sits on a bench

NYPD are asking Amber and Devante that they have to move their tent and they're trying to get them into a homeless shelter

Rose praised the police for wanting to help him and Wilson

The couple said they have been trying to get jobs in the area

NYPD are seen asking Amber and Devante that they have to move their tent

NYPD are asking Amber and Devante that they have to move their tent and they're trying to get them into a homeless shelter or permanent residence

An NYPD car is seen parked in the intersection while asking the couple to move their tent in the Upper West Side on Wednesday

Rose said the couple met shortly after Wilson moved from Maryland and was looking for a cigarette

A view shows the inside of the tent set up by Wilson and Rose

A mother and son are seen walking past the tent before it was dismantled in the UWS

Wilson said the sound of the subway was not too loud and found comfort in the 'clank' of the train.

'It's like a beat and we love music. We were actually going to record it so that he could freestyle to it, and rap to it,' she said.

The couple agreed that the intersection where they pitched their tent was among the safest places they have lived.

'We've been other places and people like to steal things and take from us. When it rained and destroyed our box before we had a tent, I had all of my stuff over here and nobody touched anything the whole night. But when we are in other places, they take stuff.'

Rose said he had worked at a Bath & Body Works in Brooklyn's Kings Mall but claimed that he stopped working there over a family matter.

The couple are seen joyously cheering and waving at a bus as it turned past them during the interview.

Wilson said she had worked as a seasonal worker at a Macy's department in Maryland and that the two are currently looking for new jobs.

She said they have had difficulty finding work because they don't have a computer to create and print resumes.

'In the situation that we're in, it's not to easy to get a job.'

The two both have case workers, who are working to get them a permanent shelter.

The couple said that Mayor Bill de Blasio needs to help homeless people more.

'We even give back to homeless people when we're homeless and he needs to get it together,' Wilson said.

They said cops had previously tried to 'bribe' them to move the tent, offering them a meal to pack up.

'Nope, not happening,' Rose said.

A 19-year-old homeless woman's body was found wrapped in plastic in an abandoned fish market now covered in graffiti in New York City

Last month, the body of Rosalee Sanchez, 19, was found wrapped in plastic in an abandoned fish market now covered in graffiti in New York City.

Sanchez was found around 9.20am on the second-floor staircase of the former Fulton Fish Market and a homeless man admitted to beating and killing her, NYPD sources told the New York Post at the time.

Austin Boehm, 25, confessed to killing Sanchez after he tried to check himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, sources told the outlet.

Boehm and a second suspect, 20-year-old Christian Mercado, were both hit with murder charges.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by the outlet, Boehm admitted that he stabbed and beat Sanchez while Mercado confessed to hitting her with a shovel and strangling her with a rope.

Boehm and Mercado have both pleaded not guilty to their murder charges before judge Gregory Carro.

Wilson had allegedly been living in the fish market with Boehm and Mercado. No motive for the murder has been given.
Mogadishu:

Mogadishu, Oct 28 (AP) A suicide car bomb exploded outside a popular hotel in Somalias capital on Saturday, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than 17, while gunfire could be heard inside, police said.

A second blast was heard in the area minutes later. Captain Mohamed Hussein said the gunfire was heard inside the Nasa-Hablod hotel, which is close to the presidential palace and is frequented by politicians and other members of Mogadishus elite. A senior Somali police colonel and a former lawmaker were among the dead, Hussein said.

Saturdays blasts came two weeks after more than 350 people were killed in a massive truck bombing on a busy Mogadishu street in the countrys worst-ever attack.

Al-Shabab, Africas deadliest Islamic extremist group, quickly claimed responsibility for Saturdays attack and said its fighters were inside the hotel.

As night fell, sporadic gunfire could be heard around the hotel as both soldiers and ambulances responded to the attack.

Mohamed Dek Haji said he survived the bombing as he walked beside a parked car that was largely destroyed by the explosion. He said he saw at least three armed men in military uniforms running toward the hotel after the suicide bombing at its gate.

ALSO READ | Afghanistan: 15 army trainees killed, 4 wounded in suicide attack at Marshal Fahim Military Academy in Kabul

I think they were al-Shabab fighters who were trying to storm the hotel, he said, lying on a hospital bed. He suffered small injuries on his shoulder and skull from flying glass.

Witnesses in some previous attacks have said al-Shabab fighters disguised themselves by wearing military uniforms. Al-Shabab often targets high-profile areas of Mogadishu.

It has not commented on the massive attack two weeks ago; experts have said the death toll was so high that the group hesitated to further anger Somali citizens as its pursues its insurgency.

Since the blast two weeks ago, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed has visited regional countries to seek more support for the fight against the extremist group, vowing a state of war.

A 22,000-strong multinational African Union force in Somalia is expected to withdraw its forces and hand over the countrys security to the Somali military by the end of 2020.

US military officials and others in recent months have expressed concern that Somali forces are not yet ready.

The US military also has stepped up military efforts against al-Shabab this year in Somalia, carrying out nearly 20 drone strikes, as the global war on extremism moves deeper into the African continent.

ALSO READ | Afghanistan: US condemns twin terror attacks on mosques

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Development, Labor and Technology of Poland Jarosaw Gowin discussed regional security, vaccination against COVID-19 and the development of border infrastructure.

"The Head of the Government of Ukraine noted that the dialogue between the countries has recently been actively developing, and this dynamic and meaningful contacts should be continued. Shmyhal thanked the Polish side for the effective support that Ukraine has felt in the context of the recent increase in the military presence of the Russian Federation near the Ukrainian borders and in Crimea," the press service of the government said following the meeting.

It is noted that Shmyhal thanked Poland, which, within the framework of the initiative of the European Commission, expressed its readiness to provide Ukraine with 1.2 million doses of coronavirus vaccine.

"We count on the support of the Polish government in agreeing a mechanism for the transfer of vaccines to Ukrainians in the near future," the head of government stressed.

Shmyhal noted, among other things, that Ukraine is closely monitoring the implementation of health certificates in the European Union and is ready to participate in the initiative to increase population mobility.

In addition, the Prime Minister of Ukraine noted that a significant increase in the capacity on the Ukrainian-Polish border is an integral part of strengthening bilateral relations.

"It is very important for us to cooperate in this direction so that we can develop, increase trade between the countries, eliminate smuggling schemes and equip as many modern checkpoints as possible. This is one of the practical steps to expand our cooperation. Checkpoints are the door between our states, therefore, progress in this area is of great importance," said Shmyhal.

He also noted that in the context of increasing trade between the countries, the issue of Polish permits for the implementation of international road freight transport arises.

"Considering the growing volumes of our bilateral trade, the number of auto permits for Ukraine should be at least 200,000. This will help reveal our mutual economic potential and improve the dynamics of trade," Shmyhal said.

During the meeting, the Prime Minister of Ukraine also noted the
Spain on Thursday called on Burkina Faso to investigate the murder of two Spanish journalists in an attack on an anti-poaching patrol.

David Beriain and Roberto Fraile, two reporters with experience of working in conflict zones, were accompanying Irish wildlife campaigner Rory Young in the Arly National Park in southeastern Burkina Faso when they were attacked.

Initially reported missing and the subjects of a major search, the Burkina authorities said Tuesday the three had been "executed by terrorists".

"We have demanded that the Burkina Faso authorities investigate, that they clarify the events and identify those responsible so they can be brought to justice," Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya told a news conference in Madrid.

"We don't want these terrible events to be forgotten or to go unpunished," she added.

The two Spanish journalists had been filming a documentary in the West African country.

Their remains are expected to arrive in Spain on Friday at 9 am (0700 GMT) "so their families can say their final goodbye," the minister said.

Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in the vast Sahel region, has been in the grip of an intensifying jihadist insurgency since 2015 which has ravaged its once-vibrant tourist industry.

The Spanish foreign minister said she had been informed of a statement from a jihadist group claiming responsibility for the attack but she said "this is not enough".

"We really want all the facts cleared up," she added.

The minister said she had spoken to her counterpart in Burkina Faso and "we agreed" that the country should "continue its investigation so we can have additional details about what happened".

du/ds/txw
SHENANDOAH  Diane Korenda is seeking a seat on Shenandoah Borough Council.

The Republican, who is retired from the Shenandoah Valley School District, recently announced her candidacy for the May 18 primary.

Im seeking a seat on borough council to help make decisions for the good of our community, she said in a release.

In addition to being born and raised in the borough, she is a 1972 graduate of Shenandoah Valley High School and was employed all her work life in the community, she said.

Korendas family includes her husband, Bill; a daughter, son and stepson; and five grandchildren.
Junior explorer looking to unlock value in the historic Bergslagen mining district of Sweden

Tomtebo covers 5,144 hectares and sits 175 kilometers northwest of Stockholm

Undertaking 5,000-meter, 21-hole program targeting four zones at Tomtebo

What District Metals does:

District Metals Corp ( ) is reimagining a historic mining district with its polymetallic Tomtebo project in Sweden.

Located in the central area of the country, the Bergslagen district is home to some world-class metal mines like Garpenberg, Zinkgruvan, and Falun. But despite its long history of mining, Sweden is still off the radar of many international investors. The country is Europes leading mining nation, accounting for 91% of the continents iron ore, 9% of the copper, and 24-39% of its lead, zinc, silver, and gold.

Swedens Boliden, which owns Garpenberg, is its largest mining company, but the country is also home to projects being explored by Lundin Mining and Agnico Eagle Mines. That said, international investment in exploration is still extremely limited  deterred by the notion of high taxes, an active environmental movement, and elevated labour costs.

Vancouver-based District is hoping to change that perception with its Tomtebo property, an advanced exploration project that covers an area of 5,144 hectares around 175 kilometers (km) northwest from Stockholm, Swedens capital. Thanks to the districts long history of mining, infrastructure like roads, railway, and power lines surround the project. Bolidens Garpenberg, which was once referred to as the worlds most productive underground zinc mine, is 25km south of Tomtebo.

District Metals sees a number of geological similarities between Garpenberg and Tomtebo, from host rocks, structure, alteration, and mineralization styles. Historic production at Tomtebo comprised 120,000 tonnes at 4.4% copper intermittently for over 200 years, but the area has seen little to no exploration in the intervening period. In 2018, former owner EMX Royalties Corp assayed eight rock grab samples from dump piles that ranged from 0.2% to 3% copper, 0.1 to 2.5 grams per ton (g/t) gold, 0.1 to 20.1% zinc, 0.1% to 10.8% lead, and 3.1 to 383 g/t silver.

Today, District Metals is looking to apply modern systemic exploration techniques at Tomtebo in an effort to unlock the propertys potential  and put an under-the-radar mining district on the international map.

How is it doing:

Since acquiring the project from EMX in February 2020, District Metals has been busy assembling the pieces to start its aggressive exploration campaign at Tomtebo.

In July 2020, the firm began an airborne electromagnetic and magnetic survey at Tomtebo - the first time a deep penetrating airborne study has been carried out at the site. The survey covered the entire Tomtebo property with around 600 line-kilometers at a line spacing of 100 metres (m) and detecting conductive polymetallic sulphide mineralization at depths of 500m or more.

On March 15, 2021, after months of preparation and armed with nearly $5 million raised in a private placement, the company finally started drilling with a 5,000m, 21-hole program targeting four zones -- Oscarsgruvan, Steffenburgs, Gardsgruvans, and Gamla Gruvans.

Two weeks later, District Metals announced that a ground survey revealed numerous gravity high anomalies on the property. The anomalies were located at the historic Tomtebo mine, both within and outside of the known mineralized zones, confirming the mineralized domains that offer immense expansion potential."

The gravity high anomalies at the mine reveal an exploration target of over 72 million tons (Mt) at a density of 3.5 grams per square centimetre (g/cm3) from near-surface down to a depth of 650m.

Another significant blind gravity high anomaly was identified 1 km northeast along trend from the historic Tomtebo mine that is open to the northeast and at depth where an exploration target of 34Mt at a density of 3.5 g/cm3 was modeled at shallow depths.

Yet another anomaly was identified 600m southwest of the mine that is associated with historic iron sulphide occurrences, which are known to sometimes coalesce with polymetallic sulphide mineralization in the Bergslagen Mining District.

In April, after drilling 1,377m in seven holes, the company sent drill core samples from three holes for analysis. It expects the results to arrive by late May.

On the personnel front, the company recently appointed Marlis Yassin as its new chief financial officer, taking over from Gavin Cooper who had been in the role since 2017. Cooper will continue to work with District Metals as a consultant. Yassin has over 15 years' experience working with companies in various sectors, including mining, technology, and industrial products.

District Metals also named Hein Raat as its country manager for Sweden in the run-up to the Tomtebo drilling program. Raat is a professional geologist (EurGeol) with extensive experience exploring for base and precious metal deposits in Scandinavia and Europe. He was a geologist for the Boliden Group in Sweden for eight years, with the last four years being focused on polymetallic projects in the Bergslagen district.

In addition. Rodney Allen, who did his PhD in volcanic resources, has been appointed as a technical advisor to the company. He was manager of Geology Research and Development for the Boliden Group in Sweden for 10 years.

Inflection points:

Drill core sample results from Tomtebo to arrive by late May 2021

Continued drilling at the mine

What the boss says:

"We are very pleased with the progression of our maiden drill program at Tomtebo," District Metals CEO Garrett Ainsworth said in a recent statement

"Our technical team and drill crew in the field are firing on all cylinders, which has resulted in optimized production from the drill rig with best practices being carried out with regards to health, safety, and the environment, he added.

Contact the author: patrick@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @PatrickMGraham
WALTHAM, Mass., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE: TMO), the world leader in serving science, today reported its financial results for the first quarter ended April 3, 2021.

First Quarter 2021 Highlights

First quarter revenue increased 59% to $9.91 billion .

. First quarter GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) increased 198% to $5.88 .

. First quarter adjusted EPS increased 145% to $7.21 .

. Continued significant role in enabling the COVID-19 response, helping to scale vaccine production and supporting testing globally, and accelerated growth in the base business.

Strong start to the year in terms of product launches including two Thermo Scientific Orbitrap Exploris Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometers, which bring high-resolution analysis to a range of applications, including toxicology and metabolomics, the Thermo Scientific Spectra Ultra electron microscope for improved throughput and workflow in materials science applications, the Kingfisher Apex Purification System for high throughput sample preparation and the Thermo Scientific AerosolSense Sampler, an in-air surveillance solution for pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2.

Continued to increase our capacity to meet customer demand. In the quarter, we began shipping single use technologies from our new facility in Suzhou to bioproduction customers in China . We also brought additional capacity online in Singapore for bioproduction and at two sites in North America for laboratory plastics.

. We also brought additional capacity online in for bioproduction and at two sites in for laboratory plastics. Advanced our environmental, social and governance priorities and committed to an impact investment of $25 million in financial institutions focused on minority communities.

in financial institutions focused on minority communities. Very active capital deployment to start the year including repurchasing $2 billion of stock, increasing our dividend by 18% and completing the acquisition of Mesa Biotech, Inc., a point-of-care molecular diagnostic company.

of stock, increasing our dividend by 18% and completing the acquisition of Mesa Biotech, Inc., a point-of-care molecular diagnostic company. After quarter end, announced an agreement to acquire PPD, Inc., a leading global provider of clinical research services, for $17.4 billion .

Adjusted EPS, adjusted operating income, adjusted operating margin and free cash flow are non-GAAP measures that exclude certain items detailed later in this press release under the heading "Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures."

"We are off to an excellent start to the year. Market conditions are strong, and our team is executing at an incredibly high level. From a financial perspective, we again delivered exceptional growth in revenue, earnings and free cash flow for the quarter," said Marc N. Casper, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific. "We began accelerating our investments in talent, capabilities and capacity in the second half of 2020 and we are already starting to see the benefits of those actions which will ensure an even brighter future for our company."

Casper added, "I am also very excited about our recently announced agreement to acquire PPD, Inc. This is a great fit for our company and will strengthen our value proposition for our largest and fastest growing end market, provide exciting career opportunities for our colleagues, and create significant shareholder value."

First Quarter 2021

Revenue for the quarter grew 59% to $9.91 billion in 2021, versus $6.23 billion in 2020. Organic revenue growth was 53%; acquisitions increased revenue by 2% and currency translation increased revenue by 4%.

GAAP Earnings Results

GAAP diluted EPS in the first quarter of 2021 increased 198% to $5.88, versus $1.97 in the same quarter last year. GAAP operating income for the first quarter of 2021 was $3.05 billion, compared with $0.91 billion in the year-ago quarter. GAAP operating margin was 30.8%, compared with 14.5% in the first quarter of 2020.

Non-GAAP Earnings Results

Adjusted EPS in the first quarter of 2021 increased 145% to $7.21, versus $2.94 in the first quarter of 2020. Adjusted operating income for the first quarter of 2021 grew 155% compared with the year-ago quarter. Adjusted operating margin was 35.4%, compared with 22.1% in the first quarter of 2020.

Annual Guidance for 2021

The company will provide updates on its 2021 financial guidance during its earnings conference call this morning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time.

Segment Results

Management uses adjusted operating results to monitor and evaluate performance of the company's four business segments, as highlighted below. Since these results are used for this purpose, they are also considered to be prepared in accordance with GAAP.

Life Sciences Solutions Segment

Life Sciences Solutions Segment revenue grew 137% to $4.20 billion in the first quarter of 2021, compared with revenue of $1.77 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Segment adjusted operating margin was 54.2%, versus 38.0% in the 2020 quarter.

Analytical Instruments Segment

Analytical Instruments Segment revenue grew 26% to $1.39 billion in the first quarter of 2021, compared with revenue of $1.10 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Segment adjusted operating margin was 19.6%, versus 15.5% in the 2020 quarter.

Specialty Diagnostics Segment

Specialty Diagnostics Segment revenue grew 69% to $1.62 billion in the first quarter of 2021, compared with revenue of $0.96 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Segment adjusted operating margin was 26.5%, versus 24.7% in the 2020 quarter.

Laboratory Products and Services Segment

Laboratory Products and Services Segment revenue grew 32% to $3.60 billion in the first quarter of 2021, compared with revenue of $2.73 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Segment adjusted operating margin was 14.8%, versus 10.8% in the 2020 quarter.

Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures

In addition to the financial measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), we use certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EPS, adjusted operating income and adjusted operating margin, which exclude certain acquisition-related costs, including charges for the sale of inventories revalued at the date of acquisition and significant transaction costs; restructuring and other costs/income; and amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets. Adjusted EPS also excludes certain other gains and losses that are either isolated or cannot be expected to occur again with any predictability, tax provisions/benefits related to the previous items, and the impact of significant tax audits or events. We exclude the above items because they are outside of our normal operations and/or, in certain cases, are difficult to forecast accurately for future periods. We also use a non-GAAP measure, free cash flow, which is operating cash flow, excluding net capital expenditures to provide a view of the continuing operations' ability to generate cash for use in acquisitions and other investing and financing activities. We believe that the use of non-GAAP measures helps investors to gain a better understanding of our core operating results and future prospects, consistent with how management measures and forecasts the company's performance, especially when comparing such results to previous periods or forecasts.

For example:

We exclude costs and tax effects associated with restructuring activities, such as reducing overhead and consolidating facilities. We believe that the costs related to these restructuring activities are not indicative of our normal operating costs.

We exclude certain acquisition-related costs, including charges for the sale of inventories revalued at the date of acquisition and significant transaction costs. We exclude these costs because we do not believe they are indicative of our normal operating costs.

We exclude the expense and tax effects associated with the amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets because a significant portion of the purchase price for acquisitions may be allocated to intangible assets that have lives of 3 to 20 years. Based on acquisitions closed through the end of the first quarter of 2021, adjusted EPS will exclude approximately $3.45 of expense for the amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets. Exclusion of the amortization expense allows comparisons of operating results that are consistent over time for both our newly acquired and long-held businesses and with both acquisitive and non-acquisitive peer companies.

We also exclude certain gains/losses and related tax effects, the impact of significant tax audits or events (such as changes in deferred taxes from enacted tax rate changes), which are either isolated or cannot be expected to occur again with any predictability and that we believe are not indicative of our normal operating gains and losses. For example, we exclude gains/losses from items such as the sale of a business or real estate, gains or losses on significant litigation-related matters, gains on curtailments of pension plans and the early retirement of debt.

We also report free cash flow, which is operating cash flow, excluding net capital expenditures to provide a view of the continuing operations' ability to generate cash for use in acquisitions and other investing and financing activities.

Thermo Fisher's management uses these non-GAAP measures, in addition to GAAP financial measures, as the basis for measuring the company's core operating performance and comparing such performance to that of prior periods and to the performance of our competitors. Such measures are also used by management in their financial and operating decision-making and for compensation purposes.

The non-GAAP financial measures of Thermo Fisher's results of operations and cash flows included in this press release are not meant to be considered superior to or a substitute for Thermo Fisher's results of operations prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of such non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are set forth in the accompanying tables. Thermo Fisher does not provide GAAP financial measures on a forward-looking basis because we are unable to predict with reasonable certainty and without unreasonable effort items such as the timing and amount of future restructuring actions and acquisition-related charges as well as gains or losses from sales of real estate and businesses, the early retirement of debt and the outcome of legal proceedings. The timing and amount of these items are uncertain and could be material to Thermo Fisher's results computed in accordance with GAAP.

Conference Call

Thermo Fisher Scientific will hold its earnings conference call today, April 29, 2021, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. To listen, dial (833) 714-0931 within the U.S. or (778) 560-2662 outside the U.S. The conference ID is 7956359. You may also listen to the call live on our website, www.thermofisher.com, by clicking on "Investors." You will find this press release, including the accompanying reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures and related information, in that section of our website under "Financial Results." An audio archive of the call will be available under "Webcasts and Presentations" through Friday, May 14, 2021.

About Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with annual revenue exceeding $30 billion. Our Mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. Whether our customers are accelerating life sciences research, solving complex analytical challenges, improving patient diagnostics and therapies or increasing productivity in their laboratories, we are here to support them. Our global team of more than 80,000 colleagues delivers an unrivaled combination of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience and pharmaceutical services through our industry-leading brands, including Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, Unity Lab Services and Patheon. For more information, please visit www.thermofisher.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

The following constitutes a "Safe Harbor" statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties relating to: the duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic; the need to develop new products and adapt to significant technological change; implementation of strategies for improving growth; general economic conditions and related uncertainties; dependence on customers' capital spending policies and government funding policies; the effect of economic and political conditions and exchange rate fluctuations on international operations; use and protection of intellectual property; the effect of changes in governmental regulations; any natural disaster, public health crisis or other catastrophic event; and the effect of laws and regulations governing government contracts, as well as the possibility that expected benefits related to recent or pending acquisitions, including our pending acquisition of PPD, Inc., may not materialize as expected. Additional important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, which is on file with the SEC and available in the "Investors" section of our website under the heading "SEC Filings." While we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if estimates change and, therefore, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views as of any date subsequent to today.

Condensed Consolidated Statement of Income (unaudited) (a)(b)



















Three Months Ended



April 3,

% of

March 28,

% of (In millions except per share amounts)

2021

Revenues

2020

Revenues

















Revenues

$ 9,906







$ 6,230





Costs and Operating Expenses:















Cost of revenues (c)

4,557



46.0 %

3,365



54.0 % Selling, general and administrative expenses (d)

1,543



15.6 %

1,251



20.1 % Amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets

423



4.3 %

425



6.8 % Research and development expenses

320



3.2 %

245



3.9 % Restructuring and other costs (e)

14



0.1 %

38



0.6 %



6,857



69.2 %

5,324



85.5 % Operating Income

3,049



30.8 %

906



14.5 % Interest Income

12







36





Interest Expense

(125)







(126)





Other (Expense) Income (f)

(183)







12





Income Before Income Taxes

2,753







828





Provision for Income Taxes (g)

(416)







(40)





Net Income

$ 2,337



23.6 %

$ 788



12.6 %

















Earnings per Share:















Basic

$ 5.93







$ 1.99





Diluted

$ 5.88







$ 1.97





Weighted Average Shares:















Basic

394







397





Diluted

397







400









































Reconciliation of Adjusted Operating Income and Adjusted Operating Margin















GAAP Operating Income (a)

$ 3,049



30.8 %

$ 906



14.5 % Cost of Revenues Charges (c)

8



0.1 %

2



0.1 % Selling, General and Administrative Charges (d)

16



0.1 %

6



0.1 % Restructuring and Other Costs (e)

14



0.1 %

38



0.6 % Amortization of Acquisition-related Intangible Assets

423



4.3 %

425



6.8 % Adjusted Operating Income (b)

$ 3,510



35.4 %

$ 1,377



22.1 %

















Reconciliation of Adjusted Net Income















GAAP Net Income (a)

$ 2,337







$ 788





Cost of Revenues Charges (c)

8







2





Selling, General and Administrative Charges (d)

16







6





Restructuring and Other Costs (e)

14







38





Amortization of Acquisition-related Intangible Assets

423







425





Other Expense (Income) (f)

197







14





Benefit from Income Taxes (g)

(130)







(98)





Adjusted Net Income (b)

$ 2,865







$ 1,175























Reconciliation of Adjusted Earnings per Share















GAAP Diluted EPS (a)

$ 5.88







$ 1.97





Cost of Revenues Charges, Net of Tax (c)

0.01







0.01





Selling, General and Administrative Charges, Net of Tax (d)

0.03







0.01





Restructuring and Other Costs, Net of Tax (e)

0.03







0.07





Amortization of Acquisition-related Intangible Assets, Net of Tax

0.84







0.83





Other Expense (Income), Net of Tax (f)

0.43







0.03





(Benefit from) Provision for Income Taxes (g)

(0.01)







0.02





Adjusted EPS (b)

$ 7.21







$ 2.94























Reconciliation of Free Cash Flow















GAAP Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities (a)

$ 1,978







$ 356





Purchases of Property, Plant and Equipment

(628)







(253)





Proceeds from Sale of Property, Plant and Equipment

5







4





Free Cash Flow

$ 1,355







$ 107







Segment Data

Three Months Ended



April 3,

% of

March 28,

% of (In millions)

2021

Revenues

2020

Revenues

















Revenues















Life Sciences Solutions

$ 4,203



42.4 %

$ 1,774



28.5 % Analytical Instruments

1,387



14.0 %

1,101



17.7 % Specialty Diagnostics

1,615



16.3 %

958



15.4 % Laboratory Products and Services

3,597



36.3 %

2,730



43.8 % Eliminations

(896)



-9.0 %

(333)



-5.4 % Consolidated Revenues

$ 9,906



100.0 %

$ 6,230



100.0 %

















Operating Income and Operating Margin















Life Sciences Solutions

$ 2,279



54.2 %

$ 675



38.0 % Analytical Instruments

272



19.6 %

171



15.5 % Specialty Diagnostics

428



26.5 %

236



24.7 % Laboratory Products and Services

531



14.8 %

295



10.8 % Subtotal Reportable Segments

3,510



35.4 %

1,377



22.1 %

















Cost of Revenues Charges (c)

(8)



-0.1 %

(2)



-0.1 % Selling, General and Administrative Charges (d)

(16)



-0.1 %

(6)



-0.1 % Restructuring and Other Costs (e)

(14)



-0.1 %

(38)



-0.6 % Amortization of Acquisition-related Intangible Assets

(423)



-4.3 %

(425)



-6.8 % GAAP Operating Income (a)

$ 3,049



30.8 %

$ 906



14.5 %





































(a) "GAAP" (reported) results were determined in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). (b) Adjusted results are non-GAAP measures and, for income measures, exclude certain charges to cost of revenues (see note (c) for details); certain credits/charges to selling, general and administrative expenses (see note (d) for details); amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets; restructuring and other costs (see note (e) for details); certain other gains or losses that are either isolated or cannot be expected to occur again with any predictability (see note (f) for details); and the tax consequences of the preceding items and certain other tax items (see note (g) for details). (c) Reported results in 2021 include charges for the sale of inventories revalued at the date of acquisition. Reported results in 2020 include charges to conform the accounting policies of a recently acquired business with the company's accounting policies. (d) Reported results in 2021 and 2020 include certain third-party expenses, principally transaction/integration costs related to recent/terminated acquisitions. Reported results in 2021 also include $2 of charges for changes in estimates of contingent acquisition consideration. (e) Reported results in 2021 and 2020 include restructuring and other costs consisting principally of severance, abandoned facility and other expenses of headcount reductions within several businesses and real estate consolidations. Reported results in 2021 also include $13 of charges for compensation contractually due to employees of acquired businesses at the date of acquisition. (f) Reported results in 2021 include $197 of losses on the early extinguishment of debt. Reported results in 2020 include $17 of costs for a subsequently terminated acquisition, primarily for entering hedging contracts and amortization of bridge loan commitments fees; and $1 of net charges for the settlement/curtailment of pension plans, offset in part by $4 of gains from investments. (g) Reported provision for income taxes in 2021 and 2020 includes incremental tax benefit for the pre-tax reconciling items between GAAP and adjusted net income and $4 and $(6) of incremental tax benefit (provision), respectively, from adjusting the company's non-U.S. deferred tax balances as a result of tax rate changes. Notes: Consolidated depreciation expense is $198 and $149 in 2021 and 2020, respectively.



Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheet (unaudited)





















April 3,

December 31, (In millions)

2021

2020









Assets







Current Assets:







Cash and cash equivalents

$ 5,583



$ 10,325

Accounts receivable, net

5,554



5,741

Inventories

4,342



4,029

Other current assets

2,206



1,862

Total current assets

17,685



21,957

Property, Plant and Equipment, Net

6,133



5,912

Acquisition-related Intangible Assets, Net

12,831



12,685

Other Assets

2,459



2,457

Goodwill

26,823



26,041

Total Assets

$ 65,931



$ 69,052





















Liabilities and Shareholders' Equity







Current Liabilities:







Short-term obligations and current maturities of long-term obligations

$ 4



$ 2,628

Other current liabilities

6,991



7,676

Total current liabilities

6,995



10,304

Other Long-term Liabilities

5,237



5,134

Long-term Obligations

18,641



19,107

Total Shareholders' Equity

35,058



34,507

Total Liabilities and Shareholders' Equity

$ 65,931



$ 69,052































Condensed Consolidated Statement of Cash Flows (unaudited)





















Three Months Ended



April 3,

March 28, (In millions)

2021

2020









Operating Activities







Net income

$ 2,337



$ 788











Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities:







Depreciation and amortization

621



574

Change in deferred income taxes

24



(41)

Other non-cash expenses, net

317



110

Changes in assets and liabilities, excluding the effects of acquisitions and disposition

(1,321)



(1,075)

Net cash provided by operating activities

1,978



356











Investing Activities







Acquisitions, net of cash acquired

(1,343)



(4)

Purchases of property, plant and equipment

(628)



(253)

Proceeds from sale of property, plant and equipment

5



4

Other investing activities, net

(32)



(7)

Net cash used in investing activities

(1,998)



(260)











Financing Activities







Net proceeds from issuance of debt





2,185

Repayment of debt

(2,804)



(1)

Net proceeds from issuance of commercial paper





382

Repayment of commercial paper





(321)

Purchases of company common stock

(2,000)



(1,500)

Dividends paid

(87)



(76)

Net proceeds from issuance of company common stock under employee stock plans

20



48

Other financing activities, net

21



(98)

Net cash (used in) provided by financing activities

(4,850)



619











Exchange Rate Effect on Cash

137



(127)

(Decrease) Increase in Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash

(4,733)



588

Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash at Beginning of Period

10,336



2,422

Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash at End of Period

$ 5,603



$ 3,010





















Free Cash Flow (a)

$ 1,355



$ 107























(a) Free cash flow is net cash provided by operating activities less net purchases of property, plant and equipment.



Media Contact Information:

Sandy Pound

Phone: 781-622-1223

E-mail: [email protected]

Investor Contact Information:

Rafael Tejada

Phone: 781-622-1356

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Thermo Fisher Scientific

Related Links

http://www.thermofisher.com


Please be patient: Timelines take time

PHUKET: The Official COVID-19 Information Center Phuket has appealed for the public to be patient and mindful of the process it takes for them to publicly provide timelines of peoples movements after the person has been confirmed as infected with COVID-19.

COVID-19Coronavirushealth

By The Phuket News

Thursday 29 April 2021, 04:35PM

The Official COVID-19 Information Center Phuket made the appeal, posted by an unnamed official as Admin, on its official Facebook page today (Apr 29).

The Official COVID-19 Information Center Phuket is operated by the Phuket office of the Ministry of Interior, otherwise better known as the Phuket Provincial Government, including the Phuket Governors Office.

The posting of timelines has come under increasing criticism online for being made available weeks after the patient was confirmed as infected.

The latest timelines posted, for cases 321-336, can be seen here.

Today, provincial officials, unnamed, responded. Here is their response, in full:

The timeline is the result of a disease investigation that provides information about the travel history of the infected person, where, when, and who they met.

For COVID-19, we create a timeline dating back to about two weeks before the person started to become sick or was detected because that is the period of high risk that shows an infection point that can quickly connect the source of infection and track high-risk people into care, limit the infections to a minimum, reduce the chance of transmission of infection, which all lead to successful disease control

Why is the timeline notified so late ????? [sic]

1. We need time to review the information. Try to answer this question yourself. How long can we think back? Most of the time, in just three days we have forgotten where we have been. Ordinary people spend hours giving us information, and the more people are not comfortable with it, the more time it takes. It takes more time to collect information. Some people take all day to provide us the information.



2. We must include the information as completely as possible and write it as short as possible. Believe it or not, the longest timeline we have is almost 20 sheets of A4 paper, but it must be summarised into only 1-2 pages.

3. We must follow it the best we can. If an infected person travels, they must specify a vehicle, the seat, where it stopped, and their accommodation. Some stops people do not remember. We have to ask to see the bus ticket, flight ticket, seat number, even the receipt of the shop that they went to, such as a receipt from a 7-Eleven store, so we can follow up with the surveillance cameras to confirm the location and the time to be as accurate as possible.

4. We need strong communication skills and patience. Investigating to obtain information is extremely difficult. Some people misrepresent their information, avoid giving information, do not want to disclose information. Some people use inappropriate words, blame, use insults or even harass officials, but we do everything we can to get information on disease control.

5. We must use appropriate and thoughtful language in the written reports. Mentioning places and third parties in the timeline has a big impact on people and places. Therefore, it must be clear, or if it cannot be identified, it must be prepared in a way to account for future comments.

6. We need to control the disease before the timeline is released. The disease control team must first manage the risk groups and locations in order to control and limit the outbreak as quickly as possible, because if the timeline is revealed first, major risk locations may close or not cooperate, and our disease control team will not be able to manage the situation.

7. We take less than 10 minutes to write up the notification, but to make sure that the information on the risk location, the time of risk and information of those exposed to high risks is complete can take at least 4-6 hours per patient.

We want to point out that the timeline is very useful in terms of epidemiology in order to quickly track down high risk people and take them into care, limit the number of infections as much as possible, and reduce the risk of transmission. It is useful in terms of both academic [study] and notification.

We want timelines to stimulate everyone to protect yourselves, not only list places where not to go.

We wish everyone to live their lives wherever they are at risk and take action in accordance with DMHTTA measures. We will continue to work as quickly as possible and embrace every offer for the benefit of our people.

INFECTIONS UPDATE

The Phuket Provincial Public Health Office (PPHO) has reported that Phuket recorded 13 new cases of infection yesterday (Apr 28)-- the third consecutive day that Phuket has marked 13 new infections  bringing to 374 the total number of people in Phuket officially recognised as infected with COVID-19 since Apr

The report was marked as accurate as of 6pm last night (Apr 28).

Of those, 235 people were receiving hospital treatment, while 138 people had already been discharged from medical care, noted the report.

The PPHO also today released an updated map showing the location of infections across the island. The map, showing 374 cases of infection and marked as accurate as of 6pm last night (Apr 28), reported the locations of infections as follows:

Patong  41 infections (Of note, the report for yesterday marked that Patong had 42 infections)

Kathu  33

Kamala  31

Cherng Talay  22

Thepkrasattri  7 (yesterday Thepkrasattri had 8 infections)

Srisoonthorn  25

Pa Khlok  10

Koh Kaew  11

Rassada  27 (yesterday 29 infections)

Talad Yai Phuket Town  24 (yesterday 25 infections)

Talad Neua Phuket Town  15

Wichit  37 (yesterday 39 infections)

Chalong  27 (yesterday 28 infections)

Rawai  20 (yesterday 21 infections)

Karon  4

Mai Khao  7

Sakhu  7

The number of infections marked on the map totalled 351, with the report noting that 13 new cases had been recognised, but it was not explained that the 13 new cases had yet to be attributed to a location.

The map did note that eight cases in Sakhu were at a Local Quarantine venue and that one case in Mai Khao was at an Alternative Local Quarantine venue.

HOSPITALS

The PPHO today also released an updated report of the number of COVID patients receiving treatment at each hospital.

The report, dated as accurate as of 6pm last night (Apr 28), noted that 84 people were receiving medical care at Field Hospitals.

A further 38 people were receiving treatment at Vachira Phuket Hospital in Phuket Town, along with 18 at Patong Hospital and 17 at Thalang Hospital.

Of the privately operated hospitals on the island, 42 people are currently receiving COVID treatment at Bangkok Hospital Phuket, along with zero COVID patients at Dibuk Hospital and 25 at Bangkok Hospital Siriroj. All three hospitals are operated by Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS) Company Limited.

Nine people with COVID are receiving treatment at Mission Hospital Phuket and two are receiving treatment at Phuket Provincial Hospital in Rassada.

The report also notes that 138 people have been discharged from COVID medical care, with one person referred to another facility, which has previously been reported as transferred to Bangkok.

RAPID TESTING OF ARRIVALS

The PPHO also reported that 3,518 people were checked on arrival to enter the province yesterday (Apr 28): 557 at the airport; 1,910 at Phuket Gateway, where buses and vans coming onto the island are checked; and 1,051 at the Phuket Check Point at Tha Chatchai.

Of those, two people tested positive by the rapid antigen test: one at the airport and one and Phuket Gateway. Both arrivals are to undergo more conclusive tests for the virus.

In total, 18, 772 people have been checked for COVID-19 when arriving on the island since the testing requirement came into effect on Apr 22, said the report.

The rapid antigen testing has so far identified 20 people as COVID carriers, the report noted.
Corporation intersects multiple high-grade gold intersections from underground and surface exploration drilling.

Best high-grade results include 187.0 g/t Au over 0.5 m, 151.5 g/t Au over 0.5 m and 147.5 g/t Au over 0.3 m.

Monarch has initiated Phase 2 of the surface drilling program to follow up on the recent near-surface results.

The 42,500-metre drilling program is ongoing, with four drills underground and one on surface.

MONTREAL, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - MONARCH MINING CORPORATION ("Monarch" or the "Corporation") (TSX: GBAR) (OTCMKTS: GBARF) is pleased to announce additional results from its 2020-2021 42,500-metre exploration diamond drilling program on its wholly-owned Beaufor Mine gold project, located 20 kilometres east of Val-d'Or, Quebec. The results include several high-grade assays, including 187.0 g/t Au over 0.5 m, 151.5 g/t Au over 0.5 m and 147.5 g/t Au over 0.3 m, as Monarch continues to test for potential resources in proximity to the historical mine.

The Beaufor Mine initially began commercial production in the early 1930's and over the years has produced over 1.1 million ounces of gold. The mine is currently on care and maintenance, which has given Monarch an opportunity to drill-test targets throughout the mine area. In June 2020, the Corporation initiated a 42,500-metre diamond drilling program to test two types of targets: the areas around historical high-grade intersections near the existing underground infrastructure, and isolated resource blocks, which are typically defined by a single drill intersection. Both of these "near-mine" targets can often be tested from the existing underground workings, generally by holes less than 200 metres long. Currently, 275 holes are planned or are already being drilled at 25-metre centres. If positive results are received, additional holes will be drilled to allow the zones in question to be converted into reserves and included in a future mine plan.

Assay results have been received for the first 121 holes (14,465 m), representing roughly 34% of the planned metres of drilling. High-grade results previously reported from the program included 783 g/t Au over 0.2 m and 293 g/t Au over 0.5 m (see press release dated October 1, 2020) and 35.87 g/t Au over 9.8 m (see press release dated January 19, 2021). Since the last reported results, the Corporation has drilled 83 additional holes (9,092 m), consisting of 79 exploration holes drilled from underground and 4 holes drilled from the surface. The best results are shown in Table 2 below and illustrated on the attached figures. Several of the holes have multiple intersections due to the stacked nature of the mineralization. The intersection widths reported are core lengths and high-grade intersections have not been capped, as the vein interpretation and statistics have not been finalized for the zones.

Figure 1: Beaufor property recent assay results (longitudinal view looking N) Figure 2: Beaufor property recent assay results (sectional view looking NW)

"We are thrilled with the results received to date. Our near-mine exploration drilling program continues to yield high-grade results as we intersect new mineralized zones and extensions of known zones outside the previously defined resource envelope. Monarch's goal is to significantly increase the near-mine resource so that a minimal amount of new development and capital will be required to put the mine back into production in the short term," said Jean-Marc Lacoste, President and Chief Executive Officer of Monarch.

Near-mine exploration drilling is ongoing, with four drill rigs underground and one on surface. The focus remains on high-grade composites that are open along strike and existing resource blocks that contain sufficient room for expansion.

In April, Monarch initiated a Phase 2 surface drill program to follow up on recent positive near-surface results, including 35.87 g/t Au over 9.8 m (see press release dated January 19, 2021). This Phase 2 program consists of approximately 40 short holes totalling 4,000 m with the aim of defining additional resources and subsequent reserves.

Sampling consists of sawing the drill core into equal halves along its main axis and shipping one of the halves to ALS Canada in Val-d'Or and AGAT Laboratories in Mississauga, Ontario, for assaying. The samples are crushed, pulverized and assayed by fire assay, with atomic absorption finish. Samples exceeding 10.0 g/t Au are re-assayed using the gravity method and samples containing visible gold are assayed using the metallic screen method. Monarch uses a comprehensive QA/QC protocol, including the insertion of standards, blanks and duplicates.

The technical and scientific content of this press release has been reviewed and approved by Christian Tessier, P.Geo., the Corporation's qualified person under National Instrument 43-101.

About BeauforThe Beaufor Mine is located within the Bourlamaque Pluton at the eastern contact with the Dubuisson Formation. The Bourlamaque Batholith, a synvolcanic intrusion, is a major geological feature of the Val-d'Or mining camp. It is a quartziferous granodiorite cut by fine-grained dioritic dykes. Gold mineralization occurs in veins associated with shear zones dipping moderately south. Mineralization is associated with quartz-tourmaline-pyrite veins resulting from the filling of shear and extension fractures. Gold-bearing veins show a close association with mafic dykes intruding the granodiorite. A National Instrument 43-101 resource estimate for the Beaufor Mine property was prepared for Monarch Mining in December 2020 by Carl Pelletier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc., and John Langton, P. Geo., JPL GeoServices Inc. The mineral resource estimate is listed in the table below.

Table 1: 2020 mineral resource estimate for the Beaufor Mine

Category Tonnes Grade (g/t Au) Gold (ounces) Measured 121,000 5.62 21,900 Indicated 310,100 7.10 70,800 Total M+I 431,100 6.68 92,700 Inferred 134,600 6.96 30,100

Mineral Resource Estimate notes:

The independent and qualified person for the 2020 MRE, as defined by NI 43-101, is Carl Pelletier, P.Geo. (InnovExplo Inc.), and the effective date is December 18, 2020. These mineral resources are not mineral reserves as they do not have demonstrated economic viability. The mineral resource estimates follow CIM Definition Standards and Guidelines. A capping of 68.5 g/t Au on assays was applied for zones 8, B, M, M1 and Q, and 34.25 g/t for all other zones. The DDH intercepts (min. 2.4 m) were capped at 16.5 g/t. The estimate method was polygonal on cross-sections with a minimum width of 2.4 m using a density of 2.75 t/m3 for the 63 mineralized zones. Measured resource polygons extend 8 m above and below development and up to 10 m laterally. Indicated resource polygons extend up to 20 m from DDH intercepts, along dip and along strike and a minimum of 2 polygons need to be in contact. Inferred resource polygons extend up to 40 m from DDH intercepts, along dip and along strike where a drill spacing ranges from 20 m to 40 m and/or in areas of isolated drill holes where mineralization is known. The reasonable prospect for an eventual economical extraction is met by having a reasonable minimum width for the polygons, a cut-off grade of 3.20 g/t Au, application of constraining volumes on the blocks (potential underground scenario) below a 30 m crown pillar. The cut-off grades inputs are: a gold price of USD1,612/oz, a CAD:USD exchange rate of 1.34; a mining cost of $100/t for the long hole method and $145/t for the room and pillar method; a processing cost of $50/t; and G&A and environment of $13/t and includes the royalty of 1.0% and a refinery charge of $5/t. The cut-off grades should be re-evaluated in light of future prevailing market conditions (metal prices, exchange rate, mining cost, etc.). Results are presented in situ. Ounce (troy) = metric tons x grade / 31.10348. The number of tonnes and ounces was rounded to the nearest hundred. Any discrepancies in the totals are due to rounding effects; rounding followed the recommendations as per NI 43-101. InnovExplo Inc. is not aware of any known environmental, permitting, legal, title-related, taxation, socio-political, marketing or other relevant issue that could materially affect the mineral resource estimate.

About MonarchMonarch Mining Corporation (TSX: GBAR) is a fully integrated mining company that owns four advanced projects, including the fully permitted past-producing Beaufor Mine, which has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold over the last 30 years. Other advanced assets include the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, all located near Monarch's wholly owned and fully permitted Beacon 750 tpd mill. Monarch owns 28,725 hectares (287 km2) of mining assets in the prolific Abitibi mining camp that host 588,482 ounces of combined measured and indicated gold resources and 329,393 ounces of combined inferred resources.

Forward-Looking Statements The forward-looking statements in this press release involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Monarch's actual results, performance and achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied therein. Neither TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Table 2: Beaufor Mine significant assay results

Hole From (m) To (m) Width* (m) Au (g/t) 20-106-158 0.00 1.30 1.30 7.94 20-106-158 14.05 15.05 1.00 8.89 20-115-105 6.50 7.70 1.20 8.79 20-116-123 98.50 99.05 0.55 14.00 20-123-92 57.30 57.80 0.50 67.20 20-126-80 18.20 18.90 0.70 7.55 20-132-56 73.35 75.50 2.15 3.88 20-132-57 49.05 51.50 2.45 2.10 20-132-57 60.00 63.20 3.20 1.80 20-132-58 46.15 48.50 2.35 20.21 Incl. 46.15 46.45 0.30 147.50 20-133-61 45.00 45.50 0.50 22.80 20-133-63 41.80 42.30 0.50 11.60 20-133-63 93.50 97.50 4.00 7.04 Incl. 94.30 95.00 0.70 26.10 20-133-63 116.60 120.10 3.50 7.90 Incl. 116.60 117.20 0.60 29.00 20-133-64 107.00 108.40 1.40 5.69 20-133-66 68.80 71.25 2.45 3.98 Incl. 68.80 69.30 0.50 17.90 20-133-66 100.80 104.55 3.75 4.08 Incl. 100.80 101.65 0.85 16.00 20-133-67 63.50 66.05 2.55 2.61 20-133-67 79.50 85.50 6.00 2.66 20-133-68 84.30 87.25 2.95 3.48 20-133-68 94.30 97.40 3.10 3.20 Incl. 94.30 94.80 0.50 17.00 20-133-73 82.25 87.50 5.25 1.41 20-133-73 90.00 92.00 2.00 2.98 20-133-73 117.75 120.00 2.25 3.58 20-146-42 23.60 24.10 0.50 65.30 20-152-19 8.58 9.58 1.00 94.42 Incl. 9.08 9.58 0.50 187.00 20-152-19 36.80 37.80 1.00 32.92 Incl. 37.30 37.80 0.50 65.10 20-152-19 89.05 90.70 1.65 8.91 Incl. 89.05 89.55 0.50 26.50 20-97-68 3.85 5.20 1.35 57.40 Incl. 3.85 4.35 0.50 151.50 20-97-69 4.05 5.70 1.65 10.07 Incl. 4.05 4.55 0.50 26.70 20-97-70 7.70 8.20 0.50 97.90 BES-20-010 24.80 25.30 0.50 40.90 BES-20-010 59.40 60.80 1.40 5.81 BES-20-010 76.30 80.00 3.70 3.64 BEU-20-10-001 80.50 83.20 2.70 10.81 Incl. 82.50 83.20 0.70 23.90 BEU-20-15-001A 143.65 144.65 1.00 7.17 BEU-20-15-006 46.10 48.40 2.30 6.59 BEU-20-15-008 48.60 51.00 2.40 5.29 BEU-20-15-008 89.40 93.30 3.90 2.35 BEU-20-17-001B 100.90 101.90 1.00 58.14 Incl. 100.90 101.40 0.50 116.00 BEU-20-17-001B 136.30 141.05 4.75 7.11 Incl. 137.75 138.50 0.75 37.80 BEU-20-17-001B 148.35 152.15 3.80 2.67 BEU-20-17-002 12.55 13.15 0.60 66.90 BEU-20-17-002 94.25 96.05 1.80 21.89 Incl. 94.25 94.95 0.70 55.70 BEU-20-17-005 13.00 16.50 3.50 1.69 BEU-20-20-006 41.30 41.80 0.50 11.50 BEU-20-20-007 19.75 23.15 3.40 1.53 BEU-20-20-008 22.80 23.30 0.50 10.65 BEU-21-10-005 100.95 103.80 2.85 5.57 BEU-21-30-004 75.80 77.70 1.90 12.47 Incl. 75.80 76.30 0.50 47.20

*The width shown is the core length. True width is unknown at this time.

Table 3: Beaufor Mine drill hole location

Hole Easting (Mine Grid) Northing (Mine Grid) Elevation (m) Az (deg.) Dip (deg.) Length (m) 20-103-62 1849.08 3158.36 2358.75 183.0 -5.0 41.1 20-103-63 1849.05 3158.25 2360.66 179.0 47.0 31.0 20-106-158 1956.82 3306.93 2517.98 309.0 -41.0 85.2 20-106-159 1958.23 3306.36 2518.03 19.0 -76.0 51.3 20-114-167 2023.42 3258.38 2331.61 39.0 -5.0 192.9 20-114-168 2023.48 3258.08 2331.70 45.0 -2.0 162.0 20-114-168A 2023.48 3258.13 2331.77 44.0 0.0 224.2 20-115-105 2029.77 3245.89 2331.88 188.0 4.0 93.7 20-116-122 2047.59 3260.40 2327.98 22.0 -29.0 145.7 20-116-123 2047.23 3260.22 2327.74 15.0 -39.0 131.3 20-116-124 2048.04 3260.35 2327.57 31.0 -35.0 102.8 20-116-125 2047.41 3253.41 2256.06 29.0 -16.0 28.0 20-120-190 2081.72 3237.95 2260.30 24.0 -31.0 70.8 20-123-92 2144.41 3305.41 2319.39 97.0 69.0 63.0 20-126-79 2152.55 3247.65 2275.90 71.0 -18.0 184.0 20-126-80 2152.78 3247.44 2275.70 76.0 -22.0 178.6 20-132-56 2142.51 3083.75 2739.84 331.0 -85.0 82.2 20-132-57 2142.78 3085.13 2739.78 12.0 -44.0 65.5 20-132-58 2143.42 3085.69 2740.47 27.0 -14.0 77.0 20-133-61 2189.00 3164.00 2741.00 77.0 -4.0 90.2 20-133-62 2189.87 3163.79 2742.02 94.0 56.0 113.4 20-133-63 2190.06 3163.64 2741.64 100.0 42.0 124.0 20-133-64 2189.80 3163.57 2742.14 107.0 58.0 127.7 20-133-65 2190.13 3163.19 2741.44 117.0 37.0 108.0 20-133-66 2189.69 3162.93 2741.82 138.0 51.0 192.3 20-133-67 2188.69 3163.21 2742.25 171.0 60.0 157.7 20-133-68 2190.03 3163.49 2741.76 108.0 47.0 144.7 20-133-71 2184.47 3166.66 2739.16 70.0 -72.0 148.0 20-133-73 2185.91 3166.42 2739.26 78.0 -21.0 150.6 20-133-74 2185.23 3166.58 2739.20 90.0 -50.0 131.7 20-133-75 2185.00 3168.00 2742.00 94.0 -25.0 155.8 20-133-76 2185.00 3168.00 2742.00 96.0 -35.0 152.4 20-146-42 2330.57 3172.41 2598.69 314.0 60.0 75.0 20-152-19 2384.25 3135.53 2598.82 160.0 28.0 126.8 20-152-20 2384.96 3136.25 2566.02 135.0 38.0 9.9 20-152-20A 2384.90 3136.15 2599.04 135.0 38.0 159.1 20-97-68 1786.33 3158.47 2365.93 316.0 -62.0 167.1 20-97-69 1785.84 3158.66 2365.85 322.0 -49.0 175.5 20-97-70 1785.44 3159.39 2366.57 324.0 -14.0 30.9 20-97-71 1786.17 3158.82 2365.96 338.0 -48.0 149.4 20-97-72 1786.46 3158.63 2365.82 344.0 -62.0 145.8 20-97-73 1787.42 3159.10 2366.54 31.0 -20.0 25.8 BES-20-007 1849.74 3782.25 3047.78 45.0 -75.0 95.0 BES-20-010 2480.84 3420.56 3065.03 302.0 -60.0 108.0 BES-20-011 2480.84 3420.56 3065.03 44.0 -78.0 105.0 BES-20-022 1545.00 3105.00 3049.00 51.0 -75.0 432.0 BEU-20-10-001 2117.65 3201.87 2739.63 198.0 -9.0 168.5 BEU-20-15-001 2472.06 2993.14 2598.41 193.0 7.0 106.1 BEU-20-15-002 2472.55 2996.74 2598.85 10.0 19.0 94.6 BEU-20-15-003 2472.71 2996.86 2597.60 13.0 -17.0 58.5 BEU-20-15-004 2471.58 2996.80 2598.28 22.0 12.0 65.6 BEU-20-15-005 2422.89 3021.29 2596.57 3.0 -64.0 116.6 BEU-20-15-006 2362.64 3051.81 2596.23 160.0 -80.0 171.0 BEU-20-15-008 2361.00 3052.00 2599.00 256.0 -74.0 191.8 BEU-20-17-001A 1673.77 3402.22 2518.96 267.0 -36.0 152.7 BEU-20-17-001B 1669.54 3401.86 2518.93 267.0 -36.0 162.2 BEU-20-17-002 1673.17 3402.63 2518.85 278.0 -31.0 142.7 BEU-20-17-003 1679.97 3407.77 2519.59 36.0 -21.0 64.6 BEU-20-17-004 1748.28 3352.39 2518.50 229.0 -85.0 35.5 BEU-20-17-005 1741.83 3357.73 2518.58 307.0 -33.0 39.7 BEU-20-17-006 1750.22 3352.74 2518.57 90.0 -36.0 39.5 BEU-20-17-008 1811.97 3474.32 2519.25 268.0 14.0 196.5 BEU-20-20-001 1872.19 3318.87 2441.98 324.0 -30.0 26.0 BEU-20-20-002 1842.53 3362.22 2443.95 218.0 16.0 22.0 BEU-20-20-003 1866.10 3378.74 2444.45 266.0 79.0 22.5 BEU-20-20-004 1841.93 3362.02 2442.81 200.0 -6.0 26.0 BEU-20-20-005 1805.64 3383.19 2445.12 162.0 42.0 30.0 BEU-20-20-006 1804.63 3385.41 2444.74 29.0 -44.0 55.0 BEU-20-20-007 1804.70 3384.16 2444.85 201.0 60.0 35.0 BEU-20-20-008 1804.26 3383.11 2444.62 201.0 35.0 35.0 BEU-20-20-009 1777.96 3385.63 2442.92 213.0 -13.0 50.0 BEU-20-20-013 1918.16 3234.47 2443.58 30.0 -6.0 126.0 BEU-20-30-001 2031.49 3230.02 2251.52 305.0 -36.0 233.3 BEU-21-10-003 2117.14 3202.46 2739.74 212.0 -10.0 196.5 BEU-21-10-005 2116.98 3202.79 2739.54 223.0 -17.0 144.6 BEU-21-15-010 2027.92 3255.32 2595.31 4.0 -24.0 139.8 BEU-21-17-007 1812.85 3473.84 2520.05 230.0 31.0 130.8 BEU-21-20-010 1957.53 3311.32 2442.66 200.0 -22.0 38.0 BEU-21-20-012 2004.42 3310.28 2444.76 314.0 77.0 35.0 BEU-21-30-004 2051.01 3223.47 2248.44 25.0 -24.0 78.1 BEU-21-30-007 2118.32 3234.05 2240.10 66.0 -53.0 174.0 BEU-21-30-008 2120.06 3266.04 2235.36 40.0 -53.0 30.5 BEU-21-30-011 2156.50 3382.65 2221.59 156.0 42.0 46.6

Table 4: Monarch combined gold resources

Tonnes (metric) Grade (g/t Au) Ounces Croinor Gold1 Measured Resources 80,100 8.44 21,700 Indicated Resources 724,500 9.20 214,300 Total Measured and Indicated 804,600 9.12 236,000 Total Inferred 160,800 7.42 38,400 Beaufor Mine2 Measured Resources 121,000 5.62 21,900 Indicated Resources 310,100 7.10 70,800 Total Measured and Indicated 431,100 6.68 92,700 Total Inferred 134,600 6.96 30,100 McKenzie Break3 In-pit Total Indicated 1,441,377 1.80 83,305 Total Inferred 2,243,562 1.44 104,038 Underground Total Indicated 387,720 5.03 62,677 Total Inferred 1,083,503 4.21 146,555 Swanson4 In-pit Total Indicated 1,864,000 1.76 105,400 Total Inferred 29,000 2.46 2,300 Underground Total Indicated 91,000 2.86 8,400 Total Inferred 87,000 2.87 8,000 TOTAL COMBINED5 Measured and Indicated Resources Inferred Resources 588,482 329,393 1 Source: Monarch Gold prefeasibility study (January 19, 2018) and resource estimate (January 8, 2016). This resourceestimate was prepared for Monarch Gold and has not been reviewed by a qualified person for Monarch Mining asrequired under National Instrument 43-101 and is thus considered as an historical estimate. 2 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Beaufor Mine, December 18, 2020, Val-d'Or,Quebec, Canada, Carl Pelletier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc. and John Langton, P. Geo., JPL GeoServices Inc. 3 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Evaluation Report on the McKenzie Break Property, February 1, 2021, Val-d'Or, Quebec,Canada, Alain-Jean Beauregard, P.Geo., Daniel Gaudreault, P.Eng., Geologica Groupe-Conseil Inc., and MerouaneRachidi, P.Geo., Claude Duplessis, P.Eng., GoldMinds GeoServices Inc. 4 Source: NI 43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Swanson Project, January 22, 2021, Val-d'Or,Quebec, Canada, Christine Beausoleil, P. Geo. and Alain Carrier, P. Geo., InnovExplo Inc. 5 Numbers may not add up due to rounding.

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SOURCE Monarch Mining Corporation
School students across the country will be taught that First Nations Australians experienced European colonisation as an invasion under proposed changes to the national curriculum.

The changes, released for discussion by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) on Thursday, also said the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous be replaced with First Nations Australians or Australian First Nations Peoples.

They come after the advisory group raised concerns about the accuracy and adequacy of the overarching themes of the current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority.

Perspectives and interpretation are core concepts in the study of history: ACARA CEO David de Carvalho. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Cross-curriculum priorities are topics that must be taught within all key disciplines, ranging from maths and science to history.
Police honor guards stand by the coffin of one of their officers in Mimika, Indonesia, a day after he was killed in a gunbattle between police and separatist rebels in the Papua region, April 28, 2021.

Indonesia designated Papuan separatist rebels as a terrorist group Thursday after they killed an army general, a policeman and four civilians this month, but observers warned the move could inflame tensions and lead to human rights abuses.

Violence by separatist insurgents in the Papua region fit the definition of terrorism under amendments to the countrys anti-terror law that were passed in 2018, said Mohammad Mahfud MD, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs.

We are treating organizations and people who commit massive violence in Papua as terrorists, Mahfud told a news conference as he announced the designation.

This is in accordance with the law No. 5 of 2018 which ... defines terrorism as an act of violence or threat that creates an atmosphere of terror and widespread fear, and causes mass casualties and or damage to public facilities, he said, referring to the anti-terror legislation.

Under the law, a suspect can be held for up to 200 days during the course of an investigation.

Mahfud MDs announcement came after President Joko Jokowi Widodo ordered a crackdown on the armed criminal group after the insurgents killed Brig. Gen. I Gusti Putu Danny Nugraha Karya, who headed the Papua operation of the State Intelligence Agency.

The National Liberation Army of West Papua (TPNPB), the armed wing of the separatist Free Papua Movement (OPM), claimed responsibility for the killing on Sunday.

Mahfud MD said the governments decision to officially label the insurgent group terrorists followed input from security agencies, politicians and communities in Papua.

In fact, many community leaders and Papuan leaders as well as officials in the Papuan government, both at the executive and legislative branches, came to the government to express their support for taking necessary action to deal with the recent violence in Papua, the minister said.

On Tuesday, a day after Jokowi ordered the crackdown, nine rebels and a policeman were killed in fighting in Gome, a district in Papuas Puncak regency, officials said.

The TPNPB, however, denied that its members were killed.

The group had also said it was behind the killing of four civilians earlier this month, including two teachers and a 16-year-old high school student, saying the victims were spies for the government.

The Papua provincial police said Thursday that the separatist group had carried out 16 separate attacks since the start of the year, including ones that killed six members of security forces and seven civilians.

TPNPB: Indonesia terrorist state

The Papuan guerrillas, who have been waging an insurgency in the largely Christian and Melanesian Papua region, now share the same official terrorist designation as violent extremist Muslim groups such as Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) and Jemaah Islamiyah, which the Indonesian government has also outlawed.

The TPNPB, in turn, accused government security forces of terrorism as it responded to the statement by the Indonesian security minister.

We, TPNPB-OPM, are ready to declare a global campaign that Indonesia is a terrorist state, rebel spokesman Sebby Sambom said in a statement.

We are defending the rights of our nation, our people and our land. We will continue to fight against terrorist and criminal forces from Indonesia, he said.

Sambom also threatened to bring Indonesia before an international tribunal.

We have our own lawyers, and our lawyers say that if Indonesia dares to designate the TPNPB as a terrorist organization, then we are very much ready to take this matter to the international court, he said.

West Papuan activists scuffle with Indonesian soldiers and police officers who try to confiscate their banner during a rally calling for the remote regions independence, in Jakarta, Dec. 19, 2020. [AP]

Using the anti-terror law to deal with the insurgency could worsen the climate in Papua, said Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert who directs the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), a Jakarta think-tank.

Wording in the terrorism law makes it easier for authorities to arrest people with soft evidence, Jones told BenarNews after the government designated the TPNPB-OPM as a terrorist group.

Right now, the complaints that are often heard are that the Papuan people are marginalized. Stigmatizing them as terrorists will only make the community more angry, she said.

Jones said the government needed to apply a new approach other than sending more troops to Papua.

We have to assess the weaknesses. There needs to be an approach in which they see a pathway to resolve the conflict using soft methods, how we can improve relations between the state and local communities, Jones said.

Amiruddin Al Rahab, deputy chairperson of the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM), said labelling the separatists as terrorists would not solve the conflict, which has simmered for decades in the far-eastern Papua region.

They keep changing the labels  KSP, KKSB, KKB, now terrorists, he said, referring to various designations authorities have used to refer to the separatist group.

What has changed? Nothing. The situation remains the same, Amiruddin told an online discussion.

Amiruddin urged the government to adopt persuasive measures and law enforcement that is transparent, fair and accountable.

The governments move will only increase tensions and endanger civil society, according to Sam Awom, Papua coordinator for the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KontraS).

The government has been too hasty in responding to the current situation in Papua because the head of the Regional Intelligence Office was killed, Sam told BenarNews.

What we fear is that activists will be treated as terrorists for having relationships with members of armed groups, added Sam.

Sam said the government should listen to Komnas, human rights groups and Papuan indigenous leaders  not just the military.

Mahfud, during his announcement, provided assurances that security forces would not target civilians.

How much strength? Yes, we are only facing a handful of people, not the Papuan people. Therefore it will be done according to the law. The police will play the leading role, with assistance from the TNI, Mahfud said.

In 1963, Indonesian forces invaded the Papua region  which makes up the western half of New Guinea Island  and annexed it.

Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 after a U.N.-administered ballot known as the Act of Free Choice. Many Papuans and rights groups said the vote was a sham because it involved only about 1,000 people.
Mumbai, April 29 : Actor Sonu Sood, who was a guest at the recent episode of the reality show "Dance Deewane", offered to provide food for the entire village of one of the contestants.

Contestant Uday Singh, a daily wage earner from a small settlement in Neemuch, shared how everyone in his village is struggling to make ends meet during the current lockdown situation.

The actor immediately told Uday that he would provide food for the entire village till lockdown is lifted and things come back to normal.

He said: "Uday, I want to tell the people in your village that the lockdown, whether it lasts for one month or two months or even six months, I will ensure that your entire village will keep getting rations. Tell them not to take tension, no one will go hungry there, no matter how long the lockdown continues." The actor has been helping people cope with the ongoing Covid crises in the country. From arranging for beds to oxygen cylinders and life-saving injections, Sonu has been trying to reach out to as many people as he can.

Last year, too, Sonu had actively worked to help migrants reach home and also provided e-rickshaws for the unemployed.
SOUTHBURY  When Mark Gasso failed to show up to work April 19, a co-worker who hes known for years went over to Gassos Berkshire Road residence to check on him. Gasso was nowhere to be found, but his truck was in the driveway, the shower was on and his cell phone and wallet were also there, the man told police accordng to an investigation report.

Police have since been investigating the whereabouts of Gasso, 63. The co-worker who has known Gasso since they were about 17, said he last exchanged text messages with Gasso on April 16 and that Gasso did not respond to a text sent April 18, the investigation report states.

Gassos co-worker called police after arriving on April 19, able to enter the residence through an unlocked door.

At the residence, police said they found a small, dried red-colored stain on the mattress  but no trails of similar substance on the floor, wall or surround area  and there were no apparent signs of a struggle inside the dwelling.

Police said local hospitals were called to see if anyone matching Gassos description had come in, but none had a Mark Gasso or anyone matching his description admitted at the time.

According to the police investigation report, Gasso had also called 911 April 16. Police said he claimed a woman was inside his house, but responding officers only found him at the residence. At the time, Gassso was found to be oriented, but stated he takes both Xanax and muscle relaxers and had been drinking, the report stated

A state police K-9 was brought in to search the residence after Gasso went missing and surrounding wooded area outside, but the track yielded no results, police said.

In a sworn statement to police, the man who reported Gasso missing said he was worried and that Gasso has never done anything like this before.

Although he still took prescription Xanax and a couple other medications, the co-worker said Gasso had been seeing a specialist to manage pain, and he did not believe he was abusing opioids. The co-worker also told police Gasso did not get around very easily due to broken bones from past injuries.

Police also contacted a woman Gasso was known to spend time with. She told police she last spoke with Gasso April 15 when they went out to dinner, the report stated. After unsuccessfully trying to reach Gasso by phone two days later, she said she went by his house but he wasnt there, the report continued.

A silver alert was issued shortly after 8 p.m. April 19. State police searched Gassos residence and surrounding area again the following day, but did not find anything, according to police.

Gassos disappearance is being investigated by the Southbury Police Department and Connecticut State Polices Western District Major Crimes Unit, and anyone with information is urged to call 203-264-5912. Police say all calls will be kept confidential.
Apr. 29An East Toledo man accused of fatally shooting a young female basketball player was ordered to serve one year in a psychiatric hospital on Thursday after he was found incompetent to stand trial.

Andre Overton, 21, of the 1200 block of Mason Street, is charged with aggravated murder, murder, and felonious assault  each carrying a firearm specification  as well as grand theft of a motor vehicle and tampering with evidence.

He is accused of the Dec. 19 killing of Daneajia Smith, 19, a 2018 Start High School graduate who played basketball for Terra State Community College. Mr. Overton fled the scene but he was later stopped by an Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper for driving 80 in a 60 mph zone on westbound I-475 near Douglas Road, the agency previously said.

Mr. Overton underwent his first competency hearing in February at the Court Diagnostic and Treatment Center. His attorneys asked for a second report, which was recently completed by Dr. Mark Babula at Central Behavioral Healthcare.

On Thursday, the defense attorneys asked Judge Lori Olender to accept the doctor's findings and follow his restoration recommendations.

"Right now, Mr. Overton is not in the position to assist with his defense and his understanding of the processes is incomplete at this point," Mr. Klucas said during the hearing.

Based on information from the report, Mr. Overton was found incompetent to stand trial but his competency may be restored in approximately one year with treatment.

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Assistant county prosecutor Dexter Phillips said he met with Ms. Smith's family to discuss the results of the second report. He did not object to the doctor's findings.

Judge Olender ordered that Mr. Overton serve one year at the Northwest Ohio Psychiatric Hospital.

He will appear in court on April 20, 2022, for a further competency hearing.

Toledo police responded to a residence in the 1200 block of Mason for the report of a person shot. Ms. Smith was pronounced dead at the scene. The Lucas County Coroner's Office ruled she suffered three gunshot wounds to the head, on the right side of her face, and none were at close-range.

Mr. Overton was arrested for operating a vehicle while impaired when troopers pulled him over for speeding. The murder charges were added after he provided a detailed description of the fatal shooting to investigators, prosecutors said.
The Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah has gone blonde.

Shah, 47, looked nearly unrecognizable as she rocked golden curls during a group shot shared on castmate Whitney Rose's Instagram on Thursday.

The reality star's new look comes while she remains out on bond after being arrested in March on federal wire fraud charges related to a near decade long telemarketing scheme.

Blonde ambition: Jen Shah was almost unrecognizable as she rocked new blonde locks in a photo of the Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City cast posted Thursday. Her fresh look comes as she prepares to defend herself against wire fraud charges in federal court

In the social media shot, the self-described businesswoman stood at the edge of the group donning a nude party dress and wavy caramel tresses.

Looking uneasy, she clung onto a friend's arm while castmates Lisa Barlow, Mary Cosby, Heather Gay, Meredith Marks, and Whitney Rose stood in line smiling.

The newcomer appeared to be Jennie Nguyen, a health influencer who has been seen filming with the ladies recently.

She's also been hyping up Barlow's tequila and her sons' haircare brand on Instagram, calling the brunette her 'favorite housewife' on Instagram last December.

And Nguyen's night out with the girls all but confirmed she'd be part of next season's Bravo drama.

Is that you? In the social media shot, the self-described businesswoman stood at the edge of the group donning a nude party dress and wavy caramel tresses as she clung to the arm of Jennie Nguyen. Castmates Lisa Barlow, Mary Cosby, Heather Gay, Meredith Marks, and Whitney Rose stood in line smiling

Newcomer: Nguyen, a Utah-based health influencer, has been filming with the ladies recently. She also appears to be close to Lisa Barlow, seen giving her shout-outs on Instagram like the above shot with her Vida tequila

Jennie's introduction comes as Shah is set to share her legal battle during season two of the show.

The mother-of-two was arrested in Salt Lake City last month while Bravo cameras were rolling.

She faces up to 30 years in prison for allegedly defrauding elderly people via a telemarketing scheme which New York prosecutors say went on for nine years.

But the reality personality seemed more worried about appearances than a potential three-decade sentence during a March 30th court appearance, where she decided to debut tightly braided cornrows.

Facing time: But the reality personality seemed more worried about appearances than a potential three-decade sentence during a March 30th court appearance, where she decided to debut tightly braided cornrows

As part of the conditions of her release, Shah is prevented from traveling outside of Utah or the United States without the permission of a pretrial officer, and ordered to surrender her passport.

She is also not allowed to use a credit card, obtain a new line of credit, or contact her co-accused assistant, Smith.

'Jennifer Shah, who portrays herself as a wealthy and successful businessperson on "reality" television, and Stuart Smith, who is portrayed as Shah's "first assistant," allegedly generated and sold "lead lists" of innocent individuals for other members of their scheme to repeatedly scam,' Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said.

'In actual reality and as alleged, the so-called business opportunities pushed on the victims by Shah, Smith, and their co-conspirators were just fraudulent schemes, motivated by greed, to steal victims' money. Now, these defendants face time in prison for their alleged crimes.'
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (WLFI)-The Indiana Department of Health held a briefing today to address how Indiana is doing on the vaccine front. So far only 1/3 of all eligible Hoosiers have been fully vaccinated in the state of Indiana. The state's top doctors say Indiana ranks on the lower end of states when it comes to people being fully vaccinated.

People ages 70 and older continue to be the highest number of people vaccinated or have scheduled an appointment at around 75 percent. That number drops off to 52 percent for Hoosiers 50-59 years of age. As for people ages 20-29, only 28 percent are fully vaccinated or have scheduled an appointment.

Along with that, the state has seen a significant decrease in demand for vaccines. At the mass vaccination site at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the state has been seeing just under a thousand appointments a day. Dr. Lindsay Weaver the Chief Medical Officer for ISDH says the decrease of appointments has caused them to give less vaccine to certain sites.

"We are sending less vaccine or allocating less vaccine because we want to supply what the need is," said Dr. Weaver. "We don't want vaccine to get wasted. There is a time when it goes out to locations in which it has to be used by."

As mass vaccination clinics wind down the state will be sending vaccines to other locations. The Department of Health hopes that by next month they will be able to start sending vaccines to primary care physicians. Dr. Weaver did acknowledge that there will likely be vaccine wasted as demand for appointments continues to go down. However, she didn't go into detail about how much vaccine the state has wasted at this point. That's why they hope to get vaccines in primary care physician's offices because many people don't want to get the vaccine until talking to their doctor.

As for why demand is for the vaccine is dwindling several people just aren't getting it. Dr. Weaver says there are three main reasons she is hearing for why people aren't getting vaccinated. Many people who have already had COVID don't think they need to get vaccinated.

She says that isn't true. She says doctors still don't know how long antibodies last and that you can get COVID a second time. Only 36 percent of people who have gotten COVID have taken the vaccine. Another reason she has heard is that people say they are perfectly healthy. However, Dr. Weaver says COVID-19 can affect you whether you are healthy or not. In fact, 66 percent of all people who caught COVID and weren't hospitalized are having long-term effects. The final reason is that many people don't trust the vaccine.

"To that, I say that all three vaccines have been studied extensively and have been shown to be extremely safe and effective," said Dr. Weaver.

Dr. Weaver said that as for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine 7 per one million women could experience blood clots in the age group of 18-49. As for all men they have a 1 in million chance of experiencing blood clots after taking the J&J vaccine.

There has also been an increase in cases of people in their 20's and 30's. Since March 1st the state has seen a 130 percent increase in cases of people ages 30-39 according to State Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box. There has been a 93 percent in Hoosiers ages 20-29 years old. That's compared to a 1.6 percent increase in ages 70-79 and a 1.6 percent increase in people ages 60-69. However, only 2.5 percent of new cases have been break-through cases. Breakthrough cases of COVID-19 occur in a person who has already been vaccinated. That's .04 percent off all people who have been vaccinated.
Mercury Public Affairs is providing strategic consulting services to the Republic of Uganda as its security forces unleash the worst wave of repression in the east African country for decades, according to the Guardian.

Hundreds of people, suspected of supporting political opposition to 76-year-old president Yoweri Museveni, have been rounded up, tortured and held in secret prisons.

Museveni, who has been in power for more than 35 years and is a key ally to the US, has denied that Ugandas military forces have abused and detained civilians.

The Guardian reports that the US and UK have expressed concern about the crackdown in Uganda via diplomatic channels.

Mercury, which began repping Uganda on April 22, is working as subcontractor to Mercury International UK Ltd. in London.

Uganda senior presidential advisor Procovia Nalweyiso oversees the PR push.

Omnicom owns Mercury.
I recently received the COVID-19 vaccine and was finally able to reunite with my godmother, Susu. We had not seen each other for 18 long months because of her emphysema and then the coronavirus pandemic. Her safety was my top priority, and I would never put her at risk.

In life, there are people who are not related by blood but are considered family. For me, that person is Susu.

After my mother and father passed away in the last few years from a heart attack and pancreatic cancer, respectively, she became my pillar of strength.

Because my fathers prognosis progressed rapidly, my husband, Jason, and I were able to get married at his bedside in the hospital room so that we could all celebrate a happy moment together.

The past year has been largely difficult, but I feel fortunate to have Jason, my health and the opportunity to receive a vaccine for a virus that kept me away from my loved ones.

Because the pharmaceutical companies produced life-saving vaccines, millions of South Carolinians and I have peace of mind.

Its imperative that lawmakers do not implement policies that risk hurting innovation or limiting patients access to treatments.

As a country, we have worked too hard for the progress made to be slowed down now.

While days are tough, I will continue to be the advocate that my parents would want me to be and the voice for those who do not have one so that every person has the opportunity to tightly hug their own Susu again.

EMZEE LUCK

North Enston Avenue

Charleston

I-73s false hopes

Sundays editorial opposing Interstate 73 is correct, as far as it goes.

Overlooked is that virtually all support for I-73 as a new interstate to the beach is based on a flawed 2011 economic impact study by Chmura Economics and Analytics.

It assumed 15.2 million annual visitors to Myrtle Beach would save up to two hours travel time on 42 miles of a new section of I-73 while driving from I-95 to S.C. Highway 22 north of Conway.

This erroneously calculated travel time savings was predicted to encourage so many visits to Myrtle Beach that tourism would increase 7.1%.

This alone would support an additional 18,856 permanent tourism-related jobs producing an increase in total tourism expenditure by $909.9 million in 2030 dollars.

Any competent engineer or accountant should have seen the errors in this report, but local politicians, the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and South Carolina Department of Transportation commissioners based their support on it, repeating the phrase 29,000 jobs endlessly.

A later $600,000 study commissioned by DOT to see if I-73 would pay for itself as a toll road showed that not only would it not  raising only $700 million over 40 years  but that less than 10% of drivers coming to Myrtle Beach would come anywhere near I-73 and only 39% of them would pay $5.26 to travel its 42 miles.

After all this time, it is now clear that only property owners in the proposed right of way will benefit by selling their land to DOT, which will then be stuck with the overpriced real estate.

TOM E, STICKLER

Old Ashley Loop

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Pawleys Island

Hunting Is. future

Tim Kanas April 21 commentary about his vision for Hunting Island was an interesting read.

Mr. Kana contends the park needs investment by the state Legislature to make needed improvements based on the preferences of visitors.

He notes prior closures due to hurricane damage and FEMAs help to fund post-storm repairs, and the fact this funding was only possible because previous improvements to the beach were engineered by pumping sand on the beach.

Mr. Kana sees an opportunity to improve access to the park if only the state and taxpayers would fund it.

His vision includes raising roadways, digging detention ponds and piping stormwater: In other words, more engineered solutions.

He points out Hunting Island needs and claims this is the vision that people of the state want.

If Mr. Kana doesnt remember the uproar when the boneyard beach on the island was leveled or consider the challenges all our beaches will face in the coming years, it is no wonder he attempts to make coastal geologist Rob Youngs vision out to be the less viable option.

Maybe Mr. Young is right and we need a new vision for how visitors will experience Hunting Island in the future.

Nature-based solutions are a key path forward as we adapt to coastal challenges ahead.

Our coastline has plenty of engineered beaches with people and property in harms way.

FEMAs funding will go only so far. And, until we get serious about how we adapt our shorelines to climate change, engineered approaches and state and federal dollars must be spent wisely.

SANDRA BUNDY

Macklen Avenue

Murrells Inlet

Health care, justice

A recent article on Earth Day activities quoted Gov. Henry McMaster as saying, Our future happiness and prosperity depend on three things  our economy, education and our environment  and today, were celebrating our environment.

I would like to add a sentiment that many of us hold dear. True happiness and prosperity also require quality health care for all and social justice.

Planting trees is vitally important to our environment; nurturing equity is crucial to the health of our community.

PRISCILLA QUIRK

Stillwater Drive

Charleston
Islamabad, April 29 : One million coronavirus vaccine doses will arrive in Pakistan on Sunday via Pakistan International Airlines' planes, the airline has said.

PIA, in a statement on Wednesday, said that vaccines were loading on three PIA Boeing 777 planes and they would arrive in Pakistan from China on Sunday.

However, the airline did not specify which vaccine brand was being brought.

The development comes a week after a Pakistan Air Force plane carrying 0.5 million Chinese-based company SinoVac's vaccine doses landed at the Nur Khan Airbase in Islamabad.

Although the government is yet to acquire more vaccines for coronavirus, it is still hoping to vaccinate at least 70 million people by the end of this year, according to a media report.

Despite the bottlenecks, Pakistani officials are confident that the daily vaccination may hit 100,000 persons per day soon. They are also expecting that the vaccination will reach 200,000 per day in the coming weeks and months as it is gaining momentum in the country.

The PTI-led government has so far approved $150 million for procurement of vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic and another formal summary will be forwarded to get an approval of $90 million for this purpose obtained from the Islamic Development Bank.

In totality, the allocated amount will go up to $240 million to obtain the vaccine that had become scarce in all countries.

Pakistan will start the local production of CanSinoBio's coronavirus vaccine next month, National Institute of Health's officials had said earlier in the day.

The development comes after 100,00 people were vaccinated in a day for the first time in Pakistan on Tuesday.

The NIH officials said the arrangements to prepare CanSinoBio's coronavirus vaccine were done, while the raw material for the vaccine would reach Pakistan in early May.

The official said they were hopeful that the single-dose vaccine would be available by the end of May for public inoculation.
LAGOS, Nigeria, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Renowned as Nigeria's foremost investor community, The Green Investment Club (TGIC) has released its 3-year impact report at a well-attended media parley in Nigeria's economic capital, Lagos. This impact report shares the TGIC story with a focus on how it has helped members diversify their investment portfolios over 3 years, especially in the face of the pandemic in 2020.

Founder, The Green Investment Club & CEO, The Vestract Company, Tomie Balogun L-R: Chairman, Princeps Holdings (Credit Wallet), Peter Atuma; Event host & CEO, Talknation, Joyce Daniels; Founder, The Green Investment Club, Tomie Balogun; Co-founder, Farmforte, Osazuwa Osayi; and COO at Apel Asset Limited, Oladunni Olawuyi at presentation of a 3-year investment report and research by The Green Investment Club in Lagos, Nigeria, April, 2021.

The report also shares some of the growth stories experienced by members over this period. It shows how in 3 years TGIC has grown to become the biggest investment club in Nigeria from 35 members at inception to 1,700 members and how it has helped mobilise at least N6.4Billion ($17M) for multiple start-ups that have created jobs and contributed to economic growth in Nigeria.

The Green Investment Club has also empowered an important demographic in its fold - women. It has successfully launched multiple projects; that have helped over 70 individuals (60% women) own real estate in Nigeria.

Tomie Balogun, Founder of The Green Investment Club and CEO of the Vestract Company expressed her delight at the achievements of the club and how it is fast gaining international recognition. "What we have achieved, including helping more than 1,700 young Nigerians invest $17m+ in the capital markets and across multiple sectors of the economy is remarkable and it is a model that has not been implemented in Nigeria on this scale ever before."

When new members join the fold, they will see how TGIC has successfully sourced direct investment opportunities in the capital market, agro-processing, consumer lending, logistics, fin-tech and real estate development sectors in Nigeria, UK, and USA. TGIC has helped many young Nigerians demystify the thought that financial education is complex. She shared that TGIC provides financial education within a community and supports members with practical tools to get the financial results they need.

"In the near future, we plan to build the club membership to 10,000, help them get financially educated and build investment portfolios in partnership with our SEC-affiliated investment partners. To achieve this audacious goal, TGIC will commence re-structuring in the coming months. Presenting this report was important to help the organization share its results, reflect on its activities and commence new projects.

Media contact:

Omawumi Ogbe

[email protected]

08091914445

SOURCE The Green Investment Club
Kerala: Idling boats, fishers anxious on the coast

by Navamy Sudhish

April 29,2021 | Source: The Hindu

Hit hard by an unprecedented dip in catch, majority of the fishing boats in Kerala are lying idle for the last few days generating anxiety in the sector. While 80% of the trawlers have stopped venturing into the sea, traditional fishers say there has been an alarming decline in the availability of pelagic fish species such as mackerel and sardine. Though the annual lean season is not over, the fishers say they are facing a fish famine for the first time in several decades. They also feel that this drastic depletion may hint at a change in marine environment and its capacity to replenish fishery stocks. Along with the low availability of fish, the hike in fuel price has left us in a difficult spot. The diesel price was around Rs.62 last year, but now it has touched Rs.86 which makes a huge difference in total expenditure. If we cant return with a reasonably good catch, the result will be mounting debts and we have decided to stay off waters due to this, says Peter Mathias, president, All Kerala Fishing Boat Operators Association. Fishers say the situation has proved all the normal forecasts wrong and point out many reasons for the famine, including pollution and overfishing. Only small units are venturing into the sea at present and they are able to survive as the prices have skyrocketed due to the shortage.



We agree that this is a lean season, but we have never experienced such scarcity before, says Jackson Pollayil, president, Kerala Swatantra Matsyathozhilali Federation. Since climate change and rising sea temperatures can affect the migratory pattern and stock size of pelagic fish, they also fear that some species might have moved away from the shallow coastal waters. In the month of April and May we usually harvest mackerel and sardine in huge volumes, but right now both have become rare. Traditional fishers mainly depend on the pelagic stock and now it remains nearly empty. Mr.Pollayil adds that unscientific fishing methods, including pair trawling, too have contributed to the situation. They use Chinese engines and multiple gears to sieve all three levels of the sea. They net a lot of juveniles and that part of the catch goes straight to the fish meal fish oil (FMFO) industry. In a sense the ban and regulation on fishing during the early pandemic days helped us as the landings were really good in post-lockdown days, he says. Mr.Mathias says overexploitation can be one main reason as an enormous number of crafts are currently fishing in our sea. We have boats and crafts three times beyond the capacity of our sea and the government keeps giving permission. At present 80% of boats in the mechanised sector are staying off waters, which is something totally unheard of under normal circumstances. If this continues it will be difficult for the sector to stay afloat, he adds.

 2021, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD.
By Dave Henderson

Some state lawmakers, once again, are pushing proposals to expand gaming by adding slot machines to pizza parlors, convenience stores, gas stations and bars in every community in the state. The legislation would add tens of thousands of Video Gaming Terminals (VGTs) and, potentially, legalize so-called skills games which continue to proliferate across the state, even though these machines are clearly illegal.

This reckless policy proposal makes absolutely no sense for our state. At a time when state revenues are slowly recovering, but income from non-federal sources continues to lag, we must shore up our revenue-producing agencies, rather than encourage the spread of slot machines to every community in the state.

Pennsylvania remains the only state in the nation that dedicates all lottery proceeds to senior programs and for good reason: Pennsylvania ranks fifth among the fifty states by the sheer size of its population age 65 and over (2.2 million) and seventh by percentage (17.8%), according to the Pennsylvania State Data Center.

Since the sale of the first PA Lottery ticket in 1972, the Pennsylvania Lottery has contributed more than $31 billion to these programs.

Adding thousands of these machines to the state would drain millions of dollars in revenues from programs for older Pennsylvanians that the state lottery provides, from meals on wheels to assistance paying for lifesaving prescription drugs.

The proliferation of illegal slot machines creates a perfect storm of lower lottery revenues at a time when more of our seniors are looking for the socialization and services funded by the Lottery than ever before.

If we have learned anything from state budget lessons of the past, it is that we must protect these vital services from cuts that will likely take years, if not decades, to restore. These programs are too important to the lives of our older Pennsylvanians for us to turn our backs on them now.

Pennsylvanians need to understand that so-called skills games have been at the root of an alarming rise in crimes that we are witnessing across the state right now. Raids of illegal machines have been conducted in Berks, Delaware, and Dauphin counties. In Philadelphia, police charged three men who used sledgehammers to smash open skills games. In Reading, a man who was frustrated by the skill machine pulled a pistol on a clerk.

Slot machines in corner stores just cannot be supervised or regulated like those in one of our states 14 licensed casinos. This type of distributed gaming is impossible to manage and ripe for corruption. We have seen, time and again, children playing these illegal machines throughout the state.

We know, unfortunately, that many operators are relying on one, low-paid, hourly employee to serve as monitor, cashier, and security for these illegal games while they are expected to perform other duties at the same time. Clearly, the voluntary compliance that operators and distributors of these machines currently rely on is not stringent enough.

Several arrests have been made in crimes involving these illegal machines. A public safety director in Philadelphia recently called the machines easy pickings for criminals.

Law enforcement officials, the PA State Police, the PA Gaming Control Board, the Office of the Attorney General and Governor Wolf have all stated that these machines are illegal and should be shut down. The Wolf administration stated that, the Commonwealths consistent position is that so-called Games of Skill are illegal gambling devices and not authorized anywhere in the commonwealth.

A state police captain outlined the risk to the public from these machines, saying, We dont know what the payout percentages are. We dont know if theyre fair to the citizens of the commonwealth because there are no safeguards. Theyre not inspected. Theyre not certified. That is our duty to the citizens of the commonwealth: to protect them from these unlicensed, unregistered devices.

We should take a lesson from the folks on the front lines in this fight and make illegal gambling more difficult in Pennsylvania  instead of rolling out the welcome mat.

The danger embodied in illegal gambling devices is clear. They are a public safety nightmare that will cause the Commonwealth to loose hundreds of millions of dollars in Lottery revenue that supports our senior citizens.

Expanding illegal gambling in Pennsylvania is a short-sighted, risky game that makes Pennsylvanians of all ages losers.

Dave Henderson is Executive Director of AFSCME Council 13
Chilling CCTV footage has emerged of a man walking behind a woman on an empty street before she was sexually assaulted.

The 30-year-old alleged victim is seen walking on Sydney road in Brunswick, in inner city Melbourne, at 6.20am on February 7, with a man close behind her.

After noticing the man, the woman decided to change directions at the intersection of Glenlyon Road.

Police released images and video of a man they believe may be able to assist with their enquiries

Police allege the woman was sexually assaulted as she crossed the road, before fleeing down nearby Merri street.

The man in the footage was wearing a bright orange Nike hoodie with the words 'Just do it' written on the front and a light blue surgical mask.

He is believed to be in his mid-20s, approximately 170cm tall, with light brown hair and a receding hairline.

Investigators have released images and video of a man they believe may be able to assist in their enquiries.

In the CCTV footage the man is captured walking in the area before the alleged assault and a short time afterwards, where he is seen looking over his shoulder.
A senior Phnom Penh police official warned of stricter lockdown measures in the capitals red zones as residents, who are unable to leave their homes, continue to make desperate calls for food donations.

Phnom Penh and the neighboring city of Takhmau implemented a new system on Thursday designating three zones - red, orange, and yellow-based on each communes case count. Red zones completely ban all business activity and prevent people from leaving their homes  leaving many in need of food and essential materials.

Deputy Phnom Penh Police Chief Sum Sokhim said personnel have been reassigned from yellow zones, where lockdown measures have been eased allowing for businesses to reopen, to orange zones and red zones. The zones will be reviewed in a week.

For the next seven days, the enforcement on both red and orange zones must be tightened and must be stricter than the previous weeks because we cannot keep the status quo, otherwise we wont be able to keep the situation under control, Sum Sokhim said.

It must be stricter, you know it must be stricter, he said.

Sum Sokhim said 242 people had been arrested in the past two weeks for crimes ranging from drinking in groups, breaking through police checkpoints, and charged with incitement for spreading fake news on social media.

Forty-two of them have had their cases sent for further processing at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and the rest were released, the deputy police chief added.

Most of the red zones are in the industrial areas in the city with a mix of factories, workers and residents.

Deputy Phnom Penh Governor Nuon Pharath told a press conference on Wednesday that the lockdown had been effective in keeping infections and that the government was working on sending food relief, but admitted shortcomings.

The government has shut down public markets across Phnom Penh, including in red zones, with the government taking on the responsibility of selling food and providing food donations. Cambodians have been pleading for food and essential items via a Telegram group set up by a government committee in charge of implementing the lockdown. As the lockdown enters its third week, thousands of messages continue to flood the group on Thursday, which has more than 50,000 participants.

Vek Sokpov, 22, dropped a message in the group because she had exhausted all of her savings and had food stocks that would last no more than a week. She lives in Stung Meanchey 1 commune which has been a red zone for the past two weeks.

Sokpov, who for the past three years worked as a salesperson at an electronic gadgets shop, lost her job during the lockdown, putting pressure on her to support her family of five. They were surviving on eggs and instant noodles, she said.
North American Construction (NOA) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.47 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.40 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.52 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of 17.50%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this heavy construction and mining services company would post earnings of $0.22 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.28, delivering a surprise of 27.27%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates four times.

North American Construction, which belongs to the Zacks Building Products - Heavy Construction industry, posted revenues of $132.99 million for the quarter ended March 2021, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 3.74%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $148.24 million. The company has not been able to beat consensus revenue estimates over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

North American Construction shares have added about 16.8% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 11.5%.

What's Next for North American Construction?

While North American Construction has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Story continues

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for North American Construction was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.39 on $140.1 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $1.51 on $596.26 million in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Building Products - Heavy Construction is currently in the bottom 19% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.



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Former Labor leader Bill Shorten says repatriation flights should resume to rescue Australians stuck in COVID-ravaged India, saying helping citizens in danger is fundamental to who we are as a country.

The Opposition frontbencher said he had been inundated by voters in his Melbourne electorate of Maribyrnong supporting the international border bans to keep Australia safe but pleading for help to get home.

A COVID-19 patient sits inside a car and breathes with the help of oxygen provided by a Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in Delhi, India. Credit:AP

Indias death toll surpassed more than 201,000 following another 3300 deaths on Wednesday and daily new infections in India surged to nearly 357,700, however experts say the true figures are far higher.

This week the federal government announced it was banning all direct flights from India and halted eight repatriation flights that were scheduled for May in response to the worsening situation on the sub-continent. It also clamped down on people being given exemptions to leave for India.
They were former enemies on Married At First Sight, after Beck Zemek accused Booka Nile of kissing her 'husband' Jake Edwards on New Year's Eve.

But all that was forgotten on Thursday, as the two Perth-based beauties came together to share their support for Western Australia's Premier Mark McGowan in a post-lockdown reunion.

Having clearly moved on from their on-screen drama, Beck, 27, and Booka, 31, appeared in high spirits as they posed together while wearing masks to adhere to Perth's strict lockdown rules.

Showing support: On Thursday Beck Zemek (left) and Booka Nile (right) came together to share their support for Western Australia's Premier Mark McGowan in a post-lockdown reunion

'@bookanile and I supporting @mark_mcgowan_mp in covid protection,' Rebecca wrote alongside the image.

'Sorry for not sitting further apart but we couldn't both fit in the photo,' Booka added.

Despite the end of a hard three-day lockdown in WA, it is still mandatory to wear face masks until at least 12:01am on Saturday when interim restrictions will be reviewed.

Restrictions: Despite the end of a hard three-day lockdown in WA, it is still mandatory to wear face masks until at least 12:01am on Saturday when interim restrictions will be reviewed. Pictured: Western Australia's Premier Mark McGowan

Their appearance comes days after Booka took to Instagram to defend Beck, after she was busted kissing an old flame on camera during the show's explosive reunion.

'It's really hard to watch the entire nation pull her apart for a mistake that many, many people have made,' the rocker said in a video.

'She's suffering enough. If you want her to suffer, mission accomplished - can we quit it now?'

'She hasn't killed anybody, so let's stop acting like she has,' she concluded.

Not happy: Booka - who Beck was originally angry at after she gave her 'husband' Jake Edwards a friendly New Year's kiss - said the response to the scandal has been 'vile'

Beck had left her 'husband' Jake in Sydney while rushing back to Perth to take care of her ailing dog Oscar, and was revealed to have kissed a mystery man in footage shown during the finale.

During the reunion episode, Rebecca was initially adamant the man was her brother, but later claimed that was an honest mistake on her part.

'The footage went so fast and I didn't even really know what it was,' she told Nine.

'I thought it was my brother. I had a few visitors come and go I was just so excited to see people and everyone was helping me out.'
Iran has slapped travel bans on 15 people for alleged involvement in a leaked audio recording in which Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif complains about the influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) on Iranian diplomacy, semi-official news agency ISNA reported on April 29.

In the leaked interview, aired by the London-based Iran International Persian-language satellite news channel late on April 25, Zarif said he had "zero" influence over Irans foreign policy.

"According to a judiciary source, 15 people involved in the interview have been banned from leaving Iran," ISNA reported.

The recording has angered hard-liners in Iran, who called the leak "an espionage act," prompting some lawmakers to call for Zarif's resignation.

State news agency IRNA reported that President Hassan Rohani April 29 replaced the head of the state-run institute that was in charge of conducting the interview. Authorities have said the recording was part of a wider project with government officials and was produced for state records rather than for publication.

"Hessameddin Ashena, head of the Strategic Studies Center, has resigned.... President Rohani has appointed the cabinet spokesman Ali Rabiei to replace him," IRNA reported.

Ashena, who Iranian media said was present during the seven-hour interview with Zarif, is also an adviser to the president.

Rohani said on April 28 that the leak was intended to disrupt talks between Tehran and six powers in Vienna aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal that Washington abandoned three years ago. He ordered an inquiry into the recording's release.

While on a regional tour, Zarif said in an Instagram post that he regretted the leak and his remarks were misinterpreted.

Based on reporting by AFP, IRNA, ISNA
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Grand Jury to Hear Mayfield Murder Case

By West Kentucky Star Staff

The Mayfield Police Department said officers found an unresponsive man at a home on South 14th Street on April 18

. Police said t

he

victim

, 31-year-old Devon Saxton of Mayfield, was found on the front porch of the home with a laceration wound to his neck, and was pronounced dead at the scene.



MAYFIELD - A Mayfield man charged with murder made a court appearance Wednesday in Graves Circuit Court.At a preliminary hearing for 36-year-old Troy Rogers, a judge found probable cause and bound the case to a grand jury. No trial date has been set.

Detectives were led to Rogers' home where he reportedly confessed to the crime. Rogers remains lodged in the Graves County Jail.
This story has been updated.

WASHINGTON  The Justice Department brought federal hate crimes charges Wednesday in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, charging a father and son who armed themselves, chased and fatally shot the 25-year-old Black man after spotting him running in their Georgia neighborhood.

Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory, were charged along with a third man, William Roddie Bryan, with one count of interference with civil rights and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are also charged with using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.

The case is the most significant civil rights prosecution undertaken to date by the Biden administration Justice Department and comes as federal officials have moved quickly to open sweeping investigations into troubled police departments as civil rights takes center stage among the departments priorities.

The indictment charges that the McMichaels armed themselves with firearms, got into a truck and chased Arbery through the public streets of the neighborhood while yelling at Arbery, using their truck to cut off his route and threatening him with firearms. It also alleges that Bryan got into a truck and then chased Arbery, using the vehicle to block his path.

Arbery, 25, was killed on Feb. 23, 2020, by three close-range shotgun blasts after the McMichaels pursued him in a pickup truck as he was running through their neighborhood. Arbery had been dead for more than two months when a cellphone video of the shooting was leaked online and a national outcry erupted.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case the next day and swiftly arrested Travis McMichael, who fired the shots, his father, and Bryan, a neighbor who joined the pursuit and took the video. The three men remain jailed on state murder charges and are due back in court in May.

In this May 17, 2020, photo, a painted mural of Ahmaud Arbery is on display in Brunswick, Ga., where the 25-year-old man was shot and killed in February. It was painted by Miami artist Marvin Weeks. (AP Photo/Sarah Blake Morgan, file)AP

The McMichaels lawyers have said they pursued Arbery, suspecting he was a burglar, after security cameras had previously recorded him entering a home under construction. They say Travis McMichael shot Arbery while fearing for his life as they grappled over a shotgun.

Local prosecutors have said Arbery stole nothing and was merely out jogging when the McMichaels and Bryan chased him.

The Justice Department alleges that the men used force and threats of force to intimidate and interfere with Arberys right to use a public street because of his race.

In pretrial court hearings in Georgia, prosecutors have presented evidence that racism may have played a role in the mans death.

Last June, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation testified Bryan told investigators that Travis McMichael uttered a racist slur right after the shooting as he stood over Arbery, who was bleeding on the ground.

Mr. Bryan said that after the shooting took place before police arrival, while Mr. Arbery was on the ground, that he heard Travis McMichael make the statement, f-ing n-er, GBI agent Richard Dial testified.

Travis McMichaels attorneys have denied that he made the remark.

During a bond hearing in November, prosecutors introduced evidence that Travis McMichael had used racist slurs in a text message and on social media.

At the time Arbery was killed, Georgia was one of just four U.S. states without a hate crimes law. Amid the outcry over his death, Georgia lawmakers quickly passed a law allowing for an additional penalty for certain crimes found to be motivated by a victims race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, or mental or physical disability.

The men charged with murdering Arbery wont face hate crime penalties at the state level because the law was changed after the killing.

FILE - This combo of booking photos provided by the Glynn County, Ga., Detention Center, shows from left, Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and William "Roddie" Bryan Jr. The Justice Department announced federal hate crime charges against the three men Wednesday, April 28,2021, in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Georgia man who was killed while out for a run last year. All three are charged with one count of interference with civil rights and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are also charged with using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence. (Glynn County Detention Center via AP)AP

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said the state case remained a priority, and he commended this positive development and the continued push to get answers for Ahmauds family, community and our state.

Attorneys for Travis McMichael said they were disappointed that the Justice Department bought the false narrative that the media and state prosecutors have promulgated.

There is absolutely nothing in the indictment that identifies how this is a federal hate crime and it ignores without apology that Georgia law allows a citizen to detain a person who was committing burglaries until police arrive, attorneys Bob Rubin and Jason Sheffield said.

Gregory McMichaels attorneys, Frank and Laura Hogue, did not immediately respond Wednesday to an email seeking comment and Bryans attorney, Kevin Gough, said he had no immediate comment because he had not read the federal indictment.

Cobb County District Attorney Flynn Broady, whose office is prosecuting the state case against the McMichaels and Bryan, had no comment on the federal charges.

___

Michael Balsamo and Russ Bynum of The Associated Press wrote this story. Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
Google Cloud and 2K Games have launched a new cloud-native game storage system called Open Saves.

Open Saves will provide a way for game developers to store game data without having to choose between storage solutions such as Cloud Storage, Memorystore, or Firestore, and is described as "an open source purpose-built single interface for multiple storage back ends thats powered by Google Cloud."

The interface has been "designed with extensibility in mind," and can be integrated into a variety of titles on a range of platforms -- whether mobile or console, multiplayer or single-player -- running on any infrastructure from on-prem to cloud or a hybrid.

Offering more detail on Open Saves in a blog post, Google Cloud for Games developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao and chief architect Rob Martin said they wanted to create a storage inferface that's simple, fast, and scalable.

"Open Saves provides a unified, well-defined gRPC endpoint for all operations for metadata, structured, and unstructured objects," reads the blog post. "With a built-in caching system, Open Saves optimizes data placements based on access frequency and data size, all to achieve both low latency for smaller binary objects and high throughput for big objects.

"The Open Saves API server can run on either Google Kubernetes Engine or Cloud Run. Both platforms can scale out to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. Open Saves also stores data in Firestore and Cloud Storage, and can handle hundreds of gigabytes of data and up to millions of requests per second."

You can find more details on Open Saves, including how to install and deploy the interface, over on GitHub and the Google Cloud website.
Stirk brings 25 years' experience driving sales growth for some of the world's most successful enterprise technology businesses

Tradeshift, a leader in e-invoicing and accounts payable automation, today announces the appointment of James Stirk as Head of Enterprise Sales EMEA APAC to support the Company's ambitious global growth strategy.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005489/en/

Tradeshift appoints James Stirk as Head of Sales for EMEA and APAC (Photo: Business Wire)

Stirk brings a deep understanding of the enterprise technology market and a consistent track record of success, having spent the past 25 years working with some of the world's biggest technology companies across finance, ERP, business intelligence and cyber. He joins Tradeshift following a successful period as Vice President and General Manager EMEA at FinancialForce where he oversaw 39 percent year-on-year growth. His previous roles include senior sales positions at McAfee and Oracle, where he was responsible for enterprise application sales, including business intelligence, CRM, ERP and EPM systems.

"Timing is everything in this market and I can't imagine a more exciting time to be joining Tradeshift," said Stirk. "The pandemic has put digital trade at the forefront of everyone's minds. We're already seeing a rapid acceleration in digitalization of the core processes which underpin supply chain relationships. But the truth is, we've only just begun to scratch the surface.

"The opportunity ahead of us is vast. Currently just 15 percent of global trade is digital. Businesses are looking to move away from the monolithic, centralised systems of the past and towards more flexible, open networks that truly reflect the demands of the new digital economy. Tradeshift has a world-leading proposition to help organizations make this transition with confidence."

Gartner predicts that end-user spending on public cloud services will rise by 23 percent in 2021 and, according to the 2021 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 69 percent of corporate directors want to accelerate enterprise digital strategies and implementations to help deal with the ongoing disruption.

"There's an enormous amount of momentum in the market at the moment," said Christophe Bodin, Chief Revenue Officer, Tradeshift. "We've started 2021 with a number of highly significant wins and it's the perfect time to add further strength to our sales function. I have every confidence that James and his team can help us move up another gear and take Tradeshift to its next level of scale."

About Tradeshift

Tradeshift is a market leader in e-invoicing and accounts payable automation and an innovator in B2B marketplaces and providing access to supplier financing. Its cloud-based platform helps buyers and suppliers digitize invoice processing, automate accounts payable workflows and scale quickly. Headquartered in San Francisco, Tradeshift's vision is to connect every company in the world, creating economic opportunity for all. Today, the Tradeshift Network is home to a rapidly growing community of buyers and sellers operating in more than 190 countries. Find out more at: Tradeshift.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005489/en/

Contacts:

Harry Ronaldson, Director, Corporate Communications

Email: pr@tradeshift.com
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GENESEE COUNTY, MI -- A man who has served as a firefighter and police officer in multiple Genesee County departments has been sentenced to jail time after pleading guilty to child sexually abusive activity.

Matthew J. Hyde, 40, of Burton was sentenced April 26 by Genesee County Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth A. Kelly to 180 days in jail, with credit for four days served, and 60 months of probation.

Hyde pleaded guilty in March to one count of child sexually abusive activity after he was caught in a Genesee County Sheriffs Department GHOST sex-trafficking sting in 2020.

The plea agreement reached dropped charges of accosting a child for immoral purposes and using a computer to commit a crime.

Hyde was one of 17 people arrested after a months-long operation by the Genesee Human Oppression Strike Team, or GHOST, that started in March 2020.

Related: Firefighter, former police officer among 17 arrested in Flint-area sex-trafficking sting

Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson said at an August 2020 press conference that Hyde believed he was speaking to two 14-year-old girls who really were sheriffs deputies acting as chatters.

Hyde was working as a firefighter for the Burton Fire Department at the time of the charges.

He was suspended without pay from the fire department after his arrest. Hyde has since been terminated from the department, Burton Fire Chief Kirk Wilkinson confirmed with MLive-The Flint Journal.

Hyde also previously worked as an officer for the Mt. Morris Police Department, Clayton Township Police Department, as well as a Genesee County Parks ranger.

During his sentencing, Hyde said he has been seeking help, linking his actions to pornography addiction.

Therapys been honestly the best thing that Ive ever done in my entire life, Hyde said. The church classes are amazing. I am meeting people who also have been in trouble with the law so theyre seeing where Im coming from. I just wanted to, again, apologize for my actions and thank you for allowing me to be here today.

Kelly said she is always troubled when she hears someone identify addiction to pornography as something that contributes to criminal behavior, calling unfettered access to pornography one of the biggest problems in society.

I think it creates more problems than our society realizes and Im sad for you that you fell victim to that because it desensitizes you and then it just required more and more as far as urges and satisfying those, the judge said. When they can find one word in someones Facebook post and shut it down but they cant block anyone from having the access that people do to pornography, I think we need to do better as a society.

Attorney Sara Coaster, who represented Hyde, said she is pleased her client was not sentenced to a term in prison.

She pointed out that Hyde has been involved in maximum treatment programs.

Mr. Hyde hopes this case points out the dangers of porn addiction and how that can grow into much larger problems, Coaster said.

She said Hyde wants to serve as an example to others of what not to do.

Read more on MLive:

Sheriffs deputy arrested in Genesee County sex-trafficking sting

Human trafficking task force launches in Upper Peninsula modeled after Genesee Countys GHOST

New police team to target human trafficking in Genesee County

Man takes Uber from Toledo to Montrose to kidnap, sexually assault teen met online, sheriff says

Police believe body found in Port Huron area was moved after death, ask public for information

Man critically injured in shooting at Flint apartment complex

17-year-old boy fatally shot in Flint
The patent comes at a time when cannabis acceptance in Europe  particularly for medical purposes  is starting to become mainstream

Vancouver-based Nextleaf has over 70 patents globally covering the extraction, purification and delivery of cannabinoids

Nextleaf Solutions Ltd ( ) ( ) has received a European patent covering its closed loop chilled solvent feed apparatus for post-extraction cannabinoid processing.

In a statement, the extraction company said the patent is vital to the low-cost production of cannabis distillate.

Vancouver-based Nextleaf has over 70 patents globally covering the extraction, purification and delivery of cannabinoids. The latest patent comes at a time when cannabis acceptance in Europe  particularly for medical purposes  is starting to become mainstream.

Earlier this year Irish pharmaceutical giant Jazz Pharmaceuticals made a bid to acquire US-listed GW Pharmaceuticals for US$7.2 billion, gaining access to its medical cannabis patent portfolio.

Nextleaf CEO Paul Pedersen told investors he is optimistic about the positive signs towards cannabis legalization in Europe.

"We have validated our extraction and distillation technology here in Canada, the world's largest and most well-regulated federally legal jurisdiction, Pedersen said.

Nextleaf's global IP strategy allows for speed to market by exporting our 'Made in Canada' technology into emerging cannabis markets. When you look at the companies that own the most cannabis patents throughout Europe, you find Canopy Growth, GW Pharma, , and Nextleaf Solutions."

Positive trends

Research firm Brightfield Group estimates that domestic cultivation and pressure on Europe's healthcare system to allow general practitioners to medical cannabis will result in a compound annual growth rate of 98% from 2020-2025. The firm expects the entire European market to grow to over $3.1 billion by 2025, led largely by the UK, which legalized medical cannabis in 2018.

In February 2021, plant-derived CBD was added as a legal ingredient in cosmetics by a key market regulator for trade in the European Union.

"We know that medical cannabis acceptance in Europe will be a major catalyst to jump-start pharmaceutical participation because these jurisdictions collectively manufacture and export over 70% of all drugs and medicines consumed globally," said Pedersen.

"We are starting to see the value of IP come to the forefront of the industry with the largest cannabis company in the world, Canopy Growth, launching a cannabis extraction patent infringement lawsuit against GW Pharma this past December."

Nextleaf said it considers its European intellectual property strategy central to the company's global aspirations.

Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas
A Christian theologian and former pastor looking to persuade skeptical evangelicals to get vaccinated for COVID-19 said Wednesday that a historic distrust of institutions was weaponized during the presidency of Donald Trump.

What is actually deeply in the fabric of American evangelicalism is a cultural tendency to be on guard against the dominant  secular institutions, said Curtis Chang, who is now a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary.

What has happened in the last five or 10 years is that [the] cultural tendency to be on guard has gotten weaponized. It has gotten exploited by external forces, Chang said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. It's now a reflexive distrust to say, Actually, they're out to get me.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Getty Images

It's a fundamental reflex of distrust and hostility and a grievance  a sense of that ... we're being persecuted by these dominant institutions, he said.

A Pew survey in February found that 45 percent of white evangelicals either definitely or probably would not get vaccinated for COVID-19. A March survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 40 percent of white evangelicals said they were unlikely to get the shot, compared with 25 percent of all Americans.

Journalist Will Saletan, Slates national correspondent, estimated based on polling that roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population is hesitant about getting a COVID-19 vaccine but can be persuaded, while another 15 percent are refusers who will just dig in their heels. We can get to herd immunity without the 15% of Americans who refuse to get vaccinated. But we need many of the 20% who are hesitating, Saletan wrote.

About one-third of Americans are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and an additional 43 percent have received at least one shot, according to the New York Times. But herd immunity will require about 70 to 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, experts have said.

Story continues

There are an estimated 41 million or so white evangelicals in the U.S., which is about 12 percent of the total population.

American evangelicalism has been antiestablishment since the nations founding, as has been documented by books such as Frances FitzGeralds The Evangelicals.

But Chang said he was motivated to create a Christians and the Vaccine video series by watching a centuries-old cultural tendency transform into something darker over the past several years. In December, he was talking to a public health agency official in the San Francisco Bay Area and realized she had little to no clue about what she was going to encounter in the evangelical church when the vaccine rollout hit.

Chang said he wants the videos to help overcome vaccine hesitancy in a way that respects people, that's not shaming, that's not arguing, that actually takes seriously where people are at, but doesn't retreat and doesnt ignore what is going on.

Curtis Chang recieves the COVID-19 vaccine. (Via Facebook)

There are videos in Changs series about whether the vaccine is safe, and about whether it is a form of government control. One video addresses concerns about a link between abortions and vaccines, and another looks at whether Black Americans can trust the vaccine.

And there is even a video addressing the question Is the COVID vaccine the Mark of the Beast? Thats a reference to apocalyptic evangelical beliefs about the end of the world and a passage in Revelation  the final book of the Bible  that talks about such a mark. Chang says the most accurate translation of that passage, actually, is that the mark was part of a story that served as a metaphor for how the Roman Emperor Nero demanded his subjects bow down to him.

The passage is not a prophecy, Chang said, but rather a warning. Don't let yourself get branded politically by allegiance to any one figure, he said. I will let the audience decide who that one figure is, [who] is most likely to be branding us these days.

The videos were produced in partnership with the National Association of Evangelicals, COVID Collaborative, the Ad Council, Values Partnerships and Public Square Strategies, according to the "Christians and the Vaccine" website.

Chang blames three main forces for exploiting deep-seated evangelical distrust of secular institutions: conservative politicians, right-wing media and online social movements such as QAnon.

It's a recipe for getting votes that, you know, in [the] case of Trump: I will be the one that will protect you from all these malign institutions out there, Chang said. And it turns out that actually broadcasting conspiracy theories and alarmist views of the world is a great way to get ratings.

Chang then flipped the script of how a conservative evangelical might think about the vaccine, saying these three groups exploiting mistrust are the kinds of villains that biblical accounts describe Jesus talking about.

These are external thieves and wolves, he said.

Two of the most prominent evangelical backers of Trump  the Rev. Franklin Graham and the Rev. Robert Jeffress  have publicly encouraged Christians to get vaccinated for COVID-19, and Jeffress did an interview with Chang for his video series. Many other Christian leaders and organizations have done the same.

Then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 12. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

But Chang said the past decade, and in particular the Trump presidency, has seen degraded evangelical trust in most American institutions  especially government, the media and public health experts  to a point of near totality.

Once you remove institutions from the picture and you think we can't trust any of them, then you will believe anything, he said.

Chang thinks the innate skepticism of evangelicals is actually a healthy thing. He was raised in a Bible church in Chicago and then studied at Harvard, where he earned a degree in government.

My evangelical culture actually trained me to be a better citizen of Harvard because I was actually a more critical thinker. I was questioning things, he said.

But he also said a weakness of evangelicalism, historically, has been that in our own theology, we don't have a language or a place for institutions. We are so hyper-individualist in our conception of how human beings relate to God that it's just me and God.

In other words, evangelicals are trained by their culture to be virtuous interpersonally but not systemically.

You have this very bizarre reality, he said. The same people will talk about the government and Microsoft as Satan  but they can be at the individual level, to their next-door neighbor, some of the kindest, most charitable, most generous individuals in the world.

____

Read more from Yahoo News:
PIME priest speaks about Ta Khmau district, home to only five Catholics. Many have never heard of Jesus, but when they experience God's gratuitousness, many doors open.

Phnom Penh (AsiaNews)  We are not yet sowing the Gospel here, we are still ploughing, said Father Giovanni Tulino, an Italian missionary with the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), speaking about the Catholic community he serves, five people in all, in Ta Khmau, a town of 60,000 residents, some ten kilometres from downtown Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

The clergyman spoke last night about working on the frontier of evangelisation during an hour-long streaming interview organised by the PIME Missionary Centre in Milan as part of PIMEs Wednesday meetings.

Father Tulino arrived in Cambodia in 2014. In 2017 he followed in the footsteps of fellow PIME missionary Fr Mario Ghezzi in Ta Khmau, an area of urban growth. Three years earlier, invited by the Apostolic Vicar of Phnom Penh, Fr Ghezzi had set up a Catholic presence there.

Here most people do not know what the Church is, the missionary explained. Many have never heard of Jesus. But when they experience God's gratuitousness, many doors open.

Fr Tulino defines his mission as one of waiting because waiting is one of the most beautiful ways to say the verb to love. The first proclamation comes with difficulties but also beauty in which sometimes you feel like the Apostle Paul having to invent a language to tell what you believe in to those in front of you.

The Catholic community in Ta Khmau today includes a small group of catechumens who have begun a journey that perhaps one day might lead them to baptism. They were impressed by the fact that someone cares about them, Fr Tulino explained. Still, there are many difficulties.

Taking care is this hidden part of the mission. A few months ago, we realised the dream of buying a house that is next to mine. There we started a kindergarten for 35 children and an after-school. We keep the gate open from 6 am to 7 pm. It's the only space for kids in the area and parents trust us enough to send them.

However, Cambodia too has had to deal with COVID-19. For the past few days, we have been in total lockdown. Until recently, the number of cases in the country was low, and measures to prevent the spread have been very strict. Even now there's a checkpoint 100 metres from my house. As a matter of fact, I haven't seen anyone in days.

Despite this, there is another expectation that could soon be fulfilled. With the new building we began to turn the multifunctional room into a place dedicated only to prayer. I say this with the emotion of those who know that when it is ready it will remain for a long time the only church in this community.
PANAMA CITY, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. ("Bladex" or "the Bank") announced today that the Bank filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 (the "2020 Annual Report") with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC").

The 2020 Annual Report and audited financial statements can be accessed by visiting either the SEC's website at www.sec.gov or Bladex's website at www.bladex.com. The Bank can also provide a copy of the Bank's audited financial statements or annual report on Form 20-F, upon a written request and without charge.

Bladex, a multinational bank originally established by the central banks of Latin-American and Caribbean countries, began operations in 1979 to promote foreign trade and economic integration in the Region. The Bank, headquartered in Panama, also has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the United States of America, and a Representative License in Peru, supporting the regional expansion and servicing of its customer base, which includes financial institutions and corporations.

Bladex is listed on the NYSE in the United States of America (NYSE: BLX), since 1992, and its shareholders include: central banks and state-owned banks and entities representing 23 Latin American countries, commercial banks and financial institutions, and institutional and retail investors through its public listing.

For further information on Bladex, please access its website at www.bladex.com or contact:

Monica Cosulich - SVP, Finance and Investor Relations

E-mail address: [email protected]. Tel.: (+507) 210-8563

Head Office Address: Torre V, Business Park, Ave. La Rotonda, Urb. Costa del Este,

Panama, Republic of Panama

SOURCE Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (Bladex)

Related Links

http://www.bladex.com


A man was struck and killed by a New Jersey Transit train early Thursday in Secaucus, officials said.

He was hit by a westbound Main-Bergen line train at about 12:50 a.m. near the HX bridge, which crosses the Hackensack River between the Secaucus Junction and Rutherford stations, according to New Jersey Transit.

Train No. 41 left Hoboken 10 minutes earlier and was scheduled to arrive in Port Jervis, New York at 3:15 a.m.

There were 21 passengers and crew members aboard.

The mans identify has not been released pending family notification. NJ Transit police are investigating.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com.
Along with his career-defining roles, Mark Wahlberg has also been known for toned physique and commitment exercise and nutrition.

But for his next film, the leading man has been packing on as many as 30 pounds to play Father Stuart Long alongside Mel Gibson, who plays his father in the drama film, Stu.

And on Wednesday the pair were spotted moments after they stepped out of their trailers on set, which is filming in Burbank, just over the hill from Hollywood.

Scroll down to video

Packing it on: Mark Wahlberg, 49, looked much heavier and bulkier when he was seen on the set of the drama film Stu in Wednesday in Burbank, which is just over the hill from Hollywood

Wahlberg, 49, wore light grey shots with a darker grey fitted shirt, that helped showcase his obvious weigh gain, and sneakers.

Since he had been keeping his body very fit over the decades, the actor looked more like a bulked up version of himself.

His arms and biceps looked much bigger in comparison to recent months, along with his legs and waist.

Gibson looked relaxed in black sweatpants and a blue polo shirt ahead of his scene for Stu later in the day.

Behind-the-scenes: Wahlberg was seen leaving his trailer with a crew members as he prepared to shoot a scene for the upcoming drama film, Stu, in Burbank, CA

BTS: Mel Gibson, 65, relaxed in sweatpants and a polo shirt ahead of his scene for Stu; the actor plays Wahlberg's on-screen father in Stu

Despite his busy schedule, the Massachusetts native was able to fit in one of his early morning workouts, dressed in his sporty ensemble from Municipal, ahead of shooting.

'NEVER SATISFIED! IF I CAN DO IT, SO CAN YOU! @municipal,' he wrote in the caption of a photo showing him checking his phone on set, along with a few bulging bicep emojis.

He also took to Instagram and shared a quick video of himself lounging in his on-set trailer with some of the crew.

'Seem like everyone's got the acting bug now,' he joked while looking straight into the camera just before panning the room to show at least three guys in the room.

Driven: The Massachusetts native encouraged his social media followers to 'never be satisfied'

Stu is a faith-based biopic loosely based on the late Father Stuart Long, who started off his career as a boxer and eventually became a priest.

The movie, which has been said to be close to Wahlberg's heart for a number of years, was written and is directed by Gibson's girlfriend Rosalind Ross.

Wahlberg recently wrapped filming Sonys adaptation of Uncharted with Tom Holland, and the drama film Arthur The King, according to Deadline.

New role; Wahlberg plays a boxer turned priest in Stu, which was written and is being directed by Gibson's girlfriend Rosalind Ross.

'Seem like everyone's got the acting bug now,' the actor joked
Lewisville, TX, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EZLynx, a leading software solution for independent insurance agencies and an Applied company, is proud to announce that it has partnered with FIRST Insurance Funding to provide a streamlined premium financing solution within EZLynx Management System.

Were excited to partner with EZLynx to offer agencies a seamless, secure and simple premium finance solution, said FIRST Insurance Funding Regional President Justin Berry. The combination of efficient technology utilization for agents and cash flow options for insureds is key in our ever-changing environment.

FIRST Insurance Funding is the largest premium finance company in North America, with more than 35 years of experience. In that time, they have earned a reputation for superior service, innovation and flexibility.

Covering the costs of large up-front insurance premiums can be a challengeone that impacts both agent and insureds. This announcement represents a key competitive advantage for EZLynx customers in the growing commercial insurance marketspace. Because this solution is available directly within the agency management system, agents can provide immediate premium financing options to their customers. Premium financing creates flexibility and improves cash flow for insureds, which can often be the determining factor to winning the business.

Available through EZLynx Submission Center, this integration will:

Retrieve a financing quote in real time

Write the financing option into the agents proposal

Create a Premium Finance Agreement (PFA), ready for signature

FIRST Insurance Funding is the latest addition to the EZLynx Connect platform. EZLynx Connect provides agencies with access to a powerful marketplace of industry-leading integrations and cross-selling opportunities.

Agents love that premium financing is now integrated within their management system, said EZLynx Product Manager Michael Rabinowitz. They experience premium financing options for their clients as a natural part the submission process, without ever having to exit or switch between software.

About EZLynx

EZLynx pioneered personal lines real-time comparative rating, enabling agents to generate quotes from multiple insurance carriers with a single data entry point. Today, over 20,000 agencies rely on EZLynx to provide more than eight million home, auto, and package rating transactions every month. EZLynx has also expanded beyond personal lines comparative rating by creating innovative software solutions that transform every facet of agency life, including agency management, client self-servicing, sales pipeline management, marketing and communications, accounting, eSignature, and more, all available on a unified, one platform solution.

About FIRST Insurance Funding

FIRST Insurance Funding is the largest premium finance company in North America and has built a reputation for superior service, innovation, and flexibility. Financing more than $10 billion annually, FIRST provides financial services to the commercial P&C marketplace, including premium financing, customized billing and payment solutions, and agency lending programs. Backed by unmatched technology, FIRST products afford insurance industry clients the ability to grow and increase their profitability. FIRST is a subsidiary of Wintrust, a $45 billion financial services holding company, with a common stock traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market.
April 29, 2021, Mountain View, CA - The SETI Institute announced today the 2020 and 2021 recipients of the SETI Forward award, recognizing outstanding undergraduate interns studying astrobiology and SETI research: Karen Isabel Perez - Columbia University, Ellie White - Marshall University and Siddhant Sharma - University of Delhi. The SETI Forward award provides scholarship funds to support the next generation of scientists pursuing SETI and astrobiology career opportunities and connects promising students with researchers. All three recipients will receive their awards at the 2021 Drake Awards ceremony taking place on May 6, 2021.

"We are delighted to recognize Karen, Ellie and Siddhant for their achievements as summer interns in astrobiology and SETI research programs," said Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute. "Providing undergraduates with the opportunity to not only do compelling science but also explore and discover career opportunities in STEM fields is so meaningful. It is precisely why our own internship program is so important."

The SETI Forward Award is an endowed fund created by Lew Levy and Dane Glasgow, and other donors to support undergraduate student research activities. Each summer, dozens of undergraduates complete internships alongside SETI and astrobiology research scientists - at organizations like the SETI Institute, U.C. Berkeley SETI Research Institute, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and many others. Too few of these students pursue science careers in SETI and astrobiology fields. SETI Forward seeks to bridge the gap between these internships and career opportunities in SETI science and astrobiology research.

The SETI Forward Award will provide a travel stipend and reimbursement of expenses of approximately $1500 per award to:

Assist undergraduate students with travel stipends to facilitate collaboration on SETI research at telescopes, universities, or other research facilities

Fund undergraduate student travel expenses associated with presenting SETI research and astrobiology at scientific meetings, conferences, or similar events

Provide undergraduate student scholarships to organizations engaged in SETI and astrobiology research to help obtain and nurture new talent in the field

"These students certainly have a bright, productive future ahead of themselves," said Fritz Demopoulos. Demopoulos sits on the SETI Institute's Board of Trustees, is a donor to the SETI Forward Fund and is a sponsor of the 2021 Drake Awards. "We at the SETI Institute want to be as close to them as possible along their journey of accomplishment in science."

Karen Perez is a 2nd-year Astronomy grad student from Houston, TX studying pulsars at Columbia University. She previously obtained her bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 2019. She earned the opportunity to intern at Breakthrough Listen the following summer (summer 2019), where she worked on testing and improving a pulsar searching pipeline and producing observation catalogs and scripts for the entire Galactic Center Survey. The internship helped reinforce her passion for radio astronomy and opened her eyes to the possibilities of using radio telescopes to look for technosignatures. Since then, she has continued to work with the team as a Visiting Graduate Student, conducting observations and analyzing data (the first of a series of papers with her mentor Vishal Gajjar is out now!) She plans on being a SETI researcher for life and hopes to one day join the ranks of many of you here today. She credits her dad with sparking her interest in astronomy and SETI, but also the countless scientists who have helped make an 8th-grader's dream a reality. Karen is the recipient of the 2020 SETI Forward award, which was postponed due to the COVID 19 shutdowns.

Ellie White is a physics major at Marshall University. She has been doing radio astronomy since the summer after her sophomore year in high school. During her first summer as an undergraduate, Ellie helped install a test instrument as part of the Cosmic Twilight Polarimeter (CTP) project at Green Bank as a student of Rich Bradley from NRAO. This past summer, she was an intern with the Breakthrough Listen REU program. She helped implement the signal processing software, GNU Radio, at the Allen Telescope Array under the mentorship of Steve Croft, Alex Pollak, and Derek Kozel. She is currently a NASA WV Space Grant Undergraduate Research Fellow and is working on several projects with the GBT and Breakthrough Listen.

Ellie sees SETI and astrobiology as a way to continue to place ourselves - Earthlings - in our broader cosmic context. She feels SETI prompts us to seek connections in our lives as much as it pushes us to find life beyond our Earth.

Siddhant Sharma or 'Sid' is from India. He was born in Faridabad, India and is a sophomore undergraduate working towards his degree in concentrations of biochemistry and chemistry. He is an upcoming visiting scholar with Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Seattle (BMSIS) and exposed to SETI's initiatives while attending Technoclimes Workshop in 2020. His research in astrobiology stems from his first summer research experience in 2020 as a research associate for BMSIS. There he worked with a highly collaborative team helmed by Dr. Henderson (Jim) Cleaves from Earth Life Science Institute in Japan, unraveling the secrets of prebiotic chemistry of life essential reactions. For the summer of 2021, Siddhant will be joining Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden through the CASSUM fellowship, working with Dr. Martin Rahm on prebiotic macromolecular synthesis using quantum chemistry. Siddhant wants to pursue graduate school and stay in academia, solving exciting problems in astrobiology and the origins of life while collaborating with SETI's efforts. He looks up to his mentor, Dr. Henderson (Jim) Cleaves and admires his passion for mentoring the next generation of young minds.

SETI Forward recipients are selected from the applicant pool by a diverse panel established by the SETI Forward Fund administration. Undergraduates at accepted institutions participating in a mentored internship are eligible to apply.

The next generation of SETI and astrobiology scientists will develop new technologies and make scientific discoveries we cannot even imagine today. The SETI Institute strives to foster future pioneers in SETI and astrobiology through educational programs and awards, such as SETI Forward.

The 2021 Drake Awards will take place on May 6, 2020 and recognize Dan Werthimer and Paul Horowitz for their substantial contributions to SETI research. In addition to the SETI Forward recipients, special guests will include Bill Nye, Adam Savage, Frank Drake and Jill Tarter. To learn more about the 2021 Drake Awards and purchase tickets, click here.

###

About the SETI Institute

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity's quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the Universe and to share that knowledge with the world. Our research encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies, including NASA and NSF.

Contact information

Rebecca McDonald

Director of Communications

SETI Institute

rmcdonald@seti.org
New York: Drowning is preventable using simple, low-cost interventions and every government should make it a priority so the 2.5 million drowning deaths in the past decade will not be repeated.

That is why all 193 members of the UN General Assembly have resolved to encourage every country to take urgent action to prevent drownings.

They called on nations to consider introducing water safety, swimming and first aid lessons as part of school curricula and appoint a national focal point for drowning prevention, develop countrywide prevention programs, and enact and enforce water safety laws.

Some 2.5 million people died from drowning in the past decade.

The resolution, co-sponsored by Bangladesh and Ireland and adopted by consensus, is the first to focus on drowning. It establishes July 25 as World Drowning Prevention Day.
Into the Wilds and the Calming / Healing of Newport, Central Oregon Coast

Published 04/28/21 at 7:55 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Newport, Oregon)  From calming to chaotic, Newport has the full spectrum of repose and crazed, energetic fun that any Oregon coast town could ask for. It has its wilder sides along with parts that are not only upscale but run the complete gamut of tastes and experiences in between. It's as if the entire Oregon coast experience is summed up in one town: where you can be an elegant beach bum.

Newport is like one big taste tester, and not just because fine wines, foods or brews are part of its basic DNA. There's international foods as well, along with catching your own dinner by crabbing and clamming along its famed Yaquina Bay. Families, younger folk interested in a slightly askew bar scene, hikers looking to tread some new paths, surfers, whale watchers, or anyone hoping for a new and interesting spot to glimpse the waves: the place is multi-layered.

Yet for some it's also a place where you go if you're in need of great healing. Portland's Gina Noell is one of those. This year she lost her husband, Michael Cubbon. Both were fixtures in Portland's music scene for decades, and her holiday parties were always the coolest, hippest things around.

Between that heavy blow and the isolation of COVID, Noell found Newport to be a sense of some relief. She also made some unique use of the town's digital foodie amenities.

If I need a quiet getaway, I go to an Air BnB a few miles north of Newport, she said. After Michael passed away, I spent nearly two weeks there in a tiny little cottage with a perfect ocean view. It was just me and my two Labradors. Bonus: I was able to hire a dog-walker and ordered so much food from Fred Meyer/Instagram that I was on a first name basis with the drivers. That may sound odd, but while wanting time alone, it was great to have a few friendly faces for a minute or two at a time, as well. Also, before Covid and hopefully soon, there's nowhere better for a late lunch than Nana's Irish Pub.

Interestingly, unlike most, Noell didn't head to the beaches, however. She has a different take on all this.





For me, the reason to be at the Coast is to relax, reflect, rewind, renew, quietly, and in solitude, she said. If I didn't have the dogs (who are too strong for me to walk) I'd probably go down to the beach, but even then, would it be much fun alone?

For some, solace and civilization overpowers the draw to the beaches, and for others a day at the beach is something manmade, certainly if the weather turns on you.

Newport's Bayfront area is the hub of activity when it comes to manmade fun in Newport, but it's where rougher-edged nature meets the tourist attractions as well as a bustling fishing port. Especially engaging is simply wandering the piers and docks without aim, just exploring the wobbly platforms and watching the kooky sea lions bellow and bounce against each other.



If you're in need of more civilization, Newport's Nye Beach is about as civilized as you can get on the Oregon coast. Calming and charming in its vibe, there's an old school Americana aesthetic that abounds in those tiled little streets and in the architecture, while those tiny shops and eateries don't run short on cajoling, even historic aspects either. This is no surprise as the place began as a tourism hub over 120 years ago, and many of the buildings have stayed over the decades.

It's where Nana's Irish Pub is, as well as uber-enamoring eateries like Coast and Vine (526 NW Coast St suite a) or the soaring Italian flavors of Sorella (526 NW Coast St suite c).

Still, it's the wilds of Newport that are the ultimate attraction in the central Oregon coast burgh. Miles and miles of beaches stretch along here, interrupted by the baymouth and craggy Yaquina Head. The massive array of fun reaches from South Beach State Park all the way to Otter Rock near Depoe Bay.

Yaquina Head is perhaps the most beautifully chaotic, where, yes, there's a lighthouse, but watching angry waves rampage against the rocks at the tip of the headland is a highlight. It doesn't take much turbulence to create that spectacle.

Nye Beach and Agate Beach form the largest chunks of Newport's sands. Nye Beach gets especially interesting as you get close to old Jump-Off Joe, the rock structure that's now crumbling ever-more quickly. Ragged slabs lie at the tideline nearby, actually remnants from another Jump-Off Joe that existed here over 100 years ago.

Right now the current Jump-Off Joe is no longer available as a viewpoint, as it too started disintegrating this past year.

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SINGAPORE, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

The 51-100 list includes bars from 22 cities across 12 countries in Asia

Japan leads the list with 14 bars across five cities

Singapore and Thailand both see six bars make the list

China and South Korea bolster their profiles across the continent with five entries apiece

Sri Lanka and Vietnam are touted as emerging hotspots with two and three bars featured respectively, marking the first time both countries appear on an Asia's 50 Best Bars list

The full ranking of Asia's 50 Best Bars 51-100 list 2021 is included at the end of this press release.

With one week to go before the announcement of Asia's 50 Best Bars 2021, sponsored by Perrier, 50 Best has revealed the bars voted onto the extended list for the first time. The ranking is created from the overall Asia's 50 Best Bars voting process and comes as part of 50 Best's overall strategy to recognise a greater number of hospitality establishments as they seek to emerge from restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

Mark Sansom, Content Editor for Asia's 50 Best Bars, says: "The last year has been devastating for hospitality and it is vital that we support as many businesses as possible at part of their recovery. In a historic first for the Asia's 50 Best Bars awards programme, the extended ranking is designed to shine the spotlight on more bars than ever before. As guests begin planning their next bar experiences, this extended list will provide double the choice of exceptional, expert-approved drinking destinations for the months and years ahead."

Japan dominates the 51-100 list with 14 bars featured. New entry Ishinohana in Tokyo places ahead of the pack at No.56, while the other nine bars from Tokyo on the list this year include Bar Landscape at No.57, Mixology Heritage at No.60, The Bellwood at No.69, Bar Orchard Ginza at No.72, Liquid Factory at No.84, Mixology Salon at No.87, Tender at No.88, Memento Mori at No.98, and Gen Yamamoto at No.99. From Nara, Lamp Bar is awarded the No.62 spot, while Kyoto's Bar Rocking Chair is placed No.80. Two bars from Japan are also tied at No.94  Ark Lounge from Aomori and Bar D from Kanagawa.

Singapore's bars secure six spots on the list including three newcomers  Ah Sam Cold Drink Stall at No.71, Live Twice at No.75 and Junior The Pocket Bar at No.82. Gibson by the Jigger & Pony Group is at No.66, Employees Only at No.70 and The Other Room at No.79.

Thailand is represented by six bars including four new entries for Bangkok  Niks Anuman's Asia Today at No.52, Thaipioka at No.53, 008 Bar at No.81 and Sugar Ray You've Just Been Poisoned at No.85. Rabbit Hole ranks at No.67 and Smalls comes in at No.93.

China boasts five entries on the extended list: Shanghai's Epic is a new entry at No.64 and is named the Campari One To Watch. The Old Man Hong Kong is at No.54, 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana and Shady Acres, both from Hong Kong, place at No.65 and No.68 respectively, while Macau's Goa Nights rounds off at No.100.

South Korea makes a strong showing with Seoul's Pussyfoot Saloon leading the pack at No.63. Mixology Bar (No.86), Soko (No.89), Southside Parlor (No.92) and Pine & Co (No.97) are featured by Asia's 50 Best for the first time.

Sri Lanka and Vietnam each make their first appearance on the list this year, with two bars from the former: Botanik Rooftop Bistro & Bar in Colombo at No.73 and Smoke & Bitters in Hiriketiya at No.91. Vietnam grabs three entries: Ne Cocktail Bar in Hanoi at No.76, Summer Experiment in Ho Chi Minh at No.77, and Hybrid in Nha Trang at No.96.

Manila leads the way in the Philippines, led by The Back Room at No.51, Oto at No.61, and Buccaneers Rum & Cocktails at No.100. Two new bars from Indonesia break into the ranking  Wishbone from Semarang is placed No.74, while A/A Bar from Jakarta earns the No.83 spot. Other notable entries include New Delhi's Hoots' at No.59, Kuala Lumpur's Pahit at No.78, and Taipei's Mu at No.90. Mu is helmed by Bannie Kang, the winner of this year's Mancino Bartenders' Bartender Award.

The sixth edition of Asia's 50 Best Bars, sponsored by Perrier, will be announced in a virtual ceremony on 6th May, beginning at 6pm HK/Singapore time (3.30pm India; 5pm Thailand; 7pm Japan). Bar and cocktail lovers are invited to join the digital countdown of the list of Asia's 50 Best Bars 2021 through The World's 50 Best Bars Facebook page and 50 Best Bars TV YouTube channel.

EDITOR'S NOTES

51-100 List Ranking Establishment City Country 51 The Back Room Manila Philippines 52 Asia Today Bangkok Thailand 53 Thaipioka Bangkok Thailand 54 The Old Man Hong Kong China 55 Draft Land Taipei Taiwan 56 Ishinohana Tokyo Japan 57 Bar Landscape Tokyo Japan 58 Coley Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 59 Hoots' New Delhi India 60 Mixology Heritage Tokyo Japan 61 Oto Manila Philippines 62 Lamp Bar Nara Japan 63 Pussyfoot Saloon Seoul South Korea 64 Epic Shanghai China 65 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana Hong Kong China 66 Gibson Singapore Singapore 67 Rabbit Hole Bangkok Thailand 68 Shady Acres Hong Kong China 69 The Bellwood Tokyo Japan 70 Employees Only Singapore Singapore 71 Ah Sam Cold Drink Stall Singapore Singapore 72 Bar Orchard Ginza Tokyo Japan 73 Botanik Rooftop Bistro & Bar Colombo Sri Lanka 74 Wishbone Semarang Indonesia 75 Live Twice Singapore Singapore 76 Ne Cocktail Bar Hanoi Vietnam 77 Summer Experiment Ho Chi Minh Vietnam 78 Pahit Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 79 The Other Room Singapore Singapore 80 Bar Rocking Chair Kyoto Japan 81 008 Bar Bangkok Thailand 82 Junior The Pocket Bar Singapore Singapore 83 A/A Bar Jakarta Indonesia 84 Liquid Factory Tokyo Japan 85 Sugar Ray You've Just Been Poisoned Bangkok Thailand 86 Mixology Bar Seoul South Korea 87 Mixology Salon Tokyo Japan 88 Tender Tokyo Japan 89 Soko Seoul South Korea 90 Mu: Taipei Taiwan 91 Smoke & Bitters Hiriketiya Sri Lanka 92 Southside Parlor Seoul South Korea 93 Smalls Bangkok Thailand *94 Ark Lounge Aomori Japan *94 Bar D Kanagawa Japan 96 Hybrid Nha Trang Vietnam 97 Pine & Co Seoul South Korea 98 Memento Mori Tokyo Japan 99 Gen Yamamoto Tokyo Japan *100 Goa Nights Macau China *100 Buccaneers Rum & Cocktails Manila Philippines

*Bars that are tied on the list

For press materials, kindly register via the Media Centre to receive login details.

Registration: https://www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia/media-centre-registration.php

Online media centre: https://mediacentre.theworlds50best.com/#/sign-in

For more information, kindly send your enquiry to:E: asias50bestbars@foodnews.com.sg

Notes to the Editor:

About Asia's 50 Best Bars

The story started in 2002 with the launch of The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, which has since grown into the most important international dining guide in the world and a hugely influential voice in gastronomy. In 2009, The World's 50 Best Bars list was created, with an annual awards ceremony launched in 2012. Asia's 50 Best Bars was added to the portfolio in 2016. The 50 Best brand now champions a global community of bartenders and chefs, cocktail aficionados and gourmets, who travel the globe to explore and experience the only worldwide ranking for premium drinking and dining. Beyond lists, 50 Best showcases leading trends and highlights upcoming food and drink destinations, while acting as an agent for positive change in the hospitality sector. William Reed Business Media, which owns the 50 Best brand, is entirely responsible for the organisation of the awards, the voting system and the respective lists.

Our Partners

Perrier  Official Water Partner; sponsor of The Best Bar in Asia AwardMichter's  Official American Whiskey Partner; sponsor of Michter's Art of Hospitality Award Nikka Whisky  Official Whisky of the World; sponsor of Nikka Highest Climber Award Ketel One Vodka - Official Vodka Partner; sponsor of Ketel One Sustainable Bar AwardAsahi Super Dry  Official Beer Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award The London Essence Co.  Official Mixer Partner; sponsor of London Essence Best New Opening AwardDisaronno  Official Italian Liqueur Partner; sponsor of Disaronno Highest New Entry AwardHeering Cherry Liqueur  Official Cherry Liqueur Partner; sponsor of Heering Legend of the List AwardMancino Vermouth  Official Vermouth Partner; sponsor of Mancino Bartenders' Bartender Award; supplier of Commemorative Shakers Campari  Official Bitters Partner; sponsor of Campari One To Watch AwardMatusalem  Official Rum Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award; supplier of Commemorative ScarvesTia Maria  Official Coffee Liqueur Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award Roku Gin  Official Gin Partner; sponsor of Roku Industry Icon Award Bellino  Official Non-Alcoholic Cocktail Partner; sponsor of a Best in Country Award

Fact SheetDate of Awards Ceremony: 6 May 2021Time of Awards Ceremony: 6.00pm HK/Singapore time Website: www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia Twitter: @50BestBarsInstagram: @50BestBarsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/50BestBars/ Hashtag: #Asias50BestBars

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1497627/Asias_50_Best_Bars_2021_51_100_List.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1497626/Asias_50_Best_Bars_2021_Logo.jpg

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/asias-50-best-bars-reveals-for-the-first-time-ever-bars-ranked-between-51st-and-100th-in-the-list-301279829.html

SOURCE Asias 50 Best Bars 2021
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:48:33|Editor: huaxia

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ISLAMABAD, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) have seized 6748.339 kg of narcotics valuing 234.325 million U.S. dollars in 24 hours in different operations across the country, a statement said on Thursday.

According to the statement issued by the ANF, the force conducted 23 counter-narcotics strikes throughout the country and arrested 26 culprits, including a foreign national and recovered drugs and weapons from the smugglers.

The biggest recoveries of 2,200 kg and 2,165 kg were made in two different areas of the country's southwest district Qilla Abdullah, a region sharing border with Afghanistan. The officials said that the drugs were smuggled from Afghanistan into the bordering district to supply them to other areas of Pakistan.

The ANF arrested a Nigerian national after he landed at the Allama Iqbal International Airport in the eastern city of Lahore and found ingested capsules filled with drugs in his stomach. The accused was admitted to a hospital where he delivered 62 cocaine-filled capsules weighing 1.086 kg, said the statement.

The force has registered cases of all 23 successful operations and launched a broad investigation to bust the rackets of the drug smugglers.

Pakistan has enhanced the intelligence and operation capacity of its anti-narcotics force during the last 10 years after intelligence agencies reported that drug money was being used in terrorist activities.

Pakistan launched its new Anti-Narcotics Policy in 2010, which has three major sections, including drug supply reduction, drug demand reduction and international cooperation. Pakistan has been an active member of the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) where it has contributed to world drug issues under its principle of multilateralism and international cooperation. Enditem
The Beryl Institute announces the publication of Volume 8, Issue 1 of Patient Experience Journal (PXJ), an international, open access, peer-reviewed journal focused on research and proven practices related to understanding and improving patient experience.

The Beryl Institute announces the publication of Volume 8, Issue 1 of Patient Experience Journal (PXJ), an international, open access, peer-reviewed journal focused on research and proven practices related to understanding and improving patient experience. Read in over 220 countries and territories, PXJ articles have been downloaded almost 800,000 times and reflect the journals commitment to disseminating rigorous knowledge and expanding the global conversation on evidence and innovation in patient experience.

Published in association with The Beryl Institute, Volume 8, Issue 1 includes 21 articles representing commentaries, personal narratives, research studies and case studies. This issue covers a selection of topics including:



A call to action for human experience

The paradoxical injunctions of partnership in care: Patient engagement and partnership between issues and challenges

No visitors allowed: How health systems can better engage patients families during a pandemic

Reexamining Defining Patient Experience: The human experience in healthcare

The influence of COVID-19 visitation restrictions on patient experience and safety outcomes: A critical role for subjective advocates

An evaluation of the effectiveness of a unique patient experience response program that provided virtual, visual and emotional connectivity to patients and families during the COVID-19 crisis

An evidence-based tool (PE for PS) for healthcare managers to assess patient engagement for patient safety in healthcare organizations

Safety participation at the direct care level: Results of a patient questionnaire

Patient Satisfaction While Enrolled in Clinical Trials: A Literature Review

Patients and family caregivers perceptions of doctor-to-doctor advice and electronic referral notifications in Alberta

The impact of patient shadowing on service design: Insights from a family medicine clinic

Delivery of patient education and support using an online digital platform for patients undergoing primary hip and knee replacement: The patients perspectives

Submissions represent a broad range of global organizations and institutions including University of Montreal, Auburn University, Catholic Health, University of Montreal, Queen's University, Northwestern University, Alberta Health Services, Florida Atlantic University, South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, KK Women's & Children's Hospital, Sant Joan de Deu Children's Hospital and more.

As we launch our 8th volume of PXJ, we continue to see the breadth and rigor of evidence on the healthcare experience expand, said Jason Wolf, Founding Editor of PXJ and President & CEO of The Beryl Institute. This clear intention by both those in academia and practice to build the science of experience is a critical part of our larger commitment to transform the human experience in healthcare. We hope others will join the effort in both research and action.

To access Volume 8, Issue 1 of PXJ, visit: http://pxjournal.org/journal/

PXJ publishes twice annually in April and November. Submissions are accepted on an ongoing basis and should follow the requested submission types and adhere to author guidelines. Papers should address the full range of topics critical to the evaluation and impact of patient experience practices, efforts and influences.

PXJ is also accepting submissions for the 2021 Special Issue on the impact of inequity and health disparities on the human experience. The deadline for submissions for that issue is April 30, 2021. Learn more: https://pxjournal.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1515&context=journal

###

About Patient Experience Journal:

Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published in association with The Beryl Institute. Read in over 220 countries and territories, PXJ is committed to disseminating rigorous knowledge and expanding the global conversation on evidence and innovation on patient experience.

About The Beryl Institute:

The Beryl Institute is a global community of over 55,000 healthcare professionals and experience champions committed to transforming the human experience in healthcare. As a pioneer and leader of the experience movement and patient experience profession for more than a decade, the Institute offers unparalleled access to unbiased research and proven practices, networking and professional development opportunities and a safe, neutral space to exchange ideas and learn from others.
Highlights

At Red Chris, drilling continues to expand the higher grade mineralisation intersected at East Ridge and at Main Zone: At East Ridge, drilling continues to demonstrate the continuity of higher grade mineralisation with RC684, returning a partial intercept of 238m** @ 0.45g/t Au & 0.52% Cu from 814m, incl. 90m**

@ 0.85g/t Au & 0.85% Cu from 962m. This hole is 100m down dip from RC678^^ which returned 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m, including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au and 1.5% Cu from 908m. East Ridge is located 300m east of the East Zone (outside of Newcrest's Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate) with mineralisation open in all directions. In the Main Zone, drilling has intersected high grade mineralisation with RC679 returning 456m

@ 0.37 g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m, incl. 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0% Cu from 440m. Main Zone has the potential for further higher grade mineralisation beneath and to the south west of the open pit.

At Havieron, drilling included both infill and growth programs: Results from growth drilling continued to support the potential for resource expansion of the Havieron system, and Completion of infill drilling with results within the Inferred Mineral Resource boundary. This drilling is in line with expectations and increases confidence in the continuity of the higher grade mineralisation.

Newcrest recently entered into an early stage option and earn-in agreement with Discovery Harbour Resources Corp on their Fortuity 89 property located in the Great Basin, Nevada.

Melbourne, Australia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 28, 2021) - Newcrest Mining Limited (ASX: NCM) (TSX: NCM) Newcrest Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sandeep Biswas, said, "Our exploration focus is on identifying new resources with tier one potential. We have a range of potential options and are increasingly seeing the benefits of leveraging technology to identify targets and optimise our drilling program. We recently announced our exciting East Ridge discovery, which is a new zone of higher grade mineralisation at Red Chris. East Ridge is located outside of our initial Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate with drill results to date supporting potential resource growth over time. At Havieron, the completion of infill drilling has increased our confidence in the continuity of high grade mineralisation, with results from our growth drilling program highlighting the potential for resource expansion and bulk mining outside of the South East Crescent Zone."

Red Chris - Significant results since the December 2020(1) Quarterly Exploration Report:

RC677^^ : 524m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.39% Cu from 528m including 156m @ 0.71g/t Au & 0.59% Cu from 638m including 10m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 784m

: RC678^^ : 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m including 104m @ 1.5g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 884m including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au & 1.5% Cu from 908m

: RC679 : 456m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m including 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0% Cu from 440m

:

Havieron - Significant infill resource drilling results since the December 2020(1) Quarterly Exploration Report:

HAD112^^ 196.1m @ 1.7g/t Au & 0.28% Cu from 545.9m including 18.5m @ 4.9g/t Au & 0.60% Cu from 595m

HAD122^^ 97m @ 3.9g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 500m including 15m @ 9.7g/t Au & 1.8% Cu from 500m

HAD123^^ 169.5m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.33% Cu from 711.5m including 58.9m @ 6.2g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 736.1m including 3.1m @ 95g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 781.8m

HAD127^^ 79.3m @ 4.5g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 537m including 41.7m @ 8.4g/t Au & 2.6% Cu from 549m

HAD130^^ 109.4m @ 5.9g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 622m including 24m @ 17g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 630m



Red Chris, British Columbia, Canada

Red Chris is a joint venture between Newcrest (70%) and Imperial Metals Corporation (30%). Newcrest acquired its interest and operatorship of Red Chris on 15 August 2019.

The Brownfields Exploration program is focused on the discovery of additional zones of higher grade mineralisation within the Red Chris porphyry corridor including targets outside of Newcrest's recently released Mineral Resource estimate. During the period, there were up to seven diamond drill rigs in operation. A further 16,854m of drilling has been completed from 12 drill holes, with all drill holes intersecting mineralisation. This contributed to a total of 121,289m of drilling from 100 drill holes since Newcrest acquired its interest in the joint venture.

At East Ridge, located adjacent to the East Zone, Newcrest's first hole has discovered a new zone of higher grade mineralisation, with hole RC678^^ returning 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m, including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au and 1.5% Cu from 908m. The style of mineralisation and grade tenor is similar to that seen in the high grade pods from the East Zone (previously reported). Follow-up drill hole RC684 drilled 100m down dip of RC678 returned a partial intercept of 238m** @ 0.45g/t Au & 0.52% Cu from 814m, incl. 90m** @ 0.85g/t Au & 0.85% Cu from 962m. This hole demonstrates the continuity of the East Ridge zone. The mineralisation at East Ridge is located 300m east of the East Zone. East Ridge is located outside of Newcrest's Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate which supports the potential for resource growth over time. Mineralisation is open in all directions and extends the eastern side of the porphyry corridor as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Follow-up drilling to further define the extent and continuity of this high grade mineralisation is underway.

In the East Zone, drilling continues to confirm the potential for additional high grade mineralisation south of the South Boundary Fault. The South Boundary Fault currently defines the southern extent of mineralisation across the East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone. Results from RC677^^, which extended across the fault, returned 524m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.39% Cu from 528m, including 156m @ 0.71g/t Au & 0.59% Cu from 638m. This interval also includes 10m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 784m which is located on the south side of the fault. Located 300m west of East Ridge south of the south boundary fault and extending outside of the Newcrest Mineral Resource estimate, drilling to define the extent and continuity of this potential high grade mineralisation is underway.

In the Main Zone, drilling has confirmed the potential for further higher grade mineralisation which could support additional mining fronts, beneath and to the south west of the open pit. Results from RC679, which followed up historic results south west of the Main Zone pit, returned 456m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m, including 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0 % Cu from 440m. The mineralisation is located within Newcrest's Mineral Resource estimate. Drilling to define the extent and continuity of this high grade mineralisation is ongoing.

Approximately 50,000m of growth-related drilling is planned this calendar year with an increase to eight drill rigs next quarter. Further drilling of the East Ridge is planned to define the extent of the mineralisation and is expected to be completed by June 2021. Further targets along the porphyry corridor and neighbouring GJ property, have been identified with the potential to conduct drilling to test these targets in the future.

Refer to Appendix 1 for additional information, and Drillhole data table for all results reported during the period.





Figure 1. Schematic plan view map of the Red Chris porphyry corridor spanning East Ridge, East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

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Figure 2. Long section view map of the Red Chris porphyry corridor showing drill hole locations and gold distribution.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

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Havieron Project, Western Australia

The Havieron Project is operated by Newcrest under a Joint Venture Agreement with Greatland Gold. As announced on 30 November 2020, Newcrest has now met the Stage 3 expenditure requirement (US$45 million) and is entitled to earn an additional 20% joint venture interest, resulting in an overall joint venture interest of 60% (Greatland Gold 40%). Newcrest can earn up to a 70% joint venture interest through total expenditure of US$65million and the completion of a series of exploration and development milestones (including the delivery of a Pre-Feasibility Study) in a four-stage farm-in over a six year period that commenced in May 2019. Newcrest may acquire an additional 5% interest at the end of the farm-in period at fair market value. The Joint Venture Agreement includes tolling principles reflecting the intention of the parties that, subject to a successful exploration program and Feasibility Study and a positive decision to mine, the resulting joint venture mineralised material will be processed at Telfer.

The Havieron Project is centred on a deep magnetic anomaly located 45km east of Telfer in the Paterson Province. The deposit is overlain by more than 420m of post mineral Permian cover. Newcrest commenced drilling during the June 2019 quarter and has progressively increased its drilling activities with up to eight drill rigs operational during the period. Drilling activities from 30 infill drill holes resulted in 20,129m of drilling completed since 30 December 2020, with all drill holes intersecting mineralisation. A total of 158,663m of drilling from 183 drill holes has been completed since Newcrest commenced exploration activity in May 2019.

At Havieron, infill drilling to support the delivery of an Indicated Mineral Resource estimate in the South East Crescent Zone and adjacent Breccia Zones has been completed. This infill drilling confirms previously reported drilling results and provides additional support for both geological and grade continuity for ongoing studies.

Drilling since May 2019 has outlined an ovoid shaped zone of variable brecciation, alteration and sulphide mineralisation with dimensions of 650m x 350m trending in a north west orientation. Breccia mineralisation has been identified internally and externally to the Crescent Zone, including targets which remain open to the east, north west and south east. Mineralisation has been observed to over 1,000m in vertical extent below the post mineralisation cover sequence and remains open at depth.

Within this ovoid shaped zone, exploration activity has identified four key target regions at this stage, which are:

South East Crescent and Breccia

North West Crescent

Northern Breccia

Eastern Breccia

An infill drilling program (comprising 43 holes) saw 26 holes completed during the period (within the Inferred Mineral Resource Boundary) at a nominal 50m by 50m spacing, designed to support the delivery of an Indicated Mineral Resource estimate in the South East Crescent Zone and adjacent Breccia Zones. Assay results have now been received for all of the holes. The results are in line with expectations and increase the confidence in the continuity of the higher grade mineralisation. Results for the reporting period include(1):

HAD112 ^^ 196.1m @ 1.7g/t Au & 0.28% Cu from 545.9m including 18.5m @ 4.9g/t Au & 0.60% Cu from 595m

HAD113W2^^ 89.3m @ 2.3g/t Au & 0.38% Cu from 799.5m

HAD114W1^^ 114.8m @ 0.97g/t Au & 0.14% Cu from 770.4m Including 16m @ 5.1g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 840.6m

HAD116^^ 164m @ 1.3g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 644m including 15.7m @ 5.2g/t Au & 0.8% Cu from 655.7m

HAD117^^ 33.7m @ 6.1g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 699m including 22.7m @ 9g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 710m

HAD117W1^^ 33.8m @ 4.1g/t Au & 0.25% Cu from 794.2m Including 15.6m @ 5.8g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 794.4m

HAD118^^ 31.9m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 626m including 18.2m @ 4.7g/t Au & 1.1% Cu from 639.3m

HAD119^^ 129.5m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.29% Cu from 550.1m including 40m @ 4.3g/t Au & 0.79% Cu from 627m

HAD119W1^^ 65m @ 2.6g/t Au & 0.45% Cu from 663m including 17.5m @ 4.6g/t Au & 0.55% Cu from 674.5m

HAD120^^ 199.5m @ 1.1g/t Au & 0.30% Cu from 573m including 13m @ 5.6g/t Au & 0.4% Cu from 670m

HAD121^^ 70.5m @ 2.8g/t Au & 0.17% Cu from 514m including 2.1m @ 59g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 519.8m

HAD122^^ 97m @ 3.9g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 500m including 15m @ 9.7g/t Au & 1.8% Cu from 500m

HAD123^^ 169.5m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.33% Cu from 711.5m including 58.9m @ 6.2g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 736.1m including 3.1m @ 95g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 781.8m

HAD127^^ 79.3m @ 4.5g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 537m including 41.7m @ 8.4g/t Au & 2.6% Cu from 549m

HAD130^^ 109.4m @ 5.9g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 622m including 24m @ 17g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 630m

HAD131^^ 54.5m @ 1.9g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 508m including 33.8m @ 2.4g/t Au & 1.2% Cu from 508.2m



Mineralisation is open at depth below the Inferred Mineral Resource estimate indicating the potential for resource expansion at depth with additional drilling. Current drilling is targeted to define the extent and growth potential of the Havieron mineralised system.

An additional four growth holes are reported since the 11 March 2021 Interim Exploration Update. Three growth holes from the Northern Breccia zone returned broad mineralised intervals which support extensions to breccia mineralisation in the Northwest of the system and further highlights potential for bulk mining outside of the South East Crescent zone. Results include:

HAD083BW4 156.6m @ 1.1g/t Au & 0.22% Cu from 805.8m including 27.4m @ 2.6g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 923.5m

HAD090 HAD090 119m @ 1.0g/t Au & 0.11% Cu from 954.7m including 13m @ 4.1g/t Au & 0.67% Cu from 1042.2m

HAD106W1 HAD106W1 73.9m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.13% Cu from 673.1m.



An initial South East Crescent growth hole confirmed extensions of mineralisation in the South East Crescent beyond the 4200mRL (1050m from surface) returned:

HAD086 72m @ 2.2g/t Au & 0.02% Cu from 1281m.



Drilling in the current period was impacted by seasonal wet weather with up to eight drill rigs operational. Currently, all drill rigs are operational on the growth drilling program with a focus on the North West Crescent, Northern Breccia Zone and depth extension of the South East Crescent and Breccia. This drilling is aimed to provide support for the potential expansion of the existing Inferred Mineral Resource estimate. Drill testing and interpretation of the geological and mineralisation controls of the Eastern Breccia Zone is ongoing. Further targets outside of Havieron, but within the joint venture area with Greatland Gold, have been identified with the potential to conduct drilling to test these targets in the future.

Refer to Appendix 2 for additional information, and Drillhole data table for all results reported during the period.





Figure 3. 3D Plan view schematic showing the spatial association of the South East Crescent + Breccia, North West Crescent, Northern Breccia and Eastern Breccia targets.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit:

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Figure 4. Plan view schematic of a horizontal slice at 4700mRL through the Crescent Sulphide Zone and Breccia-hosted Zones, showing the extents of the 0.5 and 1.0 g/t Au LeapfrogTM grade shells with highlighted newly reported intercepts for this period. Also shown is the Eastern Breccia, Northern Breccia and North West Crescent mineralisation outlines projected to the 4700mRL section - drilling is ongoing to confirm the extent of these zones.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 4, please visit:

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Wilki Project, Western Australia

Newcrest entered into an exploration farm-in and joint venture agreement with Antipa Minerals Limited on 11 March 2020 in respect of the southern portion of its 100% owned ground in the Paterson Province of Western Australia (now called the 'Wilki Project').

The Wilki Project covers a strategic landholding of ~2,200km2 which surrounds the Telfer operation and is also in close proximity to the Havieron Project.

Exploration activity during the December 2020 quarter included the completion of a 15 hole RC drill program testing five targets previously identified targets. The targets were selected on the basis of Airborne Electromagnetic Survey (AEM), geochemistry and magnetic data, with drilling results returning weak geochemical anomalism.

A work program for the CY2021 field season is currently being finalised to explore additional priority targets.

Juri Joint Venture, Western Australia

On 30 November 2020, Newcrest announced its entry into the Juri Joint Venture which is a farm-in and joint venture agreement with Greatland Gold, with respect to its Black Hills and Paterson Range East projects, located within the Paterson Province approximately 50km from the Telfer operation. The joint venture covers an area of approximately 248km2.

Under the terms of the agreement, Newcrest has been granted an initial 25% joint venture interest with the potential to earn up to a 75% joint venture interest through total expenditure of A$20 million over a two stage earn-in, across a five year period. Greatland Gold will manage the Juri Joint Venture until the end of calendar year 2021, after which Newcrest has the right to be appointed as Manager.

Newcrest and Greatland Gold have agreed an exploration program until the end of calendar year 2021 which is anticipated to drill test priority targets, which will initially include the Goliath target. Subsequent drilling will focus on the Parlay target within the Black Hills Project and the Outamind and Los Diablos targets within the Paterson Range East Project. Additionally, geophysical work will be conducted in calendar year 2021 to identify other potential targets within both projects. Field activities commenced in late March 2021.

Tennant East, Northern Territory

Newcrest is the holder of six granted titles as well as seven application areas in the recently recognised Tennant East domain. Drill testing on the initial two target areas of Lantern and Sabretooth commenced in April 2021.

Nevada, USA

At the Jarbidge project in northern Nevada, Newcrest is exploring an early-stage exploration target for low-sulfidation epithermal gold. Initial diamond drilling was completed during the period at the Jack Creek zone, where multiple outcrops of high-level epithermal-style veining have been mapped over 3.5km's of strike. Four holes totalling 2,200m were completed in the initial phase of drilling. All holes intersected multiple zones of quartz veining and hydrothermal brecciation containing anomalous gold, silver and epithermal-associated trace elements. Data compilation is underway to determine the next steps for the program.

Newcrest has recently entered into an option and earn-in agreement with Discovery Harbour Resources Corp. on their Fortuity 89 property located in the Great Basin, Nevada. Fortuity 89 is characterised by limited outcrop in a large gravel covered plain. The limited outcrop is strongly altered, and other indications are consistent with the area having potential for epithermal gold mineralisation.

GJ Project, British Columbia, Canada

During the period, data compilation and planning for the upcoming field season continued.

Central Andes, Northern Chile

In Chile, exploration activity remained suspended during the period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the Gorbea project, an option and farm-in agreement with Mirasol Resources Ltd, Newcrest plans to resume field activity at the Dorado target in August 2021.

At the Mioceno project, an option and farm-in agreement with Cornerstone Capital Resources Inc., the resumption of field activity is also planned for August 2021. The Mioceno project is contiguous with the Dorado portion of the Mirasol Gorbea agreement. The two target areas cover a large high-sulfidation epithermal alteration zone with widespread low-level gold and associated trace element anomalism.

At the Altazor high-sulfidation epithermal gold and porphyry project, which is another option and farm-in agreement with Mirasol Resources Ltd, engagement with the local communities continued on a low-level basis in accordance with COVID-19 restrictions and local regulations.

Additionally, the next stage of field work at the Vicuna high-sulfidation epithermal and porphyry-style gold target in northern Chile is planned to commence in August 2021.The Vicuna project is an option and farm-in agreement with Compania Minera del Pacifico S.A (CAP). During the period, CAP agreed to extend the option period until March 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Northern Andes, Ecuador

In Ecuador, all exploration activity remained suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ability to safely resume activities will depend on local conditions and regulations, which will be monitored during the June 2021 quarter with the aim of initiating project work in the second half of the 2021 calendar year.

Brownfield Exploration

Brownfields exploration activities within Newcrest's existing mining provinces included:

Cadia - Exploration activity included the completion of a drill hole into the Randall's target on the Junction Reefs Joint Venture. No significant results were returned. No exploration activity was completed within the Cadia Mine Corridor.

Telfer - Weather events resulted in restricted access to target areas in the period. Activities in the southern corridor will commence with drill testing of the Blue Scar and Kings Head targets in April and the Ironclad prospect in May.

Lihir - Landowner discussions continued. All field activities were suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Appendix 1

Red Chris (70% Newcrest): JORC Table 1

Section 1: Sampling Techniques and Data

Criteria Commentary Sampling techniques Core samples are obtained from core drilling. HQ and NQ diameter diamond core was drilled on a 3, 4.5m or 6m run. Core was cut using an automatic core-cutter and half core sampled at 2m intervals. Cover sequences were not sampled. Drilling techniques Core drilling was advanced with HQ3, HQ, NQ3 and NQ diameter coring configuration.



Core from inclined drill holes are oriented on 3, 4.5m or 6m runs using an electronic core orientation tool (Reflex ACTIII). At the end of each run, the bottom of hole position is marked by the driller, which is later transferred to the whole drill core run length with a bottom of hole reference line. Drill sample recovery Core recovery is systematically recorded from the commencement of coring to end of hole, by reconciling against driller's depth blocks in each core tray with data recorded in the database. Drillers depth blocks provided the depth, interval of core recovered, and interval of core drilled.



Core recoveries were typically 100%, with isolated zones of lower recovery. Logging Geological logging recorded qualitative descriptions of lithology, alteration, mineralisation, veining, and structure (for all core drilled - 16,854m in 12 holes - all holes intersected mineralisation, including orientation of key geological features.



Geotechnical measurements were recorded including Rock Quality Designation (RQD) fracture frequency, solid core recovery and qualitative rock strength measurements.



Magnetic susceptibility measurements were recorded every metre.



All geological and geotechnical logging was conducted at the Red Chris Mine.



Digital data logging was captured, validated and stored in an acQuire database.



All drill cores were photographed, prior to cutting and/or sampling the core. Sub-sampling techniques and sample preparation Sampling, sample preparation and quality control protocols are considered appropriate for the material being sampled.



Core was cut and sampled at the Red Chris Mine core processing facility. Half core samples were collected in plastic bags together with pre-numbered sample tags and grouped in plastic bags for dispatch to the laboratory. Sample weights typically varied from 5 to 10kg. Sample sizes are considered appropriate for the style of mineralisation. Drill core samples were freighted by road to the laboratory.



Sample preparation was conducted at the independent ISO 9001 certified and ISO 17025 accredited Bureau Veritas Commodities Canada Ltd Laboratory, Vancouver (Bureau Veritas). Samples were dried at 650C, and crushed to 95% passing 4.75 mm, and the split to obtain up to 1kg sub-sample, which was pulverised (using LM2) to produce a pulped product with the minimum standard of 95% passing 106m.



Duplicate samples were collected from crush and pulp samples at a rate of 1:20. Duplicate results show an acceptable level of variability for the material sampled and style of mineralisation.



Periodic size checks (1:20) for crush and pulp samples and sample weights are provided by the laboratory and recorded in the acQuire database. Quality of assay data and laboratory tests Assaying of drill core samples was conducted at Bureau Veritas. All samples were assayed for 59 elements using a 4-acid digestion followed by ICP-AES/ICP-MS determination (method MA250). Gold analyses were determined by 50g fire assay with ICP-ES finish (method FA350). Carbon and Sulphur were determined by Leco (method TC000) and mercury using aqua regia digestion followed by ICP-ES/MS determination (method AQ200).



Sampling and assaying quality control procedures consisted of inclusion of certified reference material (CRMs), coarse residue and pulp duplicates with each batch (at least 1:20).



Assays of quality control samples were compared with reference samples in the acQuire database and verified as acceptable prior to use of data from analysed batches.



Laboratory quality control data, including laboratory standards, blanks, duplicates, repeats and grind size results are captured in acQuire database and assessed for accuracy and precision for recent data.



Due to the limited extent of the drilling program to date, extended quality control programs are yet to be undertaken, whereby pulped samples will be submitted to an umpire laboratory and combined with more extensive re-submission programs.



Analysis of the available quality control sample assay results indicates that an acceptable level of accuracy and precision has been achieved and the database contains no analytical data that has been numerically manipulated.



The assaying techniques and quality control protocols used are considered appropriate for the data to be used for reporting exploration drilling results. Verification of sampling and assaying Sampling intervals defined by the geologist are electronically assigned sample identification numbers prior to core cutting. Corresponding sample numbers matching pre-labelled sample tags are assigned to each interval.



All sampling and assay information were stored in a secure acQuire database with restricted access.



Electronically generated sample submission forms providing the sample identification number accompany each submission to the laboratory. Assay results from the laboratory with corresponding sample identification are loaded directly into the acQuire database.



Assessment of reported significant assay intervals was verified by re-logging of drill core intervals and assessment of high resolution core photography. The verification of significant intersections has been completed by company personnel and the Competent Person/Qualified Person.



No adjustments are made to assay data, and no twinned holes have been completed. Drilling intersects mineralisation at various angles.



There are no currently known drilling, sampling, recovery, or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy or reliability of the data. Location of data points Drill collar locations were surveyed using a RTK GPS with GNSS with a stated accuracy of +/- 0.025m.



Drill rig alignment was attained using an electronic azimuth aligner (Reflex TN14 GYROCOMPASS). Downhole survey was collected at 9 to 30m intervals of the drill hole using single shot survey (Reflex EZ-SHOT). At the end of hole, all holes have been surveyed using a continuous gyro survey to surface (Reflex EZ-GYRO).



Topographic control is established from PhotoSat topographic data and derived digital elevation model. The topography is generally low relief to flat, with an average elevation of 1500 m, with several deep creek gullies.



All collar coordinates are provided in the North American Datum (NAD83 Zone 9). Data spacing and distribution The drill hole spacing ranges from 100 - 200m in lateral extent within an area of 1.5km2 at the East Zone, 1.5km2 at the Main Zone and 1.5km2 at the Gully Zone. The drill hole spacing is >200m at the East Ridge, where there is insufficient drilling to define the lateral extent of the area.



No sample compositing is applied to samples. Orientation of data in relation to geological structure Drilling of reported drill holes RC675, RC676, RC677, RC678, RC679, RC680, RC681, RC682 and RC684 are oriented perpendicular to the intrusive complex. The intrusive complex has an east-northeast orientation, with drilling established on a north-northwest orientation.



Drill holes exploring the extents of the East Ridge, East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone mineral system intersected moderately dipping volcanic and sedimentary units cut by sub-vertical intrusive lithologies. Steeply dipping mineralised zones with an east-northeast orientation have been interpreted from historic and Newcrest drill holes. Sample security The security of samples is controlled by tracking samples from drill rig to database.



Drill core was delivered from the drill rig to the Red Chris Mine core yard every shift. Geological and geotechnical logging, high resolution core photography and cutting of drill core was undertaken at the Red Chris core processing facility.



Samples were freighted in sealed bags with security tags by road to the laboratory, and in the custody of Newcrest representatives.



Sample numbers are generated from pre-labelled sample tags. All samples are collected in pre-numbered plastic bags. Sample tags are inserted into prenumbered plastic bags together with the sample.



Verification of sample numbers and identification is conducted by the laboratory on receipt of samples, and sample receipt advice issued to Newcrest.



Details of all sample movement are recorded in a database table. Dates, Hole ID sample ranges, and the analytical suite requested are recorded with the dispatch of samples to the laboratory analytical services. Any discrepancies logged at the receipt of samples into the laboratory analytical services are validated. Audits or reviews Due to the limited duration of the program, no external audits or reviews have been undertaken.



Internal verification and audit of Newcrest exploration procedures and databases are periodically undertaken.

Section 2: Reporting of Exploration Results

Criteria Commentary Mineral tenement and land tenure status Red Chris comprises 77 mineral tenures including five mining leases and is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Newcrest Mining Limited (70%) and Imperial Metals Corporation (30%). Newcrest Red Chris Mining Limited is the operator of Red Chris.



Newcrest Red Chris Mining Limited and the Tahltan Nation (as represented by the Tahltan Central Government, the Tahltan Band and Iskut First Nation) signed an updated Impact, Benefit and Co-Management Agreement (IBCA) covering Red Chris on 15 August 2019.



All obligations with respect to legislative requirements including minimum expenditure are maintained in good standing. Exploration done by other parties Conwest Exploration Limited, Great Plains Development Co. of Canada, Silver Standard Mines Ltd, Texasgulf Canada Ltd. (formerly Ecstall Mining Limited), American Bullion Minerals Ltd and bcMetals Corporation conducted exploration in the areas between 1956 and 2006.



Imperial Metals Corporation acquired the project in 2007 and completed deeper drilling at the East and Main Zones between 2007 and 2012. Geology The Red Chris Project is located in the Stikine terrane of north-western British Columbia, 80 km south of the town of Dease Lake.



Late Triassic sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Stuhini Group host a series of Late Triassic to Early Jurassic 204198 Ma) diorite to quartz monzonite stocks and dykes.



Gold and copper mineralisation at Red Chris consists of vein, disseminated and breccia sulphide typical of porphyry-style mineralisation. Mineralisation is hosted by diorite to quartz monzonite stocks and dykes. The main mineral assemblage contains well developed pyrite-chalcopyrite-bornite sulphide mineral assemblages as vein and breccia infill, and disseminations. The main mineralisation event is associated with biotite and potassium feldspar-magnetite wall rock alteration. Drill hole information As provided. Data aggregation methods Significant assay intercepts are reported as (A) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.1g/t Au greater than or equal to 20m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (B) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.5g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (C) length-weighted averages exceeding 1g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; (D) length-weighted averages exceeding 5g/t Au greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (E) length-weighted averages exceeding 10g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution. No top cuts are applied to intercept calculations. Relationship between mineralisation widths and intercept lengths Significant assay intervals reported represent apparent widths. Insufficient geological information is available to confirm the geological model and true width of significant assay intervals. Diagrams As provided. Balanced reporting This is the eleventh release of Exploration Results for this project made by Newcrest. Previous release dates are 30 January 2020, 11 March 2020, 30 April 2020, 11 June 2020, 23 July 2020, 10 September 2020, 29 October 2020, 10 December 2020, 28 January 2021 and 11 March 2021.



Earlier reporting of exploration programs conducted by Newcrest and Imperial Metals Corporation have previously been reported. Exploration drilling programs are ongoing and further material results will be reported in subsequent Newcrest releases. Other substantive exploration data Nil. Further work Further drilling is planned to define the extents of the East Ridge, East Zone and Main Zone.

Drillhole data(1)

Red Chris Project, British Columbia, Canada

Reporting Criteria: Intercepts reported are downhole drill width (not true width) Au >0.1ppm (0.1g/t Au) and minimum 20m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Also highlighted are high grade intervals of Au >0.5ppm (0.5g/t Au), Au >1ppm (1g/t Au), Au > 5ppm (5g/t Au), Au >10ppm (10g/t Au) and minimum 10m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Gold grades are reported to two significant figures. Samples are from core drilling which is HQ or NQ in diameter. Core is photographed and logged by the geology team before being cut. Half core HQ and NQ samples are prepared for assay and the remaining material is retained in the core farm for future reference. Each assay batch is submitted with duplicates and standards to monitor laboratory quality. Total depth (end of hole) is rounded to one decimal place for reporting purposes.

Hole ID Hole

Type Easting

(m) Northing

(m) RL

(m) Total

Depth

(m) Azimuth

(GRID) Dip From

(m) To

(m) Interval

(m) Au

(ppm) Cu

(pct) Cut

off RC675 DD 451667 6395388 1539 981.2 147 -59 150 194 44^^ 0.11 0.15 0.1















264 702 438^^ 0.32 0.41 0.1













inc. 314 326 12^^ 0.55 0.74 0.5













inc. 340 370 30^^ 0.57 0.77 0.5













inc. 544 562 18^^ 0.62 0.66 0.5 RC676 DD 452008 6396133 1554 1505.4 145 -59 156 258 102 0.26 0.06 0.1













incl. 166 176 10 1.0 0.13 0.5















288 322 34 0.14 0.05 0.1















460 486 26 0.11 0.04 0.1















506 894 388 0.34 0.30 0.1













incl. 700 712 12 0.52 0.40 0.5













incl. 856 894 38 0.64 0.51 0.5















906 964 58 0.31 0.17 0.1













incl. 950 962 12 0.60 0.20 0.5















1032 1106 74** 0.38 0.32 0.1













incl. 1060 1080 20 0.55 0.50 0.5 RC677 DD 453064 6396386 1460 1445.1 148 -64 188 230 42^^ 0.11 0.03 0.1















528 1052 524^^ 0.37 0.39 0.1













inc. 638 794 156^^ 0.71 0.59 0.5













inc. 784 794 10^^ 1.5 0.88 1













inc. 810 854 44^^ 0.57 0.43 0.5















1066 1148 82^^ 0.12 0.18 0.1 RC678 DD 453251 6396597 1420 1499.3 147 -59 706 782 76^^ 0.14 0.27 0.1















800 998 198^^ 0.89 0.83 0.1













inc. 884 988 104^^ 1.5 1.3 0.5













inc. 908 984 76^^ 1.8 1.5 1















1186 1218 32 0.19 0.02 0.1















1272 1310 38 0.16 0.03 0.1 RC679 DD 451618 6395469 1540 1135.1 148 -59 236 396 160 0.30 0.29 0.1













incl. 322 344 22 0.72 0.51 0.5















418 874 456 0.37 0.42 0.1













incl. 440 538 98 0.71 1.0 0.5













incl. 578 648 70 0.51 0.46 0.5















896 1060 164 0.23 0.04 0.1













incl. 940 956 16 0.51 0.13 0.5













incl. 1036 1054 18 0.58 0.03 0.5















1104 1135.1 31.1 0.14 0.06 0.1 RC680 DD 451718 6395301 1539 770.2 150 -59 162 402 240 0.20 0.22 0.1















560 594 34 0.11 0.06 0.1 RC681 DD 451585 6395323 1528 856.7 151 -59 22 88 66 0.10 0.07 0.1















190 222 32 0.11 0.15 0.1















244 426 182 0.19 0.21 0.1















454 528 74 0.17 0.20 0.1















642 664 22 0.19 0.09 0.1















678 730 52 0.16 0.10 0.1 RC682 DD 453064 6396386 1460 1490.7 149 -69 592 614 22 0.11 0.18 0.1















628 710 82 0.14 0.20 0.1















726 940 214 0.25 0.36 0.1















970 1216 246 0.38 0.38 0.1















1252 1272 20 0.10 0.22 0.1 RC683 DD 451963 6395068 1537 13.5 328 -59 Assays pending RC684 DD 453252 6396600 1420 1475.7 147 -63 550 606 56 0.12 0.01 0.1















748 786 38 0.28 0.34 0.1















814 1052 238** 0.45 0.52 0.1













incl. 962 1052 90** 0.85 0.85 0.5













incl. 970 986 16 1.2 1.2 1













incl. 1016 1030 14 1.1 1.1 1 RC685 DD 452533 6396281 1508 1202.3 149.9 -55 Development Hole RC686 DD 451569 6395560 1526 1085.0 147.9 -59 Assays pending RC687# DD 453126 6396509 1445 1058.0 149.8 -58 Assays pending RC688# DD 453385 6396598 1415 959.0 146.0 -61 Assays pending RC689 DD 452677 6396314 1492 827.9 147.5 -57 Development Hole RC690# DD 452587 6396286 1507 821.6 148.0 -60 Development Hole RC691# DD 452550 6396348 1495 856.9 148.0 -60 Development Hole RC692# DD 453147 6396820 1462 635.4 148.1 -53 Assays pending RC693# DD 453334 6396606 1416 467.2 238 -59 Geotechnical Hole - Not Sampled RC694# DD 452677 6396314 1492 164.0 147 -54 Development Hole

#drilling in progress. **partial intercept, assays pending. ^updated intercept ^^previously reported intercept





Figure 5. Schematic plan view map of the East Ridge and East Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model and sliced at 800mRL. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 5, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_007full.jpg





Figure 6. Schematic plan view map of the Main Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model and sliced at 800mRL. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 6, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_008full.jpg





Figure 7. Schematic cross section of RC678 and RC684 (Section Line 34) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150U) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 7, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_009full.jpg





Figure 8. Schematic cross section of RC677 and RC682 (Section Line 31) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150U) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 8, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_010full.jpg





Figure 9. Schematic cross section of RC676 (Section Line 21) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150U) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 9, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_011full.jpg





Figure 10. Schematic cross section of RC675, R679 and RC680 (Section Line 14) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150U) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 10, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_012full.jpg





Figure 11. Schematic cross section of RC681 (Section Line 13) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150U) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 11, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_013full.jpg

Appendix 2

Havieron Project (Greatland Gold Plc - Joint Venture Agreement): JORC Table 1

Section 1: Sampling Techniques and Data

Criteria Commentary Sampling techniques Core samples are obtained from core drilling in Proterozoic basement lithologies. PQ-HQ and NQ diameter core was drilled on a 6m run. Core was cut using an automated core-cutter and half core sampled at 1m intervals with breaks for major geological changes. Sampling intervals range from 0.2 - 1.0m. Cover sequences were not sampled. Drilling techniques Permian Paterson Formation cover sequence was drilled using mud rotary drilling. Depths of cover typically observed to approximately 420m vertically below surface. Steel casing was emplaced to secure the pre-collar.



Core drilling was advanced from the base of the cover sequence with PQ3, HQ3 and NQ2 diameter coring configuration.



Core from inclined drill holes are oriented on 3m and 6m runs using an electronic core orientation tool (Reflex ACTIII). At the end of each run, the bottom of hole position is marked by the driller, which is later transferred to the whole drill core run length with a bottom of hole reference line. Drill sample recovery Core recovery is systematically recorded from the commencement of coring to end of hole, by reconciling against driller's depth blocks in each core tray with data recorded in the database. Drillers depth blocks provided the depth, interval of core recovered, and interval of core drilled.



Core recoveries were typically 100%, with isolated zones of lower recovery.



Cover sequence drilling by the mud-rotary drilling did not yield recoverable samples. Logging Geological logging recorded qualitative descriptions of lithology, alteration, mineralisation, veining, and structure (for all core drilled - 6,641m from 30 drillholes, all intersecting mineralisation), including orientation of key geological features.



Geotechnical measurements were recorded including Rock Quality Designation (RQD) fracture frequency, solid core recovery and qualitative rock strength measurements.



Magnetic susceptibility measurements were recorded every metre. The bulk density of selected drill core intervals was determined at site on whole core samples.



All geological and geotechnical logging was conducted at the Havieron site.



Digital data logging was captured on diamond drill core intervals only, and all data validated and stored in an acQuire database.



All drill cores were photographed, prior to cutting and/or sampling the core.



The logging is of sufficient quality to support Mineral Resource estimates. Sub-sampling techniques and sample preparation Sampling, sample preparation and quality control protocols are considered appropriate for the material being sampled.



Core was cut and sampled at the Telfer and Havieron core processing facility. Half core samples were collected in pre-numbered calico bags and grouped in plastic bags for dispatch to the laboratory. Sample weights typically varied from 0.5 to 4kg. Sample sizes are considered appropriate for the style of mineralisation. Drill core samples were freighted by air and road to the laboratory.



Sample preparation was conducted at the independent ISO17025 accredited Intertek Laboratory, Perth (Intertek). Samples were dried at 105oC, and crushed to 95% passing 4.75mm, and the split to obtain up to 3kg sub-sample, which was pulverised (using LM5) to produce a pulped product with the minimum standard of 95% passing 106m, the sample and 10 samples either side are re-ground or re-screened. There are very few instances of

Duplicate samples were collected from crush and pulp samples at a rate of 1:20. Duplicate results show an acceptable level of variability for the material sampled and style of mineralisation.



Periodic size checks (1:20) for crush and pulp samples and sample weights are provided by the laboratory and recorded in the acQuire database. Quality of assay data and laboratory tests Assaying of drill core samples was conducted at Intertek. All samples were assayed for 48 elements using a 4-acid digestion followed by ICP-AES/ICP-MS determination (method 4A/MS907), which is considered to provide a total assay for copper. Gold analyses were determined by 50g fire assay with AAS finish (method FA50N/AA), which is considered to provide a total assay for gold.



Sampling and assaying quality control procedures consisted of inclusion of certified reference material (CRMs), coarse residue and pulp duplicates with each batch (at least 1:20).



Assays of quality control samples were compared with reference samples in acQuire database and verified as acceptable prior to use of data from analysed batches.



Laboratory quality control data, including laboratory standards, blanks, duplicates, repeats and grind size results are captured in the acQuire database and assessed for accuracy and precision for recent data.



Extended quality control programs including pulp samples submitted to an umpire laboratory and combined with more extensive re-submission programs have been completed.



Analysis of the available quality control sample assay results indicates that an acceptable level of accuracy and precision has been achieved and the database contains no analytical data that has been numerically manipulated.



The assaying techniques and quality control protocols used are considered appropriate for the data to be used for reporting exploration drilling results. Verification of sampling and assaying Sampling intervals defined by the geologist are electronically assigned sample identification numbers prior to core cutting. Corresponding sample numbers matching pre-labelled calico bags are assigned to each interval.



All sampling and assay information were stored in a secure acQuire database with restricted access.



Electronically generated sample submission forms providing the sample identification number accompany each submission to the laboratory. Assay results from the laboratory with corresponding sample identification are loaded directly into the acQuire database.



Assessment of reported significant assay intervals was verified by re-logging of diamond drill core intervals and assessment of high resolution core photography. The verification of significant intersections has been completed by company personnel and the Competent Person/Qualified Person.



No adjustments are made to assay data, and no twinned holes have been completed.



There are no currently known drilling, sampling, recovery, or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy or reliability of the data. Location of data points Drill collar locations were surveyed using a differential GPS with GNSS with a stated accuracy of +/- 0.5m for all drill holes reported.



Drill rig alignment was attained using an electronic azimuth aligner. Downhole survey was collected at 6-12m intervals in the cover sequence, and every 6 to 30m in diamond drill core segments of the drill hole using single shot (Axis Mining Champ Gyro). The single shot surveys have been validated using continuous survey to surface (Axis Mining Champ) along with a selection of drill holes re-surveyed by an external survey contactor using a DeviGyro tool - confirming sufficient accuracy for downhole spatial recording.



A LIDAR survey was completed over the project area in Nov 2019 which was used to prepare a DEM / topographic model for the project with a spatial accuracy of +/- 0.1m vertical and +/- 0.3m horizontal. The topography is generally low relief to flat, elevation within the dune corridors in ranges between 250-265m Australian Height Datum (AHD) steepening to the southeast. All collar coordinates are provided in the Geocentric Datum of Australian (GDA20 Zone 51). All relative depth information is reported in AHD +5000m. Data spacing and distribution Within the South-East Crescent and Breccia zone drill hole spacing ranges from 50 to 100m, to 50 by 50m within the initial resource extents. Outside the initial resource boundary drill hole spacing ranges from 50 to 200m in lateral extent within the breccia zone over an area of ~2km2. The data spacing is sufficient to establish the degree of geological and grade continuity.



Significant assay intercepts remain open. Further drilling is required to determine the extent of currently defined mineralisation. No sample compositing is applied to samples.



Drilling intersects mineralisation at various angles. Orientation of data in relation to geological structure Drill holes exploring the extents of the Havieron mineral system intersect moderately dipping carbonate and siliclastic sedimentary facies, mineralised breccia and sub-vertical intrusive lithologies. Geological modelling has been interpreted from historic and Newcrest drill holes.



Variable brecciation, alteration and sulphide mineralisation is observed with a footprint with dimensions of 650m x 350m trending in a north west orientation and over 1000m in vertical extent below cover.



The subvertical southeast high grade arcuate crescent sulphide zone has an average thickness of 20m and has been defined over a strike length of up to 550m, and over 600m in vertical extent below cover.



Drilling direction is oriented to intersect the steeply dipping high-grade sulphide mineralisation zones at an intersection angle of greater than 40 degrees. The drilled length of reported intersections is typically greater than true width of mineralisation. Sample security The security of samples is controlled by tracking samples from drill rig to database.



Drill core was delivered from the drill rig to the Havieron core yard every shift. On completion of geological and geotechnical logging, core processing was completed by Newcrest personnel at the Havieron facility.



High resolution core photography and cutting of drill core was undertaken at the Havieron core processing facilities.



Samples were freighted in sealed bags by air and road to the Laboratory, and in the custody of Newcrest representatives. Sample numbers are generated directly from the database. All samples are collected in pre-numbered calico bags.



Verification of sample numbers and identification is conducted by the laboratory on receipt of samples, and sample receipt advise issued to Newcrest.



Details of all sample movement are recorded in a database table. Dates, Hole ID sample ranges, and the analytical suite requested are recorded with the dispatch of samples to analytical services. Any discrepancies logged at the receipt of samples into the analytical services are validated. Audits or reviews Internal reviews of core handling, sample preparation and assays laboratories were conducted on a regular basis by both project personnel and owner representatives.



In the Competent Person's opinion, the sample preparation, security and analytical procedures are consistent with current industry standards and are entirely appropriate and acceptable for the styles of mineralisation identified and will be appropriate for use in the reporting of exploration results and Mineral Resource estimates. There are no identified drilling, sampling or recovery factors that materially impact the adequacy and reliability of the results of the drilling programme in place at the Havieron Project.

Section 2: Reporting of Exploration Results

Criteria Commentary Mineral tenement and land tenure status The Havieron Project is entirely contained within mining tenement M45/1287, which is jointly owned by Greatland Pty Ltd and Newcrest Operations Limited. Newcrest has entered into a Joint Venture Agreement (effective 30 November 2020) and Farm-In Agreement (effective 12 March 2019) with Greatland Pty Ltd and Greatland Gold plc. Newcrest is the manager of the Havieron Project. Newcrest has now met the Stage 3 expenditure requirement (US$45 million) and is entitled to earn an additional 20% joint venture interest, resulting in an overall joint venture interest of 60%. Newcrest has the right to earn up to a 70% interest and acquire a further 5% at fair market value.



Newcrest and the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation are parties to an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) which relates to the use of native title land for Newcrest's current operations at Telfer and its activities within a 60-km radius around Telfer and includes its exploration activities at Havieron. The parties have agreed that the ILUA will apply to any future development activities by the Joint Venture Participants (Newcrest and Greatland Gold) at Havieron.



The mining tenement M45/1287 wholly replaces the 12 sub-blocks of exploration tenement E45/4701 (former exploration tenement on which the Havieron Project is based) and was granted on 10 September 2020. All obligations with respect to legislative requirements including minimum expenditure are maintained in good standing for prior exploration tenement E45/4701. Exploration done by other parties Newcrest completed six core holes in the vicinity of the Havieron Project from 1991 to 2003. Greatland Gold completed drill targeting and drilling of nine Reverse Circulation (RC) drill holes with core tails for a total of approximately 6,800m in 2018. Results of drilling programs conducted by Greatland Gold have previously been reported on the Greatland Gold website.



Drilling has defined an intrusion-related mineral system with evidence of breccia and massive sulphide-hosted higher-grade gold-copper mineralisation. Geology The Havieron Project is located within the north-western exposure of the Palaeo-Proterozoic to Neoproterozoic Paterson Orogen (formerly Paterson Province), 45 km east of Telfer. The Yeneena Supergroup hosts the Havieron prospect and consists of a 9km thick sequence of marine sedimentary rocks and is entirely overlain by approximately 420m of Phanerozoic sediments of the Paterson Formation and Quaternary aeolian sediments.



Gold and copper mineralisation at Havieron consist of breccia, vein and massive sulphide replacement gold and copper mineralisation typical of intrusion-related and skarn styles of mineralisation. Mineralisation is hosted by metasedimentary rocks (meta-sandstones, meta-siltstones and meta-carbonate) and intrusive rocks of an undetermined age. The main mineral assemblage contains well developed pyrrhotite-chalcopyrite and pyrite sulphide mineral assemblages as breccia and vein infill, and massive sulphide lenses. The main mineralisation event is associated with amphibole-carbonate-biotite-sericite-chlorite wall rock alteration. Drilling has partially defined the extents of mineralisation which are observed over 650m by 350m within an arcuate shaped mineralised zone, and to depths of up to 1400m below surface. Drill hole Information As provided. Data aggregation methods Significant assay intercepts are reported as (A) length-weighted averages exceeding 1.0g/t Au greater than or equal to 10m, with a maximum of 5m consecutive internal dilution; and (B) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.2g/t Au for greater than or equal to 20m, with a maximum of 10m consecutive internal dilution, and (C) intervals of >30g/t with no internal dilution which are greater or equal to 30 gram metres (Au_ppm x length). No top cuts are applied to intercept calculations. Relationship between mineralisation widths and intercept lengths Significant assay intervals reported represent apparent widths. Drilling is not always perpendicular to the dip of mineralisation and true widths are less than downhole widths. Estimates of true widths will only be possible when all results are received, and final geological interpretations have been completed. Diagrams As provided. Balanced reporting This is the fifteenth release of Exploration Results for this project made by Newcrest. Previous release dates are 25 July 2019, 10 September 2019, 24 October 2019, 2 December 2019, 30 January 2020, 11 March 2020, 30 April 2020, 11 June 2020, 23 July 2020, 10 September 2020, 29 October 2020, 10 December 2020, 28 January 2021 and 11 March 2021.



Earlier reporting of exploration programs conducted by Newcrest and Greatland Gold have previously been reported. Exploration drilling programs are ongoing and further material results will be reported in subsequent Newcrest releases. Other substantive exploration data Nil Further work Growth drilling is planned to extend the limits of the mineralised system and infill drilling in the existing defined breccias looking to establish additional resources outside of those stated in this announcement.

Drillhole data(1)

Havieron Project, Paterson Province, Western Australia

Reporting Criteria: Intercepts reported are downhole drill width (not true width) Au >0.20ppm (0.2g/t Au) and minimum 20m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Average grades are based on length-weighting of samples grades. Also highlighted are high grade intervals of Au >1.0ppm (1g/t Au) and minimum 10m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 5m, and intervals of >30g/t with no internal dilution which are greater or equal to 30 gram metres (Au_ppm x length) are tabled. Gold grades are reported to two significant figures, the downhole lengths are rounded to 0.1m which may cause some apparent discrepancies in interval widths. Samples are from core drilling which is PQ, HQ or NQ in diameter. Core is photographed and logged by the geology team before being cut. Half core PQ, HQ and NQ samples are prepared for assay and the remaining material is retained in the core farm for future reference. Each assay batch is submitted with duplicates and standards to monitor laboratory quality. Total depth (end of hole) is rounded to one decimal place for reporting purposes. Collars denoted with a * show partial results, with further significant assays to be reported in subsequent exploration updates.

Hole ID Hole

Type Easting

(m) Northing

(m) RL

(m) Total

Depth

(m) Azi

Dip From

(m) To

(m) Interval

(m) Au

(ppm) Cu

(pct) Cut

off HAD060W3^^ MR-DD 464463 7597243 5260 853 315 -59 739 772 33 0.23 0.08 0.2 g/t Au















783 826.3 43.3 0.99 0.24 0.2 g/t Au













incl 790.2 817 26.8 1.4 0.32 1.0 g/t Au HAD083BW4 MR-DD 463544 7597519 5262 1152 43 -62 805.8 962.4 156.6 1.1 0.22 0.2 g/t Au













incl 923.5 950.9 27.4 2.6 0.49 1.0 g/t Au













incl 924.2 925 0.8 51 0.28 30 g/t Au















1001.7 1028 26.3 0.20 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















1039.6 1080 40.4 0.38 0.23 0.2 g/t Au HAD086 MR-DD 464624 7598150 5258 1426 225 -65 1281 1353 72 2.2 0.02 0.2 g/t Au













incl 1318 1319 1.0 35 0.02 30 g/t Au HAD090 MR-DD 463597 7597999 5255 1141.7 105 -64 447.5 479 31.5 2.2 0.11 0.2 g/t Au















601.3 660.5 59.2 1.3 0.10 0.2 g/t Au















675 726 51 0.4 0.16 0.2 g/t Au















750.2 778 27.8 2.1 0.35 0.2 g/t Au













incl 757.5 774.6 17.1 3.2 0.53 1.0 g/t Au















849.3 916 66.7 0.7 0.20 0.2 g/t Au















954.7 1073.7 119.1 1.0 0.11 0.2 g/t Au













incl 1042.2 1055.2 13 4.1 0.67 1.0 g/t Au HAD106W1 MR-DD 463521 7597784 5257 952.1 69 -56 637 659.6 22.6 0.24 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















673.1 747 73.9 1.5 0.13 0.2 g/t Au













incl 743 744 1.0 59 0.28 30 g/t Au















777 828 51 0.21 0.09 0.2 g/t Au















876 912.2 36.2 0.22 0.38 0.2 g/t Au HAD112^^ MR-DD 463837 7597384 5260 751 38 -57 545.9 742 196.1 1.7 0.28 0.2 g/t Au













incl 567 568 1.0 38 0.21 30 g/t Au













incl 595 613.5 18.5 4.9 0.6 1.0 g/t Au













incl 599.5 600 0.5 91 1.1 30 g/t Au HAD113W2^^ MR-DD 463850 7597976 5256 906 132 -58 629 674.9 45.9 0.55 0.05 0.2 g/t Au















767.6 788.8 21.2 0.51 0.18 0.2 g/t Au















799.5 888.8 89.3 2.3 0.38 0.2 g/t Au













incl 861 862 1.0 55 1.1 30 g/t Au HAD114W1^^ MR-DD 464570 7598074 5258 910 230 -57 770.4 885.2 114.8 0.97 0.14 0.2 g/t Au













incl 840.6 856.6 16 5.1 0.49 1.0 g/t Au HAD114W2^^ MR-DD 464570 7598074 5258 919 230 -57 770.8 781.8 11 2.7 0.06 1.0 g/t Au















833.7 906 72.3 0.28 0.04 0.2 g/t Au HAD115^^ MR-DD 464294 7597925 5257 891 220 -61 595.2 615.5 20.3 1.0 0.11 0.2 g/t Au















638.9 692 53.1 1.3 0.21 0.2 g/t Au













incl 653.2 664.8 11.6 2.5 0.08 1.0 g/t Au















718 830 112 0.87 0.21 0.2 g/t Au













incl 754 768 14 1.7 0.66 1.0 g/t Au















855 887.2 32.2 2.1 0.11 0.2 g/t Au













incl 857.8 868 10.2 6.2 0.29 1.0 g/t Au













incl 861.6 862 0.4 109 0.3 30 g/t Au HAD116^^ MR-DD 464004 7597296 5260 808 15 -65 644 808 164 1.3 0.49 0.2 g/t Au













incl 655.7 671.4 15.7 5.2 0.80 1.0 g/t Au













incl 679.2 694.5 15.3 2.1 1.2 1.0 g/t Au













incl 759 770.3 11.3 2.6 1.0 1.0 g/t Au HAD116W1^^ MR-DD 464003 7597295 5260 821 15 -65 654 759.4 105.4 0.78 0.4 0.2 g/t Au HAD117^^ MR-DD 464211 7597977 5256 859 211 -61 595.6 681.6 86 0.24 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















699 732.7 33.7 6.1 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 710 732.7 22.7 9.0 0.88 1.0 g/t Au













incl 714.5 714.9 0.4 88 0.73 30 g/t Au













incl 719.6 720.5 0.92 39 1.2 30 g/t Au















752.3 836 83.7 2.0 0.06 0.2 g/t Au















772 772.7 0.7 74 0.36 30 g/t Au















801 801.9 0.9 34 0.03 30 g/t Au HAD117W1^^ MR-DD 464210 7597978 5256 862 211 -61 599.9 669 69.1 0.32 0.02 0.2 g/t Au















700 783 83 1.5 0.12 0.2 g/t Au













incl 732.3 746.2 13.9 6.1 0.50 1.0 g/t Au













incl 732.3 732.8 0.5 72 7.5 30 g/t Au















794.2 828 33.8 4.1 0.25 0.2 g/t Au













incl 794.4 810 15.6 5.8 0.23 1.0 g/t Au HAD118^^ MR-DD 464348 7597294 5260 721 330 -55 626 657.9 31.9 3.4 0.88 0.2 g/t Au













incl 639.3 657.5 18.2 4.7 1.1 1.0 g/t Au















670.7 712.5 41.8 1.4 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 670.7 697.9 27.2 1.8 0.61 1.0 g/t Au HAD119^^ MR-DD 463898 7597795 5257 713 92 -56 550.1 679.6 129.5 1.5 0.29 0.2 g/t Au













incl 627 667 40 4.3 0.79 1.0 g/t Au HAD119W1^^ MR-DD 463899 7597795 5257 780 92 -56 546 641 95 0.67 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















663 728 65 2.6 0.45 0.2 g/t Au













incl 674.5 692 17.5 4.6 0.55 1.0 g/t Au













incl 697.3 717.7 20.4 3.7 0.54 1.0 g/t Au













incl 713 714 1.0 34 0.43 30 g/t Au HAD120^^ MR-DD 464002 7597296 5260 775 13 -58 573 772.5 199.5 1.1 0.30 0.2 g/t Au













incl 580 599.8 19.8 2.8 0.86 1.0 g/t Au













incl 627.3 643.3 16 2.2 0.74 1.0 g/t Au













incl 670 683 13 5.6 0.40 1.0 g/t Au













incl 672.2 673.2 1.0 54 0.80 30 g/t Au













incl 710 721.1 11.1 1.1 0.16 1.0 g/t Au HAD121^^ MR-DD 463853 7597437 5260 660 28 -60 514 584.5 70.5 2.8 0.17 0.2 g/t Au













incl 519.8 521.9 2.1 59 1.3 30 g/t Au















605.1 647.7 42.6 0.21 0.04 0.2 g/t Au HAD122^^ MR-DD 463855 7597435 5260 710 37 -59 500 597 97 3.9 0.5 0.2 g/t Au













incl 500 515 15 9.7 1.8 1.0 g/t Au













incl 502.9 504.3 1.4 38 0.69 30 g/t Au













incl 525.6 548.1 22.5 7.5 0.57 1.0 g/t Au













incl 538.3 539 0.7 82 0.71 30 g/t Au













incl 556.6 572.3 15.7 3.4 0.26 1.0 g/t Au HAD123^^ MR-DD 463800 7597704 5258 913 93 -61 489.3 512.3 23 0.77 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















526.8 654.3 127.5 0.45 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















711.5 881 169.5 3.4 0.33 0.2 g/t Au













incl 736.1 795 58.9 6.2 0.23 1.0 g/t Au













incl 781.8 784.9 3.1 95 0.50 30 g/t Au













incl 800.2 811.6 11.4 3.9 0.08 1.0 g/t Au













incl 821.5 832.3 10.8 3.7 0.18 1.0 g/t Au













incl 861 876.4 15.4 5.9 0.95 1.0 g/t Au













incl 863 864 1.0 33 0.90 30 g/t Au HAD124^^ MR-DD 464354 7598147 5257 770 223 -60 637 659 22 0.54 0.11 0.2 g/t Au HAD125^^ MR-DD 463932 7597782 5257 650 105 -57 511.5 623.1 111.6 0.81 0.31 0.2 g/t Au













incl 563.9 564.6 0.8 49 0.10 30 g/t Au













incl 588 606 18 1.4 0.87 1.0 g/t Au HAD126^^ MR-DD 463849 7597855 5257 694 87 -53 530.7 609 78.3 1.1 0.51 0.2 g/t Au













incl 585.9 606.5 20.6 3.0 1.1 1.0 g/t Au HAD127^^ MR-DD 464571 7597737 5259 713 269 -54 537 616.3 79.3 4.5 1.4 0.2 g/t Au













incl 549 590.7 41.7 8.4 2.6 1.0 g/t Au













incl 555 556 1.0 34 3.7 30 g/t Au













incl 571.7 572.8 1.2 81 0.69 30 g/t Au HAD128^^ MR-DD 464323 7598101 5257 624 213 -62 483.3 514 30.7 0.37 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















530 563.2 33.2 1.2 0.31 0.2 g/t Au













incl 538.3 557 18.7 2 0.38 1.0 g/t Au HAD129^^ MR-DD 464348 7597490 5261 685 315 -65 488 605 117 1.9 0.62 0.2 g/t Au













incl 496 512.5 16.5 4 0.68 1.0 g/t Au













incl 538.2 563 24.8 4.3 1.3 1.0 g/t Au













incl 594 605 11 1.6 1.2 1.0 g/t Au HAD130^^ MR-DD 464603 7597752 5258 950 267 -58 622 731.4 109.4 5.9 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 630 654 24 17 1.4 1.0 g/t Au













incl 631.1 633.4 2.4 103 1.4 30 g/t Au













incl 664 694 30 7.3 0.67 1.0 g/t Au













incl 675 676 1.0 68 1.8 30 g/t Au













incl 682 683 1.0 34 1.3 30 g/t Au















764 764.4 0.4 82 0.31 30 g/t Au















767.3 768.4 1.1 76 1.2 30 g/t Au HAD131^^ MR-DD 464348 7597489 5261 567 306 -62 508 562.5 54.5 1.9 1.3 0.2 g/t Au













incl 508.2 542 33.8 2.4 1.2 1.0 g/t Au













incl 552.5 562.5 10 2.2 2.8 1.0 g/t Au HAD132^^ MR-DD 463613 7597741 5258 695 92 -57 518.7 558 39.3 0.54 0.06 0.2 g/t Au















590.3 624.8 34.5 0.27 0.05 0.2 g/t Au





Figure 12. Schematic plan view map showing drill hole locations and significant intercepts reported in this release superimposed on the interpreted geology. Previously reported holes are not shown for the sake of clarity. Note some holes and results appear on multiple sections due to the sections orientation and sections overlap.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 12, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_014full.jpg





Figure 13. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S1, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 13, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_015full.jpg





Figure 14. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S2, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 14, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_016full.jpg





Figure 15. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S3, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 15, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_017full.jpg





Figure 16. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S4, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 16, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_018full.jpg





Figure 17. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S5, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 17, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_019full.jpg





Figure 18. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S6, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 18, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_020full.jpg





Figure 19. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S7, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 19, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_021full.jpg





Figure 20. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S8, +/-100m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 20, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_022full.jpg

Forward Looking Statements

This document includes forward looking statements and forward looking information within the meaning of securities laws of applicable jurisdictions. Forward looking statements can generally be identified by the use of words such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "plan", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "objectives", "targets", "outlook" and "guidance", or other similar words and may include, without limitation, statements regarding estimated reserves and resources, certain plans, strategies, aspirations and objectives of management, anticipated production, study or construction dates, expected costs, cash flow or production outputs and anticipated productive lives of projects and mines. Newcrest continues to distinguish between outlook and guidance. Guidance statements relate to the current financial year. Outlook statements relate to years subsequent to the current financial year.

These forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Newcrest's actual results, performance and achievements or industry results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements, or industry results, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Relevant factors may include, but are not limited to, changes in commodity prices, foreign exchange fluctuations and general economic conditions, increased costs and demand for production inputs, the speculative nature of exploration and project development, including the risks of obtaining necessary licences and permits and diminishing quantities or grades of reserves, political and social risks, changes to the regulatory framework within which Newcrest operates or may in the future operate, environmental conditions including extreme weather conditions, recruitment and retention of personnel, industrial relations issues and litigation. For further information as to the risks which may impact on Newcrest's results and performance, please see the risk factors included in the Annual Information Form dated 13 October 2020 lodged with ASX and SEDAR.

Forward looking statements are based on Newcrest's good faith assumptions as to the financial, market, regulatory and other relevant environments that will exist and affect Newcrest's business and operations in the future. Newcrest does not give any assurance that the assumptions will prove to be correct. There may be other factors that could cause actual results or events not to be as anticipated, and many events are beyond the reasonable control of Newcrest. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements, particularly in the current economic climate with the significant volatility, uncertainty and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Forward looking statements in this document speak only at the date of issue. Except as required by applicable laws or regulations, Newcrest does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward looking statements or to advise of any change in assumptions on which any such statement is based.

Ore Reserves and Mineral Resources Reporting Requirements

As an Australian Company with securities listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Newcrest is subject to Australian disclosure requirements and standards, including the requirements of the Corporations Act 2001 and the ASX. Investors should note that it is a requirement of the ASX listing rules that the reporting of ore reserves and mineral resources in Australia is in accordance with the 2012 Edition of the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves (the JORC Code) and that Newcrest's ore reserve and mineral resource estimates comply with the JORC Code.

Newcrest is also subject to certain Canadian disclosure requirements and standards, as a result of its secondary listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), including the requirements of National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Investors should note that it is a requirement of Canadian securities law that the reporting of Mineral Reserves and Mineral Resources in Canada and the disclosure of scientific and technical information concerning a mineral project on a property material to Newcrest comply with NI 43-101. Newcrest's material properties are currently Cadia, Lihir and Wafi-Golpu.

Competent Person's Statement

The information in this document that relates to Exploration Targets, Exploration Results, and related scientific and technical information, is based on and fairly represents information compiled by Mr F. MacCorquodale. Mr MacCorquodale is the General Manager - Greenfields Exploration and a full-time employee of Newcrest Mining Limited. He is a shareholder in Newcrest Mining Limited and is entitled to participate in Newcrest's executive equity long term incentive plan, details of which are included in Newcrest's 2020 Remuneration Report. He is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. Mr MacCorquodale has sufficient experience which is relevant to the styles of mineralisation and types of deposits under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the JORC Code and as a Qualified Person under

NI 43-101. Mr MacCorquodale approves the disclosure of scientific and technical information contained in this document and consents to the inclusion of material of the matters based on his information in the form and context in which it appears.

Authorised by the Newcrest Disclosure Committee

For further information please contact



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Tom Dixon

+61 3 9522 5570

+61 450 541 389

Tom.Dixon@newcrest.com.au

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+61 407 269 478

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North American Investor Enquiries

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+1 866 396 0242

+61 403 435 222

Ryan.Skaleskog@newcrest.com.au

Media Enquiries

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This information is available on our website at www.newcrest.com

[1] # drilling in progress ** partial intercept, assays pending ^ updated intercept or ^^ previously reported.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82193
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study led by University of Alberta geologists is shedding light on a fundamental mechanism of how Earth's continental plates heal, with implications for diamond exploration and locating economically important minerals.

"Cratons are the oldest stable continental land masses on Earth, and are widely known as repositories for diamonds and metals of economic importance," said Jingao Liu, lead author and visiting scholar in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Disruptions of the lithosphere beneath these cratons can be key to hosting world-class mineral deposits, especially diamonds and precious metals like platinum."

Cratons have survived billions of years of being dragged around the Earth by tectonic plate movement, undergoing a complex geological life cycle of thinning and healing. This is the first study that provides evidence of the mechanism that heals the lithosphere beneath cratons and creates suitable conditions for precious mineral formation, Liu explained.

"We found direct evidence that the deep mantle root there has been replaced roughly 1.3 billion years ago," said Liu, a visiting professor from the China University of Geosciences (Beijing), who completed the research with collaborator Graham Pearson, Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

"This replacement of an older deep continental root coincides with the appearance of a giant outpouring of basaltic magma in this regionknown as the Mackenzie Large Igneous Event, one of the biggest in Earth's history," said Pearson. "This event produced key targets for nickel and platinum metal mineralization in Canada's Arctic, and we are only now beginning to understand its importance for both diamond destruction and formationthe former via removal of the old root and the latter by creating a new thick lithospheric root."

To better understand this process, researchers examined samples erupted from diamond-bearing kimberlite in the Canadian Arctic, east of Kugluktuk in Nunavut. Using simulations based on field findings, the team showed that leftovers of this geologic melting process were redeposited in the mantle, re-thickening the lithosphere and showing the first firm evidence of the mechanism behind the healing of a continental root.

"Beyond increasing our understanding of the mechanism behind recratonization, these findings have economic significance as well," explained Liu. "We can map out the area of the mantle root affected that might host mineral deposits linked to this eventincluding areas where diamonds may be present."

The research was supported through the Geomapping for Energy and Minerals program by the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC).

"These programs are a huge help for academics and industry alike," said Liu. "This work required us to assemble a very scientifically diverse team of researchers that included experts in geochemistry, geophysics and numerical geodynamic modeling."

In addition to funding, the GSC also provided research support, including work by co-author and seismologist Andrew Schaeffer.

"Demonstrating that what we once thought were ancient and unaltered cratons are in fact substantially reworked is a major discovery. This implies that there is the potential for numerous other such cratonic regions to have been similarly altered, given the correct circumstances," said Schaeffer. "Furthermore, studies like this are critically important as they combine together multiple facets of geosciences to make a much more robust interpretation."

The research is part of a major collaborative program between the U of A and the China University of Geosciences (Beijing).

"This collaboration serves to explore the origins and evolution of the deep roots to continents and their implications for creating the mineral deposits that humanity requires," said Liu. "Our goal is to continue to better understand how these recratonization events concentrate precious metals in Earth's crust, and where to look for new diamond deposits."

The study, "Plume-driven recratonization of deep continental lithospheric mantle," was published in Nature.

More information: Jingao Liu et al. Plume-driven recratonization of deep continental lithospheric mantle, Nature (2021). Journal information: Nature Jingao Liu et al. Plume-driven recratonization of deep continental lithospheric mantle,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03395-5
The 'line of duty' almost cost Frank Serpico his life. In February 1971 he and three other plain-clothes police colleagues went to an address in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after being tipped off that a drug dealer was selling heroin there.

As the only Spanish speaker, Serpico was assigned the hazardous task of pretending to be a junkie to persuade the Latino dealer and his cronies to let them in.

As two other officers waited behind him, he knocked and said he'd come to buy. The door opened a few inches, the chain still on, and Serpico wedged himself into the gap, pushing as he shouted to his colleagues to help him.

They didn't, instead watching on as their fellow officer was shot in the face with a pistol. The bullet, fired from about 18 inches away, entered under his eye and lodged in his jaw.

The 'line of duty' almost cost Frank Serpico (pictured, Al Pacino as Serpico) his life. In February 1971 he and three other plain-clothes police colleagues went to an address in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after being tipped off that a drug dealer was selling heroin there

As he lay bleeding on the floor, his partners arrested the suspects rather than try to save him. It fell instead to an elderly tenant in the building to dial the emergency services, kneeling beside Serpico and squeezing his hand as he reassured him he would live.

The officer's fate, dramatised in the riveting 1973 film Serpico starring Al Pacino, just may have been a consequence of his decision to expose the rampant corruption within the New York Police Department.

Viewers glued to Line of Duty, the BBC drama about the work of AC-12, a fictional anti-police corruption unit, might raise an eyebrow at the sheer number of bent coppers in the series, the latest of which finishes on Sunday night. But Serpico  who turned 85 last week wouldn't be surprised.

Surrounded by officers either taking bribes from criminals or turning a blind eye to it, he was the archetypal lone voice, the courageous whistleblower who nearly lost his life exposing the truth.

As the only Spanish speaker, Serpico (Picuted: Al Pacino as Serpico) was assigned the hazardous task of pretending to be a junkie to persuade the Latino dealer and his cronies to let them in

Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants, Francis  the son of a Neapolitan shoemaker  dreamed of joining the police as a child. He did so aged 23 in 1959, after a few years in the army. Serpico earned a reputation as a zealous and hardworking officer who was never off duty.

He was always unconventional, destined to work in plain clothes as he didn't look remotely like a cop. Short and muscular, he had long hair and sported a beard. He dressed flamboyantly: off duty he was a hippy, wearing beads, flares and earrings, while on duty he had a passion for elaborate disguises. He dressed as vagrants, rabbis and doctors, even posing as a London barrister called 'Llewellyn'.

He had a bohemian lifestyle  a hedonistic ladies' man, he had a passion for opera and ballet, and lived in New York's counterculture capital of Greenwich Village.

Serpico was so unlike the average cop, his fellow officers were naturally suspicious. But what most alarmed them was his refusal to accept the culture of bribery.

New York City police officer Frank Serpico sits with his attorney, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, during a press conference concerning his allegations of widespread corruption within the NYPD

He rejected even the lowest level of corruption, the police tradition of accepting free meals in restaurants, and was gobsmacked when his patrol partner let a motorist pay $35 to overlook a traffic offence.

However when he moved to a unit policing the lucrative industries of illegal gambling and prostitution, he discovered the graft amounted to serious money.

One day, an officer passed him an envelope, saying simply it was from 'Jewish Max'. Inside was $300 (about $2,500 now).

Jewish Max ran an illegal gambling operation and this was Serpico's share of his monthly payment to be left alone.

Serpico could no longer keep quiet and, through a friend, contacted the Department of Investigation  a secretive New York equivalent of Line of Duty's AC-12 that tackled fraud and corruption among city employees.

When even a senior officer told him to forget it, Serpico began to realise even his supposedly 'honest' colleagues were willing to see corruption in the force persist.

Serpico was transferred to the Bronx, assured his new colleagues there were scrupulously honest. In fact, they were even more corrupt. One officer blithely informed him he could make at least $800 a month from kickbacks from criminals paying for immunity.

Serpico could no longer keep quiet and, through a friend, contacted the Department of Investigation  a secretive New York equivalent of Line of Duty's AC-12 that tackled fraud and corruption among city employees

The payouts, he revealed, were routinely collected in a system known as the 'pad' because payers' names were efficiently recorded on a pad of paper.

Serpico was sometimes partnered with a 'bag man' who collected the cash. The money-grubbing cops were so proficient at tracking down non-payers that Serpico concluded they could have cleaned the city up in a week had they devoted the same energy to fighting crime.

In 1967, he started telling everything he knew to senior officials at police headquarters and City Hall.

Although he had all they needed to prosecute, they dragged their feet. Serpico's position was becoming more dangerous by the day, as he rubbed shoulders with the colleagues he was implicating.

There were other honest officers but they were never brave enough to come forward. Serpico refused to be cowed, arresting suspects off and ignoring angry colleagues.

Word spread  allegedly, senior officers leaked it  that he was spilling the beans and Serpico became a pariah. Colleagues patted him down to ensure he wasn't wearing a recording device. One officer pulled a knife on him, snarling: 'I ought to cut your tongue out.'

When Serpico arrested an illegal gambler who'd been protected, the suspect ominously pointed his finger at him as if he were pulling a trigger. Serpico's 'own kind' would 'do' him, he said.

Eventually, Serpico gave up waiting for officialdom to do anything and went to the Press. In April 1970, the New York Times ran a front-page expose.

The mayor was forced to set up an independent public inquiry, the Knapp Commission. Serpico was its star witness, ending his lonely crusade as he testified that 'the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear or ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers'.

The police commissioner abruptly resigned, scores of senior officers were cleared out and investigators exposed a culture of wholesale corruption in which individual bribes were as high as $25,000 ($170,000 now) and annual backhanders in a single police department amounted to $4 million ($27 million now).

It emerged corrupt officers divided themselves into 'grass eaters' and 'meat eaters': the former simply turned a blind eye to illicit operations while the 'carnivores' strong-armed drug users, prostitutes and pimps into giving them money.

And, just as Line of Duty's writer Jed Mercurio kills off characters, showing the mortal risk to police investigating bad apples within the force, Serpico himself became a target after he blew the whistle on NYPD corruption.

After Serpico was shot in the face, it became clear some of his colleagues wouldn't be happy until he was dead. Among the first 'get well' cards he received in hospital were anonymous notes regretting that he'd survived.

His superiors accepted the claims of his partners in the drugs raid that they'd done their best to help him  and even decorated them.

Serpico took the hint and retired aged 36. He moved to Switzerland and then to the Netherlands where he married a Dutch woman. When she died of cancer and her parents took custody of their two children, he returned to the U.S. and moved to a one-room cabin deep in the woods in upstate New York.

There are still bullet fragments in his head, he remains deaf in one ear and he blames post-traumatic stress disorder for his fuse. The shooting left him lame in one leg but his antique English walking stick conceals a sword inside.

Serpico remains bitter about his treatment, outspoken that police corruption remains a problem and paranoid about his safety. 'I protect myself,' he said in February. 'But if my time has come, there's no better way than taking out some crooked cops.'

Superintendent Ted Hastings, scourge of bent coppers in Line of Duty, would surely agree.
Moro Islamic Liberation Front members, local police and military forces secure a government facility in the village of Kitango, in the town of Datu Saudi Ampatuan in Maguindanao, Philippines, following clashes between security forces and militants linked to the Islamic State, April 29, 2021.

Violence involving government forces and pro-Islamic State militants erupted anew in the town of Datu Saudi Ampatuan in the southern Philippines, leaving two women dead and six people injured, including a senior militant leader, the military said Thursday.

A bomb explosion in Maguindanao province on Wednesday morning killed the pair who the military said were linked to members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF).

The military said the women  identified as Bahria Alon, 40, and Lagabai Mohalidin, 24,  were traveling with BIFF spokesman Abu Jihad when a bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded. Jihad was able to escape.

Alon and Mohalidin were killed. One of them was a wife of a BIFF commander. They were traveling with Jihad when the explosion occurred, army Col. Pete Balisi, commander of the 1st Mechanized Brigade, told BenarNews, adding that a third civilian was injured.

Balisi said Jihad was able to escape.

Based on the accounts of our witnesses, he was wounded, Balisi said.

The women were not considered as enemy combatants but as civilians linked to BIFF, he said.

The blast forced at least 549 families to evacuate their homes for safer grounds, local disaster officials reported.

Also on Wednesday, four soldiers were injured in a separate explosion while they were pursuing the militants, according to regional military spokesman Lt. Col. John Paul Baldomar.

The blasts come a little more than a month after 14 BIFF militants died in a series of clashes in Datu Saudi Ampatuan, the region where the militants have evaded troops for years by hiding in jungle and swamp areas.

The BIFF is a splinter group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which signed a peace deal with Manila and controls a Muslim autonomous area in the south.

In January, BIFF militants carried out two roadside bombings in the south that killed three and injured scores of people. In 2019, the group carried out a series of bomb attacks in the south targeting a market and a restaurant that injured more than two dozen people.

BIFF members pledged allegiance to the Islamic State whose supporters launched an attack on the southern city of Marawi in 2017 that left more than 1,200 militants, security forces and civilians dead as a result of the five-month siege.

While BIFF did not send fighters to Marawi, it carried out diversionary attacks elsewhere.
HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEx:2318; SSE:601318) announced that Ping An is the world's most valuable insurance brand, with a brand value of USD44.8 billion, in the Insurance 100 2021 Ranking by leading brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance. Ping An has retained the top spot as the world's most valuable insurance brand for the fifth year in a row.

Brand Finance is the world's leading independent brand valuation consultancy. It evaluates thousands of the world's biggest brands every year. The Insurance 100 2021 ranking evaluates aspects of the brands' industry performance, brand equity, and contribution to business performance. Brand Finance feeds these factors into the Brand Strength Index (BSI) and quantifies the brand values. This year, Brand Finance also assessed the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on enterprise value, estimating the likely impact on brand value for each sector.

Brand Finance said, "As predicted, insurance brands have taken a hit this year as they negotiate the fallout from the pandemic  They have, however, fared better than our initial predictions at the outbreak of last year, demonstrating the resilience of the world's top insurance brands. Ping An has already begun to show signs of a strong recovery as parts of the world begin to remerge from the pandemic, and therefore, if this trend continues, Ping An should see a solid increase in brand value in the coming year."

Ping An continued to strengthen its technological capabilities and provide high quality products and services to clients amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, Ping An achieved steady business results. The Group achieved operating profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company of RMB39,120 million, up 8.9% year-on-year. In addition, the Group promoted annuity products, improved its protection product portfolio by developing new "product + service" packages for healthy business development. New business value of the life and health insurance business rose by 15.4% year-on-year to RMB18,980 million. Operating profit rose steadily by 4.2% year-on-year to RMB25,580 million. Ping An's retail customers also continued to increase. By the end of March, Ping An's retail customers grew 1.0% in the year-to-date to more than 220 million, including 84.57 million, or 38.3%, who hold multiple contracts with different Group subsidiaries.

Ping An said: "While pursuing steady progress by continuously advancing our 'finance + technology' and the 'finance + ecosystem' strategies, Ping An adheres to the philosophy of 'expertise makes life simple, technology makes financial services heartwarming, and healthcare makes life better'. In the future, Ping An will seize the development opportunities of fintech and healthtech, support the development of smart cities, fulfill social responsibilities and protect society and people's livelihoods."

In addition to Ping An, Chinese insurance brands in general have a significant presence in the Brand Finance Insurance 100 2021 ranking. A total of 12 Chinese insurers are featured, with Ping An, China Life, AIA, CPIC and PICC in the top 10. The cumulative brand value of the 12 Chinese insurance brands accounts for 30% of the total brand value of Insurance 100 2021.

About Ping An Group

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An") is a world-leading technology-powered retail financial services group. With over 220 million retail customers and 611 million internet users, Ping An is one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Ping An focuses on two over-arching domains of activity, "pan financial assets" and "pan health care", covering the provision of financial and health care services through our integrated financial services platform and our ecosystems; in financial services, health care, auto services and smart city services. Our "finance + technology" and "finance + ecosystem" transformation strategies aim to provide customers and internet users with innovative and simple products and services using technology. As China's first joint stock insurance company, Ping An is committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate reporting and corporate governance. The Group is listed on the stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Shanghai. In 2020, Ping An ranked 7th in the Forbes Global 2000 list and ranked 21st in the Fortune Global 500 list. Ping An also ranked 38th in the 2020 WPP Kantar Millward Brown BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list.

For more information, please visit www.group.pingan.com and follow us on LinkedIn - PING AN.

SOURCE Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd.

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Google plans to expand a program to help formerly incarcerated people receive job training and skills, pegged to a White House effort aimed at helping people stay out of prison and jail.

The Mountain View company is working with five nonprofits across the U.S., including in the Bay Area, and plans to provide training to 10,000 people by the end of the year. The expansion is a part of Grow with Google, the companys effort to provide skills training and career certificates. The money, about $1 million, comes from a multimillion dollar racial equity fund the company announced last year.

The training will focus on basic computer skills and job search and preparation, along with online safety and more advanced skills like project management and entrepreneurship. Google said it hopes to train at least 1,500 people statewide through the program by the end of the year.

Nonprofits the Last Mile and Defy Ventures, both with programs in the Bay Area and elsewhere in Northern California, will be part of the program.

Dane Worthington is the director of economic opportunity at the Center for Employment Opportunities, a national nonprofit with offices in the Bay Area that works with people recently released from prison and is also part of the Google initiative.

Worthington said his group typically provides training and immediate work opportunities for recently incarcerated people and that the Google money will help them expand their offerings as well as provide equipment like laptops and internet hotspots for skills training.

Having a criminal conviction can bar you from certain types of employment, Worthington said. He said the pandemic has also made it harder for recently incarcerated people to get jobs in the service industry as those jobs have not come back as strongly, but transportation and warehousing jobs have been a bright spot because of demand.

Worthington said he expects the program to reach about 2,000 people across the U.S. by years end through his group, with about half of them in California and roughly 500 in the greater Bay Area.

With virus transmission easing statewide and more people being vaccinated, California has the lowest COVID rate in the country, but parts of the states economy have still taken heavy damage. That means fewer jobs and more barriers for formerly incarcerated people to fill and get a foothold back into society.

The states unemployment rate last month was almost double the 4.5% Californians saw in March of last year. Despite hundreds of thousands of hirings due to easing restrictions, the state is still behind by 1.3 million jobs compared to March 2020.

According to the White House, more than 600,000 people re-enter society from state and federal prisons each year. Thousands of prisoners in California saw early release last year to reduce overcrowding in state prisons that contributed to outbreaks of the virus at San Quentin and elsewhere.

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice
Addressing lawmakers Wednesday in an eerily unfilled US Capitol, President Joe Biden delivered his first speech to Congress under extraordinary circumstances that highlighted the coronavirus pandemic and January's deadly riot that shook the citadel of democracy.

Barely 200 mask-wearing lawmakers spread out in the House of Representatives chamber -- the very body where many were acting to certify Biden's election victory on January 6 when marauders sent members scrambling for their lives.

"As we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol -- desecrating our democracy -- remain vivid in our minds," he told the hushed chamber in a primetime speech to mark his first 100 days in office.

But he turned the reaction to the harrowing attack, and America's response to the coronavirus, as cause for optimism.

"We have stared into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy -- of pandemic and pain -- and 'We the People' did not flinch," he said.

Evidence of the unrest remains on Capitol Hill. The metal fencing around Congress still stands, and heavily armed National Guard troops ringed the building Wednesday as a precaution.

The building's hallways were nearly empty, the tours that normally bring tourists and other guests to the Rotunda halted.

Covid restrictions made Biden's maiden speech to Congress one like no other. Most of the US Supreme Court's nine members usually attend such addresses, but this time Chief Justice John Roberts alone represented the bench.

Of the entire Biden cabinet, only Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin were present.

The joint session was historic on multiple fronts: the unprecedented number of empty seats in the chamber, indicative of the nation's ongoing 14-month battle against the Covid-19 pandemic that requires social distancing and mask-wearing at public gatherings.

And with Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seated at the dais, two women flanked a US president during his speech to Congress for the first time ever.

Story continues

"Madam Speaker. Madam Vice President," Biden began warmly as he noted their historic turn. "And it's about time."

The chamber burst into applause, with First Lady Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff joining in the ovation.

But the two spouses were largely alone in their box in the gallery. Normally filled with lawmakers' guests, the upper seats were virtually empty, as guests were relegated to watching from home.

Biden, making his case for a dramatic expansion of government social safety net programs like child care and free community college, directly appealed to Republicans in the hopes of winning at least the barest of support necessary to advance his progressive agenda.

He fist-bumped congresswoman Liz Cheney, a member of Republican leadership who has angered many in her caucus for openly denouncing former president Donald Trump, and huddled after his speech with Republican Senator Rob Portman.

Biden used a strikingly personal tone, at times whispering as he did, when he urged corporate America and the nation's wealthiest to "pay their fair share" of taxes.

The line drew blank stares from most Republicans, and loud applause from Democrats.

Biden is perhaps the American most familiar with these speeches and how they are used to win over the public and earn congressional support.

Elected to the Senate in 1972, Biden attended Richard Nixon's final State of the Union address, and sat at the dais as vice president for multiple congressional addresses by Barack Obama.

mlm
Claiming that something has a defect normally suggests an undesirable feature. That's not the case in solid-state systems, such as the semiconductors at the heart of modern classical electronic devices. They work because of defects introduced into the rigidly ordered arrangement of atoms in crystalline materials like silicon. Surprisingly, in the quantum world, defects also play an important role.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and scientific institutes and universities in Japan, Korea and Hungary have established guidelines that will be an invaluable resource for the discovery of new defect-based quantum systems. The international team published these guidelines in Nature Reviews Materials.

"We are especially proud of our guidelines because intended users extend from veteran quantum scientists to researchers in other fields and graduate students hoping to join the quantum workforce." -- Gary Wolfowicz, assistant scientist in Argonne's Center for Molecular Engineering and Materials Science division, along with the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Such systems have possible applications in quantum communications, sensing and computing and thereby could have a transformative effect on society. Quantum communications could distribute quantum information robustly and securely over long distances, making a quantum internet possible. Quantum sensing could achieve unprecedented sensitivities for measurements with biological, astronomical, technological and military interest. Quantum computing could reliably simulate the behavior of matter down to the atomic level and possibly simulate and discover new drugs.

The team derived their design guidelines based on an extensive review of the vast body of knowledge acquired over the last several decades on spin defects in solid-state materials.

"The defects that interest us here are isolated distortions in the orderly arrangement of atoms in a crystal," explained Joseph Heremans, a scientist in Argonne's Center for Molecular Engineering and Materials Science division, as well as the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Such distortions might include holes or vacancies created by the removal of atoms or impurities added as dopants. These distortions, in turn, can trap electrons within the crystal. These electrons have a property called spin, which acts as an isolated quantum system.

"Spin being a key quantum property, spin defects can hold quantum information in a form that physicists call quantum bits, or qubits, in analogy with the bit of information in classical computing," added Gary Wolfowicz, assistant scientist in Argonne's Center for Molecular Engineering and Materials Science division, along with the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

For several decades, scientists have been studying these spin defects to create a broad array of proof-of-concept devices. However, previous research has only focused on one or two leading candidate qubits.

"Our field has had a somewhat narrow focus for many years," said Christopher Anderson, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. "It was like we only had a few horses in the quantum race. But now we understand that there are many other quantum horses to back, and exactly what to look for in those horses."

The team's guidelines encompass the properties of both the defects and the material selected to host them. The key defect properties are spin, optical (for example, how light interacts with the spin of the trapped electrons), and charge state of the defect.

Possible solid-state materials include not only the already well-studied few like silicon, diamond and silicon carbide but other more recent entries like various oxides. All these materials have different advantages and disadvantages laid out in the guidelines. For example, diamond is clear and hard, but expensive. On the other hand, silicon is easy to make devices with at low cost, but is more affected by free charges and temperature.

"Our guidelines are there for quantum scientists and engineers to assess the interplay between the defect properties and the selected host material in designing new qubits tailored to some specific application," Heremans noted.

"Spin defects have a central role to play in creating new quantum devices, whether they be small quantum computers, the quantum internet, or nanoscale quantum sensors," continued Anderson. "By drawing upon the extensive knowledge on spin defects to derive these guidelines, we have laid the groundwork so that the quantum workforce -- now and in the future -- can design from the ground up the perfect qubit for a specific use."

"We are especially proud of our guidelines because intended users extend from veteran quantum scientists to researchers in other fields and graduate students hoping to join the quantum workforce," said Wolfowicz.

The work also establishes the groundwork for designing scalable semiconductor quantum devices and dovetails well with Q-NEXT, a DOE-funded quantum information science research center led by Argonne. Q-NEXT's goal includes establishing a semiconductor quantum "foundry" for developing quantum interconnects and sensors.

"Our team's guidelines will act as a blueprint to help direct the Q-NEXT mission in designing the next generation of quantum materials and devices," said David Awschalom, senior scientist in Argonne's Materials Science division, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and director of both the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Q-NEXT. "When it comes to quantum technologies with spins, this work sets the stage and informs the field how to move forward."

The team's guidelines appear in a paper entitled "Qubit guidelines for solid-state spin defects" and published in Nature Reviews Materials. In addition to Heremans, Wolfowicz, Anderson and Awschalom, authors include Shun Kanai (Tohoku University, Japan), Hosung Seo (Ajou University, Korea), Adam Gali (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary) and Giulia Galli (Argonne and University of Chicago).

This research was primarily supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https:/ / energy. gov/ science .

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:48:35|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Ma Kai-cheung's first investment in the Chinese mainland was a garment factory in Shenzhen, the neighboring city of Hong Kong, in 1985. Riding on the reform and opening-up of the mainland, Ma's business has proved to be a great success.

After more than three decades, the renowned Hong Kong entrepreneur, now in his late 80s, is even more confident in the future of Hong Kong and the country.

"The development of the country is unstoppable. We must hit the right beat at this turning point of the times," Ma said, encouraging Hong Kong's youth to seize the opportunities in the national development.

Ma recalled the difficulties when starting his own career in Shenzhen during the 1980s, saying the city's achievements over the past decades were unimaginable.

While the remote small town in south China has developed into a global metropolis, Ma's garment factory has also become a conglomerate stretching to multiple industries from food to property and logistics. He currently is the honorary chairman of Carrianna Group Holdings Company Ltd.

Now with abundant capital and policy support, the business environment of the mainland has improved significantly, providing a great opportunity for the young people in Hong Kong to show their talent, Ma said.

Ma in particular cited the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

With its enormous market, the integration of the Greater Bay Area offers a broader room for youngsters, he said, adding that the nine mainland cities of the Greater Bay Area have rolled out various favorable policies from housing to incubators for the youth from Hong Kong and Macao.

To grasp the opportunities, the young people also need courage and a fighting spirit, the senior entrepreneur said. "The policy support cannot guarantee a success and ultimately you have to rely on yourself." Enditem
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced its long-awaited plan to ban the last flavor still allowed in cigarettes  menthol  and also said it would ban all flavors of mass-produced cigars, which are popular among youths. The ban would apply only to sales, manufacturing and imports  not personal possession.

Together, these actions represent powerful, science-based approaches that will have an extraordinary public health impact, Dr. Janet Woodcock, the F.D.A.s acting commissioner, said in a statement on the agencys website. We believe these actions will launch us on a trajectory toward ending tobacco-related disease and death in the U.S.

The menthol flavor, the agency says, makes it easier for those trying their first cigarette to become addicted and then tougher to quit. The current annual death toll from smoking-related diseases in the United States stands at about 480,000, with Black Americans disproportionately affected.

Since the 1950s, menthol cigarettes have been aggressively marketed to Black smokers in the United States. Roughly 85 percent of Black smokers now use Newport, Kool and other menthol products, according to the F.D.A.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler unveiled Thursday a proposed $5.7 billion budget for the next fiscal year he says is focused on spurring the citys economic recovery, cleaning trash and graffiti and stemming the growing homelessness crisis.

He wants bureaus and city offices to spend a collective $3.7 billion, down from $3.8 billion in the current years pandemic-revised budget, according to his budget proposal. The rest of the money would be banked or transferred to other city accounts, it shows.

An infusion of federal stimulus dollars and revenue from newly enacted levies will help reduce the hit to city coffers caused by in part by the coronavirus pandemic and avoid cuts at nearly every city bureau, according to Wheeler.

One notable exception  the mayors proposal calls for nearly a $3 million reduction to Portland Police Bureau. That would represent a 1.4% decrease in bureau spending compared to its current budget.

[Read the mayors proposed budget for the 2021-21 fiscal year]

Wheeler said his proposed spending plan is grounded in a series of priorities established earlier this year by the City Council and reflects Portlands commitment to balancing equity with fiscal responsibility.

It marks the beginning of what I believe will be a year of recovery, Wheeler said in a statement. My proposal is designed to create a bridge through the challenging circumstances caused by COVID to the economic and community recovery we forecast over the next few years.

Two large bureaus that are funded mostly by user fees and dedicated taxes would see their operating budgets fall substantially under the mayors proposal.

The Bureau of Transportation is slated to have its operating budget fall by $50.5 million, or 12%. And the Bureau of Development Services operations would drop by $25 million, or 18%.

Portlands Housing Bureau, which experienced an extraordinary one-year bump in its current budget, would see spending fall by $125 million, or 35%. But it would still, at $235 million, have an operating budget substantially above the previous two years.

Budget document only shows a drop of six positions at the development services bureau but down 56 at the citys bureau of transportation.

Overall, city employment would rise by 27 full-time equivalent positions, entirely from parks levy-funded positions in the parks bureau.

Wheeler would also freeze cost-of-living adjustments and merit increases for many city of Portland staff, documents show.

Among the notable spending proposals highlighted by the mayors office:

$5.7 million for litter collection and other cleanup efforts, including $3.4 million for graffiti removal.

$2 million to help develop new homeless shelters with Multnomah County.

$978,000 to continue funding Portland Street Response in its pilot form.

$700,000 for minority chambers of commerce.

$500,000 for small businesses vandalized or damaged to cover cost of repairs.

$300,000 to provide $20 an hour jobs to people experiencing homeless to assist with citywide cleanup.

The mayor said the city of Portland lost over $100 million dollars during the pandemic  including a $20 million hit to its general fund, which supports many core programs and services.

Wheelers proposed budget seeks to beef up the general fund and bureau operations in the coming year by using about a third of the $108 million the citys expected to receive this year in federal relief funds as well as $14 million from the parks tax levy voters approved in November.

His spending proposal on the police bureau is largely in line with what the city budget office recommended earlier this year.

Under the plan, the bureau would accelerate the hire of 30 new officers to counterbalance anticipated attrition over the next two years. It would also add 22 new unarmed community safety officers  unarmed support staff who can respond to low priority calls.

As of February, the bureau had 93 officer vacancies and another 40 non-sworn vacancies.

Police havent hired any new officers for the last nine months and may not hire any officers by the end of this fiscal year in June because of the earlier cuts, the budget office noted.

These are critical investments that will stem the tide of retirements and resignations weve seen over the past year, said Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who praised the overall vision outlined in the mayors proposal.

I know that many Portlanders are discouraged about the state of the city today, but I am certain that the investments to spur economic development, improve community safety, and support housing and houseless services provide a path towards a greater City of Portland, Mapps said in a statement Thursday evening.

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement she wanted to spend the next few days reviewing the proposed budget, which is 366 pages, before delivering a complete assessment.

I will be analyzing the budget through a lens of ensuring the primary focus is on people and stabilizing our most vulnerable community members, Hardesty said. I believe that we can build back a better and more equitable Portland and I am committed to working with all Portlanders and my colleagues to do that.

As mayor, Wheeler gets to propose the city budget. But he has no more power than any other city council member when it comes to amending and approving the plan.

Wheeler and the rest of the council will hash out budget details over the coming weeks, and it will take at least three council members votes to eventually adopt a tentative budget and then approve a final version.

A City Council work session on the budget is scheduled for Tuesday.

The Council will also hold a public hearing Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m.

A final vote is scheduled for June 17.

The Oregonian/OregonLives Betsy Hammond contributed to this report.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632

Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Prince William and Kate Middleton shared never-before-seen pictures of the couple to mark their 10th wedding anniversary.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge released two new portraits taken by photographer Chris Floyd at Kensington Palace.

In one of the sweet pictures, a smiling Duchess cuddles up to her heir-to-the-throne husband with her head leaning on his shoulder, while the Duke grins in front of the camera.

This intimate picture is similar to their 2010 engagement portrait.

In the second picture, the Cambridges hold hands as Prince William looks lovingly at his wife, who looks beautiful in a blue wrap dress.

Prince William and Kate Middleton walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey on Apr. 29, 2011, in a fairy tale ceremony.

However, on that day, they have encountered some drama, just like in normal weddings - but more intense.

READ ALSO: The One Royal Family Member Struggling Following Prince Philip's Death Aside From Queen Elizabeth Revealed

Prince William, Kate Middleton's Royal Wedding Day Threat

Prince William and Kate Middleton's royal wedding was watched by millions of royal fans, with thousands of them lining outside the streets of London to get a glimpse of the future king and queen.

Kate Middleton's wedding dress was from Alexander McQueen which perfectly reflected her personality.

The newlyweds shared a kiss on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, something that will never be forgotten.

However, despite the emotions and beauty of the very special day, a recently released documentary suggested that behind the scenes, things weren't so calm.

In the documentary "The Day Will and Kate Got Married," Bob Broadhurst, the Metropolitan Police Gold Commander revealed that on their wedding day, there was a potential threat that was identified that morning.

He explained, "My fear is there's some sort of 'Guy Fawkes-ean' plot going on behind closed doors to potentially putting a bomb somewhere."

His team was reportedly on high alert for an odd person or those people obsessed with the British royal family "who might just sneak under your car."

5,000 police officers were deployed on that day.

And 20 minutes just before Kate Middleton was due to leave her hotel to walk down the aisle, police were immediately alerted that a presence of an identified vehicle entered the zone.

"Someone in a car got through the secure zone, drove up close to The Goring Hotel just around the corner, got out the car and legged it and joined the crowd."

"Now we have a real problem. This is a potential bomb in the car."

The police then considered changing their plans in response, however, there were also concerns that the Duchess wouldn't make it in time to her wedding.

Explosive experts then soon determined that there was no bomb in the car. Kate and her dad, Michael Middleton, were then able to travel safely from their hotel to the venue as planned.

The commander confessed that he didn't know how an unknown vehicle was able to enter the secure zone, and up to this day, doesn't know how it happened.

READ MORE: Kenzie Wheeler 'The Voice' Season 20: 8 Surprising Things to Know About The Unofficial Winner

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
The Tennessee Legislature has passed two criminal justice reform bills that were a priority of Governor Bill Lee and informed by the recommendations of the Tennessee Criminal Justice Investment Task Force.

The Alternatives to Incarceration Act expands access to safe prison alternatives, ensures reasonable pre-trial release conditions for those facing criminal charges, and establishes fair probation policies that limit needlessly lengthy terms or extensions.

The Re-entry Success Act creates rehabilitation and public safety-orientated parole policies, provides reentry supervision support to individuals about to re-join society, incentivizes local jails to provide rehabilitative programming, and removes unnecessary employment barriers.

Heather Rice-Minus of the group Prison Fellowship, said, No life is beyond redemption and people deserve the dignity of a second chance. Whether in prison or during reentry, people should be offered avenues for personal transformation and success. We commend Governor Lee for his leadership on seeking a values-based solution to criminal justice reform in Tennessee, and are thankful for the work of the Tennessee Criminal Justice Investment Task Force, the legislature, and pastors and faith leaders who spent years advancing this package.

Kate Trammell, also with Prison Fellowship, said, Faced with a growing prison population and high recidivism rate, Governor Lee and the Tennessee legislature have dedicated themselves to advancing legislation that creates a more restorative criminal justice system. Prison Fellowship applauds their innovative leadership in providing alternatives to incarceration and pathways to reentry success and looks forward to seeing the legislation signed into law by Governor Lee. All Tennesseans, both in our prisons and our communities, stand to benefit from these reforms that recognize redemption.

In March of 2019, Governor Lee issued Executive Order 6, which created the Tennessee Criminal Justice Investment Task Force to study criminal justice policy within the state. Governor Lee tasked this body with studying and addressing incarceration costs, crime prevention, swift responses to violent crime, sentencing guidelines, probation and parole standards, reentry policy, family support, and the mental health needs of prisoners.

In December of 2019, the Taskforce issued its final report, which found that between FY2009 and FY2018, Tennessees prison population grew by 12 percent and its corrections spending by 33 percent, while parole releases decreased and prison sentences increased. Yet, the state also suffered from a recidivism rate of 47 percent and the fourth-highest violent crime rate in the nation.

To address these challenges, the Taskforce Report also included over 20 suggestions for the improvement of the current system, including recommendations regarding sentencing alternatives, education and treatment in local jails, the prioritization of high-risk and violent individuals, community supervision, and successful reentry.

While efforts to implement these recommendations in 2020 were not ultimately successful, Governor Lee acted during the 2021 Legislative Session to move forward two proposals that would reform both sentencing and probation practices and parole and reentry policy.

On Wednesday, the Tennessee State Senate, acting unanimously, extended final legislative approval to these reforms. Both the Alternatives to Incarceration Act and the Re-entry Success Act will be sent to Governor Lee to be signed into law.
At one point during the meeting, Roudez loudly banged his gavel on the table to cut off Brooks and called for an immediate vote. As the roll call is taken Brooks loudly said hell no to approving it and quickly left the table where officials were seated.
This job expired on 28 May 2021.
George Calombaris has kept a low profile following his departure from MasterChef Australia in 2019 and the underpayment scandal of his restaurants.

But the 42-year-old couldn't turn down the opportunity to give back to the community.

On Thursday, he joined other celebrities to make 6000 sandwiches for children in need with T-House founder Tina Nettlefold and founder of Eat Up charity Lyndon Galea, at Half Acre in Melbourne.

Giving back: Axed MasterChef judge George Calombaris returned to the spotlight on Thursday, joining celebrities to make 6000 sandwiches for children in need. Pictured is George with event organiser and T-House founder Tina Nettlefold

The former MasterChef judge was dapperly dressed in a navy coat with a jumper, button up shirt and ripped jeans.

He proudly smiled with event organisers Tina and Lyndon, who looked delighted to have George's star power support the event.

George also posed for a photo with his wife Natalie Tricarico. The couple married in 2018 and share a son and daughter.

Helping hands: The former MasterChef judge was dapperly dressed in a navy coat with a jumper, button up shirt and ripped jeans. He proudly smiled with event organisers Tina and the founder of Eat Up charity Lyndon Galea (left)

Sharing the love: George also posed for a photo with his wife Natalie Tricarico. The couple married in 2018 and share a son and daughter

Community teamwork: During the event, George took to the podium to speak about the great work the organisations were doing to help the less fortunate of their community

At one point during the event, the chef took to the podium to speak about the great work the organisations were doing to help the less fortunate of their community.

He was later seen joining other celebrities and other well-known Melbourne identities at the sandwich making stations.

Also at the event was former AFL star turned radio presenter Brendan Fevola.

Getting straight into it! George was later seen joining other celebrities and other well-known Melbourne identities at the sandwich making stations

Ready to help! Also at the event was former AFL star-turned-radio presenter Brendan Fevola who smiled for a photo with Tina Nettlefold

Buttering them up! The 40-year-old father of four put on a pair of gloves and got to making easy and tasty cheese sandwiches

The 40-year-old father of four opted for a relaxed outfit of a white T-shirt and khaki shorts.

He put on a pair of gloves and got to making easy and tasty cheese sandwiches.

Comedian Ash Williams also lent a hand at the charity event and got stuck into making his share of the sandwiches.

The 38-year-old, who recently appeared on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, proudly showed off a few of the sandwiches he made.

Happy to help: Comedian Ash Williams made friends with other sandwich makers as he lent a hand at the charity event and got stuck into making his share of the sandwiches

Tasty! The 38-year-old, who recently appeared on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, proudly showed off a few of the sandwiches he made

Doing their part: Season nine MasterChef winner Diana Chan also got involved in the sandwich making action alongside friend and make-up artist Jade Kisnorbo

Season nine MasterChef winner Diana Chan also got involved in the sandwich making action alongside friend and make-up artist Jade Kisnorbo.

Altogether the attendees made a record-breaking 6,000 sandwiches in just one hour for school kids experiencing food insecurity.

Last year, George made headlines after he was found to have underpaid his restaurant staff by nearly $8 million.

The former TV star was fined $200,000 for underplaying 515 staff between 2011 and 2017 and will have his business audited for the next three years.

Controversy: Last year, George made headlines after he was found to have underpaid his restaurant staff by nearly $8 million. The former TV star was fined $200,000 for underplaying 515 staff between 2011 and 2017 and will have his business audited for the next three years

Old guard: He was also axed alongside veteran MasterChef co-judges Gary Mehigan (right) and Matt Preston (left) over a pay dispute with Channel 10

He was also axed alongside veteran MasterChef co-judges Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston over a pay dispute with Channel 10.

'Despite months of negotiations, Ten has not been able to reach a commercial agreement that was satisfactory to Matt, Gary and George,' Ten's CEO Paul Anderson said in a statement in July 2019.

New judges Melissa Leong, Andy Allen and Jock Zonfrillo took over the spots, leading to a blockbuster 2020 for the series.
BEDFORD, NS / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Silver Spruce Resources, Inc. ("Silver Spruce" or the "Company") (TSXV:SSE) (FRA:S6Q1) is pleased to announce the signing of a Definitive Agreement ("DA"), effective April 27, 2021, on the Diamante 1 and Diamante 2 concessions. Silver Spruce recently secured a Letter of Intent with Colibri Resource Corp. (TSXV:CBI) ("Colibri"), and its wholly-owned Mexican subsidiary, Yaque Minerales SA de CV ("Yaque"), to acquire up to 50% interest in four concessions comprising 1,057 hectares (see Press Releases - April 12 and April 26, 2021).

"We expedited our due diligence, validated our high level of interest and now have signed the DA to acquire an interest in Diamante," said Greg Davison, Silver Spruce VP Exploration and Director. "With execution of the DA, Silver Spruce and our project partner, Yaque and Colibri, shall commence geological, spectral and LiDAR mapping, rock sampling and an environmental report for SEMARNAT approval and the permit necessary to engage the maiden 2,000 metre drilling program at Diamante."

Figure 1. Diamante 1 and 2 Concession Location Map. Note adjacent El Mezquite and Jackie Concessions. Nicho mine development by Minera Alamos located 12 km SE of Diamante.

The Diamante gold-silver (Au-Ag) project ("Diamante" or the Property") is a drill-ready precious metal project located 5 km northwest of the town of Tepoca, and 165 km southeast of the capital city of Hermosillo, eastern Sonora, Mexico.

Diamante 1 is situated adjacent to the west boundary of Silver Spruce's 180-ha El Mezquite project. Diamante 2, 700 metres south of Diamante 1, is located 1.6 kilometres northwest of the Company's 1,130-ha Jackie project (Figure 1). The acquisition nearly doubles the Company's land holdings to 2,367 hectares.

Silver Spruce engaged a geological team to Diamante to verify the location of known mineralization, collect a photographic record of the geology, topography and vegetation, and carry out preliminary rock sampling.

The assays of specific interest from rock samples collected at five of the targets (Calton, El Cumbro, El Cazo-La Olla, La Prieta and El Chon) are reported below in Table 1, and includes channel and grab samples from the artisanal workings.

Table 1. Selected precious metal, base metal and pathfinder element assays from due diligence samples

"The pathfinder elements associated with precious and base metals create an opportunity to evaluate geochemical zoning on a property scale prior to drilling, and the artisanal workings provides the Company with early targets for discovery," stated Greg Davison, Silver Spruce VP Exploration and Director.

Project Geology

Diamante covers ten known occurrences at La Prieta-El Aguaje, El Chon-El Pillado, La Olla, La Cruz and El Caso, Mezquite Raizudo, El Puerto, El Cumbro, Calton and the Southern Anomaly.

Historical exploration sampling on Diamante (Tables 2 and 3) has reported outstanding values of Au, Ag, Pb and Zn collected from mine dumps, slag, and vein and stockwork mineralization (see Press Release - April 12, 2021).

The Property exhibits geological features of epithermal low to intermediate sulphidation Ag-Au (Pb-Zn), high sulphidation Au-Cu, and potential transition to porphyry style Au-Cu. Polymetallic mineralization occurs as disseminated, stockwork and vein styles accompanied by silicification (with veining), and phyllic, argillic, advanced argillic and propylitic zones, with near-surface overprinting by weathering, iron oxide and oxyhydroxide staining, jarosite and vuggy silica.

Table 2. Selected precious metal, base metal and pathfinder element assays from mine dumps

Table 3. Selected precious metal, base metal and pathfinder element assays from veins and stockworks

Structural lineaments with ENE, NE and NW orientations identified in the historical exploration correspond to six known vein systems.

Mineralization is reported as pyrite, chalcopyrite and galena, and probable secondary base metal oxides, carbonates and sulphates, including copper carbonate (malachite) and copper sulphates.

Project Background

The Property is located within the west-central portion of the Sierra Madre Occidental Volcanic Complex within the prominent northwest-trending "Sonora Gold Belt" of northern Mexico and parallel to the well-known, precious metals-rich Mojave-Sonora Megashear (Figure 2).

The adjacent El Mezquite and Jackie projects are currently subject to option agreements with Colibri wherein SSE can earn 50% of the gold and silver projects by meeting certain criteria over four years and two years, respectively. El Mezquite and Jackie currently have assays pending from Phase 1 mapping and prospecting while the Company recently received our SEMARNAT approval for El Mezquite's maiden drilling program to begin next month.

Figure 2. Location Map of Diamante Property and Mines of the Sierra Madre Occidental

Terms of Agreement

Silver Spruce has completed the execution of the Definitive Agreement and upon acceptance by the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV), to earn its initial 25% interest in the Property, the Company agrees to pay Colibri an initial cash amount of $75,000 USD directed to the Vendor's $100,000 USD initial property payment whereupon Silver Spruce and Yaque each will hold a 25% interest in the Property and manage the Property as equal partners ("Partners").

Silver Spruce will be the designated operator of the Property during the earn-in period with the Vendor. The Partners will direct the exploration program via a Project Oversight Committee.

To earn its initial 50% of the Diamante project, Silver Spruce and Yaque also agree to design, permit and drill a minimum of 2,000 metres on the Property within 24 months from the Execution Date of Yaque's final agreement with the Vendor; including any requisite exploration leading to the drill program, submit a final drilling report to meet NI 43-101 reporting guidelines and pay approved exploration costs at a ratio of Silver Spruce (75%) and Yaque (25%).

The Partners will pay to the Vendor 50% of the bi-annual property taxes and surface rights payments.

Upon completion of the initial earn-in, Silver Spruce and Yaque will become equal joint venture partners with the Vendor in BIMCOL, a private Mexico company holding the concessions, pay to the Vendor 50% of the bi-annual property taxes and surface rights payments and pay approved prorata exploration costs at a ratio of Silver Spruce (50%) and Yaque (50%).

Yaque will have an exclusive period of six months to purchase the remaining 50% of BIMCOL by paying the Vendor either of: i) US$2.1 million or ii) US$1.45 million and the grant of a 2% net smelter royalty (NSR) on the project.

Should Yaque elect to exercise its right to purchase the remaining 50% of BIMCOL, Yaque will also grant Silver Spruce the option to purchase one-half of its additional ownership for one-half of the cost for a period not to exceed six (6) months from the date Yaque elects to exercise its right and Yaque will provide three (3) months notice to Silver Spruce for the purchase due date within the first three (3) months of the option period.

Geochemical Analysis, Quality Assurance and Quality Control

Due diligence samples were delivered to the ALS sample preparation facility in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. ALS Global in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is a facility certified as ISO 9001:2008 and accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2005 from the Standards Council of Canada. Analytical protocols are described previously (see Press Release - April 12 and April 26, 2021).

Given the small number of samples collected, in-house quality control samples (blanks, standards, preparation duplicates) were not inserted into the due diligence sample set. ALS Global conducts its own internal QA/QC program of blanks, standards and duplicates, and the results were provided with the Company sample certificates. The results of the ALS control samples were reviewed by the Company's QP and evaluated for acceptable tolerances. All sample and pulp rejects will be stored at ALS Global pending full review of the analytical data, and future selection of pulps for independent third-party check analyses, as requisite.

All of the metal values disclosed herein by past operators and Silver Spruce are reported from grab and channel samples which may not be representative of the metal grades, and those from previous exploration efforts must be considered as historical in nature. The Company has reviewed the certificates and believes the analytical protocols and data will withstand scrutiny for inclusion.

Qualified Person

Greg Davison, PGeo, Silver Spruce VP Exploration and Director, is the Company's internal Qualified Person for the Diamante Project and is responsible for approval of the technical content of this press release within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"), under TSX guidelines.

About Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

Silver Spruce Resources Inc. is a Canadian junior exploration company which has signed Definitive Agreements to acquire 100% of the Melchett Lake Zn-Au-Ag project in northern Ontario, and with Colibri Resource Corp. in Sonora, Mexico, to acquire 50% interest in Yaque Minerales S.A de C.V. holding the El Mezquite Au project, a drill-ready precious metal project, and up to 50% interest in each of Colibri's early stage Jackie Au and Diamante Au-Ag projects, with the three properties located from 5 kilometres to 15 kilometres northwest from Minera Alamos's Nicho deposit, respectively. The Company also is pursuing exploration of the drill-ready and fully permitted Pino de Plata Ag project, located 15 kilometres west of Coeur Mining's Palmarejo Mine, in western Chihuahua, Mexico. Silver Spruce Resources Inc. continues to investigate opportunities that Management has identified or that have been presented to the Company for consideration.

Contact:

Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

Greg Davison, PGeo, Vice-President Exploration and Director

(250) 521-0444

gdavison@silverspruceresources.com

Michael Kinley, CEO

(902) 826-1579

mkinley@silverspruceresources.com

info@silverspruceresources.com www.silverspruceresources.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.

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements," Statements in this press 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.

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 mineral exploration and difficulties associated with obtaining financing on acceptable terms. We are not in control of metals prices and these could vary to make development uneconomic. 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 press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions will prove to be accurate.

SOURCE: Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643256/Silver-Spruce-Signs-Definitive-Agreement-to-Acquire-Interest-in-Diamante-1-and-2-Au-Ag-Concessions-Sonora-Mexico
Colton Underwood stripped off for a shirtless selfie amid growing backlash over his upcoming Netflix series.

The Bachelor vet, 29, posted photos of his toned torso to his Instagram account on Thursday.

'this year i prioritized my health. physically and mentally,' Colton captioned the slideshow.

Showing it off: Colton Underwood stripped off for a shirtless selfie amid growing backlash over his Netflix series

In the two photos, Colton posed with his six packs on display as he wore a pair of blue shorts and a black cap.

The photos come as backlash over his upcoming Netflix series continues.

A Change.org petition has already garnered 34,851 signatures in response to the news that Colton, who came out as gay earlier this month, will starring in a Netflix series about his new life.

The petition, called 'Cancel Colton Underwood's Netflix Documentary,' cites accusations Colton stalked and harassed his ex-girlfriend Cassie Randolph as reason for the cancellation.

Toned: In the two photos, Colton posed with his six packs on display as he wore a pair of blue shorts and a black cap

Colton and Cassie met on his season of The Bachelor, and the couple dated for over a year after the show.

However, she filed a restraining order against him last year and accused him of stalking and harassing her.

In documents filed with the request to the court and obtained by DailyMail.com, it is alleged Colton was 'stalking and harassing' Cassie, sending her 'unsettling text messages', repeatedly calling her, and placing a 'tracking device on her vehicle to track her whereabouts.'

The restraining order request also said that Colton had been seen outside her parents' home in Huntington Beach, California, on several occasions, including one time he was outside Cassie's bedroom window at two in the morning.

Split: Cassie Randolph was granted a temporary restraining order against her ex after their break-up, which she ultimately dismissed

'Mr. Underwood also watches Ms. Randolph's apartment in Los Angeles. Mr. Underwood admitted to his roommate and his roommate's girlfriend (who is also Ms. Randolph's friend) that he goes on multiple walks a day to Ms. Randolph's apartment building,' the document continued.

Colton 'obsessively called and sent text messages' when Cassie had a male visitor, leaving Cassie 'startled that he knew who was coming in and out of her apartment, and felt like she was being watched.'

He sent similar messages when she visited her family and friends, indicating that he knew where she was, the documents read.

'I'm gay': Underwood came out during a Good Morning America with Robin Roberts earlier this month

In addition to sending her frequent text messages from his own number  and also texting members of her family  Colton also allegedly 'used alias phone numbers to anonymously send harassing text messages at all hours of the day to Ms. Randolph and to her friends.'

What's more, he allegedly used those same fake numbers to send harassing messages to his own phone number.

Cassie was ultimately granted a temporary restraining order, but dismissed it.

Colton made headlines earlier this month after coming out as a gay during an interview on Good Morning America.

'I've ran from myself for a long time': Colton said the pandemic forced him to finally 'look at himself in the mirror and come to terms with his sexuality

During his interview with Robin Roberts, Colton said the pandemic forced him to finally 'look at himself in the mirror and come to terms with his sexuality.

'I'm gay,' he told Robin.

'Obviously this year's been a lot for a lot of people and it's probably made a lot of people look themselves in the mirror and figure out who they are and what they've been running from or putting off in their lives and for me, I've ran from myself for a long time,' he explained. 'I've hated myself for a long time.'

The reality star rose to stardom as a contestant on Becca Kufrin's season of The Bachelorette, where he revealed he was a virgin.

Colton ultimately came in fourth, and was named the next Bachelor shortly after her season finished airing. He selected Cassie as his final rose choice.
Michael B. Jordan says late actor Chadwick Boseman continues to inspire him and others.

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The 34-year-old actor appeared on Thursday's episode of Good Morning America, where he discussed Boseman's final role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and the actor's lasting legacy.

Jordan, who starred with Boseman in the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther, said it was an emotional experience to watch Boseman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The film premiered on Netflix in November following Boseman's death in August.

"Seeing his performance in Ma Rainey, in hindsight looking at it -- so emotional. You're looking at the last performance he gave, and that says a lot," Jordan said.

Boseman was widely expected to win Best Actor for his performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Oscars on Sunday, but lost to Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

"Oscar or no Oscar -- I think he won," Jordan said on GMA. "The way he inspires people and the way he inspired us around the world ... it's something that changed me for the rest of my life."

Boseman died Aug. 28 at age 43 following a private battle with colon cancer.

Jordan and Boseman played Killmonger and T'Challa, aka Black Panther, in Black Panther. Jordan said in an interview on Good Morning America in February that he is open to returning as Killmonger in Black Panther 2.

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Lupita Nyong'o , who plays Nakia in Black Panther, said in an interview with GMA in March that Black Panther 2 will honor Boseman's legacy.

Jordan will next star in the film Without Remorse, which premieres Friday on Amazon Prime Video.
As of early April, the Russian-occupation forces in eastern Ukraine violated the ceasefire more than 1,000 times, killing 25 Ukrainian service members and wounding another 83.

"As of April 2, the ceasefire, which came into force in July 2020, was violated by the Russian-occupation forces 1,074 times, including 138 times with weapons prohibited by the Minsk Agreements. As a result, 25 Ukrainian service members were killed during this period, another 83 were wounded," Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna informed the participating States during the OSCE Forum for Security Co-operation meeting on Wednesday, April 28, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

It was pointed out that the security situation remains dangerous and "there is a constant threat due to the presence of Russian-occupation forces in the Ukrainian Crimea and in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions."

Foreign delegations were informed that since January this year, Russia has significantly enhanced the combat effectiveness of its occupying forces in eastern Ukraine (1st and 2nd Army Corps). Currently, it consists of 30,000 people, including 2,000 members of the Russian Armed Forces.

In addition, Russia continues to deliver equipment to its occupying forces in eastern Ukraine through a section of the border not controlled by the Government of Ukraine. In January-April 2021, the Russian Federation delivered about 19,000 tonnes of fuel, 355 tonnes of ammunition, 35 trucks, tanks, and multiple rocket launchers to certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

At the same time, in violation of humanitarian law and its own international obligations, the Russian Federation continues to supply its forces in eastern Ukraine with banned POM-2 antipersonnel mines, which pose a major threat to the civilian population.

"The situation on the ground has deteriorated seriously. Compared to the end of 2020, there is a 1.3-fold increase in the number of attacks, and military losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have more than tripled," the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna said.

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I n a report by The World Health Organisation, it was revealed that up to 90 per cent of the visible changes commonly attributed to ageing may be caused by sun exposure.

To combat signs of ageing as well as protect against skin cancer, the importance of sunscreen cannot be overlooked as the sunny weather approaches.

Yet, the parabens, silicones and synthetic fragrances contained in traditional sunscreens can actually have a damaging effect rather than protective  for both your skin and the environment.

Hawaii have recently passed a law banning the selling of certain chemical sunscreens that contain oxybenzone or octinoxate, which have been found in high concentrations at coral reefs - and theyre not the only ones. Palau and Mexico have followed suit.

These chemicals destroy the algae that lives on coral thereby harming the marine environment of the reefs and the surrounding wildlife.

More and more people are looking to natural and organic sunscreens to counter these damaging side effects, not just for our own skin but for our oceans as well.

Sun lotion falls into two major categories; chemical and mineral. Natural SPFs may also be known as mineral sunscreens. These formulas contain active ingredients like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. They act as a physical barrier to deflect and shield against UVA and UVB rays where as chemical formulas absorb the rays. This ensures that they wont irritate the skin and makes them a better choice for those with sensitivities or irritations. The formulas are packed with antioxidants like vitamin E to give an extra defence against free radicals and environmental stressors that can cause premature skin ageing.

So whether you're a sun worshippers or a shade chasers, you can enjoy sun-soaked days with our selection of the best natural, organic and ocean-friendly alternatives for you and your family.

Pai British Summer Time Zinc & Cotton Extract SPF 30

Seven years in the making and well worth the wait, Pais suncream is the broad spectrum protect that you need. Its packed with skin boosting benefits and the formula is not greasy, leaves a slightly matte finish and is so lightweight that it can be worn under makeup with ease.

It is reef-friendly - comprised of zinc oxide that provides a shield from blue light and infra-red too.

Wear rain or shine to protect against premature skin ageing without drying or causing breakouts. It can be worn on sensitive skin and for daily use. The sun lotion also has a lovely scent.

Pai

REN Clean Skincare Clean Screen Mineral Sun Cream SPF 30

It comes as no surprise that clean skincare label Ren has a sun protection product that is free from any harsh or unwelcome ingredients.

The broad spectrum SPF 30 protects against UVA, UVB rays and blue light with a mattifying effect.

Kind to your skin and the planet, it is crafted from recycled packaging (50 per cent for the tube and 100 per cent for the cap). Its also vegan, cruelty and silicone-free.

Ren Clean Skincare

Dead Sea Spa Magik Sunsafe

This natural sunscreen contains Dead Sea minerals to both hydrate and protect skin as well as Aloe Vera to cool and soothe potential irritation - it also has a lovely, natural scent. The hypoallergenic formula is water resistant, vegan and and contains broad spectrum UVA and UVB protection at SPF 50. With no pore-clogging side effects, this sunscreen is gentle on the face and provided good protection without a greasy sheen.

Dead Sea Spa

Ultrasun Body Mineral Sunscreen SPF50

For sun protection that packs a powerful punch without feeling laborious or heavy on the skin, Ultrasun has got you covered. The brand is all about education on the effects of harmful rays on the skin so SPF 50 is a given and theres a high UVA filter of over 95 per cent.

The formula is hard working and high tech - made entirely from mineral filters like organic sunflower shoots and antioxidants from the likes of the Tara tree. It will also protect against blue light.

You can also shop the brands formula for face (26).

Ultrasun

SkinCeuticals Sheer Mineral UV Defense SPF50

Beloved by beauty editors and dermatologists alike, SkinCeuticals use scientific-backed formulas to create products that just work.

This mineral sunscreen protection provides an excellent shield from UV rays, while also evening out skin tone and not causing flakiness, dryness or blemishes. The non-irritating formula can even be used on sensitive skin and those suffering from rosacea.

It provides excellent cover and leaves you with a radiant complexion - what more can you ask for?

SkinCeuticals

Drunk Elephant Umbra Sheer Physical Daily Defence SPF 30

If youve not yet heard of Drunk Elephant - have you been living under a rock?

The no-nasties skincare label craft efficacious formulas free from the Suspicious Six as the brand refers to them (drying alcohol, silicones, SLS, chemical screens, essential oils or fragrance/dyes). The same is true for the sunscreens and so, they are reef-safe and non-toxic to marine life.

That being said, the product still delivers strong protection against the sun rays, while treating your skin to the benefits of antioxidants, raspberry seed and marula oils to nourish skin with moisture at the same time.

It can be used on a daily basis and under makeup as the product doesnt leave behind a sticky residue or unpleasant texture.

Drunk Elephant

CeraVe Facial Lotion with Suncream

As with all CeraVe products, the creams are developed alongside dermatologists, benefiting from their expertise. While the 70-product wide range provides sunscreens ranging from SPF 30 to 50, our favourite has to be the daily Facial Moisturizing Lotion for an easy way to incorporate SPF into your daily beauty routine.

The lightweight and fast absorbing formula provides a natural barrier against UVA rays and can be worn easily under make up. With the well-publicised ageing effects of sun exposure, this sunscreen will ensure your skins natural barrier is repaired, restored and maintained.

Green People Scent Free Sun Lotion

Renowned for their certified organic award-winning skin and body products, Green People know a thing or two about natural skincare. The labels sun lotion protects against both UVA and UVB rays with its natural and 78% certified organic formula that contains Vitamins A, C and E, alongside Green tea, olive, avocado and rosemary extract that support skins immune systems and prevent against premature ageing.

Free from silicones, emulsifiers or artificial fragrances, the cream is designed for those with sensitive skin. With no added fragrance, it is also non-greasy, water repellent and easy to spread. Whats more, 10% of the labels net profit is donated to charity.

Supporting your skins immune and protecting against cell damage, the sun cream is available in SPF 15 and 30.

Green People

Odylique Natural Sun Screen

Dont be alarmed by the pale green colouring of this natural sun cream, this is due to the fact that it has no artificial UV filters, preservatives, fragrance or colouring. The PETA-approved formula is also the first ever sunscreen that is both approved by the Fairtrade Foundation and organically certified.

It contains nine organic botanicals such as karanja seed and Fairtrade raw shea butter to replenish and soothe skin and protect against ageing. Designed for both your face and body, it also includes extracts of calming chamomile, rosemary and sea buckthorn (which is rich in omega 7) to calm the skin and counteract the damaging effects of the sun.

The silicone-free cream is SPF 30.

Incognito Skin

Winning the Queen's Award for Sustainable Development, Incognito Skin is a summer essential. For a natural sunscreen and insect repellent in one knockout formula, look no further than Incognito. Ideal for travelling, this cream will become your new best friend to protect against the sun as well as mosquito bites.

Paraben & SLS free, it contains only natural and organic ingredients such as aloe, geranium and edelweiss, making it suitable for vegans. The citrus-scented fragrance is made in the UK and once shaken creates an easily spreadable texture. The packaging is also made for renewable sugarcane and 10% of profits go to charity.

Kypris Suncreen

Cleverly titled Pot of Shade, this mineral-based formula has a dual function. As well as protecting your skin against UVA and UVB rays, the cream can also be worn under your make up as a primer due to the velvety, translucent finish. The cream contains Sweet Iris Stem Cells and Sunflowers, which are rich in fatty acid for a plumping and luminous effect as well as organic, co-op grown Tamanu seed oil for a radiant glow.

Void of artificial scents - this stellar natural sunscreen gave our skin a protective hydration boost while protecting from sun damage with SPF 30.

Verdict
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Market Reports on Saudi Arabia Provides the Trending Market Research Report on Chilled Noodles (Pasta and Noodles) Market in Saudi Arabia - Outlook to 2024; Market Size, Growth and Forecast Analytics (updated with COVID-19 Impact) under Food category. The Chilled Noodles (Pasta and Noodles) Market in Saudi Arabia is projected to exhibit highest growth rate over report offers a collection of superior market research, market analysis, and competitive intelligence and industry reports.

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Chilled Noodles - these are "fresh" noodles (in a similar way to fresh pasta) which are bagged and require chilled/refrigerated storage. Relatively rare in Western countries.

Chilled Noodles market in Saudi Arabia registered a positive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.58% during the period 2014 to 2019 with a sales value of SAR 6.30 Million in 2019, an increase of 3.15% over 2018. The market achieved its strongest performance in 2018, when it grew by 4.12% over its previous year and its weakest performance in 2017, when it increased by 1.84% over 2016.

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Market Reports on Saudi Arabia provides you with an in-depth industry reports focusing on various economic, political and operational risk environment, complemented by detailed sector analysis. We have an exhaustive coverage on variety of industries  ranging from energy and chemicals to transportation, communications, constructions and mining to Food and Beverage and education. Our collection includes over 3000 up-to-date reports all researched, analysed and published by top-notch international research firms.

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ROME, APR 29 - One person was killed and five injured, one seriously, after part of a structure collapsed at an Amazon logistical worksite in Alessandria Thursday. Amazon said it was a "terrible accident". It said "we are at the disposal of the authorities". (ANSA).
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pacific Western Bank (PWB) announced today they have partnered with Extend, a New York City-based fintech, to launch a Virtual Mastercard commercial credit card solution. PWB is pleased to be the first bank in the country offering their business clients this simplified solution for payment processing in a white labeled app available through the Apple store and Google Play store.



Their new offering will enable the bank's clients to generate true, virtual cards on demand through the PWB Virtual Card app that can easily be utilized for simple, secure payments. Once enabled, a client can instantly empower their employees, contractors, and vendors to use virtual cards for single or recurring purchases without having to wait for physical cards. Clients can establish controls on each virtual card and set recurring cards for ongoing vendor payments.

"Launching a virtual card solution is a critical step in our ongoing effort to deliver a premiere digital banking experience," said Mark Yung, COO at Pacific Western Bank. "Pairing enhanced security and a handy mobile app to manage and track payments, we are delivering our clients greater control over their payment processing needs."

As demand for virtual payments continues to increase, Pacific Western Bank will be able to deliver their clients enhanced security with virtual cards without exposing a real card number. Virtual delivery replaces a cardholder's Mastercard account number with a secure token that protects the underlying card number from fraud or identity theft. Additional benefits such as improved reconciliation, receipt and invoice attachments will all contribute to seamless expense management integration.

"Demand for virtual cards has been accelerating as business clients are seeking modern solutions for B2B vendor payments, client pass-through payments, and card-less or remote employees. We are very excited to bring the latest payments technologies to PWB and their clients." said Andrew Jamison, CEO and co-founder of Extend.

About Pacific Western Bank

Pacific Western Bank is a commercial bank with over $32 billion in assets headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with executive offices in Denver, Colorado. The Bank has 70 full-service branches located in California, with one branch located in Durham, North Carolina, and one branch located in Denver, Colorado. The bank provides community banking products including lending and comprehensive deposit and treasury management services to small and medium-sized businesses through our California-based branch offices and Denver, Colorado branch office. The Bank offers national lending products including asset-based, equipment, and real estate loans and treasury management services to established middle-market businesses on a national basis. The Bank also offers venture banking products including a comprehensive suite of financial services focused on entrepreneurial and venture-backed businesses and their venture capital and private equity investors, with offices located in key innovation hubs across the United States. For more information about Pacific Western Bank, visit www.pacwest.com .



About Extend

Extend is modernizing banking infrastructure for the future of payments. By partnering with major processors and networks, Extend delivers modern card services on existing payment rails. Now trusted financial institutions can immediately offer innovative card solutions to business clients and tap into growing payment markets. Extend offers several services to banks looking to better serve business clients and build new relationships with 3rd-party fintechs, including a suite of aggregated virtual card APIs, a virtual card app, and an industry-first card tokenization service. Founded in 2017 by industry veterans with decades of experience at Fortune 500 companies, including American Express and Capital One, Extend is headquartered in New York. For more information visit paywithextend.com

Media Contacts:

Kristen Mboijana

Pacific Western Bank

301.634.6905

[email protected]

SOURCE Pacific Western Bank

Related Links

www.pacificwesternbank.com


Hyderabad, April 29 : Actor Venkatesh shared an Instagram post on Thursday to inform fans that his upcoming Telugu film "Narappa" has been postponed owing to the Covid pandemic. The film was earlier scheduled to release on May 14.

"'Narappa' is a film that we have made with a lot of dedication and hard work and your love towards the film has been overwhelming. However ,we are all going through a turbulent time during this unprecedented global pandemic and hence, keeping in mind the health and safety of our beloved audience,the theatrical release of the film has been postponed," Venkatesh wrote on Instagram.

"We will bring Narappa to you just when the time is right... Until then, be safe take care of yourself and stay strong. We will all get through this together. Please mask up, STAY HOME AND STAY SAFE #NarappaPostponed," he added.

"Narappa" is the Telugu remake of Dhanush 's National Award-winning Tamil hit, "Asuran".
Philadelphia police have arrested a 16-year-old who they say is connected to four killings since December, including the fatal shooting of a man who was gunned down after his release from a city jail last month.

Ameen Hurst, of Philadelphia, faces murder and related charges in connection with two shooting incidents: a Christmas Eve killing in Overbrook and a quadruple shooting in West Philadelphia on March 11 that left two men dead. Police said charges are also expected to be filed against him this week in connection with the shooting death of Rodney Hargrove, 20, near the front gates of the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in the middle of the night on March 18.

Just a day before the incident outside the jail, officials had publicly named Hurst as a person of interest in the Christmas Eve killing of 20-year-old Dyewou Nyshawn Scruggs, who was streaming live on social media when he was shot.

In none of the cases did police offer a possible motive for the shootings.

The briefing was the first in a series of biweekly news conferences that activists had pressed Mayor Jim Kenneys administration to hold amid surging violence.

Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Naish said this week that at the time of the briefing, police had also connected Hurst to the March 11 shooting of four people in a parked vehicle on the 1400 block of N. 76th St. Two of the victims, 24-year-old Naquan Smith and 17-year-old Tamir Brown, died of their injuries.

Three days after the news conference, police received a tip that was instrumental in apprehending Hurst, Naish said Wednesday. Police first arrested him on March 20 and he was charged with murder.

ALSO READ: Teen charged as adult in armed robbery at Dauphin County home

Naish said ballistics evidence later led investigators to believe Hurst is at least one of the people responsible for killing Hargrove, who appears to have been a tragic victim of mistaken identity. Hargrove, of West Oak Lane, had been incarcerated for a week on theft and related charges, and was released on bail around 1 a.m. before he was shot.

Hursts attorney did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Hurst was denied bail and is being held at the Riverside Correctional Facility. He is scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing on May 10.

___

Anna Orso of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote this story.

(c)2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.inquirer.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
And, apparently, shes not the only senior Labor figure on the mailing list. Time for an audit. SITUATION VACANT Meanwhile, theres still an empty chair in Keneallys office after the NSW Senators last media adviser upped sticks after three months in the job. But theres not much interest in the job if LinkedIn is anything to go by. The post uploaded about a week ago stating experience in parliamentary tactics/strategy, politics, and/or the Home Affairs portfolio is highly desirable  is yet to attract any applicants, according to the jobs board. Chief of staff Chris Owens has listed a salary guide between $79,866 to $95,796 and an allowance of $29,862. Presumably, the job has had more bites elsewhere. TRADING PLACES Solomon Lew pulled off a coup this week convincing well-connected JB Hi-Fi boss Richard Murray to jump ship to run Lews Premier Investments, a gig which includes responsibility for brands including Just Jeans, Peter Alexander and Smiggle. The role also carries the added responsibility of representing Lew, who has forged a reputation in the industry as one of retails sharpest elbowed and most uncompromising players  somewhat of a step change from the congenial Murray who spends some of his spare time making waves as one of the harder working and more prolific Liberal Party donors and fundraisers.

Richard Murray and Solomon Lew Credit:John Shakespeare So it will be interesting to see how Murray handles the first diplomatic hurdle in his new role at Premier. Murray has been an active member of the Australian Retailers Association peak body over the past five years. He even serves as the chair of the ARAs chief executives advisory committee. He is also understood to have played a key role in appointing former David Jones chief executive Paul Zahra to lead the organisation. But theres one problem. Premier Investments has remained steadfastly outside the tent, refusing to join the peak body. Not his style, one industry boss remarked of Lew. When contacted on Thursday, one ARA source said they anticipated Premier would soon come into the fold. A spokesman from Lews camp noted Murray doesnt start until October. But theres another break in form between the two businessmen. Under Murray, JB Hi-Fi didnt claim JobKeeper subsidies during the pandemic, amid an online spending boom particularly on household items and whitegoods which lifted first-half earnings by 86 per cent. Meanwhile, Premier netted more than $15 million from the subsidy program in the six months to January, even as the company posted an 89 per cent lift in profits. And Lew has been unequivocal the group will keep the cash, arguing to pay staff in the event of any further  snap Covid-19 lockdowns. Question is, will Murray feel the same way? IN & OUT

Theres a lot of love for departing ABC chief foreign correspondent Philip Williams, leaving Aunty after 46 years. But the appreciative profiles have failed to mention a rare honour bestowed on the genial Williams: he is one of the few, if not the only, journalist to appear in a painting hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. The 2019 painting by his brother-in-law Rick Amor depicts a melancholy Williams bearing witness to history. The ABC coverage of the retirement was akin to a national moment. But there was no word on Williams replacement. Coincidently, in a parallel event, former BBC Australian correspondent Nick Bryant, now based in New York for the past eight years, announced that after 25 years at the BBC he was leaving the British public broadcaster and returning to Sydney with his Australian wife, designer Fleur Wood and their three children. He said on Facebook he was looking forward to whatever came next, but gave no word on what that was.
Ministers of have unanimously decided to contribute their one year's salary for COVID relief work in the state.

"We the ministers in have decided to donate one year of our salary for COVID relief work," state Revenue Minister R Ashoka said here on Thursday.

Ashoka was briefing reporters about Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa's meeting with the district officials to review COVID management and enforcement of lockdown.

The Minister said 230 acres of land across the state have been reserved for cremation purposes and accordingly, the Deputy Commissioners have handed over land to the Tehsildars.

In Bengaluru, three crematoria had developed problems following which three more were planned at Mavallipura, Giddenahalli and Tavarekere on the city outskirts.

However, two of them at Giddenahalli and Tavarekere with a capacity to cremate 70 bodies have become operational while the one at Mavallipura with a capacity to burn 40 will start operations soon.

Home Minister Basavaraj Bommai, who was present at the press meet, said the superintendents of police of all the districts have been directed to strictly impose the restrictions.

Permission has been granted to use 8,500 home guards for COVID related jobs, Bommai said adding, the state has decided to utilise 15,000 civil defence volunteers for tracking, tracing and home isolation of COVID patients.

The Minister noted that around 300 jail inmates have tested positive for COVID-19 following which the sanitisation of jails is underway while arrangements have been made to isolate the COVID patients in jail.

Meanwhile, the state government said in a statement that directions have been issued to the Deputy Commissioners to set up COVID care centres on priority basis.

Funds released to the deputy commissioners should be used for distributing medical kits to COVID affected, who are in home isolation, it added.

The CM directed the officials to ensure that all hospitals conducted an audit of oxygen and Remdisivir vials.

"The Chief Minister also instructed to ensure judicious usage of oxygenated beds, ventilators and Remdesivir, which should be given only to the needy.

DCs have been told to ensure timely oxygen supply to the hospitals," the statement read.

The government has also ordered a taskforce in Taluk and Gram Panchayat level to take care of infected people.

On testing, the government said the focus should be on symptomatic patients and the results must be given within 24 hours.

All backlogs shall be cleared soon, it added.

These directions came as the cases swelled in to a new high of 39,000 cases a day on Wednesday alone leading to the unprecedented demand for ICU beds, oxygen and Remdesivir antiviral drugs.

To contain COVID, the government has imposed a lockdown starting from April 27 night to May 12 morning in the urban areas of Karnataka.
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Britain's hospitality crisis was laid bare today as industry experts revealed 15 per cent of furloughed staff won't return to their jobs in the sector because they have moved abroad or taken a different role.

Experts said restaurant bosses were being hampered in their search for staff ahead of the reopening of indoor hospitality on May 17 because of the uncertainty still surrounding whether coronavirus restrictions will be lifted.

They have also faced an exodus of foreign workers back to their home countries during the pandemic, with EU staff now making up 39 per cent of the UK hospitality workforce, down from 43 per cent at the same point in 2019.

Data from hospitality software provider Fourth also revealed 35 per cent of new starters in the first three months of 2021 were from the EU, which was a significant drop from 49 per cent in the first quarter two years ago.

The overall workforce headcount is also still down 28 per cent compared to shortly after the pandemic began in April 2020, and the number of hours worked across the sector this month was at 72 per cent of the level last July.

The research based on analysis of more than 700 firms also found staff aged 18 to 21 made up just 4 per cent of all hours worked last month, compared to 10 per cent in March 2019 - suggesting younger people are working less.

People eat and drink while sitting at tables outside a restaurant at lunchtime in the City of London this afternoon

A hospitality worker speaks to a diner as a group sit at a table outside a bar in the City of London this afternoon

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of industry body UKHospitality, said today that there were 'two elements' to the recruitment crisis and pointed out that it was being felt differently across the country as the lockdown is eased.

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning: 'One is that sadly we were unable to furlough a lot of staff during the course of last year, so companies are trying to recruit in what is a difficult market.

Data reveals how the UK's hospitality workforce has changed in two years Proportion of people starting new jobs in the hospitality sector British: 54% - up from 42% in 2019

EU: 35% - down from 49% in 2019

ROW: 11% - up from 9% in 2019 Proportion of people working in the hospitality sector British: 48% - up from 45% in 2019

EU: 39% - down from 43% in 2019

ROW: 13% - up from 10% in 2019 Proportion of people working in pubs British: 73% - up from 67% in 2019

EU: 21% - down from 26% in 2019

ROW: 5% - down from 6% in 2019 Proportion of people working in restaurants British: 73% - up from 67% in 2019

EU: 47% - down from 50% in 2019

ROW: 12% - up from 11% in 2019 Proportion of people working in hotels British: 57% - down from 60%

EU: 27% - down from 29% in 2019

ROW: 15% - up from 10% ROW = Rest of the world (anyone not from the UK or EU) Advertisement

'Clearly hospitality is at the back of the queue for reopening and still with a large amount of uncertainty hanging over it because of the restrictions, and uncertainty around when those restrictions will be lifted.

'That's hampering our ability to attract staff because the industry is still seen slightly as being at risk and potentially closing again or having severe restrictions which mean we can't offer people full-time roles.

'Secondly there is the challenge when we come to bring people back off furlough; 15 per cent of our staff who are coming off furlough are saying that they're not wanting to take a role back into the companies themselves.'

Ms Nicholls said one of the primary reasons for this was foreign workers who had returned home either before the Covid-19 crisis began or around Christmas and had since been unable to return to the UK because of travel restrictions.

She continued: 'You've also got students who make up a large proportion of our seasonal workforce, and we are due to be going into our peak season, who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

'And then sadly we've had people who have been on furlough and have taken a job in another sector, and are now saying they don't want to return to hospitality.

'So all of that is creating a crunch point at the point at which we're looking to return  previously employed staff not returning from furlough, and then the challenge of recruitment in an uncertain market.'

The data from Fourth also revealed the percentage of British and 'rest of world' (ROW) workers, including anyone from outside of the UK or EU, is up since 2019.

British workers now make up 48 per cent of the workforce and ROW workers make up 13 per cent.

This is in comparison to the first quarter of 2019, where British workers made up 45 per cent and ROW workers made up 10 per cent of the workforce. These increases coincide with a reduction in workers from the EU.

When considering those starting new jobs in the hospitality sector, the majority of workers in the first quarter of 2021 were British (54 per cent), followed by EU (35 per cent) and ROW (11 per cent) nationals.

These numbers have shifted considerably since the first quarter of 2019, where EU workers were the dominant category in terms of new starters (49 per cent), followed by British (42 per cent) and ROW (9 per cent) nationals.

People eat and drink while sitting at tables outside a The Sterling bar at the base of The Gherkin skyscraper in London today

People queue outside food stores to buy their lunch in the City of London this afternoon

The pub sector saw the biggest decline in EU workers, dropping from 26 per cent in the first quarter of 2019 to 21 per cent in the first quarter of 2021.

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of industry body UKHospitality, said the recruitment crisis was being felt differently across the country as the third national Covid-19 lockdown is eased

This is followed by the restaurant sector, dropping from 50 per cent to 47 per cent, and the hotel sector, dropping from 29 per cent to 27 per cent.

Conversely, the proportion of British workers making up the pub sector workforce has grown from 67 per cent in the first quarter of 2019 to 73 per cent in the first quarter of 2021. Meanwhile the number of ROW workers dropped from 6 per cent to 5 per cent.

The proportion of British workers in the restaurant sector has grown from 38 per cent to 40 per cent, while the number of ROW workers has grown from 11 per cent to 12 per cent.

The contingent of British workers in the hotel sector, however, has fallen from 60 per cent to 57 per cent, while the proportion of ROW workers in this sector has grown significantly from 10 per cent to 15 per cent.

Sebastien Sepierre, Fourth's EMEA managing director, said: 'We have been tracking the make-up of the workforce for a number of years, and its reliance on transient workers from European countries has been a prominent feature, particularly in high demand back-of-house roles, such as chefs.

'Clearly, the pandemic, coupled with new immigration systems post-Brexit, have had a significant impact on the make-up and availability of workers from EU countries within our industry, which will become increasingly prominent as we return to full capacity.'
Thalheimer, the first deaf American fashion designer to own and manufacture her own eponymous clothing business, is donating $30,000 worth of her classic-inspired shirts to these frontline heroes.

Known for her chic elegant shirts and hybrid shirt dresses, eye for detail, and easy tailoring, Thalheimer made history when her fashion designs sold on the racks of Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, Fred Segal, and numerous other high-end specialty shops across the U.S. She is a graduate of the Chouinard Art Institute, CAL ARTS.

Thalheimer has always pushed herself to succeed, and after her studies at CAL ARTS, entertained offers from Givenchy, Valentino and Brown's, London. Instead, she remained in her native Los Angeles where she honed her classic with an edge aesthetic and launched her business. She is a regular at New York Fashion Week.

Today through June 30, 2021 buyers will have the opportunity to view Thalheimer's Fall/Winter 2021 collection of shirts and shirt dresses in crisp cottons, luxurious silks, and cool linensall in her modern classic signature look. Her collection can be viewed online at designersandagents.com digital platforms.

Throughout her life, Thalheimer has never allowed her deafness to be a reason to give up on herself. She feels fortunate to have had so many others believe in her and her talent and skill as a designer.

This is why she has always given back to others.

Thalheimer's inspiration for this initiative comes from the kindness she received from the numerous nurses and doctors who helped her deal with her hearing loss when she was young.

More recently, nurses and doctors came to her rescue with compassion and empathy when she was diagnosed with leukemia several years ago. She was successfully treated for her leukemia at UCLA's Boyer Oncology Clinic.

"I was scared to death," Thalheimer said. "But I had great care and, most importantly, I had great love from the doctors and nurses. The staff represented the best of Americaall nationalities from many different countries showing what America stands for."

She said gifting her garments to frontliners is a way to show her gratitude.

"I'm deaf and often people don't have patience for me. The frontline doctors and UCLA Health nurses are always patient and generous with their time," she said. "So, this is my way of showing my thanks. During this terrible time for our country, I want the people who've given so much to others to know that we truly appreciate their efforts."

UCLA Health nurses will receive an email from within UCLA Health alerting them to their gift. Nurses will be able to go to the dedicated shopping page to collect their shirt. shop.monathalheimer.com/ucla

For more information contact:

Bruce Johnston at (310) 430-3025 or email him at [email protected] For the "Honoring UCLA First-Line Responders" page go to shop.monathalheimer.com/ucla

For a look at Mona Thalheimer's Fall/Winter 2021 collection: VIMEO

For Mona Thalheimer's work, go to monathalheimer.com

SOURCE Mona Thalheimer

Related Links

http://www.monathalheimer.com


Brisbane Airport saw two travellers from Papua New Guinea breach security

Australia is on high alert after two potential coronavirus crises in major cities

Australia is back on edge over Covid-19 after an airport breach in Brisbane and significant fragments of coronavirus were found in Melbourne sewers, putting both cities on high alert.

Victoria's Health Department revealed Thursday it detected 'strong and unexpected' fragments of Covid in the state's sewage.

The Health Department said 246 people who live in Melbourne's western and north-western suburbs were called on Thursday and asked to get a test.

Brisbane authorities are meanwhile scrambling to identify people exposed to two passengers arriving from virus 'red zone' Papua New Guinea who were allowed to mingle with travellers heading to New Zealand at Brisbane Airport.

The duo returned from Covid hotspot Port Moresby on Thursday morning and were allowed to head to a cafe and a shop at the airport for almost two hours before authorities discovered the breach.

One of the two had since returned a negative test and the other an inconclusive result which will require another test.

The breach of isolation rules which allowed them to mingle with other travellers was put down to 'human error'.

Brisbane Airport Corporation confirmed on Thursday passengers arriving from 'red zone' country Papua New Guinea were allowed to mix with travellers heading to New Zealand (file image of Brisbane Airport)

Hundreds of Victorias have been urged to get tested for coronavirus after 'strong and unexpected' fragments of Covid were found in the state's sewage

The Victorian Health Department said it was scrambling to determine whether the sewer samples are evidence of latent community cases of coronavirus or a new arrival.

'This additional action is being taken due to the strength of the wastewater detection and because a known positive Covid-19 case, from flight QF778, has been in Victoria in the past 14 days,' the department said in a statement.

The Victorian Government contacted 246 people on Thursday including four primary close contacts of that case and 242 recently returned red and orange zone travel permit holders.

'All of these primary close contacts have recently been tested and have returned negative results. All of the 246 people are being asked to test again out of an abundance of caution,' the statement continued.

It is most likely that these new detections are due to a person or persons continuing to shed the virus after the infection period however, it could also be due to a person living in or travelling through the area in the early active infectious phase.

'The wastewater testing program is designed as an early warning system to support our ongoing efforts in continuing to protect the CovidSafe environment we have achieved and therefore a cautious approach is always taken when these detections are found,' the department said.

The passengers arriving from Papua New Guinea were 'incorrectly allowed into the "green zone"'. Pictured, a staff member in protective medical clothing moves through the arrivals area at Brisbane Airport

Papua New Guinea has been fighting to get widespread community transmission of Covid under control

The Queensland Health Department said the two passengers who slipped through the airport's security system were at the port's Hudson Cafe at the same time almost 400 'green zone' travellers were preparing to fly out to New Zealand.

The Brisbane Airport Corporation said it 'unreservedly apologises for this human error'.

'At approximately 9.30am, two transit passengers arrived on a "red" flight from Port Moresby and proceeded through screening to transit as per normal process,' the airport said in a statement.

'Initial review of CCTV indicates that at approximately 9.55am, these passengers were incorrectly allowed into the "green zone". The passengers were seated at a retail outlet within the green zone until approximately 11.20am.

'The passengers then used the bathroom and attended another retailer before they were located by BAC staff and returned to the "red zone". They were in the green zone for just under two hours.'

New Zealand's Ministry of Health told travellers arriving in the country from Brisbane to monitor their health for the next 14 days.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:44:26|Editor: huaxia

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COLOMBO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank has approved 80.5 million U.S. dollars as additional financing to help Sri Lanka access and distribute fairly the COVID-19 vaccines and strengthen the country's vaccination system and pandemic response, local media quoted the World Bank as reporting Thursday.

This additional finance builds on the 217.56 million U.S. dollars which were approved in April 2020 towards the Sri Lanka COVID-19 Emergency Response and Pandemic Preparedness Project.

The World Bank said this new financing will help purchase vaccines to cover approximately 4 million people and will also cover the costs of deploying safe and effective vaccines to 20 percent of Sri Lanka's population to meet the target of vaccinating at least 60 percent of its population.

This additional financing will help implement the National Vaccine Deployment Plan of the Ministry of Health, the World Bank said.

"Sri Lanka has demonstrated resilience in the implementation of its test, trace and treat pandemic management strategy, which has relied on its well-established public healthcare system," said World Bank Country Director for Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka Faris H. Hadad-Zervos.

"To recover from the pandemic-induced impacts, Sri Lanka needs sustainable financing mechanisms to further strengthen and equip its healthcare system, to protect its population through improved vaccination programs and curative and preventive healthcare," Faris added.

Sri Lanka has to date vaccinated over 900,000 people in the country's Western Province including capital Colombo and will look to restart its vaccination program next month once more vaccines arrive. Enditem
LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile operator Vodafone and chipmaker Qualcomm said they would join forces to develop a technical blueprint for telecoms equipment suppliers to use Open RAN (radio access network) technology.

"The move aims to lower the entry barrier for many companies and drive diversification of network equipment vendors," the companies said on Thursday.

Mobile operators and governments want to encourage the development of Open RAN technology to help more vendors enter a market dominated by Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Sarah Young)
Mykey O'Halloran had finally saved enough money to buy a small beach house on Australia's Phillip Island - and he'd settled on a color scheme he thought was perfect for it.

As a proud gay hair stylist whose Unicorn Manes salon specializes in rainbow-hued designs, O'Halloran has crafted hair to resemble tacos, cheeseburgers and fries. So he figured it made sense to give the beige, three-bedroom and attached guest bungalow rainbow stripes from top to bottom.

But after he moved into the house in February, a few of his neighbors in the island community, population 7,071, didn't agree.

The evening of March 16, O'Halloran said, he heard somebody banging on his door. When he opened it, five angry men confronted him over his plan to paint his house with bright rainbow colors, he said.

"They'd heard about it through a conversation with the painter who was painting my kitchen," said O'Halloran, 29. "They told me, 'Don't do it. Paint your house and see what happens, because next time we meet, it won't be so nice.' "

"One of them said I would make his house drop in value by $20,000 if I painted my house in 'stupid' colors," he added.

The men shouted homophobic slurs, said O'Halloran, and one of them threatened to kill him if he went ahead with his rainbow project.

"I froze up inside and thought I was about to be seriously injured," he said.

O'Halloran said he told the men he didn't feel comfortable talking to them and shut the door. Then he phoned the police. One man was charged a few days later with unlawful assault and making threats to kill, according to a statement from Victoria Police.

O'Halloran decided to share his story about the unsettling experience on Facebook and other social media.

"I cried myself to sleep last night after feeling so invaded, homophobically attacked and threatened in my very own home," he wrote.

O'Halloran also wrote that he was not going to allow anyone to bully him out of his island getaway. He would proceed with his plan to paint the house as a big rainbow.

Hundreds of people who read his post agreed, and they volunteered to help him paint it.

"For every rat bag like him, the island has a thousand others who welcome you," one neighbor commented.

"You paint your house whatever colors you want to! I'm so sorry this happened to you!" commented a woman from Pennsylvania.

Within days, O'Halloran had a small army of volunteers lined up, and the Dulux paint company had donated 12 gallons of house paint in rainbow hues, he said.

On April 18, more than 100 people - including several children, a few home renovators and a couple of police officers - came to O'Halloran's house and spent seven hours painting the home's siding, deck and fence in stripes of blue, green, yellow, orange, purple and pink. One donor had eight surveillance cameras installed at O'Halloran's house in case anyone threatens him again.

Hundreds of others chipped in about $7,750 for a fundraiser O'Halloran organized this month with local businesses to benefit the local community group Phillip Island Community and Learning Centre.

"The positive response filled my heart with love and made me feel supported and not alone," O'Halloran said. "People were dropping by to shake my hand, say hello and welcome me to the neighborhood."

Linda Wilson, a counselor who lives on the island and facilitates a "Rainbow Connect" support group for the LGBTQ community, was among those who picked up a paintbrush.

"When I heard about what had happened to Mykey, I felt it was important that I be involved and show solidarity and support for him," said Wilson, 47.

"There was a lot of openheartedness there on the day [the house was painted], and someone volunteered their time with a barbecue to feed all who attended," she added.

"When I heard about the awful reaction [Mykey] had faced, I threw myself into it wholeheartedly," said Denni Slorach, 42, who runs a print shop in Grantville, Australia, about 25 miles from Phillip Island. She designed a rainbow house logo and stickers in support of the event.

"The day came from love and joy in life, and the finished house will be uniquely Mykey - a representation of his rainbow soul," she said. "So many people said they thought it would look awful, but now that they've seen it, they're pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out."

O'Halloran couldn't contain his delight when the last bright coat of paint had dried. He and others in the community are hoping to put on the island's first pride parade.

"I know in my heart that I'm a good person, and I deserve inclusion and acceptance for how I wish to live my life," he said.

"My message now is don't let anyone else dull your sparkle, and always stay true to yourself."
Petition launched to get Rusovce manor house reconstruction moving

2019 public procurement process for repairs dragging on.

Manor house in Rusovce still waits for its better times. (Source: TASR)

Local activists have launched a petition in a bid to force authorities to re-start reconstruction of one of the capitals most prominent  but almost derelict  historical sites, the Rusovce manor house.

Related article Stephanie  The forgotten princess of Rusovce Read more

The manor in Rusovce on the outskirts of Bratislava, which was home to the aristocracy for centuries and whose last private owner was Habsburg Princess Stephanie of Belgium, has been in disrepair for decades.

Owned by the state, over the years different governments have pledged, and even begun, its reconstruction. But, activists say, it remains in poor shape and is threatening to fall apart.

We walk around the manor house every day and instead of being the pride of Rusovce, it just continues to fall apart, said Robert Kalmar, one of three people behind the petition.

The petition calls on the Governments Office, as the administrator of the estate, to push ahead with restoration plans for the manor, pointing out that any further delays will not only lead to it falling further into disrepair, but also mean a higher price in the future for its ultimate reconstruction.

A project for the buildings reconstruction has already been finished, and a public tender for the work was launched during the previous government under Peter Pellegrini, now leader of the opposition Hlas party.

When the current government came to power last March, it said it wanted the project completed, but so far the only progress made has been the cleaning out of tons of bird droppings in the building last December.

When contacted by The Slovak Spectator, the Governments Office said it was unable to discuss plans for the manor.

29. Apr 2021 at 16:55 | Jana Liptakova
A man who told a Garda to fuck off was given the benefit of the Probation Act at Portlaoise court on Thursday.

Paddy Collins, 43, of 2 Castle Avenue, Kilminchy was charged with intoxication and using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour and failing to give his name and address at Bridge Street, Portlaoise on January 17 this year.

The court heard that he was highly intoxicated. He told Garda Pychynski to f**k off and called him a f**king foreigner.

Defending solicitor Josephine Fitzpatrick said that he was a man who had suffered certain abuse when he was younger. He had had a serious medical issue for the past two years and had not been drinking for months. He had slipped on the night in question and his behaviour had been outrageous.

He was engaging with Cuan Mhuire and was trying to address his issues.

He had met Garda Pychynski subsequently on the street and had apologised to him.

Ms Fitzpatrick asked Judge Staines not to impose a custodial sentence. He would benefit from the Probation Service and was working with Simon to find housing. His partner was also expecting a baby.

Judge Staines noted his apology and that he was making efforts to deal with his alcoholism.

She applied the Probation Act.
Indias coronavirus crisis is the worst since the pandemic began, and it will probably worsen before it gets better.

Hospitals are full, oxygen supplies are dwindling, and sick people are dying as they wait to see doctors. As workers leave locked-down cities for their home villages, experts fear that the exodus could accelerate the spread of the virus in rural areas, as a similar one did last year.

Official estimates of the nationwide infection toll  well above 300,000 a day  are probably undercounted, epidemiologists say. The reported figure will mostly likely rise to 500,000 cases a day by August, they say, leaving as many as one million of Indias 1.4 billion people dead from Covid-19.

Charities, volunteers and businesses in India and beyond are trying to help the countrys Covid victims and frontline workers.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes later this week as his administration look to remove the products which disproportionately impact the health of young people and racial minorities.

On Thursday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced their response to a citizens petition on the ban, confirming their intention to ban menthol smoking products.

The statement says: "The FDA is working toward issuing proposed product standards within the next year to ban menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and ban all characterizing flavors (including menthol) in cigars."

An estimated 20 million Americans smoke the mint-flavoured cigarettes, according to the FDA. The move to pass meaningful legislation has benefitted from additional support in recent years as health organisation such as the American Medical Association throw their weight behind the cause.

Racial minorities and young people are most at-risk

The demographic split of smokers in the United States has been shifting constantly for the last half century as the full extent of the health dangers has become more apparent. The tobacco industry has faced increasing restrictions on its products but menthol products have not been specifically addressed.

During that time menthol cigarettes have been aggressively marketed to Black people in the US, report the New York Times. Research from the FDA suggests that around 85% of Black people who smoke use menthol brands, with Newport and Kool particularly popular.

Menthol products can come in a variety of flavours and some, such a mass-produced flavoured cigarillos, have been linked to young people smoking. Research has shown that menthol cigarettes and related products are much easier to become addicted to and much harder to quit than traditional tobacco.

Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of the Center for Black Health and Equity, celebrated the new, saying it had been a long time coming.

We added: Weve been fighting this fight, since back in the 1980s. We told the industry then, we didnt want those cigarettes in our communities.

When will menthol cigarettes be banned in the US?

Although Biden looks set to announce his plans to enact a nationwide ban on menthol tobacco products, any such proposals would likely get caught up with lengthy court challenges. The FDA deadline was enforced by a federal district judge in Northern California who ruled that the agency must respond to the petition by 29 April 2021.

Last year the House of Representatives passed a bill which banned all favours of menthol cigarettes and e-cigarettes, but the proposal did not pass the Senate. This time the Democrats would be in a better position to push through such a bill but they would need at least ten Republican senators to cross the aisle and vote for the legislation.

The tobacco industry is expected to fight back pretty hard against these attempts to restrict their trade and Steven Callahan, a spokesman for Altria, which owns Philip Morris, said that they would prefer a different solution.

We share the common goal of moving adult smokers from cigarettes to potentially less harmful alternatives, but prohibition does not work, he said.

A far better approach is to support the establishment of a marketplace of F.D.A.-authorized non-combustible alternatives that are attractive to adult smokers.
Chennai, April 29 : The Madras High Court on Thursday granted anticipatory bail to actor Mansoor Ali Khan in a case related to spreading misinformation against the Covid vaccine. Justice M Dhandapani asked the actor to pay Rs 2 lakh to the Health secretary to purchase Covishield vaccine as a condition for bail.

Mansoor Ali Khan was charged by the Chennai police over the statements made by him in front of a private hospital where actor Vivekh was admitted after he suffered a massive heart attack on April 16. Khan had said that Vivekh had suffered a heart attack after taking the Covid vaccine on April 15 and this statement had gone viral.

The Vadapalani police had registered an FIR under Section 153, Section 270 and Section 505 (1)(b) of the Indian Penal Code. Provisions of the Endemic Act and the Disaster Management Act were also invoked against him.

Mansoor Ali Khan had deposed before the court that his statement in front of the private hospital was owing to an emotional outburst and that he had not intended to hurt anyone.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  New Yorkers will no longer have to buy a jelly sandwich, chips or other snack with their beer under an executive order that state lawmakers repealed Wednesday.

Last summer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order requiring food to be sold with alcoholic beverages at bars and restaurants. At the time, COVID-19 rates were low and the state had begun allowing New York City bars and restaurants to re-open.

State lawmakers passed resolutions Wednesday to repeal the directive, which restaurant owners have blasted for months as nonsensical.

Cuomo had said chips or fruit alone couldnt count as food, which led to a Saratoga Springs bar offering Cuomo Chips and Salsa.

Witnessing the industry-wide devastation during the pandemic was heartbreaking, Sen. John Mannion, a Democrat of central New York, said. Rescinding the food with beverage mandate is the most pressing issue in all of my conversations with owners and managers.

The rate of new COVID-19 cases in New York is higher than three dozen other states but plummeting: 27,000 people have tested positive in the last seven days, down 31% from nearly 40,000 the prior week.

More than 52,000 people have died of COVID-19 in New York since last year, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

Cuomo defended the food-with-drinks rule over his concerns about inebriated people mingling at bars without social distancing.

If youre not eating a meal and youre just drinking, then its just an outdoor bar and people are mingling and theyre not isolated and individual tables, and thats what were seeing, Cuomo said last July 16.

Also on Wednesday, Cuomo announced an end to restaurant and bar curfews starting next month. Outdoor and indoor dining areas can operate past midnight beginning May 17 and May 31, respectively.

And starting Monday May 3, people can sit at bars in New York City.

These outdated policies made it too difficult for too many small business owners and workers to support themselves and their families, and were a grave inconvenience to customers, Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, said.

Lawmakers, who have made it harder for Cuomo to pass new COVID-19 rules this year, repealed other executive orders Wednesday: including Cuomos elimination of a loophole allowing volunteers in government to avoid compliance with state ethical requirements.

Lawmakers also repealed Cuomos executive orders imposing fines and penalties on health care providers for failing to distribute COVID-19 vaccine within a week of receiving them.
The situation on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, where a conflict between the residents of the border regions of the two states took place on Wednesday, has aggravated, the Kyrgyz Border Service of the State Committee for National Security reported on Thursday.

"In the border area of the Batken region, namely in the Kocho-Boyu area of the Batken region, the situation has aggravated. The aggravation of the situation was caused by the provocative actions of the citizens of Tajikistan, who started throwing stones at the citizens of Kyrgyzstan and their homes," the statement said.

According to the border department, "the Tajik side began to fire at passing cars of Kyrgyz citizens from hunting rifles."

The report notes that, according to preliminary data, there are victims among the citizens of Kyrgyzstan.

"The situation on the Kyrgyz-Tajik section of the state border is tense. It was not possible to contact the leadership of the border department of the Republic of Tajikistan by phone, phone calls remained unanswered," TASS cited the Kyrgyz border service as saying.

For its part, on Wednesday, the press center of the State Committee for National Security of Tajikistan reported that seven citizens of Tajikistan were injured during the conflict at the Golovnoy water distribution point, which was "instigated by Kyrgyz citizens."

The Kyrgyz-Tajik border is about 972 km long and has dozens of disputed sections, which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At present, in the process of border delimitation and demarcation, about 519 km of the border crossing line have already been described.
UN says fighting displaces up to 100,000 people in Mogadishu

Xinhua) 11:26, April 29, 2021

MOGADISHU, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations humanitarian agency said Wednesday that between 60,000 and 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Mogadishu following an outbreak of violence on April 25.

Cesar Arroyo, the UN acting humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, said those displaced include vulnerable internally displaced persons who had sought refuge in the Somali capital but have again fled to find refuge at the outskirts of the city.

Armed conflict is on the rise and disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, Arroyo said, expressing concern about the deteriorating security situation in Mogadishu.

"Unlike the previous two years, most displacement in Somalia this year is conflict-related," he said in a statement issued in Mogadishu. "I urge parties to the conflict to respect international humanitarian law and their obligation to protect civilians."

According to the UN, conflict-related displacement has escalated in Somalia, and since January, an estimated 173,000 people have been displaced, almost two-thirds by conflict. This, the UN said, includes 50,000 people who were displaced by violence in 19 villages in Berdale in South West State, Gaalkacyo in Mudug region, and Cabudwaaq in Galgaduud region.

Arroyo said the initial violence between government and pro-opposition forces has created uncertainty and fear of disruptions of humanitarian assistance to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people across the city.

He said the situation has flared up at a time that Somalia is experiencing a full-fledged drought, a significant rise in COVID-19 cases, and a serious desert locust infestation.

Fighting erupted on Sunday in Mogadishu amid heightened tension after the lower house of parliament passed legislation on the extension of President Mohamed Farmajo's term by two years. Farmajo, whose four-year mandate officially ended on Feb. 8, signed into law the parliamentary bill, which is opposed by the opposition, shortly after it was passed on April 12.

Efforts to reach an agreement on how to carry out presidential and parliamentary elections, which were originally scheduled to take place in February, have been stalled for months.

Early Wednesday, Farmajo said he will no longer pursue the extension of his presidential term and called for a return to negotiations to break the current political impasse over arrangements for the delayed elections.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Next month marks the centenary of the creation of the Northern Irish state: a moment that, for unionists, would normally be a cause for celebration. Yet they will greet this historic milestone with little enthusiasm.

Theirs is a movement in deepening turmoil, wracked by divisions, battered by social change, threatened by the inexorable demographics of a growing nationalist population and increasingly divorced from mainstream opinion in mainland Britain.

Rarely has their cherished link with the United Kingdom looked so vulnerable.

Into this toxic swirl, Arlene Fosters sudden departure as Northern Irelands First Minister  and the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party  is a gift to those who hanker for a united Ireland and the dissolution of the UK.

Her ignominious exit  ousted by her own side over her perceived softness on issues including gay rights and co-operation with Sinn Fein  has dramatically intensified the unionists sense of crisis, and may prove the moment where the cries for Irish unity rise to a crescendo.

Next month marks the centenary of the creation of the Northern Irish state: a moment that, for unionists, would normally be a cause for celebration. Pictured: Stormont Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots

Never a hardliner in the mould of Ian Paisley, the rabble-rousing founder of the DUP and its leader for 37 years, Foster was a tough-minded pragmatist who preferred negotiation to confrontation. In contrast, much of her party is still gripped by the classic unionist siege mentality: precisely the wrong attitude for these times.

The tide of history is moving in one direction. Support for a united Ireland is at record levels: one opinion poll last year by Lord Ashcroft showed a slim majority of Northern Irish voters in favour of reunification, while another poll in February put Sinn Fein five points ahead of the DUP. The Republicans are on course to be the largest party in the Stormont Assembly after next years elections. Now the DUP faces the first leadership contest in its history.

This should be a golden opportunity for the party to build a broader platform that might secure the future of unionism by winning new supporters in the centre ground.

But it looks like the DUP will move in exactly the opposite direction, retreating into its reactionary comfort zone and clinging to the self-destructive pieties of Paisleys No Surrender outlook.

That blinkered option is a guaranteed way to lose further support from the moderates and would play perfectly into the hands of Sinn Fein.

The foolish embrace of extremism is depressingly highlighted in the fact that the favourite to lead them is Ulster agriculture minister Edwin Poots, whose father Charlie was close to Ian Paisley.

Into this toxic swirl, Arlene Fosters (pictured) sudden departure as Northern Irelands First Minister  and the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party  is a gift to those who hanker for a united Ireland and the dissolution of the UK

With huge grassroots support in the DUP, Poots is almost the stereotype of the Protestant bigot, fiercely opposed to gay equality and the scientific fact of evolution. He instead voices his bizarre beliefs in the crackpot dogma of creationism, which holds  in defiance of all evidence  that the Earth is just 6,000 years old.

Other contenders are hardly more impressive. One is likely to be Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, a former aide to Enoch Powell. Despite his long membership of the Commons as MP for Lagan Valley, Donaldson has never exuded any real stature or authority.

Another could be Gavin Robinson, another MP, barrister and former Lord Mayor of Belfast, who has won plaudits for smooth style. Though his moderation  compared to Poots  could lose him the support of diehard activists.

Less likely would be a leadership bid from Ian Paisley Junior, the founders son, because he has been badly tainted by his own expenses scandal, which led to his suspension from the Commons in 2018.

With these uninspiring candidates, little wonder that the death knell could soon be sounding for the Union. Only vision, generosity and boldness can save it: but there is a precious lack of those qualities in the blinkered, self-destructive DUP.

Oddball hoping to take reins in Ulster claims Earth is a mere 6,000 years old

By Harriet Line

The favourite to take over from Arlene Foster as leader of the DUP is a creationist who believes the world is only 6,000 years old.

Edwin Poots, an agriculture minister in Stormont, announced his intention to stand for the leadership last night.

But the 55-year-olds religious beliefs have raised eyebrows. In a BBC interview in 2007, Mr Poots said: My view on the Earth is that its a young Earth. My view is 4000BC.

He also questioned the Big Bang Theory, saying: Weve had lots of explosions in Northern Ireland and Ive never seen anything come out of that that was good.

And you look at this Earth and you tell me that there was a big bang and all of a sudden all that is good about this Earth came out of it?

He hit out at evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the same interview, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate everyone with evolution. Mr Poots has also weighed in on the age of the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland  a rock formation consisting of 40,000 interlocking basalt columns.

The visitor attraction, the result of volcanic activity, is estimated by geologists to be up to be 60million years old. Mr Poots told the Belfast Telegraph in 2009: I dont believe the Giants Causeway is 60million years old. If other people make an issue of that, its up to them. The Giants Causeway is a fantastic site, an asset which needs us to sell it and make it marketable. Whatever length of time it has been in existence will not undermine that message.

He announced his intention to run last night, saying: I am a proud Northern Ireland man, I love its people and its place, and it faces many challenging times. Its with that in mind, Im putting my name forward for the leadership for the Democratic Unionist Party. I look forward to the engagement and the debate with colleagues and the wider public in this contest.

Northern Ireland is a place that has had many great things over this last hundred years, I wish to see us rebuild, revitalise, reinvigorate and revive for the next hundred.

It is unclear whether Mr Poots will have competition in his bid to take charge of Northern Irelands largest unionist party. The DUP has never had a contested leadership race. Other names thought to be in the mix include MPs Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Gavin Robinson.

Mrs Foster, who has led the party for more than five years, is standing down as DUP leader on May 28 and as First Minister in June.

There is some speculation that the twin roles she currently occupies could be split, with one politician taking on the role of party leader and another being appointed First Minister.

That would potentially allow an MP to lead the party from Westminster while a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly takes on the First Minister job.

Discontent at the DUPs Brexit strategy was a major factor in Mrs Fosters departure, with party rank-and-file laying some of the blame for the emergence of an Irish Sea border at her door.

Her resignation on Wednesday came a day after party colleagues moved against her, with a majority of senior elected representatives signing a letter of no confidence.
More than three years after it was first filed, a multi-million-pound British class action against Google has begun, with a lawyer for the company claiming the action was not viable and should not proceed.

The case alleges that Google secretly tracked millions of iPhone users and was first filed back in 2017, only to be thrown out the following year.

But the group that filed the case appealed against this verdict and won their appeal.

On the first day of the case, Wednesday, Google lawyer Anthony White told the judge that such a lawsuit could only be brought under English laws if the group had suffered damages, Reuters reported.

"It is not my case that loss of personal data may not have serious consequences, but it may not always do so in a way that attracts compensation," he said.

Additionally, the case did not take into account the differing levels of phone usage, White added.

Richard Lloyd, former executive director of the UK consumer group Which?, is leading the case and alleges that between June 2011 and February 2012, Google bypassed security settings on the iPhone's Safari browser and set a third-party cookie.

This made it possible for Google to collect personal data without seeking consent from users. "This data was used to sell a service to its advertising network called the DoubleClick Service, which enables advertisers to target and tailor adverts according to an iPhone users preferences," a statement on the Which? website says.
A Texas teen who has claimed to be a victim of sex trafficking was indicted this week for murder in connection to the murder of a man who allegedly purchased her from her pimp.

Zephaniah Trevino, 18, was facing charges of capital murder alongside Philip Junior Aguilera Baldenegro, 20, and Jesse Martinez, 20, in the shooting death of 24-year-old Carlos Arajeni-Arriaza Morillo in August 2019.

Despite not pulling the trigger, Trevino, who was 16 at the time, is accused of being part of a robbery that went wrong.

On Wednesday, a Dallas County grand jury lessened the charges against Trevino from capital murder to murder and aggravated robbery.

Her attorney Ashkan Mehryari called the decision 'disappointing' but not surprising, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Mehryari said he was glad to learn that the charge is murder, which has a minimum sentence of five years as opposed to capital murder, which is life in prison.

Zephaniah Trevino (left), 18, who has claimed to be a victim of sex trafficking has been indicted for murder in connection to the shooting death of Carlos Arajeni-Arriaza Morillo (right), 24, a man she said was her pimp

Trevino was facing charges of capital murder alongside Philip Junior Aguilera Baldenegro (right), 20, and Jesse Martinez (left), 20, in connection to the killing

On Wednesday, the grand jury indicted Trevino on a murder charge, which carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison

Lawyers for Baldenegro, the man accused of pulling the trigger, say the sex trafficking claims are 'absolute fiction' and designed to generate sympathy for Trevino.

They claim that Trevino was not a victim whatsoever and allegedly helped to set up the robbery before fleeing when it went wrong.

Lawyer David Finn claims the sex trafficking narrative is nothing more than a 'smokescreen' or 'diversion'.

'I've been a state prosecutor. I've been a federal prosecutor. I've been a criminal trial judge. I prosecuted real sex trafficking cases, both state and federal,' Finn said.

'As a judge, we had domestic violence cases that had elements of coercion and trafficking. And this allegation by Zephi Trevino, or her mother  and her attorneys  who are very good attorneys, I know them well  it's complete bullsh*t.'

'There is not one single shred of evidence that's backed up in allegations of sex trafficking  not only as it relates to my client, but to anyone.'

As news of the charges made headlines last year, Trevino gained support from celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis and Kim Kardashian.

In December, Curtis shared an open letter where urging Texas district attorney, John Creuzot, to drop the murder charge against the teen after her defense team said she was the innocent witness to her seller murdering her purchaser.

In the letter shared to her Instagram at the time, Curtis wrote: 'I'm an actress, author and advocate for children, but most important of all, I'm a mother.

'How is it possible that a 16-year-old girl, a victim of sex trafficking and sexual violence who was an innocent bystander in a crime, could possibly be held accountable for that crime? That is the brutal truth happening to Zephi Trevino today.

As news of the charges made headlines last year, Trevino gained support from celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis and Kim Kardashian

Curtis at the time pleaded with Dallas Countys district attorney, John Creuzot, to drop the charges

A petition to drop the charges garnered more than 375,000 signatures last year while a fund set up for her legal defense raised more than $100,000 after Kim Kardashian tweeted about the case

'The Dallas district attorney plans to try this teen sex trafficking victim as an adult when she is still just a child.'

'Hearing her story pierced my mother's heart and I am writing this as a way to help Zephi's own mother, Crystal, fight to free her daughter,' Curtis shared.

'As a mother of two children, I am outraged. Our criminal justice system must be better than this. All the DA has to do is drop the charges against this innocent girl.

'She didn't hold a gun. She didn't create the scenario. She was being sold for sex. And now, after being abused and victimized by her trafficker, she's being victimized again  this time by the legal system that should be protecting her.'

Curtis said injustice 'is so confounding that you need to put your name and your exposure where your mouth is but much more importantly, where your heart is'.

She ended: 'Please join us to help put pressure on the DA. No family should have to endure this.'

Trevino alleges she was being sex trafficked by Baldenegro, who was 18 at the time of the killing

Trevino's lawyers insist Trevino fell in with the wrong crowd and was groomed for prostitution

A petition to drop the charges garnered more than 375,000 signatures last year while a fund set up for her legal defense raised more than $100,000 after Kim Kardashian tweeted about the case.

Friends and family described Trevino as being a typical teenager in her Grand Prairie, Texas community.

But her life took a dangerous turn when she became involved in unhealthy relationships that led to drug use.

Her family said she started running away from home, eventually meeting an adult man who they allege began grooming her for sex trafficking using drugs, coercion, emotional manipulation and abuse, physical threats and threats against her family.

Her family claims that over time, Trevino was forced numerous times by her trafficker to participate in sexual acts with other adults.

After the public defender assigned to her case pushed her to take a plea deal with a long sentence, Trevino's family retained national civil rights and criminal defense attorney Justin A. Moore and Dallas-based criminal defense attorney Mehryari.

Her lawyers insist Trevino fell in with the wrong crowd and was groomed for prostitution.

During the fatal incident she was being pimped 'under duress', and the man who was allegedly intending to pay to have sex with her knew she was underage.
The company recently introduced a new app feature that allows you to book your vaccination appointment at Walgreens, as well as book your ride to get there. The feature is available to any Uber user in the U.S.All you have to do is open your Uber app and you will see a Vaccine option. To book an appointment, you have to add a ZIP code and check the available times. You can also book a ride, by choosing a location and pickup time. The app will send you a notification to remind you of your upcoming ride to get jabbed.Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi explained that the initiative has the purpose of making it easier for people to get to and from their appointments. Transportation is in many cases a hindrance that makes it harder for people to get to a vaccination center.Uber also holds on to its commitment to help underserved communities and offers free or discounted rides. Approximately 50 percent of Americans struggle with getting to a vaccination center because they dont have access to public transportation, according to the Vaccine Access Fund. So the company offers 10 million free or discounted rides to the disadvantaged and communities of color.According to Walgreens, there are over 9,000 location in the U.S. where people can get vaccinated and their number continues to grow.Uber, PayPal, Walgreens, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation have launched the Vaccine Access Fund to raise money for transportation. They donated $11 million themselves and also managed to raise over $380,000 so far.Their initiative can be supported by anyone who wants and affords to donate money for their cause.Separately, the Uber app introduced some other features as well, such as Uber Rent with Valet and Pickup And Go.
More than three years after 17-year-old John Albers was killed by an Overland Park police officer, the city has released a report on the shooting, which did not result in criminal charges.

The teens death was investigated by a team of Johnson County officers tasked with responding to police shootings. The teams 498-page report was made public Thursday.

Albers was shot six times on Jan. 20, 2018, by former Overland Park Police Officer Clayton Jenison.

One month later and after receiving the investigatory teams findings, the Johnson County District Attorneys Office ruled the shooting justified.

The shooting became a source of contention as Albers family and other community members began advocating for transparency from the police department and the city.

The teens parents have long wanted to review the contents of the report. The reports release was also the subject of a lawsuit filed in January by 41 Action News, or KSHB.

After the Albers family read the report Thursday, the city released the records publicly.

It contains several narratives from police who responded to the scene, a dispatch report, an autopsy report and other records. Eighty-six pages are redacted with other redactions scattered throughout the report. The city said those were made to protect the privacy of witnesses and confidential investigative techniques.

Sheila Albers, Johns mother, said the report was lopsided.

OISIT (Officer Involved Shooting Investigation Team) is not interested in an impartial investigation, she said. They are interested in clearing the officer.

Jenison fired at John Albers as he backed the familys minivan down the driveway. Police had been called for a welfare check on the teen, who was believed to be suicidal.

In an interview four days after the shooting, Jenison said he told Albers to stop the minivan as he was backing out of the garage, according to a video also released Thursday.

He didnt listen to my commands; I shot, Jenison told two detectives with the countys Officer Involved Shooting Investigation Team.

Story continues

The minivan, Jenison said, went past him rapidly before it did a U-turn. As the minivan came back toward Jenison, he fired again, he recalled.

Where I was, I believed he was going to hit me, Jenison said.

Jenison said he fired two rounds of gunshots at the minivan. In the first round, he believed he fired two to three shots; in the second, it was five to seven shots, he recalled.

According to the report, Jenison fired a total of 13 shots.

The minivan came to a stop in a neighbors yard. Jenison went to perform life saving measures on Albers, but another officer told him to get back. Jenison was then escorted to a police vehicle.

In the years since her son was killed, Sheila Albers has pushed for answers from the city.

In June 2019, she discovered Jenison had been paid $70,000 before resigning from the police department.

Last year, The Star filed a lawsuit to obtain the severance agreement. The agreement showed Overland Park police reported to the state agency on law enforcement certification that Jenisons departure was a voluntary resignation under ordinary circumstances.

Sheila Albers filed a complaint with the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training, alleging that Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez committed perjury on the form submitted to the commission.

On Monday, the Albers and community activists gathered in front of Overland Park City Hall to demand that Donchez be removed.

The teens shooting is also the subject of an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys Office.
What to do if someone is at risk of dying by suicide
Chennai Petroleum Corporation jumped 4.44% to Rs 114 after the company reported a standalone net profit of Rs 231.79 crore in Q4 FY21 as against net loss of Rs 1637.56 crore in Q4 FY20.

Net sales during the quarter increased 1.5% year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 8,737.24 crore during the quarter.

Other income includes exchange gain of Rs 22.10 crore for the quarter ended March 2021 compared with exchange loss of Rs 77.14 crore for the quarter ended March 2020.

The company reported a pre-tax profit of Rs 332.95 crore in Q4 March 2021 as against a pre-tax loss of Rs 2388.06 crore in Q4 March 2020.

Chennai Petro recorded a net profit of Rs 237.56 crore in the year ended 31 March 2021 compared with net loss of Rs 2077.58 crore in the year ended 31 March 2021. Net sales declined 39.6% to Rs 22444.76 crore in FY21 over FY20.

Average gross refining margin (GRM) for the period April-March 2021 was $7.14 per barrel compared with negative margin of $1.18 per barrel in April-March 2020.

Chennai Petroleum Corporation refines crude oil and markets petroleum and petrochemical products, including lube oil base stocks, aviation turbine fuel, propane, propylene and polybutene feedstock. The group operates two refineries, the Cauvery Basin refinery and the Manali refinery. Indian Oil Corporation held 51.89% stake in the company as on 31 March 2021.

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Sinaloa Cartel

Founded in 1989 by Hector Palma, Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman and Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, the Sinaloa Cartel today stands as one of the most established transnational drug trafficking organizations. While it has carved out a presence in 15 of the 32 Mexican states, the cartel also expanded its operations into the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

With El Chapo in prison, the cartel has been plagued by internal fighting between Zambada and three of El Chapo's four sons, known as 'Los Chapitos'.

The Drug Enforcement Administration views the Sinaloa Cartel as one of the top two criminal organizations along with its rival, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

The DEA said the Sinaloa Cartel 'exports and distributes wholesale amounts of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana in the United States by maintaining distribution hubs in various cities.'

How they get drugs into the US: 'Illicit drugs distributed by the Sinaloa Cartel are primarily smuggled into the United States through crossing points located along the [south west border]. The cartel employs gatekeepers assigned to Ports Of Entry and controls Arizona and California area smuggling corridors into the United States.'

Jalisco New Generation Cartel

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was once allied to the Sinaloa Cartel as El Chapo depended on its firepower to combat Los Zetas.

Commandeered by Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera, the group set itself apart from other cartels in the country butchering its enemies and today is considered by the Mexican government as the most dangerous group in the country.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is spread out across 23 of the Mexico's 32 states and currently finds itself at war with at least ten cartels.

The group has been known to have increased the power that its members have by purchasing military weapons and parts from the United States.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, according to the DEA, specializes 'in manufacturing and distributing large amounts of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine.'

How they get drugs into the US: 'The CJNG smuggles illicit drugs into the United States by accessing various trafficking corridors in northern Mexico along the SWB including Tijuana, Juarez, and Nuevo Laredo. The CJNG also has influence over the busiest port in Mexico, the Port of Manzanillo, and utilizes that influence for the distribution of large quantities of drugs.'

Beltran-Leyva Organization

For a while, the Beltran-Leyva Organization [BLO] was born out of the Sinaloa Cartel and became one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico led by the Beltran Leyva brothers: Marcos Arturo, Carlos, Alfredo, Mario Alberto and Hector.

The Beltran-Leyva Organization was involved in a deadly war with the Sinaloa Cartel after the brothers accused their cousin, El Chapo, of being responsible for the January 2008 arrest of Alfredo. The brothers retaliated by reportedly plotting the murder of El Chapo's 22-year-old son, Edgar Guzman, in May 2008.

Alfredo's arrest sparked one of the worst periods in Mexico's war on drugs as the BLO's new ally, the Juarez Cartel, went to war with the Sinaloa Cartel in Ciudad Juarez, a border town across from Texas.

The BLO also expanded its might by going toe-to-toe with the Gulf Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Cartel in the northeastern border city of Reynosa.

While the cartel remains viable today, the organization's members over time split into 11 factions.

How they get drugs into the US: 'BLO relies on its loose alliances with larger cartels for access to drug smuggling corridors along the [south west border].'

Los Zetas and the Cartel del Noreste [Northeast Cartel]

Los Zetas were created by Mexican military deserters who formed an alliance with the Gulf Cartel in 1999 and based its operations in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across from Laredo, Texas. The group quickly carved out a named for itself through its savage killings. By 2010, Los Zetas split from the Gulf Cartel.

Los Zetas at one point dominated more cities across Mexico than the Sinaloa Cartel, with whom it clashed amidst a threat from the Gulf Cartel to eliminate it completely.

Like some of the other Mexican cartels, Los Zetas saw some of its members split and form their own groups.

Los Zetas role play in the drug trade is enforced by one of its factions, the Cartel del Noreste [Northeast Cartel]. Together, the criminal groups have set up its small, but lucrative, drug trade business into the Texas border cities of Laredo and Eagle Pass while controlling routes and turfs in the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas.

How they get drugs into the US: 'Members smuggle the majority of their illicit drugs through the [south west border] in the areas of Laredo, Texas; Eagle Pass, Texas; and the Mexican states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and parts of Tamaulipas.'

Guerrero Unidos

Operating in central Mexico, the Guerrero Unidos broke away from the Beltran-Leyva Organization and formed an alliance with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to traffic drugs into the United States and bring back its profits into Mexico.

The cartel is accused of being behind the September 2014 disappearance of 43 students, who were kidnapped by local police in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero.

How they get drugs into the US: 'The cartel has a working partnership with the CJNG and uses the same transportation networks to move drug shipments into the United States and to return drug proceeds back to Mexico.'

Gulf Cartel

The Gulf Cartel is considered to be one of the oldest active criminal organizations in Mexico and is believed to have close ties to other gangs in Europe, West Africa, Asia, Central America, South America, and the United States.

The organization started off by smuggling alcohol into the United States during the Prohibition Era. It was not until the 1980 that it got itself immersed into the drug trade.

The DEA believes the Gulf Cartel has been working closely with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as it ships heroin and cocaine to the Texas border cities of McAllen and Brownsville.

How they get drugs into the US: 'The Gulf Cartel focuses its drug trafficking activities on heroin and cocaine by transporting loads into the United States near the McAllen and Brownsville, Texas, areas.'

Juarez Cartel and La Linea

The Juarez Cartel cemented itself as one of the mayor players in the drug trade business back in the 1970s. It founder, Amado Carrillo, was known as 'El Senor de los Cielos' or 'The Lord of the Skies' due to the massive fleet of planes he owned to transport drugs, especially cocaine from Colombia and other countries in Latin America.

The cartel was once allied to El Chapo before that relationship fell apart after the notorious drug lord declined to pay the Juarez Cartel for the right to use its drug smuggling routes.

The Juarez Cartel has depended on its armed wing, La Linea, to transport heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas.

How they get drugs into the US: 'These cartels' greatest territorial influence is in the state of Chihuahua near the [south west border]. This area has profitable smuggling opportunities between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas.'

La Familia Michoacana

La Familia Michoacana was once linked to the Gulf Cartel before it went on its own in 2006.

Between 2009 and 2010, the cartel proposed to the Mexican government that it had plans of laying down its arms as long as its home state of Michoacan was granted protection. However, President Felipe Calderon shot down their offer, which led to the cartel becoming increasingly involved in the funding of political candidates.

La Familia Michoacana today maintains a relationship with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other criminal groups as part of its drug smuggling operation.

How they get drugs into the US: 'LFM has some ties to the CJNG and also works with other smaller groups to further the cartel's drug trafficking activities.'

Los Rojos

Just like Guerreros Unidos, Los Rojos was formed as an armed wing and broke away from the Beltran-Leyva Organization.

According to a 2020 Congressional report, Los Rojos 'operates in Guerrero and relies heavily on kidnapping and extortion for revenue as well as trafficking cocaine, although analysts dispute the scope of its involvement in the drug trade.'

How they get drugs into the US: 'Los Rojos is involved in heroin trafficking'
Taking cue from Serum Insistute of India, Hyderbad-based Bharat Biotech on Thursday reduced price of its vaccine, Covaxin, for states to Rs 400 per dose from Rs 600.

This follows a widespread criticism of its pricing policy as it sold Covaxin to the central government at Rs 150 per dose.

"Recognising the enormous challenges in the public healthcare system, we have made Covaxin available to state governments at a price of 400/ dose", Bharat Biotech said in its announcement. The company is deeply concerned with the critical pandemic circumstances that India is facing at this time, it added.

Bharat Biotech - COVAXIN Announcement - April 29, 2021 pic.twitter.com/RgnROIfUCe  BharatBiotech (@BharatBiotech) April 29, 2021
VTE is a serious complication for patients in vascular care units and a preventable cause of hospital deaths worldwide [1] . The current standard of care for VTE prevention, when blood thinners cannot be prescribed, due to bleed risk, is a boot-like cuff that compresses the leg to increase blood flow, called intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC). IPC, however, is not suitable for all patients due to vascular disease, fragile skin, or complex limb injury. IPC also requires resource to correctly fit the cuffs and pneumatic pumps are not always readily available. The result is the need for an alternative mechanical intervention when IPC is impractical or unavailable.

To address this unmet need, the vascular department at the Specialty Hospital, led by Dr. Walid Mohammed Hasan Masoud, has adopted the innovative geko device for blood clot prevention. The small watch-sized device sticks to the side of the knee, increasing blood flow in the deep veins of the calf[2], via painless electrical pulses, at a rate equal to 60 percent of walking[3] without a patient having to move.

Influenced by compelling real-world data, reporting a zero VTE incidence in immobile acute stroke patients[4] , Dr Masoud saw the potential in the use of the geko device for blood clot prevention in immobile, high-risk vascular patients. Now in routine use in the unit, Dr. Masoud is leading wider awareness of the neuromuscular electrostimulation device to address other areas of unmet need at the Speciality Hospital, including complications related to swelling after surgery and hard-to-heal chronic wounds (leg ulcers).

Dr. Walid Masoud, senior consultant in vascular, endovascular and kidney transplant surgery at the Specialty Hospital, said:

"VTE is a complicating factor in the recovery of many critically ill patients within the vascular department setting; and for those unable to be prescribed drug or IPC prophylaxis there is a real danger of serious, sometimes fatal, blood clotting. My team was therefore keen to find an alternative mechanical intervention to ensure that all patients can receive appropriate VTE prophylaxis when standard of care cannot be prescribed.

"We welcomed the opportunity to examine the role of the innovative geko device in our vascular care population. Our findings show the geko device is safe and well-tolerated and can be used to protect patients until it is safe to prescribe blood-thinning drugs."

Bernard Ross, founder and CEO of Sky Medical Technology, said: "Vascular clinicians constantly have to weigh an acceptable drug VTE prophylaxis bleeding risk, in acutely or critically ill inpatients, against use of mechanical prophylaxis when a bleed risk is unacceptable. I am proud that the geko device can provide an alternative mechanical intervention without bleed risk and delighted Dr. Masoud and his clinical team have embraced this capability and its wider application in pre- and post-operative oedema management and wound therapy."

About the Specialty Hospital, Amman, Jordan

The Speciality Hospital vascular department is an internationally recognised centre for vascular surgery, and one of the biggest centres in the Middle East, supervised by highly trained specialised healthcare providers, using state of the art equipment and the latest technology. The Specialty Hospital Vascular Practice is comprehensive: Endovascular Cath labs, Vascular Radiology lab, Operation rooms and Wound care clinics.

https://www.specialty-hospital.com/en/services/36/Services/srv/115/32/Vascular-surgery

About the geko device

NICE guidance (MTG19)[5] recommends use of the geko device for VTE prophylaxis in all hospital patients where standard prophylaxis treatments are impractical or contraindicated. The geko is a neuromuscular electrostimulation device which prevents blood stasis in the deep veins of the calf by activation of foot and calf muscle pumps via stimulation of the common peroneal nerve. Weighing just 10g, silent in operation and with no wires or leads, the battery powered geko is a daily disposable device that is self-adhesive and comfortable to wear. www.gekodevices.com

About Firstkind and Sky Medical Technology Ltd

Sky Medical Technology, the parent of Firstkind Ltd, is a UK-based medical devices company. Through its innovative mechanism of neuromuscular electrostimulation, Sky has developed a non-invasive, ground-breaking technology platform, OnPulse, embedded in its industry-leading brand, the geko device. Sky's products are tailored to different medical application areas, selling through strategic partnerships or distributors in each major clinical area. Clinical areas of focus include life threatening blood clots, complications related to swelling after orthopaedic surgery and vascular conditions related to wound healing. The goal in each pathway is to partner with healthcare professionals to improve clinical outcomes and patient care whilst saving health system resources. www.skymedtech.com

About Tadawi Medical Supplies Est

Tadawi is a leading importer and distributor of medical equipment and transformative innovation for the Jordanian market. Focus application areas include intensive care and wound therapy, alongside exclusive distribution agreements with leading international companies in the respiratory field. Their selling organization has a strong medical background, with staff drawn from medical device engineering, nursing and health education.

References

Geerts WH, et al. Prevention of venous thromboembolism: American College of Chest Physicians Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guidelines (8th Edition). Chest 2008;1336 Suppl:381s453s. A. Nicolaides, M Griffin. Measurement of blood flow in the deep veins of the lower limb using the geko neuromuscular electro-stimulation device. Journal of International Angiology August 2016-04. Tucker A, et al. Augmentation of venous, arterial and microvascular blood supply in the leg by isometric neuromuscular stimulation via the peroneal nerve. The International journal of angiology: official publication of the International College of Angiology, Inc. 2010 Spring; 19(1): e31-7. Natarajan I, et al. Poster: The use of the geko device and the activation of the foot and calf pumps for prevention of venous thromboembolism in patients with acute stroke. Data on file Firstkind Ltd 2019. NICE medical technologies guidance [MTG19] Published date June 20 2014.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1494658/Specialty_Hospital_geko.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1494657/Specialty_Hospital_geko.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1395567/Geko_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1340942/Sky_Medical_Logo.jpg

Media Contact:

Sue Davenport

Sky Medical Technology Ltd

[email protected]

+44 (0)7771 667170

SOURCE The Specialty Hospital
Madrdi, April 29, 2021 (SPS) - Morocco is leading a campaign of provocation and blackmail against Spain to undermine the Sahrawi cause and push Madrid to rebel against international legitimacy, said on Wednesday the Frente POLISARIO representative in Spain, Abdullah Arabi.

"The campaign led by Morocco against Spain which welcomed the Sahrawi president Brahim Gali for treatment, is part of the policy of provocation which characterizes the bilateral relations between the two countries," Abdullah Arabi added in a statement to APS.

Sahrawi President Brahim Gali had been transferred to Spain for treatment after being contaminated with coronavirus. The Sahrawi presidency had affirmed that his health condition is not "worrying" and that he is recovering.

The Sahrawi diplomat further informed that, "the kingdom of Morocco takes every opportunity to undermine the Sahrawi cause which enjoys wide support in Spain,"

"Morocco is trying to take advantage of this situation to undermine the struggle of the Sahrawi people and their national symbols in particular".

The Spanish government said it was committed to the settlement of Western Sahara conflict in accordance with international law.

Abdullah Arabi warned against the repercussions of Moroccan policy in the region which would lead to serious consequences, calling on the international community to intervene quickly to force Morocco to comply with international law and respect the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

Arabi deplores in particular the fact that Morocco "does not understand the concept of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries", referring to the "campaign of the Moroccan official media against Spain about a sovereign decision." SPS

125/090/700


NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) is planning to divest its digital media assets including Yahoo and AOL, as part of the telecom giant's plan to exit from its investments in digital media.



According to sources, the deal could be worth $4 billion and $5 billion and might involve private-equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc.



Verizon had purchased AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017 for a sum of more than $9 billion as it wanted to make its mark in the ever-growing market of online media. Also, the fact that many people had their accounts in these two websites also attracted the Verizon investment.



In 2020, Verizon's digital media segment, including Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail and news sites like TechCrunch, Engadget, brought in revenues of $7 billion, down 5.6 percent from last year. This was mainly due to a sharp fall in advertising revenues in the first half of the year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.



In the latter half of the year, the digital media segment saw a 10 percent rise in revenues in the first quarter to $1.9 billion.



If Verizon sells in the present scenario, it would be raising cash at a time when the values of similar assets are rising. In 2021, the company has pledged around $53 billion to purchase spectrum licenses to support its 5G wireless network.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

VERIZON-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de
A young mum claims her beloved pet dog Ava died after being turned away from a local vet because they were 'too busy'.

Eloise and Evan Meyer, from the south coast of New South Wales, said their 11-year-old German Shepherd cross Rottweiler was her 'normal happy self' before her health suddenly took a turn for the worse on April 21.

'Ava was running around playing with my other dog, but by the afternoon my 7-year-old son found her laying down having trouble breathing, and with a white tongue,' Ms Meyer told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Meyer and his young son rushed Ava to a vet on the NSW South Coast.

Eloise (pictured) and Evan Meyer, from Illawarra, in New South Wales, said their 11-year-old German Shepherd cross Rottweiler was her 'normal happy self' before her health suddenly took a turn for the worse on April 21

The family claims when they arrived at the clinic, its receptionists turned them away, saying the vet was too busy

Mr Meyer, a defence force veteran who suffers anxiety and depression, said losing Ava in such tragic circumstances has caused his mental health to decline

But they claim when they arrived at the clinic, its receptionists turned them away, saying the vet was too busy.

'When my husband arrived he walked straight inside and spoke to the reception staff. Evan was clearly distressed - he told them that Ava was struggling to breathe and that she was cold,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'They refused to even look at Ava, and the female behind the desk told him to go to another clinic - which is a good 25-30 minute drive away, especially at that time of the day.

'This was an emergency, and she was disregarded like her life meant nothing... they did not even alert the vet of Ava's emergency.'

Mr Meyer instead rushed to the closest vet clinic located in a neighbouring suburb.

'The vets put Ava into the clinic straight away because they could see that she needed help as soon as possible, but unfortunately by the time they got the oxygen to her she took her last breath,' Ms Meyer said.

The mother-of-three claimed the veterinary clinic owner's excuse for not seeing Ava was that staff were 'swamped' with patients, and only had one vet working at the time.

'However, we only saw one patient waiting inside, and no one outside. Every other time we have been people are waiting outside on the seats as well,' she said.

Ms Meyer also took issue with being told by the owner that the vet was 'working on' a dog at the time and 'could not have seen Ava immediately'.

'That is a very vague excuse as far as I am concerned. Working on a dog could be anything from clipping their nails to undertaking surgery,' she said.

Ms Meyer said her husband and their three sons, aged 11, seven and four, have been left devastated by Ava's death

'If it was surgery then say it  I would be able to better understand why Ava was turned away in her time of need if that was the case.'

Ms Meyer said her husband and their three sons, aged 11, seven and four, have been left devastated by Ava's death.

'I can live with the fact that my beautiful girl has passed away and is now at peace. However, what I cannot live with is knowing that she may still be here today if they did take their jobs as vets very seriously.'

Mr Meyer, a defence force veteran who suffers anxiety and depression, said losing Ava in such tragic circumstances has caused his mental health to decline.

'Ava was not officially a companion dog. However, she has been by Evan's side through all of his difficulties and setbacks,' Ms Meyer said.

'My boys' reaction to Ava's passing has been a very emotional one. They didn't get to say goodbye to her because it all happened so suddenly.

'My seven-year-old son had to come home early from school the day after Ava died because he started crying and could not be consoled by his teachers.'

Ms Meyer said the owner of the clinic has continued to defend his reception staff's actions.
[April 29, 2021] Wealth Investment Firm, Bailard, Launches Digital Vault Platform for Clients Powered by FutureVault

Bailard, an independent, values-driven wealth and investment management firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and FutureVault, an industry-leader in enterprise digital vault solutions, have announced the launch of the Bailard Vault. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005852/en/ Bailard will look to bolster its high-touch client service and continue its proven track record of client success and satisfaction through this unique and highly-innovative digital vault offering. The Bailard Vault includes a custom white-label portal and native mobile app on Android (News - Alert) and iOS that provides secure anytime, anywhere access to documents for Bailard clients as well as the Firm's investment counselors. "Partnering with FutureVault enables us to streamline and automate several key iternal processes. From seamless client onboarding to prompt ongoing reporting, we can now provide crucial information faster and in a secure environment," commented Michael J. Faust, CFA, President of Wealth Management at Bailard. "We believe our clients' success is our success, and are proud to offer a centralized, digital environment to access important materials and interact securely with us," mentioned Austin Lastinger, CFP, Portfolio Associate at Bailard.



"We are thrilled to be working with Bailard and we are delighted that they have entrusted FutureVault as their digital vault partner," said Caroll Simmons, Director of Customer Success at FutureVault. "By being able to empower the Bailard team through our technology, we're able to support them with their commitment to delivering a best-in-class client experience." For media inquiries, please contact FutureVault at press@futurevaultinc.com.

About Bailard: With over 50 years of experience, Bailard is an independent, values-driven wealth and investment management firm. For individuals and institutions alike, Bailard proudly serves as a trusted partner focused on achieving long-term results aligned with client values and goals. An independent firm since our founding in 1969, we stand committed to our values and, most importantly, our clients. With $5 billion AUM as of March 2021, Bailard's high-touch client service and proven track record are grounded in the firm's core values of accountability, compassion, courage, excellence, fairness, and independence. About FutureVault: FutureVault is an industry leading provider of secure, cloud-based document management solutions that help organizations and their clients manage information better, together. FutureVault offers a powerful white label digital vault platform to manage document distribution and collaboration, while allowing end clients to digitize, deposit, store, and manage all their most important business and personal information. Organizations leverage FutureVault's disruptive, patented, proprietary technology to acquire and retain clients, unlock new revenue streams, improve operational efficiencies, protect information assets and maintain compliance obligations. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005852/en/

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A vegan mother films her baby chomping on sand, dirt, rocks and even supermarket shopping trolley straps - as she claims her breast milk protects the tot while he 'builds his immune system'.

Alice Bender, from Phoenix, Arizona, shared footage of eight-month-old baby Fern chewing on various objects on TikTok including sand while at the beach and even her handing him a brown rock, which he puts in his mouth straight away.

The 22-year-old, who raises her son as a vegan, defended her parenting style by insisting that germs are nothing to be afraid of - and that it's natural for babies to want to eat sand.

In the video, which has been viewed more than 12million views on Tik-Tok, Alice blamed a 'series of billion dollar campaigns' in Western medicine over the last 200 years for 'shifting the public's perspective' on bacteria and babies.

Vegan mother Alice Bender, 22, from Phoenix, Arizona, went viral after revealing online she let her son Fern, eight-months-old, eat sand and suck on rocks (pictured together)

Sharing videos of Fern eating sand and dirt on TikTok (pictured) Alice said she let him eat anything and was exclusively breast-feeding him

Alice says: 'I do not fear bacteria. In fact, I welcome it. I trust nature and my baby. It is not a coincidence babies have this instinct while they are breastfeeding.'

The housewife strongly believes that babies should expose themselves to germs - so long as they are breastfeeding.

Alice said: 'Babies only have this instinct while they are breastfeeding for a reason. Our milk is there to protect them while they build their immune system.

'Breast milk is incredible. Breast milk is the original medicine. It is far superior to any man-made medicine.

The mother said she wouldn't let Fern suck on rocks (pictured) if he wasn't breastfed, because her breast-milk was made to protect him against infection and germs

'Breast milk is alive and constantly changing to meet our babies' current needs.

'I would not want Fern to continue doing this after we're done breastfeeding, because there would be nothing for him to fall back on if he were to get sick.'

Alice incorporates her holistic views on life into all aspects of her parenting.

Alice said: 'Looking into the pharmaceutical industry as a whole made me realize so much of our society is built on us remaining customers to pharma.

'I think we all need to take a good look at our preconceived notions about health and figure out what made us this way.

Alice, pictured left, said she was not afraid of bacteria and trusted nature, and even let Fern lick shopping trolley straps, right

Alice, pictured with Fern, said her son was extremely healthy and the chunkiest baby of the family

'We should not be at a war with nature. We are nature. I've noticed Fern is incredibly healthy compared to other babies.

'He is the first chunky baby in our immediate family. People always compliment us on how healthy, calm, and alert he is when we're in public.'

People online have had very polarized opinions on Alice's parenting style and took to the comments of her video to share their thoughts.

'My baby, unfortunately, isn't exclusively breastfed but I don't shelter him from dirt and shopping carts either. Eight months and totally healthy,' one said.

The mother-of-one said breast-milk was 'the original medicine' and that there was a reason why babies wanted to eat sand and dirt while they were breastfeeding (pictured: Fern eating dirt)

Alice said she believed in the natural benefits of her breast-milk, and didn't feel Fern anything else (pictured)

The mother-of-one said Fern was 'healthier' than other babies and said people shouldn't be 'at war with nature'

Another shared this sentiment and commented: 'This is how babies build their immune systems! Go mom!"

Others completely disagreed with Alice's parenting methods and made their feelings known.

'Are you not worried about parasites? What would you do to protect him from the possibility of getting them by eating dirt?' one asked.

'Dirt won't hurt, but letting them bite the belt from the grocery store? Nah,' said another.

'All fun and games till the baby gets a parasitic infection,' one said.

Fern, pictured playing, left and eating sand, right, is a 'healthy calm, and alert baby' according to his mother

Alice said she felt Western medicine had been taken over by pharmaceutical companies, and wants a more holistic way of life (pictured with Fern)

Proud mother Alice said Fern was the chunkiest baby of her family, and said it was due to the fact he was totally breastfed

Snack time! Alice shared videos of Fern eating wet sand and ditt at the playground in a video for TikTok

'I understand building their immune system but what about the sticks and sand cutting up his stomach,' one wrote.

One added: 'I worry for the future of our country.'

According to the Mayo Clinic, breast milk has numerous advantages that benefit infants up into adulthood, including protecting them from infections.

'Breast milk contains the right balance of nutrients for your baby. Breast milk is easier than commercial formula for your baby to digest, and the antibodies in breast milk boost your baby's immune system,' the Clinic wrote on its website.

'Breast-feeding might even help you lose weight after the baby is born,' they added.

A 2016 book called 'Let Them Eat Dirt' made the case that children should play in the dirt and even eat it.

The book, written by Brett Finlay and Marie-Claire Arrietta, two University of British Columbia researchers, argued that maintaining contact with bacteria can help children develop healthy immune systems.

Another book released in 2017, 'Dirt Is Good' written by researchers from the University of San Diego, Jack Gilbert and Robert Knight, came to similar conclusions.

However, they stipulated that children with compromised immune systems and open cuts should avoid playing and eating dirt.
A married man travelled more than 400kms to see a disabled woman he met on a dating app before allegedly raping her four times, a court has heard.

The 34-year-old, from Perth, is accused of raping a 28-year-old woman in Geraldton in February after connecting with her on the Hily dating app.

His wife sat in the public gallery as he fronted Northbridge Magistrate's Court on Thursday charged with four counts of sexual penetration without consent and two counts of unlawful and indecent assault, The West Australian reports.

He intends to plead not guilty to the charges.

The court heard he arranged to meet the woman, who has a neurological disability which limits movement on one side of her body, in Geraldton, where they drank alcohol together.

The man, 34, has been charged with raping a 28-yearr-old woman in Geraldton in February (stock)

The accused then allegedly asked the woman to have sex, and she initially consented before repeatedly asking him to 'stop'.

Police prosecutors allege he ignored her requests during what they claim was a 'prolonged', 'ongoing' attack on a 'vulnerable woman', who was forced to kick him in the chest to get him off her.

He allegedly responded to the kick by swearing and biting her in the chest before demanding oral sex.

Police prosecutors said the woman complied 'due to fear', with the accused then allegedly complaining about her pubic hair and leading her to the shower to shave it off.

The woman told her carer the next day, who contacted police two days later, the court heard.

Police prosecutors urged Magistrate Robert Young to not grant the accused bail, arguing there was a risk he could interfere with the witness.

The man's lawyer argued that he should not be remanded in custody because he financially supports his family, who are not Australian citizens and cannot access government assistance.

Magistrate Young released him on bail on a $50,000 personal undertaking, $50,000 surety and a $20,000 cash bond.

His passport has been seized and he is banned from travelling within 100km of Geraldton.

He is due to face court again in June.
Steffen Hovard, Medical Device Industry Leader, Joins Butterfly Medical's Board of Directors Steffen shares our vision on how Butterflys disruptive BPH technology can transform the industry and his unique insights will help guide our vision and future strategic opportunities, said Dr. Shimon Eckhouse, Chairman of Butterfly Medical

Butterfly Medical Ltd., an Israeli medical company developing a novel implant for the prostate for the treatment of enlarged prostate (BPH) symptoms in aging men, today announced that it has appointed, medical device and urology industry leader, Mr. Steffen Hovard, to serve as an independent director of Butterfly Medicals Board of Directors.

Over the last 20 years, Mr. Hovard has held multiple leadership roles at subsidiaries of Coloplast, a publicly-traded global medical device company. Most recently, he served as the President of Interventional Urology from 2011 to 2019. At Interventional Urology, Mr. Hovard operated in a CEO capacity leading approximately 900 employees across corporate development with complete oversight of R&D, operations/manufacturing, marketing, sales, human resources, finance and legal. The business generated sales of approximately $300 million, and sustained growth greater than the industry average. Additionally, he led the global functions of the group including manufacturing in France and the United States, and sales organizations in 19 countries. Before that, Mr. Hovard served as the Vice President and Directeur General of Coloplasts Urology business in France.

We are excited to welcome Mr. Steffen Hovard as he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Butterflys board, said Dr. Shimon Eckhouse, Chairman of Butterfly Medical. His exceptional track record has made Steffen a respected and well-known executive in the medical device and urology industry. Steffen shares our vision on how Butterflys disruptive technology can transform the industry and his unique insights will help guide our vision and future strategic opportunities.

Mr. Steffen Hovard commented Im honored and excited to join the Butterfly Board of Directors. I look forward to contributing to this strong team of directors and seeing Butterfly realize its full potential by setting a new standard of care for BPH treatment and meeting the needs of this large patient group.

About Butterfly Medical Ltd.

Butterfly Medical was founded in late 2014, as part of the portfolio of Alon Medtech Ventures incubator, with the goal of developing a non-surgical treatment for men suffering from BPH symptoms. The company was founded by Mr. Yehuda Bachar, a seasoned entrepreneur in the medical device space. The technology developed by the company allows for the procedure to be transferred from the operating room to the clinic, eliminating the need for hospitalization, and significantly shortening recovery time. The company is currently conducting clinical trials in Israel, showing good safety and efficacy outcomes. The company is preparing to launch its Pivotal trial in the US, as part of the FDA clearance process. For more information, see http://www.butterfly-medical.com.
ARDEN HILLS, Minn., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Land O'Lakes, Inc. today reported net sales of $3.9 billion and net earnings of $136 million for the first quarter ending March 31, 2021, compared to net sales of $3.8 billion and net earnings of $37 million in 2020. Each business unit delivered strong results and increased net earnings compared to the prior year.

"The operating environment and fundamentals are strong in each business segment," said Beth Ford, president and CEO of Land O'Lakes, Inc. "The Ag sector is bolstered with our agronomic leadership in Winfield United, rising grain prices, and farmers investing in their crops in preparation for spring planting, and is well-positioned to take advantage of the most favorable market environment since 2014. As businesses continue to re-open in 2021, the marketplace for Dairy Foods Foodservice is rebounding rapidly. Animal Nutrition has also seen continued growth in the lifestyle segment as people continue to invest in their animals."

Net sales across the company were up 4% compared to the prior year with volume growth in each of the core business segments. Dairy Foods earnings were higher due to continued volume strength in Retail and improved margins in the Global Dairy Ingredients business. Crop Inputs earnings improved due to higher volumes and favorable product mix in Crop Protection Products, in advance of spring planting. Animal Nutrition earnings were also higher for the quarter due to volume growth in both Lifestyle and Livestock Feed. Improved performance more than offset the impact of higher supply chain costs across the portfolio. 2021 first quarter performance was the strongest of the past decade for the farmer-owned cooperative.

More information about the company's 2021 performance can be found at www.landolakesinc.com/investors.

About Land O'Lakes, Inc.

Land O'Lakes, Inc., one of America's premier agribusiness and food companies, is a member-owned cooperative with industry-leading operations that span the spectrum from agricultural production to consumer foods. With 2020 annual sales of $14 billion, Land O'Lakes is one of the nation's largest cooperatives, ranking 232 on the Fortune 500. Building on a legacy of more than 99 years of operation, Land O'Lakes today operates some of the most respected brands in agribusiness and food production including Land O'Lakes Dairy Foods, Purina Animal Nutrition, WinField United and Truterra. The company does business in all 50 states and more than 60 countries. Land O'Lakes, Inc. corporate headquarters are located in Arden Hills, Minnesota.

SOURCE Land OLakes, Inc.

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VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - International Battery Metals Ltd. (the "Company") (CSE: IBAT), (FSE: 8RE) announced today that it has appointed Garry Flowers and Ante Razmilovic to the Company's advisory board. They bring extensive experience in both engineering and financing to the Company.

ANTE RAZMILOVIC

Ante has 25 years of Investment Banking experience with top bulge bracket firms as a derivatives and structured and secured finance specialist working on the public side in securities divisions. Credit Suisse First Boston and Credit Suisse Financial Products 1992 to 1997 having then joined Goldman Sachs International in 1997 first time. JP Morgan Europe 2007 to 2010. Goldman Sachs Asia and then Goldman Sachs International 2010 to 2017. In 2017 launched a new structured finance business housed inside London subsidiary of Swiss Private Bank REYL & Cie. Ante is an International Baccalaureate, 1989, ACS Hillingdon, London, UK. Imperial College, BEng Electrical Engineering, 1989  1992, London, UK.

Work history

Credit Suisse First Boston and Credit Suisse Financial Products, 1992  1997

Credit Suisse First Boston 1992 -1993, London.

Corporate Finance and Capital Markets. Assigned to the Bank restructuring team advising the Swedish Ministry of Finance team under the now Swedish Riskbank head Stefan Ingves and team on the government bail out of the Swedish financial system. The team under Stefan Ingves would become the Bank Support Authority and a best in class case study for government bank sector bail outs across the world.

Credit Suisse Financial Products 1993 -1997, London and Hong Kong.

1993  1995 Derivates marketing to banks and hedge funds, London.

1995  1996 Derivatives marketing to institutional clients in Asia including Greater China and Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

1996 -1997 Derivatives marketing to institutional clients in Scandinavia and Europe, London.

Goldman Sachs International, London 1997 - 2007

1997  1999 Derivatives Marketing and Structuring to institutional clients in Scandinavia, UK and Europe,

1999 - 2001 Derivatives Marketing and Structuring to institutional clients in Emerging Markets in EMEA including South Africa and Russia.

2001  2007 Head of Structured Credit Structuring and Derivatives Marketing Europe (Origination, Structuring, Placement).

Promoted Managing Director in 2006.

JP Morgan, London 2007 - 2010

Managing Director Head of Cross Asset Sales and Derivatives Marketing Scandinavia and Holland (across the FICC and Equities divisions).

Goldman Sachs, Hong Kong and London 2010 - 2017

2010  2012 Managing Director Head of Cross Asset Structured Sales and Structuring FI Asia, Hong Kong.

2012  2017 Managing Director Head of Cross Asset Structuring ME (London based) and Structured Finance Origination and Structuring (Europe & ME).

Retired as Managing Director from Goldman Sachs International 1 August 2017.

REYL & Co (UK) LLP, London 2017 - 2020

Managing Director, Head of Structured Finance.

GARRY FLOWERS

Garry W. Flowers has served as executive vice president and section 16b officer since 2016 for the Fluor Corporation, responsible for Construction & Fabrication, HSE, Corporate Security, Corporate Investigations, Industrial Relations, Corporate Supply Chain, and Corporate Risk.

From 2009 to 2011, Mr. Flowers served as president and chief executive officer of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, the Fluor-led partnership that oversees the management, cleanup, and operations at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina. Mr. Flowers led the Fluor team replacing the original construction contractor on Westinghouse Nuclear Power Projects to construct four 1200-megawatt, nuclear-powered power projects for 2 public utilities in South Carolina and Georgia, valued at $9B Contract value. Additionally, he has oversight of the governor Mario M. Cuomo Cable Stay Bridge, a $3.2B fixed- price project in Tarrytown, New York, the Nuclear Weapons Storage facility at the F.E. Warren U.S. AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the U.S. Army Nitrocellulose Project in Radford, Virginia.

In 2012 he served as group president of Global Services, Operations and Maintenance. He managed a $3B operations and maintenance business sector with 19K employees in 100+ countries, and subsidiaries AMECO (equipment rental company) and TRS, Fluor's temporary staffing company. He oversaw a $500M contract between AMECO and U.S. Army to equip U.S. bases in Iraq.

Since joining Fluor in 1978, he has held numerous leadership positions across the company. Active in a variety of civic and professional organizations, Mr. Flowers is a past member of the Executive Council of the U.S. Department of State, Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) and was previously a director on the board of the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance.

He is a graduate of Furman University in South Carolina, having earned a bachelor's degree in political science. Mr. Flowers resides with his wife in Isle of Palms, South Carolina.

Dr. John Burba stated that "I am excited to have Garry and Ante on board with our team and look forward to working with them in building an ecologically, ethical, and industry leading lithium extraction company".

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Dr. John Burba"

Dr. John Burba, President CEO & Director

Tel: (778) 939-4228

Forwardlooking and cautionary statements

This press release shall 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 state in the United States in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities referred to herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from registration requirements. This release may contain statements within the meaning of safe harbour provisions as defined under securities laws and regulations.

This release may contain certain forwardlooking statements with respect to the financial condition, results of operations and business of the Company and certain of the plans and objectives of the Company with respect to the same. By their nature, forwardlooking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future and there are many factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forwardlooking statements.

SOURCE International Battery Metals Ltd.

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New Delhi: India is witnessing a second wave of coronavirus. The second wave is proving to be much more infectious and dangerous as compared to the first one. The Delhi High Court has asked the Centre and AAP government as to why there was Remdesivir drug scarcity in the national capital when the medication was being widely prescribed for COVID-19 patients.

Justice Prathiba M Singh made the Health Ministry and the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) a party in the matter and asked their lawyers to come with instructions on why there was a scarcity of the drug in Delhi.

A similar direction was issued to additional standing counsel Anuj Aggarwal, appearing for the Delhi government, and the matter was listed for hearing post-lunch by the court.

Anuj Aggarwal said that Delhi does not have the facilities to manufacture the drug and it is obtained from other states who sell it only after meeting their own demands.

On the other hand, Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday (April 14) said that those who are creating an artificial shortage of the medicine will have to face strict action.

Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) has directed for strict action into any complaint of black marketing of Remdesivir. Those who are exploiting people and creating artificial shortage of medicine, strict action should be taken against them, Dr Harsh Vardhan was quoted as saying by ANI.

Dr Harsh Vardhan "Shortage of Remdesivir happened because its production was reduced as COVID-19 cases were decreasing. Our drug controller and ministry held a meeting with stakeholders and asked manufacturers to strengthen the production."

Current total capacity of 7 manufacturers of Remdesivir is 38.80 lakh vials/month. Fast-track approval was given for 7 more sites having a production capacity of 10 Lakh vials/month to 6 manufacturers. Another 30 lakh vials/month production lined up, a statement from the ministry said.

(Inputs from agencies)

Live TV
Rudy Giuliani defiant, a day after FBI raid of home, office View Photo

NEW YORK (AP)  Rudy Giuliani sought to discredit the federal investigation into his dealings in Ukraine on Thursday, a day after agents raided his home and office.

Giuliani said the 6 a.m. search, which he said involved seven FBI agents, was unnecessary because he offered for two years to provide federal prosecutors his electronic devices and to talk it over with them.

They wont explain to me what theyre looking into for two years, Giuliani said in an evening appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello, has previously said proposed meetings between investigators and Giulianis legal team didnt take place because prosecutors wouldnt agree to a precondition that they first disclose more about the probe.

It would be rare for prosecutors to give up detailed information to a potential criminal defendant before charges are filed, or to rely on that person to voluntarily produce electronic files thought to contain incriminating evidence.

The federal probe is examining Giulianis interactions with Ukrainian figures and whether he violated a federal law that governs lobbying on behalf of foreign countries or entities.

Giuliani, the Republican former mayor of New York City, has insisted that all of his activities in Ukraine were conducted on behalf of former President Donald Trump. At the time, Giuliani was leading a campaign to press Ukraine for an investigation into President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

But some Ukrainians who were in contact with Giuliani have said in interviews that they also hoped he could help them on matters in the U.S., including arranging meetings with the U.S. attorney general and ousting the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

The search warrants for Giulianis electronic devices were approved by a federal judge. The agents who banged on his door this week took seven or eight electronic items of mine and two of someone elses, Giuliani said.

Giuliani said Thursday that federal prosecutors told his attorney they had accessed materials from his iCloud as early as 2019.

In the middle of the impeachment defense, they invaded, without telling me, my iCloud, he told Carlson, without providing details.

Earlier in the day, Giuliani made his first public comments since the raid on his daily talk show on WABC Radio. On the air, he referred to prosecutors in the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York, which he used to run, as unaccomplished bullies.

Youre not going to stop me, he said on the program. And youre not going to convict me of some phony crime.

He then ticked off a list of his own accomplishments as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in the 1980s, including prosecutions of mob figures and Wall Street fraudsters, and bashed the current prosecution team as having done nothing comparable.

What have they done? Nothing, except come after me  at six oclock in the morning with a piece of nonsense. No wonder theyre jealous, Giuliani said.

The U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan declined to comment.

In the decades since Giuliani left, the office has handled some of the nations most high-profile prosecutions, convicting global drug traffickers, corrupt politicians, Wall Street scammers and terrorists including the men behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday on CNN that the White House was given no heads up on the fact the raid was coming. The Justice Department, she said, is independent now. Theyre gonna make their own decisions, take their own actions. Thats how the president wants it.

Trump told Fox Business on Thursday that Giuliani was the greatest mayor in the history of New York and a great patriot.

Its very, very unfair, he said of what happened Wednesday. Rudy loves this country so much, it is so terrible when you see things that are going on in our country with the corruption and the problems and then they go after Rudy Giuliani.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed reporting from Washington.

By JIM MUSTIAN

Associated Press
STAMFORD  A Norwalk man who allegedly showed an interest in mass shootings will face up to five years in prison, according to the terms of a plea bargain he accepted Wednesday.

Brandon Wagshol, 23, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and illegal possession of high-capacity magazines in a remote hearing before Judge Gary White.

The deal, which had been on the table since at least November 2020, will see Wagshol receive a 10-year suspended sentence, of which he will serve between three to five years.

Based on the states recommendation and case, White will determine the length of Wagshols prison sentence at a hearing on June 23.

Assistant States Attorney Dan Cummings said the state has not settled on a recommended sentence length yet.

I havent made any decisions yet on where in the range that might fall. It could be three, it could be five, it could be in between, Cummings said.

Cummings said the state will make its recommendation after a review of Wagshols pre-sentencing investigation, a report done by the probation department that looks at a number of factors including the defendants criminal history, the details of the pending case and more.

Wagshols attorney, Darnell Crosland, said he hopes the judge will show some empathy to his client, who he said is suffering from mental health issues.

I can only hope that when Wagshol is sentenced, the court gives him the three years, he said. The prosecutor may view him as a monster, thats because they lack the understanding or just dont know how to address people with mental health issues...Lets pray that the court does the right thing.

Under the plea deal, Wagshol will also be required to serve five years of probation following his release from prison.

Wagshol had been facing charges of attempted first-degree assault, second-degree assault, second-degree assault on an elderly person and four counts of possession of a high-capacity magazine.

The guilty plea mark the end of a nearly years of court hears that began when Wagshol was arrested by Norwalk Police in August 2019 after they received tips from the FBI that he was attempting to illegally purchase extended magazine clips in New Hampshire.

During the arrest, police seized a .40 caliber handgun, a .22 caliber rifle, a rifle scope with a laser, four firearm optic sites, a firearm flashlight, body armor with a titanium plate, a full camouflage outfit, a ballistic helmet, tactical gloves, a camouflage bag, computers, and numerous .40 caliber, .22 caliber and .300 blackout rounds of ammunition, according to the search warrant.

Investigators wrote in the warrant that Wagshol had an interest in mass shootings that dated back to 2008, when he was a sixth-grader at Ponus Ridge Middle School. In November of that year, Wagshol threatened to shoot another student using his fathers guns after the other childs talking made it hard for him to concentrate, the warrant said.

Wagshol has been incarcerated since February 2020 when he was arrested on second-degree assault charges after he attacked his father with a 23-inch metal pipe. Police said the assault occurred after a dispute between the two over Wagshol playing his video games too loudly.
(ANSA) - ROME, APR 28 - Italy is to send a team of specialised staff along with an oxygen production system to COVID-ravaged India, Premier Mario Draghi said Wednesday.

"Italy will not fail to lend its support in this moment of difficulty," he said.

"I want to express my deep sympathy with the Indian people for the suffering caused by the new wave of the pandemic".

Hospitals across India have been running out of oxygen amid a COVID surge. (ANSA).


The construction of an underground liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) storage cavern in Ba Ria - Vung Tau Province has been hastened so that it can be completed in about two months, as originally scheduled.

This underground storage cavern, located in the southern Vietnamese provinces Phu My Town, is a key part of the US$1.35 billion polypropylene factory project of Hyosung Vina Chemicals Co., Ltd. (Hyosung Vina Chemicals), a South Korean company.

The investor told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reporters at the construction site that 95 percent of the workload has been completed.

The facility, located at a depth of up to 200 meters below sea level, has a total capacity of up to 240,000 metric tons, making it the largest-ever of this kind in Southeast Asia, according to the investor.

Engineer Pham Thi Hong gestures while introducing the operating principles of the underground LPG storage cavern in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, Vietnam. Photo: Dong Ha / Tuoi Tre

The construction of the storage cavern is expected to be completed in late June this year, Ba Ria - Vung Tau online newspaper reported.

When the cavern is in operation, LPG will run storage through the specialized pipes connected to a pumping system.

All activities related to the facility will be closely monitored through pressure and seismic sensors.

Regarding the reason why the storage cavern occupies a 60-hectare area that was once marshy, experts explained that from the ground surface to a depth of 60 meters is the layer of mud and soft soil but underneath this layer is a stratum of very solid granite.

Wie Chol Ryang, operating director of the underground storage, said that this facility is nearly absolutely protected from natural disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis or volcanic eruptions.

These are prerequisites for Hyosung Vina Chemicals to decide to build an underground facility in this area.

The storage cavern has an expected lifespan of 50 years, and when the term is expired, it may continue to be used if its gas pipelines and other auxiliary works are replaced, said Wie, who once joined the building of two underground gas storage facilities in South Korea decades ago.

Construction of underground storage costs less than that of an aboveground one while ensuring a high land use ratio, said Kim Young Ki, deputy general director of Hyosung Vina Chemicals.

Pham Thi Hong, an executive staff member of the underground facility, told Tuoi Tre that the cavern is located at a depth of 110-200 meters below sea level and surrounded by hard rock structures.

Air separation towers at the LPG storage project in Phu My Town, Ba Ria - Vung Tau Province, Vietnam. Photo: Dong Ha / Tuoi Tre

The storage cavern has been designed in an egg shape to ensure that pressure does not concentrate on any point but is distributed evenly, Hong said.

The Vietnamese engineer added that the facility is supported by safety technical factors to keep the LPG stored inside from leaking out.

Hoang Trung, a 36-year-old Vietnamese engineer who is assigned by Hyosung Vina Chemicals to supervise the construction of this underground work, said he is very happy to work at the storage cavern.

It is rare for anyone to be assigned by the investor as the supervisor of such a large construction, so I feel very proud and happy to work at this cavern, the first-ever of this kind in Vietnam, the supervisor said.

Commenting on Vietnamese engineers and workers engaging in the storage cavern construction, operating director Wie said that they are hard-working, friendly, and technologically-knowledgeable.

Cavern with many records This underground LPG storage cavern consists of two compartments, one of which is for propane, with a capacity of 170,000 metric tons, and the other for butane, capable of 70,000 metric tons. The propane and butane sections have their deepest points at 192 meters and 152 meters below sea level, respectively. A Hyosung Vina Chemicals representative affirmed that with such sizes and capacities, this underground LPG storage cavern becomes the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia. The company has also built 10 gas tanks on the ground, each of which has a capacity of 4,000 metric tons. This is also the biggest-ever gas tank in the world since other tanks of the same type are only capable of holding 1,000 - 2,000 metric tons each. In addition, the investor has imported and installed a gas separation tower that is nearly 120 meters in height and 10 meters in diameter. This is also the worlds tallest and largest air separation tower.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
This Spanish cheesecake's 'burnt' moniker comes from its dark golden hue, which contributes to its rich, caramelly flavor. (Joe Lingeman/TNS)

How to Make Basque Cheesecake at Home

My first bite of Basque cheesecake was a revelation. Ive never been a fan of super-rich New York-style cheesecake, so it was as if Basque cheesecakewhich is decidedly less sweet and really lets the flavor of the cheese shinewas made for me. I was initially drawn in by its dark, almost-burnt appearance, but it was the caramelized flavor and impossibly smooth texture that had me begging the chef for his recipe.

As it turns out, not only is Basque cheesecake (or burnt Basque cheesecake) incredibly delicious, but its also simple to make at home. Heres everything you need to know about this stunning Spanish sweet.

The History of Basque Cheesecake

When I moved to Boise, Idaho, I was excited to learn that the city has the largest concentration of Basque residents in the United States. Reportedly, many Basque families moved from the region in northern Spain to Idaho in the 1800s to mine silver or work as sheepherders. Today, Boise has a rich Basque culture and an entire Basque block filled with restaurants, a market, and a cultural museum. This is where I had my first Basque cheesecake.

As I learned from talking with local Basque chef Asier Garcia, chef-owner of Leku Ona, that Basque cheesecake is a relatively new concept.

Burnt cheesecake isnt something our grandmothers made for us, he said. It came out of a restaurant called La Vina in San Sebastian in the 1990s, with almost every chef, home baker, and magazine riffing on the recipe created by chef Santiago Rivera. The story goes that Rivera had taken over the family restaurant and set out to add a simple dessert to the menu. Working within the constraints of a savory kitchen, including a hot oven that contributed to the cheesecakes dark color, this riff on classic cheesecake was born.

The Taste

Basque cheesecake bakes at a higher temperature than traditional cheesecake (400 degrees F versus 350 degrees F), giving it its deep golden hue and caramelized flavor. The burnt moniker comes only from the appearanceBasque cheesecake tastes rich and caramelly.

The other thing youll notice is that Basque cheesecake doesnt have a crust. The airy batter and high heat cause the cheesecake to rise and fall in the oven a bit like a souffle, which gives the dessert a crust-like exterior and ultra-creamy interior. Depending on the bake time, the center can range from runny (think Camembert cheese) to fudge-like. A small amount of flour in the batter (just 1/4 cup for nearly three pounds of dairy) helps set the cheesecake and makes it sturdy enough to slice.

Depending on the bake time, the center can range from runny (think Camembert cheese) to fudge-like. (Pic0000/Shutterstock)

Basque cheesecake is also less sweet than most cheesecakes, which really lets the cheese flavor shine.

In Spain, Philadelphia cream cheese wasnt widely available, so the original Basque cheesecakes were made without salt, because the Spanish cream cheese was already seasoned, Garcia told me with a bit of a laugh.

Do I Need a Special Pan?

Basque cheesecakes are most often baked in springform pans, but unlike New York-style cheesecakes, you dont need a water bath. Because of this, you can use a cake pan instead. Just be sure to use one thats at least 3 inches deep, because the cheesecake will rise (and fall) quite a bit as it bakes.

3 Tips for the Best Basque Cheesecake

Riveras recipe is widely available in books and onlineTaste called it a special recipe but not a secret one. Having cooked through a handful of adaptations, Ive found a few tips for Basque cheesecake perfection.

1. Bring the cream cheese to room temperature. Cubing the cream cheese and letting it sit at room temperature for at least an hour will make mixing the batter much easier and ensure a creamy cheesecake.

2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Adding the eggs one at a time and making sure each one is fully incorporated before adding the next brings a lot of air to the batter, which is what helps create that souffle-like texture.

3. Pull the cheesecake from the oven when its jiggly. For a smooth, creamy interior, you dont want to overbake the cheesecake. Pull it out when its deeply browned on top but still jiggles when you tap on the pan. Some carryover cooking after the cheesecake is out of the oven will help it set.

To Serve

You can serve the cheesecake slightly warm or at room temperature. You can also refrigerate the dessert overnight, but just be sure to bring it back to room temperature before servingyou want it to be soft and creamy. Basque cheesecake isnt served with any toppings or sauce, but its great with a small glass of sherry, which is a traditional drink pairing in Spains Basque regionas well as in Boises Basque block.

Basque cheesecake is great with a small glass of sherry, which is a traditional drink pairing in Spains Basque regionas well as in Boises Basque block. (Stockcreations/Shutterstock)

Burnt Basque Cheesecake

Serves 8 to 10

2 pounds full-fat cream cheese

Cooking spray

1 3/4 cups granulated sugar

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

5 large eggs

2 cups heavy cream

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

Bring the cream cheese to room temperature: Cut into large cubes. Place in a large bowl if using an electric hand mixer or in the bowl of a stand mixer and let sit at room temperature at least 1 hour.

Heat the oven and prepare the pan: Arrange a rack in the middle of the oven and heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Coat a 9-inch springform pan or 9-inch (3-inch high) round cake pan with cooking spray. Line the pan with 2 overlapping sheets of parchment paper, and dont worry if there are some wrinkles and creases in the paper.

Beat the cream cheese and sugar together: Add granulated sugar to the cream cheese and beat on medium speed until smooth, about 3 minutes. Add kosher salt and beat to combine.

Beat in the eggs and cream: With the mixer on low speed, beat in eggs one at a time, mixing until each one is incorporated before adding the next. Slowly pour in heavy cream and mix until smooth.

Sift in the flour and gently fold it in: Use a fine-mesh strainer to sift all-purpose flour onto the batter. Fold it in with a large spatula.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until browned and almost burned-looking on top, with a jiggly center, 50 minutes to 1 hour. The cake will puff, crack, and fall as it bakes.

Remove the cheesecake from the oven and let cool completely on a wire rack, about 1 hour.

To serve, remove the cake from the pan, or remove the outer ring of the springform pan. Peel away the parchment paper and slice the cheesecake.

Recipe Note: This recipe was adapted from Chef Santiago Riveras recipe.

Meghan Splawn is a writer for TheKitchn.com, a nationally known blog for people who love food and home cooking. Submit any comments or questions to editorial@thekitchn.com. Copyright 2021 Apartment Therapy. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Lufthansa on Thursday lowered its expectations for a travel rebound in 2021 despite optimism about vaccines, as the coronavirus pandemic pushed the German airline giant into another quarterly loss.

The group reported a 1.0 billion ($1.2 billion) euro net loss over the January to March period, slightly beating analyst expectations.

The result was also much improved on the 2.1 billion euro loss it booked over the same period a year earlier, when the first COVID-19 wave upended air travel and left planes grounded worldwide.

"The first quarter was still completely dominated by the pandemic. Thanks to consistent cost savings, we were nevertheless able to achieve better results than in the previous year," said chief executive Carsten Spohr in a statement.

Group revenues reached 2.6 billion euros, down 60 percent on the first quarter of 2020 whose early days were still unaffected by the pandemic.

Looking ahead, Europe's largest airline said it expected to operate at 40 percent of pre-crisis capacity this year, lowering its ambitions from a previously announced 40 to 50 percent.

Lufthansa flew at just 21 percent capacity in the first quarter of 2021, carrying three million passengers10 percent of the level reached in pre-COVID 2019.

"The evolution of the pandemic is causing continued travel restrictions in almost all parts of the world. Therefore, demand is expected to only recover gradually in the second quarter," the group said.

Spohr however was upbeat about the later months of the year, citing vaccine progress and the prospect of vaccinated Americans being allowed to fly into Europe.

"Given the foreseeable major advances in vaccination rates, we expect demand to rise sharply from the summer onwards," he said.

Lufthansa, which also includes Austrian, Swiss and Brussels Airlines, was saved from bankruptcy last June by a German government bailout.

The company is in the throes of a painful restructuring to slash costs that will include thousands of job cuts.

By the end of the first quarter of 2021, Lufthansa had around 110,000 employees globally, 19 percent fewer than a year ago.

As part of the recovery plan, the group's current fleet of 800 aircraft will be slashed to 650 by 2023.

Explore further Lufthansa loses 1.26 billion euros in third quarter

 2021 AFP
Prof. Zeblon Vilakazi installed as 16th Wits Vice-Chancellor

Professor Zeblon Zenzele Vilakazi was installed as the 16th Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University at a ceremony held at the Great Hall on Thursday.

Wits has the opportunity to transcend many latitudes and ultimately to impact on society for good. This was the message delivered by the Wits VC at his installation.

The coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally altered our world, but it also provides Wits with a fortuitous moment to hit the reset button and to envision our moonshot that could dramatically change society for good, said Vilakazi. You do not usher in a vision in a moment of euphoria. You do it because the vision you are articulating is as important as the other challenges which must be overcome.

Challenges serve as catalysts for change

Vilakazi listed higher education funding and sustainability, the changing world of work and the digital divide as some of the challenges exacerbated by the pandemic. These challenges should not hold us back. Rather, they should drive us to aspire for a better future and spur us to new heights. Moonshots, combined with perseverance, will open up new worlds of possibility. It is time for Wits moonshot moment. It is time for perseverance, he added.

Vilakazi was hooded by the Wits Chancellor Dr Judy Dlamini, in the presence of the Chairperson of the Wits Council, Mr Isaac Shongwe, the Director General in the Presidency, Ms Phindile Baleni, intellectual luminaries, vice-chancellors, representatives from the private and public sectors, civil society, and members of the Wits community. The event included remarks from the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Dr Blade Nzimande.

Future focus areas

In his address, Vilakazi emphasised the importance of universities and strong public institutions in society and reiterated the role of universities in developing active social citizens, leaders, intellectuals, innovators, and critical thinkers. He also outlined three focus areas for Wits: We must focus on developing academically excellent graduates who leave their mark on society; we must continue to conduct world-class research and foster innovation and entrepreneurship; and we must use our location in the economic heartland of Africa to lead from the Global South. Finally, he emphasised the need to develop the African academy of the future. I believe that in the decades to come, we could have research that comes out of our university that will be Nobel prize-winning, and that work starts now.

Developing formidable graduates

The importance of developing ethical graduates with a strong sense of civic responsibility was emphasised by Vilakazi. Our world seems to be polarising and facing unprecedented challenges. It needs brave, principled, formidable graduates from our institution, and others, to meet these challenges, to explore and navigate the future guided by the compasses of reason, factful-ness, and deep thought. This looks like a moonshot right now, he added.

An inspiring exemplar for all Africans

The Chairperson of the Wits Council, Mr Isaac Shongwe, described Vilakazi as the epitome of a world-class scholar, globally recognised for his scientific work, and for his contribution towards developing higher education in Africa. He is a truly talented individual and an inspiring exemplar for all Africans. He is a symbol of hope for our students and an inspiration to our young scholars. He will lead Wits to its centennial next year, put forward a new vision for the institution, reinvigorate the African academy, and in so doing chart a way forward that will impact on our collective futures. I am inspired by his passion for progress and I look forward to working with Professor Vilakazi as he catapults Wits into its next century, concluded Shongwe.

Download full speech: Remarks by I Shongwe Chair of Council.

QUOTES FROM THE SPEECH OF PROF. ZEBLON VILAKAZI

On creating hope for young people

I would like to share a story of a child who in 1981, growing up in a dusty township east of Johannesburg watched as the Space Shuttle Columbia, the STS-1, take off until it was just a tiny speck of dust in the sky. This child was inspired to reach for the stars and transcend the latitude that apartheid imposed on him. This child found himself representing his country and continent at the CERN laboratories in Geneva, in what was the largest scientific experiment of its time. It is this child who, 40 years later, stands here to address you today as the 16th Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Our mission at Wits is to be the place where thousands of highly-talented young individuals from all backgrounds have the opportunity to strive for excellence and emerge as leaders who will impact positively on society.  Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University.

On the important role of universities in society

The role of universities in society is fundamental, especially in times of difficulty. In times of disruption, we need strong public institutions to remain steadfast and not buckle in the face of challenges. Our universities are treasure troves of knowledge that need to be protected, valued, guarded, and strengthened.  Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University.

On developing active citizens

We must continue to take people from different ideologies, races, religions, cultures, classes, and genders and transform them into active global citizens who are equipped to deal with the complexities of this world. Citizens that break away from their narrow enclaves. Citizens that will inspire the world. Citizens that are beacons of what is possible. We must continue with this tradition and push beyond our latitudes.  Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University.

On research and academic excellence, and leading from the Global South

Vilakazi outlined three focus areas for Wits as it transitions into its next century in 2022. We must focus on developing academically excellent graduates who leave their mark on society; conduct world-class research and foster innovation; and use our location in the economic heartland of Africa to lead from the Global South. We must transcend these latitudes if we are to compete with the best in the world from our vantage point.  Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University.

On higher education

The higher education landscape is changing rapidly and we need to move with the times but remain true to our core academic business of producing the next generation of leaders and knowledge that will have an impact on society. We need to be ready to adapt and embrace change in order to stay ahead of the curve.

On developing the African academy

We must aspire to create the African academy of the future, said Vilakazi. I believe that in the decades to come, we could have research that comes out of our university that will be Nobel prize-winning, and that work starts now. Africa needs to produce its own scholars who understand and can leverage the local context to contribute original knowledge to the global academy. We must create our own academic pipeline of academics so that we develop the next generation of scholars who excel in their disciplines, and who bring our unique, diverse backgrounds, contexts and knowledge to the global academy.

On innovation and entrepreneurship

Vilakazi described plans to reinvigorate Braamfontein, with the help of public and private sector partners, in order to develop an ecosystem of knowledge generation, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and an innovation hub which could soon spawn Africas own tech companies, which will grow and multiply to scale. We must create an enabling environment for the flourishing of great ideas that will herald this continent into an era of innovation, change, and growth.

Download the full media kit including the media release, citation, images, voice notes, full speeches, sound and video clips from http://bit.ly/Wits_Installation.
Tucker Carlson accused the Biden administration of 'having all the hallmarks of tyranny' over an FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan apartment, and claimed activist group The Lincoln Project were tipped off about the search.

Giuliani's home was searched in a dawn raid, as part of an investigation into his work in Ukraine, and electronic devices were seized. No charges have been brought against the former New York City Mayor turned Donald Trump fixer.

Last week, on April 24, the anti-Trump media group The Lincoln Project tweeted: 'Multiple sources confirming something BIG is coming this Wednesday.'

Carlson said that this was a sign the organization, which has been riven by accusations of sexual harassment and questions over its use of donor money, was 'the Democratic Party's campaign operation'.

Tucker Carlson used his show on Monday night to condemn the raid on Giuliani's home

Tucker Carlson claims the feds leaked news of the raid on Giuliani to The Lincoln Project pic.twitter.com/UeQbFlD5Qh  Acyn (@Acyn) April 29, 2021

Rudy Giuliani's Upper East Side home was raided at 6am on Wednesday

'The Feds notified their allies and the Democratic Party's campaign operation, The Lincoln Project,' said Carlson.

'The Lincoln Project then bragged online that they knew this raid was coming.

'Now, you may have thought The Lincoln Project was done.

'We told you that, in fact. We believed it was permanently discredited by a child molestation scandal. But it wasn't.

'Under this administration, The Lincoln Project is strong stronger than ever. Strong enough to know about a FBI raid before it happens.'

He said the group, started by disillusioned 'Never Trump' Republican strategists, was 'an ally of the White House.'

He added: 'So, by definition, they can do whatever they want and they do.'

Giuliani, Donald Trump's former attorney, is seen on November 7 in Pennsylvania

Rudy Giuliani's apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

On Wednesday afternoon, hours after the raid on Giuliani's apartment, The Lincoln Project was trolling him, retweeting a 2018 tweet of his in which he wrote the word: 'You'.

The activist group added: 'Have the right to remain silent.'

Giuliani is yet to comment on the raid, and is it unclear if The Lincoln Project's earlier tweet was a reference to the planned bust.

The Lincoln Project launched in November 2019 as a super PAC that allowed its leaders to raise and spend unlimited sums of money.

Since its creation, the Lincoln Project has raised $90 million - more than $50 million of which has gone to firms controlled by the group's leaders.

Its founders represent a who's who of prominent Republican strategists on cable television, including Schmidt and Reed Galen, both former advisers to John McCain; conservative attorney George Conway; former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn; Florida-based veteran political ad maker Rick Wilson; and John Weaver, who has long advised former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Backed by its founders' commanding social media presence, the organization quickly attracted a massive following of Trump critics in both parties that exceeded even its own founders' expectations.

Earlier this year, however, Weaver, a 61-year-old married father, was accused of sexually harassing young men.

Questions were also asked about what happened to the huge sums of money donated to the group. Conway, Schmidt and Horn have all resigned, and Conway says the group he co-founded should close.

Only three of the Lincoln Project board's eight co-founders now remain at the organization

Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway distances himself from the anti-Trump group he left in August as he demands a 'full explanation' of what its leaders knew about sexual misconduct allegations Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway has sought to distance himself from the anti-Trump PAC as he demands that its leaders give a full explanation into allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. Conway, a conservative lawyer and the husband of former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, addressed the controversy plaguing the Lincoln Project in an interview with Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery on Monday. Since January, nearly two dozen young men, including two minors, came forward to accuse Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver of sexually harassing them online for years. The scandal deepened as a number of current and former staffers came forward with claims that the group fostered a toxic work environment and financial disclosures revealed that it funneled $50million of donations toward consulting firms controlled by its leaders. Conway, who joined the group at its inception in December 2019 and left last August, said the revelations came as a surprise to him because he wasn't deeply involved in the group at any point. Several of Weaver's accusers have claimed that they told top brass at the Lincoln Project about his alleged misconduct, while the organization maintains that it wasn't made aware of it until last month. Conway said he didn't know who was telling the truth but called the Lincoln Project's denials 'a little bit squishy around the edges'. Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway (pictured in 2017) has sought to distance himself from the anti-Trump PAC as he demands that its leaders give a full explanation into allegations of sexual and financial misconduct Conway asserted that his involvement in the Lincoln Project was minimal from the start, saying: 'I had kind of an odd role because I was the oddball, I was the non-political consultant. 'My attraction to them was I could get them some attention, in part because my wife worked at the White House and I was out there as a major critic of Trump. 'So when they asked me to join them back in 2019 and I was all too happy to because I was looking for ways to try to make a difference. 'It was hard for me to sort of be involved functionally with them because they knew what they were doing, these were the political consultants.' Conway said he didn't know the other founders 'all that well' and 'didn't know Weaver at all'. 'I had no idea about Weaver,' he said in reference to the misconduct claims. 'The first time I ever heard anything weird about Weaver was way after the election, after I was out of the Lincoln Project. 'I heard he had some kind of thing where he would hit on people, on men, even though he was a heterosexually married male, and I heard it was pretty weird. 'I didn't hear that he was hitting on people within the Lincoln Project at that time, I certainly didn't hear that he was hitting on anybody who was underage. Then late in January more stuff started coming out.' Asked if the allegations against Weaver had been brought to the attention of other leaders at the Lincoln Project earlier, Conway said he'd heard different things. 'Some people say that they did do that, we see that in the press reports, I've heard that over the past couple of weeks privately. And then I hear the opposite,' he said. 'I have to say, the denials... they were, a little bit squishy around the edges and made me wonder. 'Maybe there's a dispute about what exactly people were told and when, I can't resolve it, and God help me you couldn't pay me money to be the one to try to resolve it.' Conway said that he thinks the accusers should be allowed to share their allegations publicly, regardless of non-disclosure agreements. He then explained that one of the reasons he left the Lincoln Project is because he 'wasn't really doing that much useful' in his role there. 'There was all this stuff going on without me, because I mean look, I'm just a lawyer, I'm not a political consultant. I might email somebody: "Hey, this is a great idea," but they probably already thought about it. 'It wasn't satisfying to just be a name on the masthead, so it was a perfect opportunity to just step back.' Conway then lamented how the allegations in recent weeks have 'blemished' the work by Lincoln Project staff members who had nothing to do with them. 'One of the things that's most upsetting about the implosion of the Lincoln Project is that [the staff's] efforts are being undermined. The justness, the rightness, the good intentions and the hard work are being blemished by all of this,' he said. 'I think all these people are owed  and I think all the people who gave money to the Lincoln Project are owed  a full explanation of what happened. So we know what happened with Weaver, and if there are issues with where the money went, that too.' Advertisement

Giuliani, a former New York prosecutor who was hired by Trump in April 2018, scheduled a press conference for 3pm, then abruptly cancelled it.

Carlson questioned why the FBI was raiding the former mayor of New York City's home, and accused the government of using 'the force of law to punish their political opponent'.

He also noted that Giuliani's lawyer claimed the agents turned down the opportunity to take custody of a hard drive from Hunter Biden's laptop.

Giuliani had been shopping the hard drive to media organizations before the election, promising that it had compromising information about the Biden family, and potential evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's business deals in China and Ukraine.

Joe Biden has always denied being involved in his troubled son's businesses.

Rudy Giuliani's Park Avenue office was also raided by federal investigators

'What is interesting is the one electronic device the Feds didn't seize, the FBI did not take in today's raid, was a copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive from his laptop,' said Carlson.

'Giuliani had a copy of that in his apartment. At one point, they picked it up and looked at it but when Rudy Giuliani told them where it came from, it came from Hunter Biden, they put it down.

'It was the one thing they didn't want - and that is very strange, if you think about it.

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and also a accused agents of ignoring Hunter's hard drives during their search

'The Justice Department is now telling us that Rudy Giuliani was somehow involved in foreign tampering with our democracy. Russia, by implication was involved.

'See, you would think they would want to examine Rudy Giuliani's own copy of Hunter Biden's laptop.

'Why? Because Hunter Biden himself just told us on television that that laptop and hard drive could be tied to Russian intelligence.

You know, the fake Russian laptop, with all of the photoshopped pictures of Hunter Biden smoking fake Russian crack with those fake Russian hookers.

'So why wouldn't they want his own copy of that?'

Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, told The Wall Street Journal that the warrant outlined an investigation into the suspected violation of overseas lobbying regulations.

At Giuliani's office, they seized items including a computer used by his longtime assistant, Jo Ann Zafonte, who's also been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury next month, Costello said.

'They're trying to make Rudy Giuliani look like a criminal,' Costello told ABC.

'He has done nothing wrong.'

Costello called the raids 'legal thuggery,' saying he had offered several times to answer questions from investigators, if they agreed to detail the subject of their probe.

'It's like I'm talking to a wall,' he told the Journal.

Investigators in the Justice Department had tried for months to secure the search warrant, according to The New York Times.

Prior to President Biden taking office, Trump appointees at the Justice Department had tried to block approval of the warrant, the paper said.
The world was stopped in its tracks by the grandeur of the royal, albeit informal, funeral of Prince Philip, and earlier by the glory of the inauguration of US President Joe Biden. Both ceremonies had me wonder whether we Egyptians, as we carry out inaugurations, funerals, or celebrations, follow the same conduct.

Amidst Covid 19 precautionary measures, Prince Philips funeral was scaled down. Still it was an historic ceremony even if it was simple in relation to what is customary. Prior to the funeral, a one-minute national silence was observed across Britain. Only thirty guests attended, but the ceremony was conducted not only with decorum and dignity but also with Prince Philips distinctive personal touches. The casket was placed on the Prince's favorite Land Rover. His three sons, Charles, Andrew and Edward, and his daughter, Ann, walked first in the procession behind the casket, followed by the grandsons Harry and William; the medals he had received were displayed inside the church, and the service ended with a proclamation of his 133 titles read out loud. Though very somber, the Queen remained the regal royal she has always been, gaining the worlds sympathy as she stood alone not able to receive the respect and condolences of anyone.

We also watched the inauguration of US President Joe Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris. The ceremony followed fastidious precision, a carefully planned ceremony with no spontaneity or improvisation, and was intended to exhibit to the world that the United States remains the most powerful country in the world.

President Biden was sworn in on a family Bible from the 19th century. The inauguration also featured several performances by celebrities who sang and spoke of their love for the US. Then President Biden and Kamala Harris went from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier accompanied by three former presidents: Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton.

Funeral ceremonies also follow the same meticulous preparations, especially if the deceased is of fame and his or her final journey will receive a great deal of attention. In such situations, everyone, not only guests but the masses stand in reverence; no one tries to violate the process or disturb order.

Operation Tay Bridge is the codename for what would be the funeral of Queen Elizabeth and has been set and rehearsed diligently since the sixties of the last century. An adaptation of the operation was applied during Lady Dianas funeral in 1997 and the Queen Mother in 2002. This tells us how seriously such events are taken and producing them in a perfect manner is not taken lightly.

This while six million British citizens stood along the streets to view Princess Dianas procession; despite raging emotions, they stood silent in respect and grief.

In Egypt, when a beloved person dies, the overwhelming sorrow turns into chaos. The funeral of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 was one of the most memorable funerals ever to be held, drawing over five million mourners, and yet it was calamitous. Egyptians, in grief, flocked the streets and engulfed the procession in the hope of bidding their beloved president farewell. Dozens were crushed and the police had to evacuate the official mourners.

Describing the funeral of Umm Kalthoum in 1973, the New York Times says that the mourners "poured like a river in her farewell." But these mourners stormed the procession ultimately taking command, and for three whole hours carried the casket themselves, ultimately heading to Umm Kalthoums favorite mosque El Hussein. Here, too, the official guests had to be evacuated.

A replica occurred at Pope Shenoudahs funeral in 2012. Although only dignitaries and clergymen were to attend, the cathedral became jammed with mourners who forced themselves in, causing three deaths and many injuries.

But Egyptians have finally realized the importance and value of the Egyptian image that the world perceives. Lately, they have presented many celebrations that deserve praise.

The inauguration ceremony of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was the first celebration that was carried out with the requisite stateliness setting a precedent worth adhering to. President El-Sisi took the constitutional oath and assumed the reins of power in the Constitutional Court, then went to the Presidential Palace to meet with dignitaries and well-wishers from the Arab and Western worlds. A celebration followed at El Qoba Palace with many carefully selected noteworthy Egyptians attending. The entire event was coordinated with precision; it followed faultless timing and an impeccable process from the arrival of guests, to seating arrangements, and to the arrival of the Presidents motorcade.

Then came the opening ceremony of the new Suez Canal in 2015, when leaders and delegations from around the world attended to witness the fruits of Egypts hard work and its ability to fulfill its ambitious dream in record time. Even with the harsh summer weather, an atmosphere of enthusiasm and pride descended on the participants, and while President Sisi delivered his speech, the first ship crossed the new Suez Canal with yet another ship sailing in the opposite direction.

Today, we have all realized that Egyptians can indeed carry out unique celebrations with disciplined and distinguished performance. Egyptians were able to embody the greatness of ancient Egypt in the Golden Parade that transferred 22 kings and queens to their final resting place in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. At sunset, a time of day chosen to correspond with the burial philosophy of ancient Egyptians, the procession moved in glamour, prestige, and dignity. Todays Egyptians paid tribute to yesterdays ancestors.

Do not tell me that the Egyptians cannot perfect their efforts; rather, say that they have proven their ability to produce powerful celebrations and inauguration. We look forward to many more perfectly carried out events.
Mainland slams promotion of Taiwan-related issues at WHA

Xinhua) 13:43, April 29, 2021

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Attempts to seek "Taiwan independence" by promoting Taiwan-related issues at the World Health Assembly (WHA) will never succeed, a Chinese mainland spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks at a press conference in response to Taiwan media reports that the European Union supports the island's participation in the upcoming WHA in May.

Noting that Taiwan is part of China, Ma said its participation in the activities of any international organization, including the World Health Organization, must be handled in line with the one-China principle.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
SAN FRANCISCO, April 27, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FreedomFi , the open 5G company, and Helium , a pioneer in decentralized wireless networks, today announced a partnership that will help mobile network operators (MNOs) accelerate their 5G Coverage using FreedomFi Gateways, a consumer-deployed connectivity device that pairs with 5G antennas.



The new FreedomFi Gateways were designed to interoperate with the Helium Network, which enables gateway hosts to mine HNT, the native cryptocurrency of the Helium Network, by providing 5G cellular coverage. FreedomFi Gateways are available for pre-order effective immediately and are expected to ship in the third quarter of 2021. Additional information and pre-orders are available at www.freedomfi.com/Helium5G.

This exciting news by Helium and FreedomFi highlights a great new path to utilize CBRS and delivers on the promise of innovation and creativity always envisioned out of the band, said former FCC Commissioner, Michael ORielly. Turning consumer gateways into network distribution tools and merging with ultra-hot cryptocurrency  consistent with the companies plans  may just be the step needed to help supercharge private 5G deployment. Now we get to see if the market agrees!

FreedomFi Gateways are the perfect way to augment the existing capacity of macro-cell tower operators. Were able to use CBRS small cells in urban areas to rapidly add density to the network at no expense to the operators. Our consumer-first approach is an exciting telecom innovation. We are already in talks with several mobile network operators (MNOs) and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) about using the Helium Network and the coverage created by FreedomFi Gateways to augment their 5G footprint in the United States, said Boris Renski, CEO at FreedomFi. Many operators have been offloading their cell towers into consumer-deployed Wi-Fi access points in a pattern referred to as Carrier Wi-Fi. We are extending this trend to 5G small cells and innovating on how operators get compensated for maintaining cellular infrastructure.

FreedomFi Gateways will run a combination of Magma open source 5G software and the open source Helium blockchain in a single device, making it possible for hosts to receive a direct economic stake in the 5G networks they power. The network will utilize CBRS spectrum band that has been made available by the FCC in January of 2020. Heliums unique reward structure paired with accessible, inexpensive CBRS small cells create a powerful mechanism for consumers and businesses alike to accelerate 5G coverage.

The Peoples Network is now opening up 5G to everyone, said Amir Haleem, Helium CEO and co-founder. FreedomFi's approach to deploying 5G networks, based on open source and CBRS shared spectrum, makes it an order of magnitude less expensive and easier to install a 5G access point than traditional cell towers. Using a blockchain-based incentive model, FreedomFi and Helium are pioneering an entirely new way to deploy 5G networks.

The new 5G network will roll out to select cities in the U.S. throughout the course of 2021. It is expected to expand into other countries and cover a variety of spectrum bands in the following years.

About Helium

Helium is a pioneer in decentralized wireless networks. The company developed the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network, the Helium Network, which connects IOT devices to the internet by incentivizing hotspot hosts to provide coverage. Co-founded by Shawn Fanning and Amir Haleem and backed by GV, Khosla Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Multicoin Capital, FirstMark, and Marc Benioff, the network is live today in more than 3,600 cities throughout North America and Europe with expansion into Asia underway. To learn more, please visit https://www.helium.com/ .

About FreedomFi

FreedomFi is the open 5G company that offers the easiest path towards open source Private LTE or 5G networks. Be it for Fixed Wireless Access, Enterprise Cellular or Mobile Broadband, just plug in any commodity small cell into a FreedomFi Gateway and start managing a private cellular network via a SaaS-hosted portal.

Media Contacts:

Emily Murray

Helium, Inc.

emily@helium.com
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trust Payments announced it has expanded into Ireland. The payments technology group will open an office in Dublin city centre as it seeks to benefit from local talent and rapid growth in the country's FinTech sector.

Chief Commercial Officer Jonathan O'Connor said: "As we emerge from Covid, tourism in Ireland will thrive once more. We are active in the travel industry and can work with a number of partners both in the EU and the US who are keen to build local relationships in Ireland. In addition, we want to drive new and exciting crypto payment and blockchain loyalty product solutions for Irish merchants. Our leadership position in the crypto payments market out of Malta gives us a competitive advantage in the Irish market."

Trust Payments will initially target Irish SMEs with a turnover of 1m or less, offering digital payment, Crypto, Blockchain and options in person (POS) as well as larger organisations operating in the retail, travel, education, financial services, hospitality, online gaming and emerging verticals.

O'Connor added, "We are excited to work with local Irish Fintechs and will offer local start-ups in payments, customer loyalty, travel and online gaming the opportunity to showcase and engage in early pilots with existing Trust Payments clients in the European, North American and Asia Pacific regions. This will provide critical early 'voice of the customer' feedback for selected companies and help Irish startups to grow. Details of this program will be published on our website by the end of June."

Trust Payments is a major player in digital payments globally, and particularly in the UK and Europe. In Ireland, the company already supports a number of clients including Brandon House Hotel, Mill Park Hotel, Nuremore Hotel & Country Club and the George Hotel via a long-term partnership with Guestline.

Clio O'Gara, Country Manager, Guestline commented: "Trust Payments and Guestline have been working together in Ireland since 2016. Via our partnership, we offer GuestPay, a highly specialised payment solution for the hospitality industry. We are looking forward to working together even more closely to further make an even bigger impact in the market. We will offer more Irish hoteliers an innovative specialist single seamless payment solution for all their payment needs including merchant acquiring, integrated point of sale and payment processing services."

Jonathan O'Connor added, "Ireland has a thriving business scene. By opening new offices in Ireland, we will be able to focus even more on our customers in Ireland, as well as gain new customers locally," O'Connor said. He added, "We will have some key senior hires based in Ireland and plan to tap into the great local talent pool of Fintech professionals to help support our local expansion."

About Trust Payments Group

Trust Payments is a global unified payments group for global pay-in, pay-out and customer journey technologies. Our mission is to help businesses to optimise their sales and customer experience through facilitating speedy and seamless payments, loyalty, and data management creating truly Converged Commerce. Our global technology platform connects to 50+ global banks to support multi-acquirer processing, as well as our own merchant acquiring solution in the EU, acquiring.com. The group holds an Authorised Payment Institution (API) License from the UK FCA, Principal Memberships with Visa and Mastercard, as well as money transmission and gaming vendor licences in the US.

Our trusted and robust technology solutions process 2.6+ bn in annualised volume for 13,000+ businesses across eCommerce, mobile and Point of Sale (POS) in 15 like-for-like settlement currencies. Partners, developers and merchants who work with us benefit from our 24 years of payments experience in Retail, Travel, Hospitality, Gaming, Education, Financial Services and Emerging Verticals.

Visit us at www.trustpayments.com.

Media enquiries

[email protected]

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1275553/TRUST_Payments_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Trust Payments
Soldiers have been deployed to remove all persons engaged in mining in waterbodies in Ghana.



The operation, which was ordered by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, commenced on Wednesday, April 28, 2021, at 6 am.



A total of 200 officers of the Ghana Armed Forces have been deployed.



The operation has started on River Pra in the Central and Western Regions.



The Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah revealed this in a press statement issued on Wednesday reading ''in furtherance of the resolutions of the final communique, of the Stakeholder Dialogue on Small Scale Mining on April 14 -15, 2021 and to ensure that mining within water bodies is immediately stopped; the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has authorized the Ghana Armed Forces, to commence an operation, to remove all persons and logistics involved in mining from Ghanas water bodies.



''The operation commenced at 0600 hours on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 on the River Pra in the Central and Western Regions of Ghana. Two Hundred (200) officers of the Ghana Armed Forces are involved in the operation.''



Former Central Regional Minister, Kwamena Duncan has cautioned the 200 soldiers deployed to execute their task accordingly.



He warned them not to compromise on the job and allow themselves to be corrupted.



"We all want money. We all want to be rich but none of them should allow themselves to be corrupted . . . .it's a privilege selection. The nation has reposed confidence in you, don't compromise yourselves," he advised.





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.

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There were violent scenes on Thursday as police dispersed protesters to let heavy trucks take construction equipment into a base where the U.S. has deployed a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery.

The Defense Ministry had mobilized 31 trucks to bring the equipment into the base in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province. It insisted the equipment is of a "non-military nature."

Police eventually succeeded in dispersing the demonstrators to let the trucks through.

Last year, the U.S. Forces Korea had to use helicopters to drop container boxes for use as temporary facilities in the base, which was formerly a golf course, because the sole access road was blocked.

"There is an utter shortage of facilities," a military source said. "The U.S. has been persistently complaining about that."

The issue was also raised in a joint statement following the latest round of U.S.-Korean defense ministers' talks earlier this month.


New Jersey Institute of Technology on Wednesday became the second college in the state that will require both students and employees to be administered the coronavirus vaccine.

While Stevens Institute of Technology has also mandated the vaccine for staff and students, Rutgers, Fairleigh Dickinson, Princeton, Montclair State and New Jersey City universities are only making them necessary for students.

NJIT, which is in Newark, said employees must receive their second Moderna or Pfizer shot by June 28. Workers who plan to get the singe-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine also have until that day to get the shot. Students have been told to complete the vaccination process two weeks before moving into campus housing or two weeks before the fall semester starts.

This decision was made with extensive community feedback and is based upon the recent and continuing expansion of vaccine availability and the scientifically demonstrated efficacy and safety of the vaccines that are available, NJIT president Joel S. Bloom said in a message to the school community.

Exemptions for medical or religious reasons will be considered.

Newark, the states largest city, has been the hardest hit in New Jersey by the coronavirus with 36,538 cases and 947 deaths since March 2020 as of Wednesday, according to Essex County officials.

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.
Staff scientist Joseph Heremans working in lab at Argonne used to synthesize ultrapure diamond crystals and engineer electron spins that carry quantum information. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Claiming that something has a defect normally suggests an undesirable feature. That's not the case in solid-state systems, such as the semiconductors at the heart of modern classical electronic devices. They work because of defects introduced into the rigidly ordered arrangement of atoms in crystalline materials like silicon. Surprisingly, in the quantum world, defects also play an important role.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and scientific institutes and universities in Japan, Korea and Hungary have established guidelines that will be an invaluable resource for the discovery of new defect-based quantum systems. The international team published these guidelines in Nature Reviews Materials.

Such systems have possible applications in quantum communications, sensing and computing and thereby could have a transformative effect on society. Quantum communications could distribute quantum information robustly and securely over long distances, making a quantum internet possible. Quantum sensing could achieve unprecedented sensitivities for measurements with biological, astronomical, technological and military interest. Quantum computing could reliably simulate the behavior of matter down to the atomic level and possibly simulate and discover new drugs.

The team derived their design guidelines based on an extensive review of the vast body of knowledge acquired over the last several decades on spin defects in solid-state materials.

"The defects that interest us here are isolated distortions in the orderly arrangement of atoms in a crystal," explained Joseph Heremans, a scientist in Argonne's Center for Molecular Engineering and Materials Science division, as well as the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Such distortions might include holes or vacancies created by the removal of atoms or impurities added as dopants. These distortions, in turn, can trap electrons within the crystal. These electrons have a property called spin, which acts as an isolated quantum system.

"Spin being a key quantum property, spin defects can hold quantum information in a form that physicists call quantum bits, or qubits, in analogy with the bit of information in classical computing," added Gary Wolfowicz, assistant scientist in Argonne's Center for Molecular Engineering and Materials Science division, along with the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

For several decades, scientists have been studying these spin defects to create a broad array of proof-of-concept devices. However, previous research has only focused on one or two leading candidate qubits.

Scanning electron microscopy image of a nanofabricated silicon carbide device engineered to capture and amplify single photons from embedded quantum states within the material. Credit: Alex Crook, University of Chicago

"Our field has had a somewhat narrow focus for many years," said Christopher Anderson, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. "It was like we only had a few horses in the quantum race. But now we understand that there are many other quantum horses to back, and exactly what to look for in those horses."

The team's guidelines encompass the properties of both the defects and the material selected to host them. The key defect properties are spin, optical (for example, how light interacts with the spin of the trapped electrons), and charge state of the defect.

Possible solid-state materials include not only the already well-studied few like silicon, diamond and silicon carbide but other more recent entries like various oxides. All these materials have different advantages and disadvantages laid out in the guidelines. For example, diamond is clear and hard, but expensive. On the other hand, silicon is easy to make devices with at low cost, but is more affected by free charges and temperature.

"Our guidelines are there for quantum scientists and engineers to assess the interplay between the defect properties and the selected host material in designing new qubits tailored to some specific application," Heremans noted.

"Spin defects have a central role to play in creating new quantum devices, whether they be small quantum computers, the quantum internet, or nanoscale quantum sensors," continued Anderson. "By drawing upon the extensive knowledge on spin defects to derive these guidelines, we have laid the groundwork so that the quantum workforcenow and in the futurecan design from the ground up the perfect qubit for a specific use."

"We are especially proud of our guidelines because intended users extend from veteran quantum scientists to researchers in other fields and graduate students hoping to join the quantum workforce," said Wolfowicz.

The work also establishes the groundwork for designing scalable semiconductor quantum devices and dovetails well with Q-NEXT, a DOE-funded quantum information science research center led by Argonne. Q-NEXT's goal includes establishing a semiconductor quantum "foundry" for developing quantum interconnects and sensors.

"Our team's guidelines will act as a blueprint to help direct the Q-NEXT mission in designing the next generation of quantum materials and devices," said David Awschalom, senior scientist in Argonne's Materials Science division, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and director of both the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Q-NEXT. "When it comes to quantum technologies with spins, this work sets the stage and informs the field how to move forward."

Explore further Solving materials problems with a quantum computer

More information: Quantum guidelines for solid-state spin defects. Nat Rev Mater (2021). www.nature.com/articles/s41578-021-00306-y Quantum guidelines for solid-state spin defects.(2021). doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00306-y
President Joe Biden on Wednesday said it was time to end the 'exhausting war' on immigration and appealed to lawmakers in both parties to come together on the issue.

Lets end our exhausting war over immigration, he said during his Joint Address to Congress.

Biden asked lawmakers to pass the comprehensive immigration plan he proposed, which includes an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, eliminates restrictions on family-based immigration, expands worker visas, and includes funding for security updates at the border.

He appealed to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle with his pitch.

If you believe we need a secure border  pass it, he said, addressing GOP concerns.

If you believe in a pathway to citizenship  pass it, he said, directed to Democrats.

If you actually want to solve the problem  I have sent you a bill, now pass it, he said.

President Joe Biden said it was time to end the 'exhausting war' on immigration

Biden called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform as the number of migrants crossing the border via the Rio Grande has surged

Republicans have criticized Biden for rolling back Donald Trumps stricter immigration policies, claiming it has led to a surge of migrants across the border.

But Biden will need their support to pass any immigration proposal given the narrow Democratic majority in the House and the 10 GOP votes hell need to advance any legislation in the Senate.

Given the legislative difficulties, Biden pushed for more targeted measures, one that would guarantee a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, migrants brought to the US as young children by their parents; allow farmworkers already in the country to earn legal status; and ease restrictions on visas for seasonal agricultural workers.

Those proposals passed the House with bipartisan support.

If Congress wont pass my plan  lets at least pass what we agree on, the president said.

Democrats gave him a standing ovation and there was some applause among Republicans, whom largely remained seated.

Biden also praised Vice President Kamala Harris, who he put in charge of diplomatic efforts on the Southern border.

I have absolute confidence she will get the job done, he said.

There was applause in the chamber to his praise of his vice president but its unclear if that was from just Democrats or if Republicans joined in.

Republicans have criticized Harris for not yet visiting the Southern border.

Harris does plan to visit Central America in June. Additionally, she held a virtual meeting on Monday with the president of Guatemala and meet virtually with community groups from the country on Tuesday.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent registers immigrant families after they crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico

Biden's immigration push comes amid a surge of migrants at the Southern border.

According to Customs and Border Patrol data, the number of immigrants apprehended along the southern border jumped from 96,974 in February to 168,195 in March.

The last time single-month apprehensions were that high was in March of 2001. Additionally in March, CBP apprehended 18,656 unaccompanied minors at the southern border, a record since at least October 2009 and double February's numbers.

Republicans see the issue as one they can use to make in roads with voters in the 2022 midterms.

Biden said immigration reform would be one of his top priorities as president but it has fallen by the way side given the COVID pandemic and the focus on rebuilding the American economy.
"Steve is a people-oriented leader and understands our business and what it takes to be successful. He is a civil engineer who worked his way up through the ranks of his first professional employer to become president of his firm. His background includes a strong understanding of McKim & Creed's core engineering and geomatic services combined with the experience of leading and growing an employee-owned professional services firm. Steve's passion will help McKim & Creed continue our fantastic growth trajectory while driving important initiatives such as diversity & inclusion, safety and career professional development," said Mr. Lucey in making the announcement.

"McKim & Creed is an extremely well-run business with a wonderful culture and tremendous opportunities for growth. I am happy to return to my roots in an employee-owned business, working in a people-oriented culture with a strong focus on technical excellence and client satisfaction. I am ready for new challenges and am excited about being able to positively influence the future of McKim & Creed," stated Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith began his career in the engineering industry in 1985 with Chas. H. Sells, Inc., a New York-based transportation and geomatics firm. From 1999 to 2007 he served as President/CEO of the company and orchestrated its growth into seven states. In late 2007 the business was purchased by WSP and Mr. Smith became president of WSP USA's transportation business.

In 2015 Mr. Smith relocated to the United Kingdom and joined WSP UK's 7,500-person business as head of highways & bridges. In this role, he led the integration of WSP UK and the newly acquired Parsons Brinckerhoff business into one cohesive unit. In 2017 Mr. Smith was promoted to managing director of WSP UK's Transport & Infrastructure business and its 3,000 employees. During his six-year tenure, he also served as the WSP UK Executive Committee sponsor leading safety (2016) and Diversity & Inclusion (2018 -2020) across the business.

Mr. Smith has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from SUNY at Buffalo and an MBA from the University of Connecticut.

About McKim & Creed: McKim & Creed is an employee-owned ENR top 148 professional service firm with 600 staff members operating throughout the U.S., including North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Texas and Pennsylvania. McKim & Creed specializes in site civil, mechanical/electrical/plumbing, water and wastewater engineering; industrial design-build; and surveying and mapping. For more information about McKim & Creed, visit www.mckimcreed.com.

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Kalibo, Aklan (CNN Philippines, April 29)  The local government of Malay, Aklan has declared 122 tourists as persona non grata after they faked RT-PCR tests to enter Boracay.

The Sangguniang Barangay of Malay released the resolution on March 11, saying the declaration should serve as a deterrent to visitors "who arrogantly refuse to heed methods and processes" in the popular destination.

Aklan Provincial Inter-Agency Task Force (PIATF) chairperson Atty. Selwyn Ibarreta confirmed in a phone interview that the Aklan government has also filed legal complaints against 11 of the 122 tourists for falsification of documents. Authorities are also planning on filing cases against the others.

Ibarreta added that the validation team of the provincial task force was being harassed by the tourists, but did not provide details.

As of April 26, the PIATF has caught 166 Boracay-bound tourists with fake COVID-19 test results.

The Department of Tourism has also filed criminal complaints against six other Boracay tourists for falsifying their RT-PCR test results.

In a press event on Wednesday, Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat said the DOT was serious in banning such tourists, as they put the lives of tourism workers and residents of Boracay at risk.
Columbia, MO (65201)

Today

Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.
Disney are currently looking for local extras to star in 'Disenchanted', sequel to hit movie 'Enchanted', which will be filmed in County Wicklow/Dublin between May and August 2021.

Clocktower Productions released the details of their casting call via MovieExtras.ie, and their post contains all the relevant details for people interested in signing up.

Submissions for nondescript roles will be accepted for all performers, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, disability, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Check out all the details and how to apply by clicking here.

The only catch if you're lucky enough to get selected is that you will need to be available for filming in Dublin between May and August. On the bright side, all work is paid and you might just get to star alongside Patrick Dempsey and Amy Adams!


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China continues to increase Internet speed, quality, and lower rates

09:41, April 29, 2021 By Han Xin ( People's Daily

Photo taken on April 19, 2020, shows a 5G base station built on Mount Qomolangma at an altitude of 6,500 meters. (Photo/China Mobile)

Under a program launched in 2015 that aims to increase broadband speed and lower rates for Internet services, China has built the world's largest broadband network infrastructure, and ensured the same broadband access and speed in rural areas as those in urban areas, said an official with the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

Meanwhile, China has reduced the average rates of fixed broadband per unit of bandwidth and mobile broadband per unit of traffic by over 95 percent, according to Liu Liehong, vice minister of the MIIT.

China has seen a significant rise in the network speed for users. The proportion of fiber optic Internet users in all users of fixed broadband in China has risen from 56 percent at the end of 2015 to 94 percent. More than 120 million households in China have been connected to 1,000M fiber optic network.

In terms of mobile network, China's 4G base stations constitute over half of the world's total. Besides, the country has built 792,000 5G base stations, with the number of mobile terminals connected to the 5G network reaching 260 million. In addition, China has managed to cover all prefecture-level cities with 5G standalone (SA) network and made initial achievements in building the world's largest 5G mobile network.

Over the past five years, China's various measures adopted to cut the rates of fixed broadband per unit of bandwidth and mobile broadband per unit of traffic have benefited more than one billion users annually, and saved users a total of over 700 billion yuan ($107.9 billion).

Such measures have made various Internet applications increasingly popular, and stimulated Chinese people's potential for information consumption.

The average monthly Internet traffic of mobile Internet users has jumped more than 40 times to 10.85 GB from 205 MB in early 2015.

China has also evidently narrowed the digital gap between the rural and urban areas by quickening the pace to tackle the weak links in rural network infrastructure.

So far, more than 99 percent of the administrative villages in China have gained access to fiber optic and 4G networks.

China intends to lower the average rates of broadband and dedicated Internet access services for small and medium-sized enterprises by another 10 percent, and step up the development of the 5G network and 1,000M fiber optic network and extend their application to more settings, according to the country's 2021 Report on the Work of the Government issued in March.

This year, China will shift its focus from broadening the coverage of networks to increasing the speed and improving the quality of broadband, and make the measures to lower rates for Internet services more targeted at certain groups of people, Liu noted.

The country will upgrade and renovate 1,000M fiber optic network in households on a larger scale, and advance the on-demand construction and further coverage of 5G network in an orderly manner.

It will also support the construction of 10,000 4G base stations in rural and remote areas, and ensure that all administrative villages in China will be granted access to broadband networks by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, China plans to roll out specific measures for lowering rates for Internet services directed at key groups, including small and medium-sized enterprises, once impoverished rural residents, as well as the elderly and disabled.

For example, it has reduced the charges for products that integrate cloud platform, network and applications for companies to lessen their costs of using Internet and cloud platforms, and offered a 50-percent discount on basic communication services for rural households that have just shaken off poverty.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Mankind Pharma is donating Rs 100 crore to the families of deceased frontline workers, including doctors, police officers and pharmacists. Families of other healthcare workers who lost their lives fighting the pandemic will also receive a part of the donation.

"As a responsible organisation, Mankind Pharma is standing alongside the families of these heroes and will donate 100 crore to support them," Mankind Pharma said.

Currently, India is faced with the second wave of Covid-19 which is proving to be deadlier than the first one. Healthcare workers are working round the clock to save the lives of lakhs of Indians battling the disease, even if it means exposing themselves to the coronavirus.

In its official statement, Mankind Pharma said as the country continues to grapple with the second wave of coronavirus pandemic, healthcare and frontline workers are racing against time to contain its spread. Many dedicated heroes have lost their lives in the process, it added.

The pharma major is releasing the money with immediate effect and hopes to complete it within three months. On the initiative, Mankind Pharma MD and Vice-Chairman Rajeev Juneja said, being the first line of defence they are highly exposed to this deadly disease. Many have lost their lives fighting the pandemic and protecting us.

"As a homage to them, we have pledged a fund of 100 crore to support and care for the families of these lost warriors. This is not our duty, but a debt we owe them. Because they are truly our hope," he added.

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As media attention wanes after the drowning of more than 130 migrants last week in yet another Mediterranean Sea tragedy, Caritas Internationalis says it is high time to take concrete political action to save human lives and counter a culture of indifference.

By Linda Bordoni

Raising its voice to condemn the indifference and lack of political will that led to the deaths of more than 130 migrants off the Libyan coast between 21 and 22 April, Caritas Internationalis says this moment of shame, as Pope Francis has described it, must be followed with concrete action.



The Catholic Churchs confederation of humanitarian agencies calls for mechanisms to be put in place to protect the rights and dignity of migrants along their journey; to ensure safe and legal migration routes, and to intensify support to local communities in the countries of origin so that people are not forced to migrate.



Outrage must be followed by concrete actions

Aloysius John, Caritas Internationalis Secretary-General, said: We cannot continue to look the other way or to witness the sad and ignoble scenario of governments passing the responsibility to each other to the detriment of human lives, the value of which seems non-existent today.

As media attention for the tragedy begins to wane, as it always does, Caritas Internationalis is sounding the alarm with its appeal to keep attention focused on the drama of migrants and to ensure that international outrage is followed by concrete actions.



A shared responsibility

We must all feel responsible and not forget that these migrants left their countries, because of the consequences of our modern unjust society which does not allow them to live in dignity in their homeland, John continued.

In its statement, Caritas Internationalis highlights the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is a cemetery for thousands of () migrants and will continue to be unless the international community decides to act.

It notes that the closing of borders is paramount to hypocrisy because the main cause of poverty in migrants countries of origin is found in political, economic, and geostrategic choices of the rich countries favouring the exploitation of local resources, in complicity with corrupt local leaders who are kept in power while oppressing their population.

Pope Francis' appeal

Recalling Pope Francis words during the Regina Coeli prayer on 25 April, when he said these migrants were human beings who begged for help which never came, Caritas says It is a shame that the international community does not want to take responsibility to save them. Each face that perished represents scars of violence, misery, poverty, hunger, and helplessness. They were entering the jaws of death with the hope that they can find a better life elsewhere.

The Caritas confederation states its firm belief that a sustainable and long-lasting solution to prevent such tragedies cannot be found unless there is the political will to develop the least developed countries, and unless all efforts are undertaken to promote democracy through peoples participation.



Call to decision-makers

Finally, forced to take stock of this umpteenth tragedy, which occurred amid worldwide indifference, and in line with the Twenty Action Points on migrants and refugees, formulated by the Vaticans Section on Migrants & Refugees of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Caritas Internationalis asks the decision-makers to:

- Adopt mechanisms to enable the safe and legal migration of migrants and refugees, to avoid the repetition of new massacres in the Mediterranean Sea

- Do all that is possible to receive migrants in dignity as victims of modern exploitation and corruption;

- Allocate international aid for promoting sustainable community-based micro-projects to enable the prevention of migration as a means of survival;

- Give ample support to NGOs involved in receiving and accompanying the migrants so that they can continue their mission.
CUNA supports oversight of financial technology companies, it wrote Wednesday to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. The committee conducted a hearing on so-called rent-a-bank relationships, and CUNA believes the committee should examine the legal framework and regulatory scope governing the oversight of traditional banks and other commercial businesses that are engaged in financial activity.

Credit unions are concerned that non-regulated companies are engaged in financial activities through partnerships with regulated financial institutions allowing them to offer products and services that are traditionally offered by credit unions and banks, but without the regulatory safeguards that these non-financial service companies would be subject to if they were a financial institution, the letter reads. These so called rent-a-bank relationships allow non-bank providers to operate under the cloak of a regulated entity will avoid regulations that would normally be in place, often from the state level, for the products and services they offer.

CUNA cited its opposition to a proposed payment charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as well as its opposition to any changes to the national bank charter that would lead to entities offering financial services but subject to less regulation and providing less consumer protection.
The globalsize is projected to reach USD 4.4 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 6.1% from 2020. The growth of the agricultural adjuvants market is driven by factors such as the growing demand for agrochemicals and the adoption of protected agriculture technologies.

Key players in the agricultural adjuvants market include Solvay (Belgium), Evonik Industries (Germany), Nufarm (Australia), and Croda International (UK), Corteva Inc. (US), and BASF (Germany). Product innovation, expansions & investments, mergers & acquisitions, joint ventures, and agreements, collaborations, joint ventures, disinvestments, and partnerships were some of the core strengths of the leading players in the agricultural adjuvants market. These strategies were adopted by the key players to increase their market presence. It also helped them diversify their businesses geographically, strengthen their distribution networks, and enhance their product portfolios. Some of the other leading players in the agricultural adjuvants include Miller Chemical and Fertilizer, LLC (US), Precision Laboratories (US), CHS Inc (US), Winfield United (US), Kalo Inc. (US), Nouryon (Netherlands), Huntsman Corporation (US), Clariant (US), Helena Agri-Enterprises (US), Stepan Company (US), Wilbur-Ellis Company (US), Brandt (US), Plant Health Technologies (US), and Innvictis Crop Care (US).

Download PDF Brochure:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=1240

Evonik Industries (Germany) is one of the leading specialty chemical companies. The company operates through business segments that include nutrition & care, performance materials, resource efficiency, services (technology and infrastructure), and corporate. The nutrition & care segment offers specialty chemicals that include amphoteric surfactants, ceramides, phytosphingosine, oleochemical quaternary derivatives, organically modified silicones, superabsorbents, amino acids and amino acid derivatives, synthesis products, pharmaceutical polymers, and DL-methionine. The company has a major presence in Europe, especially Germany, and other regions such as Asia Pacific, North America, and Central & South America.

Solvay (Belgium) is a chemical and advanced materials company and is involved in delivering innovative sustainable products and solutions. The company offers its products & services to diversified markets, which include agro, feed & food, automotive & aerospace, building & construction, consumer goods & healthcare, electrical & electronics, resources & environment, and industrial applications. It offers surfactants under its agro, feed, and food segment. The company has offices across 58 countries at 139 locations, along with 21 major research and innovation centers across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America; this enables it to have a significant global market presence.

Corteva Agriscience operates as a standalone agriculture company with industry expertise in seed technologies, crop protection, and digital agriculture. Globally, the company operates through eight segmentsagriculture, performance materials & coatings, industrial intermediate & infrastructure, packaging & specialty plastics, electronics & imaging, nutrition & biosciences, transportation & advanced polymers, and safety & construction. The agriculture segment has a diverse network worldwide, which markets the brands of the company and distributes its products to customers globally. The company ranks fourth in terms of market revenues in the agricultural adjuvants market in 2018, as per the MarketsandMarkets analysis. Adjuvants, particularly surfactants, are offered by the company under its industrial intermediates and infrastructure business segment, in its crop defense chemicals line. Being one of the leaders in crop protection chemicals, the company has a large consumer base for agricultural adjuvant products, and is hence, one of the global market leaders.

Make an Inquiry:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_BuyingNew.asp?id=1240

Asia Pacific comprises of developing countries with vast agricultural lands; the per capita income of the region depends on agricultural activities. Agricultural technologies are widely accepted and practiced in this region. In Asia Pacific, the total area under agriculture is shrinking due to the high rate of industrialization and urbanization. As a result, farmers opt for practices such as the use of chemical pesticides, which help to increase the yield or productivity of crops.

Recent Developments:




Sika's head office in Switzerland. Sika's acquisition of Hamatite will allow the prior to function on the latter's all five plants in Japan, Hiratsuka being the main site. (File Photo)

BAAR, SWITZERLAND: Sika said it has agreed to acquire Hamatite, the adhesives business of The Yokohama Rubber Co Ltd. Hamatite is a market leader in Japan, offering adhesives and sealants to the automotive and construction industries.

The acquisition will significantly strengthen Sikas market position in Japan, increase market access to all major Japanese OEMs, and notably extend the product offering for sealing and bonding applications in the Japanese construction industry. Headquartered in Tokyo, the business generates annual sales of CHF 160 million.

Hamatite is a highly recognized, trusted supplier with a strong, reputable brand, holding a leading position in the Japanese automotive and construction industry. With its high-quality products and nationwide sales network, it has built up long-lasting relationships with both Japanese automotive OEMs as well as customers in the construction sector and is seen as a reliable, long-term business partner.

The product portfolio comprises various technologies such as polyurethanes, hot melts, and modified silicones. The well-established Hamatite brand is the preferred solution among the Japanese OEMs for glass bonding as well as for hot melt applications. The main application area in the construction industry is sealing and bonding solutions for exterior facades. Hamatite operates five plants, the main site being in Hiratsuka, Japan. Additional manufacturing facilities are located in Japan, China, Thailand and in the USA.

By acquiring Hamatite, Sikas automotive business will immediately benefit from increased market access to all major Japanese OEMs, significantly increasing content per vehicle (CHF sales/vehicle) with these customers globally. Besides ensuring a seamless business transfer to all valued customers globally, Sika expects to further expand its relationship with and widen its offering for global Japanese car manufacturers when operating in other countries. The combined business will offer an extensive global production footprint, thus delivering long-term supply chain advantages to all automotive OEMs.

In construction, the acquisition will allow Sika to gain market share and become a strong player in the Japanese market.

The acquisition fits perfectly with our growth strategy. Hamatite brings leading technology, know-how, and skilled people that will accelerate Sikas market penetration in the automotive and construction industries. The global manufacturing footprint will increase our ability to serve our automotive customers worldwide  both at a global and a local level. We warmly welcome the successful team from Hamatite into the Sika family and are excited to work together in the future, said Paul Schuler, CEO of Sika.

With Hamatite we will significantly expand our network of talented sales people and customer relationships in the Japanese market. Together we will provide our customers with an extensive range of high-quality products and first-class service. In combining our businesses, Sika will pay close attention to the Hamatite corporate culture and respect Japanese business practices. We are looking forward to the Hamatite employees joining our team and to developing our joint cross-selling potential, said Mike Campion, regional manager Asia/Pacific Sika.

I am convinced that Hamatite can foster future business expansion under one of the worlds largest specialty chemical companies, Sika. Yokohama will steadily implement our New Medium-Term Business Plan Yokohama Transformation 2023 announced on February 19, 2021 by further deepening our existing core businesses, said Masataka Yamaishi, president, chairman of the board of Yokohama Rubber Co Ltd.

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The Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday ordered several European countries' diplomats to leave in a week in retaliation for their recent expulsions of Russian diplomats.



The diplomats involved are three from Slovakia, two from Lithuania, one from Estonia and one more from Latvia.

The mutual expulsions came amid a fresh diplomatic row over the past weeks between Russia and Western countries, including so far the United States, Italy, the Czech Republic, the three Baltic states, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to blacklist "unfriendly countries" and vowed necessary sanctions.
Dylan Shakespeare Robinson (pictured) has been sentenced to four years in prison

A man who helped set fire to a Minneapolis police station during protests over the death of George Floyd has been jailed for four years.

Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, 23, has also been ordered to pay back $12 million for damages caused to the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters in Minnesota.

Thousands of protestors surrounded the police station as it erupted into flames three days after Floyd's death in May last year.

At one point, the crowd could be heard chanting 'burn it down, burn it down.'

Robinson is accused of lighting a Molotov cocktail that another person threw at the building. In addition, he and others allegedly tore down a fence that surrounded the headquarters.

During the protests last year, a suspected looter was shot dead as rioters vandalized stores across Minneapolis.

The body of the man was found lying on the sidewalk outside the Cadillac Pawn shop by police officers who later performed CPR on him.

Protestors looted and set alight stores including Wendy's, Target, Walmart and AutoZone.

Robinson pleaded guilty last September to one count of conspiracy to commit arson.

The Minneapolis Third Police Precinct is set on fire during a third night of protests following the death of George Floyd

Protesters gather around a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020

Protestors setting off fireworks next to the police headquarters during violent protests on May 28

Dylan Robinson was captured by surveillance cameras. He has been sentenced to four years in prison and must pay $12 million in restitution for his role in lighting the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters on fire during civil unrest after the death of George Floyd

In a statement, Acting US Attorney Anders Folk said: 'On the night of May 28, 2020, Mr Robinson chose to depart from lawful protest and instead engaged in violence and destruction.

'The arson at the Minneapolis Police Department's Third Precinct put lives at risk and contributed to widespread lawlessness in Minneapolis.'

Three other people have pleaded guilty in federal court for their roles in the precinct fire and are awaiting sentencing.

The civil unrest that followed Floyds death led the governor to call in the National Guard.

Floyd, a black man in handcuffs, died May 25 after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, knelt on his neck.

Chauvin was convicted earlier this month of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter

'ATF is committed to investigating the civil unrest arsons of 2020 that occurred throughout the Twin Cities,' said Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jeff Reed, of the ATF St. Paul Field Division.

National Guard troops block off a section of Lake Street near the Third Precinct on May 29, 2020, during the fourth day of protests over the death of George Floyd in Minnesota

Protestors demonstrating outside the Minneapolis Third Precinct Police headquarters as it erupts in flames. One man is brandishing a sign which reads: 'I can't breathe'. Those were George Floyd's last words before he was killed

He added: 'Arson, being inherently violent, is a serious crime that put many of our community members at risk, and it cannot be tolerated.'

'The danger posed by the defendant in this case was very real,' said Michael Paul, special agent in charge of the FBIs Minneapolis field office.

'Todays sentencing sends a clear messageregardless of motivation, when someone is intent on conducting a violent act that breaks federal law, the FBI and our law enforcement partners will move assertively to hold them accountable. This type of behavior puts public servants and our entire community in danger, and we simply will not let it go unaddressed.'

Co-conspirators Bryce Michael Williams, 27, Davon De-Andre Turner, 25, and Branden Michael Wolfe, 23, have all pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit arson for their roles in the arson at the Third Precinct building. They will be sentenced at a later date.
The Duchess of Cambridge donned a pretty blue gown from one of her favourite brands for a romantic anniversary portrait with Prince William to mark 10 years of marriage.

Kate, 39, looked elegant in the bohemian-style blue patterned Avery dress by High Street brand Ghost, which cost 195 but is no longer in stock, for the pictures taken in the courtyard and garden of their official London residence, Kensington Palace.

The thrifty Duchess previously wore the gown, with a patchwork design and frill detailing, during her and William's tour of Pakistan in October 2019 where they met with staff at the British High Commission in Islamabad. No officials photographs from the royal engagement were released but images were shared to social media.

The maxi dress features a Georgette mix and match floral print with a wrap top which ties in a bow at the waist and sheer sleeves.

The Duchess of Cambridge donned a pretty blue gown from one of her favourite brands, Ghost, for a romantic anniversary portrait with Prince William to mark 10 years of marriage

The thrifty Duchess previously wore the gown, with a patchwork design and frill detailing, during her and William's tour of Pakistan in October 2019 where they met with staff at the British High Commission in Islamabad. No officials photographs from the royal engagement were released but images were shared to social media

Her glossy hair is styled into waves instead of the more formal dark curls she favoured early in their marriage, with her usual signature make-up look of brown eye shadow and a nude lip.

She also debuted a glittering 9,000 Daisy Heritage diamond pendant from Asprey London - possibly an anniversary gift from William. Kate already owns matching stud earrings from the brand worth 17,300.

The Duchess has chosen to wear blue for a number of special occasions over the years, not least the Issa dress she sported for her engagement photoshoot back in November 2010 - where she matched her outfit to Princess Diana's famous sapphire and diamond ring.

Kate also wore a blue Jenny Packham number when she emerged from the Lindo Wing carrying baby Prince George.

Mother-of-three Kate is also a long-standing fan of Ghost, which recently collaborated on a range with Marks and Spencer.

The maxi dress features a Georgette mix and match floral print with a wrap top which ties in a bow at the waist and sheer sleeves

The Duchess, pictured with William, has chosen to wear blue for a number of special occasions over the years

Last year she stepped out in the brand's Anouk Dress, which features fabric-covered buttons all the way down and romantic ruffles along the collar and hem, during Clap for Carers at Anmer Hall.

Ghost donated all profits from online sales of the now sold-out blue 129 floral gown to NHS charities in order to help in the fight against coronavirus.

The Cambridge family's blue wardrobe colour scheme on the night was done as a nod to the NHS.

For Ghost, Kate's royal endorsement is the surest sign yet that the label is enjoying a full-fledged fashion revival - 12 years after it almost collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.

Last year Kate stepped out in the brand's Anouk Dress, which features fabric-covered buttons all the way down and romantic ruffles along the collar and hem, during Clap for Carers at Anmer Hall

The brand has attained new customers with its floaty dresses and separates that perfectly capture the trend for retro tea dresses.

It also boasts a growing wholesale business and is now stocked in Selfridges, Zalando, John Lewis, Anthropologie and ASOS.

Carrie Symonds is also a fan of the brand, wearing a 120 red floral gown to watch fiance Boris Johnson's first speech as PM outside Downing Street.

Surprisingly for their 10th anniversary portraits, the couple  who tend to play it safe when it comes to official pictures  have turned to celebrity snapper Chris Floyd, best known for his Britpop portraits of the 1990s. His subjects have included Oasis, Supergrass and The Verve, as well as Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie and artist David Hockney.

The photographs are glamorous and glossy, but nonetheless natural. In each, it is clear the couple have an easy, affectionate confidence with each other.

It may be their tenth anniversary but it is likely the couple will be doing the school run as normal today. Aides say they insist their children  Prince George, seven, Princess Charlotte, who turns six on Sunday, and Prince Louis, three  come first.

Sources say William is 'extremely proud' of the way his wife has adapted to the goldfish bowl of royal life.

William proposed during a holiday in Kenya in October 2010 after asking Kate's father for his daughter's hand following a marathon eight-year courtship. Pictured, in her engagement pictures with Prince William, taken on 16 November 2010, in a blue gown
Kelsey Johnson is a member of Act Now JH. Guest Shots are solely the opinion of their authors.
Brazil's health regulator said Thursday its decision to reject the Russian-made Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine was based on the developer's own data, after the latter threatened to sue for defamation.

Brazilian regulators' decision Monday to deny emergency use authorization for the vaccine has blown up into an all-out international row, with Sputnik V's makers accusing them of "knowingly spreading false and inaccurate information" without testing the vaccine themselves.

The Brazilian agency, Anvisa, based the decision on evidence the vaccine carried a live version of adenovirus, a common cold-causing virus.

It fired back defensively in a press conference that it had drawn that conclusion from information "submitted by the Sputnik V vaccine developer itself."

"Anvisa was accused of lying, of acting unethically, of disseminating fake news about replicating adenovirus," said the agency's director, Antonio Barra Torres.

"We refute this grave accusation."

However, he said Brazil remained open to authorizing the vaccine, pending further data demonstrating its safety.

"We're not closing the door whatsoever. The data presented can be revised, corrected and presented again," he said, shortly before Brazil's overall death toll in the pandemic surpassed 400,000, second only to the United States.

"No one at Anvisa has the least interest in rejecting the importation of any vaccine. Every human being suffering from this pandemic knows how important they are," said Torres.

Sputnik V's maker, the Gamaleya Institute, reiterated its insistence that the vaccine contained no replicating virus.

"Good that Anvisa is starting to clarify the confusion it created," it tweeted.

- Live virus? -

The spat came three days after Anvisa announced it had denied a request from several states to import Sputnik V, saying its experts had flagged "uncertainties" about the jab.

Story continues

The Brazilian government, which is struggling to secure enough vaccines for the country's 212 million people, had been negotiating the purchase of 30 million Sputnik doses.

The vaccine's developers said Tuesday the decision was politically motivated, then upped their response Thursday.

"Sputnik V is undertaking a legal defamation proceeding in Brazil against Anvisa," the developer said on the official Sputnik V Twitter account.

"Anvisa made incorrect and misleading statements without having tested the actual Sputnik V vaccine."

The issue centers around an "adenovirus vector" -- a virus that normally causes mild respiratory illness but in vaccines is genetically modified so that it cannot replicate, and edited to carry the DNA instructions for human cells to develop the spike protein of the virus that causes Covid-19.

This in turn trains the human system to be prepared in case it encounters the real coronavirus.

The Sputnik V vaccine uses two different adenovirus vectors to accomplish this task, administered in two shots.

According to a slideshow presented by Anvisa regulators, the agency determined that the booster shot was "replication competent" -- meaning that once inside the body, the adenovirus can continue to multiply.

They added that this had likely occurred because of a manufacturing problem.

- Approved by more than 60 countries -

The Russian vaccine has been approved for use in at least 60 countries.

But it has not yet been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or the United States' Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Some Western countries have been wary of Sputnik V -- named after the Soviet-era satellite -- over concerns the Kremlin would use it as a soft-power tool to advance its interests.

Moscow registered the jab in August before large-scale clinical trials, but leading medical journal The Lancet has since said it is safe and more than 90 percent effective.

apo-mm-jhb/bfm
As expected, the Oregon attorney general and the Multnomah County district attorney announced Thursday that they will jointly investigate this months fatal shooting of Robert Delgado by a Portland police officer in Lents Park.

The development represents a significant departure from the standard approach for Portland police shootings, which are overseen by the Multnomah County District Attorneys Office.

Delgados family last week had asked Gov. Kate Brown and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to take over the investigation from Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt. They argued that the case warranted an outside review.

J. Ashlee Albies, the Portland lawyer representing Delgados family, said the family is pleased that the officials heard their request.

They are grateful and they are appreciative, she said. There was a tremendous amount of relief.

Albies said she is eager for details of how the arrangement between the DA and the AG will work.

Schmidt and Rosenblum issued a joint statement Thursday about their arrangement. Rosenblum will assign an assistant attorney general to work with two Multnomah County deputy district attorneys to oversee the criminal investigation, the statement says.

That investigation will be reviewed to the prosecutors for legal analysis, the statement says.

It is then expected that a grand jury will be convened to determine whether the officers use of deadly force was a legal act of self-defense or defense of others under Oregon law, according to the statement.

Delgado, 46, was shot April 16 by East Precinct Officer Zachary DeLong at Lents Park in Southeast Portland.

A 911 caller had reported that a man in the park was doing quick-draws with a gun but not pointing it at anyone, according to the Police Bureaus account. DeLong got to the scene and radioed that Delgado was not following police commands. Minutes later, DeLong fired on Delgado from behind a tree about 90 feet away.

Police recovered a replica handgun with an orange tip on it and a magazine to the gun that Delgado had.

By law, the governor has authority to direct the attorney general to take full charge of an investigation or prosecution through the Oregon Department of Justice, though such a step is rare. The governors press aides have not responded to multiple emails from The Oregonian/OregonLive seeking comment on the Delgado familys request.

In 2018, the state Justice Department investigated a fatal police shooting in Klamath Falls. The department, which ultimately ruled that the officer was justified in using deadly force, was asked to take over the case by the Klamath County district attorney.

Lawmakers last year considered legislation that would have created a new office to investigate police use of force, but Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Happy Valley, said she worried the state lacked a diverse legal pool to staff such an effort and that strengthening the laws governing the use of force took priority.

Bynum, a member of the Black Indigenous and People of Color Caucus in the Legislature and a prominent advocate for police and criminal justice reform, said she hasnt studied the Delgado shooting closely enough to know whether it warrants a special prosecutor but said the Delgado family is entitled to pursue whatever legal options they have available to them.

They have every right to call for that, she said. Absent of good reason for not doing it, it should happen.

In this case, the governor doing something different has the potential to signal a change in what we are willing to tolerate, Bynum said. You have to signal that certain behavior isnt within what we expect and its not OK for your government to hurt you.

Dan Handelman, a longtime police accountability advocate in Portland and a founding member of Portland CopWatch, said his organization has long supported an outside investigation of police shootings.

I think especially in the day and age of the uprising that happened last year and the post-George Floyd era, I think it is very important for Oregon to start working on this, he said.

Police across the state used deadly force 35 times last year  firing guns 33 times and killing 20 people, according to Portland CopWatch. Some of the incidents, including two shootings by Portland police, didnt cause fatal injuries.

Handelman says having a progressive prosecutor like Schmidt as district attorney doesnt eliminate the conflict of interest disappear.

The DA may be more inclined to be more serious about looking into possible charges but that doesnt take away that the institution of the District Attorneys Office of Multnomah County has a very close relationship with the Portland police, he said.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie
Police in Little Rock, Arkansas, are searching for a suspected serial killer who has been tied to at least four seemingly random knife attacks, three of which resulted in the victims' deaths.

The unnamed suspect is being sought in connection with violent incidents that took place between August 2020 and April 2021 in Little Rock's Midtown area.

The most recent attack resulting in a fatality took place just two-and-a-half weeks ago.

Police in Little Rock, Arkansas, are searching for this man who is suspected of being a serial killer responsible for at least three deaths

Police have released surveillance video showing the unnamed suspect, who has been linked to four random knife attacks, three of them fatal. Video shows that wanted man pacing back and forth on a sidewalk after hours

The suspect has been described as a black male standing over 6 feet tall

The agency on Thursday released surveillance video showing the unidentified suspect pacing back and forth on a sidewalk at night.

According to the Little Rock police, the first attack in the series took place in the early morning hours of August 24, 2020, when 64-year-old Larry McChristian was found stabbed to death in the 220 block of South Gaines Street, reported ArkansasOnline.com.

The first known victim of the serial killer was 64-year-old Larry McChristian, who was stabbed to death in August 2020 in Little Rock's Midtown

On September 23, police responded to an address in the 4200 block of West 12th Street and found 62-year-old Jeff Welch suffering from fatal knife wounds to his neck.

After a nearly seven-month hiatus, the alleged serial killer resumed hunting for victims, this time attacking 43-year-old Debra Walker at 19th and Marshall streets on the morning of April 11.

The woman was stabbed more than 15 times but survived and was able to give evidence to the police.

Less than 24 hours later, the killer struck again, fatally stabbing Marlon Franklin, 40, in the 2700 block of Wright Avenue.

Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey said in a videotaped statement that all four victims were randomly attacked in the early morning hours.

According to the police, the suspect, seen in surveillance video dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt and pants, is believed to be a black male standing at over 6 feet in height. He should be considered armed and dangerous.

This graphic shows the locations of the four knife attacks that took place between August 2020 and April 2021

Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey on Thursday announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest

A $20,000 reward is being offered in exchange for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Tipsters are being asked to call 501-371-4636.

Chief Humphrey said his agency has stepped up patrols in the Midtown area, and the FBI is assisting with the hunt for the killer.

'Let me be clear,' Humphrey said, 'we will do everything possible to arrest this suspect and protect our city.'
STILLWATER  A 48-year-old New Jersey man died in a police chase that began Wednesday night at the Saratoga National Historic Park and ended when the man's pickup truck hit a guardrail in Malta.

Robert A. Sanders of Lakewood died when his 2008 Toyota Tundra crashed on Route 9, according to the sheriff's office.

The state Attorney General's office was contacted by the sheriff's department and is involved in the investigation of the chase because the death occurred during a police pursuit, said Sheriff Michael Zurlo. The state office is empowered to probe deaths involving police officers.

The state agency has not said if it intends to investigate the death.

The pursuit started at 7:43 p.m. Wednesday when a vehicle crashed into barriers at the entrance to the historic battlefield site and drove off, deputies said. National Park Service rangers followed the vehicle but lost sight of it.

Stillwater police searching for the vehicle spotted it on Route 4 and gave chase, deputies said. The vehicle continued south on Route 4 into the village of Stillwater and then continued into Mechanicville.

Deputies said the vehicle headed west on Route 67 before hitting road signs at the roundabout that connects routes 67 and 9. The vehicle continued south on Route 9, hitting the guardrail near Goldfoot Road. Deputies said the driver was found dead inside the pickup.

State Police and Mechanicville police were also involved in the incident.
Dr. Julius Sokenu Named Moorpark College President

Camarillo, Calif.The Ventura County Community College District board of trustees announces that Dr. Julius Sokenu has been named the president of Moorpark College, pending contract approval. Sokenu has served as the interim president since 2019 and has been with the college for 14 years.

Dr. Sokenu is a visionary leader who supports the colleges approximately 14,000 students and the faculty and staff, said Chancellor Greg Gillespie. During his tenure as the interim president, he expanded and supported institutional priorities related to equity and diversity, specifically for services to underserved populations.

The board is pleased to have Dr. Sokenu as president of Moorpark College, where he can continue the initiatives he launched in the past two years and provide a continuity for the campus. His expertise in strategic planning and organizational leadership is a benefit to the college and District, said Chair Joshua Chancer.

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Sokenu joined Moorpark College as a dean in 2007. Over the years, he has taken on increasing leadership roles. He has 27 years of extensive and progressive leadership experience in community college education with 14 years of managerial oversight of instruction, student services, career technical education, noncredit programs and community relations.

He earned a doctorate in education, with an emphasis in curriculum and teaching, from Boston University and a master of fine arts degree, with an emphasis in creative writing, from Arizona State University. He holds bachelors degrees in English creative writing and business administration from the University of Southern California.

It is an honor to serve Moorpark College as its next permanent president, said Sokenu. The college has a student-first philosophy that informs all decisions and serves as a clarion call. We are committed to student excellence, equity, achievement and racial and social justice. I am proud to continue building pathways to prosperity for our students.
President Joe Biden may have picked up the nickname Sleepy Joe from his predecessor, but it wasnt the longtime Delaware politician who appeared to be up too late during his hour-plus address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

Observers on social media spotted moments where Republican Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas appeared to be nodding off.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee, appeared to be grabbing some shuteye just before 9:30 p.m., as the president called on Congress to send a federal minimum wage increase to his desk.

I didnt see a Sleepy Joe but I did see a Sleepy Ted Cruz and a Sleepy Mitt Romney #PresidentialAddress pic.twitter.com/ISergW6gLd  Karen (@ManagerSpeaking) April 29, 2021

Mitt Romneys sleep number is $7.25, tweeted one observer.

Mitt Romneys sleep number is $7.25  Jesse Lifson (@DoYouEvenLif) April 29, 2021

Cruz, meanwhile, seemed to doze off and on just as Biden discussed the surge of immigrants at the Southern U.S. border  a crucial issue for Cruzs state. A few on social media argued Cruz, a former presidential candidate, was just fishing for viral news clips.

Ted Cruz is taking a siesta at tonights Biden speech, asleep on the job as usual, tweeted Julian Castro, a former presidential candidate and Obama administration cabinet member.

Ted Cruz is taking a siesta at tonights Biden speech, asleep on the job as usual. https://t.co/eP3SHi8e0q  Julian Castro (@JulianCastro) April 29, 2021

Mitt Romney was *not* feeling Biden's comments about raising the minimum wage pic.twitter.com/lKuU0HeDiC  Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2021

Others joked that that Romney appeared angered by Bidens push to increase taxes on the wealthy.

"I will not impose a tax increase on any American making under $400,000 a year," says President Biden to the #JointSession, "but it's time for corporate America and the top 1% to pay their fair share."



Mitt Romney: pic.twitter.com/81JdDnhwpe  Grant Stern is half-vaccinated (@grantstern) April 29, 2021

Its hard to live within a budget and much easier to spend money like theres no tomorrow, Romney said in a statement on Bidens address. Unfortunately, the president has a lot of things hed like to do, but hes spending like crazy. In his first 100 days, he has proposed six trillion dollars of new spending. That is a modern record.

Biden touted his administrations success administering COVID-19 vaccines, and he pitched a $1.8 trillion plan to expand child care and education on the heels of a pandemic relief bill and a jobs plan that each cost about $2 trillion.

The speech received bipartisan praise from American voters, with many noting it left them feeling positive, according to several polls.

While his push to get people vaccinated and to cure cancer received applause from both sides of the aisle, Republican lawmakers had few positive reactions to the speech.

The whole thing could have just been an email, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted.

This whole thing could have just been an email.  Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) April 29, 2021

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New Delhi:

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has ordered a probe after the government learnt that more than 60,000 people registered in various social security pension schemes from the Punjab government are dead.

The alleged pension scam came into surface after re-verification of more than 19 lakh pensioners in Punjab. The re-verification revealed that around 2.50 lakh social security pension accounts were found to be fake.

Punjab has total around 20 lakh social security pension holder. A pension holder receives Rs 500 monthly under social security pension scheme. The state government spends around Rs 49.51 crore every year on social security pensions including old age pension, widow pension and disability pension.

The re-verification officials have learnt that 65,743 dead people are still registered in the scheme under old age pension and around 45,128 people registered have furnished wrong address details.

Also read| Gurdaspur by-poll win a very good sign emerging on national scene' for Congress: Punjab CM



According to the reverification report, at least 42,000 young people receiving the pensions are young people, who do not meet the income category but a large numbers of them own properties worth lakh.

The report also said that more than 10,000 people are rich senior citizens. According to officials more than 82,000 people did not participate in the re-verification process.

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A Chinese tourist charged with manslaughter over the death of a Sydney beauty clinic owner will not face trial until next year.

Jie Shao, then aged 33, was working at the Medi Beauty Laser and Contour Clinic in inner-city Chippendale in August 2017 when she allegedly administered a local anaesthetic and breast fillers into Jean Huang.

The 35-year-old went into cardiac arrest and was immediately rushed to hospital in a critical condition where she died two days later.

Jie Shao (pictured) leaves Sydney Downing Centre District Court on Thursday after her trial was delayed until next year

Shao had arrived in Australia just days before the alleged botched procedure.

She was due to face trial for manslaughter in Sydney's Downing Centre District Court this week, which has been adjourned until January next year.

Judge Christopher O'Brien on Thursday adjourned the case following difficulty in getting permission from Chinese authorities for the Crown's key witness to give evidence via video link.

The Crown has undertaken to pay Shao's costs of over $55,000 resulting from the adjournment.

Shao's defence lawyer Winston Terracini SC said his client had been unable to work due to strict bail conditions and had been privately funding her court battle.

He argued that the Crown was aware of its witness problem as early as January but only let his team know recently.

Jean Huang (pictured) went into cardiac arrest following the allegedly botched operation and died two days later

The alleged botched procedure was performed at the Medi Beauty Laser and Contour Clinic

'We're ready to rock n' roll,' Mr Terracini said in Sydney's Downing Centre District Court.

'This is a very serious matter.'

Mr Terracini submitted the Crown had further issues with its case regarding another primary witness who left for Taiwan and said words to the effect: 'You can whistle Dixie, I'm not coming back'

'So they have problems with AVL witnesses in Taiwan as well,' Mr Terracini said.

Court documents alleged Shao had injected Ms Huang with varying amounts of anaesthetic in the form of Tramadol and Lidocaine and the restricted substance hyaluronic acid.

The court previously heard Shao was a graduate of a Canton medical university and a specialist in dermatology who had practised in China and Great Britain.

Judge O'Brien continued Shao's bail and set a new trial date of January 31, 2022, with an estimation duration of four to five weeks.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) holds a press conference following the Senate GOP policy luncheon in the Rayburn Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 2, 2021. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

3 or 4 Senators Will Run for President in 2024: McConnell

Several current Republican senators will run for president in the next election cycle, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday.

McConnell during a Fox News appearance responded to former President Donald Trump, a possible candidate who again criticized the longtime senator earlier in the day.

We need good leadership. Mitch McConnell has not done a great job. I think they should change Mitch McConnell, Trump said.

The relationship between the two Republicans has frayed for months.

McConnell responded by saying that Republicans are looking in the future, not the past.

He pointed to Sen. Tim Scotts (R-S.C.) rebuttal to President Joe Bidens speech on Wednesday night, saying Scott is the future of the GOP and laid out where the Republican Party has arrived.

Trump also said, 100 percent Im thinking about running, noting that he drew some 12 million more votes in the 2020 election than he received in 2016.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing a bill for border funding in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on July 1, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

McConnell affirmed on Fox that he will back whomever voters choose as the GOP nominee in 2024.

Im going to support the nominee of the Republican Party, McConnell said. I do predict, however, theres going to be a robust competition for the nomination. Ive got three or four members of the Senate who are going to be running for president in 2024, once that all sorts itself out, as the Republican leader of the Senate, obviously, Ill be supporting the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

McConnell did not name which senators he was referring to, but Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and Scott are among the rumored potential candidates.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are also considered possible candidates. Both ran in 2016.

Others who have been mentioned as potentially running on the Republican side include former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan.

Trump on Thursday said he is considering DeSantis as his running mate if he does run.
She welcomed her son Theodore with her partner Jonny Lomas last month.

And Victoria Ekanoye looked like she was settling into motherhood as she headed out to lunch with her former Coronation Street co-star Faye Brookes in Manchester on Wednesday.

The actress, 37, beamed as she introduced her son to Faye, 33, before the trio headed to The Ivy.

New mum: Victoria Ekanoye looked like she was settling into motherhood as she headed out to lunch with her former Coronation Street co-star Faye Brookes in Manchester on Wednesday

Victoria, who played Angie Appleton in the ITV soap before leaving the show in 2019, looked gorgeous in a green patterned jumpsuit which she teamed with white trainers.

She carried her seven-week-old baby in a carrier as they headed to the restaurant.

Both Faye and Victoria couldn't take their eyes of little Theo who was wrapped up in a yellow padded jacket.

Happy: The actress, 37, beamed as she introduced her son Theodore to Faye, 33, before the trio headed to The Ivy

So cute: Both Faye and Victoria couldn't take their eyes of little Theo who was wrapped up in a yellow padded jacket

Faye, who played Kate Connor on Corrie and also left the cobbles in 2019, looked effortlessly chic in a grey knit midi dress and black heeled boots.

Victoria announced the arrival Theodore on Instagram last month and shared a sweet snap holding his hand.

She wrote: 'Our prince, our love, our world, our miracle.'

Victoria previously joked she had become pregnant in lockdown because there was 'nothing else to do.'

Speaking to The Sun, she candidly explained: 'A lockdown baby, what else were we to do? We're due in January so it's going to be an amazing start to 2021.'

Congratulations: Victoria announced the arrival Theodore on Instagram last month and shared a sweet snap holding his hand

She first announced her happy news in Hello! magazine at the beginning of November - when she was already six months pregnant.

The actress said she and her boyfriend Jonny decided to delay revealing their baby news, partly due to her suffering with sickle cell anaemia.

The couple, who celebrated their four-year anniversary in October, admitted that the pregnancy came as a 'surprise' as they had planned to start trying for a baby in 2021.

Victoria told the publication: 'We thought we would try next year. So when this pregnancy came along we were like: "It's happening".

'It did come as a bit of a surprise but it's so unbelievably exciting.'
STAMFORD  A former New Yorker accused of strangling a Stamford woman he met through a popular dating app was granted a probationary program that could see a felony charge against him dropped.

Judge Gary White granted Socrates Alicea, 33, accelerated rehabilitation, a pretrial probationary program that  if completed successfully  would lead to the first-degree strangulation charge he is facing being dropped by the state.

White said there was good cause to grant Alicea the program in light of his military service  Alicea is a highly decorated U.S. Army veteran who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan  and his long history with the culinary industry and community service.

Mark Sherman, co-counsel for Alicea, called Whites decision the right result.

Its a huge validation and relief to our client that this case is now scheduled to be dismissed, he said.

Senior Assistant States Attorney Joseph Valdes objected to Aliceas application, citing the very serious allegations.

Alicea is accused of strangling a woman he had just met until she lost consciousness during a consensual sexual encounter the two had arranged over Tinder on Nov. 9, 2019 at a Stamford hotel.

Irrespective of what occurred in that room, by rendering her unconscious and then fleeing the scene, he put her at serious risk to her health and possibly her life, Valdes said.

Police said at the time that the victim awoke with blood in her mouth, bruising on her neck and Alicea nowhere to be found. What she did find, though, was a phone and a single sock that police used to trace the incident back to Alicea, who then lived in Kingston, New York.

Alicea, who now lives in Edgecomb, Maine, claims he went to the hotel that night for a massage. But, he told police, he backed out of paying for it while the two were having sex, causing the woman to get angry and scream at him.

He said he grabbed his clothes and ran out of the room, leaving his cell phone behind, according to police.

As a part of the probationary program, Alicea will need to go two years without committing any crimes.

White also imposed 200 hours of community service to be competed over 18 months as a part of the program.

Alicea is next scheduled to appear in court on April 28, 2023.
The U.K. government on Wednesday became the first country to announce it will regulate the use of self-driving vehicles at slow speeds on motorways, with the first such cars possibly appearing on public roads as soon as this year.

Britain's transport ministry said it was working on specific wording to update the country's highway code for the safe use of self-driving vehicle systems, starting with Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) -- which use sensors and software to keep cars within a lane, allowing them to accelerate and brake without driver input. The government said the use of ALKS would be restricted to motorways, at speeds under 37 miles (60 km) per hour.

The U.K. government wants to be at the forefront of rolling out autonomous driving technology and the transport ministry forecasts by 2035 around 40 percent of new U.K. cars could have self-driving capabilities, creating up to 38,000 new skilled jobs.

"The automotive industry welcomes this vital step to permit the use of automated vehicles on UK roads, which will put Britain in the vanguard of road safety and automotive technology," Mike Hawes, CEO of car industry lobby group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said in a statement.
Special Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office in Ukraine and in the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG), Ambassador Heidi Grau, after a regular TCG meeting, called on the sides to the conflict in Donbas to urgently take steps on mine action.

"With the onset of the warm season and the approaching Easter holidays, I call on the sides to take urgent action as regards demining. According to the SMM, the majority of civilian casualties this year have been caused by mines and unexploded ordnance," Grau said on the OSCE SMM website on Thursday.

According to the ambassador, "the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine continues to record a high level of ceasefire violations. The requirement for compliance with the ceasefire was in the focus of the discussions of the Security Working Group and the TCG."

"Participants in the meeting reiterated their commitment to it. However  regrettably  no agreement was reached upon a TCG statement on responding to ceasefire violations and their elimination in the future," Grau said.

In addition, "the participants in the Political Working Group meeting, preventing progress on developing an action plan in full compliance with the Minsk agreements as tasked by the TCG."

Grau also said "the growing number of restrictions and impediments to the freedom of movement of the OSCE SMM is negatively affecting the implementation of the Mission's mandate." "The SMM's UAVs are targeted daily by small arms fire as well as by jamming," she said.
??Hoy llegaron mas vacunas contra la #COVID?19! ?????



? Este lote contiene 200 070 dosis.

? Ya sumamos mas de 2 440 000 dosis en total.

? Con estas vacunas continuaremos la inmunizacion de adultos mayores.

? La titular de @MINCETUR recibio el cargamento.#PongoElHombro???????? pic.twitter.com/eTvbtAjEGi
SIS rose 1.45% to Rs 365.45 after the company's consolidated net profit stood at Rs 102.23 crore in Q4 FY21 as against net loss of Rs 3.91 crore in Q4 FY20.

On a consolidated basis, net sales jumped 10.7% to Rs 2,445.21 crore in Q4 FY21 over Q4 FY20. EBITDA dropped 10.9% to Rs 123.30 crore in Q4 FY21 from Rs 138.50 crore in Q4 FY20. EBITDA margin stood at 5% in Q4 FY21 as against 6.3% in Q4 FY20.

Meanwhile, the company generated the highest ever cash flows with total operating cash flow generation of Rs 640 crore with cash conversion at OCF/ EBITDA of 123% for FY21 and 89% for Q4 FY21. This has been on the back of strong collections, lower working capital needs and stable business.

Despite payout of Rs 203 crore for the buyout of the balance 49% stake in SXP in Q3 FY21, the company was able to reduce net debt by Rs 327 crore during the year with the Net Debt/EBITDA stood at 0.7 at the end of the year from 1.35 at the end of FY20.

The cash logistics segment has seen an especially strong year, with March 2021 monthly revenues at 130% of the company's March 2020 monthly revenues.

The facility management segment continues steady demand recovery with a 4.5% QoQ growth in revenues, however for the full year the segment is still down 12% in revenue terms over FY20.

The international business continues to be the standout vertical this year with revenues of Rs 4,530 crore, which is a YoY increase of 22.3%. For the quarter specifically, SIS International had a 5.3% QoQ growth and a 32% YoY growth.

The India security business continued to show steady demand recovery, with March 2021 monthly revenues at 102% of the March 2020 revenues. For FY21 the revenues at Rs 3,488 crore, were flat over FY20, which in probably the biggest crises of the company's lifetimes, re-inforces the resiliience and annuity nature of the services.

Commenting on Q4 performance, Rituraj Kishore Sinha, the group managing director of SIS, said: "FY21 has been a year of validation. 7.6% Y-o-Y revenue growth, highest ever PAT of Rs 367 crs and highest ever OCF generation of Rs 640 crs, in year of GDP contraction underlines 3 unique characteristics of SIS. First, we as essential services are a fundamental need of society leading to inelastic demand. Second, ROCE remains intact at 20% across varying growth years as working capital intensity adjusts. Third, incentivisation of blue-collar job creating sectors, through fiscal measures is govt policy imperative through GDP growth and contraction phases."

SIS is a market leader in security, facility management & cash logistics solutions with operations across India, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

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Mexicos controversial new legislation that obliges telecoms firms to collect biometric user data is set to face a Supreme Court challenge from the countrys data protection body.

The National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI) will argue that the law, introduced in April, contravenes privacy rights.

The law requires operators such as America Movil and AT&T to collection fingerprint or eye data from customers and submit this to a database managed by the countrys telecoms regulator. Law enforcement would then be able to request access to the database for criminal investigations.

According to Reuters, this is aimed at making it more difficult for consumers to purchase new mobile phones anonymously. The government argues that criminals typically use unregistered pre-paid phones in cases of kidnapping and extortion.

Adrian Alcala, an INAI commissioner, said: "The prosecution of crimes is an issue that should concern us all and the state is responsible for ensuring the safety of the inhabitants, but this cannot and should not be a sufficient reason to restrict freedoms and human rights.

The Mexico Internet Association has also objected to the law, arguing that a registry of biometric data would be in violation of human rights and would end up costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars as operators are required to fund the collection of user data.

However, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has hit back at the laws critics, arguing that the bill is aimed at protecting Mexicos citizens and noting that it was supported by the Senate this month.

Speaking at a press conference, Obrador accused operators of double standards on data privacy, saying: "These telephone companies[are] acting with great hypocrisy, because they already request that data to contract a telephone service.

However, opposition to the bill is mounting. Last week a judge blocked part of the law from coming into force on the grounds that customers who refused to share their data would have their phone lines shut off, thereby putting them at risk.

Globally, 155 countries maintain registries of mobile phone users. According to the GSMA, only 8% of these require biometric data  typically for prepaid SIM card users.

Reuters notes that several of the countries that retain biometric data have poor records on human rights  among them China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Mexico will be the first western country to collect biometric mobile user data.
Digital privacy expert gives advice on keeping children safe online

LONDON, April 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- With ????? (Kodomo no Hi) celebration being just around the corner, it is the right time to speak with children about the dangers of online hacks, scams, and increasing cyberbullying.

Daniel Markuson, a digital privacy expert at NordVPN, has collected some tips so that parents can teach their children about internet privacy and safety.

1. Educate on the importance of passwords.

It is important to teach children good password habits. "Besides knowing about all the good things the internet can offer, children should also learn about the risks that come with it. There are many educational resources online, including videos, which children often prefer to other types of media," says Daniel Markuson.

2. Set an example and become digital-literate yourself.

Show how you communicate and stay safe online but try not to push your opinion. Also, kids love when you know what's up and you can discuss that popular social media platform together.

3. Explain why privacy matters, especially when talking to strangers.

Talk to your kids about privacy and explain why they shouldn't overshare on social media platforms.

Tell them (but don't try to scare them) that internet bad guys can use their address, school location, parents' workplace, and other info against them. Teach your children how to manage their privacy settings so they can choose who they want to show their information to.

4. Talk to them about cyberbullying.

Based on Statista, around 17.92 thousand cases of cyberbullying among students were reported by schools in Japan in 2019. Tell your child about cyberbullying so they can recognize it. Show how to block unwanted people or report inappropriate actions online.

5. Talk about ads and online offers.

Nothing is ever for free. Teach your child to be careful about deals that look too good to be true. Ask them to show you everything they are planning to buy or redeem. Some offers may be scams designed to extract private information or money.

6. Install games and apps together.

Make sure you download all games and apps from secure sources. Also, check that both the app and its provider are reputable. Fake pop-ups often prompt kids to install various applications for free. But that may result in malware infecting the device or the whole home network.

https://nordvpn.com
A pro-Palestine activist left a Jewish barrister with a broken nose and torn retina after an intense late-night row at a Hampstead pub, a court heard yesterday.

Ex-school caretaker and local artist Dennis McNulty, 60, repeatedly punched 63-year-old intellectual property rights specialist Tim Ludbrook, knocking him unconscious, the jury was told.

'My nose was broken in two places and I was very lucky not to lose the sight in one eye,' the Lincoln's Inn counsel told Isleworth Crown Court.

The pair clashed verbally inside the busy King William IV pub in Hampstead High Street on August 3, 2018, because of their opposing political views.

The lawyer admits lunging at McNulty inside the pub. 'He knew he got me, a Tory barrister to react badly. He enjoyed that, but it is intolerable to have this racially-charged behaviour inflicted upon you.

Ex-school caretaker and local artist Dennis McNulty (pictured), 60, repeatedly punched 63 year-old intellectual property rights specialist Tim Ludbrook, knocking him unconscious, the jury was told

'On that occasion I let it get the better of me.'

GMB union activist McNulty was ejected by pub staff, but attacked Mr Ludbrook outside in nearby Heath Street as the lawyer sat on a bench, the court heard.

'I will forever see him in that moment for the rest of my life. It is as clear as day, seared on my memory.

'There he was, bearing down at me and moments later he was striking me around the head from both sides and I don't recall anything else until I came around.

'I can remember counting them and by six I was out. I was lying on the pavement and a woman was trying to stop the bleeding.'

The lawyer concedes calling McNulty a 'Hamas-loving b*****d,' inside the pub, but insists this was after an evening of intimidation by the defendant.

'He was introduced to me as an ardent member of the Labour Party and I am well-known for being on the other side of the political spectrum,' said Mr Ludbrook.

'He told me he was a senior official in a tradesunion and I told him if I went on one of his marches then he would have to come on one of mine for Jacob Rees-Mogg.'

The pair clashed verbally inside the busy King William IV pub in Hampstead High Street on August 3, 2018, because of their opposing political views. Pictured, 63-year-old intellectual property rights specialist Tim Ludbrook

Somebody in Mr Ludbrook's group brought up the subject of the Gaza Strip and McNulty began criticising Israel, the lawyer told the court.

'He was swearing about the Tory government and intended to try and inflame the situation with his language and said: 'You can't support those f***ing c****.'

'He must have thought I was supporting them because I am a Conservative and I told him: 'Yes, I am Jewish and a supporter of Israel.'

'It was like lighting a blue touch paper and he said: "It's always you f***ing people, you're always the problem."

'He said he was going to show what kind of f***ing person I was on social media and started recording with his phone.

'The really aggressive stuff started when he goaded me into revealing my ethnicity. He's obviously got some view about Jews.

'It was not a sensible thing I said to him about being a 'Hamas-loving b*****d', but I had enough.

The lawyer concedes calling McNulty a 'Hamas-loving b*****d,' inside the pub (pictured), but insists this was after an evening of intimidation by the defendant

'I lunged toward him, I lost my temper, I suppose I wanted to grab him by the throat, but someone else came in between us.

'He said: "You're f***ing dead, I'm going to have you," and the pub staff removed him.'

McNulty denies hitting the complainant and claims Mr Ludbrook would sarcastically greet him with: 'Power to the people,' but the lawyer denied this.

He also denied McNulty's claim he said: 'We need to get rid of the Palestinians. I want gas chambers built to get rid of them all.'

'I wouldn't say that, even joking,' insisted the barrister. 'That's genocide.'

Prosecutor Margia Mostafa told the jury Mr Ludbrook was taken to the Royal Free Hospital at 2.15 am and treated for a fractured nose, plus later laser treatment on his eye.

In the pub McNulty had goaded the victim she said, asking: 'Are you Jewish? You're Jewish aren't you?

'I'm going to f*** you up you c***. You're Israeli.'

McNulty, from Hampstead, has pleaded not guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm, with intent.

The trial continues.
A woman helps her son put on a face mask outside a school in HCMC, May 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Nhu Quynh.

The World Health Organization has advised Vietnam to remain alert for Covid-19 outbreaks despite the recent absence of community transmissions and an ongoing vaccination campaign.

Vietnam needs to stay vigilant before the looming threat of new coronavirus outbreaks coming from beyond its border, even during an ongoing vaccination campaign, Kidong Park, the WHO representative in Vietnam, said Tuesday.

"The risk of case introduction to Vietnam including onward community transmission is high especially if cases among the illegal incoming travelers go undetected," Park said.

Cambodia has been in the grip of a new wave since late February. Its caseload has crossed 11,700, after recording only around 400 cases the whole of last year.

The Lao government last Friday closed the countrys borders and announced a two-week lockdown in capital Vientiane. On Monday, the country recorded 113 new cases, its highest single-day tally. There were 93 new cases on Wednesday, taking the national infection toll to 604.

Thailand reported 2,012 new Covid-19 cases Wednesday, the sixth straight day it recorded more than 2,000 daily cases, taking the total to 61,699 so far. Last year it had detected less than 7,000 cases.

Despite Vietnams successful record in the coronavirus fight, the recent surges in certain countries including India show that the crisis can worsen anytime and theres still a "long way to go as a global community," he said.

Officially, the number of cases in India surged by 362,902 in just 24 hours. As of Thursday, the country of 1.3 billion people has recorded mroe than 18.3 million infections and 204,812 Covid deaths, after 3,647 more died overnight.

Globally, 5.7 million cases and 88 000 deaths were reported to WHO last year.

"We are nearing 150 million cases of Covid-19 and 3.1 million deaths since the start of the pandemic. These are worrying trends as we continue to see the impact of variants, opening up of societies, and inequitable vaccine rollout," Park said.

In Vietnam, the public needs to be kept informed of the risks and public health measures to be adhered to, even as a national Covid-19 vaccination program is being rolled out, he advised.

The government also needs to be alert and active in risk assessment, preparing for possible resurgence of cases by ramping up border surveillance and control, setting up field hospitals in areas close to the border and advising its citizens in other countries to avoid illegal entry, among other measures, he added.

Vietnam has not recorded any new community transmission in over a month, but officials have been warning that the threat of another Covid-19 outbreak is imminent, especially via illegal entrants. Residents have been asked to wear masks in public and avoid large gatherings.

Meanwhile, patrol teams have been deployed round the clock at the border in certain provinces like Kien Giang, An Giang and Dong Thap. Field hospitals are planned in Can Tho, a vital traffic intersection in the Mekong Delta; and extra Covid-19 vaccine doses have been provided to certain Mekong Delta provinces.

So far, over 425,000 people have been vaccinated with a Covid-19 vaccine made by British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca. Most of them are frontline workers in the coronavirus fight, including doctors, soldiers and police personnel.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister and also Chairman of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), has set an ambitious target of building one million affordable residential units across the kingdom over the next five years through Roshn, a leading Saudi real estate developer powered by PIF, reported Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

Prince Mohammed unveiled the most important achievements of the Kingdom Vision 2030 programmes and projects over the past five years, in an interview transmitting on the states television and the most important Arab television channels.

Roshn venture, which aims to meet 25% of the Saudi demand, is eyeing a low profit margin of 22.5 per cent on 3 per cent to make these housing units affordable for citizens, it stated.

Fortunately, Roshn has been established and the Ministry of Housing has carried out its duties in cooperation with other stakeholders. Under the Saudi Vision 2030, Roshn is set to provide around one million national housing units as per the first objective while the second objective of Roshn unfortunately means that more than 95% of the real estate developers are very primitive, drawing the designs and failed to deliver the sewage, water, electricity and telecommunications services," stated Prince Mohammed.

Slamming these developers, he said "they were selling designs without any services to citizens who build their houses and then the suffering begins."

He pointed out that owing to this, citizens were plagued with poor infrastructure services in their neighborhoods.

"The country is in dire need of strong real estate developers adopting international standards in place in advanced countries and this is the second objective of Roshn which plans to meet 25% of the Saudi demand," he noted.

"However, no one would buy from the private sector if they fail to apply the same standards of Roshn," he added.

Today, the Roshn Company targets the development of the real estate sector in the kingdom to meet part of the existing demand, said Prince Mohammed.

Lauding the Roshn standards, he said: "The biggest advantage of buying units from there is that not oly you get standard housing at a reasonable rate compared to the other real estate funds but also water, sewage, pedestrian and all other services are gauranteed. The best part is one need not go out of the neighbourhood community for any of their daily needs."

Prince Mohammed said since its launch, Roshn had been registering a steady growth and its profits have seen an increase of 7% and more with its housing projects.

On the key challenges, the Crown Prince said: "The biggest problem was to increase the housing percentage, as it was considerably low compared with the international standard of 60%. I was worried because it was a very challenging period that required a comprehensive restructuring for the central government with complete tools all coupled with the challenge of restructuring the Ministry of Housing and unable to meet the envisioned goals in a very short time during the past four years."

"With the existence of such concerns and challenges and the inability or delay of the Ministry of Housing to achieve the necessary preparedness levels, the Roshn venture has been launched in light of the expected growing demand for housing units during the next ten years which may exceed 4 million," he added.
HONG KONG, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- China Mobile Limited (the "Company") (HKEx: 941) (NYSE: CHL) announced today that it has filed its Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2020 (the "2020 Form 20-F") with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The 2020 Form 20-F is available on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at http://www.chinamobileltd.com and on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. Shareholders may also request a hard copy of the Company's complete audited financial statements, free of charge, by contacting the Company at Investor Relations Department, China Mobile Limited, 60/F, The Center, 99 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong (Email: [email protected]; Telephone: 852-3121-8888; Fax: 852-2511-9092).

SOURCE China Mobile Limited

Related Links

http://www.chinamobileltd.com


There are a myriad of things for one to do or places to visit at Disney World. From the legendary park rides to the fine dining and the magic that happens at the theme park, it is no wonder why people are obsessed with the place that has easily earned the title The Happiest Place on Earth. Disney World has about 26 resorts to choose from. However, one hotel suite is so exclusive that no money can buy you a stay in it. Find out why it is impossible to pay for a stay In the Cinderella suite at Disney World.

Disney World | Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

How Walt Disney World became the primary tourist attraction site, it is today

RELATED: How to Go to Disney World for Cheap: A Budget-Friendly Guide to The Happiest Place on Earth

Walt Disney Company started looking for land to build another resort that would supplement Disneyland in California. Despite Disneylands success, the founder felt he needed to control the land surrounding the theme park. That coupled with the thriving businesses around Disneyland, which Disney didnt own, led the companys founder on a quest for bigger and better.

Disney also wanted the lands purchase to be top-secret. No one, not even the real estate agent who closed the deal, knew who the buyer was. The 30,000 acres that Disney World currently sits on went for $5 million, which was regarded as one of Floridas most significant land deals.

The plans for the land were initially top-secret until 1965 when Disney announced that Walt Disney Company would be building Disneyland 2.0. Due to its size and hefty amount paid for the land, many residents thought NASA had acquired the land to build an atomic energy lab. However, the rumors were put to rest after stories broke out about plans for a new Disneyland.

Everything began with Magic Kingdom

RELATED: How Each Disney Princess Movie is Represented in Magic Kingdom Park in Walt Disney World

The Disney World we know today houses various theme parks like Epcot and Animal Kingdom. However, in 1965 when the project began, only one theme park was being constructed. The theme park, called Magic Kingdom, was a replica of Disneyland and was the first Disney World theme park. Magic Kingdom took a total of six years to complete. It opened in October 1971 and was Disneys only theme park for over a decade. Today Disney World houses 27 themed resorts.

Back in the day, there were just two resorts, The Polynesian Village and The Contemporary Resort, before Disney expanded. Cinderella Castle represents Magic Kingdom. The fairy tale castle in the 1950s Cinderella film inspired Cinderella Castle. The park opened with 23 attractions, three of which were unique to the park, and the rest were replicas of attractions found at Disneyland. In 2019, Magic Kingdom had 20.9 million visitors, making it the most visited theme park worldwide for the thirteenth year.

Stays in the parks most exclusive hotel are on invites only basis

RELATED: These Overpriced Disney Resorts Are a Complete Waste of Money

Guests are allowed to visit the Cinderella Castle and take pictures of it. Guests are also allowed to shop, eat or have fun inside the castle. However, behind all that Cinderella Castle has to offer, there is a magical place that only the lucky few get to experience. Not everyone gets to stay at the secret Cinderella Castle suite. A new video by Disney Parks proves just how magical the suite is.

For starters, the only way to access it is by opening a large wooden door on the ground floor, which leads you to a Gothic-style room where a concierge escorts you to a pumpkin-like elevator. The elevator leads up directly to the suite, which doesnt fall short of detail. The suite is magical but isnt open to everyone.

The stays in this luxurious suite are invite-only. Disney has reportedly turned down large sums of money from guests eager to experience what the suite has to offer. The suite is the most exclusive resort at the park and is offered as a rare and unique prize, making for an extraordinary experience.
Two Iraqi security forces have sustained injuries after the explosive belt of a subside bomber busted as security forces shot dead the terrorist, London-based Al Quds newspaper reports.

The Iraqi defense ministry in a statement issued Thursday said security forces managed to kill a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt who tried to enter the National Security Directorate in Kirkuk Governorate.

The accident resulted in the injury of two security personnel with slight injuries after the explosive belt exploded due to being shot by the directorate guards, the statement added.

The ministry did not mention the identity or the affiliation of the terrorist but the Middle East country is used to facing such acts from militants of the Islamic state group, ISIS.

Baghdad is still fighting remnants of the terror group despite declaring in 2017 victory over it.

Iraqi forces, the Palestinian media based in London notes, have intensified combing and raid operations in pursuit of the remnants of ISIS in conjunction with the increasing frequency of attacks by suspected militants of the organization, especially in the Triangle of Death between the governorates of Kirkuk, Salah al-Din (north) and Diyala (east).
[April 29, 2021] XP-PEN Rebrands and Launches New Series, Deco Fun

SHENZHEN, China, April 29, 2021 /CNW/ -- XP-PEN, the well-known pen tablet and pen display provider, is working on its rebranding with Siegel+Gale, the leading brand strategy, design and experience consultancy, in April 2021. Siegel+Gale is part of the NYSE-listed Omnicom Group, the world's largest integrated communications group. It employs more than 75,000 people worldwide and serves 5,000+ brands in more than 100 countries and regions, its agencies have long been recognized as some of the world's most creative advertising and branding agencies. With more than 50 years of experience, Siegel+Gale, as a leading brand consultancy under Omnicom, has helped many world-renowned brands in consumer electronics, internet, and technology industries. Their clients include Google, Adobe, Microsoft, AMD, HP, SAP and more. The cooperation for XP-PEN brand's rebranding between XP-PEN and Siegel+Gale aims to develop an aspirational brand in the global pen tablet and pen display industry. The newly launched Deco Fun is tailored for users in multi-scenarios: online learning, remote meetings, playing games, and drawing. Using the Deco Fun pen tablet for remote learning allows both students and teachers to share thoughts and ideas in real-time. With infinite brushes and colors, and patterns options, allows users to create and share tutorials and presentations effortlssly. In remote meetings, Deco Fun allows users to express important points more effectively by writing or sketching on the shared content with graphs and comments. Users can even use Deco Fun to quickly sign documents digitally. Using Deco Fun to play OSU! could follow the rhythm better and hit the rankings. The quick response helps users exceed the level of players with a mouse.



Deco Fun is compatible with Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS and supports Microsoft Office, Zoom, Skype, Adobe, Photoshop, SAI, and more. It's available in three sizes and four colors, to meet users personal preference and needs. The Deco Fun series will be available on Amazon.com and other XP-PEN authorized partners in April.

Artist Pro 16 TP, XP-PEN partnered with the well-known Artist SHAN JIANG who has cooperated with notable world-class brands. This pen display features a perfect combination of multi-touch control and a 4K high-resolution screen, bringing a natural experience with multiple advanced technologies and will launch soon. XP-PEN, through its collaboration with Siegel+Gale, the global leading brand consultancy, will deliver a new image to its consumers with its series of products and services, embodying its brand belief 'Dream Brave True', to be an aspirational brand in the pen tablets and pen display industry. About XP-PEN: XP-PEN is an internationally renowned brand specializing in the production, R&D and sales of pen tablets, pen display and stylus pens. Our team is committed to endless innovation with the goal of bringing every artist into the digital era with tools and technology to suit their individual needs. Feel free to contact us via co-marketing@xp-pen.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xp-pen-rebrands-and-launches-new-series-deco-fun-301280363.html SOURCE XP-PEN

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VANCOUVER - Thomas Berger, a British Columbia politician, lawyer, judge and commissioner whose work led Canada to recognize Aboriginal title to land, has died of cancer at the age of 88.

B.C. Justice Thomas Berger, chairman of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Commission ,is photographed in May, 1977. Berger, a British Columbia politician, lawyer, judge and commissioner whose work led Canada to recognize Aboriginal title to land, has died at the age of 88. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand

VANCOUVER - Thomas Berger, a British Columbia politician, lawyer, judge and commissioner whose work led Canada to recognize Aboriginal title to land, has died of cancer at the age of 88.

Berger's daughter, Erin Berger, said her dad was active until hours before his death Wednesday, despite receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer just two months earlier with a prognosis of six months to live.

"He wanted that. Just a fast departure," she said in a telephone interview.

The man she described as "someone who never wasted his time," had been revising his obituary, coming up with more book ideas and sifting through boxes of old papers, notes and cases.

"We kept finding more," Berger said of the archiving of her dad's files.

"He would say, 'Oh, that's a landmark in labour law, that's a landmark ruling on Indigenous rights,' he was hitting so many different areas of law," she said.

Berger retired last year at the age of 87 but was still awaiting a court ruling on what will now be his final case, this one representing Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation in its dispute with the Saskatchewan government over hundreds of acres of flooded land, Erin Berger said.

B.C. Premier John Horgan said in a statement that Berger was a "giant," who "spent a lifetime working to address injustice."

His daughter, also a lawyer, worked side-by-side with her dad for 15 years and said the key to his prolific and groundbreaking production was that he loved the work he did.

His arguments before various courts of appeal or victories at the Supreme Court of Canada were "just good, hard work that he always enjoyed," said Erin Berger.

Thomas Berger was a former leader of B.C.'s New Democratic Party, a member of the legislature, a member of Parliament and a B.C. Supreme Court justice, but it was his belief in Indigenous rights and his compassionate management of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry that confirmed his place as an icon of legal and social justice.

He acted for Nisga'a elders in 1973 in a Supreme Court of Canada appeal that resulted in the first-ever acknowledgment of the existence of Aboriginal title to land.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement Thursday saying he joined Canadians in mourning the loss of one of the country's most respected lawyers and Indigenous and environmental rights activists.

Mr. Berger will be remembered as the consummate advocate. He not only gave a voice to the voiceless  he truly listened, and in doing so, empowered a generation of leaders to become voices for their own communities."

Horgan called Berger's work as commissioner of the Mackenzie pipeline inquiry in the 1970s an "unprecedented public consultation process," highlighting unresolved land claims and the threat to wildlife and an entire way of life in Northern Canada.

The Queen's Counsel lawyer received the Order of Canada in 1990 and the Order of British Columbia in 2004.

The statement from Horgan said Berger is owed a debt of thanks and gratitude.

"He spent a lifetime moving all of us towards a just society," said Horgan.

"His kindness and generosity will long be remembered. His thinking will continue to influence us for generations to come."

Jody Wilson-Raybould, a former federal justice minister and Independent member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, said in a social media message that Berger was a "great champion of Indigenous peoples and rights."

"A true trailblazer who helped change this country for the better while personally sacrificing to do so," wrote Wilson-Raybould.

Berger is survived by his wife of 65 years, Beverley, two children and three grandchildren.

A small memorial is being planned for the family, Erin Berger said, while a larger celebration of life may be possible this summer.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version said Thomas Berger's final case involved the Manitoba Metis.
Got a question or tip? Contact us at bizmojoidaho@gmail.com.
What is a worker supposed to do when he or she is told, after hours of queuing in an overcrowded bank, your account has been closed from the back-end, now move on please, asks Jean Dreze who has spent decades working with Indias poorest people. This is the reality of rural India where millions of Jan-Dhan accounts were opened with great fanfare. As with many other schemes and promises, the reality is vastly different.

In this case, one common link between urban elites with multiple bank accounts and impoverished Indians struggling to eke out a living is the harassment by banks who are allowed to freeze savings over know-your-customer (KYC) updation.

Earlier this month, Moneylife Foundation sent a memorandum to the governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on the harassment caused to ordinary depositors by the draconian action of blocking access to their own money on the grounds that KYC documents were not updated.

We are all for strict KYC norms being followed, but not its mindless application which treats law-abiding people like economic offenders. Delegating this draconian power to the branch level and making people bear the brunt for mistakes or tardiness of bank officials is nothing short of criminal. The harassment has continued throughout the past year, when India has struggled with a pandemic.

When we wrote our memorandum and followed it up with an online petition , our focus was on urban Indians and even non-resident Indians (NRIs). An email from economist, activist and teacher, Jean Dreze, showed us how much worse the problem is for rural and economically backward Indians who have all been asked to open Jan-Dhan accounts on the promise that their sole identificationthe Aadhaar card issued by the UIDAIwas adequate. Their nightmare began afterwards.

In 2018, Jean Dreze and his colleagues wrote to RBI governor Urjit Patel alerting him to the issues faced by Jan-Dhan account-holders in Jharkhand. The letter was acknowledged but nothing happened.

In 2019, they wrote to senior RBI officials where this was one of the issues raised. Again, nothing happened.

Writing about the deep crisis in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scheme in 2018, Mr Dreze said, it is manifested in the form of delayed payments, rejected payments, diverted payments and locked payments.

He describes how accounts are not merely frozen but closed altogether for want of e-KYC (biometric authentication of Aadhaar-linked accounts), which is compulsory for NREGA workersif not in theory then certainly in practice.

Why is e-KYC such a problem for the rural poor?

Explaining this in another article that year, Mr Dreze says, A myth has been created that Aadhaar enabled millions of people to open JanDhan Yojana accounts within minutes, using biometric authentication. In fact, most of these accounts were opened without biometric authentication, by seeding Aadhaar numbers from Aadhaar cards or even second-hand information. Biometric verification (in the form of e-KYC) was imposed later on, and became a serious ordeal for poor people. Failure of e-KYC often led to discontinuation of benefit payments, or to people being locked out of their accounts, temporarily or permanently.

The problems with biometric authentication, especially for those with calloused and work-worn hands, is well known.

Mr Dreze says, Many banks used the ultimatum method for e-KYC compliance. They set a deadline and simply blocked accounts en masse when people missed the deadline.

"The problem was compounded due to inconsistencies between the Aadhaar database and the bank database. The only way to get their account unlocked was to resubmit original documents, sometimes providing new documents like a PAN card.

At every step, accounts were frozen with abandon whenever people needed to be nudged, he says, explaining the situation in Jharkhand.

For the poor, this not only meant that their savings were blocked but it also led to denial of rations, subsidies, benefits from welfare schemes and the experimentation and glitches involved in seeding every new scheme meant for them.

In fact, KYC is just one of the problems faced by the poor; the problems with mapping benefits to the Aadhaar-based payment system has a series of flaw that I will not go into in this column, except to point out that these people are forced to operate through banking correspondents and are not issued passbooks and, sometimes, do not even get proper transaction receipts.

In 2019, they wrote to the RBI again, about how the Supreme Court ruling on Aadhaar hadnt help workers in Jharkhand and, often, bankers themselves were unclear about its implications for Aadhaar seeding, e-KYC and the Aadhaar payments bridge system. While banks were allowed to open accounts only with Aadhaar, operating them apparently required e-KYC or the benefits were blocked. This not only inflicted enormous hardship but deprived the poorest Indians of legitimate benefits. But everybody in the system remains unmoved, because there is no accountability. Nobody cares. Approaching the RBI in the past has been like hitting a brick wall, says Mr Dreze.

Perhaps the biggest injustice that has been done in this domain is the freezing of accounts of elderly/widowed/disabled persons for lack of KYC or e-KYC. For many of them, it is really difficult to meet the ever-tightening requirements, says Mr Dreze.

Businessmen and others who have suffered the much-publicised issues with the goods and services tax (GST) portal or MCA21, or more on 28th April, the crash of Co-WIN within minutes after it opened for vaccine registration, could probably empathise with the trauma faced by the poor.

Remember, most bankers are fully aware of how they had allowed multiple Jan-Dhan accounts to be opened with the same Aadhaar because they were under pressure to meet account opening targets, but they cant do much about setting things right.

Meena Seshu, a well-known activist and founder of SANGRAM, based in Sangli (Maharashtra), which works at empowering sex workers, says that the problems have been further compounded by the merger of nationalised banks.

She says, the government announced COVID-19 relief to women in sex work (Rs5,000 for three months + Rs2,500/month if she had children) through the ministry for women and child development. We were asked for lists, Aadhaar card numbers, bank details, and IFSC codes, which we provided. But banks refused to honour or credit those accounts where KYC was not updated.

A tedious follow-up to complete KYC by providing by linking Aadhaar to bank accounts and providing additional proof, such as PAN cards, has activated some accounts.

But, in many cases, there are inconsistencies in spellings between Aadhaar and bank account details, leading to more hassles.

Since some banks have merged, they are struggling all over again with the new changes including IFSC codes.

In the letter to governor Urjit Patel, which was essentially a plea for proper grievance redress, Mr Dreze and his colleague wrote, In recent years, some of the country's richest people have brazenly plundered public sector banks by defaulting on their loans. Meanwhile, NREGA workers and pensioners are facing endless harassment from the banks. To get their meagre wages or pensions, they have to submit numerous documents, link their accounts with Aadhaar, go through e-KYC again, stand in queues for hours, and run from pillar to post when their money is held up due to technical problems even when accounts are credited, they are not allowed to withdraw their money.

Mr Patel, who left before completing his term, only acknowledged the letter but didnt act on it. If grievance redress is such a struggle for us, well-to-do urban Indians, it is almost non-existent for the poor.

In 2019, they wrote to the RBI again, about how the Supreme Court ruling on Aadhaar hadnt help workers in Jharkhand and, often, bankers themselves were unclear about its implications for Aadhaar seeding, e-KYC and the Aadhaar payments bridge system.

While banks were allowed to open accounts only with Aadhaar, operating them apparently required e-KYC or the benefits were blocked. This not only inflicted enormous hardship but deprived the poorest Indians of legitimate benefits.

But everybody in the system remains unmoved, because there is no accountability. Nobody cares. Approaching the RBI in the past has been like hitting a brick wall, says Mr Dreze.

Will our petition fare any better? Well, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das encouraged us to document the issues and send him a memorandum. He has also asked for it to be examined by the concerned department.

Hopefully, they will dig out letters to past governors, which were probably moth-balled, and come up with a solution. Otherwise, we will have to look for other solutions.
On the anniversary of the announcement of Vision 2030, The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) today (April 28) confirmed that its regeneration project  The Journey Through Time Masterplan  represents a $15 billion opportunity for responsible investment in public-private partnership projects.

The Journey Through Time Masterplan, a roadmap to protect 200,000 years of natural and human history across the 20-km-long core historical area of AlUla, is anchored by the regeneration of five heritage districts.

It aims to set the benchmark for responsible and impactful investment in destination development by building social, economic and environmental sustainability into its blueprint, said the statement from RCU.

The masterplan aims to create a robust investment opportunity in AlUla, contributing to the diversification of the Saudi economy and creation of jobs as well as wider opportunities for the local community  all key goals of Saudi Vision 2030, it added.

CEO Amr AlMadani said: "With an estimated total development value of over $15 billion, The Journey Through Time Masterplan is an important opportunity to showcase AlUlas full potential. By de-risking investment opportunities through our $2 billion seed funding and creating a robust governance framework, we have created a platform for responsible and sustainable development to regenerate a unique location featuring a Unesco World Heritage Site," stated AlMadani.

"With $3.2 billion reserved for priority primary infrastructure, the development of AlUla will be anchored in building strong foundations as well as safeguarding AlUlas cultural and heritage assets," he noted.

An estimated $3.2 billion will be injected into developing AlUlas priority infrastructure. A key component to unlocking AlUlas future as a sustainable development destination, this will include a 46-km low-carbon tramway (22 km for the first phase) and increasing clean power capacity, with at least 50% of demand supplied through renewable energies by 2035.

The plans also includes increasing potable water capacity, with a centralised and upgraded water supply system including a new water supply of desalinated water and a tailor-made water conservation programme; and increasing wastewater capacity with an upgrade of the wastewater treatment plant in Mughayra.

According to him, the RCU is committed to de-risking future investments for partners and will support the development of heritage assets and primary infrastructure.

It has already invested in $2 billion in development projects including the expansion of AlUla International Airport, bolstering the countrys security infrastructure and developing key tourism assets including Ashar estate and the iconic Maraya multi-purpose venue.

In parallel, the wider development strategy for AlUla - encompassing multiple masterplans - will lay the foundations for a strong tourism industry with a total of 9,400 hotel keys by 2035, of which 5,000 keys will sit within the Journey Through Time Masterplan, remarked AlMadani.

He pointed out that the tourism potential of AlUla was evident in the interest it had generated amongst hoteliers and designers, including global luxury brands Aman, Accor/Banyan Tree and Habitas.

AlUla will also play host to a one-of-its-kind property designed by leading architecture firm Atelier Jean Nouvel that will revive the 2,000-year-old architectural legacy of the ancient Nabataeans, he explained.

AlUlas development strategy is guided by the AlUla Sustainability Charter, which sets the ground for adherence to a carbon-neutral strategy and circular economy principles, robust resiliency policies around development in heritage and environmentally sensitive areas, as well as flood and improved water management and vegetation planting. The masterplan will also contribute to the Saudi Green Initiative by expanding AlUlas green and open spaces up to 10 million sq m.

With investment opportunities meeting robust environmental, social and corporate governance criteria, AlUla is creating investment opportunities in new and vibrant sectors of the kingdoms economy.

As part of the masterplan, AlUla offers a rich portfolio of investment opportunities across multiple asset classes: landmark cultural projects; social infrastructure, utilities and mobility, hospitality, commercial and residential projects. The masterplan will be delivered over three phases, to be completed in 2023, 2030 and 2035 respectively.

AlMadani said: "Responsible investment can deliver strong business opportunities and investment returns, whilst also helping to address urgent social and environmental concerns. For our partners around the globe, this is an opportunity to be at a new frontier of environmental, social and economic growth."

The Journey Through Time Masterplan is the first in a series of plans for AlUla and focuses on rehabilitating AlUlas natural and cultural heritage in responsible manner, he stated.

"Upon full completion, the wider development strategy for AlUla in 2035 aims to deliver 38,000 new jobs amid a population grown to 130,000, contributing $32 billion to the kingdoms GDP," he said.

"Unique opportunities will further encourage and accelerate business and investment from partners who share RCUs values of sustainability, responsible development and community inclusivity," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Rohingya rest after being rescued by the coast guard off the coast of Teknaf sub-district in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, April 27, 2021.

Bangladesh coast-guard officials said they rescued 30 Rohingya found adrift in the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday, after pirates looted their belongings and destroyed the engine of a boat taking them toward a Malaysia-bound ship.

The Rohingya, who came from various refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, were rescued off the coast of Teknaf, a sub-district in Coxs Bazar, and sent to an island where the government has relocated some 18,000 refugees.

They arrived on Bhashan Char Island on Wednesday, said Lt. Commander Amirul Haque, a coast guard spokesman.

The trawler carrying Rohingya was floating in the sea for around five days waiting for a big ship bound for Malaysia and was caught by robbers. The robbers destroyed the engine of the trawler after looting the Rohingyas belongings, Haque told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, citing accounts from the rescued refugees about the pirate attack on Monday.

They were rescued after the trawler floated near the beach at Barodail Para in Baharchhara of Teknaf.

Over the years, thousands of Rohingya have paid traffickers to transport them to Thailand and Malaysia where they can find work.

Islamic-majority Malaysia hosts as many as 150,000 of the estimated 1.8 million to 2 million Rohingya in the world, and is a desired destination for Rohingya Muslims fleeing from Myanmar.

Coxs Bazar hosts about a million Rohingya who fled persecution in their native Myanmar. Since last December, Bangladesh has moved thousands of these refugees to Bhashan Char, insisting that the relocation was voluntary.

But the 30 rescued Rohingya were summarily sent to the island, said Asif Munir, an immigration and refugee affairs analyst.

Its a wrong decision to send them to Bhashan Char instead of returning them to their camps, Munir, a former official at the International Organization for Migration, told BenarNews.

It's almost like a punishment for trying to [enter Malaysia] illegally. You tried to go illegally. So now I am sending you to Bhashan Char as punishment.

HRW report

Separately, Bangladesh officials said Wednesday that they had arrested a dozen other Rohingya on Bhashan Char earlier this month on charges of alleged theft  and not because they were trying to leave the island, as international rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleged this week.

Twelve Rohingya have been arrested and sent to court in connection with a theft, and not because they were trying to escape. They are currently in Noakhali jail in Chittagong, Mohammad Mahe Alam, the officer-in-charge of the Bhashan Char Police Station told BenarNews.

HRW said security forces had beaten the 12 Rohingya at the police station on April 6 after they were caught trying to flee the island.

The mother of one detained refugee said that someone claiming to be a police officer threatened to kill her son in crossfire, a euphemism in Bangladesh for extrajudicial executions, unless the family paid a bribe, HRWs statement said.

Navy Commodore Rashed Sattar, director of the Bhashan Char Housing Project, acknowledged that some refugees do try to escape but said this was not the case with the 12 Rohingya in question.

It is true that some Rohingya have been caught trying to escape from here. But that they have been beaten at the police station or threatened with crossfire? . All these are imaginary allegations. How did they [HRW] know this? Do they have any evidence, or are they just making verbal accusations? Sattar told BenarNews.

Alam said they had stopped nine refugees trying to flee Bhashan Char on April 4, and police allowed them go back to their island homes after giving them a warning.

However, Munir, the refugee affairs analyst, said he and others who work with the Rohingya had heard allegations that security forces mistreat some refugees.

Not everything is perfect in Bhashan Char. Those of us who work with the Rohingya get unofficial news from there. We have also heard allegations of Rohingya being tortured by law enforcement authorities there, Munir said.

The authorities may say these are isolated or untrue incidents.

Nurul Islam, a Rohingya who went to Bhashan Char voluntarily, said their movements were being curtailed.

It was very good at first when we came to Bhashan Char. But now the situation is getting worse day by day, Islam told BenarNews.

The governments people do not allow us to go anywhere and talk freely. They are keeping a close watch on our movements.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
 Flash

The Philippines received an additional batch of the Sinovac CoronaVac vaccine from China on Thursday morning, allowing the Southeast Asian country to continue its vaccination drive.

Carlito Galvez, chief implementer of the country's fight against COVID-19, said the government expects the rest of the vaccines it purchased from Sinovac could be delivered within this year.

The Philippines is ramping up the vaccination efforts as it continues to battle a surge of COVID-19 infections fuelled by more infectious variants and people's complacency to safety protocols.

China donated the first batch of CoronaVac to the Philippines on Feb. 28, allowing the country to kick off its vaccination campaign on March 1.

The Philippines has administered more than 1.8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of April 27, primarily to frontline healthcare workers and the elderly. CoronaVac and AstraZeneca are the available vaccines in the country.

The government aims to inoculate up to 70 million Filipinos this year to achieve herd immunity.

The COVID-19 has sickened 1,020,495 people in the Philippines as of Wednesday since the disease emerged in January 2020. At least 17,031 have died from the disease.
Field Trials to commence for MustGrow's mustard-derived soil biopesticide in Canada for treatment of Clubroot disease in Canola and Aphanomyces disease in Pulse Crops.

MustGrow's organic biopesticide is plant-based, harnessing the mustard seed's natural defense mechanism to control diseases, insect pests, and weeds.

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - MustGrow Biologics Corp. (CSE: MGRO) (OTCQX: MGROF) (FSE: 0C0) ("MustGrow") and Univar Canada Ltd.'s NexusBioAg ("NexusBioAg"), a division of Univar Solutions Inc., are pleased to announce a collaborative field trial program in Canada (the "Field Trials"). NexusBioAg will conduct the Field Trials of MustGrow's mustard-derived biopesticide, TerraMG, (the "Product", or "Products") for treatment of Clubroot and Aphanomyces diseases in Canola and Pulse Crops, respectively.

MustGrow's remarkably safe and effective organic biopesticide is plant-based - harnessing the mustard seed's natural defense mechanism to control diseases, insect pests, and weeds.

Utilizing its vast technical and commercial expertise, NexusBioAg will be responsible for conducting the Field Trials. MustGrow will supply NexusBioAg with the Products for testing along with scientific support.

"We are very excited to partner with an organization like NexusBioAg. Their expertise in both the technical and commercial areas will be advantageous in accelerating the development and potential commercialization of TerraMG for use in Canada on canola and pulse crops. The NexusBioAg team has tremendous knowledge of Canadian agriculture as well as sustainable farming solutions," MustGrow COO Colin Bletsky remarked.

Daniel Samphir, NexusBioAg Marketing Manager added, "MustGrow's R&D team has developed a sustainable farming solution to address the agronomic challenges of treating Clubroot and Aphanomyces. We are excited to add TerraMG to our field trial program to further demonstrate that TerraMG is complementary to the NexusBioAg portfolio."

Clubroot Disease: Canola

In August 2020, MustGrow reported control of Clubroot in greenhouse soil; of particular note: 96.1% disease control at 0.5 gal/acre application rate; and 98.5% disease control at 10 gal/acre application rate.

Clubroot is a rapidly-spreading disease pathogen destroying canola, one of Canada's more profitable crops with over 20 million acres grown each year and contributing C$30 billion in economic activity in Canada (1). Industry experts conservatively estimate C$500 million in annual canola crop losses in Canada caused by Clubroot (2). Current measures cannot eradicate Clubroot completely - they are only intended to slow down the spread and reduce the incidence and severity of the disease. Some field infections may lead to 100% crop loss.

Aphanomyces Disease: Pulse Crops

In January 2021, MustGrow reported 100% control of Aphanomyces in laboratory tests at economic application rates within 24 hours.

Aphanomyces is a water mould pathogen responsible for root-rot disease, infecting a variety of peas, lentils and other legumes collectively referred to as pulse crops. The disease causes severe root damage and wilting, with yield losses ranging from 10% to 100% in infected fields (2). Canada is one of the world's largest producers (~9.2 million tons; 2019) and exporters of pulse crops (3). Industry experts conservatively estimate $20 million in annual pulse crop losses in Canada and $100 million globally caused by Aphanomyces (2). Current treatment measures cannot control Aphanomyces - they are only able to slow down the spread and reduce the incidence and severity of the disease.

The global plant-based protein market size is projected to grow from US$12 billion in 2019 to US$28 billion by 2025 (CAGR of 15%) (4). This is attributed to several drivers, predominantly rising consumer health-consciousness, growing prevalence of protein-rich pulse crop food products, and technological innovations in plant-based protein extraction. To accommodate the rise of plant-based protein demand, the global pulse crops market is anticipated to grow from US$16.2 billion in 2017 to US$24.3 billion by 2025 (CAGR of 5.2%) (5).

Sources:

Canola Council of Canada

3 rd party market research, MustGrow estimates

imarcgroup .com

MarketsandMarkets with analysis by EY-Parthenon

Fior Markets

About Univar Solutions

Univar Solutions is a leading global specialty chemical and ingredient distributor representing a premier portfolio from the world's leading producers. With the industry's largest private transportation fleet and North American sales force, unparalleled logistics know-how, deep market and regulatory knowledge, world-class formulation and recipe development, and leading digital tools the company is well-positioned to offer tailored solutions and value-added services to a wide range of markets, industries, and applications. Univar Solutions is committed to helping customers and suppliers innovate and grow together. Learn more at www.univarsolutions.com.

About NexusBioAg

Univar Solutions' NexusBioAg provides an expanded portfolio of crop nutrition solutions, which includes industry-leading inoculants, micronutrients, nitrogen stabilizers and foliar products. With a diverse collection of customer service, agronomists, sales and marketing experts, NexusBioAg strives to help meet the needs of increasingly unique agricultural businesses. Through these best-in-class capabilities, a collaborative team-oriented approach, and a commitment to agricultural integrity, NexusBioAg is helping customers innovate and grow. Learn more at www.nexusbioag.com.

About MustGrow

MustGrow is a publicly traded (CSE: MGRO) (OTCQX: MGROF) (FSE: 0C0) agriculture biotech company focused on providing natural science-based biological solutions for high value crops, including fruits & vegetables and other industries. MustGrow has designed and owns a U.S. EPA-approved natural solution that uses the mustard seed's natural defence mechanism to protect plants from pests and diseases. Over 110 independent tests have been completed, validating MustGrow's safe and effective signature products. The product, in granule format, is EPA-approved across all key U.S. states and by Health Canada's PMRA (Pest Management Regulatory Agency) as a biopesticide for high value crops such as in fruit & vegetables. MustGrow has now concentrated a mustard extract biopesticide in liquid format, TerraMG, and with regulatory approval, could be applied through standard drip or spray equipment, improving functionality and performance features. In addition, the Company's mustard-derived extract technologies could have other applications in several different industries from pre-plant soil treatment, to weed control, to post harvest disease control and food preservation.

The Company has approximately 42.8 million basic common shares issued and outstanding and 50.6 million shares fully diluted. For further details please visit www.mustgrow.ca.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Corey Giasson"

Director & CEO

Phone: +1-306-668-2652

info@mustgrow.ca

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements included in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" which involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may affect the results, performance or achievements of MustGrow.

Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "estimates", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "occur" or "be achieved".

Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of MustGrow to differ materially from those discussed in such 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, MustGrow.

These risks are described in more detail in MustGrow's Prospectus and other continuous disclosure documents filed by MustGrow with the applicable securities regulatory authorities and available at www.sedar.com. Readers are referred to such documents for more detailed information about MustGrow, which is subject to the qualifications, assumptions and notes set forth therein.

This release does not constitute an offer for sale of, nor a solicitation for offers to buy, any securities in the United States.



Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

 2021 MustGrow Biologics Corp. All rights reserved.

 2021 Univar Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82132
Credit: Michele Walfred

With threats of water scarcity complicating the need to feed a growing global population, it is more important than ever to get crop irrigation right. Overwatering can deplete local water supplies and lead to polluted runoff, while underwatering can lead to sub-optimal crop performance. Yet few farmers use science-based tools to help them decide when and how much to water their crops.

A new University of Illinois led study identifies obstacles and solutions to improve performance and adoption of irrigation decision support tools at the field scale.

"We wanted to offer our perspective on how to achieve field-scale precision irrigation with the most recent and advanced technologies on data collection, plant water stress, modeling, and decision-making," says Jingwen Zhang, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois and lead author on the article in Environmental Research Letters.

Zhang says many farmers rely on traditional rules of thumb, including visual observation, crop calendars, and what the neighbors are doing, to decide when and how much to water. Better data and more advanced technologies exist to help make those decisions, but they aren't being leveraged currently to their full potential.

For example, some fields are equipped with soil moisture sensors or cameras that detect changes in crop appearance, but there aren't enough of them to provide accurate information across fields. Satellites can monitor vegetation from space, but the spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images is often too large to help make decisions at the field scale.

Kaiyu Guan, assistant professor in NRES, Blue Waters professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and project leader on the study, pioneered a way to fuse high-resolution and high-frequency satellite data into one integrated high spatial-temporal resolution product to help track soil and plant conditions.

"Based on remote sensing fusion technology and advanced modeling, we can help farmers get a fully scalable solution remotely," he says. "That's powerful. It can potentially be a revolutionary technology for farmers, not only in the U.S., but also smallholder farmers in developing countries."

With modern satellite technology and Guan's fusion model, data acquisition won't be a limiting factor in future precision irrigation products. But it's still important to define plant water stress appropriately.

Historically, irrigation decisions were based solely on measures of soil moisture. Guan's group recently called for the agricultural industry to redefine drought, not based on soil moisture alone, but on its interaction with atmospheric dryness.

"If we consider the soil-plant-atmosphere-continuum as a system, which reflects both soil water supply and atmospheric water demand, we can use those plant-centric metrics to define plant water stress to trigger irrigation," Zhang says. "Again, if we use our data fusion methods and process-based modelling, we can achieve precision irrigation with very high accuracy and also high resolution."

The researchers also looked at challenges regarding farmer adoption of existing decision support tools. Because current products are based on less-than-ideal data sources, Guan says producers are reluctant to switch from traditional rule-of-thumb methods to tools that may not be much more reliable. Non-intuitive user interfaces, data privacy, and inflexible timing compound the problem.

Trenton Franz, associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and a coauthor, says farmers will be more likely to adopt precision irrigation decision tools if they are accurate down to the field scale, flexible, and easy to use. His and Guan's teams are working on technologies to fill this need and are actively testing the technology in irrigated fields in Nebraska. This includes participating with Daran Rudnick, assistant professor at UNL and co-author of the study, in the UNL Testing Ag Performance (TAPS) program, which focuses on technology adoption and education for producers across the region.

"We're pretty close. We have real-time evapotranspiration data, and we're adding the soil moisture component and the irrigation component. Probably in less than a year this will be launched as a prototype and can be tested among the farmer community," Guan says.

Explore further Redefining drought in the U.S. Corn Belt

More information: Jingwen Zhang et al, Challenges and opportunities in precision irrigation decision-support systems for center pivots, Environmental Research Letters (2021). Journal information: Environmental Research Letters Jingwen Zhang et al, Challenges and opportunities in precision irrigation decision-support systems for center pivots,(2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe436
Numerous media outlets including People's Daily, The Paper, and Hainan News of Hainan TV have reported on the first prescription and the Name Patient Program (NPP) inclusion of selinexor, in recognition of the clinical significance of having this novel therapy accessible to patients in China. Among these media outlets, People.cn stated: "the first patient with rrMM treated with selinexor in the Pilot Zone responded well to the therapy with his condition already stabilized. Selinexor achieves its antitumor effects by precision targeting the underlying oncogenic pathways, and has a special mechanism of action compared to other approved therapies. Through the rapid clinical adoption of selinexor in Lecheng, Boao, a much-needed new treatment option has been made available to patients with MM in China."

Previously, Antengene initiated a Named Patient Program (NPP) in Hong Kong for dozens of patients with rrMM and relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (rrDLBCL). After being prescribed at the Boao Super Hospital for the first time, the use of selinexor in such patients will now be a part of real-world research in China.

Multiple Myeloma (MM) and Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) are two of the common types of hematological malignancies in the world. MM is a kind of plasma cell hematologic cancer. In recent years, with the availability of autologous stem cell transplantations and introductions of newer therapies such as lenalidomide, the conventional treatment of MM continues to evolve. Although significant progress has been made in treatment, MM is still incurable, mainly due to primary drug resistance and disease recurrence. In China, patients with MM face a range of challenges including late or missed diagnosis, as well as lack of effective treatment options for relapsed patients to improve overall survival. DLBCL is an aggressive hematologic malignancy that accounts for around 50%-60% of all lymphoma incidences. About half of patients with DLBCL fail to reach complete remission after receiving first-line treatments, and approximately 60% of patients with rrDLBCL lack effective treatment options.

As a first-in-class SINE compound XPO1 inhibitor, selinexor has been approved by U.S. food and drug administration (FDA) for the treatment of rrMM and rrDLBCL, and was included into five recommended regimens by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Guidelines for the treatment of hematological malignancies. Being an oral drug requiring low dosing frequency, selinexor has the advantages of ease of use and high patient compliance. Enabled by the Interim Provisions on the Administration of Imported Drugs of Urgent Need in Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone of Hainan Province, selinexor has successfully entered into clinical application in mainland China, and became the world's first XPO1 inhibitor accessible to patients both inside and outside the country, while being authorized to be used beyond the Pilot Zone for outpatient treatment. As the company that initiated this introduction of selinexor through a collaboration with the Boao Super Hospital and Hainan Chengmei Medicine Co., Ltd., Antengene has provided patients in mainland China a reliable and convenient program to access an urgently needed therapy.

Hongxia Yao, Director of Hematological Lymphoma Department of Hainan Cancer Hospital, said: "This prescription marks the first clinical application of selinexor at the Boao Super Hospital. It is a testament to a clinical breakthrough made possible by the supporting policies of the Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone, and benefit it brings to patients. This patient with rrMM has received multiple lines of therapy, and unfortunately failed all of the approved therapies in mainland China. The special policy in Hainan has brought renewed hope to this patient, giving him the early access to a novel therapy that has already been approved abroad and the possibility of bringing the drug's use beyond the Pilot Zone for outpatient treatment."

About Antengene

Antengene Corporation Limited ("Antengene", SEHK: 6996.HK) is a leading clinical-stage R&D driven biopharmaceutical company focused on innovative medicines for oncology and other life-threatening diseases. Antengene aims to provide the most advanced anti-cancer medicines to patients in the Asia Pacific Region and around the world. Since its establishment in 2017, Antengene has built a broad and expanding pipeline of clinical and pre-clinical stage assets through partnerships as well as in-house drug discovery, and obtained 13 investigational new drug (IND) approvals and submitted 5 new drug applications (NDA) in multiple markets in Asia Pacific. Antengene's vision is to "Treat Patients Beyond Borders". Antengene is focused on and committed to addressing significant unmet medical needs by discovering, developing and commercializing first-in-class/best-in-class therapeutics.

Forward-looking statements

The forward-looking statements made in this article relate only to the events or information as of the date on which the statements are made in this article. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. You should read this article completely and with the understanding that our actual future results or performance may be materially different from what we expect. In this article, statements of, or references to, our intentions or those of any of our Directors or our Company are made as of the date of this article. Any of these intentions may alter in light of future development.

*XPOVIOis a registered trade mark of KaryopharmTherapeutics Inc.;

*NCCN is a registered trademark of National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

SOURCE Antengene Corporation Limited
Watch: Sir Anthony Hopkins dance and laugh with Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek helped Sir Anthony Hopkins celebrate his second Oscar win with a dance.

Sir Anthony became the oldest actor to win an Academy Award, at the age of 83, when he unexpectedly scooped Best Actor at the 2021 Oscars for The Father, despite not being at the ceremony and unable to collect his award in person.

Hayek, 54, has now revealed she is a guest of Sir Anthony at his home in Wales as she shared a comedy video of the pair dancing around the sitting room to Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love.

Salma Hayek and Sir Anthony Hopkins have a little dance to celebrate his Oscar win. (Instagram/salmahayek)

The Like A Boss star captioned the video: "Celebrating with the king @anthonyhopkins  his 2nd Oscar for his extraordinary performance in The Father #leonardcohen."

Read more: Salma Hayek says she lies about her weight, but not her age

Sir Anthony is shown with his arms flung out either side of him, dancing across the room, before Hayek enters the shot and dances with him until they laugh and share an embrace.

He commented on the post: "Thank you queen for the love and laughter. A memorable, beautiful day."

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It is not known why Hayek is in the UK but she and the Welsh actor have a long friendship, with her joining him when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.

The Mexican-born actor and producer  who has a 13-year-old daughter Valentina with her fashion mogul husband Francois-Henri Pinault  is currently filming Ridley Scott's biographical crime film House Of Gucci.

The Welsh actor had previously shared a video on his own Instagram account, thanking the Academy for his award and paying tribute to the late Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who had been posthumously nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, and was widely expected to win.

Josh Lucas, Salma Hayek and Jodie Foster attend Sir Anthony Hopkins's Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in 2003. (Getty Images)

He said: "Here I am in my homeland in Wales, and at 83 years of age I did not expect to get this award. I really didn't. I'm very grateful to the Academy, and thank you."

Story continues

He continued with a gesture to Boseman, who died in 2020 after a private battle with cancer.

"I want to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who was taken from us far too early.

"And again, thank you all very much, I really did not expect this, so I feel very privileged and honoured. Thank you."

Read more: Anthony Hopkins says actors are 'pretty stupid'

Sir Anthony won for his performance as an ageing father experiencing memory loss in the film, which co-stars Olivia Colman as his daughter.

Boseman  who died aged 43 in August 2020 after a private battle with colon cancer  was nominated for his performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Sir Anthony won his first Oscar in 1992 for his performance in The Silence Of The Lambs.

Watch: Anthony Hopkins shares acceptance speech online
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Billy Vincent and Susie Bradley are arguably one of the most controversial couples in Married At First Sight history.

And although their marriage was just for reality TV, Billy has now admitted that he thought their union was legally binding when he first appeared on the show.

Speaking to the Dames Who Dish podcast, the 30-year-old recalled how it took him three days to realise that the marriage wasn't actually real.

'I thought I was getting actually married': Married At First Sight's Billy Vincent has admitted that he thought his TV wedding to Susie Bradley was legally binding

'I really wasn't prepared, I hadn't watched the show before,' he said.

'I came into it a completely blank slate. I thought I was getting actually married, I thought it was a legally binding contract.

Billy said that he didn't read through the fine print of his contract after signing on for the show and assumed that he'd have to get a divorce to end his relationship with Susie.

'It wasn't until three days after the wedding that I realised that it wasn't actually a legit wedding,' he confessed.

'It wasn't until three days after the wedding that I realised that it wasn't actually a legit wedding,' he told the Dames Who Dish podcast

Billy's season of Married At First Sight recently aired in the UK and is now airing in the US.

Susie has received extreme backlash from viewers in both countries, and was even labelled 'Britain's most hated bride' after the UK airing.

Much like Australians were in 2019, British viewers were left reeling after watching Susie's toxic relationship with on-screen husband Billy.

'I hadn't watched the show before': Billy said he didn't read through the fine print of his contract after signing on for the show and assumed that he'd have to get a divorce to end his relationship with Susie

Countless people flocked to social media at the time to express their shock over Susie's antics after she repeatedly berated Billy.

In one memorable scene, Susie attacked Billy at the beach after he told a white lie about being able to surf, which ended with him in tears.

Another iconic scene was the couple's first commitment ceremony, in which Susie said Billy wasn't 'manly' enough for her.

Backlash: Susie was recently branded 'Britain's most hated bride' after season six of MAFS aired in the UK for the first time

'Billy stares, he's very awkward and makes me very uncomfortable,' she seethed.

'The silly odd things that come out of his mouth freak me out. He is a lot to take in,' she added.

Fighting back more tears, Billy responded: 'I am trying so hard. I am just trying to be a nice person.'

Flashback: In one memorable scene, Susie attacked Billy at the beach after he told a white lie about being able to surf, which ended with him in tears

British viewers didn't hold back on social media, with one writing: 'Just when we thought the show couldn't find anyone worse than Davina or Ines... they introduce the delightful Susie.'

Another tweeted: 'Billy's only mistake was putting Susie on a pedestal at the start. She's used that to try and control and belittle him.

'Really can't understand why she's so mean to him. What has he done that's so bad.'
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Katie Price's fiance Carl Woods has put in an offer for a 800,000 property for the TV star and her children to live in - while her 'mucky mansion' makeover is completed.

The former glamour model, 42, is currently renovating her property and plans to live there with car dealer Carl, 32, and her kids when it is completed.

Until then, Katie and her brood will live at Carl's new stunning Essex pad, which he will later rent out in the hopes of turning it into a business venture.

Moving up? Katie Price's fiance Carl Woods has put in an offer on a 800,000 property for the TV star and her children to live in - while her 'mucky mansion' makeover is completed

A source told MailOnline: Carl has put in an offer on the property but nothing has been accepted yet.'

The huge property has been freshly renovated ahead of their move and boasts three reception rooms, five bedrooms and two bathrooms.

The cladded property looks over sprawling fields as well as a nearby river.

Inside the house there is also a dressing room and ensuite in Katie and Carl's bedroom, as well as an open plan living and kitchen area.

Loved-up: The former glamour model, 42, is currently renovating her own property and plans to live there with car dealer Carl, 32, and her kids when it is completed

Gorgeous: Until then, Katie and her brood will live at Carl's new stunning Essex pad, which he will later rent out in the hopes of turning it into a business venture

A source told MailOnline: Carl has put in an offer on the property but nothing has been accepted yet'

Clean: A neutral colour scheme throughout the home offers a contemporary and clean finish, meaning the couple will be able to put their own stamp on the place

A neutral colour scheme throughout the home offers a contemporary and clean finish, meaning the couple will be able to put their own stamp on the place.

The family were previously living in another of Carl's properties in Essex, however he recently sold the place for 445,000 before buying the new home.

Katie and her children had been living with Carl - while they weren't with their fathers - after a flood damaged their family home.

Living space: The huge property has been freshly renovated ahead of their potential move and boasts three reception rooms, five bedrooms and two bathrooms

Stylish: Inside the house there is also a dressing room and ensuite in the bedroom, as well as an open plan living and kitchen area

The possible move comes following Katie and Carl's engagement - which marks the seventh time she has been proposed to - after 10 months together.

Katie has previously spoken of how she loves that Carl makes her own money and bought her ring, unlike some of her previous suitors.

Speaking to OK! Magazine, she said: 'I didn't have to buy my own ring this time!

Make it their own: No doubt the couple would want to put their own spin on the place if the offer is accepted

On the move! The family were previously living in another of Carl's properties in Essex, however he recently sold the place for 445,000

Scenic: The cladded property looks over sprawling fields as well as a nearby river

'It was made from scratch and came out of his own money. He designed it  it's really special. It's like a fairy-tale ring and massive.

'It's like something out of Hollywood. It's more than I could dream of.'

Katie is mum to Harvey, 18, from her relationship with Dwight Yorke. While she welcomed children Junior, 15, and Princess, 13, with ex-husband Peter Andre.

She also shares Bunny, six, and Jett, seven, with ex Kieran Hayler.
A new attraction coming to The Strip will have tourists dangling their feet over the Grand Canyon.

LAS VEGAS  A new attraction coming to The Strip will have tourists dangling their feet over the Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe and other landmarks of the American West.

But this is no helicopter tour. In fact, you don't even leave Las Vegas Boulevard.

It's called FlyOver Las Vegas, and it's being billed as an immersive flight-ride experience. What that means for Las Vegas visitors is buckling in and watching a film on a spherical screen.

Located next to the Hard Rock Cafe on Las Vegas Boulevard, FlyOver's two flight-ride theaters will open with a full-service bar in September.

With a Strip-facing entrance, ticketed visitors sit down, strap on seatbelts and roll into the center of a 52-foot wrap-around screen. The ride is designed to make you feel like you're gliding in a helicopter over destinations like the Grand Canyon, Zion and Arches National Parks, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas.

The ride is similar to Disneyland Resort's Soarin' Over California attraction. There are mists and scents and motion effects that make riders feel like they're flying.

Its so much more than a helicopter ride," said Lisa Adams, vice president of FlyOver Attractions, in an interview. "Its a story about a country and its people."

Expected to open on the Las Vegas Strip in fall 2021, FlyOver will have Las Vegas visitors have tourists dangling their feet over the Grand Canyon without leaving Las Vegas Boulevard.

It took 14 months and more than 100 hours in the air with an actual helicopter to gather all the video footage for FlyOver, she said.

This will be the first FlyOver attraction to open in the U.S.  and the third in the world. FlyOver is also located in Vancouver, Canada and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Ticket prices will be released this summer.

Ed Komenda writes about Las Vegas for the Reno Gazette Journal and USA TODAY Network.

This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: Las Vegas FlyOver will dangle tourists over Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe
Mumbai, April 29 : On his first death anniversary, late actor Irrfan Khan's wife Sutapa Sikdar took to social media to pen down an emotional note celebrating the actor.

The note talks about the actor's last night at the hospital and how she and her friend sang songs for him.

"People living deeply have no fear of d"ath"... Anais Nin your favourite poet Irrfan. Last year tonight me and my friends sang songs for you,all your favorite songs. The nurses were looking at us strangely as they were used to religious chants in critical times but I had overdone that for you irrfan morning evening and night for two years and since they told me it was time I wanted you to go with memories you loved ...so we sang songs....next day you left for the next station I hope you knew where to get down without me..363 days eight thousand seven hundred and twelve hours..when each second is counted," she wrote.

She went on to talk about the time he passed away, which was so surreal as he was so interested the mystery of numbers.

"How exactly does one swim this huge ocean of time. The clock had stopped At 11.11 on 29th april for me ....irrfan you had a keen interest in mystery of numbers . .and funny you had 'hree 11's on your final day . some say actually many say this is a very mystical number 11/11/11. How does one walk ahead the pandemic just adds to the anxiety, fear and pain," she shared.

Sutapa wrote about the emotional turmoil she went through when she had to change her name.

"The days went by with umpteen responsibilities some extremely new ones like signature galore for changing of name. My fingers kept stopping on that how could I just take his name away and make it sutapa, I was unable to sign took a day off and the name game played on my mind. Like a film in a projector," she wrote.

She, then, spoke about the day she met the actor for the first time.

"i remember sitting outside NSD late evening ..beautiful girls from kathak kendra floating out ..they were all very well dressed up unlike us we were always in our blue trackpant and sky blue t shirt ..both boys and girls wore the same ...and you mispronounced my name and I tried to correct and rubbed it in as usual my permanent thing that north Indians are so stupid and they only can pronounce sunny Vicky Rahul type names and proceed to kake ki dukaan in gol chakkar to have ek bata do chai ...." Sutapa concluded: "its been a long journey of correcting each other spanning a life time. fighting arguing laughing evolving together. you were the loner in a crowd. And now a whole crowd has followed you up there ..by the way OM from the tea stall in the nukkad went some years back has he made a chai ka stall up there? are you having ek bata do chai there. and are drinking water from the running streams? All of you stay in peace remember us that we loved you, all of you. And remember all of you is missed by some one or the other ..all your families grieve ..may you all rest in peace! I hope there is enough space I hope some of you will forgive us for not been able to give a respectable cremation #irrfan#NSD#nationbleeding#wearesorry#restinpeace" Irrfan had been diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer in 2018. He p'ssed away in Mumbai's Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital on April 29 last year.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
[April 29, 2021] Compass Expands To North Carolina

NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Compass, Inc. (NYSE: COMP) today announced its expansion to North Carolina, with 55 agents joining in the Raleigh-Durham area. Together, these agents represent more than $420 million in 2020 sales volume. Principal agents joining Compass in Raleigh-Durham include: Gretchen Coley, Linda Trevor, David Worters, Debbie Van Horn, Margaret Struble, Susan Ungerleider, Chloe Seymore and Johnny Chappell. "It is an honor to partner with this talented group of founding agents to build Compass Raleigh-Durham," said Kim Harris Campbell, Compass Regional President. "Even more impressive than their market-leading track-records is their dedication to guiding clients through the real estate process with empathy and integrity. We look forward to super-charging their businesses with Compass' proprietary technology and programs." At her previous brokerage, Linda Trevor was ranked the #1 Medium Team in The Carolinas and #22 Medium Team in the United States. Locally, she has been ranked the #1 Boutique Team by the Triangle Business Journal. Her 11-person team, Linda Trevor & Co., represent more than $114 million in 2020 sales volume. "Compass understands that for me, working with clients is about service, not sales," said Linda Trevor, Compass agent. "I'm truly excited to partner with a company who is dedicated to fostering a collaborative culture and giving us tools to grow our business, allowing us more time to work on what we love  helping our clients." Gretchen Coley joins Compass with nearly 20 years of real estate experience, having closed more than 1,300 homes totaling more than $500 million. She brings her 15-member team, The Coley Group, which specializes in serving the Triangle's rapidly-expanding new construction projects and exclusive luxury market. "I'm always looking for cutting-edge and innovative solutions that lead to better results for my clients. I was immediately impressed by Compass' elevated marketing offerings and services designed to make us more effective and stand out in the region for our clients," said Gretchen Coley, Compass agent. "As I grow my team and evolve my business, I know Compass is the right partner to supportus."



Compass' end-to-end platform, which empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service, is now available to home buyers and sellers who work with a Compass agent in North Carolina. The platform includes an integrated suite of cloud-based software for customer relationship management, marketing, client service and other critical functionality, all custom-built for the real estate industry and enabling our core brokerage services. Other agents joining Compass in Raleigh-Durham released the following statements:

"Compass is a progressive, up-tempo, game-changing company that does things the right way. This partnership will allow our team to grow, without losing sight of what's important. Compass is coming to the Triangle to raise the bar, and in doing so will rewrite the local real estate landscape. To have an opportunity to be a founding member in that venture is incredibly rewarding for all of us at Chappell." -- Johnny Chappell , Compass Agent

, Compass Agent "My clients are always my first and foremost priority. I am thrilled to now provide clients my real estate expertise powered by Compass's cutting edge technology, marketing innovations, and customer-focused concierge services." -- Debbie Van Horn , Compass Agent

, Compass Agent "I am so grateful to be a part of the Compass community. The tools, support, and technology at Compass will enable me to provide my clients with such incredible next-level service, that I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I could not pass up. I can't wait to see where this new adventure takes me." -- Margaret Struble , Compass Agent

, Compass Agent "We're so excited to be partnering with Compass. Their high-level marketing and continued efforts to stay at the forefront of our industry align well with the design-forward brand we've worked hard to create. We look forward to utilizing their innovative tools and engaging with their wide network of talented agents from across the country!" -- Chloe Seymore + Susan Ungerleider , RED Collective, Compass Agents

, RED Collective, Compass Agents "Compass is truly like no firm I have ever encountered and I am humbled, honored, and jubilant to be here from day one. The culture, camaraderie, and energy are infectious. Joining Compass gives me the marketing and tech tools to help me be the best version of myself  and that will, in turn, help my clients at every step of their real estate journey." -- David Worters , Compass Agent About Compass

Founded in 2012, Compass is a leading real estate technology company, providing an end-to-end platform that empowers its residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients. The platform includes an integrated suite of cloud-based software for customer relationship management, marketing, client service, brokerage services and other critical functionality, all custom-built for the real estate industry. Compass agents utilize the platform to grow their business, save time and manage their business more effectively. For more information on how Compass empowers real estate agents, one of the largest groups of small business owners in the country, please visit www.Compass.com. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" including, among other things, our expansion into North Carolina, our operations in North Carolina, and our ability to successfully enter and grow in the North Carolina market or other territories. Statements containing words such as "could," "believe," "expect," "intend," "will," or similar expressions constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements reflect our current perspective on existing trends and information as of the date of this release. Actual results may differ materially from our current expectations depending upon a number of factors affecting our business, including, but not limited to, expansion into new markets, prevailing market conditions, the impact of general economic, industry or political conditions in the United States or internationally, and risks related to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foregoing list of risks and uncertainties is illustrative, but is not exhaustive. For information about other potential factors that could affect our business and financial results, please review the "Risk Factors" described in our Prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on April 1, 2021, and our other filings with the SEC. Except as may be required by law, we undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward-looking statements after the date of this release. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-expands-to-north-carolina-301279755.html SOURCE Compass

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By VOA News

WASHINGTON - U.S. President Joe Biden proposed a wide expansion of national government assistance for American children and families on Wednesday in his first address to a joint session of Congress.

Biden said Democrats and Republicans cannot be so busy competing against each other at home that they forget about competing with the rest of the world.

To win that competition for the future, in my view, we also need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families, in our children, he said.

The $1.8 trillion proposal features two years of government-paid, pre-kindergarten education for the countrys children and two years of free community college for young adults. It also calls for $225 billion in child-care assistance for U.S. families and monthly payments of at least $250 to parents, a heretofore unknown U.S. social safety net.

Biden is proposing to pay for the programs with tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

I will not impose any tax increase on people making less than $400,000, he said. Its time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share.

Biden said the plan is both fair and fiscally responsible.

These are among the highest value investments we can make as a nation, he added.

Whether Bidens spending plans have any chance of enactment is an open question in Washington.

Biden, a Democrat who took office January 20, won approval for a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package without the support of a single vote from opposition Republican lawmakers, relying totally on the narrow Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Republicans are attacking his infrastructure and family spending plans as too costly and assailing Bidens plans to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest of Americans. Under Bidens prescription, those who earn more than $400,000 annually would have to pay higher federal income taxes and those earning more than $1 million annually would pay much higher taxes on their profits when they sell stock investments.

The Senate Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said Tuesday that Biden's three-plus-month presidency "can best be described as the Biden bait and switch."

"President Biden ran as a moderate, but I'm hard pressed to think of anything at all that he's done so far that would indicate some degree of moderation," McConnell said.

The presidents nationally televised speech was witnessed in person by about 200 socially distanced, mask-wearing lawmakers and key U.S. officials in the House of Representatives chamber. Normally, the crowd for such an address would be 1,600 but it is being sharply limited Wednesday night by the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. Biden entered the House chamber giving fist bumps to lawmakers instead of the more traditional handshake line on his way to the dais.

"Tonight, I come to talk about crisis and opportunity. About rebuilding our nation, revitalizing our democracy, and winning the future for America, Biden said.

He cited challenges at the start of his administration, including the coronavirus pandemic and associated economic crisis, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol shortly before his January inauguration.

"Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again, Biden said.

He highlighted progress in coronavirus vaccinations, but urged people to continue doing what is necessary to beat back the virus that has killed more than 574,000 people in the United States and infected 32 million.

Theres still more work to do to beat this virus, he said. We cant let our guard down.

Biden urged people to get vaccinated, noting those age 16 and older are now eligible.

But tonight, I can say because of you  the American people  our progress these past 100 days against one of the worst pandemics in history is one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen, he said.

Biden highlighted the coronavirus pandemic as he discussed the need to collaborate with other nations on challenges facing the entire world. He said no one nation can deal with terrorism, nuclear proliferation, mass migration, cybersecurity or climate change.

While promising every American who wants a vaccination can get one, Biden said the United States will become an arsenal of vaccines for other countries.

After four years of foreign policy under former President Donald Trump that prioritized U.S. interests, Biden said the United States would lead with its allies.

Biden said in his discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping that while he welcomes economic competition between the worlds two largest economies, we are not looking for conflict. Biden said the United States would oppose trade practices that undercut American workers and companies, and that it also will not retreat from a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Weeks after imposing sanctions against Russia for election interference and cyber attacks, Biden said he made clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States does not seek escalation, but that Russias actions have consequences. He also stressed that the two countries can cooperate on mutual interests such as combating climate change.

Regarding the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, Biden said his administration will be working closely with our allies to address the threats posed by both of these countries through diplomacy as well as stern deterrence.

And after announcing the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces in Afghanistan by September 11, Biden said the country must remain vigilant against the threats it faces, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group abroad, and white supremacist terrorism at home.

National surveys this week show Biden with an average approval rating of 53%, according to a polling aggregator, Real Clear Politics.

Biden delivered his address Wednesday from the same dais in the House chamber that insurrectionists overtook on January 6 as Trump supporters stormed past law enforcement officers into the U.S. Capitol, in an effort to block Bidens official certification as the winner of last Novembers election over Trump.

The attack on the Capitol that left five people dead. More than 400 people were arrested on various charges.

The Capitol is now heavily guarded and still surrounded by black fencing, although some National Guard troops who were guarding the perimeter have returned home.
Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, has asked Gov. Kate Brown to suspend Oregons post-fire hazard tree removal program and initiate an inquiry to vet explosive allegations of mismanagement and excessive harvesting by the contractors on the job, which is being overseen by the Oregon Department of Transportation.

The action follows a damning two-hour hearing Wednesday of the Senate Natural Resources and Wildfire Recovery Committee in which whistleblowers, landowners and others described a program with little oversight, unqualified staff, constantly evolving standards for what constitutes a hazard tree, rampant drug use by workers and instances of possible fraud.

The testimony was alarming, Golden, the chairman of the committee, said in his letter to Brown. There are multiple allegations that core elements of the projects stated purpose and specifications are being violated. Questions have also arisen as to the projects fiscal integrity (including the possibility of jeopardizing FEMA funding for the project) and the rights of citizens with burned trees on their properties. If any of these allegations are substantially true, the negative consequences for our state would be grave in a number of ways.

Golden asked Brown to immediately suspend work on the project pending an investigation of the allegations by a well-qualified neutral party.

No more trees should be felled in connection with these contracts (subject, perhaps, to very narrow exceptions for compelling and well-documented reasons) until these allegations are competently vetted, he wrote. My strong hope is that this work will resume in a manner that deserves the full confidence and support of Oregonians in general, and those devastated by the 2020 wildfires in particular.

Charles Boyle, a spokesman for the governor, said the office received and is reviewing Goldens letter and has contacted the senator about his concerns.

My understanding is that ODOT is working with legislative offices to provide the information they need about appropriate oversight of this contract, and that there will be another hearing on this subject in the House tomorrow, Boyle said in an email. Agencies are fully participating so that the legislative branchs questions can be answered and concerns addressed.

The House Special Committee on Wildfire Recovery has scheduled its own hearing to discuss the hazard tree removal program Friday. Conservation and climate justice organizations plan to rally in Salem next week and demand that Brown and state legislators put a pause on post-fire logging activities pending a full environmental review.

Tony Andersen, a spokesman for ODOT, said the agency immediately began looking into the specific claims made during Wednesdays hearing and would provide more detail in Fridays hearing. He said pausing the work would cost the state nearly $1 million in crew de-mobilization costs, compromise the timeline promised to the state and pose significant safety and liability risks as hazard trees weaken and fall over time.

Any pause, Andersen said, would also compromise evacuation routes during the upcoming fire season, slow rebuilding efforts and the reopening of recreation areas, and pose risks to public infrastructure during future storms. He also said a pause would put federal reimbursements for the work at risk, create contract disputes and potentially lead to an exodus of the workforce performing the work.

 Ted Sickinger; tsickinger@oregonian.com; 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger
Trending Internets discrimination plagues this local group of activists and leaders.

Read more . . .

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Kansas City's newly established LGBTQ Commission held its first meeting Wednesday night. It's the first of its kind in Missouri, and one of the first in the nation. But the historic night wasn't without challenges. Eight of the 13 commissioners met in person, while the rest appeared via Zoom.
 Flash

A COVID-19 patient with oxygen support arrives at a hospital in Patna, India, April 28, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

India's COVID-19 tally surpassed 18 million, reaching 18,376,524 on Thursday, as a fresh high of 379,257 new cases were recorded during the past 24 hours, said the federal health ministry.

As many as 3,645 deaths reported across the country since Wednesday morning, also the highest daily spike, took the total death toll to 204,832.

There are still a total of 3,084,814 active cases in the country, with an increase of 106,105 in the past 24 hours, as 15,086,878 people have been cured and discharged from hospitals so far.

The COVID-19 figures continue to peak in the country, but the federal government has ruled out imposing a complete lockdown. The capital Delhi has been put under a second successive week-long lockdown till May 3.

The number of daily active cases has been on the rise over the past few weeks, after once coming down to below 10,000 in January.

So far over 150 million vaccination doses have been administered to the people across the country, since the nationwide inoculation drive started in January.

Online registration began on Wednesday for vaccinating people aged above 18, which will start from May 1. This would be the third phase of COVID-19 vaccination.

Meanwhile, the federal government has ramped up COVID-19 testing facilities, as 284,471,979 tests have been conducted till Wednesday, according to the latest data issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday.

The national capital Delhi, one of the most COVID-19 affected places in the country, witnessed over 25,986 new cases and 368 deaths through Wednesday. As many as 15,377 people have died in the national capital due to COVID-19, confirmed Delhi's health department.
Colorado Democrats and Republicans could have been watching President Joe Biden deliver two entirely different speeches Wednesday night, so vast was the partisan divide between their reactions.

Democratic members of the state's congressional delegation hailed the president's declaration that America was "on the move again," cheering as Biden listed his administration's record and ticked off an ambitious set of proposals.

At the same time, the Republicans panned nearly every assertion, dismissing the points they didn't denounce.

Four members of Colorado's congressional delegation  U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse and Lauren Boebert  were among the sparse, socially distanced crowd watching Biden deliver the roughly hour-long speech in the House chamber, and the other five watched remotely.

Bennet applauded Biden's attention during the speech to the expanded Child Tax Credit, a signature proposal backed by the Denver Democrat.

Tonight, the president outlined an agenda that the majority of Coloradans support, including extending the Child Tax Credit, passing paid family and medical leave and immigration reform, increasing access to affordable health care and child care, and creating millions of good-paying jobs to rebuild our nations infrastructure," Bennet said.

"We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us to unite the country, strengthen our democracy, and earn the confidence of the American people by responding to their needs. Its our job to seize this moment and finally invest in the American people.

Hickenlooper tweeted that he felt hopeful for the future of the country after watching the speech from the gallery above the House floor.

"We have so much work ahead of us, but I have faith that together we'll move America forward," he said.

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat and dean of the delegation, had high praise for Biden's address.

The presidents message to the American people tonight is precisely the leadership we need at this critical moment," she said in a statement.

"As the president said, now is the time for us to come together to get our country back on track. With millions of people still out of work, families and business owners struggling to make ends meet, and a virus thats continuing to spread, its critical that we continue to do everything we can to provide people the help they need."

Boebert, a persistent critic of Democrats and the Biden administration's every move, tweeted a steady stream of mockery and digs during the speech.

"Is it me or is Biden talking about a lot of problems that were created in his nearly 50 years in office," she said at one point.

"Bidens jobs plan will give more jobs to government bureaucrats in D.C. than to blue collar workers throughout America," she said at another.

Midway through Biden's remarks, Boebert delivered a simple message: "I miss President Trump."

During the speech, she noisily opened a space blanket and put it across her lap, according to the Washington Examiner. Her office later said the action was to call attention to the border crisis.

Neguse, who sat across the aisle from Boebert, visited with Biden after the speech and issued a glowing assessment of the address.

"Tonight, President Joe Biden provided a compelling, hopeful and optimistic vision for our country and Americas future," Neguse said in a statement.

"While it has been a tough year for Coloradans, its clear from the Presidents remarks tonight that America is on track to crush this virus and continue a robust economic recovery."

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Springs Republican, told Colorado Politics he was "plenty happy watching at the kitchen table" but wasn't happy with what Biden said.

"I heard a lot of hot air and a lot of living in the past," he said. "I was distressed to hear he wants to keep spending money we dont have. I dont think we can borrow our way into prosperity. He talks about creating oodles of new jobs by borrowing money or raising taxes."

Added Lamborn: "I want everyday people of this country to be protected from the high cost of government."

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat, saluted the administration's record and commended Biden's proposals.

"In the 100 days President Biden has been in office, with the help of Congress hes already delivered relief to American families, small businesses, and communities that are struggling," Crow said in a statement. "Now, we have a chance to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our communities and build a path to the middle class for millions of Americans."

Tweeted U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Windsor Republican and former chairman of the state GOP: Biden "promised to reach across the aisle as a moderate Democrat. Instead, he has been an absolute disaster for hard-working Americans and sold out to the far-Left fringes."

U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, an Arvada Democrat, gave Biden's speech two thumbs up.

"Tonight we heard from President Biden about the challenges weve endured during the COVID-19 pandemic, but we were also reminded of the opportunities ahead to create good-paying jobs and a strong economy, invest in our country and its workers, and lift up hardworking families," he said in a statement.

As we know from his first few months in office, President Biden doesnt just talk the talk. President Biden, Vice President Harris and their administration are here to deliver."

The state parties echoed the politicians' split decision.

"Colorado is getting back on track, and thats thanks to the leadership of President Biden, Governor Polis, and Democrats in the state legislature and in Congress  with zero thanks to congressional Republicans," said Halisi Vinson, executive director of the Colorado Democratic Party, in a statement.

Kristi Burton Brown, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, issued a scathing assessment of Biden's speech but noted she was heartened that South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott would be delivering the GOP response.

"President Biden has spent the first 100 days of his term pushing extreme, costly, and disastrous policies. This administration has turned their backs on our energy workers, refused to admit there is a serious humanitarian and security crisis on the border, and has recklessly spent trillions of dollars on far-left policy dreams," Burton Brown said in a statement.

"I'm glad that Republicans have Senator Tim Scott providing our party's response tonight  a response that will be focused on jobs, families, security, and bringing back the American Dream."
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Encompass Health Corp. (NYSE: EHC) today announced it will present at the RBC Capital Markets Global Healthcare Virtual Conference being held May 1820, 2021.

Encompass Health's President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Tarr and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Doug Coltharp will participate in a fireside chat at 8 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 19, 2021.

The event will be webcast live and will be available at http://investor.encompasshealth.com.

About Encompass Health

As a national leader in integrated healthcare services, Encompass Health (NYSE: EHC) offers both facilitybased and homebased patient care through its network of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals, home health agencies and hospice agencies. With a national footprint that includes 139 hospitals, 241 home health locations, and 82 hospice locations in 39 states and Puerto Rico, the Company provides highquality, cost-effective integrated healthcare. Encompass Health is ranked as one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit encompasshealth.com, or follow us on our newsroom, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Media Contact

Hillary Carnel | 205 970-5912

[email protected]

Investor Relations Contact

Crissy Carlisle | 205 970-5860

[email protected]

SOURCE Encompass Health Corp.

Related Links

http://www.encompasshealth.com


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:06:59|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- About 265 million domestic trips are estimated to be made by Chinese passengers during the upcoming five-day May Day holiday from May 1 to 5, according to the Ministry of Transport (MOT).

The estimated figure represents an increase of 120.1 percent year on year, close to the 2019 level, the MOT said.

Departure passenger flows are expected to peak on the first day of the holiday with about 57.9 million passenger trips, up 115 percent and 6 percent from the 2020 level and 2019 level, respectively, MOT data showed.

Between April 29 and May 6, railway passenger trips are expected to reach 106 million, up 0.8 percent compared with the same period in 2019, said China State Railway Group Co. Ltd. (China Railway), estimating that the railway passenger trips will peak on May 1 to reach 17 million.

A total of 36 direct tourist trains to popular destinations including northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and northeast China will be arranged during the holiday, and panda-themed tourist trains will take visitors to tourist cities such as Golmud and Dunhuang.

May Day, also known as Labor Day, is observed on May 1 in China. Enditem
President Joe Biden delivers an address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on April 28, 2021. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

Biden Draws Ire of Republicans, Pushback From Democrats for $6 Trillion Spending Spree

President Joe Bidens $6 trillion in early-term spending initiativeshis $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that passed with zero Republican votes, along with his proposed $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion American Families Planhave drawn sharply critical reactions from Republicans, and more muted criticism from some Democrats, for their lofty price tags.

Biden unveiled his newest legislative proposal, the sweeping $1.8 trillion package for families and education, during his first speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28, calling it a once-in-a-generation investment that would bring lasting benefits to the economy, expand the middle class, and reduce child poverty. The plan includes $1 trillion in spending on education and child care and $800 billion in tax credits aimed at middle- and low-income families, funded mainly by tax hikes on wealthier Americans.

Republicans say the bulk of the $6 trillion proposed spending in Bidens early term is aimed to satisfy his liberal base and amounts to socialism.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to Twitter to call Bidens plans a radical vision for our country that would turn the American Dream into an American nightmare.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in remarks from the Senate floor on April 29, pushed back against what he called Bidens go-it-alone radicalism.

The president talked about unity and togetherness while reading off a multi-trillion dollar shopping list that was neither designed nor intended to earn bipartisan buy-in, he said.

A blueprint for giving Washington even more money, and even more power to micro-manage American families and build a country liberal elites want, instead of the future Americans want.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), known for his willingness to work across the aisle, took aim at the spending levels in Bidens proposals in an April 29 tweet.

In his first 100 days, the President has proposed $6 trillion in new spendingabout 4x our total federal budget! Romney wrote, adding that the sky-high spending would saddle future generations with decades of interest costs and jeopardize their future.

You know whats hard to do? Romney said in a video accompanying his tweet. Its hard to live within your budget and do good things within your budget.

Whats easy is just to spend money like theres no tomorrow. And, unfortunately, the president has lots of things hed like to do, but hes spending like crazy, Romney added, urging Biden to resist big spending calls coming from the liberal wing of his party.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, was even more sharply critical of Bidens spending.

The words of this speech sounded like what you would hear from a 15-year-old if you gave him a credit card with no credit limit on it, except the words came out of the mouth of an adult who should know better, said Christie, who was part of an April 28 panel of commentators on ABC.

Some Democrats, too, reacted with reservations to the $6 trillion price tag of Bidens early-term initiatives.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), said the goals are good in Bidens new families plan, but he questions whether the full amount is needed in light of the massive relief measures already adopted.

We have to look at how this interfaces with the previous packages, Tester said, Bloomberg reported. And if theres overlap, if that overlaps been accounted for.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was more explicit with his criticism, saying on April 28 that hes very uncomfortable with the overall cost, citing concerns about mounting public debt.

A lot of moneythat makes you very uncomfortable, youre going to find how youre going to pay for it, you know? Manchin told a CNN reporter on Capitol Hill.

Are we going to be able to be competitive and be able to pay for what we need as a country? Weve got to figure out what our needs are and maybe make some adjustments, who knows.

I dont know how much more debtwere $28.2 trillion now in debt. Theres a balance to be had and we got to work that out.

Holding a key swing vote in the evenly-split Senate, Manchin has emerged as something of a kingmaker who could force revisions to bills that he deems unreasonable in scope or cost. Notably, after Senate Republicans criticized what they said was a partisan process around passing the American Rescue Plan, Manchin called Bidens calls for unity hollow and denounced the package as bloated, wasteful, and partisan. Manchin said he would block Bidens next major legislative thrust unless more effort is made to include Republican voices.

Many conservatives hope the West Virginia senator will serve as a check on the Democrats more radical policy impulses.

Biden, who in his speech before Congress repeatedly reached out to the GOP, thanking them for proposing an alternative to his $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and urging them to back his proposals, is set to discuss his plans with top Democratic and Republican lawmakers at the White House on May 12.

The families plan Biden has proposed provides an additional four years of free public education. It calls for $200 billion for free universal pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds and $109 billion for two years of free community college.

It also proposes $225 billion in funding to help parents pay for child care and boost the pay of child care workers. Another $225 billion is earmarked for a national family and medical leave program and $45 billion to improve school meals and offer food benefits to children during the summer. Bidens proposal also seeks to lower health insurance premiums for Affordable Care Act plans, at a cost of $200 billion.

After Biden laid out his plans on April 28, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) argued that Democrats have no interest in working with Republicans on infrastructure legislation and rejected Bidens American Families Plan as a scheme to put Washington at the center of American life from the cradle to college.

Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words, Scott said in the nationally televised Republican rebuttal to Bidens address.

But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes, he added. Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams.

Reuters contributed to this report.
A former student who filed suit against a Passaic County school district, claiming she was subjected to racial harassment and abuse, has settled her case for nearly $1 million, according to court records and district officials.

Attorneys for Class of 2019 graduate Arianna Green agreed to drop their lawsuit against the West Milford Board of Education, saying the case had been settled outside of court, according to documents signed March 12.

NorthJersey.com on Wednesday reported the settlement amount was for $937,500.

Superintendent of Schools Alex Anemone on Thursday emailed NJ Advance Media the following statement:

The district has been involved in the litigation of this matter, and after careful consideration, it has been agreed to enter into a settlement in which there are no admissions of liability by the district, and in which there have been no findings of liability on the merits of the claims. Additionally, all proceeds of the settlement will be provided by the districts insurance carrier. No local district funds are being used to find the terms of the settlement. With this settlement, the case is dismissed.

Green and her parents sued the district in April 2018, alleging harassment and discrimination based on her sex and bi-racial status.

The alleged abuse dated back to when Green was in sixth grade and another student said her hair color was the same as (her) skin color, the suit states.

Green also alleged she had been called the N-word, that one of her teachers struck her with a book, and that she had been a victim of cyberbullying.

The alleged abuse, which continued through her high school years, involved assaults, intimidation and humiliation, the lawsuit claims.

Some of the incidents were reported to the board of education but no action had been taken, the lawsuit states.

The Greens sued the district for intentional infliction of emotional distress, discrimination, negligence and negligent hiring of staff.

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.
Military personnel is being deployed to implement a compulsory vaccination campaign in parts of Phnom Penh designated red zone to inoculate half a million people, said a senior Royal Cambodian Armed Forces general.

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday ordered the deployment of military medical officers and soldiers to administer and manage a COVID-19 vaccination drive for Phnom Penh residents living in red zones. These are high-risk areas where people are not allowed to leave their homes and all business activity is banned due to a high case count.

The government on Thursday put into action a three-color zoning system to curb the spread of the disease, which registered more than 500 cases in Phnom Penh.

Eth Sarath, the RCAFs Chief of Joint Staffs, told state-run broadcaster TVK that 900,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines will be used to vaccinate 571,573 residents living in red zones. Some residents in these communes have already been inoculated.

We do not care who is who in the red zones. As long as they are 18 or older, all of them must be vaccinated, Eth Sarath said on Thursday.

The campaign will start on Friday to administer 450,000 doses within the first two weeks of May, he said, and will be completed by the end of the month.

Samdech Pichey Sena gives a command to me that these doses of vaccine must not sleep in the storages, but they instead must be injected into the body of our people, Eth Sarath said, using an honorific used for Defense Minister Tea Banh.

It is not voluntary or anything else. It is our obligation to get vaccinated and combat the virus.

An Army document seen by Voice of America showed that key infantry units under the direct command of Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, the Chief of the Army and Hun Sens eldest son, have been tasked with assisting the vaccination campaign.

Those include Infantry Brigade 70, the Air Defense Command, the Special Military Region Command, the Armys medical unit, and the Special Force Command  formerly called the Airborne Paramilitary Brigade 911.

Phnom Penh City Hall spokesperson Met Measpheakdey declined to comment on the vaccination drive because he said Eth Saraths comments were clear.

According to the National Institute of Statistics population census 2019, the nine communes designated as a red zone have a population of at least 400,000 residents, not including garment workers.

Russei Keo districts Tuol Sangke I commune, which was designated a red zone starting Thursday, is the most populous with 86,640 residents.

Soeung Senkaruna, senior human rights officer at local rights group ADHOC, said the government should be mindful about its compulsory vaccination drive and the use of the military.

The peoples rights and freedom to decide on whether to get vaccinated should be preserved and protected by the government to avoid criticism that the government is using coercive methods to pressure the people into getting a shot, Soeung Senkaruna told VOA Khmer.

He said the use of military forces should be considered to be the last resort when civilian forces, like the police, can be used to prevent heightened tensions.
The Australian Federal Government recently vetoed two Belt and Road Memorandums of Understanding signed between the state of Victoria and China's National Development and Reform Commission.

Foreign Affairs Minister Payne said the arrangements were considered to be "inconsistent with Australia's foreign policy or adverse to Australia's foreign relations."

Newly appointed Defence Minister Dutton thundered that "China and others need to understand that Australia is not going to be bullied and we're standing up for our beliefs."

The reactions all seem a bit over the top when the BRI agreement did not commit the Victoria government to specific projects and were not legally binding. The agreements were about potential future co-operation.

Many Australian businesses quietly wondered just how much more debilitating aggravation would be unleashed by a Government that seems intent on frustrating cooperation with China.

The decision was not a surprise. In December 2020 the government introduced the Foreign Arrangements Scheme. It was clear the legislation was primarily aimed at the Belt and Road MOUs signed by the state of Victoria. The federal Government has a deep dislike for the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews so the attack is part of a domestic political quarrel.

Although there are impacts on the Australia-China relationship, the driving factor behind this legislation is more about domestic politics and attacking domestic political rivals.

In addition to these domestic skirmishes, there was an awareness of the impact this decision would have on Australia-China relations. The timing of the decision coincidentally followed an address by China's Deputy head of Mission, Wang Xining to the National Press Club. He again extended an olive branch, discussing ways the relationship could improve.

The last time Wang Xining did this, the response from Prime Minister Morrison was swift, immediately pledging to tear up State agreements with China.

Following this week's press conference with Wang Xining, the Foreign Affairs Minster announced exactly that.

Australia was well aware of the disruption this announcement would cause and the way this decision would further cool Australia-China relations. There are some in the Federal Government who welcome this attack. There is an active cohort of China hawks who want to contain and confront China.

In this sense, this announcement serves an Australian foreign policy agenda which very much takes its lead from the United States. This doesn't mean following every step the U.S. takes, particularly under the ex-President Trump, but it does mean Australia looks to the U.S. for guidance and support. This was the key message Australia took from the meetings in Anchorage.

Australia interpreted U.S. Secretary of State Blinken's comments in Anchorage to mean that the United States has Australia's back. Basking in this sunshine, it was perhaps inevitable that an emboldened Australia would take the next step and veto the BRI agreement.

There is a third aspect of this foreign policy as it relates to international relations rather than just relations with China. Australia has aspirations to play a leadership role in the newly created RCEP. Although an outside observer to the upcoming ASEAN meeting, Australia believes it plays an influential role in these organisations.

However, Australia's rejection of the BRI puts it out of step with many of the RCEP and ASEAN members. These are countries who are actively embracing the BRI and see this as a way to increase their engagement with China. They are wary of Australia's less than nuanced approach to China.

Part of the reason for the veto was to send an international message but judging by the level of commitment made by many ASEAN nations to BRI, it would seem that this message is already obsolete.

Australian business has watched on as this clumsy domestic politics spills over into already fraught China relations and the relationship with other nations in the region. Worried by the increasing anti-Chinese rhetoric, many business organisations have chosen to remain largely silent.

Chair of the Australia China Business Council, David Olsson said "Australian business prefer to look beyond the politics of BRI and focus on the genuine commercial opportunities that will emerge from infrastructure investments."

The veto of the Victorian agreement is largely about domestic politics, but it also signals a change from benign acceptance of the BRI, to active pushback against the BRI. Many in business believe this is a foolish change that will further damage the foundations of Australia's prosperity.

The Belt and Road Initiative is too large and has too much momentum to be hindered by this Australian decision.

The Australian Government may have rejected BRI, but smart Australian businesses know that this is where the future lies.

Daryl Guppy is an international financial technical analysis expert. He is a national board member of the Australia China Business Council.




Jeremy Paxman looked frail as he used a walking stick in Manchester recently - just weeks after breaking his ribs in a horrifying fall during a dog walk.

The former Newsnight host, 70, leaned on the walking aid as he was escorted into the TV studios by a co-worker - after revealing he has suffered a nasty tumble when his dog Derek got startled by a squirrel and pulled on his lead.

He held onto a detective novel, The Searcher, by Tana French as he headed to work at University Challenge.

Fall: Jeremy Paxman looked frail as he used a walking stick in Manchester recently - just weeks after breaking his ribs in a horrifying fall during a dog walk

The presenter - famous for his aggressive interviewing style - wore a navy shirt, tan jacket, blue shorts and sandals as he headed to work.

Taking precautions against COVID-19, he wore a patterned face mask.

Jeremy revealed he had been injured and 'blacked out' in his column for Saga Magazine recently.

The star said he had 'no recollection' of the fall because he 'blacked out beforehand or did so when my nose hit the ground'.

Canine companion: The former Newsnight host, 70, revealed he has suffered a nasty tumble when his dog Derek got startled by a squirrel and pulled on his lead (pictured 2017)

He said: There was certainly a lot of blood afterwards' and added his spaniel-Dalmatian cross Derek 'must have seen a squirrel and jerked on his lead'.

He broke some ribs in the fall during his dog walk and said he told Derek it was 'all his fault.'

Jeremy said he had been to A&E three times before after 'chopping off' the top of his thumb with an axe, when he got a contact lens stuck in his eye and when he took a friend who had impaled their thumb with a corkscrew.

Studios: He held onto a detective novel, The Searcher, by Tana French as he headed to work

Sighting: Jeremy wore a face mask as he made his way into the studios

Jeremy has previously told how his beloved dog Derek had helped him battle depression - by taking him for walks three times a day.

Last month Jeremy defended his habit of shooting squirrels with an air rifle while perched on the loo, branding the rodents a 'menace' that scare off songbirds.

He shrugged off suggestions he was being 'cruel', responding: 'They're annoying me.'

Speaking to comedian Richard Herring, he explained: 'You turn around - not while I'm having a c**p of course - just sitting on the loo if it's by the window.

'You sit on the loo with the lid down. With an air rifle you can pop, pop off a squirrel or two.'

Walking aid: Jeremy was first seen with a walking stick in 2017 while on a walk with partner Jillian Taylor, then 37

Out and about: Jeremy carried a book and a folder as he headed into the TV studios

That Paxman opens fire on squirrels from his toilet was first revealed in the introduction of his 2016 memoir, A Life In Questions.

Justifying the practice, he told Herring: 'They're always getting on the bird feeder.

'I love song birds and I can't stand the fact that squirrels are always driving them off.

'They kill all sorts of things. For example they kill trees - entire trees are killed by squirrels. They're a menace.'

Grey squirrels are allowed to be culled in Britain via means such as shooting, providing it is done in a humane way.

Branded by some as 'tree rats', they originally came from America in the late 19th Century to become the dominant squirrel in the UK, meaning reds are now a protected species.

Jeremy was first seen with a walking stick in 2016 while on a walk with partner Jillian Taylor, then 37.

In 2016 he was rushed into intensive care suffering from a potentially deadly blood clot in his lungs after a routine operation on his knee.

The veteran Newsnight broadcaster had the scare after undergoing surgery on his knee, which had become worn out by jogging. He was later snapped using crutches.

Chat: The star was escorted into the TV studios by a colleague

Walking stick: The star used the aid as he headed into the studios to start work

Dropped off: Jeremy was dropped off at the front doors by a taxi

Waiting: Jeremy was greeted by a fellow colleague wearing a mask at the studios

Paxman presented the BBC's current affairs programme, Newsnight, from 1989 to 2014, during which time he gained a reputation as a ferocious interviewer.

In November 2020 he sold his Notting Hill flat for 1million - where he lived with Canadian partner Jillian - making a 500,000 profit.

He was previously in a 34-year relationship with Elizabeth Clough, who is the mother of his three children, but left her for Jillian in 2017.

Divorcee Jillian had worked alongside the author and presenter on two of his best sellers, including Great Britains Great War  and earned effusive praise from the author in the process.

Surgery: Jeremy was pictured on crutches in 2016 - after undergoing knee surgery

Ferocious: Paxman presented the BBC's current affairs programme, Newsnight, from 1989 to 2014, during which time he gained a reputation as a ferocious interviewer
Nguyen Thanh Phuong, General Director of Sao Do Group

Nam Dinh Vu Industrial Park (IP) owned by Sao Do Group is one of the large-scale IPs of Haiphong city. So, what strong points does the attraction of Nam Dinh Vu IP come from?

With a total area of 1,329 hectares, Nam Dinh Vu IP is divided into four functional subzones: seaport and logistics zone, oil and gas zone, industrial production zone, and a duty-free zone.

When making the plans for Nam Dinh Vu IP, we were looking to build an integrated IP with functional subzones forming a complementary ecosystem. The output of this enterprise could be input for others. In particular, the nearly 200ha seaport and logistics subzone, which is equipped with seven container and general cargo berths, is the focal point for this strategy. The infrastructure of bonded and logistics warehouse areas has been invested following modern and synchronous standards. These are the main features of Nam Dinh Vu IP.

Currently, the technical infrastructure of the first phase of Nam Dinh Vu container port is complete, with two berths being put into operation with a capacity of about 800,000 to 1 million TEUs per year. The next two berths of the second phase are under investment, to be completed and exploited by mid-2022, tentatively. All equipment are newly purchased, modern, and in line with international seaport operation standards.

We also invested in 13ha of bonded warehouse space that is currently in effective exploitation. It has been gradually contributing to the completion of facilities and services in the area.

Sao Do Group's Nam Dinh Vu IP is one of the few IPs in Haiphong that has developed its infrastructure in association with a seaport

Seeing that Sao Do Group has made huge investments in logistics infrastructure when building Nam Dinh Vu IP, how would you assess the potential of logistics industry development in Haiphong?

Haiphong has the advantage of not only being a big city directly under central government but also being a growth pole in the key economic triangle of the northern region, while also possessing convenient seaport and logistics systems which have been exploited effectively for hundreds of years.

In recent years, the transport and logistics infrastructure of Haiphong (seaports, airport, railway, roads, warehouses, among others) have received strong investments. Haiphong is also a major logistics centre of the north which has created its own characteristics and advantages in industrial real estate growth of the city, which is the development of industrial zones (IZs) infrastructure linking closely with seaport operation. Based on that factor, we determined that Nam Dinh Vu IP would be an integrated zone attached with seaports and logistics.

Besides that, Resolution No.45/NQ-TW of the Politbureau set the direction for Haiphong to become a modern industrial center to support logistics in the region and the country. This has been encouraging the local government to turn the city into a regional and international logistics service centre, creating tremendous development opportunities to the enterprises operating in this field.

The growth rate of Haiphong's logistics industry is forecast to increase rapidly. Specifically, according to the adjusted master plan on socio-economic development of Haiphong city to 2025, with a vision to 2030, the average growth rate of logistics services in 2021-2025 will be 16-18 per cent per year and 17 per cent in 2026-2030. Thus, it can be said that the companies operating in logistics or related fields are also having favourable growth opportunities.

The delegation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and logistics enterprises paid a working visit to Nam Dinh Vu Industrial Park

From your point of view, is it easy to seize these opportunities?

Haiphong is the trading gateway of the northern region and the whole country, connecting to all countries over the world. Haiphong, with 125km of coastline, more than 400km of inland waterways, and five major estuaries (Bach Dang, Cua Cam, Lach Tray, Van Uc, and Thai Binh River), has great potential for socio-economic development. Its seaport system has the largest throughput in the north and is ranked second in the country (after Ho Chi Minh City). In addition, Haiphong owned many ports with a modern equipment system as well as adequate and safe infrastructure capable of accommodating international and commercial means of transport.

However, even possessing such favorable location and potential, Haiphong has not fully brought into play these advantages yet. The citys logistics activities are mainly focused on the transportation and loading/unloading of goods from ports  the stages that create the least added value in the logistics service supply chain.

In fact, road transportation services are provided by hundreds of companies. Most of them are small- and medium-sized, causing many problems such as unfair competition and ineffective exploitation. Shipping costs are still high due to inadequate transport management (mainly by road, mostly one-way vehicles), delivery method, cumbersome administrative procedures, and the low quality of warehouse services. As gathering and returning goods as well as completing procedures still takes a long time, costs remain high.

Above are the difficulties Sao Do is facing when developing a logistics area in Nam Dinh Vu Industrial Park. To solve this general issue, in my opinion, Haiphong city needs to synchronously invest in infrastructure outside the fence of industrial zones in a modern direction, attract large enterprises in the logistics sector, accelerate the administrative reforms and support all businesses. It also needs to pay attention to attracting and training human resources operating in the field of logistics.

Furthermore, it is indispensable to set up specific policies for a new, modern logistics centre to encourage logistics activities such as site clearance, land rental exemption and reduction for the construction and investment of logistics centre infrastructure, as well as import tax reduction for machinery and equipment that cannot be produced domestically to serve the operation of logistics centers.
A pool installation in Las Vegas couple's backyard revealed a prehistoric bone said to date back to Earth's most recent ice age, KTNV reported.

Matthew Perkins and his husband, who had just moved into their Las Vegas home, was surprised to wake up to police crime investigators in their backyard pool area, Monday.

According to the pool builders, they immediately called the attention of Metropolitan Police Department when they uncovered set of bones about four to five feet below ground level while excavating a supposedly 6-feet deep pool.

The police officers did not raise any law enforcement concerns as they confirmed the bones did not belong to a human body and was way larger to belong to one.

Backyard bone discovery dating back to Ice Age

According to Matthew, house owner, they were digging through ice age layer of sediment which is why they initially suspected the skeleton to belong to an animal. Nevada Science Center Research Director Joshua Bonde then confirmed the bones found in the area are between 6,000 to 14,000 years old and may belong to a horse or a similar mammal. He added that since the bones were found four to five feet beneath present ground surface, the animal could be wandering around the world in southern Nevada, which was not nearly as populated as it is today.

Perkins' home is just about 3 miles away from Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, where hundreds of fossil discovery from the last ice age was located, such as mammoths, lions and camels. According to Bonde, the area was fed by natural springs and served as a watering spot for wildlife in the arid Mohave Desert about 14,000 years ago.

Also read: Once-Believed Extinct, 'Living Fossils' Fish Shows its True Color on New Study

Fossil discovery surprisingly rare

In spite of the area being a short distance away from the fossil bed, Bonde explained that the archaeological discovery was still surprisingly rare, especially it is given that there has already been a lot of development done in the area. They now expected this event to be a lot more common than usual due to more excavations occurring.

The Perkins' concern for now is knowing what the discovery really was and what it can contribute to science, if it really was something. In reference to the United States law for Fossils and Paleontology, fossils found on private land belong to the landowner.

The homeowners are now working with Bonde to determine if the bones can be extracted. Some of the bones have already been removed from the backyard, however they suspected some parts of it was still under the home's foundation. In the most recent report, the homeowners said they have found part of a jaw bone with teeth attached in it. The couple decided to turn over the bones to Josh Bonde with the Nevada Science Center.

Bonde also added that in any case other homeowners in the area near the fossil beds find animal bones , they can contact the Nevada Science Center at 702-769-8707 or info@nvscicenter.org for further assistance.

Also read: Fossils of Ancient Horseshoe Crab Shed Light on its Final Moments




Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) on Thursday said its fourth oxygen plant being set up at Paradeep (Odisha) will commence operation by June 15 and will provide the free supply to hospitals in the state and adjoining areas.

The proposed oxygen plant in Paradeep will generate medical-grade oxygen and fill 520 big D-type cylinders daily and 200 medium B-size cylinders on demand supplied to all hospitals free from June 15.

IFFCO is setting up a total of four oxygen plants in India at the cost of about Rs 30 crore. About 610 cubic meters per hour of oxygen will be produced from these four plants. Two plants being set up in Uttar Pradesh and one plant in Gujarat will commence by May 30.

In a statement, IFFCO said the cooperative has placed an order for setting up a 4th oxygen plant in Paradeep, Odisha. The capacity of this new oxygen plant would be 150 cubic meters per hour. ''The plant will commence by June 15,'' IFFCO Managing Director and CEO U S Awasthi tweeted separately.

The transposition of these plants requires some time. A dedicated separate team has been also assigned for this project in all the plants. It's an automatic cylinder filling turnkey plant, the cooperative said.

IFFCO said it will fill up at free of cost the oxygen cylinders for hospitals in Odisha and adjoining areas. They need to bring their own cylinders for a refill. A security deposit will be taken if cylinders taken from IFFCO to avoid hoarding of oxygen, it said, adding that the groundwork for all new oxygen plants have already started.

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The Parliament and member countries have clashing positions on coronavirus restrictions. The European Parliament is taking aim at member countries' travel policies in an effort to set rules for coronavirus green certificates aimed at lifting travel restrictions and reviving tourism, Politico writes.

Brussels is racing to get the certificates in place by June  creating common standards allowing travelers to show if they've been vaccinated or tested, or if they've survived the disease. But the Parliament and member countries look set to be far apart  which could undermine efforts to get the certificates in place on time.

In a stance that has broad political backing, MEPs want free COVID tests, for the certificates to only cover vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and a ban on additional restrictions to ensure the certificate is more than just a piece of paper, lawmakers in charge of the negotiations in Parliament said at a press conference Monday.

We cannot agree to another patchwork of measures whereby every member state just does as it pleases, said Renew MEP Sophie in t Veld, a shadow rapporteur on the file. She predicted a big battle with EU countries, which insist on the freedom to roll out their own health measures. Health care falls under the purview of member countries, but the EU is supposed to ensure freedom of movement.

A year into the pandemic, Brussels is still struggling to coordinate the travel restrictions EU countries have put in place to prevent imports of the coronavirus. The Council agreed to a shared color-coded map indicating the infection risk across the Continent, but countries remain broadly in charge of the health measures they put in place. New mutations, which countries fear could undermine their vaccination campaigns, have further slowed coordination efforts.

Differing visions

EU countries insist that it should be up to them to decide whether theyd use the certificates to lift restrictions, a stance spelled out earlier this month when Council agreed on its position for negotiations with the Parliament.

That take raises concerns in Parliament that the certificates wouldnt do much to restore the EUs trademark Schengen free-movement area. Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, the Social Democrat MEP leading the work on the certificates, said the bloc's free-movement area was in very bad shape," as a consequence of unilateral national measures.

The MEPs want to ban adding any extra restrictions such as quarantines to the certificates, arguing that would make them pointless.

The aim is creating binding rights that citizens can claim before the Court of Justice of the EU, Lopez Aguilar said, so that we can get out of this situation where weve seen Schengen eroded  to a point where its not recognizable anymore. The certificate should suffice, because if the member states insist on imposing additional restrictions, one could wonder  why bother? he said.

MEPs are also set to demand free COVID tests for travel. Without controlling costs, the certificates could discriminate against poorer people, the lawmakers argued.

"If the Commission is serious about a certificate not being a costly condition for travel ... then we have to do something about these prices, otherwise we contradict the proposal itself," said shadow rapporteur Jeroen Lenaers of the European People's Party.

A separate motion for a resolution on the affordability of COVID-19 testing is on the agenda of Thursday's plenary.

Parliament also insists that the certificate only cover EMA-approved vaccines or jabs the World Health Organization has backed for emergency use. The Council left an opening for EU countries to also accept certificates for other vaccines, a nod to Hungary, which is using the Russian Sputnik and Chinese Sinopharm vaccines.

But the certificate requires a degree of certainty, in t Veld argued. If you get back to a situation where member states, on a bilateral basis, are going to decide whether or not they will accept a vaccine, then what's the purpose of having a European certificate? she argued.

The choice of vaccines, the cost of testing and the possibility of extra travel restrictions are likely to be the thorniest topics in upcoming talks with the Council, MEPs conceded.

But Lopez Aguilar argued that Parliament has a say on the bloc's Schengen free-movement area. Once upon a time, borders were the sovereignty of member states, period. Not anymore, he said. If you dont come our way, there wont be legislation, and that would be a major failure.
A nurse is suing a Houston hospital after it made coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for all of its 26,000 employees.

Jennifer Bridges, who says she isn't ready to get the vaccine, has said she will refuse the get the jab even it means losing her job.

Houston Methodist President and CEO Dr. Marc Boom said his hospital is the first in the United States to require all of its employees to get one of three Covid-19 shots.

Unless the person is exempt through religious or medical reasons, the hospital has said people who refuse to get the vaccine past June 7 could be fired.

But Bridges told KHOU11 that she wants to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more time to gather data and research on the vaccines.

None of the three vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have been full approved by the administration, with each one having been given emergency authorisation during the global pandemic.

The nurse has set up a GoFundMe page, where she has said legal action against the hospital is now pending.

Jennifer Bridges (pictured) is suing a Houston hospital after it made coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for all of its 26,000 employees. She has said she will refuse the get the jab even it means losing her job as she wants to wait for there to be be more research

News of Bridges' lawsuit comes after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held its first virtual hearing to discuss how Covid-19 is affecting the American workplaces, during which vaccines were discussed.

'It is something that they are actively considering,' said Michael Eastman, a senior vice president for the Center for Workplace Compliance.

'The Commission should clarify its existing guidance to state that employers may instate a mandatory vaccine policy.'

As vaccines were first being rolled out in December 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published guidance about vaccines and the workplace, saying it does not consider a vaccine a medical examination.

Therefore, an employer can require an employee to have a Covid-19 jab if it chooses. The case for a mandate is stronger of getting the vaccine is 'job-related and consistent with business necessity,' the guidance states.

The EEOC says an employer can also ask to see proof of a person having been vaccinated, because a vaccine card does not include disability information.

Bridges is a mother, while her father father is in a nursing home, and she has worked as a nurse for six years, but despite saying she understands the need for safety measures, she wants more time.

'All we're asking is: just more time. In the meantime, we'll wear N-95s, face shields. We'll do what the CDC says is perfectly safe,' Bridges said to KHOU11.

But Boom is showing no sign of backing down, with the hospital's new HR policy stating that if an employee is not vaccinated by June 7, they will be suspended.

If they are then not vaccinated within the two week suspension period, the company will 'initiate the employee termination process,' according to CNN.

Unless the person is exempt through religious or medical reasons, the hospital has said people who refuse to get the vaccine past June 7 will be fired

'We're never going to make anybody take the vaccine. But at the end of the day if they choose not to take the vaccine there are many other places they can work,' he said, adding that Bridges is among 3,000 employees yet to get the vaccine.

'It's not a surprise that there are some people who don't want to take the vaccine. That's ultimately anybody's right,' Boom told the network on Monday.

'But it's also our right as an employer and particularly a healthcare institution to where we have a sacred obligation to care for our patients and to keep them safe.'

Bridges, who was honored by Houston Methodist for her 'dedicated service' in October 2019, says her cause is gaining support from all around the world.

Thousands have signed her petition titled 'Covid Vaccine should not be Mandatory or Termination!!' and on Tuesday, she launched a crowd-sourcing GoFundMe.

'A lot of you know me by now. My name is Jennifer. I'm helping to fight for the rights of the employees of Houston Methodist,' she has written on the page.

Houston Methodist President and CEO Dr. Marc Boom (pictured) said his hospital is the first in the United States to require all of its employees to get one of three Covid-19 shots

'They will terminate us if we do not comply with taking the covid vaccine by June 7th. Whether we are comfortable with it or not they do not care. We are simply asking for more time, proper research, and fully FDA approved before injecting it into our bodies. Every approach so far we have tried does not work with them.

'They have clearly showed they do not value their employees. Help us fight this battle by giving us the power to have a lawsuit against them! It is already in play and we have a lot of employees on board with it. It will take a while and possibly become expensive. Every dollar will help us fight this!'

When Houston Methodist first made vaccines mandatory, Boom told CBS News that 'Mandating the vaccine was not a decision we made lightly, but science has proven that the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe and very effective.

'Like I say to everyone who askswhether they are reporters, the public, patients, or our employees, it is our sacred obligation to do everything possible to keep our patients safe.

'By choosing to be vaccinated, you are leadersshowing our colleagues in health care what must be done to protect our patients, ourselves, our families, and our communities.'
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 17:16:52|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Three years after a major listing reform, new economy companies have made the bulk of Hong Kong's initial public offering (IPO) market, fueling a new growth story of the global financial hub.

The new listing rules, which came into force on April 30, 2018, allow pre-revenue biotech companies, new economy companies with weighted voting rights structures, and qualified overseas-listed companies to raise capital in Hong Kong.

By the end of March, 146 new economy companies had listed in Hong Kong since then, raising a total of 682.2 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 88 billion U.S. dollars), and accounting for 61 percent of the total IPO fund-raising, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) said Thursday.

"We are very pleased to see that the introduction of the new listing regime has helped to transform our markets," Calvin Tai, HKEX interim chief executive, said. "HKEX has become the go-to international capital market for new economy companies, and is already the world's second-biggest biotech fund-raising hub."

New economy listings have reshaped Hong Kong's capital market.

On March 31, the capitalization of new economy companies listed on HKEX since the new listing regime took effect reached 14.45 trillion Hong Kong dollars, accounting for 27 percent of Hong Kong's total market capitalization.

In 2020, newly-listed new economy companies contributed 21 percent of the turnover in the cash equities market, up from just 1 percent in 2018.

With the fresh momentum offered by the new economy, Tai said HKEX will continue to enhance the competitiveness of its markets and maintain their quality, resilience and attractiveness as a leading global financial center. Enditem
Study Take-Aways

Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease. o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies. o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects a quantum leap in precision sequence details and discovery.

FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. - Two decades ago, the full genome sequence of humankind was released. It was funded by international government and philanthropic sources at a cost of billions of dollars.

Fast forward to 2008 and, driven by the need for better genome understanding and the precipitous drop in sequencing costs, the Genome 10K Community of Scientists (G10K) was established to promote and ensure the genome analysis of 10,000 species of vertebrates. The G10K-sponsored Vertebrate Genomes Project embraced dramatic improvements in sequencing bio-technologies in the last few years to expand production of high-quality reference genome assemblies for all ~70,000 living vertebrates in the coming years.

Today, the G10K sponsored Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) announces their flagship study and associated publications focused on genome assembly quality and standardization for the field of genomics. This study includes 16 diploid high-quality, near error-free, and near complete vertebrate reference genome assemblies for species across all taxa with backbones (i.e., mammals, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and fishes) from five years of piloting the first phase of the VGP project.

In a special issue of Nature, along with simultaneous companion papers published in other scientific journals, the VGP details numerous technological improvements based on these 16 genome assemblies. In this new study, the VGP demonstrates the feasibility of setting and achieving high-quality reference genome quality metrics using state-of-the-art automated approach of combining long-read and long-range chromosome scaffolding approaches with novel algorithms that put the pieces of the genome assembly puzzle together. To date, the current VGP pipelines have led to the submission of 129 diploid assemblies representing the most complete and accurate versions of those species to date, and is on the path to generating thousands of genome assemblies, demonstrating feasibility in not only quality standardization but also scale.

Some of the animals that were part of this study included, but were not limited to:

Mammals: Pale spear-nosed bat, Egyptian fruit bat; Canada lynx; vaquita; platypus;

Birds: Zebra finch; kakapo; Anna's hummingbird;

Reptile: Goode's thornscrub tortoise;

Fish: Zig-zag eel; climbing perch; blunt-snouted clingfish.

"When we first started the G10K idea, we gathered a small handful of diverse field zoologists together with genome-centric computer scientists, pledging to work together to develop genome sequence data for thousands of the world's vertebrates," said Stephen O'Brien, Ph.D., a professor and research scientist at Nova Southeastern University's (NSU) Halmos College of Arts and Sciences. "We wanted to offer a gift for the next generation of genome scientists. Today the dream of genome empowerment of so many living species took a giant leap forward."

O'Brien is the co-founder of the Genome 10K Consortium, the Chief Scientific Officer at the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University, Russia and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The G10K-VGP's approach combines assembly pipelines with manual curation to fix misassemblies, major gaps, and other errors, which informs the iterative development of better algorithms. For example, the VGP helped reveal high levels of false gene duplications, losses or gains, due mostly to algorithms not properly separating maternal and paternal chromosomes. One solution includes a trio binning approach of using DNA from the parents to separate out the paternal and maternal sequences in the offspring. For cases where parental data is unavailable, another solution developed by the VGP and collaborators is an algorithm called FALCON-Phase that reduces the computational complexity of phasing maternal and paternal DNA sequences at chromosome scale.

"When I was asked to take on leadership of the G10K-VGP in 2015, I emphasized the need to work with technology partners and genome assembly experts on approaches that produce the highest quality data possible, as it was taking months per gene for my students and postdocs to correct gene structure and sequences for their experiments, which was causing errors in our biological studies", said Erich Jarvis, lead of the VGP sequencing hub at The Rockefeller University, Chair of the G10K and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "For me this was not only a practical mission, but a moral imperative."

Kerstin Howe, lead of the curation team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, said: "Our new approach to produce structurally validated, chromosome-level genome assemblies at scale will be the foundation of ground-breaking insights in comparative and evolutionary genomics."

"It truly was a challenge to design a pipeline applicable to highly diverged genomes - our largest genome, 5GB in size, broke almost every tool commonly used in assembly processes," said Arang Rhie, from the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, who is the first author of the flagship paper. "The extreme level of heterozygosity or repeat contents posed a big challenge. This is just the beginning; we are continuously improving our pipeline in response to new technology improvements."

Adam Phillippy, chair of the VGP genome assembly and informatics working group of more than 100 members and head of the Genome Informatics Section of the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, added: "Completing the first vertebrate reference genome, human, took over 10 years and $3 billion dollars. Thanks to continued research and investment in DNA sequencing technology over the past 20 years, we can now repeat this amazing feat multiple times per day for just a few thousand dollars per genome."

Specific to conservation and in collaboration with the Maori in New Zealand and officials in Mexico, genomic analyses of the kakap?, a flightless parrot, and the vaquita, a small porpoise and the most endangered marine mammal, respectively, suggest evolutionary and demographic histories of purging harmful mutations in the wild. The implication of these long-term small population sizes at genetic equilibrium gives hope for these species' survival.

Richard Durbin, a Professor at the University of Cambridge and lead of the VGP sequencing hub at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, said: "These studies mark the start of a new era of genome sequencing that will accelerate over the next decade to enable genomic applications across the whole tree of life, changing our scientific interactions with the living world."

The G10K-VGP consortia involves hundreds of international scientists working together from more than 50 institutions in 12 different countries since the VGP was initiated in 2016 and is exemplary in its scientific cooperation, extensive infrastructure, and collaborative leadership. Additionally, as the first large-scale eukaryotic genomes project to produce reference genome assemblies meeting a specific minimum quality standard, the VGP has thus become a working model for other large consortia, including the Bat 1K, Global Invertebrate Genome Aliance-GIGA, Pan Human Genome Project, Earth BioGenome Project, Darwin Tree of Life, and European Reference Genome Atlas, among others.

"The VGP project is at the vanguard of the creation of a genomic catalog in analogy with Linnaeus' classification of life, said Gene Myers, lead of the VGP sequencing hub at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany. "I and my colleagues in Dresden are excited to be contributing superb genome reconstructions with the funding of the Max-Planck Society of Germany."

As a next step, the VGP will continue to work collaboratively across the globe and with other consortia to complete Phase 1 of the project, approximately one representative species per 260 vertebrate orders separated by a minimum of 50 million years from a common ancestor with other species in Phase 1. The VGP intends to create comparative genomic resources with these 260 species, including reference-free whole genome alignments, that will provide a means to understand the detailed evolutionary history of these species and create consistent gene annotations. Genome data are primarily generated at three sequencing hubs that have invested in the mission of the VGP including The Rockefeller University's Vertebrate Genome Lab, New York, USA; Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK; and Max Planck Institute, Germany.

Phase 2 will focus on representative species from each vertebrate family and is currently in the progress of sample identification and fundraising. The VGP has an open-door policy and welcomes others to join its efforts, ranging from fundraising and sample collection to generating genome assemblies or including their own genome assemblies that meet the VGP metrics as part of our overall mission.

The VGP collaborated with and tested many protocols from genome sequencing companies, some of whose scientists are also co-authors of the flagship study, including from Pacific Biosciences, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Illumina, Arima Genomics, Phase Genomics, and Dovetail Genomics. The VGP also collaborated with DNAnexus and Amazon to generate a publicly available VGP assembly pipeline and host the genomic data in the Genome Ark database. The genomes, annotations and alignments are also available in international public genome browsing and analyses databases, including the National Center for Biotechnology Information Genome Data Viewer, Ensembl genome browser, and UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute Genome Browser. All data are open source and publicly available under the G10K data use policies.

Other novel biological discoveries from the 16 genomes in the flagship paper, and 25 genomes total from over 20 papers in this first wave of publications include:

Corrections of false gene or chromosome losses, where previous assemblies missed between 30% to 50% of GC-rich protein-coding gene regulatory regions, which were considered to belong to the 'dark matter' of the genome;

Newly identified chromosomes in the zebra finch and platypus;

Complete and error free mitochondrial genomes for most species, some generated in single molecule sequences without the need for assembly;

Wild sex chromosome evolution in monotreme mammals and birds;

Genetic variations between humans and marmosets that have implications for marmosets as an emerging non-human primate model system for biomedical research;

Lineage-specific changes shaping the evolution of bird and mammal genomes: duck, emu and platypus and echidna; and

Proposal for a universal evolution-based revised nomenclature for the oxytocin and vasotocin ligand and receptor families.

###

Links to all of the reports related to this package can be found on Nature's website.

Be sure to sign up for NSU's RSS feed so you don't miss any of our news releases, guest editorials and other announcements. Please sign up (https:/ / news. nova. edu/ subscribe/ ). You can also follow us on Twitter @NSUNews.

About Nova Southeastern University (NSU): At NSU, students don't just get an education, they get the competitive edge they need for real careers, real contributions and real life. A dynamic, private research university, NSU is providing high-quality educational and research programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree levels. Established in 1964, the university includes 15 colleges, the 215,000-square-foot Center for Collaborative Research, the private JK-12 grade University School, the world-class NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and the Alvin Sherman Library, Research and Information Technology Center, one of Florida's largest public libraries. NSU students learn at our campuses in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Miramar, Orlando, Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico, and online globally. With nearly 200,000 alumni across the globe, the reach of the NSU community is worldwide. Classified as having "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, NSU is one of only 59 universities nationwide to also be awarded Carnegie's Community Engagement Classification, and is also the largest private institution in the United States that meets the U.S. Department of Education's criteria as a Hispanic-serving Institution. Please visit http://www. nova. edu for more information.

The Vertebrate Genome Laboratory at The Rockefeller University: The Rockefeller University is one of the world's leading biomedical research university and is dedicated to conducting innovative, high-quality research to improve the understanding of life for the benefit of humanity. The university's 70 laboratories conduct research in neuroscience, immunology, biochemistry, genomics, and many other areas. The Vertebrate Genome Laboratory (VGL) at the Rockefeller University specializes in long-read genomic technologies. The VGL is one of the three VGP sequencing hubs. It is equipped with cutting-edge genomic technologies including several Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore sequencers, a Bionano Genomics Saphyr optical mapper, and a 10x Genomics Chromium microfluidics instrument. Composed of a team of experts in long reads and ultra-High-Molecular Weight DNA, the VGL strives to find a way to decipher life's blueprint from any samples, even the most challenging ones. Using state of the art technologies and extensive international collaborations, we are devoted to fill the gap between field scientists and geneticists. We are particularly proud to play our small part in the effort of reversing species extinction by sequencing genomes of endangered species before it is too late. Please visit http://vertebrategenomelab. org for more information; follow us on twitter at @genomewarriors

The Wellcome Sanger Institute: The Institute is a world leading genomics research center, where scientists undertake large-scale research that forms the foundations of knowledge in biology and medicine. The institute is open and collaborative; the data, results, tools and technologies are shared across the globe to advance science. Its ambition is vast - the institute takes on projects that are not possible anywhere else, understanding the power of genome sequencing to understand and harness the information in DNA. Funded by Wellcome, the institute has the freedom and support to push the boundaries of genomics. The research findings are used to improve health and to understand life on Earth. Please visit http://www. sanger. ac. uk for more information or follow on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and on our Blog.

The MPI-CBG: The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany is one of more than 80 institutes of the Max Planck Society, an independent, non-profit organization in Germany. 500 curiosity-driven scientists from over 50 countries ask: How do cells form tissues? The basic research programs of the MPI-CBG span multiple scales of magnitude, from molecular assemblies to organelles, cells, tissues, organs, and organisms.

National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health: NHGRI is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health, focused on advances in genomics research. Building on their leadership role in the initial sequencing of the human genome, NHGRI collaborates with the world's scientific and medical communities to enhance genomic technologies that accelerate breakthroughs and improve lives. Empowering and expanding the field of genomics can benefit all of humankind. please visit https:/ / www. genome. gov for more information.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute plays an important role in advancing scientific research and education in the United States. Its scientists, located across the country and around the world, have made important discoveries that advance both human health and our fundamental understanding of biology. The Institute also aims to transform science education into a creative, interdisciplinary endeavor that reflects the excitement of real research. HHMI's headquarters are located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.

San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance: The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is a nonprofit international conservation leader, committed to inspiring a passion for nature and creating a world where all life thrives. The Alliance empowers people from around the globe to support their mission to conserve wildlife through innovation and partnerships. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance supports cutting-edge conservation and brings the stories of their work back to the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park - giving millions of guests, in person and virtually, the opportunity to experience conservation in action. The work of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance extends from San Diego to strategic and regional conservation "hubs" across the globe, where their strengths--via their "Conservation Toolbox," including the renowned Wildlife Biodiversity Bank--are able to effectively align with hundreds of regional partners to improve outcomes for wildlife in more coordinated efforts. By leveraging these tools in wildlife care and conservation science, and through collaboration with hundreds of partners, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has reintroduced more than 44 endangered species to native habitats. Each year, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance's work reaches over 1 billion people in 150 countries via news media, social media, their websites, educational resources and the San Diego Zoo Kids channel, which is in children's hospitals in 13 countries. Success is made possible by the support of members, donors and guests to the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park, who are Wildlife Allies committed to ensuring All Life Thrives.

UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute: Comprising diverse researchers from a variety of disciplines across academic divisions, the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute leads UC Santa Cruz's efforts to unlock the world's genomic data and accelerate breakthroughs in health and evolutionary biology. Our platforms, technologies, and scientists unite global communities to create and deploy data-driven, life-saving treatments and innovative environmental and conservation efforts. We are revealing life's code. Please visit genomics.ucsc.edu for more information.
London, United Kingdom & Geneva, Switzerland, April 29, 2021and the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use(ICH) are announcing the release of important new maps between global medical terminologies SNOMED CT and MedDRA. This collaborative effort is the first deliverable of a new agreement entered into between SNOMED International and ICH.

ICH is an international non-profit organisation which brings together regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical industry from across the globe to discuss scientific and technical aspects of pharmaceuticals and to develop ICH guidelines. Owned by ICH, MedDRA, the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities, is a rich and highly specific standardised medical terminology developed by ICH to facilitate sharing of regulatory information internationally for medical products used by humans and is used for registration, documentation and safety monitoring of medical products both before and after a product has been authorised for use. SNOMED International is the not-for-profit organization that owns and maintains SNOMED CT, the world's most comprehensive clinical terminology with over 350,000 concepts ranging across diagnosis, signs and symptoms and tens of thousands of surgical, therapeutic and diagnostic procedures.

This joint effort has produced two independent maps (MedDRA to SNOMED CT and SNOMED CT to MedDRA) which have been derived from frequently used and key pharmacovigilance MedDRA terms identified from the European Medicines Agency and the UK's Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. In addition, a set of COVID-19 related terms are also included in the first production release of the maps to capture important aspects of the pandemic.

The maps are intended to facilitate the exchange of data between regulatory databases (which use MedDRA) and healthcare databases/electronic health records (which use SNOMED CT). In one use case, key pharmacovigilance concepts coded in SNOMED CT in an electronic health record (EHR) could be converted to MedDRA for the purpose of adverse event reporting to regulatory authorities or for the purposes of epidemiological research. In the opposite direction, these same key terms coded in MedDRA representing adverse events, warnings, and other regulatory information could be converted into SNOMED CT so that the information is available in the patient's record to aid in clinical decision-making.

The two maps were created as part of a project involving SNOMED International and ICH entitled WEB-RADR 2. Funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a large-scale public-private partnership between the EU and the pharmaceutical industry association, EFPIA, IMI aims to boost biopharmaceutical innovation in Europe and to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. With the creation of the maps from the WEB-RADR 2 project, both SNOMED International and ICH have committed to their ongoing use and maintenance extending past the conclusion of the project.

Mick Foy, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency UK and Chair of the ICH MedDRA Management Committee said "This is an exciting development and an important milestone. Developing interoperability between SNOMED CT and MedDRA has been a long-standing ambition and will greatly enhance data collection for regulatory purposes and for drug safety research".

SNOMED International CEO, Don Sweete, welcomes the evolution of the organization's relationship with ICH. "It is exciting to see a long-term alliance borne from a collaborative project created to improve drug safety for patients and citizens. This agreement serves a joint commitment by two organizations dedicated to enabling health systems interoperability across regulatory and clinical continuums."

The Production version of the two maps is being made available to licensed SNOMED CT and MedDRA users on April 30, 2021 and will be based on the January 2021 version of SNOMED CT and the September 2020 version of MedDRA. It is planned that the maps will be released annually in April.

To access the maps:

Licensed MedDRA users, visit the Downloads (https://www.meddra.org/user/login?page=%2Fsoftware-packages) page on the MedDRA website

Licensed SNOMED CT users visit SNOMED International (https://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/Use-SNOMED-CT/maps)

Visit SNOMED International or MedDRA's Maintenance and Support Services Organization (MSSO) for map release documents, including:

MedDRA-SNOMED CT Mapping Conventions are available here (https://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/Use-SNOMED-CT/maps) for SNOMED CT users and here (https://www.meddra.org/mapping) for MedDRA users.

Criteria for accepting requests for additions or changes to SNOMED CT to MedDRA map and MedDRA to SNOMED CT map is available here (https://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/Use-SNOMED-CT/maps) for SNOMED CT users and here (https://www.meddra.org/mapping) for MedDRA users.

Map Change Request Tool (https://mapcr.meddra.org/) (Map CR) and Map CR User Guide (https://www.meddra.org/MapCR-User-Guide)

For more information on these maps and resources, please contact MedDRA MSSO) or SNOMED International).

About SNOMED International:

SNOMED International is a not-for-profit organization that owns and develops SNOMED CT, the world's most comprehensive healthcare terminology product. We play an essential role in improving the health of humankind by determining standards for a codified language that represents groups of clinical terms. This enables healthcare information to be exchanged globally for the benefit of patients and other stakeholders. We are committed to the rigorous evolution of our products and services, to deliver continuous innovation for the global healthcare community. SNOMED International is the trading name of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation.

To learn more about SNOMED International and SNOMED CT, visit www.snomed.org.

About the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use

The International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Useand www.meddra.org.

Attachment
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Thor Equities Group announced today the opening of ModernHaus SoHo, a new luxury hotel in New York's stylish SoHo neighborhood. The 114-room property features an extensive modern and contemporary art collection with pieces from some of the world's foremost names, 11,000 square feet of outdoor space, and a signature restaurant from Michelin-starred chef George Mendes  with a fully retractable glass roof that allows for al fresco dining in the warmer months and indoor dining on colder days. Located on Grand Street, the project sees the return of downtown nightlife mainstay Jimmy and its iconic rooftop and pool deck with stunning 360 views of lower Manhattan. ModernHaus represents the debut of the first-ever hospitality brand from Thor Equities Group, a global leader in urban real estate development, leasing, and management.

Skyline King Studio Guest Room - Photo Credit Nikolas Koenig

"With ModernHaus SoHo, our goal was to create a communal living room and gathering point in SoHo for New Yorkers and visitors alike. We're excited to welcome guests into our new home, that will be known for its prime location, contemporary touches, exceptional outdoor space, Michelin-star culinary talent and first-rate social offerings," said Jack J. Sitt, Director of Thor Equities Group.

Drawing heavily from the art heritage of the surrounding neighborhood and paying homage to its revered status as a creative hub, the property features a one-of-a-kind art collection including dozens of paintings and sculptures from the likes of Alexander Calder, Hans Hartung, George Condo, Harland Miller, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hofmann, Nicolas Party, and Kaws. Thor's Jack J. Sitt personally oversaw the curation of the pieces, ensuring the selection conveyed a distinct artistic perspective on SoHo's trademark modernism.

"ModernHaus SoHo will be an extension of the neighborhood's creative and artistic spirit. As a resident of SoHo myself, I'm proud to help lead a project that breathes new life into the community after such a long and challenging year," said Sitt. "Every element has been created in pursuit of greater connectedness between the guests, the city, and SoHo's heritage. The building's art and design reflects, and is inspired by, its immediate surroundings."

Managed by premier hospitality management company Highgate, ModernHaus SoHo offers more outdoor space per-room than any other hotel in downtown Manhattan  providing a rare urban resort experience for visitors right in the middle of the bustling city. In an unprecedented time for travelers prioritizing space and safe social distance, guests are invited to enjoy multiple lush, overgrown lounge setups throughout the property, outdoor bar and event space, as well as a rooftop pool deck. Designed in the style of a greenhouse, the hotel's restaurant, Veranda, provides a fully retractable roof, one of the city's few and ideal for open-air dining.

Inspired by the Bauhaus art movement of the beginning of the 20th century, ModernHaus SoHo's design focuses on clean lines, geometric harmony, and large windows. Stylist and interior design consultant Melissa Bowers worked hand in hand with Sitt on the property's design layout, focusing on a minimalist perspective that allows the beauty and energy of the surrounding urban environment to take a prominent role, while showcasing luxurious amenities, rooms, and public spaces for guests who expect an exceptionally high standard. Each guest room features panoramic city views with an abundance of natural light, accented by reclaimed wood floors and vibrant artwork. A total of 10 different room categories are available, including 5 suites, for all guest types. The hotel's crowning jewel is its Gallery Penthouse, located on the 16th floor with postcard-worthy views of Manhattan Bridge and the Freedom Tower. Featuring a separate living room and dining room complete with 12-person table, the 1,300 square foot open floor plan is perfect for meetings or celebrations of any occasion.

Renowned chef George Mendes, whose Portuguese restaurant Aldea in the city's Flatiron District earned him a Michelin star, has partnered with hospitality veteran David Rabin (a partner in such New York venues as The Lambs Club, American Bar, and the buzzed-about Sona), to open Veranda, a convivial new restaurant that offers Mendes' take on a globally inspired American menu. The restaurant also includes two separate bars for casual drinks or pre-dinner cocktails, with one boasting a spacious terrace and the other with its own entrance on 6th Avenue. Taking design cues from Philip Johnson's Glass House and the atrium cafes of Europe, Veranda will treat diners to a greenhouse-like glass enclosure with retractable roof, dotted with walnut and travertine tables contrasted against topiaries and rosemary herb plantings for an atmosphere that's simultaneously both outdoors and in.

On the second floor is Jumpin Jacks, a breakfast and cocktail bar in a light-filled lounge area with open views of the city. Serving as the living room of the property, by day Jumpin Jacks offers a high-end coffee program with pastries and to-go options, and at night turns into a destination for guests to unwind with a drink. The design is accented by the lounge's dramatic ceiling height, with a rich color palette of cognac, amber, and espresso tones and highlighted by art from Sitt's collection.

The hotel's lower level is home to The Signature Room, a 3,100 square foot event venue utilizing a clean palette of champagne, bone, and caviar blacks, accompanied by warm wood tones for special moments. The space features a private dining room, striking terrazzo bar, and seating area with velvet chairs and sofa, punctuated by an olive tree  capable of being used for gatherings big and small.

Jimmy, a staple of lower Manhattan nightlife, resumes operations on the building's rooftop. Set 18 stories high, the space received a tasteful refresh, channeling Picasso's Blue Period, while retaining its core layout and design sensibility that the city's social set has come to cherish. Created and curated by David Rabin, the atmosphere is intimate and refined, with lingham wood floors, swank modular furniture, rust tile walls, and a working fireplace. The rooftop scene is a destination unto itself, surrounded by 14' windows with panoramic views of Midtown, Wall Street, the Hudson River, and the bridges spanning the East River. Unlike typical rooftop bars, Jimmy will retain its status as a year-round destination. In colder months, guests gravitate towards the inside conversation pit  a freeform lounge area with blue velvet leather seating, pendant lighting, and sculptural stools. In warmer weather, the experience spills onto the roof deck, where guests can enjoy chaise lounges and unparalleled city views.

Anchoring SoHo's southwest corner, ModernHaus SoHo is surrounded by world-class shopping, art galleries, dining, and cultural events. Everything the sophisticated urban traveler seeks is steps away, including access to public transportation and many of the city's must-see attractions. A National Historic Landmark, SoHo is best known as the source of America's most important works in fine art, architecture, fashion, literature, and culinary arts.

ModernHaus SoHo is a Thor Equities Group property backed by a partnership including Jack J. Sitt, David Rabin, George Mendes, Once Upon a Time, Abigail Kirsch, and M.A. Bowers, Inc. A member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts, rates begin at $450 per night. For bookings, restaurant reservations, and more information, please visit modernhaushotel.com. Follow along on social via @modernhaussoho, @verandasoho, and @jimmy.soho.

About Thor Equities Group

Thor Equities Group is a leader in the development, leasing, and management of office, industrial, laboratory, residential, hotel and mixed-use assets in premier urban locations worldwide. The company operates in major cities around the globe and has a property portfolio totaling $20 billion with a development pipeline in excess of 50 million square feet. Thor has a strong presence on three continents and in addition to its US holdings, the company has assets in European gateway cities including London, Paris, Madrid, and Milan, and is the largest developer in Mexico through its Latin American division with a development pipeline of over 18 million square feet. Thor maximizes returns for institutional investors by recognizing a property's potential, reducing operating expenses, increasing tenant satisfaction, and leveraging market trends to maintain a long-term competitive edge.

About Highgate

Highgate is a leading real estate investment and hospitality management company widely recognized as an innovator in the industry. Highgate is the dominant player in major U.S. gateway cities including New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco and Honolulu, with a growing Caribbean and Latin America footprint. The hospitality forward company provides expert guidance through all stages of the property cycle, from planning and development through recapitalization or disposition. Highgate has a proven record of developing its diverse portfolio of bespoke lifestyle hotel brands, legacy brands, and independent hotels and resorts with contemporary programming and digital acumen. The company utilizes industry-leading revenue management tools that efficiently identify and predict evolving market dynamics to drive outperformance and maximize asset value. With an executive team consisting of some of the most experienced hotel management leaders, the company is a trusted partner for top ownership groups and major hotel brands. Highgate maintains corporate offices in New York, Dallas, London, Miami, Seattle and Waikiki.

About George Mendes

Acclaimed chef and cookbook author George Mendes is executive chef and partner at Veranda. Mendes first introduced New York City to elevated Portuguese cuisine in 2009 when he opened Aldea, a Michelin-starred fixture in the city's Flatiron District for over a decade. A first-generation American born to Portuguese immigrants, the Danbury, Connecticut native graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and worked for his mentor, David Bouley, at the chef's original namesake restaurant in Tribeca before honing his talent further at Alain Passard's Arpege in Paris. After more than three years running the kitchen at Toqueville near Union Square, Mendes left to chart his own course by opening Aldea to critical acclaim, which he followed with the opening of his popular Portuguese spot, Lupulo, in 2015. Mendes published his first cookbook, My Portugal: Recipes & Stories (Abrams) in 2014.

About David Rabin

Veteran restaurateur David Rabin has been a pioneering force in the hospitality industry for over 25 years. He is currently a partner at several destination restaurants in New York City, including American Bar, The Lambs Club, the newly opened Sona and upcoming Veranda, as well as rooftop lounges Jimmy and The Skylark. A graduate of Tufts University and Columbia Law School, Rabin has launched numerous other restaurants and bars, including Cafe Clover, The Double Seven, Union Bar, Rex and the Meatpacking District's legendary Lotus restaurant and nightclub. He is also a consultant for The Venetian in Las Vegas, where he co-created The Dorsey cocktail lounge as well as Rosina and Electra.

About Melissa Bowers

Melissa Bowers is a stylist, interior designer, art consultant, and founder of M.A. Bowers, Inc.  a design atelier and creative studio specialized in luxury commercial and residential interiors. With offices in New York and Los Angeles, M.A. Bowers, Inc. provides finesse and expertise to an exclusive clientele of highly recognized names and brands since 2015. Melissa's prolific career started as a stylist and set designer for visionaries like Helmut Newton, and clients like Alan Faena and most recently Priyanka Chopra. Melissa's proficiency in the art of entertaining and the exhaustive curation of the smallest details are her most recognizable trademark. Her approach brings a practicality to every project, moving beyond surface aesthetics to create spaces that express the lives and lifestyles of her discerning clients.

SOURCE Thor Equities Group
The Indiana 4-H Road Show is bringing Purdue University to the public this summer! Faculty, staff, and community partners will virtually deliver hands-on experiences to youth in grades 7-12 via in-person host sites throughout the state.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Indiana 4-H Youth Development invites youth in grades 7-12 to participate in the 2021 Indiana 4-H Road Show, an 18-day event series of fun and learning for all.

Instead of bringing crowds together for such annual summer events as 4-H Academy at Purdue, State 4-H Junior Leader Conference and 4-H Round-Up, Indiana 4-H has planned 18 one-day sessions, each focused on a different area of interest and held at multiple locations throughout the state.

The Indiana 4-H Road Show will engage youth with Purdue University faculty and staff members as they have come to expect from our typical, on-campus events during the summer, said Casey Mull, assistant director of Extension, 4-H youth development. We are excited to bring a little bit of the West Lafayette campus to our 92 counties.

Students will gather in person while learning from Purdue experts virtually. From bees and wildlife to exploring career choices, financial management, aviation, emergency medical services and more, youth will learn about the topics of their choice through hands-on activities.

Each day will begin with on-site check-in at 9 a.m. ET. Sessions will begin at 9:30 a.m., with lunch at noon, and end at 3:30 p.m. following afternoon programming. In-person sessions will follow local health and safety guidelines.

Registration is $25 per person per day or $100 per person for five days. The registration fee includes lunch, a special 4-H item and resources related to that days Road Show session. Register by May 15 at 4-H Online. Current 4-H membership is not required to participate.

Session descriptions, location lists, and registration details can be found at purdue.ag/4hroadshow. Contact your local 4-H youth development educator for more information and registration help.

Writer: Abby Leeds, 765-494-7817, mayer36@purdue.edu

Sources: Jenny Clark, jenny@purdue.edu

Casey Mull, mullc@purdue.edu

Agricultural Communications: 765-494-8415;

Maureen Manier, Department Head, mmanier@purdue.edu

Agriculture News Page
BERLIN - Germany's top court ruled Thursday the government has to set clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2030, arguing that current legislation risks placing too much of a burden for curbing climate change on younger generations.

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2019 file photo, an aircraft passes the rising sun during take off at the international airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Germanys top court has ruled that the government has to set clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2030, arguing that current legislation doesnt go far enough in curbing climate change. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)

BERLIN - Germany's top court ruled Thursday the government has to set clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2030, arguing that current legislation risks placing too much of a burden for curbing climate change on younger generations.

The verdict was celebrated by climate activists from Germany and elsewhere who  with the support of large environmental groups  had filed four complaints to the constitutional Court arguing that their rights were at risk by the lack of sufficient targets beyond the next decade.

Like other European Union countries, Germany aims to cut emissions 55% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. Legislation passed two years ago set specific targets for sectors such as heating and transport for that period, but not for the long-term goal of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050.

The 2019 regulations "irreversibly pushed a very high burden of emissions reduction into the period after 2030," judges said in their ruling.

The court backed the argument that the Paris climate accord's goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally no more than 1.5 C (2.7 F), by the end of the century compared with pre-industrial times should be a benchmark for policymakers. It ordered the government to come up with new targets from 2030 onward by the end of next year.

Lawyer Felix Ekardt, who brought one of the cases, called the verdict groundbreaking for Germany.

Germanys climate policy will need to be massively adjusted, he said.

FILE-In this Oct. 4, 2016 taken photo wind turbines spin near Halle, central Germany. Germanys top court has ruled that the government has to set clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2030, arguing that current legislation doesnt go far enough in curbing climate change. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Fellow lawyer Roda Verheyen said that the decision would likely mean Germany's plans to phase out the use of coal by 2038 will need to be brought forward, in order to realistically achieve the country's long-term emissions target.

A simple calculator shows that this will be necessary, she said.

Germany has managed to cut its annual emissions from the equivalent of 1.25 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to about 740 million tons last year  a reduction of more than 40%.

The current target would require cuts of 178 million tons by 2030, but a reduction of 281 million tons in each of the following decades.

Judges said it would be wrong to allow one generation to use up large parts of the CO2 budget with a comparatively mild reduction burden, if that simultaneously means following generations are left with a radical reduction burden and their lives are exposed to comprehensive limits to freedom.

The court also backed the view that even severe restrictions on freedom are acceptable to prevent climate change.

Climate activists expressed delight at the verdict.

With today's decision, generational justice has been achieved," said plaintiff Luisa Neubauer, a member of the youth group Fridays for Future. "Because our future freedoms and rights aren't less important than the rights and freedoms of today's generation.

Germanys main industry lobby group, BDI, called for transparent and feasible targets to give companies the ability to plan to develop new technologies and make the necessary investments required to shift from fossil fuels to carbon-free alternatives.

The countrys environment minister, Svenja Schulze, said after the verdict that she would put forward new proposals in the coming months.

The ruling plays into the hands of the environmentalist Greens party, which is currently leading in several polls ahead of Germany's national election on Sept. 26.

Annalena Baerbock, the Greens' candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, called for concrete action, here and now.

Her party wants to double the rate by which wind parks, solar farms and other sources of renewable energy sources are expanded over the coming five years, ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles from 2030, bring forward the deadline to end coal use and set additional emissions targets after 2030, she said.

Britain earlier this month announced it will aim to cut its emissions 78% from 1990 levels by 2035, the most ambitious target of any industrialized nation so far. The U.K. hosts this year's international climate summit in Glasgow in November.

President Joe Biden last week announced a doubling of the U.S. target for 2030, now aiming to cut emissions 52% from 2005 levels.

The legal cases in Germany are part of a global effort by climate activists to force governments to take urgent action to tackle climate change.

One of the first successful cases was brought in the Netherlands, where the Supreme Court two years ago confirmed a ruling requiring the government to cut emissions at least 25% by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.

In February, a Paris court ruled that the French state had failed to take sufficient action to fight climate change in a case brought by four nongovernmental organizations.

Follow AP's climate coverage at https://apnews.com/Climate
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BERLIN  In a ruling hailed as groundbreaking, Germanys top court said Thursday the government must set clear goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2030, arguing that existing legislation risks placing too much of a burden for curbing climate change on younger generations.

The verdict was a victory for climate activists from Germany and elsewhere who  with the support of environmental groups  had filed four complaints to the Constitutional Court arguing that their rights were at risk by the lack of sufficient targets beyond the next decade.

Like other European Union countries, Germany aims to cut emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. Legislation passed two years ago set specific targets for sectors such as heating and transport over that period, but not for the long-term goal of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050.

The 2019 regulations irreversibly pushed a very high burden of emissions reduction into the period after 2030, judges said in their ruling.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip



................................................................

The court backed the argument that the 2015 Paris climate accords goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally no more than 1.5 C (2.7 F), by the end of the century compared with pre-industrial times should be a benchmark for policymakers. It ordered the German government to come up with new targets from 2030 onward by the end of next year.

In a striking precedent, the court also acknowledged the idea that Germany has a finite emissions budget before the Paris goal becomes impossible. While it didnt specify what Germanys share of the global carbon budget is, scientists have said at current rates of emission it could be used up in less than a decade.

Lawyer Felix Ekardt, who brought one of the cases, called the verdict groundbreaking for Germany.

Germanys climate policy will need to be massively adjusted, he told reporters.

Fellow lawyer Roda Verheyen said the decision would likely mean Germanys plans to phase out coal use by 2038 would need to be brought forward, in order to realistically achieve the countrys long-term emissions target.

A simple calculator shows that this will be necessary, she said.

Germany has managed to cut its annual emissions from the equivalent of 1.25 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to about 740 million tons last year  a reduction of more than 40%.

The current target would require cuts of 178 million tons by 2030, but a reduction of 281 million tons in each of the following decades.

Judges said it would be wrong to allow one generation to use up large parts of the CO2 budget with a comparatively mild reduction burden, if that simultaneously means following generations are left with a radical reduction burden and their lives are exposed to comprehensive limits to freedom.

Climate activists expressed delight at the verdict.

With todays decision, generational justice has been achieved, said plaintiff Luisa Neubauer, a member of the Fridays for Future group. Because our future freedoms and rights arent less important than the rights and freedoms of todays generation.

Germanys main industry lobby group, BDI, called for transparent and feasible targets to give companies the certainty needed to plan and develop new technologies and make the necessary investments required to shift from fossil fuels to carbon-free alternatives.

Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said after the verdict that she would propose new measures for Europes biggest economy in the coming months.

The courts unanimous ruling plays into the hands of the environmentalist Greens party, which is leading in several polls ahead of Germanys national election on Sept. 26.

Annalena Baerbock, the Greens candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, called for concrete action, here and now.

She said the Greens want to double the rate by which wind parks, solar farms and other sources of renewable energy sources are expanded over the next five years, ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles starting in 2030, bring forward the deadline to end coal use and set additional emissions targets after 2030.

Britain earlier this month announced it will aim to cut its emissions 78% from 1990 levels by 2035, the most ambitious target of any industrialized nation. The U.K. hosts this years international climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Christiana Figueres, who as U.N. climate chief was instrumental in negotiating the Paris accord, said the German courts unanimous verdict made clear the need to speed up efforts to reduce emissions.

We need to focus on shorter-term mitigation and emission reductions, she said, adding that this urgency was reflected in last weeks climate summit organized by President Joe Biden, who announced a doubling of the U.S. target for 2030, now aiming to cut emissions 52% from 2005 levels.

The legal cases in Germany are part of a global effort by climate activists to force governments to take urgent action to tackle climate change.

One of the first successful cases was brought in the Netherlands, where the Supreme Court two years ago confirmed a ruling requiring the government to cut emissions at least 25% by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.

In February, a Paris court ruled that the French government had failed to take sufficient action to fight climate change in a case brought by four nongovernmental organizations.

___

Follow APs climate coverage at https://apnews.com/Climate
NEW YORK  The effort by Gov. Andrew Cuomos office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.

Cuomos most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the states own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed.

A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.

The actions coincided with the period in which Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.

And they came as the governors approach to nursing homes was receiving intensifying scrutiny from critics and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, whose administration made a public show of requesting nursing home death data from four states with Democratic governors, including New York.

The number of nursing home residents who died in the pandemic has been a particularly sensitive question for the Cuomo administration.

As the first wave hit New York in March 2020, the administration put in place a policy to prevent nursing homes from turning away patients discharged from hospitals after treatment for COVID-19. Some critics blamed the approach for the large number of resident deaths in the spring, a toll that the administration then put at around 6,000.

But by the time the policy was rescinded less than two months later, it had become clear that not all the deaths were being included in that tally; those who died after being transferred to hospitals were not counted as nursing home deaths. Lawmakers and others began asking for a complete count of all resident deaths, but the governors aides said parsing the numbers was difficult because of a fear of double counting, among other possible errors.

The full data on nursing home deaths was not released until this year, after a report by the state attorney general in late January found that the official tally might have undercounted the true toll by as much as 50%.

That was something Cuomos aides had known since the previous spring, The New York Times found.

Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer representing Cuomos office, said the administration was reluctant to release numbers it did not believe were reliable.

The whole brouhaha here is overblown to the point where there are cynical suggestions offered for the plain and simple truth that the chamber wanted only to release accurate information that they believed was totally unassailable, Abramowitz said.

The chamber was never satisfied that the numbers that they were getting from DOH were accurate, he said, adding that the actions by Cuomos aides had nothing to do with the governors book.

The Cuomo administrations handling of nursing home death data now is the subject of a federal investigation, one of at least four overlapping inquiries into the governor and his administration. As of this month, more than 15,500 nursing home residents with COVID-19 have died.

The state attorney general, Letitia James, is also looking into sexual misconduct accusations against the governor and into whether Cuomo misused state resources to write his book on the pandemic. The state Assembly is conducting an impeachment inquiry.

The governor has denied wrongdoing and urged patience as the inquiries proceed, even as prominent New York Democrats, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, have called for his resignation. Cuomo has held on to support among many Democratic voters in recent polls, but on nursing homes, he has received sharply negative marks.

After the first wave of coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths peaked in April 2020, health officials began trying to figure out how many nursing home residents had died, according to three people with knowledge of the process who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its details.

The officials surveyed nursing homes late last April  a process overseen by Cuomos aides  and gathered data on residents who died in the facilities as well as those who had died after being transferred to hospitals, the people said.

Amid criticism about Cuomos policies, the Health Department began preparing a report on the issue in spring 2020, under the close watch of the governors top advisers.

We are getting anxious over here on this report, wrote DeRosa in an email to health officials and top Cuomo aides June 18, which was reviewed by the Times. She laid out what the strongest points that should be made in the report were from my perspective; each had to do with knocking down the idea that readmitting infected people to nursing homes was problematic.

Needs to be able to stand up to scrutiny and definitively tell the story, DeRosa added.

The final version of the report, which the Times has reported was rewritten several times by senior advisers to Cuomo and published in early July, emphasized that admissions from hospitals were not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities. Instead, the report contained the lower death count and cited staff as the most likely source of infections.

But another version of the study, aimed at the scientific press and drafted at the same time by nearly a dozen health officials, took a more nuanced view.

That draft, reviewed by the Times, reached the same conclusions but included a lengthy paragraph describing the limitations of the analysis, such as a lack of information about staff-resident interactions. It put the number of residents with COVID-19 killed in the pandemic at 9,739 through the end of May, far higher than what the administration was saying publicly at the time.

Approximately 35% of all deaths at that point were nursing home residents, the draft concluded.

But that version was never published. And the publicly released report instead claimed 21% of all deaths in New York were in nursing homes.

That percentage appeared better than those in almost every other state  in part because most other states included nursing home residents who died in hospitals in their tally  and it became a talking point for the governor.

Even as internally, health officials had increasing confidence in the statistics on nursing home deaths, by May, it was clear to lawmakers and others that the Cuomo administration was not including residents who had died in hospitals in its tally of nursing home deaths. State officials said they could not release the figures because of the possibility of double counting or other issues in the data.

It was the primary reason given by Zucker, the health commissioner, during a pair of hearings on nursing homes at the state Legislature in August. When the data comes in, he testified, then I will be happy to provide that data to you.

But after that first hearing, an audit was ordered by DeRosa, who appeared not to trust the Health Departments statistics, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to discuss closed-door decisions. She sent Gareth Rhodes, a top coronavirus adviser to Cuomo, to the Health Department in mid-August, according to the people, and he sat with senior health officials to go over the numbers.

His initial check of the data was completed by the end of August. It flagged roughly 600 deaths for further investigation by the Health Department, the people said, but did not alter the fact that by then, more than 9,000 nursing home residents had died in the pandemic.

It was then, just as the initial audit was completed, that the Trump administration publicly requested data on deaths of nursing home residents. The request came from the Justice Department and was limited to publicly run nursing homes  a few dozen out of the more than 600 nursing homes in New York.

Officials saw the move as a political ploy to embarrass Democratic governors. The inquiry would become a new reason offered by Cuomos office for withholding the data; DeRosa would later say in a Zoom call to legislators that she and other Cuomo aides froze because of the federal request.

But top legislative officials told the Times in interviews that was not the reason they were given at the time. That was never expressed to us before. It was just, We need accuracy; well get back to you, said state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, chair of the health committee.

Behind the scenes, health officials and Rhodes urged finally releasing the data containing the total number of deaths, noting that the small percentage of those flagged for possible errors in the audit could be added later.

By early September, the Health Department had shared its draft letter with Cuomos office for approval. But approval never came. It was not sent to legislators.

At about the same time, on Sept. 9, the governors office provided the data that the Trump administration had requested.

The chamber responded to the DOJ request with what they deemed to be totally accurate numbers, Abramowitz said. They didnt want to have a public debate about other numbers at the same time.

Whats going on in the press now is exactly what the chamber wanted to avoid while William Barr was AG, he added, referring to Trumps attorney general.

State lawmakers and reporters continued to ask about the missing figures. During a telephone news conference on Columbus Day  Oct. 12  Cuomo was again asked when the numbers would be released.

On the numbers, theres a lot of politics being played, Cuomo told reporters.

Later that day, Cuomo convened a call about the data on total deaths with DeRosa, Zucker and other health officials, according to two people with knowledge of the call. He suggested the figures would have to come out at some point. (A spokesperson for Cuomo, Richard Azzopardi, said DeRosa did not take part in the call.)

Cuomos book, for which he received a multimillion-dollar advance, was published the next day. It quickly became a bestseller.

Some on the call believed that the governors interest meant that he wanted the numbers released, according to the people with knowledge of the conversation. But Cuomo threw another wrench in the system, the people said: He asked for further analysis of the data.

He was interested in putting out only accurate information to highlight the contrast between Albany and Washington, said Abramowitz.

After that analysis, which did not change the overall figures, the Health Department later that month again felt comfortable with the data on deaths of nursing home residents.

I am writing to share the findings of the New York State Department of Healths analysis of nursing home fatality data, read another draft letter, which carried a proposed November release date and Zuckers name.

In the one-page draft letter addressed to the state Assembly speaker, Zucker shared the total number of deaths, which at that point was 9,835 through Oct. 30.

I hope you find the information to be helpful as the state continues to examine this important issue, he wrote.

The letter was never sent.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday agreed with Republican Tim Scott that America is not a racist country but, she warned, white supremacists are a threat to national security.

In a wide-ranging interview on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to mark her and President Joe Biden's 100th day in office, Harris also defended her work on the Southern border, saying the problem won't be fixed overnight.

'I don't think America is a racist country but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country,' she said.

In his GOP response to Biden's address to Congress Wednesday night, Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, warned about fighting discrimination with discrimination and talked about his personal experience with racism.

'Hear me clearly: America is not a racist county,' Scott said.

'It's backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination. And its wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present,' he added.

Harris, the first African American vice president, agreed America isn't racist but warned the nation has to face the realistic threat from white supremacists.

'One of the greatest threats to our national security is domestic terrorism, manifested by white supremacists, and so these are issues that we must confront and it doesn't - it does not help to heal our country to unify us as a people to ignore the realities of that,' she said.

Vice President Kamala Harris gave a wide-ranging interview on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to mark her and President Joe Biden's 100th day in office

Biden has given Harris a long task list of his administration's priorities to shepherd, including helping to sell his plans to aid the economy in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic and taking the lead on border diplomacy.

It's the latter task that has brought a heap of criticism on the vice president's plate. Republicans have hounded her for not visiting the border as the number of migrants crossing into the country has surged.

Harris sounded defensive when asked about her role in border policy during the interview. She spent two uninterrupted minutes explaining her work on the issue - a lifetime of air on morning television.

She started off by arguing most people from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador don't want to leave their homes.

'Most people don't want to leave home, they don't want to leave their grandmother, they don't want to leave the place where they grew up, the place where they're familiar with the culture,' she said, adding they do so because their basic needs aren't being met.

She then went on to list the work she has done so far, including a virtual meetings and bringing in the Cabinet agencies to help.

Harris said the US needs to give citizens of those countries 'hope.'

'Let's do what we can to give the folks there some hope, that if they stay, help is on the way,' she said.

And she concluded by arguing the situation on the border won't be fixed overnight.

'Its not going to be fixed over night. If it were easy it would have been fixed a long time ago. It's not a new issue but we are prepared to make the investment and to get in there for the long haul to do what is necessary to address the reasons people flee,' she said.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott delivered his party's response to President Joe Biden's first address before Congress and talked about fighting discrimination with discrimination

VP Harris also defended her work on border diplomacy, saying the issue won't be fixed overnight

Harris will hit the road on Thursday to help celebrate the administration's 100th day in office. And she'll talk up Biden's two new proposals - his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan.

She'll also visit a COVID vaccine site during her visit to Baltimore.
The United States has vaccinated more than half of its adults against Covid-19, but it could be months until the country has vaccinated enough people to put herd immunity within reach (and much of the world is still desperately waiting for access to vaccines).

Places with rising vaccination rates, like the United States, can look forward to case numbers coming down a lot in the meantime. And sooner than you might think. Thats because cases decline via the principle of exponential decay.

Many people learned about exponential growth in the early days of the pandemic to understand how a small number of cases can quickly grow into a major outbreak as transmission chains multiply. India, for example, which is in the grips of a major Covid-19 crisis, is in a phase of exponential growth.
LONDON, ON - In a published study, a team from Lawson Health Research Institute has found that a simple device can reduce swelling after kidney transplantation. The geko device, manufactured by Sky Medical Technology Ltd and distributed in Canada by Trudell Healthcare Solutions Inc., is a muscle pump activator which significantly improves blood flow by stimulating the body's 'muscle pumps.' Patients using the device following kidney transplantation experienced shorter hospital stays and reduced surgical site infections by nearly 60 per cent.

Kidney and simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantations can significantly reduce mortality and improve the quality of life for patients with end stage renal disease. "After surgery, many of these organ recipients require a longer hospital stay due to delayed kidney function, infection, lack of mobility or edema," says Dr. Alp Sener, Lawson Scientist and Transplant Surgeon in the Multi-Organ Transplant Program at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).

Edema is swelling caused by excess fluid trapped in the body's tissues which can impact wound healing. The current standard of care for managing lower-limb edema and improving blood flow is thrombo-embolic-deterrent ("TED") stockings used with compression devices. Sleeves pumped with air squeeze the lower legs to boost circulation. They can be uncomfortable to wear, and the large pump can inhibit early mobility and disrupt sleep after surgery.

In a randomized controlled clinical trial spanning two years, 221 transplant recipients at LHSC either wore the standard TED stocking and pump or the geko device for six days after surgery. Dr. Sener's research team found that wearing the device increased urine output by 27 per cent and lowered weight gain by over a kilogram. With more urine produced and less fluid retention, patients experienced 31 per cent less swelling. The duration of costly hospitalization was shortened by over one day after kidney transplantation compared to the standard of care.

A 60 per cent reduction in wound infection rates was a striking observation. "Transplant patients are at a higher risk of infection due to the immunosuppressant medications needed after surgery," explains Dr. Sener, who is also the President of the Urologic Society for Transplantation and Renal Surgery, a global organization affiliated with the American Urological Association. "Reducing infection means a much better outcome for the patient and considering that recent data shows wound infections can cost the health care system thousands of dollars per person, it's a win-win situation."

Some of the study participants wore pedometers to track their steps, and those using the geko device had improved mobility after surgery. The team suspects this may be due to reduced swelling which could improve ease and comfort when moving.

"The study results have been both surprising and exciting. Not only have we cut down wound infection rates but we have also seen a considerable improvement in the new organ's function following transplantation. Patients report feeling more satisfied with the transplant process and are more mobile," says Dr. Sener. The geko device is now being offered to patients at LHSC in recovery after receiving a new kidney.

Ruben Garcia, 68 years old, recently received a new kidney from his daughter, Ruby, who was a match as a living kidney donor. Following his surgery, Garcia found it difficult to get out of bed due to the pain and swelling, and the function of his new kidney was very low. "My surgeon explained in very simple terms that it was as if my new kidney wasn't awake yet," describes Garcia.

Dr. Sener recommended that Garcia use the geko device to help stimulate blood flow in a way that is similar to walking. Garcia was soon able to sit up on a chair and by the next day he was walking. "My kidney woke up and starting working again! I could feel the device working and it was comfortable to wear, almost like a massage for my legs. I'm very grateful for the care that I received."

Dr. Sener adds that "using a muscle pump activator could be a game changer for other procedures like orthopedic implants where wound infection can have disastrous consequences or in surgeries where wound infections are more common such as in cancer and intestinal surgery."

The geko device is non-invasive, self-adhering, battery-powered and recyclable. It generates neuromuscular electro-stimulation and unparalleled systemic blood flow that equates to 60 per cent of that achieved by walking. Pain-free muscle contraction compresses deep veins in the lower legs to create better blood flow in these vessels and return blood to the heart. It is particularly well suited to hospital settings as it portable and requires minimal training. For the indications for the use of the geko device, go to http://www. gekodevices. com

"The results of the study provide further evidence that the geko device is an effective treatment option that can improve outcomes for patients and help them return home sooner, while reducing costs for the health-care system," says George Baran, Executive Chairman of the Trudell Medical Group and a Director of Sky Medical.

The study "Daily use of a muscle pump activator device reduces duration of hospitalization and improves early graft outcomes post-kidney transplantation: A randomized controlled trial" is published in CUAJ.

###

Lawson Health Research Institute: Lawson Health Research Institute is one of Canada's top hospital-based research institutes, tackling the most pressing challenges in health care. As the research institute of London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph's Health Care London, our innovation happens where care is delivered. Lawson research teams are at the leading-edge of science with the goal of improving health and the delivery of care for patients. Working in partnership with Western University, our researchers are encouraged to pursue their curiosity, collaborate often and share their discoveries widely. Research conducted through Lawson makes a difference in the lives of patients, families and communities around the world. To learn more, visit http://www. lawsonresearch. ca .

For more information, please contact:
Glioblastoma multiforme is among the most lethal of cancers and the most stubborn in the face of treatment. Fewer than 20 percent of patients survive more than two years after diagnosis, according to the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States.

But a team of researchers at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and City of Hope, a comprehensive care center, believes the complex way fluid flows through glioblastoma tumors holds the key to the therapy's success. They believe they can use that flow to improve chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CAR-T) and help more patients survive.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded the team $3.75 million to study the impact of fluid flow on the therapy over the next five years.

We believe we can actually encourage the T cells to move deeper into the tumor and search out those invading tumor cells in the brain and kill them." Jennifer Munson, Associate Professor, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute

Christine Brown, The Heritage Provider Network Professor in Immunotherapy, and Russell Rockne, director of the Division of Mathematical Oncology, both at City of Hope in Duarte, California, complete the multi-investigator team.

CAR-T cell therapy has been successful in treating a range of cancers. The method uses immune system cells called T cells that are genetically engineered to recognize and kill cancer cells. These engineered cells are injected into the patient's body where they replicate and attack the tumor.

Brown has led the preclinical development and clinical translation of CAR-T cells for the treatment of glioblastoma at City of Hope and was part of the team that in 2017 successfully used CAR-T cell therapy to drive glioblastoma into remission in a patient.

But results of the therapy have been inconsistent from patient to patient, Munson said. The team's study aims to identify the patient-specific factors that cause the therapy to work in some patients, but not others, while improving the therapy's implementation.

Munson's lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute will study the movement of liquid within human tissues, called interstitial fluid flow, to understand how beneficial T cells penetrate tumors. Munson specializes in engineering tissue models, so-called "tumors in a dish," which can replicate the tumors of individual patients, so the researchers can see how the cells move inside a tumor.

Munson and Brown's labs will work together to develop methods to adjust fluid flow to improve the effectiveness of the T-cell therapy. Ian Kimbrough, assistant professor in Virginia Tech's College of Science, and John Rossmeisl, the Dr. and Mrs. Dorsey Taylor Mahin Professor at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, are part of the team for this aspect of the study.

"We want to know if we can deliver T cells into a specific part of the tumor, or at a specific flow rate or volume, to basically push the T cells around or move them where we need them to go," said Munson, who also is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering.

Rockne will build mathematical models to identify biomarkers to predict if the therapy will be effective in individual patients. He compared fluid flow through tumors to a river reaching the ocean, where it may leak in numerous directions.

"Glioblastomas disrupt the blood vessel network, creating leaky vessels, like river deltas, that create complicated flows within and around the tumor. Mathematics allows us to model and quantify how those complicated, river delta-like disrupted flows contribute to CAR-T cell migration and efficacy," Rockne said.

Treatments and the survival rates for patients with gliobastomas haven't improved in decades, Munson said. The team's study affords an opportunity to contribute to progress in the ongoing enterprise of the research community to deploy multiple approaches to improve outcomes for patients with this disease.
[April 29, 2021] Military-inspired Lifestyle Brand "TACTISM" Expands Territory to Amazon

TOKYO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 7, 2021, Five Star Elements Inc. announced TACTISM, a lifestyle brand that incorporates military taste into everyday life. The first product from Tactism is the "Alpha" shock-resistant case for the iPhone 12 series. It is accented with a camouflage pattern and has been researched and designed to make it more comfortable and stress-free to use because it is one of the items in the everyday life. In celebration of the launch, Tactism will be offering 20% discount from the MSRP, with a special 5% off coupons. This is for a limited time only. iPhone 12 series case "Alpha" Features of iPhone 12 series case Alpha

1. Military-inspired Design

This case delivers simple and modern style with its matte black color, while the camouflage pattern on the top and bottom provides a unique twist. The logos are placed on the side and back in a subtle and sophisticated way. The cutout in a hexagonal shape on the back gives the case a sharper and more sophisticated look. Recommended for those who like to use something simple yet distinctive. 2. Rigid Structure that Meets U.S. Military Standard

The case is certified Military Grade (U.S. Military Standard) that guarantees high durability. More specifically, the case passed the "MIL-STD 810 Rev. H" test conducted by a third party, proving it meets the Military Standard. In addition to the shock-absorbing material, air cushions are provided at the four corners for unexpected drops. Furtermore, the inner layer with a hexagonal pattern disperses/absorbs the impact at the time of dropping and provides your smartphone a firm protection against drops.



3. High-quality Special Soft TPU Material that is Flexible and Heat-resistance

With the use of special soft TPU material that does not easily deform even at high temperatures, the case is resistant to deform from the heat generated by the phone. It is highly flexible, and easy to attach and remove. 4. Compatible with Wireless Chargers

Wireless charging (Qi charging) is possible with the case attached. *When using MagSafe, the magnetic force is weaker than when the case is not attached. Please note that the phone may not be fully charged depending on the position where it is placed.

5. Strap Holes on the Left and Right

The case comes with strap holes, which many people like to use for fall prevention, on the left and right. Having the holes on both sides gives you the freedom to choose and is also convenient when attaching a neck strap. Enjoy customizing your phone by combining straps of your favorite design. ALPHA offers two colors: Tactical black and Recon green. Product Page: https://amzn.to/2QZUjGy Overview of TACTISM Launch Campaign Sale period: APR 30, 2021 - May 31, 2021

20% off from MSRP + 5% off with coupon

Target products: iPhone 12 series case "Alpha"

How to use coupon: Check [Apply coupon] on the product page Military-inspired lifestyle brand TACTISM About the brand ?Tactical thinking is necessary in our lives. The brand name "Tactism" is created by combining the word "Tactical" with the suffix "-ism." These days, we are constantly exposed to various risks such as natural disasters and pandemics.

To live and survive in such an increasingly complex and stressful world, it is imperative that we think ahead, make necessary preparations, and have superior tools. The very mission of Tactism is to create and provide tools needed by preppers in the modern world  tools that are useful in our daily lives, whether in the city, at school, at the office, or sometimes, in outdoor occasions like camping sites, and of course, in case of emergency.

We also believe that such tools must offer not only convenience but also a sense of reassurance and enjoyment. The era of just pursuing material abundance is over, and today, we are facing a host of resources and environmental issues to tackle.

Tactism strives to offer tactical products which enrich people's lives to the fullest, with minimal tools. Naming Concept In the military phonetic alphabet, "ALPHA" represents the letter "A."

As "ALPHA" also represents "the beginning" or "the first," we named the very first Tactism product "ALPHA." We believe this will be a very exciting, first big step for Tactism in becoming the A to Z of our customers' lifestyle. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/military-inspired-lifestyle-brand-tactism-expands-territory-to-amazon-301280358.html SOURCE Five Star Elements Inc.

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Close on the heels of a new asset reconstruction company (ARC) to be set up by public sector banks, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced the formation of a high-level committee to review the working of existing ARCs. There are over a dozen ARCs in the private sector, though only 3-4 dominate the bad loan resolution business. The RBI-appointed committee would review the existing legal and regulatory framework, suggest measures to improve efficacy, study the role of ARCs in the resolution of stressed assets under Insolveny and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), and recommend ideas for improving liquidity and trading of security receipts (SRs). Let's take a look at the five big changes that are needed to strengthen the ARC framework in India.

ALSO READ: RBI panel on ARCs invites views from market participants, other stakeholders

Transformation from recovery agent of banks, NBFCs to resolution agent

The ARCs were set up under the the SARFAESI Act 2002 for bad loan resolution in the banking industry. They were designed to act as an agent for banks and NBFCs. The idea was to free up the institutions from the hassles of handling NPAs by setting up a specialised agency to restructure and resolve the loans. When ARCs were set up, they were considered to be a better recovery mechanism by virtue of being a specialised entity going after the defaulters and restructuring the loan or sale of assets. But a lot has changed in the last decade post the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The Act governing the ARCs needs to be changed to give them more freedom and flexibility. "ARCs should acquire whichever assets in whichever form," says an expert.

Permitting acquisition of assets under investigations for fraud

The RBI doesn't allow ARCs to buy fraudulent loans from banks and NBFCs. In any bad loan, the chances of fraud are very high because of multiple borrowers. In fact, as the banks have started using forensic audits and more digital tools, the instances of fraud in corporate loans are on the rise. But the RBI's diktat comes in the way of ARCs buying such assets. Take, for instance, the Piramals' recent purchase of Dewan Housing Finance (DHFL), where auditors revealed several instances of fraud. The decision to buy or not to buy or at what price should be left to banks and ARCs.

ALSO READ: RBI forms panel to review ARCs, mould them to suit financial sector needs

Allowing ARCs as resolution applicant in the bankruptcy process

The ARCs should be allowed to participate as resolution applicants in the IBC process. The SARFESI Act, which came much before IBC, is naturally silent. It may be pointed out that the RBI had turned down the application of an ARC some years ago to participate in the resolution of a failed telecom company as a resolution applicant. The ARC industry has been demanding amendments in the SARFESI Act. The IBC has been the most pathbreaking reform in the NPA resolution space. In 2019-20, the amount recovered as per cent of the amount involved under IBC was the highest at 45.5 per cent, followed by ARCs at 26 per cent.

Relaxation in equity cap for ARCs in stressed companies

The SARFESI Act allows ARCs to hold up to 26 per cent equity by way of conversion of existing debt into equity. But it doesn't allow ARCs to acquire additional equity directly or invest in fresh equity. The Act also prohibits ARCs to do any business other than that of resolution of bad assets. These guidelines restrict the operations of ARCs in the IBC regime where the resolution would involve infusing fresh equity or holding the assets for some time to create value before exiting the company.

ALSO READ: SC denies defaulting promoters back-door entry in insolvency process

Redesigning the asset buying structure

Some eight years ago, the RBI had revised the 5:95 structure of sale of assets by banks to ARCs to 15:85 structure. This meant the ARCs' investment limit in security receipt was hiked to 15 per cent as against 5 per cent earlier. Under the new rule, the trust created by ARC for resolving bad loans is paying cash of 15 per cent of the value and the money is going to selling banks. The SRs are issued to banks for the remaining 85 per cent. The idea was to have more skin in the game. While ARCs earn management fee, the recovery rate or the redemption of SRs have been abysmal. There are also challenges for ARCs to protect their capital in the 15:85 structure if the assumed recovery doesn't happen.
100+ City Bless Your Pastor Tour to Address Growing Challenges for Many Pastors, Churches





NEWS PROVIDED BY

National Association of Evangelicals

April 29, 2021



WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ -- As part of the National Association of Evangelicals' (NAE) Financial Health initiative, Brian Kluth, national spokesperson, will travel to over 100 cities across America on the Bless Your Pastor Tour to encourage greater financial health and generosity of churches and pastors.



The NAE's national research shows that pastors are facing personal and church financial challenges:

90% of pastors are experiencing financial stress (which has increased since COVID-19).



83% of pastors are providing both in person and online worship services to care for their flock.



60% of pastors receive no retirement, health care or employee benefits.



50% of pastors are paid under $50,000 while working 50 to 70 hours every week.



40% of pastor spouses serve the church 20 or more hours per week, normally without any pay.



80% of churches are under 200 people and have an average budget of $125,000.



34% of churches have seen their giving decrease because of COVID-19.

NAE Financial Health offers solutions for pastors and churches facing economic challenges, including self-assessment surveys, Best Practices resources, and online training courses. Since 2019, the Bless Your Pastor campaign  which is part of NAE Financial Health  has helped churches show and share God's love for their pastor and church staff. Over 2,000 churches have participated, raising $1.25 million in appreciation offerings. In addition, the NAE has sent $500,000 in grant-funded gift cards to senior pastors at participating churches.



On the national Bless Your Pastor media tour, Kluth will be visiting local radio and TV stations to provide Bless Your Pastor materials and to record live or pre-recorded interviews. Upon the request of the station or local ministerial groups, he will also offer a free "Financial Health and Generosity" seminar and grant-funded online training materials to bless local pastors and leaders.



"These have been challenging times for pastors and churches," said Kluth. "But by God's grace, for the past six years we've been developing quality, grant-funded financial health and generosity online training resources. We now have good seed in the barn that we can freely give to bless pastors and churches across America with the Bless Your Pastor Tour materials, interviews and free seminars."



Brian Kluth, national spokesperson for NAE Financial Health, has served within the financial health and generosity space for over 35 years, has authored several books and resources, and is a frequent media guest on local television news and radio programs. Kluth learned that God has many ways to care for pastors through their congregation when his first wife went through an 8-year cancer journey. This experience inspired him to write the list of "50 Creative Ways to Bless Your Pastor and Staff" and to help lead this movement.



Founded in 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals includes more than 45,000 churches from 40 denominations and serves a constituency of millions. The NAE provides resources, connection and influence to help evangelical leaders foster thriving communities and navigate complexity with biblical clarity.



SOURCE National Association of Evangelicals



CONTACT: Carolyn Shaw, 219-776-7707, CShaw@BlessYourPastor.org


Two Midland High School graduates have won international film awards for a series of public service announcements that premiered last year on Chicago public television.

Midland resident Mark Starks co-produced the ComicBooks For Kids! PSA, televised spots about a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides new comic books and pop culture items to hospitalized children in the United States and troops throughout the world. Hollywood actor and Midland native Paul Ganus provided his voiceover talent for the campaign.

Mark Weiss, founder and president of the nonprofit ComicBooks for Kids! and its sister site ComicBooks for Troops!, co-produced the spots with Starks.

Starks said he discovered the nonprofit more than a year ago. He felt his interests and professional talents as a comic book creator and filmmaker could help the organization gain more exposure. So, he reached out to Weiss and the rest is history.

I knew our team could create a series of PSAs that could hopefully bring more attention to the organization, Starks said. ...It goes back to me always being a comic book fan and a pop culture fan. I was immediately drawn to them and moved by their mission.

The spots, featuring pictures of kids and troops receiving their gifts along with narration, appeared on Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV) last summer and are planned for nationwide cable station distribution. Starks said the campaign received more than one dozen global film awards to date, including a voice-over award for Ganus.

This summer an updated version with new animation will compete for a Chicago/Midwest Emmy award.

We are very pleased with the response, Starks said. I think viewers are moved.

ComicBooks for Kids!, started in 2017, serves children in 175 hospitals in every state of the country. ComicBooks for Troops!, started last year, has already provided 12,000 comic books to the military in the last several months, according to a release.

We are thrilled to work with Mark Starks and his creative personality, Weiss said in a statement. It is all about the kids and creating awareness to help as many children as we can. Mark is helping us achieve that goal.

Starks said he is thankful for the Hollywood talent in the PSA. He met Ganus in high school and even participated in the same school play together. The spot also includes a short narration at the end by Wally Wingert, a former announcer with The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, who Starks met at a conference.

I am really fortunate they were able to help me out, Starks said. They lend credibility to the project.

Looking ahead, Starks is excited about the Chicago/Midwest Emmy possibility and the impact the nationwide distribution will have on ComicBooks for Kids!.

Its all about the kids, helping out the kids and the troops, he said.
Funding to provide boost to UK's international student population

LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- South Asia's largest online higher education company, upGrad, today announced that it has raised USD 120 million from Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore.

upGrad plans to use a portion of the fresh capital to support UK institutions whose international student population has suffered as a result of the pandemic. The edtech platform plans to help more universities accessible to the world by taking services online.

The cost-effective proposition offers university partners with a new revenue stream at no extra cost, with only limited faculty time required in the first year.

upGrad Co-Founders Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompallisaid in a joint statement, "We welcome Temasek in our mission to power career success for each and every member of the global workforce as their trusted LifeLongLearning partner and drive meaningful career outcomes. This capital will further fuel our commitment towards the UK market, which will houses upGrad's first international headquarters in London."

Elsewhere, upGrad will be using the funding to strengthen its team, scale its global market operations, bolster its technology and product capabilities, pursue M&A opportunities, expend graduate and post-graduate degree portfolio in India, and scale up operations to achieve its USD 2 billion revenue goal by 2026.

This is the first external funding raised by the online edtech platform. Since its founding six years ago, upGrad has been 100% owned, funded, and run by its co-founders as a capital-efficient business.

Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive financial advisor to upGrad, and Rajaram Legal acted as legal advisor.

About upGrad

upGrad is South Asia's largest online higher edtech company offering 100+ courses in collaboration with top-notch global universities like Duke Corporate Education (US), Michigan State University (US), Liverpool John Moores University (UK), Deakin Business School (Australia), Swiss School of Business Management, (Geneva), IIT Madras (India), IIM Kozhikode (India), and others. Founded in 2015, the international edtech leader has impacted over 1 million total registered learners over 50+ countries across the world.

upGrad has ranked No.1 in the LinkedIn Top Startups India 2020 list. This is the third time in a row that upGrad has been featured in the LinkedIn Top Startup list after 2018 and 2019. It is also amongst GSV Global EdTech 50 and has ranked amongst the Top 50 in the FT Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies 2021.

To know more, visit: www.upgrad.com

About Temasek

Temasek is an investment company with a net portfolio value of S$306 billion (US$214 billion) as of 31 March 2020. Its three roles as an Investor, Institution and Steward, as defined in the Temasek Charter, shape Temasek's ethos to do well, do right and do good. Temasek actively seeks sustainable solutions to address present and future challenges, through investment and other opportunities that help to bring about a better, smarter and more sustainable world.

For more information on Temasek, please visit www.temasek.com.sg
ATLANTA, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Church's Chicken , the iconic quick-service restaurant known for serving up bold flavors and warm welcomes for more than 60 years, is adding brighter futures to its menu. The company has launched its Rising Stars Education program  an initiative offering restaurant Team Members and Shift Leaders who have been with the company a minimum 90 days the opportunity to earn their GED credential at their own pace. Launched in August 2020, the program currently has 15 students enrolled and working towards their high school equivalency diploma.

"As a Company, we have a strong commitment to the equality of opportunity. Church's partnership with Pearson's GED program opens the door for equality of opportunity by providing our Team Members that do not have a High School Diploma the opportunities to be considered and move into management. We see this as a game changer, a way to impact someone's life and a path to a better future," said Karen Viera, Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at Church's Chicken. "Equality, Diversity and Inclusion often starts with equality of opportunity and we are committed to finding programs that support our Company's values."

The very first graduate completed the program in December 2020 in Memphis, TN. Her hard work and dedication truly showed as she completed the program in just 4 months. Immediately after graduating, she enrolled in college and began classes in January 2021.

"The timing was perfect," said the Graduate. "With virtual learning during the pandemic, I wanted to enroll to encourage my children that even though virtual schooling can be difficult, do not give up. Take the challenge, stick with it and your time and energy will be worth it. The gain is much larger than the obstacle."

"Offering employees an opportunity to further their education while continuing to work improves retention, employee satisfaction, and helps workers make progress in their careers," said James Reeve, managing director, Accelerated Pathways, Pearson. "We are proud to partner with Church's as they take this bold step to help put employees on a path to management and achieve their education goals by earning a GED through their Rising Stars program."

Once employees are accepted in the program, they are assigned an advisor and given a general assessment. Team Members work their way through four core subject areas including reasoning through language arts, social studies, science, and mathematical reasoning. Upon testing and passing each subject, team members graduate and are awarded their GED credential - a task participants may be able to achieve within just three to six months.

"Church's has always been a place where hardworking people can get ahead," Johnson continued. "So our goal with this program is ultimately to see more of our team members graduate, so we're able to promote from within. Whether you're interested in restaurant management, human resources, or field training, with Rising Stars, the sky's the limit!

"The response to Church's Rising Stars has been outstanding," said Jayauna Johnson, Senior Manager of Total Rewards at Church's Chicken. "Our restaurant team members truly are what makes it all possible  from the chicken marinating to the Honey-Butter Biscuit drizzling  so it's wonderful to be able to offer this program, which once completed can open all kinds of doors for them on the restaurant level and beyond!"

About Church's Chicken / Texas Chicken/ Church's Texas Chicken

Founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1952 by George W. Church, Church's Chicken is one of the largest quick-service restaurant chicken chains in the world. Church's specializes in Original and Spicy Chicken freshly prepared throughout the day in small batches that are hand-battered and double-breaded, Chicken Sandwich, Texas Tenders, Honey-Butter Biscuits made from scratch and freshly baked, and classic, homestyle sides all for a great value. Church's (along with its sister brands Church's Texas Chicken in the Americas and Texas Chicken outside the Americas) has more than 1,500 locations in 26 countries and international territories. During two national media windows the brand drove sales performance that outpaced the broader QSR category. For more information, visit www.churchs.com. Follow Church's on Facebook at www.facebook.com/churchschicken and Twitter at www.twitter.com/churchschicken

About Pearson

Learning is the most powerful force for change in the world. More than 20,000 Pearson employees deliver our products and services in nearly 200 countries, all working towards a common purpose  to help everyone achieve their potential through learning. We do that by providing high quality, digital content and learning experiences, as well as assessments and qualifications that help people build their skills and grow with the world around them. We are the world's leading learning company. Learn more at pearsonplc.com

Contact: Kim Miller

866.571.3449

[email protected]

SOURCE Church's Chicken

Related Links

https://www.churchs.com


File Photo

Amid a massive surge in the COVID-19 cases, the Uttarakhand government on Thursday suspended the Char Dham Yatra for this year. The yatra was scheduled to start from May 14. Read more

Here's more top news of the day:

1) Why Are Delhi's COVID-19 Testing Numbers Falling? Here's The Impact It Will Have On The Crisis

BCCL

Daily testing for Covid-19 in Delhi has reduced by nearly 27% over the past two weeks. This, even as the positivity rate is around 32%, meaning every third person getting tested in the city is turning positive. Read more

2) 'You Want People To Die': Delhi HC On Centre's Rule On Remdesivir To Patients On Oxygen Support

PTI

Objecting to "change" by Centre in the Covid treatment protocol related to Remdesivir use amid a shortage of the drug, the Delhi high court said "it appears you want people to die". Read more

3) Holding Kumbh Mela Made State A Laughing Stock: Uttarakhand High Court Hits Out At State Govt

Reuters

The Uttarakhand high court has lashed out at the state government over the burgeoning COVID situation. It said the state has become a laughing stock due to its organising the Kumbh Mela in the middle of a raging pandemic. Read more

4) Now Kerala To Explore Possibility Of Manufacturing COVID-19 Vaccines At Home In A PSU

AFP

Unlike in the previous phases where the Central government was the sole supplier of the shots to the states, now on they have been given an option to buy the vaccines directly from the drugmakers. Read more

5) How Startups Procured 1,365 Oxygen Concentrators & Raised Rs 13 Cr To Help India Fight COVID

Mission Oxygen

Amid international aid pouring in, a group of startups have launched a donation programme Mission Oxygen' under their NGO Democracy People Foundation, via Ketto to initially raise about Rs. 2.5 cr to source 500 Oxygen Concentrators (OCs) from China. Read more
This undated electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020, shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, blue/pink, cultured in the lab. Also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus causes COVID-19. The sample was isolated from a patient in the U.S. According to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, NIAID-RML

FREDERICTON - New Brunswick reported 10 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday.

Health officials said the Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton regions each had two new cases, the Edmundston area had three new cases and the Bathurst region had one.

Four people are hospitalized with the disease, officials said, including two in intensive care. The province now has 118 active reported infections.

Officials also gave an update on an outbreak of the disease at a residence on the Fredericton campus of the University of New Brunswick.

To date, 10 cases have been linked to the outbreak in Magee House that was caused by the variant of COVID-19 first identified in India, chief medical officer Dr. Jennifer Russell said.

Staff and residents at another of the university's residences, Elizabeth Parr-Johnston, were tested on Tuesday and so far all results have been negative.

The cases in the Fredericton area outbreak are all connected, and this situation illustrates what we are up against, Russell said in a statement Thursday. This is a virus that can and will spread quickly through casual contact. We must take every measure we can to slow the spread of COVID-19.

On the vaccination front, Education Minister Dominic Cardy said 35 per cent of New Brunswickers have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

More than 257,000 vaccine doses have been administered in the province to date.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.

  

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Vivo follows a kinkajou (a kind of rainforest mammal) as it embarks on a quest from Cuba to Miami to deliver a love letter from its owner. Songs are written and performed by Miranda, who voices the kinkajou. Kirk DeMicco (The Croods) directs alongside co-director Brandon Jeffords (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2). The script is by DeMicco and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the book for Mirandas musical In the Heights.

Since the start of the year, two other SPA features have been unveiled as Netflix exclusives in the U.S.: the Chinese co-production Wish Dragon and Mike Riandas The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The former debuts June 11, and the latter premieres this Friday.

Earlier this month, Sony and Netflix announced a major licensing deal that gives the streamer exclusive U.S. rights to stream Sonys theatrical releases in the first pay tv window, as of next year. Netflix also has a first-look agreement covering all Sonys original direct-to-streaming movies.

The next big-studio animated feature currently scheduled to come out in U.S. theaters is Spirit Untamed, from Dreamworks Animation and Universal Pictures, which is set for June 4. Other features previously on the summer theatrical calendar have been delayed, like Minions: The Rise of Gru, or also rerouted to streaming, like Pixars Luca (which will now debut on Disney+).
New Delhi:

Hyderabad Police have arrested a man from city outskirts for allegedly raping and impregnating 16-year-old daughter on Sunday.

According to police, a case was registered against the man by the victim after she was counselled by a city based NGO Balala Hakkula Sangham.

Achyuta Rao honorary president of the NGO told to the media, Girl is now five months pregnant.

She has also appealed to the to Women and Child welfare officials to examine the possibilities medical termination and take care of the girl on government cost.

Hyderabad Police said, that the accused is a labour and he allegedly rape his daughter several times over the past few months. Multiple rapes of the victim by her father led to her impregnation.

Police have registered an FIR under relevant Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections and POSCO acts. The accused has been arrested, said Hyderabad Police.

Police also informed the media that Rao had lost her mother in 2007 to the accused's brutality.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Africa risks being overrun by coronavirus infections if urgent measures are not taken to avert a similar disaster to the "very concerning" crisis in India, the continent's disease control body said Thursday.

India, a vast subcontinent with a population similar to that of Africa, is fighting an explosion of infections, with jarring scenes of citizens desperately seeking oxygen and medicines.

This has prompted fears that as new variants spread, Africa's fragile healthcare systems could crash.

"We are watching in total disbelief what is happening in India. The situation in india is very, very concerning to us as a continent. It speaks to the fact that we as a continent must be very prepared," Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), told a press conference.

Despite early predictions of disaster on the continent, Africa has so far been spared compared to other regions, counting 3.1 percent of global virus cases and about four percent of global deaths, according to the Africa CDC.

India, like many African nations, took strict early measures to combat the virus and it appeared the country had been spared the worst because of its young population.

However a new variant and mass gatherings have led to a surge in infections that has overwhelmed Indian hospitals, crematoriums and graveyards.

"It is a wake up call. We cannot be indifferent to what is happening in India. We must act now, decisively and collectively," said Nkengasong.

The African Union will convene an emergency meeting with member states' health ministers on May 8.

"We need to regroup and prepare ourselves," said Nkengasong.

India on Thursday reported 3,645 deaths and almost 380,000 cases in the last 24 hours.

Africa CDC urged a return to the basics of heeding public health guidelines to keep infections at bay by avoiding mass gatherings and wearing face masks.

"Masks work. They are the only 'vaccines' we have," said Nkengasong.

Africa still lags behind in its inoculation campaign, with the process suffering a setback after India, which manufactures the shots supplied through the global vaccine-sharing facility Covax, decided to reduce exports to address domestic needs.

But Nkengasong said vaccine hesitancy was also hindering uptake.

Some countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, have had to return jabs to the Covax facility for redistribution after failing to use them with expiry fast approaching. Jabs have also expired in South Sudan and Malawi.

So far, the continent has administered 17.9 million doses of vaccines.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
Tom is well known as a tireless champion of Indigenous rights in the judicial system. For the Metis Nation, he will long be remembered for his work as counsel for the Manitoba Metis Federation (MMF) in its land claim against the Government of Canada. Tom was involved in this capacity for most of the 32 year history of the case that culminated in the monumental ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada in Manitoba Metis Federation v. Canada in 2013.

I well remember his masterful presentation of the MMF case before the Supreme Court of Canada when he put the history of Canada and its westward expansion on trial. He carefully documented the role of the Metis Nation as Canada's partner in bringing Manitoba into Confederation through the Manitoba Act 1870, the constitutional promise of a land base for the Metis in the Act, and Canada's betrayal of this promise.

The court held that Canada did not uphold the honour of the Crown in its failure to fulfill its constitutional obligation to the Metis. It stated that "the ongoing rift in the national fabric  remains unremedied. The unfinished business of reconciliation of the Metis people with Canadian sovereignty is a matter of national and constitutional import."

Shortly afterward, Tom reflected on the decision in the Globe and Mail:

"Indeed, the rift in the national fabric remains unremedied. But the remedy lies with us. It's not too late for Canada to negotiate a modern land claims agreement with the Metis. We can't reclaim the past, but we can do justice in our own time."

These words capture the mindset and message of the man we knew and deeply respected. Thank you, Tom.

The MNC represents the Metis Nation in Canada at the national and international levels. The Metis Nation's homeland includes the 3 Prairie Provinces and extends into the contiguous parts of British Columbia, Ontario, the Northwest Territories and the United States. There are approximately 400,000 Metis Nation citizens in Canada, roughly a quarter of all Aboriginal peoples in the country.

SOURCE Metis National Council

For further information: Ke Ning, Metis National Council, [email protected], c: 613-297-5193

Related Links

www.metisnation.ca


COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Safelite Group, the nation's leading vehicle glass services and recalibration company and owner of Safelite AutoGlass, announced today an agreement to acquire the assets of Troy Auto Glass in Troy, Michigan. The transaction was completed on Wednesday, April 28, 2021.

"Welcoming associates from Troy Auto Glass is such a great pleasure," said Tom Feeney, president and CEO of Safelite Group. "Their talented team takes pride in providing old-fashioned and friendly service, earning them a highly respected reputation for over 55 years. And their mission and values nicely align with ours, making this acquisition a terrific addition to our business."

Safelite is known for its excellence with vehicle glass repair, replacement and recalibration services. "While we're a national brand, we understand and value the personal care and memorable customer service we provide in every community," Feeney said. "We look forward to serving even more customers under our Safelite AutoGlass brand."

Troy Auto Glass will leverage Safelite's excellent operational systems, advanced safety system expertise (recalibrations), world-class distribution network, global purchasing power and strong insurance and commercial relationships.

About Safelite Group

Safelite Group is a multi-faceted vehicle glass and claims management service organization based in Columbus, Ohio, and operating company-owned facilities in 50 states. The company, which has been in business since 1947, is comprised of two major business operations: Safelite AutoGlass, a vehicle glass repair, replacement and recalibration services provider and Safelite Solutions, which offers fleet and insurance claims management services for vehicle glass and other claims. The company employs nearly 16,000 people throughout the United States. Safelite is a subsidiary of Belron. Safelite AutoGlass is the largest vehicle glass repair, replacement and recalibration company under one brand in the world.

Media Contact: To connect with a Safelite spokesperson email [email protected].

SOURCE Safelite Group

Related Links

http://www.safelite.com


Vietnam announced 45 coronavirus cases, including six locally-transmitted infections, on Thursday after having gone over a month without detecting any community-based transmission.

Six of the new cases were domestic transmissions,the Ministry of Health said in a report.

The source of infection is believed to be patient No. 2,899, who was diagnosed on Thursday.

He landed in Da Nang on board flight VJ3613 from Japan on April 7 and was sent to centralized quarantine upon entry.

The patient finished his quarantine on April 21 after having tested negative for the novel coronavirus three times.

He left Da Nang on April 21 and came home in northern Ha Nam Province on April 22.

Two days later, he coughed, ran a fever, and had a sore throat before testing positive for the first time in the province on Wednesday. His retest returned positive in Hanoi one day later.

His parents, wife, and daughter were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Thursday.

Another man who lives in Ho Chi Minh City and had come into close contact with him was also confirmed as a coronavirus case the same day.

Thirty nine of the 45 new cases were imported from Poland, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Russia, according to the health ministry.

Among these patients were two Indian experts who arrived in Vietnam on April 24 before testing positive on Thursday.

All 39 had been quarantined since their arrival in the country earlier this month, the health ministry noted.

Vietnam has recorded 2,910 COVID-19 patients, including 1,577 locally-transmitted cases, since the pathogen first struck the nation on January 23, 2020, according to the health ministrys data.

The Southeast Asian country had spent 33 days finding zero community transmissions before Thursday's detection.

Recoveries have reached 2,516 while 35 patients have died, most having suffered critical pre-existing conditions.

Health authorities have warned of a possible fourth wave of infections in Vietnam as the virus is taking a toll on its neighbors Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.

The third outbreak started blindsiding Vietnam in January this year, with nearly 1,000 local cases confirmed.

The remainder hit the nation last year.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The teen a Staten Island man met online and was trying to bed down wasnt really a 14-year-old girl.

She was an undercover New Jersey cop.

But the prison term slapped on John Emilio is very real.

Emilio, 44, was sentenced Wednesday in Burlington County Superior Court to three years behind bars for trying to arrange a sexual encounter with an underage girl.

In December, the defendant pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree endangering the welfare of children (impairing or debauching the morals of a child), to resolve the case.

Emilio, a Willowbrook resident, was busted in February of 2020 as the result of an online sting, said Burlington County prosecutors.

Emilio became a suspect in November of 2019 during an investigation by the Burlington County Prosecutors Office High-Tech Crimes Unit into the exploitation of children in cyberspace, prosecutors said.

That probe revealed Emilio initiated contact and sent photos of his genitals to an individual he believed was a 14-year-old girl, authorities said.

Emilio said he was very excited that he would be having sex with a girl so young, and looked forward to taking her virginity, prosecutors said.

But Emilio actually was communicating with a detective from the Burlington County unit.

Emilio discussed coming to Burlington County to have sex with the girl, either at a motel or inside his vehicle, said authorities. However, the trip never materialized.

As part of his sentence, the defendant will be placed on the New Jersey sex offender registry upon his release from prison. He will also be under parole supervision for life.

This defendants calculated, predatory behavior presented a very real and very dangerous threat to the vulnerable population he was targeting online, said Burlington County Prosecutor Scott Coffina in a statement. We are thankful that there was no actual victim, but this case underscores the risks to children from online communication, and we urge parents to pay attention to the cyber activity of their kids.

Assistant Prosecutor Joseph Remy handled the case.

Cioffa said the New York City Police Department Computer Crimes Squad aided in the probe.

Also assisting were the United States Homeland Security Investigations  Cherry Hill Office, the Cinnaminson Township Police Department and the Staten Island District Attorneys Office.

The name of Emilios lawyer was not immediately available.
[April 29, 2021] Harris Williams Advises ADB Companies, LLC on its Sale to Warren Equity Partners

Harris Williams, a global investment bank specializing in M&A advisory services, announces it advised ADB Companies, LLC and its affiliates (ADB), a leading turnkey provider of telecommunication and utility infrastructure solutions in the United States, on its sale to Warren Equity Partners (Warren Equity). ADB was previously part of the Keeley Companies family of companies. Rusty Keeley, CEO of the Keeley Companies, and Chad Johnson, CEO of ADB, will maintain significant equity stakes in ADB. Mr. Keeley and Mr. Johnson will continue as members of ADB's board of directors, and Mr. Johnson will remain CEO of ADB. The transaction was led by Drew Spitzer, Matt White and Greg Waller of the Harris Williams Energy, Power & Infrastructure (EPI) Group. "ADB has been a market leader and differentiated performer in the telecom services sector, which has led to considerable growth as the technology and network infrastructure buildout accelerates," said Drew Spitzer, a managing director at Harris Williams. "The ADB team did an incredible job building a truly uniqu business, and we look forward to watching the company's continued evolution alongside its new partner."



"We are seeing strong demand for top-quality assets like ADB as investors look for ways to capitalize on the 5G tailwinds and we believe the segment will continue to generate strong interest," added Matt White, a managing director at Harris Williams. "We believe this business is well positioned to take advantage of those tailwinds and we are pleased to have had the opportunity to work alongside the ADB and Keeley Companies teams." ADB leverages three decades of extensive experience providing fiber infrastructure construction and engineering services nationwide to complete projects on-time, under-budget and with the highest quality standards in the industry. ADB is nationally recognized for its customer-centric philosophy, backed by accountability and results. With a commitment to safety, people, and an "ALL IN" culture, ADB sets itself apart as a leader in building careers and developing long-standing partnerships.

Recognized as one of the largest privately held companies in St. Louis, Keeley Companies provides dynamic, creative services and solutions nationwide in the construction, infrastructure, technology, development, logistics and wireless sectors. In addition to ADB, Mercury and ZeroDay, Keeley Companies consists of L. Keeley Construction and KDG and is a proud partner of Inspired Solutions. Together, Keeley Companies is comprised of over 1,800 dedicated, diversified experts nationwide. Warren Equity is a private equity firm that invests in small and middle market operating companies primarily in North America. The firm invests in established companies where additional capital and operating resources can accelerate growth, targeting companies in the industrial services, industrial products, business services and distribution sectors. Warren Equity invests in the form of buyouts, growth equity and recapitalizations. Harris Williams, an investment bank specializing in M&A advisory services, advocates for sellers and buyers of companies worldwide through critical milestones and provides thoughtful advice during the lives of their businesses. By collaborating as one firm across Industry Groups and geographies, the firm helps its clients achieve outcomes that support their objectives and strategically create value. Harris Williams is committed to execution excellence and to building enduring, valued relationships that are based on mutual trust. Harris Williams is a subsidiary of the PNC (News - Alert) Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC). The Harris Williams EPI Group has significant experience advising market leading providers of technology, services and products across a broad range of sectors. These sectors include energy management; infrastructure services; utility services; testing, inspection, and certification services; environmental services; engineering and construction; power products and technology; and energy technology. For more information on the Group's experience, please visit the EPI Group's section of the Harris Williams website. Harris Williams LLC is a registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC. Harris Williams & Co. Ltd is a private limited company incorporated under English law with its registered office at 8th Floor, 20 Farringdon Street, London EC4A 4AB, UK, registered with the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales (registration number 07078852). Harris Williams & Co. Ltd is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Harris Williams & Co. Corporate Finance Advisors GmbH is registered in the commercial register of the local court of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, under HRB 107540. The registered address is Bockenheimer Landstrasse 33-35, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany (email address: hwgermany@harriswilliams.com). Geschaftsfuhrer/Directors: Jeffery H. Perkins, Paul Poggi. (VAT No. DE321666994). Harris Williams is a trade name under which Harris Williams LLC, Harris Williams & Co. Ltd and Harris Williams & Co. Corporate Finance Advisors GmbH conduct business. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005897/en/

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realme Philippines, the countrys leading smart technology brand, is changing the local smartphone scene yet again with the introduction of its first 108MP camera sensor technology. Since the onset of the new normal, technology played a big role in the transition to a more digital lifestyle and people had to adapt to this shift. To support the youth, realme has been actively aiming to bring these powerful tech features to every Filipino.

At present, with people encouraged to stay at home, Filipinos are turning to social media to share their creativity and inspiration. The rise of new content creators on platforms like TikTok, Kumu, and YouTube continues to grow at a steep pace. As the fastest-growing smartphone brand, realme responded by improving its camera features in order to take part in this youth movement.

Celebrity A-list Kathryn Bernardo posted on her Instagram story

commending the 108MP camera of realme

Enjoying this newest feature, Kathryn Bernardo, realme's brand ambassador, shared her delight with the brands leading 108MP camera technology.

Photo taken using realmes first 108MP camera sensor in La Union, Philippines

Capture Infinity with realmes 108MP camera sensor

Mobile photography has become one of the major features in the powerful capabilities of realme smartphones, integrating seamlessly into the youths modern lifestyle. Top smartphone brand realme Philippines aims to continue to make this technology accessible to everyone. This is why realme is bringing Samsungs leading camera sensor to its smartphones globally.

As one of the top tech global brands, realme is making this powerful technology available for every Filipino. From the first-ever TUV Rheinland certified smartphone in the entry-level segment -- C25, up to Philippines fastest-charging smartphone, realme 7 Pro. It is our dream to make these devices for every Filipinos partner to enjoy and harness the power of technology in their respective lifestyles shares realme Philippines Vice President for Marketing Austine Huang.

realmes 108MP camera sensor comes with a maximum resolution of 12000x9000, providing an-ultra sharp photo quality and producing images likened to those taken from mirrorless cameras. The 108MP sensor also supports 9-in-1 Pixel Binning technology, which enables nine adjacent 0.7m pixels to be combined to one large 2.1m pixel and greatly improve image quality under dim light.

Photo taken using realmes first 108MP camera sensor in La Union, Philippines

realme continues to deliver a clearer camera optic to every Filipino. The brand has been constant in bringing new technology features to the Philippine market ever since the launch of the realme 3 Series and realme 5 Series. Last year, the mid-range champ realme 6 Series and content creators lifestyle partner realme 7 Series gained a lot of attention because of its spectacular camera features.
California wants to make it easier for homeowners to get solar panels and batteries installed as the state searches for new ways to accelerate its transition to clean energy.

The goal is simple: dramatically reduce the time it takes for contractors to receive standard permits from local governments.

To accomplish that, local agencies are starting to use a federally funded web application that creates an automated solar permitting process for cities and counties. Called SolarApp+, the technology allows contractors to seek and receive permits for typical rooftop solar installations instantaneously, if their application fulfills all requirements, instead of waiting potentially weeks to receive approvals.

The app is being deployed to about 500 government agencies in California, including Pleasant Hill, and 1,000 agencies in other states, officials announced Thursday. Those agencies hope to mirror the success already seen in places such as San Jose, which saw a sixfold increase in residential solar panel approvals after implementing its own speedy online permit program several years ago.

Jeff Cook, the SolarApp+ project lead at the federal governments National Renewable Energy Laboratory where the app was developed, said some jurisdictions in the country take up to a month and a half to process standard rooftop solar permits. That costs contractors valuable time and causes frustrating delays for homeowners.

Youve lost six weeks of potential electricity bill savings just because you havent been able to get that permit reviewed, Cook said. And its not because the jurisdiction is sitting on them and not revising the permits  there are huge backlogs. One of the key goals of the app is around helping jurisdictions that are overwhelmed.

Local news for a global problem More local climate change stories and solutions in the MicroClimates newsletter. SIGN UP

The app could expand further if a bill advancing through the state Legislature becomes law. Carried by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, SB617 would require automated solar permitting in counties with more than 150,000 residents. The bill was passed by the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee on a bipartisan vote Monday.

To meet our climate goals, a dramatic expansion of solar and energy storage is critical, Wiener said. The permitting process often takes way too long and is too expensive. Automated, app-based permitting is the future, and we should bring the future to California now.

SolarApp+ was developed with a $920,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, along with help from companies such as Tesla and Sunrun.

Much of the apps expansion is happening with help from the San Ramon firm Accela, which provides software to local governments. Agencies that contract with Accela can essentially use SolarApp+ as a free add-on.

We can significantly reduce the cost, because we dont have all the cost of the human aspect of reviewing the plans, said Amber DOttavio, Accelas vice president of product management. Now those resources can be focused on more important or more complex plans.

About 10% of Californians have solar panels attached to their homes, a number that would need to triple over the next decade to keep the state on track to meeting its climate goals, according to the California Solar and Storage Association, an industry group that was involved in developing SolarApp+.

Bringing the app to cities and counties across the state, a likely effect of SB617, would do more than just accelerate the approvals process, supporters say.

SolarApp+ can certainly increase the speed with which a permit is approved, but even in locations where its already moving pretty quickly, the other benefit of the app is error-proofing, said Igor Tregub, senior policy adviser with the solar and storage association. It actually has the potential to improve the accuracy of the approvals.

Within the large counties subject to SB617s requirements, cities and unincorporated areas with more than 50,000 residents would have until Sept. 30, 2022, to comply. Smaller areas would have to comply by the same date in 2023.

J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris
Native American women and girls know their heritage puts them at risk. They tell each other to take care. They all know it is easy for someone to take them and kill them and get away with it.

Preyed upon by attackers, rapists and killers familiar with the empty reaches of reservations, the patchwork of jurisdictions, the disregard of some and the silence of others, they are in danger just for being a Native woman or girl.

The statistics are grim.

A report from the National Institute of Justice found that more than four out of five Native American women have experienced violence in their lives. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control reported that homicide is the third leading cause of death among Native American women between the ages of 10 and 24. The Department of Justice has reported Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than other Americans.

On the 1.3-million-acre Yakama Reservation, women have passed down stories from as far back as the mid-1800s of rape and murder by miners, by soldiers, by other outsiders. The passage of time does not diminish the terror of these assaults, which continue today.

No one knows exactly how many Native girls and women have gone missing on or near the Yakama reservation.
Days after a request was made to the Texas Board of Pardons of Paroles to forgive a 2004 conviction against George Floyd, District Attorney Kim Ogg has followed up with a formal letter denouncing the arresting officers credibility.

The letter, signed Wednesday, asks for a posthumous pardon and questions the veracity of disgraced narcotics officer Gerald Goines offense report that led to prosecutors then accepting a delivery of a controlled substance charge against Floyd.

Former officer Goines is not credible, Ogg said in the two-page letter. We do not support the integrity of Mr. Floyds conviction and agree that these circumstances warrant a posthumous pardon.

The decision is pending approval by the Texas Board of Pardons of Paroles and then Gov. Greg Abbotts approval.

Ogg on Monday voiced support to a Harris County public defenders application for the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to reconsider the 17-year-old conviction, which stemmed from Goines arresting Floyd for possibly dealing a small amount of crack cocaine. The lawyer, Allison Mathis, contends Goines was the lone witness to the arrest and that he fabricated a second suspect to bolster his case in arresting Floyd.

Floyd, then a Third Ward resident, pleaded guilty to the delivery of a controlled substance charge to avoid a stiffer punishment. He was then sentenced to 10 months in a state prison.

Oggs letter outlines the Harding Street drug raid in 2019 that led to allegations that Goines had not been truthful in that narcotics case and others in his law enforcement career. The drug raid left two people  Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas  dead and five police officers, including Goines, wounded. Fallout from the raid prompted criminal charges against a dozen current and former law enforcement officials, including the veteran cop after it was revealed he may have fabricated evidence for that case and others.

Goines has since been charged with murder, tampering with a government record, theft and federal civil rights violations.

The district attorneys office combed through hundreds of Goines past cases to identify other questionable convictions where Goines was also the only witness.

The investigation opened the possibility that some convictions could be vacated. The district attorneys office tried in 2019 to reach Floyd to alert him to the possibility of an investigation. The letter, among more than 1,200 correspondences sent, never reached Floyd because he had since moved to Minnesota. Fifteen months later, a Minneapolis police officer murdered him.

In Mathis application, she said she filed the pardon request on behalf of Floyds surviving family members and to correct the record on the case involving Goines. It does not apply to other convictions against Floyd.

.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
POTTSVILLE  Visitors to the Schuylkill County Historical Society on Wednesday heard an in-depth account of the Sheppton Mine disaster and rescue of 1963.

Dave Williams, retired mining engineer and society board member, told the story of the first mining accident in which drilling was used to rescue the miners.

Williams said as part of the anthracite region, it is important for people to remember a local, historic event like this one.

Thats our heritage, Williams said. There are a lot of important parts of our history that are being forgotten.

On Aug. 13, 1963, three miners, Henry Throne, David Fellin and Louis Bova, were trapped 300 feet underground in the anthracite coal mine. Throne and Fellin were rescued on Aug. 27, being lifted out of a hole drilled into the ground. The operation ended Sept. 1, and Bova, who was separated from Fellin and Throne underground, was presumed dead.

Williams said 70 miners from the Independent Miners Association, which was based out of Pottsville at the time, volunteered to help with the rescue.

When this accident happened, the state took charge of the rescue operation, but they asked if the Independent Miners Association would help with the rescue since they were trained in rescue techniques and were experienced miners, Williams said. They didnt have to, but they did volunteer to do it.

Independent Miners Association Vice President Andrew Debritko went down into the hole himself.

He was a fellow miner, and he knew it was the right thing to do, Williams said.

Another local player involved in the event was Charles Downey, a reporter with the Pottsville Republican. Williams said while he was on the scene reporting, Downey helped to direct the helicopters flying in and clean up after the rescue ended.

Williams said one of the main goals of his presentation was to acknowledge the local people involved in the rescue who did not get recognition at the time.

Theres credit that I dont think was ever given to the people and volunteers who made this rescue possible, Williams said. Thats why I think its important that we talk about it.

Williams said that since then, the rescue techniques were used in mining accidents in France, Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and Chile, as the Sheppton accident and rescue had been world news at the time.

Cathy Satterwhite, of Saint Clair, said she remembers when the accident happened, so she was interested in attending the presentation to learn more about it.

I was 9 years old when it happened, Satterwhite said. I remember seeing it on the news and all the neighborhood talking about.

Diana Prosymchak, executive director of the historical society, said the organization will be hosting and participating in many events during the month of May, including the Schuylkill Haven Unity Day on May 1; a cleanup at the Presbyterian Cemetery on May 8; a Pysansky egg-making class on May 15; and a book signing and dinner with retired Army Gen. George A. Joulwan on May 29 and 30.

The next After Hours program will be Espionage in the American Revolution on May 26. The programs are held on the last Wednesday of every month.
Joy, Love, Grief: How It Looks When Families Reunite

The pandemic kept nursing home residents and their loved ones apart for a year. Photographers for The New York Times were there when they finally reunited.

A daughter holding her mothers hand. A son overcome that his 95-year-old mother survived the pandemic. A stoic family patriarch, suddenly in tears.

After a year of excruciating lockdowns, these were the scenes at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities as they began to open up this spring. Before the arrival of vaccines, one in three coronavirus deaths in the United States had ties to nursing homes and similar facilities.

The New York Times sent photographers across the country to document the reunions between family members. For many, it was the first time they were able to be together, hold hands and hug in more than a year.

In interviews, which have been edited and condensed for clarity, families recalled a deep fear that they would never see their loved ones again. When the time finally came, they were flooded with a years worth of emotion in a single instant: joy, relief, love  and grief for all the time that had been lost.
The Indian strain of coronavirus, which causes COVID-19 disease, is less dangerous than the British strain of coronavirus, experts at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine say.

"In our opinion, the British strain of the coronavirus is much more dangerous than the 'Indian', which has spread widely across Europe and Ukraine," Director of the Institute Mykhailo Tukalo told Interfax-Ukraine, referring to the results of a study of the Indian strain by the Institute's specialists.

Tukalo noted that the Indian strain has a new combination of mutations that are dangerous in terms of infectious properties, which were previously separately identified in different strains of the coronavirus.

"Thanks to these mutations, the virus penetrates into human cells faster. The genome of the Indian strain has about 25 mutations compared to the reference Wuhan strain," he said.

The scientist recalled that another dangerous strain of the coronavirus, South African, has already been discovered in Ukraine, regarding which "the facts of the action of existing vaccines are not encouraging." Moreover, the Indian strain has a mutation similar to the South African one.

The expert noted that the Indian strain has not been found in Ukraine yet, but has already been recorded in more than 20 countries around the world.

"Perhaps, this strain has not reached our country yet, but perhaps the reason is that very little sequencing is carried out in Ukraine - the study of mutations by decoding the virus genome sequence. Of course, it is necessary to establish constant monitoring and research of coronavirus strains," he said.

Tukalo stressed that "the study of mutations will allow both to prevent new waves of the disease and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment, as well as to understand the need to develop and use existing or new vaccines and the introduction of anti-epidemic measures to avoid the spread of dangerous strains."

"Our institute has a successful track record of sequencing coronaviruses," he said.

According to the world database GISAID, the "Indian" strain of coronavirus was detected by sequencing in more than 1,500 samples.

As reported, the PRC health authorities have recorded the "Indian" strain of the coronavirus COVID-19 in several cities in China.
For now, the rule only applies to internally vaccinated. For vaccinations abroad, verification of vaccination certificates and reciprocity agreements is expected. Entry from Brazil and South Africa prohibited. Thanks to an effective prevention program, South Korea, so close to China, has so far only had 121,351 and 1,825 deaths.

Seoul (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The State Agency for Disease Control and Prevention (Kdca) today established that all those who have been fully vaccinated in the country will be exempted from the 14-day quarantine if they return from abroad.

The country is implementing a tight pandemic control and vaccination program. The new rules will only apply if people have been vaccinated at home; they will still be subject to testing and must not have any symptoms.

The Kdca is studying how to deal with people who have been vaccinated abroad. On the one hand, the verification of vaccination certificates from other nations and the implementation of reciprocity rules between South Korea and the other countries whose certificates are recognized are at stake. One thing to keep in mind is that passengers from other countries carry variants of the virus with them. Until now, entry to people from Brazil and South Africa is prohibited.

The National vaccination program began on February 26th. So far, at least with one dose, nearly 3 million people have been vaccinated, about 5.5% of the population.

Thanks to an effective prevention program, South Korea, so close to China, has so far only had 121,351 and 1,825 deaths.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- An appeals court on Thursday overturned the assault and domestic violence convictions of a former East Cleveland police officer in a case where the Ohio Supreme Court sanctioned his attorney for acting out during the trial.

A three-judge panel at the 8th District Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy Fuerst should have read to the jury the states self-defense laws that say people are generally allowed to defend themselves when they feel they are in danger.

Davidson-Dixon punched his then-wife in the face during an argument in their home in July 2019, then told police that she attacked him first.

Presiding Judge Kathleen Ann Keough, Eileen A. Gallagher and Emanuella D. Groves held that Fuerst wrongly denied a request from Davidson-Dixons attorney, Anthony Baker, to instruct the jury on the self-defense laws before they began to deliberate on charges of felonious assault and domestic violence.

The jury convicted Davidson-Dixon of aggravated assault, the lesser-included offense of felonious assault, and domestic violence. Fuerst sentenced him in February 2020 to 18 months in prison. He is set for release May 25.

Thursdays decision sends the case back to Fuersts courtroom. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael OMalleys office could ask the court to reconsider its ruling or appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Earlier this month, the Ohio Supreme Courts Board of Professional Conduct recommended that justices publicly reprimand Baker because he left the defense table and hid behind a video screen during court proceedings to protest Fuersts ruling on the self-defense issue.

Fuerst held Baker in contempt, fined him $500 and ordered him to write two sentences 25 times each promising not to act out in court.

Baker told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer after the hearing that he should not have acted the way he did but said he felt that Fuersts ruling was incorrect and denied Dixon a fair trial.

I was totally wrong in how I protested. I dont think I was wrong in what I was fighting for, he said.

East Cleveland police fired Davidson-Dixon, and he served about 18 months in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2017 to assaulting a man he arrested and then trying to threaten him out of testifying against him. The case was featured on the popular podcast Serial.

Davidson-Dixon was on probation from that case when police arrested him in the domestic violence incident. Davidson-Dixon and his girlfriend got into an argument after she came home from a day out with friends, and she unplugged the wireless internet in their house while Davidson-Dixon was watching TV, according to court records.

Davidson-Dixon followed her into the bedroom and then punched her in the face. The blow knocked the woman unconscious and broke several bones in her face, records say. Doctors had to use a metal plate to repair her orbital bone below her eye socket, records say.

Davidson-Dixon told police that she attacked him first, and he hit her once to stop the attack. He testified at his trial that she attacked him with scissors and admitted on the stand to omitting that detail to the police. He also testified that his ex-wife left him with injuries to his face from the attack. When his sister took the stand in his defense, she testified that she saw Davidson-Dixon with the same injuries the afternoon before the attack.

Prosecutors argued that Davidson-Dixon did not act in self-defense because he followed his wife into the bedroom and was not hurt during the attack. They also noted that he gave inconsistent testimony about whether his wife attacked him with scissors saying that he lacked credibility.

The 8th District judges held that the evidence presented to the jury, when viewed in the light most favorable for Davidson-Dixon, required that the jury be instructed on self-defense because they may have found that he had a reason to believe he was in imminent danger.

Editors note: An earlier version of this story included a photograph of Davidson-Dixon from a 2018 court hearing next to his attorney at that time, Timothy Hess. Hess did not represent Davidson-Dixon in the domestic violence case.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Antarctica's fourth largest ice shelf risks collapse due to mountain winds, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The Larsen C Ice Shelf is located on the Antarctic Peninsula, which currently experiences the highest surface melt rates across Antarctica. Melt rates have been increasing in response to strengthening circumpolar winds that result from ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.

The study provides the first comprehensive explanation for the melt experienced across the ice shelf.

Strengthening circumpolar winds have brought more warm maritime air to the region and increased the frequency and strength of warm mountain wind events known as foehn over the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, where Larsen C is located. The research found foehn winds drive the highest melt rates and govern the variability of melt across the ice shelf.

Dr. Andrew Elvidge, a senior research associate in UEA's School of Environmental Sciences, led the research. He will present the findings today at the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union.

Dr. Elvidge said: "Our study has shown that the dominant control on Larsen C surface melt is the occurrence, strength and warmth of foehn winds, and that the most intense foehn-driven melt occurs in embayments, or inlets.

"From previous studies we know these regions are now prone to melt water ponding, which is the precursor to hydrofracture, when crevasses are driven open by the weight of water generated by surface melt. This is the mechanism believed to have caused the catastrophic collapses of the nearby Larsen A and B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002, respectively.

"Foehn-driven melt on Larsen C is likely to increase in the future, with further strengthening of the circumpolar winds expected due to increasing greenhouse gas concentations.

"The collapse of ice shelves causes the glaciers that previously fed them to speed up and drain directly into the ocean, which leads to sea level rise."

The research, with co-author Prof Ian Renfrew of UEA's School of Environmental Sciences and scientists from Utrecht University and the British Antarctic Survey, used measurements of the ice shelf and atmosphere gathered between November 2014 to June 2017, in conjunction with atmospheric model simulations.

According to their findings, the inlets of Larsen C experience the highest melt rates, and although foehn winds are seen just 15 percent of the time, they account for 45 percent of the surface melt.

Dr. Elvidge said: "This region is one of the fastest-warming on Earth and currently experiences the highest surface melt rates across Antarctica.

"Further work with weather and climate models is needed to improve predictions of the timescales on which Larsen C will become vulnerable to atmosphere-driven collapse."

"Atmospheric drivers of melt on Larsen C ice shelf: surface energy budget regimes and the impact of Foehn" will be presented April 29, 2021 at the Annual Meeting of the European Geophysical Union.

Explore further Warm winds in autumn could strain Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  The Department of Labor and Employment said COVID-19 has been included in the list of occupational and work-related diseases.

This means workers who were infected by the virus could receive compensation via the Employees' Compensation Commission (ECC) provided they meet the conditions specified under a recent board resolution.

"Considering the OSHC's (Occupational Safety and Health Center) recommendations and after deliberations with the Department of Labor and Employment and various labor and employer groups, (Labor Secretary Silvestre) Bello added that the Commission has moved that COVID-19 be considered an occupational and work-related disease," the ECC said in a statement released on Thursday.

Board Resolution No. 21-04-14 said the following are the conditions for the compensability of COVID-19:

- There must be a direct connection between the offending agent or event and the worker based on epidemiologic criteria and occupational risk (e.g., healthcare workers, screening and contact tracing teams, etc.);

- The tasks assigned to the worker would require frequent face to face and close proximity interactions with the public or with confirmed cases for healthcare workers;

- Transmission occurred in the workplace; or

- Transmission occured while commuting to and from work.

To apply for the benefits, workers are asked to submit the following: certificate of employment, diagnosis with RT-PCR result, submission of evidence of exposure, medical records as necessary.

Labor Undersecretary Benjo Benavidez clarified COVID-19 infection is already compensable even before the resolution was released. However, authorities said there is a need to simplify the process of compensation for those infected.

"Even prior to the board resolution, COVID-19 is already compensable. But the difficulty that the workers encounter is that they need to prove that the risk of contracting COVID-19 is increased by their working condition," he told CNN Philippines' News Night.

ECC Executive Director Stella Zipagan-Banawis told a briefing that workers will receive sickness benefits and their out-of-pocket expenses could also be returned.

"Ang mga benefits na makukuha po dito ay yung tinatawag nating sickness benefit, daily allowance po yun at ang maximum po nito ay 480 per day... Pag nagkaroon naman sila ng hospitalization ay pwede rin pong mareimburse yung tinatawag na out of pocket na nagastos nila," she said.

[Translation: They will receive sickness benefits, a daily allowance which can be up to P480 per day... If they get hospitalized, their out of pocket expenses can be reimbursed.]

The ECC added those who believe they got infected during their commute to and from work or aboard the company shuttle are covered by the aid  which is on top of PhilHealth benefits.

"With respect to medical reimbursement, the ECC will reimburse the hospital expenses net of PhilHealth...What is in excess of the reimbursement cost under PhilHealth will be paid by the ECC," Benavidez added.

Meanwhile, a workers' group said the government should work quickly to help those affected by the virus.

"Funds should immediately be available for the hospital bills of workers who got infected in the workplace," said Ayuda Network spokesperson Buddy Carranza.

"The government should state how much budget it will provide for the compensation package," he also said. "It should also be clear on the source of funding. Without the budget allocation, the listing which is a positive response, will only lead to false hopes."

Moreover, Carranza said hospital costs could "cripple" workers' families for a long time.

He also said the application process for the compensation should be made easy, adding that a long list of requirements and tedious process could add to workers' problems.
IZ*ONE has officially disbanded and the members each shared a final message for WIZ*ONE.

On April 29 KST, Mnet's project girl group from the survival show, "Produce 48," has officially disbanded after almost three years of activity - as their contracts have expired on the same day.

As IZ*ONE's activities have officially ended, the group's Japanese line consisting of Miyawaki Sakura, Yabuki Nako, and Honda Hitomi will be returning to their hometowns in Japan on April 29 KST.

According to media outlets, the three have left for Japan at the Incheon International Airport Terminal 2 at 11:00 a.m. KST.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: IZ*ONE Fans Gather More Than 1.8 Billion Won to Relaunch the Group

IZ*ONE Members Share Their Final Messages for WIZ*ONE

With the group's disbandment, the IZ*ONE members each published a final message for their fans, WIZ*ONEs, through their private mail.

Miyawaki Sakura told WIZ*ONE that the two and a half years they spent with them was precious and that it was fun. She adds that little by little, she was able to grow confident in herself thanks to WIZ*ONE.

"We were IZ*ONE, you were WIZ*ONE. I have been cherishing that in my heart. Thank you for the two and a half years," she ends.

Kwon Eunbi said that it doesn't feel real [the disbandment] and that it's sad. She feels sad whenever she thinks of iZ*ONE's last day as a group, but WIZ*ONE have to be okay, so that they're not sad either.

Kwon Eunbi said that she will practice hard, so that she can show WIZ*ONE a better side of her [in the future].

Honda Hitomi thanks WIZ*ONE for supporting, loving and staying by her side for the past two and a half years. She said that she doesn't know what path her future will hold, but the fact that she has eleven friends with her forever will never change, so that she is never alone. She looks forward to the future and will take WIZ*ONE with her wherever she goes.

Kim Minjoo asked WIZ*ONE if they remember what she said last time - that she's their first and her first ever, and that she will miss WIZ*ONE so much. She said she may take a while and that she may not have as many chances to say her thanks and express her love.

But she asks WIZ*ONE to wait. She feels sorry that she received so many things and thanks WIZ*ONE for supporting her, and that she was happy.

Now, whenever someone asks her what's most important to her, she won't have any hesitation.

Jang Wonyoung thanks WIZ*ONE for their time. She said that in a span of two and a half years, she learned, felt and thanked WIZ*ONE for many things. To her, that's an existence that is like a gift. She says its bittersweet to think about how things that were a part of her daily life will now start to change little by little, but it's not an eternal goodbye - rather, a fresh start.

"If you ask me to say something as a member of IZ*ONE, it's that 'I'm so grateful to WIZ*ONE and you'," she said. Jang Wonyoung ends her mail by saying that she looks forward to spending more time with WIZ*ONE in the future.

Lee Chaeyeon reveals that she started writing a diary where she writes about her feelings and the moments she wants to remember, however, she also expresses her regrets in not having a diary when they were active. She adds that she is feeling sad that if she doesn't remember those days, she's afraid she's gonna disappear.

Lee Chaeyeon feels different emotions, and says there is no such thing as a good breakup. "I don't think it's gonna be easy, but you promised me. We have to keep our promise. You have to be brave," she said.

Kang Hyewon thanks WIZ*ONE for being able to share her daily life, and that it was healing for her and made her happy when she was tired. It made her happy to have someone ask her how she was and listened to her.

She says WIZ*ONE have to be healthy and eat beans, even if they don't like them.

Kang Hyewon said that it was fun being with the members when she had a lot of thoughts, and that it must be because she is comfortable with them.

Yabuki Nako thanks WIZ*ONE for the two and a half years. She had a hard time, but thanks to WIZ*ONE, she was able to have a good time. "I will continue to do my best! Let's just continue on the flowery path," said Yabuki Nako.

Choi Yena says WIZ*ONE always stood by them and kept them safe, and gave them endless love. She said that WIZ*ONE really made her happy every day, and that she wants to give them more love so she is working hard.

"WIZ*ONE will always be with us in the future. WIZ*ONE, I hope we can always be together," said Choi Yena.

Kim Chaewon said that she had fun with WIZ*ONE, and asks that they keep the memories they had safe. She hopes to meet them again in the future.

Jo Yuri was very happy being able to communicate with WIZ*ONE and being a part of IZ*ONE, and that they make her daily routine more special. She said that she will WIZ*ONE a bright and pretty side of her in the future, "Until then, don't get sick. Stay healthy! I love you."

An Yujin thanks WIZ*ONE for loving and supporting the group, and that she was very lucky to meet the eleven members and WIZ*ONE. Through this experience, she now has eleven people she can contact when she is tired. She ends by saying that she will be a better person and that she loves WIZ*ONE.

Are you sad about their disbandment?

For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz.

KpopStarz owns this article.

Written by Robyn Joan
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - DS Smith Plc (SMDS.L) announced that trading in the second half of the year has, through all parts of the business in the UK, Europe and the US, continued to build positively on the trends and momentum. Looking ahead, the company expects financial performance for the full year ended 30 April 2021 to be line with its expectations, as higher sales volumes, initial price recovery and an enhanced performance from the company's US business have been better than expected and, whilst input costs have increased materially in the second half. Miles Roberts, Group Chief Executive, said, 'I am pleased to report continued positive momentum across the business. I am particularly proud that throughout the challenges of the pandemic, our colleagues have responded magnificently, keeping all of our operations open and maintaining the highest standards in service and quality for our customers.' 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.
Weekend helps travellers discover nearby locations for unforgettable weekend getaways





DUSSELDORF, GERMANY- 29 April 2021 - trivago, a leading global accommodation search platform, today announced the US and UK launch of trivago Weekend , a brand-new way for users to discover weekend getaways close to home. Weekend, which provides curated content to help travellers find great deals on accommodation and experiences on and near their doorstep, is now available to travellers in the US and UK.

Weekend highlights close-to-home adventures and experiences in direct response to the travel restrictions caused by the pandemic. The product taps into the need for experiential, memory-making trips coveted by modern travellers. The launch in the US and UK has been timed to make the most of lockdown restrictions easing across the country and the reported uptake in domestic breaks this summer.

"With the pandemic placing restrictions on travel, many of us have become aware of some of the incredible destinations and activities available on our doorstep," says Axel Hefer, CEO. "To help users understand the potential of their surrounding area, trivago Weekend provides travellers with ideas for those exciting nearby getaways. In addition to helping users find amazing deals on accommodations, we want trivago to become a source of inspiration for weekend getaways, both planned and spontaneous."

trivago users in the US and UK will be able to click onto Weekend via the homepage and set a search radius of 100-200 miles from their location, with the results showing both deals on accommodations and recommendations of attractions and things to do in the destination area. The platform can be searched by location, dates for travel and number of rooms/guests, so that travellers can tailor the perfect getaway to their needs. The search results give accommodation options, with suggestions of nearby attractions and points of interest for inspiration and planning.

The product is expected to be rolled out to select markets throughout the year.

The launch follows trivago's acquisition of weekend.com in January. The company has since integrated weekend.com's content, focused on inspirational weekend getaway packages, into its own platform.

Recent research from trivago reveals that activities and hobbies are increasingly important in choosing breaks and getaways: 'discovering new things' was the number one travel inspiration for British consumers, and of those who have picked up a new hobby during the pandemic (56%), more than half (54%) say that it's at least somewhat likely that they will pick a trip connected to a new hobby once the pandemic ends.

To learn more, visit trivago.com.

About trivago

trivago is a leading global hotel search platform focused on reshaping the way travelers search for and compare hotels and alternative accommodations. Incorporated in 2005 in Dusseldorf, Germany, the platform allows travelers to make informed decisions by personalizing their hotel search and providing them access to a deep supply of hotel information and prices. trivago enables its advertisers to grow their businesses by providing access to a broad audience of travelers via its websites and apps. As of December 31, 2020, trivago has established 54 localized platforms connected to over 5.0 million hotels and alternative accommodations, in over 190 countries.

Contact:

Press Contact:

Stephanie Lowenthal

stephanie.lowenthal@trivago.com

Forward looking statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Words, and variations of words such as "believe," "expect," "plan," "continue," "will," "should," and similar expressions are intended to identify our forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, and important factors that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. For additional information factors that could affect our forward-looking statements, see our risk factors, as they may be amended from time to time, set forth in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim and do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement in this press release, except as required by applicable law or regulation.

As used herein, references to "we", "us", the "company", or "trivago", or similar terms shall mean trivago N.V. and, as the context requires, its subsidiaries.

Attachment
Nigerian human rights activist and senior lawyer, Femi Falana, says President Muhammadu Buhari should stop giving Nigerians false impression of a likely intervention by the United States in Nigerias insecurity challenges.

Instead of giving Nigerians the false impression that the United States is going to send troops to defend them, the federal government should be compelled to embark on mass recruitment of military and police personnel, equip and motivate them to defend every part of the country, Mr Falana said while delivering a paper in Abuja on Thursday.

The paper was presented at a public lecture to mark the 80th birthday of Omotoye Olorode, a professor of botany and popular activist.

Reports of kidnappings and violent killings perpetrated by bandits and Boko-Haram terrorists have dominated the news.

These reached a peak last week as this newspaper reported 239 persons killed and 44 kidnapped in separate incidents across the country last week.

Alarmed Nigerians, including lawmakers, have pressured the presidency to seek help abroad.

President Buhari, during a virtual meeting with the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, on Tuesday, begged the American government to reconsider relocating US Africa Command (AFRICOM) from Stuttgart, Germany, to Africa, nearer the theatre of operation.

Also, he urged the international community to support Nigeria and the sub-region in tackling Nigerias growing security challenges.

Mr Blinken, in a virtual roundtable with Kenyan and Nigerian journalists, restated the commitment of the US to assist in solving Nigerias extraordinary security challenges.

It is fair to say that the challenges that Nigeria faces when it comes to security are quite extraordinary  whether its terrorism, whether its banditry and criminality, whether its piracy.

One, we are in absolute solidarity between us in trying to address these challenges together. And the United States is committed to supporting Nigeria as it meets these challenges, Mr Blinken said.

But Mr Falana warned that the intervention expected of the U.S is realistic.

Nigeria is currently witnessing the virtual collapse of the security architecture of the neocolonial state due to the diversion of the huge fund earmarked for procurement of arms and ammunition for the armed forces and the police by successive regimes.

To prevent terrorists and bandits from sacking the government, President Buhari has appealed to President Joe Biden to come to the aid of the ruling class in waging war against terror and banditry.

And without consulting either the African Union or the ECOWAS the federal government has asked President Biden to relocate the US African Command (AFRICOM) in Germany to Africa. Since 2009, the cry for help in prosecuting the counter insurgency operations had fallen on the deaf ears of the leaders of the West.

Mr Falana said the United States and her allies prevented Nigeria from acquiring vital security equipment due to the abysmal poor human rights record of the armed forces and the police.

In particular, the federal government has been accused of failing to account for the prolonged detention of thousands of people in military camps without trial and the extrajudicial execution of unarmed civilians by military and police personnel.

READ ALSO: Falana petitions ECOWAS court over detained Venezuelean diplomat

He said although the federal government instituted two judicial commissions of inquiry in 2017 to investigate allegations of gross abuse of human rights of the Nigerian people, the report of both panels have not been implemented.

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 The government has failed to prosecute the security personnel indicted by the panels.

He also blamed the lack of transparency in procurement of military equipment for the deteriorating security architecture.

Even though the Buhari administration was allowed to pay the sum of $329 million for 12 super Tucano fighter jets in November 2018 to aid the counter insurgency operations in the North East Zone the jets have not been delivered.

The rights activist advised all state and local governments to set up defence committees constituted by young men and women to collaborate with the police in securing the lives and properties of all citizens.
[April 29, 2021] Corporate Travel Technology Leader Deem Wins Silver Stevie American Business Award for COVID-19 Response

Oakland, CA, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Deem, a leading mobile and cloud technology provider for the corporate travel industry, today announced it has won the Silver Stevie award in the 19th Annual American Business Awards for its Travel SafetyCheck feature in its new Etta business travel booking and management solution. SafetyCheck efficiently provides accurate health and safety information for each segment of their trip within the booking flow as travelers are booking trips, when they need it most. We know that travel is better for business when its better for people, said Deem President David Grace. Empowering people with the right information at the right time helps them make the best choices for themselves and their companies. It allows them to focus on their jobs and helps them be more productive. This is why were so committed to being a traveler-centric software platform. As a business travel technology company, Deem is very sensitive to the impact of the pandemic on our industry and people, especially on those critical industries that need to continue traveling despite the risks. SafetyCheck was concepted, produced, and delivered to the Etta platform in just 90 days, in response to the immediacy of the pandemic and traveler needs. I was impressed how they turned their problem of wanting to offer a more actionable duty of care solution into a solution in 90 days, said one of the judges about the SafetyCheck entry. The analytics, clients, and reviews provided made ther case more professional. The website and video were very well put together and is something I could see businesses and professionals using often. A great corporate response to the pandemic.



The SafetyCheck feature is highlighted in each phase of booking  flights, hotel, and ground transportation  so travelers can easily find information such as cleaning protocols, regulations, safety scores for hotel neighborhoods based on nighttime safety, LGBTQ+ safety and other factors, maps of Covid-19 historical and current caseloads, and more. Using icons, maps, and pop-up boxes for additional vendor information, the details are presented in a clear and organized way, creating a seamless booking process for the traveler. The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations  public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small.

Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word meaning crowned, the awards will be virtually presented to winners during a live event on Wednesday, June 30. About the Stevie Awards Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The Stevies also produce the annual Women|Future Conference. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com. Sponsors of The 2021 American Business Awards include John Hancock Financial Services, Melissa Sones Consulting, and SoftPro. About Deem Deem is on a mission to transform travel. Starring Etta, its mobile-first, corporate travel booking and management platform, Deem offers employees everything they need to easily make the right travel decisions for themselves and their company. Deems travel technology plugs into major travel agencies and expense solution providers, empowering more corporate customers and the worlds largest travel management companies. Deem is a wholly owned and independently run subsidiary of Enterprise Holdings. The company is headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices in Dublin, Ireland and Bangalore, India. Learn more at Deem.com. Attachments ABA21_Silver_Winner_1200x630

SafetyCheck_Hotel results with neighborhood scores

Diana Brandon Deem 4155908414 diana.brandon@deem.com

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Beijing:

President Xi Jinping has told herdsmen from a Tibetan settlement bordering Arunachal Pradesh to set down roots to safeguard Chinese territory and focus on developing their hometown.

Without peace in the territory, there will be no peaceful lives for the millions of families, Xi, who began his second term in office after the once-in-five-years Congress of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) this week endorsed his second tenure, wrote to a herding family in Lhunze County in Tibet, official media reported on Sunday.

Xi told the herding family from Lhunze County, near the Himalayas in southwest Chinas Tibet Autonomous Region, to set down roots in the border area, safeguard Chinese territory and develop their hometown.

India asserts that the Sino-Indian border dispute covers the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control, while China claims it is confined to about 2,000 kms to the area of Arunachal Pradesh, which it refers to as Southern Tibet.

The family is based in Yumai, Chinas smallest town in terms of population at the southern foot of the Himalayas, where steep slopes and rugged paths make it difficult to live, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Xi acknowledged the familys efforts to safeguard the territory, and thanked them for the loyalty and contributions they have made in the border area, the report said.

Xi, who also heads the Central Military Commission - the overall high command of the Chinese military, made the remarks in a reply delivered to the Tibetan herders on Saturday, after they wrote to him introducing their township, the Xinhua report said.

The Chinese president hoped that the family would motivate more herders to set down roots in the border area like galsang flowers, and become guardians of Chinese territory and builders of a happy hometown.

Fresh off the 19th CPC Congress, Xi told the family that the party would continue to lead people of all ethnic groups towards better lives, the report said.

Two girls - Zhoigar and Yangzom - from the Tibetan family wrote the letter to Xi while the Congress was in session in Beijing, telling him their experiences in safeguarding the border area and the development of their township over the years.

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By Juliet Nalwooga

The Ministry of Finance has today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Investments Clubs Association of Uganda (ICAU) to boost the saving and investment culture in the country.

The Finance Ministry will, through this partnership, formally support the association in capacity building initiatives for local saving groups whose input will be reflected in government planning programs.

ICAU chair, Charles Lugendo says the move is timely.

The ministrys undersecretary Sengonzi Damulira, who signed the MOU on behalf of the minister, has urged investment club leaders to focus on finance monitoring if they are to stay in business.
OnePlus quadruples sales in Europe in Q1, two thirds of the revenue comes from the flagship series

OnePlus is soaring in Europe  the company posted a 388% growth in sales in the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year, revenue from the region increased by 286%.

The OnePlus flagship models, including the new 9-series, accounted for 65% of revenue. The OnePlus 9 Pro was the best-selling smartphone on launch day on Amazon France and Spain. But the mid-range Nord series is proving to be a pivotal part of the companys strategy.

Based on Counterpoint data for the last quarter of 2020, the OnePlus Nord was the highest-selling Android in Finland, which helped the company become the leader in the $250-$400 segment. In Denmark, it was the most popular 5G Android in the same $250-$400 segment (it was in second place once you include 4G Androids). OnePlus managed to edge out Xiaomi and Huawei in both countries.



OnePlus overtakes Xiaomi and Huawei in Finland and Denmark (data by Counterpoint Research)

Going back to Q1 2021, North Europe is OnePlus best region on the Old Continent, it contributed over 30% of the revenue and is followed by West Europe. The Top 3 individual countries were the UK, Germany and Finland. The company is happy with its growth in Central and Eastern Europe as well, with expanding presence in Poland and Romania.

There are now 3 million OnePlus users in Europe, out of 10 million globally. It credits its success to strong sales of 5G devices in the 400-500 segment, partnering up with local retailers and carriers (Amazon, Elisa, Telia, Deutsche Telekom), expanding to new markets and adding new products to its portfolio.

And, of course, its fans. As a way of saying thank you, the company will offer deals on the OnePlus 8T and the Nord starting on May 3.

Source
HIGH RIVER, Alta. - Jamie Welsh-Rollo was all smiles Thursday as COVID-19 vaccination clinics began at two of Canada's largest beef-packing plants in southern Alberta.

A Cargill meat processing plant is shown in Chambly, Que., south of Montreal, Sunday, May 10, 2020. COVID-19 vaccination clinics for two of Canada's largest beef-packing plants are to begin in southern Alberta today. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

HIGH RIVER, Alta. - Jamie Welsh-Rollo was all smiles Thursday as COVID-19 vaccination clinics began at two of Canada's largest beef-packing plants in southern Alberta.

Welsh-Rollo, who is a union steward and works on the line packaging meat at Cargill, said there was an "air of excitement" inside the plant, which employs 2,200 people.

"It's really exciting to know we're all going to be protected and there hopefully isn't another outbreak here," she said, still wearing her face shield and a black hoodie with the words "Straight Outta Quarantine."

Plans for a clinic at Cargill had been put off last week when a vaccine shipment was delayed.

The Cargill plant, near High River south of Calgary, and the JBS Canada facility in Brooks were hit hard by COVID-19 outbreaks last year.

Nearly half of Cargill's workers tested positive last spring and the plant was shut down for two weeks.

JBS reduced operations to a single shift each day for a full month. It reported 650 cases among its 2,500 workers.

The two plants together process about 70 per cent of Canada's beef.

Welsh-Rollo said she's worked at Cargill since 2018 and the last year has been unsettling. She said she's been afraid of testing positive.

"I have a five-year-old son at home and I've been worried that he's going to get sick and, if he gets sick, then it's going to be awful for me because I don't like seeing my son with a cold, let alone, COVID," she said.

"In the last year I've been tested about six times because my son would get sick and I would get sick and it's crazy."

On Thursday, employees were being called off the line, 40 at a time, and taken upstairs for their shots. Welsh-Rollo was waiting outside to get her dose of Moderna and there was a long lineup from the middle of the plant all the way to the entrance.

"I'm off tomorrow because my son has an appointment, so I need to get in today for sure."

Dr. Annalee Coakley, a Calgary physician who helped organize the clinic, took a break from giving shots to discuss its early progress.

"I'm thrilled. I'm very excited and I was very nervous yesterday with anticipation, but it seems to be working really smoothly inside so we've already done over 290 vaccinations," Coakley said just before noon.

"I'm hoping that they recognize that they're valued in our society in general and I'm hoping they're happy with the process and happy with receiving the vaccination on site. It's great to see that enthusiasm."

Ricardo de Menezes, southern director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, said vaccinations are an important part of worker safety.

"The virus spreads that much faster with the close proximity of the workers and the sort of atmosphere and environment that they work in," he said. "It's important to have as much protection for workers at Cargill and JBS and all the food-processing facilities as possible."

De Menezes said any further delay would put workers further at risk.

"We have seen cases of the variant at this plant. What do we do if another outbreak occurs?" he asked.

"They can't live without their paycheque."

Local 401 President Thomas Hesse said an overwhelming majority of members wanted early access to a safe vaccine.

"It's sort of a cautious optimism, a cautious relief."

Hesse said polls at Cargill indicate 70 to 80 per cent of workers are reasonably comfortable with receiving the vaccine, while others are somewhat hesitant.

It's not mandatory, he said, but he hopes most will decide to get a shot.

Hesse said it's important that Cargill and other employers make sure workplaces remain safe even after vaccinations. He said there finally seems to be a recognition that it's a serious workplace issue.

Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro announced earlier this week that vaccinations would happen for all meat-packing employees across the province.

They are to be offered to more than 15,000 workers at 136 federal and provincial plants.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.

 Follow @BillGraveland on Twitter
The US government told its citizens to get out of India as soon as possible as the countrys Covid-19 crisis worsens at an astonishing pace.

In a Level 4 travel advisory  the highest of its kind issued by the State Department  US citizens were told not to travel to India or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so. There are 14 direct daily flights between India and the US and other services that connect through Europe, the department said.

Indian authorities and hospitals are struggling to cope with unprecedented Covid infections and deaths. Official data on Thursday showed new cases rose by a staggering 379,257 over the prior 24 hours, another record, while 3,645 additional lives were lost. More than 204,800 people have died.

Read | Coronavirus ravages India with over 3.79 lakh new Covid-19 cases, 3,645 deaths

No Admittance

US citizens are reporting being denied admittance to hospitals in some cities due to a lack of space, the website of the US Embassy and Consulates in India said in a health alert. US citizens who wish to depart India should take advantage of available commercial transportation options now. All routine US citizen services and visa services at the US Consulate General Chennai have been canceled.

A representative for the US embassy in Delhi didnt immediately respond to a message asking if US citizens can receive help leaving India and whether they face restrictions or quarantine measures upon arrival in the US

The South Asian nation now has the worlds fastest-growing caseload with 18.4 million confirmed instances. The virus has gripped Indias populace with a severity not seen in its first wave.

Mass funeral pyres, lines of ambulances outside overcrowded hospitals and desperate pleas on social media for oxygen underscore how unprepared Indias federal and state governments are to tackle the latest outbreak.

Read | More test positive for Covid-19 double mutant strain in Bengaluru

The unfolding tragedy is prompting some of the worlds biggest corporations to organize aid. Amazon.com Inc. is harnessing its global logistics supply chain to airlift 100 ICU ventilator units from the US, and the equipment will reach India in the next two weeks. Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said he was heartbroken by the situation and the tech behemoth is using its voice, resources and technology to aid relief efforts and help buy oxygen concentrators.

Blackstone Group Inc. Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said his private equity firm is committing $5 million to support Indias Covid relief and vaccination services to marginalized communities. Local companies, too, are wading in, with the philanthropic arm of Indias most valuable company  Reliance Industries Ltd., controlled by Asias richest man Mukesh Ambani  pledging to create, commission and manage 100 ICU beds that will become operational mid next month.

Read | Ahead of addition to 'red list', Heathrow Airport turns down airline requests for extra flights from India

Global Isolation

As thousands of doctors, nurses and non-medical professionals work around the clock to save what patients they can, countries around the rest of the world are drawing up their bridges.

Within Asia, Hong Kong banned flights from India, as well as Pakistan and the Philippines, for 14 days from April 20. Singapore has barred long-term pass holders and short-term visitors who have recently been in India from entering. Indonesia is also denying entry to people traveling from India.

Further afield, the UK has added India to its travel ban list, and the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have halted passenger flights from India. Canada last week banned flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days. Australia banned flights from India this week.
Rishi Kapoor Called Juhi Chawla An 'Insecure Actor' During Sharmaji Namkeen Shoot: 'I Was Worried If I Was Holding Up Well'

Juhi Chawla & Rishi Kapoor have been one of the most memorable onscreen pairs of the 90s. She was also his last female co-star in Sharmaji Namkeen before the veteran actor died one year ago after losing his battle with leukemia. On his first death anniversary, the actress recalled how revered Rishi Kapoor for his brilliance as an actor and shared anecdotes from the sets of his last film.

The actress while talking to Times Of India, recalled how even after a year of being away in New York for his treatment of cancer, Rishi Kapoor never lost touch with his character and how he was effortless.

On the contrary, Juhi remembered how he called her an insecure actor on the sets of Sharmaji Namkeen, which was his way of showing concern wrapped in anger.

While shooting for Sharmaji Namkeen, I would be rolling with laughter because he had something to pull me up for every single day. One day, he actually called me an insecure actor because Id rush to see the monitor after every shot. His shots were fantastic, and I was worried if I was holding up well. In his typical style, he shouted at me and said, That monitor is for the director. Not you you insecure actor. It was so funny...I never questioned why he had such a tough exterior, but over the years, I started enjoying it because it was cute, the actress remembered.

Rishi Kapoor unfortunately couldnt complete the film after his cancer relapsed. He died on April 30 in a Mumbai based hospital. Actor Paresh Rawal later stepped in to completed the film which will now be released by the makers in memory of the late actor.
Albion College has announced its new School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement. Anchored in the idea that colleges and universities have a responsibility to cultivate a commitment to public purpose in their graduates, the school will offer opportunities in experiential and professional learning to students. Albion College President Dr. Mathew Johnson made the announcement.

The School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement is supported by a seed gift from a generous donor and will house current and future institutes and centers. The school will become a national model for a new engaged and experiential approach to the liberal arts. Students will prepare for a life of purpose, career success, and graduate or professional school through stackable professional credentials like project management and human resource certifications; internships and community engagement; continuing professional and executive education; and real-world learning environments, including a student-run consulting firm and a social innovation incubator.

The school will offer a new academic credential for undergraduates, the experiential certificate  an integrated blend of coursework, experiential learning, and professional training focused on a topic or field a student is passionate about. Students will design experiential certificates with intensive advising and peer mentoring through the schools institutes and centers.

At Albion, we are creating with courage  investing boldly in our people, our programs, our campus, and our community. We know students need a vibrant set of learning and doing opportunities relevant to the world we live in today to prepare them for the world they will shape tomorrow, Johnson arRWS. Our students become changemakers and leaders as they live the liberal arts through these experiential opportunities. That transformation happens as they map the purposeful pathway that begins their first day at Albion and continues for the rest of their lives.

Albions School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement will include existing centers and institutes such as the Carl A. Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management, Gerald R. Ford Institute for Leadership in Public Policy and Service, Lisa and James Wilson Institute for Medicine, and the Center for Sustainability and the Environment. Albion will be launching a new Institute on Race and Belonging this year, with plans to add new institutes for Climate Change and Arts in Public in the future.

Albions School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement also includes the Albion College Community Collaborative (AC3). Students in AC3 connect with and advise clients, build and refine strategies ranging from operations to marketing and gain valuable experience and professional preparation. AC3 will play a long-term and significant role in helping students identify and tackle real-world challenges presented by nonprofits, businesses and government agencies.

The Albion College Social Innovation Incubator, a business and social enterprise incubator, will also be part of the School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement, as well as the Office of Community Engagement, which houses the Build Albion Fellows, AmeriCorps program, and the Albion College Student Volunteer Bureau.

The announcement of Albions new School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement marks the culmination of a year of curricular innovation. The Lisa and James Wilson Institute for Medicine is offering a new, unique post-baccalaureate certificate in pre-medical studies, a new public health concentration and a new eight-year educational program in partnership with Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed). The department of economics and management added two new pathways for students to gain their graduate degrees in accounting. The mathematics and computer science department introduced a new data science major, and the communication studies department added new health communication and sport communication minors. Students also have the opportunity to pursue fast-tracked graduate degrees in political science and comparative religion through a new partnership with Western Michigan University.

Albion College is proud to be an innovator both in academics and in improving access to a liberal arts education, stated Interim Provost Ron Mourad. The Albion College Promise covers 100% of tuition for Michigan students whose families make under $65,000 annually, and at least $92,000 in scholarships over the course of four years for Michigan students whose families make over $65,000 annually, ensuring that new academic programs are accessible to Michigan families in the wake of COVID-19.

For more information on Albions new School for Public Purpose and Professional Advancement, visit albion.edu.
A six-year-old child has been rushed to hospital after swallowing up to 60mm of hand sanitiser.

The child from Western Australia had suffered acute intoxication otherwise known as alcohol poisoning after consuming the substance.

The six-year-old has since recovered after the traumatic ordeal, Nine News reported.

It's believed the child had drank between 30-60mm of the sanitiser.

A six-year-old child has been rushed to hospital after swallowing up to 60mm of hand sanitiser (stock image)

Parents have now been issued a dire warning as hand sanitiser bottles are readily available at schools and childcare centres.

Commissioner for Consumer Protection Lanie Chopping told the publication children can mistake the bottles for food or drinks.

'With many households and schools now using hand sanitiser as part of their daily routines, it's important to remember these products should be treated with extra caution around children,' Ms Chopping said.

'Most alcohol-based sanitisers contain upwards of 60 per cent alcohol content, meaning just a couple of mouthfuls can be enough to poison a child.'

Ms Chopping said poison centres across Australia have seen more cases relating to hand sanitiser, and urged parents to ensure their children were supervised when using the product.

Alcohol intoxication can affect a person's body temperature, breathing, heart rate, and in extreme cases lead to a coma or death.

Poison Hotline 131 126
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Recently, Frederico Panetta, CEO of Gould Industries, has announced the company has quadrupled sales, leading it to reach new levels of investments.

While many companies have been hit hard by the pandemic, Gould Industries is quickly expanding in the private label sector for packaging, cosmetics, baby care, and personal care. Gould has expanded its factory three times in just the last four years. Also, it has signed some major distribution deals across North America. Their CEO Frederico Panetta has led the company to partner up with most of Canada's retailers over the last four years. Now, Gould manufactures goods for their retail outlets. Thanks to these moves, the company has quadrupled sales, leading it to reach new levels of investments.

Gould is no average company, and Frederico Panetta is no average CEO. Gould Industries has been around since 1954. Its solid reputation was established thanks to its founder, Bertie Gould. Today, Frederico has reinvented and transformed this once-traditional company into a stronger competitor and leader within the industry.

Today, Gould Industries is his pride and joy. Gould's DNA and culture are different than those of their competitors and other traditional companies. The company is taking care of its employees, as well as the local community. They offer full pension plans, as well as health insurance, to all of its employees. It has also been giving back to its community through its charity initiatives. With progress on the horizons, Gould has set its sights on going public on the stock market to have an even bigger impact.

People can sometimes be apprehensive when it comes to major changes. However, even employees who have been with Gould's for years have shared that they love the radically new work environment. That indicates the company under Frederico's lead has successfully modernized Gould.

Gould has become a leader in the industry with new solutions and products being offered that fulfill immediate needs for its target market. The management team has expressed gratitude for all of the responses from Gould's partner retailers and distributors.

Looking forward, Gould expects to see some mergers and acquisitions coming. There are a few companies that show a great deal of potential. That, along with going public soon, shows that Gould is looking towards a bright future.

More information can be found on Instagram @gould.industries.

Media Contact:

Brand: Gould Industries

Contact: Frederico Panetta

E-mail: reception@gouldpkg.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Gouldindustries/

Website: https://www.gouldpkg.com/

SOURCE: Gould Industries

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643349/Gould-Industries-Announces-the-Company-Has-Quadrupled-Sales
Heathrow has lost more than 2.4 billion after passenger numbers through the airport plummeted by 91 per cent in the first three months of the year.

The company behind the airport revealed another 329 million loss in the first three months of 2021, as only 1.7 million passengers travelled through Heathrow, down 91 per cent compared to two years ago.

This comes as it emerged Covid passports are now not expected to be ready for the start of foreign holidays on May 17 and could be delayed until 'later in the summer', it was claimed today.

Grant Shapps revealed yesterday that the NHS' app for appointments and prescriptions will double as a covid passport for tourists, providing evidence of their covid vaccinations and test results.

But Mr Shapps also gave a hint that its rollout could coincide with June's G7 summit in Cornwall in early June, where he hopes to seal bilateral travel corridors with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US.

Holiday travel is currently banned under Covid-19 rules

Passengers from India are escorted through the arrivals area of terminal 5 towards coaches destined for quarantine hotels, after landing at Heathrow airport on April 23

System for testing returning holidaymakers is 'in danger of collapse when mass travel returns' The system for testing returning holidaymakers could collapse when mass international travel resumes, consumer experts warn. Ministers are talking optimistically about families being able to enjoy summer breaks overseas, but these will still be covered by a requirement for Covid tests. Even travellers returning to the UK from safe countries on an official 'green list' will need to take tests on their return. The consumer group Which? said the testing regime was already failing to deal with the relatively small number of people arriving in the UK from overseas, and it could be overwhelmed when large numbers of Britons come back from hotspots. Social media and review sites have been flooded with complaints about test result delays, with a Facebook group for those suffering problems with the system amassing 1,500 members. Which? has heard from travellers who did not receive their test results for more than ten days. Advertisement

Spain, which plans to open up at the end of May to tourists with digital proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test result, is said to have that the UK must reciprocate the same deal to its own tourists after Mr Shapps gave a muted response and told people to 'wait and see' before booking.

But the UK's recovery over summer depends on Brits being allowed to travel abroad for holidays from May 17, Heathrow warned today.

The continued uncertainty caused by the Government's policy on travel has forced the airport to reduce its forecasted passenger numbers to between 13 million and 36 million, down from 81 million in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit.

'These results show how Covid has devastated the aviation sector and British trade,' said chief executive John Holland-Kaye.

'Restarting international travel from May 17 will help to kickstart the economic recovery, allowing exporters to get their goods to market, as well as reuniting families who have been separated for over a year.'

Heathrow said that as the vaccine continues to roll out and Covid-19 levels fall, restarting travel to the US and other similar markets will be 'critical' for the UK's economic recovery.

The company has slashed its cash burn in half compared to the same time last year, cutting spending on new projects by 77 per cent over the period.

Mr Holland-Kaye said: 'Heathrow is gearing up for the recovery.

'By acting early to cut costs and protect cash, we have put ourselves in a strong financial position to weather the storm and are ready to welcome back passengers, while keeping them safe.

'This would not be possible without the energy and commitment of my colleagues across Heathrow and I am very proud of what they have achieved.'
After a busy day of grocery shopping and other errands, Diane Bell slid into a kitchen chair and took out her at-home coronavirus test kits. She swabbed both her nostrils and mixed a few chemicals, and within a few minutes, a blue line materialized on an indicator strip.

Negative! she called out to her partner. It was her seventh test in three weeks, and so far, so good.

Bells testing is part of one of the largest, most ambitious and high-stakes scientific experiments of the coronavirus pandemic  to persuade families and whole communities to incorporate home kits into their everyday routines to identify and stop infections as the nation inches toward full reopening.

Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it aims to distribute 2 million free at-home test kits to 80,000 families in Pitt County and Chattanooga, Tenn., to conduct regular testing from now until around June.

Researchers hope that by encouraging people to test themselves even if they feel perfectly fine, the country will be able to slow down  and eventually extinguish  the spread of the virus.

The project is part of a larger pivot in the nations coronavirus testing strategy to focus on prevention, and it is a recognition that one of the biggest mistakes made early on was underestimating the impact of asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic spreaders.

County officials in North Carolina and Tennessee will monitor the level of virus in wastewater and track emergency room visits, hospitalizations and other indicators of community spread in hopes they will see those go down. Early results should be available sometime in the summer, and if the results are positive, the model could be replicated across America.

We could really change the game here, said NIH Director Francis Collins. Even after we get to a high level of vaccination, we will still not be 100 percent, so testing is going to be with us for quite a long time.

Story continues

Routine at-home testing is one of many models being tried throughout the country to stop community transmission.

Tulane University in New Orleans, for example, is using a multilayered approach to test all staff and students regularly, with undergraduates tested three times each week. Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland is conducting weekly pooled testing, in which whole classrooms are tested together  a practice that is less expensive and can provide faster results.

In Michigan, the state is recommending weekly testing for youth athletes. And the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League have partnered with Clear, the airport security company that operates expedited lanes, to use digital health passports to verify the testing and vaccination status of fans and employees before they enter stadiums and other indoor areas.

With millions of Americans still reluctant to get vaccinated, the reality of breakthrough infections, and new threats from emerging variants, testing is an essential part of the new normal as the country moves to reopen schools, workplaces and other areas of daily life.

Officials say the NIH-CDC initiative is especially important for minority communities, which make up a disproportionate portion of essential workers but have lower vaccination rates.

As part of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan, President Biden has dedicated $50 billion to a large-scale expansion of testing that includes mass deployment of rapid tests that return results within minutes, expansion of lab capacity, and creation of testing protocols for schools, local governments, workplaces and other place people gather.

In the next few weeks to months, youll see a lot of tests being done in places where its never been done before, said Wilbur Lam, an Emory University medical researcher who helps run a lab that is verifying various testing technologies for the coronavirus.

Diane Bell opens instructions included in a home test kit for at her home on April 21 in Greenville, N.C.

A variety of COVID testing options

One year ago, as images of the horror in New York City and other hot spots were broadcast across the world amid an almost national lockdown, access to coronavirus testing in the United States was limited mostly to the obviously ill and involved sending off nasal swabs to distant laboratories that often took days or weeks to deliver results.

Rapid tests with low accuracy emerged soon after, but many Americans knew of them only through the stories about the White House coronavirus cluster that sent then-President Donald Trump to the hospital.

Today, the landscape looks radically different. A more diverse array of tests are being deployed in different settings in every corner of the country.

Greg Martin, director of the Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute, said this is possible because rapid tests are becoming more accurate, and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) lab tests, are faster, blurring the line between the two. A single rapid test using a nasal swab or saliva, which takes as little as 10 to 15 minutes, can still produce roughly 15% false negative results and 1 to 2% false positives, studies show  but that accuracy improves dramatically when testing multiple times in a short period.

That allows us to move the testing to where people are needing to be together for some reason, he said. That includes workplaces such as stock exchanges, factories and universities, as well as museums, convention centers and concert halls.

Experts imagine a near future where each person will be able to access tests multiple times a week.

Glimpses of that reality can already be seen in Britain, where starting this month, every person is being given two rapid coronavirus tests a week. Similar ideas are being introduced in Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, with test and shop measures in some jurisdictions that require people to submit evidence of negative tests before being allowed inside.

In the United States, much of the testing innovation has grown out of an unconventional competition that is part of a project, known as RADx, launched a year ago this month. Collins described it as setting up NIH to act as a venture capital organization.

We invited inventors in academia and small businesses to bring their best ideas for how to do this testing, he said. We were not disappointed.

The NIH received over 700 applications for diagnostic and screening tools and held what he described as a Shark Tank-like process to select the most promising. The funded projects use the traditional nasal swabs, as well as saliva, oral swabs and blood, to detect the virus, and several have received emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.

Lam, who along with Martin runs a lab at Emory that verifies the accuracy of emerging coronavirus testing technologies, said the science provides only a part of the path forward. Ongoing policy and pricing decisions will be just as critical in determining their success, he believes.

Tests could be priced as low as $10 to $15 as companies scale up, or as high as $30 to $50, depending on the technology being used. Right now, much of the costs are being borne by relief funds provided by the federal government, but its not clear who will pay for the testing once that runs out.

Similar questions surround who pays for the lost time of an employee who does not come to work after a positive test. Is it the government? Insurance companies? Employers? Everybody is at the table, and its one of the major topics of discussion, he said.

Collins, the NIH director, wonders about Americans willingness to change their habits: Will people integrate testing into their daily lives the same way they drink coffee each morning or brush their teeth? And if they test positive, will they take the responsibility to self-isolate and communicate with their health providers to monitor their symptoms and care?

Its not just a matter of whether the technology works, he said. Its also human behavior  to what extent humans take advantage of this.

A Pitt County Health Department worker passes out home test kits in Greenville, N.C.

An example of pandemic challenges

The roughly 655 square miles of Pitt County, population 185,000, in the eastern part of North Carolina, is former tobacco-growing country known today for its numerous BMX X Games medalists and as a battleground in the 2020 presidential race.

In recent months, it has also become an example of the continuing challenges to surmounting the pandemic. While about half of all eligible Americans have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, the uptake in Pitt County is only about 25%, although everyone 16 and older became eligible in early April.

County Health Director John Silvernail said the county made a lot of progress in battling COVID-19, especially in the African American population, which early on was disproportionately impacted. But he is worried the virus is still burning in that young-adult age group.

Theres a lot of hope in this study, he said. If we can stop cases in the family unit, then there is less of a chance they will go out and give it to other members of the community.

Giselle Corbie-Smith, director of the UNC Center for Health Equity Research, said that being able to stop transmission when people are the most contagious is key.

We are identifying people who are at highest risk in the household, she said, emphasizing that these individuals are at highest risk of becoming infected and passing that infection onto others. The ones going to a physical location, those who are essential.

Corbie-Smith, who is leading the project along with researchers from Duke University, believes some residents may be more open to at-home tests kits because of their privacy.

This is like a pregnancy test, she said. Theres no requirement to upload any information. We are very clear: If there is a positive test, you need to call your health-care provider and need to make sure you and people around you are safe. But people are not obligated to share other information.

Pitt County, N.C., officials have begun testing wastewater for the virus, which would indicate community infections, as federal agencies work to find ways to stop transmission.

Each enrolled family receives a box with 25 tests by Quidel Corp., which has emergency use approval from the FDA, and residents are encouraged to use them three times a week for the household member at greatest risk of exposure. That may mean an essential worker, for example, or a child attending in-person school.

In Pitt County, where kit distribution began the first week of April, officials say that 12,000, or more than a quarter, have already been claimed. The Chattanooga project will launch May 4. Families can also order kits online via sayyescovidtest.org for delivery to their homes.

The kits are going really fast, said Pastor Rodney Coles, 62, chief executive of the Churches Outreach Network, who has been helping with distribution.

Although he has seen fellow religious leaders become ill or even die, Coles said he has ministered in person throughout the pandemic and has never had any symptoms or any reason to get tested.

Now, he and his wife are testing three times a week, which he describes as mind-resetting.

I recommend that all folks should have it  even those that have the vaccine  because we can still catch it and be a carrier, he said.

Bell, 62, is a child-care provider, and her live-in partner, Robert Garner, 64, works at a landfill. She has a large network of 28 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren from her biological and foster-care kids, whom she sees regularly now that she is vaccinated.

Bell said the kits have given her peace of mind when she interacts with people outside her home, and last Sunday, she spoke with members of her church about it.

Many in the African American and Black communities, they are like, I dont want it, when it comes to the vaccine. I said, Well, wait a minute: You have to keep your body safe. And I told them they could start testing while they think about the vaccine, Bell recalled.

She said she showed them the kits and explained how she was using them, and pretty soon, they were signing up, too.
A little more than a year ago, none of us could have imagined anything like COVID-19. We went from gathering with family and friends anytime in our homes or at restaurants and working in traditional environments surrounded by co-workers to a complete shutdown overnight.

Who did Kentuckians turn to in this unprecedented healthcare crisis? Who did they count on as the pandemic raged out of control? Who did residents of the commonwealth call upon for answers?

The answer is simple: We all looked to Kentucky nurses, the largest segment of healthcare workers and the most trusted professionals for the 19th consecutive year (Gallup Poll). We knew we could count on these experts who helped to bring our babies into the world, cared for us in the emergency room and provided compassion and support as the end of life drew near for someone we loved. These are also the people who came together from all facets of nursing from the bedside to academia to business and industry to develop creative solutions and immediate action steps that have saved lives and put Kentucky on the map as a noted leader in COVID-19 prevention and response.

During Nurses Month in May, the Kentucky Nurses Association (KNA) extends a heartfelt thank you to more than 560 nurses who have volunteered their time with KNA to test and vaccinate residents across the state. Nurses who work on the frontlines have donated time on weekends, those working in administration and other non-traditional roles have stepped up, and many nurses have come out of retirement to assist. We also thank nursing students who have volunteered their time while continuing to learn.

Nurses are strong in their commitment to helping others. During this time of extraordinary stress, the KNA has partnered with the International Psychiatric Nurses Association to form Kentucky Nurses Helping Nurses, (KNHN), a volunteer network of nurses, working and retired, who have a passion for and expertise in mental health nursing who want to support nurses on the frontlines of COVID-19. Nurses who need help may call 1-877-358-0420, email admin@kentucky-nurses.org or visit the KNA website at kentucky-nurses.org. All inquiries are confidential.

Story continues

As we look toward this special month of recognition for nurses, we invite you to follow us on social media to watch our Thank You Nurses video series. We are proud to report that so many have responded to our call for thank you messages that youll see several videos in the coming days, weeks and months in 2021, The Year of the Nurse. We also are offering myriad of free and low-cost educational programs for nurses and our community members about topics such as healthcare and social justice, nurse suicide prevention, mindfulness practices and much more.

While we could tell you more about our appreciation for all Kentucky nurses, well close with words of encouragement and action steps for all.

Please get your COVID-19 vaccine and get tested. We are seeing light and hope where we recently only saw darkness and pain  Kentucky nurses are paving the way to make it happen.

Donna Meador, MSN, RN, CENP, CPHQ is the Kentucky Nurses Association Board President.
Seasonal & Current Events

By Ls Cohen Published: April 29 2021

With risk of outdoor transmission at a minimal, officials urge NYS to allow 100% capacity.

Nassau County Executive Laura Curran is urging New York State to allow beaches on Long Island to reopen this Memorial Day at 100% capacity. Citing the low risk of transmission of Covid outside, Curran said it is something that will help bring normalcy back to the area and help local businesses.

The risk for outdoor transmission is lower and if you add sunlight and open breeze its basically non existent, Curran said at a recent press conference. What we are doing is asking the state to allow our beaches to open at 100% capacity this summer. We are beach people. We are islanders. Its in our name.

Watch the full press conference below:

Video: Nassau County YouTube page.

Currently, beaches are still restricted to 50% capacity. Beaches filled with people help to fuel the local economy, according to Curran. She said that it makes sense to reopen the beaches this summer.

The science says it. Common sense says it. Even the CDC is basically saying it, she added.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 09:12:24|Editor: huaxia

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Staff members unload China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines at Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, Laos, on April 26 , 2021. (Xinhua/Zhang Jianhua)

Laos has vaccinated front-line high-risk border personnel, medical staff and some citizens with Chinese vaccines, which are safe, reliable and efficient, said a Lao official.

VIENTIANE, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The third batch of China-donated COVID-19 vaccines has arrived in and been handed over to Laos.

The Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines were handed over by Chinese Ambassador to Laos Jiang Zaidong in the Lao Health Ministry on Tuesday.

The Chinese ambassador said that the China-Laos anti-epidemic cooperation has become an important carrier for building a community with a shared future. "We will not forget that when China was struggling to fight the epidemic, the Lao side donated cash and batches of anti-epidemic materials to China."

"Since the outbreak of the epidemic in Laos, China has dispatched two expert teams, provided a large amount of supplies, helped build nucleic acid testing laboratories, and donated three batches of vaccines," the ambassador said.

The COVID-19 epidemic in Laos has spread rapidly this month, Ambassador Jiang said, adding "We believe that under the strong leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and the government, the brotherly Lao people will surely overcome the epidemic. We are willing to continue to provide assistance to this end."

Lao LPRP central committee politburo member, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the National Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control Kikeo Khaykhamphithoune said on the same occasion that whenever it is in difficulties, Laos will surely receive the precious assistance from the Communist Party of China, the Chinese government and the Chinese people.

China's vaccines are safe, reliable and efficient, Kikeo said, adding that the Lao side has already vaccinated front-line high-risk border personnel, medical staff and some citizens with Chinese vaccines.

"I have also been vaccinated (with Chinese vaccines) without any side effects, and everyone takes it into their confidence here," Kikeo said.

Kikeo believed that his country, with the strong support from China, will surely win the final victory over the pandemic. 
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The Oyo State Security Network, codenamed Amotekun, has announced the arrest of 11 suspected bandits in the state.

The commandant of the security corps, Olayinka Olayanju, said in a statement on Thursday that the suspects were arrested in Kajola and Saki areas while mounting roadblocks on major roads.

According to Mr Olayanju, his team was assisted by operatives of the Oodua Peoples Congress and the Vigilante Group of Nigeria.

Operatives of Oyo State Security Network Agency comprising Amotekun corps collaborating with OPC and VGN apprehended six bandits at Kajola local government area of Oyo state while on their joint routine patrol in the early hours of April 29, 2021, along two separate routes within the council area, he said.

They were arrested in separate incidents following encounters at two illegally mounted roadblocks. They tried to escape from the scene but were given hot pursuit by the operatives as they tried to evade arrest. We are still on the trail of others who managed to escape from the scene.

The bandits, namely Awali Atine, Ibrahim Abu, Shuaib Balau, Ibrahim Musa, Abdullah Masika and Umar Aliu Masika were of the Bororo Fulani ethnic group.

The statement said the suspected bandits were arrested along Okeho-Ilua and Okeho-Iseyin road at about 4 a.m. on April 29.

In another development, five bandits were equally arrested in Saki East council area and handed over the Divisional Police Officer in the area on April 29, 2021.

The bandits, whose modus operandi is to pretend as herdsmen in the day and violently robbed innocent passengers on the highways at night, were caught with 183 cows, weapons and a total sum of N268,470.00.

They have been handed over to the Nigerian Police Police in Okeho Divisional headquarters alongside the 183 cows, weapons and money found in their possession for further investigation, his statement read.

PREMIUM TIMES has on several occasions reported the activities of bandits in Oyo and many other southwestern states.

They are into kidnapping for ransom and killing of victims who find ransom difficult to pay. This led to the birth of Amotekun.

While some success stories have been recorded since the launch of Amotekun, the region, like other regions across the country, is still battling with security challenges.
Bad actors with suspected ties to China have been behind a wide-ranging cyberespionage campaign targeting military organizations in Southeast Asia for nearly two years, according to new research.

Attributing the attacks to a threat actor dubbed "Naikon APT," cybersecurity firm Bitdefender laid out the ever-changing tactics, techniques, and procedures adopted by the group, including weaving new backdoors named "Nebulae" and "RainyDay" into their data-stealing missions. The malicious activity is said to have been conducted between June 2019 and March 2021.

"In the beginning of the operation the threat actors used Aria-Body loader and Nebulae as the first stage of the attack," the researchers said. "Starting with September 2020, the threat actors included the RainyDay backdoor in their toolkit. The purpose of this operation was cyberespionage and data theft."

Naikon (aka Override Panda, Lotus Panda, or Hellsing) has a track record of targeting government entities in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in search of geopolitical intelligence. While initially assumed to have gone off the radar since first exposed in 2015, evidence emerged to the contrary last May when the adversary was spotted using a new backdoor called "Aria-Body" to stealthily break into networks and leverage the compromised infrastructure as a command-and-control (C2) server to launch additional attacks against other organizations.

The new wave of attacks identified by Bitdefender employed RainyDay as the primary backdoor, with the actors using it to conduct reconnaissance, deliver additional payloads, perform lateral movement across the network, and exfiltrate sensitive information. The backdoor was executed by means of a technique known as DLL side-loading, which refers to the tried-and-tested method of loading malicious DLLs in an attempt to hijack the execution flow of a legitimate program like Outlook Item Finder.

As a backup strategy, the malware also installed a second implant called Nebulae to amass system information, carry out file operations, and download and upload arbitrary files from and to the C2 server. "The second backdoor [...] is supposedly used as a measure of precaution to not lose the persistence in case any signs of infections get detected," the researchers said.

Other tools deployed by the RainyDay backdoor include a file collector that picks up recently changed files with specific extensions and uploads them to Dropbox, a credential harvester, and various networking utilities such as NetBIOS scanners and proxies.

What's more, Bitdefender said RainyDay is likely the same malware that Kaspersky disclosed earlier this month, citing similarities in the functionality and the use of DLL side-loading to achieve execution. Called "FoundCore," the backdoor was attributed to a Chinese-speaking actor named Cycldek as part of a cyberespionage campaign directed against government and military organizations in Vietnam.
TAMPA, Fla., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AACSB International (AACSB) announced today that American University of the Middle East; California State University, San Marcos; Chang Jung Christian University; Chiang Mai University; Deusto Business School, University of Deusto; Dominican University of California; Koc University; Politecnico di Milano School of Management, Politecnico Milano; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali; Royal Holloway, University of London; and VIT Business School, Vellore Institute of Technology have earned accreditation in business.

For over 100 years, AACSB accreditation has represented the highest standard of quality in business education in the world. As the longest-serving and largest business education network, AACSB connects lifelong learners, educators, and businesses worldwide. Through today's ratification a total of 901 institutions across 58 countries and territories have earned AACSB accreditation in business. Furthermore, 189 institutions maintain supplemental AACSB accreditation for their accounting programs.

"AACSB accreditation recognizes institutions that have demonstrated a focus on excellence in all areas, including teaching, research, curriculum development, and student learning," said Stephanie M. Bryant, executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of AACSB. "We congratulate each of the newly accredited institutions for earning this respected honor."

Achieving accreditation is a process of rigorous internal focus, engagement with an AACSB-assigned mentor, and peer-reviewed evaluation. During this multiyear path, schools focus on developing and implementing a plan to align with AACSB's accreditation standards. These standards require excellence in areas relating to strategic management and innovation; student, faculty, and staff as active participants; learning and teaching; and academic and professional engagement.

"The commitment to earning accreditation is a true reflection of a school's dedicationnot only to their students, alumni network, and greater business community, but to the higher education industry as a whole," said Bryant. "Today's students are tomorrow's business leaders, and the addition of these 11 institutions to the network of AACSB-accredited business schools will have a lasting positive impact, both locally and globally."

For more information about AACSB accreditation, please visit aacsb.edu/accreditation.

About AACSB International

Established in 1916, AACSB International (AACSB) is the world's largest business education alliance, connecting educators, learners, and business to create the next generation of great leaders. With a presence in more than 100 countries and territories, AACSB fosters engagement, accelerates innovation, and amplifies impact in business education. Learn how AACSB is transforming business education for a better society at aacsb.edu.

SOURCE AACSB International

Related Links

http://www.aacsb.edu


China's film authorities will continue to crack down on film copyright infringement to maintain the sound development of the film industry, said a statement issued on the website of the China Film Administration (CFA) on Wednesday.

The statement was released in response to the recent rise in copyright-infringing short videos, such as those featuring synopses of films.

In cooperation with the National Copyright Administration, the CFA will continue to intensify the crackdown on film copyright infringement, said the statement.

The CFA will also regulate and punish producers and operators of "self-media" platforms that copy, edit or spread films without authorization, to protect the legitimate rights and interests of film copyright holders.

The protection of film copyright will stimulate the vitality of innovation and creation, and promote the development of high-quality films, it said.

The CFA has always attached great importance to the protection of film copyright and cracked down on illegal acts together with public security and copyright organs, the statement added.
Hoang Nguyet Minh, director of Commercial Leasing for Savills in Hanoi

Recently, Hanoi issued some planning projects at the same time that land prices in some surrounding areas soared. Is there any connection between that and the rental price of office space and industrial land for lease?

For office space and industrial land for lease projects, all fees are paid annually, unlike housing projects with one-time advance payment. Therefore, the change in planning or the increase in prices for commercial projects will have a minor impact and will not have too much influence on the rental price.

In essence, the increase or decrease in rental rates of retail offices or industrial zones depends more on the supply of the market and the products than on the increase in land prices.

The zoning plan for four inner-city districts of Hanoi focuses on the relocation of people mainly from the Old Quarter. If the plan is implemented, how do you assess the fluctuations in the price level as well as the difficulties that Hanoi will face when planning this area?

Many companies, regardless of their relocation trend, still want to keep offices in the Hoan Kiem area and they will open more branch offices in other areas. But that is because businesses want to keep offices in the central area. However, the supply of offices in Hoan Kiem will not be too much in the future due to limited land fund and if any, the construction density is also limited to 4-5 floors as planned.

Savills predicts that office rental prices in Hoan Kiem will not decrease, but the rental real estate market will have an adjustment in customers in each area. Many businesses will consider moving to the districts of Ba Dinh or Tay Ho, or west of Hanoi instead of staying in the Hoan Kiem area.

Currently, office rent in the western area of Hanoi fluctuates at an average of $20-25 per square metre, which is a reasonable price to ensure sustainability in the future.

Does the sharp rise in land prices affect the attraction of foreign investors to Hanoi and Vietnam?

When deciding whether to invest in Vietnams real estate market, foreign investors spend a lot of time researching and evaluating actual land prices through specific pricing, rather than relying solely on personal transactions.

The buying and selling does not reflect the real value of the transaction. Investors also cannot use these numbers to evaluate, but will base on price information from previous projects, sale speed, and projects under parallel supply. Therefore, land bubbles will not affect investors decisions too much.

Which segment is seeing increasing foreign investment inflows?

Currently, many foreign investors still assess Vietnam as a potential market. In Hanoi and surrounding areas, the land bank is still quite large for exploitation, while the biggest strength of foreign investors is the construction of the project complex, which includes the provision of all amenities in addition to apartments for sale.

Asian investors are leading in completing investment transactions in Vietnam and Singapore is still the country with the most transactions in Hanoi.

Previously, foreign investors were interested in hotels but due to COVID-19, offices for rent and houses, including villas and apartments, are now seeing increasing interest.

In the housing segment, Japanese and Singaporean businesses are much more aggressive in seeking investment opportunities and are much more flexible in terms of transaction structure such as being able to cooperate with Vietnamese investors who have a large land bank but have not been able to begin exploitation and implementation.

Investors from South Korea used to be very interested in this segment, but due to the influence of the pandemic and some restrictions on being able to enter the Vietnamese market, it is more difficult to make investment decisions.

The office for lease market has been a strong point for foreign investors. Both South Korean and Japanese financiers have a very large number of companies operating in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, so they focus on the construction of office buildings.
RTHK: Astronaut Michael Collins dies aged 90

American astronaut Michael Collins, who as pilot of the Apollo 11 command module stayed behind on July 20, 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin travelled to the lunar surface to become the first humans to walk on the moon, died on Wednesday at age 90, his family said.

A statement released by his family said Collins died of cancer.

Often described as the "forgotten" third astronaut on the historic mission, Collins remained alone in the command module for more than 21 hours until his two fellow astronauts returned in the lunar module. He lost contact with mission control in Houston each time the spacecraft circled the dark side of the moon.

"Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins," the mission log said, referring to the biblical figure.

Collins wrote an account of his experiences in his 1974 autobiography, "Carrying the Fire," but largely shunned publicity.

"I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have," Collins said in comments released by Nasa in 2009.

President Joe Biden said his prayers were with the Collins family.

"From his vantage point, high above the Earth, he reminded us of the fragility of our own planet, and called on us to care for it like the treasure it is," Biden said in a statement. "Godspeed, Mike."

Acting Nasa Administrator Steve Jurczyk on Wednesday hailed Collins as "a true pioneer."

"Nasa mourns the loss of this accomplished pilot and astronaut, a friend of all who seek to push the envelope of human potential. ... His spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons," Jurczyk said in a statement.

Writing on Twitter, Aldrin paid tribute to Collins, saying: "Dear Mike, Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the Fire to Carry us deftly to new heights and to the future."

Collins was born in Rome on October 31, 1930 - the same year as both Armstrong, who died in 2012, and Aldrin. He was the son of a US Army major general and, like his father, attended the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, graduating in 1952.

Like many of the first generation of American astronauts, Collins started out as an Air Force test pilot.

In 1963, he was chosen by Nasa for its astronaut programme, still in its early days but ramping up quickly at the height of the Cold War as the United States sought to push ahead of the Soviet Union and fulfil President John F. Kennedy's pledge of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

Collins' first voyage into space came in July 1966 as pilot on Gemini X, part of the missions that prepared Nasa's Apollo programme. The Gemini X mission carried out a successful docking with a separate target vehicle.

His second, and final, spaceflight was the historic Apollo 11.

He avoided much of the media fanfare that greeted the astronauts on their return to Earth, and was later often critical of the cult of celebrity.

After a short stint in government, Collins became director of the National Air and Space Museum, stepping down in 1978. He was also the author of a number of space-related books.

His strongest memory from Apollo 11, he said, was looking back at the Earth, which he said seemed "fragile."

"I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced," he said.

His family's statement said it knew "how lucky Mike felt to live the life he did."

"Please join us in fondly and joyfully remembering his sharp wit, his quiet sense of purpose, and his wise perspective, gained both from looking back at Earth from the vantage of space and gazing across calm waters from the deck of his fishing boat." (Reuters)

This story has been published on: 2021-04-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The Verkhovna Rada has supported the decision to appoint Energoatom Vice President Herman Halushchenko as Ukraine's energy minister.

A total of 305 lawmakers voted for the decision at a parliament meeting on Thursday, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

Representatives of the Servant of the People party discussed his candidacy for the post of energy minister on April 22. On April 26, the party's faction in parliament started collecting signatures for Halushchenko's appointment. Two days later, his candidacy was supported by the parliamentary committee on energy, housing and utility services.

Halushchenko has served as Vice President of the National Nuclear Energy Generating Company Energoatom since May 2020. In 2013-2014, he worked at the company as Executive Director for Legal Support.

Halushchenko also worked in the prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as deputy head of a department at the Secretariat (Administration) of the President of Ukraine and as director of the judicial department at the Ministry of Justice.

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Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi Wednesday chaired a high-level meeting to hold consultations over the economic challenges posed by Covid-19 pandemic, national security, regional situation and stability

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Apr, 2021 ) :Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi Wednesday chaired a high-level meeting to hold consultations over the economic challenges posed by Covid-19 pandemic, national security, regional situation and stability.

During the meeting, the foreign minister said the coronavirus pandemic had impacted the powerful economies of world, and as a developing country, Pakistan was also facing the big challenge.

Considering the situation, the country was specially focusing upon its priorities of regional situation and economy, he added.

The meeting was attended by Minister for food Security Syed Fakhar Imam, Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari, Minister for Energy Hamad Azhar, PM's Advisor on Finance Shaukat Tarin, Minister for Economic Affairs Omar Ayub, PM's Advisor on Commerce Abdul Razak Dawood, PM's Special Assistant on Overseas Pakistanis Sayed Zulfiqar Abbas Bukhari, PM's Special Assistant on National Security Moeed Yousaf, Advisor on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam, PM's Special Assistant on Power Tabish Gohar, board of Investment Chairman Atif Bukhari, Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood, and other civil and military high officials, a press release said.

During the meeting, diplomatic efforts for projecting abroad the investment opportunities in the agriculture, information technology and other sectors of Pakistan were also discussed.

Foreign Minister Qureshi said they were also focusing upon economic diplomacy to promote economic cooperation and regional linkages.

He said Pakistan would continue its sincere efforts for peace and stability in Afghanistan and the whole region.

He also welcomed a joint statement issued at the conclusion of a trilateral meeting held in Turkey over Afghan issue despite the Covid pandemic.

The foreign minister reiterated Pakistan's consistent stance of stressing upon holding of a comprehensive intra-Afghan dialogue under the Afghan leadership which was acceptable to all Afghans to achieve a durable peace in the worn-torn country.

He also called upon the international community to play its role in ending the gross human rights violations and redeeming the innocent Kashmiris from the unabated aggression and oppression unleashed by the Indian occupation forces in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).

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Mumbai, April 29 : Madhuri Dixit launched a new online dance campaign on Thursday, on the occasion of World Dance Day. The campaign aims at spreading positivity amid the Covid pandemic.

"The '#UnitedByDance' campaign aims at spreading positivity, social happiness, and mental and physical wellness through dance, from the sanctity of everyone's homes," said Madhuri.

Through the initiative, participants will get a chance to join Madhuri in dance, along with dancers and choreographers across the world, from countries including the USA, Singapore, the UAE, and Mauritius, who are doing commendable work in their niche areas of dance.
A statewide teachers union and its Lawrence local are calling for a Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member to resign over comments he made at a recent meeting, days after three state lawmakers, several city officials and Congresswoman Lori Trahan also called for his removal.

Board member Michael Moriarty, executive director of the OneHolyoke community development corporation, has apologized for his remarks during a discussion of the states school accountability system, saying he never meant to disparage people who live in Holyoke and Lawrence.

The board voted on April 20 to solicit public comment on regulatory changes that would allow the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to refrain from issuing new accountability determinations this year, keeping schools and districts at their current status.

Moriarty said the freeze is necessary amid the COVID-19 pandemic but suggested a broader conversation about the accountability system, referencing earlier board discussion on the admissions policies for vocational technical schools.

We just went through an awful lot, worrying about disparate impacts in the one very precise area of how you get into a vocational school, but its accountability in places like Lawrence and Holyoke and other communities that are Level 5 or schools that are Level 5, thats disparate impact writ large, he said. Thats a period of time now where weve been unable to take the kind of actions that are necessary because of the deep inequities that exist from one district to the next, and we know they cant change themselves because they never do, so if theres any place where there needs to be a very serious conversation and a very serious intentionality about moving forward, its going to be in a revived accountability system that follows the end of this pandemic.

Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge are the three school districts assigned Level 5 or chronically underperforming status in the accountability system, and each has a state-appointed receiver overseeing turnaround efforts.

American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts President Beth Kontos and Lawrence Teachers Union Local 1019 President Kimberly Barry put out a joint statement Wednesday calling for Moriartys immediate resignation. They said other board members who participated in last weeks meeting should denounce his language and join us in calling for his resignation and that Gov. Charlie Baker should remove Moriarty from the board if he does not step down.

Kontos and Barry called it impossible for the people of Lawrence, Holyoke or any Massachusetts Gateway City where families struggle for a share of the American dream to have confidence in the department while Moriarty is on its board.

Moriartys recent comment that they cant change themselves is demeaning to parents and cause for dismissal of any public official. Mr. Moriarty must submit his resignation as a first step toward restoring confidence in the DESE board, they said.

Moriarty, an attorney, attended and taught in Holyoke Public Schools and served 13 years on that citys school committee, according to his biography on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Educations website. Baker appointed him to the state education board in September 2015.

During the April 20 Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting, I made a comment regarding the value of MCAS and the school accountability system, which I regret was insulting, and for that I sincerely apologize, Moriarty said in a statement issued last week. I was speaking about schools in Holyoke - my home town - and Lawrence, and other communities with Level 5 underperforming schools. In referring to those particular school districts I said, we know they cant change themselves, because they never do. I was referring to school districts, not people in those communities. I never meant to disparage people who live in Holyoke and Lawrence. I apologize for giving that impression. I will strive to communicate much better going forward.

On Friday, Reps. Frank Moran and Marcos Devers, Sen. Barry Finegold, and Trahan, all of whom represent Lawrence, seven city councilors and a Lawrence School Committee member wrote to Baker, requesting Moriartys removal from the board.

The letter -- signed by councilors Jeovanny Rodriguez, Maria De La Cruz, Celina Reyes, Pavel Payano, Jorge Gonzalez, Ana Levy and Estella Reyes and School Committee member Joshua Alba -- said the comments indicate that Moriartys priorities as a board member of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education do not reflect the urgent needs of the City of Lawrence and similar minority communities.

The statement that communities such as Lawrence, a city primarily comprised of immigrants and people of color will never change themselves because they never do is deeply problematic and demonstrates Mr. Moriartys incredible lack of understanding of the issues that such communities face, the officials wrote.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is next scheduled to meet on May 24 and 25.
EV

But a lot is happening behind closed doors in Cupertino, and one analyst believes Apple is actually desperate to find a partner to manufacture the car.Speaking for EE Times , CLSA analyst Patrick Chen says theres a very good chance Apple ends up working with Foxconn on anproject, though its not yet clear if this is the company that will handle the manufacturing process.Apple is indeed desperate, the analyst has been cited as saying. They are indeed in talks with Foxconn for some kind of cooperation.But according to other sources, while Apple has indeed discussed a potential EV partnership with Foxconn, a joint venture between LG and Magna could be the one taking care of the Apple Car production.Apple has previously reached out to Hyundai for the manufacturing of the Apple Car, but the talks have been dropped, possibly because the South Korean company spilled the beans on the project. Since then, Apple has reportedly tried to get in touch with a series of other traditional carmakers, including Nissan, but the talks have all failed to reach a conclusion.Apple is expected to launch the Apple Car in 2024 or 2025 at the earliest, and if Magna and LG take care of the production process, a prototype could see the daylight approximately one year before. But of course, everything depends on how the planning phase advances, as right now, Apple is yet to find someone to build its car.In the meantime, Foxconn is getting ready to set up EV production lines in North America , with a decision on which location to be used to be made by the summer of this year.
[April 29, 2021] Monte Carlo Announces Partnership With Snowflake to Help Organizations Achieve More Trustworthy Data

Monte Carlo, the data reliability company, today announced a partnership with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to help data teams trust their data and accelerate the adoption of analytics in the Data Cloud. This combination can provide Snowflake customers with end-to-end Data Observability across their entire Snowflake Data Cloud, from ingestion to analytics. Monte Carlo is an end-to-end solution that allows data engineers and analysts to seamlessly monitor the health and dependencies of their data assets across the entire Data Cloud, from ingestion to analytics - all in one collaborative interface. Simultaneously, Monte Carlo provides CDOs and other data stakeholders with a holistic view of their company's data health and reliability across critical business use cases. Joint customers such as The Zebra, Compass (News - Alert) , and PagerDuty rely on Monte Carlo to automate monitoring and anomaly detection for their data pipelines by proactively surfacing issues related to data freshness, volume, distribution, schema, and lineage. From there, Monte Carlo's end-to-end lineage helps assess the business impact of data issues and drastically reduces time-to-resolution, allowing organizations to take full advantage of Snowflake's Data Cloud. "We are delighted to partner with Monte Carlo for their data observability capabilities," said Tarik Dwiek, Director of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. "With Monte Carlo, Snowflake customers can quickly identify, resolve, and prevent broken data pipelines before they affect the business, ensuring that the data powering decision making and fueling digital services is reliable and can be trusted at each stage of its life cycle." Simultaneously, Monte Carlo customers benefit from the speed, scalability, an cost-effectiveness of Snowflake's platform. With Snowflake, analytics that previously took hours to even days can now be delivered in minutes, enabling companies to generate more trustworthy and accurate analytics, more quickly and easily.



"As data pipelines become increasingly complex and companies ingest more and more data, often from third-party sources, it's paramount that this data is reliable," said Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo. "Monte Carlo is excited to partner with Snowflake to help companies trust their data through end-to-end data observability across their cloud data stack." As the world's leading wellness services marketplace, Mindbody is a company with data at heart. Alex Soria, VP of Data & Analytics, is leading the charge with a team of over 25 data scientists, business intelligence analysts, and data engineers responsible for ensuring that the insights powering their product is fresh and reliable.

"Data-driven decision making is a huge priority for Mindbody, but our analytics are only as reliable as the data that informs them," said Alex. "by using Monte Carlo while we migrated to Snowflake, we saved a month on our gap analysis. Being able to see all the business intelligence downstream of a table as we moved over was very valuable. Now that we're on Snowflake's Data Cloud, Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for abnormalities in the data life cycle that could otherwise go unnoticed until a customer notified us." The Zebra, a leading insurance comparison site, makes it easy for consumers across the United States to compare and save on car and home insurance quotes. The company provides over 1,800 car insurance products from more than 200 national insurers, a monumental feat that relies on real-time decision making powered by data from disparate third-party vendors and partners. The Zebra's data team uses Snowflake and Monte Carlo to ensure that their data pipelines are performant and reliable. "As a data leader, there's nothing worse than not being able to trust your data," said Shea Spalding, Head of Data Governance at The Zebra. "The combination of Snowflake's Data Cloud and Monte Carlo's Data Observability platform helps ensure that our data is accessible and fresh at each stage of the data life cycle. With this stack, my team can better collaborate to resolve issues, work towards data trust, and build better products for our customers." For more information on Monte Carlo and Snowflake's partnership, please visit: www.montecarlodata.com/snowflake About Monte Carlo As businesses increasingly rely on data to drive better decision making and power digital products, it's mission-critical that this data is accurate and reliable. Billed by Forbes as the New Relic for data teams and backed by Accel, Redpoint Ventures, and GGV Capital, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data through their fully automated, SOC-2 certified data observability platform. Find out more at www.montecarlodata.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005251/en/

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The urgent need for human stool donations to treat chronic gut infections could soon be eased with innovative research to develop artificial super stool.

The collaborative research aims to create a new generation of microbial therapies that can replace donor-derived faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).

Technology that replicates the complex community of microbes in the human gut will be manufactured in Australia as part of the project.

Australian microbiome biotechnology company BiomeBank, in collaboration with RMIT University, has secured $100,000 in funding from the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC) to develop the new bioreactor technology.

Currently material for FMT can only be harvested from healthy human donors, which is time-consuming, expensive and difficult to scale-up for widespread clinical use.

The new innovation would provide significant advantages to the cost and scale of FMT, an established life-saving therapy for Clostridioides difficile infection that is also emerging as a clinically beneficial treatment for other gut conditions including Ulcerative Colitis.

BiomeBank CEO Thomas Mitchell said the IMCRC activate program funding was an exciting step forward in the collaborative development of advanced technologies to change the way gut disease is treated across the world.

This will be a game-changer in the treatment of gut conditions, overcoming the current limitations of donor-derived FMT microbial therapies. An important outcome will be enabling microbial therapies to reach more patients around the world. We're thrilled to partner with RMIT on this exciting project, connecting their manufacturing expertise to our company's unique capabilities in the development of microbiome drug products. BiomeBank will use this new manufacturing technology to develop second generation therapies to treat multiple diseases for the broader market." Thomas Mitchell, CEO, BiomeBank

Innovative manufacturing technology

RMIT School of Engineering researchers Professor Namita Choudhury, Professor Naba Dutta and Dr Srinivas Mettu will lead the project work.

Choudhury, Discipline Leader for Chemical Engineering at RMIT, said the collaborative project builds on the team's previous success in developing technology to produce multiple strains of probiotic bacteria in a single bioreactor.

"The new FMT manufacturing technology will support the growth of many beneficial bacteria strains simultaneously," she said.

"While individual probiotic bacteria can be cultivated commercially, we need multiple strains in order to restore the complex microbial diversity of the gut when this is lost due to illness, malnutrition or overuse of antibiotics - and we need to produce these varied strains efficiently and cost-effectively.

"We are excited to collaborate with BiomeBank to deliver innovative biomedical technology into the hands of clinicians to improve the health of millions of people globally who suffer from chronic gut conditions."

New business and export opportunities

Dr Matthew Young, Manufacturing Innovation Manager at IMCRC, said the FMT manufacturing technology developed as part of the research collaboration would be the first of its kind and presented a significant opportunity for BiomeBank and Australia, by creating pathways towards a manufacturing industry for microbial therapies in this country.

"Australia is leading the way globally in developing and implementing new manufacturing and business models in the medical space," Young said.

"If successful, the manufacturing technology developed as part of the project will allow BiomeBank to manufacture synthetic FMT or defined microbial products in a controlled, standardised way - ensuring quality, safety and efficacy, and opening up new business and export opportunities for high-value medical treatments."

The IMCRC funding, which is being matched by Biomebank, is enabling a $600,000 total project investment (cash and in-kind) from all partners into the development of the technology prototype.

The IMCRC-funded project draws on innovations in novel bioreactor development by Mettu and over 25 years of research in the formulation of hydrogels for biomedical and life science applications by Dutta and Choudhury.

These porous hydrogels are made from sustainable resources and can be precisely designed to support bacteria growth in the bioreactor, mimicking the levels of oxygen and acidity found in the human gut.

The new IMCRC Activate funding will advance the research to expand the diversity of microbial strains that can be cultivated simultaneously and cost-effectively.

Previously, RMIT's novel hydrogel bioreactor platform technology research was supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation GCE (Grand Challenges Exploration) funding to Mettu and Australian Research Council-funded Discovery projects to Choudhury and Dutta.
(@FahadShabbir)

Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Apr, 2021 ) :US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he was not seeking to escalate tensions with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin after imposing sanctions over an array of concerns.

"I made very clear to Putin that we don't seek escalation but their actions have consequences," Biden said in an annual address to Congress.
Media relations:

Florence Lievre

Tel.: 01 47 54 50 71

florence.lievre@capgemini.com

Investor relations:

Vincent Biraud

Tel.: 01 47 54 50 87

vincent.biraud@capgemini.com

Growth momentum stronger than anticipated in Q1 2021

Paris, April29,2021 - Capgemini Group reported Q1 2021 revenues of 4,271 million, up 24.2% year-on-year at constant exchange rates1*.

Aiman Ezzat, Chief Executive Officer of the Capgemini Group, commented: "We delivered an excellent performance in the first quarter of 2021,with a return to organic growth. Growth was stronger than anticipated and activity even surpassedpre-health crisis levels, reflecting not only a more dynamicmarket but also the accelerated deployment of our strategy. Performance improved across all ourgeographies and sectors. We are strongly positioned in cloud and data, the main drivers of technology and business transformation in the years to come, which fueled this performance. The first quarter was also marked bya return to large-scale recruitment to meet client demand. In this context, our growth for 2021 should exceed the mid-point of the targeted range.

We recently unveiled the Capgemini Engineering brand which brings togethera unique set of cutting-edge capabilities in Engineering and R&D. This perfectly complements the Group's already well-established portfolio of business offerings and supports our leadership position in Intelligent Industry.

Finally, we were recently named one of the world's most ethical companies for the ninth year in a row.This is a very meaningfuldistinction for me because our Group is founded on valuesthat enable us toforge long-lastingrelationshipswith all stakeholders in ourecosystemand pave the way for a sustainable future.

I would also like to reaffirm that our priority remains the health and well-being of our teams. Currently we are closely monitoring the health situation in India and Brazil and continue to provide support to all our employees.?"





Revenues

(in millions of euros) Change 2020

2021



Reported At

constant exchange rates* Q1 3,547 4,271 +20.4% +24.2%

Group momentum continued to improve in Q1 2021, with annual growth rates higher than in Q4 2020. With a return to growth at constant scope and exchange rates in Q1, at +1.7%, Group revenues are already up on pre-crisis levels.

Group revenues rose by +20.4% at current exchange rates and +24.2% at constant exchange rates*, with the consolidation of Altran Technologies ("Altran") effective April 1st, 2020. This momentum also reflects the double-digit growth achieved in Digital and Cloud activities.

OPERATIONS BY REGION

In Q1 2021, annual growth rates at constant exchange rates improved across all Group regions compared to Q4 2020, reflecting stronger underlying organic growth momentum, i.e. at constant scope and exchange rates.

On an organic basis, the North America (28% of Group revenues) and Rest of Europe (31% of Group revenues) regions returned to growth. Growth accelerated in Asia-Pacificand Latin America (7% of Group revenues) and United Kingdom and Ireland (12% of Group revenues), climbing to double figures in the latter region. Finally, France (22% of Group revenues) continued its gradual recovery, although it was still down on Q1 2020.

Momentum improved in all sectors in Q1 2021. In particular, on an organic basis: the Manufacturing sector (25% of Group revenues, including the Life Sciences segment) reported the most significant improvement, with now only a limited year-on-year contraction. The Public sector (14% of Group revenues) maintained its strong performance, once again reporting double-digit growth. The Consumer Goods sector (12% of Group revenues) reported a strong Q1 with a return to solid growth. Finally, the Services sector (5% of Group revenues, including transportation, hotels and catering), which bore the brunt of the crisis, reported a further improvement, with a substantially lower decline than in Q4 2020.

OPERATIONS BY BUSINESS

All of the Group's businesses reported further sequential improvements in annual growth rates compared to the previous quarter, both at constant exchange rates and organically (that is at constant scope and exchange rates).

All businesses are now posting organic growth in total revenues*, except for Engineering which however clearly improved. On an organic basis, Strategy&Transformation consulting services (7% of Group revenues) and Applications&Technology services (62% of Group revenues and Capgemini's core business) returned to growth in Q1 2021. Operations&Engineering services (31% of Group revenues) continued their recovery with only a slight decline in activity, boosted by higher growth in cloud infrastructure services.

The +77,6% growth in Operations & Engineering total revenues at constant exchange rates reflects the consolidation of Altran, which mainly delivers Engineering services. The Altran consolidation had a much lesser impact on the other business lines.

HEADCOUNT

As of March 31, 2021, the Group's total headcount stood at 274,500, up 25.3% year-on-year, with a 21.7% increase in employees in offshore centers to 152,000 (55% of the total headcount and a 1-point increase compared to December 31, 2020).

BOOKINGS

Bookings totaled 4,201 million in Q1 2021, up 27.3% at constant exchange rates year-on-year. The book-to-bill ratio also improved to 98%, compared to 96% in Q1 2020.

OUTLOOK

For the full year 2021, the Group aims to achieve:

A constant currency growth of +7.0% to +9.0%;

An operating margin of 12.2% to 12.4%, i.e. at 2019 level;

An organic free cash flow above 1,300 million.





The inorganic contribution to growth is anticipated at c. 4.5 points.

CONFERENCE CALL

Aiman Ezzat, Chief Executive Officer, and Carole Ferrand, Chief Financial Officer, will present this press release during a conference call in English to be held today at 8.00 a.m. Paris timenk. A replay will also be available for a period of one year.

All documents relating to this publication will be placed online on the Capgemini investor website at https://investors.capgemini.com/en/.

CALENDAR

May 20, 2021 Shareholders' Meeting behind closed doors)

July 28, 2021 Publication of H1 2021 results

It is recalled that the payment schedule for the dividend - the amount of which (1.95 per share) will be submitted for approval to the Shareholders' Meeting - is as follows:

June 2, 2021 Ex-dividend date on Euronext Paris

June 4, 2021 Payment of the dividend

DISCLAIMER

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. Such statements may include projections, estimates, assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives, intentions and/or expectations with respect to future financial results, events, operations and services and product development, as well as statements, regarding future performance or events. Forward-looking statements are generally identified by the words "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "plans", "projects", "may", "would", "should" or the negatives of these terms and similar expressions. Although Capgemini's management currently believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties (including without limitation risks identified in Capgemini's Universal Registration Document available on Capgemini's website), because they relate to future events and depend on future circumstances that may or may not occur and may be different from those anticipated, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Capgemini. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those expressed in, implied by or projected by forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not intended to and do not give any assurances or comfort as to future events or results. Other than as required by applicable law, Capgemini does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement.

This press release does not contain or constitute an offer of securities for sale or an invitation or inducement to invest in securities in France, the United States or any other jurisdiction.

About Capgemini

Capgemini is a global leader in partnering with companies to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology. The Group is guided everyday by its purpose of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future. It is a responsible and diverse organization of 270,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. With its strong 50 year heritage and deep industry expertise, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to address the entire breadth of their business needs, from strategy and design to operations, fueled by the fast evolving and innovative world of cloud, data, AI, connectivity, software, digital engineering and platforms. The Group reported in 2020 global revenues of 16 billion.

Get the Future You Want | www.capgemini.com



***





APPENDIX2

BUSINESS CLASSIFICATION

Strat e g y & Transformation includes all strategy, innovation and transformation consulting services.

includes all strategy, innovation and transformation consulting services. Applications & Technolog y brings together "Application Services" and related activities and notably local technology services.

brings together "Application Services" and related activities and notably local technology services. Operations & Engineering encompasses all other Group businesses. These comprise Business Services (including Business Process Outsourcing and transaction services), all Infrastructure and Cloud Services, and R&D and Engineering Services.





DEFINITIONS

Organic growth or like-for-like growth in revenues is the growth rate calculated at constant Group scope and exchange rates. The Group scope and exchange rates used are those for the reported period. Exchange rates for the reported period are also used to calculate growth at constant exchange rates.

Reconciliation of growth rates Q1 2021 Organic growth +1.7% Changes in Group scope +22.5 pts Growth at constant exchange rates +24.2% Exchange rate fluctuations -3.8 pts Reported growth +20.4%

When determining activity trends by business and in accordance with internal operating performance measures, growth at constant exchange rates is calculated based on total revenues, i.e. before elimination of inter-business billing. The Group considers this to be more representative of activity levels by business. As its businesses change, an increasing number of contracts require a range of business expertise for delivery, leading to a rise in inter-business flows.

Operating margin, is one of the Group's key performance indicators. It is defined as the difference between revenues and operating costs. It is calculated before "Other operating income and expenses" which include amortization of intangible assets recognized in business combinations, the charge resulting from the deferred recognition of the fair value of shares granted to employees (including social security contributions and employer contributions), and non-recurring revenues and expenses, notably impairment of goodwill, negative goodwill, capital gains or losses on disposals of consolidated companies or businesses, restructuring costs incurred under a detailed formal plan approved by the Group's management, the cost of acquiring and integrating companies acquired by the Group, including earn-outs comprising conditions of presence, and the effects of curtailments, settlements and transfers of defined benefit pension plans.

Normalized net profit is equal to profit for the year (Group share) adjusted for the impact of items recognized in "Other operating income and expense", net of tax calculated using the effective tax rate. Normalized earnings per share is computed like basic earnings per share, i.e. excluding dilution.

Organic free cash flow is equal to cash flow from operations less acquisitions of property, plant, equipment and intangible assets (net of disposals) and repayments of lease liabilities, adjusted for cash out relating to the net interest cost.

REVENUES BY REGION

Revenues

(in millions of euros) Change Q1 2020 Q1 2021 Reported At constant exchange rates North America 1,133 1,207 +6.5% +16.1% United Kingdom and Ireland 410 502 +22.2% +24.1% France 755 931 +23.2% +23.2% Rest of Europe 980 1,336 +36.4% +35.3% Asia-Pacific and Latin America 269 295 +9.8% +17.3% TOTAL 3,547 4,271 +20.4% +24.2%

REVENUES BY BUSINESS

Total revenues*

(% of Group revenues) Change

at constant exchange ratesintotal revenues*

of the business



Q1 2020 Q1 2021 Strategy & Transformation 7% 7% +25.2% Applications & Technology 71% 62% +5.7% Operations & Engineering 22% 31% +77.6%





* The terms and Alternative Performance Measures marked with an (*) are defined and/or reconciled in the appendix to this press release.

2 Note that in the appendix, certain totals may not equal the sum of amounts due to rounding adjustments.

Attachment
DGAP-Ad-hoc: Obotech Acquisition SE / Key word(s): IPO

Obotech Acquisition SE launches bookbuilding for up to EUR 200 million private placement and listing on Frankfurt Stock Exchange



29-Apr-2021 / 14:44 CET/CEST

Disclosure of an inside information acc. to Article 17 MAR of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





AD-HOC RELEASE

Public disclosure of inside information according to Article 17 para. 1 of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 on market abuse (Market Abuse Regulation)

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, PUBLICATION OR FORWARDING, EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH SUCH DISTRIBUTION OR PUBLICATION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL. OTHER RESTRICTIONS ARE APPLICABLE. PLEASE SEE THE IMPORTANT NOTICE AT THE END OF THIS PUBLICATION.

OboTech Acquisition SE launches bookbuilding for up to EUR 200 million private placement and listing on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and targets business combination with a European company in the real estate technology and climate technology sectors



Luxembourg, April 29, 2021 - OboTech Acquisition SE (the "Company", ISIN: LU2334363566, Frankfurt Stock Exchange: OTA), a Luxembourg special purpose acquisition company, announces the start of a private placement of up to 20,000,000 units (the "Units"), each consisting of one share (a "Public Share") and 1/3 warrant (a "Public Warrant"), at a price of EUR 10.00 per unit representing a total placement volume of up to EUR 200 million. The Units will be solely offered to institutional investors. The proceeds of the initial private placement will be held in an escrow account. The private placement is expected to end on or before April 30, 2021.

The Company, sponsored by Obotritia Capital KGaA (the "Founder"), an affiliate of Rolf Elgeti, was established for the purpose of acquiring one opeRating business in a member state of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom or Switzerland in the form of a merger, capital stock exchange, share purchase, asset acquisition, reorganization or similar transaction (the "Business Combination"). The Company, led by Rolf Elgeti (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer), Ben Barnett (Chief Investment Officer) and Lars Wittan (Chief Financial Officer) plans to target a company in the real estate technology sector ("Proptech") and climate technology sector ("Climatech"). The target should have an equity value of between EUR 200 million and EUR 3 billion (pre-money) which will be paid in new shares and/or in cash, including from the proceeds of a possible future private placement in connection with the Business Combination. The Company will have 24 months to consummate a Business Combination, plus an additional three months, if it signs a legally binding agreement with the seller of a target within those initial 24 months. Otherwise, the Company will be liquidated and distribute substantially all of its assets to its shareholders (other than the Founder).

The Company has applied for admission of the Public Shares to trading on the regulated market (regulierter Markt) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (General Standard). The Company has also applied for introduction to trading of the Public Warrants (ISIN: LU2334364374; OTAW) on the open market (Freiverkehr) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Borse Frankfurt Zertifikate AG). Trading of the Public Shares and Public Warrants is expected to commence on May 4, 2021.

As part of the transaction, the Founder will acquire a shareholding in the Company equal, in the aggregate, on an as-converted basis, to 20% (not taking into account the founder shares issued to the Founder as part of the additional founder subscription) of the total number of Public Shares issued and outstanding as a result of the completion of the private placement. The Public Shares received by the Founder as a result of conversion of its founder shares in accordance with the promote structure, as well as the founder warrants, will become transferrable if, at any time, the closing price of the Public Shares equals or exceeds 15.00 for any 20 trading days within any 30-trading day period, commencing no earlier than 150 days following the date of the consummation of the Business Combination.

Responsible Person:

Richard Kohl

Director

9, rue de Bitbourg

L-1273 Luxembourg

info@OboTechAcquisition.com

www.OboTechAcquisition.com



Important Notice

This publication may not be published, distributed or transmitted in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

This publication does not constitute an offer of securities for sale or a solicitation of an offer to purchase securities (the "Securities") of OboTech Acquisition SE (the "Company") in the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan or any other jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. The Securities of the Company may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). There will be no public offering of the securities in the United States. The Securities of the Company have not been, and will not be, registered under the Securities Act. The Securities referred to herein may not be offered or sold in Australia, Canada or Japan or to, or for the account or benefit of, any national, resident or citizen of Australia, Canada or Japan subject to certain exceptions.

This publication constitutes neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to buy securities. The listing of the Securities will be made solely by the means of, and on the basis of, a securities prospectus which is yet to be published. An investment decision regarding any securities of OboTech Acquisition SE should only be made on the basis of the securities prospectus. The securities prospectus will be published promptly upon approval by the Luxembourg Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF)) and will be available free of charge on the OboTech Acquisition SE website.

In the United Kingdom, this publication is only being distributed to and is only directed at 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"), or (ii) persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.) (all such persons together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). This publication is directed only at Relevant Persons and must not be acted on or relied upon by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this publication relates is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons.

In member states of the European Economic Area the placement of securities described in this announcement is directed exclusively at persons who are "qualified investors" within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 (Prospectus Regulation).

The Units are not intended to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any Retail Investor in the EEA. For these purposes, a "Retail Investor" means a person who is one (or more) of: (i) a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of Directive 2014/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 May 2014 on markets in financial instruments, as amended ("MiFID II"); (ii) a customer within the meaning of Directive (EU) 2016/97 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 January 2016 on insurance distribution, as amended, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II. Consequently, no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance-based investment products (the "PRIIPs Regulation") for offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to Retail Investors in the EEA has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to any Retail Investor in the EEA may be unlawful under the PRIIPs Regulation.

Solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process, the target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants has led to the conclusion that (i) the Public Shares are (a) compatible with an end target market of Retail Investors and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II, and (b) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels permitted by MiFID II and (ii) the Public Warrants are (a) compatible with an end target market of investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II, and (b) eligible for distribution to professional clients and eligible counterparties through all distribution channels permitted by MiFID II.

Any person subsequently offering, selling or recommending the Public Shares and Public Warrants (a "distributor") should take into consideration the manufacturer's target market assessment; however, a distributor subject to MiFID II is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants (by either adopting or refining the manufacturer's target market assessment) and determining appropriate distribution channels.

The Units are not intended, to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any Retail Investor in the United Kingdom ("UK"). For these purposes the expression "Retail Investor" means a person who is one (or more) of the following: (i) a retail client, as defined in point (8) of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 2017/565 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 ("EUWA"); or (ii) a customer within the meaning of the provisions of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (the "FSMA") and any rules or regulations made under the FSMA to implement Directive (EU) 2016/97, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client, as defined in point (8) of Article 2(1) of Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the EUWA ("UK MiFIR"). Consequently no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the EUWA (the "UK PRIIPs Regulation") for offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to Retail Investors in the UK has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to any Retail Investor in the UK may be unlawful under the UK PRIIPs Regulation.

Solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process, the target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants has led to the conclusion that (i) the Public Shares are (a) compatible with an end target market of Retail Investors and eligible counterparties, as defined in the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook ("COBS") and professional clients, as defined in UK MiFIR, and (b) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels and (ii) the Public Warrants are (a) compatible with an end target market of eligible counterparties, as defined in COBS, and professional clients, as defined in UK MiFIR; and (b) all channels for distribution of the Public Warrants to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate.

Any person subsequently offering, selling or recommending the Public Shares and Public Warrants (a "distributor") should take into consideration the target market assessment; however, a distributor subject to COBS is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants (by either adopting or refining the target market assessment) and determining appropriate distribution channels.

No action has been taken that would permit an offering or an acquisition of the securities or a distribution of this announcement in any jurisdiction where such action would be unlawful. Persons into whose possession this announcement comes are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions.

This announcement does not constitute a recommendation concerning the placement. Investors should consult a professional advisor as to the suitability of the placement for the person concerned.

This release may contain forward looking statements, estimates, opinions and projections with respect to anticipated future performance of the Company ("forward-looking statements"). These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms "believes," "estimates," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "may," "will" or "should" or, in each case, their negative, or other variations or comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements include all matters that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on the current views, expectations and assumptions of the management of the Company and involve significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether or not such results will be achieved. Any forward-looking statements included herein only speak as at the date of this release. The Company undertakes no obligation, and do not expect to publicly update, or publicly revise, any of the information, forward-looking statements or the conclusions contained herein or to reflect new events or circumstances or to correct any inaccuracies which may become apparent subsequent to the date hereof, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The Company accepts no liability whatsoever in respect of the achievement of such forward-looking statements and assumptions.
TORRINGTON  Taste of Torrington, which features local restaurants and a chance to support the city library, is returning this year as a reimagined event, according to library director Jessica Gueniat.

Usually, the Taste of Torrington is held in October, but by March of this year, we decided it wasnt safe to do it, she said. COVID-19 has tremendously impacted all of our businesses and fundraising efforts, and with the uncertainty of being able to host an in-person event this year, we decided to host a similar project with a focus on promoting all that Torrington has to offer.

A Taste of Torrington Reimagined Guidebook, for instance, will offer special promotions from participating restaurants and businesses.

We hope that this guidebook will help restaurant owners begin to recover and heal from the devastating effects of COVID 19, Gueniat said. Torrington has so much to offer and we want to make sure we do our part in helping people patronize the truly wonderful establishments in our community.

Gueniat said the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the business community as well as nonprofits.

She said organizers knew that they could not responsibly and safely hold an in-person fundraiser as was done in 2019, which had 200 attendees, but also knew that they wanted to help support the restaurant community, which donates to the library every year.

The benefit for restaurants for Taste of Torrington is two-fold, the director said.

First, it provides restaurants a unique opportunity to engage with a new, diverse demographic of food lovers who just might become their biggest fan. And two, it helps support the library, she said. If we can fundraise for the library and also help the restaurant community begin to recover from this past year, we are more than thrilled to do so. We have a dozen participating restaurants so far and hope to double that number by June.

The restaurants and businesses in Torrington have always been so generous to us, and we wanted to help, she said. The pandemic has just been devastating for so many people.

Each guidebook will feature one tear-out coupon per establishment that can only be used once. All committed restaurants are offering either buy-one-get-one meals, or a percentage off the total bill. Coupons expire March 31, 2022. Each guidebook will come in a gift bag, with complimentary promotional items and gifts from sponsors.

More than a dozen Torrington restaurants and businesses are committed, including Cafe 38, Nutmeg Fudge Company, Taste of Thailand, Sunset Vineyard, Rosa Vega Bakery, Toothpick, Vinnys, and a number of food trucks. If theres a good variety, it might encourage people to try places they havent been before.

The library is encouraging any restaurant interested in participating to contact Jessica at jessh@torringtonlibrary.org, or 860-489-6684, or complete the online participation form at www.torringtonlibrary.org.

Coupon offerings are at the discretion of the participating restaurant, Gueniat said.
Amid a surge in cases, the government Thursday decided to increase the duration of weekend lockdown by 24 hours, announcing that it will now cover Mondays too.

"The weekend closure will now be applicable from Friday night 8 pm till Tuesday morning 7 am," Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Navneet Sehgal said.

He said that all shops and establishments will now remain closed between Friday 8 pm and Tuesday 7 am.

Presently, the weekend lockdown in the state begins at Friday 8 pm and ends at Monday 7 am.

The decision was taken at a review meeting chaired by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

(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 16-year-old boy was also charged in connection with the case and the Kane County States Attorneys Office has petitioned to have him charged as an adult, Aurora police said during a news conference Thursday. He was 15 years old at the time of the incident.
Some sections of Lagos State judiciary workers on Thursday commenced a partial resumption of work amid the ongoing nationwide strike by their counterparts in other parts of the country.

But PREMIUM TIMES learnt that the national leadership of the body of all judiciary workers, the Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) has immediately activated counter-moves to restore a total compliance with the ongoing strike in the state.

JUSUN members across the country had on April 6 embarked on the nationwide strike, shutting down all courts across the country, to press home their demand for financial autonomy for the third arm of government.

But the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that some sections of the Lagos State judiciary workers partially resumed work on Thursday with a plan to work for three days and observe the strike in the rest of the two workdays of every week.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that the part-reopening of the courts followed a directive by the Director, Administration and Human Resources, Lagos State judiciary, Kamal Sanusi, ordering the workers to be at work on Wednesdays to Fridays, and stay at home on Mondays and Tuesday of every week, in partial suspension of the nationwide strike in the state.

The directive echoes the plan for partial suspension of the strike earlier announced by the chair of JUSUN in Lagos State, Shobowale Kehinde, who claimed government and judiciary authorities were at the verge of meeting his members auxiliary demands in the state.

But following the objection of the national leadership of JUSUN to the plan, Mr Kehinde, later backtracked , saying it was a mere proposal by the Lagos State government and required the approval of the unions national body.

But some court officials who spoke with NAN said they resumed duties on Thursday on the directive of Lagos State JUSUN.

Partial resumption

NAN reports that at the main gate of the Ikeja High Court complex was locked while the pedestrian gate was opened to members of the public on Thursday.

The courtroom registry, according to NAN, was also opened and individuals were observed filing and getting documents including affidavits stamped.

No prison vans nor prison warders were seen on the court premises.

The holding cell of the courthouse was empty because inmates were not brought in from the correctional centers for trial.

The Roseline Omotoso Courthouse which houses the Special Offences and Domestic Violence and Sexual Offences courtroom was also open, but there was no activity in all the courtrooms.

NAN reporter also observed that he courtrooms of the courts judges, Christopher Balogun, Modupe Onyeabor and Oluwatoyin Taiwo were locked.

Some courtroom staff members were observed standing in clusters and having conversations, while some others were sitting and working at their desks.

A court registrar, who pleaded anonymity, told NAN that there was unlikely to be any significant activity in the court until the coming week.

We came here following the directives of JUSUN, we are organising the courtrooms after a period of inactivity.

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Hopefully by next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the courts here will resume fully, the source said.

Ignore directive for partial resumption

Reacting to the reported reopening of the courts in Lagos State on Thursday, the national body of the union, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Koin Selepreye, urged its members in the Lagos State chapter to ignore the directive for a part suspension of the strike.

Our attention has been drawn to the referenced publication signed by one Mr. Sanusi, Kamal A. (Dir. Admin/HR) requesting workers of Lagos State Judiciary to be on their duty posts on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays of every week, from Thursday, April 29, 2021.

The National Working Committee has taken steps to curb this ugly situation and requests all workers to disregard this directive as no state has the authority to suspend the ongoing strike, Lagos inclusive, the statement read in part.

To emphasise that the strike was still nationwide, Ms Selepreye, wrote in block letters, THE STRIKE IS STILL VERY MUCH ON UNTIL WE REACH A CONCLUSION.

We are kindly requested to disseminate this information to reach all workers especially the Lagos State judiciary workers, she added.

Union leaders mobilised to enforce strike compliance in Lagos

Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES, the National Treasurer of JUSUN, Jimoh Musa, said leaders of the union in the neighbouring states had been mobilised to go to Lagos on Thursday to enforce compliance with the strike.

He said the JUSUN chairman in Lagos State, Mr Kehinde, had distanced himself from the partial resumption of judiciary workers in the state on Thursday.

In fact, he told us that he was sick and had been on hospital admission. He said he was only asked to go home to today to continue his bed rest, Mr Musa said.

No date for fresh meeting with government

In what appeared to be an indication that the strike, which has already been on for 24 days, will not be resolved soon, Mr Musa told this newspaper on Thursday that no new date has been fixed for a conciliatory meeting with government representatives.

The last one convened by the labour minister, Chris Ngige, could not hold due unexplained delay which prompted the representatives of the union to walk out of the venue of the scheduled meeting on April 20.

JUSUN, however, later apologised to the minister over the walkout.

The union, through its apology letter signed by its General Secretary, Isiah Adetola, explained that its officers, many of whom it said were Muslims undergoing fasting, had to leave the venue after waiting for about two hours without any communication from the minister.

Strike

JUSUN members embarked on the ongoing strike on April 6 in agitation for financial freedom from executive arm of government at various states.

The union is demanding the implementation of section 121(3) of the Nigerian constitution and the January 2014 judgment of the Federal High Court in Abuja conferring financial autonomy on the third arm of government.

Nigerian governors, through the Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, who is the chair of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), had promised to begin to comply with the unions demand by May ending.

But the union had dismissed the pledge which they say is not being matched with action.
Adam Doyno, Executive Director at CUNY SPH Foundation As architect and leader of the CUNY School of Public Health Foundation, Adam has been an essential catalyst in the graduate schools five-year achievement in becoming an independent, accredited, top-ranked public health authority in New York City and the nation. -- CUNY SPH Dean Ayman-El Mohandes

Adam Doyno, Executive Director of the CUNY SPH Foundation and Director of Development for the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, has been named to NYNMedia Nonprofit 40 Under 40 Class of 2021.

Doyno was celebrated as a nonprofit leader at the Nonprofit 40 Under 40 Virtual Reception taking place on Wednesday, April 28, 2021. Each year, NYN Media recognizes 40 individuals under the age of 40 who demonstrate their commitment to the nonprofit sector with outstanding contributions to the New York community.

As architect and leader of the CUNY School of Public Health Foundation, Adam has been an essential catalyst in the graduate schools five-year achievement in becoming an independent, accredited, top-ranked public health authority in New York City and the nation, says CUNY SPH Dean Ayman-El Mohandes.

A Certified Fund Raising Executive, Doyno drives the schools fundraising operations and development activities that support the school and its students, the 500,000+ students and continuous learners within the CUNY system, and New York City broadly.

CUNY SPH is New York Citys public school for public health, says Lyndon Haviland, Chair of the CUNY SPH Foundation Board of Directors. Adam designed the Foundation to deliver on our shared vision for social justice and improved health outcomes for all. His leadership and partnership have placed us on a growth trajectory to improve public health through innovations in workforce preparedness, new domains of study and food security for CUNY SPH students and their communities.

Through fundraising, board recruitment, and marketing strategy, Doyno has accelerated donor engagement in urgent urban health solutions. In three years, he raised over $4 million  $2 million in the last year alone. He has carefully cultivated a board whose passion for public health equity draws upon medical, pharmaceutical, financial, education, social work, technology, and communications expertise.

Active in the fundraising community, Doyno serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Fundraising Professionals, NYC Chapter where he is also the co-chair of the Member Engagement Committee. He is also a member of the Association of Donor Relations Professionals, where he has been a recurring speaker at its international conference. He represents CUNY SPH on the 125th Street Business Improvement District Board.

About CUNY SPH

The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) is committed to teaching, research, and service that creates a healthier New York City and helps promote equitable, efficient, and evidence-based solutions to pressing health problems facing cities around the world. Located in Harlem, CUNY SPH is the top-ranked public school of public health in New York City, New York State, and the tristate region. https://sph.cuny.edu/

About the CUNY SPH Foundation

The CUNY SPH Foundations mission is to advance the achievement of CUNY SPHs mission, vision, and values as New York Citys public school of public health through fundraising, building strategic partnerships, and providing services as a champion for the schools students as they embark on public health careers and its faculty as they work to educate the next generation of public health professionals. https://sph.cuny.edu/about/people/foundation/
Supreme Court vacates Ninth Circuit ruling against church suing California over worship limits

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The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated an appellate court ruling against a Pentecostal church that was suing California over its worship restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.

In an order Monday, the high court vacated a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that denied South Bay United Pentecostal Church injunctive relief from the pandemic restrictions on in-person worship instituted by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which have since been rescinded.

The order cited the Supreme Court case of Tandon v. Newsom, in which the justices issued a per curiam ruling in favor of multiple plaintiffs suing California over its ban on in-home worship attended by more than three households.

 government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause, whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise, stated the decision.

It is unsurprising that such litigants are entitled to relief. Californias Blueprint System contains myriad exceptions and accommodations for comparable activities, thus requiring the application of strict scrutiny.

The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Ninth Circuit "for further

consideration in light of Tandon v. Newsom."

The Thomas More Society, which is helping to represent South Bay Pentecostal, emailed a statement Tuesday celebrating the Supreme Court order.

The most recent April 26 ruling vacating the Ninth Circuits prior judgment is another major victory for religious liberty, said Special Counsel Paul Jonna.

And it sends yet another clear message to hostile lower courts: if you deprive citizens of constitutional rights, particularly the cherished right to the Free Exercise of Religion, the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene.

Last year, South Bay Pentecostal filed legal action against California over in-person worship restrictions, arguing that their religious services should be considered an essential activity.

The church experienced multiple legal defeats, with a district court judge ruling against the church last December and a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruling against it in January.

Although South Bay has demonstrated irreparable harm, it has not demonstrated that the likelihood of success, the balance of equities or the public interest weigh in its favor, wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw in the Ninth Circuit panel opinion.

Although there is no record evidence that attendance at South Bays services in particular has contributed to the spread of the virus, the record does evidence outbreaks tied to religious gatherings in San Diego County and in the Southern California region.

Earlier this month, Californias Department of Public Health changed the language on official capacity limits for worship services from mandatory to strongly recommended.

In response to recent judicial rulings, effective immediately, location and capacity limits on places of worship are not mandatory but are strongly recommended, explains Californias COVID-19 response website.

The linked guidance is in the process of being updated. All other restrictions in the guidance remain in place.

Last Friday, the Newsom administration lifted all restrictions on singing and chanting in church.

The state standards varied on a tier system based on the level of county infection rates.

For the strictest category, called purple, indoor worship was strongly discouraged and should be limited to 25% of capacity. For the lowest tier of concern, called yellow, indoor worship and other activities were recommended with a 50% capacity.
For several years now, Uzbekistans leadership has been calling for intensive changes and innovations. This was evident in a historic four-hour long address made by the President of Uzbekistan to the Parliament of Uzbekistan. Furthermore, this ambition has been outlined as a government priority when Uzbekistan announced the theme of the year 2018: Year of Proactive Entrepreneurship, Innovative Ideas and Technologies. Now, three years after the Presidents address, social innovations do not appear to have mushroomed. Why is this the case?

BACKGROUND: In 2018, President Shavkat Mirziyoev declared that Uzbekistan needs to prioritize innovations and knowledge to succeed in the global competition and for the benefit of its development. At the time of the address, it was a positive signal received from the new government of Uzbekistan that intended to introduce changes. In fact, the intention to change also impacted relationships between the government and the citizens, which was the core idea of innovations in the public sector. Based on that, the Uzbek state introduced numerous new online and offline services. While being novel for the Uzbek context, those services had several remarkable characteristics.

First, these services were designed and delivered solely by state institutions. This does not necessarily mean that they were per se poorly designed or delivered. They were remarkable for being led by the state, without close engagement with civic non-governmental organizations or the broader public. None of them were crowd-sourced or people-centered in a manner allowing citizens to design the services meeting their needs. In that sense, the government applied a top-down approach in the introduction of innovations. For public servants it became a daily routine to mention innovations, even if nothing innovative was done.

In contrast to that approach, social innovations that are driven by people have the potential to enhance public services if they are properly introduced. For instance, according to UNDP Social Innovation for Public Service Excellence Report: Social innovation refers to new ideas that work in meeting social goals. A social innovation approach puts capacity to harness innovation at the core of public service (). A feature of social innovation is that it combines multiple disciplines, types of actors and sectors. Social innovation is also more than just invention; it describes a process from initial prompt through to scale and systemic change (UNDP GCPSE, 2014: 4).

Second, social innovation projects in Uzbekistan have most frequently been implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs). Even in the cases when CSOs were seeking collaboration with organizations that belong to the private and/or government sectors, they remained the major drivers of social innovation projects. This made the implementation of social innovation projects very fragmented and usually limited to the non-governmental sector. Given that fact, scaling (diffusing) and institutionalizing those projects across the social system was a challenging task.

Finally, the term social innovation is, unfortunately, usually loosely used. In course of implementation of social innovation projects, the term has been often interchanged by local organizations with such other terms as social projects, civic engagements, and others, which tend to lead to the devaluation of the social innovation concept.

IMPLICATIONS: Though the social innovation concept is somewhat blurred, scholars have succeeded to offer a model allowing measuring, and fully considering integrated elements of the model required to spur social innovations. Besides entrepreneurial activities and field specific outputs and outcomes, framework conditions, namely, resources, institutional, societal and political frameworks are vital to nurture social innovations. As Schumpeter has noted, Regarding the exceptional role of organizational efficiency and innovativeness, entrepreneurial creative disruption is necessary to generate innovations. Undoubtedly, an innovations-oriented organizational culture, encouraging entrepreneurial activities and creativity feed innovations. Knowledge, new ideas and practices do also serve as substantial pillars of innovative eco-system. But this is not enough for social innovations.

The model suggests that framework conditions should be also considered. For instance, certain values and norms that impact human and organizational behavior make an institutional framework favorable or unfavorable for social innovations. Since social innovations address existing social needs, they, by default, contribute to the societal framework conditions. The resources framework consists of the financial, social and human capital, which enable a competitive advantage that is not imitable quite easily. The political framework drives the policy incorporating social innovations into institutional and societal frameworks, thus influencing individuals and organizations in their resource-providing role. In theory, the political framework also helps to design pilot projects to create solutions to existing problems.

In practice, in Uzbekistan, the political framework was and still remains the most critical condition for sustainability of social innovations. In 2012, when the UNDP for the first time launched social innovation projects in Uzbekistan, only the societal framework conditions, namely underserved social needs, were evident. It was believed, but could not be prechecked, that the projects target group youth  possess certain values and norms to drive social innovations in their communities. Human, social and financial resources had to be built by the donor (the UNDP) to enable the generation of social innovation projects. The political agenda supporting social innovations was non-existing, nor was there genuine interest in innovations. As a result, social innovation projects had limited effect, typically remained unsustainable, and were not institutionalized. The absence of engagement with social innovators left the projects, mainly UNDP-driven, without the participation of CSOs, the government or academia.

In 2018, the situation changed, because innovation became a government priority clearly articulated by the President. Public sector innovations were part of a bigger innovation journey started by the Uzbek state. A ministry of Innovational Development was established, and public service centers of the Agency for the Provision of Public Services under the Ministry of Justice spread across the country. This, however, has not changed much in practice for social innovations in the country. Social innovations became the business of the civic sector that often considers social innovation projects only as an instrument to address social problems or empower citizens.

In contrast to that, when the global pandemic hit Central Asia, close collaboration of self-organized civic groups, CSOs and government demonstrated how things can be effectively done to deliver health and social services to the people and support them financially and psychologically during the health crisis. Though none of those initiatives yet turned into true social innovations, they showcased that even if not explicitly named as social innovations, projects driven by a diverse spectrum of actors can lead to promising changes in society and help overcome a crisis. It is now an accepted truth that outsourcing solutions to social problems to the public allows tapping the pool of innovative ideas to design and to prototype solutions. But, to introduce, diffuse and institutionalize those socially innovative solutions requires political will mirroring societal needs.

CONCLUSIONS: Social innovations are meant to tackle social problems and make the changes required in the society by satisfying social needs. In this regard, the need for social innovations is evident. To foster social innovations politically, Uzbekistan needs to put them on its political agenda. Differently from market or public sector innovations, social innovations in Uzbekistan do not require specific institutional changes (e.g. ministerial organization), legal (e.g. Law On public service) or financial (e.g. Innovations Fund) adjustments. They can be driven by communities experiencing particular social problems and scaled up nationally if there is a systemic need for social change. But to enable the change, devised pilot projects should be politically prioritized. To address the systemic social problems, social innovations should be treated not as another act of small-scale initiative liked by the public, but as an attempt of transformation of existing social practices and social reality.

AUTHOR'S BIO:

Dr. Bakhrom Radjabov holds a PhD in Social Sciences and is an alumni of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institutes Rumsfeld Fellowship Program.

Image Source: Public Domain


Republican Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell accused Pres. Joe Biden of breaking his campaign promise to unify the country.

McConnell Accuses Biden of Breaking His Commitment

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared President Biden's first 100 days a colossal failure on Wednesday, accusing the president of failing to keep his campaign pledge to pull the country together in the aftermath of a turbulent 2020, according to a recently published article on The Hill.

McConnell said on Wednesday morning that President Joe Biden promised and pledged that he would be the President for all Americans with plans to restore, repair, and heal. However, the Senate Minority leader said that Biden's first 100 days had left much to be desired.

He said on the Senate floor, "Over a few short months, the Biden administration seems to have given up on selling actual unity in favor of catnip for their liberal base, covered with a hefty coat of false advertising."

Joe Biden To Deliver His First Joint Session of Congress Tonight, 9 pm EST, Here's How to Watch

McConnell Presents List of Biden's Decisions Without Support from Republican Lawmakers

Ahead of Pres. Joe Biden's first address to a joint session in Congress, McConnell, presented the actions of the young Biden administration that did not unify the Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to a published article on Newsvoice.

During McConnell's speech, he mentioned Biden's decision to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, the passage of the American Rescue Plan worth $1.9 trillion without any support from the Republican lawmakers, the introduction to overhaul the election laws in the country, Biden's decision to withdraw the U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and most of all how the Biden administration mishandled the surge of migrants arriving at the Southern Border.

McConnell's remarks came after the White House unveiled the measures and language of the $1.8 trillion latest legislative proposals. It included how American employees and households would benefit from free community college and prekindergarten and child care and paid leave. It will also impose higher taxes on the richest families, according to a published article on the Democratic Underground.

Former Pres. Donald Trump Reportedly Moving Operations From Florida to New Jersey

McConnell Slammed the Democrats

According to McConnell, Democrats seem to be rushing to pass as many of their broad and costly reform goals as possible before losing control of the House or Senate in 2022.

The Senate Minority Leader said, "Behind President Biden's familiar face, it's like the most radical Washington Democrats have been handed the keys, and they're trying to speed as far left as they can possibly go before American voters ask for their car back."

He also added Democrats have studiously avoided taking responsibility for the outcomes of their immigration policy rhetoric. Reckless mixed messaging has resulted in a humanitarian and defense crisis on the southern border.

McConnell criticized Biden's treatment of the influx of refugees crossing the southern border, as well as his decision to reverse the Trump administration's policy forcing 70,000 asylum seekers to stay in the United States until their appeals for safe harbor are reviewed, freeing thousands to remain in the country while their claims are heard in court.

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 25madison, a leading venture studio and incubator, today announced that it has closed on its latest funding round. Apollo Global Management, Inc. (NYSE: APO), the global alternative investment manager, Endeavor and a number of prominent high net worth individuals and family offices are among investors backing the venture studio's focus on building early-stage companies.

With $60 million of capital raised to date, 25madison is well positioned to execute on its mandate to build and invest in early stage companies. Built by founders who have run successful companies, 25madison has generated early successes with its first incubations including harbor, an app making disaster preparedness easy and accessible; The Beet, an authoritative destination for plant-based living; and sparkling tequila beverage company Onda.

"We are delighted to announce this additional capital raise and our new strategic partnerships with both Apollo and Endeavor. 25madison builds businesses. And we know that one of the most difficult challenges startups face is finding beta or distribution partners. These new relationships, in particular our partnership with Apollo, provides both companies a tremendous opportunity to significantly lower execution risk while increasing the likelihood of market acceptance" said Steven Price, 25madison CEO.

In its strategic partnership with Apollo, 25madison will help the investment firm and its portfolio companies anticipate disruption and create new revenue streams by partnering with, investing in, and co-incubating early-stage companies to accelerate growth.

David Sambur, Co-head of Private Equity at Apollo said, "We're excited to work with 25madison. Apollo is well-known for its innovative approach to building better businesses and 25madison has successfully incubated and invested in early stage companies with deep operating engagement. Working together we can quickly identify synergistic partnerships, new revenue streams and early-stage investment opportunities for Apollo and our funds' portfolio companies." Aaron Sobel, a Partner in Apollo's private equity group, has joined the 25madison Board of Directors.

Apollo funds have invested in a diverse array of innovative companies including ADT, Shutterfly, Tech Data, Rackspace Technology and Sun Country, one of the most successful IPO's of 2021.

Ben Enowitz, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development & Talent Ventures, Endeavor remarked, "We share 25madison's vision for building next-gen businesses and look forward to continuing to identify opportunities for the clients we represent and the brands we own to forge meaningful partnerships with these new companies."

The Apollo and Endeavor strategic partnerships are the latest step by 25madison to support building best-in-class start-up companies. In December, 25madison announced additions to its leadership team of Chair Michael Lynton, CEO Steven Price, President Matt-Fremont-Smith, and Chief Partnership Officer Kirk Posmantur including naming Justine Lee as COO, Matt Berberian as Head of Studio and Scott Brown as Head of User Experience. They are supported by a 15-person team with deep experience launching successful start-ups across industries.

"With this capital raise and our new partnerships, we are better positioned to execute on building breakthrough businesses and brands within our focused themes: Enabling easier access to opportunity jobs; fintech and services for our growing senior population; modern wellness  from plant-based living to promoting better health in the home and workplace; and building next-gen B2B SaaS businesses," says Price.

About 25madison: Founded in 2018, 25madison is a venture studio, incubating companies from the ground up and investing in early-stage companies from its offices in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, and Tel Aviv. For more, see www.25madison.com.

About Apollo: Apollo is a leading global alternative investment manager with offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Bethesda, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. Apollo had assets under management of approximately $455 billion as of December 31, 2020 in credit, private equity and real assets funds. For more information about Apollo, please visit www.apollo.com.

CONTACT

Margaret Strickland

25madison

917.808.4200

[email protected]

SOURCE 25madison

Related Links

www.25madison.com


A New York City woman enlisted TikTok to help track down the hunky firefighter who rescued her from a stuck elevator  and thanks to the power of social media, she was able to ask him out for a drink.

When Hailey Logan, 27, found herself trapped last week, she started filming her rescue, but she likely didn't imagine the saga would end with her coming face to face with a handsome hero.

The footage shows the dentist sitting on the elevator's floor with her mask on as members of the New York City Fire Department try to pry open the door. They eventually succeed, and she is first greeted by the sexy firefighter.

Scroll down for video

Bringing the heat! Hailey Logan, 27, captured the moment a handsome New York City firefighter freed her from a stuck elevator and shared the video on TikTok

Track him down: The dentist regretted not chatting him up and called all New Yorkers on the platform to help her locate him

Hailey regretted chatting him up and posted the video on TikTok, calling all New Yorkers on the platform to help her locate him.

'NYC I NEED YOUR HELP,' she wrote in the caption. 'Please find this man that rescued me from an elevator today.'

The viral video has been viewed more than 4.3 million times, and Hailey later shared slo-mo footage of the mystery man coming to her rescue.

Her friend stressed the urgency in the comments of her initial post, writing: 'NYC FIND THIS MAN FOR MY BESTIE.'

It didn't take long for the firefighter's sister and co-workers to come across the video. After they showed it to him, he created a TikTok account to respond to Hailey with his own clip.

Too cute: The mystery man, whose name is David, was eventually shown the video, and he created a TikTok account to respond, telling her: 'Im glad youre safe'

Prince charming? Hailey posted a duet of herself watching his sweet message to her

'Whats up guys, so my brothers at the firehouse just showed me the video. I read the comments. Thank you so much for all the love. I just wanted to make the video to say Im glad youre safe,' he told Hailey.

The man's name is David, and Hailey posted a duet of herself watching his sweet message to her.

In another follow-up video, she admitted that she was 'shocked' by how the video 'blew up' and thanked the internet for helping her out.

'Its been an extremely entertaining journey reading all of your hilarious comments all day,' she said, taking this moment to ask out the dreamy firefighter.

'TrueFirefighterBliss I hope you enjoy your new internet popularity and thank you for keeping us safe. Maybe I can buy you a drink sometime for saving my life,' she suggested. 'Its the least I can do. TikTok its been a journey, I will keep you all updated.'

Shooting her shot: Hailey filmed a follow-up clip in which she offered to buy him a drink, saying it was the least she could do after he saved her life

Hallmark are you listening? Twitter users were just as invested in the story, with many comparing it to a rom-com

The story carried over to Twitter when romance writer Rebekah Weatherspoon shared Hailey's duet with David.

'So this dude rescued this woman and few other people from a busted elevator. His sister saw that tiktok and showed him and then he posted this,' she explained. 'I hope they get married.'

Many commenters felt the same way, with romance writer Beverly Jenkins calling it 'the ultimate meet cute.'

'They dont even know theyre in a romance novel,' the author added. 'Someone should let them know.'

'I need the rom com,' added Hood Feminism author Mikki Kendall.
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan trade blame for cross-border shelling View Photo

MOSCOW (AP)  Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan traded blame Thursday for cross-border shelling and clashes that left at least four people dead and dozens injured in a conflict over water, the latest outburst of tensions between the two ex-Soviet Central Asian neighbors.

Troops from the two countries exchanged gunfire for most of the day around a water supply facility near the village of Kok-Tash in western Kyrgyzstan on the border with Tajikistan. More than 800 Kyrgyz residents were evacuated from several villages engulfed by the clashes.

Officials from the two countries declared a cease-fire late Thursday and agreed to pull back troops from the area. But a Kyrgyz police spokeswoman in Batken, Damira Yusupova, said heavy firing broke out again before dawn on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.

Kyrgyzstans Health Ministry said one person died and 45 others were injured in the clashes, according to the Tass news agency.

In Tajikistan, the mayors office in the nearby city of Isfara said three Tajiks were killed and 31 were injured, including the mayor who received a gunshot wound, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

Kyrgyzstans border guard service said Tajik troops shelled several Kyrgyz border checkpoints, setting one ablaze. In retaliation, Kyrgyz troops seized a Tajik checkpoint, it said. Kyrgyz media released video showing Kyrgyz men taking cover as automatic gunfire rang out.

Amid the clashes, Kyrgyzstans President Sadyr Zhaparov met with top officials to discuss the situation.

A large part of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border has remained unmarked, fueling fierce disputes over water, land and pastures. Kyrgyz and Tajik delegations have held several rounds of talks in recent years but have failed to end the border controversy.

Tajikistans National Security Committee said Kyrgyz troops opened fire on Tajik border guards first and accused Kyrgyzstan of trying to forcefully take over the area, which Tajikistan sees as part of its territory.

Kyrgyz authorities said the conflict erupted Wednesday, when Tajik officials attempted to mount surveillance cameras to monitor the water supply facility and the Kyrgyz side opposed the move.

Both nations have claimed the area around the water reservoir, a dispute dating back decades to when they were both part of the Soviet Union.
Australia will pour more than half a billion dollars into four military bases in the country's Northern Territory, which will allow for bigger training exercises between Aussies and the U.S. as concerns about China's actions in the Asia-Pacific region build.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced plans Wednesday to invest about $582 million into four military training and weapon ranges. The upgrades, Defence Minister Peter Dutton said, will provide opportunity for "world class training," including with Marine Rotational Force-Darwin, a 2,500-person unit that spends six months out of every year training Down Under.

"This investment is critical to ensuring that our [training areas are] equipped with the cutting-edge technology it will require to maintain our competitive advantage," Dutton said.

Read Next: The Marine Corps Is Known as a Force of Young Warriors. That's About to Change

The upgrades will be made over the next five years at Robertson Barracks, an army base in Darwin; the Kangaroo Flats field firing range; and the Mount Bundey and Bradfield Shaw training areas. Upgrades, Morrison said, will include training simulators and medical facilities.

Members of Marine Rotational Force-Darwin are typically housed at Robertson Barracks, where they also conduct training. Marines have also participated in exercises at Kangaroo Flats and Mount Bundey.

Morrison stopped short of citing China when announcing the need to invest heavily in the training areas.

"It's a significant investment ... in what is a very uncertain world and can be a very uncertain region, a region in which there are many pressures," he said. "This is another significant step forward ... to ensure that our defense forces are always ready and that they have access to the best training facilities of anywhere in the world, and they can work with our allies and partners, as we are here with the United States Marines."

Morrison's announcement was made amid an "increasingly bitter diplomatic and trade spat" between Australia and China, Reuters reported. China in 2015 secured a controversial 99-year lease of a port in the Northern Territory, which leaders have said should be reviewed. That was around the same time the U.S. Defense Department was studying the possibility of basing warships Down Under.

Marines have been rotating through Darwin in the Northern Territory since 2012. It started as a small 200-person, company-sized rotation during the Obama administration and hit the 2,500-person air-ground task force in 2019. The rotation includes ground forces, aircraft and logistics capabilities.

Morrison said the upgrades will provide Aussie troops, Marines and other partners "access to the best training facilities of anywhere in the world."

"Our objective here in this part of the world is a free and open Indo Pacific," the prime minister said. "Our objective here is to ensure a peaceful region, but one that, at the same time, Australia is in a position to always protect its interests."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Marine Corps Rotation to Australia Continues amid COVID Concerns
BRUXELLES, 29 APR - Thanks to satellites, probabilistic models, algorithms, remote sensing and citizen participation "we have the tools to greatly improve the effectiveness of surveillance against Xylella fastidiosa", French researcher Samuel Soubeyrand has said at a major conference on the plant pathogen. Scholars from all over the world presented sophisticated Xylella fastidiosa surveillance and early detection experimental tools at the final virtual meeting of the XF-ACTORS Project, a EU-funded research program entirely devoted to the plant pathogen. Tomas Poblete of the University of Melbourne illustrated the results of the use of hyperspectral images and a machine learning algorithm. In addition to digital tools, "citizens could play a very important role in detecting diseased plants", said Alexander Mastin of the University of Salford (UK). (ANSA).
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asks a question during the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Dirksen Senate Office Building on April 28, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo By Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

Josh Hawley has been mocked for urging people to buy his anti-Big Tech book  on Amazon and via Twitter.

The Senator from Missouri, who led Republican attempts to block certification of Joe Bidens election victory on 6 January, complained on social media that the woke mob were targeting his book.

Mr Hawley infamously was photographed raising his fist in support of the pro-Trump mob hours before they stormed the US Capitol but still continued his objection to certifying Donald Trumps defeat.

His controversial actions, branded by critics as anti-democratic, cost him his book deal with Simon & Schuster before it was picked up by conservative publisher Regnery.

In his latest tweet, Mr Hawley used his Apple iPhone to post an Amazon link for The Tyranny of Big Tech on Twitter.

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The corporate media and the woke mob dont want you to read this book. They tried to cancel it. They failed. One week until publication - order here, he tweeted.

Social media users were quick to point out the absurdity of Mr Hawleys promotional position.

Poor Josh: the most oppressed victim in America today. Buy my book on woke mob corporate website Amazon! tweeted @HawleyMustGo.

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Hey, I see what you did there! You used big tech to promote your book on the tyranny of big tech! Cant wait to crack open a meat beer and not read it, tweeted Barbara Hall.

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No, Josh. You lost the first contract because you tried to cancel American constitutional democracy to promote your insatiable personal ambition. Outside of MAGA-world, the rest of us remember, tweeted Frank Bowman.

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A fifth-grade teacher at Centner Academy, a private school in Miami, told 10-year-old students not to hug their parents for more than five seconds if their parents were vaccinated.

The teacher also advised the students not to get the COVID-19 vaccine when available to them. The school's co-founder, Leila Centner, told teachers that her academy would 'not be right' for them if they got vaccinated against COVID-19, citing debunked claims about vaccinated people 'negatively impacting' unvaccinated ones.

One of the students emailed her mother from her school laptop, saying she was told to stay away from her mother.

'Hola Mami. [The teacher] is telling us to stay away from you guys and not hug you for more than 5 seconds. She is also saying we should not get the covid vaccine,' the student wrote in the email obtained by CBS Miami.

Her mother, who spoke anonymously to CBS Miami, was horrified to receive the message from her daughter.

'I don't have words to describe how my stomach dropped when I saw her email,' the mother said.

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South Florida's Centner Academy teaches kids from pre-school up to eighth grade. The school cites vaccine misinformation on its website and had a prominent anti-vaccine activist speak at the school earlier this year.

The school's co-founder, Leila Centner (right, with her husband and co-founder David), sent an email to teachers telling them they would be fired if they got vaccinated against COVID-19

Centner has gained national attention recently for the Academy's strong anti-vaccine stance.

Teachers at the Academy received an email last week from leadership warning them to not take the COVID-19 vaccine. Doing so, according to the email, would make them unwelcome in the classroom.

'I have to draw a line in the sand today and tell you if you want to get [vaccinated], this is not going to be the right school for you,' said the school's co-founder, Leila Centner in a video obtained by CBS Miami.

The internal email was also sent by Leila Centner according to a report by the New York Times. It cited misinformation on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and mentioned debunked conspiracies on vaccines potentially causing menstrual problems for women.

'Reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated,' Centner wrote in the letter.

The letter claims that unvaccinated women who had interacted with a vaccinated person had later reported issues with their menstrual cycles.

The claim, which has circulated on social media, has been debunked by fact checkers. Experts agree that there is no way for a vaccine to spread from a vaccinated person to an unvaccinated person.

Florida's Covid cases have remained high since Spring Break, a trend some experts blame on its lack of mask mandate and open encouragement for college students to travel to the state

There is also no data that the COVID-19 vaccine effects menstrual cycles, although researchers at the University of Illinois are investigating whether there might be a link after thousands of women claimed their periods changed after getting the shots.

Centner's letter laid out three scenarios for teachers going forward.

If they have already been vaccinated, they will be kept physically distanced from students. If they plan on getting the vaccine before the end of the school year then they should notify the school, and they will be distanced from students after receiving it.

Teachers can also wait until after the school year to get vaccinated if they want to remain in the classroom, Centner said.

School staff members were required to fill out forms disclosing their vaccination status last week.

Teachers who have either received the vaccine or plan to do so will not be allowed to return to the classroom until clinical trials on the vaccine are completed, though the letter did note that the school may hire someone to fill the position of a vaccinated teacher to replace them permanently.

The school's website has a page titled 'Our Vaccine Policy' which links vaccines to Attention Deficit Disorder, asthma, diabetes, autism and other learning disabilities. There is no data linking any regularly scheduled vaccines or the COVID-19 vaccine to any of the listed conditions.

The page states that there are no vaccine requirements of any kind for students to attend the school.

The academy also invited Robert F Kennedy Jr, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, to speak at the school in January.

It is legal for employers to require workers to hold a certain vaccine status in order to remain employed.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in December that vaccine requirements do not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, although the federal government doe Legal experts also agree that the requirements do not violate privacy rules laid out in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

The Centner Academy runs from pre-school to eighth grade. Yearly tuition costs between $15,000 to $30,000, depending on grade level.

The academy has deleted its Facebook page in the wake of the New York Times report.

Vaccines for COVID-19 are not yet available to children under the age of 16. Pfizer has requested Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to distribute the vaccine to children aged 12 to 15.
[April 29, 2021] Nectar Sunglasses Rebrands, Launching New Premium Collection

CHARLESTON, S.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nectar Sunglasses is rolling out a new premium acetate collection this month, introducing a new website, and proudly proclaiming itself as an East Coast sunglass brand with the collaboration of Richmond-based ad agency Familiar Creatures. The West Coast gets all the love when it comes to sunglasses, but Nectar is proudly from the East. Founded by Sean Holmes in 2012, the startup straddled between Atlanta and Richmond, eventually calling Charleston home. Anticipating an expansion of the brand and the launch of a new collection, Nectar reached out to Familiar Creatures who developed a new website and a new brand platform called "Salt of the East." The acetate collection is named after some of the most beautiful destinations on the East Coast, such as Anna Ruby Falls in Georgia and Luray Caverns in Virginia. And the line pays tribute to the earth in other ways too. The handcrafted glasses are made from processed wood pulp, which makes them biodegradable. And they are built to last over time, reducing waste. Each pair is durable, flexible, and has color embedded in the frames. Meaning the glasses retain their vibrancy from the first time you wear them and beyond. "Nectar has evolved a lot since our apartment brainstorms in 2012, but buildin community has remained central to our mission," said Holmes. "We are proud to extend the Nectar community throughout the East Coast and have named each pair in our collections after iconic cities and landmarks, celebrating the rich culture, history, and landscapes that are distinctly ours."



When you think about what separates folks on the East Coast from their westward counterparts, a few things come to mind: grit, determination, soulfulness and individuality. These people are the salt of the earth. But to fully convey Nectar and their buyer base is from here as well, the agency added a little twist, hence "East." Encouraging customers to connect through the shared culture of the East and inviting those who may have left, to experience a taste of home. "From the inception of our relationship with Nectar we could tell that Sean and his team had a lot of heart for their hometown and the outdoors," said Justin Bajan, Co-Founder of Familiar Creatures. "We saw this project as an opportunity to inject soul into an otherwise plain industry, and to bring people together through a shared sense of adventure and pride."

The new website just launched in conjunction with the acetate collection and in addition to the new line, the brand continues to offer its classic collection and blue light blockers. They are also in the process of expanding merchandise offerings to include hats and shirts. Nectar Sunglasses is an eyewear company based in Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 2012, Nectar offers sunglasses, blue light blockers, and prescription eyewear. Fueled by our love for the outdoors and inspired by the culture, history, and grit of the East Coast, Nectar works to bring people together through a shared love of adventure. Familiar Creatures is an advertising agency based in Richmond, VA. Formed in 2018 by industry veterans, the agency's "fractional AOR" model takes challenger brands to the next level. Media Contact:

McKenzie Pickett

(804) 244-1175

mckenzie@familiarcreatures.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nectar-sunglasses-rebrands-launching-new-premium-collection-301279914.html SOURCE Familiar Creatures and Nectar Sunglasses

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The red flags will be out in force for the long weekend coming at the end of April. Its going to be busy with people on the move to hometowns to celebrate two holidays this weekend.

April 30 marks the end of the American war in Vietnam, as Westerners sometimes call it.

The date is known among Vietnamese as Reunification Day  one of the final moments in the process of north and south becoming reunified.

The names surrounding April 30 can be confusing. It is sometimes also called Victory Day or Liberation Day, depending on whether it is used in an official title or as locals prefer to name it.

Foreigners sometimes confuse the occasion with National Day or Independence Day, which occurs on September 2 and celebrates Vietnamese independence declared by President Ho Chi Minh on September 2, 1945 following the end of the Japanese occupation of Vietnam.

Got all that?!

Its handy to remember if youre trying to impress people in a pub with your knowledge of the local history!

The long holiday weekend basically runs from April 30 until May 3 and if you havent made any travel bookings yet then youre stuck! Trains will be full, already the two major airports in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are experiencing major crowding problems and buses will be full, too.

But probably the best way as usual with Vietnamese events is to stay close to home and just enjoy life where you are with family and friends. Theres no better demonstration of peace than that, hey?

Unlike Independence Day, which very official and serious, Reunification Day is a more celebratory occasion with the parades, festivals, and public festivities were familiar with prior to COVID-19. You could see the military parades but theres also a very strong visual emphasis on Vietnams long history, its variety of ethnic groups, and the traditional songs and costumes of the nation.

Looking around a bit at the posters strung across the top of the roads will give you a good clue to local events associated with Liberation Day.

With both Reunification Day and May 1, or International Workers Day, coming back to back, this creates quite a long weekend for the population with many heading to the beaches, taking rural holidays or just sleeping over it! I like the upbeat mood at this time and for sure, anyone who has the opportunity and money will do their best to enjoy it after so much stress during our ongoing COVID-19 situation in Vietnam. Its the perfect time to travel anyway before the sweltering heat of high summer hits. I do feel, having lived here for fourteen years, that its just getting hotter every year so its best to get your suntan early.

For Hoi An and Da Nang, it should be a very revitalizing time for the tourism industry with lots of bookings from the local area as well as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city. While wearing masks and social distancing are still recommended, I doubt it will feel over-bearing for most visitors.

I guess you could also celebrate Vietnams continuing success at keeping the coronavirus at bay and managing to still grow the economy in the middle of so much financial pressure on both the general public and the nations purse strings. Ill mot, hai, ba, yo! (one, two, three, drink!) to that!

Last year, I wrote about this day, commenting at the time on Vietnamese resilience during times of crisis and the ability of this country to work together on common goals without people going off in multiple directions on how to handle the resolutions of social problems. That this still holds true is unsurprising given what I have experienced of Vietnamese toughness, often with far less grumbling and complaining than in the Western world. Solidarity, albeit a dirty word in Western culture, is sorely needed worldwide and at least Vietnam is showing a good example of that.

Vietnams future, in spite of the health crisis escalating around the world, looks pretty rosy at the moment to my eye. We all know that millions have lost jobs and businesses and it will be some time before life gets back to anything near normal. However, its growing economically faster than most of the developed world. Industry is picking up customers again and its rapidly attracting foreign investment and manufacturing to shift here as world supply chains reposition themselves against the economic fallout from the virus.

I think Liberation Day will feel much more special this year since the nation celebrates this achievement after such a rough time last year. So theres a lot to be thankful for if youre Vietnamese. And if youre not Vietnamese? Youre still lucky to be living here than anywhere else!
E-Learning

Google Classroom Getting Integration with Clever

Starting this summer, Clever will be providing automated rostering for Google Classroom. Clever provides a single sign-in portal, roster syncing and other services used by 65% of K12 schools in the United States. Its free for districts.

According to Clever, usage of its service has nearly doubled in the last year. And the number of students and educators using Google Classroom has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020, from 40 million to 150 million.

With the new integration, districts using Google Workspace for Education Plus will be able to sync classes in Google Classroom. According to Clever: Districts who have purchased Google Workspace for Education Plus and use Clever will be able to sync rosters directly to Google Classroom from any Student Information System. Once a school technology administrator sets up Google Classroom via Clever, teachers will no longer need to manually create and invite students to join their classes, saving teachers time and enabling them to focus on what they do best: helping students reach their full potential.

"Educators have overcome incredible obstacles this past year to support student learning," said Tyler Bosmeny, chief executive officer of Clever, in a prepared statement. "Through this new partnership with Google Classroom, we're proud to be removing one of those obstacles: making sure every teacher's digital classroom will be fully set up and ready for learning on the first day of school."

Setting up classes has often been a manual, time-consuming distraction for teachers, said Shantanu Sinha, lead for Google for Education, also in a prepared statement. This new partnership will simplify workflows and empower educators to focus on what they do best: helping students reach their full potential.

Clever and Google indicated that the new integrated functionality will be available in time for back to school and that there will be a beta for summer school. Further details, including a signup for updates and for the summer beta program, can be found at go.clever.com/googleclassroomrostering.
The rate of new coronavirus cases in Pennsylvania is slowing. More people are getting COVID-19 vaccines. Some providers are opening up to walk-ins. And the Lehigh Valley is pacing the statewide vaccination rate and most neighboring counties.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health on Thursday reported 3,322 new cases and 50 deaths. The state now totals 1.14 million cases and 26,179 deaths since the pandemic began more than a year ago.

That includes 72,300 cases and 1,527 deaths in the Lehigh Valley, where 208 new cases and three deaths were reported Thursday across Lehigh and Northampton counties.

Immediately to the west, Berks County is poised to soon become the seventh of Pennsylvanias 67 counties to reach 1,000 coronavirus deaths. Six deaths reported there Thursday brought Berkss COVID-19 death toll to 991 lost lives.

(Cant see the chart? Click here.)

Meanwhile, at least 48.5% of Pennsylvanians have received one dose of vaccine, more than 30% are fully vaccinated, according to the latest figures available from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Locally, the Lehigh Valley continues to pace the statewide rate. Just over half the population in Northampton County has at least one shot, with Lehigh County just about to cross that threshold at 49.4%, according to state data on Thursday.

(Cant see the map? Click here.)

To make sure doses still get out to residents as supply rises to meet demand, some providers are starting to offer first-dose vaccinations to walk-ins. The Allentown Health Bureau announced availability without an appointment early this week, and one Lehigh Valley Health Network location did the same on Wednesday.

Anyone 16 and older is eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Shots are available through local health networks, city health bureaus and a number of pharmacies.

(See the Pa. COVID vaccine provider map here.)

As the push for vaccinations continues, the statewide rate of new coronavirus cases is trending back down after another surge.

As of Thursday, Pennsylvania reported 3,391 cases a day on average over the last week. Thats down 31% from two weeks ago, but still up more than 170% from this time last year, when we were coming down from the first peak.

(Cant see the chart? Click here.)

There are at least 2,318 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Pennsylvania, down 10% from two weeks ago and a 15% decrease from a year ago.

The rate of deaths, however, has climbed lately following the most recent case surge. State data on Thursday show 43 reported deaths a day on average over the last week, up 26% from two weeks ago. Thats still down 66% from this time last year.

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Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com.
[April 29, 2021] RIGGED is Awarded Best Documentary by Toronto Film Magazine Festival

RIGGED, a new full-length documentary, has been awarded Best Documentary Film by the 2021 Toronto Film Magazine's Online Festival. See the RIGGED trailer and full-length film here. RIGGED explains how the long prevailing Wealthist value system in U.S. higher education limits opportunity and upward mobility and thus undermines U.S. democracy. RIGGED builds on the historical premise that growing economic imbalance ultimately leads to social unrest, political upheaval, and war. Through interviews with authors, historians, educators, and students, RIGGED shows how the value system underlying U.S. higher education constitutes a major risk factor for triggering these historic consequences and how this value system can be changed. RIGGED includes compelling footage of innovative and courageous educators who are leading the movement to replace a value system that selects for wealth with one that meets genuinely motivated students where they are and advances them regardless of their economic background - a movement that could transform colleges and universities into new engines for education and social mobility. RIGGED recalls the origins of the American Dream, when the linchpin of economic opportunity was access to land. Following passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, the federal government doled out over 10 percent of the land mass of this country to individual citizens. While the outcome for settlers was far from guaranteed, the chance or individual economic advancement was undeniably real. Although the dark side of the settling of the U.S. West was the federal government's forcible seizure of native lands, there is no question the Homestead Act later provided economic opportunity for the enfranchised citizens of the time. This vast federal giveaway of land - what was then the fundamental element of economic opportunity - established the U.S. as the "land of opportunity" and built deep national loyalty and unity among the citizenry.



RIGGED points out that while land ownership remains a symbol of economic power today, we are long past the era in which the fundamental currency for economic opportunity is access to land. As the film explains, not only are we long past the Agrarian Age, we have also raced past the Industrial Age and the Knowledge Age into a new Learning Age. In this new Learning Age, where the pace of change is not only fast but accelerating, the fundamental basis for economic opportunity is no longer access to land, access to factories, or even access to knowledge. It is access to the full and formal development of learning skills, critical thought, and innovation - i.e., the elements for economic opportunity that hard-working students acquire today through any great modern university. RIGGED argues that if these modern elements of opportunity can be made broadly and freely available to all ambitious citizens regardless of their economic background, we can write the new and most important chapter in the story of the American Dream. As to the difficulty in achieving this, Jim Wolfston, Executive Producer and narrator of RIGGED, offers a thought experiment:

"Imagine that following the nation's founding during the Agrarian Age, our nation's land mass comprised 3,000 feudal estates, each run by a board of trustees comprising wealthy notables. Each citizen who desired to develop a parcel of land within one of those estates would fill out an application, provide credentials and letters of recommendation, and take tests whose scores correlated most closely with whether that citizen already came from a wealthy family. Further, for the vast majority of the citizens lucky enough to be admitted to work the land on an estate, each would pay the estate's tuition by taking on huge, oppressive debt obligations that would follow them for years into their productive careers." Given that 3,000 four-year higher education institutions largely control the modern currency for economic opportunity in this country today, you can see by parallel the crippling effect this system is imposing on U.S. social mobility. The paradox is that the people with the most power to break this system and overhaul it are the ones who have successfully risen through it and are thus the most naturally inclined to defend and preserve it. Yet because our higher education system inspires the greatest form of critical thought - the power to question one's own ideas - RIGGED suggests there's a good chance that more and more of today's leaders in U.S. higher education will step up to challenge the Wealthist value system, despite the fact that that system provided the context for their own journey to personal success. The awarding of RIGGED by the Toronto Film Magazine Festival comes at a time when 70 percent of the students who are admitted to U.S. colleges and universities and 90 percent of their graduates are from above the median income. "Higher Education is the most important asset in the Learning Age," says Wolfston. "If we can distribute this vital asset across the economic spectrum, we can optimize our nation's human capital development, prepare the next generation for citizenship, and ensure social and economic opportunity. Most importantly, by rejecting the current trend toward on-campus economic homogeneity, higher education institutions can offer their students the chance to encounter a more challenging mix of people with diverse ideas, perspectives and backgrounds. Collisions with the unexpected and unfamiliar are what best sharpen and prepare innovative minds. Thus, economic inclusion not only promotes social justice and equality of opportunity, it's also an optimizing strategy for educating tomorrow's innovators." Read more about RIGGED and watch the trailer and full documentary here. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005966/en/

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More than 2,500 manufacturing sector workers showed up at the Divali Nagar site in Chaguanas to receive their first dose of the Sinopharm Covid-19 injection at the start of a public/private sector vaccination drive.

The Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers Association (TTMA) collaborated with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Trade to facilitate the process.
Drone image of the village of Paridrayan (Taiwan) after the Morakot typhoon. The erosion had been removing the material on which the village was built during the last 350 years. Credit: Slawomir Jack Ciletycz

In August of 2009, typhoon Morakot passed over Taiwan, triggering over 22,000 landslides and adding another chapter to the forced migration of indigenous settlements in the mountainous areas. A new study recently published in the journal Tectonophysics has analyzed how extreme weather such as that caused by Morakot, when coupled with local geological conditions, can trigger landslides that have caused two forced settlement relocations of one Paiwan group in southern Taiwan in the last 350 years.

In this study, researchers from National Central and National Tsing Hua universities in Taiwan and Geosciences Barcelona (GEO3BCN-CSIC) in Spain combined information from the oral tradition of the Paiwan people with geological data to assess the effects of natural disasters on the communities that inhabit the Central Range of southern Taiwan. The study is focused on the sequence of forced settlement migrations of one Paiwan group caused by natural disasters in the the last 350 years.

"One of the objectives of this paper is to show that the oral traditions of indigenous peoples can be a reliable source of information about natural disasters. We show that when these oral traditions are combined with other geological field-based data insights into how regional geology and extreme weather can affect indigenous peoples lives in terms of socio-economic impact.", said Slawomir Jack Ciletycz from the National Central University and lead researcher of the study.

The background for the study was developed during interviews with members of Paiwan group who now live in the villages of Paridrayan and Linali. These interviews were conducted as part of the Ph.D. research of Olimpia Kot-Giletycz at the National Tsing Hua University, co-author of the study.

Part of these interviews focused on the indigenous peoples stories of past natural disasters that had had an important impact on the community. The villagers recounted major events in their migration history, among which was the story of a "collapse of the rock in the mountain across the river" that was followed by a "great water that appeared suddenly."The interviewees indicated that this rise in the water was a cause of their ancestors having abandoned the village of Tjuvung about 350 years ago when they moved to Paridrayan.

The authors then carried out site investigations in the area of Tjuvung and Paridrayan to determine the local geological and geomorphological conditions and their possible relation to the events that caused the abandonment of Tjuvung and forced the settlement migration as recorded in the Paiwan group oral traditions.

"The oral traditions told a story. What we did was to investigate whether or not there was a geological reason that could fit with these stories. We found that there was a plausible geological explanation," said Dennis Brown, researcher from Geosciences Barcelona (GEO3BCN-CSIC).

Geological measurements collected in the field were combined with Lidar data, satellite data, and climate data. With all this information, the researchers were able to verify the occurrence of a landslide triggered by rainfall during a time of known enhanced typhoon activity in Taiwan. The data analysis also corroborated the oral tradition which says that the river was blocked resulting in a barrier lake that was deep enough to flood the lower parts of Tjuvung village.

"Landslides have an important role in the lives of these people; not only because of natural disasters but also they provide areas of low relief that can be used for settlement and farming. A long-term issue is that landslides are typically recycled during subsequent events and are subject to erosion. This means that settlements built on them are transient and forced settlement migrations are a consequence," said Giletycz.

"This is an area of high mountains, sharp relief, and dense jungle cover where typhoons and earthquakes are common. The locations of landslides are conditioned by the regional geology in that they occur on dip-slopes where the regional cleavage is parallel to the slope," said Dennis Brown.

Rainfall and the vibrations caused by earthquakes are two of the most common causes of landslides in the region. "Landslides typically occur along a planar element in the rocks, be it fractures, bedding, or cleavage. In our case, this part of southern Taiwan has a well-developed cleavage along which slip occurs. This fabric is the defining element in the geomorphology of the area," said Giletycz.

"The results of our study provide insight into one way (involuntary settlement migration) in which Taiwan's indigenous mountain societies have been and continue to be, affected by extreme climate and the geological setting in which they live," the researchers write. According to Kot-Giletycz, the study also shows that "natural disasters and decisions made in adapting to their consequences can have a long-lasting effect on the lives of these people. This is evidenced by the fact that it still persists in their oral tradition some 350 years later."

"Landslides are difficult, if not impossible, to prevent, but the risks can be reduced if enough is known about the regional geology to more accurately determine the placement of man-made infrastructure," concludes Dennis Brown.

Explore further Tremors triggered by Typhoon Talas tell tales of tumbling terrain

More information: Slawomir Jack Giletycz et al. Regional geology, extreme weather events and natural disasters: Environmentally-forced, involuntary settlement migrations of the indigenous people of southern Taiwan, Tectonophysics (2021). Slawomir Jack Giletycz et al. Regional geology, extreme weather events and natural disasters: Environmentally-forced, involuntary settlement migrations of the indigenous people of southern Taiwan,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.tecto.2021.228796
[April 29, 2021] Cambridge Institute of Technology (CITech.) Collaborates with Saint-Gobain for ML & IOT projects

BANGALORE, India, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Cambridge Institute of Technology has completed Phase - 1 of the 'Video Analytics' project with the collaboration of the renowned French multinational corporation, Saint-Gobain. This success gave opportunity for the industry to associate with Cambridge Institute of Technology for IoT, ML and Environmental Projects. Students of the Cambridge Institute of Technology have developed a Machine Learning Model to check whether the Saint Gobain employees are wearing the safety equipment or not. The frequent cause of casualties in the workplace is failing to wear the safety equipment and the majority of these injuries can be prevented if workers wear appropriate Personal Protective Equipment. A Machine Learning model has been developed at CITech using a Vision-based approach to analyse record image or videos to verify PPE compliance.



The associate professor from the department of computer science and engineering, Dr. Varalatchoumy M said, "Cambridge Institute of Technology takes immense pleasure in getting the challenging AI/ML project. We thank Saint-Gobain's team, Mr.Diwakar and Mr. Santhosh for their continued support." The associate professor of Cambridge Institute of Technology Prof. Jayanthi M G quoted, "We are enthusiastic to collaborate for various IoT and Machine learning related projects in the near future with Saint-Gobain."

The France-Based company Saint-Gobain is one of the leading industries in designing manufacturing and distributing materials and solutions for future wellbeing. The industry tie-up between the Cambridge Institute of Technology and Saint-Gobain opens up vistas to a sustainable future. Mr. Santhosh MR, EHS Manager at Saint-Gobain - India region, stated, "We would like to have projects in collaboration with your institution on AI/ML & IoT, from our industry end we would provide the necessary support on the same" The CSE department is enriched with high-end facilities for its journey towards IoT and ML engineering. Mr. Nithin Mohan, CEO of Cambridge Group of Institutions said, "We have been focusing on the latest technologies and inventions. We aim to create a growing environment for students enabling project-based experience in IoT and ML engineering. Saint-Gobain has provided an opportunity to explore our limits. We have completed the Phase-1 of Video Analytics project and look forward to adding more." Cambridge Institute of Technology is a flourishing institute in the technology field and well known for providing the cutting-edge technology-based solution to industries. In future, the industry may find in CITech. a credible academic partner focusing on project-based growth for every department. Cambridge Institute of Technology (CITech.) is a legacy to carry for profound education culture in the state of Karnataka. Over 5000+ alumni of Cambridge Institute of Technology are now creating an influence on respective industries. Cambridge Institute of technology dedicated to provide a world-class learning environment and creating socially responsible professionals. Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499107/Cambridge_Institute_of_Technology_CITech.jpg

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The Indian strain of Covid-19 is more contagious and more fatal. Vietnam is rushing to sequence the gene in Covid-19 infections in four Indian experts who are currently in Vietnam.

Prof. Nguyen Van Kinh, President of the Association for Infectious Diseases, told an online meeting on Covid-19 prevention and vaccination safety on April 28 that the B.1617 virus strain in India is more dangerous than the current ones.

"This strain has a double mutation in the protein S segment, so it spreads very quickly and the fatality is high," said Professor Kinh.

Prof. Nguyen Van Kinh

In Vietnam, four Indian experts who recently entered Vietnam and were under quarantine in a hotel in the northern province of Yen Bai were confirmed to be positive to Covid-19. A hotel employee who had close contact with them was also positive. All of the five patients are being treated at the Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi.

To determine whether or not these patients are infected with the Indian strain, Vietnam is urgently sequencing the genes of these cases. Results are expected in the next few days. The patients are in stable condition.

The results of genetic sequencing will be the basis for Vietnam to strengthen preventive measures and have sufficient information for health workers to have appropriate treatment plans.

If the India strain is detected, Vietnam will have five strains of SARS-CoV-2, besides the mutant strain B.1.1.7 from the UK, B.1.351 in South Africa, D614G in Europe and the original strain in Wuhan.

According to Prof. Kinh, the Indian variant is being noticed by the whole world because it spread faster than the British variant.

The new strain spreads faster than all other strains that India has seen before. India has to face the variant, but the whole world is also very concerned about how to prevent it from spreading to other countries, Prof. Kinh said.

However, since many countries have not yet closed their borders, the new strain has appeared in at least 17 countries.

"With the current context, experts are afraid that in the next 10 days India will peak in the number of deaths, from 2,000 to 13,000 cases a day. It will be a tragedy for India if there are no timely response measures," Prof. Kinh added.

As of the morning of April 28, India had recorded nearly 18 million cases of Covid-19, ranking second in the world, and more than 201,000 deaths. In the past 24 hours, the second most populous country in the world had nearly 363,000 new cases and more than 3,200 deaths.

Thuy Hanh

Vietnamese expats struggle amid Indias devastating COVID-19 outbreak The Vietnamese community in India faces fear and uncertainty as COVID-19 spreads virtually unchecked in the country.
A Charleston-area couple has donated $500,000 to the International African American Museum that's under construction on the peninsula and set to open next year.

The donors, Mary Major and Bill Horton, said in a statement that the IAAM will "be a wonderful setting for education, reflection and dialogue."

"We are proud to join (former Charleston Mayor) Joe Riley and many others who have made the International African American Museum a reality," they said.

Riley got the museum project rolling more than two decades ago as the city's top elected official. He remains a lifetime member of the museum board.

It marked the first major gift to the IAAM since Tonya M. Matthews was was named CEO in March. She said the museum was grateful that the donors believe it will "make a positive difference."

The couple lives about 10 miles from the museum site, which is positioned where part of Gadsden's Wharf, a major port of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, was located.

Construction on the IAAM is ongoing.

An opening date has not been set, and deciding when that unveiling will be is one of Matthews' first tasks, she said after her hiring was announced.

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The IAAM was able to raise enough money to break ground  about $100 million  in mid-2019 and has continued to raise funds to pay for the second phase of museum setup, when the interiors will be furnished and exhibits installed, and to build up a robust endowment.

Museum leaders have said they hope to grow the endowment to $15 million before opening.

Other recent museum contributions include the donation of $1.7 million of audiovisual equipment for exhibits from Sony Corp., a commitment from Upstate-based Michelin North America to fund the IAAM's first traveling exhibit and a $250,000 donation from planemaker Boeing Co. that upped its total contribution to the project to $1 million.

This week's donation was the first major contribution from individuals announced by the museum so far this year.

Major and Horton also recently made another high-profile charitable gift to a Palmetto State institution. They were instrumental in financing the 10-ton bronze Gamecock statue that now stands outside the University of South Carolina's Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia. After some delays, the statue was placed last September.

Horton, a USC alumnus and a retired BlueCross BlueShield of S.C. executive, told The Post and Courier he was happy with the outcome.
An alleged domestic violence offender has escaped police by headbutting an officer and fleeing in a waiting car outside court.

Clayton Alvoen made the daring escape while appearing in Warwick Magistrates Court, 130km south-west of Brisbane, on Wednesday.

The 28-year-old was being led away to the watch house by an officer when he headbutted him and ran away.

Clayton Alvoen was being led away to the watch house by an officer when he headbutted him and ran away

Police believe Alvoen may have been picked up by a car waiting for him outside the courthouse.

Alvoen - who was in court on domestic violence, assault and drug offences - is still on the run.

Police are looking into Alvoen's known associates in a bid to find him.

Alvoen has a fair complexion, approximately 180 cm tall with a slim build, black hair and brown eyes.

The officer he headbutted has received treatment at the local hospital for a laceration to his face.

Anyone who sees Alvoen is advised to contact Crime Stoppers.
Northern Ireland's Justice Minister Naomi Long has condemned an arson attack at the home of a police officer in County Antrim as 'appalling and cowardly'.

Police said three cars were set alight at the property in Larne in the early hours of Thursday in a 'reckless attack'.

The fire also caused scorch damage to the house where the officer, his wife and daughter had been asleep at the time.

Police said three cars were set alight at the property in Larne in the early hours of Thursday in a 'reckless attack'

The trio were not injured in what has been described as a 'terrifying ordeal' for the family.

Ms Long said she 'does not underestimate the distress that is caused by an incident of this nature at a family home'.

'Our police officers put their lives on the line on a daily basis to keep us all safe,' she said.

She added: 'My thoughts are with this officer, their family and colleagues.

'This violence achieves absolutely nothing and needs to stop.

'I would encourage anyone with information about this intolerable incident to contact PSNI or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.'

Sinn Fein MLA Philip McGuigan linked the attack with loyalist anger over post-Brexit arrangements, additional checks at ports which they regard as a border in the Irish Sea.

'In recent months there has been increasingly violent rhetoric targeting the PSNI and police officers with sinister posters and graffiti appearing in loyalist areas across the north,' he said.

'These loyalist paramilitary gangs need to pack up and go away once and for all.'

The fire (above) also caused scorch damage to the house where the officer, his wife and daughter had been asleep at the time

Mark Lindsay, chair of the police representative body, the Police Federation, said the incident was a 'vile act of attempted intimidation'.

'This was a vile and reprehensible action against an officer who works to protect the community,' he said.

'Faceless bullies need to be apprehended, and I would echo the appeal made by the PSNI to the people of Larne to help track down those responsible for the attack.

'Police officers are as much a part of the community they serve and it is time the community rallied round to end this type of terror.

'My thoughts are with the officer and his family and they should know that no stone will be left unturned in the investigation that has commenced.'

Ulster Unionist MLA John Stewart said it is 'sadly not the first time that arsonists have targeted cars at residential properties in the Larne area'.

'But the fact that the house outside which these vehicles were parked belongs to a serving police officer, makes this a particularly sinister incident,' he said.

'I will repeat what I have always said when cars have been burnt out in the past; the gangsters responsible for this have no support in the community and the people of Larne want nothing to do with this type of activity. It is time for the police - and especially the judiciary - to come down hard on whoever is behind this and put these criminals behind bars for a very long time.'

Police said they were 'keeping an open mind' in terms of the motivation behind the attack but that a primary line of inquiry was that criminal elements may have been responsible.

Detective Chief Inspector Dunny McCubbin said it was a 'completely reckless attack which could have had serious consequences'.

'Thankfully, no injuries have been reported in what was a terrifying ordeal for the officer and his family,' he said.

'There are no words to describe those who would set fire to vehicles in the dark of night outside a family home when the occupants were asleep inside.

'Their actions stand in stark contrast to the officer who everyday serves our community with dignity, respect and courtesy.

'At the present time we are keeping an open mind as to the motivation behind this attack, however a primary line of enquiry is that criminal elements may be responsible.

'Detectives have now initiated a full investigation, which I can assure the community will be thorough and robust.

'I would take this opportunity to appeal for the help of the people of Larne and further afield in identifying those responsible.

'Were you in the Glenarm Road area late last night or early this morning? Did you see anyone or anything you felt was suspicious? Do you have any information about this incident? No matter how small or insignificant it may seem, please get in touch.'
Ready For The Outdoors (No Masks Needed) Toyota Sienna Multi Purpose Vehicle

SEE ALSO: Everyone Can Enjoy The Benefits Of Driving A MPV (Minivan)

PLANO, Texas (April 27, 2021)  The new Toyota Sienna is leveling up for 2022, thanks to the new Sienna Woodland Special Edition. Featuring adventure-ready, rugged styling and a standard Electronic On-Demand All-Wheel Drive System with increased ground clearance, the new edition will help drivers tackle outdoor adventures with confidence. Once the Sienna Woodland Special Edition is in dealerships this Fall, Toyota will make a $250 donation to the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) for each vehicle purchased, with a guaranteed minimum donation of $250,000, to support NEEFs mission to make the environment more accessible, relatable, relevant and connected to peoples lives.

The new Sienna Woodland Special Edition, in the available exterior colors Cement (exclusive to the Sienna Woodland Edition) or Midnight Black Metallic, offers a beautifully distinctive exterior and premium interior styling with the versatile features one would expect from the fourth generation Sienna. Designed with a focus on versatility and comfort combined with class-leading projected 35 EPA-estimated combined MPG, the Sienna Woodland Edition comes standard with:

AWD w/ Added Ground Clearance  To take on dirt roads with confidence

1500W capable power outlet  To power-up most household items for a short day trip or an overnight camping excursion

Tow hitch with 3500lb Towing Capability  Perfect for bringing a 4Wheeler or Jet Ski

Roof rails with crossbars

Exclusive Cement exterior color

Black sport trimmed seats with unique stitch color

18 wheels

Dark chrome-colored accents

Black badging

Navigation with JBL 1200W System with 12 Speakers

And with the flexibility and roominess to fit people, pets and recreational gear  the Sienna Woodland Edition also comes standard with features like super-long-slide second-row captains chairs, flexible seating and cargo layout with Split & Stow 3rd Row Seat, kick-activated sliding doors, heated front driver & passenger seats, sunshades in the 2nd row and a total of seven USB ports across all three rows.

Electronic On-Demand All Wheel Drive

The new generation Sienna is the only vehicle in its segment that combines a hybrid powertrain with AWD, and the system is available on all model grades for an exceptionally attractive price. For the 2022 Sienna Woodland Special Edition, drivers can now enjoy standard Electronic On-Demand All-Wheel Drive System with increased ground clearance.

Instead of a heavy AWD transfer case and space-robbing driveshaft to the rear wheels, this AWD system uses a separate independent electric motor to power the rear wheels the instant additional traction is needed and at all vehicle speeds.

Like the hybrid system, the Hybrid AWD system works seamlessly and transparently. During off-the-line starts, Hybrid AWD pre-emptively sends up to 80 percent of driving force to the rear wheels to help prevent front-wheel slip. The Hybrid AWD system also enhances cornering agility by helping to reduce understeer, giving the Sienna a more confident handling feel.

Torque distribution then varies with conditions, from 100:0 in constant-speed driving to 20:80 on slippery surfaces. Torque distribution is indicated on the Multi-information Display.

Class Exclusive Safety Features

In addition to exemplary collision protection provided by the TNGA-K Platform, the 2022 Sienna Woodland Special Edition, come standard with second-generation Toyota Safety Sense (TSS 2.0), a comprehensive active safety system that includes:

Pre-Collision system with Pedestrian Detection

Lane Departure Alert w/Lane Trace Assist

Full Speed Adaptive Cruise Control

Automatic High Beams

Cyclist Detection

Road Sign Recognition

Pre-Collision System (PCS) with Pedestrian Detection is designed to provide automatic braking capability should the driver not react in time in certain emergency situations. The PCS system is not only designed to detect a vehicle ahead, but it can also detect a bicyclist and even a pedestrian in low light situations. Blind Spot Monitor (BSM) with Rear Cross Traffic Alert (RCTA) is standard on all Sienna models, as well.

Toyota Limited Warranty

Toyotas 36-month/36,000 mile basic new-vehiclewarranty applies to all components other than normal wear and maintenance items. Additional 60-month warranties cover the powertrain for 60,000 miles and against perforation from corrosion for 60 months with no mileage limitation. Hybrid-related components that require repairs needed to correct defects in materials or workmanship are covered for 8 years/100,000 miles, whichever comes first from original date of first use when sold as new. The HV battery is covered for 10 years/150,000 miles, whichever comes first, and is transferrable across ownership.

The 2022 Sienna Woodland Special Edition also comes with ToyotaCare, which covers normal factory-scheduled maintenance, for two years or 25,000 miles, whichever comes first, and 2 years of Roadside Assistance, regardless of mileage.
The widow of Seacor Power's captain is accusing the lift boat's owner of ordering her husband and his crew to sail into stormy conditions before its deadly capsizing in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month.

Yvette Ledet, wife of Capt. David Ledet, made the allegation in a lawsuit she filed Wednesday at the federal courthouse in New Orleans. It contradicts an earlier public statement from the CEO of Seacor Marine Holdings Inc., owner of the ill-fated vessel, who asserted that the decision to depart from Port Fourchon on April 13 was entirely the captains.

Yvette Ledets suit alleges that Seacor Marine and Talos Energy, the operator of the offshore oil platform where the Power was headed, were fatally negligent. She demanded an unspecified amount of damages for various reasons, including emotional pain and suffering.

Despite (weather) warnings, the defendants put their profits over the safety and lives of their employees and crew members and ordered the Seacor Power to leave Port Fourchon, the suit argued. The suit didnt specify how Ledet or her attorneys might know what orders had been given to her late husband or his crew.

Seacor Marine didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Talos Energy declined to discuss the suit.

+8 As Seacor Power search continues, volunteers frustrated with lack of resources, fishing executive Two weeks after the Seacor Power lift boat capsized eight miles off the Louisiana coast, its owner, Seacor Marine, and the U.S. Coast Guard to

The 234-foot Seacor Power turned over two weeks ago as it headed for a Talos oil platform east of Venice, La. The vessel was headed into an area that forecasters warned would be experiencing tropical storm-force winds and dangerous waves. But the hurricane-force winds and wave action the vessel ultimately encountered were much more intense than anticipated.

Rescuers saved six of the 19 crewmen on the day the boat capsized. The bodies of another six  including that of David Ledet  have been recovered. Seven remaining crewmen remained unaccounted for as of Thursday.

Yvette Ledets lawsuit recounts how her husband, of Thibodaux, was attempting to help save others when he was thrown into the sea. Though he fought for his life, his body was recovered the next day with severe burns and other debilitating injuries, according to the suit, which didnt offer an exact cause for the wounds cited.

At a news conference six days after the Power overturned, Seacor CEO John Gellert said, The go/no-go decision is entirely the captains.

+3 Nearly two pounds of cocaine found on barrier island during search for missing Seacor Power crew A bundle containing nearly two pounds of cocaine was recovered this week from a barrier island at the southern tip of Terrebonne Parish during

The captain can rely on us, everyone ashore, or weather reports for advice, but ultimately its his decision, Gellert said. The captain had 50 years of experience.  He was one of our best captains and very prudent and conservative. We are very confident he would not have gone out if he had any doubt whatsoever.

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For its part, Talos has previously said that the Seacor Power was fully under the command of its captain and Seacor Marine, including when to depart the port.

Yvette Ledets filing follows similar lawsuits from the families of two Seacor Power crewmen who remain missing and another who was found dead.

Two of those cases were filed in a Texas state courthouse in Houston, where Talos is based. The third was filed in a Louisiana state court in St. Mary Parish.

Efforts to locate the missing Seacor Power crewmen at this stage are being led by the United Cajun Navy civilian fleet as well as other volunteers, many of whom are friends and family of the missing.

Volunteers were using boats, planes, drones and search dogs to canvass an area around Chauvin, northwest of Port Fourchon, the Cajun Navy said on its Facebook page. Boat teams were searching around Vermillion Bay. And volunteers riding all-terrain vehicles, planes and boats were searching east of Corpus Christi, Texas.

Cajun Navy President Todd Terrell said that some parts of the interior of the boat, like cabinets, are starting to turn up on the Texas coast.

"What that's telling us is how violent the storm was that night," he said.

A video, also on the group's Facebook page, showed Ronnie Adams of the television show "Swamp People" recounting how the group had found a square life boat from the Seacor Power. Volunteer search efforts have turned up other debris, including a throw ring with the Seacor Power's name on it, on previous days.

Friday and Saturday will be "the peak" of the search efforts, Terrell said, and then the Cajun Navy's resources will run out. He added, however, that Scott Daspit, the father of one of the missing men, has vowed to keep going.

"Mr. Scott said he's going to keep going till God tells him to stop."

The U.S. Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Boards investigation into the Seacor Power tragedy is ongoing.

Staff writer Anthony McAuley contributed to this report.
Highlights

At Red Chris, drilling continues to expand the higher grade mineralisation intersected at East Ridge and at Main Zone: At East Ridge, drilling continues to demonstrate the continuity of higher grade mineralisation with RC684, returning a partial intercept of 238m** @ 0.45g/t Au & 0.52% Cu from 814m, incl. 90m**

@ 0.85g/t Au & 0.85% Cu from 962m. This hole is 100m down dip from RC678^^ which returned 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m, including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au and 1.5% Cu from 908m. East Ridge is located 300m east of the East Zone (outside of Newcrest's Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate) with mineralisation open in all directions. In the Main Zone, drilling has intersected high grade mineralisation with RC679 returning 456m

@ 0.37 g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m, incl. 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0% Cu from 440m. Main Zone has the potential for further higher grade mineralisation beneath and to the south west of the open pit.

At Havieron, drilling included both infill and growth programs: Results from growth drilling continued to support the potential for resource expansion of the Havieron system, and Completion of infill drilling with results within the Inferred Mineral Resource boundary. This drilling is in line with expectations and increases confidence in the continuity of the higher grade mineralisation.

Newcrest recently entered into an early stage option and earn-in agreement with Discovery Harbour Resources Corp on their Fortuity 89 property located in the Great Basin, Nevada.

Melbourne, Australia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 28, 2021) - Newcrest Mining Limited (ASX: NCM) (TSX: NCM) Newcrest Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sandeep Biswas, said, "Our exploration focus is on identifying new resources with tier one potential. We have a range of potential options and are increasingly seeing the benefits of leveraging technology to identify targets and optimise our drilling program. We recently announced our exciting East Ridge discovery, which is a new zone of higher grade mineralisation at Red Chris. East Ridge is located outside of our initial Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate with drill results to date supporting potential resource growth over time. At Havieron, the completion of infill drilling has increased our confidence in the continuity of high grade mineralisation, with results from our growth drilling program highlighting the potential for resource expansion and bulk mining outside of the South East Crescent Zone."

Red Chris - Significant results since the December 2020(1) Quarterly Exploration Report:

RC677^^ : 524m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.39% Cu from 528m including 156m @ 0.71g/t Au & 0.59% Cu from 638m including 10m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 784m

: RC678^^ : 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m including 104m @ 1.5g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 884m including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au & 1.5% Cu from 908m

: RC679 : 456m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m including 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0% Cu from 440m

:

Havieron - Significant infill resource drilling results since the December 2020(1) Quarterly Exploration Report:

HAD112^^ 196.1m @ 1.7g/t Au & 0.28% Cu from 545.9m including 18.5m @ 4.9g/t Au & 0.60% Cu from 595m

HAD122^^ 97m @ 3.9g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 500m including 15m @ 9.7g/t Au & 1.8% Cu from 500m

HAD123^^ 169.5m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.33% Cu from 711.5m including 58.9m @ 6.2g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 736.1m including 3.1m @ 95g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 781.8m

HAD127^^ 79.3m @ 4.5g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 537m including 41.7m @ 8.4g/t Au & 2.6% Cu from 549m

HAD130^^ 109.4m @ 5.9g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 622m including 24m @ 17g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 630m



Red Chris, British Columbia, Canada

Red Chris is a joint venture between Newcrest (70%) and Imperial Metals Corporation (30%). Newcrest acquired its interest and operatorship of Red Chris on 15 August 2019.

The Brownfields Exploration program is focused on the discovery of additional zones of higher grade mineralisation within the Red Chris porphyry corridor including targets outside of Newcrest's recently released Mineral Resource estimate. During the period, there were up to seven diamond drill rigs in operation. A further 16,854m of drilling has been completed from 12 drill holes, with all drill holes intersecting mineralisation. This contributed to a total of 121,289m of drilling from 100 drill holes since Newcrest acquired its interest in the joint venture.

At East Ridge, located adjacent to the East Zone, Newcrest's first hole has discovered a new zone of higher grade mineralisation, with hole RC678^^ returning 198m @ 0.89g/t Au & 0.83% Cu from 800m, including 76m @ 1.8g/t Au and 1.5% Cu from 908m. The style of mineralisation and grade tenor is similar to that seen in the high grade pods from the East Zone (previously reported). Follow-up drill hole RC684 drilled 100m down dip of RC678 returned a partial intercept of 238m** @ 0.45g/t Au & 0.52% Cu from 814m, incl. 90m** @ 0.85g/t Au & 0.85% Cu from 962m. This hole demonstrates the continuity of the East Ridge zone. The mineralisation at East Ridge is located 300m east of the East Zone. East Ridge is located outside of Newcrest's Red Chris Mineral Resource estimate which supports the potential for resource growth over time. Mineralisation is open in all directions and extends the eastern side of the porphyry corridor as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Follow-up drilling to further define the extent and continuity of this high grade mineralisation is underway.

In the East Zone, drilling continues to confirm the potential for additional high grade mineralisation south of the South Boundary Fault. The South Boundary Fault currently defines the southern extent of mineralisation across the East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone. Results from RC677^^, which extended across the fault, returned 524m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.39% Cu from 528m, including 156m @ 0.71g/t Au & 0.59% Cu from 638m. This interval also includes 10m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 784m which is located on the south side of the fault. Located 300m west of East Ridge south of the south boundary fault and extending outside of the Newcrest Mineral Resource estimate, drilling to define the extent and continuity of this potential high grade mineralisation is underway.

In the Main Zone, drilling has confirmed the potential for further higher grade mineralisation which could support additional mining fronts, beneath and to the south west of the open pit. Results from RC679, which followed up historic results south west of the Main Zone pit, returned 456m @ 0.37g/t Au & 0.42% Cu from 418m, including 98m @ 0.71g/t Au & 1.0 % Cu from 440m. The mineralisation is located within Newcrest's Mineral Resource estimate. Drilling to define the extent and continuity of this high grade mineralisation is ongoing.

Approximately 50,000m of growth-related drilling is planned this calendar year with an increase to eight drill rigs next quarter. Further drilling of the East Ridge is planned to define the extent of the mineralisation and is expected to be completed by June 2021. Further targets along the porphyry corridor and neighbouring GJ property, have been identified with the potential to conduct drilling to test these targets in the future.

Refer to Appendix 1 for additional information, and Drillhole data table for all results reported during the period.





Figure 1. Schematic plan view map of the Red Chris porphyry corridor spanning East Ridge, East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_003full.jpg





Figure 2. Long section view map of the Red Chris porphyry corridor showing drill hole locations and gold distribution.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

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Havieron Project, Western Australia

The Havieron Project is operated by Newcrest under a Joint Venture Agreement with Greatland Gold. As announced on 30 November 2020, Newcrest has now met the Stage 3 expenditure requirement (US$45 million) and is entitled to earn an additional 20% joint venture interest, resulting in an overall joint venture interest of 60% (Greatland Gold 40%). Newcrest can earn up to a 70% joint venture interest through total expenditure of US$65million and the completion of a series of exploration and development milestones (including the delivery of a Pre-Feasibility Study) in a four-stage farm-in over a six year period that commenced in May 2019. Newcrest may acquire an additional 5% interest at the end of the farm-in period at fair market value. The Joint Venture Agreement includes tolling principles reflecting the intention of the parties that, subject to a successful exploration program and Feasibility Study and a positive decision to mine, the resulting joint venture mineralised material will be processed at Telfer.

The Havieron Project is centred on a deep magnetic anomaly located 45km east of Telfer in the Paterson Province. The deposit is overlain by more than 420m of post mineral Permian cover. Newcrest commenced drilling during the June 2019 quarter and has progressively increased its drilling activities with up to eight drill rigs operational during the period. Drilling activities from 30 infill drill holes resulted in 20,129m of drilling completed since 30 December 2020, with all drill holes intersecting mineralisation. A total of 158,663m of drilling from 183 drill holes has been completed since Newcrest commenced exploration activity in May 2019.

At Havieron, infill drilling to support the delivery of an Indicated Mineral Resource estimate in the South East Crescent Zone and adjacent Breccia Zones has been completed. This infill drilling confirms previously reported drilling results and provides additional support for both geological and grade continuity for ongoing studies.

Drilling since May 2019 has outlined an ovoid shaped zone of variable brecciation, alteration and sulphide mineralisation with dimensions of 650m x 350m trending in a north west orientation. Breccia mineralisation has been identified internally and externally to the Crescent Zone, including targets which remain open to the east, north west and south east. Mineralisation has been observed to over 1,000m in vertical extent below the post mineralisation cover sequence and remains open at depth.

Within this ovoid shaped zone, exploration activity has identified four key target regions at this stage, which are:

South East Crescent and Breccia

North West Crescent

Northern Breccia

Eastern Breccia

An infill drilling program (comprising 43 holes) saw 26 holes completed during the period (within the Inferred Mineral Resource Boundary) at a nominal 50m by 50m spacing, designed to support the delivery of an Indicated Mineral Resource estimate in the South East Crescent Zone and adjacent Breccia Zones. Assay results have now been received for all of the holes. The results are in line with expectations and increase the confidence in the continuity of the higher grade mineralisation. Results for the reporting period include(1):

HAD112 ^^ 196.1m @ 1.7g/t Au & 0.28% Cu from 545.9m including 18.5m @ 4.9g/t Au & 0.60% Cu from 595m

HAD113W2^^ 89.3m @ 2.3g/t Au & 0.38% Cu from 799.5m

HAD114W1^^ 114.8m @ 0.97g/t Au & 0.14% Cu from 770.4m Including 16m @ 5.1g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 840.6m

HAD116^^ 164m @ 1.3g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 644m including 15.7m @ 5.2g/t Au & 0.8% Cu from 655.7m

HAD117^^ 33.7m @ 6.1g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 699m including 22.7m @ 9g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 710m

HAD117W1^^ 33.8m @ 4.1g/t Au & 0.25% Cu from 794.2m Including 15.6m @ 5.8g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 794.4m

HAD118^^ 31.9m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.88% Cu from 626m including 18.2m @ 4.7g/t Au & 1.1% Cu from 639.3m

HAD119^^ 129.5m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.29% Cu from 550.1m including 40m @ 4.3g/t Au & 0.79% Cu from 627m

HAD119W1^^ 65m @ 2.6g/t Au & 0.45% Cu from 663m including 17.5m @ 4.6g/t Au & 0.55% Cu from 674.5m

HAD120^^ 199.5m @ 1.1g/t Au & 0.30% Cu from 573m including 13m @ 5.6g/t Au & 0.4% Cu from 670m

HAD121^^ 70.5m @ 2.8g/t Au & 0.17% Cu from 514m including 2.1m @ 59g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 519.8m

HAD122^^ 97m @ 3.9g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 500m including 15m @ 9.7g/t Au & 1.8% Cu from 500m

HAD123^^ 169.5m @ 3.4g/t Au & 0.33% Cu from 711.5m including 58.9m @ 6.2g/t Au & 0.23% Cu from 736.1m including 3.1m @ 95g/t Au & 0.50% Cu from 781.8m

HAD127^^ 79.3m @ 4.5g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 537m including 41.7m @ 8.4g/t Au & 2.6% Cu from 549m

HAD130^^ 109.4m @ 5.9g/t Au & 0.63% Cu from 622m including 24m @ 17g/t Au & 1.4% Cu from 630m

HAD131^^ 54.5m @ 1.9g/t Au & 1.3% Cu from 508m including 33.8m @ 2.4g/t Au & 1.2% Cu from 508.2m



Mineralisation is open at depth below the Inferred Mineral Resource estimate indicating the potential for resource expansion at depth with additional drilling. Current drilling is targeted to define the extent and growth potential of the Havieron mineralised system.

An additional four growth holes are reported since the 11 March 2021 Interim Exploration Update. Three growth holes from the Northern Breccia zone returned broad mineralised intervals which support extensions to breccia mineralisation in the Northwest of the system and further highlights potential for bulk mining outside of the South East Crescent zone. Results include:

HAD083BW4 156.6m @ 1.1g/t Au & 0.22% Cu from 805.8m including 27.4m @ 2.6g/t Au & 0.49% Cu from 923.5m

HAD090 HAD090 119m @ 1.0g/t Au & 0.11% Cu from 954.7m including 13m @ 4.1g/t Au & 0.67% Cu from 1042.2m

HAD106W1 HAD106W1 73.9m @ 1.5g/t Au & 0.13% Cu from 673.1m.



An initial South East Crescent growth hole confirmed extensions of mineralisation in the South East Crescent beyond the 4200mRL (1050m from surface) returned:

HAD086 72m @ 2.2g/t Au & 0.02% Cu from 1281m.



Drilling in the current period was impacted by seasonal wet weather with up to eight drill rigs operational. Currently, all drill rigs are operational on the growth drilling program with a focus on the North West Crescent, Northern Breccia Zone and depth extension of the South East Crescent and Breccia. This drilling is aimed to provide support for the potential expansion of the existing Inferred Mineral Resource estimate. Drill testing and interpretation of the geological and mineralisation controls of the Eastern Breccia Zone is ongoing. Further targets outside of Havieron, but within the joint venture area with Greatland Gold, have been identified with the potential to conduct drilling to test these targets in the future.

Refer to Appendix 2 for additional information, and Drillhole data table for all results reported during the period.





Figure 3. 3D Plan view schematic showing the spatial association of the South East Crescent + Breccia, North West Crescent, Northern Breccia and Eastern Breccia targets.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit:

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Figure 4. Plan view schematic of a horizontal slice at 4700mRL through the Crescent Sulphide Zone and Breccia-hosted Zones, showing the extents of the 0.5 and 1.0 g/t Au LeapfrogTM grade shells with highlighted newly reported intercepts for this period. Also shown is the Eastern Breccia, Northern Breccia and North West Crescent mineralisation outlines projected to the 4700mRL section - drilling is ongoing to confirm the extent of these zones.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 4, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_006full.jpg

Wilki Project, Western Australia

Newcrest entered into an exploration farm-in and joint venture agreement with Antipa Minerals Limited on 11 March 2020 in respect of the southern portion of its 100% owned ground in the Paterson Province of Western Australia (now called the 'Wilki Project').

The Wilki Project covers a strategic landholding of ~2,200km2 which surrounds the Telfer operation and is also in close proximity to the Havieron Project.

Exploration activity during the December 2020 quarter included the completion of a 15 hole RC drill program testing five targets previously identified targets. The targets were selected on the basis of Airborne Electromagnetic Survey (AEM), geochemistry and magnetic data, with drilling results returning weak geochemical anomalism.

A work program for the CY2021 field season is currently being finalised to explore additional priority targets.

Juri Joint Venture, Western Australia

On 30 November 2020, Newcrest announced its entry into the Juri Joint Venture which is a farm-in and joint venture agreement with Greatland Gold, with respect to its Black Hills and Paterson Range East projects, located within the Paterson Province approximately 50km from the Telfer operation. The joint venture covers an area of approximately 248km2.

Under the terms of the agreement, Newcrest has been granted an initial 25% joint venture interest with the potential to earn up to a 75% joint venture interest through total expenditure of A$20 million over a two stage earn-in, across a five year period. Greatland Gold will manage the Juri Joint Venture until the end of calendar year 2021, after which Newcrest has the right to be appointed as Manager.

Newcrest and Greatland Gold have agreed an exploration program until the end of calendar year 2021 which is anticipated to drill test priority targets, which will initially include the Goliath target. Subsequent drilling will focus on the Parlay target within the Black Hills Project and the Outamind and Los Diablos targets within the Paterson Range East Project. Additionally, geophysical work will be conducted in calendar year 2021 to identify other potential targets within both projects. Field activities commenced in late March 2021.

Tennant East, Northern Territory

Newcrest is the holder of six granted titles as well as seven application areas in the recently recognised Tennant East domain. Drill testing on the initial two target areas of Lantern and Sabretooth commenced in April 2021.

Nevada, USA

At the Jarbidge project in northern Nevada, Newcrest is exploring an early-stage exploration target for low-sulfidation epithermal gold. Initial diamond drilling was completed during the period at the Jack Creek zone, where multiple outcrops of high-level epithermal-style veining have been mapped over 3.5km's of strike. Four holes totalling 2,200m were completed in the initial phase of drilling. All holes intersected multiple zones of quartz veining and hydrothermal brecciation containing anomalous gold, silver and epithermal-associated trace elements. Data compilation is underway to determine the next steps for the program.

Newcrest has recently entered into an option and earn-in agreement with Discovery Harbour Resources Corp. on their Fortuity 89 property located in the Great Basin, Nevada. Fortuity 89 is characterised by limited outcrop in a large gravel covered plain. The limited outcrop is strongly altered, and other indications are consistent with the area having potential for epithermal gold mineralisation.

GJ Project, British Columbia, Canada

During the period, data compilation and planning for the upcoming field season continued.

Central Andes, Northern Chile

In Chile, exploration activity remained suspended during the period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the Gorbea project, an option and farm-in agreement with Mirasol Resources Ltd, Newcrest plans to resume field activity at the Dorado target in August 2021.

At the Mioceno project, an option and farm-in agreement with Cornerstone Capital Resources Inc., the resumption of field activity is also planned for August 2021. The Mioceno project is contiguous with the Dorado portion of the Mirasol Gorbea agreement. The two target areas cover a large high-sulfidation epithermal alteration zone with widespread low-level gold and associated trace element anomalism.

At the Altazor high-sulfidation epithermal gold and porphyry project, which is another option and farm-in agreement with Mirasol Resources Ltd, engagement with the local communities continued on a low-level basis in accordance with COVID-19 restrictions and local regulations.

Additionally, the next stage of field work at the Vicuna high-sulfidation epithermal and porphyry-style gold target in northern Chile is planned to commence in August 2021.The Vicuna project is an option and farm-in agreement with Compania Minera del Pacifico S.A (CAP). During the period, CAP agreed to extend the option period until March 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Northern Andes, Ecuador

In Ecuador, all exploration activity remained suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ability to safely resume activities will depend on local conditions and regulations, which will be monitored during the June 2021 quarter with the aim of initiating project work in the second half of the 2021 calendar year.

Brownfield Exploration

Brownfields exploration activities within Newcrest's existing mining provinces included:

Cadia - Exploration activity included the completion of a drill hole into the Randall's target on the Junction Reefs Joint Venture. No significant results were returned. No exploration activity was completed within the Cadia Mine Corridor.

Telfer - Weather events resulted in restricted access to target areas in the period. Activities in the southern corridor will commence with drill testing of the Blue Scar and Kings Head targets in April and the Ironclad prospect in May.

Lihir - Landowner discussions continued. All field activities were suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Appendix 1

Red Chris (70% Newcrest): JORC Table 1

Section 1: Sampling Techniques and Data

Criteria Commentary Sampling techniques Core samples are obtained from core drilling. HQ and NQ diameter diamond core was drilled on a 3, 4.5m or 6m run. Core was cut using an automatic core-cutter and half core sampled at 2m intervals. Cover sequences were not sampled. Drilling techniques Core drilling was advanced with HQ3, HQ, NQ3 and NQ diameter coring configuration.



Core from inclined drill holes are oriented on 3, 4.5m or 6m runs using an electronic core orientation tool (Reflex ACTIII). At the end of each run, the bottom of hole position is marked by the driller, which is later transferred to the whole drill core run length with a bottom of hole reference line. Drill sample recovery Core recovery is systematically recorded from the commencement of coring to end of hole, by reconciling against driller's depth blocks in each core tray with data recorded in the database. Drillers depth blocks provided the depth, interval of core recovered, and interval of core drilled.



Core recoveries were typically 100%, with isolated zones of lower recovery. Logging Geological logging recorded qualitative descriptions of lithology, alteration, mineralisation, veining, and structure (for all core drilled - 16,854m in 12 holes - all holes intersected mineralisation, including orientation of key geological features.



Geotechnical measurements were recorded including Rock Quality Designation (RQD) fracture frequency, solid core recovery and qualitative rock strength measurements.



Magnetic susceptibility measurements were recorded every metre.



All geological and geotechnical logging was conducted at the Red Chris Mine.



Digital data logging was captured, validated and stored in an acQuire database.



All drill cores were photographed, prior to cutting and/or sampling the core. Sub-sampling techniques and sample preparation Sampling, sample preparation and quality control protocols are considered appropriate for the material being sampled.



Core was cut and sampled at the Red Chris Mine core processing facility. Half core samples were collected in plastic bags together with pre-numbered sample tags and grouped in plastic bags for dispatch to the laboratory. Sample weights typically varied from 5 to 10kg. Sample sizes are considered appropriate for the style of mineralisation. Drill core samples were freighted by road to the laboratory.



Sample preparation was conducted at the independent ISO 9001 certified and ISO 17025 accredited Bureau Veritas Commodities Canada Ltd Laboratory, Vancouver (Bureau Veritas). Samples were dried at 650C, and crushed to 95% passing 4.75 mm, and the split to obtain up to 1kg sub-sample, which was pulverised (using LM2) to produce a pulped product with the minimum standard of 95% passing 106m.



Duplicate samples were collected from crush and pulp samples at a rate of 1:20. Duplicate results show an acceptable level of variability for the material sampled and style of mineralisation.



Periodic size checks (1:20) for crush and pulp samples and sample weights are provided by the laboratory and recorded in the acQuire database. Quality of assay data and laboratory tests Assaying of drill core samples was conducted at Bureau Veritas. All samples were assayed for 59 elements using a 4-acid digestion followed by ICP-AES/ICP-MS determination (method MA250). Gold analyses were determined by 50g fire assay with ICP-ES finish (method FA350). Carbon and Sulphur were determined by Leco (method TC000) and mercury using aqua regia digestion followed by ICP-ES/MS determination (method AQ200).



Sampling and assaying quality control procedures consisted of inclusion of certified reference material (CRMs), coarse residue and pulp duplicates with each batch (at least 1:20).



Assays of quality control samples were compared with reference samples in the acQuire database and verified as acceptable prior to use of data from analysed batches.



Laboratory quality control data, including laboratory standards, blanks, duplicates, repeats and grind size results are captured in acQuire database and assessed for accuracy and precision for recent data.



Due to the limited extent of the drilling program to date, extended quality control programs are yet to be undertaken, whereby pulped samples will be submitted to an umpire laboratory and combined with more extensive re-submission programs.



Analysis of the available quality control sample assay results indicates that an acceptable level of accuracy and precision has been achieved and the database contains no analytical data that has been numerically manipulated.



The assaying techniques and quality control protocols used are considered appropriate for the data to be used for reporting exploration drilling results. Verification of sampling and assaying Sampling intervals defined by the geologist are electronically assigned sample identification numbers prior to core cutting. Corresponding sample numbers matching pre-labelled sample tags are assigned to each interval.



All sampling and assay information were stored in a secure acQuire database with restricted access.



Electronically generated sample submission forms providing the sample identification number accompany each submission to the laboratory. Assay results from the laboratory with corresponding sample identification are loaded directly into the acQuire database.



Assessment of reported significant assay intervals was verified by re-logging of drill core intervals and assessment of high resolution core photography. The verification of significant intersections has been completed by company personnel and the Competent Person/Qualified Person.



No adjustments are made to assay data, and no twinned holes have been completed. Drilling intersects mineralisation at various angles.



There are no currently known drilling, sampling, recovery, or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy or reliability of the data. Location of data points Drill collar locations were surveyed using a RTK GPS with GNSS with a stated accuracy of +/- 0.025m.



Drill rig alignment was attained using an electronic azimuth aligner (Reflex TN14 GYROCOMPASS). Downhole survey was collected at 9 to 30m intervals of the drill hole using single shot survey (Reflex EZ-SHOT). At the end of hole, all holes have been surveyed using a continuous gyro survey to surface (Reflex EZ-GYRO).



Topographic control is established from PhotoSat topographic data and derived digital elevation model. The topography is generally low relief to flat, with an average elevation of 1500 m, with several deep creek gullies.



All collar coordinates are provided in the North American Datum (NAD83 Zone 9). Data spacing and distribution The drill hole spacing ranges from 100 - 200m in lateral extent within an area of 1.5km2 at the East Zone, 1.5km2 at the Main Zone and 1.5km2 at the Gully Zone. The drill hole spacing is >200m at the East Ridge, where there is insufficient drilling to define the lateral extent of the area.



No sample compositing is applied to samples. Orientation of data in relation to geological structure Drilling of reported drill holes RC675, RC676, RC677, RC678, RC679, RC680, RC681, RC682 and RC684 are oriented perpendicular to the intrusive complex. The intrusive complex has an east-northeast orientation, with drilling established on a north-northwest orientation.



Drill holes exploring the extents of the East Ridge, East Zone, Main Zone and Gully Zone mineral system intersected moderately dipping volcanic and sedimentary units cut by sub-vertical intrusive lithologies. Steeply dipping mineralised zones with an east-northeast orientation have been interpreted from historic and Newcrest drill holes. Sample security The security of samples is controlled by tracking samples from drill rig to database.



Drill core was delivered from the drill rig to the Red Chris Mine core yard every shift. Geological and geotechnical logging, high resolution core photography and cutting of drill core was undertaken at the Red Chris core processing facility.



Samples were freighted in sealed bags with security tags by road to the laboratory, and in the custody of Newcrest representatives.



Sample numbers are generated from pre-labelled sample tags. All samples are collected in pre-numbered plastic bags. Sample tags are inserted into prenumbered plastic bags together with the sample.



Verification of sample numbers and identification is conducted by the laboratory on receipt of samples, and sample receipt advice issued to Newcrest.



Details of all sample movement are recorded in a database table. Dates, Hole ID sample ranges, and the analytical suite requested are recorded with the dispatch of samples to the laboratory analytical services. Any discrepancies logged at the receipt of samples into the laboratory analytical services are validated. Audits or reviews Due to the limited duration of the program, no external audits or reviews have been undertaken.



Internal verification and audit of Newcrest exploration procedures and databases are periodically undertaken.

Section 2: Reporting of Exploration Results

Criteria Commentary Mineral tenement and land tenure status Red Chris comprises 77 mineral tenures including five mining leases and is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Newcrest Mining Limited (70%) and Imperial Metals Corporation (30%). Newcrest Red Chris Mining Limited is the operator of Red Chris.



Newcrest Red Chris Mining Limited and the Tahltan Nation (as represented by the Tahltan Central Government, the Tahltan Band and Iskut First Nation) signed an updated Impact, Benefit and Co-Management Agreement (IBCA) covering Red Chris on 15 August 2019.



All obligations with respect to legislative requirements including minimum expenditure are maintained in good standing. Exploration done by other parties Conwest Exploration Limited, Great Plains Development Co. of Canada, Silver Standard Mines Ltd, Texasgulf Canada Ltd. (formerly Ecstall Mining Limited), American Bullion Minerals Ltd and bcMetals Corporation conducted exploration in the areas between 1956 and 2006.



Imperial Metals Corporation acquired the project in 2007 and completed deeper drilling at the East and Main Zones between 2007 and 2012. Geology The Red Chris Project is located in the Stikine terrane of north-western British Columbia, 80 km south of the town of Dease Lake.



Late Triassic sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Stuhini Group host a series of Late Triassic to Early Jurassic 204-198 Ma) diorite to quartz monzonite stocks and dykes.



Gold and copper mineralisation at Red Chris consists of vein, disseminated and breccia sulphide typical of porphyry-style mineralisation. Mineralisation is hosted by diorite to quartz monzonite stocks and dykes. The main mineral assemblage contains well developed pyrite-chalcopyrite-bornite sulphide mineral assemblages as vein and breccia infill, and disseminations. The main mineralisation event is associated with biotite and potassium feldspar-magnetite wall rock alteration. Drill hole information As provided. Data aggregation methods Significant assay intercepts are reported as (A) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.1g/t Au greater than or equal to 20m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (B) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.5g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (C) length-weighted averages exceeding 1g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; (D) length-weighted averages exceeding 5g/t Au greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution; and (E) length-weighted averages exceeding 10g/t Au for greater than or equal to 10m, with less than 10m of consecutive internal dilution. No top cuts are applied to intercept calculations. Relationship between mineralisation widths and intercept lengths Significant assay intervals reported represent apparent widths. Insufficient geological information is available to confirm the geological model and true width of significant assay intervals. Diagrams As provided. Balanced reporting This is the eleventh release of Exploration Results for this project made by Newcrest. Previous release dates are 30 January 2020, 11 March 2020, 30 April 2020, 11 June 2020, 23 July 2020, 10 September 2020, 29 October 2020, 10 December 2020, 28 January 2021 and 11 March 2021.



Earlier reporting of exploration programs conducted by Newcrest and Imperial Metals Corporation have previously been reported. Exploration drilling programs are ongoing and further material results will be reported in subsequent Newcrest releases. Other substantive exploration data Nil. Further work Further drilling is planned to define the extents of the East Ridge, East Zone and Main Zone.

Drillhole data(1)

Red Chris Project, British Columbia, Canada

Reporting Criteria: Intercepts reported are downhole drill width (not true width) Au >0.1ppm (0.1g/t Au) and minimum 20m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Also highlighted are high grade intervals of Au >0.5ppm (0.5g/t Au), Au >1ppm (1g/t Au), Au > 5ppm (5g/t Au), Au >10ppm (10g/t Au) and minimum 10m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Gold grades are reported to two significant figures. Samples are from core drilling which is HQ or NQ in diameter. Core is photographed and logged by the geology team before being cut. Half core HQ and NQ samples are prepared for assay and the remaining material is retained in the core farm for future reference. Each assay batch is submitted with duplicates and standards to monitor laboratory quality. Total depth (end of hole) is rounded to one decimal place for reporting purposes.

Hole ID Hole

Type Easting

(m) Northing

(m) RL

(m) Total

Depth

(m) Azimuth

(GRID) Dip From

(m) To

(m) Interval

(m) Au

(ppm) Cu

(pct) Cut

off RC675 DD 451667 6395388 1539 981.2 147 -59 150 194 44^^ 0.11 0.15 0.1















264 702 438^^ 0.32 0.41 0.1













inc. 314 326 12^^ 0.55 0.74 0.5













inc. 340 370 30^^ 0.57 0.77 0.5













inc. 544 562 18^^ 0.62 0.66 0.5 RC676 DD 452008 6396133 1554 1505.4 145 -59 156 258 102 0.26 0.06 0.1













incl. 166 176 10 1.0 0.13 0.5















288 322 34 0.14 0.05 0.1















460 486 26 0.11 0.04 0.1















506 894 388 0.34 0.30 0.1













incl. 700 712 12 0.52 0.40 0.5













incl. 856 894 38 0.64 0.51 0.5















906 964 58 0.31 0.17 0.1













incl. 950 962 12 0.60 0.20 0.5















1032 1106 74** 0.38 0.32 0.1













incl. 1060 1080 20 0.55 0.50 0.5 RC677 DD 453064 6396386 1460 1445.1 148 -64 188 230 42^^ 0.11 0.03 0.1















528 1052 524^^ 0.37 0.39 0.1













inc. 638 794 156^^ 0.71 0.59 0.5













inc. 784 794 10^^ 1.5 0.88 1













inc. 810 854 44^^ 0.57 0.43 0.5















1066 1148 82^^ 0.12 0.18 0.1 RC678 DD 453251 6396597 1420 1499.3 147 -59 706 782 76^^ 0.14 0.27 0.1















800 998 198^^ 0.89 0.83 0.1













inc. 884 988 104^^ 1.5 1.3 0.5













inc. 908 984 76^^ 1.8 1.5 1















1186 1218 32 0.19 0.02 0.1















1272 1310 38 0.16 0.03 0.1 RC679 DD 451618 6395469 1540 1135.1 148 -59 236 396 160 0.30 0.29 0.1













incl. 322 344 22 0.72 0.51 0.5















418 874 456 0.37 0.42 0.1













incl. 440 538 98 0.71 1.0 0.5













incl. 578 648 70 0.51 0.46 0.5















896 1060 164 0.23 0.04 0.1













incl. 940 956 16 0.51 0.13 0.5













incl. 1036 1054 18 0.58 0.03 0.5















1104 1135.1 31.1 0.14 0.06 0.1 RC680 DD 451718 6395301 1539 770.2 150 -59 162 402 240 0.20 0.22 0.1















560 594 34 0.11 0.06 0.1 RC681 DD 451585 6395323 1528 856.7 151 -59 22 88 66 0.10 0.07 0.1















190 222 32 0.11 0.15 0.1















244 426 182 0.19 0.21 0.1















454 528 74 0.17 0.20 0.1















642 664 22 0.19 0.09 0.1















678 730 52 0.16 0.10 0.1 RC682 DD 453064 6396386 1460 1490.7 149 -69 592 614 22 0.11 0.18 0.1















628 710 82 0.14 0.20 0.1















726 940 214 0.25 0.36 0.1















970 1216 246 0.38 0.38 0.1















1252 1272 20 0.10 0.22 0.1 RC683 DD 451963 6395068 1537 13.5 328 -59 Assays pending RC684 DD 453252 6396600 1420 1475.7 147 -63 550 606 56 0.12 0.01 0.1















748 786 38 0.28 0.34 0.1















814 1052 238** 0.45 0.52 0.1













incl. 962 1052 90** 0.85 0.85 0.5













incl. 970 986 16 1.2 1.2 1













incl. 1016 1030 14 1.1 1.1 1 RC685 DD 452533 6396281 1508 1202.3 149.9 -55 Development Hole RC686 DD 451569 6395560 1526 1085.0 147.9 -59 Assays pending RC687# DD 453126 6396509 1445 1058.0 149.8 -58 Assays pending RC688# DD 453385 6396598 1415 959.0 146.0 -61 Assays pending RC689 DD 452677 6396314 1492 827.9 147.5 -57 Development Hole RC690# DD 452587 6396286 1507 821.6 148.0 -60 Development Hole RC691# DD 452550 6396348 1495 856.9 148.0 -60 Development Hole RC692# DD 453147 6396820 1462 635.4 148.1 -53 Assays pending RC693# DD 453334 6396606 1416 467.2 238 -59 Geotechnical Hole - Not Sampled RC694# DD 452677 6396314 1492 164.0 147 -54 Development Hole

#drilling in progress. **partial intercept, assays pending. ^updated intercept ^^previously reported intercept





Figure 5. Schematic plan view map of the East Ridge and East Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model and sliced at 800mRL. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 5, please visit:

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Figure 6. Schematic plan view map of the Main Zone showing drill hole locations (Newcrest & Imperial) and significant Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases). 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from a Leapfrog model and sliced at 800mRL. Gold equivalent (AuEq) grade calculated using a copper conversion factor of 1.67 ([gold grade (g/t)] + [copper grade (%) x 1.67]), using US$1,400/oz Au, US$3.40/lb Cu and 100% recovery.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 6, please visit:

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Figure 7. Schematic cross section of RC678 and RC684 (Section Line 34) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 7, please visit:

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Figure 8. Schematic cross section of RC677 and RC682 (Section Line 31) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 8, please visit:

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Figure 9. Schematic cross section of RC676 (Section Line 21) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 9, please visit:

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Figure 10. Schematic cross section of RC675, R679 and RC680 (Section Line 14) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 10, please visit:

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Figure 11. Schematic cross section of RC681 (Section Line 13) showing Newcrest and Imperial drill holes and Newcrest intercepts (drill intercepts have been reported in Appendix 1 of this report, and in prior Newcrest exploration releases) 0.5 g/t AuEq, 1g/t AuEq and 2g/t AuEq shell projections generated from Leapfrog model. Due to window size (+/- 50m) and section orientation (150) hole may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 11, please visit:

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Appendix 2

Havieron Project (Greatland Gold Plc - Joint Venture Agreement): JORC Table 1

Section 1: Sampling Techniques and Data

Criteria Commentary Sampling techniques Core samples are obtained from core drilling in Proterozoic basement lithologies. PQ-HQ and NQ diameter core was drilled on a 6m run. Core was cut using an automated core-cutter and half core sampled at 1m intervals with breaks for major geological changes. Sampling intervals range from 0.2 - 1.0m. Cover sequences were not sampled. Drilling techniques Permian Paterson Formation cover sequence was drilled using mud rotary drilling. Depths of cover typically observed to approximately 420m vertically below surface. Steel casing was emplaced to secure the pre-collar.



Core drilling was advanced from the base of the cover sequence with PQ3, HQ3 and NQ2 diameter coring configuration.



Core from inclined drill holes are oriented on 3m and 6m runs using an electronic core orientation tool (Reflex ACTIII). At the end of each run, the bottom of hole position is marked by the driller, which is later transferred to the whole drill core run length with a bottom of hole reference line. Drill sample recovery Core recovery is systematically recorded from the commencement of coring to end of hole, by reconciling against driller's depth blocks in each core tray with data recorded in the database. Drillers depth blocks provided the depth, interval of core recovered, and interval of core drilled.



Core recoveries were typically 100%, with isolated zones of lower recovery.



Cover sequence drilling by the mud-rotary drilling did not yield recoverable samples. Logging Geological logging recorded qualitative descriptions of lithology, alteration, mineralisation, veining, and structure (for all core drilled - 6,641m from 30 drillholes, all intersecting mineralisation), including orientation of key geological features.



Geotechnical measurements were recorded including Rock Quality Designation (RQD) fracture frequency, solid core recovery and qualitative rock strength measurements.



Magnetic susceptibility measurements were recorded every metre. The bulk density of selected drill core intervals was determined at site on whole core samples.



All geological and geotechnical logging was conducted at the Havieron site.



Digital data logging was captured on diamond drill core intervals only, and all data validated and stored in an acQuire database.



All drill cores were photographed, prior to cutting and/or sampling the core.



The logging is of sufficient quality to support Mineral Resource estimates. Sub-sampling techniques and sample preparation Sampling, sample preparation and quality control protocols are considered appropriate for the material being sampled.



Core was cut and sampled at the Telfer and Havieron core processing facility. Half core samples were collected in pre-numbered calico bags and grouped in plastic bags for dispatch to the laboratory. Sample weights typically varied from 0.5 to 4kg. Sample sizes are considered appropriate for the style of mineralisation. Drill core samples were freighted by air and road to the laboratory.



Sample preparation was conducted at the independent ISO17025 accredited Intertek Laboratory, Perth (Intertek). Samples were dried at 105oC, and crushed to 95% passing 4.75mm, and the split to obtain up to 3kg sub-sample, which was pulverised (using LM5) to produce a pulped product with the minimum standard of 95% passing 106m, the sample and 10 samples either side are re-ground or re-screened. There are very few instances of <95% passing the second grind. An assessment of the grind size verses Au grade has shown that rare mineralised assays are affected by grinding issues.



Duplicate samples were collected from crush and pulp samples at a rate of 1:20. Duplicate results show an acceptable level of variability for the material sampled and style of mineralisation.



Periodic size checks (1:20) for crush and pulp samples and sample weights are provided by the laboratory and recorded in the acQuire database. Quality of assay data and laboratory tests Assaying of drill core samples was conducted at Intertek. All samples were assayed for 48 elements using a 4-acid digestion followed by ICP-AES/ICP-MS determination (method 4A/MS907), which is considered to provide a total assay for copper. Gold analyses were determined by 50g fire assay with AAS finish (method FA50N/AA), which is considered to provide a total assay for gold.



Sampling and assaying quality control procedures consisted of inclusion of certified reference material (CRMs), coarse residue and pulp duplicates with each batch (at least 1:20).



Assays of quality control samples were compared with reference samples in acQuire database and verified as acceptable prior to use of data from analysed batches.



Laboratory quality control data, including laboratory standards, blanks, duplicates, repeats and grind size results are captured in the acQuire database and assessed for accuracy and precision for recent data.



Extended quality control programs including pulp samples submitted to an umpire laboratory and combined with more extensive re-submission programs have been completed.



Analysis of the available quality control sample assay results indicates that an acceptable level of accuracy and precision has been achieved and the database contains no analytical data that has been numerically manipulated.



The assaying techniques and quality control protocols used are considered appropriate for the data to be used for reporting exploration drilling results. Verification of sampling and assaying Sampling intervals defined by the geologist are electronically assigned sample identification numbers prior to core cutting. Corresponding sample numbers matching pre-labelled calico bags are assigned to each interval.



All sampling and assay information were stored in a secure acQuire database with restricted access.



Electronically generated sample submission forms providing the sample identification number accompany each submission to the laboratory. Assay results from the laboratory with corresponding sample identification are loaded directly into the acQuire database.



Assessment of reported significant assay intervals was verified by re-logging of diamond drill core intervals and assessment of high resolution core photography. The verification of significant intersections has been completed by company personnel and the Competent Person/Qualified Person.



No adjustments are made to assay data, and no twinned holes have been completed.



There are no currently known drilling, sampling, recovery, or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy or reliability of the data. Location of data points Drill collar locations were surveyed using a differential GPS with GNSS with a stated accuracy of +/- 0.5m for all drill holes reported.



Drill rig alignment was attained using an electronic azimuth aligner. Downhole survey was collected at 6-12m intervals in the cover sequence, and every 6 to 30m in diamond drill core segments of the drill hole using single shot (Axis Mining Champ Gyro). The single shot surveys have been validated using continuous survey to surface (Axis Mining Champ) along with a selection of drill holes re-surveyed by an external survey contactor using a DeviGyro tool - confirming sufficient accuracy for downhole spatial recording.



A LIDAR survey was completed over the project area in Nov 2019 which was used to prepare a DEM / topographic model for the project with a spatial accuracy of +/- 0.1m vertical and +/- 0.3m horizontal. The topography is generally low relief to flat, elevation within the dune corridors in ranges between 250-265m Australian Height Datum (AHD) steepening to the southeast. All collar coordinates are provided in the Geocentric Datum of Australian (GDA20 Zone 51). All relative depth information is reported in AHD +5000m. Data spacing and distribution Within the South-East Crescent and Breccia zone drill hole spacing ranges from 50 to 100m, to 50 by 50m within the initial resource extents. Outside the initial resource boundary drill hole spacing ranges from 50 to 200m in lateral extent within the breccia zone over an area of ~2km2. The data spacing is sufficient to establish the degree of geological and grade continuity.



Significant assay intercepts remain open. Further drilling is required to determine the extent of currently defined mineralisation. No sample compositing is applied to samples.



Drilling intersects mineralisation at various angles. Orientation of data in relation to geological structure Drill holes exploring the extents of the Havieron mineral system intersect moderately dipping carbonate and siliclastic sedimentary facies, mineralised breccia and sub-vertical intrusive lithologies. Geological modelling has been interpreted from historic and Newcrest drill holes.



Variable brecciation, alteration and sulphide mineralisation is observed with a footprint with dimensions of 650m x 350m trending in a north west orientation and over 1000m in vertical extent below cover.



The subvertical southeast high grade arcuate crescent sulphide zone has an average thickness of 20m and has been defined over a strike length of up to 550m, and over 600m in vertical extent below cover.



Drilling direction is oriented to intersect the steeply dipping high-grade sulphide mineralisation zones at an intersection angle of greater than 40 degrees. The drilled length of reported intersections is typically greater than true width of mineralisation. Sample security The security of samples is controlled by tracking samples from drill rig to database.



Drill core was delivered from the drill rig to the Havieron core yard every shift. On completion of geological and geotechnical logging, core processing was completed by Newcrest personnel at the Havieron facility.



High resolution core photography and cutting of drill core was undertaken at the Havieron core processing facilities.



Samples were freighted in sealed bags by air and road to the Laboratory, and in the custody of Newcrest representatives. Sample numbers are generated directly from the database. All samples are collected in pre-numbered calico bags.



Verification of sample numbers and identification is conducted by the laboratory on receipt of samples, and sample receipt advise issued to Newcrest.



Details of all sample movement are recorded in a database table. Dates, Hole ID sample ranges, and the analytical suite requested are recorded with the dispatch of samples to analytical services. Any discrepancies logged at the receipt of samples into the analytical services are validated. Audits or reviews Internal reviews of core handling, sample preparation and assays laboratories were conducted on a regular basis by both project personnel and owner representatives.



In the Competent Person's opinion, the sample preparation, security and analytical procedures are consistent with current industry standards and are entirely appropriate and acceptable for the styles of mineralisation identified and will be appropriate for use in the reporting of exploration results and Mineral Resource estimates. There are no identified drilling, sampling or recovery factors that materially impact the adequacy and reliability of the results of the drilling programme in place at the Havieron Project.

Section 2: Reporting of Exploration Results

Criteria Commentary Mineral tenement and land tenure status The Havieron Project is entirely contained within mining tenement M45/1287, which is jointly owned by Greatland Pty Ltd and Newcrest Operations Limited. Newcrest has entered into a Joint Venture Agreement (effective 30 November 2020) and Farm-In Agreement (effective 12 March 2019) with Greatland Pty Ltd and Greatland Gold plc. Newcrest is the manager of the Havieron Project. Newcrest has now met the Stage 3 expenditure requirement (US$45 million) and is entitled to earn an additional 20% joint venture interest, resulting in an overall joint venture interest of 60%. Newcrest has the right to earn up to a 70% interest and acquire a further 5% at fair market value.



Newcrest and the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation are parties to an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) which relates to the use of native title land for Newcrest's current operations at Telfer and its activities within a 60-km radius around Telfer and includes its exploration activities at Havieron. The parties have agreed that the ILUA will apply to any future development activities by the Joint Venture Participants (Newcrest and Greatland Gold) at Havieron.



The mining tenement M45/1287 wholly replaces the 12 sub-blocks of exploration tenement E45/4701 (former exploration tenement on which the Havieron Project is based) and was granted on 10 September 2020. All obligations with respect to legislative requirements including minimum expenditure are maintained in good standing for prior exploration tenement E45/4701. Exploration done by other parties Newcrest completed six core holes in the vicinity of the Havieron Project from 1991 to 2003. Greatland Gold completed drill targeting and drilling of nine Reverse Circulation (RC) drill holes with core tails for a total of approximately 6,800m in 2018. Results of drilling programs conducted by Greatland Gold have previously been reported on the Greatland Gold website.



Drilling has defined an intrusion-related mineral system with evidence of breccia and massive sulphide-hosted higher-grade gold-copper mineralisation. Geology The Havieron Project is located within the north-western exposure of the Palaeo-Proterozoic to Neoproterozoic Paterson Orogen (formerly Paterson Province), 45 km east of Telfer. The Yeneena Supergroup hosts the Havieron prospect and consists of a 9km thick sequence of marine sedimentary rocks and is entirely overlain by approximately 420m of Phanerozoic sediments of the Paterson Formation and Quaternary aeolian sediments.



Gold and copper mineralisation at Havieron consist of breccia, vein and massive sulphide replacement gold and copper mineralisation typical of intrusion-related and skarn styles of mineralisation. Mineralisation is hosted by metasedimentary rocks (meta-sandstones, meta-siltstones and meta-carbonate) and intrusive rocks of an undetermined age. The main mineral assemblage contains well developed pyrrhotite-chalcopyrite and pyrite sulphide mineral assemblages as breccia and vein infill, and massive sulphide lenses. The main mineralisation event is associated with amphibole-carbonate-biotite-sericite-chlorite wall rock alteration. Drilling has partially defined the extents of mineralisation which are observed over 650m by 350m within an arcuate shaped mineralised zone, and to depths of up to 1400m below surface. Drill hole Information As provided. Data aggregation methods Significant assay intercepts are reported as (A) length-weighted averages exceeding 1.0g/t Au greater than or equal to 10m, with a maximum of 5m consecutive internal dilution; and (B) length-weighted averages exceeding 0.2g/t Au for greater than or equal to 20m, with a maximum of 10m consecutive internal dilution, and (C) intervals of >30g/t with no internal dilution which are greater or equal to 30 gram metres (Au_ppm x length). No top cuts are applied to intercept calculations. Relationship between mineralisation widths and intercept lengths Significant assay intervals reported represent apparent widths. Drilling is not always perpendicular to the dip of mineralisation and true widths are less than downhole widths. Estimates of true widths will only be possible when all results are received, and final geological interpretations have been completed. Diagrams As provided. Balanced reporting This is the fifteenth release of Exploration Results for this project made by Newcrest. Previous release dates are 25 July 2019, 10 September 2019, 24 October 2019, 2 December 2019, 30 January 2020, 11 March 2020, 30 April 2020, 11 June 2020, 23 July 2020, 10 September 2020, 29 October 2020, 10 December 2020, 28 January 2021 and 11 March 2021.



Earlier reporting of exploration programs conducted by Newcrest and Greatland Gold have previously been reported. Exploration drilling programs are ongoing and further material results will be reported in subsequent Newcrest releases. Other substantive exploration data Nil Further work Growth drilling is planned to extend the limits of the mineralised system and infill drilling in the existing defined breccias looking to establish additional resources outside of those stated in this announcement.

Drillhole data(1)

Havieron Project, Paterson Province, Western Australia

Reporting Criteria: Intercepts reported are downhole drill width (not true width) Au >0.20ppm (0.2g/t Au) and minimum 20m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 10m. Average grades are based on length-weighting of samples grades. Also highlighted are high grade intervals of Au >1.0ppm (1g/t Au) and minimum 10m downhole width with maximum consecutive internal dilution of 5m, and intervals of >30g/t with no internal dilution which are greater or equal to 30 gram metres (Au_ppm x length) are tabled. Gold grades are reported to two significant figures, the downhole lengths are rounded to 0.1m which may cause some apparent discrepancies in interval widths. Samples are from core drilling which is PQ, HQ or NQ in diameter. Core is photographed and logged by the geology team before being cut. Half core PQ, HQ and NQ samples are prepared for assay and the remaining material is retained in the core farm for future reference. Each assay batch is submitted with duplicates and standards to monitor laboratory quality. Total depth (end of hole) is rounded to one decimal place for reporting purposes. Collars denoted with a * show partial results, with further significant assays to be reported in subsequent exploration updates.

Hole ID Hole

Type Easting

(m) Northing

(m) RL

(m) Total

Depth

(m) Azi

Dip From

(m) To

(m) Interval

(m) Au

(ppm) Cu

(pct) Cut

off HAD060W3^^ MR-DD 464463 7597243 5260 853 315 -59 739 772 33 0.23 0.08 0.2 g/t Au















783 826.3 43.3 0.99 0.24 0.2 g/t Au













incl 790.2 817 26.8 1.4 0.32 1.0 g/t Au HAD083BW4 MR-DD 463544 7597519 5262 1152 43 -62 805.8 962.4 156.6 1.1 0.22 0.2 g/t Au













incl 923.5 950.9 27.4 2.6 0.49 1.0 g/t Au













incl 924.2 925 0.8 51 0.28 30 g/t Au















1001.7 1028 26.3 0.20 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















1039.6 1080 40.4 0.38 0.23 0.2 g/t Au HAD086 MR-DD 464624 7598150 5258 1426 225 -65 1281 1353 72 2.2 0.02 0.2 g/t Au













incl 1318 1319 1.0 35 0.02 30 g/t Au HAD090 MR-DD 463597 7597999 5255 1141.7 105 -64 447.5 479 31.5 2.2 0.11 0.2 g/t Au















601.3 660.5 59.2 1.3 0.10 0.2 g/t Au















675 726 51 0.4 0.16 0.2 g/t Au















750.2 778 27.8 2.1 0.35 0.2 g/t Au













incl 757.5 774.6 17.1 3.2 0.53 1.0 g/t Au















849.3 916 66.7 0.7 0.20 0.2 g/t Au















954.7 1073.7 119.1 1.0 0.11 0.2 g/t Au













incl 1042.2 1055.2 13 4.1 0.67 1.0 g/t Au HAD106W1 MR-DD 463521 7597784 5257 952.1 69 -56 637 659.6 22.6 0.24 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















673.1 747 73.9 1.5 0.13 0.2 g/t Au













incl 743 744 1.0 59 0.28 30 g/t Au















777 828 51 0.21 0.09 0.2 g/t Au















876 912.2 36.2 0.22 0.38 0.2 g/t Au HAD112^^ MR-DD 463837 7597384 5260 751 38 -57 545.9 742 196.1 1.7 0.28 0.2 g/t Au













incl 567 568 1.0 38 0.21 30 g/t Au













incl 595 613.5 18.5 4.9 0.6 1.0 g/t Au













incl 599.5 600 0.5 91 1.1 30 g/t Au HAD113W2^^ MR-DD 463850 7597976 5256 906 132 -58 629 674.9 45.9 0.55 0.05 0.2 g/t Au















767.6 788.8 21.2 0.51 0.18 0.2 g/t Au















799.5 888.8 89.3 2.3 0.38 0.2 g/t Au













incl 861 862 1.0 55 1.1 30 g/t Au HAD114W1^^ MR-DD 464570 7598074 5258 910 230 -57 770.4 885.2 114.8 0.97 0.14 0.2 g/t Au













incl 840.6 856.6 16 5.1 0.49 1.0 g/t Au HAD114W2^^ MR-DD 464570 7598074 5258 919 230 -57 770.8 781.8 11 2.7 0.06 1.0 g/t Au















833.7 906 72.3 0.28 0.04 0.2 g/t Au HAD115^^ MR-DD 464294 7597925 5257 891 220 -61 595.2 615.5 20.3 1.0 0.11 0.2 g/t Au















638.9 692 53.1 1.3 0.21 0.2 g/t Au













incl 653.2 664.8 11.6 2.5 0.08 1.0 g/t Au















718 830 112 0.87 0.21 0.2 g/t Au













incl 754 768 14 1.7 0.66 1.0 g/t Au















855 887.2 32.2 2.1 0.11 0.2 g/t Au













incl 857.8 868 10.2 6.2 0.29 1.0 g/t Au













incl 861.6 862 0.4 109 0.3 30 g/t Au HAD116^^ MR-DD 464004 7597296 5260 808 15 -65 644 808 164 1.3 0.49 0.2 g/t Au













incl 655.7 671.4 15.7 5.2 0.80 1.0 g/t Au













incl 679.2 694.5 15.3 2.1 1.2 1.0 g/t Au













incl 759 770.3 11.3 2.6 1.0 1.0 g/t Au HAD116W1^^ MR-DD 464003 7597295 5260 821 15 -65 654 759.4 105.4 0.78 0.4 0.2 g/t Au HAD117^^ MR-DD 464211 7597977 5256 859 211 -61 595.6 681.6 86 0.24 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















699 732.7 33.7 6.1 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 710 732.7 22.7 9.0 0.88 1.0 g/t Au













incl 714.5 714.9 0.4 88 0.73 30 g/t Au













incl 719.6 720.5 0.92 39 1.2 30 g/t Au















752.3 836 83.7 2.0 0.06 0.2 g/t Au















772 772.7 0.7 74 0.36 30 g/t Au















801 801.9 0.9 34 0.03 30 g/t Au HAD117W1^^ MR-DD 464210 7597978 5256 862 211 -61 599.9 669 69.1 0.32 0.02 0.2 g/t Au















700 783 83 1.5 0.12 0.2 g/t Au













incl 732.3 746.2 13.9 6.1 0.50 1.0 g/t Au













incl 732.3 732.8 0.5 72 7.5 30 g/t Au















794.2 828 33.8 4.1 0.25 0.2 g/t Au













incl 794.4 810 15.6 5.8 0.23 1.0 g/t Au HAD118^^ MR-DD 464348 7597294 5260 721 330 -55 626 657.9 31.9 3.4 0.88 0.2 g/t Au













incl 639.3 657.5 18.2 4.7 1.1 1.0 g/t Au















670.7 712.5 41.8 1.4 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 670.7 697.9 27.2 1.8 0.61 1.0 g/t Au HAD119^^ MR-DD 463898 7597795 5257 713 92 -56 550.1 679.6 129.5 1.5 0.29 0.2 g/t Au













incl 627 667 40 4.3 0.79 1.0 g/t Au HAD119W1^^ MR-DD 463899 7597795 5257 780 92 -56 546 641 95 0.67 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















663 728 65 2.6 0.45 0.2 g/t Au













incl 674.5 692 17.5 4.6 0.55 1.0 g/t Au













incl 697.3 717.7 20.4 3.7 0.54 1.0 g/t Au













incl 713 714 1.0 34 0.43 30 g/t Au HAD120^^ MR-DD 464002 7597296 5260 775 13 -58 573 772.5 199.5 1.1 0.30 0.2 g/t Au













incl 580 599.8 19.8 2.8 0.86 1.0 g/t Au













incl 627.3 643.3 16 2.2 0.74 1.0 g/t Au













incl 670 683 13 5.6 0.40 1.0 g/t Au













incl 672.2 673.2 1.0 54 0.80 30 g/t Au













incl 710 721.1 11.1 1.1 0.16 1.0 g/t Au HAD121^^ MR-DD 463853 7597437 5260 660 28 -60 514 584.5 70.5 2.8 0.17 0.2 g/t Au













incl 519.8 521.9 2.1 59 1.3 30 g/t Au















605.1 647.7 42.6 0.21 0.04 0.2 g/t Au HAD122^^ MR-DD 463855 7597435 5260 710 37 -59 500 597 97 3.9 0.5 0.2 g/t Au













incl 500 515 15 9.7 1.8 1.0 g/t Au













incl 502.9 504.3 1.4 38 0.69 30 g/t Au













incl 525.6 548.1 22.5 7.5 0.57 1.0 g/t Au













incl 538.3 539 0.7 82 0.71 30 g/t Au













incl 556.6 572.3 15.7 3.4 0.26 1.0 g/t Au HAD123^^ MR-DD 463800 7597704 5258 913 93 -61 489.3 512.3 23 0.77 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















526.8 654.3 127.5 0.45 0.07 0.2 g/t Au















711.5 881 169.5 3.4 0.33 0.2 g/t Au













incl 736.1 795 58.9 6.2 0.23 1.0 g/t Au













incl 781.8 784.9 3.1 95 0.50 30 g/t Au













incl 800.2 811.6 11.4 3.9 0.08 1.0 g/t Au













incl 821.5 832.3 10.8 3.7 0.18 1.0 g/t Au













incl 861 876.4 15.4 5.9 0.95 1.0 g/t Au













incl 863 864 1.0 33 0.90 30 g/t Au HAD124^^ MR-DD 464354 7598147 5257 770 223 -60 637 659 22 0.54 0.11 0.2 g/t Au HAD125^^ MR-DD 463932 7597782 5257 650 105 -57 511.5 623.1 111.6 0.81 0.31 0.2 g/t Au













incl 563.9 564.6 0.8 49 0.10 30 g/t Au













incl 588 606 18 1.4 0.87 1.0 g/t Au HAD126^^ MR-DD 463849 7597855 5257 694 87 -53 530.7 609 78.3 1.1 0.51 0.2 g/t Au













incl 585.9 606.5 20.6 3.0 1.1 1.0 g/t Au HAD127^^ MR-DD 464571 7597737 5259 713 269 -54 537 616.3 79.3 4.5 1.4 0.2 g/t Au













incl 549 590.7 41.7 8.4 2.6 1.0 g/t Au













incl 555 556 1.0 34 3.7 30 g/t Au













incl 571.7 572.8 1.2 81 0.69 30 g/t Au HAD128^^ MR-DD 464323 7598101 5257 624 213 -62 483.3 514 30.7 0.37 0.03 0.2 g/t Au















530 563.2 33.2 1.2 0.31 0.2 g/t Au













incl 538.3 557 18.7 2 0.38 1.0 g/t Au HAD129^^ MR-DD 464348 7597490 5261 685 315 -65 488 605 117 1.9 0.62 0.2 g/t Au













incl 496 512.5 16.5 4 0.68 1.0 g/t Au













incl 538.2 563 24.8 4.3 1.3 1.0 g/t Au













incl 594 605 11 1.6 1.2 1.0 g/t Au HAD130^^ MR-DD 464603 7597752 5258 950 267 -58 622 731.4 109.4 5.9 0.63 0.2 g/t Au













incl 630 654 24 17 1.4 1.0 g/t Au













incl 631.1 633.4 2.4 103 1.4 30 g/t Au













incl 664 694 30 7.3 0.67 1.0 g/t Au













incl 675 676 1.0 68 1.8 30 g/t Au













incl 682 683 1.0 34 1.3 30 g/t Au















764 764.4 0.4 82 0.31 30 g/t Au















767.3 768.4 1.1 76 1.2 30 g/t Au HAD131^^ MR-DD 464348 7597489 5261 567 306 -62 508 562.5 54.5 1.9 1.3 0.2 g/t Au













incl 508.2 542 33.8 2.4 1.2 1.0 g/t Au













incl 552.5 562.5 10 2.2 2.8 1.0 g/t Au HAD132^^ MR-DD 463613 7597741 5258 695 92 -57 518.7 558 39.3 0.54 0.06 0.2 g/t Au















590.3 624.8 34.5 0.27 0.05 0.2 g/t Au





Figure 12. Schematic plan view map showing drill hole locations and significant intercepts reported in this release superimposed on the interpreted geology. Previously reported holes are not shown for the sake of clarity. Note some holes and results appear on multiple sections due to the sections orientation and sections overlap.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 12, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_014full.jpg





Figure 13. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S1, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 13, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_015full.jpg





Figure 14. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S2, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 14, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_016full.jpg





Figure 15. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S3, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 15, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_017full.jpg





Figure 16. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S4, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 16, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_018full.jpg





Figure 17. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S5, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 17, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_019full.jpg





Figure 18. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S6, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 18, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_020full.jpg





Figure 19. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking southwest, Section Line S7, +/-50m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 19, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_021full.jpg





Figure 20. Schematic cross section of geology and significant new drillhole intercepts (looking northwest, Section Line S8, +/-100m section width, as shown in Figure 10). Due to section window size and orientation holes may appear on multiple sections.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 20, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7614/82193_d9284e5444d1b9b6_022full.jpg

Forward Looking Statements

This document includes forward looking statements and forward looking information within the meaning of securities laws of applicable jurisdictions. Forward looking statements can generally be identified by the use of words such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "plan", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "objectives", "targets", "outlook" and "guidance", or other similar words and may include, without limitation, statements regarding estimated reserves and resources, certain plans, strategies, aspirations and objectives of management, anticipated production, study or construction dates, expected costs, cash flow or production outputs and anticipated productive lives of projects and mines. Newcrest continues to distinguish between outlook and guidance. Guidance statements relate to the current financial year. Outlook statements relate to years subsequent to the current financial year.

These forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Newcrest's actual results, performance and achievements or industry results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements, or industry results, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Relevant factors may include, but are not limited to, changes in commodity prices, foreign exchange fluctuations and general economic conditions, increased costs and demand for production inputs, the speculative nature of exploration and project development, including the risks of obtaining necessary licences and permits and diminishing quantities or grades of reserves, political and social risks, changes to the regulatory framework within which Newcrest operates or may in the future operate, environmental conditions including extreme weather conditions, recruitment and retention of personnel, industrial relations issues and litigation. For further information as to the risks which may impact on Newcrest's results and performance, please see the risk factors included in the Annual Information Form dated 13 October 2020 lodged with ASX and SEDAR.

Forward looking statements are based on Newcrest's good faith assumptions as to the financial, market, regulatory and other relevant environments that will exist and affect Newcrest's business and operations in the future. Newcrest does not give any assurance that the assumptions will prove to be correct. There may be other factors that could cause actual results or events not to be as anticipated, and many events are beyond the reasonable control of Newcrest. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements, particularly in the current economic climate with the significant volatility, uncertainty and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Forward looking statements in this document speak only at the date of issue. Except as required by applicable laws or regulations, Newcrest does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward looking statements or to advise of any change in assumptions on which any such statement is based.

Ore Reserves and Mineral Resources Reporting Requirements

As an Australian Company with securities listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Newcrest is subject to Australian disclosure requirements and standards, including the requirements of the Corporations Act 2001 and the ASX. Investors should note that it is a requirement of the ASX listing rules that the reporting of ore reserves and mineral resources in Australia is in accordance with the 2012 Edition of the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves (the JORC Code) and that Newcrest's ore reserve and mineral resource estimates comply with the JORC Code.

Newcrest is also subject to certain Canadian disclosure requirements and standards, as a result of its secondary listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), including the requirements of National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Investors should note that it is a requirement of Canadian securities law that the reporting of Mineral Reserves and Mineral Resources in Canada and the disclosure of scientific and technical information concerning a mineral project on a property material to Newcrest comply with NI 43-101. Newcrest's material properties are currently Cadia, Lihir and Wafi-Golpu.

Competent Person's Statement

The information in this document that relates to Exploration Targets, Exploration Results, and related scientific and technical information, is based on and fairly represents information compiled by Mr F. MacCorquodale. Mr MacCorquodale is the General Manager - Greenfields Exploration and a full-time employee of Newcrest Mining Limited. He is a shareholder in Newcrest Mining Limited and is entitled to participate in Newcrest's executive equity long term incentive plan, details of which are included in Newcrest's 2020 Remuneration Report. He is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. Mr MacCorquodale has sufficient experience which is relevant to the styles of mineralisation and types of deposits under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the JORC Code and as a Qualified Person under

NI 43-101. Mr MacCorquodale approves the disclosure of scientific and technical information contained in this document and consents to the inclusion of material of the matters based on his information in the form and context in which it appears.

Authorised by the Newcrest Disclosure Committee

For further information please contact



Investor Enquiries

Tom Dixon

+61 3 9522 5570

+61 450 541 389

Tom.Dixon@newcrest.com.au

Ben Lovick

+61 3 9522 5334

+61 407 269 478

Ben.Lovick@newcrest.com.au

North American Investor Enquiries

Ryan Skaleskog

+1 866 396 0242

+61 403 435 222

Ryan.Skaleskog@newcrest.com.au

Media Enquiries

Tom Dixon

+61 3 9522 5570

+61 450 541 389

Tom.Dixon@newcrest.com.au

Annie Lawson

+61 3 9522 5750

+61 409 869 986

Annie.Lawson@newcrest.com.au

This information is available on our website at www.newcrest.com

[1] # drilling in progress ** partial intercept, assays pending ^ updated intercept or ^^ previously reported.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82193
Gov. Whitmer Orders Flags to Full-Staff

Gov. Whitmer Orders Flags to Full-Staff

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 27, 2021

Contact: Press@michigan.gov

Gov. Whitmer Orders Flags to Full-Staff

LANSING, Mich. - Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in accordance with a proclamation issued by President Biden, has ordered U.S. and Michigan flags within the State Capitol Complex and upon all public buildings and grounds across the state of Michigan to immediately return to full-staff. Flags had been lowered to remember former Vice President Walter Mondale who passed away on Monday, April 19.

Walter Mondale was born on January 5, 1928 in Ceylon, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Minnesota, and served in the U.S. Army where he achieved the rank of corporal. Walter Mondale was a lifelong public servant, serving as Attorney General of Minnesota from 1960 to 1964, U.S. Senator from 1964 to 1976, and as U.S. Ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996.

He was the 42nd Vice President of the United States from 1977 to 1981, serving alongside President Jimmy Carter. He ran for president in 1984, where he selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running-mate, making her the first woman nominated for vice president by a major political party.

He married Joan Adams in 1955 and had three children, Ted, Eleanor, and William.

###
Cyprus' rival leaders remained polar opposites on what is needed for a peace deal on reunifying the ethnically divided island nation as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres continued on Wednesday trying to get dormant negotiations restarted.

Guterres held successive contacts during the second of a three-day informal gathering he is hosting in Geneva with Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar and Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, but no breakthrough appeared to emerge.

The gathering is also being attended by the foreign ministers of Cyprus' three "guarantors"  Greece, Turkey and Britain.

It's the latest attempt by the UN to revitalise the peace process since another round of negotiations collapsed in 2017.

Five decades of Cyprus talks have led nowhere.

The conflict has fueled tensions between NATO allies Greece and Turkey, impeded Ankara's bid to join the European Union and triggered friction in the eastern Mediterranean over potential undersea hydrocarbon reserves.

The focal point of Wednesday's talks was Tatar's submission to Guterres of a two-page document outlining the Turkish Cypriot vision for a peace accord based on a two-state model rather than a federation composed of Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking zones.

Cyprus was split in 1974 when Turkey invaded following a coup aiming at uniting the island with Greece.

Only Turkey recognises the Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence.

Tatar's document, released to media, called on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution recognising Cyprus' breakaway Turkish Cypriot north as a sovereign state, equal in status to the internationally recognised government in the Greek Cypriot south.

The document said a peace deal would then be worked out between "two independent states" under UN auspices.

Tatar's adviser, Ergun Olgun, said the Turkish Cypriot side heeded Guterres' encouragement to the two sides to be "creative" and "offered ideas that went beyond the status quo and failed federal talks."

Greek Cypriots reject a two-state deal because it would legitimise the island's permanent partition.

Anastasiades told reporters that he was "greatly disappointed" at the Turkish Cypriot proposal and that he would offer a detailed rebuttal to Guterres in writing.

Guterres was expected to continue his contacts with the sides on Thursday.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Here are the upcoming Chattanooga Live Music weekend events through Sunday.

Check the CLM Facebook schedule page for details of each event.

28-Apr Courtney Holder - Open Mic Night every Wed. - Wanderlinger  8:00 PM

28-Apr Amber Fults Sips and Dips with 1885 Grill  6:00 PM

28-Apr Jason Lyles 1885 Grill - Ooltewah - 5:30 PM

29-Apr Loop Skywalker with Danimal and Yattie at Wanderlinger Brewing - 7:30 PM

29-Apr Sangria Flights with Rachel Cole 1885 Grille - 6:00 PM

29-Apr Tyson Leamon - Ladies Night @ The Farm to Fork - 7:00 PM

29-Apr Open Mic w/ Rick Rushing - Gate 11 Distillery -7:00 PM

30-Apr Joels Birthday Show + Juke Skywalker at Stone Cup Cafe - 5:00 PM

30-Apr Gino Fanelli on the Patio at The FEED co.

Table & Tavern - 7:00 PM30-AprCourtney Holder - Puckett's - 8:00 PM30-AprDistillery Divas- Gate 11 Distillery - 7:00 PM30-AprMike's Bday Bash with The Fridge & Shiggy Wanderlinger Brewing  9:00 PM1-MaySaturday Brunch w/ Jason Lyles at Farm to Fork  11:00 AM1-MayRobin Baker Blues Duo - Gate 11 Distillery - 7:00 PM1-MayMichael Seabolt Band Classic Rock Outside Jacob Myers  6:00 PM1-MayLive at Puckett's! Brandon Maddox - 8:00 PM1-MayAnna Baldree, Courtney Holder, & Via Rose: Writers' Round at The Dark Roast 8 PM1-MayJason Lyles at Mash & Hops Craft Beers - 8:30 PM1-MayPower Glide at Farm To Fork - 8:30 PM1-MayDRAGRAVE: Wicked WanderLand in Wanderlinger Brewing - 9:00 PM2-MaySunday Brunch w/ Eric Kirkendoll at Farm to Fork  11:00 AM2-MaySunday Brunch with Ryan Ramey 1885 Grille St Elmo - 12 noon2-MayET and The Other Brothers "Every Other Sunday Service" Wanderlinger  3:00 PM
.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........

Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Over $19 billion in federal stimulus funding is pouring into New Mexico  a deluge that began last year and will continue amid the pandemic, according to a new report by legislative analysts.

But a substantial slice of the federal funding  about $1.1 billion  remains at the center of a standoff between the governor and state legislators over who is empowered to determine how its spent.

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Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham last month vetoed the Legislatures plan for allocating the money, contending lawmakers had intruded on the legal authority of the executive branch to handle federal funding.

One of the Legislatures key budget leaders, however, made clear Thursday the dispute isnt settled.

Rep. Patricia Lundstrom, a Gallup Democrat and chairwoman of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, didnt rule out litigation as she and other lawmakers discussed the issue. She said she intends to object if state agencies under Lujan Grisham try to spend the disputed funding without legislative approval.

Its clearly our role when it comes to appropriating and budgeting, Lundstrom said, and were going to protect that.

In a written statement, Nora Meyers Sackett, a spokeswoman for Lujan Grisham, said the administration would welcome legislative collaboration on how to best spend the federal funding. But last months budget language was premature, Sackett said, because the state hasnt yet received the funds at issue or been informed of guidelines on their use.

The veto  and how to respond  generated intense discussion among legislators.

Rep. Dayan Hochman-Vigil, an Albuquerque Democrat and member of the House budget-writing committee, said lawmakers need further clarification and direction from the courts as to what our appropriation powers look like.

At least one lawmaker suggested court action isnt necessary.

House Majority Leader Sheryl Williams Stapleton, D-Albuquerque, said executive agencies already must submit spending plans to the Legislature and face scrutiny for their work, including oversight by state auditors.

We do have an accountability cycle, she said.

In vetoing the Legislatures plan for the federal funds, Lujan Grisham cited a state Supreme Court ruling that she said concluded certain federal funding isnt subject to legislative appropriation powers.

She said she rejected budget language that would impermissibly attempt to appropriate or control the allocation of federal funds to a New Mexico governmental entity.

Some lawmakers offered a different interpretation Thursday of the 1974 court ruling cited by Lujan Grisham, known as Sego v. Kirkpatrick. They also pointed to a state law calling for broad revenue to go into the general fund and a provision in the state Constitution requiring a legislative appropriation for money paid out of the state treasury.

These were unconstitutional vetoes, Rep. Antonio Moe Maestas, D-Albuquerque, said Thursday. The question is, do we go to the courts for a remedy?

Weighing options

In Thursdays meeting, members of the Legislative Finance Committee took no final action on how to resolve the dispute over spending authority.

Among the potential options that surfaced were objecting to budget-adjustment paperwork filed by the Lujan Grisham administration, filing a lawsuit on behalf of an individual lawmaker or a formal legislative panel, or pursing a veto override in an extraordinary session.

Thursdays discussion didnt fall along party lines, with Democrats and Republicans alike expressing concern about the federal funding veto.

Democrats hold majorities in both legislative chambers, and Lujan Grisham is a Democrat, too.

We have to have an equal presence in this thing, Sen. Pat Woods, R-Broadview, said of legislative authority. Its our elected duty.

But Sackett, the governors press secretary, said appropriating federal funds is up to the executive branch.

Whats more, she said, without the governors action, the cart would have been put entirely before the horse, given that New Mexico has not yet received any of these federal funds, nor have we been informed of how many allotments the funds will come in, nor have we yet received any guidance from the Treasury Department on how the funds may be spent  all details that surely state legislators would agree are critical to making such appropriations.

Injection of funds

Disputed authority aside, a report by LFC analysts outlined the magnitude of the federal funding infusion through stimulus bills passed at the federal level, starting under then-President Trump and continuing in the Biden administration.

All told, the funding is expected to exceed $19 billion, some of which hasnt yet arrived.

By comparison, New Mexicos general-fund operating budget totals about $7.4 billion for the coming year.

The gross domestic product of the state equaled about $100 billion in 2020, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Much of the $19 billion in funding is already spoken for  flowing directly into residents back accounts as stimulus checks, reserved for specific purposes or used to bolster a host of financial assistance programs, such as unemployment benefits.

Some money has gone directly to school districts or other government agencies.

Schools, for example, have spent only about 4% of what theyre expected to receive. The money has largely gone to computers, internet hot spots, personal protective equipment, sanitation and, in some cases, salaries, according to LFC analysts.

But it isnt clear yet how they will spend the bulk of the money theyre getting.

Nonetheless, some of the federal stimulus money flowing into New Mexico is undesignated general funding that, Lundstrom said, should be subject to legislative appropriation.

In budget legislation this year, lawmakers outlined plans to spend about $1.1 billion of the money to help a depleted state unemployment fund, a popular college scholarship program and highway repairs  the language now at the center of the separation-of-powers dispute.
A Bayonne man accused of fatally stabbing a man has evaded authorities for nearly two months, and now the publics help is being sought.

Authorities say Elvis Santana, 30, stabbed 29-year-old Mathew Mortimer to death in the vestibule of a Bayonne apartment building on Avenue C near 54th Street on March 2.

The Hudson County Prosecutors Office believes Santana is still in the metro New Jersey/New York area.

Santana has been charged with first-degree murder, third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and fourth-degree unlawful possession of a weapon.

Less than a week after the murder, authorities believed they had tracked him down to a high-rise in Downtown Jersey City, but the 30-year-old was not apprehended.

An attorney representing the fugitives family has urged Santana to surrender peacefully.

If he doesnt turn himself in voluntarily there is a risk of violence, Englewood Cliffs-based attorney Mitchell Ignatoff said on March 11. If its a matter of the police (finding him and) arresting him, that situation could lead to violence.

Anyone who sees Santana should not approach him, but should immediately contact police, Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez said.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Office of the Hudson County Prosecutor at 201-915-1345 or to leave an anonymous tip on the Prosecutors Office official website at http://www.hudsoncountyprosecutorsofficenj.org/homicide-tip/.

All information will be kept confidential.
Rome-born astronaut Michael Collins has died aged 90.

Michael Collins, the American astronaut who was the command module pilot for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, has died at the age of 90.

The astronaut, who was born in the Salaria district of Rome in 1930, joined Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the first manned mission to the moon in July 1969.

He died peacefully on 28 April, after "a valiant battle with cancer," according to an announcement by his family.

Collins, sometimes known as the "forgotten astronaut" because he didn't set foot on the moon, never became a household name like Armstrong and Aldrin. However his role in the three-man mission to the moon was crucial.

He flew the command module Columbia alone in lunar orbit, while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon's surface, leading some to call him the "loneliest man in history."

After his return from the mission, Collins stated: The thing I remember most is the view of planet Earth from a great distance. Tiny. Very shiny. Blue and white. Bright. Beautiful. Serene and fragile.

US president Joe Biden led tributes to Collins, stating: "From his vantage point, high above the Earth, he reminded us of the fragility of our own planet, and called on us to care for it like the treasure it is. Godspeed, Mike.

Aldrin, aged 91 and now the last living member of the Apollo 11 mission after Armstrong's death in 2012, paid tribute to Collins on Twitter: Dear Mike, Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the Fire to Carry us deftly to new heights and to the future.

NASA issued a statement hailing Collins as a true pioneer and lifelong advocate for exploration," while in Rome the mayor Virginia Raggi paid tribute to the astronaut's "courage and valour," with a message of condolence for his family from the city of his birth.

In September 2019, in the wake of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Raggi announced that Rome would grant Collins honorary citizenship.

Collins, whose father was the US military attache at the American embassy in Rome from 1928 to 1932, was born on Via Tevere 16 where a marble plaque in his honour can be seen today.
Heartbroken friends have paid tribute to a 'fit and healthy' man who died eight days after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine.

Darren Lee Missen, 55, died in Tamworth Hospital, in northern New South Wales, on April 21 after suffering what hospital staff had described as a 'massive' blood clot in his lungs.

It's unclear which vaccine he received on April 13.

There is yet to be a confirmed link between his death and the vaccine as health authorities continue to investigate.

A close friend of the 55-year-old confirmed his death on social media.

Darren Lee Missen, 55, died in Tamworth Hospital, in northern New South Wales, on April 21 after suffering what hospital staff had described as a 'massive' blood clot in his lungs

'He was a fit, healthy fella (who) loved a schooner and a punt as we do,' he said.

'Darren had the corona(virus) jab at the end of last week and was a little bit off colour at work early this week.'

Other mates remembered Mr Missen, known as 'Misso', as a 'top bloke' and a 'true Aussie battler' who rarely missed a day of work.

'Will always remember Darren as a great guy,' another said.

'So much heartache and a very happy loving man taking way too early,' a friend also shared.

A funeral service for Mr Missen will be held on Tuesday.

It comes after it was revealed a Sydney man, 71, also died after getting the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

It's understood the man had several underlying health conditions, and his death is considered unlikely to be caused by the jab.

Any link between the vaccine and either death are also yet to be established, with both cases under investigation.

An investigation is underway into the deaths of two NSW men days after getting the Covid jab (pictured, a Sydney nurse gets her vaccine)

The Therapeutic Goods Administration confirmed that it was aware of the 55-year-old's death case but could not comment publicly on individual circumstances to protect patient privacy.

'All reports to the TGA of death following vaccination are reviewed to assess the likelihood that the vaccine contributed to the event or medical condition that lead to a fatal outcome,' the TGA said in a statement on Wednesday night.

'The reporting of an adverse event to TGA post-vaccination does not mean the event was caused by the vaccination.'

NSW Health said it is notified when a serious or unexpected adverse event occurs.

'NSW Health investigates these events and refers its expert panel findings to the TGA, which is responsible for assessing causality,' the department said.

If both deaths are linked to the vaccine, the two men will be among Australians to die after receiving a Covid-19 jab.

Mr Missen, who was described as being 'fit and healthy' died in Tamworth Base Hospital (pictured) on April 21

Genene Norris, 48, from the New South Wales Central Coast died on April 14 after receiving the AstraZeneca jab on April 8.

Ms Norris, a diabetic, developed blood clots the next day and was later placed on dialysis in an intensive care unit until her death.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration's vaccine safety investigation found Ms Norris' case of thrombosis was likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Earlier this month, the federal government announced the Pfizer vaccine was the recommended shot for people under 50 after AstraZeneca COVID-19 was linked to rare blood-clotting condition thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS).

There have been 1.1 million doses of AstraZeneca administered in Australia as of April 22, and just six reported cases of TTS.

On April 23, the TGA reported it had reviewed three suspected cases of rare blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine.

They included a 35-year-old NSW woman, a 49-year-old Queensland man and an 80-year-old Victorian man.

It concluded 'all three of the cases were likely linked to vaccination'.

Any link between the vaccine and either death are also yet to be established, with both cases under investigation (pictured, a Sydney nurse getting the jab)

In a safety report issued on Wednesday, the TGA noted a total of six cases of the rare blood clotting disorder had been identified in Australia so far this year.

A 35-year-old woman in New South Wales, a 49-year-old Queensland man and an 80-year-old Victorian man were hospitalised with the condition between nine and 26 days after receiving the jab.

On April 21, a Queensland Police officer, 40, who worked patrolling the state's quarantine hotels was hospitalised with blood clots after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

Health authorities are yet to determine whether it was linked to the jab and the case is currently being investigated by the Queensland Health and the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

Meanwhile, Australians will continue to be stranded in risky situations overseas until the federal government boosts the quarantine system, Labor says.

The government has paused flights from India, including on indirect routes, until May 15.

The suspension followed medical advice that the high ratio of positive cases in people returning from India was presenting a risk to the quarantine system and the broader Australian community.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned a number of other countries seeing rising case numbers could also be named as 'high-risk' and face travel restrictions in weeks to come.

At the same time, Australia will provide millions of pieces of medical and personal protective equipment to India, as well as oxygen concentrators.

India says more than 200,000 people have died of the infection so far and is racking up about 300,000 new cases a day.
Starting Saturday, WHRO Public Media will start operating a beloved Chesapeake radio station  though its not yet clear how much of the stations original programming will continue.

WHRO also filed a license transfer agreement with the Federal Communication Commission to own and operate WFOS-FM, according to a statement this week from WHRO. That transfer is awaiting review.

For 65 years, WFOS has churned out blues, bluegrass, classical and beach music as a commercial-free station that had been mostly student-run and funded by Chesapeake Public Schools. The studios are housed in the school districts Chesapeake Career Center. Richie Babb, a schools spokesman who has been involved with WFOS for years, said WHRO recently installed a new full-power transmitter at the Chesapeake studios.

About eight disc jockeys are on a rotation during the week, playing their own music throughout the day.

Citing increased costs as well as diminished interest from students, Superintendent Jared Cotton told the School Board last year that the district would no longer fund the station in 2021.

That put the stations future into uncertain territory, with a potential partnership with WHRO in the talks. For the past five months, the station has remained on the air.

Some radio hosts are now signing off for their last shows, though at least one hinted at coming back.

Jim Becker, who hosts the Legend Factory from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturdays, signed off this past weekend. Since 2013, he played rock n roll hits from the 1950s to the 70s  plenty of Beatles, Doors, Rolling Stones and Guess Who. He says last month the school district told him and other DJs their services were no longer needed after April 30.

One other DJ posted on social media that hed be moving over to the new WFOS Norfolk studio after a few weeks off air. WHRO is in Norfolk.

Babb said the district has been paying the staff since January, but that stops after April 30. He expects the station to keep playing the music for which its known.

Story continues

Listeners from as far as Utah have been contacting Becker since he posted on Facebook about his last show. Theyre sad to hear he wont be on the air, though Becker holds out hope he could back on with WHRO. He encouraged his listeners to contact WHRO.

If you love something, you should let people know, Becker said in an interview.

Programming is still being determined and WHRO is working on a smooth transition with staff. The goal is to keep WFOS history and spirit, Bert Schmidt, the president and CEO of WHRO Public Media, said in a statement.

As the first public school FM station in Virginia and one of the nations oldest public school radio stations, we are pleased WHRO Public Media will write the next chapters in WFOS storied history, Cotton said, according to the statement.

WHRO declined to comment beyond its statement.

For his last show, Becker read a short statement in which he hinted about a somewhat rocky transition so far. He thanked his listeners and Babb for giving him a shot to run a show.

Then, he said, take care of one another and keep on rocking. And when the musics over, well turn out the lights.

He then played When the Musics Over by The Doors, put his key in the box and walked out.

Gordon Rago, 757-446-2601, gordon.rago@pilotonline.com
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nextdoor today announced that Kiran Prasad has joined as head of product. Kiran will lead efforts to elevate the neighborhood app's product vision, strategy, and execution and manage the design and research teams in addition to collaborating with the engineering, data science, and go-to-market teams.

Sarah Friar, Nextdoor CEO, said, "Kiran is an inspiring leader who is passionate about building communities. Both an engineer and product thinker, his ability to understand the importance of community coupled with his proven success with developing innovative consumer platforms make him a strong addition for Nextdoor, and I'm thrilled to welcome him to the neighborhood."

Kiran said, "Helping people find their community and communicate is at the heart of everything I do. Creating a more simple and engaging product experience that enables more neighbors from across the globe to come together is the ultimate goal, and I'm excited to join this accomplished team because Nextdoor's purpose is directly aligned with my core values as a leader, builder, and thinker."

Kiran has more than 20 years of engineering and product experience, managing global brands and international teams. He most recently served as vice president of product at LinkedIn, where he led strategy and product development for the LinkedIn Consumer experience and Premium businesses. Prior, he managed engineering for the Consumer experience at LinkedIn, rebuilding the mobile and desktop platform before moving into product management in 2017. Before joining LinkedIn, he was the Senior Director of Applications at Palm, Inc. where he started and delivered webOS, Palm's first Windows phone and was the tech lead for the original Treo.

Kiran was born in India and moved to the U.S. when he was eight. He cites his family including his wife and two children as his biggest inspiration as they constantly motivate him to be inquisitive, remain curious, and take risks.

About Nextdoor, Inc.

Nextdoor is the app where you plug into the neighborhoods that matter to you. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, and build real-world connections with those nearby  neighbors, local businesses, and public agencies.

We believe connecting with others is a universal human need. That truth, and the reality that neighborhoods are among the most important communities in our lives, have been guiding principles for Nextdoor since the beginning.

Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in 276,000 neighborhoods around the world, including the United States (nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households), the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Canada, with many more to come.

Nextdoor is a privately held company based in San Francisco with backing from prominent investors including Benchmark, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Riverwood Capital, Bond, Axel Springer, Comcast Ventures, and others. For additional information and images: nextdoor.com/newsroom

SOURCE Nextdoor, Inc.

Related Links

www.nextdoor.com


Wednesday evening, President Joe Biden will deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress at the United States Capitol, in an event scheduled to start at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET. The speech comes just before Biden will mark his first 100 days in office, and is expected to include discussion of the administrations plans for legislation impacting families, and efforts to help the economy recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

(Dont have cable? You can watch President Joe Bidens speech live for free with FuboTV, which offers a free trial)

As the Associated Press reports, Biden is expected to use the address to Congress to make the case for a $1.8 trillion investment in children, families and education that would fundamentally transform roles the government plays in American life.

That proposal, as CNN reports, includes plans for universal preschool, two years of free community college, $225 billion for child care and monthly payments of at least $250 to parents.

Biden is also set to talk about how his administration has responded to the pandemic. As CNN reports, The U.S. recently surpassed 200 million Covid-19 shots administered since January 20, which was double the original goal Biden had outlined of achieving 100 million shots in arms in the first 100 days.

Because of the pandemic, Biden will be speaking to a smaller-than-usual number of people, including legislators wearing masks. Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will also be wearing masks as they sit behind Biden.

Heres what you need to know in order to watch President Bidens first address to a joint session of Congress, on TV and online:

What: Joe Bidens presidential address to Congress

When: Wednesday, April 28 at 6 p.m. PT (9 p.m. ET)

TV Channels: The speech is scheduled to be carried on major networks, including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, and cable news channels, including CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

How to watch live online: You can watch the speech live with FuboTV (which includes a 7-day free trial), or with free trials from Hulu + Live TV and Sling. You can also watch the address at The White House website (https://www.whitehouse.gov/live/)

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist
A Memorial Celebration of Life will be held for Judy Thornbloom of Osakis who passed away at the age of 59 in April of 2020. It will be held on Friday, June 11, 2021 from 1 - 5 pm at the Osakis VFW Post #7902 in Osakis.
(Alliance News) - Ryanair Holdings PLC's grounds for refusing to compensate passengers affected by industrial action have been rejected by the High Court, the UK aviation regulator said Thursday.

Tens of thousands of customers were affected when flights were cancelled due to a series of walkouts by pilots and cabin crew during summer 2018.

The Dublin-based carrier claimed it was exempt from awarding compensation because the disruption was due to "extraordinary circumstances".

But the Civil Aviation Authority disagreed, and took legal action against the airline.

The regulator said Judge Nigel Gerald agreed with its position in a verbal judgment on Thursday.

CAA director Paul Smith said: "Ryanair has refused to pay compensation to passengers affected by industrial action taken by its pilots in 2018.

"We believed that these passengers were in fact protected by law and that Ryanair could not claim its delayed and cancelled flights were 'extraordinary circumstances'.

"The High Court has today agreed with our interpretation of the law.

"We are committed to protecting the rights of air passengers and are determined to ensure all airlines comply with their legal obligations."

The CAA advised customers to "await further information before pursuing their claims" as Ryanair has the right to seek to appeal the judgment.

A spokeswoman for the airline said: "Ryanair does not comment on ongoing legal matters."

Rory Boland, editor of consumer magazine Which? Travel, said: "The CAA deserves credit for pursuing this case on behalf of passengers affected by Ryanair strikes in 2018, but the length of time it has taken to get to this point shows that the regulator lacks the powers it needs to take swift and effective action against airlines that break the rules.

"The law is clear that passengers must be compensated, and Ryanair should not appeal.

"It should now do the right thing and pay the compensation it owes to prevent this process from dragging on any longer.

"The airline should also proactively inform affected passengers of their rights and the outcome of the case."

The CAA has the power to launch legal action against airlines, but the regulator generally relies on holding discussions with carriers when it is concerned about their actions.

In July 2020 it said this approach led to all airlines offering cash refunds, after some passengers complained they could only receive vouchers.

Earlier this month, the Department for Transport announced it will consult on giving the CAA tougher powers as part of efforts to "build consumer confidence and develop trust in booking travel".

Shares in Ryanair closed marginally lower at EUR16.62 on Thursday in London.

By Neil Lancefield, PA Transport Correspondent

source: PA

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Page Content

The Speaker of Council, Cllr Nonceba Molwele, last night discussed spiritual, mental and social stigmatisation on her weekly talk show known as "Talk with the Speaker of Council" that takes place on Wednesdays.





It has become very important that communities are constantly made aware of this illness which often has tragic consequences because of lack of understanding of what is it, symptoms it manifests and the support needed for the person.

Above all, Madam Speaker hopes to create acceptance so that those who live with this illness feel supported. "It is for this reason that I want to probe further around this subject and in particular bring in the element of spirituality as it relates to mental health. Above all, Madam Speaker hopes to create acceptance so that those who live with this illness feel supported. "It is for this reason that I want to probe further around this subject and in particular bring in the element of spirituality as it relates to mental health.



"In some instances some people who have the ancestral calling present very similarly with psychotic behavior or depression and/or bipolar. It could have been that Mama Sangweni was one such case," she mentioned.





She had invited some experts to unpack further on the issue, namely;



 Dr Fundile Nyati, a medical doctor, a specialist and a family physician. He is also the founder of Proactive Health Solutions and also a City's Legislature Civic Education partner,





 Gogo Bakhombisile Maseko, a national co-ordinator for the Traditional Healers' Organisation,





 Gogo Ramphelane Moruthanyane, also a Traditional Health Practitioner from the Traditional Healers' Organisation and lastly





 Ms Sylvia Stevens, a social worker and a representative of Johannesburg Faith Based Organisation.



Dr Fundile talked about a wild range of mental health disorders called mental illnesses where a person can no longer able to function appropriately either at work or at home or both.



"Studies have shown that some people with ancestoral calling, sometimes they present as if they have mental illness and are mistaken as 'mad' people but after the ancestoral training they become well."



Ms Stevens alluded to the fact that mental illness causes a lot of suffering, disability and anxiety as people do not understand it, what to expect and where to seek for help and in between is a lot of myth.



"We need to have family discussion and families have to reach out for support from a number of professionals, family practitioner, traditional healer, psychologist etc. and should not take wrong conclusions on their own," she cautioned.



They all agreed that there is no cure for mental illness since it's a condition like chronic that needs to be taken care of, supported and managed. Society must stop self-hate as is not of their own making.



More campaigns, education is needed. Partnership with NGOs, the City, traditional healers, civil society organisations can assist dealing with stigma thereof.


[April 29, 2021] Tailwind Capital Creates Pure-Play Trench Safety Platform

Tailwind Capital ("Tailwind"), a growth-oriented private equity firm, today announced that it has created a pure play platform in the trench safety solutions market through a merger of Tailwind portfolio companies National Trench Safety (" NTS (News - Alert) "), Trench Plate Rental Company ("TPRC"), and Support of Excavation ("SOE"). The three companies are now united and operating under the NTS brand, creating a scaled player with a full suite of trench safety solutions, coast to coast national reach and unparalleled technical expertise that is well-positioned to benefit from expected market growth. The creation of NTS addresses a growing need for trench safety solutions in infrastructure-related end-markets such as water, electric and natural gas utilities, and transportation. The platform's comprehensive portfolio of products and services will be well-positioned to provide safety for workers in excavations, improved productivity for contractors, and compliance with all Federal, State, and Municipal requirements nationwide. Former President and Chief Executive Officer of TPRC, Phil Mason, has become President and CEO of the combined company, NTS. "We are thrilled that, with the support of Tailwind Capital, we have brought together three complementary businesses to deliver an unmatched breadth of solutions and outstanding customer service that will allow us to drive continued growth under the strong NTS brand name," said Mason. "Uniting as a single, comprehensive platform enables NTS to better serve our customers and meet growing demand with an enhanced fleet, improved service capailities, and expanded footprint."



NTS Chairman and Tailwind Operating Executive, Bruce Dressel, noted, "Increases in infrastructure spending, a continued market shift from owning assets to renting, and incremental trench safety and regulatory compliance are converging to drive strong growth in trench safety solutions. The combined NTS platform is very well-positioned to capitalize on those opportunities, better serve customers, and provide exciting opportunities for its employees. We look forward to helping the combined company drive long-term sustainable growth - both organically and by expanding the platform through future M&A." The combined company is a leading independent national provider of trench shoring and safety solutions with a broad portfolio of road plates, trench boxes, hydraulic shoring, slide rails, manholes, beams, guide frames, and sheeting, coupled with highly regarded safety and training services. With a coast-to-coast network of 73 branches in the U.S. and 2 U.K.-based branches, NTS is well-positioned to quickly respond to the needs of its approximately 8,000 active customers.

Oppenheimer and Co. provided financial advisory services to Tailwind Capital on its acquisitions of Trench Plate Rental Company and National Trench Safety. Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP provided legal advisory services to Tailwind Capital on its acquisitions of Trench Plate Rental Company, National Trench Safety and Support of Excavation. About National Trench Safety Based in Houston, Texas, NTS is a leading independent national provider of trench shoring and safety solutions with a broad portfolio of road plates, trench boxes, hydraulic shoring, slide rails, manholes, beams, guide frames, and sheeting. NTS serves approximately 8,000 customers from coast-to-coast, through a network of 73 branch locations across the United States and 2 U.K.-based branches. www.NTSafety.com About Tailwind Capital Tailwind Capital is a private equity firm focused on growth-oriented investments in targeted sectors within industrials, technology & business services and healthcare. Tailwind partners with experienced management teams and entrepreneurs to transform businesses through organic growth initiatives, acquisitions, and operational and strategic investments. Since inception, Tailwind has invested in 47 portfolio companies and over 135 add-on acquisitions. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005561/en/

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[April 29, 2021] CareCar Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding To Scale and Expand Into New Markets, With a Focus on Senior Homecare

DENVER, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CareCar, a tech-enabled benefit manager and value-based healthcare services platform, today announced that the company closed a seed funding round led by Kapor Capital and Impact America Fund, with Concrete Rose participating as a co-investor. The round raised $3 million. CareCar plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth into new markets, with a focus on expanding its services in the fast-growing senior homecare sector. CareCar has significantly expanded its benefit management services in response to growing demand, providing exceptional care to health plan members while leveraging data from each encounter to help payers achieve better quality metrics and attract and retain members. As CareCar scales up and broadens its service portfolios, the company is expanding its Care Partner network of qualified healthcare professionals to sustain quality of care and help the communities they serve thrive. "We're excited to grow the reach of our platform to deliver smarter benefit management for payers and high quality, value-based healthcare services for their members," said Joshua Itano, cofounder and CEO of CareCar. "Our payer-aligned model drives value by treating every encounter as an opportunity to provide quality care, manage risk, and capture insights to improve health outcomes. We're grateful to our investors, collaborators, and most f all our community-based Care Partners, who are vital participants in our mission."



CareCar currently manages supplemental benefits for approximately 150,000 patients in California and North Carolina. The company is implementing a growth plan to more than double its current members and reach 500,000 covered lives. At the same time, CareCar plans to onboard 500 more community-based Care Partners, certified vetted caregivers with experience as certified nursing assistants, medical assistants, home health aides, nursing students, and other qualified caregivers. Care Partners are capable of delivering exceptional care and capturing critical data. The United States is graying rapidly, primarily due to lower birth rates and longer life expectancies. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that people age 65 and up will outnumber children in the U.S. for the first time in 2034. As older adults make up a larger share of the population, demand for services like in-home care and non-emergency medical transportation are rising. In this environment, CareCar can help organizations meet the needs of their members with a variety of services and provide a sophisticated platform to manage those benefits and costs.

"Kapor Capital invests in companies that are solving challenges people face today and anticipate in the future," said Ulili Onovakpuri, Partner at Kapor Capital. "Supplemental benefit management services and platforms that harness technology to deliver value-based care are in high demand now, and we expect explosive growth in the sector over the long term, which is why CareCar is the largest investment in our portfolio. It's the right product set, market and team at the right time." Find out more about CareCar at www.carecar.co. About CareCar CareCar is a tech-enabled benefit manager and value-based care services platform. The company's mission is to create an ecosystem where healthcare organizations, caregivers, and patients thrive through inclusive access to care and support. CareCar specializes in managing non-emergency medical transportation benefits and in-home care benefits. We've created a unique care network platform that reliably and appropriately connects patients and caregivers, while leveraging real-time data to deliver actionable insights that further improve health outcomes. Learn more at www.carecar.co Media Contact

Liz Reilly

Next PR

lreilly@nextpr.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/carecar-raises-3-million-in-seed-funding-to-scale-and-expand-into-new-markets-with-a-focus-on-senior-homecare-301280276.html SOURCE CareCar

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4/28/2021

Welcome to Family News Digest, a weekly newsletter especially for University of Dayton parents and guardians.

COVID-19 status level 2  GREEN - LOCALIZED

For the most up to date information, check the COVID-19 case dashboard.

THREE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW

One-dose COVID-19 vaccine clinic without appointment for students TODAY

Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lifted the pause in the single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, the University, Miami Valley Hospital and Premier Health are offering a no-appointment, walk-in clinic for UD students 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 28, at the UD Arena. The Vatican's doctrinal office has declared it "morally acceptable" for Catholics to take any of the vaccines. Here is a video from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops addressing moral and ethical concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, including special considerations about the J&J vaccine. Transportation is available. For more details click here.

Your student can apply for donor-funded scholarships

UD awards numerous scholarships each academic year to returning undergraduate students through the generosity of donors. UD has partnered with AcademicWorks to provide a streamlined approach for students to apply. To be considered for the 2021-22 academic year, students should login and complete the application.

GradReports Salary Score lists UD No. 1 in Ohio

There's more good news for UD graduates heading into the workplace. UD ranks No. 1 among Ohio schools in GradReports' latest salary ranking. Read the news story here.

NEWS AND NOTES

Go, be justice

A UD student who attended the 2021 Catholic Social Ministry Gathering, sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, shares how the virtual conference touched lives and spurred students to action. Read the story here.

Student feedback needed on return to campus in the fall, COVID-19 vaccines

Students are asked to complete a brief voluntary, anonymous survey to help the University plan for the fall semester. This survey asks students if they are fully vaccinated or plan to get vaccinated; why they will or will not consider vaccination; and what are the most important considerations for fall related to health, safety and campus life (in-person classes, meetings and events, guest policy, fall/spring breaks, travel, intramurals etc.). Students are welcome to fill out all or part of the survey. The survey will not record any identifying details specific to students or their IP address. Students were sent an email Monday with a link to the survey, which closes 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 29.

New medical facility comes to Brown Street

Coming summer 2022, a new UD-Premier Health medical facility near the Patterson Homestead will offer close-to-campus medical services and a workplace health clinic for UD employees. An after-hours urgent care clinic will serve UD students to complement Student Health Center services, which will continue to provide student-centered care in Gosiger Hall.

Family News Digest

Every Wednesday and sometimes Friday, the University news and communications team will share news to help you stay connected. Previous issues of Family News Digest are archived at go.udayton.edu/flyerfamilies.
Puneet Agarwal appointed as the new CEO

GURUGRAM, India, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- It is with great sadness and a heavy heart we inform the demise of our esteemed co-founder and CEO, Bhupender Saharan ("Bhupi"). Bhupi passed away in a tragic accident on the fateful night of April 22nd, 2021. A visionary Bhupi was an accomplished entrepreneur and an amazing human being. He was not just the co-founder, but the face, the inspiration and the voice of VVDN. Bhupi will be remembered for his love and dedication to VVDN and will be greatly missed. His exceptional work ethic, long term commitment to customers, partners and suppliers, unwavering desire to always do the right thing and his belief that his team were integral to both his personal and the company's success made him truly one of a kind. On behalf of our Board of Directors, founding team and employees, we extend our deepest condolences to Bhupi's family.

Ramesh Singh, Chairman of the VVDN Board of Directors, issued the following statement on behalf of the Board of Directors: "Bhupi leaves behind a company built on his passion and commitment with the spirit that will forever be the foundation of VVDN. It is now our responsibility to take forward the legacy of Bhupi and fulfil our vision of making VVDN a leading Premier Electronics Engineering and Manufacturing Company. Bhupi's passion, perseverance and tenacity will continue to guide us all. To continue VVDN's journey, Puneet Agarwal (Co-founder and President Global Sales and Wireless Engineering ) has been appointed the company's new CEO and will lead the VVDN family through its journey to achieve company's vision. Entire VVDN Team and the Board is extremely confident that Puneet, with the support of its other co-Founders (Vivek Bansal and Murali Jayaraman) will continue to work with the same unwavering energy and spirit to honor and celebrate Bhupi's extraordinary life. The Board will continue to extend its support to best maximize VVDN's performance over the long term."

On behalf of the management team, Puneet Agarwal,Vivek Bansal and Murali Jayaraman issued the following statement ,"Bhupi had built a strong foundation at VVDN with a passionate and dedicated team. VVDN is well-positioned to continue supporting its customers and all stakeholders with the same momentum and spirit. The out-pouring of tremendous support received from the customers, partners, and suppliers for Bhupi's personal relationship is much appreciated, and with Puneet's leadership going forward we strive to maintain and continue to grow this confidence."

With deepest condolences,

Team VVDN

Contact:Kunwar Sinhakunwar.sinha@vvdntech.in +91 9971887719

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1499139/VVDN_Technologies_Bhupender_Saharan.jpg
REMEMBER those features back a bit, when you all contributed your great memories of the Pavilion and long-ago days of cinema-going?

Well, Tom Harding discovered those for the first time online just a few days ago and is now a committed fan of Throwback Thursday.

Pure coincidence. I just came across this site, and what do you know, the very first article I attempt to read (about The Pav) has references to both my dad and my younger brother in it! says Tom.

Flooding in Patrick Street in October, 1961.

Taken aback, he went on reading avidly, and as he did, his own memories began to surface.

Apropos my own Pav story: I was there one afternoon in the early 1960s with two friends, watching a film, when we noticed the people in the front rows were vacating their seats and moving back to us. Soon we had water lapping around our feet.

At the end of the performance, we encountered a tide so high that it came right up to the top step of the cinema in Patrick Street.

The shop window across the street caved in just then from the weight of water. Joey Kerrigan was paddling up and down the street rescuing people.

Tom adds: We divested ourselves of shoes and socks, rolled up our trouser legs, and waded off to get home.

The floodwaters did not abate until we reached Barrack Street.

"An old lady standing in the doorway of a pub (later The Flying Enterprise), seeing our bedraggled state, invited us in to dry off by the fire. We explained that we had no money left. She pooh-poohed the very concept, and insisted, so in we went, and gratefully too.

We sat in front of a roaring fire, drank creamy pints washed down with hot whisky, had beef nonion delicious door-stopper sandwiches, and didnt pay a penny.

After we had dried off, we went on our very merry way, with only gratitude to pay for our good fortune.

I went to live in London shortly after and never got to go back to that pub to thank that lovely old lady adequately.

POPULAR SPOT: The Pavilion Cinema in Patrick Street, Cork city, which opened 100 years ago this year and closed in 1989

Well, Tom, that particular pub has always had a great reputation for hospitality and friendliness. We dont know if that old lady was related to the present owner, Finbarr OShea, but he certainly continues the tradition. He even gets a mention on Trip Advisor from a grateful group of Florida visitors who came by in 2017: Our group of nine ducked in to the Flying Enterprise Pub to escape a brief rain shower and were greeted by proprietor Finbarr OShea. His hospitality made us feel at home, and the service and food were outstanding.

He gave us advice about what to see in the city, and helped a member of our party search for information about his great grandparents who left Ireland from Heartbreak Pier in Cove and immigrated to the U.S in the early 1900s. Thanks, Finbarr, for a great day!

And if it was your mother who looked after Tom Harding and his friends, Finbarr, will you pass on his sincere if belated thanks to her in your prayers tonight?

Frank Desmond contacted us about the old telephone system in Cork back in the day, which we discussed in last weeks Throwback Thursday, to point out an important aspect: You omit something that, in retrospect, is now even more amazing than the lack of technology, and that is the system for getting a phone at ALL.

To put it at its simplest, you could not just walk into a shop and buy a telephone. In fact, it was a nightmare of government bureaucracy since, first, the phone system was under the control of a government department (Posts & Telegraphs ).

"You had to apply formally to that department to get one, and it could literally take years. People used to contact TDs to help them. (In practice, TDs could not help at all.)

Frank adds: My mother applied for a phone in 1977 and finally got it in 1981. At least once it was finally plugged in, we never had any trouble with it, and it was working till a few years ago with its rotary dial. It was made in Ireland by Northern Telecom, a Canadian company. The number originally had six digits until Telecom Eireann added a seventh ( 4 ).

We can add to that, Frank: back a decade earlier, they had five digits, with a sixth, O inserted at some point when the number of landlines proliferated, and if we really delve into the past, you could have double-figure numbers in outlying regions (Goleen 34, whos that ringing at this time of night?)

The funny thing, comments Frank, is that the person who ended up rescuing us from all that complexity was Margaret Thatcher.

After she privatised British Telecom in 1984, lawyers and legislators from the Irish government got a copy of the Bill she used. Since the legal basis of the Irish telephone system was directly modelled on the British version, it was a simple case of replacing every occurrence of a British term with the corresponding Irish term. So where her bill said General Post Office the Irish bill said Dept. of Posts & Telegraphs and so on.

You know, Frank muses, when his mother finally got that phone in 1981, up in Hollyhill Apple were busy making Apple IIs.

But it was a quarter of a century before Steve Jobs reinvented the phone!

Alice Taylor, in The Village, (OBrien Press), her wonderfully bitter-sweet memories of younger days, recreates vividly the world of local telephone exchanges and the town of Bandon in the late 1950s.

There were not enough trunk lines to give instant service to the telephone subscribers at peak times, so we had to rotate calls. Sometimes a high-handed individual would demand to speak to the supervisor and insist on being put through immediately, irrespective of the fact that other people had been waiting longer

We also dealt with calls from smaller post offices: they passed their telephone calls on to us and we then connected them up.

It all worked by numbers and nobody mentioned names, but a little old lady in one of the offices had the delightful habit of coming on when her parish priest wanted to make a call and announcing in a voice loaded with reverence: Hold on for Fr OHara! The tone of her voice suggested that we ought to genuflect in homage, and I always felt that her announcement should have been accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets.

Annie Hourigan remembers moving to Dublin in pursuit of her banking career back in 1971.

We were preparing for computerisation in banking, which was a pretty big thing. Great teams, great times, travelling branch to branch.

I had a colleague called Johnny and in one branch was this phone system that looked like a load of laces on a board to me at the time.

"Sometimes, when there were too many calls coming in together, he used to say city morgue here, and you would hear the phone banging down! Ah we were young and carefree back then.

Now and then, recalls Annie, when they were up to date on the computerisation and waiting for the next phase, she would be put on customer service.

I met some very interesting people that way. Once Benjy of The Riordans came in and wanted his statement, and I couldnt remember his real name! I opened the door to a glass surround room and asked for Benjys statement please. There was a roar of laughter, and I knew from his reaction that he enjoyed it too. I took a quick look at the envelope when I got it, and was able to say politely Thank-you, Mr. Hickey when I handed it to him, trying to keep as serious a face as I could.

I met many of The Dubliners as well when they were the top singing group in the city.

Annie has a priceless memory of less famous but significant others who used the bank where she was working.

I remember the ladies of the night in Dublin 4 coming in to deposit their earnings, mostly with foreign money, asking us how much it was worth. They might have huge bundles of Italian lira worth very little!

Streetwalkers were a fact of life in the city, and taken for granted by the girls who worked in the bank.

We walked home from work, Baggot Street and Burlington Road, free as a bird, and often spoke about the poor souls down there after dark! A digs mate of mine, Mary from Kilkenny, was standing at a bus stop near Leeson Street one night, and being pushed right and left until, in the end, she copped that she was among the ladies of the night because one of them who kept pushing her said You are on my patch! I presume each one had her own exact spot. Needless to say, Mary went on standing right at the bus stop, as she was the only one really waiting for a bus!

Working in Dublin was great fun in the early 1970s, says Annie.

Being an all-rounder might have meant stamping envelopes for the post, and writing names and addresses in a ledger, but the craic was mighty.

Any girl who was asked out on a Monday or Thursday night only was definitely playing second fiddle. We had a friend, Eileen, and those were the only dates she got until we told her to cop on, the fella had someone else.

Manys the romance died back then too as a phone number might get lost, or a call missed. Fast forward to todays mobile world, I have seen a colleague dumped by text!

By 2015, Annie says, work was progressing inexorably towards Cloud, with thousands of items processed by her daily. It was like playing the piano to me. Two monitors on the desk, and not a pen or piece of paper or notebook to be seen! But I am glad to have been part of that great experience. Now, during Covid, it has been a UCC short course by Zoom from my sitting room at home on the banks of the Lee. Doesnt life change?

Email your memories to jokerrigan1@gmail.com
Deputy Shot Dead, Another Wounded in Ongoing North Carolina Standoff

A North Carolina sheriffs deputy has been killed and another has been wounded in a Watauga County standoff that continued after nightfall with law enforcement officers surrounding a home, authorities said.

Watauga County Sheriffs Office Sgt. Chris Ward died from his injuries after a standoff at a home in the town of Boone that began Wednesday morning. Law enforcement officers were dispatched to the residence after the homeowner and his family didnt report to work or answer telephone calls.

When they entered the home, an unidentified shooter opened fire, striking the pair.

Ward was airlifted to a hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was pronounced dead shortly after.

A second deputy with the sheriffs office, K-9 Deputy Logan Fox, was injured in the incident, and remained at the home in an unknown condition, Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman said.

The conditions of the other deputies who were dispatched to the home arent known at this time.

The standoff with the suspected shooter is still ongoing, the Sheriffs Office said in a release.

Some 15 law-enforcement agencies, including the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, have responded to assist with the standoff, including deputies from neighboring counties.

The Watauga County Sheriffs Office didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is an incredibly tragic situation and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved as well as their families and our community, Hagaman said in a statement. I greatly appreciate the tremendous support we are receiving from law enforcement agencies across the region and the state.

Police said the neighbourhood has been evacuated as the armed individual continues to periodically fire at officers. A shelter-in-place order was issued by authorities for those living in the area.

Clarence Wilson, 78, was on the porch of his home in Boone when sheriffs deputies pulled up in front of the house across the street. Gunfire erupted after the deputies arrived, Wilson told The Associated Press.

Then they told me to get back in the house and stay, he said.

Wilson said he saw deputies pull a man from the house.

I dont know if it was a deputy or who it was, he said. I was just worried about keeping myself safe.

Wilson said he heard a second barrage of gunfire around noon. Police remained on the scene more than four hours later, he said.

He said its a real quiet neighborhood with many retirees like himself.

We aint used to all this, he said.

Nearby residents have been asked to remain in their homes and to keep their windows and doors closed.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said in a statement that he and his wife are heartbroken over the news of Wards death in the line of duty.

We are praying for his family, the officer wounded, and their community. A tragic reminder of the dangers our law enforcement officers face every day.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (PANA) - The ruling People's Movement for Progress (MPP) on Thursday condemned the latest terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso while worrying about the resurgence of the phenomenon
STORY: Russia Mexico - Lavrov hosts Mexican counterpart in Moscow

LENGTH: 02:47

FIRST RUN: 1441

RESTRICTIONS:

TYPE: Russian/Spanish/Natsound

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

STORY NUMBER: 4323177

DATELINE: 28 April 2021 - Moscow

SHOTLIST:

++PRELIMINARY SCRIPT++

RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Moscow - 28 April 2021

1. Mid of agreement signing ceremony between Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, and Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

2. Wide of foreign ministers shaking hands

3. SOUNDBITE (Russian) Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister:

++TRANSLATION TO FOLLOW++

4. Mid of a reporter asking a question

5. SOUNDBITE (Russian) Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister:

"So for 10 years Bulgaria didn't know anything (about this) and suddenly just now - after the Czech Republic remembered the events of the 2014 - decided to outdo the Czech Republic by looking into an even deeper historical retrospective, or they knew what was happening (for a long time) and for some reasons, they didn't make it public."

6. Wide of a reporter asking a question

7. SOUNDBITE (Russian) Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister:

"Knowing how nimble the people trading arms are - who break the law and international conventions - I would point out to the attention of the EU once again that the information that is available in the media has to be treated seriously, and the EU will not be ill-advised to explain to the international community, how all of that matches up with the international conventions, agreements which the members of the EU signed together."

8. Cutaway of the assistants

9. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico ++AS TRANSLATED TO RUSSIAN THROUGH INTERPRETER++:

"Firstly, I would tell you that Birmex, the state company, a Mexican state company that was formed decades ago to produce and distribute vaccines, is already working with the Russian Investment Fund to make packaging, filling and packaging in Mexico and later will fully produce in a combined way, the Sputnik V or Sputnik number 2 or Light or whatever is developed."

10. Wide of the presser

STORYLINE:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia plans to forbid the United States from employing local personnel for operations of the US mission in Russia.

Speaking at a joint news conference with his Mexican counterpart Marcelo Ebrard, Lavrov pointed out that the US limited diplomatic visas for the Russian mission to three years.

The reason for that was, according to Lavrov, that the US diplomats were sent abroad for three years.

Lavrov said that that decision broke international agreements and transferred US practices to relations between countries, and to achieve parity Russia will do the same.

Since Russia doesn't employ local staff for Russian diplomatic missions abroad, Russia will ban the US from employing locals.

Lavrov also reacted to recent claims made by the Bulgarian general prosecutor's office, that Russian nationals might have been responsible for a series of explosions at arms factories in Bulgaria, which might be linked to 2015 attempted poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev.

Lavrov suggested the EU pay closer attention to weaponry circulating in the territories of EU members.

Meanwhile the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico Marcelo Ebrard said that the sides discussed further cooperation in the production of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine in Mexico, including a planned update of the vaccine that has been referred to as "Sputnik Light".

The ministers signed the plan of political consultations for 2021 - 2024 between the two countries.

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(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example.

CNN's new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and NBC News, with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019

The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.

The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002  right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid  that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Goldberg replied: He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population  just nine months away from the 9/11 attack  more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg's New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.

Goldberg's fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic's publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg's children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry  all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.

Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC's national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his "collaborative relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan's CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.

A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his "reporting to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false "reporting and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to independently confirm CNN's ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.

The Huffington Post, Sept. 5, 2014

On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Appointment

29 April 2021

Cycas continues to strengthen its leadership and hotel management expertise, following the appointment of Apurva Pratap as the company's first Managing Director.

Apurva will join the hotel operator from 1 May, bringing nearly 25 years of hospitality and investment experience to the new role. He joins Cycas from The Student Hotel in Amsterdam where, as Chief Customer Officer, he was responsible for the portfolio's commercial performance. Under Apurva's leadership, the company augmented its sales, yield management and marketing functions, increased direct business share by 50% and boosted guest satisfaction levels across its properties.

During nine years in senior strategic and operational roles with InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), Apurva was instrumental in exceeding European revenue targets by $200 million while reducing commercial spend for hotels. Key to this success was his ability to drive performance improvements and engagement levels across the commercial and distribution teams.

Prior to that, Apurva led a series of travel-related projects in the US, Europe and Australia for McKinsey & Company, where he was instrumental in assisting Delta Airlines execute a turnaround strategy via a $3 billion cost-efficiency programme. He also held senior positions at Starbucks, where he grew the business by 20% in one year by transforming its multi-country tea business into the company's fastest-growing beverage line.
A Hispanic man died after police pinned him down on the ground for five minutes, echoing the death of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin. Alameda Police Department released an hour-long video of the tragic death of the Hispanic man, Law & Crime reported.

The said incident happened the same day a jury in Minneapolis began the deliberation of the George Floyd case, Associated Press reported. Because of this, the Alameda Police were under fire as the family of the Hispanic man, Mario Gonzales, 26, accused the law enforcement officers on Wednesday of using excessive force on the Hispanic man.

READ NEXT: 73-Year-Old Colorado Woman With Dementia Sues Police Over Rough Arrest

Probes on the death of Hispanic Man from California

Alameda Police Department (APD) shared the identity of the officers involved: James Fisher, Cameron Leahy, and Eric McKinley.

The department noted that Fisher was hired in 2010, while Leahy and McKinley were hired in 2018. The statement of APD noted that there were four involved officers in the incident, but the department only shared three identities.

Meanwhile, three ongoing investigations are looking into the matter -- the probes by the District Attorney's Office and the Sherriff's Department, and an independent investigation launched by the city under the supervision of Lois Renne of Renne Public Law Group.

The outside investigation launched by the city pointed out that the body camera footage was not immediately released because the investigators from the sheriff's office and the prosecutor's office wanted to talk to the witnesses before disseminating the video.

An initial statement from the department has noted that Gonzales had a "medical emergency" during an altercation with the police after the officers tried to subdue him, The Guardian reported.

Hispanic Man Dies While California Police Pin him Down

The recording that was released late Tuesday by the APD also included 911 calls reporting Gonzales.

One call reported a man in front of their yard with no mask. The said man, who happens to be Gonzales, was reported to talk to them but not making any sense. The caller also noted that Gonzales was not doing anything wrong, but he is scaring the caller's wife.

APD officers approached the victim in the park and talked to him. Gonzales talked to the officers while stuttering. The officers asked him if he is feeling alright. "Well I'm feeling alright, I guess," said Gonzales.

At one moment, the officers asked for his ID, then Gonzales rummaged his hands in his pockets. When officers tried to hold his hands, Gonzales struggled saying "No wait, wait, wait, it's, it's - wait - what the heck?"

One officer also appeared in the video to put a knee on his back and leaves it there for about four minutes as the Hispanic man gasps for air. Officers rolled Gonzales shortly before the victim stopped breathing. Officers also performed CPR on Gonzales and administer two doses of Narcan.

"What I saw was different from what I was told," said Gerardo Gonzales, the brother of the victim, after watching the body camera footage.

Meanwhile, Timothy Williams Jr., an expert from LAPD noted that the victim who was pinned down by the California police was not resisting but only trying to breathe.

READ MORE: Ohio Cop Shoots Dead 16-Year-Old Black Girl Shortly Before Derek Chauvin Verdict

WATCH: California Man Dies After Officers Pin Him to Ground for 5 Minutes - from News Leader
According to Dr. Snodgrass, ptosis occurs when botox is inadvertently injected into an unwanted area causing the eyelid to droop.

Whitney Buha, a social media influencer from Chicago, has recently gone viral on TikTok for a rare complication she experienced following botox injection. Unfortunately for Buha, after injection, one eye was starting to droop while the other eye was wider than normal. Buha followed up with her injector who placed more Botox in the lower eyebrow in an attempt to counteract the eyelid droop, but this only created further eyelid drooping. The reason? Her injector placed the Botox in the wrong area around the eye, resulting in a facial asymmetry. Our expert injector and board-certified Dermatologist, Dr. Alexandra Snodgrass, from the Naderi Center for Plastic Surgery & Dermatology weighs in on the issue.

According to Dr. Snodgrass, ptosis occurs when botox is inadvertently injected into an unwanted area causing the eyelid to droop. This occurs more frequently in the hands of an inexperienced injector. Droopy eyelids, also known as eyelid ptosis, can occur when injected Botox migrates from an area of treatment (usually between the eyebrows) into the levator muscle, the muscle in charge of keeping the eyelids in their normal position. Dr. Snodgrass says that temporary paralysis of this muscle results in the inability to lift the eyelid properly.

What is the best way to avoid botox migration and eyelid ptosis? Well, it is very important to go to an experienced injector who has extensive knowledge of facial anatomy, says Dr. Snodgrass. She explains that the rate of this complication is extremely low according to studies (5%) and much of that is attributable to inexperienced injectors. In the hands of an experienced injector, Dr. Snodgrass says the risk of this complication drops to 1%. Dr. Snodgrass adds that she avoids this complication through careful pre-treatment analysis of each patient, noting any pre-existing asymmetries and pre-treatment muscle movement and tone. Dr. Snodgrass continues to say that proper injection depth and position with each procedure is critical to minimizing the risk of inadvertent diffusion of neuromodulators. Dr. Snodgrass also notes the importance of, in some cases, treating the glabella and forehead together, as these muscles work in synchrony and disruption of their balance can lead to unwanted outcomes like ptosis.

However, as with any procedure, rare complications from Botox like ptosis can occur even with proper injection placement and dose. Fortunately, Dr. Snodgrass says that multiple treatment options are available for this dreaded complication and that muscle stimulation (mechanical or electrical) and apraclonidine eye drops are the most common treatments. Furthermore, Dr. Snodgrass explains that even without treatment, lid ptosis tends to resolve spontaneously at around 4-6 weeks.

The Naderi Center is truly the most specialized and unique plastic surgery & dermatology practice in the United States.

If you would like more information on about this topic, please call us at (703)  481- 0002 or email staff@nadericenter.com
on Thursday reduced the price of Covaxin, an indigenously developed Covid-19 vaccine, by 33 per cent for state governments to Rs 400 a dose. Earlier, it was priced at Rs 600 a dose. The prices for the international market ($15-20 a dose) and private hospitals (Rs 1,200 a dose) remain the same as previously announced.

The move came a day after Serum Institute of India cut the price of its Covishield vaccine to Rs 300 from Rs 400 a dose for states. On Monday, the Centre had asked the two vaccine makers to reduce their prices, following objections by states over the differential pricing.

said that recognising the enormous challenges to the public healthcare system, it had decided to make Covaxin available for state governments for Rs 400 a dose.

he Hyderabad-based firm reiterated that the approach to pricing was determined by internally funded product development, several operationally intensive BSL -3 manufacturing facilities.

The Centre has sanctioned Rs 1,500 crore as suppliers credit for to buy future doses of vaccines. It has also received a grant of over Rs 130 crore from the Centre to augment its production capacities to 100 million doses per month by September. At present, the company is able to produce 10 million doses a month and a ramp-up plan is in the works.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 09:56:37|Editor: huaxia

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ACCRA, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Food and nutrition insecurity in the West African sub-region remains a worrying concern for stakeholders, Ghanaian Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchway said here on Wednesday.

The minister made the remarks in her keynote speech at the opening of the International Conference on West African Food Security, Storage System in Accra, capital of Ghana.

"All member states of the sub-regional bloc Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and other relevant stakeholders, therefore, need to boost their collaborative efforts," Botchway said, adding that it was also "necessary and fundamental to the consolidation of regional solidarity and integration."

"I wish to urge all stakeholders to remain committed to the crisis response coordination mechanisms both at the national and regional levels under the leadership of ECOWAS," Botchway said. Enditem
Britain's electors will go to the polls on May 6 in the biggest public vote since the December 2019 General Election.



Elections postponed from last year because of the COVID crisis are now combined with this year's scheduled voting to provide a major test of public opinion.

Electors will be casting their votes for the Scottish and Welsh devolved parliaments and for local councils across England.

Normally, the biggest point of interest would be whether or how much support has been lost by the ruling party at the national level. Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party swept to office 18 months ago on the slogan "Get Brexit Done."

Fed up with pro-EU MPs blocking implementation of the 2016 referendum result, enough Labour voters in the old industrial towns of northern England abstained or switched to the Conservatives or the Brexit Party to hand Johnson an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons.

Shortly afterwards, COVID-19 struck and British society shuddered almost to a halt. At the same time, Jeremy Corbyn stood down as Labour Party leader to be replaced by Sir Keir Starmer, chief architect of the party's disastrous General Election policy to call for a second referendum on EU membership instead of enacting the result of the first.

With the British media having successfully slandered Corbyn, a principled socialist and anti-racist, as an unpatriotic, anti-Semitic traitor who would scrap Britain's military defenses, Starmer enjoyed a brief honeymoon period in the opinion polls.

He was helped by Boris Johnson's disastrous mishandling of the COVID outbreak, when he put big business profits above the public health and wider interests of the population.

However, the Conservative lead in the polls has widened again since the beginning of 2021, boosted to eight percentage points and more by the rapid roll-out of anti-COVID vaccinations across Britain. Fresh allegations of financial sleaze against Johnson and previous Prime Minister David Cameron have yet to dent Conservative popularity.

For his part, Starmer has said and done little to enthuse his own party's members, let alone the wider electorate. Not only has he failed to fulfil his pledge to maintain his predecessor's left-wing policies, many of which  unlike Corbyn himself  enjoy quite widespread public support; he has actually driven socialists out of leadership positions and out of the party altogether, including Jeremy Corbyn himself.

That is why the leadership of the Labour Party, rather than that of the Conservative Party, is likely to be one of the two big issues on May 6.

The other is the constitutional future of Scotland. The governing party in the Edinburgh parliament, the Scottish National Party, is promising to secure a second referendum ("Indy 2") on Scottish independence. In the previous referendum, in 2014, Scots voters opted by 55% to 45% to remain part of the U.K.

Since then, opinion has shifted more towards breaking the link, although the SNP's version of "independence" would involve keeping the English monarchy, remaining in NATO and applying for re-entry to the EU. Whether it would also mean keeping the English pound sterling, adopting the Euro or creating a separate Scottish currency is not yet clear.



What is certain is that on May 6 the SNP will again win a majority of the seats north of the border.

Recent scandals surrounding the past and present leaders of the SNP have had little public impact so far, although ex-leader Alex Salmond's breakaway Alba Party might gain some seats.

The majority of Scots are anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit and regard their own government in Scotland as both more competent and less reactionary than Boris Johnson's regime in London.

What remains to be seen is whether or how a victorious SNP can win the necessary agreement from London for Indy 2. At the moment, Prime Minister Johnson flatly opposes any such proposal.

In Wales, the Labour Party continues to enjoy substantial support. However, the left-of-center Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru ("Party of Wales"), has been gaining ground as some anti-Conservative electors lose faith in Labour at the British and Welsh levels.

Across Britain, the Greens are hoping to win some votes and seats from Labour; the Liberal Democrats are trailing badly in the polls; and the far right have yet to recover from the implosion of the fascist British National Party.

The Communist Party is also standing in all three nations, with enough candidates in Wales to qualify for party election broadcasts on television and radio in the English and Welsh languages.

The party's manifesto opposes a return to austerity policies, urges a fightback against rising unemployment and calls for mass campaigning for left-wing policies of wealth redistribution and the public ownership of key industries and services in a federal Britain.

The two other contests on May 6 attracting media attention are in London and a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, north-east England.

The present mayor of London, Labour's Sadiq Khan, is a supporter of Keir Starmer, but with more of a populist touch. He should win, provided enough Labour supporters resist the temptation to cast an anti-Conservative protest vote for the Greens or LibDems.

Hartlepool was hit hard by the decline in its traditional shipbuilding, steel and engineering sectors. It has been solidly Labour most of the time since 1945 but, having seen a heavy pro-Brexit vote, only the division between the Conservative and other anti-EU parties has kept it that way.

Whatever the results, people across Britain will wake up on May 7 facing the same problems of COVID-19 recovery, unemployment, insufficient housing, big business corruption and political sleaze as before. As the proverb puts it in Hungary, "Money talks, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on."

Robert Griffiths is a former Senior Lecturer in Political Economy and History at the University of Wales and currently the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.
LONDON and WORCESTER, England, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Micro-multinational open source software company, Payara Services, has been commended for its achievements within global trading and exporting with the Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

Now in its 55th year, the Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade is the UK's most prestigious business award, honouring organisations that have excelled in overseas exports whilst maintaining the highest standards in social, economic, and environmental activity.

Payara's win attests to the growing success of the open source software business model. Payara's open source product offering, the Payara Platform, is based on the global initiatives of the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile standards. Community users can download the Payara Platform Community Edition for their development projects and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications, while the fully supported, subscription based Payara Enterprise Edition is designed for mission critical systems in production and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications.

As one of just 205 businesses across the country to have received this accolade personally approved by Her Majesty The Queen, often called the 'knighthood for businesses', Payara can utilise the esteemed Queen's Award emblem within its marketing and promotional activity for the next five years.

Steve Millidge, Founder and CEO of Payara Services Ltd, commented: "We're thrilled to win a Queen's Award for International Trade. Payara was born global and has team members in many countries. This award recognises their commitment to the mission of delivering trusted, supported, enterprise software to customers worldwide."

Payara's Marketing Manager, Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, added: "This prestigious award enhances our global reputation and builds on the exceptional growth we've experienced overseas in the last three years."

Since it was founded in 2016, Payara has implemented a strategy for overseas trade, with 95% of its services currently exported to a total of nine countries, including the USA, Japan, South Africa, and Germany.

Headquartered in Worcestershire, with a secondary EU office in Funchal, Portugal, Payara Services is recognised for its creation of innovative infrastructure software including the delivery of 24/7 production, development and migration support to customers around the world, including BMW Group, Hermes, and Rakuten Card.

The firm's leading team of tech experts - or 'Payarans' - have worked incredibly hard to increase annual revenue by 107% over the last three years, with export sales more than doubling from 33% to 75%. The Payara Server has now become one of the fastest-growing open source platforms globally, with a community of over 320,000 users.

Payara continues to expand its global customer base to reach new markets and has several innovative projects in the pipeline, including the Payara Cloud. September of 2021, Payara Cloud is the next generation of cloud-native application server and all-in-one PaaS provides a more efficient way to run Jakarta EE apps on the cloud with no Kubernetes knowledge required.

https://www.payara.fish

https://www.gov.uk/queens-awards-for-enterprise

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1497916/Payara_Queens_Award_for_Enterprise.jpg
America learned Wednesday night, if it hadnt before, not to underestimate Joe Biden. Yes, he narrowly won the states needed for victory in November. Yes, his party has the barest of congressional majorities. Yes, he presides over a country deeply divided on culture and politics. Yes, he all too often has been viewed as a political lifer fitted more for secondary roles than stardom.

Speaking to a socially distanced but clearly attentive Congress, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. made everyone forget all of that. He was formidable and commanding, deeply informed and ready for battle.

Biden went big  very big -- in what amounted to a State of the Union speech, aggressively defending and pushing for a total of $4 trillion in new spending and audaciously arguing that the best answer to the violent anti-government mob that nearly destroyed the Capitol is a ton more government.

This president has long been in and around the center of the action in Washington, in the Senate from 1973 to 2009 and vice president from 2009 to 2017. With a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom at his disposal and summoning a calm but determined energy at the age of 78, Biden laid out a stunningly sweeping spending agenda. But he also charged ahead on pressing issues of social change in America, decrying white supremacy, systemic racism, violence against women and pushing for new protections for the LGBTQ community and for a renewed assault weapons ban.

There was much  very much  in the presidents address that most real Republicans, as well as the Trump Rump, will despise and denounce. That was going to be the case regardless, but Biden in essence dared the GOP to get on board (which they wont) or get out of the way as he tries to steamroll them. Historians occupy hours of airtime musing aloud about which past president Biden is a reincarnation of  or a reaction to. The roster includes FDR and LBJ in Column A; Reagan and even Obama in Column B.

Joe Biden proved last night that he is only and consummately Joe Biden. His carefully written and even more carefully rehearsed performance was the pinnacle of life experiences and political and institutional circumstances that make him unique  and perhaps, when the history is written, more consequential than the analysts initially predicted.

Rather than be limited by his partys narrow margins, and by a GOP infested with Trump devotees, Biden has decided to treat the situation as liberating. Not generally one to gamble as he climbed the ladder, he believes that now is the time to bet it all. He has the sense of urgency that only a still-vigorous 78-year-old can have when he gets the job he literally has been yearning for since childhood.

The COVID pandemic, as it turned out, gave greater focus and thematic consistency to the big-government revival Biden decided to pursue. It is unarguable that defeating a global pandemic is a task that only government can handle. And if it can do that  and in America it can and is doing so  then what else can government do that only it can?

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is doing his part as well. As even Donald Trump understood, however dimly, Chinas rise is a story that will dominate 21st century geopolitics and economics. Biden is now shrewdly seizing on a new form of superpower competition to argue for a big-government response. Xis newly aggressive posture plays into Bidens hands.

The collapse of politics as we knew it is driving Biden, too. With the rise of siloed social media, independent fundraising, and branding of individual politicians as their own movements, Congress and the old big tent political parties have ceased to be the engines of bipartisan compromise they once were. A president is now less a president than a prime minister: intent almost exclusively on maintaining a majority by tending to the internal needs and pressures of his own governing coalition.

Biden isnt being pulled to the left. He knows how to read the room. He is going there because that is where his party is, and the Democratic Party is all he has. And he was always more of a traditional liberal union Democrat than people realized. Tiny Delaware, which he represented for so many years, was a semi-Southern state that is legal home to corporations and credit card companies. Even so, Biden was never comfortable (or all that welcome) in the Bill Clinton-led, pro-business, DLC Democrat movement. His emotional center of gravity in the party was and is labor unions.

On a personal level, the Joe Biden we saw Wednesday night was one who had spent decades being underestimated  and acutely feeling that way. Despite all his years in the Senate, he was never really part of the top leadership, regarded as too mouthy and flighty for the hard-bitten inside game. As Barack Obamas vice president, Biden was well-liked and enjoyed the buddy-buddy role he was only too glad to play for his wary boss. But the Obamas never invited the Bidens upstairs to the private quarters.

Now Biden has the run of the place.
NOVI, Mich., April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Learning Care Group, Inc. today announced its acquisition of Young School, six preschools serving families in Maryland in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, and Howard Counties. Learning Care Group is the second-largest for-profit early education and childcare provider in North America.

The Young School brand joins Everbrook Academy, Montessori Unlimited, Childtime, La Petite Academy, The Childrens Courtyard, Tutor Time, Creative Kids Learning Centers, Pathways Learning Academy, and U-GRO Learning Centres in the Learning Care Group portfolio, which includes more than 950 school locations.

With its highly regarded curricular approach, its engaging learning environment, its nurturing educators and their strong commitment to health and safety, Young School is a welcome and well-suited addition to our Learning Care Group family, said Mark Bierley, CEO, Learning Care Group. We look forward to inspiring young learners and continuing Young Schools tradition of excellence.

Young Schools philosophy is influenced by the internationally acclaimed Reggio Emilia and Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approaches to early childhood education. The school pioneered the cottage learning environment, in which children are active participants and learners within a nurturing community. In keeping with the Reggio philosophy, the physical environment itself is a key component of the program, providing rich opportunities for independent exploration and learning, fostering a childs sense of competence and self-esteem.

The Young School program engages childrens enormous potential and natural curiosity. It provides a thoughtful school experience that fosters creativity, independence, and social confidence in a dynamic, joyful setting thats respectful of each childs distinct individual needs.

Its been a privilege to serve families in our Young School learning community for more than 30 years by offering the finest care and early education, said Josh Young, founder and former President of Young School. Im confident that under Learning Care Groups leadership, Young School will continue to make a profound positive difference in the future of young children for many years to come while instilling a lifelong love of learning.

The Young School experience has engaged, empowered and inspired children for decades through our culture of respect, guided by a strong image of the child, said Jo Ann Young, Young School founder. Im looking forward to seeing that legacy continue under Learning Care Group, bringing children joy each day while helping them to thrive and achieve their full potential.

About Learning Care Group, Inc.

Learning Care Group is a leader in early childhood education, with more than 50 years of experience in inspiring children to love learning. Headquartered in Novi, Mich., the company is the second largest for-profit early education and care provider in North America. Learning Care Group provides early education and care for children ages 6 weeks to 12 years through ten unique brands: Childtime Learning Centers, The Childrens Courtyard, Creative Kids Learning Centers, Everbrook Academy, La Petite Academy, Montessori Unlimited, Pathways Learning Academy, Tutor Time Child Care/Learning Centers, U-GRO Learning Centres and Young School. It operates more than 950 schools (corporate and franchise) across 37 states, the District of Columbia and internationally, and has a capacity to serve more than 132,000 children. Learning Care Group supports child development for infants to school-agers through a comprehensive, research-based curriculum in a safe, nurturing, and fun school environment. It empowers children to be ready for school, instills a lifelong love of learning, and provides a foundation for the future. Learning Care Group also offers early education and child care programs for organizations, including onsite locations, as well as corporate partnerships and back-up care programs in its community-based schools. For more information, please visit www.learningcaregroup.com

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A man who was murdered on the towpath of the Grand Union Canal on Monday was a retired policeman, it was revealed today.

Former policeman Clive Porter, 63, died after he was attacked on the canal towpath at Broughton, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, at around 12.20pm on Monday.

The policeman, who served with Hertfordshire Constabulary until his retirement, died from head injuries at the scene.

A man and a woman have both been arrested on suspicion of offences connected with the murder.

The male suspect was today detained in hospital where he was being treated for injuries and the woman, from Birmingham, was released pending further inquiries.

Former policeman Clive Porter, 63, (pictured) died after he was attacked on the canal towpath at Broughton, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, at around 12.20pm on Monday

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police's Major Crime Team said that investigations into the murder were continuing.

'The force attended a report of an assault on the Grand Union Canal near Broughton in Aylesbury at around 12.20pm on Monday. On attendance, a man was found with serious injuries. He tragically died at the scene despite efforts of officers and paramedics.

'Following a formal identification procedure today, the victim has been identified as Clive Porter, aged 63, from Tring, Hertfordshire.

'Additionally, a Home Office post mortem examination was carried out on Wednesday and the cause of death is currently pending. Two arrests have been made in connection with this investigation.

The policeman, who served with Hertfordshire Constabulary until his retirement, died from head injuries at the scene in Broughton, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Forensic teams seen on the canal towpath where Clive Porter was killed on Monday

'A 34-year-old man of no fixed abode has been arrested on suspicion of murder and a 41-year-old woman from Birmingham has been arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and perverting the course of justice. The woman has been released on police bail until May 24, whilst the man is in the custody of officers receiving hospital treatment.'

Senior Investigating Officer, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Shearwood, of Thames Valley Police's Major Crime Unit said: 'Officers are continuing with this investigation into the death of Mr Porter, and we have made two arrests in connection with it.

'I would like to offer reassurance to the community that we are not looking for anyone else in connection with this offence.

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police's Major Crime Team said that investigations into the murder were continuing (pictured)

A man and a woman have both been arrested on suspicion of offences connected with the murder

'However we would continue to ask that anyone who can provide information in relation to this investigation contacts us. I would specifically like to appeal to anyone that was using the canal towpath near Broughton crossing between 12pm and 12.30pm on Monday and may have information to contact us urgently.

'We believe that anyone there between those times could be vital witnesses.'

In a tribute to Mr Porter, the family said he had been a police officer with Hertfordshire Constabulary.

'Clive Porter was a much loved husband, dad and grandad. He was a quiet calm and caring person, who served the community as a police officer for over 30 years before joining the Canal and River Trust. He was loved and respected by all who met him.

'Clive had a passion for working outdoors and meeting people. He believed in caring for people and the environment through the principle of policing by the people for the people.

'The family would like to thank the hard working investigation team at Thames Valley Police and also the family liaisons Detective constable James Armitage and Detective constable Lynda Stearman for their hard work and support.

'The family have also been overwhelmed by all the support and messages of condolence they have received from friends, family and the wider community.'
For the past 25 years Dr Irfan Malik has prided himself on getting to know as many of his patients as possible.

It means that during appointments at his Nottingham practice the GP instinctively knows when something isn't quite right.

'I like looking at a patient, observing things they might not have seen,' he says. 'By observing someone I can tell, for example, if they are anaemic. The same goes with weight  if they have lost weight I will know that from just seeing them because I have known them for so long. If you see someone face to face there are non-verbal cues and body language that you pick up on.'

Tragically, in recent weeks the signs and symptoms Dr Malik has been picking up on have been especially worrying.

'We are starting to see a deluge of patients from the last year now, some with very aggressive cancer symptoms or mental health problems,' explains 52-year-old Dr Malik, senior partner at Elmswood Surgery.

Steve McGregor, 48, started having difficulty breathing last March and tried to get a face-to-face appointment at Trinity Medical Centre in Blythe Bridge, Stoke-on-Trent. But restrictions on appointments because of the pandemic meant he had to wait until May to get an X-ray and phone consultation where he was told there were no issues. Unconvinced of their findings, he finally got a scan at Stafford's County Hospital in November, when he was told he had inoperable, terminal lung cancer

'I have seen a number of lung cancers that have been quite advanced, another patient with a throat cancer and different types of abdominal cancers. Had people come earlier we would have picked up early symptoms. Now we are seeing disease more at a later stage.'

The reason? The fallout from the last year's lockdowns. For starters, the often-repeated message to 'stay at home, protect the NHS' has led to some sick patients deciding not to seek medical help, whatever their symptoms.

But on top of that is the fact that access to GPs has radically changed. Where previously almost eight out of ten appointments were conducted face to face, during the height of the lockdowns that figure fell to just 30 per cent. The rest were carried out remotely, by phone or video call.

While that figure has now risen slightly, many patients complain that they are still battling to see family doctors in person. 'It amazes me that you can now get a haircut, go shopping, go to the pub but you can't get a doctor's appointment,' one fed-up patient recently complained to their local newspaper.

On social media another adds: 'My surgery is like Fort Knox  they don't answer the phone and their website doesn't work. Seeing my GP is harder than getting a private audience with the Pope.'

Among those unhappy with their ability to access healthcare during the pandemic is Jenni Payne. She suffers from psoriasis, a painful skin condition that has deteriorated dramatically during the past year. But Jenni, 42, says her efforts to get to see her GP in person have been repeatedly rebuffed.

While the reduction in face-to-face appointments was mandated by the NHS  a sensible precaution at the height of the pandemic  the fact that it continues despite dramatically falling Covid case rates and the vaccination of health workers makes some fear that the changes are here to stay.

The concern is that while phone and video appointments may be convenient for some doctors and patients, others will suffer from the lack of in-person consultations.

Older patients are the obvious example, many of whom struggle with technology and are hard of hearing. Not only do they prefer a traditional one-to-one, it also gives the medics the chance to pick up problems that might go unnoticed during a phone call.

This week a new study found that almost one in four new cases of diabetes went undiagnosed last year. Researchers estimated around 60,000 diagnoses of Type 2 diabetes were missed or delayed between March and December 2020.

Experts believe the shift from in-person appointments played a role. Cancer diagnoses have also fallen.

Figures analysed by Cancer Research UK show that between March last year and January the number of urgent GP referrals for patients with suspected lung cancer fell by 20,300 compared to the same period last year, a drop of a third.

There has also been an increase in the number of patients going straight to A&E, an indication that patients are struggling to see GPs.

Now GPs like Dr Malik, who prides himself on having done everything he could to keep his surgery doors open during lockdown, are echoing calls from patients' organisations for a faster return to face-to- face appointments.

'GP services have remained the hardest to access over the most recent part of the pandemic,' says Rachel Power, chief executive of The Patients Association, which yesterday published a survey showing widespread unhappiness at the use of phone consultations.

The charity is urging face-to-face contact to be restored as the default form of GP appointment, with remote consultations offered as an option for those who prefer them.

The Patients Association report said: 'Roughly half of respondents felt their care or experience was not as good as it would have been otherwise, while only 16 per cent felt it was better.'

That GPs have played a vital part in fighting the fallout from the pandemic goes without saying. As well as delivering the largest flu vaccination programme in UK history they have also been central to the roll-out of Covid jabs.

On top of that, data shows that in the week to April 18, GPs delivered 3.3 million consultations. In the same week in 2019, consultation figures were only two per cent higher, showing the rates are similar to pre-pandemic levels.

What is different, of course, is that only 46 per cent were face to face. Undoubtedly, some patients have embraced the new arrangements, relieved not to have to spend time in a packed waiting room before seeing their doctor.

But according to The Patients Association's research, they are firmly in the minority. In an online survey conducted over two months to April 5, patients rated access to GP appointments as the biggest 'struggle' when it came to accessing health services. 'GPs are the front door to the NHS, and patients are increasingly perceiving that door is closed to them,' the report's authors observe.

When it came to using 'non traditional' ways of accessing care, phone consultations were the most common. But nearly half of respondents said their experience and quality of care received on the call was 'not as good as it would have been otherwise'.

The report concludes: 'We can particularly identify that telephone consultations are not an adequate substitute for face-to-face contact... face-to-face contact must be restored as the default form of GP appointment, and remote consultations offered as an option for those who prefer them.'

Among those unhappy with their ability to access healthcare during the pandemic is Jenni Payne. She suffers from psoriasis, a painful skin condition that has deteriorated dramatically during the past year. But Jenni, 42, says her efforts to get to see her GP in person have been repeatedly rebuffed.

'On the phone it takes nearly an hour to get through to reception, who then tell you there are no appointments with the GP, not even phone appointments, and that I have to contact them via their online service,' says the mum of three from Maidenhead, Berks.

'I did this at the end of last year, filling in details about who I was, what my condition was, and why I wanted to talk to my GP.

'The following day I got a call saying I needed to send images, so I got my husband to take photos and upload them. Three weeks went by and I hadn't heard from them so I went through the whole palaver again only to be told they had referred me to a dermatologist and I would have to wait.'

Fourteen weeks later and still not having heard anything, Jenni's condition had deteriorated to the point where 75 per cent of her body was covered with psoriasis.

'The skin on my back was so split that it was bleeding,' she says. 'I rang the doctor's surgery two weeks ago and when I did get through I was told: 'We have done all we can for you  if it's that bad go to A&E.'

In recent weeks the signs and symptoms Dr Malik has been picking up on have been especially worrying (stock image)

Reluctantly she contacted her local hospital, only to be told to call 111. After an hour on there she was told to speak to her GP.

'It's ridiculous,' she said. 'I don't want to be bothering A&E for a skin condition. I understand the NHS has been at breaking point with Covid and this is why I didn't want to put more pressure on it. But what other option do I have?'

And she is not alone. Data released by NHS England in mid-April showed growing numbers heading to A&E departments.

Dr Adrian Boyle, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, warned: 'We know many of our patients have tried to seek alternative care, so it is possible that some may be attending emergency departments following difficulty securing an appointment with their GP.'

It is a point echoed by Sir Robert Francis, chairman of Healthwatch England. 'People will go to A&E if there is nowhere else to go, and their condition may deteriorate leading to increased treatment and care because they couldn't get help sooner,' he said.

For cancer sufferers any delay in diagnosis can have serious consequences. Last month the Mail highlighted the case of retired paramedic Steve McGregor. The 48-year-old started having difficulty breathing last March and tried to get a face-to-face appointment at Trinity Medical Centre in Blythe Bridge, Stoke-on-Trent.

But restrictions on appointments because of the pandemic meant he had to wait until May to get an X-ray and phone consultation where he was told there were no issues.

Unconvinced of their findings, he finally got a scan at Stafford's County Hospital in November, when he was told he had inoperable, terminal lung cancer.

Mr McGregor, who worked for West Midlands Ambulance Service, now believes the cancer could have been operable had it been detected sooner. The father-of-one said: 'I noticed changes in my breathing which were quite concerning. I felt like I couldn't inflate the upper left lung. I felt like I couldn't oxygenate effectively.'

But Mr McGregor claims his GP refused to see or refer him for eight months despite making 20 phone calls to the surgery.

He was however able to get a face-to-face GP appointment following the scan at Stafford Hospital. 'I have now been diagnosed with an inoperable lung cancer. I have never smoked and have been fit and well. I am only 48 years old,' he added.

When approached, his GP said: 'For reasons of patient confidentiality the practice is unable to discuss any aspects of patient care.'

Problems getting access to GPs are not just confined to the 'now'. A large majority of people are concerned that seeing their doctor will be harder in the future.

It is something 51-year-old Scott Dixon, who is suffering from long Covid since being admitted to hospital a year ago, says he has grown worried about in recent months.

'I have been left with chronic fatigue,' says Mr Dixon, a consumer rights expert from Edinburgh. 'It's simply impossible to get a face-to-face appointment or even an appointment in advance.

'To even get to speak to a doctor involves a scramble on the phone at 8am. I've had a dozen appointments in the last year, and all but one has been on the phone.

'When I was having some blood taken this week I asked the nurse when the practice would go back to the way things were before. She told me surgeries were trialling telephone triaging before Covid as a way of managing patients and that Covid has given the NHS the opportunity to introduce it permanently across the board.'

He added: 'Patients understood and accepted phone consultations initially for the right reasons, not knowing or realising that Covid would be treated as the golden opportunity to sneak it through the back door permanently.'

Under current NHS guidance, practices are advised to screen patients remotely first, either in a phone call or via an online form, to decide whether they need a phone appointment with a GP or can be dealt with by a nurse or pharmacist.

They have to offer face-to-face appointments, but only if this is regarded as 'clinically necessary'. Clearly, this is open to interpretation, resulting in widely differing experiences across the country.

But GP leaders insist that throughout the pandemic they have done everything they can to see those patients who need to be seen, despite facing increased workloads and staff shortages.

'We know many patients prefer to see their GP face to face and many GPs prefer this way of consulting too,' said Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs. 'Face-to-face consulting is an essential part of general practice and post-pandemic it needs to be down to GP practices to be able to decide how they deliver services, based on their knowledge of their patients. Ideally, we want patients to have the choice as to how they want to access GP services based on their health needs and preferences.'

He added: 'Before the pandemic, general practice was facing intense workforce and workload pressures. The pandemic has only exacerbated these pressures.

'We urgently need more GPs and other members of the practice team to manage increasing workload in general practice, so that we can continue to deliver the high-quality care and access to services that our patients need.'
She's rumoured to be starting her own OnlyFans account soon, after gaining more than 100,000 followers on Instagram thanks to her raunchy photos.

And Rebecca Lobie did little to quell the speculation on Thursday as she flaunted her sensational figure in a skintight latex dress in her latest upload.

The 'hot niece' of late wildlife conservationist Steve Irwin showcased her ample cleavage and toned legs in the flirty pink number.

'My fav party dress': Steve Irwin's 'hot niece' Rebecca Lobie flaunted her sensational figure in a skintight latex dress on Thursday amid rumours she's starting an OnlyFans account

She styled her blonde hair straight, opted for a glamorous makeup palette, and boosted her height with a pair of perspex heels.

'My fav party dress. Can't wait to head to the goldy again soon!' wrote the Sunshine Coast-based mother of two, 33, referring to her upcoming trip to the Gold Coast.

Rebecca shared another snap on her Instagram Stories of herself modelling a personalised sleepwear set, with her name 'Bec' printed on the front.

Over the weekend, Rebecca left fans wondering whether she's set to monetise her racy photos by starting an OnlyFans account.

Ready for bed: Rebecca shared another snap on her Instagram Stories of herself modelling a personalised sleepwear set, with her name 'Bec' printed on the front

Preparing to cash in? Over the weekend, Rebecca left fans wondering whether she's set to monetise her racy photos by starting an OnlyFans account

She uploaded a photo to Instagram of herself posing in skimpy white lingerie and tagged the photographer Tristan Manas - who often works with OnlyFans creators.

OnlyFans is a subscription-based adult website that allows users to sell photos and videos for a monthly fee.

Content ranges from something as innocent as a suggestive selfie all the way to hardcore pornography

Snapper: She uploaded a photo to Instagram of herself posing in skimpy white lingerie and tagged the photographer Tristan Manas (pictured) - who often works with OnlyFans creators

Looking good: Last week, Rebecca gave a fans a glimpse behind the scenes of her photo shoot with Tristan via Instagram Stories

Last week, Rebecca gave a fans a glimpse behind the scenes of her photo shoot with Tristan via Instagram Stories.

In the photo, the blonde bombshell posed on the floor of a high-rise hotel room wearing black lacy underwear.

She explained in her caption: 'A little behind the scenes with @tristanmanas! Whos excited to see the pics from this shoot?'

Fame: Rebecca rose to fame in September 2019, thanks to her sexy snaps and connection to the Irwin family. She's the daughter of Steve Irwin's sister Joy Muscillo and her husband Frank

Rebecca rose to fame in September 2019, thanks to her sexy snaps and connection to the Irwin family.

She's the daughter of Steve Irwin's sister Joy Muscillo and her husband Frank.

Rebecca was previously the managing director of the Irwin family's Australia Zoo, but left in December 2015.

The zoo is now run by Terri, Bindi and Robert Irwin, who are believed to be estranged from Rebecca.
More benefits will come to water diversion project between Yangtze and Huaihe rivers A 324 million yuan ($49.8 million) reconstruction and high-speed railway diversion project, the first of its kind in China, was accomplished in Hefei, Anhui province, on Tuesday. Some 1,000 builders from China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group, a State-owned company, relocated a section of the high-speed railway running between Shanghai and Sichuan province's Chengdu, to make way for a water diversion project in East China. Zhang Xinyi from CTCE Fourth Engineering Co Ltd, which executed the project for CTCE, said the water diversion project between the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers aims to improve urban and rural water supply in Anhui province and neighboring Henan province, and boost shipping between the two rivers. With the new railway line running more than 10 meters above the ground, the water diversion project between China's longest riverthe Yangtze, which traverses through southern Anhui for some 400 kilometersand the Huaihe River, which runs through northern Anhui, can now run a 200-meter-wide waterway beneath the new line, said Liu Chuanghui from CTCE Fourth Engineering. The project site, 18 km west of Hefei South Railway Station, includes a new 4.54-km line comprising 3.5-km railway embankment and a 1.04-km-long bridge. CTCE builders made use of a seven-hour period between 10:30 pm on Monday and 5:30 am on Tuesday, when no high-speed trains were running on the line, to divert one part of the railway to its new location. Officials concerned said the operation involved complex tasks like stripping and sawing of the railway lines, shifting them in quick time, transfer of the catenaries, and ballast and machine tamping works. From March 2019 to March this year, CTCE staff members from civil engineering, signaling, catenary, track, protection and fine-tuning departments had worked in clockwork precision, coordinating the constructing of a double-track high-speed railway several meters north of the existing line. This helped ready the section for relocation, Liu said. "Today's diversion cut off one section of the railway line and connected its two ends with the new line built earlier, and also tore off the old section." Dramatic scenes were witnessed toward the end of the seven-hour relocation operation. Safety officer Yang Hao blew a whistle and alerted staff: "In 10 minutes, a train will depart from Hefei South Railway Station for test running." That was enough to make on-site operators stop their work, check all machinery and materials one last time and examine the whole project site. At the crack of dawn, around 6 am, builders vacated the site in an orderly manner, making way for a test run of an inspection train. That marked the successful transfer of the railway line. During the connection work Tuesday morning, more than 840 sets of mechanical equipment were used, Zhang said. "A 200-meter-wide waterway needs to pass underneath the Shanghai-Chengdu high-speed railway. The existing line isn't able to meet the waterway's navigation demand, necessitating a relocation," he said. Construction of the water diversion project between the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers began on Dec 29,2016, and the project was to be completed in six years, entailing overall costs of 91.27 billion yuan ($14.07 billion). It is expected to be completed this year. From south to north, the project is divided into three sections: water diversion from the Yangtze to Chaohu Lake in central Anhui; a canal link, and northbound water transmission. The total water transmission line runs 723 km, Zhang said. The Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed railway is a major part of the country's "high-speed railways along the Yangtze River", which link East China, Central China and Southwest China. The railway lines span 1,985 km in all and are expected to become fully operational in 2023 with trains reaching speeds in the range of 160 km/h to 350 km/h. The section that traverses the Yangtze-Huaihe Rivers Diversion Project is the busiest: 122 trains run on this stretch every day, said Zhou Qingyong, deputy general manager of CTCE Fourth Engineering and project manager of the high-speed rail reconstruction project. "With the smooth transfer of the new line, the digging of the waterway will start soon, and it helps complete the water diversion project on time," he said. "I am really proud of taking part in this construction work. It's intense but we've accomplished the job. It will help lay a solid foundation for the economic and social advancement along the railway line," said Ma Chunli from CTCE Fourth Engineering.


Undocumented workers organized by Make the Road New Jersey are in the third week of their hunger strike that demands financial stimulus relief for immigrant workers like themselves.

My organization, Partners for Women and Justice, calls on Gov. Phil Murphy to take action now to ensure that ALL New Jersey families can recover from COVID-19 economic fallout.

COVID-19 has unleashed a shadow pandemic of domestic violence and has devastated low-income immigrant survivors. Unemployment, COVID infections and deaths, insecure housing, and hunger have especially harmed these families and escalated violence for those in abusive relationships. The disqualification of immigrants from stimulus funds and unemployment benefits has limited victims opportunities to leave.

Meaningful stimulus funding for all of our states immigrant workers will provide a lifeline to those who have endured 14 months of the pandemic without any outside financial support.

Immigrant workers are critical to New Jerseys economy. They have supplied the essential services our communities have depended upon and paid more than $1 billion into our unemployment system and $600 million in state and local taxes. New Jersey can correct the grave injustice it has imposed on them.

Trish Perlmutter, policy counsel, Partners for Women and Justice, Bloomfield.

Note: Partners for Women and Justice provides free legal assistance to low-income victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Of windmills and windbags

This concerns the recent article Will visible offshore wind farms sink Jersey Shore tourism? The debate churns on.

I laugh at the horror some New Jersey shore residents and visitors express at the faint possibility of seeing wind turbines in the ocean 15 miles from the Atlantic City shoreline  if they squint hard enough.

What is this so-called solace that people go to the shore for? Would that include the boardwalk freak show of arcade games, food smells, amusement park rides, loud music and the bar scene? Does it include the hunt for a parking spot, the long trek to a beach access point, the crowds and the tag fees?

I find all of that horrifying enough, while the distant, rhythmic turning of a windmill, if noticed at all, could be relaxing. I am all for passive solar, wind and other green energy initiatives. Bring it on.

Kristine Floren, East Windsor

Rubbing SALT in seniors financial wounds

With all of President Joe Bidens stimulus packages, passed and proposed, I see no relief for us senior citizens on nearly fixed incomes.

A step in the right direction would be to lower the tax rate on our Social Security benefits. Lets keep in mind that during decades while we worked, the government was taking our money for Social Security contributions. Now, in giving that money back to us, up to 85 percent of our benefits are subject to federal tax  again!

In addition, I hope our Democratic members in the House join to fight any stimulus package that doesnt include relief from the SALT cap, enacted in 2017, which limits to $10,000 the federal income tax deduction for paying state and local taxes.

Biden and the Democrats would do well to keep in mind that senior citizens are voters, too, and that we will remember these issues when we go to the polls.

Greg McLaughlin, Belle Mead

Christie positions himself for 2nd presidential fail

Regarding Chris Christies lunacy about socialism, by Tom Moran of the Star-Ledger editorial board:

The editorial board should not be surprised that Christie is up to his old tricks of blatant self-promotion at the expense of the truth.

Remember the 2013 Stronger that the Storm tourism ads that Christie made with federal recovery funds after Hurricane Sandy  in his reelection year. They featured none other than Chris Christie.

Christies position as a political analyst for a major television network gives him a unique soapbox from which to spew his garbage. I hope ABC charges him for his political advertising.

The former governor made a de facto announcement of his intention to run in for president in 2024 when he criticized Donald Trump for not accepting the results of the 2020 election. This sets the stage for Christie, whose 2016 presidential bid ended early, to once again be humiliated in public during the 2024 campaign.

Regarding Trump, Christie went from certified lackey to sharp critic once he sensed Trump had lost his reelection bid, just as he morphed from a political moderate to a right-wing firebrand when he was running for president. Spare us.

Bill Gottdenker, Mountainside

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The pandemic situation determined Romanians to spend their Easter holidays and Labor Day in the country, where the number of tourists expected in hotels and bed & breakfasts will clock in at around 300,000, double over a normal year, said, on Thursday, for AGERPRES, Traian Badulescu, communications specialist with the National Association for Travel Agencies (ANAT).

According to him, Romanians are traveling all over the country, especially in rural bed & breakfasts, in mountain resorts and in balneal resorts, such as in the Danube Delta.

The littoral region was less sought out, as the two holidays coincided this year, and Romanians prefer Easter celebrations. Furthermore, the parties that are typical of the littoral area are not yet allowed, report agerpres."Bed & breakfasts and hotels at home have a high occupancy rate. If, in a normal year, we had around 100,000 - 150,000 Romanian tourists in the country, I estimate that this year the number will be double, so we will reach 200,000 - 300,000 tourists in accommodation units, but it's hard to estimate, because many are going on their own," mentioned Badulescu.Furthermore, the main foreign destination this year is Egypt."Thousands of Romanian tourists will go to Egypt for Easter, as never before. There are nearly 10 charter flights a day, from morning to evening, from several cities. The prices are very good for all-inclusive [packages], the situation is stable there and they only require a PCR test. A couple pays, on average, with flight included, between 700 and 1,000 euro per week," showed the ANAT representative.Other foreign destinations that are not on the yellow list are Zanzibar, Madeira, Tenerife and Morocco.A big issue in this period was the inclusion of Greece and Bulgaria on the yellow list, and thousands of Romanians had to cancel their reservations."Unfortunately, the Romanian side did not sign any protocol with Greece and we do not understand why. Only those vaccinated can still travel without quarantine and those who had COVID in the past 90 days, the rest of those who return from these countries must stay in quarantine. If we signed the protocols there would be no need for quarantine. And we do not understand, if upon return to the country a COVID PCR test may be required, maybe even an antigen one, why is quarantine still necessary, if those persons prove that they do not have COVID," Badulescu also said.The green certificate will solve at the European level these issues come summer, he said.
Her son Brooklyn is set to tie the knot with his fiancee Nicola Peltz next year.

And Victoria Beckham and her soon-to-be daughter-in-law demonstrated their close bond again on Thursday, a day after the former Spice Girl hilariously accused Nicola, 26, of stealing clothes from her wardrobe.

Taking to Instagram with a snap of herself having her trousers adjusted, Victoria, 47, revealed that she was in fittings for her upcoming SS21 collection, prompting Nicola to comment: 'Hurry and fit them so I can borrow!'

Stylish mother-in-law: Victoria Beckham, 47, and Nicola Peltz, 26, demonstrated their close bond again on Thursday - when Victoria shared a snap of herself in SS21 fittings

Funny: Poking fun at her tendency to borrow clothes from her future mother-in-law's wardrobe, Nicola wrote: 'Hurry and fit them so I can borrow!'

Looking typically stylish in a pair of sorbet yellow trousers, Victoria teamed her bottoms with a red shirt.

The brunette beauty wore her hair swept back in the snap, and joked in the caption: 'Found a much better use for the gym!'

She added: 'Fittings for the Spring Summer collection.'

It comes a day after Victoria shared a gushing Instagram post on her feed about Nicola on Wednesday evening.

Close bond: Victoria's son Brooklyn is set to tie the knot with his fiancee Nicola next year and the family have grown incredibly close

Ha! Victoria proved her son's bride-to-be is already part of the family as she shared a gushing Instagram post on her feed on Wednesday evening

The former Spice Girl joked that Nicola had 'been in her wardrobe again', as she modelled her 750 black bustier in a sizzling snap.

Nicola posed up a storm in the sexy garment in a blurry bathroom snap, pouting for the camera as she wore her bright blonde locks in tumbling waves.

The corset-style garment Nicola was wearing in the photograph is available to buy on Victoria's clothing website.

Victoria captioned the image: 'Looks like the future Mrs Beckham has been in my wardrobe again! [eyes emoji] but you're forgiven because I love this VB bustier on you @nicolapeltz [pink hearts].'

Cheeky! Underneath the image, Nicola wrote: [monkey covering eyes emoji] caught! I love you so much [hearts]'

Love you! Nicola also reshared Victoria's post on her own Instagram Story and affectionately wrote: 'I love you', alongside the image

Underneath the image, Nicola wrote: [monkey covering eyes emoji] caught! I love you so much [hearts].'

Nicola also reshared Victoria's post on her own Instagram Story and affectionately wrote: 'I love you', alongside the image.

Brooklyn mirrored his fiancee's post by also showing some love for his partner and his mother.

This isn't the first time Victoria has publicly shown support for her son's relationship, as earlier this year she wished Nicola a happy 26th birthday on Instagram.

Alongside a snap of the two of them together, she wrote: 'We love you!'

In December last year, Victoria also praised Brooklyn's fiancee as she spoke about their upcoming wedding in an interview on Lorraine.

Victoria, whose son, 22, popped the question to the American actress in July, enthused about their relationship as she said their engagement came at a 'nice' time.

Speaking to Mark Heyes from her office, Posh Spice gushed: 'We couldn't have asked for him to meet a more adorable lady!'

'We couldn't have asked for him to meet a more adorable lady!' Victoria praised Brooklyn's fiancee in an interview on Lorraine

The photographer and his partner 18 months have been inseparable ever since they went public with their romance last November.

Shedding light on their bond in a rare discussion, businesswoman Victoria said: 'They're so happy. She's wonderful, sweet and kind. She's such a lovely, warm woman. We couldn't have asked for Brooklyn to meet a more adorable lady.

'It's nice with everything that has gone on this year that Brooklyn has found his soulmate and the lady he wants to spend the rest of his life with.

Smitten: The fashion designer, whose son, 22, popped the question to the actress in July, enthused about their relationship as she said their engagement came at a 'nice' time

'During this time there's been so much uncertainty and that everything felt a little bit sad. So we are very happy and very excited.'

The entrepreneur, who also shares children Romeo, 18, Cruz, 15, and Harper, nine, with her husband David, 45, admitted she hasn't found an outfit for their nuptials - reported to be scheduled for 2022 - as she asked: 'What will I wear?!

'Everyone remembers Brooklyn being a little boy at David's Manchester United game and now he's a 21 year old man.'
(Photo : Pexels/Pixabay) Facebook news outlet

Social media giant Facebook announced on Apr. 29 that it will give $5 million to pay local journalists in multiyear deals as part of its new publishing platform to help independent writers attract an audience and make money through the social media network.

Facebook to Hire Journalists

The move is part of Facebook's answer to the trend of email newsletters, led by platforms like Substack, as it focuses on reporters who are usually the lone voice covering a given community, according to The Verge.

The publishing platform, which Facebook announced last month, will be integrated with Facebook Pages and will include a free self-publishing tool for journalists to send out newsletters or create their own websites.

Independent journalists in the United States can apply to Facebook's news program starting May 6, and priority will be given to reporters who plan to cover Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, or other audiences of color, in locations that lack an existing news source.

Also Read: Facebook Users to Manipulate Their News Feed, Soon: Content in Chronological Order to Arrive

Journalists will be able to earn additional money from publishing stories using Facebook's tools, starting with subscriptions, and each writer can set their own price, according to the social media platform.

The director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, Emily Bell, posted on Twitter that while journalists and their communities will benefit from Facebook's funding, the news industry will have to reckon with the economic foundation of the Faustian pact.

This is because Facebook has been used as a tool to oppress reporters around the world, and its business relies on news workers like content moderators who are not unionized or paid well.

Paid newsletters are growing, and it has shaken up the media industry, as high-profile journalists from outlets including Vox Media and the New York Times that have left to strike out on their own on platforms like Patreon and Substack. They were lured by uncapped earning potential from their subscribers and cash advances.

Just this month, Substack announced Substack Local, a program with a budget of $1 million set to pay up to 30 local reporters to build their own subscription-supported business, Reuters reported.

Facebook's Media History

Facebook added that it would partner with the Washington-based International Center for Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists to evaluate applications, and would give the journalists selected access to experts and services to help them create a news business.

The social network giant has long had a strained relationship with the news industry, which came to a head in February after a showdown with the Australian government over paying news outlets for content.

Following the conflict, Facebook pledged to invest $1 billion in the news industry globally over the next few years.

According to the BBC, Facebook was forced to block Australian news in response to the proposed legislation. The government's news code aims to set up a fairer negotiation process between the tech giants and news companies over the value of news content.

However, it has been opposed by Facebook and Google, as both companies argue the code misunderstands how the internet works. The platform has also said that it gets little commercial gain from the news content.

Related Article: Facebook, Australia Agree to Lift News Ban in the Next Days

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Sophie Webster

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Capgemini Group (CGEMY.PK, CAPP) reported first quarter revenues of 4.27 billion euros, up 24.2% at constant exchange rates, or up 20.4% at current exchange rates with the consolidation of Altran Technologies effective April 1st, 2020. The company noted that this momentum also reflects the double digit growth achieved in Digital and Cloud activities. Organic growth was 1.7%, for the quarter. First quarter bookings were 4.20 billion euros, up 27.3% at constant exchange rates year-on-year. For 2021, the Group plans to achieve a constant currency growth of 7.0% to 9.0%. 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.
Jerry Paular fondly remembered the Filipino farmhands he grew up with. They were so well-groomed and well-dressed, he said, that you would think they were movie stars.

They wore suits that were just unbelievable, Paular, a traveling suit salesman, once recalled. They would never go to a store and buy a $20 suit and hit the streets. These guys came out looking like movie actors. And yet, they were common laborers.

At that time, Macintosh Studios was the pinnacle of Hollywood style for men.

The bespoke suitmaker, whose main shop was on 222 Powell St. in San Francisco, opened in 1922. It served as the in-house designer for many of the big Hollywood studios in the 1930s, worn by the likes of pre-Hays Code stars such as William Powell, George Raft and James Gleason.

But the suits, and Filipinos' defiant appropriation of white Hollywood aesthetics, soon drew the ire of white Americans, with fatal consequences.

Macintosh Studios was the premier high-end Hollywood tailor of the era, Roberto Isola, a vintage suit collector in South San Francisco, told SFGATE. Every aspect of the construction, the materials that they used  theyre basically pieces of art.

Not much is known now of the suits provenance, even among vintage collectors like Isola. But these werent the slim-fitted, super-conservative and formal tuxedos so often associated with Roaring Twenties-style menswear.

Longtime Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once described the trademarks of a Macintosh suit: In the days when S.F. was chockablock with show people, the Macintosh suit was a legendary trademark  huge padded shoulders, drape shape, nipped-in waist, highrise pants with deep pleats.

The suits were made out of supple wool and fine silk, and had flourishes rarely included in off-the-rack suiting  like an auxiliary pants zipper that could be undone after an especially heavy supper, or triple darts on the jacket to provide better contouring around a mans figure. Pre-Hays Code fashion leaned toward what Isola referred to as an exaggerated look, with full lapels and broad ties to match.

A series of advertisements published in the Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle in the early '50s sought to capitalize on the brands legacy of dressing pop culture royalty. Figures like Jack Bailey, the stalwart host of the long-running game show Queen for a Day, and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, father of Candice Bergen, wore these suits, the ads proudly boasted. To wear a Macintosh suit, the ad copy reasoned, was to own a little sliver of Hollywood regalia, a little taste of the spoils of fame.

San Francisco Chronicle/Archive

They know that a Macintosh suit wins regular applause from men who value appearance, one ad read.

Another advertisement published in a 1953 New Yorker issue crowed that MacIntosh tailored over 41,400 suits for ladies and gentlemen in northern California.

These advertisements, in claiming a well-to-do, A-list pedigree, glossed over a small but vital clientele: Filipino laborers in the Bay Area and Northern California.

They wanted to be smart

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Filipino men desired bespoke suits out of sheer necessity. Off-the-rack suits available at the big, mass-market department stores like The Emporium, Montgomery Ward or Sears didnt fit the standard Filipino stature.

The suit jackets sold in stores ran all the way down the average Filipinos knees, recalled Anita Navalta Bautista, a self-described mestiza historian who was born in 1933 during the height of the Great Depression.

But once the Macintosh suit entrenched itself into the collective psyche of Filipino American men at the time, the fit was entirely beyond the point. The suits were worn as a small act of defiance, as if to steal a little taste of American luxury, to lay a tiny stake to the privilege of white, upward mobility in America.

The Philippines was taken over as an American colony in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, which resulted in a yearslong war between Filipino nationals who wanted independence and the American military. But starting in 1906, still reeling from the effects from the Philippine-American War, Filipino men began emigrating to America.

They were sought after for cheap farm labor and not subject to anti-Asian migration laws because of Americas colonial relationship to the Philippines. Filipino men at the time, however, were unable to own property and did not have any path to citizenship due to their colonial status.

American teachers in the Philippines also encouraged them to come to America, promising wealth and opportunity galore.

Archival / Unknown

Thousands, mostly men by a ratio of nearly 14 to 1, emigrated. By 1930, there were more than 30,000 in California.

And for many of them, the name Macintosh was synonymous with the finest suits, to the point where many would use the term Macintosh to refer to all of their suits  even the ones not made by the Macintosh brand itself. (In many first-person memoirs and other accounts by Filipinos, theyre more commonly referred to as McIntosh suits, sans the A.)

Bautista recalled that the suits cost about $100 back when her husband Cornelio, a musician at a taxi dance hall, would travel to San Francisco and get them custom-made for his performances.

Paular, the salesman, was employed by Macintosh to travel down to Filipino neighborhoods in Central and Northern California and get their measurements so that the suits could be made back on Powell Street. Other tailors in San Francisco, including one by the name of Sommer, advertised suits specifically to Filipinos.

The men were subject to degrading conditions and low pay at work. They most commonly worked as farm laborers, picking lettuce and asparagus in the dry California heat. Some Pinoy farmworkers were paid 90 cents a day for their work, less than half what their white counterparts earned on the fields.

One Chronicle article from 1930 reported that 80% of all asparagus pickers in the state were Filipino.

Those conditions didnt matter on their days off.

Barkada, the Tagalog word often used for friends that symbolizes a communion closer to brotherhood, would go to taxi dance halls, gambling dens and pool halls to unwind from the demeaning conditions of their work.

These manongs  a word in Ilocano, a native language in the Philippines, meaning eldest son but used in 1920s parlance to refer to these young Filipino bachelors  wore their finest Macintoshes for every leisurely activity.

With a Cuban cigar in their lips, their slicked-back hair covered by a Stetson hat and their suits perfectly tailored and pressed, they looked every bit as debonair as the leading men they religiously watched on the silver screens.

In a comprehensive account of Filipino men's style and consumer habits, the Filipino historian Mina Roces contended that their desire to emulate the dandiacal aesthetics of Hollywood leading men was an effort to achieve the white masculine ideals touted by Hollywood movies of the time, and to communicate success to relatives back in the Philippines.

These suits telegraphed a status and wealth that belied the backbreaking toil of their day jobs. It didnt matter where you came from, or what work you did, if you looked like money.

They wanted to be smart and wanted to wear the most expensive suits, but remember, Filipinos at the time in the 1930s were sending their money back home, Bautista told SFGATE.

Men would go to photo studios to take pictures, often in groups of three and four, in an effort to uphold a facade of spoils and success available in America. These photos, along with remittance payments, would be sent back to the probinsyas and baryos they left behind in the Philippines.

The photos are all uniformly stunning. Handsome men, dressed to the nines, became representatives of a dream to be realized in the country that colonized them.

The taxi dance hall, a 'den of iniquity'

Frederic Lewis/Getty Images

The most common place Filipino laborers wore their suits was to the taxi dance halls, something of a precursor to seedy nightclubs that originated from San Francisco's Barbary Coast dance halls in the early 20th century.

In these dance halls, men who were outcast in mainstream society  Filipino men, European immigrants, felons and men with disabilities among them  would go and dance with white women for a dime-a-dance worth of company.

The sociologist Paul G. Cressey, in his 1932 analysis of taxi dance halls and the men who frequented them titled The Taxi-Dance Hall, wrote of young Filipino bachelors: Dapperly dressed little Filipinos  come together, sometimes even in squads of six or eight, and slip quietly into the entrance.

The group of young Filipinos, Cressey lamented, had ulterior motives. (A chapter in his book is dedicated to the issue of The Filipinos.)

Orientals, and especially Filipino young men, he wrote, prove to be such lucrative sources of income that many young women, under the spur of opportunism, lay aside whatever racial prejudices they may have and give themselves to a thorough and systematic exploitation of them.

He explained this idea further in an interview with the Chronicle, in which he noted that young Filipinos were the most populous demographic foxtrotting and swinging with the white girls at California taxi dance halls.

To  most of the taxi dancers, a Filipino is a fish to be exploited, a victim much easier to extract money from than white men, he told the paper. The Filipino, on the other hand, thinks the American girl beautiful and fascinating, but certainly not modest and ladylike according to Filipino standards.

In these terms, the relationship was transactional, if littered with racist notions of Filipino culture and desire. The white woman got paid, the Filipino man was able to access companionship, if temporary, by doing dime jigs with women in these so-called dens of iniquity.

(In 1931, less than a tenth of the Filipino population in America were women  which further motivated the desire to splurge lavishly and gallivant with women from other ethnic groups.)

Laws prohibited the coupling of non-white men and white women, but these laws were effectively brushed aside as taxi-dance halls became breeding grounds for what many white Americans deemed to be immoral conduct and miscegenation.

Some accounts recalled the taxi dances being a tad more lurid than a good ol' swing, with grinding and neck-biting between the taxi girls and their dance partners.

A 1929 article in the Stockton Record went so far as to declare that the insistence of Filipinos that they be treated as equals by white girls has been the chief cause of friction between the races.

The idea ran rampant, but Filipino men were cavorting with white women anyway beyond their dancing  especially at these dance halls.

Some naive dancers, Cressey wrote, even grew fond of their Filipino suitors, pointing to his suave manners, dapper dressing, and politeness as factors for their illicit courtship.

Anti-Filipino racism persisted differently than other forms of Asian xenophobia. Cressey, the sociologist, said that Filipinos assimilated to American culture too well.

Rather, he noted that the young Filipino in this country is, from the point of view of some people, too readily Americanized, right down to their fashion. It was a stark contrast from the other Oriental groups, he wrote, that did not accommodate to American culture quickly enough. (Here, he casually overlooks the effect that American imperialism, even culturally, had on the Philippines.)

As signs of an economic downturn began to emerge, the suits became just another thing for white men to resent.

Branded as a social menace

A scandal in late 1929 set into motion a massive wave of anti-Filipino violence.

Perfecto Bandalan, a 22-year-old lettuce grower living in Salinas, was caught by Watsonville police sharing the same room in a boarding house as two white girls, 16-year-old Esther Chemick and her 11-year-old sister Bertha.

Bandalan and Chemick, a United Press article said, were set to be engaged  and spuriously claimed that the girls mother sold her off to Bandalan. (Other reports alleged that the Chemicks mother wanted Bertha, her youngest, to be raised by Esther and Bandalan.) He was sentenced to nine months in prison.

The incident, with the subtext being a Filipino preying on two young white girls, made waves throughout the state, and served as a vital flashpoint for white folks who deemed Filipinos a social ill.

Courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

A resolution at a Monterey Chamber of Commerce meeting in January 1930 by D.W. Rohrbach, a Watsonville judge, declared the Filipinos unwelcome inhabitants  a message that reverberated through the local press.

Crucial to his incendiary, dehumanizing message was the contradiction of Filipinos withstanding slum-like living conditions but spending all their money on Macintosh suits and Florsheim shoes to perfect their appearance and woo women.

For a wage that a white man cannot exist on, the Filipinos will take the job and, through the clannish, low standard mode of housing and feeding, practiced among them, will soon be well clothed, the message from Rohrbach read, according to a 1930 article in the Pajaronian, strutting about like a peacock and endeavoring to attract the eyes of the young American and Mexican girls.

A week later, California GOP Rep. Richard J. Welch introduced legislation to curtail Filipino immigration. This is the third Asiatic invasion of the Pacific coast, he said in Congress, the Healdsburg Tribune reported. (In the same breath, he denied that he was prejudiced toward Filipinos.)

All this stoked the furies of Californians, fearful of Filipino men stealing their jobs and their girls.

Less than a week after Welchs proclamation, the Monterey Bay Filipino Club, a taxi dance hall catering mostly to Filipinos, opened up in Watsonville. In protest, trouble-seeking whites, a King City Rustler article read, cut the light wires to the dance hall and broke up the party.

The turmoil between the manongs and the white men grew more dire. Nearly 500 white men and kids congregated at the club in opposition to it  and the white women employed at the club who resided in it.

The clubs white owner, Charles Paddon, and his brothers William and Edward, barricaded the entrances and shot at the mob with salt pellets.

A reporter with the King City Rustler said that non-Filipino entrants, including himself, were challenged  to state their business in order to prevent any altercations between Filipinos and whites.

Filipino men in Watsonville, regardless of whether they partook in the dancing, were hunted down and beaten en masse in one of the biggest riots in the towns history, which lasted nearly a week. Some were thrown off bridges into the nearby river. Businesses that employed Filipinos were destroyed. Around 50 others were reportedly injured. Police were forced to hide men in City Council chambers.

The violence climaxed when Fermin Tobera, a 22-year-old laborer, was killed by gunfire while hiding from the rioters. His body was anointed and sent back home to the motherland.

Healdsburg Tribune/Archive

Only eight of the hundreds of white rioters were detained. Four were charged, but only one faced a short stint in jail.

Filipinos in the Bay Area were incensed. One man present at the Watsonville riots said, We do not want to be branded as a social menace and the scum of the earth. Furthermore, we are under the American flag, and deserve some consideration.

Other race riots throughout the Bay Area emerged in the wake of Watsonville, including in San Francisco, San Jose and Stockton.

By this point, a backlash of sorts to the taxi dance halls and their attendees emerged in the Filipino community. The most prominent group to do so was the Filipino Federation of America (FFA), headquartered in Stockton.

Also wearing their finest Macintosh suits in white, as if to align themselves to puritanical good graces, the members of the FFA decried their fellow countrymens moral indiscretions and sought acceptance from white Americans.

He must keep from dancing, drinking alcoholic drink, gambling, smoking, pool halls, strikes, violence, resistance, and all things that are destructive to humanity, read the groups constitution.

The suits, rather than flaunting a degree of success and desirability, were deployed as a show of respectability. Roces wrote that their motivation for this refashioning of the Filipino male was to prove that Filipinos were not a social problem.

Their efforts were to no avail. Shortly after the Watsonville riots, the FFA headquarters were bombed, left in shambles. Its occupants were thrown out of windows. They were blamed for perpetrating the attack on their own building.

Courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

The riots persisted well into the Great Depression. In 1934, a weekslong farmers strike in Salinas reached a fever pitch when Filipino farmworkers were shot at and their labor camp burned down, a response to increased hostility toward a Filipino labor union. The Healdsburg Tribune reported that it was seemingly in retaliation to a deputy and a highway patrolman being injured in the midst of the strike.

But shortly after, the threat of the Filipino was contained.

The Tydings-McDuffie Act, signed in 1935, eventually succeeded in curtailing Filipino migration to the U.S. for good, a crummy compromise that appeased the anti-Filipino movement and promised Philippine independence. In doing so, the law brought Filipino immigration to a screeching halt, admitting only 50 Filipino nationals a year to the country.

Macintosh suits also lost their luster in Hollywood come World War II. As the '30s studio system gave way to the Hays Code, so too did the excesses of the suits.

Glimmers of the Macintosh style lingered with the emergence of zoot suits, popularized by the jazz musician Cab Calloway and among Black, Filipino and Latino men of the era. It became the style that men of color wore in the World War II era, a sartorial protest over the rationing restrictions imposed during the time.

Taxi dance halls' popularity started to wane after the war, and started to largely shut down in the '50s and '60s just as Macintosh was clinging to its legacy of dressing Hollywoods finest in those advertisements.

The Macintosh Studio shop at 222 Powell St. shut down in 1984, and its building now stands as Sam's Cable Car Lounge. But for Filipinos of a certain age, beyond its celebrity heritage, the memory of the suits lives on as an aspirational item and as a sometimes-painful reminder of their standing in American history.
Safari Goers Stunned When Family of Cheetahs Mount Their Vehicle to Relax and Scout Gazelle

Forget having a tiger in your tankthis group of surprised safari goers were stunned when a group of cheetahs decided to lie across their vehicles open sunroof and hood.

Wildlife photographer Bhargava Srivari, 29, took these photos whilst visiting Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, east Africa.

The pictures show a group of cheetahs climbing onto a safari vehicle, which is filled with shocked visitors, as the large, lounging cats keep an eye out for any nearby prey.

A coalition of cheetahs mount a safari vehicle in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. (Caters News)

Bhargava has been visiting wildlife reserves since he was a child and couldnt believe his luck in getting up close to the elegant spotted felines.

But despite the initial excitement, the group quickly realized they could be in some danger as the sun roof was completely open, exposing them to the adult cheetahs.

I make annual trips to the Masai Mara to follow the migration and photograph the other wealth of wildlife in the area, said Bhargava, from Hyderabad, India.

One of the cheetahs relaxes on the hood of the safari vehicle. (Caters News)

These pictures were taken in the afternoon as a mother and her four sub-adult adolescents were on the lookout for a hunt but given the dry plains, there was not much plains game.

For any big cat, being perched at a height from the ground helps in seeing on to the plains and identifying potential prey moving in their direction so these cheetahs decided climbing on to the safari cars was the only way they could get to the vantage point.

The family picked different vehicles to use as the vantage point and in the process, different members got on to different vehicles.

But they couldnt find any prey on the horizon so they all decided to use the safari car as a relaxation spot for the remainder of the hot afternoon.

A coalition of cheetahs relaxing on top of a safari vehicle. (Caters News)

Bhargava says they were extremely lucky on that day that the cheetahs trusted them and felt the vehicle safe enough to use as a spot for some rest and relaxation.

He added, Initially, I was really excited as it was the first time I was experiencing anything like it but before we knew it, there were five adult cheetahs on our vehicle and I did feel some fear because you never know how a wild animal would react if one of them slipped on the thin rail and fell into the vehicle.

The sunroof was completely open meaning they could have easily got inside if they had wanted to.

Luckily, they just stayed on top of the vehicle for around twothree hours after which they spotted a group of gazelle far away and leapt off our vehicle on their hunt.

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.

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[April 29, 2021] Emerson Helps Neste Rapidly Increase Production of Biofuels

Emerson (News - Alert) (NYSE: EMR), a global technology, software and engineering company, has been selected to support Neste's digital transformation of its expanded refinery in Tuas, Singapore. Emerson's automation systems and software will help Neste deliver high-performance, efficient operations, supporting Neste's plans to increase production by up to 1.3 million tons per annum by 2023. Neste is the world's largest producer for renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel produced from renewable waste and residue raw materials. At the end of 2018, Neste made a strategic decision to expand its production facility in Singapore via the Singapore Expansion Project. On top of its existing 1.3 million tons annual production capacity of renewable diesel, the expanded refinery will have additional capacity to produce up to 1 million tons of sustainable aviation fuel and renewable raw materials for polymers and chemicals, supporting the company's goal to reduce customers' greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tons annually by 2030. To ensure the construction of the Neste Singapore Expansion Project is on time and on budget, Emerson is working with Neste to incorporate its Project Certainty methodology, the company's approach to ensuring successful capital project execution. Emerson will help Neste complete automation system implementation smoothly to bring Neste's expanded refinery on line by 2023. Cloud engineering capabilities enable global engineering teams to collaborate remotely to optimize project designs and accelerate project schedules. Smart Commissioning software automates device commissioning, enabling faster, smoother startup of the production. "By incorporating a digital foundation, advanced analytics and mobile collaboration capabilities into its expanded refinery's opertions starting from its construction phase, Neste is well positioned for long-term operational excellence," said Ron Martin (News - Alert) , president for Emerson's process systems and solutions business.



Neste will apply Emerson's DeltaV automation system and software to control production for efficient performance and to deliver on-demand remote access to data and analytics. Emerson's advanced systems, software, analytics and mobility tools - part of its Plantweb digital ecosystem - establish the foundation to digitally transform operations by turning relevant data into new operational insights and actionable information that empower better decision-making. For more on Emerson's Plantweb digital ecosystem, visit Emerson.com/Plantweb

For more on Emerson's DeltaV automation system, visit Emerson.com/DeltaV About Emerson Emerson (NYSE: EMR), headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), is a global technology and engineering company providing innovative solutions for customers in industrial, commercial and residential markets. Our Automation Solutions business helps process, hybrid and discrete manufacturers maximize production, protect personnel and the environment while optimizing their energy and operating costs. Our Commercial & Residential Solutions business helps ensure human comfort and health, protect food quality and safety, advance energy efficiency and create sustainable infrastructure. For more information, visit Emerson.com. Additional resources: Join the Emerson Exchange 365 Community

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New Delhi:

Union Minister Ramdas Athawale suggested the Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi to marry a Dalit woman. He on Sunday also stated that casteism cannot be eradicated merely by having meals with people of the community on Sunday in East Maharashtra's Akola.

Republican Party of India (Athavale) chief and a Dalit leader Ramdas Athawale said that he could help find a match for the Congress vice-president.

Gandhi regularly visits houses of Dalits and eats with them. I think he should marry a Dalit woman, said Athawale.

The minister of state for social justice also suggested that he could help Gandhi find a bride. If needed, I will help finding one (match) for him, added Athawale.

Athawale after suggesting said that he had no intentions to hurt or insult Rahul Gandhi on his marriage plans.

"I'm proposing it to present a model before the country. I have personally married a Brahmin girl. Casteism cannot be eradicated only by eating together," added the minister.

Also read: Union minister Ramdas Athawale pitches for SC, ST quota in Cabinet, Rajya Sabha

The Congress vice-president recently had said that he believed in destiny when it came to marriage. Jab hogi, tab hogi (It will happen when it does)

Also read: Meet Pidi, the 'Bot' behind Rahul Gandhi's increasing social media popularity

Athawale also said, Rahul is not 'Pappu' anymore. He looks confident and hopefully can be a good leader."

Certain section of social media mock Rahul Gandhi by referring him as Pappu.

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NEW YORK and INDEPENDENCE, Ohio, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Two Sigma Impact, the impact investing business of Two Sigma, and Avance Investment Management ("Avance"), a private equity firm that invests in established lower-middle market services and consumer businesses, today announced they have acquired Wholesale Supplies Plus ("WSP" or the "Company"), a leading e-commerce provider of ingredients and supplies to commercial artisans who create personal care, beauty and home fragrance products. The Company will continue to be led by Sam Solomon, Chief Executive Officer of WSP, and the senior management team. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

WSP is an industry-leading provider of high-quality raw materials, supplies and packaging for soap, skincare and candle artisans. The company's broad product assortment and complementary support enable an expanding artisan community to meet growing consumer demand for authentic, local and clean label personal products. WSP has attracted a large base of engaged, recurring customers and has enjoyed more than 15 consecutive years of organic revenue growth across multiple economic cycles.

"More than two decades ago, WSP was established to provide aspiring commercial crafters with affordable and professional quality soap, skincare and candle-making supplies. Today's announcement is a testament to our customers' success and our team's ability to meet the growing demand for high-quality ingredients and services. I could not be more proud of the WSP team's dedication and hard work," said Mr. Solomon. "We have gotten to know the Two Sigma Impact and Avance teams quite well over the past few months and are eager to join forces and continue scaling the business with their expertise and support."

"We are thrilled to partner with Sam, the management team and Avance to support WSP through its next phase of growth," said Amar Doshi, Senior Principal at Two Sigma Impact. "The Company is a well-recognized leader in this large and growing market with a steadfast commitment to being a responsible employer and to the success of its small business customers. We look forward to working with the Company on a variety of growth initiatives including enhanced marketing through the use of data science and accretive acquisitions."

"WSP is the ideal first investment for our firm," said Luis Zaldivar, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Avance. "Its leading market position and opportunity for continued organic and inorganic growth, are emblematic of the type of company with which we look to partner. Together with Two Sigma Impact, we are excited to support WSP, Sam and the entire management team as they continue meeting the needs of their ever growing, loyal customer base."

About Wholesale Supplies Plus

WSP is an industry-leading provider of high-quality raw materials, supplies and packaging for soap, skincare and candle artisans. The company's broad product assortment and complementary support enable an expanding artisan community to meet growing consumer demand for authentic, local and clean label personal products.

About Two Sigma Impact

Two Sigma Impact is a business of Two Sigma. Its mission is to combine active, principled ownership and data science with the goal of achieving superior returns and positive social outcomes. The Two Sigma Impact team is focused on workforce impact  where they anticipate innovative and thoughtful investments in humans will lead to an enhanced employee experience, productivity, and long-term financial returns. As part of Two Sigma, Two Sigma Impact has access to expertise in data science, technology, and a range of corporate specialties, and seeks to support its portfolio companies with those resources.

About Avance Investment Management

Avance is a private equity firm with a passion for building great businesses in partnership with talented management teams. Avance focuses primarily on thematic investments within the Services and Consumer areas in the US, seeking attractive opportunities with catalysts for growth and fragmented spaces with consolidation opportunities. Avance's team has a long history of partnering with founder-owned businesses, industry executives, and management teams and aims to add value to each investment through the application of its STAGE value creation framework. Avance has offices in New York and Miami.

Avance Media Contact

Julie Hamilton

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher

212.355.4449

Two Sigma Impact Media Contact

Andrew McGloin

Two Sigma

[email protected]

SOURCE Two Sigma
Thin Mints, Samoas and Do-si-dos are going to new heights, as the Girl Scout use drones to deliver cookies to a Virginia community with the help of a Google-affiliate tech firm.

Wing, a subsidiary of Google's corporate parent Alphabet, is adding the iconic cookies to its list of drone delivery goods in Christiansburg.

The town has been part of Wing's drone testing since 2019, which has dropped drugstore offerings, FedEx packages and locally-made pastries, tacos and cold brew coffees at people's homes.

The Alphabet-owned firm is working with the Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline in a bid to help boost cookie sales that have taken a major hit amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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Thin Mints, Samoas and Do-si-dos are going to new heights with the help of a Google Google affiliate is using drones to deliver Girl Scout cookies to a Virginia community

The cookies will be available for drone delivery through the Wing app or consumers can place an order on the Christiansburg website until the end of May, USA Today reports.

Lia Reich, Wing global communications lead, told USA TODAYs that Wing is committed to 3,000 boxes of cookies but if needed will deliver more.

The cookie sales began around 1917 as a way to finance troop activities and have always been sold by Girl Scouts outside of stores or door-to-door.

However, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed Americans into their homes and shuttered stores, resulting in a major decline in cookie sales.

The Alphabet-owned firm is working with the Girl Scouts of Virginia Skyline in a bid to help boost cookie sales that have taken a major hit amid the coronavirus pandemic

'Even with loosening COVID restrictions, the traditional method of selling cookies outside of grocery stores or shops is difficult this year, and sales are down about 50 percent from prior years,' Reich told USA Today.

Wing has really taken off amid the pandemic, as it has helped residents of the Virginia town obtain necessary goods - and the occasional coffee.

However, federal officials began rolling out new rules in early April that will allow operators to fly small drones over people and at night, potentially giving a boost to commercial use of the machines.

And this means Wing may soon have some competition, specifically Amazon that has also been working on drone delivery for years.

The cookies will be available for drone delivery through the Wing app or consumers can place an order on the Christiansburg website until the end of May

Wing, a subsidiary of Google's corporate parent Alphabet, is adding the iconic cookies to its list of drone delivery goods in Christiansburg

Amazon has also been working on drone delivery for years and partnered with UPS for trials in 2019

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a TV interview that drones would be flying to customer's homes within five years, but that deadline has long since passed.

The company did win government approval to deliver packages by drones last August, but Amazon said it was still testing them and hasnt started delivering goods to shoppers yet.

David Vos, an aerospace engineer who led Googles Wing project until 2016, said he has been surprised that drone delivery projects havent taken off more quickly.

'I thought it was completely doable to be up and going by 2021,' Vos said. While he still thinks drone technology is getting closer to delivering the size, weight and power needed to transport goods safely in populated places, Vos said the tech industry also needs a cultural shift.

In particular, he said, it needs to bring on people from the traditional aviation industry who have experience building 'safety-critical systems' that meet strict government standards.
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Frequently Asked Questions during Covid-19

Statement

Frequently Asked Questions during Covid-19

Below, you can find answers to the following questions:

I am a U.S. citizen in the U.S. Can I travel to Ireland?

I am a U.S. citizen and/or U.S. legal permanent resident currently in Ireland, can I travel to the U.S.?

I am an Irish citizen in the U.S., can I travel to Ireland?

I am an Irish citizen in Ireland, can I travel to the United States?

What Covid-19 public health restrictions are currently in place in Ireland?

Can I renew my Irish passport at the current time?

Can I apply for my first Irish passport at the current time?

I am in the process of applying for Irish citizenship through the Foreign Birth Registration (FBR) process, can I still submit my application at the current time?

Do I require a visa to travel to Ireland and how can I obtain a visa?

Is the Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco open?

How do I contact the Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco?

Question: I am a U.S. citizen in the U.S., can I travel to Ireland?

We strongly advise against all non-essential international travel.

The Government of Ireland has introduced stricter measures, including more control and enforcement and higher penalties, regarding non-essential international travel which is in breach of Ireland's Level 5 restrictions under the National Framework on Living with COVID-19. Persons travelling to and from airports may be asked to provide proof of essential travel.

If you must travel to Ireland, please note:

You will need to fill out a COVID-19 Passenger Locator Form online before you travel. To complete the COVID-19 Passenger Locator Form online, please click here . Paper versions of the form are also available at points of entry into Ireland, if required.



You will need to obtain a negative result from a pre-departure PCR Covid-19 test (i.e. Covid-19 not detected) before you travel.

Passengers from all countries will be required to show evidence of a negative result from a pre-departure PCR Covid-19 test (Covid-19 not detected) taken up to 72 hours prior to arrival in Ireland.



Passengers may be asked to present evidence of their negative/not detected result before boarding their airplane or ferry, and will be required to produce this evidence to Immigration Officers on arrival in Ireland.



Passengers who arrive in an Irish Airport or Sea Port without evidence of a negative/not detected test result commit an offence and may be subject to prosecution, punishable by a fine not exceeding 2,500 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or both.



The PCR Covid-19 test is currently the only test type considered acceptable by public health authorities in Ireland in relation to international travel.



Exemptions are limited to international transport workers, including hauliers, pilots and aviation crew, masters and maritime crew, and members of An Garda Siochana in the course of their duties. Children under six are exempt. For more information, please click here .

.

If a citizen has a genuine humanitarian emergency requiring urgent travel, please contact us immediately by phone (+1 415 823 7150) for advice and consular assistance before commencing the journey.

IF YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN VACCINATED:

You will be required to quarantine upon arrival in Ireland in a designated quarantine facility (Mandatory Hotel Quarantine).

You will be required to quarantine at a designated facility (mandatory hotel quarantine), and to have pre-booked on this portal prior to travel.

prior to travel.

On arrival in Ireland you will be greeted and escorted to a designated quarantine facility.



You must complete a minimum period of ten days of mandatory quarantine in a hotel. However, if you receive a negative or not detected result from a Covid-19 PCR test taken on day ten, your period of quarantine may be completed at home (i.e. the remaining four days of the total 14 day quarantine period).



More information can be found on the Government of Irelands website  click here.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN VACCINATED:

If you are fully vaccinated and have the documents to prove that then you do not have to complete mandatory hotel quarantine when you come to Ireland.

However, if even you are fully vaccinated, you still have to have a negative pre-departure PCR test and complete a period of self-quarantine at home or wherever you specified in your passenger locator form. This period of self-quarantine is 14 days. You can end your self-quarantine if you if you receive written confirmation of a negative or not detected RT-PCR test result taken no less than 5 days after arrival.

What 'fully vaccinated' means:

Type of vaccine You are regarded as fully vaccinated after Pfizer-BioNtech 7 days after 2nd dose Moderna 14 days after 2nd dose Oxford-AstraZeneca 15 days after 2nd dose Johnson & Johnson/Janssen 14 days after single dose

Note: Unvaccinated dependents (including minors/children) travelling with a fully vaccinated person who are exempt from the Mandatory Hotel Quarantine requirement and can self-quarantine at home/at the address given on the Passenger Locator Form. Please note that all passengers (except for children under the age of six) still need to obtain a negative result from a pre-departure PCR Covid-19 test (i.e. Covid-19 not detected) before you travel.

We recommend that U.S. citizens also contact the U.S. State Department and/or the U.S. Embassy in Dublin for travel advice for Ireland.

You will need to check any re-entry requirements for the United States. Since 26 January 2021, all airline passengers to the United States aged two years and older must provide a negative Covid-19 viral test taken within three calendar days of travel. For more information, please visit the website of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin.

Please also check the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the website of your U.S. state health department for the most up-to-date requirements.

Information about companies providing pre-departure PCR tests for the purpose of international travel can be found on the Dublin Airport website and the Cork Airport website.

If you have further questions on travel to the U.S. we advise that you visit the website of the U.S. Embassy.

Question: I am a U.S. citizen and/or U.S. legal permanent resident currently in Ireland, can I travel to the U.S.?

U.S. and non-U.S. nationals with legal permanent residence in the U.S. (i.e. Green Card holders) and their immediate family, as well as the immediate family (spouse and children) of U.S. nationals, are not restricted from entering the U.S.

You will need to check any re-entry requirements for the United States. Since 26 January 2021, all airline passengers to the United States aged two years and older must provide a negative Covid-19 viral test taken within three calendar days of travel. For more information, please visit the website of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin.

Please also check the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the website of your U.S. state health department for the most up-to-date requirements.

Information about companies providing pre-departure PCR tests for the purpose of international travel can be found on the Dublin Airport website and the Cork Airport website.

If you have further questions on travel to the U.S. we advise that you visit the website of the U.S. Embassy.

Question: I am an Irish citizen in the U.S., can I travel to Ireland?

We strongly advise against all non-essential international travel.

The Government of Ireland has introduced stricter measures, including more control and enforcement and higher penalties, regarding non-essential international travel which is in breach of Ireland's Level 5 restrictions under the National Framework on Living with COVID-19. Persons travelling to and from airports may be asked to provide proof of essential travel.

If you must travel to Ireland, please note:

You will need to fill out a Covid-19 Passenger Locator Form online before you travel. To complete the COVID-19 Passenger Locator Form online, please click here . Paper versions of the form are also available at points of entry into Ireland, if required.



You will need to obtain a negative result from a pre-departure PCR Covid-19 test (i.e. Covid-19 not detected) before you travel.

Passengers from all countries will be required to show evidence of a negative result from a pre-departure PCR Covid-19 test (Covid-19 not detected) taken up to 72 hours prior to arrival in Ireland.



Passengers may be asked to present evidence of their negative/not detected result before boarding their airplane or ferry, and will be required to produce this evidence to Immigration Officers on arrival in Ireland.



Passengers who arrive in an Irish Airport or Sea Port without evidence of a negative/not detected test result commit an offence and may be subject to prosecution, punishable by a fine not exceeding 2,500 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or both.



The PCR Covid-19 test is currently the only test type considered acceptable by public health authorities in Ireland in relation to international travel.



Exemptions are limited to international transport workers, including hauliers, pilots and aviation crew, masters and maritime crew, and members of An Garda Siochana in the course of their duties. Children under six are also exempt. For more information, please click here .

.

If a citizen has a genuine humanitarian emergency requiring urgent travel, please contact us immediately by phone (+1 415 823 7150) for advice and consular assistance before commencing their journey.

You will be required to quarantine upon arrival in Ireland in a designated quarantine facility (Mandatory Hotel Quarantine).

You will be required to quarantine at a designated facility (mandatory hotel quarantine), and to have pre-booked on this portal prior to travel.

prior to travel.

On arrival in Ireland you will be greeted and escorted to a designated quarantine facility.



You must complete a minimum period of ten days of mandatory quarantine in a hotel. However, if you receive a negative or not detected result from a Covid-19 PCR test taken on day ten, your period of quarantine may be completed at home (i.e. the remaining four days of the total 14 day quarantine period).



More information is on the Government of Irelands website here.

Question: I am an Irish citizen in Ireland, can I travel to the United States?

We strongly advise against all non-essential international travel.

The Government of Ireland has introduced stricter measures, including more control and enforcement and higher penalties, regarding non-essential international travel which is in breach of Ireland's Level 5 restrictions under the National Framework on Living with COVID-19. Persons travelling to and from airports may be asked to provide proof of essential travel.

PLEASE NOTE: Your ability to enter the U.S. after your travel to Ireland will depend on your immigration status in the U.S. For more information please visit the website of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin.

If you are eligible enter the U.S., you will also need to check any entry requirements for the United States. Effective 26 January 2021, all airline passengers to the United States ages two years and older must provide a negative Covid-19 viral test taken within three calendar days of travel. For more information, please visit the website of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin.

Please also check the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the website of your U.S. state health department for the most up-to-date requirements.

Information about companies providing pre-departure PCR tests for the purpose of international travel can be found on the Dublin Airport website and the Cork Airport website.

If you have further questions on travel to the U.S., you are advised to visit the website of the U.S. Embassy.

Question: What Covid-19 public health restrictions are currently in place in Ireland?

Ireland is currently in Level 5 restrictions under Irelands National Framework on Living with COVID-19.

For more information about these restrictions, please click here.

Question: Can I renew my Irish passport at the current time?

The Passport Service has paused operations in line with the move to Level 5 restrictions under Irelands National Framework on Living with COVID-19.

Passport Online is open to all applicants, including children, renewing their passports in the United States. These applications will be processed when the Passport Services resumes operations at Level 4.

To apply via Passport Online, please click here.

If you have already applied for a renewal online, the Passport Office is requesting that customers do not submit supporting documentation at this time. If you have already submitted documentation, it will be held securely. If you need documents returned to you, please contact the Passport Service via their WebChat (here). If you have not submitted supporting documents yet, please wait to submit until Ireland has returned to Level 4 or lower on the National Framework for Living with Covid-19.

If you are currently located in our consular region and you need an Irish travel document for urgent travel due to a genuine emergency, please call us on +1 415 823 7150.

Question: Can I apply for my first Irish passport at the current time?

The Passport Service in Ireland has paused operations in line with the move to Level 5 restrictions under Irelands National Framework on Living with COVID-19. Under this framework, paper passport applications (as used by first time applicants and those whose last passport was issued more than 15 years ago), will not be processed until Ireland moves to Level Three.

The Passport Service is extending its online passport application service, Passport Online, to all applicants applying from the US (including first time applicants). We are no longer sending out paper application forms, as it will be faster to apply through the new online system.

Passport Online is a fast and simple way to apply for your passport. Once you upload a photograph, it takes about ten minutes to complete the online application form and pay with a credit card. If you are an adult renewing your passport with the same information, it is unlikely that you will be required to submit supporting documentation. If you are a first time applicant, renewing for a child or changing the information on your passport, Passport Online will e-mail you a list of documents which you need to submit directly to the Passport Service in Ireland. When your passport is printed, it will be posted back to you directly.

If you previously received a passport application form from us, please be aware that we will not be processing paper applications apart from in exceptional cases from now on. We will not be accepting paper applications and will return same to the applicant.

If you are currently located in our consular region and you need an Irish travel document for urgent travel due to a genuine emergency, please call +1 415 823 7150

Question: I am in the process of applying for Irish citizenship through the Foreign Birth Registration (FBR) process, can I still submit my application at the current time?

The processing of Foreign Birth Registrations or FBRs (through which Irish citizenship can be claimed by persons with a grandparent born on the island of Ireland) is paused due to level 5 restrictions under Irelands National Framework on Living with COVID-19.

Please do not send supporting documentation as these cannot be processed at this time.

Please visit the Foreign Birth Registration page of the Department of Foreign Affairs website for the latest updates on this service.

When processing resumes, it is estimated that it will take between 12 to 18 months to process a completed FBR application.

Question: Do I require a visa to travel to Ireland and how can I obtain a visa?

The Government of Ireland continues to recommend against any non-essential travel to Ireland at present. The U.S. government also advises against most non-essential international travel currently, including to Ireland.

You do not need an entry visa for Ireland if you are a passport holder of the United States.

If you are a national of another country that is visa required for Ireland (please note that all countries in South America are now visa required), please note the Department of Justice and Equality has temporarily ceased accepting new visa/ preclearance applications globally with the exception of those in the Emergency/Priority list, since 29 January.

While it will still be possible to apply for an Irish visa/preclearance online in the normal manner, these temporary measures mean that applicants will not be able to complete their application process and we apologise for any inconvenience this might cause. Please note that any application made online will remain valid until such time as restrictions are lifted.

We intend to resume accepting applications as soon as safety concerns abate.

Certain priority/emergency cases will continue to be processed. For further information please see the website of Immigration Service Delivery.

We currently are only issuing visas for certain types of priority/emergency cases. More information can be found here.

For priority/emergency visa applications, please contact us directly so that we can guide you through the application process and advise you how to submit your documentation.

Question: Is the Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco open?

Yes. We are currently operating on a skeletal in office basis. However, our public office is not open at this time.

Question: How do I contact the Consulate General of Ireland, San Francisco?

For general queries, the main phone line (+1 415 823 7150) is open Monday to Friday from 8:30 AM- 4.30 PM. Please leave a detailed voice message with your name, your phone number, and the nature of your enquiry. A staff member will then return your call as soon as possible. Alternatively, you can use the Contact Us section of this website.

For emergencies (i.e. a genuine emergency involving an Irish citizen who is seeking consular assistance), please note that you can leave an emergency message on the phone system at any time by contacting the Consulate at +1 415 823 7150.

Please leave a detailed voice message with your name, your phone number, and the nature of your enquiry. The on-call duty officer will then return your call as soon as possible.

 Previous Item |
Smita Patil had already carved her name in the annals of Indian history with her path-breaking performance in many films but her son, Prateik Babbar has taken it one step further by getting her name tattooed on his chest along with her date of birth and an infinity symbol.

Inked my mothers name on my heart.. smita #4ever 1955 - a, the actor wrote in the caption while sharing the picture of the tattoo on Instagram. Babbars half-brother, Aarya and others dropped heart emojis and sweet messages in the comments section, having found this gesture wholesome. Patil died at the age of 31 but had already won two National Awards by then. She has starred in iconic movies like Bhumika, Mirch Masala, Bazaar, Mandi and Arth. Smita was also the recipient of the Padma Shri, Indias fourth-highest civilian honour and even won a Filmfare Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Female) for Chakra.
London:

Britain's Prince George is on the hit list of the Islamic State terror group which has threatened to kill the four-year-old son of Prince William and Kate Middleton, according to a UK media report.



The threat appeared as part of a message posted by ISIS members on social media.



George, who is the third-in-line to the British throne, had started his term at a primary school near the family's Kensington Palace home in central London last month.



According to the 'Star on Sunday', a picture was posted of George next to his new school Thomas's Battersea with the caption "School Starts Early" on a popular ISIS channel on the secretive messaging service Telegram.



The newspaper said the post also featured words in Arabic which translate as - "When war comes with the melody of bullets, we descend on disbelief, desiring retaliation".



ISIS is known to favour Telegram because messages are encrypted and keep the user's location hidden.



The newspaper claimed its investigators discovered the message that seemed to target the young royal.



British intelligence officials are believed to be regularly monitoring the messaging service for ISIS activity.



Concerns about security at George's school have already been raised after a woman filmed herself wandering its corridors unchallenged days before term started.



Weeks later a woman was arrested at the school on suspicion of attempted burglary.



The Metropolitan Police had said it would be reviewing security arrangements at the school following the arrest.

Also read: US-backed forces claim to have captured Raqa from ISIS



Also read: IS attacks displaced Syrians, kills 18 people: Monitor

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
The campaigna collaboration between the Ad Council and Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company created by Melinda Gatescomes at a time when many young people are struggling with isolation and stress caused by the pandemic, on top of the normal pressures of growing up. Sound It Out places an emphasis on reaching parents and caregivers in Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities, which often face the additional trauma of systemic racism and greater challenges in accessing the support they need. Songs, videos and resources will be available in English and Spanish.

Inspired by the insight that music can help unlock conversations between middle schoolers and their parents or caregivers, the campaign features exclusive new music and interviews from recording artists KAMAUU, Tobe Nwigwe, Lauren Jauregui and Empress Of. The artists participated in intimate conversations with middle schoolers and their caregivers, facilitated by mental health experts, and translated the kids' emotions and experiences into songs.

"The most impressionable minds of any group of people are the minds of children. In America, the most systematically attacked and targeted community is the 'Black' community," said KAMAUU, who wrote and recorded a song inspired by his conversation with Howie, a 14-year-old from New York. "I was drawn to participate and be a part of this project in the name of self-preservation. In doing what I can to help the youth and parents (fathers and mothers), I can help create a better community for myself and for my future children."

"Conversations with young people about their emotional health and wellbeing can be difficult, but are critically important, especially during a pandemic that has left many feeling isolated and alone," said Dr. Renee Wittemyer, Director of Program Strategy and Investment for Pivotal Ventures. "The Sound It Out campaign uses the unique power of music to help young people and the adults who care for them find a common language to express these emotions. Innovative efforts like this one are essential to helping more young people get the support they need."

There is currently a mental health crisis among our nation's youth. The transitional period of adolescence marks a critical time for parents and caregivers to engage their children in conversations around their emotional wellbeing.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than half of mental illness begins before age 14

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports the suicide rate nearly tripled among young people aged 10-14 between 2007 and 2017

2017 A CDC analysis shows that the share of emergency room visits for mental health challenges, like panic and anxiety, increased by 31% among adolescents aged 12-17 during the pandemic, indicating the negative effects of social isolation and lockdowns

"The Sound it Out project is a labor of love. Grounded in careful consideration of the cultural nuances relevant for Black and Latinx families, this project is led by a team with deep commitment to getting the conversation right," said Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble, psychologist and founder of mental health nonprofit the AAKOMA Project. "Together, we have worked diligently to incorporate a culturally fluent approach to supporting families of color in building effective conversations for reducing mental illness stigma and fostering emotional wellbeing. I am so proud to be a team member and expert advisor on this project."

"Getting middle schoolers to open up about their emotions can be hard, but music is a powerful medium that helps us put our thoughts and feelings into words. When we can't find a way to say it, there's probably a song that can," said Heidi Arthur, Chief Campaign Development Officer at the Ad Council. "At a time when it couldn't be more needed, Sound It Out uses music to help parents and caregivers have more meaningful conversations with their kids about their emotional wellbeing."

Public service advertisements (PSAs) for the campaign, developed by McCann with support from Casanova//McCann, EGAMI Group and Mass Appeal, will appear nationwide in time and space donated by the media. The campaign also features a music video for KAMAUU's song "Howie and the Howl," directed by Jared Malik Royal and featuring the work of prominent artist Hebru Brantley, whose iconic work elevates the narrative of Black heroes. An intentional collective of diverse creatives brought the campaign to life, including the photographer, video director, director of photography, editor, producers, mix engineers and stylists.

Media agency UM is providing pro bono media strategy and outreach. Bustle Digital Group, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok and ViacomCBS are among the media platforms that will support the campaign with donated media. Additionally, ViacomCBS will provide custom content and content integration as part of their ongoing focus on tackling mental health crisis through media and storytelling.

The exclusive album will be available to stream across Amazon Music, Apple Music, deezer, Google Play, iTunes, Pandora, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube. Caregivers can also access the campaign videos, songs and resources on Sound It Out channels on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

"The generational stigma and subsequent gravity of mental health conversations in my community have been top of mind more than ever. It feels inaccessible not only from a lack of tools, but from a lack of the language to talk about it. The lyrics of music, however, have the magic to speak on every emotion for a sound mind," said Gabrielle Shirdan, VP Creative Director at McCann NY. "Sound It Out tells the stories that haven't been told and uses music as an instrument to shift the culture of mental health  tools every child should grow up with. This work is for a kid in Brooklyn just trying to tell his father how he feels."

Leading mental health experts provided guidance and input on every stage of the development of the Sound It Out campaign and website. Additionally, Sound It Out will be amplified by a network of non-profit organizations focused on mental health and health equity, including the AAKOMA Project, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Child Mind Institute, The Jed Foundation, Learning Heroes, National Council for Behavioral Health, UnidosUS and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Specific activations that will extend the reach of Sound It Out to key audiences over the coming year include The Jed Foundation placing resources in schools, AAP distributing content through its network of pediatricians and UnidosUS sharing campaign assets with affiliates.

The Ad Council

The Ad Council has a long history of creating life-saving public service communications in times of national crisis, starting in the organization's earliest days during World War II to September 11th and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. Its deep relationships with media outlets, the creative community, issue experts and government leaders make the organization uniquely poised to quickly distribute life-saving information to millions of Americans.

The Ad Council is where creativity and causes converge. The non-profit organization brings together the most creative minds in advertising, media, technology and marketing to address many of the nation's most important causes. The Ad Council has created many of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history. Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk. Smokey Bear. Love Has No Labels.

The Ad Council's innovative social good campaigns raise awareness, inspire action and save lives. To learn more, visit AdCouncil.org, follow the Ad Council's communities on Facebook and Twitter, and view the creative on YouTube.

Pivotal Ventures

Pivotal Ventures is an investment and incubation company created by Melinda Gates. We work with organizations and individuals to accelerate momentum where progress has stalled and use philanthropic and investment capital to substantially improve people's lives.

McCann

McCann Worldgroup, part of the Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG), is a leading global marketing solutions network whose professionals are united across 100+ countries by a single vision: To help brands earn a meaningful role in people's lives. McCann Worldgroup was named "Global Agency of The Year" by Adweek magazine, "Network of the Year" by the Cannes Lions, the world's most creatively-effective marketing services company by the Effie Awards (for three consecutive years), "Global Network of the Year" by Campaign Magazine and "Network of The Year" by The Webby Awards. Fast Company named McCann Worldgroup to its list of The World's Most Innovative Companies. The network comprises McCann (advertising), MRM (science/technology/relationship marketing), Momentum Worldwide (total brand experience), McCann Health (professional/dtc communications), CRAFT (production), Weber Shandwick (public relations) and FutureBrand (consulting/design).

Casanova//McCann

Casanova//McCann is one of the leading Hispanic integrated communications agencies in the U.S. and the most awarded Hispanic agency in Cannes the past two years. Founded in 1984, the company is headquartered in Costa Mesa, CA, with N.Y. and Detroit offices. It handles Hispanic advertising and integrated communications services for Fortune 500 clients like Nestle, Chevrolet, US Postal Service, Cigna, and Coca-Cola, among others. Casanova has been affiliated with Interpublic Group of Companies since 1999 and became a minority, female-owned, in October 2020.

EGAMI Group

EGAMI Group is an independent, certified women and minority-owned, award-winning, integrated marketing communications agency that connects companies and brands with diverse audiences through purposeful, culture-rich strategies, ideas, experiences and creative.

Through the powerful platforms of Culture, Community, and Cause, EGAMI Group activates a brand's Purpose to inspire action and impact the world. As a Purpose Marketing pioneer, EGAMI Group has been named one of the "100 Fastest-Growing Agencies" by Adweek, recognized twice by ADCOLOR as a Most Valuable Partner, and awarded a Commercial Emmy as well as being the first minority-owned agency to win a Cannes Lions Grand Prix.



Mass Appeal

Mass Appeal is an entertainment company dedicated to telling stories from the perspective of those who shape and shift culture. Since 1996, we have documented the emerging movements that influence popular ideas. Today, Mass Appeal is the elevated voice of Hip Hop and its ever-expanding sphere of influence. Integrated offerings in content, music and creative services stoke Mass Appeal's ability to maximize the impact of our output. Our diverse school of thought separates us from friends and foes alike.

SOURCE Ad Council
Covid disease levels in the UK are close to the bottom with very low incidence, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam has suggested.

His remarks came as Matt Hancock, the health secretary, insisted that England was on track to further ease restrictions on 17 May  a major step in the governments roadmap.

Assessing the current situation, professor Van-Tam told a No 10 press conference: We are really in very low levels that are comparable to where we were in September.

We are running as a typical seven-day average at just over 2,000 people testing positive per day, he added. My sense is that probably we are at or close to the bottom at the moment in terms of this level of disease in the UK.

Professor Van-Tam stressed that during the peak in early 2021 not many people were vaccinated so the drop in cases, hospitalisations and deaths were due to the efforts of the British public during lockdown.

The vaccine has undoubtedly helped in the later stages and there is good evidence that the death rate in the elderly has dropped faster than it has in the younger age groups and it has dropped faster than it did in the second wave, and that is undoubtedly a vaccine effect, he said.

What is important about these vaccines and the vaccine rollout is it really is the way out of getting into trouble of the same size and magnitude ever again, and thats why its important that this job must get finished.

 Covid restrictions on track for step 3 on 17 May, says Matt Hancock

On the possibility of a third wave of coronavirus in Britain, the deputy chief medical officer said that if the vaccine programme continues apace, the third wave so to speak, might just be a third upsurge and much less significant.

However, he said there likely to be some twists and turns ahead in terms of cases, adding: I think we are essentially following a good dry line now but I dont want us to run into any wet patches - that is going to be really critical in the next few weeks.

Appearing alongside professor Van-Tam, the health secretary said the data pointed to the government being on track to further ease restrictions on 17 May, including some indoor mixing of households and the re-opening of pubs and restaurants indoors.

He said: The data show that we are essentially precisely on track for where we expected to be at this point and that is obviously good news. It means we can follow the road map - and we look at the data all the time.

The dates we set out are not-before dates because we want to see the impact of each step before the decision to take the next step.

Thats why the road map has been structured the way it is, so that we can check that we are on track. The good news is that as far as the next step is concerned, which is in a few weeks time - and were going to keep monitoring the data - but as of today, we are on track for step three on May 17 and that is good news.
 Close Ex-White House counsel Don McGahn agrees to testify in Trump probe

Donald Trump will remain banned from Facebook for at least another two years, the social media network has announced. The company says it will revisit the decision on 7 January 2023, but will only allow Mr Trump back on if his risk to public safety has receded.

The former president issued a furious response, calling his continued suspension an insult. He also threatened to never invite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to another White House dinner, implying that hell run for president again.

Next time Im in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the former president said in a brief statement. It will be all business!

Others criticized Facebook for not going far enough, saying the ban should be permanent.

Meanwhile, Don McGahn, the Trump-era White House counsel who featured heavily in Robert Muellers probe into Russian interference during the 2016 election, testified before the House Judiciary Committee after two years of defying their subpoenas. A transcript of the interview will be released some time in the next seven days.

Republican representatives Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan told reporters nothing of note was revealed in the testimony.

Weve learned nothing new, Mr Gaetz told reporters.

Read more:
As the virus tore through his family in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Ramesh Bhutada knew he could not sit by his brothers hospital bed or hug his grieving relatives.

Instead, the 75-year-old Sugar Land resident picked up his phone.

From across an ocean, Bhutada consoled his two sisters after the unexpected deaths of their husbands. One died a week before his youngest daughters wedding. Bhutada called his brother, who found a hospital bed in a nearby small town, and instructed the younger man to rest after sensing difficulty in his voice.

Its a very tough situation, said Bhutada. Any family I talk to over here, I find that someone from their extended family has been affected back in India.

Indian American communities across the country  including a sizable population in the Houston metropolitan area  are mourning the deaths of family members, checking on relatives with growing alarm, and launching efforts to help their native country battle the worlds worst COVID-19 surge.

The unexpected, tsunami-like barrage of cases and deaths has overwhelmed the countrys medical system and shows no signs of slowing. The surge comes months after Indian leaders and health officials declared success in effectively stamping out the virus with a prompt lockdown last spring and strong compliance with the mask mandate. Cases peaked last September, according to New York Times data, but tapered off for the next six months while a third wave slammed the U.S.

Virus variants, large gatherings and a slow vaccine rollout are among factors experts cite for the current surge in India.

Each one of us has been touched in a very deep way, said Jagdip Ahluwalia, executive director of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce of Greater Houston, who has lost multiple family members within weeks. Its a tragedy. The systems just been overwhelmed.

The countrys death toll pushed past 200,000 on Wednesday, according to data tracked by Johns Hopkins University, though health experts believe the official tally likely marks an undercount. The daily death count has nearly tripled in the past three weeks, according to the Associated Press. India, the worlds second most populous country, added nearly 380,000 new cases on Thursday, another global record, as it pushed past 18.3 million total infections. The case load is second only to the U.S.

The rampant surge is overwhelming the countrys health care system, with reports of dire oxygen shortages, desperate pleas on social media from families and doctors with dying patients, and crematoriums running out of space.

Everything that you can think of is in critical supply right now, said Gitesh Desai, president of the Houston chapter of Sewa International. The challenges are enormous. Its a mammoth task.

As President Joe Biden and leaders of other countries pledge to send help, Indian Americans from the Houston area and elsewhere in the world are raising money and coordinating relief efforts.

Sewa International, a Hindu nonprofit, launched a fundraiser that by Thursday had garnered more than $5.8 million of its $10 million goal. With the donations, the organization is buying and shipping some 2,600 oxygen concentrators and additional medical equipment to India. Multiple community and professional groups have partnered with the organization, named for a Sanskrit word meaning selfless service, Desai said.

Additionally, the Houston and Dallas branches of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce partnered to raise funds for ventilators, Ahluwalia said. The organization secured donations and purchased dozens of ventilators that the U.S. government obtained when the pandemic was overwhelming New York last spring, he said.

The group shipped 20 ventilators on Tuesday to the Indian Red Cross in Delhi, which will distribute the equipment to hospitals, and this week plans to send 30 more.

We are proud of the way the Indian diaspora across the globe, and the communities we live in, have come together, Ahluwalia said.

Texas has the second largest population of Indian Americans, behind California, with nearly half a million people, according to Asian American Pacific Islander Data. The Houston metro area was home to the eighth largest community of Indian immigrants in 2018, with 88,000 people accounting for 1.3% of the population, according to Census data.

Its really hitting home, said Naushad Kermally, a Sugar Land City Council member. Even though its happening there in India, theres a lot of folks here in Sugar Land and Houston area, and the U.S. for that matter, that have family overseas living in India.

In a Wednesday letter to President Biden, Fort Bend County Judge KP George urged the U.S. to initiate emergency measures to aid India. Roughly 100,000 residents in his county have ties to India, George said.

Over the last few weeks, family members of thousands and thousands of my constituents are facing death and serious illness, wrote George, who grew up in a small village in South India. It is because of my constituents and our interconnected communities that I write this letter.

Manisha Gandhi, a member of the board of directors for Hindus of Greater Houston, said her phone is flooded with texts and WhatsApp messages from friends across the U.S. whose Indian relatives are searching for hospital beds, oxygen or other medical treatment.

Some people are returning to India to care for sick family members or perform last rites for their parents, Gandhi said. However, flights are limited, and the U.S. issued an advisory urging people to avoid travel to India.

Fear and anxiety are prevalent among the Indian American community, she said. The diverse community has come together, regardless of political or religious affiliations, to contribute to relief efforts. Some people are praying, at home and at temples across Houston, she said.

Were all worried about whats going to happen, Gandhi said. When will it end?

The explosive situation caught many off guard. The pandemic appeared to be stable in India, with roughly 15,000 new cases and 100 deaths reported each day in early March. People gathered for massive political rallies and religious festivals.

Then, early this month, the virus erupted.

We thought things were under control, but I think everyone got caught my surpise, including the goverment of India, Bhutada said. They were flat-footed, so to say.

In a Sunday address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told citizens to get vaccinated and be cautious, Reuters reported.

Bhutada, founder and CEO of Star Pipe Products, temporarily shuttered his companys manufacturing facility in the Indian state of Gujarat when a handful of employees fell ill. He arranged for free meals and COVID-19 protections for his workers. Some have lost loved ones, he said.

In text messages, Bhutada has tried to remind his grieving employees to stay positive, even as he struggles to do the same.

In his own family, Bhutada said no one knows how his brothers-in-law, a farmer and retired school teacher, became infected. The men, ages 58 and 64, both died in hospitals when their health rapidly deteriorated. Their wives were not permitted to view the bodies.

Fortunately, in the Hindu philosophy we believe in reincarnation, he said. This is the only way you can find solace in a situation like this.

Amid the onslaught of calamitous news, Bhutada read an Indian news report about an 85-year-old man who gave up his hospital bed for a younger COVID-19 patient. The elderly man died days later. The story has circulated on social media and in Indian media outlets.

When you think about someone sacrificing his life, for the life of somebody elsetears came to my eyes, Bhutada said. The best of mankind can also show in crisis.

Still, the man who believes there is a reason behind everything keeps pondering one question.

Though he has grasped at explanations for the pandemic  lessons about taking care of each other or simplifying life  Bhutada said he has come up short of an answer.

Regarding this pandemic, he said, Im not able to answer why the humanity had to go through this kind of huge suffering.

anna.bauman@chron.com
Cox Communications has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Segra, one of the largest privately-held fibre infrastructure providers in the US.

Cox will acquire Segra's commercial services segment, which is a leading super-regional, fibre-based provider serving commercial enterprise and carrier customers in nine states in the Mid-Atlantic and South East."Cox is focused on buying and investing where it makes sense, and we believe that the demand for broadband infrastructure will continue to grow, making fibre an attractive area for long-term investment. Acquiring Segra's commercial services business is another key milestone in our pursuit of strategic infrastructure to ensure that we're providing the best products and services to our customers."

Segra's existing management team will continue to lead the Segra enterprise and carrier organisation following the acquisition, will retain the Segra brand and operate as a standalone business within the Cox family of companies," said Cox Communications president and CEO Pat Esser.

As part of the transaction, EQT Infrastructure will retain ownership of Segra's fibte-to-the-premise (FTTP) residential and small- to medium-sized business segment in Virginia and North Carolina and accelerate the plan to expand broadband services to neighbourhoods and markets throughout their regions.

"Our relationship with Cox will allow Segra to leverage expert resources, capabilities and strategic insights in order to scale up operations and accelerate long-term growth," noted Segra CEO Timothy Biltz. "Cox and Segra are equally devoted to the communities we serve. We will be even more strongly positioned to meet growing demand from carrier and enterprise customers for high-bandwidth fiber-infrastructure solutions. I would also like to thank EQT for its continued guidance and invaluable support as we worked to grow the business over the last nearly four years."
(Natural News) Big Pharma is Americas new mafia whose chemical warfare on humanity dwarfs the number of victims killed by all the world wars and acts of terrorism combined. While drug companies profit billions, people are dying by the millions. It makes you wonder if Pharmageddon is upon us with the next set of mandatory vaccinations planned by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for the profit of drug companies.

(Article republished from Aim4Truth.org)

THERE IS A WAR RAGING FOR CONTROL OF YOUR BLOODSTREAM AND IT IS LED BY THE FDA, CDC, WHO, AND BIG PHARMA, AND IT LOOKS AS IF THEY ARE WINNING.

Over 70% of Americans are on some form of pharmaceutical drug that often brings negative side-effects, including death. Iatrogenic death, or death by doctor, is considered the third leading cause of death in America, conservatively speaking. Some experts interpret the data to read iatrogenic death as the number one cause of death, and they have a great deal of evidence to back up the claim. These statistics suggest that we should change the name health industry to illness industry.

Conservative estimates suggest that America spends about 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health costs, about $3.35 trillion this year, which works out to $10,345 for every man, woman and child. Hospitals account for about 32%, doctors for 20%, and prescription drugs 10%. Spending on prescription drugs in the U.S. rose to a record $425 billion in 2016.

The vaccine business alone is currently a $30 billion per year industry and the World Health Organization has urged increased vaccines, projecting that it will become a $100 billion per year industry by 2025. (See Global Vaccine Markets Features and Trends in stunning report.)

It is evident that the federal CDC and their business partners need the public to be okay with the current 69 doses of recommended childhood vaccines, plus adherence for an additional 100 plus doses of vaccines recommended by the CDCs new adult schedule. Folks, they want us to inject our families with the additional 271 vaccines that are in the development pipeline. But nowhere on the CDCs web site can you find a disclosure that the agency is a for-profit partner with the vaccine makers for whom it is supposed to be providing federal safety oversight.

There are 57 granted U.S. patents with the CDC listed as an assignee. Some of the vaccine patents include: Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, HIV, Anthrax, Rabies, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Group A Strep, Pneumococcal disease, Meningococcal disease, RSV, Gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, SARS, Rift Valley Fever, and chlamydophila pneumoniae, flavivirus infection, human rhinovirus, adjuvants, Canarypox virus, Fowlpox virus, Sealpox virus, and dog flu.

KEY POINT: THE CDC IS A PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY IN THE BUSINESS OF PROFITING FROM ILLNESSES THEY DISSEMINATE THROUGH THEIR OWN VACCINES WHILE THEY REGULATE THEIR OWN CORPORATE INTERESTS.

BIG PHARMA IS BIG BUSINESS

Big Pharma is the moniker given to the worlds vast and influential pharmaceutical industry and its trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA. These powerful companies make hundreds of billions of dollars every year by selling drugs and medical devices. More than 20% of Americas GDP is related to the health industry. In the U.S., the industry contributes heavily to the annual budget of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is charged with regulating drugs and devices made by those same companies. The industry boldly demonstrates its power, political might, and social influence over the nations governments and agencies, its health care systems, its doctors and hospitals, as well as the psyche of the American people.

The global market for pharmaceuticals topped $1 trillion in sales in 2014. The worlds 10 largest drug companies generated $429.4 billion of that revenue. Five of the top 10 companies are headquartered in the U.S. are Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Abbot Laboratories, Merck, and Eli Lilly.

With the help of staggering profits and 1,100-plus paid lobbyists, the industry has gained powerful leverage on Capitol Hill. From 1998 to 2014, Big Pharma spent nearly $2.9 billion on lobbying expenses  more than any other industry. The industry also doled out more than $15 million in campaign contributions from 2013-14. But the large amount of cash Big Pharma bestows on government representatives and regulatory bodies is small when compared with the billions it spends each year on direct-to-consumer advertising. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world whose governments allow prescription drugs to be advertised on TV. A single manufacturer, Boehringer Ingelheim, spent $464 million advertising its blood thinner Pradaxa in 2011. The following year, the drug passed the $1 billion sales mark.

Big Pharma tends to weaken the objectivity of even the most honest health professionals while encouraging them to overprescribe medications. Consider the numbers:

Advertising instead of research: For every $1 spent on basic research, Big Pharma spends $19 on promotions and advertising.

Distribution of free drug samples: The U.S. has one pharmaceutical sales representative for every five office-based physicians.

Sponsorship of symposiums and medical conventions: Drug and medical device makers spend lavishly on doctors, including covering meals, travel, seminars and conventions that sometimes look more like vacations.

Many medical journals, including the industry standard bearer Journal of the American Medical Association, actively vie for the attention of Big Pharma advertising dollars, billing themselves as the best way for drug companies to reach their professional readership.

The United States, unlike other developed countries, allows pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they want, if they do not collude with one another in setting the prices. In other words, these companies can charge whatever the market will bear. For example, Solvadi, Gileads hepatitis C drug, costs $1,000 for each pill, which amounted to sales of $3.5 billion between April and June of 2015.

Congress, influenced by pharmaceutical lobbyists, has not allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, as do most health care systems, HMOs, and some insurance companies. In those countries that negotiate the prices of their national insurance plans with Big Pharma, most drugs sell for much less.

In the November 2015, $150 billion merger of U.S.-based Pfizer and Irish-based Allergen, a move known as an inversion transaction, Pfizer gave up its corporate citizenship in the United States so that it could reduce its tax bill by billions. Another effect of mergers is the reduction in the number of competitors, which has led to the doubling or tripling of drug prices and, in some cases, to a 1000% increase in cost. Normally, new drug prices are set only slightly higher than those of rival drugs already on the market, which typically ends up raising the price of the older drug. But if a company has few competitors or merges with its competitor, the resulting lack of, or diminished, competition means that the price of a drug can be whatever the company wants.

Big Pharma is an industry that generates higher profit margins than any other and is no stranger to multi-billion dollar fines for malpractice, collusion, and over-chargingjust a cost of doing business. Average profit margins for Big Pharma ranges from 42% to 10% with an average around 20%. Pfizer, the worlds largest drug company, made a 42% profit margin this year. Last year, five pharmaceutical companies made a profit margin of 20% or more  Pfizer, Hoffmann-La Roche, AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Eli Lilly. With some drugs costing upwards of $100,000 for a full course, and with the cost of manufacturing just a tiny fraction of this, its not hard to see why profits are so high.

IATROGENIC DEATH BY DOCTOR

Iatrogenic damage (defined as a state of ill health or adverse effect resulting from medical treatment) is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer. This means that doctors and hospitals are responsible for more deaths each year than cerebrovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases, accidents, diabetes, Alzheimers disease and pneumonia.

The combined effect of errors and adverse effects that occur because of iatrogenic damage include:

12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgery

7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals

20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals

80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals

106,000 deaths a year from non-error, adverse effects of medications

From 1976 to 2006, 62 million death certificates were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors. Imagine what those numbers will be for the next three decades 2007-2037! An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year. The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually  greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care. Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in one of five hospital patients.

In 2009, there were 4.6 million drug-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms nationwide, with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications  most of which were being taken exactly as prescribed. Heroin deaths in America in that year were 12,989. Deaths from synthetic opioids, including illicit fentanyl were 9,580. Abuse of drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin killed 17,536. These are stats that we could glean from our internet searches. We surmise that these figures will be much higher once newer statistics are released, if they are ever released accurately and promptly.

There is also iatrogenic poverty to describe impoverishment induced by medical care. Impoverishment is described for households exposed to catastrophic health expenditures or to hardship financing. In the USA, illness and medical debt causes half of the personal bankruptcy.

It is estimated that 400,000 unnecessary deaths happen in American hospitals annually. It is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Some studies show that about 1.14 million patient-safety incidents occurred among the 37 million hospitalizations in the Medicare population alone over a two-year period. But after all these iatrogenic events, less than 20,000 malpractice suits are brought against doctors each year.

DOCTOR INDUCED ILLNESS

The main cause of a cascade of injury in iatrogenic medicine is by misdiagnosis and medical error. From medical error flows a cascade of effects and results often including pain, disability, loss of job, poverty and homelessness which obviously cause mental health problems and may cause death. In medicine, a cascade effect may also refer to a chain of events initiated by an unnecessary test, an unexpected result, or patient or physician anxiety, which results in ill-advised tests or treatments that may cause harm to patients as the results are pursued.

Adverse reactions in hospitals to prescribed drugs is conservatively estimated to be 2.2 million per year.

The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year.

The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year.

The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.

The total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is estimated by some to be 783,936 per year.

If these estimates are true, the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the U.S. By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease annually is estimated at 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer is estimated at 553,250. The cost per year for treating avoidable doctor induced injuries is estimated to be over $282 billion per year.

VACCINATIONS IN AMERICA

American vaccination programs are out of control. The rise in the number of vaccines administered to American children in their first five years makes America the leader in the number of immunizations administered to children. The CDC Childhood Immunization schedule skyrocketed from 11 injections in 1983 to 36 or more injections as of 2015. Recently, California Governor Jerry Brown signed bill SB277 into law, which took effect July 1, 2016. The law is one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation which barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, thus taking away America civil rights.

NO SHOT. NO DAYCARE. NO SCHOOL. EVERY CHILD. EVERY VACCINE.

Such a harmful and unconstitutional law is like declaring Marshal Law over the American bloodstream.

Critical reports are showing that the commonly-accepted procedure of administering vaccines to children in their infancy dramatically increases risk to their systems. Corresponding to this rise in the number of vaccines was a precipitous rise in allergies, autoimmune disease, asthma, and autism. Autism affected a scant 1 in 10,000 children in 1982, where now 1 in 88 children born in the U.S. is diagnosed with autism.

VACCINE POISONS

The connection to autism has already been repeatedly established, and there are many other conditions caused by vaccines. Permanent paralysis (Guillain Barre syndrome) is surprisingly common as a side-effect of the flu vaccine. Vaccines are said to prevent certain diseases. However, the chance of contracting these diseases is incredibly remote, and the iatrogenic side-effects from vaccines are so common that overall vaccines cause much more harm than good. In some cases, vaccines infect patients with the very diseases that they were meant to offer protection from, because they utilize live viral strains.

The following substances are found in one or more mandatory vaccines given to children during the most sensitive years of their life. Mercury alone causes enough side-effects that it should be simple to understand that all vaccines should be optional or simply banned altogether. The list below contains deadly poisons, carcinogens and other unassimilable substances found in vaccines:

Aborted baby fetus tissue, human albumin, formaldehyde, mercury, antifreeze, aluminum, 2-phenoxyethanol, phenol, methanol, borax , glutaraldehyde, monosodium glutamate , sulfate and phosphate compound, ammonium sulfate, gentamicin sulfate, neomycin sulfate, tributylphosphate, polymyxin B, polysorbate 20/80, sorbitol , polyribosylribitol, beta-propiolactone, amphotericin B, animal organ tissue and blood, large foreign proteins, latex, animal viruses, human viruses, mycoplasma, genetically engineered yeast, and foreign DNA, among others.

Dr. William Thompson, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and someone working on the national immunization program came forward and said:

WE HAVE KNOWN FOR 13 YEARS, MMR VACCINE CAUSES AUTISM AND WE HAVE CONCEALED THAT FACT.

He not only said it, he made available all the documents, emails, transcripts, data outputs, databases, draft papers, original analysis plans, and exchanges with his colleagues where he had tried repeatedly to bring this to their attention. The CDC had concealed the data systematically and they revoked Wakefields license to practice medicine and denied that vaccines cause autism.

Countries in Europe that adhere to a less elaborate childhood vaccination program than the U.S. are experiencing much lower rates of autism. According to Rescuepost.com, the data shows a direct correlation between the number of vaccines called for in a countries immunization program and the incidence of autism in that countries population.

MORE VACCINES EQUAL HIGHER AUTISM RATES.

The toxic Hepatitis B vaccine is administered to babies at a day old regardless of their mothers Hep B status. Hep B is a blood-born pathogen that a child not living with a Hep B-positive person would have little risk of contracting. Despite this, it is the stated objective of the Center for Disease Control to vaccinate all American children regardless of their risk just hours after birth.

DEATH BY VACCINE

Every day, people in the United States are being injured and killed by vaccines, and those numbers are increasing. This is a fact that is not in dispute, as the Department of Justice quarterly report on vaccine injuries and deaths clearly demonstrates. And yet, the governments official public statement about vaccines is that they are safe and effective, and should be mandated for all people. Any opinion or presentation of facts to contradict their position is vigorously suppressed and censored in the mainstream media all in the name of public health.

From the study entitled: Mortality Rates and Cause-of-death Patterns in a Vaccinated Population, by McCarthy et. al., we find that analyses conducted in 2012 from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data tell us that among 13,033,274 vaccinated people, 15,455 deaths occurred between 0 and 60 days following vaccination. The mortality rate within 60 days of a vaccination visit was 442.5 deaths per 100,000.

There is a vaccine court known as the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). This program was started because of a law passed in 1986 that gave pharmaceutical companies total legal immunity from being sued due to injuries and deaths resulting from vaccines. If you or a family member is injured or dies from vaccines, you must now sue the federal government in this special vaccine court. Many cases are litigated for years before a settlement is reached.

In the period from February 16, 2016 to May 15, 2016 there were 206 cases adjudicated in which 85 cases settled were for injuries and deaths due to the flu vaccine, making the flu vaccine the most dangerous vaccine in the U.S., harming and killing more people than all the other vaccines put together.

The flu vaccine is basically an experimental vaccine that the CDC and Big Pharma want to give out to 300 million Americans every year. There are no studies showing the safety of giving the flu vaccine. The CDC is in the business of distributing flu vaccines, because they represent 300 million doses per year, whereas all the childhood vaccines together number 20 million  more than ten times the profit. Another lesson in finding truth by following the money!

With most of the settlements being cases of harm caused by the flu vaccine, Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) is the most common injury suffered from the flu shot. GBS is a debilitating disease that attacks a persons own immune system and damages the nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis. GBS is also listed as a side effect of the flu shot in the package insert.

When the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund was set up in 1988, autism was the most prevalent vaccine injury brought before the vaccine court, mostly from the MMR vaccine. This trust fund is funded through taxes the public pays on vaccines. The fund didnt have sufficient money to pay out to the 13,330 cases of autism that were pending. So, the Omnibus Autism Proceedings were conducted and it was determined that autism is not caused by vaccines; accordingly, the fund no longer paid damages for the hundreds of thousands of children suffering with autism caused by the MMR vaccines. Only 2,409 autism cases were compensated.

SUPREME COURT SHIELDS BIG PHARMA

On February 22, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court shielded drug companies from all liability for harm caused by vaccines mandated by government. (Russell Bruesewitz et al v. Wyeth et al. No. 09-152. Argued October 12, 2010). Six Supreme Court judges created the liability safety net for the U.S. mass vaccination system and wrote Big Pharma a blank check by deliberately ignoring the language and legislative history of the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act. Thus, from that moment on, drug companies selling vaccines in America were not held accountable in a court of law. If you get paralyzed by a flu shot or your child has a serious reaction to a vaccine required for school and becomes learning disabled, epileptic, autistic, asthmatic, diabetic or mentally retarded, you are on your own.

Three decades ago, government officials were ordering doctors to give children 23 doses of 7 vaccines. Today, that direct order is up to 70 doses of 16 vaccines. But now, the Supreme Court has given Pharma and doctors permission to lobby legislators to require every American, who lives to be 78 years old, to get more than 130 doses of government recommended vaccines starting on the day of birth through the last year of life.

In 1982, four of the largest drugs companies, Merck, Wyeth, Lederle, and Connaught blackmailed Congress by threatening to stop selling vaccines in America unless a law was passed giving them complete immunity from prosecution. The pharmaceutical industry knew they were in trouble because the old, crude whooping cough vaccine in the DPT shot was causing brain inflammation and death, and the live oral polio vaccine was crippling children and adults with vaccine strain polio which caused many Americans to file lawsuits.

In 1988, after great lobbying the following law was passed, 42 U.S. Code  300aa22  Standards of Responsibility was passed, which states: (1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.

Vaccines should not be legally required, especially when doctors cannot predict ahead of time who will be harmed by a vaccine and there is no civil liability for the company selling it, the person giving it or the government official mandating it.

OBAMA ADOPTS UN PLAN FOR MANDATORY ADULT VACCINES

The Obama administrations Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created a program to track Americans vaccination records, wage a massive propaganda campaign to encourage more inoculations, and foist more controversial vaccines on adults against their will. Critics of the unconstitutional scheme, formally dubbed the National Adult Immunization Plan (NAIP), say the ultimate goal is to forcibly vaccinate all Americans and move toward a radical new healthcare paradigm in which medical treatment is mandatory.

This Obama program violates the human right to protect bodily integrity and autonomy which is the core value of informed consent.

KEY POINT: The battle for the bloodstream is not just about being anti-vaccine, it is about freedom, values, beliefs, and what medical risks individuals are willing to accept. Vaccination just happens to be at the forefront of the battle.

Adding more mandatory vaccines for children and adults is an assault on individual liberty, privacy, medical ethics, and the U.S. Constitution. The radical United Nations inspired plan also incorporates eugenic sterilization and uses Obamas executive authority and the legacy media to foist coercive propaganda that supports fantastic profits for Big Pharma and illness for Americans. The same corporate Pharma-Warlords successfully lobbied the federal government to shield them from liability when their products kill and injure consumers.

Obamas Executive Order entitled: Advancing the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats states that: It is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. As articulated in the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats and implemented in Presidential Policy Directive 2 (PPD-2), promoting global health security is a core tenet of our national strategy for countering biological threats. No single nation can be prepared if other nations remain unprepared to counter biological threats; therefore, it is the policy of the United States to advance the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), which is a multi-faceted, multi-country initiative intended to accelerate partner countries measurable capabilities to achieve specific targets to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats (GHSA targets), whether naturally occurring, deliberate, or accidental.

The roles, responsibilities, and activities described in this order will support the goals of the International Health Regulations (IHR) and will be conducted, as appropriate, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), and other relevant organizations and stakeholders. To advance the achievement of the GHSA targets and to support the implementation of the IHR within partner countries, each executive department, agency, and office (agency) shall, as appropriate, partner, consult, and coordinate with other governments, international financial institutions, international organizations, regional organizations, economic communities, and nongovernmental stakeholders, including the private sector.

Translation: Obama put the United Nations in charge of every Americans bloodstream and the UNs eugenic war against over-population has targeted every American citizen. The United States of America and the U.S. Constitution is overthrown if this relinquishing of U.S. liberties is fully instituted.

BIG PHARMAS CRIMES AGAINST YOUR BLOODSTREAM

The largest drug companies are prepared annually to pay out up to $5 billion in lawsuits for damages (including death) caused by the drugs they produce. These huge pay-outs and possible deaths are simply the price of doing business. Many millions suffer untold injuries and pain due to side-effects that drug companies consider within the realm of tolerance. These deaths are already calculated in the overall business model of selling the drug. Below, we list a few of the known criminal activities of Big Pharma that have been taken to court and yet one has gone to jail for their negligence and criminal acts.

Johnson & Johnson ($74 billion) faced more than 1,800 lawsuits over products after patients suffered from organ perforation, mesh erosion or other complications. They settled more than 100 lawsuits for undisclosed amounts, but it has more than 1,000 remaining against it. It also sold faulty hip implants containing metal components that release metal debris into patients, 12,000 patients sued and they set aside $1 billion to cover the recall and hip lawsuits. They also face hundreds of lawsuits involving a blood thinner that causes an inability to control bleeding thus being life-threatening. Hundreds of Xarelto lawsuits are pending. J&Js Risperdal faces hundreds of lawsuits.

Pfizer ($49.6 billion) faced both criminal and civil allegations over illegal marketing of the drugs Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox, Lyrica, Neurontin, Detrol and Lipitor. Pfizer was accused of telling doctors that certain drugs could be used for unapproved uses and defrauding the Medicaid program. Pfizer paid $2.3 billion settlement. Effexor and Zoloft have had many law suites. Lipitor can lead to irreversible bleeding.

Merck & Co. ($42.2 billion) Vioxx brought scandal to the company, as thousands of users reported instances of cardiac side effects, including fatal outcomes. Tens of thousands of lawsuits targeted Merck and it paid out billions of dollars in settlements. Fosamax, Januvia, NuvaRing, and Propecia resulted in devastating side effects for thousands of consumers who filed lawsuits.

GlaxoSmithKlines ($37.9 billion) Avandia is linked to an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure. The FDA estimates that the drug is responsible for 100,000 heart attacks causing 50,000 lawsuits so far. Paxil, Wellbutrin and Advair were marketed illegally and paid $3 billion in fines. Paxil is also associated with serious side effects like birth defects and an increased risk of suicide. Zofran causes birth defects and led to a fraud settlement.

AstraZeneca ($26.0 billion) Crestor may cause liver damage and Type 2 diabetes. Onglyza may increase the risk of pancreatitis and heart failure. Farxiga may cause kidney problems, and Nexium was linked to an increase in heart attack risks. The company paid a fine of $520 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for illegally promoting Seroquel and settled thousands of lawsuits involving Seroquel for $647 million.

Bayer ($25.4 billion) has spent over $1 billion settling 4,800 Yaz lawsuits over blood-clot related injuries and has reserved $1.5 billion for settlements. Bayer was charged with intentionally selling a defective product misled consumers by exaggerating the benefits and inadequately warning of its risks. Bayer also faces hundreds of lawsuits claiming its blood thinner Xarelto caused internal bleeding.

Eli Lilly & Co. ($23.1 billion) Prozac is the target of multiple lawsuits that claim it can lead to suicidal thoughts and birth defects if used during pregnancy. Eli Lilly also has helped to market controversial products, including the diabetes drugs Actos, Byetta, Tradjenta, and the SGLT2 inhibitors Jardiance and Glyxambi leading to many law suties.

AbbVie Inc. ($18.8 billion) failed to warn consumers about AndroGels heart risks for men, which led to hundreds of lawsuits.

Bristol-Myers Squibb ($15.9 billion) Byetta and Bydureon are linked to pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. Farxiga has been linked to a deadly condition called ketoacidosis and a lawsuit was filed against BMS claiming Eilqiuis caused irreversible bleeding leading to a death.

Boehringer Ingelheim ($15.1 billion) thousands of injuries and more than 500 deaths among Pradaxa users over a two-year period caused patients to file more than 4,000 lawsuits. The company settled allegations regarding Pradaxas bleeding risks for $650 million in 2014.

Stryker Orthopaedics ($9.6 billion) hip and knee implants left patients needing costly and traumatic revision surgeries. An estimated 20,000 Americans received one of these devices before they were recalled in 2012. The number of hip lawsuits against Stryker continues to grow. Stryker also marketed knee implants associated with disabling side effects that have all been partially or completely recalled to protect patients.

Boston Scientific ($7.3 billion) defended the first of 6,000 lawsuits filed over health complications with Pinnacle and Obtryx, two of the manufacturers mesh products. It settled 3,000 cases for $119 million in 2015.

C.R. Bard ($3.3 Billion)  sold dangerous products such as heart catheters, inferior vena cava (IVC) filters, mesh surgical patches and transvaginal mesh products. Bard lost mesh lawsuits for $5.5 million and $2 million in 2012 and 2013. The company settled more than 500 cases for $21 million in 2014 and an additional 3,000 cases for about $200 million in 2015.

Read more at: Aim4Truth.org and BigPharmaNews.com.
ALBANY, N.Y., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 39-year-old Jesse Saperstein, who is on the autism spectrum, is on a mission to encourage everyone to get the COVID-19 vaccination by leading by example - even if it means being the subject of negative comments and false accusations.

Jesse Saperstein urges everyone to get the COVID-19 vaccination. Jesse Saperstein

Saperstein received the Moderna shots in February and March. He videotaped his final shot and placed it on his YouTube channel, located at youtube.com/watch?v=U85vE82PSrc. TikTok's Laugh Compilation added Saperstein's video to its website, and it accrued nearly 100,000 views. It was later removed by Laugh Compilation without an explanation.

"There were derogatory remarks and false accusations that 'Big Pharma' is paying me," said Saperstein. "I have also been called 'a retard,' and someone claimed my family used the pandemic as an excuse to have no contact with me."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Everyone 16 years of age and older are now eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccination. However, according to the latest report by USAFacts.org, only 26% of the population have been fully vaccinated.

"There are countless people who believe the vaccine will not help the pandemic or is more dangerous than the Coronavirus itself," Saperstein says.

Saperstein mentors a young man with autism who recently lost his 60-year-old father, who worked as an Emergency Medical Technician.

"It is time to move past the myths and use the vaccine as an opportunity to reopen the country and start the healing process," says Saperstein.

For those who do not know where to receive the vaccine, Jesse recommends visiting VaccineFinder.org for the latest information on COVID-19 vaccine.

About Jesse Saperstein:

Jesse Saperstein is the author of a memoir, "Atypical: Life with Asperger's in 20 1/3 Chapters," released in April 2010. His second book, "Getting a Life with Asperger's: Lessons Learned on the Bumpy Road to Adulthood," came out in August 2014. Penguin Group publishes both books. He serves as the Media and Activities Liaison for the College Experience (thecollegeexperience.org) run by Living Resources (livingresources.org) and the College of Saint Rose. The College Experience gives individuals with disabilities the opportunity to attend a mainstream college.

In 2020, Jesse worked with the CEO of the American Red Cross, Gail McGovern, on a social media campaign to replenish the blood supply. In 2019, Jesse was included as one of the thirty-plus American heroes profiled within the anthology "American Spirit" by New York Times bestselling authors Taya Kyle and Jim DeFelice. In 2020, he appeared on the Dr. Phil Show to advocate for his friend, David Elmore Smith, who was in dire need of resources to combat his morbid obesity. The same year, Jesse was one of 25 citizens in Albany presented with the Community Champions Award for his litter collection to benefit the Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) while raising awareness for Convalescent Plasma. He has spoken in front of the United Nations and the Mall of America in Minneapolis, among other venues. For more information about Jesse Saperstein, visit jessesaperstein.com.

Contact: D. PLUMP CONSULTING, LLC

Tel: (305) 985-4373

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Jesse Saperstein

Related Links

http://jessesaperstein.com


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 09:51:34|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland on Wednesday reported 20 new COVID-19 cases, all of which were imported, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Thursday.

Of all the cases, 11 were reported in Zhejiang, five in Shanghai, and one each in Shanxi, Hubei, Guangdong and Sichuan.

A new suspected case arriving from outside the mainland was reported in Shanghai on Wednesday, the commission said.

No new deaths related to COVID-19 were reported Wednesday, it added.

A total of 5,644 imported cases had been reported on the mainland by the end of Wednesday. Among them, 5,361 had been discharged from hospitals following recovery, and 283 remained hospitalized. No deaths had been reported among the imported cases.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the mainland reached 90,642 by Wednesday, including 324 patients still receiving treatment, three of whom were in severe conditions.

A total of 85,682 patients had been discharged from hospitals following recovery on the mainland, and 4,636 had died as a result of the virus.

There were seven suspected COVID-19 cases on the mainland on Wednesday.

A total of 14 asymptomatic cases were newly reported, all arriving from outside the mainland. There were a total of 329 asymptomatic cases, of whom 318 were imported, under medical observation by Wednesday.

By the end of Wednesday, 11,755 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 209 deaths, had been reported in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), while 49 cases had been reported in the Macao SAR, and 1,116 cases, including 12 deaths, had been reported in Taiwan.

A total of 11,392 COVID-19 patients in the Hong Kong SAR had been discharged from hospitals following recovery, while 49 had been discharged in the Macao SAR, and 1,050 had been discharged in Taiwan. Enditem
HOUSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC. (NASDAQ: PTEN) today reported financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2021. The Company reported a net loss of $106 million, or $0.57 per share, for the first quarter of 2021, compared to a net loss of $435 million, or $2.28 per share, for the first quarter of 2020. Revenues for the first quarter of 2021 were $241 million, compared to $446 million for the first quarter of 2020.

Andy Hendricks, Patterson-UTI's Chief Executive Officer, stated, "First quarter financial results exceeded our expectations, as revenues and adjusted EBITDA improved sequentially, despite challenges from the extreme winter storm in the southwest. Our contract drilling and directional drilling businesses posted better than expected results in the first quarter. Excluding the impact of the winter storm, our pressure pumping results would have been consistent with our expectations."

Mr. Hendricks continued, "In contract drilling, our average rig count for the first quarter improved to 69 rigs from 62 rigs in the fourth quarter. Our rig count ended the first quarter at 71 rigs, and we have already activated two rigs in the second quarter. Considering the timing of additional rig reactivations, as well as idle but contracted rigs rolling off contract, we expect to average 73 rigs for the second quarter. We expect our rig count will reach approximately 80 rigs over the next three months, with a substantial portion of the rig count increase in June and July.

"Average rig margin per day for the first quarter of $8,750, included a benefit of $6.0 million, or $960 per day, related to a sales and use tax refund, and a benefit of $2.3 million, or $370 per day, for revenue that was not recognized in 2020 due to concerns about collectability. However, even after excluding both of these benefits, average rig margin per day exceeded our expectation due to a combination of both higher than expected revenues and lower than expected costs. Both average rig revenue per day and operating cost per day increased sequentially, as the proportion of rigs that were idle but contracted decreased to 7% in the first quarter from 16% in the fourth quarter.

Story continues

"As of March 31, 2021, we had term contracts for drilling rigs providing for approximately $240 million of future dayrate drilling revenue. Based on contracts currently in place, we expect an average of 39 rigs operating under term contracts during the second quarter, and an average of 27 rigs operating under term contracts during the four quarters ending March 31, 2022.

"In pressure pumping, first quarter results were significantly impacted by the winter storm. Revenues decreased to $75.8 million during the first quarter and gross margin decreased to a loss of $0.7 million. We averaged seven active spreads during the first quarter, with an effective utilization of 5.5 spreads. Downtime was primarily associated with the winter storm and the mobilization of a spread from the northeast to Texas. In the second quarter, we expect utilization to improve and we plan to reactivate an additional spread late in the quarter for dedicated work.

"In directional drilling, revenues during the first quarter increased sequentially to $19.7 million from $16.9 million in the fourth quarter. Gross margin improved in the first quarter to $3.0 million, or 15% of revenues, from $2.2 million, or 13% of revenues, in the fourth quarter, as the business continues to improve."

Mr. Hendricks concluded, "Drilling and completion activity continues to improve at a moderate pace. While operators continue to exercise capital discipline, we see increasing activity across all classes of operators during the year. We believe that Patterson-UTI is well positioned given our performance and technology offerings, including solutions to help E&P companies improve efficiencies and reduce wellsite emissions through the use of alternative fuel sources."

The Company declared a quarterly dividend on its common stock of $0.02 per share, payable on June 17, 2021, to holders of record as of June 3, 2021.

Financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2020 include pre-tax, non-cash charges totaling $406 million ($349 million after-tax, or $1.83 per share). These charges include a $395 million impairment charge for goodwill and a $10.6 million impairment charge related to certain of the Company's E&P assets.

All references to "per share" in this press release are diluted earnings per common share as defined within Accounting Standards Codification Topic 260.

The Company's quarterly conference call to discuss the operating results for the quarter ended March 31, 2021, is scheduled for today, April 29, 2021, at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. The dial-in information for participants is (844) 494-0002 (Domestic) and (647) 253-8640 (International). The conference ID for both numbers is 7069802. The call is also being webcast and can be accessed through the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at investor.patenergy.com. A replay of the conference call will be on the Company's website for two weeks.

About Patterson-UTI

Patterson-UTI is a leading provider of oilfield services and products to oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the United States, including contract drilling, pressure pumping and directional drilling services. For more information, visit www.patenergy.com.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements which are protected as forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that are not limited to historical facts, but reflect Patterson-UTI's current beliefs, expectations or intentions regarding future events. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "budgeted," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "predict," "potential," "project," "pursue," "should," "strategy," "target," or "will," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding Patterson-UTI's future expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, financial conditions, assumptions or future events or performance that are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Patterson-UTI's control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: adverse oil and natural gas industry conditions; including the rapid decline in crude oil prices as a result of economic repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic; global economic conditions; volatility in customer spending and in oil and natural gas prices that could adversely affect demand for Patterson-UTI's services and their associated effect on rates; excess availability of land drilling rigs, pressure pumping and directional drilling equipment, including as a result of reactivation, improvement or construction; competition and demand for Patterson-UTI's services; strength and financial resources of competitors; utilization, margins and planned capital expenditures; liabilities from operational risks for which Patterson-UTI does not have and receive full indemnification or insurance; operating hazards attendant to the oil and natural gas business; failure by customers to pay or satisfy their contractual obligations (particularly with respect to fixed-term contracts); the ability to realize backlog; specialization of methods, equipment and services and new technologies, including the ability to develop and obtain satisfactory returns from new technology; the ability to retain management and field personnel; loss of key customers; shortages, delays in delivery, and interruptions in supply, of equipment and materials; cybersecurity events; synergies, costs and financial and operating impacts of acquisitions; difficulty in building and deploying new equipment; governmental regulation; climate legislation, regulation and other related risks; environmental, social and governance practices, including the perception thereof; environmental risks and ability to satisfy future environmental costs; technology-related disputes; legal proceedings and actions by governmental or other regulatory agencies; the ability to effectively identify and enter new markets; weather; operating costs; expansion and development trends of the oil and natural gas industry; ability to obtain insurance coverage on commercially reasonable terms; financial flexibility; interest rate volatility; adverse credit and equity market conditions; availability of capital and the ability to repay indebtedness when due; stock price volatility; and compliance with covenants under Patterson-UTI's debt agreements.

Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained from time to time in Patterson-UTI's SEC filings. Patterson-UTI's filings may be obtained by contacting Patterson-UTI or the SEC or through Patterson-UTI's website at http://www.patenergy.com or through the SEC's Electronic Data Gathering and Analysis Retrieval System (EDGAR) at http://www.sec.gov. Patterson-UTI undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement.

PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (unaudited, in thousands, except per share data)





Three Months Ended





March 31,





2021



2020

REVENUES

$ 240,929



$ 445,927

COSTS AND EXPENSES:















Direct operating costs



182,751





326,628

Depreciation, depletion, amortization and impairment



152,882





186,797

Impairment of goodwill









395,060

Selling, general and administrative



22,558





30,346

Credit loss expense









1,055

Other operating expenses, net



265





451



















Total costs and expenses



358,456





940,337



















OPERATING LOSS



(117,527)





(494,410)



















OTHER INCOME (EXPENSE):















Interest income



139





657

Interest expense, net of amount capitalized



(10,009)





(11,224)

Other



14





85



















Total other expense



(9,856)





(10,482)



















LOSS BEFORE INCOME TAXES



(127,383)





(504,892)

INCOME TAX BENEFIT



(20,970)





(70,170)



















NET LOSS

$ (106,413)



$ (434,722)



















NET LOSS PER COMMON SHARE:















Basic

$ (0.57)



$ (2.28)

Diluted

$ (0.57)



$ (2.28)

WEIGHTED AVERAGE NUMBER OF COMMON SHARES OUTSTANDING:















Basic



187,677





190,674

Diluted



187,677





190,674

CASH DIVIDENDS PER COMMON SHARE

$ 0.02



$ 0.04



PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC.



Additional Financial and Operating Data



(unaudited, dollars in thousands)



































Three Months Ended



Three Months

Ended







March 31,



December 31,







2021



2020



2020































Contract Drilling:

























Revenues

$ 133,501



$ 267,364



$ 115,574



Direct operating costs

$ 79,378



$ 163,420



$ 71,158



Margin (1)

$ 54,123



$ 103,944



$ 44,416



Other operating expenses (income), net

$ 12



$ 



$ (30)



Selling, general and administrative

$ 1,058



$ 1,464



$ 982



Depreciation, amortization and impairment

$ 101,674



$ 111,438



$ 104,928



Impairment of goodwill

$ 



$ 395,060



$ 



Operating loss

$ (48,621)



$ (404,018)



$ (61,464)































Operating days



6,183





11,235





5,720































Average revenue per operating day

$ 21.59



$ 23.80



$ 20.21



Average direct operating costs per operating day

$ 12.84



$ 14.55



$ 12.44



Average margin per operating day (1)

$ 8.75



$ 9.25



$ 7.77



Average rigs operating



69





123





62































Capital expenditures

$ 11,427



$ 49,445



$ 3,589































Pressure Pumping:

























Revenues

$ 75,839



$ 125,107



$ 79,498



Direct operating costs

$ 76,510



$ 114,855



$ 75,417



Margin (2)

$ (671)



$ 10,252



$ 4,081



Selling, general and administrative

$ 1,683



$ 3,067



$ 1,807



Depreciation, amortization and impairment

$ 37,385



$ 42,671



$ 34,044



Operating loss

$ (39,739)



$ (35,486)



$ (31,770)































Average active spreads (3)



7





10





7



Effective utilization (4)



5.5





7.7





6.3































Fracturing jobs



71





89





72



Other jobs



200





209





195



Total jobs



271





298





267































Average revenue per fracturing job

$ 977.89



$ 1,359.39



$ 1,019.85



Average revenue per other job

$ 32.05



$ 19.72



$ 31.12



Average revenue per total job

$ 279.85



$ 419.82



$ 297.75



Average costs per total job

$ 282.32



$ 385.42



$ 282.46



Average margin per total job (2)

$ (2.48)



$ 34.40



$ 15.28



























































Margin as a percentage of revenues (2)



(0.9) %



8.2 %



5.1 %





























Capital expenditures

$ 4,068



$ 14,280



$ 3,798





















































































PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC.



Additional Financial and Operating Data



(unaudited, dollars in thousands)



































Three Months Ended



Three Months Ended







March 31,



December 31,







2021



2020



2020



Directional Drilling:

























Revenues

$ 19,670



$ 34,485



$ 16,858



Direct operating costs

$ 16,637



$ 32,329



$ 14,702



Margin (5)

$ 3,033



$ 2,156



$ 2,156



Selling, general and administrative

$ 1,459



$ 2,330



$ 1,070



Depreciation, amortization and impairment

$ 6,497



$ 10,421



$ 6,806



Operating loss

$ (4,923)



$ (10,595)



$ (5,720)































Margin as a percentage of revenues (5)



15.4 %



6.3 %



12.8 %





























Capital expenditures

$ 104



$ 2,008



$ 119































Other Operations:

























Revenues

$ 11,919



$ 18,971



$ 8,871



Direct operating costs

$ 10,226



$ 16,024



$ 8,015



Margin (6)

$ 1,693



$ 2,947



$ 856



Selling, general and administrative

$ 425



$ 1,459



$ 570



Depreciation, depletion, amortization and impairment

$ 5,824



$ 20,259



$ 6,424



Operating loss

$ (4,556)



$ (18,771)



$ (6,138)































Capital expenditures

$ 2,744



$ 5,264



$ 2,602































Corporate:

























Selling, general and administrative

$ 17,933



$ 22,026



$ 16,490



Depreciation

$ 1,502



$ 2,008



$ 1,507



Credit loss expense

$ 



$ 1,055



$ 



Other operating expenses, net

$ 253



$ 451



$ 1,109































Capital expenditures

$ 180



$ 931



$ 330































Total capital expenditures

$ 18,523



$ 71,928



$ 10,438









(1) For Contract Drilling, margin is defined as revenues less direct operating costs and excludes depreciation, amortization and impairment, impairment of goodwill, other operating expenses (income), net and selling, general and administrative expenses. Average margin per operating day is defined as margin divided by operating days. (2) For Pressure Pumping, margin is defined as revenues less direct operating costs and excludes depreciation, amortization and impairment and selling, general and administrative expenses. Average margin per total job is defined as margin divided by total jobs. Margin as a percentage of revenues is defined as margin divided by revenues. (3) Average active spreads is the average number of spreads that were crewed and actively marketed during the period. (4) Effective utilization is calculated as total pumping days during the quarter divided by 75 days, which we consider full effective utilization for a spread. (5) For Directional Drilling, margin is defined as revenues less direct operating costs and excludes depreciation, amortization and impairment and selling, general and administrative expenses. Margin as a percentage of revenues is defined as margin divided by revenues. (6) For Other Operations, margin is defined as revenues less direct operating costs and excludes depreciation, depletion, amortization and impairment, and selling, general and administrative expenses.





March 31,



December 31,

Selected Balance Sheet Data (unaudited, in thousands):

2021



2020

Cash and cash equivalents

$

214,144



$

224,915

Current assets

$

487,602



$

477,956

Current liabilities

$

272,260



$

273,722

Working capital

$

215,342



$

204,234

Long-term debt

$

901,689



$

901,484



PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC. Non-U.S. GAAP Financial Measures (unaudited, dollars in thousands)





Three Months Ended



Three Months Ended







March 31,



December 31,







2021



2020



2020



Adjusted Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (Adjusted EBITDA)(1):

























Net loss

$ (106,413)



$ (434,722)



$ (106,527)



Income tax benefit



(20,970)





(70,170)





(24,846)



Net interest expense



9,870





10,567





7,249



Depreciation, depletion, amortization and impairment



152,882





186,797





153,709



Impairment of goodwill









395,060





































Adjusted EBITDA

$ 35,369



$ 87,532



$ 29,585































Total revenues

$ 240,929



$ 445,927



$ 220,801



Adjusted EBITDA margin



14.7 %



19.6 %



13.4 %





























Adjusted EBITDA by operating segment:

























Contract drilling

$ 53,053



$ 102,480



$ 43,464



Pressure pumping



(2,354)





7,185





2,274



Directional drilling



1,574





(174)





1,086



Other operations



1,268





1,488





286



Corporate



(18,172)





(23,447)





(17,525)































Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA

$ 35,369



$ 87,532



$ 29,585









(1) Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ("Adjusted EBITDA") is not defined by accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America ("U.S. GAAP"). We define Adjusted EBITDA as net loss plus net interest expense, income tax benefit and depreciation, depletion, amortization and impairment expense (including impairment of goodwill). We present Adjusted EBITDA because we believe it provides to both management and investors additional information with respect to the performance of our fundamental business activities and a comparison of the results of our operations from period to period and against our peers without regard to our financing methods or capital structure. We exclude the items listed above from net loss in arriving at Adjusted EBITDA because these amounts can vary substantially from company to company within our industry depending upon accounting methods and book values of assets, capital structures and the method by which the assets were acquired. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to the U.S. GAAP measure of net income (loss). Our computations of Adjusted EBITDA may not be the same as similarly titled measures of other companies.

PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC. Non-Cash Charges Three Months Ended March 31, 2020 (unaudited, in thousands, except per share data)



Total



Per Share

















Impairment of goodwill $ 395,060









Impairment of E&P assets

10,551









Pre-tax amount

405,611









Income tax benefit

(56,380)









After tax amount $ 349,231



$ 1.83

















Weighted average number of common shares













outstanding, excluding non-vested shares













of restricted stock

190,674









Add dilutive effect of potential common shares











Weighted average number of diluted common













shares outstanding

190,674

























Effective income tax rate

13.9 %









Cision

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SOURCE PATTERSON-UTI ENERGY, INC.
As India faces a devastating surge of new coronavirus infections, doctors are witnessing people turning to increasingly desperate measures such as witch doctors to help them.

Dr Ashita Rebecca Singh, head of medicine at Chinchpada Christian Hospital in a remote part of Maharashtra state, said she had seen Covid patients with branding marks on their abdomen from witch doctors attempting to drive out the evil spirit they believe causes the infection.

Others have relied on indigenous medicine such as herbal remedies and ancient beliefs, according to the doctor, while some have run away from their villages because they think an evil spirit is to blame for people dying.

And of those who do seek help from the hospital, which has increased its capacity from 50 beds to 82, many come only as a last resort and end up dying at the gates because it is too late, she said.

Dr Singh told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: [There is] a lot of dependence on indigenous medicine, a lot of ancient beliefs, so we still have a lot of patients who are on our wards right now on high-flow oxygen who actually have branding marks on their abdomen because they first went to the witch doctor who gave them hot iron branding in the hope the evil spirit that is supposed to be causing this illness will be exorcised.

We hear of people who have run away from their villages because they think that an evil spirit has come and that is why people are dying.

These are traditional beliefs. This is actually their first port of call when they are ill.

Only a small proportion will come to the doctors; the others will go to the witch doctor or the indigenous practitioner who will give them herbal medication for their illnesses.

Because of this, a lot of time is wasted and people come in really late and very sick and many of them never come to the hospital.

Multiple funeral pyres of Covid-19 victims burn at a site converted into a crematorium for mass cremation in New Delhi, India (Altaf Qadri/AP)

What we see in the hospital is really just the tip of the iceberg.

In some cases, people are reportedly also turning to unproven medical treatments in a desperate bid to save their loved ones, and in others to the black market for life-saving medications that are in short supply.

It comes as India's total Covid-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday after another world record number of daily infections.

The world's second most populous nation is in deep crisis, with hospitals and morgues overwhelmed.

Gravediggers have been working around the clock to bury victims, while hundreds are cremated in makeshift pyres in parks and car parks.

Additional reporting by agencies
Under President Joe Biden's American Families Plan, the federal government would cover about 75% of the average tuition cost. The state would cover the rest. Students say the plan could help them keep their student debt down.

"I still live with my parents at the moment, so it's helping out," Breann Shelton said.

Shelton is a freshman at Calhoun Community College. She chose to go to a community college to help save money and says she likes Biden's idea of making the first two years of tuition free.

"I think it would help," Shelton said.

A recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows almost 63% of high school graduates enrolled into college last year. That's down by around 3% compared to 2019. Of that group that did not enroll in college, more than 30% were not considered to be in the workforce.

"That's kind of a scary number," interim president of Calhoun Community College Dr. Joe Burke said. "This day and time, students need to have some sort of credential outside of high school to be successful."

Dr. Burke says free tuition may sound good, but there are more needs students face.

"They have so many more expenses for their education," Dr. Burke said.

Things like books, transportation and internet access are just some of the expenses students will need to think about. He's also concerned students may not complete a program or degree by the end of two years.

"The concern is that they stay in college and complete their program of study," Dr. Burke said.

However, students say the plan is more of an opportunity than anything else.

"It would eventually bring more people and allow people to realize, 'Okay! This is something I might want to look into.' It would just be a good push in the right direction," Shelton said.

If Biden's plan does pass and tuition would be covered, Calhoun Community College would expect a rise in students. The interim president says they're already prepared to deal with that increase.
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A Second World War amphibious vehicle that was buried 30 feet beneath the Cambridgeshire Fens has been excavated by a team of volunteers.

The 26ft-long LVT-4 tank was uncovered by residents who spent five days digging the lands beneath the Cambridgeshire Fens on the outskirts of Peterborough.

The tank was one of 16 brought in to act as a flood defence in the village of Crowland, Lincolnshire, during the 1947 floods after high tides, rain and wind caused the River Welland to burst its banks.

However, when the water was pumped back into the flood plain, the water managed to get underneath some of the Buffalos and led to five of the tanks floating away.

One was recovered, two sank in fishing pits and two are in the hole where the team is now digging.

The Buffalo military tank, which weighs 20 tons, had been underground for 74 years but appears to be well-preserved because it was buried in a mixture of peat and clay.

The Buffalo amphibious vehicle, which was buried 30ft underground, has been excavated by a team of volunteers in the Cambridgeshire Fens

The military tank, which has been underground for 74 years, appears to be well-preserved because it has been buried in a mixture of peat and clay

Images showed the cordoned section of land on which the amphibious tank, which was one of 16 brought in to act as a flood defence in the village of Crowland during the 1947 floods, was uncovered

The 26ft-long LVT-4 tank, which was one of 16 brought in to act as a flood defence in the village of Crowland, during the 1947 floods, was uncovered by residents who spent five days digging the lands beneath the Cambridgeshire Fens

The Buffalo military tank, which weighs 20 tons, had been underground for 74 years but appears to be well-preserved because it was buried in a mixture of peat and clay

Daniel Abbott, chairman of Crowland Buffalo LVT, said his team had to carry out 'a lot of digging by hand' as well as using a machine from the North Level Drainage Board in order to uncover the vehicle

Mr Abbott said: 'I've always wanted to get one of the tanks out before the 75th anniversary of the floods and we started planning this a couple of years ago. 'I'm over the moon with what we've achieved, it's very exciting'

Mr Abbott added: 'We've spent five days digging and we're nearly there. We've had to do a lot of digging by hand, as well as using a machine from the North Level Drainage Board'

Daniel Abbott, chairman of Crowland Buffalo LVT, said his team had to carry out 'a lot of digging by hand' as well as using a machine from the North Level Drainage Board in order to uncover the vehicle.

He said the tank will soon be winched out of the deep hole in order for it to be assessed by experts.

Mr Abbott said: 'I've always wanted to get one of the tanks out before the 75th anniversary of the floods and we started planning this a couple of years ago.

'I'm over the moon with what we've achieved, it's very exciting.

'We've spent five days digging and we're nearly there. We've had to do a lot of digging by hand, as well as using a machine from the North Level Drainage Board.

'We found the gun mount first and it's in fantastic condition for its age. The tank seems to have been well preserved in the clay.

In March 1947, 16 Buffalo tanks were deployed by the government to Crowland after floods, which came after a combination of heavy snow, a sudden thaw, high tides, rain and wind, caused the River Welland to break its banks

Around 30,000 acres of land around Crowland were flooded and some people were made homeless temporarily. As the waters continued to rise, the tanks were brought in to help seal the breach and to act as dams

Daniel Abbott poses holding a Union flag by a 26-foot-long Buffalo tank which has been extracted from the earth in Crowland, Lincolnshire

Workers are seen standing around and helping as the 26-foot tank is extracted from the ground

The team of volunteers spent five day digging the land and used a machine from the North Level Drainage Board to assist them

The Buffalo, also known as the Landing Vehicle Tracked, was one of the tanks sent in to act as a flood defence in the village of Crowland

The volunteers, who have spent five days digging the area, continue to work at the scene after discovering the military tank

A cordon has been set up in order for the team, who found the tank 30ft underground, to continue their work in the area

Once the team of volunteers have removed the mud and clay from the vehicle it will be winched out and assessed by experts

Pictured: Buffalo military tanks are brought in and used as dams after the floods hit the village of Crowland in 1947

A 26-foot-long Buffalo tank is extracted from the earth in Crowland, Lincolnshire, where it has been buried for 74 years

Today images showed the cordoned section of land on which Buffalo amphibious tank was discovered as volunteers continued to work in the area

How were Buffalo amphibious vehicles used during the war? The Buffalo tank was originally a American cargo carrier The Buffalo, also known as the Landing Vehicle Tracked, was an American cargo carrier originally designed to bring stores from ship to shore in the 1920s and 30s. It soon became an assault vehicle bringing troops ashore during amphibious operations after engineer Donald Roebling adapted his previous military tank, which he called the Alligator. The US Marines used them extensively in the Pacific against Japanese forces, even arming them with deadly flamethrowers. In Europe, the British Army used 600 of them to cross the River Rhine in 1945 during Operation Plunder, armed with 20mm cannon and machine guns. The Royal Marines used them in Burma and Malaya and in the ill-fated 1956 Suez Crisis. During the Suez Canal crisis, the Royal Marines made a landing in Port Said using the US-tanks while being supported by a number of Centurion tanks from the Royal Tank Regiment. In 1943, the US Marines used the vehicles when landing on the island of Bougainville, which is part of Papua New Guinea, during the Second World War. The tanks were also used by the US Army in Europe in small numbers in 1944-45 for river crossing operations. It was first used in North Africa in 1942 in order to tow vehicles and also for boat salvage operations. After the Second World War, some of the tanks were used during the Korean War for the landing in Incheon and the subsequent Han River crossing to re-take Seoul. The amphibious vehicles were also used in the evacuation of Hungnam Harbour when Chinese forces attacked. Following the war, the oldest Buffalo's were disposed of or sold to other countries however the LVT-3 and LVT(A)-5 remained with the US army. Advertisement

'Once we've winched it out we will assess it, then hopefully we will eventually be able to put it in a nice shed in the town and make a museum.

'It's been in Crowland for 74 years and it's part of the town's history.'

Today images showed the cordoned section of land on which Buffalo amphibious tank was discovered as volunteers continued to work in the area.

In March 1947, 16 Buffalo tanks were deployed by the government to Crowland after floods, which came after a combination of heavy snow, a sudden thaw, high tides, rain and wind, caused the River Welland to break its banks.

Around 30,000 acres of land around Crowland were flooded and some people were made homeless temporarily.

As the waters continued to rise, the tanks were brought in to help seal the breach and to act as dams.

When the water was pumped back into the flood plain, the water got under some of the Buffalos and five of them floated away.

One was recovered, two sank in fishing pits and two are in the hole where the team is now digging.

The Buffalo, also known as the Landing Vehicle Tracked, was an American cargo carrier originally designed to bring stores from ship to shore.

However it soon became an assault vehicle bringing troops ashore during amphibious operations.

The tank was designed by engineer Donald Roebling who adapted his previous military tank, which he called the Alligator, so that it could be used by the Navy and Marine Corps during the Second World War.

The LVT4 was able to protect the men inside with its armoured construction and its rear ramp also allowed troops to make a swift exit when facing incoming fire.

The US Marines used them extensively in the Pacific against Japanese forces, even arming them with deadly flamethrowers.

In Europe, the British Army used 600 of them to cross the Rhine in 1945, armed with 20mm cannon and machine guns.

The Royal Marines also used them in Burma and Malaya and in the ill-fated 1956 Suez Crisis.

In 1943, the US Marines used the vehicles when landing on the island of Bougainville, which is part of Papua New Guinea, during the Second World War.

The tanks were also used by the US Army in Europe in small numbers between 1944-45 for river crossing operations.

In 1945, the LVT-2s and LVT-4s were used by US troops crossing the Roer River, between Roermond in the Netherlands and Duren in Germany, during Operation Grenade.

The Second World War operation marked the beginning of the allied invasion of Germany.

The tanks were first used North Africa in 1942 in order to tow vehicles and also for boat salvage operations.

After the Second World War some of the tanks were used during the Korean War for the landing in Incheon and the subsequent Han River crossing.

The amphibious vehicles were also used in the evacuation of Hungnam Harbour when Chinese forces attacked.

Following the war, the oldest Buffalo's were disposed of or sold to other countries however the LVT-3 and LVT(A)-5s remained with the US army.
Savers and pensioners were given another boost to their pots after Shell lifted its prize dividend.

The rise is a modest 4 per cent to 12.4p per share  but is encouraging for ordinary Britons whose finances were left bruised by the energy giants decision to drastically slash its payout by two-thirds last year after the business was pummelled by the pandemic.

The oil major revealed yesterday that profits in the first three months of the year surged to 2.3billion on the back of rising crude prices.

Divi boost: Shell lifted its prize dividend by 4 per cent to 12.4p per share after revealing profits in the first three months of the year surged to 2.3bn on the back of rising crude prices

This was more than the 2.1billionn it made in the same period of last year  when prices began to tumble as the extent of the coronavirus spread became clear  and a staggering eight times more than the 280million it made in the final quarter of 2020.

Share buybacks are not back on the cards yet for Shell  which is holding off until its debt pile falls to 47billion. It is currently at 51billion.

Rival BP, on the other hand, has relaunched share buybacks after reaching its debt goal more than a year early  but has yet to increase its dividend.

But shares in Shell (down 1.4 per cent, or 18.6p, to 1299.2p) slid yesterday, suggesting that the City had already priced in the boost from higher oil prices, while BP fell 0.8 per cent, or 2.5p, to 302p.

Stock Watch - Character Group Toy maker and designer Character Group is heading for its best ever year after sales soared. The company said it was because it has such a strong roster of brands, with Peppa Pig, Scooby Doo and Pokemon gear all beating sales expectations. Character Group was one of the top risers on AIM  rising 21.3 per cent, or 100.5p, to 572.5p  after it said first-half profit rocketed to 7.6million, up from 2.2million the year before. It expects sales to get a boost now shops are open again.

Their drops came even as crude prices rose 1.4pc to $68 a barrel  fuelling talk among market analysts that we are entering a new commodities supercycle.

There was further evidence elsewhere, as iron ore and copper prices shot to fresh highs.

Copper was trading above $10,000 a ton for the first time since 2011, during the last era of bumper metals prices.

Copper is often seen as a key bellwether for the global economy and the metals rise is partly down to major countries beginning to recover from Covid.

But copper is also gaining because of sweeping environmental pledges from governments, as it is a key material in green technology.

In a quarterly production report, Glencore (down 0.9 per cent, or 2.85p, to 300p) said its trading arm had a strong start to the year because of the commodities boom.

The trading and mining group said annual earnings in this division would be at the upper end of its 1.6billion to 2.3billion range.

The FTSE 100 climbed back above 7000 during trading yesterday  but by the close of the session it was in the red, falling 0.03 per cent, or 2.19 points, to 6961.48.

The FTSE 250 fell 0.2 per cent, or 46.88 points, to 22,392.94.

Elsewhere, in another day choc-a-bloc with company results, Smith & Nephew and DS Smith were in high demand.

Packaging maker DS Smith (up 2.5 per cent, or 10.2p, to 424p) said sales were strong and that it is on track to hit targets for the year.

DS Smith is also investing in new box factories in Europe to capitalise on the online shopping trend that took root during lockdowns.

Artificial hip and knee maker Smith & Nephew (up 5.6 per cent, or 83p, to 1568p) was confident enough about its outlook to reinstate full-year guidance as the number of elective surgeries performed began to rise again.

Many non-emergency procedures were put on hold during the height of the pandemic as hospitals focused their attention on Covid patients.

Shares in British American Tobacco (down 2 per cent, or 54.5p, to 2626p) and Imperial Brands (down 0.5 per cent, or 8p, to 1470p) lost ground after the US Food and Drug Administration proposed banning menthol cigarettes.

It also emerged that Kenneth Dart, a reclusive billionaire based in the Cayman Islands, has taken a 7 per cent stake in BAT and 3 per cent in Imperial.

And another two companies  tech group Alphawave IP and cargo ship group Taylor Maritime Investments  both announced their intention to float.
Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economic Development, Labour and Technology of Poland Jarosaw Gowin discussed the issues of regional security, COVID-19 vaccination campaign, and development of border infrastructure.

"We highly appreciate the unwavering position of the EU and NATO member states in the context of restoring Ukraines territorial integrity," said the Prime Minister of Ukraine, the Government portal reports.

Prime Minister of Ukraine noted that the dialogue between the countries had been actively developing recently, and this dynamics and content of contacts should be continued.

Shmyhal thanked the Polish side for the effective support that Ukraine felt amid the recent increase in the Russian Federation's military presence near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea.

The parties also raised the issue of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

The Head of Government of Ukraine thanked Poland, which, as part of the European Commission's initiative, expressed its readiness to provide Ukraine with 1.2 million doses of vaccine.

"We count on the Polish governments support in agreeing on a mechanism for the supply of vaccines to Ukrainians in the near future," he said.

Among other things, the Prime Minister noted that Ukraine was closely monitoring the introduction of health certificates in the European Union and was ready to join the initiative to increase the mobility of the population.

In addition, Shmyhal and Gowin discussed the reform of Ukrainian customs and the development of border infrastructure. The Prime Minister of Ukraine noted that a significant increase in throughput functionality on the Ukrainian-Polish border is an integral part of strengthening bilateral relations.

"Mutual cooperation in this area is very important for us so that we can develop, increase trade between the countries, destroy smuggling schemes and equip as many modern checkpoints as possible. This is one of the practical steps to expand our cooperation. Checkpoints are the door between our states, so progress in this area is important," the Prime Minister said.

Shmyhal also noted that the issue of Polish permits for international road transport arises in the context of increasing trade between the countries.

"Given the growing volume of our bilateral trade, Ukraine should be given 200,000 permits at least. This will help unlock our mutual economic potential and improve trade dynamics," he said.

During the meeting, the Prime Minister of Ukraine also underscored the importance of ensuring decent conditions and protecting the rights of Ukrainian migrant workers and students.

Photo credit: Government portal

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The global electric two-wheeler market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 7.5% during the forecast period according to a new report by Polaris Market Research. Electric two-wheelers include electric bicycles, electric scooters, electric motorcycles, and others, which are powered through an electric power source. Electric two-wheelers are lightweight, compact, easy to handle, and highly fuel efficient. A small engineering company based in Austria, Johammer, has developed a futuristic electric cruiser, Johammer J1. This bike is equipped with a 2.4-inch digital display attached to its rear-view mirrors, which displays speed, revs, and warnings. It offers a top speed of 75 mph with acceleration of 62 mph in 8 seconds. The bike is designed with motor and controller integrated into the rear wheel to enhance shock absorbance.

Complete Summary with TOC Available @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/electric-two-wheeler-market

The demand for electric two-wheelers has increased over the years owing to depletion of traditional fuel sources and growing environmental concerns. The growing awareness regarding environmental pollution caused by vehicles run on traditional fuels, and development of public charging infrastructure has increased the adoption of electric two-wheelers. Governments are introducing stringent regulations regarding vehicular emissions, supporting the market growth. Governments across the world have introduced several laws and regulations to monitor vehicular emission. These regulations have mandated two-wheeler manufacturers to use advanced technologies to combat high emission levels in vehicles.

The report provides an extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the market trends and growth prospects of the Global Electric Two-Wheeler Market, 2017-2026. This report comprises a detailed geographic distribution of the market across North America, Europe, APAC and South America, and MEA. North America is further segmented into U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Europe is divided into Germany, UK, Italy, France, and Rest of Europe. Asia-Pacific is bifurcated into China, India, Japan, and Rest of Asia-Pacific.

Get sample copy of this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/electric-two-wheeler-market/request-for-sample

Asia-Pacific generated the highest revenue in 2017 owing to increasing awareness regarding environment, and growing vehicular population in this region. The increasing resource depletion, and development of public charging infrastructure have resulted in increasing adoption of electric two-wheelers in the region.

The global electric Two-Wheeler market is characterized by the presence of well-diversified international and small and medium-sized vendors. These companies are consistently launching new products to enhance their offerings in the market. With the advancement of technologies, companies are innovating and introducing new customized products to cater the growing needs of the customers. Leading companies are also acquiring other companies, and enhancing their product offerings to improve their market reach. Acquisitions enable key players to increase their market potential in terms of geographic expansion and expansion of customer base. The leading companies profiled in the report include Zhejiang Luyuan Electric Vehicle, Yadea Technology Group, Zero Motorcycles, Energica Motor company, Sanyang Industry, Alta Motors, Guangzhou Camqi Electric Vehicle, Yobykes, Ampere Vehicles, and Jiangsu Xinri E-Vehicle Co. Ltd.

Make Inquiry about this report @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/electric-two-wheeler-market/inquire-before-buying

About Polaris Market Research

Polaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide unmatched quality of offerings to our clients present globally. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world.

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KLAMATH FALLS, Ore.  With coronavirus cases rising again in Oregon, organizations in Klamath County are working to encourage vaccinations for the virus  and make the process as effortless as possible.

Klamath Health Partnership plans to host a free drive-through COVID-19 vaccine clinic beginning at 9 a.m. on May 4 at the Klamath County Fairgrounds. The event is by appointment only and scheduling can be done online.

The KHP event will offer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, recently cleared for use again in Oregon after being put on pause by the CDC earlier this month.

We know it is important for the community to be immunized, so we advocated with the Oregon Health Authority to receive this Johnson & Johnson allocation, said Dr. Flor Mounts, medical director at KHP. We are happy to be able to continue to offer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as an option to our community. This has been a safe and convenient option as a one shot vaccine and the CDCs investigation has encouraged us that they are taking every report of possible side effects seriously. We will be counseling women that are less than 50 years old of the possible risk of blood clots as directed by the CDC and FDA. 

Meanwhile, Klamath Tribal Health has started offering online vaccination appointments for doses at their clinics.

"Choosing to be vaccinated is our greatest chance to protect our community and our families," Klamath Tribal Health said. "Recently, the Navajo Nation announced that 87% of eligible members had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. They recently have been able to start the process of loosening restrictions on the reservation, after there were no new confirmed cases of COVID 19."

Klamat Tribal Health said that the Navajo Nation's push to get to this level of vaccination came at great cost. 1,273 Navajo died due to COVID-19.

"We dont want the choice for vaccination to be based off of the pain of losing more of our Tribal members. We can save lives by getting vaccinated now," the organization said.

Sky Lakes Medical Center also has regular clinics, and appointments can be made online or by phone. While the most recent clinics were last week, there will likely be more held in the coming days.
Chief Washakie Foundation Establishes Fund to Benefit UW and Wind River Reservation

UW President Ed Seidel, right, receives a check from Zedora Enos, a trustee of the Chief Washakie Foundation. Also on hand for the recent ceremony was James Trosper, Chief Washakie Foundation chairman and director of UWs High Plains American Indian Research Institute. (UW Photo)

The Chief Washakie Foundation has established an endowment fund -- the Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund -- at the University of Wyoming that benefits the Wind River Indian Reservation community.

I wanted to see this endowment created because of a passion for education and being an entrepreneur, and to help others know that they can get out and do something, says Shoshone elder and entrepreneur Zedora Teton Enos, the funds namesake and great-granddaughter of Chief Washakie. At the beginning, I wanted to set an example -- and set a good example -- and let others know what we can do. I want our people to know that they can roll up their sleeves and do something for themselves.

Enos, like legendary Chief Washakie, is a lifelong champion of education, business development and service for the Wind River Indian Reservation community. She is a trustee of the Chief Washakie Foundation.

The Chief Washakie Foundation has been an amazing philanthropic partner for the University of Wyoming, and todays gift is another milestone in meeting critical needs of the Wind River reservation, says UW President Ed Seidel. UW is committed to helping grow this fund as well as our relationship with the Wind River reservation community.

The Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund will support university outreach, service and programming to address critical needs and priorities of the Wind River reservation community, and will reward demonstrated excellence in addressing those needs. Focus areas include entrepreneurship, cultural and language preservation, and community development activities.

The fund continues the commitment of the Chief Washakie Foundation and UW to higher education and community development on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Previously, in 2003, the Chief Washakie Foundation established the Chief Washakie Memorial Endowment. To date, the endowment has provided scholarships to over 200 students to attend UW.

The excellence fund was established through a $90,000 gift from the Chief Washakie Foundation and will be maintained in perpetuity by the UW Foundation. It will be awarded annually under the direction of the Chief Washakie Memorial Awards Committee.

Quoting Chief Washakie, Eastern Shoshone Business Council Co-Chair John Washakie says, I fought to keep our land, our water and our hunting grounds. Today, education is the weapon my people need to protect them. John Washakie is the great-grandson of Chief Washakie and Enos brother.

The creation of the excellence fund was supported by Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho business council members.

As we witness the decline of revenue from energy statewide and reservationwide, this excellence fund comes at a critical time, says Lee Spoonhunter, co-chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council. It encourages entrepreneurship that will allow us to diversify our economy.

Chief Washakie has been honored in many ways: There is a county here in Wyoming named after him, a town, military post, military ship, national forest, wilderness area, ranger district, a mountain range and several mountains, John Washakie says. Its not unusual that a person of his stature also is recognized by the state of Wyoming with a statue in our nations Capitol and our states Capitol, but the lasting legacy that will have influence far into the future is the work the Chief Washakie Foundation is doing through educating our people and, now, through the Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund.

Zedora Teton was born in 1941 to Marie Washakie and Charlie Teton. Shoshone is her first language. She was raised by her maternal grandmother, Josie Trehero Washakie, a daughter-in-law of Chief Washakie as the wife of Washakies son, George Washakie.

The UW Foundation marked the creation of the Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund with a ceremony April 23 at the McMurry Legacy Hall in the Marian H. Rochelle Gateway Center. From left are: front row, Laura Raynolds, Chief Washakie Foundation trustee; Zedora Enos, namesake of the excellence fund and Chief Washakie Foundation trustee; and Ann Abeyta, also a Chief Washakie Foundation trustee; back row, James Trosper, Chief Washakie Foundation chairman and director of UWs High Plains American Indian Research Institute; Lee Spoonhunter, co-chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council; UW President Ed Seidel; and John Washakie, co-chairman of the Eastern Shoshone Business Council. (UW Photo)

Through her Grandma Josie, Zedora inherited the family passion for education, a foundation of moral teachings and cultural traditions, and family stories going back to the early 1800s. These are passed down from the Old Man, Chief Washakie, through Josie and other family members to each new generation of the Washakie family.

We need to consider what molds a persons character and makes them who they are, says John Washakie. My sister Zedora -- she was raised by our grandmother Josie Washakie, who took care of Chief Washakie the last years of his life.

The hands that fed the Old Man Washakie are the same hands that fed me, Enos says.

As a teenager, Enos lived at the Jane Ivinson Memorial Hall at the Cathedral School for Girls and attended University Prep in Laramie. She went on to graduate from high school at Flandreau Indian Boarding School in eastern South Dakota.

She entered the Miss Indian America pageant in Sheridan in 1960. Through the pageant, she won a scholarship to attend Sheridan College. The pageant also provided a job at the Wyoming State Capitol. She worked for the Wyoming Travel Commission, giving tours of the state Capitol.

Enos earned a degree in optical technology from the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute and New Mexico State University. Because education is important to Enos, she focused her energy and made sure her children got a good education. All seven of her children have graduated with higher education degrees.

After entering the workforce, Enos worked numerous jobs for the state of Wyoming, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and public education. She founded three successful businesses. In 1986, she founded Unique Optique with a storefront on Main Street in Lander, selling and fitting eyeglasses.

In order to do more lab work, Enos started Wind River Optical. The company invested in lab equipment and received contracts from stores throughout the western United States to make lenses. In addition to the lab, Wind River Optical had an eyeglass dispensary in Fort Washakie.

For 18 years, Enos traveled to many reservations, helping tribes train opticians and set up their own optical centers. After deciding to retire, she sold the business. She later was asked to come out of retirement to work for the state of Wyoming to implement the 55 Plus Employment Network on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

In 2013, Enos began working for the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center at Fort Washakie School. Currently, she is the director of the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center, where she has championed Shoshone culture, language revitalization and the preservation of the traditions that have sustained Shoshone people for centuries.

Chief Washakie championed education and forged a way for his people through great challenges. Zedora Teton Enos has humbly followed in his footsteps.

The night before Chief Washakie passed away, he called his family together. He told them, It is my earnest prayer that you will follow the footsteps, which I have made for you, and you will always be highly respected both by our people and the white people.

The UW Foundation marked the creation of the Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund with a ceremony April 23 at the McMurry Legacy Hall in the Marian H. Rochelle Gateway Center in Laramie.

Members of the Zedora Teton Enos and Washakie families attended the event, along with members of the board of the Chief Washakie Foundation; members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho business councils; and Seidel.

To support this fund, visit www.uwyo.edu/giveonline and designate the Zedora Teton Enos Excellence Fund, or call the UW Foundation at (307) 766-6300.
The geko device, manufactured by Sky Medical Technology Ltd and distributed in Canada by Trudell Healthcare Solutions Inc., is a muscle pump activator which significantly improves blood flow by stimulating the body's 'muscle pumps.' Patients using the device following kidney transplantation experienced shorter hospital stays and reduced surgical site infections by nearly 60 per cent. Credit: Lawson Health Research Institute

In a published study, a team from Lawson Health Research Institute has found that a simple device can reduce swelling after kidney transplantation. The geko device, manufactured by Sky Medical Technology Ltd and distributed in Canada by Trudell Healthcare Solutions Inc., is a muscle pump activator which significantly improves blood flow by stimulating the body's 'muscle pumps.' Patients using the device following kidney transplantation experienced shorter hospital stays and reduced surgical site infections by nearly 60 per cent.

Kidney and simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantations can significantly reduce mortality and improve the quality of life for patients with end stage renal disease. "After surgery, many of these organ recipients require a longer hospital stay due to delayed kidney function, infection, lack of mobility or edema," says Dr. Alp Sener, Lawson Scientist and Transplant Surgeon in the Multi-Organ Transplant Program at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).

Edema is swelling caused by excess fluid trapped in the body's tissues which can impact wound healing. The current standard of care for managing lower-limb edema and improving blood flow is thrombo-embolic-deterrent ("TED") stockings used with compression devices. Sleeves pumped with air squeeze the lower legs to boost circulation. They can be uncomfortable to wear, and the large pump can inhibit early mobility and disrupt sleep after surgery.

In a randomized controlled clinical trial spanning two years, 221 transplant recipients at LHSC either wore the standard TED stocking and pump or the geko device for six days after surgery. Dr. Sener's research team found that wearing the device increased urine output by 27 per cent and lowered weight gain by over a kilogram. With more urine produced and less fluid retention, patients experienced 31 per cent less swelling. The duration of costly hospitalization was shortened by over one day after kidney transplantation compared to the standard of care.

A 60 per cent reduction in wound infection rates was a striking observation. "Transplant patients are at a higher risk of infection due to the immunosuppressant medications needed after surgery," explains Dr. Sener, who is also the President of the Urologic Society for Transplantation and Renal Surgery, a global organization affiliated with the American Urological Association. "Reducing infection means a much better outcome for the patient and considering that recent data shows wound infections can cost the health care system thousands of dollars per person, it's a win-win situation."

Some of the study participants wore pedometers to track their steps, and those using the geko device had improved mobility after surgery. The team suspects this may be due to reduced swelling which could improve ease and comfort when moving.

"The study results have been both surprising and exciting. Not only have we cut down wound infection rates but we have also seen a considerable improvement in the new organ's function following transplantation. Patients report feeling more satisfied with the transplant process and are more mobile," says Dr. Sener. The geko device is now being offered to patients at LHSC in recovery after receiving a new kidney.

Ruben Garcia, 68 years old, recently received a new kidney from his daughter, Ruby, who was a match as a living kidney donor. Following his surgery, Garcia found it difficult to get out of bed due to the pain and swelling, and the function of his new kidney was very low. "My surgeon explained in very simple terms that it was as if my new kidney wasn't awake yet," describes Garcia.

Dr. Sener recommended that Garcia use the geko device to help stimulate blood flow in a way that is similar to walking. Garcia was soon able to sit up on a chair and by the next day he was walking. "My kidney woke up and starting working again! I could feel the device working and it was comfortable to wear, almost like a massage for my legs. I'm very grateful for the care that I received."

Dr. Sener adds that "using a muscle pump activator could be a game changer for other procedures like orthopedic implants where wound infection can have disastrous consequences or in surgeries where wound infections are more common such as in cancer and intestinal surgery."

The geko device is non-invasive, self-adhering, battery-powered and recyclable. It generates neuromuscular electro-stimulation and unparalleled systemic blood flow that equates to 60 per cent of that achieved by walking. Pain-free muscle contraction compresses deep veins in the lower legs to create better blood flow in these vessels and return blood to the heart. It is particularly well suited to hospital settings as it portable and requires minimal training. For the indications for the use of the geko device, go to www.gekodevices.com

"The results of the study provide further evidence that the geko device is an effective treatment option that can improve outcomes for patients and help them return home sooner, while reducing costs for the health-care system," says George Baran, Executive Chairman of the Trudell Medical Group and a Director of Sky Medical.

The study "Daily use of a muscle pump activator device reduces duration of hospitalization and improves early graft outcomes post-kidney transplantation: A randomized controlled trial" is published in CUAJ.

Explore further Pioneering dual surgery a safe option for patients with polycystic kidney disease

More information: Wen Xie et al, Daily use of a muscle pump activator device reduces duration of hospitalization and improves early graft outcomes post-kidney transplantation: A randomized controlled trial, Canadian Urological Association Journal (2020). Wen Xie et al, Daily use of a muscle pump activator device reduces duration of hospitalization and improves early graft outcomes post-kidney transplantation: A randomized controlled trial,(2020). DOI: 10.5489/cuaj.6487
Shakeup in Irans presidential office after leaked FM tape View Photo

TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  Irans president on Thursday replaced the head of a government think tank after a recording of a conversation with the countrys foreign minister leaked out this week. The tape, meant for government records, provided a rare glimpse into the theocracys power struggles and set off a firestorm in Iran.

The conversation took place as an interview with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by Saeed Leilaz, an economist. The tape was to be kept by the Strategic Studies Center, the think tank associated with Irans presidency.

In the recording, Zarif offers a blunt appraisal of diplomacy and his constricted role in the Islamic Republic.

Irans presidency announced Thursday that Hessameddin Ashena, head of the Strategic Studies Center, had resigned and that Cabinet spokesman Ali Rabiei replaces him. Ashena was also reportedly present during the interview with Zarif.

The audio tape, leaked earlier this week to London-based, Farsi-language news channel Iran International, set off political controversy across Iran ahead of the countrys June 18 presidential election. While Zarif has said he does not want to run in the election, some have suggested him as a potential candidate to stand against hard-liners in the vote.

On Wednesday, President Hassan Rouhani, who after eight years in office is restricted by term limits from running in the June election, lashed out over the recordings release. He said the interview was part of a wider project with government officials and also urged for an investigation into how the tape was leaked.

Zarif can be heard saying at various points in the tape that it was not meant for release. The recording runs a total of some seven hours.

Also Thursday, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported, citing an informed source in the judiciary, that 15 people connected to the interview have been banned from leaving the country.

Zarifs leaked remarks included cutting references to the limits of his power and those of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a top commander in Irans paramilitary Revolutionary Guard who was killed in a drone strike in Baghdad.

Earlier this week, Zarif expressed regret over the affair, saying his remarks had been misinterpreted. Rouhani portrayed the breach as intended to derail ongoing talks over the return to Irans tattered nuclear deal with world powers.

By AMIR VAHDAT

Associated Press
She enjoyed a night out at an Oscars party in LA on Sunday with her partner Garrett Hedlund.

And on Wednesday, new mom Emma Roberts was seen running a solo errand in West Hollywood.

The actress, who gave birth to her son Rhodes on December 27, put on a stylish show as usual with her chosen ensemble.

Out and about: New mom Emma Roberts put on a stylish show as usual as she ran a solo errand in West Hollywood on Wednesday wearing a 'Cool Vibe' face mask

Roberts, 30, stepped out in a beige check blouse with large collar that she wore tucked into blue jeans.

She wore light brown flats and carried a matching colored purse.

The American Horror Story star styled her hair into a ponytail, sported sunglasses and had on a blue face mask embroidered with the phrase 'Cool Vibes'.

Fashionista: The actress, 30, stepped out in a beige check blouse with large collar that she wore tucked into blue jeans. She wore light brown flats and carried a matching colored purse

Night out: Roberts and partner Garrett Hedlund welcomed a son together in late December and the couple enjoyed a date night on Sunday at an Oscars party (pictured with Evan Ross)

On Sunday night, Roberts and Hedlund, 36, attended Spring Place's Oscars party honoring Andra Day and the cast of The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

The niece of Hollywood star Julia Roberts showed off her post-baby body in a chic thigh-skimming black dress with matching cape jacket.

Her beau, whose credits include Mudbound and Tron: Legacy actor, looked dapper in a black two-piece suit with white shirt and long black tie.

The couple have been together since March 2019 and Roberts confirmed her pregnancy last August.

That's her boy! The niece of Hollywood star Julia Roberts gave birth to her first child named Rhodes on December 27
BOSTON -- The Brigham has been awarded an 'A' in the spring 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, released today by The Leapfrog Group. The designation recognizes the Brigham's efforts in protecting patients from harm and providing safer health care.

Brigham and Women's Hospital celebrates its seventh 'A' grade since the fall of 2017. The 'A' awarded Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital (BWFH) makes it one of just 27 hospitals nationwide to consistently earn that grade since the inception of the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade in 2012. The Safety Grade assigns grades from A-F to all general hospitals across the country based on their performance in preventing medical errors, injuries, accidents, infections and other harms to patients in their care.

"We are proud to receive an 'A' grade this spring from the Leapfrog Group. This extraordinary achievement is a result of our continuous commitment to the highest standards for patient safety," said Andrew Resnick, MD, MBA, chief Quality and Safety officer at the Brigham. "This accomplishment confirms the tremendous hard work, dedication, and devotion to patient care put forth by our clinicians, staff, volunteers and leadership each and every day."

"With all the challenges this year has brought, to be named among just 27 hospitals nationwide to have maintained an A grade since 2012 is a huge honor," said Christi Barney, MSN, RN, Executive Director of Patient Safety, Quality, Risk, Infection Control, Clinical Compliance and CDI at Faulkner. "Here at BWFH, our caregivers are committed to providing the highest quality health care possible each day. I am so proud to be able to share this exciting news with our staff and our patients."

More information about Brigham's commitment to quality patient care and safety can be found here: Brigham and Women's Hospital and Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital.

"An 'A' safety grade is an elite designation that your community should be proud of," said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. "The past year has been extraordinarily difficult for hospitals, but the Brigham shows us it is possible to keep a laser focus on patients and their safety, no matter what it takes."

Developed under the guidance of a national expert panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,600 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year. The Hospital Safety Grade's methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public.

Brigham Health, a global leader in creating a healthier world, consists of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital, the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization and many related facilities and programs. With more than 1,000 inpatient beds, approximately 60,000 inpatient stays and 1.7 million outpatient encounters annually, Brigham Health's 1,200 physicians provide expert care in virtually every medical and surgical specialty to patients locally, regionally and around the world. An international leader in basic, clinical and translational research, Brigham Health has nearly 5,000 scientists, including physician-investigators, renowned biomedical researchers and faculty supported by over $700 million in funding. The Brigham's medical preeminence dates back to 1832, and now, with 19,000 employees, that rich history is the foundation for its commitment to research, innovation, and community. Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and dedicated to educating and training the next generation of health care professionals. For more information, resources, and to follow us on social media, please visit brighamandwomens.org.

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JERRI LANGE, BAY AREA MEDIA LEGEND, SOCIAL ACTIVIST, EDUCATOR, AND AUTHOR HAS PASSED

Jerri Langes Spiritual Journey on Earth has Ended, but Her Legacy Continues

LOS ANGELES,Jerri Lange, one of the first African American journalists and television talk show hosts in the San Francisco Bay Area passed away peacefully on April 10, 2021, from natural causes. At 96, despite several physical challenges, Jerri remained a positive and powerful force and continued to share her wisdom and experiences with her vast circle of family, friends, and admirers. Jerri is survived by her two sons, James Cowan, a print media businessman, and Ted Lange, an actor best known for his stellar performance as Isaac on the hit television series, The Love Boat, along with Teds two sons/Jerris grandsons, Ted IV and Turner. Jerri joins her son, the late Michael Lange, former playwright, actor, professor in heaven.

Jerri was an award-winning journalist who from 1969 to 1979 hosted community-based television shows in the Bay Area on KEMO; KBHK; KGO; and KQED, where she became the first black woman to host a national talk show, Turnabout, and where she served on the Board. Jerri has interviewed world leaders and great entertainers, including Professor Arnold Toynbee, a historian from the Royal Institute of International Studies in London; Sammy Davis, Jr.; Rock Hudson; and many others. She was a professor at San Francisco State University, lectured a graduate class in communications at Stanford University, was correspondent in Africa for the San Francisco Chronicle, and was creator and publisher of the magazine, Amberstar. In her book, Jerri, A Black Womans Life in the Media, she tells of her extraordinary experiences and how they shaped her life.

Born in Berkeley and spending most of her adult life in Oakland, California, the city she called home, Jerri lived a profound spiritual life and often talked about how studying in Japan in 2006 under the auspices of Hoju Roshie, a Master Zen Buddhist Priest, changed her life. Jerris passion for learning about the cultures of the world, coupled with her love for all people bridged gaps and strengthened communities. She used her passion to empower people, especially young African Americans, who she urged to embrace the concept that we are all connected to the same source, as she guided them toward education through school, reading, researching, and traveling to enhance their lives.

The Lange family is currently planning a memorial in Jerris honor at a time to be determined in May 2021. Additional details will be forthcoming. Cards and other communications can be sent to: Jerri Lange, c/o Carmen Stone, P.O. Box 852, San Lorenzo, CA 94580, or by email to [email protected].

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Companies to launch feasibility study for new pilot plant in Europe

Trinseo (NYSE: TSE) and ETB have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on the development of purified bio-based 1,3-butadiene. This will see the two companies combine their respective technology and process expertise to accelerate the development of viable, renewably sourced material solutions.

Under the partnership, the companies will jointly explore opportunities to scale up ETB's unique single-stage process to produce bio-based 1,3-butadiene from ethanol using polyfunctional catalyst technology. The collaboration will initially focus on demonstrating the viability of sustainable ethanol-based synthetic rubber in support of green tire production. To underline this mutual commitment, Trinseo, with ETB's support, will conduct a feasibility study to explore the construction of a dedicated bio-based 1,3-butadiene pilot plant in Europe. Once operational, it is intended that the pilot plant will include a purification unit to achieve a purity target of 99.7%.

Bio-based butadiene is considered a vital first component in the value chain for enabling the replacement of fossil-based raw materials with renewable sources, thereby reducing the environmental footprint of consumer products, such as performance tires throughout their lifecycle. It also represents a key milestone in Trinseo's transformation as a sustainable solutions provider.

Within the past six months, Trinseo achieved International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) and has become the first synthetic rubber provider globally to gain mass balance certification. In addition, Trinseo recently announced a business collaboration with BASF in the area of circular feedstocks, with the aim of strengthening the efforts of both companies in the development and management of styrene with an improved environmental profile.

"Sustainability is at the heart of Trinseo and this new partnership with ETB enables us to move towards truly differentiated material solutions with a lower environmental impact than ever before," said Francesca Reverberi, Vice President, Engineered Materials Synthetic Rubber, Trinseo. "Our customers are increasingly seeking new ways to add renewable and bio-based raw materials along the value chain to support their sustainability goals. The ability to derive bio-based butadiene from ethanol with close to 100% purity enables our customers to develop more sustainable products without compromising on performance."

Vladimir Trembovolsky, CEO, ETB, added: "ETB is driven by the idea of bringing bio-based butadiene to the industry through our proprietary, patented process currently demonstrated at our pilot plant in Russia. By working closely with Trinseo, we aim to unlock new opportunities throughout the value chain from biomass to end product. We look forward to sharing technologies and expertise as we strive towards industrial production of renewably sourced 1,3-butadiene at a purification level of at least 99.7%. ETB believes that true adoption of bio-based monomers is only possible through close collaboration between industry players along the entire value chain. Our joint partnership is a beacon for the industry thanks to the scale, reach and sustainable ethos of Trinseo."

It is anticipated that the pilot plant evaluation study will be completed by the close of 2021. Both companies share the long-term ambition of scaling up live production globally.

About Trinseo

Trinseo (NYSE:TSE) is a global materials solutions provider and manufacturer of plastics, latex binders, and synthetic rubber with a focus on delivering innovative, sustainable, and value-creating products that are intrinsic to our daily lives. Trinseo is dedicated to making a positive impact on society by partnering with like-minded stakeholders, and supporting the sustainability goals of our customers in a wide range of end-markets including automotive, consumer electronics, appliances, medical devices, packaging, footwear, carpet, paper and board, building and construction, and tires. Trinseo had approximately $3.0 billion in net sales in 2020, with 17 manufacturing sites around the world, and approximately 2,600 employees. For more information, please visit: www.trinseo.com.

About ETB

ETB Global B.V. (ETB) is an innovative company developing unique catalysts for new sustainable bio-based processes, drawing on over 100 years of experience and knowledge in the fossil-based petrochemical industry and catalysis. ETB's mission is to change the environmental footprint of the rubber and plastic products we use every day. Bio-Butadiene (Bio- BD) is the first chemical building block the company has chosen to target, focusing on bio-based ethanol as a feedstock. The company draws on the strong scientific background of its founders and has its own laboratory and pilot plant in Russia and a global office at Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Geleen, the Netherlands. For more information, please visit: etbcat.com

Note on Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, projections, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements, which are not statements of historical facts or guarantees or assurances of future performance. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words like "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "will," "may," "might," "see," "potential," "likely," "target," "plan," "contemplate," "seek," "attempt," or expressions of similar meaning. Forward-looking statements reflect management's evaluation of information currently available and are based on our current expectations and assumptions regarding our business, the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. Factors that might cause such a difference include, but are not limited to, the outcome of the collaboration with ETB, our previously-announced proposed acquisition of the Arkema MMA and PMMA business; and those factors discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K, under Part I, Item 1A -"Risk Factors" and elsewhere in our other reports, filings and furnishings made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. As a result of these or other factors, our actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Therefore, we caution you against relying on any of these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005188/en/

Contacts:

Trinseo

Marjolein Groeneweg

Tel: +49 6196 969 3124

Email: mgroeneweg@trinseo.com

ETB

Vladimir Trembovolsky

Tel: +31 657 881232

Email: vladimir@etbcat.com
A nurse prepares an AstraZeneca vaccine shot in the central Quang Nam Province, April 23, 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Dac Thanh.

Part of a sum saved from last year's budget expenditure will be used to purchase Covid-19 vaccines, as approved by the parliament's standing committee.

The Standing Committee of the National Assembly (NA) has agreed to extract VND12 trillion ($520.44 million) from an amount of VND64.76 trillion, which Vietnam has saved from last years spending, to buy vaccines.

The NA's Finance and Budget Committee said it is necessary to serve an urgent issue, and complies with State Budget Law.

Besides, the government has also asked for the NAs approval to use a sum of VND1.237 trillion left from a pandemic prevention fund for 2020 of the Ministry of Health to buy vaccines.

The Finance and Budget Committee said the government proposal is reasonable given the complicated, unpredictable development of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, since the State Budget Law does not allow such a sum to be transferred from one year to the next, a final decision would be taken at the coming NA meeting in July.

Vietnam has secured a deal to have Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC) buy 30 million doses from British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca. Of these, 117,600 doses have been delivered.

Through the Global Covid-19 Vaccine Facility (Covax), Vietnam will be provided 38.9 million doses of the vaccine.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said Tuesday authorities need to ensure greater access to Covid-19 vaccines through international collaboration.

The Health Ministry last month said local firms were in talks with companies in the U.S. and India for diversification of vaccine sources as Vietnam seeks to obtain a total 150 million doses this year to immunize 70 percent of its population.

The nation is also developing four Covid-19 vaccines in various stages of testing.

Besides frontline medical workers, medical staff, the military, and police, Vietnam's priority list for Covid-19 vaccination includes teachers, diplomatic personnel, customs and immigration officers, those working in essential services like transport, people aged 65 and above, the poor, and those with chronic diseases.

People seeking to study or work abroad or living in pandemic-hit areas are also on the list.

The ministry has reported the nation now has 19.4 million people in priority groups, with Ho Chi Minh City accounting for the most at 1.56 million.

Demand for the free vaccine among priority groups, however, could be lower than expected because some are reluctant to receive it following global reports of side effects, the ministry noted.
Two sheriffs deputies were among four people who were killed in a 13-hour standoff in Boone, N.C., that the authorities said started on Wednesday morning when they were called to the home of a man who had not shown up for work.

Deputies from the Watauga County Sheriffs Office arrived at a house at 9:44 a.m. on Wednesday after the homeowners employer called to report that the person had not come to work or answered telephone calls, the sheriffs office said.

When the deputies went inside, two of them were shot as they descended the basement steps, Sheriff Len Hagaman said.

Sheriff Hagaman told reporters it was fair to say his deputies had been ambushed by the gunman, who was later identified by officials as Isaac Alton Barnes, 32. He is also suspected of killing his mother, Michelle Annette Ligon, 61, and his stepfather, George Wyatt Ligon, 58, before killing himself, according to a statement Thursday afternoon from the sheriffs office.
BMO Commercial Property Trust Limited

(a closed-ended investment company incorporated in Guernsey with registration number 50402)

(The "Company")

LEI Number: 213800A2B1H4ULF3K397

29 APRIL 2021

NOTICE OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Notice is hereby given that the 2021 Annual General Meeting of the Company will be held at the offices of BMO Global Assets Management, Exchange House, Primrose Street, London. EC2A 2NY on Thursday 17 June 2021 at 12.00pm.

The Notice of AGM together with the Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 December 2020 have been published. Under normal circumstance the Directors like to see and talk to as many shareholders as possible at the meeting. Sadly, it is unlikely that under the governments' roadmap of steps out of COVID-19 lockdown no indoor public gathering will be permitted by the date of the meeting and travel will be minimised. Shareholders are therefore invited to attend a separate online event on Thursday 3rdJune 2021 at 1.00pm during which there will be a presentation by the Fund Manager. Access to the online meeting can be requested by emailing BCPTCoSec@bmogam.com with your name and SRN. Questions can be sent in advance to the same address and there will be an opportunity to engage with the Board and Fund Manager through the question and answer session on the day.

The Company's Articles of Incorporation do not, as yet, allow the formalities of the AGM to be held online. As currently permitted, to meet the quorum requirements of the Articles of Incorporation it is proposed that the AGM will be held with just two members present in person. Voting will be conducted by way of a poll. It is strongly recommended that shareholders do not attend but exercise their votes by appointing the chairman of the meeting to act as their proxy.

In accordance with Listing Rule 9.6.3, the Notice of Annual General Meeting, proxy form and accounts have been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and will shortly be available for inspection at: https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism

Enquiries:

Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited

The Company Secretary

Trafalgar Court

Les Banques

St Peter Port

Guernsey

GY1 3QL

Tel: 01481 745001

END
A Charleston church is the latest peninsular structure slated to be replaced with a large-scale apartment building.

Developers paid $4 million in March for the 1.6-acre site of Eastside Missionary Baptist Church at 584 Meeting St. and plan to build a five-story, 250-unit multifamily project called Boulevard Apartments.

JJR Development of Charleston is partnering with MCZ Development of Chicago, which is relocating to the Lowcountry, for the estimated $40 million investment.

Eastside Missionary and its congregation plan to relocate to a 3.5-acre site it's in the process of acquiring near Cross County and Dorchester roads in North Charleston, according to church attorney Dwayne Green.

The church membership will continue to worship at the existing site until construction is completed on the new sanctuary. If all goes as planned, the move to the North Charleston site will be finalized in late 2022.

"They have been very kind to allow them to continue to hold services there," Green said of the new property owners.

He expects the church's land purchase in North Charleston to be completed in about three months.

"The new location will provide an excellent opportunity for the church to grow," Green said. "A lot of the deacons live in that corridor."

Work on the apartment development is not expected to begin for about a year or so, after plans make their way through the city review process, said Jeffrey Roberts with JJR Development. He estimated construction will take about 16 months.

Plans for the apartment building include retail space along Meeting and Stuart streets on the ground floor as well as a courtyard and pool on the second level above interior parking.

The apartments will include studio and one- and two-bedroom units.

"We don't see a market for three bedrooms," Roberts said. "That could change, and we are adaptable."

He said it's too early to set a rental price on the units, but it will be at the market rate when the building is completed.

"We believe it's well-timed," he said. "We see a tremendous impetus of growth coming to the Charleston area that will fill up any vacancy overhang at present."

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He believes the explosive development occurring on the upper peninsula and that part of Meeting Street will make it "a very vibrant part of town."

Roberts said the church was built in 1990 after the congregation left its longtime site at 53 N. Nassau St., where it had been located since 1939. The former church site was later purchased by the S.C. Department of Transportation for construction of the Ravenel Bridge.

The church, which started construction on an annex but ran into financial problems and stopped work on the building, decided to sell to settle its debt a few years ago.

A buyer was lined up but discovered some environmental issues with lead in the soil since the site was once an automobile dealership. The suitor walked away from the deal to avoid the cleanup costs.

"It was a major factor in it getting off the tracks," Green said.

JRR Development became involved since Roberts knew some of the church leaders and offered to step in.

"We partnered with the church, paid off their debt and worked on the voluntary cleanup with (the state Department of Health and Environmental Control) and the church," Roberts said. "It's an extraordinary feel-good relationship."

The church, Green said, was "cash poor and land rich" and decided to tap into its land value to satisfy its financial obligations.

He called the developers' purchase price "fair" and said the church is in a "much better financial condition" now.

For perspective on the value of the peninsular property, Green said the church paid $300,000 for the site at 584 Meeting in 1980. The sale price represents a 1233 percent increase over four decades.

The developers also are working with Trident Construction to help design the congregation's new sanctuary in North Charleston.

The proposed apartment site is adjacent to the former Regis Milk plant, where the city's Board of Architectural Review recently voted to allow the demolition of all but a small historic portion of the buildings at 578 Meeting St. Georgia-based Flournoy Development Group plans to build a 225-unit multifamily building on the site.
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Goose Rocks Wealth announced its official launch, providing clients with one-on-one personalized guidance to accelerate their search for a financial advisor suited to their needs. Thanks to many innovative technologies, the wealth management space has never had more solutions available to clients. Now the challenge for clients is deciphering between so many alternatives. Given the importance of such a decision, the founder of Goose Rocks Wealth, Jason Pinkham, is now repurposing his own experience to provide clients with a seasoned consultant to expedite their search.

The business was founded to help clients reduce the time and uncertainty in their search for an advisor. "Whether clients are evaluating a current relationship or exploring hiring an advisor for the first time, they can leverage our experience in order to save time and help increase their knowledge level to make the right decision for their family," said Jason Pinkham, Founder & President.

"Goose Rocks Wealth gives executives and entrepreneurs a valuable starting point to expedite their search and introduce them to an advisor that will match their stated requirements." - Jason Pinkham, Founder & President

Prior to starting Goose Rocks Wealth, Jason was part of the founding team of Dynasty Financial Partners. While there, Jason consulted with some of the top-ranked advisors in the country while helping them establish businesses of their own.

"Executives and entrepreneurs generally don't have a lot of extra time to properly conduct diligence of various wealth management solutions and meet with multiple financial advisors. As a result, they may end up with a suboptimal advisor simply because they don't know what other alternatives are out there and do not want to undergo another lengthy search. Goose Rocks Wealth provides them with a valuable starting point to expedite their search and introduce them to an advisor that will match their stated requirements."

For more information, please visit www.gooserockswealth.com.

About Goose Rocks Wealth

Goose Rocks Wealth is a personalized consulting business focused on assisting clients with their search for a financial advisor. Goose Rocks uses a unique, hands-on process to identify and screen advisors that will provide specialized advice to specific groups of clients. Each prospective client is offered a complimentary one-on-one consulting call to review their requirements in order to expedite the search to identify the most suitable advisor to support their interests.

Also, visit Goose Rocks on social media:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/gooserockswealth

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Goose_Rocks

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzDPBquJN06nDkbNzj6HtiA

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GooseRocksWealth

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[April 29, 2021] NetDragon and China Unicom Fujian Branch Co-launch Demonstration Project on "5G+Smart Education'' Application

HONG KONG, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited ("NetDragon" or the "Company"; Hong Kong Stock Code: 777), a global leader in building internet communities, is pleased to announce that the Company has joined hands with the Fujian branch of China United Network Communications Limited ("China Unicom Fujian Branch") to launch the New Infrastructure "5G+Smart Education" Application Demonstration Project. Based on technologies such as 5G, VR, AR and ultra-high-definition video, it aims to provide an exemplar of "5G+Smart Education" application with the participation of a hundred schools, a thousand classes and ten thousand learners. In 2020, NetDragon and China Unicom Fujian Branch's joint submission for the "2020 New Infrastructure Construction (broadband network and 5G field) 5G+Smart Education Application Demonstration Project" (the "Project") to the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was officially approved. This is a national project and is selected as the first batch of key new infrastructure projects in Fuzhou City. Being one of the only two education enterprises that have been approved for the Project, NetDragon will enjoy first-mover advantages in the field of 5G smart education. As the Project has officially kicked off, NetDragon and China Unicom Fujian Branch will integrate their respective resources and technical edges in smart education and 5G infrastructure to explore the application of 5G technlogy in various scenarios, including remote education, smart classroom and campus security. This Project will focus on developing 5G smart education solutions such as 5G+HD remote interactive learning, AR/VR immersive learning, holographic classroom, remote supervision and HD security monitoring. It targets to complete the construction of 5G smart education infrastructure in 100 schools in Fujian Province and launch over 1,000 smart education or online education demonstration classes by 2022, servicing more than 10,000 teachers and students. The Project is also aimed to be replicated across the country. NetDragon has already entered into strategic partnerships with a number of primary and secondary schools as well as kindergartens in Fuzhou. Among them, the Company will first implement this Project in Fuzhou Gezhi High School, the Affiliated No.2 Primary School of Fuzhou Education College and the Affiliated Experimental Kindergarten of Fujian Normal University.



The thorough integration of 5G technology and smart education offers extensive learning resources and personalized learning space, and breaks through the constraints of time, geographic locations and insufficient quality teaching resources. It helps promote even distribution of education resources and create a new and diversified education environment. As one of the leading digital education enterprises in China, NetDragon will contribute to the development of Fujian as a leading province in the field of "5G+Smart Education" through this demonstration project with China Unicom. The Company will further promote 5G smart education across the country and foster a rapid development of high-quality smart education. About NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited (HKSE: 0777) is a global leader in building internet communities with a long track record of developing and scaling multiple internet and mobile platforms that impact hundreds of millions of users, including previous establishments of China's first online gaming portal, 17173.com, and China's most influential smartphone app store platform, 91 Wireless. Established in 1999, NetDragon is one of the most reputable and well-known online game developers in China with a history of successful game titles including Eudemons Online, Heroes Evolved and Conquer Online. In recent years, NetDragon has also started to scale its online education business on the back of management's vision to create the largest global online learning community, and to bring the "classroom of the future" to every school around the world. For investor enquiries, please contact: NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

Ms. Maggie Zhou

Senior Director of Investor Relations

Tel.: +852 2850 7266 / +86 591 8390 2825

Email: maggiezhou@nd.com.cn

Website: ir.nd.com.cn View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netdragon-and-china-unicom-fujian-branch-co-launch-demonstration-project-on-5gsmart-education-application-301279837.html SOURCE NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

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STORRS  University of Connecticut police charged a 21-year-old Enfield man Thursday with spray painting a swastika on a building across the street from the universitys Hillel chapter last month, officials said.

In a statement, UConn police said they were alerted to the grafitti on March 27 the start of the Passover holiday.
But even though a report on its findings wont be made public until after Brown completes his review, COPA made a rare disclosure Thursday that its investigation uncovered nearly 100 allegations of wrongdoing by officers who were part of the Young raid. Such disclosures usually arent revealed until after the police superintendent reviews the case. If Brown finds that the allegations are serious enough for the officers to face firing, they will then be forwarded to the Chicago Police Board for a hearing on their evidence.
Today, the Taliban still controls large swaths of territory. Afghan security forces have prevented the group from taking over major cities, but they have relied on the support of US and allied forces to keep it at bay. In Doha, Gailani found herself talking to Taliban leaders about their children and leading them in committees to discuss womens rights, law and constitutional reform. Despite her initial doubts, she says the Taliban treats women as equals at the negotiating table, even if values clash. Age has a very important role in Afghanistan and I have this card in my hand, says Gailani, who at nearly 70 is the oldest negotiator. They look at me and my three other sisters as politicians talking to them, negotiators. And we talk to them as negotiators and we are not aware of our gender. Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, centre, arrives with other members of the Taliban delegation for an international peace conference in Moscow in March. Credit:AP The first time Gailani used her voice to deal with the Taliban was in 1996 from her exile in London. The group had captured Kabul from deeply fractured Mujahideen guerillas and declared an Islamic emirate.

Gailani, who had become the spokeswoman for the Mujahideen overseas, was appalled by the images of girls schools closing down across Afghanistan broadcast on British television, so she used her political clout to get one of the highest authorities in Sunni Islam, the late sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, to issue a fatwa condemning the exclusion of women from education. (Fatwas are rulings that help guide behaviour.) Loading Fast-forward to the peace talks in Doha which, after eight months, are yet to yield meaningful results. An offshoot conference in Turkey has been postponed until further notice. And as the US and NATO coalition prepare to withdraw almost 10,000 troops by September 11, including 80 Australian Defence Force personnel, fears Afghanistan could descend into civil war are mounting. General Frank McKenzie, the current head of the US Central Command in the region, conceded last week the Afghan military would certainly collapse in the face of a Taliban advance without continued American support, perhaps ushering in a new Taliban era.

Gailani calls herself a perpetual optimist, but she admits negotiations are fragile and, if they collapse, it could take a decade for the sides to talk again. She remembers the years before war took hold of Afghanistan, when people could walk down the streets of Kabul without looking over their shoulders and families left their doors unlocked. Afghan National Army soldiers march at their graduation ceremony in January. Credit:AP Her fondest childhood memories are of warm winters playing under palm trees in Jalalabad, on the eastern border with Pakistan, and of young people eating and drinking in the mountains surrounding Kabul on the weekends. Gailani remembers the day the Soviet Red Army marched into Kabul in 1979. She was exiled in London after fleeing Iran, where she had been studying until the Islamic Revolution overthrew that countrys monarchy.

Glued to the television screen, she watched as Russian soldiers painted Kabul red with flags and banners. They even coloured the pigeons, Gailani says. Loading In the wake of the invasion, she became the international spokeswoman for the Mujahideen, who would eventually oust the Soviet-backed communist regime. It was her father, Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, the leader of a Sufi holy order and founder of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, a party aligned with the Mujahideen, who convinced her to enter politics. When the Taliban ousted the Mujahideen government, Gailani shifted her focus to the rights of women and minorities, using her familys political status to condemn the Talibans actions from London. In the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Gailani returned to her homeland to help write the countrys new constitution and in 2005 took the helm of the Red Crescent Society, where she served as president until 2016.

Gailani feels disappointed by the decision of Australia and the US to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan but remains convinced peace can be achieved before the September exit date. For us, a withdrawal without even having a tangible result from our negotiations, and a withdrawal with a timetable but without conditions was a shock. We have to admit this, she says. But we have to face reality; whether it is today or tomorrow, we have to learn to stand on our own two feet. A mother weeps at her daughters grave on the outskirts of Kabul as friends and families of students killed in local conflicts gather in a cemetery to call for a permanent countrywide ceasefire. Credit:AP If anything, Gailani says, the sudden withdrawal of troops has united both sides of the conflict. The real roadblock in Afghanistans future, she adds, is the lack of trust between Afghan President Ashraf Ghanis government and the Taliban, but she insists the government is willing to make concessions although she does not reveal what those might be.
In December 2019, a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 ) was identified in Wuhan, China. By the 11th of March of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. A year later, more than 2.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to infection of the new viral strain and over 113 million cases have been confirmed in the lab.

The pandemic has impacted life as we know it around the globe. Healthcare systems have been tested, human behavior has been altered to curb the spread of the virus, economies have been stalled, and the norms of the modern workplace have been forced to shift.

The numerous negative impacts on human health, the strain of isolation, uncertainty and chronic stress, together with the delayed vital surgeries and therapies and reduced funding to essential disease research has provoked scientists, policy-makers, and global governments to consider what the future of pandemics may look like in order to prepare to cope with any future outbreaks of infectious disease.

Here, we discuss what the future of pandemics may look like and how they may be avoided.

Image Credit: Angelina Bambina/Shutterstock.com

Tackle climate change to manage future pandemics

Back in December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 viral strain had not been previously identified in humans. However, it was not the first coronavirus outbreak to impact humans. Recent years have witnessed outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012.

Being the third coronavirus outbreak in just two decades, it is important for scientists to understand how the strain arose and how it first entered the human species. Currently, the origin of COVID-19 is not agreed upon. Several mammals have been implicated in previous outbreaks of coronavirus, but the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 is still debated.

However, a recent paper published in January 2021 in the journal Science of the Total Environment has presented evidence that the virus emerged from bat populations. Additionally, the paper stresses that climate change directly influenced environmental changes that allowed bat species to flourish where they otherwise would not have, resulting in the infiltration of dozens more species in China and surrounding areas.

Given that number of coronaviruses in a particular environment is associated with the number of bat species that inhabit that area, the proliferation of bats in China because of climate change has been called out as a probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemics.

Scientists are calling for climate change to be tackled, not only to save the future of the planet but to simultaneously address the threat of future pandemics. COVID-19 is not alone in being an infectious disease outbreak linked to climate change. Therefore, if climate change is not addressed, numerous future pandemics could be around the corner.

The vaccine is not the end of the COVID-19 story

While the approval of several vaccines for COVID-19 has sparked hope that the end of the pandemic may be approaching, the vaccine will not be the end of the COVID-19 story. There is the chance of the virus evolving and evading the protection of the vaccine. Therefore, the future will likely heavily depend on how governments manage restrictions on social behavior.

Data shows us that different countries have addressed the pandemic in a variety of ways, and the unequal responses have generated unequal impacts. There are many lessons to learn from how social distancing strategies have been effective and ineffective at reducing the spread of the virus.

While much has been learned about SARS-CoV-2 in a short space of time, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about how the virus may evolve. Although COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out with much speed and urgency in numerous countries, it is likely that strategies that impact human behavior will continue to play a role in the future of the COVID-19 pandemic and other potential pandemics that may follow.

Many scientists consider us moving onto a new phase of the pandemic rather than the end of the pandemic and stress the need to fine-tune government-implemented restrictions so that they are effective but also tolerable. It is likely that restrictions, to some extent, will continue to be enforced into the future not only to tackle Covid-19 but to also prevent future pandemics.

This is how we prevent the next pandemic Play

Permanent changes to human behavior

What will the world look like post-COVID-19? With restrictions to some extent expected for the foreseeable future, a return to normal life will unlikely occur. It is predicted, rather, that there will be a shift in the norm in order to get ahead of potential future pandemics to avoid the significant impact on life that the COVID-19 pandemic caused.

Workplaces will likely continue to embrace some form of remote working and the structure of the modern workplace will adapt. Modern technology is ready to facilitate remote working and there are many benefits to both employees and employers to be taken advantage of. The pandemic likely induced a change in working that would have happened in some years anyway, it has simply been brought forward.

Travel is another industry that we likely see a long-term impact. Wearing face coverings on transport and preventing overcrowding will continue to be a focus. In addition, international travel will continue to be under scrutiny. It can be predicted that infectious disease outbreaks will continue to be closely monitored across the world, with travel corridors continuing and border restrictions enforced in order to prevent future pandemics.

Finally, intermittent lockdowns may be part of the new norm. Governments will have learned from their previous strategies and those of others. We may arrive at a place where effective measures may be enforced temporarily to curb the potential spread of infectious disease before it becomes out of hand.

References

Beyer, R., Manica, A. and Mora, C., 2021. Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Science of The Total Environment, 767, p.145413. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721004812?via%3Dihub

How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond. Megan Scudellari. Nature. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5

Skegg, D., Gluckman, P., Boulton, G., Hackmann, H., Karim, S., Piot, P. and Woopen, C., 2021. Future scenarios for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet, 397(10276), pp.777-778. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00424-4/fulltext

Further Reading
Pope Francis has sent a telegram of condolences for the death of Nadia de Munari, an Italian lay Missionary serving in Peru.

By Francesca Merlo



Pope Francis has sent a telegram for the death of Nadia de Munari, an Italian lay missionary of Operation Mato Grosso who died last Saturday after suffering a violent attack on Tuesday night. Nadia was attacked in her room at the "Mamma Mia" educational centre she ran in Nuevo Chimbote, Peru.

The Pope's condemnation of the violence

Pope Francis' telegram was sent as the community gathered for Nadia's funeral. Signed by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, on behalf of the Pope, and addressed to the Bishop of Chimbote, through the Apostolic Nuncio in Peru, in it the Holy Father reiterated his firmest condemnation "for this new and unjustifiable episode of violence, which is added to the many others in which missionaries have lost their lives while performing, with self-denial, their service to the Gospel and assistance to the most needy and defenseless".

Prayers for Nadia and closeness to parents

"While offering prayers for the eternal repose of the soul of this volunteer and entrusting her to the intercession of the Mother of God," the Pope expressed his "paternal closeness to her parents, family members and relatives. He assured his remembrance in prayer and his blessing upon all those participating in the ceremopny in Peru ,and upon those who will participate in the funeral when Nadia's body will be finally brought back to Italy.

The funeral was presided over by Bishop Angel Francisco Simon Piorno of Chimbote, the Peruvian coastal city where the 50-year-old volunteer from Vicenza (in northern Italy) worked. She ran 5 kindergartens and an elementary school: a service beneficial to more than 500 children from the shanty town of Nuevo Chimbote, which welcomes migrants in search of a living, who come down from the very poor villages of the Andes. All the Italian missionary priests of Omg present in Peru and many others concelebrated. Many children assisted by the missionary were also present.

The last goodbye

The days seem long for Nadia's family and community, as they await for clearence for her body to be returned to Schio, in Italy, where Nadia was born. They wait, in order to be able to give Nadia her last earthly farewell and burial after she spent more than half of her life in Latin America, at the service of the those in need.
(Photo : Screenshot From Commons.Wikipedia.org) Hackers Leak D.C. Police Data Including Arrest History, Polygraph Results, and Even Police Informants

In an attempt to extort an unknown amount of money straight out of the official D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, hackers who were with the Babuk ransomware gang shockingly leaked a huge amount of data on five of the department's own officers. The data, which was then published on the gang's own dark website, are very extensive and include chunks of information.

D.C. Police Hack 2021

The data published on the gang's reported dark web site was said to be quite extensive, and it even includes individual dossiers of every single officer that have actually been marked "confidential" and also reach a whopping 100 pages long, according to NBC News. The dossiers include very confidential information.

D.C. Police Leaked Data

The leaked data includes the following:

Vast array of different personal information

Arrest history

Financial and housing records

Extensive detail regarding training

Extensive detail regarding work background

Polygraph results

The reach of this hack does not only limit itself to the current officers in service but also those that are former employees as well.

According to Gizmodo, the files are actually part of a much larger 250GB-ish cache that was reportedly stolen from the PD's servers just about some time during the past few weeks. The huge stack of data could even potentially include intelligence regarding D.C.'s local gang activity.

Stolen Data Could Include Police Informants

Data that could have been compromised might have included how the agency responded to the recent Jan 6, Capital riot, and a lot of other actions. The hackers now threaten to publish the rest of the information if their demands are not met by the department.

Babuk, which is a relatively new cybercriminal gang, has reportedly played quite an increasingly aggressive game along with the police department throughout the last several days while posting taunting messages on its personal website. The cybercriminals are even threatening to "out" the information on certain police informants if they are not paid the ransom they demand.

Read Also: Cybercriminals Make Fake Microsoft Store Tricking Victims Into Downloading Malware

Gang Demands Ransom

The group openly stated that they advise the whole police station to get in touch with them as soon as they can since the information that they have could be very compromising, and if it were released, a lot of people could suffer. The gang even advertised screenshots of the data they had stolen and previewed them on its dark web site.

April 28, however, was when the gang had officially leaked some data to show the police they are not bluffing. Babuk had already given the law enforcement agency a narrow period of just three days for them to respond to the demands. Just shortly after the leak on Wednesday, the page then referring to the actual MPD disappeared from Babuk's online website. No official comment has been given from the MPD regarding the situation.

Related Article: Attorneys are Pushing 'EyeDetect' as Actual Lie Detecting Evidence: Accuracy at 90%

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Urian B.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Tullow's debt pile stands at around US$2.4bn with just shy of US$1bn presently due in 2021 and 2022.

( ) moved closer to a debt reset as it announced it is launching a US$1.8mln bond offer and has been given commitments for a US$600mln super senior revolving credit facility.

The aim is to extend out maturities in its borrowing, using proceeds of the bond issue to repay reserves based lending and debt coming due later this year and in 2022.

Presently, Tullow has US$300mln of bonds with a 6.625% coupon due in July 2021, and, US$650mln of senior notes with a 6.25% coupon due in 2022.

The new bonds will mature in 2026 whilst the revolving credit facility would expire in 2024.

Tullow also has US$800mln of senior notes with 7% coupon due in 2025. These will not be repaid as part of the refinancing.

In Marchs financial results for 2020, Tullow reported a US$1.22bn loss for the 2020 financial year, as it made US$1.23bn of non-cash write offs and impairments against its exploration assets.

The company, which previously built its reputation in exploration, last year exited operations in Jamaica and the Comoros Islands and significantly reduced its footprint in Cote d'Ivoire and Peru.

Tullows debt pile stood at US$2.4bn at the end of 2020. At that time, it noted that it had been reviewing its business plan and operating strategy with its creditors and their advisers, as debt refinancing is pursed.

Tullow produced 74,900 barrels of oil per day in 2020, which was in line with expectations, and generated some US$1.39bn of revenue. Gross profit was marked at US$403mln. The company highlighted some US$598mln of underlying operating cashflow.

Noting higher crude prices the company highlighted that each US$10 increment in the crude oil price delivers Tullow around US$100mln of additional cash flow.

Looking to 2021, the company said production in the present financial year is in line with expectations, and repeated guidance of 60,000 to 66,000 bopd.
Ambuja Cements reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 947 crore in the March quarter, up 71 per cent from same period last year, on the back of higher sales even as tax expenses rose considerably.

Net sales of the company stood at Rs 7,715 crore in the period under review, up 23 per cent from same period last year as special product volumes grew lending support to the topline.

The consolidated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and ammortisation (EBITDA) margin in the March quarter stood at 24.1 percent as against 19.4 percent in the same period last year, said the company release.

Tax expense of the company in the period under review stood at Rs 413.34 crore as against Rs 264 crore in the corresponding period last year.

Despite strong and continuing headwinds on input prices including coal, petcoke and diesel, we have made significant progress on efficiency improvement that has had a positive impact on cost evolution, Neeraj Akhoury, chief executive officer for LafargeHolcim and managing director and chief executive officer at Ambuja Cements was quoted as saying.

India demand growth has been strong in the last quarter, which has also helped the sales volume growth and commercial performance, he added.

On capex front, the company's upcoming facility in Marwar Mundwa, Rajasthan will enhance clinker capacity by 3 MTPA and help improve cement sales by 5 MTPA. The company, meanwhile, is progressing on its ambition to reach 50 million tonne in the mid-term.

The project is scheduled to commence operations in Oct-Dec quarter of FY21, said the company.

Going ahead, the company remains cautiously optimistic amid the strong second Covid-19 wave hitting the country.

Though the second wave of pandemic warrants caution, the increased vaccination drive combined with the various stimulus proposals provided in the Union Budget 2021 and accommodative monetary and fiscal policies are expected to support economic recovery in the medium term, said Ambuja.

Rural demand is likely to remain resilient on a good projection for the agriculture sector.

"We would like to remain cautiously optimistic for the year," said the company.

Meanwhile, the company has also put in place a 24X7 COVID-19 crisis control room and are facilitating vaccination for all eligible employees and their families.

We are closely monitoring the situation and will continue to take all necessary actions to ensure the health and safety of our employees and communities. Our Plants are continuing to operate under strict COVID protocols, informed Ambuja Cements.
Singapore: He is among the best known faces of a youth-driven pro-democracy movement that drew hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of Thailand last year, sporting the three-finger salute popularised by The Hunger Games film franchise to protest the power of the countrys king.

Now, 45 days into a hunger strike he began after being denied bail while awaiting trial on lese-majeste, or royal defamation charges, the condition of student activist Parit Penguin Chiwarak has deteriorated to such an extent his lawyers fear it may be life threatening.

Protest leaders Parit Chiwarak and Panusaya Sitthijirawattanakul at a protest in Bangkok last December. Credit:Getty Images

He cant actually walk upstairs by himself now. He has to be escorted, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights co-founder Sirikan Charoensiri told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Thursday before the latest failed attempt by his legal team and family to obtain bail at the Bangkok Criminal Court.

This morning my team, who just came out from seeing him, said he felt very weak and he started to faint several times.
WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden paid a visit to the 39th president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, during a trip to Georgia Thursday, a day after Biden delivered his first joint address to Congress.

The president and first lady Jill Biden traveled to Plains, Georgia, to meet the Carters before attending a drive-in rally in Atlanta to mark his first 100 days in office this week.

The trip to Georgia, a politically pivotal state that helped Biden win the presidency and secure a razor-thin Senate majority for Democrats, is part of what has been billed the "Getting America Back on Track" tour. Biden plans to hit the road in the coming days to pitch Americans on his $4 trillion spending proposal on infrastructure and more progressive policies like education and childcare, much like he did following the passage of his COVID-19 relief package, according to the White House.

Carter, 96, and his 93-year-old wife were unable to travel to Washington for Biden's inauguration because of the coronavirus pandemic. Carter has mostly been absent from public life after a series of health setbacks  including a string of falls that led him to undergo a brain procedure in 2019  as well as concerns about the pandemic. The couple has since been vaccinated.

FILE - Former President Jimmy Carter, right, is seen with Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Biden, who said he spoke with Carter on the eve of his inauguration, saluted the former Democratic president for "a lifetime of service" during his January inaugural address. The Carters appeared virtually at the Democratic National Convention last year to praise Biden as a loyal supporter and friend.

"Joe Biden was my first and most effective supporter in the Senate. For decades, he's been my loyal and dedicated friend," Carter said in a recorded statement. "Joe has the experience, character and decency to bring us together.

More: Joe Biden wants to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure and jobs. These 4 charts show where the money would go.

More: Why President Joe Biden's speech to Congress was unlike any other in modern history

Story continues

The Carters also participated in a March ad campaign featuring all living U.S. presidents  except former president Donald Trump  that urged Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine. The Georgia Democrat became the longest living U.S. president in March 2019.

Biden was a junior senator from Delaware in 1976 when Carter was elected president. Former vice president Walter Mondale, who served under Carter, died last week at age 93 in Minneapolis. Following his death, Biden issued a statement saying that he and the first lady spoke to Mondale before his death "to reflect on the years of friendship we shared, and how much we learned from and leaned on each other."

Former US president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter and (back row) Jill Biden, wife of former vice president Joe Biden, and former vice president Al Gore attend a funeral service for former US president George H. W. Bush at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC on December 5, 2018.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden meets Jimmy Carter during Georgia trip to mark 100 days
New Delhi, April 29 : The National Democratic Alliance led by the AINRC in Puducherry is set to win the Assembly elections in the Union Territory with a clear majority.

According to the CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News, the projected seat variation for the 30-member Puducherry Assembly for the NDA is 19 to 23 seats, well over the majority mark, while the UPA is likely to win 6 to 10 seats. Others are projected to win a maximum of 2 seats.

The exit poll predicts 16.6 per cent vote swing in favour of the NDA, while for the UPA it is -5.3 per cent, approximately, as compared to 2016.

According to the exit poll, the UPA will get 34.2 per cent votes, which is way behind the NDA which is projected to get 47.1 per cent votes.

The Congress, which was ruling the UT, was unseated after many of its MLAs defected to the BJP earlier this year, forcing incumbent Chief Minister V. Narayansamy to resign after his government was reduced to minority.
DALLAS, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kainos Capital ("Kainos"), a food and consumer-focused private equity firm, today announced that it has agreed to sell its portfolio company Olde Thompson to Olam Food Ingredients, an operating group of Olam International (SGX: 032), a global food and agri-business, in a transaction valued at $950 million. Olde Thompson was acquired by Kainos in May 2018.

Headquartered in Oxnard, California, Olde Thompson is the largest dedicated manufacturer and supplier of private label dry spices and seasonings in North America. Last year Olde Thompson acquired Gel Spice, which further established it as a leader in the spice category. The acquisition created a differentiated bi-coastal manufacturing footprint, unlocked additional channels, and expanded the company's product offering into pouches, extracts and single serve seasonings for meal kits and other applications.

The Kainos team has invested over $2 billion of equity in over 75 investments with a total value over $12 billion over the last 25 years. Kainos specializes in investing in family and founder owned businesses where it can be a value-added partner and instill a culture of operational excellence through its sales development, manufacturing, supply chain and administrative expertise.

Andrew Rosen, Managing Partner of Kainos, said, "Our investment in Olde Thompson was driven by our thesis in the growing importance of spices and flavorings as consumers seek bolder taste profiles. After meeting Jeff Shumway, the founder of Olde Thompson, nearly a decade ago, we ultimately partnered in 2018 to pursue our shared vision to grow Olde Thompson into the largest dedicated private label provider of spices and seasonings. We accomplished this by investing in our manufacturing capabilities and customer development resources, and the acquisition of Gel Spice from the Engel family in 2020 helped accelerate this strategy and was instrumental in attracting the interest of a terrific strategic acquiror in Olam."

Jeff Shumway, Chairman of Olde Thompson, said, "Our family acquired Olde Thompson in 1966 when the company primarily sold pepper mills that remain a fixture in homes across the country. Over the years, with the help of our incredible employees, we transformed our company into one of the largest spice companies in the U.S. A turning point in our history was when we partnered with Kainos and its operations team, enabling us to attract world-class talent to professionalize our management team and embark on a capacity expansion and automation plan to make us one of the most efficient spices producers in the industry. We have had a relationship with Olam for more than 15 years, and this broader partnership as part of the Olam family represents an exciting new chapter for Olde Thompson."

David Sugarman, CEO of Olde Thompson, said, "The acquisition of Olde Thompson by Olam is a terrific outcome for all of our key stakeholders. For our customers, this partnership pushes Olde Thompson to the forefront of ESG as it provides access to Olam's extraordinary international sourcing capabilities and spice expertise that will allow us to provide a new level of traceability and transparency to the marketplace. Our employees will benefit from additional resources and opportunities that will accelerate our growth even further."

Andrew Rosen concluded, "This transaction with Olam is a terrific outcome for Olde Thompson and the company's future has never been brighter."

Completion of the transaction is expected in Q2 2021.

Sawaya Partners LLC and Lazard served as financial advisors to Olde Thompson. Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as legal counsel to Olde Thompson.

About Kainos Capital

Kainos Capital is a middle market private equity firm with an exclusive focus on the food and consumer sector. The Kainos team has extensive investment and operating experience in the industry, having invested more than $2 billion of equity in more than 75 transactions with a total transaction value of more than $12 billion. The firm's strategy is to build a diversified portfolio of growing and strategically relevant food and consumer businesses that trade buyers would like to acquire. For more information, visit www.kainoscapital.com.

About Olam International

Olam is a leading food and agri-business supplying food, ingredients, feed and fibre to 17,300 customers worldwide. Our value chain spans over 60 countries and includes farming, processing and distribution operations, as well as a sourcing network of an estimated 5 million farmers.

Through our purpose to 'Re-imagine Global Agriculture and Food Systems', Olam aims to address the many challenges involved in meeting the needs of a growing global population, while achieving positive impact for farming communities, our planet and all our stakeholders.

Headquartered and listed in Singapore, Olam currently ranks among the top 30 largest primary listed companies in terms of market capitalization on SGX-ST.

Since June 2020, Olam has been included in the FTSE4Good Index Series, a global sustainable investment index series developed by FTSE Russell, following a rigorous assessment of Olam's supply chain activities, impact on the environment and governance transparency. The FTSE4Good Index Series identifies companies that demonstrate strong Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices and is used by a variety of market participants to create and assess responsible investment funds.

To subscribe to the Olam Newsroom please visit www.olamgroup.com (privacy statement here). If you do not wish to receive information from Olam please contact [email protected]

More information on Olam can be found at www.olamgroup.com.

Follow @olam

Twitter

LinkedIn

Olam is located at 7 Straits View, Marina One East Tower #20-01, Singapore 018936.

Telephone: +65 63394100, Facsimile: +65 63399755.

About Olam Food Ingredients

Olam Food Ingredients (OFI) is a new operating group born out of Olam International Limited. OFI offers sustainable, natural, value-added food and beverage ingredients and solutions so that consumers can enjoy the healthy and indulgent products they love. It consists of Olam's industry-leading businesses of Cocoa, Coffee, Nuts, Spices and Dairy.

OFI has built a unique global value chain presence including its own farms, farm-gate origination and manufacturing facilities. OFI partners with customers, leveraging its complementary and differentiated portfolio of "on-trend" food and beverage products, to co-create solutions that anticipate and meet changing consumer preferences as demand increases for healthier food that's traceable and sustainable.

Contact:

Jonathan Morgan

Kekst CNC

[email protected]

(212) 333-5525

SOURCE Kainos Capital

Related Links

http://www.kainoscapital.com


TOKYO -- Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc will invest up to 150 billion yen ($1.38 billion) in Vietnams biggest non-bank lender FE Credit, a spokesman said on Wednesday, as part of a strategy to look beyond a slow-growing domestic market.

SMFG, Japans second biggest lender by assets, said in a statement its consumer finance unit would acquire a 49% stake in FE Credit.

The Vietnamese firms valuation was $2.8 billion, its parent company said in a separate statement.

The deal, which was reported by the Nikkei newspaper earlier, comes as SMFG has sought to expand its business in Southeast Asia, given the ultra-low rate environment and shrinking population at home.

Jun Ohta, chief executive of SMFG, previously told Reuters the bank was looking to expand its business in markets including Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and India.

FE Credit, a major consumer finance firm in Vietnam, has over 13,000 points of sales nationwide and provides financial solutions through consumer lending products and services, according to its website.

The Vietnamese company posted net profit of about $125 million for the financial year ended in December.

($1 = 108.9300 yen)
Islamabad, April 29 : A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) special plane arrived in Islamabad from Beijing carrying doses of the coronavirus vaccine.

According to sources, PK6852 landed at the Islamabad airport from Beijing carrying over 300,000 coronavirus vaccines.

Sources said that around one million vaccines are being brought to Pakistan by three Boeing 777 planes, the Geo TV reported.

"Three more PIA 777s arrived in #Beijing - #China to carry another large consignment of #COVID19 vaccines as part of a larger initiative to combat the pandemic," the national airlines said on Twitter.

"On the behest of the Government of Pakistan, we would continue to serve this great nation at the time of crisis," it added.

The spokesperson of the national flag carrier, Abdullah Hafeez Khan, had said that a day earlier that three Boeing 777 planes had been sent to China for procurement of coronavirus vaccines.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall in a memorial park dedicated to the Battle of the Xiangjiang River during the Long March in the 1930s, in Caiwan, a town in Quanzhou County in the city of Guilin, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, April 25, 2021. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- In his recent remarks during an inspection trip, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated strengthening belief via the learning of the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

As the CPC marks its centenary in 2021, the Party looks back at its history and recounts the shining moments in it.

Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has on multiple occasions shared stories about the CPC and the spirit manifested within.

TRANSLATOR WHO TOOK INK FOR SUGAR

When speaking of the first Chinese version of the Communist Manifesto, Xi often shares the quote "the taste of truth is so sweet," which originates from the deeds of translator Chen Wangdao.

In 1920, young Chen Wangdao started translating the manifesto in his home village in east China's Zhejiang Province. One day, Chen's mother made him sticky rice dumplings and suggested he dip them in brown sugar water.

"I did, and they were very sweet," he responded. However, he was so absorbed in his work, and did not realize his mouth was stained black as he had dipped the dumplings in ink instead. It was with such dedication that Chen finished the translation and introduced the principles of Marxism into China.

Chen's work paved the way for the birth of the CPC. Over the years, the CPC has inherited the ideas and combined the fundamental principles of Marxism with China's reality during the country's revolution, construction and reform.

To this day, Chinese leaders have attached great importance to studying the Communist Manifesto. In the new era, the principles and spirit of Marxism continue to lead the way for the CPC.

SOLDIERS WHO CUT UP THEIR QUILT

Members of the CPC always bear in mind the interests and needs of the people. In September 2020, when visiting the city of Chenzhou, central China's Hunan Province, Xi cited a revolutionary story that took place there in 1934.

In the middle of the arduous Long March, Xu Jiexiu, an impoverished mother living in the local village of Shazhou, received three female Red Army soldiers at her home.

Shocked that Xu had only hay for mattresses and some torn-up cotton wool for quilts, the soldiers shared their only quilt with her and her son during their stay. As they were leaving, they insisted that she keep it for the winter, which Xu refused.

To settle the dispute, a soldier cut the quilt and left Xu half of it. Deeply touched, Xu never forgot about the soldiers or their acts of kindness for the rest of her life.

Lacking food and clothing, even facing life-or-death situations, the Red Army still kept the people's well-being in mind, Xi said, noting that the story shows the CPC's original aspiration and character.

Today, nearly a century from when Xu sheltered the three soldiers, the spirit manifested in the story of "half a quilt" still shines on.

As China embarks on a Long March of the new era, Xi has reassured the public of the CPC's people-oriented attribute, stressing that the Party remains committed to serving the people, which is not only a slogan, but also an action of persistence.

Achieving a complete victory in China's fight against poverty, which saw the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents lifted out of poverty over the past eight years, the Party is moving on toward its goal of building a modern socialist China and common prosperity for all.

"BEGGAR" WITH GOLD BARS ON HIS BACK

It is the CPC's uncompromising requirement for its members to remain incorruptible. When inspecting east China's Jiangxi Province in 2019, Xi spoke of the deeds of Liu Qiyao, a faithful and uncorrupted Party member.

As the leader of the Communist authority in Jiangxi, Liu was once trusted with the activity funds of the local Party organization, including 13 gold bars.

In the 1930s, after losing connection with his comrades in a battle, Liu packed up the hidden funds, embarked on a journey to find them during which he once even lived a beggar's life.

After finally getting in touch with other Party members, Liu submitted the funds. To everyone's surprise, none of the valuables were missing. Even in his most desperate days, Liu did not use any of the funds for himself.

"Only if we remain clean and upright in governance can we win public trust," Xi noted.

Despite historic achievements made over the past years on fighting corruption, it remains the biggest risk to the Party's governance, as Xi has pointed out.

The self-improvement of the CPC, a ruling political party with more than 91 million members, has a major bearing on the future of a country of over 1.4 billion people.

Just as Xi once put it, "The governance over the Party must always be strict, so that the CPC can lead and ensure the smooth sailing of the great ship of socialism with Chinese characteristics."

[ Editor: WXY ]
A $500,000 grant for a mobile coronavirus vaccination trailer should be approved any day now for Colbert County.

"The trailer is being held on the lot at the facility in Missouri. As soon as we get approval, we don't necessarily have to have the money in hand, we just have to have approval from ADECA for the grant application, so as soon as we get that approval, we have plans to taking a road trip to go get it," said Colbert County Emergency Management Director Michael David Smith.

Smith said once they get the trailer, they will partner with Helen Keller Hospital to bring the vaccine to specific areas. Smith said they do have concerns that people wouldn't utilize this service once it's offered.

"We had that initial rush of people who wanted to get it and that kept everyone busy for a while, but things have slowed down quite a bit and there are a lot of things that play into that. People scared to get the shot, people that are scared because of things that happened with Johnson & Johnson and pausing that vaccination. There are a lot of things that go into helping people make that decision, so all we can do is continue to encourage it," said Smith.

Smith is hopeful by making the vaccine so convenient, that will encourage people to get it.

"I think once you get in the community and people see their neighbors going over there and getting it, maybe it will be some peer pressure for them not to be so scared to take the shot, too," said Smith.

Smith said they are still working on logistics of the plan with Helen Keller Hospital. He said they would likely give out the Pfizer vaccine or whatever vaccine the hospital has available. He said he'd let us know once they make the trip to get the trailer from Missouri.
Migrants rescued from a craft are given medical attention in Arguineguin (Gran Canaria) in March 2021. Angel Medina G. / EFE

The more than 4,100 Malians who arrived in Spains Canary Islands in 2020 are beginning to be reflected in the official figures of asylum seekers. Up until the start of this year, the citizens from Mali that had arrived in the archipelago were invisible to both Spanish and EU authorities, who considered all arrivals to be economic migrants  not asylum seekers. But according to data from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), seen by EL PAIS, Malian citizens have made nearly 1,300 formal requests for asylum in Spain in 2021  the third-highest number of all nationalities.

Of the 14,914 formalized requests for asylum in Spain, 9% came from applicants from Mali, where a jihadist insurgency has been raging since 2013. Not since then, when the conflict started, have asylum requests from Malians been among the top highest.

Although more resources are still needed and the process has to be sped up, the access to information and the procedure has improved in the Canary Islands Maria Jesus Vega, spokesperson of the United Nations Refugee Agency

The highest number of asylum requests continue to be made by citizens of Venezuela and Colombia, which account for 21% and 20% of all requests, respectively. But this is the first time in more than two years that the top six countries on the list were not all from Latin America.

The appearance of Malian asylum seekers in the statistics reflects that the system is improving after months of chaos and barriers that blocked access to requesting protection.

Throughout 2020, when around 23,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands, potential refugees had great difficulty in requesting international protection. The migrants being held in the Arguineguin port facility in Gran Canaria, for example, had scant help from lawyers while local police lacked training on how to handle asylum requests.

When the migrants were taken to hotels managed by the Red Cross, they also had to wait months to see a lawyer as the charity only had four attorneys for the entire archipelago. And when they were finally able to go to a police station to say they wanted to request asylum, they had to wait more months for the interview that formally begins the process. Only then did their cases reach the official statistics, something that is key to ensuring Spanish and EU authorities recognize the profile and needs of the new arrivals. Improving asylum policies and guaranteeing access to the process is, in theory, a priority of the European Union.

As well as the Canary Islands, Seville, Madrid, Granada and Cadiz also saw sharp rises in the number of asylum requests from Malians

Although more resources are still needed and the process has to be sped up, the access to information and the procedure have improved in the Canary Islands, said Maria Jesus Vega, the spokesperson of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). With the closure of borders [due to the coronavirus pandemic], arrivals at airports and the number of asylum requests fell and that has sped up the resolution of pending requests and the time between when a person says they want to ask for asylum and when their request is formalized.

In the first four months of 2021, Malians made nearly 1,300 formal requests for asylum  close to the number recorded for all of last year, 1,537. The breakdown by province, provided by the Interior Ministry as of March 31, shows that not all requests were formalized in the Canary Islands. Although the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in Tenerife, recorded the largest rise in asylum requests, there were also sharp rises in Seville, Madrid, Granada and Cadiz, which is where most vulnerable Malians were transferred to as part of the program from the secretary of state for migration to bring at-risk migrants in the Canary Islands to the mainland.

The UNHCR points out that some of the asylum requests recorded in the official figures for 2021 come from citizens of Mali who arrived in mainland Spain a long time ago, but were still waiting for their interview. There has also been a sharp rise in asylum requests from Malians in the North African exclave city of Melilla. Last year, more Malians jumped the border fence separating Melilla from Morocco than any other nationality.

English version by Melissa Kitson.
Ann Arbor, Michigan--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - TransGlobal Assets Inc. (OTC Pink: TMSH) is pleased to announce that is has acquired a 9% ownership in three Michigan medical marijuana licenses pursuant to a Purchase and Sale Agreement between the Company and Darwin Harris, a CBD expert. The licenses will allow the Company to expand its footprint in the State of Michigan as it seeks to realize exponential growth of its Monster Elixir subsidiary.

In addition, Darwin Harris has been hired as a director of the company where his appointment is a great asset. Darwin has over ten years of intense CBD experience especially in the manufacturing side. He is also both a strong activist and advocate for CBD and has presented at numerous conferences and attended countless Expos.

Darwin's passion in the field stemmed from his diagnosis in 2003 of having severe Crohn's diseases. The strong medications recommended by doctors left him feeling weak, tired and suffering from nausea. As a result, he started experimenting with CBD cocktails, which were perfected in 2005, where he completely stopped using prescription medication entirely.

More importantly, Darwin's experience will be utilized by the Company as it forays into the field of psychedelic mushroom cultivation. His extensive experience in this field is invaluable to the Company's future business endeavors.

Curtis Philpot, CEO of TransGlobal Assets Inc., states, "Darwin is highly educated with two degrees from the prestigious Tougaloo College. His experience will be drawn upon especially in our marijuana business as well as our entry into the psychedelic mushroom industry."

Updates will be forthcoming.

For further inquiries please contact:

Curtis Philpot, Chief Executive Officer

TransGlobal Assets (OTC Pink: TMSH)

Email: CPhilpot360@TransGlobalAssets.net

About TransGlobal Assest:

TransGlobal Assets Inc. is a publicly traded Hemp/CBD holdings company. Our business model is a self-sustaining Hemp Ranch. Each hemp ranch will be vertically integrated from acres allocated, to outdoor cultivation and indoor greenhouses, to warehouses for processing farm grown hemp into textiles, hempcrete & plastics. The Hemp Ranch will provide raw products for processing the all-natural products line to be sold through Monster Elixir, a wholly owned subsidiary of TransGlobal Assets Inc. Monster Elixir products includes but not limited to, Green Essence Beverages; an all-natural CBD infused lemonade, and Crown Care; an all-natural Hemp infused hair care line.

Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and is subject to the safe harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and jut uncertainties. That includes the possibility that the business outlined in this press release cannot be concluded for some reason. That could be as a result of technical, installation, permitting or other problems that were not anticipated. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of TransGlobal Assets, Inc. to be materially different from the statements made herein. Except for any obligation under the U.S. federal securities laws, TransGlobal Assets, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82294
A New Jersey middle school vice principal has issued an apology after a video of him tossing beer at a group of restaurant patrons who were filming his wife's transphobic rant went viral.

Cellphone footage captured Michael Smurro, vice principal of Neptune Middle School in Monmouth County, arguing with outdoor diners at Fred & Ethel's Lantern Light Restaurant and Tavern in Smithville, Galloway Township on Saturday after Smurro's wife Lisa complained about a transgender woman using the women's bathroom.

'A man just went into the women's bathroom, and it's not right,' she's recorded saying. 'It's not right. It's not right. It's not right. She's a man. In my bathroom.'

Michael Smurro and his wife Lisa (pictured) were caught on tape getting confrontational with diners at Fred & Ethel's Lantern Light Restaurant and Tavern after they tell Lisa 'please take your hate elsewhere' following her transphobic rant

'This needs to be removed, she's just spewing transgender hate, homophobia' the person recording can be heard saying.

When the couple becomes aware they're being filmed Lisa directs her rant towards the camera.

The couple then walk towards the table where the person was filming and Lisa Smurro continues her transphobic rant to nearby waitress.

The woman at the table tells Lisa 'please take your hate elsewhere,' before Smurro walks up and tosses beer from his cup at the occupants of the table.

'Here you go, pal,' he says to someone off camera. 'there you go.'

Smurro then takes several steps back and, gesturing toward himself, and says, 'Now you can come out. I'm right here,' before the couple walks away.

Lisa Smurro is caught on tape ranting about a transgender woman using the woman's restroom at Fred & Ethel's Lantern Light Restaurant and Tavern in Smithville, Galloway Township

Michael Smurro is caught on camera saying 'here you go, pal, there you go' as he tosses his beer at a restaurant-goers

Smurro is now issuing an apology for his actions.

'I allowed my emotions to get in the way of my normally sound judgement and reacted in a way that was inappropriate,' he told Associated Press in an email statement on Tuesday.

'I do not condone violence or discrimination of any kind and should have simply walked away. I apologize to the person I threw my beer at and wish I hadn't done so. I apologize to anyone I offended,' he added.

Neptune Middle School superintendent Dr. Tami Crader said the incident is under investigation and 'will be taken seriously.'

'The actions in the video do not reflect our district's commitment to inclusivity, cooperation, respect and non-violence,' Crader said in a statement. 'We are a community for ALL learners, including our transgender students.'

In an interview with the news site breakingac.com, which first reported the story, Lisa Smurro said she and her husband were having a private conversation when someone began filming them.

'We didn't bother anyone,' she said. 'This all began because somebody was in a bathroom that they shouldn't have been in.'

'He, she, whatever it was that day, it came into the women's bathroom that they shouldn't have,' she added.

Tony Cappola, the owner of the restaurant, told breakingac.com that while there are separate bathrooms that can be used by families or for privacy, there it nothing designated to separate those who are transgender.

Michael Smurro works as a vice principal at of Neptune Middle School in Monmouth County (pictured) the school's superintendent Dr. Tami Crader said the incident is under investigation and 'will be taken seriously'

'Everyone's welcome in our restaurant,' he said. 'Hate's got no place in our society. There's too much hate right now.'

Cappola called the confrontation an 'unfortunate, ugly incident.'

Cappola said he reached out to the sergeant on duty and had been trying to track down those who were victims in the incident, but the woman who recorded the incident, who identified herself as just 'Carrie', told breakingac.com she would not talk to police.

Carrie said some of the tossed beer landed on her boyfriend who was seated next to her while the rest splashed onto a nearby table where a child was sitting.

'It was overall a completely disgusting experience,' Carrie said. 'He assaulted a table with a child at it. He should not be working with children. His wife should especially be far, far away from children.'

New Jersey law prohibits discrimination based on gender identify. It permits people to use public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

The video does not show the transgender woman who Lisa Smurro said she did not want to use the women's restroom.

Her identity could not be determined, AP reported.
A pedophile ring raped eight underage girls while they stayed at a Virginia summer camp founded by a psychic called Edgar Cayce, a lawsuit claims.

The victims - who are now adults - say they suffered sexual harassment, abuse and rapes at the hands of male workers while attending the Association for Research and Enlightenment's (ARE) summer camp in Virginia Beach.

One victim, who gave her name as Lynsey, told of how she was forced to participate in 'massage trains' with adult staff after first attending the summer camp in 2008, when she was 12.

The lawsuit says that when Lynsey was 12, a male camp counselor aged 18 or 19 forced her to play 'Spin the Bottle,' forced her to touch his genitals and placed his hands under her clothing and digitally raped her.

An alleged victim of sex abuse at the ARE summer camp in Virginia Beach called Lynsey has shared her story

'The first time I was raped by an adult counselor, I was 13. I reported it to the camp manager and nothing was done,' she said, according to WTKR.

'ARE spiritual teachings set the stage for a silent epidemic of sexual assault and violence against young children and women, including myself.'

The lawsuit says she told the camp manager what happened, but her alleged abuser was allowed to stay at the camp and no report was made to authorities.

When she was 17, she returned to the camp for a young adult retreat, where she said she was forced to embrace her abuser and tell him she forgave him, the lawsuit states.

'I returned to camp and I was forced to participate in a so-called 'Forgiveness Circle,' which meant I had to hug my abuser and say I forgave him. It was a horrible, degrading experience,' she said, according to WTKR.

Another plaintiff called Hannah Furbush described a 'Goddess Night' event in which female campers would run through a field naked while male campers watched and yelled at them

Another plaintiff, Hannah Furbush, who attended the camp as a child and later worked as a camp counselor and staff member, estimates she experienced sexual abuse, molestation and harassment at least 100 times at the camp.

The Associated Press does not generally name sexual assault victims, but Furbush gave her permission for her name to be used.

She said she was coerced into participating in a 'Liberated Underwear Movement' event in which underage female campers would run through the camp in their underwear.

In the lawsuit, Furbush also described a 'Goddess Night' event in which female campers would run through a field naked while male campers watched and yelled at them from a hilltop.

Two other women who did not wish to be identified also spoke about alleged sexual assaults and rapes at the ARE camp

'Female campers were being preyed upon by male staff members. That's because hugs and touch in between children and adults were encouraged, but it went well beyond,' Furbush said, according to WTKR.

Furbush said that when she was a 20-year-old staff member, a senior camp director massaged her against her will, touched her buttocks and tried to kiss her. She said she also was 'sexually violated' by a different male staff member. Both times, she told camp managers, but nothing was done, she said.

'It was my job as the victim to meditate or go to healing prayer or journal my trauma away while these dangerous men were given promotions and allowed to stay,' she said.

A woman who did not wish to be identified said during the video conference that: 'We were taught to love and accept our abusers unconditionally.'

Former campers allege the camp was breeding ground for sexual abuse, rape and assault of underage girls

The woman said she was sexually abused by a staff member when she was 16 years old, WTKR reported.

'It is deeply harmful when your voice is silenced and you come to believe that your voice doesn't matter. I blamed myself for his sexual assault on me,' she said.

The women said the sexual abuse led to a variety of emotional and psychological problems for them, including substance abuse, anxiety and depression. Stephen Estey, one of the attorneys representing the women, said the lawsuits seek $10 million in damages for each.

The Association for Research and Enlightenment, a nonprofit organization founded in 1931, describes itself as an organization for people to explore meditation, holistic health and the meaning of life.

In the lawsuits, filed in state court in Virginia Beach, where the organization is headquartered, the women describe what they said was a decadeslong camp culture that let adult male staffers sexually abuse young female campers with impunity.

During a virtual news conference, four of the women described the alleged abuse and a cult-like atmosphere at the camp, where they said they were taught unconditional love and forgiveness, even toward their abusers.

Eight women have filed lawsuits claiming they were sexually assaulted and raped as children at Virginia summer camp founded by 'psychic' Edgar Cayce

The lawsuits were filed in state court in Virginia Beach, where the organization is headquartered

'The organization made a rape culture possible,' said one of the women, identified in the complaint only as Lynsey Doe.

The A.R.E. organization was founded by Edgar Cayce in 1931. On its website, the association says Cayce, who died in 1945, has been described as the 'father of holistic medicine' and 'the most documented psychic of the 20th century.'

The organization describes its mission as creating opportunities for personal change in body, mind and spirt using Cayce's readings.

The A.R.E. Camp opened in the early 1960s and is located in Rural Retreat, a small southwest Virginia town.

Edgar Cayce, the so-called prophet, was arrested in New York in 1931 on allegations that his psychic readings were fake

The women said the sexual abuse led to a variety of emotional and psychological problems for them, including substance abuse, anxiety and depression. Stephen Estey, one of the attorneys representing the women, said the lawsuits seek $10 million in damages for each.

Reached Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Kevin Todeschi, who is named as a defendant, said he had not yet seen the lawsuits and could not respond to the specific allegations.

'We're horrified. This is absolutely contrary to everything the organization stands for,' he told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview.

In a statement, Todeschi said the organization first became aware of allegations last summer when several people who had attended the camp posted on its Facebook page 'that they had experienced or had seen inappropriate behavior, and even sexual assault.'

Todeschi said the board commissioned an independent outside investigation agency to scrutinize the allegations 'and to encourage anyone who experienced harm to come forward.'

Todeschi said the investigation is continuing, and two committees have been established, one to address any systemic or policy-based changes needed, and the other to review camp personnel.

The camp was closed last summer because of the coronavirus pandemic. Todeschi said it will remain closed 'until we are satisfied we have addressed any still-existing concerns.'

'Sexual assault or assault of any kind has never been even remotely acceptable. Such conduct is contrary to everything we believe in. The Camp is a Family Camp that focuses on healthy living for body, mind, and spirit,' he said.
The company is working closely with the Indian Railways for its Roll-On-Roll-Off (RO-RO) service for faster transportation of medical oxygen to most critical need areas

Linde India and Praxair India are working on several large-scale initiatives in cooperation with the Government of India, relevant authorities, and industry partners at a national level as existing supply chains are under enormous pressure in meeting the huge demand, especially to the most impacted parts of the nation for medical oxygen.

Linde in India has embarked on two major operations. The company is working closely with the Indian Railways for its Roll-On-Roll-Off (RO-RO) service for faster transportation of medical oxygen to most critical need areas.

Secondly, Linde is collaborating with its operations in the Asia Pacific, including in Singapore, China and Thailand, as well as various Indian industry partners to transport ISO cryogenic tankers from across the region to India.

These containers can carry up to 20 tonnes of liquid oxygen over long distances, and upon arrival the containers will be conditioned and certified for liquid medical oxygen transport from Linde facilities. The tankers can also act as interim oxygen storages in remote areas that are facing oxygen scarcity.

Currently eight containers have arrived in India and many more are expected to over the next few weeks.

Linde India and Praxair India Pvt Ltd collectively manage and operate several plants with air separation and manufacturing capabilities. These plants currently have a combined capacity of more than 2000 metric tonnes per day (MTPD) and are located across India. Both the companies are also converting their liquid nitrogen and liquid argon tankers to augment the oxygen transportation capacities.

Linde India and Praxair India Pvt Ltd have also fast-tracked installation works at partner hospitals to ease oxygen supply challenges there. Among others, they have recently installed a 20 KL tank at GMERS Medical College, Junagadh, Gujarat. GMERS Medical College, Junagadh and another 20 KL tank at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute, Lucknow.

Moloy Banerjee, Head Gases - South Asia, Linde South Asia Services Private Limited said, All possible efforts are being undertaken to address supply and transportation challenges and we are thankful to our international counterparts and industry partners such as the ITC Group, Tata Group and many more such organisations that are coming forward to lend their support in executing these initiatives.
A former Georgia deputy has admitted to amassing a cache of nearly a dozen unregistered firearms, after an FBI investigation into an extremist group uncovered the officer's text messages in which he boasted about beating up a black man, used racial slurs and praised Nazis.

Cody Griggers, 28, of Montrose, pleaded guilty on Monday to one count of possession of an unregistered firearm before US District Judge Tilman Self, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Georgia said in a news release.

'This former law enforcement officer knew that he was breaking the law when he chose to possess a cache of unregistered weapons, silencers and a machine gun, keeping many of them in his duty vehicle. Coupled with his violent racially motivated extreme statements, the defendant has lost the privilege permanently of wearing the blue,' Acting US Attorney Peter Leary said.

Cody Grigger, a former Wilkinson County sheriff's deputy in Georgia, has pleaded guilty to one count of possession of an unregistered firearm following an FBI probe into an extremist group

Federal officials raided Grigger's home in Montrose, Georgia (pictured), and his patrol car, and found several illegal firearms, including a machine gun

Griggers, who is a former US Marine, served as a Wilkinson County sheriff's deputy for just over a year and was fired last November after the FBI uncovered his alleged ties to an extremist group called 'Shadow Moses,' or 'Shadmo.'

Federal agents in California were looking into a San Diego resident making violent political statements on Facebook last August when they came across a group text with Griggers.

In the text addressed to fellow members of the 'Shadow Moses' group, Griggers  who is white  said he was manufacturing and acquiring illegal firearms, explosives and suppressors.

He 'also expressed viewpoints consistent with racially motivated violent extremism, including the use of racial slurs, slurs against homosexuals and making frequent positive references to the Nazi holocaust,' the US attorneys office said.

According to an FBI affidavit, Griggers bragged about pummeling a black man who he said tried to steal a gun magazine from a local gun store. He added that the beating of the suspect, whom he referred to using a racial slur, offered him 'sweet stress relief.'

Wilkinson County Sheriff Richard Chatman, who is black, told the Macon Telegraph that the beating described by Griggers in the group text never happened, based on a thorough review of records from the time of the purported arrest.

Chatman noted that there is no gun store in the county, and that Griggers likely worked in the county jail at the time of supposed beating. The sheriff speculated that his former deputy was possibly 'being braggadocios.'

Wilkinson County Sheriff Richard Chatman speculated that Griggers was being braggadocios when he boasted about beating up a black man

The affidavit also stated that Griggers had discussed a plan to 'charge black people with felonies in order to keep them from voting,' and also talked about the prospect of 'killing liberal politicians.'

According to the court document, other members of the 'Shadow Moses' group chimed in, claiming they could 'make it look like Muslim's were behind the political assassinations.

On November 19, 2020, agents searched Griggers' home on Georgia Highway 112 in Montrose and his patrol car. Inside his police vehicle, officers found multiple firearms, including a machine gun with an obliterated serial number, according to authorities.

The machine gun was not issued to Griggers for work, and he was not allowed to have the weapon in his law enforcement car, authorities said.

In all, federal officials said they found 11 illegal firearms, including an unregistered short barrel shotgun in his home.

'All law enforcement officers swear an oath to uphold the law and protect each and every citizen they serve,' said Chris Hacker, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. 'Griggers clearly violated his oath with his egregious actions and has no place in law enforcement.'

Griggers, who was detained at a pretrial hearing and remains in custody, faces up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 when he is sentenced on July 6.
NEW ORLEANS, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Schouest, Bamdas, Soshea & BenMaier PLLC, or SBSB Law, continues to strengthen its bench of maritime law experts as the firm welcomes veteran maritime lawyer Elton Foster to its New Orleans office. With more than 30 years of legal experience, Mr. Foster joins as partner where he will focus his practice on cases involving Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, Defense Base Act, Jones Act, and general Maritime Law matters.

"Mr. Foster is a wonderful addition to our maritime team and a great example of why clients continue to turn to us for counsel," said SBSB Law firm founder John Schouest. "In addition to delivering successful and favorable results for clients throughout the country, Mr. Foster maintains a solid understanding of the laws and complexities that often come with maritime and offshore incidents. We feel fortunate to have such a highly regarded attorney at our firm."

Prior to joining SBSB Law, Mr. Foster served as Senior Maritime Counsel for Travelers Insurance Groups Holdings, Inc. for more than 10 years. He also served as General Counsel for a California-based company providing services to clients in the domestic and DBA workers compensation arenas.

"Though I have worked in a variety of complex business and regulatory environments, I consider this an incredible milestone and opportunity in my legal career," said Mr. Foster. "SBSB Law has built a stellar reputation for being a premiere law firm in Maritime, Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, and Defense Base Act law, and I am eager to contribute to the firm's success and continued growth."

Mr. Foster received his undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University and his J.D. from Tulane University Law School. During his time at Tulane, he held the position of editor-in-chief of the Tulane Maritime Law Journal.

Mr. Foster is licensed in Louisiana and has been admitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern, Middle and Western Districts of Louisiana.

He also comes from a long line of sea captains and attributes his appreciation for and gravitation to maritime-related matters to his early exposure to waterway commerce.

Schouest, Bamdas, Soshea & BenMaier PLLC or SBSB Law is a group of experienced attorneys who have come together to form a law firm focused on client needs. The firm's goal is to be the go-to resource at every stage of the legal process, bringing deeper experience, deeper commitment, and deeper insights to help solve the most complex issues. In consultation or in the courtroom, the firm will aggressively pursue a client's best interests. SBSB Law attorneys are just great people who also happen to be great lawyers. For more information about the firm and its team of attorneys, visit www.sbsblaw.com.

Media Contact:

Jennie Bui-McCoy

800-559-4534

[email protected]

SOURCE Schouest, Bamdas, Soshea & BenMaier PLLC

Related Links

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British royals Prince William and Kate Middleton are celebrating 10 years of marriage.

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The duke and duchess of Cambridge marked the occasion Wednesday by sharing romantic new photos on Instagram.

The pictures, taken by photographer Chris Floyd, show William and Middleton getting close during an outdoor photo shoot. In one portrait, the couple hold hands as William gazes at Middleton.

"10 years," the caption reads.

The other photo shows William and Middleton smiling as they embrace.

"Taken this week ahead of The Duke and Duchess' 10th wedding anniversary," the caption reads.

William and Middleton married in front of 1,900 guests at Westminster Abbey in April 2011. The couple then rode in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace, where William's grandmother Queen Elizabeth II hosted a private luncheon.

William and Middleton now have three children, Prince George, 7, Princess Charlotte, who turns 6 on Sunday, and Prince Louis, who turned 3 last week. In a video in October, the trio of siblings were seen asking David Attenborough questions about animals.

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In December, William and Middleton took a royal train tour of Britain. The couple's first stop was in Edinburgh, where they thanked workers for their efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The royal family is mourning the death of William's grandfather Prince Philip, who died at age 99 this month. William backed out of attending the BAFTA Film Awards this month in the wake of Philip's death.
Local AstraZeneca jab ready by June

THAILAND: AstraZenecas plan to produce its COVID-19 vaccine in Thailand has made significant progress and the first batch of vaccines will be ready for delivery to the government by June.

CoronavirusCOVID-19Vaccine

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 29 April 2021, 07:59AM

Photo: Bangkok Post.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Siam Bioscience as a manufacturing facility for AstraZenecas COVID-19 vaccine. The company, together with Siam Bioscience, has been working tirelessly to ensure that the facility is on track to safely deliver supply to support the national vaccination campaign. The collaboration with the Thai government and the FDA has facilitated the swift but careful progress with the manufacturing plant over the past few months, according to a statement issued by AstraZeneca (Thailand) Ltd yesterday (Apr 28).

James Teague, Country President, AstraZeneca (Thailand) Ltd, said: AstraZeneca and our global manufacturing partners, including Siam Bioscience, are committed to maintaining the highest safety and quality standards of our products. Numerous safety tests and quality control measures are carried out at each step. We are working as quickly as possible to supply the vaccine to the Thai government to overcome the ongoing pandemic.

Thailand will play a central role to support our neighbours in Southeast Asia to combat COVID-19. Together we can join hands to fight this pandemic, said Mr Teague.

Shortly after the announcement, the Ministry of Public Health insisted that the first jab would be given to the first group of 16 million people on June 7. The ministry needs to inoculate at least 70% of the population living in zones having a high level of infections in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Chon Buri shortly to help slow down the spread of COVID-19 throughout the country.

Sathit Pitutecha, a deputy public health minister, said that the ministry has already set up criteria for the first group of 16 million people who are the ministrys first priority to administer AstraZenecas COVID-19 vaccine to. Their names have already been registered with the Mor Prom app which will be launched on May 1, said Mr Sathit.

Sophon Mekthon, assistant to Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, said the 16 million people include 11.7 million aged over 60 and another 4.3 million suffering from chronic diseases such as severe respiratory disease, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and stroke. Dr Sophon said the second phase of inoculation will be available for 31 million people aged between 18-59, who can register online in July. The vaccine will be ready for this group from August.
FREDERICTON, N.B., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Introhive , the fastest-growing Ai-powered B2B sales enablement platform, and Upper Sigma, a boutique Salesforce Implementation Partner, today announced their formal partnership. The combined platform offering enables businesses, particularly legal services and financial firms, to gain a true 360-degree view of their business relationships.

"Sigma Lifecycle Manager has all the capabilities and features that enable firms to make use of the relationships that they have," explained Emile Van Den Berg, Managing Director of Upper Sigma. "Introhive supplies that data in the easiest way possible, allowing the revenue team to do their jobs while Introhive populates the system for the rest of the team to do their specialisation."

In addition to their Salesforce Implementation Partner status, both Introhive and Upper Sigma are ISV partners with Salesforce and operate globally to support customers across a variety of professional services with a particular focus on legal services firms, to which each organization has deep roots. The partnership comes at a time when businesses are seeking more value from their vendors and partners as companies globally seek to differentiate themselves in this Covid-19 world while providing the best client experience.

Sigma Lifecycle Manager aids in building, understanding, and targeting data seamlessly while Introhive's Pre-Meeting Digests, automation, and Post-Meeting capture make it easier for customers to realize an ROI on Salesforce implementation.

"Customers want and expect more from vendors than ever before making it an absolute necessity to ensure that you are delivering added value, every time," said Diana Sapienza, Introhive's Global Head of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships. "The combined offering of Upper Sigma and Introhive will enable our customers to wow their customers by delivering a deeper level of understanding of the customer relationships while displaying CRM data that is relevant to the end-user."

To learn more about Introhive and Upper Sigma and how the combined offering can help your business, contact [email protected]

About Introhive

Introhive is the fastest-growing AI-powered Sales and Relationship Intelligence platform, with the single largest ERM deployment in the world with customer PwC. The company has been recognized by awards programs including the 2019 and 2020 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500, the 2020 MarTech Breakthrough Awards, and is Great Place to Work certified in Canada. Introhive's AI-powered SaaS platform enables organisations to realise the full value of their relationships across the business and to leverage untapped data to drive revenues and increase productivity while simultaneously improving the customer experience. Introhive is trusted by some of the world's most recognisable brands: Deloitte, KPMG, Clark Nexsen, Colliers, and Plante Moran. Learn more at www.introhive.ai

About Upper Sigma

Upper Sigma is a Salesforce Solutions Integrator and Independent Software Vendor with offices in London, Edinburgh and Johannesburg. Collectively, we have the expertise, knowledge and best practice implementing specialist projects within our core focus industries; Legal, Professional Services and Financial Services. We have years of experience in Salesforce, and we house some of the best Salesforce experts in EMEA. We ensure optimal customer user adoption by providing architectural frameworks and solution-driven implementations unique to your business mould.

Upper Sigma forms part of Dynamic Technologies, an evolutionary software and technology group, with 1100+ staff and 14 group companies across the UK, Europe, the US and South Africa. Dynamic Technologies provides a diverse range of technology solutions, digital services, cloud solutions, training and resource solutions and related core competencies.

Media Inquiries:

Renee Maler

Philosophy PR + Marketing

510.499.9746

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SOURCE Introhive

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 15:15:22|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on April 13, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Photo by Shen Ting/Xinhua)

Migrants are illegally pouring over the U.S. southern border, and unaccompanied children are surging through at record levels. Critics call it a humanitarian disaster -- people are being crammed into places like the one in Donna, Texas, which is supposed to house a few hundred people under COVID restrictions, but now houses 4,000.

by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Nearing 100 days in office, U.S. President Joe Biden is tasked with handling a crisis on the U.S. southern border that shows no signs of abating.

Migrants are illegally pouring over the U.S. southern border, and unaccompanied children are surging through at record levels. Critics call it a humanitarian disaster -- people are being crammed into places like the one in Donna, Texas, which is supposed to house a few hundred people under COVID restrictions, but now houses 4,000.

The Biden administration is scrambling to contain the problem, which critics blast as a major blight on the new president's first 100 days in office.

"I think that it is clear that it has become a crisis ... in terms of the conditions that some migrants, particularly children, are being held in," Jessica Bolter, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told Xinhua.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua: "It is a complicated issue for the administration," adding that while Biden wants to treat people humanely, he "doesn't want a flood of new people crossing illegally."

Some experts said that a host of issues, including hurricanes, poverty and violence, are contributing to the surge. But others maintain the problem is because Biden has changed border policies.

"Biden's first 100 days have been an all-out aggressive assault on America," Republican Strategist and TV news personality Ford O'Connell told Xinhua, adding that the border crisis is one that Biden himself created.

"Democrats see this as a two-year window to transform America into a progressive state," O'Connell said.

In a recent OP-ED on Fox New's website, Sen. Thom Tillis noted that he saw with his own eyes during last month's visit to the border "the surge of unaccompanied minors, the subpar living conditions of migrants, and the state of an overworked and overwhelmed Border Patrol." He added that these have "been direct consequences of the Biden administration's failed policies."

"Through their words and actions, the Biden administration sent a clear signal that our border is open for anyone and everyone, and the world took notice," Tillis argued.

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also chimed in recently, arguing that "expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so."

For its part, the White House said it's seeking a fix that can involve both parties.

File photo taken on March 30, 2021 shows migrants attempting to cross the Rio Bravo river on the border between Mexico and the United States, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Photo by David Peinado/Xinhua)





WHAT MIGRANTS WILL FACE

Once they have crossed the border, Bolter said, there are different processes for single adult migrants, those traveling as families, and unaccompanied children to go through.

According to the expert, for single adults, most -- 87 percent in March -- are immediately expelled to Mexico or another country. Those who aren't first processed by border authorities are then transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and placed in removal proceedings before an immigration court. Most are detained in immigration detention while they are in immigration court proceedings, but some may be released for humanitarian reasons.

For families, less than half -- 33 percent in March -- are immediately expelled to Mexico or another country. Those who are not expelled are processed by border authorities in a facility like those in Donna, Texas, Bolter noted.

Some are placed into expedited removal proceedings and briefly detained in ICE family detention facilities before being either removed or released to seek asylum. Others are placed into long-term removal proceedings and quickly released into the community for the duration of their immigration court proceedings, he explained.

From there, NGOs typically help released families arrange travel to reunite with family or friends in other parts of the United States, Bolter noted.

For unaccompanied children, they are not being immediately expelled under the Biden administration. Once they have been processed by border authorities, they are transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is within the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Bolter said.

They are transferred to one of three types of facilities, ranging from smaller facilities with extensive services available, like case management and education, to larger, emergency facilities with services limited to meals, basic health care, and minimal recreation, Bolter said.

For children held in all these types of facilities, the goal is to release them as quickly as possible to a sponsor (most often a relative) in the United States whom they can live with while they go through proceedings in immigration court, Bolter noted. 
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For decades, Zebulon Simentov refused to leave Afghanistan - surviving a Soviet invasion, deadly civil war, brutal rule by the Taliban and the US-led occupation of his homeland.

But enough is enough for Afghanistan's last Jew, and the prospect of the Taliban's return as the US withdraws its troops has him preparing to say goodbye.

'Why should I stay? They call me an infidel,' Simentov said at Kabul's only synagogue, housed in an old building in the centre of the Afghan capital.

'I'm the last, the only Jew in Afghanistan... It could get worse for me here. I have decided to leave for Israel if the Taliban returns.'

The Taliban is gaining new ground following Joe Biden's announcement to pull out all remaining troops by September, and peace talks between the Islamists and the government in Kabul have broken down.

The prospect of the Taliban's return has Zebulon Simentov preparing to say goodbye to Afghanistan

Simentov is now certain he is the last Afghan Jew in the country

Simentov continues to mark the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays at the synagogue -- sometimes even accompanied by Muslim friends

Footage emerged earlier this week showing members of the Taliban flogging a woman for speaking to a man on the phone as dozens of villagers watched on. It served to underline the impotence of the Afghan government throughout much of the country, where the locals turn to Tribal elders to mete out justice.

Footage emerged earlier this week showing members of the Taliban flogging a woman for speaking to a man on the phone as dozens of villagers watched on.

It served to underline the impotence of the Afghan government throughout much of the country, where the locals turn to Tribal elders to mete out justice.

Biden announced earlier this month his plan to withdraw the remaining 2,500 US troops on September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

This appeared to be a unilateral decision which ignored the dates set down by the Taliban and Afghan government in their Doha Agreement in February last year.

It was billed as an 'agreement for bringing peace' and stated that US and NATO allies would have to withdraw from Afghanistan within 14 months, by May 1, 2021.

Biden's new timeline to September infuriated the Taliban which has now sought to distance itself from the US-led push for peace.

The group said earlier this month that its delegates would no longer travel to Turkey for a peace conference intended to jump start negotiations.

The news has sparked concerns the Taliban will push its spring offensive, a rise in attacks that usually takes place as the weather gets warmer.

Simentov was born in the 1950s, in the western city of Herat not far from where that harrowing video of the woman being whipped was filmed.

He moved to Kabul during the Soviet invasion in the early 1980s for the capital's then relative stability.

Jews lived in Afghanistan for more than 2,500 years, with tens of thousands once residing in Herat, where four synagogues still stand - testimony to the community's ancient presence.

Simentov fears what lies ahead if he stays

Simentov was born in the 1950s, in the western city of Herat not far from where that harrowing video of the woman being whipped was filmed

But they have steadily left the country since the 19th century, with many now living in Israel.

Over the decades, all Simentov's relatives left - including his wife and two daughters.

He is now certain he is the last Afghan Jew in the country.

Dressed in a traditional Afghan tunic and trousers, a black Jewish kippah and tefillin on his forehead, Simentov fondly remembers the years before the Soviet war as the best time for Afghanistan.

'Followers of every religion and sect had full freedom at that time,' said Simentov, who calls himself a proud Afghan.

But events since have made him bitter - particularly the Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, when the Islamists tried to convert him.

'This disgraceful Taliban regime put me in prison four times,' he said.

In one incident they ransacked the temple - a large room painted in white with an altar at one end - tore books in Hebrew text, broke Menorahs and took away the antique Torah, he said, still simmering with anger.

'The Taliban said this is the Islamic Emirate and Jews had no rights here,' he said.

Still, he refused to leave.

'I have resisted. I have made the religion of Moses proud here,' Simentov said, kissing the floor of the synagogue.

He continues to mark the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays at the synagogue - sometimes even accompanied by Muslim friends.

'If it weren't for me, the synagogue would have been sold 10, 20 times by now,' he said, as he limped across to his living quarters next to the temple.

Simentov, who lives off handouts from friends and relatives, prepares his meals on a small gas stove placed on a red carpet in the room.

The Taliban has threatened the US and NATO with consequences if the promised military withdrawal from Afghanistan is not completed by May 1 after US President Joe Biden said the exit would not be completed until September 11

Taliban representatives attend the opening session of peace talks in Doha, Qatar in February. They have shunned further peace talks in Turkey as experts fear the group is preparing to fill the power vacuum which will be left when US troops leave

On a table in a corner are some books and old photographs of his daughters.

He says when the Taliban were ousted in 2001, he believed Afghanistan would prosper.

'I thought the Europeans and Americans would fix this country... but that didn't happen,' he said.

Simentov's neighbours will be sorry to see him go.

'He is a good man,' said Shakir Azizi, who owns a grocery store in front of the synagogue.

'He has been my customer for 20 years. If he leaves, we will miss him and his presence.'

But Simentov fears what lies ahead if he stays.

'The Taliban are still the same as 21 years ago,' he said. 'I have lost faith in Afghanistan... there is no more life here.'
Las Vegas, NV, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Hemp, Inc. (OTC PINK: HEMP), a global leader in the industrial hemp industry with bi-coastal processing centers, announced today this week marks the one year anniversary of Floridas state hemp program as the Company continues its massive expansion in the state. Hemp, Inc. is currently scouting locations for its Kins Communities in order to build numerous hemp growing and processing facilities in Florida due to its booming hemp market estimated to surge to $30 billion, according to Fox Business Ashley Webster. Some are even calling it the crop of the future.



According to the news source, hemp has given a boost to the Sunshine State. Overseen by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS), the department and its Office of Cannabis manage and regulate Floridas hemp program and cannabis products, including CBD.

According to Hemp, Inc. executives, Floridas prime climate is right for hemp so its really just a matter of ensuring that there are proper processing facilities once the hemp has been harvested.

Hemp, Inc. is in the initial stages of establishing hemp processing facilities, which have been a strong suit of the company given their success in other states, and the Company plans on equipping Florida hemp farmers with the infrastructure they need to ensure the success of hemp in the state. Thus far, hemp in Florida has created an estimated $370 million economic impact, supported over 9,000 jobs, and generated over $17 million in federal, state, and local tax revenue.

Floridas Agricultural Commissioner expects this year to have an increase in multicultural public education and outreach on the benefits of hemp. Hemp, Inc. has a strong foothold on the educational front with its Hemp University. The Company has held six successful hemp training symposiums in North Carolina and five in Oregon and will continue these educational symposiums throughout the entire state of Florida in order to support their hemp producers, processors, and retailers as demand continues to expand. Hemp, Inc. is proving to be one of the (hopefully many) dominate players in Florida that will help hemp farmers avoid a lot of the pitfalls theyve faced in other states.

We will also advance research and testing, ensuring Florida hemp products meet the rigorous quality and safety standards that the law requires and consumers deserve. Im proud of our departments work on this new green economic driver, and I believe that Floridians will enjoy the benefits of this commodity for generations to come. The skys the limit for Florida hemp and were very excited about year two, said Commissioner Fried.

The processing facilities throughout the state are expected to be from the Florida Panhandle down to Homestead, Florida as this will benefit local hemp farmers and the Kins Communities as each hemp farmer needs a processing center nearby.

The Kins Communities will also be a great resource to people in the state and will boost Floridas hemp production once they are built out and fully operational. The foundations, for now, include over forty Kins Communities in Florida which have been set up so far. This infrastructure is important for Florida hemp farmers, as the FDACS has approved more than 800 hemp cultivation permits for farmers in 65 of Floridas 67 counties, with more than 30,000 acres approved for planting.

Moreover, Hemp Inc. is making their King of Hemp line available at retail stores across America later this year. For those who prefer shopping online, King of Hemp products are currently available at NaturalExposureCBD.com.

Included in the King of Hemp line are items such as Bubba Kush hemp, CBD pre-rolls, fortified CBD pre-rolls, CBD and CBG Caviar and Moon Rocks, as well as Diamonds, which are the only product on the market today that contain 96%-98.7% CBD.

To learn more, go to the King of Hemp website, here.

According to Hemp Inc. executives, a distributor is selling a very limited number of signed Billy Hayes CBG pre-rolls as a collectors item. Also available are CBD pre-rolls that are signed by Bruce Perlowin, and next in the series will be the Notorious Smith Brothers. Those items will be announced and sold at a later date. In addition to their pre-rolls, the King of Hemp line also includes tinctures that contain full-spectrum hemp oil that has been extracted from the flowers and leaves of sustainably sourced hemp plants.

All King of Hemp products are compliant with the Colorado Department of Agriculture regulations and all CBD products contain 0.3% or less THC and are compliant with the 2018 Farm Bill. Those interested in King of Hemp pre-rolls; hemp-derived CBD tinctures; Caviar; Diamonds; can visit www.kingofhempusa.com and email sales@kingofhempusa.com.

What is Hemp, Inc.?

Hemp, Inc. is a publicly-traded company, founded in 2008, that has grown to become one of the most recognizable global leaders in the industrial hemp industry with a 62,000 square-foot raw hemp processing center in Medford, Oregon and approximately 10,000 square feet of space contracted for the production of finished goods in Las Vegas, Nevada

With bold moves and decisive action taken this year so far, the Company had substantial revenues for its first quarter of 2021. Last year, Hemp, Inc. focused most of its resources and personnel on growing and processing a very successful high CBD hemp grow in Southern Oregon as opposed to building a massive infrastructure. Those bold moves and strategic actions laid the foundation for this year with the launch of its King of Hemp, unique and one of kind, CBD and CBG products.

Included in the King of Hemp line are items such as Bubba Kush hemp, CBD and CBG pre-rolls, fortified CBD pre-rolls, CBD and CBG Caviar and Moon Rocks, as well as Diamonds, which are the only products on the market today that contain 96%-98.7% CBD.

To learn more, go to the King of Hemp website, here.

According to Hemp Inc. executives, a distributor is selling a very limited number of signed Billy Hayes CBG pre-rolls as a collectors item. Also available are CBD pre-rolls that are signed by Bruce Perlowin (former CEO of Hemp, Inc. now Chief Visionary Consultant to Hemp, Inc.). Next in the series will be the Notorious Smith Brothers. In addition to their pre-rolls, the King of Hemp line also includes tinctures that contain full-spectrum hemp oil that has been extracted from the flowers and leaves of sustainably sourced hemp plants.

All King of Hemp products are compliant with the Colorado Department of Agriculture regulations and all CBD products contain 0.3% or less THC and are compliant with the 2018 Farm Bill. Those interested in King of Hemp pre-rolls; hemp-derived CBD tinctures; Caviar; or Diamonds, can visit www.kingofhempusa.com or email sales@kingofhempusa.com.

Hemp Inc. will be making their King of Hemp line available at retail stores across America this year. For those who prefer shopping online, King of Hemp products are currently available at NaturalExposureCBD.com and www.kingofhempusa.com .

The Company is focusing 90% of its efforts on marketing and generating revenues. Were now mass marketing and Im certain we will have substantial revenue to report for the second quarter and beyond. While there may be a few more infrastructure footprints created, its full speed ahead for Hemp, Inc.

While Hemp, Inc.s primary focus is industrial hemp, the Company has recently been promoting the health benefits of legal cannabis by educating the public on the medicinal benefits to marijuana use. Hemp, Inc. has a variety of new medicinal products under their King of Hemp line to address a multitude of public health concerns that can be remedied in part with the use of cannabis products, and expects to have display booths at all of the upcoming concerts and events at the Veteran Village Kins Communities.

HEMP, INC.S ELEVEN DIVISIONS

It has been Hemp, Inc.s intent to continually invest in building its hemp infrastructure, especially since none existed previously. In fact, the Company has instinctively been following the same path as Amazon reinvesting profits and operating capital back into building the infrastructure. This is a business strategy that has been proven and works well.

All the years leading up to this point were building and finishing the largest hemp infrastructure in America. Now the Company is focusing 90% of its efforts on marketing and generating revenues.

Hemp, Inc.s eleven divisions are as follows:

Division One  The Industrial Hemp Infrastructure

Division Two  The Hemp Farming Infrastructure

Division Three  The Hemp Extraction & Pre-Roll Blending Infrastructure

Division Four  The Hemp Educational Infrastructure

Division Five  The Hemp Marketing Infrastructure

Division Six  Accessories, Products and Services

Division Seven  Research and Development

Division Eight  Industrial Hemp Investments and Joint Ventures

Division Nine  Industrial Hemp Consulting

Division Ten  Educational Entertainment

Division Eleven  Medical and Recreational Marijuana

Division One  The Industrial Hemp Infrastructure

The Industrial Hemp Infrastructure (Division One) consists of two hemp processing facilities across the country. The largest of the two is its multi-purpose industrial hemp processing facility and milling operation in Spring Hope, North Carolina. Its the largest industrial hemp processing center in the western hemisphere and has grown to become one of the pre-eminent centers of the industrial hemp industry. The 85,000 square foot facility sits on 9 acres. It is environmentally sustainable and was built from the ground up in hopes of Making America Hemp Again." With a patent pending manufacturing process, the North Carolina facility is operating full time to process the Companys unique kenaf-hemp blend and manufacture all-green natural loss circulation material (LCMs), called DrillWall . The DrillWall is to be sold to the oil and gas drilling industry, along with an all-green natural oil spill absorbent, a second industrial kenaf-hemp product called Spill-Be-Gone.

In addition to the companys industrial hemp processing facility in Spring Hope, North Carolina, Hemp, Inc. also has a 62,000 square-foot raw hemp processing center in Medford, Oregon (which focuses on hemp harvesting, drying, curing, trimming, bagging, storing, and in some cases selling high CBD hemp for local farmers and the Companys own hemp grown in that area, and post-processing for the CBD industry) and approximately 10,000 square feet contracted for the production of finished goods in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Companys main focus is the King of Hemp pre-rolls and high CBD smokable buds a new phenomenon of smoking hemp which has caught the marketplace by storm.

Division One Products:

 DrillWall (a loss circulation material)

 Spill-Be-Gone (an oil spill cleanup product)

 Hemp/kenaf bioplastics

Division Two  The Hemp Farming Infrastructure

The Hemp Farming Infrastructure (Division Two) consists of numerous acres of hemp and kenaf growing in multiple locations, farm equipment, cloning rooms, clones and seeds, grow rooms, greenhouses, hemp drying facilities and a huge amount of peripheral farming tools and equipment. The progress Hemp, Inc. has made in its agricultural endeavors, over the course of five years, has been amazing. This year marks the sixth year that Hemp, Inc. has been growing hemp. Visit https://www.hempincpresents.com/ to see the videos of Hemp, Inc.s grows in multiple locations.)

Hemp, Inc. operates Small Family Hemp Farm models. The Small Family Hemp Farm in North Carolina is situated on 12 acres and consists of a cloning room, a greenhouse, and enough land to grow 2,000-3,000 high CBD or CBG hemp plants. The model shows farmers how to grow high CBD and CBG hemp plants, operate a greenhouse and turn a barn into a cloning room to earn up to $100,000+ a year. This shows an example of how the Small Family Hemp Farm can be duplicated and reappear on the American landscape. After all, the original small family farms in America were able to survive economically by growing hemp as their main cash crop and the first five presidents of the United States were all hemp farmers.

Another model Small Family Hemp Farm is located Dolan Springs, Arizona. This Small Family Hemp Farm is referred to as The Orchard since it has a sizable organic orchard. There are 2 acres on which hemp will be grown; a cloning room; cold storage; and a greenhouse that is planned to be installed. This year mostly CBG hemp will be grown.

This year is about sales and marketing for us. Right now, we believe we have the largest footprint of bio-diverse hemp products with vertical integration in the hemp industry in America today. We are always looking for joint ventures where we have or can expand our footprint, commented a Hemp, Inc. executive.

Moreover, A to Z services for the farmers are available - from harvesting to drying, curing, bucking, machine trimming, hand trimming, bagging, storing, nitrogen sparging, and selling creating a one stop shop for the small to large family farms.

Division Two Products include:

 The King of Hemp Pre-Roll Blends

Visit www.kingofhempusa.com for current products.

Division Three  The Hemp Extraction & Pre-Roll Blending Infrastructure

The Hemp CBD Oil Extraction & Pre-Roll Blending Infrastructure (Division Three) originally consisted of a Supercritical C02 Extractor. After operating for over a year it has been determined that Hemp, Inc. will not be involved in the extraction industry and has changed its direction to focus primarily on the King of Hemp pre-rolls and The King of Hemp high CBD smokable flower. The CBD oil that was extracted from the 2018 hemp grows in North Carolina has been made into pure crystalline CBD isolate which was added to the Companys King of Hemp branded line of pre-rolls that are now in the marketplace across all 50 states.

Division Four  The Hemp Educational Infrastructure

The Hemp Educational Infrastructure (Division Four) includes Hemp, Inc.'s Hemp University which focuses on educating and empowering Hemp farmers and entrepreneurs with knowledge, processing, infrastructure and support. The educational seminars, through the Hemp University, are held as needed. These seminars teach farmers and landowners how to create a profitable income stream by maximizing the per-acre crop revenue. Through this division, Hemp, Inc. has trained well over 500 farmers in its first two years by doing a total of nine Hemp University seminars in North Carolina and Oregon, which included:

The New Leaf Symposium and Golden Grow Awards Gala - January 26, 2020 (Jacksonville, Oregon)

The New Leaf Symposiums focus was Regeneration" to celebrate optimism and resilience in the industry, the power of the plant, and faith in the hemp-producing community. The event sold out with over 180 attendees. The feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly possible and the speakers were hailed as the best yet. The educational symposium concluded with the Golden Grow Awards Gala. The Golden Grow Awards Gala honored Oregon's top cultivars and put Oregons best farmers head-to-head for some of the most prestigious hemp-industry accolades. There were four categories judged in the awards: Top CBD, Top Terpenes, Judges Favorite, and Peoples Choice. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 1/28/20 for a short video on this symposium.)

The Pre-Harvest Symposium  September 8, 2019 (Oregon)

The Pre-Harvest Symposium workshop at Southern Oregon University was expertly designed for both farmers and entrepreneurs of all experience levels, focused on harvesting, processing and profit channels within the hemp industry. The third edition of the Southern Oregon Hemp University brought an abundance of insight into innovations within the realm of harvesting and processing to the forefront. Additionally, the symposium touched on traditional practices in agriculture. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 9/9/19 for a short video on this symposium.)

Pre-Plant Support Workshop  May 4, 2019 (Oregon)

The Pre-Plant Support Workshop was an incredible success that filled the entire venue to capacity with attendees. In total, there were close to 200 attendees, including 20 vendors in attendance. The workshop was designed to help hemp farmers or those who are interested in the hemp industry learn the best pre-planting practices prior to the planting season. The Hemp University Pre-Planting Support Workshop was an interactive and informative workshop that covered the various details hemp farmers should know prior to planting in the 2019 season and beyond. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 5/9/19 for a short video on this workshop.)

The Hemp University Educational Seminar - March 23, 2019 (Oregon)

This was the first Hemp University held on the West Coast. The seminar provided attendees with a full day of networking, education, and support. The seminar helped others in the area who were interested in the hemp industry learn more about the Industrial Hemp Revolution and how this movement can not only transform Southern Oregons economy, but also revive family farms and small businesses in the surrounding areas. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 3/28/19 for a short video on this seminar.)

Growing Hemp for Profit  March 10, 2018  (North Carolina)

The Hemp Universitys first educational symposium event of 2018 entitled Growing Hemp for Profit took place on Saturday, March 10, 2018. Attendees learned from the Universitys industrial hemp experts as they shared their lessons from their experiences in growing industrial hemp. Growing Hemp for Profit, which took place from 8:30am to 5 pm at the Hilton Garden Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 3/17/18 for a short video on this symposium.)

Hemp Money Event: Economics, Lessons & Planning for 2018  December 2, 2017  (North Carolina)

The fifth most vital and anticipated educational symposium of the year was Hemp Money Event: Economics, Lessons & Planning for 2018. This symposium was held on Saturday, December 2, 2017 from 8:30am to 5:00pm at the Shrine Club (320 Airport Rd, Rocky Mount, NC 27804). Attendees learned the economics of growing industrial hemp for fiber, seeds, and CBD; learned about other master POD growers experiences and lessons; and, learned how to prepare for the 2018 industrial hemp growing season with a well-defined blueprint for success. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 12/23/17 for a short video on this symposium.)

The Hemp Oil Event: The Art and Science of CBD Oil  September 30, 2017 (North Carolina)

The Hemp Oil Event (The Art & Science of CBD Oil) was The Hemp Universitys fourth symposium in North Carolina, held on Saturday, September 30, 2017 from 8:30am to 5:00pm at the Peachtree Hills Country Club, 3512 Peachtree Hills Road, Spring Hope, NC 27882. The symposium brought attendees up to speed on all business and scientific aspects of Industrial Hemp CBD cannabinoids by disseminating current, reliable information that continues to shape the revolutionary CBD market. Attendees also got a chance to go to Hemp, Inc.s, then, 70,000 square foot multipurpose industrial hemp decortication facility for the first live public demonstration of its Supercritical CO2 Extraction System using North Carolina-grown CBD industrial hemp. Representatives from NuAxon Bioscience were also on-site to allow those interested in purchasing their own CBD extraction system. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 9/30/17 for a short video on this symposium.)

The Art and Science of CBD Greenhouse Growing  June 24, 2017 (North Carolina)

The 3rd Hemp University educational symposium held on June 24, 2017 focused on The Art and Science of CBD Greenhouse Growing. The educational symposium was held at Louisburg College in Louisburg, North Carolina. A team of experts engaged attendees through the greenhouse and indoor growing process from cultivation to harvest and from processing to distribution. Dr. Robert Bruck, Dean of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science at Louisburg College, was The Hemp Universitys special guest who lectured on soil microbiology during the symposium. Attendees were able to spend half of the course at Hemp, Inc.s, then, 70,000 square-foot Industrial Hemp Hub, in a 3,000 square-foot cloning room. There, attendees had the opportunity to experience a more hands-on learning approach. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 6/30/17 for a short video on this symposium.)

Farming Hemp for Profit  April 29, 2017 (North Carolina)

Hemp, Inc.s second, sold out, educational symposium (Farming HEMP for Profit), through its Hemp University, was a phenomenal success. The symposium took place on Saturday, April 29, 2017, from 8:30am  5:00pm, at the Hampton Inn & Suites located at 3920 Arrow Drive, Raleigh, NC 27612 and drew over 100 attendees. The one-day educational symposium and tour of Hemp, Inc.s, then, 70,000 square-foot multipurpose industrial hemp facility was an opportunity for landowners and farmers to learn how to apply real business building tactics with a specific step-by-step blueprint on how to grow, sell and profit from farming industrial hemp. This event accomplished its mission to help landowners and farmers add a new viable and profitable income stream by maximizing the per-acre crop revenue. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook post on 4/30/17 for a short video on this symposium.)

Farming Hemp for Profit  March 18, 2017 (North Carolina)

This was Hemp, Inc.s first Hemp University symposium. The symposium was a sold out event and was a huge success with 100 attendees who rated the quality of information presented as excellent. The symposium took place on Saturday, March 18, 2017, from 8:00am  5:00pm, at Hemp, Inc.s wholly owned subsidiary, Industrial Hemp Manufacturing, LLC, located at 1436 Highway 581 North, Spring Hope, North Carolina, 27882. The one-day educational symposium was an opportunity for landowners and farmers to receive a specific step-by-step blueprint on how to grow, sell and profit from farming industrial hemp by using real business tactics and principles, presented by industry experts. (See Bruce Perlowins personal Facebook posts on 3/18-19 and 3/21-26, 2019 for a short videos on this symposium.)

To listen to past Hemp University workshops, please visit hemp-university.teachable.com. Also visit https://www.hempincpresents.com to see highlights from Hemp, Inc.s inaugural Hemp University held in North Carolina, which sold out in two weeks.

The Hemp Universitys twelve online educational masterclasses are $10 each and each masterclass is under an hour in length. The online courses include lectures from industry leaders who have educated attendees at the Hemp University workshops in Oregon. These online masterclasses provide farmers who were either not able to attend the first Hemp University or who would like to revisit certain topics presented by the event speakers.

Those interested in Hemp, Inc.s online courses, including experts in any aspect of the industrial hemp industry, should contact (855) 554-6834.

Since The Hemp Universitys initial launch with the educational symposium, the number of attendees grew tremendously and was an overwhelming success, each time. The interactive, hands-on learning approach was invaluable. By learning in an interactive cohort format, students gained the necessary skills they needed to immediately implement them on their farm or in their organization. Its the perfect mix of quality instruction, relevant educational content and a high level of commitment, to ensure the educational success of each attendee, said one Company executive.

The Hemp University has helped transform the livelihoods of North Carolina and Oregon farmers transitioning from tobacco and other crops to industrial hemp by providing them with the tools and support needed to gain a foothold in this burgeoning industry.

Division Five  The Hemp Marketing Infrastructure

While marketing is a critical facet of any business operation for increasing revenues, Hemp, Inc. believes there must be a keen focus on the infrastructure. The demand for CBD, CBG and other hemp products is massive, some even say the demand is insatiable. In order to supply that type of volume/demand, there has to be a strong foundation or infrastructure in place. The cannabidiol (CBD) market is on track to grow to $23.7 billion through 2023, according to the Brightfield Group. The firm also estimated the smokable hemp market to be valued at $11.5 million in 2018, a growth of 250% from 2017.

Division Six  Accessories, Products and Services

Division Six focuses on the sale of hemp industry accessories such as the sale of extractors, harvesters, storage bags, containers, fertilizer, soil amendments, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, balers, greenhouses, and greenhouse equipment; the drying, trimming, curing, storing and brokering for other farmers harvesting hemp; and ultimately anything else a hemp farmer may need to be successful.

Division Seven  Research and Development

While Research and Development has been an integral part of Hemp, Inc. since day one, the Company plans on developing a more formal research and development project. This division will then start and expand rapidly. The Company originally planned for Puerto Rico to be a research and development hub, but found the barrier to entrance was much too great and has therefore changed its position to focus its research and development division on states where hemp is already legal. Hemp, Inc. is proud to have been a pioneer and leader in the early stages of the hemp industry in America with our strategy to build infrastructure even before legalization occurred in a state such as what was done in North Carolina and Arizona.

Division Eight  Industrial Hemp Investments and Joint Ventures

Hemp, Inc. established its eighth division (Industrial Hemp Investments and Joint Ventures). Since the passing of the 2018 hemp bill, Hemp, Inc. has been flooded with inquiries of people who want to invest in the hemp industry but dont know where to start. As the Avant-guard of the industrial hemp industry, Hemp, Inc. has put together numerous joint venture investment opportunities for the medium to large-scale investor. Those who are interested should email ir@hempinc.com. Millionaire investors, and in some cases billionaires and billion dollar hedge fund managers, are aggressively trying to get into the hemp industry since the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill. Our joint venture agreements are that they put up the money and we put up the expertise in a 50/50 revenue share (after all the initial investment money is paid back). This will save the large-scale hemp investor often two years and dozens of multi-million dollar mistakes that they WILL often make without an expert in the hemp industry. This is where Hemp, Inc.s vast network of experts and resources, built over a period of 10 years, in the industrial hemp industry come into play because this is something we can easily provide to those interested in entering this industry.

Division Nine  Industrial Hemp Consulting

Hemp, Inc.s Industrial Hemp and Medical Marijuana Consulting Company (IHMMCC) was recently restructured as its ninth division and is now Division Nine - Industrial Hemp Consulting. With an influx of public companies wanting to expand into the industrial hemp industry, Hemp, Inc. has been inundated with potential consulting and joint venture agreements. To keep up, Hemp, Inc. revamped its consulting division to work hands-on with each company to provide its years of expertise. There is definitely a sense of a Community of Companies whereby a lot of companies are working together to pool their resources, marketing connections and strategies in order to grow simultaneously.

Typically, companies seeking in depth consulting services from Hemp, Inc. pay mostly in stock since cash flow is oftentimes tight during the developmental stage of start-up companies in this industry. Through Hemp, Inc.s Division Nine  Industrial Hemp Consulting, a wide range of services are forged from the experiences of creating the first publicly traded company in the cannabis sector (Medical Marijuana, Inc.) and having over a decade of experience in the industrial hemp industrys public sector.

Division Ten  Educational Entertainment

The Educational Entertainment division will cover everything from investing in the movie The Adventures of the King of Pot (https://www.kingofpotthemovie.com/) and other historical movies, books and documentaries representing our industry up to the current docuseries being made on The Modern Day History of Hemp. Those interested in investing in any one of these ventures should contact ir@hempinc.com.

Division Eleven  Medical and Recreational Marijuana

Hemp, Inc.s newest division, Medical and Recreational Marijuana, is underway to enter the cannabis market in 2021 once marijuana is fully legalized across the country. Banks and merchant account providers will be more open and accepting of marijuana companies. Right now, the banking regulations for marijuana companies are very draconian. Ive known so many banks to close accounts merely because they were associated with the industry. Anyway, we dont know if well wait for full legalization yet but that decision wont discount the building out of facilities and preparation for it. After legalization occurs and large scale marijuana grows are underway, this division would already be positioned as a go-to consultant due to our industry expertise.

PREVIOUS PRESS COVERAGE

Between the Hemp University, the hemp processing center and Bruce Perlowin himself, the Company has created an enormous amount of media coverage. See below for the list of press hits the Company has received up to the end of this quarter:

Hit: Hemp: the burgeoning industry of southern Oregon - (NBC) KOBI-5, December 22, 2018

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Featured on Oregon NBC 5 Station Following Passage of 2018 Farm Bill

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-featured-on-oregon-nbc-5-station-following-passage-of-2018-farm-bill/

Hit: Carolinas next cash crop?: Farm bill will add hemp into more growers rotation - The Wilson Times, December 26, 2018

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Receives Prominent News Coverage Discussing Hemp Legalization and Small Family Farms

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-receives-prominent-news-coverage-discussing-hemp-legalization-and-small-family-farms/

Hit: Arizona's next cash crop? Lawmaker pushes for rush on hemp bill - ABC 15, January 28, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Applauds Arizona Legislative Drive to Push Up Industrial Hemp Licensing Date to June 2019 as Veteran Village Kins Community Builds Out Infrastructure

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/25/1741708/0/en/Hemp-Inc-Applauds-Arizona-Legislative-Drive-to-Push-Up-Industrial-Hemp-Licensing-Date-to-June-2019-as-Veteran-Village-Kins-Community-Builds-Out-Infrastructure.html

Hit: Farmers could plant hemp in Arizona fields this summer, if bill passes - ABC KUGN-9, February 8, 2019

Hit: Adams on Agriculture - Bruce Perlowin/Hemp, Inc. - Adams On Agriculture, February 22, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Featured on National Radio Show Discussing Company's Expanding Footprint and Demand for Cannabidiol

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/27/1743589/0/en/Hemp-Inc-CEO-Featured-on-National-Radio-Show-Discussing-Company-s-Expanding-Footprint-and-Demand-for-Cannabidiol.html

Hit: Hemp, Inc. seeking JV partners for processing facilities, CEO says - MergerMarket, February 28, 2019

Hit: Hemp, Inc. holds first west coast educational seminar in Ashland - (NBC) KOBI-5, March 23, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Featured by CBS and NBC Affiliates in Oregon About The Hemp Universitys Educational Hemp Seminar

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-featured-by-cbs-and-nbc-affiliates-in-oregon-about-the-hemp-universitys-educational-hemp-seminar/

Hit: Hemp University: getting schooled on cannabis - CBS News 10, March 26, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Featured by CBS and NBC Affiliates in Oregon About The Hemp Universitys Educational Hemp Seminar

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-featured-by-cbs-and-nbc-affiliates-in-oregon-about-the-hemp-universitys-educational-hemp-seminar/

Hit: How Hemp Is Giving Renewed Life To America's Tobacco Farmers - Forbes, March 25, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured in Forbes Discussing Tobacco Farmers Who are Turning to Industrial Hemp

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-featured-in-forbes-discussing-tobacco-farmers-who-are-turning-to-industrial-hemp/

Hit: Market for hemp still a ways off - Tri-State Neighbor, March 28, 2019

Hit: Tobacco growers may find new avenue in hemp farming - AgDaily, April 26, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured in AgDaily Discussing Hemp as Agricultural Industrys Newest Cash Crop

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-featured-in-agdaily-discussing-hemp-as-agricultural-industrys-newest-cash-crop/

Hit: Industrial hemp has potential to be a big cash crop for area farmers - Tulsa World, May 12, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured in Tulsa World Discussing Oklahomas Industrial Hemp Industry

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-featured-in-tulsa-world-discussing-oklahomas-industrial-hemp-industry/

Hit: Growing hemp in the desert - Todays News-Herald/Havasu News, June 10, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured on Cover of Todays News-Herald Discussing Arizona's Industrial Hemp Industry

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/06/17/1869821/0/en/Hemp-Inc-CEO-Bruce-Perlowin-Featured-on-Cover-of-Today-s-News-Herald-Discussing-Arizona-s-Industrial-Hemp-Industry.html

Hit: Hempathon" contest planned for Golden Valley - Mohave Daily News, July 7, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured in Mohave Daily News and CBD Today Discussing Hempathon

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-165236585.html

Hit: Hemp, Inc. Seeking Agriculture Suppliers and Farmers for Hempathon Event - CBD Today, July 2, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured in Mohave Daily News and CBD Today Discussing Hempathon

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-165236585.html

Hit: Hemp Inc. to Hold Hempathon in Mohave County - Arizona Cannabis News, July 15, 2019

Hit: Hemp, Inc. taking hemp into bioplastics - Plastics News, August 22, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Featured in Plastics News Regarding Entry Into Hemp Bioplastics Industry to Help Fill Growing Demand for Eco-friendly Materials

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-announces-hemp-cultivation-now-legal-in-new-jersey-through-expanded-regulations/

Hit: ROSEBUD ORIGINAL VIDEO: Hemp University the Pre-Harvesting Symposium - Mail Tribune, September 9, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Subsidiary, The Hemp University, Featured in Mail Tribune Showcasing Pre-Harvest Symposium Hemp Workshop

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-subsidiary-the-hemp-university-featured-in-mail-tribune-showcasing-pre-harvest-symposium-hemp-workshop/

Hit: Hemp In The Valley - CBS News 10, September 12, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Featured on CBS News 10 in Oregon Discussing States Booming Hemp Industry

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-featured-on-cbs-news-10-in-oregon-discussing-states-booming-hemp-industry/

Hit: Episode 72 : "King of pot, smuggling 101, and getting arrested on an airplane - Off Script With Trish Glose, CBS News 10 Podcast, September 25, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin to be Featured on the Podcast Off Script with Trish Glose This Wednesday

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-to-be-featured-on-the-podcast-off-script-with-trish-glose-this-wednesday/

Hit: Why US Tobacco Farmers Are Switching To Hemp - Business Insider, September 16, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Affiliate, Through a Joint Venture, Featured on Business Insider for North Carolina Farming Operations

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-affiliate-through-a-joint-venture-featured-on-business-insider-for-north-carolina-farming-operations/

Hit: HEMP, INC. Joins The Stock Day Podcast to Discuss The Distribution of Their Hemp Pre-Rolls - Stock Day Podcast, September 27, 2019

Press Release: HEMP, INC. Joins The Stock Day Podcast to Discuss The Distribution of Their Hemp Pre-Rolls

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-joins-the-stock-day-podcast-to-discuss-the-distribution-of-their-hemp-pre-rolls/

Hit: Hemp hardwoods, bioplastics expand crop use beyond CBD - United Press International, October 2, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Featured in Globally Syndicated News Provider, United Press International, Discussing Industrial Applications for Bioplastics

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-featured-in-globally-syndicated-news-provider-united-press-international-discussing-industrial-applications-for-bioplastics-2/

Hit: Rising High: An Exclusive Talk with Industrial Hemp Company Hemp, Inc. - The Fly, October 17, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Profiled in Financial News Outlet, The Fly

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-profiled-in-financial-news-outlet-the-fly-2/

Hit: Lack of Processing Facilities For Hemp - ABC News Watch 12, October 30, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. Oregon Processing Operation Featured in NewsWatch 12s Harvest Coverage

https://www.hempinc.com/hemp-inc-oregon-processing-operation-featured-in-newswatch-12s-harvest-coverage/

Hit: Hemp farmers in red tape - CBS News 10, November 5, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc.s Commentary on New USDA Rules Featured in KTVL Broadcast and Smoky Mountain News

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hemp-inc-commentary-usda-rules-133259687.html

Hit: Legislature to ban smokable hemp in N.C. - Smoky Mountain News, November 6, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc.s Commentary on New USDA Rules Featured in KTVL Broadcast and Smoky Mountain News

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hemp-inc-commentary-usda-rules-133259687.html

Hit: Hemp Inc. CEO, Bruce Perlowin Interview - The Light, November 13, 2019

Press Release: Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin Joins News Video Series, The Light, to Discuss Company Initiatives

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hemp-inc-ceo-bruce-perlowin-124612561.html

FORWARD-LOOKING DISCLAIMER AND DISCLOSURES

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires issuers to provide adequate current information and Hemp, Inc. does using the SECs Alternative Reporting Standard to publicly report its quarterly and yearly financials. All current information can be found on www.hempinc.com/hemp-financial-disclosures/. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties.

Contact Name: Hemp, Inc.

Phone: 855-436-7688

Email: ir@hempinc.com
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The Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, Hakeem Odumosu, has said popular Yoruba actor Olarenwaju Omiyinka aka Baba Ijesha is currently in custody for alleged sexual assault and not rape as it is currently being bandied.

The CP said this at a press briefing which was held at the Lagos Police Command on Thursday.

On, April 22, PREMIUM TIMES reported that the Lagos State police command arrested the actor for allegedly raping a minor.

The Lagos State Police spokesperson, Olumuyiwa Adejobi, had said preliminary findings revealed that the suspect allegedly began sexually assaulting the victim, 14, since she was 7 years of age.

More details about the case, however, emerged on Tuesday night when Nigerian comedian, Damilola Adekoya aka Princess, revealed she was the guardian of the 14-year-old girl who was allegedly raped by her colleague.

Princess later clarified that her colleague only raped the minor twice and not for seven years as the police claimed.

Princess reported the incident at Sabo Police Station, Yaba, Lagos.

Update

Speaking at the briefing, the Commissioner of Police said, You dont do trial on pages of the newspaper. Baba Ijesha was alleged to have raped a girl seven years ago, as at that time, no complaint was made and nothing was done. Last week, a video went viral where he was arrested for sexual assault. He touched the girl in indecent places and he admitted.

The case of defilement being added to it is still under investigation and we need a scientific investigation. Sexual assault is a bailable offence, it is not like rape. Everyone involved, including Baba Ijesha, was taken out and we listened to them.

We have compiled the case and sent it to the Directorate of Public Prosecution), Ministry of Justice for advice.

For now, Baba Ijesha is still in our custody. The case is bailable but we have not considered him for bail. We are waiting for DPPs advice.

The case of defilement happened seven years ago which we cannot confirm. Baba Ijesha was arrested for sexual assault (touching the girl without her consent) and not rape, which he confessed to and apologised.

Iyabo Ojo

Meanwhile, Iyabo Ojo on Thursday released a video wherein Baba Ijesha begged for forgiveness after he was allegedly caught sexually molesting the 14-year-old girl.

The 43-year-old actress released the video amid reports that the police plan to release the accused on bail on Friday.

In the video, the actor could be seen begging Princess for forgiveness.

When she asked him why he did what he is being accused of after all she had done for him, the embattled actor blamed it on the devil.

Baba Ijeshas confession after being caught red-handed on CCTV sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Be human and let your conscience be pricked, Iyabo captioned the video posted on Instagram.

The actress has been the arrowhead of a campaign to ensure Baba Ijesha is punished for allegedly molesting a minor.

The mother of two has also clashed with a male colleague of hers, Yomi Fabiyi, who likened Baba Ijeshas case to that of Baba Suwe who was wrongly arrested and unlawfully kept in detention by the National Drug Law and Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) in 2011 for alleged drug trafficking.
Kerrville, TX (78028)

Today

Mostly clear early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low 71F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low 71F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama, College Signing Day 2019. Photo credit Chuck Kennedy.

Today, Reach Higher announced that Former First Lady Michelle Obama will celebrate College Signing Day on Saturday May 1, to celebrate the Class of 2021. The pre-recorded broadcast will stream starting at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT on BetterMakeRooms YouTube channel and on gaming platform Twitch via BlackStreamLive.

The former First Lady first celebrated College Signing Day in 2014 during her time in the White House as a way to celebrate graduating high school seniors across the country who pledge to continue their education after high school. These students have made the commitment to attend and graduate from a four-year university, community college, vocational or training program, or to join the military. College Signing Day is an opportunity to shine a spotlight on these students and celebrate them.

The event will include pre-recorded appearances by Mrs. Obama and other celebrity talent and VIPs including U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Conan OBrien, Steph Curry, Ted Allen, Chloe x Halle, The Weeknd, and Amanda Gorman. High school and college students will also participate by sharing their commitments to college as well as performing original content.

College Signing Day is a chance for us all to drop everything and celebrate the hard work of students all across the country, said former First Lady Michelle Obama. Over the past year, so many of these young people have missed milestones and persevered through remote learning. Yet at the same time, the uncertainty of the pandemic has shown once again how profoundly a college education can protect and transform a young persons future. So College Signing Day is an opportunity to recognize the unique and incredible achievements of this years graduates and urge them on in their journeys to and through higher education.

Every year since 2014, the Reach Higher team has helped organize and activate communities to use May 1 to create and to celebrate college going culture, said Eric Waldo, Executive Director of Reach Higher and Chief Access and Equity Programs Officer at Common App. A college education is worth it now more than ever, and Im so excited to celebrate the hard-earned achievements of students around the world this year.

Data shows that students who obtain a college degree will earn 84 percent more than their counterparts with only a high school diploma. Since the beginning of the pandemic and amidst an global economic downturn, the jobs that are most likely to be eliminated from the market are those that generally do not require a college degree. And the jobs that are coming back require more than a high school degree. Now more than ever, students need quality education beyond high school.

Since leaving the White House, Reach Higher has continued to recognize College Signing Day annually, and 2021 marks the eighth event. Mrs. Obama has celebrated across the country in San Antonio (University of Texas San Antonio 2014), Detroit (Wayne State University 2015), New York City (Harlem Armory 2016, Public Theatre 2017), Philadelphia (Temple University 2018), and Los Angeles (University of California Los Angeles 2019). In 2020, the celebration was virtual across social media.

You can learn more about Reach Higher and our Better Make Room campaign on social media on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and our newly launched Tik Tok account (@ReachHigher and @BetterMakeRoom across platforms). Reach Higher created a toolkit to help counselors, educators, and supporters to plan their local events.

Reach Higher is now a part of Common App, a non-profit membership organization of over 900 colleges and universities dedicated to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. Each year, more than one million students, one-third of whom are first-generation, apply to college through the Common Apps online application.
More than 200 Seattle Police Department officers have left their jobs in the last year, amid months of mass protests in the city over racial injustice.

The departing officers have cited what they call an 'anti-police climate' in Seattle, city council policies and disagreements with police department leadership.

Police Chief Adrian Diaz said on Tuesday that the department is facing a staffing crisis.

Diaz said 180 police officers quit last year and another 66 so far in 2021, adding that the number of officers left in the department is at 'record' lows.

More than 200 Seattle Police Department officers have left their jobs since last year, amid months of mass protests in the city over racial injustice. Pictured: A Black Lives Matter protest in July 2020 in Seattle

'I have about 1,080 deployable officers,' he told KING-TV in Seattle. 'This is the lowest I've seen our department.

'I do see that this year we could have a significant amount of people leaving.'

That means, about 20% of officers have quit since the start of 2020.

Diaz said that 1,400 is the ideal number of officers - including police trainees - to patrol the city.

He said current staffing levels make it difficult to respond to 911 calls.

'At this staffing level... we are struggling to making sure we're responding to all calls for service,' said Diaz, who stepped into the role after former Chief Carmen Best retired suddenly last summer.

Diaz added that the department is hiring more community service and crime prevention officers to handle non-criminal calls.

Exit interviews reveal that some departing officers retired early while others left for policing jobs in different cities or private sector roles.

'The hatred directed at SPD by our City leaders, activist, and the citizens of Seattle is unwarranted and unacceptable,' one officer of more than 20 years wrote.

'The city of Seattle no longer deserves my law enforcement services. Time for me to retire and escape this failing city.'

The Seattle City Council voted to defund the police budget by roughly 17 percent in 2021.

Activists applauded the decision but Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan has cautioned against additional cuts to police funding.

In a statement reported by Fox News, Durkan's office said: 'Despite an increased focus on recruitment and retention, the Seattle Police Department continues to lose sworn officers at a record pace due to ongoing budget uncertainty.

'Based on exit interviews, we know the Council's threats of continued layoffs or cuts are having a direct impact on decisions to leave the department.'

Police Chief Adrian Diaz said on Tuesday that the department is facing a staffing crisis. Diaz said 180 police officers quit last year and another 66 so far in 2021, adding that the number of officers left in the department is at 'record' lows

The City Council is considering new cuts of $5.4million to the police department's budget.

The council has fully funded the department's hiring plan for 2021, council member Lisa Herbold said on Tuesday.

'The reductions being considered are from salary savings from officers leaving and do not reduce the number of officers SPD can hire,' she said.

Other cities, like New York, that have experienced mass demonstrations against police brutality in the last year have also seen officers leaving in large numbers, Fox reported.

Seattle was one of many cities across the U.S. to erupt into protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May.

At one point, demonstrators in Seattle established the Capital Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone - a 'cop free' area.

Armed protesters erected barriers and set up encampments around the zone, which was plagued by weeks of violence, looting, and vandalism.
Beshear Provides Update on COVID Vaccinations

By West Kentucky Star Staff

FRANKFORT - On Thursday, Governor Andy Beshear updated Kentuckians on the latest coronavirus vaccination information.The governor announced 1,751,541 Kentuckians had received at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.He said approximately 750,000 Kentuckians need to get at least their first dose for the state to meet its 2.5 million-vaccine Team Kentucky Vaccination Challenge."Every day, thousands more Kentuckians get their shot of hope, but we need to accelerate our progress," said Gov. Beshear. "The sooner more Kentuckians get vaccinated, the faster we can lift more restrictions."Beshear reported 796 new cases and a positivity rate of 3.12 percent.
Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Surrey have found that well-fitting, three-layered cloth masks can be as effective at reducing the transmission of COVID-19 as surgical masks.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 139 countries mandated the use of face coverings in public space such as supermarkets and public transports. The World Health Organization also advises the use of face coverings and offers guidance on their effective features. Face coverings suppress the onward transmission of COVID-19 through exhalation and protect the wearer on inhalation.

In a paper published by the Physics of Fluids journal, the researchers detail how they looked at how liquid droplets are captured and filtered out in cloth masks by reviewing and modelling filtration processes, including inertial impaction.

Inertial impaction does not filter as a sieve or colander does - it works by forcing the air in your breath to twist and turn inside the mask so much that the droplets can't follow the path of the air. Instead, the droplets crash into fibres inside the mask to prevent inhalation.

The team found that, under ideal conditions and dependent on the fit, three-layered cloth masks can perform similarly to surgical masks for filtering droplets - with both reducing exposure by around 50 to 75 per cent. For example, if an infected person and a healthy individual are both wearing masks, scientists believe this could result in up to 94 per cent less exposure.

While wearing a simple and relatively inexpensive cloth face mask cannot eliminate the risk of contracting COVID-19, measurements and our theoretical model suggests they are highly effective in reducing transmission. We hope that our work inspires mask designs to be optimised in the future and we hope it helps to remind people of the importance of continuing to wear masks while COVID-19 remains present in the community." Dr Richard Sear, Study Co-Author and Leader of the Soft Matter Group, University of Surrey
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YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia Armen Grigoryan has delivered remarks at the session of the CSTO Committee of Secretaries of Security Councils in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, touching upon the security challenges and threats facing the CSTO member states, as well as the measures for eliminating them, his Office told Armenpress.

Talking about the security challenges and threats, Armen Grigoryan attached importance to the situation in the South Caucasus, stating that it remains tense and is caused by the recent aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan and Turkey against Artsakh.

Mr. Grigoryan emphasized in his speech that the recent Artsakh war has made it obvious that Nagorno Karabakh can in no way be a part of Azerbaijan.

The war last year has vividly showed that Nagorno Karabakh can in no way be a part of Azerbaijan. We think that in the current situation the principle remedial secession should be applied for Artsakh, which in fact is a modern manifestation of the principle of the peoples right to self-determination and allows separate ethnic groups not only to separate from any state, when there are risks for discrimination, mass violations of human rights or genocide risks, but also rules out the merger with such a state, he said, emphasizing that the principle remedial secession should be the basis of the concept of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement.

Mr. Grigoryan in his speech has also touched upon the issue of the Armenian prisoners of war who are held captive in Azerbaijan, as well as the so-called trophy park in Baku, calling it as a manifestation of fascism. He highlighted taking all necessary measures by the CSTO to return the Armenian POWs.

Armen Grigoryans full speech is available in Armenian.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
As April is National Poetry Month, here is something that perhaps most readers havent seen: a colorful, no-nonsense and humorous doggerel verse about Charleston written about 1769. Id certainly never seen or heard of it before, at least not until recently when brought to my attention by a couple of friends who forwarded one of Nic Butlers Charleston Time Machine podcasts.

Butler, historian for the Charleston County Public Library, outlines scholarly detective work while trying to determine the origins of the poem during the highly entertaining 33-minute podcast which, for history buffs, is unturnoffable. (I know theres no such word, but it seems appropriate.)

The poem originally came to the attention of stateside collector(s) in 1948, when it was purchased from a London dealer as an intact single manuscript source, and which now resides in the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The poem, A Description of Charles Town in 1769, is signed at the bottom by Capt. Martin, Captain of a Man of War.

Archival research determined there never was a Capt. Martin commanding a British warship anchored in Charles Town harbor circa 1769, but there was an HMS Martin, commanded by one Thomas Hayward, which has led Butler to theorize that it was actually Capt. Hayward who composed the verse, deliberately obscuring its authorship.

Hayward would have been 33 years old in 1769, a native of Exeter in Devonshire, who originally landed in Charles Town in 1767 and returned seven times over the years, sailing away for the final time in 1771 with a young Charles Town bride (Anne Sinclair, born ca. 1752) in tow.

During his visits to Charles Town, the captain would have been treated like royalty  feted, wined and dined, privy to all the local gossip and goings on and of course introduced to eligible young ladies.

Here then is Capt. Thomas Haywards unbelievable poetic impression of Charles Town ca. 1769, a place and destination he clearly perceived to be unlike any other:

Black & white all mixd together,

Inconstant, strange, unhealthful weather

Burning heat and chilling cold

Dangerous both to young & old

Boisterous winds & heavy rains

Fevers & rheumatic pain

Agues plenty without doubt

Sores, boils the prickling heat & gout

Mosquitos on the skin make blotches

Centipedes & large cock-roaches

Frightful creatures in the waters

Porpoises, sharks & alligators

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Houses built on barren land

No lamps or light but streets of sand

Pleasant walks, if you can find em

Scandalous tongues, if any mind em

The markets dear & little money

Large potatoes, sweet as honey

Water bad, & past all drinking

Men & women without thinking

Every thing at a high price

But rum, hominy & rice

Many a widow not unwilling

Many a beau not worth a shilling

Many a bargain, if you strike it,

This is Charles-town, how do you like it.

Even though Capt.Hayward mentions the usual health and heat-related maladies, one senses that he found Charles Town rather fascinating and perhaps didnt mind returning there numerous times over a four-year period. And its interesting how many of his observations seem equally pertinent today!

He retired to England somewhat banged up physically after 20-plus years of service in the British Navy and enjoyed living off a comfortable pension. Sadly, he and Anne lost a newborn child in February of 1775 after a complicated delivery, and the poor lady took ill and followed her child to the grave only two months later. This was too much for the captain, who probably broke down emotionally and ultimately physically as a result of losing his young family, and was himself dead as of September the same year.

Though having sailed off to an early grave and oblivion, Capt. Hayward leaves us with a most remarkable depiction of colonial Charles Town, one that is for the ages
[April 29, 2021] The MESI mTABLET ABI has been chosen as a finalist in the Cardiovascular Devices category in the 2021 Medical Design Excellence Awards competition

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MESI mTABLET ABI, device used for early detection of Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) by measuring Ankle-Brachial Index (ABI), has been announced as a finalist in the Cardiovascular Device category in the 2021 Medical Design Awards (MDEA) competition. MDEA is the premier awards program for the MedTech industry. Since its inception in 1998, the mission of the MDEAs has been to recognize significant achievements in medical product design and engineering that improve the quality of healthcare delivery and accessibility. Each year, a panel of jurors comprised of designers, engineers, and clinicians awards honours to the most innovative products on the market. MESI, with their innovative MESI mTABLET ABI medical device, competes in the category of Cardiovascular Devices. The winners will be announced on May 13 during the MedTech Design summit. MESI mTABLET ABI is the smartest wireless Ankle-Brachial Index measurement device on the market. It allows simultaneous measurement of brachial and ankle pressures and detection of PAD i only 1 minute. This means that all patients at risk can receive the measurement on time, without unnecessary referrals, leading to timely treatment and preventing adverse events of PAD.



Due to the patented 3CUFF technology and PADsense algorithm, a reliable diagnostic result is guaranteed even in patients with low arterial perfusion. Besides its advanced technology for PAD detection, the MESI mTABLET ABI automatically saves the results of the measurement in the digital patient record, allowing the physician to monitor the patient's progress over time. MESI mTABLET ABI is a part of the MESI mTABLET comprehensive system, that consists of wireless diagnostic modules, patient records, and software extensions offering additional diagnostic options. The system can be effortlessly introduced to any medical practice, as it is fully adaptable and modular. Besides ABI, the healthcare professionals can upgrade their practice with diagnostic modules, such as automated Toe-Brachial Index, 12-lead electrocardiogram, spirometry, pulse oximetry and blood pressure.

About the company: MESI, Ltd. is an innovation-driven company located in Europe developing and producing medical devices for diagnostic purposes. MESI is focused on simplifying diagnostics, providing clinicians with predictive medical assessment, helping them discover diseases in the early stages and ensure all patients receive successful treatment. Our solutions fit into all medical environments, from individual practices to hospitals and home care. With strong in-house research & development and a certified production facility, we are a trustworthy provider of digital and connected diagnostic devices. Contact:

Manca Ursic Rosas

+386 51 656 292

manca@mesimedical.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-mesi-mtablet-abi-has-been-chosen-as-a-finalist-in-the-cardiovascular-devices-category-in-the-2021-medical-design-excellence-awards-competition-301279922.html SOURCE MESI Ltd.

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Psychedelic drugs have shown promise for treating neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. However, due to their hallucinatory side effects, some researchers are trying to identify drugs that could offer the benefits of psychedelics without causing hallucinations. In the journal Cell on April 28, researchers report they have identified one such drug through the development of a genetically encoded fluorescent sensor--called psychLight--that can screen for hallucinogenic potential by indicating when a compound activates the serotonin 2A receptor.

"Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have long been used for treating depression, but we don't know much about their mechanism. It's like a black box," says senior author Lin Tian (@LinTianLab), an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis. "This sensor allows us to image serotonin dynamics in real time when animals learn or are stressed and visualize the interaction between the compound of interest and the receptor in real time."

Tian's lab joined forces with the lab of David E. Olson, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at UC Davis, whose lab is focused on drug discovery. "This paper was an exceptionally collaborative effort," says Olson, a co-author on the study. "My lab is really interested in the serotonin 2A receptor, which is the target of both psychedelic drugs and classic antipsychotics. Lin's lab is a leader in developing sensors for neuromodulators like serotonin. It just made perfect sense for us to tackle this problem together."

Experts believe that one of the benefits of using psychedelic drugs over existing drugs is that they appear to promote neural plasticity--essentially allowing the brain to rewire itself. If proven effective, this approach could lead to a drug that works in a single dose or a small number of doses, rather than having to be taken indefinitely. But one thing that researchers don't know is whether patients would be able to gain the full benefit of neural plasticity without undergoing the "psychedelic trip" part of the treatment.

In the paper, the investigators report that they used psychLight to identify a compound called AAZ-A-154, a previously unstudied molecule that has the potential to act on beneficial pathways in the brain without hallucinogenic effects. "One of the problems with psychedelic therapies is that they require close guidance and supervision from a medical team," Olson says. "A drug that doesn't cause hallucinations could be taken at home."

The serotonin 2A receptor, also known as 5-HT2AR, belongs to a class of receptors called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). "More than one-third of all FDA-approved drugs target GPCRs, so this sensor technology has broad implications for drug development," Tian says. "The special funding mechanisms of BRAIN Initiative from the National Institutes of Health allowed us to take a risky and radical approach to developing this technology, which could open the door to discovering better drugs without side effects and studying neurochemical signaling in the brain."

###

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, a Hellman Fellowship, and UC Davis STAIR and STAIR Plus grants. Olson is the president and chief scientific officer of Delix Therapeutics, Inc., which is developing AAZ-A-154. Tian is a co-founder of Seven Biosciences, which is developing a GPCR-based imaging platform. That company was founded by Grace Mizuno, a previous graduate student in the lab.

Cell, Dong et al.: "Psychedelic-inspired drug discovery using an engineered biosensor" https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00374-3
[April 29, 2021] Carvana Grows Reach in Utah, Expands to Salt Lake City

Carvana (NYSE: CVNA), the leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars, is now offering as-soon-as-next-day touchless home delivery to Salt Lake City area residents. Customers can shop 20,000 used cars for sale, secure auto financing, purchase, trade in, and schedule as-soon-as-next-day vehicle delivery in as little as five minutes. Customers can also sell their current vehicle to Carvana and receive a real offer just as quickly, without even purchasing a vehicle. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005270/en/



Carvana brings The New Way to Buy a Car to Salt Lake City, offering as-soon-as-next-day vehicle delivery to its 277th market. (Photo: Business Wire)

Carvana pioneered online car buying, including its patented 360-degree virtual vehicle tour, where customers can view vehicles in high-definition, inside and out. Carvana vehicles are Carvana Certified, having passed a rigorous 150-point inspection, have never been in a reported accident and have no frame damage. Features, imperfections and updated information about open safety recalls are listed on every car's vehicle description page. Carvana can save customers valuable time and money, allowing them to skip the dealership and shop from the comfort of home or on the go via their mobile device. Carvana vehicles come with a seven-day return policy, giving customers the time to ensure the vehicle fits their life; an upgrade to the traditional test-drive. With a week to live with the vehicle, customers can check the visibility in inclement weather, or see if there is enough cargo space for a trip to Bryce Canyon. Customers looking to trade in their vehicle, or sell a vehicle, can also skip the dealership entirely by simply entering their VIN or license plate number on Carvana.com, answer a few questions and Carvana can pick up the vehicle and bring them a check, as soon as the next day. "Salt Lake City is a growing area with a variety of vehicle needs and wants," said Ernie Garcia, Carvana founder and CEO. "As we continue to expand in the state, we're confident that Salt Lake City area residents will appreciate the ease of buying their next car online." Carvana now offers as-soon-as-next-day vehicle delivery to customers in 277 cities across the U.S. About Carvana (NYSE: CVNA) Founded in 2012 and based in Phoenix, Carvana's (NYSE: CVNA) mission is to change the way people buy cars. By removing the traditional dealership infrastructure and replacing it with technology and exceptional customer service, Carvana offers consumers an intuitive and convenient online car buying and financing platform. Carvana.com enables consumers to quickly and easily shop more than 20,000 vehicles, finance, trade-in or sell their current vehicle to Carvana, sign contracts, and schedule as-soon-as-next-day delivery or pickup at one of Carvana's patented, automated Car Vending Machines. For further information on Carvana, please visit www.carvana.com, or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005270/en/

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The Japanese composer of the theme song for the popular anime "Doraemon" has died. Kikuchi Shunsuke was 89.

Kikuchi was born in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture, in 1931. After studying at Nihon University's College of Art, he made his debut as a film music composer in 1961.

He later moved on to television, where he wrote theme songs and background music for everything from anime series, such as "Doraemon" and "Dragon Ball," to a historical drama.

Kikuchi's work also earned him money from outside Japan. He topped an annual list of earners of overseas royalties nine times.

He received an achievement award at the Japan Record Awards in 2015.

A 2017 concert in Tokyo marking the 55th anniversary of his debut drew many fans.

Poor health prevented Kikuchi from writing music in recent years. The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers announced that he died of aspiration pneumonia in Tokyo on Saturday.
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China has successfully launched the first building block of its upcoming space station into low Earth orbit in its attempt to rival the ISS.

The 22-tonne module, named 'Tianhe', or 'Harmony of the Heavens', will become living quarters for three crew on its upcoming Chinese Space Station.

China aims to complete its Chinese Space Station, known as Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) by the end of 2022, state media reported, after several further modules are launched.

Tianhe was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the southern island of Hainan, China on the Long March 5B, China's largest carrier rocket, at 11:23 am on Thursday (04:23 BST).

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China's space station, Tianhe, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on April 29, 2021 in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China

Crowds capture the event on their smartphones at the launch in Hainan province as the first module of the ambitious Chinese Space Station departs

Close-up of the Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, the moment it lifts off. China plans to rival the ageing International Space Station (ISS)

Officials from China National Space Administration - the Chinese space agency - are working to become a space superpower alongside the US and Russia

'[Tianhe] is an important pilot project in the building of a powerful nation in both technology and in space,' state media quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping as saying in a congratulatory speech.

Tianhe is one of three main components of what would be China's first self-developed space station, rivalling the ISS (the International Space Station), which is the only other station in service.

It will form the main living quarters for three crew members in the Chinese Space Station, which will have a life span of at least 10 years.

The Long March 5B rocket, carrying China's Tianhe space station core module, shortly following lift-off on Thursday morning

The Chinese Space Station will be roughly one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station (ISS). Once completed, it'll have a life span of at least 10 years

3D rendering of the Chinese Space Station, or Tiangong Space Station, as it'll look when fully constructed. Tianhe will form the main living quarters for three crew members. Shenzhou is an existing spacecraft that would dock at the station with crew. Tianzhou is an existing cargo transport spacecraft

Chinese Space Station modules - Tianhe: Core module. Launched on April 29, 2021 - Wentian: Experiment module I. Launch planned for 2022 - Mengtian: Experiment module II. Launch planned for 2022 - Xuntian: Space telescope module. Planned launch in 2024 to co-orbit with Chinese Space Station Advertisement

The Tianhe launch was the first of 11 missions needed to complete the space station, which will orbit Earth at an altitude of 340 to 450 km (211 to 280 miles).

Chinese Space Station, or Tiangong Space Station as it's also known, is expected to have a mass between 180,000 and 220,000 pounds (80 and 100 metric tonnes)  roughly one-fifth the mass of the ISS, which is 925,335 pounds.

In later missions planned for 2021 and 2022, China will launch the two other core modules, four manned spacecraft and four cargo spacecraft.

Work on the space station programme began a decade ago with the launch of a space lab Tiangong-1 in 2011, and later, Tiangong-2 in 2016.

Both helped China test the programme's space rendezvous and docking capabilities.

China aims to become a major space power by 2030 to keep up with rivals, including the US, Russia and the European Space Agency, and create the most advanced space station orbiting Earth.

ISS, currently in orbit, took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble from the launch of the first module back in 1998.

The ISS is backed by five participating space agencies  NASA (US), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada)  but China was originally barred from participating by the US.

Tianhe was launched on the Long March 5B, China's largest carrier rocket, at 11:23 am local time on Thursday (04:23 BST)

Work on the space station programme began a decade ago with the launch of a space lab Tiangong-1 in 2011, and later, Tiangong-2 in 2016. Both helped China test the programme's space rendezvous and docking capabilities. Pictured, blast-off of Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying Tianhe

China has ramped up its space programme with visits to the moon  which returned the first moon samples to Earth in more than 45 years years  and the launch of an uncrewed probe to Mars, as well as construction of its own space station.

In contrast, the fate of the ageing ISS  in orbit for more than two decades  remains uncertain, and it may be decommissioned by 2030.

The project is set to expire in 2024, barring funding from its partners. Russia said this month that it would quit the project from 2025.

Russia is deepening ties with China in space as tensions with Washington rise.

Moscow has slammed the US-led Artemis moon exploration programme and instead chosen to join Beijing in setting up a lunar research outpost in the coming years.

A total of 11 liftoffs will be needed to build the upcoming Chinese Space Station, due for completion late 2022, according to China

Thursday's liftoff was a proud moment for China and a watershed event in its quest to become a dominant force in humankind's quest for advancement in space

China was barred from participating in the ISS project by the US. Now China is leading the race towards building the next-generation space station
Hong Kong eased restrictions on Thursday at restaurants and bars where staff and customers have begun receiving coronavirus vaccinations, part of an effort to help businesses hurt by the pandemic while attempting to boost an anemic inoculation drive.

Under a complex set of new rules, establishments that were ordered closed for much of the past year  including bars, nightclubs and karaoke parlors  will be allowed to reopen until 2 a.m. if staff and customers have had their first shot.

Restaurants where all employees have had at least one shot can stay open for dining until midnight with up to six diners at a table. Those where staff have had both shots and customers have had at least one can stay open until 2 a.m., with up to eight people per table.

Any establishment that wants to take advantage of the measures must use the governments contact tracing app. Under previous regulations, residents could forgo the app and fill out their details on paper, an option that has been popular among people worried about what data the app collects and how it might be used.
The U.S. government told its citizens to leave India as soon as possible because of the countrys escalating Covid-19 crisis.

In a Level 4 travel advisory --- the highest issued by the Department of State -- U.S. citizens were told not to travel to India or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so. There are 14 direct daily flights between India and the U.S. and other services that connect through Europe, the department said.

Indian authorities and hospitals are struggling to cope with record Covid-19 infections and deaths. Official data on Wednesday showed new infections rose by 360,960 in the prior 24 hours, while 3,293 additional lives were lost -- both a record for the country. India has the worlds fastest-growing caseload.

Australia earlier this week banned all flights from India to relieve pressure on the nations system of mainly quarantining returned residents from overseas in inner-city hotels, after a jump in infections. The U.K. has barred any visitor whos been in India in the previous 10 days from entering. British and Irish nationals arriving in England from India must quarantine in a hotel.
President Biden Delivers First Address To Joint Session Of Congress

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, April 28, 2021. Credit - Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It was a speech heavy on domestic policy, detailing ambitious plans to revamp American infrastructure, education, jobs and healthcare. But at the heart of U.S. President Joe Bidens first address to Congress late Wednesday lay a theme common with his mercurial predecessor: competition with China to win the 21st century.

In a departure from prepared remarks on the eve of his first 100 days in office, Biden felt it necessary to spell out that Chinese President Xi Jinping is deadly earnest on [China] becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others, autocrats, think that democracy cant compete in the 21st century.

Referencing a two-hour telephone conversation he had with Chinas strongman on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday in February, Biden said, I told him that we welcome the competition  and that we are not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.

Bidens tone was far less acrimonious than that of Donald Trump  who went conspicuously unmentioned throughout the 65-minute address to a half-empty Capitol  but left onlookers in no doubt that checking Beijings rise will dominate U.S. foreign policy under the new administration.

Read more: How Joe Biden Can Start Fixing Relations With China

Decades ago, we used to invest 2% of our GDP on research and development, said Biden. Today, we spend less than 1%. China and other countries are closing in fast.

In a departure from the whole of society competition that characterized bilateral relations under Trump, the president said that he would seek ways to work with China where interests aligned. In an easing of COVID-19 restrictions Monday, U.S. officials announced that Chinese students due to attend American universities after July 31 were free to enter the country.

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Yet there was no mention of an end to the trade war that has so far cost tens of billions of dollars and up to 245,000 American jobs, according to one study. Far from scrapping the tariffs, Biden championed his own nativist economic policy: American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs.

Theres no reason the blades for wind turbines cant be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing, he added. No reason why American workers cant lead the world in the production of electric vehicles and batteries.

When it comes to human rights and democratic principles, Biden also insisted that he would hold China to account. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken labeled Beijings treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority genocide, as the previous administration did.

I told [Xi] what Ive said to many world leaders  that America wont back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms, said Biden. No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated. A president has to represent the essence of our country.

Containers are seen stacked at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province on January 14, 2020. China's trade surplus with the United States narrowed in 2019 as the world's two biggest economies exchanged punitive tariffs in a bruising trade war STR/AFP via Getty Images

Reactions to Bidens Speech in China

Biden received a mixed reception in the worlds most populous nation, where some saw his preoccupation with the country as an attempt to intimidate. Chinese leaders have never talked about China-U.S. competition, tweeted Hu Xijin, the strident editor of Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece Global Times. It is you and your team who are talking about China every day. It seems that you have no idea what you should do if [you] dont compare [yourself] with China. Pity.

Wrote one cynical user on Weibo, the giant Chinese messaging platform, On the 100th day of Bidens arrival in the White House, my nostalgia for Trump is overwhelming.

Said another: Biden is tougher and more insidious with China than Trump. Trump is all explicit, Biden is more conspiratorial.

But Trumps full-throated attacks  especially his referring to COVID-19 as the China Virus and Kung Flu  made him deeply unpopular in China and contributed to the unleashing of Beijings belligerent wolf warrior diplomacy in response.

You cant just allow this kind of hostility or racism, to push China against the wall, so that people believe that the Chinese government is cornered without any way to hit back, Victor Gao, director of the China National Association of International Studies, tells TIME. Whatever differences there are between China and the United States, we need to have leadership and statesmanship with mature views of both sides to engage with each other.

Read more: Action on Climate Change Wont Improve U.S.-China Relations

Trumps animosity also enabled the CCP leadership to forge stronger cohesion within Chinese society, casting America as the common enemy. On a visit to Guanxi province last week, Xi visited the site of a key battle during the fabled Long March of Chinas Civil War and said the fight should provide inspiration for overcoming current tribulations. No matter how big our difficulties, we should think of the Red Armys Long March and the bloody Xiang River Battle, he said.

Many in China hope that Bidens more statesmanlike approach will lower the geopolitical temperature. On Friday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered a speech to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations in which he said China would welcome the Biden administration to return to multilateralism and called on the White House to treat his nation fairly.

The key is whether the United States can accept the peaceful rise of a major country with a different social system, history, and culture, said Wang. It is undemocratic  to label China as authoritarian or a dictatorship simply because Chinas democracy takes a different form than that of the United States.

But on this point, as with many, it was clear Wednesday that the two sides remain at odds. Biden declared that he wanted to be leading with our allies to preserve the liberal democratic order. We will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe  not to start conflict, but to prevent conflict, he said.

The president added: The autocrats will not win the future.
Phuket private sector makes plea to buy own vaccines

PHUKET: Leading figures from Phukets tourism and other industries have made a united plea for the national government to allow private businesses and even local municipalities on the island to buy their own vaccine doses to ensure that Phuket will be allowed to re-open to receive international tourists under the Phuket Sandbox model on July 1.

COVID-19CoronavirushealthtourismeconomicsVaccine

By The Phuket News

Thursday 29 April 2021, 06:06PM

Leading Phuket business figures Sarayuth Mallam (left) and Bhummikitti Ruktaengam, President of the Phuket Tourist Association, speaking at the mass vaccination of residents underway at Saphan Hin earlier this month.Photo: PR Phuket

Under the Sandbox model, fully vaccinated tourists would be allowed to enter Phuket without observing any period of quarantine.

A critical requirement to the policy is that 70% of the islands population must be vaccinated for COVID-19 before the national government will give its approval.

However, the ongoing spate of infections throughout the country have placed the July 1 deadline in jeopardy, with leading Phuket figures now saying that the vaccine doses initially promised to Phuket to make the July 1 deadline possible may now be allocated elsewhere to counter the rising number of infections.

Bhummikitti Ruktaengam, President of Phuket Tourist Association, said, Even though the Phuket Tourism Sandbox model has been approved, this current outbreak is affecting the distribution of vaccine doses to Phuket. The doses of vaccine that were supposed to be sent to Phuket are being provided to other areas to control the outbreak.

Phuket people understand the necessity, but the Phuket Tourism Sandbox [re-opening of tourism] is also important for Thailand, so today Phukets private sector asks the national government for approval to purchase vaccines by ourselves to be able to welcome foreign tourists as we have planned, he said.

We have been struggling in this crisis for a year. If the limited number of vaccine doses can really control the outbreak in other provinces in need, we are happy that the government provides the vaccine to help them.

We just want the government to approve and facilitate us to purchase vaccines by ourselves. The vaccine will be bought by the budget from our own private sector and local administrative organisations, in order to provide to our people and carry on our strategy for the country, he added.

Kongsak Khoopongsakorn, President of the Thailand Hotels Association Southern chapter, said tour operators were already expressing their interest to resume limited flights to Phuket, and highlighted the need for Thailand to uphold its message to the world the Phuket will re-open on July 1.

We want to show the world our efforts and the achievement of Phuket as a pilot area for Thailand to welcome foreign tourists without quarantine. Right now, we have been contacted by foreign tour operators in many countries, and they have shown interest in sending their customers to Phuket, especially operators in Germany, he explained.

A big German company informed us that they plan to have two chartered flights per week to Phuket, starting Oct 10, while companies in Scandinavian countries have asked us for clarity about the documents needed and the conditions [to be met] to travel to Phuket. We have announced to the world about our plan to re-open, and we must make it happen, Mr Kongsak said.

Joining the call for Phuket private operators and local government administrations to purchase their own vaccines to inoculate people in the own areas were Thanet Tantipiriyakij, Acting President of the Phuket Tourism Council, along with Chernporn Karnjanasaya, President of the Federation of Phuket Industries, and Thanusak Phungdet, President of the Phuket Chamber of Commerce.

Mr Thanet pointed out that Phuket business operators had first asked for permission to buy their own vaccines in January, but pointed out that the Ministry of Public Health had sent us a negative sign of vaccine distribution.

Mr Thanusak pointed out that many municipalities across the island had months ago set aside the budget required to buy their own vaccines, including Phuket City Municipality and Patong Municipality.

We have contacted the local administrative organisations that had shown their own initiative to buy vaccines for people in their areas, as well as the Thai representatives of foreign vaccine-producing companies to buy their vaccines. We have worked under pressure to deliver the promise we made to our people, he said.

We are sure that if the governor gives us a green light and a special path, we will be able to reopen the island as we have planned, Mr Thansuak added.

Mr Bhummikitti said that Phuket had already made great strides to vaccinate the islands residents to make the July 1 plan work.

We respect and understand what the government is doing for our peoples health safety as a priority. If the vaccines really need to be provided somewhere else to control the outbreak, then the government should have done this [allowed private purchase of vaccines] when we asked for it, he said.

Phuket has come too far to stop or step back. The 200,000 doses that we have used to vaccinate our people must not be wasted. We need to move forward with our momentum and to accomplish our goal together.

The plea in Phuket for private sector operators to buy their own vaccines came as Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha yesterday (Apr 28) promised close collaboration with the private sector to speed up the vaccine rollout and achieve the target of inoculating 50 million people by years end.

It also follows the Thai Food & Drug Administration approving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as fit for use in Thailand on Mar 25.

However, reasons not made public the vaccine has yet to become publicly available.

Meanwhile, the national government continues to promote advances made in the ability of Siam Bioscience to locally produce the AstraZeneca vaccine under licence.

The entire national government mass-vaccination campaign relies on just two vaccines: the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine CoronaVac.

The national government has faced harsh criticism for its slow rollout of the mass-vaccination campaign, which has so far managed to inoculate just over 4% of the national population.
An oxygen tank is shown on a truck flatbed outside Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto on Thursday, April 29, 2021. There reports that the hospital experienced a potential exhaustion of its supply of oxygen and had to send COVID-19 patients to other hospitals across the GTA Thursday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
Side view of a 11-day-old mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) larva. The raptorial appendage is folded in bellow the large eyes. Credit: Jacob Harrison, Duke University.

Adult mantis shrimp pack an explosive punch that can split water, but no crustacean emerges fully formed. Minute larvae can undergo six or seven transformations before emerging as fully developed adults and limbs and maneuvers develop over time. So, when do mantis shrimp larvae acquire the ability to pulverize their dinner and how powerful are the punches that these mini crustaceans pack? "We knew that larval mantis shrimp have these beautiful appendages; Megan Porter and Eve Robinson at the University of Hawaii had captured normal videos of a couple of strikes a few years ago," says Jacob Harrison from Duke University, USA. So, he packed up Sheila Patek's high-speed camera and high-resolution lens and traveled to Hawai'i to investigate the developing crustacean's maneuvers. The team publish their discovery that minute mantis shrimp larvae can begin unleashing their ballistic blows as little as 9-days after hatching in Journal of Experimental Biology, and show that the limbs reach blistering accelerations of 22 million deg/s2, moving at ~0.385mm/s, which is 5-10 times faster than the larval snacks they dine on

"The larvae can be incredibly tricky to collect," says Harrison, recalling how he and Porter lured the microscopic creatures into their nets at night with lights. The problem was that the crustaceans came along with a Noah's ark of other larval critters. "It can be incredibly challenging to sift through a bucket teeming with larval crabs, shrimp, fish and worms to find the mantis shrimp," laughs Harrison. He then needed a technique for securing the Gonodactylaceus falcatus larvae in place for the camera. "I had to superglue a 4 mm sized larva onto a toothpick, place it on a custom-designed rig and orient the individual within view of the camera lens before I could even start collecting data. It took about a year to troubleshoot the right way to set up the camera before we knew that we could capture these videos," Harrison recalls.

Analyzing the high-speed movies, Harrison, Patek and Matt McHenry (University of California, Irvine, USA) could see a region on the first portion of the appendage bending to store energylike a springas the larvae wound in the club-like limb ready for a flick. Then, the larvae released an internal latch that had held the appendage in place, releasing the stored energy and catapulting the limb into action. In fact, the larvae's appendage and the way it operates is remarkably similar to that in the adults, just scaled down. Most excitingly, the team realized that they could see the minute muscles within the larvae's glassy bodies contracting as they bowed the exoskeleton, something that could only be imagined in adult mantis shrimp: "We were amazed," Harrison says.

But when did the minute larvae develop their ability to annihilate prey with a single blow? Venturing off the Hawaiian shore, Harrison located an egg-laden female and retrieved her mat of eggs, but by the time they arrived at Duke University, the eggs had hatched. "We weren't sure we could keep the larvae alive in the lab," Harrison recalls. However, he nurtured the youngsters patiently until they developed successfully to 28-day old larvae and discovered that the limb only became fully operational when the youngsters began feeding, at around 9-15days. It also turned out that the larvae could hurl the limb at rotational speeds of ~16,500deg/s, with eyewatering accelerations as fast as the adults. However, their smaller stature meant that the limb moved at ~0.385m/s, which is slower than the adults, but still quite speedy for a 4.2mm long creature. Even at their smallest, there is no escaping these spring-powered predators.

Explore further New type of visual filter discovered in an unlikely place

More information: Kathryn Knight, Spring-powered mantis shrimp larvae punch like Ma and Pa, Journal of Experimental Biology (2021). Journal information: Journal of Experimental Biology Kathryn Knight, Spring-powered mantis shrimp larvae punch like Ma and Pa,(2021). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.242590
"Toby is a proven competitor that we believe will build a division of our business that will leave an imprint on the industry for years to come."

Parqa, a digital marketing agency specializing in the staffing and recruiting industry, has hired Toby Hoskins as Director of Technology & Automation. In this role, Hoskins will be responsible for launching Parqas first ever martech division to help provide best-in-class strategic services and solutions to our clients, as technology and automation platforms begin to have exponential impact on staffing firms across the globe.

Three years ago, we included in our five-year vision that we wanted to be seen as the leader in technology and automation for the staffing industry, so having Toby join our team is an incredibly exciting milestone for me personally, and for Parqa, said Jared Hummel, Chief Operating Officer at Parqa. The evolution of digital transformation was accelerated by the events of 2020 in the staffing industry, and a true martech leader has yet to emerge to take advantage of the transformation over the next decade. Toby brings an incredibly solid background with his experience at very large organizations strategizing, managing and executing complex automation and technology solutions. On top of that, Toby is a proven competitor that we believe will build a division of our business that will leave an imprint on the industry for years to come."

Hoskins joins Parqa as an experienced and forward-thinking marketing automation and technology professional with a passion for delivering the highest quality work. He has worked in the marketing automation and marketing technology fields for more than 10 years within Fortune 500 companies as well as mid-size companies. Toby brings an analytical and creative mind to demand generation and marketing automation that drives consistent results. He can connect data through multiple marketing technologies to drive scalable growth and revenue through best practice marketing automation strategies. Toby graduated from Southwest Minnesota State University with a degree in Speech Communications with an emphasis in Public Relations and a minor in Marketing. In addition, he is a member of the Minneapolis Downtown  Next Generation Lions Club.

I am looking forward to joining Parqa to help drive innovative marketing automation strategies and technology for our partners, said Hoskins. Parqa is paving the way in the industry, and I am excited to be a part of that. I highly value organizations that focus on building a great culture through core values, and it was immediately evident through the interview process that Parqa was an exact fit. I am excited to begin!"

To learn more about Parqa, visit http://www.parqamarketing.com.

About Parqa

Parqa is a digital marketing agency that serves staffing and recruiting firms throughout North America. Parqa focuses on helping companies build their brand credibility, increase online visibility and generate leads through their proven process. For more information, please visit http://www.parqamarketing.com.
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire Openminded, a France-based cybersecurity services company that provides advisory, cloud & infrastructure security, cyber defense, and managed security services. Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Founded in 2008, and powered by a security operations center, Openminded helps clients anticipate and reduce cybersecurity risks, rapidly detect and respond to cyber incidents, and implement best practices in regulatory compliance.

Once completed, the acquisition would bring approximately 100 highly skilled cybersecurity professionals to Accenture Securitys workforce of nearly 7,000 professionals globally and extend Accentures cybersecurity presence and capabilities in France and in Europe.

With cyberattacks becoming more complex, constant and costly every day, companies must fully embed cybersecurity into the different layers of their organizations to ensure resilience, said Kelly Bissell, who leads Accenture Security globally. The acquisition of Openminded supports our commitment to leveraging technology and human ingenuity to help clients be confident and secure in the face of constant change. We look forward to welcoming Openmindeds team to Accenture and helping clients defend against cyber threats more effectively across their entire ecosystemnow and in the future.

Olivier Girard, market unit lead for Accenture France and Benelux, said, Our intent to acquire Openminded is aligned with our global strategy to provide differentiated robust services to our clients in their local markets. It would accelerate our growth in France and scale our cybersecurity capabilities within the market unit and across Europe. It underscores our commitment to helping clients manage the constantly changing cyber risk environment by bringing the right technology, industry understanding, and talent tailored to a companys specific needs. We look forward to leveraging our combined expertise to help clients have the right controls in place to protect their critical assets.

Herve Rousseau, Openmindeds founder and CEO, said, Joining forces with Accenture is a great opportunity for our teams and our clients. The alliance of our talent and capabilities perfectly leverages our expertise and would allow us to deliver on a global scale. Today, the fight against cyberattacks requires the implementation of the most advanced technologies, as well as the human resources to make them efficient. This is the synergy we are going to build and put at the service of our clients.

Accenture became one of the leading global providers of managed security services as a result of its January 2020 acquisition of Symantecs Cyber Security Services business. Accenture further strengthened its cyber defense capabilities through its acquisitions of Context Information Security and Revolutionary Security in March and April 2020, respectively, and of Real Protect in January 2021.

The acquisition requires prior consultation with the work council and would be subject to customary closing conditions.
As an associate professor at a top university in Australia, Hoang Lan Anh says that she was not a typical "dutiful child and excellent student" as valued in Vietnamese culture.

Hoang Lan Anh is writing 'Dung noi loi tu biet'

She said she was mischievous in childhood and once went to see the schools board of management to ask to change a teacher.

Taking advantage of a six-month break, Anh has set to work on her novel called Dung noi loi tu biet (Dont Say Goodbye).

As a person who has lived, studied and worked in four countries for nearly 20 years and an expert in immigration, Anh is always concerned about the expatriate life of Vietnamese people overseas.

The novel is a personal debt and a part of my memoir on my journey abroad, she said.

We, the first generation of Vietnamese students studying abroad after doi moi (renovation), encounter many events and breakdowns on a difficult and lonely journey in foreign countries. We live, study and work in civilized and prosperous societies, but also have private hidden corners in our souls that not everyone can understand, she said.

Anh was a major in Russian language at the Thai Binh High School for the Gifted. Later, she studied Russian at the Hanoi University of Education in Foreign Languages. However, at that moment, the Soviet Union disintegrated.

I realized that I needed to study something rather than foreign languages, because foreign languages are just a tool we use in work, she recalled.

After two years at university, Anh decided to study tourism at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, thus studying two majors. During her study, she worked as a tour guide for many large tourism firms.

She graduated when Vietnam witnessed the tourism boom in 1999-2000. But she decided to work for an international research project. After two years of working with foreign specialists, she realized that she needed to continue studying.

She got the opportunity to research at East Anglia University after obtaining a Chevening scholarship granted by the UK Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

At that moment, I was just like a person who walked in the dark. The number of Vietnamese students studying abroad then was very modest and the internet was something very unfamiliar to Vietnamese, she recalled.

She became the valedictorian of her graduate course and received the award for the best thesis. With this great achievement, she was invited to to enter the PhD program designed for international students.

When she heard about the invitation, she was in Vietnam after graduation and had received a desirable job, she recalled. While civil servants received VND500,000-700,000 a month in monthly salary, I could earn $1,000. I was then trained to become a manager at a very large development organization."

However, she gave up and decided to return to the UK to study for a doctorate. Later, she became a postdoc at the Asian Center for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis at the National University of Singapore.

After two years in Singapore, in 2010, she became a lecturer of research and development at Melbourne University in Australia.

Working for the No 1 university in Australia in 2021 THEs ranking, she said she has more time for research. Forty percent of my time is reserved for scientific research, 40 percent is for lecturing, and 20 percent for management, she said.

Anh is now a well-known expert in the world on Vietnams immigration. She has published three books and tens of chapters and articles in the worlds leading journals. Her research works have had 1,189 citations, a very impressive figure for social sciences.

In 2020, her book about Vietnamese people in Russia was published, showing how Vietnamese struggle to survive in the Russian market.

Anh also successfully asked for funding from the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop a project on compiling a textbook on sex education for secondary school students in Vietnam.

In fact, this is not a new issue and there have been some projects in the field. But Vietnam is among the countries with a high rate of abortion among adolescents because of their limited knowledge.

Hoang Lan Anh is now a well-known expert in the world on Vietnams immigration. She has published three books and tens of chapters and articles in the worlds leading journals. Her research works have had 1,189 citations, a very impressive figure for social sciences.

Recent surveys found a high proportion of 12th grade graduates have sex. However, many children still do not understand basic knowledge about sex and reproduction.

Students should not study abroad at any cost

According to Anh, many parents try to send their children abroad at any cost but are not aware of the "other side of the coin" .

I know many students go abroad when they enter high school and many of them have to stop halfway. They cannot stand the lonely and high-pressure life in a foreign country with no parents and relatives next to them, she said.

Anh knows many students who are excellent students, or valedictorians in Vietnam, but have hard lives overseas and cannot find jobs commensurate with their qualifications.

Anh believes that parents should only send children abroad if their children can be independent and live in a demanding educational and working environment.

Thuy Nga - Phuong Thu

Female scientist with PhD in immunology pursues research on rare diseases Tran Nguyen Kim Thi is a postdoc majoring in AI usage in medicine at the Huge Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) in the US.
KONNOR PERRIN, Chariho boys lacrosse, freshman: Perrin established a school record for assists in a game with nine in the Chargers 22-0 win over Ponaganset. Perrin leads the team with 21 assists to go with 14 goals.

LILA RICH, Stonington girls track, senior: Rich won two events at the ECC Division I track meet. Rich was first in the high jump (5-0) and the pole vault (10-0) as the Bears finished third at the meet.

MADIGAN HILTZ, Westerly boys lacrosse, senior: Hiltz scored seven goals and had three assists in pair of victories for the Bulldogs. Hiltz has 17 goals and seven assists for the season.

ADDIE HAUPTMANN, Wheeler softball, junior: Hauptmann was 4 for 9 with a home run and six RBIs in two games. For the season, Hauptmann is hitting .617 with eight homers and 42 RBIs. She has 50 hits.

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A Miami cop has been suspended after he was filmed brutally beating a homeless man who stole a single piece of cooked chicken from the deli counter.

Officer Alexander Garcia-Contreras was working an off-duty security shift at the Miami Publix when the store manager told him Willie Barbor, 58, had taken a piece of chicken and was beginning to eat it as he walked towards the exit on April 16.

The manager, who has not been named, reportedly confronted Babor first and asked him to pay but he replied: 'F*** you. I am homeless. I don't have any money,' Miami Herald reports.

Garcia-Contreras then steps in, and video shows him shoving Barbor, who had his hands up, into a salad bar before wrestling him to the ground, punching him at least five times in the head, and then putting him in handcuffs.

Shocked onlookers could be heard asking 'What you doing all that for?' and 'oh my gosh'.

A Miami cop has been suspended after he was filmed brutally beating a homeless man who stole a single piece of cooked chicken from the deli counter

Officer Alexander Garcia-Contreras was working an off-duty security shift at the Miami Publix when the store manager told him Willie Barbor, 58, had taken a piece of chicken and was beginning to eat it as he walked towards the exit on April 16. Garcia-Contreras is seen attacking Barbor

Garcia-Contreras claimed in his arrest report that Barbor was 'tensing up' so the cop 're-directed the defendant to the floor and gave him a couple of distractionary strikes to gain the defendant's compliance,' the report said.

Barbor was charged with misdemeanor theft, resisting without violence, and disorderly conduct after the incident.

He was taken to jail, but was released after just one day and ordered to stay away from the Publix where he was arrested.

All of the charges against Barbor were dropped on April 20.

Garcia-Contreras has now been suspended with pay as investigators review whether he acted appropriately.

Willie Barbor, a homeless man, was charged for the alleged theft, but those charges were quickly dropped

'The Miami Police Department is aware of the incident and has launched an investigation,' the department said about Garcia-Contreras.

'The involved officer has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the investigation.'

While Garcia-Contreras has been relieved of duty, he will still be paid as the investigation continues.

Miami Fraternal Order of Police President Tommy Reyes disagreed with the decision to relieve the cop of duty.

'Based on the video I believe this is an over reaction from the administration of the police department,' Reyes said on Wednesday.

Nevertheless, the video left viewers outraged over Garcia-Contreras' conduct that day.

'I feel like as a society, we forget that we are human,' one woman told WSVN after watching the video.

'He is doing something wrong, I guess immoral, but the aggression and the force that was used, things could've went differently.'

Another man also commented to WSVN upon watching the video.

'That's just not right,' the man said. 'They could have talked to him. They could have handled it a different way. They could have taken it from him, escorted him out or arrested him, whatever they needed to do.'

Meanwhile, the assistant director of Miami's civilian investigative panel took a broader look at the incident.

'We really need to start thinking about these things as health care issues,' said Rodney Jacobs to NBC Miami.

'The first thing we need to think about it is, why is that a homeless person is coming into contact with a police officer for eating deli meat?'

Video shows the Miami police officer confronting the suspect at a Publix
ORLAND, Calif. - Glenn county moved into the orange tier for reopening on Wednesday.

Employees at The Rusty Wagon, located in Orland, told Action News Now that they can't wait for more people to come out and for business to pick up.

"We're excited, we think our foot traffic will pick up," said supervisor, Linda Riggle.

The store's mission is to provide adults with disabilities a place to learn, work and thrive in the community.

"We train in retail, printing and graphics and adult living skills. The sales all go back to our associate wages," added Riggle.

She said sales took a hit when they had to close for a few months due to the pandemic. Employees like Martina Ramirez are happy to be back and to see some restrictions lift.

RELATED: 2 North State counties move into orange tier

"It's been fun working here not being at home," said Ramirez.

Most of the products sold at The Rusty Wagon are from local vendors. Inside the store, you'll find a variety of different products, from handmade pottery, handmade jewelry and paintings from local artists and much more.

"It's very important not only for our associates but our community because a lot of our vendors are stay-at-home moms or people that rely on their sales for extra income, we support our local ranchers and local farmers, almost all of our food items you see behind me are from our local and regional areas, so it supports more than just who is in house here, it supports our whole community," added Riggle.

Some products sold at The Rusty Wagon are also handmade by their employees.

The California Department of Public Health says 42% of Glenn County's eligible population has had at least one dose, 32% are fully vaccinated, and 10% are partially vaccinated.
President Biden has justified his broad vision to remake the American economy as the necessary step to survive long-run competition with China, a foot race in which the United States must prove not only that democracies can deliver, but that it can continue to out-innovate and outproduce the worlds most successful authoritarian state.

Mr. Bidens rationale is not just a rallying cry, but part of an effort to lift his infrastructure and rebuilding plans to a higher, less partisan plane, much as President John F. Kennedy did in his we choose to go to the moon speech nearly six decades ago. But it also carries an ideological edge, with Mr. Biden warning that Americas deep polarization and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol are playing to the autocrats arguments that the sun is setting on American democracy.

It is a compelling argument, one that ties his ambitious domestic agenda to his plan to restore American influence abroad. Yet the history of more recent efforts by American presidents to revive that unifying national emotion is mixed at best; Barack Obama attempted it with his call to meet our generations Sputnik moment in his State of the Union address 10 years ago. It fell flat.

A decade later, as Mr. Biden made clear in his speech to Congress on Wednesday night, the challenge is even more complex. The United States now faces a far more capable technological competitor, a far more complex military standoff and a starker ideological conflict than anytime since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trimona Foods Inc, maker of the Trimona Bulgarian Yogurt brand, announced a few weeks ago the transition to A2A2 tested milk for its entire line of yogurt products. A2A2 is the original milk protein, which existed before the advent of modern agriculture. A1 milk carries a mutated protein called A1 beta-casein. Research has shown that many people have difficulty digesting milk that contains A1 beta-casein. What's more, milk containing the A1 protein has been linked to a wide variety of diseases, including autoimmune conditions, heart disease and various neurological disorders.

Trimona to start using A2A2 tested milk exclusively Tweet this Trimona Plain A2A2 Tested Yogurt

A2A2 tested milk, on the other hand, does not have these adverse effects. In fact, consuming organic, cultured dairy products, like our A2A2 tested Bulgarian Yogurt, not only provides much needed fat-soluble vitamins, good fats, proteins, and enzymes, but also supplies beneficial probiotics for your immune system and digestive tract.

"We had been looking to make this change for a while and are delighted to be able to partner with our family farms to bring A2A2 tested milk to consumers," said Atanas Valev, Trimona Foods' founder and Chief Yogurt Officer. "We feel A2A2 is a game changer in the dairy industry but underrepresented in the Yogurt category. What is more, many consumers who have stayed away from dairy can now enjoy it," said Valev.

Trimona Yogurt products are keto-friendly and made with A2A2 grass and herb-fed, organic milk and ingredients. They are available at retail locations across the US including Whole Foods Market, Wegmans, Giant Supermarkets, Hannaford Bros, Wegmans, Shoprite, Gelson's, Mariano's, Bristol Farms, and many others

For more information about all Trimona products, please visit www.trimonafoods.com

Media Contact:

Pavel Kolarov / Trimona Foods / [email protected] / 203-570-6669

SOURCE Trimona Foods

Related Links

https://www.trimonafoods.com


In the aftermath of the Bangladesh Rana Plaza tragedy in 2013, two initiatives were set up to oversee the countrys clothing factories for fire, electrical and structural issues  the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. The Accords tenure comes to an end next month, and there are serious concerns for garment workers if another agreement is not signed soon.

Under the oversight of the Accord and Alliance, Bangladesh now has one of the safest and most transparent ready-made garment (RMG) industries in the world. But that could now under threat.

After an initial five-year term, the remit of the Accords remit was extended until the end of May 2021. Its technical responsibilities have transitioned to the national RMG Sustainability Council (RSC), which was set up last year, but brands and retailers have no legally binding obligation to it. And while there have been discussions to renegotiate the Accord, nothing has yet been agreed or signed.

In this current situation, where we are running up against the clock, where the Accord has been such a successful programme, it is really on the brink of not continuing because of the current refusal of the brands to continue with an agreement that goes along the same lines and principles of the one we have now, Alke Boessiger, head of commerce department at UNI Global Union, signatory to the Bangladesh Accord, told a panel discussion last week hosted by the Clean Clothes Campaign and facilitated by the Worker Rights Consortium.

There is no doubt, in the years since 2013, there has been a lot of progress made in Bangladesh, but the RSC does not have the same accountability, the same enforcement mechanisms, to hold brands accountable like we have in the Accord. This question of holding individual brands accountable for their supply chains is an important one. We cannot do that with just the RCS. We need a global agreement with the brands and the unions.



Transforming an industry

According to the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF), the Accord has driven phenomenal change over the last eight years, inspecting over 1,600 factories and improving the safety of more than 2m workers. According to Clean Clothes Campaign, over 120,000 safety hazards have been corrected.

If wed had an Accord before Rana Plaza, we couldve saved all those lives, says Kalpona Akter, president of the BGIWF and founder of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity (BCWS). Under the Accord the workers voice has been included, so the workers could tell very freely how they feel when they are working in the factory, if there is a crack in the building or a fire door was needed. This is the first time the worker has been recognised as a human, not like the equipment in the factories.

If there is no binding accountability then [the RSC] will not be credible at all and unions will likely pull out. That is very loud and clear. The unions will not be with anything where it has no legal obligation or workers voices cannot be heard.

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Last month, the European Parliament adopted a report calling on the Commission to propose legislation forcing companies to fix human rights in their supply chains. It calls for the urgent adoption of a binding EU law that ensures companies are held accountable and liable when they harm  or contribute to harming  human rights, the environment and good governance.

Yet Christina Hajagos Clausen, garment director at IndustriAll global union, a signatory to the Bangladesh Accord, notes that increased calls for companies to exercise due diligence for all parts of their operations are exactly in line with what the Accord has been doing: They had to take responsibility for all their suppliers in Bangladesh. That was possible because we had a legally binding agreement that held them accountable for everything they were doing.

The new legislation is going to impose that on all the brands, and having an agreement like the Accord, which we want to continue and expand into other countries, its the perfect tool for companies to comply with these calls for legislation because it requires companies to develop internal systems, internal mechanisms, to really have control over their supply chains.

For companies to sign on to a new successor agreement of the Accord and to expand it with us into other countries is what they should be doing if they want to be in line with these calls for due diligence legislation in Europe.

A blueprint for international adoption

Alongside negotiations between unions and brands to extend the Accord in Bangladesh, there are also discussions to expand it to other countries where building and worker safety is threatened. For instance Pakistan.

Nasir Mansoor, president of the National Trade Union Federation in Pakistan, a strong advocate for decisive binding action on workplace safety in the country, told the panel he would like to see the initiative extended to other merchandise producing countries.

In Pakistan we are working with IndustriAll and Clean Clothes looking for a Bangladesh-style Accord. At the moment brands are detracting from their responsibility. We saw that in the Covid situation. The workers conditions are worsening, so the only way to resolve the issues in the RMG sector is to have some kind of binding treaty with the brands.

When there is pressure on the brands they accept responsibility; when there isnt they dont accept it. So we need some kind of joint strategy and we force, somehow, the brands to fulfil their commitment. I learnt from Rana Plaza and Ali Enterprises that if we dont have the strength and unified actions, the brands will always try to escape their responsibilities. If we want workers to get something from the brands and make them commit we need some kind of binding treaty and agreement otherwise it cant work.

Boessiger says it is important the lessons, protocols and processes of the Accord are taken and built on for other countries.

Of course, we need to see in each country who are the local stakeholders. Each will have different governance. What is important is that all stakeholders are involved, like the workers, the unions, the brands buying from the country and the governments. We want the government on board from the beginning. Lets take the successful with us, but lets adapt it with each country with all the local stakeholders.

Global call

Unions and industry organisations are now calling on brands to sign a global agreement that will take the work of the Accord into the future and remove any risk of a return to self-monitoring.

In March alone this year 40 garment workers in Egypt and Morocco lost their lives in unsafe factories, says Clausen. So our call as global unions is to sign a global agreement that we can take the best lessons learnt from Bangladesh, a proven safety programme that we have collectively done a lot of work on, that this is the right way forward. Factory problems are not new to this industry and we dont think the issues around safety should be put to the side right now. Right now is the time to move forward with the global agreement. It would be legally binding and that is the key component to this next step that we need. It is important to workers globally to be able to go to work safely.

Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, says brands are proposing a new agreement that will not be legally binding, and has no independent secretariat to oversee compliance.

Under the guise of setting up a new structure, what is happening is a return to self monitoring. Between these two things, the dismantling of the independent secretariat and the unions no longer being able to take brands to court, two of the key features of the Accord success will be removed.

I find it incredible that in the context of Covid, and in light of all the other problems plaguing the industry in Bangladesh and in other countries, that eight years on we have to fight again to keep in existence the one programme we all agree is functional.

To mark the eighth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse, industry executives have also spoken with just-style about why there is No room for complacency on Bangladesh worker safety.
New Delhi:

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni on Monday welcomed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi. He was accorded ceremonial reception on his visit.

Gentiloni said that India and Italy share strong economic relations and it is a great opportunity to make it stronger.

"We have strong economic relations and it's a great opportunity to make it stronger. We have common interests in global arena," said Italian PM.

Gentiloni to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, EAM Sushma Swaraj on Monday and will also hold delegation level talks.

Gentiloni will also meet President, Vice President and take part in an interaction with Indian and Italian CEOs in Delhi.

Earlier, announcing the visit, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the prime ministerial trip from Italy was happening after more than a decade. The last visit of an Italian prime minister to India was in February 2007.

The visit is aimed at strengthening the bilateral political and economic relations between the two countries, he said.

The Indo-Italy diplomatic ties were hit badly after two Italian marinesLatorre Massimiliano and Salvatore Girone -- on board a ship named Enrica Lexie, were arrested for allegedly killing two Indian fishermen off the coast of Kerala in 2012.

Italy claimed the ship was in international waters and that only the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) should apply. It also moved the international court.

While Latorre returned to Italy in September 2014 following an order of the Supreme Court issued on health grounds, Girone was allowed to go in May 2016. They are now in Italy, pending the verdict by the arbitration court at the Hague. The Indo-Italy diplomatic row also impacted the European Unions relationship with India.

Gentiloni will be accompanied by his wife and a 15-member Italian CEOs delegation.

Italy is Indias 5th largest trading partner in the EU with a bilateral trade of USD 8.79 billion in 2016-17, as per official figures.

Indias exports to Italy are at USD 4.90 billion, while its imports are at USD 3.89 billion, resulting in a trade imbalance of USD 1 billion in favour of India. In the first four months of fiscal 2017-18, bilateral trade has reached USD 3.22 billion.

The MEA said over 600 Italian companies are active in India covering various sectors such as fashion, garments, textile and textile machinery, automotive, automotive components industry, infrastructure, chemicals, energy, confectionery, insurance etc.

With PTI inputs

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi: Amid the spiralling COVID-19 infections in the national capital, Health Minister Satyendra Jain on Thursday (April 29) said that the Delhi government had run out of COVID-19 vaccines. The state health minister added that the authorities are awaiting fresh supplies from the private companies.

We dont have vaccines as of now. We have made requests to the company regarding vaccines, we will tell you when it comes, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said.

The statement comes as a shock to the citizens because it comes two days ahead of the third phase of the vaccination drive which is much sought after. In this phase of the vaccination drive those who are above the age of 18 years will be allowed to receive a COVID-19 vaccine jab.

We don't have vaccines as of now. We have made requests to the company regarding vaccines, we will tell you when it comes: Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain when asked about inoculation of people above 18 years of age, from May 1st. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/gJn5xQInFp  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

Health Minister Satyendra Jain also added that the public will be informed when the stocks are replenished at the vaccination centres.

In the meantime, Delhi Chief Minister and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal is scheduled to hold a meeting with high-level officials later on Thursday to review the COVID-19 situation in the national capital.

Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain is also expected to attend the meeting being chaired by Arvind Kejriwal.

Additionally, the Health Minister also added that the Delhi government is hoping for a positive impact of the COVID-19 curbs soon and it looks like the positivity rate will gradually come down in the city.

In the last 1.5 months, the daily positivity (rate) had never been below the 10-day average, but it has been below for 3 days now. So we can see a ray of hope, it seems the positivity rate will gradually come down here, Satyendar Jain said.

Meanwhile, India reported the highest ever single-day spike with 3,79,257 fresh coronavirus infections, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524 on Thursday (April 29), as per data by the health ministry.

The country's total COVID-19 caseload has now increased to 1.83 crore (1,83,76,524), of which, 30.84 lakh (30,84,814 ) are active cases. India has also witnessed 2.04 lakh (2,04,832) coronavirus-related deaths.

Live TV
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Justice Minister of Armenia Rustam Badasyan answered to the questions of ARMENPRESS regarding whether Nikol Pashinyan can be considered as caretaker prime minister after resigning from the position and is there a legal opportunity for replacement?

-Mr. Badasyan, after the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan aimed at triggering snap parliamentary elections, the discourse whether he can continue serving as caretaker PM or not still continues. After all, is there a concrete response to this question?

Of course, there is, but the discourse is highly artificial. After resigning the prime minister, as well as the other members of the Cabinet continue fulfilling their duties before the formation of a new Cabinet. In particular, according to Article 158 of the Constitution of Armenia, the government is submitting its resignation to the President also when the prime minister resigns. According to that same Article, the Cabinet members continue fulfilling their duties before the formation of a new Cabinet. And the composition of the Cabinet members is defined already by Article 147 according to which the government is composed of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers and ministers.

-Different parallels are drawn between the resignation cases of Serzh Sargsyan and Nikol Pashinyan in 2018. Is there a difference between these two resignation processes?

-Look. On April 23, 2018, a decision was adopted by the government according to which the government, based on the respective regulations of the Law on Composition and Activity of Government and the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, decided to state the impossibility of Serzh Sargsyans fulfilling his powers.

At that moment, in the absence of incumbent prime minister and the impossibility of fulfillment of powers, according to the governments decision defining the procedure of replacement of PM, Serzh Sargsyan has been replaced by first deputy prime minister Karen Karapetyan because of the impossibility of the fulfillment of duties by the PM. In other words, leaving aside the grounds of impossibility, in this case the issue of applicability or non-applicability, it has been, in fact, stated by the decision of the previous government that PMs resignation doesnt exclude him from fulfilling his duties, and a necessary act is needed to replace Serzh Sargsyan with Karen Karapetyan.

Moreover, when Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan resigned on October 16, 2018, he continued fulfilling his duties before the formation of a new government in 2019.

In other words, not only the aforementioned Articles of the Constitution clearly define this issue, but also there has never been another perception over this matter.

-Lets imagine that the PM doesnt continue fulfilling his duties after resignation. In that case is there a legal opportunity for replacement?

-Thank you for a good question. Lets imagine that the PM should not continue fulfilling his duties after his resignation, until the new Cabinet is formed, in that case where is his replacement procedure? Such a procedure, moreover, should have been defined exclusively by the Constitution, because, in fact, we are talking about the constitutional security component. According to the decision of the government as I mentioned above, there are replacement procedures for the PM only in the cases of the absence of the PM and the impossibility of fulfilling duties by him, but none of this includes the case of resignation of the PM.

Those people, who claim that only the prime minister cannot continue fulfill the duties of the PM before the formation of a new Cabinet, in fact, claim that Armenia must not have a head of an executive branch before the formation of a new Cabinet, and I think that we all understand the absurdity of such claim.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
The vice principal of a New Jersey school apologized Tuesday for tossing beer at a table of outdoor restaurant patrons who had been filming his wife complaining about a transgender woman using the women's restroom.

Michael Smurro, vice principal of Neptune Middle School in Monmouth County, said in an email to The Associated Press on Tuesday that he regrets throwing his beer when he and his wife realized other patrons were filming them.

"I allowed my emotions to get in the way of my normally sound judgement and reacted in a way that was inappropriate," he wrote in the email. "I do not condone violence or discrimination of any kind and should have simply walked away. I apologize to the person I threw my beer at and wish I hadnt done so. I apologize to anyone I offended."

The Neptune school district said it is looking into the incident and taking it seriously.

Video recorded by a patron at a table nearby shows the Smurros at an outdoor dining area at a restaurant in Galloway Township. The footage shows Lisa Smurro complaining at length about a person she said is a transgender woman using the women's bathroom.

"A man just went into the women's bathroom, and it's not right," she says. "It's not right. It's not right. It's not right. She's a man. In my bathroom."

Footage shows that the couple became aware that someone was videotaping them. They get up and walk near the table where the person filming was, and Lisa Smurro continues to complain about the transgender woman's using the restroom. A woman at the table replies, "Please take your hate elsewhere."

Michael Smurro then walks up and tosses the contents of a cup of beer at occupants of the table.

"Here you go, pal," he says on the video. "There you go."

Michael Smurro then takes several steps back and, gesturing toward himself, says, "Now you can come out. I'm right here," before the couple walks away.

Neither the restaurant nor anyone present called police, Galloway police said.

In an interview with the news site breakingac.com, which first reported the story, Lisa Smurro said she and her husband were having a private conversation when someone began filming them.

"We didnt bother anyone," she said. "This all began because somebody was in a bathroom that they shouldnt have been in. "

New Jersey law prohibits discrimination based on gender identify. It permits people to use public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

The Neptune school district posted a statement on its website on Tuesday.

"This event is troubling as its perception potentially threatens the social-emotional well-being and climate of belonging that our Neptune School District community represents," it read. "The actions shown in the video do not reflect our districts commitment to inclusivity, cooperation, respect, and non-violence.

"The Board of Education and Superintendent will respond to this incident in a manner that is appropriate and relative to the seriousness of the situation and that takes into consideration the impact this incident has had on the reputation of our wonderful district," it read.

The video does not show the transgender woman, who Lisa Smurro said she did not want to use the women's restroom. Her identity could not be determined.

___

Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
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.
Dieppe, New Brunswick--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - Colibri Resource Corporation (TSXV: CBI) ("Colibri" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has signed a definitive deal with Silver Spruce Resources (Silver Spruce) to jointly explore Colibri's recently acquired Diamante Gold & Silver Project which located in the Sierra Madre Complex near the town of Tepoca in Sonora Mexico. Silver Spruce will have an option earn up to 50% of the project.

Background

In late February, Colibri announced an agreement to acquire up to 100% of the Diamante Gold & Silver Project by way of Colibri's 100% owned Mexican subsidiary Yaque Minerales S.A de. C.V. (See news release dated February 24th, 2020 for full details).

The highly prospective gold and silver project consists of a cumulative 1,057 hectare (ha) land package in two properties named Diamante 1 and Diamante 2. Diamante 1 borders Colibri's 180-ha El Mezquite Gold Project immediately to the west and Diamante 2, located 700 metres directly south of Diamante 1, and 1.6 kilometres northwest of Colibri's 1,130-ha Jackie project.





Illustration 1: Diamante 1 and 2 Concession Location Map showing distribution of gold values reported in rock chip and channel samples from historical exploration programs



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4269/82285_2242d282b461bbb0_001full.jpg

The Diamante Project exhibits geological characteristics of epithermal low to intermediate sulfidation Ag-Au (Pb-Zn), high sulfidation Au-Cu, and potential transition zones within and peripheral to porphyry style Au-Cu at depth within the system of Sillitoe (2010).

The known sulphide mineralization includes galena, sphalerite, pyrite and chalcopyrite with secondary oxidation minerals such as copper carbonate (malachite) and copper sulphates with jarosite, hematite, goethite and limonite.

The Project hosts a variety of styles of precious and base metal polymetallic mineralization including disseminated, stockwork and vein hosted accompanied by alteration including silicification (with quartz veining), and phyllic, argillic, advanced argillic (quartz-alunite-pyrite) and propylitic (chlorite) zones, with near-surface overprinting by oxidation (goethite-hematite), jarosite and vuggy silica.

Sampling highlights from the ten known areas of interest, five from each of the two concessions, some with artisanal mining, has reported values of precious and base metals in individual samples as follows (Table 1)

Table 1: Selected rock chip and channel samples with precious and base metal values

Location Au g/t Ag g/t Pb% Zn% Diamante 1







La Prieta - El Aguaje 5.68 298 3.64 5.64 La Prieta - El Aguaje 6.76 351 0.08 0.06 El Chon-El Pillado 1.17 705 6.7 0.02 La Cruz 2.52 233 0.08 0.47 La Olla 0.05 217 7.26 0.55 Diamante 2







El Cumbro 3.6 1560 2.3 0.17 El Cumbro 6.41 3460 4.59 0.13 Mezquite Raizudo 3.87 551 5.43 8.66 Calton 18.65 62 1.34 0.03 Calton 39.8 109 1.91 0.08



Terms of Agreement

To earn its initial 25% interest in the Project, Silver Spruce agrees to pay Colibri cash in the amount of $75,000 USD. Yaque and Silver Spruce will each then hold a 25% interest and manage the Project as equal partners ("Partners").

To earn its initial 50% of the Diamante project from the original vendor, Yaque (together with Silver Spruce) agree to jointly design, permit and drill a minimum of 2,000 metres on the Property within 24 months from the Execution Date of Yaque's final agreement with the original Vendor. Any exploration costs incurred by the partners prior to the drill program, during the drilling program, and during the production of a final drilling report (to meet NI 43-101 reporting guidelines) will be shared at a ratio of Silver Spruce (75%) and Colibri/Yaque (25%).

The Partners will pay to the Vendor 50% of the bi-annual property taxes and surface rights payments.

Upon completion of the initial earn-in, Silver Spruce and Yaque will become equal joint venture partners with the Vendor in BIMCOL, a private Mexico company holding the concessions, pay to the Vendor 50% of the bi-annual property taxes and surface rights payments and pay approved prorata exploration costs at a ratio of Silver Spruce (50%) and Yaque (50%).

Also upon completion of its earn-in, Yaque will have an exclusive period of six months to purchase the remaining 50% of BIMCOL (JV company set up with original vendor) by paying the Vendor either of: i) US$2.1 million or ii) US$1.45 million and the grant of a 2% net smelter royalty (NSR) on the project.

Should Yaque elect to exercise its right to purchase the remaining 50% of BIMCOL, Yaque will also grant Silver Spruce the option to purchase one-half of its additional ownership for one-half of the cost for a period not to exceed six (6) months from the date Yaque elects to exercise its right and Yaque will provide three (3) months notice to Silver Spruce for the purchase due date within the first three (3) months of the option period.

New Website

Readers are invited to learn more about Diamante and the rest of Colibri's projects on its newly refreshed website at www.colibriresource.com.

About Colibri Resource Corporation:

Colibri is a Canadian-based mineral exploration company listed on the (TSXV: CBI) and is focused on acquiring and exploring prospective gold & silver properties in Mexico. The Company has six exploration projects of which five currently have exploration programs being executed or planned. The flagship Evelyn Gold Project is 100% owned and explored by Colibri. The Company has four additional projects, Pilar Gold & Silver Project (optioned to Tocvan Ventures (CSE:TOC)), El Mezquite Gold & Silver Project , Jackie Gold & Silver Project, and the Diamante Gold & Silver Project (earn-in agreements with Silver Spruce Resources - (TSXV-SSE)) are also currently being actively advanced.

For more information about all Company projects please visit: www.colibriresource.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.

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release contains "forward-looking statements". Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company assumes 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 the Company believes that the plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that they will prove to be accurate.

For further information: Ronald J. Goguen, President, Chairperson and Director, Tel: (506) 383-4274, rongoguen@colibriresource.com.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82285
Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the United Nations (UN) has urged all parties concerned to Syria to intensify constructive dialogues to promote the political process in the country.

Participants at the debate (Photo: VNA)

In his remarks at an online debate of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on the situation in Syria on April 29 (Vietnam time), Ambassador Quy highlighted the important role of the international community in seeking a political solution to the crisis in Syria.

Regarding the humanitarian situation, Quy showed his concern about the worsening situation in Syria and called for increased coordination among parties as well as enhanced international support to ensure that humanitarian aid will be provided to people in all regions of Syria.

He stressed the need to promote cooperation in globally supplying adequate and equitable COVID-19 vaccines, especially for people in conflict zones or areas where living conditions are difficult.

Quy took the occasion to thank UNSC member countries and the UN Secretariat for helping Vietnam run smoothly activities during the month of its presidency.

At the meeting, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir O. Pedersen briefed participants on the discussion process between the Syrian government and the opposition to narrow differences, towards reaching an agreement on working methods and preparations for further talks to build a Constitution on the basis of the UNSCs Resolution 2254 in the coming time.

Meanwhile, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs M. Lowcock underlined the necessity to maintain humanitarian assistance, especially the provision of vaccines to Syria in the time to come in the context that Syrian people are facing the seriously difficult situation due to the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic./. VNA
Center for Aesthetic and Laser Medicine

Center for Laser and Aesthetic Medicine in Tyler, Texas, will now offer hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with a variety of innovative treatment administration methods to address a range of health concerns for both men and women.

Patients can receive HRT in a variety of application methods, including pills, creams, troches, gels, injections, and pellets. Patients with a variety of symptoms including hair loss, thyroid disorders, memory, bone loss, menopause, and infertility can be treated.

HRT is most often thought of in relation to postmenopausal women, but it can actually be used to treat both men and women.

Hormone replacement therapy for men is typically recommended when low testosterone leads to diminished libido or fatigue. Men may also experience depression, lack of motivation, joint pain, and hair loss as a result of low testosterone.

Hormone replacement therapy for women may be recommended for a variety of reasons. HRT is often used to manage symptoms of perimenopause, menopause, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Additionally, women may receive HRT for mood swings, fatigue, difficulty losing weight in their midsection, mood changes, sleep difficulties, and diminished libido.

Center for Laser and Aesthetic Medicine provides a range of HRT services, including:

Bioidentical Hormones Therapy

Bioidentical hormones are exact replicas (identical) to the hormones your own body produces. These hormones are created in a lab, like synthetic hormones, but bioidentical hormones are specifically created for your body to exactly match the natural hormones at a molecular level.

Weight Loss Program

Maintaining a healthy weight can be difficult if hormone production is off. We offer hormone therapy that helps the body produce or replace hormones that aid in thyroid and metabolic function. By triggering the production of weight loss hormones, patients who are eating healthy and exercising regularly are better able to lose weight and maintain their healthy weight.

Testosterone Therapy

Low testosterone levels have numerous negative effects, including diminished sex drive, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, loss of muscle mass, hair loss, as well as cognitive and emotional changes. Testosterone replacement therapy can help improve overall health and vitality, renew sex drive, and otherwise reverse the negative effects of low testosterone.

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome treatment

Polycystic ovarian syndrome is a disordered hormone condition that occurs during a womans reproductive years. In the past, medical professionals used birth control to address ovarian cysts without fully understanding or treating the hormonal imbalance in other bodily systems that could cause numerous health concerns like weight gain, menstrual cycle irregularity, infertility, acne, mental health struggles, and more.

Womens health specialist Wendy Freden, PA who has a specialization in hormone replacement therapy and aesthetic medicine will provide the service. At the age of 44, Wendy was diagnosed with invasive ductal breast cancer which provided her with a unique and personal understanding of how estrogen deficiency affects women mentally, physically, and aesthetically. Her goal is to educate women on the protective benefits of hormone therapy while maintaining preventative measures for protection against breast cancer. You will often hear her say, When patients feel better inside, they want to look better on the outside. She strives to help her patients enhance their natural beauty through the art of aesthetic medicine. Her patients love her transparency about her personal life and often call her, friend.

Wendy will be joined by Certified Nurse Practitioner Carly Graff who is certified in Advanced Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy and has years of experience treating patients with chronic diseases and hormone imbalances such as polycystic ovarian syndrome.

To schedule an appointment call 903-579-7261.

About U.S. Dermatology Partners

As one of the largest physician-owned dermatology practices in the country, U.S. Dermatology Partners patients not only have access to general medical, surgical, and cosmetic skin treatments through its coordinated care network, but also benefit from the practices strong dermatology subspecialty thought leaders and medical advisory board. To be the best partner to its patients, U.S. Dermatology Partners is fervently focused on providing the highest level of patient-first care, and its team, therefore, includes recognized national leaders in areas such as clinical research, psoriasis, and Mohs Surgery. To learn more, visit usdermatologypartners.com.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 06:29:25|Editor: huaxia

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Apple on Wednesday announced financial results for its fiscal 2021 second quarter with a March quarter record revenue of 89.6 billion U.S. dollars, up 54 percent year over year.

The company posted quarterly earnings per diluted share of 1.40 dollars, compared to 0.64 dollar for the same period of fiscal 2020.

Its net income for the quarter ended March 27 increased to 23.63 billion dollars from 11.25 billion dollars a year ago.

"We are proud of our March quarter performance, which included revenue records in each of our geographic segments and strong double-digit growth in each of our product categories, driving our installed base of active devices to an all-time high," said Luca Maestri, Apple's CFO.

Sales of iPhone amounted to 47.94 billion dollars, up 66 percent from 28.96 billion dollars a year ago.

Its sales of Wearables, Home and Accessories products increased to 7.84 billion dollars from 6.28 billion dollars a year ago.

International sales accounted for 67 percent of the company's quarterly revenue, while Apple's net sales in the Greater China region increased to 17.73 billion dollars from 9.46 billion dollars a year ago, according to Apple's financial statement.

"Apple is in a period of sweeping innovation across our product lineup ... That certainly begins with products like the all-new iMac and iPad Pro, but it extends to efforts like the 8 gigawatts of new clean energy we'll help bring onto the grid and our 430 billion U.S. dollars investment in the United States over the next 5 years," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO.

"These results allowed us to generate operating cash flow of 24 billion U.S. dollars and return nearly 23 billion U.S. dollars to shareholders during the quarter," Maestri noted.

Apple's Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 0.22 dollar per share of the company's common stock. The dividend is payable on May 13, 2021, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on May 10, 2021. The board of directors has also authorized an increase of 90 billion dollars to the existing share repurchase program. Enditem
MUSKEGON, MI  Dozens of Muskegon businesses are banding together to give away meals and gifts to local mothers for Mothers Day.

The pay-it-forward initiative started when LaKisha Harris, the owner of Soul Filled Eatery, decided to she wanted to give away a meal to three area moms in honor of the holiday. She posted on Facebook after a community member donated to help fund the meals, and the effort snowballed.

Within a week, more than three dozen local businesses got on board and contributed bottles of wine, flowers, a free haircut, makeovers, photoshoots and more. Financial donations have come in from people around the country.

This initiative has taken on legs by itself, Harris said. There are people sending money from Mississippi, Tennessee, Fort Lauderdale, Florida and even as far away as Brazil to make a Mothers Day amazing for Muskegon County.

Related: Muskegons growing soul food scene is bringing us together

Soul Filled Eatery will now be giving away 50 meals paired with gifts from area businesses. Any additional donated funds will be distributed to the mothers as gift cards.

Harris said the collaboration between the businesses shows Muskegon is becoming more forward thinking and community-driven.

I see it taking us from being divided by location and making us one, she said.

Mothers entered into a drawing will be eligible for the free meals and gifts. Anyone can submit a name after making a purchase with no minimum cost from Soul Filled Eatery, 3232 Glade St.

A makeover with hair, makeup, clothing and jewelry will be given away to mothers nominated with a one paragraph written submission explaining why they should win.

Mothers are valued and treasured in every aspect, and all of us feel a need to take care of our mother, Harris said.

Harris will continue to accept donations until Friday, April 30. The drawing for the meals and the makeover will be held on Soul Filled Eaterys Facebook page on Saturday, May 1.

Mothers Day is Sunday, May 9.

More on MLive:

Downtown fireworks, import car show to highlight Muskegons Fourth of July celebration

In housing market like weve never seen, Realtors say to do this to land your dream home

How Muskegon policing looks nearly a year after George Floyds murder sparked national call for change
Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform; Malcolm Noonan has announced funding for this years Historic Structures Fund and the good news is that three Kilkenny city projects are included in the allocation.

Rothe House is to receive 50,000, Shee Alms House on Rose Inn Street is to receive 150,000 over two years and Tynans Bridge House Bar is to receive 15,000 under a new element of the fund for heritage shopfronts.

Rose Cottage in Johnswell is also a recipient of 10,000 to repair the corrugated roof structure. Shankill Castle received 50,000, The Heritage Council 42,500 and Kells House 37,000.

Im really delighted to be able to announce this funding for these important heritage buildings in County Kilkenny; all of which contribute to our cultural and built heritage assets and create many days of work in traditional building skills and conservation work said Minister Noonan.

The Historic Structures Fund is one of a suite of built heritage funding streams that we lead out in our department and is targeted at bringing our built heritage stock up to a high standard of conservation, repurposing buildings, consolidating the heritage led regeneration of our town and village centres and adding to our knowledge base of the construction of traditional and vernacular buildings.

Both Rothe House and Shee Alms House are an important but in my view insufficiently told story of the great merchant families of Kilkenny, the great houses they built and their connection to the political and economic life of medieval kilkenny. It is vitally important that we support the conservation of these buildings and down the line I would like to see some further work on interpreting the great Renaissance houses hidden behind more recent interventions.

In addition to supporting owners and custodians of historic and protected structures to safeguard and maintain their properties, this funding will also provide a welcome boost to local construction and heritage trades by facilitating works with a total value of almost 9 million and leveraging an estimated 13,000 days labour.

The announcement follows that of 3 million in funding under the Departments other built heritage grant scheme, the Built Heritage Investment Scheme, by Minister Noonan earlier this month and comes as the phased return of construction works gets underway. All funded works under both schemes must, of course, be carried out in full compliance with Government/HSE guidance on Covid-19.

Commenting on the announcement, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh OBrien, TD, said:

I am equally delighted to be announcing today, along with my colleague Minister Noonan, this investment of 3m across a range of projects, nationwide, under the Historic Structures Fund. These schemes help to safeguard our rich built heritage, keeping many buildings in use and helping to bring many others back into use. The awards announced today also have a welcome knock-on economic benefit by generating employment for heritage contractors and other skilled crafts and tradespeople across the country.

Through grants of between 15,000 and 200,000, the HSF assists owners of heritage structures  including those on the local authorities Record of Protected Structures and those in Architectural Conservation Areas  to meet their obligations to care for their properties. The scheme provides assistance to a wide range of heritage structures  this years HSF includes awards to historic bridges, barns, courthouses, churches, shopfronts and a dry stone wall as well as to private houses.

Also included under the HSF 2021 are two pilot streams, one for the conservation of vernacular buildings and another for the conservation of historic shopfronts.

The vernacular pilot stream has been introduced in the context of the Departments forthcoming Vernacular Strategy. Vernacular structures are the buildings and other built features of the informal or vernacular landscape, conceived and built by ordinary people, as opposed to those in authority. Vernacular builders used ideas and techniques passed down within the family and local community, making the vernacular a significant part of our intangible cultural heritage. Following assessment, six vernacular structures  including a dry stone wall and a number of cottages  will receive grant aid through the HSF this year.

The introduction of the shopfront pilot stream gives recognition to traditional shopfronts as a rich part of our built environment and historic townscapes. Under this stream, owners were invited to apply for funding to support works including the repair of historic shutters or awnings, signage, gates tiled or mosaic threshold panels and hanging signs as well as the removal of unsightly and redundant later additions such as cabling, lighting and signage. Following assessment, five shopfronts  including iconic pharmacies, Prices Medical Hall on Dublins Clare Street and DW Parke on Gladstone Street, Clonmel  will receive grant aid through the HSF this year.

Nine larger projects awarded funding over two years under HSF 2020 will also be funded out of this years 3 million allocation.

Minister of State for Local Government, Peter Burke, TD, also welcomed the announcement, stating:

As with the Built Heritage Investment Scheme, the success of the Historic Structures Fund is a result of the close working relationship between the Department and the Local Authorities, particularly the Architectural Conservation Officers, Heritage Officers and planning and administrative staff who make these schemes possible. I am particularly pleased to note the introduction of a stream for historic shopfronts, investing in our historic townscapes in line with this Governments commitment of putting Town Centres First.
The White House stands before US President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the US Capitol 28 April, 2021 (Getty Images)

Federal agencies are investigating at least two incidents on US soil that appear similar to previous suspected invisible energy attacks, including one that took place not far from the White House grounds, a report has said.

CNN has reported that the Pentagon and other agencies are investigating two mysterious episodes that caused illness in personnel, one of which reportedly took place on the south side of the White House lawn in November.

Speculation surrounding such unexplained incidents has long provoked intrigue since 2016 when employees of the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, reported experiencing unusual and unexplained symptoms.

Victims of the attacks have reported developing symptoms after hearing strange grating or vibrating sounds.

The condition, which has since become known as Havana Syndrome, includes symptoms such as headaches, ringing ears, hearing loss, memory loss, and impacts to balance and has since been reported by more officials on US soil.

The possible incident near the White House is said to have taken place on a large oval lawn near the executive mansion and sickened one National Security Council official, multiple sources told CNN.

Another incident, in 2019, involved an unnamed White House employee, who GQ reported was affected after she was allegedly targeted by a man while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that the federal agencies investigating the incidents have reached no concrete conclusions regarding the causes.

Investigators have reportedly not determined whether the bizarre incidents are connected to those that have occurred abroad or who may be responsible, the broadcaster said.

This week, Politico reported that the Pentagon briefed top lawmakers on such incidents and said that defense officials said it was possible Russia was behind the attacks.

Russia has denied any responsibility.

While the root of the attacks is still unknown, one State Department-sponsored study found they likely were the result of microwave energy attacks.

Story continues

In December last year, the report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said the most likely source of the illness was directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy.

In 2019, research by a leading sociologist and an expert in neurodegenerative diseases suggested the diseases were caused by emotional trauma and fear.

Since 2016, nearly 50 American officials have fallen ill with the syndrome.

There is nothing that the Secretary of Defense takes more seriously that [sic] the safety, health and welfare of our personnel serving around the globe in defense of our values and freedoms, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told CNN.

Any concerns on issues that call that into question are thoroughly reviewed, and the appropriate actions are taken to mitigate risks to our personnel.

The Independent has contacted the Department of Defence for comment.

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VIENNA, Va., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Alpha Omega Integration and their partner Dynamo Technologies have won a $3.3 million, contract with the USDA Forest Service Procurement & Property Services. The Forest Service will utilize Alpha Omega Integration's and Dynamo's agile software development, DevSecOps capabilities and Robotic Processing Automation expertise to improve the agency's contracting and data management process.

"The Forest Service Procurement & Property Services performs over 32,000 contract actions annually and plays a key role in our nation's conservation efforts," said Gautam Ljoor, Alpha Omega Integration's President & CEO. "The Alpha Omega, Dynamo team brings the process automation, application development and infrastructure improvement that will help this agency manage growing workloads and information management as they continue their mission of maintaining our forests and grasslands."

Alpha Omega will help the Forestry Service PPS improve how they support contract related tasks including maintaining data feeds and interfaces between various systems, automating business processes, creating and maintaining applications and reporting tools, and maintaining the Intranet and Internet sites.

"We're excited to continue our support of the U.S. Forest Service via the DAITSS BPA," said Dr. Vivek "Vick" Taneja, President of Dynamo Technologies. "The Dynamo-Alpha Omega Team is further assisting USFS in realizing operational efficiencies, cost savings, and the benefits that come with successful technology modernization efforts."

Alpha Omega Integration is an 8(a) SB created in 2014 that provides high quality, collaborative IT and business consulting services, with the expertise and capabilities to serve customers in the commercial and public sectors. At Alpha Omega, we are committed to quality and continuous process improvement, demonstrated by our CMMI-DEV ML 5 appraisal, as well as ISO/IEC registration for 20000-1:2018, 27001:2013, and 9001:2015. Our clients include HHS, DoD, USDA, Department of Homeland Security, HUD, Department of State, NASA, Department of Commerce to include NOAA and Census Bureau, and the Small Business Administration. Alpha Omega is a mission-focused, client-centric, results-driven organization. For more information, visit www.alphaomegaintegration.com

www.alphaomegaintegration.com

8(a) | CMMI ML5 | ISO 9001:2015 | ISO 20000-1:2018 | ISO 27001:2013

CIO-SP3 | 8(a) STARS II | SPARC | GSA IT Schedule 70

ABOUT DYNAMO TECHNOLOGIES

Dynamo is a full lifecycle digital transformation company providing best-in-class technology and mission support services to the U.S. federal government. Dynamo's mission is to lead the digital transformation industry and provide best-in-class solutions to its clients with a truly human touch. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in the National Capital Region (NCR), Dynamo serves CONUS and OCONUS missions across the defense, diplomacy, environmental, financial, and law enforcement markets. Dynamo delivers excellence through talented personnel, in-house innovation labs, and partnerships with leading cloud/platform technology providers. Dynamo is CMMI-DEV v2.0 Level 3 appraised, and maintains ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 17025, ISO 27001 and AS9100D quality certifications.

www.dynamotechnologies.com.

SOURCE Alpha Omega Integration
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- RXMOSAIC (RXM) today announces the appointment of Jen Fuhrman-Kestler as Executive Director. An industry expert known for inspiring teams, driving business growth, and championing brave work, in her new role Fuhrman-Kestler will further Healthcare innovation capability and oversee key strategic client relationships. She brings a successful track record of results and new business wins with two decades' experience.

"Welcoming Jen to the RXM team is another step in realizing the Agency's vision of innovating not only in communications work, but also in how we build next-generation teams for our clients," says Jennifer O'Neill, Managing Director, Healthcare, for RXM and Marina Maher Communications. "We uniquely designed Jen's role to service one of our largest global clients crossing oncology and corporate, which will leverage her expertise and stellar background in digital innovation. It's the perfect marriage for the business."

An award-winning marketer joining RXM from Golin, where she served as EVP Healthcare, Fuhrman-Kestler's rich experience includes delivery of both thought-leadership and consumer initiatives furthering reputational lift; work on a range of clients including Humana, Teva, Kaiser Permanente, Astellas and J&J; stakeholder relationship management and partnership development; and digital, social and influencer content creation. The important topics she has touched range from enabling patient safety during COVID; curbing the opioid epidemic; and educating clients and consumers alike across verticals such as oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic disorders, allergy, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Of her move to RXM, Fuhrman-Kestler says, "I'm energized to join this impressive team that shares my passion for the advancement and evolution of healthcare. RXM is a formidable player helping lead meaningful industry impact and transformation in partnership with their clients, and I'm extremely proud to be here. Connecting the dots between complex strategy and tactical execution, partnering to solve problems, and building new capabilities that further business goals, patient outcomes, and the communications disciplinethese are the things that truly drive me as a leader."

Throughout COVID, RXM's expertise in science and innovation has led to continued growth. Fuhrman-Keslter is one of many recent hires who will further drive the agency forward in partnership with RXM Deputy Director, Andrea Pellicciari.

About RXMOSAIC (RXM)

RXMOSAIC is known as the healthcare communications lab: a place filled with passionately obsessed minds, rich data, and the latest tools to invent the next generation of healthcare communications to drive our clients' businesses forward. With a proud team of geeks, explorers, and futurists, the agency is committed to continual research and validation to unearth new and often unexpected insights; employs a hybrid approach to problem-solving that marries science with creativity; and possesses the uncanny ability to unite multiple stakeholder POVs under a common vision. RXM brings boutique-style energy backed by Omnicom Group global resources, and in partnership with Marina Maher Communications, to lead healthcare communications innovation in a rapidly changing world.

About Omnicom Public Relations Group (OPRG)

Omnicom Public Relations Group is a global collective of three of the top global public relations agencies worldwide and specialist agencies in areas including public affairs, marketing to women, global health strategy and corporate social responsibility. It encompasses more than 6,300 public relations professionals in more than 370 offices worldwide who provide their expertise to companies, government agencies, NGOs and nonprofits across a wide range of industries. Omnicom Public Relations Group delivers for clients through a relentless focus on talent, continuous pursuit of innovation and a culture steeped in collaboration. Omnicom Public Relations Group is part of the DAS Group of Companies, a division of Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) that includes more than 200 companies in a wide range of marketing disciplines including advertising, public relations, healthcare, customer relationship management, events, promotional marketing, branding and research.

Media Contact:

Laura Brinker

[email protected]

513-293-8136

SOURCE Rx Mosaic Health
HEFEI, China, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sungrow, the global leading inverter solution supplier for renewables, has released the annual report 2020 to shareholders, reporting that the fiscal performance remains prosperous and the global market share reached 27% in 2020.

Financials in 2020

The revenue increased by 48.3% to $2.956 billion (2019: $1.864 billion ).

The net income attributable to shareholders of a listed company came to $298.9 million , an increase of 119.0% (2019: $127.6 million ).

, an increase of 119.0% (2019: ). The CFFO (cash flow from operations) increased by 24.5% to $473.6 million , a stellar and healthy operation structure.

, a stellar and healthy operation structure. Turnover of accounts receivable was 2.5 times, an increase of 41.6%.

Basic earnings per share thus amounted to 1.34 yuan (20.54 US cents), an increase of 119.7%.

Market Share Expansion

Sungrow had over 35 GW of PV inverters shipped in 2020, accelerating its global market share to 27%. Apart from the performance in utility-scale projects in global solar hubs, the development of distribution segments also contributes to this increase. For instance, its market share in Australia for the residential segment has increased to 24%, it has been leading the local market share in Brazil since 2019 and it predicts an even more prosperous future in Europe as it's establishing local channels.

In addition, over 800 MWh of Sungrow energy storage systems were shipped worldwide in 2020, and the deployment is expected to show a high growth trend. Sungrow, as one of a few companies that can supply both PV and energy storage product portfolios, keeps making innovations in solar-plus-storage applications as the combination becomes the next thriving sector to unlock the potential of clean energy and facilitate the energy transition.

Notably, Sungrow has expanded its annual production capacity to 90 GW, including 10 GW of India manufacturing based on a global growing demand basis. Also, the Company is on the path to establish another factory outside China in the near future.

Social Responsibility Milestones

As one of the pivotal solar and energy storage players, Sungrow keeps contributing to global carbon neutrality. The Company's accumulative shipments exceeded 154 GW as of December 2020, which is equivalent to eliminating 174.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Another breakthrough is that Sungrow joined RE100 and has pledged to switch to 100% renewable energy for its electricity requirements by 2028.

The Company is dedicated to supporting communities in the global landscape, donating to public welfare and charity undertakings based on the framework of eradicating poverty and contributing to education, as well as fighting against pandemics and natural disasters.

Securing the MSCI ESG Rating of AA, Sungrow also shows the robust resilience to long-term, industry material environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks.

As the only inverter supplier ranked "100% bankable" for two straight years by BloombergNEF, Sungrow has been at the forefront in the clean energy business for over 24 years. The Company is poised to speed up the pace towards sustainable development with more flagship product lineups rolling out in 2021.

About Sungrow

Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd ("Sungrow") is the world's most bankable inverter brand with over 154 GW installed worldwide as of December 2020. Founded in 1997 by University Professor Cao Renxian, Sungrow is a leader in the research and development of solar inverters, with the largest dedicated R&D team in the industry and a broad product portfolio offering PV inverter solutions and energy storage systems for utility-scale, commercial, and residential applications, as well as internationally recognized floating PV plant solutions. With a strong 24-year track record in the PV space, Sungrow products power installations in over 150 countries. Learn more about Sungrow by visiting www.sungrowpower.com.

SOURCE Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd

Related Links

www.sungrowpower.com


EUGENE, Ore. -- Nearly two-thirds of all county commissioners in the state of Oregon, including all five Lane County board members, signed a letter urging Gov. Kate Brown to give counties more decision-making authority on COVID-19 restrictions.

"The time has come to allow our communities the opportunity to move forward while embracing continued health and safety precautions," the commissioners wrote. "We have reached our turning point."

RELATED: LANE AND LINN COUNTIES MOVING TO EXTREME RISK

The letter was dated April 27, one day after Brown ordered 15 counties into the extreme risk category. The commisisoners are asking Brown to reconsider the state's approach to virus mitgiation measures.

"You must know restrictions on specific types of businesses compared to others within our local communities is creating rifts and dividing people rather than bringing Oregonians together," the letter says.

In the KEZI 9 News viewing area, the letter was signed by the following commisisoners:

Chris Boice, Douglas County

Jay Bozievich, Lane County

Heather Buch, Lane County

Joe Berney, Lane County chair

Melissa Cribbins, Coos County

Tim Freeman, Douglas County

Patt Farr, Lane County

Roger Nyquist, Linn County

Tom Kress, Douglas County

Bob Main, Coos County

Laurie Trieger, Lane County

Will Tucker, Linn County

Sherrie Sprenger, Linn County

John Sweet, Coos County

Below is the full letter:
CHENGDU, CHINA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / In February 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China (MIIT) issued its support to the establishment of National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation and Application Pilot Zones in Beijing, Tianjin (Binhai New Area), Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. This is the second batch of pilot zones announced by the MIIT. So far, the number of China's AI innovation and application pilot zones has increased to 8. It also marks that Chengdu has become the first AI innovation and application pilot zone in West China.

When we talked about the AI industry in Chengdu, the one thing we must know is Chengdu Science City. It is the core of the next-gen AI industry ecosystem in Chengdu. Chengdu promotes innovative development and high-quality development through new economy.

Attracting Top Enterprises

Now, a number of enterprises have established an industrial cluster with Chengdu Science City as the core, contributing to the AI industry.

With over 90 key enterprises in the ecosystem, the cluster has greatly contributed to the local transformation of AI technology. The ecosystem has also attracted many university project teams, including the Sichuan Energy Internet Research Institute of Tsinghua University and Chengdu Innovation Research Institute of Beihang University, which have created ideal conditions for the integration of AI production and research.

In the wave of the digital economy, this ecosystem focuses on the development of AI industry, and it initially gathers companies from the whole supply chain. Gradually, Chengdu builds a complete industrial ecosystem and helps it become the "fourth city of AI."

Attraction and Cultivation of AI Projects

The development of an industry cannot be separated from the support of policy. Since the MIIT started the support to the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation and Application Pilot Zone in 2019, Chengdu has been actively putting it into practice. At present, relevant policies have been enacted to create a positive development environment for the industry.

These policies include two parts: First, introduce strongly targeted industrial support policies; Second, provide rich application scenarios for AI enterprises and attract AI enterprises.

In addition, the ecological environment is processing. First, optimize the enterprise service system; Second, promote the implementation of policies; Third, build an efficient communication platform.

Build Industrial Area

In terms of AI infrastructure construction, Chengdu has built industrial parks and facilities, such as the "Supercomputing Center" and the New Economy Industrial Park, to accelerate the implementation of the digital economy.

The Chengdu Supercomputing Center, with a maximum computing speed of 100 million billion calculations per second, started trial operation in September 2020. It has cooperated with more than 200 institutions and completed 1.52 million scientific research projects. The CPU utilization rate has reached 30%.

Huawei Kunpeng Industrial Ecosystem Base and Tianfu High-Performance Computing Public Technology Service Platform, and many other innovation platforms started operation, serving more than 400 enterprises and driving the development of the AI industry in Tianfu New Area.

The Unicorn Island, the Science and Technology Innovation Park, the Overseas High-level Talents Innovation Park, the Smart Port, and other core industrial carriers will create a favorable environment for the development of the AI industry. Zones A, B, C, and D of the New Economy Industrial Park have been put into use with about 6,000 employees.

Synergistic Development in Tianfu New Area

Digital economy industries such as AI and big data are frequently mentioned in China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), which was released last month. 36KR Sichuan learned that in the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan, Tianfu New Area New Economy Bureau will also launch a series of policies spurring the AI industry:

First, increase the number of innovation sources, deepen the construction of a "1+3+N" innovation system led by the Comprehensive National Science Center, with laboratories in three major fields as the core, and supported by a number of major scientific and technological infrastructure and research platforms.

Second, improve the business patterns for science and technology. Chengdu will introduce well-known service agencies from both China and overseas, accelerating the operation of Tianfu International Technology Transfer Center and build an innovation platform for the advanced computing industry based on the Chengdu Supercomputing Center.

Third, improve the ecology of the digital economy. Chengdu will accelerate the settlement of a number of leading enterprises, start the construction of a number of major projects, and spare no effort to promote the completion of provincial and municipal key projects such as M&S Electronics and put them into operation.

Fourth, optimize city management and industrial promotion. On the principle of "preferential in industry, composite in functions, intensified in space, and suitable for both living and business," the construction of the first zone of Fengqigu Digital Economy Industrial Park will start within the year.

As the AI industry has become the core driving force for the new scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, Chengdu regards the AI industry as an important way to transform economic development. Hence, it promotes Chengdu to become the industrial highland of China's new economy.

Media Contact:

Name:Chenxi Zhang

E-mail:zhangchenxi@36kr.com

SOURCE: 36Kr

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643298/A-New-Route-for-Chengdu-to-Develop-its-AI-Industry
CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BUNDLAR's Augmented Reality (AR) platform, a comprehensive no-code solution to create, edit, and access AR, has won an AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract.

BUNDLAR submitted proposed solutions to utilize the augmented reality platform to enhance existing training for service men and women to improve time to proficiency for equipment maintenance procedures and pilot continuing education programs.

"The benefits of augmented reality are real and measurable, and we are honored to be a part of the AFWERX mission to bring innovative technology to the armed services.'' said BUNDLAR Co-founder & CTO Matthew Wren. "The goal here is simple, to improve warfighter safety and effectiveness. Our platform can modernize training materials and allow them to be delivered in a cost effective way, at the scale and speed required by the DoD."

The United States Armed Forces have been among the earliest adopters of AR technology, and BUNDLAR's mission-ready tool can support critical initiatives and improve results.

Learn more about BUNDLAR's no-code AR platform HERE.

About AFWERX

Established in 2017, AFWERX is the Air Force's team of innovators who encourage and facilitate connections across industry, academia, and the military to create transformative opportunities and foster a culture of innovation. Their mission is to solve problems and enhance the effectiveness of the service by enabling thoughtful, deliberate, ground-up innovation.

About BUNDLAR

Headquartered in Chicago, BUNDLAR is an accessible web-based platform that provides a no-code, drag-and-drop interface for authoring, editing, and publishing augmented reality experience bundles to any supported mobile device. The platform reduces the time, cost and complexity of implementing AR into existing communication channels. In addition to marketing and general applications, BUNDLAR can be utilized to augment existing training programs to increase efficacy, track completion/status, and provide faster problem resolution than traditional training methodologies.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bundlar

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BUNDLAR

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheBUNDLAR

SOURCE BUNDLAR

Related Links

bundlar.com


Two faith-related summer camps are making changes because of uncertainties regarding pandemic restrictions.

Two faith-related summer camps are making changes because of uncertainties regarding pandemic restrictions.

Day camps are permitted to have up to 10 children indoors and outdoors, but overnight programs are not allowed under public health orders set to expire in late May.

Camp Arnes, an interdenominational Christian camp, has ruled out the possibility of regular programming at its site about an hour north of Winnipeg and will hold day camps in the city instead.

The likelihood of offering sleepover camping this summer is "close to zero" because of the rise in variants of concern, board chairman Garry Roehr said.

The weeklong day camps for children ages seven to 14 will be held at Elmwood Mennonite Brethren Church in July and August.

Camp Arnes will also offer on-site cabin and recreational vehicle rentals for families. The day camps and rentals are a way to serve children and families and earn a bit of revenue, Roehr said.

"Camps have fallen between the cracks" of various government programs, he said, noting the camp has fixed costs such as property taxes and insurance.

"Many other businesses have received help, but not camps," Roehr said, adding the camp is grateful for the support from donors in 2020. "We are prayerfully making decisions every day for a way forward."

Camp Massad executive director Dan Sprintz said the Hebrew-language camp dedicated to enhancing Jewish life and culture has also ruled out overnight camping this summer.

"We were hoping to run a sleepover camp with restrictions, but the rise in the cases of the variants closed all that," he said.

Even if the province announces overnight camping can resume, it would be too late to ramp up for the summer, Sprintz said.

The camp is planning to shift to rentals for families so "some kids can still come," he said, noting they can still do camp activities with their families.

The camp can host eight to 10 families at a time from June to August, Sprintz said, adding they are jokingly calling it the Camp Massad Summer Resort.

Camp Massad was glad to receive support from groups such as the Winnipeg Foundation, the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba and the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg when it was closed last year because of the pandemic.

"They helped us make it through a lean year," he said.

Kim Scherger, executive director of the Manitoba Camping Association, said Camp Arnes and Camp Massad are not alone in shifting to new models this year.

"The variants changed everything," she said of how the associations 36 accredited camps are looking for new ways to offer programming this summer.

Scherger feared 25 per cent of camps in Manitoba might close last year, but that didnt happen because of support from donors.

"Supporters really came through and kept them afloat," she said, adding they "arent sure they can make it through another year of pandemic. They dont know if supporters can tide them over again."

Support from the government would be a big help, Scherger said.

"Camps are being forgotten. They arent on the agenda for government and public health officials," she said. "Its frustrating. Camps are hurting so much."

faith@freepress.mb.ca
London, April 29 : Encouraging self-testing of coronavirus infections at home twice a week for all adults in England is a misguided policy, unlikely to reduce transmission, warn public health experts.

Coronavirus tests per case detected are already higher in the UK than anywhere in the world, and the value of adding universal low-risk testing is unknown, yet is being introduced without plans to measure the costs and consequences, wrote Angela Raffle and Mike Gill, Public Health Consultants with experience in both communicable disease control and screening programmes, in an editorial of The BMJ.

"The priority continues to be improvement of the testing programme for everyone with symptoms no matter how minor or non-specific and all their contacts," they said.

While acknowledging that response in a pandemic requires speed, without training and proficiency testing for those taking and reading samples, may not help, they added.

"SARS-CoV-2 self-testing by asymptomatic members of the public is unlikely to reduce transmission," the experts wrote According to the UK government, "up to one third" of cases in the UK are symptomless. Yet evidence is growing that transmission arises overwhelmingly from people with symptomatic infections and their contacts, they wrote.

They pointed out that the World Health Organization has never advised testing low risk people, and both the EU and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend screening tests only for those where risk is highest.

"Current efforts are undermined by secrecy, quality failures, underused capacity, and a misplaced focus on low yield uses," they write.

"Both the laboratories and the rapid tests could be targeted to deliver a substantially more effective and cost effective testing service founded on the public service principles of sound evaluation, strong ethics, high quality, and full transparency."
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:39:29|Editor: huaxia

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MOSCOW, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia confirmed 9,284 new COVID-19 infections over the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 4,796,557, said the official monitoring and response center on Thursday.

The national COVID-19 death toll rose by 364 to 109,731 in the past day, while the number of the country's recoveries grew by 8,442 to 4,419,540.

Meanwhile, Moscow, Russia's worst-hit region, reported 3,215 new cases, the highest daily increase since Jan. 21, taking the city's total to 1,090,149.

More than 128.8 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin expressed hope on Wednesday that the country's mass inoculation campaign would be completed in the near future, adding that with three domestic vaccines already registered, a fourth one is "on the way."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refuted Western claims of a probable third wave of coronavirus infections in Russia, stressing that all the data on daily COVID-19 cases are publicly available. Enditem
Top-10 US colleges whose students redeemed the most student offers during this school year Brands can and should act no matter what, as the ongoing redefinition of normalcy takes shape from the pandemic. This is well- evidenced by the 21% global increase in redeemed personalized offers by students, said Jake Weatherly, Chief Executive Officer at SheerID.

SheerID, the identity marketing platform used by hundreds of leading brands around the world, and Riddle & Bloom, the Ideas & Access agency specializing in connecting brands with the Next Generation of consumers, announced the results of their Back to School for Marketers report today. SheerID and Riddle & Bloom partnered to survey more than 900 college students in the U.S. and Canada, as well as more than 400 students from France, Germany, and the UK.

The report also reveals Gen Z students current shopping habits and sentiment toward the college experience, offering brands actionable insights into how to best engage this next generation of consumers. While marketing to college students always had its own set of challenges, marketing to them now requires understanding how the pandemic has shifted their behavior, requiring some marketers to reshape their strategies.

Local governments continue to make progress with vaccine distribution, however, eight out of 10 students are still concerned that COVID-19 will have a large or some effect on the Fall 2021 school term. Students responded that impacts their plans, as 23% said it would delay some purchases, 67% of students stated they currently live off-campus or at home with family and 60% said they would take extra safety precautions heading back in the fall.

Brands can and should act no matter what, as the ongoing redefinition of normalcy takes shape from the pandemic. This is well- evidenced by the 21% global increase in redeemed personalized offers by students, said Jake Weatherly, CEO at SheerID. This past year we saw a doubling down of community by students as peer networks expanded, communities were formed and strengthened online, and students organically responded to the change and challenge of the pandemic.

For brands, there is a tremendous loyalty opportunity if they are able to take advantage of both the behavioral insights and brand interaction preferences to cater to the students retail needs. In fact, more than 78% of students said they would try a brand or product if they received a student discount code and if they heard about the offer from a friend or family member.

It's important for brands to keep in mind that college students are a very reachable and engageable audience that is still buying despite the changes and challenges of this past year, said Henry Lichtblau, Vice President of client solutions at Riddle & Bloom. Brands that understand the importance of student identity and student community affiliation to Gen Z college consumers will win with this segment whose shopping and spending has stayed steady or increased in the past year.

Marketers can engage students if they keep in mind that students Identify with being in college, value their student communities, and are motivated by peer recommendations and financial incentives. These insights and more can be found in the Back to School for Marketers report.

About SheerID

SheerID is the leader in identity marketing. With SheerID, brands identify and acquire consumer tribes  such as the military, students, teachers, and more  with personalized offers, gated by instant verification from the largest set of authoritative data worldwide. SheerID verifies over 2.5 billion people via 9,000 authoritative data sources; provides global insights from hundreds of the worlds leading brands, and never shares or sells customer data. As a result, the worlds biggest brands  including Amazon, Lowes, Spotify, and T-Mobile  rely on SheerID as their identity marketing partner. Founded in 2011, SheerID is backed by Arnold Venture Group, Centana Growth Partners, CVC Growth Partners, and Voyager Capital.

About Riddle & Bloom

Riddle & Bloom  a Wasserman company  is an Ideas and Access agency that builds solutions born of insight, expertise and access to create meaningful relationships with the Next Generation  Millennial and Gen Z consumers and the brands that matter to them most. A leader in college consumer marketing over the last 10 years, Riddle & Bloom brings an integrated approach to reach this larger audience mix through: experiential marketing, student ambassador programs, digital strategy, social and e-commerce solutions, to help leading brands understand and engage with todays next wave of consumers nationwide. Through its exclusive industry partnerships with NACA, NACAS and NIRSA, Riddle & Bloom has a network encompassing more than 1,000 colleges and universities, extending to post-college Millennials and younger Gen Zs. For more information, visit: http://www.riddleandbloom.com

Contact:

Matt Tatham

SheerID

matt.tatham@sheerid.com

917-446-7227

Contact:

Sara Murray

Riddle & Bloom

saram@riddleandbloom.com

603-289 9592
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the domestic sector are on course for 18-23 per cent revenue growth in the current fiscal year (FY22), mainly owing to recovery in domestic demand and higher realisation due to a rise in the prices of

Moreover, an ongoing surge in exports as importer-countries reduce their dependency on China and turn to suppliers elsewhere, including India, will support growth. However, Indias second Covid-19 wave will be a key factor that needs to be monitored.

The rebound in revenue growth follows a 13-15 per cent fall in FY21 due to the demand destruction that followed the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and a sharp fall in crude oil prices. The fall in demand is also expected to impact margins in FY21.

During April-October, domestic demand plunged, with most end-use sectors grinding to a halt following the lockdown. Exports also declined sharply owing to trade restrictions and a global slowdown. The rebound began in November 2020.

India exports chemicals to pandemic-hit US and Europe. With imports accounting for 20 per cent of domestic consumption, India is a net importer of chemicals, mostly from China.

Chemicals industry SMEs in India enjoy policy support through anti-dumping duties that vary by country and product.
The Codebreaker

Rating:

The Great British Sewing Bee

Rating:

The story of how tortured maths genius Alan Turing helped break the wartime Enigma ciphers is a favourite of television historians.

Everyone has heard of Turing. This Bletchley Park wizard has been played on screen by Benedict Cumberbatch and Derek Jacobi. Hes even going to feature on the new 50 note from June.

But his American counterpart is almost completely unknown. Elizabeth Friedmans crucial work, which saved countless thousands of Allied lives, was classified as top secret until 2008. She was never allowed to speak of it to anyone, not even her husband  also a brilliant cryptologist.

The Codebreaker (PBS America) shed long-overdue light on her extraordinary life  though you might have to be a bit of a puzzle fiend yourself to have spotted this hour-long documentary hidden in the schedules, on Freeview channel 84.

The Codebreaker (PBS America) shed long-overdue light on her extraordinary life  though you might have to be a bit of a puzzle fiend yourself to have spotted this hour-long documentary hidden in the schedules, on Freeview channel 84

Born in 1892, Friedman was the youngest of ten children in an Indiana Quaker family. Despite her parents opposition, she moved to Chicago, landing a job with an eccentric millionaire to scour Shakespeares first folio for clues that the Bard didnt write his own plays.

That kindled a fascination with cryptanalysis  the breaking of codes. Friedman was so good at it that, by 1918, she and her husband William were in charge of decrypting all German messages for the U.S. military.

Throughout the 1920s, during the Prohibition era when alcohol was controlled by organised crime, she was chief codebreaker for the American coastguard, catching rum-runners and their booze shipments. Gangsters disguised their codes by sending scrambled messages in multiple languages  but Friedman was able to spot codes, even in Chinese.

Neither the criminals nor the law enforcers could quite credit the fact that any wife and mother could be so brilliant. After her evidence in one bootleggers trial, a newspaper described her as a pretty woman who is defending the U.S..

But it was in World War II that she did her greatest work, thwarting the U-boat packs that hunted merchant convoys in the Atlantic.

At Bletchley Park, early computers were used to crack the Enigma ciphers. Friedman did it with paper and pencil.

At the wars end, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover took all the credit for her work. This appreciation of a heroine in two world wars was inspirational.

Its repeated today and again on Saturday evening  make sure you catch it.

Those seeking a heroine closer to home need look no further than Esme Young, the tiny but indomitable judge on The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1). Inspecting a shoddily sewn cloth cap, she took hold of the button on top and ripped it off.

Those seeking a heroine closer to home need look no further than Esme Young, the tiny but indomitable judge on The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1). Inspecting a shoddily sewn cloth cap, she took hold of the button on top and ripped it off

Then, as she explained why a workmans jacket had many pockets, she revealed the items she always carried: a sandwich and a hand grenade!

As contestant Andrew fervently remarked: I wouldnt like to meet Esme in an alley on a dark night.

Her fellow judge Patrick Grant was stalking the floor like the reincarnation of Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served? and presenter Joe Lycett was indulging in his usual unbridled daftness  at one point, with a jacket over his head, doing a Manchester accent and claiming to be Take Thats Gary Barlow.

This charming, frivolous series has become one of the high points of the week, with its combination of cameraderie and competition.

And Joes jokes are a delight. Patrick is a gent so classic, he declared, the National Trust do tours of his trousers. Silly boy.




Haiti - FLASH : Conflict with the DR over a canal diverting the Massacre river to Haiti





On Tuesday, Haitian and Dominican authorities met in Dajabon to try to find a solution to the conflict that was triggered by the construction of a canal on the Ounaminthe side to divert the Massacre River into the territory of Haiti.



During the meeting no type of agreement was reached, due to mutual accusations, the Haitian authorities declared that the works had been authorized by the Government of President Jovenel Moise, to try to irrigate the agricultural lands in the towns of Meac, Ferie and Derac, adjacent to the municipality of Dajabon.



Governor Rosalba Pena arranged for the meeting to be postponed until next Tuesday, in order to include all parts of the two territories including the ministries of foreign affairs and the armed forces to resolve the conflict that this triggered,



The Haitian delegation was composed of: Smith Augustin, Ambassador of Haiti accredited to the Dominican Republic, Francois Guerrier, consul in Dajabon, Joseph, vice-Governor of Ounaminthe, Ernetz Lavaux, vice-consul, Nes My Marieflue of humang rights and several police officers.



The Dominican delegation included for its part: Governor Rosalba Pena (who chaired the meeting), the Dominican Consul in Ounaminthe, Jose Valenzuela, General Miguel Angel Burgos, Commander of the fourth brigade with a Mao seat, Colonels Desiderio Duran, Commander of the 10th battalion, Juan Adames of Cesfront, Santiago Riveron the mayor of Dajabon and Eduard Perez, provincial director of the environment among others



S/ HaitiLibre


















Lucknow: The voting in the fourth and final phase of the Uttar Pradesh panchayat elections will be held on Thursday (April 29) amid the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

Over 5.27 lakh candidates are in the fray for more than 2.10 lakh seats across 17 districts in this round of the election.

"More than 2.98 crore voters will be casting their votes in the fourth and last phase of the polls which will be held from 7 am to 6 pm," officials said.

The polling is scheduled in the districts of Ambedkar Nagar, Aligarh, Kushinagar, Kaushambi, Ghazipur, Farrukhabad, Bulandshahr, Basti, Bahraich, Banda, Mau, Mathura, Shahjahanpur, Sambhal, Sitapur, Sonbhadra and Hapur, the State Election Commission (SEC) said.

According to the poll body, there are 10,679 candidates in the fray for 738 posts of Zila panchayat members in the final phase. A total of 55,408 candidates are contesting for 18,356 posts of kshetra panchayat members.

While 1,14,400 candidates are in the fray for posts of gram panchayat members, 3,47,436 contestants are fighting for 1,77,648 posts in gram panchayat wards, it said.

The candidates will contest on 'free symbols' given by the State Election Commission.

In the first phase of the polls held on April 15, an average polling percentage of 71 was recorded. The second phase of the polls on April 19 also saw over 71 per cent of polling.

In the third phase of the polls held on April 26, a polling percentage of 73.5 was recorded, according to SEC officials.

The 2015 panchayat polls had registered a polling percentage of 72.11, the poll panel said.

Meanwhile, more than 170 people, including three candidates for village pradhan posts (gram panchayat), have been charged under the Disaster Management Act at police stations Lodha, Gangiri and Iglas during the past 24 hours.

"All the three candidates were holding rallies and processions wherein none of the participants was wearing masks," Senior Superintendent of Police of Aligarh Kalanidhi Naithani said in a statement in Aligarh.

In view of the coronavirus situation, the SEC had last month announced that not more than five people would be allowed to accompany a candidate during door-to-door campaigning for the panchayat elections.

Additional Election Commissioner Ved Prakash Verma had said three-member teams were formed under the additional district magistrates to ensure that directives issued by the SEC were being followed.

At the district level, chief medical officers have been made nodal officers emphasise following COVID-19 protocol.

Voters will mandatorily have to wear masks and maintain social distancing at polling booths. Instructions have also been issued to make circles maintaining a distance of six feet between voters standing in the queue.

Verma had said COVID-19 norms would also be followed during the counting of votes and personal protective equipment (PPE) kits would be arranged according to requirements.

The Allahabad High Court had asked the Uttar Pradesh government to conclude the panchayat election process by May 25.

The counting of votes will take place on May 2.

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Apple released iOS 14.5 to the general public a few days ago. iOS 14.5 update finally introduced App Tracking Transparency which limits advertisers and developers from showing personalized or targeted ads to the user. Reports say Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba recently held a meeting to discuss the implications of App Tracking on its revenue.

App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 prevents advertisers and developers from tracking a users app usage and thus limiting them from showing personalized ads to the user. Many advertisers have feared that this would lower their revenue many folds.

Facebook, earlier speculated that ATT would change the internet for the worse, but now has reported that ATT will have a manageable impact on its ad business.

The Information has now reported that the Chinese tech giant Alibaba has been pondering over the implications of ATT on its revenue. As per the publication, Alibaba held an internal meeting where the executives explored solutions to ATT. However, sources familiar with the matter said that there was no clear consensus was reached after the meeting.

Alibaba, currently, makes more than $30 billion in revenue from small merchants and advertising agencies that pay the e-commerce tech giant to advertise their products. This $30 billion revenue makes about 40% of Alibabas total revenue, and the company is now worried about this number going down.

China has been known to be working on a tool to bypass iOS 14.5s App Tracking Transparency. The bypass tool, known as CAID, could allow developers and advertisers to track app usage without user consent. Tech companies like ByteDance are already conducting tests. Apparently, Apple knows about the CAID tool, although it hasnt made any comments to the Chinese government.

If you are unclear what App Tracking Transparency is, read our explainer on what App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 is and how it will protect your privacy.

[Via The Information
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 29)  Approximately half a million more Filipinos could get back to work if the government allows personal care services and indoor dining to resume in NCR Plus  subject to capacity limits  even if it remains under the second strictest lockdown, Trade Undersecretary Ruth Castelo said Thursday.

Castelo said 1.5 million workers were temporarily displaced when the strictest enhanced community quarantine was imposed in Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal for two weeks due to the huge spike in COVID-19 cases. The number went down to 1 million when NCR Plus eased to the less strict modified ECQ on April 12, the official said. The MECQ declaration in the greater Manila area was extended until May 14.

"1 million pa yung hindi nakakabalik dito sa NCR Plus pa lang. Kung sakaling i-approve ng IATF 'yung sa personal care services at indoor dining, we will have 400,000 dun sa personal care and another siguro 100,000 sa restaurants na madadagdag," Castelo told a briefing.

[Translation: One million workers have not gone back to work, and that's in NCR Plus alone. If the IATF approves the resumption of personal care services and indoor dining, 400,000 personal care service employees and another 100,000 restaurant workers will be added.]

Castelo said they recommend allowing salons and barbershops to reopen at half of their capacity and permitting restaurants to offer indoor dining, with the capacity limited to 10%.

The DTI official said they were pushing for the return of personal care and dine-in services so that establishments that offer them would not permanently close.

While it's a welcome move, PCCI president emeritus George Barcelon told CNN Philippines in an interview: "Kung wala namang customer, maski sabihin mo na you open up, gastos lang."

[Translation: If there are no customers, even if you open up, it would just mean added costs.]

Castelo said members of the IATF will meet within the day to tackle the list of industries which can reopen despite the MECQ extension.
Two police officers accused of punching Arab American teenager and then lying about it (Getty/iStock)

Two New Jerseypolice officers have been accused of punching an Arab American teenager and then lying about it.

Paterson Police Officers Kevin Patino and Kendry Tineo-Restituyo face civil rights and obstruction of justice charges over the alleged incident.

Investigators have accused them of depriving Osamah Alsaidi, then 19, of his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and also claim they then lied about it on a police incident report.

The December 2020 incident was captured on surveillance video and led to an investigation in February by the New Jersey Attorney Generals Office.

Both Mr Patino, 29, and Mr Tineo-Restituyo, 28, handed themselves in to authorities on Tuesday and were released on $50,000 bonds.

Both officers had to surrender travel documents and firearms and Mr Partino was ordered by a judge to undergo mental health testing.

Neither officer entered a plea during the court hearing.

Mr Patinos attorney, Anthony Iacullo said in a statement that he is confident the process will vindicate Officer Patino and establishing that his actions, based on the totality of what transpired that night, were appropriate.

Mr Alsaidi was on his way to a 1am shift at Amazon when he was allegedly attacked by the officers, who court documents state had been responding to a call about a suspicious person.

The surveillance video reportedly shows the officers briefly talking to Mr Alsaidi before he was allegedly attacked.

Lawyers for Mr Alsaidi said he suffered multiple physical injuries, including head trauma, a concussion and multiple cuts and bruises, as well as anxiety, stress and depression.

The officers are also accused of making false statements in their report.

For instance, the police report falsely stated that the victim had walked towards the officers screaming profanities and acting belligerent and that the victim had struck Patino with a closed fist in the chest. None of this was true, a press release from the New Jersey US Attorneys Office states.

Story continues

If convicted the officers each face a maximum of 10 years in prison for the civil rights violation charge, a maximum of 20 years in prison for the falsification of a record charge, and a maximum fine of $250,000 for each charge, according to the US Attorneys office.

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DENVER and CINCINNATI, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Crownpeak, the leading digital experience platform, and ilumino, a digital accessibility services and consulting firm, today announced a strategic partnership. Together, they enable enterprises to accelerate digital accessibility goals, and simplify the formation and execution of best-in-class digital governance programs.

The "Crownpeak + ilumino" solution combines Crownpeak's automated accessibility scanning technology with ilumino's deep subject matter expertise in online accessibility and usability. Enterprises looking to deliver consistent digital experiences across complex global infrastructures can ensure those experiences are inclusive and accessible to all users, across all digital touchpoints  including the web, mobile apps and software.

With more than 1 billion people worldwide living with some form of disability  relating, for example, to vision, hearing, mobility or cognition  it's important for organizations to deliver digital experiences that are inclusive of all users.

Oftentimes, though, when companies seek to provide digital content that's enjoyable for all users and adheres to accessibility standards and best practices  including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or Section 508  they take a disjointed approach. Typically, this means using basic technology, such as browser plug-ins, to check pages for accessibility on a one-off basis  and also employing separate, third-party testers to provide a one-time report on gaps. There's little focus on remediation and optimizing accessibility over the long term.

Crownpeak + ilumino Solution

In contrast, Crownpeak and ilumino together offer a single, integrated solution that combines Crownpeak's leading Digital Quality Management (DQM) technology  providing automated and ongoing scanning and auditing against WCAG guidelines  with ilumino's expert services to advance a company's culture of accessibility. By harnessing the speed and power of advanced technology, alongside the human element of accessibility testing and consulting, Crownpeak + ilumino offers a path for enterprises to advance digital accessibility within the context of their unique business practices, existing brand guidelines and user experience.

"Making the web more accessible to all is an imperative everyone can agree on  but challenges related to cost, complexity and knowledge gaps often hold companies back," said Chris Sigala, general manager of Crownpeak's Digital Quality Management business. "Crownpeak + ilumino resolves these issues. We're encouraged by the results we've seen from the partnership in a relatively short amount of time  as large organizations are realizing immense value and impact by leveraging the strengths of both organizations in powering their digital accessibility programs."

The new Crownpeak + ilumino solution is already in use by multiple billion-dollar corporations, including a technology-enabled business services firm, a major U.S. insurance company, and a global top 10 consumer packaged goods company that operates in 190 countries and has hundreds of brands.

Key features of the combined solution include:

Accessibility and compliance dashboard  providing a "single-source of truth" for automated and manual accessibility monitoring

 providing a "single-source of truth" for automated and manual accessibility monitoring Automated site scanning (enriched by manual testing)  using enterprise-grade, multi-site scanning technology

 using enterprise-grade, multi-site scanning technology Manual testing and consulting  performed by certified accessibility experts

 performed by certified accessibility experts In-house or guided remediation  tailored to each organization's unique design and development workflows

 tailored to each organization's unique design and development workflows Ongoing support  ensuring sustained compliance through a proactive approach

 ensuring sustained compliance through a proactive approach Accessibility pattern library  simplifying the remediation process and establishing long-term organizational assets

 simplifying the remediation process and establishing long-term organizational assets Litigation support  with expert review and consulting on any accessibility-related legal actions received

 with expert review and consulting on any accessibility-related legal actions received Accessibility statement  drafted to demonstrate an organization's commitment to digital inclusion

 drafted to demonstrate an organization's commitment to digital inclusion Enterprise strategy  assisting with a prioritized roadmap and risk management

"All too often, when it comes to accessibility testing, companies receive 'one-and-done' reports on violations  with no real consideration of the company's technical resources or its ability to actually act on the findings," said Mark Reardon, CEO at ilumino. "So benefits achieved are often just temporary. Crownpeak + ilumino offers a better solution and, importantly, a path toward continual compliance. Our partnership combines the scalability of Crownpeak's software platform with our expert manual consulting services. Together, we offer organizations a global solution for their digital monitoring and compliance needs  all within the unique confines of their established branding and marketing, and all aimed at providing more inclusive digital experiences."

Crownpeak + ilumino Digital Accessibility Webinar

Crownpeak and ilumino will further discuss their partnership during a webinar on May 19, at 11 a.m. ET. Titled "Getting Started on Your Digital Accessibility Journey," the webinar will provide practical, actionable steps for creating and executing an effective digital accessibility program.

Kathryn Putt, Crownpeak's director of solutions engineering, and Jenna Reardon, ilumino's co-founder and vice president of customer success, will also share tips and success stories from customers who've implemented Crownpeak + ilumino. To register for the free event, please visit http://bit.ly/crownpeak-ilumino.

About ilumino

POWERING DIGITAL INCLUSION. ilumino is a digital accessibility company driven by a passion to help create a more inclusive online world through compliant technology that everyone can enjoy. A user-focused approach makes the accessibility of websites, software or mobile applications, documents, and digital platforms straightforward, scalable, and complementary of established branding.

Custom solutions and expert services render lasting results by focusing on usability as well as compliance. For more information, please visit www.ilumino.co.

About Crownpeak

Crownpeak provides the leading digital experience platform. The industry's only true SaaS-based solution, Crownpeak offers best-in-breed capabilities that empower companies to create, deploy and optimize omnichannel digital experiences  faster and easier than ever, and with zero infrastructure to maintain.

Crownpeak also provides built-in solutions for digital governance and digital quality management. Relied on by the world's top brands, these solutions make it easy for organizations to address WCAG and ADA accessibility compliance across their digital properties  while improving SEO, reducing bounce rates, increasing brand equity and enhancing user experiences. With Crownpeak, companies can deliver high-impact, trust-building, accessible experiences at scale  improving engagement, loyalty and revenue. For more information, please visit www.crownpeak.com.

Media Contacts:

Sara Card

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 703.327.4866

Jenna Reardon

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 833.832.6695, ext. 700

SOURCE Crownpeak

Related Links

http://www.crownpeak.com


When President Biden hits the 100-day mark on Friday, Americans will be anything but excited about the "unity" of recent months. If anything, Americans will be excited that we are 100 days closer to the end of the Biden presidency  one marked by bitter partisanship and reckless negligence.

First, let's start with "unity," a Biden buzzword on Inauguration Day. After urging Republicans to embrace his mandate, Biden has refused to reach across the aisle while moving forward with more than 60 executive actions, including 40 executive orders  a modern-day record. On his first day in office, Biden overturned President Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy, which required asylum-seekers to apply before entering the United States. This single change essentially created America's border crisis, the worst in two decades.

Some Biden actions targeted the life of the unborn, religious freedom, and traditional families, while others focused on gender identity and transgender military service. The Biden administration was also quick to rejoin the Paris Agreement, which remains legally nonbinding for the world's leading polluters, such as China and India.

Then there's the issue of gun control, which Biden is weaponizing to bring more legal cases against firearms dealers and manufacturers, while expanding federal oversight of assault-style firearms. Reframing the right to bear arms as a "gun violence public health epidemic," the Biden administration is treading all over the Second Amendment, which remains overwhelmingly popular among American citizens who believe in freedom and liberty.

Promising unity, Biden has instead made it a mission to undermine the U.S. Constitution, our nation's most formative document. Equally "unifying" is the Biden administration's openness to packing the Supreme Court with liberal judges, in an attempt to offset the conservative majority currently in place.

How do we come together as Americans when our president governs like a left-wing Democrat?

It's no wonder that the Democratic president faces one of the lowest job approval ratings since the 1940s. Barely one-third of Americans approve of Biden's work on the border crisis. It doesn't help that, after Biden designated her in charge of the U.S.-Mexico border, Vice President Kamala Harris has gone weeks without even visiting the southern border.

Alas, Biden continues to get a free pass from the liberal media. News outlets like CNN now praise the president for turning America into a "global leader" on COVID-19, even though it was President Trump's Operation Warp Speed that guaranteed the mass vaccination available to Americans today. The Biden administration inherited vaccine development and a recovering economy, yet the CNN types credit only their Democratic allies for the good fortune. Activist-journalists are perfectly fine with Democrats telling Americans to "trust the science," yet they preach about mask-wearing and social distancing even after vaccination. If Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Democrats who embolden him would have their way, the pandemic would drag on indefinitely.

Here's the bottom line: from false promises and executive orders to COVID-19 paranoia, Biden's first 100 days have been disastrous. They have been catastrophic, which was to be expected. Even worse, the Biden presidency has been un-American, with Democrats failing to secure our borders yet again.

Americans deserve much, much better. What we deserve is one Biden term, a red wave in 2022, and a drastic change of leadership in 2024.

Ted Harvey serves as chairman of the anti-Biden Committee to Defeat the President.

Image: Gage Skidmore.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / CANAQUEST MEDICAL CORP (OTC PINK:CANQF) (the "Company" or "CanaQuest"), an award-winning Life Science/Pharmaceutical company developing formulations combining cannabinoid molecules with pharmaceutical-grade botanical compounds, today announced the filing of its International Patent, trade named Mentanine, which has demonstrated at least 10-times (10X) the efficacy compared to Pharma Grade CBD.

Mentanine - an International CBD Excellence Award 2020 formulation was scientifically developed through preclinical trials at Western University. Results of its potential effect on anxiety, depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia have been statistically significant. Our evidence also found that this formulation targeted a specific nuclear cellular receptor involved in anti-inflammatory mechanisms indicating that this formula may also treat inflammatory disorders.

"Our CBD-based Mentanine discovery sets the stage for substantially smaller dosages having the desired results compared to other CBD medications," stated neuroscientist Dr. Steven Laviolette, who leads a 13-member research team at Western University (Ontario, Canada). "The CBD + specific concentration of Omega-3 fatty assets increases the effects of CBD alone by improving actions on anxiety-related behaviors and improved inhibition of some specific neurochemical pathways linked to anxiety, schizophrenia, and addiction processing. By this mechanism, we believe that lower doses of CBD would be required with this formula to achieve the same efficacy attained from much higher doses of CBD by itself," he added.

Results from the Mentanine preclinical trials highlight advantages over pure CBD products on the market today , including the FDA-approved CBD drug for treating seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut and Dravet syndromes.

Paul Ramsay, CanaQuest's Co-Founder and President, said, "The Mentanine formulation further demonstrates the depth and breadth of our scientific research platform and goal of treating anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other debilitating ailments. To date, CBD alone has shown little scientific impact on the ability of the Central Nervous System (CNS) to help with mental health issues. We believe Mentanine can become a 'life-changer,' improving quality of life for many and without the side effects caused by larger CBD doses," he emphasized.

Regulatory Pathway and Drug Identification Number (DIN)

There is strong evidence from preclinical trial results that CanaQuest's modified formulation, in combination with its proprietary processing and delivery method, is also a very promising epilepsy treatment. The Company is collaborating with experienced parties to initiate the application process, including human trials to obtain approval for an Rx Drug Identification Number (DIN) for rare diseases under the umbrella of Epilepsy from the US FDA and Health Canada. The Company believes the DIN approval process time requirement will be significantly reduced, reflecting the proven regulatory pathway and previous approvals for other products containing CBD and THC.

Physicians interested in joining our network, as well as clinics and pharmacies, should register at www.canaquest.com.

Customers and patients can register at info@canaqueststore.com for updates on product developments.

CanaQuest is entering discussions with domestic and international medical cannabis distributors. Please contact us with indications of interest.

CanaQuest Medical Corp is an award-winning Life Science/Pharmaceutical company developing health and wellness products combining cannabinoid molecules with pharmaceutical-grade botanical compounds. The Company has developed two commercial-ready Master Formulations, Mentanine and Mentabinol, for treating mental health ailments. CanaQuest has also identified the regulatory pathways to obtain Rx Drug Identification Numbers (DINs) in Canada and the USA for Epilepsy rare diseases. The modified Mentanine formulation, in combination with its proprietary processing and delivery method, is very promising for epilepsy treatment as an Rx drug. The Company will be selling both products in the coming months to patients through ADC BioMedical Corp, its wholly-owned subsidiary, which was awarded a Cannabis Medical Sales Import/Export License from Health Canada under the Cannabis Act. CanaQuest is a leader in scientifically-backed cannabinoid products in collaboration with multiple Canadian universities including a Western University team led by Dr. Steven Laviolette, who has decades of research experience focused on novel pharmacotherapies addressing anxiety, depression, addiction, schizophrenia, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined in Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Statements in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions regarding the future. Such forward-looking statements include, among other things, the use of proceeds and the development, costs, and results of current or future actions and opportunities in the sector. 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 new projects and development stage companies, our ability to raise the additional funding we will need to continue to pursue our exploration and development program, and our ability to retain important members of our management team and attract other qualified personnel. 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 any beliefs, plans, expectations, and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that any such beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions will prove to be accurate. Investors should consult all the information set forth herein and should also refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in our annual Disclosure Statement filed with the OTC Markets for the most recent fiscal year.

CANAQUEST CONTACT:

Rob Rinderman, Director of Communications

CanaQuest Medical Corp

rob@canaquest.com

Tel: 973.525.6285

SOURCE: CanaQuest Medical Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/642737/CanaQuest-Files-International-MentanineR-Patent-a-Scientific-CBD-Formulation-for-Mental-Health
Bengaluru: Grappling with an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases, Karnataka is facing another challenge - of tracking and tracing of anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 coronavirus-infected patients who have "gone missing".

State Revenue Minister, R Ashoka met with various department heads on Wednesday and told reporters that he has already directed the state police to track and trace these missing COVID-19 patients.

"At least 2,000 to 3,000 people in Bengaluru have gone of our radar by switching off their phones and left their houses. We don`t know where they have gone," he admitted. Ashoka is also Vice Chairman of the Karnataka State Disaster Management Authority.

Bengaluru has become the epicenter of the viral spread ever since the pandemic broke out, often contributing a minimum 50 per cent to the state`s overall tally of Covid patients, fatalities and nearly two-thirds of patients in ICUs.

"With most of these patients switching off their mobile phones, the Health Department is not able to trace them and most of them are also not available at their given addresses, it is construed as they have `missing`. Certainly, there is a potential threat for these missing patients. These patients can turn out to be super-spreaders," Ashoka warned.

He added that the state had to rope in police as they have required expertise to track switched off mobile phones. The minister added that the state government was giving free medicines to people, which can control 90 per cent of cases, but these Covid-19 infected people have switched off their mobile phones.

"Some them reach hospitals at a critical stage and desperately look for Intensive Care Unit beds. This is what is contributing more to the already existing confusion," he said. Ashoka appealed to those who have tested positive for the viral disease to keep their cell phones on so that the official responsible for contact tracing and follow-ups could reach them.

"I pray to them with folded hands that Covid-19 cases will only increase due to this. It is wrong when you try for ICU beds at the last moment," the minister said.

The Karnataka government had recently increased its contact tracing activity after it was found that the officials in Bengaluru and other districts were tracing only four contacts per infected person, while the guidelines mandate tracing at least 20 contacts.

Health Minister K Sudhakar said Bengaluru had been the victim of this problem ever since the pandemic broke out. "In my more than one year`s experience of handling this pandemic, it is observed at least 20 per cent of the patients do not respond to our phone calls. Though in most of the cases, police track them down in their own way but there are some of them who migrate to other states and take this disease with the theme there too," he told reporters at a separate press conference.

Live TV
The Union Finance Ministry has ruled out any stimulus package for now even as COVID-19 cases continue to surge, forcing the state governments to impose localised restrictions hurting businesses and consumption sentiments. The ministry has hinted that interventions may continue for the vulnerable and impacted sections of the society as well as business sectors.

Maintaining that the government is watchful of the situation arising out of the second COVID wave, a finance ministry source told Business Today, "The government is in touch with the industry and taking its feedback on the emerging situation. As of now, a fiscal stimulus may not be required. A close watch is being kept though."

The official also said that entitlement-based packages for the needy could continue depending on the need. Amid the localised lockdowns in various states, including Maharashtra and Delhi, affecting livelihoods of people and leading to migration yet again, the government had extended the food grain entitlement scheme last week.

Also read: Lost dear one to COVID? Check out eligibility for Rs 2 lakh govt insurance claim

The Centre had announced that 5 kg food grain will be provided per person per month to 800 million beneficiaries in May and June.

"Interventions may continue for the vulnerable sections of the society as well as the industry as and when the need arises," the official added.

Even though the 'March Economic Review' released by Finance Ministry's Department of Economic Affairs claimed that India is "well prepared to combat the scourge of the virus" and "despite the surge in cases, the recovery in economy is resilient", key brokerages and rating agencies have downgraded their gross domestic product (GDP) growth projections for the country in the current financial year on account of the disruptions caused by the raging second wave of the pandemic.

While Nomura has downgraded India's GDP growth projection for the current financial year to 12.6 per cent from 13.5 per cent earlier, JP Morgan has lowered it to 11 per cent from 13 per cent earlier. UBS curtailed its growth forecast to 10 per cent from 11.5 per cent.

In order to hand-hold the economy ravaged by the national lockdown, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a Rs 20 lakh crore economic stimulus package on May 12 last year.

Also read: Hero MotoCorp, Maruti, Honda, MG Motor grind to a halt over oxygen curbs
Written by Jess Lee

Apr 29, 2021

Anyone interested in Ottoman architecture needs to add Edirne to their Turkey itinerary.

Once the Roman city of Adrianople, Edirne became capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1363, and it was from here that Mehmet the Conqueror launched his victorious military campaign to capture Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Even after Constantinople stole Edirne's crown, successive sultans continued anointing the city with grand architectural works.

The main tourist attraction people come to see is the Selimiye Mosque, agreed by most historians to represent the epitome of Ottoman architectural design. There is plenty more finery to explore and things to do beyond this major landmark, though.

View of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne

Edirne is home to three other grand mosque complexes, Turkey's most finely restored synagogue, and - being a riverine town - several well-preserved Ottoman-era bridges.

For travelers interested in cultural events, Edirne is also one of the best places to visit. In June or July every year, Edirne plays host to the Krkpnar Oil Wrestling Festival, which brings a flood of tourists into town for the three-day event. Competitive oil wrestling is said to have roots going back to the 14th century, though this festival only became an official calendar event in Turkey's modern era.

Outside of when the oil wrestling is on, you'll find Edirne remarkably less touristic than nearby Istanbul. This is because today, the city lays snug on the border with Greece (the Pazarkule border is six kilometers southwest), and many travelers beginning their travels in Istanbul tend to head south or east, leaving Edirne out of their plans.

Edirne is, though, an easy diversion if you're on the way to the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Aegean Coast, and it's only a three-hour (254-kilometer) journey west from Istanbul.

Decide what to do when in town with our list of the top things to do in Edirne.

Note: Some businesses may be temporarily closed due to recent global health and safety issues.
Continuing to call the attention of his international counterparts to the urgent issue of Armenian prisoners of war and civilians being kept in Azerbaijan, President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian has sent letters to Secretary General of the Council of Europe Maria Pejcinovic Buric and Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Helga Maria Schmid, emphasizing that Armenia anticipates support from its international partners for the speedy return of all Armenian prisoners of war and civilians being kept in Azerbaijan, as reported the Staff of the President of Armenia.

In his letters, the President talked about the war, Azerbaijans actions and statements and indicated the work that the Human Rights Defender of Armenia is doing to raise the Armenian sides concerns and current issues abroad.
Boris Johnson today claimed being portrayed as a snob about John Lewis was his main regret about the huge furore over his lavish Downing Street flat refurb.

The PM insisted the worst thing about the 'farrago of nonsense' - which includes an investigation by the elections watchdog into whether the law has been broken - was the misrepresentation of his views about the store chain.

'I love John Lewis!' he told reporters on a visit to a school in London, saying he had nothing to 'worry about'.

The controversial overhaul is said to have been sparked because his fiancee Carrie Symonds could not stand the 'John Lewis nightmare' decor left by Theresa May.

The jokey response came as Labour complained to the parliamentary standards commissioner over allegations Mr Johnson failed to declare Conservative contributions towards the works - a charge that could even lead to his suspension from the House.

Downing Street fears that a Tory paper trail could leave Mr Johnson exposed in the separate Electoral Commission probe into the murky funding of his grace-and-favour residence.

The PM and Ms Symonds face handing over emails and phone messages relating to the makeover.

They could also be interviewed - along with former chief aide Dominic Cummings - as the watchdog looks at whether donations to foot the costs were illegally kept secret.

Although the inquiry is currently targeted at the Conservative Party rather than Mr Johnson himself, concerns have been voiced that its records could lead back to the premier.

'The worry is that there could be a paper trail,' a government source told the Times. 'There was a very limited number of people who knew about the funding arrangements at CCHQ. It's not clear how this will end.'

Mr Johnson said this afternoon that he would comply with 'whatever' the Electoral Commission want, but he added: 'I don't think there's anything to see here.'

In a bombshell move yesterday, the Electoral Commission said it had carried out an initial assessment and was 'satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred'.

It has sweeping powers to demand documents and interview witnesses under caution. Failure to comply or tell the truth is a criminal offence.

No serving prime minister has ever been interviewed under caution in relation to an alleged breach of the law.

Boris Johnson shrugged off the row about the No11 refurb as he visited a school in London today with Rishi Sunak - who has pointedly revealed that he funded all the redecoration of his Downing Street flat

The PM and Carrie Symonds face the prospect of handing over emails and phone messages after the elections watchdog dramatically announced an investigation

The couple's lavish update of the decor was reportedly inspired by a desire to get rid of the 'John Lewis furniture nightmare' and the department store was quick to poke fun at the apparent revelation

John Lewis yesterday shared a photo of one of their delivery lorries park outside Downing Street with the caption: 'Good thing we have a recycling service for old pre-loved furniture'

John Lewis mocks PM over furniture snobbery John Lewis mocked Boris Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds yesterday amid the row over refurbishment of their Downing Street flat. The couple's lavish update of the decor was reportedly inspired by a desire to get rid of the 'John Lewis furniture nightmare' left over by Theresa May. The description of the flat - attributed to a visitor - was included in a recent Tatler article on Ms Symonds. But the department store poked fun at the jibe yesterday as it took to Twitter to suggest it had something for 'almost' everyone. The firm later shared a photo of one of their delivery lorries park outside Downing Street with the caption: 'Good thing we have a recycling service for old pre-loved furniture'. Advertisement

Mr Cummings, who is now in a state of war with Mr Johnson, claimed in a blog last week that he had warned the PM the 'plans to have donors secretly pay for the renovation were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations'.

He sparked alarm for Mr Johnson's allies by saying he would be 'happy' to tell the Electoral Commission what he knows.

PMs have an annual allowance for improvements to their residence, and sources told MailOnline that the 30,000 available for 2020-21 was the only public funding used for the refurb.

Mr Johnson repeatedly dodged yesterday when asked whether the extra costs of the work - believed to be 58,000 - was initially paid from Tory funds, merely insisting he had now footed the bill.

It is understood that Labour has asked the parliamentary commissioner for standards to look into the issues raised and whether any rules been broken.

Mr Johnson has previously been warned by the Commons standards committee for failing to declare interests.

In 2019, after he made public apologies, he was told he would face a more 'serious sanction' if he breached the rules again. That could potentially mean a recommendation of suspension, although it would need to be approved by the whole House.

The parliamentary commissioner only reveals what MPs she is investigating in limited circumstances, after the Commons downgraded transparency some years ago.

The premier insisted today that newly-appointed ministerial standards adviser Lord Geidt will do an 'outstanding job' in his separate review into whether the refurbishments were properly handled.

However, Labour has said the adviser's powers are too weak because the PM remains the 'ultimate arbiter' of the code, meaning he 'effectively marks his own homework'.

Sir Keir Starmer moved to turn up the heat today, visiting a John Lewis store in Manchester and saying: 'If there's an innocent explanation, the easiest thing is to set up a camera pool and take the question and answer it.

'The Prime Minister should do that this morning, then we can move on and concentrate on things that matter most to people, which is their jobs, particularly in the autumn when a lot of people are coming off furlough, what's happening on the NHS and what we are doing about the fact that the rate of crime is going up across the country.'

He also said the planned investigation into the matter by Lord Geidt was inadequate.

Mr Starmer said: 'The idea of having an adviser who can investigate only if the Prime Minister says so just shows how weak the system is.

'That's why what we are proposing is that we clean up Westminster. We have a proper, independent commission.'

Earlier, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi again insisted the PM had not broken the ministerial code, adding that he had been 'advised by officials' throughout and would follow the conclusions of his newly appointed standards adviser Lord Geidt.

'The prime minister has answered umpteen questions, including saying that if the Lord Geidt finds that the prime minister needs to make other declarations, he will then make those,' Mr Zahawi said.

'But he has throughout this whole process been advised by his officials, and he has clearly paid for the refurbishment.'

Mr Johnson took part in a science lesson at King Solomon Academy in Marylebone

The PM insisted the worst thing about the 'farrago of nonsense' - which includes an investigation by the elections watchdog into whether the law has been broken - was the misrepresentation of his views about John Lewis

Boris Johnson (pictured running today) and Carrie Symonds may have to hand over personal emails and phone messages to an official inquiry

In a bombshell move, the Electoral Commission yesterday opened a formal investigation into the funding of the lavish refurbishment of the couple's official flat. Pictured: A design by Lulu Lytle, who is believed to have carried out the refurbishment

The inquiry follows a string of revelations in the Mail suggesting a 58,000 cost overrun may have been paid originally by the Conservative Party before being covered by Tory donor Lord Brownlow.

Mr Johnson angrily told MPs yesterday that he had settled the bill with his own money.

But he ducked repeated questions about who originally paid out when the work at 11, Downing Street was completed last year. Failure to declare donations is an offence under electoral law, punishable by fines of up to 20,000.

The Electoral Commission can pass on investigations to the police if it uncovers evidence of criminal offences or believes its efforts are being frustrated.

Downing Street yesterday said Mr Johnson was willing to co-operate fully with the inquiry, which could demand to see relevant emails and WhatsApp messages. His fiancee Ms Symonds, who masterminded the costly redecoration, could also face questions.

Asked if Mr Johnson was willing to be questioned in person, his press secretary said the commission's investigation was a matter for the Conservative Party, and the Prime Minister 'will of course be happy to assist if asked'.

More details has emerged of the efforts to set up a charitable trust that could support upkeep of the Downing Street buildings.

Labour peer Baroness Jay told BBC Newsnight that she had been approached earlier this year by Lord Brownlow, who 'asked if I would like to become a trustee on the Downing Street Trust'.

She said that the proposed trust 'would be for the public part of Downing Street not the residences', although nothing formal was ever agreed.

They could also be interviewed - along with former chief aide Dominic Cummings (pictured together in 2019) - as part of the Electoral Commission probe into whether donations to foot the costs were illegally kept secret

The inquiry follows a string of revelations in the Mail suggesting a 58,000 cost overrun may have been paid originally by the Conservative Party before being covered by Tory donor Lord Brownlow. Pictured: Lulu Lytle

Labour peer 'invited to join No10 Trust' The Tory donor who is thought to have given a loan to Boris Johnson to pay for his flat's makeover approached a Labour peer to sit on a trust overseeing the work. Baroness Jay, daughter of former prime minister James Callaghan, said Lord Brownlow asked her to become a member of the proposed Downing Street Trust. Last night, the baroness said she understood it would be for the public part of the buildings, not the residences. She told BBC Two's Newsnight: 'Nothing formal was agreed [but] I did say I'd be interested... on the basis it were similar to the Chequers Trust, of which I used to be a member.' Advertisement

Tory MPs were aghast at the row, which comes when the Government is facing sleaze allegations over lobbying and procurement deals and only a week from a major round of local elections.

'It is a stupid self-inflicted wound that makes us look shifty and out of touch,' one former minister told the Mail.

'If it had been dealt with straight away then people would have thought nothing of it. But the attempt to cover up what happened looks dodgy.'

Another veteran Tory said: 'I genuinely think we are in trouble. You can argue that none of the things add up to much on their own. But there is a carelessness and arrogance in No 10 that is very dangerous.'

There was also resentment in some quarters toward Ms Symonds, with the PM's fiancee dubbed 'Carrie Antoinette' on Tory WhatsApp groups over her allegedly expensive tastes.

But there was also anger at the Electoral Commission over the timing of the announcement, which came less than an hour before Mr Johnson was due to answer questions in the Commons.

Mr Johnson appeared rattled in the chamber after Sir Keir Starmer accused him of 'major sleaze'.

Jabbing his finger at the Labour leader, he said he was 'playing political games, whereas this party gets on with delivering on the people's priorities'. He insisted no laws or rules had been broken, adding that he had 'met the requirements that I have been obliged to meet in full'.

Downing Street said Mr Johnson had not received any requests for information from the commission.

But David Howarth, a former commissioner at the elections watchdog, said it was 'inconceivable' that his conduct would not be looked at along with that of the Conservative Party.

The Cambridge law professor said: 'The investigators will look at every single transaction relating to payment for the works on the flat with a view to finding out whether reportable donations have been reported in time. The question is, who paid the bill and was it reported?'

Prime ministers can spend up to 30,000 a year of public money on their private residence. But the makeover bill came in much higher, prompting Mr Johnson to order a search to find someone to pay for the 58,000 excess. He was forced to pay himself  after various parties are all said to have funded the work at some point.
By Michael Bergmann





An anonymous hero from Kazakhstan was sentenced to a suspended prison term of two-and-a-half years for an obvious misunderstanding. And what a misunderstanding!



He simply didn't get what Korean police meant saying: "Without material evidence put on our counter, we can't do anything, however true your reports might be about criminal businesses in your neighborhood." He couldn't believe that what they really wanted him to do was to leave them in peace, and for himself to live happily in ignorance. So he made the mistake of promptly bringing them the undeniable evidence  a portion of drugs he bought for this purpose.



He was relatively lucky that police did, then, not exclusively turn against him, but also included the criminal gang in their investigations, leading to eight arrests. I won't discuss here why drug consumers should be punished so heavily for ruining their own health in a country where alcohol abuse is not even a social embarrassment. But police did not even take into account that the man only bought the drug after informing his police interpreter, and clearly never for consumption. "Buying drugs is punishable under Korean law, and you yourself brought us the evidence, so it's an easy case for us, and that's all we care about." Brutal thoughtlessness! The prosecution and the district court only confirmed this principle.



It would just be another unknown case of law enforcement on the wrong side of justice, had not an appeals court finally shown some human consideration and social responsibility and, after a long ordeal, acquitted the man. You don't, however, need his courage to experience this tendency of the Korean police and prosecution. Just join our humble initiative for transparency in local communities and you will witness the authorities' passivity towards systematic abuses  while critical residents are treated like criminals on the base of absurd accusations!



President Moon Jae-in described the general issue adequately, though extremely mildly, when he recently remarked that the prosecution had "yet to earn the public trust in a non-selective law enforcement." As a human-rights lawyer since the time of the military dictatorship, he knows what he is talking about. But his efforts to protect citizens from power abuse seem to have tragically failed. The ethical flaws in his own camp made it easy for certain forces to find targets for precisely the selective investigations he wanted to go against. It is a scary prospect that the coming year might see law enforcement insiders reaching for presidential power.



I am not saying that Korean prosecutors play a role in relation to organized crime as, for example, Alexei Navalny has revealed for their Russian counterparts. The disproportionate selectivity might often "only" result from thoughtlessness. But who benefits from brutally thoughtless inhumanity?





The author (bergmann2473@yahoo.de) is a teacher in Seoul.


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:09:56|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- No country fits the hat of "coercive diplomacy" better than the United States, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.

Spokesperson Wang Wenbin made the remarks at a press briefing when asked to comment on U.S. accusations that China engages in "coercive diplomacy" and "economic and military coercion."

Noting Alexander George, a professor at Stanford University, first put forward in 1971 the concept of "coercive diplomacy" to summarize the U.S. policy toward Laos, Cuba and Vietnam at that time, Wang said the United States has demonstrated to the world what coercive diplomacy is through its actions.

"That is, to achieve its strategic goals through the threat of force, political isolation, economic sanctions and technological blockades," the spokesperson added.

"From the perspective of the threat of force, the classic cases of 'coercive actions' by the United States have caused war and human tragedy," Wang said, adding that the U.S. government is not shy about using the term "coercive diplomacy."

"In terms of political isolation and economic sanctions, the United States has been wielding the 'big stick of sanctions' against Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Venezuela for years," Wang said.

The previous U.S. administration provoked a "trade war" with many countries, Wang said, adding that U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote that the previous U.S. administration's policy toward Iran "is all coercion and no diplomacy."

In terms of technological blockades, Wang said the United States, in a bid to retain its monopoly in science and technology, ignores the principles of market competition and international economic and trade rules, abuses national security excuses to arbitrarily suppress high-tech enterprises in other countries, and coerces other countries into taking joint actions.

"Whether France's Alstom, Japan's Toshiba and Toyota, the Soviet Union's aerospace industry, or China's Huawei, all of them are vivid examples," Wang added.

Pointing out that the United States deliberately exerts pressure on China, illegally arrests Chinese citizens, suppresses Chinese enterprises for no reason, wantonly interferes in China's internal affairs and coerces and induces other countries to form an anti-China clique, Wang said China is a victim of "coercive diplomacy," not a perpetrator.

"No matter who engages in 'coercive diplomacy,' we are firmly opposed to it," Wang added.

Noting China follows an independent foreign policy of peace, Wang said aggression and hegemony are never in the genes of the Chinese nation.

He said China follows the path of peaceful development and rejects the claim by some that a stronger China is bound to follow the beaten path to seek hegemony.

"Unlike the United States, we have never threatened other countries by force, never engaged in military alliances, never exported ideology, never stirred up trouble on others' doorsteps, never extended our reach into others' homes, never initiated a trade war, and never attacked other countries' enterprises for no reason," Wang said.

"China will, of course, take reasonable and lawful countermeasures to uphold international fairness and justice when its sovereignty and national dignity are threatened or infringed upon," said the spokesperson.

"We will work with all peace-loving countries to oppose all forms of coercion in the world," Wang added. Enditem
The European Parliament on April 29 passed a resolution threatening action against Russia over its treatment of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, its military buildup on Ukraine's border, and what lawmakers describe as "Russian attacks in the Czech Republic."

The nonbinding resolution, supported by the five mainstream political groups in the European Parliament, was adopted by 569 votes in favor, 67 against, and with 46 abstentions.



The text of the resolution said that Russia "poses not only an external threat to European security, but is also waging an internal war on its own people in the form of the systematic oppression of the opposition and arrests on the streets."



It stated that Navalny's poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020 was "an assassination attempt" that was "perpetrated by agents of the Russian security services within the Russian Federation."



"The poisoning of Navalny fits in with a pattern of actions taken against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's opponents...leading to the death of several leading opposition figures, journalists, activists, and foreign leaders," it says.



It also stated unequivocally that "the same GRU agents" from Russia's military intelligence service who were "involved in the explosion of the ammunition depot in the Czech Republic were also responsible for the attempted murder" in Salisbury, England, of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, using Novichok.



It noted that GRU agents have also been charged with the attempted murder of Emilian Gebrev, the Bulgarian owner of a weapons factory, and other people in Bulgaria in 2015, using a Novichok-like substance.



"Russia is noncooperative in investigating these crimes committed on European Union territory" and is "sheltering key suspects," it said.



The resolution called for Russia to immediately release Navalny and pull its military forces back from the border with Ukraine, saying the "scale and striking capabilities" of the Russian troops there "indicate intentions of an offensive."



It said that if those Russian forces are used to invade Ukraine, "imports of oil and gas from Russia to the EU [should] be immediately stopped" and Russia should be "excluded from the SWIFT payment system" of international bank transfers.



It also said that "assets in the EU of oligarchs close to the Russian authorities and their families" need to be frozen and their EU visas canceled if those Russian forces invade Ukraine.



On energy, the resolution called on the EU to reduce dependence on Russia by halting the completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

The resolution was welcomed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who called it robust. "These are signals Ukraine has asked for, clearly showing Russia possible costs of extending its aggression," he said on Twitter.
Rudy Giuliani has claimed that the search warrant authorizing the raid on his Manhattan home was 'illegal' and 'unconstitutional', claiming that he had offered to hand over his electronic devices willingly for the past two years, and insisting that he had never worked for a foreign national.

Giuliani's home was surrounded by FBI agents at 6am on Wednesday morning, as part of an investigation into his dealings in Ukraine.

Giuliani, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and former mayor of NYC, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday night that there was no legal justification for the raid.

'The only way you can get a search warrant is if you can get that evidence someone will destroy evidence,' said Giuliani.

Rudy Giuliani on Thursday night appeared on Fox News to discuss the raid on his home

Giuliani's apartment was raided on Wednesday: the media is seen waiting outside

He said that he had been offering his electronic devices for two years, and claimed that the government had 'spied on me' before, through the Cloud.

'I could have destroyed the evidence years ago. I didn't destroy the evidence because the evidence is exculpatory. It proves that the the president and I are innocent,' he said.

They seized 'eight electronic devices of mine and two of someone else's,' he said.

'There is no justification for that warrant,' Giuliani continued.

'It's an illegal, unconstitutional warrant.'

The warrants included an allegation that Giuliani failed to register as a foreign agent, a violation of lobbying laws.

Prior to the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani led an effort to dig up dirt on then-Democratic contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.

Rudy Giuliani's Upper East Side home was raided at 6am on Wednesday

Giuliani insisted on Carlson's show that he had never worked for any foreign nationals, and had a line in all his contracts insisting he would only work for U.S. citizens.

'I never, ever represented a foreign national,' said Giuliani, who founded management consultancy and security firm Giuliani Partners in 2002, on stepping down as mayor.

Giuliani accused agents of ignoring Hunter Biden's hard drives during their search - hard drives which contained the image above

'I have in my contracts that I didn't want to,' he said.

He worked on behalf of a wide range of foreign clients, from the Qatari government in 2007, for whom he acted as a security consultant, to a $4.3 million security contract with Mexico City, advising them on their policing and public safety.

Giuliani said that investigators would not tell him what exactly they were looking in to.

'They won't explain what they are looking into for the last two years,' he said.

'They won't address it. They say come in and discuss your entire life.'

And he expressed bemusement that the 'very professional' agents were not interested in taking Hunter Biden's hard drive with them.

'I said don't you want these?' Giuliani recalled.

'They said what are they? I said they are Hunter Biden's hard drives.'

The agents said they did not want them.

'I said, are you sure? One last time. They said no.'

Giuliani said that Hunter Biden's hard drives 'fall in the scope of the subpoena'.

He said the hard drive contained evidence of '30 years of the Biden crime family'.

Giuliani added: 'They were also completely content to rely on my word. They could have been Donald Trump's. They could have been Vladimir Putin's.'

Giuliani concluded: 'I am so offended by the things they have said about me.'

Earlier on Thursday, Giuliani had told a caller to his radio show that he was outraged at the raid, and described those behind it as 'crooks' jealous of his career.

'I've been fighting crooks all my life,' he said.

Giuliani, seen at a Trump rally on January 6, ahead of the riot, had his home raided Wednesday

Giuliani pictured in June 1987, when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York

Giuliani made his name in the 1980s taking down the mob (pictured, with FBI Director William Webster)

'I'm fighting crooks again. The only tragedy of it is they have titles from the government.

'But they're a disgrace! They are a complete disgrace to the office that I distinguished! They didn't.'

Giuliani then detailed his illustrious career, telling how he expelled 'five Nazis' from the United States and talking about his infamous mob-busting years in the 1980s, when he brought down the 'Five Families' - New York's main mafia clans.

'Did they get threatened with getting killed by the mafia? The Colombian cartel wanting to cut my throat?

'What have they done? Noting except come after me, six-o-clock in the morning, with a piece of nonsense. No wonder they're jealous!

'It's just ridiculous.'

The comments are Giuliani's first on the raid, aside from a written statement released via his lawyer on Wednesday.

Federal investigators executed a search warrant Wednesday on Rudy Giuliani's New York City apartment and office, seizing electronic devices

Rudy Giuliani's apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

Rudy Giuliani's Park Avenue office was also raided by federal investigators

Giuliani arrives at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in 2016

Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the FBI raid on 'patriot' Giuliani's Manhattan apartment, saying it is 'very unfair'.

The former president spoke out to defend his former personal attorney, telling Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo: 'Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He just loves this country, and they raid his apartment.

Michael Cohen: Giuliani is an 'idiot' who will turn on Trump - and Trump will not hesitate to 'throw him under the bus' Michael Cohen has said Rudy Giuliani 'would give Donald Trump up in a heartbeat' after federal agents raided the former New York City mayor's home and office. Speaking to CNN Thursday, Trump's former fixer called Giuliani an 'idiot' who has 'no relationship' with the ex president, who, he says, operates in a 'garbage can orbit'. Federal agents raided the 76-year-old's apartment Wednesday, taking with them his electronic devices including computers and cellphones. After news of the raid broke Wednesday, Cohen - who was also subject of a federal raid and would eventually plead guilty to eight federal counts - tweeted: 'Here we go folks.' He said Thursday: 'He's [Giuliani] nervous and rightfully so. Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat. Donald will throw anyone and everyone under the bus. 'Rudy has been shady for a long time. 'We have no idea how expansive this investigation is going to ultimately reveal itself, because Rudy's an idiot. And that's the problem. 'Rudy drinks too much. Rudy behaves in such an erratic manner, that, who knows what's on those telephones or what's on his computers?' Cohen was convicted in 2018 of campaign finance violations while working as Trump's personal attorney  he was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to nine charges. Less than a year after his sentencing, Cohen was released from Otisville Correctional Facility in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic on compassionate grounds. He has been confined to his Trump Park Avenue apartment in Lenox Hill ever since July 2020. Advertisement

'It's like so unfair and...it's like a double standard like I don't think anybody's ever seen before. It's very, very unfair. Rudy is a patriot who loves this country.'

Joe Biden later said he found out about the raid 'when the rest of the world learned about it', adding: 'I had no idea this was underway.'

The raid signals a major escalation of the Justice Department's investigation into any possible violation of federal lobbying laws and the business dealings of Giuliani.

Giuliani, once celebrated for his handling of the 9/11 terror attacks while New York City mayor, has been under federal scrutiny for several years over his ties to Ukraine. The dual searches sent the strongest signal yet that he could eventually face federal charges.

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello said the warrants involved an allegation that Giuliani failed to register as a foreign agent and that investigative documents mentioned John Solomon, a frequent Fox News commentator with close ties to Giuliani.

Solomon pushed baseless or unsubstantiated allegations involving Ukraine and Biden during the 2020 election. His former employer, The Hill, published a review last year of some of his columns and determined they were lacking in context and missing key disclosures.

Trump said on Thursday: 'I don't know what they're looking for or what they're doing.

'They say it had to do with filings of various papers and lobbying files. Well, did Hunter [Biden] file? Did [President] Biden file? Because they did a lot of work with other countries. To the best of everyone's knowledge, they didn't file.

'It's a very, very unfair situation.'

He added: 'It is so terrible when you see the things going on in our country with the corruption and the problems and then they go after Rudy Giuliani. It's very said, actually.'

He ended the interview by telling Bartiromo: 'You're going after the Rudy Giuliani's of the world when you have rapists and murderers coming in through the border.'

The raid may have been spurred by a voicemail where the former mayor of New York City hinted at having a burner phone.

Federal investigators may have been alerted over a November 2019 message Giuliani left his ex associate Lev Parnas in November 2019.

Giuliani is said to have been recorded saying: 'Joe, it's Rudy Giuliani.

'I'm calling, uh, to see if we can talk either about or with Lev. I have my lawyer with me, but you can call me back at [REDACTED]. That's [REDACTED].'

Giuliani then adds: 'That's the soon to be gotten rid of number.'

Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Parnas, filed a motion in court in December that included a transcript of the voicemail message that the ex-mayor left him.

A link of the transcript was found on Wednesday by Newsweek.
A missing 94-year-old man and his 96-year-old wife from New Jersey were found safe Tuesday night at a Rutters in Newberry Township, York County, police said.

Township police said a concerned citizen called them around 11:15 p.m. because of a confused man they encountered at the Rutters on the 2200 block of Old Trail Road.

When police arrived, they discovered the New Jersey couple, whose family had recently reported them missing from their home. Police said they were in danger because of a cognitive impairment condition.

The couple was not yet entered into a national missing persons database, but police said they were able to piece together who they were and reunite them with family.

In a Thursday news release, Newberry Township police said incidents like this highlight the importance of officers recognizing special needs and addressing them accordingly for the overall health, safety and wellbeing of the citizens we serve.

READ: East Pennsboro Township police locate good Samaritan who stopped to help crash victims

Motorcyclist dies after hitting deer in Swatara Township
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 03:20:26|Editor: huaxia

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AMMAN, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Jordan on Wednesday decided to lift the Friday lockdown and reopen public parks from April 30.

At a press conference in Amman, Jordan's Minister of State for Media Affairs Sakher Dudin said the partial curfew would remain in place, but the worshippers will be allowed to head to mosques on foot for Isha (night) and Taraweeh (night optional) prayers.

He stressed that all precaution measures taken by the government, including speeding up the vaccination campaign and restricting movements, aim to reach a "safe summer" that would enable Jordan to open all sectors at the beginning of July.

The minister added that the government is keen on resuming in-class education for schools and universities as of September, noting that the government has already started a vaccination campaign for some 160,000 teachers in a bid to ensure their safety and that of students.

Besides, Health Minister Feras Hawari said any government procedure needs two to three weeks to reflect on the epidemiological status, stressing that the global epidemiological status makes cautiousness and attention necessary.

Hawari said 200,000 people have failed to show up on schedule to take their first vaccine doses.

Jordan on Wednesday reported 1,910 new COVID-19 cases with 47 deaths, bringing the caseload to 708,265 and the death toll to 8,754. Enditem
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I first saw the inside of a jail cell when I was just 13 years old. Like so many people, young and old, I had lost my way. I thought that drugs and violence could save me. Instead, they only brought me, and everyone around me, a great deal of pain. At 19, I was arrested and incarcerated for third-degree murder for a role I played in a shooting that left a young man dead. I thought my life was over. I didnt feel I had a future anymore.

When I got to prison, all the prison cells were full, and I had to be put in isolation. I sat there alone. I was so bored that I asked one of the corrections officers if they had anything to read and he gave me a Bible. This was the first time I had ever read the Bible. And as I began to read, I realized that God had more for me. He had brought me to that place of isolation so I could feel Him and hear Him without my life getting in the way. Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

God instilled in my heart the need to repent and seek forgiveness. I spoke with the family of the man I had helped harm. I had played a part in the death of someone they loved, and it was up to me to make things right. Together, supported by the Church, I overcame the guilt and shame of what happened and found a new way forward.

Today at age 38, Im a pastor and a preacher of Gods Word. When I first felt Gods Word stirring in my heart, everything changed. In spite of my sin, the Lord reached out to me and gave me new life. I was oppressed by the weight of my sin and guilt, but God set me free to sing His praises and live for His witness.

It may sound incredible, but I dont really think my story is all that special. At its heart, my story is just the story of the Bible told in my life by Christ working through me. Its the story of sin, redemption, and second chances. And I know that most prisoners could tell the same story, if we let them. We in the Church just have to show them how.

We know from the Bible that Jesus has made all of us one family in Christ. Gods love is a fatherly love; when we accept that love and receive the good news of the Gospel, we become something that cant be found anywhere else in the world. We become the family that every sinner needs to find their way back home.

The amazing thing about Gods grace is that it doesnt discriminate. All are welcome in Gods family, and no one goes away hungry from the Lords dinner table. When God calls His people to Himself, every single person on Earth, whether they are at home in their living rooms or currently behind prison bars, is invited to answer.

But thats not what the world thinks and says. The world divides Gods people into the good and the bad, the upstanding member of society and the outsider, those who belong and those who do not. To the men and women whose broken lives and shattered hearts lead them to crime and incarceration, the world gives nothing but shame and regret.

Plenty of well-meaning people talk a great deal about how to rehabilitate prisoners after they leave prison. They talk about jobs and they talk about housing. They talk about creating opportunities and they talk about building programs. But while all of these factors are important for rebuilding a better life after prison, they arent whats most essential. They dont address the root causes.

Most fundamentally, crime is always a moral issue. Poverty, joblessness, and other social circumstances can always push a person one way or another. But these situations alone cant darken someones conscience to the harm done by crime or create the hopelessness, unhappiness, and brokenness that drives criminality. When people commit crimes like I did, they do so because they no longer feel that a life of loving, joyful companionship with their neighbors is possible. Men and women who commit crimes have lost their sense of Gods loving family.

So when the world piles shame and regret onto prisoners, it makes building a new life after prison impossible. People in prison are already hurting; the shame, regret, and guilt they feel during and after their sentence is a burden that prevents healing and weighs them down for a lifetime.

Thats what makes the Church so special as a vehicle for change. Only the Church can step into the brokenness at the heart of criminality and speak the saving message of Gods love. Only the Church can make the prisoner feel like they arent a leper, like theyre more than their guilt, like they can belong again to a family rich with grace and freedom.

To help give prisoners a second chance, the Church doesnt need to be perfect. It doesnt need to have a host of fully fleshed-out programs and resources at its disposal. All that the Church needs is the Gospel and a willingness to love prisoners as they would want to be loved. I speak from my own firsthand experience when I say that nothing is more impactful on the life of a former prisoner than being invited to dinner with friends, being given community responsibilities in a church, and being treated like a beloved family member in Gods kingdom again.

When Jesus was asked what Gods law commands, he answered with a simple message. God calls each of us to love Him with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37). The Church has a vocation to witness to that incredible, amazing love. And I speak both as a former prisoner and as a pastor when I say that that love alone is enough to transform hearts and create second chances that last a lifetime.
Chads transitional military government faces protests as citizens demand a return civilian rule after a military council took control of the country following the sudden death of President Idriss Deby Itno this month.

By Vatican News staff writer

At least five people have been killed, and several dozens injured in Chad on Tuesday, in protests demanding the countrys transitional military government transfer power back to civilians.

Tensions have been mounting in the north-central African country since the death of President Idriss Deby Itno on 19 April, while he was visiting troops fighting rebels north of the capital, NDjamena. Deby had ruled the country for three decades.

Following Debys death, a military council headed by his son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, took control of the country, drawing immediate criticism from political opponents and resistance from some Chadians. The military council has said that it will oversee an 18-month transition to elections.

Protests in spite of banned demonstrations

Defying a ban on protests imposed by the military during a period of national mourning for the late president, demonstrators swarmed the streets on Tuesday, carrying signs demanding a transition to civilian rule.

Security forces were deployed to maintain order and limit material damage. Trucks loaded with soldiers patrolled the streets of central Ndjamena and tear gas was used to disperse groups of demonstrators, some of whom burned tyres on the streets.

Concerns amid power transition

Chads Transitional Military Council (TMC) has been coming under international pressure from several quarters.

In a statement released on 22 April, the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (AU) expressed its deep concern about the evolving situation in Chad and the potential threat to peace, security and stability.

The AU also expressed grave concern with respect to the establishment of the Military Transitional Council and urged Chadian defense and security forces to respect the constitutional mandate and order, and to expeditiously embark on a process of restoration of constitutional order and handing over of political power to the civilian authorities, in accordance with to the relevant provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Chad, and create conducive conditions for a swift, peaceful, constitutional and smooth transition.

France, the former colonial ruler of Chad, condemned on Tuesday the crackdown on protesters in Chad during the demonstrations. French President Emmanuel Macron said that he remained in favor of a peaceful transition in Chad and that France would collaborate with international partners to improve the situation in the country.

Meanwhile, Mahamat Deby, in his first official address on Tuesday as the new military transitional leader said that the council was set up to face the absolute urgency of defending the nation and ensure the continuity of the state in order to guarantee national cohesion.

He also promised inclusive national dialogue and assured the nations allies that Chad will maintain its responsibilities in the fight against extremism and respect all of its international commitments.
This undated file photo provided by the U.S. Attorneys Office for Utah and introduced as evidence at a trial shows fentanyl-laced fake oxycodone pills collected during an investigation. Congress has voted to temporarily extend a sweeping tool that has helped federal agents crack down on drugs chemically similar to fentanyl. The Senate on Thursday, April 29, 2021, approved legislation extending until October an order that allows the federal government to classify so-called fentanyl analogues as Schedule I controlled substances. The drugs are generally foreign-made with a very close chemical makeup to the dangerous opioid. (U.S. Attorneys Office for Utah via AP, File)

Congress has voted to temporarily extend a sweeping tool that has helped federal agents crack down on drugs chemically similar to fentanyl.

The Senate on Thursday approved legislation extending until October an order that allows the federal government to classify so-called fentanyl analogues as Schedule I controlled substances. The drugs are generally foreign-made with a very close chemical makeup to the dangerous opioid.

The authority was set to expire next week. Some feared that letting the authorization lapse could have led to a surge in opioid deaths.

The Justice Department during President Donald Trump's administration lobbied to make the ban permanent, putting fentanyl analogues in the same legal category as heroin and cocaine forever.

The legislation headed to President Joe Biden's desk temporarily classifies the synthetic opioids as a Schedule I drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act, making it easier for prosecutors to build cases against traffickers. The emergency authority was initially authorized in 2018.

The temporary extension gives lawmakers several months to hammer out details of a more permanent solution and work through concerns with the mandatory minimum sentences attached to the order. The law triggers some mandatory penalties for possessing large quantities of fentanyl or fentanyl analogues.

The Biden administration had been slow-walking its work on the extension and had, on several occasions in recent weeks, canceled meetings with officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration to discuss the plan around fentanyl analogues, three people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

A White House spokesman told the AP that the Biden administration was "committed to avoiding expiration of this legislation."

Explore further DOJ asks congress to permanently classify fentanyl-like drugs

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Proposed changes to the national curriculum will see school students taught that First Nations Australians experienced European colonisation as an invasion.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) also advised the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous be replaced with First Nations Australians or Australian First Nations Peoples.

In a report released for discussion on Thursday, ACARA said it found a lack of 'truth telling' about the experience of First Nations Peoples since European settlement, and raised concerns about the 'accuracy and adequacy' of the current curriculum.

Proposed changes to Australia's national curriculum would see school students be taught that First Nation Australians experienced European colonisation as an invasion

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures is a cross-curriculum priority, meaning the topic must be taught across all disciplines including maths, science and history.

The existing themes have been criticised for putting too much emphasis on the experience of First Nations people in the period before European settlements.

In a summary of the proposed changes, the review states the curriculum failed to observe that 'the First Peoples of Australia experienced colonisation as invasion and dispossession of land, sea and sky.'

Students were not being taught their country is home to the worlds oldest continuing culture, and were not being made aware of the 'sophisticated' political, economic and social organisations systems of the First Nations Peoples.

The changes come after concerns were raised by an advisory body of the 'accuracy and adequacy' of the current curriculum being taught in schools

The new curriculum would teach that the occupation and colonisation of Australia 'were experienced by First Nations Australians as an invasion that denied their occupation of, and connection to, country/place'.

This would replace the current syllabus which refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities having a special connection to country and place.

A distinction will also be made between Australia's two First Nations Peoples - the Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

The biggest changes will be made to the history curriculum, with Year 4 students to learn about experiences on the First Fleet, the effects of colonisation on First Nations people and how this was perceived as an invasion.

Students in Year 9 will learn about contested terms like colonisation, settlement and invasion, as well as different historical interpretations about colonial societies.

Mark Rose, current chair of the indigenous advisory committee ACARA, said it was important to teach children about different perspectives

Currently the NSW Aboriginal Studies syllabus, an HSC course, teaches the concept of invasion, while junior high school syllabus discusses how the concepts of invasion, occupation and settlement differ depending on perspectives.

Mark Rose, chair of the indigenous advisory committee at ACARA, said it was important to teach children about different viewpoints.

'We do it not because we're pandering to a minority and we're politically correct', Mr Rose told The Sydney Morning Herald.

'We think embedded in indigenous knowledge for all kids is an ability to anchor themselves in competing world views.'

He said children who are taught different perspectives are given a 'real advantage' entering a society with multiple world views.

'It's a reality for our kids. Some people will find it controversial, but if you peel back our society, there are four faces of this nation.

ACARA chief executive David de Carvalho said perspectives and interpretation are core concepts in the study of history and were essential concepts students should learn

'We are part of Asia. We are one of the world's most multicultural nations. And we house the world's longest-living continuous culture.

'If those four faces are not represented, we are doing our kids a disservice.'

ACARA chief executive David de Carvalho said the proposed changes would encourage students to consider new perspectives, in events like the arrival of the First Fleet.

'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples' experiences and perspectives are part of Australia's past and present reality, but they do not invalidate other perspectives and experiences,' Mr Carvalho said in a statement.

'Perspectives' and 'interpretation' are core concepts in the study of history, used to identify the essential content students should learn.'
Bombay High Court has ordered Maharashtra and central governments to furnish clarifications establishing their stand on making Aadhaar mandatory for getting COVID-19 vaccinations. The question was raised while hearing the petitions filed in the court related to the COVID-19 situation in Maharashtra.

The court observed that the central and state governments should find an alternate system for vaccinating citizens across the country, especially prisoners who may not have Aadhaar cards. This statement came in the backdrop of concerns raised by Professor Vijay Raghavan, member of Centre for Criminology and Justice, TATA Institute of Social Services, whose team closely works with prisoners in 6 prisons across Maharashtra.

During the hearing a petition over the rise of COVID-19 cases in Maharashtra prisons, Raghavan told the bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice GS Kulkarni that prisoners who did not have Aadhaar cards were not able to avail vaccinations. As such, he urged the Court to pass appropriate orders.

ALSO READ: Bharat Biotech cuts Covaxin price to Rs 400 per dose for states

Chief Justice Datta, in turn, enquired with the state whether there was any mechanism to identify whether a prisoner had an Aadhaar card or not.

"Let us say an accused is asked by the Magistrate whether he has Aadhar or not, and he says no, then what can be done about it? Can you not check?" Chief Justice Datta asked Advocate General (AG) Ashutosh Kumbhakoni.

The Court further enquired if a mechanism similiar to the one used for collecting biometric data of individuals traveling abroad can be used to verify whether a prisoner has Aadhaar or not.

The AG responded that the issue of Aadhar-for-vaccination was a pressing issue in most prisons of Maharashtra as some of the prisoners were foreign nationals. Such prisoners would not have Aadhaar, he noted.

The Court observed that Aadhaar may be important for the purposes of identifying the person being administered the vaccination and for the purpose of maintaining a nation-wide data base. However, the Court opined that the authorities have to come up with some solution to vaccinate persons who may not have Aadhaar.

ALSO READ: COVID-19 vaccine: Bombay HC refuses to hear plea seeking uniform rates

"Some solution has to be found out from the Centre too. This issue of Aadhaar is pan-India issue," Chief Justice Datta said.

Kumbhakoni informed the court that a request has been made to the Centre for its instructions on this issue and its response is awaited.

Chief Justice Datta also suggested holding Aadhar card camps in prisons. To this, Kumbhakoni pointed out there are some foreigners in prisons as well.

"They can't have Aadhaar. The jail authorities have already written to central as well as state authorities about this issue of mandatory Aadhar for vaccine." The court then opined that "there must be someway to bypass this Aadhar issue. Vaccination is the easiest way to control this pandemic."

"Those who don't have Aadhaar card, they are not getting vaccinations. As a matter of policy please decide. On the ground that you do not have Aadhaar card and you are not vaccinated. That cannot be the situation," Chief Justice Datta said.

ALSO READ: COVID-19: Don't have vaccines to inoculate those above 18 years, says Delhi govt
Winners Announced for 2021 Virtual Oratorical Contest

Three local teens secured the top spots in the 2021 Oratorical Contest sponsored by Our Authors Study Club (OASC) and the Sigma Sigma Alumnae Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.

The virtual event was held March 27 and the awards were presented on April 10, with each recipient receiving certificates, gifts and cash prizes.

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Mia Moore, a 9th grader from Glendale, won 1st place for her exhortation of the topic, The Black Family: Representation, Identity & Diversity. Hunter Young, a 9th grade student at Branded Genius Academy and a member of Boy Scout Troop 848 in Los Angeles, received the 2nd place award.

Third place went to Jeremiah Davis, an 11th grader at St. John Bosco in Bellflower, who also represented the Gamma Zeta Boule Foundation. Ryshaun Brown, a 9th grade student at Blue Ridge Academy in Santa Clarita, garnered an honorable mention awarded.

It is with great honor that OASC and the Sigma Sigma chapter continue to cultivate young orators and keep the sacred traditions of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, said a spokesperson. Both organizations are connected through the late Vassie Wright, who established the OASC Los Angeles Chapter in 1945 and was also a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority.

Currently, Ernestine Jan Gordon serves as OASC president, Vanessa Rickman is the basileus (president) of the Sigma Sigma Alumnae Chapter and Rasheeda S. Liberty is the grand basileus Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.

To learn more, visit oratoricalcontest.com or asalh.org.

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LaRita Shelby contributed to this article.
Season six of Line Of Duty has left fans with more questions than answers, with viewers flocking to Twitter to question what exactly is DCI Jo Davidson is up to, whether Kate Fleming has really left AC-12 and who is H?

Here, MailOnline examines some of the most prominent fan theories

Kate Fleming HASN'T left AC-12 and is working undercover

One of the most shocking discoveries was AC-12's Kate is now working with a new team- with some fans suggesting she could even be the infamous H.

While chatting to her new gaffer DCI Davidson, Kate said: 'I got fed upon nicking coppers, I'd rather go after the psycho who murdered Gail [Vella].'

But despite seeming confident in her new role, some viewers were left wondering if all was at it seems and theorised that Kate could still be undercover for AC-12.

Even after she tipped off Davidson and incurred the wrath of Ted Hastings, fans have continued to speculate that she is so deep undercover that even Hastings is having to keep her true agenda secret.

Kate Fleming HASN'T left AC-12 and is working undercover: Is it true? The jury is still out on this one

DCI Jo Davidson is being blackmailed by an Organised Crime Group

Jo has already survived a grilling from AC-12's top team and appeared to clear her name when it was ex-girlfriend PS Farida Jatri who seemed to have taken part in corruption.

However, Jo was seen hitching a ride with known bent copper Ryan Pilkington and taken to collect a burner phone, making her look suspicious once more.

Fans, however, are convinced the DCI is being blackmailed by an OCG, following her emotional outburst when she was summoned to pick up a new burner.

DCI Jo Davidson is being blackmailed by an Organised Crime Group: Is it true? After her car park outburst it seems increasingly likely

DCI Jo Davidson's mother is Anne-Marie McGillis

Fans speculated over who Jo's mother could be after she was seen in a photograph in the first episode.

Many theorised her mother has something to do with season five character John Corbett's [Stephen Graham] mother Anne-Marie McGillis, who was killed by an Irish Republican paramilitary group sometime after 1989.

DCI Jo Davidson's mother is Anne-Marie McGillis: Is it true? There simply isn't enough evidence yet to determine on way or the other

Gail Vella is still alive

Although season six has centered around the murder of journalist Gail Vella, one obscure theory is that she is in fact still alive.

Craig Parkinson, who played Matthew 'Dot' Cottan in the show, said on BBC Sounds podcast Obsessed with Line of Duty: 'Somebody is in that flat and theres some connection with Gail Vella, the investigative journalist.

'You dont cast someone like Andi Osho and then just have her as little magazine prints and stick them up on a kitchen wall.'

Sarah Millican - who also appeared on the podcast - went on to suggest Vella may have been a former lover of DCI Davidson's.

Gail Vella is still alive: Is it true? It seems unlikely that the scale of police corruption is so huge that they could fake a murder victim

DC Chloe Bishop is Tony Gates' daughter

Bishop is one of AC-12's newest recruits, and as Gates and his wife Jools had two daughters, Natalie and Chloe, viewers have suggested their shared first name 'can't be a coincidence'.

Gates' daughter was last seen in season one in 2012, which means she'd be roughly the same age as Bishop is now.

Fans have suggested that Bishop either took her mother's maiden name or the name of a step-father, so that her true identity remains a secret - for now.

Gates died at the end of the first season when he walked into a busy road after getting a confession from gang leader Tommy Hunter, who had been blackmailing the police officer into covering up their criminal activity.

DC Chloe Bishop is Tony Gates' daughter: Is it true? The dates and facts line up, but there still isn't enough to write it off as a coincidence just yet

DCI Jo Davidson's mystery blood relative is...?

After it was revealed that Jo's DNA matched someone on the Police National Computer, fans theorized who that could be.

The overriding theories suggested that Davidson's relative was either Tommy Hunter, of series one and two, Mike Dryden of series two, John Corbett of series five, or Derek Hilton, killed off in series four.

Tommy Hunter was the leader of the OCG in earlier series of the show, and a paedophile. His character is dead.

Mike Dryden, the former Deputy Chief Constable, was last seen resigning from his post for perverting the course of justice in series two. His Scottish links also suggest he could be related to Davidson.

John Corbett was an undercover cop in series five who had his throat slit, leaving behind a wife, two daughters, and a mysterious link to a woman, Anne-Marie, whom fans claim could also be Davidson's mother.

Derek Hilton was a Chief Superintendent and later the Assistant Chief Constable of Central Police. He was also secretly affiliated with organised crime. He was shot in the mouth in a staged suicide in season four.

Other suggestions were Gill Biggeloe, Jackie Laverty, Lindsay Denton or Terry Boyle.
China has bet on developing its vast shale gas resources to boost its natural gas supply as demand surges. Despite recent shale production surprises to the upside, China still has several major challenges to overcome if it were to replicate, at least partially, the American shale boom.

China is estimated to have a lot of shale gas resources, even higher than those in the United States. China actually has the highest technically recoverable shale gas resources in the world, as per EIA estimates.

However, Beijing has struggled to develop those huge resources. The challenges arise because some of the most prolific basins are twice as deep underground as the shale gas resources in some of the most extensive U.S. shale gas plays. The challenging geology leads to higher well drilling and completion costs, lower margins for exploration and production companies, and, at times, mixed results in gas flows.

Chinas Latest Shale Gas Output Surprised To The Upside

Despite all those constraints, Chinese state-controlled oil majorsthe only ones currently developing the domestic shale gas fieldshave recently reported higher production than previously expected.

For example, oil and gas giant Sinopec brought 28 new shale gas wells on stream in January and February, and shale gas production from its major Fuling field jumped by 20 percent compared to last year.

Sinopec and another energy giant, PetroChina, are actually the only material shale gas producers in the country. Nearly all of the activity is focused on the Sichuan basin in central China.

Despite surging by 30 percent year over year in 2020, Chinas total shale gas output fell short of the government target for 2020, Wood Mackenzie said this week. At more than 20 bcm (1.9 bcfd) in 2020, shale gas production reached only two-thirds of the governments 2020 target of 30 bcm. Still, the production was almost 10 percent higher than WoodMacs forecasts, said Gavin Thompson, Vice Chairman, Energy  Asia Pacific at the consultancy.

Related: Brazil Reports 6% Oil Output Decline In Q1

Chinas state-owned majors will continue to look to boost shale gas production because of the government mandate to increase domestic gas supply amid soaring demand.

With the government seeking both to enhance energy security and increase the share of gas in the energy mix, the NOCs were never going to be able to put shale gas in the too difficult bucket indefinitely, Xianhui Zhang from Wood Mackenzies China upstream research team said.

The question now iscan the Chinese oil and gas giants succeed in drilling ultra-deep wells to reach and unlock the deeper-lying resources at reasonable costs?

Challenges To Chinas Shale Boom Remain

Most of Chinas current shale gas is produced from the so-called middle shale plays in the Sichuan basin, which are 2,000-3,500 meters (6,560-11,483 feet) deep, WoodMac says. Chinese majors are now looking at wells deeper than 3,500 meters and even deeper than 4,500 meters (14,764 feet). Thats approximately double the depth of most shale wells in the U.S. Marcellus shale gas play.

Considering the depth, its no surprise that drilling and well-performance results have been a mixed bag of hits and misses.

But this is where we believe the Chinese NOCs see their shale future  going ultradeep to unlock new gas resources, WoodMacs Zhang says.

Can Big Oil Lure Investors Back?

The problem with ultra-deep shale gas wells is not only purely the geological and terrain constraints. Its well economics and margins, too. The deeper the well, the higher the cost to drill, complete, and develop.

As per Wood Mackenzies estimates, a deep shale development well costs US$9 million to drill and complete. This is US$2 million higher than the cost to drill and complete one of the middle shale wells, from which most of Chinas current shale gas production comes.

To bring down well development costs for the super-deep shale wells, the Chinese majors will need technological advances and breakthroughs because not all the techniques and equipment for middle-shale wells may be applicable to a well twice the depth. In addition, China needs to cut its reliance on imported high-pressure and high-temperature equipment if it wants to slash development and breakeven costs, according to WoodMac.

Neither challenge will be straightforward to overcome, Zhang said.

Foreign Majors Fled Chinas Shale

In a sign that the unique challenges to Chinas shale development will not be easy to overcome in the near term, international oil majors have already abandoned shale exploration in China. In 2019, BP was one of the last majors to quit drilling for shale gas in China because of poor exploration drilling results.

I think its fair to say that most of those IOCs who ventured into Chinese shale in the past are not queuing up to repeat the experience. Its not impossible that some might consider opportunities in future license rounds if high-quality acreage is on offer, but dont count on it, WoodMacs Zhang said.

Chinas shale boom is now in the hands of its state-owned supermajors, which will continue to pour investment into shale and try to meet government directives for higher production.

Despite recent increases in output, the challenges with technology to dig ultra-deep shale wells and the high development costs could turn out to be too big to overcome, and Chinas shale gas industry may never come close to replicating the American shale boom.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
After Thoughts

18 plans and proposals for when we emerge from the pandemic.

April 29, 2021

Returning to public life happier in their trans body.

Embracing selfishness, shunning the internet and roller skating for 15 minutes a day.

A vision for a national paid vacation.

While the pandemic is by no means over, we have begun to imagine life on the other side  taking clothes out of retirement, scheduling lunches and making other plans (maybe a few too many) for the months ahead.

Many have found themselves reflecting on the kind of lives they want to live as the world reopens. Is ambition something to strive for? What have we learned about ourselves and our communities? After a year of reminders of how short, and precious, time can be, how do we want to make the most of ours?

We asked readers and writers to share their visions for their After, whenever it may arrive.
Lee's widow Hong Ra-hee, son Lee Jae-yong and daughters Lee Boo-jin and Lee Seo-hyun announced they have inherited W26 trillion in assets including W19 trillion in stocks in Samsung Electronics and affiliates plus real estate and art. That means the heirs owe a whopping W12 trillion in inheritance tax, which they have pledged to pay or offset over the next five years.

The Lee family said Wednesday they will donate some 23,000 works of Korean and international art to public museums, including 60 national treasures.

The heirs of Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee will donate a cache of priceless artworks to the nation as well as W1 trillion in cash for medical research to offset some of their massive inheritance tax (US$1=W1,114).

The amount is more than the entire inheritance taxes of W10.6 trillion the government earned from 2017 to 2019. By comparison, the heirs of Apple founder Steve Jobs paid W3.4 trillion in inheritance tax in 2011.

An inside source said the family will pay one-sixth or around W2 trillion by the end of this month and the remaining W10 trillion over the next five years. "They will pay with their own money and by borrowing from financial institutions," the source added.

Loans and ready cash on that scale have reportedly proved hard to come by, and there were fears that the Lee family would have to sell some of their controlling stake in the publicly traded conglomerate. Lee junior was reportedly able to get a loan as he earned W125 billion in dividends from his stake in Samsung Electronics, but his siblings had to take out high-interest loans from multiple financial institutions.

Charitable donations are tax-deductible.

W700 billion of the cash donation will be given to the National Medical Center to open Korea's first hospital specializing in infectious diseases and to establish a state-of-the-art research center under the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, while the other W300 billion will go to helping children with cancer and rare diseases and help treat around 17,000 pediatric patients.

The art collection will be divided up between the National Museum of Korea, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and other museums outside of Seoul. The modern collection, which includes pieces by Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, will be handed over to the Samsung Foundation of Culture. The combined value of the artworks is estimated at around W1 trillion.

The National Museum of Korea plans an exhibition of the collection in June before it travels around the country.
MYRTLE BEACH  The overall workforce in Horry County grew by more than 3,000 from last March, however, so did the unemployed, which grew by 3,380, according to recently released unemployment figures.

The state's Department of Employment and Workforce reported that the workforce in Horry County was at 147,662 in March, which is up from 144,583 in March 2020  the start of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

The unemployed in March 2020 was at 5,929, which pales in comparison to the 9,309 unemployed this March. Some have argued that the added benefit of $300 per week in federal aid added to the state's weekly unemployment benefit has kept some workers from finding a job.

"If you factor those new applicants out, we would be close to the unemployment of last March," said Wes Clark, a professor of economics at Horry-Georgetown Technical College. "We are close to the same number of employed as last year."

Clark said it's "very good news" that Horry County is only 2.2 percent above last Marchs unemployment rate.

"It is good to see the employed in Horry County go up over 4,000 this month, as well as more job openings moving up at the same time," Clark said. "I believe we will see the rate continue to creep down. I believe it will be slow due to the unemployment benefits still being high."

As for Georgetown County, he said it is encouraging to see that they are less than 2 percent above last year's March numbers.

"Georgetown also gained in employment, (which is) another good sign," Clark said. "They have been steadier in their numbers with no major change to the labor force."
[April 29, 2021] Tufin to Report First Quarter 2021 Financial Results on May 13

Tufin (NYSE: TUFN), a company pioneering a policy-centric approach to security and IT operations, today announced that it will release its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021 on Thursday, May 13, 2021 before the market opens. In conjunction with this report, the company will host a conference call at 8:00am ET on May 13, 2021 to discuss the Company's first quarter financial results and its business outlook. To participate in the call, please dial 877-407-2988 in the U.S. or 201-389-0923 for international participants and enter Conference ID# 13718996. The call will also be webcast lie on Tufin's Investor Relations website at investors.tufin.com.



Following the conference call, an archive of the webcast will be available on the investor relations section of the Company website's two hours after the live call ends. About Tufin

Tufin (NYSE: TUFN) simplifies management of some of the largest, most complex networks in the world, consisting of thousands of firewall and network devices and emerging hybrid cloud infrastructures. Enterprises select the Tufin Orchestration Suite to increase agility in the face of ever-changing business demands while maintaining a robust security posture. The Suite reduces the attack surface and meets the need for greater visibility into secure and reliable application connectivity. With over 2,000 customers since its inception, Tufin's network security automation enables enterprises to implement changes in minutes instead of days, while improving their security posture and business agility. Find out more at: www.tufin.com Follow Tufin on Twitter (News - Alert) : @TufinTech View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005640/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
MADRID (AP)  Three men whose social media posts allegedly encouraged extremist attacks against French targets are in custody in Spain after Spanish police and the European Unions crime agency traced them to the southern city of Granada.

The men threatened violent attacks against French people and French interests abroad after French magazine Charlie Hebdo republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad last September, Spanish police and Europol said in statements Thursday.

The caricatures enraged many Muslims, who found them blasphemous.

Europol described the three men in Granada as a terrorist cell.

Spanish police said the trio focused their efforts on persuading young people to carry out violent acts, creating specific online content directed at them.

When police arrested them in Granada earlier this week, they also found very valuable documentation for their investigations, the Spanish statement said.

A judge on Thursday ordered them to be remanded in custody.
Bengaluru, April 29 : Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) Dhruv, developed by state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), demonstrated deck operations in ship-borne trials off Chennai coast in collaboration with the Indian Coast Guard, the aerospace major said on Thursday.

"The operational capabilities included landing on dock, folding of blades and storing the helicopter in the onboard hangar," the city-based defence behemoth said in a statement here.

The statement added that the Dhruv Mk III MR is equipped with modern surveillance radar that can detect and identify ships and boats up to a range of 120 nautical miles to enable the Indian Coast Guard in its duty to secure the nation from outside threats.

"Coupled with an electro-optical sensor that can closely monitor even the smallest of the vessels at distances as far as 30 nautical miles, ALH Dhruv will boost the capabilities of the Indian Coast Guard," the statement said.

HAL Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) R. Madhavan said that these trials have proven the capability of ALH Dhruv to carry out extended operations from ships.

"With the successful demonstration of these capabilities like blade folding and storage, the helicopter is now ready to be fielded for operations," he said, adding that some of the missions that were successfully executed included surveillance, search and rescue, and anti-pollution to address oil spillage.

The statement added that the recently concluded ship-borne trials off Chennai coast in collaboration with the Indian Coast Guard also covered maintenance activities inside the hangar and on the deck, and hot refuelling with engines running on the deck.

The helicopter is equipped with Shakti engines and an advanced glass cockpit.

HAL had recently delivered ALH Dhruv Mk III MR to the Indian Coast Guard as part of its 16 ALH contract.

According to the HAL website, the Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH-DHRUV) is indigenously designed and developed. This helicopter is a twin engine, multi-role, multi-mission new generation helicopter in the 5.5 tonne weight class. The basic helicopter is produced in skid version and wheeled version.

Dhruv is "type-certified" for military operations by the Centre for Military Airworthiness Certification (CEMILAC) and civil operations by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
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What is getting you through the pandemic? Maybe its your favorite album. The familiarity of a movie youve seen countless times. A book that made you feel understood. The arts are essential to our lives, more so now than ever before. But at a time when there is a desperate need for creative expression, the livelihood of artists has never been more tenuous. This is especially true for artists in Houston, where so little relief funding has been directed.

Last month, we learned about Houstons share of the American Rescue Plan Act stimulus funding and how it might be used once the first half arrives on May 10: better pay for firefighters, preserving city services and adding police. We need to use this money to help our local creative community that has helped us all survive this difficult time.

Public funding for the arts in Houston largely comes from a percentage of Hotel Occupancy Taxes (HOT). Grants to artists and arts organizations are awarded based on HOT projections for the coming year, and not on existing income. Contracts for 2020 grants were signed prior to the pandemic using projections that were basically halved; artists expecting $15,000 received less than $9,000. For small organizations that employ many of our local artists? The cuts were even worse. This grant money keeps the lights on, pays wages and is a major source of income for the workers who receive it.

Though the city has approved allocating 63 percent of 2021 HOT funds to the 2020 grantee pool, the pandemic has exposed how deeply flawed our approach to public funding for the arts in our city is, and it must change. Even former Mayor Annise Parker acknowledged in the City of Houstons 2015 cultural plan that HOT tax funding is insufficient to support our arts community. Now, in order to prioritize everyones health and safety, Houstons cultural economy has come to a freeze, and an estimated 60 percent of cultural workers were furloughed or laid off nationally. At a time when it is nearly impossible for artists to find employment and most cultural organizations are still unable to safely operate, the city must do more.

Its unfortunate that despite our world-renowned reputation for performing and visual arts and diverse cultural offerings, Houston is not anywhere near the top of the list when it comes to public funding for the arts for major metropolitan cities nationwide. We are still severely underfunded, and Houston continues to trail its peer cities in this area. As of 2017 the City of Houston spent $6.70 per resident on arts and culture compared to Dallas $16.70 and Austins $22.90.

A Brookings study estimated that by July of 2020, Houstons creative workers were losing $1.3 billion in average monthly earnings. The city knows that artists are struggling and has thus far provided $5 million in CARES aid for artists and arts organizations, but its nowhere near enough. The Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs has told us that theyre using every available resource to help artists, and fortunately, we now have $600 million more in resources available from the new federal stimulus package.

The pandemic has exposed just how harmful and unsustainable Houstons approach to funding the arts is, and how urgent the need is for relief. If Houston continues to follow its current course of disaster-prone arts funding, we face a bleak future for our city. Small and mid-sized cultural organizations will close, artists will choose to leave, and the quality of life for all of us will suffer. But what if we re-imagine a future where our local government treated the creative community as essential partners in weathering this crisis? What if our city followed the lead of other cities that prioritize investing in the arts, despite having smaller populations and fewer resources than we do? With increased funding, new organizations could emerge, artist business owners could create and sell more work, and our creative economy would support the citys economy. If this vision for Houston moves you, stand with us by calling on the mayor and city council to provide significant relief and recovery funding from the new stimulus funds, and to restructure how Houston funds the arts.

Artists and cultural workers in Houston have come together to organize under the new collective, Arts Accountability Houston (AAH). AAH is building a movement to hold our local government accountable to provide short-term relief and long-term change. We have a unique window of opportunity to fundamentally change our city, and we need your help to make this a reality. Join us in making sure local artists get an equitable share of the stimulus funds coming on May 10 so that Houstons arts and culture ecosystem doesnt just survive the final stretch of this pandemic, but emerges stronger and more resilient.

Chong is a visual artist in Houston. Oliver is an organizer. Schlosberg is a Houston-based arts administrator. They are members of Arts Accountability Houston. Francis Almendarez, Delilah Montoya, Laura Napier, JD Pluecker, Reyes Ramirez, BABA RUEROB and Mkina Tapscott are members who also contributed to this piece.
Iran's president has replaced the head of a think tank that recorded an interview with the country's foreign minister that leaked out this week, a tape that provided a rare glimpse into the theocracy's power struggles and set off a firestorm in Iran.

In the recording of the conversation between Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and an economist at the Strategic Studies Center, the think tank associated with Iran's presidency, Zarif offers a blunt appraisal of diplomacy and his constricted role in the Islamic Republic.

Iran's presidency announced the former chief of Strategic Studies Center resigned and Ali Rabiei, who already serves as the Cabinet spokesman, would replace him.

The audio tape, leaked earlier this week to London-based, Farsi-language news channel Iran International, set off political controversy across Iran ahead of the countrys June 18 presidential election. While Zarif has said he does not want to run in the election, some have suggested him as a potential candidate to stand against hard-liners in the vote.

Zarifs leaked remarks included cutting references to the limits of his power and those of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a top commander in Irans paramilitary Revolutionary Guard who was killed in a drone strike in Baghdad.

Earlier this week, Zarif expressed regret that the recording had leaked out as the country's president portrayed the breach as an incident intended to derail ongoing talks over the return to Iran's tattered nuclear deal with world powers.
Court will hear JEDI political interference case against Trump

A complaint of political inference by former President Donald Trump in the Defense Departments award of a massive cloud computing contract to Microsoft in 2019 may now get its day in court.

The lawsuit filed by Amazon Web Services, alleging that Trump actively steered the 10-year, $10 billion award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Microsoft, can go forward under a ruling issued by U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith, who denied the governments motion to dismiss the claim.

If the U.S. continues with the case, it will have to continue to argue that Trump did not act improperly during the lengthy and contested solicitation process.

DOD has consistently stated in all court filings, and public discussions, that the allegation of improper influence is not supported, Pentagon spokesman Russell Goemaere said just over a week after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The DOD [inspector general] considered these allegations and found no evidence that improper influence occurred or affected the procurement process or award decision."

Attorneys for AWS have argued that the decisions to award Microsoft the contract, and to reaffirm that award in September 2020 after allowing for revisions to the original bid, reflected long-standing animus of Trump toward Jeff Bezos, founder of AWS parent company Amazon.

The court at least is willing to listen to evidence to the contrary, and that could mean a change in direction for DOD's cloud plans.

"The record of improper influence by former President Trump is disturbing, and we are pleased the Court will review the remarkable impact it had on the JEDI contract award," an AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "AWS continues to be the superior technical choice, the less expensive choice, and would provide the best value to the DOD and the American taxpayer."

In January, DOD's CIO told Congress that it could move on from JEDI if the litigation continues to drag on. The program has been under a stop-work order because of the lawsuit since February 2020.

The "prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question," the unsigned DOD communication to Congress stated. "Under this scenario, the DOD CIO would reassess the strategy going forward."

According to Microsoft corporate vice president Frank X. Shaw, the ruling "changes little."

"Not once, but twice, professional procurement staff at the DOD chose Microsoft after a thorough review. Many other large and sophisticated customers make the same choice every week," Shaw said. "We've continued for more than a year to do the internal work necessary to move forward on JEDI quickly, and we continue to work with DOD, as we have for more than 40 years, on mission critical initiatives from supporting its rapid shift to remote work to the Army's IVAS," a reference to the military's $22 billion augmented reality headset program, which recently scaled up from a pilot to production.

This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.
At some point in the 1980's, when Rudy Giuliani was a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, my mother went with a friend to hear him talk at a local meeting. She came home enormously impressed. The speaker, she reported, was not all that good-looking, but he was a real "comer."

As always, Mother was right. After an unsuccessful run for New York City's mayor in 1989, Giuliani was finally elected to that office in 1994  and then re-elected in 1998. At the end of his second term, he found himself fortuitously in the right place at a terribly wrong time, effectively able to aid and bolster the stunned, bewildered people of his city after the 9/11 attack.

There was no braver man in the Big Apple at that time. Just as he had "taken on" the New York City Mafia and won, so the mayor confronted the challenges of the horrific attack on the World Trade Center. Risking his life, Giuliani reported to Ground Zero and heroically led suffering New Yorkers to safety through the white rubble of wilderness.

For some, he was the 20th-century equivalent of Moses. Time magazine named him the 2001 Person of the Year. (Well, okay, they had given the same distinction to the Ayatollah Khomeini twenty-two years earlier!) But the point is that Rudy Giuliani was for a while not just the head honcho of the Big Apple. He was the Mayor of America.

It wasn't just for his 9/11 heroics that he earned that accolade. During his two-term administration, he cleaned up New York City as it hadn't been before and hasn't been since. Every year that I visited my family in New York, I could see the miraculous changes. The bums were gone from the theater district's skid row. The homeless were relocated to facilities up the Hudson. Tall, beefy cops patrolled every subway in New York's vast underground system. Anyone comparing the city then and now would give high marks to His Honor.

But in the intervening years, it has become political sport to turn the tables of affection on Rudy Giuliani. Originally a Democrat, he had over the years become a highly regarded Republican, at one time aspiring to the presidency. But now, solely by dint of his affiliation with Donald J. Trump, he is regarded by Democrats as a "traitor" to the nation. That is a serious charge, but "words matter" to Democrats only when it suits their purposes.

To emphasize the danger the Biden administration associates with this septuagenarian, this week, his apartment in New York City was forcibly entered by FBI agents, who seized whatever electronic devices they could get their hands on. This unexpected maneuver was undertaken despite the fact that it came in the midst of cooperative ongoing conversations with Giuliani's attorney concerning the charges against him.



Media gathered outside Giuliani's apartment (YouTube screen grab).

Not surprisingly, these had to do with the Trump administration's concerns about Joe Biden's pressuring the Ukrainian government to dismiss any investigation into corruption by the firm Burisma, which handsomely compensated Biden's son Hunter for his "service" on its Board of Directors. Never mind that Biden was, himself, guilty of quid pro quo, having said openly that he would withhold money from the Ukrainian government unless the investigation of Burisma was halted.

So, though complaints against Giuliani and company had been lodged by Democrats many months ago, it took a Biden presidency to see to it that Rudy was humiliated by an FBI "home invasion" reminiscent of the harrowing one launched against another elderly Trump associate, Roger Stone. In that early-morning raid covered by tipped off CNN, Roger and his frail wife feared for their safety.

It would seem that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is capable of thwarting  or willing to thwart  only old conservative men. They haven't bothered to breach the walls of the sprawling Clinton compound in Chappaqua for incriminating evidence in the matter of the faux dossier by Christopher Steele, financed by the DNC with funds from Hillary's campaign.

Nor have they bothered to bust into the fashionable Los Angeles digs of Hunter Biden, perhaps rummaging through his steel straws and various "extraneous" laptops to find evidence of his sweetheart deals with the wife of a Moscow mayor and a lending institution in China.

If Democrats cannot parse issue along racist lines, they handle it through sheer politics. The ruling objective of even the thinnest Democrat majority is to discount, dismay, and destroy the opposition. Hence, a credible servant of the people like Rudy Giuliani has his apartment invaded by a swarm of government agents.

Even before this recent ordeal for Giuliani's family, he had routinely become the object of scorn by leftist publications, who minimized his successes as New York's mayor and suggested he had become a bug-eyed madman. These are the same journalists  if that's the word  who would rise in resentment at any reference to Joe Biden's cognitive lapses  or his vacant, squinty eyes.

The sudden sea change in attitude toward Republican politicians is in lockstep with the woke's "cancel culture" campaign. Once revered as an American icon, someone on the right of the political spectrum can be just as quickly sabotaged  as was the case with 60 Minutes' inaccurate reporting on Florida governor Ron DeSantis  or even relabeled as a traitor to America. This scary scenario is nevertheless strategically preferred by the left, whose intent is to reconstruct  or more accurately, destruct  America in its own image. Incidentally, apologies for lapses in truth-telling are rarely forthcoming.

To accomplish this form of tyranny, it is necessary to confuse and humble Americans. Ransacking Giuliani's apartment and trashing the reputation of its occupant is not at all different from tearing down a statue of a Confederate leader. In the eyes of a power-hungry Democrat party, any rearrangement of historical truths is permissible as long as it advances their political goals.

There is a move afoot to defund or redefine the police in America. But rest assured: the FBI agents who break into the homes of Trump-supporters will not be dismissed as unessential or threatening. In fact, they appear to have become a willing strong arm of the party in power.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the issue of the and recast the world's view of digital access as a critical component to an equitable society, according to Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad, who underlined that technology is meant to be a great equaliser and not a source of division.

In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world embraced digital transformation at a pace never witnessed before," Prasad said at the UN High-Level thematic debate on Digital Cooperation and Connectivity: Whole-of-Society Approaches to End the '



"The pandemic has resulted in societies reimagining technology's critical role in how we work, learn and live, Prasad said.

Addressing the high-level event virtually on Tuesday, Prasad said the pandemic "has not only laid threadbare the issue of the but more importantly recast our view of digital access as a critical component to an equitable society.

Asserting that technology is meant to be a great equaliser, not a source of division, Prasad said almost half the world's population does not have access to high-speed broadband and is hence deprived of access to virtual platforms, tele-medicine, distance education and e-payments.

Technology is neutral but its impact will depend on choices that we make today in its application, access and governance. Hence it becomes critical that we make the digital revolution inclusive by creating an environment where nobody is left behind, he said.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, speaking at the General Assembly high-level debate, said almost half the world's population, 3.7 billion people, the majority of them women, and most in developing countries, are still offline.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted this disparity. While confronting the pandemic, those without Internet access have been unable to benefit from remote education, remote work, or remote health services. Without decisive action, the digital divide will become the new face of inequality, she said.

Prasad said the COVID-19 pandemic has also brought to the forefront the critical need for cutting-edge technology tools and innovation in the areas of tele-education and tele-medicine.

The expedited development of contact and tracing application called AarogyaSetu' (Heath Bridge) and CoWINapp for the rollout of vaccines are outcomes of India's efforts, he said adding that in the spirit of South-South cooperation, India launched the Pan Africa E-Network which aims to provide free tele-education and tele-medicine services to developing countries.

Further, he underlined that digitalisation can support waves of change that could dramatically shift to a more efficient governance system. We need to make technology an enabler for sustainable development, economic growth, social inclusion and environment sustainability.

We need to develop a more equitable and effective digital ecosystem by continuous skill development, increased access and affordability of digital technology. This will enable us to correct the structural injustices and ensure that the digital revolution is inclusive and empowering, he added.

Prasad told the General Assembly event that India has taken a concerted decision to adopt a whole-of-society approach to digital technology and improved public services, citizen engagement and accountability.

In 2015, the government launched 'Digital India' with the aim to bring digital inclusion and empower ordinary citizens with technology-based solutions that are affordable and easy to use.

Today, India has the second-largest internet user base and is the second-largest mobile manufacturer, offering the cheapest internet data tariffs in the world.

We aim to develop India as a USD 1 trillion digital economy by 2025, 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.)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:46:41|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese military spokesperson on Thursday blasted some U.S. politicians for hyping the so-called "China threat," saying it will ultimately harm the United States.

The comment by Chinese Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Wu Qian came after the U.S. government, in its budget proposal for the 2022 fiscal year, listed China as the most pressing of many challenges to the country's defenses.

The wild speculation and hype from some people in the U.S. government reflect a morbid mentality, Wu said at a regular press conference.

"China has no intention of threating or challenging any country," he said. "But if someone insists on threating or challenging China, we will have no choice but to respond in kind."

Wu was also asked to comment on the Chinese navy's commissioning of vessels on April 23.

"The commissioning of naval vessels is irrelevant to the regional situation and is not aimed at any specific country or goal," Wu said, adding that China's policy stance of firmly maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea remains unchanged. Enditem
(Natural News) Young adults who previously contract the Wuhan coronavirus and subsequently recover are not protected against potential reinfection, according to a study. Findings suggest that the presence of antibodies after the initial infection is not enough to prevent later reinfections.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai looked at data obtained from more than 3,000 healthy members of the U.S. Marine Corps. The service members aged 18 to 20 years old were observed during the study period of May 2020 until November 2020. The researchers found that about 10 percent of the service members who were previously infected with the Wuhan coronavirus contracted it again.

According to the April 15 study published in The Lancet, 19 of 189 Marines infected with COVID-19 caught the virus once more. This was compared with new infections found in 50 percent of participants  1,079 out of 2,247 service members  who had not contracted the pathogen. Marines who tested positive a second time during the study period were isolated, with researchers conducting additional tests. Meanwhile, Marines who were newly infected with COVID-19 had their neutralizing antibody levels taken.

The study authors then looked at their findings to compare the antibody responses of re-infected and newly infected Marines. Through the findings, the authors also sought to understand why the re-infections occurred.

They discovered that in those who tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, re-infected Marines had lower antibody levels against the virus than the newly-infected Marines. In addition, re-infected service members had about 10 times less of the pathogen in their body compared with service members who were infected the first time.

The findings suggest that some re-infected people could transmit the virus, but the authors noted that this theory merits further scrutiny. The researchers also noted that while their study looked at young, fit and mostly male recruits  the risk of reinfection will also extend to young people regardless of gender.

Even vaccines would not be sufficient to protect young people against the Wuhan coronavirus

According to the researchers, the crowded living conditions on a military base and the close personal contact required for basic training played a role in the pathogens transmission among the Marines. Thus, they called for vaccination to boost immune responses, prevent reinfection and reduce transmission.

Professor and senior study author Dr. Stuart Sealfon warned young people that despite recovering from a prior infection, they can still contract the Wuhan coronavirus again. Immunity is not guaranteed by past infection, and vaccinations that provide additional protection are still needed for those who have had COVID-19. Sealfon and the other authors exhorted young people to get vaccinated whenever possible. (Related: Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least 8 months after infection, study says.)

But it appears that getting vaccinated does not prevent the transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus at all. Two particular variants of concern  the B117 strain from the U.K. and the B1351 strain from South Africa  have been found to be more infectious compared to the original strain. In fact, a study conducted by Israeli researchers discovered that these two variants may break through vaccine-induced immunity.

A team of researchers from Israels Tel Aviv University (TAU) and health care provider Clalit Health Services found that people who complete the two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine were eight times more likely to contract the South African B1351 strain. Meanwhile, those who receive at least one dose of the BNT162b2 jab were also more susceptible to contracting the U.K. B117 variant. (Related: Covid-19 injections are spreading new variants of coronavirus.)

The Israeli team looked at the COVID-19 tests results of 800 citizens for their study. Half of the test results came from people who were vaccinated with the Pfizer jab, while the other half came from unvaccinated Israelis. The research aimed to determine if immunized people were more likely to catch variants of concern compared to those who were not.

The researchers found that in people who completed the two-dose vaccination schedule, the South African strain was eight times more prevalent vis-a-vis unvaccinated people  at 5.4 percent versus 0.7 percent. The British variant was of equal prevalence as the South African strain in individuals who got two vaccine doses. However, it had a higher occurrence in people who got at least one dose of the Pfizer jab.

Speaking to the Times of Israel, lead researcher and TAU professor Adi Stern remarked: We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccines protection.

Visit Pandemic.news to read more articles about COVID-19 reinfection and transmission.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

TheLancet.com

LifeSiteNews.com

TimesOfIsrael.com
New Delhi: Late legendary actor Irrfan Khan left this world last year on April 29. On his first death anniversary, the nation remembered the icon with nostalgia and much love in the heart. His wife and companion of several years, Sutapa Sikdar shared a few heartwarming details on her Facebook account, recalling the man of few words with impressive eyes which said it all!

Sutapa Sikdar's note to late husband Irrfan Khan reads: People living deeply have no fear of death Anais Nin

your favourite poet Irrfan. Last year tonight me and my friends sang songs for you,all your favorite songs. The nurses were looking at us strangely as they were used to religious chants in critical times but I had overdone that for you irrfan morning evening and night for two years and since they told me it was time I wanted you to go with memories you loved so we sang songs.next day you left for the next station I hope you knew where to get down without me..

363 days eight thousand seven hundred and twelve hours..when each second is counted .

how exactly does one swim this huge ocean of time. The clock had stopped

At 11.11 on 29th april for me .irrfan you had a keen interest in mystery of numbers . .and funny you had three 11s on your final day . some say actually many say this is a very mystical number 11/11/11.

How does one walk ahead the pandemic just adds to the anxiety, fear and pain.

The days went by with umpteen responsibilities some extremely new ones like signature galore for changing of name.

My fingers kept stopping on that how could I just take his name away and make it sutapa, I was unable to sign took a day off and the name game played on my mind. Like a film in a projector .i remember sitting outside NSD late evening ..beautiful girls from kathak kendra floating out ..they were all very well dressed up unlike us we were always in our blue trackpant and sky blue t shirt ..both boys and girls wore the same and you mispronounced my name and I tried to correct and rubbed it in as usual my permanent thing that north Indians are so stupid and they only can pronounce sunny Vicky Rahul type names and proceed to kake ki dukaan in gol chakkar to have ek bata do chai .its been a long journey of correcting each other spanning a life time. fighting arguing laughing evolving together. you were the loner in a crowd. And now a whole crowd has followed you up there ..by the way OM from the tea stall in the nukkad went some years back has he made a chai ka stall up there? are you having ek bata do chai there. and are drinking water from the running streams?

All of you stay in peace remember us that we loved you, all of you. And remember all of you is missed by some one or the other ..all your families grieve ..may you all rest in peace! I hope there is enough space I hope some of you will forgive us for not been able to give a respectable cremation.#irrfan#NSD#nationbleeding#wearesorry#restinpeace

Irrfan battled Neuroendocrine Tumour for two long years. He went to the United Kingdom for treatment before announcing the news on social media with his fans.

The unfortunate news of Irrfan's demise sent shockwaves across the globe with fans and well-wishers thronging social media to offer their condolences. Celebs from Hollywood, Bollywood and Pakistan expressed grief over his sudden and untimely demise.

Irrfan's last rites were performed on April 29, 2020, at the Versova Kabrastan in Andheri, Mumbai. His relatives and close ones paid their last respects. Throughout his illustrious showbiz career, the master craftsman was applauded for several of his notable works and praised for many.

Irrfan married Sutapa, a fellow NSD graduate on 23 February 1995. Together, they have two sons - Babil and Ayaan.

We miss you, Irrfan!
In this image taken from Alameda Police Department body-camera video, officers pin Mario Gonzalez to the ground during an arrest on April 19, 2021, in Alameda, Calif. (Alameda Police Department)

It's a video that has drawn comparison to that of the George Floyd killing.

On April 19, police in the Bay Area city of Alameda responded to a report of an intoxicated man and a possible theft.

An altercation occurred, an officer was seen pinning a man for at least four minutes, and soon Mario Gonzalez was dead. Experts have expressed shock at his death, questioning why the officers pinned him when he appeared to pose no imminent threat. The case has sparked outrage in the community.

The Alameda County coroners office is conducting an autopsy. Gonzalezs death is under investigation by the Alameda County Sheriffs Office and the county district attorneys office.

Here is what we know:

When the video begins

The nearly hourlong video from two officers body cameras shows police talking to Gonzalez in a park after receiving 911 calls that he appeared to be disoriented or drunk. Gonzalez in the video acts dazed and struggles to answer officers questions.

Gonzalez wont produce any identification, so the officers try to force his hands behind his back to handcuff him, but he does not let his arms go limp. The officers determine that he is resisting, then push him to the ground, according to the video.

The officers, as they seek to restrain him, repeatedly ask Gonzalez for his full name and birth date.

Were going to take care of you, OK, were going to take care of you, one officer tells him.

I think you just had too much to drink today, OK? Thats all, the officer says. After learning his name, the officer adds, Mario, just please stop fighting us.

Gonzalez, who weighed about 250 pounds, by that point is lying facedown on some wood chips and can be heard shouting and grunting as the officers use body weight to control him. One officer seems to put an elbow on his neck and a knee on his shoulder.

Hes lifting my whole body weight up, an officer tells his colleague.

A knee on the back

One officer puts his knee on Gonzalezs back for four minutes or more.

Story continues

Gonzalez is heard in the video telling officers, I didnt do nothing, OK?

Shortly before Gonzalez stops breathing, one officer asks the other, Think we can roll him on his side?, but the other answers, I dont want to lose what I got, man.

Another officer then asks, We got no weight on his chest?, then repeats, No! No weight ... no weight.

Hes going unresponsive, one officer says.

The officers roll Gonzalez over and perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but he was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

This is the video released by police. Caution: It is graphic.

How did police initially describe the incident

The Alameda Police Department said in its first news release that "officers attempted to detain the man, and a physical altercation ensued. At that time, the man had a medical emergency."

Another news release said that there was a scuffle as officers attempted to place his hands behind his back.

The protection of human life is our primary duty as police officers, interim Police Chief Randy Fenn said last week in announcing a series of investigations into the death. The loss of Mr. Gonzalez is a terrible tragedy, and our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones.

Those statement did not mention Gonzalez being pinned to the ground.

What is the family saying?

His family said officers unnecessarily escalated what should have been a minor, peaceful encounter with the unarmed man.

The police killed my brother, in the same manner they killed George Floyd, his brother Gerardo Gonzalez told reporters Tuesday.

Hes a lovely guy. Hes respectful, all the time, Marios mother, Edith Arenales, said. They broke my family for no reason.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
BOSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Eaton Vance Senior Floating-Rate Trust (NYSE: EFR) (the "Fund") held a special meeting of shareholders on April 16, 2021 (the "Special Meeting"). At the Special Meeting, Fund shareholders were asked to approve a new investment advisory agreement with Eaton Vance Management, the Fund's investment adviser. The Special Meeting was adjourned to April 30, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time to allow more time for shareholders to vote. The October 29, 2020 record date for shareholders entitled to vote at the adjourned Special Meeting remains unchanged. Information about the adjourned Special Meeting appears below.

If, as of October 29, 2020, you were a Fund shareholder and have not yet voted, the Fund urges you to submit your vote in advance of the adjourned Special Meeting by one of the methods described in the Fund's proxy materials. The Fund's proxy statement is available online at https://funds.eatonvance.com/closed-end-fund-and-term-trust-documents.php.

If, as of October 29, 2020, you were a holder of record of Fund shares (i.e., you held Fund shares in your own name directly with the Fund) and wish to participate in and vote at the adjourned Special Meeting, you should email your full name and address to AST at [email protected] You will then be provided with credentials to participate in the adjourned Special Meeting. You will be able to vote by entering the control number found on the proxy card you previously received. All requests to participate in and/or vote at the adjourned Special Meeting must be received by AST by no later than 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on April 30, 2021.

If, as of the relevant record date, you held Fund shares through an intermediary (such as a broker-dealer) and wish to participate in and vote at the adjourned Special Meeting, you will need to obtain a legal proxy from your intermediary reflecting the Fund's name, the number of Fund shares you held and your name and email address. You may forward an email from your intermediary containing the legal proxy or attach an image of the legal proxy to an email and send it to AST at [email protected] with "Legal Proxy" in the subject line. You will then be provided with credentials to participate in the adjourned Special Meeting, as well as a unique control number to vote your shares. If you would like to participate in, but NOT vote at, the adjourned Special Meeting, please send an email to AST at [email protected] with proof of ownership of Fund shares. A statement, letter or the Vote Instruction Form from your intermediary will be sufficient proof of ownership. You will then be provided with credentials to participate in the adjourned Special Meeting. All requests to participate in and/or vote at the adjourned Special Meeting must be received by AST by no later than 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on April 30, 2021.

Please contact AST at [email protected] with any questions regarding access to the adjourned Special Meeting, and an AST representative will contact you to answer your questions.

About the Fund

Eaton Vance Corp. was acquired by Morgan Stanley on March 1, 2021. Its Eaton Vance Management, Parametric, Atlanta Capital and Calvert investment affiliates are now part of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the asset management division of Morgan Stanley. These investment managers offer a diversity of investment approaches, encompassing bottom-up fundamental active management, responsible investing, systematic investing and customized implementation of client-specified portfolio exposures.

Shares of closed-end funds often trade at a discount from their net asset value. The market price of Fund shares may vary from net asset value based on factors affecting the supply and demand for shares, such as Fund distribution rates relative to similar investments, investors' expectations for future distribution changes, the clarity of the Fund's investment strategy and future return expectations, and investors' confidence in the underlying markets in which the Fund invests. Fund shares are subject to investment risk, including possible loss of principal invested. The Fund is not a complete investment program and you may lose money investing therein. An investment in the Fund may not be appropriate for all investors. Before investing, prospective investors should consider carefully the Fund's investment objective, strategies, risks, charges and expenses.

This press release is for informational purposes only and is not intended to, and does not, constitute an offer to purchase or sell shares of the Fund. Additional information about the Fund, including performance and portfolio characteristic information, is available at eatonvance.com.

Statements in this press release that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements, as defined by the U.S. securities laws. You should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on forward-looking statements because they are subject to uncertainties and other factors that may be beyond the Fund's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Eaton Vance Management

Related Links

www.eatonvance.com


The annual Lake Avenue garage sale is one of the most asked-about events in the Auburn area.

"Is it happening this year?" "Is it still the first Saturday in May?" "Is it still on Lake Avenue?"

The fact the sale didnt take place last year  due to the COVID-19 pandemic  has led to even more questions about it this year.

But the sale will indeed take place this weekend, its traditional first Saturday in May. Located along Lake Avenue from the Owasco River Bridge to Auburn High School, the 17th annual sale will last from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 1. As any previous shoppers of the sale know, however, both those hours and those directions are elastic, and could extend as much as any homeowner desires.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

India's mammoth push to beat its raging COVID surge with vaccinations looks troubled, with its vast inoculation programme plagued by shortages, confusion and political squabbles.

From Saturday, just as the country reels from a brutal explosion of cases, an estimated 500-600 million Indians will become eligible when the drive is opened to all adults.

Until now, only "frontline" workers like medical staff, people over 45 and those with existing illnesses have been given the AstraZeneca shot or Bharat Biotech's homegrown Covaxin.

But even this more modest programme has faltered, with some areas running out of shots and others throwing them away because of a lack of demand, in part due to hesitancy.

"The queues here are so colossal," said Jayanti Vasant as he waited at a busy vaccination centre in Mumbai. "The people are just fighting amongst themselves."

Stocks

So far around 150 million shots have been administered, equating to 11.5 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people. Just 25 million have had two shots.

According to the government, Indian states have stocks of more than 10 million shots and a further eight million will be made available in the coming days.

The Serum Institute is making 60-70 million AstraZeneca doses per month, and is aiming for 100 million by July. Bharat is aiming to produce 10 million a month and targets 60-70 million.

Indian firms also have deals to produce other shots including Russia's Sputnik Vsome of which should arrive soonJohnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine and Novomax.

But it could be months until these are deployed.

"Do you want to control the epidemic, save lives or both? If you want both you'll require a huge amount of vaccines. And we don't have it." said T Jacob John, a retired clinical virology professor at the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

Targeted strategy

Several states have said they don't have enough shots to start vaccinating all over-18s, including Maharashtra and New Delhi, two of the worst-hit areas.

But despite this, and even though people have to register on a government app but there may still be a rush at vaccination centres on Saturday.

On Wednesday, when online registration began, more than 13 million people signed up and users complained of technical glitches.

Further confusion has been created by New Delhi's decision to ask states and private hospitals to order vaccine supplies on their own, creating a three-tier pricing system that requires them to pay more per dose than the central government.

This has led to squabbles between the central government, run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, and states governed by opposition parties.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some private clinics have been told they won't receive any vials for months.

Experts say that given the shortages, and its colossal population, India should have a much more targeted vaccination policy than just opening up its programme to everyone over 18.

This could include concentrating vaccinations in hotspotssome 75 percent of cases are in nine out of India's 36 regionsand higher-risk population groups.

"We will have to use whatever supplies are available in a very careful and judicious way," agreed Lalit Kant, former head of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research.

"Priority areas must be identified by the (central government) and the states using a proper epidemiological picture to decide who needs it first," Kant told AFP.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross delivers a speech during a visit to Coldstream in the Scottish Borders during campaigning for the Scottish Parliamentary election. Picture date: Thursday April 29, 2021. PA Photo. See PA story SCOTLAND Election. - Jane Barlow/PA Wire

Douglas Ross has pleaded with Scots to put aside their dislike of Boris Johnson and the sleaze row engulfing Downing Street when they vote in next week's Holyrood election, arguing that the SNP's independence threat dwarfed both.

In a message directed at Unionists disillusioned with his party, the Scottish Tory leader said Westminster governments and Prime Ministers "can change" but the SNP's independence plans are "irreversible."

Referring to Mr Johnson's low popularity ratings in Scotland, he said the election was "more important than what you think about individuals and parties".

He also warned against complacency that the result does not matter as the Prime Minister will block Ms Sturgeon's demand for a second independence referendum, stating: "We cannot leave the future of our country to wishful thinking."

In a speech delivered at Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, Mr Ross said: "We cannot give strength to the SNPs argument that Scotland wants another independence referendum. If we want the UK to continue then we need to vote for it."

His speech was delivered amid intense concern in Tory ranks that the series of controversies engulfing Downing Street and Mr Johnson will depress turnout among the party's supporters, while spurring more nationalists to come out and vote.

Ms Sturgeon plans to use a victory to force Mr Johnson to drop his opposition to another independence referendum, which she wants to stage by the end of 2023, with Scotland still recovering from the pandemic.

If he refuses, she plans to pass her own Referendum Bill and challenge him to block it in court.

But she was accused of being "delusional" over a separate Scotland requiring a hard border with England after she argued that she could get a similar deal to Northern Ireland's Brexit arrangement.

The First Minister said the Northern Ireland Protocol could be a "template" if Scotland was permitted to join the EU. The province continues to follow many EU rules so there is no land border on the island of Ireland, in line with the Good Friday agreement peace deal.

Story continues

However, there is a new regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which no longer follows EU regulations thanks to Brexit, requiring inspections at the province's ports and customs documents.

Labour said Ms Sturgeon was "detached from reality" as the protocol was already causing a major headache for Northern Irish firms. Liberal Democrat Alistair Carmichael said: "She is singing from the Brexiteer songbook."

The First Minister has this week ratcheted up her attempts to make a key election issue the funding of Boris Johnson's flat renovation, his alleged "let the bodies pile high" comment opposing a third lockdown, and a lobbying row over Covid-19 contracts.

She used a Channel 4 leaders' debate this week to urge voters in elections across the UK next week to punish Mr Johnson over the "stench of sleaze" around his Government and show the Tories "they are not untouchable".

But Mr Ross said: "Governments both at Holyrood and Westminster, First Ministers and Prime Ministers can change. What the SNP are proposing right now is irreversible.

"It would crush our economic recovery. It would take us to the brink of ending the United Kingdom. And right now, they are on course to achieve that, for winning a majority and ending the Union."

Urging Labour and Lib Dem supporters to vote tactically for his party, he said: "We need to stand up to them in the national interest, to stop a second independence referendum and secure our recovery. Just this once, we need to put our differences aside and come together behind a single campaign."

He reiterated the best way of stopping the nationalists getting a majority was to vote Tory on the regional list ballot paper, a tactic he said worked in 2016 under Ruth Davidson's leadership.

Emma Harper, an SNP candidate in South Scotland and an MSP in the last parliament, has claimed a hard border with England would create jobs despite the rest of the UK accounting for more than 60 per cent of Scottish trade.

But Mr Ross said it would instead "put half a million Scottish jobs at risk, make foreigners out of friends and family, and end a 300-year-old Union".

In an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr last weekend, Ms Sturgeon floundered when asked why a separate Scotland would be "the only part of the EU" not to have a hard border with a neighbouring country that is not part of the bloc.

However, she told the Irish Times: "The Northern Ireland protocol, if there are easements there, yes, I think that does offer some template, but we work in a proper planned way to make sure that any rules that have to be applied are applied in a way that absolutely minimises any practical difficulties for businesses trading across the England-Scotland border."

Mr Carmichael said: "The Northern Ireland protocol was hastily cobbled together and badly thought out. Already we are seeing the devastating consequences of that decision."

Ian Murray, Labour's Shadow Scottish Secretary, said: "The First Ministers comments simply beggar belief and demonstrate the bizarre positions that Nicola Sturgeon is forced to adopt in a vain attempt to mask the economic threat caused by Scottish separation.

"It seems that the First Minister is not a keen observer of Northern Irish politics and has an almost Faragesque relationship with reality."
Spain's National Police force has warned homeowners to be on the lookout for a new technique that burglars are using to know if anyone is at home.

With many people unable to regularly visit their properties because of coronavirus travel restrictions burglars have been looking for new tricks to make their crimes easier.

Through their social media accounts, the National Police have warned of a new method being used by thieves, which is similar to the one already well-known involving transparent plastic strips.

In this new method, the criminals place strings of glue between door and the frame. With this simple system, the thieves know if there is movement in the house in question and if its occupants enter and leave normally or, if on the contrary, they have not opened the door for days.

The National Police force is calling for the public to be vigilant and if they find these glue strings at the entrance to their property, to call 091. In this way, officers can be put on the trail of criminals who may be operating in the area.
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Clinical Oncology NGS Market Growth & Trends

The global clinical oncology next generation sequencing market size is expected to reach USD 892.61 million by 2028 registering a CAGR of 14.70%, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Technological advancements in next-generation sequencing coupled with high adoption of companion diagnostics and personalized medicine drive the global market growth.

In addition, a rise in the utility of next generation sequencing (NGS) for liquid biopsy is expected to increase revenue generation in the market. NGS is employed to sequence circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) for the analysis of liquid biopsy samples. This leads to efficient molecular profiling of tumors, which, in turn, facilitates real-time, non-invasive monitoring of tumors.

Moreover, a rise in market competitiveness, growth in oncology diagnostics spending, and increasing research activities to develop solutions that can potentially be used for clinical oncology drive market progression. For instance, in January 2021, Spectrum Solutions, LLC collaborated with the UCLA School of Dentistry on saliva-based NGS liquid biopsy research, which would be used for early diagnosis of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC).

North America dominated the global market in 2020 owing to multiple initiatives taken by various government bodies in the region to screen and prevent cancer, such as Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network, a flagship program by the CDC. Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest-growing regional market over the forecast period owing to continuous reforms in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries in the region.

Key players in this market have undertaken strategic alliances to strengthen their market position. For example, in March 2020, Thermo Fisher Scientific signed an agreement with Janssen Biotech, Inc. for the development of CDx for tumor management. Under the agreement, Janssen Research & Development, LLC would validate multiple biomarkers to be used with Thermo Fisher's Oncomine Dx target test for identification of patients with NSCLC

Request a free sample copy or view report summary: Clinical Oncology NGS Market Report

Clinical Oncology NGS Market Report Highlights

Targeted sequencing & resequencing accounted for the largest market share in 2020 owing to the high adoption of targeted gene panels for oncology diagnostics

Moreover, the discovery of novel cancer biomarkers further boosts the development of targeted sequencing oncology panels

Whole-Genome Sequencing (WGS) is projected to register the fastest growth rate from 2021 to 2028 as the technology offers a complete genomic survey of the tumor genome

This helps in the generation of a detailed map of indels, copy number changes, Single Nucleotide Variations (SNV), and complex structural rearrangements with a single assay

Companion diagnostics is projected to be the fastest-growing application segment from 2021 to 2028 owing to the high adoption and benefits offered by the technology

Therefore, major market participants focus on innovative R&D in companion diagnostics to gain approval for novel tests

For instance, in August 2020, the FDA approved Guardant360 CDx assay; an NGS-based liquid biopsy CDx to identify Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) gene mutations in metastatic NSCLC

Access Press Release@ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-clinical-oncology-next-generation-sequencing-ngs-market

Clinical Oncology NGS Market Segmentation

Grand View Research has segmented the global clinical oncology next generation sequencing market on the basis of technology, workflow, application, end-use, and region:

Clinical Oncology NGS Technology Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2028)

Whole Genome Sequencing

Whole Exome Sequencing

Targeted Sequencing & Resequencing Centrifuges

Clinical Oncology NGS Workflow Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2028)

Pre-Sequencing

Sequencing

Data Analysis

Clinical Oncology NGS Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2028)

Screening Sporadic Cancer Inherited Cancer

Companion Diagnostics

Other Diagnostics

Clinical Oncology NGS End-use Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2028)

Hospitals

Clinics

Laboratories

Clinical Oncology NGS Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2028)

North America US. Canada

Europe Germany UK. France Italy Spain

Asia Pacific Japan China India South Korea Australia

Latin America Brazil Mexico

Middle East and Africa (MEA) South Africa Saudi Arabia



List of Key Players of Clinical Oncology NGS Market

Illumina, Inc.

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

Agilent Technologies

Myriad Genetics

Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI)

Perkin Elmer

Foundation Medicine

Pacific Bioscience

Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd.

Paradigm Diagnostics

Caris Life Sciences

Partek, Inc.

Eurofins Scientific S.E.

Qiagen N.V.

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.
On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement.

Five feet long and weighing about the same as an adult African elephant, this space rock posed no threat. But the early detection of this asteroid, only the second to be spotted in space before hitting land, was a good test of our ability to spot larger, more dangerous asteroids. Moreover, it afforded scientists the chance to study the asteroid before its obliteration, quickly narrow down the impact site and obtain some of the most pristine, least weathered meteorite samples around.

Later that day, a fireball almost as bright as the sun illuminated Botswanas darkened sky before exploding 17 miles above ground with the force of 200 tons of TNT. Fragments fell like extraterrestrial buckshot into a national park larger than the Netherlands.

Immediately, Botswanan scientists and guides joined with international meteorite experts to hunt for the asteroids wreckage. As of November 2020, the team has found 24 individual meteorites. And thanks to the telltale geology of these rocky leftovers, observations of their path to Earth and the memories of a dead NASA spacecraft, scientists were able to unspool the history of this asteroid with breathtaking detail.
Local News, Crime, Press Releases

By Chris Boyle Published: April 29 2021

The male suspect was carrying a white colored cup containing a dark colored substance which he then threw at the victims face.

Nassau County Legislator Carrie Solages (D - Lawrence) has urged residents to call police with any information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the man responsible for a gruesome acid attack that gravely wounded a 21-year-old Hofstra University student in the driveway of her Elmont home.

The assault occurred at 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday March 17. According to the Nassau County Police Department, Nafiah Ikram, 21, while walking on the driveway of her Arlington Avenue residence, was approached from behind by an unknown male. The male suspect was carrying a white colored cup containing a dark colored substance which he then threw at the victims face. The suspect, who is described as approximately 62 tall, skinny build, wearing a black colored sweatshirt with a hood and wearing gloves, fled eastbound on Arlington Avenue.

According to a GoFundMe page (warning - graphic, distressing images), Ikram sustained severe burns to her face, eyes, chest, arms and lungs and was hospitalized for several weeks. She has lost nearly all her eyesight and it is unclear how much - if any - can be regained. Earlier today, Legislator Solages applauded Crime Stoppers for doubling the reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in this case to $20,000.

After enduring a vicious attack that gravely injured their daughter and violated the sanctity of this familys home in such an unthinkable way, the most important thing we can do as a community is come forward with any information that can help police solve this case, Legislator Solages said. During my meetings with Nafiah and her family, they have displayed tremendous courage and resolve amidst this nightmarish ordeal, and I will not rest until the individual responsible for this heartless assault is at long last brought to justice.

Legislator Solages urges anyone with information is urged to call Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. All calls are kept confidential.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in enterprise disaster recovery and business continuity planning in areas such as remote access, networking, SaaS applications and ransomware. Over the past year, IT execs have been scrambling to plug those gaps and update DR plans on the fly.

More significantly, the pandemic triggered fundamental IT changes at many organizations, including a hasty migration of applications to the cloud, an acceleration of digital transformation efforts, the emergency provisioning of new systems and services outside of traditional procurement procedures, and, in many industries, the emergence a new category of full-time, work-at-home employees who are handling mission-critical data on their personal devices.

According to new research from Accenture, "More than three-quarters of business executives plan to redesign how staff work, accelerate digital transformation plans and fundamentally change how they engage with customers," says group chief executive Manish Sharma.

All of those factors will need to be taken into account as organizations rewrite their disaster recovery and business continuity plans for 2021 and beyond. The pandemic demonstrated that worst-case scenarios (or scenarios even worse than we could ever imagine) do happen. And disaster recovery and business continuity planning will never be the same.

DR and BC plans put to the test

Most enterprises had disaster recovery plans in place prior to the pandemic, and many were conscientious about performing practice drills, called tabletop exercises, in which key players gather together to respond to a disaster scenario. Pandemic response is typically part of a DR plan.

In fact, Dan Johnson, director of global business continuity and disaster recovery at IT service management company Ensono, recalls that he was conducting disaster-recovery war games at a client site in late 2019 and just happened to select a pandemic as the test scenario.

But no one anticipated anything resembling the magnitude, the global scope and the duration of the current pandemic. Viewed from the narrow focus of IT keeping the lights on without any service interruptions or data loss (the recovery part of the equation), the pandemic didn't present issues that IT wasn't prepared to handle. After all, the virus didn't cut the power, crash servers or infect networks with malware.

As a business continuity challenge  which is the broader discipline of maintaining business processes, coordinating the people aspect of the response, and communicating internally and externally  the pandemic exposed some shortcomings. "For the most part, disaster recovery plans were still soundthe recovery of technology. The biggest impact was with business continuity plans, which is the recovery of processes and people, making sure all business systems are working," Johnson says.

Losing data wasn't the issue, adds Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at ESG Research. It was more about having the right people in place, and understanding all the steps that needed to be taken in terms of things like VPNs and networking. The most obvious challenge was the sudden requirement that employees work from home full-time. "Some organizations were more ready than others," Bertrand says. "Some were caught flatfooted in terms of collaboration tools and the ability to support a remote workforce."

Not only did organizations need to make sure that employees had the right physical equipment and Internet connection, they had to provide robust and secure collaboration tools, and they had to protect this new, broad attack surface of home Wi-Fi networks from the surge in ransomware targeted at remote workers.

"There was a lot of scrambling. We took a lot of panicked phone calls," particularly in connection with ransomware, says Doug Matthews, vice president of product management at Veritas Technologies, which provides enterprise backup and recovery services. Organizations needed to quickly make sure that endpoints were protected, and that enterprise firewalls were set up to repel attacks that might originate from an unsecured endpoint.

Matthews added that the pandemic also triggered "a hasty movement to cloud adoption," even at organizations that had previously been resistant to cloud technologies. This has created what he calls a "resiliency gap," as companies are just now going back, reading their agreements with SaaS vendors, and realizing that their data is not necessarily protected.

"One area that is problematic is SaaS," Bertrand says. "People don't understand SLAs all that well. Just because you have data in Office 365 or Salesforce that doesn't mean they do backup for you." SaaS providers offer SLAs for availability, but that's not the same as recoverability.

"You're always responsible for your data," Bertrand adds. He says organizations need to make decisions on what data is mission critical and therefore needs to be backed up. "Salesforce is mission critical, and Office 365. But what about GitHub or Zendesk? There's a lot more than meets the eye."

The pandemic also exposed a lack of foresight when it came to the networking aspect of DR/BC planning, since the sudden shift of employees to remote sites scrambled traditional network traffic patterns and created potential bandwidth issues.

Ravi Ravishanker, CIO and associate provost at Wellesley College, says he was fortunate that the college recently moved all of its ERP applications, Web servers and learning management system to the cloud, because the college would not have had the bandwidth to accommodate students and staffers connecting from remote locations if all of those applications had been on-premises.

Wellesley College transitions to remote learning

The pandemic affected industries in different ways, and higher education was faced with a difficult challenge: How do you suddenly switch from in-person classrooms to fully remote learning?

"We all prepared for a pandemic, but nobody was prepared for COVID," Ravishanker says. Fortunately, with core applications living in the cloud, Wellesley was able to keep its systems available to end users and students no matter where they were located.

The difference between a disaster like a fiber cut or power outage and the COVID pandemic is that by mid-March, people could see it coming and do some quick planning. "One of most fundamental things we needed to get decisions on was the technology platform for remote learning. We were all in agreement the choice should be Zoom," Ravishanker says.

The college quickly obtained an institutional license and set up Zoom drop-in sessions for students prior to their leaving the campus last March. "Decisions were made at a pace never seen before," he adds. There were a small number of students who had outdated computers or couldn't afford Internet connections at their home locations, so the college took care of those arrangements.

After students were sent home, the next week was spring break, so the team had some time to train teachers before remote classes began. They started with the basics and then over time moved to more advanced features like creating breakout rooms and managing chats.

When the semester ended, the team conducted de-briefing sessions with faculty and began gearing up for the fall semester in which approximately half of the students were on campus and half were remote.

Having to support two systems at once created technology challenges, as well as issues such as making sure classrooms were set up for social distancing and ensuring that everyone was following the colleges COVID protocols, such as wearing masks. With students wearing masks it was difficult to be heard, so the team provided additional microphones in each classroom.

Amid disasters, there are always positives. Some faculty have been reporting that the chat option on Zoom has resulted in more contributions from students who might have been reluctant to raise their hands and speak publicly. And Ravishanker says the crisis has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies like Zoom which will likely continue to be used, even after the pandemic is over.

At IT service management company Ensono, everyone had laptops and many were already working from home, so that wasn't an issue. The company made sure employees were connecting over a VPN, and bandwidth was expanded to accommodate increased traffic from remote workers. On the business continuity angle, the CEO conducted regular town hall meetings with employees, and managers were encouraged to check in on employees often. Customers were also kept in the loop

At this point, Ensono employees are still working from home, and Johnson doesn't anticipate that employees will ever return to their pre-pandemic work schedule. It seems more likely that some employees will work from home permanently, and others will adopt a hybrid model of 2-3 days a week in the office.

Once decisions like that shake out at organizations across the globe, DR plans will have to be altered. For example, many companies have physical backup sites equipped with computers, phones, etc., so that employees can continue to work in the event that headquarters is hit with a disaster. But those facilities proved useless in the pandemic because they weren't set up for social distancing, and if employees are able to do their jobs from home, maybe it's time to abandon those sites.

Similarly, as companies move their backup data to the cloud, and many turn to disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), maybe it's time to reconsider the need for owning and operating a physical data backup site.

The future of DR/BC

As a result of the pandemic, disaster recovery has gone from the back burner to the forefront of enterprise IT planning. ESG asked 600 IT professionals in North American and Western Europe about their spending intentions for 2021, and they indicated that DR was a top priority. For example, disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) has exploded due to COVID, according to the research firm Markets and Markets, which predicts the global DRaaS market will increase 23.3% a year between now and 2025. "The DRaaS market will continue to grow post-COVID-19 as more enterprises migrate IT infrastructure to the cloud, boost business continuity and improve IT operations," according to the report.

Adding to the pressure on IT execs in post-COVID era, Bertrand notes that the business requirements for data recovery times have shrunk from hours to minutes. And 15% of respondents in the ESG survey say their business units won't tolerate any downtime at all.

On top of that, organizations may now have data in multiple public clouds, in SaaS applications that organizations don't have direct control over, as well as on-premises. In this hybrid cloud world, "you have to have solutions in place that protect mission-critical applications in a way that is congruent with business objectives," Bertrand says.

The good news is that there are automated tools that can help. Vendors such as Collibra, Digital Guardian and Varonis can help companies automate data classification. Zerto, Veeam, Unitrends and others provide automated, non-disruptive DR testing tools as part of their broad DR/BC platforms. And vendors such as Rubrik, Cohesity and Actifio offer highly automated data protection and data management platforms build for hybrid cloud environments.

IT execs who are thinking strategically about data protection should also consider the concept of dual use. For example, if there is backup data sitting in the cloud, it could be an opportunity to apply analytics to that data in order to support the company's digital transformation efforts.

"There is a tremendous amount of work still ahead," Bertrand says. "It's definitely not a time to let up."
Early Learning and Care Division

Subject: Guidance Regarding the Extension of Temporary Emergency Childcare Services, Enrolling New Families in Temporary Emergency Childcare, Transition into Ongoing Childcare Services, and Assessment of Family Fees for Essential Workers and At-risk Populations

Number: 21-08

Date: April 29, 2021

Expires: June 30, 2022, unless rescinded sooner

Authority: Senate Bill 117 (Chapter 3, Statutes of 2020); Executive Order N-33-20; Executive Order N-45-20; Executive Order N-47-20; Senate Bill 89 (Chapter 2, Statutes of 2020); Executive Order N-66-20; Assembly Bill 89 (Chapter 7, Statutes of 2020); Senate Bill 98 (Chapter 24, Statutes of 2020), Senate Bill 820 (Chapter 110, Statutes of 2021), Assembly Bill 82 (Chapter 6, Statutes of 2021), Assembly Bill 86 (Chapter 10, Statutes of 2021)

Attention: Executive Directors and Program Directors of California Alternative Payment Programs (CAPP) and California Migrant Alternative Payment Programs (CMAP)

Purpose

This Management Bulletin (MB) rescinds and replaces MB 20-14, which set forth directives for the temporary extension of services for families whose children were enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare during Fiscal Year (FY) 201920, the assessment of family fees, and the transition and prioritization of enrolling eligible families into ongoing childcare services in FY 202021.

This MB provides updated guidance, as authorized in Assembly Bill (AB) 82 and AB 86, to California Alternative Payment Programs (CAPP) and California Migrant Alternative Payment Programs (CMAP) on the extension of temporary Emergency Childcare services through June 30, 2022. This updated guidance is for families receiving services in temporary Emergency Childcare during FY 2019-20, and whose services were further extended during FY 2020-21 under Senate Bill (SB) 820.

This MB provides new guidance to CAPP and CMAP contractors on enrolling additional children of essential workers, at-risk children, and children with disabilities or special health care needs whose individualized education plan (IEP) or individualized family service plan (IFSP) includes early learning and care (ELC) services through June 30, 2022, and the assessment of family fees for families enrolling in temporary Emergency Childcare.

This MB also provides guidance for the transition and prioritization of enrolling eligible families into ongoing childcare services. Additionally, this MB provides guidance on CAPP contractor augmentations and describes Child Development and Nutrition Fiscal Services (CDNFS) Reporting Updates.

Finally, this MB provides the authority under which the California Department of Education (CDE) is issuing these policy changes and its rationale for doing so, background on other recent policy changes that interact with the directives issued here, and additional resources that may support programs in understanding and implementing the changes.

The directives below only apply through June 30, 2022, pursuant to AB 82 (Chapter 6, Statutes of 2021), and AB 86 (Chapter 10, Statutes of 2021). As the situation evolves, the Legislature may choose to change or modify the actions they have taken in the 202021 Budget Act. To the extent that any changes are made, additional guidance will be issued.

Policy

Services for families who are currently enrolled in Emergency Childcare through a CAPP or CMAP may be extended until June 30, 2022, in accordance with the guidance below.

CAPP and CMAP contractors may also enroll new families into temporary Emergency Childcare. New enrollments in temporary Emergency Childcare under the CAPP or CMAP contract must be consistent with the instructions outlined below. Unlike families enrolled into temporary Emergency Childcare in the spring of 2020, new families whose children are enrolled into temporary Emergency Childcare pursuant to this MB must meet the eligibility requirements as specified in the Child Care and Development Services Act, commencing with Section 8200 of the California Education Code (EC). Families must be enrolled in priority order, and must be enrolled as eligible for services using the self-certification process as specified below. Families who are newly enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare through this process may receive services until June 30, 2022, subject to the availability of funds, but will not have 12-month eligibility pursuant to EC Section 8263(h), nor a right to appeal when services are terminated because the family has not established initial eligibility for services pursuant to all of the requirements of the state Child Care and Development Services Act. Once families are enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare services, contractors shall not request updated information from those families. All families enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare must be assessed a monthly family fee, assuming the family is not otherwise exempt from fees pursuant to EC Section 8273.1 or MB 20-19(a). Contractors must use the FY 202021 Family Fee Schedule available at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/familyfeeschedulejul2020.xlsx.

Contractors must enroll new families into temporary Emergency Childcare, and transition families into ongoing subsidized childcare in priority order, as specified below.

All families who meet the eligibility and need requirements as defined in EC sections 8263 and 8263.1, and who are currently enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare have priority for enrollment into ongoing subsidized childcare over any other family on the contractor's wait list, as specified below. Families transitioning from Emergency Childcare into ongoing childcare by meeting all requirements of the Child Care and Development Services Act, or its successor, are eligible for ongoing subsidized services for no less than 12 months from the date they are certified for ongoing subsidized services.

Directives for Implementation

Extension of Temporary Emergency Childcare for Currently Enrolled Families

Families whose children are currently enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare through a CAPP or CMAP may continue to be served until June 30, 2022. Families that are currently enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare are not required to submit updated documentation in order for temporary Emergency Childcare services to be extended.

For families whose temporary Emergency Childcare services are being extended, contractors may either issue families a Notice of Action (NOA), or a letter notifying them of the extension of services. The notification must include the effective date of extension in temporary Emergency Childcare; the revised last date of enrollment in temporary Emergency Childcare, and the amount of any family fee assessed, as specified below. A letter template for notification of the extension of temporary Emergency Childcare services, assessment of family fees, and the revised last date of temporary Emergency Childcare services can be located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/emerextenparentletter.docx.

Note: Families who were previously enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare that have since disenrolled and wish to return are required to re-enroll into temporary Emergency Childcare services as a new enrollment, as specified in the guidance below for new enrollments into temporary Emergency Childcare.

Contractors shall remind families in writing at least 30 days before the end date of the limited term authorization of temporary Emergency Childcare so that they may make alternative arrangements for care.

New Enrollments into Temporary Emergency Childcare

The CAPP and CMAP contractors may enroll new families into temporary Emergency Childcare after all families who are currently enrolled have received an extension of temporary Emergency Childcare services.

Pursuant to AB 82 and AB 86, families enrolling in temporary Emergency Childcare as an essential worker or other special population must be eligible for subsidized services pursuant to EC Section 8263(a)(1)(A) and have a need for services pursuant to EC Section 8263(a)(1)(B). Contractors must use the FY 2020-21 Revised Income Ceilings Guidelines, as set forth in MB 20-12, which can be accessed at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb2012.asp, when enrolling families in temporary Emergency Childcare services. Families enrolling in temporary Emergency Childcare are eligible to receive services until June 30, 2022.

Application Process for New or Returning Families Enrolling into Temporary Emergency Childcare Services

New families of essential workers and at-risk populations that need temporary Emergency Childcare must submit a self-certification form attesting to their basis of eligibility and need for temporary Emergency Childcare services, including their income and family size, in order to enroll in temporary Emergency Childcare. Families shall complete and submit the Self-Certification of Eligibility for COVID-19 Emergency Childcare form for each parent included in the family size. The Self-Certification of Eligibility for COVID-19 Emergency Childcare form can be accessed at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/covidselfcert.pdf. This form will be the only documentation required in order to enroll the family into temporary Emergency Childcare services, and must be included in the family data file. The contractor shall review the self-certification of income and family size prior to enrolling the family to ensure that the family meets the eligibility requirements for temporary Emergency Childcare services.

The CAPP and CMAP contractors who obtain a signed Self-Certification of Eligibility for COVID-19 Emergency Childcare form shall not be responsible for verifying if a parent or guardians eligibility for subsidized services, if the parent or guardians work is essential under State Executive Order N-33-20, or if a family is part of the at-risk population in accordance with this MB when accepting a child for temporary Emergency Childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the CAPP and CMAP contractor shall not be subject to a penalty for accepting a child whose parent or guardian is determined not to meet those definitions.

Families who are essential workers are eligible to enroll their children in temporary Emergency Childcare, subject to capacity, if all of the following apply:

The family works as an essential worker as defined below. If the family includes a two-parent household, both parents/caregivers must either be essential workers or the other parent must be unable to provide care for the child due to incapacitation

The family requires childcare to perform their essential work

The family is working outside of the home and is unable to work remotely

The familys income does not exceed 85 percent of the State Medium Income, or the family is otherwise eligible for services under EC 8263(a)(1)(A); and

The familys assets do not exceed $1 million

Families whose children are included in the at-risk population category are also eligible to enroll their children in temporary Emergency Childcare, subject to capacity, if both of the following apply:

The parent, as defined in EC Section 8208(u), self-certifies a child is identified as one of the following: Receiving Child Protective Services or at risk of abuse, neglect or exploitation; or

Participating in the Emergency Childcare Bridge Program for Foster Children (authorized by Californias Welfare and Institutions Code Section 11461.6); or

Experiencing homelessness as defined in Section 11434(a)(2) of Title 42 of the United States Code, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act; or

A survivor of domestic violence; or

Has disabilities or special health care needs whose IEPs or IFSPs include ELC services The family assets do not exceed $1 million.

Reminder: Families enrolling in Emergency Childcare on the basis of the child being a survivor of domestic violence, or on the basis of having a child with disabilities or special health care needs whose IEPs or IFSPs include ELC services must meet the eligibility requirements and have a need for subsidized ELC services, as specified in EC 8263.

To enroll the children of essential workers and at-risk populations in an expeditious manner, contractors shall allow for the use of digital signatures and electronic submission of applications, if at all possible. To the extent possible, applications should be reviewed and the family should be enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare immediately. Families can be notified of their enrollment electronically to expedite the process.

For families who are newly enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare services, contractors may either issue families an NOA, or a letter notifying them of the enrollment in services. The notification must include the effective date of enrollment in temporary Emergency Childcare; the last date of enrollment in temporary Emergency Childcare (which cannot be later than June 30, 2022), and the amount of any family fee assessed, as specified below. A letter template for notification of enrollment in temporary Emergency Childcare services, assessment of family fees, and the last date of temporary Emergency Childcare services can be located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/emerenrollparentletter.docx.

Prioritization for New Enrollments in Temporary Emergency Childcare in CAPP and CMAP

Contractors must enroll new families into temporary Emergency Childcare in the following priority order:

At-Risk Populations At-Risk Population Priority 1: Children identified as receiving Child Protective Services or at-risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation

Children identified as receiving Child Protective Services or at-risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation At-Risk Population Priority 2: Children receiving services through the Emergency Foster Care Bridge Program

Children receiving services through the Emergency Foster Care Bridge Program At-Risk Population Priority 3: Families experiencing homelessness as defined in Section 11434(a)(2) of Title 42 of the United States Code, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act

Families experiencing homelessness as defined in Section 11434(a)(2) of Title 42 of the United States Code, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act At-Risk Population Priority 4: Children of domestic violence survivors Essential workers in the following sectors, whose total family income does not exceed the current income eligibility threshold and are not able to work remotely (enroll in the order listed): Essential Worker Priority 1: Healthcare/Public Health and Emergency Service sectors

Healthcare/Public Health and Emergency Service sectors Essential Worker Priority 2: Food and agriculture, teachers, education staff and providers of ELC services including custodial, kitchen and other support staff; workers supporting critical infrastructure, state and local government workers, communications and information technology (IT), energy, transportation and logistics, critical manufacturing, hazardous materials, financial services, and chemical sectors

Food and agriculture, teachers, education staff and providers of ELC services including custodial, kitchen and other support staff; workers supporting critical infrastructure, state and local government workers, communications and information technology (IT), energy, transportation and logistics, critical manufacturing, hazardous materials, financial services, and chemical sectors Essential Worker Priority 3: All other fields listed on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers document, located at https://covid19.ca.gov/img/EssentialCriticalInfrastructureWorkers.pdf Families with children with disabilities or special health care needs whose IEPs and IFSPs include ELC services.

Family Fees for Families Newly Enrolled in Temporary Emergency Childcare

Contractors must provide written notification to families who are newly enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare that they will be required to pay a family fee, as applicable, effective the date they are enrolled into temporary Emergency Childcare. Family fees shall be assessed based on the familys self-certification of income, family size, and hours of need provided at enrollment into temporary Emergency Childcare services.

Contractors must issue families an NOA or a letter notifying them of the family fee, as applicable, with the right to appeal the assessed family fee in accordance with California Code of Regulations, Title 5 (5 CCR), Section 18120.

At the time CAPP and CMAP contractors notify families of the fee assessment, as applicable, they must also notify providers of the assessed fees and the date fees are to be collected from the family if the contractor deducts the family fees from the providers reimbursement. Family fees are effective the date the family is enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare. Family fees for subsequent months are due on the first day of the month, just as they are for families enrolled through the typical process and will become delinquent in accordance with normal procedures. Failure to pay the family fee could result in dis-enrollment from services. Unlike in ongoing childcare, in temporary Emergency Childcare, if a family appeals the contractors decision to assess family fees, and if the familys appeal of the assessed family fee is successful, the contractor shall issue a refund of the overpayment of fees, as applicable. Contractors may, but are not obligated to, offer families a reasonable repayment plan for delinquent fees. Contractors should ensure that all delinquent fees are resolved prior to the end of the families Emergency Childcare services.

Families who are dis-enrolled prior to June 30, 2022, due to non-payment of family fees must be given appeal rights. Contractors may notify families of dis-enrollment due to non-payment of family fees by issuing an NOA or a letter. In either case, the family shall be given appeal rights in accordance with 5 CCR Section 18120. A letter template to notify families of dis-enrollment from temporary Emergency Childcare due to unpaid fees can be found at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/emerdisenparentletter.docx.

Contractors must use the FY 202021 Family Fee Schedule available at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/familyfeeschedulejul2020.xlsx when assessing fees through the end of this fiscal year, as directed below:

Fees are based on the income, family size and hours of need self-certified by the parent at time of enrollment. No additional documentation will be required.

Part-time fees are assessed for self-certified need of less than 130 hours per month, and full-time fees are assessed for self-certified need of 130 hours or more per month.

Families currently enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare and whose family circumstances have changed may submit a revised self-certification.

The following families are exempt from paying family fees:

All families with children who are receiving Child Protective Services (CPS) (for the duration of the extension, re-enrollment, or new enrollment of temporary Emergency Childcare)

All families with children who have been identified as at-risk of abuse or neglect (for the duration of the extension or new enrollment of temporary Emergency Childcare)

In accordance with MB 20-19(a), through June 30, 2021; in instances where a provider must close unexpectedly, including due to COVID-19, or when the provider is required to limit in-person services in response to a local or public health order or guidance, the family should receive a refund or credit for their family fee as specified below:

When the family paid a full-time or part-time fee as specified in their NOA or letter, as applicable, and the provider was closed for the entire month due to a written state or local public health order or guidance or needed to limit availability for in-person services due to staffing/group size restrictions, the family fees paid for the month of closure should be refunded or credited.

When the family paid a full-time fee at the beginning of the month as specified on their NOA or letter, and the provider was unexpectedly closed due to a written state or local public health order or guidance, or needed to limit availability for in-person services due to staffing/group size restrictions, the family should be refunded or credited the difference between the full-time fee and the part-time fee, if the hours of in-person service due to the closure were less than 130 hours.

Transition of Temporary Emergency Childcare Families to Ongoing Childcare Services in CAPP and CMAP, and Priorities for Enrollment

Pursuant to AB 89, contractors received an augmentation in September 2020 to provide continuity of care for families who are enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare. To the extent possible, CAPP contractors must utilize these funds to transition children who are enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare into ongoing (non-Emergency) subsidized CAPP if they have sufficient funds to do so, in accordance with the requirements below.

CAPP contractors must prioritize families that were enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare before July 1, 2020, for ongoing subsidized childcare, prior to any other new enrollments, and must enroll families in the following priority order, as specified in Item 6100-194-0890, Provision 7 of AB 89, Section 111(f) of Senate Bill (SB) 98, EC 8263(b) and (c), and 5 CCR Section 18106:

First Priority Category: Families that received temporary Emergency Childcare in a CAPP prior to July 1, 2020, who:

Seek to enroll children that are receiving CPS through a county welfare program

Seek to enroll children that are identified by a legally qualified professional as at-risk of being neglected or abused

Meet income eligibility requirements, with the lowest gross monthly income in relation to family size admitted first

Second Priority Category: Families that did not receive temporary Emergency Childcare prior to July 1, 2020, who:

Are receiving CPS through a county welfare program

Are identified by a legally qualified professional as at-risk of being neglected or abused

Meet income eligibility requirements, with the lowest gross monthly income in relation to family size admitted first

Note: Within each priority category, families must be prioritized in the order listed.

Families receiving temporary Emergency Childcare services that are certified for ongoing subsidized services for FY 202021 shall follow the typical enrollment process and must provide all documentation as specified in 5 CCR, and the 12-Month Eligibility Implementation Guidance issued with MB 17-14, located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/twelvemonthguidance.doc.

Families certified for ongoing subsidized services shall receive services for no less than 12 months, as specified in MB 17-14, which can be located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb1714.asp. Families who are certified for ongoing 12-month eligibility shall receive services for no less than 12 months from the date they are certified for ongoing childcare.

Families seeking to enroll children who are receiving CPS through a county welfare program into ongoing childcare, or who are seeking to enroll children who have been identified by a legally qualified professional as at-risk of being neglected or abused into ongoing childcare, must provide a written referral as specified in 5 CCR Section 18092 to be eligible for prioritization into ongoing childcare. Families who are seeking to be transitioned into ongoing childcare through the CAPP or CMAP, but who do not have a written referral, may continue to receive Emergency Childcare services until June 30, 2022. When the family has obtained the written referral, as specified in 5 CCR Section 18092, the CAPP or CMAP contractor may enroll the family into ongoing childcare services. To the extent possible, CAPP contractors must work directly with families whose children are enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare and the local R&R agency to assist those families with accessing ongoing subsidized or nonsubsidized childcare services that meet the familys needs. As part of this process, families who meet need and eligibility requirements must be provided information and assistance to access subsidized childcare, while families who do not meet the eligibility and need requirements for ongoing subsidized childcare must be provided information and assistance to access nonsubsidized childcare.

Application Process for Families Transitioning from Temporary Emergency Childcare into Ongoing Childcare

As described above, to the extent possible based on the availability of funds, CAPP contractors may begin transitioning eligible families from temporary Emergency Childcare into ongoing childcare, following the certification processes specified in 5 CCR and the 12-Month Eligibility Implementation Guidance, located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/twelvemonthguidance.doc.

Families must document, through the regular documentation process, that they meet the eligibility and need requirements specified in EC sections 8263 and 8263.1 in order to be enrolled into ongoing subsidized CAPP childcare.

At the time of certification into ongoing subsidized childcare, the contractor must determine if the family is responsible for paying a flat monthly family fee, and shall assess the family fee as specified in MB 20-13, available at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb2013.asp using the FY 202021 Family Fee Schedule available at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/documents/familyfeeschedulejul2020.xlsx.

Contractors shall issue families transitioning from temporary Emergency Childcare into ongoing childcare an NOA informing them of their 12-month eligibility in accordance with EC Section 8263(h) and MB 17-14. Contractors are required to issue an NOA as specified in 5 CCR Section 18118, and shall also provide families with due process as specified in 5 CCR Section 18120. Families transitioning from temporary Emergency Childcare into ongoing childcare shall be assessed fees, if applicable, based on the eligibility and needed documentation submitted during the enrollment process. If family fees are applicable, contractors shall determine and calculate the appropriate full-time or part-time monthly fee in accordance with MB 20-13, and issue an NOA informing the parent of the applicable full-time and part-time fee.

Child Development and Nutrition Fiscal Services Updates

Alternative Payment Program Contractor Augmentations

AB 82 provides $76 million to extend current Emergency Childcare enrollments for CAPP and $80 million to allow for new Emergency Childcare enrollments in CAPP and CMAP through June 30, 2022. The length of time families may be extended for temporary Emergency Childcare, or the number of new families that may be enrolled into temporary Emergency Childcare, is subject to the availability of funds for each CAPP and CMAP contractor. Augmentations provided in FY 202021, including the forthcoming augmentation provided by AB 82, must be considered when determining the number of new children that a CAPP or CMAP contractor may enroll with the intention that all temporary Emergency Childcare enrollments can receive care through June 30, 2022.

Each CAPP and CMAP contractor must assess the cost of extending care for each child enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare to ensure all children enrolled prior to June 30, 2020, may receive care through June 30, 2022. Subsequently, contractors should determine the number of new children that can be enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare. When determining the number of children that can be enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare with total contract funding, contractors should consider the number of children that will transfer from temporary Emergency Childcare into ongoing childcare. It is the contractors responsibility to ensure that the cost of providing care, for current and new enrollments, does not exceed the total CAPP and CMAP contract amount.

An FY 202021 augmentation will be provided to CAPP and CMAP contractors to support the extension of enrollments of families currently enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare, and an additional allocation to allow for new temporary Emergency Childcare enrollments.

CDNFS Reporting Updates

CDNFS report forms will continue to collect temporary Emergency Childcare enrollment data. All temporary Emergency Childcare enrollments reported on CDNFS report forms must align with enrollment and eligibility criteria set forth in this MB. If there are questions related to caseload or fiscal reporting, please contact your assigned CDNFS Fiscal Analyst. The CDE Fiscal Apportionment Analyst Directory web page can be found at https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/cd/faad.asp.

Background and Authority

The California Education Code (EC) Section 8263(a)(1)(A) and 8263(a)(1)(B) sets forth the eligibility and need requirements for families receiving subsidized ELC services. Generally, families must meet one eligibility requirement and one need requirement to be eligible for ELC services.

With the exception of the California State Preschool Program (CSPP), EC Section 8263(b) specifies the priority order for enrolling families. Families with children who are receiving CPS or are at-risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation receive first priority for services.

EC Section 8263(c) specifies the requirements for promoting continuity of care in a state or federally-funded child care program.

Additionally, EC Section 8263(h) specifies that a family who is found to be eligible by a contractor as meeting eligibility and need requirements pursuant to the state Child Care and Development Services Act must receive services for no less than 12 months from the certification date, and must not be required to report changes to income or other changes for at least 12 months.

In accordance with EC sections 8227.3, 8262.1, and 8262.2, contractors are authorized to use digital signatures and maintain records electronically, or convert records from a paper format to an electronic format. Please refer to MB 16-02, located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb1602.asp for additional guidance.

EC Section 8273 requires the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI) to establish a family fee schedule for families receiving ELC services, subject to the approval of the schedule by the Department of Finance. The SSPI is charged with designing the family fee schedule based on the most current SMI, adjusted for family size.

On March 19, 2020, April 4, 2020, and April 7, 2020, respectively, the Governor issued Executive Order (EO) N-33-20, EO N-45-20, and EO N-47-20; which in pertinent part, during the State of Emergency:

Required that all California residents stay at home unless they are considered Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers (essential workers)

Defined essential workers, which can be found at https://covid19.ca.gov/img/EssentialCriticalInfrastructureWorkers.pdf

Sustained childcare subsidies for currently enrolled families

Waived eligibility requirements for children with parents who are essential workers, as defined above, and children with disabilities and special health care needs whose IEPs or IFSPs include ELC services in the following subsidized ELC programs: California Alternative Payment Program (CAPP), California State Preschool Program (CSPP), General Child Care (CCTR), California Migrant Child Care (CMIG), California Migrant Alternative Payment Program (CMAP), and Family Child Care Home Education Networks (CFCC)

Waived enrollment priorities in EC Section 8263(b)(2) and (3), other than prioritizing income-eligible families over families that are not income eligible; and any accompanying regulations with respect to non-CalWORKs ELC services provided to children of essential workers and children with disabilities or special health care needs whose IEPs and IFSPs include early childhood education services

Waived requirements to allow children enrolling in temporary Emergency Childcare, that are at risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation to enroll without the need for a written referral from a legal, medical, or social services agency

On March 17, 2020, the Governor signed SB 89 (Chapter 2, Statutes of 2020), which appropriated funds for Coronavirus Disease (COVID) response. The Governor and the Legislature identified $50 million of these funds for CAPP contractors for new temporary Emergency Childcare enrollments during FY 201920.

Based on the authority of SB 117 and these Executive Orders, the CDE issued guidance stating that CAPP, CSPP, CCTR, and CFCC contractors could enroll families in temporary Emergency Childcare until June 30, 2020, if they are one of the following:

Deemed to be an essential worker, as defined above Identified as a member of an at-risk population, which includes: Children who are receiving CPS or who have been deemed to be at risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation

Children eligible through the Emergency Childcare Bridge Program for Foster Children (authorized by California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 11461.6)

Families experiencing homelessness as defined in Section 11434(a)(2) of Title 42 of the United States Code, known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act

Children of domestic violence survivors Families with children with disabilities or special health care needs whose IEPs and/or IFSPs include ELC services

Based on the authority of SB 117 and these Executive Orders, families enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare were required to self-certify their eligibility for enrollment in temporary Emergency Childcare.

On May 29, 2020, the Governor issued EO N-66-20, which allows essential worker families, at-risk populations, and children with disabilities or other health care needswhose IEPs and/or IFSPs include ELC services and who are enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare through either a CCTR, CSPP, CFCC, or a CAPP contractto receive services through June 30, 2020, or for 60 calendar days following the date of the childs enrollment, whichever is longer; subject to available funds.

On June 29, 2020, the Governor signed SB 98 (Chapter 24, Statutes of 2020), which appropriated $73 million for CAPP and CMAP contractors to provide temporary Emergency Childcare services for essential workers and other designated populations for an additional 90 days, in addition to the 60 calendar days specified in EO N-66-20, and possibly longer if a contractor has not exhausted its funds. SB 98 also requires all children who received temporary Emergency Childcare services to be given first priority for enrollment in alternative payment programs with available capacity.

On June 29, 2020, the Governor signed Assembly Bill (AB) 89 (Chapter 7, Statutes of 2020), which appropriated $47,236,000 available beginning July 1, 2020, for 5,600 CAPP slots to provide continuity of care for families who were previously enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare. AB 89 requires that families previously enrolled in temporary Emergency Childcare through CAPP and CMAP be given first priority for enrollment into ongoing subsidized childcare through CAPP.

On October 21, 2020, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC) released a letter directing $110 million from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to address some of the additional costs incurred by ELC programs. On October 28, 2020, Governor Newsom signed EO N-129-20 to allocate these funds for the cost of waiving family fees for families not receiving in-person care, to extend temporary Emergency Childcare enrollments through June 30, 2021, and to reimburse programs for the cost to provide school age children full-time childcare.

On February 23, 2021, the Governor signed AB 82, which appropriated $76 million for CAPP and CMAP contractors to extend temporary Emergency Childcare services for currently enrolled families through June 30, 2022, and $80 million for CAPP and CMAP contractors to enroll additional essential workers, at-risk children, and children with disabilities or special health care needs, whose IEPs or IFSPs include ELC services, in temporary Emergency Childcare services through June 30, 2022, when those families meet the eligibility and requirements specified in the EC, commencing with Section 8200. AB 82 directs the CDE to issue guidance for these additional temporary Emergency Childcare slots that is as similar as possible to guidance issued for temporary Emergency Childcare in the past.

On March 5, 2021, the Governor signed AB 86, to include allowing families enrolling into Emergency Childcare to self-certify their eligibility and need for services.

Resources

The ELCD has developed a COVD-19 guidance and resource page that includes answers to frequently asked questions, all management bulletins issued to implement pertinent legislation, and other relevant resources at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/elcdcovid19.asp.

To be informed of the updated information, please sign up for ELCD's email distribution list at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/progspeclist.asp.

For guidance on the use of digital applications and signatures, refer to MB 16-01, located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb1601.asp, and MB 17-03, located at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/mb1703.asp.

If you have any questions regarding the information in this MB, please contact your assigned ELCD Program Quality Implementation Office (PQI) Regional Consultant via the ELCD Consultant Regional Assignments web page at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/ci/assignments.asp or by phone at 916-322-6233.

If you have any fiscal questions about the information in this MB, please contact your assigned Child Development Nutrition and Fiscal Services analyst at https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/cd/faad.asp or by phone at 916-323-6196.





Stephen Propheter, Director

Early Learning and Care Division

Questions: Early Learning and Care Division | 916-322-6233

Last Reviewed: Tuesday, May 11, 2021
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When it comes to real estate in Port Aransas and North Padre Island, Keith McMullin is one of the most trusted names in the industry.

McMullin, a real estate broker of Port Aransas Realty and Mustang Island Realty, has been in sales and marketing his entire career, and has both Port Aransas and North Padre Island real estate offices.



In 2005, he left the telecommunications industry and got his real estate license, immediately starting with Port Aransas Realty.

Ive always appreciated the family atmosphere with the company, McMullin said. At the time, I thought that the island would be a good place to sell a few homes and condos and earn a living. I had no idea and I dont believe anybody fully anticipated all that has transpired since those days.

Little did McMullin realize he would later serve six years as mayor of Port Aransas, which lent him a deeper, richer understanding of the area  a close-knit island town in a beautiful natural environment, with lauded public schools, friendly neighborhoods and diverse, multigenerational households.

In 2016, after serving as mayor, McMullin said Becky Corder, the founder and broker of Port Aransas Realty, retired. He then took up the mantle, becoming a broker there in September of that year. Today, he sells a diverse mix of properties ranging from off-the-beach cottages to gulf-front condos to luxury homes in master-planned beachfront communities like Cinnamon Shore, Palmilla Beach and Sunflower Beach. Visit.

Properties in each of these market segments are much more affordable than comparable homes and condos in Florida, California and many other coastal destinations, he said.

In the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was staying safe at home, McMullin said the island was eerily quiet. But, he said, the real estate market took off again last May when Texas opened back up.

All of our inherent strengths suddenly became even more desirable than before, he added. A small town, miles of uninterrupted wide sandy beaches and being a convenient drive from home.

He said buyers found the spot appealing since mothers and fathers could work remotely from their beach home, kids could log in for distance learning, and the island makes for a wonderful vacation escape that doesnt involve flying or leaving Texas.

Americans are leaving the big cities and opting for rural areas, McMullin added, a form of migration thats soared during the pandemic. Were certainly seeing that in our real estate market with historic sales levels and unprecedented interest.

To learn more about coastal property in the area, visit www. TexasIslandProperties.com or visit Port Aransas Real Estate on Facebook, or reach McMullin at 361-749-7500.
YEREVAN.  We have great potential for vaccination against the coronavirus, but we face a problem that this potential is not being met properly, which poses risksnot only in healthcare, but also economic. Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this at Thursdays Cabinet meeting of the interim government of Armenia.

The acting premier called on the members of the interim government to be vaccinated within the next week.

He informed that Armenia currently had the AstraZeneca and Sputnik V vaccines, and it was going to receive a COVID-19 vaccine from China in the near future.

The PM assured that if any vaccine poses a threat to lives of Armenian citizens, the government will not accept that vaccine.

Pashinyan added that some movements against these vaccines had started in Armenia, and it was not clear what their objective was.

"Currently, only 2,690 people are vaccinated in Armenia, which is a disgracefully low figure. (). It is very important to silence all those voices that are starting a campaign against vaccinations. Businesses must be engaged so that vaccinations are carried out at a proper level. Also, a vaccination process must be carried out in the [Armenian] armed forces, in state bodies, in general," Pashinyan stressed.
Editor

Zaldy Dandan is the recipient of the Best Editorial Writer Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the CNMI Humanities Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism. His three books are available on amazon.com
Mumbai: The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) has said that 40 out of 73 private COVID-19 vaccination centres in the city will remain closed today due to insufficient vaccines stock.

MCGM also appealed to people that only those who want to take the second dose should come for vaccination on April 29.

"The stock of covid vaccine available in Mumbai has almost run out today (April 28, 2021). Due to this, 40 out of 73 private vaccination centers in Mumbai will not be vaccinating on Thursday, April 29, 2021. The remaining 33 private vaccination centres are also available for limited vaccination. For this reason, the citizens who come there for the second dose will be vaccinated with priority and as long as there is a stock of vaccine," MCGM said in a release.

According to MCGM, some stock is expected to be available late at night on Wednesday. "If these stocks are received, vaccination will start on Thursday at government and municipal hospital centres in Mumbai."

The municipal body also provided a list of centres that will remain closed on Thursday.

#MyBMCVaccinationUpdate



CVCs that have exhausted their stocks:



Worli Koliwada

Maa Hospital

Ramabai Thackeray

VD Savarkar

Mithaghar

MT Agrawal

Wockhardt

Prince Ali Khan

Lilavati

Shree Balaji (Malad)

Zen Multispeciality

CAMA

RCF (Chembur)#MyBMCUpdate #MumbaiVaccinationUpdate https://t.co/P3S28dYGWb   Mumbai,  BMC (@mybmc) April 28, 2021





Meanwhile, Mumbai reported 4,966 fresh COVID-19 cases and 78 deaths on Wednesday. With these, the total case tally in the city reached 6,40,507. As many as 5,60,401 people recovered from disease in Mumbai so far.

MCGM's notification comes on the day when the registration for vaccination for all adults started on Wednesday.

The Centre on April 19 had announced a ''liberalised'' policy, making all above 18 years of age eligible to get vaccinated from May 1. It has also allowed state governments and private hospitals to purchase vaccines from manufacturers.

Registration for the new eligible population groups has commenced from 4 pm on Wednesday. Potential beneficiaries can either register directly on CoWIN portal (cowin.gov.in) or through the Aarogya Setu app.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.
Editor: Pennsylvanias statutes on disaster emergencies are extremely expansive.

Governors have the authority to suspend laws during a declared emergency. They can close businesses and restrict movement and activities. Governors can shut down schools, compel evacuations, commandeer property and order the arrest of people who refuse to comply with their orders. In the hands of the wrong person, these powers can inflict immense harm.

A single person should not have the ability to declare a disaster emergency and renew it indefinitely. The governor should not be able to ignore the Legislatures request to end emergency declarations. A single person should not have the ability to decide which businesses are essential and which ones will be ruined. Nor should a single person dictate who can and who cannot work to feed his family. This is too much power for any one person.

The amendments on the May 18 election ballot would maintain a governors ability to address emergencies quickly, but would limit the duration of emergency orders to 21 days. Approval from the Legislature would be required for a governor to extend or reissue emergency orders.

These common-sense revisions would restore the proper checks and balances in Harrisburg.

Dont be fooled by the wording of the ballot questions. The questions appear to be written in a biased and confusing manner. The amendments would protect the rights of Pennsylvanians. Republicans, Democrats and independents should vote yes on May 18 to protect our freedom.

ROBERT MINNINGER

SPRING CITY,

CHESTER COUNTY

Editor: Pennsylvanias primary election will be held May 18. In addition to the usual municipal races on the ballot, three proposed constitutional amendments will also be put before voters.

The first two ballot questions involve taking away powers from the Pennsylvania executive branch  the governor  and giving them to the state Legislature, some of whose current members refuse to wear masks or follow science-based pandemic precautions. Tell me, what good would a limited, 21-day emergency declaration, as proposed in this legislation, have made in controlling the coronavirus pandemic?

Would you entrust this decision to the same bunch of Republicans who control the state House and Senate and are among the highest-paid and least-productive state legislators in the entire country? This is bad.

The third ballot question involves amending the Pennsylvania Constitution by providing that equality of rights under the law shall not be denied because of an individuals race or ethnicity. This is good.

In a Pennsylvania primary, all registered voters, including independents and other party members, can vote on the three proposed constitutional amendments. These voters could decide whether the amendment issues pass or not, because Democrats and Republicans often are nearly equally represented.

Additionally, mail-in voting remains an option for the May 18 primary and voters dont need to be absent from their district in order to request and qualify for a mail-in ballot.

Join me in voting no-no-yes to the three ballot questions.

NANCY CHISWICK

STATE COLLEGE

Editor: The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical importance of medical research.

As members of Congress address the needs of our nations most vulnerable impacted by COVID-19, they continue their work to address another devastating disease affecting millions of Americans  Alzheimers. During the pandemic, deaths among Alzheimers and dementia patients have increased by 16%.

Increasing funding for Alzheimers and dementia research at the National Institutes of Health by $289 million would enable scientists to work at a more rapid pace to advance basic disease knowledge, explore ways to reduce risk, uncover new biomarkers for early diagnosis and drug targeting and make discoveries that can lead to a treatment or a cure. We cant afford not to fund research.

It is only through increased research funding that we will discover new ways to treat and eventually prevent Alzheimers and other dementia.

Today, more than 6 million Americans live with Alzheimers  one in nine people age 65 and older, a number expected to more than double by 2050, including 280,000 in Pennsylvania. Without medical breakthroughs, this number is projected to rise.

I lost my mother and maternal grandmother to this terrible disease and continue to advocate and work to end Alzheimers with the hope of seeing the first survivor and not worrying about my sons future.

Please join me and the Alzheimers Association in thanking U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright of Moosic for his support and encourage him to lead in the fight to end Alzheimers by supporting the critical funding needed.

MARK ENTWISTLE

EYNON

Editor: Thanks to Times-Tribune staff writer Jeff Horvath for his April 11 Sunday Times article concerning local property taxes (What will your tax bill look like?).

Over the years I have written about this out-of-control problem. Low wages and high taxes make for a poor city. The mayor and members of the Scranton School Board and city council should get together to finally solve the problem, not just vote for tax increases every year. Corruption and mismanagement of tax money have contributed to this situation. That is why many people dont want to live in Scranton and some of those living here want to get out.

Its really sad that poor and elderly people are scared of losing their homes due to constantly rising property taxes. So, they go without and they have nowhere else to go. It has been years since many of them had children in school so what benefit do they get besides keeping their homes?

We shed light on the problem, but it never gets solved. We need property tax relief in the worst way, yet we continue to pay higher taxes. There should be a sales tax instead.

BILL LOVELAND

SCRANTON
New Delhi: The United States in their continued effort to help India in the latters fight against the novel coronavirus has dispatched military aircraft with medical equipment.

US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin posted a video on microblogging site Twitter of one of the aircraft on the runway of a US Air Force base just before it took off for India.

He wrote: Right now, a C-5M Super Galaxy and a C-17 Globemaster III are en route to India from Travis Air Force base. Theyre carrying oxygen cylinders/regulators, rapid diagnostic kits, N95 masks, and pulse oximeters. Thanks to USAID for the supplies & to all involved in the effort.

Right now, a @usairforce C-5M Super Galaxy and a C-17 Globemaster III are en route to India from @Travis60AMW. Theyre carrying oxygen cylinders/regulators, rapid diagnostic kits, N95 masks, and pulse oximeters. Thanks to @USAID for the supplies & to all involved in the effort. pic.twitter.com/awtUFrT30D  Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) April 29, 2021

On Wednesday, the US had announced that it was sending more than $100 million in supplies to India, days after US President Joe Biden promised to step up assistance.

The first shipment includes 960,000 rapid tests, which can detect Covid in 15 minutes, and 1 lakh N95 masks for frontline health workers, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said.
SCRANTON  A plan to revitalize Pine Brook, a neighborhood known for industry, businesses and tight housing, would focus on improving catalyst areas, organizers announced Wednesday.

The nonprofit United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania began a year ago planning a long-term revitalization of Pine Brook, a neighborhood generally bounded by Olive Street and New York Street and from the Lackawanna River to North Washington Avenue.

During an event Wednesday outside National Bakery on Capouse Avenue, UNC unveiled four main concepts of an upcoming, five-year revitalization plan.

Plans include improving the Capouse Avenue gateway from downtown at Olive Street; creating infill housing in the lower Capouse Avenue area; revamping the defunct Penn Ridge pool, also on Capouse Avenue, into something functional; and connecting the Sweeneys Beach area along the Lackawanna River with the Chic Feldman Field atop an adjoining slope.

UNC identified these catalyst areas as assets underutilized or needing improvement, and critical to revitalization, said Chrissy Manuel, UNCs director of community revitalization. UNC expects to finalize the plan in about a month. Afterward, the timing of undertaking various facets of the plan is unknown, as implementation steps would depend on grant funding, she said.

UNC helped revitalize part of South Scranton several years ago and hopes to do the same for Pine Brook, said UNC President and CEO Lisa Durkin. The overall goal is to create a stronger, more attractive neighborhood with buy-in from residents and businesses.

The effort also involves a steering committee of community stakeholders, business owners and residents. Committee member Meegan Possemato, owner of On&On History Recycled Marketplace on Capouse Avenue, thinks the revitalization plan would help attract residents and businesses.

This is just going to be great for our neighborhood. People dont know about the neighborhood itself, Possemato said. I feel really lucky that they want to do this for us. Its a really good plan.

The neighborhoods positives include its mixed uses and buildings that are good for redevelopment, said Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Bob Durkin.

This is exactly the place for adaptive reuse, he said. For a neighborhood to live and work and breathe organically, you need a mix of socioeconomics that appeal to residents and businesses.

Its a really neat neighborhood because its got the industrial and residential intermixed, said Lackawanna River Conservation Association Executive Director Bernie McGurl, who is on the steering committee and UNC board. He believes the plan would have far-reaching, lasting impacts.

Were really going to create some economic-opportunity building for younger generations, for businesses coming in, McGurl said.
Clifford Chance has announced the promotion of counsels Nicky Reader in the UAE and Sahel Mughal in Saudi Arabia, effective May 1, 2021.

Reader works in the Firm's Global Financial Markets practice, based in the UAE. She has built a strong general finance practice throughout her career which focuses on general lending, acquisition finance and real estate finance matters, and her unique specialism is in financial restructuring. She joined Clifford Chance as a trainee in London in 2008, qualifying into the London restructuring practice and spending a year on secondment to RBS before relocating to Abu Dhabi in 2017. She is qualified in England and Wales.

Mughal works in the Firm's Corporate and Equity Capital Markets practice in Riyadh. His broad practice includes advising on M&A, joint ventures, tech, funds and securities regulation. He joined the firm as a trainee in London in 2006 and, qualifying into the private funds group, he undertook a client secondment to the private equity firm, 8 Miles LLP, as general counsel. He has been based in Riyadh for the past ten years and is qualified in England & Wales.

Both are part of a global cohort of 29 new partners drawn from all of the firm's market-leading practices and every region. Together, they specialise across a range of our leading practice and product areas that are critical to our clients and their strategic needs, in particular financial investors1, litigation and dispute resolution, ESG and financial restructuring.

"I am delighted to welcome Nicky and Sahel to our partner ranks in the Middle East," said Mohammed Al-Shukairy, Clifford Chance's Regional Managing Partner for the Middle East. "Our region is and will remain an area of significant focus for the Firm and we will continue to invest in our people and see organic growth in the years to come."

Matthew Layton, Clifford Chance Global Managing Partner adds: "I'd like to congratulate each and every one of our new partners for reaching this important milestone in their career. It is a testament to their commitment to being trusted advisers to our clients on their most complex and important challenges and opportunities. Together they underline the quality, diversity, and depth of talent that underpins our strategy and they embody the collaborative and inclusive culture that is at the heart of our firm. Promoting these new partners reinforces our ambitious commitment to invest in our firm for today and into the future." -- TradeArabia News Service
The United States Postal Service is facing backlash and mockery over its social media spying operation.

Under the Postal Services Internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, analysts are reported to have looked through posts on Facebook, Parler and Telegram ahead of scheduled protests, and flagging any 'inflammatory' or 'threatening' language to government agencies.

The move smacked of authoritarianism to some, who decried a government agency monitoring its citizens' communications in a fishing expedition for 'unapproved' language or topics.

'Let that sink in ... an entity [whose] sole purpose is to deliver mail and packages is spying on American citizens,' Dustin Isenhour posted on Facebook. 'Our government has grown so large that its postal service has a law enforcement arm. Time to wake up people.'

The USPS has long had a law enforcement branch to police things like mail fraud and illegal items that might be being trafficked. The revelation of a social media operation, though, was one step too far, many said.

'This is NOT ok,' Martha Bueno tweeted. 'How many agencies are spying on us and why? Land of the free? Methinks not.'

'At this point, every government agency and associates are spying on Americans,' added one Twitter user with the handle @ultrapurwater.

The Postal Inspection Service postal inspectors, who work as federal law enforcement officers

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service typically investigates mail-related crimes, but a recent report shows its officers have been engaging in covert operations, spying on Americans' social media posts

The program falls under the jurisdiction of the United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service, which also investigates information related to illegal narcotics, mail theft, identity theft, mail fraud, suspicious mail, disaster response, money laundering, cyber crimes and child exploitation.

'The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is the primary law enforcement, crime prevention and security arm of the U.S. Postal Inspection Services,' the USPS said in a statement to Yahoo News, which broke the story.

'As such, the U.S. Postal Inspection Services has federal law enforcement officers, postal inspectors, who enforce approximately 200 federal laws to achieve the agency's mission: protect the U.S. Postal Service and its employees, infrastructure, and customers, enforce the laws that defend the nation's mail system from illegal or dangerous use and ensure public trust in the mail.'

That trust, however, seems to be waning for some, as many Americans have taken to social media to express their frustrations with the program.

'Finding out the USPS was running a covert social media domestic spying program' Twitter user Justin Case wrote, posting a meme.

Still, other users lambasted the agency for its sometimes-shoddy service, saying that if it can't even get the mail delivered properly, then how can it be expected to spy properly?

Users took to Twitter following the news that the USPS had a covert spying arm to express their displeasure with the news, and mock the Postal Service

'If USPS is indeed spying on Americans, I can only guess theyre doing a slow, shi**y job at it,' one user tweeted.

Another said the Post Office should spend their 'money doing your job , delivering mail on time .instead of worrying about your social media 'score.''

Billy Brick, though, said he did not worry about the USPS spying as they 'can't even put mail the right in the right box.'

Yahoo News first reported about the program on April 21, revealing a leaked bulletin from the Postal Inspection Service in which analysts were going through social media posts related to the March 20 'World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, in which protesters demonstrated against COVID lockdowns.

'Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts,' the bulletin reads, noting, 'Parler users have commented about their intent to use the rallies to engage in violence.'

It later adds, however, 'No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats.'

A leaked bulletin first reported by Yahoo News details how the US Postal Inspection Service collected data as part of the Internet Covert Operations Program or iCOP

Analysts are said to have looked through posts on Facebook, Parler and Telegram before flagging 'inflammatory' messages to government agencies

The March 16 government bulletin focuses on a planned protest March 20, the World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, to demonstrate against COVID lockdowns

About one hundred supporters of World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy along with two dozen Proud Boys attend a gathering to impeach Governor Roy Cooper and for the return of constitutional freedoms in Raleigh, NC, United States on March 20

Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale, right, testified before Congress on Wednesday that the USPS has a covert operation that he plans to continue. More than 30 House Republicans have sent a letter to Postmaster Louis DeJoy (pictured) asking about the iCOP program

More than 30 House Republicans then sent a letter posing these questions to Postmaster Louis DeJoy last week, calling the program an 'encroachment' on Americans' private lives, according to FOX News.

'The type of amorphous, broad mandate under which iCOP is allegedly operating is particularly troubling because it is unclear why the USPS, of all government agencies and the only one devoted to the delivery of Americans' mail, is taking on the role of intelligence collection,' the letter reads, especially when the U.S. is 'not lacking in intelligence agencies.'

'The type of general review alleged in the review alleged in the reporting does not indicate that the posts reviewed by iCOP are related to the protection and security of USPS, its postal routes, its employees or the mail generally.'

In Congress on Wednesday, Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale claimed that iCOP is not a real 'program' at USPS because it's 'incident-related' not an ongoing matter, but the social media operation is being overseen by an 'executive.'

He testified that he does not know how much money is being allocated for the spying initiative, according to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and would not say during the briefing which agencies are coordinating with USPS.

He also said the USPS would stop publishing bulletins, but would continue using its iCOP program.
If you were covered by a Blue Cross insurance plan between February 2008 and October 2020, you could cash in on one of the biggest healthcare settlements in U.S. history.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and associated plans agreed to pay $2.7 billion as part of a settlement related to antitrust allegations. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

About $1.9 billion will go to eligible subscribers and about $700 million will go to the attorneys, according to the settlement.

Plaintiffs in the case claimed that Blue Cross plans split up territories to reduce competition, so they were able to charge higher rates for plans, in violation of antitrust laws. Blue Cross argued its business strategy reduced costs and provided more access to consumers.

People have until Nov. 5, 2021, to file a claim online at www.BCBSsettlement.com. Or they can mail a claim to Blue Cross Blue Shield Settlement c/o JND Legal Administration, P.O. Box 91390, Seattle, WA 98111.

You also have the ability to opt out of the settlement, retaining the right to file a separate lawsuit, or you can object to the lawsuit by sending a letter to the court, postmarked by July 28, 2021, to the same address.

You can also send questions to info@BCBSsettlement.com.

The case was filed in federal court in Alabama, where Blue Cross controls more than 85% of the health insurance market, according to the American Medical Association. The settlement is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

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

Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com.
LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cboe Europe, a pan-European exchange operator and a subsidiary of Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE), announced it plans to launch Cboe Europe Derivatives, a new Amsterdam-based futures and options market, on Monday, 6 September 2021, subject to regulatory approvals. Cboe has secured the support of a broad range of participants, including banks, clearing firms, market-makers and proprietary trading firms who are expected to help contribute to the provision of liquidity and client order flow on Cboe Europe Derivatives.

Participant bank and clearing firms currently include ABN AMRO Clearing, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Participant market-makers and proprietary trading firms currently include All Options, Da Vinci Derivatives, DRW, Flow Traders, Liquid Capital Markets and Susquehanna International Securities.

Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to leverage Cboe's global derivatives expertise and European equity trading and clearing footprint to bring a modern, on-screen market structure utilized in the U.S. to Europe and to grow the region's equity derivatives market overall. EuroCCP, Cboe's pan-European clearing operator, will provide clearing services for the venue, subject to regulatory approval. By taking a pan-European approach, Cboe Europe Derivatives will enable market participants to access a vibrant derivatives market through a single access point, creating efficiencies in trading and clearing.

David Howson, EVP, President of Europe and Asia-Pacific for Cboe Global Markets, said: "We are delighted to bring together such a strong group of participants to support the anticipated launch of Cboe Europe Derivatives. We have listened to the needs of market participants and are designing this new market from a pan-European point-of-view, leveraging our global derivatives expertise, European equities trading footprint, ownership of EuroCCP and world-class technology to build a more efficient equity derivatives market."

Robbert Booij, CEO Europe at ABN AMRO Clearing Bank N.V, said: "Cboe Europe Derivatives represents an attractive new marketplace for European equity derivatives. It is being created by a highly-respected exchange operator and we look forward to having our clients benefit from this new market."

Elizabeth Martin, Global Head of Equities Electronic Trading at Goldman Sachs, said: "Partnering with Cboe Europe Derivatives aligns with our support of innovative electronic marketplaces and offers another opportunity to provide additional market access and liquidity to our clients."

David Russell, Global Co-Head of Institutional Equities at Morgan Stanley, said: "By increasing competition in the European equity derivatives market, our clients benefit from having more choice, while lower friction pricing models also promote greater liquidity. Over the past 10 years, European exchange traded derivative volumes have lagged global markets, and we are supportive of this new initiative to bring further competition and innovation to this space."

John Keogh, Managing Director at Susquehanna International Securities, said: "We are committed to working with exchanges to support product innovation and grow the listed options markets in Europe. We are excited to become a liquidity provider on Cboe Europe Derivatives as we are aligned with its goal of developing a strong, liquid orderbook-focused exchange."

Cboe Europe Derivatives is expected to form part of Cboe NL, Cboe's Netherlands-based exchange, and initially offer trading in futures and options based on six Cboe Europe Indices: the Cboe Eurozone 50, Cboe UK 100, Cboe Netherlands 25, Cboe Switzerland 20, Cboe Germany 30, and Cboe France 40  all calculated using Cboe market data1.

Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to add futures and options on additional European benchmarks, along with single stock options, at a later date, based on customer demand.

Ade Cordell, President of Cboe NL, said: "We have had an extremely positive response to our vision for Cboe Europe Derivatives from participants across the trading community. Firms not currently active in European markets are excited by the prospect of a transparent, efficient, lit pan-European equity derivatives market, which will help to unlock its true potential and grow the market overall."

About Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) provides cutting-edge trading and investment solutions to market participants around the world. The company is committed to defining markets through product innovation, leading edge technology and seamless trading solutions.

The company offers trading across a diverse range of products in multiple asset classes and geographies, including options, futures, U.S., Canadian and European equities, exchange-traded products (ETPs), global foreign exchange (FX) and volatility products based on the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX Index), recognized as the world's premier gauge of U.S. equity market volatility.

Cboe's subsidiaries include the largest options exchange and the third largest stock exchange operator in the U.S. In addition, the company operates one of the largest stock exchanges by value traded in Europe, and owns EuroCCP, a leading pan-European equity clearing house. Cboe also is a leading market globally for ETP listings and trading.

The company is headquartered in Chicago with a network of domestic and global offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia, including main hubs in New York, London, Kansas City and Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.cboe.com.

CBOE-C

CBOE-E

CBOE-OE

Cboe and Cboe Global Markets are registered trademarks of Cboe Exchange, Inc.

The content of this press release is for information purposes only and does not constitute or form part of, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain information contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties.

1 With the exception of the Cboe Switzerland 20

SOURCE Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.cboe.com


HALIFAX - The reopening of the Atlantic travel bubble has been delayed for the second time as health officials in the region try to control the spread of COVID-19.

Motorists line up to cross the Confederation Bridge as the so-called tourism bubble for the Atlantic region begins, Friday July 3, 2020. The opening of the so-called Atlantic bubble is delayed once again as COVID-19 case counts climb in the region. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Brian McInnis

HALIFAX - The reopening of the Atlantic travel bubble has been delayed for the second time as health officials in the region try to control the spread of COVID-19.

Atlantic Canada's premiers met Wednesday to discuss the bubble and concluded that outbreaks in the region "accelerated by variants of concern" have made it necessary to maintain restrictions on travel, the four premiers said in a joint statement.

And unlike the previous time they announced a delay, the four premiers did not provide a date on which they planned to allow free travel again within the region. "Premiers will revisit the reopening of the Atlantic travel bubble when the threat of further outbreaks has been reduced," they said.

Last summer, Atlantic Canadian residents were permitted to travel freely within the four provinces without being required to isolate for 14 days when they crossed provincial boundaries. Restrictions were maintained for the rest of the country. The travel bubble was closed last fall when infection rates began to rise in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The four premiers had hoped to reinstate the bubble on April 19, but another COVID-19 outbreak in New Brunswick led them to push the opening to May 3 at the earliest. A recent outbreak in Nova Scotia has led to record numbers of daily infections in that province and prompted health officials this week to impose a two-week lockdown. Nova Scotia reported 70 new cases Thursday.

Non-essential travel is either prohibited or discouraged in most of the Atlantic region but the four premiers say the bubble will likely reopen soon.

"Premiers remain optimistic that travel within Atlantic Canada will resume by summer, when most Atlantic Canadians have been vaccinated against COVID-19," they said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.
Amid ascending COVID-19 figures, the US State Department on Thursday approved the voluntary departure of family members of government employees from India. They also revised the US travel advisory for India, calling on US citizens to avoid travelling to India. On Wednesday, the Department approved of this and said,

"US citizens who wish to depart India should take advantage of available commercial transportation options."

As quoted by Sputnik, in a press release the Department alerted US citizens about travelling to India and said,

"The Department of State renewed its travel advisory for India on April 28, 2021. The Department continues to advise travelers not to travel to India."

Various countries have either closed their borders or prohibited passenger flights from India. These countries include Bangladesh, Iran, United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. France restricted travel from India, Brazil Chile, Argentina, South Africa and French Guiana; the U.K. also added India to its "red" travel list. Germany halted travel from India started on Monday, their health ministry said it was necessary so as to "not endanger our vaccination campaign."

Earlier today, South African Health Minister had said there is no direct risk of COVID-19 infections transmission from India to South Africa. He assured people that due vigilance would be exercised for all those coming from India or via other countries. This surfaced a day after Belgium imposed a travel ban on passenger flights from India, South Africa and Brazil over concerns about COVID-19.

Amid raging COVID-19 figures, media reports, and gutting images of a wobbly medical infrastructure, many countries have poured in their solidarity with India. United Kingdom, United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, European Union, Singapore, Bhutan amongst few others have come forward to provide assistance to India in procuring tonnes of liquid medical oxygen, transporting mobile oxygen plants, drugs, and vaccines against destructive COVID-19 second-wave. This would ensure requisite medical oxygen across states which are facing shortages. In the recent past, COVID-19 patients have succumbed to the virus due to a dearth of medical oxygen supply at hospitals.

COVID-19 tally in India

In the last 24 hours, India's clocked 3,79,257 fresh COVID-19 cases with 2,69,507 recoveries and 3,645 fatalities, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,83,76,524 cases and the death toll to 2,04,832. Total COVID-19 active cases in India have now mounted to 30,84,814.

On April 4, India recorded over 1 lakh cases, which has doubled in a span of ten days and witnessing unprecedented rise ever since, with now for the fifth consecutive day, over 3-lakh COVID-19 cases have been reported. India's contribution to the world figure has risen from 9 percent to 35 percent, which is the highest ever figure by any country.

(With ANI inputs)
John Woodard

When Donald Trump ordered all forms of Critical Race Theory being taught to men in the Federal Government, he was roundly criticized. I recently was looking into this issue and came across the information below. As you read this, it should become clear why President Trump took this action.Last year, Sandia National Laboratories  which designs America's Nuclear weapons  hosted a 3 day reeducation camp for their white male executive staff, with the intent of exposing their "white privilege" and deconstructing "white male culture".They sent these executives to the La Posada Resort, to undergo mandatory training called "White Men's Caucus on eliminating Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Organizations".In the opening session, the trainers demanded that men make a list of Associations about white male culture. The trainers required that the attendees write the following terms: White Supremacists, KKK, Sexism, Aryan Nation, MAGA hat, Privileged, and Mass Killings.The trainers then insisted that white males must work hard to understand their white privilege, male privilege and heterosexual privilege. They claimed that white men benefit from positive stereotypes that far outweigh other male groups.Next, the male employees had to expose the roots of white male culture which consists of rugged individualism, a can-do attitude, hard work and efforts to improve themselves which sound good but are devastating to women.In fact, the trainers claim that white male culture leads to lowered quality of life at work and at home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships and high stress. It also forces this white male standard on women and minorities.In a subsequent session, the white males must publicly recite a series of White Privilege Statements and Male Privilege Statements. They must accept their complicity in the white male system and their role in creating oppressions.As the reeducation camp concluded, white males had to write letters directed to white women, people, and other groups regarding the meaning of this Caucus experience, and apologize for their privilege and pledge to become better people and coworkers.It is time to expose this taxpayer-funded pseudoscience and demand that our Legislators stop these deeply divisive training sessions. We must abolish critical race theory in the Federal Government. Can you imagine how demeaning this training was for these company Executives?
When Craig Silliphant was waiting in line to get his COVID-19 vaccine shot, he was aware the dose going into his arm could leave him with some side-effects.

When Craig Silliphant was waiting in line to get his COVID-19 vaccine shot, he was aware the dose going into his arm could leave him with some side-effects.

The 46-year-old Saskatoon culture commentator says he has experienced some self-inflicted legendary hangovers in his life. So, the possibility of a "vaccine hangover" in exchange for a dose that would keep him and his family safe was an easy choice.

Craig Silliphant, shown in this undated handout image, a culture commentator in Saskatoon, says his self-inflicted legendary hangovers in the past had him prepared for any side-effects he was going to get from receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. A range of side-effects in some people who get a COVID-19 vaccine is being called "vaccine hangover" and experts say there's no real way to predicting who will experience it. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

"I'd like to think all the training and drinking I've done throughout my life ... had some positive effect on how I felt," Silliphant says with a laugh.

The day after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, he had a sore arm but soon after "felt like a million bucks." Two friends who got the same vaccine at the same time, however, developed flu-like symptoms for about 24 hours, he says.

As more Canadians get vaccinated each day, some are reporting a range of side-effects.

Some people have a bit of pain and swelling in the area they received the shot. But a smaller number might also experience tiredness, headache, muscle pains, chills, fever or nausea.

These symptoms now have the informal title of the "vaccine hangover."

Jason Kindrachuk, assistant professor in the department of medical microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba, says immune systems are complex and very individualized.

"It's tough to predict how somebody is going to respond to something like vaccination," he says.

Occasional side-effects are common among a lot of vaccines, not just the ones for COVID-19.

Across demographics, including gender and age, there are different immune responses based on biological differences, Kindrachuk says. Some people are just more likely to have a strong response to stimulation of their immune system from a vaccine.

A study published this week in The Lancet, a medical journal, found 13.5 per cent of people reported side-effects after one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech and 22 per cent reported it after their second dose.

It found a larger number of people  37.7 per cent  reported side-effects after getting their first dose of AstraZeneca.

Headache and fatigue were more common in women and all side-effects were more likely if people had previously been infected with COVID-19.

It also found people younger than 55 were more likely to have side-effects.

Dr. Joseph Blondeau, head of clinical microbiology at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, says that may be because younger people have a more robust immune system that's quicker to respond.

He adds that stronger side-effects among some people during their second dose is likely because a person's body has already been primed by the first dose.

"The body is responding quicker and more aggressively because it's recognized something it has seen before and that is what the body is supposed to do," he says.

Blondeau himself felt more tired and sore from getting vaccinated than his wife, who went at the same time and got the same vaccine.

"It doesn't make it good or bad, it just means we are all individuals and we may not necessarily respond the same way."

And if a person doesn't get side-effects from the vaccine, he says they shouldn't be worried that it's not working.

Blondeau says he suspects people may also be reporting more side-effects than they would with something like the annual flu shot because there's an intense awareness of COVID-19 vaccines.

He says people are watching closely because they know it is important to help the world get back to some semblance of normality.

While some people may feel symptoms for a few days, Blondeau says the risks of COVID-19 far outweigh that inconvenience.

Silliphant agrees and has some advice for those concerned about side-effects.

He says you can find the bright side to a vaccine hangover by thinking about how you dealt with the alcohol-related pain of your college days.

"Make it an excuse to order pizza and hang out on the couch to watch Netflix all day," he says with a laugh.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2021.
Beijing, Apr 28 (UNI) The Chinese mainland reported 12 new COVID-19 cases, all of which were imported, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Wednesday.

Of them, three each were reported in Guangdong and Sichuan, two in Shanghai, and one each in Tianjin, Chongqing, Yunnan and Shaanxi.

Four new suspected cases arriving from outside the mainland were reported in Shanghai, the commission said.

No new deaths related to COVID-19 were reported Tuesday, it added.

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With this unique contest that kicks off on April 26, 2021, and ends on May 30, 2021, there is more than one way to be a winner - The creator whose recipe has the most shares via Quicklly will be eligible to win $500, but all recipes are eligible for either a cash reward of $50 for every 100 shares or a 2% lifetime royalty payment whenever the ingredients from their specific recipe are sold.

"As a major foodie and investor in many food-based startups, I'm excited for the opportunity to spotlight and celebrate the creativity, ingenuity, and skill of recipe creators through the World of Recipes competition," said John Cerasani, Owner of Glencrest Global, Cerasani Family Office. "Whether chefs are sharing a new twist on a classic dish or a legacy recipe that's been in their family for years, I'm thrilled that we'll be able to show customers the ways that Quicklly can make even buying the ingredients for specific recipes easy and turn-key."

With ingredients and meals that can be shipped nationwide, customers can order online, schedule their most convenient delivery time and date, and easily manage payment with the click of a button. Quicklly helps small businesses maximize the reach and simplifies customers' lives by managing local deliveries up to a 20-mile delivery radius, offering a range of Ready-to-Cook Sauces, Meal Kits, and Organic Instant Pot Meals made with authentic Indian spices and ingredients, and providing new nationwide delivery for ingredients via the "World of Recipes'' competition.

"This recipe contest was inspired by what we see as the power of food to unite, carry memories, and comfort," said Keval Raj and Hanish, Quicklly's Co-Founders. "We know that so many of our customers have cherished family recipes that they love to prepare and share, so we wanted to provide a platform for them to reveal their passion for cooking with others while also getting rewarded themselves."

Through partnerships with local grocery stores, restaurants, and food companies, Quicklly is on a mission to be the nation's largest and most comprehensive Indian and South Asian food marketplace. To learn more about the "World of Recipes'' contest, go to quicklly.com/recipes. For more information or to sign up, go to quicklly.com.

About Quicklly

Whether longing for ingredients to stock up your kitchen or meals to satisfy your cravings, Quicklly offers everything you need to enjoy South Asian and Indian cuisine, all in one place. As the nation's most comprehensive, one-stop marketplace, Quicklly provides access to a range of Indian grocery ingredients, tiffins, meal kits, and fully prepared restaurant meals delivered to your doorstep.

Founded in 2017, Quicklly also provides a full digital presence for local businesses, connecting them to customers across Greater Chicago, New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and nationwide. Learn more at https://www.quicklly.com.

World of Recipes Terms and Conditions

Full terms and conditions can be found on quicklly.com/recipes.

Media Contact

Susan Oguche

[email protected]

SOURCE Quicklly

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Recompose, a company that offers human composting services in Washington, places the body onto a bed of wood chips, alfalfa and straw inside a steel, 8-foot-long by 4-foot-tall cylinder, according to its website. Each body creates about one cubic yard of soil.

Everything  including bones and teeth  transforms during the process, its website says. The contents of the cylinder are also blended by Recompose staff members, which helps to break up any remaining bone fragments and teeth.

However, nonorganic material like prosthetics and artificial joints are fetched from the cylinder and removed.

Katrina Spade, Recomposes co-founder and chief executive, said on Wednesday that the company was already looking at locations in the Denver area, where it hopes to build a 50-cylinder facility if the bill becomes law.

Ms. Spade said people in Colorado had expressed interest in Recompose, adding that there is an ethos of ecological love and respect in the Denver area and in Colorado broadly, everywhere from the mountains to the farming that happens around the state.

She said that Recomposes process saved about one metric ton of carbon dioxide for each body that is composted rather than cremated or buried traditionally. Mr. Soper, who represents a rural part of Colorado, said some of his liberal constituents were interested in human composting for its environmental benefits.

Among his more conservative constituents from the agricultural community, Mr. Soper said, there are farmers or ranchers who really like the idea of being connected to the land that they were born and raised on.
PINKBIKE FIELD TRIP



ROCKY MOUNTAIN GROWLER



Doesn't hold back on the descents.





Words by Sarah Moore, Photography by Tom Richards





Rocky did include some of the features youd hope to see on pricier bikes, with all the cables running inside the frame through rubber grommets, including the dropper post line, a threaded bottom bracket, and a Boost thru-axle rear end. Our Growler 40 is the middle child of the bunch, with the most expensive Growler 50 model retailing for $2,099 USD Growler 50 and the Growler 20 priced at $1,039 USD.

Next up is the Rocky Mountain Growler 40, the final hardtail in our Field Trip value bike series . It's an aluminum 29er that comes with a 140mm fork and retails for $1,669 USD. Rocky Mountain bills it as an incredibly capable hardtail and with its 64 degree head tube angle, it's the slackest of all the bikes we rode on the Sunshine Coast.Rocky did include some of the features youd hope to see on pricier bikes, with all the cables running inside the frame through rubber grommets, including the dropper post line, a threaded bottom bracket, and a Boost thru-axle rear end. Our Growler 40 is the middle child of the bunch, with the most expensive Growler 50 model retailing for $2,099 USD Growler 50 and the Growler 20 priced at $1,039 USD. Rocky Mountain Growler 40



Fork travel: 140mm

Wheel size: 29"

Frame construction: aluminum

Head angle: 64 degrees

Chainstay length: 435mm

Reach: 440mm (medium)

Sizes: S-XL

Weight: 31.2 lbs / 14.2 kg

Price: $1,699 USD

More info:

Fork travel: 140mmWheel size: 29"Frame construction: aluminumHead angle: 64 degreesChainstay length: 435mmReach: 440mm (medium)Sizes: S-XLWeight: 31.2 lbs / 14.2 kgPrice: $1,699 USDMore info: www.bikes.com

Climbing

Descending

Pros

+ Incredible on rough, fast descents

+ Spec well-suited to aggressive riding



Incredible on rough, fast descentsSpec well-suited to aggressive riding Cons

- Handling not as quick and responsive as traditional hardtails

- Can feel sluggish on mellower trails

Handling not as quick and responsive as traditional hardtailsCan feel sluggish on mellower trails

The 2021 Pinkbike Field Test was made possible with support from Toyota.

Let's talk about that 64-degree head angle for a second. When you sit on a full-suspension bike, the rear end sags just like the front, meaning that the bike gets a bit lower to the ground and maybe a nip slacker, but when you sit on a hardtail its only the fork that sags, obviously. That means that hardtails get a little steeper when youre riding them. Their dynamic geo is steeper than the static geo, to sound all official. The seat tube gets a 75-degree angle and, again, this will actually get a tiny bit steeper rather than slacker as it does on a full-suspension bike.All sizes come with a 435mm rear-end, with the reach running from 425mm on the size small to 500mm on the XL. Our medium sits at 450mm.The Growlers focus is clearly about having as much fun as possible, and I think we all know where that usually happens: on the descents. So the thing we were curious about before riding the bike was how much that would take away from its climbing abilities. Our climb trail snakes up through a few tight spots here and there and definitely had some slippery roots to trip you up, but the Growler went through it all just as well as the steeper bikes.That being said, the steering isn't as quick and precise and it's not going to be quite as adept at the really tricky stuff. Its also not a bike thats going to encourage you to chase a fast time up anything. Of course its efficient, but the WTB rubber makes you feel like you're chained to one spot whenever the trail was rolling slow. We were grateful for the wide-range Deore gearing in those moments.The Growler is best suited to a rider that's going to pedal it up the mountain at whatever pace is comfortable, with the ride being about fun instead of fitness. Its not a climbers bike, but I doubt thats what a potential Growler owner will be interested in.You know what a Growler owner probably is interested in? What happens on the way back down. That's where the Growler is leaps ahead of the other hardtails we had for the Value Field Test. Actually, its ahead of some of the full-suspension bikes as well. It all comes down to that progressive geometry and spec choices made to suit aggressive riding.The position with the 800mm wide handlebar, low slung frame, and how the relatively slack head angle puts the front wheel a bit farther out in front of you all combine to instantly make the Rocky feel more ready for anything than the other bikes. One of our test trails was a high-speed descent covered in embedded round rocks and slippery roots, exactly the kind of place that can surprise you quickly, but the Growler was much more stable and relaxed about things than the Norco or Canyon. Instead of reacting to what the front-end was doing and constantly being on the edge of control, the bikes calmness gives you more time to prepare and think ahead about whats coming.The Growler's composure gives you time to actually look at the trail more, and so you can find better (or just more fun!) lines. As Mike Levy said, "Its the only hardtail on test that I rode like a full-suspension bike - similar lines, similar moves, similar commitment." If you're going to continue to push the limits on this bike, do yourself a favour and upgrade the brakes since the 2-piston Shimano brakes that come on the bike don't have enough initial bite and lack power.
Jordan's Minister of State for Media Affairs Sakher Dudin said that the country is going to lift the Friday lockdown and reopen public parks from April 30. The partial curfew would remain in place, but the worshippers will be allowed to head to mosques on foot for Isha (night) and Taraweeh (night optional) prayers.

He stressed that all precaution measures taken by the government, including accelerating the vaccination campaign and restricting movements, aim to reach a "safe summer" that would enable Jordan to open all sectors at the beginning of July, as per reports.

The minister added that the government is keen on resuming in-class education for schools and universities as of September, noting that the government has already started a vaccination campaign for some 160,000 teachers in a bid to ensure their safety and that of students.

Besides, Health Minister Feras Hawari said that any government procedure needs two to three weeks to reflect on the epidemiological status, stressing that the global epidemiological status makes cautiousness and attention necessary. Hawari said that 200,000 people have failed to show up on schedule to take their first vaccine doses.

Jordan on Wednesday reported 1,910 new Covid-19 cases with 47 deaths, bringing the caseload to 708,265 and the death toll to 8,754.

Nepal govt gives approval to Indian Army chief General to visit Nepal in November

Pakistan to start local production of CanSinoBio's vaccine from May

Covid-19: Iran reports 21,713 new cases, See Global Updates on Corona here
Nuns ask Supreme Court to stop New York's abortion healthcare mandate

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A group of nuns and other religious organizations in New York are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case against a 2017 state mandate requiring employers to cover abortions in their employee healthcare plans.

Led by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, a coalition of religious organizations filed an appeal Friday asking the nations high court to hear the case of Diocese of Albany v. Lacewell.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the law firm Jones Day represent the plaintiffs, which include several Catholic dioceses, local branches of Catholic Charities, individual Catholic churches, Catholic and Anglican nuns and faith-based corporations.

The plaintiffs believe that New Yorks abortion mandate violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because it imposes severe burdens on their religious exercise, including a steadfast opposition to abortion.

In a 2017 regulation, the New York State Department of Financial Services mandated that employers fund abortions through their employee health insurance plans, the petition to the Supreme Court explained. This regulatory command exempts religious entities whose purpose is to inculcate religious values and who employ and serve primarily coreligionists. But religious organizations must cover abortions if they have a broader religious mission (such as service to the poor) or if they employ or serve people regardless of their faith.

For example, Catholic Charities, which serves the poor regardless of if they are Catholic, is required to fund abortions through its employee health insurance plan despite its connection to the Catholic Church, which is well-known for its opposition to abortion.

Even with the limited exemptions provided to certain religious employers, the regulation mandates that group and blanket insurance policies that provide hospital, surgical, or medical expense coverage  shall not exclude coverage for medically necessary abortions. Medically necessary abortions are not explicitly defined in the regulation, but the petition contends that the phrase refers to abortions in cases of rape, incest, or fetal malformation.

The petitioners initially sought relief from the abortion mandate in state court, but the state judicial system upheld the regulation. They are now seeking relief from the Supreme Court. The high court consists of six Republican-appointed justices and three justices appointed by Democratic presidents.

Our faith tells us that every life is precious from the moment of conception until natural death, said Mother Miriam, of the Sisterhood of Saint Mary, the oldest Anglican religious order in the U.S. New York has told us that if we want to hold our beliefs about the sanctity of life, we have to stop serving Non-Anglicans. We cannot compromise on our religious beliefs, or in our service to people of all faiths or no faith at all. Thats why we need relief from the Supreme Court.

According to Becket Senior Counsel Lori Windham, New York instituted its abortion mandate when nuns with the Little Sisters of the Poor were already two Supreme Court victories into their battle against the contraceptive mandate.

Now theyve won for a third time, sending the clear message that the government cant make nuns do its dirty work, Windham said. New Yorks failure to learn from the Little Sisters saga that you cant make nuns pay for abortions is beyond reason. The Court needs to step in and teach New York that lesson.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 last summer that a Trump administration rule broadening religious exemptions to the Obamacare mandate requiring employers to include contraceptive coverage in their employees healthcare plans did not violate the Constitution.

In 2016, the Supreme Court vacated lower court rulings against the Little Sisters of the Poor back to the lower courts, a decision that resulted in the case once again making its way up to the Supreme Court.

Attorneys for the petitioners argue that the Supreme Courts previous rulings in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor have set a precedent that will require the justices to strike down New Yorks abortion mandate. They warned that failure to do so would have adverse impacts on their clients ability to do business in accordance with their faith.

The consequences could hardly be more severe, should this Court not intervene, the petition argued. New York churches and religious ministries will be forced to cooperate in what they consider to be grave evil  or stop operating. Before that happens, the Court should at least consider whether the Constitution allows it.

It is hard to imagine a more critical legal question for Petitioners than whether New York can force them to cover abortions in their employee health plans, the petition continues. And although the impact on religious adherents in New York alone would support review, the importance of this issue travels well beyond New Yorks borders  this case presents critical questions about a fundamental constitutional right.
By Zephania Ubwani

Members of the East African Legislative Assembly have paid glowing tribute to their former colleague the late Mathias Kasamba who succumbed to a brain tumor on Tuesday night.

The MPs said Kasamba was vocal on the dismal performance of the agriculture sector in the East African region and pushed for creation of a new body to oversee the sector development.

In a tweet, EALA Speaker Martin Ngoga says the late Kasamba was one of the active legislators in the House and contributed enormously to the debates.

The outspoken lawmaker was until last week seen in the screens of the plenary sessions of EALA now held virtually due to Covid-19 outbreak.

The late Kasamba was elected into the Fourth EALA (2017-2022) in December 2017 and was to end his first term late 2022.

Regulations require that another member is nominated to fill the void upon death of a legislator, but officials at the regional Assembly in Arusha could not confirm that another MP from Uganda would be elected to fill the now vacant position.

Each of the six EAC partner states has nine members in the Assembly.

The tenure for all the elected members to EALA, which is the legislative organ of the EAC is five years, renewable once.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the states top two legislative leaders committed Wednesday to sending $11.2 billion in federal stimulus money to schools, a victory for education advocates clamoring for the funds.

With the announcement, Texas public schools will start gaining access in the coming months to billions of dollars largely aimed at helping students struggling amid the pandemic. Educators across the state report many of Texas 5.3 million public schoolchildren are laboring academically, behaviorally and socially  with the roughly one-third of those still in online-only classes often falling behind the most.

School district leaders across Texas have not yet detailed precise plans for stimulus money, largely because they did not know how much they will receive or when funding would arrive. However, several superintendents have identified top priorities, such as hiring more staff, extending the school day or year, upgrading ventilation systems and providing retention bonuses.

The State of Texas is ensuring that our public schools have the necessary resources to help Texas students recover from learning loss related to COVID-19, Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement.

What it means to local districts Northside ISD will receive about $173 million, equal to about 17 percent of its annual operating costs. North East ISD is slated for $117 million, about 19 percent of its yearly operating costs. San Antonio ISD, meanwhile, will take in nearly $208 million - nearly 35 percent of its annual operating expenditures. Source: Texas Education Agency data See More Collapse

The decision by Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan brings a simmering debate over federal stimulus money for schools to a partial close. The trio did not specify Wednesday how they plan to spend about $7 billion in remaining stimulus money due to Texas schools as they continue to navigate federal requirements and political waters surrounding the cash.

In a message to school administrators, Texas Education Agency officials also confirmed they will not withhold state funding from schools as part of the stimulus spending plan, alleviating a fear of many education leaders.

State officials delivered about $1 billion to Texas schools from the first stimulus package, but they cut state funding by a similar amount to pay for other costs, such as technology for students. The third stimulus package, which includes the $11.2 billion committed to schools Wednesday, contains provisions that made it more difficult for Texas leaders to divert state education funding.

Funds are being provided, supplemental to all other funding sources to school systems, and will not be supplanted at the state level, TEA officials wrote to administrators.

Texas top Republicans have faced growing calls in recent weeks from educators, public schools advocates and Democratic lawmakers to release federal stimulus funds directly to schools, with few strings attached. They have argued that local educators  as opposed to Texas Education Agency officials and state lawmakers  know how best to spend the money on students struggling academically, behaviorally and emotionally amid the pandemic.

State officials delivered on those demands Wednesday with the $11 billion chunk of stimulus money, albeit later than some educators and lawmakers wanted.

State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin, said its a good day knowing that school districts can finally plan for the extra cash, though he cautioned that the Democratic caucus  and likely some Republicans  will continue to push for allocating the remaining stimulus funds to K-12 education.

Theres going to be some pressure, said Rodriguez, who authored a state budget amendment last week aimed at speeding up the delivery of school stimulus money. This isnt over yet at all.

Some school superintendents reacted cautiously, saying they were awaiting details. Others were effusive.

Because of these funds, we are able to proactively address student learning loss and support childrens mental health as a result of the prolonged pandemic. We continue to be hopeful that all funds are released in a timely fashion, San Antonio Independent School District Superintendent Pedro Martinez said.

Brian Woods, the superintendent at Northside ISD, the San Antonio areas largest district, applauded state leaders and said the funding comes at a critical time for educators who are looking beyond this school year to address the needs of students through summer programming, tutoring, before/after school programs, Saturday school, and other efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wednesdays decision was belated but very substantial progress, said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-San Antonio, but he criticized the states lack of movement on the uncommitted $7 billion. Doggett had led Texas Democratic congressional delegation in sending a letter to the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month condemning state leaders for stalling the funds.

Our childrens future is not a place to cut corners and misuse federal aid to education for non-educational purposes, Doggett said in a statement.

The Texas Association of School Administrators also hailed the decision as much appreciated and consistent with the intent of these federal funds, while issuing a similar warning.

It will give schools across the state the opportunity and targeted resources needed to help Texas students begin to recover from COVID-19 learning loss as soon as this summer, TASA Executive Director Kevin Brown said in a statement.

Our students and school staff have suffered many hardships this past year, and recovery will take multiple years. These resources are critical, and we will continue to work with state leaders to ensure the remaining (stimulus) funds also flow to school districts as supplemental funding.

In his statement, Abbott said he would work with Patrick, Phelan and four state legislators to resolve any outstanding questions about the states education stimulus funds before the end of the legislative session next month. An Abbott spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TEA officials released each districts share of the $11 billion on Wednesday, cautioning that only two-thirds of the money will be available immediately. The remaining one-third will arrive once the U.S. Department of Education approves Texas written plan for the money.

The funds will flow in proportions similar to federal Title I money, meaning public school districts with a higher percentage of students from lower-income families will receive a greater share of the cash.

The states public schools reported about $53.4 billion in total operating costs in 2018-19, the most recent year with available data.

Staff writer Danya Perez contributed to this report. jacob.carpenter@chron.com; cayla.harris@express-news.net
Happy news to unite two prominent Melbourne families. Ollie Howard, son of Victorian Governor Linda Dessau and her husband, Anthony Howard, a former County Court judge, is engaged to Lauren Thurin, granddaughter of property developer and philanthropist John Gandel.

The young couple has announced the happy news with a nod to both traditional and modern audiences: an advertisement in engagements column of the Australian Jewish News and a social media post.

Thurin, who celebrated her 30th last May with a virtual event to raise money for mental health charities, is the daughter of Gandels daughter, Lisa Thurin, and her husband, David Thurin, a lifetime member of the Melbourne Demons and owner of Tigcorp.

Lauren Thurin was previously based in New York and working for Flat World Partners, an advisory and investment firm focused on sustainability and impact.

Howard, meanwhile, an arts law graduate from Monash University, has veered away from his parents trade and has worked in Europe as chairman of AFL Europe, expanding the game into 22 European countries.
By Farah Master and Aleksander Solum

HONG KONG (Reuters) -In Hong Kong's famed party zone Lan Kwai Fong, dormant bars and clubs opened to serve customers again, but only for those who have had at least one vaccine shot - one of the few examples globally of offering greater freedom for the vaccinated. Bar staff need to have gotten at least one coronavirus vaccine dose too, and patrons must register with a government mobile tracking application as they enter.

"Before it was a dead city, now it has loosened a little and everyone is happier," said Vanessa, a 25-year-old office worker who was visiting the popular bar district. The Chinese special administrative region has kept COVID-19 transmission largely under control. Hong Kong has recorded more than 11,700 coronavirus cases, far lower than other developed cities. The new rules come as authorities there try to encourage the city's 7.5 million residents to get vaccinated; only about 12% have received their first dose. "The re-opening of bars and the extension of opening hours are incentives for people to receive the vaccination, while the most important thing ... is to prevent the spread of the infection, should it hit us again," said Professor Lau Chak Sing, head of department of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). "In an ideal situation, one should complete the course of vaccination to ensure protection," he said, adding that with Hong Kong's adequate supply of vaccines, people eager to go to bars would complete both their first and second doses. Venues including nightclubs, karaoke lounges and bathhouses, can stay open until 2 a.m. from Thursday but must operate at half capacity, Sophia Chan, the city's Health Secretary said. Bars can only seat two people per table.

COMPLEX RULES

Customers must scan the government's app and show their vaccination record - stored electronically on their mobile phones - when they enter. Many residents have declined to use the app because of privacy concerns, choosing instead to write down their details. Restaurants can stay open until 2 a.m. and seat up to 8 people at a table, provided they have received both vaccine doses. But they must have a separate area for unvaccinated customers, and depending on whether staff have been vaccinated, might be required to close 10 p.m. or midnight. The multi-tiered rules are tough to implement immediately, industry executives said, and many venues cannot open fully as they cannot force staff to get vaccinated. Allan Zeman, chairman of Lan Kwai Fong Group, a property owner and developer in the nightclub district, said that bar owners were desperate to reopen but that there remained a lot of apprehension among staff about vaccinations. "The restrictions will not be easy. Customers themselves need to have one vaccine, that in itself is very limiting," he said, adding that the measures were a baby step forward and an experiment for both the government and the industry.

Story continues

Ben Leung, president of Hong Kong's Licensed Bar and Club Association, said only around 50% of the city's 1280 bars would open on Thursday with others remaining closed until all their workers had received vaccinations.

Simon Wong, chief executive of LH Group, which operates dozens of restaurants and employs hundreds of staff, wrote on his Facebook page that the new arrangement was "so complicated". Wong said his restaurants would only be able to seat 4 people per table and stay open until 10 p.m., as many staff did not want to get vaccinated. Hong Kong residents have been hesitant since the vaccination programme began in February because of a lack of confidence in China's Sinovac vaccine and fears of adverse reactions. Some residents have shown greater take-up for the vaccine offered by Germany's BioNTech in the city but overall figures remain far below satisfactory, said the city's leader, Carrie Lam.

(Additional reporting by Donny Kwok and Joyce Zhou ; Writing by Farah Master. Editing by Gerry Doyle and Toby Chopra)
Lately, weve been talking about new arrivals at the Essex Street Market (bagels, ice cream and soup have been added to the retail mix). But  pending legal proceedings  theres also a noteworthy departure to report; a merchant whos been part of the market for 23 years.

For the past couple of decades, Carmen Salvador has run Three Brothers Clothing from a small stall on the north end of the market. But her landlord, the citys Economic Development Corp. (EDC) booted the longtime business at the end of September. Salvador turned to a local non-profit group, Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and to MFY Legal Services, which have been helping her fight the move in court; the two sides are scheduled to appear before a judge Thursday.

According to Salvador and Carlina Rivera, director of programming and services at GOLES, city officials have indicated they made the decision because the clothing store has been closed too frequently in recent months. But she argues that the absences were unavoidable  due to several medical issues, including respiratory and thyroid conditions and hypertension. Salvador traveled to the Dominican Republic for surgery, requiring her to close the business for a one-month period. She said market management did not warn her before issuing a written notice in August that she would be required to vacate the retail space. GOLES contends that communication with Salvador, who does not speak much English, was less than ideal; a market security guard apparently acted as an interpreter. City Council member Rosie Mendez spoke with EDC officials on Salvadors behalf, noting her medical issues.

A spokesperson for the EDC told The Lo-Down yesterday that Salvadors permit expired and we elected not to renew it. The agency declined to discuss the specific reasons since the matter is in litigation. But the spokesperson asserted that Salvador was given multiple opportunities to rectify the situation, and that the decision should not have come as a surprise.

At Community Board 3s October land use committee meeting, Rivera and her boss, GOLES Executive Director Damaris Reyes, both spoke out about the situation. Right now there are some vendors who have been vendors (at the Essex Street Market) for a very long time and they are being pushed out, Reyes said, and we are extremely concerned about the timing of this This is what were beginning to see and its one of our fears being realized.

As previously reported, the Essex Crossing development project, unveiled earlier this fall, includes the relocation of the market to a new, larger facility on the south side of Delancey Street. During negotiations with the city, CB3 fought for and won protections for the vendors; any merchants in good standing at the time of the move will be given first priority in the new market, and their rent schedules will be commensurate with what theyre paying prior to the move. The developers are also picking up moving expenses. Reyes is a public member of CB3s land use committee and was involved in the Seward Park deliberations during the past four years.



City officials are emphatic that the Three Brothers situation has absolutely nothing to do with long-term plans for the market, and should not be seen as a sign that existing vendors are being weeded out. Historically, the market has included all types of vendors, but in recent years new merchants have all been food-related businesses, a vision that will be carried through to the new facility when it opens several years from now. But the EDC spokesperson indicated existing non-food vendors have nothing to fear if they are in good standing. There are only a few of these kinds of businesses remaining, including Aminovas Barber Shop, Santa Lucia (a religious articles shop) and a store run by the LES Girls Club.

Essex Market businesses do not have leases. Over the years, merchants have noted that their contracts offer few protections; the city has a lot of latitude to terminate permits and to decide against renewals. A couple of years ago, the community board panel that helped shape the Seward Park redevelopment plan held several sessions devoted to the market. During those meetings, there was some conversation about establishing a community benefits agreement to protect the vendors in the new project. Its not a proposal that went anywhere.

From the citys perspective, merchants have little reason for concern. Delancey Associates, the development team for the Seward Park project, has signed a detailed contract with the city which, among many other things, keeps the market as a publicly-run facility operated by the Economic Development Corp. The EDC spokesperson told us the city is passionate about upholding the markets legacy as a place in which products are available at various price points, rather than creating an exclusive, high-end-only shopping experience. As an indication of a continuing commitment to the current vendors, the Essex Crossing developers are sitting down with the merchants this week to hear their thoughts about the design of the new facility. Last year, as the Seward Park project began to come together, the vendors created a merchant association.

As for Carmen Salvador, she says the loss of her affordable space (which she rented for about $360/month) has been a big blow. Her son has been helping with rent during the past couple of months, but thats not something he can do indefinitely. My 23 years at the market should count for something, Salvador said.

Well let you know the outcome of Thursdays court hearing.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / Expected to be a multi-billion dollar market by 2025, the cannabidoil (CBD) industry is growing at a rapid pace of compound annual growth rate of 15%+ in the U.S.. From tincture drops to gummies and even honey sticks for your tea, CBD has been marketed to have a variety of therapeutic effects and methods of use since its legalization in all 50 U.S. States in the 2018 Farm Bill.

While hemp-derived CBD with less than 0.3% delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana - is federally legal, marketing giants including Google and Facebook are still not allowing it to be promoted through their paid advertising platforms.

So, how can CBD brands reach their eager customers online without the help of these giants? Founder of SocialCow and CMO for CBD distributor and brand creator, Associated Hemp, Kristina Centnere shares her insights.

"Marketers are presented with an interesting challenge when it comes to promoting CBD products online. Whereas most of us rely on paid advertising to reach our ideal customers, in the case of CBD, we have to get creative and really focus on the foundation of the brand and organic opportunities to promote it."

Centnere shares that some of these opportunities include organic search engine optimization, influencer relations, email marketing, programmatic advertising, guest blogging, expos and direct sales to retail locations.

"It's important to note that as with any marketing, there is no silver bullet. Especially when you are barred from conventional paid advertising channels, it's important to run cohesive campaigns across multiple channels simultaneously to get your product in front of your target audience."

A strong proponent of foundational marketing, Centnere notes that marketing is best started before the brand is even fully conceptualized. While most marketers take a brand and do their best to promote what is, Centnere finds that especially in new, restricted industries like CBD, taking marketing into account as you are building the brand is key.

"Smaller companies often treat marketing as an afterthought, rather than building a brand around marketing. At Associated Hemp, we design brands with customer-first mindset and marketing as our guiding light to the creative."

When initializing a brand, Centnere and her team at SocialCow first identify ideal customers for each brand's concept, then deep-dive into their personalities, likes and behaviors. Once designs of the brand are built, SocialCow implements neuromarketing to identify which concepts their target audience resonates with most.

"A decade in [behavioral marketing] and we are still often surprised by the data we learn from neuromarketing tests. Unlike surveys, which have been deemed ineffective by the expert marketing community, the brain doesn't lie."

Neuromarketing is a new concept to the U.S. with Centnere and her team at SocialCow spearheading its use and development for small and medium-sized businesses. Using neuroscience for marketing insight, it is an effective technique of identifying emotional response to visuals as well as measuring gaze direction and intensity.

"We have most recently implemented neuromarketing testing for building a CBD beauty brand, which not only helped us decide on colors of the bottles, but to also verify our pricing estimates and that our concept stood out among competitors' products."

With ample competition and restricted methods of advertising, CBD brands need to be especially mindful of how their products are perceived. While neuromarketing significantly reduces guesswork when it comes to brand concepts and marketing visuals, it works best in conjunction with ongoing analysis.

"Once your brand is on the market, feedback analysis is your best friend. From neuroanalysis of website sessions to surveying our retailers, we bring the data together to see where puzzle pieces may be missing or fitting improperly. The marketing job is never 'done'."

To learn more about neuromarketing, visit SocialCow. To connect with Kristina Centnere, visit her Instagram or LinkedIn.

CONTACT:

Paula Henderson

561-768-4444

phendersonnews@gmail.com

SOURCE: SocialCow

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643406/How-SocialCow-Uses-Neuromarketing-For-CBD-Brand-Creation-And-Marketing-Founder-Kristina-Centnere-Shares-Market-Insight
AG Nessel Announces $300 Million Multistate Settlement with Suboxone Maker

AG Nessel Announces $300 Million Multistate Settlement with Suboxone Maker

Lynsey Mukomel 517-599-2746 Attorney General

April 29, 2021

LANSING - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced today that Michigan will receive more than $4 million in a settlement agreement involving Indivior PLC and Indivior Inc. (Indivior).

This settlement covers six federal lawsuits and involves Indivior's product Suboxone, a buprenorphine drug that was approved for use by recovering opioid addicts to avoid or reduce withdrawal symptoms while they undergo treatment.

Allegations detailed in lawsuits assert that, from 2010 through 2015, Indivior:

promoted the sale and use of the drug to physicians who were writing prescriptions without having a medical purpose;

knowingly promoted Suboxone Sublingual Film based on false and misleading claims that it was less subject to diversion and abuse than other buprenorphine products and less susceptible to accidental pediatric exposure than Suboxone Sublingual Tablets; and

improperly controlled pricing of Suboxone, including pricing to state Medicaid programs, by submitting a petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on September 25, 2012, fraudulently claiming that Suboxone Tablet had been discontinued "due to safety concerns" and taking other steps to fraudulently delay the entry of generic competition for various forms of Suboxone.

Indivior will pay a total of $300 million to resolve these civil fraud allegations, which impacted Medicaid and other government programs. Michigan's settlement portion was determined by a litigation damage model based, in part, upon drug overpayments from each state.

"My office is dedicated to holding drug companies accountable for their actions," Nessel said. "We are particularly focused on behavior fueling the opioid epidemic and this settlement serves as a win in the fight against a national crisis."

This settlement follows the Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC ("Reckitt") settlement with the federal government and the states in 2019, which involved similar allegations involving Suboxone.

The Michigan Department of Attorney General Health Care Fraud Division receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under a grant award totaling $5,025,536 for federal fiscal year 2021. The remaining 25 percent, totaling $1,675,177, is funded by the State of Michigan.
Haurin joined My Alarm Center in November 2019 as Vice President of Marketing. In this role, she was responsible for developing and scaling the company's marketing efforts for the full subscriber lifecycle, including media, acquisition, customer engagement, and analytics. In the last year, Haurin has re-vamped the company's marketing organizational structure, including hiring and directing MAC's first in-house creative team. The marketing team, under her leadership, has transformed and solidified the My Alarm Center family of brand's digital presence, expanded and expedited customer referral programs, and developed a data-driven customer acquisition and engagement strategy. Haurin regularly collaborates across the company on operational initiatives and has a customer-focused mindset. As SVP of Marketing, Haurin will have responsibility for My Alarm Center's ongoing brand management, advertising, and customer engagement initiatives.

Anastasia Bottos, President & COO, says, "Since joining our team, Maddie has brought an entirely fresh perspective to our marketing strategy. We have been operating at a higher level, producing more sophisticated marketing materials because of her vision and contributions. It has been a pleasure working with her, and I am excited to see our marketing output evolve under her leadership as she continues to drive this critical part of our business."

Evan Flamm, Chief Financial Officer, added, "Maddie has demonstrated the ability to maximize returns on marketing capital while greatly enhancing the marketing collateral of the organization. She has well-positioned My Alarm Center for scalable lead generation efforts to maximize growth and profitability. We are thrilled with Maddie's contributions to MAC since 2019, and we are excited to see her continue to shine as a member of the senior leadership team." Before joining My Alarm Center, Haurin has led growth efforts for other direct-to-consumer businesses. Most recently, she led the media team at Connect America as Director of Media, where she led their strategic marketing initiatives and managed their annual media budget. Haurin holds a BA Degree in Communication from Marist College and lives in Philadelphia.

About My Alarm Center

My Alarm Center is a leading provider of security and smart home automation to residential and small business customers throughout the United States. With a primary focus on providing best-in-class security and alarm monitoring, My Alarm Center offers a range of services to help protect customers. In addition to intrusion, fire and carbon monoxide protection, My Alarm Center delivers smart home integration, expanding security services to a total lifestyle solutionand keeping customers connected to home and family from anywhere. Ranked as the 7th largest residential security provider in the United States, regional brands for My Alarm Center include Hawk Security Services in Texas, ACS Security in Los Angeles, Alarm Monitoring Service Of Atlanta (AMSA), and My Alarm Center in WA, PA, NJ, and DE. For more information, visit www.myalarmcenter.com.

SOURCE MY ALARM CENTER

Related Links

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An anti-mask conspiracy theorist who encouraged hundreds of Manitobans to break COVID-19 public health orders at a Sunday rally at The Forks was arrested Tuesday, when he did the same thing in Thunder Bay.

An anti-mask conspiracy theorist who encouraged hundreds of Manitobans to break COVID-19 public health orders at a Sunday rally at The Forks was arrested Tuesday, when he did the same thing in Thunder Bay.

The small rally in the Ontario city on the shore of Lake Superior went ahead, but 37-year-old organizer Chris (Sky) Saccoccia of King City, Ont., was later charged for breach of undertaking and faces charges under Ontarios Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.

Thunder Bay Police Service also charged an organizer from the host city and another from B.C. under the act.

On Wednesday, the Manitoba government, RCMP and Winnipeg Police Service all declined to say whether local officers have the power under provincial legislation to cuff someone for contravening such orders or encouraging others to do so.

Saccoccia was on a cross-country tour, and failed to self-isolate upon his arrival in Manitoba. The anti-lockdown agitator is also known for spreading anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric.

Manitoba officials initially would not say whether he was one of two local attendees ticketed Sunday. Video circulating on social media appears to show enforcement officials, flanked by what looks like an undercover police vehicle, serve Saccoccia with two tickets in a parking lot adjacent to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

A provincial spokesman issued a statement late Wednesday, saying Saccoccia was issued two tickets for his role in the event, each carrying a fine of $1,296.

"We are not aware of anyone being arrested in Manitoba for breaches of the public health order," WPS Const. Rob Carver said in an email, when asked if police have the power to make such arrests.

"All infractions have been dealt with by warnings or the issuing of offence notices."

Asked by the Free Press whether officers have made any arrests for breaching health orders or if they have that power under provincial legislation, Manitoba RCMP said they wouldnt be able to provide an answer Wednesday.

Earlier, a provincial enforcement spokesperson ignored most questions about Sundays rally, including why it was allowed to occur; whether officials spoke to organizer Saccoccia; and what the provinces overall policy is on enforcement at defiant mass gatherings.

Instead, the spokesperson provided a statement identical to one given to the Free Press late afternoon Tuesday.

"Enforcement officials were focused on surveillance and interventions. Tickets were issued, information was gathered and further tickets are pending based on video and other information collected on site," the statements read.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera
PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Accenture (ACN), a professional services company, announced Thursday its agreement to acquire Openminded, a French cybersecurity services company that provides advisory, cloud & infrastructure security, cyber defense, and managed security services. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition requires prior consultation with the work council. The deal would be subject to customary closing conditions. Openminded, founded in 2008, is powered by a security operations center. It helps clients anticipate and reduce cybersecurity risks, rapidly detect and respond to cyber incidents, and implement best practices in regulatory compliance. Following the deal closure, Openminded's around 100 cybersecurity professionals will be part of Accenture Security's workforce. The deal will extend Accenture's cybersecurity presence and capabilities in France and in Europe. Olivier Girard, market unit lead for Accenture France and Benelux, said, 'Our intent to acquire Openminded is aligned with our global strategy to provide differentiated robust services to our clients in their local markets. It would accelerate our growth in France and scale our cybersecurity capabilities within the market unit and across Europe.' 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.
(Independent)

The US has started withdrawing its final combat troops from Afghanistan - a move that would mark the end of the nations longest war.

Twenty years after US and UK forces invaded the South Asian nation in a bid to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, it was reported the last of 2,500 US forces still based there were finally leaving.

The invasion resulted in the deaths of more than 3,500 coalition forces, and unknown number of Taliban fighters, as well as countless thousands of Afghan civilians.

For all the blood spent, and devastation wrought, large swathes of the nation remain in Taliban control.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden was located holed up in a compound in Pakistan, a purported US ally, where he was killed in a raid by special forces in 2011.

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Brits could travel safely to most parts of Europe without needing to quarantine with infections at the levels they are now, according to an easyJet-commissioned study by Yale University in the US.

May 17 will be the day the Government decides where people can go on holiday this summer and researchers have suggested one or two-week quarantine policies are too harsh for most destinations.

Because the UK's infection rate is so low there would likely be no benefit for travellers quarantining when they arrive, as long as they were tested instead.

Quarantine is more likely to be needed for returning travellers and those visiting the UK, the researchers said, but up to five days would likely suffice for most places  again if people are tested before and after they fly.

easyJet has seized on the research to call for open borders this summer as it hopes to get passengers in the air after a devastating year for the airline industry. Its CEO Johan Lundgren claimed 'it is safe to put much of Europe on the green list'.

The Yale study, commissioned by easyJet, suggested safe quarantine periods for different country-pairs, with travellers from the UK not required to quarantine anywhere but Portugal and Turkey, while people coming into Britain from other nations (except Portugal and Finland) should self-isolate for between two and five days. (In the graphic, the suggested quarantine period for people travelling from the UK is shown as a number beside the destination country in the first column, below the 'UK' header) Turkey has a high quarantine period because visitors stay there for an unusually long time and there are a lot of travellers relative to population, the researchers said

People travelling or returning into the UK should quarantine because most countries have higher infection rates than Britain does. The countries shaded in darker purple should have longer quarantines, according to the study, with the number of days ranging from two to five

easyJet, which commissioned the research, has seized its results to call for open borders this summer as it hopes to get passengers in the air after a devastating year for the airline industry

The Yale study suggested that the number of people being hospitalised with Covid may only rise by six per day even if international travel opens up en masse. The current rate is at 144 new patients per day.

It said: 'Our analysis demonstrates that for the vast majority of origin-destination country pairs, there are combinations of short-duration quarantine and testing that are as effective as border closure.

'Furthermore, for most origin-destination country pairs, travel with testing and no quarantine will reduce imminent in-country transmission more than would border closure.

'We find that the duration of quarantine is predominantly influenced by country prevalence and quantity of travel.

'With higher prevalence in the origin country compared to the destination country, the minimum duration of quarantine increases from zero to beyond fourteen days, at which point border closure would likely be practical.'

According to the paper, which is based on infection rates in April and assumes countries have similar levels of vaccinated people, Brits could travel to most countries without needing to quarantine, including Italy, Greece, Finland, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

It suggests that a two-day quarantine would be a good idea in Portugal, and a nine-day one in Turkey  Turkey is an outlier because far more people travel in than out, the researchers said, so it was necessary to prevent importing cases.

The reasons that quarantine could be shorter than previously, the experts said, was that in most situations there was a low risk of a traveller being infected and, if they came from a riskier country than the one they were going to, testing before and after the flight would weed out almost all of the infections.

HEATHROW WARNS BORDER FORCE TO 'GET A GRIP' BEFORE MAY 17 Heathrow's boss today warned of his 'deep concerns' about impending chaos at arrivals after it emerged covid passports will not be ready for the start of foreign holidays from May 17 and could be delayed until 'later in the summer'. John Holland-Kaye said the Home Office and UK Border Force 'need to get a grip' immediately or risk repeats of six-hour waits in queues where social distancing proved impossible and one passenger even collapsed. Grant Shapps revealed yesterday that the NHS' app for appointments and prescriptions will double as a covid passport for tourists, providing evidence of their covid vaccinations and test results. But Mr Shapps also gave a hint that its rollout could coincide with June's G7 summit in Cornwall in early June, where he hopes to seal bilateral travel corridors with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US - despite the Transport Secretary saying the chances of a foreign holiday 'look good' in just under three weeks. Reacting to the delay and the impending influx of passengers, Mr Holland-Kaye, CEO of Heathrow Airport, said: 'I am deeply concerned. They [Border Force] are struggling to cope with even the few thousand of travellers coming in at the moment, and all the additional checks they have to carry out. 'They either need to change that system or have more Border Force officers on the desks. Border Force and the Home Office need to get a grip on this ahead of May 17th so that immigration does not become a stranglehold on the UK's economic recovery'. He added: 'We are focused on 17 May, we are getting ready to open up then, working with the airlines to make sure we can give a really warm welcome to passengers. But the key question is whether Border Force will be ready to receive those passengers when they come into the country, so they have a smooth journey through the airport and not the kind of lengthy queues that unfortunately we have seen too often in recent weeks'. Advertisement

In countries with devastating outbreaks it might still be the best move to put in border controls, they said, but most of Europe has the virus under control.

easyJet's Mr Lundgren urged the Government to put popular destinations such as Spain, Portugal and Greece in the lowest risk category when foreign holidays resume.

Overseas leisure travel is expected to be permitted for people in England from May 17 as part of the next easing of coronavirus restrictions.

A risk-based traffic light system will be implemented, with different quarantine and testing requirements for countries on green, amber and red lists.

People returning from green destinations will not need to self-isolate and will only be asked to take one post-arrival test.

The analysis, based on data from April 12, found that opening UK borders to travellers from much of Europe would increase hospital admissions by less than 4 per cent.

If Spain  the most popular overseas destination for UK holidaymakers  was on the green list, only an additional four people per week would require hospital treatment due to coronavirus, the study found.

The researchers also claimed the 10-day quarantine period for people returning from amber countries is longer than necessary.

The travel lists are expected to be published next week.

In a speech to a virtual meeting of the Aviation Club, Mr Lundgren said 'it is safe to put much of Europe on the green list', as 'the impact of travel on hospitalisations is minimal'.

Eliminating coronavirus is 'not viable for the UK', he told the audience of aviation industry leaders, adding: 'We need to learn how to operate with it.'

Mr Lundgren went on: 'The success of the UK vaccine rollout has broken the link between cases and hospitalisation. It is the same success that allows for the domestic reopening.

'And as we get into May and June we expect the situation to improve because of the progress of the vaccination programmes.

'So, we have demonstrated through the scientific analysis it is safe for much of Europe to be categorised as green.'

Dr Townsend said: 'Travel quarantines have been a cornerstone of efforts to prevent infectious disease prevention since the 14th century.

'We've determined that appropriate, shorter quarantines and judicious testing can facilitate travel, in cases where they are needed to prevent unsafe levels of transmission.'
New Delhi, April 29 : Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said on Thursday that the test positivity rate for Covid-19 has been declining in the national capital, which is a ray of hope for Delhi government.

"With the positivity rate dropping down to 31.76 per cent, Delhi reported 25,986 cases on Wednesday. The numbers have been constantly breaching the 20,000-mark for the past 10-12 days. However, the fact that the positivity rate has been declining is a certain ray of hope for us," Jain said.

"The highest positivity rate was recorded at nearly 35 per cent about four days ago. We thought that this might go beyond 40-45 per cent. But it has halted at 35 per cent, and is even dropping down, like yesterday it was 31.76 per cent," he added.

While presenting a graph that demonstrated the 10-day average and daily positivity rate, Jain said that the 10-day average has been decreasing significantly since the past couple of days. "This ignites hope within us. We are foreseeing the positivity rate to decline even further," he said.

He also pointed out that the demand for oxygen has increased exponentially in Delhi, and the Arvind Kejriwal-led government is focussing on increasing the number of oxygen beds and maintaining its consistent supply.

Jain claimed that the Aam Aadmi Party government's preparations for the vaccination drive for those above 18 tears of age are on track and it shall commence as soon as the government receives vaccine doses from the companies.

He also mentioned that this is not the time to politicise things, as everything has been displayed transparently by the Delhi government, which has never hidden anything in the past and can assure that it won't do the same in the near future.

Jain assured that no matter how many hindrances the Kejriwal government faces, it will continue to work for the welfare of the people of Delhi.

With reference to doubts regarding a small error related to Covid deaths in Wednesday's health bulletin, Jain said, "The bulletin was correct, but the only mistake was in the cumulative total. It was supposed to be added to the previous day's numbers, but instead it was mistakenly added to the day before yesterday's numbers. It has been rectified and disseminated."
ST. LOUIS, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Peabody (NYSE: BTU) today announced its first quarter 2021 operating results, including revenues of $651.3 million; loss from continuing operations, net of income taxes of $77.7 million; net loss attributable to common stockholders of $80.1 million; diluted loss per share from continuing operations of $0.79; and Adjusted EBITDA1 of $61.1 million.

"While economies across the globe are in varying stages of recovery from the ongoing pandemic, I'm pleased to note that operational and productivity improvements continue to take hold across the company," said Peabody President and Chief Executive Officer Glenn Kellow. "In addition, we successfully completed our refinancing activities and subsequently repaid a portion of our long-term debt. Looking ahead, we remain focused on further improving our seaborne metallurgical cost structure and capturing continued cash improvements across the organization while positioning for ongoing seaborne market improvements."

First Quarter 2021 Financial Results

First quarter revenues totaled $651.3 million compared to $846.2 million in the prior year primarily due to the impact of lower volumes, pricing and sales mix.

Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased 13 percent from the prior year to $21.7 million from the company's ongoing cost reduction program.

Depreciation, depletion, and amortization (DD&A) declined 36 percent from the prior year to $68.3 million, primarily due to the impairment at the North Antelope Rochelle Mine recorded in Q2 2020 as well as lower volumes.

Interest expense increased $19.3 million over the prior year due to $10.6 million of one-time fees expensed as part of the refinancing transactions, higher borrowing costs and amortization of the related debt issuance costs.

Loss from continuing operations, net of income taxes totaled $77.7 million compared to $129.3 million in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $61.1 million compared to $36.8 million in the prior year.

Segment Performance

During the first quarter, the seaborne thermal segment exported 2.3 million tons at an average realized price of $58 per ton with the remaining 1.8 million tons sold under a long-term domestic contract. First quarter seaborne thermal segment costs of $36 per ton increased 14 percent compared to the prior year primarily due to expected lower volumes from the United Wambo JV transition as well as unfavorable exchange rates and the impacts on the logistics chain from both historic flooding in New South Wales and a ship loader outage at the Newcastle NCIG port. These impacts were partially offset by cost improvements at Wilpinjong. The segment reported 16 percent Adjusted EBITDA margins and Adjusted EBITDA of $28.5 million.

In the first quarter, Wilpinjong sold 2.9 million tons at a cost of $23 per ton and contributed approximately $24.6 million to the seaborne thermal segment's Adjusted EBITDA. Wilpinjong had $6.1 million of capital expenditures in the first quarter and $104 million of cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2021.

The seaborne met segment shipped 1.0 million tons, including 0.1 million tons from idled operations, at an average realized price of $87 per short ton in the first quarter. Seaborne met costs, excluding idled operations, were approximately $84 per ton. Total segment costs of $110 per ton were in line with the prior year even as the segment shipped one million less tons in 2021 as productivity improvements at Moorvale offset the impacts of unfavorable exchange rates and idled mine costs at Metropolitan and Shoal Creek. The segment reported Adjusted EBITDA loss of $22.4 million.

The PRB segment shipped 20.7 million tons at an average realized price of $11.01 per ton. Weather conditions in February impacted shipments for the quarter by an estimated 1 million tons. PRB costs per ton decreased 7 percent to $9.56 due to ongoing cost management initiatives and pit sequencing despite a 12 percent reduction in volumes from the prior year. The segment reported 13 percent Adjusted EBITDA margins and Adjusted EBITDA of $30.1 million.

The other U.S. thermal segment shipped 3.9 million tons at an average realized price of $39 per ton. Cost per ton decreased 6 percent from the prior year to $29 due to productivity improvements and cost management efforts at each of the mines. The segment reported 24 percent Adjusted EBITDA margins and Adjusted EBITDA of $36.2 million.

Balance Sheet and Cash Flow

During the quarter, Peabody generated $71 million of cash from operating activities, repaid debt of approximately $54 million and ended the quarter with $623.7 million of cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash.

The quarter included one-time items related to the refinancing transactions including $33 million of refinancing fees and approximately $40 million of debt repayment.

Peabody also posted $43.5 million of collateral under the accounts receivable securitization facility as outstanding letters of credit temporarily exceeded the balance of eligible receivables at quarter-end, primarily due to the timing of shipments.

Investing cash flows included $50 million related to capital expenditures and $34 million of net contributions to joint ventures, primarily related to upcoming capital expenditures for the United Wambo JV transition.

Comprehensive Improvement Program Update

Peabody continues to take action, particularly to improve its met coal operating performance and capture cash improvements across the platform.

The CMJV continues to recognize the ongoing cost improvements implemented, with productivity improvements overcoming an $0.11 unfavorable exchange rate impact. Costs per ton at the complex declined $12.92 year over year.

Shoal Creek remains idled as the company continues activities to achieve higher productivity, lower costs and improved yields from the operation in the future. The restart of mine production and coal shipments is contingent upon successful completion of these initiatives and stable customer demand. Initiatives include a prep plant upgrade project, which is anticipated to be commissioned in mid Q3. Additionally, the Shoal Creek labor contract expired on April 1, 2021 and negotiations are ongoing.

While discussions are ongoing with customers and workforce, the Metropolitan full workforce will return to the mine in early May. Development work at the mine has been ongoing through the idle period and longwall production is anticipated to restart in the second quarter, with ramp up to full production in the third quarter.

Outlook

Based on current market conditions, Peabody anticipates the following results in 2021:

U.S. Thermal Operations: PRB volumes remain largely in line with 2020 volumes, with more than 95 percent of 2021 tons currently priced at an average price of $10.98 per ton. Other U.S. thermal shipments are expected to be approximately 16 million tons, priced at an estimated average price of $39 per ton. U.S. thermal coal deliveries are largely dependent on general economic conditions, weather, natural gas prices and utility inventory levels.

Based on expected production levels, Peabody anticipates PRB and other U.S. thermal costs per ton to be largely in line with 2020 levels.

Seaborne Thermal: Peabody anticipates volumes and costs will progressively improve throughout the year as the company's mines continued to safely operate throughout the quarter. For the full year, seaborne thermal volumes are expected to be approximately 17 million tons, including 7-8 million domestic tons. Seaborne thermal costs per ton are expected to increase compared to 2020 levels given lower volumes, higher expected royalties and currently unfavorable exchange rates. Tight supplies and low inventory levels have resulted in improved pricing year-to-date for Newcastle thermal coal.

Seaborne Met: Due to productivity improvements and increased customer demand, CMJV volumes are expected to be higher than 2020 volumes. Volumes at idled mines will be contingent upon customer demand and ongoing improvement program activities at Shoal Creek and the production ramp up at Metropolitan. Prices for Australian hard coking coal continues to be impacted by the China ban on Australian coal, in addition to increased COVID concerns in India. Prices for low-vol PCI are at parity with Australian hard coking coal as tight supply and China paying premiums for Russian coals have resulted in higher prices.

Corporate and Other: Previous SG&A expense guidance has been revised down $5 million to $85 million. Capital expenditures are expected to be $225 million, including approximately $135 million on major project capital primarily for the seaborne thermal segment. 2021 interest expense is expected to be approximately $200 million, including $50 million of non-cash expense. Peabody also anticipates the following cash impacts for the full year 2021:

$60 million related to final reclamation activities

related to final reclamation activities $30 million related to postretirement benefits in excess of expense

related to postretirement benefits in excess of expense $15 million related to final multi-employer pension plan (MEPP) payment

Second quarter 2021 results are expected to be largely in line with the first quarter based on current pricing levels.

Today's earnings call is scheduled for 10 a.m. CT and can be accessed via the company's website at PeabodyEnergy.com.

Peabody (NYSE: BTU) is a leading coal producer, providing essential products to fuel baseload electricity for emerging and developed countries and create the steel needed to build foundational infrastructure. Our commitment to sustainability underpins our activities today and helps to shape our strategy for the future. For further information, visit PeabodyEnergy.com.

Contact:

Alice Tharenos

314.342.7890

________________________________ 1 Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure. Revenues per ton, costs per ton, Adjusted EBITDA margin per ton and percent are non-GAAP operating/statistical measures. Adjusted EBITDA margin is equal to segment Adjusted EBITDA divided by segment revenues. Please refer to the tables and related notes in this press release for a reconciliation and definition of non-GAAP financial measures.

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (Unaudited) For the Quarters Ended Mar. 31, 2021 and 2020







(In Millions, Except Per Share Data)







Quarter Ended

Mar.

Mar.

2021

2020







Tons Sold 30.2



35.6









Revenues $ 651.3



$ 846.2

Operating Costs and Expenses (1) 582.6



779.5

Depreciation, Depletion and Amortization 68.3



106.0

Asset Retirement Obligation Expenses 15.9



17.6

Selling and Administrative Expenses 21.7



24.9

Restructuring Charges 2.1



6.5

Transaction Costs Related to Joint Ventures 



4.2

Other Operating (Income) Loss:





Net Loss (Gain) on Disposals 0.6



(8.1)

Loss from Equity Affiliates 0.9



9.1

Operating Loss (40.8)



(93.5)

Interest Expense 52.4



33.1

Gain on Early Debt Extinguishment (3.5)





Interest Income (1.5)



(3.1)

Net Periodic Benefit (Credit) Costs, Excluding Service Cost (8.7)



2.8

Loss from Continuing Operations Before Income Taxes (79.5)



(126.3)

Income Tax (Benefit) Provision (1.8)



3.0

Loss from Continuing Operations, Net of Income Taxes (77.7)



(129.3)

Loss from Discontinued Operations, Net of Income Taxes (2.0)



(2.2)

Net Loss (79.7)



(131.5)

Less: Net Income (Loss) Attributable to Noncontrolling Interests 0.4



(1.8)

Net Loss Attributable to Common Stockholders $ (80.1)



$ (129.7)









Adjusted EBITDA (2) $ 61.1



$ 36.8









Diluted EPS - Loss from Continuing Operations (3)(4) $ (0.79)



$ (1.31)









Diluted EPS - Net Loss Attributable to Common Stockholders (3) $ (0.81)



$ (1.33)







(1) Excludes items shown separately. (2) Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure. Refer to the "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures" section in this document for definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. (3) During the quarters ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, weighted average diluted shares outstanding were 98.4 million and 97.2 million, respectively. (4) Reflects loss from continuing operations, net of income taxes less net income (loss) attributable to noncontrolling interests.



This information is intended to be reviewed in conjunction with the company's filings with the SEC.

Supplemental Financial Data (Unaudited) For the Quarters Ended Mar. 31, 2021 and 2020





Quarter Ended

Mar.

Mar.

2021

2020 Tons Sold (In Millions)





Seaborne Thermal Mining Operations 4.1



4.6

Seaborne Metallurgical Mining Operations 1.0



2.0

Powder River Basin Mining Operations 20.7



23.5

Other U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 3.9



4.9

Total U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 24.6



28.4

Corporate and Other 0.5



0.6

Total 30.2



35.6









Revenue Summary (In Millions)





Seaborne Thermal Mining Operations $ 176.4



$ 201.1

Seaborne Metallurgical Mining Operations 87.5



193.2

Powder River Basin Mining Operations 228.4



266.6

Other U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 149.3



192.3

Total U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 377.7



458.9

Corporate and Other 9.7



(7.0)

Total $ 651.3



$ 846.2









Total Reporting Segment Costs Summary (In Millions) (1)





Seaborne Thermal Mining Operations $ 147.9



$ 146.0

Seaborne Metallurgical Mining Operations 109.9



225.9

Powder River Basin Mining Operations 198.3



241.2

Other U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 113.1



153.8

Total U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 311.4



395.0

Corporate and Other (1.8)



18.1

Total $ 567.4



$ 785.0









Other Supplemental Financial Data (In Millions)





Adjusted EBITDA - Seaborne Thermal Mining Operations $ 28.5



$ 55.1

Adjusted EBITDA - Seaborne Metallurgical Mining Operations (22.4)



(32.7)

Adjusted EBITDA - Powder River Basin Mining Operations 30.1



25.4

Adjusted EBITDA - Other U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 36.2



38.5

Adjusted EBITDA - Total U.S. Thermal Mining Operations 66.3



63.9

Middlemount (2) (2.3)



(9.7)

Resource Management Results (3) 0.4



8.0

Selling and Administrative Expenses (21.7)



(24.9)

Other Operating Costs, Net (4) 12.3



(22.9)

Adjusted EBITDA (1) $ 61.1



$ 36.8









Note: See footnote explanations on following page





Supplemental Financial Data (Unaudited) For the Quarters Ended Mar. 31, 2021 and 2020









Quarter Ended

Mar.

Mar.

2021

2020 Revenues per Ton - Mining Operations (5)





Seaborne Thermal $ 43.36



$ 44.10

Seaborne Metallurgical 87.47



95.65

Powder River Basin 11.01



11.36

Other U.S. Thermal 38.76



39.25

Total U.S. Thermal 15.36



16.18









Costs per Ton - Mining Operations (5)(6)





Seaborne Thermal $ 36.36



$ 32.03

Seaborne Metallurgical 109.89



111.82

Powder River Basin 9.56



10.28

Other U.S. Thermal 29.37



31.39

Total U.S. Thermal 12.66



13.93









Adjusted EBITDA Margin per Ton - Mining Operations (5)(6)





Seaborne Thermal $ 7.00



$ 12.07

Seaborne Metallurgical (22.42)



(16.17)

Powder River Basin 1.45



1.08

Other U.S. Thermal 9.39



7.86

Total U.S. Thermal 2.70



2.25











(1) Total Reporting Segment Costs and Adjusted EBITDA are non-GAAP financial measures. Refer to the "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures" section in this document for definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. (2) We account for our 50% equity interest in Middlemount Coal Pty Ltd. (Middlemount), which owns the Middlemount Mine, under the equity method. Middlemount's standalone results exclude the impact of related changes in deferred tax asset valuation allowance and reserves and amortization of basis difference recorded by the company in applying the equity method. Middlemount's standalone results include (on a 50% attributable basis):



Quarter Ended



Mar.

Mar.



2021

2020



(In Millions)

Tons sold 0.6



0.5



Depreciation, depletion and amortization and asset retirement obligation expenses $ 6.7



$ 5.9



Net interest expense 5.1



2.7



Income tax benefit (0.1)



(4.2)

(3) Includes gains (losses) on certain surplus coal reserve and surface land sales and property management costs and revenues. (4) Includes trading and brokerage activities, costs associated with post-mining activities, minimum charges on certain transportation-related contracts and costs associated with suspended operations including the North Goonyella Mine. (5) Revenues per Ton, Costs per Ton and Adjusted EBITDA Margin per Ton are metrics used by management to measure each of our mining segment's operating performance. Revenues per Ton and Adjusted EBITDA Margin per Ton are equal to revenues by segment and Adjusted EBITDA by segment, respectively, divided by segment tons sold. Costs per Ton is equal to Revenues per Ton less Adjusted EBITDA Margin per Ton. Management believes Costs per Ton and Adjusted EBITDA Margin per Ton best reflect controllable costs and operating results at the mining segment level. We consider all measures reported on a per ton basis to be operating/statistical measures; however, we include reconciliations of the related non-GAAP financial measures (Adjusted EBITDA and Total Reporting Segment Costs) in the "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures" section in this document. (6) Includes revenue-based production taxes and royalties; excludes depreciation, depletion and amortization; asset retirement obligation expenses; selling and administrative expenses; restructuring charges; asset impairment; amortization of take-or-pay contract-based intangibles; and certain other costs related to post-mining activities.









This information is intended to be reviewed in conjunction with the company's filings with the SEC.

Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets As of Mar. 31, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2020







(Dollars In Millions)







(Unaudited)





Mar. 31, 2021

Dec. 31, 2020







Cash and Cash Equivalents $ 580.2



$ 709.2

Restricted Cash 43.5





Accounts Receivable, Net 167.8



244.8

Inventories 241.4



261.6

Other Current Assets 239.2



204.7

Total Current Assets 1,272.1



1,420.3

Property, Plant, Equipment and Mine Development, Net 3,025.4



3,051.1

Operating Lease Right-of-Use Assets 46.8



49.9

Investments and Other Assets 142.0



140.9

Deferred Income Taxes 



4.9

Total Assets $ 4,486.3



$ 4,667.1









Current Portion of Long-Term Debt $ 69.4



$ 44.9

Accounts Payable and Accrued Expenses 721.6



745.7

Total Current Liabilities 791.0



790.6

Long-Term Debt, Less Current Portion 1,411.3



1,502.9

Deferred Income Taxes 34.6



35.0

Asset Retirement Obligations 658.6



650.5

Accrued Postretirement Benefit Costs 410.8



413.2

Operating Lease Liabilities, Less Current Portion 37.5



42.1

Other Noncurrent Liabilities 251.0



251.5

Total Liabilities 3,594.8



3,685.8









Common Stock 1.4



1.4

Additional Paid-in Capital 3,366.4



3,364.6

Treasury Stock (1,369.5)



(1,368.9)

Accumulated Deficit (1,353.4)



(1,273.3)

Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income 194.6



205.8

Peabody Energy Corporation Stockholders' Equity 839.5



929.6

Noncontrolling Interests 52.0



51.7

Total Stockholders' Equity 891.5



981.3

Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity $ 4,486.3



$ 4,667.1









This information is intended to be reviewed in conjunction with the company's filings with the SEC.

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (Unaudited) For the Quarters Ended Mar. 31, 2021 and 2020









(Dollars In Millions)











Quarter Ended



Mar.

Mar.



2021

2020 Cash Flows From Operating Activities







Net Cash Provided By (Used In) Continuing Operations

$ 74.1



$ (1.6)

Net Cash Used in Discontinued Operations

(3.1)



(3.1)

Net Cash Provided By (Used In) Operating Activities

71.0



(4.7)

Cash Flows From Investing Activities







Additions to Property, Plant, Equipment and Mine Development

(50.3)



(31.3)

Changes in Accrued Expenses Related to Capital Expenditures

(11.4)



(11.4)

Proceeds from Disposal of Assets, Net of Receivables

0.9



10.5

Contributions to Joint Ventures

(69.3)



(96.3)

Distributions from Joint Ventures

35.6



98.4

Advances to Related Parties





(6.9)

Cash Receipts from Middlemount Coal Pty Ltd

2.3





Other, Net

(1.0)



(0.1)

Net Cash Used In Investing Activities

(93.2)



(37.1)

Cash Flows From Financing Activities







Repayments of Long-Term Debt

(40.2)



(7.2)

Payment of Debt Issuance and Other Deferred Financing Costs

(22.5)





Repurchase of Employee Common Stock Relinquished for Tax Withholding

(0.6)



(0.8)

Distributions to Noncontrolling Interests

(0.1)



(0.1)

Other, Net

0.1



0.2

Net Cash Used In Financing Activities

(63.3)



(7.9)

Net Change in Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash

(85.5)



(49.7)

Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash at Beginning of Period

709.2



732.2

Cash, Cash Equivalents and Restricted Cash at End of Period

$ 623.7



$ 682.5











This information is intended to be reviewed in conjunction with the company's filings with the SEC.

Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures (Unaudited) For the Quarters Ended Mar. 31, 2021 and 2020







(Dollars In Millions)













Note: Management believes that non-GAAP performance measures are used by investors to measure our operating performance and lenders to measure our ability to incur and service debt. These measures are not intended to serve as alternatives to U.S. GAAP measures of performance and may not be comparable to similarly-titled measures presented by other companies.









Quarter Ended

Mar.

Mar.

2021

2020







Loss from Continuing Operations, Net of Income Taxes $ (77.7)



$ (129.3)

Depreciation, Depletion and Amortization 68.3



106.0

Asset Retirement Obligation Expenses 15.9



17.6

Restructuring Charges 2.1



6.5

Transaction Costs Related to Joint Ventures 



4.2

Changes in Deferred Tax Asset Valuation Allowance and Reserves and Amortization of Basis Difference Related to Equity Affiliates (1.5)



(0.7)

Interest Expense 52.4



33.1

Gain on Early Debt Extinguishment (3.5)





Interest Income (1.5)



(3.1)

Unrealized Losses on Economic Hedges 1.9



2.2

Unrealized Losses (Gains) on Non-Coal Trading Derivative Contracts 7.6



(0.1)

Take-or-Pay Contract-Based Intangible Recognition (1.1)



(2.6)

Income Tax (Benefit) Provision (1.8)



3.0

Adjusted EBITDA (1) $ 61.1



$ 36.8









Operating Costs and Expenses $ 582.6



$ 779.5

Unrealized (Losses) Gains on Non-Coal Trading Derivative Contracts (7.6)



0.1

Take-or-Pay Contract-Based Intangible Recognition 1.1



2.6

Net Periodic Benefit (Credit) Costs, Excluding Service Cost (8.7)



2.8

Total Reporting Segment Costs (2) $ 567.4



$ 785.0









Net Cash Provided By (Used In) Operating Activities $ 71.0



$ (4.7)

Net Cash Used In Investing Activities (93.2)



(37.1)

Free Cash Flow (3) $ (22.2)



$ (41.8)







(1) Adjusted EBITDA is defined as loss from continuing operations before deducting net interest expense, income taxes, asset retirement obligation expenses and depreciation, depletion and amortization. Adjusted EBITDA is also adjusted for the discrete items that management excluded in analyzing each of our segment's operating performance, as displayed in the reconciliation above. Adjusted EBITDA is used by management as the primary metric to measure each of our segment's operating performance. (2) Total Reporting Segment Costs is defined as operating costs and expenses adjusted for the discrete items that management excluded in analyzing each of our segment's operating performance, as displayed in the reconciliation above. Total Reporting Segment Costs is used by management as a metric to measure each of our segment's operating performance. (3) Free Cash Flow is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities less net cash used in investing activities and excludes cash outflows related to business combinations. Free Cash Flow is used by management as a measure of our financial performance and our ability to generate excess cash flow from our business operations.



This information is intended to be reviewed in conjunction with the company's filings with the SEC.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the securities laws. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. They often include words or variation of words such as "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "projects," "forecasts," "targets," "would," "will," "should," "goal," "could" or "may" or other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements provide management's current expectations or predictions of future conditions, events or results. All statements that address operating performance, events, or developments that Peabody expects will occur in the future are forward-looking statements. They may include estimates of sales and other operating performance targets, cost savings, capital expenditures, other expense items, actions relating to strategic initiatives, demand for the company's products, liquidity, capital structure, market share, industry volume, other financial items, descriptions of management's plans or objectives for future operations and descriptions of assumptions underlying any of the above. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made and reflect Peabody's good faith beliefs, assumptions and expectations, but they are not guarantees of future performance or events. Furthermore, Peabody disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, except as required by law. By their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those suggested by the forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, a variety of economic, competitive and regulatory factors, many of which are beyond Peabody's control, including the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and factors that are described in Peabody's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2020, and other factors that Peabody may describe from time to time in other filings with the SEC. You may get such filings for free at Peabody's website at www.peabodyenergy.com. You should understand that it is not possible to predict or identify all such factors and, consequently, you should not consider any such list to be a complete set of all potential risks or uncertainties.

SOURCE Peabody

Related Links

PeabodyEnergy.com


On Monday I emailed Gov. Phil Murphys office to ask a couple questions.

The first was when he is going to stop issuing those state-of-emergency orders that hes been cranking out like clockwork since March of last year.

The second concerned what plans he has for compensating all of the business owners who have lost money because of his edicts.

Later that day I got a no comment in my inbox. I also got a press release from the desk of Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal. It announced that Shamrock Beef and Ale, a popular bar in Wildwood, will be losing its liquor license for 90 days beginning June 1 because of violations of the governors orders.

There goes the entire summer season, which is all that matters to the merchants in a summer town like Wildwood.

That seemed a bit extreme to me. It also seemed a bit extreme to Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Gloucester County Democrat who frequents that part of the Shore in summer.

I dont know how much they were ignoring the orders, but that just seemed like a real heavy-handed punishment for these businesses that are struggling, Sweeney said.

It seemed that way to me, too. When I got the bars manager, Sara Ambrico, on the phone she said the citations stemmed from a disagreement over whether a section of the bar was outdoors or indoors, where the edicts are more strict.

Ambrico said that after a prior tiff with the town, the owner had reconstructed a room so it had sliding doors that could be opened to expose it to the breeze.

We were running something we considered outdoors, Ambrico said.

Thats an easy mistake to make, given the confusing nature of Murphys edicts.

They have been so confusing even he doesnt understand them. That became clear last summer after the governor visited another Shore bar, the Waters Edge in Bayville.

Murphy caught a lot of criticism after a photo surfaced online showing him glad-handing a potential voter as he stood in front of a bar with a flat-screen TV in the background.

Murphy tried to wriggle out of it by arguing that the bar in question was open to the air. It was indeed, I found out when I went there. But it had a hard roof. That made it an indoor bar by his own definition. (Earlier that month Murphy violated his own restrictions on outdoor gatherings to march in a Black Lives Matter protest.)

A few days later he changed the definition. Thats the fun of ruling the state by edict instead of legislation.

But when will that end? I put that question to Sweeney.

Hopefully soon were talking to him about that, he replied.

State Sen. Declan OScanlon is hoping for those talks as well. At the time of that Bayville incident the Monmouth County Republican tangled with the governor over a restaurant in Red Bank that also was open to the breeze but had a hard ceiling.

Im not sure anyone could decipher all the rules, OScanlon said. But the governors goal should be to lead business in the right direction, not to destroy their business.

OScanlon said business owners told him they were disappointed by Murphys Monday COVID press briefing.

He teased a major reopening announcement, OScanlon said. And then on Monday it was good for caterers but for the restaurants it was deadly.

Murphy announced he was loosening some restrictions on proms and graduations. However restaurants will remain restricted to 50 percent capacity for indoor dining.

Meanwhile New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that bar seating can return on Monday and that food and beverage curfews will end next month.

With the weather getting warmer and vaccinations widely available, Murphy should be setting dates for a complete reopening, he said.

Hes not gonna have a choice, OScanlon said. We just have to be relentless in the pressure to get him to do the right thing.

In the meantime, OScanlon and his fellow minority Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee introduced a bill to restrict Murphys power to decide how to spend $6.5 billion in federal relief funding.

When I asked Sweeney about that, he said the governor is open to negotiating that in the run-up to the adoption of the states Fiscal Year 2022 by July 1.

Were working with the administration right now and this will all be resolved, said Sweeney.

OScanlon suggested that some of that relief money should go to places like the Shamrock that were closed for violating Murphys many edicts.

The governor should back off and pardon these infractions that happened as these businesses were trying to survive, he said.

Yes, he should, especially if he wants to get re-elected.

The office up for grabs on that November ballot will be Governor, not Emperor.

Theres a big difference. But it seems to be lost on Murphy.
DETROIT, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Stratview Research announces the launch of a new research report on Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry by Type (Bisphenol A and Novolac) by End-Use Industry Type (Pipe & Tanks (Chemical Storage, Oil & Gas, Water & Waste Water, Pulp & Paper, and Others}, Building & Construction {CIPP, Swimming pool, Bars & Beams, and Others}, Marine {Structural and Non-Structural}, Wind Energy {Spar Caps and Others}, Transportation {Under-the-Hood Applications and Others}, and Others), by Process Type (Filament Winding, Open Mold, Pultrusion, Resin Infusion, Compression Molding, and Others), and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World), Size, Share, Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2021-2026.

This strategic assessment report, from Stratview Research, provides a comprehensive analysis that reflects today's vinyl ester resin market realities and future market possibilities in the composites industry for the forecast period of 2021 to 2026. The report estimates the short- as well as long-term ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for vinyl ester resins in various composite markets 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 and information provided in the report can play a crucial role for market participants as well as investors in formulating short-term as well as long-term growth strategies.

Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry: Highlights from the Report

Vinyl ester resin is widely used in the fabrication of composite parts for a wide array of industries such as transportation, marine, buildings & construction, pipe & tanks, wind energy, and aerospace & defense. The chemical-resistant property of vinyl ester resins in corrosive aqueous areas is superior to that of other thermosets; hence, preferably used in the fabrication of pipes, tanks, structural boat parts, wind turbine spar caps, etc. Higher strength and durability of vinyl ester composites in comparison to polyester composites further give an impetus to their growing acceptance in the transportation, building & construction, wind energy, and aerospace & defense industries.

In 2020, the rapid spread of COVID-19 has completely shaken the global economy, causing supply chain disruption, production halts, reduced demand, and employee layoffs. The vinyl ester resin market in the composites industry was no exception and suffered a decline of over 10% in 2020. The market started showing signs of recovery from the 3rd quarter of 2020 with ease in lockdown in different parts of the world. Also, the long-term outlook seems positive with a gradual rebound in demand for vinyl ester resins from the major composite markets such as pipes and tanks, marines, building & construction, and transportation, ultimately rebounding the demand at a CAGR of 7.5% during 2021-2026 to reach a value of US$ 537 million in 2026.

Click Here and Run Through the TOC of the Report: https://www.stratviewresearch.com/toc/1505/vinyl-ester-resin-market-in-composites-industry.html

Based on type, Bisphenol-A-based vinyl ester resin is likely to remain dominant in the market till 2026, whereas Novolac-based is expected to heal at a faster rate during the forecast period. Better mechanical and chemical-resistant properties of bisphenol-A-based vinyl ester resin are the major reasons behind its dominance in the market.

Based on the end-use industry, Stratview research has segmented the market as pipes & tanks, building & construction, marine, wind energy, transportation, and others. Despite the current glum scenario, the pipe & tank application is expected to maintain its dominance in the market by 2026. Increasing acceptance of FRP pipe & tank in wastewater/water, chemical, oil & gas, and industrial applications with vinyl ester as the preferred choice for resin will keep driving the demand for vinyl esters in the pipe & tank segment.

Enquire Here for a Free Sample of the Detailed Report: https://www.stratviewresearch.com/Request-Sample/1505/vinyl-ester-resin-market-in-composites-industry.htmlform

Despite the grave downturn, Asia-Pacific is projected to remain the largest market for vinyl ester resins during the forecast period. The region's dominance is attributed to several factors including the growing disposable income of consumers, growing infrastructure projects, rapid urbanization, and increasing investment towards renewable energy. North America and Europe are also expected to offer substantial growth opportunities.

The supply chain of this market comprises raw material suppliers, vinyl ester resin manufacturers, distributors, composite part fabricators, OEMs, and MRO companies. Key vinyl ester resin manufacturers are Ineos Composites, AOC Aliancys, Polynt-Reichhold Group, Swancor, Eternal Materials Co., Ltd., Interplastic Corporation, SIR Industriale S.p.A., and Sino Polymers.

Major players are shifting their focus towards rebuilding their short-term and long-term strategies to handle the current distressing time. However, execution of mergers & acquisitions and development of new applications have been the key strategies adopted by the major players to gain a competitive edge in the market.

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 vinyl ester resin market in the global composites industry and has segmented the market in four ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. Following are the four ways in which the market is segmented:

Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry, by Type

Bisphenol A (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Novolac (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry, by End-Use Industry Type

Pipes & Tanks

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW



Application Analysis: Chemical Storage, Oil & Gas, Water & Waste Water, Pulp & Paper, and Others

Building & Construction

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW



Application Analysis: CIPP, Swimming pool, Bars & Beams, and Others

Marine

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW



Application Analysis: Structural and Non-Structural

Wind Energy

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW



Application Analysis: Spar Caps and others

Transportation

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW



Application Analysis: Under the hood applications and others

Others

Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW

Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry, by Process Type

Filament Winding (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Open Mold (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Pultrusion (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Resin Infusion (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Compression Molding (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Others (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW)

Vinyl Ester Resin Market in the Composites Industry, by Region

North America (Country Analysis: The USA , Canada , and Mexico )

Europe (Country Analysis: Germany , France , the UK, Russia , and Rest of Europe )

Asia-Pacific (Country Analysis: Japan , China , India , and Rest of Asia-Pacific )

Rest of the World (Country Analysis: Brazil , The UAE, 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:

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: sales@stratviewresearch.com

Direct: +1-313-307-4176

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660595/Stratview_Research_Logo.jpg
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Count Every Hero, a cross-partisan initiative formed in the fall of 2020 to ensure military votes were counted in the general election, launched a new campaign today called Operation Protect Democracy focused on fighting corruption in politics by reforming the electoral system.

Operation Protect Democracy is organized around the following six principles. When legislation embodies these principles, such as major tenets of the For the People Act, it is supported.

Secure elections free of foreign interference Equal access to the polls for all eligible voters Accountability of elected officials All American voters directing our country's future, not only an elite few Transparency and effective oversight of the electoral system Civic literacy to build an informed, engaged, and expanded electorate

"The recent presidential election and its aftermath was a real wake up call," said Gen. Tony Zinni, USMC (ret.), chair of Count Every Hero. "I was appalled and saddened by the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol - the symbol of our democracy. The veteran community has an opportunity to help heal our nation by calling on our fellow Americans to rally together. One of the best ways we can do this is by improving our electoral system."

General Zinni is joined by the following retired senior military and civilian defense leaders:

The Honorable Luis Caldera, 17th Secretary of the Army

The Honorable Sean O'Keefe , 69th Secretary of the Navy

, 69th Secretary of the Navy The Honorable Deborah Lee James , 23rd Secretary of the Air Force

, 23rd Secretary of the Air Force General George Casey , USA (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Army

, (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Army Admiral Steve Abbot , USN (ret.), former Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command

, USN (ret.), former Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command General John Jumper , USAF (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Air Force

, USAF (ret.), former Chief of Staff of the Air Force Admiral James Loy , USCG (ret.), former acting Secretary of Homeland Security

Operation Protect Democracy is a national awareness campaign that seeks to improve our elections, increase civic literacy, and encourage voter participation.

About Us: Count Every Hero is a fiercely cross-partisan coalition of veterans and citizens dedicated to protecting democracy and fighting corruption.

Contact:

Joe Plenzler

Marjorie K. Eastman

Organizers, Count Every Hero

(301) 800-9457

[email protected]

SOURCE Count Every Hero

Related Links

https://counteveryhero.org


CALISTOGA  The Calistoga Fire Departments latest acquisition isnt much to look at, but what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in value.

This so-called radio-in-a-box is a 10-watt AM radio with a range of 5-10 miles specifically designated as means to provide information to residents in the case of an emergency, such as an earthquake or wildfire. It is the only radio of its kind in Napa County and is licensed by the FCC. And its fully operational and ready to go.

Said Fire Chief Steve Campbell, All anyone has to do is tune into AM station 1670 for the latest information about any type of emergency event. We will link the radio to Nixle alerts to let residents know they should tune in."

Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help We're offering our best deal ever with this Editor's Special. Support local news coverage by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register.

The station is accessible on car radios as well as hand-crank or battery-operated transistor radios.

"We know that some people dont have smartphones or internet access to get Nixle alerts," said Campbell, adding that the new radio will also work in conjunction with Calistogas existing emergency sirens. The fire department is working to make personal AM radios available free of charge to those who live in Calistoga later this spring or summer. Signs with the radio stations number will also be placed around town.
According to a report delivered at the BAC A BANK meeting held on April 26, the bank has completed its master plan on restructuring in 2016-2020 which has been approved by the State Bank of Vietnam. BAC A BANK has accomplished almost all of its goals.

BAC A BANK has organised its annual general shareholders' meeting, with many key targets adopted

Facing difficulties caused by the health crisis, BAC A BANK revised its business plans in a suitable manner with impressive results.

BAC A BANKs total asset are worth about VND117.3 trillion ($5.1 billion), reaching 101.5 per cent of the initial plan, while the charter capital has increased by VND7.085 trillion ($308 million), and capital mobilisation hit 102.9 per cent of the initial plan.

The banks loans have touched nearly 100 per cent of the initial plan, while bad debts sat at 0.79 per cent, lower than the earlier set target of 1.5 per cent, and BAC A BANKs profit has reached 104 per cent of the plan. As of December 31, 2020, BAC A BANK boasted a transaction network of 146 spots, including one headquarters, 44 branches, and 100 transaction offices in 31 provinces and cities nationwide.

In 2021 which is the first year for BAC A BANK to implement its 2021-2025 business plan, the bank will continue building up and implementing its goals safely and effectively. In March 2021, BAC A BANK listed itself on the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) with the BAB ticker.

The move has helped elevate BAC A BANKs stature and prestige in the Vietnamese market, increasing the benefits for its stakeholders, and approach a new long-term capital mobilisation channel. This has also helped BAC A BANK operate more effectively and transparently in order to approach new investors. This is a firm foundation for BAC A BANK to continue growing strongly in the time to come.

In 2021, BAC A BANK aims to see a rise of 7 per cent in its total assets, 6.3 per cent in charter capital, 8 per cent for deposits, and 11 per cent for loans. Other goals have also been set, such as revenue from services ($4.57 million), pre-tax profit ($38 million), and the number of transaction spots will rise by nine.

BAC A BANK has also adopted a scheme to raise charter capital by another VND446 billion ($19.4 million) through issuing another 44.6 million shares in order to pay dividends. With this scheme, BAC A BANK has set a plan to reap an after-tax profit of VND700 billion ($30.43 million), up 19.66 per cent compared to the realised figure in 2020.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 22:03:10|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of National Defense has lodged solemn representations to the United States over a U.S. warship's interference in Chinese naval training exercises, a military spokesperson said on Thursday.

The ministry's spokesperson Wu Qian made the remarks in response to a query about frequent activities of U.S. warships and aircraft in waters and airspace near China.

Referring to the destroyer USS Mustin's close reconnaissance of China's Liaoning aircraft carrier fleet which was carrying out a normal training mission, Wu said the action seriously threatens the safety of ships and personnel of both Chinese and U.S. sides. The U.S. vessel was later urged to leave.

Since the current U.S. administration took office, U.S. warships have been 20 percent more active on sea areas around China compared with the same period last year, and reconnaissance aircraft have been 40 percent more active, Wu said.

The Chinese side firmly opposes such actions that escalate regional militarization and threaten peace and stability in the region, said Wu.

"We urge the U.S. side to strictly restrain its frontline troops and comply with regulations, such as the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters and the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea, so that such dangerous incidents do not reoccur," he said. Enditem
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In 2018, David and Adam Rudman began work on their latest project, Donkey Hodie.

Truth is, Fred Rogers came up with the original idea decades prior.

After three years of hard work  with plenty of starts and stops due to the pandemic  the PBS Kids series will premiere at 11:30 a.m. Monday, May 3, on New Mexico PBS. It will rebroadcast more than a dozen times through June 26.

The series is from Fred Rogers Productions, home of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and Spiffy Pictures.

It is inspired by the funny, quirky side of beloved childrens TV pioneer Rogers, the imaginative puppet series for preschoolers follows the adventures of Donkey Hodie, a can-do little yellow donkey with a bright magenta mane  and the granddaughter of the original Donkey Hodie character from Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

The series will premiere with a one-hour special featuring four adorable stories  Flying Flapjacks, Pickle Penguin Problem, A Big Favor for Grampy and A Fair Way to Bounce.

The series is set in the colorful world of Someplace Else (which fans may also recognize from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, along with other such Easter eggs from the original show), where Donkey Hodie and her best pals, Purple Panda, Bob Dog, and Duck Duck, help empower young viewers to dream big and overcome obstacles, work hard and persevere, be resourceful and discover they can solve problems on their own  and laugh themselves silly all along the way. Each episode features catchy original tunes as well as re-imagined versions of Fred Rogers songs that reinforce the stories positive messages and fun adventures.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip



................................................................

Were still evolving and keep discovering new things, Adam Rudman says. Its been really fun. To see where we are a year later is exceptional. We still have eight more months to get better.

Ellen Doherty, executive producer and chief creative officer of Fred Rogers Productions, says her goal is to make sure that shows are designed for children but also meant for anyone.

This series is really clear and strongly crafted, Doherty says. The stories will resonate with viewers of all ages. We took our inspiration from a character Fred created years ago, and its an homage to his way of teaching. The series is letting viewers know that nobody is perfect. As long as you push through and reach for your goals, its all worth it.

ON TV

Donkey Hodie will premiere at 11:30 a.m. Monday, May 3, on New Mexico PBS.
BTS reaches another milestone as the first foreign act to surpass 300 million streams on Japan's Oricon chart with their hit "Dynamite."

Keep on reading to know more.

BTS Becomes First Foreign Act to Surpass 300 Million Streams on Oricon Japan with 'Dynamite'

On Wednesday, April 28 KST, it was revealed that BTS's hit song, "Dynamite" had surpassed more than 300 million combined streams in Japan's music chart, Oricon.

BTS's disco-pop song added more than 6.69 million streams in Oricon's recent weekly streaming chart that was gathered by the Japanese music chart from April 19 to April 25. This 6.69 million addition allowed "Dynamite" to hit more than 306.5 million streams in total, according to Big Hit Music.

After 36 weeks of its release, "Dynamite" achieved this new milestone and becomes the third song to surpass the 300 million threshold, making BTS the first foreign artist to do so as well, said Big Hit Music.

The first act to reach the milestone is the Japanese band, Official Hige Dandism, with their song "Pretender," 94 weeks after its release. Following the band is Japanese music duo Yoasobi and heir song "Yoru ni Kakeru" that surpassed 300 million streams 50 weeks after its release.

BTS's "Dynamite" is an all-English song that was release in August last year. With "Dynamite," BTS became the first Korean act to top the Billboard's singles chart and receive their first-ever Grammy nomination.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN: BLACKPINK Jennie, TWICE Tzuyu, and More: Korean Media Outlet Selects the Idols Who Look Better IRL Than in Photos

BTS to Make Comeback With English Song "Butter" in May

On April 27 KST, Big Hit Music uploaded a trailer for BTS's upcoming single, "Butter" on their official social media accounts and announced it release on May 21 at 1pm KST.

According to reports made by media outlets, "Butter" will be an all-English summer song that will be in the dance-pop genre. This will be the group's second time releasing a song that is completely in English, after their hit song "Dynamite" that was released in August of last year.

A physical copy of their song will be released in both South Korea and worldwide.

In addition, as the release of "Butter" is only a few weeks away, Korean media outlets predict that the group will be performing their new song at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards as the event will take place on May 24 KST.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN: BTS J-Hope Selected As the Idol People Want Invited to University Festivals + See Full List

For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz.

KpopStarz owns this article.



Written by Robyn Joan
- Cboe's new Netherlands-based derivatives exchange plans to launch on Monday, 6 September 2021, subject to regulatory approvals

- Wide range of participants have committed to supporting the exchange

- Exchange will introduce a modern, vibrant pan-European derivatives market, which promotes an on-screen market structure

- Cboe-owned EuroCCP will provide clearing services for the exchange, subject to regulatory approvals

LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cboe Europe, a pan-European exchange operator and a subsidiary of Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE), announced it plans to launch Cboe Europe Derivatives, a new Amsterdam-based futures and options market, on Monday, 6 September 2021, subject to regulatory approvals. Cboe has secured the support of a broad range of participants, including banks, clearing firms, market-makers and proprietary trading firms who are expected to help contribute to the provision of liquidity and client order flow on Cboe Europe Derivatives.

Participant bank and clearing firms currently include ABN AMRO Clearing, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Participant market-makers and proprietary trading firms currently include All Options, Da Vinci Derivatives, DRW, Flow Traders, Liquid Capital Markets and Susquehanna International Securities.

Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to leverage Cboe's global derivatives expertise and European equity trading and clearing footprint to bring a modern, on-screen market structure utilized in the U.S. to Europe and to grow the region's equity derivatives market overall. EuroCCP, Cboe's pan-European clearing operator, will provide clearing services for the venue, subject to regulatory approval. By taking a pan-European approach, Cboe Europe Derivatives will enable market participants to access a vibrant derivatives market through a single access point, creating efficiencies in trading and clearing.

David Howson, EVP, President of Europe and Asia-Pacific for Cboe Global Markets, said: "We are delighted to bring together such a strong group of participants to support the anticipated launch of Cboe Europe Derivatives. We have listened to the needs of market participants and are designing this new market from a pan-European point-of-view, leveraging our global derivatives expertise, European equities trading footprint, ownership of EuroCCP and world-class technology to build a more efficient equity derivatives market."

Robbert Booij, CEO Europe at ABN AMRO Clearing Bank N.V, said: "Cboe Europe Derivatives represents an attractive new marketplace for European equity derivatives. It is being created by a highly-respected exchange operator and we look forward to having our clients benefit from this new market."

Elizabeth Martin, Global Head of Equities Electronic Trading at Goldman Sachs, said: "Partnering with Cboe Europe Derivatives aligns with our support of innovative electronic marketplaces and offers another opportunity to provide additional market access and liquidity to our clients."

David Russell, Global Co-Head of Institutional Equities at Morgan Stanley, said: "By increasing competition in the European equity derivatives market, our clients benefit from having more choice, while lower friction pricing models also promote greater liquidity. Over the past 10 years, European exchange traded derivative volumes have lagged global markets, and we are supportive of this new initiative to bring further competition and innovation to this space."

John Keogh, Managing Director at Susquehanna International Securities, said: "We are committed to working with exchanges to support product innovation and grow the listed options markets in Europe. We are excited to become a liquidity provider on Cboe Europe Derivatives as we are aligned with its goal of developing a strong, liquid orderbook-focused exchange."

Cboe Europe Derivatives is expected to form part of Cboe NL, Cboe's Netherlands-based exchange, and initially offer trading in futures and options based on six Cboe Europe Indices: the Cboe Eurozone 50, Cboe UK 100, Cboe Netherlands 25, Cboe Switzerland 20, Cboe Germany 30, and Cboe France 40 - all calculated using Cboe market data1.

Cboe Europe Derivatives plans to add futures and options on additional European benchmarks, along with single stock options, at a later date, based on customer demand.

Ade Cordell, President of Cboe NL, said: "We have had an extremely positive response to our vision for Cboe Europe Derivatives from participants across the trading community. Firms not currently active in European markets are excited by the prospect of a transparent, efficient, lit pan-European equity derivatives market, which will help to unlock its true potential and grow the market overall."

About Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) provides cutting-edge trading and investment solutions to market participants around the world. The company is committed to defining markets through product innovation, leading edge technology and seamless trading solutions.

The company offers trading across a diverse range of products in multiple asset classes and geographies, including options, futures, U.S., Canadian and European equities, exchange-traded products (ETPs), global foreign exchange (FX) and volatility products based on the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX Index), recognized as the world's premier gauge of U.S. equity market volatility.

Cboe's subsidiaries include the largest options exchange and the third largest stock exchange operator in the U.S. In addition, the company operates one of the largest stock exchanges by value traded in Europe, and owns EuroCCP, a leading pan-European equity clearing house. Cboe also is a leading market globally for ETP listings and trading.

The company is headquartered in Chicago with a network of domestic and global offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia, including main hubs in New York, London, Kansas City and Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.cboe.com.

Media Contacts

Analyst Contact









Tim Cave +44 (0) 7593-506-719 tcave@cboe.com Angela Tu +1-646-856-8734 atu@cboe.com

Debbie Koopman +1-312-786-7136 koopman@cboe.com



















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Cboe and Cboe Global Markets are registered trademarks of Cboe Exchange, Inc.

The content of this press release is for information purposes only and does not constitute or form part of, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain information contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties.

1 With the exception of the Cboe Switzerland 20

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Hundreds of people lined the streets to send off a baby boy who was killed after his pram was struck by a car.

Ciaran Leigh Morris was pinned to a wall by a BMW that mounted the pavement in Brownhills, West Midlands, at around 4pm on Easter Sunday.

The newborn was rushed to Walsall Manor Hospital after being given CPR at the scene but nothing could be done to save his life despite the best efforts of medics.

His funeral cortege passed through the town's high street yesterday, with the area covered in blue ribbons in his memory, as Ciaran's teenage parents, supported by friends and neighbours, said a final goodbye.

A hearse bearing floral tributes led a horse-drawn carriage through the streets before motorbike and scooter riders formed a procession.

A horse-drawn carriage was led through the streets of Brownhills, West Midlands, in memory of baby Ciaran Leigh Morris

Two-week-old Ciaran Leigh Morris (above) who was killed after his pram was struck by a car died as a result of 'major trauma', an inquest heard

Floral tributes left at the scene on High Street, Brownhills, where the newborn was tragically killed on Easter Sunday

The baby was pinned to a wall by a BMW that mounted the pavement in Brownhills, West Midlands, at around 4pm on Easter Sunday

Earlier this month, an inquest into Ciaran's death was opened and adjourned at Black Country Coroner's Court by Area Coroner Joanne Lees.

She revealed parents Camaron Morris and Codie Holyman, both 18, had to identify tiny Ciaran's body and offered the couple her 'sincere condolences.'

She said: 'We are here to open the inquest into the death of Ciaran Morris. His death was reported to me by West Midlands Police.

'He was born on March 17, 2021 and sadly died on April 4, 2021 at Manor Hospital in Walsall in the West Midlands.

'It was reported to me that Ciaran had been taken in there following a collision at 4pm on April 4, 2021 involving a vehicle that mounted the pavement and collided with a pram carrying baby Ciaran.

'Paramedics attended and administered CPR, then he was taken to Manor Hospital in Walsall where sadly he was confirmed as having passed away.

'Doctor Lawson has provided the medical cause of death, that was major trauma caused by a road traffic accident.

'Ciaran was identified by his parents Camaron Morris and Codie Holyman. In these circumstances an inquest into the death is required.

Ciaran suffered serious injuries after a white BMW collided with his stroller as his family were pushing him along the pavement in Brownhills, near Walsall, West Midlands, on Easter Sunday afternoon (pictured, the scene of the crash)

Camaron Morris, father of Ciaran, pictured with the tragic baby shortly after he was born

Earlier this month, 34-year-old James Paul Davis appeared before magistrates charged with causing baby Ciaran's death by dangerous driving, and other motoring offences (above, Davis outside Wolverhampton Magistrates' Court on April 6)

'I have been made aware a person has been charged with a criminal offence in connection with the death of Ciaran Morris.

'Therefore I am going to open the inquest into the death of Ciaran Morris.

'I am going to suspend my coronial conclusion into the death of Ciaran pending the outcome of criminal investigations.

'I would like to offer my sincere condolences to Kiaran's family.'

Earlier this week Camaron, a McDonald's worker, and Codie, a college student, paid tribute to their newborn son.

They were said to have been on their first walk together as a family when the collision occurred and had been left 'numb with grief'.

The couple said: 'Mommy's and Daddy's hearts will always ache, we love you more than anything.

'We didn't get to keep you for long but we are happy we had the chance to meet you, look after you and call you our son.

'Fly high angel.'

West Midlands Police said the crash, which happened on Brownhills High Street, happened after the car was in collision with a Ford vehicle.

A note (bottom right) left by the parents of Ciaran Leigh Morris at the scene on High Street, Brownhills, Walsall

It then mounted the pavement and struck the pram being pushed along by Ciaran's family leaving the youngster with catastrophic injuries.

Sergeant Mark Crozier said previously: 'We've all been left numb by the sad death of Ciaran. He was just two-weeks-old and his life has been tragically taken away.

'To see the loss of someone so young is difficult for us as officers, but we know the pain is even greater for Ciaran's family.

'We'll be doing all we can to support them while also trying to establish what happened leading to the collision.'

Well-wishers have raised more than 33,000 towards the funeral of the two-week-old baby so far.

A crowdfunding site which was set up through JustGiving with an appeal target of 2,000 to help support the family, has now raised more than 16 times that total in just four days.

More than 2,000 people and businesses have so far donated.

Among the tributes on the JustGiving page, set up by Karl Roberts, was a message from Barbara Johnson, which read: 'There are no words to ease the deepest heartache and sadness you must feel at this awful time, no parent should have to experience this. Rest in peace beautiful boy, an angel far too soon.'

Another, from Michelle Butler, said: 'I have a new grandson who's 2 weeks old and to think of losing him is beyond tragic. I hope u find comfort and get support from family and friends. How u get over this god knows. I'm so deeply sorry - may he rest in peace.'

James Paul Davis of Walsall, appeared before Wolverhampton Magistrates' Court earlier this month, charged with causing death by dangerous driving.

He has also been charged with driving while uninsured, failing to stop at the scene of a collision and failure to report a collision.

Mr Davis, 34, was remanded in custody to appear at Wolverhampton Crown Court on May 4.
By Margo Kissell, university news and communications

President Joe Biden has nominated Myaamia Center Executive Director Daryl Baldwin  a leader in Native American language and cultural revitalization  to the National Council on the Humanities, the White House announced Wednesday.

Daryl Baldwin

A citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, Baldwin is an adjunct assistant professor in educational leadership and also serves as co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, which is based in the Myaamia Center on Miami Universitys Oxford campus.

Miami University congratulates Daryl Baldwin for this prestigious nomination to the National Council on the Humanities, Miami President Gregory Crawford said.

Daryls work on Native American language and cultural revitalization projects for the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages  and his work with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma through the Myaamia Center  are having a tremendous impact that will be felt for generations to come, Crawford said. Miami is a place for trailblazers and innovators, with humanities at its core, and Daryl and his important work are shining examples.

The National Endowment for the Humanities chairman is advised by the National Council on the Humanities, a board of 26 distinguished private citizens appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Members serve staggered six-year terms.

The Myaamia Center  a research-focused collaboration between the Miami Tribe and university  has been leading a language and cultural revitalization effort that has resulted in the first generation in nearly 100 years learning to speak the Myaamia language.

neepwaantiinki means learning from each other

Baldwin credits the nearly 50-year relationship between the two Miamis  the sovereign tribal nation and the public educational institution  with playing a key role. At Miami, tribe students have the unique experience of learning together and expanding their knowledge about their own heritage and culture by taking classes through the Myaamia Heritage Award Program.

Baldwin stands with Miami President Gregory Crawford, center, and Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Chief Douglas Lankford (photo by Scott Kissell).

The program, which began in 1991, is a four-year undergraduate college experience for Miami tribe students enrolled at the Oxford campus. It provides a tuition waiver and the additional coursework relative to their heritage.

The Myaamia word neepwaantiinki, which means learning from each other, embodies the core understanding of this relationship. It captures the desire to mutually engage with each other by creating opportunities for learning and sharing.

Kara Strass, director of Miami Tribe Relations for the Myaamia Center, said Baldwin has been a visionary in the Miami Tribes language and cultural revitalization.

His experience and ongoing commitment to community-based work make him a perfect nominee for this position, said Strass (Miami MS 18). As someone who has experienced his leadership and innovative thinking, I know that Daryl could bring a new and unique voice that will be invaluable to the National Council on the Humanities."

In 2016, Baldwin was named a MacArthur Fellow. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation made the selections based primarily on exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances.

The White House news release included background from Baldwins biographical page on the Myaamia Center site, which says his forefathers were active in the political affairs of the Miami Nation dating back to the 18th century, and he continues this dedication to tribal self-determination through his efforts in language and cultural revitalization today.
But in terms of speaking to people on the ground, people delivering the vaccine, even the patients themselves, all the impressions suggest hesitancy has risen significantly in that time. Weeks ago there was huge demand for the coronavirus vaccine at Westcare Medical Centre in Melton in Melbournes outer west, but GP Alastair Stark said bookings for the jab had plummeted as reports of the extremely rare complication dominated headlines. People were coming from everywhere to try and book us, but now appointment bookings have died right down, Dr Stark said. Every patient is asking about clots. We are only vaccinating those over 70 and even the 80-something-year-old patients are asking about blood clots. Theyre saying things like I had a blood clot when I was 50  does that matter? Or, Ive got varicose veins, does that mean I am at greater risk? They see the reports on the news and hear it from the Prime Minister. All they know is that the vaccine causes blood clots and it sticks in their minds. Alastair Stark at his Melton clinic. Credit:Justin McManus

The clinic receives about 400 doses of the coronavirus vaccine per week and while flu shots are booked out until the end of May, hundreds of doses of AstraZeneca are expected to be left in the fridge this week. Loading RACGP Victorian chair Anita Munoz said doctors across the state had been anecdotally reporting increasing rates of vaccine hesitancy among patients of all ages in the past three weeks. There is indication from GPs that older groups are in particular more hesitant about the vaccine, Dr Munoz said. The Melbourne GP suspected the almost daily media reports on the very rare clotting condition, which has been estimated to be as low as one in 200,000, was giving the impression the extremely rare side-effect was far more common than it was.

The fact that the side-effect is much less likely in older populations doesnt necessarily come out as a key message, she said. And because we have more or less a COVID free environment at the moment the risk is perceived as much lower than it would be, for example, for a person over the age of 50, who was living in India. There have been six cases confirmed cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia linked to AstraZeneca, including a man in his 80s and a woman who died in NSW . The Australian cases prompted the countrys vaccine advisory group to recommend people under the age of 50 get a different vaccine. Two recent blood-clotting deaths that emerged on Thursday do not appear to be linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine. Therapeutic Goods Administration head John Skerritt said the cases were still under investigation, but current evidence did not suggest the deaths were linked to the vaccine. Altona GP Mukesh Haikerwal said his medical practice had also observed a drop in vaccine bookings in the past fortnight, driven by confusion, people not having their concerns about the risks of AstraZeneca alleviated and GPs not having the supply to vaccinate them.

Its a combination of all those things, said Dr Haikerwal, a former president of the Australian Medical Association. Dr Stark said a major shift in the narrative, which highlighted the benefits of being vaccinated against COVID-19, was needed to boost uptake in Melbournes outer-western suburbs, particularly among people in lower socioeconomic pockets, who face greater barriers to healthcare. Health literacy here in Melton remains a big problem, Dr Stark said. It is relatively easy to discuss these concerns with elderly patients when they come in and explain that complications with this vaccine are really, really exceedingly rare and that the benefits far outweigh the risks of being infected with coronavirus for them. Generally patients are then happy enough to go ahead with their vaccine once you weigh up the risks with them. But it is reaching the people who arent even booking in to get their vaccines that Im most worried about.

However, Katie Attwell, chief investigator for the Coronavax project  which monitors online vaccine sentiment  said qualitative data collected from older Australians in Western Australia in recent weeks indicated there was still strong support for receiving the vaccination. Older Australians expressed they were motivated by a desire travel and were used to accepting risks for other medical interventions, Dr Attwell said. The concerns over vaccine hesitancy come days after it emerged elderly people, who are too frail to travel to mass coronavirus vaccination hubs, were being put on vaccine waiting lists stretching out to September by their general practitioners. Meanwhile, Melbournes mass vaccination centres continue to operate at a fraction of capacity, while some clinics continue to battle supply issues, saying they are quickly exhausting their weekly allocation of vaccines doses. Former Australian Medical Association national president Tony Bartone believes Victorias focus on mass vaccine centres was hindering its rollout among the elderly, who want to be vaccinated by their GPs and are most in danger of severe illness and death if they are infected with coronavirus.

If GPs had more vaccines we wouldnt be talking about the slow rollout and thats the bottom line, Dr Bartone said. The mass vaccination hubs only create another opportunity for logistical division of a small supply of vaccines. But Health Minister Martin Foley said it was clear the expansion of immunisation centres in Victoria was showing real results with the states vaccine numbers surpassing NSW for the first time on Thursday. Victoria has now delivered 202,506 doses through our state-run health services, Mr Foley said. Thirty thousand of them since the doors of the high-volume vaccination centres were opened for bookings and walk-ins. A Victorian health department request to the Commonwealth to redistribute its two-week allocation of 52,000 doses to GPs instead of mass vaccine hubs appears to have been successful. A federal government health spokesman said the department was undertaking an analysis to review available AstraZeneca doses for primary care vaccination sites, including working directly with state and territories and Primary Health Networks to re-distribute any available allocations upon request.
Isaac Alton Barnes, 32, has been identified as the shooter in the North Carolina mass shooting

The man who killed his elderly parents before opening fire and killing two North Carolina sheriffs deputies before then killing himself has been identified.

Isaac Alton Barnes, 32, is accused of killing his mother Michelle Annette Ligon, 61, and stepfather George Wyatt Ligon, 58, WJHL reported.

He then began a 13-hour shootout with deputies from Boone County Sheriff's Office who responded to the home in Boone for a welfare check Wednesday morning.

Two of those cops, Sgt. Chris Ward and K-9 Deputy Logan Fox, were shot and killed. A third deputy escaped uninjured.

After the massacre, Sheriff Len Hagaman told WRAL that people who knew Barnes had called law enforcement last weekend to warn them that he was dangerous and had 'a lot of guns.'

Hagaman said Barnes appeared to have a plan for 'taking people out' but did not elaborate to the outlet what those plans were.

'They were just kind of giving us the heads-up  this is what he's thinking about doing  and for us to be careful,' Hagaman told the outlet.

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Michelle Ligon and her husband George were killed during by her son on Wednesday

George Ligon, left, was killed by his stepson Isaac Barnes on Wednesday, it has been revealed

The Ligons are pictured in their wedding photos before their murders

George Ligon, left, and Michelle Ligon, right, were killed by Barnes on Wednesday

But deputies were never able to find him until he showed up to the house on Wednesday - and officials suspect he may have planned to target members of the public but was kept in the home by the officers who died.

'We were trying to get him away from someplace where we could have more control over him. He just decided to take this route,' Hagaman told WRAL.

'I'm convinced now, in this situation, given the layout of the neighborhood ... they did their job by keeping him in the house,' he said, referring to the deputies who worked to contain Barnes inside his family's home.

Sister Sommer Barnes commented about the tragedy to WRAL on Thursday.

'I love and miss them all so much,' Barnes said Thursday and confirmed to the outlet that her brother, mother and stepfather were all dead.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Barnes for more information and additional comment.

Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman revealed more details of the incident on Thursday morning, sharing that three deputies were dispatched to a home in Boone at 9:44am on Wednesday morning for a welfare check, unaware of the shooter in the home.

The deputies were dispatched after the homeowner and his family failed to report to work or answer calls. All of the vehicles were still on the property.

K-9 Deputy Logan Fox died at the scene, though his death wasn't announced until Thursday. He is pictured right with a canine member of the sheriff's office, which police said was also shot

Sgt. Chris Ward (pictured with family) was airlifted to a hospital, where he died Wednesday

Ward, 36, began his law enforcement career in 2013. He is survived by his wife and two children

Authorities confirmed late on Wednesday that Ward had died in an update around 9pm - nearly 10 hours after the standoff with police started.

Ward had been airlifted to Johnson City Medical Center in Tennessee where he succumbed to his injuries.

The standoff last around 13 hours before coming to an end around 11pm. Barnes allegedly turned the gun on himself, The News Herald reports.

A neighbor was able to return to their home after being evacuated at around midnight, according to WSOC-TV.

'I received some terrible news from Watauga County today. We've had a situation, at first we thought it was a teenager but through further reports, he was an older gentleman,' North Carolina General Assembly state representative Ray Pickett said yesterday afternoon.

Fox, meanwhile, remained inside the home throughout the lengthy standoff, despite having been shot. On Thursday, it was announced that Fox had died at the scene.

'We shouldn't have to go through this,' Hagaman said after the standoff.

'Once was devastating, but this is just unreal. It's just -- I can't put it into words. The saving grace though is the community has come together in support, both mentally, physically, spiritually. And so, we certainly want to let the community know that we know they love us.'

A standoff in North Carolina has now resulted in five deaths after the death of another sheriff's deputy was announced on Thursday (tactical van pictured from Wednesday)

Among those killed are two sheriff's deputies, the gunman's mother and stepfather, and the 32-year-old gunman himself (scene pictured)

A SWAT team responding to the shooting was seen praying together

Hagaman believes the officers were ambushed by the suspect upon entering the home.

A firefighter and two police officers attempted to rescue the injured deputies before coming under fire themselves.

One Boone police officer was even hit by gunfire, but the bullet ended up hitting his Kevlar helmet and he was not injured, according to the sheriff.

There were periodic moments of gunfire mixed in with periods of ceasefires during the standoff.

A police canine was also shot during the welfare check. Investigators found 'a lot' of firearms in the home, though the exact number has not been specified.

More than a dozen emergency vehicles were spotted responding to the scene of the shooting, including at least three ambulances and a medical chopper.

State representative Ray Pickett announced in the state's legislature that a man killed his elderly mother and father before shooting at deputies who responded to conduct a welfare check

A heavy police response was seen at the scene were a man had shot at least two deputies after killing his parents

Armored vehicles are seen stationed near the home of a man who killed his elderly mother and father on Wednesday

The Watauga County Sheriff's Office previously said the shooter remains barricaded in a portion of the home

Deputies had visited the home where the standoff took place over the weekend, but it's not immediately clear why.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation was filmed arriving at the scene.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Watauga County Sheriff's Office for more information and additional comment.

After the standoff ended, a procession of law enforcement and EMS vehicles honored Ward around 1:30am on Thursday, according to WBTV.

During the incident, the Mount Vernon Baptist Church parking lot was turned into a mobile command unit, prompting the lockdown of a school on the property.

'We had to lock it down because we were just uncertain of the nature of the threat earlier on,' Rev. Todd Houston told WSOC-TV.

Neighbors who were not evacuated were told to shelter-in-place, closing up doors and windows.

Clarence Wilson, 78, was on the porch of his home in Boone when sheriff's deputies pulled up in front of the house across the street. Gunfire erupted after the deputies arrived, Wilson said.

'Then they told me to get back in the house and stay,' he said.

Wilson said he saw deputies pull a man from the house.

'I dont know if it was a deputy or who it was,' he said. 'I was just worried about keeping myself safe.'

Pictured: Memorials have sprung up for the officers who were killed on Wednesday

Dozens of candles and flowers have been left outside the sheriff's office in a memorial

The makeshift memorial has been attracting mourners throughout Thursday

Pictured: A procession for Ward that took place around 1:30am on Thursday

Wilson said he heard a second barrage of gunfire around noon. Police remained on the scene more than four hours later, he said.

He said it's a 'real quiet neighborhood' with many retirees like himself.

'We ain't used to all this,' he said.

On Thursday morning, a memorial began rising outside of the sheriff's office to honor the deputies and civilians who were killed.

'It's hard. I know God's got another angel,' Donna Ward, a relative of Chris Ward, said to WSOC-TV at the memorial on Thursday morning. 'A very loving family, loving. He would do anything for you.'

The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team was also on the scene at the memorial to help the community through the grieving process.

Governor Roy Cooper and Senator Thom Tillis are among those who have expressed condolences following the shooting.

'We grieve for Sgt. Chris Ward, K-9 Deputy Logan Fox and the entire Watauga County law enforcement community today after these tragic deaths in the line of duty,' Cooper tweeted in a Thursday morning statement.

'Susan and I are heartbroken Sgt. Chris Ward with the Watauga County Sheriff's Office was killed in the line of duty,' Tillis tweeted late Wednesday night, before Fox's death was announced.

'A tragic reminder of the dangers our law enforcement officers face every day.'

Back the Blue NC started a GoFundMe to take care of Ward's family, which has raised over $35,000 in just seven hours.

They've also raised over $24,000 for Fox's family in six hours.
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The Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) has announced a massive shake-up involving the redeployment of its senior officers.

The FRSC spokesperson, Bisi Kazeem, said this in a statement late on Wednesday.

Pursuant to the recent approval of the promotion of senior officers by the Federal Road Safety Commission and the need to strategically reposition the officers for optimal performance, the Corps Marshal, Federal Road Safety Corps, Boboye Oyeyemi, has approved the redeployment of officers, in the capacity of Deputy Corps Marshals, Assistant Corps Marshals, Corps Commanders, Deputy Corps Commanders and intermediate ranks, who are all expected to report to their new commands with immediate effect, Mr Kazeem said.

He described the redeployments as a routine exercise.

Read the full statement below.

FRSC WITNESSES MASSIVE SHAKE UP AS CORPS MARSHAL APPROVES THE REDEPLOYMENT OF SENIOR OFFICERS AND OTHERS

Pursuant to the recent approval of the promotion of senior Officers by the Federal Road Safety Commission and the need to strategically reposition the Officers for optimal performance, the Corps Marshal, Federal Road Safety Corps, Dr Boboye Oyeyemi has approved the redeployment of Officers, in the capacity of Deputy Corps Marshals, Assistant Corps Marshals, Corps Commanders, Deputy Corps Commanders and intermediate ranks, who are all expected to report to their new Commands with immediate effect.

A statement issued last night by Bisi Kazeem, the FRSC spokesperson, said the redeployment which is a routine exercise intended to bolster the system for superior performance and efficiency, shows that, Deputy Corps Marshal (DCM) HZ Fomsuk fdc, former DCM Special Duties and External Relations (SDER) is to now take over as DCM in charge of the Department of Motor Vehicle Administration at the national headquarters, Abuja, DCM Victor C Nwokolo, the outgoing Zonal Commanding Officer RS8HQ Ilorin, to move in as the Head of Policy, Research and Statistics Department also at the national headquarters (RSHQ), ACM Kayode Olagunju PhD, mni, former Zonal Commanding Officer, (ZCO) RS4HQ Jos to proceed as Commandant FRSC Academy, Udi, Enugu State. While ACM Kingsley Agomoh mni the erstwhile Zonal Commanding Officer, (ZCO) RS6HQ Portharcourt moves to the Corps Project Implementation office, ACM AB Datzama fsi takes over helm of affairs in the Department of Special Duties and External Relations and ACM M Adetunji the Deputy Corps Secretary, becomes ACM Personnel at the national headquarters.

Accordingly, Kazeem said that ACM S. Iyamah fwc who is currently heading the Corps Budget Office, as well as ACM RT Kumven fwc heading the Corps Safety Engineering Office are to retain their positions, while, ACM EN Obot fsi, erstwhile Corps Commander in charge of Policy Advisory Unit under the office of the Corps Marshal, moves to Command Administration and Strategies (CAS) at the Operations Department RSHQ, as ACM MR Yerima fwc transits from CC Research to ACM Man Power Development.

On the redeployment of Zonal Commanding Officers, the spokesperson revealed that ACM Osadebamwen mni former ACM Manpower Development, has been redeployed to Adamawa as ZCO RS3HQ Yola, ACM OC Oladele psc the outgoing Commandant FRSC Academy, Udi moves to RS8HQ Ilorin as the Zonal Commanding Officer (ZCO), former Sector Commander, Bayelsa ACM CB Nkwonta fwc is now the Zonal Commanding Officer (ZCO) RS6HQ Portharcourt, as the outgoing Deputy Commandant FRSC Command and Staff College, ACM GO Omiko PhD, moves to RS1HQ Kaduna as Zonal Commanding Officer. Similarly, the erstwhile Sector Commander Anambra State, ACM AA Kumapayi moves to RS5HQ Benin as Zonal Commanding Officer while the outgoing Sector Commander RS7.1 FCT ACM AG Wobin has been redeployed as ZCO RS4HQ Jos.

He added that apart from Jos Kaduna, Ilorin, Benin , Portharcourt and Jos Zonal Commands, all other Zonal Commanding Officers remain in their respective Commands of influence.

Expectedly, out of the 37 Sector Commands, 27 Sector Commanders retained their positions while the remaining 10 States were affected. Those posted to the affected Sector Commands include; Corps Commander (CC) Okoyeocha Patrick, Delta State , CC Iro Danladi, Zamfara State, CC IU Boyi, Anambra State, CC JS Udoabba,, Enugu State, CC OS Ochi, FCT, CC AK Okore fsi, Ebonyi, CC PI Ugwu, Abia, CC UA Ibrahim, Bayelsa, CC OI Ameh fsi, Cross River and CC MO Olonisaye, Akwa Ibom.

Other officers redeployed are; CC I Ibrahim to assume duty as the Corps Provost, CC MA Jatau, the Sector Commander Abia to proceed to Inspectorate Training School Owa Alero as Commandant, CC Ofordu the erstwhile Sector Commander Cross River goes to FRSC Command and Staff College, as Deputy Commandant, CC UI Ojeamiran to report to FRSC Academy Udi as the Deputy Commandant while CC AO Omotayo replaces him as the head FRSC Post Service Scheme. In the same vein, Former Head National Road Safety Advisory Council (NARSAC), CC AO Oladayo-Odeleye fsi who has been redeployed to head FRSC Print Farm, will be replaced by CC LT Bamigbayan. While CC MA Dapel retains his position as the head of Signage Plant Gwagwalada, CC YK Nadabo becomes the Corps Commander in charge of Local Government Area Station Officers, as CC CO Asom transits to CC Special Marshals at the national headquarters, JO Asaolu jpsc now heads the Policy Advisory Unit in the Office of the Corps Marshal and I Ibrahim assumes position as Deputy Corps Secretary.

Also, out of about 13 Assistant Corps Commanders that were affected, 6 were posted to assume duty as Unit Commanders.

In the memo containing the posting, the Corps Marshal admonished the redeployed Officers to buckle up, double up their efforts, and remain steadfast in their commitment and dedication to duties and to share in the FRSC vision of making Nigerian roads safer for all motorists.

Oyeyemi further enjoined them to play pivotal role to ensure that they contribute their quota in enhancing the safety of lives and properties of all road users.
The man who found worldwide fame as the 'Spanish Laughing Guy' has died aged 65 after a 'long illness'.

Juan Joya Borja shot to fame in 2007 when he appeared on a variety show and struggled to tell an anecdote because he was laughing so much.

Nicknamed 'El Ristas' or 'The Giggles', Borja's interview with Jesus Quintero on Ratones Coloraos became an international sensation.

The video of the interview has since been rehashed into several memes in which, most often, Borja mocks the stupidity of a customer or client.

In one parody, Borja mocks the specifications of the 2015 Macbook by telling a story of his friend 'Jony' who manages to get hold of a prototype.

Juan Joya Borja, who found worldwide fame as the 'Spanish Laughing Guy', has died aged 65 after a 'long illness'

He shot to fame in 2007 when he appeared on a variety show and struggled to tell an anecdote because he was laughing so much

'No USB ports!', Borja appears to cackle in the footage, 'No extra USB ports, a mobile processor, 1,299. That's all our customers need!'

The original video came from when Borja was invited on Quintero's show as part of a series of genuine characters invited on the show to tell their unscripted stories.

Taken directly from the street, Quintero offered ordinary Spaniards ten minutes of fame - though Borja's moment in the limelight lasted much longer.

Borja also appeared alongside the host in several other shows, including El Vagamundo and Los Mice Coloraos.

Nicknamed 'El Ristas' or 'The Giggles', Borja's interview with Jesus Quintero on Ratones Coloraos became an international sensation

The original video came from when Borja was invited on Quintero's show as part of a series of genuine characters invited on the show to tell their unscripted stories

Taken directly from the street, Quintero offered ordinary Spaniards ten minutes of fame - though Borja's moment in the limelight lasted much longer.

Before appearing on the show the giggly Spaniard had spent most of his life working odd jobs such as cooking and unloading cement.

Borja passed away peacefully in the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville on Wednesday after spending months there recuperating from a leg amputation.

Tributes flooded in for Borja.

'You're iconic laugh brought many laughs to me and my friends', one user said.

Another wrote: 'Thank you for the years of laughter, Rest In Peace'.
On April 20, four Coleman Regional Agriscience Center students, who are completing their second year of being enrolled in the Coleman Regional Agriscience Center received their Michigan FFA State FFA Degree at the Michigan FFA State Convention held on the campus of Michigan State University.

The Michigan FFA State Degree is the highest degree a state can confer. In order to obtain this degree, these students had to complete a long list if qualifications including earned and productively invested at least $1,000 or worked at least 300 hours in excess of scheduled class time, have a satisfactory scholastic record as certified by the local agricultural education instructor and the principal or superintendent. and have participated in at least 25 hours of community service, within at least two different community service activities. In addition to receiving their degree, these students will also receive six free credits to Michigan State University.
[April 29, 2021] Smartly.io Reveals Key Insights for Social Advertising Post-pandemic

Smartly.io, the leading social advertising automation platform for creative and performance marketers, today announced new research underscoring the role social media continues to play in how consumers shop and remain connected in a world changed by the pandemic. Conducted by Dynata, the global survey of 1,000 consumers in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Australia, explored consumer sentiment around social media today -- lending insights for brands to consider for their advertising strategies. Now more than ever, brands are seeking ways to stay relevant. Marketers must be prepared for every possible scenario as they face varying stages of reopening across regions, as well as a range of preferences from consumers. According to the Smartly.io survey, consumers are still relying on social media to stay in touch. Specifically, more than half (56%) of global respondents and 64% of those in the UK said they are using social media to connect with friends and family. Facebook (News - Alert) remains the most popular social media platform. More than one-third of global consumers (38%) said they have used Facebook the most during the past 30 days, followed by YouTube (News - Alert) (18%), and Instagram (15%). Additionally, global consumers are most open to receiving video ads on social media right now (27%), followed by photo carousels (23%), and Stories (19%). "Consumers are anticipating a return to normalcy, which reflects their eagerness to spend," said Robert Rothschild, CMO, VP & Global Head of Marketing, Smartly.io. "For brands, social media provides an opportunity to reach targeted consumers in an impactful way. To be successful, marketing teams must balance their strategy to align with current consumer preferences across platforms formats, and audiences. Relevant, localized and timely content will be key to winning share in a competitive marketplace."



Additional key findings from the Smartly.io study include: Even a year later, pandemic fatigue hasn't hit consumers yet More than half of global consumers (51%) said they still want brands to acknowledge the pandemic in their ads (for example, safety measures, updated store hours, etc.).

Consumers are opening their wallets... 35% of global consumers said the social media ads they encountered in the last 30 days have spurred them to make a purchase online, up from 26% in August 2020 (when Smartly.io previously surveyed consumers). 38% of global consumers said they would be most open to purchasing clothing/apparel via social media in the next 30 days.

...but are still motivated by deals and discounts 45% of global respondents said they would like to see ads with deals and discounts from travel brands. This is particularly high in Australia, where 59% of respondents said they're looking for deals and discounts from travel brands' advertising. 55% of global respondents said they would like to see deals and discounts in advertising from grocery stores, followed by local offers from nearby stores (42%).

Learn more about this latest research from Smartly.io, along with best practices for brands to engage consumers with social ads.

About the Study In a study commissioned by Smartly.io, Dynata surveyed 1,000 adult consumers to understand their preferences and attitudes towards social media, including channel use, engagement with ads, and purchasing decisions. Respondents were located in the U.S., UK, Germany and Australia and were over the age of 18. The survey was conducted in March 2021. About Smartly.io Powering beautifully effective ads, Smartly.io automates every step of social advertising to unlock greater performance and creativity. We combine creative production and ad buying automation with outstanding customer service to help some 700 brands scale their results - not headcount - on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. We are a fast-growing community of more than 500 Smartlies with 17 offices around the world, managing nearly 3B in annual ad spend and growing rapidly and profitably. Visit Smartly.io to learn more. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005139/en/

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New Delhi, April 29 : The BJP-led NDA is winning Puducherry, barely retaining Assam and losing Tamil Nadu, whereas the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress is likely to retain West Bengal while Pinarayi Vijayan-led LDF will make a clean sweep in Kerala, as per the CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News.

The findings and projections are based on personal interviews conducted statewide on and after polling day among adults, all confirmed voters.

The data is weighted to the known demographic profile of the states. "We believe this will give the closest possible trends," said C-Voter founder and psephologist Yashwant Deshmukh.

The Delhi-based polling agency highlighted in its exit poll that Mamata Banerjee is set to retain West Bengal, even as the BJP is likely to win on 109 to 121 seats, while the M.K. Stalin-led DMK will win Tamil Nadu with a big majority.

The sample size of the exit poll was 28,393 in Assam, 43,630 in Tamil Nadu, 5,003 in Puducherry, 26,447 in Kerala and 85,000 in West Bengal.

Deshmukh also said that for the analytics, they used proprietary algorithm to calculate the provincial and regional vote share based on the split-voter phenomenon. The same algorithm has been used to extrapolate the vote share projections into probable seat share in range.

The C-Voter exit poll data collection starts right after the polling process and continues until the elections are over.

"Technically speaking, for a single state, we conduct interviews across randomly selected polling booths across all assembly segments," Deshmukh said.

Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala went to the polls in a single phase on April 6. In West Bengal, polling was held in eight phases from March 27 to April 29. In Assam polling was held in three phases from March 27 to April 6.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen issues a dire warning to Rudy Giuliani on CNN (CNN)

After federal investigators raided Rudy Giuliani s home and office, another former Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen , had a message for him.

Rudy, I told you so! I told you so! Mr Cohen told CNNs Alisyn Camerota on Thursday.

What I told him was that Donald Trump doesnt care about anyone or anything, that he will be the next one to be thrown under the bus, and thats exactly whats going to happen, he explained.

Federal investigators on Wednesday executed a search warrant on Mr Giulianis Manhattan office and apartment, seizing cell phones and computers. The raid is believed to be part of an investigation into whether Mr Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukraine in 2019.

To Mr Cohen, the situation felt awfully familiar.

Well, two things came straight to mind after he learned of the raid, he told CNN. First is that Im no longer the only one.

Mr Cohen is serving a three-year prison sentence, currently via house arrest, for crimes including ones that he says he committed at Mr Trumps behest. The most salacious of them was a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels , a pornographic actress with whom Mr Trump allegedly had a sexual affair, which was ruled a campaign finance violation.

In order to avoid a longer sentence, Mr Cohen pleaded guilty to a number of charges, and is now cooperating with the Manhattan District Attorney s investigation of Mr Trump. On Thursday he predicted that Mr Giuliani will be pressured into a similar plea deal, and will probably turn on the former president.

Prior to Donald becoming president, Rudy didnt like Donald, and Donald certainly didnt like Rudy, Mr Cohen said. So, do I think Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat? Absolutely.

The former Trump fixer also predicted that Mr Giuliani will give information on others in Mr Trumps garbage can orbit, including Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, and Jared Kushner.

Like Mr Cohen, Mr Giuliani served as Mr Trumps personal lawyer during his presidency. During that time, he and the former president pressured Ukrainian officials to open unfounded investigations into Joe Biden s son Hunter , who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Democrats said the effort was designed to hurt the reputation of Joe Biden  who eventually became Mr Trumps election opponent  and it led to Mr Trumps first impeachment.

Story continues

Now prosecutors are investigating whether Mr Giulianis communications between the two countries not only served Mr Trumps political interests, but the interests of Ukraininan oligarchs. It is a federal crime to lobby the US government on behalf of another country without disclosing it to the Justice Department.

Mr Giuliani has not been charged with any crime, and his lawyer has called the FBI raid a stunt to create bad publicity.

This is totally unnecessary, attorney Bob Costello told Fox News , saying it was designed to make Mr Giuliani look like hes some sort of criminal.

According to Mr Cohen, however, the investigation is making the former mayor nervous.

I think he starts to sweat more, he told CNN, and hopefully hes taking the stuff out of his hair that turns it black, because its going to be everywhere.

Read More

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Marco Rubio left furious after his own typo kills off his amendment to water bill
Disturbing news has been reported out of North Korea. Apparently, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has suicide drones at his disposal that threaten his neighbors to the south and parts of the West.

Kim Jong Un and His Suicide Drones Worry South Korea

A report said that the North Korean leader had launched his drones to get information on the west, according to the Sun. One of the fears is that leader Kim will use the drones to gain photographic info or use them to attack targets remotelyanytime, anywhere.

According to Daily NK, the Communist regime's military officials have successfully demonstrated the compact drones. North Korean leader Kim has recently discussed the development of military drones as an "important project."

Information gathered by the source says the tests were done in three days, starting April 10 at the City of Guson. According to sources, the experiments were conducted by researchers, engineers, and regime officials.

One of the claims by the North Koreans is these unmanned vehicles are capable of surveillance that extends deep into enemy territory. These autonomous aerial vehicles (UAVs) are certainly dangerous in North Korea's hands.

Another one of the touted capabilities of the North Korean UAVs is how they can attack and perform suicide runs on South Korean troops stationed in the south. Unmanned drones capable of performing reconnaissance over South Korean army bases are said to have already been established by the U.S. and ROK armies.

According to Daily NK, UAVs may also conduct "pincer assaults" on Western targets. Military leaders expected to finish the suicide drone trial by April 1, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung's birthday, and Kim Jong-un will want to see them.

Read More: North Korea Hunting Leaker of Kim Jong-Un's Fake Death Video That Circulated Online

On April 14, they allegedly advised regime leaders that the UAVs had achieved "effective final tactical and technical data stability tests." When Kim heard the news, he reportedly sent a message and gave his remarks on a job well done.

These drones were called a significant step by the Supreme Leader towards the military power of the Korean People's Army when combined with missile technology, making Pyongyang a formidable foe.

He heaped praise on the on-site researchers and reviewers, who advanced the cause of North Korea by developing UAVs for planned action coming soon. Indicators say that the drones will be ready and available for use by the Nokor military, the date stated in November.

Although rumored but not verified, the Supreme leader in Pyongyang made sweeping claims that his attack drones can load biological and chemical weapons.

One North Korean defector, known as Jin-myeong Han, an alias, warned that the NoKor UAVs could be sent in and attack Seoul in less than one hour.

Unverified information says that Kim has about 240 nukes and ICBMs that can attack the west at the press of a button; this information has yet to be verified.

A series of studies by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies and the Rand Corp has made the grim prediction that the Supreme leader could have hundreds of nukes and numerous ICBMs by the year 2027.

Kim Jong-Un needs the nukes as an ace in the hole on the Korean Peninsula for both attacking and defensive purposes.

Related Article: Kim Jong Un Will Reveal New Ballistic Missile in Parade as Warning to the US

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Wyoming Area School District is investigating allegations about a teacher going on a homophobic rant at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars Post after seeing a drama club shirt on a parent.

School district solicitor Jarrett Ferentino noted the allegations have been posted on social media and addressed the allegations at Tuesday's school board meeting.

A speaker at Tuesday's meeting asked if the employee "is still around kids."

"No," Ferentino replied.

"So until the investigation is over the employee won't be around," the speaker said.

"That's correct," Ferentino replied.

The school board must remain independent from the investigation because it may have to issue a ruling on the matter, Ferentino explained. An employee could choose to go to arbitration to contest a disciplinary action, instead of appealing to the board, Ferentino said.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett. This is bad news for proponents of gun control in New York. The case is a challenge to a strictly enforced state law that requires a showing of proper cause before people can obtain a license to carry a firearm outside of the home. Given the sharp turn to the right the Supreme Court has taken, thanks to Donald Trump being able to get more Supreme Court justices confirmed in a single term than Barack Obama was in two, it is highly unlikely that the restriction will survive.

While the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has often been perceived as the major barrier to passing gun control measures in the United States, this has generally not really been true. For most of American history, the Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms at all. (Former Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom Republican President Richard Nixon nominated because of his reputation as a law and order judge, called the idea that the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms a fraud.) But even after the Supreme Court created an individual right to bear arms in the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller, the state retained a wide latitude to regulate firearms. [T]he right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited, declared Justice Antonin Scalia in his opinion for the Court, and nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Scalia also observed that the government could ban dangerous and unusual firearms.

Both Heller and the follow-up case McDonald v. Chicago (which held that the individual right to bear arms constrained the states as well as the federal government) said only that laws preventing people from having an operative handgun for self-defense in their homes were illegal. Nothing in either case suggested that New Yorks strict licensing requirement for taking handguns outside the home was unconstitutional.

Until now, then, the primary barrier to passing gun control legislation has been political, not legal. The federal government and the overwhelming majority of state and local jurisdictions have passed less stringent gun control regulations than the Court permitted in Heller. Only laws that prevented keeping guns in ones home were at-risk of being overturned. But this is about to change.

The reason for the coming judicial war on gun control, as Voxs Ian Millhiser observes, was revealed in the memoir Justice John Paul Stevens released shortly before his death two years ago. According to Stevens, the qualifying and moderating language in Scalias opinion was mostly added at the insistence of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate member of the five-justice conservative majority. But Kennedy, a Republican appointee, decided to retire strategically in 2018 while Trump was in office. He was replaced by his former clerk Brett Kavanaugh, a justice with a quite radical anti-gun control record. The Second Amendment is one of the many issues where Kavanaughs confirmation figures to move the Court to the right.

Still, the holding period the Court has been in with respect to gun control persisted even after Kavanaughs confirmation. The Court repeatedly refused to provide the four votes necessary to hear gun control appeals, presumably because the Courts four most conservative judges were not confident that the Courts then-median vote, Chief Justice John Roberts, would be willing to push the Court to the right on Second Amendment issues.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the rapid Senate confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however, makes Robertss vote superfluous. Barrett, like Kavanaugh, has a notably conservative record on the Second Amendment. The decision of the Court to finally grant certiorari in a major gun control case suggests that the Courts conservatives believe they have the votes to overturn gun control measures generally opposed by Republicans, and this assumption is well-founded in the public record of Trumps Supreme Court nominees.

It is unclear exactly how far the new Supreme Court majority will go in expanding Second Amendment rights. But the most vulnerable laws are atypically restrictive outliers in Democratic-controlled states. This is very bad news for New Yorks licensing requirement. It is almost inconceivable that the regulation will be upheld by this Supreme Court. And other regulations  such as the bans on assault weapons passed at both the state level and by municipal governments in New York City, Albany, Rochester and Buffalo  could also be highly vulnerable.

With New York City dealing with a homicide rate that sharply spiked in 2020 for reasons that are not fully understood, more people carrying firearms on city streets are the last thing the state needs. But, thanks to the contingencies of the Supreme Court appointment process, it is what the state and its residents are almost certainly going to get.
Regulatory News:

CLASQUIN (Paris:ALCLA):

Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Change at

current

exchange

rates Change at

constant

exchange

rates Q1 2019 Change at

current

exchange

rates CONSOLIDATED (unaudited) Number of shipments 69,050 62,285 +10.9% +10.9% 64,125 +7.7% Sales(m) 135.0 87.1 +54.9% +58.1% 77.0 +75.3% Gross profit (m) 24.0 17.6 +36.8% +39.4% 17.2 +39.3%

*Note: Sales is not a relevant indicator for assessing activity in our business, because it is greatly impacted by changing sea and air freight rates, fuel surcharges, exchange rates (especially versus the $), etc. Variations in the number of shipments, the volumes shipped and-in terms of the Group's finances-gross profit are relevant indicators.

MARKET AND BUSINESS REVIEW

The recovery in international trade observed in Q4 2020 gathered pace in Q1 2021, thanks largely to the strength of the Chinese and US economies.

In a context of reduced capacity for both air (load capacity) and sea freight (shortage of containers) that drove prices up sharply, particularly in sea freight, the Group posted robust Q1 growth in terms of both volumes (number of sea containers and air tonnage up over 20%) and number of shipments:

In airfreight, after a steady decline throughout 2020, Q1 marked the resumption of moderate growth that steepened throughout the quarter. The charter business is growing strongly.

In sea freight, the 21.3% increase reflects significant market share gains resulting from the quality of the offer and the commitment of our sales teams.

After a year heavily impacted by the health crisis in 2020, the roll-on/roll-off* business (North Africa and Turkey) resumed moderate growth in Q1 which is expected to accelerate throughout the year.

This robust growth was driven by:

historical markets: France up 20%, Greater China up 21%, USA up 23%, Spain up 32%,

but also by

but also by newer markets at Group level: Germany up 139%, Portugal up 53%, Chile up 34%.

* Combined road sea transport (trailers or trucks loaded on ships)

Gross profit per shipment benefited both from favourable market conditions and from higher volumes per shipment reflecting changes in the Group's client portfolio.

In this environment, Group gross profit leapt 36.8% (up 39.4% at constant exchange rates) driven by a 55.6% increase in sea freight gross profit.

For the record, gross profit growth reported in Q1 2019, in the pre-COVID period, was 39.3%.

BREAKDOWN BY BUSINESS LINE

NUMBER OF SHIPMENTS GROSS PROFIT (m) At current scope and exchange rates Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Change Q1 2021 vs Q1 2020 Q1 2019 Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Change Q1 2021 vs Q1 2020 Q1 2019 Sea freight 32,333 26,652 +21.3% 26,658 12.3 7.9 +55.6% 7.4 Air freight 17,636 17,580 +0.3% 19,330 7.3 5.4 +34.5% 5.4 RORO*** 11,399 11,169 +2.1% 12,701 2.2 2.1 +7.8% 2.4 Other 7,682 6,884 +11.6% 5,436 1.5 1.5 -0.1% 1.6 TOTAL OVERSEAS BUSINESS 69,050 62,285 +10.9% 64,125 23.4 17.0 +38.0% 16.8 Log System 0.7 0.8 -10.2% 0.7 Consolidation entries (0.1) (0.2) N/A (0.2) TOTAL CONSOLIDATED 24.0 17.6 +36.8% 17.2

VOLUMES At current scope and exchange rates Q1 2021 Q1 2020 Change Q1 2021 vs Q1 2020 Q1 2019 Sea freight 59,911 TEUs* 48,529 TEUs* +23.5% 47,725 TEUs* Air freight 16,551 T** 13,186 T** +25.5% 13,567 T**

Twenty-foot equivalent units

** Tons

*** Roll-on/roll-off

Q1 2021 HIGHLIGHTS

Completion of development projects now fuelling growth

Spain:

January acquisition of the Columbus Transit SA business by CLASQUIN Spain.

5-member team managing annual gross profit of around 700k.



by CLASQUIN Spain. 5-member team managing annual gross profit of around 700k. Belgium:

Creation of CLASQUIN BELGIQUE followed on 1 April by this entity's acquisition of the business assets represented by the international activities of INTERLINES Belgium.

Team of approximately 20 people generating annual gross profit of around 1.5 million.

Blocking of the Suez Canal: our Live platform, an asset for our clients

In March 2021, the blockage of the Suez Canal by the Ever Given for several days caused a sustained disruption of a route that carries over 10% of global trade. The rerouting of ships via the Cape of Good Hope resulted in lengthened sea times and port congestion.

The impact of this extremely rare event highlighted the need for visibility both as an operational requirement and as a means of improving client satisfaction.

LIVE and its augmented data allowed CLASQUIN to keep clients informed in real time of new predictive arrivals and enabled its business experts to efficiently forecast these recalculated times. This enabled the Group to build competitive fallback solutions with our clients in case of need.

2021 OUTLOOK

Market

International trade estimates (by volume): up 8%

Sea freight market estimates (by volume): up 5%

Air freight market estimates (by volume): up 7%

CLASQUIN

Outperform market growth

UPCOMING EVENTS (publication after-market closure) Wednesday 09 June 2021: Wednesday 1 September 2021: Wednesday 22 September 2021: Thursday 28 October 2021: 2020 AGM Q2 2021 business report H1 2021 results Q3 2021 business report

CLASQUIN is an air and sea freight forwarding and overseas logistics specialist. The Group designs and manages the entire overseas transport and logistics chain, organizing and coordinating the flow of client shipments between France and the rest of the world and, more specifically, to and from Asia-Pacific, North America, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

Its shares are listed on EURONEXT GROWTH, ISIN FR0004152882, Reuters ALCLA.PA, Bloomberg ALCLA FP. Read more at www.clasquin.com.

CLASQUIN confirms its eligibility for the share savings plan for MSCs (medium-sized companies) in accordance with Article D221-113-5 of the French Monetary and Financial Code established by decree number 2014-283 of 4 March 2014 and with Article L221-32-2 of the French Monetary and Financial Code, which set the conditions for eligibility (less than 5,000 employees and annual sales of less than 1,500m or balance sheet total of less than 2,000m).

CLASQUIN is listed on the Enternext PEA-PME 150 index.

LEI: 9695004FF6FA43KC4764

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005677/en/

Contacts:

CLASQUIN

Philippe LONS Deputy Managing Director/Group CFO

Domitille CHATELAIN Group Head of Communication International Marketing Executive

Groupe CLASQUIN 235 cours Lafayette 69006 Lyon

Tel: 04 72 83 17 00 Fax: 04 72 83 17 33
An FIR has been filed against former Mumbai Police Commissioner Parambir Singh after a police inspector accused him of corruption.

The FIR has been registered at the city Kotwali police station in Akola in the Vidarbha region against Singh, DCP Parag Manere and 26 other policemen. The Akola police has filed a zero FIR in the matter and then transferred it to Thane police, i.e., getting an FIR lodged at a police station whether the offence has been committed in that area or not.

The police personnel have been charged under sections like criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence, and sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989.

Police inspector Bhimrao Ghadge, who was posted in Thane police commissionerate during 2015-18 alleged that several officers indulged in various acts of corruption under Parambir Singh.

He added that Singh also asked him not to charge-sheet certain individuals against whom FIRs had been filed. Ghadge also alleged that after he refused to comply with Singh's orders, five FIRs were registered against him and he was suspended.

This, however, is not the only case filed against Parambir Singh.

The Maharashtra Home Department had asked Director General of Police Sanjay Pandey earlier this month to conduct 'preliminary inquiry' into a complaint lodged by Assistant Police Inspector Anup Dange against Singh on February 2. Pandey has also been asked to look into the report submitted by the Assistant Police Commissioner (crime) on April 7.

Singh was removed as the Mumbai police commissioner in March.

With PTI inputs

Also read: Centre grants Y category security to Serum Institute CEO Adar Poonawalla amid threats over Covishield supplies
Prime Minister will chair a meeting of the Friday morning to discuss the Covid crisis, which has the country in its grip in a deadly second wave, according to sources.

This would be the first such meeting to be held after the second wave of the pandemic hit India. The PM has held meetings with pharma companies, vaccine makers, oxygen manufacturers and state chief ministers during the past few weeks to review how the Covid situation was being tackled.

In his address to the nation on April 20, Modi had appealed to states that lockdown should be the last resort and that economic activity and livelihood should remain least impacted. He has maintained that the focus should be on restrictions and curfews in containment zones. A prolonged national lockdown imposed in March 2020 had adversely impacted the countrys economy and businesses and the government has so far been avoiding a repeat of that situation, officials said.

Many states have imposed lockdowns and restrictions on movement of people to curb the spread of the virus.

Shortage of oxygen supply and vaccines has been a major challenge in the current spell of Covid. Health minister Harsh Vardhan told reporters on Thursday that there was no need for people to panic and rush to hospitals. He said there was adequate supply of oxygen in the country earlier as well and now it had been increased further. Requirement of oxygen among Covid patients has been higher in the second wave of the pandemic compared to the first, according to health ministry data.

The health ministry has also seen a massive rush in the registration for Covid vaccinations in the 18-45 years age group. More than 8 million have registered on the CoWIN portal on the second day as well for the vaccine. Vaccination is a critical component of the containment and management strategy of the government. The fight against the pandemic is ongoing and the government is using all its experience to tackle the situation, Vardhan said.

He said that no one knew about the virus last year but now the government was better informed about how to deal with the menace and was leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to fight the deadly pandemic. Army too has been roped in for setting up Covid care facilities, involving retired medical officers. Modi on Thursday met the chief of army staff General MM Naravane to discuss various initiatives being taken by the Army to help in Covid management.




Apr. 29Since March, H-E-B personnel have been touring Texas schools to recognize educators who go the extra mile to serve their students.

One of their latest stops was made on Friday, April 16 to reward educators at Port Isabel High School.

A lunch was hosted for the campus' educators and they were given opportunities to win $2,000 in prizes throughout the event.

"The event was absolutely what we needed this year to recognize our teachers and staff for all of the hard work that they've done," Port Isabel High School principal Imelda Munivez said. "This year has probably been a year like no other and anytime that we have an opportunity to celebrate our teachers is amazing."

Port Isabel High School librarian Jessica Hedrick won a $250 H-E-B gift card during the celebration.

"This was really awesome," Hedrick said. "We know H-E-B does a lot for education and Texas. They're huge supporters, but for them to actually come to campus and individually give us rewards and tell us they appreciate us is a really big thing for us."

Tour stops were determined by public voting.

According to school district personnel, Port Isabel High School is the only high school in the Valley that won a stop in the tour.

"It's just amazing to be put on the map for our specific campus," Munivez said. "It just validates all of the hard work and all the things that our staff and teachers have overcome during this most difficult challenging year."

Port Isabel High School teacher Luis Rincones was the one who discovered the opportunity to win a visit from H-E-B and was determined to help the school become a stop on the tour.

"I'm always looking for ways to gather resources for the students," Rincones said. "I already follow H-E-B on social media so when this came across I thought it was such a great opportunity."

Rincones said he shared it with the administration to promote it and he also spread the word on social media to try to get as many votes as possible.

"I was just amazed at the participation overall," Rincones said. "It was great seeing everybody having a good time with some food and listening to music."
Telstra has its Xbox All Access service for its customers, delivering 24 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and an Xbox Series X or S, with no upfront cost, and stock of the Xbox Series X is back in Australia.

New stock of the Xbox Series X has just landed in Australia and is available on the Telstra.com site to add on with Xbox All Access (XAA) plans for Telstra customers.

Telstra also advises it has limited consoles across a number of Telstra stores, although the telco recommends you contact your local store to check stock availability first.

The company reminds us that with its Xbox All Access service, players can get everything they need to jump into the next generation of gaming - an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S, plus 24 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate - with no upfront cost.

It is bundled with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership, with the Xbox Series X package costing $46 a month (which translates to a minimum cost of $1104 when you stay connected for 24 months plus your plan charges).

Telstra offers a similar package for the Xbox Series S, which the company says represents great value at $33 per month for 24 months (min cost $792 when you stay connected for 24 months plus your plan charges).

More information is at Telstras Xbox All Access page here.

Were also advised of some important details of the offer:
Posters depicting Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha are seen during an anti-government protest in Bangkok demanding the release of arrested leaders charged with royal defamation, March 6, 2021.

Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-chas move this week to take over all his ministers powers temporarily so he can deal with the COVID-19 pandemic is akin to a second coup by the former army and junta chief, critics said Thursday.

Prayuth now has the power to allow or prevent legislation to do with any urgent issues, an announcement in the Royal Gazette on Tuesday said. That day the cabinet passed a resolution to grant the prime minister more powers so he could adequately handle a new wave in the pandemic, the governments public relations office said.

The authority of ministers or acting persons are temporarily transferred to the prime minister, including the power to permit, approve, order, command, prevent, correct, suppress or halt any emergency matters, or the power to help assist people, the gazette announcement said.

The temporary transfer of powers and duties is intended to enable the prime minister to handle the COVID-19 situation with greater efficiency and tackle the problem in a timely manner, said a statement by the governments public relations office.

Prayuths enhanced powers give him control of the Cyber Security Act and Computer Crimes Act, as well as other laws to do with communicable diseases, drugs, national vaccine security and arms control, the gazette said. In total, the Thai PM now can now enforce 31 acts, purportedly to curb the spread of the virus.

A slew of international reports this year had said that many Southeast Asian leaders were using the pandemic to control the media, crack down on free speech and appropriate power.

As it is, Prayuth has been in the eye of a storm since July 2020 when a youth-led pro-democracy movement began to press him to overhaul a 2017 charter which, according to its critics, entrenched the militarys power.

Tens of thousands of protesters have since taken to the streets in Bangkok and across the country to demand three changes  Prayuths resignation, reforming the powerful monarchy and constitutional amendments.

Prayuths government has since July used some of the acts the PM now controls  such as the computer crimes act  to target critics and opposition leaders.

Prayuths second seizure of power

However, it is true that Thailand is in the grip of a third wave of COVID-19, which spread from Bangkoks nightspot venues in early April.

The country has reported 34,702 new infections since April 1 alone, taking the cumulative caseload to 63,570. Ten virus-related deaths on Thursday raised pandemic-related fatalities to 188, according to official data.

By Asian or even global standards, these numbers are not alarming. But for Thailand they are, because the Southeast Asian nation had been a leader in controlling the pandemic for much of last year. Now, daily new infection numbers have shot up to more than 1,500, which is higher than during the worst of the second wave last November-December.

Still, the worsening pandemic is no excuse for a consolidation of power in one person, said critics and opposition members.

They harked back to 2014, when the Prayuth, who was then Gen. Prayuth Chan-o-cha, spearheaded a coup and took over as prime minister. The former general retained the post in a 2019 election, which opposition parties viewed as rigged in the militarys favor.

Now that the Prime Minister has this much power it is equal to his second seizure of power, Somkid Cheukong, a lawmaker from the opposition Pheu Thai Party, told reporters after the announcement about Prayuth being given his ministers powers.

If there is a crisis or a challenge, powers should be given to talented officials rather than to one official, said Navaporn Sunanlikanon, a social sciences researcher at Chulalongkorn University.

Problem solving requires cooperation for diverse solutions. Giving all power to one person means that [that person] now has the absolute power to do [just about] anything Navaporn told BenarNews.

Even though the excuse may be that a decision has to be carried out in a timely manner, every order has to be lawful.

The government denied this was a power grab.

Despite the announcement, the ministers maintain their powers, except that the prime minister [now] shares their powers and he can issue direct orders, while normally those powers have to be approved by the cabinet, Anucha Burapachaisri, the government spokesman, said on Tuesday.

It is not a seizure of power.

Thai PM fined for not wearing mask

Others are worried about Prayuth having too much power because of the perception that he is wilful and short-tempered.

For instance, when he was junta chief in 2014 he flung a banana peel at a cameraperson he was frustrated with. In 2018, he told reporters to direct their questions to a life-size cutout of himself. Last month, he sprayed disinfecting mist on reporters when their persistent questions about a cabinet reshuffle began to annoy him.

And on Monday, Prayuth was seen without a face mask while leading a meeting with his coronavirus vaccine procurement advisors. This happened a day after Bangkok made it mandatory for people to wear protective face masks in public and set fines for violating the rule.

The PM was promptly fined 6,000 baht (U.S. $192).

This action is a violation of the Announcement of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration which mandates people in the Bangkok area to wear a mask every time they go out of their homes, Asawin Kwanmuang, the Bangkok governor, said on his Facebook page on Monday.

I, along with the commander of the Metropolitan Police and the investigators at Dusit Police Station, came to the Government House on the same day.  The Prime Minister agreed to pay the fine.

Kunnawut Boonreak in Chiang Mai, Thailand, contributed to this report.
TORONTO and NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Real Brokerage Inc. ("Real") (TSXV: REAX) (OTCQX: REAXF), a national, technology powered real estate brokerage in the United States, will release its first quarter 2021 financial results on Tuesday, May 11, 2021 before the open of market trading, followed by a conference call at 11:00 a.m. EST.

Details of the conference call are listed below:

Date: May 11, 2021

Time: 11:00 a.m. EST*

Dial-in Number: 877-407-0727| International: 201-689-8048

Webcast: https://www.webcaster4.com/Webcast/Page/2699/41103

Replay Number: 877-481-4010; International: 919-882-2331

Passcode: 41103

Webcast Replay: https://www.webcaster4.com/Webcast/Page/2699/41103

*The conference call will include a question and answer session. Participants are encouraged to dial in 5 to 10 minutes before the beginning of the conference call.

About Real

Real ( www.joinreal.com ) is a technology-powered real estate brokerage operating in 28 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Real is building the future, together with agents and their clients. Real creates financial opportunities for agents through better commission splits, best-in-class technology, revenue sharing and equity incentives.

Contact Information

For additional information, please contact:

The Real Brokerage Inc.

Lynda Radosevich

[email protected]

917-922-7020



Hayden IR

James Carbonara

[email protected]

646-755-7412

Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek", "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "likely" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. These statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management as at the date hereof. Forward-looking information in this press release includes, without limiting the foregoing, the business and strategic plans of Real.

Forward-looking information is based on assumptions that may prove to be incorrect, including but not limited to Real's business objectives, expected growth, results of operations, performance, business projects and opportunities and financial results. Real considers these assumptions to be reasonable in the circumstances. However, forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. These factors should be carefully considered and readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Real cannot assure readers that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and Real assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release, and the OTCQX has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

SOURCE The Real Brokerage Inc.
A mynah bird who thinks she's a chicken has become an internet hit with hilarious performances of her favourite phrases.

The bird was filmed pronouncing: 'My name is Nuggets and I'm a big fat chicken' in footage filmed at her home in Hilo, Hawaii on April 15.

The clip was uploaded to TikTok where videos of the Indian mynah have been viewed as many as 14million times.

Among Nuggets' other favourite phrases to repeat are 'Hi', 'what are you doing?' , 'pretty girl' and 'let's make us a snack'.

Nugget the Mynah bird, pictured, has several phrases which she repeats for his fans across the globe

She is also able to cluck like a hen and make a disgusting burp sound.

However, it seems her 'chicken' phrase is the biggest hit with fans, who say she brightens up their day.

Fake Nerd Girl said: 'I have begun to sing "my name is nuggets and I'm a big fat chicken" at random points during the day. I love Nuggets so much.'

Arianne Jenkins agreed, claiming she uses the phrase while walking around the house.

Rebecca Galbreath said she was planning to quote Nugget when she returns to work.

Jackie Mitchell said she has been 'driving people mad at work' by repeating the phrase.

One of her favourite phrases is 'my name is Nuggets and I am a big fat chicken'

He also imitates a chicken and is able to make a disgusting burp sound

Nuggets' owner responded to many of the comments, answering questions about her pet, revealing her love of fruit as a snack.

One person wanted to know why Nugget looks down when talking.

Her owner responded: 'I think it's how she pushes air out to get her sounds out. Really no idea actually. But even the wind mynahs do this when they communicate.'

The pet received her name because she stole her owner's chicken nuggets when a chick.

She also said Nugget's first word was 'Stay' because she would tell her dogs to remain in their place.

Julz said: 'There used to be a mynah bird in my local pet shop but he learnt too much swearing from the teens so he couldn't stay in there.'

Another TikToker said: 'I work at a group home, and the residents all love watching Nugget with me.'

Mynah birds are members of the starling family and live in southern Asia, especially in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Birds raised by hand make excellent pets and are believed to be able to learn up to 100 words.

Owners can train their birds to repeat certain phrases and follow simple commands.

The best mimics start training before they reach six months.

In the wild mynah birds are considered a pest and have been known to bully other birds - especially native birds in areas they have been introduced.
Malin Andersson effortlessly showcased her fashion credentials when she enjoyed a shopping trip with friends wearing a nude ensemble.

Stepping out on Thursday, the Love Island star, 28, teamed her pale pink top and long jacket with a pair of chic black trousers.

Malin's trip to Westfield comes days after she opened up about suffering a miscarriage, two years after her daughter Consy's tragic death.

Glam: Malin Andersson, 28, effortlessly showcased her fashion credentials when she enjoyed a shopping trip with friends wearing a nude ensemble

The brunette beauty wore her hair loose for the outing, and was flanked by her driver and two female friends.

Pairing her outfit with black sliders, Malin toted her belongings in a pale pink shoulder bag.

She wore a full face of glam as she browsed the shopping center's offerings.

It comes days after Malin revealed she had suffered a miscarriage - two years after her four-week-old daughter Consy passed away.

Day out: The brunette beauty wore her hair loose for the outing, and was flanked by her driver and two female friends

The TV personality shared the heartbreaking news to Instagram on Sunday, admitting while 'my strength never ceases to amaze me sometimes, it pains me to talk about this in detail right now due to what happened to Consy'.

The mental health campaigner lost her baby girl Consy from complications as a result of being born premature in January 2019, 14 months after her mother, Consy-Gloria, died of stomach cancer aged 65.

Brave Malin wrote alongside an image of two pregnancy tests: 'Hi everyone, Obviously I have disappeared for a bit and I have had hundreds of messages from people asking if I am okay and sending me love.

Retail therapy: Pairing her outfit with a pair of black sliders, Malin toted her belongings in a pale pink shoulder bag

'I appreciate every single message and it means a lot that you all want to make sure I am okay.

'Sometimes I need to take time to deal with my life privately, as my life is so public, I needed to take time out.'

The reality star detailed the importance of speaking out about her trauma in an effort to help others.

The media personality added: 'The past few months haven't been easy for me, but there is also something else I would like to address.

'You all know that I am very transparent about taboo subjects, and I like to shed light on things that are often not spoken about and especially trauma I have experienced myself I found out I was pregnant - and I then soon after miscarried.

'It pains me to talk about this in detail right now due to what happened to Consy.. but I want you all to know that miscarriage doesn't discriminate and it can happen to anyone. Even when you think you have gone through enough.

'I'll be fine - my strength never ceases to amaze me sometimes but I felt that I needed to share this with you all as I've never been one to hold anything back - especially when I know it can help someone else.'

'My strength never ceases to amaze me': Malin (pictured last month) revealed she's suffered a miscarriage - two years after her four-week-old daughter Consy passed away

Her daughter Consy, named after Malin's late mother, was born seven weeks early and cared for at Great Ormond Street Hospital since her premature birth.

Malin's mum battled breast cancer twice since 2001, and the cancer spread for a third time before her death. Tragically, the TV star's father died from skin cancer after battling the disease twice.

The influencer uploaded a moving quote about 'building resilience' to her Stories, which read: 'In order to remain hopeful even in times of turmoil, it's important to develop resilience.

'It pains me to talk about this in detail right now': The Love Island star shared the heartbreaking news to Instagram on Sunday

'You need to learn how to function in distressing situations so consider practicing relaxation techniques, or call on friends who you consider part of your support system.'

The former flight attendant later posted a short video of herself in a car, alongside the caption: 'Back to work... life carries on.'

MailOnline has contacted Malin's representatives for further comment.

Malin's last relationship was with Michael Sadler, 35, who she recently dumped after she discovered he had a secret pregnant girlfriend.

Tragic: The mental health campaigner lost her baby girl Consy (pictured) from complications as a result of being born premature in January 2019

The Hertfordshire native ended her 18-month romance with Michael after his partner of seven-years Rebecca Barr, 38, contacted her to reveal he has four children and one that's due in August.

Rebecca and Michael also share son Luciano, two, and he also has three other children from a previous relationship.

It is understood Michael did not tell Malin about any of his offspring during their time together.

Brave: The former flight attendant later posted a short video of herself in a car, captioned: 'back to work, life carries on'

It's believed the pair first met when Michael reached out to Malin claiming to be a 'security professional' shortly after her ex Tom Kemp was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Tom - the father of Consy - was jailed at Aylesbury Crown Court in September last year, after admitting to actual bodily harm, which left Malin 'black and blue'.

Malin's violent ex was freed from prison after just 12 weeks of his 10-month sentence, forcing her to up the security on her London home.
The new, monthly stimulus checks for families: Biden wants them for years

Families are still a few months away from the monthly payments  stimulus checks, of a sort  that they're scheduled to get during the second half of this year. Yet President Joe Biden is already proposing to keep that cash flowing for at least a few more years.

The checks, for up to $300 per child per month, are scheduled to start going out in July as part of a one-year expansion of the child tax credit. Biden would make the beefed-up credit a little less temporary under the "American Families Plan" he laid out in his big speech to Congress Wednesday night.

Some Democrats want to go even further and make the payments a permanent fixture, to help families pay essential bills and fight debt, and to reduce child poverty in the U.S.

Proposals would extend the new child tax credit

Steve Heap / Shutterstock

The child credit was expanded for 2021 through the massive COVID relief package Biden signed in mid-March. It's the bill that's been providing most Americans with the more conventional stimulus checks for up to $1,400 each.

Couples who file taxes jointly and earn less $150,000, and individuals who make under $75,000, get tax credits of $3,600 for each kid who's 5 or younger, and $3,000 per child ages 6 through 17.

"With two parents, two kids, that's up to $7,200 in your pocket to help take care of your family," Biden said during his speech. Households are getting up to $1,600 more per child than they did under the previous version of the credit.

Families will receive the first half of the fatter credit in the form of monthly checks of either $250 (per child 5 and under) or $300 (per child 6 to 17) starting in July and continuing through the end of the year. The remainder can be taken as a refund when you file your 2021 taxes next year.

Biden's families plan would continue the child credit expansion  presumably including the monthly checks  through 2025.

But that's not enough for several Democrats in Congress, who are pushing to make the larger child credit permanent.

Story continues

"For our economy to fully recover from this pandemic, we must finally acknowledge that workers have families, and caregiving responsibilities are real," says Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. He has introduced a bill to permanently extend the credit.

The costs may be a big obstacle

Nicole Glass Photography / Shutterstock

Republicans have bristled at the price tag for Biden's families package: $1.8 trillion.

More than $400 billion of that would come from extending the child credit for four years, based on an estimate from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that just one more year would cost around $109 billion.

Making the expansion permanent would cost taxpayers roughly $1.6 trillion, according to an analysis from the Tax Foundation.

Republicans and many of the countrys business leaders are alarmed by how Biden plans to pay for the child credit extension to 2025 and the rest of his families plan: with tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, including a hike in the top capital gains tax on millionaires to 39.6%.

"Even more taxing, even more spending to put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college" is how South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott summed up the president's proposals Wednesday night in the Republican response to Biden's address.

Given the ultra-slim majority that Biden's party holds in the U.S. Senate, all Democrats would have to get behind the families bill in order for it to pass. And that's far from assured, considering the weight Wall Street money still carries with both major parties.

What if your family needs extra cash now?

Iakov Filimonov / Shutterstock

If the bigger child tax credit is extended, your family could be provided with a significant amount of assistance for at least five years. But it's not clear whether Biden has a chance of getting his new plan across the finish line  and that first check in July may seem like a long way off if youre feeling a cash crunch today.

Here are some options to cut costs and earn extra money to fill the gap:
LOS ANGELES, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, reminds investors of a class action lawsuit against Credit Suisse Group AG ("Credit Suisse" or "the Company") (NYSE: CS) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investors who purchased the Company's securities between October 29, 2020 and March 31, 2021, inclusive (the ''Class Period''), are encouraged to contact the firm before June 15, 2021.

If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate.

We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2460, Los Angeles, CA 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at [email protected].

The class, in this case, has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member.

According to the Complaint, the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. Credit Suisse concealed serious defects in its risk policies and procedures and compliance oversight functions. The Company concealed these deficiencies so that high-risk clients including Greensill and Archegos could take advantage of excess leverage. This leverage exposed the Company to billions of dollars in losses. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about Credit Suisse, investors suffered damages.

Join the case to recover your losses.

The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics.

CONTACT:

The Schall Law Firm

Brian Schall, Esq.,

www.schallfirm.com

Office: 310-301-3335

[email protected]

SOURCE The Schall Law Firm

Related Links

www.schallfirm.com


Hyderabad, April 29 : A bank employee was killed, and another injured in when armed robbers opened fire at an ATM in Kukatpally area in Hyderabad on Thursday, police said.

Security guard Ali Baig, an ex-serviceman, was killed and the other bank employee, Srinivas was injured in the incident.

The attackers escaped with Rs 5 lakh cash. The daylight robbery and firing sent panic in the busy area.

The armed robbers came on a two-wheeler and attacked two bank employees refilling money in the ATM. One of the assailants opened fire, injuring Ali. The security guard, who received a bullet injury in the stomach, succumbed at a hospital.

Cyberabad Police Commissioner V.C. Sajjanar who visited the scene of offence, told reporters that all check posts were alerted to prevent the offenders from leaving the city.

He said the police officials gathered vital clues and hoped to track down the guilty soon. The Police Commissioner said a home-made weapon was used in the offence.

He suspected involvement of an inter-state gang in the incident. Police were scanning the CCTV footage in the area to identify the offenders and gather more clues.
Madison County authorities say a man is dead following a vehicle chase involving deputies around midnight.

Madison County Coroner Tyler Berryhill said Brian Potts, 39, of Huntsville, was pronounced dead at Enterprise Way near University Drive at 12:27 a.m.

Sheriffs Office spokesman Brent Patterson said Potts fled when deputies attempted to take him into custody for outstanding warrants for reckless endangerment and attempting to flee and elude.

Potts was the only occupant of his vehicle. After a few minutes, he lost control of his vehicle while traveling east on University Drive near Enterprise Way, Patterson said. He crossed into the opposing lane of traffic and struck a deputys patrol vehicle that was traveling west on University Drive.

Pottss vehicle left the roadway, and he was ejected. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The deputy suffered minor injuries. Huntsville police conducted the traffic accident investigation.

It is the second time this week someone in Alabama has died following a police pursuit.

Robyn Naftel Herring, a nurse practitioner at UAB Hospital, was pronounced dead on Lakeshore Parkway near the Interstate 65 ramp in Homewood at 6:55 p.m. Monday. The suspect, Jordan Ricks, was apprehended today in Tuscaloosa.

That crash happened when Ricks was allegedly fleeing Vestavia Hills police and slammed into the Jeep Wrangler in which she was a passenger.
New Zealand says it is "uncomfortable" using the 70-year-old "Five Eyes" intelligence grouping, which includes the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada, to criticize China. Some critics accuse the government in Wellington of selling out to Beijing.

The Five Eyes alliance was formed in 1941 to share secrets during World War II. Now, however, disagreements within the U.S.-led alliance are emerging about using the spy network to exert political pressure on China.

New Zealand, the group's smallest member, has expressed reluctance to sign joint statements from its alliance partners condemning Beijing's crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong and its treatment of its minority Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang province. The declarations have infuriated China's government.



New Zealand's foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, believes the Five Eyes alliance is not the best forum to voice those concerns. "Can I say we do value the Five Eyes relationship. We receive a significant benefit from being a part of that relationship and they are close allies and friends in terms of common values and principles. But whether or not that framework needs to be invoked every time on every issue, especially in the human rights space, is something that we have expressed further views about," said Mahuta.

However, critics, including some British lawmakers and influential newspapers, have accused the government in Wellington of selling "its soul to China." They accuse New Zealand, which earns about 29 percent of its export revenue from China, of choosing its economic ties with Beijing over a longstanding alliance with like-minded nations.

Media commentators in New Zealand have described the dilemma; speak out against China and suffer economic damage, as Australia has found, or stay silent and see the end of a "moral foreign policy" of which the nation was proud.


[April 29, 2021] Red Hat Names Carahsoft Marketing Partner of the Year

RESTON, Va., April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Carahsoft Technology Corp ., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, today announced it has been named Marketing Partner of the Year for the Public Sector by Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions. This award is part of the annual Red Hat North America Partner Awards, which aim to honor partners for continued efforts to support customers on the path to IT modernization and an open hybrid cloud.

Carahsoft was honored for its dedication to providing innovative open source solutions to customers in the Public Sector. Specifically, Carahsoft was recognized for its collaboration with Red Hat across more than 170 unique marketing programs and creative initiatives executed to drive results and create measurable impact on the Public Sector and partner business. This award is a testament to Red Hat and Carahsofts mutual efforts to proactively educate our customers and reseller partners around the increasing momentum behind enterprise open source across the Public Sector, sad Natalie Gregory, Vice President of the Red Hat Team at Carahsoft. We are honored to be recognized by Red Hat as Marketing Partner of the Year and look forward to our continued collaboration.



Red Hat's 2020 North America Partner Awards honor both commercial and Public Sector partners for successfully delivering innovative open source solutions to customers. Honorees were recognized for outstanding performance in 2020 across several categories that span Red Hats open hybrid cloud portfolio and their continued dedication to delivering customer success. Carahsoft is a valued partner to Red Hat, and we are pleased to honor them with this well-deserved award, said Michael Byrd, Vice President, Public Sector Channel Sales, Red Hat. We look forward to our continued relationship with Carahsoft and helping them provide industry-leading enterprise open source solutions to their customers.

About Carahsoft Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator for our vendor partners, we deliver solutions for Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, Customer Experience and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Visit us at www.carahsoft.com . Contact

Mary Lange

(703) 230-7434

PR@carahsoft.com Red Hat is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.



[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Mask Manufacturers Association ( AMMA ) today is proud to announce its official formation, with the goal of eliminating foreign dependence on PPE by increasing production, procurement and distribution of American-made face masks, saving American lives, and driving manufacturing growth. AMMA appreciates the steps taken by the Biden administration and Capitol Hill with the recently enacted American Rescue Plan and related Executive Orders and look forward to working with them to further define a clear path towards creating a cycle of security, opportunity, and prosperity.

AMMA's mission supports current federal efforts to address the serious personal protective equipment (PPE) supply issues the country faced amid the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Americans in both the private and public sectors, including hospitals and healthcare organization, were obligated to pay top dollar for what turned out to be inferior, often counterfeit, masks from questionable international sources.

"In 2020, the pandemic exposed a significant national security vulnerability for the United States: Our inability to quickly manufacture face masks to protect our citizens and healthcare workers when they needed it most," said Brent Dillie, chairman of AMMA. "Not only did this leave our country at the mercy of foreign suppliers, but many Americans lost family and friends because of this extremely solvable vulnerability. AMMA's mission is to never let that happen again." AMMA, which currently represents 21 American companies, believes it is imperative that the federal government and private producers work together to develop and distribute innovative and low-cost masks that will protect Americans from respiratory disease pathogens. Therefore, AMMA is encouraged by the Biden Administration's Mask Innovation Challenge: Building Tomorrow's Mask . AMMA believes American innovation has made our country the global leader in the development of many lifesaving products, and looks forward to working with Biomedical Advanced Research & Development Authority and the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health to welcome the winner(s) to the family of American-made masks.

AMMA is also pleased to see the Biden Administration's $50 billion proposal included in the American Jobs Plan to open a new office within the Department of Commerce to oversee the nation's critical supply chains. Throughout 2020, state and local governments saw first-hand how difficult it is to procure safe, authentic masks needed for healthcare workers, first responders, and other high-risk individuals so that they are adequately protected. AMMA's members are at the forefront of this challenge, setting up companies, hiring a well-trained workforce and producing masks that Americans need and want. AMMA looks forward to working with the Biden Administration and Congress to make this new office a reality.

"We are thrilled that President Biden has committed to supporting the small businesses that make up the AMMA," said Dillie, who is also the Managing Director of Premium PPE-Amerishield. "The continued price undercutting and subsidizing by foreign governments and companies puts America's mask manufacturing base at significant risk. We will need the continued support of our federal and state governments to ensure American companies can compete."

MEDIA CONTACT: Tom Cheredar; (512) 831-4409; [email protected]

SOURCE AMMA
Washington  When Rep. John Katko appeared April 15 on Fox News Primetime, it marked the second time that day  and at least the 11th time in a month  that he appeared on a Fox network to raise alarms about border security.

Katko blamed President Joe Bidens executive orders that reversed Donald Trumps immigration policies for a surge of migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico.

Ive been down there twice and the human tragedy that has been caused by this executive order is stunning, Katko told Fox viewers after returning from his second trip to the border in a month. Its a humanitarian crisis that we  this United States government  caused.

The Central New York congressman has stepped into the national spotlight in the last two months, helping to lead Republican opposition to Bidens border and immigration policies.

Its an unfamiliar role for a congressman who has cultivated an independent brand during his six-year career in Congress, touting his willingness to work across party lines and stay above the partisan fray.

Fox says Katko, R-Camillus, has appeared in live interviews on its Fox News Channel and Fox Business networks 17 times so far this year, after being only an occasional guest in previous years.

His regular TV spots blasting Biden over the border crisis are part of Katkos new role as the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. But its also a sign of a political strategy aimed at raising money and holding off a primary challenger at home, where Conservative Party leaders dumped Katko over his January vote to impeach Trump.

The potential reward for Katko: If Republicans can win back the House in next years midterm elections, he would become chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, a powerful panel that oversees almost every aspect of domestic security.

In the meantime, the TV spots have coincided with record-breaking fundraising for Katko, who now has $586,000 in his reelection account.

Since House Republicans elevated Katko in January to serve as ranking member, the minority partys top post on the committee, he has led two GOP fact-finding trips to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas.

After those trips, Katko called for Biden to reverse executive orders  signed in the presidents first day in office  that halted construction of Trumps border wall and ended a Trump policy that forced migrants to stay in Mexico after applying for asylum in the United States.

Katko claimed the policies signaled to the drug traffickers that the borders are open and led to a surge in human trafficking by drug cartels.

He has stood alongside the top three House Republicans  Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, GOP Whip Steve Scalise and Conference Chair Liz Cheney  at news conferences to blame Biden for disorder at the border by executive order.

One Democratic strategist from Upstate New York said its no coincidence that Katko is repeating a campaign-style slogan in his TV appearances.

Katko is making a risky political bet that the issue will help him win a fifth term next year, said Josh Schwerin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and Syracuse native Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor.

Republicans have already signaled they will make immigration and border security a top issue in their bid to regain control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, Schwerin said.

Former Trump aide Stephen Miller said in February that it would be a good idea for the GOP to use the divisive immigration issue to their political advantage.

From a purely political standpoint, this is a recipe for Democrats to have an historic drubbing in the midterms if we can make it even as big an issue, or bigger, than Obamacare, Miller told The Washington Post.

Katko has embraced Trumps signature issue at a time when some of the former presidents top supporters in Central New York say they feel abandoned by the congressman.

Katko is among 10 House Republicans who broke ranks and voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Since then, Katko has faced backlash from Republicans and Conservative Party leaders in the 24th Congressional District.

Conservative Party committees in the four-county district have abandoned Katko, saying they will no longer support or endorse him to run on the partys ballot line.

In February, a group of top Republican and conservative leaders met privately at a Syracuse restaurant to discuss whether to back a primary opponent against Katko next year.

Trump vowed the same month in a national speech to conservatives to get rid of the 10 GOP House members and seven Republican senators who voted to impeach him, calling them RINOs, Republicans-In-Name-Only.

So far, Katko is the only one of those 10 House Republicans who has managed to avoid drawing a primary opponent, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.

Schwerin, the Democratic strategist, said its clear Katko embraced the border issue in an attempt to raise money and save his political career.

Katkos new prominence helped him raise more than $436,000 for his re-election campaign in the first three months of the year, a personal record for the first quarter.

Its pure politics, Schwerin said of Katkos border focus. Hes trying to raise money from the Fox News crowd. Hes trying to keep Trump and his allies from supporting a primary opponent. And its a misguided attempt to hold onto Trump voters.

One risk is that Katkos border push will alienate independent voters and those Democrats who split their ticket and voted for Katko in the past, said Schwerin, of Saratoga Strategies.

The 24th Congressional District voted for Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the last three presidential elections.

In November, Katko was among only nine House Republicans elected in a district that Biden won. In fact, Katko outperformed the top of the ticket last year more than any House member in the nation, according to an analysis by Cook Political Report.

Schwerin said it would be a mistake for Katko to think that the immigration issue  and his focus on Central American migrants  is a winning strategy in Central New York.

It didnt work for Donald Trump, Schwerin said. He tried to use division and fear to increase his base and excite turnout, and it didnt work.

Some Republican and Conservative Party leaders in Central New York say they appreciate Katkos new, outspoken role on border security. But will it be enough to redeem him for voting to impeach Trump?

I sadly do not think it will, said Fred Beardsley, chairman of the Oswego County Republican Committee. Make no mistake about it, I live in Trump country. When John voted to impeach, he shot himself in the foot.

Beardsley said Katko may have underestimated the political damage hes done with local Republicans.

Ive been in this for 35 years, and I have never seen a reaction from the Republican committee and supporters like I have after Mr. Katkos vote, Beardsley said.

When he voted, I said to myself, Why? I dont think he gained any Democratic or independent support, but he absolutely lost Republican support, Beardsley said.

Katko declined to be interviewed for this story.

Bernie Ment, chairman of the Onondaga County Conservative Committee, said he likes what hes heard from Katko about border security over the last two months. But its too little, too late, he said.

It does make a difference, Ment said. But it doesnt excuse what he has done already. John is trying very hard to walk back what I think is a slap in the face of conservatives.

The Onondaga County Conservative Committee has decided to stop supporting Katko and to withhold its endorsement next year, Ment said, a decision thats unlikely to be reversed.

This is not to say he will do other things that may redeem himself with us, but at this point in time the things that he has done are egregious, Ment said. He has essentially burned a bridge with the conservatives that is going to be very hard to rebuild.

Katko spent his first six years in Congress trying to find compromise on issues that include immigration and border security. In 2018, he helped negotiate a sweeping immigration reform bill. But he said the deal was ultimately sabotaged by Trump and GOP hardliners.

This month, he introduced bipartisan legislation with Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, that would set up a $1 billion fund for federal agencies to use in response to humanitarian needs at the border.

But hes also supporting political messaging bills about the border from Republicans. Those bills have no chance of making it into law in a Democratic-controlled Congress and White House.

Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, appears on Fox News Primetime to talk about border security, Thursday, April 15, 2021.Provided by Fox News

Last week, Katko co-sponsored a bill with 51 Republicans that would require the federal government to immediately resume construction of Trumps border wall.

Ment, the Conservative Party chairman, said Katkos campaign operatives sent him at least a dozen emails in recent weeks  despite their public breakup  updating him about the congressmans work on the border.

Katko also mailed a letter in March to potential donors that touts his border security role and asks for donations to his political campaign.

I will continue to lead the Republican effort to push back against these dangerous policies put in place by the Biden administration, Katko wrote in the letter obtained by syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

That is why I am asking for your support, to help fight back against the far-left radical agenda and ensure our borders are secure, he wrote. If you are able, please contribute $100, $50, or even $25  any amount you can  to help us fight against this radical agenda.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Mark Weiner anytime by: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
New Delhi: Social media giant Facebook on Thursday said it had temporarily blocked a hashtag calling for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's resignation "by mistake" and that it wasn't done on government orders.

The development comes amid reports that social media companies are being asked to remove posts that are critical of the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

According to reports, a hashtag calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was briefly blocked on Facebook on Wednesday. Users searching the hashtag were given a message that said such posts were "temporarily hidden here" because "some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards".

Meanwhile, Electronics & IT Ministry too issued a statement saying, A Wall Street Journal story attributing removal of the certain hashtag by FB to GoIs efforts to curb public dissent is misleading on facts & mischievous in intent. Govt hasn't issued any direction to remove the hashtag. FB clarified it was removed by mistake.

A Wall Street Journal story attributing removal of certain hashtag by FB to GoIs efforts to curb public dissent is misleading on facts & mischievous in intent. Govt hasn't issued any direction to remove the hashtag. FB clarified it was removed by mistake: Electronics&IT Ministry pic.twitter.com/YfOYatolHS  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

India is registering a record number of COVID-19 cases daily that has put extreme pressure on the healthcare infrastructure of the country.

The massive rise in infections in the second wave of the pandemic has led to hospitals in several states reeling under a severe shortage of medical oxygen and beds.

Social media timelines are filled with SOS calls with people looking for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, plasma donors and ventilators. Organisations across the spectrum have come forward to support the fight against the COVID pandemic.

Recently, Twitter and other social media platforms removed about 100 posts and URLs after the government asked them to remove content that was critical of the handling of the current medical crisis or spreading fake news around the pandemic.

Reports citing Lumen database, an independent research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content, suggested that more than 50 posts - including those by a Member of Parliament, MLA and filmmakers - were removed by Twitter on government request.

Government sources had said the social media platforms were asked to remove the posts and URLs (uniform resource locators) to "prevent obstructions in the fight against the pandemic" and disruption of public order due to the said posts.

They had added that the order was issued in view of the misuse of social media platforms by certain users to spread fake or misleading information and create panic about the pandemic in the society "by using unrelated, old and out of the context images or visuals, communally sensitive posts and misinformation about COVID-19 protocols".

Live TV
Sylvia Jeffreys welcomed her second son with husband Peter Stefanovic earlier this month.

And on Wednesday, the 35-year-old shared a sweet mother-son bonding moment with the apple of her eye.

In the picture posted to the Today Extra host's Instagram, Sylvia is seen snuggling up to the little one while out for a walk.

Adorable: Sylvia Jeffreys shared a sweet bonding moment with her adorable newborn son Henry on Wednesday

She beamed underneath her chic shades as her adorable baby boy, dressed in a blue and white stripped onesie, cuddled up to her.

Sylvia wrote in the caption: 'Low on sleep and sanity but that little head tucked into my neck is giving me ALL THE LIFE.'

Fellow Today Extra host Belinda Russell commented: 'Soak it all up. Those newborn sounds and smells, those koala cuddles. Such a special time, despite the impact on your sleep and sanity.'

How sweet: Her friends - fellow Today Extra host Belinda Russell, Jodie Speers and Sally Obermeder - shared their love for the sweet photo of herself with her newborn son

Channel Seven reporter and mother-of-three Jodie Speers wrote: 'Sending you love Sylv, 1 > 2 is a tough gig, newborn deliciousness notwithstanding!'

Meanwhile, Sally Obermeder said: 'All the feels .'

Earlier in the day, Sylvia shared an adorable photo of their eldest son, one-year-old Oscar, who already seems to be taking after his journalist father.

She posted a picture of the tot wearing Peter Stefanovic's work clothes - a black suit jacket with a grey stripped neck tie.

Just like dad! Sylvia also shared an adorable photo of her son Oscar, one, wearing his father's suit jacket and tie on Wednesday. His father Peter Stefanovic, the host of Sky News' First Edition, was beside him, making sure the jacket did not overwhelm his little boy

Peter, 39, who is the host of Sky News' First Edition, was seen beside his little one making sure the jacket did not overwhelm his small frame.

Underneath, Oscar had on an adorable blue jumper, white T-shirt and pink shorts.

The Channel Nine TV presenter, who is currently on maternity leave, added a sticker to the post that read: 'Rise and grind.'

Family: Sylvia and Peter are doting parents to two young boys - Oscar, one (pictured), and Henry, who was born earlier this month

Pregnant pals: The Today Extra host is currently on maternity leave after welcoming her second son. Pictured is Sylvia, a couple of weeks before giving birth, alongside friend and colleague Jayne Azzopardi who is also expecting

Sylvia's adorable post comes after she announced the birth of their second son, Henry, in an Instagram post on April 7.

She shared photos of the newborn wrapped in a hospital blanket and wrote in the caption: 'Henry, our gorgeous, healthy little boy makes us a family of four. His proud parents couldn't be happier.'

'His big brother is learning to be gentle. Big love all around,' she added.

Sweet! Sylvia welcomed their second child, Henry, and announced his birth in an Instagram post earlier this month. Pictured is Sylvia with newborn Henry and one year old son Oscar

'Our gorgeous, healthy little boy makes us a family of four': Sylvia shared photos of newborn wrapped in a hospital blanket and wrote in the caption: 'His proud parents couldn't be happier'

Sylvia and Peter began dating in 2013 after meeting at Nine and were engaged in 2016 while on holiday in France.

They tied the knot at the Ooralba Estate in Kangaroo Valley on April 1, 2017.

Last year, Sylvia and Peter welcomed their first son, Oscar Hamilton, who turned one year old in February.

Just eight months later, the TV presenter revealed that she was pregnant with her second child, a son.

Love story: Sylvia and Peter began dating in 2013 after meeting at Nine and were engaged in 2016 while on holiday in France. They tied the knot at the Ooralba Estate in Kangaroo Valley on April 1, 2017

Cute: They welcomed their first son, Oscar Hamilton, who turned one year old in February

Sylvia conceived her first son, Oscar, via IVF, but said her second pregnancy was 'spontaneous'.

'We hadn't planned to go down that path so soon, but having had not an entirely easy path the first time around you can't be anything but thankful and grateful to have fallen pregnant this way,' she told The Australian Women's Weekly.

She said many people had advised her against having boys 15 months apart, but she insisted they wouldn't have it any other way.

'I know it will be a lot to keep up with two turbo little boys, but for now I'm just embracing the beautiful chaos,' Sylvia added.
Karriem Allah describes how the origin of the Domestic Life of the Messiah, the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, is rooted in the prophetic narratives of the major prophets whose lives prefigured the Messiahs life.

In this Message, Karriem Allah examines the events prophesied to occur, according to the Holy Quran and Bible, during the Honorable Louis Farrakhans departure to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Karriem Allah discusses several scenarios depicted in the Scriptures that can be used to set expectations for the Honorable Louis Farrakhans imminent departure.

Karriem Allah describes how the origin of the Domestic Life of the Messiah, the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, is rooted in the prophetic narratives of the major prophets whose lives prefigured the Messiahs life. As such, Karriem Allah shows how the Domestic Life goes back thousands of years, and how it has been defended for hundreds of years by Islamic scholars, in particular, through their defense of Prophet Muhammads polygamous marital life.

Karriem Allah introduces Brother Jabril Muhammads vision-like experience described in His book, Closing the Gap: Inner Views of the Heart, Mind & Soul of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. Karriem Allah explains how this vision-like experience involves the prophesied departure of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan; and aligns with the Gospel Prophecies as the basis for several scenarios that bear on the Messiahs exit from among the people to the Throne of God.

Karriem Allah, in parsing Brother Jabril Muhammads vision-like experience, explains why the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, during His talk after this past Saviours Day lecture, on February 28, 2021, stated that He was the stone of stumbling  as mentioned in the Bible in Isaiah 8:14:  He (Messiah) will be a holy place (sanctuary); for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare.

Karriem Allah explains that, according to the Messianic Prophecies, Jesus wanted his disciples to understand him and relate to him through the Messianic Prophecies, which forecasted his appearance and work. Karriem Allah shows how the disciples failure to perceive Jesus in his proper light led to their abandonment of Jesus when he was apprehended and persecuted.

Karriem Allah raises questions regarding the events surrounding the announcement of the Honorable Elijah Muhammads death in February 1975, in light of the Honorable Louis Farrakhans declaration that He was instructed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad on the Great Mother Plane in 1985. Karriem Allah shows how this controversy also bears on the Honorable Louis Farrakhans impending return to the Great Mother Plane.

This lecture, Prophesied Scenarios involved in the Departure of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, the Imminent Christ, to the Great Mother Wheel is part of the The Messianic Prophecies Series and is available on Karriem Allahs Youtube channel and through his website.
- By GF Value





The stock of Philip Morris International (NYSE:PM, 30-year Financials) is believed to be modestly overvalued, according to GuruFocus Value calculation. GuruFocus Value is GuruFocus' estimate of the fair value at which the stock should be traded. It is calculated based on the historical multiples that the stock has traded at, the past business growth and analyst estimates of future business performance. If the price of a stock is significantly above the GF Value Line, it is overvalued and its future return is likely to be poor. On the other hand, if it is significantly below the GF Value Line, its future return will likely be higher. At its current price of $94.15 per share and the market cap of $146.7 billion, Philip Morris International stock appears to be modestly overvalued. GF Value for Philip Morris International is shown in the chart below.





Philip Morris International Stock Shows Every Sign Of Being Modestly Overvalued

Because Philip Morris International is relatively overvalued, the long-term return of its stock is likely to be lower than its business growth, which is estimated to grow 3.67% annually over the next three to five years.

Link: These companies may deliever higher future returns at reduced risk.

Investing in companies with poor financial strength has a higher risk of permanent loss of capital. Thus, it is important to carefully review the financial strength of a company before deciding whether to buy its stock. Looking at the cash-to-debt ratio and interest coverage is a great starting point for understanding the financial strength of a company. Philip Morris International has a cash-to-debt ratio of 0.13, which is worse than 79% of the companies in Tobacco Products industry. GuruFocus ranks the overall financial strength of Philip Morris International at 4 out of 10, which indicates that the financial strength of Philip Morris International is poor. This is the debt and cash of Philip Morris International over the past years:

Story continues

Philip Morris International Stock Shows Every Sign Of Being Modestly Overvalued

Companies that have been consistently profitable over the long term offer less risk for investors who may want to purchase shares. Higher profit margins usually dictate a better investment compared to a company with lower profit margins. Philip Morris International has been profitable 10 over the past 10 years. Over the past twelve months, the company had a revenue of $29.1 billion and earnings of $5.55 a share. Its operating margin is 41.96%, which ranks better than 92% of the companies in Tobacco Products industry. Overall, the profitability of Philip Morris International is ranked 8 out of 10, which indicates strong profitability. This is the revenue and net income of Philip Morris International over the past years:

Philip Morris International Stock Shows Every Sign Of Being Modestly Overvalued

One of the most important factors in the valuation of a company is growth. Long-term stock performance is closely correlated with growth according to GuruFocus research. Companies that grow faster create more value for shareholders, especially if that growth is profitable. The average annual revenue growth of Philip Morris International is -0.2%, which ranks in the middle range of the companies in Tobacco Products industry. The 3-year average EBITDA growth is 0.2%, which ranks in the middle range of the companies in Tobacco Products industry.

Another way to look at the profitability of a company is to compare its return on invested capital and the weighted cost of capital. Return on invested capital (ROIC) measures how well a company generates cash flow relative to the capital it has invested in its business. The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) is the rate that a company is expected to pay on average to all its security holders to finance its assets. We want to have the return on invested capital higher than the weighted cost of capital. For the past 12 months, Philip Morris International's return on invested capital is 34.42, and its cost of capital is 5.92. The historical ROIC vs WACC comparison of Philip Morris International is shown below:

Philip Morris International Stock Shows Every Sign Of Being Modestly Overvalued

In short, the stock of Philip Morris International (NYSE:PM, 30-year Financials) gives every indication of being modestly overvalued. The company's financial condition is poor and its profitability is strong. Its growth ranks in the middle range of the companies in Tobacco Products industry. To learn more about Philip Morris International stock, you can check out its 30-year Financials here.

To find out the high quality companies that may deliever above average returns, please check out GuruFocus High Quality Low Capex Screener.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.


North Korea's latest mass meeting with masked participants was presented on state television on Thursday, two days after the event took place.

The official report did not mention leader Kim Jong Un attending the 10th Congress of the "Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist Youth League" but like the last time this congress was held, Kim may attend later.

The youth league is an important part of social control in North Korea, requiring participation from many citizens up until their late twenties, or whenever they move into another state organisation that will take over responsibility for managing their lives.

The opening ceremony took place on Tuesday in a stadium built by the South Korean Hyundai company, back when it was trying to develop relations with Pyongyang.

Footage from North Korea's state television showed thousands of young adults in suits and military uniforms filing into the stadium.

The agenda items include "renaming the youth league", according to the Korean Central News Agency, as well as standard procedures like reviewing past work and revising rules and electing its leadership.

The last congress of this youth league was in August 2016.

North Korea has cut contacts with the outside world since the coronavirus pandemic emerged.

Pyongyang's state media continue to emphasise strict precautions against the virus, but have not announced plans for vaccination of the population.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
At the Taj Mahal

The death of Prince Philip is a watershed moment in the history of the modern monarchy. And for Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and his wife, Catherine, it marks a significant new chapter.

A decade on from their wedding at Westminster Abbey, Marlborough College and St Andrews-educated Catherine (as William publicly calls her now, rather than Kate) is centre stage. Together with their children, George, Charlotte and Louis, the couple represent what is good in so many ways about our country and its system of constitutional monarchy.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have withstood malicious and unfounded rumours of problems in their marriage, and now stand resolute to serve Queen and country, while raising their young family.

I witnessed first-hand how they performed on the world stage on a tricky diplomatic visit to Pakistan in October 2019. The soft-power mission  overseen by the dukes then private secretary Simon Case, who is now head of the civil service  was a triumph. I also saw Catherines confidence grow. When she spoke with members of the British press at the back of the RAFs Voyager jet, she demonstrated poise and wit.

The couple have had their fair share of storms to weather. William was upset by his younger brother and sister-in-laws difficulties with the institution  but also hurt by the perceived attacks on him and his father. Harry claimed both were trapped by the system; neither William nor Charles feel trapped, household sources have told me.

Prince Charles is now the patriarch of the Firm and chief supporter to his mother. The Queen, who is 95, will continue to reign, but the death of Philip, her beloved husband of 73 years, has left a void in her life.

I know the Queen discussed stepping aside  not down  at 95 so that Charles would become a Regent. But a senior figure who worked closely with Her Majesty for many years said he felt she would only step aside if she was no longer able to perform her role as custodian. For Charles to have the title of Regent is, in reality, not crucial. When the world returns to some semblance of order after the pandemic, his foreign forays on behalf of the Government will effectively be state visits.

Story continues

But whatever the next few years holds, make no mistake that this is a monarchy in transition  and the next generation are poised and ready for whatever challenge they face.

Robert Jobson is the author of The Future Royal Family; William, Kate and the Modern Royals. His latest book, Prince Philips Century 1921-2021: The Extraordinary Life of the Duke of Edinburgh, is available now.

Read More

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Meghans remarks about the Duchess of Cambridge could scupper any bid to heal rift, royal author says

The Royal property portfolio: from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges Norfolk estate to Prince Charless Welsh cottage
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Key Highlights Offered in the Report:

Information on how to identify strategic and tactical negotiation levels that will help achieve the best prices.

Gain information on relevant pricing levels, detailed explanation on pros and cons of prevalent pricing models.

Methods to help engage with the right suppliers and discover KPI's to evaluate incumbent suppliers.

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Several strategic and tactical negotiation levers are explained in the report to help buyers achieve the best prices for the Building Thermal Insulation market. The report also aids buyers with relevant Building Thermal Insulation pricing levels, pros, and cons of prevalent pricing models such as volume-based pricing, spot pricing, and cost-plus pricing and category management strategies and best practices to fulfill their category objectives.

Insights on buyer strategies and tactical negotiation levers

Key Drivers and Trends Fueling Market Growth:

The pressure from substitutes and a moderate level of threat from new entrants has resulted in the low bargaining power of suppliers.

Price forecasts are beneficial in purchase planning, especially when supplemented by the constant monitoring of price influencing factors. During the forecast period, the market expects a change of 2.00%-4.00%.

Identify favorable opportunities in Building Thermal Insulation TCO (total cost of ownership).

Expected changes in price forecast and factors driving the current and future price changes.

Identify pricing models that offer the most rewarding opportunities.

Some of the top Building Thermal Insulation suppliers listed in this report:

This Building Thermal Insulation procurement intelligence report has enlisted the top suppliers and their cost structures, SLA terms, best selection criteria, and negotiation strategies.

BASF SE

Owens Corning

Dow Inc.

Huntsman Corp.

Saint-Gobain Group

Kingspan Group Plc

Covestro AG

ROCKWOOL International AS

Cameron Ashley Building Products Inc.

Johns Manville Corp.

Atlas Roofing

Byucksan Corp.

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Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

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Scranton, PA (18503)

Today

Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly cloudy. Low near 70F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
A Portarlington company that has played a key part in distributing Covid-19 vaccines is planning an extension to its facilities and features on RTE's Open for Business show in a year which the company celebrates 25 years in business.

Polar Ice Ltd intend to apply for planning permission for development at its premises at Portarlington Industrial Estate.

The development will consist of the construction of a proposed two-storey factory type building containing office accommodation, packaging area with canopied truck loading to rear, truck wash and a canopied link to the existing Polar Ice factory facility.

Separately, the company is applying for retention for development at Unit 3, Portarlington Industrial Estate.

The development for retention consists of the opening of a roller shutter door to the west of the existing factory building. The proposed development will consist of a second roller shutter door to the west, the blocking up of an existing roller shutter

door to the east with the installation of a high-level window, a single storey extension to the south, internal modifications and the installation of a sliding electric gate.

Through the production of dry ice Polar Ice provides transportation of chilled items, dry ice blasting and cold storage.

It has played a key role in the fight against coronavirus because the dry ice it produces the dry ice that is needed to preserve vaccines and testing kits during transportation.

The CEO Ronan Berry told RTE's Open for Business the part it has played.

"We've been involved in the fight against Covid-19 from Day 1. From supplying dry ice from shipping testing kits to Germany and all across Europe right up to the current day where we are supplying companies who are involved in the distribution of vaccines both north and south of the border," said the CEO.

COCO Content Broadcasting and Media Production Company, which makes the show, were onsite at Polar Ice HQ in Portarlington in early April for the show which will air on RTE1 on Thursday, April 29 at 7pm.

This episode will focus on the role Irish companies play in the fight against COVID-19 and the vaccine rollout.

The company operates just inside the Offaly border but is very much part of the Laois Offaly border town supporting local initiatives and charities over the past quarter of a century during which it has won multiple awards.

The comany has depots in Dublin, Cork, and Portadown, Co Armagh.
RUSSELL  Eighteen-year-old Zackary Cernak stumbled  literally stubbed his toe  on a mystery wedged under a rock on a hillside overlooking the Westfield River valley.

A senior about to graduate from Westfield Technical Academy, Cernak was working on his network of dirt bike trails, raking leaves and scraping debris away from a giant rock when he spotted something that looked too round, too unnatural, for its surroundings.

Something seemed a little bit off, said Cernak.

What he found is an iron ball, corroded and cracked with flakes of metal peeling from it, weighing in at a little more than 8 pounds and just more than 4 inches in diameter. Cradled in his hands, it looks like a rust-colored candlepin bowling ball.

His first move was to send a Mom, guess what? text message.

That started off alarming, said his mother, Jessica Cernak. But now its just fascinating. We just want to know more.

Their curiosity was also piqued after after uncovering rudimentary stone fire rings, like the remnants of a campsite, nearby. The Knox Trail, the route taken by Henry Knox and his ox-drawn noble train of artillery during the winter of 1775-76 is about a mile away. Today its Route 23.

Historians say they need to know more, and perhaps dig the hillside where the teen found the mysterious sphere, in order to know exactly what it is.

Robert Allison, a history professor at Suffolk University and a Revolutionary War expert, said the ball sounds a lot like the Revolutionary War cannonball that sits on his desk, given to him by a friend who dug it up in South Boston a few years ago during a backhoe project.

We are finding things all the time, Allison said. The question is where did it come from?

Jonathan Lane is the Revolution250 coordinator at Massachusetts Historical Society, part of a statewide consortium of 70 civic groups preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. He said the balls dimensions roughly match the round that would have been fired from what was called a nine-pound gun, named for the approximate weight of the round it fired.

Henry Knox, portraited around 1805 by Gilbert Stuart.

Knox transported four nine-pound guns from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, part of the 60 tons of artillery he dragged through the woods in the dead of winter to Boston, where Gen. George Washington used them to break the British resistance and drive them from the city.

How cool would it be to be able to link it to Knox? That would be dandy, Lane said. For despite the heroic efforts of Knox and his men, we dont have many artifacts from his trek. And that story has a deep attachment for Western Massachusetts which tends to get overshadowed because of Lexington and Concord being in the East.

Thomas Ragusa, a local historian from nearby Otis, doubts there is a Knox connection, noting the distance of Cernaks discovery from the Knox Trail.

Lane said Knox famously fired his guns for an adoring crowd in Westfield. Probably he used just powder and some sort of wadding. But out in the woods he might have fired off a real cannonball as a training exercise.

Ragusa thinks the ball could be older, dating back to Lord Jeffery Amherst and his expeditions during what we call the French and Indian War of 1754-63.

Lane said that could be. He said Route 23 was the main east-west route from Springfield to the New York state line for generations. That means all the Massachusetts troops headed to the Hudson Valley of New York in both the French and Indian War and the Revolution hauled all their stuff over the mountain going to battle and on their way back home. Maybe a round or two fell off a wagon, or got dumped.

The Springfield Armory was an arms depot in the Revolution and afterward, Lane said, so all sorts of ammo and equipment traveled back and forth to Springfield as well.

Whats more, the Army issued basically the same iron nine-pound cannonballs for generations, with some militia units using them up until the Civil War. A militia outfit could have a camped in Russell to train.

Or the cannonball might have been a curio, brought back by a veteran or tourist in subsequent generations. Next thing you know the kids are bowling with it, Lane said, and the cannonball gets lost in the woods.

Bruce W. Cortis is an author and local historian whos visited the site. He said its just downhill from whats generally considered to be the oldest homestead in Russell, which might have something to do with it.

At the same time, big heavy iron balls like this were also used in various industries for grinding. So who knows if it was ever a cannonball at all.

It is intriguing, Cortis said.

Zackary Cernak said he wants to keep working to find out what the ball really is and, as best he can, find out where it came from. Then hell sell it or donate it so it can be displayed, maybe with his name nearby.

Related content:
If it wasn't for the kindness and goodwill of the people, this country would be in shambles right now. I mean, it already is but the people are trying their best to keep it afloat.

The rising Covid cases in the country along with the collapse of the healthcare system due to the unavailability of adequate resources has led people to go out of their way to help those in need of medicine, oxygen, hospital beds, plasma etc.

While social media is flooded with requests and leads, there are others who are physically putting themselves out there to lend a helping hand.

An example of the same is 22-year-old Ravali Thikka from Hyderabad who travelled for more than two hours to donate blood to a woman who was nine months pregnant.

Also read: Cop Swiftly Responds To Blood Requirement SOS In Varanasi, Saves Woman's Life

Unsplash

The woman who needed the blood is identified as G Vajeera. She did not have a covid-related emergency but things became difficult for her when her husband, G Prashant was diagnosed with the coronavirus.

According to The New Indian Express, Prashant said that his wife is not COVID-positive but due to some medical issue, doctors wanted to procure blood for her. He said, I reached out to blood banks, but they said it was not available. I called others but no one agreed."

He added that while he was on the lookout for a blood donor, his WhatsApp status where he had put up the request received a reply. Ravali saw the request and said that she felt it was her duty to help Prashant's wife.

Her criteria matched with the required blood requisite and she went to Mulugu where Vajeera was admitted.

Also read: Good Samaritans: Couple In Coimbatore Pledges Jewellery, Donates 100 Fans To COVID Ward

CIDRAP

Ravali revealed that her parents were sceptical about her travelling during a time like this for two long hours. However, she was dedicated to her cause of helping the couple. She said, "I convinced my parents and took a public bus to reach Mulugu."

This was the first time Ravali had donated blood.

Also read: Kerala Man Who Had Rs 2,00,850 In His Bank Account Donates Rs 2 Lakh To Buy COVID-19 Vaccines

Unsplash

Kindness goes a long way.

All images for representational purposes only.
Mohammed Aisha, a Syrian sailor working on a Bahraini cargo ship stranded off the Egyptian coast, was forced to spend four years as a castaway after a court made him the ships legal guardian.

The sailors troubles began in July 2017, when the ship he was working on, the MV Aman, was detained at the Egyptian port of Adabiya, because its safety equipment and classification certificates had expired. Usually, this sort of issues are easily resolvable, but the ships owners in Bahrain were experiencing financial difficulties, and its Lebanese contractors. As the ships Egyptian captain had gone ashore after the MV Aman was technically abandoned at sea, Mohammed, the ships chief officer, was named its legal guardian by a local court. When Aisha signed the document, he had no idea he would be sentencing himself to four years of self-isolation on the ship

Photo: video screengrab

Mohammed recently told the BBC that he had no idea what being the legal guardian of the MV Aman meant, and only found out four months later, as the other crew members gradually left the vessel. He was legally required to stay with the cargo ship, and by the summer of 2019, he was all alone on it, with no power, no sanitation, and no information on when his ordeal would end.

He watched as ships sailed past, in and out of the nearby Suez Canal, waiting for the day that he would be allowed to go home again. In August of 2018, he got word that his mom had died, and that only made things worse. That was the low-point of his ordeal, as he admits to contemplating the thought of taking his own life.

In March of 2020, the ship that had become Mohammeds prison was blown off its anchorage by a powerful storm, causing to drift for several miles, before running aground just a few hundred meters from the Egyptian shoreline. The stranded sailor considers this divine intervention, as this allowed him to swim to shore to get food, and charge his cell phone.

A few days ago, after spending almost four years stranded at sea, Mohammed Aisha finally boarded a plane to his home in Syria to see his family and friends again. He described the feeling of leaving the ship as being freed from prison.

Photo: Thomas_G/Pixabay

Contacted by the BBC, Aishas employers, Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, said that they had tried to help the sailor over the years, but their hands were tied, and even blamed him for signing the court order that made him legal guardian, which he shouldnt have done.

I cant force a judge to remove the legal guardianship, a company representative said. And I cant find a single person on this planet  and Ive tried  to replace him.

On the other hand, the International Transport Workers Federation, which took up Mohammeds case in December of 2020, claims that his ordeal could have been avoided had the owners of the ship and its contractors had respected their responsibilities and obligations.
Bidens use of the term 'genocide' jeopardizes regional peace while confining Armenias future to events that occurred over a century ago, Dr. Javid Valiyev, the head of the AIR department that focuses on Azerbaijani foreign policy, geopolitics in South Caucasus, internal and external policy of Turkey, Azerbaijan-Turkey relations, writes in the article for Anadolu Agency.

The use of the term genocide by US President Joe Biden to describe the events of 1915 has sparked a slew of legal and political debates. Legal experts believe that this is a political statement and has nothing to do with international law, while political experts believe the statement is not even in favor of the regional politics of the US, much less Turkey-US relations and the situation of Turkish citizens of Armenian descent. On the contrary, the declaration risks seriously damaging the post-conflict peacebuilding process in the South Caucasus.

According to the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, international courts, not political leaders or parliaments, have the authority to determine whether or not the term genocide can be applied to a situation. In this regard, there is as yet no court decision labeling the 1915 events as a genocide. In this case, however, the courts have reached the exact opposite conclusion. According to a 2013 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), for example, the events of 1915 are a matter for courts of law to authoritatively speak on, not politicians.

Although there are disagreements about its legal implications, this statement will undoubtedly have political repercussions. This declaration will almost certainly have negative consequences, especially in terms of cooperation opportunities in the South Caucasus region following the Second Karabakh War. Bidens declaration has been particularly described as a show of support for Armenian revanchists, who suffered a heavy defeat in the Second Karabakh War, and as a damaging step toward regional cooperation. President Biden reportedly told President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the phone the day before the announcement that this had been his position for the past twenty years and that he must keep his word. This, however, appears to be a simplistic explanation that does not ring true. For example, before 2008 US presidential elections, Barack Obama had also promised to the Armenian diaspora and lobby organizations that he would define the events of 1915 as "genocide." But he never uttered that word during his time in the office in order to avoid damaging US-Turkey relations.

Bidens statement came at a time when Azerbaijan and Turkey were making statements about post-war cooperation in the region, causing deep disappointment in the region. Azerbaijani Presidential aide Hikmet Hajiyev called President Bidens declaration a historical mistake. During a recent telephone conversation with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev expressed strong support for his countrys strategic ally by stating that Turkey had been playing a critical and positive role in the region in the post-conflict period and that the US presidents statement was met with concern by both Azerbaijans leadership and public.

Following the Second Karabakh War, Azerbaijan made three concrete offers in the region: the opening of railway communication lines between Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, and Turkey, the emergence of a six-party cooperation format in the region, and the integration of Armenians living in Karabakh into Azerbaijan. The goal, according to President Ilham Aliyev, was to reduce regional tensions and prevent future wars.

Recently, there has been some support in Armenia, albeit at a low level, in response to Azerbaijans and Turkeys proposals for regional cooperation. Some Armenian politicians, including Pashinyan, recognize that without regional cooperation, Armenia's future is in danger. Pashinyans statement that Armenia should review its relations with its neighbors is remarkable. Armenian President Armen Sarkissian also acknowledged this reality during a visit to Georgia, stating that Armenia should improve relations with Georgia and Azerbaijan.

The resolution of the Karabakh issue has also created new opportunities for Turkey and Armenia to establish diplomatic relations and open the border between them. Statements by both countries authorities indicate that they are willing to go in that direction. One of the main issues between the parties in this case is one of trust. Mutual trust must be established in addition to diplomatic relations between the two sides in order to achieve normalization of relations between the peoples of both sides. Bidens statement, on the other hand, undermines trust between the two peoples and jeopardizes the normalization of relations. The tension caused by the use of the issue in parliamentary agendas for decades has not served the rapprochement of the two nations; on the contrary, it provokes hostile feelings and delays peace, said Sahak Mashalian, head of Turkeys Armenian Patriarchate.

As a result of Bidens statement, theres a possibility that the demand for the genocide to be recognized will resurface on the bilateral agenda. Turkey has a clear proposal in this regard: establish a joint commission to investigate the events of 1915. Armenia, however, rejects this proposal and opposes an objective examination of the events. Therefore, Bidens statement undermines the possibility reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.

Furthermore, there are also revanchist and radical nationalist opposition groups competing against Pashinyan ahead of the June snap parliamentary elections announced after Pashinyans resignation. Although these groups have been trying for a long time to gain support in Armenia, they have remained weak against Pashinyan. Because of Bidens statement, however, these radical groups in Armenia now have the chance to become more active and increase the number of their supporters. Therefore, Bidens statement negatively affects regional cooperation opportunities as well as Armenias pre-election process, playing into the hands of radical nationalist groups.

Biden's statement does not appear to be in the best interests of Turkish Armenians, either. President Recep Tayyip Erdogans condolence messages to Turkish Armenians have served to build a climate of trust in Turkey for the past 18 years. Therefore, Armenians living in Turkey are expressing their discomfort with Bidens statement. They believe that third parties are exploiting the Armenian issue for political gain. The US and the EU are involved in the issue with political motives, Bedros Sirinoglu, the head of the Armenian Foundations Union in Istanbul, said last Friday, criticizing political authorities for instrumentalizing the 1915 incidents, which happened between the Turkish and Armenian nations. He stated that the prerequisite for empathy with the Armenian people is to not play with the dignity of the Turkish people or adopting a hostile attitude towards Turkey.

Bidens statement pleased neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan, nor all Armenians, but rather some radical nationalist elements in the diaspora and in Armenia. This declaration jeopardizes regional peace while confining Armenias future to events that occurred over a century ago. Instead of making such provocative statements, the Biden administration should seek ways to support the regions post-conflict peacebuilding and cooperation process. This would help to increase the chances of a lasting peace between Turkey and Armenia, as well as between Azerbaijan and Armenia peace, by following through on the November 10 declaration.
DUBLIN, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Data Center Market in Middle East - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Middle East data center market by investment is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7% during the period 2020-2026.

Arista Network, AWS, Atos, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, and Dell Technologies are among the major IT vendors expanding their presence in the Middle East region.



The data center market has observed a steady growth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in heightened access to internet-related services aided by nationwide lockdowns and restrictions. IoT-enabled devices witnessed high acceptance for monitoring and surveillance purposes, especially in the healthcare sector, during the pandemic.

Government agencies have also contributed to the growth of cloud-based services in the Middle East. In Kuwait, the Ministry of Health (MoH), the Central Agency for Information Technology (CAIT), collaborated with Zain to launch an application - Shlonik to monitor citizens that have returned to the country.

The growing adoption of cloud, IoT, big data in the wake of the COVID-19 has increased colocation investments in the region. Cloud, social media, and video conferencing service providers have contributed majorly to data generation. Many enterprises operating in the cloud are migrating to colocation data centers to operate hybrid infrastructure services.



Middle East Data Center Market Segmentation



The Middle East data center market research report includes a detailed segmentation by IT infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, mechanical infrastructure, cooling technique, cooling systems, general construction, tier standards, geography. The Middle East IT infrastructure market expects to grow at a CAGR of over 6% during 2020-2026.

The server market is shifting slowly from rack-based to blade servers to support a high-density operating environment. This is because of the increased usage of IoT, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning by enterprises across the Middle Eastern market. Enterprises prefer servers that can reduce space in the data center environment without affecting performance.



The UPS market in the Middle East anticipates to cross USD 89 million during the forecast period. There has a steady rise in the deployment of edge computing; also, colocation operators are investing in the region, which increases the demand for high-capacities UPS in the region. The use of 750-1,500 kVA systems has witnessed high adoption along with less than 500 kVA UPS systems. The adoption of lithium-ion batteries is also likely to increase during the forecast period as the price of these batteries is expected to decline during the forecast period.



Cooling systems, including water-cooled chillers, CRAH, and cooling towers, are installed with N+20 redundancy in the Middle East region. Most facilities in the region design to cool servers via water-based cooling techniques. The growing construction of data centers in the UAE is a key factor in developing multiple chillers, cooling towers, and CRAH units. In Saudi Arabia, data centers' construction will increase the adoption of multiple chillers, cooling towers, and CRAH units.

Newly constructed data center facilities will use advanced air-based cooling techniques because of the high temperature. Data centers in Turkey adopt CRAC & CRAH units and chiller units. In terms of redundancy, most operators use N+1 and N+2 cooling redundancy. Besides, operators are likely to deploy dual water feed for efficient and uninterruptable operations.



Brownfield development is more cost-effective than greenfield development in the Middle East. In the Middle Eastern region, data center commissioning service providers follow standard operating procedures, depending on the depth of commissioning required in the facility. The Middle East data center market is mostly dominated by small data centers with less than 15 MW power centers. The building & engineering design market is expected to reach over USD 32 million in 2026, growing at a CAGR of approx-7%.

The increasing demand for reliable, efficient, and flexible building infrastructure among service operators is expected to influence its growth. The adoption of physical security apparatus is increasing to protect the data and information. BFSI, telecommunication, and healthcare are the most vulnerable sectors for intrusions and breaches. Sensors and video cameras are installed for surveillance in data centers in the region.

The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the data center is driving the DCIM solutions market. DCIM solutions improve efficiency, monitor power consumption, and predict system failures. They are becoming a major part of data center operations as they monitor critical elements such as power, cooling, and IT infrastructure.



Most data centers in the UAE are Tier III certified or built according to Tier III standards. Several data centers in Saudi Arabia are built according to Tier III or Tier IV standards and have a minimum redundancy of N+1 in power and cooling infrastructure. Tier III data centers are equipped with UPS systems redundancy of N+1.

The majority of modern data centers in Turkey are developed according to Tier III standards, with a minimum of N+1 redundancy in power infrastructure. A few data centers operate 2N power infrastructure or have additional capacity to commission 2N infrastructure solutions based on the customer's demand. Most developments in Turkey are greenfield projects, whereas modular data centers are confined to enterprise on-premises deployments.

Key Topics Covered:



1 Research Methodology



2 Research Objectives



3 Research Process



4 Scope & Coverage

4.1 Market Definition

4.2 Base Year

4.3 Scope of The Study

4.4 Market Segments



5 Report Assumptions & Caveats

5.1 Key Caveats

5.2 Currency Conversion

5.3 Market Derivation



6 Market at a Glance



7 Introduction

7.1 Internet & Data Growth

7.2 Data Center Site Selection Criteria



8 Market Opportunities & Trends

8.1 5G To Grow Edge Data Center Investments

8.2 Growing Procurement Of Renewable Energy

8.3 Submarine Cable Deployment & Impact On Data Center Investment

8.4 Smart City Initiatives Fuel Data Center Deployments



9 Market Growth Enablers

9.1 Impact Of COVID-19 On Data Center Market

9.2 Rise In Data Center Investments

9.3 Big Data, IoT & Cloud Drive Data Center Investment

9.4 Migration From On-Premises Infrastructure To Colocation & Managed Services

9.5 Modular Data Center Development



10 Market Restraints

10.1 Location Constraints For Data Center Construction

10.2 Lack Of Skilled Workforce

10.3 Security Breaches Hinder Data Center Investments



11 Market Landscape

11.1 Market Overview

11.2 Market Size & Forecast

11.3 Area

11.4 Power Capacity

11.5 Five Forces Analysis



12 Infrastructure

12.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

12.2 IT Infrastructure

12.3 Electrical Infrastructure

12.4 Mechanical Infrastructure

12.5 General Construction



13 IT Infrastructure

13.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

13.2 Server Infrastructure

13.3 Storage Infrastructure

13.4 Network Infrastructure



14 Electrical Infrastructure

14.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

14.2 UPS Systems

14.3 Generators

14.4 Transfer Switches & Switchgear

14.5 Power Distribution Units

14.6 Other Electrical Infrastructure



15 Mechanical Infrastructure

15.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

15.2 Cooling Systems

15.3 Racks

15.4 Other Mechanical Infrastructure



16 Cooling Systems

16.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

16.2 CRAC & CRAH Units

16.3 Chiller Units

16.4 Cooling Towers, Condensers & Dry Coolers

16.5 Other Cooling Units



17 Cooling Technique

17.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

17.2 Air-Based Cooling Techniques

17.3 Liquid-Based Cooling Techniques



18 General Construction

18.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

18.2 Core & Shell Development

18.3 Installation & Commissioning Services

18.4 Building & Engineering Design

18.5 Physical Security

18.6 DCIM/BMS Solutions



19 Tier Standards

19.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

19.2 TIER I & II

19.3 TIER III

19.4 TIER IV



20 Geography

20.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

20.2 Area Snapshot & Growth Engine

20.3 Power Capacity Snapshot & Growth Engine

20.4 United Arab Emirates

20.5 Saudi Arabia

20.6 Turkey

20.7 Jordan

20.8 Other Middle Eastern Countries



21 Competitive Landscape

21.1 IT Infrastructure

21.2 Construction Contractors

21.3 Data Center Investors

Key Data Center Critical (IT) Infrastructure Providers

Arista Networks

Atos

Broadcom

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Huawei Technologies

IBM

Lenovo

NetApp

Key Data Center Contractors

Atkins

Deerns

ENMAR ENGINEERING

Edarat Group

ISG

RED Engineering

Harinsa Qatar (HQ)

Turner & Townsend

McLaren Construction Group

LAING O'ROURKE

ICS Nett

Linesight

Qatar Site and Power (QSP)

Key Data Center Investors

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Akbank

Batelco

Etisalat Group

Equinix

Gulf Data Hub

Turkcell

Telecom Italia Sparkle

Khazna

Zain

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/no2fg4

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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More tributes have been paid to the late John 'Jack' Duggan, a Laois teacher whose tragic death has stunned the Portlaoise community this week.

The Patrician Secondary School in Newbridge also added its voice to the sympathies expressed to his family. Having taught at the Kildare school in the eighties and early nineties, he was very highly regarded.

Mr Duggan from Clonboyne Portlaoise died on Tuesday April 27. He was Deputy Principal and an Irish teacher in St Mary's CBS in Portlaoise, and a stalward member of Portlaoise GAA club.

Retired teacher Michael Reynolds is secretary of the Leinster Council.

"He was the salt of the earth, a great worker and a good teacher. He contributed to the GAA both in the Patrician College in Newbridge where he started his teaching career, and in Portlaoise GAA club and St Mary's CBS.

"He gave an unknown amount of time to training young lads and going to matches. He gave a lifetime of support, enjoying every sport to the full," Mr Reynolds said.

A near neighbour to John Duggan, he also noted his dedication as a farmer breeding pedigree cattle.

"On behalf of the Leinster Council, I extend sympathy to his wife and all the Duggan family," he said.

Portlaoise GAA club has also shared their shock and sadness.

"It is with shock and deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of a great clubman, John Jack Duggan. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to all of his family at this sad time. Our thoughts and prayers are also with his friends, colleagues and students. May they all find comfort in the tough days ahead. Ar dheis De go raibh a hanam dilis."

John Duggan is mourned by his wife Anna and his parents Dan and Margaret, brothers Liam and Cyril, sisters Ann and Noeleen, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews and all of his extended family, neighbours and a large circle of friends. Funeral will be private in line with restrictions. Details to follow.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 02:19:11|Editor: huaxia

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Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (L) meets with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 28, 2021. (Photo by Li Xiaowei/Xinhua)

COLOMBO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka and China vowed here Wednesday to enhance pragmatic cooperation in all sectors between the two countries including the military.

The pledge came after Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe.

During the meeting, the Sri Lankan president, who is also the defense minister, thanked China for providing long-term and precious support to Sri Lanka and hoped to learn the governing experience from the Communist Party of China on poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, among others.

Noting that Sri Lanka has prioritized developing the relations with China and firmly supported China's positions on issues concerning its core interests, the president said his country has been pursuing an independent foreign policy and will never bends to pressure from major powers outside the region as well as never forge an alliance with any country.

Closely following the pragmatic cooperation in the military field between the two countries, the president hoped that the two militaries will carry out closer exchanges so as to further lift the level of pragmatic cooptation.

In his meeting with Wei, the Sri Lankan prime minister said Wei and his delegation visited Sri Lanka at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is still not contained, demonstrating that China attaches great importance to developing the ties with Sri Lanka.

Hailing China for its achievements made in the pandemic prevention and control, economic development and poverty alleviation, the prime minister thanked China for providing unselfish help to his country.

Sri Lanka will always be a sincere friend to China and will firmly support China's position on safeguarding its own core interests, the prime minister said.

Sri Lanka stands ready to strengthen exchanges and pragmatic cooperation with China in various fields including the military, so as to achieve further growth of the bilateral ties, he added.

For his part, Wei said that China and Sri Lanka enjoy a long history of friendship with deep bilateral relations.

The two countries are jointly working for the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road, Wei said, pointing out that they share a bright prospect of development.

The Chinese side appreciates Sri Lanka's position on issues relating to China's Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and will as always support Sri Lanka's stance over issues relating to human rights and national reconciliation, Wei said.

Noting the long-lasting friendship between the two militaries, Wei called on the two sides to further deepen cooperation and promote relations between the two militaries.

Peaceful development and win-win cooperation is the global trend and the right way forward, Wei said, adding that certain major countries are keen to form cliques and factions and seek regional hegemony, which goes against people's shared aspiration and severely harms the interests of the regional countries.

China appreciates Sri Lanka's independent and non-aligned policy and will make joint efforts with Sri Lanka to strengthen coordination and safeguard regional peace and tranquility.

On Wednesday, Wei also held talks with Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne and jointly launched a website of the Chinese National Defence University Alumni Association of Sri Lanka. Enditem
PHOENIX, Ore.  It's been more than six months since the Almeda, South Obenchain, and Slater fires swept through Jackson, Josephine, and Siskiyou counties  scorching thousands of acres and leaving thousands of people without their homes or businesses.

Right now, state management crews are working on the process of clearing out the ash and debris and get these areas one step closer to completing the rebuilding process.

One of areas that were destroyed by the Almeda Fire was the Mountain View Estates. Right now, the state management crews are close to being done with their part of the process.

So really this is a big success story. This is a locally owned park here in Oregon, and we're incredibly excited to work with the property owner, hand them the, the letter that they're ready to rebuild and, and let them take it from there, said Kevin Alvarado, PIO for the Debris Management Task Force for the South Region.

Alvarado says the Mountain View Estates was one of the two largest mobile home parks that the state management crews are doing work on. The task force is combined of groups from the Oregon Departments of Transportation, Environmental Quality and Emergency Management.

Our work is done when the property is cleaned, at that point we hand over the letter to the property owner and its up to them in terms of deciding what they want to do in terms of reconstruction and the types of facilities they are going to bring in, Alvarado added.

Alvarado still says the timetable for completion on these sites for the entire state are still anywhere from 6 to 18 months. He adds they currently have about 1,150 home sites that have been cleared in the Almeda corridor in the Rogue Valley.

Although we understand that when it comes to getting folks back into their homes there is no such thing as fast enough, we are excited to the pace that the crews have been able to maintain," Alvarado said.
RLI recognized Dean Saunders, ALC, with SVN Saunders Ralston Dantzler in Florida, with the program's most coveted and prestigious award, the APEX 2020 Top National Producer.

RLI is also proud to recognize the accomplishments of the APEX 2020 National Broker of The Year recipients in each of the following eight distinct land categories:

Ag Land Sales  Crops: Skye Root , ALC, Root Agricultural Advisory, Idaho

 Crops: , ALC, Root Agricultural Advisory, Ag Land Sales  Ranches: Todd Renfrew , ALC, California Outdoor Properties, Inc., California

 Ranches: , ALC, California Outdoor Properties, Inc., Recreational Land Sales: Todd Crosby , ALC, Crosby Land Company, Inc., South Carolina

, ALC, Crosby Land Company, Inc., Timberland Sales: Clint Flowers , ALC, National Land Realty, Alabama

, ALC, National Land Realty, Commercial Land Sales: Matt Davis , ALC, Cushman & Wakefield, California

, ALC, Cushman & Wakefield, Residential Land Sales: Ryan Sampson , ALC, Eshenbaugh Land Company, Florida

, ALC, Eshenbaugh Land Company, Auction Land Sales: Steve Bruere , Peoples Company of Indianola, Iowa

, Peoples Company of Agribusiness: Randall Upchurch , Southeastern Land Group LLC, Alabama

Agribusiness is the newest category in the APEX Awards, added in 2021 to recognize agents for the sale of land along with any value-added agricultural operations.

RLI also awarded Geoff Hurdle, ALC, of Hurdle Land & Realty in Tennessee with the APEX 2020 Wrangler Award for largest number of transaction sides closed in 2020.

All applicants must be members of RLI and have at least four million dollars of qualifying dollar volume in closed land sales in 2020. Each applicant was also recognized as part of the RLI APEX 2020 Producers Club with the twenty highest producing applicants awarded as an APEX 2020 Top Twenty National Producer.

For the first time in the history of the awards program, RLI recognized a female, Nancy Surak, ALC, of Land Advisors Organization in Tampa, FL, in the APEX Top Twenty National Producers.

"The APEX 2020 Award Winners are the cream of the crop when it comes to conducting land transactions. RLI is proud to be partnered with The Land Report for the fourth year now to give these land agents the national industry recognition as a top-producer that they deserve," said RLI's CEO Aubrie Kobernus, MBA, RCE, about the program.

"In just four years, the RLI APEX Awards Program has established itself as the gold standard for real estate professionals who specialize in land," says Eric O'Keefe, editor of The Land Report.

The APEX Awards Program celebrated its fourth year by tripling in size since its inception, with 140 applicants totaling a combined $3.5 billion in qualifying transaction volume. All land professionals recognized as part of the RLI APEX Awards Program are active members of RLI. The 2020 APEX Top 20 Award winners were ranked within the top 20 applicants by qualifying production volume, starting at around $49M in production volume. For more information on the award winners, make sure to get a copy of The Land Report, one of the industry's leading magazines for landowners and land professionals, which will be publicizing the top winners in their upcoming spring 2021 issue. All land real estate professionals are invited to join RLI and apply to the prestigious APEX Awards Program next year. Learn more at rliland.com.

About the Realtors Land Institute

The Realtors Land Institute, "The Voice of Land," continually strives to maintain its status as the acknowledged leader for all matters pertaining to the land real estate profession. RLI endeavors to remain the essential membership organization for the extraordinary real estate professionals who broker, lease, sell, develop, and manage our most precious resource: the land. The Realtors Land Institute provides the expertise, camaraderie, and valuable resources that are the foundation for all land real estate professionals to become the best in the business. For more information, visit rliland.com or call 800.441.5263. It's the best time to join the best!

About The Land Report

The Land Report magazine provides news, information, and insight into America's land for existing and potential landowners. The Land Report profiles passionate landowners, identifies investment opportunities, explains ways to improve and conserve land, provides legislation updates, and highlights outdoor gear and equipment. For more information visit LandReport.com.

For additional information contact:

Dave Adams, Marketing Manager

800-441-5263 | [email protected]

SOURCE The Land Report

Related Links

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YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan particularly emphasized the role of Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin in stopping the war in Nagorno Karabakh during the meeting with Russian PM Mikhail Mishustin. ARMENPRESS reports Pashinyan assessed the activities of the Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno Karabakh as effective.

I want to also point out the activities of the trilateral working group, co-chaired by the Deputy PMs of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan. We have a constructive approach to this issue. I have to note that we greatly appreciate the works of the trilateral working group, since the unblocking of the regional communications can alter the economic situation in our region and strengthen the economic relations and integration between Armenia and Russia. In this context, I want to mention Russian Deputy PM Alexei Overchuks important and constructive role. We really greatly appreciate his work and hope it will lead to concrete results. Its clear for everyone that its important not only for our region, but our region in a broader sense, since we are talking about the restoration of links between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Russian Federation. This can really become a powerful economic factor for the development of the Eurasian Economic Union. I wish to once again confirm that we have a constructive stance and hope that the ongoing works will lead to concrete results that will bring stability, peace and welfare to our region, Nikol Pashinyan said.
New Delhi: The Exit Poll results of elections in four states and one union territory have been declared.

According to Zee News Maha Exit Poll, BJP is set to win in Assam and Puducherry. There is a close battle in Bengal but BJP seems to have the edge. In Tamil Nadu, DMK is likely to get a win over the ruling party AIADMK and in Kerala LDF is expected to form government again.

Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary on Thursday (April 29) discussed the exit polls results of five assemblies with a special focus on West Bengal where the chances of lotus blooming look decent.

In Assam, out of the total 126 seats, BJP is expected to win 73 (64 seats are needed to form the government), while Congress and its allies are likely to 51 seats.

According to the Maha Exit Poll, out of a total of 234 seats in Tamil Nadu, where 118 seats are needed to form the government, pollsters predict that DMK-Congress alliance can form the government as it is expected to bag 173 seats. AIADMK and BJP are estimated to get only 57 seats.

In Kerala, the ruling party LDF is expected to win 91 out of the 140 seats, paving its way to power. UDF is projected to get 47 seats only.

In Puducherry, with about 19 seats, BJP could emerge as the victor.

Battle of Bengal

However, all eyes are on the results of West Bengal polls, where there is a tough contest between BJP and Mamata Banerjees TMC. Banerjee may not have expected that BJP would reach so close, but the party has done it.

According to Maha EXIT POLL, BJP is expected to win 144 seats, while TMC could win 132 seats. Congress and Left alliance are likely to get only 16 seats.

In West Bengal, it has been observed that since the 2006 assembly elections, the Exit Polls have never been wrong.

In 2006, Mamata Banerjee was looking strong against then Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee of the Left. But as the Exit Poll predicted, the Left parties won comfortably.

Similarly, in the Exit Poll of the 2011 assembly elections, it was predicted that 34 years of left governance would end in Bengal and TMC government would come to power. When the results came out, the Exit Polls were proved correct. The same happened in the 2016 assembly elections.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as well, most of the Exit Polls were saying that there will be a close fight between BJP and TMC. And that is what happened. Whether this trend will continue this time or not, will be clear on May 2.

In the 2016 assembly elections, TMC had a voter share of 45.6 percent and it won 211 of the 294 seats. CPM came second with 20.1 percent vote share, Congress third and BJP was at the fourth position.

BJP's vote share at that time was 10.3 percent and won only three seats out of 294. It means the party was not even close to TMC five years ago. But today it is claiming it stake to form the government in the state.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, TMC won 22 seats out of 42 seats, while BJP won 18. The vote share of TMC was around 43 percent, while that of BJP was 40 percent  a difference of just 3 per cent.

From a difference of 35 percent in 2016 assembly elections to 3 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP filled an enormous gap in just three years.

Will the BJP be able to finally take lead over TMC in Bengal? This will be answered on May 2.

Live TV
More than 318,700 people across the country have received both shots of the COVID-19 vaccination by Wednesday morning, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH).

An inspector from the Ministry of Health checks COVID-19 prevention and control work at the An Phuoc Commune Medical Station in Mang Thit District, the southern province of Vinh Long.  VNA/VNS Photo Le Thuy Hang

Provinces and cities have made efforts to speed up the vaccination process but still ensure safety.

About 30 per cent of people had reactions after the vaccination, including fever, fatigue and injection site pain. The rate is lower than European reports and those of the manufacturers. These are common symptoms and also common reactions of the body to all vaccines in general, according to the MoH.

In particular, the MoH said, because Vietnam's immunisation programme was very methodical with the goal of ensuring safety of people who get vaccinated, the procedures for vaccination against COVID-19 were different from other countries. There is screening, pre-vaccination counselling, safe vaccination sessions, and the vaccination person is monitored at the injection site for at least 30 minutes, then continues with home health monitoring for at least a day, before receiving follow up checks for up to three weeks after injection.

Hospitals are always ready to prevent severe reactions after vaccination to ensure maximum safety for people being vaccinated.

Professor Dang Duc Anh, director of the Central Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, said it was expected that by May 15, Vietnam would complete the second round of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccinations.

In June, the World Health Organisation would continue to provide COVID-19 vaccines to Vietnam and would continue to distribute them nationwide, he said.

The MoH issued a request to provincial and municipal departments of health to continue to strengthen inspection and handling of violations related to COVID-19 pandemic prevention.

In Vietnam, although no cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the community for a while, the risk of disease transmission remains very high.

The MoHs inspector will coordinate with relevant departments to organise unscheduled inspections at a number of establishments producing, importing and trading in goods for pandemic prevention nationwide.

The MoH on Wednesday morning organised an online conference with 63 provinces and cities nationwide.

It also marked the launch of the COVID-19 Vaccination Safety Steering Committee. During the online conference, the MoH gave training on how to handle adverse incidents following COVID-19 vaccination.

The conference aimed to improve the capacity of COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment for medical examination and treatment facilities across the country.

VNS
Two arrivals from Papua New Guinea were allowed to mingle with travel bubble passengers at Brisbane Airport on Thursday in a breach that has been blamed on human error.

Brisbane Airport Corporation released a statement apologising for the incident at Brisbane Airports International Terminal.

The breach occurred inside Brisbane International Airport on Thursday. Credit:Attila Csaszar

The breach is due to human error, and BAC is currently working with all relevant authorities including Queensland Health to investigate the circumstances of the breach, it said.

The statement said the passengers who arrived about 9.30am on a flight from Port Moresby went through screening to transit as normal.
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The Toronto-based Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival opens Thursday with the world premiere of A.rtificial I.mmortality, which explores advancements in AI, robotics, and biotech through close encounters with neuroscientists, AI developers, transhumanists, robot-creators, and visionaries who are pointing the way toward post-biological life.

Director Ann Shin spoke to Variety about her new filmone of 13 features in the festivals Canadian Spectrum juried competitionand chatted up the next projects of Fathom Film Group, the female-led production company she founded in Toronto in 2006, and which is now represented by APA in the U.S.

A.rtificial I.mmortality is produced by Fathom Films Erica Leendertse and Hannah Donegan, with Shin and Gerry Flahive as executive producers, and in association with Canadian streamer Crave, a division of Bell Media Inc., with funding from the Canada Media Fund and Rogers Cable Network Fund.

Earlier this week Variety learned that the producers have been talking with distributors, and that a deal for world rights excluding North America would likely close in the early days of the festival.

Making a documentary about a fast-moving technology is like trying to catch a shooting arrow in the air, said Shin, whose previous Hot Docs films include My Enemy, My Brother (2017) and The Defector: Escape from North Korea (2013).

Shin began her investigation into the 21st-century-style pursuit of immortality a few years ago, when her fathers faltering memory prompted her to wonder if the essence of the human mind can be replicated to create a digital version of ourselves.

The merging of humans and machines isnt coming, its here, Shin says. Since most groundbreaking AI work is done on servers, which doesnt make for great visuals, Shin spends quality time with robots, including Erica (a conversational android created in Japan) and Bina48 (a chatty cybernetic companion, the mind of which is modeled after the African-American spouse of its multi-millionaire creator). Shin also visits scientists who are growing brain organoids that can be wired up to control the movements of simple robots.

In the film, Shin speaks with both the real and recently launched digital version of Deepak Chopra, both of whom are taking part in tonights extended Q&A, one of four free live streamed discussions presented at Hot Docs this year.

AI is so advanced that its not only out-thinking humans, it can mimic our emotions and our intuition. When I was interacting with Digital Deepak I had this irrational feeling of guilt when we were going to shut it off.

Although its been around for a while, AI is still a bit like a new car youre distracted by the dashboard and gadgets, but you really need to see the road to know where youre headed. So Im offering a view of the horizon.

As for Fathom, Shin says that Chloe Sosa-Simss Hunting in Packs is now in post production and will be gunning for a festival launch later this year. The feature doc follows three female politicians from different countries who represent different ends of the political spectrumJess Phillips (Labour, U.K.), Pramila Jayapal (Democrat, U.S.), and Michelle Rempel (Conservative, Canada).

The company also has two documentary feature projects in development: Dark Flower is a character-driven verite film exploring how social equity is the main issue behind cannabis legalization; and The Painting, directed by Laura Friedman, which traces a family from the Holocaust to the present through the story of a mysterious painting.

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SACRAMENTO  Frustration over schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic helped fuel the effort to put a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom on the ballot. But a new poll suggests the issue might not be such a liability for him after all.

The survey found 59% of likely voters approve of the way Newsom is handling reopening schools for in-person learning, while 40% disapprove, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

Mark Baldassare, the institutes president and CEO, said that although anger about school closures helped Newsoms critics gather recall signatures, it appears most voters credit the governor with pushing schools to reopen for in-person learning this spring.

In addition, Baldassare said, many voters arent holding the delay against him or their individual school districts because of the severity of the pandemic.

It just speaks to the fact these are extraordinary times and that people have factored this in, Baldassare said. I think lots of people are feeling (Newsom and school districts are) doing the best they can under the circumstances.

That said, the slow pace of school reopenings does appear to have harmed Newsom. The survey found 57% of adults approve of how Newsom is handling the K-12 education system overall, compared with 73% last April, in the early days of the pandemic.

In March, Newsom and state legislators reached a deal to provide $2 billion in financial incentives for districts to resume at least some in-person instruction by March 31, after an impasse that lasted months.

Recall organizers pointed to pandemic school closures to help give momentum to their campaign. They collected more than enough signatures to put a recall on the ballot, though the exact date of the election wont be set for several months.

Baldassare said while some voters are deeply unhappy with Newsom over the schools issue, the number falls short of the majority that would be needed to remove him at the ballot box. A separate poll by the institute last month found 56% of likely voters surveyed opposed the recall.

Support for Newsoms handling of school reopenings largely reflects partisan divisions among likely voters  80% of Democrats and 56% of independents in the new survey approve of the governors performance on the issue, while just 21% of Republicans approve.

Regardless of whether they support Newsom, nearly all those surveyed agree that students have struggled trying to learn from home.

The survey found 67% of likely voters think children are falling behind academically by a lot during the pandemic, while 22% say they are falling behind by a little. Only 10% said children are not falling behind.

Baldassare said the poll also offers a warning to Newsom: Voters want the pace of school reopenings to continue. The survey found 64% of likely voters are somewhat or very concerned that schools will not be open in time for in-person instruction this fall.

If theyre disappointed around that, I think theyll be disappointed in their districts and the governor, Baldassare said.

The institute surveyed 1,104 likely voters in English, Spanish and several other languages April 1-14. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Dustin Gardiner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dustin.gardiner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dustingardiner
Nicola Sturgeon wants to stage another independence referendum by the end of 2023, but support for the idea has fallen - Andrew Milligan/ PA

Support for Scottish independence has fallen amid increasing nervousness that the country would find it harder to tackle a pandemic outside the UK and the prospect of a hard border with England, according to detailed research.

Polling and focus groups conducted by the former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft showed 49 per cent support for separation and 51 per cent opposition.

The survey of 2,019 adults  double the sample of a normal poll  found many people were worried whether "vaccination, furlough and business support programmes could have been sustained outside the UK".

Major doubts were also raised about the strength of a separate Scotland's economy, the likelihood of it being able to join the EU with a huge spending deficit, and the implications for the border with England.

Asked how Scotland would change after independence, more people said they felt taxes, energy bills, food prices and unemployment would increase rather than drop.

But the poll found the SNP still remains by far the most popular party in the country, with its supporters more likely to turn out in next week's Holyrood election than those of rival parties.

Nicola Sturgeon had easily the highest ratings of any political leader in the UK, with even a third of Tory supporters believing she had done a good job during the pandemic thanks to the clarity of her daily BBC TV briefings.

However, Alex Salmond and his new Alba Party had the worst approval ratings, with even seven out of 10 SNP supporters saying their view of him had deteriorated over the past year.

Four in 10 people thought his political comeback was motivated by the desire for a second independence referendum  nearly twice as many thought he wanted to relaunch his career and three-quarters that he wanted to undermine Ms Sturgeon.

Asked to compare the UK's political leaders to animals, focus groups cited a lion, meerkat or hyena for Ms Sturgeon and a warthog, snake or toad for Mr Salmond. Boris Johnson was compared to a mosquito, panda or baboon, while Sir Keir Starmer was likened to low-profile animals like a mole or a sloth.

Story continues

The poll was conducted between April 7 and 19, and eight online focus groups were staged between April 14 and 22.

Other surveys have shown Ms Sturgeon is on the cusp of winning a majority in next week's poll. She plans to use victory to force Mr Johnson to drop his opposition to another independence referendum, which she wants to stage by the end of 2023.

Lord Ashcroft's research was published after Ms Sturgeon repeatedly failed to explain how a separate Scotland in the EU could avoid a hard border with England.

In an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr last weekend, she floundered when asked why a separate Scotland would be "the only part of the EU" not to have a hard border with a neighbouring country that is not part of the bloc.

Independent research has disclosed Scotland's public spending deficit is expected to increase to up to 25 per cent this year, eight times the maximum required for EU membership, and Scots benefit from a Union dividend of more than 2,500.

Lord Ashcroft said: "While not necessarily ready to say they have yet changed their minds, we found some former 'Yes' voters more nervous about independence.

"Though they think Sturgeon has outperformed the Prime Minister, they know that vaccine procurement was a UK effort and doubt whether an independent Scotland could have sustained its own furlough scheme on anything like the scale seen over the past year."

Almost two-thirds of Scottish voters (64 per cent) believed Ms Sturgeon had handled the pandemic well, while more than half said Mr Johnson had responded poorly, despite his Government being responsible for the country's vaccine procurement.

Some felt she was prevented from taking further steps by the UK Government, especially on international travel and the border with England, despite both being under her control. However, others said her daily TV appearances had turned into an exercise in party politics or self-promotion. They also noted that her decision to lift some restrictions early coincided with the Holyrood election campaign.

The survey found 37 per cent of people thought separation would make it harder to tackle a pandemic compared to 29 per cent who said it would be easier. The remaining 27 per cent said it would make no difference.

For the constituency votes, the SNP was forecast to poll 49 per cent, the Scottish Conservatives 22 per cent, Scottish Labour 15 per cent and the Liberal Democrats eight per cent.

In the regional list vote, the SNP was on 42 per cent, the Conservatives 22 per cent, Labour 16 per cent, the Greens nine per cent and the Lib Dems seven per cent. The Alba Party registered only two per cent.
Shorter headed dogs, visually cooperative breeds, younger and playful dogs form eye contact faster. Credit: Eniko Kubinyi

Eye contact plays a fundamental role in human communication and relationships. However, humans also make eye contact with dog companions. According to new research by Hungarian ethologists, at least four independent traits affect dogs' ability to establish eye contact with humans. Short-headed, cooperative, young and playful dogs are the most likely to look into the human eye.

Dogs adapted uniquely well to live with humans, and communication plays a vital role. They are sensitive to the direction of the human's gaze, which helps them decide whether a message is directed to them. Forming eye contact with the owner raises oxytocin levels in both parties, which plays a role in developing social bonding. However, individual dogs are not equally prone to make eye contact; the anatomy of the eye, the original function of the breed, i.e., the task they were bred for, age and personality might also affect the tendency to form eye contact.

"One hundred and thirty family dogs were examined at the Department of Ethology, Eotvos Lorand University. We measured the length and width of their heads because this is related to their vision," said Zsofia Bognar, Ph.D. student, first author of the study, published in Scientific Reports. "The boxer, bulldog, pug, and snub-nosed dogs, in general, have a more pronounced area centralis in the retina, so they can better respond to stimuli in the central field, which may make it easier for them to form eye contact with humans."

Credit: Zsofia Bognar

In contrast, long-nosed dogs, such as greyhounds, see a wide panoramic image because the nerve cells that process the visual information distribute more evenly in their retina. Therefore, if they have to focus on the center of their visual field, they may be distracted by visual stimuli from the periphery more easily.

In the behavior test, the experimenter first initiated play with the dog. In another test, she measured how quickly and how many times the dog formed eye contact with her within five minutes. "The experimenter did not speak and remained motionless until the dog looked at her. Every time the dog looked at her, she rewarded the dog with a treat. Meanwhile, the owner sat on a chair, silent. We measured how much time elapsed after eating the treat until the next eye contact," said Dr. Dora Szabo, ethologist.

It turned out that the shorter the dog's nose, the faster it made eye contact with the experimenter. "It is likely that they see the human face more sharply because of their special retina, but it is also possible that their owners gaze at them more often as their facial features resemble a small child, a powerful cue for humans. Because of this, dogs with shorter noses may be more experienced in making eye contact," said Zsofia Bognar.

This research emphasises the fact that many factors affect the way dogs and humans communicate. It also sheds new light on our knowledge of short-nosed dogs. Many researchers, including Konrad Lorenz, suggested that these dogs were selected for their baby-like facial appearance. However, it is also plausible that people preferred individuals that were more attentive to them and looked at them for a longer duration, facilitating communication. Credit: Tamas Farago

The researchers also examined whether the original role of the breeds still influenced eye contact. Shepherd dogs, for example, are visually cooperative who follow the direction of the owner's hand (stick) during their work with the stock. In contrast, visually non-cooperative sled dogs running in front of the musher can only rely on vocal cues, while dachshunds also cannot see their owner in the underground life-and-death struggle for which they were bred. Long- and short-headed dogs evenly distributed across the different breed groups.

As expected, dogs bred for visually guided work made eye contact faster than those driven by voice or selected for independent work. Surprisingly, the mixed breeds performed similarly well, even though 70% were adopted from a shelter. Perhaps their willingness to make eye contact even helped them to get adopted in the first place.

The research was part of the European Research Council funded Senior Family Dog Project, aimed at aging research. The oldest dog participant was 15 years old.

Credit: Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE)

"We assumed that aging dogs would find it more difficult to control their attention and would be slower to switch from eating to looking at the face of the experimenter. That's what happened. Since we pre-screened our participants for potential visual and auditory impairments, the slower establishment of eye contact seems to be a natural consequence of aging," says Dr. Eniko Kubinyi, the leader of the project.

This research emphasizes the fact that many factors affect the way dogs and humans communicate. It also sheds new light on our knowledge of short-nosed dogs. Many researchers, including Konrad Lorenz, suggested that these dogs were selected for their baby-like facial appearance. However, it is also plausible that people preferred individuals that were more attentive to them and looked at them for a longer duration, facilitating communication.

More information: Zsofia Bognar et al. Shorter headed dogs, visually cooperative breeds, younger and playful dogs form eye contact faster with an unfamiliar human, Scientific Reports (2021). Journal information: Scientific Reports Zsofia Bognar et al. Shorter headed dogs, visually cooperative breeds, younger and playful dogs form eye contact faster with an unfamiliar human,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-88702-w

Provided by Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE)
Lugano, Switzerland,April 29, 2021 - Helsinn, a Swiss pharmaceutical group focused on building quality cancer care and rare disease products, is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Mary Lynne Hedley as a new member of its Board of Directors, effective April 28, 2021.



Dr. Hedley is an immunologist and cancer cell biologist, with a vast level of experience within the pharmaceutical industry, specifically within the field of oncology. Most recently, Dr Hedley was Director, President and Chief Operating Officer at TESARO, a biotechnology company she co-founded in 2010, focused on the development and global commercialization of oncology therapeutics. During her time at TESARO the team built up a pipeline of early and late stage drug candidates including the commercial product niraparib, a PARP inhibitor that changed the treatment paradigm for women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The company was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2019 for $5.1 billion.

Prior to founding TESARO, Dr. Hedley was Executive Vice President and CSO of the biotechnology company, Abraxis Bioscience, responsible for R&D, Operations, Medical Affairs and Business Development. Elsewhere she was Executive Vice President of Eisai Inc, with a focus on the global reorganization of its R&D program and building a global oncology strategy. She was also Executive Vice President, as well as CSO, responsible for R&D, at MGI PHARMA (MGI) until its acquisition by Eisai in 2008. In addition, she was Co-Founder, Director, President and CEO of ZYCOS prior to its acquisition by MGI in 2004. Dr. Hedley received her bachelor's degree in Microbiology from Purdue University and her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Immunology from UT Southwestern Medical Center, USA. Following this, Dr. Hedley carried out her postdoctoral training at Harvard University in the areas of Immunology and Gene Regulation.

Dr. Hedley currently sits on the board at Veeva and Centessa Pharmaceuticals and is a board member of the Youville Assisted Living Communities and WITH (Women Innovating Together in Healthcare).

Riccardo Braglia, Helsinn Group Vice Chairman and CEO, commented: "I am delighted to welcome Dr. Hedley to Helsinn's Board of Directors and look forward to benefitting from her many years of biopharmaceutical industry experience. Helsinn Group is a leading cancer care and rare disease product company andher scientific expertise, as well as her leadership and board level know-how, will be invaluableas we continue to progress and deliver our innovative pipeline of oncologyand rare disease products to patients."

Dr. Mary Lynne Hedley, newly appointed member of the Helsinn Board of Directors, commented: "Helsinn is a company that has proved its long-standingcommitment to providing patients with first-in-class cancer care, whether that be through supportive care or therapeutics. The team's dedication to improving patients' quality of life is something I share, and I am thrilled to be working with Riccardo and the whole Boardas we work towards this mission."

About the Helsinn Group

Helsinn is a privately-owned Swiss Pharma Company which, since 1976, has been improving the lives of patients, guided by core family values of respect, integrity and quality. The Group has an extensive portfolio of marketed innovative cancer and rare disease therapies, a robust drug development pipeline and ambitions to further accelerate its growth through in-licensing and acquisitions to address unmet medical needs. Helsinn operates a unique integrated licensing business model, achieving success with long-standing partners in 190 countries, who share its values. The Group's pharmaceutical business (Helsinn Healthcare) is headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland with operating subsidiaries in the U.S. (Helsinn Therapeutics US) and China (Helsinn Pharmaceuticals China) which market the Group's products directly in these countries. The Group has additional operating subsidiaries in Switzerland (Helsinn Advanced Synthesis, an active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer) and Ireland (Helsinn Birex Pharmaceuticals, a drug product manufacturer). 3B Future Health Fund (formerly known as Helsinn Investment Fund) was created to enhance the future of healthcare by providing funding and strategic support to innovative companies.

Helsinn Group plays an active and central role in promoting social transformation in favor of people and the environment. Corporate social responsibility is at the heart of everything we do which is reinforced in the company's strategic plan by a commitment to sustainable growth.

To learn more about Helsinn Group please visit www.helsinn.com

For more information:

Helsinn Group Media Contact:

Paola Bonvicini

Group Head of Communication

Lugano, Switzerland

Tel: +41 (0) 91 985 21 21

Email: Info-hhc@helsinn.com
File photo: A woman is silhouetted behind the Aboriginal flag in Sydney, Australia on May 26, 2006. (Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

Queensland Launches Indigenous Treaty Talks

Consultations on Queenslands proposed treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made steady progress in Cairns, significantly raising the profile of Queenslands ongoing Path to Treaty work.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships Minister Craig Crawford and the newly-appointed Treaty Advancement Committee had consultations in Cairns on Thursday.

The committee is charged with developing options and giving independent advice in what the government says is a vital role on its path to a treaty.

Crawford has previously said the state is also committed to a truth-telling and healing process.

The TAC is co-chaired by Bidjara/Birri Gubba Juru woman Jackie Huggins and Ghungalu man Mick Gooda.

The other members are Michael Lavarch, Josephine Bourne, and Sallyanne Atkinson.

Crawford says having the voices of local communities heard is an important step in the path to the treaty process.

From consultations with Queenslanders right across the state we have seen an interest in our Path to Treaty that shows it will have an enduring legacy for generations to come, he said.

Treaties are a critical tool in promoting reconciliation and setting the foundation for a new and just relationshipone that acknowledges the ongoing disadvantage that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience and provides a platform for justice, equality and opportunity.

We must work together to truly reconcile our past with our present in order for us to share our future together.

The TAC will report to government on options in the second half of 2021.

Meanwhile, Queensland is one of many jurisdictions involved in a treaty process after Victoria signed a treaty with Indigenous communities before passing it into law in July 2018.

The ACT signed a treaty with Indigenous groups in 2019 and the Northern Territory government has entered into treaty consultations, which are due to be completed by the end of this year.

South Australias Labor government had been working towards a treaty, but the process was stopped in 2018 upon the election of a new Liberal government.

NSW, Western Australia, and Tasmania are not working towards a treaty agreement at present.

The federal coalition government is also working on a design for an Indigenous voice to government, which would be consulted on laws but would not be cemented in the constitution.

National Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday that he supports an Indigenous voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution
Todd Wagner, senior pastor and co-founder of Watermark Community Church in Dallas, Texas, has reportedly retired since heading the church for more than two decades.

"We are fully convinced that today, in the interest of Christ, for me and for my family, and for Watermark in this next season, it would be best served by me ending my season in serving as pastoral elder of Watermark Community Church," said Wagner as quoted by CBN News from his video statement posted on the church's website.

Wagner's resignation was confirmed after he announced last September that he was temporarily standing down from the pulpit owing to the sin of pride, according to the Christian Post (CP).

"For the first time in 20 years, I'm stepping back from what I usually do so I can do the hard work of hard work," Wagner reportedly told the congregation.

"So don't be looking for some scandal. Don't even think this is scandalous. What is scandalous is when a Christian plays with, overlooks or welcomes sin, respectable or not," he added.

It is uncommon for the sin of pride to hit the news, but Wagner said that he is attempting to be completely transparent about it. He also thanked God for surrounding him with friends who helped him, emphasizing that "pride kills."

"And I would call what I've heard my friends describing and telling me, pride. That's the sin. And it's really interesting because you know I don't think of myself or I fool myself into thinking I'm not a prideful person because I never look in the mirror and clap," he said.

In-House Protocols

In November of 1999, Wagner and a handful of friends initiated the church. According to CP, the church currently has about 11,000 weekly worshippers spread over two campuses.

Wagner's resignation was confirmed by church elders Kyle Thompson and Mickey Friedrich in a statement on Sunday, three weeks after Elder David Leventhal resigned from his role as an elder and a staff member.

Leventhal, his wife, and their children had been active members of the Watermark congregation since its inception. He said that he resigned due to a loss of confidence in Wagner's capacity to serve as senior pastor and elder.

"We believe both men are seeking to be faithful to the Lord and honor one another in this process," explained the elders. "At the same time, we land at a different place than David and Todd regarding why we have arrived here. After hundreds of hours of conversations over several months, every member of the Elder team, Elder Emeritus team, and the various community groups involved all affirm these decisions."

According to their letter, after a trying season, Leventhal and Wagner are reconciled and will work again on the Elder Emeritus committee. Present alternatives are also being explored to determine how each person can best support the mission in the coming days.

Additionally, the elders announced that another nominee has been chosen for the role of elder and is currently undergoing the nominee procedure.
It may be impossible to buy a graphics card right now, but the new Game Ready 466.27 drivers released today just tipped off Nvidias next counterstrike in the war against cryptocurrency miners. The company accidentally cracked its own anti-mining hashrate limiter introduced alongside the GeForce RTX 3060 but its coming back for a second round of restrictions, and these ones could be even more extensive.

In the new features section of the 466.27 driver release notes, youll find the following note: This driver updates the hash limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB and is required for product shipped starting mid-May.

That alone would be intriguing enough, but just yesterday, reputable leak site Videocardz reported that Nvidia plans to start shipping a Lite Hash Rate series for the GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards starting in mid-May. These refreshed silicon iterations wont perform any differently in gaming workloads than the original versions of the RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090, nor will they be marketed as new products with new names, if Videocardzs report proves true (and the note in Nvidia's new drivers certainly adds credence to it). But the new, slightly tweaked GPUs will require new drivers, and it looks like theyll sport Nvidias latest anti-mining technology. Videocardz reports the new silicon with an older name will also add in native Resizable BAR support for increased performance in compatible systems.

Brad Chacos/IDG EVGA's GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming.

Wed also expect those features (including the updated hash limiter) to come stock in any new GeForce releases as well, such as the long-rumored RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti.

RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent, Nvidias Matt Wuebbling said while announcing the first doomed iteration of the technology. Any graphics card that cant bypass the hash limiter, new or old, would be significantly less profitable for mining cryptocoins.

Industrious miners may very well wind up cracking Nvidias impending anti-mining features, because theres a lot of money floating around Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and big money lets mining farms pay developers dedicated to crafting custom software as needed. Nvidia, conversely, wants miners paying up for its new CMP HX crypto cards instead. But if Nvidias countermeasures prove successful, PC gamers may finally be able to start buying GPUs regularlythough mining isnt the only reason graphics card cost so much right now.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Thursday met with the families of the 53 crew members who died when a submarine sank and broke apart near the resort island of Bali.

Speaking to the crowd of family members in Surabaya, Widodo offered his "deep condolence" and prayed for those who were onboard the KRI. Nanggala 402, which went missing earlier in the month.

The meeting was also attended by the Navy's Chief of Staff, Yudo Margono and several ministers and other officials.

The German-built diesel-powered vessel first went missing April 21.

On April 25, officials announced that search teams located the submarine's wreckage lying in at least three pieces on the ocean floor at a depth of 838 meters (2,750 feet).

The cause of the submarine's sinking remains uncertain.

The wreckage is located 1,500 meters (yards) to the south of the site where the submarine last dove off Bali's northern coast.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
By Niket Nishant and John McCrank

(Reuters) -New York Stock Exchange-owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc reported first-quarter profit that beat Wall Street estimates on Thursday, boosted by strength in its mortgage technology business and continued market volatility.

Excluding one-time items like M&A costs, ICE earned $1.34 per share in the quarter, 4 cents above analysts' average estimate, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

ICE's mortgage servicing business benefited from its $11-billion acquisition last year of mortgage tech firm Ellie Mae. ICE has been investing in the business since 2016.

"We see, just like we saw in the commodities markets two decades ago, just like we've seen in the fixed income markets, that the mortgage space is an industry that's going through a significant analog to digital transition," ICE President Ben Jackson said on a call with analysts.

Revenue in the segment surged 672% from a year earlier to $355 million, which the company said was just scratching the surface of what it sees as a $4 billion opportunity in the mortgage loan origination and processing space alone.

The exchange, clearinghouse, and data services provider also benefited from the pandemic-induced market turmoil, which continued its momentum into the first quarter as a new cohort of retail traders entered the market.

ICE's exchange segment, its biggest business, brought in $1.61 billion in revenue, up marginally from last year.

Total revenue, excluding transaction-based expenses, rose 15% to nearly $1.8 billion.

In the current quarter, ICE said it sold its 1.4% stake in cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase for more than $1.2 billion. Coinbase debuted on NYSE competitor Nasdaq Inc earlier this month with an initial market capitalization larger than ICE's.

ICE's own cryptocurrency exchange subsidiary, Bakkt, is expected to complete its merger with blank-check firm VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings at the end of this quarter, giving it a $2.1 billion enterprise value.

(Reporting by John McCrank in New York and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru;Editing by Vinay Dwivedi and Nick Zieminski)
In this April 8, 2021, file photo, President Joe Biden gestures as he speaks about gun violence prevention in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington. Biden will mark his 100th day in office on Thursday, April 29.

If there is an overarching theme of President Joe Biden's first 100 days, it's his argument that a bigger government can make the lives of Americans better.

That's a seismic departure from decades of Reagan-era dogma that big government is never the solution, only the problem.

If anything, Biden's view is a throwback to the Great Society domestic activism of Lyndon Johnson or the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt. (Biden met with presidential historians in March, according to Axios, to ponder those historical antecedents as he assembled his legislative agenda.)

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Nonetheless, it's also vital to highlight the risks of such a strategy. Biden is setting a high bar for himself with his proposition that trillions of dollars in government spending, paid with higher debt and higher taxes, will address society's ills  rather than rely on the private sector and market-driven solutions. It assumes federal bureaucracy can be an efficient, waste-avoiding engine for social change.

And so far, so good.

COVID-19 vaccination and economy

President Joe Biden, with Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, addresses a joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021.

In contrast to President Donald Trump's fumbling hands-off approach last year to the coronavirus pandemic, where botched federal testing and mixed-signal precautions led to soaring infections and death, Biden has marshaled government resources so that within his first 100 days, just more than half of the adult population has received at least a single dose of a vaccine.

Meanwhile, the pandemic illustrated the growing divide between wealthier Americans, who could adjust to the disease by simply working at home, and lower earners whose jobs went away, were reduced or required them to work exposed to the virus.

The K-shaped economy that emerged was fertile ground for Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, pushed through Congress in March with only Democratic votes.

It's the largest expansion of the social safety net in generations with its direct payments to those most financially strapped by the pandemic, along with tax credits and billions of dollars for child care and restaurant recovery. Seventy percent of Americans were pleased by it, including 41% of Republicans.

Story continues

Likewise there is, so far, popular support for Biden's $2 trillion proposed infrastructure bill that would rebuild roads and bridges, and spend hundreds of billions on promoting electrical vehicles, expanding broadband, revitalizing the nation's electric grid and upgrading the nation's community- and home-based eldercare system.

And Wednesday, he unveiled his American Families Plan that calls for $1.8 trillion in spending for education, child care and paid family leave, among other things.

Meanwhile, there are broad signs of robust economic recovery around the corner, for which presidents always receive credit, whether or not it's appropriate. And despite a harshly polarized electorate, Biden's approval rating has consistently remained above 50%, much improved over his predecessor.

Challenges ahead for Biden

All of this might, to a degree, insulate Biden when challenges arise. But the gamble of extolling bigger government is that there's very little room for failures.

What if the influx of unaccompanied children flooding the southern border becomes an even greater crisis? (The Biden administration has recently had success transferring children held in jail-like U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities to more appropriate housing with the of Department Health and Human Services.)

What if fears of rising interest rates and inflation become reality? The federal debt is on course to exceed the size of the economy this year for only the second time since World War II.

And what if, as many experts predict, Afghanistan collapses into televised chaos, cruelty and civil war after the U.S. withdrawal ordered by Biden?

After two decades of war in that country, at the cost of 2,400 U.S. troops killed and more than $2 trillion, could there be a greater example of wholesale government miscalculation and waste?

Much of Biden's agenda is smart and bold, but in a time of a closely divided Washington, where Democrats have the barest of majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, successful implementation is paramount. Biden will have to manage his new, bigger government with all the benefit of his five decades of experience in Washington to avoid blowback that will diminish his accomplishments.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff and the USA TODAY Network. Most editorials are coupled with an Opposing View, a unique USA TODAY feature.

To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden gambles 100 days on big government plan
Perhaps you may find this surprising  because I certainly do  but as we roll on through Wallpapergate, it is Carrie Symonds who has my sympathy.

The price of having her walls lined with gold scrolling ferns is that she has been painted as a grasping opportunist who would spend 1,000 on a designer tea cosy, if only she could get some mug Tory Party donor to foot the bill.

A Carrie Antoinette doing the cakewalk of greedy shame down corridors lined with the finest silks; a Princess Nut Nut wallowing in tasteful luxury while the peasants have to make do with John Lewis posters and wipe-clean sofas in practical neutrals.

Give Carrie a break. She has had to cope with pregnancy, the pandemic and her lover, Boris, becoming dangerously ill

I hold no scented candle for the Prime Minister and his fiancee, who have both behaved with a remarkable lack of common sense over the refurbishment of their Downing Street flat

A preview of Lulu Lytle (pictured with her dog Panther) of Soane Britain's collaboration with Christie's Spring edition of The Collector sales

Gaah! Pass me that hand-stitched ivory vellum lampshade, all the better to shield my eyes from the decor horror of the High Street.

But is this fair? I hold no scented candle for the Prime Minister and his fiancee, who have both behaved with a remarkable lack of common sense over the refurbishment of their Downing Street flat. And that is putting it mildly. But is she deserving of so much of the blame?

Perhaps we should remember that when Carrie moved into Downing Street in July 2019 she was already (possibly) pregnant with son Wilf, who was born the following April. The impulse to nest, to put her stamp on another womans recently vacated domain must have been powerful.

One must also factor in the dreariness and claustrophobia of living in this public building at the heart of British government. French leaders have the Elysee Palace, Americans have the White House, but we have a clutch of poky rooms above the shop with a vermin problem.

Yes, there is the consolation of Chequers at the weekend  although not during the pandemic  but I imagine that actually living in Downing Street is a kind of hell.

Those prison-like gates, the lack of sunlight and privacy, the crushing omnipresence of politics and political operatives 24/7? No Prime Minister has ever relished living there; his or her family even less.

Give Carrie a break. She has had to cope with pregnancy, the pandemic and her lover, Boris, becoming dangerously ill. What woman would not want to take refuge in swatches, in cheering the place up, in perhaps taking tea with Lulu Lytle to discuss her range of delicious chintzes at 270 per metre and ponder over wicker or rattan for the dining room chairs?

I dont condemn her for that, even if it seems strange that at no point did it cross her mind to ask the all-important question: Boris, can we afford this? It appears that she pressed on without a budget, without parameters or guidance. What a mess  but surely the blame for that lies with him, not her?

Boris is a man who likes his creature comforts, but before he became Prime Minister he was practically living in a van. What does he care about wall sconces or sofas that he is only going to spill wine on anyway?

Look at him! Here is a man who looks like he has never hung up a jacket in his life, someone who quite possibly sleeps in a skip while voles nest in his hair. Does he care about the epaulette fringing on the armchair? Or the shade of pink on the curtains?

Given all this, it seems even more ludicrous that Carrie took it upon herself to hire one of the most expensive decorators in London, to refurb what is essentially a rented flat

The sin here is not in the extravagance of the coverlets, but in the disgrace of the cover-up

Hed eat his dinner from a can and sit on a crate, if left to his own devices. Fighting for Brexit, fighting for his own life and fighting to get Britain through the pandemic? Perhaps he simply gave the matter of refurbishment very little thought  and maybe for that he even  whisper it  deserves credit? I can just imagine him saying to Carrie: Yes darling, whatever you want, do it. Just dont bother me. And then panicking like a coursed hare when he saw the bills.

For the problem at heart is that Boris is a man of slender means. Take him down to the studs and you will probably find that his two divorces have all but wiped him out financially, while he can no longer command his usual six-figure salary for newspaper columns or top up his income by dashing off a book called Pericles  The Bees Knees or somesuch.

His weakness for women and the chaos of his life have led him to this point of self-harm crisis, which despite all the good he has done over the past year, has left him open to ethical allegations. Idiot.

Given all this, it seems even more ludicrous that Carrie took it upon herself to hire one of the most expensive decorators in London, to refurb what is essentially a rented flat.

In this initiative, she does display the regrettable, casual entitlement that has swirled for years around Johnson and his inner circle; people who live a five-star life they simply cannot afford, but cosy up socially and professionally to those who can.

In the grand scheme of things, its not even that much money. Im sorry, but its not. An overspend of 58,000 compared with the 2.6 million spent on the Downing Street press conference room, which will never be used for its original purpose? I know which I think is the bigger waste of money and the greater crime.

But that is not the point. The point is that Carrie was just carrying on, unchecked and running wild among the parrot-print fabric, thinking she was doing nothing wrong.

And Boris, who seems to spend his life in the pursuit of beautiful women, then lives in terror of them once he has captured their affections, panicked when he realised what was going on. And then obfuscated over his clumsy attempts to get others to pay the bill  his real crime.

The sin here is not in the extravagance of the coverlets, but in the disgrace of the cover-up. If Boris comes to a sticky end over wallpaper, he will have no one to blame but himself. No, not even Carrie. Just no.

Upset at this years dead Oscars. For months, it was considered a shoo-in that Chadwick Boseman would win a posthumous Best Actor for his performance in Ma Raineys Black Bottom. The ceremony was even rearranged around that expected outcome, scheduling Bosemans category last so his widow could accept the award and the show would end in a climax of high emotion.

That didnt happen. Instead, Sir Anthony Hopkins won for The Father, throwing the event into confusion. The 83-year-old wasnt even there, but at home in Wales.Many have complained about this, grumbling that the Oscars are still too white. It became a farce  but that is what happens when you turn awards ceremonies into fiestas of political correctness.

I do hope Sir Anthony doesnt let protesters detract from his win, for there isnt an actor on the planet who deserves an Oscar more. Over a long career, he has turned in unforgettable performances in films such as The Remains Of The Day, Howards End and, yes, The Silence Of The Lambs. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me, said Hannibal Lecter. Well, quite.

No excuses, Tom just tells it like it was

Tom Parker Bowles was 13 when he first spotted paparazzi on the drive at home trying to get photos of his mother, Camilla. He was 18 when Princess Diana pressed the nuclear button and went public over Prince Charless affair with Camilla.

One year later, he was a student at Oxford when a private, embarrassingly intimate conversation between the Prince and his mother was made public.

Having to suffer these mortifications at such an impressionable age would be enough to send any young man off the rails, or feel sorry for himself.

Indeed, Tom was caught in a tabloid sting when he was 24, in which he admitted snorting cocaine.

But his great triumph is that he doesnt blame his background for anything. He takes full responsibility for himself and his mistakes. It was nothing to do with pressures of the situation I was in. God no. I just loved raving, he told a newspaper this week. Good for Tom! No wonder he has thrived and survived, despite it all.

You can tell a lot about a man by his footwear. David Bowie and his platforms, Ken Clarkes rakish penchant for suede loafers  these shoes all tell their own story.

But perhaps none speak as loudly as those of Simon Case. The head of the Civil Service looks the business from the ankles up  a smart mandarin right down to his polished specs.

But look at his shoes! In those horrible scuffed brogues he looks like Just William after a scrumping adventure. Is it beyond him to polish his shoes before going to work in Whitehall? I must protest in the strongest possible terms, as Sir Humphrey might say. It is simply not good enough.

The truth wool out, Harry

Goodness, is it really a decade since Prince William married Kate Middleton? Congratulations to them both. Ten years and three children later, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge seem to have made a great success of their marriage and their family life.

Many of us are particularly glad, for we remember not only the romance of the day but the knitting fever that gripped so many of us.

In the lead-up to the wedding, more than 50,000 copies of a pattern book called How To Knit The Royal Family (by Fiona Goble) were sold. And like many Daily Mail readers, I knitted the lot. We became obsessed, we wrote to each other, we complained about the difficulties of the Queens ankles! Then we screamed when William appeared on his wedding day wearing his Colonel of the Irish Guards uniform  because we had all knitted him, as instructed, in his Royal Air Force outfit.

Such is a knitters life. I dont expect you to sympathise. But, now, when I look at my old royal knits (above), I am struck by my clairvoyant skills.

Look at my Prince Charles, a sad owl with much to worry about. There is Prince William with a prescient lack of hair. And I knitted Prince Harry with a big lollipop head and a vacant expression that suggested he was three stitches short of a full row.

How could I possibly have known?

Insights firm Perspectus Global has published a list of tell-tale signs that you are getting old.

They include asking for a Rachel cut at the hairdressers; failing to recognise a Love Island contestant; buying your underwear from Marks & Spencer; becoming obsessed with bin day and struggling with your telly remote control.

Oh my God. Guilty on all charges. They didnt add the practice of exclaiming ooof! when you sit down and oooooof! when you get back up again, but it can only be a matter of time.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese business leaders and a Nobel-prizewinning biologist called upon the government to reform its vaccination programme, including allowing drive-through inoculations, as the nation struggles to contain a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Japan has secured the largest quantity of COVID-19 vaccines in Asia, as it gears up for the summer Olympics. But it has inoculated only 1.6% of its population so far, the slowest among wealthy countries.

Government data on Wednesday showed that Japan has only used about a fifth of the coronavirus vaccine doses it has imported so far, underscoring logistical hurdles such as a shortage of medical staff.

Twenty-four business leaders, including e-commerce group Rakuten's CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, and Nobel-winning stem cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka said a bolder and coordinated effort was needed to speed up vaccinations.

"The government and local administrations must not be constrained by outdated thinking and must make effective use of private sector expertise," they said in a statement on Wednesday.

They urged the government to simplify vaccine application procedures, quicken administration of vaccines by allowing them to be done using a drive-through system and large-scale facilities, and seek the cooperation of medical experts.

The proposals also called for the government to manage vaccination records to encourage residents and visitors from outside Japan who have been inoculated to resume economic activities.

Japanese government officials were not immediately available for comment on Thursday, a national holiday in Japan.

Rakuten's Mikitani, who is also the representative director of the Japan Association of New Economy, has said it was "too risky" to hold the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this summer, as Japan struggles with a nascent fourth wave of the pandemic.

Supporters of the proposals included the Japan Medical Association President Yoshitake Yokokura, furniture chain Nitori Holdings Co's CEO Akio Nitori and Takeshi Niinami, head of Japanese beverage group Suntory Holdings.

(Reporting by Eimi Yamamitsu; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
Minister of Defence, Nicolae Ciuca, thanked, on Thursday, war veterans in our country and emphasized the need for their experience to be known by younger generations.

"I have the honor of wishing you a long life, health and joy on the occasion of the War Veterans' Day, the day that teaches us that today the freedom to live, to dream and to love always has a price paid by our forebearers who have seen in the fight to free and to unite the Romanian people a cause higher than their own lives, loves, or aspirations," said the minister, quoted in a MApN release.

"As soldiers we have sworn on the flag to defend our country with the price of our lives, we have been taught that 'a nation that does not know its history is like a child who does not know his parents,'" Nicolae Ciuca emphasized.

"Allow me to thank you, in the name of the Romanian Army, for the faith and the courage with which you endured in times of trial. Our generation has the privilege to learn from you pure love for country, the only thing able to guide us in muddled times and to connect us, Romanians, to a heroic dimension. Faith in heroes begets heroes, so that our youth has the unique chance to understand from each of you that each harbors in their soul the virtues of patriotism and that they should always place heroes before them and the Country before all," the minister said.

The Day of War Veterans, celebrated each year on April 29, was marked, on Thursday, in Bucharest, through a wreath-laying ceremony and meetings of the Defence Minister with servicemen of the Romanian Army from World War II and theaters of operations.

The actions dedicated to the Day of War Veterans include the live broadcast, in the evening, on the Ministry's Facebook page, of the Great Thursday night's of the 12 Gospels of the Passion of Our Lord and Savior, from the Church of the Michael the Brave 30th Guard Brigade, at the end of which the priest will render a message to war veterans.

Furthermore, similar ceremonies will take place, throughout April, at home and abroad, at memorials, cemeteries and monuments dedicated to the sacrifice of Romanian soldiers fallen in World War II.

The Ministry of National Defence is running the campaign "Voices across the centuries," documenting the life stories of war veterans, project that has as a media partner the Romanian Television, in view of creating video material commemorating the lives of veterans.
 Flash

Sri Lanka and China vowed Wednesday to enhance pragmatic cooperation in all sectors between the two countries including the military.



The pledge came after Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe.

During the meeting, the Sri Lankan president, who is also the defense minister, thanked China for providing long-term and precious support to Sri Lanka and hoped to learn the governing experience from the Communist Party of China on poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, among others.

Noting that Sri Lanka has prioritized developing the relations with China and firmly supported China's positions on issues concerning its core interests, the president said his country has been pursuing an independent foreign policy and will never bends to pressure from major powers outside the region as well as never forge an alliance with any country.

Closely following the pragmatic cooperation in the military field between the two countries, the president hoped that the two militaries will carry out closer exchanges so as to further lift the level of pragmatic cooptation.

In his meeting with Wei, the Sri Lankan prime minister said Wei and his delegation visited Sri Lanka at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is still not contained, demonstrating that China attaches great importance to developing the ties with Sri Lanka.

Hailing China for its achievements made in the pandemic prevention and control, economic development and poverty alleviation, the prime minister thanked China for providing unselfish help to his country.

Sri Lanka will always be a sincere friend to China and will firmly support China's position on safeguarding its own core interests, the prime minister said.

Sri Lanka stands ready to strengthen exchanges and pragmatic cooperation with China in various fields including the military, so as to achieve further growth of the bilateral ties, he added.

For his part, Wei said that China and Sri Lanka enjoy a long history of friendship with deep bilateral relations.

The two countries are jointly working for the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road, Wei said, pointing out that they share a bright prospect of development.

The Chinese side appreciates Sri Lanka's position on issues relating to China's Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and will as always support Sri Lanka's stance over issues relating to human rights and national reconciliation, Wei said.

Noting the long-lasting friendship between the two militaries, Wei called on the two sides to further deepen cooperation and promote relations between the two militaries.

Peaceful development and win-win cooperation is the global trend and the right way forward, Wei said, adding that certain major countries are keen to form cliques and factions and seek regional hegemony, which goes against people's shared aspiration and severely harms the interests of the regional countries.

China appreciates Sri Lanka's independent and non-aligned policy and will make joint efforts with Sri Lanka to strengthen coordination and safeguard regional peace and tranquility.

On Wednesday, Wei also held talks with Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne and jointly launched a website of the Chinese National Defence University Alumni Association of Sri Lanka.
Since 2017, the California bighorn sheep on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge have declined by almost 70%. Refuge biologists counted just 48 sheep during aerial surveys conducted in 2020, a trend that puts the population at risk of extirpation.

To address the decline, Refuge staff, in coordination with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and USDA-Wildlife Services, developed a Bighorn Sheep Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The EIS is focused on evaluating and managing factors influencing the bighorn sheep population including habitat and causes of mortality. In the EIS, we analyzed existing data and identified alternatives that represent a range of reasonable management approaches that reflect the urgency to implement short-term management actions in combination with mid- to long-term management and monitoring. The goal is to restore the herd to a healthy, sustainable population that is resilient to the dynamic conditions on the Refuge such as predation, drought, and changing habitat conditions.

In May 2020, we published the Notice of Intent to develop the EIS in the Federal Register and opened the initial 30-day public scoping period. A Scoping Report that summarized comments and major issues was completed.

Your Voice Matters!

How To Comment

Public comments on the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge Draft Bighorn Sheep Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement provide meaningful and important feedback. Comments will be accepted through June 14, 2021, and may be submitted by email at Sheldon-Hart@fws.gov, or by U.S. Mail addressed to: Project Leader, Sheldon-Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Complex, P.O. Box 111, Lakeview, OR 97630. Please include Hart Mountain Bighorn Sheep Plan in the subject line of emails. We will accept comments from the public for a period of 45 days following publication of the notice of availability in the Federal Register.

All comments received from individuals become part of the official public record. We will handle all requests for such comments in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act and the CEQs NEPA regulations in 40 CFR 1506.6(f). Our practice is to make comments, including names and home addresses of respondents, available for public review during regular business hours. Individual respondents may request that we withhold their home address from the record, which we will honor to the extent allowable by law. If you wish us to withhold your name and/or address, you must state this prominently at the beginning of your comments.

Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge Draft Bighorn Sheep Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement

For additional information, refer to our Notice of Intent (NOI) and the following: Bighorn Sheep on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge Bighorn sheep, an iconic species native to Oregon and the Refuge, were extirpated in the State by 1912. The species was successfully reintroduced to Hart Mountain in 1954. Learn More Decline of Bighorn Sheep on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge Since 2017, the bighorn sheep herd on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge has declined to a precariously low population size. Learn More Bighorn Sheep Management Plan Preliminary Issues & Alternatives The Service is developing a management plan and environmental impact statement that will be used to restore the bighorn sheep herd on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge to a self-sustaining population. Issues & Preliminary Alternatives NEPA Timeline and How You Can Help Timely completion of the management plan and EIS are essentially to maintaining a bighorn sheep herd on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge. How To Help



The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has completed an assessment of the herd's health, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has completed a peer review of the results; here are the assessment and peer review.

ODFW Assessment / USGS Assessment
Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies has seen its revenue for the first quarter of 2021 fall by 16.5% year-on-year to 152.2 billion yuan (A$30.5 billion), which the company said was as per its forecast.

In a statement, Huawei, a private company headquartered in Shenzhen, said revenue from its consumer business fell, partly due to the sale of its budget smartphone unit Honor in November last year.

However, the company said its net profit margin, based on unaudited figures, had risen by 3.8 percentage points year-on-year to 11.1%.

This was put down to efforts to improve operations and efficiency. Patent royalties brought in US$600 million (A$770 million).

Over the last two years, the company has been fighting to stave off the effects of the crippling US sanctions which have hit both its flagship smartphones  due to its inability to obtain top-end chips  and its carrier business due to the US bulldozing many countries to avoid buying its 5G gear.

The company's smartphone business has been affected by the fact that it is unable to source the proprietary Google apps  the PlayStore, Maps, YouTube and Drive, among others  that are part of the Android mobile operating system.

To cover for this, Huawei has developed its own mobile operating system named HarmonyOS based on the free version of Android, and also built an ecosystem for downloading apps known as Huawei Mobile Services.

"[The year] 2021 will be another challenging year for us, but it's also the year that our future development strategy will begin to take shape," said Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman.

"We thank our customers and partners for their ongoing trust. No matter what challenges come our way, we will continue to maintain our business resilience. Not just to survive, but do so sustainably. As always, we will remain focused on the needs of our customers and keep delivering practical business value.

"As always, we remain committed to technological innovation and investing heavily in R&D as we work to address supply continuity challenges caused by restrictions in the market. We will continue making breakthroughs in basic science and pushing the frontiers of technology."

Despite the US sanctions, last year Huawei managed to post a profit for the full year 2020, due to strong sales in China.
TORONTO, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In light of the recently announced third wave of COVID-19, Workwolf in partnership with MAGNUS Healthcare Recruitment Solutions has donated $10,000 to provide 1,000 registered nurses and registered practical nurses with a portable digital credential wallet, which offers access to verifiable credentials in real-time from any smart device. The two Toronto-based companies are partnering to offer healthcare workers free background checks and other credential verification services to expedite their hiring process and to support understaffed healthcare facilities.



The Government of Ontario has recently reported that the province is facing another threat to its healthcare capacity as a result of the recent and rapid rise in hospitalizations, particularly in those being admitted to the ICU. As such, all qualified professionals are being sought out to relieve overworked and understaffed hospitals and other care facilities. With recent reports of over 34,000 active cases throughout the province of Ontario, Workwolf in partnership with MAGNUS will provide 1,000 healthcare professionals with the ability to share verifiable credentials via what is called a Digital Work Passport to encourage further adoption of the technology.

Initially used to house digital currencies, these Digital Work Passports courtesy of MAGNUS and Workwolf leverage blockchain technology to expedite hiring in the healthcare sector and allow workers to be deployed between facilities without the friction normally associated with criminal clearance and license verification screening; for facilities experiencing a high number of COVID-19 cases who need nurses immediately, MAGNUSs donation will aid in acquiring more qualified and registered healthcare workers, inevitably saving lives.

MAGNUS Founder Erik Simins has led a successful medical staffing practice for over decade, placing thousands of healthcare professionals in community, long term care, and acute care centers across the country. He has witnessed on several occasions the damage that can be done when fraudulent credentials or licenses are missed during screening. In 2019, CBC News reported on the systemic vulnerabilities within the Ontario healthcare system after Elizabeth Wettlaufer, a registered nurse murdered eight senior citizens under her care over a nine-year period. MAGNUS Advisor Candace Chartier, who leads Ontarios COVID-19 task force for long term care, was also a witness in the Wettlaufer trial. Of Workwolfs tamper-proof technology, she states that if we had this technology available, we could have prevented those deaths and improved the level of care in facilities across the province.

With the hysteria and shortage of front-line healthcare staff, it is of utmost importance that verifications of credentials, background checks, criminal history, and instances of malpractice are performed quickly and correctly, says Simins. This is when we need proven technology to help ensure patients are safe and that we are doing our best to maintain some level of certainty in such an uncertain time. We use Workwolfs Digital Work Passports for our clients in healthcare and it is absolutely a game-changer when it comes to expediting the onboarding process. It saves clients at least two weeks in their time-to-hire.

To further support MAGNUS in funding healthcare workers Workwolf Digital Work Passports, visit the MAGNUS HRS website at www.magnushrs.com. Here, front-line healthcare workers can get their passports for free, and employers or government members can donate funds towards Workwolfs Digital Work Passport initiative.



Further information

Erik Simins, President & Chairman

MAGNUS Heathcare Recruitment Solutions

erik@magnushrs.com 1-844-8MA-GNUS

866 The Queensway, Suite 200

Toronto, ON | M8Z 1N7

www.magnushrs.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7734d2e2-70f3-42bf-8248-c3c8f5010b11
Lucknow, April 29 : Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) cadres will now provide support and assistance to the Covid affected families.

The VHP cadres will also arrange for the last journey of the Corona victims.

The VHP is deploying its cadre and organisational strength to help people battle the pandemic.

According to VHP sources, the organisation has prepared a comprehensive action plan to serve the people in the pandemic.

Central secretary general of VHP, Milind Parande, while declaring a war on Corona, called upon the volunteers to mobilize with full steam and join forces with all the monasteries, temples, Gurudwaras, saints, Dharmacharyas and voluntary organisations to wage war against this pandemic.

The VHP has evolved a four-fold strategy for this.

Under the first part, VHP volunteers will create awareness on how to save people from the virus through the 'prevention is better than cure' concept.

They will also ensure that all eligible people take advantage of the vaccination programme of the government. The volunteers will counter the anti-vaccine propaganda and confusion through social media, phone calls and personal contacts.

They will sensitize people about the indispensability of the present norms of personal distancing, use of face-masks, hand and face sanitization and other protocols of hygiene.

The second part of the strategy includes serving the infected persons the infected and make all possible efforts to save their lives.

The volunteers have already started distributing Ayurvedic, Homeopathic and Siddha medicines as necessary, running Yoga sessions to promote the virtues of social discipline, patience and boost morale; and through helpline numbers, arranging consultations with and assistance from experts in the respective fields.

The services pertaining to the second front, include consultations with physicians and Vaidyas, arranging for ambulances, provisions for oxygen cylinders, plasma, blood, oxygen concentrator units, medicines and oximeters.

It also includes isolation/quarantine centres, meals for patients and their family members, assistance to lone family members in homes and hospitals, and support to and cooperation with medical personnel.

Services pertaining to the third front include distribution of food and water, medicines and ration to the affected families and the labourers, other low-income group people; care for the home-alone elderly, students and children; fodder and water for the cattle and other animals; food, water and medicines for the travelling people, forced to flee to their native places.

The service in the fourth front include arranging for hearse/mortuary vans to transport Corona victims from the hospitals/homes to cremation grounds and making arrangements for their funeral services and cremation.

Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini - the youth wings of the VHP - are wholeheartedly engaged physically, mentally and resource-wise in these service activities.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Overall postsecondary enrollment is down 4.2% from a year ago, while graduate enrollment continued to grow 4.4% nationwide. The research released today is based on data as of March 25, 2021, reflecting 12.6 million students and 76% of institutions that report to the Clearinghouse.

"The continuing slide in community college enrollments is of great concern," said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. "In a sign of potentially long-lasting impact on the level of skills and credentials in the workforce, there is still no age group showing increases at community colleges, even after a full year of pandemic and related unemployment."

Research highlights include:

Associate degree enrollment saw a 10.9% drop and bachelor's degree enrollment declined 2.2%. In contrast, master's and doctoral degree enrollments are up 5.2% and 3.6%, respectively.

Traditional college-age students, particularly those aged 18 to 20, saw the largest decline of all age groups (-7.2%). 18- to 20-year-olds make up the largest share of undergraduates overall (40.9%). The decline was especially pronounced at community colleges (-14.6%).

At primarily online institutions, where more than 90% of students enrolled exclusively online prior to the pandemic, both undergraduate and graduate enrollments increased more than the pre-pandemic rate of growth.

Only three states made gains in undergraduate enrollment: Nebraska (+1%), Utah (+0.9%), and West Virginia (+0.6%). In 25 states, undergraduate enrollment declined more than the national average (-5.9%), with five dropping by double-digits ( Alaska , Delaware , New Mexico , Oregon , and South Dakota ).

(+1%), (+0.9%), and (+0.6%). In 25 states, undergraduate enrollment declined more than the national average (-5.9%), with five dropping by double-digits ( , , , , and ). Graduate enrollment is up in all states except Alaska , Indiana , Michigan , Minnesota , and New York . The rate of growth was most pronounced for Mississippi (+18.8%), followed by Virginia (+12.6%), and West Virginia (+11.7%). The South is seeing larger gains in graduate students this spring (+7.8%) than any other region (West +4.8%, Midwest +1.8%, and Northeast +1.6%).

Other research results include:

By race and ethnicity, Native Americans continued to experience the greatest decline of any racial and ethnic group among undergraduates, having dropped 13% this spring. Declines are smallest among Asian students (-4.8%), while White, Black and Latinx students fell by roughly equal levels (-8.5%, -8.8% and -7.3%, respectively). The largest enrollment swing occurred for Latinx students at both community colleges (+1.7% last spring vs. -13.7% this spring) and public four-year colleges (+2.1% vs. -1.9%). At community colleges, only Latinx enrollment grew before the pandemic.

Male undergraduates are increasingly falling behind their female counterparts, but primarily online institutions have been the only exception. This spring, male undergraduate enrollment is up 3.5 % at these institutions, compared to 1.4 % for female enrollment.

Enrollment in health professions and related clinical sciences programs fared the best this spring among the top five most common major fields for those pursuing associate degrees (-3.7%) and undergraduate certificates (+2.0%). Among the top 10 bachelor's degree programs, psychology, computer and information sciences and support services, and education majors increased more than health related majors.

Graduate-level education programs are flourishing this spring in all types of credentials. Master's degree and doctoral degree enrollments rose by 4% and 8%, respectively, from a year ago. Graduate programs in education, particularly at the doctoral level, increased by 8.2% after increasing 1.7% last spring. MBA enrollments have seen a 7.6% increase this spring after a 0.5% decline last spring. Science and engineering master's enrollment increased 3.3% this spring.

For additional information, listen to the Research Center's recent webinar about the pandemics' impact on college enrollments.

About the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center is the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse. The Research Center collaborates with higher education institutions, states, school districts, high schools, and educational organizations as part of a national effort to better inform education leaders and policymakers. Through accurate longitudinal data outcomes reporting, the Research Center enables better educational policy decisions leading to improved student outcomes.

The Research Center currently collects data from nearly 3,600 postsecondary institutions, which represent 97% of the nation's postsecondary enrollments in degree-granting institutions, as of 2018. Clearinghouse data track enrollments nationally and are not limited by institutional and state boundaries. To learn more, visit https://nscresearchcenter.org.

Media contact: Todd Sedmak, [email protected].

SOURCE National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

Related Links

https://nscresearchcenter.org


KYIV, Ukraine  Belarus' Foreign Ministry on Tuesday expressed regret over sanctions that the United States reimposed on nine state-owned companies in the ex-Soviet country, citing human rights violations.

Belarus has become a target of Western sanctions after authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko won his sixth term in office in a widely disputed election in August and unleashed a harsh crackdown on subsequent mass protests that demanded he steps down.

More than 34,000 people have been arrested, many of them beaten, and most prominent opposition figures have fled Belarus or have since been jailed.

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was revoking a license that has allowed transactions with nine sanctioned state-owned companies in Belarus since 2015, including the oil company Belneftekhim, which accounts for 30% of the countrys industrial output. U.S. companies will have to wind up transactions with the nine entities by June 3.

This action is a further consequence of the Belarusian authorities flagrant disregard for human rights and Belarus failure to comply with its obligations under international human rights law," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Monday.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that the move is effectively aimed at impairing the material well-being of Belarusian citizens and reducing the economic potential of our country.

The interests of businesses, ordinary Belarusians or Americans, security and stability in the region and in the world don't mean anything to Washington in this process. Maybe because our region will be the one paying the price for the consequences of such irresponsible acts, the ministry said, adding that it reserves the right for an asymmetrical response.

The Belarusian government said the country's gross domestic product dropped 0.9% last year; the World Bank's forecast before the U.S. reimposed sanctions on state-owned companies said it would drop 2.7% this year.

Resumption of the sanctions will weigh heavily on Belarusian state companies amid recession and the sharp drop of the GDP, independent economist Lev Margolin said. Repressions are costing Lukashenko, who's running out of money, too much.

The Associated Press
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 09:54:32|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Nov. 18, 2019 shows the expressway section from Havelian to Mansehra under the Karakoram Highway (KKH) Phase Two project in Pakistan's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. (Xinhua/Liu Tian)

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor western route will accelerate the socio-economic development in some of Pakistan's underdeveloped regions, including Balochistan province and tribal areas, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said.

ISLAMABAD, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Wednesday that completion of the western route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) will usher in a new era of development and prosperity in Pakistan.

The CPEC western route will accelerate the socio-economic development in some of the Asian country's underdeveloped regions, including Balochistan province and tribal areas, Khan said at a ground-breaking ceremony for several development projects in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan.

He said Pakistan is lucky to be a part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through CPEC, and the western route will turn the dream of prosperity into reality for the local people.

A train for the Orange Line arrives at a subway station in Lahore, Pakistan, Oct. 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Tian)

"The areas along the western route which had long been neglected in the past and lagging behind, will now be connected to one of the fastest growing economies in the world (China)," the prime minister said.

He said the main focus of his government is to eradicate extreme poverty, adding that China's development and its strategy to lift people out of poverty is exemplary and Pakistan can learn from the same model.

Expressing his government's resolve to ensure the development of militancy-hit areas that had long witnessed unrest and suffering, the prime minister said that the provincial government of Balochistan has been spending billions of rupees out of its own resources for local development.

Despite financial constraints, the incumbent government is committed to diverting funds toward development programs and bringing revolutionary prosperity to the province through projects of infrastructure and human development, he added. 
A federal grand jury brought additional charges on Wednesday against three men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, saying they planned to use weapons of mass destruction to blow up a bridge.

Adam Fox, 40, of Wyoming, Michigan; Barry Croft Jr, 45, of Bear, Delaware; and Daniel Joseph Harris, 23, of Lake Orion, Michigan, were charged with knowingly conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction against persons or property, the US Justice Department said.

Fox, Croft and Harris along with Brandon Caserta, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks were arrested and charged in October with conspiring to grab Whitmer, a Democrat, from her vacation home in Antrim County, a rural area in northern Michigan.

Prosecutors said the men, who face up to life in prison if convicted, were part of a plot by a right-wing militia extremist group known as the Wolverine Watchmen to abduct Whitmer in retribution for public health orders she imposed to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

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A federal grand jury brought additional charges on Wednesday against Adam Fox (center), 40, Barry Croft Jr (right), 45, and Daniel Harris (left), 23, accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer

Fox, Croft and Harris along with Brandon Caserta, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks were arrested and charged in October with conspiring to grab Whitmer (left), a Democrat, from her vacation home in Antrim County, a rural area in northern Michigan

The Watchmen had met periodically for firearms and tactical training in remote areas 'to prepare for the "boogaloo,"' a term referencing a violent uprising against the government or impending politically motivated civil war,' state police Det Sgt Michael Fink wrote in an affidavit.

In the new indictment, Fox, Croft and Harris were accused of planning to destroy a bridge near Whitmer's vacation home in order to hinder the response by law enforcement.

The indictment accuses the men of discussing kidnapping Whitner, meeting in July 2020 in Wisconsin to practice using assault rifles, and surveilling Whitmers vacation home in August and September 2020, mapping out how far it was from the nearest police station.

The indictment also said that on September 12, 2020, Fox and Croft stopped to inspect the underside of a highway bridge for a place to mount an explosive charge.

The next day, Fox ordered $4,000 worth of explosives for an undercover FBI agent posing as a co-conspirator, the indictment said.

It added that about three weeks later, Fox and Harris made payments toward the explosives, the indictment said.

The new indictment also accused Croft and Harris of possessing a 'destructive device' that was not registered as required by federal law. It said Harris also possessed an unregistered semiautomatic assault rifle between July 10, 2020 and September 13, 2020.

Lawyers for the men were not immediately available for comment.

Last month, Jackson County District Court Judge Michael Klaeren threw out threw out charges for communicating a threat of terrorism against Paul Bellar, 21, (left) Pete Musico, 42, (center) and Joe Morrison, 26, (right). They were also accused of plotting to kidnap Whitmer

Eight other men who were accused of taking part in the kidnapping plot have been charged in Michigan state court with domestic terrorism and are also characterized by prosecutors as members or associates of the Wolverine Watchmen.

Garbin broke ranks with his co-defendants in January and pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping conspiracy charge.

For the deal, he agreed to testify against those charged as co-conspirators in both federal and state investigations.

Sentencing for Garbin, who remains in custody, was set for July 8, and he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

While the plea deal did not obligate the government to recommend a reduced sentence for Garbin, prosecutors said they would decide their recommendation based on his level of cooperation.

Garbin's plea agreement also contained the allegation that Fox, one of the accused ringleaders, had said at a meeting in June that 'he wanted to recruit 200 people to storm the (Michigan) Capitol, try any politicians they caught for "treason" and execute them by hanging on live television'.

Ty Garbin (left), broke ranks with his co-defendants in January and pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping conspiracy charge. Brandon Caserta (left) is also a defendant in the case

Garbin himself, according to the court filing, had later advocated 'waiting until after the national election, when the conspirators expected widespread civil unrest to make it easier for them to operate'.

The men were among armed demonstrators who entered the Michigan Senate gallery on April 30, 2020, following a larger protest outside the Capitol against Whitmer's stay-at-home order.

Following arrests tied to the kidnapping plot, Whitmer said rhetoric from then-President Donald Trump had been a 'rallying cry' for extremists.

She said the Republican president had spent months during the coronavirus pandemic 'denying science, ignoring his own health experts, stoking distrust, fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.'

At the time, Trump claimed Whitmer had done a 'terrible job' and should lift restrictions aimed at slowing the virus' spread.

Last month, Jackson County District Court Judge Michael Klaeren threw out charges for communicating a threat of terrorism against Paul Bellar, 21, Pete Musico, 42, and his son-in-law Joe Morrison, 26.

The three men are also accused of aiding six others who are charged in federal court with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer.

Klaeren said there was enough evidence for Bellar, Morrison and Musico - all of whom live in Michigan - to stand trial on charges of providing material support for terrorist acts, gang membership and using a firearm during a felony.

However, the judge ruled there wasn't enough probable cause in the case against Musico and Morrison to send charges forward for communicating a threat of terrorism.

Providing material support for terrorist acts and gang membership charges each are 20-year felonies while felony firearm charges carry two-year maximum prison sentences.

According to a court affidavit, Musico and Morrison are founding members of the Wolverine Watchmen, which authorities described as 'an anti-government, anti-law enforcement militia group.'
UK PM hails European Parliament's ratification of post-Brexit trade deal

Xinhua) 10:02, April 29, 2021

LONDON, April 28 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday welcomed the European Parliament's ratification of the post-Brexit trade deal signed between the European Union (EU) and Britain.

Johnson said on Twitter that it is "great news that the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly in favour of our zero tariffs, zero quotas Trade and Cooperation Agreement."

"Now is the time to look forward to a new relationship with the EU and a more Global Britain," Johnson said.

"Hope we can now begin a new chapter together as Europeans, characterized by friendly cooperation between sovereign equals," said Britain's Chief Brexit negotiator David Frost after the vote.

After hours of debate, 660 lawmakers of the European Parliament backed the zero tariff, zero quota deal on goods. Just five lawmaker voted against the historic agreement, while 32 abstained, four years after the Article 50 Brexit process was triggered in March 2017.

Britain joined the regional bloc in 1973 but announced to withdrawal in 2016 after a referendum. The two sides reached an agreement on their post-Brexit trade relations on Dec. 24, 2020.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Liang Jun)
Visitors enjoy the peony flowers on Apr 11, in Luoyang, Henan Province. [For chinadaily.com.cn/Zhang Yixi]

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism will tighten up management of travelers and attractions for the approaching May Day holiday starting on Saturday to prevent risks of novel coronavirus epidemic resurgence.

The ministry said attractions should control population flows over the break. Travelers are required to make reservations before a visit.

Prevention measures, such as scanning health codes at attraction entrances and taking a traveler's body temperature, are required. Areas in attractions that may have massive gatherings, including traveler centers, restaurants and transportation stations, should be in stricter control.

The ministry also requires attraction operators to give health reminders to travelers during while taking shuttles, checking in hotels and sightseeing to better secure their safety during the holiday.

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)
Longtime harness racing industry participant Ed Sahely of Waterdown, Ont. passed away on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 on his 86th birthday.

Ed was predeceased by his wife Vera and leaves behind his two sons, Eddie and Mitch.

Ed's lifelong passion was betting on horse racing. He was a familiar face for years in the Flamboro Downs grandstand, and owned a number of notable performers over more than 50 years of involvement. Upickit gave son Mitch his first driving win, and in doing so Mitch became the first driver in Canada to notch his first driving win in a sub-2:00 mile. Another notable campaigner was Horizons Dancer, the former older pacing mare track record holder at Flamboro Downs who also gave Hall of Famer Trevor Ritchie his first sub-2:00 driving tally.

The family has indicated that Ed will be cremated and that there will be no public service.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Ed Sahely.
A little bit of recent New Jersey history popped up on Jeopardy! Wednesday night.

The shoutout arrived in the form of Bridgegate  not that anyone got the answer right.

Guest host Anderson Cooper read the clue from the $400 square of the In-car-cerated category, which was sandwiched between Land fill and Modern Hebrew:

Nickname for the 2013 scandal in which access lanes from N.J. to the GW were deliberately closed, causing monster gridlock.

They also didnt know Canal Street was in New York.  #Jeopardy pic.twitter.com/l5GdEJPcIZ  Amy Kuperinsky (@AmyKup) April 29, 2021

Was it the GW that threw them off? (Cooper read this as GW, not GWB or George Washington Bridge.)

Was it the lack of a Chris Christie mention?

Maybe the clue wouldve been more transparent if the direct quote traffic problems in Fort Lee replaced monster gridlock.

Whatever it was, there were no takers for this one. No one answered.

Bridget Anne Kelly, former deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Chris Christie, sent the famous time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee email before the access lanes to the George Washington Bridge were closed.

It's time for some Bridgegate problems on "Jeopardy!""Jeopardy!"/ABC

In 2016, Kelly and Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were found guilty of fraud and conspiracy. They were convicted in connection with a scheme to snarl traffic in Fort Lee.

Prosecutors said the purpose of the scheme was retaliation against Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, after he did not endorse Christie for reelection in 2013.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Kelly and Baronis convictions.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- May is National Hamburger Month, a full 31-day celebration of the beef patty on a bun that's been one of America's most popular foods since White Castle introduced the Original Slider 100 years ago.

In honor of the occasion  and in observance of its 100th birthday this year  White Castle has all kinds of exciting things in store for the month of May.

White Castle is celebrating National Hamburger Month with a sweepstakes offering a grand prize of $100,000. Tweet this White Castle has special packaging in honor of its 100th birthday.

"White Castle is the official sponsor of National Hamburger Month, having created the month-long event in 1991 to pay homage to the Original Slider we created and the industry we pioneered," said Lisa Ingram, president and CEO of White Castle, the nation's first fast-food hamburger chain. "So it's always a special occasion for us, but especially this year as we celebrate our 100th birthday. We look forward to having some fun this month with our Craver fans."

To kick off National Hamburger Month, White Castle is excited to announce the following:

White Castle Time Machine Sweepstakes

On May 1, White Castle will introduce its Time Machine Sweepstakes.* The decade-themed sweepstakes allows restaurant and retail customers to explore White Castle's past, present and future while giving them the chance to win thousands of prizes, including the grand prize of $100,000 in cash.

There are several ways to play and win, but all start by jumping into the time machine at WhiteCastleTimeMachine.com. Players can enter every day until the sweepstakes ends on July 11. No purchase is necessary to play or win, but every White Castle purchase, whether it's from a restaurant or a location where our retail Sliders are sold, offers a chance for the $100,000 grand prize.

Other prizes include:

A personal voicemail greeting recorded by White Castle CEO and Slider Queen Lisa Ingram

The winner's name lit up on an outdoor White Castle restaurant sign

A restaurant booth named after the winner

A shoutout on White Castle's social media

A year's worth of White Castle Sliders

A coveted Telfar shopping bag

Big Green Egg MiniMax Prize Package

A Coca-Cola mini retro cooler and hot beverage tumbler

White Castle 100 th birthday swag

birthday swag White Castle food prizes

Gift cards from popular retailers, such as Apple, Amazon and UberEats

White Castle Shares 100th Birthday with Loyal Cravers

White Castle isn't the only centenarian this year. About 90,000 people in the U.S. are celebrating the big 1-0-0, but two, in particular, stand out because of their long-lasting devotion to White Castle. So White Castle is giving them the royal treatment, including an award, a personal note from CEO Lisa Ingram, and a complimentary White Castle meal for themselves and a few guests.

Joseph Girolamo turned 100 on March 9. The Livonia, Michigan, resident and World War II veteran has lived in the metro-Detroit area his whole life and has been a White Castle fan since his childhood. His large Italian family  he's the oldest of seven kids  indulged on White Castle Sliders any opportunity they got. As he and his siblings got older, they shared their love of White Castle with their own kids, often bringing Sliders to their large family gatherings. In 1973, he took two boxes of frozen Sliders on a plane all the way to California to surprise his brother for his 50th birthday.

Ann Lynch will turn 100 on July 27. A resident of the Chicago area her whole life, Ann loved White Castle growing up and instilled her passion for Sliders in her own seven kids. The self-professed White Castle Queen loves to associate with the brand and still craves the hot and tasty Sliders whenever she can get them. The Original Slider and Cheese Slider remain her favorites!

White Castle Opens in Orlando, its First Location in Florida

May is already going to be a crave-tacular month, but there's more good news. White Castle is coming to Florida! On May 3 at 8 a.m., White Castle will open a Castle in Orlando, marking the brand's return to the Sunshine State since operating four restaurants in Miami in the 1960s. The 4,567-square-foot restaurant  the largest free-standing White Castle in the world  offers two drive-thru lanes and seating for 72 indoors and 56 outdoors. The iconic tower that graces the front of the building features a sleek, industrial-style architectural design rather than the traditional white brick on most other Castles. To provide a more memorable experience for customers, hospitality doors will replace drive-thru windows, allowing team members to walk out to cars in the drive-thru lanes. Once the Orlando castle is open, White Castle will have restaurants in 15 states. Its retail Sliders are available in all 50 states.

More Exciting News Coming Your Way

White Castle will be releasing more news in the next few weeks about National Slider Day, special offers, new partnerships with lifestyle and pop culture brands, and more. Stay tuned!

*About the White Castle Time Machine Sweepstakes

*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A purchase will not increase your chances of winning. Promotion begins 5/1/21 at 12:00 PM ET and ends 7/11/21 at 11:59:59 PM ET. Open to legal residents in the U.S., at least 18 years old. For official rules, including how to enter, free method of entry instructions, odds, prize details and restrictions visit https://whitecastletimemachine.com. Void where prohibited. Messaging and data rates may apply. Sponsor: White Castle Management Co., 555 Edgar Waldo Way, Columbus, OH 43215.

About White Castle

White Castle, America's first fast-food hamburger chain, has been making hot and tasty Sliders as a family-owned business for 100 years. Based in Columbus, Ohio, White Castle started serving The Original Slider in 1921. Today White Castle owns and operates more than 360 restaurants dedicated to satisfying customers' cravings morning, noon and night and sells its famous fare in retail stores nationwide. The Original Slider, named in 2014 as Time magazine's "Most Influential Burger of All Time," is served alongside a menu of creatively crafted Sliders and other mouthwatering food options, including White Castle's Impossible Slider, named by Thrillist in 2019 as the "Best Plant-Based Fast Food Burger." White Castle's commitment to maintaining the highest quality products extends to the company owning and operating its own meat processing plants, bakeries and frozen-food processing plants. In 2021, 100 years after the first Slider was sold, Fast Company named the fast-food pioneer one of the "10 Most Innovative Dining Companies." White Castle is known for the legendary loyalty of its team members, more than 1 in 4 of whom have worked for White Castle for at least 10 years, and also for its faithful fans ("Cravers"), many of whom compete each year for entry into the Cravers Hall of Fame. The official White Castle app, available at iTunes App Store or Google Play, makes it easy for Cravers to access sweet deals and place pickup orders at any time. They can also have their orders delivered using one of White Castle's delivery partners. For more information on White Castle, visit whitecastle.com.

SOURCE White Castle

Related Links

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President Xi Jinping sent condolences on Wednesday to Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, head of Chad's transitional military council, over the passing of Chadian president Idriss Deby.

In the name of the Chinese government and people and in his own name, Xi expressed his deep condolences over Deby's sudden death, and his sincere sympathy to the Chadian government and people as well as the family members of late president Deby.

Deby had led the people of Chad in defending its national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, Xi said, adding that the late president had advanced the country's economic and social development and maintained regional peace and stability.

Xi also praised Deby's important contributions to the development of China-Chad friendly cooperation, saying that Deby attached great importance to developing Chad's relations with China and had actively pushed forward bilateral exchanges and cooperation in all areas.

The Chinese president said that he highly values the friendship between the two peoples and China stands ready to work with Chad to carry forward bilateral relations in order to benefit the two countries and their peoples.

Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, who is also the son of Deby, assumed the functions of Chadian president after Deby, 68, died on April 20 following injuries received at the front line when he commanded fighting against rebels from Libya.

On April 19, Deby had been declared winner of the nation's presidential election for a sixth term.

In 2018, Deby attended the 2018 Forum of China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing.




Press Release

29 April 2021

Spring Break 2021 didn't just dive in, it made a cannonball-sized splash for Florida hotels and other U.S. destinations.

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When looking at STR's School Break Report, 39% of college students and just 7% of K-12 students were on break beginning 6 March. Despite this slightly low percentage, all signs pointed to a strong spring break period right out of the gate. The STR-defined Florida Keys market, at that point, was the only U.S. market to reach an 80% occupancy levelat 85.9% for the opening week of March. Other markets, such as Sarasota (75.4%), Fort Lauderdale (72.5%) and McAllen/Brownsville, TX (70.5%), were lower but all above tstrhe 70% mark.

The following week provided a similar percentage of students on break, but Saturday, 13 March and Sunday, 14 March, is when things really began to heat up. Those dates showed the highest percentage of college students on break at one time (66%). Concurrently, roughly 32% of K-12 students were on break for the respective dates. During the second week of March, the Florida Keys market was once again on top in terms of occupancy (88.0%), followed by Daytona Beach (86.1%).

Photo: STR

A hotel occupancy heatwave

The week ending 20 March is when the Florida markets reached the peak of spring break. The Florida Keys once again had something to brag abouta 95.5% occupancy level. In comparison, the 2020 level for the comparable week was just 52.6%. While that might not be viewed as an achievement because last year was pandemic-affected, how about this? The 2019 level for the comparable week was 92.5%. That's rightthe market achieved a greater occupancy level than what was seen pre-pandemic. For the week ending 20 March, occupancy indexed at 103, meaning that occupancy was 103% of what it was in 2019. This is what STR defines as "Peak" when discussing recovery. The second-highest occupancy market for the week, Sarasota (91.8%), reached the same indexed comparison of 103.

The heightened occupancy and pre-pandemic milestone were surely lifted by the percentage of students on spring break for the weekcollege (roughly 34%) and K-12 (roughly 25%) between 15-19 March. Combine those stats with 20 March, where roughly 46% of college students and 38% of K-12 students were on break, and you have a brewing recipe for success. An added ingredient is that a large amount of both Florida college and K-12 students were on break during the period.

The short-lived, back-to-school blues

The back-to school blues, while only lasting a mere 7 days, came during the week ending 27 March when the amount of college and K-12 students on break was cut in half. This spring breaker downsize was slightly felt in both the Florida Keys and Sarasota, where occupancy came in at 91.7% and 85.7%, respectively. Florida markets still reigned supreme, as nine of the top 10 U.S. occupancy markets for the week were all within the state.

A new contender sneaks its way to the top

A new week brings new visitors, and while college spring break was dwindling, K-12 was about to reach its peak. While the college break typically falls in line with the same period each year (mid-late March), many K-12 districts follow the Easter holiday which is why we see a heightened shift later in the period.

With all eyes on Florida during spring break, an unlikely market was slowly creeping its way to the top week after weekproving that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket.

Let's begin the week ending 3 April with the obviousthe Florida Keys. After a slight decrease in occupancy, the market crept back up to a 93.8% occupancy level, followed by Sarasota (90.6%). Throughout the week, the number of K-12 students on break shifted upwards, remaining in the 30% range, but by the end of the week, the K-12 percentage hit 63%.

Now onto the next newsthe third-place hotel occupancy winner. At this point, the markets had fluctuated week over week by a few percentage points and between a handful of markets. While the third-place market itself was not an unusual destination, the place it held on the occupancy charts the previous weeks made it especially noteworthy. During the week ending 13 March, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, TN, held the 71st occupancy spot at 54.1%, jumping to the 15th spot during the week ending 27 March (73.4%). By the week ending 3 April, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge had surpassed markets that had continuously been leaders throughout the spring break period, taking over the third spot at 88.8%. By this point, the number of students on break in Tennessee had faded out, but surrounding states such as North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and West Virginia were in the thick of breakshowing that drive-to destinations remain a popular option among travelers.

What's especially noteworthy is that, like previously seen in the Florida Keys and Sarasota, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge reached "Peak" recovery during the week of 28 March through 4 April. During the comparable week in 2019, occupancy in the market was just 77.9%. This means that when indexed to 2019, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge's occupancy was 114% of what it was in 2019.

By the following week, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge had climbed to the second-highest occupancy spot among U.S. marketsreaching 92.3%. The market came in behind, you guessed it, the Florida Keys (93.9%). This was the last week where the School Break Report noted a significant percentage of students on break.

If this past year has taught us anything, it's that events such as spring break can majorly impact a marketeven those you might not expect, and weekend leisure trips are still a popular choice among travelers even during a pandemic. With increased vaccinations across the U.S., we are likely to see ramped up hotel performance, especially during the summer months. After drive-to destinations held the top spots during summer 2020, it will be interesting to see which markets take the crown for summer 2021.

About the School Break Report

The School Break Report features 2020-2021 calendar data for most public-school districts and traditional college students across the U.S. This report also features several innovative data visualizations which aggregate academic calendar patterns for the country as well as individual states. For product details , click here
President Muhammadu Buhari is disappointed and sad over the comments of the Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, in reaction to the killings in the state, an official has said.

Mr Buharis stance was contained in a statement signed by a presidential spokesperson, Garba Shehu, on Thursday.

Mr Ortom, earlier in the week, berated the federal governments approach to the prevailing security challenges, saying not less than 70 persons have been killed in Makurdi local government area of the state in two weeks.

Seven deaths were recorded in one of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Abagena village on Monday.

Mr Ortom, in his reaction, called on the president to rise up to his responsibilities and do the needful.

How do you wake up every day and see your people being killed? How can I be a happy man?

Mr President must do the needful and I want to suggest that immediately let there be a security summit. Im aware that the situation is prevalent in other parts of the country.

In his response, Mr Shehu said the president expressed his condolences to the families of the victims who lost their loved ones in the recent spate of killings in Benue State.

Furthermore, he states that the rising levels of incidents, especially the killings and violence in various parts of the country calls for further collaboration with security agencies to curb its recurrence.

He also states his disappointment and sadness to hear Samuel Ortom, the Governor of Benue State make a litany of accusations against his person and his government of following the recent unfortunate incidents in the state.

No responsible government takes pleasure in such events as the killing of the military and that of innocent citizens taking refuge in an Internally Displaced Peoples camp.

Mr Shehu restated that his principal is deeply pained by the terrible acts of violence happening in Benue State and other parts of the country.

  and (he) expects that the law enforcement agencies will go to every possible extent to catch the perpetrators of these heinous acts and bring them to justice.

The lives of fellow citizens should not be desecrated by deploying them in political diatribe which unfortunately appeared to be the intent of the string of emotional attacks and blame laid at the doors of the President for those killings by Governor Ortom.

President Buhari took an oath to defend the life and property of every citizen, a duty he takes seriously and is committed to ensuring.

President Buhari continuously stresses that the strength of our country lies in our diversity in faith, culture, and traditions and attempts to sharpen the divide between northern and southern Nigeria, between Muslims and Christians, and between communities that have coexisted for centuries should be frowned upon and resisted.

The presidential spokesperson blamed religious leaders and other leaders for the countrys woes.

As Nigerians, we accuse colonial rulers of the policy of divide and rule. Today, it is our own leaders who put region against region, religion against religion, ethnic group against ethnic group and community against community.

The future of Benue State and indeed that of the entire country lies in harmony and the respect for law, order, and the constitution. It is the only way to achieve progress and development.

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While the President will continue to keep security, police and the armed forces on their toes to be on top of their act in troubled parts of the country, the situation in the states will greatly be helped by everyone working together because that is the foundation on which progress and prosperity can be achieved.

He then advised that Benue under the Ortom administration should cooperate with the federal government in the implementation of a number of national strategies programs in addressing underlying issues militating against peace, progress and development.
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover.

We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.
Tesla already uses something similar to ALKS known as Autopilot

Britain is set to allow self-driving vehicles with a possibility the first driver-assist models might be on roads by the end of the year, the government said today.

Alongside a call for evidence about self-driving systems, the Department of Transport said it was working on changes to the Highway Code to enable the use of vehicles equipped with Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS)  a system of sensors and software that keep a vehicle within a lane, accelerate and brake without a driver.

Speeds will be limited to 37mph initially, said the DoT.

Motor manufacturers welcomed it as a step forward but insurers reacted with caution saying the technology was not proven.

Using the ALKS system might lead to confusion about the need for a driver added Matthew Avery, research director at Thatcham Research, which has analysed ALKS.

"Aside from the lack of technical capabilities, by calling ALKS automated our concern also is that the UK Government is contributing to the confusion and frequent misuse of assisted driving systems that have unfortunately already led to many tragic deaths," he told Reuters.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders disagreed and argued that the use of automated systems might reduce human error by drivers.

Automated driving systems could prevent 47,000 serious accidents and save 3,900 lives over the next decade through their ability to reduce the single largest cause of road accidents  human error, said SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes.

Motorists could soon be using self-driving vehicles on British roads, making future journeys safer, easier, greener and more reliable. ????



Follow the link to find out more about self-driving technology and the benefits it will bring ???? https://t.co/j7Nce9stlA #BuildBackBetter pic.twitter.com/DD1iXWgnws  Department for Transport (@transportgovuk) April 28, 2021

( ) already uses a system similar to ALKS known as Autopilot and it has been embroiled in controversy after a series of accidents.

Only last week, two people were reported killed in Texas after a Tesla S, which is fitted with Autopilot, careered off the road with no one at the wheel according to local police.

The USs National Highway Traffic Safety Board said in March it had 27 investigations underway into crashes involving Tesla vehicles.

Tesla has stressed that Autopilot is not an autonomous-driving program and drivers must be ready to take control of the vehicle at any time.

On its website, it said: Autopilot and full self-driving capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment, noting that even with these features no Tesla cars are fully autonomous today.

CEO Elon Musk added that data on its cars fitted with AutropIlot indicated there was a 10 times lower chance of an accident than average.

In a statement with the announcement, UK Transport Minister Rachel Maclean said: This is a major step for the safe use of self-driving vehicles in the UK, making future journeys greener, easier and more reliable while also helping the nation to build back better.

But we must ensure that this exciting new tech is deployed safely, which is why we are consulting on what the rules to enable this should look like.
SOFIA -- Bulgaria says it will expel another Russian diplomat after the country's authorities said they suspected six Russian citizens of involvement in a series of blasts that hit four weapons and armament facilities over the past 10 years.

Bulgarias Foreign Ministry declared one more Russian diplomat persona non grata and requested the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation to provide full assistance to the Bulgarian authorities in their investigation into the blasts, the ministry said in a statement on April 29.

Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva held an in-depth and serious conversation with the Russian ambassador in Sofia, the statement read, adding that Bulgaria wishes to maintain equal and mutually beneficial relations with Russia and in this regard insists on active and effective assistance from the Russian side to clarify the circumstances surrounding the incidents on our territory.

Moscow, which has denied any involvement in the incidents, has vowed to respond to Bulgarias move.

Bulgarian prosecutors said on April 28 that that there is a reasonable assumption that the blasts that rocked the four warehouses and production facilities in Bulgaria between 2011 and 2020 are connected to the near-fatal poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in 2015 and an explosion at Czech ammunition depots in 2014.

Since October 2019, the EU and NATO member state has expelled seven other Russian diplomats and an employee of Russias Embassy over alleged spying and other accusations.

A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor-General's Office, Siika Mileva, told a press conference that three Russians who are being sought over the murder attempt against Gebrev and two other Bulgarian citizens most likely were agents of Russias GRU military intelligence.

Mileva also said that at least six Russians identified as, or are believed to be GRU agents were residing in Bulgaria around the dates of the blasts and the poisonings.

The Czech Republic earlier this month accused Russian GRU military intelligence of being behind an October 2014 explosion in the town of Vrbetice that set off 50 metric tons of stored ammunition and killed two people.

The Czech government later announced the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats it considered to be spies, setting off a string of tit-for-tat moves between Prague and Moscow.

In solidarity, several NATO and EU members have followed by expelling Russian diplomats for alleged spying as well.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on April 29 blasted the Czech and Bulgarian unacceptable and inflammatory actions, as well as completely unacceptable and baseless accusations against Russia.

Such actions wont go unanswered," he told journalists.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax
The materiality analysis involved over 740 stakeholders, a group comprised of those inside and outside the bank, in determining the topics that are material for illimity. Five pillars in line with international trends were identified, ranging from the G20s priorities to the new Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics:



Principles of Governance: illimitys Corporate Governance sees a Board of Directors, led by the Chairperson Rosalba Casiraghi, that is well-balanced in terms of gender.

illimitys Corporate Governance sees a Board of Directors, led by the Chairperson Rosalba Casiraghi, that is well-balanced in terms of gender. People: illimity was recognised as a Great Place to Work for the second consecutive year, with 85% of employees noting overall satisfaction and the gender pay-gap effectively closed.

illimity was recognised as a Great Place to Work for the second consecutive year, with 85% of employees noting overall satisfaction and the gender pay-gap effectively closed. Prosperity : the Bank has introduced an ESG rating into its credit assessment and in 2020 has allocated financing of EUR 247 million to the relaunching of SMEs in difficulty.

the Bank has introduced an ESG rating into its credit assessment and in 2020 has allocated financing of EUR 247 million to the relaunching of SMEs in difficulty. Planet and Society: the Bank has offset the emissions of 489 tCO2eq arising from its business activities (Scope 1 and Scope 2), representing the Groups 2020 Carbon Footprint, by purchasing carbon credit certificates.

the Bank has offset the emissions of 489 tCO2eq arising from its business activities (Scope 1 and Scope 2), representing the Groups 2020 Carbon Footprint, by purchasing carbon credit certificates. Innovation: a focus on technology and the digital approach are distinctive features of the Bank, with 100% of its proprietary systems on cloud computing.



MILAN, Italy, April 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via InvestorWire-- illimity Bank S.p.A. (illimity or the Bank) presents its first Voluntary Consolidated Non-Financial Statement (NFS) pursuant to the Italian Legislative Decree no. 254/2016 and announces that it already achieved carbon neutrality at a Group level in 2020.

Since starting activities in 2019, the Bank has always placed specific emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Taking a native approach, illimity has embarked on a path of building these into the Groups strategies, processes and governance. This commitment is also reflected in the Groups decision to prepare its first voluntary NFS, continuing the reporting and transparency process started last year with the publication of its Sustainability Profile.

With its first Non-Financial Statement, illimity provides a wide range of information on its ESG performance to all its stakeholders. The report  based on the figures as of December 31, 2020  has been prepared in compliance with the GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards (GRI Standards)  Core option, to which voluntary qualitative and quantitative indicators have been added. The preparation of this report, in the name of the digital innovation that has always set the Bank apart, involved all the main corporate functions and divisions using an ESG Digital Governance collaborative platform.

The illimity Groups first Sustainability Report represents an important moment for sharing the responsibilities that guide us in helping people, families and businesses to unleash and enhance their potential with all of our stakeholders, stated illimity Chairperson Rosalba Casiraghi. I am especially proud of also chairing the Sustainability Committeea testament to our strong commitment to ESG issuesan involvement that unites us all, from the Banks top management to its single functions and areas.

We are continuing our commitment to ensuring solid profits for people who have invested in illimity. This innovative project aims to be useful to society as a whole while advancing sustainability and sustainable growth in our country, said illimity CEO Corrado Passera. Italy can and must reactivate its economic and social potential this year. And we in illimity intend to play our part in that process.

The Non-Financial Statement is structured on the basis of five strategic pillars  Principles of Governance, People, Prosperity, Planet and Society and Innovation - in line with international trends, which range from the priorities of the G20 under the Italian Presidency to the new Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics.

The following paragraphs set out the results achieved and the initiatives begun in 2020 for each of the five pillars:

1. Principles of Governance

A rule-based culture and integrity in business conduct act as the basis for the way in which corporate governance operates and staff work. In addition, diversity and expertise are central values, and in practice these are reflected in the Groups corporate governance system: In this respect, illimitys Board of Directors is one of the few in Italy with a Chairperson, Rosalba Casiraghi, in office since 2018 and re-appointed as head of the new Board of Directors on April 22, 2021. Since February 2021, illimitys Board of Directors is well-balanced in terms of gender, with 56% of directors being men and 44% women. A Sustainability Committee looks after sustainability issues, providing proposals and advice to the Board of Directors. The Communication & Stakeholder Engagement Function coordinates the process for monitoring and reporting non-financial matters, in constant collaboration with the Groups various functions and divisions.

2. People

Diversity and inclusion are crucial factors in a Group consisting of over 600 illimiters having 20 nationalities and coming from more than 200 organisations operating in 17 different industries. From the beginning, illimity has always set its sights on closing the gender pay-gap, which, owing to grade and work experience, is at a physiological level of 3.6%. Specific emphasis is given to reconciling work with family life. Parental leave for new fathers allows for an extension to 20 days compared to the seven days envisaged in the new contract for the banking sector, and since the start of the health emergency, employees who have to look after children or relatives have been granted two hours of paid leave a day. For the second consecutive year, the Bank has been recognised as a Great Place to Work, with an especially positive perception by employees of the working environment: 85% of them consider it excellent. In addition, the year saw the launch of the illimitHER programme, created to enhance the potential of young women promoting under-35 role models who have followed STEM paths. The programme involved over 10 speakers, 20 partners and inspired 6,000 young people in its first eight months of activity.

3. Prosperity

The illimity Groups aim is to generate long-term value for its stakeholders. Its business divisions are committed in this sense, having as their objective the unleashing and enhancement of the potential of people, families and businesses.



The SME Division of illimity supports small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in development, restructuring and relaunch processes, with the resulting positive repercussions on society, such as jobs and entrepreneurship. Financing totalling EUR 247 million was directed towards relaunching businesses in difficulty in 2020. In addition, at an environmental level, EUR 29 million was disbursed in operations dedicated to sectors involved in the circular economy, green transportation and renewable energy. An ESG rating has been gradually introduced to integrate sustainability and related risks in the credit assessment process.

The Distressed Credit Investment & Servicing Division is one of Italys leading operators specialising in corporate non-performing loans (NPL) and unlikely-to-pay (UTP). The division focuses on purchasing distressed loans, financing third-party investors that purchase bad loans and, through its neprix servicing platform, managing and enhancing the value of distressed loans. As part of its servicing activity, the Division provides professional support for its customers, seeking to conclude out-of-court agreements that speed up settlement periods and contribute to recover the exposure. The Collaborative Agreement Index, the ratio between the number of positions closed through out-of-court proceedings and the total number of positions, ended the year at 80.8%.

In addition, the Division identified the energy sector as an area of further specialisation, also given the contribution the segment provides to green-style energy conversion. A dedicated desk has therefore been set up having not only financial expertise but also technical and legal skills in energy-based and environmental matters.

The Banks Digital Direct Division , i llimitybank.com, was set up with the aim of providing value-added services and contents and in 2020 initiated projects for the dissemination of financial culture. Appreciation for the Banks initiatives and services was reflected in its Net Promoter Score  an index that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty  for which it achieved 48 points compared to an industry average of 9.

4. Planet and Society

Measuring, mitigating and offsetting emissions

illimitys business model, with its fully digital and cloud-based infrastructure, minimises direct environmental impacts and makes the responsible use of resources more efficient. The Banks process for measuring environmental impacts was originally set up from the beginning of its activity and further extended to include all Group companies in 2020.

illimity introduced mitigation activities as a means of making consumption more efficient and reducing usage by way of initiatives designed to discourage the use of lifts, printers and (FSC certified) paper, encouraging the exchange of digital documents. The Milan offices are equipped with a system of timers that enable lighting and air-conditioning systems to be automatically switched off. In addition, from 2021 the electricity used in the two main offices in Milan and Modena is produced from 100% GO (Guarantee of Origin) certified renewable sources.

Despite the limited environmental impact, right from the start the Bank decided to offset the emissions arising from its business activities (Scope 1 and Scope 2); these emissions, amounting to 489 tCO2eq. in 2020, represent the Groups Carbon Footprint. Carbon Neutrality is achieved by purchasing Gold Standards carbon credit certificates linked to the Clean Cookstoves Mozambique project in Maputo, Mozambique, which has led to the replacement of high-usage coal burners with more efficient systems designed to reduce CO2 emissions and the resulting benefits on the savings and health of the local populations.

Initiatives to combat the Covid-19 emergency

illimitys smart native, innovative and technological nature enabled the Bank to be one of the first businesses to introduce continuous smart working as the standard way of working right from the beginning of the emergency. In addition, a continuous screening process has been introduced for all employees and collaborators, who have the possibility of undertaking a free-of-charge swab test in their offices once a week, and a specific Covid-19 insurance policy has been taken out.

In terms of business support, illimity took prompt action to implement the measures introduced by the legislator, setting up a lean, streamlined process for obtaining the suspensions contemplated in the Cura Italia Decree Law and ABI moratoria. In 2020 suspensions and moratoria were concluded in almost 200 cases for a total of approximately EUR 86.5 million (now reduced to approximately EUR 48 million). illimity further acted on a timely basis by donating medical equipment worth EUR 270 thousand that was needed to deal with the health emergency at the disposal of hospital facilities.

5. Innovation

In illimity, innovation is the driver capable of generating value for the whole business, the strategic lever that pervades the entire organisation and provides a real contribution to achieving the Groups business objectives and responding to stakeholders needs. A focus on technology and the digital approach is one of the distinctive features of the Bank, the first Italian institution to be set with 100% of its systems using cloud computing. Aware that innovation and a digital approach represent a fundamental approach to a countrys growth, illimity consistently proposes services that respond to the new needs of the customer by combining cutting edge technologies with the human dimension.



From a fully Open Platform perspective, the Bank has extended its range of services to include functions that support a greener lifestyle, particularly by fostering sustainable mobility and physical well-being. Noteworthy among the services launched last year is illimity connect, a program enabling customers to make payments from a single digital touchpoint. This innovation is an example of how Open Banking technology can be used to help people to improve the relationship with their finances, giving them greater control and awareness. illimity's growth in Open Banking has seen a very strong acceleration in the last part of the year since the creation of the joint venture in HYPE, the leading Italian fintech platform with over 1.3 million customers.

To obtain further information and download the 2020 NFS, consult the website https://www.illimity.com/en/who-we-are/sustainability.

For further information :

Investor Relations

Silvia Benzi: +39.349.7846537 - +44.7741.464948 - silvia.benzi@illimity.com

Press & Communication illimity Isabella Falautano, Francesca DAmico Sara Balzarotti, Ad Hoc Communication Advisors +39.340.1989762 press@illimity.com +39.335.1415584 sara.balzarotti@ahca.it

Wire Service Contact:

InvestorWire (IW)

Los Angeles, California

www.InvestorWire.com

212.418.1217 Office

Editor@InvestorWire.com
Local resident Shahnawaz Shaikh (center), who sold his SUV car to raise funds in order to start a free service to provide oxygen cylinders to the needy people amid the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, manages data in his operating center that was previously being used a general store at a slum in Mumbai on April 28, 2021. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP via Getty Images)
A Melbourne woman has died after suffering an allergic reaction during a heart scan organised by her employer.

Mother-of-two Peta Hickey had an anaphylactic reaction to contrast dye injected as part of a CT scan of her heart in May 2019. She died eight days later.

Peta Hickeys death is before the coroner.

The 43-year-old general manager had the scan at the suggestion of her employer, Programmed Skilled Workforce Limited, which had launched a testing regime for all senior staff after a colleague suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest while on a work trip to Japan in 2018.

Ms Hickey had no medical history of cardiac problems.
Popcaans run-in on Sunday with a female Inspector of Police in St. Thomas, who slapped him with breaches of Jamaicas Road Traffic Act, remains the talk of the town, with the incident now being made the subject of a stinging Jamaica Observer editorial and one eyewitness coming forward to defend the Dancehall superstar.

On Sunday afternoon the Numbers Dont Lie artist was prosecuted for, among other things, driving an unlicensed motor vehicle, driving without insurance or fitness, having no fixed registration plate, driving without a helmet, and careless driving. A day later, he complained on Twitter that he was being targeted by the St. Thomas police with every move I make and said that he was thinking of withdrawing his annual Unruly Fest concert as a result.

However, his assertions of being a police target have been rubbished by Commanding Officer for the parish, Superintendent Allison Byfield. According to the STAR, she said police had been receiving reports that a gentleman by the name of Popcaan was staging river parties in the Sunning Hill area and the attendees would sprint off into bushes whenever they saw the police approaching.

Byfield added that along with contravening the law on Sunday, Popcaan had been warned the week before about hosting events in contravention of the Disaster Risk Management Act (DRMA) after he was spotted at the same site in the company of other persons. Under the DRMA, there is a ban on all public events. Public beaches and rivers are also to remain closed until May 4.

She said that instead of prosecuting him for breaching the DRMA, the 32-year-old Bath native, was warned and asked to pack up and leave.

The police could have charged him then but they did not, so I dont think hes being targeted. In fact, the inspector who prosecuted him on Sunday didnt know who he was at the time, and even if she did, this is a very professional inspector  a principled person, the Superintendent said.

Byfield contended that nobody is above the law, and that everyone travelling through the parish must have a vehicle that is properly regulated and deemed fit for the road. The Superintendent said on the day Popcaan was prosecuted, the police received reports that a river party was being held in Sunning Hill, and acting upon intelligence, went to the area where they intercepted a fleet of vehicles with the entertainer in the midst on a bike.

A male figure on the bike, when the inspector asked him Where is the documents for the bike? he told the inspector yuh can tek it. So the police asked him for his drivers licence. He said he doesnt have one and she asked him for it again, he said he doesnt have it. Hence, summons were prepared and served on him for breaches of the Road Traffic Act, she told The Star.

Observers Editorial

Popcaans statement that he would withdraw his Unruly Fest from St. Thomas, is also being questioned by The Jamaica Observer newspaper. The paper stopped short of describing his comments as puerile in its editorial today, noting that the reason he gave appeared frivolous, and they would really love to hear from Popcaan what is his real motivation for wanting to give up his brainchild.

The editorial, which was titled Why dont we just hand over Jamaica to Popcaan and his ilk?, said Popcaan made an empty threat to end his aptly named Unruly Fest concert, complaining bitterly that he is being harassed by the St Thomas police.

According to the newspaper, without greater clarification, we can only assume that he considers himself above the law and ought not to be stopped by the police carrying out their duties.

So what terrible act of oppression and persecution could have caused the entertainer to want to abandon the annually held concert into which he has invested so much time, resources, and effort? the Observer stated.

The editorial also said there is a history of entertainers behaving as if they are little gods who are untouchable and objecting strenuously to being held to account by law enforcers and it hopes Mr Sutherland is not one of them.

We can only draw from the failure of Popcaan to contest the charges on Twitter that the polices account is factual. But even assuming that the lawmen made up the charges against him  which should come out in the trial  that could hardly be a reason to give up on an event which is said to be a boost to the economic activity of the parish of his birth, the Observer added.

St. Thomas Resident Defends Poppi

St. Thomas native Allana Davis, who said she was present at the time of Popcaans apprehension, has sought to defend the Party Shot artist, claiming that the St. Thomas police appear to have a personal anti-Poppi or even anti-dancehall mandate.

According to her, if she had not been there myself, I would have bought into the manufactured argument that Popcaan just unruly now.

She described Popcaans situation as being a big sting operation and an act of persecution on a young man in his community, on a dirt road riding a dirt bike on a dirt track, one whose enduring passion has been to develop his underdeveloped parish.

Davis also rebuked the Jamaica Constabulary Force for its poor community policing practices and lack of engagement of the young men in the Bath area, and expressed dismay at how the police quickly sent, to national media outlets, details of the encounter.

The Bath police did not take the time to positively impact the group of young men they met during their operation persecute Popcaan on SundayNo sign of community policing, she argued.

She also highlighted Popcaans community development initiatives, back-to-school treats for students, cleaning and upgrading of the river in his community for eco-tourism, and cutting roads and fixing trail routes in St Thomas at his own expense.

She contended that instead of pumping money into community development doing this, the Vanquish artiste while he could have relocated to Canada or Europe and continue to build on the mega music fame he has been generating or invested his energies and money in a Kingston community or hide away in one of his mansions in upper St Andrew or elsewhere.

But, in turn, the police in the parish, hungry for fame, use every opportunity to kill his passion for his community, driving him and his investment further away from St Thomas. If a man cannot find peace in his home, he may just have to find a new home, and so too will his investments, Davis said.
(Natural News) Professor Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine and editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) publication Evidence-Based Medicine, has issued a warning that face masks are useless at protecting against infection with the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

During a recent appearance on British news, Heneghan explained that forcing children to wear a face covering all day long while at school is especially pointless  and many would say harmful  because cloth and plastic have never been proven to stop the spread.

In the absence of evidence, if you think they should be wearing them, go and talk to some children, Heneghan says. Thats what Ive done and said, Whats the reality on the ground? Whats it like for you in class? How does it feel? And I can tell you they hate them.

They find it really difficult. They dont adhere to the guidelines, so, for instance, they go in the pocket to pull them out. Thats a dangerous issue with co-infections and the potential for that to stay infected for a period of time.

Heneghan believes in taking a common sense, precautionary approach when it comes to imposing interventions like masks that have the potential to cause harm. The government seems to be mandating them willy-nilly using not science but fear and superstition as backing. In Heneghans apparent view, this is a mistake.

So, I think, look, it comes back to at the end of the day common sense. And, in effect, were going in two weeks time, theyre being told they can remove them, he says.

I think, again, the government should start to look cool and calmly at the data, and then think, Where does it have an evidence base and where doesnt it? And thats all I ever do is say, Wheres the evidence to inform what we do? And if its lacking, then you have to err on the side of not intervening.

Heneghan directs the NIHR SPCR Evidence Synthesis Working Group, a collaboration of nine primary care departments across various universities in the United Kingdom. He also directs the Oxford Covid Evidence Services, which oversees more than 400 peer-reviewed publications.

Heneghan further edits the Catalogue of Bias, a consortium of definitions, explanations and examples of some of the most important biases that can affect health research.

If your children are struggling to breathe every day, you have Fauci to thank

That someone of this caliber is speaking out against masks says a lot. As far as we can tell, Heneghan is more in-the-know than Anthony Fauci, who seems to know nothing about public health, hence why he is constantly flip-flopping about the simplest things.

At first, Fauci said masks were bad. Then they were good. Then they were bad again. Now they are good again. The guy just cannot get his story straight, and tens of millions of innocent children are now having to suffer through the school day muzzled and suffocated.

The sun kills the virus and it is blatantly stupid and child abuse for these kids to be wearing masks, wrote one commenter at Citizen Free Press.

There is no evidence masks work, wrote another. They dont stop infections or transmission of viruses, but they do harm health and may lead to death in immunocompromised people.

Yet another pointed out that while a mask might block large particles like dust while you are sweeping your garage, they certainly are not effective at blocking microscopic virus particles that pass right through their mesh with almost zero resistance.

More related news stories about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) deception can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

CitizenFreePress.com

NaturalNews.com
2021Fair Housing: Restoring HUD Rules and Revenues Nearly $9 billion boost in discretionary funds to support CDBG, homelessness

Although the month of April is annually observed as Fair Housing Month, the reality for Black America and other people of color is that housing has not significantly changed since the 1968 federal enactment of the Fair Housing Act. Its enactment came seven days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who had strongly advocated fair and open housing.

But 53 years after an historic enactment, race and place remain the determining factors of who is allowed the opportunity to build wealth, as well as to share wealths financial advantages across family generations.

What makes this years observance more hopeful are renewed efforts by both President Biden and Congress to correct decades long denials of full access to the American Dream.

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For the first time in more than four years, the nations President committed his Administration to the active pursuit of fair housing. Beginning with a memorandum coinciding with his inauguration on January 26th, President Biden directed the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to as soon as practicable, take all steps necessary to examine the effects of the Trump Administrations 2020 repeal of two key housing rules issued by the Obama Administration: the 2013 Disparate Impact Standard and the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.

On inauguration day, the U.S. Senate had not yet taken action on many cabinet-level agencies.

This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination, stated President Biden on January 26th, but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.

The disparate impact standard for proving discrimination helps to ensure that lenders, insurers, governments and others covered by the 1968 Fair Housing Act to analyze their policies and eliminate those that disproportionately hurt certain groups without justification. Similarly, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) legally requires that federal agencies as well as recipients of federal funds to actively address and work to eliminate housing discrimination and segregation.

Systemic discrimination continues to limit housing opportunity for Black and Brown communities and stunts our countrys economic growth, said Nikitra Bailey, Executive Vice President with the Center for Responsible Lending. Reinstating the original Disparate Impact and AFFH rules will move us closer to achieving a more just society where everyone has access to opportunity. Moreover, given the large amounts of federal funding subject to the AFFH requirement being distributed, there is an urgency to restore the rules obligations on jurisdictions.

Only a month following her March 13th U.S. Senate confirmation, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge acted on the Presidents direction and announced steps to restore both fair housing rules gutted by the Trump Administration. HUD has submitted the rules to the Office of Management for regulatory review. Once OMB completes its review, the revised rules will be published in the Federal Register.

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As much as fair housing regulations are needed, adequate funding to support HUD programs determine how many low-and-moderate income people can actually receive housing assistance.

On April 9th and exercising presidential authority for discretionary spending, $68.7 billion was awarded to HUD for fiscal year (FY) 2022. This nearly $9 billion increase above 2021 funding levels will boost revenues for programs delivering direct services. All of these monies are bonus funds that will be augmented by other funding made available through the annual budgetary process.

President Bidens FY22 discretionary funding request turns the page on years of inadequate and harmful spending requests and instead empowers HUD to meet the housing needs of families and communities across the country. I am particularly pleased that the request proposes more than $30 billion to expand housing vouchers to an additional 200,000 low-income families, noted HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge.

The bulk of these funds are dedicated to expanding the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program by $3.8 billion. CDBG is one of the departments most valued programs and has benefitted over the years from bipartisan support due to its focus on local priorities to remedy housing ills. Similarly, $3.5 billion in discretionary revenues will be dedicated to resolving homelessness.

After more than a year of challenges wrought by COVID-19, the risk of losing housing looms even larger today. Preserving affordable housing and homelessness prevention are key pulse points for many local communities.

Other HUD programs that will expand due to the discretionary funding include: Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8 housing that augments monthly rental cost in the private housing market and serves low-to-moderate income families; and the HOME Investment Partnerships Program that serves elderly and persons with disabilities with permanently affordable housing.

Fair housing is also emerging as a priority item on Capitol Hill lawmakers.

On April 13th, the U.S. Senate Banking and Urban Affairs Committee convened a hearing entitled, Separate and Unequal: The Legacy of Racial Discrimination in Housing. Ohio Senator Sherrod Browns opening statement as committee chair set the tone for the forum.

As my friend Joyce Beatty said recently, we cannot change our history, noted Sen. Brown. But we can learn from it, and we can build a far better future  one that brings us closer to making our founding ideals real for everyone. Fair housing took longer to pass through Congress than voting rights, desegregation of public spaces, and even equal opportunities for employment.

Expert testimony provided startling data and calls for changes that will make real the promises of fair housing.

Testifying on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., Richard Rothstein, its Senior Fellow Emeritus, candidly assessed Americas lack of fair housing and the consequences of it. Since its founding in 1940 by the late Thurgood Marshall, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, achieve racial justice through litigation, advocacy and public education. In housing, LDF works to combat racial segregation and promote racial integration and opportunity.

As an example of federal discriminatory practices, Rothstein cited the example of Levittown, a mass-produced post World War II suburb of 17,000 homes that sold for $7,990 with a 0% down payment for veterans. Despite the guarantees of the Servicemens Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the G.I. bill, Black veterans were denied loans and suburbs remained all-white.

This discrimination was long sustained, even though the G.I. bill guaranteed a range of benefits to veterans that spanned education, unemployment, and loans to purchase homes, farms or businesses.

Despite the homeownership boom in the 1950s and 1960s, which sent homeownership rates in the U.S. from 30 to 60%, 98% of the loans approved by the federal government between 1934 and 1968 went to white applicants, testified Rothstein.

By guaranteeing affordable mortgages for white families and excluding Black families or limiting Black families to purchase in less economically advantageous neighborhoods, the government created, encouraged, and reinforced intense residential racial segregation throughout the nation, continued Rothstein. White flight, or the creation of white suburbs, was also undergirded by massive federal investments in the construction of the interstate highway system. The federal government often took possession of homes and land in Black communities by claiming eminent domain in order to construct highways as physical barriers between white neighborhoods and areas with a large presence of African Americans or communities of color.

Also testifying at the Senate hearing was Lisa Rice, President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, the countrys only national non-profit civil rights agency dedicated to eliminating all forms of housing discrimination and ensuring equitable housing opportunities for all.

In this nation where you live matters, said Rice. Your address determines almost everything about you  your chances of graduating from high school or college, getting arrested, net worth, income, ability to own a home, credit score and how long you will live. Your zip code is a better determinant of your health than your genetic code. Segregation creates a built inequitable environment where resources and opportunities get concentrated in predominately white communities and are sparsely located in communities of color It is the bedrock of inequality in America because neighborhoods of color are more likely to have poorly resourced schools and fewer amenities like healthcare facilities, grocery stores, green spaces, and bank branches. But communities of color are more likely to have hazardous and toxic waste plants and more polluted land, air, and water.

When you look at our residential and lending patterns, we are a century behind where we need to beThe bias in our markets is not a bug but a feature. They were built that way and intended to operate in a discriminatory fashion. They will continue to do so until we make systemic and cultural changes, concluded Rice.

In other words, race all too often determines place. And place remains a key determinant in life. Real fair housing can and must be the difference and the change.
The mega-fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is on the brink of being called off, with alternative opponents for both Britain's world heavyweight champions already on stand-by.

Fury's US promoter Bob Arum said on Thursday night: 'We keep passing deadlines for Eddie Hearn to deliver the deal he keeps talking about and we are out of time. Once again he is saying next week but next week never comes.'

Legal arbitration about Deontay Wilder's right to a trilogy fight with Fury, who sensationally knocked him out to gain the WBC world title, have been delayed even longer than the Joshua contract but have been accelerated this week in New York.

Anthony Joshua's fight with British heavyweight rival Tyson Fury is under serious jeopardy

A two-fight deal had initially been agreed between the heavyweight champions in March

Wilder is back in training and Arum added: 'Fury-Joshua looks dead in the water. Tyson has been out of action for too long and has to fight this summer. Who else is he going to fight other than Wilder? A third fight between them is huge in its own right.'

Oleksandr Usyk, the former undisputed world cruiserweight champion, is also back at work in the gym as the mandatory challenger for one of Joshua's collection of belts and is ready to step in against AJ.

Hearn is still insisting that a $150million (108m) deal for a mid-summer battle between Joshua and the Gypsy King remains in the Saudi Arabia pipeline for this summer, saying: 'It is definitely, 100 per cent, going to happen.'

Bob Arum (left), Fury's US promoter, has slammed Eddie Hearn for not delivering a deal

AJ's promoter, Hearn, has been confident that the heavyweight bout would be confirmed soon

Arum retorts: 'Eddie only has one fight left with his Joshua contract and he is desperate for it be this big one. Usyk is a a good fight but not as huge as Tyson and AJ. But it doesn't look possible now before next year or even the year after. Like Tyson, Joshua needs to fight soon.'

Hearn protests that he has been carrying the work-load of finding a country willing to pay a site fee massive enough to meet both boxers' expectations of one hundred million dollar purses, adding: 'A little support would be nice.'

Arum and Fury's UK promoter Frank Warren said that when the various, complex tasks of a fight of this magnitude were allocated between them, Hearn insisted on handling the search for a site.

Arum has now talked up a trilogy fight for Fury with American rival Deontay Wilder

Under Arum's TV contract with ESPN, the US Disney-owned giant, Fury can still expect a hefty pay-night in America against Wilder, with help from BT.

Unless the biggest Brit battle ever can be saved - and next - Sky will have to rejoin the bidding for UK rights to what might yet end up as a Wembley blockbuster.

If so, that would delight British fans, even though there will be massive, widespread dismay at another delay. Even more so if Joshua v Fury never happens.
New Delhi, April 29 : The BJP led-NDA is set grab the strongholds of Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and the Left in West Bengal as out of the 79 such seats, the saffron party is projected to win 37 seats, according to the CVoter Exit Poll for Times Now/ABP News.

Out of the 79 important constituencies, the Trinamool is likely to win 40 seats, while the BJP is projected to win 37, and one each would go to the Congress and the Left, as per the exit poll.

Even though the Trinamool is leading, there would be a close contest between Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and BJP's Suvendu Adhikari, her former close aide, in Nandigram.

In Tarakeswar, BJP's Swapan Dasgupta is leading by a very thin margin, the survey found. In Debra, where two former IPS officers -- Humayun Kabir (Trinamool) and Bharati Ghosh (BJP) --- are contesting, the BJP has an edge in a close contest.

In Domjur, BJP's Rajib Banerjee, a former minister in the Mamata Banerjee-led government, is projected to win by a thin margin, the survey found.

Region-wise, the survey data show that the ruling Trinamool is expected to grab 13 to 15 seats in the Deltaic Region, followed by the BJP with 11 to 13 seats.

In the Greater Kolkata region, the Trinamool is projected to secure 37 to 39 seats, while the BJP is likely to corner 16 to 18 seats.

In the Highlands region, according to the survey projections, the Trinamool is likely to register victory on 25 to 27 seats, while the BJP is expected to grab 23 to 25 seats.

In the North Border region, the Trinamool is expected to emerge winner on 29 to 31 seats, while the BJP is projected to win 20 to 22 seats.

In the Northern Hills region, while the Trinamool is likely to garner 11 to 13 seats, the BJP is expected to register victory on 14 seats.

Southern Plains is another region where the Trinamool is expected to grab a large number of seats as the party is expected to win 37 to 39 seats, while the BJP is projected to manage 25 to 27 seats.

The trends are happening also because the first-time voters came out in large numbers in support of the BJP-led NDA in West Bengal. However, more female voters voted for the Trinamool, the exit poll found.

Meanwhile, the BJP is likely to receive votes in large numbers from the OBC (45.9 per cent), SC/ST (84.1/45.7 per cent) and upper caste Hindu communities (49 per cent).

The Trinamool is likely get 35.6 per cent OBC votes, 35.4 per cent SC votes, 36 per cent ST votes and 37 per cent votes from the other Hindu voters.
[April 29, 2021] SEngine Precision Medicine to Present Pan Cancer Data on Predictive Value of PARIS Test at 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting

SEATTLE, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SEngine Precision Medicine, a precision oncology company that pre-tests drugs on live tumor specimens employing its CLIA certified PARIS Test, today announced that new data from a study summarizing the predictive value of the PARIS Test across solid tumor cancers will be presented during a poster session (abstract number 2602) at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, to be held virtually June 4-8, 2021.

Details related to the poster presentation are as follows:

Title: A cancer organogram test as a guide for oncology treatments in solid tumors: an analysis of 628 tests in 419 patients

First Author: Astrid Margossian, MD, PhD

Senior Author: Carla Grandori, MD, PhD

Abstract Number: 2602

Poster Session: Developmental Therapeutics Immunotherapy About PARIS Test

The PARIS Test is a next generation diagnostic test that predicts drug responses integrating knowledge of cancer genomics with drug sensitivity testing of patient-derived live cells combined with robotics and AI-driven computational tools. SEngines CLIA certified PARIS Test generates actionable drug sensitivity reports for patients and is applicable to all solid tumors including colon, breast, lung, ovarian and pancreatic cancer. Cancer-derived cells grown in 3D outside the body maintain the functionalityof the original tumor as well as its genomic characteristics. For cancers where a treatment path is not clear, such as many metastatic and recurrent cancers, the PARIS Test provides crucial information to treating physicians to match the right drug to the right patient.



About SEngine Precision Medicine

SEngine Precision Medicine Inc. is a precision oncology company revolutionizing cancer therapies by pre-testing drugs on patient-derived 3D cultures utilizing patient specific tumor cells. As a spin-out from the world-renowned Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, SEngine is leveraging over two decades of R&D in diagnostics and drug discovery. The Company is commercializing the PARIS Test, a next generation diagnostic test that predicts drug responses integrating knowledge of cancer genomics with phenotypic testing of patient-derived live cells combined with robotics and AI-driven computational tools. SEngines CLIA certified PARIS Test generates actionable drug sensitivity reports for patients with solid tumors. SEngine is also pursuing drug discovery via strategic collaborations with biopharmaceutical / pharma companies by deploying its precision oncology platform. Discover more at SengineMedicine.com and follow the latest news from SEngine on Twitter at @SEngineMedicine and on LinkedIn .

Contact:

Stephanie Carrington

stephanie.carrington@westwicke.com

646-277-1282



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Facebook temporarily blocked posts with the hashtag #ResignModi that called for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday.

The social media giant has now restored the hashtag after it was accused of censoring posts because it may have violated community standards.

This is what happens when you search for the hashtag #ResignModi on Facebook (at least in India). pic.twitter.com/Rzehg3meB8  Shivam Vij (@DilliDurAst) April 28, 2021

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, Facebook said in a statement.



Andy Stone from Facebook communications later tweeted that the social network was "looking into what happened.

This hashtag has been restored and we are looking into what happened.  Andy Stone (@andymstone) April 28, 2021

When searching for the #ResignModi hashtag, users in India met with a message "Posts with #ResignModi are temporarily hidden here. Some content in those posts goes against our community standards.

Last week, Twitter also removed several posts at the requests of the Indian Government as Certain people are misusing social media to create panic in society, Indias Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had said in a statement.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all removed posts which they were asked to do which put a question mark on the integrity of social media companies in India.

 Unsplash/glen-carrie

"When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter's Rules, the content will be removed from the service," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement on Sunday. "If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only.



It seems like the recent blockage of the hashtag was only implemented in India as Facebook users in other countries could still access posts marked with #ResignModi.

 Reuters

There were about 12,000 posts hidden that Facebook later restored after it scrutinised all over the world for manipulating information.



Whether Facebook blocked the hashtag by mistake or not, it sure seems like the social media giant is far from being neutral in India.

We should know more once the company clarifies as to why the hashtag was blocked in India especially since the Government of India did not request it.
Dozens of additional security cameras could be installed in San Franciscos Castro district as part of a controversial crime-fighting proposal thats been criticized by several neighborhood groups on privacy grounds.

The proposal, financed by a $700,000 donation from tech billionaire and prolific political donor Chris Larsen, would install a linked network of video cameras in public areas.

The Castro Upper Market Community Benefit District, a business group, presented the plan  which has been discussed for about a year  once again at an online meeting this week, drawing renewed opposition from people concerned that the cameras constitute a perilous privacy invasion.

Supporters of the plan say it could stem property crimes, robberies and accidents.

Under the proposal, cameras would be installed at major intersections, including along Market Street at Castro, Sanchez, Noe, Church and Octavia streets. The cameras would be centrally administered, giving police quick access to footage when investigating a crime. There are already more than 200 private surveillance cameras in the area, the business district said, but they are maintained by their individual owners and accessing them can be a challenge for law enforcement.

There so much property crime and accidents, so many broken windows, said the districts executive director, Andrea Aiello, citing the need for the additional cameras.

Among the opponents of the plan is the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Club, which issued a statement saying the cameras would further erode our communitys privacy.

Queer people and people of color have historically been the victims of targeted violence from law enforcement, the Toklas club said in a statement. We encourage everyone who values (what) makes the Castro special to speak out against this dangerous plan.

The Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, in a statement, said no way to what it described as the installation of a sophisticated surveillance network throughout the Castro.

The Milk Club argued that surveillance camera footage had been used by law enforcement during the 1980s against gay activists and against cannabis buyers.

Aiello said she understood the clubs worries.

People subjected to a long history of police discrimination and abuse are legitimately concerned about police looking at things, Aiello said.

A survey commissioned by her group, she said, showed overwhelming community support for accepting the donation and installing the cameras. Video footage, she vowed, would only be made available to police if they could show there had a been a valid, real crime with a police report attached to it.

Opponents of the plan pointed to a study by the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which found San Francisco police requested and received access to hundreds of cameras in the Union Square area during protests against police violence in May, 2020. The group said the data dump could have jeopardized the privacy of protesters or bystanders.

After the online meeting, Aiello said she hoped her group could win over opponents to the plan and go forward with the camera installation by summer.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
STOCKHOLM, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "Hoist Finance's first quarter was impacted by the consequences of the pandemic and further lockdowns across Europe. Limited investment volumes in 2020 and forward-looking impairments in some portfolios, predominately in the UK and Spain, explain the negative profits in the quarter. The underlying financial performance adjusted for forward-looking impairments totals SEK 120m compared to SEK 110m in the first quarter last year. Collection performance remains solid at 103%, and our efforts to improve efficiency continue according to plan. In the quarter we acquired our first portfolio via the partnership with Magnetar Capital. So despite recent difficulties, we see a positive market outlook, supporting our priority to return to growth", says Klaus-Anders Nysteen, Hoist Finance CEO.

January - March 2021

Total operating income amounted to SEK 319m (529)

(529) Profit/loss before tax totalled SEK -246m (-61)

(-61) Adjusted for forward-looking impairments, profit/loss before tax totalled SEK 120m (110)

(110) Earnings per share amounted to SEK -2.73 (-0.73)

(-0.73) Return on equity was -25 per cent (-6)

Carrying value of acquired loans totalled SEK 21,266m (21,075)

(21,075) The total capital ratio was 15.59 per cent (16.49) and the CET1 ratio was 9.81 per cent (10.76)

Figures in brackets refer to the first quarter of 2020 for profit comparisons and to the 31 December 2020 closing balance for balance sheet items.

Events during the quarter:

Forward-looking negative impairment of unsecured portfolios of SEK -351m

Italian portfolio acquired in the securitisation programme

Digital collection run-rate at 24 per cent

Confirmed and extended financial targets at the Capital Markets Day

New business lines operational as of 1 January 2021 .

Subsequent events:

At Hoist Finance Annual General Meeting 13 April 2021 Mattias Carlsson was elected Chairman of the Board. Fredrik Backman , Per Anders Fasth , Niklas Johansson , Helena Svancar and Peter Zonabend were elected as new members of the Board.

This information is information that Hoist Finance AB (publ) is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication by Andreas Lindblom at 07:30 A.M. CEST on 29 April 2021.

A teleconference for Investors, Analysts and Press will be held at 11:00 AM CEST. To listen in to the conference live, please dial:

SE: +46850558366 UK: +443333009264 US: +18338230586

The presentation will be held in English and broadcast live at: https://tv.streamfabriken.com/hoist-finance-q1-2021

For further information, please contact:

Andreas Lindblom, Head of Investor Relations

Telephone: +46 (0) 72 506 14 22

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/hoist-finance/r/interim-report-q1-2021,c3336313

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Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury. Photo: Regis Duvignau/Reuters

The chief executive of Airbus (AIR.PA) has warned that the crisis is not yet over for the aviation industry as airline Lufthansa nosedives to a 1bn (869m, $1.2bn) loss.

Guillaume Faurys comment came as Airbus swung to a profit of 362m in the first quarter of the year, compared with a 481m loss in the same period the year prior. It was the companys third profitable quarter in a row and came in ahead of analysts estimates.

Revenues slipped 2% to 10.5bn.

The European planemaker delivered 125 commercial aircraft during the three months, a slight improvement compared to the same period in 2020.

It added that performance was also boosted by its strong net cash position, as well as positive contributions from its helicopter and defence and space activities.

Airbus said that its guidance issued in February 2021 remains unchanged. Shares rose more than 2% in Paris on the back of the news.

Airbus shares rose on Thursday on the back of the news. Chart: Yahoo Finance

Fundamental questions persist around when demand will return for the airframer, Jack Winchester, analyst at research firm Third Bridge, said.

First, we need to see more people taking flights, and then we need to see how airlines will think about replacing old aircraft, many of which havent seen many flight hours since March 2020.

WATCH: Protesting Airbus workers allegedly start forest fire after burning road barricade

It comes as German airline Lufthansa (LHA.DE) crashed to 1.1bn first-quarter loss as revenue fell 60%.

The company, which also includes Austrian Airlines, Swiss and Eurowings, revealed that it has cut its capacity for summer as new waves of COVID infections dent hopes of air travel reopening.

Lufthansa now expects to offer only 40% of its pre-pandemic capacity for 2021  below the level it said is needed to generate positive cash flow.

It said it expected a gradual demand pick-up in April-June and a "significant market recovery" in the second half.

"We know that bookings shoot up wherever restrictions are loosened and travel becomes possible again," chief executive Carsten Spohr said in a statement.

Story continues

Shares edged around 0.3% lower on Thursday.

READ MORE: Heathrow's pandemic losses rise to 2.4bn as airport warns travel must restart soon

Due to a sluggish vaccine rollout at the start of the year, Europe is still dealing with a third wave of COVID-19. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) forecasted that the region will be the slowest worldwide to reduce losses this year.

Meanwhile, India is currently suffering from one of the worlds worst outbreaks since the coronavirus pandemic began more than a year ago.

The variant of COVID-19 first detected in India, called the double mutant has already been found in several other countries, including in the UK and in America.

This could cause economies to reopen more slowly if cases of the variant spike. Scientists are currently working to understand exactly what threat the strain poses as more variants appear across the globe.

WATCH: Should I book a holiday in 2021?
FDA Moves To Ban Menthol Cigarettes And Flavored Cigars

Packs of menthol cigarettes sits on a table on Nov. 15, 2018 in New York City. Credit - Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Its easy to forget that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only gained the ability to regulate tobacco products in 2009, given how much it has done in the following decade-plus. In recent years, the FDA has enacted a series of regulations that have significantly shaped the ways in which Americans buy and consume nicotine.

In the last two years alone, the FDA has banned the sale of many flavored e-cigarette products and, following legislation issued by the Trump Administration in late 2019, began enforcing a new federal minimum age for tobacco sales, up to 21 from 18. A policy originally proposed in 2017 by then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieba cap on the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, meant to make them less addictiveis now once again under discussion. And, as FDA officials announced on April 29, the agency will soon ban all favored cigars and all menthol cigarettes, the only flavored combustible cigarette products still available for sale in the U.S.

The FDA ban must still go through a rule-making process and so may not take effect for years. Even still, the policy fits into a new era of U.S. tobacco regulationone that has already and will continue to clear the market of many tobacco products, from flavored e-cigarettes to menthol cigarettes and, maybe someday, cigarettes with enough nicotine to be addictive.

Many public-health groups say that approach is appropriately aggressive, given the nearly 500,000 Americans who die each year from smoking-related disease. The FDAs policies have, however, earned it plenty of critics. Some lawmakers, as well as nicotine industry supporters and harm reduction advocates, consider the recent federal approach prohibitionist and draconian. And some unexpected adversaries, including civil rights groups, fear the FDA may be setting the stage for discriminatory policing practices with a new list of banned products.

Story continues

The FDAs menthol ban comes eight years after a citizen petition calling for such a move. Many public-health groups have for years vocally opposed the sale of menthol cigarettes, arguing that menthols cool mouthfeel and minty flavor makes cigarettes more palatable and appealing, particularly to young people. Cutting off access to menthol products, they contend, could dissuade some people from smoking, further lowering rates of addiction and tobacco-related disease.

Some civil rights groups have also called for a menthol ban, given cigarette companies long history of targeting menthol cigarette advertising toward Black communities. Today, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Black adults are more likely than non-Black adults to smoke menthols, and roughly 70% of Black youth who smoke combustible cigarettes choose menthols. The predatory marketing of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products must be stopped and we should all recognize this as a social justice issue, and one that disproportionately impacts youth and communities of color, a group of 10 civil rights and health organizations reportedly wrote in a recent letter to Xavier Becerra, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Opponents of such a ban argue that it could create an underground market and become a new criminal justice issue: Such a ban will trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately affect people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction, representatives from numerous civil rights and drug policy groups wrote in their own letter to Becerra.

Proponents of the ban argue that criminal penalties would fall primarily on manufacturers and retailers, not individuals. Even before the menthol ban, there was fierce outcry from the tobacco and harm-reduction worlds over the FDAs increasingly aggressive nicotine regulations. Recently, that conversation has largely centered around e-cigarettes.

The FDA was initially slow to act on e-cigarettes, taking years to draw up rules for their regulation in the U.S. The products were meant to give smokers a less dangerous alternative to combustible cigarettes. And indeed, most health experts agree that they are less harmful than cigarettesthough there are still not enough data to say for certain how effective they are at helping smokers stay away from cigarettes and improve their health.

E-cigarettes have been a subject of intense legal and regulatory scrutiny over the past few years, due largely to what federal health officials have called an epidemic of teen vaping. In an effort to curb youth vaping, the FDA in the fall of 2018 put forth new restrictions, forbidding the sale of products in all flavors except mint, menthol, and tobacco in stores where minors can shop. In early 2020, it all-out banned the sale of potentially youth-friendly flavored productsnotably and controversially excluding mentholused in pod-based systems, like market leader Juul.

Those policies have drawn praise (from anti-tobacco groups) and criticism (from pro-vaping and harm reduction groups) in almost equal measure. The Biden Administrations efforts to add menthol to the federal ban list will surely fuel these debates. And the biggest regulatory battles are still yet to come: the FDA is expected to make a call later this year on whether to grant e-cigarette products the approval they need to stay on the market in the U.S. The agency is also reportedly considering new limits on the amount of nicotine in combustible cigarettes. Changes are coming to the U.S. nicotine market, no matter what; the question is, how dramatic they will be.
The chairman of a race review slammed the 'vile misrepresentation' of his comments on slavery by quoting a song by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The Government's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was published a month ago amid claims it was 'culturally deaf' as it concluded there was little evidence of institutional racism in Britain.

The authors were accused of trying to put a 'positive spin on slavery' after they called on schools to use history lessons to 'tell the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today'.

Dr Tony Sewell slammed suggestions he had spoken of the 'glorification of slavery', adding it was a statement on how African people retained their humanity

In his foreword, chair Tony Sewell said there was a new story to be told about the 'slave period' and about how 'culturally African people transformed themselves into a remodelled African/Britain'.

Yesterday at a Policy Exchange think tank event in front of 700 attendees, Dr Sewell hit back at comments suggesting he had spoken of the 'glorification of slavery'.

The Times reported him saying: 'We wanted to not only speak of the inhumanity of slavery but how African people managed to retain their humanity and resist slavery.'

After quoting Bob Marley's Redemption Song, he added 'He's talking here about slavery, those pirates robbing him, how African slaves retained the powerhouse of their imagination . . . That was the thing that the slavers couldn't take away from us.

'We had our imagination and this led to resistance and it's led to us retaining our African culture right inside that horror of slavery.'

He added he is feeling much better about the report's reception because 'people are bothering to read it, and once they read it, they get it'.

He added: 'There's been some misconception around the notion that all of our board members are not fiercely anti-racist.

'We believe racism exists. It exists in institutions, it exists in structures, it exists across the piste, and we have found that in the report.

Dr Sewell quoted Bob Marley and the Wailers' Redemption Song at the think tank gathering

'And I would really kind of urge people to revise their perceptions of what they've seen of this, and I do welcome the fact that now we're getting more and more support for this.

'And I think that you'll find the Sewell report in years to come will be something that people will really look back positively on.'

Dr Sewell also encouraged the public to look carefully at the 24 recommendations in the report, commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he said are 'very, very progressive'.

He said members of the commission were 'very open' when considering the evidence, and what they saw was 'something that was more complex than simply landing everything on racism'.

He continued: 'However, and I'll say this again, the lived experiences of people... the idea that we would deny that or we would avoid that is ridiculous.

'That is a reality and people live that every day and the report, if people bothered to read it, acknowledges that.'
A woman who says she was sexually assaulted as she walked down a major shopping strip in Melbournes inner-north to meet a friend has publicly appealed for information about the alleged offender in the hope it doesnt happen to anyone else.

Sarah, who did not want to use her real name, was walking south on Sydney Road between Albert Road and Glenlyon Road in Brunswick about 6.20am on February 7 when a man she didnt know began to follow her.

Anyone able to identify this man is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 Credit:Victoria Police

The 30-year-old woman noticed the man was walking close behind her as she crossed Sydney Road near the intersection of Glenlyon Road. He continued to follow her for several blocks.

I was on the way to meet a friend, we go walking or running every Sunday morning, we like to go quite early before it gets busy and theres too many people at the park and I dont drive, so I was walking there, she said on Thursday.
W. R. Berkley Corporation (NYSE: WRB) today announced the appointment of Clare Himmer as president of Berkley Re UK Limited effective September 1, 2021. Richard Fothergill will continue as Berkley Re UK's Chief Executive Officer with the expectation that, by the end of 2021, Ms. Himmer will be appointed CEO and Mr. Fothergill will become Chairman.

Ms. Himmer has nearly 30 years of experience in the reinsurance industry with a particular focus on the London and international markets across multiple classes of business. Most recently, she led the London subsidiary of a specialty Bermuda reinsurance group, establishing and developing key client and broker relationships and growing the London business to a substantial percentage of the group's revenue. Previously she established, built and led the international treaty platform at another Bermuda based carrier. She is a graduate of the University of Leeds and a member of the Reinsurance Leaders Practice Group at the London Market Forum, Lloyd's Market Association Sustainability Working Group and the Institute of Directors.

Richard Fothergill joined Berkley Re UK in 2011 to lead the development of the newly formed business. As CEO, he will continue to lead the organization through the transition. Upon assuming the Chairman role, he will remain a valuable resource for the Berkley Re UK team, as well as engage on special projects and initiatives throughout W. R. Berkley Corporation.

W. Robert Berkley, Jr., president and chief executive officer of W. R. Berkley Corporation, commented on the appointment, "Richard has done a tremendous job establishing and developing Berkley Re UK as a successful participant in the U.K and European reinsurance markets. We are exceptionally grateful for his contributions and accomplishments on behalf of the Company and are pleased that he will continue with our organization into the future. His knowledge, expertise and counsel are invaluable to the group. Clare will be an outstanding addition to the BRUK team, and we are confident that she will play an important role in moving Berkley Re UK forward in the U.K. and European reinsurance markets. We are delighted to welcome her to Berkley."

For further info about products and services available from Berkley Re UK Limited, visit https://www.berkleyre.com/emea/.

Founded in 1967, W. R. Berkley Corporation is an insurance holding company that is among the largest commercial lines writers in the United States and operates worldwide in two segments of the property casualty insurance business: Insurance and Reinsurance Monoline Excess. For further information about W. R. Berkley Corporation, please visit www.berkley.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005697/en/

Contacts:

Karen A. Horvath

Vice President

Financial Communications

(203) 629-3000
LONDON (AP) - Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party is looking for a new leader following First Minister Arlene Foster's announcement that she will be standing down after nearly 5 1/2 years in the post.

Following weeks of pressure related to her handling of Brexit and her perceived softening on social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, Foster said she would step down as leader of the party on May 28 and as first minister of Northern Ireland at the end of June.

Her successor, who will be the party's fourth leader, is set to be chosen in a ballot of the party's lawmakers in the U.K. Parliament in London as well as those in Northern Ireland's power-sharing assembly in Belfast.

It's unclear whether there will be more than one candidate. If there is, it would be the first time in the Democratic Unionist Party's 50-year history that an election has taken place. It's also not clear whether the winner will necessarily take up the position of first minister as the leader could be based in London.

Still, who replaces Foster matters - for Northern Ireland and for the wider United Kingdom and its relationships with Ireland and the European Union.

That's because the DUP has played an outsized role in British politics over the past couple of decades after becoming the leading proponent of the union between Northern Ireland and Britain.

FILE - In this Satuday, Oct. 26, 2019 file photo, Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster, left, has her picture taken with party members Jeffrey Donaldson, MP, and Emma Littele-Pengelly, MP, at the party's annual conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party is looking for a new leader following the announcement Wednesday, April 28, 2021 by First Minister Arlene Foster that she will be standing down after nearly five and a half years in post. Following weeks of pressure related to her handling of Brexit and her perceived softening on social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, Foster said she would step down as leader of the party on May 28 and as first minister at the end of June. Potential candidates include Jeffrey Donaldson, Edwin Poots, Gavin Robinson, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)

The party has provided three of the four first ministers to have run the devolved administration in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 formalized power-sharing arrangements between those who want to remain in the U.K. and those who wish to see Northern Ireland become part of the Republic of Ireland.

For decades, that fissure fueled sectarian violence. The so-called Troubles, which formally ended with the Good Friday Agreement, resulted in around 3,500 deaths.

The DUP also played a prominent role in the Brexit debate. It backed the U.K.'s departure from the EU in the 2016 referendum and has tried to use its votes in the U.K. Parliament in the years since to eke out concessions from successive British Conservative governments.

However, post-Brexit trade rules that took effect at the start of this year imposed customs checks on some goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., which has angered many within the DUP .

These are some potential contenders to succeed Foster:

JEFFREY DONALDSON

Donaldson, 58, has been a lawmaker in the U.K. Parliament since 1997 and leads the DUPs eight--member grouping there. He says he wanted to enter politics after the Irish Republican Army killed his police officer cousin Samuel Donaldson in 1970. Like Foster, he is considered a pragmatist. Both started out in the Ulster Unionist Party, which the DUP usurped as Northern Irelands main voice of unionism. As a result, he may face questions of trust - as Foster did - from the more traditional wing of the DUP. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016.

___

IAN PAISLEY JR.

The 54-year-old son of the partys founder, Paisley has appeal within the DUP. However, he is sometimes viewed as somewhat of a maverick. A series of controversies involving the non-declaration of foreign trips with U.K. Parliament authorities have dinted his standing.

___

EDWIN POOTS

Poots, 55, the current agriculture minister in the Northern Ireland assembly, is seen by many as the leading contender to replace Foster, partly because he takes a hardline stance on social issues that many DUP members think echo the partys founder, Dr. Ian Paisley. When he was health minister in the Northern Ireland assembly, Poots in 2011 backed a ban on gay men donating blood, and he is a vociferous opponent of abortion and LGBT people adopting children. Recently, he found himself in an awkward position as his ministerial portfolio requires him to implement the border checks required under the Brexit deal. Earlier this year, Poots had surgery for kidney cancer and returned to work soon after.

___

GAVIN ROBINSON

Robinson, 36, has been a lawmaker in the U.K. Parliament for the East Belfast constituency since 2015. Given his youth and relatively liberal views, the former lawyer could be the option for those who think it's time for the party to move on. Others may think it's too soon.

___

SAMMY WILSON

Wilson, 68, was heard regularly during the Brexit debates. While Northern Ireland ultimately voted to remain in the EU, Wilson aired his pro-Brexit views with passion. As a result, he is a popular figure within the party. His social conservatism, such as his consistent opposition to same-sex marriages, may be an asset, though it's unclear whether he will run to become DUP leader. He declined to do so in 2015.

FILE - In this Monday, Jan. 11, 2016 file photo newly elected Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster who is also the Democratic Unionist Party leader faces the media outside Parliament Buildings, Storming, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Foster, the leader of Northern Ireland announced her resignation on Wednesday, April 28 after party members mounted a push to oust her over her handling of the fallout from Brexit and other issues. Foster said she would step down as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party on May 28 and as First Minister of Northern Ireland at the end of June. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019 file photo, people walk past the grounds of Stormont estate beside Parliament buildings, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party is looking for a new leader following the announcement Wednesday, April 28, 2021 by First Minister Arlene Foster that she will be standing down after nearly five and a half years in post. Following weeks of pressure related to her handling of Brexit and her perceived softening on social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, Foster said she would step down as leader of the party on May 28 and as first minister at the end of June. Potential candidates include Jeffrey Donaldson, Edwin Poots, Gavin Robinson, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)

FILE - In this Friday, May 8, 2015 file photo, Democratic Unionist Party candidate for East Belfast Gavin Robinson celebrates after being elected MP for East Belfast at the Kings Hall count center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party is looking for a new leader following the announcement Wednesday, April 28, 2021 by First Minister Arlene Foster that she will be standing down after nearly five and a half years in post. Following weeks of pressure related to her handling of Brexit and her perceived softening on social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, Foster said she would step down as leader of the party on May 28 and as first minister at the end of June. Potential candidates include Jeffrey Donaldson, Edwin Poots, Gavin Robinson, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 21, 2015 file photo, Democratic Unionist Party Member of Parliament Ian Paisley Jr, smiles to the media during the launch of the Democratic Unionist Party Election Manifesto in Antrim, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party is looking for a new leader following the announcement Wednesday, April 28, 2021 by First Minister Arlene Foster that she will be standing down after nearly five and a half years in post. Following weeks of pressure related to her handling of Brexit and her perceived softening on social issues such as abortion and LGBT rights, Foster said she would step down as leader of the party on May 28 and as first minister at the end of June. Potential candidates include Jeffrey Donaldson, Edwin Poots, Gavin Robinson, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)
Joe Biden (Center R) and Vice President Kamala Harris (Center L) meet with 10 Republican senators, including Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 1, 2021. (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Republican Senators Critical of Bidens Lack of Bipartisanship After Wednesdays Address

Moderate Republicans, many of whom have met with President Joe Biden to negotiate the administrations pandemic relief bill, came away from the presidents address to the joint session of Congress doubtful about his calls for bipartisanship and unity.

After the first 100 days, many of those GOP lawmakers who were hopeful about Bidens desire to work with them across the aisle are now more cynical about how much input Democrats actually want from Republicans.

I was very hopeful with the tone he set that [Inauguration] day, and I said so at the time. And yet that rhetoric has not been matched by action. It hasnt been matched by action when it comes to key policy initiatives theyve already put forward, including the latest COVID-19 spending bill that passed in March. Remember, despite a 50-50 Senate and very tight majority in the House of Representatives, there was no outreach to Republicans on the COVID-19 legislation, said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) in a speech on Thursday.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said in a statement, As I sat and listened to the remarks tonight, Im left with a strong concern at the lack of bipartisanship shown in the first 100 days. I call on President Biden to follow through on his inaugural promise to work in a bipartisan manner, and to spend the next 100 days working to build consensus across the aisle.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) asks a question during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23, 2020. (Alex Edelman/Pool/Getty Images)

That is the only way to truly bring people together, make progress for the betterment of our nation, and craft enduring solutions for generations to come, Murkowski added.

During his joint address to Congress, Biden praised the Democrat leaders for coming together with Republicans to pass the $1.8 trillion American Rescue Plan, but no Republican senator voted in favor of the bill, which passed through budget reconciliation with 50 votes.

Republicans are concerned that Biden is going to continue with his approach to getting his legislation passed with the simple majority, and many top Democrats including Biden have hinted that they would be willing to go it alone by getting rid of the 60-vote rule in the Senate.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment concerning Republican sentiment about lack of bipartisanship.

Republicans have been critical of non-pandemic-related items being pushed into Bidens rescue package and the soon-to-be-voted infrastructure packagecriticized by the GOP for having very little to do with core infrastructure.

Portman, who has also been involved in past talks with the administrations, also criticized Biden for lack of GOP input on another of his legislative packages.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2017. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Right now, the Biden administration is repeating this same mistake, as far as I can tell, because theyve introduced their $2.3 trillion infrastructure package without consulting, again, any Republicans. And we now hear that White House and some Democratic leaders may want to pass this latest partisan proposal by reconciliation as well, said Portman.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said Bidens call for unity and working for all Americans have just been words.

To date, these words have rung hollow. The Biden White House has focused most of its energy on forcing through aspects of the left-wing wish list, either by executive order or partisan legislation while stonewalling most Republican ideas and input, Toomey said.

Beyond bipartisanship, Republicans are concerned about the spending in the last three packages, adding up to almost $6 trillion dollars, and how that will impact the economy down the road.

Now President Biden is continuing this unprecedented spending spree by proposing another $4 trillion for a Jobs and Families plan. Rather than touting ways to create new industries, I want to see the President reverse decisions he has made that cost good-paying jobs and the families they support in Alaska, said Murkowski.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who was one of the GOP senators who went to the White House in February to work on pandemic relief, was critical of the spending in Bidens new proposals.

Well, I think, with the experience weve had with the $1.9 trillion rescue plan, he would like Republicans to vote for his plan. But in terms of meeting in the middle, that hasnt been something the administration has shown, Romney added.

Im sure Bernie was happy, he told reporters, referring to outspoken liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Romney also called on Biden to get back to the job of bipartisan governing.

The president says he wants unity, but its impossible to unify America if youre only appealing to the liberal wing of your own party, he said in a written statement.
An extra 60 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been secured to help support a booster Covid-19 vaccination programme beginning from the autumn months later in the year, the UK government said on Wednesday.

During a Downing Street briefing where he made that announcement, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock was questioned about sending vaccines to India as it battles a massive second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and faces vaccine shortages.

We currently have no excess doses, we are doing what we can but we work very closely with India on vaccine production, the minister said, adding that the UK had ensured at-cost supply of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines to the Serum Institute of India, which is manufacturing some of the largest number of doses of the jabs in the world by benefitting from British science.

That is the biggest contribution we can make," Hancock said.

At the briefing, he laid out preparations by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for a booster programme based on clinical need to ensure people have the strongest possible protection against Covid-19.

Read: Global community rushes financial and medical assistance to India to combat Covid-19 surge

The additional Pfizer/BioNTech jabs, as a forward production order, will be used alongside other approved Covid-19 vaccines for the booster programme.

These further 60 million doses will be used, alongside others, as part of our booster programme from later this year, so we can protect the progress that weve all made," said Hancock.

Our vaccination programme is bringing back our freedom, but the biggest risk to that progress is the risk posed by a new variant. We're working on our plans for booster shots, which are the best way to keep us safe and free while we get this disease under control across the whole world, he said.

The government said it has already hit its target of offering all those aged 50 and over, the clinically vulnerable and health and social care workers a first dose of the vaccine by April 15 and remains on track to offer a jab to all adults by the end of July.

This week those cohorts were expanded to over-42s and 42-year-old Hancock said he is booked with the National Health Service (NHS) to get his first dose on Thursday.

According to official data, health services across the UK have now administered a total of 47,540,984 million vaccines between 8 December and 27 April, including 33,959,908 million people with their first dose (64.5 per cent of all adults) and 13,581,076 million with their second (25.8 per cent of all adults).

Our brilliant Vaccines Taskforce has secured an extra 60 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines to support our booster programme, which will be developed in line with the advice of our experts, said Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi.

Ben Osborn, Country Manager at Pfizer UK, added: By more than doubling our supply commitment to the UK, we are delighted to support the ongoing rollout of the UK immunisation programme and help the government in its efforts to address the pandemic.

Along with our partner BioNTech, we are working relentlessly to support vaccination campaigns worldwide and, based on current projections, believe we can deliver more than 2.5 billion doses of our vaccine globally by the end of 2021.

The government said it will publish further details on the booster programme in due course and the final policy will be informed by advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) and the results of clinical trials studying the use of different combinations of approved Covid-19 vaccines.

The DHSC pointed to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Oxford University which shows that Covid-19 infections fell significantly by 65 per cent after the first dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, rising further after the second dose.

Data from Public Health Englands real-world study shows the vaccines are already having a significant impact in the UK, reducing hospitalisations and deaths, saving more than 10,000 lives between December and March.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang co-chairs the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video link in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Yue Yuewei)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday that China stands ready to work with Germany to keep the overall direction of bilateral relations featuring dialogue and cooperation and promote Sino-German relationship to a higher level.

Li made the remarks when co-chairing the sixth China-Germany inter-governmental consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video link in Beijing.

He stressed that cooperation and win-win results is the main thrust of China-Germany all-round strategic partnership.

Li called on China and Germany to enhance anti-epidemic cooperation, promote fair and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, and reject vaccine nationalism.

He said the two countries should give full play to their fast track for essential travels and jointly safeguard the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains.

Noting that both sides are willing to embrace opening-up and uphold fair competition, the premier said China stands ready to work with EU to jointly promote the signing and entry into force of the China-EU investment agreement as soon as possible to facilitate the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations.

For her part, Merkel said Germany advocates opening-up and cooperation and opposes to protectionism.

She underscored the importance of the investment agreement between EU and China and expressed hope that the two sides can jointly promote entry into force of the agreement at an early date.

After the consultation, Li and Merkel jointly witnessed the "cloud signing" of a series of bilateral cooperation documents including climate response, social security, health, food safety, transportation and sustainable development.

During the consultation, Li and Merkel also attended a bilateral forum on economic and technological cooperation and met with Chinese and German business leaders via video link.

Li said in the first quarter of this year, China-Germany trade went up by 41.5 percent year-on-year, which is a full demonstration of the high-level and huge potential of bilateral cooperation.

He said the more than 7,000 German enterprises in China and more than 2,000 Chinese companies in Germany have become an "active force" of bilateral cooperation.
As a number of Canadian-based horses and participants are making plans to race in various stateside jurisdictions, two O'Brien Award winners that were slated to return to Canada after training down in Florida will be heading north  but not back home to Canada just yet.

Dr. Ian Moore told Trot Insider that 2020 Somebeachsomewhere Horse of the Year Century Farroh and 2020 Two-Year-Old Male Pacer of the Year Lawless Shadow will be headed to Ohio after logging their final prep miles  against each other  on Friday (April 23) at the Southern Oaks Training Center. Century Farroh (Dale Spence) cut fractions of :27.1, :54.3 and 1:22.3 with Lawless Shadow right on his helmet. Lawless Shadow paced home with a :28.1 final quarter to comfortably pace by his accomplished stablemate and trip the timer in a sharp lifetime best 1:51  one of the fastest miles in the history of Southern Oaks. Moore was very pleased with Lawless Shadow while not being concerned that Century Farroh was bested:

"They're both ready to roll. Lawless was super good and I'm really excited about him. I'm just so disappointed that we can't go home and race.... I just can't wait, but it's a shame that I have to do what I have to do.

"When you look at the past two years, [Century Farroh's] qualifiers ... Casimir Richie P beat him last year here in a qualifier," Moore continued. "He's never been good in qualifiers. When he sees the starting gate at a real track, he comes around."

With his home province shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic, Moore is in a similar situation to a number of Canadian horsemen looking for a place to race. His scenario is slightly different as he's also trying to get home from Florida while preparing his horses for races that might not happen.

"I've decided to leave Century Farroh and Lawless Shadow in Ohio with my best groom down here," noted Moore, stating that he expects to have his horses likely competing at Scioto Downs. "Lady Arthur is already up there ... we'll see what happens."

Moore previously indicated that Tattoo Artist would head to New Jersey into the stable of Chris Ryder for the upcoming legs of the Graduate, with the first of those set for Saturday at The Meadowlands. The weekend card at The Big M features a number of familiar faces from the Mohawk circuit, with James MacDonald joining the driving colony and Team Baillargeon  Sara and Ben  listed on the training side.

"It's amazing how many people have left [Ontario], but there's no end in sight, really."

Moore will be heading back to Canada with all of his two-year-olds plus three-year-olds Alumni Seelster and Andra Day, and that group will wait patiently for racing in Ontario to resume. Moore, on the other hand, is running low on patience.

"I'm going to write lots of letters. Public Health has not responded to me on the two emails I've sent first, which was April 7 with a detailed explanation of what we like to do and what we'd like an exemption for  just to look after the horses basically, that's it, not going to go anywhere else, not going to be responsible for everybody. But they haven't responded to me; one of the guys said [at the time] 'that's 11 business days.' I said, 'Okay, so sounds like they're not even working on weekends, you know, with all this going on.' You'd think they would be."

The horses are shipping north on April 29. Moore himself has additional details to tend to upon his arrival back in Canada as he recently sold the house he and his wife, Nancy, had been living in, and his new barn is nearing completion.

"My new barn is built, it needs some mats and a few things still ... screweyes and things like that. My son, Tyler, is on that now, so it should be good for Friday when I land."

As someone who has gone through the difficult nature of managing a Grand Circuit stable of horses from afar, recognizing that the nature of the border between Canada and the U.S. is not likely to change anytime soon, Moore is hopeful for a safe and imminent return to racing according to the schedule currently in place. Two of the races he might have had his horses pointed for  the Confederation Cup and the Camluck Classic  have already been cancelled, and not rescheduled.

"They're just cancelling it outright, $150,000, two years in row, gone, off the table. I don't why they can't schedule it some other time," he said, speaking of the Camluck Classic. "Same as the Confederation Cup. It's just gone.

"Last year, it was all about the North America Cup and everything and waiting for the Americans to get across. Well, the border never opened, and it's not going to open. So I said They can do the same thing that we do. We send them to people in the U.S. if we want to race down there. If they want to race up in Canada, send them to somebody in Canada," stated Moore. "I found it really, really difficult to navigate and work around that stuff last year. Like I said, theres a lot of money taken off the table that people all planned for and bought horses for and trained horses for. You know the story, I dont need to tell you. If they start racing the first of June, it is my opinion that the North America Cup should go as scheduled when scheduled. If Perfect Sting and all those guys want to be in it, they can damn well do what we did for the last year and what were going to have to do this year. And if they dont, to hell with them. Thats just the way it is.

"[Woodbine] waited last year and it made no difference, so theres no point in waiting this year because that borders not going to open. I guarantee you, not for a long time. They dont know, nobody knows. It aint going to open in the near future, thats for sure."

While some feel that the stature of the race is diminished if the connections of certain horses decide to skip races like the North America Cup, Moore countered with how much the Canadian harness racing industry suffers is a greater consequence.

"Its going to really damage the Canadian horseman and the Canadian industry if they do start cancelling or postponing everything like they did before other than what theyve lost in May. Obviously, they dont have any choice in May. But if theyre going to start the first of June, go as scheduled. Everything. Dont be putting Golds back here there and everywhere, messing everybody up. Thats what weve been training for, striving for, all these last several months.

"Its going to do no good to delay that. Its going to further hurt Canadian horsepeople that train and plan so much for it. Yeah, its extraordinary times but it doesnt matter. They know how it works now to try and live with it."
SOLID GROWTH IN Q1 2021 REVENUES: UP 16.0%

VERY STRONG GROWTH IN RETAIL SALES: UP 45.5%

Paris, 29 April 2021

ROCHE BOBOIS SA (ISIN: FR0013344173 - Ticker symbol: RBO), global benchmark on the high-end furniture market and the name behind the French Art de Vivre, enjoyed a remarkable business momentum at the start of 2021. The Group has once again reported very good quarterly revenues, as well as an excellent level of retail sales (up 45.5%).

Q1 2021 revenue amounted to  71.7 million, up 16.0% compared with 31 March 2020 and up 19.0% at constant exchange rates. This performance can be seen on both brands and across all regions, and reflects not only excellent sales momentum at the end of 2020 (order intake) but also a high level of customer deliveries in Q1 2021. The Group also benefited from a favourable comparison base over the quarter (as a reminder, deliveries were disrupted in most countries during the same period last year).

Revenues

(unaudited - in m) 2020 2021 Change at current

exchange rates (%) Change at constant

exchange rates (%) Q1 61.8 71.7 +16.0% +19.0%

The breakdown of revenues by region is presented in the appendix.

Double-digit growth in all regions

Roche Bobois France revenues amounted to 23.6 million in Q1 2021, up 12.3% from 21.0 million in Q1 2020. This growth reflects a convincing recovery and strong momentum in volumes at the end of last year (with a record month in December) after the forced closure of stores in November.

Cuir Center recorded revenues of 8.9 million in Q1 2021, compared with 7.3 million in Q1 2020 (up 22.7%), also reflecting strong sales at the end of last year and a favourable comparison base (the company suffered delays in the supply of containers in Q1 2020).

Revenues for the United States/Canada region totalled 20.4 million in Q1 2021, compared with 17.7 million in Q1 2020, up 15.2% at current exchange rates thanks to the network's excellent business momentum at the end of last year. The Group also benefited from the consolidation of the three franchise stores in the US[1] (San Francisco, Seattle and Portland), which contributed 1.4 million to revenues for the quarter. Note that the currency effect for the quarter is significant with 24.9% growth at constant exchange rates.

The United Kingdom posted revenues of 3.4 million in Q1 2021, compared with 2.6 million in Q1 2020 (up 28.9%), mainly reflecting the comparison base (in the same period last year, the Group suffered a shutdown of its London warehouse in early March).

Lastly, in the rest of Europe (excluding France and the UK), the Group recorded revenues of 13.1 million in Q1 2021, compared with 11.2 million in the same period last year, representing a 17.0% growth attributable to the gradual ramp-up of recently opened stores and the sharp rebound in business at the end of last year. Revenue growth was particularly pronounced in Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

Boom in Q1 2021 despite closures

In Q1 2021, Roche Bobois recorded very strong growth in retail sales to 176.8 million (all brands combined), up 45.5% from 121.5 million in Q1 2020. This record level of quarterly growth illustrates the Group's ability to make up for closures very quickly (at the start of 2021: UK, Germany, Switzerland and Canada in particular), with record volume increases as soon as stores reopen. Roche Bobois also recorded a large volume of distance sales during imposed closures, thanks to the commitment of its teams. March was accordingly particularly strong (59.0 million, or up 188% from the same period last year).

The Group also benefited from a favourable comparison base this quarter compared with the same period last year (start of the first lockdown). Growth is also very strong if we take 2019 as the reference year, as total retail sales for Q1 2021 (all brands combined) are up 25% compared with two years ago.

The trend is similar for the two brands' owned stores, with retail sales of 89.5 million in Q1 2021, compared with 64.2 million in Q1 2020, representing increases of 39.4% and 21.8% respectively compared with two years ago. For the Roche Bobois brand, retail sales totalled 75.5 million, a 21 million increase on the same period last year.

To date, the Group has reopened almost all of its owned stores in Europe and the US/Canada. Thus, other than France, closures are confined to part of Germany, Toronto and Dublin.

Looking ahead, the very high level of retail sales in Q1 2021, combined with a favourable comparison base, makes the Group confident in its capacity to deliver very significant revenue growth in H1 2021. Note that the US/Canada region is expected to drive part of this growth in view of deferrals of deliveries to Q2 and the sustained level of order intake recorded in Q1. The total order backlog is still growing in this region, and amounted to 52.8 million at the end of March 2021 (compared with 46.5 million at 31 December 2020 and, as a reminder, 36 million at the end of March 2020). This will provide revenues to be recognized over the coming months. France is also doing very well, with an order backlog of 39.5 million at the end of March 2021 (compared with 24.5 million at 31 March 2020).

In total, across all brands, the overall order backlog was 129.5 million at 31 March 2021, compared with 92.5 million at 31 March 2020, a very substantial increase of 40%.

Lastly, Roche Bobois is also confident in its ability to deliver a strong operational performance during the year. The company remains cautious in view of the current context, but has already on several occasions demonstrated the resilience of its model through its ability to make up for any imposed closures quickly. Roche Bobois also confirms its store opening plan for 2021.

About ROCHE BOBOIS SA



ROCHE BOBOIS SA is a French family business founded in 1960. The Group operates in 55 countries and has a network of 337 owned stores and franchises (at 31 December 2020) marketing its two brands: Roche Bobois, a high-end furniture brand with a strong international presence, and Cuir Center, positioned in the mid-range market segment with an essentially French customer base. Through its Roche Bobois brand, the Group embodies the French Art de Vivre whose presence can now be felt on the world stage, with original and bold creations from talented designers (Bruno Moinard, Jean Nouvel, Ora Ito, Sacha Lakic, Christophe Delcourt, Stephen Burks, Kenzo Takada, Bina Baitel...) and partnerships with fashion and haute couture houses. Roche Bobois is also a committed partner in the world of culture and the arts. Including franchises, these two brands posted 2020 revenues of 484.5 million excluding VAT, to which Roche Bobois contributed 392.8 million and Cuir Center 92 million.

Roche Bobois SA 2020 consolidated revenues came to 266.0 million.



For more information please visit www.finance-roche-bobois.com



CONTACTS



Actus Finance - Anne-Pauline PETUREAUX

Investor Relations

Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 67 36 72 / apetureaux@actus.fr



Actus Finance - Serena BONI

Press Relations

Tel.: +33 (0)4 72 18 04 92 / sboni@actus.fr









APPENDICES

Revenues by region and by brand (unaudited - in k) Q1

2020 Q1

2021 Change at current exchange rates (%) Change at constant exchange rates (%) Roche Bobois France 21,005 23,588 +12.3% - Roche Bobois US/Canada 17,675 20,368 +15.2% +24.9% Roche Bobois UK 2,624 3,384 +28.9% +30.9% Roche Bobois Other Europe 11,179 13,085 +17.0% +18.0% Roche Bobois other (overseas) 1,227 1,459 +18.9% +17.5% Cuir Center 7,278 8,930 +22.7% - Corporate 787 850 +7.9% +7.9% TOTAL 61,776 71,664 +16.0% +19.0%

Transition table Retail sales/Revenues (m)

Q1 2021 Retail sales 176.8 Franchise retail sales (87.3) Retail sales of associates (0.5) Impact of pace of orders and deliveries (26.5) Royalties 2.8 Other services 6.4 Q1 2021 revenues 71.7

Forward-looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements do not constitute guarantees regarding the future performance of ROCHE BOBOIS. This forward-looking information covers the future outlook, growth and commercial strategy of ROCHE BOBOIS and is based on the analysis of future result forecasts and estimates of amounts that cannot yet be determined. By nature, forward-looking information involves risks and uncertainties, as it relates to events and depends on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. ROCHE BOBOIS draws your attention to the fact that forward-looking statements provide no guarantee of future performance and that its actual financial position, results and cash flow, as well as changes in the sector in which ROCHE BOBOIS operates, may differ significantly from those proposed or suggested by the forward-looking statements contained in this document. Moreover, even if ROCHE BOBOIS' financial position, results, cash flow and changes in the sector in which ROCHE BOBOIS operates were to be in accordance with the forward-looking information contained in this document, these results or changes may not be a reliable indicator of ROCHE BOBOIS' future results or developments. A description of events that could have a material adverse impact on ROCHE BOBOIS' business, financial position or results, or on its ability to achieve its targets, is given in Chapter 4 "Risk Factors" of the Base Document.

[1] See press release of 9 November 2020

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Guwahati: A child shows cracks that developed in a Guwahati building following an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale hit North Eastern states of India on Jan 4, 2016. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Guwahati, April 29 : People of central and northern Assam spent a sleepless night on Wednesday as 20 aftershocks continued till Thursday afternoon after the powerful earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale jolted the state, causing damages to many buildings and injuring 10 persons.

According to the National Centre for Seismology (NCS), the powerful quake which first shook Sonitpur in northern Assam at 7.51 a.m. on Wednesday, were also felt in North Bengal, other northeastern states including Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, neighbouring Bhutan and Bangladesh.

The NCS data said that after the main quake at a depth of 17 km from the surface, 20 aftershocks of magnitude 2.3 to 4.7 on the Richter scale were recorded on Wednesday and Thursday (until 4.17 p.m. on Thursday) in the vicinity of Sonitpur, Nagaon, Morigaon districts.

The disaster management officials in Guwahati said that there are reports of damage to buildings, roads and some other infrastructure in different parts of Sonitpur, Tezpur, Nagaon, Morigaon and adjoining areas.

At least 10 persons were injured in Darrang, Kamrup Metro, Nagaon and Sonitpur districts.

The official said that several apartments, buildings and hotels developed cracks. Electricity and gas supply were disrupted in some places.

An official statement of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority said that detailed damage assessment is going on in coordination with various agencies including Fire and Essential Services, state and national disaster response forces and the experts from Assam Engineering College led by Professor Jayanta Pathak.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and DoNER (Development of North Eastern Region) Minister Jitendra Singh spoke to Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and assured all possible help.

Immediately after the tremors were felt, Sonowal rushed to Dhekiajuli, 140 km north of Guwahati, to assess the situation and announced financial assistance for those injured in the tremor.

Successive earthquakes in the mountainous northeastern states, especially in Assam, Mizoram and Manipur, have made the authorities worried.

The northeastern states, especially Mizoram, frequently witness mild to moderate earthquakes that force the public and private builders to construct quake resistant houses.

Seismologists consider the mountainous northeastern region as the sixth most earthquake-prone belt in the world. In 1950, an earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale had altered the course of the mighty Brahmaputra river, which passes by the Guwahati city.
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP)  Police in Alameda, California, are under fire over the death of a Latino man who was pinned to the ground for more than five minutes in an arrest that unfolded the same day a jury in Minneapolis began deliberating in the George Floyd case.

Autopsy findings on the cause of death have not been released, but the family of 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez blames police, accusing them of using excessive force.

Authorities are investigating, and the city says it is "committed to full transparency and accountability."

Police were called to the park because Gonzalez was talking incoherently.
The government has come to the rescue of Canada's third largest air carrier, offering Air Transat's operator secured loans of up Can$700 million

The Canadian government has provided Transat with up to Can$700 million (US$570 million) in loans to keep the nation's third-largest carrier flying after a precipitous drop in air travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

"With this support, we now look forward to resuming operations as soon as safe travel is possible and travel restrictions can be lifted," company president Jean-Marc Eustache said in a statement Thursday.

Through its Air Transat brand, Transat offers vacation packages, hotel stays and air travel to about 60 destinations in the Americas and Europe.

It had concluded a takeover by Air Canada in June 2019, but the deal fell apart earlier this month when it became apparent it would not get regulatory approval in Europe.

The nation's flagship Air Canada itself received a Can$5.9 billion government bailout earlier this month, also in the form of secured loans.

Under the terms of bridge financing through the government's Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility, Transat must reimburse customers whose travel had to be canceled over the past year due to public health restrictions on travel.

The average rate of the loans is about six percent, it said. The loans are also backed by warrants that may be converted into up to 25 percent of outstanding shares in the company.

Explore further Air Canada, Transat call off merger deal

 2021 AFP
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:29:41|Editor: huaxia

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An Afghan woman works at a clothes factory managed by Shirin in Pul-e-Khumri, capital of Baghlan province, northern Afghanistan, April 21, 2021. (Photo by Sahel/Xinhua)

PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, April 29 (Xinhua) -- "I lost my husband and my house 25 years ago in the destructive war and nowadays I fear to lose my business with the possible return of the hardliner Taliban group to power," Shirin said.

Seemingly in her 50s and running a shop to supply a mixed of traditional and modern clothes in Pul-e-Khumri city, the capital of the troubled Baghlan province, Shirin recalled that Taliban militants set on fire at her house 25 years ago leaving her in pain.

Without going into details, the lady recalled with sorrow that the war had claimed the life of her husband 25 years ago too.

She expressed concerns over the U.S.-led forces' preparation for departure from Afghanistan, a possible Taliban group's return to power and the eruption of infighting in her country.

Recalling her bitter memories, Shirin said that she had experienced extreme poverty, joblessness, illness and solitary life since the death of her husband, but slowly stood on her feet after the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

"With a small capital around 3,000 U.S. dollars, I launched a handicraft shop in Pul-e-Khumri city 18 years ago and gradually my business had been developed by hiring women to needle work and embroidery," said Shirin.

Currently about 50 women and girls are working for her business, she said, adding that her employees and she are satisfied with the "reasonable income" through the business.

"Dozens of women are working with me and I am satisfied with the income," Shirin's partner Laila Kazimi, 24, who also runs a embroidery shop in the beleaguered Pul-e-Khumri city, told Xinhua.

Like Shirin, Laila Kazimi also expressed concern over the increasing militancy, saying the ongoing conflict and the possible return of the Taliban could confine Afghan women to their houses.

"Opening schools, a favorable environment and the restoration of women rights after the Taliban collapse in late 2001 had enabled women and girls to get education and work outside home and that is why more than 50 shops are run by women in Pul-e-Khumri city nowadays," said head of the Women Affairs Department in Baghlan Khudija Yaqin. Enditem
Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals The level of care in our acute physical rehabilitation hospital setting cannot be provided at other levels of care such as skilled nursing facilities

Everests free standing physical rehabilitation hospital will be constructed on 6.10 acres of land on the highly visible and convenient northwest corner of Highway 92 and Loop 570 (Polk Parkway East) in Auburndale, FL (E. Lakeland). Everest Rehabilitation Hospital operates and develops identical, modern, 40,000 square foot, 36-bed, single story comprehensive physical rehabilitation hospitals. Everests hospitals are much more like a luxury hotel versus a typical hospital setting. Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals are predesigned to be able to add an additional 17 private beds should the market dictate the need for expansion.

The hospital includes spacious, technologically advanced equipped inpatient and outpatient physical therapy gyms, a large outdoor mobility courtyard for therapeutic use, aqua therapy, a fully furnished life skills training apartment with kitchen and bathroom, several family gathering areas, an extra-large dining hall and patio, in-house dialysis, and an in-house pharmacy. The hospital will serve patients recovering from stroke, brain injury, neurological conditions, trauma, spinal cord injury, speech impediments, amputation, pulmonary disease, orthopedic injury, COVID-19, and other medically complex conditions.

Everests multimillion-dollar rehabilitation hospital in Auburndale (East Lakeland and Winterhaven), Florida will create over 100 jobs and provide for an $8 million-dollar a year payroll to the community. We are extremely excited to be able to serve the Auburndale, Lakeland, Winter Haven, Wahneta, Lake Wales, Haines City, Bartow, Lake Alfred, Fort Meade, Highland City and Polk City communities. We firmly believe that patients thrive exponentially when their environment and their level of care far exceed their expectations. The level of care in our acute rehabilitation hospital setting cannot be provided at other levels of care such as skilled nursing facilities (SNF). The average length of stay at a comprehensive inpatient rehabilitation hospital is one-third of a typical stay at a skilled nursing facility. Jay Quintana, Everest Rehabilitations CEO said. We provide one to one physical therapy, five to seven days a week, daily medical visits by rehabilitation physicians and a strong 24 hour a day nurse to patient ratio that contributes to optimal outcomes and the highest quality of care.

Everest Rehabilitation Hospital Auburndale will feature a comprehensive and interdisciplinary physician-led experienced team of rehabilitation therapists focused on increasing patient strength and endurance and improving quality of life in a modern, state of the art setting.

About Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals, LLC

Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals LLC, based in Dallas, Texas, is a multispecialty acute care physical rehabilitation hospital company focused on providing high quality, physical rehabilitation care. Everest is passionate about patient care; striving to create healing and nurturing environments for all patients that not only meet their medical needs but address their emotional and social needs as well. Patients are guided through the necessary steps to reclaim daily life, recover function, and return to an optimal quality of life by combining the latest treatments, technologies, and research with a unique interdisciplinary team approach involving the patient and family from day one. Everest provides the highest level of care available to patients with disabilities caused by injuries or illnesses, or from traumatic accidents.

http://www.everestrehab.com

Jay Quintana, CEO/ Co-Founder

jquintana(at)everestrehab.com

469-713-1145
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size It is a rare suggestion that Australias wealthiest woman Gina Rinehart could lose most of her $35.6 billion iron ore fortune over the price of a few printed court documents, but it is one floated before the West Australian Supreme Court in a bid to suppress a discovery action brought against her. Mrs Rineharts lawyers argue that, should her daughter Bianca Rinehart succeed in gaining information she then uses to further her claims to owning dynasty founder Lang Hancocks iron ore tenements, it will effectively dismantle the $20 billion equity-rich mining company Hancock Prospecting (HPPL). It is a claim the daughter denies. Present in court last week were Supreme Court Justice Rene Le Miere, TV screens beaming three barristers representing both generations of Rineharts, as well as Hancock Prospecting, from their offices in Sydney and a handful of observers  including this reporter. It was a small affair, where only one week earlier, seated in the same courtroom placed high atop Perths skyline, commanding million-dollar views of the Swan River, sat a roomful of sharply suited lawyers oblivious to their surrounds as more valuable real estate 1200 kilometres away looked to go under the gavel. Testing the waters: Hearings over Western Australias clash of the dynasties have sat in the David Malcolm Justice Centre courtrooms, which command stunning Swan River views. Legal arguments over the framing of next years trial into the rights and royalties of Pilbara mine Hope Downs  Langs most-prized multibillion-dollar iron ore tenement  were wrestled by four interested parties, with a fifth, Rio Tinto, also paying heed to what may become of its Hancock joint venture. Wright Prospecting, once belonging to Langs former business partner Peter Wright and passed on to his dynasty, wants equal share with Hancock in Hope Downs, while DFD Rhodes, belonging to late engineer Don Rhodes estate, is seeking a comparatively minor royalty that will pay millions.

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But those claims pale into insignificance when compared to the outright ownership of Hope Downs sought by the younger Rinehart, together with her brother John Hancock, in what they say is their rightful inheritance under the Hope Margaret Hancock family trust, established in 1988  four years before Langs death. Bianca Rineharts counsel Christopher Withers SC accused Australias richest mining magnate in open court of defrauding the trust of Hope Downs and other assets for her own benefit through a series of complex agreements and deeds to her company Hancock Prospecting. Hancock Prospectings senior counsel Noel Hutley vehemently denied the claim and in turn accused the siblings of greedily seeking the companys most valuable iron ore asset, Roy Hill, as part of the trial. It was an assertion quickly rejected by Mr Withers since any blurring of the lines could see them dismissed from the Hope Downs Supreme Court action. But the allegation was again put to Justice Le Miere when barrister Christian Bova SC fought the daughters bid last week to uncover court-tendered testimony that she claimed may help investigate any misstep by Mrs Rinehart during her time as trustee to the family trust. Bianca Rinehart has applied to the court for any affidavits relating to a lawsuit in which Langs solicitor Carnegie Fieldhouse was accused by Gina Rinehart, via the family foundation, of helping her late father commit a corporate fraud to write-off millions of dollars in personal debts just before his death in 1992. The lawsuit failed more than 20 years later. Mr Fieldhouse also testified in separate federal court proceedings that declared Mr Hancocks estate bankrupt and essentially cut off his younger widow and former cleaner Rose Porteous. Mrs Porteous spent years fighting in the court after similarly accusing Mrs Rinehart of defrauding the estate for her own benefit, but was not successful.

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Mr Bova argued that Bianca Rinehart was seeking the documents for improper purpose and they should be withheld until there was a known result in the confidential Federal Court arbitration, where the familys internal squabble continues to play out. He said it was the responsibility of the court to supervise the administration of the trust, which fell to the younger Rinehart as trustee but who had a clear conflict of interest since she would personally benefit from stripping Hancock Prospecting of its most valuable assets. If those claims succeed, the value of HPPL and its shares will reduce dramatically, he told the court. And given the principal asset of HMH Trust is a significant shareholding in HPPL, so the success of Biancas personal claims cannot be in the interests of HMH Trust. It was a clever circular argument that rang some alarm bells with NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Julie Ward, when she handed down her judgment to delay the release of corporate files relating to the trust held by Mrs Rinehart and the company after a similar attempt by Bianca late last year. It was revealed most recently in court that Hancock Prospecting uncovered some 27,000 documents in its possession, according to the search terms provided by Mrs Rineharts daughter, but sifting through those documents as to actual their relevance to the trust would cost around $300,000 in estimates by Mrs Rineharts solicitors. Even then, Mrs Rinehart has to approve their release.

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It proved another dead end in a long standoff over corporate information sharing that is understood to also be occurring before specially appointed federal court arbitrator Wayne Martin QC. And it is behind those closed arbitration doors, where Hancock Prospecting would prefer all matters to be argued. Loading In fact, further arbitration involving DFD Rhodes has been floated as a way of being rid of Bianca and John from the Supreme Court action, effectively whittling the Hope Downs trial to a good old fashioned gun-sling between Hancock and Wright. Justice Le Miere, who has reserved his decisions, will be up against it as he has been reminded of the High Court of Australias decision to endorse confidential arbitration as a preferred method of settlement. He will also not wish to step too far outside the NSW judges decree, despite it being in a separate jurisdiction and the handful of files most recently sought relating to his own court hearings rather than being a matter of piercing a corporate veil. Justice Le Miere is also aware his decision may spawn a web of further court hearings that may delay trial, since he has sat through most of the Hope Downs hearings over the decades, but he will wish to see justice done for all parties.

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The remains of a Tesla vehicle are seen after it crashed in The Woodlands, Texas, April 17, 2021, in this still image from video obtained via social media. (Photo : SCOTT J. ENGLE via REUTERS)

The U.S. transport safety board is working to publish as soon as possible a preliminary report on a recent Tesla vehicle crash in Texas in which local police said no one was in the driver's seat, a senior official told Reuters, acknowledging public confusion over the fatal accident.



"A preliminary report typically comes out in a month, but we are working hard to get it out as soon as possible because we recognize there is this confusion out there," Kristin Poland, Deputy Director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said in an interview with Reuters.



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Earlier this month, a Tesla Model S smashed into a tree in Texas and burst into flames, killing one occupant found in the front passenger seat and the owner in the back seat. Police said it was apparent that there was no one in the driver's seat at the time of the crash.



On Monday, Tesla refuted police's claims, saying a deformed steering wheel suggested that someone was likely in the driver's seat.



"We recognize that that's not an ideal circumstance," Poland said, referring to public confusion over what happened during the accident. "The sooner we can get the preliminary report out the better it will be for everybody to provide as much clarity as possible," she said, saying the report will be based on solid facts.



The veteran NTSB official declined to discuss any findings so far, saying that the probe by its experienced investigators is underway.



The NTSB has criticized Tesla's Autopilot after a series of investigations into fatal crashes, including a lack of adequate driver monitoring systems.



Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted earlier that data downloaded by Tesla indicates the vehicle was not operating on Autopilot, its semi-autonomous driving system.



Tesla said it was not able to recover the data from an SD card from the burnt car at the time of the impact, but local authorities are working on that.



"We were able to knock down the bulk of the fire within 3 to 4 minutes," Palmer Buck, Fire Chief of The Woodlands Fire Department, told Reuters.



Fire officers cooled the battery area while an initial accident investigation took place, as a chemical chain reaction in the lithium ion battery pack continued to cause heat and occasional flames from the underside of the car.



The fire was fully extinguished once the investigation was complete, he said.


New Delhi: Few days before the Central government is set to expand the COVID-19 vaccination drive for those above 18 years, many opposition-ruled states have flagged the issue of shortage of vaccine.

Ove four opposition-ruled states, including Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab and Chhattisgarh, have revealed that they wont be able to take part in the next phase of COVID-19 vaccination drive for those above 18 years, due to the shortage of vaccine supply.

Earlier this week Rajasthan government had alleged that the Serum Institute of India (SII) have informed them that they wont be able to supply the COVID-19 vaccine doses before May 15.

Rajasthan Health Minister Raghu Sharma told the media, We were told to speak to Serum Institute. Their feedback was that the orders that they have got from the central governmentthey will need time till May 15 to supply those orders. So they are not in a position to give the vaccine to us.

So, the question is, if the states want to procure vaccines directly, what is the process? This the central government should decide. The question before us is, we have 3.13 crore people in the 18-45 age group; how will we vaccinate them? he added.

Following this, Rajasthan Health Minister held a meeting with his counterparts from Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, over the issue. All state leaders then addressed a press conference, in which Sharma said, We are ready to pay but the rates should be uniform, adding that This the central government should address.

Chhattisgarh health minister T S Singh Deo and Punjab health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu also supported Sharmas demands.

Maharashtra also reported that due to inadequate vaccine stock, 40 private vaccination centres will close on April 29, while the remaining 33 private vaccination centers are also left with only limited second doses of COVID-19 vaccine.

Jharkhand Health Minister Banna Gupta reportedly said, We want to vaccinate, but will we make vaccines in our homes?

AS per the reports, Punjab CM Amarinder Singh had ordered the state Health Department to order over 30 lakh Covishield doses for the upcoming vaccination drive of the 18-45 age group. But, the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines for the 18-45 age group is not expected before May 15.

All the leaders from these four states have accused the Centre of discrimination in supply of medical resources to fight the deadly COVID-19.

Meanwhile, The official data on Wednesday (April 28) showed that deaths due to COVID-19 have crossed the 2-lakh mark in the country with the highest ever 3,000 deaths in the last 24 hours.

India also reported 3,60,960 fresh coronavirus infections, taking the cumulative caseload to 1,79,97,267, as per data by the health ministry.

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She has recently returned to London after a prolonged stint in Los Angeles doing modelling work.

And Lottie Moss caught the eye as she headed out in Chelsea on Wednesday in a skintight black bodysuit from PrettyLittleThing.

The model, 23, teased a hint of her svelte waist in the figure-hugging top which she teamed with light blue frayed hem jeans, also from the fashion giant.

Fashion maven: Lottie Moss caught the eye as she headed out in Chelsea on Wednesday in a skintight black bodysuit from PrettyLittleThing

Lottie added a boost to her height with black heeled boots and accessorised her outfit with a silver chain necklace and sunglasses, which she wore on her head.

She toted a small black shoulder bag as she left her home for the rainy stroll in the capital.

Lottie wore her blonde locks in soft curls and accentuated her flawless complexion with deftly touches of make-up.

The model, 23, teased a hint of her svelte waist in the figure-hugging top which she teamed with light blue frayed hem jeans, also from the fashion giant

Strutting her stuff: Lottie added a boost to her height with black heeled boots and accessorised her outfit with a silver chain necklace and sunglasses

Rainy day: She toted a small black shoulder bag as she left her home for the rainy stroll in the capital

It comes after Lottie headed to a tattoo removal specialist to laser off an inking on her derriere on Tuesday.

The model showed off her ample cleavage in a plunging khaki crop top as she lay on the bed and filmed the procedure on Instagram.

Wearing a hot pink thong, Lottie showed the laser equipment as a trained therapist worked to zap away the inking.

The blonde beauty is thought to have around five tattoos, including a flock of birds under her breast, a zodiac sign on her hip, heart on her wrist, a hand holding a smoking cigarette and an infinity on her upper arm and 'not yours' on her derriere.

Home sweet home: Earlier this week, Lottie revealed that she decided to fly back to England after a date with a man in New York turned sour

Unlucky in love: She said: 'Flew to New York [from Los Angeles] to see a guy and he ended up being just a bit of an a**ehole, to be honest'

Earlier this week, Lottie revealed that she decided to fly back to England after a date with a man in New York turned sour.

She said: 'Flew to New York [from Los Angeles] to see a guy and he ended up being just a bit of an a**ehole, to be honest.

'I have really bad taste in guys. I keep going for guys who couldnt care less. Ive been single for five years now.'

The model was previously linked to Made In Chelsea's Alex Mytton and presenter Roman Kemp.
The approval of Ilaris (canakinumab) in the treatment of adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD) brings hope for Canadians living with this rare, debilitating, and sometimes life-threatening inflammatory disorder.





Ilaris, an interleukin-1 beta inhibitor, provides a new mode of treatment for this disease which previously had limited options.1,2

DORVAL, QC, April 29, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc. is pleased to announce that Health Canada has approved Ilaris (canakinumab) for the treatment of active Still's disease, including adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD)1. AOSD is a rare form of inflammatory arthritis that can be a complex disease with variable presentation and potentially life-threatening complications2.

This new indication follows the existing approval of Ilaris for Systemic Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (SJIA)1, now allowing patients over the age of 16 to be treated. Characteristics of AOSD have considerable overlap with SJIA, which includes fever, arthritis, rash and elevated markers for inflammation, suggesting these as similar conditions under the same disease continuum but with different ages of onset3. AOSD is complex, multigenic, disruptive, and difficult to diagnose4. The disease can vary from an indolent chronic condition to a severe and highly symptomatic one from patient to patient2,4.

"The availability of Ilaris for the treatment of adult-onset Still's disease represents a significant advancement for Canadians currently suffering from this potentially life-threatening autoinflammatory condition, and also for the expansion of research in this field," said Dr. Derek Haaland, rheumatologist, clinical immunologist and allergist in Barrie, Ontario. "This development also brings with it much-needed awareness of AOSD and other related autoinflammatory disorders that are rare and too often don't receive the attention they deserve."

New treatments have been slow to develop for AOSD, in part because its rarity and complexity make it difficult for the scientific community to study4. While the clinical manifestations of AOSD are similar to other autoinflammatory diseases in some ways, including the characteristic of interleukin involvement, it is differentiated by the length and severity of flares, the occurrence of bone and cartilage destruction, and the apparent lack of genetic origin4. As such, the availability of a therapy for AOSD that inhibits interleukin-1 beta is significant.

"With rare autoinflammatory diseases like AOSD, we are especially eager to provide new treatment options for patients who too often have limited options," said Andrea Marazzi, Country Head, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada. "We are proud to announce this latest approval for Ilaris and are hopeful that it will open the door to reimagining care for adult Canadian patients."

Ilaris is a genetically engineered high-affinity human anti-human-interleukin-1 beta (IL-1) monoclonal antibody, administered by subcutaneous injection every four weeks in the treatment of AOSD1. As a targeted biological therapy, Ilaris is an entirely new mode of treatment for this disease, which has historically been managed with corticosteroids and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs1,2.

AOSD is estimated to affect less than one per 100,000 people3. First described in 1971, the disorder presents with high spiking fevers, skin rash, sore throat, abnormal liver function, and joint symptoms4.

In addition to AOSD and SJIA, Ilaris is also approved for a number of autoinflammatory Periodic Fever Syndromes, including Cryopyric-Associated Periodic Syndrome (CAPS) in adults and children1.

About Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada

Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc., a leader in the healthcare field, is committed to the discovery, development and marketing of innovative products to improve the well-being of all Canadians. In 2020, the company invested $45 million in research and development in Canada. Located in Dorval, Quebec, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc. employs approximately 1,000 people in Canada and is an affiliate of Novartis AG, which provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. For further information, please consult www.novartis.ca .

About Novartis

Novartis is reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the world's top companies investing in research and development. Novartis products reach nearly 800 million people globally and we are finding innovative ways to expand access to our latest treatments. About 110,000 people of more than 140 nationalities work at Novartis around the world. Find out more at https://www.novartis.com.

References

1. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada, Inc. ILARIS Product Monograph. February 22, 2021 2. Y Jamilloux, M Gerfaud-Valentin, T Henry, P Seve. Treatment of adult-onset Still's disease: a review. Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management 11, pp 33-43. Available at : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278737/ 3. Efthimiou P., Yadlapati S. (2019) Adult-Onset Still's Disease. In: Efthimiou P. (eds) Auto-Inflammatory Syndromes. Springer, Cham. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96929-9_19 4. M Gerfaud-Valentin, Y Jamilloux, J Iwaz, P Seve. Adult Onset Still's Disease. Autoimmunity Reviews 13, pp 708-722. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568997214000986

Ilaris is a registered trademark.

SOURCE Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc.

For further information: Novartis Media Relations, Julie Schneiderman, Novartis Corporate Communications, +1 514 633 7873, E-mail: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.novartis.ca


New York nurses caring for COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic experienced anxiety, depression, and illness--but steps their hospitals took to protect them and support from their coworkers helped buffer against the stressful conditions, according to a study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing.

"A critical part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic should be supporting the mental health of our frontline workers. Our study demonstrates that institutional resources--such as supportive staff relationships, professional development, providing temporary housing, and access to personal protective equipment--were associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression among nurses," said Christine T. Kovner, RN, PhD, the Mathey Mezey Professor of Geriatric Nursing at NYU Meyers and the study's lead author.

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained health systems around the world. The public health crisis has subjected nurses--the largest group of healthcare professionals responding to the pandemic--and other frontline workers to situations of unparalleled stress, as routine roles and responsibilities were disrupted. Not only have nurses worked tirelessly to care for very ill patients, many of whom died, but they themselves have been at risk of exposure to a life-threatening disease and worry about bringing it home to their loved ones.

Research shows that nurses responding to disasters can experience anxiety and depression, but a variety of factors--both personal and in the workplace--can help nurses cope with, adapt to, and recover from stressful conditions. This study, published in Nursing Outlook, examined what factors helped nurses responding to COVID-19 thrive and what factors may have challenged their mental health.

Kovner and her colleagues surveyed 2,495 nurses across four hospitals in the New York City area that are part of NYU Langone Health. This study was conducted from May through July 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic.

Key findings include:

Anxiety and depression were common among nurses during COVID-19's first wave.

Roughly 27 percent of nurses surveyed reported anxiety and 17 percent reported depression.

The more that nurses cared for patients with COVID-19, the higher their depression and anxiety.

Younger nurses were more likely to be anxious and depressed than were older nurses.

Nurses working in intensive care units were more likely to be depressed than were those in other settings.

Workplace support protected nurses' wellbeing.

When asked what helped the nurses to carry out their care of patients, the most common responses were coworker support (75 percent), followed by support from family and friends (58 percent).

More than half of the respondents were assigned to a new unit as part of their hospital's response to the pandemic. Of those, 77 percent felt that they had received sufficient support from staff at the new unit.

Less anxiety and depression were associated with more support in the workplace, better physician-nurse work relations, and access to hospital resources (e.g., adequate personal protective equipment, or PPE). Anxiety and depression were higher among those with more organizational constraints.

Nurses experienced COVID-19's impact not only at work, but in their personal and home lives as well.

Thirteen percent of nurses reported having contracted COVID-19 and 24 percent had family or a close friend with the illness.

Almost half of the nurses surveyed had to self-isolate and nearly one in five lived in temporary housing provided by the hospital.

Conflict between work and home responsibilities was linked to higher levels of depression and anxiety; residing in temporary housing was linked to lower depression and anxiety.

Nurses valued professional development and training tailored to the pandemic.

Training in the proper donning, doffing, and disposal of PPE was one of the top factors the majority of nurses identified as helping them care for patients with COVID-19.

Having a sense of mastery at work was the most protective factor against depression and anxiety.

Prior education and experience did not necessarily translate to a pandemic with a novel virus: 24 percent of nurses had prior experience with epidemics, and only 23 percent reported that their nursing education was helpful in caring for COVID-19 patients.

"Hospitals can play a role in building and sustaining resiliency in their workforces by understanding the triggers that contribute to stress, depression, and anxiety, and by developing resources to minimize these factors, particularly during crises," said Kovner.

###

In addition to Kovner, study authors include Victoria H. Raveis of NYU College of Dentistry; Nancy Van Devanter, Gary Yu, and Kimberly Glassman of NYU Meyers; and Laura Jean Ridge of the University of Michigan School of Nursing. The research was supported by NYU Langone Health.

About NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing (@NYUNursing)

NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing is a global leader in nursing and health. Founded in 1932, the College offers B.S., M.S., DNP and Ph.D. degree programs providing the educational foundation to prepare the next generation of nursing leaders and researchers. NYU Meyers has several programs that are highly ranked by U.S. News & World Report and is among the top 10 nursing schools receiving NIH funding, thanks to its research mission and commitment to innovative approaches to health care worldwide.
Three additional police officers in Loveland, Colorado were placed on administrative leave Wednesday after video showed officers laughing and joking while watching body cam footage of a violent June arrest of an elderly woman with dementia. Two officers arrested 73-year-old Karen Garner after responding to a call that she had walked out of a local Walmart without paying for $13.88 of items. One of the arresting officers, Austin Hopp, approached Garner on the side of the road before quickly slamming her to the ground, breaking her arm and dislocating her shoulder, according to a lawsuit filed by Garners family. Hopp was placed on administrative leave earlier this week.

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As disturbing as the arrest itself, is what happened back at the station. Hopp and his partner Daria Jalali took Garner to the Loveland police station where she was handcuffed to a bench in a holding cell and left weeping for hours because of her injuries, the familys court filing states. Meanwhile, video footage released by Garners lawyer shows Hopp and Jalali sitting 10-feet away watching the body cam footage of the arrest, laughing, and providing commentary. I cant believe I threw a 73-year-old on the ground, Hopp can be heard saying on the tape. At one point, officers fist-bump when assessing the arrest. I thought it went great, Hopp said. I think we crushed it.

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At one point, Jalali exclaims that the footage is like live TV. Body cams are my favorite thing to watch, Jalali says. I could watch livestream body cams all day. At one point, both officers are joined by a third officer, Tyler Blackett. I was super excited, Hopp said of the arrest. I was like, All right, lets wrestle, girl. Lets wreck it! I got her on the ground and all that stuff. I got her cuffed up.  Threw her on the ground a couple of times.

On Wednesday, Jalali and Blackett were both placed on leave, as was their supervising officer, Philip Metzler.
UK Precisely on Track of Johnsons Roadmap to Reopen, Say Hancock

The UK should be able to reopen on dates set out in the governments roadmap out of the lockdown, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said.

Speaking at a televised CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus briefing on Wednesday, the Health Secretary said: The data show that we are essentially precisely on track for where we expected to be at this point and that is obviously good news.

It means we can follow the roadmapand we look at the data all the time, he added.

As far as the next step is concerned, which is in a few weeks timeand were going to keep monitoring the databut as of today, we are on track for step three on May 17 and that is good news.

According to the roadmap, stage three will begin no earlier than May 17, pubs and restaurants can open indoors, and cinemas and hotels will reopen.

If all goes well, all legal limits on social contact will possibly be removed from June 21 at the earliest.

When asked why England will not follow the United States, where health regulators have said the latest science means people given two doses of the vaccine can meet freely, Hanck said the government made the decision to move together.

As you know, in the autumn we moved different parts of the country according to the rates that we saw in those areas. That had some advantages but it also had a disadvantage that we then saw in the areas where we had fewer restrictions we saw cases pop up, Hancock said, referring to the tiered approach which had different regions under different levels of restrictions.

So we took the decision when we wrote the road map that we all move as one, and I think that is very widely supported, he said.

Jonathan Van-Tam, Englands deputy chief medical officer, speaks during a virtual press conference inside 10 Downing Street, in central London, on Dec. 2, 2020. (John Sibley/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Speaking at the same briefing, Englands deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said he believed it would be incredibly safe for fully vaccinated people to meet, but not quite now.

If two people who both had two doses of vaccine and have both served at least 14 days after their second dose, then I would be highly confident scientifically that if they were reputable vaccines then indeed it would be incredibly safe for those two people to meet, Van-Tam said.

On when that could happen in the UK, he said: Soon, I really hope soon, but not quite now.

He warned that nobody under 42, apart from the clinically extremely vulnerable in whom the vaccine may be slightly less effective and healthcare workers, has had the vaccine.

I know this feels tantalisingly extremely close, and it is going to be frustrating at times for people, particularly those whove had their two doses, he said.

But we just need to make sure we dont have to go backwards again on any of this and just hold the line a teeny bit longer.

Hancock, 42, received his vaccine on Thursday morning from Van-Tam at the Science Museum in central London.

A recent study by Public Health England showed that one dose of either Pfizer/BioNTech or AstraZeneca vaccines can reduce the risk of CCP virus transmission by up to a half,

Hancock said this is the first concrete evidence of how vaccines reduce transmission of COVID-19 within households.

Were looking at whether the second dose gives an even bigger effect, Hancock said on Wednesday.

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told BBC Radio 4s Today programme on Thursday that about 70 [percent] of the adult population of England now have antibodies, almost two-thirds have had a single dose, a quarter have had two doses.

(There are) lots of really good things, but we have to remain cautious and we will continue to look at the data  But the good news is May 17 looks good, June 21 looks good too, Zahawi said.

PA and Alexander Zhang contributed to this report.
A detransitioned woman's gender transition testimony has her questioning a system that allowed her to make irreversible changes to her body. On April 21, she shared that it had been five years since she had a double mastectomy, saying it was "really tough to deal with" and that "My scars are so large and I want to crawl out of my skin."

"I can't believe I was allowed as a child to have this procedure. No one could have prepared me for the reality of it," the girl named Eden said in a series of tweets, as per Big League Politics.

"I was promised sunshine and rainbows. Happiness. All my sadness and gender dysphoria would go away. Of course a kid who was miserable would take that immediately."

"I don't even feel as if I fit into any gender anymore. My dysphoria is worse than I could have imagined, the fever dream that is transition blinded me," Eden wrote, claiming the same facts that other medical practitioners have said before, that beginning with puberty blockers would lead them down a path to more serious, irreversible changes.

"I'm so tired. I wish I could go back to being a little girl and tell myself no, this is the wrong path," she added.

"Why are we expecting children to know exactly who they will be as adults? Let them grow," Eden argued.

A report from the Economist revealed that according to doctors who treat trans-identifying minors, puberty blockers are usually used momentarily to give children time to decide if they want to proceed to cross-sex hormones and hormone therapy, among other procedures.

However, a "vast majority" of these children who take puberty blockers do end up getting cross-sex hormones, suggesting that in fact, these puberty blockers tend to encourage them to proceed with more serious therapies and possibly even surgeries. The report said, "Cross-sex hormones, meanwhile, cause myriad severe health problems, including uterine atrophy and heart problems for trans men on testosterone. They can cause sterility."

In a 2019 report from Sky News, an anonymous Australian detransitioner who went by the name of Ruby recounted how the clinic that provided gender transition services did not address her mental health issues that may have been connected with her gender dysphoria. She shared her gender transition testimony saying, "I think there is a system of saying, 'okay here's your hormones, here's your surgery, off you go.' I don't think that's helpful for anyone."

More and more detransitioners are speaking out on this issue, including Keira Bell and Charlie Evans from the U.K. and Helena Kerschner in the U.S.

However, WND reports that those who support the transgender agenda are fighting to silence the pain of transitioners who have regretted their decision, vilifying them and those that seek to shed more light on their unique gender transition testimonies. The James Dobson Family Institute founder, James Dobson, even called out President Joe Biden's support for the transgender agenda, calling it "lunacy."

Dobson argued that the president is "under the very mistaken impression that teaching our children the truth about biological reality constitutes discrimination." He explained that puberty blockers are being prescribed to prepubescent children who want to transition, but what they do not know is that these blockers prevent them from experiencing puberty, a vital period in their lives in which they truly discover aspects of their identity.
[April 28, 2021] IDEMIA and Razer Fintech's LED-enabled Razer Card wins Technology Excellence Award for FinTech Payment Cards

Razer Fintech and IDEMIA clinched the Singapore Business Review (SBR) Technology Excellence Award for 'FinTech Payment Cards' for its LED-enabled Razer Card, the first of its kind in Singapore. The physical prepaid card can be used to make payments at any VISA-accepting merchants and is linked to Razer Fintech's e-wallet platform to also allow for seamless virtual payments. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005856/en/ (Photo: Business Wire) The Razer Card, aimed at the e-wallet's gamer-centric customer segment, absorbs power from the electric payment terminals when tapped, which would then power the LED embedded in the card to light up for several seconds while the payment is being processed - making a battery-powered card a thing of the past. Each card is linked to the respective customer's Razer Pay mobile app and can be used to make contactless payments at credit card terminals, after which the appropriate amount will be debited from the e-wallet balance. "IDEMIA is dedicated to quality and innovation, which is reflected in our creation of one-of-a-kind products and solutions customised to suit our clients' unique profile and needs. As Razer Fintech is synonymous with innovation and excellence - whether within the gaming ecosystem or the fast-growing FinTech market - we worked closely with them to provide their end-users with a unique and attractive payment, one that distinguishes themselves as e-wallet users in terms of status and technology," said Romain Zanolo, Managing Director of APAC Financial Institutions, IDEMIA. As part ofthe Razer Card's initial roll-out, the Razer Card was opened to 1337 select beta users from October 2020 till January 2021. As with all IDEMIA cards, the Razer Pay card also incorporates advanced contact and contactless transaction technology for payment convenience. It also adheres to all typical credit card requirements, including meeting ISO specifications and schemes, and maintaining compliance with EMV chips and standard magnetic stripes.



"As many of our users are part of the high-end gaming segment, they have exacting standards and would settle for no less when it comes to product and solution excellence. Our Razer Card offers them just that and we have received great feedback on it from our customers thus far. IDEMIA has an unmatched track record in card production and security; with their technology, we are offering our discerning customers a product that helps them enjoy more value from our financial services via both style and substance," said Lee Li Meng, CEO of Razer Fintech. -END-

About IDEMIA IDEMIA, the global leader in Augmented Identity, provides a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities (such as pay, connect and travel), in the physical as well as digital space. Securing our identity has become mission critical in the world we live in today. By standing for Augmented Identity, an identity that ensures privacy and trust and guarantees secure, authenticated and verifiable transactions, we reinvent the way we think, produce, use and protect one of our greatest assets - our identity - whether for individuals or for objects, whenever and wherever security matters. We provide Augmented Identity for international clients from Financial, Telecom, Identity, Public Security and IoT sectors. With close to 15,000 employees around the world, IDEMIA serves clients in 180 countries. For more information, visit www.idemia.com / Follow @IdemiaGroup on Twitter (News - Alert) About Razer Fintech Backed by the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers synonymous with the youth and millennials, Razer Fintech is the financial technology arm of Razer Inc (1337: Hong Kong). Established in April 2018, Razer Fintech has grown to become one of the largest O2O (offline to online) digital payment networks in emerging markets and has processed over billions of dollars in total payment value. Razer Fintech operates two verticals, Razer Merchant Services ("RMS") and Razer Pay. Razer Merchant Services is a leading B2B (business-to-business) solution encompassing: RMS Online: Card processing gateway supporting global scheme cards and over 110 payment methods, powering online payments for global blue-chip merchants in SEA.

RMS Offline: SEA's largest offline payment network of over 1 million physical acceptance points across SEA. RMS Offline also extends point-of-sale services (such as bill payments and telco reloads), cash-over-counter services (including Razer Pay top-ups and fulfilment of e-commerce purchases), distribution of third-party point-of-sale activation (POSA) cards, and merchant acquiring services for Razer Pay and other third-party e-wallets. Razer Pay is a B2C (business-to-consumer) solution comprising an all-encompassing e-wallet focused on offering a plethora of compelling use cases targeted at the youths, millennials. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210428005856/en/

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Three speakers at the 16th edition of the Re: Akoto Memorial Lectures in Kumasi have stressed the need for the nation to honour the late Baffour Osei Akoto for the tremendous role be played in multi-party politics and human rights development of the country.



The speakers were economist, Mr Kwame Pianim; a former Speaker of Parliament, Prof. Mike Oquaye, and a son of the late linguist and Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto.



Baffour Osei Akoto, a senior linguist of the Asantehene, was the founder of the National Liberation Movement(NLM) which later merged with the Northern People Party (NPP) to form the United Party (UP), the founder party of the ruling New Patriotic Party.



Re: Akoto & 7 Others



The lecture, the 16th since its inception of the lecturers was organised as part of activities marking the Students Representative Council (SRC) Week celebration of the Ghana School of Law..



The theme for this year's commemoration was : " The legacy of Baffour Osei Akoto: A family man, a chief and a statesman"



On November, 11 1959, Baffour Akoto and seven others were arrested and summarily detained without trial under the Preventive Detention Act( PDA).



Counsel for the suspects, Dr J.B. Danquah, filed an application for habeas corpus at the High Court for the release of the eight persons to enable them to stand trial at the court but the court refused the application on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction.



Not satisfied, Dr Danquah,who later also became a victim of the PDA, proceeded to the Supreme Court, invoking the apex courts original jurisdiction for interpretation of Article 13(1) of the 1960 Constitution, which, among other things, provided that on assuming office, the President shall make a declaration that he will ensure the safety and security of all persons in Ghana without discrimination.



Reading the courts decision, the Chief Justice, Justice Arku Korsah, said the Preventive Detention Act, 1958, is not contrary to the Constitution and Parliament is competent to pass such an act even in peace time.



He said it was not accepted that the High Court judge, on hearing the application, was obliged to have released the suspects.



Since then, that decision has been a subject of criticism by legal educators and scholars since in their view it gave unfettered power to President Kwame Nkrumah to trample on the fundamental rights of Ghanaians.



Name airport after him



Mr Pianim, who chaired the event, proposed that an international airport be built in honour of Baffour Akoto.



Alternatively, he said an international civic institute could also be established to train the youth in civic duties and on human rights issues in memory of the late politician traditional ruler and statesman.



He commended the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, for initiating the lecture and the Ghana School of Law for also making it part of its annual programmes.



New Constitution



Prof. Oquaye also extolled the virtues of Baffour Akoto and said even though his action at the Supreme Court did not succeed, it provided the basis for the review of the constitution such that the Ghana had had new constitutions in 1969, 1979 and 1992.



He said the countrys politics could not be written without mentioning the contribution and role of Baffour Akoto.



Politics



Delivering the keynote address, Dr Akoto said his late father laid the foundation for multiparty democracy in Ghana.



He said as a generational thinker and futuristic person, he accepted in 1956 the proposal for general election in the hope that even if his party did not form a government, it would have representatives who would offer alternative ideas for national development.



Dr Akoto said at the time the liberty of the Ghanaian was being eroded with the introduction of one-party rule in Ghana , Baffour and his colleagues fought to reverse that trend because it was incongruent to our traditions and that policy was bound to deprive the citizenry of their rights and freedoms.



According to him, the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory is for each and everyone of us to do all we can to preserve for posterity as he did, the best in our traditions, cultures and societies thereby enriching all humankind.



Effect of laws



The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mr Godfred Yeboah Dame, noted that in building a society based on the rule of law, We must be guided by the effects of the law on ordinary people and not only the high and mighty or the specific class of people you target. 



He said the case of Re:Akoto and seven others was a classical case that all facet of society could be affected by the law.



According to him, the judgment of that case had become a scar on the conscience of the nation.

Source: graphiconline.com









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HOUSTON  When Shalemu Bekele awoke on the morning of Feb. 15, the townhouse he shared with his wife and two children was so cold, his fingers felt numb.

After bundling up in extra layers, Bekele looked out a frosted window: A winter storm had swept across Texas, knocking out power to millions of homes, including his own, and blanketing Houston in a thin layer of icy snow.

It was beautiful, Bekele, 51, recalled thinking as he headed outside to snap photos of his two children, ages 7 and 8, playing in their first snow. After a few minutes, he sent them back inside to warm up under blankets as he cleared ice off his car, unsure if he would be expected to drive into work.

Shalemu Bekele's children, Beimnet, left, and Rakeb enjoy the snow on the morning of Feb. 15. (Shalemu Bekele)

Bekeles wife, Etenesh Mersha, 46, meanwhile, made a fateful decision, one repeated by scores of Texas residents who lost electricity that week. Desperate to warm up, she went into their attached garage and turned the key to start her car. As the engine hummed, it provided power to run the cars heater and charge her phone while she talked to a friend in Colorado  at the same time, filling her garage and home with a poisonous gas.

There was no carbon monoxide alarm in place to warn the family of the invisible danger. None was required under local or state law.

When Bekele went back inside 30 minutes later, he found Mersha slumped over in the drivers seat, poisoned by the fumes flowing from the cars tailpipe. Confused, he shook her and called her name. Still on the line, the friend in Colorado pleaded over the cars speakers for someone to explain what was happening.

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Not knowing what else to do, Bekele, a devout Christian, ran and grabbed holy water from inside and splashed it on his wifes face, as his children cried and shouted: Whats wrong with Mama? Whats happening?

Thats when Mersha vomited. Suddenly starting to feel ill himself, Bekele wondered if theyd all been sickened by the eggs hed made for breakfast. Panicked, he sent the kids inside to grab towels to clean up their mother. Before they could return, both children collapsed onto the floor inside.

Bekele fainted next, landing with a thud on the garages concrete floor as the car continued to run.

Shalemu Bekele during an interview at his church in Houston. (Annie Mulligan / for NBC News / ProPublica / The Texas Tribune)

After the power flicked off in millions of homes across Texas during the states historic freeze in mid-February, families like Bekeles faced an impossible choice: risk hypothermia or improvise to keep warm. Many brought charcoal grills inside or ran cars in enclosed spaces, either unaware of the dangers or too cold to think rationally.

In their desperation, thousands of Texans unwittingly unleashed deadly gases into homes and apartments that, in many cases, were not equipped with potentially lifesaving carbon monoxide alarms, resulting in the countrys biggest epidemic of CO poisoning in recent history, according to Dr. Neil Hampson, a retired doctor who has spent more than 30 years researching carbon monoxide poisoning and prevention. Two other experts agreed.

In the aftermath of the unprecedented wave of poisonings two months ago, Texas lawmakers have taken few steps to protect residents from future carbon monoxide catastrophes. That choice caps more than a decade of ignored warnings and inaction that resulted in Texas being one of just six states with no statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms in homes, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News found.

Instead, Texas has a confusing patchwork of local codes, with uneven protections for residents and limited enforcement, all of which most likely contributes to unnecessary deaths, health policy experts said.

At least 11 deaths have been confirmed and more than 1,400 people sought care at emergency rooms and urgent care clinics for carbon monoxide poisoning during the weeklong Texas outage, just 400 shy of the total for 2020. Children made up 42 percent of the cases. The totals dont include residents who were poisoned but did not seek care or those who were treated at hospitals and urgent care clinics that do not voluntarily report data to the state.

Black, Hispanic and Asian Texans suffered a disproportionate share of the carbon monoxide poisonings, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News found based on a review of statewide hospital data. Those groups accounted for 72 percent of the poisonings, far more than their 57 percent share of the states population.

Related: Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas that can cause serious injury or even death if inhaled in high quantities. Heres how you can keep your home and family safe.

Over the past two decades, the vast majority of states have implemented laws or regulations requiring carbon monoxide alarms in private residences, often on the heels of high-profile deaths or mass poisonings during storms.

But in Texas, where top lawmakers often promote personal responsibility over state mandates, efforts to pass similar carbon monoxide requirements have repeatedly failed.

Lawmakers introduced a slew of bills aimed at overhauling the states electric grid after the storm, which had its most devastating effects from Feb. 14-17. Temperatures plunged into the single digits, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses lost power at the peak of the storm, and more than 150 people died, many of them frozen in their homes.

Image: People wait in line to fill propane tanks in Houston on Feb. 17. (David J. Phillip / AP file)

Demands for change triggered a series of resignations but, with virtually all of the media and legislative focus on the regulatory failures that caused the power outage, little attention was paid to carbon monoxide alarms. The result was a significant missed opportunity to pass reforms after an entirely preventable public health crisis, said Emily Benfer, a visiting professor at Wake Forest University School of Law in North Carolina who specializes in housing health hazards.

Lawmakers this year are considering a broader modernization of state building codes that is unrelated to Februarys storm. If the measure passes, it would require carbon monoxide alarms in some new homes and apartments, but not those built or renovated before 2022. And it would allow local governments to opt out.

Its completely shocking, Benfer said. In a single week we have concrete evidence of a state governments willful disregard for the health and safety of the most vulnerable residents of the state.

'Public health disaster'

Bekele and Mersha came to Houston from Ethiopia a decade ago with dreams of a better life for their family. For years, they lived in a small apartment and set aside their earnings as gas station clerks until they could afford to buy a home. In 2017, they purchased the three-bedroom townhouse in southwest Houston where they planned to watch their son, Beimnet, and daughter, Rakeb, grow up.

Shalemu Bekele with his wife, Mersha, daughter, Rakeb, and son, Beimnet. (Courtesy Bekele family)

Looking back, Bekele doesnt remember if anyone notified them that the home lacked carbon monoxide alarms. State law requires that information to be disclosed when single-family homes are sold, but there is no policy in Houston or across Texas that would have required the previous owners to install one.

Ive never been told about carbon monoxide before, Bekele said, speaking through an interpreter in his native Amharic.

The first thing he remembers after passing out on the morning of Feb. 15 was waking up in the back of an ambulance. He thought hed only been knocked out for a few minutes, oblivious that it was now after midnight. He and his family had spent more than 12 hours unconscious inside while the friend in Colorado, unaware of their address, frantically searched on social media for family members who could direct emergency responders to their home.

Bekele started to ask the paramedics what happened to his wife and children but blacked out before he could get the words out.

The ambulance driver navigated ice-covered roads to deliver Bekele to Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center. The hospital was overrun with patients like Bekele. Medical staff were treating so many people for carbon monoxide poisoning that the department was running out of beds and oxygen tanks, said Dr. Samuel Prater, the medical director of the hospitals emergency department.

Weve never seen anything like this, Prater said later.

Each year, the Memorial Hermann Health System treats about 50 patients for carbon monoxide poisoning at its 20 emergency rooms in Houston and surrounding counties. But that Monday, staff at Praters ER alone treated more than 60. Across the Memorial Hermann system, one of the largest hospital chains in the Houston region, 224 patients sought care for carbon monoxide poisoning during the freeze and power outages  more than four times its annual volume of such patients, according to data provided by the hospital.

Prater worked quickly to get more oxygen tanks to the ER and to set up emergency triage protocols to prioritize the hospitals limited hyperbaric chambers. The chambers, which deliver oxygen at high pressure to more quickly flush carbon monoxide from patients bloodstream, are a standard treatment for halting the damage done by serious cases of CO poisoning.

With the power still out in millions of Texas homes and temperatures dropping, Prater asked the heads of media affairs at Memorial Hermann and UTHealths McGovern Medical School, where hes a professor, to reach out to news outlets to help warn residents about the dangers of carbon monoxide.

In no uncertain terms, this is a public health disaster, Prater said at a televised news conference a day later, urging people whod lost power not to bring charcoal grills or portable generators inside. Additionally, never run your vehicle inside your garage and then get inside that vehicle as an attempt to get warm.

For more of NBC News' in-depth reporting, download the NBC News app

In an interview later, Prater explained what was at stake: Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas that, at high concentrations, can kill within minutes. In serious cases, those who survive may suffer from permanent brain damage and other long-term health problems, including memory loss, blindness and hearing damage.

Almost 80 percent of patients treated at Memorial Hermann facilities for carbon monoxide poisoning that week were Hispanic or Black, even though those groups account for 55 percent of the population in the greater Houston region. The majority of patients came from neighborhoods that the hospital identified as home to vulnerable populations.

Part of this disparity is a result of where the power outages occurred. Across the state, areas with a high share of residents of color were four times more likely to lose power compared with predominantly white areas, according to an analysis of satellite and U.S. census data released by the Electricity Growth and Use in Developing Economies Initiative, a nonprofit collaboration among five universities.

Image: Eric Traugott warms up his young son, Eric Traugott Jr., beside a fire, made from a discarded wooden armoire outside of their apartment in Austin, Texas, that remains without power on Feb. 17, 2021. (Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times) (Tamir Kalifa / The New York Times via Redux)

Once their power went out, families in lower-income communities generally faced greater challenges. Few had relatives they could stay with. Some didnt have vehicles that could handle icy roads and others lacked awareness of local warming shelters. This left many trapped in freezing homes and at higher risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, said Melissa DuPont-Reyes, an assistant professor at Texas A&M who studies health disparities.

They have no other option to stay warm, she said. Theyre going to use whatever means possible, and unfortunately its toxic.

Benfer, the Wake Forest professor, agreed: The most marginalized communities are also marginalized from information, resources and a safety net they can fall back on in a time of crisis.

More than 24 hours after passing out, Bekele finally regained consciousness inside one of Memorial Hermanns hyperbaric chambers. He immediately asked about his wife and kids, he said. A nurse told him he was very sick and needed to rest.

But Bekele kept asking, he said, until finally a doctor sat down at his bedside. He cried when she delivered the news.

His son, Beimnet, was connected to a ventilator in the intensive care unit, the doctor told him.

His wife and daughter, the doctor said, had died before paramedics arrived, poisoned by a gas that until that moment Bekele had never heard of.

Pleading for help

As Bekele was recovering in the hospital, 911 calls continued flooding emergency operators across the state.

In Austin, the states capital, Franklin Pena felt increasingly powerless as he watched his 3-year-old son shiver from the brutal cold that engulfed his familys apartment. On the evening of Feb. 16, after two days without electricity, Pena brought in a charcoal grill to burn wood for warmth.

My desperation was such that I lost all fear or my head, Pena said in Spanish during an interview. The only thing I could think of doing was to bring the grill in.

Just after 6 p.m., Penas wife and two children started to throw up. His own legs shaking, Pena dialed 911.

Please help me, he pleaded with the operator in Spanish, according to a recording obtained via a public information request. His wife wailed in the background as he told the 911 operator that his older son, 12, who has a developmental disability, had fainted. Because of their high metabolic rates, experts say, children can be more vulnerable to the effects of carbon monoxide.

Is everyone out of danger? the operator asked as Pena explained that they had fled their apartment and were outside in the cold. They are breathing but they are not doing well, he responded.

For 30 excruciating minutes, the 37-year-old Mexico native struggled to answer the operators questions as his wife and 12-year-old son drifted in and out of consciousness. Please, se fuerte mami, he repeated between sobs, begging his wife to be strong.

An incident report later cited extreme levels of carbon monoxide in the familys apartment, which Pena said had no CO alarms.

None were required.

Texas has given local governments the discretion to establish their own carbon monoxide rules. As a result, requirements vary widely, and no single agency tracks them across the state.

Fort Worth and Dallas require the devices in newly constructed homes and existing multifamily units, but not in most single-family homes. Houston requires them only in new or renovated homes, though its now considering a broader requirement that will include existing homes. Most rural communities have less oversight.

Even in cities with stricter regulations, many homes lack the devices.

In 2017, Austin voted to become the first major Texas city to require carbon monoxide alarms in new and existing residences with fuel-fired appliances or attached garages. The change was prompted, in part, by an incident years earlier that left two residents dead.

Penas home only had electric appliances, which excluded his apartment from the requirement.

When emergency responders finally arrived at Penas home, they rushed him, his wife and 12-year-old son to the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning. The 3-year-old was given oxygen but not hospitalized. Pena, who works painting and remodeling houses, said all have since recovered but occasionally suffer from headaches and the trauma of what they lived through that night.

Any time it gets cold, we become afraid, he said. If we see any kind of smoke coming out of the stove, we become afraid and everything that happened that day comes flooding right back.

Emergency room data provided by the state does not reflect the number of residents by city or county who visited hospitals for carbon monoxide poisoning. But 911 call records obtained and analyzed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News show that, in Austin and surrounding Travis County, the majority of the 60 emergency calls for carbon monoxide exposure came from vulnerable neighborhoods, where residents earn two-thirds that of Travis County overall.

The vulnerabilities were more pronounced around Rundberg Lane in North Austin, where Pena lives. A third of the citys carbon monoxide emergency calls came from the community, which has more than double the countys proportion of immigrants and refugees. About 4 in 5 residents in the area are people of color and nearly 2 in 5 are not proficient in English, according to an analysis of 911 calls and U.S. census data by the news organizations.

Three miles from Penas home, Lucila Montoyas family brought inside a gas-powered portable stove to cook lunch and a grill with burning charcoal to help keep their apartment warm, not realizing the white-hot coals still emit fumes even after the flames are down.

Lucila Montoya with her husband, Jose, and her daughter Tifany. (Courtesy Lucila Montoya)

About an hour later, Montoya felt weak but thought it was her pregnancy. She was due in March. But then her daughter Tifany, 7, started crying and losing consciousness. Montoya grabbed the phone as her husband, Jose, threw the child on his back and took her outside in the freezing weather.

My little girl got sick, she started throwing up and is not responding, please, Montoya, a Honduras native, frantically told the 911 operator in Spanish through an interpreter. I need you to come quickly. ... Shes barely breathing.

The 28-year-old mother, who was hospitalized for a day along with her daughter, recalled Tifany saying she couldnt breathe. She felt like she was going to die, said Montoya, whose home didnt have a carbon monoxide alarm.

We were so naive  we almost ended her life and mine, added Montoya, who has since given birth to a healthy girl. As a mother, I dont wish this upon anyone.

Failed reform attempts

In the weeks and months after the outages, Texas lawmakers scrambled to introduce and pass bills aimed at overhauling the states electric grid, with the goal of preventing future disasters.

When I see people who die of hypothermia, or carbon monoxide poisoning, when I see the disruption to the business community, the people who cant get a hot meal, cant get water ... this cannot stand, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who sets legislative priorities in the state Senate, declared in February.

But even as lawmakers demanded a wave of complex reforms, they did little to address one of the simplest changes: establishing a statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms in homes. The devices cost as little as $15 and health experts say they are critical to preventing carbon monoxide poisoning.

The states top three Republicans  Gov. Greg Abbott, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Patrick  did not respond to questions about why carbon monoxide safety wasnt a legislative priority.

State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin and a member of the legislative committee where energy reforms were discussed, said carbon monoxide wasnt on her radar. But Howard said the findings from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News show that it should have been.

Clearly weve had to have reminders throughout this discussion of the fact that people died, she said. We all know how tragic it is, but we get caught up in the politics of the policies and sometimes lose sight of that bottom line.

Legislation seeking to create statewide regulations for carbon monoxide alarms has repeatedly failed to pass the Texas Legislature, even following major storms that led to a surge in CO poisonings and deaths. A bill filed in 2019 that would have required the devices in rental housing didnt get a hearing.

Former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat, co-wrote a failed measure in 2007, a year after former state Sen. Frank Madla and his mother-in-law were killed in a house fire. His 5-year-old granddaughter, who was also in the home, died from carbon monoxide exposure.

The measure would have required smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms in newly constructed homes and older homes for sale if the residences had fuel-burning appliances.

But the bill did not advance despite the close connection many lawmakers had to Madla and supportive testimony from fire chiefs, an emergency room doctor and a poison control center representative.

Industry groups like the Texas Association of Builders at the time staunchly opposed it, criticizing carbon monoxide alarms as an unproven technology that would do more harm than good if required.

We believe mandating this would create a false sense of security for homeowners and would open up liability for homebuilders should they fail, Ned Munoz, vice president of regulatory affairs and general counsel for the group, said during a 2007 House hearing. Munoz also pointed out that the devices were not yet included in the international building codes that are widely adopted by state and local governments.

Van de Putte cant shake the feeling that the states failure to pass a statewide carbon monoxide policy cost lives in February.

We have so many things that protect the physical, the tangible, the property, Van de Putte, a pharmacist, said about current regulations. By not putting in carbon monoxide alarms, thats what were valuing. Were valuing property over life.

Since the failure of the 2007 bill, carbon monoxide alarms have become more reliable and are now required by most state governments and recommended by leading health and safety organizations. The International Code Council first recommended them for many newly constructed and renovated single-family homes in 2009 and apartment complexes in 2012.

In light of the new standards, the Texas Association of Builders has changed its position, said Scott Norman, the groups executive director. The group now supports requirements for carbon monoxide alarms in newly constructed and renovated residences, Norman said.

Decades ago, there were questions about the reliability, he said. But the codes evolve.

Fire safety advocates and public health experts say that a statewide requirement for carbon monoxide alarms would better protect residents and help drive home the message about the deadly hazard.

You dont know if youre going to be exposed until its too late and youre sick or dead from it, said John Riddle, president of the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters, which represents first responders. A statewide law or requirement would absolutely make things easier.

In some states that have passed robust statewide rules, theres been a significant reduction in poisonings, fire safety experts say.

When the state comes in and requires it, there is continuity across the whole state  there is one message, said Jim Smith, the state fire marshal in Minnesota, where emergency department visits for carbon monoxide poisoning fell by 45 percent  from 411 to 226  in the seven years after the state passed a sweeping law requiring alarms in most private residences. It is no different than a seat belt.

In early April, the Texas House passed a bill that would require cities to adhere to more recent health and safety codes for newly constructed and renovated residences. Under the measure, which has not yet been approved by the state Senate, carbon monoxide alarms would be required in homes built after 2022 that have fuel-fired appliances or attached garages. The requirement wouldnt apply to unincorporated areas unless counties chose to adopt the codes, and cities could opt out of the provision.

The legislation, as written, would not protect millions of Texans who live in already constructed homes and apartments.

Starting over

In Houston, Bekele was well enough to be discharged after a four-day hospital stay, but he did not go home. For days, he sat vigil at his sons bedside, leaving only to shower at a family members house, while a machine pumped oxygen in and out of the boys lungs.

Bekele was there, at Beimnets side a few days later, to mark his ninth birthday.

Initially doctors told him that his son had a very low probability to survive, Bekele said. Even if he did, doctors warned that hed likely suffer from permanent brain damage. Prolonged exposure to carbon monoxide had prevented oxygen from reaching his brain.

Day after day, Bekele held his sons hand and begged God to spare his boy.

Then, nearly two weeks after being admitted, Beimnet regained consciousness. Within days, he was off life support and was up and walking around the hospital, slowly getting stronger until he was finally well enough to leave.

Two months later, Beimnet takes pills to prevent a relapse of seizures like the ones he suffered as a result of his carbon monoxide exposure, but he otherwise shows no signs so far of permanent damage.

He is attending school now and is doing well, said Bekele, who has since returned to work at the gas station.

Shalemu and Beimnet Bekele in April. (Annie Mulligan / for NBC News / ProPublica / The Texas Tribune)

This month, Bekele sued nearly a dozen companies that supply power to the states electric grid, one of dozens of lawsuits that seek to hold Texas companies accountable for serious injuries and deaths caused by the winter outages. The power companies have not yet filed a response to Bekeles lawsuit in Harris County District Court but have denied responsibility for outage-related deaths in similar cases filed across Texas.

Bekele doesnt know what will happen with the case, but he said no amount of money can make up for what hes lost.

He still hasnt had the strength to return to the place he and his family called home before his wife and daughter died. Hoping for a fresh start, he took money raised by loved ones on GoFundMe and put it toward the security deposit and rent for a nearby apartment. Its smaller than their old townhouse, but enough space for just the two of them.

Not long after moving in, Bekele discovered a problem, one that he said he planned to fix as soon as possible: The apartment had no carbon monoxide alarms.

About the data: Statewide emergency room data is from Feb. 13-20 and came from the Texas Syndromic Surveillance system. Patients self-reported their race and ethnicity. A total of 11 percent of individuals who did not report their race or ethnicity were removed from the analysis. A separate analysis on patient ages removed less than 5 percent of individuals whose age was missing. Economic and demographic data is from the 2019 five-year American Community Survey and was analyzed at the census tract-level. Unless otherwise noted, areas with EMS calls were compared to the entire Austin-Travis County EMS service area.
It was acclaimed director Peter Faiman (The Don Lane Show, The Paul Hogan Show, Crocodile Dundee) who Adam Hills credits as giving him the magic on hosting ABC music show Spicks & Specks.

Peter Faiman came on board in the very early days who of course had directed everyone from Don Lane to Graham Kennedy to Paul Hogan, says Hills.

He basically said to me, Youve got to treat it like its a dinner party.

The camera is the guest who has just arrived who doesnt know anyone else at the dinner party. Your job is to introduce them, explain whats going on and if at any point you think they havent caught up with the conversation its your job to bring them up to speed.'

This Sunday, Adam, Myf and Alan find out all about Synesthesia, what Amyl and the Sniffers said to Agro, whether Tom Ballard can tap dance and what Dee Snyder and Denise Scotts love child would look like.

Hills is also hoping to resume comedy touring this year.

Im hoping that I can tour Australia either later this year or next year. But this year, Ive got another two series of The Last Leg as well as the Paralympics if they still go ahead. With travel restrictions that might mean being in the UK for the last six months of the year and not seeing my wife and kids at all. So Im trying to just find that balance at the moment, he continued.

I wasnt allowed to leave the UK unless I had work in Australia because you cant leave for any other reason. So I had to put work in the diary so that I could leave the UK. Ill be honest, the rest of the year is kind of in the balance.

Im hoping I can get back to the UK and get the jab to change things. Im also writing a childrens book and thats what kept me going through the quarantine, so at some point Ive got to finish that too.

7:40pm Sunday on ABC.

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For nine minutes, an Alameda police officer tried to engage a man in a park who didnt appear to be harming anyone.

Seven minutes later, 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez was unresponsive, after three officers and a civilian parking employee held him down. Family members were outraged and drew comparisons to George Floyd. Police characterized Gonzalezs death as a medical emergency and said they sought to defuse the situation.

The April 19 incident was the latest deadly encounter to put law enforcement under a microscope, raising questions about how  or whether  officers should respond to people who dont pose an imminent threat of violence.

Given the nature of the phone call, I think our city leadership needs to shift how we respond to calls, said Alameda City Council Member John Knox White. There was no crime in process, there was no call that violence was imminent. We should have been responding with mental health and public health outreach.

Officers James Fisher, Eric McKinley and Cameron Leahy confronted Gonzalez after receiving two calls, the first from an Alameda resident who said Gonzalez was muttering to himself outside the front gate to his house.

Hes not doing anything wrong. Hes just scaring my wife, the caller told a dispatcher, according to audio released by the Alameda Police Department.

A second caller told dispatch that Gonzalez was lingering in Scout Park at the corner of Oak and Powell streets with what the caller suspected might be stolen bottles of alcohol. When McKinley arrived at the park, he found Gonzalez standing beside two Walgreens baskets with bottles.

McKinley spoke to Gonzalez for nine minutes before he and the other officers attempted to arrest him, according to a review of body-camera footage released Tuesday afternoon. It shows the police restraining Gonzalez for five minutes, at which point he went limp.

In a press release, police described the incident as a physical altercation with a man who was suspected in a possible theft and appeared to be under the influence. They said he suffered a medical emergency.

Gonzalezs family contested that version of events, saying police killed him. The video complicated the official narrative: It showed that Gonzalez did not comply, but also did not attack the officers.

This is a drunk guy in the park, said attorney Julia Sherwin, who represents Gonzalezs family. It doesnt justify death.

The footage elicited swift and widespread reaction, with former Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts criticizing the police response on social media.

Interim Police Chief Randy Fenn said he is waiting for more information before judging the officers actions.

We had an obligation to respond to the call and try to get to the bottom of why it was that we were called there, Fenn told The Chronicle on Wednesday, noting that officers spent several minutes trying to build a rapport with Gonzalez before approaching him.

An attorney representing the officers said they were trying to keep Gonzalez safe and did not intend to hurt him. The attorney, Alison Berry Wilkinson, cited a moment in the exchange when McKinley offered Gonzalez a chance to leave.

Heres the plan, the officer can be heard saying. I gotta identify you so I know who Im talking to, make sure you dont have any warrants or anything like that, OK? You come up with a plan, let me know that youre not going to be drinking in our parks over here, and then we can be on our merry way, OK?

He asked Gonzalez for an ID.

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Merry go round? Gonzalez asked.

It was clear all of the synapses werent connecting, Wilkinson said. Those are clues that the officers are looking for. Is this person safe? Is it safe for us to leave him out here?

Gonzalezs family described him as healthy to reporters and on a GoFundMe page that has raised more than $83,000 for funeral costs, as well as for the mother, brother and 4-year-old son he left behind.

Alameda, like other cities in the Bay Area and throughout the country, has taken steps to dramatically reimagine policing. In March, the City Council unanimously voted to pursue a new model in which mental health professionals would handle some calls for service, rather than police officers.

Those efforts resulted in part from last years videotaped arrest of Mali Watkins. Officers knocked Watkins to the ground and handcuffed him, after responding to a call that he was dancing in the street. Ultimately, neither Watkins nor the officers involved in his arrest were charged with a crime.

Sherwin told The Chronicle that Alameda police were on the right track before they tried to arrest Gonzalez.

When the initial officer came on the scene, he did things right in talking to Mario, Sherwin said. Its unclear why he and his colleagues decided to try to arrest Mario. Its also unclear why it was impossible for two officers to get Mario into handcuffs safely when one of the officers had Mario in a rear wrist lock with his right arm.

The other officer tried to control Gonzalezs left arm while clutching a pair of sunglasses, the video shows. Sherwin argued that the officers should have continued talking to Gonzalez, and that there was no rush to take him into custody. All three officers are now on paid administrative leave, per department policy.

The city has hired an outside law firm, Renne Public Law Group, to conduct an administrative investigation into the officers conduct. Separately, the Alameda County Sheriffs Office and District Attorneys Office are each conducting criminal probes of the incident.

Looming over everything is the death of Floyd and subsequent conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Like the Gonzalez case, it began with a relatively minor complaint and ended with a person dying after being restrained by officers.

Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft said Wednesday morning that she had watched the Gonzalez video more than once.

My heart is heavy that a life has been lost, she said. A young mans life, who was a father, brother, son, friend, community member.

Rachel Swan and Michael Williams are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com, michael.williams@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @rachelswan, @michaeldamianw
Featurespace, the leading provider of Enterprise Crime Prevention software, has received the Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade.

This is the second time the company has received a Queen's Award, the first being in 2018 in the Innovation category for its pioneering work in fraud prevention technology.

One of 205 organisations to be honoured, Featurespace secured the Queen's Award for Enterprise now in its 55th year for its outstanding commitment to protecting organisations around the globe from financial crime with its award-winning fraud prevention and anti-money laundering software.

"Having studied and founded a company out of Cambridge, as well as witnessing our expansion to the Americas and Asia-Pacific, this is a tremendous honour and underscores our commitment to excellence and to our customers," said Dave Excell, founder of Featurespace.

The award follows Featurespace's launch of Automated Deep Behavioural Networks for the card and payments industry, which provides a deeper layer of defence to protect consumers from scams, account takeover, card and payments fraud, which cost the financial services industry an estimated $42 billion in 2020.

Featurespace was recognised in The Sunday Times' Sage Tech Track 100, which celebrates Britain's private technology companies with the fastest-growing sales. The company also recently received a Business Culture Award for "Culture in a Crisis" by demonstrating strength in its strong culture before and during the pandemic.

- ENDS

About Featurespace

Featurespace is the world leader in Enterprise Financial Crime prevention for fraud and Anti-Money Laundering. Featurespace invented Adaptive Behavioral Analytics and Automated Deep Behavioral Networks, both of which are available through the ARIC platform, a real-time machine learning software that risk scores events in more than 180 countries to prevent fraud and financial crime.

ARIC Risk Hub uses advanced, explainable anomaly detection to enable financial institutions to automatically identify risk, catch new fraud attacks and identify suspicious activity in real-time. More than 30 major global financial institutions are using ARIC to protect their business and their customers. Publicly announced customers include HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, NatWest, Contis, Danske Bank, ClearBank, AK Bank and Permanent TSB.

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The Patania II, a deep-sea mining machine, faced a sudden accident. Because of this, the robot is now stranded beneath the Pacific Ocean. Could this be the work of mother nature to warn people about its dangerous activities against the Earth?

The stranded robotic machine is a 25-tonne un-crewed device. It was detached from the cable, which connects it to a ship at the surface.

This incident happened during the growing issue over seabed's mineral mining plans.

The Patania II deep-sea mining robot was stranded when it was already halfway through a month-long program of research and trials. Here are other details that you should know about:

What Happened to Patania II deep-sea mining robot?

According to BBC's latest report, the Patania II deep-sea mining machine was deployed in an area of the Pacific licensed to GSR exploration. On the other hand, several zones of the Pacific ocean were already designated to some government agencies and companies.

Also Read: ESA Unloads DAEDALUS, a Sphere Robot That Wanders Around the Moon's Unexplored Lunar Caves

This hi-tech machine, which was developed by the Belgian company GSR, almost finished its first phase of trials. However, its cable suddenly became detached from its connection to the surface machine.

"On its final dive in the GSR area, a lifting point separated and Patania II now stands on the seafloor," explained GSR's spokesman. "An operation to reconnect the lifting point begins this evening and we will provide an update in due course."

So, would Patania II resume its operation? As of now, it's hard to know.

Nevertheless, ccording to Bloomberg's previous report, Sandra Schoettner, a Greenpeace marine biologist, said that the incident should be a lesson that deep-sea mining activities are too dangerous.

However, GSR hasn't replied to her statement. As of the moment, Patania II is still beneath the Pacific Ocean. The company said that if the machine is properly retrieved from the depths of water, it would redeploy it for further research.

For more news updates about Patania II and other similar robots, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: US Army Creates AI Natural Language Voice-Command for Tanks, Robots; Uses Tech for Search and Rescue

This article is owned by TechTimes

Written by: Griffin Davis

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
This means that commercial vehicle operators using BigRoad ELD will be compliant with HOS requirements in both Canada and the U.S., where the BigRoad solution has been in wide commercial use since 2018.

Nearly 100,000 drivers and fleets in North America have chosen BigRoad as their ELD compliance partner already. BigRoad's ELD is a full-stack solution: a plug-and-play device features HOS alerts, DVIR, DOT Inspection Mode, fuel tracking for IFTA, and a free digital load-matching platform.

For more information on Fleet Complete's BigRoad ELD solution, please visit a dedicated Canadian ELD Mandate page where you will find resources and product information.

About Fleet Complete

Fleet Complete is a leading global provider of connected vehicle technology, delivering mission-critical fleet, asset, and mobile workforce management solutions. The company is servicing over 600,000 subscribers and over 40,000 businesses and government organizations in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Australia, and across Europe. It maintains key distribution partnerships with AT&T in the U.S. and Mexico, TELUS and Rogers in Canada, Telstra in Australia, Telia in Denmark, COSMOTE in Greece, and Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) in multiple European countries. Fleet Complete cultivates strong OEM partnerships with global market leaders, such as ConMet, Cummins, Ford, General Motors, Mitsubishi Australia, and Toyota, among others. It remains one of the fastest-growing companies globally, having won numerous awards for innovation and growth. For more information, please visit www.fleetcomplete.com

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[April 29, 2021] ReturnQueen invests its business in the Triangle area of NC

RALEIGH, N.C. and DURHAM, N.C. and CHAPEL HILL, N.C. and CARY, N.C., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ReturnQueen, the exclusive shopping return service app, has expanded its services to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/Cary area of North Carolina. In addition to the software company's corporate headquarters in the NY Metro area, and recent launches in Charlotte, Nashville, Tampa, and Austin, the company's sixth ReturnHouse location (logistics facility) grows the company footprint to a total of 4,221 zip codes nationwide. "Tech savvy, young, diverse professionals are exactly who we know are the highest engagers of convenience services." Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill are known for their research and technology roots and collegiate rivalries. This tri-city region (known as the Triangle) is luring new folks every day with strong job growth and an elevated quality of life. "When mapping out our growth strategy, this felt likethe natural next location, as it hits our core user demographics,'' says Melissa Sprich, VP of Growth. "Tech savvy, young, diverse professionals are exactly who we know are the highest engagers of convenience services." This week alone, Apple has announced plans to invest $1 billion in North Carolina over 10 years, including $552 million to establish a campus in Research Triangle Park where it will create at least 3,000 jobs.



About ReturnQueen

ReturnQueen, an on-demand service that picks up, processes, and sends back all your shopping returns. This contactless service was created to be the solution to the biggest pain points in the shopping cycle including, printing labels, packaging items, waiting in line, driving to the post office, and handling receipts. This unique app allows users to view all their online purchases at a glance and choose which items they want to return. You can return as many items as you can fit into the return bag, provided by ReturnQueen. Membership options will be available to serve different customer needs. ReturnQueen is currently operational in 4,221 zip codes across NJ, NY, Tenn., Fla., Texas, and NC. Immediate plans to expand to Miami, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Chicago within the next 30 days. Their goal is to make this service quickly available throughout the U.S.

First pick up is FREE, Available NOW for download:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/returnqueen/id1537845231

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.returnqueen View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/returnqueen-invests-its-business-in-the-triangle-area-of-nc-301280268.html SOURCE ReturnQueen

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The Texas House gave approval on April 28 to a bill that would expand the states medical cannabis program to include those with chronic pain, all cancer patients and Texans suffering from PTSD.

House Bill 1535, by Rep. Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth, who authored the bill establishing Texas initial medical cannabis program in 2015, would also authorize the Department of State Health Services to add additional qualifying conditions through administrative rulemaking, instead of the Legislature needing to pass a law to expand eligibility.

Currently, patients eligible include those with terminal cancer, intractable epilepsy, seizure disorders, multiple sclerosis, spasticity, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, autism or an incurable neurodegenerative disease. Next, the Senate will consider the bill, before it can be sent to the governor to be signed into law.

When hemp was legalized in 2019, the medical cannabis program was rendered mostly moot  with legally permissible cannabis treatments only being marginally more potent than over-the-counter CBD oils or tinctures.

The bill would also raise the THC, or Tetrahydrocannabinol, cap from 0.5% to 5% and make it possible for those in Texas medical cannabis program to have access to much higher doses than currently available. THC is the psychoactive compound which produces a high. The National Organization for Reforming Marijuana Laws doesnt recognize the states current program as a true medical marijuana program, instead labeling it a medical CBD program because of its emphasis on cannabidiol, derived from hemp and containing only traces of the psychoactive compounds found in cannabis, over THC for medicinal use.

Texas program is called the Compassionate Use Program and has fewer enrolled patients and businesses than most other states with medical cannabis programs. At least some form of medical cannabis is legal in 47 states nationwide, but Texas restrictions put it in the bottom 11 in terms of accessibility, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

There were only about 3,500 Texans registered with the state to use medical cannabis, though advocates estimate that there are over 2 million people eligible based on current law.

Heather Fazio, director of Texans for Responsible Marijuana Policy, says the increased THC limit is a step in the right direction, but it still would limit doctors from being able to decide the proper dosages for their patients.

Theres an incredibly restrictive cap on THC, she said. Low levels of THC will work for some people but it doesnt work for others. And so what we think is that doctors need to be the ones making these decisions, not lawmakers.

Fazio said the bill would help bring more Texas patients to the program and help reduce the use of addictive opioids. However, she says the bill still leaves patients behind who desperately need access to this medicine.

While Klicks bill strictly affects the legal use of medical cannabis in the state, lawmakers are also taking up bills that tackle how recreational marijuana use is penalized.

The House passed House Bill 2593 on April 27, which would reduce penalties for possession of some marijuana concentrate. The penalty for possession of up to two ounces of those products would be lowered to a class B misdemeanor.

Also under consideration is House Bill 441, which would lessen the penalty for possession of one ounce or less of cannabis, as well as remove the possibility of jail time or losing a drivers license. Offenders would receive a Class C misdemeanor, with police issuing a citation similar to a traffic ticket punishable by a fine of up to $500.

Fazio said the bill would especially help keep young people from suffering criminal consequences.

Not that we want to condone young people smoking weed, but the punishment for possessing it shouldnt be harsher than the actual use of the plant, Fazio said. The penalties have caused far more harm than smoking marijuana ever could.

While the House has been receptive to bills related to reducing penalties for marijuana use, the Senate has been less welcoming. In 2019, the House approved a bill that would have reduced penalties for marijuana possession, but Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared it dead in the Senate  not allowing it to be brought to a vote.

But in recent years, Texans have increasingly demonstrated a desire to see marijuana use legalized in the state. According to the February 2021 University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls, 60% of respondents supported legalization for at least small amounts of marijuana for both medical and recreational use  compared to 49% in 2014.

Theres a significant shift happening now, and its so wonderful to see, Fazio said. To see the shift in the way that this issue is perceived, the seriousness that is given at the legislature and now increased support  its very rewarding. Its such an exciting time to be an advocate.

Texas medical cannabis program could expand under bill OKd by House was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

T

Topics Texas Cannabis
A day after the Center opened registration for May 1-phase of Covid vaccination, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday demanded that all the citizen should get free vaccines.

"India must get free COVID vaccine. All citizens must receive the inoculation free of charge. Let's hope they get it this time,#vaccine," Rahul Gandhi tweeted.

free /fri/

adjective, adverb



costing nothing, or not needing to be paid for. e.g.-

 India must get free COVID vaccine.

 All citizens must receive the inoculation free of charge.



Lets hope they get it this time. #vaccine  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 29, 2021





More than 1.55 crore people have registered themselves on the first day of registration for the third phase of Covid vaccination starting Saturday. In the third phase, everyone above the age of 18 will be eligible to get a vaccine against Covid-19.



As per the CoWin dash board over 23 lakh people registered for the third phase of vaccination on Thursday. Around 10.30 a.m., 23,82,756 people have registered themselves for vaccination on Thursday.



Registration for third phase started at 4 p.m. on thursday and in eight hours till midnight more than one crore people got themselves registered for vaccination.



Post midnight, CEO, National Health Authority, RS Sharma tweeted, "We closed the day with 1.33 crore registrations on Co-Win and delivered 2.78 crore SMSes."



As the registration process started, people complained about glitches which were denied by the Union Health Ministry.


Alabamas coat of arms is found on many governmental seals of the state and is worn as a shoulder patch by Alabama State Troopers.

Within the seal are images of the symbols of the five nations which have at various times held sovereignty over Alabama: France, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Confederate States of America.

Its the image of the Confederacy -- the controversial battle flag -- that is generating debate in the State House that will likely continue throughout the year as state lawmakers look at a wholesale redesign of the coat of arms.

The fate of the design and concerns about historical accuracies about it surfaced Wednesday before the Alabama House State Government Committee.

I expect us to study it and come up with something historically accurate and come up with an agreement that reflects who really held sway over Alabama over all these years, said State Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, the committees chairman.

The proposal aimed at altering the design is part of HB43, sponsored by state Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville. She is hopeful all interested sides in the debate, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans, can be included in upcoming talks over how to present an accurate depiction of the coat of arms.

We ought to be able to sit at the table and have a conversation and talk about how we are feeling (over the design), Hall said. Once you have a relationship with people, there is an opportunity to work together.

The current design was endorsed 82 years ago in 1939 and was intended to serve as a visual inventory of the history of political entities in control of Alabama, according to Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives & History.

Accuracy

But inaccuracies abound, and Murray and others want to see the symbol altered.

The most high-profile error is with the Confederate battle flag image, which is not an actual political flag, but is a military flag used on the battlefield. One proposal could include removing the battle flag image and replacing it with the first official national flag of the Confederacy, often referred to as the stars and bars.

Additionally, proponents for changing the design want to incorporate imagery recognizing Alabamas Native American history given that American Indians were the first to have settled within the state.

Thats the reason Native Americans are now part of the discussion, said Pringle. There is nothing in there about Native Americans.

Eloise Josey, executive director with the Alabama Indian Affairs Commission, said the challenge would be finding imaginary that reflects all of the tribes that settled in the state, and not just one tribe.

Alabama is like most other places in this part of the country, said Joey. The Indians are sort of an invisible minority. There are so few of them. But as tribes, they have their own symbols, and their own flags depicting the different tribes like Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee.

Battle flag

The lack of Native American inclusion generated no discussion from the people who spoke before the committee. Instead, it was the hot button issue of Confederate imagery that generated the most debate.

Why would we stand for a symbol that is outdated and oppressive and not outright racist? said Shay Farley with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund in Montgomery.

Farley said the legislation for the seal was sponsored in 1939 by an attorney who once represented notorious Birmingham public safety commissioner Bull Connor, who became internationally known for brutal attacks on peaceful protestors during the Civil Rights era.

The person who brought this to us is tied to the very principle of why we have to remove it, Farley said.

Representatives with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, however, are concerned about the symbolism of removing the battle flag, and argued a defense of the Southern States role in the Civil War.

Real history shows that slavery was only a small issue when it came to the secession of the Southern states, said John King with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Money was the issue.

Altering an official government seal or emblem has occurred before in Alabama. In 2015, the Baldwin County Commission voted 3-1 to change its county seal so it appeared more historically accurate than the prior design. The 2015 changed involved replacing the Spanish, English and French flags with versions that better reflected the era in which country initiated its influence over coastal Alabama.

Also, the Confederate battle flag was replaced with the first national flag of the Confederacy.

The change in Baldwin County occurred around the time of a national reckoning over the battle flag following a mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., in which nine churchgoers were killed inside a historically black church. Several pictures surfaced after the shooting showing the gunman posing with the battle flag.

Sam Crosby, a Baldwin County resident who was a part of the process six years ago, said he felt it was time to make the historical corrections to the state imagery.

I believe continuing use of the coat of arms hurts the states image and is detrimental to recruiting industry, he said.

For Vincent Jackson, a Black retired State Trooper, wearing the coat of arms as a patch on his uniform for years was painful since the design includes a Confederate battle flag symbol.

I was angry for such a long time, Jackson said. I was the guy behind this patch. I represented everyone and I represented my mother and those who marched (during) civil rights. It was a painful symbol for my parents. It turned into a painful symbol when I realized what it meant.

He said he could not express his concerns about the image while he was an active state trooper.

My senior advisors and the people I worked with strongly discouraged it, he said. If you brought it up  it was a career ender. Now that Im retired, my conscious has led me (to the discussion over altering it).
Apr. 29A Manchester man is facing home invasion and a number of other felony charges based on accusations he chased his girlfriend into a two-family house on Oak Street on Jan. 22, then searched both units of the house for her, threatening residents he encountered.

The man, Arcenio Dunker, 31, who has listed an address on South Main Street, is being held on $750,000 bond at the Bridgeport Correctional Center, online records show.

In addition to the home invasion charge, which carries 10 to 25 years in prison, Dunker is facing felony charges that include two counts of first-degree burglary, two counts of risk of injury to a child, and a single count of first-degree threatening.

He also is facing misdemeanor charges that include six counts of second-degree threatening and two counts of third-degree criminal mischief.

HOME INVASION

DEFENDANT: Arcenio Dunker, 31, who has listed an address on South Main Street in Manchester

FELONY CHARGES: Home invasion, first-degree threatening, two counts each of first-degree burglary and risk of injury to a child

STATUS: Held on $750,000 bond, due July 14 in Hartford Superior Court

Dunker's girlfriend told police that he had driven her to the home of friends of hers on Oak Street and they got in an argument in the car outside the house, according to a report by Manchester police Officer Zachary Chantios.

The officer went on to report the following: At one point, the woman said, she got out of the car, which was registered to her child's father but which she primarily used, according to the police report. She said Dunker then grabbed a wooden stick from the trunk and started to hit the car.

The woman, who had gone inside the house, said she came back out and yelled at Dunker to stop. She said they got back into the car and continued to argue. Eventually, she said, she got out again and went back into the house. She said she left through the back door and walked home.

Residents of the side of the two-family house the woman had gone into told police that Dunker came in later and searched for her, kicking in a locked door on the third floor.

Story continues

Eventually, they said, he went to the other side of the house where he continued to search. Two sisters who were in the basement of that unit told police that he also searched that area. They said he went to the second floor where residents confronted him and told him to leave, causing him to respond belligerently.

A man who was on the third floor said he went down the stairs, encountered Dunker, and asked him who he was. A confrontation ensued in which Dunker tried to punch the man multiple times as other people tried to restrain him, the man and other witnesses told police.

One of the sisters said Dunker appeared intoxicated. His girlfriend told police that she had called a friend after their argument and said Dunker was going crazy.

Police came to the scene in response to emergency calls and separated Dunker from the man he was trying to punch, at which point Dunker threatened to come back and kill the man, witnesses told police.

During booking at the police station, Dunker became combative with officers and threatened to kill them, according to the officer's report.

Dunker also is facing charges in a Hartford carjacking that occurred in April 2020 and gun charges in an incident that occurred in August, also in Hartford, as well as two probation violation charges in old cases, online state judicial records show.

He is due July 14 in Hartford Superior Court in all his cases. An attempt this morning to reach Dunker's lawyer, Walter D. Hussey, wasn't successful.

For updates on Glastonbury, and recent crime and courts coverage in North-Central Connecticut, follow Alex Wood on Twitter: @AlexWoodJI1, Facebook: Alex Wood, and Instagram: @AlexWoodJI.




Haiti - Humanitarian : Impact of the donation from Qatar in Haiti





The organisation Hope for Haiti and The Qatar Haiti Fund are pleased to share the impact on the Haitian population made possible through The Qatar Haiti Fund's $1,890,945 donation to the organization in 2019. The significant donation impacted the lives of 300,000 Haitians through Hope for Haiti's programs designed to improve access to quality healthcare, clean drinking water, and education.



"Thanks to the support from the Qatar Haiti Fund, Hope for Haiti has been able to improve the quality of life for Haitian children, parents and grandparents," said Hope for Haiti CEO Skyler Badenoch. "The support from the Qatar Haiti Fund came at a critical time, as Haitian families faced significant challenges resulting from political unrest and the social, economic, and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic."



"Through the Qatar Haiti Fund, we are proud to partner with Hope for Haiti in support of their important work, and we hope our gift has served as a symbol of solidarity from the people of Qatar to show that Haiti is not forgotten and not without hope," said His Excellency Meshal Bin Hamad Al-Thani, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the United States.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















As state lawmakers in Austin wrap up the latest legislative session, Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday threatened to withhold their pay by vetoing a line item in the states budget because a Democratic walkout killed his priority elections bill. No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities, Abbott tweeted. Should the governor veto Legislature funding?

You voted:
U.S. President Joe Biden has reiterated his intention to end the U.S. war presence in Afghanistan. In a presidential address to Congress marking his first 100 days in office, Biden said on April 28: "We degraded the terrorist threat of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And after 20 years of valor and sacrifice, it is time to bring those troops home."
A jilted husband allegedly took revenge on his ex-wife by blowing up her car as she slept inside it with her new lover.

Shocking CCTV footage shows the heartbroken man walking across a gas station before throwing a homemade petrol bomb onto a car in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand on the night of March 17.

The man, wearing a red shirt and identified by police as Niwat Chankaew, allegedly tracked his ex-lover's pickup truck and erupted in rage after seeing she was with another man.

This is the moment Niwat Chankaew is accused of firebombing his former wife's car while she was asleep inside it at a gas station in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand

Thai police claim this man captured on CCTV footage is Chankaew who is accused of starting the fire

The fire engulfed the vehicle in seconds with Ms Kongsidee and Suchart Suksakul inside

Mr Chankaew is then said to have returned with a Molotov cocktail and hurled it to the truck while his ex and another man were sleeping, with the flames quickly spreading all over the vehicle.

The woman Pattarapond Kongsidee, 26, scrambled to safety with only minor burns. She told police they stopped over at the gas station to rest while travelling to deliver fruit with her new boyfriend Suchart Suksakul, 38, when the incident happened.

She said: 'He was my ex-husband. We have one child together but I had to leave him after I found out he was dealing drugs.

'I was shocked. I tried to maintain a good relationship with him and I thought we had an understanding. Now I am confused what made him do it.

'Recently he did a livestream on his social media where he was threatening to brutally kill me after what happened.

'I thought we were going to die. He smashed the window which sent glass everywhere and made it even harder to escape and put out the fire.

'We covered the 170,000 baht repair bill by ourselves. We also lost the watermelons we were supposed to deliver which cost us another 50,000 baht.'

Ms Kongsidee said she and her boyfriend had to pay 8,000 to replace the truck and 1,000 for the watermelons on the back which they had been due to sell

Chankaew's ex was sleeping in a truck with her new boyfriend outside this gas station

Chankaew, pictured, was ordered by police to carry out a reconstruction of the crime so witnesses might come forward to assist in the investigation

Ms Kongsidee added that they reported the incident to the police, who later arrested Mr Chankaew and took him on a crime reconstruction.

He reportedly confessed to setting his ex-lover's car alight because he was heartbroken over the split and that she owed him money.

Mr Chankaew told local media he was not hiding from the police and was waiting for them to arrest him.

He said: 'My heart was still broken. I told her not to come to Nakhon Si Thammarat until I get better. She took everything from me and now she's giving it to the other person.

Police ordered Chankaew to show how he set fire to his ex's truck on March 17

'I have not been hiding from the police. They just didn't arrest me. I'm ready to be imprisoned but she has to pay me what she owes me so we can be fair.'

Police Captain Rakkiat Chotsak said that officers are still working on the case.

He said: 'We interviewed and interrogated all witnesses and the evidence was already collected. We initially invited the man who was allegedly on the video for questioning but he did not show up. An arrest warrant was issued and we found him and he confessed to starting the fire.

'We're not gathering his testimony and interviewing all the witnesses to know the full situation before he can be charged.'
In his first congressional address Wednesday night, President Biden said very little about foreign policy, and theres no reason why he should have. He has done a lot in that realm in his first 100 daysmending alliances, rejoining global forums, renewing the New START treaty, restarting the Iran nuclear talks, among othersbut the accomplishments are still tentative, and their impact on Americans day-to-day lives is vague.

Biden admitted as much in his speech, noting that in conversations with world leaders, they tell him, We see that America is backbut for how long? My fellow Americans, he went on, we have to show not just that we are back, but that we are here to stay.

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In spelling out his plan on how to do that, Biden shifted the way that presidents usually define foreign policy, especially in these sorts of speeches. The shift was summed up in two lines of the address: Ive often said that our greatest strength is the power of our example, not just the example of our power. And: Were in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.

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Essentially, Biden was sayingand he repeated the idea throughout the speech, in various formulationsthat the crucial example we set, before the rest of the world, is whether we win that competition, whether were capable of winning the competition, whether a democratic government can still do big things for the benefit of its people, or whether, as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have proclaimed several times, autocracies will win the contest because democracies cant muster consensus.

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One big test of whether we can do big things, Biden argued, is whether Congress will pass his multi-trillion-dollar programs for economic revitalization, infrastructure, scientific research, and family assistancebuilding on his existing record, remarkable in so short a time (and very popular among many Republicans, though not GOP legislators), of distributing vaccines to more than 200 million Americans and sending out $1,400 checks to almost as many Americans in need.

A televised joint session of Congress (even one with a fraction of live attendants, owing to COVID regulations) was the ideal forum for this message. Biden was able to spell out how his proposals would help American people, how they would shore up Americas technological advantage over China, andthe political pointhow the biggest impediment to all this is the Republican caucus in Congress.

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Time and again, Biden proposed what should have been uncontroversial improvements to lifeclean water, free tuition for community colleges, cutting child poverty in halfand the camera would show Democrats applauding and Republicans sitting on their hands, some of them falling asleep.

Time and again, Biden implored his friends on the Republican side of the aisle, in a soft-spoken, conversational tone, to join him in his quest, or at least to suggest their own programs if they dont like his. The implied message to the millions of viewers at home: Im trying to salvage your lives, educate your kids, elevate the power of our example, and win the competition with China. If we dont get it done, its the Republicans fault. Get vaccinated! was one of his explicit pleas, delivered straight to the camera. Call your senator or Vote for Democrats in 2022 was the clear subtext.

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And yet the mingling of domestic themes and foreign policy wasnt merely political. It resonates with concepts of national security dating back to just after the end of World War II. George Kennan, the architect of Americas containment policy at the start of the Cold War, said, in 1994, on his 90th birthday, in a speech looking back on his career, It is primarily by example, never by precept, that a country such as ours exerts its most useful influence beyond its borders. Kennan wasnt engaging in revisionism. In his first writings on the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, in the late 1940s, when he coined the term, this was, as he saw it, the essence of containment: we stave off the Soviet Unions expansionist tendencies, and, over the long haul, if were patient and true to ourselves, the Soviet systemwhich carries the seeds of its own destructionwill collapse, while ours will survive.

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The competition with China is very different from the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But Bidens recipe for handling the former takes some cues from Kennans for handling the latter.

Biden is also borrowing from President Dwight Eisenhowers playbook for selling big domestic programs. In the late 1950s, Eisenhower, a popular Republican and war hero, pitched the spending of billions of dollars on an interstate highway system and more science classes in high schools and colleges by calling his bills the National Defense Highway Act and the National Defense Education Act. We needed highways, he said, so the army could mobilize and the people could evacuate, in the event of war. We needed more science classes, so America could compete with Russia in the race to launch rockets into space and develop other technological wonders.

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It was a bit of a ploy, as is Bidens pitch that costly social and economic programs are needed to win the competition with China. But there was, and is, substance to both campaigns as well. In the 50s, American schools were woefully short of science teachers and lab equipment, while Soviet schools were eons ahead. Today, the U.S. leads in microchips and other high-tech gear; but China is catching up, its pivoting cyber technology in directions that threaten Western interests, and its capturing crucial supply chains.

Biden exaggerates when he depicts all of global politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy, but many leaders and ordinary citizens, especially in Europe and Asia, are closely watching whether the United Statesthe self-proclaimed leader of democratic nationscan work through its tribal divisions, calm its partisan violence, and solve its myriad big problems. The stakes are high. The theme of Wednesday nights spectacle was that Biden seems to realize thisand the Republicans in Congress dont.

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Still, the world also poses problems, challenges, and impending crises that fit more conventional concepts of national security and foreign policyand have little to do with whether America fixes its roads, bridges, or pre-school curricula. They include Chinas incursions in the South China Sea, North Koreas nuclear program, Russias taunts of Ukraine, Irans position in the rest of the Middle East, Afghanistans stability in the wake of the U.S. pullout, and, of course, the panoply of issues transcending borders, such as climate change, terrorism, migration, deep poverty, andstillthe pandemic.

Biden has recruited smart, experienced people to deal with these problems. Theyve made sound moves on a few of these problems already. But crises are sure to arise, and the power of our example might hold little sway when they do.
 Is Justice Kavanaugh eager to bring proportionality review to government sanctions ... to protect speech under the First Amendment? | Main | "Reckless Lawmaking: How Debt-Based Driver's License Suspension Laws Impose Harm and Waste Resources" 

April 28, 2021

Not even much lip service about sentencing reform in Prez Biden's first address to Congress

Prez Joe Biden gave a very lengthy speech this evening (full text here), but it only included a precious few sentences about criminal justice reform. Here are these sentences:

We have all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black America. Now is our opportunity to make real progress. Most men and women in uniform wear their badge and serve their communities honorably. I know them. I know they want to help meet this moment as well. My fellow Americans, we have to come together. To rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve. To root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system. And to enact police reform in George Floyds name that passed the House already. I know the Republicans have their own ideas and are engaged in productive discussions with Democrats. We need to work together to find a consensus. Lets get it done next month, by the first anniversary of George Floyds death. The country supports this reform. Congress should act.

Though I was pleased to hear small mention of policing reform by Prez Biden, I was disappointed (though not really surprised) that there was not any other mention of any other criminal justce reform efforts. And this new NPR piece, headlined "Activists Wait For Biden To Take Bold Action On Criminal Justice Reform," picks up this theme. Here are excerpts:

President Biden campaigned on a plan to remake the criminal justice system. He admitted that many of the tough-on-crime positions he staked out 30 years ago just did not work. He said he would focus on drug treatments and on cutting long mandatory prison sentences. NPR's Carrie Johnson has been talking to progressive activists who are waiting for that to happen.... JOHNSON: The Biden White House has been talking regularly with [Inimai] Chettiar and others who want to overhaul the justice system. Kevin Ring advocates for people in prison at the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums. KEVIN RING: FAMM's been around 30 years. I don't know that we've ever had that kind of outreach from the White House or the Justice Department. JOHNSON: Ring says he had a guarded optimism about Biden based on his campaign rhetoric. RING: But there was also some skepticism that he was going to have to tear down the house that he built in some ways through the sentencing laws and prison policies he not only sponsored but bragged about. JOHNSON: Ring says it's still early, but the White House seems to be trying to lay the groundwork for more foundational change. Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project isn't so sure about that. KARA GOTSCH: The lip service is good, but we need more, more action.... JOHNSON: Other advocates credit the Biden team for supporting bipartisan legislation that would finally equalize the penalties for people caught with crack cocaine. Since the 1980s, offenses involving crack have been punished 100 times more harshly than the powder form of the drug, which has been more popular with white people. Chettiar of the Justice Action Network thinks that bill could become law this year. With Congress so closely divided between the two political parties, the odds of legislation that would transform the justice system are pretty slim. That's why advocates are pushing the White House and DOJ to go big now before time runs out.

April 28, 2021 at 10:47 PM | Permalink

Comments

I get that advocates want to relentlessly advocate, because that's most of their job description. That's fine of course. But I hope they also recognize the plain reality that no amount of advocating with the WH is going to change the nanofiber wide margin in the Senate. Someone commenting on the LGM blog put it very nicelyand I'm summarizing herethat Biden's apparent legislative strategy is just to push reconciliation to the limit, not invest a ton of political capital in other measures that would be DOA for now, and bank on that improving the Senate position for 2022 and beyond. I think it's a pretty smart approach and so far it seems to be paying off. Of course it means stuff like sentencing has to get postponed. I do think Biden is doing what he can on the DOJ side for now, but obviously that has a limit.

Again, I understand advocates focusing on the Prez because he's the big dog. Moreover, they expect a more sympathetic ear in a Democrat like Biden. But no amount of sympathy can alter basic Senate math right? If they're not doing it already, I wonder if the advocates might try with Senators who might not initially be that sympathetic, but for whom flipping might actually change the calculus in terms of getting bills passed.

Posted by: hardreaders | Apr 29, 2021 12:06:31 PM

The first comment has merit though unsurprising that a sentencing authority would be focused on this.

The person, e.g., years back was disappointed that Obama didn't do more, citing some speech he gave that few probably noted. Obama had lots of stuff on his plate, but again, I'm not surprised about the selective focus/disappointment levels.

Likewise, graded Trump on a curve since on balance he seemed to do something & since you didn't expect much anyway, kudos! That at some point got to be a bit offensive given who Trump was as a whole.

Biden too has a lot on his plate with certain areas more likely to pass. There is some room in the criminal justice area and it might have something to do with his priorities. He also might think a significant role there will be handled by existing discretion by the Garland Justice Department. I do hope stuff will be done there, including addressing reform of the pardon power.

There is also exactly what "criminal justice" entails. Does it entail violence against women? Gun regulations? Immigration reform? (Criminal justice repeatedly involves immigrants)

Posted by: Joe | Apr 29, 2021 3:06:46 PM

Appreciate Joes comments as always. No surprise at the OP being focused on the issue since its a specialty blog of course. The only surprise is just at the OPs own surpriseif thats a fair characterizationthat Biden isnt making a big deal of it given (1) what other priorities there are and (2) the political constraints hes facing. Garland obviously isnt known as being a thought leader on sentencing, but neither was Biden historically and hes surprised in a lot of areas so far.

Agree that just like infrastructure it makes a lot of sense to view criminal justice broadly.

Posted by: hardreaders | Apr 29, 2021 4:05:13 PM

I am surprised and disappointed, Joe and hardreaders, that you do not see modest sentencing reforms as an opportunity for bipartisan action. I am not talking about abolishing the death penalty or eliminating all mandatory minimums, but I am talking about achievable reforms like:

-- further expanding home detention and compassionate release (at least during the pandemic)

-- ending the use of acquitted conduct at federal sentencing

-- eliminating the crack/powder sentencing disparity

The first two items listed above are bills that have been sponsored by Senator Grassley, the third is a policy endorsed by Jeff Sessions and so many others in the past. And here is a link to an effective CNN piece detailing a number of additional modest reforms that would seem ripe for bipartisan action:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/09/opinions/bipartisanship-criminal-justice-reform-jones-reed/index.html

Put another way, I think this is MUCH more about political priorities, not political constraints --- and I felt the same way about both Obama and Trump, largely because so many red and blue states have shown an ability to do all sort of important and consequential bipartisan work in this arena over the last 15 years.

Especially because Obama's campaign rhetoric was about doing much better in this arena, I was consistently troubled he did not make these issues more of a priority until late in his time in office. Because Trump's campaign rhetoric was "law and order" oriented, I was pleasantly surprised that he bit on historic reforms despite his tough-on-crime bark.

Biden's campaign rhetoric in this arena promised a whole lot, and he is yet to deliver much or seem all that interested in delivering much. He is, of course, entitled to define his political priorities, but his lack of action should not be attributed to "political constraints" nor should they escape criticism from those who believe he should have sentencing reform among his priorities.

Posted by: Doug B. | Apr 30, 2021 11:42:41 AM

"I am surprised and disappointed, Joe and hardreaders, that you do not see modest sentencing reforms as an opportunity for bipartisan action."

Speaking for myself, this isn't true.

The rest of the reply doesn't seem to explain why it's true. There is disagreement on the specifics -- e.g., Democrats didn't support certain legislation for a reason and that is a judgment call -- but that's another matter.

"I think this is MUCH more about political priorities, not political constraints"

State reforms are appreciated (one can read various books on the matter, including Rachel Barkow and Emily Bazelon), but there are very well strong political constraints on the federal level not in place in the state level that complicate this.

How MUCH MORE is a likely a reasonable debate. It still doesn't make the claim that I "do not see modest sentencing reforms as an opportunity for bipartisan action" true.

I welcomed reforms and since the issue at hand was broader -- criminal justice -- my final paragraph's more open-ended approach only helps the chance.

===

Obama's "campaign rhetoric" put criminal justice reform as a limited priority. Again, it's nice he made some nice speech or speeches or something. But, as a whole, the non-specialist is far from surprised that with all the areas -- economy, health care, foreign policy, LGBT etc., that he did less in that area. And, political constraints mattered. Republicans very well in that respect made it harder to get things done that they in theory might support.

This is especially the case that unlike in the past, criminal justice issues were less national issue (not that the tough on crime national concerns lead to great policy). This again might be a difference between local criminal justice policy and federal policy, showing the complexity.

==

Net, Trump was simply horrible even if he "bit" (or was willing not to veto or something stuff that didn't interfere with his main concerns ... this includes farming out court picks, some of whom the professor found good) on modest reforms.

This includes as a whole in a "criminal justice" nature, if we look at that writ large. To say otherwise, again, to me is sadly misguided. A horrible drunk husband might do something nice now and then, but net even "grading on a curve" he's horrible.

Posted by: Joe | Apr 30, 2021 12:48:31 PM

Since there is a lot there, I could say more, and missed some typos, but one more thing that underlines the difference is also in details.

On second thought, I'll leave it be.

Posted by: Joe | Apr 30, 2021 1:02:00 PM

Okay, I'll cover the last paragraph ..



"Biden's campaign rhetoric in this arena promised a whole lot"

I, like the average voter, didn't really focus much on his criminal justice (or specifically sentencing) promises as such, but again, logical a specialist is focused on that.

"he is yet to deliver much"

What is he supposed to have delivered? He came into office in late January. Again, I personally think a major factor in his criminal justice policy is the leadership of the Justice Department. Which ALREADY is acting on things. And, it will likely do more now that more of the supporting characters are getting there.

Maybe, the idea is policy. But, huh, maybe there are immediate emergencies that had to be addressed like COVID. EVEN THERE, using a wide brush, I think something was "delivered" that will help criminal justice in a wide sense, given what often factors in there.

"or seem all that interested in delivering much"

I'm not sure what this means really. What is "much"? He has supported the George Floyd bill. He supported putting people in positions that will deliver. He supports various things, with varying degrees of passion, of a criminal justice character.

Or maybe this is more specific to sentencing policy or whatever. It remains to be seen.

"He is, of course, entitled to define his political priorities, but his lack of action should not be attributed to "political constraints" nor should they escape criticism from those who believe he should have sentencing reform among his priorities."

Why shouldn't it be so attributed if that is a factor?

We can debate HOW MUCH, and I don't want to say it is the ONLY thing, but it is very well a factor. Not that in 100 days, as he has to deal with COVID, the border, getting out of Afghanistan etc., I think it is soon enough to truly judge.

He also should not "escape criticism" any more than anyone else. My complaint in that area was/is a sense of lack of perspective.

Posted by: Joe | Apr 30, 2021 1:16:19 PM

Joe, if there weren't "disagreement on the specifics," then every bill in every area would pass without a dissenting vote. The issue is how and when will a President prioritize using his political capital to cajole Congress to find enough agreement on the specifics to get a bill to his desk.

You are right that the political realities of getting stuff done is much different in DC than in state capitals, but I remain convinced there is a way to get significant bipartisan sentencing reform done in DC if and when a Prez makes this a priority --- and I say that, in large part, because Obama was able to help get (modest) bipartisan crack reform done in 2010 when he made that a priority, and Trump was able to help get (not so modest) bipartisan sentencing and corrections reform done when he made that a priority in 2018. This is my main point and concern --- when a Prez makes these issues a relatively priority, folks on the Hill invest more time trying to find enough agreement on the specifics to get a bill to his desk. So if Prez Biden does not express interest in sentencing reform, it is much less likely to get done.

I agree that the GOP hindered Obama's ability to do more reform when he started focusing on these issues a lot more starting in 2014/2015 -- which is why I was critical about his failure to make these issues more of a priority much earlier. Other folks with other concerns can surely defend Obama for having other priorities over his first six years. But I write a sentencing blog and have assailed mass incarceration and federal sentencing policies and practices for decades, so few should be surprised when I criticize what I see as Obama's failings in this arena.

As for Trump, I am not grading his whole presidency, but rather his criminal justice reform work. In Aug 2018, he embraced the "progressive" approach to the FIRST STEP Act by saying that it should include sentencing reforms in addition to the prison-only reforms that has been passed by the House. Doing so helped ensure the bill's bipartisan passage while also expanding its impact and import. That alone does not in any way "make up" for any other "horrible drunk husband" behavior, but it helped give him a sentencing reform legacy that is ultimately more consequential than Obama's.

I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that Biden might achieve even more than Obama and Trump combined. But that will happen only if he makes sentencing reform more of a priority, and that is why I will keep urging him to do so.

Posted by: Doug B. | Apr 30, 2021 1:31:02 PM

"The issue is"

A lot was said, so I again go back to one of my rule of thumbs -- there is usually more than one issue. The "specifics" debate was there writ large, not in the "no dissenting vote in a specific piece of legislation" way. So, e.g., WHY something didn't pass in the Obama years is a complex thing that helps judge his report card.

The next two paragraphs are generally of the "fine" variety (w/o agreeing with everything) more or less. This partially because as I said in my very first comment, I am not surprised people concerned about specific things will be concerned about specific things of a generalist like a POTUS. But, perspective there works both ways.

Again, I said even SPECIFICALLY in the criminal justice sense (and pardon sense, another thing raised on this blog at the time) as a whole he was horrible. How much is support of that legislation helped is unclear to me. But, the overall point to me holds.

It is myopic to speak of his "sentencing legacy" in that sense as much as talking of the drunk's "legacy" because he helped in a small way while in general even in that general field (the comparison to criminal justice -- specifically cited at the start of your blog comment, and my general concern) he was horrible.

I again wonder what Biden is supposed to have done already in 100 days & note he very well even in that sense did something. Again, maybe in the narrower sentencing area he will be bad. Who knows. OTOH, his opening gambits on criminal justice generally, from his picks at Justice, nominees to the courts (including a favorite of yours) and so forth, he has started on the right foot.

Posted by: Joe | Apr 30, 2021 2:10:40 PM

"it helped give him a sentencing reform legacy that is ultimately more consequential than Obama's"

It is noted that both Obama and Trump had "modest" reforms, but somehow Trump was "more consequential than Obama." Unclear to me, though not being an expert, I won't try to micro-analyze the details of that specific area. I remain suspicious with the idea that it is specific policy focus as compared to wider factors that led it to pass in 2018.

My concern is "criminal justice reform work" as a whole.

On that, Trump was horrible time and time again. Racist. Supporting police abuse. Pardoning those who abused civil rights. Heavy handed immigration policy, spreading lies and vitriol making sane criminal justice policy harder. His Justice Department weakened restraints on local abuses. I can go on. Even if one wants to criticize Obama on his use of pardon power (go ahead), Trump was horrible there too, especially without including some good ones in the final batch.

Grading him on a curve won't help much. Anyway, thanks for the responses.

Posted by: Joe | Apr 30, 2021 2:36:54 PM

I respect all your reasonable takes, Joe, and I can sum up my views up this way: in the sentencing reform arena, Obama did not do nearly as much as I had hoped, Trump was not as bad as I feared, and Biden still has years to define his legacy. And I will persistently urge this Prez, as I did the ones before, to prioritize long-overdue and long-needed sentencing reforms.

Posted by: Doug B. | Apr 30, 2021 2:57:26 PM

Through my own fault, I'm late to the party and it's going to be impossible for me to engage with all these lengthy follow-up comments midstream.

I will just reiterate two things about the President. One is thatand it's not limited to this area (sentencing)I think the fixation on the President, while certainly understandable, is pretty excessive at times. Especially when it's something that requires a legislative solution. If he's not doing all he can on the agency side, then yeah, his bad for sure. For the legislative stuff, it's understandable because I get that he's the most important person in all of gov't and he certainly has influence with his own caucus and even the other side via the bully pulpit. But there are clear limits to that, particularly for the latter. It's not like he's a CEO so he just gives orders and then people carry them out. Many lay persons seem to have that impression although I hope not present company. Folks like to bring up LBJ sometimes, but LBJ had overwhelming legislative majorities to work with. That's obviously not the case here right now, and it wasn't with Obama either post-"shellacking".

Two is the idea of a President getting "credit" just because something happened to occur while he also happened to be president. I think many people would recognize that as a basic logical fallacy. Latin fans might call it post hoc ergo propter hoc, or more fashionably these days "correlation != causation". It's not like Former Guy was the driving force behind the FSA. While it might be "fake news", according to Wikipedia at least, it was also Senate *Democrats* who made the big push for sentencing reform in the Act. Former Guy wasn't even interested until failson-in-law Kushner cajoled him. (I'm sure Caligula also did at least a few good things on a whim or when people begged or flattered him enough. That doesn't make him a good guy.) And I'm sure it wasn't because he suddenly became enlightened about criminal justice; it had to be because he thought it would help him personallythat's the only reason Former Guy ever does anything. We pretty much know that's the case because after the Act passed he complained incessantly that he wasn't getting enough praise for it. So what I'm trying to say is Presidents don't get credit just for showing up and sitting around when other folks are doing all the heavy lifting. And other than the FSA, which I argue is disqualified, what else can even plausibly be to Former Guy's credit?

Posted by: hardreaders | Apr 30, 2021 8:12:16 PM

And just to be totally unequivocal, I completely am in favor of sentencing reform in a lot of areas. But as many folks know by now, in my view, white collar is definitely *not* one of those areasat least not to make it more lenient.

Posted by: hardreaders | Apr 30, 2021 8:16:10 PM

Your points here, hardreaders, are not misguided, but I think your disaffinity for Trump prevents you from giving some credit when some credit is due. Can you think of any other issue on which Senate Democrats made a "big push" and then Trump embraced that push over opposition from some allies in his own party like Tom Cotton? And sure, he did a political calculation (like all politicians do) as well as a personal calculation (as Trump does more than others), but he should still should get credit for making that calculation in a way that led him to advocate to get the FIRST STEP Act to the finish line. If he had decided to be oppositional --- which would certainly have been more in line with his "law and order" brand and most of his base --- the bill would not have even gotten a vote in the Senate despite 5+ years of work on the Hill by so many.

These realities do not make Trump a sentencing refrom hero, nor does it make up for lots of lousy criminal justice stuff during his time in office. But it means Trump should get at least some credit for the biggest CJ reform passed by Congress in a generation. Moreover, it means the Trump brand --- which I fear will still define the GOP for years to come --- includes support for some important CJ reforms and thus provides even more space for GOP officials to vocally support the reforms that have long been pushed by some on the other side of the aisle.

This last point is why the Prez is really so important in this conversation. He is always a key leader of his party --- during and after his time in office --- and all members of his party will take cues from his words and deeds. If a Prez never prioritizes an issue, it is hard not just for those in Congress to get attention for that issue, it is hard for Govs and state legislatures and other state actors and advocates to get those issues prioritized. Not everything should or does flow through the work of a Prez, but his priorities almost always end up being the nation's priorities. This is certaintly NOT what the Framers wanted, but it is our modern reality.

Posted by: Doug B. | May 3, 2021 10:25:40 AM

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In a video post titled "The Silent Christian Secession," Gab CEO Andrew Torba asserts that Christians are the majority in the country and that if they band together, they will effectively defeat socialism.

"This is the path forward," said Torba in a Gab TV video posted on Tuesday. He called for all believers to unite by casting aside all bickering over theological nuances, political stances, and other differences.

"We can't just be atomized individuals anymore. We have to unite. We have to unite across all of Christendom," he said, and stand up for Christ amid what's happening today.

"They're not going to care if you're an Orthodox Christian, or if you're a Catholic or if you're a Protestant believer. What they're gonna care about is that if you believe in Jesus Christ and that you're professing His Gospel, and that you're speaking truth to power, and that you're living biblically, that is what they're going to care about. That is what they want to stop," he pointed out.

Christians are Not Violent Revolutionaries

After starting his video with a prayer asking God the Father for boldness and wisdom, the head of Gab first laid down that real Christians are not violent anarchists. Historically and biblically, he said that people of faith had always been reformers and builders. They will not engage in violence because they see no reason for it.

"We can take back our local community or countries, our economy without, you know, getting violent at all," he said. "The best way to do this is through a what I call a silent Christian secession. And we see this starting to unfold, almost on a daily basis."

Politicians Don't Represent Christians

"I think it's very clear to all of us, or most of us, that whether you're left, right or center, the people that are in Congress that people that are in Washington D.C., do not represent us, do not represent our best interests."

What these politicians represent, according to Torba, are foreign powers, corporations, and the billionaire oligarch class. He added that essentially, people don't really have a choice between left and right, between Democrats and Republicans, because they're just a unit party of the "elites."

How Christians Can Turn It Around

"The silent Christian secession is a two-fold, you know, approach," explained the Christian business owner. "So part of it is economic and part of it is political."

The economic part, he said, is now seen on a day to day basis. He cited the elitist award shows like Oscar and Grammy which are presently "tanking in the rake" as example. This happens because good family people are tired of having their values and beliefs mocked, he said.

"They're tired of being told what to do, and how to think, and all of these political opinions that are being shoved down their throats," noted Torba. "And they're not even political opinions. Really, it's communism. It's Marxism. It's critical theory. It's all this stuff that is totally anti- American, anti-white, anti-family, anti-God, and anti-Christian."

"For all intents and purposes, the United States of America is absolutely a Christian country," he continued adding that Christians have the purchasing power to "annihilate" any company they want, economically speaking. He mentioned the NBA's decreasing ratings and Coca-Cola's declining revenues as examples.

"You may feel disenfranchised from the voting booth after 2020, but where you still have power is in your pocketbook. Right, when you go to the store and you're buying stuff, that is your vote, and that is a vote that they can't take from you," he said.

When Christians, as consumers, stop buying from people, organizations, or corporations that hate their values, this is economic secession says Torba.

"If Christians unite and decide, 'I'm going to really look at what things I'm buying, what services, what products,' and really examine to say, 'Is this a woke brand? Is this brand pushing communist critical theory?... then why am I giving them my money?' Right. It's that simple."

Will the Christian Builders Please Stand Up

Instead of allowing the secularists to dominate, the CEO said that Christians ought to get busy building.

"We need people who are building, people that are entrepreneurial people that are thinking outside of the box," he said.

When Christians are able to create innovative goods and services in the economy, they would be less susceptible to being dominated by the ungodly agendas of large corporations. They can create their own safe spaces and micro economies on the internet. This is annihilation without violence says Torba.

"So were going to start fresh. We're going to support Christian entrepreneurs, and Christian services and Christian businesses. That is how we're going to separate from these cancerous communists," he declared.

Political Succession: It Starts in Each Person's Backyard

Torba said that if there's any hope of redeeming America's government, it must start locally.

"You should know who's running the political organizations in your own backyard before worrying about what's going on in D.C. every day," he said.

He went on to suggest for Christians to consider running for school board or city council. That way, they can represent their people well. Additionally, he said that it's vital for the Christian movement to decentralize. They must work to build significant influence in every political level starting from a town to a municipality, from a county to a state and finally the country.

The problem then, according to Torba, was that "the movement was heavily centralized around Donald Trump."

"That is why the globalist American empires machine was able to center, all their firepower on Trump for five years," he said while noting the stolen elections and internet bans meant to silence conservative and other dissenting voices.

Kill or Shrug Off Pessimism

"We need to have a positive mindset of 'Christ is King right now. This whole earth is His dominion, and we're going to take it in His name. We're going to take it back in His name.' Period," declared Torba.

Never a fan of violence, he reiterated non-violent ways like the economic and political secession as well as decentralization.

"Remember, speak freely, folks. Speak two full weeks and think on these things. Share this video with a friend if you found value in it. God bless, and have a good day," wrapped the Christian dad and entrepreneur.

Watch Torba's video below:
Credit: Stratolaunch

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(Newser)  Former President Trump hasn't committed to a 2024 run, but it's beginning to look more likely that he would ditch Mike Pence if it happens. In an interview with Marie Bartiromo of Fox Business on Thursday, the former president instead spoke glowingly of a different possible running mateFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A lot of people like thatyou know, Im just saying what I read and what you readthey love that ticket, Trump said, per Politico. But certainly, Ron would be considered. Hes a great guy. The governor has not responded publicly to the comments. Trump also said DeSantis has "done a great job as governor." Politico notes that DeSantis' star is rising within the GOP for his resistance to COVID restrictions. Also in the interview:

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Giuliani: Trump blasted the raid of Rudy Giuliani's apartment and law office by federal agents on Wednesday, reports the Hill. Giuliani "is a great patriot," said Trump of his former personal attorney. "He just loves this country, and they raid his apartment." The former president called the raid "unfair" and a "double standard" for his allies. "I don't know what they're looking for or what they're doing," he said. "They say it had to do with filings of various papers and lobbying files. Well, did Hunter [Biden] file? Did [President] Biden file? Because they did a lot of work with other countries. To the best of everyone's knowledge, they didn't file."

Trump blasted the raid of Rudy Giuliani's apartment and law office by federal agents on Wednesday, reports the Hill. Giuliani "is a great patriot," said Trump of his former personal attorney. "He just loves this country, and they raid his apartment." The former president called the raid "unfair" and a "double standard" for his allies. "I don't know what they're looking for or what they're doing," he said. "They say it had to do with filings of various papers and lobbying files. Well, did Hunter [Biden] file? Did [President] Biden file? Because they did a lot of work with other countries. To the best of everyone's knowledge, they didn't file." 'Ungracious': Trump complained that the Biden administration is not crediting him for his accomplishments on the COVID vaccines and other issues. Its ridiculous, Trump said, per Mediaite. "Obviously theyre very ungracious people. I did the vaccine. They like to take the vaccine. But even the fake news isnt giving them credit for that. We did the vaccine, saved tens of millions of lives throughout the world by coming up with a vaccine. If I werent president, vaccine, you wouldnt have a vaccine for five years, three to five years would be the minimum. I got it done in less than nine months. And thats only because of me.

(Read more Donald Trump stories.)
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At MidMichigan, home care nurses have a unique opportunity to use their specialized knowledge and skills. They closely partner with patients to identify their goals, and collaborate with a team of physicians and providers to help patients achieve those goals.
Indiana Attempted Murder Suspect Investigated for Possible Ties to Delphi Killings

An Indiana man who is accused of kidnapping a 9-year-old girl is being investigated for a potential connection to the unsolved murders of two teenagers in Delphi in 2017, officials said on Wednesday.

James Brian Chadwell was arrested last week after he lured the girl into his home to pet his dogs, according to court documents obtained by Fox59 and other local media outlets. Police found the girl inside Chadwells basement after she was reported missing.

Lafayette authorities received a report about a missing child on April 19, according to NBC13. The childs parents called for help after their 9-year-old was missing for about 30 minutes after 7 p.m. local time.

Court documents said that Chadwell was the girls next-door neighbor, and when police questioned him, he said the girl had been there earlier, but then left. Chadwell then allowed them to search his home. Officials told the local station that police discovered the child in his basement.

Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby told local media that investigators are now looking into his possible involvement in the slayings of eighth-graders Libby German and Abby Williams at the Delphi Historic Trails, which are unsolved.

The information [regarding Chadwell] has been shared with us and our investigators are looking into him, Leazenby said.

Investigators have received thousands of tips about a potential suspect in the Delphi murders.

We also believe this person is from Delphi currently or has previously lived here, visits Delphi on a regular basis or works here, Doug Carter, the head of state police, said in 2019 of the possible suspect. We believe you are hiding in plain sight, Carter said to the suspect. He added: We likely have interviewed you or someone close to you. We know that this is about power to you, and you want to know what we knowthat one day, you will.

In the Lafayette case involving the 9-year-old, Chadwell is charged with attempted murder, criminal confinement, and a slew of other charges.
Female black widow spiders start eating their partner in the middle of sperm transfer during copulation, a new study shows.

Researchers in Canada have described the disturbing mating behaviour of a black widow spider species endemic to South America, called Latrodectus mirabilis.

Cannibalism between the two sexes is initiated by females 'through leg grasping and piercing during mating', they reveal from lab observations.

Overall, 70 per cent of females cannibalised their first mate, they observed, but this number jumped to 85 per cent if the female had mated previously.

The freshly deceased cannibalised male might also be less likely to become a parent, because the female is then free to copulate with other males.

Gruesome video footage shows an unfortunate male dwarfed by its relatively gigantic lover in his final moments.

Scroll down for video

Images of female and male Latrodectus mirabilis during mating trials. In the early stage of mating the female is grasping the males leg (ml) with her chelicerae (fc) and piercing it with her fangs. Males abdomen (ma) is also marked

EXPERTS REPORT NEW 'TRAPDOOR SPIDER' Scientists have found a new species of spider in Miami that looks like a 'small shiny black tarantula' and has venom that induces painful stings just like a bee. The Pine Rockland trapdoor spider (Ummidia richmond) was first found by a zookeeper in the grounds of Zoo Miami in Florida. With legs extended, the male is approximately the size of a one pound coin, while the female is estimated to be two to three times larger. Ummidia is a trapdoor spider  meaning it lives in a burrow with a hinged cover like a trapdoor to hide from predators and snatch unlucky prey. Read more: Terrifying new species of spider discovered in Miami Advertisement

Sexual cannibalism in insects and arachnids is well documented and tends to be the dominant female killing and eating the male after mating.

Generally, the benefits of sexual cannibalism may include obtaining nourishment for reproduction or encouraging males to avoid mating with inferior females, previous studies show.

From the male's point of view, it is evolutionarily beneficial for him to sacrifice himself for the good of his mate and his offspring, which benefit from his vital nutrients.

'Usually there are some advantages to the male for being eaten during mating, like longer copulations as well as decreased female receptivity to future males,' study author Luciana Baruffaldi at the University of Toronto Scarborough told New Scientist.

'In this case, though, we don't yet know how the male benefits from sexual cannibalism.'

For the study, Baruffaldi and her colleague collected male and female L. mirabilis juvenile spiders from the field in Piedras de Afilar, Canelones, Uruguay.

The specimens were then held in plastic cages in the Clemente Estable Institute of Biological Research in Montevideo, Uruguay at room temperature.

Their development was monitored and the date they reached sexual maturity was recorded before males and females were introduced to each other and their interactions were filmed and analysed.

In the later stage of mating the female is piercing the males abdomen (ma) with her fangs while grasping the males body with her chelicerae (fc), and the males legs are encased in silk (s)

PROCESS OF SEXUAL CANNIBALISATION Study author Luciana Baruffaldi from the University of Toronto Scarborough told MailOnline what's happening in the video above. The poor male was sexually cannibalised by the female during mating. 'The female started by grasping and piercing the males leg with her chelicerate, then added more silk to the other males legs and pulled the male's abdomen towards her chelicerate and pierced it with her fangs while in copulation,' she explained. Advertisement

Adult females were placed in mating arenas for somewhere between 24 and 48 hours to construct webs prior to the introduction of males.

In all, 21 unmated females were paired with adult males  and only one of the females was not 'actively courted'. Of the remaining 20, all females copulated at least once.

Nine of the 20 matings ended with only one copulation, mostly due to the female sexually cannibalising males during the first copulation.

Cannibalism started during copulation when females grasped the males legs with their chelicerae  their strong, fang-bearing front appendages  and pulled males' abdomens to their mouths to start eating them.

In a second round of experiments, the team found 85 per cent of previously-mated females cannibalised their second mate.

Interestingly, sperm transfer is not prevented by cannibalism, but the fact females go on to mate with other males 'reduces the possibility for benefits of cannibalism for males', the experts say.

Other spiders in the Latrodectus genus practise sexual cannibalism during copulation.

Male redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti) and brown widow spiders (Latrodectus geometricus) actually initiate the cannibalism by flipping themselves over to 'offer' their abdomens to the female, according to Baruffaldi.

The difference with L. mirabilis is that cannibalism was initiated by females, and not facilitated by males like these other species.

The new study, published in Behavioural Processes, describes a unique form of sexual cannibalism not previously reported for the genus.
Foresight Risk & Insurance Services, the commercial insurtech platform offering safety incentives to insureds, today announced the availability of Commercial Property insurance lines, including Inland Marine, Contractors Equipment, and Builders Risk, which will be offered as a complement to Workers Compensation. The launch positions Foresight as a disruptive commercial insurtech in the middle market segment, with a focus on hard-to-place industries such as construction/trades, solar farms, agriculture, manufacturing, and light industrial.

Coverage is now available exclusively through appointed brokers in all eight states in which Foresight operates: Arkansas, Arizona, California, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas. The new offering streamlines the complex commercial placing process, furthering Foresights commitment to bringing insurtech value to brokers. Brokers can now place more of their clients risk through Foresight.

The option to add commercial property and inland marine lines onto workers compensation coverage was important to our valued broker partners and their clients, so it became important to us, said David Fontain, CEO and founder of Foresight. The new lines allow us to deliver ease of doing business to brokers and opens the door to more hard-to-place businesses that want to save on their workers compensation premiums.

In addition to now expanding its insurance offerings, Foresight is poised to launch in several key states and add additional commercial lines to its platform later this year. This expansion will allow the company to meet market demand for a safety-driven pricing model in workers compensation coverage.

Foresight is the only commercial insurtech MGU to focus solely on the middle market, a sector loosely defined by workers compensation policies over $50,000 in premium. Businesses in this segment are more frequently partnered with brokers due to a more complex rating and binding process. Since launching in September 2020, Foresight has received $300M in risk submissions from commercial brokers on the platform and expects to exceed $50M in total written premium by the end of 2021. Foresight is now working with 165 appointed commercial agencies, including 14 of the top 20 agencies in the United States, according to the annual ranking by Insurance Journal.

About Foresight

Foresight is the first insurtech specializing in commercial coverage for the hard-to-place middle market. Our mission is to improve every business we underwrite, starting with workplace safety. Foresight wraps innovative risk management technology into every policy, reducing workplace incident frequency by up to 57% and giving policyholders the ability to earn lower premiums. Learn more about us at getforesight.com.
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There will is a big social media emphasis in a new 200,000 contract being offered by a State-funded agency that runs schools and provides adult education in Laois and Offaly.

The Laois Offaly Education and Training Board has invited companies to bid for a valuable video production services contract. The board says it wishes to engage a full-service video production company to plan, develop and produce high-quality video content.

"This may include but not limited to, promotional videos, educational videos, video case studies, testimonials, explainer videos, virtual open days, events, Podcasts, Vlogs and animation for internal use, across social media platforms, YouTube and the LOETB website," says the offer.

From video, sound-mixing, graphics and teleprompter, the full menu of tools necessary for producing content to make videos for various platforms is required by the board. The use of drone footage may be required in the production of the videos.

Among the aims are to help increase the number of visitors to the LOETB website and increase the amount of time spent on the LOETB Website and/or social media platforms.

They hope to increase the number of downloads, registrations and enquiries through the website for the relevant sections/departments. They also want to attract new students to the post-primary schools, further education centres, traineeships and apprenticeships.

The tender says the LOETB wants to increase the number of views, likes/followers/subscribers, shares/retweets and comment across its online platforms.

It adds that all the objectives will be measurable, using enrolment figures, contact enquiries, analytical data from Google Analytics and Facebook pixel and any other recommendations.

The tender documents say the video content must reflect the "advanced and dynamic nature" of the schools and learning centres and be appealing to its target audiences, be "visually pleasing, interactive and user-focused".

"It is our aim to produce accessible video content and strive to make our video content accessible to all across a range of devices. The main objective of LOETB is to create content that will generate awareness for the organisation and all it encompasses and reflect on the ever-progressing nature of the organisation and the range of services on offer," they say.

As for the length of the contract, the LOETB says the 'framework agreement' will be for a period of 12 months with the option for three extensions.

The ETB says the indicative budget for the framework agreement is 210,000  ex VAT over the lifetime of the agreement

LOETB says it is one of the main employers in the midlands with 1,000 staff providing education for over 4,000 students at post-primary level and over 11,000 beneficiaries on FET programmes and services. LOETB says it manages nine post-primary schools and twelve multi-programme FET Centres and is also joint patron of five Community Schools located in Mountmellick, Ballinakill, Mountrath, Birr, and Ferbane.

The deadline for response to the tender is Monday, May 17.
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Joe Biden last night brought the total new spending commitments announced in his first 100 days in office to $6 trillion - but he's facing questions over whether tax rises he proposes will be enough to cover the ambitious plans he needs to put through Congress.

Speaking to 200 lawmakers in Congress last night, Biden set out plans for his $2.3 trillion 'American Jobs Plan' that he called 'a blue-collar blueprint to build America'. It joins the American Rescue Plan and the American Families Plan, at a time when national debt is at its highest level since 1945.

The $1.9trillion American Rescue Plan that gave aid to American citizens amidst the coronavirus pandemic has passed Congress and is already covered through federal spending.

The $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan he has proposed will cost a total of $4.1 trillion, still needs Congressional approval and Republicans have demanded negotiation to lower the costs.

In order to pay for those two plans, the president announced a series of tax initiatives including almost doubling capital gains to 39.6 percent and hiking the rate for the top one 1 percent of income earners to 38.6 percent.

He would also push corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent, impose a global minimum tax on corporations and will give the IRS $80billion to chase town tax evaders - which he says will generate $700billion in net revenue over 10 years.

According to experts at The Tax Foundation, Biden's tax increases announced in Congress on Wednesday would raise an estimated $2.37 trillion.

Their analysis of Biden's taxation plans in full project that his planned taxes will raise a total of $3.3 billion - however this is subject to many factors including the performance of the economy.

Biden also intends to crack down on multinationals, forcing US firms that make money overseas and companies who use offshore businesses to pay significantly more in taxes under his 'Made in America' tax plan.

The looming gap between Biden's spending ambitions and the projected tax revenues raises the prospect that the President could resort to further borrowing to cover his spending.

Republicans widely panned the speech on Wednesday as 'boring' and a list of 'socialist dreams'.

In the GOP's rebuttal to Biden's speech, Senator Tim Scott belittled the new president's initial priorities - aimed at combating the deadly virus and spurring the economy - as wasteful expansions of big government.

'We should be expanding options and opportunities for all families,' Scott said. 'Our best future won't come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams.'

The national debt currently stands at around $28 trillion, 100 percent of GDP and the highest it has been since 1945; and on track to reach 107 percent by 2031, not factoring in Biden's proposed 10-year spending.

Under Biden's predecessor Donald Trump, America's national debt rose by $7.8 trillion, and was rising even before the coronavirus pandemic forced the need for economic injection.

But unlike Biden, Trump was often more reluctant to pass spending bills, and in contrast to Biden's tax proposals, the former president introduced sweeping tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

President Joe Biden launched sweeping tax hikes on Wednesday night as part of his administration's proposal to raise $6 trillion for his three plans; The American Rescue Plan, The American Jobs Plan and The American Families Plan. Pictured: Biden address the joint session at the US Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday night

The American Jobs Plan: $2.3 trillion

The 'Made in America' tax plan falls under the The American Jobs Plan, that if passed will see $2.3 trillion spent on improving America's ageing infrastructures, including its roads, bridges, rail lines and utilities, as well as huge spending on R&D.

The plan includes a raise in corporation tax - from 21 percent to 28 percent - and a substantial increase in tax on the activities of U.S. multinational corporations, both locally and abroad.

Ahead of Biden's address on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the spending plan is so large, that 15 years of higher corporate taxes will be required to cover around eight years of spending.

Part of that spending will include a huge $621bn for transportation projects as well as funds going towards improving drinking water, infrastructure, expanding broadband, maintaining electrical grids and elderly care.

The Tax Foundation estimates that if passed at 28 percent, the new corporate tax rate could raise around $886.3 billion between 2022 and 2031, before factoring in potential reduced economic output.

The foundation also estimates that Biden's proposed 15 percent minimum book tax would raise about $202.7 billion in additional revenue from 2021 to 2030.

Furthermore, it predicts that the proposed increase on U.S. multinational's tax liabilities would see them pay an additional $104 billion in 2022, and $1.2 trillion over 10 years, and would increase the tax burden on the foreign operations of multinationals by more than $714 billion over the next decade.

However, in its conclusion of its assessment of Biden's proposed corporation tax increase, The Tax Foundation said: 'Raising the U.S. corporate income tax rate would erode America's international tax competitiveness, giving us the highest combined corporate tax rate in the OECD.

'Such a relatively high corporate tax rate would encourage profit shifting abroad and otherwise out of the U.S. corporate sector.'

Addressing Congress and those watching, Biden told his audience: 'I know some of you at home are wondering whether these jobs are for you. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy thats rapidly changing. Let me speak directly to you.

'Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth for years to come. These are good-paying jobs that can't be outsourced. Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. 75% do not require an associates degree.

'The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. And, it recognizes something I've always said. Wall Street didnt build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions build the middle class.'

The American Rescue Plan, worth $1.9 trillion, has already passed the senate in a 50-49 party-lines vote held in March. The American Jobs Plan worth around $2.3 trillion and the The American Families Plan worth $1.8 trillion take the combined total of Biden's three plans to $6 trillion, that will be spent over roughly 10 years. Pictured: President Biden addresses Congress

The American Families Plan: $1.8 trillion

Having beat back progressive primary challengers and pushed major government interventions in the economy through taxes and spending, Biden put a focus on the wealthy and demanded measures to bring more economic equality in his speech.

Funds for the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan - in which Biden has proposed $1 trillion worth of new spending and $800 billion in tax credits - will also be raised through taxation.

However, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicts the tax increases under the American Families Plan will see $1.5 billion raised in total through tax hikes, leaving a $300 billion deficit after the $1.8 billion spending over 10 years.

Under the plan, the IRS' funding would be increased, and marginal income tax for top 1 percent and capital gains and dividend tax rates for those earning over $1 million per year would also be raised.

The plan would see $506 billion spent on education, including free, universal pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-olds, as well as two free years of community college tuition for all Americans.

A further $495 billion would e spent on families and children, including subsidized child-care, paid family medical leave program, and $855 billion on expanded tax credit extensions, including the extending the child Tax Credit expansions from the American Rescue Plan through 2025 and permanently make the Child Tax Credit fully refundable.

In order to raise the funding, the proposal would see $80 billion in enhancements to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which could raise $700 billion from tax evaders, according to estimates made by the White House.

It would also raise marginal income tax for top 1 percent of earners, or those earning over around $400,000, to 38.6 percent  from the current rate of 37 percent.

'That's where it was when George W. Bush became president,' Biden said referring to the current rate, after bashing the 'big tax cut of 2017' enacted under Trump. 'It was supposed to pay for itself and generate vast economic growth. Instead it added $2 trillion to the deficit,' he said.

'We're going to get rid of the loopholes that allow Americans who make more than $1 million a year pay a lower rate on their capital gains than working Americans pay on their work,' Biden said.

'This will only affect three tenths of 1% of all Americans. And the IRS will crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes,' he added.

Biden unveiled on Wednesday a massive capital gains increase. California, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota and Oregon would have the highest top capital gains rates

Capital gains and dividend tax rates for those earning over $1 million per year would also be increased from the current 23.8 percent to 39.6 percent, with an effective rate of 43.4 percent when the Medicare surcharge is added.

For those earning more than $1 million in high-tax states, the total rate will be even higher given the combined federal and state tax capital gains. In New York it could be as high as 52.22 percent and for Californians it could be 56.7 percent.

Biden has still vowed that no one earning under $400,000 a year will pay more taxes under his administration.

Analysis of Biden's tax plans during his 2020 campaign from The Tax Foundation suggested his plans would raise $3.3 trillion over the next decade.

The remaining funding will have to come from sources that are yet to be announced, through cutting spending elsewhere, or added to the national debt.

Republicans slam Biden's speech as a 'boring, socialist dream'

Republicans widely panned the speech on Wednesday as 'boring' and a list of 'socialist dreams'.

GOP Senator Tim Scott said in his party's rebuttal that the president was 'pulling the country apart' instead of promoting unity, that his remarks were 'full of empty platitudes', and belittled the new president's initial priorities - aimed at combating the deadly virus and spurring the economy - as wasteful expansions of big government.

'We should be expanding options and opportunities for all families,' said Scott, who preached a message of optimism while remaining a loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump, 'not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.'

Citing the partisan battle over Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which Congress approved over unanimous GOP opposition, Scott said: 'We need policies and progress that bring us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.'

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott delivered his party's response to President Joe Biden's first address before Congress

Biden's address came three months into a presidency that's seen Republicans repeatedly accuse him of abandoning his campaign pledge to seek bipartisan compromises. While Biden cited a rosy roster of accomplishments and goals in his own speech - 'America is on the move again,' he said - Scott said it was Republicans who had bolstered the economy and began to tame the pandemic.

'This should be a joyful springtime for our nation,' said Scott, citing the Trump administration's role in helping spur vaccine development and beginning a revival of the staggered economy. 'This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run!'

The address also came as Scott, a 10-year veteran of Congress who usually keeps a low profile, has found a spotlight leading his party in a bipartisan effort to overhaul police procedures. That drive was prompted by last May's slaying of George Floyd, a Black man, and energized anew by this month's conviction of a white former Minneapolis police officer for the killing.

'I'm still working. I'm still hopeful,' he said of the talks.

Scott criticized many school systems' decisions to halt or limit in-person classes during the pandemic as a safety measure. Those closures, which were recommended by public health officials, have drawn fire from Republicans as an overreaction and become part of the GOP's culture war with Democrats.

'Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future,' Scott said.

Scott cited low unemployment rates for minorities before the pandemic struck last year, calling it 'the most inclusive economy in my lifetime.' And he praised GOP efforts including tax breaks to encourage business investments in low-income communities.

'Our best future won't come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams,' he said, echoing the GOP's oft-repeated theme that Democrats are pushing far-left plans. 'It will come from you - the American people.'

Scott has long embraced themes of opportunity and a cheerful optimism that were conservative calling cards during the Reagan era. He retold the story of a grandfather who left grade school to pick cotton and led a lifetime of illiteracy, his own childhood living in a single bedroom with his single mother and brother and nearly failing out of high school.

Scott said his family went 'from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. So I am more than hopeful - I am confident - that our finest hour is yet to come.'

Those messages could make Scott a positive messenger for the GOP in what could otherwise be a divisive 2022 election campaign, when the party has high hopes of winning control of the House and perhaps the Senate. Scott is strongly favored to be reelected next year.

Over the years, Scott at times called out Trump in measured tones over some of his racially offensive broadsides. Yet he's remained a strong supporter of the former president and opposed Trump's removal from office after the House impeached him for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
WORBLAUFEN (dpa-AFX) - Swiss telecommunication services firm Swisscom AG (SWZCF.PK, SCMWY.PK) reported that its first-quarter net profit was 638 million Swiss francs, up 61.9% from the prior-year due to non-recurring items in the financial results. This was mainly attributable to a shareholding that Fastweb transferred as a capital contribution to the newly-founded fibre optic network company FiberCop as part of the strategic partnership with TIM. Group revenue for the first-quarter rose by 2.4% to 2.803 billion francs from last year. In the saturated Swiss core business, revenue rose slightly by 0.7% to 2.08 billion francs. The increase resulted from the IT solutions business with business customers and a higher number of smartphones sold. However, ongoing competition and price pressure continued to result in a decline in revenue from telecommunications services, which decreased by 3.5% to 1.39 billion francs. Swisscom said it has set itself an ambitious expansion target with its aspiration to offer all customers the best network in Switzerland everywhere and at all times. By the end of 2025, FTTH fibre-optic coverage is set to increase to 60%. For 2021, Swisscom now expects net revenue of around 11.3 billion francs, EBITDA of 4.3 billion francs to 4.4 billion francs and capital expenditure of 2.2 billion francs to 2.3 billion francs. Previously, Swisscom expected net revenue of around 11.1 billion francs, EBITDA of around 4.3 billion francs and capital expenditure of around 2.3 billion francs. Swisscom will propose to the 2022 Annual General Meeting that the dividend for the 2021 financial year should remain unchanged at 22 francs per share. 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.
An influencer and her boyfriend fell 12 storeys to their deaths in Bolivia after neighbours heard the pair arguing, in an incident police are investigating as a murder-suicide.

The grim moment was captured in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz on April 27.

The victims were identified as Sarah Arauco and Dagner Rojas. Both died on impact, suffering some gruesome injuries.

Sarah Arauco and Dagner Rojas fell 12 storeys to their deaths in Bolivia after neighbours heard the pair arguing, in an incident police are investigating as a murder-suicide

Two videos of the incident appear to show one of the pair falling to their death.

One shows Rojas dangle from the window before falling as the distressed filmmaker can be heard shouting as the video ends.

A second video shows the incident from a different angle.

Rojas' fall was filmed by neighbours just moments after his girlfriend was seen falling from the same spot.

Neighbours told local newspaper Milenio they heard the pair arguing before the tragic incident.

The report added 'a friend of the couple' said Rojas had behaved 'jealously' during their relationship, but the pair had still planned to marry in May this year.

One shows Rojas dangle from the window before falling as the distressed filmmaker can be heard shouting as the video ends

Rojas and Arauco had planned to get married in May this year, friends told local newspaper Milenio

Arauco was well known in the city as an Instagram influencer and had amassed a following of 29,300 followers on the platform

The couple were fairly well known in the area and Arauco had amassed a following of 23,900 followers on Instagram

Special Force Against Violence Director Jose Velasco said in a statement to the local press that the authorities 'are processing the scene' and that they 'want nothing other than to do a serious job'.

Further details about the ongoing investigation will come from the district attorney, Velasco said.

The pair had participated in a now discontinued television show called 'Calle 7' between 2009-2013.

The show involved several contestants taking on group challenges to try to win a prize.

The couple were fairly well known in the area and Arauco had amassed a following of 23,900 followers on Instagram.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain is making massive strides in its national vaccination campaign following a reduction of coronavirus transmission rates among all age groups by an average of 93%.

Health Ministry Undersecretary Dr Waleed Khalifa Al Manea highlighted the success of the Kingdoms efforts to contain the spread of the virus during yesterdays press conference organised by the National Taskforce for Combating the Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Dr Al Manea, a task force member, noted that the Kingdom has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world today. The task force emphasised that the procedures put in place for arriving travellers from certain destinations to provide a PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) certificate will support mitigating the spread of COVID-19 and will ensure the safety of citizens and residents.

The procedures are regularly reviewed and altered based on scientific data presented and developments on the virus. Dr Al Manea highlighted the Kingdoms thorough mitigation efforts, adding that capacity across hospitals is always reviewed to ensure medical services are not affected, given that COVID-19-related medical care, including examinations, isolation, treatments, and vaccinations, is free to all.

In March and April, only 2% of existing cases are travel-related, which indicates that mandatory procedures put in place for incoming travellers to take PCR tests upon arrival, as well as on the fifth and tenth day of stay, are effective.

Dr Al Manea called on citizens and residents to register for the first available COVID-19 vaccine appointment, adding that all vaccines are safe and effective. Another task force member, Lt. Col. Dr Manaf Al Qahtani, said that despite the presence of mutated strains of the virus, vaccines have provided immunity and have protected individuals by relieving symptoms.

A study showed an increase in the percentage of existing cases among those who were not vaccinated, compared to a small percentage of those who are fully vaccinated and had completed 14 days since the last dose.

Dr Al Qahtani explained that the number of existing cases that have been admitted to intensive care since January 2021 has reached 631 cases, of which 612 cases have not been vaccinated, or 97% of the total cases.

The study also revealed that 273 deaths have been recorded, since January 2021 of which 265 cases had not been vaccinated, or 97% of the total cases.

Dr Al Qahtani noted that these statistics show the importance of vaccines in immunising the community, reducing mortality rates and the number of critical cases by a very large percentage.
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The first remains of an ancient Egyptian mummified pregnant woman has been identified, having been discovered in Thebes, dating back more than 2,000 years.

The corpse was 28 weeks into her pregnancy when she died, scans of the body revealed.

Experts from the Polish Academy of Sciences, working as part of the Warsaw Mummy Project, worked to discover more about the woman, thought to be in her 20s.

Through a combination of CT scans and X-rays, the team discovered the remains of a foetus, about 26 to 30 weeks old, inside the woman - the first time a pregnant mummy has been discovered.

The body of the woman, who died 2,000 years ago, had been carefully wrapped in fabrics and left with a rich set of amulets to see her into the afterlife, according to the authors writing in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The team can't say exactly why the foetus was left inside the woman and not mummified separately, but suggest it may be because it was too young to have a name so needed to travel to the afterlife inside its mother.

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Abdominal area of the mummy shown through a range of scans, with the foetus nearly visible as a bright mass

The head and CT scans the mummy. The first remains of an ancient Egyptian mummified pregnant woman has been discovered in Thebes, dating back more than 2,000 years, the corpse was 28 weeks into her pregnancy when she died

WHAT IS EGYPT'S VALLEY OF THE KINGS? The Valley of the Kings in upper Egypt is one of the country's main tourist attractions and is the famous burial ground of many deceased pharaohs. It is located near the ancient city of Luxor on the banks of the river Nile in eastern Egypt - 300 miles (500km) away from the pyramids of Giza, near Cairo. The majority of the pharaohs of the 18th to 20th dynasties, who ruled from 1550 to 1069 BC, rested in the tombs which were cut into the local rock. The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues as to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period. Almost all of the tombs were opened and looted centuries ago, but the sites still give an idea of the opulence and power of the Pharaohs. The most famous pharaoh at the site is Tutankhamun, whose tomb was discovered in 1922. Preserved to this day, in the tomb are original decorations of sacred imagery from, among others, the Book of Gates or the Book of Caverns. These are among the most important funeral texts found on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. Advertisement

Study lead author Dr Wojciech Ejsmond said this was the 'first discovery of a pregnant embalmed body,' adding: 'There is no other so well preserved ancient body of a pregnant woman.'

The body was wrapped in high quality fabrics and was laid to rest with a range of amulets that represent the four sons of Horus, which the team say suggest she was someone very important in Thebes.

The mummy was said to have been found in royal tombs in Thebes, Upper Egypt, coming from the elite of Theban community, according to the study authors.

It was discovered in the 1800s and dates back to the first century BC, a time when Cleopatra was Queen and the city of Thebes was a hive of activity.

The woman was taken to Warsaw in Poland in 1826, around the time of some of the most important discoveries from the Egyptian Valley of the Kings and is currently on show at the National Museum in Warsaw.

Closer examination in 2021, using modern imaging techniques, revealed that the woman died between 20 and 30 years of age together with the foetus, aged up to the 30th week of pregnancy.

'This mummy provides new possibilities for pregnancy studies in ancient times, which can be compared with and related to current cases,' study authors wrote.

'Furthermore, this specimen sheds a light on an unresearched aspect of ancient Egyptian burial customs and interpretations of pregnancy in the context of ancient Egyptian religion.'

'For Egyptologists, this is a fascinating discovery because we know little about perinatal health and childhood in ancient Egypt,' Dr Ejsmond added.

'Physicians can study, for example, the intestinal content of the foetus to gather information on the development of the immune system in ancient times.'

The foetus was located in the lower part of the lesser pelvis and partly in the lower part of the greater pelvis and was mummified together with its mother. However, it was not removed from its original location..

It was left intact in the uterus. Its head circumference was 9.8 inches, which the team used to determine it was between the 26th and 30th week of life.

'Due to the poor state of preservation of the child's skeleton, with shrinking bones caused by drying and fractures, it was impossible to take any measurements of other bones,' the team wrote.

CT images of the infant were obscured by tissue from the uterus surrounding it, which meant they could not get a more detailed analysis beyond measuring the head.

It wasn't taken out from the uterus, as was in the case of the heart, lungs, liver, and intestines with the stomach.

7. X-ray of the head and the teeth of the mummy. Through a combination of CT scans and X-rays, the team discovered the remains of a foetus, about 26 to 30 weeks old, inside the woman - the first time a pregnant mummy has been discovered

The team examined the mummy, coffin and casing that were given to the National Museum in Warsaw for display and have been in Poland since the 18th century

Abdominal area of the mummy with amulets representing the Four Sons of Horus above the navel area

The study authors couldn't say why the foetus wasn't extracted and mummified on its own, as has been shown in other instances of stillborn children.

'It may have been thought to be still an integral part of the body of its mother, since it was not yet born,' they said.

The foetus hadn't been given a name and according to ancient Egyptian beliefs, a name was an important part of a human being, thus, its afterlife could only have happened if it had gone to the netherworld as part of its mother.

Maternal mortality is high even today, according to the World Health Organisation 295,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2017 - it was much higher in ancient times.

Another scan showing the abdominal area of the mummy where the conical-disc and textiles in the navel area are visible

However the approximations of how serious the problem was are often educated guesses, according to the study authors, adding that until this find, sources of information in ancient Egypt were written records.

Burials of pregnant women are rarely identified and until the current discovery there was no material to perform the first hand examinations related to birth complications and test bodies for use of ancient medical treatments.

'This mummy opens a new possibility for studying pregnancy in ancient times, development of fetuses, and the taphonomic processes of foetuses as well as uteruses.

'The fact that only non-invasive examinations of this mummy have been conducted so far means that it is intact and can be the subject of future multidisciplinary investigations.

These are the earliest drawings of the mummy casing, dating back to the 1800s when the mummy was first taken to Poland

'For example, an analysis of the intestinal content of the foetus can be compared with current research results of bacterial colonisation to gather information on the development of immunological system,' the team wrote.

This discovery is also important for studies on ancient interpretations of pregnancy in the context of funerary beliefs. Establishing the meaning of leaving the foetus inside the mother's womb and mummifying both of them together is difficult, but also very interesting, they explained.

More work is needed to better understand how the woman came to be mummified with the foetus, according to the team, who say they can't confirm who she is or even that she was actually found in the royal tombs.

The findings have been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-30 01:01:14|Editor: huaxia

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VALLETTA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Two-thirds of businesses in Malta describe the current business conditions as weak and well below pre-COVID-19 levels, and only a quarter of them expect to see improvements soon, according to a study conducted by the Central Bank of Malta (CBM) and published here on Thursday.

The bank said in a statement that only a third of companies contacted during the first quarter (Q1) of 2021 reported positive developments. This share was six percent higher than that in the previous quarter.

During Q1 2021, 43 percent of Malta's businesses expected their business activity to remain unchanged over the next few months, while 27 percent saw signs of early improvements. Fourteen percent said they expected the situation to worsen.

The results were included in the bank's new quarterly publication "CBM Business Dialogue", which summarised results obtained from 60 meetings conducted by the bank's economists with top-level representatives of corporations and institutions.

The bank said that the share of respondents who expected business prospects to remain uncertain halved compared to the final quarter of 2020 but remained significant at 16 percent.

Over three-quarters of businesses reported that both input and selling prices had remained unchanged in the previous few months. Around a fifth of the businesses contacted said that input costs increased, while 17 percent admitted they had raised their selling prices in response.

Sixty-nine percent of firms contacted between January and March 2021 reported that their investment plans had remained on track, while 13 percent said they had postponed their investment plans.

The share of respondents reporting cancelation of investments was small, while 15 percent said they were not planning any investments, the bank said.

The employment situation remained broadly stable among the pool of firms interviewed in Q1 2021, with 81 percent of them reporting unchanged employment plans. Most firms continue to benefit from the government's COVID-19 wage supplement scheme, which was widely seen as essential for maintaining current staff levels, the bank said. Enditem
Eight people have been indicted in connection with the death last month of a sophomore at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, days after he had attended an off-campus fraternity event where school officials have said alleged hazing activity took place, prosecutors said on Thursday.

A grand jury indicted the men, seven of whom are Bowling Green students, on charges that included involuntary manslaughter and hazing in the death of Stone Foltz, 20, said Paul A. Dobson, the Wood County prosecuting attorney.

Most of the defendants, who range in age from 19 to 23, were also charged with multiple misdemeanor counts of providing alcohol to underage people and obstructing official business. Two face charges of reckless homicide, the authorities said.

Mr. Dobson said in a statement that the multiple counts of hazing and failure to comply with underage alcohol laws reflect the allegation that those defendants participated in providing copious amounts of alcohol to Mr. Foltz and the other new members of the universitys Pi Kappa Alpha chapter.
By Xinhua

Somali President Mohamed Farmajo on Wednesday called for elections and dropped plans to extend his term in office by two years to help ease tensions sparked by political violence in the country.

As we have repeatedly stated, we have always been ready to implement timely and peaceful elections in the country. But unfortunately, our efforts were hampered by individuals, and foreign entities who have no aim other than to destabilize the country and take it back to the era of division and destruction in order to create a constitutional vacuum, he said in a televised speech early Wednesday. Farmajo said he will address the Lower House on Saturday to ask lawmakers to bring back the Sept. 17 agreement, an election model agreed on between his government and five leaders of the federal member states. If the Lower House approves the presidents request, it will reverse the two-year term extension for the executive and the legislative arms of government, which was passed by lawmakers on April 12.

The president lost most of his key allies on Tuesday in a bid to stay in power when the prime minister sided with Galmudug and Hirshabelle, two states formerly aligned with Farmajo, to reject the term extension and instead called for elections. Farmajo said his government will never allow the Somali people to fall into further destruction and displacement. Therefore, I call upon the parties organizing unrest, including politicians who were recently holding prominent political positions and are now aiming to assume public positions through chaos, to refrain from such acts, Farmajo said. He said the last few days have given people a clear indication of who harbors good or bad intentions, adding that political interests will end but Somalia will remain.

Farmajo called on the federal member state leaders to attend a new round of consultative talks on the electoral process, building on the work of the technical committee which met in Baidoa in the southwest region on Feb. 15-17. Failure to resolve the electoral impasse has plunged Somalia into a political crisis since Farmajos term officially ended on Feb. 8, while the four-year term of parliament ended on Dec. 27, 2020. Fighting erupted in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday between government and pro-opposition forces over a mandate extension, allowing al-Shabab militants to take some regions. Farmajo urged all security agencies to ensure the stability of the capital and the safety of innocent civilians.
Memories of the U.S.S. Mississippi: a gripping history of WWII. Memories of the U.S.S. Mississippi is the creation of published author, John E. Kent, proud son of a WWII veteran.

John writes, Except for the official record of the USS Mississippi, there are not many accounts from the men who served on her during WWII. Now fifty years after my dad was in the Navy, he tells his story. Its not in the order of how it was in WWII, but you have to remember it was fifty years ago. He told me, You had to be stupid not to be scared. Every man was fighting to survive. It was the most decorated battleship in WWII.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Kents new book is a personal tale of the trials and tribulations aboard one of the most famous battle ships of all time and the men who navigated her.

Working from his fathers retelling, Kent offers readers a private look into the past as experienced by the brave men of the U.S.S. Mississippi.

View a synopsis of Memories of the U.S.S. Mississippi on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Memories of the U.S.S. Mississippi at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Memories of the U.S.S. Mississippi, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
CHENGDU, CHINA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / From February 23rd to the 25th, the 9th Mobile World Congress (MWC) was held in Shanghai, China. A number of technology enterprises from Chengdu showed up with their innovative achievements and cutting-edge technologies. These companies are lesser-known companies - relatively unknown, small or midsize, and worldwide leaders in their markets. You may see them grow slowly, compete in stable markets, and prefer to shun publicity to avoid attracting competition. They also concentrate on developing their own specialties, avoiding such currently popular management practices as diversification, strategic alliances, and outsourcing. Though not well known to the general public, in their fields of expertise, they are known as the "hidden champions."

XpowerIt Tech: Pioneer of the "All-Wireless Era"

At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February this year, OPPO showed a scroll concept phone that can achieve complete wireless "remote charging." The phone uses a high-frequency magnetic resonance wireless charging technology solution, which comes from XpowerIt Tech, an enterprise from the Chengdu High-tech Industrial Development Zone.

Yu Yiqiang, founder and Chairman of XpowerIt Tech, introduced the technical framework of this high-frequency magnetic resonance coupling technology. The company then launched a new generation of magnetic resonance wireless charging technology - "RiCharge," which is the world's first wireless charging technology solution with the possibility of mass production and match both international and domestic safety standards. It also marks the transformation from wired charging and contact charging to the current medium- and long-range remote charging, truly realizing charging methods in an "all-wireless era."

In the past 6 years, XpowerIt Tech has grown into a leader in the field of wireless charging in China

Coxsat: New Power in 5G Era

As new infrastructure construction develops, the 5G era is accelerating like never before. In stadiums, large factories, stations, and other people-intensive places, which need large-capacity and large-bandwidth network, 5G millimeter-wave (MMW) small base station shows its great advantage. As one of the rare manufacturers in the world that can provide co-aperture dual-polarization MMW small base station, Coxsat unveiled a series of products, including 5G MMW small base station and MMW phased array antenna.

From unknown to famous, Coxsat has experienced 7 years of extreme dedication. As the first bid winner of China Mobile's 5G MMW base stations in China, Coxsat has cooperated with many large domestic equipment manufacturers. In 2021, Gexie will focus on the commercialization of 5G MMW and satellite communication phased array antenna products, providing full support for 5G networks to enable various industries.

Chengdu NTS: More than a Behind-the-Scenes Hero

Based on years of experience in the development of RF communication products, Chengdu NTS has launched 5G open base station products and solutions and formed strategic cooperative relations with many domestic and international operators.

With the advent of 5G era, Chengdu NTS adopts self-developed DPD algorithms and high-efficiency technologies to take the lead in launching 5G white-box RRU and has achieved interconnection with a number of mainstream BBU manufacturers around the world to jointly launch 5G open base station products and solutions.

From relying on a large enterprise to assisting 5G to enable various industries, Chengdu NTS has been widely deployed in the global operator market and has accumulated rich experience in the development and industrialization of RF products, which has demonstrated its technological innovation for decades.

Why Are These " Hidden Champions" Born in Chengdu?

The "Chengdu Paradigm" of technology innovation revolves around their innovation platform, talent policy, financial support, and so on.

Talents are the primary resource. The "Talent New Policy" has attracted more than 410,000 young talents to the city, making the city the winner of the "Top 10 Most Attractive Cities for Talent in China" award continuously. As a result, Chengdu ranked 47th in the Global Innovation Index in 2020.

Universities are important platforms for basic research. By establishing a collaborative innovation mechanism of "Urban Development Partnership" between universities, institutions, enterprises, and local government, the city has signed strategic cooperation agreements with 18 well-known universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, bringing a number of innovative projects into practice.

In addition, Chengdu has vigorously implemented the program for supporting new and high-tech enterprises. In 2020, the city encouraged enterprises to invest 10.46 billion CNY in R&D through incremental awards and subsidies for research and development, up by 3.608 billion CNY.

There are many other steadily developing high-tech enterprises which are constantly overcoming technological hurdles in Chengdu since innovation-driven development has always been the choice and consensus of this city aiming at future development.

Media Contact:

Name:Chenxi Zhang

E-mail:zhangchenxi@36kr.com

SOURCE: 36Kr

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643291/Hidden-Champions-Among-Chengdus-Technology-Companies
As the coronavirus pandemic abates in the northeast U.S., Connecticut is marching toward a full economic re-opening.

But the new era of hygiene precipitated by the crisis is not ending.

More than a year after the pandemic spread to New England, a number of Connecticut-based companies that provide cleaning products and services said that they are still seeing robust demand, a trend that is spurring new products and more hires.

Where we sit today is with an entirely different strategy than on this day last year, Tim Kane, CEO of Goodway Technologies, a Stamford-based manufacturer of industrial maintenance products, said in an interview. When I look at where we are today, its with much more strategic initiative.

Facing disruption

The pandemic prompted abrupt changes in how Goodway interacted with suppliers and customers, as it dealt with a rush of business resulting from the COVID-19-triggered focus on hygiene. Its products include tube-cleaning systems, industrial vacuums, cooling-tower maintenance systems, dry-steam sanitation solutions, coil-cleaning products and hose-and-pipe cleaning systems.

Goodway never stopped operating during the pandemic because, as a manufacturer, it was deemed an essential business by the state government.

There were supply-chain challenges that were changing daily, Kane said. Literally, we would swing off one supplier onto a backup supplier  in order to avoid whether it was raw-materials shortages or worker shortages or what have you  only to then get lined up with a backup supplier and have that fall through because they had a sudden case of COVID.

Milford-based EBP Supply Solutions, a wholesale distributor of supplies to the cleaning and food-service industries, also navigated major changes at the beginning of the pandemic.

When this happened, the industry went into a supply-chain seizure. There were cleaners, wipes, and disinfectants that were unavailable, said EBP Supply CEO Meredith Reuben. We think of ourselves as a selling organization and a training organization. We became a supply-chain super-sourcer.

Since early 2020, growing awareness about the importance of personal hygiene has prompted Henkel to ramp up production of its Dial-branded soap. Dials sales and marketing are overseen at the companys North American consumer goods headquarters in Stamford.

Henkel does not disclose sales figures for Dial, but the brands products consistently rank among the top 50 sellers in their category on amazon.com. Dial offerings include the new Clean + Gentle line of body washes and antibacterial foaming hand washes.

Our primary objective  both short and long term  is to serve the needs of customers, which have shifted in the past year, said Randi Melton, a Henkel marketing vice president. As the leader in anti-bacterial hand soap, we have seen significant demand for our products over the course of the pandemic.

Goodway has also adapted its research and development to incorporate the lessons learned during the past year.

We tried to look at the potential behavior changes as we all come out of this and say to ourselves, Are we going to feel the same walking into a hotel room as we did over a year ago, or are we going to look to something new and different? Kane said. Is there anything that we can provide to that hotel customer of ours that will help them to ensure that a room has been fully sanitized and is ready for occupancy?

Combating COVID in the workplace

As they have revamped their supply chains, executives at companies such as Goodway and EBPSupply said that workers health and safety has remained a paramount concern.

At Goodways headquarters at 420 West Ave., on the west side of Stamford, visitors and employees have to get their temperature checked upon arrival. The company also requires employees to undergo COVID-19 tests every week, with the testing done in its main offices.

Goodway has recorded a very small number of COVID-19 cases among its approximately 100 employees, according to company officials.

Im extremely grateful for our employees and what theyve been able to do, Kane said. There are so many examples that I can show of our employees having to be very flexible and adapt to this situation.

EBP Supply officials said that they have also instituted a number of workplace changes in the past year  including staggered schedules, temperature checks, contact tracing and physical-distancing measures such as glass partitions between cubicles.

COVID-19 cases among EBP Supply have remained at a low level, according to the company.

Weve done a great job, knock on wood, said EBP Supply President Matthew Sugarman. A lot of the employees have recognized that and feel comfortable coming back in the environment weve created for them.

Looking to grow

To meet the growing demand for Dial products, Henkel announced last September an approximately $17 million investment in new equipment and technology at its facility in Geneva, N.Y., an expansion expected to generate 180 new jobs. For the same purpose, the company is allocating another $2.5 million for its plant in West Hazleton, Pa., and allotting $3 million for additional equipment at both sites.

EBP is also hiring in a number of areas, including customer service and sales positions. It employs more than 260, including about 160 based at its Milford headquarters.

Were strategically hiring in the departments that we believe will best service the customers, Sugarman said. Were always opportunistic on looking for quality salespeople.

Goodway is hiring for positions in sales, engineering, shipping and customer support  and preparing for the next crisis.

Its really not how well did you do during the pandemic. To me, its how well you transitioned out of the pandemic into this new world, Kane said. Everyone who was alive during this time can say they lived through this pandemic, and everyone is going to have thoughts and concerns about when the next one is coming and how well prepared were going to be. We hope that Goodway will be in that equation.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 21:59:11|Editor: huaxia

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NEW YORK, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Growing anti-Asian atmosphere in the United States has chilled Chinese scientists working in the country, with some being forced to abandon their careers and work in other nations instead, according to an article published on American weekly magazine Bloomberg Businessweek.

Rising anti-Asian sentiment, inflamed by some U.S. leaders and institutions, is deterring Chinese talents from coming to the United States to study and work, said the article published on Monday by San Francisco-based writer Peter Waldman.

It also poses a serious danger to the nation's research base, the article quoted some of the most prominent American scientists and academics as saying.

Peter Michelson, a physics professor and senior associate dean for the natural sciences at Stanford University, blamed FBI Director Christopher Wray's "whole-of-society" hyperbole for whipping up anti-Chinese fervor at some companies and campuses, and fueling exaggerated mistrust of Chinese graduate students and engineers, according to the article.

Earlier, Wray claimed that China has taken a "societal approach to steal innovation."

"You don't cast a broad net like that. That's profiling," said Michelson, who co-chairs a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to strengthen international science partnerships.

"We're trying to attract talent to this country, but I think some of his rhetoric, while perhaps unintended, puts a target on people's back. Words do matter," he noted. Enditem
Premier Explosives announced the termination of the order bagged for supply of HMX and RDX derivatives from Elmas Savunma Sanyii Ve Havacilik Ticarett, Ankara, Turkey, which was intimated to stock exchanges on 27 November, 2019, due to difficulty in obtaining license from Government of India for export of the said products to Turkey.

There is negligible impact on the financial performance of the Company and no damages on cancellation of the aforesaid order.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shares of Morepen Laboratories extended their winning run to the second day in a row and jumped nearly 8 per cent to hit a fresh 52-week high on the BSE in Thursday's session after the company board approved raising Rs 433 crore via issuance of shares on a preferential basis.

So far in the two trading sessions, the scrip has gained 17 per cent. The stock of the smallcap pharma firm hit a fresh 52-week high of Rs 59.45 on the BSE today. At 10.55 am, it was trading 2.90 per cent higher at Rs 56.80 as against a decline of 0.31 per cent in the BSE Sensex at the same time.

The company on Wednesday said its board has approved raising over Rs 433 crore through the issue of shares to Switzerland's private venture capital firm Corinth Investment Holdings and Liquid Holdings, a promoter group of the company, on a preferential basis.

"The board of Directors considered and approved issue and allotment of up to 10.85 crore equity shares of the face value of Rs 2 each, on a preferential basis," it said in a regulatory filing.

Morepen Laboratories board approved the issue of up to 5 crore equity shares to Liquid Holdings, an entity belonging to the promoter group of the company, at a price of Rs 38 per equity share, for an aggregate amount of up to Rs 190 crore.

Furthermore, in a separate filing, the company said its board approved the investment proposed by Corinth Group, a global private investment Group headquartered in Switzerland, to the extent of $32.50 million (Rs 243 crore) in Morepen Laboratories out of a total $100 million investment in the promoter group.

Following the shareholder and regulatory approval, Corinth would be allotted 5.85 crore new equity shares on a preferential basis. This shareholding would equate to a 9.41 per cent equity stake in the company on a fully expanded capital base. The balance $67.50 million would be in the promoter group companies, it said.

The board of directors has also approved an allotment of 5 crore fresh equity shares to the promoter group in lieu of the 9.85 crore unsubscribed warrants issued in the last financial year which lapsed due to technical reasons.

The company said total fund infusion in Morepen Laboratories, including investor funds and promoter's equity, will be Rs 565 crore.

The funds would be used in the expansion or scaling up of the company's R&D centre/facilities to meet the significantly enhanced active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) demand.

It will also be utilised for setting up a new API plant to meet the significant ramp-up in scale and pipeline the company is working on. The firm will also use the funds, among other purposes, to establish a facility for finished dosages as per USFDA standards at Morepen's pharma complex in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh to cater to highly sophisticated/regulated such as the US and Japan.

Besides, the company would also invest in world-class diagnostics facilities including the manufacture of critical inputs, components and enzymes to meet regulated market standards. It would use the funds to add to the new products and brands under the Dr Morepen umbrella and investment in new-age personal care and skincare brands.

An Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) of the company will be held on May 20, 2021, to seek the approval of the members for the said preferential issue.
BOSTON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Learning to drive is a coming-of-age moment many kids (and parents sick of being taxi services) dream about. But all of this  the tears, the tests, the parallel parking  could become relegated to the realm of nostalgia alongside VHS tapes and flip phones.

This is due to the massive focus on automation sweeping the personal transport industry.

Future Transport Methods. IDTechEx Research

There are five levels of automation in land vehicles:

Driver Assistance (DA) - hands or feet off. Partial Automation (PA)  hands and feet off. Conditional Automation  eyes off. The driver can take their eyes off the road in autonomous modes during defined scenarios (e.g. traffic jam pilot) but needs to take over control after system alerts. High Automation  mind off. The vehicle can drive autonomously without human intervention except under extreme scenarios. In most cases, the driver can be 'mind-off', e.g. they can sleep during the journey and there is no take-over request for the driver. Most OEMs have claimed plans to launch Level 4 production cars in the early 2020s. Fully Automated  driverless. The system can drive autonomously without any human intervention under any conditions. The end goal for robot shuttles.

Robot Shuttles vs Robotaxis

It is worth noting the difference between robot shuttles and robotaxis. Robotaxis are autonomous cars (level 4 or 5) intended to replace many private cars and taxis by being more affordable to own and use and available to more types of customer. Cheaper, widely available cars with reduced need for high focus and the use of hands and/or feet would make personal transport more accessible for disabled people, and a potential peace of mind for worried parents watching their teens drive off for the first time.

Robot shuttles, on the other hand, are box-shaped road vehicles designed for slow-speed, multi-purpose city use. It is expected that people will use them rather than buy them. Because robot shuttles are zero-emission, compact and multi-purpose, the possible future they present is one where there are no private vehicles in city centers: accessible, electric, fully automated transport would ease congestion and eliminate the need for private car ownership within cities. They are intended to help to solve the problems of road safety, congestion, expense, emissions, and lack of suitable vehicles.

Robot shuttles are already in action  37 types in 15 countries as quoted by IDTechEx. Baidu, China's answer to Google, is working with Chinese bus-maker King Long to build buses, called Apolong based on its Apollo design. In 2018, it made and deployed 100 of them in over 30 Chinese cities. The buses can seat 14 passengers, but there is no driver's seat or steering wheel. Apolong comes with level 4 autonomous driving capabilities, which do not require a driver within a specific geographic area, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The company also announced updates to its self-driving platform, called Apollo.

Aurrigo is conducting many driverless pod trials. One such trial involved blind veterans in Brighton as part of an exercise to explore possible 'first and last mile' transport solutions. The company joined forces with Blind Veterans UK to develop a six-month programme of testing that started in April 2020. This was the first time Aurrigo has ever conducted an extended trial with veterans or people with a disability, and the results indicated an overall positive experience for participants, including reduced travel anxiety.

Smart Cities

The updates to cars may be expected, but what about the roads themselves? Smart Cities could mean roads that generate solar electricity, and even charge electric vehicles through the road surface, as well as interact with autonomous vehicles to direct traffic and present congestion.

A project for this concept currently underway is Toyota's 'Woven city' in Japan. The city will be designed with three different types of streets: one for self-driving vehicles, one for pedestrians using personal mobility devices like bikes, and one for pedestrians only. The rooftops of buildings will be covered in photovoltaic panels to generate solar power and hydrogen fuel cell power, and all around will be native vegetation grown using hydroponics: a method of growing plants without soil.

A fleet of Toyota's self-driving electric vehicles, called e-Palettes, will be used for transportation, deliveries, and mobile retail throughout the city.

From the roads to the skies

What vision of a sci-fi future is complete without flying cars? The concept of air taxis is not quite the flying cars of Back to the Future; in fact, air taxi services with vertical take-off and landing are not a new concept. Helicopters have been certified for civilian passenger transport since the late 1940s, but have always remained an expensive and niche form of transport. Recent advances in electric battery technology and electric motors, however, have facilitated the design of these aircraft with distributed electric propulsion (DEP) architectures that can alleviate a number of the issues which have prevented helicopter transport from becoming more widespread.

Air taxis could offer an advantage for cross-city trips in cities which lack existing transport infrastructure, or between cities which are relatively close by but have no direct transport links, for example between Cambridge and Oxford.

A leading air taxi manufacturer is Joby Aviation, who recently took over the hugely influential Uber Elevate program. Joby are aiming for flight certification as early as 2023, with the launch of commercial operations from 2024.

Links/conclusion

IDTechEx's latest report on "Autonomous Cars and Robotaxis 2020-2040: Players, Technologies and Market Forecast" forecasts that autonomous cars and robotaxi services will become a $2.5 trillion market by 2040. For further analysis on the potential and pitfalls of the Smart Cities Market, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/smartcities, and for an investigation into and their key enabling technologies, see the report "Air Taxis: Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing Aircraft 2021-2041" at www.IDTechEx.com/airtaxi.

IDTechEx's team of expert analysts track emerging technologies over time, building extensive personal networks within the industry of study and supporting customers using these connections. Any report purchase comes with a minimum of 30 minutes "analyst time", with customers also having the option to subscribe on an annual basis to IDTechEx's research by topic. For more information about the benefits of IDTechEx's reports, or for specific questions, please contact [email protected].

About IDTechEx

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For months, protests and riots have taken place across the nation. Time and again, these rioting marxists have burned our cities, looted and destroyed businesses and companies. Ironically, they have screamed for "justice" while unjustly burning and looting black-owned businesses, small businesses and shops. All I can say is, Dr. King would be appalled.

But alongside this injustice of gargantuan proportions, comes a similarly terrible but much quieter injustice: reverse racism against white folks. The institution of Critical Race Theory in schools across the nations, "racial sensitivity training" and seminars hosted by sanctimonious white women pretending to know exactly how African-Americans feel while lecturing us on race have been central in this quiet revolution. Slowly but surely, systemic racism is, in fact, becoming prevalent.

If one buys in to this CRT garbage, this individual believes:

1. All whites are inherently racist and closeted bigots

2. Whites are stupid

3.Whites are horrible white supremacists at heart, even if they don't know it

4. If you are a straight white male, your opinion is irrelevant in any political conversation.

Folks, this stuff is not only being implemented under the guise of "equality and fairness" in workplaces and institutions, it is being taught in our schools. Third graders are going to learn that America is a terrible racist place that only accepts white folks.

Think of it, folks, an entire generation of kids are going to come out of our schools believing that their white peers and classmates are terrible people who hate them and are all cosseted members of the KKK.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his historic I Have a Dream speech I have a dream that one day my two little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

This is my dream as well. In Gods sight, we are all equal. I hope and pray that we will come to our senses to realize this indoctrination in our schools. My suggestion is to teach both sides and draw your own conclusions.

This isnt racial justice, this is racial plunder.

William Reynolds
The United States renewed support Thursday for Haiti holding overdue elections but said it did not back a constitutional referendum after US lawmakers warned that voting this year would only bring more turmoil.

Amid soaring violence and kidnappings, President Jovenel Moise has been ruling the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation by decree after legislative elections due in 2018 were delayed and following disputes on when his own term ends.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said that elections set for September would "restore the legislature's role in Haitian democracy."

"Presidential elections scheduled for the fall of this year are necessary to transfer power peacefully and on a timely basis from one democratically elected leader to another," Price told reporters.

But he voiced opposition to a June referendum championed by Moise that would consolidate powers around the presidency.

"We've emphasized to the government of Haiti that the US government will not provide financial support for a constitutional referendum," he said.

A group of US lawmakers this week urged the United States to ensure that no US money supports the referendum, pointing to statements of support for the vote by the United Nations and Organization of American States.

In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the lawmakers of his Democratic Party led by Representative Gregory Meeks, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for a broader reevaluation of policy on Haiti which it warned was ill-equipped to vote in September.

"While elections will clearly be needed in the near future to restore democratic order, we remain deeply concerned that any electoral process held under the current administration will fail to be free, fair or credible and that continued US insistence on elections at all costs will only make this outcome more likely," they wrote.

They called for a "Haiti-led process for change," warning that a troubled election would "only further undermine faith in democratic governance, waste scarce resources and perpetuate a cycle of political instability and violence."

Story continues

Haiti's embassy in Washington denounced the letter as a call "for regime change to replace the democratically elected president."

"We are committed to hold credible and legitimate elections that will stand up to international scrutiny. We know what is at stake," it wrote.

sct/mdl
Will West Bengal remain a bastion of Mamata Banerjee or will the BJP make it? Can Kamal Haasan create a third front in Tamil Nadu? Can BJP retain its stronghold in Assam?

Viewers and political news enthusiasts will get an inkling of the mood of the voters in these states before every vote is counted on May 2.

WHERE TO WATCH LIVE STREAMING OF EXIT POLL RESULTS

In order to get a point-by-point explanation and detailed analysis of the voters' psyche in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, and Puducherry, you need to tune into India Today TV at 6 pm to view the India Today-Axis My India exit poll live. You can also visit the India Today YouTube channel for the same.

Viewers can also tune in to the Aaj Tak TV channel and YouTube channel to get updates regarding the exit poll in Hindi. You can also tune into BusinessToday.In for the latest updates on the exit polls.

ELECTIONS IN WEST BENGAL, TAMIL NADU, KERALA, ASSAM AND PUDUCHERRY

Total 18.68 crore voters cast their votes across 2.7 lakh polling stations located in 824 assembly constituencies over the past two months.

NUMBER OF CONSTITUENCIES

West Bengal-294

Tamil Nadu-234

Kerala-140

Assam-126

Puducherry-30

While states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry voted in single-phase, Assam voted in three phases and West Bengal voted in eight phases.

WEST BENGAL, ASSAM, TAMIL NADU, PUDUCHERRY, KERALA EXIT POLL

The BJP has managed to emerge as a strong force in these elections. By inducting ex-TMC leaders like Suvendu Adhikari and Rajiv Banerjee, the saffron party has so far managed to give a tough fight to the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, which had fired first with Khela Hobe and Bohiragato.

The BJP is hopeful of conquering Bengal, retaining its stronghold in Assam, and making inroads in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Kerala. The only hope for the Left and the Congress seems to be Assam owing to the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sentiment in the state.

Also read: Exit poll 2021: When, where to watch results for West Bengal, Assam, TN, Kerala, Puducherry, and more

Also read: West Bengal Election 2021: Voting dates, election results, full poll schedule, timings, all FAQs

Also read: Assam Election 2021: Voting dates, full poll schedule, timings, election results, FAQs

Also read: Tamil Nadu Election 2021: Voting dates, poll schedule, timings, election results, all FAQs

Also read: Kerala Election 2021: Voting dates, poll schedule, timings, election results, all FAQs

Also read: Puducherry election 2021: Voting dates, poll schedule, timings, election results, all FAQs
ZUG, Switzerland, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Qontigo has licensed the EURO STOXX 50 Index to KBSTAR ETF, the ETF division of KB Asset Management, to serve as an underlying for an ETF listed on the Korea Exchange.

"Since the COVID 19 outbreak, local Korean investors' interest in overseas assets have significantly increased. We believe that the EURO STOXX 50 index, as the benchmark for European markets, is also capturing more investors' attention and will lead to retail investors' direct investment in the ETF. In particular, the collaboration between KBSTAR ETF and Qontigo is expected to provide a compelling option to investors who are considering investing in Europe via individual pension accounts," said Yung Gi Hong, Head of the Multi-Solution Division at KB Asset Management.

"We are very happy that we are now making further inroads into the Korean market and expanding the reach of our EURO STOXX 50 flagship index, which currently combines 32.3 billion in assets under management globally. The EURO STOXX 50 is the go-to index for investors who are looking for ways to track the largest companies in the Eurozone across a diverse range of sectors," said Rick Chau, Head of Asia/Pacific at Qontigo.

The EURO STOXX 50 Index covers the 50 largest companies among the 20 ICB supersectors in terms of free-float market cap in eight Eurozone countries: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. The index has a fixed number of components and is part of the STOXX blue-chip index family. The index captures approximately 60% of the free-float market cap of the EURO STOXX Total Market Index (TMI). Its selection methodology ensures a stable and up-to-date index composition. Fast-exit rules ensure that the index accurately represents the performance of only the largest and most liquid companies in a sector.

About Qontigo

Qontigo is a financial intelligence innovator and a leader in the modernization of investment management, from risk to return. The combination of the company's world-class indices and best-of-breed analytics, with its technological expertise and customer-driven innovation enables its clients to achieve competitive advantage in a rapidly changing marketplace. Qontigo's global client base includes the world's largest financial products issuers, capital owners and asset managers. Created in 2019 through the combination of STOXX, DAX and Axioma, Qontigo is part of Deutsche Borse Group, headquartered in Eschborn with key locations in New York, Zug and London.

Legal disclaimer:

STOXX Ltd., Qontigo GmbH, Qontigo Index GmbH, Deutsche Boerse Group and their licensors, research partners or data providers do not make any warranties or representations, express or implied, with respect to the timeliness, sequence, accuracy, completeness, currentness, merchantability, quality or fitness for any particular purpose of its index data and exclude any liability in connection therewith. STOXX, Qontigo GmbH, Qontigo Index GmbH, Deutsche Boerse Group and their licensors, research partners or data providers are not providing investment advice through the publication of indices or in connection therewith. In particular, the inclusion of a company in an index, its weighting, or the exclusion of a company from an index, does not in any way reflect an opinion of STOXX, Qontigo GmbH, Qontigo Index GmbH, Deutsche Boerse Group or their licensors, research partners or data providers on the merits of that company. Financial instruments based on the STOXX indices, DAX indices or on any other indices supported by STOXX are in no way sponsored, endorsed, sold or promoted by STOXX, Qontigo GmbH, Qontigo Index GmbH, Deutsche Boerse Group or their licensors, research partners or data providers.

SOURCE Qontigo
Idaho gov. signs bill to prohibit indoctrinating students with critical race theory

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In a preemptive strike to prevent the indoctrination of students in public schools with the controversial critical race theory, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed legislation into law late Wednesday that prohibits forcing students to accept it.

The claim that there is widespread, systemic indoctrination occurring in Idaho classrooms is a serious allegation, Little wrote in the bills transmittal letter addressed to Republican House Speaker Scott Bedke The Associated Press reported. Most worryingly, it undermines popular support for public education in Idaho.

Critical race theory is a framework through which some scholars seek to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice. Scholarship on the theory traces racism in the U.S. through the legacy of slavery, the civil rights movement and recent events.

Kimberle Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia universities, explained the idea to CNN last year.

"It's an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," she said.

While the recently signed legislation, HB 377, does not ban the teaching of critical race theory, it prohibits all public schools, including institutions of higher education and school districts, from teaching that "any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior." It also prohibits teaching that "individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin."

These ideas, Idaho lawmakers noted, are often found in critical race theory, and they exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho and its citizens.

Opponents of critical race theory, like Christopher F. Rufo, a director at the Discovery Institute, praised the move Wednesday as a historic win.

Idaho becomes the first state in the nation to ban critical race theory indoctrination in public schools. Governor Brad Little signed the bill into law, which will prohibit schools from promoting race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation. A historic win! he wrote in a statement on Twitter.

Layne McInelly, president of the Idaho Education Association, said in a statement to CNN that the bill is seeking to address a problem that doesnt exist.

"The passage of HB 377 and the accompanying insinuations about Idaho teachers are very disappointing," she said. "This is a 'monster under the bed' problem brought about by a false and misleading narrative that some legislators have willfully conflated. They aim to diminish the public's trust in our teachers and schools, just to come back next year and push to privatize education."
CHICOPEE  A School Committee member accused of punching his girlfriend in the face and spitting on her is facing domestic assault and battery charges.

Douglas Girouard, 47, was arrested at his home on April 2 and charged with assault and battery on a family or household member and resisting arrest. He was arraigned later that day in Chicopee District Court. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf and he was released on personal recognizance, according to court records.

The case is continued until July 28, court records said.

It was a misunderstanding. She has gone to the court and asked that the charges be dropped, Girouard said on Wednesday. He declined to comment further.

The victim, who The Republican is not identifying by name, confirmed she is asking the judge to drop the charges and said the two are no longer a couple.

Girouard was appointed to the School Committee in the spring of 2020 by a special committee made up of all members of the City Council and School Committee. He is filling a term vacated by Michael Pise, who resigned to become the mayors chief of staff.

Initially there was some confusion by city officials over how long Girouard will serve, since Pises term was due to end on Jan. 1, 2024. But the law department has reviewed the City Charter and determined it calls for Girourad to serve until the next municipal election, which will take place in November, and then voters will elect a candidate to fill the remaining two years of the term, City Clerk Keith Rattell said.

He and a business partner also have the contract to run the concessions at the city-owned Chicopee Country Club.

There is no recall provision and no way to discipline a School Committee member. The way the charter is written, elected officials answer directly to the voters, Mayor John L. Vueau said.

Early in the morning on April 2, police were called by Girouards then-girlfriend, who said she was hiding in a locked bathroom in fear after he allegedly hit her. When officers arrived, they found her bleeding heavily from a half-inch horizontal cut on her lip, records said.

The victim said the two had been drinking that night, started arguing and were not talking to each other by the time they went home. The woman said she announced she was leaving the house, according to a police report written by Officer Alexander Trusiewicz.

This angered (Girouard) so he spit in her face and called her a loser numerous times, the report said. She then began packing and he went to take a shower.

He entered the bedroom again and proceeded to grab her by the area of her neck/throat, slamming her on the bed, while punching/hitting her with closed fists in the area of her face/mouth, the report said. Once (Girouard) was done punching her in the face, she stated that she grabbed his phone, ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind her so she could call E911.

Although she told police I am fine, the victim was taken to Holyoke Medical Center by the Chicopee Fire Department ambulance for treatment, court records said.

When three officers responded to the house, Girouard walked outside and talked to them in the driveway. He made disparaging comments about the victim and denied any altercation took place when asked what happened, the police report said.

After talking to the victim, the officers determined there was probable cause to arrest Girouard and asked him to place his hands behind his back. As the officers were trying to place handcuffs on his wrist, Girouard started to resist, and it took the three officers a few minutes to gain control, Trusiewicz said in the report.

Related content:
80% of Indian enterprises have kept the next-generation connectivity technology, 5G, on their priorities list said a study.

According to Deloittes Global Advanced Wireless Survey  India edition, next-gen wireless technologies, such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6, will improve service levels such as security, scalability, and reliability/resilience and will lead to business success.

About 71 % of Indian executives, the highest amongst the countries surveyed, believe that their organisations will invest in more wireless networking due to COVID-19.

According to the results of the survey, over 80% of Indian enterprises have kept 5G at the top of their priorities list, and over 73% of enterprises believe that Wi-Fi 6 is equally important. 55% of the subjects in the study chose Wi-Fi 6 for providing indoor connectivity, while 53% of subjects preferred 5G for outdoor connectivity.

The data comes from Deloitte India, which surveyed 437 IT Line-of-Business (LoB) executives from nine different countries, out of which 51 subjects were from India.

The survey highlights that India ranks second only to Japan amongst the countries surveyed in terms of the investment planned on wireless networking. The increased investment is going towards customer engagement through digital platforms (57%), improved bandwidth requirements for remote workers (61%), and enhanced remote monitoring of machines (50%).

According to the survey, two-thirds of the organisations in India believe that existing networking infrastructure is preventing them from innovation  the highest amongst global peers.

India, along with the UK and Brazil, is expected to be most optimistic in using next-generation technologies to implement emerging technology, it said.

Meanwhile, businesses in India rank second amongst global peers in terms of willingness to spend on wireless networking technology to meet the performance gap.

After Japan and the UK, India is least inclined towards private 5G and most likely to go for a combination of both public and private 5G slices.

More than 8 in 10 networking executives are willing to explore new providers across the advanced connectivity ecosystem  those in India and the UK are most inclined to do so.
A restaurateur who owns pizza shops in Stamford and Greenwich was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in federal prison for his part in a tax evasion scheme involving TV chef Bruno DiFabio

Steven Cioffi, who owned a stake in ReNapoli Pizza in Old Greenwich and Amore Cucina & Bar in Stamford, is also required to pay $122,177 plus an additional $100 in restitution to the government.

Cioffi, 35, pleaded guilty to aiding and assisting in the filing of a false tax return in the fall of 2018.

Dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, Cioffi expressed remorse for his actions in a brief statement at his sentencing hearing, held over Zoom. He said he wanted to complete whatever sentence the court imposed and move on and do better things with my life.

U.S. District Judge Victor Bolden also ordered one year of supervised release for Cioffi, a Trumbull resident who previously lived in Stamford.

In imposing the sentence, Bolden said he had weighed the impact a prison sentence on the 28 employees of Cioffis two small businesses, as well as his lack of a prior major criminal history.

You are someone who has worked hard, Bolden said. You have built up some business, the challenge obviously being here whether there were some shortcuts taken.

But Bolden said Cioffis offense was not victimless, and that by depriving the government of tax revenue he had in effect stolen from everyone.

Federal authorities accused Cioffi, who also owns half of Pinocchio Pizza in Pound Ridge, N.Y., of taking part in a scheme with DiFabio in which cash was removed from the restaurants cash registers, not deposited into its operating bank account.

The businesses outside bookkeeper and accountant used the bank records to determine business gross receipts, a statement from the U.S. Attorneys Office said. When cash was removed from the register and not deposited into the business bank account, the cash would not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

Federal authorities said Cioffi was also aware some employees were paid off the books, allowing withholding taxes to go underpaid.

DiFabio, who federal authorities said has business interests in Cioffis three restaurants, was also charged in the scheme. In the fall of 2018, DiFabio pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false income tax returns and payroll tax returns. Authorities say his involvement resulted in the loss of more than $816,000 to the IRS. He awaits sentencing.

Cioffis criminal defense attorney David Colgan painted his client as a young man led astray by the adults in his life, noting that Cioffi first met DiFabio when he was 17.

Colgan also said that while Cioffi has not made payments toward restitution  at one point citing financial difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic  he said Cioffi has saved about $10,000 he intends to pay once he knows how to make out the check.

Colgan asked for Cioffi to be incarcerated in a minimum security prison. Bolden said he would recommend Cioffi serve his sentence in a minimum security camp at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher W. Schmeisser said Cioffi was the primary person responsible for the restaurants he owned, and said he was the point person who met with a person whom investigators sent undercover to unravel the scheme. He was not blindly following Mr. DiFabio, Schmeisser said.

When Cioffi was debriefed by investigators, Schmeisser said he spent time minimizing his involvement. But there is a reason that there wasnt a cooperation agreement extended to this defendant.

He also noted Cioffis family had moved to Connecticut from Yonkers, N.Y., since his guilty plea, taking on a substantial mortgage rather than paying prior obligations to the IRS.

Its unclear whether the businesses Colgan referred to were the pizza restaurants involved in Cioffis arrest.

Two others involved in the scheme have also pleaded guilty to federal charges. Idalecia Lopes Santos, the businesses bookkeeper, pleaded guilty to tax evasion in June 2019. The businesses accountant, James Guerra, pleaded guilty to willful failure to collect and pay over withholding taxes earlier this year.

Lopes Santos was sentenced to three years of probation on March 30.

Cioffi is required to report to prison on Aug. 2.
STM Group PLC - Isle of Man-registered cross-border financial services provider - Says subsidiary company Options UK Personal Pensions LLP - formerly Carey UK Pensions LLP - on Wednesday afternoon sought permission from the Supreme Court to appeal the recent judgment by the Court of Appeal in the long-standing Adams v Carey case. The original case was heard in March 2018 and relates to an investment made in 2012.

Chief Executive Officer Alan Kentish commented: "It is a natural step for Options, having spoken with its advisers, to request leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. There are clearly some very significant factors here that will not only impact the SIPP market, but also the wider United Kingdom financial services market as a whole. It seems there could be significant unintended consequences flowing from the judgment.

"There are real risks for firms and third parties who may have inadvertently stepped over an unclear regulatory line. This is a wholly undesirable outcome for providers and firms involved in the financial services sector and will drive up costs for consumers. The whole market needs more guidance on this issue, and we hope that this would be forthcoming as part of any appeal to the Supreme Court."

Current stock price: 30.36 pence

Year-to-date change: 0.3% higher

By Arvind Bhunjun; arvindbhunjun@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Barbara Eckersley, 69, was on Thursday found not guilty of murder

An elderly stroke affected woman was unlawfully killed by her daughter, a former wildlife carer, using a drug known as 'green dream'.

Barbara Eckersley, 69, was on Thursday found not guilty of murder but guilty of Mary White's manslaughter at an aged-care centre in August 2018.

Ms White, 92, a renowned environmental scientist, had severe dementia and other health conditions, having suffered a stroke in 2016.

She died two days before she was due to move out of the nursing home in Bundanoon in the NSW Southern Highlands to another facility in Coffs Harbour, closer to family.

Eckersley and her husband Richard visited on August 5 with the offender placing a small amount of a drug in Ms White's food, a NSW Supreme Court jury heard.

The drug - known as 'green dream' - was left over from Eckersley's working as a wildlife carer in Canberra about two decades earlier, the court was told.

Ms White (pictured), 92, a renowned environmental scientist, suffered a stroke and was being cared for in a nursing facility

It was used to euthanise native animals.

She added a small amount to her mother's food thinking Ms White would go to sleep, not that it would kill her, Eckersley's lawyer Kieran Ginges told the jury.

After telling detectives she had put drugs in her mother's meal, Eckersley was charged with murder.

At trial, Mr Ginges contended the drugs were not a significant cause of death, pointing to Ms White's heart condition, thrombosis and other health issues.

The former scientist was paralysed on the right side of her body and at the time of her death was incontinent, non-verbal and needed full-time care.

The facility (pictured) where Ms White had been staying when Ms Eckerlsy visited her

Crown prosecutor Paul Kerr had told the jury murder was usually associated with violence, mayhem, anger, revenge and jealousy.

He said that did not describe Eckersley - calling her a loving, caring and compassionate daughter.

But Mr Kerr said taking another life constitutes murder.

The jury, sitting in Goulburn, took a little more than a day to return its verdict.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 28)  The modified enhanced community quarantine status of Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal will remain in place for another two weeks, President Rodrigo Duterte announced on Wednesday.

The MECQ declaration in the greater Manila area, also known as NCR Plus, is extended until May 14. Santiago City in Isabela, and the provinces of Quirino and Abra will also remain under MECQ from May 1 to 31, Duterte added.

MMDA Chairman Benhur Abalos said there will be some changes to the MECQ for May in terms of businesses allowed to reopen, but border controls in the NCR Plus bubble will remain strict. Metro Manila mayors have recommended a "flexible MECQ," which they believe is the middle ground between MECQ and general community quarantine so more businesses can operate.

RELATED: New curfew hours for Metro Manila to start May 1

The Department of Trade has yet to issue which industries can reopen starting May 1. But Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez earlier pushed for the resumption of personal care services, such as salons and spas, even with an initial 10% capacity.

During the start of MECQ in mid-April, travel was limited to accessing essential goods and for those working in permitted establishments. Businesses that allowed to operate at 50% capacity during ECQ were allowed to fully open, while other sectors such as media establishments, medical clinics, banks, and other specific establishments were allowed to reopen at half capacity.

RELATED: MECQ guidelines in April 2021: What we know so far

Meanwhile, general community quarantine will be imposed on the following areas starting May:

- CAR: Apayao, Baguio City, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, Mountain Province

- Region 2: Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya

- Region 4-A: Batangas, Quezon

- Region 8: Tacloban City

- Region 10: Iligan City

- Region 11: Davao City

- BARMM: Lanao del Sur

The rest of the country will be placed under the more relaxed modified general community quarantine for the entire month of May, but authorities will be giving special attention to high-risk areas in Luzon, Western Visayas and Zamboanga Peninsula.

The MECQ status was supposed to end on April 30. NCR Plus eased to MECQ on April 12 after being placed under the strictest enhanced community quarantine for two weeks to ease the congestion in hospitals that stemmed from the fresh surge in COVID-19 cases.

The Department of Health earlier recommended that the MECQ be extended in NCR Plus for a week or two, arguing that while the number of new infections is declining, the COVID-19 bed occupancy rates remain high.

During the early stages of the surge in March, reports on social media showed families of COVID-19 patients from Metro Manila have reached outlying provinces in search of medical attention. Some, meanwhile, were not able to make it inside health facilities even hours after waiting in line to be accommodated.

The Philippines has recently marked grim milestones, including breaching one million cases on April 26 and seeing the deadliest day of the pandemic on April 9, with 401 COVID-19 deaths.

The DOH has so far logged 1,020,495 cases nationwide, of which 17,031 resulted in deaths. Meanwhile, 935,695 have been tagged as recovered.
VANCOUVER, Wash. - Putting on a happy face might not be enough for entrepreneurs to win over potential investors.

Despite perceptions that entrepreneurs should always be positive about their ventures, a study led by a Washington State University researcher found that entrepreneurs whose facial expressions moved through a mix of happiness, anger and fear during funding pitches were more successful.

"Our findings show that there's a role for different emotions in pitches," said Ben Warnick, WSU assistant professor in WSU's Carson College of Business and lead author on the study published in the Journal of Business Venturing. "For example, an angry facial expression can convey how much you care about something, instead of just smiling, which on the extreme end can come off as insincere or overoptimistic. It's good to balance that out. There are different reasons for using different expressions."

While previous research--and advice for entrepreneurs--has focused on using happy or positive attitudes in pitches, Warnick and his co-authors looked at several emotions: happiness, anger, fear and sadness.

For the study, the researchers analyzed nearly 500 pitch videos from the online crowdfunding site, Kickstarter. They used facial analysis software to code the presenters' facial expressions for the four emotions as well as neutral expressions for every frame of each video. They measured the percentage of the pitch that the entrepreneurs expressed each emotion. Then, they compared the display of these emotional expressions with the ultimate success of the pitch by three measures: whether the entrepreneurs met their stated fundraising goal, total amount raised and how many people contributed.

The study showed that those who used a variety of three emotional expressions--happiness, anger and fear--had the most fundraising success. The only emotion that had a negative effect on funding was sadness.

In a qualitative analysis, the authors found that many successful entrepreneurs used different emotional expressions at different points in the pitch. For instance, many entrepreneurs would start their pitch in a happy way, introducing themselves and talking about how proud they are of their team. They would then use anger to talk about their determination or the problem they were trying to address. When the entrepreneurs talked about obstacles, the risk they were taking or need for resources, they would often use facial expressions conveying fear.

In contrast, people who expressed very little emotion on their faces did not do well in garnering funds even if the words they were saying were compelling. Entrepreneurs who stuck to just one emotion also did not do as well.

Yet there were limits to the use of emotion in pitches, even if it was varied.

"There's a Goldilocks point where you can have too little or too much," said Warnick. "Expressing happiness, anger and fear all promote funding up to a point. But if you express any one of these emotions too frequently, you're hurting your funding prospects."

This study only looked at the use of facial expressions. Warnick suggested that further research might look into other channels of expression or at the connection between what people actually feel and what they express, as the two don't always align.

"Some people might be very expressive, where what they're feeling on the inside shows quite readily to other people," said Warnick. "Others might be engaging in impression management, in other words, faking it."

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BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 3.55 am ET Thursday, Germany's Federal Labor Agency is slated to release unemployment data. The number of unemployed people is forecast to fall by 10,000 in April after decreasing 8,000 in March. Ahead of the data, the euro traded mixed against its major counterparts. While it rose against the yen and the franc, it fell against the greenback and the pound. The euro was worth 131.95 against the yen, 1.2117 against the greenback, 0.8677 against the pound and 1.1039 against the franc at 3:50 am ET. 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.
New Delhi, April 29 : Edtech industry leader Byju's is raising nearly $150 million from UBS Group AG, that will take its market valuation to $16.5 billion, reliable sources said on Thursday.

UBS Group AG, part of UBS Asset Management, will invest a total of around $300 million in Byju's, people familiar with the deal told IANS.

The leading ed-tech company recently raised nearly $1 billion as part of its 'Series F' funding that included Baron Funds and Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin's B Capital Group.

The latest fund-raising came after Byju's announced to acquire Aakash Educational Services Ltd (AESL) through a strategic merger. The deal size is also pegged at close to $1 billion.

In September last year, Byju's raised $500 million (approximately Rs 3,689 crore) in a funding round led by global technology investment firm Silver Lake.

Existing investors Tiger Global, General Atlantic and Owl Ventures also participated in the round that put the edtech startup's valuation at $10.8 billion.

The new investment came barely a month after Byju's acquired WhiteHat Jr, a Mumbai-based coding platform, for $300 million.

Byju's said it has seen over 20 million new students starting learning from its platform for free since the lockdown.

The app currently has over 64 million registered students and 4.2 million annual paid subscriptions.
Chennai, April 29 : The Greater Chennai Corporation on Thursday denied that there are abnormal numbers of Covid deaths in its jurisdiction.

Talking to IANS, its Commissioner G. Prakash said: "There are no abnormal Covid-19 deaths in the city. We are monitoring the situation closely and the fatality rate is 1.4 per cent." The Chennai corporation has appointed M.A. Siddique, Secretary, Commercial taxes as the Covid monitoring officer of the Greater Chennai Corporation.

"More beds with Oxygen facilities are being added in Chennai and 250 such beds will be functional at the Chennai trade centre, Nandambakkam and this will be scaled up to 500 numbers in a few weeks time," Siddique told IANS.

Terming the second Covid wave a Tsunami, he said that the existing 2,545 oxygen beds in government facilities will be doubled with immediate effect.

The official said that a 24x7 screening centre will be set up at the Kendriya Vidyalaya at Island Grounds this week itself and that Madras Medical college will be managing it. The corporation is also adding more vaccination centres for hassle-free second doses to people who have taken the first shot.

Meanwhile the Commissioner has also met state Transport Department officials to discuss augmenting services. "The Transport Department has promised to add 400 more buses to the present fleet to ensure that there is no overcrowding in the buses," Prakash said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Migrants: boat with 24 bodies taken to Canaries Wooden vessel found drifting. Only three survivors on board

(ANSAmed) - TENERIFE, APR 29 - A wooden boat found drifting with 24 dead migrants on board was towed to the port of Los Cristianos, on the island of Tenerife (Canaries, Spain), by a Spanish maritime rescue vessel. "Firefighters are removing the bodies from the boat and they will take them to a funeral home", said Domingo Martin of the Spanish Red Cross.



Rescuers had initially spoken about 17 bodies on board, but found more victims, including two minors, once the boat was taken to the port.



The drifting vessel was first seen Monday by a military plane some 500 km south-east of the island El Hierro. Only three survivors were on board, a woman and two men who were taken to hospital by helicopter. (ANSAmed).




[April 29, 2021] Open source innovation recognised by royalty as Payara wins prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise

LONDON and WORCESTER, England, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Micro-multinational open source software company, Payara Services, has been commended for its achievements within global trading and exporting with the Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade. Now in its 55th year, the Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade is the UK's most prestigious business award, honouring organisations that have excelled in overseas exports whilst maintaining the highest standards in social, economic, and environmental activity. Payara's win attests to the growing success of the open source software business model. Payara's open source product offering, the Payara Platform, is based on the global initiatives of the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile standards. Community users can download the Payara Platform Community Edition for their development projects and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications, while the fully supported, subscription based Payara Enterprise Edition is designed for mission critical systems in production and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications. As one of just 205 businesses aross the country to have received this accolade personally approved by Her Majesty The Queen, often called the 'knighthood for businesses', Payara can utilise the esteemed Queen's Award emblem within its marketing and promotional activity for the next five years.



Steve Millidge, Founder and CEO of Payara Services Ltd, commented: "We're thrilled to win a Queen's Award for International Trade. Payara was born global and has team members in many countries. This award recognises their commitment to the mission of delivering trusted, supported, enterprise software to customers worldwide." Payara's Marketing Manager, Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, added: "This prestigious award enhances our global reputation and builds on the exceptional growth we've experienced overseas in the last three years."

Since it was founded in 2016, Payara has implemented a strategy for overseas trade, with 95% of its services currently exported to a total of nine countries, including the USA, Japan, South Africa, and Germany. Headquartered in Worcestershire, with a secondary EU office in Funchal, Portugal, Payara Services is recognised for its creation of innovative infrastructure software including the delivery of 24/7 production, development and migration support to customers around the world, including BMW Group, Hermes, and Rakuten Card. The firm's leading team of tech experts  or 'Payarans'  have worked incredibly hard to increase annual revenue by 107% over the last three years, with export sales more than doubling from 33% to 75%. The Payara Server has now become one of the fastest-growing open source platforms globally, with a community of over 320,000 users. Payara continues to expand its global customer base to reach new markets and has several innovative projects in the pipeline, including the Payara Cloud. September of 2021, Payara Cloud is the next generation of cloud-native application server and all-in-one PaaS provides a more efficient way to run Jakarta EE apps on the cloud with no Kubernetes knowledge required. https://www.payara.fish

https://www.gov.uk/queens-awards-for-enterprise View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/open-source-innovation-recognised-by-royalty-as-payara-wins-prestigious-queens-award-for-enterprise-301278148.html SOURCE Payara

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Mistrust in local and national government plays a significant role in slowing down child vaccination progress in Africathe continent home to half of the world's unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children, new research reveals.

A study published in BMJ Global Health finds child vaccination rates in African countries are considerably lower in areas where the local population has high levels of mistrust in local authorities. Even when comparing children from households with similar socio-economic characteristics, who live in the same area and have similar access to healthcare facilities, mistrust in local authorities, government, courts or the electoral system matters significantly when it comes to parents vaccinating their children.

Researchers from Lancaster University, UCLouvain, the University of Antwerp and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) studied information on the status of child vaccinations for close to 167,000 children across 22 African countries, and matched it with information on the levels of trust people had in local and national authorities.

Child vaccinations were significantly lower in regions where people did not trust the courts, parliament, the head of state and local government. For instance, when mistrust in local government increased by 10 percentage points, children living in that region were 11% more likely not to receive any of the eight basic vaccines (the BCG or Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine, three doses of the combined diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine; three doses of the polio vaccine, and a dose of measles-containing vaccine) and 3.4% less likely to receive all eight of the basic vaccines.

"Vaccine hesitancy was already recognised as one of the most important threats to global health before the COVID-19 outbreak, but was mainly documented in high-income countries like France or the US," said co-author Dr. Jean-Francois Maystadt, Associate Professor in Economics at Lancaster University and UCLouvain. "Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that institutional mistrust is an important barrier in reaching universal child immunisation in Africa and poses a significant risk to vaccination campaignswhich are more important now than ever."

Co-author Dr. Nik Stoop, from the University of Antwerp, said: "Our findings back evidence from qualitative case studies across Africa, suggesting that mistrust is an important contributor to vaccine hesitancy. A well-known example of the impact of mistrust is the way Nigerian communities boycotted the polio vaccination in the early 2000s, leading to the outbreak of a disease that had almost been eradicated. But other examples can be found in many African countries, including from Cameroon, Chad, DRC, to Mozambique, Nigeria or South Sudan."

Authors say while their study is the first comprehensive attempt to quantify the role of institutional mistrust on child vaccination uptake in Africa, the issue is not felt in the continent alone. Mistrust in authorities impacting on vaccine take up has already been documented in high-income countries like Russia, the US, France and Croatia, so researchers suggest these new findings should be of use to authorities around the world.

Based on their results, researchers argue there is an urgent need to recognise the importance of mistrust in vaccination campaigns, especially in a post-COVID world where the global roll-out of vaccines is considered crucial in bringing the pandemic to an end.

"There is no doubt that COVID-19 vaccination in Africa is limited by supply constraints and huge logistical challenges. But even if global allocation mechanisms like COVAX or the availability of new vaccines were to overcome these challenges, we would still need to convince people to get vaccinated," continues Dr. Maystadt. "The lack of action leaves room for anti-vaxxers, in a context where traditional medicine has already been unduly advanced in several African countriespresenting serious health risks to individuals and the continent as a whole."

With the pandemic leading to the cancellation of several immunization campaigns, the authors call for 'trust-smart' policies in order to protect the 2.6 million under-5s who are estimated to be at risk of dying due to vaccine-preventable diseases by 2030.

They say that while strengthened myth-busting and communication around the benefits of vaccines is important, it is unlikely to be sufficient without trust and confidence in information providers improving significantly.

"Lessons from successful campaigns in Africa highlight the importance of engaging with local communities, trusted political or religious leaders and providing space for open dialogue. A top-down approach is unlikely to work," adds Dr. Kalle Hirvonen, co-author and Senior Research Fellow at the IFPRI. "However, a lot of uncertainties remain on how grassroots initiatives can be scaled up, and questions need to be asked about the role of social media within local communities. In a post-COVID world where mobility is curbed and people are more isolated, we've seen social networks become ideal platforms for spreading anti-vaccination views."

The paper, "Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa," is published in the BMJ Global Health today.

Explore further Black Americans report high levels of vaccine hesitancy

More information: "Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa," BMJ Global HealthDOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004595 Journal information: BMJ Global Health "Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa,"DOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004595
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium today announced the five finalists for the 14th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award . The winner will be announced on a digital panel at The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on May 18, 2021.

For more than a decade, the Award has recognized Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who lead their organizations to deliver exemplary levels of business value through innovative use of IT.

"The awards committee is pleased to recognize these five MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award Finalists," said George Westerman, Award Co-Chair. "Each of these individuals has used technology to transform their digital enterprise and shift it into high gear."

The 2021 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award finalists are :

Marina Bellini , Chief Information and Digital Officer and Director, Digital and Information, BAT

, Chief Information and Digital Officer and Director, Digital and Information, BAT Vipin Gupta , CIO, Toyota Financial Services

, CIO, Toyota Financial Services Anupam Khare , SVP and CIO, Oshkosh Corporation

, SVP and CIO, Oshkosh Corporation Bryson Koehler , CTO, Equifax

, CTO, Equifax Pertisth Mankotia, CIO, Sheela Foam Limited

"It is an honor to have been nominated for this Award alongside such a distinguished group of leaders," said Ms. Bellini, Chief Information and Digital Officer and Director, Digital and Information, BAT. "This nomination is recognition of the huge transformation underway at BAT to becoming a high growth, multi-category consumer goods business, with a purpose to reduce its health impact, driven by meeting evolving consumer needs."

"I am honored by the MIT Sloan CIO leadership recognition," said Mr. Gupta, CIO, Toyota Financial Services. "This recognizes the results driven by our incredible team at Toyota Financial Services (TFS) that is reshaping the captive auto finance business into a multi-brand, mobility-finance-as-a-service business. We are empowering digital experiences for our customers and dealers using groundbreaking, agile digital factories and innovative business solutions."

"It is a great honor to receive this recognition from the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership program," said Mr. Khare, SVP and CIO, Oshkosh. "Digital technology is a critical driver in Oshkosh Corporation's innovation and growth strategies, and this prestigious award is only possible thanks to the innovative spirit of our Digital Technology team who continually pushes the boundaries of technology to drive business growth."

"At Equifax, we're committed to helping people live their financial best," said Mr. Koehler, CTO, Equifax. "Our $1.5B cloud-native rebuild will allow us to innovate more quickly, at lower cost, while still being able to adapt to changing regulations and security needs across disparate markets. I am honored to be recognized as a finalist for the 2021 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award. This is a testament to the dynamic, disruptive culture that the entire Equifax team has embraced."

"Technology can do wonders for the business if it is fueled with purpose, passion and perfection," said Mr. Mankotia, CIO, Sheela Foam Limited.

After two rounds of extensive review, a panel of judges that includes CIOs, academic researchers and IT professionals selected the Award finalists who exhibit the key traits of a CIO leader in the following four areas: exceptional communicator, recognized IT leader, driver of business value and trusted partner.

These criteria are adapted from the award-winning book The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value , which draws extensively upon research conducted at MIT Sloan. To register to attend the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award digital event on May 18th at 10:30am EDT, visit: https://mitcio.com/register/

About the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is a premier global conference that brings together a unique community of MIT academic leaders, CIOs, digital technology executives, and industry experts, enabling them to be more effective leaders. The Symposium offers an environment for engaging discussions where the best in-the-trenches business practices, technology innovations, actionable insights, and new ideas can be shared and debated. The Symposium is organized by the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association. For more information and to register for this year's Symposium, visit www.mitcio.com .

Media Contact:

Sadie Smith

[email protected]

1-717-2981865



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PEPPER PIKE, Ohio -- Woodmere Mayor Ben Holbert has many reasons to smile these days, and he happily discussed them at the Orange Board of Educations meeting with the mayors Wednesday (April 28).

Holbert, a former Woodmere councilman who has been the villages mayor since January 2018, has seen such a positive transformation on Woodmere Village Council that he has decided to seek re-election in November.

Im going to be throwing my hat back into the ring for another term, he said at the school boards meeting with the mayors of the districts five primary municipalities, held on Zoom video and live-streamed on the Orange Schools website.

Things werent looking so rosy for Holbert just a few months ago. He was frustrated at Village Councils repeated voting against legislation that would allow a sidewalk project called the Woodmere Chagrin Valley Gateway Pedestrian Trail to move forward.

That legislation would enable the village to accept grant funding totaling $265,000 to be used to develop sidewalks between Woodmere and Orange on Brainard Road, between Waterford Court and Chagrin Boulevard.

But on Feb. 23, a special election was held in which four Woodmere Village Council members were recalled.

When the election results became official March 12, former council president Jennifer Mitchell Earley and council members Lisa Brockwell, Glenda Todd Miller and Craig Wade were voted out. Those four were the council members who consistently voted against the pedestrian trail legislation.

The three remaining council members -- Nakeshia Nickerson, Tennyson Adams and Vivian Walker -- were tasked with selecting replacements.

The four new council members are Nicole Culliver, Hilman Lindsey, Waymond Scott and Seth Young. Culliver is councils new president, and Young is the new finance chair, Holbert said.

At the new councils first meeting April 14, it passed legislation on not only the pedestrian trail, but also the villages website, which Holbert said had not been active for over a year.

Holbert said the new sidewalks will be on the western portion of Brainard Road and will connect into Orange.

The great part about that is it gives the people who live in Orange the ability to walk through Woodmere and go up to Chagrin Boulevard, and it gives the people who live in Woodmere the opportunity to walk over to Pinecrest (in Orange), he said. So were excited.

Holbert said Village Engineer Edward Hren has started survey work on the project and is trying to get that fast-tracked.

The target is to complete the construction by mid-September, he said.

So the $265,000 that we received from the county and the state (via grants) will actually go to use, he said, smiling. Thank you.

The villages new website will be unveiled Saturday (May 1), as the legislation approved by council allows the creation of a web designer position.

Thats very important, because during the height of COVID, we couldnt provide our residents with any information or updates (via the website), Holbert said. So were pretty happy to have that.

In addition, Holbert said the village has applied for a grant with Cuyahoga County to put digital signage in front of Village Hall, so we can start to make sure that our residents are aware of activities and events and emergency information.

For two years, just to be honest, it was very difficult, he said. We were struggling to try to make improvements within the village.

Im hoping with this brand-new council -- the three who remain and the four coming on board -- that well be able to communicate and move forward.

In October, Orange Village Council passed a resolution urging Woodmere council to accept the grant funding earmarked for the pedestrian trail.

When you have a council you can work with, its fine, Orange Mayor Kathy U. Mulcahy told Holbert after he said he had decided to seek re-election.

Update on Moreland Commons

Moreland Hills Mayor Daniel Fritz provided an update on the Moreland Commons housing development. He said the 21-acre site -- located off Chagrin Boulevard, between Lander Circle and Ohio 91 -- could accommodate up to 90 new homes, but currently the plan is to build in the mid- to upper 60s.

Were up to about nine homes now (that have been built), he said. Several are in construction, and various homes are in a design-on-approval phase.

Thus far, they all appear to be empty nesters. Construction and purchasing is taking place at an accelerated level now.

Fritz noted that the project is located across from the Orange Schools campus.

We hope we havent been too much of an inconvenience to the school district, he said. Hopefully, we wont have too much of an impact on (the schools) moving forward.

Fritz said the developer, Axiom Development Group, is not building model homes, and the project had been moving quite slowly through the coronavirus pandemic.

I think we saw an increase in the pace once the infrastructure was actually placed inside the roads and the curbs, he said. People were able to drive through and actually see the lots, as opposed to just having to look at a map.

I think once you were able to drive through that development, it became a little bit easier to sell the lots.

Ground was broken in 2019 on the housing development, which will feature a combination of single-family homes and townhouses.

I know many of these developments are going to draw empty nesters, but we know that it will still affect our enrollment a little bit, school board member Beth Wilson-Fish said. Were going to see our numbers go up, and thats a good thing.

More housing coming in Orange

In Orange, Mulcahy said she expects plans for the Pinecrest residential project to start rolling out over next few months.

She noted that a group headed by local real estate developer Randy Kertesz acquired the former Beachwood Inn property in a sheriffs sale via public auction in February. The property is located next to Pinecrest, and that transaction will result in a different entrance into that mixed-use development, she said.

It could be as much as 390 units, Mulcahy said. Its supposed to be mostly townhouse/villa-type things, but theyre also trying to throw in some apartment buildings.

So Im not thrilled. I dont know how that will play out.

In addition, Mulcahy said several new homes are being approved every month at the Lakes of Orange housing development, near Brainard and Miles roads.

I get the sense that most of them are empty nesters, and a lot of them are residents already who are moving into that development, although there are some families with children there, she said.

They did add a Phase 7 to Lakes of Orange, which adds another 49 units to the original 150. Theyre just selling like hotcakes; its amazing.

Pepper Pike Mayor Richard Bain said regarding his citys housing situation, 32 new home permits were pulled last year.

Our total of new home and renovation permits value is just under $20 million, he said. So, hopefully, that gets picked up by (Cuyahoga) County, and that should result in some new revenue for the schools.

Hunting Valley Mayor Bruce Mavec said things were quiet in his village.

Praise from Pepper Pike mayor

Bain praised the Orange school board and administration for how it has weathered the storm during the pandemic.

All the villages and (Pepper Pike) have dealt with the COVID routine and the pandemic for the last year-plus, and we face our own challenges, keeping our staffs operational and delivering services, he said.

The (Orange) school board and administration faced a very different task, where your impact was how do you keep (nearly 2,000 students) operational and going to school. I know its been really challenging for you.

But the board and the administration, you guys have always appeared to me to be open to a conversation with the community about it, and I think youve done a marvelous job of trying to balance some extraordinarily challenging and novel problems that you did not anticipate and didnt ask for, he continued.

At least as we seem to be emerging from this, we should not let it pass without congratulating you on a job well done.

Wilson-Fish thanked Bain for his kind words.

Our administration has been wonderful through this, she said. Our teachers and staff have been wonderful, and the power of the community forums that were held  to have community forums where our administrative staff continued to answer those tough questions from residents for hours.

I give all of the credit to our staff in the school district for what they did. It was really quite impressive, compared to other school districts.

Superintendent Lynn Campbell said hes very proud of the districts administrative team, the way they were able to pivot so many times, and our families who rolled with us.

There were moments when it became very stressful, but Id say overwhelmingly, the comments (from residents) were positive, he said. We delivered what I feel was a very successful program during our remote learning, which was not ideal.

Thanks for everything the villages have done to keep our kids safe.

Enrollment remains stable

Campbell addressed district enrollment, noting that it has been very consistent in recent years.

He displayed a graph indicating that enrollment of residents actually attending school has remained at around 1,900 students since 2017. As of March 1, it was at 1,892.

Theres been a lot of discussion throughout remote learning about whether there was a concern about a mass exodus or us losing (a lot of) students, and that wasnt the case, he said.

We did lose some kids, primarily our kindergarten numbers. Some parents said a remote kindergarten was not of interest, but they intend to be here in person for first grade, and we have gained some back.

Campbell said he is hopeful the district will have a traditional start to the 2021-22 school year.

If the data trends stay the way they are, we expect a full in-person model for next year, he said. The goal is to get everybody back and continue with our mitigation strategies and get back to our typical practices as much as possible.

Read more from the Chagrin Solon Sun.
Pope Francis has issued tough new anti-corruption regulations which bans Vatican staff from receiving any gifts worth more than 40 euros.

New laws published today are believed to be aimed at putting an end to the lavish gifts given by wealthy benefactors, friends and fellow clerics.

The Pontiff has preached about cleaning up corruption in the Vatican for eight years, but the new law marks his biggest step to ensure his own cardinals and managers are clean.

The 40 euro limit on gifts applied to all Vatican employees of any level and the rest of the decree to managers, whether clerics or lay.

It said managers must disclose at the moment of appointment and every two years after that if they have been the subject of financial investigations.

The Pontiff has vowed to clean up alleged corruption in the Vatican over the last eight years

It also says they cannot use tax havens or own real estate obtained with funds from illegal activity. Vatican financial authorities will be empowered with controls.

The Pope wrote the regulations were necessary 'because corruption can manifest itself in different forms and ways.'

He wrote: 'Vatican superiors have the particular responsibility of making concrete the fidelity of which the Gospel speaks, acting according to principles of transparency and the absence of any conflicts of interest.'

New hires must sign a declaration attesting they have never been convicted of a crime and aren't currently under investigation for offenses including money laundering, corruption, fraud, exploitation of minors or tax evasion.

The decree followed another papal law last May in which Francis tightened rules for Vatican procurement contracts.

The practice of gift-giving among Catholic clerics was the source of several scandals in the Church in recent years.

The new laws include all Vatican employees as the Pope said: 'Corruption can manifest itself in different forms and ways'

In 2019, an investigation by the U.S. Church found that Bishop Michael J. Bransfield of West Virginia sent personal cheques totalling more than $350,000 to about 140 fellow clerics over more than a decade, including two U.S. cardinals.

He later used local Church funds to reimburse himself. The investigation found him responsible for sexual harassment of adults and financial improprieties. He denied wrongdoing.

One of the Vatican cardinals who received the gifts from Bransfield returned the money and the other said he had given it to charities.

Last year, a Vatican report into disgraced former U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick showed that he regularly gave cash gifts to fellow clergymen, including Vatican officials, over a period that scanned decades.

McCarrick was expelled from the priesthood in 2019 after an internal investigation found him guilty of sexual abuse of minors and adults and abuse of power.
A wrongful death lawsuit was filed Thursday in the 2020 death of a 2-year-old Jefferson County boy.

Demetric Hampton Jr., who was just 12 days shy of his third birthday, died May 13 at Childrens of Alabama, a little over an hour after he was first brought to the Birmingham hospital. His father, Demetric Hampton Sr., has been charged with murder in his death, and his stepmother, Terrica Harris, is charged with aggravated child abuse.

The boys mother died in 2018 when she was hit by a vehicle on Interstate 59/20.

Birmingham attorneys Tommy James of Tommy James Law and Jeremy Knowles of Morris Haynes represent Demetric Jr.s estate. They filed the lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the director of the Jefferson County Department of Human Resources, Hampton Sr. and yet-to-be identified DHR caseworkers.

Jefferson County sheriffs deputies at 12:30 a.m. that Wednesday were called to the 1600 block of Sixth Street N.W. in Center Point on a report of a child not breathing. When they arrived on the scene, the parents told lawmen he had been eating and then began to choke. The boy was taken to Childrens of Alabama where doctors discovered he had multiple injuries. Demetric was pronounced dead at 1:46 a.m.

Demetric Hampton Jr. (Contributed)

Hampton, said Sgt. Joni Money on Friday, told deputies his son had been eating and had started choking. He said he removed the food from the childs airway and began life-saving efforts. Hampton said his wife, was not at home at the time, but arrived home shortly before medics made it to the scene.

Further investigation revealed the toddler had multiple injuries and burns that were not consistent with the parents stories, Money said. There were multiple other young children in the Hampton home, including Demetrics twin sister.

Court records show Hampton was arrested April 5, 2020 on charges of third-degree domestic violence, resisting arrest, endangering the welfare of a child and obstruction of justice. Harris was arrested at the same time on charges of disorderly conduct, endangering the welfare of a child, resisting arrest and obstruction of justice.

Jefferson County sheriffs deputies responded to the residence after they received an anonymous call that a couple was arguing in the driveway. The caller told deputies the man had a gun, and the female was in her vehicle trying to leave.

Harris, who also goes by Terrica Hampton, became irate that deputies were there, charging documents state, and immediately began yelling and cussing. Hampton was holding their 9-month-old son, deputies wrote in their report. Harris took the baby from Hampton.

Harris continued to argue with deputies, who then asked her to hand over the baby. When she refused, documents state, Hampton punched her in the face with a closed fist. The baby boy was hit in the lip, which started to bleed.

Deputies broke up the fight between the couple. One of the deputies was knocked over in the struggle.

Hampton was then tased but continued to resist. In all, five children were released into the custody of a grandmother that night. Court records indicated the entire ordeal was captured on deputies body cameras.

The lawsuit alleges DHR returned Demetric to his father and stepmother shortly after they had been arrested in the April case, and Demetric was dead 38 days later.

According to the lawsuit, Hampton had a long history with DHR before Demetrics death. In fact, DHR had taken custody of his oldest daughter - Demetrics oldest sister- at birth. Additionally, when Demetric and his twin sister were born, DHR immediately gave custody of them to their maternal grandmother.

James contends DHR has been aware of Hamptons history of child abuse and neglect since the birth of his first child and violated policy by placing Demetric back with his father and stepmother, despite his history of prior abuse and their recent criminal charges directly related to endangering children.

DHR knew Demetrics father and stepmother were a danger to their children and yet they placed him back with them. The fact he was allowed to stay with the individuals who had just been charged with child endangerment is both baffling and infuriating, said James. This innocent baby is dead because the people at DHR did not do their jobs and it is appalling it was allowed to happen.

DHR does not comment on pending lawsuits.

DHR is paid with our tax dollars to protect children like Demetric and yet they did the opposite by placing him directly in harms way, James said.

His death is heart-breaking, and it should never have happened. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars to hire private lawyers to fight in court, the governor and attorney general should join us and those who loved Demetric in the search for the truth to find out how this happened, to prevent this from happening to another child.

The familys attorney says DHR is failing Alabamas children.

The number of child deaths in Alabama from abuse is shocking, James said. Children in our state are dying needlessly because DHR caseworkers are not doing their jobs. Our most vulnerable children must be protected and is past time for DHR and its employees to be held accountable. I hope and pray this case will lead to change so that something like this never happens again.
SHASTA COUNTY, Calif. - Shasta County's case rate is at purple tier levels but because the countys positivity rate is at orange levels, its keeping the county in the red tier for now.

Shastas positivity rate is just under 4% and the case rate is around 10 per 100,000 residents.

Fortunately, our test positivity is still in the orange tier range, said Robin Schurig, the Public Health Branch Director. At 3.9% up a little from 3.1% last week, so we will be staying in the red tier for now.

The countys case rate needs to stay below 6 per 1000,000 and the positivity rate needs to be under 8% for Shasta to get back into the orange. The numbers need to remain that way for two weeks before changing tiers.

People in the community don't want to see the county go back to the purple.

I think that we need to just kind of live our lives now, said Alisa Robinson of Redding. "Just kind of take responsibility for being careful and just not go into purple. I don't want to go back into purple.

Public Health continues to urge people to get vaccinated, continue wearing face coverings, and practice social distancing.

Shasta County is one of 13 counties in the red. Zero California counties are in the purple tier, 41 are in the orange tier, and four are in the yellow tier.

But as the countys case rate goes up, local businesses worry about what could happen if the numbers dont level off.

Erin O'Loughlin works with the Redding Fashion Alliance. She told Action News Now moving back into the purple tier would mean theyd have to cancel classes and limit their shopping space.

But just as concerning is how it would affect peoples morale.

As a business that believes in community and the strength of the community, it'd be something that we would be really upset to see, said OLoughlin. Especially for other businesses, including our own. We know the restrictions put a damper on business.

Redding Fashion Alliance limits the number of people in its classes and offers masks and hand sanitizers for customers.

O'Loughlin said First Fridays helps businesses because it brings in more people into the store.
Editor's Note: San Antonio is filled with weird history and we're here to track it down for you. Have a question about the Alamo City? Email us at mysa@mysa.com.

San Antonio voters are heading to the ballot box on May 1 to vote on the Proposition B, an issue that has been highly contentious for years. And it appears that the nation is watching.

The New York Times said in a March article that union and city leaders in the U.S. are "especially watching" if San Antonio voters will approve or reject the ballot item, which calls for the repeal of the San Antonio Police Association's collective bargaining abilities, which in turn would weaken the force's power to protect officers accused of misconduct.

RELATED: Judge Nelson Wolff says Abbott's allegations of migrant abuse in San Antonio are 'completely false'

The Times published a lookback on how police unions throughout Texas, including San Antonio, used tactics taught by former cop-turned-organizer Ron DeLord to fight for perks and protections. DeLord is currently guiding the local union through negotiations with an arguably toned down approach.

"The unions need to bend," he told NYT. "They need to be prepared to bargain over things that their community thinks are fair."

Such was not the case in the 1980s.

The newspaper reported that during period, the San Antonio Police Union sent a gift basket with a dead rat in it to a San Antonio City Council member who tried to cut police costs. The New York Times did not name the city official who received the rat carcass. Texas Monthly reported Nelson Wolff, who currently serves as Bexar County Judge received a dead rat around the same time.

It's unclear if the two accounts pertained to the same package because as it turns out rats in packages seemed to be a thing in the 1980s. Wolff's predecessor, Councilman Ed Harrington, was sent a dead rat over a fluoride debate.

Scorsese himself couldn't have written it better.

READ MORE FROM MADALYN: Local turnout ahead of May 1 election marked 'best early voting ever'

San Antonio Express-News archives show the Wolff received dead roses and a rubber rat in October 1987 while he was a city council member. His staff worked to figure out who sent the withered flowers and toy but the delivery service would not release the name.

"I don't know what to make of it," Wolff said at the time. "I'd rather get a rubber rat than a dead rat."

In an interview with MySA on April 28, Bexar County Public Information Officer Monica Ramos said there was some "miscommunication" over the years about the rat debacle. Ramos, who said she did not know who sent the mystery package, did confirm the Express-News archives were true and the rat Wolff received was faux indeed.
Guam's tourism officials weighed the possibility of marketing the island as a place where American expatriates in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines and other Asia-Pacific countries can get vaccinated while vacationing.

After more than a year of a tourism standstill, the Guam Visitors Bureau is looking to rethink its marketing strategies to welcome back visitors.

Its main tourist markets of Korea and Japan, however, are still struggling with low COVID-19 vaccination rates that impact their citizens' travel plans, officials noted on Thursday.

GVB tabled an earlier proposal to provide free PCR testing to tourists prior to their return to their home country, to entice them to visit Guam.

This could cost GVB $5 million for the first 25,000 tourists at $200 a test, said GVB Vice President Gerry Perez.

"The motion basically was subject to availability of funds. To be honest with you, we don't have any funds. They've all been committed," he said, referring to some $5.9 million allocated for the Matapang Beach Park upgrade, flood mitigation and marketing.

But GVB officials said Guam is in a unique position to pursue vaccine tourism among American expats in the region because it's one of the few areas in the region with ample U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID-19 vaccines.

Perez and board Director Sam Shinohara said there have been inquiries from American expatriates in the Asia-Pacific region and representatives from American chambers of commerce in the region, whether they can get vaccinated for COVID-19 on Guam.

"It's a big market," Shinohara said, adding that this vaccine tourism is a "brilliant" idea and a "win-win" situation for everyone.

GVB board Chairman Milton Morinaga and other bureau officials said that means these expatriates could vacation on Guam, stay at hotels and can continue to work remotely for three weeks to a month if they're getting the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer vaccines.

Besides helping with tourism, this can also be a "good deed" toward American citizens in the region, Morinaga said.

Bureau officials also said this complies with the federal policy of limiting the use of COVID-19 vaccines allotted to Guam to American citizens and residents.

Morinaga said he appreciates the ideas from board members and bureau staff on reinvigorating tourism. He said the board will continue to discuss the idea.

90% vaccination goal

The board chairman and other officials, however, said that vaccine tourism may only be aggressively pursued after at least 80% to 90% of Guam's adult population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

He said this high vaccination rate is the type of news that could bode well for Guam tourism in the long run.

Guam has now exceeded Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero's Path to Half goal of fully vaccinating at least 50% or 62,500 of the adult population by May 1 to reopen tourism and lift post-travel quarantine.

The governor's next goal is to fully vaccinate at least 100,000 to achieve herd immunity by July 21, when Guam marks the 77th anniversary of Guam's liberation from Japanese occupation during World War II.

GVB officials said while tourism is expected to reopen in May, they don't anticipate a flood of tourists coming in by then. It could be August or September when Guam sees a considerable number of visitors, they said.

A similar island destination, Maldives, launched a new tourism campaign called "3V" for "visit, vaccinate, vacation," in which once all local residents have been offered a chance to get vaccinated, COVID-19 shots will be made available for anyone traveling there on holiday.

No testing tourists

Former GVB Chairman and now Director Sonny Ada withdrew his motion pertaining to GVB pursuing financial support for testing tourists returning to their home country, if there are funds available, to give way to more robust discussion on vaccine tourism.

Ada said he supports the idea of getting vaccinated while vacationing on Guam. He also said the idea of still providing COVID-19 testing "should not necessarily be a dead issue."

Many places including Guam and its source tourism markets require negative PCR test results prior to arrival.

GVB officials said Korea announced on Wednesday that it will offer some exemptions to the mandatory two-week quarantine for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 after they return from overseas travel, to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
The Business Resource Centre (BRC) Ada office has signed up as an Agent for Fidelity Bank Ghana Ltd. in the Ada East & West Districts within the Greater Accra Region to support and offer world class banking experiences to its customers in and around these districts.



The Fidelity Bank Agency services offered by the BRC- Ada will also afford residents and businesses in and around Sogakope and its environs to also be a part of this experience.



As a Fidelity Bank Agent, customers who visit BRC-Ada will be able to perform transactions such as Interbank deposit - account option, bill payment - DSTV (account and cash options), bill payment - ECG (account and cash options), account to wallet transfers (all networks) cash to wallet (all networks) and wallet to cash (all networks).



On this laudable journey embarked upon by the BRC, the General Manager, Mr. Kweku Hammond, opined that after a careful survey of these districts, there was the need for the presence of an Agency that will afford to service the Micro, Small & Medium Scale businesses.



He also explained that the reason why BRC has 37 locations throughout the country is to provide a one stop enterprise support centre at the district level designed to provide a broad range of Business Development Services (BDS) to potential and existing entrepreneurs and enterprises. He further stated that the move is in line with its mandate to operate as a financial and investments facilitation hub and business information repository for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).



He further explained that the BRCs have been established as part of the Industrial Transformation Agenda of the Government and being implemented by the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA) with funding from IFAD & AfDB.



This he believed would afford and position the MSMEs to fully benefit from AfCTA



Commenting on the initiative, Head of Agency Banking at Fidelity Bank Ghana Limited, Dr. David Okyere welcomed the decision by BRC-Ada to join the Fidelity Agency Banking network. He also disclosed that BRC joins a vast network of Fidelity Bank Agents who are providing exceptional banking services to the under-banked and unbanked across the length and breadth of the country.



Dr. Okyere added that Fidelity Bank will work tirelessly to ensure that every qualified Ghanaian has access to financial services to promote improved livelihoods and financial independence.

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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NEW ORLEANS, April 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ClaimsFiler, a FREE shareholder information service, reminds investors of pending deadlines in the following securities class action lawsuits:

Amdocs Limited (DOX)

Class Period: 12/13/2016 - 3/30/2021

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: June 8, 2021

SECURITIES FRAUD

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-amdocs-limited-securities-litigation-1

FibroGen, Inc. (FGEN)

Class Period: 11/8/2019 - 4/6/2021

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: June 11, 2021

SECURITIES FRAUD

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-fibrogen-inc-securities-litigation

Canaan Inc. (CAN)

Class Period: 2/10/2021 - 4/9/2021

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: June 14, 2021

SECURITIES FRAUD

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-canaan-inc-american-depositary-shares-securities-litigation

Credit Suisse Group AG (CS)

Class Period: 10/29/2020 - 3/31/2021

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: June 15, 2021

SECURITIES FRAUD

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-credit-suisse-group-ag-american-depositary-shares-securities-litigation

If you purchased shares of the above companies and would like to discuss your legal rights and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, contact us toll-free (844) 367-9658 or visit the case links above.

If you wish to serve as a Lead Plaintiff in the class action, you must petition the Court on or before the Lead Plaintiff Motion deadline.

About ClaimsFiler

ClaimsFiler has a single mission: to serve as the information source to help retail investors recover their share of billions of dollars from securities class action settlements. At ClaimsFiler.com, investors can: (1) register for free to gain access to information and settlement websites for various securities class action cases so they can timely submit their own claims; (2) upload their portfolio transactional data to be notified about relevant securities cases in which they may have a financial interest; and (3) submit inquiries to the Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC law firm for free case evaluations.

To learn more about ClaimsFiler, visit www.claimsfiler.com
OTTAWA, ON, April 28, 2021 /CNW/ -

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to create stress and anxiety for many Canadians, particularly those who do not have ready access to their regular support networks. Through the Wellness Together Canada online portal, people of all ages across the country can access immediate, free and confidential mental health and substance use supports, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This National Immunization Awareness Week (NIAW), I have been reflecting on importance of vaccines in protecting our health and wellbeing. During COVID-19, this year's theme is particularly poignant; "Vaccines bring us closer," highlights how vaccinations can connect us to the people and things we miss most and to a healthier future. Several safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are currently being rolled out across Canada and, along with maintaining other necessary public health measures and individual protective practices, vaccines are a vital tool to help lead us out of this pandemic, bringing us closer together once again. But, this week is also a reminder of the importance of keeping up to date with routine vaccinations throughout our lives, including childhood vaccinations as well as adult vaccinations, that protect us from serious vaccine preventable diseases across our lifespan.

There is a lot to take in and it's normal for people to have questions. I encourage medical and public health professionals across Canada to engage in meaningful dialogue with patients early and often, to listen to concerns, answer questions and guide people as they make informed decisions regarding vaccination for themselves and their families. Likewise, I encourage all Canadians to ask questions and seek information from their healthcare providers and other trusted and credible sources, such as Canada.ca and Immunize.ca, which provides a list of additional credible online resources about immunization.

As COVID-19 activity continues in Canada, we are tracking a range of epidemiological indicators to monitor where the disease is most active, where it is spreading and how it is impacting the health of Canadians and public health, laboratory and healthcare capacity. At the same time, the Public Health Agency of Canada is providing Canadians with regular updates on COVID-19 vaccines administered, vaccination coverage and ongoing monitoring of vaccine safety across the country. The following is the latest summary on national numbers and trends, and the actions we all need to be taking to reduce infection rates, while vaccination programs expand for the protection of all Canadians.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 1,194,989 cases of COVID-19, including 84,313 active cases and 24,065 deaths reported in Canada; these cumulative numbers tell us about the overall burden of COVID-19 illness to date. They also tell us, together with results of serological studies, that a very large majority of Canadians remain susceptible to COVID-19. As vaccine delivery ramps up at an accelerated pace, there is cause for optimism that widespread and lasting immunity can be achieved through COVID-19 vaccination. We now have multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines with unique advantages that are authorised for use in Canada. Vaccine coverage is increasing across Canada, with benefits being seen in prioritized high-risk populations. Ramp up of vaccine supply and acceleration of vaccination programs will return further benefits to protect more Canadians, over the coming weeks and months.

Although COVID-19 activity remains elevated, with a high proportion of cases involving more contagious variants of concern, we are cautiously optimistic that our efforts and strengthened restrictions are beginning to have an impact, as presented in the latest epidemiology and modelling update. However, strong public health measures must be sustained where COVID-19 is circulating and individual precautions are important everywhere. The latest national-level data show a 7-day average of 7,992 new cases daily (Apr 21-27), a 7.5% decrease compared to the previous seven days.

Elevated infection rates continue to impact COVID-19 severity indicators, particularly in areas with sustained high levels of disease activity. The rise in severe and critical illnesses continues to place a prolonged and heavy strain on the health system and healthcare workforce. Provincial and territorial data indicate that an average of 4,382 people with COVID-19 were being treated in Canadian hospitals each day during the most recent 7-day period (Apr 21-27) representing a 13% increase over last week. This includes, on average 1,365 people who were being treated in intensive care units (ICU), which is 17% higher than the previous week. The mortality trend is also still on the rise, with the 7-day average of 50 deaths reported daily 10% higher than the week prior.

While COVID-19 continues to impact people of all ages in Canada, infection rates are highest among those under 60 years of age. Serious illness can occur at any age and evidence indicates that variants of concern can be associated with more severe illness and increased risk of death. In addition, circulation of COVID-19 in younger, more mobile and socially-connected adults is an ongoing risk for spread into high-risk populations and settings. As of April 27, a total of 98,393 variant of concern cases have been reported across Canada, including 94,575 involving B.1.1.7 variants, 3,240 P.1 variants and 578 B.1.351 variants. These represent the tip of the iceberg, as there are many more COVID-19 cases that have screened positive for mutations indicative of variants of concern.

Canadians are urged to remain vigilant, continue following local public health advice, and consistently maintain individual practices that keep us and our families safer: stay home/self-isolate if you have any symptoms, think about the risks and reduce non-essential activities and outings to a minimum, avoid all non-essential travel, and maintain individual protective practices of physical distancing, hand, cough and surface hygiene and wearing a well-fitted and properly worn face mask as appropriate (including in shared spaces, indoors or outdoors, with people from outside of your immediate household).

Canadians can also go the extra mile by sharing credible information on COVID-19 risks and prevention practices and measures to reduce COVID-19 in communities and by downloading the COVID Alert app to break the cycle of infection and help limit the spread of COVID-19. Read my backgrounder to access more COVID-19 Information and Resources on ways to reduce the risks and protect yourself and others, including information on COVID-19 vaccination.

SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada

For further information: Media Relations, Public Health Agency of Canada, 613-957-2983, [email protected]
Washington DC, April 27, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Today Forest Trends Ecosystem Marketplace, a nonprofit globally recognized leader in fostering voluntary carbon markets transparency, launched a powerful new data platform for tracking and analyzing carbon markets and voluntary offsetting by corporations, governments, non-profits, individuals, among others.

The Ecosystem Marketplace (EM) Global Carbon Hubs Data Intelligence & Analytics Dashboard provides carbon offset transactions, deliveries, issuances, and retirements data and analysis. EMs unique dataset of pricing and volumes data comes from an international network hundreds of carbon market participants reporting to the EM Global Carbon Survey, with more than 15,000 offset transactions over the past decade. The platform also hosts offsets issuances and retirements data from more than 7,300 projects registered with leading carbon standards Verified Carbon Standard, Gold Standard, American Carbon Registry, Climate Action Reserve, CARB (California Air Resources Board), Clean Development Mechanism, and Plan Vivo, with more to be added in the coming months  the first time EM has made such data been available in a single place.

As voluntary carbon markets grow to meet booming demand from companies with ambitious net zero goals, we need robust market infrastructure to grow along with it, says Stephen Donofrio, Director of Ecosystem Marketplace. The new dashboard offers the broadest, most dynamic dataset on voluntary carbon markets to date.

The free-to-the-public version 1.0 of the Data Intelligence & Analytics Dashboard includes price and other market data and expert analysis from Ecosystem Marketplace, which will be regularly updated as EM Respondents report new data on calendar year 2020 and year to date 2021 via the redesigned and enhanced EM Global Carbon Survey platform, also launching today. Subsequent iterations of the new platform will include new features, including a machine learning tool to estimate carbon offsets prices, and a data benchmarking analysis tool for users to decode offsets prices and volumes by core carbon, additional attributes, and buyers' details.

Voluntary carbon markets will be a key tool for corporations and financial institutions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with Paris Agreement targets. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (the Taskforce), a private-sector-led initiative initiated by Mark Carney, UN special envoy for climate action and finance adviser to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for COP26, has identified a lack of comprehensive and regular market data as a barrier to bringing markets to scale.

Carbon markets need transparency to scale with integrity, said Patrick Maguire, Senior Program Manager of Ecosystem Marketplace. Were in a unique position as a nonprofit organization to ensure a high degree of transparency, and to make that data widely available, to support more informed decision-making and high standards when it comes to offset quality.

The EM Data Intelligence & Analytics Dashboard is available in an open-access (log-in required) platform at https://ecosystemmarketplace.shinyapps.io/PublicCarbonDashboard/.

The EM Global Carbon Survey is available and now accepting responses at https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/carbon-markets/em-global-carbon-survey/

"3Degrees is proud to be a strategic supporter of Ecosystem Marketplace's 2021 Global Carbon Survey. The data from this initiative is invaluable to our team and provides the insights necessary to ensure honest and transparent market growth." Stephanie Harris, Director, Carbon Markets, 3Degrees

You cant react to what isnt measured, so we congratulate and thank Ecosystem Marketplace for building upon their historical work to now improve their data collection and management to match growing demand and interest in the voluntary carbon market. Dee Lawrence, Co-Founder, High Tide Foundation

"Trusted parties like Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace help us drive scale and transparency in the market. We're at a phase now where we have to scale and decarbonize quickly at the same time. So why not invest in groups that already have credibility in the marketplace? We think EM is moving this forward." Jeremy Manion, Lead, Forestry Carbon Markets, Arbor Day Foundation

Cheyenne Coxon Forest Trends 1 202 446 1980 ccoxon@forest-trends.org

Source: Forest Trends
The research team set out to definitively determine the age of the Red Sea, the formation and age of which has long been contested by scientists. Credit: KAUST

Spreading of the seafloor in the Red Sea basin is found to have begun along its entire length around 13 million years ago, making its underlying oceanic crust twice as old as previously believed.

The formation history and age of the Red Sea basin has long been contested, largely because the crust under the sea is widely overlain by thick layers of salt and sediment, making it difficult to observe directly.

"Existing geological models of the Red Sea often contradict each other, largely due to limited high-resolution data and the influence of overlaying salt layers," says Froukje van der Zwan from KAUST, who worked on the project. "For example, magnetic methods do not work well because of the salt layers, where lava erupting under the salt blankets develops significantly different magnetic signatures than those from other oceans."

"We decided to start afresh without preconceptions and make use of gravity and earthquake data, which allowed us to 'see through' the salt layers to the crust beneath," explains van der Zwan.

Areas of thick crust, such as mountains and volcanoes, and denser rock types have a high gravity index, and oceanic crust displays different gravity properties compared with continental crust. These differences are mapped by satellites monitoring the gravitational field of the Earth, and the resulting "vertical gravity gradient" (VGG) data are readily available.

The international team combined VGG data with high-resolution seafloor maps, rock chemistry and earthquake data to gain a comprehensive overview of the basin. Their results indicate that the Red Sea has the fairly simple geological structure of a young ocean, with large volcanoes running the length of the slow-spreading rift. These features are typical of mid-ocean ridges around the world and suggest that the entire Red Sea is not a young sea, but rather a maturing "teenage" ocean basin of around 13 million years old.

"Most of the basin is underlain by oceanic crust, and the continental crusts on either side are further apart than previously indicated," says van der Zwan.

The new model explains features found in the northern Red Sea that are unaccounted for in earlier models. Furthermore, dating the spreading of the seafloor changes the understanding of the region's geological history and could help researchers better understand the formation of other oceans, such as the South Atlantic.

"With a stronger sense of where the earth plate boundaries are, we may improve our understanding of regional seismic activity," says van der Zwan. "Our model will enable us to conduct detailed studies of the ocean crust, active fault systems and the volcanic explosion craters that we found."

Explore further The Red Sea is no longer a baby ocean

More information: Nico Augustin et al. 13 million years of seafloor spreading throughout the Red Sea Basin, Nature Communications (2021). Journal information: Nature Communications Nico Augustin et al. 13 million years of seafloor spreading throughout the Red Sea Basin,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22586-2
The cost of delivering universal, high-quality and affordable child care and early education in Massachusetts would exceed $5 billion a year in new public funding, according to a report, requiring the state to quadruple its commitment to an industry that has become a focal point for Beacon Hill.

The affordability of child care and access for families to high-quality programs has jumped up the priority list of legislative and Congressional leaders in Massachusetts after a year of the COVID-19 pandemic that exposed both its importance and vulnerabilities.

The report from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center estimated that the cost of expanding the early education and care system for children from infancy to age 4 to cover 288,000 children, or more than three times the 91,000 currently enrolled in public programs, would add $5.03 billion in cost.

The centers estimate factors in increases in pay and benefits for early education teachers and staff and assumes a cap on the amount of money families would have to pay out of pocket, regardless of income or how many children they have in programming.

This is obviously a long-term vision and will take a number of years to get there, but there are ways to prioritize this. All the evidence says if you take under-resourced kids, low-income kids, and put them in high quality early education programs you can see an impact, said Colin Jones, senior policy analyst for MassBudget.

The release of the MassBudget report on Thursday comes a day after President Joe Biden rolled out a $1.8 trillion proposal named by the White House the American Families Plan that would invest $200 billion for free, universal pre-school for three- and four-year-olds and another $225 billion to raise the pay of early educators and make day care more affordable for families.

Like the model used by MassBudget, the Biden plan would cap family fees at 7 percent of household income, and if it were to pass Congress would wind up covering 45 percent or more of the new costs in Massachusetts, Jones said.

Nows a great time to think about doing it, Jones said, referencing the potential influx of billions in federal aid. We would need to set a multi-year plan to get here.

According to the report, the total cost of providing services to 287,600 children, or about 80 percent of the children under 5, would be $7.56 billion. The report estimates that families, with a cap and a sliding scale for fees, would contribute $1.27 billion and the state currently allocates another $1.27 billion a year to early education and care.

That would leave a gap of just over $5 billion.

The center recommends a sliding fee scale for families that would kick in for households earning at least half of the statewide median income, or $60,000 for a family of four. Child care would be free for families earning less.

The state could start with the families that need it the most, provide it and expand it over time and hopefully see the impact, Jones said.

The report describes a high-quality program as one with a strong curriculum and professional development opportunities, small class sizes, well-compensated teachers and a full-time, year-round schedule that aligns with the schedules of working parents.

The full cost of providing this type of care and schooling through Head Start, subsidized centers and pre-school programs offered through local districts would average $28,267 a year per child, with infants costing more and pre-schoolers less, the report found.

While there were roughly 8,100 state licensed early education and care programs before the pandemic, MassBudget said the state reported in February that as many as one in six of those programs had not reopened, further exacerbating the crisis.

The American Rescue Plan passed by Congress shortly after Biden took office is expected to deliver over $500 million for child care to Massachusetts to help centers regroup from the pandemic, which also resulted in reduced capacities in addition to the closures.

The centers report also recommends prioritizing investments in communities of color, where Black and Latinx families are more likely to be lower-income and their children have unequal access to quality education that has long-lasting impacts.

The system is not meeting families with what they need. Its difficult to access, particulrly in rural areas and low-income areas, and its extremely unaffordable, Jones said.

Senate President Karen Spilka earlier this spring identified an overhaul of child care funding as part of her moonshot to create an intergenerational care system in Massachusetts, and U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, a Melrose Democrat, has been pushing for substantial new aid in Congress.

The Legislature in this years fiscal 2021 budget also created a Early Education and Care Economic Review Commission, and House Education Committee Chair Rep. Alice Peisch said Monday night she anticipated the commission would have recommendations by the end of the year.

Sen. Su Moran, a Falmouth Democrat who sits on the commission, said Wednesday she would be hosting an online child care town hall for child care providers, teachers, and other stakeholders next Monday night.
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, informs its shareholders of the change of the time of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) to be held in camera on May 12, 2021.

The AGM will be held at 2 pm CEST (and not at 10 am CEST as previously indicated).

All other aspects of this General Meeting remain unchanged.

It is reminded that the AGM will be broadcast live on the same link as previously communicated:

https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/QReg/ShowUUID=5F8F86A0-2E90-4E47-99F4-3E670E3F55F2&LangLocaleID=1036

The shareholders will be able to follow the management presentation in French and ask written questions via the platform during the Q&A session. Questions will be answered orally during the meeting.

It is also recalled that it will not be possible to vote via the Internet during the meeting.

CARMAT's shareholder are thus invited to exercise their voting rights exclusively remotely, before the Annual Shareholders' Meeting, either:

by sending a proxy to the Company, or,

by voting by postal ballot,

by using the voting form available on www.carmatsa.com according to the procedures indicated in the prior notice published on April 7, 2021 in the BALO.

All documents relating to this General meeting remain unchanged and are available upon request to the company and may be consulted on the company's website section Investors Documentation Shareholder's Meeting.

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, Aeson, 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 February 24, 2021 under number D.21-0076 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/20210428005892/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
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall in a memorial park dedicated to the Battle of the Xiangjiang River during the Long March in the 1930s, in Caiwan, a town in Quanzhou County in the city of Guilin, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, April 25, 2021. [Xinhua/Ju Peng]

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua)  In his recent remarks during an inspection trip, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated strengthening belief via the learning of the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

As the CPC marks its centenary in 2021, the Party looks back at its history and recounts the shining moments in it.

Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has on multiple occasions shared stories about the CPC and the spirit manifested within.

Translator Who Took Ink for Sugar

When speaking of the first Chinese version of the Communist Manifesto, Xi often shares the quote "the taste of truth is so sweet," which originates from the deeds of translator Chen Wangdao.

In 1920, young Chen Wangdao started translating the manifesto in his home village in east China's Zhejiang Province. One day, Chen's mother made him sticky rice dumplings and suggested he dip them in brown sugar water.

"I did, and they were very sweet," he responded. However, he was so absorbed in his work, and did not realize his mouth was stained black as he had dipped the dumplings in ink instead. It was with such dedication that Chen finished the translation and introduced the principles of Marxism into China.

Chen's work paved the way for the birth of the CPC. Over the years, the CPC has inherited the ideas and combined the fundamental principles of Marxism with China's reality during the country's revolution, construction and reform.

To this day, Chinese leaders have attached great importance to studying the Communist Manifesto. In the new era, the principles and spirit of Marxism continue to lead the way for the CPC.

Soldiers Who Cut up Their Quilt

Members of the CPC always bear in mind the interests and needs of the people. In September 2020, when visiting the city of Chenzhou, central China's Hunan Province, Xi cited a revolutionary story that took place there in 1934.

In the middle of the arduous Long March, Xu Jiexiu, an impoverished mother living in the local village of Shazhou, received three female Red Army soldiers at her home.

Shocked that Xu had only hay for mattresses and some torn-up cotton wool for quilts, the soldiers shared their only quilt with her and her son during their stay. As they were leaving, they insisted that she keep it for the winter, which Xu refused.

To settle the dispute, a soldier cut the quilt and left Xu half of it. Deeply touched, Xu never forgot about the soldiers or their acts of kindness for the rest of her life.

Lacking food and clothing, even facing life-or-death situations, the Red Army still kept the people's well-being in mind, Xi said, noting that the story shows the CPC's original aspiration and character.

Today, nearly a century from when Xu sheltered the three soldiers, the spirit manifested in the story of "half a quilt" still shines on.

As China embarks on a Long March of the new era, Xi has reassured the public of the CPC's people-oriented attribute, stressing that the Party remains committed to serving the people, which is not only a slogan, but also an action of persistence.

Achieving a complete victory in China's fight against poverty, which saw the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents lifted out of poverty over the past eight years, the Party is moving on toward its goal of building a modern socialist China and common prosperity for all.

'Beggar' with Gold Bars on His Back

It is the CPC's uncompromising requirement for its members to remain incorruptible. When inspecting east China's Jiangxi Province in 2019, Xi spoke of the deeds of Liu Qiyao, a faithful and uncorrupted Party member.

As the leader of the Communist authority in Jiangxi, Liu was once trusted with the activity funds of the local Party organization, including 13 gold bars.

In the 1930s, after losing connection with his comrades in a battle, Liu packed up the hidden funds, embarked on a journey to find them during which he once even lived a beggar's life.

After finally getting in touch with other Party members, Liu submitted the funds. To everyone's surprise, none of the valuables were missing. Even in his most desperate days, Liu did not use any of the funds for himself.

"Only if we remain clean and upright in governance can we win public trust," Xi noted.

Despite historic achievements made over the past years on fighting corruption, it remains the biggest risk to the Party's governance, as Xi has pointed out.

The self-improvement of the CPC, a ruling political party with more than 91 million members, has a major bearing on the future of a country of over 1.4 billion people.

Just as Xi once put it, "The governance over the Party must always be strict, so that the CPC can lead and ensure the smooth sailing of the great ship of socialism with Chinese characteristics."

(Source: Xinhua)


By Ivan Ssenabulya

In a move meant to empower Ugandans through job creation and creating sustainable livelihoods, Airtel Uganda, has launched its inaugural nation-wide campaign dubbed the Franchise Partner Development Training.

According to the Airtel Uganda Chief Commercial Officer Amit Kapur, the training will see Franchise Partners equipped with business skill sets that will see them become efficient, improve their individual performance and become more profitable.

Kapur adds that the program will replicate into a sustained value chain creating jobs for agents and Sim Selling Outlets, covering topics such as Personal Money Management, Basic Business Skills, Running my Airtel Business Tax and compliance.

These business skill sets will see them become efficient, improve their individual performance and hence become more profitable, said Kapur.

Speaking at the launch of the training in Hoima, the Airtel Uganda Business Manager Mr Joseph Musoke confirmed Airtels commitment towards offering partners with the requisite support they require as they do business with Airtel Uganda.
Braving heat and Covid-19, people came out in large numbers to exercise their franchise recording 16.04 per cent of polling in the first hours in the last phase where 35 constituencies spanning across four districts went to polls on Thursday.

According to the data released by the commission though Malda and Murdshidabad recorded high polling, North Kolkata and Birbhum recorded a low voter turnout till 9 a.m.

Malda where six constituencies are going for the polls recorded 18.97 per cent polling followed by Murshidabad where 18.86 per cent of polling was recorded from the 11 constituencies in the fray.

Kolkata North where there are seven constituencies recorded a polling of only 12.89 per cent and 13.44 per cent of polling was recorded in the 11 constituencies of Birbhum.

So far as individual constituencies are concerned Sujapur in Murshidabad district recorded the highest voter turnout of 21 per cent till 9 a.m. and Dubrajpur recorded the lowest polling percentage in the first two hours. This constituency in Birbhum district recorded only 6 per cent of polling in the first two hours.

An analysis of the assembly seats on the parameters of Lok Sabha election shows that Trinamool Congress had a lead in 19 constituencies, BJP had an edge in 11 constituencies and the rest of the 5 seats were in control of Congress. The Left Front hardly had any impression in these 35 seats.

A close look at the basic facts shows that the total number of electors including service voters in these constituencies are 84,93,255 of which 43,70,693 are male electors and 41,22,403 are female voters.

There are 11,860 polling booths spread across 5,837 polling station location where 9,216 are main booths and the rest 2,644 are auxiliary booths. The number of 80 plus voters are 1,12,440 while 72,094 are PWD (Persons with Disabilities) voters. The total number of service electors in this phase are 14,981, third gender voters are 159 and the number of overseas voters is only 10.

Election is going on in booth number 126 of Sitalkhuch assembly constituency in Coochbehar district where four persons were killed during the polling in the fourth phase on April 10.

The Election Commission has already announced that 5,433 booths of the total 11,860 booths are extremely sensitive and so have deployed 24 general observers, nine expenditure observers and nine police observers for the eighth phase of the polls. There will be webcasting facilities in 5,565 per cent of the booths and micro-observers will be deployed in 20 per cent of the booths.

The Commission will deploy 646 companies of central forces during the last phase with Birbhum having the highest deployment of 225 companies for its 11 constituencies.

Two hundred and fifteen companies of central forces will be used for its 11 constituencies in Murshidabad, 110 companies for the 6 constituencies of Malda while North Kolkata will have the lowest deployment of 96 companies for its 7 constituencies

--IANS

saibal/in

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi: Two planes from Russia and one from the United Kingdom carrying COVID-19 supplies landed at the Delhi airport on Thursday (April 29).

Two flights from Russia, carrying 20 oxygen concentrators, 75 ventilators, 150 bedside monitors, and medicines totalling 22 MT, arrived at Delhi airport earlier this morning, news agency ANI reported.

#WATCH | Two flights from Russia, carrying 20 oxygen concentrators, 75 ventilators, 150 bedside monitors, and medicines totalling 22 MT, arrived at Delhi airport earlier this morning. pic.twitter.com/L2JRu3WLZs  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

A shipment from the United Kingdom, containing 120 oxygen concentrators, arrived in Delhi in the morning.

#WATCH | Another shipment from the United Kingdom, containing 120 oxygen concentrators, arrived in Delhi earlier this morning.#COVID19 pic.twitter.com/MrrKRw54yJ  ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2021

Meanwhile, a number of leading countries including the US, France, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Singapore, Portugal, Sweden, New Zealand, Kuwait and Mauritius have announced medical assistance to India to help it fight the pandemic.

France said it will send to India five containers of liquid medical oxygen and each of them is capable of supplying medical oxygen to up to 10,000 patients per day.

The country is also sending 28 ventilators and their consumables, as well as 200 electric syringe pumps.

Under the European Union's Civil Protection Mechanism, Ireland is sending 700 oxygen concentrators, one oxygen generator and 365 ventilators to India while Belgium is supplying 9,000 doses of antiviral medicine Remdesivir and Sweden is providing 120 ventilators.

(With inputs from news agencies)

Live TV
As such, the battle we have here saw the two coupes engaging in a straight-line fight. The Z06 came to the party in standard form, which means its supercharged 6.2-liter V8 churns out 650 hp (659 PS) and 650 lb-ft (881 Nm) of torque; this example features the eight-speed automatic, not the six-speed manual.When in factory configuration, the 3.0-liter twin-turbo straight-six of the M2 Comp delivers 405 horsepower (410 PS) and 406 lb-ft (550 Nm) of twist. Then again, the engine of this particular example has received a massage. To be more specific, the list of custom hardware includes the downpipes, mid-pipe, air intake, as well as a 93-octane tune.Sure, the Bavarian coupe is available with a dual-clutch tranny, but the one sitting here features a six-speed manual, which is obviously a drawback in the fight against the 'Vette.It's also worth mentioning that these RWD animals sit in the same weight class, with both tipping the scales at well over 1,500 lbs (1,600 kg).And while we're talking about the scale footprint, you should know that each vehicle took a passengerYouTuber Auto Glory rode shotgun in the Chevy to capture the whole thing on camera.The BMW M2 Competition and the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 engaged in a pair of races, doing battle on the street, which means they went for the usual rolling starts. Now, please keep in mind to avoid such stunts and use the safe environment provided by the drag strip The first race kicked off at 45 mph (72 kph), while the second saw the hostilities starting at 60 mph (96 kph). And all we can say without spoiling it for you is that the velocity encounter came with a clear conclusion.
New Delhi, April 29 : The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has approved Tata Digital's proposed acquisition of 64.3 per cent stake in Supermarket Grocery Supplies Private Ltd (SGS), which operates the business-to-business arm of the online grocery firm BigBasket.

The proposed combination involves acquisition by Tata Digital Limited (TDL) of up to 64.3 per cent of the total share capital of SGS (on a fully diluted basis) through a combination of primary and secondary acquisitions, in one or more series of steps.

Subsequently, through a separate transaction, SGS may acquire sole control over Innovative Retail Concepts Private Limited (IRC).

The proposed combination will result in the acquisition by TDL of majority stake of and control over SGS.

Tata Digital Ltd (TDL) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Pvt Ltd, which is the ultimate holding company of the entities belonging to the Tata Sons group.

At present, TDL is engaged in the business of providing technology services related to identity and access management, loyalty program, offers and payments.

SGS is incorporated under the laws of India and is engaged in online B2B sales of the relevant products in India through business.bigbasket.com.

IRC is incorporated under the laws of India engaged in online B2C sales of the relevant products in India and operates the website www.bigbasket.com and related mobile applications.
In addition to the direct health impacts and related financial distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has exposed anew the significant health disparities between majority and minority communities.

The disease has not affected Blacks more drastically than whites because Blacks are susceptible to the coronavirus, but because many minority communities have less effective access to health care.

To begin correcting one of the longest-standing public health disparities facing minorities, the Biden administration is expected to ban the use of menthol and other sweet flavorings in cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Tobacco companies long have marketed menthol cigarettes heavily to Black smokers, about 85% of whom favor that variety, according to the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. That group, along with 19 other Black civil rights organizations and research organizations, including the NAACP and the National Medical Association, representing Black doctors, has petitioned the FDA for years to ban menthol cigarettes.

The petition asserts that the popularity of menthol cigarettes among minority smokers is the result of a decades-long marketing strategy by tobacco companies.

Menthol, unlike nicotine, is not addictive. But according to researchers at Yale University and the University of Connecticut, menthol cigarettes are more addictive than others because the substance diminishes irritation in the throat caused by tobacco smoke. That, researchers say, is a key element in young smokers of all races taking up the habit long enough to become addicted to nicotine.

There is not an open question on whether menthol in cigarettes is harmful  the evidence is overwhelming and consistent, Joelle Lester, director of commercial tobacco control programs at the Public Health Law Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota, recently told The Washington Post.

Some Black leaders have said it would be discriminatory to bar a product that is favored by Black smokers. But the ban would be directed at producers, not consumers.

The FDA should begin the process of banning menthol cigarettes and candy-flavored tobacco products, then move on to mandating reduced levels of addictive nicotine in tobacco products so that fewer people will become addicted and those addicted will find it easier to quit.
Martin Compston has admitted he finds his Line Of Duty character DS Steve Arnott 'arrogant' and said 'nobody can understand' how he's had so many romances.

The actor, 36, spoke to the Shrine Of Duty podcast on Wednesday ahead of the last episode this weekend, and amusingly said DS Arnott is 'the overdressed w****r at work' so he didn't get why he managed to attract so many women over the years.

Reflecting on his character, and his love of waistcoats, Martin said: 'Steve does see himself as Sherlock Holmes, he sees himself as a super detective.

'He's the overdressed w****r at work': Line Of Duty star Martin Compston claimed his character Steve Arnott is 'arrogant' while speaking on a podcast on Wednesday

'[It's] that idea but also he's the overdressed w****r at work, he's the guy in the call centre with a headset on, with the waistcoat, having all the affairs and nobody can understand why, you know?

'How is he pulling all these birds? It's just this wee arrogant thing about him, he just thinks he's a wee bit better.'

Martin went on: 'I like playing him, he's a joy to play and the one thing with him, he is an arrogant wee so-and-so but he really cares about his job, that is something Jed [Mercurio, the show's creator] drives home to us.'

Lothario: Martin added that he doesn't understand how Arnott (pictured with DS Sam Railston, played by Aiysha Hart) has had so many romances

Budding romance: In series six, Arnott has been wooing DS John Corbett's widow Stephanie (Amy De Bhrun, pictured)

DS Arnott has enjoyed a multitude of romances since the first season, including with witnesses and co-workers.

The detective caught the eye of waitress Nadzia Wojcik (Elisa Lasowski) and nurse Claire Tindall (Jeany Spark), with pictures of him with the latter in her bedroom leading to problems at work.

He also had a short-lived romance with DC Georgia Trotman (Jessica Raine) when she joined AC-12, prior to her death after she was thrown out of a window.

Flirt: Arnott has enjoyed a multitude of romances since the first season, he has caught the eye of waitress Nadzia Wojcik (Elisa Lasowski, right) and nurse Claire Tindall (Jeany Spark, right)

Former flame: Arnott also had a short-lived romance with DC Georgia Trotman (Jessica Raine, right) when she joined AC-12, prior to her death after she was thrown out of a window

Following Trotman's death, he sparked up a romance with DS Nicola Rogerson (Christina Chong) and they shared a few onscreen kisses, however conflicts of interest in work led to the pair calling things off.

In series three, DS Sam Railston (Aiysha Hart) was introduced as Arnott's girlfriend, and they even enjoy a one year anniversary before she breaks up with him when he's framed for murder.

However, the couple briefly started up their romance once more in series five and they even shared intimate scenes onscreen but his back injuries forced him to call the night's activities off early, and he later claims they haven't got back together.

Fling: Following Trotman's death, he sparked up a romance with DS Nicola Rogerson (Christina Chong, pictured) and they shared a few onscreen kisses, but split over conflicts of interest

Long-term: In series three, DS Sam Railston (Aiysha Hart, pictured) was introduced as Arnott's girlfriend, and they even enjoyed a one year anniversary before she broke up with him

In series six, Arnott and late John Corbett's wife Stephanie relaxed on a bed but did not do anything more than sleep side-by-side.

It was also implied that he and bent copper DI Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes) also had a fling.

Although he was reluctant to confirm it and hoped to keep it private, their relationship was revealed during her appeal trial and she was acquitted on the basis of their improper romance.

Secret fling: It was also implied that he and bent copper DI Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes, pictured) also had a fling, and their romance led to her acquittal in court

DS Steve Arnott's former flames Nadzia Wojcik The detective caught the eye of waitress Nadzia Wojcik (Elisa Lasowski) in series one, and the pair enjoyed a flirty exchange while he interviewed her as a witness over an incident involving DCI Anthony Gates (Lennie James). Claire Tindall He and the nurse enjoyed a brief romantic encounter in series two, pictures of the pair in a loving embrace landed Arnott in hot water. DC Georgia Trotman Arnott and DC Trotman met when she joined the AC-12 in series two, however their romance was destined to be short-lived as she was killed when she was thrown out of a window by corrupt cop DC Jeremy Cole (Henry Pettigrew). DS Nicola Rogerson Arnott and DS Rogerson (Christina Chong) develop a relationship in series two, but while they shared a few onscreen kisses, conflicts of interest at work led to them to call things off. DI Lindsay Denton In season three it was revealed that Arnott had a secret fling with bent copper DI Denton (Keeley Hawes). Although he was reluctant to confirm it and hoped to keep it private, their relationship was revealed during her appeal trial and she was acquitted on the basis of their improper romance. DS Sam Railston In series three, DS Railston (Aiysha Hart) was introduced as Arnott's girlfriend, and they even enjoyed a one year anniversary before she broke up with him when he was framed for murder. The couple briefly started up their romance in series five and they even shared intimate scenes onscreen but his back injuries forced him to call the night's activities off early. Stephanie Corbett In series six, Arnott has been wooing DS John Corbett's widow Stephanie. While the pair have slept in the same bed together, they have not taken their budding romance to the next level. Advertisement

The final episode of Line Of Duty is set to take place on Sunday evening and dedicated viewers are hoping to uncover the identify of 'H' - the fourth man.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Martin teased that fans will get some 'big answers' during the finale, as he admitted he believes it could be the 'perfect ending' to the police drama.

Martin confessed that while he thinks Sunday's episode could be the best way to wrap up the 'story arch' - he also refused to rule out another series.

Teaser: Elsewhere in the podcast, Martin teased that fans will get some 'big answers' during the finale, as he admitted he believes it could be the 'perfect ending' to the police drama

When quizzed on whether viewers will learn who the illusive 'H' is, Martin said: 'I wouldn't quite go the Jo Davidson no comment route - but what I will tell you is I think there's a lot of pay offs coming this Sunday.

'There's a lot of big answers and it's deserved, people have stuck with us for a long time, so there comes a point where the story arch comes to an end.'

Martin also touched on whether series seven is likely, after show bosses previously claimed they believed the current season would be the last.

Omg! Martin confessed that while he thinks Sunday's episode could be the best way to wrap up the 'story arch' - he also refused to rule out another series

He said: 'We don't know [if there will be another] - that's nothing new. Jed always takes time after a series, like a couple of months.

'There's a lot of stuff above my pay grade like analytics and audience scores. He takes the emotion out of it and looks at all that.'

Admitting it could be the 'perfect ending', he said: 'It's different this year, because we have to look it in terms of, do people want us back? 10 years in you start to think of legacy, and if it goes down that well it might be the perfect ending.'

'But then we might go another couple of months and... what I will say is we won't do one just for the sake of doing it. Jed will only do it if there's a story to be told.'

Exciting: Martin said of the finale, 'There's a lot of big answers and it's deserved, people have stuck with us for a long time, so there comes a point where the story arch comes to an end'

Elsewhere, during the chat, Martin also discussed filming the 30 minute-long interrogation scene after Jo Davidson [Kelly MacDonald] was arrested last week.

Martin said that there can be high levels of tension during these types of scenes, which he admitted can often descend into fits of laughter.

He said: 'These big interview scenes, the tension in them is unreal, not just cos of the scene, but thinking 'can we do this?' - it's 30 minutes long - can we get through it?'

He added: 'Usually day two, after lunch, your mind has gone and you're on autopilot. The giggles are ready to go as the finish line is in sight, it just takes something to go.

'Adrian had a bit of a brain freeze - but animal themed - and when he was on a rant at Kelly, he says a bunch of racist thugs, but it comes out as a slugs.'

'There was a mountain of evidence, but he said there's a mountain of elephants coming at you. And we were just like, what is going on?

'One of them happened and everyone's averting their eyes and pinching their own legs under the table, trying not to laugh. The slugs one, everyone just lost it.'

Coming back: Line Of Duty will be back on Sunday night and fans are eager to find out whether AC-12 will finally crack the case on the elusive H

'That's the horrible thing about the giggles, once you start, there's no way back.'

Martin's character, who is known for his love of waistcoats, also touched on whose idea it was to dress Steve in the signature garment.

He said: 'It was me who decided it, in the first series Jed wanted Steve wearing a lot of layers so he looked a bit different.

'But in the second series I thought about it and Steve does see himself as Sherlock Holmes, but also - he's the overdressed w****er at work.

Trailer: In a teaser released on Monday, viewers can be certain of an action-packed finale episode with a police standoff, the return of balaclava men and that 'definately' misspelling

'He's the guy in the call centre with the headset and waistcoat having all the office affairs, but nobody can understand why he's pulling all these birds.

'There's that wee arrogance to him, that he thinks he's a bit better, I love him and playing him, and he is a wee arrogant so and so, but he really cares about his job.'

The chat comes days after a new trailer for Line Of Duty's finale was released, only serving to heighten speculation around the identity of 'H'.

AC-12: The trailer starts off with Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), state: 'All of these suspicious deaths were orchestrated by one officer in particular, H. The fourth man'

Fall from grace: The trailer then shows acting Superintendent Jo Davidson (Kelly MacDonald) leaving the high-security prison in handcuffs

Scary: She ends up alone in a van with a corrupt prison officer who previously injured Lindsay Denton in series three

Clue: A handwritten note is also teased in the trailer, with the word definite misspelt to mirror what viewers have seen previously- will this be the clue AC-12 needs?

Viewers can be certain of an action-packed finale episode complete with a police standoff, the return of balaclava men and the discovery of a written note with THAT 'definately' misspelling.

The trailer starts off with Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), who is facing imminent retirement, state: 'All of these suspicious deaths were orchestrated by one officer in particular, H. The fourth man.'

Hastings' powerful words went alongside flashbacks of the deaths of solicitor Jimmy Lakewell, police officer Lisa Patel, journalist Gail Vella and former Detective Inspector Marcus Thurwell- whom fans believe is still alive.

Drama: It certainly seems Hastings and his team are on to something as police cars speed down the road, while armed officers close in on a residential area and Hastings briefs his team

Shootout: And it only gets more dramatic as balaclava men jump out of vehicles armed with guns themselves

Crime: The police board shows AC-12's work so far; with DI Dot Cottan, Chief Superintendent Derek Hilton, Gill Biggeloe and OCG members including Lisa McQueen and Tommy Hunter

The trailer then shows acting Superintendent Jo Davidson (Kelly MacDonald) leaving the high-security prison in handcuffs, only to end up alone in a van with a corrupt prison officer who previously injured Lindsay Denton in series three.

Jo says: 'What's going on?', before the camera flashes a sinister look from the prison officer.

A handwritten note is also teased in the trailer, with the word definite misspelt to mirror what viewers have seen previously.

A huge clue of the identity of H began to emerge in series five, when the OCG communicated with 'H' through a computer.

Eagle-eyed fans were quick to notice H spelling definitely as 'definately', and this misspelling has been repeated in subsequent episodes.

Corrupt? Partricia Carmichael will also return after her suspicious behaviour during the interview on the last episode

Will this handwritten report be the breakthrough AC-12 need to close in on 'the fourth man'?

It certainly seems Hastings and his team are on to something as police cars sped down the road, with armed officers closing in on a residential area during the trailer.

The Superintendent briefs DI Kate Fleming, DI Steve Arnott and DC Chloe Bishop as they arrive at the scene.

Hastings says: 'AFO's will secure the suspect down', while the words 'Every investigation has led to this... H'.

And it only gets more dramatic as balaclava men jump out of vehicles armed with guns themselves.

Kate opens the police van, brandishes her gun and shouts: 'armed police' before the screen fades to black.

Action: The snaps, which are thought to be depicting the seventh episode of the series, show a stoney-faced Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) getting out his police car

Intriguing: Another snap shows Hastings pointedly walking out of the front gates of Decker Avenue Police Station, where Jimmy Lakewell was taken before withdrawing his cooperation with AC-12

The newly-released trailer for the finale showed Kate wearing the same grey turtleneck jumper as she is seen wearing in the on-set snaps, while it teases at the return of the balaclava men and shows DCI Jo Davidson handcuffed in prison.

Viewers were stunned on Sunday night when it appeared James Nesbitt's character was killed off before he even appeared on screen - but some are convinced it was a cover-up.

Towards the end of the nail-biting penultimate episode, Guardia Civil police officers stormed Marcus Thurwell's Spanish home, while the AC-12 team watched via video link.

When the law enforcement officers entered the home, they were met by two bodies, and a Spanish captain turned to the camera and identified one as 'Senor Thurwell'.

While many viewers expressed surprise an actor of Nesbitt's calibre was denied even a scene, some were left convinced Thurwell was in fact the Spanish AFO leading the raid on his home.

Showdown? Other images show Kate (centre) and Steve (right) speak to Hastings, leaving fans asking if the duo confront the AC-12 boss about the 50,000 given to John Corbett's widow Steph

Under pressure: Hastings, who has already become exasperated as time is running out before he's forced into retirement and AC-12 is disbanded, is seen looking concerned in the images

One tweeted: 'Is it just me or was one of those Spanish "police officers" Thurwell? Im sure it was him.'

Another wrote: 'Exactly what I was thinking? Nice job if James Nesbitt only got paid for a few photos so I suspect that Marcus Thurwell is 100% alive.'

And one commented: 'Is this Marcus Thurwell or have they just found the Spanish Jimmy Nesbitt to play the part?' - sharing a series of screenshots to illustrate the likeness.

AC-12 were looking into the retired former detective chief inspector after SI Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) learned that Gail Vella - the journalist who was murdered - had been looking into the death of Lawrence Christopher while in police custody - a case Thurwell was in charge of.

Ready to go: Hastings, who is up against the clock before AC-12 is disbanded, is also seen getting out of a police car as things heat up during the series

Link: A dramatic trailer for the BBC drama's finale showed Kate wearing the same grey turtleneck jumper as she is seen wearing in the on-set snaps (pictured)

Thurwell also has links to Darren Hunter, the son of former organised crime group boss Tommy Hunter.

The OCG also murdered Oliver Stephens-Lloyd before he had an opportunity to give evidence about sexual abuse at Sands View Boys' Home, with Superintendent Ted Hastings convinced Thurwell is connected to the killing and the abuse cover-up.

When Thurwell was found 'dead', Hastings was visibly exasperated - with time running out for him to solve the mystery before his impending retirement.

Elsewhere in the episode, viewers learned PC Ryan Pilkington met a grizzly end, after working as an inside man in the Murder Investigation Team (MIT) for the Organised Crime Group (OCG).

Trouble ahead? The images have left people questioning whether Kate and Steve are going to confront Hastings about the mysterious wad of cash given to Steph, and wondering what the trio are doing at Decker Avenue Police Station

Determined: In snaps taken on set, Hastings appeared to be hard at work ahead of his forced retirement as he was seen getting out of a police car looking determined

After being lured to a lonely car park by DCI Jo Davidson during the previous episode, Kate was met by armed officer Ryan who said he planned to kill her as he held up his gun and aimed it at her.

The episode ended as two gun shots sounded, before the new episode revealed that Ryan had been shot twice in the chest, with Kate and Jo fleeing the scene in a Thelma and Louise-inspired fashion.

When DI Steve Arnott arrived with the AC-12 unit they discovered that Kate and Jo had gone on the run and Ryan was dead.

DCS Patricia Carmichael could be heard telling officers that the duo were considered to be 'armed and dangerous' and sent out an order for their address.

Theory: Fans were stunned on Sunday night when it appeared James Nesbitt's character was killed off before he even appeared on screen - but some are convinced it was a cover-up

Towards the end of the penultimate episode, Guardia Civil police officers stormed Marcus Thurwell's Spanish home, while the AC-12 team watched via video link. They found Thurwell's body (right) - but some fans believe the Spanish captain was Thurwell in disguise (left)

Despite the gripping hunt for Jo and Kate which commenced, fans were overjoyed that one of their favourite characters had survived.

Elsewhere during the new episode, fans were left convinced that Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael is the fourth man after Sunday's episode.

The officer, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, placed herself at the centre of the action as she ordered Kate Fleming to be arrested following the shootout and then tried to shut down Ted Hastings' questions during a very intense interview of Jo.

Some viewers even theorised that Carmichael was trying to send a message during the 'puzzling' interview - which also saw Jo discover her paternity despite offering more 'no comments' than answers - based on how often she tapped her pen.

This Morse code theory popped up during Arnott's questioning of Davidson, specifically when he tried to get information about Gail Vella's laptop and computer.

Although Davidson remained tight-lipped, Carmichael did seem to start sweating a little as she tapped her pen four times and took a sip of water.

Interesting: While many viewers expressed surprise that an actor of Nesbitt's calibre was denied even a scene, some were left convinced that Thurwell was in fact the Spanish AFO

She's alive! Line Of Duty ended on a tense cliffhanger last week after gunshots were fired as DI Kate Fleming and bent copper Ryan Pilkington held up their weapons

Morse Code is an alphabet that spells out words or messages using a series of short and long sounds, with the officer appearing to make four taps and spell out H.

Carmichael again set alarm bells ringing when she cut off Hastings at the end of the interview following his knockout question about Osborne being H.

Cutting off the AC-12 head's question, she declared that Davidson was being charged with 'perverting course of justice and misfeasance in public office'.

The Line Of Duty series six finale airs on BBC One on Sunday at 9pm.

Cliffhanger: After being lured to a lonely car park by DCI Jo Davidson (pictured) [Kelly MacDonald] during the previous episode, Kate [Vicky McClure] was met by armed officer Ryan
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 04:50:55|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) announced this week it was suing pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for breach of contract amid major delivery shortfalls, a case that legal analysts said could be hard to prove.

A spokesman for the European Commission told Xinhua Wednesday that AstraZeneca had indicated it would be able to deliver just a third of the 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses it promised to deliver by mid-year.

That meant the company was in breach of its contract, the spokesman said. The case will be heard in a Belgian court.

For its part, AstraZeneca said the contact called for the company to make a "best-effort" to honor delivery targets, something legal experts said meant the EU's lawyers would have to prove the company did not do all it could to meet targets.

"The 'best effort' language does not mean the company cannot be found guilty of breach of contract, but it makes that conclusion more difficult to prove," Geert Van Calster, a contract law professor at Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, said in an interview with Xinhua.

AstraZeneca has vowed to "aggressively fight" the EU lawsuit.

Van Calster said the expected a three- to seven-week timetable for the proceedings to start and the "interlocutory application" of the case meant the judge would only be able to consider points that are apparent from "an immediately obvious reading of the contract" and not from an in-depth study of the contract's language.

Giacomo Di Federico, a professor of EU law at LUISS University in Rome, agreed with that analysis. He said the European case to the judge would be that AstraZeneca "did not comply with the broad reading of the contract and that the judge should force it to comply."

Di Federico said there was not a provision for financial damages in the case.

"The fact that the European Commission is not seeking damages and that the vaccine delivery goal may very well be met by the time the judge reaches a decision is an illustration that a big part of this process is about perception and public relations," Di Federico told Xinhua.

The EU's vaccine rollout has been hindered by delivery problems when compared to some other countries, including Britain, which left the EU in 2020.

The wide use of the AstraZeneca vaccine -- which was developed at Oxford University in Britain -- has been a large part of that country's faster vaccine rollout.

"Europe had some disadvantages compared to (Britain) in that it needed to reach consensus among 27 nations," Di Federico said. "But it is being criticized and a lawsuit like this one can show it is taking steps to address the situation."

The delivery problems are not the only issue AstraZeneca's vaccine has had in Europe. Last month, the use of the vaccine was paused for days in several EU states in connection with reports it caused blood clots in some patients. The European Medicines Agency ultimately concluded that its benefits outweigh its risks.

On Wednesday, news reports in Italy said the country was considering a policy that allowed the vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (which also resulted in blood clots in a very small percentage of cases) to be used "voluntarily" in some cases.

The other vaccines approved for use in Italy -- the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and the alternative from Moderna -- would continue to be used without restrictions, the reports said.

In January, Italy threatened to sue Pfizer for shortfalls in its delivery schedule, but the company ultimately caught up and the Italian government did not follow through on its threats.

As of Wednesday, Italy had at least partially vaccinated 18.62 million residents, the equivalent of 31.0 percent of its population. A total of 5.48 million people, or 9.1 percent of the country's population, have been fully vaccinated. Enditem
Criminals are poised to bombard people with ticketing, travel and health insurance scams as lockdown restrictions ease.

With many people looking to book holidays and tickets to concerts or festivals, fraudsters are advertising bogus tickets at low prices as well as for events that have already sold out, UK Finance said.

It warned people to watch out for scam emails, telephone calls, fake websites and posts on social media.

To stay safe, people are reminded to follow the advice of the Take Five To Stop Fraud campaign and pause to think before parting with their money or personal information.

Katy Worobec, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, said: 'Criminals have been capitalising on the pandemic to commit fraud, and the easing of lockdown restrictions provides another opportunity for them to target victims.

'As you start booking holidays and planning social activities, don't let criminals take you for a ride.

'Follow the advice of the Take Five To Stop Fraud campaign and always visit websites you're buying from by typing it in to the web browser - avoid clicking on links in unsolicited emails or text messages.

'Be wary of any requests to pay by bank transfer when buying or booking services online, and instead use a credit card or the secure payment options recommended by reputable websites.'

The conmen foolishly rang Durham Constabulary's Specials Chief Officer Dale Checksfield

Mr Checksfield agreed to meet them to 'compare warrants' but the scammers hung up

Chief Officer Dale Checksfield said he had not been fooled by the over-the-phone effort

It came after dopey phone scammers targeting innocent Britons for data and money have got their comeuppance - after blundering into calling a police chief.

The fake figures rang Durham Constabulary's Specials Chief Officer Dale Checksfield and claimed to be from the National Crime Agency.

Bemused CO Checksfield was told a warrant was out for his arrest before he turned the tables on the callous conmen.

He agreed to meet them to 'compare warrants' and the scammers, who are believed to be based in India quickly hung up.

It appears to be the most audacious target so far after a number of members of the public have reported having the same con performed on them.

The scams have prompted the NCA to issue a public warning that it would never ask people for their bank account or National Insurance number and should ring their control centre if they were unsure.

Chief Officer Dale Checksfield said: 'Phone call today from the NCA (India branch, according to the number) to advise there is a warrant out for my arrest

Fake Hermes delivery messages also try to get innocent victims to part with their cash

Vulnerable Britons are being targeted with fraudulent text messages offering them access to coronavirus vaccinations

A Royal Mail text scam (one such text, pictured) asking customers to pay for packages before they are delivered has tricked thousands into handing over their bank details

Top tips to stop fraud - Criminals will offer 'travel deals' to obtain your money and information. Websites may look genuine, but subtle changes in the URL can indicate they are fraudulent. Websites may use images of luxury villas and apartments that do not exist. These are offered for rent, often at discounted prices and require deposits which are never returned. Where possible, book directly with an established hotel or through a reputable travel company/agent that is a member of a trade body such as Abta or Atol. - Always use the secure payment options recommended by reputable online travel providers and do not accept requests to pay separately via a bank transfer. Where possible, use a credit card when booking holidays over 100 and up to 30,000 as you receive protection under Section 75 of the Credit Consumer Act. - When travelling in the EU, people will be able to access emergency and medical care with a Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC). This card has replaced the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC). Criminals are asking people for payment details, when the GHIC is free. They are advertising cards on fake websites that emulate the NHS. They claim to either fast-track or manage your application process before charging an up-front fee. The GHIC can be obtained directly via the NHS website - https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/healthcare-abroad/apply-for-a-free-uk-global-he alth-insurance-card-ghic/ - Criminals may also target people with fake 'Covid certificates' and 'passports'. Often posts include a link to a fraudulent website, used to steal personal and financial information. - Make sure you book festival and theatre tickets directly through official sellers. SOURCE: Take Five To Stop Fraud Advertisement

'For a moment I feared Lynne Owens (director general of the NCA) had finally found me out.

'Somewhat surprised my offer to compare warrants in person was declined.'

It comes after many members of the public had been scammed by fraudulent calls and text messages claiming that they must pay a fine for breaching lockdown rules.

A spokesperson for the NCA said: 'We've been receiving an increased number of scam call reports. NCA will NOT contact you about your bank account or National Insurance number.

'If you're in any doubt about the identity of an NCA officer please verify with our Control Centre on 0370 496 7622.'

Ofcom have also warned racketeering messages can purport to come from the UK Government, the NHS, people's local GP surgeries and even the World Health Organisation (WHO) but were fake.

They aim to trick unsuspecting members of the public into handing over money to cover the costs of non-existent penalty charges.

Other coronavirus-related scams presently being run include emails, calls or texts promising to offer a COVID-19 test, vaccine, treatment or financial support.

In the calls, a recorded message or caller will claim to be contacting you about the coronavirus,' an Ofcom spokesperson warned.

'They might offer a test for the virus, a treatment or cure, or might offer to discuss your medical needs. However, these calls are designed to encourage you to either speak to an operator, or press a button on your phone for more information.'

'If you speak to an operator, you could be at risk of giving them your personal information or your financial details, which could result in identity theft or financial loss,' they continued.

'If you press a button on your phone you could be connected to a high-cost premium number, leaving you liable for a significant call cost.'

'If you think one of these calls or texts might be genuine  from your GP, for example  you can call your GP's surgery separately to check whether they have tried to contact you.'

Ofcom also warned that there are scams in operation which claim to be legitimate messages from the the communications regulator itself.

'A recorded message or caller will claim that, because of more people working from home due to coronavirus, your broadband needs to be slowed down or switched off,' Ofcom explained.

'As with the scam calls outlined above, they will try to encourage you to either speak to an operator, or press a button for more information. If you do this, you could face the same risks,' they continued.

'Ofcom will never call you out of the blue like this. If you receive one of these calls claiming to be from us, please hang up.'
Sen. Joe Manchin, (D-WV) speaks at a confirmation hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 24, 2021. (Leigh Vogel-Pool/Getty Images)

Manchin Uncomfortable Over Rising Cost of Biden Legislative Plans

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), a crucial moderate Democrat, has expressed reservations over the mounting costs associated with implementing President Joe Bidens legislative agenda.

His comments come after Biden unveiled a $1.8 trillion plan to expand educational opportunities and child care for families, dubbed the American Family Plan. The plan is expected to be funded by an increase of the top individual tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent for taxpayers in the top 1 percent of income.

The White House is also proposing to raise the capital gains tax rate to 39.6 percent for households making more than $1 million.

The latest proposal follows Bidens $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan that is still being debated by Congress and a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan that has since been enacted. The three packages expand social welfare programs and would total about $6 trillion.

Its a lot of money, a lot of money, Manchin, who is seen as a key swing vote in a 50-50 Senate, told reporters on Wednesday. That makes you very uncomfortable.

Manchin on Sunday indicated that he favored a more targeted infrastructure package and has previously said that he does not support Bidens plan to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, arguing instead that a 25 percent hike was more preferable.

Are we going it be able to be competitive and be able to pay for what we need in the country? Weve got to figure out what our needs are and maybe make some adjustments. Who knows? Manchin said.

He also raised concerns over adding to the already burgeoning debt.

Were at $28.2 trillion now, debt, so you have to be very careful. Theres a balance to be had here, he said.

Democratic Senator Jon Tester (D-Mont.) shared similar concerns, telling reporters that although he was initially pleased by the recent proposal, he would like to take a closer look at the American Families Plan to make sure any measures in this plan are not overlapping with other spending proposals.

I think the goals are great, and I just [need to] have a look at it and see how it dovetails in with the other ones, see how much overlap there is, he said. To be honest with you, Ive been like a bull running around a haystack. I havent had a chance to sit down. Its going to take a little bit of time, but I like the goals.

Meanwhile, a key Republican, Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on Wednesday that Bidens legislative proposals need to be curbed.

In his first 100 days, hes asked for $100 trillion in spending, Romney told reporters on Wednesday, without explaining how he came up with the $100 trillion figure. To put that in context, our total federal budget that we vote on every year is $1.4 or $1.5 trillion.

So its a massive amount of spending. So I think maybe if he were younger Id say his dad needs to take away the credit card, he added.

Republicans have already rejected the Democrats $2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal, expressing concern over the price tag. Instead, a group of Republican lawmakers has offered a $568 billion infrastructure counterproposal that is expected to focus more on a traditional concept of infrastructure.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has already suggested that he would not back Bidens infrastructure plan. He characterized the proposal as another multitrillion-dollar smorgasbord of liberal social engineering.

Its being sold as a serious effort to rebuild our nations infrastructure. Its a pretty brazen misdirection. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, Democrats have chosen to live in an alternate universe where both the campaign promises they made and the mandate the American people delivered were completely different than what happened here on planet Earth, he told the Senate floor on Wednesday.

During his speech on Wednesday evening, Biden touted the passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus bill, which cleared the Senate without the support of a single Republican. He also praised the American Jobs Plan calling it a blue-collar blueprint to build America. He said that independent experts estimate it will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth in the United States for years to come.

These are good-paying jobs that cant be outsourced. Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan dont require a college degree. 75 percent dont require an associates degree.

Isabel Van Brugen contributed to this report.
MOSCOW (AP)  The Russian military said Thursday that its troops have returned to their permanent bases after concluding massive drills near Ukraine that alarmed Western countries.

Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the military's General Staff, said that more than 300,000 troops, nearly one-third of the nation's 1 million member military, took part in the exercise earlier this month. Speaking during a meeting with the top military brass to discuss the drills, he noted that they involved 35,000 combat vehicles, about 900 aircraft and 180 navy ships.

The commander of the Western Military District, Col. Gen. Alexander Zhuravlev, reported that most of his troops are now back at their garrisons, and just one trainload of troops was still on its way to their home base.

The troop buildup in Russia's south and southwest near the Ukrainian border worried the West, which urged Moscow to withdraw its forces. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered the troops pullback last week after watching major maneuvers in Crimea, but emphasized that the move had nothing to do with Western calls he rejected as inappropriate.

Russia annexed the Black Sea's Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014 following the ouster of Ukraine's Moscow-friendly president and then threw its weight behind separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. More than 14,000 people have been killed in seven years of fighting, which devastated Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland called Donbas.

A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped end large-scale battles, but skirmishes have continued along the line of contact and a political settlement has stalled. Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of shoring up the rebels with troops and weapons  allegations that Moscow has denied.

The Kremlin sternly warned the Ukrainian authorities against trying to reclaim control of the rebel east by force, saying it could be pushed to intervene to protect civilians there.
Second instalment of Realtime Gaming's blockbuster slot to go live at South Africa's favourite online casino on 19 May

Players are being encouraged to shop until they drop at South Africa's favourite online casino, Springbok Casino, with the isles now open at the latest slot release from Realtime Gaming, Shopping Spree II.

This is the second instalment of the hugely popular game that caters to both the luxury high-end shopper and the bargain hunter. Of course, players will want to trigger the Shopping Spree Bonus feature that allows players to checkout with some massive wins.

While playing the highly volatile slot, Wild "Sale" symbols can appear grouped on reel three and substitute for all other symbols except the Scatter. The prize is then multiplied by x2, x3, x5, x10 or x20 when "Sale" substitutes in a winning combination.

The Scatter symbol is "Shopping Spree II" and if three or more land during the base game, the Shopping Spree Bonus is triggered with nine Free Spins instantly awarded. As the feature plays out, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 point symbols may land on the reels.

The points tally starts at zero, but as the point symbols land, the tally increases. For every 1,000 points the player earns, another three free spins are awarded up to a maximum of 12 games. While the feature is active, reel three is made up of "Sale" Wild symbols.

If the total points tally does not exceed 1,000 points, a consolation prize is awarded as per the below:

500 900 points x3 bet multiplier

400 points x5 bet multiplier

300 points x10 bet multiplier

200 points x20 bet multiplier

100 points x40 bet multiplier

0 points x100 bet multiplier

If that wasn't enough to get players heading straight to the Springbok Casino Mall, Shopping Spree II also comes hooked up to a Progressive Jackpot that can be won when 5 Diamond Ring symbols occur on a payline with a x20 "Sale" Wild. The jackpot seeds at $100,000.

Shopping Spree II launches at Springbok Casino on 19 May and can be played via download, instant play and web browser.

ENDS

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005050/en/

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Funds raised under the placement will be used to complete the recently announced acquisition of Blackspur Oil Corp.

The company anticipates being reinstated to ASX trading next week.

( ) has completed a strongly supported capital raising under its retail offer and institutional placement for total funds of A$37.9 million.

There were 5,425,783,115 fully paid ordinary shares issued at a price of A$0.007 per share.

The company received strong demand in the retail offer and scale backs have been applied with the scale-back funds to be remitted back to the investors on Friday, April 30, 2021.

Shares under the capital raising were issued in a single tranche following shareholder approval on April 15, 2021, and accordingly do not count towards the companys LR 7.1. placement capacity.

ASX reinstatement

The company is making progress on the path to production and revenue generation from assets in the prolific Montney Formation in Canada and is confident of ending an ASX trading suspension in the near future.

Calima anticipates being reinstated to trading on May 3, 2021, with this process boosted by progress with the recent Blackspur Oil Corp acquisition which will create a stronger merged entity.

Funding acquisition costs

The funds raised under the capital raising will be used for:

Cash component of the acquisition of Blackspur Oil Corp;

Paydown debt of Blackspur as detailed in the notice of meeting dated March 11, 2021;

Pay for the costs of the acquisition of Blackspur Oil Corp; and

For working capital purposes.

Blackspur transaction progresses

The acquisition arrangement has progressed with Blackspur receiving Canadian Court Approval in respect of the binding agreement with Calima.

Blackspur owns producing oil and natural gas assets in two core areas within Alberta, at Brooks and Thorsby.

Calima has also been buoyed by news that has approved a C$25 million revolving credit facility for Blackspur Oil Corp.

Together with revenue generated from operations, this will provide the additional short-term working capital to fund the capital works program for 2021 and 2022.
NEW HAVEN  Aside from knowing his way really well around a deep fryer and the spices that go into lip-smacking fried shrimp, scallops or fish, Paul Hill, owner of the new Still Off The Hook Seafood restaurant in the Amity section is nothing if not persistent.

Off The Hook  sound familiar?

It should.

For several years, Hill, 47, owned and operated Off The Hook restaurants in a couple of locations along Dixwell Avenue in Hamden. He closed the last one a couple of years ago.

But now hes back with a new restaurant in the Whalley Commons shopping center. Its in the corner storefront that used to be the short-lived Koreana restaurant and before that The Thai restaurant, in the shopping center that also houses Walgreens and a post office..

And hes about to open additional locations that will spread his crunchy seafood love to Bridgeport, Middletown and Waterbury.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

I want people to look at me as a guy who took a chance and made it, said Hill, who grew up in the citys Newhallville section, pointing out that in the Great Depression, millionaires were found.

While not all of his past ventures have endured, Youre not a boss until you take a loss, Hill said, calling himself a 47-year-old man who has a hunger for success.

Hes making some big moves now because I love challenges, he said. Im a high risk-taker.

He also has longer-term plans, even though he calls the restaurant business a very tough industry.

My dream and my goal will be to mentor and franchise, he said.

Hill, who learned about the fried seafood years ago as an employee of Kevins Seafood in New Haven, said Still Off The Hook may not be the only fried seafood restaurant in New Haven but Im the most unique.

What makes me unique is my sauces  my garlic parm, my General Tso, he said.

Still Off The Hook also serves a lobster egg roll that is a mash-up of two classic Connecticut favorites, lobster rolls and Chinese egg rolls.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Its food is available to eat in-house, for takeout or via delivery from Seamless, Grubhub and DoorDash. Hill hopes to add outdoor seating soon. Lately, business has been split about 50-50 between eat-in and takeout and delivery, he said.

The New Haven restaurant opened last fall. The Bridgeport, Middletown and Waterbury restaurants all are fully approved and about to open as soon as Hill can assemble staffs for them, he said.

The Bridgeport Still Off The Hook will be at 75 Fairview Ave. near St. Vincent Medical Center. The Middletown restaurant will be at 102 Court St. The Waterbury Still Off The Hook will be at 21 East Farm St., he said.

If you go to the New Haven restaurant, chances are that Chef Jeff Simuel will be doing the cooking for you if Hill isnt doing it himself. Simuel has 15 years of experiences, including at the Chowder Pot, Chilis and T.G.I. Fridays, among others.

Whats his secret to making great fried seafood?

Love, Simuel said. I put love into the food.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
ROCHESTER, Minn - A few weeks ago, several Rochester restaurants partnered for the 'Do-It-4-M-Dog' fundraiser where all of the proceeds were going to support transplant patients.

Jack and Jennifer lost their 10-year-old son, Marcus, while he was waiting for a dual lung transplant. That's why it was an easy decision for them to donate the money raised during the fundraiser to the Gift of Life Transplant House, which was a total of $10,388.

Because the family knows firsthand how important transplant homes are and the comfort they bring to patients, they wanted to show their gratitude. "I've never met an employee or helper at a transplant home that isn't living in the light," explained Jack. "That isn't a positive ray of light and they're needed. They make you feel great."

But this fundraiser wouldn't have been made without the support of the community. "This would not be possible in any means if people didn't step up and give back," Jennifer said. "So, it's very powerful."

The Executive Director at Gift of Life Transplant House, Mary Wilder, said this money will allow the house to continue offering affordable nights for patients who stay there in the future. "This means that we can ensure that they're gonna have a safe home-like environment to come to where finances are going to the least of their worries," she explained. "They're not going to have to be concerned about that."

On Friday, the Gift of Life Transplant House is hosting the 'Walk of Remembrance' virtually on their Facebook page. It's a time to honor loved ones who are connected to organ donation. There will also be blue and green luminaries along the sidewalk on 2nd Street right outside of the house if you'd like to check them out.
Diversifieds commitment to global excellence and meeting all our clients technology needs around the world has always been a driving force for the company.

Diversified, a leading global technology solutions provider, is pleased to be named one of 205 organisations to receive a prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise, recognised for excellence in International Trade for Outstanding Short-Term Growth in overseas sales over three years. Now in its 55th year, the Queens Awards for Enterprise are the most distinguished business awards in the United Kingdom, celebrating business excellence across the country.

It is a huge honour to be awarded a Queens Award for Enterprise in International Trade by Her Majesty The Queen, says Daryl Clarke, senior vice president of Diversifieds EMEA operations. Seemingly out of reach just a few years ago, this award is a true testament to the dedication of our team and partners around the globe.

With overseas sales growing year on year by 195% over the last three years, Diversified continues expanding their growing global presence, operating worldwide in more than 50 countries. Its top five markets are the USA, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Israel with a considerable increase in sales across India, Israel and the USA.

Diversifieds commitment to global excellence and meeting all our clients technology needs around the world has always been a driving force for the company, says Kevin Collins, president of Diversified. As the primary hub for all activity in the EMEA region, our London team epitomizes our DNA of not necessarily being the biggest, but the best.

Diversifieds expansive portfolio of technology solutions and services enables the company to uniquely serve as their clients trusted technology partner, capable of delivering all their global technology needs to scale and with uncompromised customer service. To learn more about the great work of the companys EMEA team, visit onediversified.com/emea.

About Diversified

Diversified is a leading global technology solutions provider delivering a comprehensive suite of solutions to help a diverse clientele achieve the highest performance levels, enhance their operations, increase productivity and drive ROI. Our mission is to enable a digital futureconnecting people, technology and experiences, where and when it matters most. Our solutions are experienced by millions every day. Removing the distance. Delivering a message. Powering business. Celebrating fandom. Even saving lives. Founded in 1993, were a global organization serving local needs with 2,000+ employees in 50+ locations worldwide. Learn more at onediversified.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.


Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 07:38:58|Editor: huaxia

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SAO PAULO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's Sao Paulo-based Butantan Institute, a state-run medical research facility, on Wednesday began to manufacture ButanVac, the first Brazilian vaccine against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), state governor Joao Doria announced.

"It will be the first vaccine manufactured entirely in Brazil, without the need to import raw materials," Doria said during a press conference at the institute, which is funded by the state government.

Production began on the first of an expected 18 million doses by mid-July, though Brazil's Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) has yet to authorize the vaccine.

The institute also makes and packages the CoronaVac vaccine developed by Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinovac Life Sciences. CoronaVac has been applied since Jan. 17 as part of Brazil's vaccination campaign against the coronavirus.

"In the first half of July, it will be ready for use as soon as Anvisa authorizes it. Production of ButanVac can reach 100 million or 150 million doses by the end of the year," said Doria.

Anvisa on Tuesday requested more documentation from the institute before authorizing the start of human trials of ButanVac.

"We hope for a sense of urgency from Anvisa," said Doria, whose state is the hardest hit by the pandemic.

Butantan, the main manufacturer of influenza vaccines in the Southern Hemisphere and the leading supplier of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, represents 85 percent of the international consortium involved in researching the new vaccine.

The Sao Paulo government said 1,800 volunteers will take part in the first and second phases of human trials, once authorized. Enditem
LONDON (AP)  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge marked their 10th wedding anniversary Thursday by releasing photographs and a video offering an image of domestic bliss  a contrast to the tensions that have gripped Britain's royal family in recent weeks.

Two photographs show Prince William, second-in-line to the throne, and the former Kate Middleton in complementary shades of blue. A video released later showed the family at play, replete with their smiling children walking near the sea.

William married his former university flatmate on April 29, 2011, at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony televised globally. They have three children: Prince George, 7, Princess Charlotte, 5, and Prince Louis, 3. The traditional gift for a 10th wedding anniversary is tin, a symbol of durability.

Thank you to everyone for the kind messages on our wedding anniversary,'' the couple said on their Twitter feed. We are enormously grateful for the 10 years of support we have received in our lives as a family.''

The celebration comes 12 days after the funeral of Prince Philip, William's grandfather, who died April 9 at the age of 99.

Last month, the family was rocked by an interview in which Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, alleged that palace staff had been insensitive toward Meghan and a member of the royal family had made racist comments about the couple's first child. Harry, William's younger brother, stepped away from royal duties last year and moved to California with his wife and son.
Cybersecurity

Mayorkas: DHS running ransomware task force, White House plan coming

Alejandro Mayorkas as deputy DHS secretary in 2016. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Lora Ratliff)

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday said his agency has formed a task force to combat ransomware and that the White House is actively developing its own plan to confront the issue.

The DHS task force includes representatives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Secret Service, Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit, according to Mayorkas. The new task force is part of the secretary's planned "60-day sprint" on ransomware, which he announced in March would be the first in a series of new efforts.

"Beyond CISAthe entire federal government is stepping up to face this challenge," Mayorkas said during the event hosted by the Institute for Security and Technology. "The White House is developing a plan dedicated to tackling this problem."

Mayorkas also confirmed recent press reports stating the Justice Department last week established its own task force focused on ransomware.

The secretary's remarks coincided with the release of a new report by IST featuring recommendations for the Biden administration on combatting ransomware. The group behind the report include dozens of industry experts from companies such as Microsoft, McAfee and FireEye as well as various former government officials.

The report, echoing that of other industry threat assessments published this year, notes an uptick in ransomware attacks coincided with the spread of the coronavirus.

Ransomware "has disproportionately impacted the healthcare industry during the COVID pandemic, and has shut down schools, hospitals, police stations, city governments, and U.S. military facilities.

Some of the report's recommendations include establishing a U.S. government "Joint Ransomware Task Force," forming an international coalition focused on ransomware, sanctioning countries that fail to take action against threat actors and designating ransomware a national security threat.

Mayorkas earlier this month issued a joint statement with Attorney General Merrick Garland and counterparts in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada on the threat ransomware poses.

"Ransomware is a growing cyber threat which compromises the safety of our citizens, the security of the online environment, and the prosperity of our economies. It can be used with criminal intent, but is also a threat to national security," the April 7 statement said.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has seen cyber threat actors exploiting this new environment as a means of furthering malicious activity," the statement continued.
[April 29, 2021] NII Holdings Issues Its 2020 Audited Financial Statements And Provides Update On Dissolution Matters

RESTON, Va., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NII Holdings, Inc. ("NII" or the "Company") today issued its 2020 audited financial statements and provided an update on its dissolution. 2020 Audited Financial Statements

The audited financial statements are available on NII's website at www.nii.com. NII reported net assets in liquidation as of December 31, 2020 of $276.3 million ($2.64 per share), an increase of $0.9 million as compared to net assets in liquidation as of December 31, 2019 of $275.4 million. Update on Dissolution Matters

As previously announced, on January 13, 2020, NII filed a certificate of dissolution with the Secretary of State of the State of Delaware. Further, on October 8, 2020, the Company filed a Verified Petition for Dissolution in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (the "Delaware Court"). In addition, on January 15, 2021, the Company filed a Motion for a Distribution to Stockholders and for Approval of Reserves (the "Motion") requesting that the Delaware Court enter an order granting NII's request to make an initial distribution of $161.0 million (approximately $1.54 per share) to the Company's stockholders and to establish a reserve of $125.7 million for the Company's remaining known claimants and potential future unknown claimants. On March 22, 2021, the Delaware Court entered an Order Approving Notice and Certain Reserve Amounts and Barring Certain Claims (the "Order"). The Order approved the reserves set forth in the Motion, with the exception of the proposed $3 million reserve for potential unknown claims (the "Unknown Claims Reserve"). On March 16, 2021, the Delaware Court entered a separate order appointing a guardian ad litem (the "Guardian") to represent the interests of potential unknown future claimants. The Guardian has been charged with investigating the nature and extent of possible unknown claims, evaluating the sufficiency of the Unknown Claims Reserve, and evaluating whether a period of time longer than five years after the date of dissolution should be used for evaluating potential unknown claims. If the Guardian determines that the Unknown Claims Reserve is adequate, then the Guardian will submit a recommendation to the Delaware Court to that effect. If the Guardian, determines that the Unknown Claims Reserve is inadequate, then the Guardian may negotiate with the Company regarding an adequate Unknown Claims Reserve. If the Guardian and the Company cannot reach agreement, then the Guardian will litigate the question of an Unknown Claims Reserve on behalf of the potential unknown claimants.



While there can be no assurances with respect to the timing or outcome of the work conducted by the Guardian, all other reserves proposed in the Motion were approved by the Delaware Court in the Order, and therefore the Company expects to make an initial distribution once the Guardian's work is concluded and approved by the Delaware Court. Furthermore, the Delaware Court may require NII to withhold an aggregate amount of security in excess of the $3 million amount originally proposed by NII for the Unknown Claims Reserve. In addition, NII cannot predict the impact, if any, of the Covid-19 pandemic on the timing of proceedings in the Delaware Court, and it is possible that delays could result. There also can be no assurance as to the timing or amount of any additional distributions that NII may make as part of the dissolution process.

Based on currently available information, NII currently estimates that the total amount of distributions will be between $2.14 and $2.65 per share. The low end of the range includes a reserve of $5.0 million for additional tax, accounting and legal costs, as well as potential personnel costs that may need to be incurred in connection with the dissolution process, and the $3.0 million Unknown Claims Reserve, which constitutes the Unknown Claims Reserve proposed by NII in the Motion, but remains subject to review by the Guardian and approval by the Delaware Court. The ultimate amount distributable to stockholders will depend on factors outside of NII's control, including, among other things, the amount of cash recovered from escrow amounts related to the sale of NII's operations in Mexico and Brazil and the amount that the Delaware Court ultimately determines is reasonably likely to be sufficient for the Unknown Claims Reserve, and could vary from NII's current estimates. More information about these matters and the Company's financial condition can be found in the Company's 2020 audited financial statements. About NII Holdings, Inc. Visit NII's website at www.nii.com . NII Holdings, Inc.

1405 S Fern Street, #93001

Arlington, VA 22202

www.nii.com Investor and Media Relations:

Tim Mulieri

timothy.mulieri@nii.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nii-holdings-issues-its-2020-audited-financial-statements-and-provides-update-on-dissolution-matters-301280632.html SOURCE NII Holdings, Inc.

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U.S. health regulators pledged again Thursday to try to ban menthol cigarettes, this time under pressure from African American groups to remove the mint flavor popular among black smokers.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has attempted several times to get rid of menthol but faced pushback from Big Tobacco, members of Congress and competing political interests in both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Any menthol ban will take years to implement and will likely face legal challenges from tobacco companies.

Thursday's announcement is the result of a lawsuit filed by anti-smoking and medical groups last summer to force the FDA to finally make a decision on menthol, alleging that regulators had 'unreasonably delayed' responding to a 2013 petition seeking to ban the flavor.

The deadline for the agency's response was Thursday. The FDA met that deadline by vowing to ban menthol cigarettes, but isn't enacting any new regulations immediately, instead saying it will act within a year.

New regulations would also ban menthol and fruity flavors from low-cost, small cigars, which are increasingly popular with young people, especially Black teens.

'Banning menthol - the last allowable flavor - in cigarettes and banning all flavors in cigars will help save lives, particularly among those disproportionately affected by these deadly products,' said Acting FDA Commissioner Dr Janet Woodcock in a statement.

Health experts say that the menthol cigarette industry is to blame for high rates of smoking addiction and lung cancer among black Americans, but the ACLU and several other civil rights groups are concerned that criminalizing menthols will only lead to an increase in policing and incarceration of black people.

The FDA promised to enact a ban on menthol cigarettes (pictured)within the next year, but a block on the flavored products would likely take years to actually go into effect

President Joe Biden ultimately made the decision about moving ahead with the menthol ban, proponents told CBS News (file)

Between 1980 and 2018, menthol cigarettes alone led to 378,000 premature deaths in the U.S., a University of Michigan study published earlier this year estimates.

And about 85 percent of black smokers prefer menthols, suggesting that a large share - if not a majority - of those deaths were among black Americans.

'Taken together, these policies will help save lives and improve the public health of our country as we confront the leading cause of preventable disease and death,' Mitch Zeller, the FDA's head of tobacco, said in a statement.

Menthol is the only cigarette flavor that was not banned under the 2009 law that gave the FDA authority over tobacco products, an exemption negotiated by industry lobbyists. The act did, though, instruct the agency to continue to weigh banning menthol.

The flavor's persistence has infuriated anti-smoking advocates, who point to research that menthols numbing effect masks the harshness of smoking, likely making it easier to start and harder to quit.

Biden's proposed ban on menthol cigarettes would HURT black communities because it would lead to more policing and prison sentences, ACLU and civil rights groups warn The American Civil Liberties Union and a number of other civil rights group warned that President Joe Biden's move to ban menthol cigarettes could actually harm communities of color. 'A menthol cigarette ban would disproportionately impact communities of color, result in criminalization of the market, and exacerbate mass incarceration,' a letter sent this week to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra warned. It was signed by the ACLU, the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy and 24 other related groups. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration was expected to announce the proposal to ban menthol cigarettes soon, which would set off a process with the Food and Drug Administration that could take years, but would be applauded by antismoking and other civil rights groups. Antismoking groups, along with some civl rights allies, have pressured the federal government to make the move because they say the tobacco industry has aggressively targeted black communities when pushing the mint flavored smokes. But the ACLU, drug legalization and other groups have countered that the move had the potential to create 'large underground, illegal markets.' 'In addition, underground cigarette sales would be a massive law enforcement problem for states, counties, and cities, since all states treat unlicensed sale of tobacco products as a crime  usually as a felony punishable by imprisonment,' the letter said. 'In the end, tobacco policy will no longer be the responsibility of regulators regulating, but police policing.' 'Our experience with alcohol, opioid, and cannabis prohibition teaches us that that is a policy disaster waiting to happen, with Black and other communities of color bearing the brunt,' the letter continued. The letter asked HHS to better fund youth education, smoking cessation programs and healthcare programs for communities of color instead. Advertisement

The mint-flavored cigarettes are overwhelmingly used by young people and minorities, particularly Black smokers, 85% of whom smoke menthols. That compares to about a third of white smokers.

'The science is there, the data is there, so why are these products still on the market?' said Carol McGruder of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council.

Her group sued along with Action on Smoking and Health, the American Medical Association and the National Medical Association, which represents Black physicians.

For decades, companies focused menthol marketing and promotions on Black communities, including sponsoring music festivals and neighborhood events.

Company documents released via 1990s litigation also show companies viewed menthol cigarettes as good 'starter' products because they were more palatable for teenagers .

'There was a specific, intentional focus on creating the next generation of smokers by making menthol cigarettes available in those communities,' said Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics group on minority health and equity.

In the late 1990s, new restrictions banned cigarette advertising from billboards, public transit and most event sponsorships.

Companies shifted more promotions to retail locations like gas stations and convenience stores, which researchers have shown are heavily concentrated in Black neighborhoods

About a third of all cigarettes sold in the U.S. are menthol and its elimination would be a huge blow to tobacco companies, including Altria and Reynolds American, maker of the leading menthol brands, Newport and Kool. With the slow decline of smoking, tobacco companies have been diversifying into alternative products, including electronic cigarettes and tobacco pouches. But those ventures still account for a tiny slice of industry sales.

A spokeswoman for Reynolds American said the company would submit evidence countering FDAs proposal.

'Published science does not support regulating menthol cigarettes differently from non-menthol,' she said in a statement.

An Altria spokesman said in a statement that 'criminalizing menthol' would have 'serious unintended consequences.'

Smoking can cause cancer, strokes and heart attacks and is blamed for 480,000 deaths each year in the U.S. About 14% of Americans smoke cigarettes, with rates roughly even between white and Black populations. But Black smokers are less likely to successfully quit, a trend that the U.S. Surgeon General and others have attributed to menthol cigarettes.

Menthol occurs naturally in mint plants. Known for its cooling effect, the chemical is used in cough drops and other medicines. Cigarette makers began adding the chemical in the 1920s after realizing it reduced the throat hit of cigarettes.

Past government efforts targeting menthol have faced opposition from lawmakers from traditional tobacco states like North Carolina, but also some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, many who have received campaign contributions from cigarette makers.

Menthol cigarettes are estimated to be responsible for about 10 million more smokers than there would be if there were no flavored options, as well as 278,000 premature deaths between 1980 and 2018 (file)

Some caucus members warned that banning menthol would create an illegal market for the products, subjecting Black communities to increased law enforcement.

But calls for action have been growing and last year the House of Representatives voted to ban the flavor with support from the majority of Black members. The bill stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate after Trump made clear he opposed the measure.

The FDA's attempts to get rid of menthol have repeatedly been delayed or derailed by forces inside and outside government.

In 2011, an outside panel of FDA advisers recommended banning menthol after concluding that it increases smoking among young people and minorities and makes it harder for them to quit. But cigarette makers challenged the findings in court, claiming some panel members had conflicts of interest they hadn't disclosed.

In 2013, the FDA conducted its own internal study and reached similar conclusions, but the Obama administration did not move ahead with a ban.

Under the Trump administration, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb tried to again restart the process but it was never greenlighted by the White House.

Massachusetts and California have passed laws banning menthol. But Californias ban was suspended in January after a legal challenge backed by tobacco companies; the issue is on the ballot next year.
Shares of Tata Communications declined nearly 3 per cent in early trade after the company reported March Quarter earnings.

At 11:17 hours, Tata Communications was quoting at Rs 1122.30, down 2.34 percent on the BSE. On a year-to-date (YTD) basis, the stock is down around 2 per cent. The stock has given 26 per cent returns over the last six months and risen 177.45 per cent over the last 12 months. The Tata Group firm posted a consolidated net profit of about Rs 299 crore for the quarter ended March 2021 against a loss of Rs 275 crore in the same quarter a year ago.

Consolidated revenue stood at Rs 4,073 crore, down 7.4 per cent year-on-year (YoY). The company informed that the decline is largely due to degrowth in Voice business and Data business.

"Execution on financial fitness is yielding good results and the shifts from products to platforms, deeper customer engagements are a work in progress and we anticipate continued progress on these strategic levers to achieve our goals. Our teams have gone the extra mile in delivering benchmark level Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a difficult year and are committed on execution to deliver on our strategy," said A.S Lakshminarayanan, MD and CEO, Tata Communications.

Meanwhile, ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala's wife Rekha Jhunjhunwala has also sold 2.5 lakh equity shares in Tata Communications in the quarter ended March 2021. As per the shareholding pattern, Rekha Rakesh Jhunjhunwala held 29,50,687 equity shares or 1.04 per cent stake in the company at the end of the March quarter. She held 32,00,687 equity shares or 1.12 per cent stake in the company at the end of the December quarter of FY21.

Also read: Stocks in news: Reliance Industries, ONGC, Tata Communications, Bajaj Auto and more

Also read: RIL share rises over 2% amid report of revival of stake sale talks with Saudi Aramco
Florida Governor-elect Ron DeSantis (R) sits next to President Donald Trump during a meeting with Governor elects in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Dec. 13, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Trump Floats 2024 Presidential Run Again, Says DeSantis Could Be Potential Running Mate

Former President Donald Trump said hes floating a 2024 run and could consider Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential running mate.

I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocketship, the former president told Fox Business on April 29. Hes done a great job as governor. Im saying what I read and what you read, they love that ticket. Certainly, Ron would be considered. Hes a great guy.

If Trump doesnt run, DeSantis has been considered a potential GOP frontrunner for 2024. The Florida governor has been praised by numerous Republicans for his move to lift all COVID-19-related restrictions in his state in September, making Florida one of the most open states.

I ran twice, and the second time, I got 12 million more votes than the first time, Trump said in the interview.

The former commander-in-chief, however, didnt make a definitive prediction in the interview about running again. If he makes an announcement too early, it has a big impact on fundraising and many other things.

Its a little bit of a crazy, complex thing, Trump said. The whole fundraising contribution stuff is ridiculous; the laws are so archaic and stupid, frankly.

Separately, Trump encouraged Republicans to have courage and keep fighting against the Democrats agenda.

Its going to happen, he said. Were going to turn it around. Theyve gone too far. They cant get away with this. We cant allow them to get away with this. Theyre destroying our country. Have courage. Its going to happen. Im with you.

It came after President Joe Bidens first speech to Congress on April 28, where he pushed a vision of more government investment funded by the wealthy. He made a plea to raise taxes on corporations and high-earning Americans to pay for his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan.

Its time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to pay their fair share  just pay their fair share, Biden said.

He argued that his proposals for families and infrastructure, which together total about $4 trillion, represent a once-in-a-generation investment vital to Americas future.

Some Republicans have said that the proposals are part of a socialist agenda designed to increase government control over Americans lives.

The President has adopted the radical lefts agenda to control every aspect of your life, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wrote on Twitter in response. Republicans will work with anyone to build America up, but we cant tax and spend our way out of our problems. We will not stand by as he takes us down the path of socialism.

DeSantiss office didnt respond to a request for comment by press time.

Reuters contributed to this report.
MARIETTA, Ga., April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Wellstar Health System, one of the largest and most integrated healthcare systems in Georgia, today announced several partnerships and initiatives to respond to long-standing, critical health inequities and social disparities affecting people and communities across the state.

The system continues to build on its legacy and commitment to serving communities by actively listening to best understand and respond to what consumers want, need, and expect from their healthcare provider.

"As a leader in healthcare, we must take action to meet the evolving needs of people and communities. Health equity connects to everything we do, and recognizing hardships, disparities, and inequities is just the first step," said Candice L. Saunders, president and CEO of Wellstar Health System. "Through strategic partnerships and programs, Wellstar is committed to supporting people and communities to make a tangible and lasting difference, enhancing the health and well-being of everyone we serve."

Wellstar Center for Health Equity addresses community needs at a grassroots level

The Wellstar Center for Health Equity (WCHE)  an extension of Wellstar's long history of community engagement and allyship to provide people-centric care  was formed to drive lasting change at a grassroots level. The six areas of focus were informed by Wellstar's triennial Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) of 2019: Primary Care, Behavioral Health, Food Insecurity, Suicide, Cancer, Women's Health.

Each of these strategic domains connects to Wellstar medical service lines to bring to bear the deep expertise and broad bench of resources needed to identify pertinent needs, relevant partnerships, and viable programs.

To create meaningful impact, Wellstar has forged strategic partnerships with government agencies, businesses, philanthropies, non-profit organizations, academia, and citizens. Examples of how WCHE has activated resources in the community include:

Walk-up, pop-up family COVID-19 testing : With the support of community partners, Wellstar conducts free walk-up, pop-up family testing at churches and school lunch pick-up sites and distributes safety kits in English and Spanish. To-date, WCHE has orchestrated 29 pop-up testing sites, administered over 3,000 COVID tests, and distributed more than 51,000 wellness kits with culturally and linguistically safety information.

Reaching faith-based congregants with vital information and vaccines : WCHE is hosting a series of community town halls to debunk myths about COVID-19 and vaccines in partnership with the Wellstar Congregational Health Network. In April, WCHE hosted a Hispanic town hall to address community questions and launched a series of equity-centric and language-proficient vaccination clinics for congregants at faith-based organizations.

Providing nutritious meals to food-insecure communities : In partnership with Goodr, an organization that provides food resources for people in need, and funded in part by Wellstar Foundation donations, the WCHE "Mobile Market" hosts "pop-up" farmers' markets in seven communities, feeding over 700 families monthly.

Enabling technology-driven community health transformation : WCHE launched a year-long initiative to enhance access to medical care via technology with leading community partners. Supported by contributions to the Wellstar Foundation, the "Community Health Transformation" program enables the following community organizations to reach, engage, and support at-risk individuals with measurable results: Bethesda Community Clinic; Empowerment Resource Center; Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia; Good Samaritan Health Center of Cobb; and MUST Ministries.

Anchoring vulnerable patients with vital healthcare resources : When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 80 percent of COVID-19 patients in eight Georgia areas were Black people, WCHE developed "Anchoring Vulnerable Patients," a project in Clayton County to assess and address the medical and social needs of Black patients with co-morbidities that put them at risk for contracting COVID-19.

Wellstar endorses Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion pledges

Wellstar joined the Metro Atlanta Chamber (MAC) ATL Action for Racial Equity, a multi-year action plan designed to address the effects of systemic racism. Over 150 metro Atlanta-based companies have joined the initiative, including Atlanta Hawks, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, Newell Brands, Prime Revenue, and UPS, to "leverage the size, scale, and expertise of the region's business community to advance racial equity." Saunders has also endorsed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge, aimed to rally the business community to advance diversity and inclusion at work. The pledge outlines actions the signatory CEOs will take to cultivate a trusting environment where employees feel comfortable and empowered.

Wellstar Foundation launches Innovation Series

Wellstar Foundation has launched a series of virtual roundtable discussions with local leaders in the philanthropy and corporate communities to discuss and address pertinent community health and well-being issues. The series aims to facilitate conversation and collaboration that will lead to meaningful action and a pathway to transforming healthcare in Georgia. The first Innovation Series event, "Bridging the Gap: A Collaborative Approach to Health Equity," took place on March 29 featuring experts from across Wellstar, with a keynote presentation from Dr. Gail C. Christopher, executive director of National Collaborative for Health Equity. More than 100 participants attended the inaugural event and engaged in discussion about how to enhance health equity. Future topics include digital health innovation, behavioral health and wellness, women's health and pediatrics, and workforce planning.

ABOUT WELLSTAR HEALTH SYSTEM

At Wellstar, people are at the center of everything we do. By listening actively to what people want, need and expect from their healthcare, Wellstar is able to provide "More than Healthcare. PeopleCare."  at every age and stage. Nationally ranked and locally recognized for our personal, high-quality care, inclusive culture, and exceptional doctors and team members, Wellstar provides access to compassionate, high-quality care through our: 11 hospitals; 300+ medical office locations; 9 cancer centers; 74 rehabilitation centers; 3 hospice facilities; 1 retirement village; 34 imaging centers; 17 urgent care locations; and 5 health parks. As one of the largest and most integrated healthcare systems in Georgia, Wellstar is growing our services, footprint, capabilities, and ability to meet evolving patient needs. Our passion for people extends into the communities we serve. As a not-for-profit health system, we thoughtfully reinvest annually in prevention and wellness programs, as well as charity care for eligible patients. Our Wellstar Foundation also supports our mission to enhance the health and well-being of every person we serve with funding for equipment, services, and programs that provide more than healthcare. To learn more about how Wellstar is always listening, learning, and tailoring care to meet patients' individual needs, visit Wellstar.org.

CONTACT: Erin Walsh, 770-568-7837, [email protected]

SOURCE Wellstar

Related Links

https://www.wellstar.org


BAY CITY, MI  A former Bay City resident is charged with sexually assaulting an underage girl on New Years Day.

Alejandro C. Cervantes, 26, is charged with two counts of third- and one count of second-degree criminal sexual conduct. Third-degree involves penetration while second-degree is limited to touching. Both are punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

According to an affidavit contained in court files, a girl between the ages of 13 and 15 told investigators that she was at Cervantes residence on Bay Citys East Side on Jan. 1, 2020. While there, Cervantes and the girl exchanged oral sex, the affidavit states.

In Michigan, the age of consent for sexual activity is 16.

The matter was investigated by the Michigan State Police. They have declined to say how Cervantes had access to the girl or how the matter was reported to them.

Authorities issued a warrant for Cervantes on Feb. 23 of this year.

Cervantes was arraigned on the charges on April 9, at which time Bay County District Judge Timothy J. Kelly set bond at $50,000 cash-surety.

Cervantes on the afternoon of Thursday, April 29, appeared before Bay County District Judge Mark E. Janer via Zoom from the Bay County for a scheduled preliminary examination. Defense attorney Aaron A. Hetherington said Cervantes wished to waive his right to the hearing and have his case bound over to Circuit Court, where his options will be to face trial or enter a plea deal.

Janer granted the quest and bound Cervantes over to the higher court. Had the preliminary examination gone forward, the prosecution would have had to present probable cause that a crime occurred and that Cervantes perpetrated it.

Hetherington also put forth a motion for Cervantes bond to be reduced. He said Cervantes lives in Ypsilanti, is employed there, and has a college education.

He has never been charged with any criminal acts before, Hetherington said. We expect to reach a resolution in this matter with the prosecution. Mr. Cervantes is not a risk to himself or society at large. Even as to the facts that are alleged here, it is not something where there was a violent act committed.

He added that Cervantes family ties are to Bay City and that he was visiting relatives when the alleged sexual assaults occurred.

Bay County Assistant Prosecutor Bernard J. Coppolino argued against the bond reduction, pointing out that a conviction of third-degree criminal sexual conduct precludes a probationary sentence and requires some form of incarceration.

Janer said there was no indication his colleague Judge Kelly had abused his discretion in setting Cervantes bond at $50,000 and opted to keep it set at that.

Cervantes next court date is pending.

Read more:

Michigan man accused of assaulting, impregnating underage girl

Detroit-area man charged in double-shooting of CMU football players

Dog trapped on Saginaw County island saved after officials alerted by good Samaritan
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has tasked the inter-governmental commission to prepare new initiatives for increasing the trade turnover and mutual investments with Armenia.

During the meeting with Armenias caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on April 29, PM Mishustin said the coronavirus pandemic has affected the dynamics of the bilateral trade as last year the joint trade turnover declined by nearly 10%, comprising about 2,3 billion dollars, reports TASS.

Of course, we are not satisfied with this situation. I propose to task our inter-governmental commission to prepare new initiatives for the increase of trade turnover with Armenia, the growth of mutual investments, the Russian PM said, conveying the greetings of President Vladimir Putin to Pashinyan. First of all I want to convey the warm greetings and best wishes of Russian President Vladimir Putin to you, he said.

PM Mishustin said Moscow assesses as high the brotherly relations with Yerevan which are of allied and strategic nature. He said the statements adopted by the Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders following the stop of the military operations in Nagorno Karabakh, have opened great opportunities for joint work.

Its first of all the unblocking of all economic and transportation ties, the creation of new infrastructure routes. This in turn will create conditions for the sustainable development of the South Caucasian region, the Russian PM said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
TSX.V: DME

U.S. OTC: DMEHF

Frankfurt: QM01

VANCOUVER, BC, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - DESERT MOUNTAIN ENERGY CORP. (the "Company") (TSXV: DME) (U.S. OTC: DMEHF) (Frankfurt: QM01) From the President of the Company.

The Company is pleased to announce that the Arizona Oil & Gas Conservation Commission has granted Desert Mountain Energy Corp. the permit to drill another exploratory helium well in NE Arizona. This well is located approximately 30 miles west of the first two successful wildcat helium wells the company drilled then completed last year. These wells are all situated on a known anticlinal feature which the company ran proprietary geophysical studies pertinent to locating specific trapping mechanisms required to have commercial quantities of helium.

The Company has contacted the drilling contractor and is now in queue for the drill rig in addition to the open hole logging and cementing companies. The company anticipates having the drilling company on site in seven to ten days. The Company anticipates drilling three new wells prior to undertaking completion procedures.

The Company will be adding additional staff during this time as we begin our planned work on these and other wells and their possible associated production.

About Desert Mountain Energy

Desert Mountain Energy Corp. is a publicly traded exploration and resource company focused on the discovery and development of rare earth gas fields in the US. The Company is primarily looking for elements deemed critical to the green energy and high technology industries.

We seek safe harbor

" Robert Rohlfing"

Robert Rohlfing

Chairman & CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in polices of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The statements made in this press release may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual events or results may differ from the Company's expectations.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forwardlooking statements and information herein include but are not limited to statements regarding the Company's anticipated performance in the future the planned exploration activities, receipt of positive results from drilling, the completion of further drilling and exploration work, and the timing and results of various activities.

Forward-looking statements or information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company and its operations to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such factors include, among others, changes in national and local governments, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments in Canada and the United States; financial risks due to helium prices, operating or technical difficulties in exploration and development activities; risks and hazards and the speculative nature of resource exploration and related development; risks in obtaining necessary licenses and permits, and challenges to the Company's title to properties.

Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable, including but not limited to the continued operation of the Company's exploration operations, no material adverse change in the market price of commodities, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or information, there may be other factors that cause results to be materially different from those anticipated, described, estimated, assessed or intended. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. The Company does not intend to, and does not assume any obligation to update such forward-looking statements or information, other than as required by applicable law.

SOURCE Desert Mountain Energy Corp.

Related Links

https://desertmountainenergy.com/


DuPont Tedlar PVF film, celebrating 60 years of superior protection We are proud of the role Tedlar has played during the past 60 years in protecting assets for the long-term, said Eric Wang, global business director for DuPont Tedlar.

DuPont (NYSE:DD) today announced the 60th anniversary of DuPont Tedlar, a unique brand of polyvinyl fluoride (PVF) film that has become the golden standard, synonymous with superior protection, durability and reliability in a wide variety of industries and applications, from photovoltaics and aerospace to transportation, building and construction, and wallcoverings.

We are proud of the role Tedlar has played during the past 60 years in protecting assets for the long-term, said Eric Wang, global business director for DuPont Tedlar. From providing electrical and weather protection to hundreds of millions of solar panels across the globe, enabling aircraft cabin interiors to remain spotlessly clean flight after flight, to cladding iconic buildings around the world such as the Sheraton Hotel in Paris, Logan International Airport in Boston and protecting the myriad skylights over Wembley Stadium in London, Tedlar film has demonstrated its superior protection in an envious list of applications for decades. He added: But rather than focusing on the past, we are resolutely turned towards the future, and the numerous new possibilities Tedlar film has to offer, such as in healthcare interiors for its ability to withstand cleaning with harsh chemicals or in bifacial photovoltaics where its lightweight and durable properties make it ideal for installing larger-size, higher power-producing panels.

Tedlar film provides superior protection against the elements, high-traffic, and touch surfaces; it is chemically-inert, resistant to cleaning with harsh chemicals, to dirt, corrosion, the effects of prolonged exposure to UV radiation and does not support the growth of mold, mildew and other fungi. Tedlar is specified in almost all commercial aircraft interiors, exceeding stringent U.S. Federal Aviation Administration requirements for toxicity and flammability; it is also used in photovoltaics where Tedlar film for backsheets has been demonstrated in the field to protect solar modules for over 35 years.

The history of Tedlar began in 1901 when vinyl fluoride was first synthesized by Belgian chemist Frederic Swarts. Four decades later, in 1942, polyvinyl fluoride was invented by DuPont, with the company being granted a US patent for the process of polymerization in 1947. In 1961, DuPont receives the original registered trademark for Tedlar PVF film and officially introduces it for commercial use. Two years later, in 1963, Boeing first uses Tedlar film for its aircraft interiors. By the early 70s, Japan had begun using Tedlar film for highway noise barriers. In 1986, after an eleven-year study sponsored by the US Department of Energy, NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) qualifies Tedlar film for backsheets, due to its long-term performance attributes. NASAs Phoenix Mars Lander uses Tedlar PVF film as part of its bio barrier in 2007, and in 2012, the largest-solar powered boat with Tedlar-protected photovoltaic panels sails around the world.

Today DuPont Tedlar PVF film is trusted around the globe as the high-performance asset protection standard. DuPont continues to develop new Tedlar-based applications to meet evolving marketplace needs, including innovative films for use in flexible, building-integrated solar power, greenhouses, vehicle-integrated photovoltaics, as well as backsheet repair solutions for damaged solar panels in the field.

To find out more about some of the most impactful milestones that have helped build a legacy of tested, trusted and proven performance, visit: https://www.dupont.com/brands/tedlar-60-years-superior-protection.html.

About DuPont Tedlar

DuPont Tedlar represents a portfolio of product solutions with 60 years of service to the solar, aerospace, building & construction and many other markets. Our products deliver proven power and lasting value for the fast-growing photovoltaics sector, including DuPont Tedlar films as well as DuPont Fortasun solar silicones. DuPont Tedlar films provide superior surface protection for a variety of materials and industries, including construction, signage & graphics, transportation, healthcare and wallcoverings. We are committed to continuing to innovate through time-tested science and engineering to solve todays challenges. To learn more about the Tedlar business, please visit http://www.photovoltaics.dupont.com and http://www.tedlar.com.

About DuPont

DuPont (NYSE: DD) is a global innovation leader with technology-based materials, ingredients 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, health and wellness, food 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.

# # #

DuPont, the DuPont Oval Logo, and all trademarks and service marks denoted with , SM or  are owned by affiliates of DuPont de Nemours, Inc. unless otherwise noted.

4/29/21

High resolution images:

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Proposed caption: DuPont Tedlar PVF film, celebrating 60 years of superior protection

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/aircraft-interiors-1963.jpg

Proposed caption: Boeing first introduces DuPont Tedlar film for aircraft interiors, 1963

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/phoenix-mars-lander-2008.jpg

Proposed caption: DuPont Tedlar film used as a biobarrier in Phoenix Mars Lander, 2008

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/planetsolar-2012.jpg

Proposed caption: PlanetSolar, equipped with DuPont Tedlar-protected solar panels sails around the world, 2012

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/clear-tedlar-2019.jpg

Proposed caption: DuPont Clear Tedlar film innovation for photovoltaics, 2019

Low resolution images:

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https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/aircraft-interiors-1963a.jpg

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/phoenix-mars-lander-2008a.jpg

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/planetsolar-2012a.jpg

https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-pvf-films/public/images/articles/clear-tedlar-2019a.jpg
[April 29, 2021] New Season of Topcon Talks Ag Podcast Launches

Topcon Agriculture has launched the fourth season of the Topcon Talks Agriculture podcast series. The previous three seasons are available for streaming or download and have spanned a wide variety of topics in more than 20 episodes. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005845/en/ Topcon Agriculture has launched the fourth season of the Topcon Talks Agriculture podcast series. (Photo: Business Wire) Brian Sorbe, vice president and general manager, Americas, for Topcon Agriculture, said, "We've been excited to host discussions that we believe matter to farmers and that are both informative and entertaining. We wanted to have a little something for everyone from technical soil management discussions to a light-hearted 'Rapid Fire Interview' episode with Greg Peterson of the Peterson Brothers Farm, creators of music parody videos. "Podcasts are mobile-friendly ways to listen from the tractor cab or wherever people may want to tune in. This program, which we first kicked off mid-2020, is one that we will be offering for the long-haul," Sorbe said. Curt Blades, senior vice president of Agriculture Services and Forestry with the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), participated as the special guest in the "Sustainability with Precision Agriculture" episode. Blades spoke to the recent AEM study looking at the environmental benefits of precision agriculture. "There is a lot of research out there about the economic benefits of precision agriculture, most of it on an individual farmer level," Blades said. That data had been used to help speed technology adoption, but what had not been done in a meaningful way until the study was conducted was on "societal benefits and then aggregating it in a way that makes a difference to lawmakers," he said. Rob Sharkey, a farmer from Illinois and host of the multi-media program Shark Farmer, was a guest in season two discussing his experiences with establishig a wind farm. Lesley Kelly of High Heels and Canola Fields addressed the importance of mental health for the farmer in season three. The new season's first episode is "Connectivity is Required," with guest Julie Bushell, president of Paige Wireless, discussing the critical need of rural connectivity for precision agriculture.



Listeners can subscribe to the Topcon Talks Agriculture series through their preferred podcast streaming app. Additionally, the podcasts are available at topconpositioning.com/na/podcasts-ag. All Topcon podcasts, including those for the construction industry, are available at topconpositioning.com/podcasts. About Topcon Positioning Group

Topcon Positioning Group, always one step ahead in technology and customer benefits, is an industry leading designer, manufacturer and distributor of precision measurement and workflow solutions for the global construction, geospatial and agriculture markets. Topcon Positioning Group, including Topcon Agriculture, is headquartered in Livermore, California, U.S. (topconpositioning.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). Its European head office is in Capelle a/d IJssel, the Netherlands. Topcon Corporation (topcon.com), founded in 1932, is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (7732). Topcon Agriculture: (topconagriculture.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429005845/en/

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A flight in Australia was so delayed that, by the time it arrived, travel restrictions had changed triggering mandatory quarantine for all passengers onboard.

Virgin Australia flight VA469 was flying from Perth to Brisbane on 23 April when it fell foul of the rule change.

Australian states have their own separate guidelines, and Western Australia announced a three-day lockdown for the Perth and Peel region after a suspected outbreak of coronavirus.

In response, Queensland, the home state of Brisbane, declared that arrivals from the region would have to quarantine for 14 days.

Flight VA469 should not have been affected; the quarantine came into play at midnight, hours after the plane was due to land.

However, a mechanical issue in Perth meant the aircraft departed five hours late, missing the deadline and arriving into Brisbane at around 1am on 24 April.

Passengers were told they would need to spend the next two weeks stuck in a quarantine hotel.

However, the Queensland government said it would cover the cost of quarantine for the VA469 passengers.

We know prevention measures can be inconvenient, but they are necessary to protect Queenslanders, Dr Jeannette Young, Queenslands chief health officer, told local press.

In the end, the passengers were only required to quarantine for three days, after the Perth Covid outbreak was contained to three people, enabling Queensland to lift its self-isolation requirements early.

Travellers were allowed to leave after testing negative for coronavirus.

Had Virgin been formally notified of this change prior to its departure we would have delayed the departure of the aircraft and given passengers the option to stay in Perth, Virgin Australia told CNN.

This would have been in the passengers' and Virgin Australia's interests, and is what we have done in the past with border changes.
In just a moment the current Commander-In-Chief will take the stage in order to address colleagues and constituents across the nation.



Even if only out of morbid curiosity, this one is worth watching for denizens of the discourse.



It's likely that Prez Biden won't go off script given that the Prez often gets lost in mid-sentence . . . Which also happens to this humble blogger.

Still, in terms of spending, tax hikes and foreign policy . . . Tonight's talk is important.



And so we leave it to TKC READERS to decipher and discuss.



Check the links . . .

AP: Biden to the nation: Were turning peril into possibility

The Hill: Pandemic casts shadow over Biden's first address to Congress

Fox News: Only 200 people will be attending Bidens first marquee event before Congress

CBS News: Republican Senator Tim Scott delivers response to President Biden's address

MarketWatch: President Biden made America great again in the eyes of the world - poll

MSNBC: Pelosi on Biden address - 'We are so pleased with what has happened so far in the first 100 days'

Politico: Prez Bidens tax hikes are about to collide with reality

Update . . .

Congressman Cleavers Statement on President Bidens Address to Congress

Graves Statement on President Bidens Address to Congress

Kansas, Missouri representatives react to President Biden's address to Congress

Fact check: Both Biden and Republican response got it wrong in 100-day speeches

You decide . . .
An Atlanta-area sheriff whos no stranger to controversy is accused of violating the civil rights of several people in his agencys custody by ordering that they be unnecessarily strapped into a restraint chair and left there for hours, according to a federal indictment.

The indictment against Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill was filed April 19 and was unsealed by a federal judge Monday. It says Hill regularly received training that said force may not be used as punishment and had approved a policy that says a restraint chair may be used with a violent or uncontrollable person to prevent injury or property damage if other techniques are ineffective.

The policy emphasizes that the restraint chair will never be authorized as a form of punishment.

But the indictment, which accuses Hill of violating the civil rights of four people in his custody, says the sheriff repeatedly ordered people restrained for hours even though they posed no threat and had complied with deputies and that the men suffered pain and bodily injury as a result.

Sheriff Hills abuse of power not only harmed the victims as I have described, but they erode the trust that the community places in law enforcement and the work that it does, Acting U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine told reporters.

In a statement released Tuesday, Hill called the prosecution a political motivated federal legal case.

I will continue to focus on the mission of fighting crime in Clayton County for continued success, Hill said in the statement on Nixle, a public messaging system.

Drew Findling, one of Hills lawyers, said they have been aware of the federal investigation and have done their own investigation and that those four allegations do not involve any physical injury at all. Findling said Hill is a beloved sheriff who is overwhelmingly supported by his community and called the case against him nonsensical.

Hill was released on bond Tuesday, Findling said.

Georgia law provides for the governor to convene a three-person panel to consider the suspension of elected officials who are indicted while in office. Cody Hall, a spokesman for Gov. Brian Kemp, said in an email that they have not received the indictment yet and declined to comment on what action the governor might take.

On Hills orders, deputies unnecessarily and unreasonably strapped four people into a restraining chair for hours, the indictment says.

One man was arrested without incident in February 2020 on charges stemming from an argument with two women at a grocery store three weeks earlier. Hill confronted the man during booking, asking what he had been doing in Clayton County, the indictment says.

Its a democracy, sir. Its the United States, the man replied, according to the indictment.

No, its not. Not in my county, Hill responded.

A 17-year-old boy accused of vandalizing his family home during an argument with his mother in April 2020 was arrested by a deputy without incident a short time later. The deputy spoke with Hill and texted him a photo of the teen in a police car.

How old is he? Hill texted, according to the indictment.

17, the deputy responded.

Chair, Hill responded.

A man arrested in April 2020 after a domestic disturbance with possible drug use pretended to pass out and then walked out of a hospital after refusing treatment and was uncooperative with arresting officers. He wasnt combative once he arrived at the jail.

Hill berated him and the teen while they were strapped into restraint chairs near each other, the indictment says.

Also in April 2020, Hill called a man whod had a dispute with one of his deputies over landscaping work hed done for the deputy in Butts County. When Hill asked why the man was harassing the deputy, the man used an expletive and said the deputy should pay his bill.

Unsure it was actually the sheriff, the man called back several times using FaceTime until Hill answered and removed a mask he was wearing. Hill then texted the man to warn him not to text or call anymore. The man responded by text, so this is Victor Hill correct. Hill again warned him by text not to call or text anymore.

Hill then instructed a deputy the next day to take out a warrant for harassing communications and then texted the man to tell him to turn himself in, the indictment says. Hill then sent a fugitive squad armed with handguns and AR-15 rifles to try to arrest the man on the misdemeanor charge, the indictment says.

The man hired a lawyer and turned himself in.

Hill has been controversial since he first became sheriff in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta.

He fired 27 deputies on his first day in office in 2005 and used a tank owned by the sheriffs office during drug raids as part of a tough-on-crime stance adopted in his first term.

He failed to win re-election in 2008, but voters returned him to office in 2012 despite the fact that he faced more than two dozen criminal charges in a corruption case. A jury later acquitted him of all 27 charges, clearing the way for him to continue as sheriff.

Hill pleaded no contest to a reckless conduct charge in August 2016 after shooting and injuring a woman in a Gwinnett County model home in May 2015. Hill and the woman said it was an accident that happened while they were practicing police tactics.

Civil rights groups sued him last year, claiming he was failing to protect people held in the Clayton County jail from the risk of contracting the coronavirus. That suit is still pending.

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

Topics Georgia
A cop has died after his head was stomped by a suspect who also attacked an elderly couple, sending both to hospital.

Cpl. Keith Heacook, 54, was declared 'clinically dead' on Wednesday at a Baltimore hospital, three days after he was allegedly attacked by Randon Wilkerson, 30.

The veteran cop had been responding to an early morning 911 call that Wilkerson had reportedly attacked his roommate at the Yorkshire Estates Community in Delmar, Delaware, on Sunday.

A second call came through moments later, to say Wilkerson had then crossed the street and attacked his neighbors; 73-year-old Steve Franklin and his wife Judy, 76.

Heacook went to investigate but soon stopped responding to dispatch. When backup arrived they found him unconscious. He was rushed to hospital but died days later.

It's not yet clear how Wilkerson allegedly got the better of the veteran cop.

Warning graphic image below

Cpl. Keith Heacook, 54, (right) was declared 'clinically dead' on Wednesday at a Baltimore hospital, three days after he was allegedly attacked by Randon Wilkerson, 30 (left)

Wilkerson allegedly attacked his neighbors; 73-year-old Steve Franklin (pictured in hospital after the attack) and his wife Judy, 76

Court documents first obtained by ABC 47 reveal that the incident began when Wilkerson allegedly fought his roommate around 3am, punching them in the face.

According to the 911 caller, Wilkerson was allegedly being disorderly, fighting with fellow residents, and destroying property.

Another 911 caller from across the street then reported that he and his wife had been assaulted by a male assailant who was no longer in the house.

Court documents allege Wilkerson entered the Franklins' home by knocking on the back door and claiming there was a disturbance at his own home.

He then allegedly punched Steve, a respected local fundraiser, and beat him to the ground with a glass angel figurine, telling him he was going to kill him.

Wilkerson then allegedly beat Judy with the glass figurine, leaving her with two broken eye sockets before walking out the front door.

Both victims were eventually taken to the hospital, and Judy was transferred to Shock Trauma in Baltimore. They are now both back at home and resting.

Pictured: Judy and Steve Franklin, who were allegedly assaulted by the same perpetrator

A GoFundMe account for the Franklins has raised over $20,000 on their behalf

Heacook responded to the first call, but when he arrived at the house, he was physically confronted by Wilkerson, according to a release from the Delaware State Police.

The court documents state that witnesses saw Wilkerson bringing his foot down on the head of the corporal repeatedly.

It's not clear whether or not Heacook was ambushed. It's also not clear if he was wearing a body camera at the time of the incident.

Dispatchers tried to reach Heacook after he responded to the scene, but did not hear back from the corporal.

Additional officers, including a Wicomico County Sheriffs Office Deputy and a Delaware State Trooper responded to the scene, when Heacook stopped responding to dispatch and found him unconscious.

Officers began performing First Aid on the officer until EMS arrived, at which point Heacook was taken to TidalHealth in Salisbury before being transferred to Shock Trauma in Baltimore with significant injuries to his head.

Police officers found Wilkerson on the rear of the property from the first 911 call and was taken into police custody without further incident.

Heacook was responding to a call about a fight in progress when the alleged attack happened

Pictured: Heacook with his wife, Susan. Keith was declared 'clinically dead' Wednesday

NBC Philadelphia reports that Heacook was declared 'clinically dead' at 12:48pm on Wednesday afternoon.

He remained on life support until his organs were donated.

'I need you to know that even with his sacrifice, he's still a hero for someone,' Chief Ivan Barkley said during a news conference on Wednesday.

'Our community, my department, his family  we all mourn,' Barkley added.

Heacook worked for the Delmar Police Department for 22 years and is survived by a wife and a son.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Delmar Police Department for further comment.

Wilkerson has been charged with attempted murder, two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of possession of a deadly weapon during a felony, burglary, third-degree assault, and terroristic threatening.

Due to Heacook's passing, Wilkerson's charges will likely be upgraded to murder. He is being held on $451,000 cash bond.

'He will be held accountable for his heinous crimes against Corporal Heacook, against the elderly couple he viciously attacked, and against Delmar and our entire state,' said Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings.

ABC 47 reports funeral arrangements for Heacook will be made in the coming days according to Barkley.

Before Keith Heacook died, Susan Heacook took to Facebook to criticize his police department

Aer the attack on Heacook, his wife Susan spoke out on Facebook, criticizing the Delmar Police Department.

Susan wrote: 'Could all of this been avoided? To the Delmar Police Department, I ask why? Why was my husband the only officer on duty? Why was he the only officer sent to respond to that call?'

She also asked about protocols and noted the current atmosphere around policing, wondering why more officers weren't sent with her husband.

'I beg you to reevaluate your standards of policing and consider reaching out to other agencies for back up if you don't have the manpower within your department,' Susan added.

Delmar Mayor Michael Houlihan responded to ABC 47 by noting the department's limited resources, further hampered by a recent retirement.

'There will be a time when we can have this discussion, where we can all sit down at the table with the mayors and department heads,' Houlihan said.

Meanwhile, a GoFundMe was created by the Humane Society of Wicimico County to raise money for the Franklins.

'Steve & Judy are a huge part of our HSWC family and Steve spends a few hours walking our dogs several days a week,' the fundraiser reads.

'Steve is truly a dedicated volunteer at our shelter, loves each dog as if they were is own and always shows up no matter the weather.'

The fundraiser has raised more than $20,000 for the couple in just three days.
Chief executive David Minchin said the company looks set to deliver the maiden drill programme on schedule in mid-May.

( ) has begun the mobilisation of a drill rig ahead of a pivotal programme at the Rukwa helium project in Tanzania.

The drill rig and equipment will be moved to a holding yard near Mbeya, about 100 kilometres from Rukwa. At the same time, a camp has been established at Rukwa ready to accommodate workers ahead of drilling, Helium One said.

Chief executive David Minchin said the company looks set to deliver the maiden drill programme on schedule in mid-May.

"We are delighted to report on continued progress at the Rukwa project with our on the ground team commencing the process of mobilising the drill rig and support equipment to site, Minchin said.

Mobilising a project of this size requires time and planning. Equipment from a wide range of sources will be collected at a forward holding yard near Mbeya before travelling in convoy to the first well location.

Also, Helium One today opens its shares to an American audience with a listing on the US OTC market, with the shares quoted on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker HLOGF.

"The company is seeking to encourage the significant interest that our Rukwa project has generated internationally with the commencement of trading of our shares on the OTCBQ.

The US has a significant interest in helium as a commodity and we hope that the visibility we gain will further broaden our shareholder base and increase shareholder demand in one of the major helium markets of the world."

On AIM, meanwhile, Helium One shares started Thursday rising just over a penny or 6.36% to change hands at 17.97p.
South L.A. Pastors Show Support for Congresswoman Maxine Waters

Los Angeles faith leaders stood up for U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters after a few conservatives, including elected officials and media, attacked her last week for advising to protesters to get confrontational if needed.

Pastor Shane B. Scott of Macedonia Baptist Church and Bishop Craig A. Worsham of Agape Church of L.A. joined colleagues in a press conference on April 27, to announce their unequivocal support for Waters as well as call for policy changes when it comes to issues impacting Black and Brown community members.

The criticisms against Waters came after she joined protestors in Minneapolis on the weekend before the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict. While marching peacefully in a show of support for justice for people of color, Waters was asked by protesters how to respond if Chauvin was found not guilty.

In her typical, frank manner, she replied, We got to stay on the street. And weve got to get more active, weve got to get more confrontational. To those who have followed Waters throughout her political career, her response was not surprising. After all, as she wrote in an April 22 op-ed in the L.A. Times, Confronting injustice has been my lifes work.

ADVERTISEMENT

Agreeing with her statement, Scott said, Congresswoman Waters has always been on the side of the marginalized; she has been for the people because she is of the people. Her legislative agenda has not been partisan, although as a proud progressive, and regardless of race, sexual orientation, criminal background, educational attainments, or socio-economics, Congresswoman Waters has sought to create a just and equitable society for everyone.

Other clergy were on hand at the conference to declare their backing of Waters. In addition to Worsham, notable supporters included Pastor John E. Cager III of Ward AME Church and president of the L.A. Council of Religious Leaders, Pastor Najuma Smith-Pollard of Word of Encouragement Community Church and program manager of the USC Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement, Pastor Welton Pleasant of Christ Second Baptist Church of Long Beach and vice president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California, Pastor Terry Brown of Liberty Baptist and Judson Baptist Churches, former corporate law enforcement officer Carl A. Brown, and former LAPD officer Stinson Brown.

Also, a statement was issued on behalf of the leaders, which stressed the strong relationship that the congresswoman has with not only the faith community, but also and people of all ethnicities. The ministers asserted, As Congresswoman Maxine Waters friend, we commend her fierce defense of liberty and justice for all  we, and other religious leaders, stand for her, as she continues to push for justice and accountability.

The pendulum in American history is swinging. This pendulum of the new majority of like-minded people who have come together, have set into motion meaningful change that will last for centuries to come in America if we continue to fight.

African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Caucasians, immigrants and refuges have a right to come together in order to form a more perfect union. We cannot continue to suffer at the hands of those who are sworn to serve and protect us.
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By Tom Plate





It is still true, even in this speed-freak era of AI and machine-learning, that international diplomacy needs governments to station quality representatives in foreign capitals, and for international organizations to listen and learn, soak up the ineffable atmosphere, and interact with real people, especially those with "issues," and report back home.



Long-distance artificial intelligence calibrations suffice for a number problems and may work well enough for the Pentagon, but for the complex measurement of (sometimes insane) people and their crazy politics, AI comes up short precisely because of its artificial rationality.



Cut-rate diplomatic appointments can blow up in your face and trying to do things on the cheap with big-bucks campaign bozos or oily hacks who can insult the very host country with whom tensions are building.



In this sense, the Biden administration deserves praise: Two candidates who have emerged as the potential U.S. ambassador to China are Nicholas Burns and Charlene Barshefsky. The former is a pleasant but blunt-as-he-has-to-be career diplomat and former State Department official; the latter is an expert lawyer with international trade expertise second to none.



Foreign Service officer Burns is a graduate of the highly-regarded Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; trade lawyer Barshefsky is famous for her amazing teamwork two decades ago with Premier Zhu Rongji on China's admission to the World Trade Organization.



As a former U.S. intelligence official said of Burns: "Anyone appointed is going to be hawkish on China, and Nick at least is a seasoned diplomat."



Russia and China, with their own mountains of problems, are ranked by the Biden administration as the main international challengers, but the true existential challenge comes not from afar but from within.



The U.S. economy may well be recovering but the American psyche is still mostly flatlining. Washington would do better with its time and money if it were to focus less on how to destabilize Beijing or Moscow and more on how to re-stabilize an America that seems lost at home and adrift abroad.



The big search  deep, broad and realistic  is about taking America in a better direction.

This cannot be accomplished by conventional thinking: not within the besieged ranks of the U.S. Foreign Service, for all the human gems it fields; nor within the pious sanctuary of the Council on Foreign Relations, scrambling for relevance; nor even from canonical American business schools (Harvard, etc), who can teach one plus one but not right from wrong.



The 2008 global meltdown spotlighted America's own legions of greedy wolf warriors, feeding at the trough. Neither America's nor China's wolf warriors offer happy returns, but only our best deep thinkers, it seems, know this.



One is Richard Falk who, in his just-published political memoir "Public Intellectual," is as successful as anyone in making the point that what's needed is not simply a course correction but a new course.



The renowned Princeton University professor emeritus of international law admires the famous quote from the late William Sloane Coffin (iconic clergyman and antiwar champion): "For the world is now too dangerous for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love."



No doubt such gooey sentiment will seem to our macho wolf warriors everywhere as mushy as the average Korean TV soap opera.



Not Falk, whose lifetime resume merits some kind of global peace prize for his recognition that "militarist approaches to the foreign policy of geopolitical actors have lost their effectiveness in most postcolonial contexts even while augmenting their destructiveness and human costs. The fact that China and Asia understand this, and the U.S. and the West do not, helps explain China's rise and the West's decline."



Deeply doubtful of the utility and validity of Marxism thanks to the Soviet disaster, but at the same time deeply alienated by presumptuous claims of American exceptionalism, Falk proposes that any Western evaluation of China should give it some credit, valid human rights issues notwithstanding, for marrying Marxism with market-driven thinking and transforming otherwise static state socialism into a "spectacular instrument of growth, influence and stature at home and throughout the world."



Falk, who nowadays divides his time between his wife Hilal Elver's Turkey and his adopted (and far warmer than Princeton) California, is no "Asianist," much less a stereotype-prone Orientalist.



He honed his intellectual chops at Yale Law School; his career took him to the stratospheres of international law  ecological and human rights in particular  and on noteworthy near-impossible peace missions with post-Shah Iran.



For years, as the fearless U.N. special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, he bumped heads with the Israeli government almost as often as he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (annually since 2009).



Understanding China, he believes, requires a special effort. The good-versus-evil bifurcation produces policy astigmatism that clouds judgment. Naval-gazing  at China's build-up in the South China Sea  need not trigger regional warfare if China's motive is understood as strategically defensive rather than offensive, and if issues are negotiated, not militarized.



A bold statement was made recently by President Joe Biden. After 20 years in Afghanistan, American troops would be removed by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers.



Neither the al-Qaida attack, nor the prolonged American counterattack, accomplished much except to end the lives of many human beings. When will mankind learn?



Perhaps Biden, at 78, after such a long career, has it figured out: Humanity needs fewer militaristic answers to very deep questions. If the Xi Jinping government interprets the Afghanistan withdrawal as American weakness, this would be a blunder.



Understanding America, as it tries to get its proper personality pieced back together, will also take a special effort now, especially in Beijing. Very rare political memoirs such as Falk's can help both sides get things right.





Loyola Marymount University Professor Tom Plate (platecolumn@gmail.com) is the author of "In the Middle of China's Future" and "Yo-Yo Diplomacy," as well as founder of LMU's Asia Media International (asiamedia.lmu.edu). The original version of this column appeared in the South China Morning Post, where Prof. Plate is a regular contributor.


A headteacher at the helm of a controversial school has sparked outrage today after revealing she has banned teachers from using phrases including, 'boys and girls.'

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson from Anderton Park primary in Moseley, Birmingham, has stopped teachers from using terms including, 'let's go, guys', 'man up', 'grow a pair' and 'boys and girls'.

Students as young as three are taught to hold up posters flagging 'sexist' terms and the two pupils who find the best examples are rewarded with certificates at the end of the week.

But the 'absolutely ridiculous' scheme has prompted a backlash among parents and critics.

Broadcaster Nana Akua told Good Morning Britain today: 'I'd be very worried if this woman was teaching my kids. What I think we're doing here is creating a generation of wallflower kids who are listening for an offence.'

And Chris McGovern, a former primary school head and now chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, told MailOnline: 'This is about adults who have a neuroses about gender and are hoisting their own anxieties onto the shoulders of young children.

'By trying to correct a children's language at a very early age, one is actually limiting, restraining and burdening them with an anxiety they don't need.

'This is an attempt to control language, which is a very sinister development. It is part of a woke philosophy across education, an unstoppable tsunami of Wokeism.'

More than 80 per cent of pupils on the roll at Anderton Primary are Muslim, and two years ago the school shot to national attention when parents stormed the gates in a furious protest about lessons on same-sex families.

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson from Anderton Park primary in Moseley, Birmingham (pictured) has stopped teachers from using terms including, 'let's go, guys', 'man up', 'grow a pair' and 'boys and girls'

Two years ago, parents staged a series of demonstration against the controversial 'No Outsiders' curriculum programme at Anderton Park Primary School

Mother-of-two bugle-playing philosophy graduate who took on the Trojan Horse scandal and anti-LGBT protesters Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson shot to national attention two year ago when parents of her pupils stormed the school gates in a furious protest about lessons on same-sex families. A mother of two teenage daughters Gretel, 17, and Kitty, 14, she has been at the helm of the Birmingham since 2012. In 2015 the 50-year-old addressed the annual conference of the National Association of Headteachers in Liverpool and spoke about the climate of 'fear and intimidation still prevalent' in Birmingham in the wake of the Trojan Horse scandal, which exposed attempts by militant Muslims to infiltrate state schools to impose an Islamic agenda. Since her appointment in 2012, Mrs Hewitt-Clarkson has fought a running battle with hardline governors and parents who tried to undermine her and the ethos of Anderton Park (some Muslim children, for example, were discouraged by their parents from playing with white pupils). She lives with her daughters and partner Mark Brodermann and told the National Association of Head Teachers that she, 'grew up in a home filled with music, Methodists teachings, a Head Teacher father, and love of Shakespeare.' She said she was a 'bugle-playing, church band member busting out a tune.' Advertisement

Speaking on Good Morning Britain today, Ms Hewitt-Clarkson said 'sexist' language was damaging to children.

She told the show: 'Fast forward a little bit to when the children are older just to see why this is so important because it's a tiny part of a huge jigsaw.

'We've seen in the last year the biggest ever rise in child abuse, in grooming, and if our boys and girls grow up and in school we don't challenge this sexist language and boys are told, 'man up', 'grow a pair', 'don't cry', 'boys don't cry' - it's very damaging for them and abusers later on potentially, or bullies, people they walk past on the way home from school - will also use this fear.

'And fear is the biggest weapon that abusers have and if boys are told, 'boys aren't afraid', 'boys don't get scared', 'boys don't talk about their feelings', then where are they going to go when they are afraid and they are frightened?'

But the revelation sparked a heated debate on social media, with one parent tweeting: 'I'd quite like school to teach my kids to read and write etc. I don't need them wasting time on banning phrases like 'morning guys'. Far too much time and energy wasted on ridiculous things.'

Another wrote: 'I am a teacher and think this is ridiculous. Concentrate on reading, writing and maths with the boys and girls.'

And broadcaster Nana Akua claimed the move was 'absolutely ridiculous'.

She told GMB: 'To be honest, I'd be very worried if this woman was teaching my kids.

'What I think we're doing here is dissecting language in the most clinical form and then creating a generation of wallflower kids who are listening for an offence.

'I go to schools and I lecture in schools and I talk to the kids - can you imagine if I went to her school and said, 'good morning guys'?

'It is getting to the point where we are losing a grip here. We need to be looking at the context of language and that's what I'll be teaching my children.

'To say 'good morning guys' if you're actually seriously picking that apart then I feel that perhaps your energy is in the wrong place.

'Really we should be teaching kids the context of language and how to use language that is non offensive.

If you take something out of a context and dissect all the bits and pieces you will find yourself in a black hole so let's take the word 'mankind' - does she allow that?'

Protests against Ms Hewitt-Clarkson in 2015 saw a dead dog strung up on the railings at the entrance to her school and dismembered cats thrown on the playground.

A death threat sent to her on social media around the same time read: 'Any headteacher who teaches my children it's alright to be gay will be at the end of my shotgun.'

Former headteacher Chris McGovern told MailOnline: 'This is burdening children with adult responsibilities. But it is very cruel to burden children with the problems that adults have.

'Children treat each other, generally speaking, fairly and with much less hang ups and with much less prejudice than adults.

'Adults are inclined to think that because they see the world as a complicated place, children will too.'

The scheme has sparked a backlash among parents and critics and a heated debate on social media

Mr McGovern added: 'But children will become confused. If children use what is considered to be a sexist term, they don't mean any offence by it. But they're then told they are carrying offensive guilt with them.

'They need to take a lesson from Pink Floyd and 'leave the kids alone.'

'Teachers should teach their subjects and tell children to treat other people as you wish to be treated  indeed, that is the golden rule of all religions  and that is all they need.

Former headteacher Chris McGovern said: 'This is burdening children with adult responsibilities'

'This only confuses them and can be very upsetting not only to the children, but to their parents who see their children brainwashed into woke political correctness.

'Children are no longer free to be children - they have to be products of a particularly woke philosophy.

'Children are individuals, and we should treat them as individuals  they are not as malign as adults.

'But this is demonising them  which is completely contrary to what education is all about. Why can't we use the word guy? Guys and Dolls, Guy Fawkes. This is absurd and sinister.

'What worries me the most is people can't speak out in the profession because they'll have their careers blighted. As a teacher starting out in your career, you have to endorse this nonsense.

'It's not healthy and is an unstoppable tide from the woke brigade. It is a very worrying situation.'

Two years ago, parents staged a series of demonstration against the controversial 'No Outsiders' curriculum programme at Anderton Park Primary School.

The aim of the No Outsiders program was teach students about the positive values of diversity, tolerance and acceptance, as well as LGBT rights, same-sex relationships, gender identity, race, religion and colour.

More than 80 per cent of the pupils at Anderton primary are Muslim.

They handed out leaflets that declared 'We DO NOT believe in homosexuality. Parents do NOT want their children's belief changed.'

Others read, 'This programme promotes a whole-school gay ethos' and 'You can't be gay and Muslim'.
Brazils death toll in the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 400,000 Thursday, as the country struggled to secure enough vaccines and the Senate investigated whether President Jair Bolsonaros government has exacerbated the crisis.

The health ministry reported 3,001 Covid-19 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing Brazils overall toll to 401,186  second only to the United States.

With 212 million people, the South American giant also has one of the highest mortality rates in the pandemic, at 189 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants  the worst in the Americas and one of the top 15 worldwide.

Brazil has been devastated by a surge in cases since the start of the year that pushed hospitals to the brink of collapse in many areas.

Although it appears to have passed the peak of the new wave, the number of daily deaths remains staggeringly high, at an average of 2,526 over the past week, behind only India.

Experts blame the latest surge partly on the Brazil variant of the virus, a mutation that emerged in or around the Amazon rainforest city of Manaus in December.

Known as P1, it can reinfect people who have had the original strain of the virus, and may be more contagious.

P1 has had a very big impact. Nothing was done to contain the variant when there was a spike in January in Manaus. It was only a matter of time before it swept across Brazil, said epidemiologist Ethel Maciel of Espirito Santo Federal University.

P1 is now circulating in 54 countries, according to the World Health Organization, which labels it a variant of concern, along with the so-called British and South African strains.

 Crimes against humanity 

The country is meanwhile struggling with vaccine shortages.

Around 28 million people in Brazil have received a first Covid-19 vaccine dose, just over 13 percent of the population.

About 12.7 million have received a second.

But cities in 14 of Brazils 27 states have had to suspend second doses because of shortages, according to TV Globo.

In a bit of good news, the first million doses of the Pfizer vaccine were due to arrive Thursday evening, adding to Brazils two current options, the AstraZeneca vaccine and Chinese-developed CoronaVac.

On Tuesday, the Senate opened an investigation into whether there was criminal neglect in the Bolsonaro administrations handling of the pandemic.

The far-right president has controversially downplayed the virus, fought stay-at-home measures to contain it and rejected offers of various vaccines  including, initially, Pfizers.

Bolsonaro defended his handling of the pandemic as the commission opened, telling supporters: I was wrong about nothing.

The president argues the economic damage of measures such as a national lockdown would cause more suffering than the virus itself.

But the commissions rapporteur vowed to hold officials accountable for mishandling the crisis.

Senators will be investigating, among other things, horrific scenes such as those that unfolded earlier this year in Manaus, where dozens of Covid-19 patients suffocated to death due to oxygen shortages.

The country has the right to know who contributed to these thousands of deaths, and they must be punished immediately, said the rapporteur, Senator Renan Calheiros.

There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity We will wage a crusade against this agenda of death.

 Next wave? 

Maciel, the epidemiologist, said authorities were still mishandling the response.

There is zero national coordination in Brazil to fight the pandemic, she told AFP.

And stay-at-home measures imposed by individual states to contain the latest surge are being lifted too soon, she added.

They should have been maintained for several weeks, until there was a real flattening of the curves, she said.

Until we have mass vaccination, well still be at the mercy of each new wave.
COLLINSVILLE  A pair of local police departments have taken to their Facebook pages this month to warn residents against falling for home improvement scams that prey on senior citizens.

Weve recently been informed that home improvement scammers are in our area, states a post on Collinsville Police Departments Facebook page. These criminals typically target senior residents. Please talk to your family members and neighbors, educating them on what to look for to prevent them from falling victim to this crime.

The post, made on April 22, then provided a link to HomeAdvisors website, with information and tips on how to prevent home improvement fraud.

Meanwhile, the Highland Police Department warned of a different kind of scam in an April 20 Facebook post.

The Highland Police Department was recently notified of a possible scam. The citizen stated he received an email from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The email stated that he was receiving a citation for speeding in the City of Highland and requested that he pay his fine online within 72 hours. Please do not send a payment as requested in the email.

The department included an image of the fraudulent email, which included details of the alleged incident, not to mail the payment but to use the EasyPay Center and even a link to contest the ticket via the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles.

Last month, Edwardsville Police posted on Facebook about a large number of unemployment insurance fraud incidents. The department linked to the Illinois Department of Employment Security on how to recognize fraud and what steps you should take if youre a victim. They also told residents they can always call the department with any additional fraud questions or if they believe theyve been a fraud victim.

Police Chief Jay Keeven said Wednesday that his department had not seen any such complaints come in lately. Glen Carbon Police Chief Todd Link concurred.

Meanwhile in Springfield, Sen Rachelle Crowe (D-Glen Carbon) supports a Senate initiative, SB 2225, to outlaw scam call operators from disguising their identity through spoofing, which uses a false telephone number to show on the potential victims caller ID screen.

Scammers use deceitful measures to persuade residents into giving them personal information, Crowe said. By prohibiting automated solicitors from falsifying caller ID, we can help protect residents from falling victim to telephone scams.

In Illinois, the Telephone Solicitations Act requires a live operator to state his or her name, the organization they are representing and the purpose for the call. The law also prohibits a solicitor from manipulating caller ID. However, current state law does not address when the caller is not a live operator.

To protect consumers, SB 2225 requires the operator of any soliciting telephone call to immediately state the affiliated business and the purpose of the call and to confirm consent from the receiver.

Its shameful for scammers to use dishonest tactics to intentionally seek out vulnerable residents, Crowe said. Call authentication is critical to protect residents from identity fraud and theft.

Senate Bill 2225 passed the Senate and moves for further deliberation in the House.

Reach reporter Charles Bolinger at 618-659-5735
India will receive the first regiment set of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems by the end of this year, Indias Ambassador to Russia Bala Venkatesh Varma told a briefing on Thursday, TASS reports.

"[The first regiment set will arrive in India] by the end of the year," he said, adding that the contract was being implemented in accordance with the timeframe.

New Delhi announced its intention to purchase Russian-made S-400 air defense systems back in 2015. A $5.43 bln contract on the delivery of five regiment sets of S-400 Triumf anti-aircraft missile systems was signed during Russian President Vladimir Putins visit to India in October 2018.

Russias S-400 Triumf (NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler) is the latest long-and medium-range surface-to-air missile system that went into service in 2007. It is designed to destroy strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons and can also be used against ground installations. The S-400 can engage targets at a distance of up to 400 km and at an altitude of up to 30 km under intensive enemy fire and jamming.
Mumbai, April 29 : Television star Shubhangi Atre, who is currently recovering from Covid-19, will not be able to celebrate International Dance Day with fervour on Thursday. She says dance is a form of meditation for her.

"For me, dance is a form of meditation too. It's an ecstatic experience. Dancing and meditation can be just like offering your prayers to the nature or divine powers. It makes you look and feel beautiful at the same time," Shubhangi tells IANS.

The actress, whose favourite form of dance is Kathak, idolises late Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan and points out dancing relieves stress.

"Dance is not only a wonderful way to express yourself but also a fantastic spare time activity one can enjoy. Dancing will definitely boost your mood, helps you to forget everything around you, and allows you to connect with yourself. It will bring of so much of positivity and relaxation, " says Shubhangi, popular as Angoori Bhabhi in "Bhabhi ji Ghar Par Hai".

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
America is not only back, President Joe Biden boasted on Wednesday night; its here to win.

Again and again, Biden sold his signature domestic initiatives as not only worthy in and of themselves, but as a means to assure Americas continued global leadership and fend off challenges from authoritarian governmentsprincipally China.

China and other countries are closing in fast, Biden warned. He twice argued that we are in a competition with China and its fellow authoritarian states to win the 21st century, necessitating spending on infrastructure, education, and research. Speaking of efforts to combat climate change, he said, Theres no reason the blades for wind turbines cant be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing, flipping President Donald Trumps quip, after withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, that he had been elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. Summing up, he warned that Americas adversariesthe autocrats of the worldare betting that American democracy is too weakened and divided to meet global challenges, but we have to prove them wrong.

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Using superpower competition to sell domestic programs is nothing new. As Slates Fred Kaplan notes, Biden often seems to be borrowing directly from Dwight Eisenhowers Sputnik-era playbook. But what was striking about how Biden employed this rhetoric is that this is exactly the sort of internationalist talk that, not so long ago, Democratic foreign policy thinkers had concluded was no longer effective.

In his speech, the president referred to a foreign policy that benefits the middle class, reportedly one of the administrations guiding concepts, and one which Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also heavily emphasized. The phrase originated in a Carnegie Endowment Project to reimagine U.S. foreign policy which began in 2018. In 2020, Carnegie released a report co-authored by Bidens now National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, which notably warned that:

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[T]here is no evidence Americas middle class will rally behind efforts aimed at restoring U.S. primacy in a unipolar world, escalating a new Cold War with China, or waging a cosmic struggle between the worlds democracies and authoritarian governments. In fact, these are all surefire recipes for further widening the disconnect between the foreign policy community and the vast majority of Americans beyond Washington, who are more concerned with proximate threats to their physical and economic security.

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Likewise, a 2019 Center for American Progress report on public attitudes about foreign policy based on voter focus groups stressed, Traditional language from foreign policy experts about fighting authoritarianism and dictatorship, promoting democracy, or working with allies and the international community uniformly fell flat with voters in our groups. The report also found that Despite Russia being viewed as mostly an enemy of the United States and China being seen as the chief global competitor, American voters are conflict-averse, strongly desire more cautious steps with both of these countries, and firmly reject a primarily military-based response in dealing with them.

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This seems a far cry from Bidens pledge to maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific. And while there wasnt any talk of rebuilding partnerships with democratic allies in the speech Wednesday, the theme is omnipresent whenever the administration is more explicitly discussing foreign policy.

Establishment politicians attachment to fuzzy concepts like the international community, global leadership, and spreading democracywhich to many Americans, have come to connote endless wars and jobs flowing overseassupposedly provided an opening for Donald America First Trump, who took a narrowly transactional view of world affairs that viewed alliances with suspicion and considered democracy promotion a waste of time.

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Subsequent eventsthe pandemic, the election, Jan. 6may have shifted Americans view on the value of promoting democracy and maintaining global leadership, but they havent shifted them that much. A February Pew poll found that only 20 percent of Americans view promoting democracy in other nations as a top priority for the U.S., the lowest score out of 20 foreign policy issues it asked about. Forty-eight percent of Americans overall believe containing China is a top priority, but only 36 percent of Democrats.

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So what is the theory behind Bidens message? Before he took office, it was hard to get a handle on what foreign policy for the middle class meant in practice. Beyond a trade policy that creates rather than destroys jobs and a basic level of security from foreign threats, does the middle class really have cohesive foreign policy priorities? The catchphrase seemed more like a way for the blobObama adviser Ben Rhodes term for Washingtons hawkish bipartisan foreign policy consensusto repackage its longtime preoccupations for an increasingly skeptical public, rather than a departure from them.

After 100 days of Biden being in office, the foreign policy for the middle class premise is coming into focus a bit more. It seems, however, to be running in the opposite direction from how it was originally anticipated to operate. In 2019, Sullivan imagined a White House national security team in the habit of asking before making key foreign policy decisions, What will this mean for the middle class? Perhaps that is happening at the meetings Biden leads in the White House, but in public, the president is more likely to emphasize what domestic initiativestargeted at the middle class, naturallywill mean for foreign policy.

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Here, Biden may quietly be taking some cues from the left side of his party. Despite his recent decisions on Yemen and Afghanistan, which did more to extricate the U.S. from endless wars than many of this critics on the left had expected, Bidens hawkishness on China and his all-out embrace of American exceptionalism might seem at odds with the progressive drift of his domestic policy. But during the Democratic primary, both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tried to tie the main themes of their economics-focused campaigns to a global struggle against what Sanders called an authoritarian axis. Their argument went that the same dynamics that created unaccountable corporations and politically powerful billionaires in the U.S. are what keep autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman in power. They also argued that measures to make the U.S. system more democratic would help promote democracy abroad. It was democracy promotion without the military interventionism that gave that concept a bad name during the George W. Bush years.

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Biden has adopted some of this approach, particularly the emphasis on global anti-corruption efforts as an autocracy-fighting tool. Still, his pairing of it with directly confronting Beijing and maintaining military supremacy is probably not what these progressives had in mind.

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To his credit, Biden does appear to have found a way to discuss Americas global leadership in a way that at least feels less abstract than the usual blob rhetoric, and is less likely to make viewers eyes glaze over. In his vision, the countrys competition with the forces of authoritarianism is a common project that Americans can participate in as they work to rebuild the countrys economy and tackle climate change.

But this brand of muscular progressive internationalism involves some risks. It assumes that Americans actually care about beating China rather than just being safe from it, or care about whether other countries choose a path more like Americas or Chinas. A significant number of Democratic foreign policy experts, including a number who now work for this administration, concluded just a few years ago that Americans dont care about these things and it was counterproductive to try to make them care. It would also be nice to think that economic inequality and climate change are big enough priorities that we could mobilize to confront them without tacking on an international conflict as extra motivation. Polls suggest these domestic priorities are actually more popular than the international ones theyre being tied to.

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More consequentially, the fusion of domestic policy ambition with promoting the countrys international standing risks unleashing some forces this administration wont be able to control. Bidens China rhetoric comes without the conspiratorial, nativist edge of Trumps, and the president spoke on Wednesday about efforts to combat anti-Asian hate crimes, but Americans track record of drawing a clear distinction between the enemy abroad and minorities at home is not all that encouraging.

Then there are the risks of international conflict itself. Biden emphasized that the U.S. will still look to cooperate on areas of mutual interestclimate, nonproliferationwith countries like Russia and China. Ive been more optimistic than some that this is doable, even as tensions remain high, but it would be naive to think there will be no trade-offs at all. And with heated rhetoric, sanctions, and military pressure escalating, theres always the risk that the competition to win the 21st century could turn into an actual conflicteither a Cold Warstyle proxy battle or something more direct. A war between two or more nuclear-armed superpowers would not benefit the middle class.
After a year in which the pandemic shined a harsh spotlight on the stark inequities in New York Citys school system, the city announced Thursday that, once again, only tiny numbers of Black and Latino students had been admitted into top public high schools. The numbers represent the latest signal that efforts to desegregate those schools while maintaining an admissions exam are failing.

Only 9 percent of offers made by elite schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science went to Black and Latino students this year, down from 11 percent last year. Only eight Black students received offers to Stuyvesant out of 749 spots, and only one Black student was accepted into Staten Island Technical High School, out of 281 freshman seats.

Over half of the 4,262 offers this year went to Asian students. The schools have enormous significance for thousands of low-income Asian-American students who attend them, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Efforts to change the admissions system have been seen by some as disregarding the accomplishments of those vulnerable students. Accusations of bias from Asian-American New Yorkers have made the debate over whether to keep the exam as the sole means of entry into the schools extremely fraught.

Though Black and white students made up the same percentage of test takers  about 18 percent each  less than 4 percent of Black students received offers, compared with nearly 28 percent of white students, a clear sign that having large numbers of Black students take the exam is not leading to more equitable outcomes.
CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Green & Bio-Solvents Market by Type (bio-alcohols, bio-diols, bio-glycols, lactate esters), End-Use Industry (industrial & domestic cleaners, paints & coatings, adhesives, printing inks, pharmaceuticals) and Region - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Green & Bio-Solvents Market size is estimated to be USD 1.2 billion in 2021 and is projected reach USD 1.5 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 4.5% between 2021 and 2026.

PDF Download: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=755

Browse 179 market data Tables and 51 Figures spread through 214 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Green & Bio-Solvents Market"

View detailed Table of Content here - https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/green-bio-solvents-market-755.html

Solvents derived from biomass are referred to as green & bio-solvent. Green & bio-solvents are derived from the processing of bio-diesel, plant, or natural products as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to petrochemical solvents. Solvents are liquids that possess the ability to dissolve, dilute or extract other substances without modifying the chemical composition of the extracted substances or of the solvent itself.

Industrial & Domestic Cleaners is the largest application of the Green & Bio-Solvents Market. North America was the largest market for green & bio-solvents in 2020, in terms of both volume and value. Factors such as growing demand from pharmaceuticals industry, rapid industrialization in growing economies like China, India & Thailand and increasing stringent regulations will drive the Green & Bio-Solvents Market.

Methyl Soyate is the fastest-growing segment by type for Green & Bio-Solvents Market during the forecast period

Methyl soyate has become commercially successful as a viable green alternative industrial solvent on its own merits. Its market demand has increased exponentially over the past ten years. This is despite some perceived solvent property deficiencies. Beyond being an ingredient in cleaners and strippers to replace chlorinated or petroleum products, methyl soyate could find increased use as a carrier solvent. Methyl soyate is not limited to the replacement of regulated industrial cleaning solvents. Due to its eco-friendly nature, methyl soyate can be used to clean up and recover petroleum products from shorelines and streams. The EPA has listed a methyl soyate bio-solvent on the National Contingency Plan product schedule for oil spills.

Industrial & Domestic Cleaners is estimated to be the largest application for Green & Bio-Solvents Market between 2021 and 2026.

Bio-solvents are used in the cleaning of high-precision mechanical parts such as ball bearings. For this application, perfect cleaning is necessary for the proper functioning of the mechanical piece (remaining dirt would damage the metal) and is critical to the safety of machines in the working process. The use of bio-solvents in household cleaners helps to clean the kitchens, showers, toilets, carpets, and other household items. For example, solvents used in dry cleaning machines help clean clothes by dispersing and dissolving dirt. Bio-solvents also help with disinfectant to get into all the nooks and crannies of the surface. They give products a longer shelf-life and also ensure product stability.

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North America is expected to be the largest Green & Bio-Solvents Market during the forecast period, in terms of value and volume.

North America has conventionally been a strong market for green & bio-solvents. Globally, the North American market has been a leader with respect to demand as well as product innovation in terms of quality and application development. The key countries in the North American market are the US (the most dominant market, accounting for a significant market share), Canada, and Mexico. Although a small market, Mexico has witnessed promising demand that is expected to continue in the near future.

As the shale gas production increases, North American ethylene producers are increasingly shifting from petroleum-derived naphtha to lighter, natural gas-based feedstock. Sugars, glycerol, and other plant-derived products are emerging as economically competitive starting materials for a range of commodity chemicals. The US accounts for the maximum market share in the North American region, followed by other countries in the region. Many key players of the Green & Bio-Solvents Market are headquartered in the region. The versatile properties of various types of green & bio-solvents have resulted in high growth of the market in the past decades.

The key players profiled in the Green & Bio-Solvents Market report include BASF SE (Germany), Archer Daniels Midland Company (US), Vertec Biosolvents Inc. (US), Stepan Company (US), Solvay (Belgium), GFBiochemicals (Netherlands), Cargill Inc. (US), Astrobio (Italy), The Dow Chemical Company (US), and India Glycols Limited (India).

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Browse Adjacent Market: Green Bio Chemicals Market Research Reports & consulting

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Solvents Market by Type (Alcohols, Ketones, Esters, Glycol Ethers, Aromatic, Aliphatic), Application (Paints & Coatings, Polymer Manufacturing, Printing Inks), and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/solvent-market-1325.html

Renewable Chemicals Market - Alcohols (Ethanol, Methanol), Biopolymers (Starch Blends, Regenerated Cellulose, PBS, Bio-PET, PLA, PHA, Bio-PE, and Others), Platform Chemicals & Others - Global Trends & Forecast to 2020

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/renewable-chemical-274.html

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LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, illycaffe, a global coffee industry leader in sustainable quality, announces Gran Caffe illy will open its doors at the much-anticipated Italian food market and restaurant concept Eataly London. An icon of Italian culture, illycaffe is an Italian family business founded in Trieste in 1933, whose vision and mission has always been to produce and offer the best coffee to the world, enhanced by the best technologies and sustainable practices and by the pursuit of beauty in everything they do.

Located on the ground floor of the 42,000 sq. ft venue, Gran Caffe illy at Eataly London will be a full-service Italian coffee bar, inspired by the elegant cafes of Italy. At the heart of the coffee menu will be the illy blend, a world-renowned, unique blend of nine different types of Arabica, selected by illy from the finest beans harvested around the world, from South America to Central America, India and Africa.

Alongside illy classics such as the eponymous Italian espresso, coffee lovers can also expect specials such as illy's Cold Brew, a 100% Arabica coffee cold brewed for 12 hours, which is naturally sweet, thirst quenching and offers a uniquely refreshing taste. For those with a sweet tooth, there will also be indulgent hot specials such as Marocchino, an espresso with hot chocolate, topped with frothed milk. The illy coffee Gran Caffe will also offer breakfast, lunch, aperitivo and late-night bites created by the Eataly London chefs using high-quality ingredients from their market.

To bring illy's ongoing support of art and culture to life in the Gran Caffe illy space, illy has worked with Italian contemporary artist Massimiliano (Max) Petrone to create a series of artworks, which will be situated throughout the cafe. Featuring 12 pieces in total, each work of art is made of coffee, the same raw material illy's world revolves around. The aim of each of the pieces is to allow customers to discover the sustainable journey in which illy's quality is transformed into an unmistakable coffee experience, alongside illy's One Makes The Difference campaign, promoting sustainable actions throughout the supply chain. And reflects Eataly London's dedication to craft.

The Gran Caffe illy has extensive seating both indoors (which will open from 17 May) and outdoors. For those visiting ahead of 17 May, illy coffee can be enjoyed on the extended terrace just outside the cafe, or as a takeaway option.

Visitors to Eataly London will also be able to purchase a variety of illy products in the Eataly market, from coffee beans and ground coffee to accessories such as the exclusive illy Art Collection cups, and iconic coffee machines like the illy Y3.3 and X7.1.

Echoing Eataly's 'Eat, Shop, Learn' mantra, the renowned Eataly cookery school 'La Scuola', will be hosting a number of illy coffee masterclasses from May onwards. The classes will be hosted by illy's highly skilled team, including Aniello Manfredonia, head of illy's Universita del Caffe in the UK. The Universita del Caffe draws on the wealth of knowledge illy has acquired through their long history and the desire to share it, with the aim of promoting and spreading the culture of high-quality coffee, which is central to its legacy. illy coffee will also be served throughout Eataly London and in all three restaurants, as well as on the terrace.

"We are glad to be partners of Eataly, with whom we share the same vision of promoting Made in Italy and high quality, sustainable products, in their first opening in London" says Massimiliano Pogliani, CEO of illycaffe. "As we look to the future with confidence, we hope that this opening can be the first sign of a return to normalcy. We are sure that the illy Grand Caffe will represent an exciting hospitality experience on the London scene, bringing us even closer to our consumers in the United Kingdom, a very important market for our brand".

Eataly is the only experience of its kind in the capital, offering a unique gastronomic experience that celebrates craftsmanship of high-quality Italian food and produce. The Gran Caffe illy and Eataly market will be open from 7am - 11pm.

Please find further imagery here to preview and download on Dropbox.

About illycaffe

illycaffe is an Italian family-owned company, founded in Trieste in 1933. Its mission has always been to offer the best coffee to the world. illycaffe produces a unique 100% Arabica blend, combining 9 of the best varieties in the world, selected by illycaffe: every day 8 million cups of illy coffee are served in over 140 countries around the globe, in the cafes, restaurants and hotels, in single-brand cafes and shops, at home. As a result of its innovations, illycaffe contributes to the coffee technology progress at global level. In 1991, the "Premio Ernesto Illy de qualidade sustentavel do cafe para espresso" was launched in Brazil for quality espresso coffee. illycaffe has contributed to the sharing of the know-how, paying growers a premium price for the best quality selected by illycaffe. Since 2016, with the "Ernesto Illy International Coffee Award", the company has celebrated coffee growers all over the world that, according to illy, have produced the best sustainable coffee. Since 2013, the company has been in the list of the World Most Ethical Companies. In 2019, it enhanced its commitment to pursue a sustainable business model integrating the interest of people with the environment, adopting the status of Societa Benefit (Benefit Company) and adding this commitment into its own bylaws. In 2021, illycaffe was the first Italian company in the coffee sector to obtain the international certification as B Corp as a result of its commitment to comply with the highest standards of social and environmental performance. The company also founded the University of Coffee, which has the objective of sharing culture at all levels, offering a comprehensive and practical training to growers, baristas and coffee lovers. Everything that is "made in illy" is about beauty and art, the founding principles of the brand, starting from its logo, designed by artist James Rosenquist, up to illy Art Collection cups, decorated by over 100 international artists. In 2019, the company had 1405 employees and a turnover of  520,5 million. There are 269 illy single-brand shops in over 40 countries all over the world. In 2021, Rhone Capital became a shareholder of illycaffe with a minority share to support the company in its international growth.

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Daly City officials on Thursday released the names of four officers involved in the fatal shooting of 44-year-old Roger Allen this month.

Officer Rosa Brenes, Lt. Michael Brennan, Officer Nicholas McCarthy and Officer Cameron Newton were involved in the April 7 incident, which began after an officer stopped to assist Allen with a flat tire, officials said.

Officials did not specify which officer fired the shot that killed Allen, though that officer was placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe said in a statement.

Officials said there is no body camera or video footage of the incident.

According to the version of events supplied by police, an officer patrolling the 700 block of Niantic Avenue stopped to help Allen, who was parked and sitting in his truck.

The driver got out of the vehicle to speak with the officer and three more officers showed up to the scene. A woman was in the back seat and Allen was in the front passenger seat, officials said.

Police said they noticed what appeared to be a gun on Allens lap during the check, and a struggle ensued with the officers to control the gun, Wagstaffe told The Chronicle.

The weapon turned out to be a BB gun, Wagstaffe said.

An officer fired two shots at Allen, one of which struck him in the chest, after he saw the gun pointed at an officers face, officials said. Allen was removed from the vehicle and transported to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died.

Officials said the incident is being investigated by the San Mateo County District Attorneys Office. An administrative investigation by an outside investigator will also be conducted.

Anyone with information about this case should call the District Attorneys Office and speak with Chief Inspector William Massey at 650-363-4883.

Vanessa Arredondo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vanessa.arredondo@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @v_anana
SBS heist caper The Unusual Suspects will premiere in early June.

The 4 part series about female friendship and empowerment, set in Sydneys glamorous Eastern suburbs, starts Thursday June 3 at 8:30pm with all episodes dropping at SBS on Demand.

The series stars Aina Dumlao (Sanzaru, Ballers, MacGyver), Miranda Otto (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Homeland, The Lord of the Rings) and Michelle Vergara Moore (Condor, The Time of Our Lives) plus Heather Mitchell, Susie Porter, Peter OBrien and more.

Aina Dumlao said: The Unusual Suspects is unlike anything Ive ever seen before. Its a crazy ride with lots of twists and turns but, at the heart of it, its about female friendship. Underneath the wrapper of a crazy heist, its a story about empathy and finding common ground.

The Aquarius Films series also marks the first major representation of Filipino-Australians in a local drama series.

Miranda Otto said: What attracted me to the story is the joyful, colourful sense of fun. This high-pitched zany caper felt really fresh as an Australian project. Its also a wonderful window into a culture that exists here that people probably dont know a lot about.

Michelle Vergara Moore said: Theres suspense, intrigue and mystery but its also very funny. We had such a blast shooting it, so I really hope everyone enjoys watching it. As the daughter of Filipino immigrants, shooting this role with this amazing cast of women has been one of the highlights of my career.

When a $16 million necklace is taken from self-made businesswoman Roxanne Waters (Michelle Vergara Moore) home in an elaborate heist, the ensuing police investigation exposes cracks in Eastern Sydneys sparkling facade. With the stakes higher than ever, can the masterminds stop themselves from turning on each other, or will they discover a friendship worth more than diamonds?

Both entertaining and enthralling, the series uses the hook of the heist genre to unpack the complex relationships between a diverse group of women. The Unusual Suspects marks the first major representation of Filipino-Australians on Australian television and continues SBSs legacy of delivering exceptional drama exploring the rich diversity of Australia in an authentic and nuanced way.

Joining the impressive cast are Otto and Moores real-life partners, Peter OBrien (Wentworth, Tidelands, The Killing Field) and Toby Leonard Moore (Billions, Mank, Daredevil, Condor), Matt Day (Rake, Wolf Creek, A Place to Call Home), Lena Cruz (Shortland Street), Susana Downes (Dead Lucky), Ari Boyland (Shortland Street, Power Rangers RPM), Heather Mitchell (A Place to Call Home, Janet King), James Lugton (Hacksaw Ridge), Renee Lim (The Invisible Man, Secret City), Susie Porter (Hungry Ghosts, Wentworth), Sandy Gore (Australia, Brides of Christ, Prisoner), Megan Smart (Between Two Worlds) and Andrea Demetriades (The Commons, Janet King).

Miguel Castro, Darcey OBrien, Emma Cleland, Liam Cleland, Blake Santos, Avery Santos and Danielle David will also appear in their first major television roles.

The series is produced by award-winning filmmaking duo Angie Fielder and Polly Staniford, whose recent credits include Lion, nominated for six Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards as well as Berlin Syndrome, Dirt Music, The Other Guy and The Unlisted. They are joined by Vonne Patiag (Halal Gurls) as Associate Producer. Written by series creator Jessica Redenbach (Spirited, Rush), Roger Monk (Nowhere Boys, The Secret Life of Us) and co-writer Vonne Patiag, with Margarett Cortez as Script Consultant. In the directors chairs are Emmy Award-winning Natalie Bailey (Retrograde, Run, Avenue 5, The Thick of It) and Melvin Montalban (Rope Burn, Cupid).

To mark the launch, SBS will be celebrating across its platforms with a curated collection of content across the network celebrating both women and Filipino culture. The Feeds Alice Matthews will also present a special half-hour program  Unwrapped  featuring the cast and creatives discussing gender, race and representation. It will be available on SBS On Demand following the series premiere.

The Unusual Suspects is an Aquarius Films production for SBS with major production investment from Screen Australia in association with Screen NSW and About Premium Content, which also handles international distribution. The series is financed with support from Cutting Edge Post.

The Unusual Suspects will be subtitled in Filipino, Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean and Hindi and will be added to the subtitled collection on SBS On Demand. The series will also be available with audio description for audiences who are blind or vision impaired.

8:30pm Thursday June 3 at SBS and SBS On Demand (full-series drop).

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ROME, APR 29 - The hand of the famed colossal ancient Roman statue of Emperor Constantine has been pout back together in Rome after a finger arrived from the Louvre in Paris, the Capitoline Museums said Thursday. The bronze hand is on display in the Marcus Aurelius Exedra together with other bronzes, formerly in the Lateran Palace, gifted to the Roman people by Pope Sixtus IV in 1471. The Rome museums thanked Louvre Director Jean-Luc Martinez for his generosity. (ANSA).
Scientists have discovered record numbers of blood-sucking eel-like fish in Australia after they were saved from the brink of extinction.

Lampreys were feared to be extinct after the Millennium Drought in the 2000s, but 101 fish from two species were tracked from July to October 2020 in South Australia.

The species, which are about 360 million-years-old, feed parasitically by attaching their mouths to the side of a fish or whale before sucking blood.

Scientists have discovered record numbers of Lampreys (pictured) - ancient blood-sucking eel-like fish - are travelling from the Southern Ocean to the River Murray to breed

Lampreys (pictured_ were feared to be extinct after the Millenium Drought in the 2000s, but 101 fish from two species were tracked from July to October 2020

The Millennium Drought was between 2001  2010, with the worst period between 2007 and 2010 with no freshwater flow from the River Murray to the Coorong and ocean.

This stopped the migration of adult lamprey from the Southern Ocean to the River Murray, where the lampreys return to their own birthplace to breed, lay eggs and then die.

'There were no freshwater flows to the ocean from the River Murray at the Lower Murray barrages for almost three years,' Adrienne Rumbelow from the Department for Environment and Water South Australia said.

'You need winter flows that are allowed to travel from source to sea ... If you don't get these things right you won't get migration and spawning.

'There were grave concerns for the future of the species in the Murray-Darling Basin.'

Lampreys (pictured) are around 360 million years old and in the ocean they feed parasitically by attaching their mouths to the side of their host fish or whale

About 91 pouched lamprey and four short-headed lamprey were tagged with microchips which were then scanned as they moved upstream.

'This helps us learn more about their movement and solve the mystery of where they spawn,' said Ms Rumbelow.

One pouched Lamprey, nicknamed 'Larry' by the scientists, travelled 878km at about 4.5km per hour.

When the fish start migrating up the River Murray, they stop feeding by changing their internal organs to invest in their reproductive system instead of their digestive system.

Scientists still do not know where the fish breed in the Murray-Darling Basin.
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DENVER  Responding to the Colorado supermarket shooting that killed 10 people, state Democratic lawmakers on Thursday outlined legislation that would create a state office dedicated to preventing gun violence, expand background checks and allow municipalities greater freedom to adopt their own gun control laws.

Senate Majority Leader Stephen Fenberg told a Capitol news conference that the legislation likely would not have stopped the Boulder shooting from happening. But he said the package advances Democrats gun control initiatives this year that have included new laws requiring safe firearms storage and reporting of lost or stolen firearms.

After the Boulder supermarket attack, residents called for an assault-style weapons ban, but Fenberg said such a move would be largely ineffective without a nationwide ban. He repeated that Thursday but insisted preventing gun violence requires continual steps.

There is nothing we can do to bring back the lives that were stolen from us, said Fenberg, who represents Boulder. We must continue to demand federal action on gun violence prevention.

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Lawmakers said the package includes a bill that would bar persons convicted of certain violent misdemeanors from buying a firearm for five years. The suspect in the March 22 Boulder supermarket shooting had been convicted of a third-degree misdemeanor assault charge, but authorities say he legally purchased a firearm days before the attack.

Another bill would close a loophole in state law that allows a gun buyer to obtain a weapon from a dealer if a background check hasnt been completed within three days. Its not immediately clear how that measure might be related to the Boulder shooting, but it has been a goal of gun-control activists since the man serving a life term for a 2017 attack that killed nine people inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church obtained a pistol used in the attack despite a background check delay.

Another bill would eliminate a statute that prohibits local municipalities from enacting gun regulations that are stricter than what state law allows. Citing that law, a state court had overturned a Boulder ban on assault weapons just days before the supermarket shooting, although authorities have said the suspect purchased his weapon in the neighboring Denver suburb of Arvada.

An Office of Gun Violence Prevention would collect data on shootings to craft initiatives to deter firearms use, said Sen. Rhonda Fields. Rep. Tom Sullivan, who like Fields has lost a son to gun violence, said the office would engage in community outreach and publicize existing laws, such as a so-called red flag law that allows, in certain instances, the surrender or seizure of firearms from persons deemed by a court to be a threat to themselves or others.

Ahwad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, faces multiple murder and attempted murder charges in connection with the attack at a busy King Soopers supermarket that killed 10 people, including a police officer. He has not been asked to enter a plea pending a mental health evaluation sought by his public defenders.

Prosecutors have yet to say if theyve determined a possible motive for the attack. Alissas next scheduled court appearance is May 25.

Republicans protested that they werent consulted on the legislation before Thursdays announcement, which came as the Democrat-led Legislature enters its final weeks.

The House Minority leader, Rep. Hugh McKean, said Republicans were eager to continue work on expanding access to and funding for mental and behavioral health services, which he called a root cause of gun violence. But he blasted the idea of an Office of Gun Violence Prevention, saying that the creation of new bureaucracies is never the solution and will only starve real efforts of scarce resources. He also defended the current background check system as effective.

Everyone from Republicans, Democrats, and independents is sick from the recent incidents of violence, McKean said in a statement.

Boulder investigators have said Alissa legally purchased a Ruger AR-556 pistol used in the attack. The weapon resembles an AR-15 rifle with a slightly shorter stock. He bought it six days before the shooting after passing a background check.

Alissa also was armed with 10 high-capacity ammunition magazines, devices banned in Colorado after previous mass shootings, according to Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty.

Dougherty has said that Alissa unlawfully possessed the magazines that hold more than 15 rounds but that investigators dont believe the magazines were purchased illegally. The high-capacity magazines were banned in Colorado after the 2012 mass shootings at a suburban Denver movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
New DNA technology has revealed that an unidentified homicide victim whose skeletal remains were found in West Manchester Township in 2013 is primarily Black and could have relatives in North Carolina, according to police.

Investigators previously thought John Doe was white, perhaps Hispanic, but the DNA Doe Project determined he is of 75% sub-Saharan African descent, West Manchester Township police announced Wednesday.

This means our victim was Black and may have had a Caucasian great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent in the family line, a police news release states. Results based on this new information are showing in the genealogy websites of distant family in the North Carolina area and surrounding states.

Based on the new DNA information, forensic artist Jenny Kenyon of Penn State Universitys Digital Fabrication and Specialized Technologies Departmentcreated two new renderings of how the man might have looked, police said.

But they warned that these renditions might not be exact likenesses. For example, police said, the person might have a different skin tone or different hairstyle.

One of the renditions shows John Doe with fractures to the bones of his left eye and the left side of his nose, police said; the other shows him without those injuries.

Prior isotope testing that indicates the victim was born and raised in the southeastern United States falls in line with the new DNA findings, police said.

In November 2013, a tree-trimming crew discovered skeletal remains just off Loucks Road near the intersection of Carlisle Road ( Route 74) in West Manchester Township.

Since then, West Manchester Township Police have determined the man was a victim of homicide but have declined to make public his cause of death.

Experts and scientists also have determined the man was likely between 35 and 45 years old and 5-feet-5 to 5-feet-8.

He wore an inexpensive upper dental plate and was missing some teeth in the upper right side of his mouth, officials have said.

He also suffered serious head trauma that broke his nose and the orbital bone around his left eye. However, police said the wound had healed or was healing, meaning it was unrelated to his death.

The trauma left the victim with an asymmetrical face, according to Kenyon, who previously created a clay reconstruction of what the mans face could have looked like. Police made that clay rendition public at a 2018 press conference.

At that press conference, Kenyon said the man was thin but had a muscular neck and muscular jawline.

Township Sgt. Lance Krout, the lead investigator in the case, has said that testing and examination determined the victim spent his last decade in or around Pennsylvania.

The victims information has been added to NamUs, a national database of missing persons, Krout told reporters.

Forensic experts estimate John Does body was lying in a brushy area a few feet off Loucks Road near the intersections of Haviland Road and Route 74 for between 3 and 10 years  and perhaps for as long as 18 or 20 years, according to Krout.

Theres a very good possibility this subject didnt live in the area, he said.

The body was in a culvert that hid it from the view of passing drivers, police said.

Asked whether John Doe was killed where his remains were found or whether his body was dumped there after he was killed, the officer has said investigators have opinions but cant yet discuss them publicly.

Anyone with information about the mans identity is asked to call West Manchester Township Police at 717-792-9514 and ask for Sgt. Krout or Detective Sgt. Sean Conway.

Reach senior crime reporter Liz Evans Scolforo at levans@yorkdispatch.com or on Twitter at @LizScolforoYD.
After negotiations between the presidents of Russia and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Joseph Biden, the intensity of passions around Donbass began to decline. Ukraine has declared its desire to solve the problem through diplomatic means. Russia has completed military exercises in Crimea. To what extent Kiev was really ready for the military campaign, whether a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky would take place, the political observer of Vestnik Kavkaza Kamran Hasanov asked the Ukrainian political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky.

- Mikhail Borisovich, what do you think, did Kiev or Washington have a plan for a military solution to the conflict? Were they going to really fight?

- It's hard to say what really happened. We have a distributed decision-making system, arbitrary interpretation in the head of the president, in the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense. They have their own point of view, volunteer units - another, the State Department - a third. Arguments that Kiev was preparing for war are easy to find. In mid-March, echelons with tanks, which were going to the confrontation line, appeared on social networks (video - editor's note). But I never seriously believed in an offensive, since the Russian leadership declared that in the event of an attack, Russia would take part in the response. I do not think that (the leadership of Ukraine - ed.) Made the decision. Those who make the decision should have been seriously afraid of such a development.

The reaction of Russia and the supply of troops to the border was not so much because Moscow believed in an offensive, but because Russia decided to end this burden, when in Kiev they first talk about the recognition of the Minsk agreements, then they reject them. It was decided to show how all this could end. The forces (of Russia - ed.) Transferred to the border were quite enough to force Ukraine to peace. I think it worked. Kiev's reaction that "we do not want provocation, but are ready for diplomacy" was hysterical. Numerous appeals to NATO, the State Department, the EU, Macron - in Ukrainian it sounds like "retort", "Putin will attack us, one hope for you" - all this looked like a cooling of the brains of our hot heads. Shoigu said that the check would be over in two weeks. She fulfilled her task. The threat of Kiev's attack on Donbass in the short term has been canceled, but there is no solution to the problem. And this burden lies with the Kremlin.

- Let's talk about a diplomatic solution to the conflict. About two weeks ago, Zelenskiy said that Minsk could no longer be a platform for negotiations, because Belarus is dependent on Russia. Where do you think negotiations can take place between Putin and Zelensky, if they take place?

- I do not see the prospects for a meeting between Putin and Zelensky. As an experienced person, Putin formulated, as it were, a response to Zelensky's delusional offer to meet in the Ukrainian Donbass. I do not exclude meetings at the level of the four (Merkel, Putin, Macron and Zelensky - ed.), But if Zelensky takes steps to implement the obligations he took in Paris in December 2019. As for the transfer, what difference does it make where to meet if a meeting is possible? Some of the talk show participants suggested moving the negotiations from Minsk to Moscow - I think this is real. I cannot offer more original. Finland? But representatives of Donbass will not go there. It seems to me that now everything is moving towards the loss of Ukraine's Donbass.

- The Russian leadership has repeatedly said that Kiev should communicate with the DPR and LPR directly. What prevents Zelensky and his administration from doing this?

- The very concept of confrontation interferes. The Ukrainian leadership does not accept the interpretation of what is happening as an internal Ukrainian event. This changes the attitude towards him in the circle of friends of Ukraine. They impose sanctions on Russia because "Russia is the aggressor." But if Zelensky or the head of the Foreign Ministry directly meets with people on the other side, this will mean a conflict between Ukrainians and Ukrainians. But this is unacceptable not so much for Kiev as for the image of what is happening in the eyes of the West, which supports Ukraine, because it opposes "an evil and terrible Russia." If Europe says that this is a civil war, then they give a pass to Putin, that is, they are on his side.

- In a recent interview, Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon listed four ways to return Crimea and Donbass to Ukraine. Three of them - the collapse of Russia, the war and US sanctions - he considers unlikely or ineffective. In his opinion, the best option is to make Ukraine economically attractive so that the DPR and LPR want to return to it. What do you think about this?

- I would not want to comment on the words of Gordon, he wags at every power, was friends with all the presidents. My position is this - I would like Crimea to be a part of Ukraine, in which the rights, including those of Russian speakers, are respected. I love Crimea, but I do not see any prospects for the return of Crimea to Ukraine in the short and medium term. Unless he can be ours and yours, but no Russian president will agree to the legally binding transfer of Crimea. Although the option of special relations between Ukraine and Crimea, when Ukraine returns water to Crimea and receives a preferential treatment for investments in Crimea, is real. This is possible, but with a different attitude towards Russia and the Russian people.

- And the return of Donbass?

- Things are worse with Donbass. I am not a fan of making far-reaching forecasts. I think Donbass is much closer to Russia than a return to Ukraine. The Ukrainian leadership under Zelensky did everything to lose Donbass. There are people in Donbass who have a good attitude towards Russia and a bad attitude towards NATO. And in the Ukrainian government there are people who want to be a part of the West, NATO, the EU. Even if it does not work out (to join NATO - editor's note), they would like to keep this perspective. Therefore, the return of Donbass would create a number of problems along the way.
The meteorite studied in this work, named Miles, weighed 265 kg when it was discovered on a farm in Queensland, Australia, in 1992. This photo shows a 20-centimeter slice of the Miles meteorite loaned by the Harvard Museum of Natural History collection. Credit: Clara Maurel/MIT

If you stumble upon an unusual rock that could be a meteorite, do not place a magnet on it to see if it's magneticyou'd end up erasing 4.5 billion years of magnetic history. Meteorites are remnants of our solar system's first protoplanets and, in some cases, retain a record of the magnetic fields they've experienced in the distant past.

"As planetary scientists, we're interested in understanding how protoplanets formed and evolved prior to the formation of the planets we know today," said Clara Maurel, a Ph.D. student at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. "There are many different areas of research that tackle these questions, and our angle of approach is to use magnetism."

In a recent paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Maurel and colleagues from MIT, Oxford, Arizona State, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab detected the signatures of ancient magnetic fields imprinted in a meteorite's ferromagnetic grains at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS).

The results revealed a bias in the magnetization directions found in different regions of the sample, indicating that the meteorite was exposed to a substantial, stable magnetic field that magnetized its ferromagnetic grains upon cooling. The team interpreted this as evidence for a dynamo-generated magnetic field powered by the parent body's churning, molten-metal core. A similar mechanism powers the Earth's magnetic field today.

Combined with earlier measurements of two other meteorites from the same parent and radioisotopic dating of the samples, the results support an extended time frame for the cooling of molten protoplanetary cores. Despite its small size compared to planets, this protoplanet did not cool quickly, but instead sustained a molten metallic core for tens of millions of years after the birth of the solar system.

"For people who are interested in modeling the evolution of protoplanets, experimental constraints like this are essential," said Maurel. "These data points represent an important first step toward a better understanding of the chronological activity of protoplanets, from their formation to the time they completely solidify and become inactive."

Explore further An origin story for a family of oddball meteorites

More information: Clara Maurel et al. A LongLived Planetesimal Dynamo Powered by Core Crystallization, Geophysical Research Letters (2021). Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters Clara Maurel et al. A LongLived Planetesimal Dynamo Powered by Core Crystallization,(2021). DOI: 10.1029/2020GL091917
Russia's aggression against Ukraine today resembles coronavirus, which mutates daily and becomes only more aggressive, while the "vaccine" against it can only be a broad coalition of countries, based on the G7 and under the leadership of the United States, leader of the Groysman's Ukrainian Strategy party Volodymyr Groysman said in on the air of the Ukraine 24 television channel.

In his opinion, today the world faces a choice  either banditry and lawlessness, or order and law. It is Ukraine that should give the world a chance to make a choice and form a powerful, friendly and painful response to the aggressor.

"Now Putin's aggression is coronavirus that mutates and becomes more aggressive. And this needs to be realized. The vaccine against the virus is the consolidation of our partners. This is the main task of world diplomacy. I call on President [Volodymyr] Zelensky and the ruling majority to direct efforts to consolidate our partners and our troops, which are firmly in their positions, Putin flexed his muscles and announced that he was withdrawing troops. And all the talk about meetings (Zelensky and Putin), the search for a place is a waste of time for Ukraine. For us, time is of key importance," the former prime minister said.

As Groysman said, the Kremlin is trying its best to drag out the negotiations in order to win an opportunity to adapt itself, to the sanctions, to the situation in the world. In return, Ukrainians receive funerals and suffer daily losses.

"We have a unique chance to be a global coalition led by U.S. President Joe Biden, who is personally involved in the process and starts to show leadership in this process, to achieve results," the politician said.

He said that sanctions against Russia must be coordinated, and "the aggressor must be hurt."

"The diplomatic corps needs to involve our partners, the G7 countries  to invite them to Ukraine to express their support here. This is a serious agenda. Consolidation of the world is of key importance. This is the action plan that needs to be dealt with," the former prime minister said.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 29, 2021) - iCo Therapeutics ("iCo" or the "Company") (TSXV: ICO) (OTC: ICOTF) today reported financial results for the year ended December 31, 2020. Amounts, unless specified otherwise, are expressed in Canadian dollars and presented under International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS").

William Jarosz, CEO of iCo Therapeutics Inc., noted "We were very pleased by the progress of our Oral Amp B program during the year with our compound being safe and well tolerated in Phase 1b clinical trials and potential as a therapeutic agent for novel Coronavirus. We are also excited for the new strategic directions that are open for us in this new year with Satellos, and the associated concurrent financing, previously announced."

The Company also announced the resignation of Susan Koppy as President of the Company and from the Board of Directors, effective April 30, 2021. "While I've had a long affiliation with iCo, I now feel that the Company is on a solid trajectory. For personal reasons, it's the right time for me to move on and tender my resignation. I wish the Company every success," noted Susan Koppy.

"We have benefitted from the guidance that Susan has provided for Business Development and thank her for all her hard work," said William Jarosz. The Company expects to appoint new officers and new members to the Board in conjunction with the Satellos transaction.

Operational and Financial Highlights

Corporate

On March 21, 2021, the Company entered into an agreement (the "Arrangement Agreement") providing for the business combination of iCo and Satellos Bioscience Inc. ("Satellos") by way of a plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") in accordance with Section 192 of the Canada Business Corporations Act (the "CBCA"). Pursuant to the Arrangement, Satellos will become a wholly owned subsidiary of iCo, and the parties expect to complete an amalgamation of iCo and Satellos, with the resulting entity named "Satellos Bioscience Inc." (the "Resulting Issuer"), operating in the life sciences industry. Following the Arrangement, and the Concurrent Financing (described below) shareholders of iCo will hold an approximately 27.7% ownership interest, and the shareholders of Satellos will hold approximately 58.8.% of the outstanding common shares of the Resulting Issuer.

The completion of the Arrangement will result in a reverse takeover of iCo as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange"). Completion of the Arrangement is subject to, among other things, the approval of the Exchange, court approval, and approval from iCo and Satellos' shareholders. As part of the Arrangement, iCo has closed a private placement (the "Concurrent Financing") of subscription receipts (the "Subscription Receipts") issuing 85,294,117 subscription receipts at a price of $0.085 per Subscription Receipt for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately C$7.25 million, representing an upsize from the C$6 million financing announced on March 22, 2021. Each Subscription Receipt entitles the holder thereof to receive, upon satisfaction of certain escrow release conditions, and without payment of additional consideration, one common share in the Resulting Issuer. The proceeds from the Concurrent Financing have been placed in escrow and, upon satisfaction of the release conditions and completion of the Arrangement, will be used for research, development, and general corporate expenses of the Resulting Issuer.

Also, subsequent to year end, warrant holders exercised 27,335,000 for proceeds of $1,758,795 to the Company.

Oral Amp B Delivery System

On February 25, 2020, iCo announced the completion of the Phase 1b study in which both (100 mg and 400 mg) doses of the oral Amphotericin B were well tolerated with no adverse events reported, including no signs of kidney or other toxicity.

On April 15, 2020, iCo announced pharmacokinetic results from the Phase 1b study. The oral Amphotericin B at the 100 mg dose achieved a median plasma Cmax of 25 ng AmB/mL and AUC (0-inf) 990 hr* ng/mL after day 1 of dosing and a median plasma Cmax of 44 ng AmB/mL and AUC (0-inf) 1998 hr*ng/mL after 10 day of dosing. This approximate doubling of the AUC (0-inf) measure between day 1 and day 10 was observed not only at the 100 mg dose but at the 400 mg dose as well.

On December 31, 2020, iCo and Skymount Medical, Inc. ("Skymount") announced that they entered into a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding to develop iCo-019, iCo's oral Amphotericin B formulation. Skymount is expected to initially commit up to $US 550,000 for pre-clinical work targeting the use of iCo-019 as a therapeutic product for infections relating to COVID-19.

On March 15, 2021, iCo announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Amphotericin B Technologies, Inc., entered into an agreement with IIT Research Institute to test the in vivo efficacy of iCo's novel oral amphotericin B asset ("iCo-019") against SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19 in the hACE2 mouse model (the "iCo-019 Study"). iCo anticipates that the iCo-019 Study will be completed by the end of Q2 2021.

Financial results for Year End 2020

We incurred a total comprehensive loss of $1,506,303 for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to a total comprehensive loss of $1,932,202 for the year ended December 31, 2019, representing a decrease of $425,899. The decrease is primarily the result of lower general and administrative expenses offset by lower research and development tax credits recognized during 2020.

Research and development expenses were $895,112 for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to $917,475 for the year ended December 31, 2019, representing a decrease of $22,363 or 2%. For both years the research and development expenses primarily reflected contract research expenses for a Phase 1b clinical trial conducted on the Oral Amp B program.

For the year ended December 31, 2020 general and administrative expenses were $760,463 compared to $1,288,198 for the year ended December 31, 2019, representing a decrease of $527,735. The decrease reflects lower consulting and professional fees during the period. The Company's participation in the IMMUNE bankruptcy process last year caused an increase in consulting and professional fees in the prior year.

Liquidity and Outstanding Share Capital

As at December 31, 2020, we had cash and cash equivalents of $65,413 compared to $989,937 as at December 31, 2019. Subsequent to year end, warrant holders exercised 27,335,000 for proceeds of $1,758,795 to the Company.

As at April 29, 2021, we had an unlimited number of authorized common shares with 181,082,713 common shares issued and outstanding.

For complete financial results, please see our filings at www.sedar.com.

About iCo Therapeutics Inc.

iCo Therapeutics identifies existing development stage assets for use in underserved ocular and infectious diseases. Such assets may exhibit utility in non-ophthalmic conditions outside the Company's core focus areas and if so the Company will seek to capture further value via partnerships. iCo shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "ICO" and on the OTC under the symbol "ICOTF".

For more information, visit the Company website at: www.icotherapeutics.com.

iCo Contact Information

William Jarosz

Chief Executive Officer

iCo Therapeutics

(917) 692-8799

Jarosz@icotherapeutics.com

iCo Therapeutics Inc.

1 604 800 9860

No regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the content of this press release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulatory 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

Certain statements included in this press release may be considered forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, which may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the completion of the Arrangement, the satisfaction of the escrow release conditions, intended use of proceeds from the financing, progress of the Oral Amp B program, and the potential of the Oral Amp B compounded as a therapeutic agent for the novel Coronavirus. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as: "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "goal," "seek," "believe," "project," "estimate," "expect," "strategy," "future," "likely," "may," "should," "will," and similar references to future periods. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements, and therefore these statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. All forward-looking statements are based on iCo's current beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to iCo and relate to, among other things, anticipated financial performance, business prospects, strategies, regulatory developments, market acceptance and future commitments, including statements relating to reporting further data regarding studies for Oral Amp Delivery System, the timing of receipt of the statistical analysis for clinical data, the timing, receipt and amount of Australian refundable tax credits, any decrease in research and development expenditures and the completion of additional funding and commencement of additional clinical studies. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are based only on information currently available to iCo and speak only as of the date of this press release. Due to risks and uncertainties, including the risks and uncertainties identified by iCo in its public securities filings and on its website, actual events may differ materially from current expectations. In evaluating forward-looking statements, readers should consider the risk factors set out herein and in the Company's Annual Information Form dated April 29, 2019, a copy of which is available under iCo's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and as otherwise disclosed in the Company's filings under its profile on SEDAR from time to time. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and iCo 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.

NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/82380.
FILE PHOTO: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gestures during a news conference at the National Palace in Mexico City

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador criticized the country's telecoms companies on Wednesday for impeding an initiative to create a national biometric cellphone user registry that is opposed both by industry and rights groups.

Backed as a measure to improve public safety by the Senate this month, the registry would require companies to pay for collection of their clients' biometric data, which would then be stored and managed by the telecoms regulator.

Telecoms sector groups argue it would cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. Rights groups say it poses a human rights violation and could lead to wrongful convictions if people's identities are stolen.

Mexico's data protection body plans to challenge the registry before the Supreme Court. Judges have also suspended its implementation, according to local media.

But Lopez Obrador said telecoms providers were impeding a law designed to protect people.

"These telephone companies ... have a lot of power, in addition to acting with great hypocrisy, because they already request that data to contract a telephone service," he told reporters at a regular news conference.

"Now as they also have lots of money to buy or rent media, they're running a campaign against us," he added, singling out Telmex, a unit of America Movil, the company controlled by the family of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

Supporters of the measure say it will help crack down on criminals who use unregistered pre-paid phones for kidnapping and extortion calls. The registry's information would be available by request from law enforcement officials.

While over 150 countries around the world maintain cellphone user registries, only about 8% of those also require biometrics, according to global telecoms industry lobby GSMA.

(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) Centre For Asian Nursing Studies (CANS) and the Skin Research Institute of Singapore (SRIS), a tripartite hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)

Chronic wounds among patients with diabetic foot ulcers and bedsores leeds to longer hospital stays. This increases the economic burden on healthcare resources, with significant reductions in quality of life for affected patients.

On April 14, 2021, Singapore's Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) Centre For Asian Nursing Studies (CANS) and the Skin Research Institute of Singapore (SRIS) inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a tripartite hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) aiming further research collaboration between the parties for new models of care for seniors, and in particular, improved wound care outcomes. These new models of care will improve the quality of life for patients with chronic wounds.

The partnership will enable continued collaboration in the areas of; Better understanding of pressing needs in chronic wound care. This will facilitate the conception of new models of care that follows an elderly patient from an acute hospital care setting to a community or home setting. This also can drive innovation for products that can aid wound healing (example: locally developed disposable pressure compression bandages for patients with Venous Leg Ulcers) and can boost training opportunities for local nurses.

Furthur, TTSH specialist wound care nurses and key representatives from the Skin Research Institute of Singapore (SRIS) shared more about the significance of this MOU with Biospectrum Asia.

How significant is this MoU in covering Chronic wound care in elderly patients?

At present, and also as reflected in the research paper, most of the follow-up care for chronic wounds takes place at acute hospitals or specialist outpatient clinics.

Through this MOU and with more innovation, research and training to ensure more nurses are trained to care for elderly patients with chronic wounds, this could allow for early and timely intervention without requiring the patient to return to the hospital for treatment for chronic wounds such as bed sores and venous leg ulcers.

Can you elaborate on the care models that will improve the quality of life in chronic wound patients?

There is potential to fast-track care and reduce waiting time, from about four weeks to two weeks, for patients seeking care for their chronic wounds if more nurses in the community are trained to manage wounds in the future.

How do you describe Wound Care Innovations and innovative products aiding wound healing?

With this collaboration, we hope to work on next-generation wound dressing and diagnostics to fight wound infections and improve patient wound healing outcomes. One example of ongoing collaboration is the invention of micro-bubble wrap pressure sensor developed locally (by SRIS and A*STARs Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), as well as TTSH) for purpose of wound care and training tool for nurses, which can be used to aid nurses in applying the right pressure for compression therapy that is needed for patients with venous leg ulcers.

It could also potentially reduce the burden of specialist nurses caring for patients with chronic wounds, as this Pressure Sensor Tool can help to widen the pool of nurses with the required skills to handle chronic wounds. At present, and also as reflected in the research paper, most of the follow-up care for VLUs takes place at the specialist outpatient and primary care setting.

What defines the economic burden on healthcare resources in the Asia-Pacific region? How do TTSH research collaboration strategies reduce the distress at patient care?

Chronic Wounds pose a significant burden to healthcare systems, accounting for up to 10% of healthcare expenditure in developed nations. Chronic wounds can have a huge negative impact a persons mobility, well-being and quality of life. Chronic wounds primarily affect the elderly and with a rapidly ageing population like Singapore, China, Japan and South Korea, it is anticipated that the numbers of individuals afflicted with chronic wounds will only further increase.

The research study by SRIS Wound Care Innovation for the Tropics (WCIT) programme and TTSH (see factsheet for more details) highlighted that chronic wounds among patients with diabetic foot ulcers and bedsores led to longer hospital stays. The paper gathered data on chronic wounds among elderly patients at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) via an e-Wounds system. On a whole, the average length of stay for each wound episode was 17.7 days, which is 2.4 times that of the average length of stay within TTSH. This increases the economic burden on healthcare resources, with a significant reduction in quality of life for affected patients. As such, there is an urgent need to innovate and address the issue now. One area of our common interest is education and training to improve nursing competencies to prevent and manage chronic wounds according to international best practices.

Spokespersons:

Goh Cheng Cheng Karine, Nurse Clinician (Specialist Wound Care Nurse), Tan Tock Seng Hospital

Dr Ng Yizhen, Programme Manager, WCIT, Skin Research Institute of Singapore (SRIS)
New Delhi:

A 16-year-old Mumbai girl files complaint against her uncle convicted in double murder for allegedly raping and burning her private parts with candle whenever he came out on parole.

According to senior police officers of Mumbai Police, a 16-year-old girl approached the Mahim police station and lodged a complaint against her fathers brother and his wife.

She told us that , whenever he rape her, he used to burn her private parts with candle whenever she tried raising a protest, said an official from Mahim police station.

Police said, she in the complaint has mentions that her uncle whenever came out in parole used to torture the victim by burning her with candles and repeatedly raped her since she was 10-year-old.

Also read: UP: Man rapes 18-month-old niece in Badaun



The police officer added that she in her complaint mentioned that on Tuesday evening her 46-year-old uncle repeatedly raped her after showing her porn clips at his house.

Mahin police have arrested the accused and his wife under intimidation, assault and sections of POSCO act.

The police officer said the accuseds wife has been arrested ash she was aware of the crime but did not inform the girl family or the police.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Many Americans would, I suspect, be surprised to learn that the truth is that many high-tax, high-benefit countries are quite successful at creating jobs. Take the case of France: Adults between the ages of 25 and 54, the prime working years, are more likely to be employed in France than they are in America, mainly because Frenchwomen have a higher rate of paid employment than their American counterparts. The Nordic countries have an even larger employment advantage among women.

How can employment be so high in countries with lots of job-killing taxes? The answer is that taxes dont visibly kill jobs  but lack of child care does. Parents in many rich countries are able to take paid work because they have access to safe, affordable child care; in the United States such care is prohibitively expensive for many, if they can get it at all. And the reason is that our government spends almost nothing on child care and pre-K; our outlays as a percentage of G.D.P. put us somewhat below Cyprus and Romania.

The American Family Plan would completely change this picture, providing free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds while limiting child care costs to no more than 7 percent of income for lower- and middle-income parents. If this raised employment of prime-age American women to French levels, it would add about 1.8 million jobs; if we went to Danish levels, we would add three million jobs.

Just to be clear, making it possible for more women to take paid jobs isnt the principal point of this plan  and theres nothing wrong with parents choosing to stay at home and care for their kids. Instead, its mainly about improving the environment in which children grow up, partly as a matter of social justice, partly so that they eventually become healthier, more productive adults.

But higher employment  jobs generally expand to meet the available work force  would be a significant and more immediate side benefit. And it would also offer a partial fiscal offset to the direct cost of child care and pre-K, both because newly working Americans would pay taxes and because they would be less likely to need support from safety-net programs like food stamps. No, Bidens spending plans wont pay for themselves. But theyll cost taxpayers less than the headline numbers might suggest.

And if these plans improve life for millions of Americans, will anyone besides professional ideologues care if theyre big government?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Internet freedom in Pakistan has declined dramatically in 2021 as Prime Minister Imran Khan-led government has increased blocking political, social and cultural websites, as well as increased "weaponisation of the cybercrime law as a tool", said a report. The report, 'Annual Pakistan media legal review 2020', was launched by the Institute for Research, advocacy and Development (IRADA) to commemorate the upcoming World Press Freedom Day on May 3, Dawn reported.

Report: 'Internet freedom has declined in Pakistan'

As per the report titled, "Growing fear and hate in Pakistani online civic spaces", the accumulative effect of these outcomes was that the already unfriendly legal framework governing freedom of expression, right to information and digital rights in Pakistan has worsened considerably during 2020. The report further said that Pakistan was experiencing major setbacks in the enforcement of digital rights, freedom of expression and right to information- especially on online spaces-through regression in areas of internet policies and regulations.

"This is resulting in a rise in censorship, hate speech, digital surveillance and breach of privacy and disinformation and misinformation online," the report added.

Noting that the cybercrime law was repeatedly invoked against journalists and opinion makers for exercising freedom of expression and social media activism, the report said that a large number of journalists and social media activists became targets of the draconian Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) 2016.

The report also mentioned that several journalists and rights activists have faced inquiries, abductions, investigations and arrests related to their online/social media activities and posts. Stating that the freedom of expression is guaranteed fundamental right in the shape of Article 19 of the Constitution, IRADA Executive Director Mohammad Aftab Alam said, "Imran Khan-led Pakistan government need to roll back its increasingly coercive policy and hostile practices aimed at curbing free speech and bring them in alignment with the best practices of diversity and pluralism in expression and allow online spaces to be representative of the people's opinions and interests."

(Image: AP, PTI)
ROGUE VALLEY, Ore. -- Multiple agencies are working together to mitigate fire risk in southern Oregon.

Early this month, the USDA awarded new partnership projects in Oregon to help mitigate climate change and protect natural resources while supporting americas producers.

The West Bear All-Lands Restoration Project, was one of 5 to receive funding.

Projects like this, help us do our job by the reducing the fuels to the wild land urban interface. Jacksonville is a little national historic town so we have a lot of wild land, urban interface in that area so this helps us immensely," said Wayne Painter, Jacksonville Fire Department, Fire Chief.

Lomakatsi Restoration Project is the lead partner but multiple other agencies and investments from fundraising efforts have bolstered the action of wildfire mitigation in southern Oregon.

The West Bear All-Lands Restoration Project will treat thousands of acres, with a goal of preventing deadly and devastating wildfires from tearing through our Southern Oregon communities.

The time is right now, there's never been more interest from private land owners as well, said Peter Winnick, Jackson County's Acting District Conservationist, "we're trying to really get along the ingress and the egress and, and really look at communities at risk with all the losses going on in communities, it just has to be part of it.

The mitigation plan focuses on an area west of I-5 in Jackson county that starts near Jacksonville and moves south.

Gov. Brown calling it a win for everyone involved.

I see these projects as win-win win. Obviously we're creating healthier, more fire, resilient landscapes, we're putting folks to work, and we're creating safer communities, particularly for private landowners in the area," said Gov. Brown.

The Nature Conservancy in Oregon has put together projections for areas in our region that need wildfire mitigation work done, sharing today that theres a lot to do and it wont be cheap.

We've identified all of the areas about a million acres over 20 years that would need to be treated," said Darren Borgias with The Nature Conservancy, "some of it will generate income with small diameter logs that we can sell to the mills and creating more jobs and induce even more jobs beyond that; a lot of it is non-commercial and it's going to cost a pretty penny to do all of the work, we estimate about $700-$800 million.

Agencies in attendance today thanked the Governor and asked for the continued support for Senate Bill 762 which would designate a study on strategies to promote wildfire response and recovery and then present those results in a report before September of 2022.
(Newser)  Last year, GQ reported that strange, apparent attacks like those that sickened diplomats in Cuba had taken place inside the US. A month later, one such incident occurred just outside the White House. A National Security Council official was sickened near the Ellipse, the oval lawn on the White House's south side, in November, CNN reports. That followed a 2019 incident involving a White House official walking just outside Washington. She reported a headache, ringing in her ears, and a tingling on her face. As GQ reported, the official had experienced a similar sensation months earlier while accompanying John Bolton, then the national security adviser, on a trip to London. Lawmakers on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees were briefed this month on the incidents, said to resemble "Havana Syndrome" cases among US personnel in Russia, China, and Cuba.

story continues below

The National Academies of Science studied the symptoms of up to 40 diplomats who served in China and Cuba before concluding they were consistent with "directed, pulsed radio frequency energy," per NBC News. "Studies published in the open literature ... by Western and Soviet sources provide circumstantial support for this possible mechanism," reads the report issued in December. Briefers, who also described apparent attacks on US troops in the Middle East, told lawmakers that the technology likely originated in Russia or China, per Politico. However, one former US official tells CNN that a naturally occurring phenomenon has not been ruled out. While the wide array of locales and symptomsincluding dizziness, visual disturbances, and brain damagemake cases difficult to investigate, the CIA, State Department and Defense Department are on the case. (Read more White House stories.)
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Persistence Market Research (PMR) published a report on the ultrasonic skin care devices market, which considers the global industry analysis 2014 - 2018 and opportunity assessment 2019 - 2029, and projects that the ultrasonic skin care devices market is expected to reach ~ US$ 440 Mn by the end of 2019 in terms of value, and is forecasted to reach ~ US$ 720 Mn by the end of 2029.

The presence of large number of companies is creating a healthy environment among the players. Companies with wide range of ultrasonic skin care devices are creating competitive environment for the other players in the market. The players are constantly working on developing better products to stay ahead of the pack.

Planning Forward? Access Sample Of Ultrasonic Skin Care Devices Market Report! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.co/samples/27490

Company Profiles: Merz Pharma GmbH & Co. kGaA

Koninklijke Philips N.V

Iskra Medical d.o.o

Ibramed

Shenzhen Leaflife Technology Co., Ltd

Guangzhou Beautylife Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.

Ionto Health & Beauty Gmbh

Grand Aespio Inc.

Termosalud S.L

Adore cosmetics

Hironic Co. Ltd.

Bomtech Electronics co., Ltd

General Project Srl

Asterasys Co. Ltd.

Jellen Products Inc.

Companies such as Merz Pharma GmbH & Co. KGaA, Adore Cosmetics, Jellen Products, Inc. etc. are some of the prominent players in the market. Presence of local players including Shenzhen Bowei tech Co.ltd, Zerone Co., Ltd., and others are further likely to challenge the established companies.

Thus, these conditions are inciting manufacturers to come up with more advanced and improvised ultrasonic skin care devices.

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Manufacturers to Tap Opportunities in Sales through E-commerce Sites

The online availability of the ultrasonic skin care devices has created a favorable condition for the market players. Most of the companies provide the international shipping services, and therefore the devices can be ordered from anywhere globally.

Many products are also available on online shopping sites such as amazon, flipkart, etc. and can be easily purchased by consumers, even in remote areas. These online websites also help in brand promotion and advertisement of ultrasonic skin care devices, thereby creating better opportunities for players.

Increasing Adoption of Home-based Skin Care Devices to Push the Market Growth

There is high demand for home care setting ultrasonic skin care devices which are user friendly and convenient to use. These ultrasonic skin care devices are cost effective and do not require any extra maintenance. Also, the procedure time for home care ultrasonic skin care devices are shorter as compared to table top devices and do not require professionals to operate.

Products such as palm sonic by Adore Cosmetics, Visa boost by Philips, PureCle Dr. by Bomtech Electronics co., Ltd. continue to account major share of the manufacturers bottom lines. Home- based devices are easy to handle and do not require any professional assistance. These devices can be used for various applications such as skin tightening and skin rejuvenation, with better results.

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Table top devices are used in hospitals and clinics, and require professional experts to operate them. The ultrasonic skin care tabletop devices are widely used to overcome several skin related problems and to perform certain procedures like face lifting, skin tightening etc.

However, the cost of these ultrasonic skin care devices are high as compared to other handheld devices, thus representing a threat to the market growth. For instance, Ultherapy ultrasonic device manufactured by Merz Pharma GmbH & Co. KGaA are widely used in aesthetic clinics and has average price of US$ 70000. Such high cost of these devices are likely to act as a hindrance for the growth of the ultrasonic skin care devices market.

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Wasabi triples valuation as it continues to establish first hyperscale cloud storage architecture

Boston, MA, April 29, 2021, the hot cloud storage company, today announced $112M in Series C funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from existing investors. The round follows Wasabi's $27.5M in debt financing announced in January. The C round brings Wasabi's total equity financing to $219 million.

The valuation of the C round was roughly triple the valuation of the company's most recent equity round, which closed almost exactly one year ago. Wasabi's revenue and storage under management has also tripled in the last year with deployed storage recently passing one exabyte. The company has 22,000 customers worldwide, and Wasabi's channel network more than doubled to over 5,000 partners worldwide. The company has data centers in the US, Europe and Japan.

Proceeds from this funding will be used to expand the company's network of resellers, technology alliance partners, and distributors, open data centers in many new international markets, and to significantly grow its internal team across all fronts including development, sales, support, marketing, administration and operations. The company will also use the proceeds to make further investments in building its brand internationally and providing additional marketing support for its channel partners.

"This new funding is a watershed event for Wasabi," said Wasabi CEO & Co-Founder David Friend. "With revenues tripling for each of the last 3 years and over $100M of new investment led by one of the world's largest and most prestigious financial institutions, our customers will know that their data is in the hands of a reliable, fast-growing company with the substantial resources to meet their growing needs. Storing the world's data in the cloud is one of the biggest opportunities in the IT industry, and we are now well-positioned to secure a leadership role in the evolution of the cloud. We will continue to invest in our proprietary software, grow our channel, enhance our brand and expand storage capacity around the world."

Wasabi is redefining the way businesses think about cloud storage by offering a solution that is 1/5th the cost of Amazon S3, has zero fees for egress or API requests and requires no vendor lock-in. With cloud data storage growing 60% year over year, low-cost, highly reliable and infinitely scalable cloud storage is in demand by a wide range of organizations. It's an ideal product for the channel because every organization needs to store data, it's simple to learn to sell, and channel partners enjoy healthy margins. Wasabi's rapidly expanding customer base stores every imaginable type of data ranging from backups, DR and archiving to surveillance, medical imaging, big science, education, genomics, AI/ML data lakes, television, movies and government data.

"The cloud IaaS market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year, primarily fueled by businesses' needs to support new ways of working, while also delivering more digital goods and services to customers." said Andrew Smith, Research Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC. "As cloud data migrations and hybrid cloud adoption continues to accelerate, Wasabi is well-positioned to deliver IaaS storage solutions that meet buyer needs for consistent, transparent pricing, as well as integration across multiple cloud and on-premises storage environments."

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC served as lead placement agent and Lincoln International served as a co-placement agent to Wasabi in connection with this funding. Foley & Lardner served as counsel to the company.

For more information on Wasabi's hot cloud storage, please visit Wasabi.com.

About Wasabi

Wasabi provides simple, predictable and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over the world. It enables organizations to store and instantly access an infinite amount of data at 1/5th the price of the competition with no complex tiers or unpredictable egress fees. Trusted by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, Wasabi has been recognized as one of technology's fastest-growing and most visionary companies. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi has secured nearly $250 million in funding to date and is a privately held company based in Boston.

Follow and connect with Wasabi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagramand our blog.
Modelo is awarding prizes so people 21+ can celebrate, connect on social and raise a glass to the heroes who got us here

CHICAGO, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- This Cinco de Mayo, Modelo is giving away $250,000 worth of beer, in the form of $10 gift cards, so fans can join in on a celebratory SaludToCinco social toast on Wednesday, May 5 - a virtual "salud" to connect. Additionally, Modelo, the beer brewed with The Fighting Spirit, is again supporting FirstRespondersFirst with a donation to salute the ongoing tireless efforts of first responders.



"At Modelo, we believe the best celebrations happen when we're able to reconnect with friends and family," said Greg Gallagher, Vice President, Modelo Brand Marketing. "That's why we're picking up the tab this Cinco de Mayo so fans can raise a glass to the heroes who've had our backs this past year."

Now through noon on May 4, those 21+ can visit ModeloCincodeMayo.dja.comor follow @ModeloUSA on social to learn how to enter for a chance to win a $10 e-gift card that can be used to purchase a 6-pack of Modelo.* Modelo will then encourage fans of legal drinking age to join the social toast on Cinco de Mayo, honoring first responders and tagging the heroes in their lives with the hashtag SaludToCinco.

Modelo will continue its support of first responders with a $250,000 donation to FirstRespondersFirst, an organization dedicated to the wellbeing of healthcare workers. Modelo has always been committed to honoring those with The Fighting Spirit, a core part of the brand's DNA. Last year Modelo donated $750,000 to FirstRespondersFirst to provide essential supplies, equipment, and resources to protect healthcare workers on the frontline.

To bring to life the essence of SaludToCinco, Modelo recently teamed up with Mario Lopez - actor, media personality, and brand fan - to surprise a group of healthcare workers in his hometown of Burbank, Calif. While at the hospital, they expressed appreciation of the staff's hard work and sacrifices while treating them to local Mexican food.

*About the Sweepstakes: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to 50 US/DC, 21+. Ends 5/4/21 at 11:59 AM ET. Void where prohibited. Rules: modelocincodemayo.dja.com

About Modelo

Born in 1925 in the small town of Tacuba, Mexico, Modelo has been bringing distinctive high-quality beer to people ever since, including Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, Modelo Chelada Especial, Modelo Chelada Tamarindo Picante, Modelo Chelada Limon y Sal and Modelo Chelada Mango y Chile. Modelo Especial is a golden, full-flavored Pilsner-style Lager with a clean, crisp finish whose original recipe was first brewed under the vision to create a 'model' beer. As the #1 imported beer in the U.S., Modelo Especial surpassed 100MM cases sold in 2018. The Modelo family of beers are exclusively brewed, imported and marketed for the U.S. by Constellations Brands.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Angie Taylor

angie.taylor@zenogroup.com




NDRF personnel spray disinfectant as a precautionary measure against COVID-19 at the Charminar monument during a night curfew imposed by the state government in the wake of increasing coronavirus infections in Hyderabad. (Photo: AP)

HYDERABAD: A division bench of Telangana High Court, comprising Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy, sought to know what the State government intends to do once the night curfew ends on Friday.

The bench directed advocate general B.S Prasad to inform it about the decision of the government by Friday morning.

The court had asked it earlier also but Prasad on Thursday informed that the chief secretary would hold a meeting with district collectors and others Friday Morning. Subsequently, a decision would be taken based on the inputs gathered during the meeting.

The court wanted to know the decision of the Government as the Union Home Ministry had asked the State government to impose local restrictions and implement strict containment measures to flatten the Covid-19 curve.

We are not compelling or recommending the State to go for this or that, in view of Centres advice. But, everyone should know about the decision at least one day before. Do you feel there would be radical changes in one day, the Chief Justice asked Prasad.

The bench also questioned about reducing Covid tests since April 26.

Your data and media reports only say that tests had come down by 10,000 on April 27 compared to the earlier day and on April 28, it was down by 8,000 tests. We are not relying on media or any other third party reports. Your report only says that tests have come down to around 80,000 from one lakh. Automatically, when tests are lowered, the infected cases will also come down correspondingly. It is nothing but wrapping up data, the court said.

The court advised the State to be transparent and alert to the situation.
Call 2 Worship  April 26

Calvary Baptist Church hosts A Shot of Faith Vaccination Pop-up Clinic on May 1, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at 4911 W. 59th St., in Los Angeles, said Pastor Virgil Jones. The Pfizer or Moderna vaccines will available for free to L.A. County residents ages 16 and up. Also, Dr. Jerry Abraham, Kedren Health Center Director, will be on hand, along with other medical experts to answer vaccine questions and the L.A. Regional Food Bank will distribute free groceries. To learn more, call the church office at (323) 298-1605.

African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council (AATCLC) kicks-off No Menthol Sunday on May 4, at 2 p.m. Faith leaders and members are invited to the virtual town hall to learn about the effects of tobacco on Black American and African Immigrant populations, the tobacco industrys predatory marketing tactics, and the need to regulate flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes. To register, visit http://bit.ly/canms2021.

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Brookins-Kirkland Community AME Church observes Mothers Day on May 9, at 9 a.m., during its virtual Sunday worship service, said Pastor Mary S. Minor. A special sermon and musical selections will be shared. Also, Lamar Stuart will deliver a special tribute in honor of all mothers and those who act as a mother to others. Call the church office at (323) 296-5610 for the virtual service phone number.

California African American Museum plans a virtual reading of Rock of Ages: A Tribute to the Black Church on May 15, at 10:30 a.m. The event, co-sponsored by Oakland Public Library, also celebrates CAAMs exhibition, Enunciated Life. A librarian will read from Rock of Ages, written by Tonya Bolden and featuring illustrations by R. Gregory Christie. For Zoom details, RSVP at caamuseum.org/programs.

Email news about your faith-based and community events to [email protected]!
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 17:51:10|Editor: huaxia

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China has emerged as a stronger country under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and it has a great future, said Reno Calleja, President of the Malta China Friendship Society (MCFS), in a recent interview.

Calleja also emphasized that China provides assistance without strings attached to the benefit of the world, particularly many African countries.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
NEW YORK, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Internet Brands, a KKR portfolio company and owner of WebMD Health Corp. ("WebMD"), a leader in health information services for physicians and consumers, today announced an agreement to acquire PulsePoint Inc., a leading technology company using real-time data to unlock and activate health insights. Internet Brands' acquisition of PulsePoint accelerates its expansion into the healthcare marketing technology space, adding enhanced programmatic and data capabilities across its portfolio of companies.

As part of Internet Brands, PulsePoint's technology will help deliver next generation, privacy-focused targeting and analysis for a post-cookie marketplace. PulsePoint's machine learning engine powers its ability to deliver personalized messaging at each stage of the health journey. With real time intelligent customer decision-making tools, health marketers are able to effectively leverage and act on data to deliver optimized messaging complementary to past and future actions and behaviors across display, mobile web, app, connected TV, digital out-of-home, native and social channels.

"PulsePoint's privacy-focused approach to programmatic advertising and real-time analytics adds to our portfolio of brands and services, giving our customers greater flexibility, ease, and ability to reach qualified audiences throughout their journey. The addition of PulsePoint will enable WebMD and Medscape to leverage combined competencies and scale to better serve clients, healthcare professionals and consumers even more comprehensively," said Internet Brands and WebMD CEO Bob Brisco.

"There is no other company better positioned for PulsePoint to join forces with than Internet Brands and its portfolio of iconic health media brands, including WebMD and Medscape," said PulsePoint CEO Sloan Gaon. "With the support of WebMD, our growth in data innovation and product development will only further accelerate to introduce new solutions that we believe will reshape the future of healthcare engagement."

PulsePoint will remain an independently run entity, with teams in New York, San Francisco and London. The company's programmatic exchange will continue to service demand and supply side partners across the ad tech ecosystem and Internet Brands' portfolio of auto, home and travel, legal and diversified media brands, and alongside its health specific technologies.

The transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks, subject to regulatory and other approvals. Terms are not being disclosed.

About Internet Brands

Internet Brands is a fully integrated online media and software services organization focused on four high-value vertical categories: Health, Automotive, Legal, and Home/Travel. The company's award-winning consumer websites are a leader in their categories and serve more than 250 million monthly visitors, while a full range of web presence offerings has established deep, long-term relationships with SMB and enterprise clients. Internet Brands' powerful, proprietary operating platform provides the flexibility and scalability to fuel the company's continued growth. Internet Brands is a portfolio company of KKR and Temasek.

About WebMD Health Corp.

WebMD Health Corp., an Internet Brands Company, is a leading provider of health information services, serving patients, physicians, health care professionals, employers, and health plans through our public and private online portals, mobile platforms, and health-focused publications. The WebMD Health Network includes WebMD Health, Medscape, Jobson Healthcare Information, MediQuality, Frontline, QxMD, Vitals Consumer Services, MedicineNet, eMedicineHealth, RxList, OnHealth, Medscape Education, and other owned WebMD sites. WebMD, Medscape, CME Circle, Medpulse, eMedicine, MedicineNet, theheart.org, and RxList are among the trademarks of WebMD Health Corp. or its subsidiaries.

About PulsePoint

PulsePoint produces a complete view of the health customer, to unlock and activate health insights in order to revolutionize health decision-making in real time. Through machine learning and programmatic automation, the company interprets the hard-to-read signals of the health journey to understand the connection points between relevance and engagement. This is achieved by unifying real-time Digital Determinants of Health, offline and clinical data to create a unique and precise view of the health ecosystem that refines, improves and increases its view over time. You can learn more at www.pulsepoint.com .

SOURCE Internet Brands, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.internetbrands.com


New Delhi: Today is the first death anniversary of the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan who succumbed to death from a colon infection after battling the rare Neuroendocrine cancer disease for two years.

The actor, who is sorely missed, is often kept alive in our memories by beautiful anecdotes shared on social media posts shared by his son Babil Khan.

On Thursday (April 29), which marks the first death anniversary of the late actor, Babil took to his Instagram account to share a long post remembering his father.

Recounting Irrfans coping up mechanism from the severe chemotherapy treatment, Babil shared, Chemo burns you from the inside, so to find joy in the simple things, like building your own table to write your own journals. There is a purity, I have not yet discovered. There is a legacy that has already been concluded by my Baba himself. A full stop. Nobody can ever replace him. Nobody will ever be able to.

Talking about the love that he has for his father that is  more than all that shah-Jahan/mumtaz stuff, Babil wrote, I love you so much, for the rest of this chaos we are choosing to call life. I miss you, more than all that shah-Jahan/mumtaz stuff; I would have built a space monument that could have taken us to the furthest parts of a blackhole singularity you were always intrigued by, but I would have been there with you Baba, and we could have gone together, hand in hand. (Exploring the last mysteries).

Earlier, in an interview Babil revealed that Irrfan knew that he was going to die and told this to him two days before passing away.

Babil is going to follow in the footsteps of his late father and become an actor. He has already bagged a Netflix film Qala co-starring Triptii Dimri and produced by Anushka Sharmas Clean Slatz.
President Joe Biden took aim at China in his first speech to Congress on Wednesday, pledging to maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific and promising to boost technological development and trade.

'China and other countries are closing in fast. We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future,' Biden said.

He referenced U.S. competitor China multiple times in his remarks. Biden has focused on Beijing's economic threat since he took office and his speech featured plenty of tough talk.

'Were in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better,' he said, using his campaign slogan.

'China and other countries are closing in fast,' he warned.

He brought up a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping and referenced years of complaints about Chinese trade practices  which helped prompt a trade war under President Trump.

'That means making sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China,' Biden said. 'In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competition  and that we are not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.'

And in a line that drew some of the strongest applause of the evening, he said, 'There is simply no reason the blades for wind turbines can't be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.'

Biden has repeatedly identified competition with China as the greatest foreign policy challenge the country faces. He and his fellow Democrats as well as opposition Republicans have all moved toward a harder line on dealings with Beijing.

President Joe Biden took aim at China in his first speech to Congress

He brought up a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping and referenced years of complaints about Chinese trade practices

'America will stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and American industries, like subsidies to state-owned enterprises and the theft of American technology and intellectual property,' Biden said.

He also said he told President Xi that the United States will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific 'just as we do for NATO in Europe - not to start conflict - but to prevent one.'

While offering few specifics, Biden gave more attention to China than any other foreign policy issue in a speech largely focused on domestic policies.

He has been urging lawmakers to pass a sweeping bipartisan package of legislation now making its way through the Senate that would press Beijing on human rights, address the trade imbalance and boost funding for U.S. development of new technologies to compete more effectively with China.

'America won't back away from our commitments to human rights and fundamental freedoms and our alliances,' he said.

Biden also addressed competition with another geopolitical rival, Russia. He said he had made clear to President Vladimir Putin that Moscow's interference in U.S. elections and cyber attacks on government and businesses would have consequences, but Washington does not seek escalation.

And, in a departure from the go-it-alone foreign policy of his Republican predecessor former President Donald Trump, Biden said he would work closely with allies to counter the threats posed by the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
Hospital-based procedures have been migrating to the outpatient space for 20 years. During that time, Dr. Hewett has been leading the way in the development and management of surgical centers in an outpatient setting, with more than 25 years of experience in minimally invasive vascular care. Since 2007, he has opened eight vascular care centers throughout the western U.S. with a focus in California. Now, Dr. Hewett has put his extensive experience and expertise to work building Orange County Surgical Center, the most advanced outpatient surgical center ever constructed in Orange County.

According to Dr. Hewett, "Orange County Surgical Center represents the future of healthcare. This super-hybrid ambulatory surgical center is designed to facilitate full-scope vascular care, combining the best skills and expertise with a convenient and patient-centered experience."

Dr. Hewett drew on 14 years of experience designing outpatient vascular and minimally-invasive surgical centers to create Orange County Surgical Center's patient-focused design and architecture. The Center boasts concierge-level service, caring for patients in a compassionate, patient-first environment. Orange County Surgical Center offers shorter pre-operative wait times, semi-private pre- and post-surgery rooms, and post-surgery meals on demand, creating the most comfortable patient experience. The Center takes minimally-invasive surgical procedures out of the hurried, clinical setting of the physician's office or hospital, and places them in a stress-free, patient-centered environment that promotes meaningful doctor-patient interactions coupled with the ultimate in high-quality care.

Orange County Surgical Center offers hospital-grade fluoroscopic imaging, supporting the next generation in outpatient cardiac interventions. This super-hybrid ambulatory surgical center combines the best of the vascular physician's office, vascular diagnostic imaging, outpatient endovascular procedures, and the most advanced ambulatory surgical care available.

Orange County Surgical Center uses the latest advancements in the delivery of outpatient vascular and dialysis care. Says Davita's Traci Balandran, "Drs. Hewett, Goldstein, and Hashisho have provided exceptional Dialysis access care to our patients with end-stage renal disease. Their practice offers a superior level of service for the nephrologists and dialysis units in Orange County."

Orange County Surgical Center is conveniently located at the corner of highways 405 and 55, for easy freeway access. Ample free parking is available for patients and families.

Orange County Surgical Center

1400 Reynolds Avenue, Suite 109

Irvine, California 92614

ocsurgicalcenter.com

(949) 390-9000

Media Contact: [email protected], (949) 209-9297

SOURCE Orange County Surgical Center

Related Links

https://ocsurgicalcenter.com/


President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev will visit Turkmenistan, according to the press service of the Uzbek president.

A meeting will be held with the President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov during the visit.

Thus, one of the topics of the meeting will be the discussion of further strengthening of Uzbek-Turkmen relations and strategic partnership, expansion of multifaceted and regional cooperation.
Two North Carolina sheriff deputies were shot near Boone, and a standoff with the alleged gunman is ongoing. The sheriff's office referred to a wellness check on Wednesday morning because the homeowner and his family failed to show up for work or return phone calls, said a statement received by WBTV from the Watauga County Sheriff's Office.

North Carolina sheriff deputies shot while doing a wellness check

"When deputies entered the house, they were met with gunshots from an unidentified person. Two deputies were shot and injured. One deputy was flown to Johnson City Medical Center for treatment after being rescued from the scene. The other deputy is also on the site. At this time, the condition of the deputy on the scene is unclear."

Johnson City Medical Center is located in eastern Tennessee. According to the statement, the alleged gunman is barricaded in the house and occasionally shoots at law enforcement officers.

Residents in the area have been evacuated. The Boone Police Department tweeted that it is giving support to Watauga County deputies in Brown's Chapel, CNN via MSN reported.

Video: Unidentified Man Brutally Attacks Asian American Woman, Prompts NY Hate Crime Investigation

A resident saw two deputies were shot as they arrived

According to a news release from the sheriff's office, deputies were called to a home in Boone at 9:44 a.m. after the resident, and his family failed to show up for work or return phone calls. Deputies approached the house and were fired upon, said the news release.

Law enforcement has surrounded the house, according to the sheriff's office. As sheriff's deputies pulled up in front of the house across the street, Clarence Wilson, 78, was on the porch of his home in Boone.

According to ABC News, Wilson said gunfire erupted after the deputies appeared. He explained, "Then they ordered me to get back in the house and wait."

New Jersey 'Torso Killer' Confesses to 1974 Murder Case of 2 Teenage Friends

Wilson said that he saw deputies removing a man from the residence. He said, "I don't know whether it was a deputy or who it was. All I was concerned with was keeping myself safe."

Around noon, Wilson said he heard the second round of gunfire. He added that police were on the scene for more than four hours. Wilson explained that the area is a "real quiet neighborhood" as many residents are retirees like him, and they are "not used to all this."

All of the family's cars were outside when the deputies arrived. When they entered, an anonymous gunman opened fire, shooting two of them, said the police.

At around 1 p.m., a rescue helicopter took off, taking one victim to the Johnson City Medical Center. The other was already inside the house at 5 p.m. Residents were advised to lock their doors and windows and seek refuge inside.

According to a video from the scene, police had blocked Chapel Hills Road and were staging in the church parking lot while trying to secure the location. A lockdown was also imposed at a nearby Mount Vernon school, though parents could pick up their children. The home was surrounded by police, who said they rescued nearby residents. As of 5 p.m., the standoff was still going on, Fox News reported.

Asian Hate Crime in New York: Man in Critical Condition at Hospital Following Attack

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 19:36:31|Editor: huaxia

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The latest meeting of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Joint Commission is held in Vienna, Austria, April 27, 2021. (EU Delegation Vienna/Handout via Xinhua)

Washington, if sincere in its intent to return to the pact, should act first, given its decision to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA and apply maximum pressure on Iran thereafter, setting off the current crisis.

VIENNA, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The negotiations on getting the United States and Iran to resume compliance with the historic 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have entered their fourth week in Vienna.

The international community is longing for a major breakthrough in the negotiations. Washington, if sincere in its intent to return to the pact, should act first, given its decision to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA and apply maximum pressure on Iran thereafter, setting off the current crisis.

Elaborating on his country's logic for returning to the nuclear agreement, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said earlier this month that "the United States, which caused this crisis, should return to full compliance first."

Photo taken on April 8, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

The U.S. administration under former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 and unilaterally reimposed sanctions on Iran. In response to the U.S. moves, Iran gradually stopped implementing parts of its JCPOA commitments from May 2019.

Therefore, in the quest for some real progress, Washington must take the first step by lifting all illegal unilateral sanctions against Iran and involved third parties.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said earlier that the United States must "lift all sanctions" before any progress can be made.

His view is also shared by Russia and China, which have repeatedly urged the United States to immediately and completely lift sanctions against Iran.

People work at the construction site of the second phase of Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in Bushehr, southern Iran, on Nov. 10, 2019. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)

Removing all illegal unilateral sanctions is "the key to the success of the negotiations," said Wang Qun, Chinese envoy to the United Nations and other international organizations in Vienna.

"All parties must continue to focus on and resolve this core issue first. At the same time, the Joint Commission should also consider how to verify the U.S. lifting of sanctions," Wang added.

Attended by representatives of China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and Iran, the meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission began on April 6 in Vienna.

The one who began the trouble should end it. The negotiations have entered a crucial stage, and steps by the United States are of paramount importance to the fate of the historic nuclear deal and future stability of the region and the world.

It is time for Washington to shoulder its global responsibility by taking the first step toward a breakthrough in the nuclear talks. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-28 23:34:58|Editor: huaxia

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Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) can learn a great deal from China, said a lawmaker in BiH after a video meeting with Chinese legislators.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Jerry Lara / San Antonio Express-News

On Wednesday, the San Antonio Police Department said it discovered human remains at the home of D'Lanny Reaneille Chairez, the mother whose toddler has been missing since January.

Police have not said if the remains belong to James Avi Chairez, who was last seen in surveillance footage at the age of 18 months at a local Walgreens on Jan. 4. Since then, the mother has been spotted alone and has been arrested in connection with the case and is facing tampering charges. It is unclear if she will face more charges.
Texass top state leaders announced Wednesday they are releasing $11.2 billion out of nearly $18 billion available in federal pandemic relief funding that has been dedicated for the states public schools.

The announcement comes as education advocates and Demcratic lawmakers have been urging officials in recent weeks to release the money that was set aside by Congress for Texas public schools to address learning loss and cover pandemic-related education expenses.

Its unclear how the state plans to spend the remaining $7 billion in stimulus money, which was allocated through multiple aid packages in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That funding could not be immediately released due to federal requirements, state officials said.

"The State of Texas is ensuring that our public schools have the necessary resources to help Texas students recover from learning loss related to COVID-19," said Gov. Greg Abbott in a press release.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, criticized state leaders, calling the announcement "belated."

"State Republicans are hardly justified in patting themselves on the back for ending a blockade that should never have occurred," Doggett said. "After four months, Governor Abbott is still obstructing distribution of the remaining $5.5 billion, which Congress approved in December. Even today, he has failed to offer any justification for his delay and attempt to divert these funds from our schools. Our childrens future is not a place to cut corners and misuse federal aid to education for non-educational purposes.

State officials had previously argued the reason they hadnt allocated the one-time funding to the schools was because they were awaiting federal government guidance about whether the state would need to increase funding for higher education to make the K-12 funding available.

Last week, the federal government weighed in and clarified the state must maintain both higher education and public education funding at the same proportion to the budget as it was in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to tap into those dollars. Effectively, that means Texas would have to increase higher education spending by $1.2 billion to unlock the K-12 stimulus dollars.

Abbott has applied for a federal waiver that would allow Texas to bypass increasing higher education spending, but no decision has been announced on whether the waiver was granted. His office did not respond to questions about what this announcement means for higher education funding or why the public school funding was released. The announcement said legislative leaders will work to address outstanding issues about distributing the rest of the federal funding by the end of the legislative session.

K-12 and higher education advocates argue increasing funding for higher education is worth it to receive the nearly $18 billion in relief funds for K-12 schools.

The state is seeking a federal waiver to avoid this additional spending, but that is the wrong thing to do, especially at a time when our institutions of higher education need the additional funding to cover extra expenses incurred during the pandemic, said Texas Faculty Association President Pat Heintzelman in a press release this week.

School districts also called the state to release the money because they need to know how much money schools will receive as they develop budgets for next year. While the funding can be used for a variety of resources, including extra mental health support, counselors and more staff, school leaders were growing concerned they would run out of time to hire the necessary staff without access to more money.

This is a positive first step in getting the funds our schools need, said Zeph Capo, president of Texas American Federation of Teachers, in a statement. Its unfortunate that it took nearly two months of pushing the governor to get to this point. Many districts that have been contemplating cuts related to pandemic expenses can now implement plans to help students catch up.

The governors office and Texas Education Agency have argued the state has supported public education by fully funding virtual learning and maintaining fully funded budgets for school districts regardless of attendance declines. A spokesperson for Abbott also previously said that the proportion of funding going to higher education has decreased because of increases in K-12 investments.

This money is in addition to approximately $2.2 billion in federal funding to help Texas public schools manage the pandemic. It also comes after the state increased its investment in public education by more than $5 billion from the previous year in 2019.

Duncan Agnew contributed to this report.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Moncks Corner, SC (29461)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 72F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 72F. Winds light and variable.
President Biden's First Address to Congress Is Invite Only

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden's first address to Congress is an invite-only affair, no guests allowed.

The restrictions for Wednesday's event are due to COVID-19 safety protocols, but they will have the added security benefit of a limited number of people inside the U.S. Capitol for the president's first major indoor event since he took office just weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Fencing is still up around the Capitol, and the National Guard is still there.

"Obviously the events of the sixth are poignant reminders of why we need to be vigilant," said Michael Plati, the U.S. Secret Service special agent in charge who is leading security for the joint session. "But the standard of security remains the same."

Congressional leadership extended the invitations, and anyone without one must leave the building by 5 p.m. Wednesday, though staff with Capitol offices and those credentialed by the sergeant-at-arms can remain in the building, according to a memo by Timothy Blodgett, the acting sergeant-at-arms. Official visitors are allowed only until 1 p.m., and they must be escorted into the Capitol from the barricades.

While senators are in Washington this week, the House is not in session, with most lawmakers working remotely. House Republicans are holding a private retreat in Florida, and it's doubtful many will rush back to attend.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the only member of the Supreme Court invited to Wednesday's speech. He plans to attend, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

Security agencies ready

One of the main issues on Jan. 6 was a lack of coordination between multiple agencies in the district, which won't happen this time because those agencies have already been approved to work together and have been doing so for months, said Plati, who led security for the Jan. 20 inauguration that proceeded without any problems.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited Biden to the chamber to share his "vision for addressing the challenges and opportunities of this historic moment." Presidents don't deliver a State of the Union address to Congress until their second year in office.

The joint session is designated as a "national special security event," which clears the way for communication, funding and preparation between multiple agencies in Washington, including the U.S. Capitol Police, Pentagon, Homeland Security and District-area police. Other such events are the State of the Union, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Biden's address comes as he completes his first 100 days in office. He didn't give a traditional address to Congress earlier this year because, the White House said, he was focusing on his COVID-19 recovery and response efforts.

The address will provide him with an opportunity to update the American public on his progress toward fulfilling his promises and make the case for the $2.3 trillion infrastructure package he unveiled earlier this month.

Security will be tight around the Capitol region for the event. National Guard troops, in place since the riot, are still in the area. Some security plans will be obvious  officers in uniforms, checkpoints, metal detectors, fencing  and some won't. Capitol police said Monday that streets around the Capitol will be shut down two hours before the event.

"We have many options, and we prepare for contingencies well in advance," Plati said.

Trouble at the Capitol

The Capitol Plaza remains behind fencing that was erected after a mob of Donald Trump supporters had descended on it on Jan. 6, sacking the building and disrupting the vote to certify Biden's presidential win. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer. Hundreds of people were charged in the insurrection.

There had also been a second razor-wire-tipped fence that blocked off city streets around the Capitol, but that has since come down. Soon after it was removed, a man rammed his car into two Capitol Police officers, killing one. It's likely that streets will be blocked off anew for Wednesday's event.

And a 22-year-old Virginia man was caught by Capitol Police scaling the fence Monday. He was taken into custody.

Law enforcement officials never go into too much detail about security so would-be attackers aren't tipped off. But Plati said they have taken into account recent events and watched other major U.S. events such as the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis and the response to it.

"There are always opportunities to learn from these incidents, but the planning is comprehensive" and incorporates the possibility for mass civil unrest or other security concerns, Plati said.

"We continuously evaluate the intelligence with our partners and refine the plan; we look to make those refinements," Plati said.
The son of a 63-year-old man who died two years ago following a road rage fight with Netflix Mexican actor Pablo Lyle has filed a civil lawsuit and is seeking $100,000 for 'severe emotional damages.'

Juan Ricardo Hernandez has sued for the anguish he says his family has suffered as a result of the March 31, 2019 incident that took place in the middle of a busy Miami street. His dad Juan Ricardo Hernandez Sr died four days after the attack, which left him with a fractured skull and internal bleeding.

Lyle has been charged with manslaughter over the incident, and is due to stand trial in June.

According to TV Azteca's investigative news show 'Ventaneando', the lawsuit alleges that the victim and his surviving family members have suffered pain due to the incident's violent nature and the publicity that the victim's death generated.

The family claims they spent their life savings to cover the funeral and hospital expenses.

Lucas Delfino, Lyle's brother-in-law, is also named in the lawsuit which was filed March 29.

Lyle is best known for his work in Mexican soap opera 'My Adorable Curse' and the Netflix series 'Yankee'.

SEE VIDEO BELOW

Mexican soap opera star Pablo Lyle will go on trial in June 2021 for a manslaughter charge after he was involved in a fight in which he punched 63-year-old Juan Ricardo Hernandez on March 31, 2019 in Miami before he died four days later at a hospital. He now also faces a civil suit

Juan Ricardo Hernandez (pictured) suffered a fractured skull and internal bleeding following the March 31, 2019 road-rage incident with Mexican actor Pablo Lyle

Juan Ricardo Hernandez has claimed that the elder Juan Ricardo Hernandez and his family have experience damage as a result of the March 31, 2019 incident that took place in the middle of a busy Miami street. They are seeking $100,000 compensation

Lyle, a Mazatlan native, was hit with manslaughter charges after surveillance video showed him punching Juan Ricardo Hernandez during an argument.

Delfino initially argued with Hernandez after the latter approached him at an intersection moments after Delfino reportedly cut him off on a highway lane.

Once the vehicle started to move forward by itself towards the intersection, Delfino raced back and Lyle jumped out and confronted Hernandez.

Lucas Delfino (left) rushes to his car as it starts to move at an intersection while Pablo Lyle (center) charges at Juan Ricardo Hernandez before he punched him during a traffic altercation March 31, 2019 in Miami. Hernandez fractured his skull and suffered internal bleeding before he died four days later at a hospital

The Mexican actor is under house arrest and has been staying in Miami with his family. He is required to wear an ankle monitor which allows the court to track his whereabouts 24 hours a day

The 33-year-old Lyle then rushed towards Hernandez, knocking him out and sending him crashing to the ground.

Hernandez suffered a fracture to the right side of the skull and internal bleeding from the fall, and was declared dead April 4 after his family gave the order to have his life support turned off.

Following the fight, Lyle left the scene but police were able to track him down to Miami International Airport. After dropping off his family at the airport, Lyle and his Delfino turned themselves in.

Lyle has argued in court that he acted in self-defense because Hernandez threatened him and his family.

His manslaughter trial, which has been delayed on several occasions, is set for June.

The Mexican actor is under house arrest and has been staying in Miami with his family. He is required to wear an ankle monitor which allows the court to track his whereabouts 24 hours a day.
President Joe Biden said he was not given a head's up that federal agents were going to carry out a raid on Rudy Giuliani's apartment and office in New York City and that he learned about it at the same time as the public.

'I give you my word, I was not,' Biden said told NBC's Craig Melvin at the White House Thursday morning in an interview that will air Friday on the 'Today Show.'

'I made a pledge,' Biden continued. 'I would not interfere in any way  order or try to stop any investigation the Justice Department had in their way. I learned about that last night when the rest of the world learned about it.'

Federal prosecutors have been looking at Giuliani and his work in the Ukraine for nearly 1-1/2 years. Wednesday's morning raid - where Giuliani's electronics were seized - came after prosecutors stepped up their investigation into the former New York City mayor after it was put on hold last summer out of concerns it was too close to the election.

And Giuliani's son Andrew accused the Department of Justice of raiding his father's New York apartment and office for political reasons - and claims agents didn't want to take allegedly incriminating evidence involving Hunter Biden.

'Any American, whether you are red or blue, should be extremely disturbed by what happened here today, by the continued politicization,' a furious Andrew, 35, told reporters in the Upper East Side on Wednesday.

'The only piece of evidence that they did not take up there today was the only piece of incriminating evidence that is in there  and it does not belong to my father, it belongs to the current president's son,' he added.

It's not clear what he was referring to. Giuliani claimed he obtained the materials from a laptop of Hunter Biden during the 2020 election and he also visited the Ukraine in December 2019.

President Joe Biden said he had no idea federal agents were going to carry out a raid on Rudy Giuliani's apartment and office

The White House posted a behind-the-scenes picture of the interview

Giuliani claimed Biden's son made millions of his work on the board of a gas company in the Ukraine and pushed Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens for corruption. The Bidens have not been charged with that crime. Hunter Biden is being investigated for his taxes.

Both Giuliani's lawyer and his son accused Biden's Justice Department of politicization, a charge made often against the department in President Donald Trump's administration when Trump would publicly pressure his attorneys general to follow his wishes on legal matters. Top DOJ officials would have had to approve the raid.

But Biden told NBC News he has not been briefed on Giuliani nor any other federal investigation.

Asked if he's been briefed about any other investigation, Biden said: 'No, and I'm not asking to be briefed  that's the Justice Department's independent judgment.'

He went on to criticize the Trump administration's handling of the DoJ, saying officials 'politicized the Justice Department so badly, so many of them quit, so many left.'

'That's not the role of the president to say who should be prosecuted, when they should be prosecuted, who should not be prosecuted. That's not the role of the president. The Justice Department is the people's lawyer, not the president's lawyer,' Biden said.

Meanwhile, Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and also accused agents of ignoring Hunter's hard drives during their search.

'Keep in mind that the agents could not read the physical hard drives without plugging them in, but they took Mr. Giuliani's word that the hard drives were copies of Hunter Biden's hard drive and did not contain anything pertaining to Mr. Giuliani,' Costello said in a statement.

'Their reliance on Mr. Giuliani's credibility tells you everything you need to know about this case,' he added.

'It is outrageous that the Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone so far that hatred has driven this unjustified and unethical attack on the United States Attorney and Mayor who did more to reduce crime than virtually any other in American history,' Costello said.

The Giuliani team took a page from the Trump playbook, fighting the accusations with charges of their own against a political rival.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that Giuliani, who was universally hailed for his leadership after the September 11th attacks, 'has come unhinged.'

'It's a sad thing to have to say about a predecessor,' de Blasio said on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe.' 'But Rudy Giuliani has just come unhinged in every sense. He attached himself to Donald Trump but then went even farther and decided to be one of the most extreme voices in the Trump world.'

Andrew Giuliani blasted accused President Joe Biden's Justice Department for playing politics after agents raided his father's apartment and office

The federal investigation centers on whether Rudy Giuliani, who was Donald Trump 's personal attorney, acted as an unregistered federal agent and lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs

The federal investigation centers on whether Giuliani, who was Donald Trump's personal attorney, acted as an unregistered federal agent and lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs.

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and also a accused agents of ignoring Hunter's hard drives during their search

Those were the same group of people who were helping Giuliani search for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Ukrainian gas company, during the 2020 election in an effort to help Trump politically.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, it is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the US government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department.

The United States Attorney's office in Manhattan and the FBI had wanted to execute the warrant on Giuliani's Upper East Side home and office for months but had been stymied by the political leadership put in place at the Justice Department by President Trump.

To obtain the search warrant, investigators would have needed to convince a judge they had sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed and the search would turn up evidence of that. It does not indicate guilt.

The warrant was originally sought last summer but top officials at DOJ raised concerns about issuing a warrant so close to an election.

DOJ rules prevent actions close to an election that might be seen as interference  a matter that came up both in 2016 during the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails and in 2020 during the investigation, not publicly revealed, into Hunter Biden over potential tax issues.

But after Merrick Garland was confirmed as President Biden's attorney general, the Justice Department lifted its objection to the search.

The raids indicate the investigation of the former New York City mayor has entered an aggressive new phase. It is unusual for prosecutors to execute a search warrant on a lawyer, particularly one who has privileged conversations with his client, the former president of the United States.

The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election.

The two Soviet-born men were charged with federal campaign finance violations.

The two, who pleaded not guilty, were arrested at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe. That investigation is on-going and faced some delays due to the COVID pandemic.

Trump has said he doesn't know the two men or the work they did.

Investigators are also looking into Giuliani's role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump's first impeachment trial. Current and former U.S. officials testified at that inquiry that Giuliani carried out a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine.

As Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation of the Bidens, he pushed to have Yovanovitch removed, seeing her as an obstacle to his efforts to produce a probe that would benefit Trump politically.

At Giuliani's urging, Trump had her recalled.

Press and members of the public crowd the street in front of Giuliani's condo building

The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election and were charged with violating the ban on political donations by foreign nationals in October 2019

Lev Parnas, center, and Igor Fruman with Rudy Giuliani at far right, Trump second right, and VP Mike Pence left

Investigators are also looking into Giuliani's role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump's first impeachment trial

Prosecutors are examining whether Giuliani was working not only for Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted Yovanovitch dismissed for their own reasons, The New York Times reported.

Giuliani later bragged about having her removed, saying he 'forced' her out as she was making his push for the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens 'difficult.'

Trump was impeached on two counts in his first trial after reports of a July 25, 2019, phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden and also a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.

Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
[April 29, 2021] Chairman of the Board of Avia Solutions Group Gediminas Ziemelis: The market, anticipated to reach $174.02 billion by 2040 - hydrogen aircraft

LONDON, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- For quite some time already, sustainability has been a top topic in amongst aviation professionals. While many companies in the aviation industry focus on optimisation and green initiatives, something bigger has been on people's minds  sustainable aircraft. Aviation fuel is one of the main culprits in aviation pollution, so it's about time the industry shifted its focus towards greener fuel options. The new fuel should be accessible at a global level and must be safe, environmental, and economical. Hydrogen has the potential to change the aviation industry and substitute the currently used aviation fuel. Hydrogen, as an energy carrier for usage in aircraft, has some great qualities such as minimum pollution, global availability, and safety, thus making it a suitable aviation fuel. In comparison with Lithium-ion batteries, hydrogen has a greater energy density, both in terms of gravimetric and volumetric measures. Furthermore, hydrogen use is expected to gain popularity and momentum in several industries, speeding up the advancements of fuel cells and storage systems and encouraging quicker development of necessary infrastructure. These factors, associated with hydrogen as aviation fuel, are expected to drive the growth of the global hydrogen aircraft market over the years to reach the anticipated value of $27.68 billion in 2030, and $174.02 billion by 2040. The idea of hydrogen-powered aircraft has been in the minds of professionals for decades. Back in the 1950s, the US Air Force flew B-57 aircraft with hydrogen fuel, and in the 1980s, Tupolev converted a Tu-155 aircraft to a hydrogen gas turbine. While now the focus shifts to hydrogen because of ecological concerns, at the time Tupolev's reasoning was more economical - relatively inexpensively fuel production using nuclear power made hydrogen an attractive alternative. However, the use of hydrogen fuel posed some challenges. Due to its significantly lower energy density, hydrogen requires much more space than fossil fuel and needs to be cooled in a challenging temperature of minus 253 degrees Celsius in order to stay liquid to save space. To store the fuel, Tu-155 aircraft had a large hydrogen tank in the rear part of the passenger cabin, taking up about a third of the space there. A total of 30 additional systems were integrated into the aircraft so that it could run on hydrogen. There were three engines on board: two classic turbojet engines and one NK-88 - an experimental turbojet that used hydrogen or natural gas for operation. More than 100 flights were performed using the aircraft - a part of them using hydrogen and others - using natural gas. There were even international flights performed: Moscow - Hanover and Moscow - Bratislava - Nice. The Tu-156 project, where a revised version of the natural gas engine (NK-89) was used, was in the works for years. The program was eventually terminated, most likely due to the fall of Soviet Union.



Currently, hydrogen use in aviation is in its early stages. In 2008, Boeing flew the first hydrogen-powered aircraft and ZeroAvia flew the world's first hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft in 2020. But the main industry player, already in the works to present hydrogen-powered aircraft to the market, is Airbus. For hydrogen-powered aircraft, hydrogen can be used in two ways: as a fuel source for fuel cells, when hydrogen reacts with oxygen to produce electricity that powers the engine; or alternatively, it can be used directly as a fuel source in a modified engine. Airbus is looking at both these methods for aircraft. The company has presented three models of modified aircraft that would be operated using hydrogen and has already committed to have the first aircraft in service by 2035.

But the usage of hydrogen is not without its challenges. The largest limitation of hydrogen use as fuel is storage. The energy density of liquid hydrogen is only about a quarter of that of jet fuel, meaning that for the same amount of energy it needs a storage tank four times the size. So aircraft would need to be redesigned for additional fuel storage. Furthermore, an entire new infrastructure would need to be put in place to transport and store hydrogen at airports. But it's worth noting that because hydrogen can be extracted from water, airports could generate their own hydrogen fuel, reducing the need for fuel transportation, eliminating related emissions and possible transportation safety hazards. While hydrogen has not yet been widely used in aircraft, it has already proven its advantages in vehicles. Toyota Mirai's, hydrogen-powered vehicle's, tank weighs 87,5 kg and holds 5 kg of hydrogen, so the total of 92,5 kg weight allows you to drive 500 km according to the WLTP standard. Meanwhile, the Tesla Model 3, with a 321 kg battery, can drive only 430 km according to the WLTP standard, meaning that 1 kg of hydrogen allows a vehicle to travel 5,4 km while 1 kg of batteries - only 1,33 km. Maybe the aviation is next to prove hydrogen's efficiency? The potential of hydrogen as aviation fuel is undeniable, but there is still a long way to go. But the constantly growing attention to aviation sustainability will act as a catalyst in making a hydrogen-powered aircraft a reality. About Gediminas Ziemelis: Gediminas Ziemelis is a founder and chairman of "Avia Solutions Group" - one of the largest aerospace servicing companies presented in more than 67 countries. In 2016, G. Ziemelis received a prestigious European Business Award in recognition for his visionary business management and development skills. The same year, under his leadership, Avia Solutions Group was named a national public champion in the category of Entrepreneurship, earning a spot in the top 110 of European businesses. Twice, in 2012 and in 2014, Ziemelis was acknowledged as one of the top 40 most talented young leaders in the global aerospace industry by the leading USA aerospace magazine Aviation Week". 2014  2017 Gediminas Ziemelis personally supported and consulted Chinese Banks (including ICBCL, CMBL, and Skycop) with regard to financing aircraft sale-leaseback transactions in the CIS region. His total value of transactions  more than $ 2 B. 2006  2013 Gediminas executed successful IPOs of 4 companies at OMX and WSE and raised public capital worth more than $ 100 M. More info: www.gediminasziemelis.com For media inquiries:

Vilma Vaitiekunaite

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Over 90% of Ukrainians to celebrate Easter on May 2, almost 20% of adult population to go to church

A total of 92% of Ukrainians intend to celebrate Easter on May 2, almost 20% of the adult population will go to church, according to the results of an all-Ukrainian public opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on April 13-15, 2021.

According to the study, 92% of the population plan to celebrate Easter in one way or another, only 6% will not celebrate (and 2% were undecided).

Among the adult population of Ukraine, every fifth (19%) plans to go to church on Easter, and 9% plan to take part in the service.

The majority of Ukrainian population does not plan to go to church at Easter. Some 69% of Ukrainians plan to cook Easter dishes at home, 25% plan to pray in the family circle, and 19% plan to receive guests from relatives at home.

Also, according to the survey, among the entire population of Ukraine, 11% will go to the cemetery; some 8% will go on a visit within their city; some 5% will go on a visit outside their city.

The largest number of those who plan to go to church to bless Easter cakes is observed in the western region (29%), in all other regions this number is slightly less: 19% in the South, 15% in the Center, 12% in the East. Some 18% of Ukrainians aged 18-29, some 19% of those aged 40-49, some 22% of Ukrainians 50-59 years old and 60+ will go to bless Easter food in church; the lowest percentage, 15%, is among the category 30-39 years old.

The largest number of those who plan to cook Easter meals with their families is also in the western region (73%); in the center and south it is 69%, in the east - 63%.

A total of 8% of residents of the East do not plan to celebrate Easter, there are 7% of those in the center, 6% in the South, and 5% in the West. The number of those who do not plan to celebrate Easter decreases with age: in the age group of 18-29 years they make 13%, in the group of 30-39 and 40-49 years - 7% and 6% respectively, in the group of 50-59 and 60+ years - 4% and 3%, respectively.

The survey was conducted by the method of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) on the basis of a random sample of mobile phone numbers, 2,001 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine (except for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) were interviewed. The sample is representative of the adult population (aged 18 and over) in Ukraine. The sample does not include territories that are temporarily not controlled by Ukrainian authorities - the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The statistical error of the sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.1) does not exceed 2.4%.




By Ko Dong-hwan







Two people have been arrested in connection with a family-run brothels they operated in Suwon for 23 years after "inheriting" the illegal business from their mother, police said Thursday.







It is alleged the brothels made 12.8 billion won ($11.5 million) profits in that time.







Three others  another sibling and their spouses  are also under investigation for allegedly aiding the two arrested individuals.







The investigation began after two women filed a complaint five months ago with the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office; they claimed they had been forced into prostitution and abused for more than a year by the suspects.







Last month police raided five brothels run by the suspects near Suwon Station to secure evidence and immediately froze assets worth about 6.2 billion won before handing the case back to prosecutors.







The siblings reportedly took over the business in 1998 from their mother, who had run brothels in the Suwon area for decades. She died in 2019.







The suspects allegedly lured women with financial debts to sex work by partially paying off their debts, police said. They then forced the women to work regardless of their health conditions and limited their time off.







The red-light district near the station first sprung up in the early 1960s and continued to grow as many as 100 establishments before police started to turn their attention to them on them in the early 2000s. Redevelopment in the area, has seen the number of brothels decreased.


Americans kids' mental health suffered during pandemic 'Zoom school,' with a quarter of children becoming stressed, anxious and angry, a survey of caregivers in Chicago found.

A third of children and teens were lonely, and only a third of students had 'positive' peer relationships while confined to interacting with them through screens, caregivers said in the Children's Hospital of Chicago study published Thursday.

It's been a year since kids were sent home from class and whether or not, and how, to reopen schools is still a subject of heated debate in the U.S., resulting in patchwork policies.

Although cases among children have increased in recent months as more schools have brought their students back for in-person learning, kids still rarely catch Covid, and even more rarely get seriously ill or die when then do contract the virus.

Yet not every school is back to in-person learning, and pediatricians are now urging them: It's time to make a safe plan to bring kids back, before their mental health suffers any worse.

Caregivers reported that rates of anger, anxiety, depression, loneliness, stress and self-harm increased by as much as four-fold among pre-K through 12th grade students in Chicago

Rates of depression among children - as described by their caregivers - rose by four-fold after schools closed and classes were relegated to Zoom at home, the survey found (file)

As of March 23, fewer than half of schools were open for full in-person classes, according to a

The Children's Hospital survey asked more than 32,000 caregivers of prekindergarten through 12th grade students how the children and teens had fared during remote learning, in a questionnaire sent out in June and July.

Alarming increases in the rate of kids with mental health concerns were seen across the group.

The share of children whose caregivers said they were lonely increased by more than 28 percent after schools closed, compared to rates prior to the shutdown.

Up to 44 percent of children seemed well-adjusted to their parents or guardians before the pandemic kept them home and 'very few' showed signs of mental health issues before their schools closed, according to the study, published in JAMA Network Open.

That all changed once the students were cooped up at home to watch classes on computer screens.

As much as 30 percent of kids who were previously happy became angry, depressed, lonely or stressed while their schools were shut down.

Nearly two-thirds of kids seemed to their caregivers to have good relationships with their peers pre-pandemic.

But after COVID-19 forced their schools to close, that rate plummeted to less than half (47 percent).

'Caregivers are reporting that the pandemic and school closures have taken a substantial emotional toll on their children and adolescents,' said study lead author Dr Tali Raviv and a psychologist with the Children's Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University.

The share of kids who were considered well adjusted by their peer relationships, outlooks, sibling interactions, how relaxed they were, and notions of their futures plummeted amid the pandemic

'Greater public attention to youth mental health issues during this time can help appropriately allocate resources and inform policies to support the well-being of students as schools begin to reopen.'

In other words, simply bringing students back to school as it was pre-pandemic may not be enough to undo the mental health consequences of a year of Zoom school.

That may be especially true for children of color, who saw much steeper increases in mental health issues after school closures.

Among black students, rates of anxiety nearly doubled from 8.7 percent pre-pandemic to 15.2 percent after school closures.

Three times as many black children were described as 'agitated or angry' after schools closed, and rates of depression more than doubled too, from 3.7 pre-school closures to 8.2 percent after schools shutdown.

Anxiety rates increased from 10.6 percent to 17.8 percent among Hispanic students, while the share who were agitated and angry more than tripled.

'The pandemic revealed to all what we've long known is true: schools are important community hubs that meet fundamental needs like access to food, health and mental health supports and services, as well as other kinds of protection,' said co-senior author Dr Kenneth Fox, MD, from the Chicago Public Schools.

'While schools continue to meet those needs, we think they will also serve as sites of community healing where public health strategies and systems can converge and align to serve families in innovative ways.

'This convergence may be a powerful way to address the increased mental health needs the pandemic has wrought among our students, especially those from Black and Latinx communities, to ensure equitable access to support and care.'

In a commentary published alongside the study, pediatricians called on U.S. education officials and politicians to prioritize getting schools not only reopened, but braced to handle a whole matrix of challenges in the aftermath of Zoom school.

'One year into the pandemic, school districts continue to be mired in debate over reopening, students continue to fall further behind, and there is no clear consensus on offering summer school programs to help address the learning loss and other needs of children. The toll this will take in both the short and long term is staggering, although largely invisible at present,' wrote Dr Danielle Dooley and Dr Dimitri Christakis, pediatricians at Children's National Hospital and Seattle Children's Research Institute, respectively.

'At every stage of the evolving pandemic in most communities, school reopening has been an afterthought and not a priority. The time for debating school reopening has passed. We need to focus on school re-envisioning. The disruption in learning and the consequences for childrens health means that we cannot resume school as usual.
JACKSONVILLE  Tom Brewer has been trekking across Illinois on foot for the past four years in a bid to raise funds and awareness for OSF HealthCare Childrens Hospital of Illinois and the Heller Center for Kids with Cancer.

On Wednesday evening, Brewer, 75 and a great-grandfather, left his footprints in Jacksonville before heading north on Thursday morning to Virginia.

His mission  Toms Walk4CHOI (Childrens Hospitals of Illinois)  is to walk a path across Illinois in the form of a religious cross to bless and support the healthy development of young lives. He will take the final steps in that mission at noon May 8 as he walks onto the OSF HealthCare Childrens Hospital property in Peoria.

We have two flags while walking, Brewer said. One has the childrens hospital logo; the other honors all of the first responders.

Brewer started out Saturday in Alton, making his way to Jacksonville via Jerseyville, Carrollton, White Hall and Murrayville. His path will continue through Virginia to Chandlerville before stopping in Havana.

Weve reached our halfway point, Brewer said.

Brewers wife, Stella, is helping with the journey, meeting him at his end points to pick him up and taking him back the next day to continue his trek from where he left off.

We average about 15 miles a day, Tom Brewer said. It gets a little complicated.

Once arriving in Havana, Brewer will take a two-day break before putting his walking shoes back on and heading to Duck Creek.

These old feet need a break, Brewer said. I plan on paying some bills and mowing the yard.

Brewer has raised $47,000 since he began his journey in November 2018. He expects to add another $20,000 this year.

Brewer was inspired to begin his walk after listening to a talk about the hospital in 2018. It was a choice between raising money for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital or OSF HealthCare, specifically the Heller Center for Kids with Cancer, an organization that helps kids thrive after a cancer diagnosis.

They help them get back to society, Brewer said.

The Heller Center helps educate both patients and families who are dealing with cancer and provides long-term counseling to address treatment side effects.

Brewers final journey will total 153 miles, making his four-year journey cover 526 miles.

Along his route, Brewer has met the most wonderful people, he said, singling out a woman who didnt have much money but approached him and said, All I have are the eight quarters  thank you for what youre doing.

I still have those eight quarters, Brewer said. She was giving from her needs, not her extras.

The people he has met also have stayed in his life.

During his first walk in November 2018, he was resting at a car stop when a woman approached him, introduced him to her daughter, Cloe, and thanked him for raising money because the hospital had helped Cloe.

Cloe has a lot of issues, Stella Brewer said. But shes 2 now.

As Brewer approaches the end of his journey, hes not thinking about putting his feet up.

My mind is going, What should I do next, he said.
The Maharashtra government has decided to extend state wide lockdown till 15th May due to increasing number of COVID19 patients. There are no new restrictions imposed in the order issued by chief secretary Sitaram Kunte.

On 11 April, the state government had decided to extend the lockdown till 30 April 2021.

In the order, Mr Kunte says, "The government in exercise of the powers conferred under Section 2 of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, read with all other enabling provisions of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, finds it is necessary to continue the enforcement of the current restrictions throughout the State beyond 7am on 1 May 2021 till 7am on 15 May 2021 to break the chain of transmission effectively.

Meanwhile, hearing a petition, the the Bombay High Court on Thursday asked the state government if there is a need for a lockdown like last year. The HC asked advocate general Ashutosh Kumbhakoni if at least 15 days of lockdown is needed to successfully contain the spread of COVID-19 in the state.

Earlier, while extending the lockdown till 30th April, state chief minister Uddhav Thackeray in a video broadcast, had said, "You take precautions, we will take responsibility for your safety."

"Certain areas in the state may see some relaxations, however there will be total shutdown in affected areas," the CM says, adding, "Instructions about examinations in schools, universities, allowing industries to be operational, will be given soon. I request you to not panic."

Referring to apprehensions in many quarters, he said that all agricultural activities in the state are continuing as before.

"All essential supplies are also continuing as usual with the movement of vehicles and there will be no disruptions of any kind", the CM had said.
A group of nuns and other religious organizations in New York are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case against a 2017 state mandate requiring employers to cover abortions in their employee healthcare plans.

Led by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, a coalition of religious organizations filed an appeal Friday asking the nations high court to hear the case of Diocese of Albany v. Lacewell.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the law firm Jones Day represent the plaintiffs, which include several Catholic dioceses, local branches of Catholic Charities, individual Catholic churches, Catholic and Anglican nuns and faith-based corporations.

The plaintiffs believe that New Yorks abortion mandate violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because it imposes severe burdens on their religious exercise, including a steadfast opposition to abortion.

Source:The Christian Post
YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Unidentified attackers launched assaults on two Myanmar air bases on Thursday, with blasts reported at one base and rocket fire seen at another, media and a witness said, Reuters reports.

The attacks come after three months of turmoil in Myanmar triggered by a Feb. 1 military coup. There was no claim of responsibility or any confirmation of any casualties in the attacks.

In the first attack on Thursday, three blasts went off at an air base near the central town of Magway in the early hours, the Delta News Agency reported in a post on Facebook.

Later, five rockets were fired at one of the country's main air bases, at Meiktila, to the northeast of Magway, reporter Than Win Hlaing, who was near the base at the time, said in a post.
Former NETS IT Director Added to Support Current Growth

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kvanto Payment Services A/S, a wholly owned operating subsidiary of Canadian based Kvanto Payment Services Ltd. ("Kvanto") are pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Lars Studstrup to the Company's Board of Directors. Mr. Studstrup was the former IT Director of NETS - Denmark, one of Europe's largest financial payment processor, and brings significant experience to Kvanto as it enters into its current phase of growth. Under Studstrup's leadership, seven Nordic IT departments have seen a yearly OPEX budget of over 500 million DKK.



Studstrup has been CIO and member of Group Management for 20 years at Royal Greenland, DISA (former Dansk Industri Syndikat A/S), and a company within the MAERSK group. As a specialist in operational efficiency and maturity, enterprise infrastructure, compliance, project and programme management, Studstrup has worked in over 20 countries throughout Europe, Asia and North America. He holds degrees in computer science and management information systems from Aarhus University and St. Cloud State University.

"It is truly a pleasure to have Mr. Studstrup accept appointment to our Board," CEO of Kvanto, Jesper Skorstengaard, said. "Mr. Studstrup brings vast experience from the financial sector, which will be a definite asset to assist Kvanto achieve our ambitious goals," he added.

Studstrup has been an advisor for Kvanto in the past and has participated in negotiations with Mobileware Technology Inc. regarding its acquisition and the implementation of the Kvanto gateway to support Kvanto's ardent growth in India.

"I've been involved and have followed Kvanto for some years now and it's good to finally officialise it," said Studstrup. "Kvanto has been undergoing an amazing development, and I agree with their vision and strategy. I really look forward to working with them and offering my experience to work towards it."

Mr. Studstrup replaces Mr. Brian Gjerstrup who recently stepped down from his board responsibilities. The Company would like to wish the best to Mr. Gjerstrup and thank him for his contributions and the time he spent with the company.

About Kvanto Payment Services:

Kvanto commenced operations in 2012 to compete in the rapidly changing digital payment solutions market. Client adoption proves Kvanto has the solutions to compete.

Kvanto has positioned itself as a premium European multi-connectivity payment service provider (holding a PSP-ISO), with a world-recognized payment gateway which integrates leading acquirers who handle different payment methods and payment cards linking to online and offline business efficiently, affordably and reliably.

The Kvanto organization boasts several decades of experience within the payment and financial industries. It's extensive network of partners and collaborators across the world is one of the key reasons why Kvanto is able to provide customers with a payment solution no matter where they operate from.

Kvanto Payment Services AS based in Denmark, is a 100% operating subsidiary owned by Kvanto Payments Services Ltd in Canada.

For Further Information Contact:

Kvanto Payment Services A/S

CEO, Jesper V. Skorstengaard

Phone: +45 4033 3396

Mail: jvs@kvanto.com

www.kvanto.com

Disclaimer

All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. Kvanto Payment Services A/S is under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Saddleback's Kay Warren: Church is 'vital' to combating mental health crisis

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As the pandemic has resulted in increased anxiety and depressive disorder among Americans, Saddleback Church co-founder Kay Warren says the Church can play a unique role in caring for those with mental illness and their families no matter how messy situations might be.

During a message delivered Thursday at the 2021 Evangelical Press Association Christian Media Convention, Warren, who co-founded the California-based megachurch with her husband, Rick, reflected on the death of her son, Matthew. He took his own life in 2013 after a life-long battle with mental illness.

I'll tell you  I will miss my son every day for the rest of my life, until that glorious resurrection day when I see Jesus and see Matthew again, she said.

After Matthews death, Warren founded Saddlebacks Hope for Mental Health Initiative to support individuals and family members of loved ones with mental illness and suicidal ideation.

She shared statistics revealing that one in five adults in the United States and one in five children will be affected by mental illness in the coming year. Suicide has become the second leading cause of death among people 10 to 34 years of age.

Where do people go who are living with mental health challenges? Where do they go to find compassionate care and understanding? Where can they find hope for their dark days? Warren asked. I really believe that the Church of Jesus Christ needs to be that safe, welcoming, and compassionate place for all who suffer.

There's a desperate need for the Church to engage with individuals with mental health challenges and their families, she added. The Church is positioned to take strong leadership and to provide the help that others can't.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in February that about four in 10 adults in the U.S. have during the pandemic reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, an increase from one in 10 who reported these symptoms in 2019.

The report also found that young adults have experienced various pandemic-related consequences, such as the closure of schools and loss of income that may contribute to poor mental health.

The foundation notes that during the pandemic, 56% of 18 to 24-year-olds reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder and are more likely than all adults to report substance use and suicidal thoughts.

Stressing that the Church can fill in the gaps that government programs and secular organizations leave behind, Warren cited statistics revealing that 25% of people who are seeking help in a mental health crisis will go to their priest, rabbi or pastor before they'll go to a mental health professional or physician.

I seriously beg you, don't walk by the Church of God on your way to engaging the world on critical issues like mental illness, Warren said. It's going to be messy ... [but] the Church is the only vehicle that God has chosen to spread his message of compassion and mercy, and at the center of it all is Christ and His body, the Church.

You can't say you love Jesus and hate His Church or have no use for it or ignore it, she continued. It is His body, and in His church, in His body, there is a place for everyone.

It doesnt require a large church congregation or excessive wealth to have an attitude of mercy and compassion and tenderness, Warren said. Instead, it requires a decision to care, to let your heart be touched by the suffering of fellow human beings, to allow their pain in some way to touch yours.

A 2014 survey from Lifeway Research found that nearly half of pastors (49%) rarely or never speak to their church in sermons or large group settings about acute mental illness.

Additionally, about one in four individuals said they had either stopped attending church, had not found a church to attend or had changed churches based on the churchs response to mental health issues.

Mental illness dehumanizes people, Warren stressed. But the Church has the opportunity to open its arms and befriend and listen to those struggling.

What if we held each other's hearts in our hands for a few moments and validated each other's significance ... and provided each other with the comfort that God has given to us, she said.

The most powerful thing the faith community can do is remove the debilitating stigma and rejection that those living with a mental illness encounter, Warren said, adding: The faith community is what I call a legitimizing force in society. If the Church says you're OK, you're OK."

The primary reason many people struggling with mental illness dont seek help, she explained, is due to the stigma attached to it. But the Bible is clear that having an illness doesnt mean that youre not valuable or that theres something spiritually wrong, she assured.

Nobody wants to be thought of as having a mental health challenge, Warren pointed out. Mental illness is part of our body; it's part of the physical part of our body. And when you can let people know that it's not a sin to be sick and your church is a  safe place to bring your brokenness, then we're beginning to remove the stigma.

Warren encouraged churches to hold mental health seminars, compile a list of some mental health professionals for referral purposes and offer hope to those struggling with mental illness.

The LifeWay study found that 68% of pastors surveyed said their churches maintain a list of local mental health resources for church members. Still, only about 28% said that families are aware those resources exist.

Hope is the most valuable commodity that we have in the Church to offer people in profound pain, she said.

The Church is to offer hope at every stage and phase of life. That's what makes us different from every other organization trying to offer help in this space. We're here to stay. And we're here to continue to hold out hope.
'Captured alive on May 8, killed on May 17 in alleged clash with Sabah police' FIVE ABU Sayyaf terrorists were killed following an a...
Tragically, those who endured apartheid have been mocked by Human Rights Watchs latest report, A Threshold Crossed . By accusing Israel of enforcing apartheid against Palestinians, the report reveals far more about Human Rights Watch than it does about the conflict. Most distressingly, the report  full of omissions, distortions, and evident agendas  will do nothing to improve Palestinians lives.

Their black maids gave up years with their own families, instead raising my parents in cities far from their impoverished townships. Ive heard countless stories of family members who, after protesting for equality, were either jailed or forced into self-imposed exile.

As a child of South African immigrants, Im all too familiar with apartheids atrocities. Black people were devalued as human beings; they were expendable. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, my parents understood how much black lives didnt matter.

According to the report, Israeli authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to the extent that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. Yes, many Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer greatly. Israel too, has contributed at times to this suffering. But despite Human Rights Watchs 213-page diatribe against Israels treatment of Palestinians, its the reports glaring omissions that speak loudest.

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In a conflict that has seen Israelis mourn almost 24,000 soldiers and more than 3000 victims of terrorism, the report is notably silent on Palestinian terrorisms effect on Israelis, which has, in turn, had tragic consequences for Palestinians. While it mentions the West Bank separation barrier  viewed by Israelis as a safeguard against Palestinian terrorism  more than 30 times, it neglects to mention the very Palestinian terrorist attacks that prompted the barriers construction. Take, for example, the 2001 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub, leaving 21 dead and over 120 injured, most of whom were teenage escapees from the former Soviet Union.

Thus, one must ask, if Human Rights Watch sought an honest understanding of the causes of Palestinian suffering, would it not find it relevant to mention such attacks as part of a greater context? Hamas, too, is mentioned more than 10 times, yet, astonishingly, the report omits its designation as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States, the European Union, Australia and others.

The report brings two international rulings to justify its accusations: the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the International Criminal Courts 1998 Rome Statute. This is rejected, however, by Richard Goldstone. A fierce anti-apartheid advocate who Nelson Mandela appointed as a justice to South Africas highest court, he once noted in The New York Times that in Israel, nothing  comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute. Goldstone says the charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.
Every weekday, we deliver the news in under five minutes in podcast form. Listen to the podcast at this link or on your favorite app including iTunes, Spotify, Alexa and Google. Episodes are available every day on syracuse.com. Subscribe/Follow and rate the podcast via your favorite app.

New York ending curfew for bars, restaurants

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HOUSTON, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lummus Technology today announced that its Novolen business has been awarded a PP contract by BUA Refinery, a subsidiary of Nigeria's BUA Group, at their grassroots refinery in Nigeria. Lummus' scope includes the technology license for a 285 KTA polypropylene unit as well as basic design engineering, training and services, and catalyst supply.

"We look forward to working with BUA Refinery on this critical project and supporting the first Novolen polypropylene unit in Nigeria," said Leon de Bruyn, Lummus Technology's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our world-class Novolen technology is well suited to meet Nigeria's increasing demand for the growing petrochemical products market. It offers a flexible range of industry-leading products for all PP applications, and the industry's lowest overall capital and operational costs, while providing customers with high process reliability and flexibility in responding to market needs."

"We are pleased to sign this polypropylene contract for our BUA Refinery and Petrochemicals Project with Lummus Technology, a world leader in delivering polypropylene solutions, which will solve the increasing demand for high-performance grade polypropylene in Nigeria, the Gulf of Guinea as well as the Sub-Saharan Africa Region," said Abdul Samad Rabiu, Chairman of BUA Group. "We are confident in the capacity and technical expertise of Lummus Technology to deliver a best-in-class, 285 KTA PP unit for our refinery project scheduled to come on stream in 2024."

Lummus Novolen Technology GmbH licenses polypropylene technology and provides related engineering and technical support/advisory services. Novolen also supplies NHP catalysts for the production of high-performance polypropylene grades in the Novolen process and NOVOCENE metallocene catalyst for the production of special polypropylene grades.

About Lummus Technology

With a heritage spanning more than 110 years and a focus on innovation that has resulted in approximately 130 technologies and 3,400 patents, Lummus Technology is the global leader in developing and implementing process technologies. We are a Master Licensor of petrochemical, refining, gasification, gas processing and renewable technologies, and a supplier of catalysts, proprietary equipment and related services to customers worldwide. To learn more about the new Lummus, visit www.LummusTechnology.com.

SOURCE Lummus Technology, LLC

Related Links

www.LummusTechnology.com


Passions in the Caucasus are heating up as the start of construction of a transport corridor from Azerbaijan to its exclave region of Nakhchivan through the territory of Armenia is delayed. Meanwhile, the implementation of this project, which changes the economic realities of the region, is one of the central points of the trilateral agreement of November 9, 2020 between Baku, Moscow and Yerevan. The issue has been consistently torpedoed by Yerevan, whose behavior seems to be causing increasing irritation in Baku.

The harsh tone of recent statements from Azerbaijan leaves no doubt: Azerbaijanis do not intend to put up with half-hearted decisions and attempts to blur the essence of the agreements reached with Yerevan through the mediation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Several days ago, Ilham Aliyev said that if Armenia refuses to implement the Zangezur corridor, as it is called in Baku, the Armenian side will be forced to open this corridor. In Armenia, these statements of the Azerbaijani leader were perceived as a threat to their own territorial integrity and began to remind of Russia's allied obligations to defend the republic. In Russia, which is remarkable, they did not react to this at all. At the same time, until recently, Armenia itself was a country violating the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. A circumstance that clearly demonstrates how the balance of power in the region has radically changed after the Second Karabakh War in 2020.

Another harsh message Ilham Aliyev voiced on April 27 during his visit to the liberated Zangilan region. "The military provocation recently perpetrated against our border guards on the Zangilan direction of the Azerbaijani-Armenian border should be the last such attempt. We, having shown restraint, did not respond to this provocation. But this is the last warning. If a similar attempt is made again, the enemy will be destroyed on the spot, "the Azerbaijani president said, referring to the April 22 border incident. Modern military equipment and dozens of Israeli "Harop" kamikaze drones, against which Aliyev spoke to his military, made his words even more convincing.

While the Azerbaijani president in an army off-road vehicle drives around the vast territories liberated by his army, political uncertainty continues to reign in Yerevan - a state in which the Armenian society permanently remains after the signing of an armistice (or an act of surrender, as the opposition in Armenia calls it). The paradox of the situation is that even despite the painful defeat in Karabakh, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan remains the most popular politician in the country. On April 25, he submitted his technical resignation due to early parliamentary elections scheduled for late July, where he will be re-elected together with his My Step bloc. Recent opinion polls have shown that no other political force is even close to Pashinyan's "My Step", whose rating is more than 30%. Reanimation as a political figure of the second president of Armenia, Robert Kocharian, is proceeding slowly and with a creak - his rating is only 5-6%, and he has not yet created his own political movement.

But on the eve of the elections, Pashinyan's team began to receive impressive support from the West. Friends, as they say, are known in trouble. US President Joe Biden called the events of 1915 "Armenian genocide", the chairman of the French Senate solemnly promised to promote the idea of independence of Karabakh in Europe, and the US Ambassador to Yerevan Lin Tracy announced her country's readiness to start negotiations with the CSTO member (!) Armenia on the supply of American weapons. All this is credited to the diplomatic successes of Pashinyan's team. The opposition has nothing to boast about.

The Armenian authorities tie the implementation of the Zangezur corridor to the issue of "return of prisoners of war." We are talking about a group of soldiers of the Armenian Armed Forces of more than 60 people transferred to the rear of the Azerbaijani army in Karabakh after the conclusion of the trilateral agreement of November 9. In Baku, they are considered saboteurs and are reminded that the arrested Armenian soldiers killed and wounded several Azerbaijani soldiers and civilians. Accordingly, the Azerbaijanis are not going to return them - at least not yet. Russia has taken a cautious stance on this delicate issue - on the one hand, Moscow at the level of the foreign minister confirmed Baku's data that the soldiers were illegally deployed after the conclusion of the trilateral agreement. On the other hand, the Foreign Ministry emphasizes that it is in favor of an exchange of prisoners on the principle of all for all. But the US Congress is preparing a resolution demanding from Azerbaijan the unconditional return of "Armenian prisoners of war". Thus, in this issue, one can observe a certain synchronization of the actions of the Armenian government and its Western partners. The topic of "prisoners of war" is one of the most problematic for Nikol Pashinyan, and it is easy to calculate a pre-election move to neutralize its negative impact on one's image by supporting the United States and France.

An interesting situation is developing in the region today. Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan are politically and economically interested in unblocking regional railway communications. The Armenian authorities, represented by Pashinyan, are blocking the solution of this issue, receiving rather serious pre-election bonuses from the West in return. Will Yerevan risk finally sabotaging the trilateral agreement - despite Vladimir Putin's unequivocal warning that it will become suicide for Armenia? Or such a maneuver and flirting with the West is just a pre-election game, the purpose of which is to maintain power and gain space for foreign policy maneuvers. In any of the options, there is a high risk that regional players - Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan - may very abruptly stop Nikol Pashinyan's flirting with the very unfriendly Bayden West. And in this context, Aliyev's statements about the possibility of "forcible" creation of the Zangezur corridor, his "last warning" on the occasion of the recent border incident, as well as Moscow's deathly silence, appear in a different, rather dangerous light for Armenia.
SHENZHEN, China, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nam Tai Property Inc. ("Nam Tai" or the "Company") (NYSE Symbol: NTP) today announced its unaudited results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

In the quarter ended March 31, 2021:

Revenue was $69.0 million in the first quarter of 2021, an increase of $68.3 million year-on-year.

in the first quarter of 2021, an increase of year-on-year. Net income from operations was $36.2 million , increased from net loss from operations of $3.7 million in the first quarter of 2020.

, increased from net loss from operations of in the first quarter of 2020. Consolidated net income was $25.6 million in the first quarter of 2021, increased from consolidated net loss from operations of $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2020.

in the first quarter of 2021, increased from consolidated net loss from operations of in the first quarter of 2020. Real estate properties under development, net was $327.4 million as of March 31, 2021 , an increase of $15.2 million from the end of 2020.

In addition, as of March 31, 2021:

The occupancy rate of Nam Tai Inno Park reached 48%, an increase of five percentage points from the quarter ended December 31, 2020 .

. Approximately 1,100 dormitory units of Nam Tai Inno Park have been delivered to our tenants.

The construction of the main structure of Tower C in Nam Tai Technology Center and the basement work of Nam Tai - Longxi have been completed.

The following tables set forth key highlights of the financial information for the periods indicated:

(In thousands of US dollars, except per share data, percentages and as otherwise stated)





Quarterly Results









Q1 2021



Q1 2020



YoY(%)(a)





Revenue

$ 69,047



$ 699





9,778.0%





Gross profit

$ 44,970



$ 82





54,741.5%





Net income (loss) from operation

$ 36,240



$ (3,722)











% of revenue



52.5%





(532.5)%













per share (diluted)

$ 0.92



$ (0.10)











Consolidated net income (loss)

$ 25,631



$ (3,175)











% of revenue



37.1%





(454.2)%













Basic earnings (loss) per share

$ 0.65



$ (0.08)











Diluted earnings (loss) per share

$ 0.65



$ (0.08)











Weighted average number of shares ('000)



























Basic



39,198





38,841













Diluted



39,209





38,841















Notes:

(a) Percentage change is not applicable if either of the two periods contains a loss or no amount.





Financial Position







As of March 31,



As of December 31,



As of March 31,







2021



2020



2020



Cash and cash equivalents(a)

$ 20,642



$ 60,980



$ 121,340

Short term investments(b)

$ 92,399



$ 150,150



$ 4,090

Restricted cash

$ 71,857



$ 2,065



$ 790

Real estate properties under development, net

$ 327,386



$ 312,185



$ 262,937

Real estate properties held for sales type lease

$ 9,266



$ 31,558



$ 

Real estate properties held for lease, net

$ 90,872



$ 92,207



$ 

Property, plant and equipment, net

$ 25,870



$ 26,568



$ 25,290

Total assets

$ 664,689



$ 701,210



$ 460,557

Amount due to a shareholder

$ 146,869



$ 146,869



$ 

Short term bank loans

$ 



$ 



$ 1,374

Current portion of long term bank loans

$ 120,708



$ 122,883



$ 2,901

Accounts payable

$ 57,073



$ 61,559



$ 36,308

Advance from customers

$ 8,192



$ 69,722



$ 71,220

Long term bank loans

$ 



$ 



$ 119,236

Total shareholders' equity

$ 271,722



$ 248,828



$ 211,614

Total number of common shares issued



39,198





39,198





38,935



Notes:

(a) Cash and cash equivalents include all cash balances and certificates of deposit having a maturity date of three months or less when purchased.

(b) Short term investments include investments with original maturities of three months and less than 12 months and investments that are expected to be realized in cash in the next 12 months. As of March 31, 2021, the Company had short term investments of $92.4 million, which were from the proceeds of a private placement completed on October 5, 2020 (the "Private Placement"), investing into a supply chain fund managed by Credit Suisse with underlying notes insured by insurance companies with a credit rating of at least A by Standard & Poor's or A2 by Moody's, which was terminated subsequently effective as of March 4, 2021 due to some of the fund's assets being subject to considerable valuation uncertainty and reduced availability of insurance coverage for new investments. The proceeds of compulsory redemption in March 2021 will be paid out by the supply chain fund in several instalments as soon as practicable until the Company has received the total proceeds from the compulsory redemption in respect of the fund. As of April 26, 2021, the Company received two instalments in aggregate of $68.7 million from the fund.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION (UNAUDITED) IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2021

Key Highlights of Financial Position





As of March 31,



As of December 31,

As of March 31,







2021



2020

2020



Current ratio(a)

0.91



0.87

1.34



Debt ratio(b)

59.1%



64.5%

54.1%



Return on equity(c)

9.8%



6.8%

(1.5)%



Ratio of total liabilities to total equity

1.45



1.82

1.18





Notes:

(a) Current ratio is calculated with all current assets divided by all current liabilities.

(b) Debt ratio is calculated with all total liabilities divided by total assets.

(c) Return on equity is calculated with consolidated net income (loss) divided by average of total shareholders' equity at beginning and end of the period.

FINANCIAL RESULTS

Revenue

Revenue for the first quarter of 2021 was $69.0 million compared to $0.7 million in the first quarter of 2020. Revenue for the first quarter of 2021 mainly consisted of the sales type lease income of $66.5 million and operating lease income of $1.1 million from Nam Tai Inno Park recognized following the delivery of the dormitory units, operating lease income of $0.9 million from existing buildings located on the sites of Inno Valley, Wuxi, Shanghai, and the leased space at Nam Tai - Tang Xi Technology Park. Revenue for the first quarter of 2020 mainly consisted of rental income of $0.7 million from existing factory buildings located on the sites of Inno Valley, Wuxi and the leased space at Nam Tai - Tang Xi Technology Park.

Gross Profit

Gross profit for the first quarter of 2021 was $45.0 million compared to $0.1 million in the first quarter of 2020. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2021 mainly consisted of revenue of $69.0 million, offset by cost of $24.1 million for the period. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2020 mainly consisted of revenue of $0.7 million, offset by rental cost of $0.6 million for the period.

Net Income (Loss) from Operations

Net income from operations for the first quarter of 2021 was $36.2 million compared to net loss from operations of $3.7 million in the first quarter of 2020. Net income from operations for the first quarter of 2021 mainly consisted of gross profit of $45.0 million, offset in part by our general and administrative expenses of $7.6 million and selling and marketing expenses of $1.1 million for the period. Net loss from operations for the first quarter of 2020 mainly consisted of general and administrative expenses of $3.0 million and selling and marketing expenses of $0.8 million, offset in part by our gross profit of $0.1 million for the period. The increase in general and administrative expenses of $4.6 million in the first quarter of 2021 was mainly due to the increase in legal, agent and professional fees.

Consolidated Net Income (Loss)

Consolidated net income for the first quarter of 2021 was $25.6 million compared to consolidated net loss of $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2020. Consolidated net income for the first quarter of 2021 mainly consisted of net income from operations of $36.2 million and other net income of $0.05 million, interest income of $0.08 million, offset in part by income tax expenses of $10.7 million. Consolidated net loss for the first quarter of 2020 mainly consisted of net loss from operations of $3.7 million and other net expenses of $0.06 million, offset in part by interest income of $0.4 million from time deposits and income tax benefit of $0.2 million.

Cash and Cash Equivalents

Cash and cash equivalents decreased by $40.4 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $61.0 million as of December 31, 2020 to $20.6 million as of March 31, 2021. The decrease was primarily attributable to net cash provided by investing activities of $57.7 million, offset by net cash used in operating activities of $23.1 million and financing activities of $1.3 million, an exchange rate effect of $3.9 million and the increase in restricted cash of $69.8 million in the first quarter of 2021. The net cash provided by investing activities was primarily attributable to proceeds from the redemption of short term investments of $57.7 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Restricted Cash

Restricted cash increased by $69.8 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $2.1 million as of December 31, 2020 to $71.9 million as of March 31, 2021, as our lending banks have restricted the remittance from the bank accounts of the subsidiaries of the Company in their banks in China and an injunctive order was imposed on the Company by the High Court of Justice of the British Virgin Islands of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in March 2021, which has restricted us from dealing with the proceeds raised from the Private Placement.

Real Estate Properties under Development, Net

Real estate properties under development, net increased by $15.2 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $312.2 million as of December 31, 2020 to $327.4 million as of March 31, 2021, primarily attributable to the increase of $10.6 million for the construction of Nam Tai Technology Center, $2.9 million for the construction of Nam Tai - Longxi and $1.7 million for the construction of Nam Tai Inno Park.

Real estate properties held for sales type lease

Real estate properties held for sales type lease are stated at the lower of carrying amounts or fair value less selling costs. Real estate properties held for sales type lease decreased by $22.3 million from $31.6 million as of December 31, 2020 to $9.3 million as of March 31, 2021. The decrease was mainly due to delivery of part of Towers 8, 9 and 10 during the first quarter of 2021.

Real estate properties held for lease, net

Real estate properties held for lease, net are recorded at cost less accumulated depreciation. Real estate properties held for lease, net decreased by $1.3 million from $92.2 million as of December 31, 2020 to $90.9 million as of March 31, 2021, which was mainly due to depreciation during the first quarter of 2021.

Accounts Payable

Accounts payable decreased by $4.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $61.6 million as of December 31, 2020 to $57.1 million as of March 31, 2021. The decrease was mainly due to the increase of project payable of $5.4 million and $0.8 million for Nam Tai Technology Center and Nam Tai - Longxi, and decrease of project payable of $9.9 million for Nam Tai Inno Park, and $1.0 million for Shenzhen Kaicheng Architecture and Decoration Co., Ltd., which is a subsidiary of the Company.

Advance from Customers

Advance from customers decreased by $61.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $69.7 million as of December 31, 2020 to $8.2 million as of March 31, 2021. The decrease was mainly attributed to the recognition of revenue of $66.5 million from the prepaid rent for the units delivered to customers of Nam Tai Inno Park during the period.

Current Portion of Long Term Bank Loans

The current portion of long term bank loans decreased by $2.2 million in the first quarter of 2021 from $122.9 million as of December 31, 2020 to $120.7 million as of March 31, 2021, due to $1.3 million of loan repayments and $0.9 million of exchange gain in the period. In March 2021, the Company received demand letters from Bank of China, Bank of Beijing, Industrial Bank, and Xiamen International Bank (the "Lending Banks"), regarding payment in full of amounts due under the respective loan agreements with the banks. Following the demand letters, the Lending Banks have restricted the remittance from the accounts of the subsidiaries of the Company in their banks in China. The Company is negotiating with the Lending Banks. All bank borrowings were re-classified as current liabilities as of December 31, 2020.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of March 31, 2021, the Company had a total cash and cash equivalents of $20.6 million. As of December 31, 2020, the Company had a total cash and cash equivalents of $61.0 million.

In 2021, our planned capital expenditures are estimated to be $138.0 million for the three major real estate development projects, of which $35.4 million has been allocated for Nam Tai Inno Park, $72.4 million has been allocated for Nam Tai Technology Center and $30.2 million has been allocated for Nam Tai - Longxi.

Going Concern

The unaudited consolidated financial information of the Company for the first quarter of 2021 has been prepared assuming that the Company will continue as a going concern which contemplates the realization of assets and the satisfaction of liabilities in the normal course of business. As of March 31, 2021, the Company had net current liabilities of $33 million which, among other conditions and uncertainties, raised substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.

In addition to the continuing negotiations with the Lending Banks and certain other creditors, the Company is evaluating several methods of financing, such as additional external financings, acceleration of the leasing of Nam Tai Inno Park, and presale of Nam Tai Technology Center and Nam Tai - Longxi, failing which rights offering and project disposal will also be considered. Currently, the Company intends to raise loans from financial institutions and potential funders to maintain our normal operations.

However, there are significant uncertainties pertaining to the governing and management of the Company as a result of the postponing of a special meeting of shareholders. For more information, see "Recent Development  Appeal on the Judgement of the BVI Court". The appropriate course of actions may have to be decided by the Board and management subsequent to the meeting, while the current Board and management are committed to taking actions to preserve the best interests of all shareholders and explore options that will be able to be considered.

Please see the Company's Condensed Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income for further details. The information contained herein has also been published on the Company's website at https://www.namtai.com/quarterly/index.html.

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

Leasing Progress

As of March 31, 2021, we had leasable area of approximately 365,000 square meters, of which around 85% was located in Shenzhen and 15% was located in Wuxi and Shanghai. As of March 31, 2021, the occupancy rate of our Shenzhen projects, including pre-leasing areas, was approximately 52%, and that of our Wuxi and Shanghai projects was approximately 98%. The occupancy rate of Nam Tai Inno Park was 48%, an increase of five percentage points from the quarter ended December 31, 2020.

Projects

Leasable Area as of March 31, 2021

Leased Area as of March 31, 2021

Occupancy Rate

Shenzhen

310,193



161,186

52%

Nam Tai Inno Park

264,337



125,652

48%

Nam Tai Inno Valley

38,270



30,024

78%

Nam Tai - Tang Xi Technology Park

7,586



5,510

73%

Wuxi & Shanghai

54,809



53,851

98%

Wuxi facilities

50,828



50,828

100%

Nam Tai  U-Creative Space (Lujiazui)

3,981



3,023

76%

Total

365,002



215,037

59%



In January 2021, the inauguration ceremony of Nam Tai Entrepreneurs Club was successfully held at Nam Tai Inno Park Industry Service Center. More than 60 entrepreneurs who settled in Inno Park and officials from Shenzhen Guangming District Science and Technology Innovation Bureau attended the event. We established Nam Tai Entrepreneurs Club with the aim to foster engagement with entrepreneurs and create a resource sharing platform among the community of entrepreneurs.

Project Construction and Development Progress

For Nam Tai Inno Park , as of March 31, 2021 , approximately 1,100 dormitory units have been delivered to our tenants. We are working on interior decoration of the industrial office of Towers 3 and 5. In the first quarter of 2021, we attracted 27 corporate tenants, mostly from the health, technology and related industries. The vast majority of our dormitory units in Inno Park have been delivered to tenants and our focus will shift to the leasing of industrial office and commercial spaces which we face fierce competition in the local market.

, as of , approximately 1,100 dormitory units have been delivered to our tenants. We are working on interior decoration of the industrial office of Towers 3 and 5. In the first quarter of 2021, we attracted 27 corporate tenants, mostly from the health, technology and related industries. The vast majority of our dormitory units in Inno Park have been delivered to tenants and our focus will shift to the leasing of industrial office and commercial spaces which we face fierce competition in the local market. For Nam Tai Technology Center, we have completed the construction of main structure of Tower C as of March 31, 2021 . Currently we are undergoing the construction of main structures of Towers A, B and D. At present, we have not met the conditions for applying pre-sale permit for the project. One of the conditions for applying for the pre-sale permit is to enter into an industrial supervision agreement with the local authorities, under which we will be imposed certain performance indicators such as total investment amount on the Nam Tai Technology Center, and aggregated output value and tax contribution attained by the enterprises registered in Nam Tai Technology Center. There have been differences between the performance indicators that might be imposed by the local authorities and those proposed by us. We are in the process of negotiating the performance indicators with the local authorities, and there is no assurance that the local authorities will agree to the performance indicators proposed by us. If we cannot reach an agreement with the local authorities, we may not be able to obtain the pre-sale permit and commence pre-sale on time, or at all. Even if we are to enter into the industrial supervision agreement, failure to comply with the performance indicators set out in the agreement may result in substantial penalties and fines imposed by the local authorities. Any material adverse outcome from the negotiation with the local authorities may materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. In addition, due to stressed liquidity condition of the Company, the construction progress of the project has been adversely affected. We are in negotiation with the relevant contractors.

. Currently we are undergoing the construction of main structures of Towers A, B and D. At present, we have not met the conditions for applying pre-sale permit for the project. One of the conditions for applying for the pre-sale permit is to enter into an industrial supervision agreement with the local authorities, under which we will be imposed certain performance indicators such as total investment amount on the Nam Tai Technology Center, and aggregated output value and tax contribution attained by the enterprises registered in Nam Tai Technology Center. There have been differences between the performance indicators that might be imposed by the local authorities and those proposed by us. We are in the process of negotiating the performance indicators with the local authorities, and there is no assurance that the local authorities will agree to the performance indicators proposed by us. If we cannot reach an agreement with the local authorities, we may not be able to obtain the pre-sale permit and commence pre-sale on time, or at all. Even if we are to enter into the industrial supervision agreement, failure to comply with the performance indicators set out in the agreement may result in substantial penalties and fines imposed by the local authorities. Any material adverse outcome from the negotiation with the local authorities may materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. In addition, due to stressed liquidity condition of the Company, the construction progress of the project has been adversely affected. We are in negotiation with the relevant contractors. For Nam Tai Inno Valley , we are still in the process of obtaining approval for our urban renewal application. Before obtaining the approval from local authorities, we will continue to lease out the units in Inno Valley in short-term tenancy. The occupancy rate of Inno Valley was 78% as of March 31, 2021 .

, we are still in the process of obtaining approval for our urban renewal application. Before obtaining the approval from local authorities, we will continue to lease out the units in Inno Valley in short-term tenancy. The occupancy rate of Inno Valley was 78% as of . For Nam Tai - Longxi, as of March 31, 2021 , the basement work has been completed. We are currently working on the main structure's construction. Due to stressed liquidity condition of the Company, the construction progress of the project has been adversely affected. We are negotiating with the contractors.

Industrial Operation Progress

In January 2021 , "Nam Tai National High-tech Enterprise Cultivation and Innovation Center" was established in Nam Tai Inno Park with the objective to facilitate enterprises to obtain national qualification of high and new technology enterprise and to support the growth of enterprises through our comprehensive trainings. In March 2021 , we organized the first training course "Nam Tai National High-tech Enterprise" in which representatives of the Science and Technology Innovation Association of Guangming Science City elaborated industrial development policies of Guangming District and we attracted 12 enterprise tenants to join. In the same month, we held the "Nam Tai Inno Park Enterprise Talent Fair" to assist the tenants on talent recruitment.

Real Estate Market Update

In the first quarter of 2021, the supply and demand of commercial housing in Dongguan hit a record high in the same period of nearly five years, of which the supply floor area and transacted floor area reached approximately 1.13 million and 1.42 million square meters, respectively, representing year-on-year growths of 136% and 118%. The average transaction price of commercial housing in Dongguan in this period increased by approximately 26% year-on-year to RMB28,479 per square meter.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Appeal on the Judgment of the BVI Court

On April 7, 2021, we filed an application to appeal the March 3, 2021 judgment issued by the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in the High Court of Justice in the British Virgin Islands. The judgment held that the Private Placement previously announced by us on October 5, 2020 was void and should be set aside. On April 20, 2020, in connection with our appeal of the judgment, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal in the British Virgin Islands (the "Court of Appeal") has granted an order postponing the special meeting of shareholders previously scheduled for April 26, 2021. The meeting will be rescheduled at a later date to be determined by the court in due course.

Supply Chain Fund Managed by Credit Suisse

We have placed $150 million out of the proceeds from the Private Placement to a supply chain fund managed by Credit Suisse (the "Fund") with the objective of seeking a stable and enhanced return through an insured cash management solution. As represented by Credit Suisse, the Fund was a safe "liquidity management tool" with a weekly redemption feature and "100% protection on the underlying investments". The underlying notes were insured by insurance companies with a credit rating of at least A by Standard & Poor's or A2 by Moody's. In January 2021, the Company received a redemption amount of $15 million from the Fund. Subsequently, the Fund was terminated on March 4, 2021 and is being liquidated due to some of the Fund's assets being subject to considerable valuation uncertainty and reduced availability of insurance coverage for new investments. We have been notified by the Fund that the liquidation proceeds will be repaid in installments. As of April 26, 2021, we had received two installments in an aggregate of $68.7 million, or over 51% of the principal of $135 million, from the Fund.

On April 16, 2021, we sent a demand letter to Credit Suisse for the remaining repayments and reserved all our rights to take further legal actions for breach of duty, misrepresentation and/or mis-selling. On April 19, 2021, we filed complaints to Securities & Futures Commission of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Monetary Authority. We are actively negotiating with Credit Suisse and are committed to act in the best interest of the Company. There is no assurance that we can fully recover our principal from the Fund.

Industrial Supervision Agreement of Nam Tai Technology Center

We are negotiating an industrial supervision agreement with the local authorities before we can obtain the pre-sale permit for Nam Tai Technology Center, which includes performance indicators such as total investment amount on Nam Tai Technology Center, and the aggregated output value and tax contribution attained by the enterprises registered in Nam Tai Technology Center. The outcome of this negotiation is uncertain. For more information, please see "Business Overview  Project Construction and Development Progress".

Lawsuit filed by a supplier

On April 26, 2021, one of the Company's subsidiaries received a writ of summons from the Shenzhen Guangming District People's Court together with a civil complaint filed with such court by one of our suppliers, under which the supplier sought an order requiring us to settle the outstanding construction fees of around $ 5 million. We are negotiating with the supplier and seeking legal advice from external counsel.

OPERATING RESULTS





As of March 31, 2021 (By Floor Area)

(in square meter) Projects Completed

190,722 Projects Under Development

450,094 Projects For Future Development

170,200 Total

811,016

Project Portfolio - As of March 31, 2021

Project



Nam Tai Inno Park

Nam Tai Technology Center

Nam Tai Inno Valley

Nam Tai - Longxi City



Shenzhen

Shenzhen

Shenzhen

Dongguan Type(a)



Office and Dormitory

Office and Dormitory

Office and Dormitory

Residential and Commercial Property Site Area (sq.m.)



103,739

22,364

22,367

33,763 Capacity GFA



265,139

139,746

N/A

84,408 Total GFA (sq.m.)



331,701

194,595

170,200(b)

114,520 Total GFA Completed(c)



190,722(d)

-

-

- Under Development (sq.m.)



140,979

194,595

-

114,520 Future Development (sq. m.)



-

-

170,200(b)

- Interest Attributable To Us



100%

100%

100%

100%

Address



Fenghuang Community, Guangming District, Shenzhen

Namtai Road, Baoan District, Shenzhen

Dongtai Village, Machong Town, Dongguan





























Notes:

(a) The types of our projects are based on our development plans or certificates issued by the relevant authority subject to adjustment upon the final approval.

(b) The gross floor area is based on the assumption that we will receive M-0 zoning approval for the entire Inno Valley site prior to its redevelopment. If we do not receive the M-0 zoning approval, we will be required to develop Inno Valley under the M-1 zoning requirements. In that case, appropriate adjustments to our plan will have to be made. The existing gross floor area of Inno Valley is 41,927 square meters. According to "Shenzhen Industrial Block Range Line Management Measures", the location of Nam Tai Inno Valley is within the designated industrial block range, of which the government strictly controls the proportion of M-0 zoning on industrial land. Therefore, the proportion of M-0 zoning, floor area ratio and construction area of Inno Valley are subject to the final approval of the government which is uncertain at this time. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to develop Inno Valley according to the floor area currently disclosed.

(c) Properties completed refer to the status following the completion of the construction of the properties, the registration of the completion acceptance and the internal acceptance criteria.

(d) As of March 31, 2021, the construction of Towers 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Nam Tai Inno Park was completed.

Properties Under Development

The table below sets forth certain information of our property projects under development as of March 31, 2021, comprising properties under development with the foundation work construction permits obtained but the construction work was still in progress.



Project

Nam Tai Inno Park

Nam Tai Technology Center

Nam Tai - Longxi City

Shenzhen

Shenzhen

Dongguan (Estimated) Total GFA (sq. m.)

331,701

194,595

114,520 (Estimated) Leasable GFA (sq. m.)

264,337

-

- (Estimated) Saleable GFA (sq. m.)

-

130,166

64,408(a) Commencement of Construction

May 2017

December 2018

July 2020 Status of Pre-sale Permit

Not eligible

To be obtained

To be obtained Estimated Completion Time

2021 Q2(b)

2022

2022 Interest Attributable to Us

100%

100%

100%

Notes:

(a) Excluding parking space and construction area that needs to be handed over to the local government free of charge. The final floor area is subject to the approval of the government.

(b) We are working on the interior decoration of Towers 3 and 5 of Nam Tai Inno Park.

Properties for Future Development

The table below sets forth certain information of our property projects held for future development as of March 31, 2021, comprising properties for which we have obtained the land use right certificate and are in the process of obtaining the foundation work construction permits, or we have entered into land grant contracts or are in the process of applying for special planning although the land use right certificate is not yet obtained.

Project

Nam Tai Inno Valley City

Shenzhen Estimated Total GFA(1) (sq. m.)

170,200 Estimated Completion Time

2025

Note:

(1) The figures are subject to adjustment upon the final approval of the relevant authority.

Projects for Operation and Management

The table below sets forth certain information of our projects leased from third parties for operation and management as of March 31, 2021.



Project

Location

Contracted Floor Area (sq. m.)

Operation Model 1 Nam Tai - Tang Xi Technology Park

Shenzhen

7,586

Leasing and Operation 2 Nam Tai - U-Creative Space (Lujiazui)

Shanghai

3,981

Leasing and Operation

The information contained in, or that can be accessed through, the website mentioned in this announcement does not form part of the announcement.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND FACTORS THAT COULD CAUSE OUR SHARE PRICE TO DECLINE

Certain statements included in this announcement, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "might", "can", "could", "will", "would", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "forecast", "intend", "plan", "seek", or "timetable". These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business and the industry in which we operate. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations about future events. There are several factors, many beyond our control, which could cause results to differ materially from our expectation. These risk factors are described in our Annual Report on Form 20-F and in our Current Reports filed on Form 6-K from time to time and are incorporated herein by reference. Any of these factors could, by itself, or together with one or more other factors, adversely affect our business, results of operations or financial condition. There may also be other factors currently unknown to us, or have not been described by us, that could cause our results to differ from our expectations. Although we believe the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements apply only as of the date of this announcement; as such, they should not be unduly relied upon as circumstances change. Except as required by law, we are not obligated, and we undertake no obligation, to release publicly any revisions to these forward-looking statements that might reflect events or circumstance occurring after the date of this announcement or those that might reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

SCHEDULE FOR RELEASE OF QUARTERLY FINANCIAL RESULTS FOR 2021

Announcements of Financial Results

Quarter

Date of release Q1 2021

April 29, 2021 (Thursday) Q2 2021

July 26, 2021 (Monday) Q3 2021

November 1, 2021 (Monday) Q4 2021

January 31, 2022 (Monday)

ABOUT NAM TAI PROPERTY INC.

We are a real estate developer and operator, mainly conducting business in Mainland China. Our main land resources are located in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area ("Greater Bay Area") and Wuxi, China, of which the three plots of land in Shenzhen will be developed into the technology parks of Nam Tai Inno Park, Nam Tai Technology Center and Nam Tai Inno Valley. We plan to build these technology parks into landmark projects in the region, and provide high-quality industrial offices, industrial service spaces and supporting dormitories to the park tenants. Based on the experience of developing and operating technology parks, and the industrial relationship network accumulated over the past 40 years, we have also exported the operation mode of technology parks to other industrial properties using the asset-light model to rent industrial properties for repositioning and business invitation. We will also expand the commercial and residential property business in China as an auxiliary development strategy of the Company. As the growth prospects of China maintain, we will actively seize development opportunities in the Greater Bay Area and other first- and second-tier cities in China, and continue to strengthen and expand the business of industrial real estate, and commercial and residential properties.

Nam Tai Property Inc. is a corporation registered in the British Virgin Islands and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (Symbol: "NTP"). Please refer to the Nam Tai website (www.namtai.com) or the SEC website (www.sec.gov) for our press releases and financial results.

NAM TAI PROPERTY INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME

FOR THE PERIODS ENDED MARCH 31, 2021 AND 2020

(In Thousands of US dollars except share and per share data)





Three months ended March 31,









2021

2020









(Unaudited)



(Unaudited)





Revenue

$ 69,047



$ 699





Cost of revenue



(24,077)





(617)





Gross profit



44,970





82





Expenses



















General and administrative expenses



(7,587)





(3,003)





Selling and marketing expenses



(1,143)





(801)





Total operating expenses



(8,730)





(3,804)





Net income (loss) from operations



36,240





(3,722)





Other income (expenses), net



45





(57)





Interest income



81





411





Income (loss) before income tax



36,366





(3,368)





Income tax (expense) benefit



(10,735)





193





Consolidated net income (loss)



25,631





(3,175)





Other comprehensive loss (1)



(2,834)





(2,737)





Functional currency translation adjustment



(2,834)





(2,737)





Consolidated comprehensive income (loss)

$ 22,797



$ (5,912)





Earnings (loss) Per Share



















Basic

$ 0.65



$ (0.08)





Diluted

$ 0.65



$ (0.08)





Weighted average number of shares ('000)



















Basic



39,198





38,841





Diluted



39,209





38,841







Notes:

(1) Other comprehensive loss (income) was due to foreign exchange translation.

NAM TAI PROPERTY INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

AS AT MARCH 31, 2021 AND DECEMBER 31, 2020

(In Thousands of US dollars)





March 31, 2021



December 31, 2020





(Unaudited)



(Audited)

ASSETS















Current assets:















Cash and cash equivalents

$ 20,642



$ 60,980

Restricted cash



71,857





2,065

Short term investments



92,399





150,150

Rental deposits



155





156

Accounts receivable



4,124





3,965

Real estate properties under development, net



124,598





121,693

Real estate properties held for sales type lease



9,266





31,558

Prepaid expenses and other receivables



8,007





7,141

Total current assets

$ 331,048



$ 377,708

Rental deposits



285





287

Real estate properties under development, net



202,788





190,492

Property, plant and equipment, net



25,870





26,568

Real estate properties held for lease, net



90,872





92,207

Right of use assets



9,316





9,695

Deferred income tax assets



4,411





4,154

Other assets



99





99

Total assets

$ 664,689



$ 701,210

LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY















Current liabilities:















Current portion of long term bank loans



120,708





122,883

Accounts payable



57,073





61,559

Rental deposits from customers



2,089





1,498

Accrued expenses and other payables



28,199





30,136

Advance from customers



8,192





69,722

Amount due to a shareholder



146,869





146,869

Amount due to a related company



161





161

Current portion of lease liabilities



970





1,064

Total current liabilities

$ 364,261



$ 433,892

Long term rental deposits



185





300

Financing lease payable



19





19

Deferred income tax liabilities



19,779





8,927

Noncurrent portion of lease liabilities



8,723





9,244

Total liabilities

$ 392,967



$ 452,382

EQUITY















Shareholders' equity:















Common shares

$ 392



$ 392

Additional paid-in capital



265,181





265,084

Retained earnings (accumulated deficit)



14,809





(10,822)

Accumulated other comprehensive loss (1)



(8,660)





(5,826)

Total shareholders' equity

$ 271,722



$ 248,828

Total liabilities and shareholders' equity

$ 664,689



$ 701,210



Notes:

(1) Accumulated other comprehensive loss was due to foreign exchange translation.

NAM TAI PROPERTY INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS

FOR THE PERIODS ENDED MARCH 31, 2021 AND 2020

(In Thousands of US dollars)





Three months ended March 31,





2021

2020







(Unaudited)



(Unaudited)





CASH FLOWS FROM OPERATING ACTIVITIES



















Consolidated net income (loss)

$ 25,631



$ (3,175)





Adjustments to reconcile consolidated net loss to net cash provided by operating activities:



















Depreciation and amortization



1,085





394





Amortization of right of use assets



466





408





Unrealized gain of trading securities









97





Share-based compensation expenses



97





739





Unrealized exchange loss (gain)



649





(44)





Deferred income tax benefit



10,595





(159)





Changes in assets and liabilities:



















Increase in accounts receivable



(159)





(7)





Increase in prepaid expenses and other receivables



(866)





(12,080)





Increase in deposit









(174)





Decrease (increase) in real estate properties under development



7,617





(13,948)





(Decrease) increase in accrued expenses and other payables



(2,288)





(6,802)





Decrease in accounts payable



(4,486)











Decrease in lease liabilities



(351)





(654)





(Decrease) increase in advance from customers



(61,530)





4,627





Increase in rental deposits from customers



476





376





Total adjustments

$ (48,695)



$ (27,227)





Net cash used in operating activities

$ (23,064)



$ (30,402)





CASH FLOWS FROM INVESTING ACTIVITIES



















Purchase of property, plant & equipment



(84)





(33)





Purchase of trading securities









(2,823)





Decrease (increase) in short term investments



57,751





(1,924)





Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities

$ 57,667



$ (4,780)





CASH FLOWS FROM FINANCING ACTIVITIES



















Repayment of bank loans



(1,267)





(7,263)





Proceeds from bank loans









34,886





Proceeds from shares issued for option exercise









2,049





Net cash (used in) provided by financing activities

$ (1,267)



$ 29,672





Net increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash

$ 33,336



$ (5,510)





Cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash at beginning of period



63,045





130,218





Effect of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash



(3,882)





(2,578)





Cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash at end of period

$ 92,499



$ 122,130





SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION ON CASH FLOWS



















Cash and cash equivalents

$ 20,642



$ 121,340





Restricted cash

$ 71,857



$ 790



































NAM TAI PROPERTY INC.

NOTES TO CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

FOR THE PERIODS ENDED MARCH 31, 2021 AND 2020

(In Thousands of US dollars)

These financial statements, including the consolidated balance sheet as of December 31, 2020 , which was derived from audited financial statements, do not include all of the information and notes required by U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for complete financial statements and should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes included in the Company's annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 . In the opinion of management, all adjustments (consisting of normal, recurring adjustments) considered necessary for a fair presentation have been included. Operating results for the interim periods presented are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected for the full year ending December 31, 2021 . Accumulated other comprehensive loss represents foreign currency translation adjustments. The consolidated comprehensive income was $22.8 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and the consolidated comprehensive loss was $5.9 million for the three months ended March 31, 2020 . A summary of the operating income, other income (expenses), net, net income (loss) and long-lived assets by geographical areas is as follows:





Three months ended March 31,











2021



2020





RENTAL INCOME WITHIN:



















-PRC, excluding Hong Kong

$ 69,047



$ 699





NET INCOME (LOSS) FROM OPERATIONS WITHIN:



















- PRC, excluding Hong Kong

$ 31,933



$ (1,695)





- Hong Kong



(6,302)





(1,480)





Total net income (loss)

$ 25,631



$ (3,175)







































March 31, 2021



December 31, 2020

LONG-LIVED ASSETS WITHIN:















- Real estate properties under development in PRC, excluding

Hong Kong

$ 202,788



$ 190,492

- Property, plant and equipment in PRC, excluding Hong

Kong



25,731





26,389

- Hong Kong



139





179

- Real estate properties held for lease in PRC, excluding Hong

Kong



90,872





92,207

- Right of use assets in PRC, excluding Hong

Kong



9,210





9,511

- Hong Kong



106





184

Total long-lived assets

$ 328,846



$ 318,962



SOURCE Nam Tai Property Inc.

Related Links

http://www.namtai.com


Biden Delivers 100-Day Speech to Joint Session of Congress

President Joe Biden on Wednesday night delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress on the eve of his 100th day in office, attempting to paint the future of the nation as that of hope, strength, and resilience amid the ongoing CCP virus pandemic while calling on lawmakers to back his radical proposals, including on infrastructure, election reform, police reform, and gun control.

Biden claimed to have on Jan. 20 inherited a nation that was in crisis under his predecessor former President Donald Trump, giving examples such as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic and the resultant economic fallout across the country. The CCP virus is commonly known as the novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China. Biden also cited the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, which he dubbed the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

America is on the move again  After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for a takeoff in my view, Biden said.

Biden continued to urge people to get vaccinated and said that the administration has set up vaccination sites in more than 40,000 pharmacies across the nation, as well as various community vaccination sites and mobile units in hard-to-reach communities. Last week, the administration surpassed Bidens goal of administering 200 million COVID-19 shots by his 100th day in office.

President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress as Vice President Kamala Harris (L) and Speaker of the House U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (R) look on in the House chamber of the Capitol, in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

The president in his speech reviewed what he called his early accomplishments, and asserted that the economy was on the mend under his watch.

He celebrated the passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus bill, which cleared the Senate without the support of a single Republican. He also praised the American Jobs Plan, a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package unveiled earlier this month, calling it a blue-collar blueprint to build America. He said that independent experts estimate it will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth in the United States for years to come.

These are good-paying jobs that cant be outsourced. Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan dont require a college degree. 75 percent dont require an associates degree.

Biden also called on lawmakers to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act for equal pay, and pass the $15 minimum wage.

Read More Bidens First 100 Days a Radical Transformation of America

Republicans have criticized both the pandemic relief bill and the infrastructure proposal as having little to do with the pandemic or infrastructure. Democrats argue that pushing the pandemic stimulus through without Republican support was necessary to help Americans struggling with the economic impacts of the pandemic.

Radical Proposals

The president took the opportunity to praise his latest proposal, the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which if passed, would expand access to community college and preschool, as well as child care and healthcare for families.

He furthermore signaled he would seek to work with Congress to massively expand the reach of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, in an effort he hopes would help reduce drug prices.

To pay for his radical proposals, the president is proposing an increase in corporate taxes. Were going to reform corporate taxes so they pay their fair shareand help pay for the public investments  We take the top tax bracket for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americansthose making $400,000 or moreback up to 39.6 percent, he said.

Among other issues, Biden said that Americans have to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system in part by enacting police reform that the Democratic-led House narrowly passed in March.

Biden also sought action on gun control, calling for background checks, and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

He also pushed for Senate Republicans to join in passing his immigration proposal, which would provide a path to legal status, permanent residency, and citizenship for illegal immigrants. The immigration bill has little public Republican support. House Democrats in March passed two bills that would advance parts of Bidens pro-immigration agenda.

Biden also called on Congress to pass the H.R. 1 For the People Act election reform bill, which would transfer authority over how elections are administered from states to the federal government, and make permanent many voting rules that critics say are vulnerable to election and voter fraud.

President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Biden has faced criticism for delaying his first address, in contrast to his predecessors. Trump delivered his first speech to Congress on Feb. 28, 2017, roughly two months relatively earlier than Biden from the day of having taken office.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott delivered the Republican partys response to Bidens first joint address on Wednesday night. In a Twitter statement that immediately followed Bidens address, Scott took aim at the policies outlined by the president to the nation.

The beauty of the American Dream is that families get to define it for themselves, he said. We should be expanding options and opportunities for all familiesnot throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) meanwhile described the presidents agenda as dead on arrival, saying on Twitter that Biden promised higher taxes, crushing debt, and open borders.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meanwhile criticized every policy that Biden proposed during his address, saying that they call for a radical socialist agenda.

So far, President Biden has successfully outlined a radical, socialist agenda for the next 4 years. That should trouble every freedom-loving American, Pompeo said on Twitter.

Nearly every policy President Biden has proposed tonight involves bigger government and higher taxes, Pompeo added. This does nothing but HURT the American worker.

Mimi Nguyen Ly and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
London Bridge Terrorist Tricked Prison Boss Before Attack, Jury Heard

The terrorist who stabbed two people to death near London Bridge in 2019 had tricked a prison boss before the attack, an inquest jury has heard.

Homegrown terrorist Usman Khan had a brief conversation with Steve Machin, governor of counter-terrorism at HMP Whitemoor, at a prisoner education event at Fishmongers Hall where he would later fatally stab Cambridge graduates Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.

Jack Merritt (L) and Saskia Jones, victims of the London bridge stabbing attack on Nov. 29, 2019, are seen in this undated combination image provided by the Metropolitan Police. (Metropolitan Police/Handout via Reuters)

Khan had served eight years of a 21-year sentence for earlier terrorism offenses and was released from HMP Whitemoor in 2018.

During an inquest started on Wednesday, Machin told the jury that he briefly chatted with Khan when the pair bumped into each other at the Learning Together event, and Khan tried to hug him.

[Khan] threw his arms open and stepped in for a hug, which felt a bit weird for me, he said.

I met him halfway, took one hand, and did a prisoner-style shoulder bump.

He said Khan was initially quiet but then began to talk about life in prison.

One thing he said made me stop and raise my eyebrowshe talked about things he had done, specifically imams, and said we need to get people not employed by prison in because imams hadnt been able to alter his position of his religion, Machin said.

I raised my eyebrows and he quickly said, Fortunately through these things [Learning Together], I have learned that violence isnt the path.

Asked if he had reflected on his dealings with Khan, Machin said it was all he had done since.

On Thursday, Machin said he had also asked Khan why he wore an extra-large coatwhich concealed a fake suicide beltbut thought Khans answer about dressing for the weather was plausible.

Im not in the same headspace as when Im at workI wasnt there as a counter-terrorism governor, I was there as operational manager of HMP Whitemoor, Machin said after being accused of dropping his guard by Nick Armstrong, who represents the families of Jones and Merritt.

I couldnt live my life expecting every encounter with the community or ex-offenders is going to lead to devastation, I couldnt live with that level of paranoia, Machin added.

Machin rejected Armstrongs suggestion that Khan being an example of a good news story for rehabilitation had effectively blunt his antennae of concern.

I saw him being involved [with Learning Together] as good, it hadnt got to the point of a good news story, Manchin said.

Regarding Khans early release from the prison, Machin said he was making progress.

Although there had been intelligence saying Khan was seeking a return to his old ways, Machin said that certainly in his last six months to a year, they [reports of Khans links to religious bullying and gang culture in jail] tailed off in both the number and the tone.

Machin agreed with the suggestion from Samantha Leek QC, for the Government, that prisoners sometimes report malicious or unwittingly false intelligence about another prisoner, in order to secure a move away for one of them.

You cant review intelligence at the same level as a piece of research, Machin said. You are looking to find overt intelligence.

Messages of condolence and floral tributes, including a photograph of victim Jack Merritt, are seen near the scene of a stabbing on London Bridge, in London, Britain, on Dec. 1, 2019. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

On Wednesday, Khans older brother, who can not be named, say his family was truly sorry.

First all, sincere condolences to Jack and Saskias family. We are truly, truly sad of the events that happened, he said, before giving evidence to the jury.

Whoevers been affected physically or mentally, we are really sorry as a family, really, really sad. I just wanted to get that off my chest, he added.

The brother said the attack was a total shock to the family and that they wouldve been the first ones to inform, to stop him in his tracks if they noticed anything.

Armstrong showed the witness evidence of Khan talking effusively about Merritt during an interview with Learning Together staff in March 2019, describing him as deeply disturbed.

He (Khan) was a nasty, violent, self-regarding piece of work, Armstrong said, adding that all the signs were there, but his family saw none of that.

Khan made repeated threats to set off the fake suicide belt after stabbing Merritt, Jones, and several others, and was shot dead by police moments later.

PA and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Marginalised Roma vaccine-shy as long as majority remain lukewarm towards vaccines

People living in settlements show little interest in getting the jab; involvement of doctors they know and trust could help, according to field workers.

When the coronavirus first reached Slovakia's marginalised Roma communities in the spring of 2020, very few among the public objected against closing the communities within police- or military-controlled quarantine. The hygienic conditions in the settlements have been seen as making the people living in them particularly vulnerable to spreading infection. Fast forward one year, Covid vaccination is rolling out in Slovakia, but vulnerable communities appear not to have access or interest in it.

People living in marginalised Roma communities make up a significant portion of inhabitants in some regions of the country. Exact up-to-date data are currently unavailable. The Atlas of Roma Communities from 2013 states that nearly 74,000 people (or 18.4 percent of all estimated Roma inhabitants of Slovakia) lived in segregated communities, while tens of thousands lived in Roma settlements on the margins or within municipalities.

Coronavirus has exposed the vulnerability of this part of the population, and that isolation means an everyday struggle for survival in relation to marginalised Roma communities, Andrea Buckova, the government's proxy for Roma Communities, told The Slovak Spectator.

Her predecessor in the post, Abel Ravasz, concurred that the pandemic fully unveiled the precarious position these communities are in. Speaking to The Slovak Spectator, Ravasz listed the full-scale quarantine, the loss of jobs after the labour market situation worsened and children struggling to keep up with online learning without proper access to the internet, among the main problems.

Closures not automatic, hygienists claim

Unlike majority inhabitants, the first quarantines in the Roma communities early on in the pandemic meant the arrival of the police and the military to the area to make sure there would not be violations.

Even when that ceased to be a frequent sight, entire areas were often put in quarantine. Buckova noted that since the end of last year, her office had information of 50 cases of entire quarantined communities, parts of villages or whole blocks of flats. The number of marginalised Roma communities ordered to quarantine regularly increased over the winter and early spring of 2021, as Slovakia was coping with the second surge of the infection.

29. Apr 2021 at 17:37 | Nina Hrabovska Francelova
Detectives want to trace 60 more men they think were attacked by Britain's worst rapist Reynhard Sinaga.

Sinaga, 36 - described as a 'monster' by a judge - is thought to have carried out sex attacks on 206 men over a two-and-a-half year period.

Police say they've identified another 23 people who are believed to be victims after Sinaga roamed the streets of Manchester's clubland and lured men to his apartment before drugging them so they became unconscious.

Sinaga, a mature student originally from Indonesia, would then rape or sexually assault them while filming the attacks on his mobile phone.

Reynhard Sinaga (pictured), 36 - described as a 'monster' by a judge - is thought to have carried out sex attacks on 206 men over a two-and-a-half year period

Police say they've identified another 23 people who are believed to be victims after Sinaga (pictured) roamed the streets of Manchester's clubland and lured men to his apartment before drugging them so they became unconscious

He was jailed for life in January 2020, with his minimum term increased from 30 to 40 years by the Court of Appeal.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said they received 155 reports after an appeal was launched following the last of Sinaga's four trials.

Of those, 23 were identified as potential victims - with 12 previously classed as unidentified victims after footage or images was recovered from Sinaga's devices.

But GMP said all had decided not to pursue further prosecutions again Sinaga as they are satisfied 'justice has been done'.

Detectives are now urging other victims - with around 60 still unidentified - to come forward.

Bottles of alcohol which were used to spike victims in the home of Reynhard Sinaga in Manchester

Detective Chief Inspector Zed Ali, Senior Investigating Officer for Operation Island, said: 'Supporting those affected by Sinaga's despicable crimes has always been our priority, alongside securing the maximum possible jail term for him.

Timeline of Reynhard Sinaga's sexual assaults January 2015 to May 2017: The period over which Reynhard Sinaga was said to have committed sex assaults against 48 men in Manchester. June 1 to July 10, 2018: Sinaga goes on his first trial which sees him convicted of 31 counts of rape, three counts of attempted rape and six counts of sexual assault. April 1 to May 7, 2019: Sinaga goes on trial for the second time and is convicted of 49 counts of rape, five counts of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault. He is jailed for 20 years after the first two trials. September 16 to October 4, 2019: Sinaga goes on his third trial and is convicted of 26 counts of rape, one count of assault by penetration and five counts of sexual assault. December 2, 2019 and December 20, 2019: Sinaga goes on his fourth trial and is convicted of 30 counts of rape and two counts of sexual assault. January 6, 2020 : Sinaga is jailed for at least 30 years over the third and fourth trials. In total, he was found guilty across all four trials of 159 offences - 136 rapes, eight attempted rapes, 14 sexual assaults, and one by penetration. February 17, 2020: Sinaga is moved to HMP Wakefield. December 2020: Police reveal they think he raped 206 men, 60 of whom remain unidentified. Advertisement

'GMP, working with partners including St Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre and Survivors Manchester, will always be on hand to help anyone who believes they may have been a victim of a sexual offence.

'It is important we continue to make attempts to trace the around 60 men we believe are victims of Sinaga, but who haven't made contact with police or support services yet.

'Our appeal, launched last year, has so far identified 23 further victims of Sinaga. I commend their bravery for getting in touch and the strength and dignity they have shown throughout the past year during our further investigations.

'Ultimately, they decided not to pursue further prosecutions given Sinaga is already serving a record sentence for rape offences, and it will be four decades before he is even considered for release.

'That they are satisfied justice has been done is testament to the hard work of our officers, who were able to secure the evidence needed to put Sinaga in prison - where he belongs.

'I would urge anyone who thinks they may have been a victim to please get in touch with us.

'Specialist staff involved in Operation Island remain key members of our force and will continue to investigate any further enquiries that come to light.

'If you don't feel comfortable speaking to police, specialist support services are widely available with organisations such as St Mary's SARC and Survivors Manchester.'

During Sinaga's fourth trial, Manchester Crown Court heard how he 'catalogued' the attacks by copying victims' Facebook pages or photos and stole 'souvenirs' such as their watches, driving licences or student cards.

All of his victims suffered varying degrees of memory loss and almost all had no recollection of being attacked - with many believing they had simply got drunk and fallen asleep.

It wasn't until they were tracked down years later by police that they learned the shocking truth.

GMP's investigation - Operation Island - is believed to be the largest rape investigation in British judicial history.

The bedroom floor, where dozens of rapes took place, in the home of Sinaga in Manchester

Sinaga was convicted of 159 sexual offences against 48 different men, including 136 rapes, eight attempted rapes, two assaults by penetration and 13 sexual assaults between 2015-2017.

But he's thought to have carried out dozens more sex attacks.

Anyone who believes they may have been a victim can contact police or specialist support agencies using the contact details below.

For anyone who wishes to seek support but does not want to talk to police, St Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre can continue to be reached on 0161 276 6515 and Survivors Manchester can be contacted on 0161 236 2182.
A 22-year-old man working in a meat shop reported to the police on Saturday that he was sexually assaulted by a police officer and a woman a week ago.

Police said that around 4.30 p.m. on Saturday, the man visited St James Police Station with his report.
Advocates call for immigration leadership at State as the Biden administration struggles to implement a new refugee cap. Refugee advocates encourage President Joe Biden to "swiftly" appoint a heavyweight figure to a crucial role in grappling with the complicated matter.

Refugee advocates urged the Biden administration to fill the immigration role

Refugee Council USA, a group of refugee advocates and resettlement organizations, wrote a letter to Biden as the administration debated whether to put the immigration cap for the rest of this fiscal year. It also comes when Senate Democrats are putting more pressure on Biden to raise the number from where he is now.

Biden promised in February that the quota would be raised from 62,500 refugees for the current fiscal year to 125,000 the following year. However, the administration declared earlier this month that it would maintain the 15,000 ceiling imposed by former President Donald Trump, who essentially attempted to eliminate the refugee admissions program. Following a barrage of criticism from within the Democratic Party, the Biden administration vowed to release a figure greater than 15,000 by May 15, POLITICO reported.

It was a significant political blunder for the president, who has generally succeeded with good progressives and others with his policies. Biden's refusal to agree to the 62,500 figure came as Republicans pressed him to do so as the number of asylum seekers at the southern border grew. GOP lawmakers and Fox News analysts have blamed Biden for the number of refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border, which has made the administration suspicious of the admissions. Asylum seekers and refugees are two different types of people who go through other screening processes.

The administration stated that one of the reasons it wanted to keep the 15,000 number in place, for the time being, was that it inherited a severely depleted refugee program from the Trump administration, which will take time to repair. On the other hand, refugee resettlement agencies said they have been beefing up their capacities and that a high cap was only supposed to be an aspirational goal, one that will send a message to the rest of the world.

How Joe Biden's 100 Days in Office Compares to Donald Trump's

Biden administration to consider raising refugee cap

After dropping earlier proposals for an expansion, the White House is currently reconsidering increasing the refugee cap, as per The Washington Post. The White House is considering expanding the refugee cap to 62,500 people, up from 15,000 under the Trump presidency.

The Biden administration had hoped to raise the refugee quota to 125,000 by the end of President Biden's first year in office, which would necessitate allowing 62,500 refugees fleeing conflict and natural disasters to enter the country. When asked about the Washington Post report on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that meeting a target of 62,500 refugees would still be "challenging."

Psaki acknowledged that the Biden administration inherited a "broken system" from the Trump administration, making Biden and others skeptical of how many refugees the government should receive. But she stressed the importance of sending a "strong message" that the United States welcomes refugees.

ICE Ends Trump-Era Policy, Says Penalties for Undocumented Immigrants 'Ineffective'

Biden's immigration problem is not all Trump's fault

According to MSNBC, the Biden administration may have underestimated how to fix the immigration issues. In assessing the Biden administration's approach to immigration in its first 100 days, it is important to recognize that the problems at hand are so complicated. Many of the processes in play are so severely ignored that lasting change will take much longer than a few months.

The Biden administration is well aware of this and has stated that the root causes of immigration - climate change, political corruption, and conflict - need a regional structure and long-term sustainable investment.

In his speech commemorating his first 100 days in office on Wednesday, the president is expected to discuss this issue. However, even when looking at what is achievable within a 100-day timeframe (which is arbitrary), the effects on immigration are widely diverse.

A whirlwind of executive orders marked the Biden administration's first few weeks. Biden formed a task force to reunite families divided by the Trump administration, moved to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, issued a 100-day immigration moratorium, and revoked the Muslim ban.

The Biden administration also suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols, or "remain in Mexico" scheme, rescinded the Trump great turning rule and the previous administration's changes to the naturalization examination. Also, it ended the "blank space" policy at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reinstated Deferred Enforced Departure for Liberians, and extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to B people. Furthermore, activists praised the administration's policy plan for immigration reform.

President Joe Biden's Major Immigration Promises Waiting To Be Fulfilled

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San Francisco, 29 April 2021: The Report Gene Therapy Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Indication (Large B-cell Lymphoma, Beta-Thalassemia Major/SCD), By Vector Type (Lentivirus, AAV), By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2021 - 2028

The global gene therapy market size is expected to reach USD 10.0 billion by 2028 registering a CAGR of 20.4% during the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The market growth is attributed to the increasing prevalence of cancer coupled with the lack of effective treatment for the disease. Constant expansion of cancer genetic studies has deciphered relevant information about cancer-related molecular signatures.

This has driven the clinical trials for advanced cancer therapeutics, thereby driving the market growth. In addition, expansion of this mode of treatment in non-cancer applications with approval of therapies, such as approval of Bluebird Bios Zynteglo in June 2019 for -thalassemia and others, demonstrates the shift in the preferences of companies towards other unsaturated segments.

Various universities and institutes are observed to exhibit a broad portfolio in the pipeline, which is anticipated to boost revenue generation in the future. The market is anticipated to witnesses a short-term revenue slowdown due to a shift in focus and delay in product launches. However, initiatives for developing novel trial designs, improving the regulatory environment, and managing the supply chain are expected to play a critical role in minimizing the impact of the current global crisis.

Access Research Report of Gene Therapy Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/gene-therapy-market

Gene Therapy Market Report Highlights

Viral vectors have proven their efficiency as a method for effective gene deliveries. As a result, a substantial number of research communities and biotechnology companies have designed their gene therapy programs based on viral vectors

Moreover, most of currently FDA-secured products involve the use of viral vectors, which contributes to the dominance of the viral vectors segment

Due to the approval and huge success of lentivirus-based Kymriah and retrovirus-based Yescarta, retrovirus and lentivirus are also among the key revenue-generating segments

Cancer has led the revenue flow in the market over the past few years and is expected to maintain its dominance in the forecast period

The presence of approved products for various cancer forms including Large B-cell lymphoma, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), and melanoma has resulted in the dominance of this segment

The U.S. is recognized as the hub for clinical trials related to gene therapy. This has significantly impacted the revenue growth of the North America market

Also, the success of Yescarta and Kymriah in the U.S. as the first approved CAR-t therapy programs has driven huge investments by various government agencies, sponsors, and key companies in this region

Major market participants are partnering with other key stakeholders via signing licensing, commercialization, and development deals to enhance their worldwide business operations

For instance, in June 2020, uniQure announced a license agreement with CSL Behring for the commercialization of hemophilia B gene therapy

List of Key Players of Gene Therapy Market

REGENXBIO, Inc.

Oxford BioMedica plc

Dimension Therapeutics, Inc.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

SANOFI

Applied Genetic Technologies Corporation

Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

Bluebird Bio, Inc.

Novartis AG

Taxus Cardium Pharmaceuticals Group, Inc. (Gene Biotherapeutics)

UniQure N.V.

Shire Plc

Cellectis S.A.

Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc.

Orchard Therapeutics

Gilead Lifesciences, Inc.

Benitec Biopharma Ltd.

Sibiono GeneTech Co., Ltd.

Shanghai Sunway Biotech Co., Ltd.

Gensight Biologics S.A.

Transgene

Calimmune, Inc.

Epeius Biotechnologies Corp.

Astellas Pharma, Inc.

American Gene Technologies

BioMarin Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Access Press Release of Gene Therapy Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-gene-therapy-market
The Delhi government will procure 6.7 million doses of Covishield vaccine from Serum Institute of India and the first tranche of 300,000 shots will be delivered by May 3, official sources said on Thursday.

The Delhi government has also sought a supply schedule from the manufacturer for the remaining doses which are to be delivered over the next three months.

An official source said a purchase order has been issued in the name of Prakash Kumar Singh, Director, Government and Regulatory Affairs at the Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII).

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced on Thursday that a plan has been formulated to vaccinate all adults against within the next three months.

He said vaccination centres would be set up on a large scale and those eligible must come forward to take the jab.

Earlier in the day, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said the city "does not have vaccine" doses for inoculating people in the 18-44 age group and purchase orders have been placed with manufacturers for the same.

The minister, however, said preparations to give jabs to people in this category have been completed.

"At present, we don't have vaccine. We have requested the companies to provide it," Jain told reporters when asked if there were enough vaccine available for the 18-44 age group.

"We will tell you in a day or two," he replied to another query about starting the inoculation drive for this category on May 1. The minister also said the manufacturers are yet to provide schedules of vaccine supply to the Delhi government.

Kejriwal had on Monday said everybody aged above 18 would be administered COVID-19 vaccines free of cost in Delhi.

He had said his government had approved the procurement of 1.34 crore vaccine doses from various manufacturers.
Pose creator Steven Canals has revealed he was warned off making the show by film company executives for two-and-a-half-years.

The screenwriter, 40, spoke with Digital Spy on Thursday about the award-winning show's hotly-anticipated third and final season, which will be its last, and detailed what it was like when he originally tried to pitch it.

He was told it'd be 'really hard' to get funding for the show, which tells the story of several members of New York City's African-American and Latino LGBTQ drag ball culture scene, because they felt the show was 'very black', 'queer' and 'trans'.

Candid: Pose co-creator Steven Canals revealed on Thursday he was warned off making show because film executives felt it would be 'really hard' to get funding (pictured, MJ Rodriguez)

Looking back, Steven said: 'I would say about 50% were giving me some version of: "It's going to be really hard. It's very Black, it's very brown, it's queer, it's trans, it's a period piece."

'But then there was a smaller group that was very direct, saying, "No one's ever going to give you the money or trust you need to get this to the finish line."'

However, a meeting with American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy changed that, as Steven reflected: 'I was tired because it had been two-and-a-half years of going in and out of offices, pitching the story, and talking about it.

Claim: The screenwriter (pictured in 2019) said he spent two-and-a-half years pitching the show and was told it wouldn't get support because it was 'very black', 'queer' and 'trans'

'So, by the time I got to the meeting with Ryan, I was equal parts exhausted, and, at the same time, there was kind of an interesting "I don't feel like I have anything to lose" attitude and energy.

'But the minute that we sat down and we started talking, I realised immediately, "Oh, he's the right person for this."'

Steven went on to say that he hopes in the future that LGBTQ+ storylines will not be seen 'as being a risk' in the film and TV industry.

Right time: A meeting with American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy changed that, and Steven said he knew he was 'the right person for this' (pictured, Indya Moore)

'We're still in a place right now where LGBTQ+ programming is looked at as niche,' he explained. 'It's like, "Ugh, who wants to tell that story? Who's going to watch it?"

'And the reality is, "No, our stuff is really good. Our stories are great. And our stories are important."'

He added that Pose was important for him to make as a queer person because 'our story is not taught in schools' and he wanted to make sure the history of the LGBTQ+ community was told.

'If we're not the ones at the forefront telling our own stories, then those stories just get lost. They get completely erased. And they get overlooked,' Steven said.

Thoughts: Steven went on to say that he hopes in the future that LGBTQ+ storylines will not be seen 'as being a risk' in the film and TV industry (pictured, Billy Porter)

Reflecting on current society, Steven also said that the LGBTQ+ society is 'deserving of love and respect' and often isn't seen that way.

He claimed: 'We're still living in a world where there's a lot of homophobia. There's still a lot of transphobia.

'People don't understand or have a lot of misinformation around what it means to be bisexual. Folks completely ignore someone who is gender non-binary or gender non-conforming.

'The reality is that we all are deserving of love and respect. We all deserve to occupy space unapologetically, just like our straight or cisgender counterparts.'

In the forthcoming series, Blanca Rodriguez-Evangelista (MJ Rodriguez) struggles to juggle being a mother, a nurse's aide in hospital and a partner to her new love, while also reflecting on the monumental progress her family has made.

Elsewhere, HIV-positive Pray Tell (Billy Porter) has to come to terms with his new health troubles as the AIDS epidemic continues to ravage communities in America, becoming the leading cause of death for those aged between 25 and 44.

The final series will feature Pose staples including Dominique Jackson, Indya Moore, Ryan Jamaal Swain, Dyllon Burnside, Angel Bismark Curiel, Hailie Sahar and Sandra Bernhard.

The full Steven Canals interview can be read on the Digital Spy website.
Three more Colorado police officers have been placed on leave in connection with the arrest of a 73-year-old woman with dementia who had her shoulder dislocated by cops after she tried to leave a store without paying $14 for her purchases.

Officers Daria Jalali and Tyler Blackett, and Sgt. Phil Metzler were put on administrative leave on Friday stemming from the case of Karen Garner, of Loveland, police spokesman Tom Hacker said.

Metzler was present during the woman's arrest in June 2020, and Jalali and Blackett were seen on surveillance video laughing while watching body camera footage depicting arresting officer Austin Hopp breaking Garner's arm and damaging her shoulder.

Loveland, Colorado, police officers (L to R) Daria Jalali, Austin Hopp and Tyler Blackett have been placed on leave in connection with the June 2020 arrest of Karen Garner, 73

Sgt Phil Metzler (far right), who was present during Garner's arrest, also has been placed on administrative leave

Surveillance video from the police station showed Hopp (left) and Jalali (right) first-bumping each other while talking about the dementia-stricken woman's arrest

After Garner filed a federal lawsuit this month and her lawyer released the body camera footage, the department announced it was putting Hopp on leave and said that Jalali and Metzler were being placed on desk duty.

Hacker said he did not know specifically what led to the changes in the status of Jalali, Blackett and Metzler but noted that Blackett helped transport Garner to the police station.

Blackett's involvement in the arrest was not publicly known until he was seen on surveillance video from the police station released Monday by Garner's lawyer. It shows Hopp, Jalali and Blackett watching Hopp's body camera footage, laughing and first-bumping each other as Garner is crying in a holding cell just 10 feet away.

Garner was arrested after attempting to walk out of a Walmart without paying just under $14 for a few items. Police caught up with her in a field (pictured)

Body camera video from Garner's arrest was released earlier this month by her lawyer. A popping sound can be heard on the video when Officer Hopp twists her arm

Officer Hopp took down the 80-pound woman, leaving her with injuries, after she repeatedly told the cops she was 'going home'

A federal lawsuit says Garner suffered a dislocated shoulder and a fractured arm. According to the complaint, she was denied medical care for six hours

Garner's lawsuit accusing the police of violating her civil rights said Hopp dislocated her shoulder during the arrest, and that she did not receive medical care for about six hours after being taken to the county jail, where she was handcuffed to a bench.

In this undated file photo provided by Allisa Swartz, is Karen Garner, a 73-year-old Colorado woman with dementia, whose family is suing Loveland, Colorado

In the first hour alone, Garner screamed: 'They hurt my shoulders' 22 times, 'They hurt my wrists' 13 times, 'They keep hurting' eight times and 'It hurts' eight times.

From time to time in the first two hours after her arrest, officers came to her cell to ask her a question, and Garner screamed that she was in pain, the lawsuit says.

At one point, the officers went in to take photographs of Garner, who again complained, 'It hurts - my shoulder.'

Officer Hopp allegedly responded, 'I know.' Hopp was one of the arresting officers and named in the amended lawsuit

As the officers watched body camera footage that showed Hopp holding Garner against a patrol car, Hopp said, 'Ready for the pop?', suggesting he was aware that he had injured her.

The body camera footage can be heard but not seen on the police station video. Viewed separately, the body camera footage shows Hopp holding the handcuffed Garner facing away from him against the car.

When she tried to turn around and said, as she did repeatedly, that she was trying to go home, he pushed her back against the car and moved her bent left arm up near her head, holding it, saying, 'Are you finished? Are you finished? We don't play this game.'

About 30 seconds later, Garner began to slump toward the ground. Jalali, who recently arrived, said, 'Stand up! We're not going to hold you.'

The videos and lawsuit came amid a national reckoning over the use of force by police against people - including those with mental and physical health conditions.

Hopp arrested Garner in June 2020 after she allegedly left a store without paying for $13.88 worth of items, including a can of soda, a T-shirt and a candy bar.

Garner she appeared visibly confused in body camera footage, repeatedly telling the officer she was just going home as she picked wildflowers in a field along a road.

'Ma'am I don't think you want to play it this way,' Hopp says. 'You just left Walmart. Do you need to be arrested right now?'

Within a few minutes, Hopp is seen dragging Garner  who is five feet tall and weighs 80 pounds  to the ground as she screams: 'I'm going home'.

Garner cried out for help 51 times during her first hour in a holding cell (pictured)

Garner is subsequently seen being pushed up against the officers' police car as she continues to wail: 'I'm going home!'

'Quit it!' Jalali commands as she pulls Garner's arm behind her back.

She was arrested on a Friday at 4:36pm but it wasn't until 10:38pm that a family member even knew about Garner's injuries or her arrest - and they heard it from hospital staff where she eventually had been transported, the lawsuit says.

'For the six hours that Ms. Garner was kept in custody by Loveland and the jail, despite many jokes made about her being disabled and mentally unfit, no one attempted to locate Ms. Garner's caregiver, console or help her, de-escalate her, or alert her loved ones to her terrible situation,' the lawsuit says.

Later at the police station, before they watched the body camera footage, Hopp and Jalali fist-bumped before talking about how the arrest went.

Garner was just 10 feet away from the cops as they were laughing while watching footage from her arrest

Hopp said he thought they 'crushed it' but Jalali hesitated to answer. She eventually said that she got pushed off to the side when she tried to act and did not want Hopp to think she was not acting enough.

Jalali says 'I hate this.' The video shows her pull her hat over her eyes while another male officer says, 'I love it.'

Hopp then says Garner is 'flexible' and makes another reference to the popping sound, telling Jalali, 'I was pushing, pushing, pushing. I hear - pop. I was like, "Oh, no,"' he said. Jalali put her head in her hands and said, 'This is going to turn into something.'

Later in the surveillance video, Hopp and Blackett fist bump at the part of the body camera footage where Hopp dismisses the concerns of a man passing by the arrest scene who stops to object to how Hopp treated what the man thought was a child.

After watching that part of the body cam video a second time, Blackett who is recorded on the surveillance video reacts to the man who stopped at the arrest scene by saying: 'What are you doing? Get out of here. This is none of your business.'

On the police station video, Hopp says he is a little worried that Garner is like senile and stuff. Several times, he and the other officers say she fought with police and Hopp says she got her handcuffs halfway off.

Garner was ultimately diagnosed with a fractured arm, dislocated shoulder as well as a sprained wrist and was covered in scrapes and bruises, according the lawsuit.

She has never regained full mobility in her arm, her lawyer Sarah Shielke told DailyMail.com. She still needs help with everyday tasks like getting dressed or showering, Shielke said, because of her injuries.

Jalai (pictured left and right) is heard saying in the security video, 'I hate this,' referring to the bodycam footage. She later comments: 'This is going to turn into something'

Garner's family said the Loveland police treated their mother and grandmother like 'an animal.' They said in a statement given to DailyMail.com that the silence of the Loveland Police Department is unacceptable and a 'slap in the face.'

'What more could anyone need to see after watching these videos?' they said in the statement. 'They care more about protecting their officers and themselves than they do about the people they've hurt.'

They called for the officers to be fired and criminally charged.

The district attorneys office has announced the arrest of Garner would be investigated by a team of outside law enforcement agencies. The city of Loveland has also said it will conduct a review.
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Holcombs signature followed his own reservations earlier in the Legislative session, when he said that the wetlands repeal was a cause for concern. He further allowed staff at the natural resources and environmental management departments to oppose the bill in hearings in January, where state regulatory officials argued that the wetlands must be protected because they purify water, provide habitat for wildlife and reduce flood risks.
JTI Ukraine tobacco company in 2020 produced 15.9 billion cigarettes at a factory in Kremenchuk (Poltava region), of which 6.04 billion were exported for $ 117.7 million, Director General of Japan Tobacco International (JTI) Ukraine Paul Holloway said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He noted that the export of cigarettes by the company remains stable, despite the contraction of the Ukrainian cigarette market. Last year, JTI Ukraine exported its products to 14 countries, including Japan and Mexico.

"We are planning to turn the factory in Kremenchuk into a large export hub. Our factory is very flexible and can produce various types of products - we export not only cigarettes, but, for example, filters, which are then used to produce cigarettes in our other factories. We hope that our factory in Ukraine will continue to increase exports," the director said.

He clarified that he hopes for further revenue growth from the export of the factory's products in Kremenchuk. According to him, an important factor that influenced the company's export plans was its obtaining the status of an authorized economic operator, which will reduce customs formalities when importing raw materials and exporting finished products.

Holloway noted that JTI, which received this status as the first in Ukraine, will receive a number of advantages when passing through customs formalities in Ukraine, including the opportunity to use a special dedicated traffic lane for commercial vehicles.
The brother of a slain policeman has choked back tears while slamming Richard Pusey - the Porsche driver who filmed four officers as they lay dying after a horrific crash.

Pusey had been pulled over for speeding at 149km/h in his Porsche on the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne when a truck driver crashed into the emergency lane on April 22 last year.

Leading Senior Constable Lynette Taylor, Senior Constable Kevin King, and Constables Glen Humphris and Josh Prestney died in the crash.

Instead of helping, Pusey retrieved his phone and slowly walked around and filmed the scene, zooming in on the dead and dying officers and their injuries.

'That is f***ing justice, absolutely amazing,' Pusey said, focusing on a damaged unmarked police car.

Constable Prestney's brave younger brother Alex said he doesn't have 'any feelings' toward Pusey, and wants to focus on mourning the 28-year-old during a live TV interview.

Constable Josh Prestney's (centre left) heartbroken younger brother Alex (centre right) said he doesn't have 'any feelings' toward Pusey, and wants to focus on mourning the 28-year-old. Pictured with their parents Andrew and Belinda

Mr Prestney - who is also a police officer - said he feels 'pretty realistic' about the prospect of Pusey walking free next week

'He is not worth the time. It's like having a bully around at school, if you don't look at him or give him any air time, then he won't do anything or hurt you or affect you in any way,' he told host Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show on Thursday.

Mr Prestney - who is also a police officer - said he feels 'pretty realistic' about the prospect of Pusey walking free next week, after he was jailed on Wednesday for 10 months.

His sentence includes the 296 days he's already spent in custody, which means he could be released within days if he's granted bail on unrelated matters.

'He's had his time served, he's done what he's done... being realistic about it and being in the police force myself I know that's what has to be done,' Mr Prestney said.

'Once I was told about [the sentence] yesterday, I completely forgot 30 seconds later and got back to playing my guitar.'

Mr Prestney said he isn't going to dwell on the lenient sentence, and instead will put his energy into learning how to live without his brother.

'We know it is justice, this sort of thing has to be done... But it is not at the forefront of our minds - the forefront of our minds is how we live without our mate, without Josh.

Alex Prestney (left) said he isn't going to dwell on the lenient sentence, and instead will put his energy into learning how to live without his brother (right). Pictured with their parents

Instead of helping, Pusey retrieved his phone and slowly walked around and filmed the scene, zooming in on the dead and dying officers and their injuries

Left to right: Senior Constable Kevin King, Constables Glen Humphris, Leading Senior Constable Lynette Taylor, Constable Josh Prestney died in the crash

Pusey had been pulled over for speeding at 149km/h in his Porsche on the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne when a truck driver crashed into the emergency lane on April 22 last year

Mr Prestney said having someone like Pusey back on the streets 'isn't ideal'.

'Life will have its way. He and everyone else who have done with this sort of thing can live with that,' he said.

Mr Prestney described his late brother as 'respectful', hardworking and 'professional' in anything he put his mind to.

'He brought so many traits that we pride ourselves on as a family - treating people how you like to be treated,' he said.

'He had the policing world at his feet.'

Stefanovic looked emotiona; as he played a song Mr Prestney wrote and recorded for his beloved brother.

'Very powerful. Your courage for coming on and talking about your bro this morning is incredibly inspiring but very difficult and we thank you for it,' Stefanovic told him.

Outside Victoria's County Court on Wednesday Sen Const Taylor's widower Stuart Schulze said it 'tears my heart and soul' to see and hear references to his wife's final moments as filmed by Pusey.

'The pain is almost unbearable,' he told reporters.

Mr Schulze also said the sentence imposed by Judge Trevor Wraight was too lenient

'I find it to be outraging public decency that a more appropriate sentence was not imposed by this court,' the man said.

Judge Wraight labelled Pusey's conduct at the scene as 'heartless, cruel and disgraceful' among other descriptors.

'A normal human reaction of a person coming upon a scene like this, would likely be to immediately telephone triple zero, or simply to run to the side of the deceased or seriously injured,' the judge said.

'What you did, however, was film the scene with a running commentary which, on one view, may be described simply as bizarre behaviour in the circumstances. It can also be described as extremely insensitive and heartless.

'Your focus was entirely on yourself. You were upset that your car had been destroyed and seemed to take pleasure in seeing the destruction of the police vehicles.'

Pusey has a severe personality disorder, which played into his actions, as did the shock of narrowly avoiding death himself.

He admitted outraging public decency on the basis of his comments in filming the scene. He later told police he was ashamed.

Pusey has a severe personality disorder, which played into his actions, as did the shock of narrowly avoiding death himself

Mother of Josh Prestney, Belinda Prestney (centre) is seen outside the County Court of Victoria in Melbourne dor Pusey's sentencing

Pusey also admitted speeding offences and possessing MDMA, which he tested positive to, alongside cannabis, when pulled over before the crash

'That's how s*** comes out of my head, I'm highly offensive,' Pusey said during his police interview.

Prosecutors accepted Pusey was talking to himself in the videos and did not taunt the officers.

'Oh he's smashed. Look at that. Look at that. Lucky I went and had a piss,' he said while zooming in on Const Humphris wedged between the truck and Porsche.

Pusey also admitted speeding offences and possessing MDMA, which he tested positive to, alongside cannabis, when pulled over before the crash.

On top of his jail sentence, he was handed an adjourned undertaking and a $1000 fine. His licence was also cancelled for two years.

After the sentence, Police Association of Victoria boss Wayne Gatt described Pusey as a 'worthless individual that lacks any human traits'.

'Each and every one of us will face our mortality one day. And when his day comes, I hope that he faces the same coldness and the same callousness with which he provided my members,' Mr Gatt said.

The Office of Public Prosecutions said its standard practice was to review all sentences and Pusey's would be looked at in due course.

Singh was earlier this month jailed for a maximum of 22 years for causing the deaths of the four officers.
The two Democratic mayoral candidates in Taylor said their priorities include supporting police and improving public spaces.

With Mayor Ted Praschak not seeking another term, Taylor voters will see Frank DeAngelo Jr. and Loni Kavulich Loiselle on the ballot May 18. There are no Republican candidates.

DeAngelo, 50, a Pittston Area teacher, serves on the boroughs Planning Commission. He was inspired to run for mayor from his politically active family, which includes his father, Taylor Councilman Francis DeAngelo.

My father made me think it was a great time in my life to try to pursue an elected position, he said. Taylor is a great community and Id be honored to serve as their mayor.

Kavulich Loiselle, 33, a Riverside paraprofessional, wants to carry on the legacy of her father  the late state Rep. Sid Michaels Kavulich  by serving the community where she grew up. Her fathers death in 2018 left a big hole in the Taylor community, which he tirelessly and honorably served, she said.

Taylor is a borough that feels like a family to me, she said. Its helping my community, its helping my town, and its everything that my dad stood for.

Kavulich Loiselle said that as mayor, she would be an ally to the Taylor Police Department, which is among the finest forces in the region, by affording officers the resources they need.

DeAngelo said hes supported the local police force for years, in particular through donations to fund uniforms for bicycle officers and the purchase of yard signs supporting the department. As mayor, he said he would strive to continue supporting the respected department.

In addition to fostering development in Taylor, especially with borough-owned properties, DeAngelo wants to apply for grant funding to revitalize Main Street with new sidewalks and lighting, much like what the city of Pittston has gotten done over the last five years.

DeAngelo said he would also look into additional banners that could promote the town when Hometown Heroes banners arent on display.

Kavulich Loiselle wants to prioritize parks improvements, which she said can benefit younger and older populations. She believes engaging children through parks and youth programming keeps them active, focused and away from dangerous or unhealthy activities.

Im dedicated to keeping the programs that work and improving the ones that need improvement, but also converting our play centers into attractive, well-equipped and safer venues where children want to play, she said.

She said the federal government allocated more than $584,000 to Taylor through the American Rescue Plan, and she wants to ensure officials balance infrastructure needs with pandemic recovery as they spend it.

Serving four-year terms, the mayor of Taylor makes $5,000 per year.
New Delhi:

A Chhattisgarh local court in Raipur on Sunday remanded senior journalist Vinod Verma in police custody till October 31.

Verma was arrested by Chattisgarh Police in connection with an alleged case of blackmailing and extortion from his residence in Ghaziabad on Friday

The senior journalist in the court of Judicial Magistrate First Class S P Tripathi on Sunday evening, informed Faizal Rizvi, Vermas lawyer to the media.

He added that Verma has been sent to police custody till October 31 by the court. He was taken to the court amid tight police security.

According to defence counsel also informed the media that Verma was also moved an application under section 156 (3) of the CrPC in the court, claiming he was framed.

Verma has alleged that two influential Chhattisgarh ministers have hatched a conspiracy against him and CDs were seized from his possession, added Rizvi

Rizvi also claimed that Vermas life is in threat in the police custody. Meanwhile, several Congress party workers present in the court premises raised slogans in support of the senior journalist.

Also read: Vinod Verma to be presented before special court by Raipur Police

Verma on Friday after his arrest from Ghaziabad had claimed that he has sex tape of Chhattisgarh ministers due to which he is being framed.

According to Raipur Police, a case of blackmail and extortion was registered at the Pandri Police station on complaint by one Prakash Bajaj.

Bajaj in his complaint had said that he was being harassed over the phone by an unidentified caller who told him that he had a CD of his master.

Police claims that during the course of investigation they learnt that Verma was behind the the blackmailing calls. A search team was sent to Delhi and he was arrested. The police also claimed to have recovered 500 porn CDs, a pen-drive and a laptop from his possession.

Soon after the arrest of Verma, a sex video allegedly involving Public Works Department Minister Rajesh Munat surfaced in Raipur triggering a political row between Congress and BJP. The state government has recommended a CBI probe into the alleged sex CD row.

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OTTAWA, ON, April 28, 2021 /CNW/ - The Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, will discuss Budget 2021 investments at a virtual roundtable with small and medium-sized enterprises.

Opening remarks will be open to members of the media. The Minister will be available for questions following her remarks. The virtual roundtable is closed to media.

Date: Thursday, April 29, 2021



Time: Minister's remarks at 12:30 p.m. (ET)

Media availability at 12:35 p.m. (ET)



Note: To register and receive login information, members of the media who wish to participate must confirm their attendance in writing to infc.ruralopportunity-possibilitesrurales.infc@canada.ca.

Stay connected

Follow Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on Twitter: @ISED_CA

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View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2021/28/c9133.html
Oslo, 29 April 2021

The Board of Directors of Thin Film Electronics ASA has become aware of an inadvertent mispricing, compared to US tax laws, of certain subscription rights awards previously granted to US employees under the Company's 2020 Subscription Rights Incentive Plan ("2020 Plan"). The Board has therefore, as allowed under the 2020 Plan, resolved to reprice such prior grants to become fully compliant with applicable US tax laws. With reference to the Company's announcements on Oslo Brs on 13 September, 16 October, 11 December and 18 December 2020 regarding grants of subscription rights to employees, the exercise prices per share in these four rounds of grants have been amended to NOK 0.3300, NOK 0.3752, NOK 0.3900 and NOK 0.4470, respectively.

Contact:

Stale Bjrnstad - Investor Relations

E-mail: stale.bjornstad@thinfilmsystems.com

Phone: +47 99 16 76 72

Kevin Barber - Chief Executive Officer

E-mail: kevin.barber@thinfilmsystems.com

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
Employers Face Challenges Filling Vacancies

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WESTERN KENTUCKY - Jobs are plentiful across the region and state. However, many employers are having trouble finding people to fill job vacancies.Sandra Wilson, President of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce, and Kate Shanks, Vice President of Public Affairs at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, joined the Greg Dunker Show Thursday to discuss the statewide trend.Shanks said the state began a 'Who's Hiring' campaign last spring, which uncovered approximately 95,000 available jobs across the state.She said, "There are quite a few employers out there that are looking for help right now in various sectors of the economy. It's definitely a problem that employers are facing, and we're really eager to get people back to work."Both Wilson and Shanks agreed there are multiple factors at play when evaluating the problem. Some of those include fear of COVID-19, access to federal stimulus money, extra federal unemployment benefits, and not having access to childcare.With vaccines becoming more plentiful, childcare capacity increasing, and summer programs for children opening, Shanks is hopeful that we will begin to see an increase in people jumping back into the job market."It's going to be really important for our continued economic recovery," She continued, "This summer could be great for so many people. We have so many great outdoor recreational opportunities, especially in western Kentucky. But to take advantage of all that, we have to make sure we have workers there that can provide services to people as they're getting out and about."Wilson said she has encouraged employers to pursue college students for employment or internships to help fill the gap."I think that's a really good option. Those college students, they need work experience, and it's a great opportunity for them," Wilson shared.The Paducah Chamber has information available to employers interested in providing internships to students. Wilson also encouraged interested employers to reach out to Hannah Carroll, Murray State University's Internship Coordinator, and Marlo Rhodes, WKCTC's Career Services Manager.Shanks encouraged everyone searching for a job to check out the Kentucky Chamber's 'Who's Hiring' website. The page allows users to search for a job by region and sector. You can view the website by clicking here. "The resources are there. We just encourage you to go ahead and start looking," Shanks said. "There's a lot out there to help you get going. I think we're all eager to get back to our normal lives, and this is going to be important for all of us."
Getty (2); Splash News Online; Getty From left: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Caitlyn Jenner, Angelyne and Mary Carey

California recall elections can attract a chaotic crowd of candidates  and the latest one is shaping up that way, too, with a list that already includes lawmakers, entrepreneurs and Caitlyn Jenner.

The last governor's recall, in 2003, ended with Arnold Schwarzenegger ousting incumbent Gray Davis to become the state's leader. The film star also bested more than 100 other candidates, most of whom entered the race with long-shot hopes.

Schwarzenegger, who held office until 2011, still easily recalls a lesson learned from that race.

"Anyone has a chance," he told Jimmy Kimmel this week.

With another recall approaching, many Californians agree.

The pending recall of current Gov. Gavin Newsom will be held later this year, after a Republican-led effort gathered enough signatures across the state to force the rare election.

Candidates have started lining up, from serious political contenders to local long-shots.

The Los Angeles Times reports the current list of candidates vying to challenge 53-year-old Newsom include politicians, businesspeople, oddball celebrities and even an ex-porn star.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/Bloomberg via Getty Gavin Newsom

Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Caitlyn Jenner

Newsom  who said earlier this year that he was "worried" about the recall effort but that he was "going to fight because there's too much at stake in this moment"  may well eye Jenner as a notable challenger.

The Associated Press reports that Newsom's re-election campaign sent out a fundraising email this week, telling supporters that "we're going to need help keeping up with Caitlyn's personal wealth and ability to raise money from right-wing donors."

RELATED: Arnold Schwarzenegger Reacts to 'Good Friend' Caitlyn Jenner Running for Governor of California

Jenner has brought on a handful of operatives who worked for former President Donald Trump  though Jenner has taken pains to maintain she rescinded her support for Trump in 2018 due to his controversial anti-LGBTQ policies.

Story continues

RELATED: How Caitlyn Jenner Has Described Her Politics as She Launches Campaign for Governor

The Times reports that there are other noted Republicans in the mix: former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and former Rep. Doug Ose.

Millionaire Republican businessman John Cox, a former gubernatorial candidate, has also tossed his name into the ring  though he lost by what the Times described as a "historic margin" in the last election against Newsom.

Cox, 65, unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice in addition to past failed campaigns for president and a county seat in Illinois.

Ric Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany under Trump, may also run.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/Shutterstock Doug Ose

David Yeh/NBCU/Getty Kevin Faulconer

RELATED: Kardashian-Jenners Have 'Differing Political Opinions' But Want Caitlyn 'Happy' amid Gov. Run

Perhaps the most colorful of the candidates are local celebrities Angelyne, a billboard model who gained fame in the 1980s, and Mary Carey, a retired porn actress. Both have run for governor in the past.

Carey ran against Schwarzenneger and then-Gov. Davis in 2003. Her campaign website touts that she "placed 10th out of a field of over 130 candidates" in that race.

"Last time I ran I was young, dumb and full of fun," she said in a statement earlier this month. "This time I have more experience and will not be taking this position laying down. I am ready to be on top!"

Albert L. Ortega/Getty Mary Carey

Mcp/Shutterstock Angelyne

Angelyne, who is known in Los Angeles for driving around a hot pink corvette, told Los Angeles Magazine earlier this month that if she somehow won the election, she would continue to govern from her car instead of an office.

"I'll still drive my car as the governor's office on wheels," Angelyne told the magazine. "People will be appointed to do things like put gas in my car. We'll have a party and make a pretend governor and give everybody the option of being in power."

When the reporter asked what "hot-button issues" she'd like to tackle if elected, Angelyne reportedly squealed and replied: "Hot button?! Ooh!"

The recall election will be held by the fall. The exact date is pending.
Employees of Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (CEPEP) say they have were blindsided with a 33 1/3 per cent pay cut in their salaries.

While some workers were under the impression the cut was supposed to occur next fortnight, many were unprepared for managements move.

One employee told the Express yesterday while talk was being bandied about a few days ago with regard to the pay cut, she thought more notice would have been given to staff since globally theres a pandemic. I am hurt and disappointed.
She often uploads bold images to social media in a bid to promote body confidence.

And Ireland Baldwin was in her element as she posed for an impromptu shoot in a field on Wednesday.

The model, 25, commanded attention as she slipped into a white lace bralet, teamed with denim jeans, before playing with tattoo filters on Instagram.

Watch her glow: Ireland Baldwin was in her element as she posed for an impromptu shoot in a field on Wednesday

Putting on a busty display, the fashion star's top was complete with delicate trimmings and semi-sheer material.

The DJ ensured focus remained on her bold outfit and heavily-tattooed arms as she opted for minimal accessories.

The New York Film Academy alum highlighted her naturally clear complexion with light strokes of make-up, while her tresses were worn loose.

Working it: The model, 25, commanded attention as she slipped into a white lace bralet, teamed with denim jeans

All in the details: Putting on a busty display, the fashion star's top was complete with delicate trimmings and semi-sheer material

'I just might!' The media personality later played around with filters as she contemplated getting face and neck tattoos

The media personality later experimented with filters as she contemplated getting face and neck tattoos.

In 2020, the blonde celebrated being six years free from eating disorders which had a negative impact on her childhood.

The media personality previously took to social media to share a nude photo of herself along with an empowering message about loving yourself and not taking life too seriously.

'You better not had!' Last year, the fashion star posted an image of a temporary tattoo on her face, which prompted a swift response from her mother Kim Basinger

'Love your body. respect your body,' she wrote in the caption, before continuing her post to offer more advice to her followers.

'Spend your remaining time on this earth with people who love you and make you feel good and if you dont have many of those people, get out and go look for them.

'Some of yall are taking this whole life thing so damn seriously... and its so not worth it,' she advised.

The in-demand model has been featured on the covers of Elle Bulgaria, L'Officiel Ukraine and Marie Claire Mexico and has had editorials in W, Vogue Italia and Vogue Taiwan.
Masks will continue to be mandatory and some gathering restrictions will remain for a further week as Premier Mark McGowan outlined the next phase of WAs step-down from lockdown.

Mr McGowan announced the loosening of restrictions on Thursday evening after five days without any new community cases being detected.

WA Premier Mark McGowan has announced the final stages out of Perths lockdown restrictions. Credit:Getty Images

It followed around two million people in the Perth and Peel regions being plunged into a snap three- day lockdown on Saturday followed by four days of mandatory mask wearing and 20-person gathering limits.

The new measures, which come into effect at 12.01am on Saturday, include mandatory masks indoors, 30-person limits in homes, outdoor gathering caps of 500, the casino and nightclubs adhering to the 4-square-metre rule and weddings up to 200 people.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 29, 2021 - 22:41 | All, World, Coronavirus

A cross-border coalition of medicines regulators has begun exploring alternatives to large-scale clinical trials in evaluating the efficacy and safety of coronavirus vaccines, as it is becoming difficult for latecomers to secure enough study participants.

If the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities finds other effective ways, drugmakers in Japan and other countries trailing the United States and European countries in COVID-19 vaccine development would be able to accelerate their development and production.

The authorization or approval of vaccines generally requires a large-scale clinical study with the involvement of tens of thousands of participants -- in groups receiving a vaccine or a placebo -- to assess its safety and efficacy by comparing their data.

However, since vaccination campaigns using those developed by U.S. and European makers have already been under way in a number of countries, it has become difficult for some nations to recruit a sufficient number of test subjects who hold no immunity against the novel coronavirus.

The move by the coalition came as calls have been mounting from many countries for reviewing the policy requiring large-scale clinical trials.

In Japan, for example, several companies including Shionogi & Co. have been engaging in the development of coronavirus vaccines but a large-scale clinical study becomes a major hurdle for the completion of domestic vaccines.

With highly contagious virus variants spreading in the country and elsewhere, the government is scrambling to find other ways to evaluate vaccine efficacy while not turning a blind eye to its safety, including assessment of potential side effects, at the same time.

"We are not in a stage to disclose concrete methods yet. It is essential to collect reliable data not only on efficacy but also on safety," a Japanese health ministry official said.

The authorities are studying various ways based on data of already available vaccines developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and others.

One alternative is to figure out the relationship between the amount of antibodies generated after vaccination and its effectiveness in preventing symptoms of the disease using available data.

Such a measure may allow other makers to evaluate the efficacy of their vaccine candidates by studying the amount of antibodies in small-scale clinical studies.

Other ideas include comparing data of people who received vaccines still under development and those who received authorized vaccines of U.S. and European makers. This method does not require data of those who received a placebo.

If the coalition, which plans to discuss the matter several times a month, can establish an alternative capable of evaluating COVID-19 vaccines swiftly, it would apply to the development of modified vaccines against coronavirus variants as well.
Connecticut officials announced Thursday that the state will receive about $8 million as part of an approximately $300 million multistate settlement with pharmaceutical company Indivior, which has been accused of wrongfully promoting its Suboxone drug to treat opioid addiction  misconduct that they said has resulted in improper Medicaid expenditures.

Indiviors payout will resolve civil fraud allegations involving government health care programs such as Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income people and comprises one of the largest payers for health care in the U.S., according to state officials. Approximately $204 million will go to Medicaid, and about $91 million will be distributed to the 50 states, as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Of that total, $7.9 million will be returned to Connecticuts Medicaid program. The state will also receive $200,000 for state Department of Social Services programs.

Indivior knowingly promoted the sale of Suboxone for unsafe and unnecessary purposes, reaping undue profits from states and the federal government while endangering the lives of countless individuals, state Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. This settlement sends a strong message that states across the nation are united in taking aggressive action against those who fraudulently and callously contributed to the opioid epidemic.

In a statement, Indivior said that the various state settlement agreements being announced this week are administrative in nature and simply formalize the individual state settlements which were previously agreed to in principle as part of the July 2020 criminal and civil resolution between Indivior and the states (and the federal government).

It added that there is no new financial or legal obligation that has arisen. The company was pleased to put those issues behind it in 2020 and remains focused on realizing its patient-focused vision and fulfilling its compliance commitments. The company will have no further comment on this matter.

The civil settlement will resolve claims against Indivior brought in six pending lawsuits in federal courts in New Jersey and Virginia. Among the allegations, Connecticut officials said that Indivior promoted the sale and use of Suboxone to physicians who were writing prescriptions that were not for a medically accepted indication in that they lacked a legitimate medical purpose.

Indiviors actions resulted in the company fraudulently receiving Medicaid funds needed by our most vulnerable state residents, Chief States Attorney Richard Colangelo, Jr. said in a statement. This collaborative investigative effort between the Attorney Generals office, the Division of Criminal Justice and federal agencies sends a clear message that the fraudulent diversion of Connecticut Medicaid funds will not be tolerated and will result in serious consequences from civil fines, as shown in this case, up to and including possible criminal charges.

The agreement with Indivior follows a $1.4 billion settlement in 2019 among consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser Group, the federal government and the states  a deal that state officials said resolved Reckitts potential criminal and civil liability related to substantially similar allegations involving Suboxone. Connecticut received nearly $19 million through the 2019 settlement.

Litigation is one of the main strategies that Connecticut and other states have employed to seek accountability for the opioid crisis. In 2020, 1,273 people in the state died from opioid overdoses, up 13 percent from 2019, according to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Among other actions, the state has sued Purdue Pharma, the Stamford-based maker of OxyContin, which it has accused of deceptively marketing its opioids. Purdue has denied those allegations.

In February, Connecticut officials announced the distribution of $7.5 million to the state through a $573 million multistate settlement with consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which has been accused of supporting efforts to boost the opioid sales of Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies. McKinsey did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

This national settlement (with Indivior), bringing over $8 million to Connecticut, is another reminder that companies and providers that take advantage of public health programs and put enrollees at risk will be met with strong enforcement action, Deidre Gifford, Department of Social Services commissioner and acting Department of Public Health commissioner, said in a statement. I join Attorney General Tong and Chief States Attorney Colangelo in welcoming this important result for program integrity, enrollees and taxpayers.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott
Washington, April 29 : US President Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered his first speech to the US Congress and declared "America is on the move again". Biden's speech to Congress started as a victory lap and ended with a warning.

Biden, delivering his first address to a joint session of the US Congress, said: "America is rising anew. Choosing hope over fear".

He also cited the Capitol riot as "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War", the BBC reported.

"If we are to truly restore the soul of America, then we need to protect the sacred right to vote. Congress should pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and send them to my desk right away," Biden tweeted from US President's official handle.

"Trickle-down economics has never worked. It's time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out," he said in another tweet.

The Biden speech was held on the eve of the Democrat's 100th day in office. In a historic first for the US, both people seated behind the President during the speech were women. When Vice President Kamala Harris was asked about the momentous event, what she thought about this breaking of a historic glass ceiling -- she said: "Normal".

Biden pitched two massive spending packages to overhaul the US social safety net.

He began by touting what has been by all accounts a very successful rollout of vaccinations in the US, paving the way for a return to some semblance of normalcy in the months ahead.

Biden boasted of hundreds of thousands of new jobs created in his first 100 days and a growing economy. He touted recently passed funding that will help cut child poverty in the US in half.

That was all a set-up, however, for the President's pitch for more - more spending and more action from Congress.

The US President proposed a trillion-dollar package of universal pre-kindergarten, two years of free college education, family leave and childcare funding. He called for legislation on gun control, immigration, criminal justice reform and voting rights.

He concluded, however, by turning to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and the threat posed to democracy by the world's autocratic nations. He said the biggest threat to homeland was from white supremacists.

Biden assured the nation that the US will prevail.

President Biden urged the joint session of Congress to pass a federal policing overhaul named after George Floyd, who was killed last year by a police officer in Minneapolis, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement.

Twitterati appeared satisfied with Biden speech as it trended. A CNN poll showed 7 out of 10 who watched the speech felt optimistic about the future.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Help India!



According to a report by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, an Indian government programme aimed at universalization of education within a time frame, Dalgaon was the worst-performing block in north-eastern Indian state of Assam. The first story in four part TCN Ground Report series looks at teacher-student ratio in Darrang district of Dalgaon Education Block and what ails education in the region, which has a predominant population of Muslims.

Mahibul Hoque, TwoCircles.net

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Up to 126 students stuff the classrooms at No 3 Shayampur Middle English (ME) Madrasa, a government school in the Darrang district of the northeastern Indian state of Assam. A total of 938 students are accommodated in nine classrooms at the school, which only has children from 5th to 8th standard. As there are too many students in each batch, each class is divided into three sections resulting in a shortage of teachers to be present in every classroom.

Since there are not enough teachers for each class, we merge two sections so that students are not left out of the classrooms and that is why we have such a huge number of pupils in one room, said Muslim-ud-Din Ahmed, 52, a subject teacher at the school.

Teachers at the school told TwoCircles.net that when two (sometimes three) sections are merged, students cannot even find a place to sit nor they can write down the instructions. There is little space left for the teacher to move around the class and check what the students are doing while the class is going on.

Teachers said that they find no time to check the homework of the children as checking too many copies requires a lot of time. If we spend time checking the copies, then when do we take classes? This is how we also miss out on noticing the individual progress of the students, Ahmed said.

Cramped with a lot of students, naturally the classrooms become noisy and teachers usually have to scream at the top of their voice to control the situation. Thats how some students get scared of the teachers, which is contradictory to a cordial teacher-student relationship, he said.

No 3 Shayampur ME Madrasa falls under the administration of Dalgaon-Sialmari Education Block of Darrang district, which has one of the highest enrollment rates in the district. Around 115 kilometres north from state capital Guwahati, the school is among 24 ME schools from the educationally backward block which records the worst teacher-student ratio with 156:1 for the school year 2020-2021, presumably among the highest in the state and the country doubtfully.

The school had 885 students against 5 teachers during 2019-2020, forming the teacher-student ratio 177:1.

Similarly, Mahmud Alam Hussain, the headteacher at Aliganj Lower Primary (LP) School complains that he has not been able to find an assistant teacher for the last three years to manage the classes.

Hussain and his only co-teacher look after the 133 pupils enrolled in the school.

Aliganj LP School is situated at Namati village, just around 110 kilometres northeast from Guwahati in the same education block.

Dalgaon-Sialmari Education Block also referred to as the Dalgaon Education Block of the district which has a Pupil-Teacher Ratio (PTR) of 35.88:1 in the lower primary section (from first to fifth standards) for the year 2019-20.

This is almost at par with Bihar, the worst-performing state in India with 38:1 PTR and second-worst performing Delhi Union Territory with 35:1 according to the Ministry of Human Development data. The HRD ministry based its data on Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE), which maintains school details for both government and private schools, records for 2017-18. PTR or student-teacher ratio is the average number of pupils per teacher at a specific level of education in a given school year. PTR is an important indicator in the process of implementation of the landmark Right to Education (RTE) Act 2009 which stipulates that each school should maintain at least one teacher for every 30 students in the lower primary section of schools, and 35:1 for the upper primary schools.

Distressing PTR in Upper Primary

From sixth to eighth standards, i.e. the upper primary section, Dalgaon education block has the worst PTR in Darrang district. There are 30 upper primary schools under the block which had 10,797 students for the school year 2019-2020. Against these students the block had only 220 teachers, making the PTR stand at 49:1.

Only six upper primary schools from the block had PTR of less than 35:1, and the rest varied from 37:1 to 177:1 for 2019-2020.

Indias national PTR for 2017-18 was 24:1 for upper primary schools, while neighbouring Sikkim, Nagaland and Manipur had the distinction of best performing states with PTR rate of 6:1, 8:1 and 9:1 respectively.

The rural-urban divide

The Dalgaon education block provides a peek into the dismal condition of primary education in rural India.

A look into the available government data from the Department of Education and Literacy for the year 2017-18 reveals that India, as a nation has significantly been able to comply with the RTE Acts 30:1 teacher-student ratio. In fact, the country has been able to achieve an impressive PTR of 23:1. While the nations PTR has been commendable, Dalgaon education blocks state, Assam, has performed even better by maintaining a healthier PTR of 21:1 for the primary section.

As for the Darrang district, it has matched the national average of one teacher for every 23 students. In total, the district has 1,053 government or provincialized schools and 3,909 teachers against the 91436 enrolled students according to the UDISE 2017-18 database.

This data reflects PTR from three education blocks Sipajhar, Kalaigaon and Dalgaon, however, the Dalgaon block lags far behind the other two education blocks of the district.

Data obtained through the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005 shows that Dalgaon block had 445 government or provincialized schools. Of these, 65 per cent of schools had worse PTR than the stipulated 30:1 for the school year 2019-2020 in the lower primary section, which translates to grade I to grade V.

There are several schools which have a single teacher. In my Namati cluster, there are 12 schools but only three has RTE stipulated PTR, rest have only two teachers each whereas the number of students is more than hundred, Hussain, the headteacher at Aliganj Lower Primary (LP) School, said as he narrated how he has been struggling for the last three years after one of the teachers at the school retired from service.

The gravity of the problem can be gauged from the examples of Panbari Gaon LP School. The school had only one teacher for 128 students, and Nadirkash LP school, which had 3 teachers for 298 students making the ratio stand at 99:1.

According to a report by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan,, an Indian government programme aimed at universalization of education within a time frame, from 2003 to 2009-2010, Dalgaon was the worst-performing block in the state. The report noted, The data shows that PTR of Primary School of this district is 30 and that of Upper primary is 36. In the Primary category, the Dalgaon block is having the highest PTR (57) and for Upper-primary Dalgaon have the highest PTR (73) and the lowest PTR (16) and (20) in Sipajhar block in Primary and Upper primary level respectively.

Why the minority education block is ailing behind

Since 2012, Assam has been recruiting teachers through an eligibility test called Teacher Eligibility Test (TET). Following the first TET exam in 2012, the state government recruited 40750 teachers much to the hopes of concerned circles in the state.

This recruitment brought massive relief as schools under our education block saw several new teachers joining and we were hopeful that the new teacher appointments would reduce the teacher-student ratio gap, which initially happened as well, Fakarudding Ali, a teacher at Baruajhar High School under the same education block, said.

However, their hopes started to fade within a few months after the appointments of TET teachers. Though the state government, then led by late chief minister Tarun Gogoi and his education minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, laid out that teachers would not be transferred at any case expect mutual transfers (teachers exchanging their schools as per their convenience), on the contrary teachers from remote villages started to take transfers.

Headmaster of Habiganj LP School Abul Kashem told TwoCircles.net that from his school, three TET teachers left the school within a few months of their appointments. They came with official transfer orders, which I had to comply with. Though their transfer should have been a mutual arrangement, but I did not get any replacements for them, Kashem said.

Prejudice, long distance add to low PTR

Many teachers from the block reflected upon why such transfers were allowed up to 2018. Unfortunately a teacher was allegedly raped at Chikonmati Tea Estate in 2013. Following which several teachers especially women were transferred from this education for their safety, Ali said.

However, for one untoward and condemnable crime, you cannot blame the whole community. The safety and security of the teachers are the responsibility of authorities. Instead of taking safety measures, authorities got the teachers transferred from Dalgaon block eventually leading to this worse PTR and leaving the students vulnerable to become slow learners, he added.

The Dalgaon Education Block is considered an educationally backward block and it was included in the District Primary Education Programmes (DPEP) Pilot project. The project was introduced in 1994 to cater to the educational needs of specific communities, localities, universalize access, improve learning achievement, retention and reduce disparities among social groups.

The educationally backward block has since seen relative progress, but the PTR in the block remains poor even after decades of intervention of various educational missions.

While the RTE also envisages the rationalisation of teachers getting teachers to those areas where PTR is not in compliance with the stipulated 30:1 from areas which has a surplus number of teachers Dalgaon education block has not seen the distribution of teachers.

What teachers say about poor PTR

Haidar Ali, a former Cluster Resource Coordinator (CRC) in the education block said, While the number of student enrolment is high in this Muslim minority block, teachers have not been appointed in this block accordingly. There are blocks which have far better PTR within the district, the authorities can rationalize teachers from that block to Dalgaon.

He further said, While announcing the vacancies in Darrang district, the government took account of all the three education blocks. Of the three, two blocks have healthy PTR which makes the average PTR in the district better. Thus, vacant positions remain low in the district whereas Dalgaon block faces the shortage of teachers.

Echoing Haidars views, a teacher under the Daipam cluster, who wished to remain anonymous said, In our school, we have 180 students and there are only four teachers. We are entitled to two more teachers but there has been no appointment to our school even the government recently recruited teachers.

The teacher who travels around 70 km from Baihata in Kamrup (Rural) district to reach his school in Daipam cluster also said that he along with some other teachers used to stay a rented accommodation in Bechimari (a small township area around 8 km from his school) before the outbreak of Covid-19. I have to travel around 70 kilometres every day to reach my school. As it takes a lot of time on public transport, I along with other three teachers from nearby schools use a shared car for our travels to schools. Obviously, I look for opportunities to get a mutual transfer, he said.

Apart from distance, prejudice impacts the bad PTR in the education block as well.

A woman teacher, who is in her forties from Golaghat district which is 220 kilometres away from Mazgaon village where she is appointed to work in Dalgaon block, told TwoCircles.net, Before joining here, people at my place told me that the entire region is Muslim dominated and it might be difficult to work there. In one instance, another candidate from my place did not even join her school as she had this notion of a bad environment in the area. But I have been working here. I have been respected, and comfortable so far.

However, the woman teacher said that she is also looking for a mutual transfer as soon as possible. I travel from Rowta to my school which takes more than one hour, sometimes, I have to wait a lot when I change the route. I even have to walk for 3 kilometres sometimes to reach school. That is a problem for me, she said.

When asked about why she is not willing to take accommodation in the nearby area, she said that she has been staying with family friends, a comfortable option for her.

My father-in-law is ailing and my husband is also working. He alone cannot attend to his father. I am the only woman in the family so I feel that me, being at home, would be helpful for all of us, she said.

Though the non-mutual transfers have been stopped for the last two and half years, the damage in terms of a low number of teachers has been done in this minority block. This has a ripple effect of low score in tenth and twelfth and eventually dropout cases in secondary years, added Fakaruddin about the low PTR in the greater area of Dalgaon, Bechimari, Kharupetia and Dhula, the main townships within the education block.
A pair of companies accused of illegally leasing dogs in Massachusetts have agreed to waive more than $126,000 in outstanding balances and hand over dozens of canines to residents in a settlement with state Attorney General Maura Healey, the prosecutors office announced Thursday.

As parts of the settlement, the companies, Credova Financial and Nextep Holdings, agreed to stop collecting on their existing dog leases and transfer ownership of the canines to the consumers. They will also return any payments they collected from residents since Jan. 1 and cancel balances remaining on the leases, which total roughly $126,077, Healeys office said in a statement.

The Nevada-based finance companies also agreed not to originate any new leases in Massachusetts and pay the state $50,000, the statement said.

Dog leases are illegal in Massachusetts and are often an expensive way to buy a canine, the attorney generals office noted. These payment plans often carry high charges, which can range from hundreds of dollars to more than a thousand dollars, depending on the lease term and the pets purchase price.

Getting a dog can be a significant emotional and financial investment for many families, so when the dog is used as collateral in a lease, the end result can be expensive and heartbreaking, Healey said in her offices statement. State law clearly prohibits dog leasing for good reason, and our office will not allow companies to exploit Massachusetts families in this manner. We are pleased to be securing monetary relief for these pet owners.

The investigation the prosecutors office launched into the companies revealed that since as early as 2017, Credova and Nextep, through their subsidiary MyPetFunding, had been originating or purchasing leases made to residents who wanted to buy dogs from retailers. They are accused of violating the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act and other state laws in doing so, according to authorities.

In some states, pet stores may offer people the option to lease a dog as an alternative way to finance the pet. Under these arrangements, the consumer must make monthly payments to the finance company for the duration of the lease, according to the attorney generals office.

To actually buy the dog at the end of the lease, the consumer must make yet another payment to the finance company. However, if a person misses a payment, the pet can be repossessed, like a leased car, Healeys office said.

Her office is continuing to investigate whether other companies have leased dogs to Massachusetts residents. Those who have been victims of canine leases have been urged to call the attorney generals Insurance and Financial Services Division at 1 (888) 830-6277 or file a complaint at www.mass.gov/ago.
[April 29, 2021] Blackstone Announces Investment in Hotwire Communications in Partnership with Founders

Today, funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Blackstone Infrastructure Partners (collectively, "Blackstone") announced an investment in Hotwire (News - Alert) Communications ("Hotwire"), a leading provider of fiber-to-the-home in the United States. Co-founded in 2000 by Michael Karp and CEO Kristin Johnson, Hotwire's 100-percent fiber network helps deliver cutting-edge internet and telecommunication services to high-rise multi-dwelling units, gated communities, and homeowners' associations across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Hotwire has previously been named by Netflix as the fastest consumer internet provider in the country and has industry-leading consumer satisfaction scores. Jasvinder Khaira, a Senior Managing Director with Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, said: "We are proud to back this team of world-class technology entrepreneurs at Hotwire. Consumers are increasingly seeking state-of-the-art fiber connectivity to meet their growing need for connected devices in their homes, and we believe Hotwire is exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on this rising market demand. We look forward to leveraging Blackstone's scale to turbocharge Hotwire's growth with further investment." Greg Blank, a Senior Managing Director with Blackstone Infrastructure Partners, said: "We are enormously excited to invest behind the Hotwire management team as they continue their pioneering efforts to deliver best-in-class technology and connectivity. Data proliferation and consumer connectivity are two of Blackstone's highest conviction themes, and we are pleased to invest in an industry leader. By combining Hotwire's strong, entrepreneurial business model with Blackstone's scale, resources and reach, we see an immense opportunity for continued growth."



Kristin Johnson, CEO of Hotwire, said: "The Hotwire Team is thrilled with the partnership with Blackstone. We have an aligned vision for both the future of broadband and fiber optic infrastructure, and Blackstone's broad reach will help Hotwire to continue to scale as a premier provider of telecom and Internet services during a time when digital services are playing an increasingly vital role in all our lives." Tactical Opportunities is Blackstone's platform investing globally across asset classes, industries and geographies, seeking to identify and execute on attractive, differentiated investment opportunities in high-conviction themes. Blackstone Infrastructure Partners is the firm's permanent capital infrastructure platform, which is an active investor across the transportation, digital infrastructure, energy (renewables, utility and midstream) and water and waste sectors.

About Blackstone Blackstone is one of the world's leading investment firms. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our $649 billion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow Blackstone on Twitter (News - Alert) @Blackstone. About Hotwire Communications Hotwire Communications is a pioneering leader in fiber optic technology, and has been providing cutting edge fiber-based telecommunication services since 2002. Headquartered in Florida with regional offices throughout the Southeastern U.S., Hotwire offers a full suite of services including multi-Gigabit Internet, crystal-clear voice, HD and 4K IPTV (News - Alert) , and home automation products custom-tailored to a wide variety of residential and enterprise customers. Hotwire Communications has received a number of accolades from third-party outlets, including being named 2020 Fastest Business ISP, 2020 Fastest ISP in the Southeast United States, and 2021 Best Gaming ISP in the Southeast United States by PCMag, ranked by Broadband Communities Magazine as one of the Fiber-To-Home Top 100, named 2020 Independent Operator of the Year by Cablefax, and awarded two Silver 2021 Stevie Awards in recognition of the company's concierge-style, white glove customer service. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210429006145/en/

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New York, April 29 : US pharmaceutical firm Moderna on Thursday announced plans to increase the global supply of its Covid-19 vaccines to up to 3 billion doses.

The company will make new funding commitments to increase supply at its manufacturing facilities in Europe and the US, it said in a statement.

The additional investments will double drug substance manufacturing at Lonza's Switzerland-based facility, and more than double output at Rovi's Spain-based facility, as well as increase drug substance a 50 per cent at Moderna's facilities in the US.

The investment to increase supply is necessary due to an expected significant need for booster vaccinations in 2022 and beyond. Increasing the global capacity to 3 billion doses will depend upon the mix between its mRNA vaccine and potentially lower doses of its variant booster candidates and paediatric vaccines, the statement said.

"As we follow the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, we believe that there will continue to be significant need for our mRNA Covid-19 vaccine and our variant booster candidates into 2022 and 2023," said Stephane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, in the statement.

"Today we have announced that our investments in Europe, including Spain, France and Belgium, Switzerland, and the US will allow us to deliver up to 3 billion doses in 2022, depending on the mix of products between primary series of vaccination and variant boosters," Bancel added.

The pharma major also plans to increase its 2021 manufacturing supply forecast to between 800 million to 1 billion doses.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
OTTAWA - The federal Liberal government is tapping former Supreme Court justice and UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour to lead what it is billing as an independent review of the militarys handling of sexual assault, harassment and other misconduct.

Katie Telford, Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, appears as a witness via videoconference during a House of Commons finance committee in the Wellington Building in Ottawa, Thursday, July 30, 2020. Conservatives are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to allow his chief of staff to testify on what she knew about a complaint involving former defence chief general Jonathan Vance. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - The federal Liberal government is tapping former Supreme Court justice and UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour to lead what it is billing as an independent review of the militarys handling of sexual assault, harassment and other misconduct.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced Arbour's appointment Thursday, nearly three months after the government and Canadian Armed Forces were rocked by allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour by the militarys very top commanders.

While one of Arbour's primary tasks will be to help establish an independent system for victims and others to report incidents of sexual misconduct, Sajjan says she will also review other aspects of the militarys approach to preventing and punishing such behaviour.

That includes everything from how it screens recruits and trains service members to the way reports are handled, victims are supported and perpetrators are investigated and punished.

"This system needs to be focused on those who have experienced misconduct, be responsive to their needs, and be outside of the chain of command and the Department of National Defence," Sajjan said, according to prepared remarks.

"Any less cannot be accepted. Any less will not be accepted. Madame Arbour and her team will provide significant direction on how we must evolve to support affected people and how we can ensure that every incident is handled appropriately."

Yet while Sajjan billed Arbour's appointment as a major step forward in the militarys fight against sexual misconduct, reaction to Thursday's announcement was extremely mixed from victims, advocates and experts.

Many questioned the need for yet another review more than six years after another retired Supreme Court justice, Marie Deschamps, released an explosive report on the extent of sexual misconduct in the Armed Forces.

Deschamps's top recommendation was to create an independent centre outside the military that would receive reports of inappropriate behaviour while helping develop training, providing victims with support, and monitoring how cases are handled.

But the military resisted creating such an external body. The government instead allowed for the creation of a sexual misconduct response centre, a civilian-run body focused primarily on victim support and training but with no oversight powers.

Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for International Migration Louise Arbour speaks during a press briefing after the closing session of UN Migration Conference in Marrakech, Morocco, Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Mosa'ab Elshamy

"The last thing the CAF needs right now is another external review," Megan MacKenzie, who studies military sexual misconduct at Simon Fraser University, said in an email.

"Justice Deschamps has recently noted that her recommendations are 'gathering dust' and it would be stretch to say that they have implemented even 4 of the 10 recommendations."

That the government said Arbour's mandate would focus on establishing an external system for receiving reports of sexual misconduct, but did not include a similar emphasis on external accountability and oversight, was also seen as cause for some concern.

"There is no real accountability structure, we don't know much about how it will evolve, and we don't know who can actually push for change at a higher level," said Charlotte Duval-Lantoine of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Opposition parties were quick to pan the review, with Conservative defence critic James Bezan accusing the Liberals of trying to ease the political pressure over their failure to act over the past few months.

For his part, NDP defence critic Randall Garrison said: "While we have the utmost respect for Justice Arbour, another review that will take months is a distraction.

"We already have the Deschamps report from 2015. The recommendations from that report were not implemented."

Others such as Carleton University professor Leah West, who has previously spoken about having been sexually assaulted while serving in the Canadian Armed Forces, were more optimistic.

While West questioned why the Liberal government waited six years to launch Thursday's review, she said such work was necessary to start implementing Deschamps's recommendations and begin bringing about real change in the military.

"What I think was necessary at the time the Deschamps report came out was a meaningful engagement in: 'Okay, how are we going to go about implementing these recommendations and then putting those recommendations into practice?'" West said.

"That's not what happened. That's what should have happened. And so now we're left, six years later, with having to engage in that exercise. And the exercise needs to take place. It should have happened five years ago. But it does need to happen."

The former Supreme Court justice will not be looking at individual cases, a number of which are currently under active military police investigation, but will instead make recommendations on how the military can do better.

Arbour, whose appointment was one of a number of new initiatives announced by Sajjan, will send recommendations over the next year or so to the minister, who will pick which to direct the military or Department of National Defence to implement.

The 74-year-old has earned a reputation over the years of speaking truth to power, including during her four-year tenure as the United Nations' top human rights official, and West was among those expressing optimism that her appointment would lead to real change.

Defence Department deputy minister Jody Thomas acknowledged that many may be "skeptical" of Thursday's announcement, adding: "Please continue to judge us by our actions."

Sajjan said the government is committed to acting upon Arbour's recommendations, which will be made throughout the course of her tenure, and that her final report will be made public once it is complete.

Responsibility for putting Arbour's recommendations into practice will ultimately rest with a new team under a three-star general with the title "chief of professional conduct and culture," whose responsibility will extend to weeding out racism and hateful conduct as well.

Lt.-Gen. Jennie Carignan, one of the militarys highest-ranking female officers, who recently completed a tour commanding a NATO training mission in Iraq, has been tapped to fill the position.

West suggested the military leadership in place now is better placed to deal with the issue of sexual misconduct than when Deschamps's report came out in 2015.

"I do have a sense that the CAF's leadership does care and wants to get it right," said. "And I think that is the key offset here."

Along with Arbour's appointment, Sajjan said the Ottawa-based response centre will be expanding its footprint to different military communities across the country. The government will also be offering peer support for victims who have served in uniform.

Both measures, which were hinted at in the federal budget as the government promised $77 million in new money and said it planned to redirect another $158 million from other parts of the military to help fight sexual misconduct in the ranks.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Apr. 29, 2021.
UPDATE -- State Police and the Watertown City Police Department have identified the two victims who were killed in the shooting incident as:

Maxine M. Quigg, age 50 from Wellesley Island, NY

Terence M. O'Brien, age 53 from Black River, NY

Both victims worked at the Bridgeview Real Estate Agency where the shooting occurred.

Following a Be On the Lookout (BOLO) a State Police K9 unit observed the suspect vehicle on Route 11B in the town of Dickinson, Franklin County, and attempted to pull the vehicle over. The driver, identified as Barry Stewart, drove off the roadway and was found inside the vehicle with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was pronounced deceased at the hospital.

The investigation is continuing.

WATERTOWN, N.Y.  New York State Police have located the suspect accused of shooting and killing two people at a Watertown real estate business on Wednesday.

New York State Police say 55-year-old Barry K. Stewart, of Carthage, was found in Franklin County.

Stewart allegedly fled the scene in a grey F150 truck, after two people were shot and killed at Bridgeview Real Estate on Clinton Street. Authorities considered Stewart armed and dangerous when he was at large.

Watertown Mayor Jeff Smith released a statement Wednesday, confirming that there was an active shooting incident that resulted in the loss of two lives.

"My heart breaks for the victims, their families and our entire community who I know share in my disbelief that this could happen here in Watertown," said Smith. "I would like to thank our brave law enforcement and emergency responders who responded to the scene earlier today, including the City of Watertown Police Department, City of Watertown Fire Department, Jefferson County Sheriffs Office, New York State Police andGuilfoyle Ambulance Service."

This is a developing story and will be updated when more information is available.
DGAP-Ad-hoc: Obotech Acquisition SE / Key word(s): IPO

Obotech Acquisition SE launches bookbuilding for up to EUR 200 million private placement and listing on Frankfurt Stock Exchange



29-Apr-2021 / 14:44 CET/CEST

Disclosure of an inside information acc. to Article 17 MAR of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





AD-HOC RELEASE

Public disclosure of inside information according to Article 17 para. 1 of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 on market abuse (Market Abuse Regulation)

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, PUBLICATION OR FORWARDING, EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH SUCH DISTRIBUTION OR PUBLICATION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL. OTHER RESTRICTIONS ARE APPLICABLE. PLEASE SEE THE IMPORTANT NOTICE AT THE END OF THIS PUBLICATION.

OboTech Acquisition SE launches bookbuilding for up to EUR 200 million private placement and listing on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and targets business combination with a European company in the real estate technology and climate technology sectors



Luxembourg, April 29, 2021 - OboTech Acquisition SE (the "Company", ISIN: LU2334363566, Frankfurt Stock Exchange: OTA), a Luxembourg special purpose acquisition company, announces the start of a private placement of up to 20,000,000 units (the "Units"), each consisting of one share (a "Public Share") and 1/3 warrant (a "Public Warrant"), at a price of EUR 10.00 per unit representing a total placement volume of up to EUR 200 million. The Units will be solely offered to institutional investors. The proceeds of the initial private placement will be held in an escrow account. The private placement is expected to end on or before April 30, 2021.

The Company, sponsored by Obotritia Capital KGaA (the "Founder"), an affiliate of Rolf Elgeti, was established for the purpose of acquiring one operating business in a member state of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom or Switzerland in the form of a merger, capital stock exchange, share purchase, asset acquisition, reorganization or similar transaction (the "Business Combination"). The Company, led by Rolf Elgeti (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer), Ben Barnett (Chief Investment Officer) and Lars Wittan (Chief Financial Officer) plans to target a company in the real estate technology sector ("Proptech") and climate technology sector ("Climatech"). The target should have an equity value of between EUR 200 million and EUR 3 billion (pre-money) which will be paid in new shares and/or in cash, including from the proceeds of a possible future private placement in connection with the Business Combination. The Company will have 24 months to consummate a Business Combination, plus an additional three months, if it signs a legally binding agreement with the seller of a target within those initial 24 months. Otherwise, the Company will be liquidated and distribute substantially all of its assets to its shareholders (other than the Founder).

The Company has applied for admission of the Public Shares to trading on the regulated market (regulierter Markt) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (General Standard). The Company has also applied for introduction to trading of the Public Warrants (ISIN: LU2334364374; OTAW) on the open market (Freiverkehr) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Borse Frankfurt Zertifikate AG). Trading of the Public Shares and Public Warrants is expected to commence on May 4, 2021.

As part of the transaction, the Founder will acquire a shareholding in the Company equal, in the aggregate, on an as-converted basis, to 20% (not taking into account the founder shares issued to the Founder as part of the additional founder subscription) of the total number of Public Shares issued and outstanding as a result of the completion of the private placement. The Public Shares received by the Founder as a result of conversion of its founder shares in accordance with the promote structure, as well as the founder warrants, will become transferrable if, at any time, the closing price of the Public Shares equals or exceeds 15.00 for any 20 trading days within any 30-trading day period, commencing no earlier than 150 days following the date of the consummation of the Business Combination.

Responsible Person:

Richard Kohl

Director

9, rue de Bitbourg

L-1273 Luxembourg

info@OboTechAcquisition.com

www.OboTechAcquisition.com



Important Notice

This publication may not be published, distributed or transmitted in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

This publication does not constitute an offer of securities for sale or a solicitation of an offer to purchase securities (the "Securities") of OboTech Acquisition SE (the "Company") in the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan or any other jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. The Securities of the Company may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). There will be no public offering of the securities in the United States. The Securities of the Company have not been, and will not be, registered under the Securities Act. The Securities referred to herein may not be offered or sold in Australia, Canada or Japan or to, or for the account or benefit of, any national, resident or citizen of Australia, Canada or Japan subject to certain exceptions.

This publication constitutes neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to buy securities. The listing of the Securities will be made solely by the means of, and on the basis of, a securities prospectus which is yet to be published. An investment decision regarding any securities of OboTech Acquisition SE should only be made on the basis of the securities prospectus. The securities prospectus will be published promptly upon approval by the Luxembourg Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF)) and will be available free of charge on the OboTech Acquisition SE website.

In the United Kingdom, this publication is only being distributed to and is only directed at 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"), or (ii) persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.) (all such persons together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). This publication is directed only at Relevant Persons and must not be acted on or relied upon by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this publication relates is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons.

In member states of the European Economic Area the placement of securities described in this announcement is directed exclusively at persons who are "qualified investors" within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 (Prospectus Regulation).

The Units are not intended to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any Retail Investor in the EEA. For these purposes, a "Retail Investor" means a person who is one (or more) of: (i) a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of Directive 2014/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 May 2014 on markets in financial instruments, as amended ("MiFID II"); (ii) a customer within the meaning of Directive (EU) 2016/97 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 January 2016 on insurance distribution, as amended, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II. Consequently, no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance-based investment products (the "PRIIPs Regulation") for offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to Retail Investors in the EEA has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to any Retail Investor in the EEA may be unlawful under the PRIIPs Regulation.

Solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process, the target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants has led to the conclusion that (i) the Public Shares are (a) compatible with an end target market of Retail Investors and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II, and (b) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels permitted by MiFID II and (ii) the Public Warrants are (a) compatible with an end target market of investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II, and (b) eligible for distribution to professional clients and eligible counterparties through all distribution channels permitted by MiFID II.

Any person subsequently offering, selling or recommending the Public Shares and Public Warrants (a "distributor") should take into consideration the manufacturer's target market assessment; however, a distributor subject to MiFID II is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants (by either adopting or refining the manufacturer's target market assessment) and determining appropriate distribution channels.

The Units are not intended, to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any Retail Investor in the United Kingdom ("UK"). For these purposes the expression "Retail Investor" means a person who is one (or more) of the following: (i) a retail client, as defined in point (8) of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 2017/565 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 ("EUWA"); or (ii) a customer within the meaning of the provisions of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (the "FSMA") and any rules or regulations made under the FSMA to implement Directive (EU) 2016/97, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client, as defined in point (8) of Article 2(1) of Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the EUWA ("UK MiFIR"). Consequently no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the EUWA (the "UK PRIIPs Regulation") for offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to Retail Investors in the UK has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to any Retail Investor in the UK may be unlawful under the UK PRIIPs Regulation.

Solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process, the target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants has led to the conclusion that (i) the Public Shares are (a) compatible with an end target market of Retail Investors and eligible counterparties, as defined in the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook ("COBS") and professional clients, as defined in UK MiFIR, and (b) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels and (ii) the Public Warrants are (a) compatible with an end target market of eligible counterparties, as defined in COBS, and professional clients, as defined in UK MiFIR; and (b) all channels for distribution of the Public Warrants to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate.

Any person subsequently offering, selling or recommending the Public Shares and Public Warrants (a "distributor") should take into consideration the target market assessment; however, a distributor subject to COBS is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the Public Shares and Public Warrants (by either adopting or refining the target market assessment) and determining appropriate distribution channels.

No action has been taken that would permit an offering or an acquisition of the securities or a distribution of this announcement in any jurisdiction where such action would be unlawful. Persons into whose possession this announcement comes are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions.

This announcement does not constitute a recommendation concerning the placement. Investors should consult a professional advisor as to the suitability of the placement for the person concerned.

This release may contain forward looking statements, estimates, opinions and projections with respect to anticipated future performance of the Company ("forward-looking statements"). These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms "believes," "estimates," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "may," "will" or "should" or, in each case, their negative, or other variations or comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements include all matters that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on the current views, expectations and assumptions of the management of the Company and involve significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether or not such results will be achieved. Any forward-looking statements included herein only speak as at the date of this release. The Company undertakes no obligation, and do not expect to publicly update, or publicly revise, any of the information, forward-looking statements or the conclusions contained herein or to reflect new events or circumstances or to correct any inaccuracies which may become apparent subsequent to the date hereof, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The Company accepts no liability whatsoever in respect of the achievement of such forward-looking statements and assumptions.
New York's 2017 abortion healthcare mandate for employers finds fierce opposition in a group of nuns from various dioceses.

The Christian Post (CP) reported that the coalition of religious organizations from various dioceses led by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court regarding New York's mandate for employers to provide abortion coverage in their health care plans for employees.

Faith-based corporations, local branches of Catholic Charities, individual Catholic Churches, and Anglican nuns also joined the dioceses in filing the lawsuit. All of whom are legally represented by Jones Day law firm and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The nuns believed that the New York mandate is a violation of the Free Exercise Clause in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment for "it imposes severe burdens on their religious exercise" and strong convictions against abortion, CP noted.

The 48-page petition for a Writ of Certiorari filed in the U.S. Supreme Court as Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, Et.Al. v. Linda A. Lacewell, Superintendent, New York State Department of Financial Services, Et. Al. raised that the mandate specifies that religious organizations must cover abortions "if they have a broader mission (such as service to the poor) or if they employ or serve people regardless of their faith."

The petition identified the nuns from the Sisterhood of St. Mary and the Teresian House Nursing Home Company as part of the petitioners.

"Needless to say, this regulation imposes enormous burdens on the countless religious entities opposed to abortion as a matter of longstanding and deep-seated religious conviction," the petition's Introduction stressed.

"Because New York's regulation forces these organizations to violate their religious beliefs, they filed suit in New York state court seeking to enjoin this abortion mandate as a violation of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment. They argued that the mandate runs afoul of the Free Exercise Clause because it imposes severe burdens on their religious exercise, and that it runs afoul of both Religion Clauses because it interferes with religious autonomy," it elaborated.

The petition also raised that statutory protections on the federal level have "often obviated the need to further define the scope of the Free Exercise Clause," such that the "reach of the Religion Clauses is in urgent need of clarification."

It cited the recent cased in COVID-related emergency that have shown the lower courts being "hopelessly divided." It stressed that the petition would serve as a landmark case to address the said issues and "provide clear guidance to the lower courts." Most importantly, the petition hoped that the petitioners be granted of the case they have filed in court.

CP added that the petitioners actually filed a petition in the state court but was denied it. The Sisterhood of Saint Mary's Mother Miriam said that state officials pointed out that the only recourse for religious organizations to uphold their "beliefs about the sanctity of life," which is against abortion, would be to "stop serving Non-Anglicans." CP explained that the Sisterhood of St. Mary's is the oldest religious order of Anglicans in the United States.

Mother Miriam told CP that they "cannot compromise" their religious beliefs nor stop serving people of various faiths or no faith just because the state mandated such a healthcare provision. For this reason, she said, they needed "relief from the Supreme Court" through the petition they filed.
[April 29, 2021] PROGEN signs non-exclusive distribution agreement for sales of research antibody products

HEIDELBERG, Germany, April 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PROGEN Biotechnik GmbH, established manufacturer of premium research antibodies and AAV gene therapy tools, has signed a non-exclusive distribution agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific for selected proprietary antibodies, including top-selling immunochemicals. Since 1983, PROGEN has developed a widely cited portfolio of over 1.000 primary and secondary antibodies for basic and applied life sciences. Sales channels include the company's online shop and the collaboration with global distributors. As a leading supplier of research materials, Thermo Fisher will now offer a choice of 371 primary antibodies globally. Among them are top-selling products in biomedical research and development, such as lipid metabolism, cytoskeleton, cell adhesion, or oncology that cover the full range of immunochemical applications. PROGEN antibodies are available with full service and support from Thermo Fisher Scientific, also through e-procurement systems. Joint Managing Directors Katja Betts and Maik Lander welcome the partnership: "We look forward to tapping the sales power of a leading life sience manufacturer to make our research antibody product widely available in a competitive global market."



After focusing for more than three decades on research antibody markets, PROGEN is currently exploring other life science sectors and further expanding its leading role in the AAV gene therapy market to enable safe and effective treatments. About PROGEN

Starting out in 1983 as pioneers in antibody manufacturing, PROGEN has since become a globally operating biotech company that serves the life science and pharma sectors. We believe that our research antibodies and test kits are more than commodities but enabling tools for the advancement of research and development in academia and industry alike. Our goal is to deliver innovative and reliable products that fuel biopharmaceutical and diagnostic progress along the complete value chain  from the lab to manufacturing and quality control. PROGEN is continuously expanding its selection of over 1.000 research antibodies in different formats to enable novel applications that facilitate and accelerate the workflow at the bench. Building on our core competence in immunochemistry, PROGEN's portfolio includes adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapy tools, phage display technology and libraries for the generation of novel recombinant antibodies as well as density gradient media for easy cell fractionation. We place great value on premium quality and are breaking new ground in product validation to meet the key demand of the research community for high quality, reliable immunochemicals. Based in Heidelberg, PROGEN has been a 100% subsidiary of R-Biopharm AG since 2012. Media contact

Katja Betts

Managing Director

Phone: +49 6221 8278-0

E-Mail: betts@progen.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/progen-signs-non-exclusive-distribution-agreement-for-sales-of-research-antibody-products-301280317.html SOURCE PROGEN Biotechnik GmbH

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Its also not clear how long first-dose protection lasts without the boost from a second dose, Dr. Fauci said during a White House press briefing in April.

We have been concerned, and still are, that when you look at the level of protection after one dose, you can say its 80 percent, but its a somewhat tenuous 80 percent, Dr. Fauci said. He said theres concern that more-contagious variants that continue to spread around the globe could partially-evade vaccine-induced antibodies after just one dose. Youre in a tenuous zone if you dont have the full impact of two doses, he said.

Although breakthrough infections after vaccination are rare, they do happen. A recent study of 250 people in Israel who were infected after they were partially vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine  between two weeks after the first dose and one week after the second dose  showed that they were disproportionally infected by B.1.1.7, the variant first identified in Britain. The same study found that in a group of 149 people infected after the second dose of vaccine, eight infections with B.1.351 (the variant first identified in South Africa) occurred between days seven and 13 following the second dose. No breakthrough infections with the South Africa variant were seen 14 days after the second dose. Although it was a small sample, the finding suggested that full vaccination offers more protection against the variants, said Adi Stern, the studys senior author, a professor at the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, Tel Aviv University.

Another study showing the benefits of full vaccination looked at a group of 91,134 patients who had previously been seen by doctors in the Houston Methodist Hospital system and followed them between December and April. Most were not vaccinated, but 4.5 percent were partially immunized and 25.4 percent were fully immunized. There were 225 deaths from Covid-19 in the group, and 219 (97 percent) were among the unvaccinated. But five deaths (2.2 percent) occurred among the partially immunized. Only one person (0.004 percent) died in the fully immunized group. In that study, full vaccination was 96 protective against hospitalization and 98.7 percent protective against dying from Covid-19. But the partially vaccinated were only 77 percent protected from hospitalization and 64 percent protected from fatal Covid-19.

The studys senior author, Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said he began the research with a neutral view about the benefits of two doses versus a single dose. But hes now convinced the benefits of a second dose are meaningful.

Given the data from our study and other evidence, it does not make sense for people to skip their second dose, Dr. Omer said. When it comes to prevention of deaths through vaccines, the glass is 64 percent full, but wouldnt you rather have it nearly 100 percent full for such a drastic and irreversible outcome as death?

Beyond the obvious health risks, skipping the second dose also could make your life more complicated if you want to travel or visit facilities that require proof of vaccination. You will not be considered fully vaccinated, Dr. Brownstein said. It may have implications for getting back to normal again. If your vaccine passport or card doesnt show a complete status, you may not be able to do certain things. You may not be able to get on a plane.
The Wattle Dam resource evaluation forms part of Maximus near-term strategy aimed at building value by increasing gold resources across the greater Wattle Dam area.

Annotated core photo from hole WDUD0175 with an enlargement of significant coarse gold in drill-core.

Resources Ltd ( ) has started preparing a gold resource estimate for remnant ore at the historic Wattle Dam Gold Mine within the Wattle Dam Project near Kambalda in Western Australia.

The high-grade Wattle Dam was mined by Ramelius Resources ( ) from 2006 to 2012, producing 262,000 ounces from ore grading 10.9 g/t gold through a shallow open pit and underground mining operation.

There are currently no reported mineral resources for any remnant unmined mineralisation at the Wattle Dam mine.

Known gold mineralisation

Recent work by Maximus has included a consolidation of a large amount of data from legacy drilling to enhance the geological knowledge of Wattle Dam area.

This has culminated in the identification of resource growth opportunities across the under-explored Spargoville tenements.

An ongoing review has highlighted a broad zone of remnant unmined carbonate-quartz stockwork (Wattle Dam stockwork) with known gold mineralisation intersections, adjacent to the previously mined high-grade shoot at Wattle Dam.

Opportunities get better every day

Managing director Tim Wither said: The opportunities across the greater Wattle Dam area get better every day, as we continue to develop our geological understanding.

The potential to significantly increase the companys existing gold resources, together with the recent high-grade gold intercepts at Redback and observed stockwork at the S5 Prospect, all validates our belief that there is a much larger mineral system in the Wattle Dam area.

Shares have been up by more than 9% intra-day to 10 cents.

Wattle Dam stockwork

The Wattle Dam stockwork is characterised by carbonate-quartz-gold veins within a competent rock mass on the western shear zone of Wattle Dam.

Stockwork gold mineralisation extends from surface and closely follows the plunge of the previously mined high-grade shoot at Wattle Dam.

During mining operations, the Wattle Dam high-grade shoot and stockwork were mined out within the shallow open pit.

Wattle Dam stockwork mineralisation is up to 40 metres wide, has a varied strike length between 40 metres and 100 metres, occurring west of the mined high-grade shoot.

Gold intersections through the wider domain are characteristically variable and consistent with the nature of stockwork mineralisation.

Sample for future studies

Confirmatory and QAQC drilling incorporated into the upcoming RC program will provide sample material for metallurgical test-work to support future studies.

Near-mine opportunities at Wattle Dam have also been identified, which will be included in the resource estimate evaluation, including:

High-grade shoot - remnant mineralisation along strike and between open-pit and top level of underground workings;

Wattle Dam South - significant intercepts south of the underground workings, tested in the recently completed diamond drill program with assays pending; and

Wattle Dam North - potential area immediately north of the mine where the prospective trend has not been adequately drill tested in an area spanning 150 metres x 180 metres of the prospective corridor.

Forward plan
Colonel Collins contacted NASA and learned that the lunar module had touched down safely, Armstrong having radioed: Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed. Peering down from Columbia as he orbited at 5955 kilometres per hour, Colonel Collins spotted the lunar module briefly, and he made radio contact with Armstrong and Aldrin before their moonwalks. (He was too far above to actually see them walking on the surface.) He also heard President Richard Nixons telephone call to the two men as they stood on the moon, congratulating them on the magnitude of that moment. Apollo 11 astronauts (L-R) Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong peering out the window of a quarantine room aboard recovery ship Hornet following splashdown. Credit:Getty Colonel Collins, who had begun flying in 1952, had hurtled through the skies as a test pilot and orbited the Earth 43 times in the Gemini 10 capsule.

In 2019, he recalled his orbit of the moon for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. I had this beautiful little domain, he told The New York Times. I was the emperor, the captain of it, and it was quite commodious. I had warm coffee, even. He may have been the third man that day, but he was busy completing the items on his task list. I was nervous about getting every syllable of it exactly right, because this was going to be the day, he remembered. This was no fooling around. This was it. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Colonel Collins was greatly worried about the moment when the lunar module was to blast off from the moon to dock with Columbia for the trip back to Earth. He knew that if the landers ascent engine malfunctioned, Armstrong and Aldrin might be stranded on the lunar surface, or sent into a wild orbit. What happens if they veer this way, that way, the other way? he remarked 50 years later, noting that he had carried a packet around his neck containing 18 contingency plans for rescuing his crewmates.

As he wrote of the moment in his memoir: My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter. If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it. The ascent from the moon and the docking of Columbia and the lunar lander proved flawless. When the Apollo 11 crew members splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, they were American heroes. In a statement on Twitter, Aldrin, the last surviving member of that crew, wrote, Dear Mike, Wherever you have been or will be, you will always have the fire to carry us deftly to new heights and to the future. Michael Collins was a member of a distinguished military family. He was born on October 31, 1930, in Rome, when his father, Major General James Lawton Collins, who had been an aide to John Pershing, the general of the armies, in Mexico and World War I, was the military attache at the United States embassy.

Michael was a nephew of General J. Lawton Collins, known as Lightning Joe, a prominent World War II commander who also served as Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michaels older brother, Brigadier General James Lawton Collins jnr led an artillery battalion ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day and was later director of the Armys military history program. Michael travelled with his father and his mother, Virginia (Stewart) Collins, to Army postings as a child; attended the St Albans prep school in Washington; and graduated from West Point in 1952. The three Apollo crewmen, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Buzz Aldrin await pickup by a Navy helicopter from the USS Hornet after the Apollo 11 lunar mission splashdown, Pacific Ocean, July 24, 1969. Credit:Getty He chose an Air Force career over the Army to avoid suggestions of nepotism in future assignments. He became a jet fighter pilot and in 1960 he entered the test-pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was selected by NASA three years later as part of a third group of astronauts chosen to participate in the Apollo mission to the moon.

In July 1966, he teamed with Commander John Young of the Navy in the three-day Gemini 10 mission. They docked with an Agena rocket that had lifted off before them from Cape Canaveral, then fired its 16,000-pound thrust engine and reached an altitude of 764 kilometres, the farthest penetration of space that anyone had achieved at that time. Their Gemini spacecraft remained linked with the Agena for more than 38 hours, in the first significant test of the docking technique to be employed by Columbia and Eagle. Loading The Gemini 10 astronauts carried out a second rendezvous when they came within a few inches of another Agena rocket, which had remained in space after the Gemini 8 mission. But they did not attempt to dock with it since its electrical system was no longer operating, as NASA had anticipated. Colonel Collins became the first man to emerge from a spacecraft twice during a single mission. He stood up waist-high from an open hatch in the Gemini 10 to take photographs of ultraviolet rays given off by stars, and he later carried out a spacewalk to retrieve a scientific device from the side of the Gemini 8 Agena. That was also the first time an astronaut had taken such a journey to reach another object in space. Gemini 10 almost ran out of fuel before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, but it was a highly successful mission.

Colonel Collins left NASA a year after the Apollo 11 mission, when he was named assistant secretary of state for public affairs. He was appointed under secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1978 and was named vice-president of the LTV Aerospace and Defence Company in 1980. He later formed a Washington-based consulting firm. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 as a major general. Mr Collinss survivors include his daughters  Kate Collins, an actress best known for her long run on the soap opera All My Children, and Ann Collins Starr  and seven grandchildren. His wife, Patricia (Finnegan) Collins, a social worker, died in 2014. His son, Michael, also died before him. Collins sought to capture the wonder and beauty of space, he wrote in Carrying the Fire: I have been places and done things you simply would not believe. I feel like saying: I have dangled from a cord a hundred miles up; I have seen the Earth eclipsed by the moon, and enjoyed it. I have seen the suns true light, unfiltered by any planets atmosphere. I have seen the ultimate black of infinity in a stillness undisturbed by any living thing. I do have this secret, he added, this precious thing, that I will always carry with me.
Major Chinese investors, including the sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation (CIC) and Chinese national oil companies, are the ones looking to buy a stake at the biggest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco, Reuters sources said on Wednesday.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had announced on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia was looking to sell 1% of its oil giant Saudi Aramco to one of the leading energy companies in the world. He did not specify which energy company. MbS also said it could sell additional Aramco shares to other international investors.

The 1% stake sale could generate as much as $19 billion for the oil-dependent economy as the country tries to diversify away from its prized possession, oil.

On Tuesday, MbS said somewhat ambiguously that the deal could increase sales to the country where this company resides. Saudi Arabia is already Chinas largest oil supplier.

And its not the only deal Aramco is making. Aramco just recently finalized a deal to sell a 49% stake in its pipeline business to Washington D.C.-based EIG Global Energy Partners, which brought in $12.4 billion for the oil giant at a time when budgets are tight due to the low oil prices and lowered production as a result of the pandemic subsequent OPEC agreement.

Reuters sources suggest that Aramco has been looking for investors in China since before the pandemic began. Aramco has reportedly spoken with all the major state investors with overseas money, but few showed an interest in the oil giant.

That Aramco has found a buyer for a portion of its pipeline business and is now shopping around a 1% stake in Aramco reflects the problematic situation that Saudi Arabia now finds itself in as it attempts to bring Vision 2030 to fruition. The billions of dollars that could be generated by these mega sales may be the very thing that the ambitious plan needs.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Almost all women said they had experienced some form of harassment or violence towards them. (Getty)

Over half of women have been sexually assaulted by a partner in their sleep and 99.7% have been repeatedly subjected to some form of violence including assault, harassment and rape, a study has found.

VictimFocus said its study found only 0.3% of women reported never being subjected to a violent incident.

The study found 51% of women have woken up to their male partner having sex with them or performing sex acts on them whilst they are asleep and 27% have been subjected to this more than three times.

The figure was revealed in the new report and laid bare the devastating extent of sexual violence suffered by women in the UK.

Over 90% of women said they had been catcalled at least once. (Stock image, Getty)

Read more: Putting police in clubs and bars 'a knee-jerk reaction' and 'superficial' move

The study asked over 22,000 women about violent acts committed against them.

In total, 22,419 women reported that they had collectively been subjected to at least 808,607 acts of violence including 216,965 physical assaults and 363,964 sexual assaults.

They also found just under half of the women were subjected to some form of violence in their childhoods.

This meant on average the participants were all subjected to at least 37 acts of violence each in their lives since birth.

The report into the scale of violence committed against women also found

88% have been sexually harassed by someone.

56% have been kissed by someone without consent (forced or coerced).

87% have been sexually touched by someone without consent.

45% were forced to engage in a sex act they did not consent to.

17% had nude photos or videos of them that they did not know had been taken shared without their consent.

55% have been coerced into penetrative sex they did not consent to.

27% have been physically forced or threatened with violence to have sex they did not consent to.

38% have been forced to have sex whilst very drunk or high when they could not consent.

16% have been forced or coerced to perform sex acts someone saw in porn.

43% have had someone perform a sex act on them that they didnt consent to.

Despite all of these findings, 92% of women did not report physical or sexual violence crimes committed against them when they were a child to the police and 98% did not report any harassment.

Story continues

The figures were only slightly better for those who reported crimes committed against them when they were an adult.

Watch: Reclaim These Streets organiser 'disappointed but not surprised' by report into vigil policing

For women over the age of 18, the most common perpetrators of violence against women were male partners and ex-partners, followed by male strangers and male friends.

In childhood, the most common perpetrators of violence against girls were fathers, boyfriends, other male family members.

The findings come amid increased scrutiny of dealing with violence and harassment against women in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard.

Everard went missing on 3 March this year and her remains were found a week later.

Her sudden disappearance sparked a wave of stories from women about how they felt unsafe walking down the street and shared stories of harassment and violence they had been subjected to.

A country-wide vigil was held on 13 March, with the main London one being shut down by police for breaching COVID regulations.

The scenes of police forcefully dispersing the crowds only added to the anger felt by many.

Watch: Rape survivor calls for public awareness campaign to make face covering exemptions clearer
As California gears up for what could be another destructive fire season, the states firefighting agencies have a powerful tool at their disposal that has gone somewhat unheralded: the largest wildfire camera network in the world.

The network consists of more than 700 state-of-the-art cameras that survey fire-prone areas, and provide crucial intel to firefighting agencies and first responders throughout a fires life cycle. A public website shows photos snapped every 10 seconds, allowing community members to report smoke and wildfires, and prepare for possible evacuation.

How cameras help fight fires

The cameras help confirm and sometimes even discover potential massive events, and have become increasingly important as Californias fire seasons worsen.

Last year, they helped identify many of the fire starts for the LNU, SCU, CZU Lightning Complex and August Complex fires.

It tells you how quick the fire is moving, how big its getting, said John Cornell, emergency preparedness coordinator for the Lafayette Police Department. If its moving quicker than expected, you can start evacuating areas further out. ... You cant put someone in the middle of a fire, but you can put a camera in the middle of a fire.

The camera network, ALERTWildfire, is run jointly by the University of Nevada, UC San Diego, and the University of Oregon. Beyond California, it has installed more than 60 cameras in five other Western states. It began as a pilot program in Tahoe in 2013 and soon grew to the massive network it is today.

Max Whittaker, Special to the SF Chronicle

Last year, some wildfires werent contained until the end of December, and since then, California hasnt gotten much of a break. According to Cal Fire, theres already been 1,354 fires across the state, more than twice the five-year average, including several in the CZU Lightning Complex footprint in Santa Cruz.

We really havent stopped, said Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Lab at UNR, who started the ALERTWildfire system. Were trying to hit those areas that just dont have any ALERTWildfire presence. ... That said, I dont think there are many counties where we dont have cameras anymore.

About 300 cameras have been installed since 2019, with 250 more planned for this year and next year.

Last year, for the first time ever, five cameras were destroyed by intense wildfires. In previous years, cameras always survived burnovers.

Two of the destroyed cameras were in the Vaca Mountains and showed the ignition of the fast-moving Hennessey Fire, and another one was in Santa Cruz Countys Bonny Doon. The apocalyptic final images from that camera showed the surrounding areas engulfed in flames, but the information gathered was crucial to the wildfire response.

Max Whittaker, Special to the SF Chronicle

Jonathan Cox, deputy chief for Cal Fires San Mateo division, helps broker the sites with landowners where the cameras will be placed. Firefighting agencies can move the cameras remotely and see 15 frames a second in a live view, so they can pinpoint exactly where a fire has started and monitor its behavior. Cox said the cameras also accelerate the public reporting process.

They help us with real-time situational awareness at all times, he said. Theyre incredible at informing the public. Now they can see what were seeing in terms of fire behavior.

Cox said especially after the CZU Lightning Complex, more residents have learned about the cameras and its created more awareness in the community.

There is concern that this season is already shaping up to be a very active wildfire year due to a lackluster rainy season. Rainfall to date in the Bay Area is below 40% of a normal full season. Cox is worried about the current dryness of the vegetation, and what we dont know.

We cant predict how many offshore events we might have or the lightning that might come through, he said. The worst-case scenario is what we have seen over the last year: more fires in a greater area for a longer period of time.

What it takes to install the cameras

Getting a camera installed takes the cooperation of many, including county officials, wireless internet service providers and landowners, but Cornell said he has never run into any roadblocks. Once he explains what the cameras can do, everyone is willing to help.

Max Whittaker, Special to the SF Chronicle

The Tahoe Prosperity Center helped fund the initial ALERTTahoe project, and now ALERTWildfire receives donations from utility companies, nonprofits, Cal Fire, and other government agencies to pay for installations that range from $7,000 to $50,000.

Interactive California Fire Tracker This interactive map provides information on wildfires burning across California and lets you explore coverage of past fire seasons.

Technically savvy and certified as a tower climber, Cornell has been instrumental in getting cameras installed across Contra Costa County. He said the Bay Area has about 90% to 95% camera coverage in Tier 3 fire-threat areas, which means they have an extreme risk of a utility-associated wildfire. The regions are determined by the California Public Utilities Commission and marked on a map.

When I say coverage, I mean even if the camera is 10 miles away from a fire, the camera can still be a huge help, Cornell said. You can zoom in, see how big the smoke cloud is, if the fire is moving fast.

Hilltop installation sites are common across California's fire-prone areas, and some even have multiple cameras offering a 360-degree view. In a situation where firefighting and air resources are stretched thin, as California experienced last year, the cameras become more eyes on the fires, Cornell said.

If the wildfire camera team is installing a camera on a pre-existing tower, building or house, it usually takes three to four hours. But sometimes they need to start from scratch, which can take a long time to get permission for new sites, and then take several days to build the infrastructure.

In addition to ramping up the camera network, the technology and capabilities of the cameras themselves are also advancing.

The Lafayette Police Department has a solar-powered, portable trailer equipped with a camera on a 30-foot mast. It hasnt been used in an active fire yet, but has been deployed to some areas as a proof of concept for what the trucks can do, especially if a fire-prone area does not have a permanent camera.

ALERTWildfire has also been experimenting over the past couple of years with artificial intelligence technology, working with South Korean firm Alchera on a pilot program in Sonoma County to develop real-time fire detection. Kent said 90% of wildfires are quickly called in. Its that other 10% where technological and crowdsourcing advancements could really help.

Cox said one silver lining to come out of the bad wildfire seasons is increasing public awareness of what is going on, and an eagerness to help.

People are very diligent about calling in smoke and potential hazards, he said. Thats only going to continue, and the cameras really help us with that.

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 11:10:43|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

- - - -

MANILA -- The Philippines received an additional batch of the Sinovac CoronaVac vaccine from China on Thursday morning, allowing the Southeast Asian country to continue its vaccination drive.

Carlito Galvez, chief implementer of the country's fight against COVID-19, said the government expects the rest of the vaccines it purchased from Sinovac could be delivered within this year.

- - - -

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia -- Beijing Jiaotong University of China and the University of Malaysia Pahang signed an agreement on Wednesday on the offering of dual degree programs related to railway to jointly cultivate Malaysian talents in the field.

According to the Memorandum of Agreement signed between the two universities, three railway related programs of dual bachelor's degrees will be offered initially, including civil engineering, mechanical/vehicle engineering as well as electrical engineering. The tuition fee would be covered by Malaysia's Public Service Department.

- - - -

BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Wednesday reported 20 new COVID-19 cases, all of which were imported, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Thursday.

Of all the cases, 11 were reported in Zhejiang, five in Shanghai, and one each in Shanxi, Hubei, Guangdong and Sichuan.

- - - -

BUENOS AIRES -- Argentina's Ministry of Health on Wednesday reported 23,718 new COVID-19 infections and 348 more deaths in the last day, with a total of 2,928,890 cases and 62,947 deaths.

The country's Minister of Security Sabina Frederic and Secretary of Justice and Security of Buenos Aires Marcelo D'Alessandro agreed on "greater control of terminal station entrances and different transfer centers" in the capital city in response to the new wave of infections.

- - - -

OTTAWA -- Canada reported 5,071 new COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday afternoon, bringing the total number to 1,200,057, including 24,106 deaths and 101,586 variants, according to CTV.

Canada's national-level data showed a seven-day average of 7,992 new cases daily on April 21-27, a 7.5 percent decrease compared to the previous seven days, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada on Wednesday. Enditem
Apr. 29There are 16 regular-season games remaining, but the University of Hawaii baseball team's end game is evident.

UH head coach Mike Trapasso, who coordinates the'Bows' pitching, has anointed Tyler Dyball and Cameron Hagan as closers.

Dyball, a third-year freshman, is on a roll of saves in three consecutive appearances. Hagan, who transferred from Chemeketa College in August, tops the'Bows with 11 relief appearances, including a seven-out closeout against UC Davis on Sunday.

Trapasso said Dyball's ascension to late-inning work "is a really good story."

As a Kaiser High senior, Dyball's fastball clocked in the mid-to-high 80s. But with a 6-foot-2 frame and a cross-fire motion, Dyball showed promiseand an unpredictable future. He redshirted in 2019, and struggled in the final game of the abbreviated 2020 season. "He looked a little nervous and in awe of Oregon, " Trapasso said.

During the offseason, Dyball gained confidence in his two-seam fastballand the'Bows, in turn, gained confidence in Dyball. Dyball, a right-hander, throws a two-seamer that breaks and then sinks toward a right-handed batter and away from a lefty. It is a pitch that mirrors the path of a left-handed pitcher's hard slider. At up to 91 mph, his fastball sets up his secondary pitches. This season, Dyball is holding left-handed batters to a.222 average and righties to.194.

Five of Dyball's nine appearances have come in relief of ace Aaron Davenport. By design or not, Dyball's menu contrasts to Davenport's four-seam fastball and high-spin curve. "I play off of Davenport, " Dyball said.

"If you told me a year ago I'd be throwing this kid into games with a two-run lead in a Friday game, I don't think I'd believe you, " Trapasso said. "It's a tribute to him. ... It reminds you that kids grow and mature, not just physically but emotionally."

Dyball has had only one shaky appearance this year, giving up three runs in an inning against UC Irvine on March 28. But he has not relinquished an earned run in four subsequent appearances. Trapasso marveled at Dyball's poise and forward thinking.

Story continues

"If you watch 'Ted Lasso, ' my favorite show, he said the shortest memory is the goldfish, " Trapasso said in a Zoom call with reporters. "You need your closer to be a goldfish. Tyler is that way. ... You've got to forget your past performance, good or bad."

Hagan, a 6-foot-5 right-hander, also throws a two-seam fastball that befuddles left-handed hitters. "Hagan's (fastball ) is a power sinker, " Trapasso said. "Same thing (as Dyball's ). They both have had success against lefties because that two-seamer is running away, which (lefties ) don't like."

There also appears to be a heaviness to Hagan's pitches, especially when he targets the lower part of the zone. He is inducing an average of 1.4 ground outs per inning. His WHIP is 0.93.

"I think Cam has a really bright future, " Trapasso said, "His upside is almost scary. I'm excited about what we're going to see out of him the next couple years."
It was a conflict 10 months in the brewing.

Members of the Jefferson Parish Council and Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng sparred Wednesday over Lee Sheng's decision to continue to require people wear masks when entering or being in any common areas of parish buildings, a day after Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was revoking most provisions of the state's mask mandate.

Lee Sheng's emergency proclamation, issued Tuesday after Edwards' announcement, followed the state guidelines closely, including requiring masks in government buildings. The Parish Council, however, refused to require masks in the council meeting chambers, and several members wanted the mandate completely vacated.

COVID mask mandate ends in Louisiana: See metro New Orleans rules by parish Louisiana joined several southern states Tuesday in lifting its mask mandate, which had been in effect since July 2020 to slow the spread of t

The council voted 6-1 to approve a resolution "expressing opposition" to the remaining mask requirements in public buildings. The resolution, sponsored by Council members Deano Bonano and Dominick Impastato, has no force of law, they acknowledged.

But it thrust into public view a fracture that began when Lee Sheng issued a parishwide mask mandate in June 2020. At that time she had tried to persuade the council -- which in Jefferson Parish is the governing authority -- to take action, but members refused. When she had a news conference announcing her mandate, few council members showed up to stand with her on it.

The issue became moot days later, when the governor instituted one for the entire state. And for the most part, the Parish Council and Lee Sheng have walked in step on most COVID-related issues.

In neighboring New Orleans, the mayor announced Wednesday that Orleans Parish's mask mandate would remain in place.

As state restrictions loosen, some in Jefferson have been impatient to dump the masks completely.

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

"I just worry that the message you are sending to the public is very contradictory," Bonano said to Lee Sheng. He asked why, if parish businesses can be open without most capacity limits and or a mask mandate, members of the public were required to wear one in government buildings.

Impastato sounded similar notes. Lee Sheng, he noted, has made health-related decisions during the pandemic out of "her deep concern for our community."

"Nevertheless, I believe the mask mandate should be lifted across the board," he said.

No COVID mask requirement in St. Tammany, Parish President Mike Cooper says St. Tammany Parish will not opt for a local mask requirement following Gov. John Bel Edwards' announcement that he will drop the statewide mas

Lee Sheng said the parish charter establishes the president's office as the administrative arm that runs the various departments of parish government. Some employees, such as librarians, are forced to greet members of the public as part of their jobs. They should be protected, she said.

"It is my job to create a safe work environment for our employees," she said. "While we are doing well on vaccination efforts, two-thirds of people still don't have the vaccine," she added, referring to a statistic she gave earlier that said 31% of Jefferson Parish's eligible residents were fully vaccinated.

"I hate that it came to this, but I will...be looking at what we can still require masks for the public who are greeting our employees," she said.

Lee Sheng got support from Gretna-based Councilman Marion Edwards, a close confidant of her father, the late Sheriff Harry Lee, and longtime family friend.

"I believe this decision lies with the parish president's office," he said. Edwards was the only council member to vote against the resolution.
Sam Fuller and India Toth keep an eye on the sonar screen during the underwater search

Students, from left, Alexis Boydston, Sam Fuller, India Toth and Gavin Page and Assistant Professor Morgan Smith watch a sonar screen that shows ship wreckage on the bottom of the Tennessee River.

A sonar image shows what may be the U.S.S. Chattanooga on the bottom of the Tennessee River. On either side of the long, dark rectangle in the middle of the screen are wooden framing and planks. The circular object in the upper righthand corner may be part of a paddlewheel. The dark rectangle is an acoustic shadow created by the sonar device.

Morgan Smith wasnt sure hed find what he was seeking. Heck, he didnt even know if it was there at all.

He thinks he found it on the first try.

Smith, assistant professor in the UTC Department of Anthropology at UTC, and his students are 90 percent sure they found the wreckage of the U.S.S. Chattanooga, a steamship that brought supplies to the starving army of U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant outside Chattanooga in 1863. According to historical records, supplies had dwindled until there was only one loaf of bread left for Union soldiers.

After the war, the ship sat on the northern side of the Tennessee River across from what is now the Tennessee Aquarium and Riverfront. Eventually, it fell apart and sank.

On April 14, Mr. Smith and students in his Underwater Anthropology course are pretty sure they found pieces of it sitting on the muddy river bottom.

It had a big role in American history and it is unrecorded as far as archaeological sites go. The state of Tennessee was not aware that this was even here before we did this survey today, he told a group of students before they pulled away from the Riverfront fishing pier on a pontoon boat.

As the boat cruised back and forth on a section of the river - Its called Mowing the Lawn, Mr. Smith said - a sonar computer screen showed dark spots on the river floor. Some large, some small, some straight-edged, some curvy. The U.S.S. Chattanooga ship was a Frankenstein, made from parts scavenged from other ships, he said, so it probably has broken apart.

That might be the paddlewheel, he said, pointing to a round shape on the sonar screen.

Coming across pieces of what may be the U.S.S. Chattanooga is exhilarating, said Austin Averill, a senior in environmental science.

It was fun. It was very interesting, India Toth, a senior with a double major in anthropology and chemistry, said after stepping off the pontoon boat onto the pier.

An initial look with sonar can find a submerged wreck without disturbing it and without spending a lot of money only to find nothing, he said.

Its one of the main ways to try to find locations without actually taking all of the equipment and all the money and all the people in diving. Its a lot more efficient, Mr. Smith said.

Along with the U.S.S. Chattanooga, sonar also detected five or six other wrecks, probably barges, he said.

Learning to read sonar is a major plus for anyone pursuing a career in anthropology, said Sam Fuller, a junior in anthropology and military science.

Its one of the defining factors of the employment spectrum. Is there a diversity of skills? he said. If youre studying a site thats in the water, you need to know how.

Now that the remains of the U.S.S. Chattanooga probably have been found, the next step is to compare the sonar imagery with archival data, getting an idea of the length and width of the ship to see if they line up with whats in the water. Construction techniques used at the time of the Civil War also will be compared to the wreck for further confirmation, Mr. Smith said.
Driving behaviors harbor early signals of dementia

April 28, 2021 -- Using naturalistic driving data and machine learning techniques, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed highly accurate algorithms for detecting mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers. Naturalistic driving data refer to data captured through in-vehicle recording devices or other technologies in the real-world setting. These data could be processed to measure driving exposure, space and performance in great detail. The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics.

The researchers developed random forests models, a statistical technique widely used in AI for classifying disease status, that performed exceptionally well. "Based on variables derived from the naturalistic driving data and basic demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, race/ethnicity and education level, we could predict mild cognitive impairment and dementia with 88 percent accuracy, "said Sharon Di, associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering and the study's lead author.

The investigators constructed 29 variables using the naturalistic driving data captured by in-vehicle recording devices from 2977 participants of the Longitudinal Research on Aging Drivers (LongROAD) project, a multisite cohort study sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. At the time of enrollment, the participants were active drivers aged 65-79 years and had no significant cognitive impairment and degenerative medical conditions. Data used in this study spanned the time period from August 2015 through March 2019.

Among the 2977 participants whose cars were instrumented with the in-vehicle recording devices, 33 were newly diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and 31 with dementia by April 2019. The researchers trained a series of machine learning models for detecting mild cognitive impairment/dementia and found that the model based on driving variables and demographic characteristics was 88 percent accurate, much better than models based on demographic characteristics only (29 percent) and driving variables only (66 percent). Further analysis revealed that age was most predictive of mild cognitive impairment and dementia, followed by the percentage of trips traveled within 15 miles of home, race/ethnicity, minutes per trip chain (i.e., length of trips starting and ending at home), minutes per trip, and number of hard braking events with deceleration rates  0.35 g.

"Driving is a complex task involving dynamic cognitive processes and requiring essential cognitive functions and perceptual motor skills. Our study indicates that naturalistic driving behaviors can be used as comprehensive and reliable markers for mild cognitive impairment and dementia," said Guohua Li, MD, DrPH, professor of epidemiology and anesthesiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and senior author. "If validated, the algorithms developed in this study could provide a novel, unobtrusive screening tool for early detection and management of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers."

###

Co-authors are Carolyn DiGuiseppi, Colorado School of Public Health; David W. Eby and Lisa Molnar, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute; Linda Hill, University of California San Diego School of Public Health; Thelma J. Mielenz, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; David Strogatz, Bassett Research Institute; Howard Andrews, Terry Goldberg, Barbara Lang, and Minjae Kim, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The study was supported by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the seventh largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit http://www. mailman. columbia. edu .

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School's faculty are at the center of the University's cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, "Columbia Engineering for Humanity," the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

This story has been published on: 2021-04-28. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
(Newser)  President Biden will outline a sweeping series of proposals to use the power of government to solve problems and create opportunity when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. He'll ask members of both parties to support a broadening of support and benefits for Americans, paid for by higher taxes on the nation's wealthiest, the New York Times reports. "We have to prove democracy still works," say Biden's prepared remarks, which were released in advance by the White House. The expansion of government involvement would build on the momentum created by its role in battling the coronavirus and economic shutdown. The president sees it as a $1.8 trillion investment in children, families, and education.

story continues below

Other advance word on the speech includes:

Biden will call on Congress to empower Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, per AP, in an effort to cut consumer costs.

Gun control legislation and immigration changes will be proposed.

For the first time, the two people seated behind the president during his speech will be women, per the Washington PostHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris. "He'll certainly note that," Biden's press secretary said.

The Supreme Court's only representative will be Chief Justice John Roberts. And only Gen. Mark Milley will attend, not the usual lineup of Joint Chiefs.

The audience will be about 200, far fewer than is usual for a State of the Union or other presidential addresses, because of the pandemic. Spectators will be socially distanced.

The first lady will not sit with her guests, as is customary. The White House said five "virtual guests" will attend.

(Read more President Biden stories.)
Mumbai: If youre looking for a better time to pick on learning new dance moves, the time is now! As you stay at home, strap on your dancing shoes, ditch the gloom and groove to hip beats all day long with a special dance-off showdown on &flix, this World Dance Day. Dancing is good for the heart and the franchise synonymous to dance is sure to get you grooving with an all-day airing of the biggest dance battles in the Step Up series, this Thursday, April 29th, 11 AM onwards.

#LeapForth to the world of epic dance battles and get ready to steady your stance with the most jaw-dropping and spectacular performances.

The only movie that comes to mind that literally drove global attention towards the competitive world of dancing is Step Up. The franchise that earned fans all over for its experimental dance flex, crazy dance routines and the most talented bunch of crewmates was just the beginning of an era of street style dancing.

The dance revolution comes home this Thursday, with the epic airing of Step Up starring Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan followed by the sequel Step Up 2: The Streets starring Briana Evigan and Robert Hoffman. The movie is remembered for taking underground dance battles to a whole new level and inspiring a generation of movie lovers to get up and shake a leg to the hip hop soundtracks in the film.

The third instalment in this highly successful blockbuster franchise, Step Up 3D which will air soon after brings back the greatest rivalry of dance crews on screen with amazement of fireworks and visual tech bound to leave you wide-eyed and twirling to the tunes.

This World Dance Day, celebrate moments with family inside your home and catch the television binge of not one but three of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters Step Up franchise movies airing this Thursday, April 29th only on &flix

#LeapForth into a world of unlimited possibilities and follow us on @AndFlixHD, @andflix and @AndFlix
Prem Rawat (left) and Rev. Dr. Menzi Mkhathini of the Department of Correctional Services sign an MOU to expand the Peace Education Program at correctional facilities throughout South Africa

The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF) is partnering with the South Africa Department of Correctional Services to expand the Peace Education Program at correctional facilities throughout the country.

A new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalizes the partnership and builds on years of positive results with the program to help inmates rehabilitate and successfully reintegrate into society. More than 1,000 inmates have already participated in the program at Zonderwater Prison in Cullinan, South Africa, winning praise from administrators for improving behavior. When you have peace in yourself, if you have hope, then we can start the process of restorative justice. The Peace Education Program is working in South Africa, said Deon Du Preez, Deputy Head at Zonderwater.

The Peace Education Program workshops give participants the opportunity to focus and reflect on their own humanity, and their inner resources such as choice, hope and dignity. The workshops feature videos of Prem Rawats addresses and on April 15 the founder of TPRF was in Cape Town for a celebration of the MOU signing.

The Peace Education Program works by providing a mirror, by providing an opportunity to help people find a way back to themselves, said Prem Rawat at the gathering of leaders and supporters.

Rev. Dr. Menzi Mkhathini, who spoke on behalf of the Commissioner General of the South African Correctional Service, expressed great appreciation for the expanding partnership with TPRF.

We have realized that, for us to be able to rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders back into the community, we have to ensure that we really reach the inner spirit of an individual. And this program exactly helps in terms of doing that, he said. I want to say to The Prem Rawat Foundation, continue with the stunning work that you have started to support us in correcting the offending behavior, and ensuring that those in need during this unprecedented time of COVID-19 and beyond are also assisted.

The strengthening partnership in South Africa mirrors growing support in other countries across the world. For example, earlier this year, the Italian Ministry of Justice signed an MOU to also bring the program into widespread use at correctional facilities to help inmates reintegrate into society.

The program has already been offered at over 685 correctional facilities across the globe. A comprehensive recent study found that 89 percent of 604 incarcerated participants in four continents benefited by helping them feel empowered to face past events, gain a willingness to change, better manage their anger and avoid fighting.

The Peace Education Program also has a proven track record of benefiting diverse people outside of corrections, from other disadvantaged populations to university students.

Last year in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Department of Social Development designated the Peace Education Program as one of the essential services needed to help people cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. A subsequent study by the department found remarkable benefits for 95 percent of participants in homeless shelters, helping them experience a paradigm shift in their value system from anger and self-pity to enhanced tolerance, contentment and self-reliance.

In 2020 nearly 3,000 people in South Africa participated in the Peace Education Program in a range of settings, including rehabilitation and youth development centers. Total participation worldwide rose to over 44,000 people in 50 countries.

The Peace Education Program workshops can be offered in person, virtually, or on inmate tablets by GTL and Edovo (tablet versions currently available in the U.S. only). The Prem Rawat Foundation makes the workshop materials available free of charge.

The Peace Education Program is just one of the ways that TPRF advances dignity, peace and prosperity by addressing fundamental human needs.

TPRF has provided more than $300,000 for COVID-19 relief projects throughout the world in the last year, including an initiative to feed parolees and other disadvantaged people in Johannesburg.

Learn more about The Prem Rawat Foundation and the Peace Education Program here.
Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son to visit Russia

Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son has been invited by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to visit Russia at an appropriate time and the invitation was accepted with pleasure.









Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son phoned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. (Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs).



The information was unveiled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs following phone calls between the two FMs on April 28.



Lavrov congratulated Son on his appointment as Foreign Minister of Vietnam at a recent National Assembly session, and expressed his belief with his wealth of experience Son will continue to lead Vietnams diplomacy to new success, effectively realizing the countrys foreign policy.



The Russian diplomat highly valued Vietnams recent foreign achievements, including successfully assuming its role as ASEAN Chairman in 2020 and a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2020 - 2021.



For his part, FM Bui Thanh Son expressed his delight at the positive development of the Vietnam - Russia relations over the years, affirming that Vietnam always attaches great importance to the comprehensive strategic partnership with the Russian Federation.



Russia is one of the most important partners of Vietnam in its foreign policy, stressed Son.



He congratulated Russia on its success in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in research and production of coronavirus vaccines for disease prevention.



He noted that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, both sides have maintained the exchange of high-level contacts, contributing to promoting bilateral cooperation in all fields.



The two ministers exchanged views on bilateral cooperation between the two countries and two ministries, as well as their coordination at multilateral forums, including the United Nations Security Council and ASEAN.



They expressed their desires to promote implementation of activities within the framework of the Vietnam - Russia and Russia-Vietnam Year in 2021.



Minister Son thanked Russia for supporting Vietnam during the latters ASEAN Chairmanship Year in 2020, as well as in taking the role of a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2020-2021. He voiced Vietnams readiness to work closely with Russia and other ASEAN countries to successfully organize activities to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ASEAN-Russia relations this year.
Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

Mostly clear skies early then increasing clouds with some scattered thunderstorms late. Low 71F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Mostly clear skies early then increasing clouds with some scattered thunderstorms late. Low 71F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Rev Professor Joy Mante, Moderator of General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG), has called on the government to provide more job opportunities for Ghanaians to end the craze for quick money.



He explained that the need to make money while unemployed often contributed to people indulging in such money rituals, using human blood and parts.



He appealed to the government to provide enough jobs and better conditions of service for workers to reduce the tendency of getting quick money at all cost.



Rev Mante made the call in an interaction with the media during his visit to the PCG, Victory Congregation, a new church auditorium funded solely by a couple, Mr and Mrs Agbo at Akyem Apoli in the Birim South District of the Eastern Region.



He noted that lack of jobs often influenced people to pay heed to claims of money doubling and other social vices and called on the countrys regulatory bodies such as the Bank of Ghana to step up its supervisory role.



He said the two teenagers, who were arrested at Kasoa for the murder of an 11-year-old boy was the height of indiscipline and craze for quick money which ought to engage the minds of Ghanaians to call for a change in our moral direction as a country.



He said money doubling TV stations could not entirely be blamed and that their closure was a step in the right direction, adding the government should extend the arrest to pastors, priests and mallams who also claim to have the powers for doubling the money.

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.

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Gab Mejia considers himself a conservation photographer. Mejia, who was recently included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for The Arts in Asia, got his first camera at 18. Since then, he has spent most of his waking hours taking pictures outdoors  striking photos that would captivate anyone looking through his Instagram profile: mountainscapes in purple, blue and marigold, white flowers blooming along the edge of a marsh, and the red-orange tarp where Kali, the last captive bred tamaraw, lay after her passing. Though he says, I dont want these stories to just be on an Instagram feed... but something that can reach and educate others about the importance of these places that we document.

His advocacy began even before he bought his first camera. I actually was very interested in photographs already. Maybe not yet taking pictures but looking through Nat Geo magazines when I was a kid  my dad subscribed to National Geographic  and watching Animal Planet or National Geographic on T.V.

Gab Mejia began his work with National Geographic when he turned 19 after winning first place in the Global Youth Wetlands Youth Photo Contest in 2017. Photo by AJ CONCEPCION/Courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Mejia said that mountains have been one of his greatest sources of inspiration since childhood. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Mejia began his work with National Geographic when he turned 19 after winning first place in the Global Youth Wetlands Youth Photo Contest in 2017, which got him connected to the organization. The winning photo: a view on the summit of Mt. Sawi, the plains of Nueva Ecija stretching into the mountains, rivers cutting through like scribbles.

The photograph of the the Gabaldon Floodplain which Mejia submitted to the Global Youth Wetlands Youth Photo Contest in 2017. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

From here, he found out that something called an early career grant was being awarded to young photographers. But to have a shot at it, I needed to think of a story, a bigger project, he said.

Mejia turned his sights on the Agusan Marsh, a wildlife sanctuary in Agusan del Sur, Mindanao. First, for its environmental relevance: More than 67% of our wetlands all over the world are gone. Its something thats really drastic because wetlands are natural climate solutions. They really protect us from the effects of climate change like typhoons, he said. Second, he wanted a story closer to home. All the stories that Ive grown up with reading National Geographic or watching the channel  there's not so many stories about the Philippines. He added, Most of the stories that we know have been tainted in war, conflict  not sharing about the true beauty of the Agusan Marshlands.

The project took two years.

Mejia plunged into the Agusan Marsh, a mosaic of greens partly submerged underwater, and home to species that constantly shift depending on the dry and wet seasons, including crocodiles. From February to December, when the rain is at its strongest, new lakes form where ducks come to nest. Do you know Lolong? Mejia asked excitedly, referring to the largest saltwater crocodile ever discovered. Lolong was actually found there.

A photo of the rare Mindanao Hornbill, taken after two days of waiting in the swamp forest. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Mejia was also able to take his share of bird photos. One of his favorites is of a rare bird called the Mindanao Hornbill, found in a swamp forest nicknamed the Wonderland due to countless cautionary tales of people seeing spirits and getting lost. Observing the ethics of wildlife photography, he and his team waited, silently and patiently, for two days until it appeared. It perched on the tree for about five to seven seconds and it flew away. But Mejia was able to photograph it.

Another favorite picture is of the Brahminy Kite, wings spread against a blue cloudless sky. I remember that moment when I shot that photo. He beamed. I was going down to the boat, so it was really wavy and I had my cameras and bags. It literally came flying up the river. I had to really get my camera and like shoot, shoot, shoot as much as I can. Hopefully its sharp. Luckily, I got that shot as well.

A photo of the Brahminy Kite, taken while Mejia was on his way down to a boat. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Beyond the lens, he witnessed firsthand how the marsh was suffering. There were droughts. I was beating on the fires. The smoke and ash destroyed the trees and killed the birds like the Mindanao Hornbill and the Brahminy Kite. And he took pictures of those too.

I think one of the most amazing experiences there was being and living with the indigenous communities  the marginalized communities, which are the Manobo tribe, Mejia said.

Mejia's photo of the Agusan Marsh taken from above, the floating houses dotted along the water. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Living in wooden houses that float above the water, the Manobos are losing their livelihoods, which depend on the use of barotos or dugout canoes, to forest fires. Theyve been living there for centuries, coexisting with the marsh, and these are the stories that we dont get to hear out there. These beautiful people have embraced their heritage and protected their home without changing much of their way of life. The droughts and the development of palm oil plantations are taking away what is sacred to them, instead bathing it in smoke and ash. They are losing their way of life in the marsh.

Amplifying the message, not only have Mejias photos reached the governor, government agencies like Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and international conservation organizations, but he also worked with local filmmakers, Ivan Torres and Andrew Gregory, to develop a documentary that features the people in the community.

He said, We really wanted to do a screening for it in the marsh as well so that the communities can show it and the leaders, the datus, of the Manobo tribe can watch it themselves first before they show it to the public. It should always be approved by the people we were filming and that they resonate with it, that they take ownership of it first.

He has since co-founded the Youth Engaged in Wetlands in 2018, an international youth team that aims to represent the voice of the youth and vote in governmental bodies.

Manobo Elder Mario Francisco taken in the Agusan Marsh. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Another direct effect of the pandemic is an increase in poaching, which brings the already critically-endangered tamaraw even closer to extinction. Photo courtesy of GAB MEJIA

Mejia has also worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help raise funds to secure the jobs of the rangers protecting the last 500 tamaraws.

Read: Saving Mindoros last tamaraws amid tragedy and pandemic

But perhaps his impulse to tell stories is most felt in his work with the World Wide Fund for Natures National Youth Council. Where the UNDP needs him on the field, collaborating directly with veterinarian doctors and tamaraw rangers, the WWFNYC takes him to different educational institutions, including public and private schools and universities, to teach kids about animals and the environment.

As a storyteller, I really want that love for the animals and that love for nature to be with other kids or youth, he said. We are the ones that are going to inherit these places and having that active engagement with the youth community in a youth organization that works for these conservations sites and these conservation areas  its gonna go a long way because were really building this generation that has a culture of care for animals and care for nature.
Millionaire Mitt Romney refused to applaud Joe Bidens plans for taxing the wealthiest Americans and raising the minimum wage.

The Senator from Utah, who is reportedly worth $250m from his career at private equity firm Bain Capital, refused to get to his feet or to clap when the president addressed the subjects during his speech to the joint session of Congress.

Its time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share, Biden said. Just their fair share.

Mr Romney was caught on camera staying firmly seated when lawmakers around him applauded the plan.

And the senator looked equally unimpressed when Mr Biden renewed his call for a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.

The president called on Congress to pass the PRO Act, which is pro-labour, and then added: By the way, while youre thinking of sending things to my desk, lets raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars. No one working 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25, and the White House included, then removed, the raise in the Covid-19 stimulus package passed in March.
CreplaceENNE, Wyo. (AP)  A Wyoming Department of Health employee working with computer code accidentally released COVID-19 test results for one-quarter of the states residents as well as associated names, addresses, birth dates and other information, the department announced Tuesday.

The employee also inadvertently released law enforcement blood alcohol test information for thousands of others going back to 2012.

In all, the employee released information on 164,010 people to private and public storage locations on GitHub.com, an internet-based software development platform. The release included COVID-19 plus flu test results for 145,698 Wyoming residents and blood alcohol test results for another 18,312 people mainly from Wyoming but also other states.

State officials dont know if anybody has misused the information, department spokeswoman Kim Deti said.

Wyoming has about 577,000 residents, according to the 2020 census, meaning the COVID-19 testing release alone affected some 25% of the states population.

We are taking this situation very seriously and extend a sincere apology to anyone affected. We are committed to being open about the situation and to offering our help, department Director Michael Ceballos said in a statement.

The unidentified employee began mishandling the information as long ago as Nov. 5. The information became publicly available on GitHub as long ago as Jan. 8.

The release didnt stem from any problem with GitHub, which has privacy and security policies and procedures for data use, according to the department statement.

Department officials became aware of the problem March 10 and began mailing notices to affected people Monday. The department doesnt have contact information for everybody affected, however, so Wyoming residents who got COVID-19 tests anywhere in the U.S. before March 10 should call (833) 847-5916 to find out if their information was released.

Anyone given a breath alcohol test by Wyoming law enforcement between April 19, 2012, and Jan. 27, 2021, also should call.

The department will give those affected a year of identity theft protection through the IdentityForce advanced credit and dark web monitoring service.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Key and Peele are a dynamic comedy duo. From their early days on MADtv to their recent work in movies, the two are no strangers to making audiences laugh (or cry, in Peeles case, as he has proven himself a horror film master). Their big-screen comedy Keanu delivered more gut-busting laughter.

The adorably fuzzy star  a gray tabby cat  got its name from a truly awesome actor who provided the voice for the kitten. Heres how the filmmakers came up with the name.

Who are Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele?

Actors Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele at the premiere of Keanu at the ArcLight on April 27, 2016, Cinemas Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, California | Amanda Edwards/WireImage

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele began working together on the comedy show MADtv. The popular magazine MAD inspired the series, which aired for 14 seasons.

Both Key and Peele had imagined different career paths when they were younger. Key studied fine arts at Penn State and had always planned to pursue a career in the theater, NPR reports. According to Biography, Peele went to Sarah Lawrence College and wanted to be a puppeteer. He ended up dropping out of college after discovering a love for improv.

#Ad I like some Basil with my basil A little @basilhaydens neat while preparing a nice marinara is how I like to keep it on lock in the kitchen. How do you like to spend your #6ourbon7ime? #TheHappiestHour #BasilwithmyBasil #basilhaydens pic.twitter.com/Wr9FoI1BiK  Keegan-Michael Key (@KeeganMKey) February 26, 2021

The two met at Second City, an improv comedy club in Chicago, The Things reports. One of the writers at Second City introduced them, and by chance, they both ended up on MADtv. About three years after MADtv ended, their manager asked if they might be interested in doing a show together. For Key and Peele, the answer was a no-brainer: definitely yes.

Key & Peele: 5 seasons of brilliant sketches

Congratulations on the Golden Globe nominations for @GetOutMovie @JordanPeele. We have just the guy to help you out when you want to make the sequel. pic.twitter.com/8N7Fb0boLR  Key & Peele (@KeyAndPeele) December 11, 2017

RELATED: 5 Most Hilarious Skits From Comedy Centrals Key & Peele

Key & Peele premiered in 2012 on Comedy Central. The sketch show debuted to 2.1 million viewers. It was the networks biggest premiere since The Jeff Dunham Show three years earlier, Mental Floss reports.

During the shows hilarious five seasons, the brilliant comedy duo accomplished many impressive feats, including working with President Obama and winning a Peabody Award. The show featured several recurring characters that quickly became fan favorites.

Barack Obama and his anger translator, Luther, was one of the shows most memorable sketches. Peele brought the president to life, while Key played Luther. Luthers purpose was to translate the presidents calm, friendly statements into the real, underlying angry tirades Obama was hiding. The sketch was so popular that Key was invited to the Annual White House Correspondents dinner to play his character for the real President Obama.

Other fan-favorite characters include Mr. Wendell, a sci-fi nerd; Mr. Garvey, an angry substitute teacher; and the Valets, two starstruck valet parking attendants who love to talk about movies. But the sketches didnt always pan out exactly the way Key and Peele planned. For example, Mr. Garvey was originally supposed to be a Spanish teacher. Luckily, the changes seemed to work out for the best because the audience loved the shows characters.

How their movie got its name

In 2016, Key and Peele took their act from TV to the big screen with their film Keanu, The Wrap reports. The talented duo created a comedy about two friends pretending to be gangsters to rescue their stolen kitten. Enter the real star of the show: the kitten.

The adorable feline is named for one of Hollywoods sweetest stars: Keanu Reeves. Theres a simple story about how the on-screen pet got its name. They were hanging out one day when Peele had an epiphany. Out of the blue, he said, For some reason, I feel like the cat should be named Keanu, co-screenwriter Alex Rubens told The Wrap.

Interestingly enough, the kitten wasnt even supposed to be in the film. The original version of the script didnt have the stolen-pet plot and instead followed Keys and Peeles characters through various wacky adventures related to their gangster personas.

The filmmakers had originally reached out to actor Keanu Reeves to see if he would be a part of the film. At first, he declined. But after seeing the trailer, he changed his mind. He agreed to give a voice to the kitten with his name and recorded lines to be used during a special sequence in the film.
Ronald McDonald House Charities of New Mexico ("RMHC-NM") and Titan Development ("Titan") a creator and developer of The Highlands project (in partnership with Maestas Development Group-MDG), is celebrating the arrival of the first guest families to its new Ronald McDonald "Highlands House" which occupies the hotel's entire third floor. The floor is dedicated to the nonprofit and customized to fit the needs of families staying with their often seriously ill children undergoing treatment at area hospitals. The new 19,000-square-foot space features 20 guest rooms, a secured dedicated elevator and community areas including living room spaces, library, indoor and outdoor play areas, technology nooks, a large kitchen and laundry room.

"Today we are welcoming to our new Highlands House our very first guest family whose child is currently in treatment at Presbyterian Hospital," said Jessica Wright, chief executive officer of RMHC-NM. "We're delighted that hundreds of other children and teens each year will be able to have the comfort of their families close by  just a short walk through an enclosed Skybridge to the hospital. While it may not be able to make the medicine taste better or erase the discomfort of a much-needed treatment, Highlands House will lessen the financial, emotional and physical burden for the families during a very difficult time in their lives. We are very grateful to Titan for their commitment to making this project a success, and we hope it becomes a model for future partnerships with developers, hotels and medical centers to expand Ronald McDonald Houses around the U.S."

Highlands House is among the first projects to be developed as part of the planned $120 million mixed-use Highlands development, spanning five blocks and 12 acres in a previously blighted area in the heart of Albuquerque. Titan and MDG first envisioned The Highlands project 15 years ago, and after several years navigating approvals and upgrading the site's infrastructure, a formal plan was presented in 2015 to revitalize the community and create an iconic destination on Historic Route 66. Titan employees have long volunteered at RMHC's first New Mexico location, and understood the charity's need for additional space beyond its current house, which unfortunately had been forced to turn away hundreds of families each year.

"From the beginning we were determined that The Highlands would provide a positive social impact for the community, not just an economic benefit," said Kurt Browning, Partner at Titan. "The Ronald McDonald House Charities reached out to us in 2016 looking for a site within our masterplan for a second Ronald McDonald house, but instead, we collectively brainstormed the out-of-the-box idea  adding a floor to the planned hotel for a new Ronald McDonald House. Over the last five years the challenge and complexity of this project has touched nearly everyone at Titan. We want to thank our dedicated employees and share their pride that many more families in need will be helped by Highlands House and will allow the organization to serve an additional 640 families each year."

Matt Lammers, Director of Development at Titan, said, "We knew this was the perfect location for Highlands House and the opening is a tremendous milestone for the entire Highlands project. We brought together many stakeholders, including Marriott for approvals, to realize the dream of Highlands House, from concept through completion. It has been a unique opportunity for Titan and MDG to contribute to the community and we look forward to the many exciting attractions coming to The Highlands that will make this a truly vibrant mixed-use neighborhood."

In addition to working with Dallas-based architecture firm 5G Studio Collaborative to customize the third-floor space at no cost to RMHC-NM, Titan also partnered with French & French Interiors to donate their design services and worked with other suppliers to furnish the space.

About The Highlands

The Highlands development includes the 118-room Marriott Springhill Suites hotel; 92 residential apartments at Highlands North; an additional 228 planned apartments at Highlands East; and the Highlands Central Market, a 15,000 square foot urban food hall and artisanal market that will connect to the main lobby of Presbyterian Hospital via the landmark Skybridge, to service the hospital staff, patients, visitors, hotel guests and the local community. Additional retail and restaurant space will be available adjacent to a community plaza with art installations and landscaping. Once completed, the Highlands is projected to bring over 200 jobs to the area. The project is being developed by Titan Development and MDG.

About Titan Development

Titan Development is a full-service development and real estate investment firm. Formed in 1999, Titan Development has a wealth of real estate development experience in many asset classes including private equity fund investment and management. Titan has offices in Albuquerque, NM and Austin, TX.

Most recently, Titan Development closed their second private equity fund, the Titan Development Real Estate Fund II (TDREF II), focusing on industrial and multifamily development in secondary and tertiary markets. This fund follows their inaugural fund, Titan Development Real Estate Fund I (TDREF I) with investments in a variety of real estate asset classes.

To learn more, please visit www.titan-development.com.

About Ronald McDonald House Charities  New Mexico

Ronald McDonald House Charities of New Mexico (RMHC-NM), a non-profit, 501(c)(3), eases the hardship of children's illness on families through programs that directly improve the health and wellbeing of children. Through its core programs: Ronald McDonald House, Ronald McDonald Family Room, and Katie's Kart, RMHC-NM keeps families with sick children together and close to the medical care their child needs at leading local hospitals. RMHC-NM programs provide access to quality health care and enable family-centered care, ensuring families are fully supported and actively involved in their children's care. Visit www.rmhc-nm.org for more information.

Media Contacts:

Lambert & Co.

Lisa Baker

[email protected]

914-725-5949

-or-

Josh Skalniak

[email protected]

480-352-2050

SOURCE Titan Development
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President Joe Biden was interrupted by protesters at a rally marking his 100th day in office Thursday night in Duluth, Georgia.

Biden, who had just been introduced by first lady Jill Biden, was shouted down by a small group asking him to 'abolish ICE' and get detainees out of private prisons.

The president then responded and hinted that he may take action at the border following criticism of his administration's handling of the crisis.

'I agree with you, Im working on it, man, give me another five days,' Biden said, trying to de-escalate the situation. 'Folks, you all know what theyre talking about. There should be no private prisons period. Private detention centers. They should not exist. And were working to close all of them.'

President Joe Biden was interrupted by protesters at the first rally he held during his presidency, marking his 100th day in office

Protesters interrupted President Joe Biden at Thursday night's rally in Duluth. They held up a banner that said 'Communities Not Cages'

First lady Jill Biden (left) and President Joe Biden (right) held hands as they walked onstage at a rally in the parking lot of the Infinite Energy Center in Duluth, outside Atlanta

President Joe Biden speaks at a drive-in style rally in Duluth, Georgia Thursday night. The White House said around 315 cars were in the audience

Supporters of President Joe Biden held signs that said '100 Days' and 'Kindness Wins'

They held up a neon orange banner - and had it pointed toward the audience, not the president - that said 'communities not cages.'

One protester continued to shout that 'our families are dying.'

'We voted for you too,' a protester said.

'I promise you,' the president pledged.

Biden signed an early executive order phasing out the Department of Justice's use of private prisons - but that order never extended to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Biden has said in the past that he doesn't support the leftwing part of the Democratic Party's call to 'abolish ICE.'

When running for president in the 2020 cycle, Biden was sporadically interrupted on the campaign trail over Obama-era deportations.

Biden chose a Georgia trip to celebrate his 100th day because the state had delivered for him thrice: once in the November presidential election, swinging it blue for the first time since 1992. And then a second and third time on January 5, with the election of Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in two run-off races.

Both Ossoff and Warnock joined Biden onstage at the end of the rally.

At that moment, Biden also briefly lost his mask.

'Looking for my mask, I'm in trouble,' the president said as he searched the podium, delaying his departure.

At the rally, Biden repeated many of the points he made during Wednesday night's address before Congress. During a president's first year in office the address isn't called the State of the Union.

Biden is trying to sell his American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan that will account for $4.1trillion in spending over the next 10 years, which hasn't yet been approved by Congress.

Thursday night's drive-in rally - set up like a drive-in movie theater format to enforce social distancing - may be one of the last of its kind, as more and more Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19.

Biden and the Democrats used drive-in type rallies as a way to pump up the base in the months leading up to the November election, as Trump continued to pack unmasked thousands into his rallies.

The White House said about 315 cars were in the audience.

First lady Jill Biden (left) and President Joe Biden (right) leave their meeting at Jimmy and Rosalynn (center) Carters' house. The former president didn't step outside, but his wife did

President Joe Biden leaves a meeting with the Carters with Rosalynn Carter (left) watching from the front porch of the couple's Plains, Georgia home

The Beast, the president's limo, is seen in the driveway of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carters' residence in Plains, Georgia on Thursday

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are in Georgia Thursday - with their first stop a trip to see Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter (left) and former first lady Rosalynn Carter (right) are fully vaccinated and hosted President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden in Plains, Georgia on Thursday

Earlier in the day, the Bidens met with 96-year-old former President Jimmy Carter and his 93-year-old wife, Rosalynn, during their first stop in the Peach State.

Jill Biden spoke of meeting with the Carters during her introduction.

'And they are such a powerful reminder that serving our country isn't limited to the office you hold,' the first lady said. 'The Carters continue their work making our country stronger every day and we are grateful and honored for their friendship.'

Rosalynn Carter, 93, using a walker and wearing a white shirt, poked her head out and watched the Bidens leave from the front porch of her Plains, Georgia residence. Her husband, the former president, stayed inside.

The couple have been living living in the two-bedroom rancher the president built himself since before he entered the White House. In 2018 it was valued at $167,000 - less than the value of the Secret Service armored cars outside, The Washington Post reported.

On Air Force One, deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained that the visit wasn't because Jimmy Carter was in poor health.

'They had said on that call they would try to connect after inauguration,' she said, explaining that Biden and Carter had spoke by phone on the eve of Biden's swearing-in. 'And since they were going to Georgia they wanted to stop by and say hello.'

She also said the visit was unrelated to the recent death of Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who was also a close friend of Biden's.

'No, this is just, as I said, a longstanding friendship - they said they were going to try and see each other after inauguration,'

The Carters had to miss Biden's January inauguration due to COVID-19 concerns for people of their age.

Jean-Pierre also shared that Biden was the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter when the then former governor decided to run for president, winning the White House in 1976.

'So they have a longstanding relationship that goes back decades,' she said.

Both the Bidens and the Carters have been vaccinated for COVID-19.
, 42, was shot and killed by police in North Carolina at 8.30am on April 21

A North Carolina sheriff announced on Thursday that he has cleared four deputies involved in the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr to return to active duty after a review of body camera video showed they did not fire their guns.

Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten stated in a press release that he has restored to duty Lt Steven Judd; Sgts Michael Swindell; Kenneth Bishop and Joel Lunsford, who were placed on administrative leave after Brown's killing last week.

'After reviewing the preliminary conclusions of the independent investigators conducting the internal review, and after carefully examining the body camera footage of the incident with my own staff,' Wooten stated, 'its obvious that four of the deputies never fired their weapons and deserve to be reinstated to active duty.'

Wooten said the three deputies who did fire their weapons, identified by the sheriff as investigator Daniel Meads; deputy Robert Morgan and Cpl Arron Lewellyn, will remain on leave until an investigation is completed.

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Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten on Thursday identified seven deputies involved in Andrew Brown Jr's shooting and restored four of them to duty because they did not fire their weapons

Several employees resigned in the wake of the shooting, among them Deputy Sheriff William Harris and Lt. Christopher Terry. Deputy James Flowers chose to retire.

'Some people want a rush to judgment and others want to pit people against each other in a way that can only hurt our county,' Wooten stated. 'My job is to ensure transparency and accountability, while also preserving the ability for the independent investigators to do their deliberate, painstaking, and vital work.'

Brown Jr, 42, a father of 10, was shot on the morning of April 21 by deputies serving drug-related search and arrest warrants at his house in Elizabeth City.

Andrew Brown Jr, 42, was shot five times and killed by police officers on April 21

Brown's family have released an independent autopsy showing he was shot five times, including in the back of the head. The state's autopsy has not been released yet.

Brown family attorney Harry Daniels called the decision to reinstate the four deputies 'unprofessional,' noting that the family has not been shown the video that Wooten says shows they did not fire their weapons.

'They're reinstating deputies with no transparency,' Daniels said. 'We think that's inappropriate and should not be done.'

'We have to take their word for it - that's not transparency,' he said.

'Unprofessional - at least show us the video so we can make the determination,' he added.

The release of the names of the seven deputies who were involved in Brown's arrest came after hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Elizabeth City for the eighth night in a row on Wednesday, after a judge refused to release body camera footage to the public for at least 30 days, saying it might impede the ongoing investigation.

More than 200 activists chanted 'Say his name!' and 'Hands up! Don't shoot!' The demonstration ultimately ended with a standoff with police in riot gear, and five people were arrested for breaking the city's 8pm curfew, reported News & Observer.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets for the eight consecutive night in North Carolina on Wednesday after a judge refused to release body cam footage of Brown Jr. being shot dead by police to the media. Pictured: Officers arrest a protester on Wednesday night

The demonstrators had blocked Elizabeth Street at the Camden Bridge, with some protesters standing on cars while fist pumping the air

More than 200 protesters last night chanted 'Say his name! Andrew Brown! Hands up! Don't Shoot!' as they marched through Elizabeth City on Wednesday

Brown's family and protesters have been calling for all of the body cam footage of shooting to be shared with the public.

But on Wednesday Judge Jeffrey Foster denied a media petition to release the footage. However, the judge did order authorities to allow Browns family to privately view five videos from body cameras and one from a dashboard camera within 10 days, with some portions blurred or redacted.

While one attorney for Browns family, Wayne Kendall, initially said it was a 'partial victory' for the family to view more video, the legal team later issued a statement condemning the decision not to make the video public.

The ruling came shortly after a North Carolina prosecutor said that Brown had hit law enforcement officers with his car before they opened fire last week.

District Attorney Andrew Womble, who viewed the body camera videos, told the judge that he disagreed with a characterization by an attorney for Browns family that Brown did not try to drive away until deputies opened fire. Womble said the video shows that Browns car made 'contact' with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.

'As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers,' he said, adding that the car stops again. 'The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.'

Womble said that officers shouted commands and tried to open a car door before any shots were fired.

Womble argued that video of the shooting should be kept from the public while state investigators pursue their probe. He said the video should not be released until a trial in the shooting or, alternatively, if a completed investigation results in no charges.

One of the Brown family lawyers, Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who viewed the 20-second video, said Monday that shots were heard from the instant the clip started with Browns car in his driveway and his hands on the steering wheel. She said he did not try to back away until after deputies ran up to his car and began shooting, and he did not pose a threat to deputies, explaining: 'He finally decides to try to get away and he backs out, not toward officers at all.'

In response to Wombles remarks in court, she defended her description of the footage.

'At no time have I given any misrepresentations. I still stand by what I saw in that clip,' she said, adding that she watched the clip 'over and over,' taking notes.

In the early hours of this morning, Elizabeth City Police Department said a group of 15 protesters 'had refused to disperse' and that 'arrests are being made at this time'

Police in riot gear reportedly began making arrests about three hours after the city's 8pm curfew and five people were arrested

Brown, pictured, a father of 10, was shot in his car on April 21 by sheriffs. Judge Jeffrey Foster denied a media petition to release the footage of his shooting publicly for at least 30 days, saying it might impede the ongoing investigation

District Attorney Andrew Womble told a judge at a hearing Wednesday that he viewed body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by attorneys for the family of Andrew Brown Jr. that his car was stationary when the shooting started. Womble said the video shows that Browns car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard

An attorney for the officers involved in the shooting said they are 'very distraught' and opposed the footage being released, but added: 'We believe the shooting was justified.'

A North Carolina law that took effect in 2016 allows law enforcement agencies to show body camera video privately to a victim's family, but it generally requires a court to approve any public release.

The FBI launched a civil rights probe Tuesday into the death of Brown Jr, and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper called for a special prosecutor.

Police said they were carrying out an arrest warrant for drug offenses and claim Brown was a drug dealer trafficking in heroin, fentanyl and crack cocaine with a rap sheet dating back to 1988. Brown had a 180-page criminal record and had been filmed selling narcotics in the weeks leading up to his death, Fox News reported Monday.

Demonstrators, led by clergy, march Wednesday from Mt. Lebanon AME Zion Church in Elizabeth City, N.C., to the site where Andrew Brown Jr. was shot and killed by Pasquotank County Sheriff deputies

A judge is considering formal requests to make the video public Wednesday

The FBIs Charlotte field office, which opened the civil rights investigation into Browns death, said in a statement that its agents planned to work closely with the Department of Justice 'to determine whether federal laws were violated.'

Following the news, lawyers for the Brown family said they have 'great faith' in the investigation.

Brown's family will be allowed to watch redacted footage from four body cams. The family can watch the footage within ten days but not take copies

They also called separate footage taken by a neighbor of the moment a large group of cops surrounded Brown Jr.'s car 'an inflamed modern-day lynch mob'.

The independent autopsy on Brown was performed Sunday by a pathologist hired by Brown's family. The exam noted four wounds to the right arm and one to the head. The states autopsy has not been released yet.

The family's lawyers also released a copy of the death certificate, which lists the cause of death as a 'penetrating gunshot wound of the head.' The certificate, signed by a paramedic services instructor who serves as a local medical examiner, describes the death as a homicide.

The sheriff's office pushed back against that characterization of Brown's shooting, calling it an 'unproven hyperbole that only inflames the community.'

The autopsy results came a day after Brown's relatives were shown a 20-second clip of footage from one deputy's body camera.

On Tuesday, footage emerged of the moment a large group of cops surrounded Brown Jr.'s car. The clip - taken by a neighbor in the moments after officers opened fire - shows in the seconds after Brown's car had crashed into a tree.

Brown's son Khalil Ferebee questioned why deputies opened fire.

'Yesterday I said he was executed. This autopsy report shows me that was correct,' he said Tuesday at a news conference. 'Its obvious he was trying to get away. Its obvious. And theyre going to shoot him in the back of the head?'

The pathologist, North Carolina-based Dr. Brent Hall, noted the wound to the back of Browns head from an undetermined distance that penetrated his skull and brain. He said there was no exit wound. Two shots to Browns right arm penetrated the skin. Two others shots to the arm grazed him.

Witnesses said Brown got into his car (pictured) and was driving away when the deputy opened fire.

The moment a 'militarized' sheriff's vehicle carrying armed deputies rushed to Brown's home

The results of an independent autopsy released by attorneys for Brown's family Tuesday shows he was shot five times; four times in his right arm and once in the head

Attorney's for the family of Andrew Brown, Harry Daniel, left, and Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, right make comments after a judges decision on the release body cam video

Brown, 42, father of 10 children, was shot and killed in his car at around 8.30am in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, while police were executing search-and-arrest warrants for drug offenses, officials said

The State Bureau of Investigation began a probe of the shooting shortly after it happened. It initially said that it would turn its findings over to the local district attorney, as is standard under state laws and procedures.

But the governor urged the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the state's case.

'This would help assure the community and Mr. Browns family that a decision on pursuing criminal charges is conducted without bias,' Gov Cooper said in a statement.

State Attorney General Josh Stein said state law puts control of criminal prosecutions in the hands of the local district attorney, so his office cannot intervene unless asked. He said he has offered assistance to the local prosecutor, but has only received an acknowledgment.

'For my office to play a role in the prosecution, the District Attorney must request our assistance,' Stein said.

The slow movement has prompted an outcry from protesters, the family's lawyers and racial justice advocates, who noted that law enforcement agencies in other states have moved faster.

In Columbus, Ohio, the day before Brown was shot, body camera footage was released within hours of an officer fatally shooting a 16-year-old Black girl who was swinging a knife at another girl.

Democrats in the North Carolina General Assembly filed a measure this month proposing that body camera video be released within 48 hours unless a law enforcement agency asks a court to delay its distribution.

But the legislation faces long odds with the GOP controlling both chambers of the Legislature.

A key Republican lawmaker, state Sen. Danny Britt, issued a statement saying GOP lawmakers are open to considering improvements to the current law. But with a hearing set for Wednesday, he said, the process has had little time to unfold.
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by Emanuele Scimia

Speaking to Congress, the US President launches his challenge to Xi Jinping, focusing on technological competition and the struggle between democracy and autocracy. The European Union is increasingly aligned with the US. The Philippines is back on a more pro-US line. For Chinese academic, Biden is mistaken; China does not want to undermine the United States as a world superpower.

Rome (AsiaNews)  In his first address before Congress yesterday, US President Joe Biden said that America is "in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.

The main battles for the US President are over technological supremacy, an area in which China is making great strides, as well as who has the best system of government.

Biden wants the US to reinvest 2 per cent of its GDP (now it is 1 per cent) in research and development so as to dominate the technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy. Such a commitment requires major investments in the countrys education system.

According to Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping is deadly earnest in making China the most significant country in the world. For the US leader, Xi, like other autocrats, thinks democracy cannot compete with autocracies this century, since it needs a long time to get a consensus.

Still, the president said he welcomed China's competition, adding however that his administration will fight to ensure that everyone in the global economy plays by the same rules. Washington and its allies, especially in Europe, have long accused Beijing of engaging in unfair trade practices and violating intellectual property rules.

Biden also made it clear that his administration will not give up defending human rights and fundamental freedoms in other parts of the world, a message in line with what was expressed yesterday in the European Parliament, where a group of MEPs threatened to reject the investment agreement signed by China and the European Union on December 30.

Only the European People's Party seems ready to support the agreement with Beijing; the other political groups in the European parliament are calling for the lifting of Chinese sanctions on European politicians and academics, which Beijing imposed after the European Union sanctioned members of the Chinese Communist Party for human rights violations in Xinjiang.

In his address, Biden pointed out that the United States will maintain a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific region. Not to start a conflict, but to prevent one, he noted. Indeed, the US leader wants to revitalise regional alliances, weakened under the Trump administration.

In a recent development, Washington welcomed the Philippines' decision to continue patrolling the South China Sea, which China claims almost as a whole. Specifically, Beijing refuses to withdraw its fishing vessels and other ships from the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone. This has forced Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to take a tough stance against Beijing, even though he considers China an indispensable trading partner.

I think Biden exaggerate the so-called China threat, mainly for domestic political reasons as well as for misunderstanding China's growth and policies, said Wang Yong, the director of the Center for International Political Economy at Peking University, speaking to AsiaNews.

The Chinese scholar explains that the US is still an important country and an inseparable partner for China. in his view, China is not interested in displacing the role of the US in the world. In fact, Chinese leaders simply want to develop the country, improve the material life of its people, and boost Chinas international standing for domestic reasons.

Wang hopes the US and China will work to improve the understanding of each other's intention and capability, especially since their different values and government systems have led to misperception between the two sides.


Brazils Rondonia state is home to rainforests and at least three different native groups. The area has also faced serious problems like deforestation.

So when Brazilian reporter Gustavo Faleiros learned of an illegal attempt to take land away from a huge protected area in the state, he used his reporting skills to bring attention to it.

The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Reserve in Rondonia is spread over 18,000 square kilometers. It holds land used by many of Brazils native or indigenous people.

"When I did the stories about the invasion of indigenous land, I felt it was really contributing to bring attention to that specific place, Faleiros said.

A grant from the Pulitzer Centers Rainforest Journalism Fund (RJF) permitted Faleiros to travel to Rondonia and report. The Pulitzer Center is an organization that gives financial support to journalists around the world. Faleiros work was included in an RJF investigation into threats to the environment and indigenous communities in Latin America.

Faleiros now runs the Pulitzer's Rainforest Investigations Network. Reporters from several countries in the network work together to investigate issues like climate change and corruption.

The Pulitzer Center started RJF in 2018 to aid reporting on the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. The center plans to produce 200 environmental journalism stories through the RJF by 2023.

Nora Moraga-Lewy is the manager of the RJF. She said her group gives journalists the chance to report on stories that would not be written without its help. In addition to financial support, reporters are given training and access to a network of other journalists.

"At the Pulitzer Center we view journalism as a tool for empowering the public to engage in global issues and understand where their community fits in," Moraga-Lewy said.

Maraga-Lewy said the centers work brings attention to the threats facing rainforests and the forces that influence them over short and long periods of time. She added that the reporting seeks to find answers to problems that should have more attention or support.

Strengthening local journalism is also an important part of RJFs work. The center does its best to find local reporters.

"Local journalism can help spread important information, share knowledge and build connections within communities that help bring change, she said.

However, there are real difficulties with environmental reporting, Faleiros said. For example, it can be hard to get community members to talk. Falieros said people directly hurt by illegal forestry and mining are the most at risk from speaking to reporters.

"These are the guys who know a lot about the local context and can point out who is behind the environmental problems, Faleiros said. Although it is very important to speak to local community members, if anyone is identified as a source, they can face serious actions. Talking with locals requires being honest with people and understanding why someone might not want to talk.

Reporting on rainforest destruction often means looking into corruption, organized crime, violence and human rights violations. When there is a risk of danger, Faleiros said the Pulitzer Center helps with security.

He has not been directly threatened himself, but he knows there are dangers. "Many of these rainforest countries are the ones with the biggest levels of violence, both for activists and journalists," he said.

Faleiros believes his reporting has brought good results for local communities. While not every project will lead to policy reforms, Faleiros believes RJFs work tells important stories about communities that are suffering.

Moraga-Lewy said RJF stories have gotten the attention of government officials. She said in all three areas were the group works, officials have taken some kind of action where there had previously been inaction or silence.

Im Mario Ritter, Jr.

Jessica Blatt wrote this story for Voice of America. Dan Novak adapted it for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

________________________________________________

Words in This Story

contribute-v. to give (something, such as money, goods, or time) to help a person, group, cause, or organization

grant-n. an amount of money that is given to someone by a government, a company, etc., to be used for a particular purpose (such as scientific research)

journalist-n. the activity or job of collecting, writing, and editing news stories for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio

access-n. a way of getting near, at, or to something or someone

reserve n. an area of land where people, animals or plants are given special protection

empower -v. to give power to (someone)

engage- v. to get and keep (someone's attention, interest, etc.)

contextn. the situation in which something happens : the group of conditions that exist where and when something happens

source-n. someone or something that provides what is wanted or needed
I

nside Britains largest police service, there is a force within a force working to root out corruption and links to organised crime among officers.

Scotland Yards Anti-Corruption Command is the equivalent of Line of Dutys fictional AC-12, gathering intelligence and running covert operations to investigate suspects within the Met.

Theres only one thing theyre interested in, and that's catching real-life bent coppers.

But Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Holdcroft, who leads the unit, admits that their day-to-day work isn't as dramatic as you see on the TV.

In reality we spend a lot more of our time sat in front of computers than taking part in car chases and gun fights, he tells The Independent.

Our officers will spend months working on an investigation, which includes gathering intelligence and building up a case against officers accused of wrongdoing.

One of our top priorities is detecting and preventing corruption. We have the capability to covertly and proactively investigate any area of the Met's workforce and external threats from criminals who try to corrupt officers and staff.

Det Ch Supt Holdcroft, who is the Metropolitan Polices Ted Hastings, has watched the first four series of Line of Duty and says some storylines arent too far away from the truth  although thankfully fewer people are kidnapped and murdered.

 Viewers spot another H clue in episode 4 of Line of Duty

Both AC-12 and the Mets anti-corruption unit is committed to rooting out corruption and exposing wrongdoing, he adds.

We also do use a lot of acronyms which wont make much sense to anybody outside of policing.

In his first interview, Det Ch Supt Holdcroft says his unit has more support from senior Met officers than is seen among the largely hostile Central Police in Line of Duty.

Most of his officers are specialists in different fields of policing and do not switch between different roles, like Kate Fleming and other characters in the show.

If an officer is put undercover in the Metropolitan Police, they are taken from a force elsewhere in the country so they are not recognised.

That said, our officers do have a wealth of policing experience which gives us the opportunity to deploy them across the organisation if needed, Det Ch Supt Holdcroft says. One similarity is that a lot of our work has to be covert and we can't always be open about our ongoing investigations.

In another striking similarity to Line of Duty, the Directorate of Professional Standards - of which Anti-Corruption Command is part - fell under suspicion itself in 2017.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigated allegations that officers in the the Serious Misconduct Unit had abused their position to affect ongoing investigations.

Det Chf Supt Peter Holdcroft is the head of the Mets Directorate of Professional Standards (Metropolitan Police)

In October, the watchdog said it found no case to answer for 15 officers and a staff member, but that some internal processes would be changed.

Many police officers watch Line of Duty, although the vast majority ridicule it as sensationalised and unrealistic.

Some officers, particularly women, point to Prime Suspect as one of the more accurate portrayals of policing  for the rampant sexism in stations three decades ago, if nothing else.

The Anti-Corruption Command treats sexual misconduct, both inside and outside work, as a corruption priority, as well as drugs, theft and undisclosed links between officers and criminals.

Those links can see sensitive information and data leaked to organised crime groups (OCGs), who may bribe or blackmail officers to obtain useful intelligence or warnings of operations against their interests.

The Anti-Corruption Command is one arm of the Metropolitan Polices wider Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), which has more than 300 officers and staff.

It also deals with public complaints, misconduct by officers and injuries and deaths following police contact, working with the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

Det Ch Supt Holdcroft describes the DPS as a police service within a police service, adding: We have all the same capabilities as the rest of the Met but are able to work independently to carry out our own investigations.

Five separate investigations into the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan have ended without a successful prosecution and Scotland Yard has admitted the first probe was hampered by police corruption (PA)

Where there is evidence of wrongdoing we will put officers before a misconduct panel and in the most serious cases seek to bring criminal charges against those accused of corrupt behaviour.

The DPS carries out between 800 and 900 investigations every year, although many end with no further action against suspects after disproving suspected wrongdoing.

Recent cases include that of a Violent Crime Task Force officer who was jailed for more than two years for attacking a man in what a judge called a clear case of racial profiling.

PC Charlie Harrison, 39, was jailed for more than two years on 12 April following a DPS investigation.

He attacked a black man with his two teenage sons, breaking his leg. The family had been walking home from a cemetery, where the children had laid flowers on their mothers grave.

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Gregory Perrins said: They had done absolutely nothing wrong, nor had they behaved in any way that could be deemed suspicious.

In another case, an officer was jailed for fraud after watching porn on a grieving familys television, as a 14-year-old boy lay dead inside the home.

Avi Maharajs actions led his father to believe his son had been accessing pornography before his death.

Getting away with murder: Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes Show all 3 1 /3 Getting away with murder: Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes Getting away with murder: Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes 240917.bin PA Getting away with murder: Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes 240918.bin PA Getting away with murder: Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes 240919.bin PA

Many larger cases are ongoing and some unsolved crimes have haunted the DPS for decades. One is the murder of private detective Daniel Morgan, who was brutally killed in a London pub car park in 1987.

Five separate investigations have ended without a successful prosecution and Scotland Yard has admitted the first probe was hampered by police corruption.

The most famous corruption investigation in Metropolitan Police history, Operation Countryman, also ended with no convictions after running from 1978 to 1982 at a cost of 3m.

Earlier in the 1970s, a probe into the Criminal Investigation Department discovered some officers were receiving bribes from criminals in return for advance warnings about police raids or arrests, fabricating evidence against innocent men and arranging for charges to be dropped against guilty criminals.

The operation resulted in around 500 officers being dismissed or resigning.

Since then we have remained focused on tackling corruption and, as with the rest of policing, our work has improved and progressed through the advent of new technology, says Det Ch Supt Holdcroft.

Unfortunately there has always been corrupt police officers, however these only make up a small minority of the Met and the majority of our 44,000 officers are committed to keeping Londoners safe.

Update: This article was amended on 21 April 2021. The original article said that the Anti-Corruption Command was investigated in 2017, whereas in fact the wider Directorate of Professional Standards was the focus of that operation, and particularly the Serious Misconduct Unit.
: dragonfly (-), : Fashion

 : ForeignAffairs ()

: BBS  (Wed Apr 28 18:23:45 2021, )



  Military  

: SandersTrump (TrumpSanders), : Military

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: BBS  (Wed Apr 28 17:37:48 2021, )







https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2021-04-28/washington-avoiding-

tough-questions-taiwan-and-china



The Case for Reconsidering U.S. Commitments in East Asia



On China, U.S. policymakers have reached a near consensus: the country is a

greater threat than it seemed a decade ago, and so it must now be met with

increasingly competitive policies. What little debate does exist focuses on

questions about how to enhance U.S. credibility, what role U.S. allies

should play in balancing against China, and whether it is possible to blunt

Beijings economic coercion. But the most consequential question has been

largely overlooked: Should the United States trim its East Asian commitments

to reduce the odds of going to war with China?



The question of which commitments to keep and which to cut should come up

whenever there are big shifts in the global balance of power. A rising power

may be able to achieve previously unobtainable goals and embrace new goals,

while the declining power may find that its existing commitments are

becoming costlier and riskier to maintain.



Such is the case with China and the United States today. Beijing has

acquired military capabilities that were far beyond its reach a couple of

decades ago. It has built up its anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD)

capabilities, which are designed to prevent U.S. forces from operating close

to Chinese territory. It now has a reasonable prospect of prevailing in a

war over Taiwan and is acquiring the ability to sustain naval forces across

the South China Sea. At the same time, its leaders are becoming more

provocative and have made it exceedingly clear that unification with Taiwan

is a pressing goal. Chinas improved military capabilities reduce the

United States ability to deter, and its increasingly intense maritime

disputes raise the risk of accidents. As a result, a terrifying prospect is

growing more likely: a major war between the worlds two foremost powers.



Stay informed.

In-depth analysis delivered weekly.

The emerging debate over U.S. China policy, however, recognizes only half of

the logic of decline. Officials and analysts understand that as its

capabilities increase, China will increasingly challenge U.S. commitments,

and the probability of war will rise. But they are forgetting the second

part of the equation: that for the declining power, the best option may be

to cut back on its commitments. In East Asia, that would mean giving Beijing

greater leeway in the South China Sea, letting go of Taiwan, and accepting

that the United States is no longer the dominant power it once was in the

region. These are hard choices, but maintaining the status quo is also a

choiceand an increasingly dangerous one.



COMMITMENT ISSUES

To evaluate the United States commitments in East Asia, one must first

rank the countrys interests there and estimate Chinas capability to

threaten them. All else being equal, Washington should be much more

reluctant to reduce commitments that protect vital interests than ones that

protect secondary interests. Fortunately, the one truly vital interestthe

safety of the U.S. homelandis not at risk. The United States and China are

separated by a vast ocean, which makes conventional invasion virtually

impossible. And even though China is modernizing its nuclear force, the U.S.

arsenal is far bigger and more advanced. Washington will be able to

maintain its deterrent capabilities with ease.



Next in this hierarchy of U.S. interests is the protection of East Asian

allieschief among them Japan and South Korea. For decades, the United

States has cherished its security alliances with these large, rich, and

strategically located countries. U.S. leaders still consider these

relationships essential for preventing China from dominating its region,

stopping South Korea and Japan from obtaining nuclear weapons, and

preserving U.S. global leadership. Even scholars who advocate a more limited

grand strategy of offshore balancing and wish to withdraw U.S. forces

from Europe and the Persian Gulf maintain that U.S. alliances in Asia are

necessary.



The prospects for defending these interests remain good. Chinas ability to

threaten U.S. allies is growing, but Japan, with U.S. help, should be able

to fend off a Chinese attack. Invasion across several hundred miles of water

has never been easy, and it is even harder today thanks to advanced

surveillance technologies and accurate conventional weapons. Although China

would have an easier time enacting a blockade designed to strangle and

coerce Japan, that, too, would likely fail. Japan lies beyond the effective

reach of Chinas A2/AD capabilities and could thus be supplied from its

eastern ports. South Korea, closer to China, is more vulnerable, but it, too

, would likely prevail with U.S. help.



A terrifying prospect is growing more likely: a major war between the world

s two foremost powers.

Further down the hierarchy of U.S. interests is Taiwan. Since formally

recognizing China in 1979, the United States has maintained unofficial

relations with the Taiwanese government. Washington has signaled a somewhat

ambiguous commitment to defend the island if China launches an unprovoked

attack and has sold it tens of billions of dollars worth of arms. Compared

with the U.S. commitment to Japan and South Korea, the obligation to Taiwan

is much riskier. Beijing has both the motive and, increasingly, the means

to forcibly bring Taiwan under its control. Chinese leaders consider the

island part of China, and with only 110 miles separating Taiwan from the

mainland, it is more vulnerable to Chinese conventional forces.



Taiwan is not a vital U.S. interestits size and wealth put it at a rank

below the major powersbut it is a vibrant democracy of 23 million people.

Unlike Japan and South Korea, Taiwan is rarely framed in terms of U.S.

security. Instead, the key rationales that U.S. officials offer for

protecting the island are ideological and humanitarian: democracies in

general should be defended, and Taiwan in particular is worthy of protection

, since it is a precious success story that would no doubt be snuffed out

were it to fall under Chinas authoritarian control. Beginning in the 1980s

, Beijing spoke of one country, two systems, the idea that Taiwan would

be integrated with the mainland but governed under its own system. That

notion was always a bit tenuous. Chinas recent repression of Hong Kong has

made it appear entirely unrealistic.



Although the ideological and humanitarian rationales for protecting Taiwan

are sound, many analysts go further, arguing that basic U.S. security

interests are at stake, too. If Washington were to terminate its commitment

to Taiwan, they say, U.S. credibility across the region would suffer. China

would question whether the United States would actually come to the defense

of Japan or South Korea. Harboring the same doubts, U.S. allies might be

tempted to bandwagon with Beijing. Some analysts make a second claim,

contending that by controlling Taiwan, China could extend its military reach

by basing both its attack submarines and its nuclear-armed submarines there

. The ability of U.S. conventional forces to reach China would be reduced;

Chinas ability to respond to a nuclear attack, increased.



But there is good reason to doubt this doomsday scenario. Even if it ended

its commitment to Taiwan, the United States could preserve its credibility

with Japan and South Korea. These allies would no doubt understand that

Taiwan was less important to the United States than they are and that the

risks of protecting it were much higher. Letting go of Taiwan should suggest

little, if anything, about the strength of Washingtons commitment to

Tokyo and Seoul. Whats more, the United States could take action to

reinforce these commitmentsfor example, stationing more troops in the Indo

-Pacific and further integrating military planning and operations with

allies.



For a declining power, the best option may be to cut back on its commitments.

As for the effect that Chinas control of Taiwan would have on its ability

to fight the United States, there is likewise little cause for concern. Even

if Chinese nuclear-armed submarines enjoyed newfound access to the Pacific

Ocean, whose vast expanse might increase their survivability, the United

States retaliatory capability would not be diminished. Its nuclear

deterrent would remain highly effective. The conventional military threat is

harder to assess, but again, there is evidence to suggest that the threat

posed by Chinese submarines might be bigger, but not by much. Chinas land-

and sea-based forces already pose a threat to U.S. forces within range of

China. Moreover, the U.S. Navy could likely deploy its antisubmarine warfare

assetsattack submarines, maritime patrol aircraft, and ocean surveillance

shipsto greatly reduce the ability of Chinese submarines to leave Taiwan.

All that said, even if Chinese conventional capabilities did grow as a

result of control over Taiwan, it wouldnt matter as much; because the

United States would no longer be committed to protecting Taiwan, the odds of

a major war with China would drop precipitously.



Below Taiwan in the hierarchy of U.S. interests in East Asia lies the South

China Sea. In these waters, many analysts argue, Washington has an interest

in preventing China from interrupting the flow of trade. The United States

has long sworn to preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,

made ambiguous commitments to protect the Philippines maritime claims, and

criticized China for building military bases in the Spratly Islands.



Again, the danger of ending this commitment is probably overstated. In

peacetime, of course, all countries have an interest in keeping these sea-

lanes open. But even in the midst of a war in which China managed to close

off the South China Sea, shipping that usually entered that sea after

passing through the Strait of Malacca could instead bypass the South China

Sea, reaching Japan and South Korea via the archipelagic waters of Indonesia

and the Philippines. China, by contrast, would be in a much tighter spot.

Goods coming to and from its major ports have little choice but to pass

through the South China Sea. And even if China somehow managed to solve this

problem, much of Chinese trade would still need to travel across the Indian

Ocean, which would remain dominated by the U.S. Navy.



THE CASE FOR CONCESSIONS

Not all interests are created equal, nor are the threats to them equivalent.

So why should the United States treat its varied interests in East Asia the

same way? The alliances with Japan and South Korea are both important and

relatively low risk, so Washington should continue protecting them. But when

it comes to the commitments to Taiwan and to the South China Sea, the logic

of current policy is much less defensible. There is a strong case for

cutting back on these commitments.



Concessions on these interests could take a variety of forms. The most

attractive type would be a grand bargain, in which the United States agreed

to end its commitment to Taiwan in exchange for China agreeing to resolve

its South China Sea disputes with the other claimants. Yet the time for such

a geopolitical compromise has passed. China has hardened its positions on

the South China Sea and on the U.S. role in East Asia.



Without acknowledging it, U.S. officials are accepting a great deal of risk.

That leaves a less attractive option: the unilateral shedding of U.S.

commitments. One form that choice could take is appeasementconcessions

that were granted with no expectation of reciprocity and designed to satisfy

Chinas interest in expansion. Appeasement, however, would now be a bad

bet, given that a total U.S. withdrawal from East Asia might be required to

satisfy Beijing. A better bet would be retrenchment. The United States could

end its commitment to Taiwan and scale back its opposition to Chinas

assertive policies simply to avoid conflict. Washington would be seeking a

clear benefit: lowered odds of a crisis or going to war over secondary or

tertiary interests. Retrenchments success would not depend on whether

Chinas goals are limited or on whether China agreed with the United States

on the purpose of the concessions.



What would this policy look like in practice? The United States would make

its revised position public, thereby laying the foundation to minimize

pressure from foreign policy elites and the public to intervene if China

attacked Taiwan. It would continue to make clear that Chinas use of force

to conquer Taiwan would violate international norms, and it could even

continue to sell arms to Taiwan to make conquest more difficult.

Retrenchment need not necessarily entail defense cuts. In fact, Washington

could boost spending to preserve and even enhance its capability to defend

Japan and South Korea. These investments would send a clear signal to China

and to U.S. allies: the United States is determined to protect the

commitments it hasnt cut.



HARD CHOICES

Under the current strategy of preserving all U.S. commitments in East Asia,

the risk of a major war with China is small (although growing). But unlikely

events with massive consequences deserve to be taken seriously. The costs

of a U.S.-Chinese war would be enormous, even catastrophic were it to go

nuclear. And yet policymakers have shown little interest in scaling back the

commitments that make such a war imaginable.



Retrenchment may not be getting the hearing it deserves because it clashes

with the United States self-perception as the global superpower. For those

who see the United States as the winner of the Cold War, the creator and

leader of the liberal international order, and the protector of much of what

is worth protecting, retrenchment is simply too jarring. This is a

dangerous reflex. This attachment to a certain identity could act as a

barrier to revising policy, leading the United States to insist on

preserving the status quo when its material interests point in the opposite

direction. Although Chinas rise should not cause the United States to

change its values, including respect for democracies, it should prompt it to

update its self-image and accept some loss of status.



Most observers appear to believe that the United States is pursuing a

cautious policy: after all, it is simply maintaining its existing

commitments. Yet a declining power determined to preserve the status quo can

in fact be engaging in very risky behavior. This is what the United States

is doing today. Without acknowledging it, U.S. officials are accepting a

great deal of risk, clinging to old commitments as the balance of power in

East Asia shifts. The burden for sustaining the current policy should lie

with its proponents, who should acknowledge the risks and spell out why they

are warranted. Without having this debate, the United States will continue,

almost on autopilot, to preserve its commitments in the region, even though

what is likely called for is a long-overdue change in course.

--

 :WWW  mitbbs.com [FROM: 173.]


The parents of the remaining 29 students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization, Afaka, Kaduna, promised to storm the National Ass...





The parents of the remaining 29 students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization, Afaka, Kaduna, promised to storm the National Assembly in an unprecedented protest if the Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria (FRIN), which supervises the college, fails to secure the release of their children from their abductors by midnight of Thursday, April 29, 2021.

Ten of the 39 students abducted on Tuesday, March 11, 2021 have already been released by the abductors in two batches of 5 each.

Chairman and Secretary of the committee of the affected parents, Usman Abdullahi and Catherine Y. Saleh, in a statement, explained that depressed by the continued captivity of the children suffering severe maltreatment in the hands of their abductors, and, consequently, enraged by the devastating indifference of the government, through the FRIN, to their plight, the parents rose from their meeting on Monday, April 26, giving the FRIN 72 hours, which expires, midnight of Thursday, April 29 within which to secure the release of the abductees.

They observed that Monday, April 26 meeting reviewed events from the first day of abduction of the students, saying that on 11th March, 2021, 50 days ago, to date, beyond the release of 10 of the students, that there is no sign whatsoever that anything is being done at any level to secure the release of the remaining 29 students.

It explained that the parents see no hope in sight for the release of their children, stressing that what stares at them now is depressing abandonment and neglect of the poor children.

It said as of the afternoon of Thursday, April 29, there was no inkling of hope from any government quarters, suggesting any time for the release of the 29 remaining abductees.

The statement explained, At the National Assembly, the aggrieved parents would seek the intervention of the Federal Parliamentarians to query the Minister of Environment whose ministry oversees the affairs of FRIN, which in turn oversees the affairs of the College where their children were abducted, over the continued captivity of the children.

It stated that since the 10 students were released in two batches of 5 each, the parents have been condemned to excruciating trauma over the continued captivity of their children, especially as they have been left to fight alone for the release of the children without any iota of concern shown by the FRIN towards securing their release.

The parents also expressed their outrage over the way the 10 released students are left to cater for themselves without any care whatsoever, especially in terms of medical chec-kup from any arm of government, as against the claim for such care by the government.

The parents of the 10 released students, who have vowed not to back out of the struggle for the release of the remaining 29, have had to go in and out of hospital to take further care of their childrens health at their own personal cost.

This development is unacceptable as it shows abdication of responsibility by those in whose custody the students were before their abduction.

Knowing the struggle, the parents of the 10 students so far released are going through to keep their children in good health and sound mind, the parents of the students still in captivity, while awaiting the release of their own children, demand compensation from FRIN for the students already released and a similar demand will be made for those that will be released later for their proposed rehabilitation.

The parents said that there has been a change in the leadership of the Committee running their affair with effect from today 28th April, 2021, with Chairman  Usman Abdullahi Catherine Y. Saleh as Secretary.
Darryl Morris Will Join VirExit Technologies as an Advisory Board Member

RICHLAND, WA / ACCESSWIRE / April 29, 2021 / VirExit Technologies, Inc. (OTC PINK:VXIT) has added Darryl Morris as an Advisory Board Member. Mr. Morris has over three decades of marketing and finance experience working with business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies.

"After working on multiple Fortune 500 projects focused on consumer and business-to-business purchases for over three decades, it is my pleasure to bring experience and my relationships to the VirExit team," said Quantum International Trading Hedge Fund CEO, Darryl Morris. "My work has included helping to build multiple campaigns and brands, from 'Just Do It' to "Got Milk'. I know the importance of reaching your target market effectively. That is exactly what I will help do at VirExit."

As a diversified company that is launching its Safer Place Marketplace soon for both business and consumer safety and hygiene products, VirExit Technologies will be offering health, hygiene, safety, and sanitization products. VirExit's products will help mitigate the spread of germs wherever they are used.

"Hygiene and safety are critical during this difficult time," said James C. Katzaroff, President and CEO, VirExit Technologies, Inc., formerly known as Poverty Dignified, Inc. (OTC PINK: PVDG). "Our team understands the real impact of harmful toxins and viruses when they are not removed from our environments. Whether it is during a pandemic or simply preventing the spread of colds and the flu, it is essential that we consistently protect ourselves, our surfaces, and our environments."

NOTICE REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements that include the words believes, expects, anticipate or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In addition, description of anyone's past success is no guarantee of future success. This news release speaks as of the date first set forth above and the company assumes no responsibility to update the information included herein for events occurring after the date hereof.

About VirExit Technologies, Inc formerly Poverty Dignified, Inc.

VirExit Technologies, Inc. (OTC PINK: VXIT) formerly known as Poverty Dignified, Inc. (PVDG) is a diversified company with ownership of Sun Ovens, Inc., a company that decades ago, pioneered solar oven technology and produces, markets, and sells solar ovens and accessories. In 2020, the company acquired the registered brand, VirExit Technologies, Inc., along with other related intellectual property owned and developed by Patrick Netter. The VirExit brand pioneers innovative, effective, ethical, and safe products within the antiviral space. The company also purchased Safer Place Technologies, LLC in 2020, whose purpose is to create a primary sales and marketing platform as a vertical online marketplace. This new acquisition seeks to provide a single source for buyers and sellers of protective products and services which resonate with the VirExit mission statement: Making the world a safer place with innovative, ethical and effective technologies. For investor relations information please contact investorrelations@virexit.com.

CONTACT:

Brooke Greenwald

Cornerstone Communications, LTD

brooke@cornerstonepr.net

(240) 360-0866

SOURCE: Poverty Dignified, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/643231/VirExit-Technologies-Inc-OTC-PINKVXIT-Adds-Darryl-Morris-As-Strategic-Advisor
Tata Motors has appointed Martin Uhlarik as the new Global Design Head of the Indian car manufacturer today. The announcement came soon after its outgoing global design chief Pratap Bose decided to step down.

Uhlarik has been previously working as the Head of Design for Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC). He comes with an experience of 27 years working for different carmakers over the time. He had joined Tata Motors back in 2016 as the Head of Design in United Kingdom. He is also credited with the development of the Impact 3 generation of vehicles.
IPG Mediabrands Australia has appointed Maria Grivas as Reprise Australia CEO. She will be replacing Matt Sallis, the former Reprise Australia CEO, who had joined the company in January.

Before getting appointed as CEO, Maria was working as the chief data and technology officer at UM Australia for the past three and a half years.

According to the media reports, in her new role, she will be leading the full-service performance agency which has more than 150 staff across its offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Grivas has been associated with comapnies like Yahoo as Sales Strategy Manager, UM Australia as National Director & has also worked with IPG Media Brands as Digital Head for 2 years.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-04-29 06:00:11|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations is helping India in its uphill battle against COVID-19, said a UN spokesman on Wednesday.

The UN team in India, led by Resident Coordinator Renata Lok-Dessallien, is supporting the authorities' response to the pandemic by providing equipment and supplies, including to local governments, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) are procuring equipment and supplies, including 7,000 oxygen concentrators and 500 nasal devices for oxygen supply, as well as oxygen-generating plants, COVID-19 testing machines, and personal protective kits, he said.

The WHO is also helping to set up mobile hospital units and is providing for laboratories. Some 2,600 WHO field officers have been immediately deployed to support health authorities. In the western state of Maharashtra, the second-most populous in India, UNICEF has engaged experts to work on risk governance, he told a daily press briefing in New York.

The UN team in India is also continuing its campaign to highlight the three Ws: Wear a mask, Wash your Hands, Watch your distance and stay six feet apart, he added.

India alone accounted for 38 percent of all new COVID-19 cases recorded worldwide in the seven-day period that ended on April 25. India also reported a 93 percent week-on-week increase in the number of coronavirus-related deaths last week. In the past seven days, 15,161 people lost their lives to the virus, the WHO said Wednesday. Enditem
Ex-officer Amber Guyger wants murder conviction in death of worship leader Botham Jean overturned

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Former Dallas County police officer Amber Guyger, who fatally shot beloved worship leader Botham Jean in his apartment in 2018, is seeking to have her murder conviction for his death overturned in favor of a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide because she believed she was in her own apartment.

A jury found Guyger guilty of murdering Jean and sentenced her to 10 years in prison in 2019. If she is successful in her appeal, and if found guilty of only criminally negligent homicide, she will likely be released as the punishment for that crime is six months to two years in prison.

Guyger submitted her request to the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Dallas, Texas, Tuesday presided over by Chief Justice Robert D. Burns III, Justice Lana Myers and Justice Robbie Partida-Kipness.

Defense attorney Michael Mowla, who represented Guyger, argued that the trial court did not allow his client to use the Mistake of Fact defense.

Under Texas Penal Code 8.02 (a): It is a defense to prosecution that the actor through mistake formed a reasonable belief about a matter of fact if his mistaken belief negated the kind of culpability required for commission of the offense.

In a legal sufficiency case, as the court knows, the issue is whether a defendant is guilty under a hypothetically correct jury charge. And under a hypothetically correct jury charge, I believe my client was entitled to a mistake of fact instruction, Mowla argued.

Mowla cited Granger v. State, a 1999 criminal appeals court case which he said addresses his argument thoroughly. In that case, the defendant shot into a car he thought was empty but ended up killing a veteran who was sleeping inside and he was convicted of murder. An appeals court later found that he could not have "intentionally or knowingly" caused the death of the victim or "intend[ed] to cause serious bodily injury" to the victim if he did not know that the victim was in the car.

Now what Mr. Granger did was facially illegal. You cannot, under any circumstances, fire into a vehicle whether you believe someone is in there or not. However, although he couldnt justify shooting into the vehicle, he could not be guilty of murdering its occupant if he reasonably believed the car was empty, Mowla said, arguing that the same standard should apply to Guyger based on the evidence in the case.

If Ms. Guyger had walked into, knowingly or intentionally, shot and killed a person, in this case, it was Mr. Botham Jean, a horrific result, no doubt. If she had intentionally or knowingly killed someone by intentionally or knowingly walking into her apartment, she would be guilty of murder. But if there was a mistaken fact, a reasonable belief in a mistaken fact which I assert she had, as I think the evidence showed, she thought she was walking into her own apartment.

During Mowlas arguments, Justice Burns pointed out that Guyger had testified that she did intentionally shoot Jean and suggested that he was overlooking that admission.

"Mr. Mowla, you're overlooking the fact that Miss Guyger testified that she intentionally shot Mr. Jean," Burns said.

Mowla explained that even though Guyger admitted she intentionally shot Jean, her response to him was based on a reasonable mistaken belief that he was an intruder in her apartment.

"I'm not overlooking the fact, your honor. I agree," he said. "She did intentionally shoot Mr. Jean because that was her intent. That was the truth. Those were the facts of the case. If she had walked into her apartment, and there was an intruder inside her apartment ... she would have been entitled to use deadly force in self-defense."

Burns also noted that the jury rejected Guygers claim of self-defense in convicting her of murder. But Mowla said if the mistake of fact defense is applied, a reasonable apprehension of danger on Guygers part could be argued.

The evidence presented during the trial showed that many other people inadvertently walked to the wrong floor of the South Side Flats apartments.  They drove to the wrong level of the South Side Flats apartments. They walked to the wrong door. One witness was an attorney here in Dallas that works for a civil firm. He testified that one time he walked into the wrong apartment and didnt realize he was in the wrong apartment until he saw a lady sitting on the couch looking at him with amazement. So again, the issue is if the court believes her mistake in fact in going to apartment 1478, which is one floor above hers, the same side, the same part of the building was reasonable, then the mistake of fact instruction applies, he said.

Justice Lana Myers raised concern that Mowla was conflating self-defense with mistake of fact in his arguments.

Mr. Mowla, arent you erroneously mixing mistake of fact defense and self-defense justification? Those are under two different titles in our Texas Penal Code. Mistake of fact is a defense and self-defense is a justification. So doesnt the fact that she testified that she believed she was in her own apartment just go to whether or not she had a reasonable belief that she was in such immediate danger that she had to use deadly force? Myers asked.

Your honor, Im not mixing the two because I think the only way what happened would make sense if you apply Section 8.02A to what happened, Mowla replied.

Justice Robbie Partida-Kipness noted that Guygers mistaken belief about where she was doesnt negate her intent to kill.

Mowla argued that the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting show Guyger did not have evil intent and should not be held mentally culpable for murder.

There are many, many cases in the court of criminal appeals that say mental culpability has to be inferred from the circumstances under which an act based on a defendants words acts and conduct. I dont think you can reasonably state that when you consider all the facts of the case, when you consider what happened, that she had an evil intent when she walked into what she thought was her own apartment, he said.

He further noted: As I explained in my brief in detail, I believe that Ms. Guyger at most is guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Because the evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt, if the court were inclined to go this route, that she shot Mr. Jean causing his death. Thats undisputed. That she should have been aware of the substantial risk of death from her conduct because she did not pay close enough attention to the cues that she was in the wrong apartment.

Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Douglas Gladden argued that mistaken belief and mistake of fact is not a justifiable defense.

"This is a murder case, not a criminal trespass case. When Amber Guyger shot Botham Jean, she didn't take someone else's property. She took the life of a human being," Gladden said.

He said the court has to decide what defensive issues were raised by the evidence in the first place and argued that the evidence in the case supports the murder conviction.

This court has to decide whether mistake of fact was raised by the evidence in this case. This court has the responsibility to apply the correct law and do so correctly. This is the states cross issue and were not asking for an advisery opinion on this. Whether mistake of fact was raised by the evidence in the case is a legal question, and the state would benefit from it here because the question on the appeal is whether the legal sufficiency analysis should look at the mistake of fact defense at all, Gladden said.

Responding to Guygers appeal, Jean's mother, Allison Jean, told CNN she was confident the appeals court would uphold the murder conviction.

"Amber Guyger needs to sit where she is in prison and accept responsibility for what she did to my son, my family, my country, my world," Allison Jean said.

She added that had roles been reversed, her son would be facing a much longer prison term.

"He was destined to lead this world. For his life to be taken away from us in such a careless manner, she needs to be given more time for what she did," Allison Jean continued. Our life has just been turned upside down as a result of Amber Guyger's action, and she needs to leave us alone right now. She's done enough harm."

Guyger had reportedly just ended a 15-hour shift when she parked on the wrong level of the South Side Flats garage where she lived on the third floor directly below Botham Jeans apartment. She got off on the fourth floor where Botham lived and went to his door, thinking it was hers.

The four floors of the South Side Flats look the same with concrete floors and tan doors but a light at each door displays the apartment number. Guyger reportedly didn't notice that Botham's door had a red doormat in front of it. Hers didn't have one.

She went on to put her key in the door but it was unlocked, and the door opened. The lights were off and she saw a figure in the darkness and thought her apartment was being robbed. She pulled her gun and fired twice, hitting Botham Jean once in the chest. She only realized she was in the wrong apartment after she turned on the lights.

The appeals court is expected to make a decision in the case at a later date.
New Jersey officials have accused a group of prisoners of forming a hit squad to attack both officers and others locked up around the state.

One prisoner was beaten so badly last year he suffered a traumatic brain injury, and members of the gang discussed attacking investigators at their homes, authorities said. Another prisoner targeted by the gang was moved to protective custody before he could be hurt.

Nine people have been charged so far, according to a press release.

Gang violence is always a danger in our state prisons, but we charge that these defendants and their so-called hit squad posed a special threat to the safety and security of inmates and correctional police officers, state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said Thursday in a statement.

The head of the states largest corrections union said New Jersey must continue to be vigilant and take preventive measures against gang violence.

Thankfully this one as well as many others ... have been uncovered, William Sullivan, president of PBA Local 105, wrote in an email.

The only person charged who is not in prison was the groups leader, Frank Blake, 33, of Hillside, officials said.

He was in charge of the Elizabeth chapter of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation street gang, according to the release.

Officials said Blake directed gang members through phone calls and letters, particularly at Northern State Prison in Newark and New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.

When he was arrested April 22, investigators found multiple guns, an illegally large magazine and what may have been methamphetamine pills in his home, authorities said.

Blake faces a long list of assault, weapons and drug charges, among others, according to court records.

He intends to plead not guilty and denies leading any gang, according to his lawyer, Thomas Ashley. A hearing to determine if Blake should stay in jail is scheduled for next week, Ashley said.

The attorney said he had not yet reviewed any evidence so could not comment on specific allegations.

The other eight people were charged Wednesday, officials said, and the accusations ranged from assault to possessing makeshift blades behind bars.

Two men  Roberto Garcia, 25, of Carteret, and Eduardo Lago, 27, of Newark  attacked another Trenton prisoner Sept. 28 and sent him to the hospital, according to authorities and court records. The pair worked at the direction of Blake and two other prisoners, William Figueroa, 27, of Hightstown, and Andy Reyes, 25, of Somerset.

Another man, Alexander Chludzinski, 27, of Phillipsburg, discussed hurting officers at their homes, officials and a complaint warrant said.

Furthermore, authorities said three others also plotted an attack at Northern State that was ultimately thwarted: Kevin Washington, 32, of Atlantic City, James Zarate, 33, of Randolph, and Larry Cardona, 28, of Elizabeth.

It was not immediately clear if they have lawyers.

The ongoing investigation is led by the prison systems special investigations division and the state attorney generals office. Many of the charges could result in decades-long sentences, said Thomas Eicher, director of the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability.

We charge that these members of the Latin Kings sought to hold sway in prison through violence and fear as if they were out on the street, but we have stopped their alleged reign of terror, Eicher said in a statement. Were committed to protecting people in custody.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Blake Nelson may be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.

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Why Did Xi Jinping Purge Jack Ma?

Commentary

Jack Ma, now Chinas fourth-richest man and the former CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, criticized Chinas financial system policies at the Bund Summit 2020 in October. Since then, his enterprises have become the target of Xi Jinping.

At first, the listing plan for Ant Group, an affiliate company of Alibaba, was halted on Nov. 3. On April 10 this year, the Alibaba Group was fined $2.8 billion on the grounds that it violated an antitrust law, and Mas elite business school, Hupan University, was forced to halt enrolments.

I dont think Mas troubles are over.

But why did Xi Jinping purge Ma? In my opinion, there are five main reasons:

Xis Authority Is Untouchable

On Oct. 24 last year, in the opening remarks, Wang Qishan, Vice President of the Communist Party of China (CCP), said at the Bund Summit that the bottom line is that no systemic financial risks should be taken.

However, as a keynote speaker, Ma responded, systemic risks do not exist in China because there is not a financial system in China and in fact China is at a risk of lacking a financial system.

Mas sharp comments were actually very much an open challenge to Xi Jinping, because Wang was speaking on behalf of Xi Jinping.

In May 2018, at a meeting with American businessmen in Beijing, Wang Qishan had said that his job as the vice president of the country is to do what Xi Jinping asks him to do.

The outbreak of the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, and the subsequent pandemic has resulted in Xis biggest threat to his dictatorship. The anti-Xi voices are ever-growing both at home and abroad. Political opposition is a major issue that Xi will never be able to tolerate.

Xi Is Worried About the Recurrence of a Financial Coup

The crux of a financial coup is politics. It involves the seizure of the CCPs highest power.

In June 2015, at a critical moment when Xi Jinping and the former CCP dictator Jiang Zemin were engaged in a power struggle, China experienced a major stock market crash, and trillions in funds were transferred to foreign countries. Some people called it an anti-Xi financial coup.

Since then, Xi has been purging senior officials and their agents from Jiang Zemins faction in the financial sector. In addition to investigating a group of senior financial officials from the Peoples Bank of China, China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Banking Regulatory Commission, and China Insurance Regulatory Commission, Xis arrested financial predators include: Ye Jianming, chairman of Huaxin Group; Lai Xiaomin, chairman of Huarong Group; Hu Huaibang, chairman of China Development Bank; Wu Xiaohui, Chairman of Anbang Group; and Xiao Jianhua, founder of Tomorrow Group.

If Mas Ant Group was successfully listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong simultaneously on Nov. 5 last year, he could have become Chinas largest financial giant and surpassed Tomorrow Group founder Xiao Jianhua.

Before Ant Group went public, individual investors in Shanghai and Hong Kong placed bids of a record high of $3 trillion. Ants IPO valued the company at $313 billion, the biggest IPO of all time.

Who is behind the Ant Group? With careful inspection, most of them are from Xi Jinpings number one political opponent, former CCP dictator Jiang Zemins faction.

The Ant Group was first established with the support of an important figure in the Jiang faction, Huang Qifan, the mayor of Chongqing at the time.

On Feb. 16, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative report stating that the author interviewed more than twelve CCP officials and the regimes advisors. Behind layers of opaque investment vehicles that own stakes in the firm are a coterie of well-connected Chinese power players, including some with links to political families that represent a potential challenge to President Xi and his inner circle, the report said. They are known as the secret strategic investors of the Ant Group, for example, Jiang Zemins grandson, Jiang Zhicheng (Alvin Jiang), and Li Botan, the son-in-law of Jia Qinglin, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee and a close friend of Jiang Zemin.

Mas Alibaba Group is also highly connected to Jiangs faction. The New York Times disclosed in its report on July 20, 2014, that Alibabas shareholders include princelings Alvin Jiang, Chen Yuan, He Jinlei, and Liu Lefei. Liu Lefei is the son of Liu Yunshan and He Jinlei is the son of He Guoqiang, both were former members of the Politburo Standing Committee and top officials of the Jiang faction. Chen Yuans father, Chen Yun, was the most important CCP veteran cadre who promoted Jiang Zemin to the leadership of the CCP.

Before Ant Group was ready to be listed, Jack Ma was already publicly opposing Xi in Shanghai at the Bund Summit. If Ant Group successfully goes public and establishes its dominant financial kingdom, will it repeat the 2015 financial coup with the support of Jiangs faction? I believe this is also one of Xis biggest concerns.

Xi Jinping Must Prevent Financial Risks

The risks here mainly refer to social problems relevant to the economy.

Wang Qishan said during the Bund Summit: Chinas financial sector must not follow the crooked path of speculation and gambling, the wrong track of self-circulation of financial bubbles, or the evil path of Ponzi schemes. This is a strong warning to the financial chaos in the communist society.

China has the biggest Peer to Peer (P2P) lending market. In the 2018 Unreliable Entity List issued by the regimes State Council, Chinas financial market was faced with a crisis of 1,282 problematic P2P platforms. Also stated in the report is that 472 companies were involved in financial fraud of more than $15.4 million, and 30 companies involved in financial fraud of $77 million or more.

The massive failures of the financial system have filled mainland China with desperate protests for government assistance.

As a significant figure of Chinas digital economy, Jack Mas Alibaba Group and Ant Group affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, including through shopping, deposits, investment, loans, and more.

Economic analyst Huang Shicong once analyzed that the two virtual credit card companies under the Ant Group, Huabei and loan provider Jiebei, only have $463 million in capital, but their bank loans are as high as $463 billion. The leverage ratio is too high. Huang questioned, With so much money, how many bad debts are there? As long as the bad debt ratio is 3-4 percent, it will be totally unaffordable.

The Impact of Internet Giants

I am sure that Xi is aware of the serious impact of internet giants such as Twitter and Facebook blocking the speeches of U.S. President Donald Trump during the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Of course, its nearly impossible for this to happen in China under the dictatorship, but Xi has his concerns.

Chinas e-commerce giant Jack Ma also invests in the media industry. According to a report on Chinese news portal sina.com, Alibaba owns about 30 percent of Weibos shares, valued at $3.5 billion. Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, pretty much directs public opinion in China. Alibaba has approximately 6.7 percent of the shares in Station B, valued at $2.6 billion. Station B is the most popular video platform for Chinese teenagers and young white-collar workers. Alibaba also owns approximately 5.3 percent of Focus Media, a value of $1.2 billion. Focus Media is the largest out-of-home advertising network in China, and perhaps the largest in the world. Their LCD screens allow 300 million people across the country to watch the same video at the same time.

In 2015, Alibaba acquired the South China Morning Post, the biggest English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, at the cost of $266 million. On Dec. 4, 2015, China policy researcher Cheng Xiaonong said in an interview with Voice of America that although Jack Ma was the investor who purchased the South China Morning Post, Zeng Qinghong, the former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, is the actual leader in the management and control of the newspaper. Zeng was the first leader of the Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macau Affairs. He is also the number two figure in Jiangs faction.

Other media under Alibaba also include Wujie News, China Business Network, and Huxiu.com. On the night of March 4, 2016, an open letter asking Xi Jinping to resign showed up on the website of Wujie News.

Xi Is Running Out of Capital

China is nominally the second largest economy in the world. But in fact, the Chinese economy is facing a serious crisis.

According to an analysis from Epoch Times contributor Cheng Xiaonong, Its hard to understand or believe that with a nominal $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the CCP actually has very little in cash reserves. After deducting the hard currency debts, the foreign investment that flowed out of China, the U.S. debts, and the regimes overseas investments, the regimes cash reserves are nearly dried up.

Whats the routine practice when the CCP runs out of cash? It has been doing everything possible to collect the wealth of private enterprises.

On April 15, in a hearing (pdf) on An Assessment of the CCPs Economic Ambitions, Plans, and Metrics of Success, Miles Yu, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, said, In the past 15 years alone, no fewer than 27 Chinese billionaires have been arrestedthe charges range from the bizarre to the absurd. In America, we celebrate those who make it on the Forbes billionaires list. In China, getting on the Hurun rich peoples roster can be like being added to a hit list.

Why did the CCP purge these people? An important reason is to collect the wealth in their hands.

Take November 2020 as an example. On Nov. 11, Sun Dawu, an entrepreneur from Hebei Province, was arrested and his Dawu agricultural and animal husbandry group was investigated; on Nov. 17, Yang Zongyi, Nanjings richest man and entrepreneur, was criminally detained and CCP authorities took control of his Fuzhong group; on Nov. 20, Chongqings entrepreneur Li Huaiqing was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment and all his assets were frozen.

What Jack Ma is experiencing now is of course also for his money.

Jack Ma already knew how his story would end. In an interview with Esquire magazine in January 2013, a reporter asked Ma: You made a lot of statements in 2011 that seemed very pessimistic. People have always seen you as a very optimistic person who inspires others. Why is that? You said it was a bad time, and you said that almost no Chinese entrepreneurs die a natural death. Have you become pessimistic?

Ma denied having said that, he explained that what he actually said was Chinese entrepreneurs really dont end up well.

I, Jack Ma, already know my own end, so I am optimistic about this. Ill just go ahead with it anyway because, good or bad, the end is there already, Ma said.

Why?

Because there is no market economy in China today. Rather, it is a market dominated by the CCP. The private entrepreneurs rely on various factions within the CCP hierarchy to establish their kingdoms. Becoming a sacrifice in the power struggle is only a matter of time.

Wang Youqun graduated with a Ph.D. in Law from the Renmin University of China. He once worked as an aide and copywriter for Wei Jianxing (19312015), a member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee from 1997 to 2002.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Residents across Wrexham invited to walk out of lockdown for Hope House and Ty Gobaith Childrens Hospices

As Covid restrictions begin to ease people across Wrexham are being encouraged to walk their way out of lockdown by joining Hope House and Ty Gobaith Childrens Hospices Midsummer Walk.

Throughout the month of June and midsummer people are being challenged to complete 75 miles to raise vital funds to help seriously ill local children and their families.

The route will take walkers through a virtual scenic route from Conwy to Oswestry, the homes to Hope House and Ty Gobaith.

By using a live leader board those who sign up will be able to track their progress as they put the miles in, passing milestones and seeing where other participants are up to.





Fundraiser Nicola Eyes said: Its been an incredibly tough past year for everyone, and for our hospices. But come June the sun will be shining, the bees will be buzzing, and it will be perfect weather to get out walking.

As lockdown restrictions ease into the summer, we want people to join us and walk out of lockdown by taking on this 75-mile challenge, wherever they are, and at the same time raise vital funds to help support the children and family that use the hospice services.

The Midsummer Walk is going to be a lot of fun, and a bit competitive too, with a leader board where walkers able to see how close they are to the top.

People will be able to link to their Strava accounts or manually input their miles. They will also receive a bespoke medal once you complete your challenge.

This is a free to enter event with a commitment to raise a minimum of 21 for a medal and goodie bag, and those that raise over 50 will be entered into our prize draw.

What are you waiting for, sign up today and join us for some midsummer fun, added Nicola.

You can sign up today by visiting www.hopehouse.org.uk/midsummer.
Idaho is now the first state in America to pass a bill banning Marxist critical race theory in the classroom. The Idaho Senate passed the new legislation with a 28-7 vote after the House of Representatives passed it with a 57-12 vote, meaning it is now on its way to Republican Governor Brad Little's office for his signature.

The controversial H.B. 377 aims to prevent public schools and universities from teaching Marxist critical race theory, which hinges on the idea that America and the Western Civilization are inherently racist.

According to WND, Idaho is the first state to pass such a legislation, with several other states hoping to follow suit soon. Arkansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Texas and West Virginia are all considering similar legislation that limits the teachings of Marxist critical race theory to the youth.

H.B. 377 is set to ban teachings that say "any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior" and that "individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin," Newsweek reported.

The bill serves as a resistance to growing reckoning on how race and racism influences the different aspects of American life, Idaho News reported. A number of Republican lawmakers in the state are concerned that federal authorities may force belief systems such as the Marxist critical race theory onto unknowing students through school curricula.

They believe that ideologies in Marxist critical race theory are mostly "contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being" of Idaho.

Republican Sen. Carl Crabtree, who sponsored the bill, reassured the public, however that H.B. 377 "does not intend to prohibit discussion in an open and free way." Instead, it is a "preventive measure" that acknowledges how there is a "rampant problem in Idaho." But the problem isn't only in Idaho.

Just this month, Paul Rossi, a whistleblower teacher from Manhattan was barred from teaching for the rest of the school year after he released an essay criticizing Grace Church School's administration for including ideas of Marxist critical race theory in their curriculum by "stifling dissent and fixating on race," the New York Post reported.

Even more shockingly, school principal George Davison was caught on tape admitting that the school was "demonizing kids, we're demonizing white people for being born." Davison admitted that he agreed with Rossi, saying "there has been a demonization that we need to get our hands around in a way in which people are doing this understanding."

Conservatives are concerned that more Marxist critical race theory ideologies will make their way into school classrooms especially after President Joe Biden proposed federal funding to support the teaching of the "1619 Project," a New York Times series that narrates America's history through the viewpoint of slavery, calling it as a "defining characteristic of the American experience," WND reported. The Department of Education claims that this will help combat systemic racism in the country.
BISHKEK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2021) Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov on Thursday chaired a meeting of the Security Council over a shootout at the country's border with Tajikistan, the president's press office told Sputnik.

"Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov held a meeting of the Security Council of Kyrgyzstan in limited format," a spokesperson of the office said.

During the meeting, measures to decrease tensions on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, "preserve the territorial integrity of the country, ensure the safety of residents of border areas" were discussed.

"President Sadyr Japarov noted that all involved state bodies must take the necessary measures to peacefully resolve the current situation," the spokesperson said.
Two pilots escaped serious injury when they were forced to crash land their Second World War Hawker Sea Fury plane in a field.

Emergency services were called to the scene about a mile from Royal Naval Air Station Yeovilton in Limington, Somerset yesterday afternoon after the fighter had engine trouble.

Pictures showed its propeller separated from the wreckage as police stand guard.

Emergency services stand near the crashed Second World War Hawker Sea Fury plane

The Navy Wings charity, which flies historic warbirds, posted on its Facebook page: 'Navy Wings' Sea Fury T.20 made a precautionary forced landing in a field next to RNAS Yeovilton following a problem with the engine on a routine training flight this afternoon.

'The cause is under investigation and both the CAA and Air Accident Investigation Branch have been informed. No further information is available at this time.

'Although both pilots walked out of the aircraft, after medical checks in Yeovil District Hospital, one of them has been detained in hospital overnight for further observation.

The plane's propeller was seen separated from the wreckage, about one mile away from a naval base

Several emergency services were called to the scene yesterday afternoon in Limington, Somerset

'The other pilot has been discharged.'

An Avon and Somerset police spokesman added: 'We were called at 2.16pm today following a report of a Hawker Sea Fury aircraft carrying out an emergency landing in a field in Limington.

'Officers attended the scene, along with other emergency services. Two people on-board the plane suffered minor injuries. The Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB) have been notified.'

South Western Ambulance Service said two male patients were treated at the scene and transported to hospital.

Their condition is said to be 'not too serious.'
Social commentator, Atik Mohammed has appealed to government to strengthen the Whistleblower Act to empower Ghanaians offer relevant information about illegal miners in the country.



With an aim to end galamsey, the President has deployed 200 soldiers to mining communities.



The soldiers are tasked to remove all illegal miners and protect the waterbodies, particularly River Pra in the Central and Western Regions.



A statement by the Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah on Wednesday read ''in furtherance of the resolutions of the final communique, of the Stakeholder Dialogue on Small Scale Mining on April 14 -15, 2021 and to ensure that mining within water bodies is immediately stopped; the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has authorized the Ghana Armed Forces, to commence an operation, to remove all persons and logistics involved in mining from Ghanas water bodies.



''The operation commenced at 0600 hours on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 on the River Pra in the Central and Western Regions of Ghana. Two Hundred (200) officers of the Ghana Armed Forces are involved in the operation.''



Speaking on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme, Atik stated that encouraging the locals in the communities where illegal mining, otherwise called galamsey, to tip off authorities about the activities of the illegal miners to help with the fight against galamsey.



He believed the Whistleblower Act will help in clamping down on galamseyers.



"The State should be able to reward people who come forward with information like that. By so doing, you would have made it a collective fight and everybody would have felt a part of it," he stated.





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.

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While the biggest challenge in the state's vaccination effort is convincing people to get a shot, South Carolina public health officials are also concerned about another problem: Many recipients of the two-dose vaccines haven't gotten their second shot.

As of April 26, roughly 172,000 South Carolinians are past-due on the second dose of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. That works out to 11 percent of people who have gotten a first dose from one of the two manufacturers.

Without the second dose, recipients won't have the full protection the vaccines can offer. But there is still time to remedy the problem.

Dr. Brannon Traxler, director of public health for DHEC, said regardless of how long it's been since a person had their first dose, they should get a second.

"It still would be recommended," she said. "If they are able to and are willing to, go ahead and get that second dose now."

Still, she said it is best to get the second dose within the three- to four-week window. Vaccine providers have been advised they should schedule the second shot at the time of the first one, but appointments are available to anyone 16 and older across the state.

Statewide numbers

New cases reported: 430 confirmed, 453 probable.

Total cases in S.C.: 480,804 confirmed, 96,746 probable.

Percent positive: 5 percent.

New deaths reported: 20 confirmed, 5 probable.

Total deaths in S.C.: 8,357 confirmed, 1,138 probable.

Percent of ICU beds filled: 69 percent.

Sign up for our new health newsletter The best of health, hospital and science coverage in South Carolina, delivered to your inbox weekly. Email

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How S.C. ranks

South Carolina ranks 41st in the nation in the number of vaccines administered per 100,000 people as of April 28, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hardest-hit areas

In the total number of newly confirmed cases, Greenville County (44), York County (40) and Newberry County (29) saw the highest totals.

What about the tri-county?

Charleston County had 23 new cases on April 29, while Dorchester County had 21 and Berkeley County had 18.

Deaths

Of the deaths from COVID-19 confirmed April 29, 13 were patients age 35 to 64. Seven were patients age 65 or older.

Hospitalizations

Of the 498 COVID-19 patients hospitalized as of April 29, 118 were in the ICU and 58 were using ventilators.

What do experts say?

A small study from the CDC confirms that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are effective in protecting against hospitalization from COVID-19.

The research, published April 28, offers real-world results in a small study group of people age 65 and older. Researchers wrote the effectiveness of both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines was 94 percent among adults who were fully vaccinated and 64 percent in people who had only gotten their first dose.
House mice in New York and Alberta independently evolved to have large bodies and build bigger nests to cope with the cold, according to a study publishing April 29th in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics by Kathleen Ferris and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley.

As house mice began to colonize North America 200 - 300 years ago, populations encountered radically different temperatures to their native range in Europe. To understand how they adapted genetically, physically, and behaviorally, the researchers captured wild house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) from five populations along the west coast of North America, from Arizona to Alberta. They sequenced the genomes of 50 mice and returned 41 mice to the lab to establish breeding populations. Lab-reared descendants of mice from Alberta were significantly heavier than those of mice from Arizona and built nests twice the size, both adaptations to colder climates. A genome-wide survey identified eight mutations in five genes associated with increased body size in the Albertan mice.

Comparing the data to the results from a previous study of house mice in New York and Florida, they found 16 genes that showed parallel evolution along the north-south gradient on both coasts, many of which are involved in regulating body temperature. For example, Trpm2 - a gene that causes mice to avoid very high temperatures - showed genetic changes in southerly populations. Mice on the east and west coasts exhibited evidence of independent evolution in many of the same genes, but each coast also harbored unique genetic adaptations, which the authors suggest may be a result of distinct regional features such as rainfall and soil color.

Nachman and Ferris add, "Since their initial colonization of the Americas a few hundred years ago, house mice have independently adapted to cold environments in eastern and western North America by becoming larger and building bigger nests. By looking across the genome, we found that adaptation to latitudinal gradients in the east and west has involved a mixture of parallel and unique genetic changes."

###

Peer-reviewed; Experimental study; Animals

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Genetics: http://journals. plos. org/ plosgenetics/ article?id= 10. 1371/ journal. pgen. 1009495

Citation: Ferris KG, Chavez AS, Suzuki TA, Beckman EJ, Phifer-Rixey M, Bi K, et al. (2021) The genomics of rapid climatic adaptation and parallel evolution in North American house mice. PLoS Genet 17(4): e1009495. https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1371/ journal. pgen. 1009495

Funding: ASC was supported by an NSF postdoctoral Fellowship (PRFB-1402539). This work was supported by NIH grants to MWN (RO1 GM074245 and R01 GM127468). 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.
This article appears in the April 30, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Only Limits to Growth

Are Self-Imposed

[Print version of this article]

This is an edited version of the presentation Ross delivered to the Schiller Institutes Manhattan Dialogue, The World Needs More People: Why True Economic Progress Depends Upon Population Growth, on April 10, 2021.

Id like to talk about something thats related to the report recently released by The LaRouche Organization, The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Crushes the Green New Deal Fraud.

The Green New Deal is not something that was planned to make a better future for people, but rather to reduce the worlds population. Diane Sare, the previous speaker, discussed the recently deceased Prince Philip and his desire to be reincarnated as a deadly virus.

Heres what Prince Philip said in his Foreword to [Fleur Cowles 1987] book If I Were an Animal:

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

View full size

right: CC/Nick Harrison

Maybe he is an animal. And this is the man who claimed he was so concerned about the future of the world and who wanted to make sure that there we would all have a pleasant future, and a safe one!

Lets consider another fellow, whose menacing tones we are familiar with from nature documentaries:

The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us.

Sir David Attenborough.

Potential Relative Population-Density

Why can the human population not continue to grow in the same old way as Sir David Attenborough puts it. Well, in a certain sense hes right: Humanity cant grow in the same old waywithout the introduction of new technologies and new scientific principles, mankinds growth will hit a limit. This limit is something that Lyndon LaRouche called the potential relative population-density of the human species or a certain culture of the human species: That is, the potential number of people that can be supported by a given land-area using the kinds of technologies and social organization that are available at the time, or in the culture, that sets a limit. And, indeed, you cant surpass that just by doing more of the same old thing. You need to develop new resources, new technologies. And that is exactly what the Green New Deal aims to prevent, by sending us backward on the track of human development.

Why does Sir David Attenborough believe that the world population must be controlled by us, and if not, by nature? Because he believes that resources are limited. Are they? Well, that was the title of a book published by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth. Lyndon LaRouche disagreed, and he wrote a book: There Are No Limits to Growth! Lets review some material from The Limits to Growth, and from the Club of Rome, which created The Limits to Growth. First, one of their earliest authors, who wrote 200 years earlier, Thomas Malthus, said:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

Thomas Malthus, 1798

Now, in terms of the so-called power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, the Earth doesnt produce much in the way of subsistence for man, at least not the Earth alone, unless you actually are in the habit of wandering into the forest and killing bears and then bringing them home to eat them; or if you find truly wild berries in your journeys through forest, or dig up morels or something like that, you are not relying on subsistence from the Earth, you are relying on agriculture, which is subsistence from human beings. So unlike animals which consume resources and themselves are, in turn, resources for others in the web of life, we produce resources.

Dr. Kelvin Kemm had referred to the use of wood as a fuel; and wood, indeed, is a fuel, with the discovery of fire. But think about how coal completely transformed the equation there. Coal became a resource, rather than a mineral, or a rock formation of interest only to a geologist. Coal became of interest to everybody, with the development of steam power: We created a resource! We transformed a rock into a resource, a mineral deposit into an ore, in this case, coal.

The Club of Rome, in 1972, said:

If the present growth trends in the world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years.

Now, truly, in their book, they believed it would come much sooner than that. They had tried to wow people with lousy computer models, similar to some of the computer models that we have today that are claiming to predict the future of the entire worlds climate over a period of years. The Club of Rome used computer models with such incredibly bland and non-descriptive and overbroad parameters as population, pollution, resources, these kinds of things, and showed how resources and pollution would interact with each other over time and bring about the end of the human race.

However, they did not count on entirely new technologies being produced, which is the obvious solution to the very real problem of any society that ceases to progress. If you stop progressing, you go extinct. Just ask the dinosaurs! The mammals are far superior, and thats why were here, and they arent.

Energy Consumption, Over Time

FIGURE 1 Global Primary Energy Consumption Twh per year View full size

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Source: Vaclav Smil (2017) and BP Statistical Review of World Energy. CCBY

Lets talk about energy over time, because the type of energy that human beings have used has been transformed both in quantity and in quality. Figure 1 shows how the initial source of world energy was traditional biofuelsin red, at the bottom. Thats things like the stacks of wood that Dr. Kemm spoke about.

FIGURE 2 Primary Energy Consumption by World Region Twh per year View full size

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Source: Vaclav Smil (2017) and BP Statistical Review of World Energy. CCBY

If you look at the growth in energy consumption, it wasnt because we started cutting down more trees, although this did go up somewhat. Its because we developed new resources, like coal, like oil, like natural gas, like the red that you see in the top, nuclear, which has been far too underutilized. And as we look at different regions of the world (see Figure 2), we find that the level of growth that we see in the Asia Pacific is absolutely phenomenal. This is the growth in countries coming out of poverty, and doing so, with an energy infrastructure able to support industry, science and technology.

Lets contrast the sources of energy in two different types of countries. Figure 3A compares the energy consumption of developed countries, where in green is petroleum as a large source of power; yellow is coal, gray is gas. If you compare that with a typical developing country, the blue line on the left, there, is biomass. Biomass has somehow turned into a sexy or progressive word, as though its a new thing to burn wood, but thats what it means: burning plants. Raising corn to turn into ethanol to burn it, instead of feeding it to a person or an animalwell, thats biomass.

FIGURE 3A Energy Consumption by Source View full size

Courtesy of Benoit Odille Figure 3b Ghana View full size

Courtesy of Benoit Odille

In Ghana, Figure 3B, look at where the energy comes from: fuel wood, 58%; charcoal, 31%. Now, where does that charcoal come from? Charcoal comes from  wood. So essentially, low energy usage means, wood, biofuels. That also means a lot of pollution: If your source for heat in your home, for cooking, or home heating, is a biofuel fire, well, youre dealing with the kind of smoke, the kind of emissions that come out of that inside your home.

Energy Return on Energy Invested

Lets talk about what the difference is in terms of how much you get out of developing a new power source. If you build a windmill, you get 16 times more energy out of that windmill than you had to consume in producing it. This is, mining the resources, producing the steel, producing the fiberglass blades, transporting them, and all of that.

But, what happens when you take storage into account: a drop of 75% in the energy return on energy invested, taking it below the level of economic viability. What does this mean? A windmill on its own, produces energy sometimes, and if you add up all the energy it produces, you can say, Oh look, its way more than went into making the windmill. But, a windmill is increasingly useless the more of them that you build, because they are unreliable. So, along with your windmill, if you want to be sure you have power all day, you have to either create storage, or back up power plantsthat is, in order to support windmills, you have to build a natural gas power plant that actually works all the time. Youre doubling, essentially, your capital investment, in terms of how many megawatts of power capacity youre installing; its not quite double, but its almost that much.

When you consider that, they become absolutely uselessthrowing money away. And heres why. Comparing different fuel sources, the energy contained in 1 ton of wood, is also found in 500 lbs. of coal; or 340 lbs. of oilso thats an improvementor, 0.0002 lbs. of uranium. Thats also 75 milligrams, and either number is basically incomprehensible, if you try to imagine it in some type of everyday relationship. Tiny amounts of fuel, but a million times more energy dense in uranium. So, in fuel intensity, nuclear is off the charts. You wouldnt even be able to see that thing if there were a chart. It would be just a line at the bottom of the axis, literally off the chart.

Figure 4 shows the amount of material that goes into making energy sources. Here you can see, per amount of energy producednot energy capacity, how much it might supposedly producebut the actual amount of energy that you get out of it. Look at nuclear on the right. Look at how much material is required per amount of energy youre getting from nuclear. Then, look at wind, look at hydrolook at how many tons of material are required to produce solar panels able to generate as much energy as a nuclear power plant. The fuel consumed by the nuclear plants is almost nothing. Even the material going into making that power plant, is almost nothing, if you compare it to wasteful solar panels.

Energy Systems

What we have to think about is how do we provide energy as a whole to society? This is a dynamic approach. Rather than looking at one energy source at a time, or one power plant at a time, we say, how do we create a network, a platform thats able to support a certain quality of economic activity? That is, if youre going to industrialize, if youre going to be building factories and the like and increasing the productivity of labor, you need a reliable power supply. If you build a factory and youre able to use it for only four, or five, or six hours per day, is that economically viable, compared to if youre able to run 24 hours a day, by having a reliable energy source? So, weve got to get away from thinking of one energy source at a time, one solar panel on your roof at a time, and think, how do we provide society with the power that it needs?

And here you see the issue with that. In Figure 5, European Wind Energy Generation in 2018, the orange line, way up at the top, is the amount of wind capacity that supposedly is installed. So, supposedly, in 2018, there were 178 GW of installed windmill-power in Europe. The blue chart at the bottom, shows how much power its actually making: Look in July or August, look at the summertime. The average is maybe 25-30 GWthat is a tiny portion, 10%, maybe 15%. As a yearly average, maybe 15, or 20% of what the installed capacity supposedly is. You cant count on it.

Theres a cost to that unreliability, and you can actually measure it. Figure 6 is a chart that demonstrates how expensive it is to have wind. Now, the x-axis, going across horizontally, is what percent of electricity is generated by wind. If Im only going to have a tiny amount of electricity produced by wind, and Im building the first windmill in my area, then we look all the way at the left side of the chart. The blue is the generation cost: What does it take to actually produce that windmill, compared to the energy that comes out? You can see a line thereabout 60/MWh.

FIGURE 6 Wind: System Levelized Cost of Electricity View full size

F. Ueckerdt et al., Energy vol. 63 (Dec. 15, 2013), 61-75.

But the full cost, the cost of providing an energy system, you can see, as you go up to maybe 40%, or before that, 30% windif you had that as your goal, the cost of providing that wind energy will double: Because as part of a system, its useless. The more of it you have, the worse each piece is. Its sort of like the opposite of what you get by going in bulk or economies of scale. Here the economy of scale is negative.

There Are No Limits to Growth

Now, to conclude on this, and move on to the discussion that Im eager to engage in, as Im sure we all are: the point to take here from this, is LaRouches approach on resources and on the limits to growth. There are no limits to growth, because the universe is infinitely discoverable, and we will never run out of new physical principles to uncover and to create as hypotheses in our minds.

There are so many fields of science, where, if you go just beyond the surface, you realize that we actually dont have it all figured out! Chemistrymaybe we think we have a pretty good knowledge about that, and I agree. How about nuclear science? There is so much that we dont understand! What is the best way to create nuclear reactions? Why do isotopes have the characteristics that they do? If you change the number of neutrons, why does resulting behavior of the nucleus vary as it does? We dont have complete answers to these things!

As we come to discover more about nuclear science, as we unlock the power and potential of controlled thermonuclear fusion, well, this is going to be the springboard for the next level of energy development. That will make us today seem almost as energy-impoverished, as we would, looking back 200 years, before the introduction of the steam engine, back when the only power sources human beings had were those proposed by the Green New Deal todaygoing back to hydro, wind, and biofuels, instead of that leap that we had with the introduction of coal and powered machinery, with the introduction of understanding electromagnetism, and the ability to use motors and communications systems, and control systems and all of this.

And then, the energy unleashed through controlled thermonuclear fusion may make us view resources and even water in an entirely different light, as we become able to make economically viable, physically viable, the desalination of seawater at a level, not only for residential and city use, but also for agricultural use, just to give one example.

That is the future that we can create, that actually eliminates poverty on this planet. The Green New Deal approach will perpetuate poverty. It will reduce the potential carrying capacity of the Earth for human beings. It will result in depopulation, if it is implemented. And this is why, as the rubber meets the road, more and more countries like India are simply saying, No! We cannot achieve these goals without holding back our development, and we will not do that.
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Two of Australia's biggest energy companies are owned by Chinese investors, sparking national security fears as tensions ramp up with the communist superpower.

Energy Australia, which has 1.7 million customers, is owned by the China Light and Power Company after being sold off by the NSW government for $1.4 billion in 2011.

And Alinta Energy, which has 1.1 million customers, was sold by its private owners to Chow Tai Fook Enterprises for $4billion in 2017.

Energy Australia, which has 1.7 million customers, is owned by the China Light and Power Company. Pictured: Energy Australia's wind farm at Cathedral Rocks, SA

Although neither Energy Australia or Alinta distribute electricity, both are energy generators and retailers, owning crucial assets such as coal power stations, solar power fields and wind farms.

Alinta Energy's assets include the Braemar Power Station in Queensland, the Wagerup Power Station in Western Australia and the Loy Yang B Power Station in Victoria.

EnergyAustralia's infrastructure includes the Cathedral Rocks wind farm in South Australia, the Tallawarra gas station in NSW and the Yallourn coal station in Victoria.

With China-Australia relations hitting a new low during the coronavirus pandemic (a senior public servant has even said the 'the drums of war' are beating), the federal government has tightened its foreign investment rules and is being urged to take back key national assets from China.

Peter Jennings, executive director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said foreign ownership of Australia's energy infrastructure is a major worry.

'I do think we need to be very concerned about the security of the electricity grid,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Alinta Energy, which has 1.1 million customers, was sold by its private owners to Chow Tai Fook Enterprises for $4billion in 2017. Pictured: Alinta's Loy Yang power station in VIC

Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured with Fortescue Metals Group CEO Andrew Forrest) approved the sale of Alinta Energy in 2017

Earlier this week US President Joe Biden launched a '100-day plan to improve the cybersecurity of the nation's electric infrastructure' amid fears that foreign spies could easily hack in and disrupt the system.

Mr Jennings warned that China - which has been blamed for ongoing cyber attacks in Australia - is 'interested in being able to do precisely this sort of damage, potentially in the lead up to a conflict' and said Chinese ownership of Australian assets makes them more vulnerable.

'In Australia we have the added complication of Chinese (and Hong Kong) owned companies running much of the grid,' he said.

'So this is a serious security concern given the current state and future direction of Australia-China relations.

'I would have thought that, for any Australian government, the risk of leaving this infrastructure in [Chinese] hands is intolerable.'

As well as potentially threatening infrastructure, foreign cyber attackers are also know to target customer and company data.

Scott Morrison, who was treasurer at the time Alinta Energy was sold, approved the deal as long as the new owners complied with 10 secret conditions mostly relating to data security.

But Alinta came under fire last year when it was revealed an internal audit found inadequate systems were in place to protect customer data such as passport numbers, credit card details and even health records. The company said it had taken steps to fix the issue.

Last year Mr Morrison called an extraordinary press conference in which he said a foreign state was launching an unprecedented amount of cyber attacks on Australian institutions. Sources say the attacks have not slowed in recent months.

When contacted by Daily Mail Australia, Alinta Energy declined to comment.

A spokesman for Energy Australia said: 'When our customers share their personal information, they trust us to handle that data like it's our own. That means, above all, keeping it safe.

'Our approach to security overall  digital and our physical assets  is aimed at preventing an incident and, should one occur, responding quickly.

'We continually apply recommendations made by the experts, combining protections for customers, our people and our assets.'

China Merchants Port Holdings has 50 per cent control of the Port of Newcastle (pictured), a major coal export hub, until 2112

Mr Jennings has also raised concerns about Chinese ownership of two of Australia's most important harbours - Darwin Port and the Port of Newcastle - which were leased to Chinese companies as state governments cashed in on lucrative private investment.

'You don't have to own a piece of critical infrastructure to hack into it, but ownership helps and Chinese law requires all Chinese businesses to assist their intelligence services if asked,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

The Port of Newcastle, the world's biggest coal port, was handed over to a Chinese-backed consortium for 98 years for $1.75 billion when Mike Baird was NSW Premier in 2014.

The decision means the port is half controlled by Aussie company Gardior and half by China Merchants Port Holdings Company until 2112.

Meanwhile, Darwin Port is run by Chinese company Landbridge Group, which secured a 99-year lease in 2015 for just $506 million.

Mr Jennings said the federal government faces a 'difficult problem' in unwinding investment decisions made several years ago but said 'bad behaviour' from China makes the decision easier.

'I have no doubt that the Federal Government will step in to resume control of our critical infrastructure in coming years,' he said.

Chinese-Australian relations have deteriorated since Canberra called for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus last year.

Beijing has blocked major Australia exports including lobster, beef, barley and wine.

Last week the Morrison government used a new law to tear up the Victorian government's 'Belt and Road' infrastructure deal with Beijing.